initial commit of ebook 35608HEADmain

1 files changed, 10646 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/35608-8.txt b/35608-8.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..35427f8
--- /dev/null
+++ b/35608-8.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,10646 @@
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Masterman and Son, by W. J. Dawson
+
+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: Masterman and Son
+
+Author: W. J. Dawson
+
+Release Date: August 21, 2011 [EBook #35608]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MASTERMAN AND SON ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Al Haines
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Masterman and Son
+
+
+by
+
+W. J. DAWSON
+
+_Author of "A Prophet in Babylon," etc._
+
+
+
+
+NEW YORK ---- CHICAGO ---- TORONTO
+
+Fleming H. Revell Company
+
+LONDON AND EDINBURGH
+
+
+
+
+Copyright, 1909, by
+
+FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY
+
+
+
+
+  New York: 158 Fifth Avenue
+  Chicago: 80 Wabash Avenue
+  Toronto: 25 Richmond St., W.
+  London: 21 Paternoster Square
+  Edinburgh: 100 Princes Street
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+PART ONE
+
+ARCHIBOLD MASTERMAN
+
+CHAPTER
+
+     I. THE MASTER-BUILDER
+    II. A DISCUSSION
+   III. THE BIG STRONG BEAST
+    IV. MRS. BUNDY
+     V. THE MAGIC NIGHT
+    VI. YOUNG LOVE
+   VII. ENTER SCALES
+  VIII. THE ACCUSATION
+    IX. THE CONTEST
+     X. THE FAREWELL
+
+
+PART TWO
+
+THE AMERICAN MADONNA
+
+    XI. NEW YORK
+   XII. MR. WILBUR MEREDITH LEGION
+  XIII. ADVENTURES OF AN INCOMPETENT
+   XIV. HE FINDS A FRIEND
+    XV. THE MILLIONAIRE
+   XVI. KOOTENAY
+  XVII. THE NEW LIFE
+
+
+PART THREE
+
+FATHER AND SON
+
+ XVIII. THE AMALGAMATED BRICK CO.
+   XIX. THE FEAR
+    XX. THE RETURN
+   XXI. THE VERDICT
+  XXII. MRS. BUNDY PHILOSOPHISES
+ XXIII. THE LAST HOME
+  XXIV. THE NEW WORLD
+
+
+
+
+PART ONE
+
+ARCHIBOLD MASTERMAN
+
+
+I
+
+THE MASTER-BUILDER
+
+Archibold Masterman, tall, heavily-built, muscular, and on the wrong
+side of fifty, was universally esteemed an excellent specimen of that
+dubious product of modern commerce, the self-made man.  At twenty he
+was a day-labourer, at thirty a jobbing builder, at forty a contractor
+in a large way of business.  At that point may be dated the beginning
+of his social efflorescence.  It was then that he began to wear
+broadcloth on week-days, and insisted on a fresh shirt every other day.
+Hitherto careless of his appearance, he now took a quiet pride in
+clothes, and discovered the uses of the manicure.  A little later he
+discovered that a man's position in society is judged by the kind of
+house he lives in, and that it is social wisdom to pay a high rent for
+a small house in a discreetly "good" locality, rather than a low rent
+for a much better house in a deteriorated suburb.  That was the year in
+which he purchased Eagle House, a pompous, old-fashioned residence
+standing in its own grounds in Highbourne Gardens.
+
+Highbourne Gardens was one of those London suburbs which contrive to
+preserve a faint aroma of gentility for many years after the real
+gentlefolk have left it.  It had many old houses of the plain and
+specious order, inhabited a century ago by great London merchants.  In
+the floors of these houses might be found vast beams of some foreign
+wood, hard enough to turn the keenest chisel; in the gardens at their
+backs were copper beeches, mulberry trees, and an occasional cedar of
+Lebanon.  Modern London, with its vast invasion of mean streets,
+stopped respectfully before the proud exclusiveness of Highbourne
+Gardens.  It was one of the last localities to have roads which were
+marked "Private," guarded by locked gates, and to employ watchmen in
+faded liveries, who dwelt in tiny sentry-boxes and at stated hours
+collected the letters of the residents.
+
+It was precisely the kind of neighbourhood for such a man as Archibold
+Masterman to make his first social experiment, and he was quick to
+recognise its advantages.  Eagle House, Highbourne Gardens, was a
+thoroughly respectable address; if it did not convey the impression of
+social distinction, it clearly did imply solid competence, which was a
+good deal better.  Jones, the well-known city tailor, lived there, and
+drove a pair of horses which any lord might envy; there were half a
+dozen brokers who kept as good tables as any man in London; and there
+was Loker, the famous manufacturer of soaps, whose rhymed
+advertisements met the eye in every railway-carriage.  According to the
+views of Archibold Masterman, in his present stage of social
+enlightenment, these illustrious persons composed a real aristocracy of
+solid merit.
+
+Above all, there was in Highbourne Gardens a church, at which most of
+these prosperous persons were regular attendants, and Archibold
+Masterman was shrewd enough to see that such a church was admirably
+adapted to the plan of social advancement which he had in view.  It was
+not an Episcopal church, it was true; but that scarcely mattered in a
+neighbourhood which was by long tradition Non-conformist.  It was
+enough for him that it contained the people he wished most to know, and
+his first act on settling at Eagle House was to rent the most expensive
+pew in the church which then chanced to be at liberty.  The day when he
+took possession of this pew was a red-letter day in his life.  He was
+conscious that he was well-dressed, and that he and his family were
+favourably remarked.  Loker, the soap manufacturer, took the collection
+in his aisle, and when Masterman put a new five-pound note upon the
+plate, he knew that he had created a sensation.  When he left the
+church, Loker shook his hand with great cordiality, and from that hour
+his position was assured.
+
+All this was, of course, many years ago.  Since then he had played his
+cards so well that he had become almost the best-known man in the
+locality.  He was certainly esteemed the wealthiest.  He was a deacon
+in the church, _vice_ Loker deceased, and he now trod the aisles with
+the collection plate, and kept a jealous eye upon its contents.  Among
+the church folk his record for generosity stood high.  Among the
+younger men the story of his life had become a stimulating tradition.
+There were two versions of this tradition.  In the young men's
+societies, and at their annual club dinner, he was accustomed to tell a
+touching story of how he once did a piece of humble work which no one
+else would touch, and found his fidelity rewarded by sudden promotion,
+which gave him his first real chance in life.  This story never failed
+to arouse loud cheers, and when irate parents found their boys
+unwilling to black their own shoes or weed the garden, they would cry,
+"Remember Masterman."  Among a few old cronies in the building trade,
+in convivial moments, this tradition took a different form.  To them he
+boasted that he bought his first plot of land by issuing a cheque when
+he had nothing in the bank, only borrowing the money just in time to
+prevent discovery.
+
+"It was a prison or a fortune," he was accustomed to remark.  "And I
+took the risk.  I took the risk, and see what I am to-day."  Whereat
+his old cronies, particularly Grimes, a small builder in Tottenham, who
+were all more or less under financial obligations to him, would applaud
+him even more vigorously than the church young men.
+
+The whole character of the man may be discerned in the incident.  That
+he should have risked a prison to make a fortune was nothing to be
+ashamed of; although he had sense enough to know that it was not the
+kind of story which would be received with acclamation by the church
+young men.  Therefore to them he gave a milder version, suited to their
+innocence.  But in his heart he was proud of his own daring, still
+prouder of his triumph.  His blood thrilled pleasurably whenever he
+recalled that perilous and nearly fatal morning--his sudden decision to
+buy the land whose speculative value none but he could recognise, the
+bold bluff he practised on the sellers, the false cheque which he knew
+put the handcuffs oh his wrists, the mad, breathless rush across London
+to secure the money at any rate of interest from any kind of lender.
+And then the ecstatic moment when, just ten minutes before the bank
+closed, he had paid in the five thousand pounds which saved his credit.
+In the end he had made twenty thousand pounds out of that land, and
+from that moment he dated his prosperity.  He had taken risks, and that
+was to him the equivalent of heroism.  Life was full of risks, and the
+man who dared nothing was a coward.  It was the simple philosophy of
+the buccaneer, the pirate, the adventurer.  Had he lived a hundred
+years earlier and been bred to the sea, he would have gloried in the
+black flag, and would have competed with Captain Kidd for terrifying
+fame.  The very joy of living lay in taking risks.
+
+He had been taking risks ever since, although time and prosperity had
+taught him caution and a more sober craft.  Sometimes, and especially
+since he had become a resident in Highbourne Gardens, he had resolved
+to content himself with the kind of business which avoided speculative
+perils, but the old instinct always proved too strong for him.  Show
+him an opportunity that offered the chance of great and sudden profit,
+and he could no more help putting all he had in jeopardy to secure it
+than can the old gambler refuse one more cast of the dice.  But under
+the chastenings of his new respectability he had become more and more
+secretive in these dubious transactions.  His own family never once
+suspected them.  All that they knew was that there were recurring
+periods when he went about the house in grim silence, and sat up half
+the night in the little room which he called his office.  At such times
+his face seemed to harden; new lines appeared about the eyes and the
+firm mouth; but it always remained impassive and inscrutable.  Some day
+the cloud would lift suddenly; the grim toiler in the midnight office
+came forth, jovial, loud-voiced, ten years younger; and there was a
+period of joyous extravagance, a new pair of horses in the stable, a
+conservatory added to the drawing-room, a large subscription to the
+church funds, and the genial stir and tumult of dinner and lawn-tennis
+parties.  After a time the cloud rolled back again, but his friends
+were alike ignorant of the causes that produced or the triumphs which
+dissolved it.
+
+So Masterman lived his life, and it was part of the man that the church
+had come to occupy a considerable place in it.  He felt that he owed it
+gratitude, for had it not done much to forward his social ambitions?
+He no longer moved in it humbly, as a man sedulous of notice; he had
+long since become its undisputed king.  The day was past when he was
+grateful for the hand-shake of a Loker: it was his turn now to confer
+the favours which he once had sought.  It represented an essential
+feature in his triumph.  When the time came that he sought public
+honours, which he meant to do, the church would prove a valuable factor
+in his ambitions.  He would then get back all that he had given it, in
+willing service.  It pleased him to think that the church itself would
+turn out a good investment when that time came.
+
+Not that he was destitute of all sense of religion; in his own way he
+valued it, though not upon the grounds that were common with ordinary
+pious folk.  He thought it a good thing that men should have definite
+views of truth, especially when their views encouraged them in the
+belief that they would become in another world persons of as much
+importance as they had been in this.  As he understood the matter, it
+was necessary for a man to have certain right beliefs in order that he
+might become secure of the reversion of eternal happiness; and if that
+were true, a man would be a fool who did not accept these beliefs.
+Hence he was severely orthodox, and insisted on orthodoxy in his
+family.  He liked a good sermon, he liked good music, and it was part
+of his pride that the Highbourne Gardens Church had both in all
+excellence unapproachable by any of the lesser churches in the
+neighbourhood.  This was the limit of his apprehension as regards the
+church.  He recognised in it one of the great proprieties of life, a
+kind of etiquette toward God which no moral human creature would refuse.
+
+That he was moral, in the ordinary meaning of the word, there could be
+no doubt.  Long ago, when he was a mere day-labourer, he had indulged
+in a week's drunkenness, and had learned once for all the lesson that
+success in life is not compatible with insobriety.  He had been
+discharged from his employment, and had spent a miserable month in
+hunting work with a damaged character.  From that hour he was a
+water-drinker.  Life, having taught him this lesson, proceeded to teach
+him a second, that the man who means to succeed must not meddle with
+the coarser passions.  He had come near to an entanglement with an evil
+woman, and had issued from it with a fixed conviction that the
+pleasures of passion were never worth the price men paid for them.
+Here the original hardness of his nature served him, and this was soon
+reinforced by the temper of ambition.  Cool, shrewd, alert, he became
+too much enamoured of success to stop for wayside pleasures; he knew
+the more recondite joy of climbing over the shoulders of disabled men
+to seize the prize which they had forfeited.  In a word, it paid him to
+be moral, and his temperament jumped with his self-interest.
+
+But of morality in its higher forms of ethical ideals he knew nothing.
+Deacon of a church as he was, he was still a pirate, a buccaneer, a
+highwayman of commerce, thirsting for illicit adventure.  There was a
+grim humour in the situation of which he himself caught brief glimpses.
+Like the bandit who makes a gift to the Virgin from his spoils, and
+holds himself henceforth reconciled to heaven, so Masterman paid his
+tithe to God, in the comfortable faith that no one had the right to
+examine too closely the means by which it was obtained.
+
+"A hypocrite," the shallow reader will exclaim, but no word would be
+farther from the truth, for the real and only hypocrite is he who,
+having light to see the highest things, deliberately uses them to serve
+his lower instincts.  Masterman did nothing of the kind.  He simply had
+no higher light.  Not even a jury with a damaging verdict, or a judge
+with a scathing allocution, could have convinced him that it was a
+wrong time to write a bogus cheque in an emergency, when twenty
+thousand pounds hung upon the chance of his deceit being undiscovered.
+He would have done it again to-morrow, done it proudly, with a kind of
+fearless, misguided heroism.  Life was like that, he would have said;
+you took your chances.  And what he would have said and done at
+thirty-five, he would have said and done at fifty.  There was a hard,
+unmalleable quality in the man that turned the edge of all those fine
+ethics which the preachers uttered.  It was their duty to utter them,
+no doubt; it was what they were paid to do; but what did they know of
+life?  What did John Clark, the minister of Highbourne Gardens Church,
+comfortably paid, and living in a good house, know of life as Masterman
+had found it?  He was like a child playing in the shallows; he had
+never known deadly contest with tides, and waves, and tempests.  So
+Masterman listened to him with a kindly irony, and went upon his way
+totally unmoved by any delicate displays of pulpit rhetoric.
+
+Yet of late things had somewhat altered; he was conscious that there
+was a changed atmosphere in the world.  John Clark was preaching a
+different kind of sermon, a bolder, plainer sermon, full of pungent
+references to public evils and daily conduct.  That would not have
+mattered much, for Masterman was perfectly aware that he was John
+Clark's master whenever he might choose to assert the rights of the
+purse.  But a much more pertinent and painful problem was gradually
+rising in Masterman's own household.  He had but two children, Helen
+and Arthur, and upon the boy all his hopes were set.  He had sent him
+to Oxford, where he had done tolerably well; from the University he had
+returned with a fund of new ideas which were to his father strange and
+detestable.  And among them was a vague socialism, which displayed
+itself in vehement attacks on the common processes by which wealth was
+acquired.  There came a day when Masterman was aware, for the first
+time, that he was face to face with a separate personality in his son,
+which had its own springs of action and claimed its own liberty of
+thought.  And as the boy uttered his youthful diatribes, the father
+began to wonder how much he knew about his own life, how far those
+diatribes might be directed obliquely against himself.
+
+He listened in silence, with a difficult good-humour.  He never
+attempted to retort.  When he did speak, he meant to speak once for
+all, but he would choose his time.  He often wondered what he should
+say; whether he would tell the boy with a brutal frankness all about
+his methods of business, or leave him to discover a little at a time,
+when he entered the office, as in due time Masterman meant that he
+should.  But whatever he said or did, he would act with finality when
+the time came.  There were means of bringing Arthur to heel as well as
+John Clark.
+
+The present trouble was that Arthur seemed greatly to approve John
+Clark's teaching.  He quoted it, amplified it, and insisted on its
+rightness.  And yet in all this the father knew quite well that his son
+could intend no disloyalty to him.  The boy's frank gray eyes had no
+deceit in them.  But they also flashed an unmistakable challenge on the
+world.  The father could not but admire the boy.  He was no fool, he
+often told himself with a bitter smile.  Perhaps these new opinions of
+his were, after all, mere froth; it might be wise to let him talk
+himself out.  Surely he must come to see life from the commonsense
+point of view, which of course was Masterman's.  So the father eagerly
+debated, and once more the light burned late in the little office, and
+as the days passed, his mouth grew grim and the lines deepened on his
+face.  Here was a problem much more difficult than buying land without
+money, and it was not solved by mere daring.
+
+So matters stood when John Clark preached his notorious sermon on
+jerry-building, in which he accused without mercy the men who ran up
+rotten buildings for the poor as thieves and assassins.
+
+Archibold Masterman heard the sermon, and left the church with a
+frowning face.  For the rest of the Sabbath he shut himself up in his
+office, and a heavy silence dwelt in Eagle House.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+A DISCUSSION
+
+It was in Masterman's office that the informal
+meeting of some of the leading church officials
+took place next day.  The meeting had been
+preceded by what was known as "a high tea,"
+for the customary evening dinner was dispensed with
+when deacons were the guests.  This was done out
+of deference to the inferior position of some of the
+younger deacons, who had not yet attained the social
+dignity of late dinners.
+
+Masterman, however, took care that this substitutionary
+meal did credit to his own social superiority.
+Where the younger deacons were accustomed to
+provide for the entertainment of their brethren plates of
+exiguous ham, manifestly bought at the cookshop,
+insufficient salads frugally overlaid with sliced eggs, and
+a sparse variety of home-made cake and pastry,
+Masterman spread a groaning table with a cold sirloin
+of beef, a pair of fowls, and an entire ham, to say
+nothing of thick cream and expensive fruits.  Masterman's
+coffee, too, was of a richness quite unapproachable
+by the inferior decoctions of Beverley and Luke,
+whose wives dealt at local shops, and were not above
+using a certain detestable invention known as coffee
+essence.  Luke and Beverley also used gas fires in
+their dining- and drawing-rooms, to save labour,
+which was necessary when but one maid was kept;
+whereas Masterman had a coal fire even in the hall,
+and burned logs of wood in his living-rooms.  Upon
+Masterman's table there was also real silver of
+undeniable price, and a vast silver urn; whereas Beverley
+and Luke could pretend to nothing better than electro
+imitations, which were not even silver-plated.  So
+that it was clear that though Masterman gave high
+teas, they were scarcely distinguishable from evening
+dinners; and if he was a deacon, he was by no means
+a common deacon.
+
+Arthur Masterman had long ago come to regard
+those diaconal high teas with a kind of sombre
+merriment.  It amused him to remark his father's difficult
+adjustment to a form of meal to which he was not
+used; his conflict between condescension and
+hospitality; his manifest, and not quite successful, effort to
+modify his blunt, domineering outspokenness to the
+sensitive susceptibilities of his guests.  He was aware
+also, with a sort of pride, how big his father seemed
+beside these men.  He loomed above them like some
+vast cathedral front over huddled houses.  They were
+city dwellers all, and had never been anything else.
+They had the precise, neat manners of men accustomed
+to formal ways of life.  Their talk rarely went
+beyond the gossip of church affairs, or the recapitulation
+of something in the morning's paper.  But no one
+could look at Archibold Masterman without a sense
+of something primitive and massive in the man.  The
+heavy frame, the great breadth of shoulder, the
+clean-shaven face with its firm lines, the eyes, clear,
+watchful, dominating, with a certain almost vulpine
+intensity and hardness--all these declared a man at all
+times unusual, but most unusual in contrast with
+these men, who bore in every feature the evidence
+of how cities by mere attrition grind men down into
+conventional similarities.  That the boy should fear
+his father was natural, for Archibold Masterman was
+a man whose will was law; that he should not wholly
+understand him was also natural, for a vast world
+of experience lay between them: but his pride in him
+was a genuine and steadfast feeling, all the more
+remarkable because the father was uneducated, and
+the son had drunk deep of the waters of Oxford
+scholarship.
+
+With the sister, Helen, the case was very different.
+Arthur had inherited from his father the gift of
+self-poise.  He knew how to look at things with a single
+eye, to meditate on them in silence, and to take up
+an attitude of his own toward them.  Helen's whole
+nature was of lighter calibre.  She was a girl easily
+influenced by chance acquaintance, more ready to
+enjoy life than to examine its underlying elements, in
+all things more comformable to conventions.  When
+she came home from an expensive finishing-school,
+she brought with her less her own character than a
+character imposed upon her by her teachers.  She took
+her place in life with an instant alacrity of
+adaptation; formed a dozen light-hearted friendships,
+became popular for her vivacity and gaiety, and in her
+heart thought her father dull.  She had none of the
+sense of his essential bigness that Arthur had.  She
+had no curiosity about him: he was simply an element
+in the convenient furniture of her own life.  She
+sometimes wished him a little more polished, resented
+his brusque manners, misunderstood his heavy silence,
+and was inclined to be ironical about his social
+ambitions.  Yet these same social ambitions were the
+chief common bond between them.  Through them she
+saw her road to a life that would gratify her vanity.
+Somewhere, in the dim future, she discerned a golden
+world, which she hoped to enter when her father's
+force of character had broken down the barriers of
+social caste.  What her father's character really was, or
+by what means he meant to reach that desirable golden
+world, she did not ask.  As long as the result was
+reached, she had no curiosity about the process.
+
+The last person in the family group to be remarked
+is the mother.  She sat at the end of the long table,
+dispensing tea and coffee with an air of weary
+assiduity.  In her youth she had had some claim to beauty,
+and there still clung to her a kind of tired elegance.
+Her hair, once blond, had become almost white, and
+lay in rippled fullness over a forehead much lined.
+Her face was without colour, the eyebrows dark and
+beautifully curved, the eyes gray and clear, with a
+certain startled expression, as if life had presented to
+her little else than a series of unforeseen surprises.
+She was a very silent woman; silence was her
+dominating quality, but it was enigmatic silence.  Persons
+of effusive and flamboyant manners found her silence
+scarcely distinguishable from scorn; people of
+vivacious temperament called it stolidity; the general
+impression among her acquaintance was that it was
+significant of a nature at once cold and colourless.  They
+were all wrong, however.  And those were yet further
+from the truth who confused her silence with placidity.
+There were times when a sudden flash of fire in the
+gray, watchful eyes witnessed to an inner heat.  If
+she spoke little, it was not because she felt little--it
+was rather because she realised the total ineffectiveness
+of language to express her thought.  Helen had
+characteristically never tried to understand her mother.
+But as Arthur had grown older, and especially since
+his return from Oxford, he had often found himself
+speculating on the real nature of his mother's
+character.  He saw her, an apparent automaton, content
+to fill an automatic place in life, making no claims
+for herself, offering no opposition to the claims of
+others, apparently desirous of squeezing herself into
+a position of neglected insignificance; but he was acute
+enough to know that all this self-effacement was
+artificial.  What were her real relations with his father?
+Was she a woman simply overborne by his superior
+weight?  How much of her silence sprang from fear
+of his heavy-handed judgments?  But no sooner did
+such thoughts visit him than the boy recoiled from
+them with a sense of their indelicacy.  Not to
+speculate at times upon the relations of his parents was
+impossible in one who was just at that stage of
+observation when the entire area of life is an object of
+intense curiosity; but to cherish or pursue such
+thoughts was too much like violating a privacy which
+both nature and custom had declared sacred.  Yet of
+one thing he was sure: his mother's native force of
+character was not inferior to his father's, and her
+silence rested on a deep-lying intensity of
+temperament, not on apathy.
+
+The meal pursued its common course of dullness.
+Luke retailed some petty gossip about a family named
+Vickars, who had recently joined the church; and
+Beverley contrived to get upon his usual topic of fiscal
+reform, producing as his own opinions the substance
+of a leading article which had appeared in the
+morning paper.  No one took any notice of Beverley, but
+Luke's topic of conversation proved more interesting,
+especially to the only other deacon present, a middle-aged,
+slightly gray man, with quick, crafty eyes, called
+Scales.  Scales kept the record of the seat-holders, and
+felt that Beverley was intruding on his own peculiar
+domain when he described the Hilary Vickars, the
+new family which had joined the congregation.
+
+"I know them very well," he remarked.  "They
+have only taken two sittings, and they are not the
+sort of people who will add much strength to the
+church.  They live in a small house in Lonsdale
+Road--one of your houses, sir," he added, turning to
+Masterman.
+
+"A very good class of people live in Lonsdale Road,
+I believe," said Masterman drily.
+
+"Oh yes, of course--I know that; and in the changing
+conditions of the neighbourhood a street of houses
+like Lonsdale Road is a great benefit to the locality.
+But this Hilary Vickars only rents a part of a house,
+I am informed, and that is what I meant when I said
+he wouldn't add much strength to the church."
+
+"Hilary Vickars," said Arthur.  "Why, isn't he
+a writer?  I think I saw his name mentioned the other
+day as the author of a novel which appeared this spring."
+
+"Very likely," said Scales.  "Now I think of it,
+some one told me he wrote for the papers.  I wonder
+now if he couldn't give the church a write-up in _The
+Weekly Journal_ some day?"
+
+"In that case he might prove a greater accession
+to the church than you imagine," said Beverley, who
+was always glad to score a point against Scales, whose
+assumption of authority he disliked.
+
+Scales made no reply.  He really had no information
+about Hilary Vickars, beyond the fact that he
+had taken a sitting in the church.  As he never read
+a book of any kind, nor a literary journal, he was
+quite ignorant of Hilary Vickar's pretensions as a
+writer.  But since Beverley appeared to think Vickars
+an acquisition of some value, he was eager to prove
+the contrary.  He remembered opportunely that it was
+immediately after John Clark's sermon on jerry-building
+that Vickars had applied for sittings, and
+immediately said so, with a crafty glance at Masterman.
+
+"Of course I don't know what other people think,"
+he added, "but I consider that sermon an outrage."
+
+Arthur flushed.
+
+"Do you really?" he asked.  "It seems to me that
+to say that is to beg the whole question.  The real,
+and therefore the only, question is, Was it true?"
+
+Masterman turned his heavy, frowning gaze on Arthur.
+
+"We won't discuss that here," he said.  "If you
+are ready, gentlemen, we will adjourn to my office."
+
+The men rose and left the room, Masterman leading
+the way.  When the office door closed, Masterman
+at once began to speak.
+
+"I don't propose to beat about the bush," he said;
+"it isn't my way.  You all know just why we are
+here, and what the subject of discussion is.  It's Clark."
+
+The others remained silent.
+
+"Have you nothing to say?" he asked, with a
+sombre glance at Scales.
+
+"We would all prefer to hear you first," said Scales.
+"Have you any course to propose?"
+
+"Yes, I have," said Masterman, in a formidable
+voice.  "I've had about enough of Clark.  I know
+he's a good preacher and all that, but he's greatly
+changed.  For weeks past he has been attacking people
+from the pulpit.  That's not the kind of thing we pay
+him for, and it must stop.  Unless it stops, either
+he or I must leave the church, and it's for you to choose."
+
+Thus bluntly adjured, the fountains of discussion
+were at once open.  Masterman lit a cigar, and sat
+before the big writing-table, smoking stolidly.  He
+had shot his bolt, and was pretty sure of its effect.
+He had the great advantage of having meditated on
+his course with sober boldness.  He knew very well
+that he could do without the church better than it
+could do without him.  He did not wish to leave it,
+but he had now reached a point in his career when
+he was relatively indifferent to its advantages.  It
+would not hurt him much if he did join the rival
+Episcopal church in the neighbourhood, which had
+recently become quite popular under a new incumbent
+of mellifluous voice and no particular convictions.  It
+might even help him socially--conceivably it might.
+But that was a course which he did not mean to take
+except under extreme pressure.  It would certainly
+have the aspect of defeat, and to be defeated by John
+Clark was intolerable.
+
+As he saw the matter, the issue was absolutely clear.
+Clark could no longer hold his own if he should oppose
+him.  A church can always get a minister, but a
+minister could not always get a church.  If Clark should
+recognise the weakness of his position, and amend his
+ways--well, he was not vindictive, and he would accept
+any reasonable compromise.  No, he was neither
+vindictive nor unreasonable, but he meant to have his way,
+and the only question in debate was by what means he
+should secure it.
+
+To Beverley's cautious platitudes and Luke's halting
+remonstrances he scarcely listened, but when at last
+Scales began to speak, he was all attention.  He knew
+better than to place Scales in the category with Luke
+and Beverley.  Although his social position was not
+much superior to theirs, yet he had by suavity and
+some real ability insinuated himself into a place of
+some authority in the counsels of the church.  People
+listened to him.  He always spoke with gravity, and
+with a certain air of deprecation, as of one who
+admitted his humility, but was quietly aware of his
+importance.  And he usually knew exactly what to say
+to influence opinion, for he had a habit of collecting
+privately the opinions of other people before he
+announced his own.  Nothing sounds so like wisdom in
+debate as for a speaker to give back in clear form the
+half-articulated opinions of his audience, and in this
+art Scales was an adept.  Therefore Masterman
+listened to him eagerly, when he began in his usually
+non-committal voice to array reasons and suggest a course.
+
+Open opposition would not do, he remarked.  That
+would in all probability stiffen Clark in his views,
+and rally round him those who agreed with him.  But
+it was a known fact that Clark was about to pay a
+long-projected visit to the Holy Land.  Let them give
+him a cordial send-off--they might even give him a
+cheque toward his expenses.  Then, when he was
+gone, would be the time to call a special meeting to
+inquire into the condition of the church.  At such
+a meeting people would speak freely, as they would
+not if Clark were present.  Of course no one could
+prophesy exactly what might happen, but it would not
+be surprising if a good deal of opposition developed
+both to the minister and his views.
+
+"Which means in plain words?" interrupted Masterman.
+
+"That possibly he may not come back," said Scales
+quietly.
+
+"I will be no party to getting rid of the minister,"
+said Beverley.
+
+"Certainly not," said Scales.  "But it is possible--I
+only say it is possible, you know--that he may resign."
+
+"Under compulsion, you mean?"
+
+"Not at all.  Simply in recognition of inevitable facts."
+
+Masterman's grim mouth relaxed in a broad smile.
+His eye rested on Scales with a glance of ironic
+admiration.  What a pity such a man was after all
+only a superior clerk, with no opportunity to display
+his diplomatic gifts except upon the narrow stage
+of church affairs.  Yet he was conscious too of a
+curious element of repulsion which mingled with his
+admiration of the clerk's astuteness.  His mind, which
+half an hour before had been filled with hot enmity
+against the minister, now recoiled swiftly and inclined
+to his defence, when he saw the kind of weapons
+which Scales meant to use against him.  He was a
+man both by nature and by habit not delicate in his
+use of means to attain an end; he could be both cruel
+and unscrupulous upon occasion; but he had no taste
+for deliberate perfidy, he had no capacity for
+meanness, and he contemplated the narrow-shouldered,
+suave-tongued clerk with a rising disgust.
+
+"I don't like your plan," he broke forth loudly.
+"That Holy Land scheme of yours, getting rid of
+Clark and then attacking him, it's mean, it's too much
+like tying a rope across a road to trip up a man in
+the dark whom you dare not tackle openly."
+
+"It's only a suggestion, sir," said Scales deferentially.
+
+"It had better remain a suggestion, then."
+
+He turned his back on Scales, and began to arrange
+the papers on his desk.  It was the signal that the
+conference was over.  Luke and Beverley soon left,
+but Scales remained.
+
+"I don't think you quite appreciate your own
+position in this affair," Scales remarked.
+
+"My position?  What do you know of my position?"
+
+"More than I cared to say before the others.  I
+would like to ask you a question."
+
+"Ask away," Masterman retorted grimly.
+
+"Well then, do you know the real reason why Clark
+preached that sermon?"
+
+"Oh, I suppose it was the expression of the
+new-fangled socialism he professes."
+
+"In part, yes.  But there was a personal element,
+too.  Do you recollect a church you built at Orchard
+Green about ten years ago?"
+
+Masterman's face darkened, for he knew very well
+what was coming.  He had received more than one
+letter lately from the trustees of Orchard Green Church,
+who complained that the west wall of the edifice was
+sinking, owing to imperfect foundations.  It would
+have to be rebuilt, and they naturally traced their
+disaster to his bad workmanship.  Hitherto he had
+taken no notice of these letters.  The people who
+wrote them were not persons of any influence.  They
+had no legal claim upon him.  Of course his work
+had been properly certified by the architect at the
+time of its completion, and in any case the lapse
+of ten years made him immune from all responsibility.
+Nevertheless, it was not an affair that
+he cared to have generally known, and he was
+startled at Scales' reference to the Orchard Green Church.
+
+"Well," Scales continued, "it seems Clark has
+friends at Orchard Green.  When he went to see them
+a little time ago, they told him that the walls of the
+church were sinking.  They had uncovered a part of
+the foundations to discover the cause, and had found
+instead of sound concrete a rotten mixture of
+oyster-shells and road-gravel.  Of course they told him that
+you were the builder, and he came back raging.  Then
+he preached his sermon."
+
+"And you disapproved his sermon?"
+
+"Certainly--certainly," Scales replied in an eager voice.
+
+"Even though his facts were right?"
+
+"Ah!  I couldn't agree to that, sir.  And I'm sure
+you wouldn't admit it."
+
+Masterman threw away his cigar, lit another, and
+stood regarding Scales with a sardonic eye.
+Somehow the craft of the clerk did not appear to him the
+admirable quality that it had seemed half an hour
+earlier.  To rob upon a large scale was one thing;
+to cheat the mind into false conclusions was quite
+another.  The first he had done, and would do again;
+but by a strange paradox this robber in action
+remained honest in thought, and could not bring himself
+to say the thing he did not mean.  He felt again that
+spasm of aversion to Scales, and with his aversion
+there was mixed a strong curiosity to know just how
+far the clerk's supple conscience would serve him, and
+what was the part he wished to play.
+
+He wheeled suddenly upon Scales, and broke into
+a harsh laugh.
+
+"Is that all you have to say?" he asked.
+
+"Yes, that is all."
+
+"Well, now listen to me.  The facts about the
+Orchard Green Church are all right.  I admit them.
+They wanted everything as cheap as could be; they
+wanted me cheap; so I gave them cheap work just to
+balance matters.  Don't think that's an apology, for
+it isn't.  As for Clark, I don't object to his saying
+anything he likes about the business, but I do object
+to his saying it from a pulpit.  He wants to injure me,
+and so he can't complain if I get back at him.  But
+there's two ways of fighting a man--one's face to face,
+and the other's by hitting him behind.  I'm going to
+fight honest.  And do you know, Scales, much as I
+dislike Clark, I really think I like him better than I
+like you, after all."
+
+"I fail to understand----" Scales began.
+
+"Oh no, you don't; you're much too clever for that.
+But if you do really want a little light, I'd have you
+remember this--that Archibold Masterman was never
+frightened yet by threats, and when he fights he fights fair."
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+THE BIG STRONG BEAST
+
+The next morning Masterman wrote a letter to the overjoyed trustees of
+the Orchard Green Church, offering to make good without cost all
+defects of workmanship in the building which might be justly charged to
+him.  He was careful to explain that while they had no legal claim on
+him, he regarded this work as a debt of honour.
+
+He had just finished the letter when Arthur came into the office.
+Arthur's manner was constrained and almost timid.  Masterman, on the
+contrary, was in his most jovial mood.  He had just performed an act
+which was not only good in itself, but wise and politic; for, of
+course, he knew that his action toward the Orchard Green trustees would
+become public, and would be quoted to his credit.
+
+"Well," he began, "getting a bit tired of doing nothing?  Not that I
+grudge you your liberty, you know.  I promised you a year to look
+around, before you settle to your life-work, and I shall stick to my
+bargain.  But I confess it will be a glad day for me when I write
+'Masterman & Son' over my doors."
+
+"I'm very far from doing nothing, sir," he answered.  "Oxford is one
+world, and London quite another.  I am learning every day a lot of
+things Oxford never taught me."
+
+"Of course you are.  London's a big world, and the things it has to
+teach are the things that count.  Not that Oxford isn't worth while
+too.  It gives a man a start in life nothing else can give.  That's why
+I sent you there, you know."
+
+"Yes, I know, father, and I am grateful to you."
+
+"Nothing to be grateful for, my boy.  I owed it to you."  His face
+softened with a musing look very unusual with him.  "I got no kind of
+start myself, you know," he continued.  "At fifteen I was working in a
+brickfield.  When I went home at night, my father used to beat me.  I
+don't think I ever hated any one as I hated my father.  One day I
+struck back, and ran away from home.  Queer thing--I was always sorry
+for that blow.  I used to lie awake at nights for weeks after,
+wondering if I really hurt the old man.  From that day to this I never
+saw him any more.  But I'm still sorry for that blow.  Sons shouldn't
+hit their parents, anyway.  I ought to have let him go on beating me;
+he'd got the habit, and I could have stood it all right.  Well, well,
+it's such a long time ago that I can hardly believe it ever happened."
+
+He stopped suddenly, with a lift of the shoulders, as if he shook off
+the burden of that squalid past.  But the rude words had left the son
+inexpressibly touched.  A swift picture passed before his mind of a
+gaunt boy toiling over heavy tasks, ill-paid, cruelly used, wandering
+out into the world lonely and unguided, and a strong passion of pity
+and of wonder shook his heart.  Above all, those artless words, "Sons
+shouldn't hit their fathers, anyway," fell upon him with the weight of
+a reproach.  Had he not already condemned his father in his thoughts?
+He had known very well to whom Clark alluded in his sermon, and yet he
+had approved.  He had entered the office that morning with the fixed
+intent of endorsing Clark's tacit accusation of his father.  And now he
+found himself suddenly disarmed.  That old sense of something big about
+his father came back to him with redoubled force.  To start like that,
+shovelling clay in a brickyard for twelve hours a day, and to become
+what he was--oh! it needed a big man to do that, an Esau who was
+scarcely to be judged by the standards of smooth-skinned, home-staying
+Jacobs.
+
+"I didn't know you had suffered all that, father.  You never told me
+that before."
+
+"There's a sight of things I've suffered that I wouldn't like you to
+know.  But they were all in the day's work, and I don't complain.  And
+that's one thing I want to say to you, and I may as well say it now.
+You've got a start I never had, and you won't suffer what I suffered,
+but I want you to know that the world's a pretty hard place to live in
+anyway.  You can't go through it without being badly hurt somewhere.
+You've got to take what you want, or you won't get it.  Talking isn't
+going to mend things: life's a big strong beast, and it isn't words but
+a bit and bridle and a whip a man needs who is going to succeed.  Now
+you're at the talking stage, and I don't complain.  You admire talkers
+like Clark, and you think they are doing no end of good, don't you?
+Well, you'll learn better presently.  You'll find that the world goes
+on much the same as it ever did, in spite of the talkers.  I want you
+to digest that fact just as soon as you can, and then you'll be ready
+to step down into the thick of life where I am, and help me do the
+things I want to do."
+
+"But, father, is what Clark said concerning you true?"
+
+"Do you want to discuss it with me?"
+
+"No; I have no right to ask that."
+
+"Yes, you have.  I want you to join in the business when you're ready,
+and you've a right to know what kind of business it is, and, if you
+like to put it so, what kind of person your partner is."
+
+"He is my father, and I love him.  That is enough," said Arthur proudly.
+
+"No, it isn't enough.  I had a father, and I didn't love him.  But as
+to this business of Clark's.  He found out something against me, and
+instead of coming to me about it, he preached a sermon on it, and for
+that I don't forgive him.  Well, what was it he found out?  No more
+than this--that ten years ago I had to do a cheap job, and I did it
+cheaply.  My work has held together ten years, which is about all that
+could be expected at the price.  Now I'll tell you what I've done.
+I've agreed to do the work over again for nothing.  There's the letter
+which I've just written.  You had better read it."
+
+Arthur took the letter, and read it slowly.  His father had risen from
+his desk, and stood watching him narrowly.  Perhaps until that moment
+he had never quite realised how much his heart was set on having his
+son in the business with him.  And he wanted above all things to win
+the son's approval.  Perhaps there was some underlying thought of this
+kind in his mind when he wrote the letter.  Not that he meant to alter
+all the methods of his business to suit his son.  Once in the business,
+Arthur would learn what these were by imperceptible degrees, and would
+grow accustomed to them.  But just now the father's heart was wholly
+set upon concession and conciliation.  He remembered, with a rush of
+tenderness, how he had long ago taught the boy to swim.  He could still
+see the slight, childish form shivering on the rock above the
+swimming-pool.  He had begun with threats, but had soon found them
+useless.  Then he had used persuasion and cajolery, until at last the
+boy had slipt into the pool, and in a week was swimming with the best
+of them.  Well, it was like that now.  If he could but cajole him into
+the deep stream of life, that was enough; when the deep water heaved
+beneath his feet, he would have to do what the others did in pure
+self-defence.
+
+"Well?" he said at last.
+
+Arthur laid down the letter and turned a shining face upon his father.
+
+"It is a noble letter, father.  Forgive me that I misjudged you."
+
+"That's all right, then."
+
+"You have taught me a lesson.  I shall not forget it."
+
+"Oh! don't take it too seriously, my boy.  It is only a small affair,
+after all."
+
+But each knew that it was not a small affair.  In that moment these two
+opposite natures were nearer together than they had ever been before,
+and, although neither knew it, nearer than they would ever be again.
+
+Arthur left his father with a strong sense of exaltation.  The cloud of
+misgiving concerning his father's methods of business had miraculously
+dissolved.  In the quick rebound of feeling he was inclined to judge
+himself intolerant and unjust, and his father's image glowed before his
+mind, endued with heroic virtues.  He shuddered when he thought of his
+father's youth, with its dreadful disabilities; he kindled with
+admiring ardour when the thought of his father's triumph over a weight
+of circumstance which would have crushed a weaker man.  If some of the
+mire of the pit yet clung to him, if in many things he was crude,
+violent, narrow, it was not surprising; the marvel was that his faults
+were not more numerous and more unpardonable.  As Arthur went to his
+room, he caught a vision of himself in the mirror of his wardrobe--a
+slight figure admirably clothed, a face fresh and unlined, with white
+forehead and close curling hair, the picture of youth delicately
+nurtured, upon whom the winds of life had not blown roughly--and he was
+filled with compunction at the contrast afforded by that other picture
+of a poor drudging boy toiling in a brickfield and beaten by a drunken
+parent.  In spite of all his superficial superiorities, he seemed a
+creature of small significance beside this Titanic father of his.
+
+It was an exquisite spring morning, one of those mornings when London
+draws her first fresh, unimpeded breath after the long, choking fogs of
+winter.  The lawn lay green beneath the window, presided over by a busy
+thrush, who flirted his wings in the strong sunlight, and stopped at
+intervals to address a long mellow note of rapture to the blue sky; the
+japonica had hung the garden wall with crimson blossoms; the poplars
+took the light upon their slender spires, till each burned with yellow
+flame.  Nature, unconquered by the gross antipathy of man, was invading
+the brick Babylon, flinging brocades of light upon the beaten ways, and
+filling them with the music of the pipes of Pan.  Arthur could not
+resist the call.
+
+He felt a need of solitude.  He had many thoughts that cried aloud for
+readjustment.  He stepped out in the blither air, and took his way to
+Hampstead Heath.  Soon the narrow streets were left behind, the long
+hill rose above him, and his feet trod the furze-clad slopes, little
+altered since the day when Roman legions camped upon their crests, and
+eighteenth-century highwaymen concealed themselves among their hollows.
+He walked far and fast, meditating much on life.  It seemed a wonderful
+thing to be alive, where so many generations of men had fought and
+perished, to be for a little time sole possessor of a world that had
+cast off such myriads of tenants; and there came to him, with an almost
+painful wonder, the sense of the richness of his opportunity.  He would
+make his own life something worthy.  It was true, as his father had
+said, that he started at a point of vantage not given to every one.  By
+so much that he started higher, he must soar higher, go farther.  But
+in the midst of all his exultant thoughts there intruded his father's
+terse picture of life as a big strong beast only to be mastered by bit
+and whip and bridle.  And at that thought the tide of exaltation began
+to leave him.  He walked more slowly, became listless, was conscious of
+weariness.  It no longer seemed an easy and a rapturous thing to live;
+life rose before him as a menace.
+
+In the early afternoon he came to the Spaniards' Inn, and entered it.
+Coming from the brilliant air into the dim room of the inn, he did not
+at first recognise a man already seated there, finishing a frugal meal
+of bread and cheese and ale.  The man was tall, with somewhat stooping
+shoulders; his face was long and bearded, his forehead high, with thin
+dark hair, his eyes dark and penetrating.  He wore a flannel shirt with
+a silk tie of some indeterminate colour akin to dull crimson.  He held
+a book in one hand, and read as he ate.
+
+As Arthur entered the room he looked up.
+
+"You don't know me, I suppose," he said genially.  "But I know you by
+sight at least.  My name is Hilary Vickars."
+
+So this was Hilary Vickars, of whom he had heard Scales speaking at the
+deacon's tea.  Now that he looked at him more closely he recognised him
+at once.  Among the crowd of ordinary faces in the church, that face
+had stood out with a singular distinctness.  It was a face at once
+grave and composed, sad and humorous; the face of a man who had striven
+much and suffered much, but had retained through all a certain
+vivacity, which was distinct from gaiety while including it.  And all
+these qualities seemed to rest upon a deeper quality of composure, so
+that the final impression was of a man who through suffering had won
+his way to some secret knowledge which gave him an air of gentle
+authority.
+
+"I have often wished to know you," said Arthur.
+
+"And I you."
+
+"Why should you wish to know me?"
+
+"Oh! a fancy of mine.  It is my business to study people.  And you do
+not look like the run of folk in Highbourne Gardens.  Most of the folk
+in Highbourne Gardens are dear, good, comfortable folk, but stodgy.
+They are as alike as peas.  I could tell you their exact method of
+life, even to what they have for breakfast.  They are products of
+manufacture, all turned out just alike to the last hair, and all doing
+just the same things every day, without the least variation.  That is
+what stodginess means."
+
+"And I am not stodgy?" Arthur laughed.
+
+"No; you are fluid.  You have not hardened into shape yet.  You are a
+problem."
+
+Arthur looked at the dark, ironic face, and felt a sudden friendliness
+for the man.  It was a long time since he had conversed with a man of
+ideas; he had scarcely done so since he had left Oxford.  The church
+young men he had found distasteful to him.  They were good young men
+for the most part, much enamoured of respectability, laboriously
+virtuous, cherishing many mild scruples about the use of the world and
+inclined to judge it by standards quite foreign to their real tastes;
+but they had no mental horizons.  They were also inclined to be a
+little shy of him, as a rich man's son with a superior education; a
+little envious, too, and not at home in his presence, so that
+intercourse with them had not been easy.  But here was a man who spoke
+another kind of language; it was that language of ideas which at once
+asserts kinship, among those to whom it is intelligible.
+
+Arthur drew his chair to the table, and soon found himself absorbed in
+conversation.  Hilary Vickars talked slowly, with hesitating pauses--a
+trick which lent emphasis to what he said.  It was as though he fumbled
+for the right word, and then flashed it out like a sudden torch.
+Arthur noticed, too, that he occasionally did not pronounce a word in
+the way common among educated men.  The variation was slight; it could
+scarcely have been called erroneous; but it suggested some deficiency
+of early training.  Perhaps the boy's face betrayed his surprise too
+ingenuously, for after one of these variations Vickars said abruptly:
+
+"I envy you.  It was my dream to go to Oxford.  I didn't dream true in
+that case."
+
+"Perhaps you have done just as well without Oxford," said Arthur
+generously.
+
+"No, I have never cherished that--delusion.  Deprivations in middle
+life don't matter; but deprivations in early life can never be made
+up."  He paused a moment, and then added.  "I was a gardener before I
+became an author."
+
+Arthur looked his surprise, whereat Vickars laughed.
+
+"Oh!  I assure you," he said, "even gardeners have their dreams.  Mine,
+as I said, was Oxford, for I spent my youth within sight of her spires,
+within sound of her bells.  I believed I could become a scholar;
+indeed, I still believe my old belief not quite foolish.  I spent all
+my money on grammars and dictionaries which I did not know were
+obsolete, got to know the classics in a crude fashion, and went on
+imagining that some day I might enter the University.  Of course it was
+all an absurd dream; you do not need to be told that.  My first real
+discovery in life was that learning is the privilege of wealth.  That
+led me to some other discoveries of the same nature, the sum of which
+was that the great mass of mankind are born disinherited, and that I
+was one of them.  It hurt me dreadfully at the time, but in the long
+run it was the making of me.  It set me studying life as it is, not as
+it once was in ancient times.  And the more I studied it, the more I
+came to admire common men and women, until at last I was glad that I
+belonged to them.  It is a great thing to know just to whom you belong;
+no man does any kind of good work till he knows that."
+
+"But you are not a common man," Arthur interrupted.  "You are a writer."
+
+"Oh!  I have some aptitudes that are not common, no doubt; I am
+immodest enough to think that.  But if I am a writer, I write of common
+people.  It is common life that interests me, the virtues, vices,
+trials, heroisms, debasements, and nobilities of plain people.  But I
+did not mean to talk about myself, and you must forgive me."
+
+"There is nothing to forgive.  What you say deeply interests me.  My
+father said a thing to-day about life which has been in my thoughts a
+good deal, and you make me recall it.  By the way, do you know my
+father?"
+
+"Yes, I know him."
+
+He spoke the words with a certain caustic accent which did not pass
+unnoticed.
+
+"You mean you do not like him," Arthur replied with a flash of anger.
+
+"No, I don't say that.  I know him merely as a type.  But what did he
+say?"
+
+"He said life was a hard business, in which one was sure to be hurt;
+that it was a big strong beast which could only be subdued by whip and
+bridle."
+
+"An excellent definition.  Life is strong and cruel and hard.  Men who
+really live soon discover that."
+
+"Have you found it so?"
+
+"Yes.  And I've seen the big strong beast tread thousands down--the
+people who haven't got the whip and bridle."
+
+He spoke the words with remarkable intensity.  They were flashed from
+him rather than spoken.  Then, as if ashamed of his display of feeling,
+he rose from the table, and said in a matter-of-fact tone, "The evening
+is coming on.  I must be going."
+
+They went out of the inn together.  The long gray road with its groups
+of trees and dim houses lay before them; and, as the darkness deepened,
+the distant lights of London flung a yellow conflagration on the sky.
+"That's where the big strong beast lies," said Vickars.  "You can hear
+his mighty hooves at work."  And, as he spoke, from that great caldron
+of life, that lay packed and mist-swathed to the eastward of the road,
+there did come up a sound as of waves upon a groaning beach, a sound of
+crashing and rending, mingled with the dull thud of wheels and the
+demoniac shriek of engine and of factory whistles.
+
+But he did not recur to the theme.  The talk became trivial,
+commonplace; once only did it touch a theme of interest, when Vickars
+recalled how Coleridge and Keats and Haydon and Leigh Hunt had trodden
+that same road, each with his own separate vision of what life meant,
+and what man was meant to do in it.
+
+It was nearly dark when they reached the neighbourhood of Highbourne
+Gardens.  Presently Vickars stopped before a small house, one of many,
+in a long gravelled street.  The houses were all alike; each had its
+strip of garden, its bow-window, its door with glass panels, its aspect
+of decent mediocrity.  There was still enough light to see that though
+the houses were comparatively new, a kind of premature decay had
+overtaken them.  The iron garden-gates sagged upon their hinges, and
+the bricks appeared to be joined with sand, which errand-boys had
+picked out in deep grooves while waiting in the porch for orders.  The
+dilapidation of age may be respectable and even romantic, but in this
+dilapidation of newness there was something inexpressibly depressing.
+
+"This is where I live," said Vickars.
+
+"I don't think I was ever in this street before," said Arthur.  "It
+must have been built while I was at Oxford."
+
+"It was," said Vickars.  "Your father built it."
+
+They said good-night and parted.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+MRS. BUNDY
+
+A few days after Arthur's memorable conversation with his father,
+Archibold Masterman entered on one of his recurring fits of gloom.  He
+went about the house silently, ate and drank in silence, took little
+notice of any member of his family, and sat alone in his office till
+long past midnight.  The causes of his silence were, as usual,
+inscrutable.  Sometimes he looked on Arthur with a long, brooding,
+wistful gaze, as if he would like to confide in him, but the confidence
+never came.  Possibly if he had followed up his recent burst of
+tenderness with complete confidence, the boy might have been won.  But
+in Masterman's nature there was a curious element of perversity, which
+often prevailed over the dictates of reason and even of self-interest.
+It was this element of perversity that lay at the root of much that
+seemed complex in his character, exhibiting itself sometimes in gusty
+tenderness, sometimes in unscrupulous hardness, so that to the casual
+observer he appeared a man of formidable moods, none of whose actions
+could be predicated from any precedent experience.
+
+Once, when Arthur said timidly, "Can I be of any help to you in the
+office, sir?" he replied curtly, "None whatever.  I'll tell you when I
+want you," and the boy said no more.  His sister had gone away to spend
+some weeks with a friend, his mother was as silent as his father, and
+he was left more completely to himself than he had ever been.
+
+It was little wonder that he turned eagerly from that gloomy house to
+the society of such friends as were available.  Among these was Hilary
+Vickars, for whom he had conceived a strong liking.  He walked with him
+occasionally in the afternoons, but as yet Arthur had not visited the
+house.  Another friend, whose house was always open to him, and had
+been since he was a boy, was a certain Mrs. Bundy, a motherly,
+cheerful, eccentric Scotchwoman.  She was a person of extraordinary
+slovenliness and good-humour, indefatigably kind, generous, and
+light-hearted, who had been so used to carrying burdens herself that
+she cheerfully shouldered other people's burdens as a kind of right.
+Every one knew where Mrs. Bundy lived; lonely Scotch youths who had
+come to London to push their fortunes found in her an ardent
+sympathiser; and should one come to her sick with the shame of some
+sudden defeat of virtue, he never failed to find in her a shrewd and
+optimistic friend.  Over such youths she exercised a directorship as
+complete as that of a Jesuit Father; she inspected with a jealous eye
+their morals and their underwear; mended for them, dosed them when they
+had colds, fed them with anything that came to hand, took charge of
+their money, made them small loans, and addressed them with apostolic
+fervour upon the perils and the pitfalls of London life.
+
+"Poor laddies!" she would say, "they need mothering," and her ample
+breast swelled with pity at the picture of their loneliness in shabby
+London lodgings, where they did unequal battle with rapacious
+land-ladies.  Not that she herself was childless; she was the proud
+mother of two of the most odious children in the locality, who spent
+their whole time in making life intolerable to their neighbours.  But
+to her, of course, they were merely riotous young angels, whose
+mischief was the proof of hearty spirits, and whose worst faults
+reposed upon a solid base of good intentions.
