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+Project Gutenberg's The Troll Garden and Selected Stories, by Willa Cather
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Troll Garden and Selected Stories
+
+Author: Willa Cather
+
+Release Date: October, 1995  [Etext #346]
+Posting Date: November 10, 2009
+[Last updated: December 14,2016]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE TROLL GARDEN ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Judith Boss
+
+
+
+
+
+THE TROLL GARDEN
+
+AND
+
+SELECTED STORIES
+
+By Willa Cather
+
+
+Contents
+
+
+
+_Selected Stories_
+
+     On the Divide
+     Eric Hermannson's Soul
+     The Enchanted Bluff
+     The Bohemian Girl
+
+
+_The Troll Garden_
+
+     Flavia and Her Artists
+     The Sculptor's Funeral
+     "A Death in the Desert"
+     The Garden Lodge
+     The Marriage of Phaedra
+     A Wagner Matinee
+     Paul's Case
+
+
+
+
+SELECTED STORIES
+
+
+
+
+On the Divide
+
+
+Near Rattlesnake Creek, on the side of a little draw stood Canute's
+shanty. North, east, south, stretched the level Nebraska plain of long
+rust-red grass that undulated constantly in the wind. To the west the
+ground was broken and rough, and a narrow strip of timber wound along
+the turbid, muddy little stream that had scarcely ambition enough to
+crawl over its black bottom. If it had not been for the few stunted
+cottonwoods and elms that grew along its banks, Canute would have shot
+himself years ago. The Norwegians are a timber-loving people, and if
+there is even a turtle pond with a few plum bushes around it they seem
+irresistibly drawn toward it.
+
+As to the shanty itself, Canute had built it without aid of any kind,
+for when he first squatted along the banks of Rattlesnake Creek there
+was not a human being within twenty miles. It was built of logs split
+in halves, the chinks stopped with mud and plaster. The roof was covered
+with earth and was supported by one gigantic beam curved in the shape of
+a round arch. It was almost impossible that any tree had ever grown in
+that shape. The Norwegians used to say that Canute had taken the log
+across his knee and bent it into the shape he wished. There were
+two rooms, or rather there was one room with a partition made of ash
+saplings interwoven and bound together like big straw basket work. In
+one corner there was a cook stove, rusted and broken. In the other a
+bed made of unplaned planks and poles. It was fully eight feet long, and
+upon it was a heap of dark bed clothing. There was a chair and a bench
+of colossal proportions. There was an ordinary kitchen cupboard with
+a few cracked dirty dishes in it, and beside it on a tall box a tin
+washbasin. Under the bed was a pile of pint flasks, some broken,
+some whole, all empty. On the wood box lay a pair of shoes of almost
+incredible dimensions. On the wall hung a saddle, a gun, and some ragged
+clothing, conspicuous among which was a suit of dark cloth, apparently
+new, with a paper collar carefully wrapped in a red silk handkerchief
+and pinned to the sleeve. Over the door hung a wolf and a badger skin,
+and on the door itself a brace of thirty or forty snake skins whose
+noisy tails rattled ominously every time it opened. The strangest things
+in the shanty were the wide windowsills. At first glance they looked as
+though they had been ruthlessly hacked and mutilated with a hatchet, but
+on closer inspection all the notches and holes in the wood took form and
+shape. There seemed to be a series of pictures. They were, in a rough
+way, artistic, but the figures were heavy and labored, as though they
+had been cut very slowly and with very awkward instruments. There were
+men plowing with little horned imps sitting on their shoulders and on
+their horses' heads. There were men praying with a skull hanging over
+their heads and little demons behind them mocking their attitudes. There
+were men fighting with big serpents, and skeletons dancing together. All
+about these pictures were blooming vines and foliage such as never grew
+in this world, and coiled among the branches of the vines there was
+always the scaly body of a serpent, and behind every flower there was
+a serpent's head. It was a veritable Dance of Death by one who had felt
+its sting. In the wood box lay some boards, and every inch of them
+was cut up in the same manner. Sometimes the work was very rude and
+careless, and looked as though the hand of the workman had trembled. It
+would sometimes have been hard to distinguish the men from their evil
+geniuses but for one fact, the men were always grave and were either
+toiling or praying, while the devils were always smiling and dancing.
+Several of these boards had been split for kindling and it was evident
+that the artist did not value his work highly.
+
+It was the first day of winter on the Divide. Canute stumbled into his
+shanty carrying a basket of cobs, and after filling the stove, sat
+down on a stool and crouched his seven foot frame over the fire, staring
+drearily out of the window at the wide gray sky. He knew by heart every
+individual clump of bunch grass in the miles of red shaggy prairie that
+stretched before his cabin. He knew it in all the deceitful loveliness
+of its early summer, in all the bitter barrenness of its autumn. He had
+seen it smitten by all the plagues of Egypt. He had seen it parched by
+drought, and sogged by rain, beaten by hail, and swept by fire, and in
+the grasshopper years he had seen it eaten as bare and clean as bones
+that the vultures have left. After the great fires he had seen it
+stretch for miles and miles, black and smoking as the floor of hell.
+
+He rose slowly and crossed the room, dragging his big feet heavily as
+though they were burdens to him. He looked out of the window into the
+hog corral and saw the pigs burying themselves in the straw before the
+shed. The leaden gray clouds were beginning to spill themselves, and the
+snow flakes were settling down over the white leprous patches of frozen
+earth where the hogs had gnawed even the sod away. He shuddered and
+began to walk, trampling heavily with his ungainly feet. He was the
+wreck of ten winters on the Divide and he knew what that meant. Men fear
+the winters of the Divide as a child fears night or as men in the North
+Seas fear the still dark cold of the polar twilight. His eyes fell upon
+his gun, and he took it down from the wall and looked it over. He
+sat down on the edge of his bed and held the barrel towards his face,
+letting his forehead rest upon it, and laid his finger on the trigger.
+He was perfectly calm, there was neither passion nor despair in his
+face, but the thoughtful look of a man who is considering. Presently
+he laid down the gun, and reaching into the cupboard, drew out a pint
+bottle of raw white alcohol. Lifting it to his lips, he drank greedily.
+He washed his face in the tin basin and combed his rough hair and
+shaggy blond beard. Then he stood in uncertainty before the suit of dark
+clothes that hung on the wall. For the fiftieth time he took them in
+his hands and tried to summon courage to put them on. He took the paper
+collar that was pinned to the sleeve of the coat and cautiously slipped
+it under his rough beard, looking with timid expectancy into the
+cracked, splashed glass that hung over the bench. With a short laugh he
+threw it down on the bed, and pulling on his old black hat, he went out,
+striking off across the level.
+
+It was a physical necessity for him to get away from his cabin once in a
+while. He had been there for ten years, digging and plowing and sowing,
+and reaping what little the hail and the hot winds and the frosts left
+him to reap. Insanity and suicide are very common things on the Divide.
+They come on like an epidemic in the hot wind season. Those scorching
+dusty winds that blow up over the bluffs from Kansas seem to dry up the
+blood in men's veins as they do the sap in the corn leaves. Whenever the
+yellow scorch creeps down over the tender inside leaves about the ear,
+then the coroners prepare for active duty; for the oil of the country is
+burned out and it does not take long for the flame to eat up the wick.
+It causes no great sensation there when a Dane is found swinging to his
+own windmill tower, and most of the Poles after they have become too
+careless and discouraged to shave themselves keep their razors to cut
+their throats with.
+
+It may be that the next generation on the Divide will be very happy, but
+the present one came too late in life. It is useless for men that have
+cut hemlocks among the mountains of Sweden for forty years to try to be
+happy in a country as flat and gray and naked as the sea. It is not easy
+for men that have spent their youth fishing in the Northern seas to be
+content with following a plow, and men that have served in the Austrian
+army hate hard work and coarse clothing on the loneliness of the plains,
+and long for marches and excitement and tavern company and pretty
+barmaids. After a man has passed his fortieth birthday it is not easy
+for him to change the habits and conditions of his life. Most men bring
+with them to the Divide only the dregs of the lives that they have
+squandered in other lands and among other peoples.
+
+Canute Canuteson was as mad as any of them, but his madness did not
+take the form of suicide or religion but of alcohol. He had always taken
+liquor when he wanted it, as all Norwegians do, but after his first year
+of solitary life he settled down to it steadily. He exhausted whisky
+after a while, and went to alcohol, because its effects were speedier
+and surer. He was a big man and with a terrible amount of resistant
+force, and it took a great deal of alcohol even to move him. After nine
+years of drinking, the quantities he could take would seem fabulous to
+an ordinary drinking man. He never let it interfere with his work, he
+generally drank at night and on Sundays. Every night, as soon as his
+chores were done, he began to drink. While he was able to sit up he
+would play on his mouth harp or hack away at his window sills with his
+jackknife. When the liquor went to his head he would lie down on his bed
+and stare out of the window until he went to sleep. He drank alone and
+in solitude not for pleasure or good cheer, but to forget the awful
+loneliness and level of the Divide. Milton made a sad blunder when he
+put mountains in hell. Mountains postulate faith and aspiration. All
+mountain peoples are religious. It was the cities of the plains that,
+because of their utter lack of spirituality and the mad caprice of their
+vice, were cursed of God.
+
+Alcohol is perfectly consistent in its effects upon man. Drunkenness is
+merely an exaggeration. A foolish man drunk becomes maudlin; a bloody
+man, vicious; a coarse man, vulgar. Canute was none of these, but he was
+morose and gloomy, and liquor took him through all the hells of Dante.
+As he lay on his giant's bed all the horrors of this world and every
+other were laid bare to his chilled senses. He was a man who knew no
+joy, a man who toiled in silence and bitterness. The skull and the
+serpent were always before him, the symbols of eternal futileness and of
+eternal hate.
+
+When the first Norwegians near enough to be called neighbors came,
+Canute rejoiced, and planned to escape from his bosom vice. But he was
+not a social man by nature and had not the power of drawing out the
+social side of other people. His new neighbors rather feared him because
+of his great strength and size, his silence and his lowering brows.
+Perhaps, too, they knew that he was mad, mad from the eternal treachery
+of the plains, which every spring stretch green and rustle with the
+promises of Eden, showing long grassy lagoons full of clear water
+and cattle whose hoofs are stained with wild roses. Before autumn the
+lagoons are dried up, and the ground is burnt dry and hard until it
+blisters and cracks open.
+
+So instead of becoming a friend and neighbor to the men that settled
+about him, Canute became a mystery and a terror. They told awful stories
+of his size and strength and of the alcohol he drank.
+
+They said that one night, when he went out to see to his horses just
+before he went to bed, his steps were unsteady and the rotten planks
+of the floor gave way and threw him behind the feet of a fiery young
+stallion. His foot was caught fast in the floor, and the nervous horse
+began kicking frantically. When Canute felt the blood trickling down
+into his eyes from a scalp wound in his head, he roused himself from his
+kingly indifference, and with the quiet stoical courage of a drunken man
+leaned forward and wound his arms about the horse's hind legs and held
+them against his breast with crushing embrace. All through the darkness
+and cold of the night he lay there, matching strength against strength.
+When little Jim Peterson went over the next morning at four o'clock to
+go with him to the Blue to cut wood, he found him so, and the horse was
+on its fore knees, trembling and whinnying with fear. This is the story
+the Norwegians tell of him, and if it is true it is no wonder that they
+feared and hated this Holder of the Heels of Horses.
+
+One spring there moved to the next "eighty" a family that made a great
+change in Canute's life. Ole Yensen was too drunk most of the time to be
+afraid of any one, and his wife Mary was too garrulous to be afraid of
+any one who listened to her talk, and Lena, their pretty daughter, was
+not afraid of man nor devil. So it came about that Canute went over to
+take his alcohol with Ole oftener than he took it alone, After a while
+the report spread that he was going to marry Yensen's daughter, and the
+Norwegian girls began to tease Lena about the great bear she was going
+to keep house for. No one could quite see how the affair had come about,
+for Canute's tactics of courtship were somewhat peculiar. He apparently
+never spoke to her at all: he would sit for hours with Mary chattering
+on one side of him and Ole drinking on the other and watch Lena at her
+work. She teased him, and threw flour in his face and put vinegar in
+his coffee, but he took her rough jokes with silent wonder, never even
+smiling. He took her to church occasionally, but the most watchful and
+curious people never saw him speak to her. He would sit staring at her
+while she giggled and flirted with the other men.
+
+Next spring Mary Lee went to town to work in a steam laundry. She came
+home every Sunday, and always ran across to Yensens to startle Lena
+with stories of ten cent theaters, firemen's dances, and all the other
+esthetic delights of metropolitan life. In a few weeks Lena's head was
+completely turned, and she gave her father no rest until he let her go
+to town to seek her fortune at the ironing board. From the time she came
+home on her first visit she began to treat Canute with contempt. She had
+bought a plush cloak and kid gloves, had her clothes made by the dress
+maker, and assumed airs and graces that made the other women of the
+neighborhood cordially detest her. She generally brought with her a
+young man from town who waxed his mustache and wore a red necktie, and
+she did not even introduce him to Canute.
+
+The neighbors teased Canute a good deal until he knocked one of them
+down. He gave no sign of suffering from her neglect except that he drank
+more and avoided the other Norwegians more carefully than ever, He lay
+around in his den and no one knew what he felt or thought, but little
+Jim Peterson, who had seen him glowering at Lena in church one Sunday
+when she was there with the town man, said that he would not give an
+acre of his wheat for Lena's life or the town chap's either; and Jim's
+wheat was so wondrously worthless that the statement was an exceedingly
+strong one.
+
+Canute had bought a new suit of clothes that looked as nearly like the
+town man as possible. They had cost him half a millet crop; for
+tailors are not accustomed to fitting giants and they charge for it. He
+had hung those clothes in his shanty two months ago and had never put
+them on, partly from fear of ridicule, partly from discouragement, and
+partly because there was something in his own soul that revolted at the
+littleness of the device.
+
+Lena was at home just at this time. Work was slack in the laundry and
+Mary had not been well, so Lena stayed at home, glad enough to get an
+opportunity to torment Canute once more.
+
+She was washing in the side kitchen, singing loudly as she worked. Mary
+was on her knees, blacking the stove and scolding violently about the
+young man who was coming out from town that night. The young man had
+committed the fatal error of laughing at Mary's ceaseless babble and had
+never been forgiven.
+
+"He is no good, and you will come to a bad end by running with him! I do
+not see why a daughter of mine should act so. I do not see why the Lord
+should visit such a punishment upon me as to give me such a daughter.
+There are plenty of good men you can marry."
+
+Lena tossed her head and answered curtly, "I don't happen to want to
+marry any man right away, and so long as Dick dresses nice and has
+plenty of money to spend, there is no harm in my going with him."
+
+"Money to spend? Yes, and that is all he does with it I'll be bound. You
+think it very fine now, but you will change your tune when you have been
+married five years and see your children running naked and your cupboard
+empty. Did Anne Hermanson come to any good end by marrying a town man?"
+
+"I don't know anything about Anne Hermanson, but I know any of the
+laundry girls would have Dick quick enough if they could get him."
+
+"Yes, and a nice lot of store clothes huzzies you are too. Now there is
+Canuteson who has an 'eighty' proved up and fifty head of cattle and--"
+
+"And hair that ain't been cut since he was a baby, and a big dirty
+beard, and he wears overalls on Sundays, and drinks like a pig. Besides
+he will keep. I can have all the fun I want, and when I am old and ugly
+like you he can have me and take care of me. The Lord knows there ain't
+nobody else going to marry him."
+
+Canute drew his hand back from the latch as though it were red hot. He
+was not the kind of man to make a good eavesdropper, and he wished he
+had knocked sooner. He pulled himself together and struck the door like
+a battering ram. Mary jumped and opened it with a screech.
+
+"God! Canute, how you scared us! I thought it was crazy Lou--he has been
+tearing around the neighborhood trying to convert folks. I am afraid as
+death of him. He ought to be sent off, I think. He is just as liable as
+not to kill us all, or burn the barn, or poison the dogs. He has been
+worrying even the poor minister to death, and he laid up with the
+rheumatism, too! Did you notice that he was too sick to preach last
+Sunday? But don't stand there in the cold, come in. Yensen isn't here,
+but he just went over to Sorenson's for the mail; he won't be gone long.
+Walk right in the other room and sit down."
+
+Canute followed her, looking steadily in front of him and not noticing
+Lena as he passed her. But Lena's vanity would not allow him to pass
+unmolested. She took the wet sheet she was wringing out and cracked him
+across the face with it, and ran giggling to the other side of the room.
+The blow stung his cheeks and the soapy water flew in his eyes, and
+he involuntarily began rubbing them with his hands. Lena giggled with
+delight at his discomfiture, and the wrath in Canute's face grew blacker
+than ever. A big man humiliated is vastly more undignified than a little
+one. He forgot the sting of his face in the bitter consciousness that
+he had made a fool of himself He stumbled blindly into the living room,
+knocking his head against the door jamb because he forgot to stoop.
+He dropped into a chair behind the stove, thrusting his big feet back
+helplessly on either side of him.
+
+Ole was a long time in coming, and Canute sat there, still and silent,
+with his hands clenched on his knees, and the skin of his face seemed to
+have shriveled up into little wrinkles that trembled when he lowered his
+brows. His life had been one long lethargy of solitude and alcohol,
+but now he was awakening, and it was as when the dumb stagnant heat of
+summer breaks out into thunder.
+
+When Ole came staggering in, heavy with liquor, Canute rose at once.
+
+"Yensen," he said quietly, "I have come to see if you will let me marry
+your daughter today."
+
+"Today!" gasped Ole.
+
+"Yes, I will not wait until tomorrow. I am tired of living alone."
+
+Ole braced his staggering knees against the bedstead, and stammered
+eloquently: "Do you think I will marry my daughter to a drunkard? a man
+who drinks raw alcohol? a man who sleeps with rattle snakes? Get out
+of my house or I will kick you out for your impudence." And Ole began
+looking anxiously for his feet.
+
+Canute answered not a word, but he put on his hat and went out into the
+kitchen. He went up to Lena and said without looking at her, "Get your
+things on and come with me!"
+
+The tones of his voice startled her, and she said angrily, dropping the
+soap, "Are you drunk?"
+
+"If you do not come with me, I will take you--you had better come," said
+Canute quietly.
+
+She lifted a sheet to strike him, but he caught her arm roughly and
+wrenched the sheet from her. He turned to the wall and took down a hood
+and shawl that hung there, and began wrapping her up. Lena scratched
+and fought like a wild thing. Ole stood in the door, cursing, and Mary
+howled and screeched at the top of her voice. As for Canute, he
+lifted the girl in his arms and went out of the house. She kicked and
+struggled, but the helpless wailing of Mary and Ole soon died away in
+the distance, and her face was held down tightly on Canute's shoulder so
+that she could not see whither he was taking her. She was conscious only
+of the north wind whistling in her ears, and of rapid steady motion and
+of a great breast that heaved beneath her in quick, irregular breaths.
+The harder she struggled the tighter those iron arms that had held the
+heels of horses crushed about her, until she felt as if they would crush
+the breath from her, and lay still with fear. Canute was striding across
+the level fields at a pace at which man never went before, drawing the
+stinging north winds into his lungs in great gulps. He walked with his
+eyes half closed and looking straight in front of him, only lowering
+them when he bent his head to blow away the snow flakes that settled
+on her hair. So it was that Canute took her to his home, even as his
+bearded barbarian ancestors took the fair frivolous women of the South
+in their hairy arms and bore them down to their war ships. For ever and
+anon the soul becomes weary of the conventions that are not of it, and
+with a single stroke shatters the civilized lies with which it is unable
+to cope, and the strong arm reaches out and takes by force what it
+cannot win by cunning.
+
+When Canute reached his shanty he placed the girl upon a chair, where
+she sat sobbing. He stayed only a few minutes. He filled the stove
+with wood and lit the lamp, drank a huge swallow of alcohol and put the
+bottle in his pocket. He paused a moment, staring heavily at the weeping
+girl, then he went off and locked the door and disappeared in the
+gathering gloom of the night.
+
+Wrapped in flannels and soaked with turpentine, the little Norwegian
+preacher sat reading his Bible, when he heard a thundering knock at his
+door, and Canute entered, covered with snow and his beard frozen fast to
+his coat.
+
+"Come in, Canute, you must be frozen," said the little man, shoving a
+chair towards his visitor.
+
+Canute remained standing with his hat on and said quietly, "I want you
+to come over to my house tonight to marry me to Lena Yensen."
+
+"Have you got a license, Canute?"
+
+"No, I don't want a license. I want to be married."
+
+"But I can't marry you without a license, man, it would not be legal."
+
+A dangerous light came in the big Norwegian's eye. "I want you to come
+over to my house to marry me to Lena Yensen."
+
+"No, I can't, it would kill an ox to go out in a storm like this, and my
+rheumatism is bad tonight."
+
+"Then if you will not go I must take you," said Canute with a sigh.
+
+He took down the preacher's bearskin coat and bade him put it on while
+he hitched up his buggy. He went out and closed the door softly after
+him. Presently he returned and found the frightened minister crouching
+before the fire with his coat lying beside him. Canute helped him put it
+on and gently wrapped his head in his big muffler. Then he picked him
+up and carried him out and placed him in his buggy. As he tucked the
+buffalo robes around him he said: "Your horse is old, he might flounder
+or lose his way in this storm. I will lead him."
+
+The minister took the reins feebly in his hands and sat shivering with
+the cold. Sometimes when there was a lull in the wind, he could see the
+horse struggling through the snow with the man plodding steadily beside
+him. Again the blowing snow would hide them from him altogether. He had
+no idea where they were or what direction they were going. He felt as
+though he were being whirled away in the heart of the storm, and he said
+all the prayers he knew. But at last the long four miles were over, and
+Canute set him down in the snow while he unlocked the door. He saw the
+bride sitting by the fire with her eyes red and swollen as though
+she had been weeping. Canute placed a huge chair for him, and said
+roughly,--
+
+"Warm yourself."
+
+Lena began to cry and moan afresh, begging the minister to take her
+home. He looked helplessly at Canute. Canute said simply,
+
+"If you are warm now, you can marry us."
+
+"My daughter, do you take this step of your own free will?" asked the
+minister in a trembling voice.
+
+"No, sir, I don't, and it is disgraceful he should force me into it! I
+won't marry him."
+
+"Then, Canute, I cannot marry you," said the minister, standing as
+straight as his rheumatic limbs would let him.
+
+"Are you ready to marry us now, sir?" said Canute, laying one iron hand
+on his stooped shoulder. The little preacher was a good man, but like
+most men of weak body he was a coward and had a horror of physical
+suffering, although he had known so much of it. So with many qualms of
+conscience he began to repeat the marriage service. Lena sat sullenly in
+her chair, staring at the fire. Canute stood beside her, listening with
+his head bent reverently and his hands folded on his breast. When the
+little man had prayed and said amen, Canute began bundling him up again.
+
+"I will take you home, now," he said as he carried him out and placed
+him in his buggy, and started off with him through the fury of the
+storm, floundering among the snow drifts that brought even the giant
+himself to his knees.
+
+After she was left alone, Lena soon ceased weeping. She was not of a
+particularly sensitive temperament, and had little pride beyond that of
+vanity. After the first bitter anger wore itself out, she felt nothing
+more than a healthy sense of humiliation and defeat. She had no
+inclination to run away, for she was married now, and in her eyes
+that was final and all rebellion was useless. She knew nothing about
+a license, but she knew that a preacher married folks. She consoled
+herself by thinking that she had always intended to marry Canute
+someday, anyway.
+
+She grew tired of crying and looking into the fire, so she got up and
+began to look about her. She had heard queer tales about the inside of
+Canute's shanty, and her curiosity soon got the better of her rage.
+One of the first things she noticed was the new black suit of clothes
+hanging on the wall. She was dull, but it did not take a vain woman long
+to interpret anything so decidedly flattering, and she was pleased in
+spite of herself. As she looked through the cupboard, the general air of
+neglect and discomfort made her pity the man who lived there.
+
+"Poor fellow, no wonder he wants to get married to get somebody to wash
+up his dishes. Batchin's pretty hard on a man."
+
+It is easy to pity when once one's vanity has been tickled. She looked
+at the windowsill and gave a little shudder and wondered if the man were
+crazy. Then she sat down again and sat a long time wondering what her
+Dick and Ole would do.
+
+"It is queer Dick didn't come right over after me. He surely came, for
+he would have left town before the storm began and he might just as
+well come right on as go back. If he'd hurried he would have gotten here
+before the preacher came. I suppose he was afraid to come, for he
+knew Canuteson could pound him to jelly, the coward!" Her eyes flashed
+angrily.
+
+The weary hours wore on and Lena began to grow horribly lonesome. It was
+an uncanny night and this was an uncanny place to be in. She could
+hear the coyotes howling hungrily a little way from the cabin, and more
+terrible still were all the unknown noises of the storm. She remembered
+the tales they told of the big log overhead and she was afraid of those
+snaky things on the windowsills. She remembered the man who had been
+killed in the draw, and she wondered what she would do if she saw crazy
+Lou's white face glaring into the window. The rattling of the door
+became unbearable, she thought the latch must be loose and took the
+lamp to look at it. Then for the first time she saw the ugly brown snake
+skins whose death rattle sounded every time the wind jarred the door.
+
+"Canute, Canute!" she screamed in terror.
+
+Outside the door she heard a heavy sound as of a big dog getting up and
+shaking himself. The door opened and Canute stood before her, white as a
+snow drift.
+
+"What is it?" he asked kindly.
+
+"I am cold," she faltered.
+
+He went out and got an armful of wood and a basket of cobs and filled
+the stove. Then he went out and lay in the snow before the door.
+Presently he heard her calling again.
+
+"What is it?" he said, sitting up.
+
+"I'm so lonesome, I'm afraid to stay in here all alone."
+
+"I will go over and get your mother." And he got up.
+
+"She won't come."
+
+"I'll bring her," said Canute grimly.
+
+"No, no. I don't want her, she will scold all the time."
+
+"Well, I will bring your father."
+
+She spoke again and it seemed as though her mouth was close up to the
+key-hole. She spoke lower than he had ever heard her speak before, so
+low that he had to put his ear up to the lock to hear her.
+
+"I don't want him either, Canute,--I'd rather have you."
+
+For a moment she heard no noise at all, then something like a groan.
+With a cry of fear she opened the door, and saw Canute stretched in the
+snow at her feet, his face in his hands, sobbing on the doorstep.
+
+
+
+
+
+Eric Hermannson's Soul
+
+
+It was a great night at the Lone Star schoolhouse--a night when the
+Spirit was present with power and when God was very near to man. So
+it seemed to Asa Skinner, servant of God and Free Gospeller. The
+schoolhouse was crowded with the saved and sanctified, robust men
+and women, trembling and quailing before the power of some mysterious
+psychic force. Here and there among this cowering, sweating multitude
+crouched some poor wretch who had felt the pangs of an awakened
+conscience, but had not yet experienced that complete divestment of
+reason, that frenzy born of a convulsion of the mind, which, in the
+parlance of the Free Gospellers, is termed "the Light." On the floor
+before the mourners' bench lay the unconscious figure of a man in whom
+outraged nature had sought her last resort. This "trance" state is the
+highest evidence of grace among the Free Gospellers, and indicates a
+close walking with God.
+
+Before the desk stood Asa Skinner, shouting of the mercy and vengeance
+of God, and in his eyes shone a terrible earnestness, an almost
+prophetic flame. Asa was a converted train gambler who used to run
+between Omaha and Denver. He was a man made for the extremes of life;
+from the most debauched of men he had become the most ascetic. His was a
+bestial face, a face that bore the stamp of Nature's eternal injustice.
+The forehead was low, projecting over the eyes, and the sandy hair was
+plastered down over it and then brushed back at an abrupt right angle.
+The chin was heavy, the nostrils were low and wide, and the lower lip
+hung loosely except in his moments of spasmodic earnestness, when it
+shut like a steel trap. Yet about those coarse features there were
+deep, rugged furrows, the scars of many a hand-to-hand struggle with the
+weakness of the flesh, and about that drooping lip were sharp, strenuous
+lines that had conquered it and taught it to pray. Over those seamed
+cheeks there was a certain pallor, a greyness caught from many a vigil.
+It was as though, after Nature had done her worst with that face, some
+fine chisel had gone over it, chastening and almost transfiguring it.
+Tonight, as his muscles twitched with emotion, and the perspiration
+dropped from his hair and chin, there was a certain convincing power
+in the man. For Asa Skinner was a man possessed of a belief, of that
+sentiment of the sublime before which all inequalities are leveled, that
+transport of conviction which seems superior to all laws of condition,
+under which debauchees have become martyrs; which made a tinker an
+artist and a camel-driver the founder of an empire. This was with Asa
+Skinner tonight, as he stood proclaiming the vengeance of God.
+
+It might have occurred to an impartial observer that Asa Skinner's God
+was indeed a vengeful God if he could reserve vengeance for those of
+his creatures who were packed into the Lone Star schoolhouse that night.
+Poor exiles of all nations; men from the south and the north, peasants
+from almost every country of Europe, most of them from the mountainous,
+night-bound coast of Norway. Honest men for the most part, but men with
+whom the world had dealt hardly; the failures of all countries, men
+sobered by toil and saddened by exile, who had been driven to fight for
+the dominion of an untoward soil, to sow where others should gather, the
+advance guard of a mighty civilization to be.
+
+Never had Asa Skinner spoken more earnestly than now. He felt that
+the Lord had this night a special work for him to do. Tonight Eric
+Hermannson, the wildest lad on all the Divide, sat in his audience with
+a fiddle on his knee, just as he had dropped in on his way to play for
+some dance. The violin is an object of particular abhorrence to the Free
+Gospellers. Their antagonism to the church organ is bitter enough, but
+the fiddle they regard as a very incarnation of evil desires, singing
+forever of worldly pleasures and inseparably associated with all
+forbidden things.
+
+Eric Hermannson had long been the object of the prayers of the
+revivalists. His mother had felt the power of the Spirit weeks ago, and
+special prayer-meetings had been held at her house for her son. But
+Eric had only gone his ways laughing, the ways of youth, which are short
+enough at best, and none too flowery on the Divide.
+
+He slipped away from the prayer-meetings to meet the Campbell boys in
+Genereau's saloon, or hug the plump little French girls at Chevalier's
+dances, and sometimes, of a summer night, he even went across the dewy
+cornfields and through the wild-plum thicket to play the fiddle for Lena
+Hanson, whose name was a reproach through all the Divide country, where
+the women are usually too plain and too busy and too tired to depart
+from the ways of virtue. On such occasions Lena, attired in a pink
+wrapper and silk stockings and tiny pink slippers, would sing to him,
+accompanying herself on a battered guitar. It gave him a delicious sense
+of freedom and experience to be with a woman who, no matter how, had
+lived in big cities and knew the ways of town folk, who had never worked
+in the fields and had kept her hands white and soft, her throat fair
+and tender, who had heard great singers in Denver and Salt Lake, and who
+knew the strange language of flattery and idleness and mirth.
+
+Yet, careless as he seemed, the frantic prayers of his mother were not
+altogether without their effect upon Eric. For days he had been fleeing
+before them as a criminal from his pursuers, and over his pleasures had
+fallen the shadow of something dark and terrible that dogged his steps.
+The harder he danced, the louder he sang, the more was he conscious that
+this phantom was gaining upon him, that in time it would track him down.
+One Sunday afternoon, late in the fall, when he had been drinking beer
+with Lena Hanson and listening to a song which made his cheeks burn, a
+rattlesnake had crawled out of the side of the sod house and thrust its
+ugly head in under the screen door. He was not afraid of snakes, but he
+knew enough of Gospellism to feel the significance of the reptile lying
+coiled there upon her doorstep. His lips were cold when he kissed Lena
+goodbye, and he went there no more.
+
+The final barrier between Eric and his mother's faith was his violin,
+and to that he clung as a man sometimes will cling to his dearest sin,
+to the weakness more precious to him than all his strength, In the great
+world beauty comes to men in many guises, and art in a hundred forms,
+but for Eric there was only his violin.
+
+It stood, to him, for all the manifestations of art; it was his only
+bridge into the kingdom of the soul.
+
+It was to Eric Hermannson that the evangelist directed his impassioned
+pleading that night.
+
+"_Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?_ Is there a Saul here tonight
+who has stopped his ears to that gentle pleading, who has thrust a spear
+into that bleeding side? Think of it, my brother; you are offered this
+wonderful love and you prefer the worm that dieth not and the fire which
+will not be quenched. What right have you to lose one of God's precious
+souls? _Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?_"
+
+A great joy dawned in Asa Skinner's pale face, for he saw that Eric
+Hermannson was swaying to and fro in his seat. The minister fell upon
+his knees and threw his long arms up over his head.
+
+"O my brothers! I feel it coming, the blessing we have prayed for. I
+tell you the Spirit is coming! just a little more prayer, brothers, a
+little more zeal, and he will be here. I can feel his cooling wing upon
+my brow. Glory be to God forever and ever, amen!"
+
+The whole congregation groaned under the pressure of this spiritual
+panic. Shouts and hallelujahs went up from every lip. Another figure
+fell prostrate upon the floor. From the mourners' bench rose a chant of
+terror and rapture:
+
+
+            "Eating honey and drinking wine,
+            _Glory to the bleeding Lamb!_
+            I am my Lord's and he is mine,
+            _Glory to the bleeding Lamb!"_
+
+
+The hymn was sung in a dozen dialects and voiced all the vague yearning
+of these hungry lives, of these people who had starved all the passions
+so long, only to fall victims to the barest of them all, fear.
+
+A groan of ultimate anguish rose from Eric Hermannson's bowed head,
+and the sound was like the groan of a great tree when it falls in the
+forest.
+
+The minister rose suddenly to his feet and threw back his head, crying
+in a loud voice:
+
+"_Lazarus, come forth!_ Eric Hermannson, you are lost, going down at
+sea. In the name of God, and Jesus Christ his Son, I throw you the life
+line. Take hold! Almighty God, my soul for his!" The minister threw his
+arms out and lifted his quivering face.
+
+Eric Hermannson rose to his feet; his lips were set and the lightning
+was in his eyes. He took his violin by the neck and crushed it to
+splinters across his knee, and to Asa Skinner the sound was like the
+shackles of sin broken audibly asunder.
+
+
+
+                              II
+
+For more than two years Eric Hermannson kept the austere faith to which
+he had sworn himself, kept it until a girl from the East came to spend
+a week on the Nebraska Divide. She was a girl of other manners and
+conditions, and there were greater distances between her life and Eric's
+than all the miles which separated Rattlesnake Creek from New York City.
+Indeed, she had no business to be in the West at all; but ah! across
+what leagues of land and sea, by what improbable chances, do the
+unrelenting gods bring to us our fate!
+
+It was in a year of financial depression that Wyllis Elliot came to
+Nebraska to buy cheap land and revisit the country where he had spent
+a year of his youth. When he had graduated from Harvard it was still
+customary for moneyed gentlemen to send their scapegrace sons to rough
+it on ranches in the wilds of Nebraska or Dakota, or to consign them to
+a living death in the sagebrush of the Black Hills. These young men did
+not always return to the ways of civilized life. But Wyllis Elliot had
+not married a half-breed, nor been shot in a cowpunchers' brawl, nor
+wrecked by bad whisky, nor appropriated by a smirched adventuress. He
+had been saved from these things by a girl, his sister, who had been
+very near to his life ever since the days when they read fairy tales
+together and dreamed the dreams that never come true. On this, his
+first visit to his father's ranch since he left it six years before, he
+brought her with him. She had been laid up half the winter from a sprain
+received while skating, and had had too much time for reflection during
+those months. She was restless and filled with a desire to see something
+of the wild country of which her brother had told her so much. She was
+to be married the next winter, and Wyllis understood her when she
+begged him to take her with him on this long, aimless jaunt across the
+continent, to taste the last of their freedom together. It comes to all
+women of her type--that desire to taste the unknown which allures and
+terrifies, to run one's whole soul's length out to the wind--just once.
+
+It had been an eventful journey. Wyllis somehow understood that strain
+of gypsy blood in his sister, and he knew where to take her. They had
+slept in sod houses on the Platte River, made the acquaintance of the
+personnel of a third-rate opera company on the train to Deadwood, dined
+in a camp of railroad constructors at the world's end beyond New Castle,
+gone through the Black Hills on horseback, fished for trout in Dome
+Lake, watched a dance at Cripple Creek, where the lost souls who hide
+in the hills gathered for their besotted revelry. And now, last of all,
+before the return to thraldom, there was this little shack, anchored on
+the windy crest of the Divide, a little black dot against the flaming
+sunsets, a scented sea of cornland bathed in opalescent air and blinding
+sunlight.
+
+Margaret Elliot was one of those women of whom there are so many in this
+day, when old order, passing, giveth place to new; beautiful, talented,
+critical, unsatisfied, tired of the world at twenty-four. For the moment
+the life and people of the Divide interested her. She was there but a
+week; perhaps had she stayed longer, that inexorable ennui which travels
+faster even than the Vestibule Limited would have overtaken her. The
+week she tarried there was the week that Eric Hermannson was helping
+Jerry Lockhart thresh; a week earlier or a week later, and there would
+have been no story to write.
+
+It was on Thursday and they were to leave on Saturday. Wyllis and his
+sister were sitting on the wide piazza of the ranchhouse, staring out
+into the afternoon sunlight and protesting against the gusts of hot wind
+that blew up from the sandy riverbottom twenty miles to the southward.
+
+The young man pulled his cap lower over his eyes and remarked:
+
+"This wind is the real thing; you don't strike it anywhere else. You
+remember we had a touch of it in Algiers and I told you it came from
+Kansas. It's the keynote of this country."
+
+Wyllis touched her hand that lay on the hammock and continued gently:
+
+"I hope it's paid you, Sis. Roughing it's dangerous business; it takes
+the taste out of things."
+
+She shut her fingers firmly over the brown hand that was so like her
+own.
+
+"Paid? Why, Wyllis, I haven't been so happy since we were children and
+were going to discover the ruins of Troy together some day. Do you know,
+I believe I could just stay on here forever and let the world go on its
+own gait. It seems as though the tension and strain we used to talk of
+last winter were gone for good, as though one could never give one's
+strength out to such petty things any more."
+
+Wyllis brushed the ashes of his pipe away from the silk handkerchief
+that was knotted about his neck and stared moodily off at the skyline.
+
+"No, you're mistaken. This would bore you after a while. You can't shake
+the fever of the other life. I've tried it. There was a time when the
+gay fellows of Rome could trot down into the Thebaid and burrow into the
+sandhills and get rid of it. But it's all too complex now. You see
+we've made our dissipations so dainty and respectable that they've
+gone further in than the flesh, and taken hold of the ego proper. You
+couldn't rest, even here. The war cry would follow you."
+
+"You don't waste words, Wyllis, but you never miss fire. I talk more
+than you do, without saying half so much. You must have learned the art
+of silence from these taciturn Norwegians. I think I like silent men."
+
+"Naturally," said Wyllis, "since you have decided to marry the most
+brilliant talker you know."
+
+Both were silent for a time, listening to the sighing of the hot wind
+through the parched morning-glory vines. Margaret spoke first.
+
+"Tell me, Wyllis, were many of the Norwegians you used to know as
+interesting as Eric Hermannson?"
+
+"Who, Siegfried? Well, no. He used to be the flower of the Norwegian
+youth in my day, and he's rather an exception, even now. He has
+retrograded, though. The bonds of the soil have tightened on him, I
+fancy."
+
+"Siegfried? Come, that's rather good, Wyllis. He looks like a
+dragon-slayer. What is it that makes him so different from the others? I
+can talk to him; he seems quite like a human being."
+
+ "Well," said Wyllis, meditatively, "I don't read Bourget
+as much as my cultured sister, and I'm not so well up in analysis, but
+I fancy it's because one keeps cherishing a perfectly unwarranted
+suspicion that under that big, hulking anatomy of his, he may conceal a
+soul somewhere. _Nicht wahr?_"
+
+"Something like that," said Margaret, thoughtfully, "except that it's
+more than a suspicion, and it isn't groundless. He has one, and he makes
+it known, somehow, without speaking."
+
+"I always have my doubts about loquacious souls," Wyllis remarked, with
+the unbelieving smile that had grown habitual with him.
+
+Margaret went on, not heeding the interruption. "I knew it from the
+first, when he told me about the suicide of his cousin, the Bernstein
+boy. That kind of blunt pathos can't be summoned at will in anybody. The
+earlier novelists rose to it, sometimes, unconsciously. But last night
+when I sang for him I was doubly sure. Oh, I haven't told you about that
+yet! Better light your pipe again. You see, he stumbled in on me in the
+dark when I was pumping away at that old parlour organ to please Mrs.
+Lockhart It's her household fetish and I've forgotten how many pounds of
+butter she made and sold to buy it. Well, Eric stumbled in, and in some
+inarticulate manner made me understand that he wanted me to sing for
+him. I sang just the old things, of course. It's queer to sing familiar
+things here at the world's end. It makes one think how the hearts of men
+have carried them around the world, into the wastes of Iceland and the
+jungles of Africa and the islands of the Pacific. I think if one lived
+here long enough one would quite forget how to be trivial, and would
+read only the great books that we never get time to read in the world,
+and would remember only the great music, and the things that are really
+worth while would stand out clearly against that horizon over there. And
+of course I played the intermezzo from _Cavalleria Rusticana_ for him;
+it goes rather better on an organ than most things do. He shuffled his
+feet and twisted his big hands up into knots and blurted out that he
+didn't know there was any music like that in the world. Why, there were
+tears in his voice, Wyllis! Yes, like Rossetti, I _heard_ his tears.
+Then it dawned upon me that it was probably the first good music he had
+ever heard in all his life. Think of it, to care for music as he does
+and never to hear it, never to know that it exists on earth! To long
+for it as we long for other perfect experiences that never come. I
+can't tell you what music means to that man. I never saw any one so
+susceptible to it. It gave him speech, he became alive. When I had
+finished the intermezzo, he began telling me about a little crippled
+brother who died and whom he loved and used to carry everywhere in his
+arms. He did not wait for encouragement. He took up the story and told
+it slowly, as if to himself, just sort of rose up and told his own woe
+to answer Mascagni's. It overcame me."
+
+"Poor devil," said Wyllis, looking at her with mysterious eyes, "and so
+you've given him a new woe. Now he'll go on wanting Grieg and
+Schubert the rest of his days and never getting them. That's a girl's
+philanthropy for you!"
+
+Jerry Lockhart came out of the house screwing his chin over the unusual
+luxury of a stiff white collar, which his wife insisted upon as a
+necessary article of toilet while Miss Elliot was at the house. Jerry
+sat down on the step and smiled his broad, red smile at Margaret.
+
+"Well, I've got the music for your dance, Miss Elliot. Olaf Oleson
+will bring his accordion and Mollie will play the organ, when she isn't
+lookin' after the grub, and a little chap from Frenchtown will bring his
+fiddle--though the French don't mix with the Norwegians much."
+
+"Delightful! Mr. Lockhart, that dance will be the feature of our trip,
+and it's so nice of you to get it up for us. We'll see the Norwegians in
+character at last," cried Margaret, cordially.
+
+"See here, Lockhart, I'll settle with you for backing her in this
+scheme," said Wyllis, sitting up and knocking the ashes out of his pipe.
+"She's done crazy things enough on this trip, but to talk of dancing all
+night with a gang of half-mad Norwegians and taking the carriage at four
+to catch the six o'clock train out of Riverton--well, it's tommyrot,
+that's what it is!"
+
+"Wyllis, I leave it to your sovereign power of reason to decide whether
+it isn't easier to stay up all night than to get up at three in the
+morning. To get up at three, think what that means! No, sir, I prefer to
+keep my vigil and then get into a sleeper."
+
+"But what do you want with the Norwegians? I thought you were tired of
+dancing."
+
+"So I am, with some people. But I want to see a Norwegian dance, and I
+intend to. Come, Wyllis, you know how seldom it is that one really wants
+to do anything nowadays. I wonder when I have really wanted to go to a
+party before. It will be something to remember next month at Newport,
+when we have to and don't want to. Remember your own theory that
+contrast is about the only thing that makes life endurable. This is my
+party and Mr. Lockhart's; your whole duty tomorrow night will consist in
+being nice to the Norwegian girls. I'll warrant you were adept enough
+at it once. And you'd better be very nice indeed, for if there are many
+such young Valkyries as Eric's sister among them, they would simply tie
+you up in a knot if they suspected you were guying them."
+
+Wyllis groaned and sank back into the hammock to consider his fate,
+while his sister went on.
+
+"And the guests, Mr. Lockhart, did they accept?"
+
+Lockhart took out his knife and began sharpening it on the sole of his
+plowshoe.
+
+"Well, I guess we'll have a couple dozen. You see it's pretty hard to
+get a crowd together here any more. Most of 'em have gone over to the
+Free Gospellers, and they'd rather put their feet in the fire than shake
+'em to a fiddle."
+
+Margaret made a gesture of impatience. "Those Free Gospellers have just
+cast an evil spell over this country, haven't they?"
+
+"Well," said Lockhart, cautiously, "I don't just like to pass judgment
+on any Christian sect, but if you're to know the chosen by their works,
+the Gospellers can't make a very proud showin', an' that's a fact.
+They're responsible for a few suicides, and they've sent a good-sized
+delegation to the state insane asylum, an' I don't see as they've made
+the rest of us much better than we were before. I had a little herdboy
+last spring, as square a little Dane as I want to work for me, but after
+the Gospellers got hold of him and sanctified him, the little beggar
+used to get down on his knees out on the prairie and pray by the hour
+and let the cattle get into the corn, an' I had to fire him. That's
+about the way it goes. Now there's Eric; that chap used to be a hustler
+and the spryest dancer in all this section-called all the dances. Now
+he's got no ambition and he's glum as a preacher. I don't suppose we can
+even get him to come in tomorrow night."
+
+"Eric? Why, he must dance, we can't let him off," said Margaret,
+quickly. "Why, I intend to dance with him myself."
+
+"I'm afraid he won't dance. I asked him this morning if he'd help us out
+and he said, 'I don't dance now, any more,'" said Lockhart, imitating
+the laboured English of the Norwegian.
+
+"'The Miller of Hofbau, the Miller of Hofbau, O my Princess!'" chirped
+Wyllis, cheerfully, from his hammock.
+
+The red on his sister's cheek deepened a little, and she laughed
+mischievously. "We'll see about that, sir. I'll not admit that I am
+beaten until I have asked him myself."
+
+Every night Eric rode over to St. Anne, a little village in the heart
+of the French settlement, for the mail. As the road lay through the most
+attractive part of the Divide country, on several occasions Margaret
+Elliot and her brother had accompanied him. Tonight Wyllis had business
+with Lockhart, and Margaret rode with Eric, mounted on a frisky little
+mustang that Mrs. Lockhart had broken to the sidesaddle. Margaret
+regarded her escort very much as she did the servant who always
+accompanied her on long rides at home, and the ride to the village was
+a silent one. She was occupied with thoughts of another world, and Eric
+was wrestling with more thoughts than had ever been crowded into his
+head before.
+
+He rode with his eyes riveted on that slight figure before him, as
+though he wished to absorb it through the optic nerves and hold it in
+his brain forever. He understood the situation perfectly. His brain
+worked slowly, but he had a keen sense of the values of things. This
+girl represented an entirely new species of humanity to him, but he knew
+where to place her. The prophets of old, when an angel first appeared
+unto them, never doubted its high origin.
+
+Eric was patient under the adverse conditions of his life, but he
+was not servile. The Norse blood in him had not entirely lost its
+self-reliance. He came of a proud fisher line, men who were not afraid
+of anything but the ice and the devil, and he had prospects before him
+when his father went down off the North Cape in the long Arctic night,
+and his mother, seized by a violent horror of seafaring life, had
+followed her brother to America. Eric was eighteen then, handsome as
+young Siegfried, a giant in stature, with a skin singularly pure and
+delicate, like a Swede's; hair as yellow as the locks of Tennyson's
+amorous Prince, and eyes of a fierce, burning blue, whose flash was most
+dangerous to women.
+
+He had in those days a certain pride of bearing, a certain confidence of
+approach, that usually accompanies physical perfection. It was even said
+of him then that he was in love with life, and inclined to levity, a
+vice most unusual on the Divide. But the sad history of those Norwegian
+exiles, transplanted in an arid soil and under a scorching sun, had
+repeated itself in his case. Toil and isolation had sobered him, and
+he grew more and more like the clods among which he laboured. It was as
+though some red-hot instrument had touched for a moment those delicate
+fibers of the brain which respond to acute pain or pleasure, in which
+lies the power of exquisite sensation, and had seared them quite away.
+It is a painful thing to watch the light die out of the eyes of those
+Norsemen, leaving an expression of impenetrable sadness, quite passive,
+quite hopeless, a shadow that is never lifted. With some this change
+comes almost at once, in the first bitterness of homesickness, with
+others it comes more slowly, according to the time it takes each man's
+heart to die.
+
+Oh, those poor Northmen of the Divide! They are dead many a year before
+they are put to rest in the little graveyard on the windy hill where
+exiles of all nations grow akin.
+
+The peculiar species of hypochondria to which the exiles of his people
+sooner or later succumb had not developed in Eric until that night at
+the Lone Star schoolhouse, when he had broken his violin across his
+knee. After that, the gloom of his people settled down upon him, and the
+gospel of maceration began its work.
+
+_"If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out,"_ et cetera. The pagan smile
+that once hovered about his lips was gone, and he was one with sorrow.
+Religion heals a hundred hearts for one that it embitters, but when it
+destroys, its work is quick and deadly, and where the agony of the cross
+has been, joy will not come again. This man understood things literally:
+one must live without pleasure to die without fear; to save the soul, it
+was necessary to starve the soul.
+
+The sun hung low above the cornfields when Margaret and her cavalier
+left St. Anne. South of the town there is a stretch of road that runs
+for some three miles through the French settlement, where the prairie
+is as level as the surface of a lake. There the fields of flax and
+wheat and rye are bordered by precise rows of slender, tapering Lombard
+poplars. It was a yellow world that Margaret Elliot saw under the wide
+light of the setting sun.
+
+The girl gathered up her reins and called back to Eric, "It will be safe
+to run the horses here, won't it?"
+
+"Yes, I think so, now," he answered, touching his spur to his pony's
+flank. They were off like the wind. It is an old saying in the West that
+newcomers always ride a horse or two to death before they get broken
+in to the country. They are tempted by the great open spaces and try to
+outride the horizon, to get to the end of something. Margaret galloped
+over the level road, and Eric, from behind, saw her long veil fluttering
+in the wind. It had fluttered just so in his dreams last night and the
+night before. With a sudden inspiration of courage he overtook her and
+rode beside her, looking intently at her half-averted face. Before, he
+had only stolen occasional glances at it, seen it in blinding flashes,
+always with more or less embarrassment, but now he determined to let
+every line of it sink into his memory. Men of the world would have said
+that it was an unusual face, nervous, finely cut, with clear, elegant
+lines that betokened ancestry. Men of letters would have called it a
+historic face, and would have conjectured at what old passions, long
+asleep, what old sorrows forgotten time out of mind, doing battle
+together in ages gone, had curved those delicate nostrils, left their
+unconscious memory in those eyes. But Eric read no meaning in these
+details. To him this beauty was something more than colour and line;
+it was a flash of white light, in which one cannot distinguish colour
+because all colours are there. To him it was a complete revelation, an
+embodiment of those dreams of impossible loveliness that linger by a
+young man's pillow on midsummer nights; yet, because it held something
+more than the attraction of health and youth and shapeliness, it
+troubled him, and in its presence he felt as the Goths before the white
+marbles in the Roman Capitol, not knowing whether they were men or gods.