+
+Life for these youngsters was merely a joke and an adventure, and, to
+tell the truth, Mrs. Bundy's view of life was not unlike theirs.  Her
+whole existence had been fugitive and precarious, for her husband was a
+speculator who had followed for thirty years the will-o'-the-wisp of
+sudden fortune.  He was a solemn little man, with large, dreamlike
+eyes, whose immense power of industry had been almost uniformly turned
+in wrong directions.  At the whisper of gold, silver, lead, coal,
+nitrates, oil, land-booms, he was ready at a moment's notice to wander
+off into the most inaccessible places of the earth, from which he
+returned sometimes penniless, and sometimes with a profusion of spoil
+which he soon contrived to lose again.  Most women would have tired of
+these fruitless quests, but Mrs. Bundy's faith in her husband never
+faltered, and all the strange caprices of his fortune did not
+disconcert her.  When her adventurer returned with bags of gold, she at
+once rose to the occasion, moved into a larger house, rode in her
+carriage for a few weeks, and thoroughly enjoyed the sunshine while it
+lasted.  When the luck failed, she went back contentedly to the
+cheapest house she could find, used up her fine gowns in household
+service, and waited hopefully for the return of Bundy.  He always came
+back, though more than once he had been away a whole year; and his
+return was sometimes dramatic--as, for instance, when he appeared at
+midnight, and flung a diamond necklace round her throat, while she hid
+in her pocket a county-court summons for a year's milk bills which she
+could not pay.
+
+"Come in wi' you, my bonny lad," was the usual greeting to Arthur, and
+she would lead him into the kitchen with the air of a duchess
+introducing him to a salon; for it should be said that at this time the
+Bundy star was in eclipse.  And then she would sit down and tell him
+wondrous tales of people she had known, much too grotesque and tragic
+for any reasonable world, with stories still more grotesque of the
+wanderings of Bundy in Brazil and South Africa, and the narrow escapes
+he had had of being a multimillionaire.  Just now, it appeared, he was
+engaged on some mysterious business in Canada, where a handful of
+dollars judiciously expended might purchase an estate as large as
+England.  And she would tell these stories with such a vivid art, and
+with such good faith and humour, that Arthur would roar with laughter,
+which perhaps was what she wished him to do, for he often came to her
+with a clouded brow.
+
+"It's small good staying in England these days, if you want to
+prosper," she would remark.  "What wi' all the ships upon the sea and
+all the new lands that lie beyond, it's a shame for a youth to sit at
+home.  You don't get any fun out of life that way."
+
+Arthur might have retorted that there did not seem to be much fun in a
+kind of life that left Mrs. Bundy sole tenant of a ruinous old house in
+Lion Row, whose rent she could scarcely pay, while Bundy wandered in
+Brazil or Canada, but Mrs. Bundy was so unaffectedly enamoured of her
+lot that he never said it.  On the contrary, there was sown in his mind
+a little germ of adventure which was to ripen later on, and he got
+exhilarating glimpses of the romance and bigness of life.
+
+She examined his hand one night, for she affected a knowledge of
+palmistry, and ended by saying, "You'll have your adventures before
+long"; and in spite of his entire scepticism, a pleasurable thrill shot
+through his veins at the prophecy.
+
+"You've got a hand like Bundy's," she remarked; whereat he laughed, and
+said rather rudely that he had no wish to resemble Bundy.
+
+"Bundy's had his bad times," she retorted, "but he's had his good times
+too.  But if you asked him, I don't think he'd regret anything, and
+he'd live the same life again if he had the choice.  And so would I,
+for that matter."
+
+And then she swept across the kitchen in her soiled silk dress with the
+air of pride and dignity that would have become a palace, and Arthur
+was left reflecting on the happy courage of her temperament as
+something to be greatly envied.
+
+He learned much from Mrs. Bundy in those weeks, and above all he
+learned to love her.  She was, in spite of all her eccentricities, so
+motherly, and such a fountain of inexhaustible sympathy, that he got
+into the way of confiding to her many of his private thoughts.
+
+One night he spoke to her about his father, and of his father's plans
+for him.
+
+"He wants me to enter the business," he said.
+
+"And why not, laddie?"
+
+"Frankly, I don't like it."
+
+"That's neither here nor there.  You've got to live, and as long as a
+business is honest, one business is as good as another."
+
+"But is it honest?"
+
+He had not meant to ask the question.  It came from him unawares.  It
+was a long-silent, long-concealed thought, suddenly become audible.
+
+"What is dishonest in it?"
+
+"I can't quite tell.  But I do know that my father buys land for
+speculative building, and puts up houses that are built of the
+rottenest material, and sells them to ignorant people."
+
+"Aye, laddie, your father's like the man in the parable, 'an austere
+man, gathering where he has not strawed.'  But he's a strong man, is
+your father.  There's few stronger men than Archibold Masterman.
+
+"Strong, but is he good?  I mean, is his way of life right?"
+
+"I canna' tell about that, laddie.  But if I was you, I think I
+wouldn't ask that question about my father.  There's a lot of goodness
+in men, and my conviction is that most men are about as good as they
+know how to be.  There's many people wouldn't call Bundy good, because
+he's what they call a speculator, and has to live with wild men, and
+doesn't go to church when he's home; but I know he's got a heart of
+gold.  He never cheated any man knowingly.  He's lost himself much more
+than men have lost by him.  And he'd always give away his last penny to
+the poor."
+
+"Ah, but that's not the point.  I know my father is good in that way.
+Why, only the other day he rebuilt a church entirely at his own expense
+for people who had no legal claim at all on him.  But it's his
+business, it's the method of it.  And I must find an answer, for I must
+join him in the business or refuse it."
+
+"Well, if you feel like that, refuse it, laddie.  Not that I'll say
+you're wise, nor even right.  Fathers have some claims on their sons
+after all, and these claims ought to come before your own tastes.  Only
+if you know you couldn't draw together with your father, and would only
+make him and yourself unhappy trying to, then the best thing is to say
+so at once."
+
+"I suppose you are right," he said in a lugubrious voice.  And then he
+added, "There's another trouble, too.  How am I to get my living?"
+
+"You'll find that out fast enough when you become acquainted with
+hunger," she said with a laugh.
+
+"But if I don't go into my father's business, God only knows what I can
+do.  I don't seem to be fitted for anything in particular."
+
+"I wouldn't worry about that, either," she replied.  "There's very few
+men do the things they think they're fitted for; but they find out how
+to do other things that are just as important.  There's Bundy, now;
+you'll never guess what he thought himself fitted for when I married
+him."
+
+"Well, what?"
+
+"A clergyman."
+
+Arthur laughed profanely.  The thought of the nefarious Bundy, whose
+life had been spent in the promotion of companies of a singular
+collapsibility, as a clergyman was too ridiculous.
+
+"Ah! you may laugh, but let me tell you he'd have made a first-rate
+parson if he'd gone to college, and started fair."
+
+She spoke with heat, which immediately passed into laughter, as she
+caught a glimpse of the whimsicality of the thing.
+
+"Ye canna' say Bundy has not a fine flow of language when he chooses,
+and he can look as solemn as a bishop, and I'm sure he would have had a
+fine bedside manner," she continued.  "But my belief is that a man who
+can do one thing well can do any other thing just as well."
+
+"That's a consoling faith, at any rate."
+
+"It isn't a faith, it's a fact.  It's just a question of ability.  The
+worst of you London-bred lads is that you all want a place made for
+you, and you don't see that the strong man makes a place for himself."
+
+Arthur did not quite like that, and he liked it the less because he
+knew that it was true.  For was not he London bred?  Had not his path
+been made easy for him?  And how could that happen without some
+emasculation of nature?  To grow up in streets, carefully paved and
+graded, punctually lit at night; to live in houses where a hundred
+conveniences sprang up to meet the idle hand, to be guarded from
+offence, provided for without exertion--ah, how different that life
+from the primitive life of man, familiar with rain and tempest, with a
+hundred rude and moving accidents, always poised upon the edge of
+peril, and existing instant by instant by an indomitable exercise of
+will and strength!  For the first time he caught a vital glimpse of the
+primeval life of man, and recognised its self-sufficing dignity.  For
+the first time he realised that the essence of all true living lay in
+daring.  It was a truth which neither London nor Oxford had imparted to
+him.  He had not even learned it through his own father, whom he knew
+conventionally rather than really.  Strangely enough, it came to him
+now through the talk of Mrs. Bundy, wise with a wisdom which
+vicissitude alone could teach, and through the somewhat sorry epic of
+her husband's hazardous adventures.
+
+"The strong man makes a place for himself"--it was sound doctrine and
+indubitable fact as well; but was he one of the strong?  The question
+hung upon the confines of his mind, a whispered interrogation, which
+disturbed and sometimes tortured him.  Youth is always a little
+ludicrous, often pathetically ludicrous, and in nothing so much as in
+its capacity for taking itself seriously.  Life seems such an immensely
+solemn business at one-and-twenty.  Later on we discover that the
+decisions on which we supposed angels waited are of scant interest to
+any one but ourselves, and that the world goes on much the same
+whatever we do or say.
+
+Yet youth is right, even in its crude vanity and egoism, for the
+history of the world would be poor reading if it recorded nothing
+better than the commonsense and commonplace performances of middle-age.
+Mrs. Bundy, from her fifty years' coign of vantage, saw life as Arthur
+could not see it; above all, she saw its width, which was a great
+vision to attain.
+
+"No man really enjoys life," she said to him one day, "unless he starts
+poor."
+
+"How do you make that out?"
+
+"Because the poor are the only people capable of adventures," she
+replied.  "As long as a man is poor, anything may happen to him; but
+after he becomes rich, nothing happens."
+
+"But you would like to be rich, wouldn't you?"
+
+"Not rich enough to want for nothing," she replied.
+
+As usual she fell back upon her own experience for wisdom, and drew a
+shrewd and humorous sketch of one of her episodic emergences into
+wealth.
+
+"Bundy was really rich that time," she remarked.  "He'd struck oil in
+Texas, and had only to sit still and let the oil work for him.  It was
+good fun at first.  We took a big house at Kensington, and Bundy spent
+his time getting cheated over horses, and I spent mine being cheated
+over sham Sheraton furniture, and when we tired of that we bought
+pictures, until at last the house was so full of things we couldn't get
+another stick into it.  'What shall we do now?' says Bundy.  'Let us
+try being fashionable,' says I."  [She uttered the word
+"fash-ee-on-abell," with an indescribable drawling accent of contempt.]
+"So we tried that, too, and drove in the Park, and gave dinner-parties,
+and Bundy had to wear dress-clothes, though he never could make out how
+to tie his white tie, and made more fuss than enough of it.  We got
+plenty of folk to eat our dinners, but a duller lot I never met.  The
+men all wanted to talk oil, and the women couldn't talk of anything but
+dress, and men and women alike hung round Bundy, and let him know as
+plainly as they dared that all they came for was to see if they could
+get any oil-shares out of him.  After a time we grew tired of being
+fashionable, and Bundy says, 'I think we'll have a yacht.'  So we
+bought a yacht, though neither of us liked the sea, and we made out a
+summer that way.  And all the while the oil was pouring out of those
+wells in Texas, and the money was pouring in, and we saw no end to it.
+Then Bundy tried being a philanthropist, and that was really
+interesting while it lasted.  There wasn't a crank in London--nor, one
+would suppose, in Europe, from the look of his mail-bag--that didn't
+find him out.  They sat upon his doorstep to catch him coming out, and
+hunted him down the street, and all the men he'd ever known anywhere
+claimed him as an old friend, so that the poor man lived the life of a
+partridge on the mountains, as the saying is.  He grew quite
+old-looking, and lost his sleep, and after a time he didn't even read
+what the papers said about him, which is a pretty bad sign in a man."
+
+"Poor Mr. Bundy!" said Arthur, in mock commiseration.
+
+"Ah! you may well say it, laddie, and poor Mrs. Bundy, too, for I'd
+never been so miserable in my life.  You see, it was the dullness of
+the thing that made us miserable.  When you can get everything you
+want, you don't want anything after a time."
+
+"And how did it end?"
+
+"Well, one morning I lay a-bed late, for there was nothing particular
+to get up for, and I could hear Bundy in his dressing-room, opening and
+shutting drawers, as though he couldn't make up his mind what clothes
+he wanted to wear.  There came a knock on the outer door, and I heard a
+crumpling of paper, and then he whistled.
+
+"'What is it?' I called out.
+
+"He didn't answer, but I heard him rampaging round.  So I jumped out of
+bed, and ran into the dressing-room, and there stood Bundy laughing to
+himself, and upon my word he looked happier than I had seen him for
+twelve months or more.
+
+"'What is it?' I says again.
+
+"And then he looked at me mighty solemn and queer, and says, 'Can ye
+bear it?'
+
+"'Bear what?' says I.
+
+"'Oh! nothing much,' says he, 'only we're bust.  The oil's given out.'
+
+"'Then we're poor?' says I.
+
+"'Poor we are,' says he--'poor as Job.  For, you see, I've been
+spending everything as it came, thinking that that oil would last for
+ever, and now we're bust.'
+
+"'Hallelujah!' says I.  'That's the best news I've heard a long time.'
+
+"He looked at me a minute, kind of doubtful, and then he burst out
+laughing, and says, 'I rather think I feel that way myself.'
+
+"'I knew you would,' says I.  And then I put my arms round him, and we
+danced round the room, and I give you my word that was the happiest
+hour I ever spent in that big house at Kensington.  You see, we'd both
+been dying of dullness, though neither of us liked to say it.  We'd got
+where there weren't any adventures; and that's why life didn't seem
+worth living."
+
+She looked at Arthur with humorous eyes, in which also there was the
+gleam of motherly affection and solicitude.
+
+"You're dreadfully afraid of being poor, aren't you, my dear?" she
+concluded.  "London makes men feel like that.  And it's because men get
+afraid of life that they take the first comfortable groove that offers,
+and then all the fun is over for them.  Well, don't you be like that.
+If I was you, I'd live my life, and let the question of getting a
+living shift for itself.  And remember what I say, for it's true--the
+only people who really enjoy life are the poor, because they're the
+only people who have lots to look forward to."
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+THE MAGIC NIGHT
+
+Coming home one night along the Lonsdale Road, Arthur found Hilary
+Vickars standing at his garden gate, taking the air.  It was June, that
+most exquisite of all months in London, when the perfume of summer
+finds its way into the narrowest streets, and the imprisoned people
+thrill with a new sense of freedom and deliverance.  In the soft
+twilight even Lonsdale Road was touched with the idyllic; its impudence
+of newness was concealed under a faint wash of mauve, and its tiny
+gardens were fresh with the scent of mown grass.
+
+Hilary Vickars himself seemed softened with the hour; when he spoke to
+Arthur there was a new kindness in his voice.  Perhaps he could not
+have explained his mood; few of us can explain these sudden softenings
+that come to us, sometimes through the influence of external things,
+sometimes from the welling up in us of founts of tenderness which we
+had thought for ever sealed.  A gust of wind among the trees, a bird's
+song in the dusk, a girl's voice at her piano, in its first fresh,
+unrestrained sweetness--who of us cannot recall how things as slight as
+these have had a strange power to provoke some crisis of emotion, which
+perhaps has coloured all our after-life?  Hilary Vickars had been
+listening that night to his daughter as she sang.  She had sung a song
+her mother had been fond of, and in the mind of the widowed man all the
+past had leapt into agonised distinctness.  And from that he had passed
+to the perception of the daughter's likeness to her mother, and to the
+pathos of her youth.  Her voice yet lingered in the air, as he stole
+out of the room, and stood bareheaded at the garden gate.  And then he
+saw Arthur coming up the road, and as his eye rested on the slim,
+graceful figure he again realised this infinite pathos of youth.
+
+"He wants help, and I ought to help him," was his instant thought.
+
+Hitherto a kind of pride had imposed a barrier of reserve between
+himself and Arthur.  He had seen him as a rich man's son, the member of
+a class for which he had only scorn and anger.  But now he saw him
+simply as a youth launching his frail bark upon the perilous sea of
+life, and he loved him.  So Nature wrought within him, using his
+softened mood for her own ends, and with Nature came Destiny, casting
+the first threads of her inscrutable design upon the loom of life.
+
+He held his hand with a lingering pressure, and then said, as if
+obeying a resolve imposed upon his own will rather than suggested by
+it, "Won't you come in?"
+
+He led the way into the house, and Arthur followed with a glad alacrity.
+
+The narrow hall-way opened upon a room at the back of the house, which
+served both as living-room and library.  The only light in the room
+came from two candles on the piano brackets.  Between them sat a young
+girl, her fingers still upon the keys, her face, rayed with the nimbus
+of the candlelight, turned upward with a charming air of expectation
+and surprise.
+
+She was not beautiful, judged by the canons of exacting art; yet there
+was no artist who could have been indifferent to her, for she possessed
+an element of charm much more rare than beauty.  The hair, dark and
+abundant, was very simply dressed above a low white forehead; the face
+was beautifully moulded, and expressed a delicate fatigue; the mouth,
+too large for beauty, was mobile and eager; the eyes were a stag's
+eyes, brown and full and limpid.  It was in these that her charm was
+concentrated.  They held depth beyond depth, eyes into which the gaze
+sank, fathomless as water in a well.
+
+She rose as her father and his guest entered the room.
+
+"My daughter, Elizabeth," he said.
+
+She bowed, and turned toward Arthur the regard of her unfathomable
+eyes.  Arthur stood transfixed.  For a long moment his gaze clung to
+hers, and a new, strange, pleasurable heat thrilled his blood.  A
+subtle, undecipherable telegraphy was in that clinging gaze.  It was as
+though soul challenged soul; the citadel of sentience in each awoke to
+sudden life, and quivered at the shock of contact, with an emotion half
+alarm and half delight.  Then the veil fell between them, and the soul
+of each receded into secrecy.
+
+It was a relief to each when Vickars lit the gas, and began to speak in
+accents of conventional courtesy.
+
+"This is my work-room," he said.
+
+And indeed the room told its own tale.  Bookshelves, closely packed,
+covered each wall; the books lay in heaps upon the floor; and in their
+midst stood a wide table piled with manuscripts, proofs, and notebooks.
+There was not a single picture in the room, not an ornament of any
+kind.  Near the window stood a typewriter and a small table, and on the
+other side of the window the piano.
+
+"I suppose there are few rooms in London that know more about
+brain-toil than this room--that is, if rooms can receive impressions,
+as I sometimes think they can," he continued.  "Certainly none in
+Lonsdale Road," he added with a smile.  "Ah! that reminds me of a
+story.  When I first came to live here, there was the greatest
+curiosity to know what I did for a living.  Lonsdale Road could not
+account for any man who did not go to the city every day, and therefore
+refused to accept his credentials of respectability.  I never knew how
+far this aversion went till one day our little servant told us with
+tears that she must leave us.  It took a long time to draw from her her
+reason.  You would never guess it.  At last she said, 'Mother say she
+thinks you are a burglar.'  And then I found that our neighbours had
+actually woven this ingenious romance about us, and I am not sure that
+they have discarded it even yet."
+
+He spoke lightly, and yet with an accent of resentment and of hurt
+pride.  To Arthur the story was a revelation of the social loneliness
+of Vickars's life.  But he was thinking less of the father than the
+daughter.  Once more his eyes sought that fair face, and he was
+surprised to find no laughter in it; it was evident the story had
+pained her.
+
+"Elizabeth does not like that story," said her father, noticing her
+silence.
+
+"No, father, I do not.  It makes me hate the world to think it treats
+you unjustly."
+
+"Oh! the world's very well, little girl," he replied.  "One doesn't
+expect justice from it.  One should be content if the world merely
+allows him to live."
+
+"Yet you are always fighting for justice.  You know you are, father."
+
+"Ah! justice for other people--that's a different thing.  But the
+condition of such a fight as that is to be indifferent to the question
+of justice to one's self.  That is a very small matter indeed."
+
+"That is how he always talks," she answered, with a charming
+friendliness of appeal to Arthur.  "He never thinks about himself."
+
+"There, there! we're getting very serious, little girl," Vickars
+replied.  "Suppose we change the subject.  We don't often have a guest.
+Don't you think a little supper and some music afterwards might fit the
+occasion?"
+
+"How forgetful of me!" she said.  She rose and left the room.
+
+"You mustn't take my fine sentiments too seriously, so I give you due
+warning," he remarked.  "Men who write books get into the way of
+talking their own books.  You'll find, as you come to know me better,
+that there's a good deal of--of the artificial in me.  The only merit I
+have above other men is that I am conscious of it."
+
+"I have read your last book," said Arthur, "and I found nothing
+artificial in it.  I thought it a great book."
+
+"Have you?  Well, I'm glad."  His pale face was illumined for an
+instant by the boy's ingenuous praise.  "No, Arthur," he added, "it's
+not great.  It is merely true.  And I think I can say this with real
+sincerity--I care much more for its truth than for its greatness."
+
+"Are they not the same?" said Arthur.
+
+"Not for this generation.  This is the age of 'best sellers,' and the
+book that is called great is usually the book that has least to say
+about the truth of life."
+
+"I was not thinking of contemporary opinion."
+
+"Contemporary opinion is the only court of appeal we have.  A book must
+justify itself to the generation in which it is written, or be sure of
+it no other generation will know anything about it.  Yet I do sometimes
+think that truth must make itself heard.  I cherish the belief, in
+spite of history and experience."
+
+He spoke with an accent of infinite dejection.  Arthur could find no
+words of reply.  If, an hour before, he had been asked what kind of
+life came nearest his ideal, perhaps he would have replied, "The
+literary life," and he would have instanced Vickars.  Now, as he looked
+at the writer's tired face, it was as though the naked realities of
+such a life lay before him, stripped of all delusive trappings.  To
+drain one's life-blood into books that no one read, to prophesy to deaf
+ears and undiscerning eyes, ah! surely there must be a better way of
+life than this; and on the instant he knew what that way was.  That
+warmth which still pierced his veins spoke to him more clearly than any
+voice.  To love--that was life.  To live the lyric life of love--that
+was better than to write of it.  And straightway there came to him a
+vision of wide plains and deep forests, dotted with the homes of men,
+beneath whose roofs lip met lip in faithful kisses, and heart beat to
+heart through long nights of sleep, and all the primeval life of man
+went on in birth and death, as it had done since the gates of Eden
+closed.  Ah! infinite desirable delight of love, strong, and natural,
+and enduring, on which the great seal of God had always rested!  In
+that moment he ceased to be a boy; his manhood rushed upon him; he
+blushed, and in his heart a voice cried, "Elizabeth!"
+
+She re-entered the room at that moment, carrying a supper-tray, and
+Arthur could not but observe the supple poise and grace of her young
+figure.  She moved easily, with a soft gliding motion; she was dressed
+wholly in white, and conveyed an impression of a creature inimitably
+virginal.  The face had not lost its look of delicate fatigue, but it
+was clear that this fatigue was of the mind rather than the body, and
+owed itself to no physical defect.  Both he and Vickars rose together
+to clear a place upon the littered writing-table for the supper-tray,
+and in performing this act his hand touched hers.  It was but a
+feather's touch, but it thrilled him, and his very flesh seemed to
+dissolve in a fire of rapture.  Again he sought her eyes, but now they
+were averted.  The moment passed like a chord of music that left the
+air vibrating.  It seemed to him that all the world must know what had
+happened.
+
+Then the current of his life ran back into its normal channels, and he
+found himself talking with excited eagerness.  The meal was as simple
+as a meal could be, but for him it had ambrosial flavours.  She sat
+quite silent, listening, apparently unaware that he talked for her
+alone.  Vickars caught the gaiety of his good spirits, and talked as
+eagerly as he.  The conversation soon found its accustomed
+grooves--books, and London, and the interminable comedy and tragedy of
+man.  Presently Vickars happened to mention a young poet who had lately
+died, and Arthur asked if he had known him.
+
+"Yes, he came here once.  It was in his last days, when he had finally
+discovered that the world had rejected him.  But he never knew why he
+was rejected."
+
+"Why was he rejected?"
+
+"Because he could only sing of the past.  He had no vision of the
+modern world.  He despised it, and his contempt blinded him to its real
+significance.
+
+"I do not think that is quite just, father," said Elizabeth.
+
+"Ah!  I forgot to say," said Vickars, with an admiring glance at his
+daughter, "that Elizabeth is a much better critic than I.  She is a
+better critic because she is a kinder."
+
+"No, it's not that, father.  My criticism, such as it is, is only
+feeling, and I felt that poor Lawson was just finding his way to the
+right method when he died.  Don't you remember those lines on London in
+his last sonnet?--
+
+  O Calvaries of the poor, dim hills of pain,
+    Whose utmost anguish is not nail or thorn,
+    The beaten blood-smeared brow, the soft flesh torn,
+  But this, that ye are crucified in vain.
+
+The man who wrote those lines surely saw the modern world, and realised
+its significance."
+
+She recited the lines slowly, in a low fluty voice which would have
+imparted dignity and music to much worse lines.  Arthur listened
+entranced.  Surely there was magic in this summer's night, a magic of
+the soul as well as of the flesh.  His hand had touched hers, but now
+her mind revealed itself, and thrilled his with a subtler contact.  In
+one swift glimpse he understood her exquisite sensitiveness, her
+pitifulness and tenderness, her strength and goodness; it was as though
+the Madonna's halo rested for an instant on that fair brow, and awed
+him into worship.  He drew a long breath, and now, when his eyes sought
+hers, her gaze was not averted.  She accepted the challenge of his eyes
+with complete sincerity, and with a frankness which was the last effect
+of complete innocence and modesty.
+
+The voice of Vickars broke the spell.
+
+"Yes, you are right," he said; "you usually are."  And then, turning to
+Arthur with a whimsical smile, "Do you know Elizabeth writes my books
+for me?"
+
+"Typewrites, he means.  That is all, I assure you," she said.
+
+"And corrects my blunders, which are many."
+
+"Only the spelling.  Father never could spell, and when he is in
+difficulties he makes a hieroglyphic with his pen, and leaves me to
+decipher it."
+
+"I am afraid the critics find it hieroglyphic too," said Vickars, with
+a return to his dejected manner.  "I sometimes wish we had Grub Street
+back again, with all its tribe of famished hacks; they at least would
+understand a book that deals with poverty.  But who are the critics
+to-day?  They are gentlemen with settled incomes who write in
+comfortable armchairs, and know as little about real life as the
+tadpole knows of the ocean.  The result is they simply cannot
+understand the things I write about.  They persuade themselves that
+such things don't exist.  What can one say of them but the accusation
+which is as old as time--'having eyes they see not, and ears they hear
+not, and hearts they do not understand'?"
+
+"They will surely understand one day," said Arthur.
+
+"Ah! one day--but when?  When the common people have forced them to see
+and understand.  For there is my real hope, after all--the common
+people.  They know what they want, and don't go to the critics for
+their opinions.  A venomous review may do much to injure a young
+author; but if he goes on writing undismayed, the time comes when
+reviews, whether bad or good, don't affect him.  If he can justify
+himself to the common people, he is certain to triumph in the long run.
+But there, we are getting too serious again.  Let us forget books, and
+have some music.  One can find solace for any kind of disappointment in
+music.  It is the only art that makes a universal appeal."
+
+Elizabeth rose and went to the piano, stooping as she went to kiss her
+father's brow.
+
+She played nothing that was not familiar, but it seemed to Arthur that
+all she played was the expression of her own personality.  She played
+on and on, wandering at will from Chopin to Tchaikowsky, and in the
+profound melodies of the great Russian her whole spirit spoke.  And it
+seemed to Arthur that the Spirit of the World spoke too--a romantic and
+enchanted world, and yet a world of infinite yearning and pain, of love
+and battle and heroism, till he saw, as it were, the weird procession
+of human life, with white faces strained in final kisses, hands that
+rose above encroaching waves to touch and part, hearts that broke in
+ecstasies of love and joy and sorrow.  The cool night breeze came in at
+the open window, the leaves whispered as it passed, and at intervals
+the deep voice of London ran like an undertone inwoven with the music.
+O wonderful, various, inscrutable world, what, bliss to be alive in it,
+even though it be for the briefest moment!  But there was a bliss
+beyond bliss, unspeakable, unimaginable, not to live alone, but to love
+as the greatest hearts have loved, and surely that was the final
+message of this magic hour!  Time, and the years, and all the
+centuries, and all events and histories, seemed to concentrate
+themselves in one fair girl, from whose slender fingers came this music
+of the world; she alone was important; she was the race itself in its
+final flower of love and loveliness.  So ran the incoherent thoughts of
+youth, songs rather than thoughts, the wordless musical out-cries of a
+heart waking to a knowledge of itself, and finding all outer objects
+lit with the glamour of the magic hour.
+
+The music ceased abruptly.  There was a dull repeated thud upon the
+wall.
+
+"What on earth is that?" cried Arthur.
+
+"Oh, merely our neighbours," said Vickars.  "Poor souls! they rise
+early and work hard, and I suppose they want to go to bed."
+
+"Why, I shouldn't have thought they could have heard as plainly as
+that."
+
+"That's because you don't live in Lonsdale Road," said Vickars with a
+smile.  "Why, I can hear the children sneeze next door.  And there's a
+crack in the party wall, big enough for light to shine through, and I
+know when the light appears that they are going to bed.  My dear
+fellow, I honestly believe it's only the paper that holds the walls
+together at all."
+
+Arthur blushed furiously, for he had remembered what Vickars had
+forgotten, that the house was the work of Archibold Masterman.  It was
+a horrible irruption of the commonplace upon the magic hour.
+
+Vickars, recognising his mistake, turned the conversation into ordinary
+channels.  Arthur still clung to the vanishing skirts of his romance.
+Once more he thrilled as he touched Elizabeth's hand in farewell, but
+as he went out into the cool dusk it seemed as though Life strode
+beside him, a dark and menacing figure, no longer lyrical and friendly.
+
+"What can they think of my father?" he thought, as he walked home.  And
+behind this lay another thought: "If they think ill of my father, as
+they have a right to, can they think well of me?"
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+YOUNG LOVE
+
+A month had passed, a wonderful month; it was as though the whole of
+life had flowered in that month.  All the days and years that had
+preceded it had been but so many roots and tendrils which had stored
+the strong essences of life, that at last they might display themselves
+in this miraculous bloom!  It is the flower that blooms but once, this
+exquisite flower of young, adoring love.  Maturer years may bring the
+strength of calm affection, the heat of turbulent passion, but, in the
+incredible romance of sex, once only comes the wonder-hour, when the
+whole world is dipped in splendour, winged with song, glittering with
+the fresh dew of young desire.  We who are older recall that hour with
+a kind of mournful wonder.  Just to wake and think she wakes too, she
+breathes the same morning air, was an intoxicating thought.  And what
+beautiful and foolish things we did: how we kissed the scrap of paper
+that bore the adored name, watched the adored shadow on the blind, were
+at once so bold and shy, so determined and so fearful, so daring and so
+absurdly sensitive.  No one else had ever loved as we loved; we alone
+possessed the immortal secret, and the knowledge of that secret
+separated us from common men and common life.  Yes, we are older now,
+wiser and colder too, and the flesh no longer thrills with ecstasy at
+the touch of lip or hand; but who would not give all this late-found
+wisdom to recapture for a moment this divine folly of first love?
+
+Arthur gave himself to the divine folly with complete abandonment.  He
+did all the foolish things that lovers do: sat night after night in
+Vickars' room, pretending interest in the father while his eyes never
+left the daughter; trembled when she spoke, shivered when her dress
+touched his hand, shrank from her as if unworthy to touch the hem of
+her garment, and in the same moment longed to clasp her in his arms.
+He waited long hours just to gaze an instant into the depths of her
+timid eyes; gazed with ardour, and then flushed for shame, as one
+convicted of an outrage.  When he left the house he walked only to the
+end of the street, came back again, and in the darkness watched the
+house, wondering what room was hers, and picturing her silent in the
+innocence of sleep.  What if the house should burn?  What if some
+outrageous wrong should violate her slumber?  What if she should die in
+the night?  When he went home at last, to the grim silence of Eagle
+House, it was to dream of her; and no sooner did he wake than he must
+seek Lonsdale Road, finding fresh joy and amazement in the impossible
+fact that she was still alive.
+
+All this time his father said not a word to him, and made no question
+of his comings and goings.  He passed him with averted face, his eyes
+not unkindly but absorbed, for it was a time of panic in the city, when
+richer men than he watched the trembling balance of events, which meant
+sudden triumph or sudden ruin.  But with the unconscious cruelty of
+youth Arthur discerned none of these things.  The material life had
+practically ceased for him; wealth and poverty were alike terms of no
+significance; they belonged to a world so far removed that he no longer
+apprehended it.  It was enough for him that the punctual day awoke him
+with a new cup of happiness; with its first beam he mounted to the
+heaven of his romance, and there dwelt among rosy clouds, with the
+singing of the morning stars in his ears.
+
+With Vickars it was different; him Arthur saw daily, and he could not
+dismiss him from his consideration.  He had begun by admiring him with
+youthful ardour; he sincerely liked him; but now a new question
+disturbed their relationship--did Vickars approve of him?  He was at
+pains to understand Vickars' view of life, for he knew that whatever
+his view was, it was Elizabeth's too.  Had she not typewritten all his
+books for him?  Did not her mind speak in them as well as his?  And he
+knew instinctively that in both father and daughter there was a certain
+resolute fibre of conviction which could not be softened by mere
+sentiment.  They each lived by some kind of definite creed; in a sense
+they were Crusaders pledged to loyalty to that belief; and if he were
+to become to either what he hoped to be, he knew that he must
+understand their attitude to life.
+
+It piqued Arthur that Vickars said so little to him on these matters.
+But one night the opportunity arrived.  Vickars had been busy over some
+literary task; when Arthur came into the room, Elizabeth was putting
+the cover on her typewriter and gathering up a mass of MSS.
+
+"Come in," said Vickars.  "You find me at a good moment.  I have just
+finished a piece of work that has given me a vast deal of trouble."
+
+"Another novel?"
+
+"No, not exactly.  I suppose it is fiction in form, and no doubt most
+people will regard it as fiction in essence too; but as a matter of
+fact it is a plain statement of what is wrong with the world, and a
+proposition for its remedy."
+
+"That sounds rather formidable, doesn't it?"
+
+"It would be formidable if the world would take it seriously.  But they
+won't.  I don't suppose it will even get read.  I am by no means sure
+that it will even get printed.  My publishers are considered bold men,
+but they are only bold along lines thoroughly familiar to them.  Show
+them something new, really and truly new, and they will most likely be
+frightened out of their wits."
+
+"Is it as bad as that?"
+
+"It's not bad at all.  It's absolutely plain commonsense.  I wonder who
+the fool was who first talked of commonsense?  My experience teaches me
+that sense is the most uncommon thing in the world.  Most men are so at
+home with folly that nothing is so likely to alarm them as the
+irruption of real rational sense."
+
+"I wish you would tell me all about it," said Arthur earnestly.
+
+"Do you?" said Vickars, with an ironic smile.  "Well, I don't know
+about that.  You see, at heart I am a fanatic, and, like all fanatics,
+I should expect you to agree with me.  If you didn't, I might not--like
+you.  And then there's Elizabeth.  I rather think she agrees with me.
+And she might not--like you."
+
+"Oh no, father," Elizabeth began, and then flushed and dropped her eyes.
+
+"Oh yes," he retorted.  "Why, don't you know that the one great
+divisive force in society is opinion?  I like the man who agrees with
+me, and I dislike the man who doesn't; and although I may accuse myself
+of intolerance, and persuade myself that he possesses all kinds of
+virtues, I shall still go on disliking him, because I think him stupid.
+And he will dislike me for the same reason--he will think me stupid."
+
+He rose from his writing-table, lit a pipe, and stood with his hands
+behind him, with that whimsical smile upon his face which Arthur knew
+so well.
+
+"No," he continued, with a sudden flash of passion, "I don't suppose I
+shall get heard.  The nearer truth you come in your writing, the less
+likely are you to get heard, for above all things men hate truth.  They
+crucified truth two thousand years ago on Calvary; and they have been
+doing it ever since.  Yet truth is the most obvious thing in the world,
+to any one who is sincere enough to discern it.  You want to know what
+I think, what I have been writing about.  Well, I will tell you.  I
+have simply put down in plain English a series of facts which are all
+indisputable.  That war is folly, to begin with, and if the cost of
+armies and navies were removed, the prosperity of Europe would be
+instantly doubled.  That the reckless growth of cities is folly, and if
+you could make the people stay upon the land by giving them land on
+equitable terms, three-fourths of the poverty would disappear.  That
+unlimited commercial competition is folly, and that if you could make
+nations act as a great co-operative trust, only producing what each
+nation is best fitted to produce, and only as much of any commodity as
+was really needed, you would cure all the ills of labour.  And I say
+all this is absolutely obvious.  Every one knows it, though every one
+ignores it.  It is so obvious that if God would make me sole dictator
+of the world for a single year, I would guarantee to make the world a
+Paradise.  I wonder God doesn't do it Himself, instead of letting man
+go on age after age mismanaging everything, with the result that a few
+are rich and not happy, and the multitude are poor--and miserable.  So
+now you know just the sort of man I am.  Didn't I tell you I was a
+fanatic?"  He broke off his harangue with a laugh.  "Now how do you
+like me?" he asked.
+
+"I like you better than I ever did," said Arthur.
+
+"Ah! you think you do.  But remember my definition: you only really
+like the man with whom you agree.  Do you agree with me?"
+
+"I think I do."
+
+"Then what are you going to do with your own life?"
+
+The abrupt question struck upon the mind with a sharp clang, like the
+sudden breaking of a string on a violin.  It was the old question which
+Arthur had debated so often and so wearily.  During this lyric month of
+love it had been forgotten, his mind had been bathed in delicious
+languor; but now the question returned upon him with singular and
+painful force, and his mind woke from its trance.  What was he to do
+with his life?  And as he asked the question, for the first time he
+caught a full vision of the gravity and splendour of existence.  Man
+was born to do, not alone to feel, to act as well as love.  And
+beautiful as love was, he saw with instant certainty that in creatures
+like Elizabeth it rested on a solid base of intellectual idealism.
+That was its final evolution: it was no longer the wild, passionate
+mating of forest lovers; it was a thing infinitely delicate and pure,
+infinitely complex and sensitive, in which the spirit, with all its
+agonies and exultations, was the dominating force.
+
+For a breathless moment he was conscious of the grave eyes of Elizabeth
+resting on him with an anxious tenderness of inquisition.  Then he
+answered in a low voice, "I wish to make my life worthy of the highest.
+That is as far as I can see."  The speech was the implied offer of
+himself to Elizabeth, and she knew it.  Her face was suffused with
+happy light, and her breast rose and fell in a long satisfied sigh.
+
+"That is as far as any one need see," said Vickars.  And then the tense
+moment broke, and the conversation flowed back into ordinary channels.
+
+From that hour began a real intimacy with Vickars which had a great
+influence over his own character.  Hitherto he had admired the man
+without understanding his real aims.  Now he began to comprehend these
+aims.  Vickars had spoken truly when he described himself as a fanatic,
+but his fanaticism was so wise and so gentle that it provoked love
+rather than antagonism.  And it had also a certain restful and
+melancholy quality which was infinitely touching.  He did not expect to
+be heard, and he knew that he would not prevail; yet he would at any
+time have suffered martyrdom with cheerful courage.  Many men have
+found it not difficult to die for a faith which they believed would
+move on to triumph by the way of their Golgotha; but Vickars was
+prepared to die for a faith which he knew must fail.  He had no
+illusions; he saw all things in a clear bleak light of actual fact,
+knew the world ill-governed and man incurably foolish, but not the less
+he was willing to sacrifice himself for convictions which the world
+called absurd.  His speech about what he would do were he dictator of
+the world was not mere rhetoric; it was his genuine belief that life
+was at bottom a very simple business, and that mankind missed available
+happiness merely by perverse repudiation of the simplest principles of
+happiness.  So he gave himself in hopeless consecration to the
+exposition of these principles; and if the martyr is great who can die
+because he sees the crown and palm waiting for him in the skies, how
+much greater is he who can die expecting no reward?
+
+It was only by degrees that Arthur came to recognise these qualities in
+Vickars.  What he did not recognise at all was that the influence of
+Vickars was slowly loosening all the moorings that held him to his own
+former life.  Although he had not said it openly, he knew now that he
+could not join his father in the business.  He was careful to frame no
+accusation of his father even in his own most secret thoughts, but he
+knew that their ways lay apart.  This life his father loved of scheming
+and of toiling, with its empty wealth and emptier social rewards, had
+no attraction for him.  It was too crude, too barbarous; and beside it
+the life of Vickars, in its noble poverty, shone like a gem.  He did
+not judge his father, but he judged unmercifully the society in which
+he moved, especially the church society, with its pettiness of
+interest, its lack of idealism, and its honour for smooth hypocrites
+like Scales; and this set him wondering why Vickars went to church at
+all.  He asked him the question one day.
+
+"I go for Clark's sake principally," he replied.  "He is the one
+pulpit-man in the neighbourhood who has a real glimpse of truth, and I
+feel it my duty to support him."
+
+"But what about the Church itself?"
+
+"You mean, what do I think of it?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"I think that it will disappear, that, in fact, it is in process of
+disappearance.  Dry rot has set in, and so, though it looks stately and
+stable, it is like the towering mast of a ship, only held upright by a
+thin varnished skin, but rotten at the core.  It will last as long as
+the weather is fine; when a storm comes, it will fall."
+
+"Well, but what has happened?  I don't think I understand."
+
+"Something has happened that very few persons have observed.  Wealth
+has bought the Church; it is in the proprietorship of the rich.  They
+finance it, they dictate its policies, and naturally those policies are
+not going to be hostile to themselves.  Then it has ceased to be
+democratic in any true sense.  It will be charitable to the poor, but
+it will not be just.  Thus its very charity is a bribe to make men
+forget justice.  And besides this, the note of conviction has left the
+pulpit.  Half the preachers spend their time in apologies for
+Christianity, and the apologetic person soon finds himself despised.
+The centre of gravity has shifted, and the people who do believe most
+heartily in Christianity are people outside the churches--men like
+Tolstoi, for example.  Why is it that the Church is always complaining
+of its want of success?  It ought to succeed as nothing else can.  It
+has privileges and attractions which no other institution has.  The
+reason is that its vitality has run out.  It has the dry rot, as I
+said, and the only skin that holds the thing together is the custom of
+worship.  That also is becoming spotted with decay, and when the decay
+eats through the outer skin, the end will come."
+
+"But we must have religion."
+
+"Yes, we must have religion; but the Church and religion are not
+synonymous terms.  The Founder of the Christian religion stood outside
+the Church."  He paused a moment, with that curious hesitation which
+marked the movement of emotion in him.  Then he laid his hand upon
+Arthur's shoulder, and said in a gentle voice, "Do you remember what
+you said you would do with your life?  You said you wished to make it
+worthy of the highest.  'The utmost for the highest'--that's it, isn't
+it?  Well, you needn't bother your head about the Church.  That saying
+of yours is a tolerably complete definition of religion.  You'll find
+it more than sufficient, if you'll be true to it."
+
+There were many conversations such as this between Arthur and Vickars
+in this wonderful summer month.  Life and love, like twin flowers on
+one stem, were opening, their petals simultaneously for Arthur.  His
+mind flowered in contact with Vickars, his heart in contact with
+Elizabeth; for though the girl said little, her silence was eloquent of
+the bond of complete sympathy which existed between her father and
+herself.  He tacitly included her in all his views of life.  And it was
+clear that she gave him adoring discipleship--the discipleship of a
+young girl, long motherless, who had drawn from him all the elements of
+thought and will in her own character.  It was a beautiful
+relationship, rare always, but especially rare in that conventional
+society which surrounded them, in which women were merely the butterfly
+appendages of men whose chief work in life was to provide them with the
+means of easy gaiety.
+
+Vickars did not press his opinions upon Arthur; he was much too wise
+and gentle to play the pedant.  If Arthur learned much from him, it was
+by indirection; knowledge came to him unconsciously, as an atmosphere
+to be breathed, rather than as a lesson to be mastered.  Vickars had a
+curious knack of evading controversy.  He would flash a winged sentence
+on the air, satisfied that it would find its mark; and then dismiss the
+subject with a laugh, or with the usual comment, "But we are growing
+too serious; let us have some music."  Then Elizabeth would open the
+piano, and find her way to some solemn theme of Beethoven or
+Tchaikowsky, and the soft, perfumed wind would blow across the room
+from the open window, and the divine melodies would lift the spirit
+into worlds of unimaginable agony or rapture.  But all the time the
+word that had been spoken would vibrate through the music, till the
+music seemed its real interpretation; and thus it was endowed with new
+vitality and emphasis by Elizabeth's playing.  "How well she
+understands him!" Arthur would reflect, wondering at the perfect bond
+of sympathy between them; and then, with a pang of yearning, "Will she
+ever understand me like that?"
+
+In such moments he trod the lover's hell, which is as real as the
+lover's heaven.  He could never attain to her.  He saw the miraculous
+freshness and richness of her nature, and knew the crudeness of his
+own.  What was there in him that she should desire him?  This very bond
+of sympathy between her and her father, so rare and sensitive, became
+his menace.  She could not _want_ him; but, O God! with what an agony
+of yearning did he want her!  And then, as he sat disconsolate, with
+head resting on his hand, she would turn to him, as if she divined his
+thoughts, with a gaze infinitely pitiful and kind; and his eyes clung
+to hers for an instant in mute appeal and adoration, and something told
+him that there was yet a void in that virgin heart that he alone could
+fill.  O exquisite terrors, authentic agonies, brief sky-daring hopes,
+surely it were worth all the millions of years of slow evolution from
+the brute to touch but for an instant so painful and delicate a bliss!
+
+One night--it was a Sunday night--the three sat together in the little
+room.
+
+Vickars was unusually silent.
+
+"You look depressed, father.  What is it?" said Elizabeth.
+
+"Oh, nothing personal, my child.  I think it's merely the spectacle of
+the congregation at church to-night that has disturbed me."
+
+"What was wrong with the congregation?"
+
+"Nothing was right, I think.  Didn't you notice how stolid they
+looked--and in the presence of truths and hopes so vast, that had they
+believed them, they must have leapt to their feet and shouted in
+ecstasy?"
+
+"That would be a novelty indeed," she smiled.
+
+"It would have been natural," he replied.  "But alas! who is natural?
+Most people never live at first-hand.  They are plagiarists.  Arthur,
+don't be a plagiarist.  It cuts the fibre of sincerity.  It's like
+drinking stale water from a dirty cup.  But there," and then came the
+usual comment, "let us have some music."
+
+And Elizabeth began to play.  Perhaps it was the suggestion of the
+Sabbath evening that made her play sweet and solemn airs from Handel.
+Presently she wandered into old hymn-tunes, and finally began to play
+"Nearer, my God, to Thee."
+
+Suddenly she stopped, for Vickars had left the room.
+
+"Oh, I forgot!" she cried.  "I ought not to have played that."
+
+While she spoke, her father returned.  His face was pale: he held in
+his hand a miniature of a woman.
+
+"Do you remember what to-day is?" he said in a soft, shaken voice.
+"Twenty years ago to-day.  And that was the last thing she played ...
+and then she went ... in the night ... upon her long journey.  And it
+all seems but an hour ago.  O my child! you are so like your mother."
+
+He kissed her forehead.
+
+Twenty years ago, and love still fresh!  Arthur bowed his head before
+the sacred vision.  He rose to go.  He felt he had no right to look on
+that unveiled immortal sorrow.
+
+Elizabeth stood for a moment with him at the garden gate.
+
+"Could you?" ... He stopped, for emotion choked him.  "Could you ...
+love me like that?"
+
+He could see her tremble, and in the dim light he could divine her
+startled gaze.  His hand clasped hers.
+
+She pressed his for a single moment, turned, and fled.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+ENTER SCALES
+
+August had come with its heavy, brooding heat, and the idyllic weather
+had disappeared.  There were no more fresh breezes, tempering the hot
+sunlight, no more cool nights of lingering twilight; over the weary
+city spread a pall of stifling haze, and the atmosphere had the
+flatness of an unaired room.  The trees turned brown, and the leaves
+began to fall, as though it were autumn, not summer.  The greenness of
+the parks had vanished, and the pleasant sward had become a dirty gray,
+upon which vast tribes of ragged children camped.  August in London,
+when from countless miles of brick walls and stone pavements heat is
+radiated; when roads steam beneath the casual visitations of the
+water-cart, and barefooted urchins paddle in the gutters, and the city
+sprawls like a languid drab too tired to be conscious of her
+dishevelment; August, when a million hearts feel a dull ache of
+yearning for green fields and open spaces, and in fortunate homes
+guide-books are being studied, routes of travel discussed, boxes
+packed, fishing-tackle and golf-clubs overhauled, and carriages, piled
+high with trunks, with pale, excited children gazing from their
+windows, day by day roll down every street, and converge at last in the
+wild pandemonium of the great terminal stations which are the doorways
+of the country.
+
+In Eagle House such preparations were in process, but it was a joyless
+business.  Masterman had informed his family that there would be no
+Scotland for them this year; times were hard, and they must make the
+best they could of Brighton.
+
+"I'm sure Brighton will cost just as much as Scotland," objected his
+daughter.
+
+"It's near London, and I can't afford to be far from town this year,"
+he replied.
+
+"We don't know any one there, father.  All the people we know are going
+north.  Why can't we?"
+
+For this young lady was accustomed to get her own way in most things,
+and to consider every one her enemy who opposed her.  There was not
+much of her physically; she was _petite_ and graceful, with irregular
+features, pretty hair, and shallow blue eyes which showed no evidence
+of a soul; but like many small persons, she had a wonderful gift of
+obstinacy.  As a rule, she could do as she liked with her father in
+small ways, by means of a childish wheedling manner, which concealed
+her obstinacy; but every now and again she came upon a hard strata in
+his nature which turned the edge of her assaults, and it was so now.
+Of course, she did not so much as perceive the grim lines that had
+written themselves upon his tired face during the past two months.
+Neither did she believe his plea of poverty.  It was merely a selfish
+whim of his to be near London through August, and she must needs be
+sacrificed to his whim.
+
+"At any rate, you might choose a better place than Brighton," she
+retorted petulantly.
+
+"I might choose, but I don't," he retorted.  "There's a good train
+service to Brighton, and it suits me.  It will have to suit you, too."
+
+"I'm sure I would just as soon stay in London," Arthur interrupted; and
+he was rewarded by a glance of intense disdain from his sister's eyes.
+
+"No; you'll go to Brighton with the others."  And Masterman, not
+knowing the private thoughts of Arthur, was gratified with his remark.
+He saw in it the evidence of that serious sense of duty which was
+presently to make him the kind of man for whom business is an imperious
+master.  "You see, we must go somewhere.  If we didn't, folk might
+talk.  I've had a pretty hard time, my boy, but it's nearly over now.
+And I want you to go to Brighton for a reason of my own.  There are
+some people there I'd like you to meet."
+
+"Of course I'll do as you wish, father."
+
+"That's the proper spirit," he replied kindly.
+
+But when Masterman left the room, Helen turned upon her brother
+spitefully.
+
+"Oh! you needn't think I don't know why you want to stop in London,"
+she cried.  "I know where you spend your evenings.  You're not nearly
+so clever as you think you are."
+
+"Do you?" he replied, trying in vain to subdue the hot blood that
+rushed to his cheeks.
+
+"Yes, I do.  And you just wait until father knows.  I've a great mind
+to tell him."
+
+"You can tell him anything you wish," he replied proudly.
+
+"And do you wish it?"
+
+And with this Parthian shot she drew her small figure up in anger, and
+left the room.
+
+But the Parthian arrow left its wound, for it was tipped with subtle
+poison.  Magic months are exquisite experiences; but the pity of it is
+that the magic is rarely so complete that the outlines of the plain
+world are totally obliterated.  Helen's words were a sword that slashed
+a great rent in the purple curtains of young love, and the outer world
+lay visible.  No use to turn the eyes away or to patch the rent; there
+lay the fact of things, palpable enough.  Did he wish his father to
+know his love for Elizabeth?  He had never yet faced the question.  But
+the moment it was asked he saw with fatal prescience all that it
+implied.  He had chosen not alone Elizabeth, but with her a path of
+life, an ideal of conduct.  That path led out into a strange, uncharted
+world, the very existence of which his father had not so much as
+surmised.  And he knew that his father never could be brought to see it.
+
+He knew this, but he knew also that he himself had reached a clearness
+of vision of which nothing could deprive him.  He had seen the land
+very far off, and henceforth his eyes could see no other.  He was vowed
+to the highest, as men had been in days of knighthood, and he must
+follow the gleam wheresoever it led.  To his father it would all seem
+the wildest folly; no doubt in that forgotten dream-time of the world,
+to men bartering in the market-place or reaping in the fields, young
+Sir Galahad must have seemed mad as he rode past singing, into the
+haunted forest.  It would be no better now; nay, it would be far worse,
+for was not the world one vast clamorous marketplace, no longer merely
+disdainful but actively antagonistic to the dreamer?  Not that he was
+worthy to rank himself with the Sir Galahads; he was merely a boy,
+intoxicated with the new wine of love and life; but nevertheless he had
+his ideal of what life should be, and he meant to pursue it.  To one
+thing at least he had attained--he was not afraid of poverty.  Hilary
+Vickars had taught him that, by showing him how little outward
+circumstance can affect the inner peace of the soul.  And when all
+things are said and done, perhaps that is the greatest truth that a
+youth can learn, for if it does not necessarily produce heroism, it at
+least makes it possible.  For it is through fear of poverty that men
+sell their souls; and not until that ignoble fear is gone does the soul
+have a chance to live.
+
+But he did not wish to challenge his father to the conflict till the
+proper hour came.  The clash must come, but he would leave the foreseen
+moment in the hands of time.  It could not be long delayed, but he
+would not anticipate it.  And in so determining he was thinking of his
+father rather than himself.  His father might be wholly wrong in his
+method of life, but that old sense of his father's bigness still
+dominated him.  Primeval, proud, scarred with savage conflict, he saw
+his father rise before him; he could not but admire even while he
+censured; and simply because he knew that it was in his power to wound
+the giant in a vital part, he was afraid to strike.
+
+So in the first week of August the Masterman household accomplished its
+annual exodus, and Arthur found himself one of five hundred tenants in
+a vast hotel at Brighton.  Brighton is not precisely a pleasant place
+in August--"a sea without a ship, and a shore without a tree"--but
+undeniably it has at all seasons a certain strong glitter of life, and
+its shipless sea is an inexhaustible reservoir of tonic breezes.  But
+poetry does not breathe in the air of Brighton, and Arthur's heart was
+at the stage when poetry is indispensable to happiness.  He could have
+been relatively happy in some deep Scotch glen, whipping a stream for
+the infrequent trout, and listening unconsciously to the wind-music in
+the fir-tops; for though he would still have been separated from
+Elizabeth, he would have seen her face mirrored in the stream, and
+heard her voice in the wind, and have felt her presence in the wide
+peacefulness.  But the hard materialism of Brighton jarred upon his
+senses.  It was London over again, a cleaner and a meaner London.  The
+same kind of face met him everywhere--the heavy, soulless face of men
+who have their portion in this world.  In the men it was a
+clean-shaved, rubicund face, in the women it was puffed and sometimes
+rouged; and this face was reduplicated everywhere--in the hotel, on the
+parade, on the pier, till it became a persecution such as one suffers
+in dreams.  Looking at these faces, Arthur had not only a strong
+repulsion, but he knew the cause of it; these faces were the mirror of
+unclean souls.  There was something dark and turbid in them, a mire of
+sin washed up from the abhorred depth of life; these eyes all had the
+same expression, something of greed and glassy insolence and vulpine
+shrewdness, and the mouths had the same looseness of sensual thirst.
+Perhaps he did not see with entire justice, for Elizabeth's face hung
+like a picture in his heart, before which he had built a shrine and lit
+a lamp of faith; or perhaps he did see with perfect lucidity the souls
+of these fellow creatures of his, simply because that lamp of pure love
+in his heart gave him light.  At all events, he hated Brighton, and
+betook himself daily to the green empty Downs, and sometimes as far as
+Chantlebury Ring, where the width of the world could be felt once more,
+and the shy voice of love might be heard, like a cuckoo-note, in the
+great sylvan silences.
+
+Helen had soon found friends, and was now quite reconciled to Brighton;
+his mother, more fragile than ever in appearance, was content to sit
+still all day, looking at the smooth sea-plain with its gem-like
+glitter.  More than once he was moved to open all his heart to his
+mother, and there were times when her eyes seemed to invite his
+confidence; but always between them was that gulf of silence, for which
+speech could frame no bridge.  He wondered much about this silence of
+hers.  It was scarcely apathy; no eyes could be as bright as hers if
+the heart were apathetic.  It seemed rather to be a resolved
+incuriousness about things around her, a turning away of the face from
+life, as from something dreadful, that had only pain to offer her.
+Could one imagine a human creature, with "a bright, sunshiny day after
+shipwreck," sitting beside an empty sea, willing to think of nothing
+that came before or after, but just to breathe, and watch, and
+wait--that was the kind of impression Mrs. Masterman made upon the
+mind.  Arthur was always delicately tender with her.  He hung about her
+chair, arranged her shawl or pillows, was quick to perceive her wishes;
+but in the very kiss with which she rewarded him there was restraint.
+The time was to come when he was to know what it meant, but that time
+was not yet.  Now, as in all the later years which he could recall, her
+one wish seemed to be to efface herself, and to take up as little room
+in life and in the thoughts of others as possible.
+
+He was greatly surprised one night, when he came back to the hotel from
+a long walk over the Downs, to find his father in conference with
+Scales.  There was a mass of papers lying on the table, and it was
+clear the two men were deeply interested in them.
+
+"Come in," said Masterman.  "We're busy, you see, but we'll soon be
+through now."
+
+Scales greeted him with his usual smooth civility, and, as usual, it
+was a little overdone.
+
+"Shall I wait?" said Arthur.
+
+"No.  You'd better dress for dinner.  Scales is going to spend the
+night here.  I have something to say to you later on."
+
+Arthur left the room without remark; but as he was dressing the thought
+suddenly took hold on him, What did his father want with Scales?
+
+He knew that his father did not like the man, and that made their
+present relation the more unintelligible.  He had heard his father
+speak with brusque scorn of Scales' plan to punish John Clark, by
+getting him off to the Holy Land, and then starting a church revolution
+in his absence.  That the man was false was beyond doubt.  Falsity
+looked out of his narrow, deprecating eyes, falsity breathed in his
+smooth voice, falsity declared itself in his obsequious manners.  Under
+no possible circumstances could such a man play fair either as friend
+or foe.  Judas was such another as Elisha Scales, and Judas was an
+apostle as Scales was a deacon.
+
+And here Arthur laughed at the absurdity of the suggestion.
+
+"He'll find it hard to betray father," he said.
+
+But not the less he was uneasy.  There was something in the man that
+was sinister, supple, diabolically adroit, and he felt instinctively
+that his presence in his father's room boded no good for any one.
+Suddenly there recurred to his memory his father's statement that there
+were persons in Brighton he wanted him to meet, and he felt sure that
+it was to Scales he referred.  Yes, it must be so, because no one else
+who could claim his father's acquaintance had appeared in Brighton;
+and, if it were so, it argued some kind of compact or pre-arrangement
+with Scales.
+
+That night, however, nothing was said that could illumine the
+situation.  Scales spent the night in the hotel, was closeted late with
+his father, and accompanied him to London on the following day.
+
+Another day passed, and then his father sent for him.
+
+"Arthur," he began, "I'm not going to interfere with our compact.  I
+gave you till the end of September to make your mind up about the
+business, and I don't want you to speak a word until then.  But there's
+a matter of business on which I want your help now."
+
+"I'm not much good at business, father.  I don't think I ever shall be."
+
+Masterman ignored the confession.
+
+"You don't know that until you try."
+
+"Of course, if there's anything in which I can help you, father, I'll
+do my best."
+
+"Well, you're old enough to use your eyes, and that's all I want of
+you.  Sit down, and let me explain."
+
+Thereupon he explained.  It seemed that Scales had got wind in the
+broker's office where he was managing clerk of a certain amalgamation
+of several brick companies which was likely to come off before long.
+One of these companies was in Sussex, not far from Brighton.  It was in
+difficulties, had been a long time, and might be bought cheap.
+Masterman proposed to buy it, and then resell to the trust when it
+should be formed.  Properly handled, there might be a fortune in the
+transaction.
+
+"I thought you didn't trust Scales," said Arthur quietly.
+
+"And I don't.  Not an inch farther than I can see him.  I know very
+well he'd sell the shirt off my back if he got a chance."
+
+"Of course he's not working for nothing."
+
+"Certainly not.  If he were, I should distrust him still more.  You'll
+find that in business no one does anything for nothing."
+
+"But I don't see anything I can do, father."
+
+"That's the point I am coming to.  I dare not go to look at this Sussex
+property.  I'm known.  If I appeared upon the scene, they'd spring the
+price at once.  But you can go to see it.  It's at Leatham, not more
+than twenty miles away.  What I want you to do is to go to the village,
+stop at the inn for a few days, make all the inquiries you can,
+quietly, and then report to me.  Will you do it?"
+
+How could he refuse?  It was at least a break in the dull monotony of
+Brighton.  And he was really touched, too, by his father's faith in him.
+
+"But I have no expert knowledge, father, and surely that is what you
+need."
+
+"Not at all.  They'd suspect an expert.  All that is wanted is a pair
+of good eyes, and good commonsense.  I think you have these."
+
+"Very well, father, I will go.  When do you want me to start?"
+
+"At once.  You can't be too quick."
+
+"I will start this morning, sir."
+
+"That's the spirit I like," said Master-man.  "It will be the first bit
+of business you ever did for me, and it won't be the last."
+
+On that pious hope Arthur made no comment.  He could not refuse to do
+what his father asked, and he did it the more readily because in his
+own mind he knew it would be likely to prove both the first and the
+last act of the kind he would perform.
+
+"I daresay Scales will turn up at Leatham.  Behave to him as civilly as
+you can."
+
+"I'll try, sir."  But he said it with so wry a smile that his father
+laughed.
+
+"He'll be civil enough to you, never fear."
+
+Of course, thought Arthur.  Judas was no doubt a pleasant-mannered
+gentleman, and the very pattern of civility--until he bared his fangs.
+
+So Arthur went to Leatham, and for the first time found himself in
+contact with that mysterious world of business in which his father
+lived.  At first this contact produced an almost pleasurable sensation,
+such as the swimmer feels when the sting of the salt water thrills his
+nerves.  It was all so new, this contact with rough reality.  He found
+the owner of the brickfield an old man, as skilled in craft as Ulysses.
+The old man came to see him in the village inn, and played the game of
+cross-purposes with inimitable subtlety.  He supposed the young
+gentleman wanted to settle there?  No?  Well, it was a fine
+neighbourhood, few better, and the sport was considered good.
+Interested in business?  Well, for a safe paying business there was few
+things like bricks.  People must have bricks, because they must have
+houses.  He was an old man, and had an idea of retiring.  If the young
+gentleman was interested in bricks, he'd like him to come over the
+works some day.  Not that it could be supposed he was interested.
+Bookish, wasn't he?  Been to college?  Well, lots of college men went
+into business now, and even titled ladies kept bonnet-shops.  So he'd
+heard.  He was really an amusing old man, and Arthur enjoyed his
+company more than could have been supposed of a young Sir Galahad.
+
+His father had not been mistaken when he had credited him with a pair
+of good eyes and cool commonsense, and the more he used his eyes the
+less he thought of the possibilities of the Leatham brick-works.  It
+was clearly a bankrupt concern.  It was handicapped by being four miles
+from the rail.  It had been able to do a small local trade for several
+years, and that was about all it was ever likely to do.  If there was a
+fortune in it, it was of such microscopic proportions that it needed
+keener eyes than Arthur's to discover it.
+
+On the Saturday night Scales came down, deferential and obsequious as
+usual, but clearly a little ill at ease.  Arthur dined with him in the
+old-fashioned inn-parlour, and after dinner came at once to the point.
+He said bluntly that he believed the Leatham Brick Manufacturing Co.
+was a worthless property.
+
+Scales smiled enigmatically.
+
+"You appear to dissent," said Arthur.
+
+"No, not altogether.  I never thought much of it myself."
+
+"Then why do you want my father to buy it?"
+
+"Why, to resell it, of course."
+
+"If it's worthless, you can't resell it."
+
+"It won't be worthless if your father gets it.  If it's worthless now,
+it's because it hasn't been developed.  The present owner hasn't had
+the money to put into it.  Your father will develop it."
+
+"And then?
+
+"Make it a company."
+
+"And then?"
+
+"Resell it to the Amalgamated Brick Trust."
+
+"And if the Amalgamated doesn't want it?"
+
+"But they will.  It's my business to look after that."
+
+"Then why not let the present owner sell it to the Amalgamated?  He's
+worked it all his life.  If there's a fortune to be made out of it, as
+my father seemed to think, it's that poor old man who ought to get
+it--not my father."
+
+"That's not the way business is done."
+
+"It seems to me the way it should be done.  It's the only honest way."
+
+Thereupon Scales entered on an exposition of the methods of modern
+business, according to which it seemed that fortunes were only made by
+snatching advantages from the weak who could not hold them.  Arthur
+listened in silence, and as Scales proceeded the boy's face had a
+curious likeness to his father's in his grimmest mood.
+
+"It's no good," he broke out at length.  "If that is what business
+means, it seems to me to be nothing better than organised theft.  I'm
+sorry to disappoint you, Mr. Scales--for no doubt you hope to make
+something yourself out of this fine scheme--but my father expects me to
+report honestly what I think, and I shall report against the purchase."
+
+"You'll regret it if you do."
+
+"I should regret it all my life if I didn't."
+
+"Think over it.  Don't act hastily."
+
+And as he spoke there was something like a tremor of anger in the suave
+voice.
+
+"I've done my thinking already," said Arthur.  "There's only one thing
+more I want to say.  If the transaction were never so honest, there's a
+weak place in your scheme which I think my father will appreciate.  It
+is that he has only your word for it, Mr. Scales, that the Amalgamated
+will, buy the property, and, to be quite frank, I don't trust your
+word."
+
+He left the room and went to bed.  The next morning he returned to
+Brighton.  The first thing that met his eyes as he entered his room was
+a letter from Elizabeth.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+THE ACCUSATION
+
+It was a very brief note, simply informing him that Hilary Vickars was
+ill, and wished to see him.
+
+An hour later he was in the train.  Fortunately he had written his
+report of the Leatham business before he left the village, and this he
+left upon his father's desk.  As he went up to London he read and
+re-read Elizabeth's brief note, in a conflict of torture and delight.
+There was but one phrase in it which impressed the personality of the
+writer.  "I am alone with father, and very anxious," she wrote.  He
+felt the throb of her heart in those words, and he realised that she
+leaned on him for strength.  His own heart swelled with tenderness at
+the thought.  There is a kind of pain which is so exquisite that it
+becomes joy; he realised such a pain now, an immense yearning to take
+the lonely girl to his bosom, and kiss her wet eyelids, and defend her
+from the imminent sword of sorrow.
+
+He stood at the door of the little house in Lonsdale Road.  The street
+lay silent in the August heat, the little patch of grass was brown and
+parched, there was an aspect of forlornness over everything.  A sudden
+terror smote him: what if it were Elizabeth herself who was ill?  His
+hand trembled as he rang the bell.  The door opened softly, and there
+stood Elizabeth, pale and quiet as a spectre.
+
+"Elizabeth!"
+
+Her hand lay in his, her beautiful eyes, swimming in tears, met his; he
+drew her to him in one long kiss.  It was the first time he had kissed
+her, and how often had he imagined the ecstasy of that kiss!  It had
+come at last, but not with the kind of ecstasy he had imagined, yet
+with the diviner ecstasy of sorrow.  The rose of her heart was yielded
+to him, but it was wet with tears.
+
+"Elizabeth!"
+
+She withdrew herself from his embrace, saying simply, "I wanted you so
+much."
+
+And in that brief phrase all was said, and each knew that henceforth an
+irrevocable vow bound their hearts together.
+
+She took his hand, and together they went into the room where they had
+so often talked.  The desk was littered with papers, half-corrected
+proofs, unanswered letters, the mute, pathetic witness of an arrested
+hand.
+
+"How long ago is it?" he whispered
+
+"Four days."
+
+"What is it?"
+
+"Typhoid, the doctor thinks."
+
+"Can I see him?"
+
+"It was he who told me to write you.  He wants to see you."
+
+"And you?"
+
+"Yes, I wanted you too."
+
+There was a tender reproach in the words, which he was quick to
+recognise.
+
+"I should not have asked the question.  Forgive me."
+
+"No, you need not have asked it."
+
+They went upstairs together.  Vickars lay very straight and quiet in
+the bed, his face pallid, his eyes closed.  He roused instantly at
+their entrance, and at once began to speak in a weak, eager voice.
+
+"So you see I'm caught at last," he said with difficult cheerfulness.
+"I've never had an illness--ailments, but not illness--and I don't
+quite know what to make of it.  It's an experience that makes one
+humble."
+
+"Don't talk, father.  It exhausts you," said Elizabeth.
+
+"On the contrary, it keeps me cheerful," he said, with the old
+whimsical smile.  "Habit, I suppose.  And besides, I have certain
+things to say to Arthur."
+
+Elizabeth took the hint and left the room.  Arthur sat beside the bed
+in awkward silence.
+
+Presently Vickars said abruptly, "You love her?"
+
+"Yes, with all my heart."
+
+"I thought so."
+
+He was silent for some moments.  Then he said, "A month ago I suppose I
+should almost have hated you for that confession.  She is all I have; I
+have always wanted to keep her wholly to myself....  I have dreaded
+this hour....  But I see now it is the course of nature.  I may have to
+leave her soon--I don't know.  But I'm glad now you love her.  Yes, I
+think I'm glad, and I wished to tell you so."
+
+"I hope you'll soon be better."
+
+"Ah! do you?  But then, you see, I might not feel the same toward you.
+But there--that's irony.  You know that.  Honestly, I'm glad you love
+her."
+
+His eyes closed, and Arthur, sitting silently beside the bed, could not
+but mark the change in Vickars since last he saw him.  The bones of the
+face showed white through the stretched, transparent skin, the eyes
+were sunken, and new lines had been etched upon the forehead.  It came
+to him, in a rush of pity and of admiration, that he loved this man.
+And there came to him also some dim perception of the depth of that
+sacrifice which Vickars endured in resigning his sole jealous claim
+upon Elizabeth.  It is seldom that young love attains to this vision.
+It is all hot eagerness, imperious and intense with the overmastering
+impulse of sex, and blind to the tendrils of old affection which it
+tears apart to reach its goal.  But to Arthur there was granted a truer
+vision, a nobler temper, because love in him had always had a sacred
+meaning, and had never been the more clamorous cry of sex.
+
+It was as though Vickars divined his thoughts.  He opened his eyes, and
+said, "Bring me my notebook.  It is lying on the table."
+
+Arthur brought the book.
+
+"I want to read you something.  It was written by a wayward man of
+genius, who made many blunders both in thought and morals, but he
+understood love, and the one best thing in all his life was that he did
+know how to love.  Listen.  'To love we must render up body and soul,
+heart and mind, all interests and all desires, all prudences and all
+ambitions, and identify our being with that of another....  To love is
+for the soul to choose a companion, and travel with it along the
+perilous defiles and winding ways of life; mutually sustaining when the
+path is terrible with dangers, mutually exhorting when it is rugged
+with obstructions, and mutually rejoicing when rich broad plains and
+sunny slopes make the journey a delight, showing in the quiet distance
+the resting-place we all seek in this world.'"
+
+The words, beautiful in themselves, had a strange solemnity as Vickars
+read them.  It was as though all the ages spoke in them, as though one
+overheard in some dim cathedral the low whispering of multitudes of
+lovers, confessing the ultimate secret of both life and love.
+
+He put the book down, sank back upon his pillow, and began to talk in a
+low, intense voice.
+
+"Yes, I loved like that....  A companion of the soul, that was what I
+found.  Women are such delicate and fragile creatures, but oh! so
+strong--much stronger than we are; and a good woman is the strongest of
+all.  The heavier the load you lay upon them, the happier they are.  I
+know.  I should have fallen by the way but for her.  She always smiled
+at difficulty ... such a tender, smiling mouth she had ... like a fresh
+flower in the sun.  Then God took her.  She went smiling--her last word
+a word of encouragement to me, her eyes signalling courage as they
+closed.  And Elizabeth is like her.  She has carried my burdens and
+borne my sorrows....  Poor child! it may be I have leaned too heavily
+on her.  Well, well.  God forbid I should grudge her her right to joy.
+Take her, Arthur, and don't lean too heavily upon her."
+
+Instinctively Arthur knelt beside the bed.  His eyes were full of
+tears.  Vickars stretched out his hand, and laid it on his head.  There
+was no need of further words.
+
+When he next spoke, it was with his old manner of whimsical humour.
+
+"If I must needs have a son, I don't want an idle one," he said.  "I
+want you to help me, Arthur."
+
+"I'll do anything I can."
+
+"Well, this is what I want you to do.  You will find the proofs of my
+new book downstairs on my desk.  They must be corrected at once, or the
+book will miss the autumn season.  Will you correct them for me?"
+
+"If Elizabeth will let me," he said with a smile.
+
+"I think she will let you.  I am sure she would let no one else."
+
+"Then I'll begin at once."
+
+"Well, that's a load off my mind.  And don't you think I'm going to
+die, for I'm not.  But I'm in for a hard fight, there's no doubt of
+that.  Now go to Elizabeth--and the proofs.  I'm tired out, and will
+sleep.  I've never been lazy in my life before, and it's a new and
+quite exquisite sensation."
+
+From that hour a strange chapter of life began for Arthur.  Eagle House
+was closed, and he took refuge with Mrs. Bundy.  He wrote his father a
+brief note, saying he was detained in London, and would not return to
+Brighton.  He had not the courage to tell him the whole truth; that
+revelation would come soon enough, and he did not wish to antagonise
+his father by an abrupt declaration of his position.  To this note his
+father made no reply.
+
+Most of his hours were spent in the little house in Lonsdale Road.
+There he toiled over Vickars's new book.  Much of it consisted of rough
+drafts, which he had to copy and piece together as best he could.  In
+this delicate work he could obtain no counsel from Vickars.
+
+Of Elizabeth he saw much, and yet far less than he would have imagined
+possible.  She was constantly at her father's bedside.  And as the days
+wore on, the fight for life in that shadowed room became intense.  A
+silent pressure of her hand, a silent kiss--and she would glide from
+him like a ghost, and disappear into the gloom of that upper chamber.
+
+One night it happened that she had gone to rest, worn out with long
+watching, and Arthur took her place at Vickars' bedside.  For a long
+time Vickars lay in complete stupor.  The gray dawn was near, and a
+milk-cart rattled down the road.  The noise roused him for a moment,
+and he began to speak in half-delirious words.
+
+"The old story," he said.  "Rotten work, and human lives to pay for it.
+The poor ... the poor pay for everything in this world ... with their
+blood.  And the rich sit in houses splashed with the blood of the poor,
+and don't even know it....  I always knew the drains were bad.  I
+always said they smelt of death.  But that damned builder didn't
+care--not he.  He only laughed ... laughed."
+
+The voice trailed off into an incoherent whisper.
+
+When Vickars began to speak, Arthur listened drowsily; but as he
+finished, his entire mind sprang into vivid apprehension.  It was as
+though a sudden torch flared through his brain.
+
+What did the sick man mean?  And with the question there came back to
+Arthur's memory a snatch of conversation at the deacons' tea, when he
+had first heard the name of Hilary Vickars.  He recalled the suave,
+purring voice of Scales explaining to his father that the Vickars were
+inconsiderable people, living in Lonsdale Road--"in one of your houses,
+sir."
+
+"I always said the drains smelt of death.  But that damned builder
+didn't care.  He only laughed."
+
+And the builder was his father.
+
+A blackness of great horror fell upon him.  He struggled against it, as
+against an overwhelming tide.  Could it be that Vickars knew this
+dreadful thing all the time, knew it even when he had laid his hand
+upon his head, and welcomed him as a son?  It seemed hardly possible.
+He told himself that after all he had nothing to go upon but a few
+delirious words.  Perhaps Vickars was not thinking of his own case at
+all.  It might have been simply some scene in one of his books which he
+rehearsed--a snatch of drama flung out by the toiling, unconscious
+brain.  But in his heart he knew that such an explanation was untrue.
+An inner force of conviction, stronger than reason, affirmed the
+reality of Vickars' words.  The delirious mind had uttered a tragic
+truth which the conscious mind had concealed.
+
+The dawn had now come.  He heard Elizabeth going down the stairs
+silently.  How could he meet her?  Perhaps she also knew the truth, had
+known it all the time.  He hastily wrote a note, saying that he had
+gone for a walk, and would return in an hour.  Vickars still slept.  He
+knew that in a few minutes Elizabeth would be with him.  He went softly
+down the stairs, and let himself out into the Lonsdale Road.
+
+In the freshness of the morning air his tragic suppositions seemed
+incredible.  Life lay round him in its wide security of joy; birds
+sang, flowers bloomed, men were astir; everything breathed of honest
+industry, honest kindness, and it seemed a thing impossible that behind
+this fair show of things there lay unimaginable depths of cruelty.  He
+passed Eagle House, shuttered and silent, and he fell to thinking of
+his father.  Stern, inscrutable, resolute he knew his father to be, but
+he had never known him cruel.  Yet if he had done this thing he was a
+monster.  He had made a compact with death for money.  Over the porch
+of Eagle House there hung a Virginia creeper, already touched with the
+first rusty crimson of autumn, and to the boy's wild imagination it was
+a stain of blood.  "Splashed with blood of the poor," Vickars had
+said....  Yet, at that moment, every memory of his father that he could
+summon up was kind and gracious.  He remembered his generosities to him
+during his university career, his patience with him while he waited for
+a decision on which his heart was set in burning eagerness, his trust
+in him over the Leatham business, and all that pride and love which had
+a thousand times met him in his father's glance.  But he knew also that
+in the scales of justice even such memories as these were worthless.
+They could not outweigh deliberate fraud.  He must know the truth; he
+was merciless in his appetite for truth; until that hunger was
+satisfied there was no place for kinder thoughts.
+
+It struck him all at once that there was an easy way to satisfy his
+doubts.  The doctor would know the exact truth, and to the doctor he
+would go.
+
+Ten minutes later he stood in the doctor's waiting-room.  Dr. Leet was
+not yet up.  He would be down in half an hour.
+
+Presently the doctor entered, a somewhat formal, gray, middle-aged man,
+with a hesitating manner which had grown upon him in the constant
+effort to avoid hurting the susceptibilities of patients who asked
+awkward questions which he was unwilling to answer.
+
+"Ah, you come from Mr. Vickars?  Nothing wrong, I hope?"
+
+"No, doctor.  I left him asleep."
+
+The doctor nodded and waited.
+
+"I came to ask you a question, doctor."
+
+"Yes."
+
+"It's about Vickars.  I want to know the cause of his illness.  I have
+a good reason for asking."
+
+"The cause?  Well, you see, Vickars had been run down for a long time
+before he became ill.  He had probably worked too hard for years.  That
+meant a certain devitalisation, which made him susceptible to fever."
+
+"And is that all?"
+
+"Well, not altogether, of course.  There is still the question of the
+fever itself."
+
+"That is what I want to know, doctor.  I shall be very glad if you tell
+me plainly what you think."
+
+"Oh, there's not much room for conjectures.  Drains, of course.
+Lonsdale Road had been a perfect nest of typhoid germs for years.  I
+don't know who built the street, but I do know that, whoever he was, he
+was a scoundrel.  The drains run under the kitchen floors, and I'll be
+bound that there isn't one that is not a death-trap.  I've seen some of
+these drains exposed, and I give you my word for it that the pipes are
+not so much as cemented together."
+
+Arthur turned sick and pale.  Then he said quietly, "My father built
+those houses."
+
+"Oh, my dear sir," began the doctor, "I'm sorry I spoke.  I had no
+idea."
+
+"You need not apologise," said Arthur.  "I asked a plain question and
+expected a plain answer.  I understand that Vickars is the victim of
+bad drains?"
+
+"Well, yes, primarily.  Of course, run down as he was, he might have
+fallen ill, any way.  But honestly I can't say that I believe this.
+The real cause is only too clear."
+
+"Then Eliz--Miss Vickars is in danger too?"
+
+"Any one is in danger who lives in those houses," said the doctor
+hotly, forgetting his usual caution.  "They are mere death-traps, I
+tell you.  And though I don't want to hurt your feelings, yet I am
+bound to say that in my opinion a highway robber who takes your purse
+upon a public road is a respectable person compared with the rascal who
+condemns scores of decent people to certain suffering, and some to
+certain death, for the sake of a few pounds of illicit gain."
+
+"Thank you, doctor.  I think I'll go now."
+
+He groped for his hat, like a blind man.
+
+"You'd better wait a little while," said the doctor.  "Stop, and have
+some breakfast with me."
+
+And then Arthur's self-control broke.  He leant against the library
+shelves, covering his face with his hands.
+
+"O my father," he cried, "how could you do it?"
+
+"Don't take it too hardly," said the doctor.  "Perhaps he didn't know
+... surely he didn't think."
+
+"Yes, he knew," said Arthur, turning on the doctor a pair of flaming,
+tear-wet eyes.  "He's done it before.  He once put oyster-shells and
+road-gravel into the foundations of a church instead of concrete.  I
+heard him say so.  He must have done it many times.  And he doesn't
+care.  People die, and he doesn't care.  And I'm his son ... the son of
+a man who is a scoundrel."
+
+He pushed the astonished doctor aside, and somehow found his way into
+the open air.  There lay the world, even as he had left it, but its
+aspect was wholly changed.  In the fresh morning light it had smiled
+upon him, it had seemed honest, it had breathed security of joy; now
+the mask of hypocrisy was gone, and it was an old, evil, wrinkled face
+that leered at him.  It was the stage of tragic passions, it was full
+of the habitations of cruelty.
+
+"Splashed with blood of the poor"--so he saw the world at that moment,
+a red grotesque, a grim crimson horror.  And he saw his father, too,
+clothed in the same blood-red livery of crime.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+THE CONTEST
+
+The troubles of the young are apt to move the ridicule of the mature,
+who have long since discovered that even tragedies can be outlived,
+disasters forgotten, and the worst defeats repaired.  That there is a
+strange and stubborn resilience in life, which enables us to survive a
+thousand shocks, is indeed a wonderful quality which is needed to
+explain the persistence of the race.  But the final view of life is
+never the immediate view, and, whatever we may think now of ancient
+sorrows, unless the memory is quite dulled we know well that they were
+once real and terrible enough.  The child's terror of the dark, his
+bitter tears over slight or injustice, his first agony of homesickness,
+his rage against acts of cruelty or tyranny, the wounds inflicted on
+his tenderness or pride--these things may appear to us now absurd or
+insignificant episodes in the process by which we adjusted ourselves to
+the social scheme; but it may be doubted if any tears were bitterer
+than these, any later sorrow comparable with these young sorrows that
+left us dumb with fury and astonishment.  The years bring healing and
+forgetfulness--or perhaps it were truer to say, a tougher skin, a less
+sensitive organism; but, if we care to examine our hearts, most of us
+would find that the scars of these earliest wounds run deep and are
+ineffaceable.
+
+How well does the writer recollect a certain mournful morning when he
+stood at bay in the corner of a large school playground, tormented by
+the jeers and blows of a jovial crowd of young bullies, who found
+occasion for fresh mirth in every fresh impotent spasm of rage and
+grief.  Since that day he has wept over open graves, said farewell to
+so many of those he loved that the unseen world seems less uninhabited
+than the seen, been betrayed by friends he trusted, been humiliated in
+a thousand ways by the cruelty or stupidity of men, but he has known no
+sorrow quite as keen as that sorrow, and no betrayal that seemed quite
+so cruel as the act by which his parents gave him to the wolves in that
+brutal playground.  He can jest about the story now, but in his own
+private heart that fatal morning still looms tragic, and there are
+times when he still wakes out of painful dreams with the old horrible
+sense of forsakenness that he felt then.
+
+So he finds it impossible to treat lightly Arthur Masterman's first
+cruel astonishment when the revelation of his father's misdoing was
+made plain to him.  If Arthur had been more observant, he would have
+learned it by degrees, and so its force would have been broken; if he
+had not built up for himself an admired image of his father, the shock
+would have been easier to bear.  As it was, the revelation came with a
+shattering blow which shook his life to the centre.  And the blow
+struck him precisely at the point where he was most sensitive.  His
+father had all but slain Vickars, who was his friend, and he might yet
+strike down the daughter who was dearer to him than his own life.  He
+had as good as planned their death, for what he did he had done
+deliberately, well knowing the issue of his deeds.  And how many more
+were there who were his helpless victims?  How many graves had he
+filled?  Where would the harvest of disgrace and death end?  The doctor
+was right--the highwayman who took a purse was a reputable citizen
+compared with the criminal who wilfully sowed the seeds of death among
+innocent people for a few pounds of illicit gain!  And he was the son
+of the man who had done this; the very clothes he wore, the food he
+ate, the books he read, were purchased by his father's sin.
+
+To Vickars, slowly recovering from a mortal sickness, he dared not
+speak, to Elizabeth still less.  So he took refuge with Mrs. Bundy,
+whose bosom was an open hospice for all sorts of vicarious sorrows.
+
+"Well, well!" she said cheerfully, "Didn't I tell you that your father
+was like the man in the parable, 'an austere man, gathering where he
+had not strawed'?  But it takes all sorts to make a world, laddie, and
+your father's none so bad as some."
+
+"That's poor comfort," he replied gloomily.
+
+"Poor it may be, but it's not to be forgotten.  I mind the time when
+Bundy was in trouble, and it was your father helped him.  Did I ever
+tell you that?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Well, he did.  He lent Bundy what he asked, and did it cheerfully."
+
+"Oh!  I don't doubt he can be generous, but that's not the point.  It's
+not what he may do with his money, but how he makes it."
+
+And then he proceeded to pour out all the bitterness of his heart in
+hot, indignant words.  He raged like a man blind with pain, who knows
+not how or where his blows fall.
+
+"You cannot justify him," he cried.  "God knows I've tried hard enough,
+but I cannot.  Dr. Leet said he was a scoundrel, and I, his son, could
+not contradict him.  I have tried to think he did not know, but this is
+a thing he must have known.  It's a hard thing to hear your father
+called a scoundrel, and be silent.  And I was silent, for I knew that
+it was true."
+
+"Hush, hush, laddie!  It's not for you to say that."
+
+"I must say it.  There are hundreds of people saying it.  And I am his
+son--the son of a scoundrel."
+
+If Arthur had not been blinded by his anger he would have known why
+Mrs. Bundy sought to stop the torrent of his words.  For, while he was
+speaking, young Scales had entered the house, and stood in the doorway
+watching this unusual scene.  The Scales family had returned that
+evening from their holiday, and it had occurred to young Benjamin
+Scales to call at Mrs. Bundy's, where he would be sure to find some of
+his acquaintance.  Young Benjamin was not a pleasant youth; he had a
+mean, narrow face, like his father, and wore eye-glasses, not from any
+defect of vision, but because he imagined that they gave him an air of
+cleverness, and among his strong antipathies was jealousy of Arthur.
+So what more natural than that he should seize avidly on Arthur's angry
+words, and duly report them to his father, who in turn waited his
+opportunity of reporting them to Archibold Masterman.
+
+The opportunity came a few days later, when Scales went to Brighton to
+see Masterman upon the Leatham business, which was still undecided.
+Scales knew very well why it was undecided, and his grudge against
+Arthur had grown by careful nursing.  And now, thanks to Arthur's angry
+words, he had the means of avenging himself.
+
+Masterman had, of course, read Arthur's report, and was secretly
+delighted with it.  It was an admirable piece of writing, plain and
+convincing, and it was expressed with a lucidity to which he was not
+accustomed in similar documents.  "The boy has brains," he said, as he
+read it; "he will go far."  It was the first time he had tested those
+brains on any practical affair, and his pride in his son was great.
+
+"I'm not at all sure Arthur isn't right," he said to Scales, and so he
+had postponed decision from day to day.
+
+But the time had now come when the decision must be made, and Scales
+was fully resolved that that decision should be favourable to his own
+interests.
+
+"I don't deny," he said, "that your son's report is admirably done, but
+you must recollect that he has no real experience of business.  And
+besides----"
+
+"Besides what?"
+
+"I don't think he will ever understand business."
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"From words he said to me.  From words he has said to others."
+
+"What words?  Tell me plainly what you mean?"
+
+"I had rather not."
+
+"Now look here, Scales," said Masterman, "either you have said too much
+or not enough.  In a few weeks Arthur will be my partner, and the
+sooner you begin to think of him in that way the better for our future
+relations."
+
+"I don't think he will ever be your partner," said Scales quietly.
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"Because he is a wild, impracticable boy," said Scales, throwing away
+his caution.  "Because he told me that business--your business and
+mine--was, in his opinion, organised theft.  Because he has been going
+about saying that you are a scoundrel----"
+
+"What's that?" cried Masterman, rising to his feet.  His face was pale
+and terrible, and his attitude so menacing that Scales was afraid.  But
+in that mean heart hate was stronger than fear, and it supplied a
+certain desperate courage.
+
+"I didn't mean to tell you, sir.  But you ought to know it.  Ask what
+he has been doing in London this last fortnight.  Ask him where he has
+been.  I can tell you.  He has been living with Hilary Vickars, he has
+been making love to his daughter.  Vickars is a Socialist.  And your
+son shares his views, and he has said publicly that your methods of
+business prove you a scoundrel."
+
+"Is that true?" said Masterman.
+
+"It is God's truth.  Do you think I would have come between father and
+son with a lie that was bound to be found out."
+
+"No; I believe if you lied, you'd choose a safe lie, Scales," he said
+bitterly.
+
+"You are unjust to me, sir.  I have never lied to you.  I don't lie
+now."
+
+"That will do," said Masterman.
+
+"But what will you do?"
+
+"That's my affair," he retorted grimly.
+
+"But it's my affair too, sir.  I want to know whether your son's report
+is to go against my experience and yours? whether you will complete
+this Leatham purchase or not?"
+
+"Ah!  I wasn't thinking of that."  He turned away, and stood for some
+moments looking out of the window in silence.  Then he walked rapidly
+to his desk, unlocked a drawer, and took out Arthur's report.  "This is
+my reply," he said.  He tore it in pieces, slowly, almost methodically,
+and trampled it beneath his feet.  "Come in an hour," he added.  "I
+will sign the purchase papers.  Now go."
+
+"I hope you'll forgive me, sir----"
+
+"What's that?" he roared in sudden rage.  "'Go!' I said.  Man, can't
+you see I'm dangerous?  Go----"
+
+The door banged behind the retreating Scales, and Archibold Masterman
+was alone.
+
+So this was the end of all his hopes, his dreams, his ambitious
+purposes for Arthur!  For he did not think of doubting the story Scales
+had told him.  He knew very well that Scales would never have dared to
+tell the story if it were not true.  In a swift moment of agonised
+apprehension he knew also that there had always been an element of
+insecurity in those very hopes and purposes on which he had set his
+heart so eagerly.  His son had always stood aloof from him, there had
+always been some impalpable barrier between them.  Yet of late he had
+been much less conscious of this barrier than he had ever been.  Arthur
+had shown himself willing to meet his father's wishes, and in the
+Leatham business he had displayed practical faculties for which he had
+not given him credit.  Instinctively Masterman knew that something had
+happened of which even Scales had not the clue.
+
+If Arthur had been guilty of any of the common indiscretions of youth,
+he could have forgiven him readily; he would indeed have almost
+welcomed the opportunity, since it would have destroyed the barrier
+between them.  But this was a different matter.  He caught a galling
+vision of his son as his judge and critic publicly condemning him; no
+father could condone that.  He had been too lenient with him, too
+generous.  He had as good as admitted his superiority, he had even been
+humble before him.  And this was the result--his son forgot all
+gratitude, all decency even, and denounced him as a scoundrel.  The
+word stung him like a gadfly.  His heart began to harden into cold,
+pitiless anger towards his son.
+
+Yet he must give him a hearing.  That was only fair.  And he was too
+proud to seek it.  His first instinct was to wire Arthur to come to
+Brighton at once, but this would be to admit an importance in the
+situation which he was resolved to ignore.  In a day or two the family
+would be back in London, and then the opportunity would come.
+
+The opportunity came a few days later.
+
+Eagle House was reopened, and the common forms of life were
+re-established.  Dinner was just over.  Helen was chattering about the
+new friends she had made at Brighton, but no one else had anything to
+say.  A heavy restraint rested like a cloud over the family.  Mrs.
+Masterman sat silent as usual, Arthur had not said a word during the
+meal, Masterman had replied to Helen's ceaseless small talk in curt
+monosyllables.
+
+Arthur rose quietly to leave the room, when his father's voice arrested
+him.
+
+"Arthur."
+
+"Yes, father."
+
+"I want to see you."
+
+"Very well, sir."
+
+The words were colourless in themselves, but to one ear in that room
+they rang like a clash of swords.  Mrs. Masterman looked up, her face
+quivering and eager.  Her eyes sought Arthur, and as he passed her
+chair she pressed his hand.  Arthur understood that silent overture,
+and was grateful for it.
+
+"Come into the office," said Masterman, rising from the table.
+
+Arthur followed obediently.  The hour long foreseen had come, and upon
+the whole he was glad.  He was sick of suspense, sick of the deceit of
+eating his father's bread with bitter resentment in his heart, but not
+the less he trembled.  There was a strangling pressure in his throat,
+his heart swelled, a vein in his temple throbbed painfully.  He had
+long rehearsed the hour; he had shaped every phrase that he would use
+to sharpest meaning; but now he felt unaccountably dumb.  And, as if
+memory herself turned traitor, a sudden picture flashed before him of
+how, years ago, in some childish illness, his father had sat beside his
+bed, had taken him upon his knee, and had hushed him to sleep upon his
+bosom.  It passed through his thoughts like a strain of music, like the
+fragrance of incense from an altar, subtly suggestive of a forgotten
+sacredness in old affections and of their inalienable claim upon his
+heart.  And with it came that old sense of bigness in his father.
+Strange how that persisted, but it did.  This rough mass of man, this
+big fighting figure, this man of many combats, did he really understand
+him?  And he replied with the sadness of a great pity that he
+understood him too well, and he saw the gulf between them.
+
+But there was no such touch of grace or tenderness in the father's
+mind.  He also had rehearsed this hour, but with an extraordinary
+vehemence of rage, which grew by what it fed on.  He had come to
+conceive himself a too generous and indulgent parent wronged by an
+ungrateful child.  And worse still, he had come to conceive of Arthur
+as a weakling, who refused the battle of life; a fool, who wanted life
+arranged on a plan of his own; an attitudinising Pharisee, who held
+himself aloof from realities, and said to the man who grappled them,
+"Stand aside, I am holier than thou."  Well, he would teach him!  He
+would give him a lesson which he would never forget.  His only mistake
+had been that he had not done it long ago.
+
+The moment the door was closed he wheeled round upon him with a
+formidable gesture.
+
+"I want a word with you," he said, "and I'll thank you not to interrupt
+till I'm done.  It seems I've got a son that doesn't approve me.  Well,
+I could bear that, but what I can't bear is to have a son that is fool
+enough to go about saying so.  It seems I'm not good enough to be the
+father of this son.  I'm a scoundrel, so he says, and he says it with
+my meat in his belly and my clothes on his back.  My father was a hard
+man, and beat me, but I never told other folk what I thought of him.  I
+never went whining to other folk and called my father names.  I bore
+what I had to bear, and kept my mouth shut.  But it seems I've got a
+son that must be talking.  Well, I'm going to take care that he talks
+where I can't hear him.  I thought to take him into my business--the
+more fool I.  Business!  Let me tell you business needs commonsense,
+which it seems you haven't got.  And business needs a still tongue,
+which you'll never get, to say nothing of some kind of decent faith
+between partners, which you haven't a notion of.  Partners!  Why, let
+me tell you, I'd sooner take the most ignorant boy in my office and
+make him my partner than you!  He'd at least have commonsense enough to
+know which side his bread's buttered, which you'll never know.  So
+that's at an end, and you know my mind."
+
+"But, father, you are unjust to me.  You don't understand."
+
+"What don't I understand?"
+
+"What was in my thought."
+
+"It's not a thing I'm at all anxious to understand," he retorted grimly.
+
+"But you must.  I won't be condemned unheard."
+
+"But you condemned me unheard."
+
+This was a shaft that drew blood.  It was true, Arthur knew it to be
+true; he had taken the word of other people against his father.
+
+"There were circumstances----" he began.
+
+"Circumstances?  Every fool pleads circumstances," Masterman
+interrupted.  "Give it the right name, you that are so honest, and say
+lying gossip."
+
+"No, it was not gossip, father."
+
+And thereupon he went over the whole story of the illness of Vickars,
+his visit to Dr. Leet, and the doctor's angry denunciation of the
+builder of the Lonsdale Road houses as a scoundrel.  He spoke with
+quiet force, and his father listened in perfect silence, but with
+averted face.
+
+"Have you done?"
+
+"Yes, father."
+
+"Are you sure you've omitted nothing?"
+
+"No, that is all."
+
+"Well, now listen to me.  Dr. Leet may be right or wrong in what he
+says--I don't know, and I don't care.  The only thing I know is that
+when I built those houses I gave the best value I could at the price.
+I've told you before that if I am paid a cheap price I give cheap work.
+All the talking in the world can't upset that position--it's plain
+business."
+
+"But if people die through the cheap work!  O father, you can't mean
+what you say!"
+
+"A good many people have lived in Lonsdale Road and haven't died.  Your
+doctor is an old woman, telling fairy-tales.  But even if he were
+right, I disclaim responsibility.  I give the best value I can for the
+money; if people won't pay for things, they can't have them.  _I_
+didn't set the standards of business.  They existed before me, and
+they'll exist after me.  If I hadn't built those houses, some one else
+would have built them, and probably worse."
+
+"But the dishonesty of it!" cried Arthur.
+
+"Dishonest?  Well, I'll admit that too, if you like.  But whose
+dishonesty?  Find me a business in London that isn't dishonest.  It's
+London itself that is dishonest.  It insists on having what it hasn't
+paid for, and won't pay for.  It prefers shoddy because it's cheap.  It
+has no right to complain of what it gets."
+
+Arthur listened in appalled silence; before this brutally lucid
+exposition of what business meant, it seemed as though all his fine
+ideals of right and justice were so many burst bubbles.  For a long
+moment it was as though he saw the world streaming past him, like a
+dark torrent thronged with dead faces, upon whose agonised pale lips
+was the eternal accusation of things as they are.
+
+"Father, it can't be right!" he cried.
+
+"There's a power of things isn't right in this world, as you'll find
+out some day.  And talking won't put 'em right, either.  But that
+brings me to what I wanted to say.  It's about the thing you omitted to
+mention when you told me your story."
+
+"What was that, father?"
+
+"I'll tell you.  You can show me what's wrong in my business, and now
+I'm going to show you something that's wrong in your conduct.  If I
+told you you'd behaved like a sulky young whelp, you'd say I was
+unjust, wouldn't you?  Well, that's just what you've done."
+
+"Father----"
+
+"Don't interrupt.  You've had your say, and I mean now to have mine,
+and be done with it.  If you'd come to me when this thing began to
+trouble you, I'd have talked it over with you frankly.  But what did
+you do?  You kept away from me.  You did worse.  You went about
+repeating what Dr. Leet said.  You hadn't even the common decency to
+wait until you'd seen me.  You hadn't even the gratitude to recollect
+that I'd done the best I could for you, and was planning to do more.
+You behaved just like a bad-hearted little boy who goes about letting
+folks think that his father is his enemy.  That's pretty behaviour in a
+son, isn't it?  But it seems that's the kind of son I've got.  And for
+that I don't forgive you.  You've made it clear that you and I can't
+draw together."
+
+"I never meant anything of the kind."
+
+"Never meant!  What kind of excuse is that?  It's what every
+slack-baked youth in the office says when he's played the fool.  And
+when a youth can find nothing better to say than that, I fire him.  And
+I'm going to fire you."
+
+"I am entirely in your hands, father.  I can see that I was wrong in
+not coming to you at once.  What more can I say?"
+
+"It's too late to say anything.  You can't undo wrong by just saying
+you are wrong.  The plain fact is, I can't trust you.  There's only one
+end for it--you must go your way, and I mine."
+
+There was a rough dignity in Masterman as he uttered these words which
+was profoundly moving.  Had he been only angry, violent, or satirical,
+Arthur could have borne it.  He would have been sustained by the
+justice of his cause.  But now that very justice on which he had relied
+for strength broke beneath him like a rotten prop.  He who had been so
+keen for justice was himself unjust.  He saw himself--an implicit
+parricide, a child who had taken arms against his father.  And he saw
+with a sudden agonised clearness of perception his father's nature,
+with its strange blending of rugged virtue and unscrupulous craft, its
+hard, indomitable fibre shot through by soft veins of tenderness, his
+public traffic with dishonour almost counterbalanced by his stern
+reticence under the early cruelties he had endured, and his honourable,
+stoical silence under their brutal ignominies--he saw all this, and he
+saw himself as weak, hysteric, foolish, crying out for justice in
+another, but blind to the folly of his own behaviour.
+
+"I am sorry, father," he said in a broken voice.
+
+"That's the first sensible word you've said to-night.  Only, you see,
+it comes too late.  You and me's got to part.  Our roads lie different."
+
+"What do you wish me to do, father?"
+
+"I don't know.  I want to think things over.  You'd better go now."
+
+And then with a sudden savage burst of anger, as Arthur left the room,
+he shouted after him: "You can take my compliments to Dr. Leet, and
+tell him he's a confounded interfering fool!"
+
+But there was more of pain than anger in this violent dismissal.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+THE FAREWELL
+
+The night had fallen upon Eagle House.  Arthur sat alone in his bedroom
+at the open window.  A soft wind talked to itself in the branches of
+the big mulberry tree on the lawn; a few placid stars shone in the
+blue-black heavens, then the late moon like a yellow fire; a nested
+sparrow chirped contentedly beneath the eaves; and, like a solemn wash
+of waves upon a hidden beach, London moaned and murmured through all
+its vast circumference.  Out of the deep night the Spirit of his own
+Youth arose, and sat beside him.
+
+"Listen to me," said the Spirit.  "I bring with me two swords--Faith
+and Courage.  Gird them on."
+
+But London laughed.  A soft derision shook the leaves upon the mulberry
+tree, and the waves upon the hidden beach were scornful.
+
+"You have your life to live.  Live it," said the Spirit.
+
+But the stars, like eyes, turned slowly toward him in despairing irony.
+"How many millions have we heard say that," they whispered, "and each
+has been overcome in turn, and has sunk in nameless dust."
+
+"You are not as the nameless millions," said the Spirit.  "You are
+yourself, with your own right and power to live."
+
+And at that the heavens moved, and an infinite procession of scarred
+brows and sad eyes, passed by, and a multitude of lips whispered, "We
+said that once, but Life was too strong for us."
+
+"Nevertheless, thou canst conquer Life," said the Spirit.
+
+"Nay, Life will conquer thee," replied the legions of the dead.  "Let
+be.  Submit.  Why strive when all strife is vain?"
+
+And then, out of the deep well of his misery, a bubble of light swam
+up, and something in his soul cried, "I will not submit!  I will gird
+on the two swords of Faith and Courage.  I will conquer Life!"
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+He had sat so long in absorbed silence that he was unconscious that the
+door of the room had opened and shut.  The noise of the closing door,
+gentle as it was, roused him like a clap of thunder.  He turned at the
+sound, and saw his mother.
+
+She was robed in white, a white silk shawl was drawn over her head, and
+in the dim light she looked like a gentle apparition.
+
+"Mother!" he cried.
+
+She came toward him with outstretched arms.
+
+And then, as by a magic touch, he became a little child again.  She sat
+besides him, drew his head down upon her warm bosom, put her arm round
+his neck, and whispered, "I know."  And beneath her gentle caress,
+thawed as it were by the mere warmth of contact with her, something
+hard and cold in his own heart dissolved and drained itself away in
+delicious tears.  He wept unrestrainedly, as a child weeps who is in no
+haste to cease from weeping, lest the consolation for his tears should
+cease with the tears themselves.  And the chief sweetness of it all lay
+in the silence of their communion.  Neither spoke because there was no
+need of speech.  He knew that he was comprehended, and this is the
+final ecstasy of all communion.  From this faithful bosom he had drawn
+his life; these hands had been the first to touch him; and as they had
+long ago bound up his childish bruises, so now their very touch drew
+the hurt out of his pained heart.  He drank life from her again; he was
+conscious of a warm inflowing flood of strength, of restful power, of
+quiet blessedness.
+
+When at last he lifted his eyes he saw her transfigured.  The frost of
+silence had melted from her face; he caught in the dim light the
+sparkle of her eyes, divined rather than discerned the flush of her
+cheek and the new youth and vehemence of her aspect.
+
+"Mother!" he said again.
+
+She quietly pushed him from her, and gazed deep into his eyes.
+
+"And now let us talk," she whispered.
+
+"You know what has happened?" he said.
+
+"Yes, I know."
+
+"O mother, what am I to do?"
+
+"You must do right, my son."
+
+She was silent for a moment, and he felt her hand tighten as it held
+his own.  Then she said abruptly, "I have my confession to make before
+I can counsel you."
+
+"Your confession, mother?"
+
+"Can't you see that one is needed?  Have you never asked yourself the
+reason for my silence, my aloofness, and my lack of interest in life?
+Did you never feel yourself that these things were unnatural, that
+there must be a reason for them, and that the reason must be tragic?  I
+am going to tell you that reason.  I have waited for this hour for
+years--O my God, what dreary, fearful years!  I have watched your
+growth with terror, Arthur--yes, with terror, because I feared what you
+might become.  Do you know what I feared?  God forgive me!  I feared
+you might be like your father.  I watched every little seed of thought
+as it opened in you, fearful of what flower it might bear.  I studied
+every glance, every sign of disposition, every drift of temperament;
+weighed your words, analysed them endlessly through sleepless nights,
+gazed into your mind and heart with dread and yearning.  No one knows
+what I suffered when you went to Oxford.  There was not a night when I
+did not lie awake for hours thinking of you.  I said, 'Here he will
+meet the world in all its grossness, and he will succumb to it, as a
+thousand others have done.  He will lose his fineness; he will become
+like the rest.'  Each time when you came home I met you with a kind of
+terror.  I dared scarcely look into your face for fear of the record I
+might find written there.  A mother reads the signs that no one else
+can read.  She knows, as no one else can know, the secret potencies
+within the nature of her child.  And knowing what I did of life, I was
+terrified; and it was because I feared to look I stood aloof, that I
+shunned even speech with you, that I have shut myself for years within
+a wall of ice.  Arthur, can you forgive me?"
+
+"O my poor mother! it is I who should ask forgiveness, because I did
+not understand you better."
+
+She stooped to kiss his forehead, and went on relentlessly: "No; I see
+now that I was wrong.  I denied myself to you.  I should have given
+myself to you all the more because I feared for you.  But surely I have
+been punished--punished by the loss of how many moments like this!  And
+I might have had them!  What can ever give me back the kisses I have
+never kissed?"
+
+"Mother, I will not have you talk like that.  I have never doubted that
+you loved me.  And I love you all the more for what you have endured
+for me.  Yes, I knew you suffered--I always understood that."
+
+"I suffered--but I have not yet told you the deepest cause.  I must
+tell you that too."
+
+"I don't want to know, mother.  I have no right to know."
+
+"Yes; it is your right to know."
+
+There was anguish in her voice now.  The yellow rays of the sinking
+moon, falling on her face, revealed a white, strained contour, as
+though flame and marble mingled.