+At times he felt like uncovering his head before it, again the fury
+seized him to break and despoil, to find the clay in this spirit-thing
+and stamp upon it. Away from her, he longed to strike out with his arms,
+and take and hold; it maddened him that this woman whom he could break
+in his hands should be so much stronger than he. But near her, he never
+questioned this strength; he admitted its potentiality as he admitted
+the miracles of the Bible; it enervated and conquered him.
+
+Tonight, when he rode so close to her that he could have touched her, he
+knew that he might as well reach out his hand to take a star.
+
+Margaret stirred uneasily under his gaze and turned questioningly in her
+saddle.
+
+"This wind puts me a little out of breath when we ride fast," she said.
+
+Eric turned his eyes away.
+
+"I want to ask you if I go to New York to work, if I maybe hear music
+like you sang last night? I been a purty good hand to work," he asked,
+timidly.
+
+Margaret looked at him with surprise, and then, as she studied the
+outline of his face, pityingly.
+
+"Well, you might--but you'd lose a good deal else. I shouldn't like you
+to go to New York--and be poor, you'd be out of atmosphere, some
+way," she said, slowly. Inwardly she was thinking: _There he would be
+altogether sordid, impossible--a machine who would carry one's trunks
+upstairs, perhaps. Here he is every inch a man, rather picturesque; why
+is it?_ "No," she added aloud, "I shouldn't like that."
+
+"Then I not go," said Eric, decidedly.
+
+Margaret turned her face to hide a smile. She was a trifle amused and a
+trifle annoyed. Suddenly she spoke again.
+
+"But I'll tell you what I do want you to do, Eric. I want you to dance
+with us tomorrow night and teach me some of the Norwegian dances; they
+say you know them all. Won't you?"
+
+Eric straightened himself in his saddle and his eyes flashed as they had
+done in the Lone Star schoolhouse when he broke his violin across his
+knee.
+
+"Yes, I will," he said, quietly, and he believed that he delivered his
+soul to hell as he said it.
+
+They had reached the rougher country now, where the road wound through
+a narrow cut in one of the bluffs along the creek, when a beat of hoofs
+ahead and the sharp neighing of horses made the ponies start and Eric
+rose in his stirrups. Then down the gulch in front of them and over the
+steep clay banks thundered a herd of wild ponies, nimble as monkeys and
+wild as rabbits, such as horse-traders drive east from the plains of
+Montana to sell in the farming country. Margaret's pony made a shrill
+sound, a neigh that was almost a scream, and started up the clay bank to
+meet them, all the wild blood of the range breaking out in an instant.
+Margaret called to Eric just as he threw himself out of the saddle and
+caught her pony's bit. But the wiry little animal had gone mad and was
+kicking and biting like a devil. Her wild brothers of the range were all
+about her, neighing, and pawing the earth, and striking her with their
+forefeet and snapping at her flanks. It was the old liberty of the range
+that the little beast fought for.
+
+"Drop the reins and hold tight, tight!" Eric called, throwing all his
+weight upon the bit, struggling under those frantic forefeet that now
+beat at his breast, and now kicked at the wild mustangs that surged and
+tossed about him. He succeeded in wrenching the pony's head toward him
+and crowding her withers against the clay bank, so that she could not
+roll.
+
+"Hold tight, tight!" he shouted again, launching a kick at a snorting
+animal that reared back against Margaret's saddle. If she should lose
+her courage and fall now, under those hoofs--He struck out again and
+again, kicking right and left with all his might. Already the negligent
+drivers had galloped into the cut, and their long quirts were whistling
+over the heads of the herd. As suddenly as it had come, the struggling,
+frantic wave of wild life swept up out of the gulch and on across the
+open prairie, and with a long despairing whinny of farewell the pony
+dropped her head and stood trembling in her sweat, shaking the foam and
+blood from her bit.
+
+Eric stepped close to Margaret's side and laid his hand on her saddle.
+"You are not hurt?" he asked, hoarsely. As he raised his face in the
+soft starlight she saw that it was white and drawn and that his lips
+were working nervously.
+
+"No, no, not at all. But you, you are suffering; they struck you!" she
+cried in sharp alarm.
+
+He stepped back and drew his hand across his brow.
+
+"No, it is not that," he spoke rapidly now, with his hands clenched at
+his side. "But if they had hurt you, I would beat their brains out with
+my hands. I would kill them all. I was never afraid before. You are the
+only beautiful thing that has ever come close to me. You came like an
+angel out of the sky. You are like the music you sing, you are like the
+stars and the snow on the mountains where I played when I was a little
+boy. You are like all that I wanted once and never had, you are all
+that they have killed in me. I die for you tonight, tomorrow, for all
+eternity. I am not a coward; I was afraid because I love you more than
+Christ who died for me, more than I am afraid of hell, or hope for
+heaven. I was never afraid before. If you had fallen--oh, my God!" He
+threw his arms out blindly and dropped his head upon the pony's mane,
+leaning limply against the animal like a man struck by some sickness.
+His shoulders rose and fell perceptibly with his laboured breathing. The
+horse stood cowed with exhaustion and fear. Presently Margaret laid her
+hand on Eric's head and said gently:
+
+"You are better now, shall we go on? Can you get your horse?"
+
+"No, he has gone with the herd. I will lead yours, she is not safe.
+I will not frighten you again." His voice was still husky, but it was
+steady now. He took hold of the bit and tramped home in silence.
+
+When they reached the house, Eric stood stolidly by the pony's head
+until Wyllis came to lift his sister from the saddle.
+
+"The horses were badly frightened, Wyllis. I think I was pretty
+thoroughly scared myself," she said as she took her brother's arm and
+went slowly up the hill toward the house. "No, I'm not hurt, thanks to
+Eric. You must thank him for taking such good care of me. He's a mighty
+fine fellow. I'll tell you all about it in the morning, dear. I was
+pretty well shaken up and I'm going right to bed now. Good night."
+
+When she reached the low room in which she slept, she sank upon the bed
+in her riding dress, face downward.
+
+"Oh, I pity him! I pity him!" she murmured, with a long sigh of
+exhaustion. She must have slept a little. When she rose again, she took
+from her dress a letter that had been waiting for her at the village
+post-office. It was closely written in a long, angular hand, covering a
+dozen pages of foreign note-paper, and began:
+
+My Dearest Margaret: if I should attempt to say _how like a winter hath
+thine absence been_, I should incur the risk of being tedious. Really,
+it takes the sparkle out of everything. Having nothing better to do, and
+not caring to go anywhere in particular without you, I remained in the
+city until Jack Courtwell noted my general despondency and brought me
+down here to his place on the sound to manage some open-air theatricals
+he is getting up. _As You Like It_ is of course the piece selected. Miss
+Harrison plays Rosalind. I wish you had been here to take the part. Miss
+Harrison reads her lines well, but she is either a maiden-all-forlorn or
+a tomboy; insists on reading into the part all sorts of deeper meanings
+and highly coloured suggestions wholly out of harmony with the pastoral
+setting. Like most of the professionals, she exaggerates the emotional
+element and quite fails to do justice to Rosalind's facile wit and
+really brilliant mental qualities. Gerard will do Orlando, but rumor
+says he is _epris_ of your sometime friend, Miss Meredith, and his
+memory is treacherous and his interest fitful.
+
+My new pictures arrived last week on the _Gascogne_. The Puvis de
+Chavannes is even more beautiful than I thought it in Paris. A pale
+dream-maiden sits by a pale dream-cow and a stream of anemic water flows
+at her feet. The Constant, you will remember, I got because you admired
+it. It is here in all its florid splendour, the whole dominated by a
+glowing sensuosity. The drapery of the female figure is as wonderful as
+you said; the fabric all barbaric pearl and gold, painted with an easy,
+effortless voluptuousness, and that white, gleaming line of African
+coast in the background recalls memories of you very precious to me. But
+it is useless to deny that Constant irritates me. Though I cannot prove
+the charge against him, his brilliancy always makes me suspect him of
+cheapness.
+
+Here Margaret stopped and glanced at the remaining pages of this strange
+love-letter. They seemed to be filled chiefly with discussions of
+pictures and books, and with a slow smile she laid them by.
+
+She rose and began undressing. Before she lay down she went to open the
+window. With her hand on the sill, she hesitated, feeling suddenly as
+though some danger were lurking outside, some inordinate desire waiting
+to spring upon her in the darkness. She stood there for a long time,
+gazing at the infinite sweep of the sky.
+
+"Oh, it is all so little, so little there," she murmured. "When
+everything else is so dwarfed, why should one expect love to be great?
+Why should one try to read highly coloured suggestions into a life like
+that? If only I could find one thing in it all that mattered greatly,
+one thing that would warm me when I am alone! Will life never give me
+that one great moment?"
+
+As she raised the window, she heard a sound in the plum bushes outside.
+It was only the house-dog roused from his sleep, but Margaret started
+violently and trembled so that she caught the foot of the bed for
+support. Again she felt herself pursued by some overwhelming longing,
+some desperate necessity for herself, like the outstretching of
+helpless, unseen arms in the darkness, and the air seemed heavy with
+sighs of yearning. She fled to her bed with the words, "I love you more
+than Christ who died for me!" ringing in her ears.
+
+
+                             III
+
+About midnight the dance at Lockhart's was at its height. Even the old
+men who had come to "look on" caught the spirit of revelry and stamped
+the floor with the vigor of old Silenus. Eric took the violin from the
+Frenchmen, and Minna Oleson sat at the organ, and the music grew more
+and more characteristic--rude, half mournful music, made up of the
+folksongs of the North, that the villagers sing through the long night
+in hamlets by the sea, when they are thinking of the sun, and the
+spring, and the fishermen so long away. To Margaret some of it sounded
+like Grieg's _Peer Gynt_ music. She found something irresistibly
+infectious in the mirth of these people who were so seldom merry, and
+she felt almost one of them. Something seemed struggling for freedom
+in them tonight, something of the joyous childhood of the nations
+which exile had not killed. The girls were all boisterous with delight.
+Pleasure came to them but rarely, and when it came, they caught at it
+wildly and crushed its fluttering wings in their strong brown fingers.
+They had a hard life enough, most of them. Torrid summers and freezing
+winters, labour and drudgery and ignorance, were the portion of
+their girlhood; a short wooing, a hasty, loveless marriage, unlimited
+maternity, thankless sons, premature age and ugliness, were the dower
+of their womanhood. But what matter? Tonight there was hot liquor in the
+glass and hot blood in the heart; tonight they danced.
+
+Tonight Eric Hermannson had renewed his youth. He was no longer the big,
+silent Norwegian who had sat at Margaret's feet and looked hopelessly
+into her eyes. Tonight he was a man, with a man's rights and a man's
+power. Tonight he was Siegfried indeed. His hair was yellow as the heavy
+wheat in the ripe of summer, and his eyes flashed like the blue water
+between the ice packs in the north seas. He was not afraid of Margaret
+tonight, and when he danced with her he held her firmly. She was tired
+and dragged on his arm a little, but the strength of the man was like
+an all-pervading fluid, stealing through her veins, awakening under her
+heart some nameless, unsuspected existence that had slumbered there all
+these years and that went out through her throbbing fingertips to his
+that answered. She wondered if the hoydenish blood of some lawless
+ancestor, long asleep, were calling out in her tonight, some drop of
+a hotter fluid that the centuries had failed to cool, and why, if this
+curse were in her, it had not spoken before. But was it a curse, this
+awakening, this wealth before undiscovered, this music set free? For the
+first time in her life her heart held something stronger than herself,
+was not this worthwhile? Then she ceased to wonder. She lost sight of
+the lights and the faces and the music was drowned by the beating of her
+own arteries. She saw only the blue eyes that flashed above her, felt
+only the warmth of that throbbing hand which held hers and which the
+blood of his heart fed. Dimly, as in a dream, she saw the drooping
+shoulders, high white forehead and tight, cynical mouth of the man she
+was to marry in December. For an hour she had been crowding back the
+memory of that face with all her strength.
+
+"Let us stop, this is enough," she whispered. His only answer was to
+tighten the arm behind her. She sighed and let that masterful strength
+bear her where it would. She forgot that this man was little more than
+a savage, that they would part at dawn. The blood has no memories, no
+reflections, no regrets for the past, no consideration of the future.
+
+"Let us go out where it is cooler," she said when the music stopped;
+thinking, _I am growing faint here, I shall be all right in the open
+air_. They stepped out into the cool, blue air of the night.
+
+Since the older folk had begun dancing, the young Norwegians had been
+slipping out in couples to climb the windmill tower into the cooler
+atmosphere, as is their custom.
+
+"You like to go up?" asked Eric, close to her ear.
+
+She turned and looked at him with suppressed amusement. "How high is
+it?"
+
+"Forty feet, about. I not let you fall." There was a note of
+irresistible pleading in his voice, and she felt that he tremendously
+wished her to go. Well, why not? This was a night of the unusual, when
+she was not herself at all, but was living an unreality. Tomorrow, yes,
+in a few hours, there would be the Vestibule Limited and the world.
+
+"Well, if you'll take good care of me. I used to be able to climb, when
+I was a little girl."
+
+Once at the top and seated on the platform, they were silent. Margaret
+wondered if she would not hunger for that scene all her life, through
+all the routine of the days to come. Above them stretched the great
+Western sky, serenely blue, even in the night, with its big, burning
+stars, never so cold and dead and far away as in denser atmospheres. The
+moon would not be up for twenty minutes yet, and all about the horizon,
+that wide horizon, which seemed to reach around the world, lingered a
+pale white light, as of a universal dawn. The weary wind brought up to
+them the heavy odours of the cornfields. The music of the dance sounded
+faintly from below. Eric leaned on his elbow beside her, his legs
+swinging down on the ladder. His great shoulders looked more than ever
+like those of the stone Doryphorus, who stands in his perfect, reposeful
+strength in the Louvre, and had often made her wonder if such men died
+forever with the youth of Greece.
+
+"How sweet the corn smells at night," said Margaret nervously.
+
+"Yes, like the flowers that grow in paradise, I think."
+
+She was somewhat startled by this reply, and more startled when this
+taciturn man spoke again.
+
+"You go away tomorrow?"
+
+"Yes, we have stayed longer than we thought to now."
+
+"You not come back any more?"
+
+"No, I expect not. You see, it is a long trip halfway across the
+continent."
+
+"You soon forget about this country, I guess." It seemed to him now
+a little thing to lose his soul for this woman, but that she should
+utterly forget this night into which he threw all his life and all his
+eternity, that was a bitter thought.
+
+"No, Eric, I will not forget. You have all been too kind to me for that.
+And you won't be sorry you danced this one night, will you?"
+
+"I never be sorry. I have not been so happy before. I not be so happy
+again, ever. You will be happy many nights yet, I only this one. I will
+dream sometimes, maybe."
+
+The mighty resignation of his tone alarmed and touched her. It was as
+when some great animal composes itself for death, as when a great ship
+goes down at sea.
+
+She sighed, but did not answer him. He drew a little closer and looked
+into her eyes.
+
+"You are not always happy, too?" he asked.
+
+"No, not always, Eric; not very often, I think."
+
+"You have a trouble?"
+
+"Yes, but I cannot put it into words. Perhaps if I could do that, I
+could cure it."
+
+He clasped his hands together over his heart, as children do when they
+pray, and said falteringly, "If I own all the world, I give him you."
+
+Margaret felt a sudden moisture in her eyes, and laid her hand on his.
+
+"Thank you, Eric; I believe you would. But perhaps even then I should
+not be happy. Perhaps I have too much of it already."
+
+She did not take her hand away from him; she did not dare. She sat still
+and waited for the traditions in which she had always believed to speak
+and save her. But they were dumb. She belonged to an ultra-refined
+civilization which tries to cheat nature with elegant sophistries. Cheat
+nature? Bah! One generation may do it, perhaps two, but the third--Can
+we ever rise above nature or sink below her? Did she not turn on
+Jerusalem as upon Sodom, upon St. Anthony in his desert as upon Nero
+in his seraglio? Does she not always cry in brutal triumph: "I am here
+still, at the bottom of things, warming the roots of life; you cannot
+starve me nor tame me nor thwart me; I made the world, I rule it, and I
+am its destiny."
+
+This woman, on a windmill tower at the world's end with a giant
+barbarian, heard that cry tonight, and she was afraid! Ah! the terror
+and the delight of that moment when first we fear ourselves! Until then
+we have not lived.
+
+"Come, Eric, let us go down; the moon is up and the music has begun
+again," she said.
+
+He rose silently and stepped down upon the ladder, putting his arm about
+her to help her. That arm could have thrown Thor's hammer out in the
+cornfields yonder, yet it scarcely touched her, and his hand trembled
+as it had done in the dance. His face was level with hers now and the
+moonlight fell sharply upon it. All her life she had searched the faces
+of men for the look that lay in his eyes. She knew that that look had
+never shone for her before, would never shine for her on earth again,
+that such love comes to one only in dreams or in impossible places like
+this, unattainable always. This was Love's self, in a moment it would
+die. Stung by the agonized appeal that emanated from the man's whole
+being, she leaned forward and laid her lips on his. Once, twice and
+again she heard the deep respirations rattle in his throat while
+she held them there, and the riotous force under her head became
+an engulfing weakness. He drew her up to him until he felt all the
+resistance go out of her body, until every nerve relaxed and yielded.
+When she drew her face back from his, it was white with fear.
+
+"Let us go down, oh, my God! let us go down!" she muttered. And the
+drunken stars up yonder seemed reeling to some appointed doom as she
+clung to the rounds of the ladder. All that she was to know of love she
+had left upon his lips.
+
+"The devil is loose again," whispered Olaf Oleson, as he saw Eric
+dancing a moment later, his eyes blazing.
+
+But Eric was thinking with an almost savage exultation of the time when
+he should pay for this. Ah, there would be no quailing then! if ever a
+soul went fearlessly, proudly down to the gates infernal, his should go.
+For a moment he fancied he was there already, treading down the tempest
+of flame, hugging the fiery hurricane to his breast. He wondered whether
+in ages gone, all the countless years of sinning in which men had sold
+and lost and flung their souls away, any man had ever so cheated Satan,
+had ever bartered his soul for so great a price.
+
+It seemed but a little while till dawn.
+
+The carriage was brought to the door and Wyllis Elliot and his sister
+said goodbye. She could not meet Eric's eyes as she gave him her hand,
+but as he stood by the horse's head, just as the carriage moved off, she
+gave him one swift glance that said, "I will not forget." In a moment
+the carriage was gone.
+
+Eric changed his coat and plunged his head into the water tank and went
+to the barn to hook up his team. As he led his horses to the door, a
+shadow fell across his path, and he saw Skinner rising in his stirrups.
+His rugged face was pale and worn with looking after his wayward flock,
+with dragging men into the way of salvation.
+
+"Good morning, Eric. There was a dance here last night?" he asked,
+sternly.
+
+"A dance? Oh, yes, a dance," replied Eric, cheerfully.
+
+"Certainly you did not dance, Eric?"
+
+"Yes, I danced. I danced all the time."
+
+The minister's shoulders drooped, and an expression of profound
+discouragement settled over his haggard face. There was almost anguish
+in the yearning he felt for this soul.
+
+"Eric, I didn't look for this from you. I thought God had set his mark
+on you if he ever had on any man. And it is for things like this that
+you set your soul back a thousand years from God. O foolish and perverse
+generation!"
+
+Eric drew himself up to his full height and looked off to where the new
+day was gilding the corn-tassels and flooding the uplands with light.
+As his nostrils drew in the breath of the dew and the morning, something
+from the only poetry he had ever read flashed across his mind, and he
+murmured, half to himself, with dreamy exultation:
+
+"'And a day shall be as a thousand years, and a thousand years as a
+day.'"
+
+
+
+
+The Enchanted Bluff
+
+We had our swim before sundown, and while we were cooking our supper the
+oblique rays of light made a dazzling glare on the white sand about
+us. The translucent red ball itself sank behind the brown stretches
+of cornfield as we sat down to eat, and the warm layer of air that had
+rested over the water and our clean sand bar grew fresher and smelled of
+the rank ironweed and sunflowers growing on the flatter shore. The river
+was brown and sluggish, like any other of the half-dozen streams that
+water the Nebraska corn lands. On one shore was an irregular line of
+bald clay bluffs where a few scrub oaks with thick trunks and flat,
+twisted tops threw light shadows on the long grass. The western shore
+was low and level, with cornfields that stretched to the skyline, and
+all along the water's edge were little sandy coves and beaches where
+slim cottonwoods and willow saplings flickered.
+
+The turbulence of the river in springtime discouraged milling, and,
+beyond keeping the old red bridge in repair, the busy farmers did not
+concern themselves with the stream; so the Sandtown boys were left in
+undisputed possession. In the autumn we hunted quail through the miles
+of stubble and fodder land along the flat shore, and, after the winter
+skating season was over and the ice had gone out, the spring freshets
+and flooded bottoms gave us our great excitement of the year. The
+channel was never the same for two successive seasons. Every spring the
+swollen stream undermined a bluff to the east, or bit out a few acres of
+cornfield to the west and whirled the soil away, to deposit it in spumy
+mud banks somewhere else. When the water fell low in midsummer, new sand
+bars were thus exposed to dry and whiten in the August sun. Sometimes
+these were banked so firmly that the fury of the next freshet failed to
+unseat them; the little willow seedlings emerged triumphantly from the
+yellow froth, broke into spring leaf, shot up into summer growth, and
+with their mesh of roots bound together the moist sand beneath them
+against the batterings of another April. Here and there a cottonwood
+soon glittered among them, quivering in the low current of air that,
+even on breathless days when the dust hung like smoke above the wagon
+road, trembled along the face of the water.
+
+It was on such an island, in the third summer of its yellow green, that
+we built our watch fire; not in the thicket of dancing willow wands, but
+on the level terrace of fine sand which had been added that spring;
+a little new bit of world, beautifully ridged with ripple marks, and
+strewn with the tiny skeletons of turtles and fish, all as white and dry
+as if they had been expertly cured. We had been careful not to mar the
+freshness of the place, although we often swam to it on summer evenings
+and lay on the sand to rest.
+
+This was our last watch fire of the year, and there were reasons why I
+should remember it better than any of the others. Next week the other
+boys were to file back to their old places in the Sandtown High School,
+but I was to go up to the Divide to teach my first country school in the
+Norwegian district. I was already homesick at the thought of quitting
+the boys with whom I had always played; of leaving the river, and going
+up into a windy plain that was all windmills and cornfields and
+big pastures; where there was nothing wilful or unmanageable in the
+landscape, no new islands, and no chance of unfamiliar birds--such as
+often followed the watercourses.
+
+Other boys came and went and used the river for fishing or skating,
+but we six were sworn to the spirit of the stream, and we were friends
+mainly because of the river. There were the two Hassler boys, Fritz and
+Otto, sons of the little German tailor. They were the youngest of us;
+ragged boys of ten and twelve, with sunburned hair, weather-stained
+faces, and pale blue eyes. Otto, the elder, was the best mathematician
+in school, and clever at his books, but he always dropped out in the
+spring term as if the river could not get on without him. He and Fritz
+caught the fat, horned catfish and sold them about the town, and they
+lived so much in the water that they were as brown and sandy as the
+river itself.
+
+There was Percy Pound, a fat, freckled boy with chubby cheeks, who took
+half a dozen boys' story-papers and was always being kept in for reading
+detective stories behind his desk. There was Tip Smith, destined by
+his freckles and red hair to be the buffoon in all our games, though he
+walked like a timid little old man and had a funny, cracked laugh. Tip
+worked hard in his father's grocery store every afternoon, and swept it
+out before school in the morning. Even his recreations were laborious.
+He collected cigarette cards and tin tobacco-tags indefatigably, and
+would sit for hours humped up over a snarling little scroll-saw which he
+kept in his attic. His dearest possessions were some little pill bottles
+that purported to contain grains of wheat from the Holy Land, water from
+the Jordan and the Dead Sea, and earth from the Mount of Olives. His
+father had bought these dull things from a Baptist missionary who
+peddled them, and Tip seemed to derive great satisfaction from their
+remote origin.
+
+The tall boy was Arthur Adams. He had fine hazel eyes that were almost
+too reflective and sympathetic for a boy, and such a pleasant voice that
+we all loved to hear him read aloud. Even when he had to read poetry
+aloud at school, no one ever thought of laughing. To be sure, he was
+not at school very much of the time. He was seventeen and should
+have finished the High School the year before, but he was always off
+somewhere with his gun. Arthur's mother was dead, and his father, who
+was feverishly absorbed in promoting schemes, wanted to send the boy
+away to school and get him off his hands; but Arthur always begged off
+for another year and promised to study. I remember him as a tall, brown
+boy with an intelligent face, always lounging among a lot of us little
+fellows, laughing at us oftener than with us, but such a soft, satisfied
+laugh that we felt rather flattered when we provoked it. In after-years
+people said that Arthur had been given to evil ways as a lad, and it is
+true that we often saw him with the gambler's sons and with old Spanish
+Fanny's boy, but if he learned anything ugly in their company he never
+betrayed it to us. We would have followed Arthur anywhere, and I am
+bound to say that he led us into no worse places than the cattail
+marshes and the stubble fields. These, then, were the boys who camped
+with me that summer night upon the sand bar.
+
+After we finished our supper we beat the willow thicket for driftwood.
+By the time we had collected enough, night had fallen, and the pungent,
+weedy smell from the shore increased with the coolness. We threw
+ourselves down about the fire and made another futile effort to show
+Percy Pound the Little Dipper. We had tried it often before, but he
+could never be got past the big one.
+
+"You see those three big stars just below the handle, with the bright
+one in the middle?" said Otto Hassler; "that's Orion's belt, and the
+bright one is the clasp." I crawled behind Otto's shoulder and sighted
+up his arm to the star that seemed perched upon the tip of his steady
+forefinger. The Hassler boys did seine-fishing at night, and they knew a
+good many stars.
+
+Percy gave up the Little Dipper and lay back on the sand, his hands
+clasped under his head. "I can see the North Star," he announced,
+contentedly, pointing toward it with his big toe. "Anyone might get lost
+and need to know that."
+
+We all looked up at it.
+
+"How do you suppose Columbus felt when his compass didn't point north
+any more?" Tip asked.
+
+Otto shook his head. "My father says that there was another North Star
+once, and that maybe this one won't last always. I wonder what would
+happen to us down here if anything went wrong with it?"
+
+Arthur chuckled. "I wouldn't worry, Ott. Nothing's apt to happen to it
+in your time. Look at the Milky Way! There must be lots of good dead
+Indians."
+
+We lay back and looked, meditating, at the dark cover of the world. The
+gurgle of the water had become heavier. We had often noticed a mutinous,
+complaining note in it at night, quite different from its cheerful
+daytime chuckle, and seeming like the voice of a much deeper and more
+powerful stream. Our water had always these two moods: the one of sunny
+complaisance, the other of inconsolable, passionate regret.
+
+"Queer how the stars are all in sort of diagrams," remarked Otto. "You
+could do most any proposition in geometry with 'em. They always look
+as if they meant something. Some folks say everybody's fortune is all
+written out in the stars, don't they?"
+
+"They believe so in the old country," Fritz affirmed.
+
+But Arthur only laughed at him. "You're thinking of Napoleon, Fritzey.
+He had a star that went out when he began to lose battles. I guess the
+stars don't keep any close tally on Sandtown folks."
+
+We were speculating on how many times we could count a hundred before
+the evening star went down behind the cornfields, when someone cried,
+"There comes the moon, and it's as big as a cart wheel!"
+
+We all jumped up to greet it as it swam over the bluffs behind us. It
+came up like a galleon in full sail; an enormous, barbaric thing, red as
+an angry heathen god.
+
+"When the moon came up red like that, the Aztecs used to sacrifice their
+prisoners on the temple top," Percy announced.
+
+"Go on, Perce. You got that out of _Golden Days_. Do you believe that,
+Arthur?" I appealed.
+
+Arthur answered, quite seriously: "Like as not. The moon was one of
+their gods. When my father was in Mexico City he saw the stone where
+they used to sacrifice their prisoners."
+
+As we dropped down by the fire again some one asked whether the
+Mound-Builders were older than the Aztecs. When we once got upon the
+Mound-Builders we never willingly got away from them, and we were still
+conjecturing when we heard a loud splash in the water.
+
+"Must have been a big cat jumping," said Fritz. "They do sometimes. They
+must see bugs in the dark. Look what a track the moon makes!"
+
+There was a long, silvery streak on the water, and where the current
+fretted over a big log it boiled up like gold pieces.
+
+"Suppose there ever _was_ any gold hid away in this old river?" Fritz
+asked. He lay like a little brown Indian, close to the fire, his chin on
+his hand and his bare feet in the air. His brother laughed at him, but
+Arthur took his suggestion seriously.
+
+"Some of the Spaniards thought there was gold up here somewhere. Seven
+cities chuck full of gold, they had it, and Coronado and his men came up
+to hunt it. The Spaniards were all over this country once."
+
+Percy looked interested. "Was that before the Mormons went through?"
+
+We all laughed at this.
+
+"Long enough before. Before the Pilgrim Fathers, Perce. Maybe they came
+along this very river. They always followed the watercourses."
+
+"I wonder where this river really does begin?" Tip mused. That was an
+old and a favorite mystery which the map did not clearly explain. On the
+map the little black line stopped somewhere in western Kansas; but since
+rivers generally rose in mountains, it was only reasonable to suppose
+that ours came from the Rockies. Its destination, we knew, was the
+Missouri, and the Hassler boys always maintained that we could embark
+at Sandtown in floodtime, follow our noses, and eventually arrive at
+New Orleans. Now they took up their old argument. "If us boys had grit
+enough to try it, it wouldn't take no time to get to Kansas City and St.
+Joe."
+
+We began to talk about the places we wanted to go to. The Hassler boys
+wanted to see the stockyards in Kansas City, and Percy wanted to see
+a big store in Chicago. Arthur was interlocutor and did not betray
+himself.
+
+"Now it's your turn, Tip."
+
+Tip rolled over on his elbow and poked the fire, and his eyes looked
+shyly out of his queer, tight little face. "My place is awful far away.
+My Uncle Bill told me about it."
+
+Tip's Uncle Bill was a wanderer, bitten with mining fever, who had
+drifted into Sandtown with a broken arm, and when it was well had
+drifted out again.
+
+"Where is it?"
+
+"Aw, it's down in New Mexico somewheres. There aren't no railroads or
+anything. You have to go on mules, and you run out of water before you
+get there and have to drink canned tomatoes."
+
+"Well, go on, kid. What's it like when you do get there?"
+
+Tip sat up and excitedly began his story.
+
+"There's a big red rock there that goes right up out of the sand for
+about nine hundred feet. The country's flat all around it, and this here
+rock goes up all by itself, like a monument. They call it the Enchanted
+Bluff down there, because no white man has ever been on top of it. The
+sides are smooth rock, and straight up, like a wall. The Indians say
+that hundreds of years ago, before the Spaniards came, there was a
+village away up there in the air. The tribe that lived there had some
+sort of steps, made out of wood and bark, bung down over the face of the
+bluff, and the braves went down to hunt and carried water up in big jars
+swung on their backs. They kept a big supply of water and dried meat up
+there, and never went down except to hunt. They were a peaceful tribe
+that made cloth and pottery, and they went up there to get out of the
+wars. You see, they could pick off any war party that tried to get up
+their little steps. The Indians say they were a handsome people, and
+they had some sort of queer religion. Uncle Bill thinks they were
+Cliff-Dwellers who had got into trouble and left home. They weren't
+fighters, anyhow.
+
+"One time the braves were down hunting and an awful storm came up--a
+kind of waterspout--and when they got back to their rock they found
+their little staircase had been all broken to pieces, and only a few
+steps were left hanging away up in the air. While they were camped at
+the foot of the rock, wondering what to do, a war party from the north
+came along and massacred 'em to a man, with all the old folks and women
+looking on from the rock. Then the war party went on south and left the
+village to get down the best way they could. Of course they never got
+down. They starved to death up there, and when the war party came back
+on their way north, they could hear the children crying from the edge
+of the bluff where they had crawled out, but they didn't see a sign of a
+grown Indian, and nobody has ever been up there since."
+
+We exclaimed at this dolorous legend and sat up.
+
+"There couldn't have been many people up there," Percy demurred. "How
+big is the top, Tip?"
+
+"Oh, pretty big. Big enough so that the rock doesn't look nearly as tall
+as it is. The top's bigger than the base. The bluff is sort of worn away
+for several hundred feet up. That's one reason it's so hard to climb."
+
+I asked how the Indians got up, in the first place.
+
+"Nobody knows how they got up or when. A hunting party came along once
+and saw that there was a town up there, and that was all."
+
+Otto rubbed his chin and looked thoughtful. "Of course there must be
+some way to get up there. Couldn't people get a rope over someway and
+pull a ladder up?"
+
+Tip's little eyes were shining with excitement. "I know a way. Me and
+Uncle Bill talked it over. There's a kind of rocket that would take a
+rope over--lifesavers use 'em--and then you could hoist a rope ladder
+and peg it down at the bottom and make it tight with guy ropes on the
+other side. I'm going to climb that there bluff, and I've got it all
+planned out."
+
+Fritz asked what he expected to find when he got up there.
+
+"Bones, maybe, or the ruins of their town, or pottery, or some of their
+idols. There might be 'most anything up there. Anyhow, I want to see."
+
+"Sure nobody else has been up there, Tip?" Arthur asked.
+
+"Dead sure. Hardly anybody ever goes down there. Some hunters tried to
+cut steps in the rock once, but they didn't get higher than a man can
+reach. The Bluff's all red granite, and Uncle Bill thinks it's a boulder
+the glaciers left. It's a queer place, anyhow. Nothing but cactus and
+desert for hundreds of miles, and yet right under the Bluff there's good
+water and plenty of grass. That's why the bison used to go down there."
+
+Suddenly we heard a scream above our fire, and jumped up to see a dark,
+slim bird floating southward far above us--a whooping crane, we knew by
+her cry and her long neck. We ran to the edge of the island, hoping we
+might see her alight, but she wavered southward along the rivercourse
+until we lost her. The Hassler boys declared that by the look of the
+heavens it must be after midnight, so we threw more wood on our fire,
+put on our jackets, and curled down in the warm sand. Several of us
+pretended to doze, but I fancy we were really thinking about Tip's Bluff
+and the extinct people. Over in the wood the ring doves were calling
+mournfully to one another, and once we heard a dog bark, far away.
+"Somebody getting into old Tommy's melon patch," Fritz murmured
+sleepily, but nobody answered him. By and by Percy spoke out of the
+shadows.
+
+"Say, Tip, when you go down there will you take me with you?"
+
+"Maybe."
+
+"Suppose one of us beats you down there, Tip?"
+
+"Whoever gets to the Bluff first has got to promise to tell the rest of
+us exactly what he finds," remarked one of the Hassler boys, and to this
+we all readily assented.
+
+Somewhat reassured, I dropped off to sleep. I must have dreamed about a
+race for the Bluff, for I awoke in a kind of fear that other people were
+getting ahead of me and that I was losing my chance. I sat up in my
+damp clothes and looked at the other boys, who lay tumbled in uneasy
+attitudes about the dead fire. It was still dark, but the sky was blue
+with the last wonderful azure of night. The stars glistened like crystal
+globes, and trembled as if they shone through a depth of clear water.
+Even as I watched, they began to pale and the sky brightened. Day came
+suddenly, almost instantaneously. I turned for another look at the blue
+night, and it was gone. Everywhere the birds began to call, and all
+manner of little insects began to chirp and hop about in the willows.
+A breeze sprang up from the west and brought the heavy smell of ripened
+corn. The boys rolled over and shook themselves. We stripped and plunged
+into the river just as the sun came up over the windy bluffs.
+
+When I came home to Sandtown at Christmas time, we skated out to
+our island and talked over the whole project of the Enchanted Bluff,
+renewing our resolution to find it.
+
+
+Although that was twenty years ago, none of us have ever climbed the
+Enchanted Bluff. Percy Pound is a stockbroker in Kansas City and will go
+nowhere that his red touring car cannot carry him. Otto Hassler went
+on the railroad and lost his foot braking; after which he and Fritz
+succeeded their father as the town tailors.
+
+Arthur sat about the sleepy little town all his life--he died before he
+was twenty-five. The last time I saw him, when I was home on one of my
+college vacations, he was sitting in a steamer chair under a cottonwood
+tree in the little yard behind one of the two Sandtown saloons. He was
+very untidy and his hand was not steady, but when he rose, unabashed,
+to greet me, his eyes were as clear and warm as ever. When I had talked
+with him for an hour and heard him laugh again, I wondered how it was
+that when Nature had taken such pains with a man, from his hands to the
+arch of his long foot, she had ever lost him in Sandtown. He joked about
+Tip Smith's Bluff, and declared he was going down there just as soon
+as the weather got cooler; he thought the Grand Canyon might be worth
+while, too.
+
+I was perfectly sure when I left him that he would never get beyond
+the high plank fence and the comfortable shade of the cottonwood. And,
+indeed, it was under that very tree that he died one summer morning.
+
+Tip Smith still talks about going to New Mexico. He married
+a slatternly, unthrifty country girl, has been much tied to a
+perambulator, and has grown stooped and grey from irregular meals and
+broken sleep. But the worst of his difficulties are now over, and he
+has, as he says, come into easy water. When I was last in Sandtown I
+walked home with him late one moonlight night, after he had balanced his
+cash and shut up his store. We took the long way around and sat down on
+the schoolhouse steps, and between us we quite revived the romance of
+the lone red rock and the extinct people. Tip insists that he still
+means to go down there, but he thinks now he will wait until his boy
+Bert is old enough to go with him. Bert has been let into the story, and
+thinks of nothing but the Enchanted Bluff.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+The Bohemian Girl
+
+The transcontinental express swung along the windings of the Sand River
+Valley, and in the rear seat of the observation car a young man sat
+greatly at his ease, not in the least discomfited by the fierce sunlight
+which beat in upon his brown face and neck and strong back. There was
+a look of relaxation and of great passivity about his broad shoulders,
+which seemed almost too heavy until he stood up and squared them. He
+wore a pale flannel shirt and a blue silk necktie with loose ends. His
+trousers were wide and belted at the waist, and his short sack coat hung
+open. His heavy shoes had seen good service. His reddish-brown hair,
+like his clothes, had a foreign cut. He had deep-set, dark blue eyes
+under heavy reddish eyebrows. His face was kept clean only by close
+shaving, and even the sharpest razor left a glint of yellow in the
+smooth brown of his skin. His teeth and the palms of his hands were very
+white. His head, which looked hard and stubborn, lay indolently in the
+green cushion of the wicker chair, and as he looked out at the ripe
+summer country a teasing, not unkindly smile played over his lips.
+Once, as he basked thus comfortably, a quick light flashed in his eyes,
+curiously dilating the pupils, and his mouth became a hard, straight
+line, gradually relaxing into its former smile of rather kindly mockery.
+He told himself, apparently, that there was no point in getting excited;
+and he seemed a master hand at taking his ease when he could. Neither
+the sharp whistle of the locomotive nor the brakeman's call disturbed
+him. It was not until after the train had stopped that he rose, put on
+a Panama hat, took from the rack a small valise and a flute case, and
+stepped deliberately to the station platform. The baggage was already
+unloaded, and the stranger presented a check for a battered sole-leather
+steamer trunk.
+
+"Can you keep it here for a day or two?" he asked the agent. "I may send
+for it, and I may not."
+
+"Depends on whether you like the country, I suppose?" demanded the agent
+in a challenging tone.
+
+"Just so."
+
+The agent shrugged his shoulders, looked scornfully at the small trunk,
+which was marked "N.E.," and handed out a claim check without further
+comment. The stranger watched him as he caught one end of the trunk and
+dragged it into the express room. The agent's manner seemed to remind
+him of something amusing. "Doesn't seem to be a very big place," he
+remarked, looking about.
+
+"It's big enough for us," snapped the agent, as he banged the trunk into
+a corner.
+
+That remark, apparently, was what Nils Ericson had wanted. He chuckled
+quietly as he took a leather strap from his pocket and swung his valise
+around his shoulder. Then he settled his Panama securely on his head,
+turned up his trousers, tucked the flute case under his arm, and started
+off across the fields. He gave the town, as he would have said, a wide
+berth, and cut through a great fenced pasture, emerging, when he rolled
+under the barbed wire at the farther corner, upon a white dusty road
+which ran straight up from the river valley to the high prairies, where
+the ripe wheat stood yellow and the tin roofs and weathercocks were
+twinkling in the fierce sunlight. By the time Nils had done three miles,
+the sun was sinking and the farm wagons on their way home from town came
+rattling by, covering him with dust and making him sneeze. When one of
+the farmers pulled up and offered to give him a lift, he clambered in
+willingly. The driver was a thin, grizzled old man with a long lean
+neck and a foolish sort of beard, like a goat's. "How fur ye goin'?" he
+asked, as he clucked to his horses and started off.
+
+"Do you go by the Ericson place?"
+
+"Which Ericson?" The old man drew in his reins as if he expected to stop
+again.
+
+"Preacher Ericson's."
+
+"Oh, the Old Lady Ericson's!" He turned and looked at Nils. "La, me! If
+you're goin' out there you might a' rid out in the automobile. That's a
+pity, now. The Old Lady Ericson was in town with her auto. You might 'a'
+heard it snortin' anywhere about the post-office er the butcher shop."
+
+"Has she a motor?" asked the stranger absently.
+
+"'Deed an' she has! She runs into town every night about this time for
+her mail and meat for supper. Some folks say she's afraid her auto won't
+get exercise enough, but I say that's jealousy."
+
+"Aren't there any other motors about here?"
+
+"Oh, yes! we have fourteen in all. But nobody else gets around like
+the Old Lady Ericson. She's out, rain er shine, over the whole county,
+chargin' into town and out amongst her farms, an' up to her sons'
+places. Sure you ain't goin' to the wrong place?" He craned his neck and
+looked at Nils' flute case with eager curiosity. "The old woman ain't
+got any piany that I knows on. Olaf, he has a grand. His wife's musical:
+took lessons in Chicago."
+
+"I'm going up there tomorrow," said Nils imperturbably. He saw that the
+driver took him for a piano tuner.
+
+"Oh, I see!" The old man screwed up his eyes mysteriously. He was a
+little dashed by the stranger's noncommunicativeness, but he soon broke
+out again.
+
+"I'm one o' Miss Ericson's tenants. Look after one of her places. I did
+own the place myself once, but I lost it a while back, in the bad years
+just after the World's Fair. Just as well, too, I say. Lets you out o'
+payin' taxes. The Ericsons do own most of the county now. I remember
+the old preacher's favorite text used to be, 'To them that hath shall be
+given.' They've spread something wonderful--run over this here country
+like bindweed. But I ain't one that begretches it to 'em. Folks is
+entitled to what they kin git; and they're hustlers. Olaf, he's in the
+Legislature now, and a likely man fur Congress. Listen, if that ain't
+the old woman comin' now. Want I should stop her?"
+
+Nils shook his head. He heard the deep chug-chug of a motor vibrating
+steadily in the clear twilight behind them. The pale lights of the car
+swam over the hill, and the old man slapped his reins and turned clear
+out of the road, ducking his head at the first of three angry snorts
+from behind. The motor was running at a hot, even speed, and passed
+without turning an inch from its course. The driver was a stalwart woman
+who sat at ease in the front seat and drove her car bareheaded. She left
+a cloud of dust and a trail of gasoline behind her. Her tenant threw
+back his head and sneezed.
+
+"Whew! I sometimes say I'd as lief be _before_ Mrs. Ericson as behind
+her. She does beat all! Nearly seventy, and never lets another soul
+touch that car. Puts it into commission herself every morning, and keeps
+it tuned up by the hitch-bar all day. I never stop work for a drink
+o' water that I don't hear her a-churnin' up the road. I reckon her
+darter-in-laws never sets down easy nowadays. Never know when she'll pop
+in. Mis' Otto, she says to me: 'We're so afraid that thing'll blow up
+and do Ma some injury yet, she's so turrible venturesome.' Says I: 'I
+wouldn't stew, Mis' Otto; the old lady'll drive that car to the funeral
+of every darter-in-law she's got.' That was after the old woman had
+jumped a turrible bad culvert."
+
+The stranger heard vaguely what the old man was saying. Just now he was
+experiencing something very much like homesickness, and he was wondering
+what had brought it about. The mention of a name or two, perhaps;
+the rattle of a wagon along a dusty road; the rank, resinous smell of
+sunflowers and ironweed, which the night damp brought up from the draws
+and low places; perhaps, more than all, the dancing lights of the motor
+that had plunged by. He squared his shoulders with a comfortable sense
+of strength.
+
+The wagon, as it jolted westward, climbed a pretty steady up-grade. The
+country, receding from the rough river valley, swelled more and more
+gently, as if it had been smoothed out by the wind. On one of the last
+of the rugged ridges, at the end of a branch road, stood a grim square
+house with a tin roof and double porches. Behind the house stretched a
+row of broken, wind-racked poplars, and down the hill slope to the left
+straggled the sheds and stables. The old man stopped his horses where
+the Ericsons' road branched across a dry sand creek that wound about the
+foot of the hill.
+
+"That's the old lady's place. Want I should drive in?" "No, thank you.
+I'll roll out here. Much obliged to you. Good night."
+
+His passenger stepped down over the front wheel, and the old man drove
+on reluctantly, looking back as if he would like to see how the stranger
+would be received.
+
+As Nils was crossing the dry creek he heard the restive tramp of a horse
+coming toward him down the hill. Instantly he flashed out of the road
+and stood behind a thicket of wild plum bushes that grew in the sandy
+bed. Peering through the dusk, he saw a light horse, under tight
+rein, descending the hill at a sharp walk. The rider was a slender
+woman--barely visible against the dark hillside--wearing an
+old-fashioned derby hat and a long riding skirt. She sat lightly in the
+saddle, with her chin high, and seemed to be looking into the distance.
+As she passed the plum thicket her horse snuffed the air and shied.
+She struck him, pulling him in sharply, with an angry exclamation,
+_"Blazne!"_ in Bohemian. Once in the main road, she let him out into
+a lope, and they soon emerged upon the crest of high land, where they
+moved along the skyline, silhouetted against the band of faint colour
+that lingered in the west. This horse and rider, with their free,
+rhythmical gallop, were the only moving things to be seen on the face of
+the flat country. They seemed, in the last sad light of evening, not to
+be there accidentally, but as an inevitable detail of the landscape.
+
+Nils watched them until they had shrunk to a mere moving speck against
+the sky, then he crossed the sand creek and climbed the hill. When
+he reached the gate the front of the house was dark, but a light was
+shining from the side windows. The pigs were squealing in the hog
+corral, and Nils could see a tall boy, who carried two big wooden
+buckets, moving about among them. Halfway between the barn and the
+house, the windmill wheezed lazily. Following the path that ran around
+to the back porch, Nils stopped to look through the screen door into
+the lamplit kitchen. The kitchen was the largest room in the house; Nils
+remembered that his older brothers used to give dances there when he was
+a boy. Beside the stove stood a little girl with two light yellow braids
+and a broad, flushed face, peering anxiously into a frying pan. In the
+dining-room beyond, a large, broad-shouldered woman was moving about the
+table. She walked with an active, springy step. Her face was heavy and
+florid, almost without wrinkles, and her hair was black at seventy.
+Nils felt proud of her as he watched her deliberate activity; never a
+momentary hesitation, or a movement that did not tell. He waited until
+she came out into the kitchen and, brushing the child aside, took her
+place at the stove. Then he tapped on the screen door and entered.
+
+"It's nobody but Nils, Mother. I expect you weren't looking for me."
+
+Mrs. Ericson turned away from the stove and stood staring at him. "Bring
+the lamp, Hilda, and let me look."
+
+Nils laughed and unslung his valise. "What's the matter, Mother? Don't
+you know me?"
+
+Mrs. Ericson put down the lamp. "You must be Nils. You don't look very
+different, anyway."
+
+"Nor you, Mother. You hold your own. Don't you wear glasses yet?"
+
+"Only to read by. Where's your trunk, Nils?"
+
+"Oh, I left that in town. I thought it might not be convenient for you
+to have company so near threshing-time."
+
+"Don't be foolish, Nils." Mrs. Ericson turned back to the stove. "I
+don't thresh now. I hitched the wheat land onto the next farm and have
+a tenant. Hilda, take some hot water up to the company room, and go call
+little Eric."
+
+The tow-haired child, who had been standing in mute amazement, took up
+the tea-kettle and withdrew, giving Nils a long, admiring look from the
+door of the kitchen stairs.
+
+"Who's the youngster?" Nils asked, dropping down on the bench behind the
+kitchen stove.
+
+"One of your Cousin Henrik's."
+
+"How long has Cousin Henrik been dead?"
+
+"Six years. There are two boys. One stays with Peter and one with
+Anders. Olaf is their guardeen."
+
+There was a clatter of pails on the porch, and a tall, lanky boy peered
+wonderingly in through the screen door. He had a fair, gentle face and
+big grey eyes, and wisps of soft yellow hair hung down under his cap.
+Nils sprang up and pulled him into the kitchen, hugging him and slapping
+him on the shoulders. "Well, if it isn't my kid! Look at the size of
+him! Don't you know me, Eric?"
+
+The boy reddened tinder his sunburn and freckles, and hung his head. "I
+guess it's Nils," he said shyly.
+
+"You're a good guesser," laughed Nils giving the lad's hand a swing. To
+himself he was thinking: "That's why the little girl looked so friendly.
+He's taught her to like me. He was only six when I went away, and he's
+remembered for twelve years."
+
+Eric stood fumbling with his cap and smiling. "You look just like I
+thought you would," he ventured.
+
+"Go wash your hands, Eric," called Mrs. Ericson. "I've got cob corn for
+supper, Nils. You used to like it. I guess you don't get much of that in
+the old country. Here's Hilda; she'll take you up to your room. You'll
+want to get the dust off you before you eat."
+
+Mrs. Ericson went into the dining-room to lay another plate, and the
+little girl came up and nodded to Nils as if to let him know that his
+room was ready. He put out his hand and she took it, with a startled
+glance up at his face. Little Eric dropped his towel, threw an arm about
+Nils and one about Hilda, gave them a clumsy squeeze, and then stumbled
+out to the porch.
+
+During supper Nils heard exactly how much land each of his eight grown
+brothers farmed, how their crops were coming on, and how much livestock
+they were feeding. His mother watched him narrowly as she talked.
+"You've got better looking, Nils," she remarked abruptly, whereupon he
+grinned and the children giggled. Eric, although he was eighteen and as
+tall as Nils, was always accounted a child, being the last of so many
+sons. His face seemed childlike, too, Nils thought, and he had the open,
+wandering eyes of a little boy. All the others had been men at his age.
+
+After supper Nils went out to the front porch and sat down on the step
+to smoke a pipe. Mrs. Ericson drew a rocking-chair up near him and began
+to knit busily. It was one of the few Old World customs she had kept up,
+for she could not bear to sit with idle hands.
+
+"Where's little Eric, Mother?"
+
+"He's helping Hilda with the dishes. He does it of his own will; I don't
+like a boy to be too handy about the house."
+
+"He seems like a nice kid."
+
+"He's very obedient."
+
+Nils smiled a little in the dark. It was just as well to shift the line
+of conversation. "What are you knitting there, Mother?"
+
+"Baby stockings. The boys keep me busy." Mrs. Ericson chuckled and
+clicked her needles.
+
+"How many grandchildren have you?"
+
+"Only thirty-one now. Olaf lost his three. They were sickly, like their
+mother."
+
+"I supposed he had a second crop by this time!"
+
+"His second wife has no children. She's too proud. She tears about on
+horseback all the time. But she'll get caught up with, yet. She sets
+herself very high, though nobody knows what for. They were low enough
+Bohemians she came of. I never thought much of Bohemians; always
+drinking."