+
+"Listen, Arthur.  I must go back through the years to the time when I
+married your father.  I was young, gay, inexperienced, and as
+lighthearted as a girl could be.  Your father had a greatness of his
+own--never think that I doubt that--and when I first met him I thought
+him the most wonderful man in all the world.  No man was ever better
+calculated to impress the senses of a young girl.  I gave him what was
+almost adoration, unthinking adoration.  Of course I knew that I shared
+only one part of his life, but what did I care?  Women are usually
+content if men love them; they do not care to ask what kind of life the
+men they trust live when they are away from them.  Of the nature of
+your father's business life I could hardly form a guess.  It was not my
+concern, and I was happy in my ignorance until--until a day came when I
+had to know.
+
+"I will spare you details, Arthur.  I have said enough when I say that
+the discovery I made was that your father's business was based on
+merciless chicanery and fraud.  I begged him on my knees to alter it.
+I told him that I was willing to live anywhere, to do anything, to
+suffer any privation, rather than eat dishonest bread.  At first he
+argued with me, as one might with a foolish child.  He told me he was
+no worse than other people--all businesses were like that; he was as
+good as circumstances permitted; and he laughed at what he called my
+pretty Puritanism.  Then, when he saw that I was in earnest, he grew
+angry.
+
+"'Haven't I given you everything you possess?' he cried.
+
+"'You shall give me no more,' I answered.  'You have taken from me much
+more than you gave.'
+
+"'What have I taken?'
+
+"'My belief in you, my belief in life,' I answered.  And then, in my
+hot anger, I told him all that I had learned, and how I abhorred to
+live softly at the price of cruel suffering in others, and refused to
+profit by the wages of robbery.  He turned pale at that, for he saw
+that I knew something which went beyond legalised dishonesty.
+
+"From that hour our lives were separate.  I never again wore my girlish
+finery; I ate as little as I could; I lived in solitude.  I knew that
+nothing I could say would influence him.  I was condemned to futility.
+It was in that year of our final quarrel you were born.  O my boy, can
+you understand now with what terror I looked at your little innocent
+face as it lay upon my bosom?  For many, many months I wished you dead
+for fear of what you might become.  I have watched the growth of your
+father's wealth with far deeper alarm than men have ever watched the
+coming of poverty.  I could discern in it nothing but a threat to you.
+I have wasted myself in tears and prayers for you, all the time telling
+myself that prayers were in vain.  And now--praise be to the God I have
+insulted!--I find my prayers miraculously answered.  Arthur, my son,
+you have stood the test.  Your soul has overcome the forces of your
+blood.  I live to-night, I live for the first time in twenty years, and
+God restores to me the years that the locust has eaten."
+
+Her impassioned speech thrilled him like the note of rapture in the
+voice of a saint.  And as she spoke, with that pale moonlight lighting
+her face like a flame, it was as though the saint's halo rested on her
+brow; she was the creature of a vision, ineffably pure and tender,
+clothed in the eternal sacredness of motherhood.  He had rested his
+head upon her bosom while he wept; he knelt now, and laid it on her
+knees.
+
+"O my son, my son," she cried, "I planned for this long before you were
+born, but I never thought it would come true.  It was for this I
+chastened myself with tears and fasting, hoping that the life I
+nourished might be freed from the stain I feared.  But I had no faith.
+I could only bring God my timidity; I could only plead my agony; I had
+no strength to bring to Him.  Yet He heard me, and after all the
+doubting years He has given me the desire of my heart."
+
+"And I never understood," he whispered.
+
+"But you understand now, and I am repaid in full," she answered.  "When
+I saw you go out with your father to-night into the office, I knew the
+great battle of your life had come, and something told me you would not
+fail."
+
+"Yet I did fail, mother.  He made me feel that I had wronged him."
+
+"I know.  He told me."
+
+"He said I had behaved like a bad-hearted little boy.  He humbled me to
+the dust."
+
+"I know that too.  That is why I came to you, my dear.  I knew that you
+would need me."
+
+"I do need you, mother.  Everything is dark and perplexed to me.  It
+seems that though I have done right, I have done it in the wrong way."
+
+"The great thing is to have done right.  That atones for everything
+with God, I think."
+
+"But I don't see the next step, mother."
+
+"We never do, till we take it.  But I can see it.  Shall I tell you
+what it is?"
+
+"Yes, mother."
+
+"It is the step I did not take--that is why I see it so clearly.  You
+must go away.  You must take your life into your own hands.  You must
+begin it all over again.  Women cannot do that; men can.  Only now and
+then does a woman claim her own personality, and for her the risk is
+terrible.  But a man can do it; he is meant to do it.  That is where he
+finds his greatness."
+
+"But that will be to leave you, mother.  How can I do that, especially
+now, when I know what your life has been?"
+
+"It is the fate of mothers, dearest, and it is a joyous fate.  What
+matter where you go?  I shall still live in you.  Don't you see, dear,
+that my life reaches its height to-night, and through you?  I have paid
+twenty years of loneliness and tears for this hour, and I find the
+price light.  Do you think I grudge a few more years of separation?
+And they will not be lonely.  I have wept my last tears for you.  I
+have triumphed after all, and nothing can rob me of my triumph."
+
+The supreme self-abnegation of that speech was too great to be
+understood all at once.  It came upon him by degrees; perhaps it would
+be true to say that it was only after many years, when he stood beside
+his mother's grave, that he understood its full significance.  But
+enough of that significance was felt even now to fill his soul with
+wonder.  He saw only the first page in the sacred gospel of motherhood,
+but he caught its meaning.  To ask nothing, to give everything, to
+purchase momentary rapture with the grief of years, to toil without
+reward, to love and be forgotten, to yield flesh and heart for the
+nurture of the seeds of life in others, to create for them the
+unparticipated victory--that was the destiny of motherhood, a thing not
+less sacred than the love that once endured the Cross for man.  To find
+himself so loved was an overwhelming thought.  Beneath its weight he
+lay breathless, in an ecstasy of marvel.
+
+"Yes, you must go away," she continued.  "Shall I tell you why?"
+
+"Yes, mother, tell me."
+
+"Because if you stay in London you will never find your freedom.  In
+London the net is drawn so close that individuality is strangled.
+London insists upon conformity.  It grinds men down by slow attrition
+to a common likeness.  I have thought it all over.  It is because there
+are cities like London, full of avarice and pleasure, that the best men
+grow into criminals without knowing it.  Your father might have been a
+good man if he had never seen London.
+
+"And there is another reason too.  Your father, in spite of his anger,
+will not give you up.  He will try to keep you near him, even though
+you are not his partner in the business.  He will bribe you by his
+generosity, subdue you by his forgiveness.  And he is a strong man,
+remember, who always gets his own way sooner or later.  Don't you know
+that, Arthur?"
+
+"Do you mean that his very love for me is a peril, mother?"
+
+"Yes, that is what I mean, my dear.  You don't know what it means to be
+subject to the constant pressure of a strong man who loves you.  But I
+know.  It is that which has reduced my own life to futility.  If I had
+hated your father, my hatred would have given me strength to leave him.
+But because I loved him, I learned to distinguish between him and his
+sin.  Oh! there have been many times when I have been almost overcome;
+times when I have said, 'What is the use of struggle?'  It were wiser
+to submit at once, to accept a strong man's love with gratitude, to ask
+no questions, to become like the rest.  I have never really submitted,
+but I have compromised, and that has meant futility!  But you are
+different.  You have your chance to escape, to build your own life.  I
+don't want your life to be futile, as mine has been.  It is the torture
+of all tortures.  Arthur, I think I would rather see you dead!"
+
+"But you, mother, how can I leave you?"
+
+"Have I not told you I wish you to go?  Do you think I am so selfish,
+dear, that I would have you stay with me to your loss?  That would be
+my loss too, and a worse loss than any I have yet endured.  My heart
+says, Stay; but see, I pluck the weakness from my heart.  Arthur, I
+command you to go."
+
+She rose as she spoke.  The moon had sunk.  The first gray gleam of day
+was in the sky, and suddenly the earliest sunbeam clothed her.  In that
+fuller light he saw her face irradiated.
+
+"I will go," he said.
+
+She drew him to her, and kissed his brow.
+
+"There speaks my own true son," she said.
+
+For some moments a deep silence filled the room.  A bird twittered in
+the dawn-light; London turned like a weary sleeper on a couch of pain;
+a wind, fresh from the fountains of the day, blew hopefully, with a
+hint of free seas and far-off lands.
+
+"Promise me one thing, my son."
+
+"What is that, mother?"
+
+"It is that whatever your life may be, it shall be honest.  Rich or
+poor, defeated or successful, accept no gain by violence, win no
+pleasure by dishonour.  O my son, you know why I say this, you know
+what I mean by it."
+
+"Yes, I know, mother, and I promise."
+
+"And go at once, my dear.  I have foreseen this hour and have provided
+for it.  You will not go without money.  You need not be ashamed to
+take it; it is yours.  I have saved it, and for you.  And now God bless
+you, my dear, dear son!"
+
+She withdrew herself from his arms and was gone.  The full day shone
+now, and from its shining summits Arthur heard the bugle cry, calling
+him to distant lands and new life.
+
+
+
+
+PART TWO
+
+THE AMERICAN MADONNA
+
+
+
+XI
+
+NEW YORK
+
+If he had been able to earn his living in any conventional and accepted
+way, he would not have been on his way to join the S.S. _Saurian_ as
+she lay off the landing-stage at Southampton on that bright September
+morning.  The poor must needs learn a trade, because a trade is
+necessary to mere existence; but it is the tragedy of the rich and the
+semi-rich that, when once deprived of the artificial security of
+riches, they are helpless.
+
+Arthur had plenty of time to do battle with this afflicting thought as
+he travelled down to Southampton.  It accompanied him, like a voice of
+irony, in the rushing wheels; flashed upon him in the sentinel
+telegraph posts, each bearing aloft its spark of silent fire; saluted
+him from a hundred fields where men stood bare-armed beside the loaded
+wains; mocked him in casual glimpses of firm faces behind the glass of
+signal-boxes, in hurrying porters at the points of stoppage, in groups
+of labourers leaning lightly on spade or mattock, as the train
+thundered past.  In all these faces, common as they were, there was a
+look of proud efficiency.  In every sight and sound was the vindication
+of human toil.  These men, each in his several way, had solved the
+problem of life.  Each had learned to do something which the world
+wanted done.  They did the work required of them, undistracted by
+problems and philosophies; asked no questions concerning the structure
+of society or the nature of life; were content to add their stone to
+the cairn, to pass on and be forgotten, and to earn the final simple
+elegy, "home have gone and ta'en their wages."
+
+But Arthur--what did he know of this primeval life of man, which had
+gone on from the dawn of the world, unchanged by change of dynasties,
+by the readjustment of nations, by the birth and death of a hundred
+intricate philosophies, literatures, reforms, social experiments,
+social reconstructions?  He knew less than the humblest child who
+followed the reapers in the field, or began the perilous process of
+existence by earning casual pence in the mine or factory.  Like so many
+youths in an age when all forms of hand-labour have lost their dignity,
+he had learned a hundred things which lent a false glamour to
+existence, but not one which supplied its vital needs.  He had
+accumulated accomplishments, but had not developed efficiencies, as
+though one should adorn and decorate a machine in which the works were
+lacking.
+
+"Let me reckon up my capital," he thought as the train rushed on; "let
+me ascertain my authentic stock-in-trade.  I have some knowledge of
+Greek literature and Roman history, but it is probable that in all this
+train-load of human creatures there are not half a dozen who would
+attach the least value to my knowledge.  I can decipher old French
+chronicles with fair success; I know enough of music to understand the
+theory of counterpoint, and enough of poetry to construct a decent
+sonnet; and, so far as I can see, these are not commodities which
+possess any marketable value.  I have thirty pounds given me by my
+mother; but if my life depended upon my earning thirty pence, I know no
+possible method by which I might wrest the most wretched pittance from
+the world's closed fist.  I am, in fact, an incompetent, but through no
+fault of my own.  It seems that I have been elaborately trained to do a
+great number of things which no one wants done, but not one of the
+things for which the world makes eager compensation.  What were mere
+pastime to the savage is to me an inaccessible display of effort; left
+alone with the whole open world for my kingdom, it is doubtful if I
+could build a house, grow a potato, bake a loaf, or secure the barest
+means of life.  Such is my deplorable condition that it is
+possible--no, entirely certain, that the poorest emigrant in this
+rushing freight of men and women would scruple to change places with
+me.  That's a pretty situation for a gentleman of England and an Oxford
+graduate, isn't it?"
+
+He smiled mirthlessly at the thought.  Yet while it humiliated him,
+youth asserted its right sufficiently to extract from it a certain
+flavour of exhilaration.  He was at all events coming to grips with the
+reality of living.  He had been like a boy swimming upon bladders; the
+bladders were now removed, and a potent and tremendous sea throbbed
+beneath him.  Since he could depend no more on artificial aids to life,
+it followed that life must needs develop its own latent forces.  There
+surely must be such forces in himself, an elemental manhood which must
+justify itself.  There recurred to him a saying of Hilary Vickars.
+They had been discussing one night the infinite and elusive question of
+wherein lay the wisdom of life, when Vickars had abruptly said,
+"Practice is the only teacher.  You learn to walk by walking, to swim
+by swimming, to live by living.  The child has no theory about walking:
+he simply walks, at the price of a thousand tears and bruises.  In the
+same way we must make the experiment of living in order to learn how to
+live.  It is the same with religion.  We make the experiment of God
+before we can find God.  The particular folly of men to-day is that
+they think wisdom comes by talking about wisdom.  One honest attempt to
+do something, however blunderingly, is worth a lifetime of discussion
+about how it should be done."
+
+"Yet Browning held that the great thing planned was better than the
+little thing achieved," he had responded.
+
+"Browning also was a talker rather than a doer," Vickars had replied.
+"He misleads men by the very robustness of his talk into the notion
+that great dreams can take the place of great actions.  Don't let him
+mislead you.  Remember what I say, that the great business of life is
+to live, not to criticise life."
+
+He remembered the words now, and they acquired new significance as he
+studied the faces of his comrades.  There were four men in the carriage
+with him, one of them middle-aged, the others mere youths.  The
+middle-aged man had a good, plain, country face, with a fringe of gray
+whisker; two of the youths were clearly country-bred, the third had the
+alert look and pallor of the city.  The middle-aged man sat in stolid
+silence, with his big knotted hands folded on his knees; the two
+country youths watched the flying fields with eagerness; the city youth
+had produced a zither, on which he was strumming hymn-tunes.  "Safe in
+the arms of Jesus," was the tune he strummed.
+
+"Thank you, sir," said the middle-aged man.  "It kind of cheers one up
+a bit to hear that."
+
+"It's the only tune I really know," said the youth apologetically.
+"You see, I'm only a beginner."
+
+"My little girl used to sing it.  Learned it in a Sunday school at
+Newcastle.  She's dead now."
+
+The simple words had the effect of dissolving the reticence of these
+chance travellers.  They began to talk, and very soon each was relating
+his history.  The two country youths had the least to say.  They had
+heard there was work in America with good pay; in that statement their
+entire history was comprehended.  They had not the least idea of the
+country they were going to; its very geography was as much a mystery to
+them as the binomial theorem; they were, in fact, staking everything
+upon a rumour, and Arthur found their very ignorance at once deplorable
+and wonderful as an expression of the hopeful courage of the human
+heart.  The London youth was more garrulous, and slightly better
+informed.  It seemed he had a relative who had promised him a place in
+a small business which he managed near Philadelphia.
+
+"I am a clerk, you know.  A man who is a good clerk can always get on
+in any commercial centre.  Except in London.  There everything's
+congested, too many people and not enough work to go round. "England," he
+pronounced oracularly, "is done.  Her day's over."
+
+It seemed the younger men endorsed this verdict with surprising
+unanimity.  Each was a fugitive from an unequal battle.  Men could not
+live on the land, because of high rents and exorbitant taxation;
+neither could they live in cities, because over-population and
+excessive competition had reduced wages to starvation point; "England
+was all very well for the rich--let them live in it as they could--but
+a poor man couldn't, and that was about the size of it."
+
+"But surely you two could live well enough," said Arthur to the country
+youths.
+
+"Oh, live--yes," said one; "but what is there at the end of it all?
+Nothing but the workhouse."
+
+"Yes, that's it," said the middle-aged man slowly, "but there's
+workhouses in the States, too.  Don't you be deceiving of yourselves.
+England ain't no worse than other places."
+
+"And why are you leaving it then, I'd like to know?" said the London
+youth.
+
+"Because I've had a trouble, young man."
+
+Arthur's heart warmed toward this unwilling exile.  The London youth,
+with his glib denunciation of England, disgusted him; the two country
+youths could by no stretch of charity be accounted interesting; but
+this grave, silent man who had "had a trouble" made an instant appeal
+to his sympathy.  He began to talk with him, and little by little drew
+his history from him.  It seemed his name was Vyse; he was a riveter by
+trade, had worked in the great shipyards of Clydebank, Newcastle, and
+Belfast, earning excellent wages, and had acquitted himself with
+industry and honour.  Here was a man who had done something tangible
+and something that endured.  Doubtless at that moment the work of his
+hands was distributed throughout the world; again and again he had
+stood silent as the vast hull upon which he had toiled trembled on the
+slips, took the water, and presently disappeared upon the plains of
+ocean, there to encounter the strangest diversities of fate, to be
+buffeted by the vast seas of the North Atlantic or the Horn, to be
+washed with phosphorescent ripples in the heart of the Pacific or among
+the coral islands of the South Seas, to fight the ice-floes of the
+Arctic, or sleep upon the waters of the Amazon.  Here, thought Arthur,
+was the very poetry of labour; these disfigured hands held the threads
+that bound the world together, and round this plain man lay an horizon
+as wide as the farthest seas.  Unconsciously the man's trade had
+imparted certain elements of largeness to his mind.  He spoke of
+himself and his prospects with a certain plain dignity and confidence.
+He knew his value to the world; east or west, he was a needed man, one
+for whom the gate of labour stood wide open.
+
+"I'll find work, never fear," he said.  "I'm not like these boys," he
+added, with a glance at the two stolid country youths and the London
+clerk, who still strummed his one tune upon the zither.  "They think
+they'll find life easier in America, and that's all they go for.  I
+would think shame upon myself to emigrate upon such a hope as that.  I
+don't hold with folk as run down England.  It's my belief that them as
+runs down their own country won't be of much good in any other country.
+I tell you I'm sorry enough to leave England, and I wouldn't do it,
+except that I have a trouble."
+
+Presently it came out what his trouble was.  His wife was dead, and his
+only son had taken to evil ways.  The man could have borne the
+loneliness of loss, but when the boy robbed and insulted him, proving
+finally intractable, he made up his mind to start life afresh in a new
+land where his disgrace could not follow him.
+
+"There's years of work in me yet," he said.  "But I can't work properly
+without a peaceful mind.  And there's another thing, I've got to pay
+back what Charlie took from other folk.  I couldn't lift my head up if
+I didn't.  That's right, isn't it, sir?"
+
+"Mr. Vyse," said Arthur, "I wish all of us could show as clean a bill
+of health as you."
+
+The train was running into Southampton.  Beside the landing-stage lay
+the great ship, which was to receive within a few minutes so many
+histories and destinies.  The steerage was already packed with
+emigrants, many of them Italians, distinguishable by their gay-coloured
+clothing.  Arthur found, to his delight, that Vyse was billeted with
+him in a four-berth cabin; the two other tenants were an old
+horse-dealer from the Western States, and a clergyman's son, going out
+upon a remittance.  The cabin was deep down in the bowels of the ship,
+dark and airless.  He hastened from it to the deck, and found himself
+in the midst of many farewell groups.  Among them was the clergyman's
+son, who stood superciliously smoking a cigar, with his face averted
+from his father, who pressed upon him final kindnesses and counsels.
+"All right, father.  It's time for you to go, you know," he said
+sullenly.  "May God bless you, my boy!" said the old man.  "Oh, I
+daresay," said the boy indifferently; and it was so they parted.  Some
+one began to sing "Home, Sweet Home," a singularly inappropriate song
+in such an hour.  A woman shrieking for her husband and her two
+children was put ashore; it seemed the baby in her arms was afflicted
+with sarcoma, and was expelled the ship.  The brown water showed a
+sudden strake of white; a soft pulse throbbed somewhere beneath the
+decks; the screw had made the first of those countless revolutions that
+would not cease for three thousand miles; and the great vessel glided
+out upon the long path toward the setting sun.
+
+There are few schools in the world where character can be studied at
+closer quarters, and certain lessons of life learned more rapidly, than
+on ship-board.  The mere contiguity of a great variety of human
+creatures is itself a lesson in the real values of life.  It was, for
+instance, an admirable incentive to self-reliance for Arthur to find
+himself for the first time in a position where he was despised.  This
+incentive was administered daily by groups of gentlemen in ulsters and
+ladies in elaborate travelling-costumes, who gathered at the rail of
+the deck above like spectators in a gallery, and gazed down with
+evident commiseration, and sometimes with sarcastic comment, on the
+second class passengers.  Occasionally these groups would leave their
+lofty gallery and make excursions through the inferior quarters, with
+the dainty airs of personally-conducted parties investigating slums,
+commenting openly as they went upon the manners of the lower deck in a
+spirit of condescending and cheerful vulgarity.  The London clerk, with
+his eternal zither, was much remarked, and appeared proud of the
+attention he attracted.  On the other hand, men like Vyse received
+these visits in stolid silence, not wholly free from resentment and
+contempt.  "That's what money does," he said bitterly one day, when a
+group of these excursionists had retired; and Arthur, reflecting on the
+circumstance, came to see that the old workman was right in his
+diagnosis, and that it was a diagnosis shameful to human nature.  For
+it was clear that these people owed their eminence neither to manners
+nor accomplishments; in solid worth and dignity of character Vyse would
+have been judged their superior in any equitable court; and, taken man
+for man, it was merely the better coat and not the better breeding that
+distinguished the upper from the lower deck.
+
+When it came to kindness, which is the flower of all gentility, the
+virtues of the lower deck were even more strikingly apparent.  On the
+fourth day out stormy weather was encountered; black, foamless seas
+rolled in perpetual assault from the north-west; there was an hour when
+the great ship made but five miles; word went round that the lifeboats
+were cleared and victualled; and the constant noise of hammers audible
+in the pauses of the tempest was significant of some damage in the iron
+walls that lay between them and death.  It was then that, amid fear and
+dreadful discomfort, the virtues of the lower deck displayed
+themselves.  Vyse nursed a sick child with the tenderness of a woman;
+the cattle-dealer spent the day in telling stories, very far from
+decorous, it must be admitted, to a group of half-frightened lads, who
+forgot their fears in their laughter; even the London clerk shone
+conspicuous with his zither and his eternal "Safe in the arms of
+Jesus."  In the dark and narrow alley-ways, pounded by the threshing
+seas, whose fearful detonations seemed to fill the air with thunder,
+the clerk found his mission, and trembling voices sang with pathetic
+desire of conviction the words that express a faith which lifts the
+soul beyond the terrors of destruction.
+
+"That is what money does," Vyse had said, and the reflection was
+inevitable that it did very little after all to benefit character, and
+not a little to emasculate or degrade it.  The people with whom Arthur
+travelled had no monopoly of virtue, as he was bound to admit; the
+London clerk in his ordinary mood was a creature at once slight and
+vain, the horse-dealer was coarse; and so he might have gone through
+the whole list of his acquaintances, remarking plentiful defect in
+each.  But the qualities were more obvious than the defects.  There was
+a general spirit of helpfulness and kindness; many had grievous
+accusations, only too authentic, to make against the land from which
+they fled, but these accusations were rarely made in a spirit of
+bitterness or envy; all had the cardinal grace of courage, and were
+willing to believe that at the end of a long road of failure and defeat
+victory awaited them.  It was this unquenchable buoyancy of hope in the
+crowd of fugitives from an unequal battle which struck Arthur as
+entirely wonderful and, indeed, heroic.  There was not one of them
+unacquainted with failure in some extreme form; not one who had not
+heard the bugles of retreat on some disastrous field; yet each, after a
+brief inspection of the ruined architecture of his life, was ready to
+begin building anew, each believed himself competent for the task, and
+each had that rarest form of courage which forgets the past.  For one
+reared as he had been, it was a revelation to be made aware of such
+virtues lying at the base of very ordinary characters, and a revelation
+for which he thanked God with devout gratitude.  It amounted almost to
+a discovery of human nature.  He had known hitherto little more than a
+human coterie; he had lived in artificial conditions; and he knew the
+kind of lives that such conditions bred.  Now, for the first time, he
+touched the primeval; he had joined the company of those whose sole
+defence and worth lay in their authentic manhood, and he dimly saw that
+what had seemed a fall in life had been an ascent, for the truly
+ignoble lay, not below him, but above him.  Thus insensibly he drew
+courage from the fortitude of his companions, and caught from them that
+spirit of adventure which "street-born" men never know--the spirit
+which has flung forth the Anglo-Saxon race into every quarter of the
+globe, and has made them the world's great empire-builders.
+
+On the seventh day out the Atlantic storm-belt, with its miserable
+monotony of vexed and gloomy seas, was left behind.  For a wonder there
+was no fog upon the Banks; the seas were of an indescribable hue of
+limpid turquoise, the ship seemed to glide across a far-glimmering
+floor, and the wind had a tonic sweetness and renewing potency.  The
+blood sang in the veins, the eye took a deeper colour, and among all
+the fugitives of the lower deck there was not one who did not move with
+a brisker step.  Laughter ran along the deck; a child beating a tin cup
+with a spoon was the object of general admiration; languid faces
+smiled, and among the women a fresh ribbon on the hair or a glance of
+innocent coquettishness in the eye marked the advent of a new zest in
+life.
+
+Arthur stood against a bulk-head, watching with delighted eyes the
+bright elusive colours of the sea, varying from the clearest
+bottle-green where the ship's bulk clove the waters to the deepest
+purple where a cloud drove its shadow like a chariot across the liquid
+plain.  Vyse stood beside him, his rugged face reddened by the fresh
+wind.
+
+"Looks cheerful, doesn't it?" he remarked.  "The sea somehow makes a
+man think better of himself."
+
+"Yes," said Arthur.  "I feel that too.  Life seems larger."
+
+"That reminds me of something I wish to say to you," said Vyse.  "You
+and me's been good friends upon the voyage, and if you won't be
+offended, I'd like to ask you a question."
+
+"You won't offend me.  What is it?"
+
+"I've wondered what you might be going to do when you reached New York."
+
+"Well, to tell you the truth, Vyse, I don't know.  I have to begin a
+new life, but I don't in the least know how."
+
+"I guessed something of the sort.  Well, what I wanted to say was this.
+Men as is Englishmen and has travelled together like you and me should
+stick together, shouldn't they?  Now, I'm only a plain man, and you're
+a gentleman, but maybe I might help you a bit.  I'd like to give you my
+address.  A pal of mine gave it me.  And if ever you don't know where
+to go, come to me, and you'll be kindly welcome."
+
+"I believe I shall," said Arthur simply.  "And I thank you from my
+heart."
+
+The kindness of Vyse touched him more deeply than he could say.  It was
+another evidence of that fine courtesy which exists in all simple
+natures, and he took it as a fresh assurance of that worth of human
+nature itself which he had discovered on the voyage.
+
+Two days later Fire Island was passed, the long flat shore of Long
+Island lay like a yellow line drawn across the water, and in the
+afternoon the screw ceased from its long labour, and the ship lay at
+rest off Sandy Hook.  The harbour with its green bluffs, studded with
+lawns and white verandahed houses, opened up; the tremendous
+battlements of New York bulked against the distant skyline; and in the
+foreground, like a colossal watcher of the gate, strode the Statue of
+Liberty.
+
+"Look," said Vyse, nudging Arthur's arm and pointing to the bows, where
+a multitude of emigrants stood at gaze.
+
+And in truth it was a scene not easily forgotten.  Yellow-haired
+Scandinavians, with something of the old Viking stature and clear
+resoluteness of eye, watched the unfolding scene; Hungarians in
+embroidered jackets gathered in a separate group; Danes, Germans, and
+Russians were there, all silent with an emotion which might have been
+apprehension or anticipation; but in the foreground, the unconscious
+centre of all eyes, knelt a group of Italian men and women.  They were
+crossing themselves devoutly, their ecstatic eyes raised to the
+gigantic figure of Liberty with her lamp.
+
+"What are they doing?" said Arthur, and he found himself whispering as
+though he waited in some dim cathedral for the elevation of the Host.
+
+"They call that there Statue of Liberty the American Madonna, so they
+tell me," said Vyse.
+
+The reply thrilled him as the whisper of the oracle might have thrilled
+the worshippers long since beneath the oaks of Dodona.  The American
+Madonna, the calm-faced Mother standing at the gates of empire with
+impartial welcome, her uplifted torch lighting her new-found children
+to the path of novel destinies--there was a sacramental virtue in the
+thought, and it shone through his mind like a heavenly omen.
+
+"Ave Madonna!" cried the kneeling group, each with eyes fixed upon that
+lofty brow of bronze, as if they expected instantly the face to quicken
+with a human tenderness, the head to stoop in condescending grace.
+
+Perhaps it did.  In that clear and sunny air the face appeared to
+smile, and from the outstretched hand there came to each humble
+suppliant the veritable grace of hope.
+
+And then the moment passed; the ship moved on; from a Titanic
+structure, pierced with many windows, a babel of voices clashed upon
+the still air, and in another half hour the ship, her long voyage done,
+swung slowly to her berth.
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+MR. WILBUR MEREDITH LEGION
+
+Were a man never so lonely, there is something in a first introduction
+to a strange city which communicates a spirit of elation.  The mere
+strangeness of what he sees, the novel aspect of things, the touch of
+the original and unexpected in the buildings, the conformation of the
+streets, the faces of the hurrying throngs--this new note of life,
+everywhere audible, is itself so surprising and absorbing that the mind
+is insensibly withdrawn from the contemplation of private griefs and
+memories.  A more exact examination may reveal the depressing fact that
+a new world is new alone in name; that men carry their conventions with
+them wheresoever they travel, and may reproduce upon the loneliest rock
+of the Pacific or in the heart of the Sahara the complete social
+counterpart of those narrower forms of civilisation which they might be
+supposed to have renounced for ever.  But even so, it still remains
+true that the thing which seems new is really new to us, for we live by
+our sensations as much as by our knowledge.  He who cannot yield
+himself to this illusion of the senses will certainly deny himself the
+finer pleasures of existence; he will march across the world with the
+stiff air of the pedant, who sacrifices poetry to precision, declining
+more and more into a bloomless frugality of life, until at last not
+alone the outer world but the inner places of his own heart will become
+arid as a desert.
+
+Arthur was much too young to reject the illusion of the senses, and too
+essentially a poet to desire to do so.  He had his own private griefs,
+and they were by no means a negligible burden.  In the noisy darkness
+of the long nights at sea, when the clanging of the piston kept him
+wakeful, he had again and again reviewed these griefs with a
+self-torturing persistence.  Would he ever see his mother again?--and
+sometimes out of the heart of the black night a voice told him he would
+not.  Would that exquisite but slender bond that held him to Elizabeth
+withstand the strain of a dateless separation?  Would he find the
+things he sought, have strength to build the life he had had the vision
+to design, justify himself before the world?  These and many cognate
+thoughts oppressed him; they wrote their abrupt interrogations on the
+curtain of the night, until he hid his face from them, and could have
+wept for weakness.  But in spite of these oppressions, his spirit had
+gained both in hope and fortitude upon the voyage.  He had begun to
+find himself blunderingly, as all men must at first, yet with some
+sincerity and real truth of vision.  Two things he had discovered in
+himself which appeared to him a sufficient base for life, at once a
+programme and a creed--the one was the fixed determination to be
+content only with the best kind of life, the other was a faith in the
+Guiding Hand.  From this creed he drew both his inspiration and his
+courage, and the more he dwelt upon it the more his heart leaped to
+meet the future, and the less did he regret the dissolution of the past.
+
+And so that first vision of the New World thrilled him with a vague but
+joyous wonder.  New York impressed him as the most superb of all
+examples of man's will to live.  Here, upon a narrow strip of rock, the
+most ill-fitted spot in all the world for a city metropolitan, man had
+compelled nature to his purpose; he had disregarded her intention and
+had triumphed over it; he had bridged the very seas with ropes of
+steel, carried his means of locomotion into the upper air, and, unable
+wholly to escape the limitation of the jealous earth, had invaded the
+sky with his monstrous fortresses of steel and masonry.  The very
+absence of grace, suavity, dignity in all he saw was itself impressive.
+Brutal as it was, yet was it not also the assertion of a strength which
+made for its object with a kind of elemental directness, not only
+scorning obstacles, but defying in its course the most august
+conventions of the centuries?  The will to live--that was the legend
+flaunted by invisible banners on each sky-daring tower; the city hummed
+and sang with its crude music; it was written on every face he met in
+lines of grim endeavour.  And it was a needed lesson for such as he.
+It struck him like a buffet from a strong hand, roused him like a
+challenge.  To the perpetual oncoming hosts of invaders from an older
+world, New York spoke its iron gospel, "Man is unconquerable, if he
+have the will to conquer."  And the oncoming host received that stern
+gospel with acclamation as indeed good news--not the highest gospel,
+nor the sweetest, but assuredly a needed gospel.
+
+Certainly his situation called for both fortitude and hopefulness, for
+it was highly precarious.  He had left London in such haste that he had
+had no time to make any plans for the future; he had simply acted on an
+imperative instinct of the soul to assert its rights, to seize upon
+immediate freedom.  A voice within him had whispered, "Now or never,"
+and in a sudden access of resolution he had broken his bonds.  He did
+not regret its precipitation, but he had begun to perceive its
+consequences.
+
+The only persons to whom he had confided his intention were Hilary
+Vickars and Mrs. Bundy.  Immediately after the midnight interview with
+his mother he had gone to Vickars, who listened to his story in grave
+silence.  How every detail of that hour passed with Hilary Vickars
+stood out in his memory!  He could see the face of Vickars, pale and
+eager, as it bent toward him; he remembered how he noted that the lock
+of hair that fell across his forehead was newly streaked with gray, and
+how the veins in the long thin hands showed every intricate
+reticulation.  He recollected how he watched a little patch of sunlight
+as it crept across the floor, saying to himself with a kind of childish
+irrelevance, "When it touches the wainscot, I must go."  And what
+length of years or gulfs of immense vicissitude could obliterate the
+face of Elizabeth, as he saw it through that difficult hour--so pale,
+so sweet, so intense, her lips parted in surprise, her eyes signalling
+to him messages of faith and constancy?
+
+"You are doing right," said Vickars, and he had laid the long,
+blue-veined hand upon his head in benediction; and then Elizabeth had
+taken Arthur's hand in hers, and kissed it softly, and held it for a
+moment to her bosom--and both acts had been done so solemnly that they
+seemed like sacred rites in a religious ceremony.
+
+When he rose to go--it was in the exact moment when the patch of
+sunlight touched the wainscot--Vickars had offered him some practical
+advice.
+
+"I wish I could help you," he said.  "Let me see, it's New York you're
+going to, isn't it?"
+
+"Yes--New York."
+
+"Well, there's a man there I know slightly--I met him once over a
+negotiation for book rights in the States.  He had an odd
+name--probably that's why I remember him--Wilbur Meredith Legion, and
+he seemed to be a decent fellow.  It won't do you any harm to have an
+introduction to him."
+
+From a pigeon-hole in his desk Vickars produced a card: "Mr. Wilbur
+Meredith Legion, Vermont Building, Broadway, New York.  Literary and
+Press Agent."
+
+"You'll find him interesting, at all events," said Vickars, "and he may
+be able to put you in the way of using your pen."
+
+From Lonsdale Road Arthur had gone to Mrs. Bundy's.  That redoubtable
+woman at once rose to the occasion, and indulged herself in a flight of
+prophecy which would have done credit to the wildest programmes of Mr.
+Bundy.
+
+"You'll make your fortune before you're thirty," she exclaimed.  "Think
+of Carnegie."
+
+And thereupon she poured forth a stream of exhilarating and incorrect
+information, which sounded strangely like excerpts from Bundy's
+prospectuses, so that it seemed as though a conjurer flung a dozen
+golden balls of sudden wealth into the air, and kept them flashing and
+gyrating for some seconds with amazing ingenuity.
+
+"Stop!--stop!" said Arthur, laughing.
+
+"Not a bit of it," she replied.  "I only wish you could meet Bundy.
+He'd be the man to help you."
+
+"Where is Mr. Bundy just now?"
+
+"The last I heard he was in Texas.  He was negotiating the purchase of
+forty thousand acres of land which he says is the finest in the world.
+Let me see--why, to be sure, he said he'd be in New York before
+Christmas.  He always stops at the Astor House.  No doubt you'll find
+him there."
+
+"I will certainly look for him," said Arthur.
+
+"Do.  If there's any man can make your fortune, it's Bundy."  And then,
+with unremarked inconsistency, she added, "I wish I could give you
+something, my dear, but it's low water with us just now.  Stop, though;
+here's something that may be useful."  After rummaging in a cupboard
+she produced a small flat bottle, which contained something which bore
+a strong resemblance to furniture polish.  "It's rum and butter, my
+dear, and let me tell you it's a splendid remedy for sore throat.
+Those ships are cold, draughty places, and maybe you'll be glad of it.
+Bundy always takes it with him on a journey.  Well, my dear, let an old
+woman kiss you, and wish you well," whereupon the motherly creature
+flung her arms round his neck and kissed him heartily.  The two Bundy
+boys, coming in at that moment from the back garden, where they had
+spent an exhilarating hour in lassoing a collie dog, stared round-eyed
+at this proceeding, the younger of the two remarking with an air of
+solemn impudence, "I'll tell father"--whereupon Mrs. Bundy had chased
+them out of the kitchen with many threats, and it was thus, in a gust
+of laughter, he had taken leave of his old friend.  She had stood at
+her door till the last moment when he disappeared down the road, waving
+her hand energetically, and in spite of all that was ridiculous in the
+scene, Arthur felt a real and deep sadness when she faded from his view.
+
+An introduction to a dubious person called Legion, the frail
+possibility of a rendezvous with Bundy, and a few pounds in his
+pocket--it must be admitted this was not an exorbitant equipment for
+the conquest of a new world; but to this exiguous capital there must be
+added something not readily assessed--the high and hopeful spirit of
+liberated youth.  He had escaped the strangling grip of circumstance;
+he was free, and the blood moved in his veins with a novel speed and
+nimbleness; he was at last upon the world's open road.
+
+His first act was to secure a room at the old Astor House, and make
+inquiries for Mr. Bundy.  He addressed these inquiries to a clerk who
+was so busily absorbed in the task of picking his teeth with a wooden
+toothpick that he appeared to resent interruption.  When Arthur had
+twice repeated his question, this youth answered curtly that he didn't
+know, and turned his back upon him.
+
+"Pardon me, but I have a particular reason for asking.  If you are too
+busy to examine the register, please let me."
+
+The clerk pushed a formidable volume toward him, and went on picking
+his teeth.  There was no Bundy in the long list of recent entries, but
+there was a wonderful array of places, with strange, exotic names, such
+as Saratoga, Macon, Fond du Lac, Pueblo, and a hundred others that were
+musical with old-world memories.  Upon that sordid page they shone like
+gems; they exhaled a perfume of secular romance; Memphis and
+Carthagena, Syracuse, Ithaca, and Rome, Valparaiso and Paris, jostled
+each other in the wildest incongruity, as if each bore witness to some
+ancient mode of life which had helped to form the strange amalgam which
+called itself American.  He was so delighted with this glittering
+tournament of words that at length the clerk, remarking his interest,
+condescended to inquire, "Found it?"
+
+"Mr. Bundy?  No; he doesn't appear to be here."
+
+"What like was he?"
+
+"An Englishman.  A small man, very quick and active; interested in
+mines, I think."
+
+"Well, why didn't you say he was interested in mines, any way?  Then I
+should have known.  He was here six months ago, stayed a week, private
+lunch every day in Parlour A, floating a syndicate for Texas land.  I
+know him.  Wanted me to take shares.  Said he'd be back in a month.
+Hasn't come.  Guess he's bust."
+
+"He's expected at Christmas, isn't he?"
+
+"Can't say.  If you make out to know Mr. Bundy, like you say, you'd
+know that it's his pecooliarity not to answer to anybody's
+expectations.  He's a live man, is Bundy.  Yes, sir, for a Britisher
+he's the liveliest man I know."
+
+With this unsolicited testimonial to the liveliness of Mr. Bundy he had
+to be content.
+
+"I'll let you know when he comes," said the clerk more graciously.
+"I'll see you don't miss him."
+
+"You don't know his address, do you?"
+
+"Why, let me see.  Yes, he left an address.  Here it is--Bundy, Curtis
+House, Oklahoma City; but, you know, he won't be there.  You can write
+and try; the Oklahoma people will trace him for you."
+
+"Thank you, I will do so," said Arthur, and withdrew to his bedroom,
+where he spent an interested half-hour in studying the uses of a large
+coil of rope which was conspicuously displayed near the window,
+together with minute directions as to what to do in case of fire.  He
+fell asleep that night with the directions in case of fire, and the
+exotic names he had read, and the remembered rhythm of the steamer
+piston all singing together in his mind, in an infinite succession of
+strophes, at the end of which clashed like a cymbal the words Bundy and
+Oklahoma.
+
+The next morning he sought the office of Mr. Wilbur Meredith Legion.
+He was whirled rapidly in an elevator to the eleventh floor of a
+populous and narrow building.  When, after some explanations made to an
+indifferent office-boy, whose jaws appeared to be afflicted with a
+curious rotary motion, due, as he afterwards discovered, to the
+mastication of chewing-gum, he was ushered into the presence of the
+agent.  Mr. Legion proved to be a stout, elderly man, clean-shaved,
+with a high, benevolent forehead, and a most remarkable squint.  He had
+quite a patriarchal air, a manner that might be termed diaconal, and a
+suave and insinuating voice.
+
+"Ah! you come from my friend, my dear friend, Vickars.  A most
+remarkable man!"  But when Arthur mentioned Vickars' latest book, he
+observed that Mr. Wilbur Legion did not appear to have heard of it.
+
+"We handle such an immense quantity of stuff," he said apologetically.
+"The world's greatest authors come to us.  They are beginning to find
+out what we can do for them commercially.  Have you ever heard of
+Sampson E. Dodge?"
+
+Arthur confessed his ignorance.
+
+"One of our brightest young men, sir.  A man destined to take rank with
+our greatest writers.  You must have seen his story, _The Perambulator
+with a Thousand Wheels_.  It has sold a hundred thousand.  Two years
+ago he was a clerk in a dry goods store, and to-day he is among the
+most popular of our American authors.  You've not heard of him?  Well,
+you are to be excused, sir.  We have not yet operated in Great Britain.
+Great Britain appears to have a prejudice against our great writers.
+Wilbur M. Legion means to wake Great Britain up, sir.  This state of
+wilful ignorance cannot exist much longer.  Great Britain cannot
+afford, I say, to be ignorant of the work of Mr. Sampson E. Dodge."
+
+"I see that I, as well as Great Britain, have a good deal to learn,"
+said Arthur, with quiet irony.
+
+"You have, indeed.  Not to know Mr. Sampson E. Dodge is to argue
+yourself unknown, as some one on your side of the water once
+said--Browning, wasn't it?"
+
+"Not Browning, I think."
+
+"Well, it's true just the same.  I suppose you don't know our new poets
+either, do you?  Mrs. Mary Bonner Slocum, for example.  I am happy to
+say that I operate all her poetry for her.  She writes a poem a day,
+sometimes three or four, and I place them for her in the magazines and
+journals of the country.  Her _Ode to Washington_ has been generally
+admired.  Her little talks with women on the management of the home and
+the baby are even more popular than her poems.  When I first knew her,
+she was earning nothing, sir; it is a proud reflection that to-day,
+through my efforts, her income is at least ten thousand dollars a year."
+
+Mr. Legion was evidently prepared to indulge himself at length in
+personal reminiscences.  In the course of ten minutes he had given
+sufficient biographies of his leading patrons, including not only the
+details of their earnings, but many particulars of their private
+lives--such as the fact that Mr. Sampson E. Dodge was not always
+strictly sober, and Mrs. Mary Bonner Slocum had been twice divorced.
+And with that amiable American frankness which stands in such marked
+contrast to the reticence of the British man of business, Mr. Legion
+proceeded to declare the amount of his own earnings, the number of his
+children, his fatherly hopes for Ulysses E. Legion, "a smart boy, sir,"
+who was doing well at the high school, together with some account of
+how he first met Mrs. Legion, and his intentions to take his entire
+family to Europe, at an early date.  He concluded by asking Arthur to
+lunch with him, and pressed on his notice a box of cigars (the cost of
+which he named), and a thick handbook, adorned with many portraits,
+which explained and justified the world-wide operations of Mr. Wilbur
+M. Legion.
+
+Mr. Legion took him to a kind of club which had its quarters in the top
+storey of a lofty building, from which a marvellous view of New York
+was obtained.  During the process of lunch, which was excellent, Mr.
+Legion drew Arthur's attention to a large number of persons, all of
+whom were described as among the "smartest" men in New York.  Mr.
+Legion appeared to know all about them, and Arthur found himself
+listening to a vast amount of recondite information concerning their
+upbringing, their early struggles, their matrimonial adventures or
+misadventures, and above all, the amount of dollars which each was
+supposed to possess.
+
+"That is the celebrated Stamford Parker, sir,"--indicating a spare,
+clean-shaved man.  "Sure now, you must have heard of him?  What?  Not
+heard of him?  The greatest magazine proprietor in America, sir.
+Raised in Vermont, worked on a farm, telegraph operator at Bangor,
+Maine, bust twice, made good at last, income half a million, his wife a
+lovely woman.  Ah! he sees me; I think he is coming over to speak to
+me."
+
+The great man strolled across the room, smoking his cigar, and Arthur
+was effusively introduced to him as a bright young Englishman, fresh
+from Oxford, and acquainted with all the leading English authors of the
+day.
+
+"Well, not quite all," said Arthur, with a smile.
+
+The great man received his demur without surprise.  When he had
+returned to his table, Legion said, with a shake of his patriarchal
+head, "Now, you shouldn't have said that, you know."
+
+"Said what?"
+
+"That you didn't know all your leading authors."
+
+"But I don't know them."
+
+"Well, you needn't have said so.  Didn't you see how Parker froze at
+once?  But you don't understand our American way, so you must be
+excused."
+
+"And what is the American way?"
+
+"Always go a little beyond the truth, but on no account below
+it--people expect it of you.  Leave them to make their discount."
+
+This principle, so unblushingly announced, served Mr. Legion for a
+text, on which he discanted for some minutes, at the end of which
+discourse Arthur began to acquire some insight into the meaning of the
+word "bunkum," and was in a position to apply the method of discount to
+Mr. Legion's own artless superlatives concerning his business methods
+and success in life.
+
+Mr. Legion was genial, affable, cordial, in a way which no Englishman
+could have attained toward an entire stranger, and Arthur was disposed
+to set a high value on these qualities.  Nevertheless, he could not but
+remark that the agent appeared anxious to evade any practical
+obligations imposed on him by Vickars's letter of introduction.  He
+drew a picture, almost comic in its gross inaccuracy, as Arthur
+afterwards discovered, of the extreme ease with which fortunes were
+made in America, and especially by the pen.  Magazine writers lived in
+sumptuous hotels, and successful novelists built for themselves
+elaborate palaces.  It was the age of young men.  A man who had not
+made a reputation at thirty was a "Has-been."  The old method of slowly
+acquired and slowly widening reputation was obsolete.  This was the day
+of literary booms.
+
+"And after the boom the boomerang!" interjected Arthur.
+
+"Very good--very good indeed.  I always thought you Britishers had no
+sense of humour.  It's a general belief in the States.  But that's
+quite a smart saying.  Sampson E. Dodge might have said it."
+
+Arthur ought to have blushed at this high praise, but instead, he
+stolidly explained his epigram, and observed further that no literary
+man who respected himself would connive in a boom.  "Hilary Vickars,
+for example."
+
+"And that's just where Vickars makes his mistake," said Legion.  "And
+what's the result?  He isn't known."
+
+"But he has done excellent work."
+
+"You make me tired," answered Legion.  "What's the good of doing
+excellent work if no one reads it?  The public doesn't know good work
+from bad.  Some one's got to tell them.  An author must be written up.
+And let me tell you another thing--the best writing in the world won't
+attract so much attention as half a dozen spicy paragraphs about the
+writer.  Do you know how _The Perambulator of a Thousand Wheels_ became
+so popular?"
+
+"Not having seen the book, it can't be supposed I do."
+
+"Well, I'll tell you.  I killed the author three times before his book
+came out."
+
+"You did what?" asked Arthur, with a shout of laughter.
+
+"Killed him, sir.  Once he perished on the Matterhorn in a snow-storm.
+The next time he was killed in a railway accident in Canada.  The last
+time he was lost in a wreck in the South Sea Islands.  By this time
+every one was talking of him.  I received no fewer than four hundred
+press cuttings the last time headed, 'A Famous Author Lost at Sea.'
+The name of Sampson E. Dodge became as famous as the President's.  Of
+course, when his book came out every one rushed for it."
+
+"And was he really in Switzerland, Canada, or the South Seas?"
+
+"Certainly not.  As safe as you are.  Writing his book at a farmhouse
+in Vermont."
+
+"Do you often practise this method, Mr. Legion?"
+
+"Well, it must be applied judiciously, of course.  Dodge writes
+adventure novels, so I give him adventures.  But for quieter authors,
+you must invent something else.  It used to be appendicitis, but that's
+nearly played out.  Total loss of memory through overwork used to take,
+but I found that the authors objected to it.  Double pneumonia in a
+lonely shack among the mountains, where he had gone to obtain local
+colour for his new novel, answers as well as anything else.  And that
+reminds me--didn't you say Vickars had been ill?"
+
+"Yes, he nearly died.  Typhoid fever from bad drains."
+
+"And didn't anybody write it up?"
+
+"Not that I ever heard of."
+
+"My! what a blunder!  And with a new book coming out, too.  I wish I
+could have had the handling of that 'story.'"
+
+"I don't think Vickars would have liked that."
+
+"No, I suppose not.  You Britishers seem to be afraid of publicity.  It
+almost amounts to a disease."
+
+"We are getting over it by degrees.  I assure you there are British
+authors who are quite reconciled to the immodesty of newspaper puffs.
+But not men like Vickars.  He is one of those who stand in proud
+silence, and is content to wait for his recognition."
+
+"Well, I guess he'll have to wait till there's skating in Hades.  The
+standing apart business is all very well if you've got the dollars and
+don't care; but if you haven't, it means starvation."  He rose from the
+table, and said, "Shall we go?"
+
+"Well, there's one thing I want to ask you first," said Arthur, "and as
+you haven't mentioned it, it seems I must.  I want to know if you can
+put me in the way of earning my living in New York?"
+
+"But, my dear sir, I thought you were just travelling through for
+pleasure."
+
+"I was afraid that you were under that misconception, and I apologise
+for not undeceiving you sooner.  The plain truth is, I have a very
+little money in my pocket, no particular experience of life, and my
+bread to earn."
+
+"Dear me!--dear me!  That sounds serious."
+
+"It may easily become so."
+
+The older man looked gravely sympathetic.  Suddenly, however, he
+brightened up, as though he had discovered the solution of the whole
+problem.
+
+"Well, young man, don't be alarmed," he cried.  "Remember that you've
+come to the land of the free and the home of the brave.  There are no
+feudal distinctions to keep you down here, as in your own unhappy
+country.  This great and glorious Republic allows free play to
+individual exertions.  Sir, America bids you rise, and all you have to
+do is to go out--and Rise!"
+
+"It would be a good deal more to the purpose if you could tell me how
+and in what way to begin this process of rising."
+
+"Ah! that's another matter.  I must think that over.  Come to me again
+in a day or two.  And remember my advice to you is, Go out and Rise!"
+
+He went out, too much amused with Legion's valediction to criticise the
+man very strictly.  It was not until he lay a-bed that night, thinking
+over the curious adventures of the day, that a strong conviction seized
+him that Mr. Wilbur Meredith Legion was a windbag.
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+ADVENTURES OF AN INCOMPETENT
+
+When a youth is thoroughly adrift in a strange city, with no better
+equipment than a large stock of unapplied aptitudes, he is likely to
+make many interesting discoveries concerning the real nature of life,
+the chief of which is that there is no way of living that has not a
+good deal more in it than meets the eye.  By what adroit use of
+opportunity is the least foothold secured in this crowded world, by
+what intrigues and stratagems, comparable only with the art which
+governs battlefields, and less than that art only in the range of its
+effects!  By what quickness of resource, adaptability to circumstance,
+infinite, weariless plotting and manoeuvering, were only so small a
+thing achieved as to sell a card of buttons with success!  Around this
+exiled youth jostled the rude, vigorous world of New York, a multitude
+of men and women each battling toward a certain goal, and not one of
+whom was not better equipped to win the race than himself.  Certain
+phrases used by this jostling crowd struck upon his ear continuously,
+such as "to make good," "to deliver the goods."  They implied that
+nothing was valued in New York save the sort of brute force that
+trampled its way into attention.
+
+"He has made good, sir," was Legion's verdict on that eminent writer,
+Mr. Sampson E. Dodge, and the phrase was uttered with an accent of
+reverence which was undoubtedly sincere.
+
+With Legion ideals and intentions counted for nothing; culture and
+scholarship were worthless commodities; the one thing he could
+appreciate was concrete success--"to make good."
+
+The same spirit met Arthur everywhere.  He found the newspapers pouring
+adulation at the feet of men against whom every kind of crime might be
+alleged; but they had "made good," and therefore were unassailable.  He
+remarked a cheerful disregard of morals, which was less disrespect than
+light-hearted ignorance; and the most curious thing of all was that the
+very men who talked as though honesty, faith, and trust did not exist
+were themselves men of amiable virtues.  He found himself quickly and
+quietly appraised; a keen eye ran over him, reading his deficiencies,
+and his doom was pronounced with a smile.  An insulting word would have
+been less difficult to bear than that disconcerting smile; but these
+arbiters of his destiny never failed in courtesy, nor in the sort of
+kindness which finds its outlet in easy generosity.  They would invite
+him to lunch, introduce him to clubs, allow him to believe that he had
+made real progress in their friendship and esteem; but when it came to
+the enunciation of some plan by which he might earn his bread, they
+became strangely silent.  They "gave him a good time," to use another
+cheerful American phrase--to do so appeared to be part of a definite
+system of international courtesy; but they were at no pains to conceal
+their sense that he was a virtual incompetent.