+
+Nils puffed away at his pipe in silence, and Mrs. Ericson knitted on. In
+a few moments she added grimly: "She was down here tonight, just before
+you came. She'd like to quarrel with me and come between me and Olaf,
+but I don't give her the chance. I suppose you'll be bringing a wife
+home some day."
+
+"I don't know. I've never thought much about it."
+
+"Well, perhaps it's best as it is," suggested Mrs. Ericson hopefully.
+"You'd never be contented tied down to the land. There was roving blood
+in your father's family, and it's come out in you. I expect your own
+way of life suits you best." Mrs. Ericson had dropped into a blandly
+agreeable tone which Nils well remembered. It seemed to amuse him a
+good deal and his white teeth flashed behind his pipe. His mother's
+strategies had always diverted him, even when he was a boy--they were so
+flimsy and patent, so illy proportioned to her vigor and force. "They've
+been waiting to see which way I'd jump," he reflected. He felt that Mrs.
+Ericson was pondering his case deeply as she sat clicking her needles.
+
+"I don't suppose you've ever got used to steady work," she went on
+presently. "Men ain't apt to if they roam around too long. It's a pity
+you didn't come back the year after the World's Fair. Your father picked
+up a good bit of land cheap then, in the hard times, and I expect maybe
+he'd have give you a farm, it's too bad you put off comin' back so long,
+for I always thought he meant to do something by you."
+
+Nils laughed and shook the ashes out of his pipe. "I'd have missed a lot
+if I had come back then. But I'm sorry I didn't get back to see father."
+
+"Well, I suppose we have to miss things at one end or the other. Perhaps
+you are as well satisfied with your own doings, now, as you'd have been
+with a farm," said Mrs. Ericson reassuringly.
+
+"Land's a good thing to have," Nils commented, as he lit another match
+and sheltered it with his hand.
+
+His mother looked sharply at his face until the match burned out. "Only
+when you stay on it!" she hastened to say.
+
+Eric came round the house by the path just then, and Nils rose, with a
+yawn. "Mother, if you don't mind, Eric and I will take a little tramp
+before bedtime. It will make me sleep."
+
+"Very well; only don't stay long. I'll sit up and wait for you. I like
+to lock up myself."
+
+Nils put his hand on Eric's shoulder, and the two tramped down the hill
+and across the sand creek into the dusty highroad beyond. Neither spoke.
+They swung along at an even gait, Nils puffing at his pipe. There was no
+moon, and the white road and the wide fields lay faint in the starlight.
+Over everything was darkness and thick silence, and the smell of dust
+and sunflowers. The brothers followed the road for a mile or more
+without finding a place to sit down. Finally, Nils perched on a stile
+over the wire fence, and Eric sat on the lower step.
+
+"I began to think you never would come back, Nils," said the boy softly.
+
+"Didn't I promise you I would?"
+
+"Yes; but people don't bother about promises they make to babies. Did
+you really know you were going away for good when you went to Chicago
+with the cattle that time?"
+
+"I thought it very likely, if I could make my way."
+
+"I don't see how you did it, Nils. Not many fellows could." Eric rubbed
+his shoulder against his brother's knee.
+
+"The hard thing was leaving home you and father. It was easy enough,
+once I got beyond Chicago. Of course I got awful homesick; used to cry
+myself to sleep. But I'd burned my bridges."
+
+"You had always wanted to go, hadn't you?"
+
+"Always. Do you still sleep in our little room? Is that cottonwood still
+by the window?"
+
+Eric nodded eagerly and smiled up at his brother in the grey darkness.
+
+"You remember how we always said the leaves were whispering when they
+rustled at night? Well, they always whispered to me about the sea.
+Sometimes they said names out of the geography books. In a high wind
+they had a desperate sound, like someone trying to tear loose."
+
+"How funny, Nils," said Eric dreamily, resting his chin on his hand.
+"That tree still talks like that, and 'most always it talks to me about
+you."
+
+They sat a while longer, watching the stars. At last Eric whispered
+anxiously: "Hadn't we better go back now? Mother will get tired waiting
+for us." They rose and took a short cut home, through the pasture.
+
+
+                           II
+
+The next morning Nils woke with the first flood of light that came with
+dawn. The white-plastered walls of his room reflected the glare that
+shone through the thin window shades, and he found it impossible to
+sleep. He dressed hurriedly and slipped down the hall and up the back
+stairs to the half-story room which he used to share with his little
+brother. Eric, in a skimpy nightshirt, was sitting on the edge of the
+bed, rubbing his eyes, his pale yellow hair standing up in tufts all
+over his head. When he saw Nils, he murmured something confusedly and
+hustled his long legs into his trousers. "I didn't expect you'd be up so
+early, Nils," he said, as his head emerged from his blue shirt.
+
+"Oh, you thought I was a dude, did you?" Nils gave him a playful tap
+which bent the tall boy up like a clasp knife. "See here: I must teach
+you to box." Nils thrust his hands into his pockets and walked about.
+"You haven't changed things much up here. Got most of my old traps,
+haven't you?"
+
+He took down a bent, withered piece of sapling that hung over the
+dresser. "If this isn't the stick Lou Sandberg killed himself with!"
+
+The boy looked up from his shoe-lacing.
+
+"Yes; you never used to let me play with that. Just how did he do it,
+Nils? You were with father when he found Lou, weren't you?"
+
+"Yes. Father was going off to preach somewhere, and, as we drove along,
+Lou's place looked sort of forlorn, and we thought we'd stop and cheer
+him up. When we found him father said he'd been dead a couple days. He'd
+tied a piece of binding twine round his neck, made a noose in each end,
+fixed the nooses over the ends of a bent stick, and let the stick spring
+straight; strangled himself."
+
+"What made him kill himself such a silly way?"
+
+The simplicity of the boy's question set Nils laughing. He clapped
+little Eric on the shoulder. "What made him such a silly as to kill
+himself at all, I should say!"
+
+"Oh, well! But his hogs had the cholera, and all up and died on him,
+didn't they?"
+
+"Sure they did; but he didn't have cholera; and there were plenty of
+hogs left in the world, weren't there?"
+
+"Well, but, if they weren't his, how could they do him any good?" Eric
+asked, in astonishment.
+
+"Oh, scat! He could have had lots of fun with other people's hogs. He
+was a chump, Lou Sandberg. To kill yourself for a pig--think of that,
+now!" Nils laughed all the way downstairs, and quite embarrassed little
+Eric, who fell to scrubbing his face and hands at the tin basin. While
+he was parting his wet hair at the kitchen looking glass, a heavy tread
+sounded on the stairs. The boy dropped his comb. "Gracious, there's
+Mother. We must have talked too long." He hurried out to the shed,
+slipped on his overalls, and disappeared with the milking pails.
+
+Mrs. Ericson came in, wearing a clean white apron, her black hair
+shining from the application of a wet brush.
+
+"Good morning, Mother. Can't I make the fire for you?"
+
+"No, thank you, Nils. It's no trouble to make a cob fire, and I like to
+manage the kitchen stove myself" Mrs. Ericson paused with a shovel full
+of ashes in her hand. "I expect you will be wanting to see your brothers
+as soon as possible. I'll take you up to Anders' place this morning.
+He's threshing, and most of our boys are over there."
+
+"Will Olaf be there?"
+
+Mrs. Ericson went on taking out the ashes, and spoke between shovels.
+"No; Olaf's wheat is all in, put away in his new barn. He got six
+thousand bushel this year. He's going to town today to get men to finish
+roofing his barn."
+
+"So Olaf is building a new barn?" Nils asked absently.
+
+"Biggest one in the county, and almost done. You'll likely be here for
+the barn-raising. He's going to have a supper and a dance as soon as
+everybody's done threshing. Says it keeps the voters in good humour. I
+tell him that's all nonsense; but Olaf has a head for politics."
+
+"Does Olaf farm all Cousin Henrik's land?"
+
+Mrs. Ericson frowned as she blew into the faint smoke curling up about
+the cobs. "Yes; he holds it in trust for the children, Hilda and her
+brothers. He keeps strict account of everything he raises on it, and
+puts the proceeds out at compound interest for them."
+
+Nils smiled as he watched the little flames shoot up. The door of the
+back stairs opened, and Hilda emerged, her arms behind her, buttoning
+up her long gingham apron as she came. He nodded to her gaily, and she
+twinkled at him out of her little blue eyes, set far apart over her wide
+cheekbones.
+
+"There, Hilda, you grind the coffee--and just put in an extra handful;
+I expect your Cousin Nils likes his strong," said Mrs. Ericson, as she
+went out to the shed.
+
+Nils turned to look at the little girl, who gripped the coffee grinder
+between her knees and ground so hard that her two braids bobbed and her
+face flushed under its broad spattering of freckles. He noticed on her
+middle finger something that had not been there last night, and that had
+evidently been put on for company: a tiny gold ring with a clumsily set
+garnet stone. As her hand went round and round he touched the ring with
+the tip of his finger, smiling.
+
+Hilda glanced toward the shed door through which Mrs. Ericson had
+disappeared. "My Cousin Clara gave me that," she whispered bashfully.
+"She's Cousin Olaf's wife."
+
+
+                           III
+
+Mrs. Olaf Ericson--Clara Vavrika, as many people still called her--was
+moving restlessly about her big bare house that morning. Her husband had
+left for the county town before his wife was out of bed--her lateness
+in rising was one of the many things the Ericson family had against her.
+Clara seldom came downstairs before eight o'clock, and this morning
+she was even later, for she had dressed with unusual care. She put
+on, however, only a tight-fitting black dress, which people thereabouts
+thought very plain. She was a tall, dark woman of thirty, with a rather
+sallow complexion and a touch of dull salmon red in her cheeks, where
+the blood seemed to burn under her brown skin. Her hair, parted evenly
+above her low forehead, was so black that there were distinctly blue
+lights in it. Her black eyebrows were delicate half-moons and her lashes
+were long and heavy. Her eyes slanted a little, as if she had a strain
+of Tartar or gypsy blood, and were sometimes full of fiery determination
+and sometimes dull and opaque. Her expression was never altogether
+amiable; was often, indeed, distinctly sullen, or, when she was
+animated, sarcastic. She was most attractive in profile, for then one
+saw to advantage her small, well-shaped head and delicate ears, and felt
+at once that here was a very positive, if not an altogether pleasing,
+personality.
+
+The entire management of Mrs. Olaf's household devolved upon her aunt,
+Johanna Vavrika, a superstitious, doting woman of fifty. When Clara
+was a little girl her mother died, and Johanna's life had been spent
+in ungrudging service to her niece. Clara, like many self-willed and
+discontented persons, was really very apt, without knowing it, to do
+as other people told her, and to let her destiny be decided for her
+by intelligences much below her own. It was her Aunt Johanna who had
+humoured and spoiled her in her girlhood, who had got her off to Chicago
+to study piano, and who had finally persuaded her to marry Olaf Ericson
+as the best match she would be likely to make in that part of the
+country. Johanna Vavrika had been deeply scarred by smallpox in the old
+country. She was short and fat, homely and jolly and sentimental.
+She was so broad, and took such short steps when she walked, that her
+brother, Joe Vavrika, always called her his duck. She adored her niece
+because of her talent, because of her good looks and masterful ways, but
+most of all because of her selfishness.
+
+Clara's marriage with Olaf Ericson was Johanna's particular triumph. She
+was inordinately proud of Olaf's position, and she found a sufficiently
+exciting career in managing Clara's house, in keeping it above the
+criticism of the Ericsons, in pampering Olaf to keep him from finding
+fault with his wife, and in concealing from every one Clara's domestic
+infelicities. While Clara slept of a morning, Johanna Vavrika was
+bustling about, seeing that Olaf and the men had their breakfast, and
+that the cleaning or the butter-making or the washing was properly begun
+by the two girls in the kitchen. Then, at about eight o'clock, she would
+take Clara's coffee up to her, and chat with her while she drank it,
+telling her what was going on in the house. Old Mrs. Ericson frequently
+said that her daughter-in-law would not know what day of the week it
+was if Johanna did not tell her every morning. Mrs. Ericson despised and
+pitied Johanna, but did not wholly dislike her. The one thing she hated
+in her daughter-in-law above everything else was the way in which Clara
+could come it over people. It enraged her that the affairs of her son's
+big, barnlike house went on as well as they did, and she used to feel
+that in this world we have to wait overlong to see the guilty punished.
+"Suppose Johanna Vavrika died or got sick?" the old lady used to say to
+Olaf. "Your wife wouldn't know where to look for her own dish-cloth."
+Olaf only shrugged his shoulders. The fact remained that Johanna did not
+die, and, although Mrs. Ericson often told her she was looking poorly,
+she was never ill. She seldom left the house, and she slept in a little
+room off the kitchen. No Ericson, by night or day, could come prying
+about there to find fault without her knowing it. Her one weakness was
+that she was an incurable talker, and she sometimes made trouble without
+meaning to.
+
+This morning Clara was tying a wine-coloured ribbon about her throat
+when Johanna appeared with her coffee. After putting the tray on a
+sewing table, she began to make Clara's bed, chattering the while in
+Bohemian.
+
+"Well, Olaf got off early, and the girls are baking. I'm going down
+presently to make some poppy-seed bread for Olaf. He asked for prune
+preserves at breakfast, and I told him I was out of them, and to bring
+some prunes and honey and cloves from town."
+
+Clara poured her coffee. "Ugh! I don't see how men can eat so much sweet
+stuff. In the morning, too!"
+
+Her aunt chuckled knowingly. "Bait a bear with honey, as we say in the
+old country."
+
+"Was he cross?" her niece asked indifferently.
+
+"Olaf? Oh, no! He was in fine spirits. He's never cross if you know how
+to take him. I never knew a man to make so little fuss about bills. I
+gave him a list of things to get a yard long, and he didn't say a word;
+just folded it up and put it in his pocket."
+
+"I can well believe he didn't say a word," Clara remarked with a shrug.
+"Some day he'll forget how to talk."
+
+"Oh, but they say he's a grand speaker in the Legislature. He knows
+when to keep quiet. That's why he's got such influence in politics. The
+people have confidence in him." Johanna beat up a pillow and held it
+under her fat chin while she slipped on the case. Her niece laughed.
+
+"Maybe we could make people believe we were wise, Aunty, if we held our
+tongues. Why did you tell Mrs. Ericson that Norman threw me again last
+Saturday and turned my foot? She's been talking to Olaf."
+
+Johanna fell into great confusion. "Oh, but, my precious, the old lady
+asked for you, and she's always so angry if I can't give an excuse.
+Anyhow, she needn't talk; she's always tearing up something with that
+motor of hers."
+
+When her aunt clattered down to the kitchen, Clara went to dust the
+parlour. Since there was not much there to dust, this did not take very
+long. Olaf had built the house new for her before their marriage, but
+her interest in furnishing it had been short-lived. It went, indeed,
+little beyond a bathtub and her piano. They had disagreed about almost
+every other article of furniture, and Clara had said she would rather
+have her house empty than full of things she didn't want. The house was
+set in a hillside, and the west windows of the parlour looked out above
+the kitchen yard thirty feet below. The east windows opened directly
+into the front yard. At one of the latter, Clara, while she was dusting,
+heard a low whistle. She did not turn at once, but listened intently as
+she drew her cloth slowly along the round of a chair. Yes, there it was:
+
+I dreamt that I dwelt in ma-a-arble halls.
+
+She turned and saw Nils Ericson laughing in the sunlight, his hat in his
+hand, just outside the window. As she crossed the room he leaned against
+the wire screen. "Aren't you at all surprised to see me, Clara Vavrika?"
+
+"No; I was expecting to see you. Mother Ericson telephoned Olaf last
+night that you were here."
+
+Nils squinted and gave a long whistle. "Telephoned? That must have been
+while Eric and I were out walking. Isn't she enterprising? Lift this
+screen, won't you?"
+
+Clara lifted the screen, and Nils swung his leg across the window-sill.
+As he stepped into the room she said: "You didn't think you were going
+to get ahead of your mother, did you?"
+
+He threw his hat on the piano. "Oh, I do sometimes. You see, I'm ahead
+of her now. I'm supposed to be in Anders' wheat-field. But, as we were
+leaving, Mother ran her car into a soft place beside the road and sank
+up to the hubs. While they were going for the horses to pull her out,
+I cut away behind the stacks and escaped." Nils chuckled. Clara's dull
+eyes lit up as she looked at him admiringly.
+
+"You've got them guessing already. I don't know what your mother said
+to Olaf over the telephone, but be came back looking as if he'd seen
+a ghost, and he didn't go to bed until a dreadful hour--ten o'clock, I
+should think. He sat out on the porch in the dark like a graven image.
+It had been one of his talkative days, too." They both laughed, easily
+and lightly, like people who have laughed a great deal together; but
+they remained standing.
+
+"Anders and Otto and Peter looked as if they had seen ghosts, too, over
+in the threshing field. What's the matter with them all?"
+
+Clara gave him a quick, searching look. "Well, for one thing, they've
+always been afraid you have the other will."
+
+Nils looked interested. "The other will?"
+
+"Yes. A later one. They knew your father made another, but they never
+knew what he did with it. They almost tore the old house to pieces
+looking for it. They always suspected that he carried on a clandestine
+correspondence with you, for the one thing he would do was to get his
+own mail himself. So they thought he might have sent the new will to
+you for safekeeping. The old one, leaving everything to your mother, was
+made long before you went away, and it's understood among them that it
+cuts you out--that she will leave all the property to the others. Your
+father made the second will to prevent that. I've been hoping you
+had it. It would be such fun to spring it on them." Clara laughed
+mirthfully, a thing she did not often do now.
+
+Nils shook his head reprovingly. "Come, now, you're malicious."
+
+"No, I'm not. But I'd like something to happen to stir them all up, just
+for once. There never was such a family for having nothing ever happen
+to them but dinner and threshing. I'd almost be willing to die, just to
+have a funeral. _You_ wouldn't stand it for three weeks."
+
+Nils bent over the piano and began pecking at the keys with the finger
+of one hand. "I wouldn't? My dear young lady, how do you know what I can
+stand? _You_ wouldn't wait to find out."
+
+Clara flushed darkly and frowned. "I didn't believe you would ever come
+back--" she said defiantly.
+
+"Eric believed I would, and he was only a baby when I went away.
+However, all's well that ends well, and I haven't come back to be a
+skeleton at the feast. We mustn't quarrel. Mother will be here with a
+search warrant pretty soon." He swung round and faced her, thrusting his
+hands into his coat pockets. "Come, you ought to be glad to see me, if
+you want something to happen. I'm something, even without a will. We can
+have a little fun, can't we? I think we can!"
+
+She echoed him, "I think we can!" They both laughed and their eyes
+sparkled. Clara Vavrika looked ten years younger than when she had put
+the velvet ribbon about her throat that morning.
+
+"You know, I'm so tickled to see mother," Nils went on. "I didn't know
+I was so proud of her. A regular pile driver. How about little pigtails,
+down at the house? Is Olaf doing the square thing by those children?"
+
+Clara frowned pensively. "Olaf has to do something that looks like the
+square thing, now that he's a public man!" She glanced drolly at Nils.
+"But he makes a good commission out of it. On Sundays they all get
+together here and figure. He lets Peter and Anders put in big bills for
+the keep of the two boys, and he pays them out of the estate. They are
+always having what they call accountings. Olaf gets something out of
+it, too. I don't know just how they do it, but it's entirely a family
+matter, as they say. And when the Ericsons say that--" Clara lifted her
+eyebrows.
+
+Just then the angry _honk-honk_ of an approaching motor sounded from
+down the road. Their eyes met and they began to laugh. They laughed as
+children do when they can not contain themselves, and can not explain
+the cause of their mirth to grown people, but share it perfectly
+together. When Clara Vavrika sat down at the piano after he was gone,
+she felt that she had laughed away a dozen years. She practised as if
+the house were burning over her head.
+
+When Nils greeted his mother and climbed into the front seat of the
+motor beside her, Mrs. Ericson looked grim, but she made no comment
+upon his truancy until she had turned her car and was retracing her
+revolutions along the road that ran by Olaf's big pasture. Then she
+remarked dryly:
+
+"If I were you I wouldn't see too much of Olaf's wife while you are
+here. She's the kind of woman who can't see much of men without getting
+herself talked about. She was a good deal talked about before he married
+her."
+
+"Hasn't Olaf tamed her?" Nils asked indifferently.
+
+Mrs. Ericson shrugged her massive shoulders. "Olaf don't seem to have
+much luck, when it comes to wives. The first one was meek enough, but
+she was always ailing. And this one has her own way. He says if he
+quarreled with her she'd go back to her father, and then he'd lose the
+Bohemian vote. There are a great many Bohunks in this district. But when
+you find a man under his wife's thumb you can always be sure there's a
+soft spot in him somewhere."
+
+Nils thought of his own father, and smiled. "She brought him a good deal
+of money, didn't she, besides the Bohemian vote?"
+
+Mrs. Ericson sniffed. "Well, she has a fair half section in her own
+name, but I can't see as that does Olaf much good. She will have a good
+deal of property some day, if old Vavrika don't marry again. But I don't
+consider a saloonkeeper's money as good as other people's money."
+
+Nils laughed outright. "Come, Mother, don't let your prejudices carry
+you that far. Money's money. Old Vavrika's a mighty decent sort of
+saloonkeeper. Nothing rowdy about him."
+
+Mrs. Ericson spoke up angrily. "Oh, I know you always stood up for them!
+But hanging around there when you were a boy never did you any good,
+Nils, nor any of the other boys who went there. There weren't so many
+after her when she married Olaf, let me tell you. She knew enough to
+grab her chance."
+
+Nils settled back in his seat. "Of course I liked to go there, Mother,
+and you were always cross about it. You never took the trouble to find
+out that it was the one jolly house in this country for a boy to go to.
+All the rest of you were working yourselves to death, and the houses
+were mostly a mess, full of babies and washing and flies. Oh, it was all
+right--I understand that; but you are young only once, and I happened
+to be young then. Now, Vavrika's was always jolly. He played the violin,
+and I used to take my flute, and Clara played the piano, and
+Johanna used to sing Bohemian songs. She always had a big supper for
+us--herrings and pickles and poppy-seed bread, and lots of cake and
+preserves. Old Joe had been in the army in the old country, and he could
+tell lots of good stories. I can see him cutting bread, at the head of
+the table, now. I don't know what I'd have done when I was a kid if it
+hadn't been for the Vavrikas, really."
+
+"And all the time he was taking money that other people had worked hard
+in the fields for," Mrs. Ericson observed.
+
+"So do the circuses, Mother, and they're a good thing. People ought to
+get fun for some of their money. Even father liked old Joe."
+
+"Your father," Mrs. Ericson said grimly, "liked everybody."
+
+As they crossed the sand creek and turned into her own place, Mrs.
+Ericson observed, "There's Olaf's buggy. He's stopped on his way from
+town." Nils shook himself and prepared to greet his brother, who was
+waiting on the porch.
+
+Olaf was a big, heavy Norwegian, slow of speech and movement. His head
+was large and square, like a block of wood. When Nils, at a distance,
+tried to remember what his brother looked like, he could recall only his
+heavy head, high forehead, large nostrils, and pale blue eyes, set far
+apart. Olaf's features were rudimentary: the thing one noticed was the
+face itself, wide and flat and pale; devoid of any expression, betraying
+his fifty years as little as it betrayed anything else, and powerful by
+reason of its very stolidness. When Olaf shook hands with Nils he looked
+at him from under his light eyebrows, but Nils felt that no one could
+ever say what that pale look might mean. The one thing he had always
+felt in Olaf was a heavy stubbornness, like the unyielding stickiness of
+wet loam against the plow. He had always found Olaf the most difficult
+of his brothers.
+
+"How do you do, Nils? Expect to stay with us long?"
+
+"Oh, I may stay forever," Nils answered gaily. "I like this country
+better than I used to."
+
+"There's been some work put into it since you left," Olaf remarked.
+
+"Exactly. I think it's about ready to live in now--and I'm about ready
+to settle down." Nils saw his brother lower his big head ("Exactly like
+a bull," he thought.) "Mother's been persuading me to slow down now, and
+go in for farming," he went on lightly.
+
+Olaf made a deep sound in his throat. "Farming ain't learned in a day,"
+he brought out, still looking at the ground.
+
+"Oh, I know! But I pick things up quickly." Nils had not meant to
+antagonize his brother, and he did not know now why he was doing it. "Of
+course," he went on, "I shouldn't expect to make a big success, as you
+fellows have done. But then, I'm not ambitious. I won't want much. A
+little land, and some cattle, maybe."
+
+Olaf still stared at the ground, his head down. He wanted to ask Nils
+what he had been doing all these years, that he didn't have a business
+somewhere he couldn't afford to leave; why he hadn't more pride than to
+come back with only a little sole-leather trunk to show for himself, and
+to present himself as the only failure in the family. He did not ask one
+of these questions, but he made them all felt distinctly.
+
+"Humph!" Nils thought. "No wonder the man never talks, when he can butt
+his ideas into you like that without ever saying a word. I suppose he
+uses that kind of smokeless powder on his wife all the time. But I guess
+she has her innings." He chuckled, and Olaf looked up. "Never mind
+me, Olaf. I laugh without knowing why, like little Eric. He's another
+cheerful dog."
+
+"Eric," said Olaf slowly, "is a spoiled kid. He's just let his mother's
+best cow go dry because he don't milk her right. I was hoping you'd take
+him away somewhere and put him into business. If he don't do any good
+among strangers, he never will." This was a long speech for Olaf, and as
+he finished it he climbed into his buggy.
+
+Nils shrugged his shoulders. "Same old tricks," he thought. "Hits from
+behind you every time. What a whale of a man!" He turned and went round
+to the kitchen, where his mother was scolding little Eric for letting
+the gasoline get low.
+
+
+                           IV
+
+Joe Vavrika's saloon was not in the county seat, where Olaf and Mrs.
+Ericson did their trading, but in a cheerfuller place, a little Bohemian
+settlement which lay at the other end of the county, ten level miles
+north of Olaf's farm. Clara rode up to see her father almost every day.
+Vavrika's house was, so to speak, in the back yard of his saloon. The
+garden between the two buildings was inclosed by a high board fence
+as tight as a partition, and in summer Joe kept beer tables and wooden
+benches among the gooseberry bushes under his little cherry tree. At
+one of these tables Nils Ericson was seated in the late afternoon, three
+days after his return home. Joe had gone in to serve a customer, and
+Nils was lounging on his elbows, looking rather mournfully into his
+half-emptied pitcher, when he heard a laugh across the little garden.
+Clara, in her riding habit, was standing at the back door of the house,
+under the grapevine trellis that old Joe had grown there long ago. Nils
+rose.
+
+"Come out and keep your father and me company. We've been gossiping all
+afternoon. Nobody to bother us but the flies."
+
+She shook her head. "No, I never come out here any more. Olaf doesn't
+like it. I must live up to my position, you know."
+
+"You mean to tell me you never come out and chat with the boys, as you
+used to? He _has_ tamed you! Who keeps up these flower-beds?"
+
+"I come out on Sundays, when father is alone, and read the Bohemian
+papers to him. But I am never here when the bar is open. What have you
+two been doing?"
+
+"Talking, as I told you. I've been telling him about my travels. I find
+I can't talk much at home, not even to Eric."
+
+Clara reached up and poked with her riding-whip at a white moth that was
+fluttering in the sunlight among the vine leaves. "I suppose you will
+never tell me about all those things."
+
+"Where can I tell them? Not in Olaf's house, certainly. What's the
+matter with our talking here?" He pointed persuasively with his hat
+to the bushes and the green table, where the flies were singing lazily
+above the empty beer glasses.
+
+Clara shook her head weakly. "No, it wouldn't do. Besides, I am going
+now."
+
+"I'm on Eric's mare. Would you be angry if I overtook you?"
+
+Clara looked back and laughed. "You might try and see. I can leave you
+if I don't want you. Eric's mare can't keep up with Norman."
+
+Nils went into the bar and attempted to pay his score. Big Joe, six feet
+four, with curly yellow hair and mustache, clapped him on the shoulder.
+"Not a Goddamn a your money go in my drawer, you hear? Only next time
+you bring your flute, te-te-te-te-te-ty." Joe wagged his fingers in
+imitation of the flute player's position.
+
+"My Clara, she come all-a-time Sundays an' play for me. She not like to
+play at Ericson's place." He shook his yellow curls and laughed. "Not a
+Goddamn a fun at Ericson's. You come a Sunday. You like-a fun. No forget
+de flute." Joe talked very rapidly and always tumbled over his English.
+He seldom spoke it to his customers, and had never learned much.
+
+Nils swung himself into the saddle and trotted to the west of the
+village, where the houses and gardens scattered into prairie land and
+the road turned south. Far ahead of him, in the declining light, he saw
+Clara Vavrika's slender figure, loitering on horseback. He touched his
+mare with the whip, and shot along the white, level road, under the
+reddening sky. When he overtook Olaf's wife he saw that she had been
+crying. "What's the matter, Clara Vavrika?" he asked kindly.
+
+"Oh, I get blue sometimes. It was awfully jolly living there with
+father. I wonder why I ever went away."
+
+Nils spoke in a low, kind tone that he sometimes used with women:
+"That's what I've been wondering these many years. You were the last
+girl in the country I'd have picked for a wife for Olaf. What made you
+do it, Clara?"
+
+"I suppose I really did it to oblige the neighbours"--Clara tossed her
+head. "People were beginning to wonder."
+
+"To wonder?"
+
+"Yes--why I didn't get married. I suppose I didn't like to keep them in
+suspense. I've discovered that most girls marry out of consideration for
+the neighbourhood."
+
+Nils bent his head toward her and his white teeth flashed. "I'd have
+gambled that one girl I knew would say, 'Let the neighbourhood be
+damned.'"
+
+Clara shook her head mournfully. "You see, they have it on you, Nils;
+that is, if you're a woman. They say you're beginning to go off. That's
+what makes us get married: we can't stand the laugh."
+
+Nils looked sidewise at her. He had never seen her head droop before.
+Resignation was the last thing he would have expected of her. "In your
+case, there wasn't something else?"
+
+"Something else?"
+
+"I mean, you didn't do it to spite somebody? Somebody who didn't come
+back?"
+
+Clara drew herself up. "Oh, I never thought you'd come back. Not after
+I stopped writing to you, at least. _That_ was all over, long before I
+married Olaf."
+
+"It never occurred to you, then, that the meanest thing you could do to
+me was to marry Olaf?"
+
+Clara laughed. "No; I didn't know you were so fond of Olaf."
+
+Nils smoothed his horse's mane with his glove. "You know, Clara Vavrika,
+you are never going to stick it out. You'll cut away some day, and I've
+been thinking you might as well cut away with me."
+
+Clara threw up her chin. "Oh, you don't know me as well as you think. I
+won't cut away. Sometimes, when I'm with father, I feel like it. But I
+can hold out as long as the Ericsons can. They've never got the best of
+me yet, and one can live, so long as one isn't beaten. If I go back to
+father, it's all up with Olaf in politics. He knows that, and he never
+goes much beyond sulking. I've as much wit as the Ericsons. I'll never
+leave them unless I can show them a thing or two."
+
+"You mean unless you can come it over them?"
+
+"Yes--unless I go away with a man who is cleverer than they are, and who
+has more money."
+
+Nils whistled. "Dear me, you are demanding a good deal. The Ericsons,
+take the lot of them, are a bunch to beat. But I should think the
+excitement of tormenting them would have worn off by this time."
+
+"It has, I'm afraid," Clara admitted mournfully.
+
+"Then why don't you cut away? There are more amusing games than this in
+the world. When I came home I thought it might amuse me to bully a few
+quarter sections out of the Ericsons; but I've almost decided I can get
+more fun for my money somewhere else."
+
+Clara took in her breath sharply. "Ah, you have got the other will! That
+was why you came home!"
+
+"No, it wasn't. I came home to see how you were getting on with Olaf."
+
+Clara struck her horse with the whip, and in a bound she was far ahead
+of him. Nils dropped one word, "Damn!" and whipped after her; but she
+leaned forward in her saddle and fairly cut the wind. Her long riding
+skirt rippled in the still air behind her. The sun was just sinking
+behind the stubble in a vast, clear sky, and the shadows drew across the
+fields so rapidly that Nils could scarcely keep in sight the dark figure
+on the road. When he overtook her he caught her horse by the bridle.
+Norman reared, and Nils was frightened for her; but Clara kept her seat.
+
+"Let me go, Nils Ericson!" she cried. "I hate you more than any of
+them. You were created to torture me, the whole tribe of you--to make me
+suffer in every possible way."
+
+She struck her horse again and galloped away from him. Nils set his
+teeth and looked thoughtful. He rode slowly home along the deserted
+road, watching the stars come out in the clear violet sky.
+
+They flashed softly into the limpid heavens, like jewels let fall into
+clear water. They were a reproach, he felt, to a sordid world. As he
+turned across the sand creek, he looked up at the North Star and smiled,
+as if there were an understanding between them. His mother scolded him
+for being late for supper.
+
+
+                           V
+
+On Sunday afternoon Joe Vavrika, in his shirt sleeves and carpet
+slippers, was sitting in his garden, smoking a long-tasseled porcelain
+pipe with a hunting scene painted on the bowl. Clara sat under the
+cherry tree, reading aloud to him from the weekly Bohemian papers. She
+had worn a white muslin dress under her riding habit, and the leaves
+of the cherry tree threw a pattern of sharp shadows over her skirt. The
+black cat was dozing in the sunlight at her feet, and Joe's dachshund
+was scratching a hole under the scarlet geraniums and dreaming of
+badgers. Joe was filling his pipe for the third time since dinner,
+when he heard a knocking on the fence. He broke into a loud guffaw and
+unlatched the little door that led into the street. He did not call Nils
+by name, but caught him by the hand and dragged him in. Clara stiffened
+and the colour deepened under her dark skin. Nils, too, felt a little
+awkward. He had not seen her since the night when she rode away from him
+and left him alone on the level road between the fields. Joe dragged him
+to the wooden bench beside the green table.
+
+"You bring de flute," he cried, tapping the leather case under Nils'
+arm. "Ah, das-a good' Now we have some liddle fun like old times. I got
+somet'ing good for you." Joe shook his finger at Nils and winked his
+blue eye, a bright clear eye, full of fire, though the tiny bloodvessels
+on the ball were always a little distended. "I got somet'ing for you
+from"--he paused and waved his hand--"Hongarie. You know Hongarie? You
+wait!" He pushed Nils down on the bench, and went through the back door
+of his saloon.
+
+Nils looked at Clara, who sat frigidly with her white skirts drawn
+tight about her. "He didn't tell you he had asked me to come, did he?
+He wanted a party and proceeded to arrange it. Isn't he fun? Don't be
+cross; let's give him a good time."
+
+Clara smiled and shook out her skirt. "Isn't that like Father? And he
+has sat here so meekly all day. Well, I won't pout. I'm glad you came.
+He doesn't have very many good times now any more. There are so few of
+his kind left. The second generation are a tame lot."
+
+Joe came back with a flask in one hand and three wine glasses caught by
+the stems between the fingers of the other. These he placed on the table
+with an air of ceremony, and, going behind Nils, held the flask between
+him and the sun, squinting into it admiringly. "You know dis, Tokai? A
+great friend of mine, he bring dis to me, a present out of Hongarie. You
+know how much it cost, dis wine? Chust so much what it weigh in gold.
+Nobody but de nobles drink him in Bohemie. Many, many years I save him
+up, dis Tokai." Joe whipped out his official corkscrew and delicately
+removed the cork. "De old man die what bring him to me, an' dis wine he
+lay on his belly in my cellar an' sleep. An' now," carefully pouring
+out the heavy yellow wine, "an' now he wake up; and maybe he wake us
+up, too!" He carried one of the glasses to his daughter and presented it
+with great gallantry.
+
+Clara shook her head, but, seeing her father's disappointment, relented.
+"You taste it first. I don't want so much."
+
+Joe sampled it with a beatific expression, and turned to Nils. "You
+drink him slow, dis wine. He very soft, but he go down hot. You see!"
+
+After a second glass Nils declared that he couldn't take any more
+without getting sleepy. "Now get your fiddle, Vavrika," he said as he
+opened his flute case.
+
+But Joe settled back in his wooden rocker and wagged his big carpet
+slipper. "No-no-no-no-no-no-no! No play fiddle now any more: too much
+ache in de finger," waving them, "all-a-time rheumatic. You play de
+flute, te-tety-tetety-te. Bohemie songs."
+
+"I've forgotten all the Bohemian songs I used to play with you and
+Johanna. But here's one that will make Clara pout. You remember how her
+eyes used to snap when we called her the Bohemian Girl?" Nils lifted his
+flute and began "When Other Lips and Other Hearts," and Joe hummed the
+air in a husky baritone, waving his carpet slipper. "Oh-h-h, das-a fine
+music," he cried, clapping his hands as Nils finished. "Now 'Marble
+Halls, Marble Halls'! Clara, you sing him."
+
+Clara smiled and leaned back in her chair, beginning softly:
+
+       "I dreamt that I dwelt in ma-a-arble halls,
+          With vassals and serfs at my knee,"
+
+and Joe hummed like a big bumblebee.
+
+"There's one more you always played," Clara said quietly, "I remember
+that best." She locked her hands over her knee and began "The Heart
+Bowed Down," and sang it through without groping for the words. She was
+singing with a good deal of warmth when she came to the end of the old
+song:
+
+             "For memory is the only friend
+             That grief can call its own."
+
+Joe flashed out his red silk handkerchief and blew his nose, shaking his
+head. "No-no-no-no-no-no-no! Too sad, too sad! I not like-a dat. Play
+quick somet'ing gay now."
+
+Nils put his lips to the instrument, and Joe lay back in his chair,
+laughing and singing, "Oh, Evelina, Sweet Evelina!" Clara laughed, too.
+Long ago, when she and Nils went to high school, the model student of
+their class was a very homely girl in thick spectacles. Her name was
+Evelina Oleson; she had a long, swinging walk which somehow suggested
+the measure of that song, and they used mercilessly to sing it at her.
+
+"Dat ugly Oleson girl, she teach in de school," Joe gasped, "an' she
+still walks chust like dat, yup-a, yup-a, yup-a, chust like a
+camel she go! Now, Nils, we have some more li'l drink. Oh,
+yes-yes-yes-yes-yes-yes-_yes_! Dis time you haf to drink, and Clara she
+haf to, so she show she not jealous. So, we all drink to your girl. You
+not tell her name, eh? No-no-no, I no make you tell. She pretty, eh? She
+make good sweetheart? I bet!" Joe winked and lifted his glass. "How soon
+you get married?"
+
+Nils screwed up his eyes. "That I don't know. When she says."
+
+Joe threw out his chest. "Das-a way boys talks. No way for mans. Mans
+say, 'You come to de church, an' get a hurry on you.' Das-a way mans
+talks."
+
+"Maybe Nils hasn't got enough to keep a wife," put in Clara ironically.
+"How about that, Nils?" she asked him frankly, as if she wanted to know.
+
+Nils looked at her coolly, raising one eyebrow. "Oh, I can keep her, all
+right."
+
+"The way she wants to be kept?"
+
+"With my wife, I'll decide that," replied Nils calmly. "I'll give her
+what's good for her."
+
+Clara made a wry face. "You'll give her the strap, I expect, like old
+Peter Oleson gave his wife."
+
+"When she needs it," said Nils lazily, locking his hands behind his head
+and squinting up through the leaves of the cherry tree. "Do you remember
+the time I squeezed the cherries all over your clean dress, and Aunt
+Johanna boxed my ears for me? My gracious, weren't you mad! You had both
+hands full of cherries, and I squeezed 'em and made the juice fly all
+over you. I liked to have fun with you; you'd get so mad."
+
+"We _did_ have fun, didn't we? None of the other kids ever had so much
+fun. We knew how to play."
+
+Nils dropped his elbows on the table and looked steadily across at her.
+"I've played with lots of girls since, but I haven't found one who was
+such good fun."
+
+Clara laughed. The late afternoon sun was shining full in her face,
+and deep in the back of her eyes there shone something fiery, like the
+yellow drops of Tokai in the brown glass bottle. "Can you still play, or
+are you only pretending?"
+
+"I can play better than I used to, and harder."
+
+"Don't you ever work, then?" She had not intended to say it. It slipped
+out because she was confused enough to say just the wrong thing.
+
+"I work between times." Nils' steady gaze still beat upon her. "Don't
+you worry about my working, Mrs. Ericson. You're getting like all the
+rest of them." He reached his brown, warm hand across the table and
+dropped it on Clara's, which was cold as an icicle. "Last call for play,
+Mrs. Ericson!" Clara shivered, and suddenly her hands and cheeks grew
+warm. Her fingers lingered in his a moment, and they looked at each
+other earnestly. Joe Vavrika had put the mouth of the bottle to his lips
+and was swallowing the last drops of the Tokai, standing. The sun, just
+about to sink behind his shop, glistened on the bright glass, on his
+flushed face and curly yellow hair. "Look," Clara whispered, "that's the
+way I want to grow old."
+
+
+                           VI
+
+On the day of Olaf Ericson's barn-raising, his wife, for once in a way,
+rose early. Johanna Vavrika had been baking cakes and frying and boiling
+and spicing meats for a week beforehand, but it was not until the day
+before the party was to take place that Clara showed any interest in it.
+Then she was seized with one of her fitful spasms of energy, and took
+the wagon and little Eric and spent the day on Plum Creek, gathering
+vines and swamp goldenrod to decorate the barn.
+
+By four o'clock in the afternoon buggies and wagons began to arrive at
+the big unpainted building in front of Olaf's house. When Nils and his
+mother came at five, there were more than fifty people in the barn, and
+a great drove of children. On the ground floor stood six long tables,
+set with the crockery of seven flourishing Ericson families, lent for
+the occasion. In the middle of each table was a big yellow pumpkin,
+hollowed out and filled with woodbine. In one corner of the barn, behind
+a pile of green-and-white striped watermelons, was a circle of chairs
+for the old people; the younger guests sat on bushel measures or
+barbed-wire spools, and the children tumbled about in the haymow. The
+box stalls Clara had converted into booths. The framework was hidden by
+goldenrod and sheaves of wheat, and the partitions were covered 'With
+wild grapevines full of fruit. At one of these Johanna Vavrika watched
+over her cooked meats, enough to provision an army; and at the next her
+kitchen girls had ranged the ice-cream freezers, and Clara was already
+cutting pies and cakes against the hour of serving. At the third stall,
+little Hilda, in a bright pink lawn dress, dispensed lemonade throughout
+the afternoon. Olaf, as a public man, had thought it inadvisable to
+serve beer in his barn; but Joe Vavrika had come over with two demijohns
+concealed in his buggy, and after his arrival the wagon shed was much
+frequented by the men.
+
+"Hasn't Cousin Clara fixed things lovely?" little Hilda whispered, when
+Nils went up to her stall and asked for lemonade.
+
+Nils leaned against the booth, talking to the excited little girl and
+watching the people. The barn faced the west, and the sun, pouring in
+at the big doors, filled the whole interior with a golden light,
+through which filtered fine particles of dust from the haymow, where the
+children were romping. There was a great chattering from the stall where
+Johanna Vavrika exhibited to the admiring women her platters heaped with
+fried chicken, her roasts of beef, boiled tongues, and baked hams
+with cloves stuck in the crisp brown fat and garnished with tansy and
+parsley. The older women, having assured themselves that there were
+twenty kinds of cake, not counting cookies, and three dozen fat pies,
+repaired to the corner behind the pile of watermelons, put on their
+white aprons, and fell to their knitting and fancywork. They were a fine
+company of old women, and a Dutch painter would have loved to find them
+there together, where the sun made bright patches on the floor and sent
+long, quivering shafts of gold through the dusky shade up among the
+rafters. There were fat, rosy old women who looked hot in their best
+black dresses; spare, alert old women with brown, dark-veined hands; and
+several of almost heroic frame, not less massive than old Mrs. Ericson
+herself. Few of them wore glasses, and old Mrs. Svendsen, a Danish
+woman, who was quite bald, wore the only cap among them. Mrs. Oleson,
+who had twelve big grandchildren, could still show two braids of yellow
+hair as thick as her own wrists. Among all these grandmothers there were
+more brown heads than white. They all had a pleased, prosperous air, as
+if they were more than satisfied with themselves and with life. Nils,
+leaning against Hilda's lemonade stand, watched them as they sat
+chattering in four languages, their fingers never lagging behind their
+tongues.
+
+"Look at them over there," he whispered, detaining Clara as she passed
+him. "Aren't they the Old Guard? I've just counted thirty hands. I guess
+they've wrung many a chicken's neck and warmed many a boy's jacket for
+him in their time."
+
+In reality he fell into amazement when he thought of the Herculean
+labours those fifteen pairs of hands had performed: of the cows they
+had milked, the butter they had made, the gardens they had planted, the
+children and grandchildren they had tended, the brooms they had worn
+out, the mountains of food they had cooked. It made him dizzy. Clara
+Vavrika smiled a hard, enigmatical smile at him and walked rapidly away.
+Nils' eyes followed her white figure as she went toward the house.
+He watched her walking alone in the sunlight, looked at her slender,
+defiant shoulders and her little hard-set head with its coils of
+blue-black hair. "No," he reflected; "she'd never be like them, not if
+she lived here a hundred years. She'd only grow more bitter. You can't
+tame a wild thing; you can only chain it. People aren't all alike. I
+mustn't lose my nerve." He gave Hilda's pigtail a parting tweak and
+set out after Clara. "Where to?" he asked, as he came upon her in the
+kitchen.
+
+"I'm going to the cellar for preserves."
+
+"Let me go with you. I never get a moment alone with you. Why do you
+keep out of my way?"
+
+Clara laughed. "I don't usually get in anybody's way."
+
+Nils followed her down the stairs and to the far corner of the cellar,
+where a basement window let in a stream of light. From a swinging shelf
+Clara selected several glass jars, each labeled in Johanna's careful
+hand. Nils took up a brown flask. "What's this? It looks good."
+
+"It is. It's some French brandy father gave me when I was married. Would
+you like some? Have you a corkscrew? I'll get glasses."
+
+When she brought them, Nils took them from her and put them down on
+the window-sill. "Clara Vavrika, do you remember how crazy I used to be
+about you?"
+
+Clara shrugged her shoulders. "Boys are always crazy about somebody or
+another. I dare say some silly has been crazy about Evelina Oleson. You
+got over it in a hurry."
+
+"Because I didn't come back, you mean? I had to get on, you know, and it
+was hard sledding at first. Then I heard you'd married Olaf."
+
+"And then you stayed away from a broken heart," Clara laughed.
+
+"And then I began to think about you more than I had since I first went
+away. I began to wonder if you were really as you had seemed to me when
+I was a boy. I thought I'd like to see. I've had lots of girls, but no
+one ever pulled me the same way. The more I thought about you, the
+more I remembered how it used to be--like hearing a wild tune you
+can't resist, calling you out at night. It had been a long while since
+anything had pulled me out of my boots, and I wondered whether anything
+ever could again." Nils thrust his hands into his coat pockets and
+squared his shoulders, as his mother sometimes squared hers, as Olaf, in
+a clumsier manner, squared his. "So I thought I'd come back and see. Of
+course the family have tried to do me, and I rather thought I'd bring
+out father's will and make a fuss. But they can have their old land;
+they've put enough sweat into it." He took the flask and filled the
+two glasses carefully to the brim. "I've found out what I want from the
+Ericsons. Drink _skoal_, Clara." He lifted his glass, and Clara took
+hers with downcast eyes. "Look at me, Clara Vavrika. _Skoal!_"
+
+She raised her burning eyes and answered fiercely: "_Skoal!_"
+
+
+The barn supper began at six o'clock and lasted for two hilarious
+hours. Yense Nelson had made a wager that he could eat two whole fried
+chickens, and he did. Eli Swanson stowed away two whole custard pies,
+and Nick Hermanson ate a chocolate layer cake to the last crumb. There
+was even a cooky contest among the children, and one thin, slablike
+Bohemian boy consumed sixteen and won the prize, a gingerbread pig
+which Johanna Vavrika had carefully decorated with red candies and burnt
+sugar. Fritz Sweiheart, the German carpenter, won in the pickle contest,
+but he disappeared soon after supper and was not seen for the rest of
+the evening. Joe Vavrika said that Fritz could have managed the pickles
+all right, but he had sampled the demijohn in his buggy too often before
+sitting down to the table.
+
+While the supper was being cleared away the two fiddlers began to tune
+up for the dance. Clara was to accompany them on her old upright piano,
+which had been brought down from her father's. By this time Nils had
+renewed old acquaintances. Since his interview with Clara in the cellar,
+he had been busy telling all the old women how young they looked, and
+all the young ones how pretty they were, and assuring the men that
+they had here the best farmland in the world. He had made himself so
+agreeable that old Mrs. Ericson's friends began to come up to her and
+tell how lucky she was to get her smart son back again, and please to
+get him to play his flute. Joe Vavrika, who could still play very well
+when he forgot that he had rheumatism, caught up a fiddle from Johnny
+Oleson and played a crazy Bohemian dance tune that set the wheels going.
+When he dropped the bow every one was ready to dance.
+
+Olaf, in a frock coat and a solemn made-up necktie, led the grand march
+with his mother. Clara had kept well out of _that_ by sticking to the
+piano. She played the march with a pompous solemnity which greatly
+amused the prodigal son, who went over and stood behind her.
+
+"Oh, aren't you rubbing it into them, Clara Vavrika? And aren't you
+lucky to have me here, or all your wit would be thrown away."
+
+"I'm used to being witty for myself. It saves my life."
+
+The fiddles struck up a polka, and Nils convulsed Joe Vavrika by leading
+out Evelina Oleson, the homely schoolteacher. His next partner was a
+very fat Swedish girl, who, although she was an heiress, had not been
+asked for the first dance, but had stood against the wall in her tight,
+high-heeled shoes, nervously fingering a lace handkerchief. She was soon
+out of breath, so Nils led her, pleased and panting, to her seat,
+and went over to the piano, from which Clara had been watching his
+gallantry. "Ask Olena Yenson," she whispered. "She waltzes beautifully."
+
+Olena, too, was rather inconveniently plump, handsome in a smooth, heavy
+way, with a fine colour and good-natured, sleepy eyes. She was redolent
+of violet sachet powder, and had warm, soft, white hands, but she danced
+divinely, moving as smoothly as the tide coming in. "There, that's
+something like," Nils said as he released her. "You'll give me the next
+waltz, won't you? Now I must go and dance with my little cousin."
+
+Hilda was greatly excited when Nils went up to her stall and held out
+his arm. Her little eyes sparkled, but she declared that she could not
+leave her lemonade. Old Mrs. Ericson, who happened along at this moment,
+said she would attend to that, and Hilda came out, as pink as her pink
+dress. The dance was a schottische, and in a moment her yellow braids
+were fairly standing on end. "Bravo!" Nils cried encouragingly. "Where
+did you learn to dance so nicely?"
+
+"My Cousin Clara taught me," the little girl panted.
+
+Nils found Eric sitting with a group of boys who were too awkward or too
+shy to dance, and told him that he must dance the next waltz with Hilda.
+
+The boy screwed up his shoulders. "Aw, Nils, I can't dance. My feet are
+too big; I look silly."
+
+"Don't be thinking about yourself. It doesn't matter how boys look."
+
+Nils had never spoken to him so sharply before, and Eric made haste to
+scramble out of his corner and brush the straw from his coat.
+
+Clara nodded approvingly. "Good for you, Nils. I've been trying to
+get hold of him. They dance very nicely together; I sometimes play for
+them."
+
+"I'm obliged to you for teaching him. There's no reason why he should
+grow up to be a lout."
+
+"He'll never be that. He's more like you than any of them. Only he
+hasn't your courage." From her slanting eyes Clara shot forth one of
+those keen glances, admiring and at the same time challenging, which she
+seldom bestowed on any one, and which seemed to say, "Yes, I admire you,
+but I am your equal."
+
+Clara was proving a much better host than Olaf, who, once the supper was
+over, seemed to feel no interest in anything but the lanterns. He had
+brought a locomotive headlight from town to light the revels, and he
+kept skulking about as if he feared the mere light from it might set his
+new barn on fire. His wife, on the contrary, was cordial to every one,
+was animated and even gay. The deep salmon colour in her cheeks burned
+vividly, and her eyes were full of life. She gave the piano over to the
+fat Swedish heiress, pulled her father away from the corner where he
+sat gossiping with his cronies, and made him dance a Bohemian dance with
+her. In his youth Joe had been a famous dancer, and his daughter got
+him so limbered up that every one sat around and applauded them. The old
+ladies were particularly delighted, and made them go through the dance
+again. From their corner where they watched and commented, the old women
+kept time with their feet and hands, and whenever the fiddles struck up
+a new air old Mrs. Svendsen's white cap would begin to bob.
+
+Clara was waltzing with little Eric when Nils came up to them, brushed
+his brother aside, and swung her out among the dancers. "Remember how
+we used to waltz on rollers at the old skating rink in town? I suppose
+people don't do that any more. We used to keep it up for hours. You
+know, we never did moon around as other boys and girls did. It was dead
+serious with us from the beginning. When we were most in love with each
+other, we used to fight. You were always pinching people; your fingers
+were like little nippers. A regular snapping turtle, you were. Lord, how
+you'd like Stockholm! Sit out in the streets in front of cafes and talk
+all night in summer, just like a reception--officers and ladies and
+funny English people. Jolliest people in the world, the Swedes, once you
+get them going. Always drinking things--champagne and stout mixed,
+half-and-half, serve it out of big pitchers, and serve plenty. Slow
+pulse, you know; they can stand a lot. Once they light up, they're
+glowworms, I can tell you."
+
+"All the same, you don't really like gay people."
+
+"_I_ don't?"
+
+"No; I could tell that when you were looking at the old women there this
+afternoon. They're the kind you really admire, after all; women like
+your mother. And that's the kind you'll marry."
+
+"Is it, Miss Wisdom? You'll see who I'll marry, and she won't have a
+domestic virtue to bless herself with. She'll be a snapping turtle,
+and she'll be a match for me. All the same, they're a fine bunch of old
+dames over there. You admire them yourself.
+
+"No, I don't; I detest them."
+
+"You won't, when you look back on them from Stockholm or Budapest.
+Freedom settles all that. Oh, but you're the real Bohemian Girl, Clara
+Vavrika!" Nils laughed down at her sullen frown and began mockingly to
+sing:
+
+       "Oh, how could a poor gypsy maiden like me
+       Expect the proud bride of a baron to be?"
+
+Clara clutched his shoulder. "Hush, Nils; every one is looking at you."
+
+"I don't care. They can't gossip. It's all in the family, as the
+Ericsons say when they divide up little Hilda's patrimony amongst them.
+Besides, we'll give them something to talk about when we hit the
+trail. Lord, it will be a godsend to them! They haven't had anything so
+interesting to chatter about since the grasshopper year. It'll give
+them a new lease of life. And Olaf won't lose the Bohemian vote, either.
+They'll have the laugh on him so that they'll vote two apiece. They'll
+send him to Congress. They'll never forget his barn party, or us.
+They'll always remember us as we're dancing together now. We're making
+a legend. Where's my waltz, boys?" he called as they whirled past the
+fiddlers.
+
+The musicians grinned, looked at each other, hesitated, and began a new
+air; and Nils sang with them, as the couples fell from a quick waltz to
+a long, slow glide:
+
+           "When other lips and other hearts
+            Their tale of love shall tell,
+            In language whose excess imparts
+            The power they feel so well."
+
+The old women applauded vigorously. "What a gay one he is, that Nils!"
+And old Mrs. Svendsen's cap lurched dreamily from side to side to the
+flowing measure of the dance.
+
+          "Of days that have as ha-a-p-py been,
+          And you'll remember me."
+
+
+                          VII
+
+The moonlight flooded that great, silent land. The reaped fields lay
+yellow in it. The straw stacks and poplar windbreaks threw sharp black
+shadows. The roads were white rivers of dust. The sky was a deep,
+crystalline blue, and the stars were few and faint. Everything seemed to
+have succumbed, to have sunk to sleep, under the great, golden, tender,
+midsummer moon. The splendour of it seemed to transcend human life and
+human fate. The senses were too feeble to take it in, and every time one
+looked up at the sky one felt unequal to it, as if one were sitting deaf
+under the waves of a great river of melody. Near the road, Nils Ericson
+was lying against a straw stack in Olaf's wheat field. His own life
+seemed strange and unfamiliar to him, as if it were something he had
+read about, or dreamed, and forgotten. He lay very still, watching the
+white road that ran in front of him, lost itself among the fields, and
+then, at a distance, reappeared over a little hill. At last, against
+this white band he saw something moving rapidly, and he got up and
+walked to the edge of the field. "She is passing the row of poplars
+now," he thought. He heard the padded beat of hoofs along the dusty
+road, and as she came into sight he stepped out and waved his arms.
+Then, for fear of frightening the horse, he drew back and waited. Clara
+had seen him, and she came up at a walk. Nils took the horse by the bit
+and stroked his neck.
+
+"What are you doing out so late, Clara Vavrika? I went to the house, but
+Johanna told me you had gone to your father's."
+
+"Who can stay in the house on a night like this? Aren't you out
+yourself?"
+
+"Ah, but that's another matter."
+
+Nils turned the horse into the field.
+
+"What are you doing? Where are you taking Norman?"
+
+"Not far, but I want to talk to you tonight; I have something to say to
+you. I can't talk to you at the house, with Olaf sitting there on the
+porch, weighing a thousand tons."
+
+Clara laughed. "He won't be sitting there now. He's in bed by this time,
+and asleep--weighing a thousand tons."
+
+Nils plodded on across the stubble. "Are you really going to spend the
+rest of your life like this, night after night, summer after summer?
+Haven't you anything better to do on a night like this than to wear
+yourself and Norman out tearing across the country to your father's
+and back? Besides, your father won't live forever, you know. His little
+place will be shut up or sold, and then you'll have nobody but the
+Ericsons. You'll have to fasten down the hatches for the winter then."
+
+Clara moved her head restlessly. "Don't talk about that. I try never to
+think of it. If I lost Father I'd lose everything, even my hold over the
+Ericsons."
+
+"Bah! You'd lose a good deal more than that. You'd lose your race,
+everything that makes you yourself. You've lost a good deal of it now."
+
+"Of what?"
+
+"Of your love of life, your capacity for delight."
+
+Clara put her hands up to her face. "I haven't, Nils Ericson, I haven't!
+Say anything to me but that. I won't have it!" she declared vehemently.
+
+Nils led the horse up to a straw stack, and turned to Clara, looking
+at her intently, as he had looked at her that Sunday afternoon at
+Vavrika's. "But why do you fight for that so? What good is the power
+to enjoy, if you never enjoy? Your hands are cold again; what are you
+afraid of all the time? Ah, you're afraid of losing it; that's what's
+the matter with you! And you will, Clara Vavrika, you will! When I used
+to know you--listen; you've caught a wild bird in your hand, haven't
+you, and felt its heart beat so hard that you were afraid it would
+shatter its little body to pieces? Well, you used to be just like that,
+a slender, eager thing with a wild delight inside you. That is how I
+remembered you. And I come back and find you--a bitter woman. This is
+a perfect ferret fight here; you live by biting and being bitten. Can't
+you remember what life used to be? Can't you remember that old delight?
+I've never forgotten it, or known its like, on land or sea."
+
+He drew the horse under the shadow of the straw stack. Clara felt him
+take her foot out of the stirrup, and she slid softly down into his
+arms. He kissed her slowly. He was a deliberate man, but his nerves were
+steel when he wanted anything. Something flashed out from him like a
+knife out of a sheath. Clara felt everything slipping away from her; she
+was flooded by the summer night. He thrust his hand into his pocket,
+and then held it out at arm's length. "Look," he said. The shadow of the
+straw stack fell sharp across his wrist, and in the palm of his hand she
+saw a silver dollar shining. "That's my pile," he muttered; "will you go
+with me?"
+
+Clara nodded, and dropped her forehead on his shoulder.
+
+Nils took a deep breath. "Will you go with me tonight?"
+
+"Where?" she whispered softly.
+
+"To town, to catch the midnight flyer."
+
+Clara lifted her head and pulled herself together. "Are you crazy, Nils?
+We couldn't go away like that."
+
+"That's the only way we ever will go. You can't sit on the bank and
+think about it. You have to plunge. That's the way I've always done,
+and it's the right way for people like you and me. There's nothing so
+dangerous as sitting still. You've only got one life, one youth, and
+you can let it slip through your fingers if you want to; nothing easier.
+Most people do that. You'd be better off tramping the roads with me than
+you are here." Nils held back her head and looked into her eyes. "But
+I'm not that kind of a tramp, Clara. You won't have to take in sewing.
+I'm with a Norwegian shipping line; came over on business with the New
+York offices, but now I'm going straight back to Bergen. I expect
+I've got as much money as the Ericsons. Father sent me a little to get
+started. They never knew about that. There, I hadn't meant to tell you;
+I wanted you to come on your own nerve."
+
+Clara looked off across the fields. "It isn't that, Nils, but something
+seems to hold me. I'm afraid to pull against it. It comes out of the
+ground, I think."
+
+"I know all about that. One has to tear loose. You're not needed here.
+Your father will understand; he's made like us. As for Olaf, Johanna
+will take better care of him than ever you could. It's now or never,
+Clara Vavrika. My bag's at the station; I smuggled it there yesterday."
+
+Clara clung to him and hid her face against his shoulder. "Not tonight,"
+she whispered. "Sit here and talk to me tonight. I don't want to go
+anywhere tonight. I may never love you like this again."
+
+Nils laughed through his teeth. "You can't come that on me. That's not
+my way, Clara Vavrika. Eric's mare is over there behind the stacks, and
+I'm off on the midnight. It's goodbye, or off across the world with me.
+My carriage won't wait. I've written a letter to Olaf, I'll mail it
+in town. When he reads it he won't bother us--not if I know him. He'd
+rather have the land. Besides, I could demand an investigation of his
+administration of Cousin Henrik's estate, and that would be bad for a
+public man. You've no clothes, I know; but you can sit up tonight, and
+we can get everything on the way. Where's your old dash, Clara Vavrika?
+What's become of your Bohemian blood? I used to think you had courage
+enough for anything. Where's your nerve--what are you waiting for?"
+
+Clara drew back her head, and he saw the slumberous fire in her eyes.
+"For you to say one thing, Nils Ericson."
+
+"I never say that thing to any woman, Clara Vavrika." He leaned back,
+lifted her gently from the ground, and whispered through his teeth: "But
+I'll never, never let you go, not to any man on earth but me! Do you
+understand me? Now, wait here."
+
+Clara sank down on a sheaf of wheat and covered her face with her hands.
+She did not know what she was going to do--whether she would go or stay.
+The great, silent country seemed to lay a spell upon her. The ground
+seemed to hold her as if by roots. Her knees were soft under her. She
+felt as if she could not bear separation from her old sorrows, from her
+old discontent. They were dear to her, they had kept her alive, they
+were a part of her. There would be nothing left of her if she were
+wrenched away from them. Never could she pass beyond that skyline
+against which her restlessness had beat so many times. She felt as if
+her soul had built itself a nest there on that horizon at which
+she looked every morning and every evening, and it was dear to her,
+inexpressibly dear. She pressed her fingers against her eyeballs to shut
+it out. Beside her she heard the tramping of horses in the soft earth.
+Nils said nothing to her. He put his hands under her arms and lifted her
+lightly to her saddle. Then he swung himself into his own.
+
+"We shall have to ride fast to catch the midnight train. A last gallop,
+Clara Vavrika. Forward!"
+
+There was a start, a thud of hoofs along the moonlit road, two dark
+shadows going over the hill; and then the great, still land stretched
+untroubled under the azure night. Two shadows had passed.
+
+
+                          VII
+
+A year after the flight of Olaf Ericson's wife, the night train was
+steaming across the plains of Iowa. The conductor was hurrying through
+one of the day coaches, his lantern on his arm, when a lank, fair-haired
+boy sat up in one of the plush seats and tweaked him by the coat.
+
+"What is the next stop, please, sir?"
+
+"Red Oak, Iowa. But you go through to Chicago, don't you?" He looked
+down, and noticed that the boy's eyes were red and his face was drawn,
+as if he were in trouble.
+
+"Yes. But I was wondering whether I could get off at the next place and
+get a train back to Omaha."
+
+"Well, I suppose you could. Live in Omaha?"
+
+"No. In the western part of the State. How soon do we get to Red Oak?"
+
+"Forty minutes. You'd better make up your mind, so I can tell the
+baggageman to put your trunk off."
+
+"Oh, never mind about that! I mean, I haven't got any," the boy added,
+blushing.
+
+"Run away," the conductor thought, as he slammed the coach door behind
+him.
+
+Eric Ericson crumpled down in his seat and put his brown hand to his
+forehead. He had been crying, and he had had no supper, and his head was
+aching violently. "Oh, what shall I do?" he thought, as he looked dully
+down at his big shoes. "Nils will be ashamed of me; I haven't got any
+spunk."
+
+Ever since Nils had run away with his brother's wife, life at home had
+been hard for little Eric. His mother and Olaf both suspected him of
+complicity. Mrs. Ericson was harsh and faultfinding, constantly wounding
+the boy's pride; and Olaf was always setting her against him.
+
+Joe Vavrika heard often from his daughter. Clara had always been fond of
+her father, and happiness made her kinder. She wrote him long accounts
+of the voyage to Bergen, and of the trip she and Nils took through
+Bohemia to the little town where her father had grown up and where she
+herself was born. She visited all her kinsmen there, and sent her father
+news of his brother, who was a priest; of his sister, who had married a
+horse-breeder--of their big farm and their many children. These letters
+Joe always managed to read to little Eric. They contained messages for
+Eric and Hilda. Clara sent presents, too, which Eric never dared to take
+home and which poor little Hilda never even saw, though she loved to
+hear Eric tell about them when they were out getting the eggs together.
+But Olaf once saw Eric coming out of Vavrika's house--the old man had
+never asked the boy to come into his saloon--and Olaf went straight to
+his mother and told her. That night Mrs. Ericson came to Eric's room
+after he was in bed and made a terrible scene. She could be very
+terrifying when she was really angry. She forbade him ever to speak to
+Vavrika again, and after that night she would not allow him to go to
+town alone. So it was a long while before Eric got any more news of his
+brother. But old Joe suspected what was going on, and he carried Clara's
+letters about in his pocket. One Sunday he drove out to see a German
+friend of his, and chanced to catch sight of Eric, sitting by the cattle
+pond in the big pasture. They went together into Fritz Oberlies' barn,
+and read the letters and talked things over. Eric admitted that things
+were getting hard for him at home. That very night old Joe sat down and
+laboriously penned a statement of the case to his daughter.
+
+Things got no better for Eric. His mother and Olaf felt that, however
+closely he was watched, he still, as they said, "heard." Mrs. Ericson
+could not admit neutrality. She had sent Johanna Vavrika packing back to
+her brother's, though Olaf would much rather have kept her than Anders'
+eldest daughter, whom Mrs. Ericson installed in her place. He was not
+so highhanded as his mother, and he once sulkily told her that she might
+better have taught her granddaughter to cook before she sent Johanna
+away. Olaf could have borne a good deal for the sake of prunes spiced in
+honey, the secret of which Johanna had taken away with her.
+
+At last two letters came to Joe Vavrika: one from Nils, enclosing a
+postal order for money to pay Eric's passage to Bergen, and one from
+Clara, saying that Nils had a place for Eric in the offices of his
+company, that he was to live with them, and that they were only waiting
+for him to come. He was to leave New York on one of the boats of Nils'
+own line; the captain was one of their friends, and Eric was to make
+himself known at once.
+
+Nils' directions were so explicit that a baby could have followed them,
+Eric felt. And here he was, nearing Red Oak, Iowa, and rocking backward
+and forward in despair. Never had he loved his brother so much, and
+never had the big world called to him so hard. But there was a lump in
+his throat which would not go down. Ever since nightfall he had been
+tormented by the thought of his mother, alone in that big house that
+had sent forth so many men. Her unkindness now seemed so little, and her
+loneliness so great. He remembered everything she had ever done for him:
+how frightened she had been when he tore his hand in the corn-sheller,
+and how she wouldn't let Olaf scold him. When Nils went away he didn't
+leave his mother all alone, or he would never have gone. Eric felt sure
+of that.
+
+The train whistled. The conductor came in, smiling not unkindly.
+"Well, young man, what are you going to do? We stop at Red Oak in three
+minutes."
+
+"Yes, thank you. I'll let you know." The conductor went out, and the boy
+doubled up with misery. He couldn't let his one chance go like this.
+He felt for his breast pocket and crackled Nils' letter to give him
+courage. He didn't want Nils to be ashamed of him. The train stopped.
+Suddenly he remembered his brother's kind, twinkling eyes, that always
+looked at you as if from far away. The lump in his throat softened. "Ah,
+but Nils, Nils would _understand_!" he thought. "That's just it about
+Nils; he always understands."
+
+A lank, pale boy with a canvas telescope stumbled off the train to the
+Red Oak siding, just as the conductor called, "All aboard!"
+
+The next night Mrs. Ericson was sitting alone in her wooden
+rocking-chair on the front porch. Little Hilda had been sent to bed and
+had cried herself to sleep. The old woman's knitting was on her lap, but
+her hands lay motionless on top of it. For more than an hour she had not
+moved a muscle. She simply sat, as only the Ericsons and the mountains
+can sit. The house was dark, and there was no sound but the croaking of
+the frogs down in the pond of the little pasture.
+
+Eric did not come home by the road, but across the fields, where no one
+could see him. He set his telescope down softly in the kitchen shed, and
+slipped noiselessly along the path to the front porch. He sat down on
+the step without saying anything. Mrs. Ericson made no sign, and the
+frogs croaked on. At last the boy spoke timidly.
+
+"I've come back, Mother."
+
+"Very well," said Mrs. Ericson.
+
+Eric leaned over and picked up a little stick out of the grass.
+
+"How about the milking?" he faltered.
+
+"That's been done, hours ago."
+
+"Who did you get?"
+
+"Get? I did it myself. I can milk as good as any of you."
+
+Eric slid along the step nearer to her. "Oh, Mother, why did you?" he
+asked sorrowfully. "Why didn't you get one of Otto's boys?"
+
+"I didn't want anybody to know I was in need of a boy," said Mrs.
+Ericson bitterly. She looked straight in front of her and her mouth
+tightened. "I always meant to give you the home farm," she added.
+
+The boy stared and slid closer. "Oh, Mother," he faltered, "I don't care
+about the farm. I came back because I thought you might be needing me,
+maybe." He hung his head and got no further.
+
+"Very well," said Mrs. Ericson. Her hand went out from her suddenly
+and rested on his head. Her fingers twined themselves in his soft, pale
+hair. His tears splashed down on the boards; happiness filled his heart.
+
+
+
+
+THE TROLL GARDEN
+
+
+
+
+Flavia and Her Artists
+
+As the train neared Tarrytown, Imogen Willard began to wonder why she
+had consented to be one of Flavia's house party at all. She had not felt
+enthusiastic about it since leaving the city, and was experiencing a
+prolonged ebb of purpose, a current of chilling indecision, under
+which she vainly sought for the motive which had induced her to accept
+Flavia's invitation.
+
+Perhaps it was a vague curiosity to see Flavia's husband, who had been
+the magician of her childhood and the hero of innumerable Arabian fairy
+tales. Perhaps it was a desire to see M. Roux, whom Flavia had announced
+as the especial attraction of the occasion. Perhaps it was a wish to
+study that remarkable woman in her own setting.
+
+Imogen admitted a mild curiosity concerning Flavia. She was in the habit
+of taking people rather seriously, but somehow found it impossible to
+take Flavia so, because of the very vehemence and insistence with which
+Flavia demanded it. Submerged in her studies, Imogen had, of late years,
+seen very little of Flavia; but Flavia, in her hurried visits to New
+York, between her excursions from studio to studio--her luncheons with
+this lady who had to play at a matinee, and her dinners with that singer
+who had an evening concert--had seen enough of her friend's handsome
+daughter to conceive for her an inclination of such violence and
+assurance as only Flavia could afford. The fact that Imogen had shown
+rather marked capacity in certain esoteric lines of scholarship, and
+had decided to specialize in a well-sounding branch of philology at
+the Ecole des Chartes, had fairly placed her in that category of
+"interesting people" whom Flavia considered her natural affinities, and
+lawful prey.
+
+When Imogen stepped upon the station platform she was immediately
+appropriated by her hostess, whose commanding figure and assurance of
+attire she had recognized from a distance. She was hurried into a high
+tilbury and Flavia, taking the driver's cushion beside her, gathered up
+the reins with an experienced hand.
+
+"My dear girl," she remarked, as she turned the horses up the street, "I
+was afraid the train might be late. M. Roux insisted upon coming up by
+boat and did not arrive until after seven."
+
+"To think of M. Roux's being in this part of the world at all, and
+subject to the vicissitudes of river boats! Why in the world did he come
+over?" queried Imogen with lively interest. "He is the sort of man who
+must dissolve and become a shadow outside of Paris."
+
+"Oh, we have a houseful of the most interesting people," said Flavia,
+professionally. "We have actually managed to get Ivan Schemetzkin. He
+was ill in California at the close of his concert tour, you know, and he
+is recuperating with us, after his wearing journey from the coast. Then
+there is Jules Martel, the painter; Signor Donati, the tenor; Professor
+Schotte, who has dug up Assyria, you know; Restzhoff, the Russian
+chemist; Alcee Buisson, the philologist; Frank Wellington, the novelist;
+and Will Maidenwood, the editor of _Woman_. Then there is my second
+cousin, Jemima Broadwood, who made such a hit in Pinero's comedy last
+winter, and Frau Lichtenfeld. _Have_ you read her?"
+
+Imogen confessed her utter ignorance of Frau Lichtenfeld, and Flavia
+went on.
+
+"Well, she is a most remarkable person; one of those advanced German
+women, a militant iconoclast, and this drive will not be long enough to
+permit of my telling you her history. Such a story! Her novels were the
+talk of all Germany when I was there last, and several of them have been
+suppressed--an honor in Germany, I understand. 'At Whose Door' has been
+translated. I am so unfortunate as not to read German."
+
+"I'm all excitement at the prospect of meeting Miss Broadwood,"
+said Imogen. "I've seen her in nearly everything she does. Her stage
+personality is delightful. She always reminds me of a nice, clean,
+pink-and-white boy who has just had his cold bath, and come down all
+aglow for a run before breakfast."
+
+"Yes, but isn't it unfortunate that she will limit herself to those
+minor comedy parts that are so little appreciated in this country? One
+ought to be satisfied with nothing less than the best, ought one?" The
+peculiar, breathy tone in which Flavia always uttered that word "best,"
+the most worn in her vocabulary, always jarred on Imogen and always made
+her obdurate.
+
+"I don't at all agree with you," she said reservedly. "I thought
+everyone admitted that the most remarkable thing about Miss Broadwood is
+her admirable sense of fitness, which is rare enough in her profession."
+
+Flavia could not endure being contradicted; she always seemed to regard
+it in the light of a defeat, and usually colored unbecomingly. Now she
+changed the subject.
+
+"Look, my dear," she cried, "there is Frau Lichtenfeld now, coming to
+meet us. Doesn't she look as if she had just escaped out of Valhalla?
+She is actually over six feet."
+
+Imogen saw a woman of immense stature, in a very short skirt and a
+broad, flapping sun hat, striding down the hillside at a long, swinging
+gait. The refugee from Valhalla approached, panting. Her heavy, Teutonic
+features were scarlet from the rigor of her exercise, and her hair,
+under her flapping sun hat, was tightly befrizzled about her brow. She
+fixed her sharp little eyes upon Imogen and extended both her hands.
+
+"So this is the little friend?" she cried, in a rolling baritone.
+
+Imogen was quite as tall as her hostess; but everything, she reflected,
+is comparative. After the introduction Flavia apologized.
+
+"I wish I could ask you to drive up with us, Frau Lichtenfeld."
+
+"Ah, no!" cried the giantess, drooping her head in humorous caricature
+of a time-honored pose of the heroines of sentimental romances. "It has
+never been my fate to be fitted into corners. I have never known the
+sweet privileges of the tiny."
+
+Laughing, Flavia started the ponies, and the colossal woman, standing
+in the middle of the dusty road, took off her wide hat and waved them
+a farewell which, in scope of gesture, recalled the salute of a plumed
+cavalier.
+
+When they arrived at the house, Imogen looked about her with keen
+curiosity, for this was veritably the work of Flavia's hands, the
+materialization of hopes long deferred. They passed directly into a
+large, square hall with a gallery on three sides, studio fashion. This
+opened at one end into a Dutch breakfast room, beyond which was the
+large dining room. At the other end of the hall was the music room.
+There was a smoking room, which one entered through the library
+behind the staircase. On the second floor there was the same general
+arrangement: a square hall, and, opening from it, the guest chambers,
+or, as Miss Broadwood termed them, the "cages."
+
+When Imogen went to her room, the guests had begun to return from their
+various afternoon excursions. Boys were gliding through the halls with
+ice water, covered trays, and flowers, colliding with maids and valets
+who carried shoes and other articles of wearing apparel. Yet, all this
+was done in response to inaudible bells, on felt soles, and in hushed
+voices, so that there was very little confusion about it.
+
+Flavia had at last built her house and hewn out her seven pillars; there
+could be no doubt, now, that the asylum for talent, the sanatorium of
+the arts, so long projected, was an accomplished fact. Her ambition
+had long ago outgrown the dimensions of her house on Prairie Avenue;
+besides, she had bitterly complained that in Chicago traditions were
+against her. Her project had been delayed by Arthur's doggedly standing
+out for the Michigan woods, but Flavia knew well enough that certain of
+the _rarae aves_--"the best"--could not be lured so far away from the
+seaport, so she declared herself for the historic Hudson and knew no
+retreat. The establishing of a New York office had at length overthrown
+Arthur's last valid objection to quitting the lake country for three
+months of the year; and Arthur could be wearied into anything, as those
+who knew him knew.
+
+Flavia's house was the mirror of her exultation; it was a temple to the
+gods of Victory, a sort of triumphal arch. In her earlier days she had
+swallowed experiences that would have unmanned one of less torrential
+enthusiasm or blind pertinacity. But, of late years, her determination
+had told; she saw less and less of those mysterious persons with
+mysterious obstacles in their path and mysterious grievances against the
+world, who had once frequented her house on Prairie Avenue. In the stead
+of this multitude of the unarrived, she had now the few, the select,
+"the best." Of all that band of indigent retainers who had once fed at
+her board like the suitors in the halls of Penelope, only Alcee Buisson
+still retained his right of entree. He alone had remembered that
+ambition hath a knapsack at his back, wherein he puts alms to oblivion,
+and he alone had been considerate enough to do what Flavia had expected
+of him, and give his name a current value in the world. Then, as
+Miss Broadwood put it, "he was her first real one,"--and Flavia, like
+Mohammed, could remember her first believer.
+
+"The House of Song," as Miss Broadwood had called it, was the outcome
+of Flavia's more exalted strategies. A woman who made less a point of
+sympathizing with their delicate organisms, might have sought to plunge
+these phosphorescent pieces into the tepid bath of domestic life;
+but Flavia's discernment was deeper. This must be a refuge where the
+shrinking soul, the sensitive brain, should be unconstrained; where
+the caprice of fancy should outweigh the civil code, if necessary. She
+considered that this much Arthur owed her; for she, in her turn, had
+made concessions. Flavia had, indeed, quite an equipment of epigrams
+to the effect that our century creates the iron genii which evolve its
+fairy tales: but the fact that her husband's name was annually painted
+upon some ten thousand threshing machines in reality contributed very
+little to her happiness.
+
+Arthur Hamilton was born and had spent his boyhood in the West Indies,
+and physically he had never lost the brand of the tropics. His father,
+after inventing the machine which bore his name, had returned to the
+States to patent and manufacture it. After leaving college, Arthur had
+spent five years ranching in the West and traveling abroad. Upon his
+father's death he had returned to Chicago and, to the astonishment of
+all his friends, had taken up the business--without any demonstration
+of enthusiasm, but with quiet perseverance, marked ability, and amazing
+industry. Why or how a self-sufficient, rather ascetic man of thirty,
+indifferent in manner, wholly negative in all other personal relations,
+should have doggedly wooed and finally married Flavia Malcolm was a
+problem that had vexed older heads than Imogen's.
+
+While Imogen was dressing she heard a knock at her door, and a young
+woman entered whom she at once recognized as Jemima Broadwood--"Jimmy"
+Broadwood she was called by people in her own profession. While there
+was something unmistakably professional in her frank _savoir-faire_,
+"Jimmy's" was one of those faces to which the rouge never seems to
+stick. Her eyes were keen and gray as a windy April sky, and so far from
+having been seared by calcium lights, you might have fancied they had
+never looked on anything less bucolic than growing fields and country
+fairs. She wore her thick, brown hair short and parted at the side; and,
+rather than hinting at freakishness, this seemed admirably in keeping
+with her fresh, boyish countenance. She extended to Imogen a large,
+well-shaped hand which it was a pleasure to clasp.
+
+"Ah! You are Miss Willard, and I see I need not introduce myself. Flavia
+said you were kind enough to express a wish to meet me, and I preferred
+to meet you alone. Do you mind if I smoke?"
+
+"Why, certainly not," said Imogen, somewhat disconcerted and looking
+hurriedly about for matches.
+
+"There, be calm, I'm always prepared," said Miss Broadwood, checking
+Imogen's flurry with a soothing gesture, and producing an oddly
+fashioned silver match-case from some mysterious recess in her dinner
+gown. She sat down in a deep chair, crossed her patent-leather Oxfords,
+and lit her cigarette. "This matchbox," she went on meditatively, "once
+belonged to a Prussian officer. He shot himself in his bathtub, and I
+bought it at the sale of his effects."
+
+Imogen had not yet found any suitable reply to make to this rather
+irrelevant confidence, when Miss Broadwood turned to her cordially: "I'm
+awfully glad you've come, Miss Willard, though I've not quite decided
+why you did it. I wanted very much to meet you. Flavia gave me your
+thesis to read."
+
+"Why, how funny!" ejaculated Imogen.
+
+"On the contrary," remarked Miss Broadwood. "I thought it decidedly
+lacked humor."
+
+"I meant," stammered Imogen, beginning to feel very much like Alice
+in Wonderland, "I meant that I thought it rather strange Mrs. Hamilton
+should fancy you would be interested."
+
+Miss Broadwood laughed heartily. "Now, don't let my rudeness frighten
+you. Really, I found it very interesting, and no end impressive. You
+see, most people in my profession are good for absolutely nothing else,
+and, therefore, they have a deep and abiding conviction that in some
+other line they might have shone. Strange to say, scholarship is the
+object of our envious and particular admiration. Anything in type
+impresses us greatly; that's why so many of us marry authors or
+newspapermen and lead miserable lives." Miss Broadwood saw that she had
+rather disconcerted Imogen, and blithely tacked in another direction.
+"You see," she went on, tossing aside her half-consumed cigarette, "some
+years ago Flavia would not have deemed me worthy to open the pages of
+your thesis--nor to be one of her house party of the chosen, for that
+matter. I've Pinero to thank for both pleasures. It all depends on the
+class of business I'm playing whether I'm in favor or not. Flavia is
+my second cousin, you know, so I can say whatever disagreeable things I
+choose with perfect good grace. I'm quite desperate for someone to laugh
+with, so I'm going to fasten myself upon you--for, of course, one can't
+expect any of these gypsy-dago people to see anything funny. I don't
+intend you shall lose the humor of the situation. What do you think of
+Flavia's infirmary for the arts, anyway?"
+
+"Well, it's rather too soon for me to have any opinion at all," said
+Imogen, as she again turned to her dressing. "So far, you are the only
+one of the artists I've met."
+
+"One of them?" echoed Miss Broadwood. "One of the _artists_? My offense
+may be rank, my dear, but I really don't deserve that. Come, now,
+whatever badges of my tribe I may bear upon me, just let me divest you
+of any notion that I take myself seriously."
+
+Imogen turned from the mirror in blank astonishment and sat down on the
+arm of a chair, facing her visitor. "I can't fathom you at all,
+Miss Broadwood," she said frankly. "Why shouldn't you take yourself
+seriously? What's the use of beating about the bush? Surely you know
+that you are one of the few players on this side of the water who have
+at all the spirit of natural or ingenuous comedy?"
+
+"Thank you, my dear. Now we are quite even about the thesis, aren't
+we? Oh, did you mean it? Well, you _are_ a clever girl. But you see it
+doesn't do to permit oneself to look at it in that light. If we do, we
+always go to pieces and waste our substance astarring as the unhappy
+daughter of the Capulets. But there, I hear Flavia coming to take you
+down; and just remember I'm not one of them--the artists, I mean."
+
+
+Flavia conducted Imogen and Miss Broadwood downstairs. As they reached
+the lower hall they heard voices from the music room, and dim figures
+were lurking in the shadows under the gallery, but their hostess led
+straight to the smoking room. The June evening was chilly, and a fire
+had been lighted in the fireplace. Through the deepening dusk, the
+firelight flickered upon the pipes and curious weapons on the wall and
+threw an orange glow over the Turkish hangings. One side of the smoking
+room was entirely of glass, separating it from the conservatory, which
+was flooded with white light from the electric bulbs. There was about
+the darkened room some suggestion of certain chambers in the Arabian
+Nights, opening on a court of palms. Perhaps it was partially this
+memory-evoking suggestion that caused Imogen to start so violently when
+she saw dimly, in a blur of shadow, the figure of a man, who sat smoking
+in a low, deep chair before the fire. He was long, and thin, and brown.
+His long, nerveless hands drooped from the arms of his chair. A brown
+mustache shaded his mouth, and his eyes were sleepy and apathetic. When
+Imogen entered he rose indolently and gave her his hand, his manner
+barely courteous.
+
+"I am glad you arrived promptly, Miss Willard," he said with an
+indifferent drawl. "Flavia was afraid you might be late. You had a
+pleasant ride up, I hope?"
+
+"Oh, very, thank you, Mr. Hamilton," she replied, feeling that he did
+not particularly care whether she replied at all.
+
+Flavia explained that she had not yet had time to dress for dinner,
+as she had been attending to Mr. Will Maidenwood, who had become faint
+after hurting his finger in an obdurate window, and immediately excused
+herself As she left, Hamilton turned to Miss Broadwood with a rather
+spiritless smile.
+
+"Well, Jimmy," he remarked, "I brought up a piano box full of fireworks
+for the boys. How do you suppose we'll manage to keep them until the
+Fourth?"
+
+"We can't, unless we steel ourselves to deny there are any on the
+premises," said Miss Broadwood, seating herself on a low stool by
+Hamilton's chair and leaning back against the mantel. "Have you seen
+Helen, and has she told you the tragedy of the tooth?"
+
+"She met me at the station, with her tooth wrapped up in tissue paper.
+I had tea with her an hour ago. Better sit down, Miss Willard;" he rose
+and pushed a chair toward Imogen, who was standing peering into the
+conservatory. "We are scheduled to dine at seven, but they seldom get
+around before eight."
+
+By this time Imogen had made out that here the plural pronoun, third
+person, always referred to the artists. As Hamilton's manner did not
+spur one to cordial intercourse, and as his attention seemed directed
+to Miss Broadwood, insofar as it could be said to be directed to anyone,
+she sat down facing the conservatory and watched him, unable to decide
+in how far he was identical with the man who had first met Flavia
+Malcolm in her mother's house, twelve years ago. Did he at all remember
+having known her as a little girl, and why did his indifference hurt her
+so, after all these years? Had some remnant of her childish affection
+for him gone on living, somewhere down in the sealed caves of her
+consciousness, and had she really expected to find it possible to be
+fond of him again? Suddenly she saw a light in the man's sleepy eyes,
+an unmistakable expression of interest and pleasure that fairly startled
+her. She turned quickly in the direction of his glance, and saw Flavia,
+just entering, dressed for dinner and lit by the effulgence of her most
+radiant manner. Most people considered Flavia handsome, and there was
+no gainsaying that she carried her five-and-thirty years splendidly. Her
+figure had never grown matronly, and her face was of the sort that does
+not show wear. Its blond tints were as fresh and enduring as enamel--and
+quite as hard. Its usual expression was one of tense, often strained,
+animation, which compressed her lips nervously. A perfect scream of
+animation, Miss Broadwood had called it, created and maintained by
+sheer, indomitable force of will. Flavia's appearance on any scene
+whatever made a ripple, caused a certain agitation and recognition, and,
+among impressionable people, a certain uneasiness, For all her sparkling
+assurance of manner, Flavia was certainly always ill at ease and, even
+more certainly, anxious. She seemed not convinced of the established
+order of material things, seemed always trying to conceal her feeling
+that walls might crumble, chasms open, or the fabric of her life fly
+to the winds in irretrievable entanglement. At least this was the
+impression Imogen got from that note in Flavia which was so manifestly
+false.
+
+Hamilton's keen, quick, satisfied glance at his wife had recalled to
+Imogen all her inventory of speculations about them. She looked at him
+with compassionate surprise. As a child she had never permitted herself
+to believe that Hamilton cared at all for the woman who had taken him
+away from her; and since she had begun to think about them again, it
+had never occurred to her that anyone could become attached to Flavia in
+that deeply personal and exclusive sense. It seemed quite as irrational
+as trying to possess oneself of Broadway at noon.
+
+When they went out to dinner Imogen realized the completeness of
+Flavia's triumph. They were people of one name, mostly, like kings;
+people whose names stirred the imagination like a romance or a melody.
+With the notable exception of M. Roux, Imogen had seen most of them
+before, either in concert halls or lecture rooms; but they looked
+noticeably older and dimmer than she remembered them.
+
+Opposite her sat Schemetzkin, the Russian pianist, a short, corpulent
+man, with an apoplectic face and purplish skin, his thick, iron-gray
+hair tossed back from his forehead. Next to the German giantess sat the
+Italian tenor--the tiniest of men--pale, with soft, light hair, much
+in disorder, very red lips, and fingers yellowed by cigarettes. Frau
+Lichtenfeld shone in a gown of emerald green, fitting so closely as to
+enhance her natural floridness. However, to do the good lady justice,
+let her attire be never so modest, it gave an effect of barbaric
+splendor. At her left sat Herr Schotte, the Assyriologist, whose
+features were effectually concealed by the convergence of his hair and
+beard, and whose glasses were continually falling into his plate.
+This gentleman had removed more tons of earth in the course of his
+explorations than had any of his confreres, and his vigorous attack upon
+his food seemed to suggest the strenuous nature of his accustomed toil.
+His eyes were small and deeply set, and his forehead bulged fiercely
+above his eyes in a bony ridge. His heavy brows completed the leonine
+suggestion of his face. Even to Imogen, who knew something of his work
+and greatly respected it, he was entirely too reminiscent of the Stone
+Age to be altogether an agreeable dinner companion. He seemed, indeed,
+to have absorbed something of the savagery of those early types of life
+which he continually studied.
+
+Frank Wellington, the young Kansas man who had been two years out of
+Harvard and had published three historical novels, sat next to Mr. Will
+Maidenwood, who was still pale from his recent sufferings and carried
+his hand bandaged. They took little part in the general conversation,
+but, like the lion and the unicorn, were always at it, discussing,
+every time they met, whether there were or were not passages in Mr.
+Wellington's works which should be eliminated, out of consideration
+for the Young Person. Wellington had fallen into the hands of a great
+American syndicate which most effectually befriended struggling authors
+whose struggles were in the right direction, and which had guaranteed
+to make him famous before he was thirty. Feeling the security of his
+position he stoutly defended those passages which jarred upon the
+sensitive nerves of the young editor of _Woman_. Maidenwood, in the
+smoothest of voices, urged the necessity of the author's recognizing
+certain restrictions at the outset, and Miss Broadwood, who joined the
+argument quite without invitation or encouragement, seconded him with
+pointed and malicious remarks which caused the young editor manifest
+discomfort. Restzhoff, the chemist, demanded the attention of the entire
+company for his exposition of his devices for manufacturing ice cream
+from vegetable oils and for administering drugs in bonbons.
+
+Flavia, always noticeably restless at dinner, was somewhat apathetic
+toward the advocate of peptonized chocolate and was plainly concerned
+about the sudden departure of M. Roux, who had announced that it would
+be necessary for him to leave tomorrow. M. Emile Roux, who sat at
+Flavia's right, was a man in middle life and quite bald, clearly without
+personal vanity, though his publishers preferred to circulate only those
+of his portraits taken in his ambrosial youth. Imogen was considerably
+shocked at his unlikeness to the slender, black-stocked Rolla he had
+looked at twenty. He had declined into the florid, settled heaviness of
+indifference and approaching age. There was, however, a certain look of
+durability and solidity about him; the look of a man who has earned the
+right to be fat and bald, and even silent at dinner if he chooses.
+
+Throughout the discussion between Wellington and Will Maidenwood, though
+they invited his participation, he remained silent, betraying no sign
+either of interest or contempt. Since his arrival he had directed most
+of his conversation to Hamilton, who had never read one of his twelve
+great novels. This perplexed and troubled Flavia. On the night of his
+arrival Jules Martel had enthusiastically declared, "There are schools
+and schools, manners and manners; but Roux is Roux, and Paris sets
+its watches by his clock." Flavia had already repeated this remark to
+Imogen. It haunted her, and each time she quoted it she was impressed
+anew.
+
+Flavia shifted the conversation uneasily, evidently exasperated and
+excited by her repeated failures to draw the novelist out. "Monsieur
+Roux," she began abruptly, with her most animated smile, "I remember so
+well a statement I read some years ago in your 'Mes Etudes des Femmes'
+to the effect that you had never met a really intellectual woman. May I
+ask, without being impertinent, whether that assertion still represents
+your experience?"
+
+"I meant, madam," said the novelist conservatively, "intellectual in
+a sense very special, as we say of men in whom the purely intellectual
+functions seem almost independent."
+
+"And you still think a woman so constituted a mythical personage?"
+persisted Flavia, nodding her head encouragingly.
+
+"_Une Meduse_, madam, who, if she were discovered, would transmute us
+all into stone," said the novelist, bowing gravely. "If she existed at
+all," he added deliberately, "it was my business to find her, and
+she has cost me many a vain pilgrimage. Like Rudel of Tripoli, I have
+crossed seas and penetrated deserts to seek her out. I have, indeed,
+encountered women of learning whose industry I have been compelled
+to respect; many who have possessed beauty and charm and perplexing
+cleverness; a few with remarkable information and a sort of fatal
+facility."
+
+"And Mrs. Browning, George Eliot, and your own Mme. Dudevant?" queried
+Flavia with that fervid enthusiasm with which she could, on occasion,
+utter things simply incomprehensible for their banality--at her feats of
+this sort Miss Broadwood was wont to sit breathless with admiration.
+
+"Madam, while the intellect was undeniably present in the performances
+of those women, it was only the stick of the rocket. Although this
+woman has eluded me I have studied her conditions and perturbances as
+astronomers conjecture the orbits of planets they have never seen.
+if she exists, she is probably neither an artist nor a woman with a
+mission, but an obscure personage, with imperative intellectual needs,
+who absorbs rather than produces."
+
+Flavia, still nodding nervously, fixed a strained glance of
+interrogation upon M. Roux. "Then you think she would be a woman whose
+first necessity would be to know, whose instincts would be satisfied
+only with the best, who could draw from others; appreciative, merely?"
+
+The novelist lifted his dull eyes to his interlocutress with an
+untranslatable smile and a slight inclination of his shoulders. "Exactly
+so; you are really remarkable, madam," he added, in a tone of cold
+astonishment.
+
+After dinner the guests took their coffee in the music room, where
+Schemetzkin sat down at the piano to drum ragtime, and give his
+celebrated imitation of the boardingschool girl's execution of Chopin.
+He flatly refused to play anything more serious, and would practice only
+in the morning, when he had the music room to himself. Hamilton and M.
+Roux repaired to the smoking room to discuss the necessity of extending
+the tax on manufactured articles in France--one of those conversations
+which particularly exasperated Flavia.
+
+After Schemetzkin had grimaced and tortured the keyboard with malicious
+vulgarities for half an hour, Signor Donati, to put an end to his
+torture, consented to sing, and Flavia and Imogen went to fetch Arthur
+to play his accompaniments. Hamilton rose with an annoyed look and
+placed his cigarette on the mantel. "Why yes, Flavia, I'll accompany
+him, provided he sings something with a melody, Italian arias or
+ballads, and provided the recital is not interminable."
+
+"You will join us, M. Roux?"
+
+"Thank you, but I have some letters to write," replied the novelist,
+bowing.
+
+As Flavia had remarked to Imogen, "Arthur really played accompaniments
+remarkably well." To hear him recalled vividly the days of her
+childhood, when he always used to spend his business vacations at her
+mother's home in Maine. He had possessed for her that almost hypnotic
+influence which young men sometimes exert upon little girls. It was a
+sort of phantom love affair, subjective and fanciful, a precocity of
+instinct, like that tender and maternal concern which some little girls
+feel for their dolls. Yet this childish infatuation is capable of
+all the depressions and exaltations of love itself, it has its bitter
+jealousies, cruel disappointments, its exacting caprices.
+
+Summer after summer she had awaited his coming and wept at his
+departure, indifferent to the gayer young men who had called her their
+sweetheart and laughed at everything she said. Although Hamilton never
+said so, she had been always quite sure that he was fond of her. When
+he pulled her up the river to hunt for fairy knolls shut about by low,
+hanging willows, he was often silent for an hour at a time, yet she
+never felt he was bored or was neglecting her. He would lie in the sand
+smoking, his eyes half-closed, watching her play, and she was always
+conscious that she was entertaining him. Sometimes he would take a copy
+of "Alice in Wonderland" in his pocket, and no one could read it as he
+could, laughing at her with his dark eyes, when anything amused him.
+No one else could laugh so, with just their eyes, and without moving a
+muscle of their face. Though he usually smiled at passages that seemed
+not at all funny to the child, she always laughed gleefully, because he
+was so seldom moved to mirth that any such demonstration delighted her
+and she took the credit of it entirely to herself Her own inclination
+had been for serious stories, with sad endings, like the Little Mermaid,
+which he had once told her in an unguarded moment when she had a cold,
+and was put to bed early on her birthday night and cried because she
+could not have her party. But he highly disapproved of this preference,
+and had called it a morbid taste, and always shook his finger at her
+when she asked for the story. When she had been particularly good, or
+particularly neglected by other people, then he would sometimes melt
+and tell her the story, and never laugh at her if she enjoyed the "sad
+ending" even to tears. When Flavia had taken him away and he came no
+more, she wept inconsolably for the space of two weeks, and refused
+to learn her lessons. Then she found the story of the Little Mermaid
+herself, and forgot him.
+
+Imogen had discovered at dinner that he could still smile at one
+secretly, out of his eyes, and that he had the old manner of outwardly
+seeming bored, but letting you know that he was not. She was intensely
+curious about his exact state of feeling toward his wife, and more
+curious still to catch a sense of his final adjustment to the conditions
+of life in general. This, she could not help feeling, she might get
+again--if she could have him alone for an hour, in some place where
+there was a little river and a sandy cove bordered by drooping willows,
+and a blue sky seen through white sycamore boughs.
+
+That evening, before retiring, Flavia entered her husband's room, where
+he sat in his smoking jacket, in one of his favorite low chairs.
+
+"I suppose it's a grave responsibility to bring an ardent, serious young
+thing like Imogen here among all these fascinating personages," she
+remarked reflectively. "But, after all, one can never tell. These grave,
+silent girls have their own charm, even for facile people."
+
+"Oh, so that is your plan?" queried her husband dryly. "I was wondering
+why you got her up here. She doesn't seem to mix well with the faciles.
+At least, so it struck me."
+
+Flavia paid no heed to this jeering remark, but repeated, "No, after
+all, it may not be a bad thing."
+
+"Then do consign her to that shaken reed, the tenor," said her husband
+yawning. "I remember she used to have a taste for the pathetic."
+
+"And then," remarked Flavia coquettishly, "after all, I owe her mother a
+return in kind. She was not afraid to trifle with destiny."
+
+But Hamilton was asleep in his chair.
+
+
+Next morning Imogen found only Miss Broadwood in the breakfast room.
+
+"Good morning, my dear girl, whatever are you doing up so early? They
+never breakfast before eleven. Most of them take their coffee in their
+room. Take this place by me."
+
+Miss Broadwood looked particularly fresh and encouraging in her blue
+serge walking skirt, her open jacket displaying an expanse of stiff,
+white shirt bosom, dotted with some almost imperceptible figure, and
+a dark blue-and-white necktie, neatly knotted under her wide, rolling
+collar. She wore a white rosebud in the lapel of her coat, and decidedly
+she seemed more than ever like a nice, clean boy on his holiday. Imogen
+was just hoping that they would breakfast alone when Miss Broadwood
+exclaimed, "Ah, there comes Arthur with the children. That's the reward
+of early rising in this house; you never get to see the youngsters at
+any other time."
+
+Hamilton entered, followed by two dark, handsome little boys. The girl,
+who was very tiny, blonde like her mother, and exceedingly frail, he
+carried in his arms. The boys came up and said good morning with an ease
+and cheerfulness uncommon, even in well-bred children, but the little
+girl hid her face on her father's shoulder.
+
+"She's a shy little lady," he explained as he put her gently down in her
+chair. "I'm afraid she's like her father; she can't seem to get used to
+meeting people. And you, Miss Willard, did you dream of the White Rabbit
+or the Little Mermaid?"
+
+"Oh, I dreamed of them all! All the personages of that buried
+civilization," cried Imogen, delighted that his estranged manner of the
+night before had entirely vanished and feeling that, somehow, the old
+confidential relations had been restored during the night.
+
+"Come, William," said Miss Broadwood, turning to the younger of the two
+boys, "and what did you dream about?"
+
+"We dreamed," said William gravely--he was the more assertive of the two
+and always spoke for both--"we dreamed that there were fireworks hidden
+in the basement of the carriage house; lots and lots of fireworks."
+
+His elder brother looked up at him with apprehensive astonishment, while
+Miss Broadwood hastily put her napkin to her lips and Hamilton dropped
+his eyes. "If little boys dream things, they are so apt not to come
+true," he reflected sadly. This shook even the redoubtable William, and
+he glanced nervously at his brother. "But do things vanish just because
+they have been dreamed?" he objected.
+
+"Generally that is the very best reason for their vanishing," said
+Arthur gravely.
+
+"But, Father, people can't help what they dream," remonstrated Edward
+gently.
+
+"Oh, come! You're making these children talk like a Maeterlinck
+dialogue," laughed Miss Broadwood.
+
+Flavia presently entered, a book in her hand, and bade them all good
+morning. "Come, little people, which story shall it be this morning?"
+she asked winningly. Greatly excited, the children followed her into
+the garden. "She does then, sometimes," murmured Imogen as they left the
+breakfast room.
+
+"Oh, yes, to be sure," said Miss Broadwood cheerfully. "She reads a
+story to them every morning in the most picturesque part of the garden.
+The mother of the Gracchi, you know. She does so long, she says, for the
+time when they will be intellectual companions for her. What do you say
+to a walk over the hills?"