+
+Again and again, in the still hours of the morning, he recounted the
+rebuffs and misadventures of the previous day with wonder and
+misgiving.  The irony of his position was laughable, if it had not been
+so serious.  He had been told by the eloquent Legion to go out and
+rise; and certainly it appeared, by the light of conspicuous examples,
+that he was in a land where multitudes of men had risen from the
+lowliest to the loftiest positions with a singular celerity.  Yet no
+one believed him capable of rising, nor indeed did he himself venture
+to assert it with any vigour of conviction.  And in such moments there
+came to him the recollection of his father.  For the first time he
+realised with some approach to adequacy the vital elements in his
+father's character.  He told himself that had his father been flung
+suddenly into the streaming tides of New York, he would not have lived
+through twenty-four hours without getting his feet securely planted on
+the rung of some ladder that led to eminence.  And then, with a sudden
+heat of resolution, he would tell himself that he was his father's son,
+and he would rise and go forth once more to hammer on the barred gates
+of chance.
+
+"To-day I will not fail," he would cry.
+
+And when the day closed, recording nothing but defeat, he would still
+cry, "To-morrow I must succeed," and endeavour to believe it.
+
+The real trouble was that he was assaulting the stern citadel of life
+with weapons not only imperfect, but nearly useless.  He had been
+taught many things, but not the one thing needful; and he now perceived
+with humiliation that the humblest human creature who could work a
+typewriter, keep accounts, hew a stone, or shape a beam, was more
+efficient than he to wrest a living from the world.  This discovery was
+the first real lesson he had ever learned from life.  And it said much
+for his character, that he accepted it without resentment, without the
+bitterness and sulkiness of injured pride.
+
+A fortnight after his first interview with Legion, he returned to the
+office of the literary agent, resolved to act upon his discovery.
+
+The great man received him with friendliness, for it was one of his
+principles never to offend any one who might prove a valuable client at
+some future date.
+
+"Ah! so you've come back," he began.  "You've been studying our
+remarkable city, eh?  And you've met some of our most remarkable men,
+no doubt?"
+
+"I've certainly met some remarkable men."
+
+"Yes, sir.  New York has more remarkable men to the acre than any other
+city in the world.  Genius has made its abode in Manhattan.  'Westward
+the course of Empire'--you know the rest.  Paris and London must go
+down--they are old.  New York will rule the world.  Don't you think so?"
+
+"I am afraid I have not thought upon the subject at all."
+
+"No?  Well, no doubt you've been absorbing the atmosphere of our
+wonderful city.  That's a very wise step, for a novelist.  Sampson E.
+Dodge always insisted on atmosphere.  Have you written anything yet,
+any little thing that I can place for you?"
+
+"I have written nothing, and I think I ought to tell you that I am not
+a novelist."
+
+"Not a novelist!  But, my dear sir, why then did your friend Vickars
+send you to me?"
+
+"I suppose he did it out of consideration for me, Mr. Legion.  Will you
+allow me to say that it is time we understood one another.  I am not a
+novelist, not even a writer in your sense of the term.  I am a young
+man with an excellent education, a good university degree, and a wide
+assortment of unmarketable knowledge.  I believe that exhausts the
+statement of my assets, unless I add good health and a strong desire to
+live as honestly as I can.  Upon the debit side of the account I must
+ask you to enter a total ignorance of business, which has been so
+carefully cultivated that it approaches the dignity of a fine art.  I
+may further add that toward what is generally understood by business I
+entertain an invincible repugnance."
+
+"Dear me!" interrupted Legion, "that is a most extraordinary statement."
+
+"It has, at least, the merit of truth."
+
+"And are there many young men like yourself in the Old Country, sir?"
+
+"They are an innumerable army, which is constantly recruited by the
+credulous pride of parents who prefer accomplishments to efficiency.
+They call the process making their sons gentlemen."
+
+"And what becomes of them?"
+
+"Those who have money spend a vacuous existence in the pursuit of
+strenuous idleness; those who have no money and some remains of
+self-respect occasionally emigrate, as I have done.  And that brings me
+to my point, Mr. Legion.  I have been long enough in your remarkable
+city to understand that there is a welcome for the man who can do
+things, and for no one else.  I don't flatter myself that I can do
+anything of much account, but I am willing to work, and I believe I am
+willing to learn.  To be very plain, I need employment, and I ask you
+to give it me."
+
+"Well, I like your honesty," said Legion.  "But I think better of you
+than you do of yourself.  A man of your splendid education must be able
+to write.  Now, I'll tell you what--you go away and write me a
+descriptive sketch of your friend Vickars, and if it's the right kind
+of stuff I'll use it in the papers."
+
+This seemed a feasible project at least.  He went away and wrote the
+essay upon Vickars, and because he wrote in a spirit of genuine love
+and admiration, he wrote well.
+
+On the following Sunday Legion invited him to his house in New Jersey,
+where he had the opportunity of making the acquaintance of the Legion
+family.  His most immediate impression was of a Legion shorn of his
+beams, so to speak: no longer the arbiter of fame for struggling
+authors, but a singularly humble individual, whose authority in his own
+household was dubious and disputed.  The real ruler of the household
+appeared to be that exceedingly smart boy, Ulysses E. Legion, whose
+self-confidence would have done credit to an aged diplomat whose voice
+had for half a century swayed the councils of kings and statesmen.  He
+talked incessantly, making no scruple to express his views on a great
+variety of subjects, in such a way as to indicate that his father was
+mistaken in most of his opinions.  At the dinner-table this young
+gentleman advised his father how to carve the joint, and directed him
+with unblushing precision toward the special tit-bits which he himself
+preferred.  To see the great literary agent humbly obeying these
+directions, or listening with extreme docility to the opinions of this
+young patriarch of twelve, was a striking revelation of the amiability
+of the American parent.  Of the qualities revealed in the child perhaps
+the less said the better.  Yet it was to this young gentleman that
+Arthur owed a considerable advance in the esteem of Mr. Legion.  It is
+one of the unpleasing characteristics of the American house to dispense
+with doors between the various living-rooms, and thus many things may
+be overheard that are not meant for general circulation.  The parlour
+in Mr. Legion's house being divided from the dining-room by nothing
+more substantial than a flimsy curtain, Arthur could not avoid hearing
+a conversation which took place between the father and son after dinner.
+
+"Say pop," said the boy, "is he a Britisher?"
+
+"Why, yes, he comes from London."
+
+"We always licked the Britishers, didn't we?"
+
+To which the father replied with the popular mendacity which is taught
+in all American histories, "Of course, Americans have never been
+defeated."
+
+"Well, I thought he was American.  He looks like an American, any way."
+
+This unsolicited testimonial to his personal appearance evidently
+impressed Mr. Legion, for when he returned to the dining-room there was
+a marked increase of geniality in his manner.
+
+"And now let me hear what you've written about your friend," he said.
+
+Arthur produced his manuscript, and began to read.  It was an admirable
+paper, an uncoloured and just statement of his friend's aim and method,
+which a discerning critic would have readily recognised as excellent
+writing.  It seemed, however, to produce a totally different impression
+on Mr. Legion.  Looking up, Arthur saw the geniality fading from his
+face, and something like consternation displacing it.  The moment he
+finished the reading, Legion spoke.
+
+"My dear sir," he began, "it won't do--it won't do at all.  It might
+suit your dull old English papers, but for the bright, smart,
+up-to-date American periodical, it won't do at all."
+
+"What's wrong with it?" said Arthur, with a blush.
+
+"Why, the trouble is, it's all wrong.  Our readers don't want to know
+about the man's books, they want to know something about _him_.
+Couldn't you tell us how he looks, and what coloured ties he wears, and
+what he eats and drinks and how much he earns, and something about that
+interesting daughter of his?  That's what our readers like,
+sir--bright, personal, spicy, snappy details.  And look here, you
+haven't said a word about his having had a fever through bad drains.
+You might have worked that up, any way--how he lived among the poor on
+purpose to study their lives, and got the fever doing it, and that sort
+of stunt.  You ought to have made him romantic and picturesque, and
+worked his lovely daughter in, and then people would have begun to ask
+about his books."
+
+"I'm sorry, but that's not the English way of writing."
+
+"English--nothing!  You're in America now, and you must write the
+American way.  I did hope for something better.  You can write--I won't
+deny that--and you look smart enough to write any way you darn please.
+My boy Ulysses saw that at once.  He said to me, 'Pop, he looks like an
+American.'  And so you do, for my boy Ulysses is rarely mistaken, and
+yet you haven't got the first idea how to write the American way.  What
+are those old colleges of yours for, any way, if they can't teach you
+to write livelier stuff that that?"
+
+It was impossible to be angry with the man, for it was clear that his
+consternation was genuine and unaffected.  And it was equally clear to
+Arthur that he meant well by him.  To have argued literary ethics with
+Mr. Legion would have been the vainest of pursuits.  This became
+evident a moment later, when the literary agent, following the
+suggestion opened up by the inability of the British colleges to impart
+the art of smart writing, gave some reminiscences of his own career in
+that spirit of innocent boastfulness which is common among men who have
+miraculously achieved positions for which nature never intended them.
+
+"What I can't understand," he remarked, "is why it is you young fellows
+who have all the chances don't know how to use them properly.  Now,
+look at me.  I never had what may be rightly called a chance at all.
+I've worked for my bread since I was ten years old.  I've been all
+sorts of things, clerk in a store, drummer on the roads, rail-roading,
+land-speculating, newspaper reporting, more things than I could count
+on my ten fingers.  I never had time to ask what I wanted to do; I had
+to do what came to me, and do it the way those that paid me wanted it
+done.  There was never anything superior about me, and I knew it.  And
+that's why I've got on.  That's why all the writers come to me to-day.
+They know very well I can't write worth a red cent, not compared with
+them, that is.  But I've lived among the people all my life, and I know
+what they want.  And if you'll take a word of advice from me, you'll
+just set yourself to find out what people like, and give it 'em hot and
+strong, and then you'll succeed fast enough."
+
+"It is excellent advice--if one could take it."
+
+"And what's to prevent you?" he cried.  "You've got good looks, you've
+got education, you've got ability.  I'll tell you what I'll do.  You
+come to my office for a couple of weeks, and be ready to do what I tell
+you.  I'll pay you what I think just, and if you don't like it, you're
+under no obligation to remain."
+
+"I'll come with pleasure," Arthur replied; "and whether I please you or
+not, I shall always be grateful to you for your kindness."
+
+"Oh! that's nothing.  I was a young cub myself once, and I shouldn't
+have been here now if some one hadn't licked me into shape."
+
+It was not exactly a pleasant way of putting things, but Arthur had
+sense enough to perceive that it was uttered in a spirit of rough
+kindness.  He believed himself quite incapable of moulding his mind to
+Mr. Legion's pattern, and it was with a sense of ingratitude that he
+found himself secretly despising that pattern.  But a fortnight of New
+York had taught him this much, that beggars cannot be choosers, and,
+moreover, Mr. Legion's door was the only door that stood open to him.
+He could at least try to do what was asked of him, and in the secret of
+his heart pride whispered that he might even succeed in elevating Mr.
+Legion's sense of literary merit, and impart to it a dignity which it
+conspicuously lacked.
+
+He went to the office on the following morning.  To his surprise he
+found himself introduced to a typewriting lady not at all as an
+unfortunate person who had failed to master the American method of
+writing, but as "one of our brightest and smartest young men, who is
+destined to become one of the star writers of our time"; from which it
+appeared that Mr. Legion had already forgotten his demerits, or had
+yielded to that spirit of innocent effusiveness which was
+characteristic of his usual modes of speech.  The typewriting lady had
+heard such phrases too often to attach much importance to them, and
+received them with a wearied smile.  She readjusted the combs in her
+hair, nodded to him coldly, and went on with her work unmoved by the
+presence of this bright particular star of Mr. Legion's firmament.
+Later on, when Mr. Legion had left the office, this inaccessible lady
+thawed a little, and informed him with a pretty grimace that she
+guessed that a good many stars rose and set every month in Broadway.
+
+"You must take no notice of Mr. Legion's superlatives," he replied.
+
+"I don't."
+
+"I am here only as a learner, a kind of apprentice."
+
+"Then I guess you'll get some surprises."
+
+Surprises he certainly did get in plenty in the course of that eventful
+fortnight.  He found, for example, that Mr. Sampson E. Dodge, in common
+with most of Mr. Legion's authors, always wrote the preliminary press
+announcements of his novels himself, in which he declared his profound
+conviction that the present novel was the best he had ever written,
+ever could write, ever would write, being dramatic in a high degree,
+racy of the soil, full of vigorous situations, and worthy of the
+highest traditions of American fictional art.  As if this were not
+enough, Mr. Dodge's humble statements of his own powers were further
+embroidered with resonant superlatives by the skilled hand of Legion
+himself, who lavished on him praise that would have sounded excessive
+had it been applied to Walter Scott or Victor Hugo.  The whole thing
+was so humorous in its gross exaggeration that one day, in a spirit of
+mockery, Arthur drew up a description of the works of Dodge in which he
+outdid his model, ending with the statement that the day would come
+when America would be remembered in history chiefly as the birthplace
+of the famous author of _The Perambulator of a Thousand Wheels_.  This
+burlesque, left carelessly upon his desk, fell into the hands of
+Legion, who, to his intense surprise, congratulated him upon it.
+
+"That's what we want," he cried joyously.  "I always said you could
+write, but I really didn't think you'd get hold of the American method
+so soon."
+
+"But it's pure nonsense--in fact, a burlesque," said Arthur.
+
+"A what?"
+
+"A burlesque, a skit, a satire, if you will."
+
+"You may call it what you like, but it's what I want, and what the
+public wants, and I'm going to print it."
+
+"I hope you'll do nothing of the kind.  You must see it is nonsense,
+and no one will believe it."
+
+"The American public will believe anything," Legion retorted with grave
+conviction.  "They like being fooled.  It is what the papers exist for.
+And there's no sort of fooling pleases them so much as patriotic
+fooling.  That reference of yours now to America being remembered as
+the birthplace of Dodge--why, it's a stroke of genius, sir.  It may not
+be strictly true, of course; but it is impressive, and it makes folk
+feel proud of their native authors, and it sells the books, and that's
+what we want, isn't it?"
+
+Remonstrance was so clearly useless that Arthur said no more, and in
+due time read with blushes his unlucky paragraph in the advertising
+columns of a New York paper, and found that it had been disseminated by
+the hand of Legion through a hundred inferior papers, where it was duly
+quoted as the valuable opinion of a celebrated English critic.
+
+This was but one instance among many of the remarkable methods of Mr.
+Wilbur M. Legion.  He pursued mendacity with an ardour which few
+persons have manifested in the quest of truth.  He dwelt in an
+atmosphere of exaggeration so dense that the real values of things were
+totally obscured.  Words were to him the golden balls of a juggler; he
+tossed them hither and thither with a sole eye to rapid effect and
+novel combination.  Upon the question of Dodge he was fantastically
+sincere; he was really in love with the man and his writings; but the
+language which he used of Dodge was substantially the same language
+with which he decorated all his authors.  It was his boast that he
+would make the worst book sell by daring methods of advertisement.  He
+once expressed to Arthur with entire gravity the opinion that the true
+cause for the decay of religion was that the Bible had not been
+sufficiently advertised; it has been left to preachers instead of being
+handed over to the press agents.  Let him have the handling of it for a
+month, and he would show them!  For it must be noted that Mr. Legion
+was in his way a respecter of religion, a zealous opponent of
+heterodoxies, a man of excellent Sunday proprieties, who had won the
+gratitude of the sect to which he belonged by presenting an organ to
+his church.  If he had been told that his chief achievement in life was
+to debase the literary currency, he would have been genuinely
+astonished, for so singular a thing is the mind of man that he actually
+believed that he had advanced its interests.
+
+Things came to a crisis at last, and, as it happened, over the very
+article which Arthur had written on Vickars.  This article had remained
+in Legion's hands, and what was Arthur's astonishment when he found it
+duly head-lined in a sensational journal, and accompanied by a portrait
+which was certainly not that of Vickars.  Here and there he could
+distinguish some remnants of his own handiwork, but the whole was
+overlaid by the most extraordinary flamboyant ornament, and abounded in
+passages which he recognised as pure Legionese.  The things which he
+had said about Vickars in unsuspicious confidence were all remembered,
+but were twisted with such amazing ingenuity into novel forms that he
+blushed to recognise them.  Vickars was described as living in a
+garret, existing upon the most exiguous of earnings, finding his
+comrades among all kinds of social outcasts, a hero, a saint, and a
+socialist, assisted in his sacrifice by a lovely daughter, whose
+personal charms were touched in with the bold hand of a police-court
+journalist.  Arthur's heart flamed as he read the article.  He could
+imagine what Vickars would think of it; what he would think of the
+pathetic fiction that he had nearly died of a fever caught in nursing a
+diseased outcast (this was the Legionese improvement on the
+drain-story), and with what feelings he would regard the exploitation
+of Elizabeth.  It seemed to him that the world must ring with the
+infamous business; that Vickars would become the laughing-stock of
+London; and that since the article could be attributed to no one but
+himself, he would henceforth stand pilloried as a false friend, a liar,
+and a fool.
+
+The moment Legion appeared in the office, he flung the article upon his
+desk, and cried in a voice shaken with anger, "Did you write that?"
+
+"Why, what's the matter?" he replied, slowly adjusting his spectacles.
+"Oh!  I see--the Vickars article.  I meant to tell you about that.
+What you wrote was too good to waste, so I worked over it a bit, and
+I've got quite a satisfactory price for it.  I wouldn't wonder if it
+created quite a demand for Vickars' books, and we ought to communicate
+with him at once about his new book."
+
+He was going on, in the innocence of his heart, to explain how a
+Vickars boom might be worked, when Arthur interrupted him with a
+furious gesture.
+
+"What I wrote was truth, and what you have written is lies.  Why, even
+the portrait you have used isn't Vickars!"
+
+"And who cares about that?  No one knows any better.  It's a good
+enough portrait, any way."
+
+"I can't argue about it, Mr. Legion.  You have done me incalculable
+harm.  You have ruined me with Vickars.  As for his ever allowing you
+to handle his books, let me tell you he wouldn't touch a dirty dog like
+you with a ten-foot pole."
+
+"What's that?" cried Legion, his face pale with astonishment and
+indignation.  "What was that you said?"
+
+"I say you are a scoundrel, Mr. Legion--a mercenary, lying scoundrel!"
+
+"Oh! come now, you're excited.  I can make allowances--you don't know
+what you're saying."
+
+"I know quite well what I'm saying, and I will repeat it, if you like:
+you're a scoundrel!"
+
+Even Legion's good temper was not proof against this violence.
+
+"Very good," he said.  "I won't tell you what you are.  But I'll tell
+you what's going to happen to you.  You are going to starve in the
+streets of New York, my young friend.  You're too darned superior for
+this country of commonsense business methods.  You're the sort that
+comes to sleeping on the benches in Union Square, and fighting for a
+place in the bread-line."
+
+"Very possibly," said Arthur.  "I'm sure I don't know what sort I am,
+but I am sure of this, that I am not the sort you want in this office,
+and I beg to say good-morning."
+
+He put on his hat and coat, and rushed for the door.  Perhaps it was
+because Legion saw how white and drawn his face was, and how wild his
+eyes, that his heart relented towards him.
+
+"Look here," he said, "hadn't you better think it over?  I didn't mean
+what I said about starving in the streets.  I hadn't ought to have said
+that.  Besides, you know, there's some money owing to you.  Don't go
+without that."
+
+But the mention of money, instead of staying his flight, lent it new
+impulse.  He was besmirched enough already without taking the wages of
+his defilement.  He rushed out of the room, and the banging door cut
+short Mr. Legion's eirenicon.
+
+
+
+
+XIV
+
+HE FINDS A FRIEND
+
+Arthur's first act on regaining his hotel was to terminate his
+residence therein.  He ought to have done this long ago, for these
+thronged corridors, resounding night and day with the chink of
+innumerable dollars, was no place for one so poor as he.  He had stayed
+there rather from natural heedlessness and inexperience than from
+choice; partly also in the hope that the invaluable Bundy would arrive;
+but now his fears were thoroughly aroused.  Legion's phrase about the
+benches in Union Park and the breadline stuck in his mind.  He had
+heard of such tragedies; he remembered a story which Vickars had told
+him of one of the most brilliant poets of the day who, in the course of
+his early struggles, had been reduced to holding horses at public-house
+doors for ha'pence in the Strand.  It had also been the habit of his
+father, when he wished to inculcate habits of economy and perseverance
+on his childish mind, to do so by various realistic versions of the
+prodigal son, illustrated from the histories of certain men he had
+known who had not possessed the sense "to know which side their bread
+was buttered."  It seemed that he was well upon the way to become such
+a prodigal.  He was bound for the bread-line.  Well, if this were the
+appointed night when he was to take farewell of respectability, the
+obsequies should be fitly celebrated.  If to-morrow he must starve,
+to-night, at least, he would eat; he had lost so much that no further
+loss could make him poor; and from the extreme of fear his mind ran to
+the extreme of recklessness.  From the clerk with the tooth-pick he
+learned the address of a small hotel near the docks, to which he
+ordered his trunks to be forwarded; having done which, and distributed
+various tips with a gentlemanly profusion, he stepped out into the
+gathering night of New York.
+
+The city hummed and sang like some monstrous wheel, driven by an unseen
+dynamo.  It presented to the eye a riot of life and light; its lofty
+buildings flared like torches, its shops glowed like jewels, its
+streets were lanes of fire; and into the upper air, still coloured with
+the hues of sunset, there rose an immense reverberation, composed of
+human cries and shouts, wheels pounding on granite roads, wheels
+groaning on roads of steel, all resolved into a thunderous bass note,
+the raucous music of the human multitude.  There are moods in which
+such a spectacle is exhilarating, moods in which it is dreadful; but
+there is another and a rarer mood, when it appears majestic.  As Arthur
+surveyed the scene, it was this aspect of majesty that appealed to him.
+It overwhelmed his mind with an impression more commonly attributed to
+astronomy--viz., the entire insignificance of the individual in
+relation to physical magnitudes.  His own particular troubles suddenly
+assumed dwarfed proportions; his little life appeared a mere bubble
+floating for an instant on the crest of disappearing waves; the city
+itself a streaming star-river, flowing out of dark eternities, peopled
+for an instant by a tribe of eager ants.  To what avail the strife, the
+passion, the disorder of these tiny lives?  Yet a little while, a few
+days it might be, a few years at most, and he would be lost to sight as
+though he had never been.  But the wheel would spin on, with a million
+new Ixions bound upon its flaming spokes; the magnificent and monstrous
+city would go on, piling pyramid on pyramid above the bones of its
+exhausted slaves, and with not one light the less because he did not
+see it, not one softened moment in its raucous song because his ear was
+filled with the clods of the valley.
+
+In that moment he understood why men commit suicide, why it may appear
+the soberest act of reason and of justice to fling away a life which
+has lost its value in losing its egoism.  But over that abyss his
+thought hovered but an instant, and the horror of that instant produced
+a swift reaction.  The dangerous moment passed, and left him with a new
+appetite for life.  He felt the swift uprisal of faculties of enjoyment
+in himself such as the convalescent feels when the blood flows nimbly
+after sickness; and on a sudden he found himself convulsed with
+laughter.  The absurdity of his position moved him like a caricature.
+He had blundered badly, but of what consequence was it in the vast sum
+of things?  All things continued as they were, the stars still were
+steadfast in their courses, and from that upper silence fell a voice
+that made him, and all human perturbations, a vain thing that endured
+but for a moment.  The spirit of derision was upon him, and, still
+laughing, he plunged into the moving crowd.
+
+Presently he found himself in Sixth Avenue, and his eye recognised the
+sign of a small Italian restaurant of which he had heard an excellent
+report.  The front of the house was mean and narrow; the door opened on
+a sanded vestibule, which, in turn, led to a long and crowded room.  At
+its upper end was a daïs, on which an excellent orchestra was seated.
+As he entered the room, a man with a sweet and powerful tenor voice
+sang an Italian comic song, the chorus of which was taken up by the
+diners, who beat time with glasses and knives upon the tables.  An
+extraordinary vivacity characterised this curiously mixed assembly;
+they appeared to have no cares in life, or, if they had, they were
+intent upon forgetting them.  All types were present, from the city
+clergyman a little ill at ease in his environment to women of exotic
+beauty, whose sidelong glances left little doubt of their profession.
+Yet there was no element of disorder, no impression of vulgarity; there
+was freedom but no licence, the mingling of human creatures in a
+catholic amity; each content for the time to forget distinctions that
+elsewhere might be deemed important, each happy in a transient release
+from the servitudes of the long day, and perhaps from the memories of
+misfortune.
+
+Arthur was fortunate in finding a single seat vacant at a narrow table
+next the wall.  Here he took his place, and had already proceeded
+halfway with his meal before he noticed a man who sat on the other side
+of the table.  He was a cheerful little fellow, with a good face,
+humorous eyes, and mobile mouth, who was evidently itching for
+conversation.  Some trifling courtesy of the table brought them
+acquainted, and in a few moments they were deep in talk.  It seemed
+that he was an Englishman, a wandering artist, a man with a wide and
+cheerful acquaintance with vicissitude, who gave his name as Horner.
+He had been born and bred in London, in an atmosphere of lower
+middle-class insularity and ignorance, from which he had escaped into a
+wider world by the means of art-classes and night-schools.  He had thus
+reached the lower slopes of Parnassus, only to discover that there his
+progress ended; he had neither the education nor the means to carry him
+farther; and so he had slowly declined from the production of original
+work into a kind of Ishmael hanging on the borders of the art-world, an
+expert restorer of old paintings, and at times an amateur dealer.  It
+is a curious fact that the Englishman, who at home is the most reticent
+of all human animals, often becomes the most communicative when he
+meets men of his own nation abroad.  There the freemasonry of race
+tells, loneliness acts as a solvent of reserve, and the possession of
+common memories invites immediate intimacy.  To hear the familiar
+Cockney dialect again, with its clipped vowels and reckless
+distribution of the aspirate, to remark phrases heard nowhere save upon
+the London streets, is to be transported instantly, as on a magic
+carpet, to the atmosphere of home, to see again the glitter of the
+Strand, the midnight throngs in Piccadilly Circus, the dear and dingy
+purlieus of Soho.  The very words have an esoteric significance; they
+cannot be heard or uttered save with a thrilling heart; and among
+banished Englishmen they are the symbols of an irrecoverable joy, and
+constitute an instant bond of brotherhood.
+
+Arthur listened with delight to Horner's narrative of his adventures.
+It appeared that he knew most of the millionaires who collected
+pictures, and nearly all the dealers from whom they bought them.  In
+describing these people he had the rare art of the vitalising touch.
+The millionaires moved before the eye in all their eager ignorance, the
+dealers in all their duplicity and craft.  Manufactories of old masters
+existed for the sole purpose of meeting the demand of American
+millionaires.  It was a known fact that sixteen thousand Corots had
+passed the New York Customs House in the last few years, whereas every
+one knew that Corot could not have painted more than two thousand
+pictures in a long life of the most unremitting toil.
+
+"Why, I could paint better Corots myself than most of those that hang
+in American galleries," he remarked.
+
+"Perhaps you've done so," laughed Arthur.
+
+"I won't say I hav'n't," he replied with cheerful impudence.  "But I've
+done with that sort of thing now.  And I'll say one thing for myself, I
+never yet sold a picture that I knew was a fake.  But, O Lor', these
+people are such children!  They think they know everything, and on art
+they are as ignorant as dirt.  They carry round little books of
+nothingness by Professor This and Professor That, and go into raptures
+over all sorts of rubbish because they're told to.  And they won't be
+told better, that's the trouble.  But I mean to tell them some day.
+Only, you see, I can't write the way it ought to be written.  I
+suppose, now, you're not by any chance a writer, are you?"
+
+"I suppose I'm a sort of writer.  At all events, the last thing I did
+was to write something of which I am heartily ashamed."
+
+"And did they sack you?"
+
+"They did.  Or, to be more precise, I sacked myself."
+
+"Well, why shouldn't you and I join forces?  Of course I wouldn't think
+of saying this to any one but an Englishman.  I can give you lots of
+stuff, and you can write it up, you know.  We might make a book, don't
+you think?"
+
+"But I know nothing about art except in an amateur way."
+
+"And what's that matter, I'd like to know?  I'll be bound you know lots
+more than the folk that do the writing here.  And as for the
+collections--oh my, you should see them!  Constables done in Soho, and
+Raphaels painted in Paris; curtains hung over them, if you please, as
+if they were too precious to see the light; and when you mildly remark,
+'But that picture's in Munich or Dresden or Buckingham Palace,' they
+reply indignantly, 'Oh no! that's the copy--this the original.  I have
+a certificate of genuineness.'  And then they produce a written
+pedigree, with the names of Prince This or Prince That, through whose
+hands their precious canvas has passed, when any one with half an eye
+can see that the paint is 'ardly dry upon it."
+
+"Is it as bad as that?"
+
+"Much worse, if I told you all."
+
+And thereupon followed story after story, full of rapid etchings of the
+dupes and the dealers; with amazing biographies of adroit Jews born in
+garrets who now owned palaces and sported titles; and strange old men
+in London who hid behind shuttered windows genuine and priceless
+pictures, and credulous millionaires in New York, who bought what might
+by courtesy be called pictures by the yard, labelling them with august
+names, and taking care that the papers duly reported the immense sums
+they paid for them.  It was all highly amusing, a backstairs view of
+life, so to speak, which somehow bore the stamp of the authentic.  The
+time sped; the music and the company had become less restrained; and
+the hovering waiter reminded them by his black looks that they had sat
+too long.
+
+"Where are you staying?" said Homer, as they rose to go.
+
+Arthur mentioned the hotel to which he had sent his trunks.
+
+"Oh my!" said Horner, "but, you know, that won't do.  It isn't a safe
+district, that.  What took you there?"
+
+"Poverty, to be frank," said Arthur.  "I find it necessary to choose
+the cheapest lodging I can find."
+
+"But it won't do," said the little man gravely.  He meditated for a
+moment, as if not quite sure of how to express what he wished to say.
+"Englishmen should stand together, shouldn't they?" he remarked at
+last.  "Now look here, suppose you come to my rooms.  You'll be very
+welcome.  I can give you a shake-down of some sort, and to-morrow we'll
+talk over that book.  I really shall be very much gratified if you'll
+come."
+
+The offer was made with such unaffected kindness that Arthur's heart
+warmed toward the little man.  He had already received a hard lesson in
+life that day, and it had left his heart sore and bitter.  Here was
+another kind of lesson.  A man whom the world had not used generously
+or perhaps justly, a total stranger, who had seen enough of the seamy
+side of life to make him reasonably suspicious or even cynical, was
+ready to share what he had with him on the mere ground of common
+nationality.  "Englishmen should stand together," he had said, and was
+instantly prepared to act upon that simple ethic, although for all he
+knew the man to whom he offered hospitality might be a rascal or a
+thief.  Such a lesson at such a moment was calculated to restore faith
+in human nature, faith in that radical goodness of the human heart
+which is the base of all decent living.
+
+"Mr. Horner," he said, "I accept your offer thankfully.  You don't know
+how much you've done for me by making it.  I shall never forget it."
+
+"Oh! that's all right," said the little man, with a deprecating
+gesture.  "I've only done what I'd like some one to do for me."  And he
+did not seem to be aware that the words uttered so carelessly, as if
+they expressed nothing more than the most ordinary commonplace, really
+contained the sum of all religion.
+
+Arthur went home with his new friend, and found that his rooms
+consisted of a littered studio in one of the older houses of New York.
+
+"When I'm doing pretty well, I always stay in a hotel," said Horner,
+"but at a pinch one can sleep here."
+
+"Why apologise?" said Arthur.  "Why, man, you have something here that
+the best hotel in New York can't give you.  You've an open fireplace.
+It's like coming home again to see that."
+
+"Yes," said Horner, with a whimsical air of wisdom, "the decay of
+marriage and the family in America dates from the hot-air register and
+the steam-heating business.  People who never sit round an open fire
+never get a chance of knowing one another.  I never had much of a home
+myself.  I had to start out working pretty early; but there's one thing
+I never forget, and that's the open fire round which we kids sat on
+winter nights while mother told us stories.  I used to see things in
+that fire--castles, and sunsets, and burning ships, like most kids do.
+But I wanted to paint 'em, and if it hadn't been for those times in the
+firelight I'd never have been an artist.  But O Lor', look at these
+Americans!--the women standing over hot-air registers with their
+clothes blown out like balloons when they want to get warm, and the men
+getting as close as they can to a fizzling coil of steam-pipes.  I
+don't call that being civilised, do you?  It's a beastly way of living,
+I call it."
+
+While he was thus delivering his views on the iniquity of steam
+heating, the little man had lit a fire of wood, which instantly blazed
+up, and filled the room with ruddy light.  Having done this, he
+attacked with great vigour what appeared to be a wardrobe, tugging at
+it with might and main, until the whole front suddenly collapsed,
+revealing a concealed bed.  From behind a curtain in a corner of the
+room he wheeled a small chair-bedstead, and at the same time produced a
+plate of fruit and a tin of tobacco.
+
+"Now we can be comfortable," he remarked.  "It's not exactly in the
+Waldorf Astoria style, but I guess it'll do.  And now let us talk."
+
+If Horner had talked well over dinner in the restaurant, he talked
+super-excellently well now in this friendly firelight.  Arthur had
+little to do but listen, which he did for the most part with rising
+admiration.  He remarked an unaffected innocence of spirit in the man
+which was entirely unsubdued by his hard experience of life; he talked
+like a good-natured, enthusiastic boy who had by some occult means
+possessed himself of the experience of a world-worn man; he entertained
+ideals of an almost pathetic impractibility; he had even written
+poetry, and at that moment, it appeared, designed a prose work on art
+which should be a magnificent compendium of the wisdom of the ages.  Of
+these great designs he spoke at one moment with the ardent vanity of
+the amateur; the next, the man of the world popped up, to pour upon
+them humorous depreciation.  The same spirit of contradiction coloured
+all his judgments.  England he should have detested, for it had cast
+him out; but let a word of justest criticism be uttered of its customs
+or its manners, and he was in arms at once.  America had befriended
+him, and yet he was more than candid in his apprehension of her faults,
+and had no word of praise for her institutions.  In his judgments of
+men it was the same.  He had seen enough of the baser side of life to
+fill him with the venom of Diogenes, and yet he spoke with kindliness
+even of those who had defrauded him.  His mind moved in giddy flight
+among these crags of contradiction; he did not aim at consistency, nor
+did he value it; yet out of the turmoil of his thoughts there shone
+unmistakably a generous nature, a kindly disposition, a temperament of
+light-hearted courage, which made a jest of disadvantage and calamity.
+Courage was perhaps his most essential quality, and particularly that
+rare courage which is not depressed by past error; so that listening to
+him, Arthur thought that many a preacher he had heard had a much less
+vital message to declare than this irresponsible but philosophic
+Bohemian.
+
+Arthur slept soundly that night, and awoke in a glow of spirits he had
+not known for many days.  Horner's talk had given a tonic to his mind
+which he badly needed, and he awoke with many clear and definite
+resolutions to repay his debt in the best way he could.  But here
+Destiny took a hand in the game, for no sooner was breakfast over than
+a telegram was handed in to his host which changed the whole situation.
+
+"My!" he said, "here's a go!  I'm wanted at once in Baltimore, and I
+suppose I'd best go.  And just now too, when you and I were going to
+work together."
+
+"Must you really go?"
+
+"I fear I must.  It's important.  But look here, you know that need
+make no difference to you.  You can stop here just as long as you like.
+It'll save you a hotel, anyhow."
+
+"But----" began Arthur.
+
+"No buts," said the little man, with dignity.  "I shall be offended if
+you think of saying No.  I know the room isn't all that I could wish to
+offer to a friend, but if you'll put up with it, it's yours as long as
+you like.  And see here, I'll leave you my papers to run over while I'm
+gone.  It'll be a fine thing for me to have you here, and I count it
+luck; so we'll take that as settled."
+
+And so, waving aside all remonstrance, the little artist packed his
+valise, and half an hour later, with a final grip of the hand,
+disappeared down the narrow staircase, leaving Arthur monarch of all he
+surveyed.
+
+And then began that period in the experience of our hero which, like
+the more obscure passages of history, may be passed over in silence,
+although they contain more of tragedy than many famous battlefields.
+Emptied of the vivacious presence of Horner, the room seemed singularly
+desolate, and life at once took a grayer aspect.  Perhaps it was helped
+by the character of the day.  The exquisite sky, which had shone
+brilliant as a jewel for so many weeks, was now filled with heavy
+clouds; a bitter wind blew, snow had begun to fall, and the city
+crouched like some frightened animal, waiting for the stroke of the
+impending blizzard.  Arthur's first act was to light the fire, and go
+over the mass of papers which Horner had confided to him.  In the
+innocence of his spirit Horner had informed him that it was no
+difficulty for him to write--the really difficult thing was to stop
+writing; and the fruits of this facility now lay before Arthur in an
+enormous pile of manuscript.  It consisted of pencil jottings on a vast
+variety of themes, notes on pictures (often pungently sagacious),
+anecdotes of humorous frauds perpetrated on the credulous, the
+beginnings of an autobiography as frank as Benvenuto Cellini's,
+interspersed with fragments of poems, short stories, crude
+philosophies, and even the draft of a novel.
+
+"What on earth does he expect me to do with all this?" groaned Arthur.
+
+One thing he could see very plainly--viz., that here was a prodigious
+mine of excellent material for any one who knew how to use it.  The
+storm beat without, the long day passed, and he was still at his task.
+He struggled through the snow to a cheap restaurant, came back,
+rekindled the fire, and sat down to reflect for the hundredth time on
+the strangeness of his position.  Here he was, in the room of a man
+whom he scarcely knew, and, as it appeared, the custodian of his most
+private memoranda.  As he read on and on, there gradually grew before
+his mind's eye an authentic portrait of the man.  He saw him at once
+shrewd and guileless, sagacious and impractical, full of innocent
+vanities and idealisms, unworldly as a child, and also, like a child,
+attaining moments of naïve wisdom, of unintentional philosophic
+insight; and he suddenly perceived what might be done with this mass of
+memoranda.  There was no doubt what Horner wished to have done; he
+designed a book of some sort.  Why not edit it?  And, as if in answer
+to this question, there came next noon a hurried line from Horner,
+saying he would be detained in Baltimore for at least a month, and
+begging him to do anything he liked with his papers, with the fullest
+discretionary power.  Here was an unsought task imposed upon him by
+what seemed the whim of circumstance.  He could take Horner's partly
+written novel, fill in the gaps from his own abundant autobiographic
+material, and perhaps succeed in producing a human document that would
+at least arrest attention by its realistic truth.  As for himself, he
+smiled grimly as he counted the few remaining dollars in his purse.
+Christmas and the elusive Bundy were six weeks away; he was destined to
+a hard siege, with the bread-line as a not negligible possibility.
+Providence had put a roof over his head; here was a task recommended to
+him by his gratitude, and if it would bring him no financial gain, yet
+it afforded him an inestimable distraction from the uncertainties of
+his own situation.  It seemed he was predestined to become a writer
+after all.
+
+Then began a form of life which in after years appeared to him
+fantastic as a dream.  He measured out his money with the strictest
+parsimony, existed on the cheapest forms of food, and amid the riot of
+New York lived the life of an anchorite in his cell.  The days passed
+unregarded; he went nowhere, saw no one; and at length there came a
+night when his task was done.  Does the reader recollect a novel called
+_The Amateur Artist_, by Cyril Horner, which a short time ago became
+the sensation of the season?  That was the book which Arthur finished
+late one night at Horner's room, and expressed next morning with almost
+his last penny to the office of Mr. Wilbur M. Legion.
+
+He felt weak and ill, and for the first time a thrill of fear shot
+through his heart.  Toward evening he dined exiguously on a dish of
+milk and porridge, and remembered hazily a dispute with the waiter on
+the question of a tip.  He went out into the streets.  A slender curve
+of moon rode in a sky of ice, the air was bitter cold, a sharp wind
+eddied round the corners of the streets, and took him by the throat.
+He walked on and on, with the illusion of the city slipping past him
+like a river full of glittering reflections, himself treading upon air.
+Once he found himself shambling; it horrified him, for it was so that
+tramps and outcasts walked.  A little later he found himself gazing on
+the bread-line; he stood an instant in fascinated pity, and fled.
+
+About midnight he found himself once more before the doors of the old
+Astor House, and felt that he could walk no farther.  He gathered
+courage to enter, and blessed the undesigned humanitarianism of
+America, which makes an hotel lobby an open rendezvous.  Here, at
+least, was light and warmth.  A night clerk was at the desk--not he of
+the toothpick and the supercilious back.  He made a shift to ask him if
+Bundy had arrived.
+
+"When do you expect him?" asked the clerk.
+
+"Hourly."
+
+"Where does he come from?"
+
+"The West--Oklahoma, I believe."
+
+"Then he'll get in at seven on the Pennsylvania, most likely."
+
+"Can I wait for him?"
+
+The clerk eyed him narrowly.
+
+"You used to stay here, didn't you?"
+
+"I was here for a fortnight."
+
+"I don't know but you can," he remarked ungraciously.  "But say, you
+ought to take a room, you know."
+
+"I'd rather not till I know if Mr. Bundy comes."
+
+"Down on your luck?"
+
+"Down on my luck," said Arthur gravely.
+
+The clerk laughed.
+
+"Parlour A. might suit you.  Don't let me see you, that's all."
+
+In Parlour A. he took refuge, and was soon asleep, his head bowed upon
+the table.  He woke from time to time with a strong shudder.  "Not
+that, O God--not that!" he moaned, for it was of the bread-line he had
+dreamed.
+
+He was still asleep when a sudden hand was laid upon his shoulder.
+
+He awoke, and looked into the face of Bundy.
+
+
+
+
+XV
+
+THE MILLIONAIRE
+
+He could hardly believe his good fortune.  The mist of sleep and
+weakness was upon his eyes, hysteric laughter shook him.  He rose,
+trembling.  He saw the good-natured night-clerk in the doorway, heard
+him say, "I guess he's been up against it good and hard," and the next
+moment found himself sinking through an abyss of coloured lights into
+an unfathomable darkness.  The descent lasted but for an instant; when
+he opened his eyes again it was to protest that there was nothing
+whatever the matter with him.
+
+"Been out on the bat," said the clerk laconically.
+
+"Been starving," said another voice.
+
+And then the owner of that second voice grew clear to him--a kindly
+face of inimitable shrewdness, the gray hair neatly parted in the
+middle, the gray moustache closely trimmed, and a pair of big, dreamy
+eyes fixed on him in anxious consideration.
+
+"Poor lad!--poor lad!" said Bundy.  "It seems I'm just in time.  I got
+your letter--only a week ago.  I got one from home, too--trust Mrs.
+Bundy for telling a man what his duty is.  So I hustled, and came off
+at once.  Now tell me, you aren't ill, are you?"
+
+"I don't think so," said Arthur weakly.
+
+"Case of the last dollar, eh?  Well, we'll soon mend that.  When you've
+put yourself outside a sirloin steak ... here, Mr. Squire, send Charlie
+up at once ... I'll breakfast here--it's my old room....  Now, hurry!"
+He bustled round in a furious heat of action, flung his fur-coat from
+him, talking all the while.  "Omelette, steak, and special
+coffee--that'll do for a beginning, Charlie; ... and see here, Mr.
+Squire"--this to the clerk--"my friend is a distinguished Englishman,
+and don't you forget it."
+
+"Of course," said the clerk.  "I knew he was a friend of yours, or I
+wouldn't have done what I did for him."
+
+"That's all right, Mr. Squire.  But you'd better forget what you said
+about going out on the bat--he's not that kind.  Now, are we ready?"
+
+And with the suddenness of a transformation scene in a pantomime,
+Arthur found himself seated at a laden table, the meats steaming on the
+dish, the coffee bubbling in the percolator, the very air fragrant with
+provocation to his appetite.  No wonder men stole for food, he thought;
+his very nostrils quivered with the lust of meat.  The blood sang
+within his veins as the first drop of liquid warmth thrilled his
+palate, and his flesh seemed sweeter to him, his whole house of man
+renewed.  Until that hour he had not known how hardly he had used his
+body, how great the violence he had offered it.  Now he entered into
+the repossession of his own flesh; this was the moment of his
+reconciliation, and this the sacramental food of a physical atonement.
+
+"And now," said Bundy, when the meal was finished, "tell me all about
+yourself."
+
+Arthur told his story from the beginning, Bundy meanwhile smoking and
+watching him with a curious flicker of suppressed humour in his eye.
+It was a little disconcerting to be so watched; it set Arthur wondering
+what Bundy really thought of him, and at last he broke out with the
+remark, "I'm afraid you think me something of a fool, Mr. Bundy?"
+
+"Well, I won't pretend to say that I would have done all that you've
+done," Bundy answered.  "I don't quite get your view-point, especially
+in what you say about your father.  But there's one thing in which I
+see you have been wise--you've left England, and that was the wisest
+thing you ever did."
+
+"I've sometimes thought it the most foolish."
+
+"Ah! because you've had a hard time.  But that's nothing.  I've been
+stony-broke myself a dozen times, and I've lived to think that these
+were the moments when I enjoyed my life the most.  The great point is,
+you've shown yourself capable of an adventure.  That's the spirit I
+like to see, and I like you the better for it.  Now, my boy, I'd
+recommend you to get a good sleep.  I've a pile of business to attend
+to.  Later on we'll talk over your affairs, and I'll have something
+definite to say to you."
+
+Great is the power of wealth, greater still, perhaps, the power of
+reputed wealth and the willingness to distribute it.  At the waving of
+Bundy's magic wand Arthur had become at once a person of consideration;
+he was the tenant of an admirable suite of rooms, waited on by
+obsequious bell-boys, remarked by admiring chamber-maids, even sought
+by adroit reporters.  He was a friend of Bundy's--that was the sole
+explanation of the miracle--for it appeared that Bundy's star was once
+more in the ascendant.  When, late in the afternoon, Arthur left his
+room and went down into the hotel lobby, it seemed to him that it
+hummed with the name of Bundy.  A constant stream of messenger-boys
+sought Parlour A.; a succession of automobiles discharged at the hotel
+door fur-coated men with anxious eyes, all bound for the same goal; the
+evening papers were full of the portraits and exploits of Bundy.
+Opening the door of Parlour A., he had a passing glimpse of a Bundy he
+had never seen before--a wild-eyed, gesticulating Bundy, orating behind
+a barricade of books and papers to a crowded room, rushing at intervals
+to the telephone and shouting orders, a man glowing with ardour, on
+springs with energy, intoxicated with success.
+
+"I'll see you presently," he cried, and went on pouring out what
+appeared to be a Niagara of figures.
+
+Arthur withdrew silently, went up to his room, and ordered all the
+papers, from which he proceeded to inform himself on the doings of his
+friend.  The story, divested of a vast accretion of shop-soiled
+adjectives, reduced itself to this--that Bundy had suddenly enrolled
+himself among the multi-millionaires, at least potentially.
+
+"The story of Mr. Bundy," began the chronicle, "is one of those
+romances of sudden wealth which are only possible in this country of
+unlimited and still undiscovered resources.  Born in humble
+circumstances in the city of London, England, Mr. Bundy has raised
+himself by his own exertions to a place among the great captains of
+wealth, whose remarkable careers constitute the epic of human progress,
+and shed glory on the institutions of this free and enlightened
+country."  Here, it appeared, the journalist's well of rhetoric ran
+dry, and he condescended to laconic statement.  It was not to be
+supposed that a plain statement of fact could support all the amiable
+exaggerations with which the reporter had adorned Mr. Bundy's personal
+history; but the facts themselves were sufficiently amazing.  From them
+Arthur gathered that Bundy had discovered fresh deposits of gold in the
+rivers of the Yukon, of undoubted value, and was about to float a
+dredging company which promised enormous dividends.  "As early as
+1898," continued the report, "fine-grained platinum was recognised in
+the black sand obtained along the Tuslin River, Yukon Territory, but
+until recently no active preparations have been made to recover it.
+This river drains the Tuslin Lake; its gravel-bed carries gold in
+paying quantities even by hand-working, throughout its entire length of
+120 miles.  Mr. Bundy claims that this gravel-bed contains immense
+quantities of gold, which may be recovered by the simple process of
+dredging.  For thousands of years the erosion of the hills has
+precipitated gold into the river; the gold has sunk by its specific
+gravity into the river-bed, and there it remains in incalculable
+quantities.  A good dredger costs about five thousand dollars.  It
+scoops up the river-bed in so thorough a fashion that not a grain of
+gold is lost.  Mr. Bundy has proved by actual experiment that from ten
+ounces of black sand, taken at random, sixty cents worth of platinum is
+obtainable, and gold in much larger quantities.  Mr. Bundy holds a
+concession for more than eighty miles of this river.  This means that
+with the most adequate machinery it will take fifty years to dredge the
+Tuslin.  When we reckon the relatively light cost of dredging, it
+appears probable that Mr. Bundy's proposition means not less than _one
+thousand per cent._ profit to the fortunate investor."
+
+So this accounted for the wild scene in Parlour A., the rush of
+automobiles to the door of the hotel, the sudden fame of Bundy.  The
+indefatigable adventurer, who was supposed to be in Texas or Oklahoma,
+had all the time been scooping gold in handfuls from the lap of the
+frozen north; Oklahoma had no doubt been used as a blind to cover his
+tracks; the reports in the papers had been ingeniously engineered; and
+then, at the precise moment, Bundy had descended on New York in a
+benignant advent.  Arthur's thoughts went back to the shabby house in
+Lion Row, and he wondered if Mrs. Bundy had heard the news.  He saw her
+preparing for a new apotheosis; fitting on the golden wings, so to
+speak, which were to waft her to the porticos of palaces; and,
+remembering her stories of similar hegiras, he wondered how much of
+truth lay behind this astounding story.  Bundy no doubt believed it--it
+was impossible to doubt his good faith; but Bundy had been deceived
+before, he might be deceived again.  A voice told Arthur that there was
+something unsubstantial in this glittering edifice; somewhere there was
+a rotten bolt, which, if plucked out, would result in total ruin.  And
+the same voice told him that his own path did not lie in this
+direction; that whatever its allurement, it was not for him.
+
+Bundy did not have the promised talk with him that evening, nor all the
+next day.  The man was devoured by his own energy; he ate little, slept
+not at all, rushed frantically about New York in automobiles, was
+always the centre of a crowd, himself excited, vociferous, burning with
+zeal like an apostle.  It was not until the third evening that he
+rushed into Arthur's room, and sank exhausted on the couch.
+
+"I've treated you shamefully," he cried, "but it couldn't be helped.
+Lad, I've done it.  I've pulled it off.  Don't speak a word to me about
+it yet.  I believe I've gone the limit.  One more question to answer
+and I'd have a fit."
+
+It was obvious even to an unpractised eye that he spoke the truth.  The
+blood was congested in his cheeks, his breath came unevenly, his hands
+trembled, an insane frenzy blazed in his eyes.
+
+"Order dinner," he went on hoarsely.  "An hour's time--that will do.  I
+didn't know I was so tired.  I believe I'll just go to sleep where I
+am.  They won't look for me here."
+
+Arthur turned the lights down, covered him with a travelling-rug, and
+left him.  He might have been a felon hiding from justice rather than a
+triumphant millionaire, and Arthur could not but reflect upon the
+strangeness of the spectacle.  It was the first time he had looked upon
+the lust for gold.  His father had acquired wealth, but not in this
+way.  It had been won by deliberate siege, by steady, patient pressure
+which called for high qualities of restraint; if it was a gross
+passion, it had elicited certain elements of character that in
+themselves were worthy.  But this mode of winning wealth had no
+dignity.  It was a lust.  It had the grossness and ferocity of a lust.
+It took the brain and body of a man and shattered them with its
+tremendous throb.  And it was a lust also that had contagion in it.  It
+was impossible to deny that its subtle virus had already touched his
+own heart.  During those three days he had been as a man deafened by
+the noise of guns; he had stood in the very heart of the explosion, and
+had recognised something strong and savage in the scene.  It thrilled
+him, fascinated him, made all ordinary modes of life trite and tame,
+and left him asking, Was not this life indeed?
+
+And he knew it was not.  He had only to think of that prostrate,
+half-demented man, sunk in the sleep of exhaustion on the couch, only
+to recollect the brave and lonely woman waiting for him in Lion Row, to
+know that this was not life.  Better, better far, the humblest bread
+earned in quietness and eaten in peace, than this madness of mere
+possession.  "A man's life consisteth not in the abundance of things
+which he possesseth"--ah no! _things_ are a poor substitute for life,
+and to forfeit life in the pursuit of things is man's crowning folly.
+
+An hour later there emerged a Bundy clothed and in his right mind,
+fresh-shaved, fresh-bathed, smiling, easy, tolerant.  Dinner was served
+in Bundy's rooms, and when the meal was over he began to talk freely of
+his adventures and affairs.
+
+"You'll never know how good civilised food is till you've gone upon a
+diet of salt-horse and biscuit for four months," he remarked.  Little
+by little he unfolded the story of his travels, a story full of fierce
+hazards, Homeric toils, adroit strategies, defeats, despairs,
+surprising victories, ending in the supreme moment when he held his
+dearly-won concession in his hand, and knew himself master of
+incalculable spoil.  It was the story of Ulysses, master of men,
+diplomat and fighter, swift, strong, and infinitely cunning, retold not
+without pride, but with the laconic brevity of the man who counts past
+hazards things of no importance.
+
+"Well, I've pulled it off," he cried.  "I've paid blood and sweat to do
+it.  And now, do you know, about the only thing I've left to wish for
+is to go to sleep for a month, and wake up in my old bed at home, and
+smell the eggs and bacon cooking for my breakfast, and hear the old dog
+barking in the garden at the kids."
+
+"Mrs. Bundy will be glad to hear the news."