+
+As they left the house they met Frau Lichtenfeld and the bushy
+Herr Schotte--the professor cut an astonishing figure in golf
+stockings--returning from a walk and engaged in an animated conversation
+on the tendencies of German fiction.
+
+"Aren't they the most attractive little children," exclaimed Imogen as
+they wound down the road toward the river.
+
+"Yes, and you must not fail to tell Flavia that you think so. She will
+look at you in a sort of startled way and say, 'Yes, aren't they?' and
+maybe she will go off and hunt them up and have tea with them, to fully
+appreciate them. She is awfully afraid of missing anything good, is
+Flavia. The way those youngsters manage to conceal their guilty presence
+in the House of Song is a wonder."
+
+"But don't any of the artist-folk fancy children?" asked Imogen.
+
+"Yes, they just fancy them and no more. The chemist remarked the other
+day that children are like certain salts which need not be actualized
+because the formulae are quite sufficient for practical purposes. I
+don't see how even Flavia can endure to have that man about."
+
+"I have always been rather curious to know what Arthur thinks of it
+all," remarked Imogen cautiously.
+
+"Thinks of it!" ejaculated Miss Broadwood. "Why, my dear, what would any
+man think of having his house turned into an hotel, habited by freaks
+who discharge his servants, borrow his money, and insult his neighbors?
+This place is shunned like a lazaretto!"
+
+"Well, then, why does he--why does he--" persisted Imogen.
+
+"Bah!" interrupted Miss Broadwood impatiently, "why did he in the first
+place? That's the question."
+
+"Marry her, you mean?" said Imogen coloring.
+
+"Exactly so," said Miss Broadwood sharply, as she snapped the lid of her
+matchbox.
+
+"I suppose that is a question rather beyond us, and certainly one which
+we cannot discuss," said Imogen. "But his toleration on this one point
+puzzles me, quite apart from other complications."
+
+"Toleration? Why this point, as you call it, simply is Flavia. Who could
+conceive of her without it? I don't know where it's all going to end,
+I'm sure, and I'm equally sure that, if it were not for Arthur,
+I shouldn't care," declared Miss Broadwood, drawing her shoulders
+together.
+
+"But will it end at all, now?"
+
+"Such an absurd state of things can't go on indefinitely. A man isn't
+going to see his wife make a guy of herself forever, is he? Chaos
+has already begun in the servants' quarters. There are six different
+languages spoken there now. You see, it's all on an entirely false
+basis. Flavia hasn't the slightest notion of what these people are
+really like, their good and their bad alike escape her. They, on the
+other hand, can't imagine what she is driving at. Now, Arthur is worse
+off than either faction; he is not in the fairy story in that he sees
+these people exactly as they are, _but_ he is utterly unable to see
+Flavia as they see her. There you have the situation. Why can't he see
+her as we do? My dear, that has kept me awake o' nights. This man who
+has thought so much and lived so much, who is naturally a critic, really
+takes Flavia at very nearly her own estimate. But now I am entering upon
+a wilderness. From a brief acquaintance with her you can know nothing of
+the icy fastnesses of Flavia's self-esteem. It's like St. Peter's; you
+can't realize its magnitude at once. You have to grow into a sense of
+it by living under its shadow. It has perplexed even Emile Roux, that
+merciless dissector of egoism. She has puzzled him the more because he
+saw at a glance what some of them do not perceive at once, and what will
+be mercifully concealed from Arthur until the trump sounds; namely, that
+all Flavia's artists have done or ever will do means exactly as much to
+her as a symphony means to an oyster; that there is no bridge by which
+the significance of any work of art could be conveyed to her."
+
+"Then, in the name of goodness, why does she bother?" gasped Imogen.
+"She is pretty, wealthy, well-established; why should she bother?"
+
+"That's what M. Roux has kept asking himself. I can't pretend to analyze
+it. She reads papers on the Literary Landmarks of Paris, the Loves of
+the Poets, and that sort of thing, to clubs out in Chicago. To Flavia
+it is more necessary to be called clever than to breathe. I would give a
+good deal to know that glum Frenchman's diagnosis. He has been
+watching her out of those fishy eyes of his as a biologist watches a
+hemisphereless frog."
+
+For several days after M. Roux's departure Flavia gave an embarrassing
+share of her attention to Imogen. Embarrassing, because Imogen had the
+feeling of being energetically and futilely explored, she knew not for
+what. She felt herself under the globe of an air pump, expected to yield
+up something. When she confined the conversation to matters of general
+interest Flavia conveyed to her with some pique that her one endeavor
+in life had been to fit herself to converse with her friends upon those
+things which vitally interested them. "One has no right to accept their
+best from people unless one gives, isn't it so? I want to be able to
+give--!" she declared vaguely. Yet whenever Imogen strove to pay her
+tithes and plunged bravely into her plans for study next winter, Flavia
+grew absent-minded and interrupted her by amazing generalizations or
+by such embarrassing questions as, "And these grim studies really have
+charm for you; you are quite buried in them; they make other things seem
+light and ephemeral?"
+
+"I rather feel as though I had got in here under false pretenses,"
+Imogen confided to Miss Broadwood. "I'm sure I don't know what it is
+that she wants of me."
+
+"Ah," chuckled Jemima, "you are not equal to these heart to heart talks
+with Flavia. You utterly fail to communicate to her the atmosphere of
+that untroubled joy in which you dwell. You must remember that she gets
+no feeling out of things herself, and she demands that you impart yours
+to her by some process of psychic transmission. I once met a blind girl,
+blind from birth, who could discuss the peculiarities of the Barbizon
+school with just Flavia's glibness and enthusiasm. Ordinarily Flavia
+knows how to get what she wants from people, and her memory is
+wonderful. One evening I heard her giving Frau Lichtenfeld some random
+impressions about Hedda Gabler which she extracted from me five years
+ago; giving them with an impassioned conviction of which I was never
+guilty. But I have known other people who could appropriate your stories
+and opinions; Flavia is infinitely more subtle than that; she can
+soak up the very thrash and drift of your daydreams, and take the very
+thrills off your back, as it were."
+
+After some days of unsuccessful effort, Flavia withdrew herself, and
+Imogen found Hamilton ready to catch her when she was tossed afield.
+He seemed only to have been awaiting this crisis, and at once their
+old intimacy reestablished itself as a thing inevitable and beautifully
+prepared for. She convinced herself that she had not been mistaken in
+him, despite all the doubts that had come up in later years, and this
+renewal of faith set more than one question thumping in her brain. "How
+did he, how can he?" she kept repeating with a tinge of her childish
+resentment, "what right had he to waste anything so fine?"
+
+When Imogen and Arthur were returning from a walk before luncheon one
+morning about a week after M. Roux's departure, they noticed an absorbed
+group before one of the hall windows. Herr Schotte and Restzhoff sat
+on the window seat with a newspaper between them, while Wellington,
+Schemetzkin, and Will Maidenwood looked over their shoulders. They
+seemed intensely interested, Herr Schotte occasionally pounding his
+knees with his fists in ebullitions of barbaric glee. When imogen
+entered the hall, however, the men were all sauntering toward the
+breakfast room and the paper was lying innocently on the divan. During
+luncheon the personnel of that window group were unwontedly animated and
+agreeable all save Schemetzkin, whose stare was blanker than ever, as
+though Roux's mantle of insulting indifference had fallen upon him, in
+addition to his own oblivious self-absorption. Will Maidenwood seemed
+embarrassed and annoyed; the chemist employed himself with making polite
+speeches to Hamilton. Flavia did not come down to lunch--and there was
+a malicious gleam under Herr Schotte's eyebrows. Frank Wellington
+announced nervously that an imperative letter from his protecting
+syndicate summoned him to the city.
+
+After luncheon the men went to the golf links, and Imogen, at the first
+opportunity, possessed herself of the newspaper which had been left on
+the divan. One of the first things that caught her eye was an article
+headed "Roux on Tuft Hunters; The Advanced American Woman as He Sees
+Her; Aggressive, Superficial, and Insincere." The entire interview was
+nothing more nor less than a satiric characterization of Flavia, aquiver
+with irritation and vitriolic malice. No one could mistake it; it was
+done with all his deftness of portraiture. Imogen had not finished the
+article when she heard a footstep, and clutching the paper she started
+precipitately toward the stairway as Arthur entered. He put out his
+hand, looking critically at her distressed face.
+
+"Wait a moment, Miss Willard," he said peremptorily, "I want to see
+whether we can find what it was that so interested our friends this
+morning. Give me the paper, please."
+
+Imogen grew quite white as he opened the journal. She reached forward
+and crumpled it with her hands. "Please don't, please don't," she
+pleaded; "it's something I don't want you to see. Oh, why will you? it's
+just something low and despicable that you can't notice."
+
+Arthur had gently loosed her hands, and he pointed her to a chair. He
+lit a cigar and read the article through without comment. When he had
+finished it he walked to the fireplace, struck a match, and tossed the
+flaming journal between the brass andirons.
+
+"You are right," he remarked as he came back, dusting his hands with his
+handkerchief. "It's quite impossible to comment. There are extremes of
+blackguardism for which we have no name. The only thing necessary is to
+see that Flavia gets no wind of this. This seems to be my cue to act;
+poor girl."
+
+Imogen looked at him tearfully; she could only murmur, "Oh, why did you
+read it!"
+
+Hamilton laughed spiritlessly. "Come, don't you worry about it. You
+always took other people's troubles too seriously. When you were little
+and all the world was gay and everybody happy, you must needs get the
+Little Mermaid's troubles to grieve over. Come with me into the music
+room. You remember the musical setting I once made you for the Lay of
+the Jabberwock? I was trying it over the other night, long after you
+were in bed, and I decided it was quite as fine as the Erl-King music.
+How I wish I could give you some of the cake that Alice ate and make you
+a little girl again. Then, when you had got through the glass door into
+the little garden, you could call to me, perhaps, and tell me all the
+fine things that were going on there. What a pity it is that you ever
+grew up!" he added, laughing; and Imogen, too, was thinking just that.
+
+At dinner that evening, Flavia, with fatal persistence, insisted upon
+turning the conversation to M. Roux. She had been reading one of his
+novels and had remembered anew that Paris set its watches by his clock.
+Imogen surmised that she was tortured by a feeling that she had not
+sufficiently appreciated him while she had had him. When she first
+mentioned his name she was answered only by the pall of silence that
+fell over the company. Then everyone began to talk at once, as though
+to correct a false position. They spoke of him with a fervid, defiant
+admiration, with the sort of hot praise that covers a double purpose.
+Imogen fancied she could see that they felt a kind of relief at what the
+man had done, even those who despised him for doing it; that they felt
+a spiteful hate against Flavia, as though she had tricked them, and a
+certain contempt for themselves that they had been beguiled. She was
+reminded of the fury of the crowd in the fairy tale, when once the child
+had called out that the king was in his night clothes. Surely these
+people knew no more about Flavia than they had known before, but the
+mere fact that the thing had been said altered the situation. Flavia,
+meanwhile, sat chattering amiably, pathetically unconscious of her
+nakedness.
+
+Hamilton lounged, fingering the stem of his wineglass, gazing down the
+table at one face after another and studying the various degrees
+of self-consciousness they exhibited. Imogen's eyes followed his,
+fearfully. When a lull came in the spasmodic flow of conversation,
+Arthur, leaning back in his chair, remarked deliberately, "As for M.
+Roux, his very profession places him in that class of men whom society
+has never been able to accept unconditionally because it has never been
+able to assume that they have any ordered notion of taste. He and
+his ilk remain, with the mountebanks and snake charmers, people
+indispensable to our civilization, but wholly unreclaimed by it; people
+whom we receive, but whose invitations we do not accept."
+
+Fortunately for Flavia, this mine was not exploded until just before the
+coffee was brought. Her laughter was pitiful to hear; it echoed through
+the silent room as in a vault, while she made some tremulously light
+remark about her husband's drollery, grim as a jest from the dying. No
+one responded and she sat nodding her head like a mechanical toy and
+smiling her white, set smile through her teeth, until Alcee Buisson and
+Frau Lichtenfeld came to her support.
+
+After dinner the guests retired immediately to their rooms, and Imogen
+went upstairs on tiptoe, feeling the echo of breakage and the dust of
+crumbling in the air. She wondered whether Flavia's habitual note of
+uneasiness were not, in a manner, prophetic, and a sort of unconscious
+premonition, after all. She sat down to write a letter, but she found
+herself so nervous, her head so hot and her hands so cold, that she
+soon abandoned the effort, just as she was about to seek Miss Broadwood,
+Flavia entered and embraced her hysterically.
+
+"My dearest girl," she began, "was there ever such an unfortunate and
+incomprehensible speech made before? Of course it is scarcely necessary
+to explain to you poor Arthur's lack of tact, and that he meant nothing.
+But they! Can they be expected to understand? He will feel wretchedly
+about it when he realizes what he has done, but in the meantime? And M.
+Roux, of all men! When we were so fortunate as to get him, and he made
+himself so unreservedly agreeable, and I fancied that, in his way,
+Arthur quite admired him. My dear, you have no idea what that speech has
+done. Schemetzkin and Herr Schotte have already sent me word that they
+must leave us tomorrow. Such a thing from a host!" Flavia paused, choked
+by tears of vexation and despair.
+
+Imogen was thoroughly disconcerted; this was the first time she had ever
+seen Flavia betray any personal emotion which was indubitably genuine.
+She replied with what consolation she could. "Need they take it
+personally at all? It was a mere observation upon a class of people--"
+
+"Which he knows nothing whatever about, and with whom he has no
+sympathy," interrupted Flavia. "Ah, my dear, you could not be _expected_
+to understand. You can't realize, knowing Arthur as you do, his entire
+lack of any aesthetic sense whatever. He is absolutely _nil_, stone deaf
+and stark blind, on that side. He doesn't mean to be brutal, it is
+just the brutality of utter ignorance. They always feel it--they are so
+sensitive to unsympathetic influences, you know; they know it the moment
+they come into the house. I have spent my life apologizing for him and
+struggling to conceal it; but in spite of me, he wounds them; his very
+attitude, even in silence, offends them. Heavens! Do I not know? Is
+it not perpetually and forever wounding me? But there has never been
+anything so dreadful as this--never! If I could conceive of any possible
+motive, even!"
+
+"But, surely, Mrs. Hamilton, it was, after all, a mere expression of
+opinion, such as we are any of us likely to venture upon any subject
+whatever. It was neither more personal nor more extravagant than many of
+M. Roux's remarks."
+
+"But, Imogen, certainly M. Roux has the right. It is a part of his
+art, and that is altogether another matter. Oh, this is not the only
+instance!" continued Flavia passionately, "I've always had that narrow,
+bigoted prejudice to contend with. It has always held me back. But
+this--!"
+
+"I think you mistake his attitude," replied Imogen, feeling a flush that
+made her ears tingle. "That is, I fancy he is more appreciative than he
+seems. A man can't be very demonstrative about those things--not if he
+is a real man. I should not think you would care much about saving the
+feelings of people who are too narrow to admit of any other point of
+view than their own." She stopped, finding herself in the impossible
+position of attempting to explain Hamilton to his wife; a task which,
+if once begun, would necessitate an entire course of enlightenment which
+she doubted Flavia's ability to receive, and which she could offer only
+with very poor grace.
+
+"That's just where it stings most"--here Flavia began pacing the
+floor--"it is just because they have all shown such tolerance and have
+treated Arthur with such unfailing consideration that I can find no
+reasonable pretext for his rancor. How can he fail to see the value of
+such friendships on the children's account, if for nothing else! What
+an advantage for them to grow up among such associations! Even though he
+cares nothing about these things himself he might realize that. Is there
+nothing I could say by way of explanation? To them, I mean? If someone
+were to explain to them how unfortunately limited he is in these
+things--"
+
+"I'm afraid I cannot advise you," said Imogen decidedly, "but that, at
+least, seems to me impossible."
+
+Flavia took her hand and glanced at her affectionately, nodding
+nervously. "Of course, dear girl, I can't ask you to be quite frank with
+me. Poor child, you are trembling and your hands are icy. Poor Arthur!
+But you must not judge him by this altogether; think how much he misses
+in life. What a cruel shock you've had. I'll send you some sherry, Good
+night, my dear."
+
+When Flavia shut the door Imogen burst into a fit of nervous weeping.
+
+Next morning she awoke after a troubled and restless night. At eight
+o'clock Miss Broadwood entered in a red and white striped bathrobe.
+
+"Up, up, and see the great doom's image!" she cried, her eyes sparkling
+with excitement. "The hall is full of trunks, they are packing. What
+bolt has fallen? It's you, _ma cherie_, you've brought Ulysses
+home again and the slaughter has begun!" she blew a cloud of smoke
+triumphantly from her lips and threw herself into a chair beside the
+bed.
+
+Imogen, rising on her elbow, plunged excitedly into the story of the
+Roux interview, which Miss Broadwood heard with the keenest interest,
+frequently interrupting her with exclamations of delight. When Imogen
+reached the dramatic scene which terminated in the destruction of the
+newspaper, Miss Broadwood rose and took a turn about the room, violently
+switching the tasselled cords of her bathrobe.
+
+"Stop a moment," she cried, "you mean to tell me that he had such a
+heaven-sent means to bring her to her senses and didn't use it--that he
+held such a weapon and threw it away?"
+
+"Use it?" cried Imogen unsteadily. "Of course he didn't! He bared his
+back to the tormentor, signed himself over to punishment in that speech
+he made at dinner, which everyone understands but Flavia. She was here
+for an hour last night and disregarded every limit of taste in her
+maledictions."
+
+"My dear!" cried Miss Broadwood, catching her hand in inordinate delight
+at the situation, "do you see what he has done? There'll be no end to
+it. Why he has sacrificed himself to spare the very vanity that devours
+him, put rancors in the vessels of his peace, and his eternal jewel
+given to the common enemy of man, to make them kings, the seed of Banquo
+kings! He is magnificent!"
+
+"Isn't he always that?" cried Imogen hotly. "He's like a pillar of
+sanity and law in this house of shams and swollen vanities, where people
+stalk about with a sort of madhouse dignity, each one fancying himself a
+king or a pope. If you could have heard that woman talk of him! Why,
+she thinks him stupid, bigoted, blinded by middleclass prejudices. She
+talked about his having no aesthetic sense and insisted that her artists
+had always shown him tolerance. I don't know why it should get on my
+nerves so, I'm sure, but her stupidity and assurance are enough to drive
+one to the brink of collapse."
+
+"Yes, as opposed to his singular fineness, they are calculated to do
+just that," said Miss Broadwood gravely, wisely ignoring Imogen's tears.
+"But what has been is nothing to what will be. Just wait until Flavia's
+black swans have flown! You ought not to try to stick it out; that would
+only make it harder for everyone. Suppose you let me telephone your
+mother to wire you to come home by the evening train?"
+
+"Anything, rather than have her come at me like that again. It puts me
+in a perfectly impossible position, and he _is_ so fine!"
+
+"Of course it does," said Miss Broadwood sympathetically, "and there
+is no good to be got from facing it. I will stay because such things
+interest me, and Frau Lichtenfeld will stay because she has no money to
+get away, and Buisson will stay because he feels somewhat responsible.
+These complications are interesting enough to cold-blooded folk
+like myself who have an eye for the dramatic element, but they are
+distracting and demoralizing to young people with any serious purpose in
+life."
+
+Miss Broadwood's counsel was all the more generous seeing that, for her,
+the most interesting element of this denouement would be eliminated by
+Imogen's departure. "If she goes now, she'll get over it," soliloquized
+Miss Broadwood. "If she stays, she'll be wrung for him and the hurt may
+go deep enough to last. I haven't the heart to see her spoiling things
+for herself." She telephoned Mrs. Willard and helped Imogen to pack. She
+even took it upon herself to break the news of Imogen's going to Arthur,
+who remarked, as he rolled a cigarette in his nerveless fingers:
+
+"Right enough, too. What should she do here with old cynics like you and
+me, Jimmy? Seeing that she is brim full of dates and formulae and other
+positivisms, and is so girt about with illusions that she still casts
+a shadow in the sun. You've been very tender of her, haven't you? I've
+watched you. And to think it may all be gone when we see her next. 'The
+common fate of all things rare,' you know. What a good fellow you
+are, anyway, Jimmy," he added, putting his hands affectionately on her
+shoulders.
+
+Arthur went with them to the station. Flavia was so prostrated by the
+concerted action of her guests that she was able to see Imogen only
+for a moment in her darkened sleeping chamber, where she kissed her
+hysterically, without lifting her head, bandaged in aromatic vinegar.
+On the way to the station both Arthur and Imogen threw the burden of
+keeping up appearances entirely upon Miss Broadwood, who blithely rose
+to the occasion. When Hamilton carried Imogen's bag into the car, Miss
+Broadwood detained her for a moment, whispering as she gave her a large,
+warm handclasp, "I'll come to see you when I get back to town; and, in
+the meantime, if you meet any of our artists, tell them you have left
+Caius Marius among the ruins of Carthage."
+
+
+
+
+The Sculptor's Funeral
+
+A group of the townspeople stood on the station siding of a little
+Kansas town, awaiting the coming of the night train, which was already
+twenty minutes overdue. The snow had fallen thick over everything; in
+the pale starlight the line of bluffs across the wide, white meadows
+south of the town made soft, smoke-colored curves against the clear sky.
+The men on the siding stood first on one foot and then on the other,
+their hands thrust deep into their trousers pockets, their overcoats
+open, their shoulders screwed up with the cold; and they glanced from
+time to time toward the southeast, where the railroad track wound along
+the river shore. They conversed in low tones and moved about restlessly,
+seeming uncertain as to what was expected of them. There was but one of
+the company who looked as though he knew exactly why he was there; and
+he kept conspicuously apart; walking to the far end of the platform,
+returning to the station door, then pacing up the track again, his chin
+sunk in the high collar of his overcoat, his burly shoulders drooping
+forward, his gait heavy and dogged. Presently he was approached by a
+tall, spare, grizzled man clad in a faded Grand Army suit, who shuffled
+out from the group and advanced with a certain deference, craning his
+neck forward until his back made the angle of a jackknife three-quarters
+open.
+
+"I reckon she's agoin' to be pretty late ag'in tonight, Jim," he
+remarked in a squeaky falsetto. "S'pose it's the snow?"
+
+"I don't know," responded the other man with a shade of annoyance,
+speaking from out an astonishing cataract of red beard that grew
+fiercely and thickly in all directions.
+
+The spare man shifted the quill toothpick he was chewing to the other
+side of his mouth. "It ain't likely that anybody from the East will come
+with the corpse, I s'pose," he went on reflectively.
+
+"I don't know," responded the other, more curtly than before.
+
+"It's too bad he didn't belong to some lodge or other. I like an
+order funeral myself. They seem more appropriate for people of some
+reputation," the spare man continued, with an ingratiating concession
+in his shrill voice, as he carefully placed his toothpick in his vest
+pocket. He always carried the flag at the G. A. R. funerals in the town.
+
+The heavy man turned on his heel, without replying, and walked up the
+siding. The spare man shuffled back to the uneasy group. "Jim's ez full
+ez a tick, ez ushel," he commented commiseratingly.
+
+Just then a distant whistle sounded, and there was a shuffling of feet
+on the platform. A number of lanky boys of all ages appeared as suddenly
+and slimily as eels wakened by the crack of thunder; some came from the
+waiting room, where they had been warming themselves by the red stove,
+or half-asleep on the slat benches; others uncoiled themselves from
+baggage trucks or slid out of express wagons. Two clambered down from
+the driver's seat of a hearse that stood backed up against the siding.
+They straightened their stooping shoulders and lifted their heads, and
+a flash of momentary animation kindled their dull eyes at that cold,
+vibrant scream, the world-wide call for men. It stirred them like the
+note of a trumpet; just as it had often stirred the man who was coming
+home tonight, in his boyhood.
+
+The night express shot, red as a rocket, from out the eastward marsh
+lands and wound along the river shore under the long lines of shivering
+poplars that sentineled the meadows, the escaping steam hanging in gray
+masses against the pale sky and blotting out the Milky Way. In a moment
+the red glare from the headlight streamed up the snow-covered track
+before the siding and glittered on the wet, black rails. The burly man
+with the disheveled red beard walked swiftly up the platform toward
+the approaching train, uncovering his head as he went. The group of
+men behind him hesitated, glanced questioningly at one another, and
+awkwardly followed his example. The train stopped, and the crowd
+shuffled up to the express car just as the door was thrown open,
+the spare man in the G. A. B. suit thrusting his head forward with
+curiosity. The express messenger appeared in the doorway, accompanied by
+a young man in a long ulster and traveling cap.
+
+"Are Mr. Merrick's friends here?" inquired the young man.
+
+The group on the platform swayed and shuffled uneasily. Philip Phelps,
+the banker, responded with dignity: "We have come to take charge of the
+body. Mr. Merrick's father is very feeble and can't be about."
+
+"Send the agent out here," growled the express messenger, "and tell the
+operator to lend a hand."
+
+The coffin was got out of its rough box and down on the snowy platform.
+The townspeople drew back enough to make room for it and then formed a
+close semicircle about it, looking curiously at the palm leaf which lay
+across the black cover. No one said anything. The baggage man stood by
+his truck, waiting to get at the trunks. The engine panted heavily, and
+the fireman dodged in and out among the wheels with his yellow torch and
+long oilcan, snapping the spindle boxes. The young Bostonian, one of
+the dead sculptor's pupils who had come with the body, looked about him
+helplessly. He turned to the banker, the only one of that black,
+uneasy, stoop-shouldered group who seemed enough of an individual to be
+addressed.
+
+"None of Mr. Merrick's brothers are here?" he asked uncertainly.
+
+The man with the red heard for the first time stepped up and joined the
+group. "No, they have not come yet; the family is scattered. The body
+will be taken directly to the house." He stooped and took hold of one of
+the handles of the coffin.
+
+"Take the long hill road up, Thompson--it will be easier on the horses,"
+called the liveryman as the undertaker snapped the door of the hearse
+and prepared to mount to the driver's seat.
+
+Laird, the red-bearded lawyer, turned again to the stranger: "We didn't
+know whether there would be anyone with him or not," he explained. "It's
+a long walk, so you'd better go up in the hack." He pointed to a single,
+battered conveyance, but the young man replied stiffly: "Thank you, but
+I think I will go up with the hearse. If you don't object," turning to
+the undertaker, "I'll ride with you."
+
+They clambered up over the wheels and drove off in the starlight tip the
+long, white hill toward the town. The lamps in the still village were
+shining from under the low, snow-burdened roofs; and beyond, on every
+side, the plains reached out into emptiness, peaceful and wide as the
+soft sky itself, and wrapped in a tangible, white silence.
+
+When the hearse backed up to a wooden sidewalk before a naked,
+weatherbeaten frame house, the same composite, ill-defined group that
+had stood upon the station siding was huddled about the gate. The front
+yard was an icy swamp, and a couple of warped planks, extending from the
+sidewalk to the door, made a sort of rickety footbridge. The gate hung
+on one hinge and was opened wide with difficulty. Steavens, the young
+stranger, noticed that something black was tied to the knob of the front
+door.
+
+The grating sound made by the casket, as it was drawn from the hearse,
+was answered by a scream from the house; the front door was wrenched
+open, and a tall, corpulent woman rushed out bareheaded into the snow
+and flung herself upon the coffin, shrieking: "My boy, my boy! And this
+is how you've come home to me!"
+
+As Steavens turned away and closed his eyes with a shudder of
+unutterable repulsion, another woman, also tall, but flat and angular,
+dressed entirely in black, darted out of the house and caught Mrs.
+Merrick by the shoulders, crying sharply: "Come, come, Mother; you
+mustn't go on like this!" Her tone changed to one of obsequious
+solemnity as she turned to the banker: "The parlor is ready, Mr.
+Phelps."
+
+The bearers carried the coffin along the narrow boards, while the
+undertaker ran ahead with the coffin-rests. They bore it into a large,
+unheated room that smelled of dampness and disuse and furniture polish,
+and set it down under a hanging lamp ornamented with jingling glass
+prisms and before a "Rogers group" of John Alden and Priscilla,
+wreathed with smilax. Henry Steavens stared about him with the sickening
+conviction that there had been some horrible mistake, and that he had
+somehow arrived at the wrong destination. He looked painfully about
+over the clover-green Brussels, the fat plush upholstery, among the
+hand-painted china plaques and panels, and vases, for some mark of
+identification, for something that might once conceivably have belonged
+to Harvey Merrick. It was not until he recognized his friend in the
+crayon portrait of a little boy in kilts and curls hanging above the
+piano that he felt willing to let any of these people approach the
+coffin.
+
+"Take the lid off, Mr. Thompson; let me see my boy's face," wailed
+the elder woman between her sobs. This time Steavens looked fearfully,
+almost beseechingly into her face, red and swollen under its masses
+of strong, black, shiny hair. He flushed, dropped his eyes, and then,
+almost incredulously, looked again. There was a kind of power about
+her face--a kind of brutal handsomeness, even, but it was scarred and
+furrowed by violence, and so colored and coarsened by fiercer passions
+that grief seemed never to have laid a gentle finger there. The long
+nose was distended and knobbed at the end, and there were deep lines
+on either side of it; her heavy, black brows almost met across her
+forehead; her teeth were large and square and set far apart--teeth that
+could tear. She filled the room; the men were obliterated, seemed tossed
+about like twigs in an angry water, and even Steavens felt himself being
+drawn into the whirlpool.
+
+The daughter--the tall, rawboned woman in crepe, with a mourning comb in
+her hair which curiously lengthened her long face sat stiffly upon the
+sofa, her hands, conspicuous for their large knuckles, folded in her
+lap, her mouth and eyes drawn down, solemnly awaiting the opening of the
+coffin. Near the door stood a mulatto woman, evidently a servant in
+the house, with a timid bearing and an emaciated face pitifully sad and
+gentle. She was weeping silently, the corner of her calico apron lifted
+to her eyes, occasionally suppressing a long, quivering sob. Steavens
+walked over and stood beside her.
+
+Feeble steps were heard on the stairs, and an old man, tall and frail,
+odorous of pipe smoke, with shaggy, unkept gray hair and a dingy beard,
+tobacco stained about the mouth, entered uncertainly. He went slowly up
+to the coffin and stood, rolling a blue cotton handkerchief between his
+hands, seeming so pained and embarrassed by his wife's orgy of grief
+that he had no consciousness of anything else.
+
+"There, there, Annie, dear, don't take on so," he quavered timidly,
+putting out a shaking hand and awkwardly patting her elbow. She turned
+with a cry and sank upon his shoulder with such violence that he
+tottered a little. He did not even glance toward the coffin, but
+continued to look at her with a dull, frightened, appealing expression,
+as a spaniel looks at the whip. His sunken cheeks slowly reddened and
+burned with miserable shame. When his wife rushed from the room her
+daughter strode after her with set lips. The servant stole up to the
+coffin, bent over it for a moment, and then slipped away to the kitchen,
+leaving Steavens, the lawyer, and the father to themselves. The old man
+stood trembling and looking down at his dead son's face. The sculptor's
+splendid head seemed even more noble in its rigid stillness than in
+life. The dark hair had crept down upon the wide forehead; the face
+seemed strangely long, but in it there was not that beautiful and chaste
+repose which we expect to find in the faces of the dead. The brows were
+so drawn that there were two deep lines above the beaked nose, and the
+chin was thrust forward defiantly. It was as though the strain of life
+had been so sharp and bitter that death could not at once wholly relax
+the tension and smooth the countenance into perfect peace--as though he
+were still guarding something precious and holy, which might even yet be
+wrested from him.
+
+The old man's lips were working under his stained beard. He turned to
+the lawyer with timid deference: "Phelps and the rest are comin' back to
+set up with Harve, ain't they?" he asked. "Thank 'ee, Jim, thank 'ee."
+He brushed the hair back gently from his son's forehead. "He was a good
+boy, Jim; always a good boy. He was ez gentle ez a child and the kindest
+of 'em all--only we didn't none of us ever onderstand him." The tears
+trickled slowly down his beard and dropped upon the sculptor's coat.
+
+"Martin, Martin. Oh, Martin! come here," his wife wailed from the top of
+the stairs. The old man started timorously: "Yes, Annie, I'm coming." He
+turned away, hesitated stood for a moment in miserable indecision; then
+he reached back and patted the dead man's hair softly, and stumbled from
+the room.
+
+"Poor old man, I didn't think he had any tears left. Seems as if his
+eyes would have gone dry long ago. At his age nothing cuts very deep,"
+remarked the lawyer.
+
+Something in his tone made Steavens glance up. While the mother had been
+in the room the young man had scarcely seen anyone else; but now, from
+the moment he first glanced into Jim Laird's florid face and bloodshot
+eyes, he knew that he had found what he had been heartsick at not
+finding before--the feeling, the understanding, that must exist in
+someone, even here.
+
+The man was red as his beard, with features swollen and blurred by
+dissipation, and a hot, blazing blue eye. His face was strained--that of
+a man who is controlling himself with difficulty--and he kept plucking
+at his beard with a sort of fierce resentment. Steavens, sitting by
+the window, watched him turn down the glaring lamp, still its jangling
+pendants with an angry gesture, and then stand with his hands locked
+behind him, staring down into the master's face. He could not help
+wondering what link there could have been between the porcelain vessel
+and so sooty a lump of potter's clay.
+
+From the kitchen an uproar was sounding; when the dining-room door
+opened the import of it was clear. The mother was abusing the maid for
+having forgotten to make the dressing for the chicken salad which had
+been prepared for the watchers. Steavens had never heard anything in
+the least like it; it was injured, emotional, dramatic abuse, unique and
+masterly in its excruciating cruelty, as violent and unrestrained as had
+been her grief of twenty minutes before. With a shudder of disgust the
+lawyer went into the dining room and closed the door into the kitchen.
+
+"Poor Roxy's getting it now," he remarked when he came back. "The
+Merricks took her out of the poorhouse years ago; and if her loyalty
+would let her, I guess the poor old thing could tell tales that would
+curdle your blood. She's the mulatto woman who was standing in here a
+while ago, with her apron to her eyes. The old woman is a fury; there
+never was anybody like her for demonstrative piety and ingenious
+cruelty. She made Harvey's life a hell for him when he lived at home;
+he was so sick ashamed of it. I never could see how he kept himself so
+sweet."
+
+"He was wonderful," said Steavens slowly, "wonderful; but until tonight
+I have never known how wonderful."
+
+"That is the true and eternal wonder of it, anyway; that it can come
+even from such a dung heap as this," the lawyer cried, with a sweeping
+gesture which seemed to indicate much more than the four walls within
+which they stood.
+
+"I think I'll see whether I can get a little air. The room is so close
+I am beginning to feel rather faint," murmured Steavens, struggling with
+one of the windows. The sash was stuck, however, and would not yield, so
+he sat down dejectedly and began pulling at his collar. The lawyer came
+over, loosened the sash with one blow of his red fist, and sent the
+window up a few inches. Steavens thanked him, but the nausea which had
+been gradually climbing into his throat for the last half-hour left him
+with but one desire--a desperate feeling that he must get away from this
+place with what was left of Harvey Merrick. Oh, he comprehended well
+enough now the quiet bitterness of the smile that he had seen so often
+on his master's lips!
+
+He remembered that once, when Merrick returned from a visit home, he
+brought with him a singularly feeling and suggestive bas-relief of a
+thin, faded old woman, sitting and sewing something pinned to her knee;
+while a full-lipped, full-blooded little urchin, his trousers held up
+by a single gallows, stood beside her, impatiently twitching her gown to
+call her attention to a butterfly he had caught. Steavens, impressed by
+the tender and delicate modeling of the thin, tired face, had asked him
+if it were his mother. He remembered the dull flush that had burned up
+in the sculptor's face.
+
+The lawyer was sitting in a rocking chair beside the coffin, his head
+thrown back and his eyes closed. Steavens looked at him earnestly,
+puzzled at the line of the chin, and wondering why a man should conceal
+a feature of such distinction under that disfiguring shock of beard.
+Suddenly, as though he felt the young sculptor's keen glance, he opened
+his eyes.
+
+"Was he always a good deal of an oyster?" he asked abruptly. "He was
+terribly shy as a boy."
+
+"Yes, he was an oyster, since you put it so," rejoined Steavens.
+"Although he could be very fond of people, he always gave one the
+impression of being detached. He disliked violent emotion; he was
+reflective, and rather distrustful of himself--except, of course, as
+regarded his work. He was surefooted enough there. He distrusted men
+pretty thoroughly and women even more, yet somehow without believing ill
+of them. He was determined, indeed, to believe the best, but he seemed
+afraid to investigate."
+
+"A burnt dog dreads the fire," said the lawyer grimly, and closed his
+eyes.
+
+Steavens went on and on, reconstructing that whole miserable boyhood.
+All this raw, biting ugliness had been the portion of the man whose
+tastes were refined beyond the limits of the reasonable--whose mind was
+an exhaustless gallery of beautiful impressions, and so sensitive that
+the mere shadow of a poplar leaf flickering against a sunny wall would
+be etched and held there forever. Surely, if ever a man had the magic
+word in his fingertips, it was Merrick. Whatever he touched, he revealed
+its holiest secret; liberated it from enchantment and restored it to its
+pristine loveliness, like the Arabian prince who fought the enchantress
+spell for spell. Upon whatever he had come in contact with, he had left
+a beautiful record of the experience--a sort of ethereal signature; a
+scent, a sound, a color that was his own.
+
+Steavens understood now the real tragedy of his master's life; neither
+love nor wine, as many had conjectured, but a blow which had fallen
+earlier and cut deeper than these could have done--a shame not his, and
+yet so unescapably his, to bide in his heart from his very boyhood. And
+without--the frontier warfare; the yearning of a boy, cast ashore upon a
+desert of newness and ugliness and sordidness, for all that is chastened
+and old, and noble with traditions.
+
+At eleven o'clock the tall, flat woman in black crepe entered, announced
+that the watchers were arriving, and asked them "to step into the dining
+room." As Steavens rose the lawyer said dryly: "You go on--it'll be a
+good experience for you, doubtless; as for me, I'm not equal to that
+crowd tonight; I've had twenty years of them."
+
+As Steavens closed the door after him be glanced back at the lawyer,
+sitting by the coffin in the dim light, with his chin resting on his
+hand.
+
+The same misty group that had stood before the door of the express car
+shuffled into the dining room. In the light of the kerosene lamp they
+separated and became individuals. The minister, a pale, feeble-looking
+man with white hair and blond chin-whiskers, took his seat beside a
+small side table and placed his Bible upon it. The Grand Army man sat
+down behind the stove and tilted his chair back comfortably against the
+wall, fishing his quill toothpick from his waistcoat pocket. The two
+bankers, Phelps and Elder, sat off in a corner behind the dinner table,
+where they could finish their discussion of the new usury law and its
+effect on chattel security loans. The real estate agent, an old man
+with a smiling, hypocritical face, soon joined them. The coal-and-lumber
+dealer and the cattle shipper sat on opposite sides of the hard
+coal-burner, their feet on the nickelwork. Steavens took a book from
+his pocket and began to read. The talk around him ranged through various
+topics of local interest while the house was quieting down. When it
+was clear that the members of the family were in bed the Grand Army man
+hitched his shoulders and, untangling his long legs, caught his heels on
+the rounds of his chair.
+
+"S'pose there'll be a will, Phelps?" he queried in his weak falsetto.
+
+The banker laughed disagreeably and began trimming his nails with a
+pearl-handled pocketknife.
+
+"There'll scarcely be any need for one, will there?" he queried in his
+turn.
+
+The restless Grand Army man shifted his position again, getting his
+knees still nearer his chin. "Why, the ole man says Harve's done right
+well lately," he chirped.
+
+The other banker spoke up. "I reckon he means by that Harve ain't asked
+him to mortgage any more farms lately, so as he could go on with his
+education."
+
+"Seems like my mind don't reach back to a time when Harve wasn't bein'
+edycated," tittered the Grand Army man.
+
+There was a general chuckle. The minister took out his handkerchief and
+blew his nose sonorously. Banker Phelps closed his knife with a snap.
+"It's too bad the old man's sons didn't turn out better," he remarked
+with reflective authority. "They never hung together. He spent money
+enough on Harve to stock a dozen cattle farms and he might as well have
+poured it into Sand Creek. If Harve had stayed at home and helped nurse
+what little they had, and gone into stock on the old man's bottom
+farm, they might all have been well fixed. But the old man had to trust
+everything to tenants and was cheated right and left."
+
+"Harve never could have handled stock none," interposed the cattleman.
+"He hadn't it in him to be sharp. Do you remember when he bought
+Sander's mules for eight-year-olds, when everybody in town knew that
+Sander's father-in-law give 'em to his wife for a wedding present
+eighteen years before, an' they was full-grown mules then."
+
+Everyone chuckled, and the Grand Army man rubbed his knees with a spasm
+of childish delight.
+
+"Harve never was much account for anything practical, and he shore was
+never fond of work," began the coal-and-lumber dealer. "I mind the last
+time he was home; the day he left, when the old man was out to the barn
+helpin' his hand hitch up to take Harve to the train, and Cal Moots was
+patchin' up the fence, Harve, he come out on the step and sings out, in
+his ladylike voice: 'Cal Moots, Cal Moots! please come cord my trunk.'"
+
+"That's Harve for you," approved the Grand Army man gleefully. "I kin
+hear him howlin' yet when he was a big feller in long pants and his
+mother used to whale him with a rawhide in the barn for lettin' the
+cows git foundered in the cornfield when he was drivin' 'em home from
+pasture. He killed a cow of mine that-a-way onc't--a pure Jersey and the
+best milker I had, an' the ole man had to put up for her. Harve, he was
+watchin' the sun set acros't the marshes when the anamile got away; he
+argued that sunset was oncommon fine."
+
+"Where the old man made his mistake was in sending the boy East to
+school," said Phelps, stroking his goatee and speaking in a deliberate,
+judicial tone. "There was where he got his head full of traipsing to
+Paris and all such folly. What Harve needed, of all people, was a course
+in some first-class Kansas City business college."
+
+The letters were swimming before Steavens's eyes. Was it possible that
+these men did not understand, that the palm on the coffin meant nothing
+to them? The very name of their town would have remained forever buried
+in the postal guide had it not been now and again mentioned in the world
+in connection with Harvey Merrick's. He remembered what his master had
+said to him on the day of his death, after the congestion of both lungs
+had shut off any probability of recovery, and the sculptor had asked
+his pupil to send his body home. "It's not a pleasant place to be lying
+while the world is moving and doing and bettering," he had said with a
+feeble smile, "but it rather seems as though we ought to go back to the
+place we came from in the end. The townspeople will come in for a look
+at me; and after they have had their say I shan't have much to fear from
+the judgment of God. The wings of the Victory, in there"--with a weak
+gesture toward his studio--"will not shelter me."
+
+The cattleman took up the comment. "Forty's young for a Merrick to cash
+in; they usually hang on pretty well. Probably he helped it along with
+whisky."
+
+"His mother's people were not long-lived, and Harvey never had a robust
+constitution," said the minister mildly. He would have liked to say
+more. He had been the boy's Sunday-school teacher, and had been fond of
+him; but he felt that he was not in a position to speak. His own sons
+had turned out badly, and it was not a year since one of them had made
+his last trip home in the express car, shot in a gambling house in the
+Black Hills.
+
+"Nevertheless, there is no disputin' that Harve frequently looked upon
+the wine when it was red, also variegated, and it shore made an oncommon
+fool of him," moralized the cattleman.
+
+Just then the door leading into the parlor rattled loudly, and everyone
+started involuntarily, looking relieved when only Jim Laird came out.
+His red face was convulsed with anger, and the Grand Army man ducked
+his head when he saw the spark in his blue, bloodshot eye. They were all
+afraid of Jim; he was a drunkard, but he could twist the law to suit his
+client's needs as no other man in all western Kansas could do; and
+there were many who tried. The lawyer closed the door gently behind him,
+leaned back against it and folded his arms, cocking his head a little
+to one side. When he assumed this attitude in the courtroom, ears were
+always pricked up, as it usually foretold a flood of withering sarcasm.
+
+"I've been with you gentlemen before," he began in a dry, even tone,
+"when you've sat by the coffins of boys born and raised in this town;
+and, if I remember rightly, you were never any too well satisfied when
+you checked them up. What's the matter, anyhow? Why is it that reputable
+young men are as scarce as millionaires in Sand City? It might almost
+seem to a stranger that there was some way something the matter with
+your progressive town. Why did Ruben Sayer, the brightest young lawyer
+you ever turned out, after he had come home from the university as
+straight as a die, take to drinking and forge a check and shoot himself?
+Why did Bill Merrit's son die of the shakes in a saloon in Omaha? Why
+was Mr. Thomas's son, here, shot in a gambling house? Why did young
+Adams burn his mill to beat the insurance companies and go to the pen?"
+
+The lawyer paused and unfolded his arms, laying one clenched fist
+quietly on the table. "I'll tell you why. Because you drummed
+nothing but money and knavery into their ears from the time they wore
+knickerbockers; because you carped away at them as you've been carping
+here tonight, holding our friends Phelps and Elder up to them for their
+models, as our grandfathers held up George Washington and John Adams.
+But the boys, worse luck, were young and raw at the business you put
+them to; and how could they match coppers with such artists as Phelps
+and Elder? You wanted them to be successful rascals; they were only
+unsuccessful ones--that's all the difference. There was only one boy
+ever raised in this borderland between ruffianism and civilization who
+didn't come to grief, and you hated Harvey Merrick more for winning out
+than you hated all the other boys who got under the wheels. Lord, Lord,
+how you did hate him! Phelps, here, is fond of saying that he could buy
+and sell us all out any time he's a mind to; but he knew Harve wouldn't
+have given a tinker's damn for his bank and all his cattle farms put
+together; and a lack of appreciation, that way, goes hard with Phelps.
+
+"Old Nimrod, here, thinks Harve drank too much; and this from such as
+Nimrod and me!"
+
+"Brother Elder says Harve was too free with the old man's money--fell
+short in filial consideration, maybe. Well, we can all remember the
+very tone in which brother Elder swore his own father was a liar, in
+the county court; and we all know that the old man came out of that
+partnership with his son as bare as a sheared lamb. But maybe I'm
+getting personal, and I'd better be driving ahead at what I want to
+say."
+
+The lawyer paused a moment, squared his heavy shoulders, and went on:
+"Harvey Merrick and I went to school together, back East. We were dead
+in earnest, and we wanted you all to be proud of us some day. We
+meant to be great men. Even I, and I haven't lost my sense of humor,
+gentlemen, I meant to be a great man. I came back here to practice, and
+I found you didn't in the least want me to be a great man. You wanted me
+to be a shrewd lawyer--oh, yes! Our veteran here wanted me to get him
+an increase of pension, because he had dyspepsia; Phelps wanted a new
+county survey that would put the widow Wilson's little bottom farm
+inside his south line; Elder wanted to lend money at 5 per cent a month
+and get it collected; old Stark here wanted to wheedle old women up in
+Vermont into investing their annuities in real estate mortgages that are
+not worth the paper they are written on. Oh, you needed me hard enough,
+and you'll go on needing me; and that's why I'm not afraid to plug the
+truth home to you this once.
+
+"Well, I came back here and became the damned shyster you wanted me
+to be. You pretend to have some sort of respect for me; and yet you'll
+stand up and throw mud at Harvey Merrick, whose soul you couldn't dirty
+and whose hands you couldn't tie. Oh, you're a discriminating lot of
+Christians! There have been times when the sight of Harvey's name in
+some Eastern paper has made me hang my head like a whipped dog; and,
+again, times when I liked to think of him off there in the world, away
+from all this hog wallow, doing his great work and climbing the big,
+clean upgrade he'd set for himself.
+
+"And we? Now that we've fought and lied and sweated and stolen, and
+hated as only the disappointed strugglers in a bitter, dead little
+Western town know how to do, what have we got to show for it? Harvey
+Merrick wouldn't have given one sunset over your marshes for all you've
+got put together, and you know it. It's not for me to say why, in the
+inscrutable wisdom of God, a genius should ever have been called from
+this place of hatred and bitter waters; but I want this Boston man to
+know that the drivel he's been hearing here tonight is the only
+tribute any truly great man could ever have from such a lot of sick,
+side-tracked, burnt-dog, land-poor sharks as the here-present financiers
+of Sand City--upon which town may God have mercy!"
+
+The lawyer thrust out his hand to Steavens as he passed him, caught up
+his overcoat in the hall, and had left the house before the Grand Army
+man had had time to lift his ducked head and crane his long neck about
+at his fellows.
+
+
+Next day Jim Laird was drunk and unable to attend the funeral services.
+Steavens called twice at his office, but was compelled to start East
+without seeing him. He had a presentiment that he would hear from him
+again, and left his address on the lawyer's table; but if Laird found
+it, he never acknowledged it. The thing in him that Harvey Merrick had
+loved must have gone underground with Harvey Merrick's coffin; for it
+never spoke again, and Jim got the cold he died of driving across the
+Colorado mountains to defend one of Phelps's sons, who had got into
+trouble out there by cutting government timber.
+
+
+
+
+
+"A Death in the Desert"
+
+Everett Hilgarde was conscious that the man in the seat across the
+aisle was looking at him intently. He was a large, florid man, wore a
+conspicuous diamond solitaire upon his third finger, and Everett judged
+him to be a traveling salesman of some sort. He had the air of an
+adaptable fellow who had been about the world and who could keep cool
+and clean under almost any circumstances.
+
+The "High Line Flyer," as this train was derisively called among
+railroad men, was jerking along through the hot afternoon over the
+monotonous country between Holdridge and Cheyenne. Besides the blond
+man and himself the only occupants of the car were two dusty,
+bedraggled-looking girls who had been to the Exposition at Chicago,
+and who were earnestly discussing the cost of their first trip out of
+Colorado. The four uncomfortable passengers were covered with a sediment
+of fine, yellow dust which clung to their hair and eyebrows like gold
+powder. It blew up in clouds from the bleak, lifeless country through
+which they passed, until they were one color with the sagebrush and
+sandhills. The gray-and-yellow desert was varied only by occasional
+ruins of deserted towns, and the little red boxes of station houses,
+where the spindling trees and sickly vines in the bluegrass yards made
+little green reserves fenced off in that confusing wilderness of sand.
+
+As the slanting rays of the sun beat in stronger and stronger through
+the car windows, the blond gentleman asked the ladies' permission to
+remove his coat, and sat in his lavender striped shirt sleeves, with a
+black silk handkerchief tucked carefully about his collar. He had seemed
+interested in Everett since they had boarded the train at Holdridge, and
+kept glancing at him curiously and then looking reflectively out of
+the window, as though he were trying to recall something. But wherever
+Everett went someone was almost sure to look at him with that curious
+interest, and it had ceased to embarrass or annoy him. Presently the
+stranger, seeming satisfied with his observation, leaned back in his
+seat, half-closed his eyes, and began softly to whistle the "Spring
+Song" from _Proserpine_, the cantata that a dozen years before had made
+its young composer famous in a night. Everett had heard that air on
+guitars in Old Mexico, on mandolins at college glees, on cottage organs
+in New England hamlets, and only two weeks ago he had heard it played on
+sleighbells at a variety theater in Denver. There was literally no way
+of escaping his brother's precocity. Adriance could live on the other
+side of the Atlantic, where his youthful indiscretions were forgotten in
+his mature achievements, but his brother had never been able to outrun
+_Proserpine_, and here he found it again in the Colorado sand hills. Not
+that Everett was exactly ashamed of _Proserpine_; only a man of genius
+could have written it, but it was the sort of thing that a man of genius
+outgrows as soon as he can.
+
+Everett unbent a trifle and smiled at his neighbor across the aisle.