+
+"Yes, I guess she will.  I didn't ought to have been away so long.
+It's been hard on her.  Tell me, now, how was she looking?  Older, I'm
+afraid, eh?"
+
+And then he fell into a train of tender reminiscence.  He talked of how
+brave and patient his wife had been, and of the long separation, and of
+the boys of whom he had seen so little.
+
+"Sometimes it seems as if it wasn't worth it.  It's only a short time
+folk have to live together any way, and I've been away from home most
+of my life.  I don't know but what I'd have been a sight happier if I'd
+have lived like other folk, and gone to church Sundays with the kids,
+and earned my bit of money in the city, and just had a home.  That's
+the thing I've never had--a home."
+
+It was a singular confession for a man to make who had just attained
+the summit of success.  He spoke with an extraordinary simplicity and
+tenderness, as if unconscious of an auditor, obedient only to some tide
+of memory that rose and swelled within his bosom.
+
+"It's queer, the way we're made," he went on.  "Here am I telling you
+what I've got by leaving England, and yet, if you're like me, you'll
+never have a happy day till you get back again.  There's a house me and
+Mrs. Bundy lived in when we were first married: it was out Epping way,
+and it had a bed of mignonette under the window, and a hay-field just
+beyond the garden-wall; and I can smell that mignonette now, and the
+hay, and up there in the Yukon I'd wake in the mornings with that smell
+in the air, though there wasn't a flower in sight for God knows how
+many miles.  I don't believe I could bear to see that house again.  Yet
+if I could just go back, and be young again, I guess I'd give all the
+gold in the Yukon to do it--and then repent my bargain, and go off to
+get some more.  Well, that's the way we're made.  We don't know what we
+want, and with all our trying we get the wrong thing after all, most
+like."
+
+He ended abruptly.
+
+"I oughtn't to be talking like this.  I guess it's mere foolishness.
+Well, let us come to business.  There's something I want to say to you.
+It's about your father.  Now, did Mrs. Bundy ever tell you that your
+father once helped me when I was in difficulties?"
+
+"Yes, she told me that."
+
+"She did, eh?  Well, I've never forgotten it.  Of course I've paid the
+money back long ago, but you can't pay a debt like that with money.
+I've always wanted to do more than that, and now the chance has come to
+me.  I can't do anything for your father, but there's something I would
+like to do for you."
+
+"You've already done a great deal, for which I am deeply grateful,"
+said Arthur.
+
+"Ah, that's a bagatelle!  I mean something permanent.  Now, how would
+it suit you if I made you secretary to my Dredging Company?  You could
+draw five thousand dollars a year for a beginning, and I'd assign you
+shares in the company besides."
+
+It was a splendid offer which might well dazzle a youth who a week ago
+had been acquainted with starvation.  Had it come on that night when he
+shuddered at the bread-line, he would have snatched it as a starving
+dog flies upon a bone.  But he had had time to recapture his
+self-control.  He had been fed with good meat, he had slept, and once
+more the physical machine ran sweetly.  And he had also had a
+terrifying glimpse of what the lust of gold meant, he had just heard
+Bundy's own expression of innocent regret, he had before him the man
+himself.  Did he envy him?  Something half-heroic in those Homeric
+labours he could recognise, but what about their object?  And it came
+to him with the vividness of a revelation that there were elements in
+his own nature that responded all too eagerly to the bribe held out to
+him; that if he yielded now he would go the way of multitudes whose
+only god is wealth; that if he resisted now he might preserve those
+higher ideals of life so intimately dear and sacred to him, and only
+thus could they be retained.  No, it must not be.  The die was cast in
+silence, and the golden phantom vanished.
+
+"Mr. Bundy," he said in a low and trembling voice, "you have made me a
+munificent offer.  You have spoken to me your own intimate thoughts.
+Will you now let me speak mine with equal frankness?"
+
+"Surely."
+
+"Don't think me ungrateful, but I must refuse your offer."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"For reasons, some of which you have supplied, some of which lie in my
+own character.  To be quite frank, I am not strong enough to resist the
+fascination of wealth.  Some men know how to set a boundary to their
+desires, to stop there, and say, 'I will go no farther.'  I do not
+believe I am one of these.  If I once took the road of wealth, I should
+push on to the utmost limit.  I might not become avaricious, but the
+fascination of the game would absorb me, and God only knows whether I
+might not become cruel and hard in course of time.  Well, I dare not
+risk it, and that is the truth, the humiliating truth, if you like.
+The life I have always planned for myself is a life of quiet toil,
+simple, content--books, a garden, a home: I cannot let it go.  My only
+anchorage in life lies there; without it I know not whither I might
+drift."
+
+He ended.  He had not noticed Bundy's face as he spoke; he had been too
+absorbed in his own confession.  He saw that face now--pale, eager, and
+with tears upon the cheek.  To his immense surprise, Bundy sprang up
+and flung his arms about his neck.
+
+"My dear fellow," he cried, "I understand.  Ah, you little know how
+you've torn the veil from my own heart!  I once had all those thoughts.
+I would have entered the Church; I don't know why I didn't.  I took
+another road--the wrong road, I suppose, and here I am....  Well, well!
+it can't be altered now.
+
+"You're the best and kindest man I ever knew," cried Arthur.  "And I
+know some one else who would say so too--Mrs. Bundy."
+
+"Ah! that's because she loves me too much to see my faults.  But I can
+see them.  Well, well!"  He turned his head away, his good honest face
+bowed in his hands.  Then he recovered himself briskly, turned round,
+and said, "Well, that's done with.  Now we'll start out afresh upon a
+new tack.  I've _got_ to help you, don't you understand?  And I'm going
+to.  Let me think a moment."
+
+Presently he said, "Now I think I've got it.  Sit down and light a
+fresh cigar.  That's right.  Now I believe I know the kind of life you
+want.  Shall I take it for granted you don't mean to return to England?"
+
+"No; there is no place for me there, at present."
+
+"Well, there's one point settled, and let me say I agree with you.  Now
+for another point.  You want an outdoor life?"
+
+"Yes, I prefer it."
+
+"Very good.  Now, let me paint you a picture.  A country of wooded
+hills and snow mountains, a lake, a log-house, and let us say a hundred
+acres of cleared land with seventy-five apple trees to the acre.  Do
+you know what that means?  I'll tell you.  An apple tree in bearing
+means from five to ten dollars.  An orchard of only fifty acres
+therefore means--here, hand me that paper-pad."
+
+And straightway he fell to work, with all the recovered ardour of the
+speculator, adding and re-adding interminable lines of figures, until
+he announced the surprising result that the man who owned fifty acres
+of land in this most desirable of valleys might count upon a yearly
+income of $18,750, and in due time twice or thrice that sum.
+
+"It's better than a gold-mine," he cried inconsistently.  "And it's
+safe--it's absolutely safe!"
+
+"But how am I to buy it?"
+
+"You're not going to buy it.  Don't you understand?  It's already
+yours.  Here, wait a moment."
+
+There was another series of swift calculations, and then Bundy
+communicated this result: that the money Archibold Masterman had lent
+him years before had been really worth to him thrice its value, for it
+had set him on his feet; that morally therefore he owed £2,000 to
+Archibold Masterman; that the price of this excellent fruit ranch, by a
+strange coincidence, was exactly £2,000; and that finally it was his
+fixed determination to make the ranch over to Arthur, as an act of
+gratitude.
+
+"There's the life you want," he cried enthusiastically.
+
+"But, Mr. Bundy----"
+
+"Now don't object, for I won't hear of it.  I'm only too glad you made
+me think of this.  Why, if I were younger and hadn't got the Dredging
+Company on my hands, I'd go there myself, like a shot.  There's no
+credit to me in giving it you.  I'm rich; and besides, it's yours
+morally.  God bless you, my boy! and if ever things go wrong with me,
+keep a room for poor old Bundy on the ranch.  And now let us go to bed."
+
+And, as if to prevent all further discussion, he swiftly switched the
+lights off, and incontinently vanished.
+
+
+
+
+XVI
+
+KOOTENAY
+
+The train was climbing slowly to the summit of the Crow's Nest Pass.
+To the northward rose an extraordinary mountain, deeply tinted at its
+base with greens and purples, and capped with a dazzling crown of snow
+and ice.  Around the glowing base, like children gathered at the knees
+of a monstrous mother, rose seven inferior monoliths, pillars of rock
+which in the morning light flamed like torches.  All around were
+mountains, some flat-topped and hooded, some broken spires as of a vast
+cathedral ruined; beneath them wild gullies yawned, intricate defiles,
+deep canyons to whose sides the pines clung in an agony of effort; and
+so far below that it appeared but a thread of silver ran a silent
+river.  Into these defiles the train moved timorously; now hanging for
+an instant on a wall of precipice, now suspended on a groaning
+trestle-bridge over depths of air, but ever moving on, like a living
+creature animate with the unconquerable energy of man.  How good this
+mountain air, chill and clear and bright; how welcome this irregularity
+of form, passing through every grade from the exquisite to the
+magnificent, after the long, barren monotony of the plains!  It was the
+transition from prose to poetry, from barbarian prose to lyric music.
+It was with a sinking heart that Arthur had remarked the long unfolding
+of the plains.  They oppressed the mind, they lay like a weight upon
+the eyes, they breathed a savage and a hostile spirit.  The scattered
+towns had an air of dereliction; the very houses seemed frozen to the
+soil, and around them was a silence, like the silence of death.  But
+here once more Nature became a living thing, a hospitable and kindly
+mother.  And to Arthur, who had never seen a mountain, this sudden
+revelation of grandeur and magnificence came with a shock of exquisite
+pain.  His eyes filled with happy tears, his nerves tingled with
+delight, he drank long draughts of crystal air, he could have sobbed
+and shouted.  For the first time he knew the bliss of being alive.
+
+On that long westward journey he had had time to reflect on many
+things.  New York had already sunk into the past like a disordered
+dream.  Legion and Horner were alike unsubstantial figures, shapes that
+had moved for an instant on a tinted cloud and had disappeared.  But
+Bundy travelled with him; the spirit of the man still warmed his heart
+like a cordial.  He saw his honest features wet with tears as he
+recalled his home; heard his reverberating eloquence in Parlour A.; was
+subdued and reverent before the generosity and ardour of the man.  He
+had parted with him two days after that memorable midnight
+conversation.  He was now upon his way to England--and Mrs. Bundy.  If
+Arthur could have chosen, he would have wished to be the sole architect
+of his own fortunes.  That had been his proud dream, and he had been
+slow to relinquish it.  His pride had struggled to the last against
+Bundy's generosity, until remonstrance seemed ungracious and insulting.
+He saw now that that pride was the least worthy thing about him.  The
+refusal to accept generosity was scarcely less base than the refusal to
+confer it.  God had not designed man to stand alone; He had surrounded
+him with a network of obligations and relationships; total independence
+was impossible in a world where all living creatures existed by a
+dependence on each other.  He had been in peril of becoming an Ishmael
+by renunciation of the social bond; Bundy had re-created that social
+bond for him.
+
+And, strangely enough, Bundy's generosity owed itself to a similar
+generosity in his father--the father whom he had deserted.  There was
+plentiful food for irony in that thought.  He had condemned his
+father's mode of life, applied to him unsparing judgments, fled from
+him; and here, six thousand miles away, he was travelling toward an
+opportunity that would not have existed but for a quality of goodness
+in Archibold Masterman.  He had refused partnership with his father in
+London; here, in a strange and distant land, he was still the partner
+of his father's deeds.  The thought sensibly softened his heart toward
+his father.  He had long ago ceased to think of him with anger; enmity
+he had never felt; now there came to him a gush of tender recollection,
+and with it the power of truer comprehension.  He saw that no man is
+either wholly good or wholly bad; that character cannot be limned in
+plain black and white; that a thousand delicate gradations separate yet
+unite the two extremes; and that the final verdict on any man lies
+beyond the human mind.  Man must be taken as he is; he is at all times
+a contradiction, an enigma, a creature that exceeds his category.  To
+see this is to become human; to miss this vision is to remain a
+Pharisee, whose cardinal defect is inhumanity.  And it was this wider
+and more charitable temper that came to birth in him as he reflected on
+the new course his life had taken.
+
+From his pocket he took a bundle of letters, and re-read them slowly.
+The latest in date was from Elizabeth, and it closed with a phrase that
+had clamoured in his memory through all that week of journeying--"Well
+I know my true knight will not fail me."  No emotional utterance could
+have moved his so deeply.  It was the affirmation of a vow which he
+knew would endure as long as time, and after.  It braced his spirit to
+repeat it; he accepted with a swelling heart its brave implication, and
+wore it like a badge of honour.
+
+The longest letter was from Vickars.  It was the last letter he had
+received before he left New York, and he had read it so often that he
+almost knew it by heart.  "I have shot my arrow in the air," he wrote,
+"and God alone knows where it may fall.  My book is out, and there are
+some signs that it may succeed.  You know what I mean by that.  The
+only success I crave is to influence other minds in right directions.
+Men have called me a dreamer, perhaps you yourself have thought so too;
+but I know, and I think you know, that I have dreamed true.  We are
+moving toward a revolution.  It is impossible that the present system
+can endure much longer.  My message is for the day after the revolution
+is accomplished.  Then will begin the reconstruction of life again from
+the base upward, a simpler and an ampler life.  It is for that day I
+write, and my bones will thrill to it even in the grave.  As for me, I
+am like Balaam; I shall see it, but not now; I shall behold it, but not
+nigh.  Even so, I am content."  There followed a fuller expression of
+his social ideals, and the whole closed with this paragraph--"Your
+mother came to see us last week.  It was a great but very happy
+surprise.  Can you guess what we talked of?  Of you, Arthur.  For we
+three know you as no others do, and we love you, and believe in you.
+She kissed Elizabeth at parting, and said, 'Some day----' and then
+stopped; but we knew what she meant.  Well, you must work on toward
+that some day.  Poor lady!  Deal tenderly with her.  I think she has
+sore wounds in her heart, and remember it was harder for her to part
+from you than for you to go.  By so much her quiet sacrifice is greater
+than yours.  She is the tarrier by the stuff, a harder lot, I think,
+than his that goes down into the battle."
+
+Tears filled his eyes as he read the words.  There came to him a sudden
+vision of the London he had left--the vast tribes of toiling men, the
+blind pain and suffering of so many millions, the silent agonies that
+hid beneath those gray skies and congregated roofs.  And then, looking
+from the windows, the eye dwelt again upon this magnificent heritage
+that bore the flag of England, and he marvelled why men fought for bare
+life in cities when an empty empire called for them.  Surely some day
+the wizard's spell would break, and London would pour its wasted tribes
+into this land of fertility and beauty.  To reconstruct life from the
+base upward, that could never be done there; it might be done here.
+Here the simpler, ampler life was possible.  Ah! if he could not fight
+by Vickars' side in London, he was still fighting for him here, and was
+it not better to create the new than to rebuild the old?
+
+The mountain peaks were gradually receding.  The train crawled slowly
+round the walls of precipice, hung suspended for a giddy instant, and
+then, with a tumult of squealing brakes and hissing steam, plunged into
+the abyss, doubling on itself a score of times, till it reached the
+valley and the roaring river.  It was past noon when the train stopped
+beside a placid lake.  Immense forests rose on every side; an
+immemorial silence lay on all things, broken only by the gentle ripple
+of the waters.  A steamer lay beside the landing-stage; an hour later
+he was afloat.
+
+There were not many passengers, and what there were seemed
+uncommunicative.  They were for the most part long-limbed, sturdy men,
+ranchers, traders, lumber-jacks, their faces bronzed with outdoor life.
+They eyed him narrowly and critically.  He knew quite well what their
+criticism implied.  He was a greenhorn, and no doubt looked like one.
+As long as the light lasted he took no notice of them; he was too
+absorbed in the unfolding beauty of the lake, and in curiosity as to
+what it would reveal for him.  Somewhere on the lake lay his small
+estate, and he found himself studying with eager interest the wooded
+shores, in the hope of discovering something that gave a hint of human
+habitation.  There was very little to reward his gaze.  Twice he saw a
+blue curl of smoke rising from the forest; once a rude hut, whose one
+window glittered like a gem in the setting sun; beyond this nothing met
+the eye but a shore of snow, the black bare poles of charred trees
+rising above the living pines, and the solitary sky.  The scene was
+sombre; the silence so profound that the churning stern-wheel sounded
+like the passage of an army.  Night fell swiftly.  It was seven o'clock
+when a lighted hillside met the eye, and he was told that it was Nelson.
+
+He slept that night at a small hotel near the shore, and rising early
+next morning was quite unprepared for the beauty of the scene that
+awaited him.  The distant hills of snow were touched with rosy fire,
+the lake was like a turquoise, and the town surprised him by its sober
+aspect of prosperity.  He scarce knew what he had expected in this
+remote outpost of the Empire, but certainly not what he saw--broad
+streets, buildings of hewn stone, substantial shops and warehouses, all
+gathered round a curve of lake so exquisite that few places could
+surpass it in its natural loveliness.  The hotel was kept by an
+Englishman, who made haste to cultivate his acquaintance.  He was a
+lightly built, bearded fellow, with a shrewd eye and a perpetual smile,
+one of the numerous family of Smith.
+
+"So you're going up the lake?" he inquired.
+
+"Yes.  I want a ranch called Bundy's."
+
+"Bundy.  Let me see.  I don't know of any Bundy here."
+
+"He isn't here.  It's his ranch I want to find."
+
+"Did he tell you where it was?"
+
+"Poplar Point."
+
+"Ah! now I know.  If you'll come with me, I think I can show you
+whereabouts it is."  He took him to the landing-stage, and pointed out
+a deep fold in the hills.  "You make for that," he said.  "Unless I
+disremember, Bundy's ranch is there or thereabout.  But people are
+always going and coming here.  These 'ere ranches are always changing
+hands.  Young fellows like you come out, and get tired of the work at
+the end of the summer, and sell out.  They're the plague of Nelson.
+Quitters, we call 'em.  I hope you ain't a quitter."
+
+"I don't think I am.  I've come here to live."
+
+"Well, sir, you've come to a good place.  But let me give you a word of
+warning.  It's only hard work that pays here, and you'll have to work
+hard and wait long if you want to do anything in fruit.  This is no
+place for quitters."
+
+He went on to give him many brief histories of the obnoxious tribe of
+quitters.  They were all looking out for a soft job--that was what was
+the matter with them.  Mamma's darlings--that's what they were.  Did he
+know what it was to handle an axe.  No, he thought not.  Land had to be
+cleared--did he know what that meant?
+
+"But mine is cleared," Arthur interrupted.  "At least, fifty acres are."
+
+At this he looked puzzled.
+
+"I never heard of fifty acres of cleared land anywheres near Poplar
+Point," he observed.
+
+There happened to come along the landing-stage at that moment a
+somewhat extraordinary-looking old man.  He wore blue jeans, a red wool
+sweater, and a battered felt hat.  His hair and beard were unkempt, and
+both were gray.  A beggar could not have been worse dressed, and yet
+there was about him something of the dignity that marks the open-air
+man.
+
+"That's Jim Flanagan," remarked Smith; "he ought to know.  Here, Jim, I
+want to speak to you."
+
+The old man came towards them in silence.
+
+"Jim, do you know a ranch at Poplar Point called Bundy's?  You know
+most of the places up and down the lake, don't you?"
+
+"Yes, I know it.  It lies back a quarter of a mile or so, on a bench."
+
+"Cleared, is it?"
+
+"Not much.  It was once, but most of it's growed up again."
+
+"Well, this gentleman's going there.  Maybe you could give him
+pointers."
+
+"Going to live there?" asked Flanagan.
+
+"Yes, I'm going to live there," said Arthur.
+
+"Well, I don't know but what you can.  There's a pretty good log-house.
+I'm living not far away myself."
+
+"Can't you row me over?"
+
+"No, I can't do that.  It wouldn't be no good if I did.  You can't live
+there without a good bit of preparation.  There ain't no shops at
+Poplar Point, and there ain't no hotel," he remarked with a grin.
+
+"Now I'll tell you what I would do, if I was you," said the landlord.
+"You just let Jim give you some pointers.  He'll treat you right, will
+Jim."
+
+"I'll be glad to do anything I can," said the old man.  "I've got an
+hour to spare, any way."
+
+Arthur took Flanagan up to the hotel with him, and was soon interested
+in his strange preceptor.  It seemed he was an old hunter and
+prospector, a man of infinite adventures, with a dislike of
+civilisation, which was perhaps his most marked characteristic.  There
+was no remote solitude of the surrounding woods with which he was not
+acquainted.
+
+"As for this ranch of yours, I guess you've been expecting too much,"
+he remarked.  "It's good enough land, that I believe.  And I won't say
+but what it has been planted all right once.  But it's been let grow
+up.  I kind of remember a man called Bundy bought it--took it for a
+debt, 'twas said.  But he's never been here, not a£ I remember.  And
+I've been here and hereabout a matter of a dozen years."
+
+So it appeared that Bundy had let the light of his imagination gild
+Kootenay Lake with a delusive splendour, as it did all those
+"propositions" which engaged his ardent rhetoric.  But Arthur was in no
+mood to judge his benefactor critically.  The land was there--that was
+something; and it would go hard with him if he could not make it all
+that Bundy had imagined it.  He might have known that Bundy had never
+seen it for himself.  The story of his having taken it for a debt had
+the accent of truth.  The mouth of the gift-horse must not be too
+closely examined, but at least he was a veritable beast.  And in spite
+of the passing shadow of disappointment, Arthur's spirits rose at the
+menace of unexpected difficulty.
+
+"Well," said Flanagan.  "I must be getting along.  When will you be
+coming out?"
+
+"Immediately.  Some time this afternoon."
+
+"In that case you'll have to get a move on.  You've a lot to do."
+
+Flanagan thereupon sat down again and gave him a series of elaborate
+instructions.  He must first of all buy a boat; he'd need one, any way.
+There was a boat he knew of that might be had second-hand for twenty
+dollars.  Then he'd want to buy an axe or two, a grub-hoe, a sack of
+flour, sugar, rice, tea, coffee, tinned milk, and may be a side of
+bacon and a case of eggs.  That would do for a beginning.
+
+The boat was duly bargained for upon the wharf.  It was an interesting
+ruin: the paint had long since disappeared, it had no rudder, and it
+leaked like a sieve.  Its owner, remarking Arthur's innocence, wished
+to raise the price, but Jim kept him to the twenty dollars.
+
+"That or nothing," he said sternly.  "And put a couple of baling-tins
+in.  They'll be needed."
+
+Arthur looked upon this ancient tub with frank dislike and with some
+dismay.  The beauty of the rose-tinted morn was over; the sky was gray,
+and a rising north-west wind was making more than ripples on the lake.
+
+"How far is Poplar Point?" he asked.
+
+"Five miles," Jim answered.  "But I guess you'll do it.  You look
+strong."
+
+"It isn't myself I'm thinking of; it's the boat.  Do you think she can
+do it?"
+
+"I've seen worse," said Jim.  "Not many of them, though.  But she'll do
+it, never fear.  That there old boat have been on the lake ever since I
+knowed it."
+
+Which, under the circumstances, was scarcely a recommendation.
+
+By one o'clock, somehow or other, Arthur had got through his
+preparations.  His story had got about; he found himself stared at in
+the streets as a greenhorn; but every one had shown him civility, and
+some a rough kindness.  At the bank a great surprise awaited him.  He
+found that Bundy had telegraphed a considerable sum of money to his
+credit, more than enough to give him a fair and even generous start.
+Willing hands helped him to pack his goods.  They were all there--the
+axes, the grub-hoe (with whose uses he was totally unacquainted), the
+sack of flour, and the various provisions.  His valise was shoved under
+the stern seat, and with it half a dozen pamphlets on fruit-growing
+which he collected in the town.  Flanagan had gone two hours earlier,
+with the promise that he would look out for him at Poplar Point.
+
+"Keep your eye on the gap in the hills," was his final instruction,
+"then push up the creek to the left; and if it's dark, I'll burn a
+flare."
+
+He had no sooner left the landing than he began to feel the force of
+the wind.  It blew with a steady and increasing violence, dead ahead;
+pull as he would, he made little progress, and, to add to his
+discomfiture, he had to be continually baling.  The moment he stopped
+to bale, the boat swung round or was driven backward.  His hands were
+soon blistered, his muscles ached, yet toil as he would the far-off gap
+in the hills seemed no nearer.  The water ran black and foam-flecked in
+short, choppy waves; the sky had darkened rapidly, and presently a
+cutting hail fell.  In ordinary circumstances he would have turned
+back, but he had a lively recollection of Smith's stinging phrases, and
+had no mind to be written down a mamma's darling or derided as a
+quitter.  This was, in its way, his first test, and to succumb would be
+to lose nerve for future difficulties.  He was now in the very centre
+of the lake, and a thrill of apprehension seized him as he saw how
+small an object this crazy boat appeared in that loneliness of angry
+water.  Black water, black forests, and on the upper hills pale rays of
+watery sunset--that was what he saw, and himself scarcely more
+noticeable than a bird, buffeted by the impending storm.  But he toiled
+on, and at last got a little shelter from the shore.  More than three
+hours had passed since he left Nelson; and in this deep fissure of the
+hills the night had already camped.  The darkness deepened rapidly.  It
+was five o'clock when he rounded the point of the creek.  Here the
+water was smoother, and he could pull more leisurely; but it was now
+quite dark.  All his hopes were fixed on Flanagan.  For another hour he
+searched the shores eagerly for any sign of light.  Nothing met his eye
+but the tiny twinkling of a lamp here and there in the window of some
+unseen house.  At last, just when he had made up his mind to spend the
+night upon the lake and wait for dawn, a sudden shaft of red flame
+soared up not a hundred yards away.  A voice hailed him, and never did
+a human voice sound sweeter.  Ten minutes later Flanagan's hand grasped
+his, and he stepped ashore.
+
+"The old boat's done it, then," said Flanagan.  "I rather guessed she
+would.  Now you come right along with me."
+
+"So it was only a guess, was it?"
+
+"Well, most things in this world are a sort of guess," said the old
+man.  "The only thing sure is that men don't die till their hour's
+come."  He turned away gruffly, and at once began to shoulder Arthur's
+goods.
+
+"But you can't carry all that," cried Arthur, as the old man hoisted
+the sack of flour upon his shoulders.
+
+"Needs must when the devil drives," he said grimly.  "There ain't no
+hotel hereabouts, didn't I tell you?  You've got to get all your goods
+into the shack to-night.  That wind's bringing up snow, and the sooner
+we get this job done the better."
+
+Arthur grasped his valise, and such impedimenta as Flanagan would let
+him carry, and followed the old man.
+
+The snow was deep and soft, in spite of the cold wind.  The darkness
+was like a solid wall on either side of the thin ray that fell from
+Jim's lantern.  Through the wood there ran a perpetual ghostly murmur,
+a sound of sighing, groaning, struggling, as the branches beat to and
+fro and rubbed against each other.  Suddenly a long and terrible cry
+rose above the noises of the forest, a cry of infinite pain, despair,
+melancholy, and Arthur started back, shouting, "What's that?"
+
+"Why, that's only a coyote," said Jim--"just an old dog coyote.  Bless
+you! he won't hurt you."
+
+Arthur said no more, but he was glad that no one could see the colour
+of his face.  He struggled breathlessly in the steps of his guide.  The
+hill was steep, the foothold uncertain; more than once he waded to his
+knees in a hidden bog-hole.  And yet, in spite both of his discomfort
+and his fear, he was conscious of a gradual heightening of his spirits.
+There was something wild and savage in these black walls of forest that
+encompassed him, in the mystery and solitude of this primeval place,
+something that exhilarated while it awed him.  He was conscious of the
+falling from him of the trappings of a discarded civilisation.  He had
+come to a place where the artificialities of life had no significance;
+where the natural man stood front to front with the stubborn earth,
+with no weapons to subdue her but his own thews and muscles, his own
+right of domination, and his unconquerable will.
+
+The ground was easier now, and they moved more swiftly on a level
+narrow trail.  At last the darkness thinned a little; they had reached
+a small clearing, and a light shone brightly.
+
+"Here we are," said Jim.  "And not sorry to get here either."
+
+He pushed open the door of a log-hut.  It was perhaps fourteen feet
+square; a stove burned red-hot in the centre of the hut; on one side
+was a long bunk built of red cedar.
+
+"I done my best to clean it up," said Jim.  "Maybe there's a rat or two
+around, and perhaps a porcupine, but they won't hurt you.  It's dry,
+that's one thing.  And now I'll say good-night."
+
+He tramped off into the wood.  Arthur stood a long time listening, but
+Jim's footsteps were soon lost amid the groaning of the trees.  The
+long, melancholy cry of the coyote again thrilled the air.  Arthur shut
+the door.
+
+And it was so that he came into his heritage.
+
+
+
+
+XVII
+
+THE NEW LIFE
+
+He contrived to make himself some coffee, and after a while
+extinguished the lamp and crawled into the bunk.  The red-hot stove
+filled the hut with a dim light, and he fell asleep.
+
+An hour later he woke in a sweat of terror.  The fire in the stove had
+died down, the hut was bitterly cold, and he was in total darkness.
+The darkness was like nothing he had known before; it closed round him
+with a pressure that was almost tangible, and it seemed alive.  There
+was a horrible sense of something hostile in it; he could have thought
+it moved stealthily, with a faint rustling of unseen robes, that it
+breathed and palpitated, that it was a presence inimical to life.  A
+rat ran across his bed, and on the roof there was a long grating sound.
+Outside, in the wide night, he could recognise the melancholy cry of
+the coyote; but there were other cries and sounds which he could not
+recognise.  Close to the door of the hut there was audible what seemed
+like deep, stertorous breathing, deepening into a human groan.  From
+the depth of the wood came a fearful wail, as of a woman in distress.
+He sprang from the bunk, rushed to the door, and opened it.  There was
+a soft flutter of wings, and the groaning ceased; but the wailing in
+the woods went on, upon a scale of rising agony.  There was nowhere any
+sign of life.  The moon had risen, and the snow-laden trees rose pure
+and mystic in the silver light.  They were like a cohort of silent
+watchers round his lonely hut, and he welcomed them as comrades.
+Slowly his fears subsided.  It was not until the next day he learned
+from Flanagan that the soft groaning at the door proceeded from nothing
+more alarming than a mountain owl, and that the wailing in the forest
+was merely a mountain lion in search of prey.
+
+This unforgetable night was his first and last occasion of terror.  It
+is only when the causes of phenomena are hidden from us that the
+phenomena themselves are terrible.  When we know that the tapping in
+the wainscot is caused by an innocent insect, the movements in the
+forest to be the work of wind or frost, the breathing in the dark to be
+a sleeping owl, the mind at once regains the equipoise of reason.
+Perhaps if we knew what really lay behind the mystery of death, we
+should fear it as little as we do the commonplace phenomena of birth
+and life.
+
+The morning came at last in floods of living light, and as Arthur once
+more stood at the cabin door, he thought that he had never looked upon
+a scene so exquisite.  Pale rays of colourless and pure fire spread
+like a fan along the eastern sky; they deepened into momentary purple,
+throbbed as with a pulse, and suddenly were quickened with a flood of
+scarlet.  The distant peaks of snow one by one caught the elemental
+splendour, the higher summits topped with flame, the lower stained with
+rose; and across the dim and quiet lake, from an open gateway of the
+hills a shaft of light shot, slender as a spear and vibrating with the
+joy of speed.  A gust of air shook the forest, and the ice-clad boughs
+tinkled like a chime of bells.  There was no other sound except the
+little song of water, running underneath its roof of ice.  All around
+rose the still and solemn woods.  The miniature plains of snow gathered
+at their feet glittered like a floor of diamonds.  And from sky and
+lake and forest came an air inimitably virginal, the cold and taintless
+air of unviolated Nature, infinitely pure and strong and vital.
+
+He stood for some moments quite silent, in that intense clarity of
+dawn, scarcely conscious of himself, his whole being drawn out in a
+kind of effortless and sacred awe.  He had an inward sense of
+lustration and release: the soul rose clean as from a bath of fire; the
+will, so often misdirected, was modulated to the perfect harmony of
+this external world.  Such moods lie beyond reason, and are therefore
+beyond the explication of the reason.  The pivots upon which life moves
+consist of a few rare and exquisite moments; for one man a sunrise, for
+another a strain of music heard at midnight, for yet another the
+sudden, arrowy fragrance of violets in a wood, and behold! life is
+changed, something has been withdrawn from it and something added--a
+new element, wholly authentic, yet wholly indefinable.  It was such a
+moment with this solitary exile.  The dawn came to him as an omen and a
+challenge.  It was the porch of a new life, and he entered it with
+willing feet.
+
+He returned to the cabin, and breakfasted in haste after a fashion
+which would have provoked pity and derision in the bosom of the British
+house-wife.  His coffee was boiled in a discarded meat-tin; bread he
+had none; and his effort to fry eggs was probably among the least
+successful of all recorded operations known to culinary science.  In
+the midst of his crude performance Jim Flanagan arrived, surveying him
+from the doorway with a smile of irony.
+
+When the meal was over, Jim began to talk in his slow, caustic way.
+Like many men who have passed their lives in the open air and solitude,
+Jim had acquired a certain rude philosophy, the fruit of much silent
+thinking, experience, and observation.  He had worked in lumber-camps,
+mines, and on the railroads, but only by necessity; no sooner had he
+acquired a little money than he had always gone off into solitude
+again.  Carrying all his scant possessions with him, he would disappear
+into the forests and mountains, and would be lost to sight for many
+months.  What was he doing?  Hunting, prospecting for gold and copper,
+and loafing.  He would return from these expeditions not a penny piece
+the richer, a little raggeder, and with deeper lines upon his face,
+having often suffered great privations, yet at the first opportunity he
+would resume them.  For all settled ways of life he had a positive
+aversion, and not all the gold of Golconda could have bribed him to
+reside in cities.  This was the more remarkable because he had spent
+his childhood and early youth in Liverpool, from which dim and dreary
+city he had been thrust out by chance and poverty into the Canadian
+wilderness.  Till he landed in Canada he had never seen a forest or a
+mountain, had scarcely looked upon a flower, and had breathed only the
+tainted air of slums; but on his first view of the wooded heights of
+Montreal, something woke in his heart, a dumb love of Nature, a passion
+for freedom, an appetite for solitude.  Friends he had none, and if he
+ever had relations, he had long ago forgotten them.  Thus left wholly
+to himself, he had fashioned his own way of life with neither memory
+nor obligation to restrain him; had considered his debt to civilization
+cancelled; had become a wanderer upon the face of the earth, a taciturn
+but contented nomad, whose feet had traversed the breadth of a mighty
+continent, and penetrated a hundred savage solitudes where none but he
+had trodden.  Thus, in his own way, he had solved the problem of
+existence; he had achieved freedom, and had enrolled himself among the
+humble Argonauts of Empire.
+
+The greatness of this half-discovered empire was his chief thought, and
+upon this theme he was always ready to speak.
+
+"England don't know what she's got in Canada," was a frequent sentiment
+of his, often expressed with biting scorn.  "She sends her worst out
+here," he would continue--"dumps her rubbish on us."  He made this
+remark now, to which Arthur replied with a laugh, "I hope you don't
+consider me rubbish, Jim."
+
+"No, you're young, and I guess you're strong.  But there's lots of hard
+work ahead of you, and I've seen many a chap like you fly the tracks."
+
+"I wish you'd tell me what I've got to do."
+
+"Well, I ain't no fruit-rancher myself," said Jim.  "But maybe I can
+teach you.  Suppose you and me take a look round."
+
+They went out together into the keen air.  Around the cabin for a space
+of several acres the snow lay deep, its pure surface broken only by
+black tree-stumps.  Farther back was a tangle of young wood, and beyond
+this the primeval forest.  At a distance of fifty yards from the cabin
+the snow was discoloured, and Arthur recognised the bog-hole into which
+he had stumbled on the previous night.
+
+"There seems a lot of bog, and I don't see any apple-trees," he
+remarked.
+
+"That there bog's the best land you've got," Jim answered, "but it's
+got to be drained.  The apple-trees are in the bush somewheres; didn't
+I tell you they've got growed up?  You've got to start slashing that
+bush.  It's a job that must be done.  And I don't see how you're to do
+it all alone."
+
+"Neither do I," said Arthur.  "But if you'd help me, Jim, I think I
+could soon learn."
+
+"I ain't no fruit-rancher," he began again.
+
+"Unless I'm mistaken, you're just what you choose to be," said Arthur.
+"Name your own wage, Jim, and be my teacher."
+
+"Well, I'll consider it," said the old man.
+
+A couple of days passed, during which Arthur saw nothing of Jim.  On
+the afternoon of the third day Arthur saw his boat moving toward the
+landing.
+
+"I've been getting some things we'll want," said Jim.  "You'll find 'em
+put down to your account.  I may as well tell you I've been drunk.
+Maybe you won't want me now," he added with a grin.
+
+"I'll take my chance on that, Jim."
+
+"It's a thing what has to be," said the old man with a solemn roll of
+his gray head.  "I ain't no drunkard, understand.  I'd think shame of
+being that.  But an occasional booze hurts no one, and is a necessity
+of life.  It kind of limbers up one's wits."
+
+"We'll let it go at that," laughed Arthur.
+
+And thus the articles of this strange partnership were settled.
+
+From that day began a life of furious and unremitting toil.  Days and
+weeks passed unremarked in those Homeric labours; Arthur worked in
+blinding sweat, with aching muscles; rose early in the biting cold,
+plied the axe from morn to eve, and no sooner ate his rough evening
+meal than he was fast asleep.  A hundred times it seemed as if no human
+organism could sustain the immense fatigue which he endured.  As the
+snow melted, his task became the heavier.  There were tree-stumps to be
+blasted, and the fumes of the blast left him with a splitting headache.
+There was the bog to be drained, and he worked for hours to his knees
+in water.  There were trees to fell, to cut up into lengths for
+building, and the rest to be burned.  Yet amid it all he was conscious
+of a growing sanity of mind and body.  His hands, at first torn and
+wounded by his toil, hardened to their task; his shoulders broadened,
+his muscles grew supple, and on his cheek was the glow of health.  A
+curt word of praise from Jim seemed the superlative of approbation; to
+hear him say, "Well, I guess you ain't no quitter," warmed him like a
+draught of wine.  And the mental transformation was not less definite
+than the physical.  The immediacy of his work, the constant need of
+patience, caution, and alertness, the mere brute vigour of his life,
+drove from his mind a hundred haunting ghosts.  He had no time to
+debate on thin-spun theories of the universe and life, and even social
+problems sunk into insignificance.  To see that a tree fell rightly, to
+disengage a fertile soil from the neglect of ages, to drain the
+bog--these were his problems, and he found them sufficiently absorbing.
+He had got back to the primeval; work and sleep and work again, all
+slowly issuing in a visible success--was not this the oldest and the
+one divine task of man, pursued through countless centuries, and
+furnishing the one solid base on which all human domination rested?
+
+It might have been supposed that such a hard insistency of toil would
+have dulled the finer faculties.  In so far as these faculties depended
+for their nourishment on books, no doubt they suffered; but they found
+a new and more vital food in the scenes which surrounded him.  The
+inexhaustible surprise of sunrise and of sunset, the music of the
+forest, perpetual as the music of the sea, the blue expanse of lake,
+the wide array of snow-clad mountains--these and a hundred lesser
+things, such as the magic wrought by shafts of light in the deep
+shadows of the wood, trees glittering in a sheath of ice, moonlight
+upon snow, fascinated and absorbed him.  He had never guessed how
+wonderful the world was.  The laborious exercises of the human mind in
+quest of beauty seemed a tedious absurdity compared with this opulence
+of loveliness that met him everywhere.  And he saw too that there is a
+kind of wisdom deeper than any that is found in books, which flows in
+upon the spirit which is in accord with Nature.  Flanagan, with all his
+crudity and ignorance, had something of this wisdom.  He moved at ease
+in his environment, envied no man, coveted no man's goods, brought to
+each returning day a strength precisely equal to his task; and Arthur
+asked himself if either religion or philosophy could produce a form of
+life more admirable or more efficient.  In these daily toils Jim was
+his sole companion.  They worked and ate together, and in the long
+evenings sat in the warm cabin talking endlessly.  To his surprise, he
+found that the old man was an indefatigable reader, but of not more
+than half a dozen books.  The Bible he knew with thoroughness, and upon
+it had built up theories of life which would have surprised the
+theologians.
+
+"Them Jews were like us," he would declare.  "They stole a country and
+drove the other people out.  Like us with the Injuns, I guess.  A dead
+Injun is the only kind of Injun I've got any use for.  Them Philistines
+was a kind of Injun, by all I make out."
+
+One story which he loved to discuss was the desire of Israel to have a
+king.  "What did they want a king for?" he would cry.  "They'd got on
+well enough without one, and they never had no luck after they'd got
+one.  They should have stuck to Samuel."  And then he would go on to
+recount all he knew about the wickedness of kings.  "They'd never been
+no good.  They just sucked the people's blood, that's what they did.
+Why, they wer'n't even soldiers, not nowadays--just dressed-up dolls.
+Some day the world would get rid of them, and the sooner the better, so
+said he.  A pretty thing indeed that decent folk should pay taxes to
+support such a rotten lot as they were."
+
+The one poet whom he knew was Burns.  He carried with him in the pocket
+of his ragged coat an old leather-bound copy of Burns, with a brass
+clasp, closely printed in blinding type upon a page nearly destitute of
+margins.  It was a tiny book, in size about three inches by two,
+published within a few years of the poet's death.  It bore signs of
+hard usage: the cover was stained and polished by the touch of hands
+that long since were dust; doubtless it had been carried in the pockets
+of a race of humble men, read in swift glimpses behind the plough, as
+like as not, within sight of the very hills the poet loved, or pored
+over by eager eyes round peat fires in solitary clachans.  It was safe
+to say that a book so humble had never known the touch of hands polite;
+its pages had been turned by clumsy fingers hardened with excessive
+toil, and the faces that had stooped above it were plain and homely
+faces, roughened with wind and weather.  To this forgotten race of men
+it had doubtless brought gaiety and hope, the brief vision of things
+lovely and eternal, and above all the message of that inward liberty
+which man never loses save by his own cowardice or folly.  From the
+soiled pages Jim Flanagan drew the same inspiration.  They breathed
+into him the pride of freedom, fed his fierce joy of independence,
+helped him, as they had helped ten thousand others, to walk upright in
+a world where an innumerable host of men bend their backs to the unjust
+yoke and learn to cringe and crouch.  As Jim recited the
+well-remembered verses in this lonely hut at night, his voice trembled,
+his eyes glowed, and all aspects of meanness and commonness fell from
+him, leaving something that was intrinsically fine and great.  That a
+man so crudely ignorant as Flanagan should have anything to teach a
+youth like Arthur appears absurd; yet so it was.  What that teaching
+was it would be difficult to state in words, but its effect was clear.
+By its quiet assertion of undeniable qualities where they might be
+least expected, a general sense of the worth of mankind was produced,
+an essential worth, which was wholly independent of outward
+circumstance.
+
+As time went on, Arthur discovered also that his life was not nearly so
+isolated as he had supposed.  Scattered along the shores of the lake
+were other men, like himself, engaged on a daring experiment of life.
+One or two were sullen, unapproachable, apparently afraid lest their
+dignity should be compromised by chance acquaintanceships, the kind of
+men who carry into a new world all that is socially most narrow and
+petty in the old.  But these were the exceptions; among the rest there
+was a real and kindly sense of community.  Many of them were persons
+interesting in themselves and in their histories.  There were ex-army
+officers, public-school and university men, even a musician--all, for
+some cause or other, fugitives from the vain strifes of civilised life.
+They never complained, they never thought of going back, they were all
+full of hope about the future.  They talked with buoyant faith of the
+day when Kootenay Lake would be as well known as Geneva or Lucerne, and
+when its shores, now clothed with darkling forests, would become one of
+the gardens of the world.  They pointed out how each year marked the
+growing invasion of the orchard on the forest.  And, whatever the hard
+tasks of their life, they were clearly in love with it, desired no
+better, and would not have exchanged it for anything that cities could
+have offered them.
+
+He found among these settlers a disposition toward mutual service,
+notable in itself, and unique in his experience.  A man thought nothing
+of giving a day's service to a neighbour, of loaning him a team, or
+helping him to build his house.  Being all engaged on the same tasks,
+each relied upon the other, expecting and assuming that the help given
+to-day would be loyally returned when his own occasion came.
+
+And, besides this, there was much mutual visiting, concerts, suppers,
+dances--a free and simple hospitality, without elaboration or pretence.
+The concerts might not have satisfied a Queen's Hall audience, and the
+dances were but feebly illumined with the grace of woman; but all was
+homely, honest, and sincere.  And then the walk back along the narrow
+trail, with the moon riding overhead, or beneath a roof of stars, each
+keenly bright, and the fresh lake-breeze moving through the forest in
+low-breathed symphonies--ah! this was life indeed!  Often and often, as
+he walked that trail at night, he opened his lungs to drink in the
+crystal air that seemed a draught of life itself, and he thought with
+commiseration of the herded life on city pavements, and thanked God for
+his deliverance.
+
+The spring came with melting snow and soft winds, and he began to
+realise some progress in his work.  When the new growth was cleared
+away, he discovered a few hundred apple-trees of five years' growth.
+
+"You're luckier than I thought," said Jim.  "They're Spitzenbergs.
+You'll get something from them this year, I guess."
+
+Then June came with a rush of heat and light.  A long procession of
+days followed, the sky exquisitely bright, the hills clad in living
+green, the lake sparkling like a floor of amethyst.  And then the
+winter once more, with its wonder of snow, and skies full of unearthly
+splendour.
+
+So two years passed, and at their close he saw the triumph of his
+labour.  The forest was pushed back by many acres; where the dense
+undergrowth had thrived, there spread the level fields, with long rows
+of budding trees; and the bog was a fertile garden.  He had built
+himself another house, more commodious than the first rude cabin.  Upon
+its walls hung the ranchman's usual pictures, coloured prints from
+magazines; there was also a goodly shelf of books, and the photographs
+of those he loved.  Here he sat and meditated in the long summer
+evenings.  From Vickars he had received many letters, keen, witty, sad;
+it seemed he was famous, after a London fashion, but his constant
+complaint was that no one really listened to his message.  Elizabeth
+had written him even more frequently, and each letter had strengthened
+the implicit bond between them.  Love-letters they could not be called,
+for love was rarely mentioned in them; but they were letters that only
+love could write--they exhaled the very perfume of her heart.  From his
+father and his sister he had heard not a word.  Latterly even his
+mother's letters had become irregular, and he sometimes thought he
+could discern in them an effort at concealment, as if she purposely
+avoided something which her whole nature urged her to say.
+
+He sat thus, thinking over all the past, upon a summer's evening, when
+he heard Jim's tread upon the wood-path.  Jim had been into Nelson upon
+some errand in the afternoon, and had hurried back, contrary to his
+custom, for there was some heavy work to be done upon the morrow.
+
+"Well, Jim, any news?"
+
+"Not as I know of.  But I've got you a paper.  It's the English _Daily
+Mail_.  You're always glad to see that."
+
+"All right, Jim.  Thank you.  I'll look at it to-morrow."
+
+Jim moved off to his own shack, and Arthur went into the house.  It was
+quite late, it seemed hardly worth while to light the lamp, and he was
+about to get into bed in the dark, when the white outline of the paper
+lying on the table attracted his eye.
+
+"I may as well look at that," he thought; "I'm not sleepy."
+
+He lit the lamp, and unfolded the paper.  His eye wandered casually
+over the crowded columns, finding little that was interesting.  Then,
+with a sudden chill of apprehension, his eye caught the name of
+Masterman.
+
+"The Affairs of the Amalgamated Brick Co.," the paragraph was headed.
+"It has been long suspected that the affairs of this company were not
+as prosperous as could be wished, but no serious complications were
+expected until the close of last week.  There were various unpleasant
+rumours on the Stock Exchange late on Friday afternoon, and the stock
+dropped rapidly.  On Monday morning it became known that serious frauds
+were charged against the company.  The nature of these charges is not
+yet ascertained, but we understand that warrants have been issued for
+the arrest of Archibold Masterman, the chairman of the company, and
+Elisha Scales, its secretary.  If the allegations made against the
+company are at all such as rumour represents them, very sensational
+developments may be anticipated."
+
+The blood rushed back into his heart as he read.  His very being was
+suspended.
+
+"My God!" he cried.  "I must go home at once!"
+
+And in that cry all the old loyalties awoke, and, chief of all, the
+son's loyalty to his father.
+
+
+
+
+PART THREE
+
+FATHER AND SON
+
+
+
+XVIII
+
+THE AMALGAMATED BRICK CO.
+
+The offices of the Amalgamated Brick Co. were situated within a
+stone's-throw of the Mansion House.  London throbbed and roared around
+them; on every side spread an intricate confusion of narrow and ancient
+streets, inhabited by a host of nomadic men, who camped in them for a
+few hours each day, filled them with clamour, and fled at nightfall.
+The invasion began with the earliest light; then might be seen the
+scouts of the advancing army, mere boys, whose fresh faces had not yet
+acquired the London pallor or lost the mischievous vivacity of boyhood;
+youths immaculately dressed in well-brushed common clothes;
+narrow-shouldered men in shabby overcoats; oldish men, who walked with
+eyes fixed upon the pavement, as if bowed with some unforgetable
+humiliation, and, here and there, women, some mere girls, treading
+briskly, others shawled and shapeless figures with battered bonnets,
+charwomen, office scrubbers, and the like, all passing in an endless
+stream, and swallowed up at last in these dim byways of the city.
+Later on came another class of men, wearing better clothes, but whose
+eyes were anxious; then well-fleshed and confident persons, who walked
+upright with an air of authority; last of all, the magnates, fur-coated
+and wearing diamond pins and studs, smoking cigars or cigarettes,
+arriving in cabs or carriages, who were received in these crowded
+offices with the silence which awaits the passage of kings.  With their
+advent began the real business of the day.  At their glance every pulse
+beat faster, every brain grew more alert, and the great wheel of
+business revolved with electric speed, humming, throbbing, tumultuous,
+till the very walls shook with its reverberations, and the whole city
+became clamorous as a cave into which a fierce sea thunders.  By noon
+the tide was at its height; at four o'clock the ebb began; with the
+earliest stars the invading host began the process of dispersal till,
+by the time midnight had arrived, Tadmor in the wilderness was not more
+silent or more solitary than this deserted city.
+
+For centuries this daily invasion had gone on, and who shall say what
+uncounted multitudes had fallen on the field of battle!  For centuries
+more it would go on, and always with the same history.  Here was
+achieved a perpetual immolation of mankind, a hopeless and unatoning
+sacrifice.  To this battlefield youth brought its energy, manhood its
+virtue and its strength, womanhood its humble patience.  To what
+delusive trumpet-music had they marched, beneath what visionary
+banners, with what far-off thrilling glimpses of golden heights which
+they would never scale!  To these thronged recruits in the regiments of
+Mammon, experience brought no caution, age no wisdom.  For the story
+was always the same, the issue unvarying: first the baseless hope of
+youth, then the long unfruitful patience of laborious manhood, lastly
+the miserable despair of age.  Happy those who fell early in the
+struggle; they had the consolation of a might-have-been whose absurdity
+was not detected, and they were spared the worst.  Most miserable those
+who lived on, until hope failed, each year became a new disability, and
+at last they found themselves superseded, thrust out by a new
+generation, discarded, and left alone with the spectres of want,
+sickness, and the workhouse.  A few survived, of course, and their
+histories, passed from lip to lip, became the stimulus for fresh hosts
+of foredoomed toilers.  By luck, by fraud, by adroit use of
+opportunity, by unscrupulous ability, by cruel and ruthless stratagem,
+these few rose, climbed upon a holocaust of victims into power, and
+became the battle lords of this inglorious field.  None saw in them a
+warning, multitudes offered them adulation; and they thus became new
+lures for ignorant ambition.  And so the endless martyrdom went on;
+ever fresh hosts clamouring to sacrifice flesh and brain upon these
+ignoble altars, with a fervour of fanaticism never equalled in the most
+sacred causes of freedom or religion.  Ah! not upon the snows of
+Russia, the plain of Waterloo, or the heights of Gettysburg are found
+the most dreadful battlefields of earth!  The bloodiest of all
+battlefields are in the heart of cities.
+
+Archibold Masterman was one of those who had risen, especially since
+the successful launching of the Amalgamated Brick Co.  He had become a
+personage sought for at civic dinners, known at clubs, and surrounded
+by a clamour of more or less sincere flattery.  From the windows of his
+office he could see the gray roof of the Mansion House, and he never
+looked that way without elation.  Why should he not reign there?  What
+was there to prevent him moving at the height of civic glory?  The
+kingdoms of the world--his world--were spread before him, and the glory
+of them, and he was eager to inherit them.  Lord Mayor of London,
+Member of Parliament for the city, knighthood, baronetcy--so ran his
+dream, and he knew that it was not a foolish dream.  Men less able than
+himself had won these prizes.  And he meant to have them in good time.
+The truly great period of his life was just beginning.  He had got the
+world beneath his feet at last, and he meant to keep it there.
+
+Extreme prosperity had had a softening influence upon the man; a harsh
+critic might have called it a disintegrating influence.  The mental
+force was not abated, the alertness of his eye was not dimmed; but he
+went with a looser rein.  He rose later, sat longer at the table, and
+had learned to rely upon subordinates.  His suspicion, that sixth sense
+of the man of business, was relaxed.  The strong opiate of
+self-sufficiency had begun to work in his veins.  He was the conscious
+conqueror, walking with uplifted head, and no longer closely watchful
+of the way he trod.
+
+With him Elisha Scales had risen too.  The clerk, with his mean face
+and crafty eyes, had proved himself indispensable.  Masterman's dislike
+for him remained, but use and contiguity had worn down much of his
+original prejudice.  He could not but admit his ability.  Beyond that,
+however, he did not care to go.  He knew him to be adroit, patient,
+obsequious, daring; but the inner springs of his character remained
+inscrutable.
+
+It was Scales who had really engineered the Brick Trust.  The purchase
+of the Leatham brick-yard had been but the first of a great number of
+similar transactions.  No sooner was the Amalgamated floated than it
+achieved a miraculous success.  There was a fortnight of frantic buying
+by the public; gold poured into the treasury; the financial papers,
+duly subsidised by copious advertisement, pushed the boom; and at the
+end of three months the name of Masterman was enrolled among the great
+magnates of modern commerce.  His portrait appeared in the journals.
+The story of his early struggles was adorned with legendary marvel.
+Due stress was laid upon his piety: was he not the deacon of a church,
+a man of strict morals, a man who might be safely trusted, a man of
+solid character?  And of all the baits that drew the public, perhaps
+this was the most successful.  The small investor rallied to him.
+Humble folk in remote religious communities learned his name, discussed
+his doings, and struggled for the chance to lay their savings at his
+feet.  If any word of warning reached them, it was disregarded.  Six
+per cent. is so much more attractive than four, that, when it is
+guaranteed by the piety and genius of a Masterman, the voice of
+prudence speaks in vain.
+
+A few months of secret campaigning, a month of deafening publicity, and
+behold the result--Scales flourishing in a house of new and expensive
+furniture, the possessor of a carriage; Masterman enthroned in spacious
+offices, from whose windows he beholds all the vanities of
+earth--sheriffship, mayoralty, knighthood, and the like--moving
+steadily towards him in a golden pageant.
+
+Has the reader ever seen a balloon of paper, with a tiny light burning
+in its centre, soar into the evening air?  It is a pretty spectacle.
+One wonders how so frail a thing can hold so perilous a force as flame.
+We watch with astonishment its little lamp borne aloft, carried hither
+and thither like a starry feather on the delicate tides of air, yet
+always moving higher.  Watch it long enough, and you will see something
+else.  Sooner or later there comes a flash of fire, a dim red spark,
+visible for an instant, and where is the balloon?  Its very fragments
+are undiscoverable, and it is seen no more.
+
+Masterman's balloon soared bravely in those first six months.  Then
+something happened which no sagacity could predict--a wind of war arose
+suddenly, and the lamp showed dangerous flickerings.
+
+When war happens to a nation it at once becomes the supreme interest.
+And this was no common war.  From insignificant beginnings, at which
+the nation smiled in proud contempt, it grew into a devastating
+struggle.  Troops were poured to the front, until the martial resources
+of the nation were exhausted.  There was a cry for volunteers; and city
+offices and warehouses were depleted by whole battalions of heroic
+youth.  All business was arrested, and sank into narrow channels.  The
+daily crash of bankruptcy filled the air.  And, since the last thing
+men do at such a time is to extend their premises and build houses, it
+came to pass that there was no demand for bricks.  The Brick Trust
+ruled the market; but, when there is no market, this appears a hollow
+boast.  And yet there were dividends that must be paid, for they were
+guaranteed; there was an appearance of prosperity which must be
+maintained at all costs.  There came at last a day when a chill
+apprehension began to spread through the offices of the Trust.  It was
+at first but a tiny cold wave, but it crept higher, for a whole sea lay
+behind it.  Masterman, sitting in his office, heard the lapping of the
+rising tide, and saw it carrying away the broken gauds of the pageant
+of which he had dreamed.
+
+"The war will end in a month!" he cried.  But it did not end.  "It will
+end in three months," he prophesied; "and then will come a marvellous
+prosperity."  But the prophecy proved false.  On lonely veldt and
+behind unassailable kopjes a daring and sullen foe held on.  "It looks
+as if it will go on for ever!" he exclaimed at last, in the bitterness
+of his heart.  And the day when he said that brought with it something
+the strong man had never known before--a sudden loosening of the bonds
+of all his vigour.  For weeks he had slept little; he had grown gaunt
+and nervous; and now there came this thrill of weakness, this collapse
+of force.  In the gray winter dawn he rose and dressed as usual, but
+his strong hands trembled, and his head swam.  A newsboy, racing past
+his house, shouted, "Another British defeat!"  That was the last
+stroke.  He sank helpless to the ground.  When he woke he was in bed.
+
+"I must go to the city!" he cried.
+
+"You cannot!" said the voice of Dr. Leet.  "If you don't obey my orders
+now, you will never go to the city again."
+
+"A million of money is at stake!" he groaned.
+
+"So is your life," said the doctor.
+
+He lay quiet a long time after that.  It was a new and terrible
+thought, and he found it hard to adjust his mind to it.  "His life"--he
+had always assumed that that at least was his own unforfeitable
+possession.  He had never known the moment when eager nerve and artery
+and brain-cell had not leapt to obey his will.  And now it seemed his
+whole house of life was in revolt.  His will, that iron captain-general
+of all these servile forces, was deposed.  Well, he simply would not
+die.  If he must obey the doctor, he must.  And, after all, to a man
+tired in brain and body this restfulness of soft pillows, this utter
+quietness and shaded light, was sweet.  Anything was better than that
+horrible thrill of weakness, that loosening of each intimate joint and
+muscle--anything!
+
+He turned his face from the light, and fell asleep.
+
+Toward evening he was told that Scales insisted on seeing him.  He
+would have seen him; but the doctor was present, and interposed his
+fiat.  The most that the doctor would allow was that Scales should send
+him a written message.
+
+The message came: "What are we to do?"
+
+It was accompanied by no explanation, but the words were ominous.  He
+made an effort to grasp their meaning, but it escaped him.
+
+"Do what you will," he wrote.
+
+Then the blind wave of stupor overwhelmed him again.  Why should he
+trouble?  It was all right--everything was all right.  It was a hard
+thing that a man who had worked all his life couldn't get one day's
+rest.  He wasn't going to worry.  Let Scales do the worrying; that was
+what he was paid for.  Everything was all right--it must be all right
+... and Scales was no fool.  So he fell asleep again, and the black
+night settled on the city, and he heard no more the voices wailing in
+the darkness, "Another British defeat!"
+
+If his eyes could have followed the clerk, he would have seen a face
+paler than his own, with puckered, blinking eyes, and jaw set in grim
+determination.  As Scales drew nearer to his own house, it was as
+though he smoothed out his face by some magic of dissimulation.
+Perhaps it was the mere spectacle of the house that turned the scale of
+destiny for him that night.  How could he give up that house?  It was
+the outward symbol of his social apotheosis.  He had bought it but a
+year ago.  And since then how much had he spent on it!  What delighted
+chafferings he had had with decorators and upholsterers!  There was the
+dining-room, all panelled in oak, with beautiful red walls, and a
+Turkey carpet; and the little library, with its bookcases--all
+mahogany; and the drawing-room, with its white stucco decorations, and
+its white wooden partitions, which every one admired; and the
+billiard-room, with its French windows opening on the little lawn; why,
+even the servants' bedrooms were done in white and gold!  There was
+never a completer house--every one had said so.  He had never grown
+tired of explaining its unique conveniences to his less fortunate
+friends; and on Thursday afternoons, when Mrs. Scales "received," she
+had usually closed the function by taking her more intimate
+acquaintances all over her house, never even omitting the kitchens.
+And he was to give this up?  He was to sink back again into a
+"semi-detached," with iron railings and a strip of garden, and rooms
+with cheap wall-papers?  And he was to sell his horse, which he had
+bought from an alderman, and get rid of that adorable victoria, in
+which he aired his greatness on Saturday afternoons before envious
+suburban eyes--and perhaps come back again to the indignity of cheap
+trams and 'buses?  Well, not if he knew it!  He knew a trick worth two
+of that.  Masterman had told him to do as he liked; and an evil spirit
+whispered at his ear as he went up the steps of the house, and told him
+quite distinctly what it was that he must do.
+
+Mrs. Scales met him in the hall, plump, smiling, robed in yellow satin;
+and somehow that yellow satin angered him like an insult.  He regarded
+it with distinct aversion.  He felt a rising wave of disgust against
+his wife, merely because she looked so cheerful and proud, while he
+endured secret tortures--she could wear yellow satin, while his mind
+wore crape.  That was like women--they had nothing to do but eat and
+drink and dress, while their men-folk were on the rack.  Talk about the
+fine discernment of women!  Why, they hadn't any!  You might live with
+a woman for years, and she would never guess what you, endured and
+suffered.  So he let his ill temper against his wife smoulder; for it
+is a habit common with persons of the Scales variety to treat a wife as
+a kind of lightning-rod, which conveniently receives the discharge of
+their superfluous wrath.
+
+This wrath accumulated violence in the course of an uncomfortable
+dinner.  The poor woman had but one theme of perennial interest--her
+house and her servants.
+
+"I've thought of a new improvement," she began joyously.  "What do you
+think of it?  I'm going to have a little conservatory opening from the
+library window.  The builders' men were here this afternoon, and they
+say it can be done quite easily, and won't cost more than about two
+hundred pounds."
+
+"Ah! that's like you!" he retorted, with a vicious snarl.  "Always
+planning and plotting to spend my money, aren't you?  Do you think I'm
+made of money?  Do you think I've nothing to do but pay for your whims?
+I'd have you know I'm master in this house!  And I'll have no builders'
+men coming here when I'm out!"
+
+"But Elisha, I thought you'd be pleased----"
+
+"Then you'd no business to think?  I won't have you doing things
+without consulting me!  No, I don't want any more dinner!  I've other
+things to think of besides conservatories!"
+
+And he flung off from the table in a rage, leaving behind him tears and
+consternation.
+
+"What's the matter with father?" asked young Benjamin.
+
+"I'm sure I don't know," she replied.
+
+"He's getting mighty ill tempered."
+
+But at that the instinctive woman's loyalty flew to his defence.
+
+"I expect he's worried.  Your father has so much to think of.
+Sometimes I think we were happier before we had all this money."
+
+"I don't," grinned the son.  "That's all nonsense, mother.  Money is
+about the only thing I know that's worth having in this world."
+
+With which admirable sentiment he took himself off to the
+billiard-room, where he remained till bed-time, smoking innumerable
+cigarettes, and playing a sullen game of pool.  He also helped himself
+somewhat plentifully to whiskey, for what was the use of money if you
+couldn't get all the drink you wanted with it?  The creed that money
+was the one thing in the world best worth having had not found a
+conspicuous justification in Benjamin Scales.  He was not an amiable
+youth, as we have already seen; under no circumstances could he have
+achieved manly virtues; but, whereas poverty might have kept him in a
+straight course by the mere pressure of deprivation, money had set wide
+for him the gateway of easy vices and destructive pleasures.
+
+The dark night sped on; and, in the little library with the mahogany
+bookshelves, Scales devised his scheme.  It was by no means novel; it
+had often been achieved before, and sometimes with success; it was
+simply the last throw of the commercial gambler.  Dividends must be
+paid; and, when the entire credit of a great concern depends upon their
+instant payment, why not pay them out of capital?  It was a risk, of
+course--the kind of risk which a hundred petty thieves run every day
+when they back horses with money stolen from their master's till, in
+the firm belief that they can pay it back before suspicion is aroused.
+Scales was not constitutionally a brave man; he would have fled from
+physical peril promptly and without the least sense of shame; but one
+form of courage he had, the courage of the rat that fights desperately
+when it is at bay.  He saw with terrifying vividness what stood at the
+end of the road he proposed to travel--a judge in a red gown, with a
+face of inimitable sternness, warders in blue coats with brass buttons,
+and the doors of a prison.  Nevertheless, he resolved to take the risk.
+Masterman had taken the same risk years before in that matter of the
+bogus cheque.  And he was proud of the transaction; he had boasted of
+it many times; it had been the beginning of all his greatness.
+Providence had removed Masterman from the area of the present crisis;
+and perhaps it was as well, for since his rise into notoriety he had
+shown himself more and more eager to obey the safe traditions of
+society.  But, in the mind of the clerk, that early and successful
+piece of trickery was not forgotten, and he used it now for his own
+justification.  Masterman, at all events, would have no right to
+grumble at the repetition of his own trick, but upon a far wider scale
+and for a greater prize.
+
+And, besides, the risk was more apparent than real.  This long run of
+ill luck to the British army in South Africa was something that went
+beyond the natural chances of the game.  It must end; and, when it
+ended, it would be suddenly.  A single sweeping victory, and the tide
+of prosperity would roll back.  Hadn't some pious person said that it
+was always darkest before the dawn?  If that were true, the dawn was
+close at hand--it was more than probable, it was inevitable.  And what
+a fool he would be if, after holding on to the Amalgamated through all
+these weeks of darkness, he let it sink just when the first gleam of
+gold was in the sky!
+
+So Scales argued with himself through that long night in the solitary
+library.  In such arguments it is inclination that supplies the final
+bias.  When a man argues with himself upon a question of right and
+wrong, it is never right that wins.
+
+And during that same long night Masterman slept peacefully, ignorant of
+the Tragic Angel that stooped above his pillow.  If the Angel could
+have spoken, he would have told the story thus.  "Years ago a man did
+wrong, and was not punished for it.  He was elated by his immunity, and
+boasted of it.  He succeeded in life, as men count success.  He climbed
+to a place of honour, from which he saw a new world opening at his
+feet.  Then he would have been glad to forget that early deed of wrong.
+He did forget it, as far as he could.  But there is a general memory in
+the world which forgets nothing.  It goes about with a searchlight,
+raking over the gutters of the past, and making discoveries.  This
+sleepless memory found the thing which he was now anxious to forget;
+gave it to another, who turned it round and round like a precious
+talisman; and, last of all, this other used the talisman both for the
+ruin of himself and of the man who had shown him how to use it.  And
+this other man did not know that the talisman had lost its magic.
+Still less did he suspect that it was a fatal and malignant gift.  Who
+are we to suppose that we can divorce the present from the past?  Words
+live, deeds live--they live eternally.  We cannot lose them at will.
+They are seeds which are carried far away upon the wind, but they
+always find some soil in which they spring up.  They are dead, we say.
+Thou fool, nothing is dead which man has ever said, thought, or done.
+It only waits its hour, and it always springs up at last."
+
+A month later the financial journals remarked with ardent approbation
+that in spite of the wide depression of trade, produced by this
+calamitous war, the Brick Trust had paid its full dividends.  Such a
+circumstance reflected great credit upon the management of the Trust,
+especially on its president, Mr. Masterman, whose financial genius had
+thus received an extraordinary vindication.  If the investor had ever
+had the least doubt of the stability of this great commercial venture,
+his doubts should be set at rest for ever by this remarkable
+achievement.  They regretted to add that Mr. Masterman had been
+seriously ill, as the result of his indefatigable labours on behalf of
+the Trust.  He was now, however, quite himself again, and those who had
+recently seen him reported him in the best of health.
+
+This announcement created a new boom in the stock of the Trust.  At the
+same time news came of what appeared to be the first wave of final
+triumph in South Africa.  Bells were rung, rockets soared, and shouting
+multitudes filled every street.  Masterman, from his rooms at Brighton,
+saw the passing of the shouting crowd, and the tumult went to his head
+like wine.
+
+"We are past the worst!" he cried.  "I feel years younger.  To-morrow I
+will wire for Scales, and get into harness again."
+
+And, as he spoke, the face kindled with its old fire of vigour, his
+eyes flashed, and his form had its old erectness.
+
+He also believed himself to have won another battle, and the pageant of
+his ambitions once more moved steadfastly before him.
+
+
+
+
+XIX
+
+THE FEAR
+
+Another month had passed, and Masterman was back in his office.
+Outwardly he appeared little changed by his illness.  The superb frame
+had suffered a shock, but there was no sign of vital injury.  The eye
+was as keen as ever, the face as firm in outline, the expression of the
+lips as masterful.
+
+Nevertheless, there were changes of a more subtle character which were
+obvious to a critical observer.  He had hours of languor when he would
+sit with folded hands, dreamily gazing out of the window, entirely
+careless of business.  His temper had grown fitful and capricious.
+There was no longer the old steady dominance; there was swift
+assertion, gusty, violent energy, soon spent, and followed by periods
+of sullen inaction.  His clerks approached him with trepidation, and
+often fled from him in dismay.  They never knew what to expect.
+Sometimes they were received with brutal and unjust reproaches for
+faults they had not committed, or for faults so slight that a generous
+mind would have disregarded them.  At other times they were welcomed
+with familiarity, treated as equals, and perhaps invited to listen to
+long boastful talks which had neither purpose nor coherence.  And then,
+for a few days, as though some obstruction in the brain were suddenly
+dissolved, another man would appear, firm, sagacious, capable of swift
+decision, a human driving force of incomparable energy--the Masterman
+whose marvellous efficiency was the legend of the city.
+
+One feature of his conduct in these days was very marked--he avoided
+Scales.  He had to meet him every day, but such intercourse as existed
+was approached uneasily, hurried through, and dismissed with visible
+relief.  The truth was, that at the back of his mind lay a great fear
+which he dared not even formulate to himself.  There was a question
+always on his lips which he ached to ask, yet he dared not ask it:
+"What was it Scales had done to save the credit of the Trust?"  It
+appears incredible that he should not have satisfied his curiosity.  A
+single hour of scrutiny would have put him in possession of the truth.
+But it was precisely because he already guessed too accurately what
+that truth was, that he refused to hear it uttered.  It is easy enough
+to walk with boldness in the dark, ghost-haunted room, if you
+undoubtedly believe there is no ghost.  But if you do--if you have
+heard the rattling chain and stealthy sigh, and have felt your blood
+stiffen at the moving shadow--then what?  The easiest plan is the
+child's old game of make-believe.  You will invent some fantastic
+reason why you should look no closer.  And that is what Masterman was
+doing.  He played at make-believe, haunted by the single terror that
+the ghost was real.
+
+He would sometimes skirt the edge of the thought that was consuming
+him, begin a sentence boldly, and then let it trail off into a kind of
+hurried whisper, or turn it to another end.
+
+"All going well?" he would begin interrogatively, as Scales entered his
+private room.  "Ah! there are some things I wanted to talk over with
+you, Scales--important things, you know."
+
+For a moment his eyes would search the crafty face of the clerk, and
+then he would add, "But it doesn't matter, just now.  I'm busy
+to-day--very busy.  Another time will do."
+
+"I'm at your service whenever you like," Scales would say, with a kind
+of half-defiant obsequiousness.
+
+"No, no; not now.  I'm too busy to-day.  Another time."  And then he
+would rustle the papers on his desk, with a great pretence of business,
+and drop his gaze, and go on muttering aimlessly, "Another time,
+Scales, when I'm a little stronger, you know."
+
+When Scales left the room he would sit quiet for a long time, and gaze
+out of the window, his eyes always falling at last on the gray roof of
+the Mansion House.
+
+He never looked in that direction without receiving a new impulse to
+his ambition.  From the silent doors of that great house he saw himself
+issuing forth triumphant, the conqueror of circumstance, seated in a
+golden carriage drawn by noble horses, with the applauding crowd
+thronging at his wheels.  He adorned his triumph with new features day
+by day, wearied his invention to create them, and dwelt upon them with
+a childish ardour of delight.  There were even moments when they ceased
+to be imaginary; they had the glow and substance of reality, and he
+could hear the beating of the horses' hoofs upon the asphalt, the crash
+of music, and the raucous shouting of the crowd.
+
+Then a cold, gray cloud obscured the vision, a gust of cold air set him
+shivering, and he was alone once more with his silent fear.
+
+In his own home his conduct was marked by the same contradictions.  He
+would arrive from the city at nightfall, enter the house in a fierce
+bustle of energy, talking eagerly, laughing loudly; and then, as like
+as not, in the midst of dinner, would relapse into a heavy silence.
+The chief subject of his talk on these occasions, was the things he
+meant to do with his increasing wealth.  He had engaged a firm of
+architects to plan a country house for him, although the site was not
+yet found nor the estate bought.  He would spend hours over the details
+of this house.  It would be such a house as was never built before.  It
+should have a marble swimming-pool, electric ovens, and a vast
+palm-garden.  For its decoration he would import marble fireplaces from
+Italian palaces, tapestries from France, oak carving from Holland.  Of
+course it would have a picture-gallery--every gentleman had that.  He
+would employ an expert to collect the pictures.  And of course there
+would be a great library, and vast stables, and a private golf-course,
+and sheets of ornamental water, and extensive gardens.
+
+"Have you done anything more about the new house?" Helen would ask, as
+she fluttered up to him with a perfunctory kiss.
+
+"Not to-day.  It's been a busy day in the city.  But we'll have a look
+at the plans presently."
+
+And then the plans would be unrolled, and the details once more
+discussed, and new features added.
+
+"I'm tired of this old house," Helen would cry, with pretty petulance.
+"I don't see the good of being rich if you've got to live here."
+
+"And you won't live here much longer.  Wait till the war is over, and
+then you shall take your place with the greatest ladies of the land."
+
+And then Helen would blush with pleasure, her light mind inflated with
+pride, her imagination picturing a bright butterfly flight through all
+kinds of glittering scenes.  Mrs. Masterman, silent as ever, took no
+part in these conversations.  They were to her a source of pain; but to
+Helen they were the breath of life.  In the future she pictured to
+herself her mother had no part.  But she saw herself with singular
+distinctness moving on a high plane of circumstance and pleasure, and
+she made it her aim to foster her father's vanity as a means of
+gratifying her own.
+
+"Father's easy enough to manage," she often told herself.  And yet
+there were many occasions when her boast was rudely falsified.  Did she
+never notice the sudden shadow that fell across her father's face?  Did
+she never ask why it was he would angrily sweep the plans of his new
+house aside, crying that, maybe, he would never want them after all,
+and would stalk off in gloomy silence to his own room, where he sat
+alone until long after the midnight hour had struck?  No; she never
+guessed the cause of these explosions.  But her mother did, and
+trembled.
+
+And amid all these aberrations, perhaps the most curious was that his
+mind appeared to have received a new bias toward religion.
+
+There was a certain Sunday evening when Mrs. Masterman surprised him,
+reading in his office.  The house was very still, and he was reading
+aloud in a grave and solemn voice.
+
+He looked up as she entered, and, instead of frowning on her intrusion,
+motioned her to silence, and went on reading.
+
+"Listen to this," he said.  "I thought I knew the Bible, but here's
+something I've never met before.  The man that wrote this was a wise
+fellow.
+
+
+"_'What hath pride profited us?  Or what good hath riches with our
+vaunting brought us?  All those things are passed away like a shadow,
+and as a host that hasted by; and as a ship that passeth over the waves
+of the water, which, when it is gone by, the trace thereof cannot be
+found, neither the pathway of the keel in the waves; or, as when a bird
+hath flown through the air, there is no token of her way to be found,
+but the light air being beaten with the stroke of her wings, and parted
+with the violent noise and motion of them, or passed through, and
+therein afterwards no sign where she went is to be found; or like as,
+when an arrow is shot at a mark, it parteth the air, which immediately
+cometh together again, so that a man cannot know where it went through:
+even so we in like manner, as soon as we were born, began to draw to
+our end.'_
+
+
+"There's a lot of truth in that," he remarked.  "As soon as we are born
+we begin to draw near to our end.  That's mighty true.  It kind of
+makes a man feel small, though, as if nothing mattered.  It makes a man
+feel as though God laughed at him.  And it makes me feel, too, as if it
+would be rather a good thing to be done with it all.  If I could be a
+boy again I wouldn't say.  I believe I should think it worth while
+being kicked and beaten again, just to feel as I did then.  But, by the
+time a man is going on for sixty, he's about tired of it all.  Doesn't
+seem worth while doing anything then, except to get into bed and go to
+sleep."
+
+He paused a moment, as if to swallow some choking bitterness, and then
+went on again in the same low tone:
+
+"There's few men that ever had a harder time than I did when I was a
+boy.  You never knew my father?  No, and a good job too.  There's no
+question he was a brute.  But somehow, when I heard that he was dead,
+it came to me what it all meant.  He'd never had a fair chance, never
+had his real share in life, never had enough of anything, except,
+maybe, drink, and of that he'd had too much.  Well, that day when I
+pictured him lying there all white and quiet, I kind of understood what
+the drinking meant too.  He was in a rage against life, wanted to
+forget the way he'd been treated, and that's why he drank.  I reckon
+that's why most men drink, just to forget.  And I said to myself,
+'Well, I don't want to forget.  I'll remember everything the world did
+to him, and I'll pay it back, blow for blow, and bruise for bruise.
+I'll get my fingers into the world's throat before I've done, and I'll
+get what I want.'  And I've done it too.  And now the queer thing is,
+it doesn't somehow seem worth while.  Things you've wanted all your
+life don't seem what you thought 'em when once you've got them.  Seems
+as if you'd paid too dear for them, and been cheated after all.  Your
+good time is when you want 'em, and can't get them, and, when you've
+got them, you wonder what made you want 'em.  That's what I meant when
+I said it seemed as though God laughed at us.  I believe I'd laugh
+myself if I could see it far enough off.  All the fuss and bother, and
+rampaging up and down, and then a quiet old fellow puts his hand on
+your shoulder, and says, 'What hath pride profited us?' and goes on to
+tell you all you've done don't amount to a row of pins, and you know
+it's true, too.  That's the thing that hurts--it's true, and you know
+it, and feel like the worst kind of fool."
+
+He spoke musingly, in a voice of extraordinary softness and sad
+deliberation.  His wife listened wonderingly.  The passage he had read,
+whose sombre wisdom contradicted every purpose of his own conduct, the
+impression it produced of the vanity of life, and his own entire
+gravity, tenderness, and sincerity, as he read the solemn words,
+wrought in her complete amazement.  In all her long knowledge of her
+husband she had never known him in this mood.  A woman whose habitual
+thoughts moved on a more earthly level would have found the mood
+ominous; she would have shuddered in every fibre of her affection, and
+have imagined the slow beating of the wings of death upon the quiet
+air.  But, for her, all that was ominous in the scene was eclipsed by
+an overmastering sense of spiritual gratitude.  Through long years she
+had prayed for such an hour, and prayed against hope.  Had it come at
+last, this hour of wisdom, this impartation of a higher light, this
+sudden softening and sweetening of a nature whose harsh earthiness had
+been to her a cause of unspeakable distress?
+
+"O Archie," she cried, "how glad I am to have you speak like that!  Let
+the world go, Archie dear, before it lets you go.  Let us go from this
+hateful life, you and I.  If we could only be poor again, and live in
+some quiet place, we could be happy yet.  You've never got any
+happiness yet out of all your money that I can see, and you never will.
+Can't we start again, dear, and won't you forgive Arthur, and have him
+back?"
+
+She was on her knees beside him, her head bowed, or she would have seen
+the swift hardening of his face.
+
+"Don't be a fool!" he said harshly.
+
+"Is it folly?" she cried.
+
+"Yes, the silliest of folly.  A man can't turn back if he would, and I
+don't really want to.  He must go on to the end of things."
+
+"Ah! the end--what will that be, Archie?"
+
+"God knows.  But there's one thing I know, and that is, that a man
+doesn't fight all his life to get something, just to throw it away upon
+a whim.  I'd think shame of myself if I didn't fight my battle out to
+the last stroke.  You and me have never agreed, and we don't agree now."
+
+"If you'd only forgive Arthur," she persisted.
+
+"I never forgive fools.  I reckon God doesn't do that either.  He
+forgives sinners, but not fools.  Arthur's a fool!"
+
+He closed the Book with a bang, and rose.  His face was dark and
+troubled.  His wife left the room without another word.  From the
+church across the road there came the soft music of the evening hymn.
+He listened, with dilated eyes, keeping time to the familiar rhythm
+with extended finger.  He breathed a long sigh as it ceased.  "It's a
+queer thing to think about, that in fifty years' time not one of those
+folk will be alive," he reflected.  "All gone like--how did the words
+run?--like a ship on the water that leaves no trace.  I wonder where
+Scales will be?  Nowhere near where I am, I hope.  Scales is a beast!"
+
+And then once more The Fear returned.  He saw it like a dark-winged
+phantom, pale-faced, threatening, gliding up the road, standing at his
+gate.
+
+It stood there a long time, and he wondered if the people coming out of
+church could see it too.  The wings trailed the ground, and it wore a
+black hood.  The face beneath the hood he could not see, but he could
+hear the words softly uttered, "What hath pride profited us?  Or what
+good hath riches with our vaunting brought us?"  And the evening hymn,
+which had ceased, seemed to begin again, attenuated like a whisper from
+some organ in the air, a frail, slow, unearthly melody:
+
+  Swift to its close ebbs out life's little day;
+  Earth's joys grow dim, its glories pass away;
+  Change and decay in all around I see...
+
+
+Just then a door clanged, Helen's light, laughing voice was heard in
+the hall, and the whole phantom sunk out of sight.  He took hold of
+gross reality again, and saw his path, hard and lucid like a line of
+burnished gold, leading on to a bright shining ridge, on which arose
+the long colonnades of a great house, round which a multitude of people
+buzzed, and held out golden wreaths to him.
+
+In the reaction of emotion which ensued there came to him a new
+virility of purpose.  To come so near those golden heights and miss
+them was a thing impossible.  Once let him scale them, stand visibly
+triumphant--and then?  Well, it would be time enough then to meditate
+upon the deep sad words of this old philosophic thinker which had so
+strangely moved him.
+
+Nevertheless, this softened mood did not wholly leave him all this
+Sabbath evening.  The memory of his father had evoked also the memory
+of his son.  For the first time a faint suspicion crossed his mind
+that, after all, Arthur might have chosen a form of life which promised
+greater happiness than his own.  Through all the many months of absence
+he had rarely mentioned Arthur's name; if he had done so, it had been
+with a frowning brow.  Now, to the surprise of both mother and
+daughter, he asked for Arthur's letters, took them with him into the
+office, and there read them quietly.
+
+"If he only had not gone away!" he said.
+
+And with that thought his sense of injury returned.  It was a hard
+thing for a father to condone the implied condemnation of that flight.
+And the only rehabilitation of his pride lay in some visible success
+which even Arthur must respect.  There was a lot of good that might be
+done with money.  It was expected nowadays of rich men that they should
+be public benefactors.  Here was an untried field which he might
+conquer; and what a fine irony it would be if Arthur should return to
+England some day to find the name of the father he had despised
+mentioned with general respect as a public benefactor!  It was strange
+that he had not thought of that before.  It would afford him a new
+interest in life, and be an exquisite revenge.
+
+He rose next morning full of this new plan.  He had already done more
+than his fair share in subscribing to various charities, but from this
+hour he began to develop what appeared a reckless generosity.  In
+reality it was the entire reverse of reckless; it was governed by the
+most deliberate strategy.  He had no idea of not letting his left hand
+know what his right hand gave.  He gave only in such a way as to
+attract immediate attention.  His greatest act was a subscription of
+£10,000 to a patriotic fund for the equipment of army hospitals at the
+seat of war.  His generosity was much applauded; the example of his
+public-spiritedness was quoted far and wide; it was even mentioned in a
+sermon preached in St. Paul's Cathedral, and in the "religious press"
+there were many pleasing homilies on the wise use of money.  From these
+new forms of homage his pride drew fresh strength.  He moved with a
+firmer step, was conscious of increased physical vigour, and became
+again the Masterman of the old days, eagle-eyed, daring, despotic.
+
+"You're giving away a lot of money," said one of his friends at the
+club to him one day.  "I suppose it's part of your policy," he added
+ironically.
+
+"A man ought to give in times like this," he answered.
+
+"I suppose so," said his friend.  "There never was a time when money
+could buy so much.  Probably because most of us have so little of it."
+
+He did not appreciate the gibe.  But in the bottom of his heart he knew
+what men called his generosity was, after all, just what his candid
+friend had called it--policy.  And it was good policy too.  It gave
+fresh prestige to the Trust.  It was a good investment.  To be remarked
+for public spirit and generosity led to all sorts of things in England.
+England might make pretence to many virtuous and fine ideals, but
+there, as in every other country, money could buy anything.  It must
+not be done openly, of course.  But it was done all the same, only a
+little less flagrantly than in those franker days when men sold their
+votes, and it was said that members of Parliament looked beneath their
+dinner-plates for Bank of England notes before they decided what their
+views were on questions of disputed legislation.
+
+And at length he had his reward.  There came one day to his office a
+large official envelope, containing cautious inquiries, whether, under
+certain circumstances, which were deftly indicated, he would be
+prepared to accept a knighthood.  There was, of course, a grave
+reference to his public services, especially in his large gifts to
+patriotic causes, which had no doubt stimulated the generosity of the
+public, and had attracted the attention and gratitude of the Government.
+
+He sat still for a long time with his eyes fixed upon the letter.  So
+it had come at last, the long-expected, the unavoidable, the supreme
+prize of his existence!  No: not the supreme; this was but the
+beginning.  He meant to have more, much more than this.
+
+He resolved that he would say not a word about it, except by way of
+proud hint to his family.  He would surprise them with it; and he
+pictured himself announcing the news.  The final letter which conferred
+the dignity would come by the morning mail most probably; he would
+distinguish it at once by the large official envelope; but he would be
+in no haste to open it.  He would do what children do with sweetmeats,
+keep the best to the last.  And then, just when Helen kissed him as he
+left the house, and said "Good-bye, father!" he would turn round with a
+grave smile, and say, "Sir Archibold Masterman, if you please."  And
+she would say, "What new joke is this, father?"  And he would answer
+with a calm voice, as though he spoke of a matter of the least possible
+importance, "It's not a joke ... read that!"  And his wife would stand
+behind Helen, trembling a little; and, far away in Canada, Arthur would
+get the news, and would be sorry he had not valued such a father....
+It was a delightful vision, and he thrilled to it with the ardour of a
+boy.
+
+He replied at once, expressing his appreciation and his gratitude.
+Then he fell to wondering how long it took to get the matter settled.
+There were no doubt forms and preliminaries, and all that sort of
+thing, but surely a week would be long enough.  A week passed, a
+month--still no answer came.  He tortured himself with fears of what
+might have happened.  Had he expressed himself foolishly in his reply,
+shown himself too eager perhaps, or had his letter miscarried?
+
+He would go to Brighton.  This strain of waiting was intolerable.  No,
+he would go to Paris.  The man who was to collect the oak and marbles
+for his projected country house lived there, and it would divert his
+thoughts to meet him.
+
+He went by the afternoon express from Charing Cross.  As he entered his
+compartment, he noticed a neatly dressed inconspicuous man who appeared
+to be observing him closely.  The man looked at him strangely, passed
+by him and entered the same train.  He saw him again upon the boat.
+When he reached the Gare du Nord the same man passed by him again, just
+as he was ordering a carriage, and disappeared into the crowd.
+
+"Some pressman, I suppose.  Well, he'll know me again," he said to
+himself, and thought no more about it.
+
+The next day he met the dealer he had come to see.  He proved to be a
+most interesting fellow, shrewd, adroit, and a master in the art of
+persuasion.  One thing led to another, and a couple of days passed in
+the inspection of the stock.  Each night he came back quite tired out
+to the hotel.  Each morning he began his quest for art treasures with
+renewed ardour.  He had no other occupation.  He had left no address at
+the office, and no mail reached him.  It was a new and delightful
+method of taking a holiday, and he wondered he had not thought of it
+before.
+
+As he left the dealer's one day for lunch, he saw the same neatly
+dressed inconspicuous man crossing the street just ahead of him.  The
+man turned back, stopped at a shop-window, and, as he passed, looked
+him squarely in the face.  When he reached his hotel that night the
+same man was sitting quietly reading in the foyer.  This time the man
+did not look at him.
+
+On the fourth day he had completed his business with the dealer.  The
+longed-for letter must have come by this time.  He resolved to return
+to London by the nine o'clock train next morning.
+
+In the evening, as he was packing his valise, there was a knock at the
+bedroom door.  He opened it, and found the man standing outside.
+
+"You are Mr. Masterman, I believe?"
+
+"Yes, my name is Masterman."
+
+"I want a word with you, if you please."
+
+"You must be quick then.  I'm busy--I leave to-morrow morning for
+London."
+
+"I also leave to-morrow morning.  We might travel together."
+
+"What do you mean, sir?  I don't know you, and I don't in the least
+desire your company."
+
+"Very few people do," said the man, with a quiet smile.  There was
+something in that smile indefinitely stealthy, hostile, menacing; it
+sent an icy thrill through the heart and curdled the marrow in the
+bones.  "Mr. Masterman," the man went on, in a low, firm voice, "I'm
+sorry to cause you personal inconvenience.  You will understand that I
+have a duty to perform.  You must go with me, sir."
+
+"Why, what ... what ... do you mean you arrest me?"
+
+"That is my duty, sir.  There are grave charges against you, which I
+for one shall be glad if you can disprove, for I've heard of lots of
+good you've done.  Mr. Scales was arrested two days ago.  I take it
+you'll come quietly."
+
+"Scales arrested?  For what, pray?"
+
+"The charge is fraud.  I am not at liberty to say more."
+
+"Ah!  And so----"  But speech failed him.  He appeared to be losing his
+grip upon reality as he had done on that Sunday evening when he saw The
+Fear....  There was a sound of organ music, rolling in soft surges,
+faint, solemn, sad--"Swift to its close ebbs out life's little day."
+
+And a figure with dark wings that trailed the dust, and hooded head,
+very silent.  The hood slowly lifted, and he saw the face at last--a
+face with a quiet smile, authoritative, inscrutable, indefinitely
+hostile.  He had seen it at Charing Cross; it had followed him through
+the streets of Paris; he saw it now, a kind of white patch on the
+darkness, the hard whiteness of flame which nothing could quench.
+
+Then the phantasm faded out, as it had done before.  The horrible truth
+went crashing through his brain.  He knew now why his letter had not
+been answered....  So they had heard things ... and never, never now
+would he be Sir Archibold Masterman.  They had heard things ... and,
+while he waited for honour, they were plotting his dishonour.  God! how
+they must have laughed!  It was the supreme irony.
+
+A wave of bitter laughter began to rise in his own heart; but something
+warned him, if he laughed just then, he would go mad.
+
+He clutched at his leaping nerves as a man might clutch the reins of a
+runaway horse.  All at once he attained complete sad composure.  He was
+walking on a bleak high tableland among the stars, from which he looked
+down, and saw the world and all that was therein as a very little
+thing.  Honour, dishonour, wealth, poverty--all were alike trifles, the
+blowing up and down of a little dust....  "_As a ship that passeth over
+the waves of the water, which, when it is gone by, the trace thereof
+cannot be found._"
+
+He was quite calm now.  He turned toward the man, who still stood with
+his inscrutable quiet smile, unavoidable as destiny, watching him
+narrowly.
+
+"I will go with you," he said.  "I give you my word, I will go quietly."
+
+
+
+
+XX
+
+THE RETURN
+
+Through the soft summer seas the great ship moved into the mouth of the
+English Channel.  The early dawn had revealed the faint mist-folded
+promontories of the Cornish coast well to westward.  Red-sailed
+fishing-boats hung like a flight of birds upon the lucid floors of
+ocean; coasting steamers snorted past with an air of insular
+importance; here and there a white-sailed brig glimmered in the early
+sunlight; and, coming after the long loneliness of open seas, these
+signs of life impressed the mind like the stir and tumult of a city.
+Plymouth would be reached by noon.
+
+Letters, telegrams, and papers had already come aboard with the
+pilot--the first friendly overtures of a land slowly rising out of the
+thinning morning bank.  Men and women, with laughing eyes and gladdened
+faces, stood in little groups reading their correspondence, exchanging
+jests, commenting upon scraps of news which they had gathered from the
+papers.  It seemed the tide of war had turned at last.  It was to a
+madly joyous land the great ship made its slow approach.  Suddenly upon
+the deck the band clashed with the animating music of the National
+Anthem.  The English stood uncovered as the first familiar bar vibrated
+on the quiet air; the Americans watched them with a half-sympathetic
+amusement; even the steerage passengers, foreigners for the most part,
+without part or lot in British victories, smiled cheerfully.  So joyous
+was the hour that private grief appeared a contradiction, an
+impertinence.
+
+There was neither telegram nor letter for Arthur, and he had been
+unable to secure a paper.  To him England extended no welcome.
+
+During the long trans-continental journey, and the longer ocean voyage,
+he had beaten out all the conditions of his situation with an iteration
+that had finally exhausted the possibilities of vehement emotion.  It
+is happily not within the power of the human organism to feel and
+suffer intensely except for short periods; agony begets lethargy.  It
+is one of the mercies of pain that it thus dies of its own excess, that
+in its intensity it becomes coma.  Arthur had reached the point of
+moral coma.  The red-hot iron had ploughed through his soul, but it had
+also seared it into brief insensibility.
+
+In his first extremity of consternation it had seemed a thing
+impossible to survive the horror that possessed him.  The image of his
+father rose before him, sad-browed, accusing, spent with mortal
+struggle, pale with immortal defeat--it travelled with him like a face
+painted in the air.  It evoked in him an anguish of commiseration, and
+even of remorse.  He remembered every slighting thought that he had
+cherished, as men recollect wrongs done to the dead, magnifying errors
+into cruelties, faults into crimes.  With a sudden burning of the blood
+he had realised how singular and strong is that bond of flesh which
+unites the parent to the child, how sacred and how incapable of all
+annulment.  At the root of his own life lay a force stronger than
+justice, stronger than religion, a thing bare, irrational,
+primeval--the awful sanctity of kinship.  And he knew in that moment
+that, for good or ill, his place was beside his father.  There he must
+needs stand, even though it were at the gallows' foot.  Whatever burden
+crushed those strong shoulders he must share, even though the load were
+shameful.  From that obligation there was no discharge.
+
+From New York he had cabled both to his father and to Bundy, but no
+reply had come from either.  He had had to wait two days for the
+sailing of a ship, the first of which was a day of infinite misery,
+aimless wandering, languid revisitation of familiar scenes.  On the
+second day he met Horner.  He found the little artist re-established in
+his studio, and from him received a boisterous welcome.
+
+"Have you seen my book?" he cried.
+
+"What book?"
+
+"Well, I like that.  Didn't you write it for me?  And don't you
+recollect we were to share profits?  Look at those"--and he pushed
+toward him an immense bundle of press-cuttings.
+
+From these it appeared that the book had achieved notoriety, if not
+fame.
+
+"You didn't let me know where you went, and you've never written me, or
+I would have posted these things to you.  Ripping, aren't they?"
+
+"They appear excellent."
+
+"And there's something else that's still better.  Read that!"
+
+It was a letter bearing the well-known office address of Mr. Wilbur M.
+Legion, and enclosing a substantial cheque.
+
+"It only came yesterday.  I guess we'll cash it.  Half of it is yours,
+you know, and if you're going to England it may come in handy."
+
+Arthur looked up at that, fixing his eyes on Horner's cheerful face
+with a long, searching gaze.
+
+Did Horner know the miserable truth about his father?  But of course he
+did.  It was being shouted round the world.  And this reference to the
+money being handy on a voyage to England was no doubt the little
+artist's indirect, and indeed delicate, way of communicating his
+knowledge.
+
+"O Horner!" he cried.  "I am very miserable!"  And he bowed his head
+upon his hands, and wept the first tears he had shed since the blow had
+fallen on him.
+
+There was a kindly arm round his shoulders in a moment.  "Why, look
+'ere, what's the matter?"  And before he knew it he was telling Horner
+everything.
+
+"Well," said Horner, when he finished.  "I guess things aren't as bad
+as you think.  They never are, you know."
+
+"They couldn't be much worse."
+
+"Oh yes, they could," he went on philosophically.  "The jury hasn't
+convicted yet, and perhaps they won't.  But that's neither here nor
+there.  The thing you've got to do is to buck up.  And look 'ere, about
+this cheque--you take it all.  I don't want it.  I'm in funds.  And,
+besides, there's more to come."
+
+"No, I can't do that."
+
+"Yes, you can, and you will.  Call the half of it a loan, if you like,
+but you've got to take it.  You know my motto, 'Englishmen ought to
+help each other,' and you've just got to let me help you."
+
+Once before in his extremity Horner had saved him from starvation; now
+he saved him from despair.  The little artist was not a person of
+exacting virtues, he made no pretence to religion, and would have
+appeared a strange sheep indeed in the folds of the elect; but he
+possessed a simple faith in kindness not always found among persons of
+immaculate behaviour, and, what is more, he practised his belief.  He
+filled the studio with the echoes of his cheerful laughter, waited on
+Arthur with a watchful tenderness that was almost womanly, refused
+encouragement to grief, and finally insisted on a good dinner at
+Delmonico's, in the pious hope which is common to all Englishmen that
+the ugliest troubles of the brain are erased by due attention to the
+stomach.  It was Horner who insisted that this should be no
+second-class voyage on a slow boat; it was he who engaged a berth on a
+famous liner, drove with Arthur to the dock, and waved a cheerful hand
+to him as the great ship swung off upon the gray water.  When the true
+apocalyptic books, which record the unknown kindnesses of man, are
+opened, it is not impossible that the name of this little hare-brained
+artist may stand higher than the name of kings and conquerors--perhaps
+also than the names of certain saints, who in their earthly days were
+less remarkable for warm sympathies than for icy propriety, and a
+strict attention to the main chance.
+
+And now the voyage was done; the white shaft of the Eddystone lay
+astern, and the exquisite green bosom of Mount Edgecumbe swelled from
+the sun-flecked water.  The passengers streamed down into the tender,
+and a few minutes later he stood in the long Custom House sheds of
+Plymouth.
+
+Here at last he got a daily paper, and the first thing that met his eye
+was a long account of the Masterman trial.
+
+At the same moment a telegraph-boy went shouting through the crowd,
+"Masterman!  Any one of the name of Masterman?"
+
+He took the telegram in silence, conscious of many eyes suddenly turned
+toward him.  It was from Bundy, and read, "Will meet you at
+Paddington."  He was eager to take immediate refuge in the railway
+carriage.  He was conscious that even the telegraph-boy was looking at
+him curiously.  Suddenly he saw moving toward him through the crowd
+another figure that he thought he recognized--O joy! it was Vickars!
+
+"Vickars!"
+
+"Yes, I learned from Bundy by what boat you'd come.  I've a compartment
+reserved for you.  Let us get into it at once."
+
+"O Vickars! that we should meet like this!"
+
+"Come, come, my fellow--no hysterics.  You were always brave.  Be brave
+now."
+
+He put his arm through Arthur's, and moved through the crowd with erect
+head.  They were scarcely seated in the carriage when the train began
+to move.
+
+"And now," said Vickars, "we can talk.  In the first place, let me ask
+you how much do you know of this unhappy business?"
+
+"Nothing but what the papers tell me.  I see the trial is to-day."
+
+"This is the third day.  By the time we reach London the verdict may be
+expected."
+
+Arthur turned eagerly, with a flushed face, to the pile of papers he
+had purchased.
+
+"I wouldn't trouble over those just now, if I were you," said Vickars.
+"Suppose you just let me tell you all about it.  That is what I came
+for, you know."
+
+He spoke with such entire calmness that it might have been supposed
+that what he had to say was of no importance.  And this note of calm
+communicated itself to Arthur, as he meant it should.  He knew that the
+great thing just now was to invigorate the boy's strength, and this
+must be done by the suppression of active sympathy.
+
+"Very well," said Arthur, "I am ready."
+
+And then Vickars told his story, to the soft thudding accompaniment of
+the rushing wheels.
+
+The substance of the story was this.  The strong point made by the
+defence was that Masterman had not been aware of the frauds committed
+by Scales.  There was no doubt whatever that Scales would be convicted;
+but, since the trial began, a great deal of public sympathy had gone
+out to Masterman.  It was proved that he had been too ill to have any
+knowledge of what Scales was doing.  This might be called criminal
+negligence; it would depend largely on what view the judge took.  It
+was proved that he had not absconded, as was at first supposed; his
+flight to Paris was an accident.  From the hour of his arrest, those
+who were most inclined to judge him harshly could not but admit a
+certain magnanimity in his behaviour.  He had sacrificed his entire
+private fortune to his creditors, and as for the Brick Trust, it was
+very likely indeed that it would weather the gale.  The near close of
+the war was creating a boom in all business.  And then, amid the
+general joyousness, there was perhaps a tendency to lenient judgment;
+even jurymen were not wholly insensitive to such a tendency.
+
+"Then you don't think father will be convicted?"
+
+"I don't think so.  But of course he will be ruined.  You know what I
+have thought of your father's business methods, and my opinion is
+unchanged.  But I have learned more charitable judgments than I used to
+have.  I see now that men may be criminals without the least suspicion
+that they are acting criminally.  When a man has done wrong for a long
+course of years, he gets to believe that his wrong is right--the light
+that is in him becomes darkness.  He simply steers his life by an
+untrue compass, and no one is more amazed than himself when shipwreck
+happens.  That is your father's case, I honestly believe.  He is the
+victim of the force that he has helped to create."
+
+"But you say he has not been dishonest in this affair?"
+
+"No, not explicitly--perhaps not implicitly.  That is something which
+no one will ever know.  The fault lies deeper.  It lies in greed.  A
+man wants more than he has a just right to have, is not content with
+honest returns for honest work, becomes unscrupulous, comes to believe
+that business is warfare, in which the spoils are for the victor, and
+by the time he reaches this point his sense of right and wrong is
+fatally confused.  He does not really know what is his and what is
+another's.  And the worst of it is that the world in which he moves is
+no wiser.  He finds himself applauded for acts which in a juster system
+of society would cover him with shame.  Ah, Arthur! 'beware of
+covetousness'--no deeper word than that was ever uttered."
+
+He spoke with a certain sad quietness, very different from his old
+clamant vehemence.  Arthur could not but notice it, and he found
+himself looking with a kind of wonder on the face of his friend.  The
+face seemed to have taken on a new aspect.  It was paler and thinner,
+with an increased loftiness of brow; there were new lines round the
+mouth, deeper shadows underneath the eyes, and the lock of hair that
+fell across the forehead was almost white; but the most striking thing
+was that a certain subtle fire that once lit the face had disappeared.
+The keen prophetic look was still there, but it was veiled, dulled, no
+longer edged with expectancy; a prophet's face, but no more the face of
+a prophet who saw the morning.  And in the slow, quiet voice there was
+an accent of wearied hope, almost of despair.
+
+Vickars caught the look of wonder on Arthur's face, and said, "Ah!  I
+see you are surprised that I should speak so tolerantly.  I used to say
+that I could make the world a paradise if I were sole despot of the
+world for a single year, didn't I?
+
+"And now?"
+
+"Now I see that I spoke foolishly.  The world is not so easily
+transformed."
+
+"Is it you that are transformed?"
+
+"Yes.  I used to hate men for being evil; and the only weapon I had to
+attack them with was hatred.  I have come to see that hatred is the
+wrong weapon.  You must love men, if you are to change them.  You must
+love even the vile, and those most bitterly opposed to you.  You cannot
+even understand them unless you love them.  I hated your father once,
+because I did not understand the kind of temptations he endured.  Now I
+have come to understand these temptations, and I find it in my heart to
+pity him."
+
+"O Vickars!" cried Arthur.  "You are teaching me a hard lesson.  I also
+have hated....  I have never made allowances.  I have indulged
+contempt, I have behaved like the worst kind of prig.  But do you know,
+since this happened ... well, how can I put it? ... I have seen my
+father in a new light.  And now it seems to me a wonderful thing that
+he is as good as he is."
+
+"Yes, that is precisely true, and not only of your father, but of all
+men.  The truly divine thing about man is that he is always better than
+you might expect him to be.  It is not the depravity of human nature
+that is its outstanding feature--it is the goodness.  And you find the
+goodness in the very heart of the depravity, like the pearl in the
+oyster.  But I'm preaching--it's an old habit of mine: forgive me."
+
+"It's a sermon I much needed," said Arthur humbly.
+
+"We all need it, and those who think themselves the best need it most."
+And then, with a touch of the old whimsical humour, he added, "Whenever
+you hear a man preaching very earnestly against a vice, you may be sure
+he has it.  I am a case in point."
+
+After that there was little said for a long time.  Arthur sat gazing
+from the window at the flying scroll of country, the dear desirable
+green land, with its ancient parks, clear shallow streams, trim
+cottages, level lawns, and wealth of flowers--all so different from
+that majestic, half-barbaric vastness which he had left.  The tears
+filled his eyes, as they have filled the eyes of many a returning
+exile.  Why did men ever leave it, this land which in every detail was
+a finished picture, created by the art of centuries?  Where else could
+they expect to find such "haunts of ancient peace," dreamy nooks, gray
+towers and spires, leisurely, modest happiness, infinite, calm
+security?  And, as he looked, there came to him again the old thought
+that the only life worth living was one remote from cities.  Had his
+father lived here, earning modest competence, how different the story!
+It was the city that had snared him, killed the best in him, infected
+him with its fierce, unnatural greed.  O damnable, dreadful London! how
+many hast thou slain, thou Harlot of the Nations, with thy skirts full
+of blood!  And yet men went on building new and even worse Londons,
+undeterred by past warnings--New York, with its roaring tides of greed
+and clang of gold; Chicago, with its naked barbarism, the pure seas
+evermore polluted, the fair landscapes blackened, the skies stained
+with pestilence.  O! it was horrible!  If he could but save his father
+from this--it might not yet be too late.  And there sprang up in his
+mind that pathetic fallacy, so often asserted by religion, but so
+seldom true, that all suffering purifies; that from wounded pride and
+overthrown ambition there must needs come the nobler heart: whereas
+every one knows that suffering more often has its issue in bitter
+stoicism, and injured pride clamours for revenge, and there is no more
+deadly force than defeated ambition, which draws a new strength from
+rage.
+
+It was a hard problem for a youth of twenty-three to grapple: no wonder
+that he failed.
+
+But that desirable green land spoke its message all the same.  "_Man
+walketh in a vain show and disquieteth himself in vain_"--so ran the
+message.  Even Vickars had found that message true.  He had beaten
+himself weary against the strong bastions of the world, and in vain.
+Had he also learned the difficult lesson that the most one man can do
+is to live his own life the best way he can, satisfied that nothing
+really perishes in the vast sum of things, content if he can add his
+insignificant unit of effort to a growing righteousness?  Perhaps he
+had.  Perhaps also that was the only real lesson life had to teach us.
+
+He was aroused from his reverie by the hand of Vickars on his shoulder.
+
+"My dear fellow," he said, "there's something else I have to say to
+you, something I find it very difficult to say."
+
+"About my father?"
+
+"No; I have told you all there is to tell.  Believe me, I have kept
+nothing back."
+
+"What then?"
+
+"Have you thought of what this calamity has meant for others beside
+your father?  Have you thought what effect it might have upon your
+mother?"
+
+"She is not ill?"