+Immediately the large man rose and, coming over, dropped into the seat
+facing Hilgarde, extending his card.
+
+"Dusty ride, isn't it? I don't mind it myself; I'm used to it. Born and
+bred in de briar patch, like Br'er Rabbit. I've been trying to place you
+for a long time; I think I must have met you before."
+
+"Thank you," said Everett, taking the card; "my name is Hilgarde. You've
+probably met my brother, Adriance; people often mistake me for him."
+
+The traveling man brought his hand down upon his knee with such
+vehemence that the solitaire blazed.
+
+"So I was right after all, and if you're not Adriance Hilgarde, you're
+his double. I thought I couldn't be mistaken. Seen him? Well, I guess!
+I never missed one of his recitals at the Auditorium, and he played
+the piano score of _Proserpine_ through to us once at the Chicago Press
+Club. I used to be on the _Commercial_ there before I began
+to travel for the publishing department of the concern. So you're
+Hilgarde's brother, and here I've run into you at the jumping-off place.
+Sounds like a newspaper yarn, doesn't it?"
+
+The traveling man laughed and offered Everett a cigar, and plied him
+with questions on the only subject that people ever seemed to care to
+talk to Everett about. At length the salesman and the two girls alighted
+at a Colorado way station, and Everett went on to Cheyenne alone.
+
+The train pulled into Cheyenne at nine o'clock, late by a matter of four
+hours or so; but no one seemed particularly concerned at its tardiness
+except the station agent, who grumbled at being kept in the office
+overtime on a summer night. When Everett alighted from the train he
+walked down the platform and stopped at the track crossing, uncertain as
+to what direction he should take to reach a hotel. A phaeton stood near
+the crossing, and a woman held the reins. She was dressed in white, and
+her figure was clearly silhouetted against the cushions, though it was
+too dark to see her face. Everett had scarcely noticed her, when the
+switch engine came puffing up from the opposite direction, and the
+headlight threw a strong glare of light on his face. Suddenly the woman
+in the phaeton uttered a low cry and dropped the reins. Everett started
+forward and caught the horse's head, but the animal only lifted its
+ears and whisked its tail in impatient surprise. The woman sat perfectly
+still, her head sunk between her shoulders and her handkerchief pressed
+to her face. Another woman came out of the depot and hurried toward the
+phaeton, crying, "Katharine, dear, what is the matter?"
+
+Everett hesitated a moment in painful embarrassment, then lifted his
+hat and passed on. He was accustomed to sudden recognitions in the most
+impossible places, especially by women, but this cry out of the night
+had shaken him.
+
+While Everett was breakfasting the next morning, the headwaiter leaned
+over his chair to murmur that there was a gentleman waiting to see him
+in the parlor. Everett finished his coffee and went in the direction
+indicated, where he found his visitor restlessly pacing the floor. His
+whole manner betrayed a high degree of agitation, though his physique
+was not that of a man whose nerves lie near the surface. He was
+something below medium height, square-shouldered and solidly built. His
+thick, closely cut hair was beginning to show gray about the ears, and
+his bronzed face was heavily lined. His square brown hands were
+locked behind him, and he held his shoulders like a man conscious of
+responsibilities; yet, as he turned to greet Everett, there was an
+incongruous diffidence in his address.
+
+"Good morning, Mr. Hilgarde," he said, extending his hand; "I found your
+name on the hotel register. My name is Gaylord. I'm afraid my sister
+startled you at the station last night, Mr. Hilgarde, and I've come
+around to apologize."
+
+"Ah! The young lady in the phaeton? I'm sure I didn't know whether I
+had anything to do with her alarm or not. If I did, it is I who owe the
+apology."
+
+The man colored a little under the dark brown of his face.
+
+"Oh, it's nothing you could help, sir, I fully understand that. You see,
+my sister used to be a pupil of your brother's, and it seems you favor
+him; and when the switch engine threw a light on your face it startled
+her."
+
+Everett wheeled about in his chair. "Oh! _Katharine_ Gaylord! Is it
+possible! Now it's you who have given me a turn. Why, I used to know her
+when I was a boy. What on earth--"
+
+"Is she doing here?" said Gaylord, grimly filling out the pause. "You've
+got at the heart of the matter. You knew my sister had been in bad
+health for a long time?"
+
+"No, I had never heard a word of that. The last I knew of her she was
+singing in London. My brother and I correspond infrequently and seldom
+get beyond family matters. I am deeply sorry to hear this. There are
+more reasons why I am concerned than I can tell you."
+
+The lines in Charley Gaylord's brow relaxed a little.
+
+"What I'm trying to say, Mr. Hilgarde, is that she wants to see you. I
+hate to ask you, but she's so set on it. We live several miles out of
+town, but my rig's below, and I can take you out anytime you can go."
+
+"I can go now, and it will give me real pleasure to do so," said
+Everett, quickly. "I'll get my hat and be with you in a moment."
+
+When he came downstairs Everett found a cart at the door, and Charley
+Gaylord drew a long sigh of relief as he gathered up the reins and
+settled back into his own element.
+
+"You see, I think I'd better tell you something about my sister before
+you see her, and I don't know just where to begin. She traveled
+in Europe with your brother and his wife, and sang at a lot of his
+concerts; but I don't know just how much you know about her."
+
+"Very little, except that my brother always thought her the most gifted
+of his pupils, and that when I knew her she was very young and very
+beautiful and turned my head sadly for a while."
+
+Everett saw that Gaylord's mind was quite engrossed by his grief. He was
+wrought up to the point where his reserve and sense of proportion had
+quite left him, and his trouble was the one vital thing in the world.
+"That's the whole thing," he went on, flicking his horses with the whip.
+
+"She was a great woman, as you say, and she didn't come of a great
+family. She had to fight her own way from the first. She got to Chicago,
+and then to New York, and then to Europe, where she went up like
+lightning, and got a taste for it all; and now she's dying here like a
+rat in a hole, out of her own world, and she can't fall back into ours.
+We've grown apart, some way--miles and miles apart--and I'm afraid she's
+fearfully unhappy."
+
+"It's a very tragic story that you are telling me, Gaylord," said
+Everett. They were well out into the country now, spinning along over
+the dusty plains of red grass, with the ragged-blue outline of the
+mountains before them.
+
+"Tragic!" cried Gaylord, starting up in his seat, "my God, man, nobody
+will ever know how tragic. It's a tragedy I live with and eat with and
+sleep with, until I've lost my grip on everything. You see she had made
+a good bit of money, but she spent it all going to health resorts. It's
+her lungs, you know. I've got money enough to send her anywhere, but the
+doctors all say it's no use. She hasn't the ghost of a chance. It's just
+getting through the days now. I had no notion she was half so bad before
+she came to me. She just wrote that she was all run down. Now that she's
+here, I think she'd be happier anywhere under the sun, but she won't
+leave. She says it's easier to let go of life here, and that to go East
+would be dying twice. There was a time when I was a brakeman with a run
+out of Bird City, Iowa, and she was a little thing I could carry on my
+shoulder, when I could get her everything on earth she wanted, and she
+hadn't a wish my $80 a month didn't cover; and now, when I've got a
+little property together, I can't buy her a night's sleep!"
+
+Everett saw that, whatever Charley Gaylord's present status in the world
+might be, he had brought the brakeman's heart up the ladder with him,
+and the brakeman's frank avowal of sentiment. Presently Gaylord went on:
+
+"You can understand how she has outgrown her family. We're all a pretty
+common sort, railroaders from away back. My father was a conductor. He
+died when we were kids. Maggie, my other sister, who lives with me, was
+a telegraph operator here while I was getting my grip on things. We had
+no education to speak of. I have to hire a stenographer because I can't
+spell straight--the Almighty couldn't teach me to spell. The things that
+make up life to Kate are all Greek to me, and there's scarcely a point
+where we touch any more, except in our recollections of the old times
+when we were all young and happy together, and Kate sang in a church
+choir in Bird City. But I believe, Mr. Hilgarde, that if she can see
+just one person like you, who knows about the things and people she's
+interested in, it will give her about the only comfort she can have
+now."
+
+The reins slackened in Charley Gaylord's hand as they drew up before a
+showily painted house with many gables and a round tower. "Here we are,"
+he said, turning to Everett, "and I guess we understand each other."
+
+They were met at the door by a thin, colorless woman, whom Gaylord
+introduced as "my sister, Maggie." She asked her brother to show Mr.
+Hilgarde into the music room, where Katharine wished to see him alone.
+
+When Everett entered the music room he gave a little start of surprise,
+feeling that he had stepped from the glaring Wyoming sunlight into some
+New York studio that he had always known. He wondered which it was of
+those countless studios, high up under the roofs, over banks and
+shops and wholesale houses, that this room resembled, and he looked
+incredulously out of the window at the gray plain that ended in the
+great upheaval of the Rockies.
+
+The haunting air of familiarity about the room perplexed him. Was it
+a copy of some particular studio he knew, or was it merely the studio
+atmosphere that seemed so individual and poignantly reminiscent here
+in Wyoming? He sat down in a reading chair and looked keenly about him.
+Suddenly his eye fell upon a large photograph of his brother above the
+piano. Then it all became clear to him: this was veritably his brother's
+room. If it were not an exact copy of one of the many studios that
+Adriance had fitted up in various parts of the world, wearying of them
+and leaving almost before the renovator's varnish had dried, it was at
+least in the same tone. In every detail Adriance's taste was so manifest
+that the room seemed to exhale his personality.
+
+Among the photographs on the wall there was one of Katharine Gaylord,
+taken in the days when Everett had known her, and when the flash of her
+eye or the flutter of her skirt was enough to set his boyish heart in a
+tumult. Even now, he stood before the portrait with a certain degree
+of embarrassment. It was the face of a woman already old in her first
+youth, thoroughly sophisticated and a trifle hard, and it told of
+what her brother had called her fight. The camaraderie of her frank,
+confident eyes was qualified by the deep lines about her mouth and the
+curve of the lips, which was both sad and cynical. Certainly she had
+more good will than confidence toward the world, and the bravado of
+her smile could not conceal the shadow of an unrest that was almost
+discontent. The chief charm of the woman, as Everett had known her, lay
+in her superb figure and in her eyes, which possessed a warm, lifegiving
+quality like the sunlight; eyes which glowed with a sort of perpetual
+_salutat_ to the world. Her head, Everett remembered as peculiarly
+well-shaped and proudly poised. There had been always a little of the
+imperatrix about her, and her pose in the photograph revived all his old
+impressions of her unattachedness, of how absolutely and valiantly she
+stood alone.
+
+Everett was still standing before the picture, his hands behind him
+and his head inclined, when he heard the door open. A very tall woman
+advanced toward him, holding out her hand. As she started to speak, she
+coughed slightly; then, laughing, said, in a low, rich voice, a trifle
+husky: "You see I make the traditional Camille entrance--with the cough.
+How good of you to come, Mr. Hilgarde."
+
+Everett was acutely conscious that while addressing him she was not
+looking at him at all, and, as he assured her of his pleasure in coming,
+he was glad to have an opportunity to collect himself. He had not
+reckoned upon the ravages of a long illness. The long, loose folds
+of her white gown had been especially designed to conceal the sharp
+outlines of her emaciated body, but the stamp of her disease was
+there; simple and ugly and obtrusive, a pitiless fact that could not be
+disguised or evaded. The splendid shoulders were stooped, there was a
+swaying unevenness in her gait, her arms seemed disproportionately
+long, and her hands were transparently white and cold to the touch. The
+changes in her face were less obvious; the proud carriage of the head,
+the warm, clear eyes, even the delicate flush of color in her cheeks,
+all defiantly remained, though they were all in a lower key--older,
+sadder, softer.
+
+She sat down upon the divan and began nervously to arrange the pillows.
+"I know I'm not an inspiring object to look upon, but you must be quite
+frank and sensible about that and get used to it at once, for we've no
+time to lose. And if I'm a trifle irritable you won't mind?--for I'm
+more than usually nervous."
+
+"Don't bother with me this morning, if you are tired," urged Everett. "I
+can come quite as well tomorrow."
+
+"Gracious, no!" she protested, with a flash of that quick, keen humor
+that he remembered as a part of her. "It's solitude that I'm tired to
+death of--solitude and the wrong kind of people. You see, the minister,
+not content with reading the prayers for the sick, called on me this
+morning. He happened to be riding by on his bicycle and felt it his
+duty to stop. Of course, he disapproves of my profession, and I think
+he takes it for granted that I have a dark past. The funniest feature
+of his conversation is that he is always excusing my own vocation to
+me--condoning it, you know--and trying to patch up my peace with my
+conscience by suggesting possible noble uses for what he kindly calls my
+talent."
+
+Everett laughed. "Oh! I'm afraid I'm not the person to call after such
+a serious gentleman--I can't sustain the situation. At my best I don't
+reach higher than low comedy. Have you decided to which one of the noble
+uses you will devote yourself?"
+
+Katharine lifted her hands in a gesture of renunciation and exclaimed:
+"I'm not equal to any of them, not even the least noble. I didn't study
+that method."
+
+She laughed and went on nervously: "The parson's not so bad. His English
+never offends me, and he has read Gibbon's _Decline and Fall_, all five
+volumes, and that's something. Then, he has been to New York, and that's
+a great deal. But how we are losing time! Do tell me about New York;
+Charley says you're just on from there. How does it look and taste and
+smell just now? I think a whiff of the Jersey ferry would be as flagons
+of cod-liver oil to me. Who conspicuously walks the Rialto now, and what
+does he or she wear? Are the trees still green in Madison Square, or
+have they grown brown and dusty? Does the chaste Diana on the Garden
+Theatre still keep her vestal vows through all the exasperating changes
+of weather? Who has your brother's old studio now, and what misguided
+aspirants practice their scales in the rookeries about Carnegie Hall?
+What do people go to see at the theaters, and what do they eat and drink
+there in the world nowadays? You see, I'm homesick for it all, from the
+Battery to Riverside. Oh, let me die in Harlem!" She was interrupted
+by a violent attack of coughing, and Everett, embarrassed by her
+discomfort, plunged into gossip about the professional people he had met
+in town during the summer and the musical outlook for the winter. He was
+diagraming with his pencil, on the back of an old envelope he found in
+his pocket, some new mechanical device to be used at the Metropolitan in
+the production of the _Rheingold_, when he became conscious that she was
+looking at him intently, and that he was talking to the four walls.
+
+Katharine was lying back among the pillows, watching him through
+half-closed eyes, as a painter looks at a picture. He finished his
+explanation vaguely enough and put the envelope back in his pocket. As
+he did so she said, quietly: "How wonderfully like Adriance you are!"
+and he felt as though a crisis of some sort had been met and tided over.
+
+He laughed, looking up at her with a touch of pride in his eyes that
+made them seem quite boyish. "Yes, isn't it absurd? It's almost as
+awkward as looking like Napoleon--but, after all, there are some
+advantages. It has made some of his friends like me, and I hope it will
+make you."
+
+Katharine smiled and gave him a quick, meaning glance from under her
+lashes. "Oh, it did that long ago. What a haughty, reserved youth you
+were then, and how you used to stare at people and then blush and look
+cross if they paid you back in your own coin. Do you remember that night
+when you took me home from a rehearsal and scarcely spoke a word to me?"
+
+"It was the silence of admiration," protested Everett, "very crude and
+boyish, but very sincere and not a little painful. Perhaps you suspected
+something of the sort? I remember you saw fit to be very grown-up and
+worldly.
+
+"I believe I suspected a pose; the one that college boys usually affect
+with singers--'an earthen vessel in love with a star,' you know. But it
+rather surprised me in you, for you must have seen a good deal of your
+brother's pupils. Or had you an omnivorous capacity, and elasticity that
+always met the occasion?"
+
+"Don't ask a man to confess the follies of his youth," said Everett,
+smiling a little sadly; "I am sensitive about some of them even now. But
+I was not so sophisticated as you imagined. I saw my brother's pupils
+come and go, but that was about all. Sometimes I was called on to play
+accompaniments, or to fill out a vacancy at a rehearsal, or to order a
+carriage for an infuriated soprano who had thrown up her part. But they
+never spent any time on me, unless it was to notice the resemblance you
+speak of."
+
+"Yes", observed Katharine, thoughtfully, "I noticed it then, too; but it
+has grown as you have grown older. That is rather strange, when you have
+lived such different lives. It's not merely an ordinary family likeness
+of feature, you know, but a sort of interchangeable individuality;
+the suggestion of the other man's personality in your face like an air
+transposed to another key. But I'm not attempting to define it; it's
+beyond me; something altogether unusual and a trifle--well, uncanny,"
+she finished, laughing.
+
+"I remember," Everett said seriously, twirling the pencil between his
+fingers and looking, as he sat with his head thrown back, out under the
+red window blind which was raised just a little, and as it swung back
+and forth in the wind revealed the glaring panorama of the desert--a
+blinding stretch of yellow, flat as the sea in dead calm, splotched here
+and there with deep purple shadows; and, beyond, the ragged-blue outline
+of the mountains and the peaks of snow, white as the white clouds--"I
+remember, when I was a little fellow I used to be very sensitive about
+it. I don't think it exactly displeased me, or that I would have had it
+otherwise if I could, but it seemed to me like a birthmark, or something
+not to be lightly spoken of. People were naturally always fonder of
+Ad than of me, and I used to feel the chill of reflected light pretty
+often. It came into even my relations with my mother. Ad went abroad to
+study when he was absurdly young, you know, and mother was all broken
+up over it. She did her whole duty by each of us, but it was sort of
+generally understood among us that she'd have made burnt offerings of us
+all for Ad any day. I was a little fellow then, and when she sat alone
+on the porch in the summer dusk she used sometimes to call me to her and
+turn my face up in the light that streamed out through the shutters and
+kiss me, and then I always knew she was thinking of Adriance."
+
+"Poor little chap," said Katharine, and her tone was a trifle huskier
+than usual. "How fond people have always been of Adriance! Now tell me
+the latest news of him. I haven't heard, except through the press, for
+a year or more. He was in Algeria then, in the valley of the Chelif,
+riding horseback night and day in an Arabian costume, and in his
+usual enthusiastic fashion he had quite made up his mind to adopt the
+Mohammedan faith and become as nearly an Arab as possible. How many
+countries and faiths has he adopted, I wonder? Probably he was playing
+Arab to himself all the time. I remember he was a sixteenth-century duke
+in Florence once for weeks together."
+
+"Oh, that's Adriance," chuckled Everett. "He is himself barely long
+enough to write checks and be measured for his clothes. I didn't hear
+from him while he was an Arab; I missed that."
+
+"He was writing an Algerian suite for the piano then; it must be in
+the publisher's hands by this time. I have been too ill to answer his
+letter, and have lost touch with him."
+
+Everett drew a letter from his pocket. "This came about a month ago.
+It's chiefly about his new opera, which is to be brought out in London
+next winter. Read it at your leisure."
+
+"I think I shall keep it as a hostage, so that I may be sure you will
+come again. Now I want you to play for me. Whatever you like; but if
+there is anything new in the world, in mercy let me hear it. For nine
+months I have heard nothing but 'The Baggage Coach Ahead' and 'She Is My
+Baby's Mother.'"
+
+He sat down at the piano, and Katharine sat near him, absorbed in his
+remarkable physical likeness to his brother and trying to discover in
+just what it consisted. She told herself that it was very much as though
+a sculptor's finished work had been rudely copied in wood. He was of
+a larger build than Adriance, and his shoulders were broad and heavy,
+while those of his brother were slender and rather girlish. His face was
+of the same oval mold, but it was gray and darkened about the mouth by
+continual shaving. His eyes were of the same inconstant April color,
+but they were reflective and rather dull; while Adriance's were always
+points of highlight, and always meaning another thing than the thing
+they meant yesterday. But it was hard to see why this earnest man should
+so continually suggest that lyric, youthful face that was as gay as his
+was grave. For Adriance, though he was ten years the elder, and though
+his hair was streaked with silver, had the face of a boy of twenty, so
+mobile that it told his thoughts before he could put them into words. A
+contralto, famous for the extravagance of her vocal methods and of her
+affections, had once said to him that the shepherd boys who sang in the
+Vale of Tempe must certainly have looked like young Hilgarde; and the
+comparison had been appropriated by a hundred shyer women who preferred
+to quote.
+
+
+As Everett sat smoking on the veranda of the Inter-Ocean House that
+night, he was a victim to random recollections. His infatuation for
+Katharine Gaylord, visionary as it was, had been the most serious of his
+boyish love affairs, and had long disturbed his bachelor dreams. He was
+painfully timid in everything relating to the emotions, and his hurt
+had withdrawn him from the society of women. The fact that it was all so
+done and dead and far behind him, and that the woman had lived her
+life out since then, gave him an oppressive sense of age and loss. He
+bethought himself of something he had read about "sitting by the hearth
+and remembering the faces of women without desire," and felt himself an
+octogenarian.
+
+He remembered how bitter and morose he had grown during his stay at his
+brother's studio when Katharine Gaylord was working there, and how he
+had wounded Adriance on the night of his last concert in New York. He
+had sat there in the box while his brother and Katharine were called
+back again and again after the last number, watching the roses go up
+over the footlights until they were stacked half as high as the piano,
+brooding, in his sullen boy's heart, upon the pride those two felt in
+each other's work--spurring each other to their best and beautifully
+contending in song. The footlights had seemed a hard, glittering line
+drawn sharply between their life and his; a circle of flame set about
+those splendid children of genius. He walked back to his hotel alone
+and sat in his window staring out on Madison Square until long after
+midnight, resolving to beat no more at doors that he could never enter
+and realizing more keenly than ever before how far this glorious world
+of beautiful creations lay from the paths of men like himself. He told
+himself that he had in common with this woman only the baser uses of
+life.
+
+Everett's week in Cheyenne stretched to three, and he saw no prospect of
+release except through the thing he dreaded. The bright, windy days of
+the Wyoming autumn passed swiftly. Letters and telegrams came urging
+him to hasten his trip to the coast, but he resolutely postponed his
+business engagements. The mornings he spent on one of Charley Gaylord's
+ponies, or fishing in the mountains, and in the evenings he sat in his
+room writing letters or reading. In the afternoon he was usually at his
+post of duty. Destiny, he reflected, seems to have very positive notions
+about the sort of parts we are fitted to play. The scene changes and the
+compensation varies, but in the end we usually find that we have played
+the same class of business from first to last. Everett had been a
+stopgap all his life. He remembered going through a looking glass
+labyrinth when he was a boy and trying gallery after gallery, only at
+every turn to bump his nose against his own face--which, indeed, was not
+his own, but his brother's. No matter what his mission, east or west,
+by land or sea, he was sure to find himself employed in his brother's
+business, one of the tributary lives which helped to swell the shining
+current of Adriance Hilgarde's. It was not the first time that his duty
+had been to comfort, as best he could, one of the broken things his
+brother's imperious speed had cast aside and forgotten. He made no
+attempt to analyze the situation or to state it in exact terms; but
+he felt Katharine Gaylord's need for him, and he accepted it as a
+commission from his brother to help this woman to die. Day by day he
+felt her demands on him grow more imperious, her need for him grow more
+acute and positive; and day by day he felt that in his peculiar relation
+to her his own individuality played a smaller and smaller part. His
+power to minister to her comfort, he saw, lay solely in his link with
+his brother's life. He understood all that his physical resemblance
+meant to her. He knew that she sat by him always watching for some
+common trick of gesture, some familiar play of expression, some illusion
+of light and shadow, in which he should seem wholly Adriance. He knew
+that she lived upon this and that her disease fed upon it; that it sent
+shudders of remembrance through her and that in the exhaustion which
+followed this turmoil of her dying senses, she slept deep and sweet and
+dreamed of youth and art and days in a certain old Florentine garden,
+and not of bitterness and death.
+
+The question which most perplexed him was, "How much shall I know? How
+much does she wish me to know?" A few days after his first meeting with
+Katharine Gaylord, he had cabled his brother to write her. He had merely
+said that she was mortally ill; he could depend on Adriance to say the
+right thing--that was a part of his gift. Adriance always said not
+only the right thing, but the opportune, graceful, exquisite thing. His
+phrases took the color of the moment and the then-present condition, so
+that they never savored of perfunctory compliment or frequent usage. He
+always caught the lyric essence of the moment, the poetic suggestion
+of every situation. Moreover, he usually did the right thing, the
+opportune, graceful, exquisite thing--except, when he did very cruel
+things--bent upon making people happy when their existence touched his,
+just as he insisted that his material environment should be beautiful;
+lavishing upon those near him all the warmth and radiance of his rich
+nature, all the homage of the poet and troubadour, and, when they were
+no longer near, forgetting--for that also was a part of Adriance's gift.
+
+Three weeks after Everett had sent his cable, when he made his daily
+call at the gaily painted ranch house, he found Katharine laughing like
+a schoolgirl. "Have you ever thought," she said, as he entered the
+music room, "how much these seances of ours are like Heine's 'Florentine
+Nights,' except that I don't give you an opportunity to monopolize the
+conversation as Heine did?" She held his hand longer than usual, as
+she greeted him, and looked searchingly up into his face. "You are the
+kindest man living; the kindest," she added, softly.
+
+Everett's gray face colored faintly as he drew his hand away, for
+he felt that this time she was looking at him and not at a whimsical
+caricature of his brother. "Why, what have I done now?" he asked,
+lamely. "I can't remember having sent you any stale candy or champagne
+since yesterday."
+
+She drew a letter with a foreign postmark from between the leaves of a
+book and held it out, smiling. "You got him to write it. Don't say you
+didn't, for it came direct, you see, and the last address I gave him was
+a place in Florida. This deed shall be remembered of you when I am with
+the just in Paradise. But one thing you did not ask him to do, for you
+didn't know about it. He has sent me his latest work, the new sonata,
+the most ambitious thing he has ever done, and you are to play it for me
+directly, though it looks horribly intricate. But first for the letter;
+I think you would better read it aloud to me."
+
+Everett sat down in a low chair facing the window seat in which she
+reclined with a barricade of pillows behind her. He opened the letter,
+his lashes half-veiling his kind eyes, and saw to his satisfaction that
+it was a long one--wonderfully tactful and tender, even for Adriance,
+who was tender with his valet and his stable boy, with his old gondolier
+and the beggar-women who prayed to the saints for him.
+
+The letter was from Granada, written in the Alhambra, as he sat by the
+fountain of the Patio di Lindaraxa. The air was heavy, with the warm
+fragrance of the South and full of the sound of splashing, running
+water, as it had been in a certain old garden in Florence, long ago.
+The sky was one great turquoise, heated until it glowed. The wonderful
+Moorish arches threw graceful blue shadows all about him. He had
+sketched an outline of them on the margin of his notepaper. The
+subtleties of Arabic decoration had cast an unholy spell over him,
+and the brutal exaggerations of Gothic art were a bad dream, easily
+forgotten. The Alhambra itself had, from the first, seemed perfectly
+familiar to him, and he knew that he must have trod that court,
+sleek and brown and obsequious, centuries before Ferdinand rode into
+Andalusia. The letter was full of confidences about his work, and
+delicate allusions to their old happy days of study and comradeship, and
+of her own work, still so warmly remembered and appreciatively discussed
+everywhere he went.
+
+As Everett folded the letter he felt that Adriance had divined the thing
+needed and had risen to it in his own wonderful way. The letter was
+consistently egotistical and seemed to him even a trifle patronizing,
+yet it was just what she had wanted. A strong realization of his
+brother's charm and intensity and power came over him; he felt the
+breath of that whirlwind of flame in which Adriance passed, consuming
+all in his path, and himself even more resolutely than he consumed
+others. Then he looked down at this white, burnt-out brand that lay
+before him. "Like him, isn't it?" she said, quietly.
+
+"I think I can scarcely answer his letter, but when you see him next you
+can do that for me. I want you to tell him many things for me, yet they
+can all be summed up in this: I want him to grow wholly into his best
+and greatest self, even at the cost of the dear boyishness that is half
+his charm to you and me. Do you understand me?"
+
+"I know perfectly well what you mean," answered Everett, thoughtfully.
+"I have often felt so about him myself. And yet it's difficult to
+prescribe for those fellows; so little makes, so little mars."
+
+Katharine raised herself upon her elbow, and her face flushed with
+feverish earnestness. "Ah, but it is the waste of himself that I mean;
+his lashing himself out on stupid and uncomprehending people until they
+take him at their own estimate. He can kindle marble, strike fire from
+putty, but is it worth what it costs him?"
+
+"Come, come," expostulated Everett, alarmed at her excitement. "Where is
+the new sonata? Let him speak for himself."
+
+He sat down at the piano and began playing the first movement, which was
+indeed the voice of Adriance, his proper speech. The sonata was the most
+ambitious work he had done up to that time and marked the transition
+from his purely lyric vein to a deeper and nobler style. Everett played
+intelligently and with that sympathetic comprehension which seems
+peculiar to a certain lovable class of men who never accomplish anything
+in particular. When he had finished he turned to Katharine.
+
+"How he has grown!" she cried. "What the three last years have done for
+him! He used to write only the tragedies of passion; but this is the
+tragedy of the soul, the shadow coexistent with the soul. This is the
+tragedy of effort and failure, the thing Keats called hell. This is my
+tragedy, as I lie here spent by the racecourse, listening to the feet of
+the runners as they pass me. Ah, God! The swift feet of the runners!"
+
+She turned her face away and covered it with her straining hands.
+Everett crossed over to her quickly and knelt beside her. In all
+the days he had known her she had never before, beyond an occasional
+ironical jest, given voice to the bitterness of her own defeat. Her
+courage had become a point of pride with him, and to see it going
+sickened him.
+
+"Don't do it," he gasped. "I can't stand it, I really can't, I feel it
+too much. We mustn't speak of that; it's too tragic and too vast."
+
+When she turned her face back to him there was a ghost of the old,
+brave, cynical smile on it, more bitter than the tears she could not
+shed. "No, I won't be so ungenerous; I will save that for the watches
+of the night when I have no better company. Now you may mix me another
+drink of some sort. Formerly, when it was not _if_ I should ever sing
+Brunnhilde, but quite simply when I _should_ sing Brunnhilde, I was
+always starving myself and thinking what I might drink and what I might
+not. But broken music boxes may drink whatsoever they list, and no
+one cares whether they lose their figure. Run over that theme at the
+beginning again. That, at least, is not new. It was running in his head
+when we were in Venice years ago, and he used to drum it on his glass at
+the dinner table. He had just begun to work it out when the late autumn
+came on, and the paleness of the Adriatic oppressed him, and he decided
+to go to Florence for the winter, and lost touch with the theme during
+his illness. Do you remember those frightful days? All the people who
+have loved him are not strong enough to save him from himself! When
+I got word from Florence that he had been ill I was in Nice filling
+a concert engagement. His wife was hurrying to him from Paris, but I
+reached him first. I arrived at dusk, in a terrific storm. They had
+taken an old palace there for the winter, and I found him in the
+library--a long, dark room full of old Latin books and heavy furniture
+and bronzes. He was sitting by a wood fire at one end of the room,
+looking, oh, so worn and pale!--as he always does when he is ill, you
+know. Ah, it is so good that you _do_ know! Even his red smoking jacket
+lent no color to his face. His first words were not to tell me how ill
+he had been, but that that morning he had been well enough to put the
+last strokes to the score of his _Souvenirs d'Automne_. He was as I
+most like to remember him: so calm and happy and tired; not gay, as he
+usually is, but just contented and tired with that heavenly tiredness
+that comes after a good work done at last. Outside, the rain poured
+down in torrents, and the wind moaned for the pain of all the world and
+sobbed in the branches of the shivering olives and about the walls of
+that desolated old palace. How that night comes back to me! There were
+no lights in the room, only the wood fire which glowed upon the hard
+features of the bronze Dante, like the reflection of purgatorial flames,
+and threw long black shadows about us; beyond us it scarcely penetrated
+the gloom at all, Adriance sat staring at the fire with the weariness
+of all his life in his eyes, and of all the other lives that must aspire
+and suffer to make up one such life as his. Somehow the wind with all
+its world-pain had got into the room, and the cold rain was in our eyes,
+and the wave came up in both of us at once--that awful, vague, universal
+pain, that cold fear of life and death and God and hope--and we were
+like two clinging together on a spar in midocean after the shipwreck of
+everything. Then we heard the front door open with a great gust of wind
+that shook even the walls, and the servants came running with lights,
+announcing that Madam had returned, _'and in the book we read no more
+that night.'_"
+
+She gave the old line with a certain bitter humor, and with the hard,
+bright smile in which of old she had wrapped her weakness as in a
+glittering garment. That ironical smile, worn like a mask through so
+many years, had gradually changed even the lines of her face completely,
+and when she looked in the mirror she saw not herself, but the scathing
+critic, the amused observer and satirist of herself. Everett dropped
+his head upon his hand and sat looking at the rug. "How much you have
+cared!" he said.
+
+"Ah, yes, I cared," she replied, closing her eyes with a long-drawn sigh
+of relief; and lying perfectly still, she went on: "You can't imagine
+what a comfort it is to have you know how I cared, what a relief it is
+to be able to tell it to someone. I used to want to shriek it out to the
+world in the long nights when I could not sleep. It seemed to me that I
+could not die with it. It demanded some sort of expression. And now that
+you know, you would scarcely believe how much less sharp the anguish of
+it is."
+
+Everett continued to look helplessly at the floor. "I was not sure how
+much you wanted me to know," he said.
+
+"Oh, I intended you should know from the first time I looked into your
+face, when you came that day with Charley. I flatter myself that I have
+been able to conceal it when I chose, though I suppose women always
+think that. The more observing ones may have seen, but discerning people
+are usually discreet and often kind, for we usually bleed a little
+before we begin to discern. But I wanted you to know; you are so like
+him that it is almost like telling him himself. At least, I feel now
+that he will know some day, and then I will be quite sacred from his
+compassion, for we none of us dare pity the dead. Since it was what my
+life has chiefly meant, I should like him to know. On the whole I am not
+ashamed of it. I have fought a good fight."
+
+"And has he never known at all?" asked Everett, in a thick voice.
+
+"Oh! Never at all in the way that you mean. Of course, he is accustomed
+to looking into the eyes of women and finding love there; when he
+doesn't find it there he thinks he must have been guilty of some
+discourtesy and is miserable about it. He has a genuine fondness for
+everyone who is not stupid or gloomy, or old or preternaturally ugly.
+Granted youth and cheerfulness, and a moderate amount of wit and some
+tact, and Adriance will always be glad to see you coming around the
+corner. I shared with the rest; shared the smiles and the gallantries
+and the droll little sermons. It was quite like a Sunday-school picnic;
+we wore our best clothes and a smile and took our turns. It was his
+kindness that was hardest. I have pretty well used my life up at
+standing punishment."
+
+"Don't; you'll make me hate him," groaned Everett.
+
+Katharine laughed and began to play nervously with her fan. "It wasn't
+in the slightest degree his fault; that is the most grotesque part of
+it. Why, it had really begun before I ever met him. I fought my way to
+him, and I drank my doom greedily enough."
+
+Everett rose and stood hesitating. "I think I must go. You ought to be
+quiet, and I don't think I can hear any more just now."
+
+She put out her hand and took his playfully. "You've put in three weeks
+at this sort of thing, haven't you? Well, it may never be to your glory
+in this world, perhaps, but it's been the mercy of heaven to me, and it
+ought to square accounts for a much worse life than yours will ever be."
+
+Everett knelt beside her, saying, brokenly: "I stayed because I wanted
+to be with you, that's all. I have never cared about other women since I
+met you in New York when I was a lad. You are a part of my destiny, and
+I could not leave you if I would."
+
+She put her hands on his shoulders and shook her head. "No, no; don't
+tell me that. I have seen enough of tragedy, God knows. Don't show me
+any more just as the curtain is going down. No, no, it was only a boy's
+fancy, and your divine pity and my utter pitiableness have recalled it
+for a moment. One does not love the dying, dear friend. If some fancy of
+that sort had been left over from boyhood, this would rid you of it,
+and that were well. Now go, and you will come again tomorrow, as long as
+there are tomorrows, will you not?" She took his hand with a smile that
+lifted the mask from her soul, that was both courage and despair, and
+full of infinite loyalty and tenderness, as she said softly:
+
+     For ever and for ever, farewell, Cassius;
+     If we do meet again, why, we shall smile;
+     If not, why then, this parting was well made.
+
+The courage in her eyes was like the clear light of a star to him as he
+went out.
+
+On the night of Adriance Hilgarde's opening concert in Paris Everett sat
+by the bed in the ranch house in Wyoming, watching over the last battle
+that we have with the flesh before we are done with it and free of it
+forever. At times it seemed that the serene soul of her must have left
+already and found some refuge from the storm, and only the tenacious
+animal life were left to do battle with death. She labored under a
+delusion at once pitiful and merciful, thinking that she was in the
+Pullman on her way to New York, going back to her life and her work.
+When she aroused from her stupor it was only to ask the porter to waken
+her half an hour out of Jersey City, or to remonstrate with him about
+the delays and the roughness of the road. At midnight Everett and the
+nurse were left alone with her. Poor Charley Gaylord had lain down on a
+couch outside the door. Everett sat looking at the sputtering night lamp
+until it made his eyes ache. His head dropped forward on the foot of the
+bed, and he sank into a heavy, distressful slumber. He was dreaming of
+Adriance's concert in Paris, and of Adriance, the troubadour, smiling
+and debonair, with his boyish face and the touch of silver gray in
+his hair. He heard the applause and he saw the roses going up over the
+footlights until they were stacked half as high as the piano, and the
+petals fell and scattered, making crimson splotches on the floor. Down
+this crimson pathway came Adriance with his youthful step, leading his
+prima donna by the hand; a dark woman this time, with Spanish eyes.
+
+The nurse touched him on the shoulder; he started and awoke. She
+screened the lamp with her hand. Everett saw that Katharine was awake
+and conscious, and struggling a little. He lifted her gently on his arm
+and began to fan her. She laid her hands lightly on his hair and looked
+into his face with eyes that seemed never to have wept or doubted. "Ah,
+dear Adriance, dear, dear," she whispered.
+
+Everett went to call her brother, but when they came back the madness of
+art was over for Katharine.
+
+Two days later Everett was pacing the station siding, waiting for the
+westbound train. Charley Gaylord walked beside him, but the two men had
+nothing to say to each other. Everett's bags were piled on the truck,
+and his step was hurried and his eyes were full of impatience, as he
+gazed again and again up the track, watching for the train. Gaylord's
+impatience was not less than his own; these two, who had grown so close,
+had now become painful and impossible to each other, and longed for the
+wrench of farewell.
+
+As the train pulled in Everett wrung Gaylord's hand among the crowd of
+alighting passengers. The people of a German opera company, en route
+to the coast, rushed by them in frantic haste to snatch their breakfast
+during the stop. Everett heard an exclamation in a broad German dialect,
+and a massive woman whose figure persistently escaped from her stays in
+the most improbable places rushed up to him, her blond hair disordered
+by the wind, and glowing with joyful surprise she caught his coat sleeve
+with her tightly gloved hands.
+
+"_Herr Gott_, Adriance, _lieber Freund_," she cried, emotionally.
+
+Everett quickly withdrew his arm and lifted his hat, blushing. "Pardon
+me, madam, but I see that you have mistaken me for Adriance Hilgarde.
+I am his brother," he said quietly, and turning from the crestfallen
+singer, he hurried into the car.
+
+
+
+
+The Garden Lodge
+
+When Caroline Noble's friends learned that Raymond d'Esquerre was to
+spend a month at her place on the Sound before he sailed to fill his
+engagement for the London opera season, they considered it another
+striking instance of the perversity of things. That the month was May,
+and the most mild and florescent of all the blue-and-white Mays the
+middle coast had known in years, but added to their sense of wrong.
+D'Esquerre, they learned, was ensconced in the lodge in the apple
+orchard, just beyond Caroline's glorious garden, and report went that
+at almost any hour the sound of the tenor's voice and of Caroline's
+crashing accompaniment could be heard floating through the open windows,
+out among the snowy apple boughs. The Sound, steel-blue and dotted with
+white sails, was splendidly seen from the windows of the lodge. The
+garden to the left and the orchard to the right had never been so
+riotous with spring, and had burst into impassioned bloom, as if to
+accommodate Caroline, though she was certainly the last woman to whom
+the witchery of Freya could be attributed; the last woman, as her
+friends affirmed, to at all adequately appreciate and make the most of
+such a setting for the great tenor.
+
+Of course, they admitted, Caroline was musical--well, she ought to
+be!--but in that, as in everything, she was paramountly cool-headed,
+slow of impulse, and disgustingly practical; in that, as in everything
+else, she had herself so provokingly well in hand. Of course, it would
+be she, always mistress of herself in any situation, she, who would
+never be lifted one inch from the ground by it, and who would go on
+superintending her gardeners and workmen as usual--it would be she who
+got him. Perhaps some of them suspected that this was exactly why she
+did get him, and it but nettled them the more.
+
+Caroline's coolness, her capableness, her general success, especially
+exasperated people because they felt that, for the most part, she
+had made herself what she was; that she had cold-bloodedly set about
+complying with the demands of life and making her position comfortable
+and masterful. That was why, everyone said, she had married Howard
+Noble. Women who did not get through life so well as Caroline, who could
+not make such good terms either with fortune or their husbands, who did
+not find their health so unfailingly good, or hold their looks so well,
+or manage their children so easily, or give such distinction to all they
+did, were fond of stamping Caroline as a materialist, and called her
+hard.
+
+The impression of cold calculation, of having a definite policy, which
+Caroline gave, was far from a false one; but there was this to be said
+for her--that there were extenuating circumstances which her friends
+could not know.
+
+If Caroline held determinedly to the middle course, if she was apt to
+regard with distrust everything which inclined toward extravagance, it
+was not because she was unacquainted with other standards than her own,
+or had never seen another side of life. She had grown up in Brooklyn,
+in a shabby little house under the vacillating administration of her
+father, a music teacher who usually neglected his duties to write
+orchestral compositions for which the world seemed to have no especial
+need. His spirit was warped by bitter vindictiveness and puerile
+self-commiseration, and he spent his days in scorn of the labor that
+brought him bread and in pitiful devotion to the labor that brought him
+only disappointment, writing interminable scores which demanded of the
+orchestra everything under heaven except melody.
+
+It was not a cheerful home for a girl to grow up in. The mother, who
+idolized her husband as the music lord of the future, was left to a
+lifelong battle with broom and dustpan, to neverending conciliatory
+overtures to the butcher and grocer, to the making of her own gowns
+and of Caroline's, and to the delicate task of mollifying Auguste's
+neglected pupils.
+
+The son, Heinrich, a painter, Caroline's only brother, had inherited all
+his father's vindictive sensitiveness without his capacity for slavish
+application. His little studio on the third floor had been much
+frequented by young men as unsuccessful as himself, who met there to
+give themselves over to contemptuous derision of this or that artist
+whose industry and stupidity had won him recognition. Heinrich, when he
+worked at all, did newspaper sketches at twenty-five dollars a week. He
+was too indolent and vacillating to set himself seriously to his art,
+too irascible and poignantly self-conscious to make a living, too much
+addicted to lying late in bed, to the incontinent reading of poetry, and
+to the use of chloral to be anything very positive except painful. At
+twenty-six he shot himself in a frenzy, and the whole wretched affair
+had effectually shattered his mother's health and brought on the decline
+of which she died. Caroline had been fond of him, but she felt a certain
+relief when he no longer wandered about the little house, commenting
+ironically upon its shabbiness, a Turkish cap on his head and a
+cigarette hanging from between his long, tremulous fingers.
+
+After her mother's death Caroline assumed the management of that
+bankrupt establishment. The funeral expenses were unpaid, and Auguste's
+pupils had been frightened away by the shock of successive disasters and
+the general atmosphere of wretchedness that pervaded the house. Auguste
+himself was writing a symphonic poem, Icarus, dedicated to the memory
+of his son. Caroline was barely twenty when she was called upon to face
+this tangle of difficulties, but she reviewed the situation candidly.
+The house had served its time at the shrine of idealism; vague,
+distressing, unsatisfied yearnings had brought it low enough. Her
+mother, thirty years before, had eloped and left Germany with her music
+teacher, to give herself over to lifelong, drudging bondage at the
+kitchen range. Ever since Caroline could remember, the law in the house
+had been a sort of mystic worship of things distant, intangible and
+unattainable. The family had lived in successive ebullitions of generous
+enthusiasm, in talk of masters and masterpieces, only to come down to
+the cold facts in the case; to boiled mutton and to the necessity of
+turning the dining-room carpet. All these emotional pyrotechnics had
+ended in petty jealousies, in neglected duties, and in cowardly fear of
+the little grocer on the corner.
+
+From her childhood she had hated it, that humiliating and uncertain
+existence, with its glib tongue and empty pockets, its poetic ideals and
+sordid realities, its indolence and poverty tricked out in paper roses.
+Even as a little girl, when vague dreams beset her, when she wanted to
+lie late in bed and commune with visions, or to leap and sing because
+the sooty little trees along the street were putting out their first
+pale leaves in the sunshine, she would clench her hands and go to
+help her mother sponge the spots from her father's waistcoat or press
+Heinrich's trousers. Her mother never permitted the slightest question
+concerning anything Auguste or Heinrich saw fit to do, but from the
+time Caroline could reason at all she could not help thinking that many
+things went wrong at home. She knew, for example, that her father's
+pupils ought not to be kept waiting half an hour while he discussed
+Schopenhauer with some bearded socialist over a dish of herrings and a
+spotted tablecloth. She knew that Heinrich ought not to give a dinner on
+Heine's birthday, when the laundress had not been paid for a month and
+when he frequently had to ask his mother for carfare. Certainly Caroline
+had served her apprenticeship to idealism and to all the embarrassing
+inconsistencies which it sometimes entails, and she decided to deny
+herself this diffuse, ineffectual answer to the sharp questions of life.
+
+When she came into the control of herself and the house she refused
+to proceed any further with her musical education. Her father, who had
+intended to make a concert pianist of her, set this down as another
+item in his long list of disappointments and his grievances against
+the world. She was young and pretty, and she had worn turned gowns and
+soiled gloves and improvised hats all her life. She wanted the luxury of
+being like other people, of being honest from her hat to her boots, of
+having nothing to hide, not even in the matter of stockings, and she was
+willing to work for it. She rented a little studio away from that house
+of misfortune and began to give lessons. She managed well and was the
+sort of girl people liked to help. The bills were paid and Auguste went
+on composing, growing indignant only when she refused to insist that
+her pupils should study his compositions for the piano. She began to
+get engagements in New York to play accompaniments at song recitals.
+She dressed well, made herself agreeable, and gave herself a chance.
+She never permitted herself to look further than a step ahead, and set
+herself with all the strength of her will to see things as they are and
+meet them squarely in the broad day. There were two things she feared
+even more than poverty: the part of one that sets up an idol and the
+part of one that bows down and worships it.
+
+When Caroline was twenty-four she married Howard Noble, then a widower
+of forty, who had been for ten years a power in Wall Street. Then, for
+the first time, she had paused to take breath. It took a substantialness
+as unquestionable as his; his money, his position, his energy, the big
+vigor of his robust person, to satisfy her that she was entirely safe.
+Then she relaxed a little, feeling that there was a barrier to be
+counted upon between her and that world of visions and quagmires and
+failure.
+
+Caroline had been married for six years when Raymond d'Esquerre came
+to stay with them. He came chiefly because Caroline was what she was;
+because he, too, felt occasionally the need of getting out of Klingsor's
+garden, of dropping down somewhere for a time near a quiet nature, a
+cool head, a strong hand. The hours he had spent in the garden lodge
+were hours of such concentrated study as, in his fevered life, he seldom
+got in anywhere. She had, as he told Noble, a fine appreciation of the
+seriousness of work.
+
+One evening two weeks after d'Esquerre had sailed, Caroline was in the
+library giving her husband an account of the work she had laid out for
+the gardeners. She superintended the care of the grounds herself. Her
+garden, indeed, had become quite a part of her; a sort of beautiful
+adjunct, like gowns or jewels. It was a famous spot, and Noble was very
+proud of it.
+
+"What do you think, Caroline, of having the garden lodge torn down and
+putting a new summer house there at the end of the arbor; a big rustic
+affair where you could have tea served in midsummer?" he asked.
+
+"The lodge?" repeated Caroline looking at him quickly. "Why, that seems
+almost a shame, doesn't it, after d'Esquerre has used it?"
+
+Noble put down his book with a smile of amusement.
+
+"Are you going to be sentimental about it? Why, I'd sacrifice the whole
+place to see that come to pass. But I don't believe you could do it for
+an hour together."
+
+"I don't believe so, either," said his wife, smiling.
+
+Noble took up his book again and Caroline went into the music room to
+practice. She was not ready to have the lodge torn down. She had gone
+there for a quiet hour every day during the two weeks since d'Esquerre
+had left them. It was the sheerest sentiment she had ever permitted
+herself. She was ashamed of it, but she was childishly unwilling to let
+it go.
+
+Caroline went to bed soon after her husband, but she was not able to
+sleep. The night was close and warm, presaging storm. The wind had
+fallen, and the water slept, fixed and motionless as the sand. She rose
+and thrust her feet into slippers and, putting a dressing gown over
+her shoulders, opened the door of her husband's room; he was sleeping
+soundly. She went into the hall and down the stairs; then, leaving the
+house through a side door, stepped into the vine-covered arbor that led
+to the garden lodge. The scent of the June roses was heavy in the still
+air, and the stones that paved the path felt pleasantly cool through the
+thin soles of her slippers. Heat-lightning flashed continuously from the
+bank of clouds that had gathered over the sea, but the shore was flooded
+with moonlight and, beyond, the rim of the Sound lay smooth and shining.
+Caroline had the key of the lodge, and the door creaked as she opened
+it. She stepped into the long, low room radiant with the moonlight which
+streamed through the bow window and lay in a silvery pool along the
+waxed floor. Even that part of the room which lay in the shadow was
+vaguely illuminated; the piano, the tall candlesticks, the picture
+frames and white casts standing out as clearly in the half-light as
+did the sycamores and black poplars of the garden against the still,
+expectant night sky. Caroline sat down to think it all over. She had
+come here to do just that every day of the two weeks since d'Esquerre's
+departure, but, far from ever having reached a conclusion, she had
+succeeded only in losing her way in a maze of memories--sometimes
+bewilderingly confused, sometimes too acutely distinct--where there was
+neither path, nor clue, nor any hope of finality. She had, she realized,
+defeated a lifelong regimen; completely confounded herself by falling
+unaware and incontinently into that luxury of reverie which, even as
+a little girl, she had so determinedly denied herself, she had been
+developing with alarming celerity that part of one which sets up an idol
+and that part of one which bows down and worships it.
+
+It was a mistake, she felt, ever to have asked d'Esquerre to come
+at all. She had an angry feeling that she had done it rather in
+self-defiance, to rid herself finally of that instinctive fear of him
+which had always troubled and perplexed her. She knew that she had
+reckoned with herself before he came; but she had been equal to so much
+that she had never really doubted she would be equal to this. She had
+come to believe, indeed, almost arrogantly in her own malleability and
+endurance; she had done so much with herself that she had come to think
+that there was nothing which she could not do; like swimmers, overbold,
+who reckon upon their strength and their power to hoard it, forgetting
+the ever-changing moods of their adversary, the sea.
+
+And d'Esquerre was a man to reckon with. Caroline did not deceive
+herself now upon that score. She admitted it humbly enough, and since
+she had said good-by to him she had not been free for a moment from
+the sense of his formidable power. It formed the undercurrent of her
+consciousness; whatever she might be doing or thinking, it went on,
+involuntarily, like her breathing, sometimes welling up until suddenly
+she found herself suffocating. There was a moment of this tonight,
+and Caroline rose and stood shuddering, looking about her in the blue
+duskiness of the silent room. She had not been here at night before, and
+the spirit of the place seemed more troubled and insistent than ever it
+had in the quiet of the afternoons. Caroline brushed her hair back from
+her damp forehead and went over to the bow window. After raising it
+she sat down upon the low seat. Leaning her head against the sill, and
+loosening her nightgown at the throat, she half-closed her eyes
+and looked off into the troubled night, watching the play of the
+heat-lightning upon the massing clouds between the pointed tops of the
+poplars.
+
+Yes, she knew, she knew well enough, of what absurdities this spell was
+woven; she mocked, even while she winced. His power, she knew, lay not
+so much in anything that he actually had--though he had so much--or
+in anything that he actually was, but in what he suggested, in what he
+seemed picturesque enough to have or be and that was just anything
+that one chose to believe or to desire. His appeal was all the more
+persuasive and alluring in that it was to the imagination alone, in that
+it was as indefinite and impersonal as those cults of idealism which
+so have their way with women. What he had was that, in his mere
+personality, he quickened and in a measure gratified that something
+without which--to women--life is no better than sawdust, and to the
+desire for which most of their mistakes and tragedies and astonishingly
+poor bargains are due.
+
+D'Esquerre had become the center of a movement, and the Metropolitan
+had become the temple of a cult. When he could be induced to cross the
+Atlantic, the opera season in New York was successful; when he
+could not, the management lost money; so much everyone knew. It was
+understood, too, that his superb art had disproportionately little to do
+with his peculiar position. Women swayed the balance this way or that;
+the opera, the orchestra, even his own glorious art, achieved at such a
+cost, were but the accessories of himself; like the scenery and costumes
+and even the soprano, they all went to produce atmosphere, were the mere
+mechanics of the beautiful illusion.
+
+Caroline understood all this; tonight was not the first time that she
+had put it to herself so. She had seen the same feeling in other people,
+watched for it in her friends, studied it in the house night after night
+when he sang, candidly putting herself among a thousand others.
+
+D'Esquerre's arrival in the early winter was the signal for a feminine
+hegira toward New York. On the nights when he sang women flocked to
+the Metropolitan from mansions and hotels, from typewriter desks,
+schoolrooms, shops, and fitting rooms. They were of all conditions
+and complexions. Women of the world who accepted him knowingly as they
+sometimes took champagne for its agreeable effect; sisters of charity
+and overworked shopgirls, who received him devoutly; withered women who
+had taken doctorate degrees and who worshipped furtively through prism
+spectacles; business women and women of affairs, the Amazons who dwelt
+afar from men in the stony fastnesses of apartment houses. They all
+entered into the same romance; dreamed, in terms as various as the hues
+of fantasy, the same dream; drew the same quick breath when he stepped
+upon the stage, and, at his exit, felt the same dull pain of shouldering
+the pack again.
+
+There were the maimed, even; those who came on crutches, who were pitted
+by smallpox or grotesquely painted by cruel birth stains. These, too,
+entered with him into enchantment. Stout matrons became slender girls
+again; worn spinsters felt their cheeks flush with the tenderness of
+their lost youth. Young and old, however hideous, however fair, they
+yielded up their heat--whether quick or latent--sat hungering for the
+mystic bread wherewith he fed them at this eucharist of sentiment.
+
+Sometimes, when the house was crowded from the orchestra to the last row
+of the gallery, when the air was charged with this ecstasy of fancy,
+he himself was the victim of the burning reflection of his power. They
+acted upon him in turn; he felt their fervent and despairing appeal to
+him; it stirred him as the spring drives the sap up into an old tree;
+he, too, burst into bloom. For the moment he, too, believed again,
+desired again, he knew not what, but something.
+
+But it was not in these exalted moments that Caroline had learned to
+fear him most. It was in the quiet, tired reserve, the dullness, even,
+that kept him company between these outbursts that she found that
+exhausting drain upon her sympathies which was the very pith
+and substance of their alliance. It was the tacit admission of
+disappointment under all this glamour of success--the helplessness of
+the enchanter to at all enchant himself--that awoke in her an illogical,
+womanish desire to in some way compensate, to make it up to him.
+
+She had observed drastically to herself that it was her eighteenth year
+he awoke in her--those hard years she had spent in turning gowns and
+placating tradesmen, and which she had never had time to live. After
+all, she reflected, it was better to allow one's self a little youth--to
+dance a little at the carnival and to live these things when they are
+natural and lovely, not to have them coming back on one and demanding
+arrears when they are humiliating and impossible. She went over tonight
+all the catalogue of her self-deprivations; recalled how, in the light
+of her father's example, she had even refused to humor her innocent
+taste for improvising at the piano; how, when she began to teach, after
+her mother's death, she had struck out one little indulgence after
+another, reducing her life to a relentless routine, unvarying as
+clockwork. It seemed to her that ever since d'Esquerre first came into
+the house she had been haunted by an imploring little girlish ghost that
+followed her about, wringing its hands and entreating for an hour of
+life.
+
+The storm had held off unconscionably long; the air within the lodge was
+stifling, and without the garden waited, breathless. Everything seemed
+pervaded by a poignant distress; the hush of feverish, intolerable
+expectation. The still earth, the heavy flowers, even the growing
+darkness, breathed the exhaustion of protracted waiting. Caroline felt
+that she ought to go; that it was wrong to stay; that the hour and the
+place were as treacherous as her own reflections. She rose and began to
+pace the floor, stepping softly, as though in fear of awakening someone,
+her figure, in its thin drapery, diaphanously vague and white. Still
+unable to shake off the obsession of the intense stillness, she sat down
+at the piano and began to run over the first act of the _Walkure_, the
+last of his roles they had practiced together; playing listlessly and
+absently at first, but with gradually increasing seriousness. Perhaps it
+was the still heat of the summer night, perhaps it was the heavy odors
+from the garden that came in through the open windows; but as she played
+there grew and grew the feeling that he was there, beside her, standing
+in his accustomed place. In the duet at the end of the first act she
+heard him clearly: _"Thou art the Spring for which I sighed in Winter's
+cold embraces."_ Once as he sang it, he had put his arm about her,
+his one hand under her heart, while with the other he took her right
+from the keyboard, holding her as he always held _Sieglinde_ when he
+drew her toward the window. She had been wonderfully the mistress of
+herself at the time; neither repellent nor acquiescent. She remembered
+that she had rather exulted, then, in her self-control--which he had
+seemed to take for granted, though there was perhaps the whisper of a
+question from the hand under her heart. _"Thou art the Spring for which
+I sighed in Winter's cold embraces."_ Caroline lifted her hands quickly
+from the keyboard, and she bowed her head in them, sobbing.
+
+The storm broke and the rain beat in, spattering her nightdress until
+she rose and lowered the windows. She dropped upon the couch and began
+fighting over again the battles of other days, while the ghosts of the
+slain rose as from a sowing of dragon's teeth, The shadows of things,
+always so scorned and flouted, bore down upon her merciless and
+triumphant. It was not enough; this happy, useful, well-ordered life
+was not enough. It did not satisfy, it was not even real. No, the other
+things, the shadows--they were the realities. Her father, poor Heinrich,
+even her mother, who had been able to sustain her poor romance and keep
+her little illusions amid the tasks of a scullion, were nearer happiness
+than she. Her sure foundation was but made ground, after all, and the
+people in Klingsor's garden were more fortunate, however barren the
+sands from which they conjured their paradise.
+
+The lodge was still and silent; her fit of weeping over, Caroline
+made no sound, and within the room, as without in the garden, was the
+blackness of storm. Only now and then a flash of lightning showed a
+woman's slender figure rigid on the couch, her face buried in her hands.
+
+Toward morning, when the occasional rumbling of thunder was heard no
+more and the beat of the raindrops upon the orchard leaves was steadier,
+she fell asleep and did not waken until the first red streaks of dawn
+shone through the twisted boughs of the apple trees. There was a moment
+between world and world, when, neither asleep nor awake, she felt her
+dream grow thin, melting away from her, felt the warmth under her heart
+growing cold. Something seemed to slip from the clinging hold of her
+arms, and she groaned protestingly through her parted lips, following
+it a little way with fluttering hands. Then her eyes opened wide and she
+sprang up and sat holding dizzily to the cushions of the couch, staring
+down at her bare, cold feet, at her laboring breast, rising and falling
+under her open nightdress.
+
+The dream was gone, but the feverish reality of it still pervaded her
+and she held it as the vibrating string holds a tone. In the last hour
+the shadows had had their way with Caroline. They had shown her the
+nothingness of time and space, of system and discipline, of closed doors
+and broad waters. Shuddering, she thought of the Arabian fairy tale in
+which the genie brought the princess of China to the sleeping prince
+of Damascus and carried her through the air back to her palace at dawn.
+Caroline closed her eyes and dropped her elbows weakly upon her knees,
+her shoulders sinking together. The horror was that it had not come
+from without, but from within. The dream was no blind chance; it was the
+expression of something she had kept so close a prisoner that she had
+never seen it herself, it was the wail from the donjon deeps when the
+watch slept. Only as the outcome of such a night of sorcery could the
+thing have been loosed to straighten its limbs and measure itself with
+her; so heavy were the chains upon it, so many a fathom deep, it was
+crushed down into darkness. The fact that d'Esquerre happened to be on
+the other side of the world meant nothing; had he been here, beside her,
+it could scarcely have hurt her self-respect so much. As it was, she was
+without even the extenuation of an outer impulse, and she could scarcely
+have despised herself more had she come to him here in the night three
+weeks ago and thrown herself down upon the stone slab at the door there.
+
+Caroline rose unsteadily and crept guiltily from the lodge and along the
+path under the arbor, terrified lest the servants should be stirring,
+trembling with the chill air, while the wet shrubbery, brushing against
+her, drenched her nightdress until it clung about her limbs.
+
+At breakfast her husband looked across the table at her with concern.
+"It seems to me that you are looking rather fagged, Caroline. It was a
+beastly night to sleep. Why don't you go up to the mountains until this
+hot weather is over? By the way, were you in earnest about letting the
+lodge stand?"
+
+Caroline laughed quietly. "No, I find I was not very serious. I haven't
+sentiment enough to forego a summer house. Will you tell Baker to come
+tomorrow to talk it over with me? If we are to have a house party, I
+should like to put him to work on it at once."
+
+Noble gave her a glance, half-humorous, half-vexed. "Do you know I am
+rather disappointed?" he said. "I had almost hoped that, just for once,
+you know, you would be a little bit foolish."
+
+"Not now that I've slept over it," replied Caroline, and they both rose
+from the table, laughing.
+
+
+
+
+The Marriage of Phaedra
+
+The sequence of events was such that MacMaster did not make his
+pilgrimage to Hugh Treffinger's studio until three years after that
+painter's death. MacMaster was himself a painter, an American of the
+Gallicized type, who spent his winters in New York, his summers in
+Paris, and no inconsiderable amount of time on the broad waters between.
+He had often contemplated stopping in London on one of his return trips
+in the late autumn, but he had always deferred leaving Paris until the
+prick of necessity drove him home by the quickest and shortest route.
+
+Treffinger was a comparatively young man at the time of his death, and
+there had seemed no occasion for haste until haste was of no avail.
+Then, possibly, though there had been some correspondence between them,
+MacMaster felt certain qualms about meeting in the flesh a man who in
+the flesh was so diversely reported. His intercourse with Treffinger's
+work had been so deep and satisfying, so apart from other appreciations,
+that he rather dreaded a critical juncture of any sort. He had always
+felt himself singularly inept in personal relations, and in this case he
+had avoided the issue until it was no longer to be feared or hoped for.
+There still remained, however, Treffinger's great unfinished picture,
+the _Marriage of Phaedra_, which had never left his studio, and of which
+MacMaster's friends had now and again brought report that it was the
+painter's most characteristic production.
+
+The young man arrived in London in the evening, and the next morning
+went out to Kensington to find Treffinger's studio. It lay in one of the
+perplexing bystreets off Holland Road, and the number he found on a
+door set in a high garden wall, the top of which was covered with broken
+green glass and over which a budding lilac bush nodded. Treffinger's
+plate was still there, and a card requesting visitors to ring for the
+attendant. In response to MacMaster's ring, the door was opened by a
+cleanly built little man, clad in a shooting jacket and trousers that
+had been made for an ampler figure. He had a fresh complexion, eyes of
+that common uncertain shade of gray, and was closely shaven except for
+the incipient muttonchops on his ruddy cheeks. He bore himself in
+a manner strikingly capable, and there was a sort of trimness and
+alertness about him, despite the too-generous shoulders of his coat. In
+one hand he held a bulldog pipe, and in the other a copy of _Sporting
+Life_. While MacMaster was explaining the purpose of his call he noticed
+that the man surveyed him critically, though not impertinently. He was
+admitted into a little tank of a lodge made of whitewashed stone, the
+back door and windows opening upon a garden. A visitor's book and a pile
+of catalogues lay on a deal table, together with a bottle of ink and
+some rusty pens. The wall was ornamented with photographs and colored
+prints of racing favorites.
+
+"The studio is h'only open to the public on Saturdays and Sundays,"
+explained the man--he referred to himself as "Jymes"--"but of course we
+make exceptions in the case of pynters. Lydy Elling Treffinger 'erself
+is on the Continent, but Sir 'Ugh's orders was that pynters was to 'ave
+the run of the place." He selected a key from his pocket and threw open
+the door into the studio which, like the lodge, was built against the
+wall of the garden.
+
+MacMaster entered a long, narrow room, built of smoothed planks, painted
+a light green; cold and damp even on that fine May morning. The room was
+utterly bare of furniture--unless a stepladder, a model throne, and a
+rack laden with large leather portfolios could be accounted such--and
+was windowless, without other openings than the door and the skylight,
+under which hung the unfinished picture itself. MacMaster had never
+seen so many of Treffinger's paintings together. He knew the painter
+had married a woman with money and had been able to keep such of
+his pictures as he wished. These, with all of his replicas and
+studies, he had left as a sort of common legacy to the younger men of
+the school he had originated.
+
+As soon as he was left alone MacMaster sat down on the edge of the model
+throne before the unfinished picture. Here indeed was what he had come
+for; it rather paralyzed his receptivity for the moment, but gradually
+the thing found its way to him.
+
+At one o'clock he was standing before the collection of studies done for
+_Boccaccio's Garden_ when he heard a voice at his elbow.
+
+"Pardon, sir, but I was just about to lock up and go to lunch. Are
+you lookin' for the figure study of Boccaccio 'imself?" James queried
+respectfully. "Lydy Elling Treffinger give it to Mr. Rossiter to take
+down to Oxford for some lectures he's been agiving there."
+
+"Did he never paint out his studies, then?" asked MacMaster with
+perplexity. "Here are two completed ones for this picture. Why did he
+keep them?"
+
+"I don't know as I could say as to that, sir," replied James, smiling
+indulgently, "but that was 'is way. That is to say, 'e pynted out very
+frequent, but 'e always made two studies to stand; one in watercolors
+and one in oils, before 'e went at the final picture--to say nothink
+of all the pose studies 'e made in pencil before he begun on the
+composition proper at all. He was that particular. You see, 'e wasn't so
+keen for the final effect as for the proper pyntin' of 'is pictures. 'E
+used to say they ought to be well made, the same as any other h'article
+of trade. I can lay my 'and on the pose studies for you, sir." He
+rummaged in one of the portfolios and produced half a dozen drawings,
+"These three," he continued, "was discarded; these two was the pose he
+finally accepted; this one without alteration, as it were."
+
+"That's in Paris, as I remember," James continued reflectively. "It went
+with the _Saint Cecilia_ into the Baron H---'s collection. Could you
+tell me, sir, 'as 'e it still? I don't like to lose account of them, but
+some 'as changed 'ands since Sir 'Ugh's death."
+
+"H---'s collection is still intact, I believe," replied MacMaster. "You
+were with Treffinger long?"
+
+"From my boyhood, sir," replied James with gravity. "I was a stable boy
+when 'e took me."
+
+"You were his man, then?"
+
+"That's it, sir. Nobody else ever done anything around the studio.
+I always mixed 'is colors and 'e taught me to do a share of the
+varnishin'; 'e said as 'ow there wasn't a 'ouse in England as could
+do it proper. You ayn't looked at the _Marriage_ yet, sir?" he asked
+abruptly, glancing doubtfully at MacMaster, and indicating with his
+thumb the picture under the north light.
+
+"Not very closely. I prefer to begin with something simpler; that's
+rather appalling, at first glance," replied MacMaster.
+
+"Well may you say that, sir," said James warmly. "That one regular
+killed Sir 'Ugh; it regular broke 'im up, and nothink will ever convince
+me as 'ow it didn't bring on 'is second stroke."
+
+When MacMaster walked back to High Street to take his bus his mind was
+divided between two exultant convictions. He felt that he had not
+only found Treffinger's greatest picture, but that, in James, he had
+discovered a kind of cryptic index to the painter's personality--a clue
+which, if tactfully followed, might lead to much.
+
+Several days after his first visit to the studio, MacMaster wrote to
+Lady Mary Percy, telling her that he would be in London for some time
+and asking her if he might call. Lady Mary was an only sister of Lady
+Ellen Treffinger, the painter's widow, and MacMaster had known her
+during one winter he spent at Nice. He had known her, indeed, very well,
+and Lady Mary, who was astonishingly frank and communicative upon
+all subjects, had been no less so upon the matter of her sister's
+unfortunate marriage.
+
+In her reply to his note Lady Mary named an afternoon when she would be
+alone. She was as good as her word, and when MacMaster arrived he
+found the drawing room empty. Lady Mary entered shortly after he was
+announced. She was a tall woman, thin and stiffly jointed, and her body
+stood out under the folds of her gown with the rigor of cast iron.
+This rather metallic suggestion was further carried out in her heavily
+knuckled hands, her stiff gray hair, and her long, bold-featured face,
+which was saved from freakishness only by her alert eyes.
+
+"Really," said Lady Mary, taking a seat beside him and giving him a sort
+of military inspection through her nose glasses, "really, I had begun to
+fear that I had lost you altogether. It's four years since I saw you
+at Nice, isn't it? I was in Paris last winter, but I heard nothing from
+you."
+
+"I was in New York then."
+
+"It occurred to me that you might be. And why are you in London?"
+
+"Can you ask?" replied MacMaster gallantly.
+
+Lady Mary smiled ironically. "But for what else, incidentally?"
+
+"Well, incidentally, I came to see Treffinger's studio and his
+unfinished picture. Since I've been here, I've decided to stay the
+summer. I'm even thinking of attempting to do a biography of him."
+
+"So that is what brought you to London?"
+
+"Not exactly. I had really no intention of anything so serious when I
+came. It's his last picture, I fancy, that has rather thrust it upon me.
+The notion has settled down on me like a thing destined."
+
+"You'll not be offended if I question the clemency of such a destiny,"
+remarked Lady Mary dryly. "Isn't there rather a surplus of books on that
+subject already?"
+
+"Such as they are. Oh, I've read them all"--here MacMaster faced Lady
+Mary triumphantly. "He has quite escaped your amiable critics," he
+added, smiling.
+
+"I know well enough what you think, and I daresay we are not much on
+art," said Lady Mary with tolerant good humor. "We leave that to peoples
+who have no physique. Treffinger made a stir for a time, but it
+seems that we are not capable of a sustained appreciation of such
+extraordinary methods. In the end we go back to the pictures we find
+agreeable and unperplexing. He was regarded as an experiment, I fancy;
+and now it seems that he was rather an unsuccessful one. If you've come
+to us in a missionary spirit, we'll tolerate you politely, but we'll
+laugh in our sleeve, I warn you."
+
+"That really doesn't daunt me, Lady Mary," declared MacMaster blandly.
+"As I told you, I'm a man with a mission."
+
+Lady Mary laughed her hoarse, baritone laugh. "Bravo! And you've come to
+me for inspiration for your panegyric?"
+
+MacMaster smiled with some embarrassment. "Not altogether for that
+purpose. But I want to consult you, Lady Mary, about the advisability
+of troubling Lady Ellen Treffinger in the matter. It seems scarcely
+legitimate to go on without asking her to give some sort of grace to my
+proceedings, yet I feared the whole subject might be painful to her. I
+shall rely wholly upon your discretion."
+
+"I think she would prefer to be consulted," replied Lady Mary
+judicially. "I can't understand how she endures to have the wretched
+affair continually raked up, but she does. She seems to feel a sort of
+moral responsibility. Ellen has always been singularly conscientious
+about this matter, insofar as her light goes,--which rather puzzles me,
+as hers is not exactly a magnanimous nature. She is certainly trying to
+do what she believes to be the right thing. I shall write to her, and
+you can see her when she returns from Italy."
+
+"I want very much to meet her. She is, I hope, quite recovered in every
+way," queried MacMaster, hesitatingly.
+
+"No, I can't say that she is. She has remained in much the same
+condition she sank to before his death. He trampled over pretty much
+whatever there was in her, I fancy. Women don't recover from wounds of
+that sort--at least, not women of Ellen's grain. They go on bleeding
+inwardly."
+
+"You, at any rate, have not grown more reconciled," MacMaster ventured.
+
+"Oh I give him his dues. He was a colorist, I grant you; but that is
+a vague and unsatisfactory quality to marry to; Lady Ellen Treffinger
+found it so."
+
+"But, my dear Lady Mary," expostulated MacMaster, "and just repress me
+if I'm becoming too personal--but it must, in the first place, have been
+a marriage of choice on her part as well as on his."
+
+Lady Mary poised her glasses on her large forefinger and assumed an
+attitude suggestive of the clinical lecture room as she replied. "Ellen,
+my dear boy, is an essentially romantic person. She is quiet about it,
+but she runs deep. I never knew how deep until I came against her on the
+issue of that marriage. She was always discontented as a girl; she found
+things dull and prosaic, and the ardor of his courtship was agreeable
+to her. He met her during her first season in town. She is handsome, and
+there were plenty of other men, but I grant you your scowling brigand
+was the most picturesque of the lot. In his courtship, as in everything
+else, he was theatrical to the point of being ridiculous, but Ellen's
+sense of humor is not her strongest quality. He had the charm of
+celebrity, the air of a man who could storm his way through anything
+to get what he wanted. That sort of vehemence is particularly effective
+with women like Ellen, who can be warmed only by reflected heat, and she
+couldn't at all stand out against it. He convinced her of his necessity;
+and that done, all's done."
+
+"I can't help thinking that, even on such a basis, the marriage should
+have turned out better," MacMaster remarked reflectively.
+
+"The marriage," Lady Mary continued with a shrug, "was made on the basis
+of a mutual misunderstanding. Ellen, in the nature of the case, believed
+that she was doing something quite out of the ordinary in accepting him,
+and expected concessions which, apparently, it never occurred to him to
+make. After his marriage he relapsed into his old habits of incessant
+work, broken by violent and often brutal relaxations. He insulted her
+friends and foisted his own upon her--many of them well calculated to
+arouse aversion in any well-bred girl. He had Ghillini constantly at the
+house--a homeless vagabond, whose conversation was impossible. I don't
+say, mind you, that he had not grievances on his side. He had probably
+overrated the girl's possibilities, and he let her see that he was
+disappointed in her. Only a large and generous nature could have borne
+with him, and Ellen's is not that. She could not at all understand that
+odious strain of plebeian pride which plumes itself upon not having
+risen above its sources."
+
+As MacMaster drove back to his hotel he reflected that Lady Mary Percy
+had probably had good cause for dissatisfaction with her brother-in-law.
+Treffinger was, indeed, the last man who should have married into
+the Percy family. The son of a small tobacconist, he had grown up a
+sign-painter's apprentice; idle, lawless, and practically letterless
+until he had drifted into the night classes of the Albert League, where
+Ghillini sometimes lectured. From the moment he came under the eye and
+influence of that erratic Italian, then a political exile, his life
+had swerved sharply from its old channel. This man had been at once
+incentive and guide, friend and master, to his pupil. He had taken the
+raw clay out of the London streets and molded it anew. Seemingly he had
+divined at once where the boy's possibilities lay, and had thrown aside
+every canon of orthodox instruction in the training of him. Under
+him Treffinger acquired his superficial, yet facile, knowledge of the
+classics; had steeped himself in the monkish Latin and medieval romances
+which later gave his work so naive and remote a quality. That was the
+beginning of the wattle fences, the cobble pave, the brown roof beams,
+the cunningly wrought fabrics that gave to his pictures such a richness
+of decorative effect.
+
+As he had told Lady Mary Percy, MacMaster had found the imperative
+inspiration of his purpose in Treffinger's unfinished picture,
+the _Marriage of Phaedra_. He had always believed that the key to
+Treffinger's individuality lay in his singular education; in the _Roman
+de la Rose_, in Boccaccio, and Amadis, those works which had literally
+transcribed themselves upon the blank soul of the London street boy,
+and through which he had been born into the world of spiritual things.
+Treffinger had been a man who lived after his imagination; and his mind,
+his ideals and, as MacMaster believed, even his personal ethics, had to
+the last been colored by the trend of his early training. There was in
+him alike the freshness and spontaneity, the frank brutality and the
+religious mysticism, which lay well back of the fifteenth century. In
+the _Marriage of Phaedra_ MacMaster found the ultimate expression of
+this spirit, the final word as to Treffinger's point of view.
+
+As in all Treffinger's classical subjects, the conception was wholly
+medieval. This Phaedra, just turning from her husband and maidens to
+greet her husband's son, giving him her first fearsome glance from
+under her half-lifted veil, was no daughter of Minos. The daughter of
+_heathenesse_ and the early church she was; doomed to torturing visions
+and scourgings, and the wrangling of soul with flesh. The venerable
+Theseus might have been victorious Charlemagne, and Phaedra's maidens
+belonged rather in the train of Blanche of Castile than at the Cretan
+court. In the earlier studies Hippolytus had been done with a more pagan
+suggestion; but in each successive drawing the glorious figure had been
+deflowered of something of its serene unconsciousness, until, in the
+canvas under the skylight, he appeared a very Christian knight.
+This male figure, and the face of Phaedra, painted with such magical
+preservation of tone under the heavy shadow of the veil, were plainly
+Treffinger's highest achievements of craftsmanship. By what labor he had
+reached the seemingly inevitable composition of the picture--with its
+twenty figures, its plenitude of light and air, its restful distances
+seen through white porticoes--countless studies bore witness.
+
+From James's attitude toward the picture MacMaster could well conjecture
+what the painter's had been. This picture was always uppermost in
+James's mind; its custodianship formed, in his eyes, his occupation.
+He was manifestly apprehensive when visitors--not many came
+nowadays--lingered near it. "It was the _Marriage_ as killed 'im," he
+would often say, "and for the matter 'o that, it did like to 'av been
+the death of all of us."
+
+By the end of his second week in London MacMaster had begun the notes
+for his study of Hugh Treffinger and his work. When his researches
+led him occasionally to visit the studios of Treffinger's friends and
+erstwhile disciples, he found their Treffinger manner fading as the
+ring of Treffinger's personality died out in them. One by one they were
+stealing back into the fold of national British art; the hand that
+had wound them up was still. MacMaster despaired of them and confined
+himself more and more exclusively to the studio, to such of Treffinger's
+letters as were available--they were for the most part singularly
+negative and colorless--and to his interrogation of Treffinger's man.
+
+He could not himself have traced the successive steps by which he was
+gradually admitted into James's confidence. Certainly most of his adroit
+strategies to that end failed humiliatingly, and whatever it was that
+built up an understanding between them must have been instinctive and
+intuitive on both sides. When at last James became anecdotal, personal,
+there was that in every word he let fall which put breath and blood into
+MacMaster's book. James had so long been steeped in that penetrating
+personality that he fairly exuded it. Many of his very phrases,
+mannerisms, and opinions were impressions that he had taken on like wet
+plaster in his daily contact with Treffinger. Inwardly he was lined
+with cast-off epitheliums, as outwardly he was clad in the painter's
+discarded coats. If the painter's letters were formal and perfunctory,
+if his expressions to his friends had been extravagant, contradictory,
+and often apparently insincere--still, MacMaster felt himself not
+entirely without authentic sources. It was James who possessed
+Treffinger's legend; it was with James that he had laid aside his pose.
+Only in his studio, alone, and face to face with his work, as it seemed,
+had the man invariably been himself. James had known him in the one
+attitude in which he was entirely honest; their relation had fallen
+well within the painter's only indubitable integrity. James's report
+of Treffinger was distorted by no hallucination of artistic insight,
+colored by no interpretation of his own. He merely held what he
+had heard and seen; his mind was a sort of camera obscura. His very
+limitations made him the more literal and minutely accurate.
+
+One morning, when MacMaster was seated before the _Marriage of Phaedra_,
+James entered on his usual round of dusting.
+
+"I've 'eard from Lydy Elling by the post, sir," he remarked, "an' she's
+give h'orders to 'ave the 'ouse put in readiness. I doubt she'll be 'ere
+by Thursday or Friday next."
+
+"She spends most of her time abroad?" queried MacMaster; on the subject
+of Lady Treffinger James consistently maintained a very delicate
+reserve.
+
+"Well, you could 'ardly say she does that, sir. She finds the 'ouse a
+bit dull, I daresay, so durin' the season she stops mostly with Lydy
+Mary Percy, at Grosvenor Square. Lydy Mary's a h'only sister." After a
+few moments he continued, speaking in jerks governed by the rigor of his
+dusting: "H'only this morning I come upon this scarfpin," exhibiting a
+very striking instance of that article, "an' I recalled as 'ow Sir 'Ugh
+give it me when 'e was acourting of Lydy Elling. Blowed if I ever see a
+man go in for a 'oman like 'im! 'E was that gone, sir. 'E never went in
+on anythink so 'ard before nor since, till 'e went in on the _Marriage_
+there--though 'e mostly went in on things pretty keen; 'ad the measles
+when 'e was thirty, strong as cholera, an' come close to dyin' of 'em.
+'E wasn't strong for Lydy Elling's set; they was a bit too stiff for
+'im. A free an' easy gentleman, 'e was; 'e liked 'is dinner with a few
+friends an' them jolly, but 'e wasn't much on what you might call big
+affairs. But once 'e went in for Lydy Elling 'e broke 'imself to new
+paces; He give away 'is rings an' pins, an' the tylor's man an' the
+'aberdasher's man was at 'is rooms continual. 'E got 'imself put up
+for a club in Piccadilly; 'e starved 'imself thin, an' worrited 'imself
+white, an' ironed 'imself out, an' drawed 'imself tight as a bow string.
+It was a good job 'e come a winner, or I don't know w'at'd 'a been to
+pay."
+
+The next week, in consequence of an invitation from Lady Ellen
+Treffinger, MacMaster went one afternoon to take tea with her. He was
+shown into the garden that lay between the residence and the studio,
+where the tea table was set under a gnarled pear tree. Lady Ellen rose
+as he approached--he was astonished to note how tall she was--and greeted
+him graciously, saying that she already knew him through her sister.
+MacMaster felt a certain satisfaction in her; in her reassuring poise
+and repose, in the charming modulations of her voice and the indolent
+reserve of her full, almond eyes. He was even delighted to find her
+face so inscrutable, though it chilled his own warmth and made the open
+frankness he had wished to permit himself impossible. It was a long
+face, narrow at the chin, very delicately featured, yet steeled by an
+impassive mask of self-control. It was behind just such finely cut,
+close-sealed faces, MacMaster reflected, that nature sometimes hid
+astonishing secrets. But in spite of this suggestion of hardness he
+felt that the unerring taste that Treffinger had always shown in larger
+matters had not deserted him when he came to the choosing of a wife, and
+he admitted that he could not himself have selected a woman who looked
+more as Treffinger's wife should look.
+
+While he was explaining the purpose of his frequent visits to the studio
+she heard him with courteous interest. "I have read, I think, everything
+that has been published on Sir Hugh Treffinger's work, and it seems to
+me that there is much left to be said," he concluded.
+
+"I believe they are rather inadequate," she remarked vaguely. She
+hesitated a moment, absently fingering the ribbons of her gown, then
+continued, without raising her eyes; "I hope you will not think me too
+exacting if I ask to see the proofs of such chapters of your work as
+have to do with Sir Hugh's personal life. I have always asked that
+privilege."
+
+MacMaster hastily assured her as to this, adding, "I mean to touch on
+only such facts in his personal life as have to do directly with his
+work--such as his monkish education under Ghillini."
+
+"I see your meaning, I think," said Lady Ellen, looking at him with
+wide, uncomprehending eyes.
+
+When MacMaster stopped at the studio on leaving the house he stood for
+some time before Treffinger's one portrait of himself, that brigand of
+a picture, with its full throat and square head; the short upper lip
+blackened by the close-clipped mustache, the wiry hair tossed down over
+the forehead, the strong white teeth set hard on a short pipestem. He
+could well understand what manifold tortures the mere grain of the man's
+strong red and brown flesh might have inflicted upon a woman like Lady
+Ellen. He could conjecture, too, Treffinger's impotent revolt against
+that very repose which had so dazzled him when it first defied his
+daring; and how once possessed of it, his first instinct had been to
+crush it, since he could not melt it.
+
+Toward the close of the season Lady Ellen Treffinger left town.
+MacMaster's work was progressing rapidly, and he and James wore away
+the days in their peculiar relation, which by this time had much of
+friendliness. Excepting for the regular visits of a Jewish picture
+dealer, there were few intrusions upon their solitude. Occasionally
+a party of Americans rang at the little door in the garden wall,
+but usually they departed speedily for the Moorish hall and tinkling
+fountain of the great show studio of London, not far away.
+
+This Jew, an Austrian by birth, who had a large business in Melbourne,
+Australia, was a man of considerable discrimination, and at once
+selected the _Marriage of Phaedra_ as the object of his especial
+interest. When, upon his first visit, Lichtenstein had declared the
+picture one of the things done for time, MacMaster had rather warmed
+toward him and had talked to him very freely. Later, however, the man's
+repulsive personality and innate vulgarity so wore upon him that, the
+more genuine the Jew's appreciation, the more he resented it and the
+more base he somehow felt it to be. It annoyed him to see Lichtenstein
+walking up and down before the picture, shaking his head and blinking
+his watery eyes over his nose glasses, ejaculating: "Dot is a chem, a
+chem! It is wordt to gome den dousant miles for such a bainting, eh? To
+make Eurobe abbreciate such a work of ardt it is necessary to take it
+away while she is napping. She has never abbreciated until she has lost,
+but," knowingly, "she will buy back."
+
+James had, from the first, felt such a distrust of the man that he would
+never leave him alone in the studio for a moment. When Lichtenstein
+insisted upon having Lady Ellen Treffinger's address James rose to the
+point of insolence. "It ayn't no use to give it, noway. Lydy Treffinger
+never has nothink to do with dealers." MacMaster quietly repented his
+rash confidences, fearing that he might indirectly cause Lady Ellen
+annoyance from this merciless speculator, and he recalled with chagrin
+that Lichtenstein had extorted from him, little by little, pretty much
+the entire plan of his book, and especially the place in it which the
+_Marriage of Phaedra_ was to occupy.
+
+By this time the first chapters of MacMaster's book were in the hands
+of his publisher, and his visits to the studio were necessarily less
+frequent. The greater part of his time was now employed with the
+engravers who were to reproduce such of Treffinger's pictures as he
+intended to use as illustrations.
+
+He returned to his hotel late one evening after a long and vexing day at
+the engravers to find James in his room, seated on his steamer trunk by
+the window, with the outline of a great square draped in sheets resting
+against his knee.
+
+"Why, James, what's up?" he cried in astonishment, glancing inquiringly
+at the sheeted object.
+
+"Ayn't you seen the pypers, sir?" jerked out the man.
+
+"No, now I think of it, I haven't even looked at a paper. I've been at
+the engravers' plant all day. I haven't seen anything."
+
+James drew a copy of the _Times_ from his pocket and handed it to him,
+pointing with a tragic finger to a paragraph in the social column. It
+was merely the announcement of Lady Ellen Treffinger's engagement to
+Captain Alexander Gresham.
+
+"Well, what of it, my man? That surely is her privilege."
+
+James took the paper, turned to another page, and silently pointed to
+a paragraph in the art notes which stated that Lady Treffinger had
+presented to the X--gallery the entire collection of paintings and
+sketches now in her late husband's studio, with the exception of his
+unfinished picture, the _Marriage Of Phaedra_, which she had sold for
+a large sum to an Australian dealer who had come to London purposely to
+secure some of Treffinger's paintings.
+
+MacMaster pursed up his lips and sat down, his overcoat still on.
+"Well, James, this is something of a--something of a jolt, eh? It never
+occurred to me she'd really do it."
+
+"Lord, you don't know 'er, sir," said James bitterly, still staring at
+the floor in an attitude of abandoned dejection.
+
+MacMaster started up in a flash of enlightenment, "What on earth have
+you got there, James? It's not-surely it's not--"
+
+"Yes, it is, sir," broke in the man excitedly. "It's the _Marriage_
+itself. It ayn't agoing to H'Australia, no'ow!"
+
+"But man, what are you going to do with it? It's Lichtenstein's property
+now, as it seems."
+
+"It ayn't, sir, that it ayn't. No, by Gawd, it ayn't!" shouted James,
+breaking into a choking fury. He controlled himself with an effort
+and added supplicatingly: "Oh, sir, you ayn't agoing to see it go to
+H'Australia, w'ere they send convic's?" He unpinned and flung aside the
+sheets as though to let _Phaedra_ plead for herself.
+
+MacMaster sat down again and looked sadly at the doomed masterpiece.
+The notion of James having carried it across London that night rather
+appealed to his fancy. There was certainly a flavor about such a
+highhanded proceeding. "However did you get it here?" he queried.
+
+"I got a four-wheeler and come over direct, sir. Good job I 'appened to
+'ave the chaynge about me."
+
+"You came up High Street, up Piccadilly, through the Haymarket and
+Trafalgar Square, and into the Strand?" queried MacMaster with a relish.
+
+"Yes, sir. Of course, sir," assented James with surprise.
+
+MacMaster laughed delightedly. "It was a beautiful idea, James, but I'm
+afraid we can't carry it any further."
+
+"I was thinkin' as 'ow it would be a rare chance to get you to take the
+_Marriage_ over to Paris for a year or two, sir, until the thing blows
+over?" suggested James blandly.
+
+"I'm afraid that's out of the question, James. I haven't the right stuff
+in me for a pirate, or even a vulgar smuggler, I'm afraid." MacMaster
+found it surprisingly difficult to say this, and he busied himself with
+the lamp as he said it. He heard James's hand fall heavily on the trunk
+top, and he discovered that he very much disliked sinking in the man's
+estimation.
+
+"Well, sir," remarked James in a more formal tone, after a protracted
+silence; "then there's nothink for it but as 'ow I'll 'ave to make way
+with it myself."
+
+"And how about your character, James? The evidence would be heavy
+against you, and even if Lady Treffinger didn't prosecute you'd be done
+for."
+
+"Blow my character!--your pardon, sir," cried James, starting to his
+feet. "W'at do I want of a character? I'll chuck the 'ole thing, and
+damned lively, too. The shop's to be sold out, an' my place is gone
+any'ow. I'm agoing to enlist, or try the gold fields. I've lived too
+long with h'artists; I'd never give satisfaction in livery now. You know
+'ow it is yourself, sir; there ayn't no life like it, no'ow."
+
+For a moment MacMaster was almost equal to abetting James in his theft.
+He reflected that pictures had been whitewashed, or hidden in the crypts
+of churches, or under the floors of palaces from meaner motives, and to
+save them from a fate less ignominious. But presently, with a sigh, he
+shook his head.
+
+"No, James, it won't do at all. It has been tried over and over again,
+ever since the world has been agoing and pictures amaking. It was tried
+in Florence and in Venice, but the pictures were always carried away in
+the end. You see, the difficulty is that although Treffinger told you
+what was not to be done with the picture, he did not say definitely what
+was to be done with it. Do you think Lady Treffinger really understands
+that he did not want it to be sold?"
+
+"Well, sir, it was like this, sir," said James, resuming his seat on the
+trunk and again resting the picture against his knee. "My memory is as
+clear as glass about it. After Sir 'Ugh got up from 'is first stroke, 'e
+took a fresh start at the _Marriage_. Before that 'e 'ad been working
+at it only at night for a while back; the _Legend_ was the big picture
+then, an' was under the north light w'ere 'e worked of a morning. But
+one day 'e bid me take the _Legend_ down an' put the _Marriage_ in its
+place, an' 'e says, dashin' on 'is jacket, 'Jymes, this is a start for
+the finish, this time.'
+
+"From that on 'e worked at the night picture in the mornin'--a thing
+contrary to 'is custom. The _Marriage_ went wrong, and wrong--an' Sir
+'Ugh agettin' seedier an' seedier every day. 'E tried models an' models,
+an' smudged an' pynted out on account of 'er face goin' wrong in the
+shadow. Sometimes 'e layed it on the colors, an' swore at me an' things
+in general. He got that discouraged about 'imself that on 'is low days
+'e used to say to me: 'Jymes, remember one thing; if anythink 'appens to
+me, the _Marriage_ is not to go out of 'ere unfinished. It's worth the
+lot of 'em, my boy, an' it's not agoing to go shabby for lack of pains.'
+'E said things to that effect repeated.
+
+"He was workin' at the picture the last day, before 'e went to 'is club.
+'E kept the carriage waitin' near an hour while 'e put on a stroke an'
+then drawed back for to look at it, an' then put on another, careful
+like. After 'e 'ad 'is gloves on, 'e come back an' took away the brushes
+I was startin' to clean, an' put in another touch or two. 'It's acomin',
+Jymes,' 'e says, 'by gad if it ayn't.' An' with that 'e goes out. It was
+cruel sudden, w'at come after.
+
+"That night I was lookin' to 'is clothes at the 'ouse when they brought
+'im 'ome. He was conscious, but w'en I ran downstairs for to 'elp lift
+'im up, I knowed 'e was a finished man. After we got 'im into bed 'e
+kept lookin' restless at me and then at Lydy Elling and ajerkin' of 'is
+'and. Finally 'e quite raised it an' shot 'is thumb out toward the wall.
+'He wants water; ring, Jymes,' says Lydy Elling, placid. But I knowed 'e
+was pointin' to the shop.
+
+"'Lydy Treffinger,' says I, bold, 'he's pointin' to the studio. He means
+about the _Marriage_; 'e told me today as 'ow 'e never wanted it sold
+unfinished. Is that it, Sir 'Ugh?'
+
+"He smiled an' nodded slight an' closed 'is eyes. 'Thank you, Jymes,'
+says Lydy Elling, placid. Then 'e opened 'is eyes an' looked long and
+'ard at Lydy Elling.
+
+"'Of course I'll try to do as you'd wish about the picture, 'Ugh, if
+that's w'at's troublin' you,' she says quiet. With that 'e closed 'is
+eyes and 'e never opened 'em. He died unconscious at four that mornin'.
+
+"You see, sir, Lydy Elling was always cruel 'ard on the _Marriage_. From
+the first it went wrong, an' Sir 'Ugh was out of temper pretty constant.
+She came into the studio one day and looked at the picture an 'asked
+'im why 'e didn't throw it up an' quit aworriting 'imself. He answered
+sharp, an' with that she said as 'ow she didn't see w'at there was to
+make such a row about, no'ow. She spoke 'er mind about that picture,
+free; an' Sir 'Ugh swore 'ot an' let a 'andful of brushes fly at 'is
+study, an' Lydy Elling picked up 'er skirts careful an' chill, an'
+drifted out of the studio with 'er eyes calm and 'er chin 'igh. If there
+was one thing Lydy Elling 'ad no comprehension of, it was the usefulness
+of swearin'. So the _Marriage_ was a sore thing between 'em. She is
+uncommon calm, but uncommon bitter, is Lydy Elling. She's never come
+anear the studio since that day she went out 'oldin' up of 'er skirts.
+W'en 'er friends goes over she excuses 'erself along o' the strain.
+Strain--Gawd!" James ground his wrath short in his teeth.
+
+"I'll tell you what I'll do, James, and it's our only hope. I'll see
+Lady Ellen tomorrow. The _Times_ says she returned today. You take the
+picture back to its place, and I'll do what I can for it. If anything is
+done to save it, it must be done through Lady Ellen Treffinger herself,
+that much is clear. I can't think that she fully understands the
+situation. If she did, you know, she really couldn't have any motive--"
+He stopped suddenly. Somehow, in the dusky lamplight, her small,
+close-sealed face came ominously back to him. He rubbed his forehead
+and knitted his brows thoughtfully. After a moment he shook his head
+and went on: "I am positive that nothing can be gained by highhanded
+methods, James. Captain Gresham is one of the most popular men in
+London, and his friends would tear up Treffinger's bones if he were
+annoyed by any scandal of our making--and this scheme you propose would
+inevitably result in scandal. Lady Ellen has, of course, every legal
+right to sell the picture. Treffinger made considerable inroads upon
+her estate, and, as she is about to marry a man without income, she
+doubtless feels that she has a right to replenish her patrimony."
+
+He found James amenable, though doggedly skeptical. He went down into
+the street, called a carriage, and saw James and his burden into it.
+Standing in the doorway, he watched the carriage roll away through
+the drizzling mist, weave in and out among the wet, black vehicles and
+darting cab lights, until it was swallowed up in the glare and confusion
+of the Strand. "It is rather a fine touch of irony," he reflected,
+"that he, who is so out of it, should be the one to really care. Poor
+Treffinger," he murmured as, with a rather spiritless smile, he turned
+back into his hotel. "Poor Treffinger; _sic transit gloria_."
+
+The next afternoon MacMaster kept his promise. When he arrived at Lady
+Mary Percy's house he saw preparations for a function of some sort, but
+he went resolutely up the steps, telling the footman that his business
+was urgent. Lady Ellen came down alone, excusing her sister. She was
+dressed for receiving, and MacMaster had never seen one so beautiful.
+The color in her cheeks sent a softening glow over her small, delicately
+cut features.
+
+MacMaster apologized for his intrusion and came unflinchingly to the
+object of his call. He had come, he said, not only to offer her his
+warmest congratulations, but to express his regret that a great work of
+art was to leave England.
+
+Lady Treffinger looked at him in wide-eyed astonishment. Surely, she
+said, she had been careful to select the best of the pictures for the
+X--- gallery, in accordance with Sir Hugh Treffinger's wishes.
+
+"And did he--pardon me, Lady Treffinger, but in mercy set my mind at
+rest--did he or did he not express any definite wish concerning this one
+picture, which to me seems worth all the others, unfinished as it is?"
+
+Lady Treffinger paled perceptibly, but it was not the pallor of
+confusion. When she spoke there was a sharp tremor in her smooth voice,
+the edge of a resentment that tore her like pain. "I think his man has
+some such impression, but I believe it to be utterly unfounded. I cannot
+find that he ever expressed any wish concerning the disposition of the
+picture to any of his friends. Unfortunately, Sir Hugh was not always
+discreet in his remarks to his servants."
+
+"Captain Gresham, Lady Ellingham, and Miss Ellingham," announced a
+servant, appearing at the door.
+
+There was a murmur in the hall, and MacMaster greeted the smiling
+Captain and his aunt as he bowed himself out.
+
+To all intents and purposes the _Marriage of Phaedra_ was already
+entombed in a vague continent in the Pacific, somewhere on the other
+side of the world.
+
+
+
+
+A Wagner Matinee
+
+I received one morning a letter, written in pale ink on glassy,
+blue-lined notepaper, and bearing the postmark of a little Nebraska
+village. This communication, worn and rubbed, looking as though it had
+been carried for some days in a coat pocket that was none too clean, was
+from my Uncle Howard and informed me that his wife had been left a small
+legacy by a bachelor relative who had recently died, and that it would
+be necessary for her to go to Boston to attend to the settling of
+the estate. He requested me to meet her at the station and render her
+whatever services might be necessary. On examining the date indicated
+as that of her arrival I found it no later than tomorrow. He had
+characteristically delayed writing until, had I been away from home for
+a day, I must have missed the good woman altogether.
+
+The name of my Aunt Georgiana called up not alone her own figure,
+at once pathetic and grotesque, but opened before my feet a gulf of
+recollection so wide and deep that, as the letter dropped from my
+hand, I felt suddenly a stranger to all the present conditions of
+my existence, wholly ill at ease and out of place amid the familiar
+surroundings of my study. I became, in short, the gangling farm boy
+my aunt had known, scourged with chilblains and bashfulness, my hands
+cracked and sore from the corn husking. I felt the knuckles of my thumb
+tentatively, as though they were raw again. I sat again before her
+parlor organ, fumbling the scales with my stiff, red hands, while she,
+beside me, made canvas mittens for the huskers.
+
+The next morning, after preparing my landlady somewhat, I set out for
+the station. When the train arrived I had some difficulty in finding my
+aunt. She was the last of the passengers to alight, and it was not until
+I got her into the carriage that she seemed really to recognize me. She
+had come all the way in a day coach; her linen duster had become black
+with soot, and her black bonnet gray with dust, during the journey. When
+we arrived at my boardinghouse the landlady put her to bed at once and I
+did not see her again until the next morning.
+
+Whatever shock Mrs. Springer experienced at my aunt's appearance she
+considerately concealed. As for myself, I saw my aunt's misshapen figure
+with that feeling of awe and respect with which we behold explorers who
+have left their ears and fingers north of Franz Josef Land, or their
+health somewhere along the Upper Congo. My Aunt Georgiana had been a
+music teacher at the Boston Conservatory, somewhere back in the latter
+sixties. One summer, while visiting in the little village among the
+Green Mountains where her ancestors had dwelt for generations, she
+had kindled the callow fancy of the most idle and shiftless of all the
+village lads, and had conceived for this Howard Carpenter one of
+those extravagant passions which a handsome country boy of twenty-one
+sometimes inspires in an angular, spectacled woman of thirty. When she
+returned to her duties in Boston, Howard followed her, and the upshot of
+this inexplicable infatuation was that she eloped with him, eluding the
+reproaches of her family and the criticisms of her friends by going with
+him to the Nebraska frontier. Carpenter, who, of course, had no money,
+had taken a homestead in Red Willow County, fifty miles from the
+railroad. There they had measured off their quarter section themselves
+by driving across the prairie in a wagon, to the wheel of which they had
+tied a red cotton handkerchief, and counting off its revolutions. They
+built a dugout in the red hillside, one of those cave dwellings whose
+inmates so often reverted to primitive conditions. Their water they got
+from the lagoons where the buffalo drank, and their slender stock of
+provisions was always at the mercy of bands of roving Indians. For
+thirty years my aunt had not been further than fifty miles from the
+homestead.
+
+But Mrs. Springer knew nothing of all this, and must have been
+considerably shocked at what was left of my kinswoman. Beneath the
+soiled linen duster which, on her arrival, was the most conspicuous
+feature of her costume, she wore a black stuff dress, whose
+ornamentation showed that she had surrendered herself unquestioningly
+into the hands of a country dressmaker. My poor aunt's figure, however,
+would have presented astonishing difficulties to any dressmaker.
+Originally stooped, her shoulders were now almost bent together over her
+sunken chest. She wore no stays, and her gown, which trailed unevenly
+behind, rose in a sort of peak over her abdomen. She wore ill-fitting
+false teeth, and her skin was as yellow as a Mongolian's from constant
+exposure to a pitiless wind and to the alkaline water which hardens the
+most transparent cuticle into a sort of flexible leather.
+
+I owed to this woman most of the good that ever came my way in my
+boyhood, and had a reverential affection for her. During the years
+when I was riding herd for my uncle, my aunt, after cooking the three
+meals--the first of which was ready at six o'clock in the morning-and
+putting the six children to bed, would often stand until midnight at
+her ironing board, with me at the kitchen table beside her, hearing me
+recite Latin declensions and conjugations, gently shaking me when my
+drowsy head sank down over a page of irregular verbs. It was to her, at
+her ironing or mending, that I read my first Shakespeare', and her old
+textbook on mythology was the first that ever came into my empty hands.
+She taught me my scales and exercises, too--on the little parlor organ,
+which her husband had bought her after fifteen years, during which she
+had not so much as seen any instrument, but an accordion that belonged
+to one of the Norwegian farmhands. She would sit beside me by the hour,
+darning and counting while I struggled with the "Joyous Farmer," but she
+seldom talked to me about music, and I understood why. She was a pious
+woman; she had the consolations of religion and, to her at least, her
+martyrdom was not wholly sordid. Once when I had been doggedly beating
+out some easy passages from an old score of _Euryanthe_ I had found
+among her music books, she came up to me and, putting her hands over my
+eyes, gently drew my head back upon her shoulder, saying tremulously,
+"Don't love it so well, Clark, or it may be taken from you. Oh, dear
+boy, pray that whatever your sacrifice may be, it be not that."
+
+When my aunt appeared on the morning after her arrival she was still in
+a semi-somnambulant state. She seemed not to realize that she was in the
+city where she had spent her youth, the place longed for hungrily half
+a lifetime. She had been so wretchedly train-sick throughout the journey
+that she had no recollection of anything but her discomfort, and, to all
+intents and purposes, there were but a few hours of nightmare between
+the farm in Red Willow County and my study on Newbury Street. I had
+planned a little pleasure for her that afternoon, to repay her for some
+of the glorious moments she had given me when we used to milk together
+in the straw-thatched cowshed and she, because I was more than usually
+tired, or because her husband had spoken sharply to me, would tell me
+of the splendid performance of the _Huguenots_ she had seen in Paris,
+in her youth. At two o'clock the Symphony Orchestra was to give a Wagner
+program, and I intended to take my aunt; though, as I conversed with her
+I grew doubtful about her enjoyment of it. Indeed, for her own sake,
+I could only wish her taste for such things quite dead, and the
+long struggle mercifully ended at last. I suggested our visiting the
+Conservatory and the Common before lunch, but she seemed altogether too
+timid to wish to venture out. She questioned me absently about various
+changes in the city, but she was chiefly concerned that she had
+forgotten to leave instructions about feeding half-skimmed milk to
+a certain weakling calf, "old Maggie's calf, you know, Clark," she
+explained, evidently having forgotten how long I had been away. She was
+further troubled because she had neglected to tell her daughter about
+the freshly opened kit of mackerel in the cellar, which would spoil if
+it were not used directly.
+
+I asked her whether she had ever heard any of the Wagnerian operas and
+found that she had not, though she was perfectly familiar with their
+respective situations, and had once possessed the piano score of _The
+Flying Dutchman_. I began to think it would have been best to get her
+back to Red Willow County without waking her, and regretted having
+suggested the concert.
+
+From the time we entered the concert hall, however, she was a trifle
+less passive and inert, and for the first time seemed to perceive her
+surroundings. I had felt some trepidation lest she might become aware
+of the absurdities of her attire, or might experience some painful
+embarrassment at stepping suddenly into the world to which she had been
+dead for a quarter of a century. But, again, I found how superficially
+I had judged her. She sat looking about her with eyes as impersonal,
+almost as stony, as those with which the granite Rameses in a
+museum watches the froth and fret that ebbs and flows about his
+pedestal-separated from it by the lonely stretch of centuries. I have
+seen this same aloofness in old miners who drift into the Brown Hotel at
+Denver, their pockets full of bullion, their linen soiled, their haggard
+faces unshaven; standing in the thronged corridors as solitary as though
+they were still in a frozen camp on the Yukon, conscious that certain
+experiences have isolated them from their fellows by a gulf no
+haberdasher could bridge.
+
+We sat at the extreme left of the first balcony, facing the arch of our
+own and the balcony above us, veritable hanging gardens, brilliant as
+tulip beds. The matinee audience was made up chiefly of women. One
+lost the contour of faces and figures--indeed, any effect of line
+whatever--and there was only the color of bodices past counting, the
+shimmer of fabrics soft and firm, silky and sheer: red, mauve, pink,
+blue, lilac, purple, ecru, rose, yellow, cream, and white, all the
+colors that an impressionist finds in a sunlit landscape, with here and
+there the dead shadow of a frock coat. My Aunt Georgiana regarded them
+as though they had been so many daubs of tube-paint on a palette.
+
+When the musicians came out and took their places, she gave a little
+stir of anticipation and looked with quickening interest down over the
+rail at that invariable grouping, perhaps the first wholly familiar
+thing that had greeted her eye since she had left old Maggie and her
+weakling calf. I could feel how all those details sank into her soul,
+for I had not forgotten how they had sunk into mine when I came fresh
+from plowing forever and forever between green aisles of corn, where, as
+in a treadmill, one might walk from daybreak to dusk without perceiving
+a shadow of change. The clean profiles of the musicians, the gloss of
+their linen, the dull black of their coats, the beloved shapes of the
+instruments, the patches of yellow light thrown by the green-shaded
+lamps on the smooth, varnished bellies of the cellos and the bass viols
+in the rear, the restless, wind-tossed forest of fiddle necks and bows--I
+recalled how, in the first orchestra I had ever heard, those long bow
+strokes seemed to draw the heart out of me, as a conjurer's stick reels
+out yards of paper ribbon from a hat.
+
+The first number was the _Tannhauser_ overture. When the horns drew out
+the first strain of the Pilgrim's chorus my Aunt Georgiana clutched
+my coat sleeve. Then it was I first realized that for her this broke a
+silence of thirty years; the inconceivable silence of the plains. With
+the battle between the two motives, with the frenzy of the Venusberg
+theme and its ripping of strings, there came to me an overwhelming sense
+of the waste and wear we are so powerless to combat; and I saw again the
+tall, naked house on the prairie, black and grim as a wooden fortress;
+the black pond where I had learned to swim, its margin pitted with
+sun-dried cattle tracks; the rain-gullied clay banks about the naked
+house, the four dwarf ash seedlings where the dishcloths were always
+hung to dry before the kitchen door. The world there was the flat world
+of the ancients; to the east, a cornfield that stretched to daybreak;
+to the west, a corral that reached to sunset; between, the conquests of
+peace, dearer bought than those of war.
+
+The overture closed; my aunt released my coat sleeve, but she said
+nothing. She sat staring at the orchestra through a dullness of thirty
+years, through the films made little by little by each of the three
+hundred and sixty-five days in every one of them. What, I wondered, did
+she get from it? She had been a good pianist in her day I knew, and her
+musical education had been broader than that of most music teachers of
+a quarter of a century ago. She had often told me of Mozart's operas and
+Meyerbeer's, and I could remember hearing her sing, years ago, certain
+melodies of Verdi's. When I had fallen ill with a fever in her house she
+used to sit by my cot in the evening--when the cool, night wind blew
+in through the faded mosquito netting tacked over the window, and I lay
+watching a certain bright star that burned red above the cornfield--and
+sing "Home to our mountains, O, let us return!" in a way fit to break
+the heart of a Vermont boy near dead of homesickness already.
+
+I watched her closely through the prelude to _Tristan and Isolde_,
+trying vainly to conjecture what that seething turmoil of strings and
+winds might mean to her, but she sat mutely staring at the violin bows
+that drove obliquely downward, like the pelting streaks of rain in a
+summer shower. Had this music any message for her? Had she enough left
+to at all comprehend this power which had kindled the world since she
+had left it? I was in a fever of curiosity, but Aunt Georgiana sat
+silent upon her peak in Darien. She preserved this utter immobility
+throughout the number from _The Flying Dutchman_, though her fingers
+worked mechanically upon her black dress, as though, of themselves, they
+were recalling the piano score they had once played. Poor old hands!
+They had been stretched and twisted into mere tentacles to hold and
+lift and knead with; the palms unduly swollen, the fingers bent and
+knotted--on one of them a thin, worn band that had once been a wedding
+ring. As I pressed and gently quieted one of those groping hands I
+remembered with quivering eyelids their services for me in other days.
+
+Soon after the tenor began the "Prize Song," I heard a quick drawn
+breath and turned to my aunt. Her eyes were closed, but the tears were
+glistening on her cheeks, and I think, in a moment more, they were in
+my eyes as well. It never really died, then--the soul that can suffer so
+excruciatingly and so interminably; it withers to the outward eye only;
+like that strange moss which can lie on a dusty shelf half a century and
+yet, if placed in water, grows green again. She wept so throughout the
+development and elaboration of the melody.
+
+During the intermission before the second half of the concert, I
+questioned my aunt and found that the "Prize Song" was not new to her.
+Some years before there had drifted to the farm in Red Willow County a
+young German, a tramp cowpuncher, who had sung the chorus at Bayreuth,
+when he was a boy, along with the other peasant boys and girls. Of a
+Sunday morning he used to sit on his gingham-sheeted bed in the hands'
+bedroom which opened off the kitchen, cleaning the leather of his boots
+and saddle, singing the "Prize Song," while my aunt went about her work
+in the kitchen. She had hovered about him until she had prevailed upon
+him to join the country church, though his sole fitness for this step,
+insofar as I could gather, lay in his boyish face and his possession of
+this divine melody. Shortly afterward he had gone to town on the Fourth
+of July, been drunk for several days, lost his money at a faro table,
+ridden a saddled Texan steer on a bet, and disappeared with a fractured
+collarbone. All this my aunt told me huskily, wanderingly, as though she
+were talking in the weak lapses of illness.
+
+"Well, we have come to better things than the old _Trovatore_ at any
+rate, Aunt Georgie?" I queried, with a well-meant effort at jocularity.
+
+Her lip quivered and she hastily put her handkerchief up to her mouth.
+From behind it she murmured, "And you have been hearing this ever
+since you left me, Clark?" Her question was the gentlest and saddest of
+reproaches.
+
+The second half of the program consisted of four numbers from the
+_Ring_, and closed with Siegfried's funeral march. My aunt wept quietly,
+but almost continuously, as a shallow vessel overflows in a rainstorm.
+From time to time her dim eyes looked up at the lights which studded the
+ceiling, burning softly under their dull glass globes; doubtless they
+were stars in truth to her. I was still perplexed as to what measure of
+musical comprehension was left to her, she who had heard nothing but
+the singing of gospel hymns at Methodist services in the square frame
+schoolhouse on Section Thirteen for so many years. I was wholly unable
+to gauge how much of it had been dissolved in soapsuds, or worked into
+bread, or milked into the bottom of a pail.
+
+The deluge of sound poured on and on; I never knew what she found in the
+shining current of it; I never knew how far it bore her, or past what
+happy islands. From the trembling of her face I could well believe that
+before the last numbers she had been carried out where the myriad graves
+are, into the gray, nameless burying grounds of the sea; or into some
+world of death vaster yet, where, from the beginning of the world, hope
+has lain down with hope and dream with dream and, renouncing, slept.
+
+The concert was over; the people filed out of the hall chattering
+and laughing, glad to relax and find the living level again, but my
+kinswoman made no effort to rise. The harpist slipped its green felt
+cover over his instrument; the flute players shook the water from their
+mouthpieces; the men of the orchestra went out one by one, leaving the
+stage to the chairs and music stands, empty as a winter cornfield.
+
+I spoke to my aunt. She burst into tears and sobbed pleadingly. "I don't
+want to go, Clark, I don't want to go!"
+
+I understood. For her, just outside the door of the concert hall, lay
+the black pond with the cattle-tracked bluffs; the tall, unpainted
+house, with weather-curled boards; naked as a tower, the crook-backed
+ash seedlings where the dishcloths hung to dry; the gaunt, molting
+turkeys picking up refuse about the kitchen door.
+
+
+
+
+Paul's Case
+
+_A Study in Temperament_
+
+It was Paul's afternoon to appear before the faculty of the Pittsburgh
+High School to account for his various misdemeanors. He had been
+suspended a week ago, and his father had called at the Principal's
+office and confessed his perplexity about his son. Paul entered the
+faculty room suave and smiling. His clothes were a trifle outgrown, and
+the tan velvet on the collar of his open overcoat was frayed and worn;
+but for all that there was something of the dandy about him, and he
+wore an opal pin in his neatly knotted black four-in-hand, and a red
+carnation in his buttonhole. This latter adornment the faculty somehow
+felt was not properly significant of the contrite spirit befitting a boy
+under the ban of suspension.
+
+Paul was tall for his age and very thin, with high, cramped shoulders
+and a narrow chest. His eyes were remarkable for a certain hysterical
+brilliancy, and he continually used them in a conscious, theatrical sort
+of way, peculiarly offensive in a boy. The pupils were abnormally large,
+as though he were addicted to belladonna, but there was a glassy glitter
+about them which that drug does not produce.
+
+When questioned by the Principal as to why he was there Paul stated,
+politely enough, that he wanted to come back to school. This was a lie,
+but Paul was quite accustomed to lying; found it, indeed, indispensable
+for overcoming friction. His teachers were asked to state their
+respective charges against him, which they did with such a rancor and
+aggrievedness as evinced that this was not a usual case, Disorder and
+impertinence were among the offenses named, yet each of his instructors
+felt that it was scarcely possible to put into words the real cause of
+the trouble, which lay in a sort of hysterically defiant manner of the
+boy's; in the contempt which they all knew he felt for them, and which
+he seemingly made not the least effort to conceal. Once, when he had
+been making a synopsis of a paragraph at the blackboard, his English
+teacher had stepped to his side and attempted to guide his hand. Paul
+had started back with a shudder and thrust his hands violently behind
+him. The astonished woman could scarcely have been more hurt and
+embarrassed had he struck at her. The insult was so involuntary and
+definitely personal as to be unforgettable. In one way and another he
+had made all his teachers, men and women alike, conscious of the same
+feeling of physical aversion. In one class he habitually sat with his
+hand shading his eyes; in another he always looked out of the window
+during the recitation; in another he made a running commentary on the
+lecture, with humorous intention.
+
+His teachers felt this afternoon that his whole attitude was symbolized
+by his shrug and his flippantly red carnation flower, and they fell
+upon him without mercy, his English teacher leading the pack. He stood
+through it smiling, his pale lips parted over his white teeth. (His lips
+were continually twitching, and he had a habit of raising his eyebrows
+that was contemptuous and irritating to the last degree.) Older boys
+than Paul had broken down and shed tears under that baptism of fire, but
+his set smile did not once desert him, and his only sign of discomfort
+was the nervous trembling of the fingers that toyed with the buttons of
+his overcoat, and an occasional jerking of the other hand that held his
+hat. Paul was always smiling, always glancing about him, seeming to feel
+that people might be watching him and trying to detect something.
+This conscious expression, since it was as far as possible from boyish
+mirthfulness, was usually attributed to insolence or "smartness."
+
+As the inquisition proceeded one of his instructors repeated an
+impertinent remark of the boy's, and the Principal asked him whether he
+thought that a courteous speech to have made a woman. Paul shrugged his
+shoulders slightly and his eyebrows twitched.
+
+"I don't know," he replied. "I didn't mean to be polite or impolite,
+either. I guess it's a sort of way I have of saying things regardless."
+
+The Principal, who was a sympathetic man, asked him whether he didn't
+think that a way it would be well to get rid of. Paul grinned and said
+he guessed so. When he was told that he could go he bowed gracefully and
+went out. His bow was but a repetition of the scandalous red carnation.
+
+His teachers were in despair, and his drawing master voiced the feeling
+of them all when he declared there was something about the boy which
+none of them understood. He added: "I don't really believe that smile of
+his comes altogether from insolence; there's something sort of haunted
+about it. The boy is not strong, for one thing. I happen to know that he
+was born in Colorado, only a few months before his mother died out there
+of a long illness. There is something wrong about the fellow."
+
+The drawing master had come to realize that, in looking at Paul, one
+saw only his white teeth and the forced animation of his eyes. One warm
+afternoon the boy had gone to sleep at his drawing board, and his master
+had noted with amazement what a white, blue-veined face it was; drawn
+and wrinkled like an old man's about the eyes, the lips twitching even
+in his sleep, and stiff with a nervous tension that drew them back from
+his teeth.
+
+His teachers left the building dissatisfied and unhappy; humiliated to
+have felt so vindictive toward a mere boy, to have uttered this feeling
+in cutting terms, and to have set each other on, as it were, in the
+gruesome game of intemperate reproach. Some of them remembered having
+seen a miserable street cat set at bay by a ring of tormentors.
+
+As for Paul, he ran down the hill whistling the "Soldiers' Chorus" from
+_Faust_, looking wildly behind him now and then to see whether some of
+his teachers were not there to writhe under his lightheartedness. As it
+was now late in the afternoon and Paul was on duty that evening as usher
+at Carnegie Hall, he decided that he would not go home to supper. When
+he reached the concert hall the doors were not yet open and, as it was
+chilly outside, he decided to go up into the picture gallery--always
+deserted at this hour--where there were some of Raffelli's gay studies
+of Paris streets and an airy blue Venetian scene or two that always
+exhilarated him. He was delighted to find no one in the gallery but the
+old guard, who sat in one corner, a newspaper on his knee, a black patch
+over one eye and the other closed. Paul possessed himself of the peace
+and walked confidently up and down, whistling under his breath. After a
+while he sat down before a blue Rico and lost himself. When he bethought
+him to look at his watch, it was after seven o'clock, and he rose with
+a start and ran downstairs, making a face at Augustus, peering out from
+the cast room, and an evil gesture at the Venus de Milo as he passed her
+on the stairway.
+
+When Paul reached the ushers' dressing room half a dozen boys were there
+already, and he began excitedly to tumble into his uniform. It was one
+of the few that at all approached fitting, and Paul thought it very
+becoming--though he knew that the tight, straight coat accentuated his
+narrow chest, about which he was exceedingly sensitive. He was always
+considerably excited while he dressed, twanging all over to the tuning
+of the strings and the preliminary flourishes of the horns in the music
+room; but tonight he seemed quite beside himself, and he teased and
+plagued the boys until, telling him that he was crazy, they put him down
+on the floor and sat on him.
+
+Somewhat calmed by his suppression, Paul dashed out to the front of
+the house to seat the early comers. He was a model usher; gracious and
+smiling he ran up and down the aisles; nothing was too much trouble
+for him; he carried messages and brought programs as though it were his
+greatest pleasure in life, and all the people in his section thought
+him a charming boy, feeling that he remembered and admired them. As
+the house filled, he grew more and more vivacious and animated, and the
+color came to his cheeks and lips. It was very much as though this were
+a great reception and Paul were the host. Just as the musicians came out
+to take their places, his English teacher arrived with checks for the
+seats which a prominent manufacturer had taken for the season. She
+betrayed some embarrassment when she handed Paul the tickets, and a
+hauteur which subsequently made her feel very foolish. Paul was startled
+for a moment, and had the feeling of wanting to put her out; what
+business had she here among all these fine people and gay colors? He
+looked her over and decided that she was not appropriately dressed and
+must be a fool to sit downstairs in such togs. The tickets had probably
+been sent her out of kindness, he reflected as he put down a seat for
+her, and she had about as much right to sit there as he had.
+
+When the symphony began Paul sank into one of the rear seats with a long
+sigh of relief, and lost himself as he had done before the Rico. It was
+not that symphonies, as such, meant anything in particular to Paul,
+but the first sigh of the instruments seemed to free some hilarious and
+potent spirit within him; something that struggled there like the genie
+in the bottle found by the Arab fisherman. He felt a sudden zest of
+life; the lights danced before his eyes and the concert hall blazed into
+unimaginable splendor. When the soprano soloist came on Paul forgot even
+the nastiness of his teacher's being there and gave himself up to
+the peculiar stimulus such personages always had for him. The soloist
+chanced to be a German woman, by no means in her first youth, and the
+mother of many children; but she wore an elaborate gown and a tiara, and
+above all she had that indefinable air of achievement, that world-shine
+upon her, which, in Paul's eyes, made her a veritable queen of Romance.
+
+After a concert was over Paul was always irritable and wretched until he
+got to sleep, and tonight he was even more than usually restless. He had
+the feeling of not being able to let down, of its being impossible to
+give up this delicious excitement which was the only thing that could
+be called living at all. During the last number he withdrew and, after
+hastily changing his clothes in the dressing room, slipped out to the
+side door where the soprano's carriage stood. Here he began pacing
+rapidly up and down the walk, waiting to see her come out.
+
+Over yonder, the Schenley, in its vacant stretch, loomed big and square
+through the fine rain, the windows of its twelve stories glowing like
+those of a lighted cardboard house under a Christmas tree. All the
+actors and singers of the better class stayed there when they were in
+the city, and a number of the big manufacturers of the place lived there
+in the winter. Paul had often hung about the hotel, watching the people
+go in and out, longing to enter and leave schoolmasters and dull care
+behind him forever.
+
+At last the singer came out, accompanied by the conductor, who
+helped her into her carriage and closed the door with a cordial _auf
+wiedersehen_ which set Paul to wondering whether she were not an old
+sweetheart of his. Paul followed the carriage over to the hotel, walking
+so rapidly as not to be far from the entrance when the singer alighted,
+and disappeared behind the swinging glass doors that were opened by a
+Negro in a tall hat and a long coat. In the moment that the door was
+ajar it seemed to Paul that he, too, entered. He seemed to feel himself
+go after her up the steps, into the warm, lighted building, into an
+exotic, tropical world of shiny, glistening surfaces and basking ease.
+He reflected upon the mysterious dishes that were brought into the
+dining room, the green bottles in buckets of ice, as he had seen them in
+the supper party pictures of the _Sunday World_ supplement. A quick
+gust of wind brought the rain down with sudden vehemence, and Paul was
+startled to find that he was still outside in the slush of the gravel
+driveway; that his boots were letting in the water and his scanty
+overcoat was clinging wet about him; that the lights in front of the
+concert hall were out and that the rain was driving in sheets between
+him and the orange glow of the windows above him. There it was, what
+he wanted--tangibly before him, like the fairy world of a Christmas
+pantomime--but mocking spirits stood guard at the doors, and, as the
+rain beat in his face, Paul wondered whether he were destined always to
+shiver in the black night outside, looking up at it.
+
+He turned and walked reluctantly toward the car tracks. The end had to
+come sometime; his father in his nightclothes at the top of the stairs,
+explanations that did not explain, hastily improvised fictions that
+were forever tripping him up, his upstairs room and its horrible yellow
+wallpaper, the creaking bureau with the greasy plush collarbox, and
+over his painted wooden bed the pictures of George Washington and John
+Calvin, and the framed motto, "Feed my Lambs," which had been worked in
+red worsted by his mother.
+
+Half an hour later Paul alighted from his car and went slowly down
+one of the side streets off the main thoroughfare. It was a highly
+respectable street, where all the houses were exactly alike, and
+where businessmen of moderate means begot and reared large families of
+children, all of whom went to Sabbath school and learned the shorter
+catechism, and were interested in arithmetic; all of whom were as
+exactly alike as their homes, and of a piece with the monotony in which
+they lived. Paul never went up Cordelia Street without a shudder of
+loathing. His home was next to the house of the Cumberland minister. He
+approached it tonight with the nerveless sense of defeat, the hopeless
+feeling of sinking back forever into ugliness and commonness that he had
+always had when he came home. The moment he turned into Cordelia Street
+he felt the waters close above his head. After each of these orgies
+of living he experienced all the physical depression which follows a
+debauch; the loathing of respectable beds, of common food, of a house
+penetrated by kitchen odors; a shuddering repulsion for the flavorless,
+colorless mass of everyday existence; a morbid desire for cool things
+and soft lights and fresh flowers.
+
+The nearer he approached the house, the more absolutely unequal Paul
+felt to the sight of it all: his ugly sleeping chamber; the cold
+bathroom with the grimy zinc tub, the cracked mirror, the dripping
+spiggots; his father, at the top of the stairs, his hairy legs sticking
+out from his nightshirt, his feet thrust into carpet slippers. He was
+so much later than usual that there would certainly be inquiries and
+reproaches. Paul stopped short before the door. He felt that he could
+not be accosted by his father tonight; that he could not toss again on
+that miserable bed. He would not go in. He would tell his father that he
+had no carfare and it was raining so hard he had gone home with one of
+the boys and stayed all night.
+
+Meanwhile, he was wet and cold. He went around to the back of the
+house and tried one of the basement windows, found it open, raised it
+cautiously, and scrambled down the cellar wall to the floor. There he
+stood, holding his breath, terrified by the noise he had made, but the
+floor above him was silent, and there was no creak on the stairs. He
+found a soapbox, and carried it over to the soft ring of light that
+streamed from the furnace door, and sat down. He was horribly afraid of
+rats, so he did not try to sleep, but sat looking distrustfully at the
+dark, still terrified lest he might have awakened his father. In such
+reactions, after one of the experiences which made days and nights out
+of the dreary blanks of the calendar, when his senses were deadened,
+Paul's head was always singularly clear. Suppose his father had heard
+him getting in at the window and had come down and shot him for a
+burglar? Then, again, suppose his father had come down, pistol in hand,
+and he had cried out in time to save himself, and his father had been
+horrified to think how nearly he had killed him? Then, again, suppose
+a day should come when his father would remember that night, and
+wish there had been no warning cry to stay his hand? With this last
+supposition Paul entertained himself until daybreak.
+
+The following Sunday was fine; the sodden November chill was broken
+by the last flash of autumnal summer. In the morning Paul had to go to
+church and Sabbath school, as always. On seasonable Sunday afternoons
+the burghers of Cordelia Street always sat out on their front stoops and
+talked to their neighbors on the next stoop, or called to those across
+the street in neighborly fashion. The men usually sat on gay cushions
+placed upon the steps that led down to the sidewalk, while the women, in
+their Sunday "waists," sat in rockers on the cramped porches, pretending
+to be greatly at their ease. The children played in the streets; there
+were so many of them that the place resembled the recreation grounds of
+a kindergarten. The men on the steps--all in their shirt sleeves,
+their vests unbuttoned--sat with their legs well apart, their stomachs
+comfortably protruding, and talked of the prices of things, or told
+anecdotes of the sagacity of their various chiefs and overlords. They
+occasionally looked over the multitude of squabbling children, listened
+affectionately to their high-pitched, nasal voices, smiling to see their
+own proclivities reproduced in their offspring, and interspersed their
+legends of the iron kings with remarks about their sons' progress at
+school, their grades in arithmetic, and the amounts they had saved in
+their toy banks.
+
+On this last Sunday of November Paul sat all the afternoon on the lowest
+step of his stoop, staring into the street, while his sisters, in their
+rockers, were talking to the minister's daughters next door about how
+many shirtwaists they had made in the last week, and how many waffles
+someone had eaten at the last church supper. When the weather was warm,
+and his father was in a particularly jovial frame of mind, the girls
+made lemonade, which was always brought out in a red-glass pitcher,
+ornamented with forget-me-nots in blue enamel. This the girls thought
+very fine, and the neighbors always joked about the suspicious color of
+the pitcher.
+
+Today Paul's father sat on the top step, talking to a young man who
+shifted a restless baby from knee to knee. He happened to be the young
+man who was daily held up to Paul as a model, and after whom it was his
+father's dearest hope that he would pattern. This young man was of a
+ruddy complexion, with a compressed, red mouth, and faded, nearsighted
+eyes, over which he wore thick spectacles, with gold bows that curved
+about his ears. He was clerk to one of the magnates of a great steel
+corporation, and was looked upon in Cordelia Street as a young man with
+a future. There was a story that, some five years ago--he was now barely
+twenty-six--he had been a trifle dissipated, but in order to curb his
+appetites and save the loss of time and strength that a sowing of
+wild oats might have entailed, he had taken his chief's advice, oft
+reiterated to his employees, and at twenty-one had married the first
+woman whom he could persuade to share his fortunes. She happened to
+be an angular schoolmistress, much older than he, who also wore thick
+glasses, and who had now borne him four children, all nearsighted, like
+herself.
+
+The young man was relating how his chief, now cruising in the
+Mediterranean, kept in touch with all the details of the business,
+arranging his office hours on his yacht just as though he were at home,
+and "knocking off work enough to keep two stenographers busy." His
+father told, in turn, the plan his corporation was considering, of
+putting in an electric railway plant in Cairo. Paul snapped his teeth;
+he had an awful apprehension that they might spoil it all before he got
+there. Yet he rather liked to hear these legends of the iron kings that
+were told and retold on Sundays and holidays; these stories of palaces
+in Venice, yachts on the Mediterranean, and high play at Monte Carlo
+appealed to his fancy, and he was interested in the triumphs of these
+cash boys who had become famous, though he had no mind for the cash-boy
+stage.
+
+After supper was over and he had helped to dry the dishes, Paul
+nervously asked his father whether he could go to George's to get some
+help in his geometry, and still more nervously asked for carfare. This
+latter request he had to repeat, as his father, on principle, did not
+like to hear requests for money, whether much or little. He asked Paul
+whether he could not go to some boy who lived nearer, and told him that
+he ought not to leave his schoolwork until Sunday; but he gave him the
+dime. He was not a poor man, but he had a worthy ambition to come up
+in the world. His only reason for allowing Paul to usher was that he
+thought a boy ought to be earning a little.
+
+Paul bounded upstairs, scrubbed the greasy odor of the dishwater from
+his hands with the ill-smelling soap he hated, and then shook over his
+fingers a few drops of violet water from the bottle he kept hidden in
+his drawer. He left the house with his geometry conspicuously under his
+arm, and the moment he got out of Cordelia Street and boarded a downtown
+car, he shook off the lethargy of two deadening days and began to live
+again.
+
+The leading juvenile of the permanent stock company which played at one
+of the downtown theaters was an acquaintance of Paul's, and the boy
+had been invited to drop in at the Sunday-night rehearsals whenever
+he could. For more than a year Paul had spent every available moment
+loitering about Charley Edwards's dressing room. He had won a place
+among Edwards's following not only because the young actor, who could
+not afford to employ a dresser, often found him useful, but because he
+recognized in Paul something akin to what churchmen term "vocation."
+
+It was at the theater and at Carnegie Hall that Paul really lived; the
+rest was but a sleep and a forgetting. This was Paul's fairy tale,
+and it had for him all the allurement of a secret love. The moment he
+inhaled the gassy, painty, dusty odor behind the scenes, he breathed
+like a prisoner set free, and felt within him the possibility of doing
+or saying splendid, brilliant, poetic things. The moment the cracked
+orchestra beat out the overture from _Martha_, or jerked at the serenade
+from _Rigoletto_, all stupid and ugly things slid from him, and his
+senses were deliciously, yet delicately fired.
+
+Perhaps it was because, in Paul's world, the natural nearly always wore
+the guise of ugliness, that a certain element of artificiality seemed to
+him necessary in beauty. Perhaps it was because his experience of
+life elsewhere was so full of Sabbath-school picnics, petty economies,
+wholesome advice as to how to succeed in life, and the inescapable odors
+of cooking, that he found this existence so alluring, these smartly clad
+men and women so attractive, that he was so moved by these starry apple
+orchards that bloomed perennially under the limelight.
+
+It would be difficult to put it strongly enough how convincingly
+the stage entrance of that theater was for Paul the actual portal of
+Romance. Certainly none of the company ever suspected it, least of all
+Charley Edwards. It was very like the old stories that used to float
+about London of fabulously rich Jews, who had subterranean halls there,
+with palms, and fountains, and soft lamps and richly appareled women
+who never saw the disenchanting light of London day. So, in the midst of
+that smoke-palled city, enamored of figures and grimy toil, Paul had
+his secret temple, his wishing carpet, his bit of blue-and-white
+Mediterranean shore bathed in perpetual sunshine.
+
+Several of Paul's teachers had a theory that his imagination had been
+perverted by garish fiction, but the truth was that he scarcely ever
+read at all. The books at home were not such as would either tempt or
+corrupt a youthful mind, and as for reading the novels that some of his
+friends urged upon him--well, he got what he wanted much more quickly
+from music; any sort of music, from an orchestra to a barrel organ.
+He needed only the spark, the indescribable thrill that made his
+imagination master of his senses, and he could make plots and pictures
+enough of his own. It was equally true that he was not stagestruck--not,
+at any rate, in the usual acceptation of that expression. He had no
+desire to become an actor, any more than he had to become a musician. He
+felt no necessity to do any of these things; what he wanted was to see,
+to be in the atmosphere, float on the wave of it, to be carried out,
+blue league after blue league, away from everything.
+
+After a night behind the scenes Paul found the schoolroom more than ever
+repulsive; the bare floors and naked walls; the prosy men who never wore
+frock coats, or violets in their buttonholes; the women with their dull
+gowns, shrill voices, and pitiful seriousness about prepositions that
+govern the dative. He could not bear to have the other pupils think, for
+a moment, that he took these people seriously; he must convey to them
+that he considered it all trivial, and was there only by way of a jest,
+anyway. He had autographed pictures of all the members of the stock
+company which he showed his classmates, telling them the most incredible
+stories of his familiarity with these people, of his acquaintance with
+the soloists who came to Carnegie Hall, his suppers with them and the
+flowers he sent them. When these stories lost their effect, and his
+audience grew listless, he became desperate and would bid all the boys
+good-by, announcing that he was going to travel for a while; going to
+Naples, to Venice, to Egypt. Then, next Monday, he would slip back,
+conscious and nervously smiling; his sister was ill, and he should have
+to defer his voyage until spring.
+
+Matters went steadily worse with Paul at school. In the itch to let his
+instructors know how heartily he despised them and their homilies, and
+how thoroughly he was appreciated elsewhere, he mentioned once or twice
+that he had no time to fool with theorems; adding--with a twitch of
+the eyebrows and a touch of that nervous bravado which so perplexed
+them--that he was helping the people down at the stock company; they
+were old friends of his.
+
+The upshot of the matter was that the Principal went to Paul's father,
+and Paul was taken out of school and put to work. The manager at
+Carnegie Hall was told to get another usher in his stead; the doorkeeper
+at the theater was warned not to admit him to the house; and Charley
+Edwards remorsefully promised the boy's father not to see him again.
+
+The members of the stock company were vastly amused when some of Paul's
+stories reached them--especially the women. They were hardworking women,
+most of them supporting indigent husbands or brothers, and they laughed
+rather bitterly at having stirred the boy to such fervid and florid
+inventions. They agreed with the faculty and with his father that Paul's
+was a bad case.
+
+
+The eastbound train was plowing through a January snowstorm; the dull
+dawn was beginning to show gray when the engine whistled a mile out of
+Newark. Paul started up from the seat where he had lain curled in uneasy
+slumber, rubbed the breath-misted window glass with his hand, and peered
+out. The snow was whirling in curling eddies above the white bottom
+lands, and the drifts lay already deep in the fields and along the
+fences, while here and there the long dead grass and dried weed stalks
+protruded black above it. Lights shone from the scattered houses, and a
+gang of laborers who stood beside the track waved their lanterns.
+
+Paul had slept very little, and he felt grimy and uncomfortable. He
+had made the all-night journey in a day coach, partly because he was
+ashamed, dressed as he was, to go into a Pullman, and partly because he
+was afraid of being seen there by some Pittsburgh businessman, who might
+have noticed him in Denny & Carson's office. When the whistle awoke him,
+he clutched quickly at his breast pocket, glancing about him with an
+uncertain smile. But the little, clay-bespattered Italians were still
+sleeping, the slatternly women across the aisle were in open-mouthed
+oblivion, and even the crumby, crying babies were for the nonce stilled.
+Paul settled back to struggle with his impatience as best he could.
+
+When he arrived at the Jersey City station he hurried through his
+breakfast, manifestly ill at ease and keeping a sharp eye about him.
+After he reached the Twenty-third Street station, he consulted a cabman
+and had himself driven to a men's-furnishings establishment that was
+just opening for the day. He spent upward of two hours there, buying
+with endless reconsidering and great care. His new street suit he put
+on in the fitting room; the frock coat and dress clothes he had bundled
+into the cab with his linen. Then he drove to a hatter's and a shoe
+house. His next errand was at Tiffany's, where he selected his silver
+and a new scarf pin. He would not wait to have his silver marked,
+he said. Lastly, he stopped at a trunk shop on Broadway and had his
+purchases packed into various traveling bags.
+
+It was a little after one o'clock when he drove up to the Waldorf, and
+after settling with the cabman, went into the office. He registered from
+Washington; said his mother and father had been abroad, and that he
+had come down to await the arrival of their steamer. He told his story
+plausibly and had no trouble, since he volunteered to pay for them in
+advance, in engaging his rooms; a sleeping room, sitting room, and bath.
+
+Not once, but a hundred times, Paul had planned this entry into New
+York. He had gone over every detail of it with Charley Edwards, and in
+his scrapbook at home there were pages of description about New York
+hotels, cut from the Sunday papers. When he was shown to his sitting
+room on the eighth floor he saw at a glance that everything was as it
+should be; there was but one detail in his mental picture that the
+place did not realize, so he rang for the bellboy and sent him down for
+flowers. He moved about nervously until the boy returned, putting
+away his new linen and fingering it delightedly as he did so. When the
+flowers came he put them hastily into water, and then tumbled into a hot
+bath. Presently he came out of his white bathroom, resplendent in his
+new silk underwear, and playing with the tassels of his red robe. The
+snow was whirling so fiercely outside his windows that he could scarcely
+see across the street, but within the air was deliciously soft and
+fragrant. He put the violets and jonquils on the taboret beside the
+couch, and threw himself down, with a long sigh, covering himself with
+a Roman blanket. He was thoroughly tired; he had been in such haste,
+he had stood up to such a strain, covered so much ground in the last
+twenty-four hours, that he wanted to think how it had all come about.
+Lulled by the sound of the wind, the warm air, and the cool fragrance of
+the flowers, he sank into deep, drowsy retrospection.
+
+It had been wonderfully simple; when they had shut him out of the
+theater and concert hall, when they had taken away his bone, the
+whole thing was virtually determined. The rest was a mere matter of
+opportunity. The only thing that at all surprised him was his own
+courage--for he realized well enough that he had always been tormented by
+fear, a sort of apprehensive dread that, of late years, as the meshes of
+the lies he had told closed about him, had been pulling the muscles of
+his body tighter and tighter. Until now he could not remember the time
+when he had not been dreading something. Even when he was a little boy
+it was always there--behind him, or before, or on either side. There had
+always been the shadowed corner, the dark place into which he dared not
+look, but from which something seemed always to be watching him--and
+Paul had done things that were not pretty to watch, he knew.
+
+But now he had a curious sense of relief, as though he had at last
+thrown down the gauntlet to the thing in the corner.
+
+Yet it was but a day since he had been sulking in the traces; but
+yesterday afternoon that he had been sent to the bank with Denny &
+Carson's deposit, as usual--but this time he was instructed to leave the
+book to be balanced. There was above two thousand dollars in checks, and
+nearly a thousand in the bank notes which he had taken from the book
+and quietly transferred to his pocket. At the bank he had made out a
+new deposit slip. His nerves had been steady enough to permit of his
+returning to the office, where he had finished his work and asked for
+a full day's holiday tomorrow, Saturday, giving a perfectly reasonable
+pretext. The bankbook, he knew, would not be returned before Monday or
+Tuesday, and his father would be out of town for the next week. From
+the time he slipped the bank notes into his pocket until he boarded the
+night train for New York, he had not known a moment's hesitation. It was
+not the first time Paul had steered through treacherous waters.
+
+How astonishingly easy it had all been; here he was, the thing done;
+and this time there would be no awakening, no figure at the top of the
+stairs. He watched the snowflakes whirling by his window until he fell
+asleep.
+
+When he awoke, it was three o'clock in the afternoon. He bounded up with
+a start; half of one of his precious days gone already! He spent more
+than an hour in dressing, watching every stage of his toilet carefully
+in the mirror. Everything was quite perfect; he was exactly the kind of
+boy he had always wanted to be.
+
+When he went downstairs Paul took a carriage and drove up Fifth Avenue
+toward the Park. The snow had somewhat abated; carriages and tradesmen's
+wagons were hurrying soundlessly to and fro in the winter twilight; boys
+in woolen mufflers were shoveling off the doorsteps; the avenue stages
+made fine spots of color against the white street. Here and there on
+the corners were stands, with whole flower gardens blooming under glass
+cases, against the sides of which the snowflakes stuck and melted;
+violets, roses, carnations, lilies of the valley--somehow vastly more
+lovely and alluring that they blossomed thus unnaturally in the snow.
+The Park itself was a wonderful stage winterpiece.
+
+When he returned, the pause of the twilight had ceased and the tune of
+the streets had changed. The snow was falling faster, lights streamed
+from the hotels that reared their dozen stories fearlessly up into
+the storm, defying the raging Atlantic winds. A long, black stream of
+carriages poured down the avenue, intersected here and there by other
+streams, tending horizontally. There were a score of cabs about the
+entrance of his hotel, and his driver had to wait. Boys in livery were
+running in and out of the awning stretched across the sidewalk, up and
+down the red velvet carpet laid from the door to the street. Above,
+about, within it all was the rumble and roar, the hurry and toss of
+thousands of human beings as hot for pleasure as himself, and on every
+side of him towered the glaring affirmation of the omnipotence of
+wealth.
+
+The boy set his teeth and drew his shoulders together in a spasm of
+realization; the plot of all dramas, the text of all romances,
+the nerve-stuff of all sensations was whirling about him like the
+snowflakes. He burnt like a faggot in a tempest.
+
+When Paul went down to dinner the music of the orchestra came floating
+up the elevator shaft to greet him. His head whirled as he stepped into
+the thronged corridor, and he sank back into one of the chairs against
+the wall to get his breath. The lights, the chatter, the perfumes, the
+bewildering medley of color--he had, for a moment, the feeling of
+not being able to stand it. But only for a moment; these were his own
+people, he told himself. He went slowly about the corridors, through
+the writing rooms, smoking rooms, reception rooms, as though he were
+exploring the chambers of an enchanted palace, built and peopled for him
+alone.
+
+When he reached the dining room he sat down at a table near a window.
+The flowers, the white linen, the many-colored wineglasses, the gay
+toilettes of the women, the low popping of corks, the undulating
+repetitions of the _Blue Danube_ from the orchestra, all flooded Paul's
+dream with bewildering radiance. When the roseate tinge of his champagne
+was added--that cold, precious, bubbling stuff that creamed and foamed
+in his glass--Paul wondered that there were honest men in the world at
+all. This was what all the world was fighting for, he reflected; this
+was what all the struggle was about. He doubted the reality of his
+past. Had he ever known a place called Cordelia Street, a place where
+fagged-looking businessmen got on the early car; mere rivets in a
+machine they seemed to Paul,--sickening men, with combings of children's
+hair always hanging to their coats, and the smell of cooking in their
+clothes. Cordelia Street--Ah, that belonged to another time and country;
+had he not always been thus, had he not sat here night after night,
+from as far back as he could remember, looking pensively over just such
+shimmering textures and slowly twirling the stem of a glass like this
+one between his thumb and middle finger? He rather thought he had.
+
+He was not in the least abashed or lonely. He had no especial desire to
+meet or to know any of these people; all he demanded was the right to
+look on and conjecture, to watch the pageant. The mere stage properties
+were all he contended for. Nor was he lonely later in the evening, in
+his lodge at the Metropolitan. He was now entirely rid of his nervous
+misgivings, of his forced aggressiveness, of the imperative desire
+to show himself different from his surroundings. He felt now that his
+surroundings explained him. Nobody questioned the purple; he had only to
+wear it passively. He had only to glance down at his attire to reassure
+himself that here it would be impossible for anyone to humiliate him.
+
+He found it hard to leave his beautiful sitting room to go to bed that
+night, and sat long watching the raging storm from his turret window.
+When he went to sleep it was with the lights turned on in his bedroom;
+partly because of his old timidity, and partly so that, if he should
+wake in the night, there would be no wretched moment of doubt, no
+horrible suspicion of yellow wallpaper, or of Washington and Calvin
+above his bed.
+
+Sunday morning the city was practically snowbound. Paul breakfasted
+late, and in the afternoon he fell in with a wild San Francisco boy,
+a freshman at Yale, who said he had run down for a "little flyer" over
+Sunday. The young man offered to show Paul the night side of the town,
+and the two boys went out together after dinner, not returning to the
+hotel until seven o'clock the next morning. They had started out in the
+confiding warmth of a champagne friendship, but their parting in the
+elevator was singularly cool. The freshman pulled himself together to
+make his train, and Paul went to bed. He awoke at two o'clock in the
+afternoon, very thirsty and dizzy, and rang for icewater, coffee, and
+the Pittsburgh papers.
+
+On the part of the hotel management, Paul excited no suspicion. There
+was this to be said for him, that he wore his spoils with dignity and in
+no way made himself conspicuous. Even under the glow of his wine he was
+never boisterous, though he found the stuff like a magician's wand for
+wonder-building. His chief greediness lay in his ears and eyes, and his
+excesses were not offensive ones. His dearest pleasures were the
+gray winter twilights in his sitting room; his quiet enjoyment of his
+flowers, his clothes, his wide divan, his cigarette, and his sense of
+power. He could not remember a time when he had felt so at peace with
+himself. The mere release from the necessity of petty lying, lying every
+day and every day, restored his self-respect. He had never lied for
+pleasure, even at school; but to be noticed and admired, to assert his
+difference from other Cordelia Street boys; and he felt a good deal
+more manly, more honest, even, now that he had no need for boastful
+pretensions, now that he could, as his actor friends used to say, "dress
+the part." It was characteristic that remorse did not occur to him. His
+golden days went by without a shadow, and he made each as perfect as he
+could.
+
+On the eighth day after his arrival in New York he found the whole
+affair exploited in the Pittsburgh papers, exploited with a wealth of
+detail which indicated that local news of a sensational nature was at a
+low ebb. The firm of Denny & Carson announced that the boy's father had
+refunded the full amount of the theft and that they had no intention of
+prosecuting. The Cumberland minister had been interviewed, and expressed
+his hope of yet reclaiming the motherless lad, and his Sabbath-school
+teacher declared that she would spare no effort to that end. The rumor
+had reached Pittsburgh that the boy had been seen in a New York hotel,
+and his father had gone East to find him and bring him home.
+
+Paul had just come in to dress for dinner; he sank into a chair, weak
+to the knees, and clasped his head in his hands. It was to be worse than
+jail, even; the tepid waters of Cordelia Street were to close over him
+finally and forever. The gray monotony stretched before him in
+hopeless, unrelieved years; Sabbath school, Young People's Meeting, the
+yellow-papered room, the damp dishtowels; it all rushed back upon him
+with a sickening vividness. He had the old feeling that the orchestra
+had suddenly stopped, the sinking sensation that the play was over. The
+sweat broke out on his face, and he sprang to his feet, looked about him
+with his white, conscious smile, and winked at himself in the mirror,
+With something of the old childish belief in miracles with which he
+had so often gone to class, all his lessons unlearned, Paul dressed and
+dashed whistling down the corridor to the elevator.
+
+He had no sooner entered the dining room and caught the measure of the
+music than his remembrance was lightened by his old elastic power of
+claiming the moment, mounting with it, and finding it all-sufficient.
+The glare and glitter about him, the mere scenic accessories had again,
+and for the last time, their old potency. He would show himself that he
+was game, he would finish the thing splendidly. He doubted, more than
+ever, the existence of Cordelia Street, and for the first time he drank
+his wine recklessly. Was he not, after all, one of those fortunate
+beings born to the purple, was he not still himself and in his own
+place? He drummed a nervous accompaniment to the Pagliacci music and
+looked about him, telling himself over and over that it had paid.
+
+He reflected drowsily, to the swell of the music and the chill sweetness
+of his wine, that he might have done it more wisely. He might have
+caught an outbound steamer and been well out of their clutches before
+now. But the other side of the world had seemed too far away and too
+uncertain then; he could not have waited for it; his need had been
+too sharp. If he had to choose over again, he would do the same thing
+tomorrow. He looked affectionately about the dining room, now gilded
+with a soft mist. Ah, it had paid indeed!
+
+Paul was awakened next morning by a painful throbbing in his head and
+feet. He had thrown himself across the bed without undressing, and had
+slept with his shoes on. His limbs and hands were lead heavy, and his
+tongue and throat were parched and burnt. There came upon him one of
+those fateful attacks of clearheadedness that never occurred except when
+he was physically exhausted and his nerves hung loose. He lay still,
+closed his eyes, and let the tide of things wash over him.
+
+His father was in New York; "stopping at some joint or other," he told
+himself. The memory of successive summers on the front stoop fell upon
+him like a weight of black water. He had not a hundred dollars left; and
+he knew now, more than ever, that money was everything, the wall that
+stood between all he loathed and all he wanted. The thing was winding
+itself up; he had thought of that on his first glorious day in New York,
+and had even provided a way to snap the thread. It lay on his dressing
+table now; he had got it out last night when he came blindly up from
+dinner, but the shiny metal hurt his eyes, and he disliked the looks of
+it.
+
+He rose and moved about with a painful effort, succumbing now and again
+to attacks of nausea. It was the old depression exaggerated; all the
+world had become Cordelia Street. Yet somehow he was not afraid of
+anything, was absolutely calm; perhaps because he had looked into the
+dark corner at last and knew. It was bad enough, what he saw there, but
+somehow not so bad as his long fear of it had been. He saw everything
+clearly now. He had a feeling that he had made the best of it, that he
+had lived the sort of life he was meant to live, and for half an hour he
+sat staring at the revolver. But he told himself that was not the way,
+so he went downstairs and took a cab to the ferry.
+
+When Paul arrived in Newark he got off the train and took another cab,
+directing the driver to follow the Pennsylvania tracks out of the town.
+The snow lay heavy on the roadways and had drifted deep in the open
+fields. Only here and there the dead grass or dried weed stalks
+projected, singularly black, above it. Once well into the country, Paul
+dismissed the carriage and walked, floundering along the tracks, his
+mind a medley of irrelevant things. He seemed to hold in his brain an
+actual picture of everything he had seen that morning. He remembered
+every feature of both his drivers, of the toothless old woman from whom
+he had bought the red flowers in his coat, the agent from whom he had
+got his ticket, and all of his fellow passengers on the ferry. His mind,
+unable to cope with vital matters near at hand, worked feverishly and
+deftly at sorting and grouping these images. They made for him a part
+of the ugliness of the world, of the ache in his head, and the bitter
+burning on his tongue. He stooped and put a handful of snow into his
+mouth as he walked, but that, too, seemed hot. When he reached a little
+hillside, where the tracks ran through a cut some twenty feet below him,
+he stopped and sat down.
+
+The carnations in his coat were drooping with the cold, he noticed,
+their red glory all over. It occurred to him that all the flowers he had
+seen in the glass cases that first night must have gone the same way,
+long before this. It was only one splendid breath they had, in spite of
+their brave mockery at the winter outside the glass; and it was a losing
+game in the end, it seemed, this revolt against the homilies by which
+the world is run. Paul took one of the blossoms carefully from his coat
+and scooped a little hole in the snow, where he covered it up. Then he
+dozed awhile, from his weak condition, seemingly insensible to the cold.
+
+The sound of an approaching train awoke him, and he started to his feet,
+remembering only his resolution, and afraid lest he should be too late.
+He stood watching the approaching locomotive, his teeth chattering,
+his lips drawn away from them in a frightened smile; once or twice he
+glanced nervously sidewise, as though he were being watched. When
+the right moment came, he jumped. As he fell, the folly of his haste
+occurred to him with merciless clearness, the vastness of what he had
+left undone. There flashed through his brain, clearer than ever before,
+the blue of Adriatic water, the yellow of Algerian sands.
+
+He felt something strike his chest, and that his body was being thrown
+swiftly through the air, on and on, immeasurably far and fast, while his
+limbs were gently relaxed. Then, because the picture-making mechanism
+was crushed, the disturbing visions flashed into black, and Paul dropped
+back into the immense design of things.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Troll Garden and Selected Stories, by 
+Willa Cather
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