+
+"No," said Vickars solemnly, "she is not ill.  She is ill no longer.
+She is at rest."
+
+"O Vickars!--not dead?"
+
+"Let us use a better word--at rest.  She is where she has wished to be
+these many weary years."
+
+"And I did not know it.  O mother!--mother!"
+
+Vickars turned his face away from that sacred grief.  After a few
+moments he said, "Can you bear that I should tell you about it?"
+
+"Yes.  Tell me."
+
+"I think she was never the same after you left, Arthur.  I told you she
+came to see us, didn't I?  After that first visit she came often.  She
+honoured us with her confidence.  Little by little we learned her
+story--the story of a saintly heart at war with circumstance.  I
+believe the one supreme force that enabled her to live was the purpose
+to redeem you from the kind of life that threatened you.  She summed
+herself up in that purpose.  When it was once achieved, her hold on
+life gradually relaxed.  She had no wish to live longer, composed
+herself for the grave, and spoke cheerfully of her departure.  Let this
+be your great comfort, my dear boy--she was absolutely sure of you, of
+your ability, I mean, to live the high life she had always coveted for
+you.  Her joy in dying was that you were safe."
+
+"When ... when did it happen?"
+
+"On the day your father was arrested.  She never knew that, God be
+thanked.  She went quite quietly, without pain.  She simply slept, and
+woke--somewhere else."
+
+"O my poor father!"
+
+"Yes.  It is right you should think of him.  All his life fell at one
+blow.  There is a sweetness in your grief--you had been the one
+happiness of her closing years; but think of the bitterness that was in
+his."
+
+"Why was I not told?" he cried fiercely.
+
+"You had enough to bear.  We knew you would come home, and we waited."
+
+"But you terrify me.  How much more are you keeping back?  Is Elizabeth
+safe?  Is there any other cup that I must drink?"
+
+"Hush! hush!  I give you my word I have told you everything.  Don't
+make it hard for me, Arthur.  It sounds a poor thing to say that I have
+acted for the best, but it is the only thing left to say."
+
+"Forgive me.  I know you have."
+
+So that inner voice which had told him that he would see his mother's
+face no more had spoken truly.  How vividly he recalled that night of
+moonlight, that earnest pleading voice, that solemn farewell!  But, as
+the anguish of the shock subsided, he found nothing left but softened
+thought, and the beginnings of a sad pathetic gratitude.  She had never
+known the worst, for which he, too, could say, "God be thanked!"  One
+significant phrase of Vickars vibrated through his mind like a chord of
+music--"she composed herself for the grave."  He could see the tired
+hands meekly folded, the threads of life dropping one by one from the
+weary fingers, a holy softness on her face, the first wave of the
+Eternal peace rippling round the heart.  That was not death--no, mere
+rest.  And there came to him, too, like a sudden revelation, a thought
+which he was never to forget, the divine essential sacrifice in the
+lives of all good women.  To live not only for others but in others, to
+toil and be forgotten, to be content that something fashioned from her
+own mind and flesh by prayer and tears and humble renunciation would
+live when she was gone, a flower drawing strength and loveliness from
+her own buried life--that was woman's lot, a thing divine as the Cross
+itself, and like the Cross, the expression of the eternal sacrifice of
+self.
+
+"God help me to be worthy of such a sacrifice," he prayed.  "But there
+never yet lived a man who was worthy of what a mother does for him.
+God help me to remember, and to see in all women something holy, for
+her dear sake."
+
+The train was rapidly nearing Paddington.  The blue sky was tinged with
+smoky grayness, the green fields were discoloured, and long rows of
+mean, shabby houses took the place of white cottages under hanging
+woods.
+
+"And now, pull yourself together," Vickars said.  "God help you in the
+next few hours."
+
+"I think He will," said Arthur simply.
+
+"I forgot to tell you, Bundy expects you to stay with him.  He has a
+kind of palace somewhere in Kensington, I believe."
+
+"I don't think I can do that."
+
+"No, I don't think I would.  You should be with your father to-night."
+
+"If..." and the rest he dared not utter.
+
+"You mustn't think of that.  I feel morally sure that he will be
+acquitted.  And then he will want you badly.  You understand?"
+
+"Yes.  I understand."
+
+The train glided into Paddington.  Bundy saw him at once as he stepped
+from the train.  His honest face was flushed, his eyes bright with
+excitement.
+
+"I have a carriage ready!" he cried.  "Be quick!"
+
+"Where are we going?"
+
+"To the Old Bailey.  The jury are now considering their verdict.  If we
+drive fast, we shall be just in time."
+
+
+
+
+XXI
+
+THE VERDICT
+
+The carriage rolled out of Paddington into the familiar London streets.
+The gaiety of summer clothed the city.  High white clouds sailed in a
+sea of blue, houses were gay with window flowers, women in bright
+clothing, themselves like flowers, gave colour to the streets.  In
+Oxford Street flags were flying, the signals of a recent victory in
+Africa.  There was an indescribable sense of resurrection in the air,
+as if not alone the earth, but the hearts of men and women had won
+release from some deep grave of fear.  Arthur watched the scene with
+dull, unseeing eyes; and to his morbid sensitiveness it seemed as
+though London laughed in mockery of his grief.
+
+Vickars sat beside him in silence; Bundy watched the two anxiously, his
+eyes full of tears.  He wished to say something comforting; and from
+time to time made some casual remark, but uttered it hesitatingly, with
+an apologetic smile.  It was precisely like the action of a good
+friendly dog, who lays his warm head on his master's unresponsive hand,
+and watches him with wistful eyes, delicately fearful of intrusion on a
+grief he cannot comprehend.  It was evident, however, that Bundy had
+something which he really wished to say, and at last it came.
+
+"You'll be wondering, after what I said to you in New York, why I
+haven't helped your father?"
+
+"No.  I've never thought about it, except to know you would be as good
+as your word."
+
+"And so I would have been.  But----"
+
+"You needn't explain.  There is too much love between us for that."
+
+"But I must.  And I would rather do it at once and get it over.  Your
+father refused all help.  You, know his pride, and he's prouder now
+than ever he was.  One might almost suppose it pleased him to stand
+alone, to fight with his back to the wall, to defy the world to do its
+worst on him.  And I believe that is what he really does feel."
+
+"I think I can understand."
+
+"Then you'll understand why I could not help him, why no one could.  I
+offered him anything he liked to ask, and this is what he said: 'No,
+Bundy; I've brewed the cup, and I'll drink it.  I don't want any sugar
+in it.  No one shall ever say that Archibold Masterman was a coward.'
+That was what he said to me, and he said it like a fallen emperor.  It
+was foolish, but there was something great in it too.  I felt that it
+was great."
+
+"I think so too."
+
+"It was great."  The phrase was a portrait--vital, indubitable,
+convincing.  During all these miserable days and nights Arthur had
+laboured to fashion some portrait of his father.  He had seen him bent,
+shame-stricken, prematurely aged; had imagined him leaning on his young
+strength for succour, acknowledging his errors, voluble in explanation,
+perhaps fierce in accusation of those who had failed him or betrayed
+him; had, in fact, seen him in every attitude but the real one; and
+now, as though a curtain lifted, he saw his father painted at a touch,
+with an instinctive penetration, an absolute veracity.  He was a
+fighter, and would fight to the last.  His pride fed upon defeat.
+Calamity had given him nerves of steel.  He would drink the cup that he
+had brewed, and drink it with a smile.  "No sugar"--that phrase said
+everything.  Pity, sympathy, help, consolation--he was above them,
+beyond them, indifferent to them; a man who bared his breast to the
+flight of arrows, thrust his hand in the flame without a shudder,
+challenged the thunderbolt, upheld while the flame consumed him by a
+scorn more potent than his anguish.  Yes, it was great--a Promethean
+greatness, which defies the heart-eating vulture.  He might have known
+so much, if he had thought about it.  In a sense, he had always known
+it, for he had always, even as a boy, felt the element of greatness in
+his father.  But now, for the first time, he really measured it, and
+his heart quailed before it, foreseeing elements in this imminent
+meeting with his father which he had not so much as guessed.
+
+They had driven fast.  The carriage passed rapidly by the old Church of
+St. Sepulchre, and under the walls of Newgate, stopping at last at the
+mean, insignificant doors of the Old Bailey.
+
+The pavements were thronged.  From the court a great crowd was pouring
+out.  And already, from the neighbouring newspaper offices, men and
+boys were racing breathlessly, shouting "Verdict!"  Above the clamour
+of the street the shrill cry rose, "_Verdict!  Verdict!_"
+
+Bundy leapt from the carriage, and plunged into the throng.  He came
+back a moment later, waving an evening paper.
+
+"What is it?"
+
+"Scales five years; Masterman acquitted!"
+
+"Thank God!"
+
+And then the tension broke.  Arthur found himself sobbing, with the arm
+of Vickars round his neck.
+
+"Take me to my father at once," he said.  "I wish to go home with him."
+
+"Very well," said Bundy.  "Wait here till I find him."
+
+The crowd rapidly thinned, till, in a few moments, where a roaring
+torrent of life had run, but an insignificant ripple flowed and eddied.
+The tragic bubble, so long watched by thousands of eager eyes, had
+burst; it was a thing of the past, to be speedily forgotten.  The
+carriage moved unimpeded now to the doors of the court.  A few
+stragglers still hung around, in the hope of seeing once more the
+protagonists in the finished drama.
+
+A long black van with a grated door at the back drew up against the
+curb.  Two policemen came out of the court-house, looked warily up and
+down the street, and disappeared again.  The man who drove the van
+nodded to them, and went on reading his evening paper.
+
+The policemen reappeared, with a man walking between them.  The man's
+head was bowed, his coat-collar turned up, his hat drawn down over his
+eyes.
+
+Arthur had a brief glimpse of a face yellow as wax, a pair of shifty,
+bloodshot eyes, and he shuddered.  It was Scales.  The door of the van
+closed, and, through the barred window, that yellow, awful face looked
+out, in a last glimpse at liberty.  A long, terrible look, gathering up
+and flashing to the memory things that would be seen no more,
+unforgetable things that would become the torture of sleep and dreams,
+little things, such as sunlight flashing on a pool of water, sparrows
+in the gutter, a broken flower lying in the road, a girl's languorous
+face turned toward her lover, a beggar gazing into the window of a
+cook-shop--and then the lids fell upon the bloodshot eyes, and the van
+rolled away.
+
+"And that might have been my father," thought Arthur.  And with the
+thought came a pang of pity for the man in the black van.  Not a good
+man, not even a lovable man; without grace, without charm, inherently
+mean-natured--yet, were he a thousandfold worse than he was, to be
+pitied as a creature going to the torture.  And, after all, who should
+judge even a Scales with justice, who declare how far he was a victim
+of the evil system which had inflamed his avarice--the victim, too,
+perhaps of some potency of evil in his own blood, some ghostly hand
+stretched out of the illimitable past, from whose predestined clutch he
+could not escape?  Ah, God! who should judge?
+
+And now at last he saw him--his father.  Archibold Masterman stood in
+the doorway of the court-house.  He came down the steps with a firm
+tread, looking up and down the street with a calm, defiant glance, his
+lips compressed in scornful challenge.  Yet scorn could not conceal the
+ravage wrought in him by his misfortunes.  The face had lost its
+colour, it was drawn and haggard, and the hair was nearly white.  He
+was talking with Bundy, and he smiled as he talked.  He drew near the
+waiting carriage, opened the door, and stepped in.
+
+"Father!"
+
+"Ah, Arthur!"--no other word.
+
+There was a hard grip of the hand, a sudden heat that flushed the
+haggard face, and then iron-cold composure.
+
+"Won't you come to my house, Masterman?  If only for to-night," pleaded
+Bundy.
+
+"No; I want to go home....  To such a home as I've got," he added
+bitterly.
+
+"Well, God bless you, my friend!" said Bundy softly.
+
+"I'm not asking anything of God that I know of, and you needn't ask
+anything for me.  I reckon I can look after myself.  Tell the driver,
+Eagle House, Highbourne Gardens."
+
+And the carriage moved off.
+
+They reached the house, and entered it in silence.  Masterman went at
+once to his room--the room in which his wife had died--and remained
+there.  What memories, what remorses met him there, who can say?
+Arthur, passing that closed door at midnight, could hear his father
+walking up and down like a caged lion.  He stood listening to that
+slow, continuous footfall; but he dared not knock upon the door.  He
+went downstairs again, knowing sleep impossible, and sat in the
+deserted dining-room, still pursued by that inevitable footfall.  A
+dreadful thought possessed his mind--his father might be contemplating
+suicide.  When, for an instant, the footfall ceased the sweat of fear
+stood upon his forehead and his flesh crept.  When it commenced again
+he drew a long breath of relief.  So the brief summer night passed,
+sleepless for both father and son, and at last, through the unshuttered
+window, the first ray of dawn stole in.
+
+The house appeared both deserted and dismantled.  The pictures and much
+of the furniture had disappeared.  Instead of the array of smiling
+servants, a single sour old woman occupied the kitchen.  From her,
+Arthur learned that the pictures and the more valuable furniture had
+been sold at some auction rooms in the city; and that Helen had left
+the house upon the day of her mother's funeral, and had not returned.
+Did she know where she had gone?  To some friend--so she said.  But no
+one knew.
+
+The father and son met at breakfast next morning.  It was a miserable
+meal, ill-cooked and coarsely served--very different from the generous
+luxury of other days.  The cloth was stained and torn, the china
+broken, the food wretched.  Masterman appeared to notice none of these
+things.  He drank the straw-coloured tea and ate the burned toast with
+complete indifference.  He seemed indifferent even to the presence of
+his son.
+
+When the meal was over, he said, with a mocking abruptness, "So you've
+come home to pity me, I suppose?  Well, you and me have got to have an
+explanation.  As well now as later."
+
+"I came home to help you, father--if I could."
+
+"Ah! did you?" he sneered.  "Well, let me tell you I want no man's pity
+and no man's help.  You think I'm done for, don't you?  So does
+everybody.  But I'm not.  The world has cheated me, but I'm going to
+get even with the world.  I'm going to get my revenge.  I've years of
+work in me--years of work--and I've a dozen schemes for success."
+
+And then he began to talk in a loud, scornful, hectoring voice.
+Failure?  Only fools talked of failure, and they failed themselves
+because they were fools.  He was going to start again.  He would start
+that very day.  No sensible man would think the worse of him for what
+had happened.  There were scores of men in the city who had come much
+nearer a prison than he had; and what were they now?  They were rich,
+honoured, respected.  They had succeeded, and no one reminded them of
+past misfortunes.  The very men who had tried to ruin them were now
+licking their boots.  Well, he'd have the world licking his boots, too,
+before he died.  Only he'd kick their lying faces in when the time
+came, that's what he'd do.  He'd teach them.  He'd let them know what
+kind of man Archibold Masterman was.
+
+There was much more of the same kind, a loud outrageous monologue, to
+which Arthur listened with a sinking heart.  It was obviously useless
+to interrupt or interfere.  It was the fierce outcry of a man in
+torment, the immedicable torment of an injured pride.  And, as Arthur
+looked upon that coldly furious face, he began to suspect, what was
+indeed the truth, that his father's mind hung upon the verge of madness.
+
+And this impression was confirmed when, without warning, the gust of
+rage ceased, and was replaced by a pathetic weak humility.
+
+"I somehow don't feel well this morning.  I didn't sleep last night.
+Perhaps I'd better wait a day or two and get my strength built up.  O
+Arthur!  I've had lots to try me.  I've had a hard life, with very
+little in it but toil and trouble.  And I'm a man that's had sorrows.
+Your mother's dead.  They buried her while I was in gaol.  They
+wouldn't give me bail at first.  Did I tell you that?  When they let me
+out on bail, she'd gone.  They'd buried her in Highbourne Cemetery.
+They showed me her grave.  And Helen wasn't pleased with me.  I did
+everything I could to please the girl.  And yet, when my trouble came,
+she flew at me like a cat.  And she's gone away too--I don't know
+where.  I reckon she thinks me a poor kind of father.  Well--well--I'm
+a man that's had sorrows.  And I suppose you'll be going away too?  Eh?"
+
+"Father, father, you know I won't go away.  I love you, and you used to
+love me.  Don't you love me still?"
+
+"Well, I don't know, Arthur.  I don't know that I love any one.  It
+doesn't seem much good loving people, does it?  They always go away.
+Well--well----"
+
+And then he relapsed into a gloomy silence, from which nothing could
+arouse him.  So he sat for hours, gazing out of window, until he fell
+asleep in his chair.
+
+This scene was but a sample of many similar scenes.  Sometimes he would
+rouse himself, dress, and go down into the city, full of all kinds of
+schemes to rehabilitate his fortunes.  From these excursions he would
+return late at night, weary, but full of impossible hopes.  He would
+try the Stock Exchange.  That was where fortunes were made.  Hard work
+didn't pay; it was the gambler who got both the luck and the money.  He
+had had a tip from some one who knew; such and such a stock was bound
+to rise.  And then, with pen and paper, he would work out his illusory
+profits, his hands trembling, his face glowing, and reach the most
+surprising and incredible conclusions.
+
+"If I only had the money!" he would cry.  "I would buy upon a margin.
+Bruce and Whitson would be proud to do business for me, for old times'
+sake.  Masterman isn't forgotten in the city, I can tell you.  Not by a
+long chalk.  All I want is a chance, just a little money to begin with."
+
+"I have a hundred pounds, father," Arthur replied to one of these
+appeals.  "You can have that."
+
+"A hundred pounds!  Yes, that would be enough."  And then, with a
+sudden flare of the old pride, he exclaimed, "No, no.  That wouldn't do
+at all.  I'm not sunk so low as to be a pensioner upon my children.
+I'll get what I want out of the world yet, and I'll get it by myself.
+I'm not very well yet, but wait till I get my nerve back, and I'll show
+you.  Don't you be afraid about me.  I'm playing a waiting game, and
+I'm going to win--you mind that!"
+
+So a month passed, marked by tragic incalculable alternations of temper
+in his father.  No one came near the house.  Bundy had called twice,
+but Masterman had refused to see him.  The church people appeared to
+have forgotten his existence.  When the Sundays came, Masterman drew
+down the blinds, and sat alone in his office.  If Arthur left the house
+it was but for the briefest absence.  He would go round to Lonsdale
+Road, exchange a few words with Vickars, taste a raptured moment with
+Elizabeth, and return in haste and often in fear.  For he could not
+calculate his father's moods, he did not know what he might be tempted
+to do, and he dared not leave him solitary.
+
+And yet, all the time, Masterman's mind was slowly recovering its
+poise.  His anger still burned, but it was now with smouldering rather
+than with active flame.  His boastfulness declined.  There were
+moments, not only of humility, but of extreme gentleness, like the
+gentleness of a sick child.  They were but moments, often followed by
+gusts of bitter speech.  In the bitter moments Arthur was to him the
+prodigal son who had deserted him; in the tender moments the only human
+creature on whose love he might repose.  It was Arthur's lot to listen
+in silence to a hundred hurting comments on his conduct, uttered with
+sardonic scorn, and all the talent for invective which a disordered
+brain and wounded heart could contrive.  And then, just when he was
+goaded almost beyond endurance, the mood would change, the black squall
+of rage would pass, and an inimitable softness, like the softness of a
+rain-washed sky, succeed it.
+
+"I begin to think I'm a fool," he said once, after one of these
+explosions.  "Well, you must forgive me.  I'm a new kind of Job, and,
+like Job, I speak foolishly.  I never could make out why they called
+Job patient.  The thing I admire in Job is that he wasn't patient.  He
+let himself rip.  He cursed himself tired.  Well, that's like me.  I've
+got to do it, or burst."
+
+"But Job trusted God through it all, father.  Can't you?"
+
+"Did he?  Well, if he did at first, he didn't in the middle, any way.
+And I'm in the middle of the mess.  And, besides, I don't see what
+God's got to do with it.  As I understand it, a man's got to go through
+with things to the end, and the only satisfaction he'll get out of it
+is that he hasn't squealed."
+
+It was a poor enough philosophy no doubt, but there was no denying the
+tonic virtue in it.  And perhaps it was the only kind of medicine for
+this mind diseased, as Arthur came to see.  For a nature of such
+stubborn fibre the commonplaces of religion had no efficacy.  And with
+that stubbornness there was allied a certain indomitable honesty, which
+perceived their essential falsity.  Let it stand to Masterman's credit
+that he was unwilling to blame God for his own misdoings, or to ask for
+a release to which he knew he had no right.  He would bear his own
+burden, simply because, in the long run, that was what all men had to
+do, religion notwithstanding.  And, whereas the attempt to shift his
+burden upon God would have fed his weakness, the very effort to bear it
+alone increased his strength.
+
+One evening, when the gentler mood was on him, he drew from Arthur his
+story of his own doings since the day he left London.  Up to this time
+he had not manifested the least interest; it was a subject he had
+purposely avoided.  When Arthur described the life upon the ranch, he
+had many questions to ask.
+
+"Then you worked with your hands, did you?"
+
+"Of course, father.  No day labourer ever worked harder."
+
+"And you liked it?"
+
+"Yes, I liked it.  It was hard enough at first; but I soon got used to
+that, and I liked it."
+
+"Well, I wouldn't have believed it if you hadn't told me.  It seems
+sort of queer when you come to think about it."
+
+"What's queer about it?"
+
+"Why, this.  I never meant that you should do anything of that kind,
+schemed to avoid it--sent you to Oxford, made a gentleman of you, as
+the saying is; and why did I do it?  Because I'd had a hard life, and
+didn't want you to have it.  And here you go and do just what I did at
+your age--work like a common labourer.  Seems a kind of destiny in it,
+as if it had to be."
+
+"Then destiny has been kind, father, for I have never been so truly
+happy as at Kootenay.  I would a thousand times rather work with my
+hands, and eat the fruit of my labour, than get the softest job a city
+could offer me."
+
+"Don't you get thinking that living in a city is a soft job, for it
+isn't.  But I know what you mean.  There's a kind of satisfaction in
+working out of doors with your hands; that's what you mean, isn't it?
+Well, I used to feel that way--once.  I can mind how I used to whistle
+at my work, and had a jest for my mates, and got more real pleasure out
+of a pot of ale and a plate of bread-and-cheese than I've ever had
+since, in fine living....  I don't know but what that was the happiest
+time of my life, after all; though of course I didn't think so then.  I
+can mind the little house I lived in, and the patch of garden.  I'd be
+working in that garden by five o'clock on a summer morning, and again
+late at night, after work.  Seems to me, as I look back, that in those
+days I hadn't got a real care.  It's a queer thing to think about.
+Makes you feel as if life had fooled you after all.  But I reckon
+that's about what life is for most of us--kind of game of blind hookey.
+Well, I've lost the game, that's evident; and it seems as if you'd won
+it."
+
+It was a curious confession from such a man.  Arthur recollected that
+Bundy had said much the same thing.  He also had spoken of a little
+house with mignonette under the window, with its unforgetable memories
+of content and peace, and had summed up his life in one little bit of
+dearly bought wisdom--"We don't know what we want, and, with all our
+trying, get the wrong thing after all."  Had his father also made that
+sad discovery, and made it too late?
+
+All that evening Masterman was very quiet and subdued.  He talked at
+intervals, and in snatches, of various things in his own past life,
+speaking of them with ironic sad composure, as of things which lay a
+long way off, in which he had ceased to be interested.  And yet there
+appeared to be some method in this vague reminiscent talk, some point
+toward which his thoughts were working, something that he found it
+difficult to say.
+
+At last he reached his point.  "When you and me parted--"  He stopped,
+as though swallowing something bitter, and began again.  "When you went
+away, do you remember you said something to me?  You said I was
+dishonest.  You didn't ought to have said that."
+
+"O father! don't speak of that!"
+
+"I reckon it's got to be spoke of.  I want to know what you think of me
+now."
+
+"Father, you have no need to defend yourself to me."
+
+"Haven't I?  Well, I suppose that's kindly meant, and I ought to be
+grateful.  Only I'm not; and I'll tell you why.  Do you know why I'm
+sitting in this empty house, feeding on the pig's swill that old lady
+in the kitchen calls food?  Perhaps you think I like it?  Well, I
+don't.  Do you know why there's no furniture in the rooms?  Do you know
+why I'm a beggar?  Do you know why the men I knew in the city turn
+their faces away when I pass, why the men I used to lunch with won't
+speak to me and are too busy to see me when I call?  Well, I'll tell
+you.  It's just because I've been too honest.  I had no call to give my
+fortune to the creditors of the Amalgamated.  They hadn't a pretence of
+right to it.  It was mine, every penny of it.  But I did it, just
+because I was honest, and proud of my honesty.  There's not half a
+dozen men in the city would have done that.  Those jeering scoundrels
+who pass me in the street as if I was dirt, and laugh and whisper to
+one another, 'That's poor old Masterman, poor old bankrupt Masterman;
+and lucky he ain't in gaol'--there's not one of them as would have done
+it.  But bankrupt Masterman did it, and he knew he had no call to do
+it.  He was too proud to let any man call him a thief.  If he hadn't
+done it, he'd be riding in his carriage now, and folk would ha' said,
+'Mighty smart man, that Masterman,' and they'd have thought the better
+of me.  Well, that's what I want you to remember.  No, I don't want you
+to answer me.  I'm not concerned to know what you think about it.  I
+know I'm down, but I've got my pride still, and I don't care what
+people think about me.  I've been robbed of almost everything, and I
+needn't have been but for this--that I'm honest!"
+
+He spoke with extraordinary heat, striding up and down the room, his
+face dark and harsh.  He was again the Masterman of the old days, full
+of fierce passion, proud, strong, not to be contradicted.  But amid all
+the harshness of that strong face there shone something new, something
+never seen there before, like light flashed fitfully through dark
+clouds--an element of dignity that was almost nobleness.  Arthur gazed
+upon that spectacle in a sort of silent wonder.  And once more the
+sense of elemental bigness in his father came to him with vivid force.
+Here was a nature that overtopped his own at all points.  It was great
+even in its faultiness, and who could estimate its crude astounding
+virtues?
+
+There was no return of this mood.  The next day Masterman spent several
+hours out of doors, coming home late at night, weary and silent.
+
+On the morning following, Arthur heard him moving up and down a
+little-visited garret of the house.
+
+He was there a long time.  Presently he called, "Arthur!"
+
+Arthur obeyed eagerly, his ever-active fear that his father might be
+tempted to some dreadful act giving wings to his feet.
+
+He found his father kneeling beside a common deal box, the contents of
+which were flung upon the floor.  These contents appeared to consist of
+old discarded clothing, among which were discernible a blue cloth cap,
+a rough jacket, and a pair of stained corduroy trousers.
+
+"Do you know what these are, Arthur?"
+
+"No.  What are they, father?"
+
+"They're the clothes I used to wear when I was a workman.  I've always
+kept them by me--sort of souvenir, you know.  Well, I'm going to wear
+them again."
+
+"But, father, I don't understand,"
+
+"Don't you?" he said grimly.  "Well, I'll tell you.  I'm going to work
+again.  Going back to what I was forty years ago.  It's as good as a
+story, isn't it?"
+
+"But you're not going to be a common workman.  You surely don't mean
+that, father."
+
+"That's just what I do mean.  You can work with your hands, and so can
+I.  I reckon it's our destiny.  Grimes has given me a job--you remember
+Grimes, don't you?  He's a bit of a builder at Tottenham nowadays, and
+calls himself a contractor.  Well, he's given me a job, sort of
+foreman, at two quid a week, and good pay, too.  It's a sight more than
+I'd have done for an old bankrupt fellow, close on sixty.  I'm going to
+work for Grimes.  I begin to-morrow, and you'll have to put up with the
+fact the best way you can that your father's no longer Archibold
+Masterman, Esq., as might have been Sir Archibold, but just a common
+workman."
+
+
+
+
+XXII
+
+MRS. BUNDY PHILOSOPHISES
+
+"I can't see what your father wanted to do it for.  He had no call to
+do it.  It's a most extraordinary piece of perversity."
+
+The speaker was Bundy, and the scene was his new house in Kensington.
+After his many wanderings and adventures, Bundy appeared to have found
+permanent anchorage at last.  His final apotheosis had begun, and a
+prophetic eye perceived that it was likely to include all the elements
+of eminent British respectability.  He had begun to collect pictures
+again, was planning a library, drove daily in the park, was already
+known as a generous patron of many well-intentioned charities, and had
+even lectured in a parish-room on the wonders of the Yukon.  There was
+ground to believe that in course of time he might even become a
+churchwarden, and it was only a total fluidity of opinion on local
+politics which denied him a seat upon the Borough Council.
+
+Even the boys had suffered a transformation into something rare and
+strange.  They no longer lassoed dogs upon the plains of Texas in the
+back-garden, and their interest in Indians had declined.  They wore
+white collars which were fresh every morning, practised a difficult
+propriety, and walked gravely to church on Sundays, top-hatted and
+circumspectly clothed.  There could be no manner of doubt that the
+short-lived glory of irresponsible poverty was fast fading into the
+light of common day, and that shades of respectability were closing
+round these growing minds.
+
+And as for Mrs. Bundy--dear, slovenly, warm-hearted Mrs. Bundy--the
+historian relates with sadness that even she was tamed.  Her force of
+speech remained, her sincerity, her lovableness; to the end of her days
+she would remain the sort of woman who addresses angry
+umbrella-emphasised allocutions to drivers who flog their horses, who
+gives hospitality to stray dogs, and opens her impulsive heart to the
+sorry fabrications of every histrionic beggar.  But she had returned to
+unoccupied woman's first love, which is dress.  Exiled from her
+kitchen, she had plunged recklessly into the study of fashion-papers.
+To hear her disputing with dressmakers, upholsterers, and
+house-decorators, to follow her in her many animated controversies with
+servants and a long succession of nefarious butlers, gave assurance
+that the wonted fires still burned ardently in her veins.  But she was
+tamed.  Wealth had riveted upon her golden fetters.  She submitted to
+them, not without reluctance.  Perhaps, if the entire truth was told,
+she was much happier as the mistress of the kitchen in the old house in
+Lion Row than as the mistress of a mansion in Kensington.
+
+It was in the library of this house at Kensington that Arthur sat
+discussing the situation with his old friends.  It was a spacious room,
+furnished after a plan which a celebrated firm had described as
+mediæval.  The mediævalness of the room appeared to consist mainly in
+an imitation stucco ceiling, and in modern oak-panelling which declared
+its newness by uncanny loud explosions, as the wood cracked under the
+influence of heat.  Before the open hearth Bundy stood oracular, with
+his hands behind him spread out to the warmth; and Mrs. Bundy sat at
+the table, mending socks--an example of the survival of primeval
+instincts.
+
+"No, I don't see it at all," said Bundy.  "Your father's wasting
+himself.  There are plenty of men who would have helped him to recover
+his position.  I would have given him anything he liked to ask, and
+been glad of the chance."
+
+"I know you would," said Arthur.  "And he knows it too."
+
+"Then, why won't he let me?"
+
+"I suppose because, as you say, he's too proud.  But there's something
+else too, something deeper, I think."
+
+"And what's that, pray?"
+
+"Well, I don't know how to describe it, but it's more than mere pride
+and perversity.  I think it's a kind of return to type.  He began life
+as a workman, and he's gone back to it.  It's his way of showing the
+world he doesn't care what it does to him."
+
+"And what's that but pride?"
+
+"Perhaps so," said Arthur wearily.  "I've long ago given up judging my
+father.  I only know that I never thought so well of him as I do now."
+
+"Well done!" cried Mrs. Bundy.  "That's what I think too."
+
+"Well, I can't see it," said Bundy.  "Tell me again how he's living."
+
+"He's taken a small house at Tottenham, almost a cottage.  Grimes gives
+him two pounds a week.  He works from six in the morning till six at
+night.  Next week I'm going to live with him."
+
+"Yes, that's the worst part of it!" cried Bundy.  "Your life is to be
+sacrificed too.  With your splendid education you ought to be making a
+figure in the world.  At all events you ought to be back upon your
+ranch, if that's the kind of life you mean to live.  You must know
+that."
+
+"Yes, I know it.  But I can't go back as long as father lives.  I have
+to make amends to him for past unkindness.  And, remember, he has no
+one left but me."
+
+"What about Helen?" said Mrs. Bundy.
+
+"That's one of the things I came over to tell you about.  I have a
+letter from her.  You had better read it."
+
+The letter was dated from Paris, and read as follows:
+
+
+"DEAR ARTHUR:
+
+"I hear that you are back in London, so you know all about the _mess_
+father has made of his affairs.  You were lucky to be out of it, for it
+was a dreadful disgrace.  I thought I should have _died_ of shame.
+Just, too, when he was going to be knighted, for that's come out since,
+you know.  He must have known all about it--I mean the disgrace--long
+before it came.  And yet he never told me one word, but let me think
+things were all right, and was always talking to me about the house he
+meant to build, and the place in society I was to have.  I can see now
+that it was all lies, and I will never forgive him.  I suppose you will
+say I ought to sympathise with him, and all that kind of _rot_: you
+always did pretend to be so mighty good.  Well, I don't, and I won't
+forgive him.  And I dare say you'll say I ought to have stayed with
+him, and all that kind of thing.  A pretty idea!  As if I could have
+put my head out of doors, with everybody talking about us, and father's
+name in all the papers.  I did go out once, and the Collinson girls,
+_proud, conceited things_, cut me dead, though I went to school with
+them.  I wasn't going to stand that, so, after mother's funeral, I went
+away to one of my _true_ friends in Paris.  I didn't tell her what had
+happened, you may be sure.  And she doesn't read the English papers,
+_thank God_.  Her name is Adèle Siedmyer.  She went to school with me,
+and her father is rich.  She gave me a good time, I can tell you, and
+not a word said.  The Siedmyers live in a beautiful house, much better
+than that _old_ Eagle House, which I always detested.  Well, now, I've
+something to tell you, which is quite _important_.  There was a nice
+old gentleman who used to come to dinner at the Siedmyers', and I soon
+saw that he was very fond of me.  They told me he was seventy, but he
+doesn't look more than _fifty_, for these Frenchmen know how to dress
+and keep young, which Englishmen never do.  He told me all about his
+life--he'd been twice married, but his wives had treated him
+_abominably_--and I felt very sorry for him.  I forgot to say he's
+something in the Stock Exchange--the Bourse, they call it here--and the
+Siedmyers thought no end of him.  Well, I dare say you'll guess the
+rest.  He asked me to marry him.  I thought he put it so _cleverly_; he
+said it was the _entente cordiale_.  I laughed at first, and then I
+cried a good deal; for it seemed hard that I should have to marry an
+old man, even if he is only fifty and a _good figure_.  But what was a
+poor girl to do?  Adèle and the Siedmyers persuaded me, and really it
+did seem to me quite _providential_, just in the midst of this
+disgrace; and it's not as though he didn't love me, for he's perfectly
+_infatuated_ over me.  I know you'll sneer, you always were good at
+that.  But I don't care.  There's one thing I _always_ made my mind up
+to--it was that I wouldn't be poor.  And, as I said, it did really seem
+quite _providential_, just when I couldn't hope to marry well in
+England, because of father's _wickedness_, that M. Simon--that's his
+name--should fall in love with me.  I was dreadfully afraid at first
+that he'd ask awkward questions about father, but he never did, though
+he must have known _something_.  Of course I didn't tell him--not
+likely.  So the upshot of it is that we were married last week.  So now
+you know.  I thought I ought to tell you, and you can tell father, if
+you like.  You needn't expect me _ever_ to come to London
+again--horrid, hateful city!  If you like to come over to Paris some
+time, of course I'll see you; but I won't see father!  I draw the line
+at that.  And I am sure he won't expect it after all the _cruel_ wrong
+he's done me.  I should think he would be too _ashamed_.  If you can
+find any of my little knick-nacks in my drawers I wish you would pack
+them up and send them over.  But I dare say they're gone--very likely
+the servants took them; and it doesn't _really_ matter, for I've
+everything I need.  Thank God, I shall not be poor now, in spite of
+father's _wickedness_.
+
+"Your sister,
+  "HELEN.
+
+"P.S.--We are living at the Hotel Continental, _for the present_.  If
+you were only sensible I would say come over, and meet Adèle Siedmyer.
+She will have lots of money when her father dies.  But I suppose you
+prefer _digging_ like a labourer in that _nasty_ Canada.  There's no
+accounting for tastes, is there?"
+
+
+Arthur, who, of course, was familiar with the letter, turned his face
+away while Mrs. Bundy read it, for he was heartily ashamed of it.  Its
+complete selfishness and shallowness, its spite, its rancour, its hard
+worldliness, above all, its nauseous pietism, had filled him with
+disgust.  He was surprised therefore when Mrs. Bundy put it down, with
+the exclamation, "Poor child!"
+
+"Why do you say that?" he cried.  "A letter like that puts its writer
+beyond pity."
+
+"Ah, Arthur!  I see you've not yet got out of the bad habit of judging
+people harshly.  My laddie, don't let your heart grow hard against your
+sister, even though she is to blame.  I'm not saying that that isn't a
+bad letter, and it comes from a hard, cruel heart.  But I mind Helen as
+a little girl, as sweet and bright a child as you might meet in a day's
+march.  It wasn't her fault that she was shallow; that's the way she
+was made.  Yes, she was shallow, and only meant to sail in shallow
+waters, and when the deep waters overtook her, she was frightened to
+death.  That's the letter of a poor, terrified girl who doesn't know
+what she's saying."
+
+"I didn't think of it like that."
+
+"No; it wasn't to be supposed you could.  It isn't a boy that
+understands the heart of a poor, terrified girl."
+
+"But it's the meanness of it--no word about my father but cruel
+accusation."
+
+"Yes, it's mean; fear makes weak people mean."
+
+"That's right," interjected Bundy.  "I've seen a man, when thoroughly
+frightened, pour out all the black things in his heart, without the
+least idea of what a cad he looked to other people."
+
+"Ah! and that's not all," went on Mrs. Bundy.  "You think she's beyond
+pity.  Why, she never had a better right to pity than now.  She's sold
+her youth to that old Frenchman--I never did believe in Frenchmen--and
+she's got to pay for her folly, and it'll be a hard, long price before
+she's through with it, be sure of that.  December and May--I never did
+know any good come of that kind of marriage yet.  No, no.  Your
+father's to be pitied, but he's got his pride; and you are to be
+pitied, but you've got your youth and freedom; but, if you ask me who
+is to be pitied most, it's that poor motherless girl.  She may have a
+hard heart, but it can bleed; yes, and life will make it bleed before
+long, I doubt."
+
+And so from Mrs. Bundy Arthur once more learned that lesson in life
+which he had found so difficult to master, the lesson always difficult
+to youth, and perhaps the most difficult of all to those whose ideals
+are highest--the lesson of charity, of tolerance, of lenient judgment
+toward the faulty.  Mrs. Bundy had once before shown him the better
+road, when she had made him acquainted with virtues in his father which
+he had ignored; he had learned something of what charity meant from
+Vyse upon the _Saurian_, and Horner in New York, each with his catholic
+axiom that Englishmen ought to stand by one another; he had remarked
+Vickars's altered attitude to life, his sense of life's complexity, and
+his allowance for faults in men, for which their own will was but
+partially responsible: four times the Angel of Charity had stood beside
+him, and each time he had turned his face away.  He had not allowed
+Mrs. Bundy's plea; he had accepted Horner's kindness, but without any
+accurate conception of the rarity and real beauty of his character; he
+had heard Vickars's confession, and in his utmost heart had thought him
+an apostate prophet.  And now the same test met him again in the case
+of his sister.  He saw her hardness and shallowness with more than
+sufficient accuracy; what he had not seen was her weakness, her terror
+under sudden disaster, and the tragic folly to which she had been
+driven by her terror.  It was left to Mrs. Bundy to show him that.
+Suddenly he saw it; and he saw much besides.  He saw that there is a
+vision of the mind and a vision of the heart; that the one is judging
+vision, the other sympathetic vision; that the one sees the surface
+only, the other the depth; and that therefore the vision of the heart
+is the only true vision.  Of the four persons who had instructed him,
+three were quite simple persons, without the least claim to
+intellectual superiority; the other a man of genius, who had become
+humble by contact with human sorrows.  And there was a fifth--there was
+Bundy himself, an adventurer whom he had secretly despised and
+ridiculed, but from whose hand had come salvation in his own hour of
+direst need.  And the bond between these persons was quite simple; they
+had warm, human hearts, and in the difficult hours of life they were
+governed by warm impulses.  Ah! that had been his error; he had looked
+at life with the mind, rarely with the heart.  He had set himself up to
+judge others, and now he was judged.  He had not pitied his sister; it
+was left for a stranger to do that; and in that moment he saw, as
+clearly as though expressed in tongues of heavenly flame, the divine
+grace resting on the head of Mrs. Bundy, and himself standing in the
+dark shadows cast by his own proud egoism.
+
+"O Mrs. Bundy!" he cried, "I have been wrong--quite wrong; you have
+made me see it!"
+
+And, having no mother, he was not ashamed to turn to this motherly
+heart for comfort.  He knelt before her, and laid his head upon her
+lap, as he had often done in childish troubles; and her kind hands were
+upon his head, and her kind voice soothed him.
+
+"There, there, laddie, that's all right.  You've been badly hurt
+yourself, and you've been very brave over it.  It's not easy to keep
+sweet-tempered when you're hurt--you know that, don't you, Bundy?
+Many's the time and oft I've said hard things I didn't mean, because my
+heart was bleeding.  We all do it sometimes.  But I think God turns His
+head away and doesn't listen.  Perhaps He couldn't go on loving us if
+He did.  And you know what the prayer says: 'Forgive us our trespasses
+as we forgive them that trespass against us.'  I never understood
+anything about theologies, and that kind of thing; but I know _that's_
+true.  It's true because we can't go on living without it.  So that's
+over, my dear, and don't you think any more about it."
+
+And so she drew the bitterness out of his heart, and kissed him, and
+finally laughed at him through her tears, calling herself a foolish old
+woman to be supposing she could teach a big, clever fellow like him,
+until they were both laughing into one another's eyes like a pair of
+lovers.
+
+"Well, now, we'll write Helen, and wish her joy.  And, Bundy, you're
+going to Paris next week, aren't you?  You will go to see her, of
+course.  And we must send the poor child a present.  It's a mercy,
+after all, she hasn't got into worse mischief than getting married to
+an old Frenchman.  And perhaps he may make her a good husband, there's
+no telling--even though he is a Frenchman.  And now I've a surprise for
+you.  What do you think it is?"
+
+"Something pleasant, no doubt."
+
+"Well, it ought to be.  Vickars and Elizabeth are coming to lunch.  And
+you must stay, of course.  And after lunch you can talk to Elizabeth,
+and we old folk will go away and talk about you, and see what can be
+done for you."
+
+"Yes," said Bundy.  "It's all very well for your father to work for
+Grimes; but you have to get to work too.  Ah! there's the bell.
+That'll be Vickars, so we'll postpone that business."
+
+It was a delightful lunch.  For the first time since his return to
+England Arthur attained a real cheerfulness.  In this atmosphere of
+warm affection it was impossible to think too urgently of past griefs.
+And it did seem as if the black shadow was at last rolling off, like a
+rain-cloud with trailing skirts edged with pure light.
+
+Vickars, to his surprise, took quite a cheerful view of Helen's
+marriage.
+
+"What Helen always needed was _duties_," he remarked.  "Duties give
+poise and ballast to life.  I suppose, ever since she left school, she
+has had no real duties to fulfil, and nothing makes people so selfish
+as a total absence of some kind of daily duty.  If marriage does
+nothing else, it does impose duties on men and women.  It takes them
+out of themselves, makes them look outward instead of inward, which is
+always a great thing."
+
+"Then you don't think she has made a mistake?" said Arthur.
+
+"No one can know that.  But there's a kind of instinct in people which
+often guides them to what is right for them, though to an outsider
+their actions may appear quite foolish and incomprehensible.  They
+unconsciously know what's good for them, just as animals know the kind
+of food that suits them best.  Not a very complimentary analogy, is
+it?" he added, with his whimsical smile.
+
+"No; but I see what you mean, I think."
+
+"It doesn't need much seeing, for it meets us everywhere.  Have you
+ever watched a dog in a field?  He knows exactly what grasses are good
+for him, and he finds them.  We don't know in the least the principle
+of his discrimination.  Well, it's like that with men and women.  They
+make their own choice, and it often seems to us a matter of folly or
+caprice.  But, in nine cases out of ten, if they are left to
+themselves, they do somehow manage to choose what's best for them."
+
+"And you would apply the same principle to my father?"
+
+"Precisely.  He is probably doing the only thing that was left for him
+to do.  He knows what is the best medicine for his wound, and no one
+else knows anything at all about it."
+
+"Poor father!  At this moment, while we are feasting, he is working in
+bitterness of heart."
+
+"Well, you don't know that.  Very likely he is forgetting his
+bitterness of heart in his work, and if he were here he would remember
+it."
+
+"And what about yourself?" cried Arthur.  "If men really guide
+themselves by instinct, and do it with efficiency, there's a poor
+occupation for the man who sets out to reform them."
+
+"I know it, my boy.  Didn't I tell you I've given up thinking that I am
+competent to guide the world?  Don't remind me of an old vanity of
+which I am ashamed.  I guide the world!  Why, God Himself appears to do
+that with difficulty."
+
+"Can one man do nothing then for another?"
+
+"Of course he can.  But he won't do it by shouting in the market-place.
+The only thing he can really do is to live in such a way that other
+people see that his way of living is better than their own.  Let him
+live--not just talk about living."
+
+"And what about reform, all that bright dream of a reconstruction of
+society which----?"
+
+"Yes, I know what you are going to say.  And my answer is, that reform
+comes by example, too.  One man who shows others how to live by living
+accomplishes more than all the books that were ever written."
+
+"You needn't think father means to stop writing, for he doesn't," said
+Elizabeth, with a smile.
+
+"No, I shall write, because that's my _métier_--the grass that suits me
+best.  But there's this difference.  I used to think, when I had
+written a book, that I had done all that was required of me.  Now I see
+I must live my books.  There's far too much writing in the world, and
+far too much preaching; there's never been enough living."
+
+"I'm sure you've discussed that point long enough," said Mrs. Bundy.
+"Come and look at my new conservatory.  Do you know I've turned
+orchid-grower?  I really prefer roses; but Bundy wants orchids, just
+because they're expensive.  It's a terrible thing to be rich, because
+you've got to have what other people want, instead of what you want."
+
+They went into the conservatory, and presently, under the skilful
+management of Mrs. Bundy, Arthur found himself alone with Elizabeth.
+They sat there a long time, hand in hand, in sympathetic silence.  For
+these two had reached that most perfect union of spirit, which is quite
+beyond the common mediations of language.  Love for them had found its
+rarest form, a complete repose.  From the first they had rested on each
+other, and, by a kind of spiritual clairvoyance, had read the deepest
+secrets of each other's thought.  They had no need to reiterate the
+lover's hungry question, "Do you love me?"  Such a question implies
+dubiety, and they had no doubts.  Elizabeth's hand, laid in his, said
+everything; her lips, yielded willingly to his, would have been
+profaned by speech.  And in those long sacramental silences there was
+something holy--an ardour of the spirit, for which language had no
+symbols.
+
+They returned at last into the library, where they found Vickars and
+Bundy engaged in conversation.
+
+"You have quite made your mind up to live with your father?" asked
+Bundy.
+
+"Yes.  I could not leave him alone."
+
+"Very well, then.  No doubt you're right.  Well, listen.  I once asked
+you to be secretary to the Dredging Company in New York, and you
+refused.  I want you now to act as my private secretary for a few hours
+every day.  In that way you will be earning something, and you can go
+on living with your father as long as you think fit."
+
+"And I cheerfully accept," said Arthur.
+
+"Then we'll take that as settled.  And if you can persuade your father
+to come back to the life which I think he is better fitted for, why do.
+He may count on me."
+
+"I don't think he will ever do that.  But I am sure he will be glad to
+know you thought of it."
+
+"Poor fellow," said Bundy, his eyes full of tears.  "The world has used
+him hardly.  It somehow doesn't seem fair that I should be here and he
+there."  And then, with a trembling voice, came the old sentiment.
+"But it's great, all the same, the way he takes things.  Your father's
+a great man."
+
+"I think so too," said Arthur.  "He's the greatest man I ever knew, and
+you are the best."
+
+
+
+
+XXIII
+
+THE LAST HOME
+
+The summer passed in heavy, brooding heat; the autumn brought long days
+of diminished sunshine; and at last the winter came, with rain and fog.
+London looked its worst, dull, drab, dishevelled, and nowhere was its
+grim squalor more distressing than in Tottenham.
+
+A district of mean streets, formless and chaotic, sprawling aimlessly
+in a sea of mud; houses gray and dingy, exuding dirt; other houses, new
+and cheaply built, already overtaken by decay, huddled in shivering
+wretchedness along roads deep in mire; churches with the paint peeling
+from their doors; paltry ill-stocked shops visibly struggling for
+existence; a few smoke-stained trees; a smoke-stained sky; and tribes
+of men and women moving to and fro dejectedly, with backs hunched
+against the driving rain, or faces showing pallid in the fog,--such is
+Tottenham.  It is a district without grace, without charm, with no
+interruption in its uniformity of dullness.  The disparities caused by
+social rank, which elsewhere give some semblance of external variety,
+are not found here.  Poverty sees itself reduplicated at every turn; it
+looks into its own face, and sees no other.  A district no man chooses;
+into which he may be thrust by dire misfortune, in which he may dwell
+with resentment, with a heart swollen with regret, with a mind
+embittered; but which excites in him no respect and no affection.
+London, with its glories and adventures, shines afar; it shines
+splendid and contemptuous.  For here there are no adventures; memories,
+but no prospects; life without ardour; struggle without hope; toil
+without release.
+
+It was in this district that Masterman had chosen to live.  Its tragic
+dreariness presented a subtle correspondence with his own temper.
+Having sought wealth for so many years with a fierce intensity of
+passion, he now embraced poverty with an equal ardour.  The world had
+humiliated him, and, as if to show how little he cared for the world's
+verdict, he added to his humiliation features which the world had not
+intended.  He hungered for renunciation, not as saints have hungered,
+but with the bravado of a broken heart.  He would show himself
+unsubduable; that was his main thought.  And in what more striking way
+could he do this than by a complete indifference to the world's
+opinion, a voluntary descent into indignity?  To toil in harsh labours,
+to eat poor food, to live in the meanest way, without complaint,
+without visible resentment,--this was his challenge to the world, by
+which he declared his complete contempt for the world's judgment and
+opinion.
+
+This had been his sole motive for rejecting the proffered generosity of
+Bundy.  And there were others beside Bundy, the friends and
+acquaintances of his prosperity, who would gladly have given him a
+helping hand.  But, since he could not wholly recover his old position,
+he scorned a partial reclamation.  To move before the eyes of these
+former friends shorn of his power, narrowed, limited, perhaps pitied,
+was a thing impossible.  Better far to leave the arena for ever, and
+leave it with a proud disdain.  Exile was less painful than toleration.
+The exile may at least keep his pride; but what pride is possible to
+the broken supernumerary who "lags superfluous on the stage"?
+
+"No," he said, when Bundy pressed him to accept his help, "I can't do
+it.  I know you mean it kindly; but I can't."
+
+"But why not?"
+
+"You wouldn't understand if I told you."
+
+"I understand you're the most obstinate man I ever met," said Bundy,
+with a touch of indignant heat.
+
+"Obstinate?  Well, p'raps so.  We'll let it go at that.  Yes, I'm
+obstinate."
+
+And his smile was so grim and tragic that Bundy said no more.
+
+It was one of the curious features of his situation that the house he
+chose to live in at Tottenham was a triumph of architectural mendacity;
+the same kind of house, in fact, as those with which he himself had
+disfigured London, but some grades lower than his own flimsiest
+performances.  The doors were badly hung and would not close; the
+wainscots, fashioned of green wood, were already shrunken; the window
+frames rattled and let in the cold air; the chimneys smoked; the
+ceiling plaster was already in process of disintegration; there was
+nothing in the house that was not eloquent of fraud.  Perhaps he had
+been moved by the spirit of irony in the selection of such a house as
+his final habitation.  He might have lived elsewhere; but nowhere else
+could he have gratified his perversity with such completeness.  Grimes
+employed him; well, let him live in one of Grimes's houses too; in
+doing so he anticipated the world's laughter by laughing himself.
+
+"He's a holy terror, is Grimes," he would remark.  "I thought I knew
+how to build a thirty-pound house myself pretty well; but Grimes beats
+me hands down.  He can give me points every time."
+
+And then he would recapitulate with sardonic skill all the building
+tricks of which Grimes had been guilty, specifying each with bitter
+humour.
+
+"I did sometimes use sand in my mortar; but Grimes uses mud--mere road
+mud at that.  And I did put down drains of some sort; but Grimes beats
+me there--he don't appear to have heard of drains.  And his
+party-walls, holy Moses!  I believe if I spat at them they'd fall down."
+
+When Arthur came home in the evening, he would meet him at the door
+with ironic warnings.
+
+"Here, mind you shut that door quietly.  If you bang it, it's my belief
+the whole gimcrack will be about your ears.  And be careful you take
+your boots off before you go upstairs.  Those stairs weren't meant for
+boots.  And, whatever you do, don't you be leaning against the walls.
+They kind o' shake every time a fly walks over them.  I guess it
+wouldn't need much of a Samson to pull _them_ down.  He wouldn't need
+to touch 'em; I reckon a sneeze would do the trick."
+
+"Father, I can't bear to see you so bitter."
+
+"Bitter?  Oh no, I'm not bitter.  I'm amused, that's all."
+
+"I wish you wouldn't live here, father.  There's no need.  Let me find
+another house.  Between us, we've money enough."
+
+"Well, Arthur, you see I kind of like living here.  It's exciting.  You
+never know what's going to happen.  And, besides, it's instructive.
+I'm studying the methods of my friend Grimes, in case I should want to
+start again presently as a contractor.  I'm learning every day.
+There's more than meets the eye in this contracting business; and,
+since I've worked for Grimes, I begin to think I never knew a thing
+about it."
+
+Remonstrance was so clearly useless that after a time Arthur ceased to
+attempt it.  He accepted his father's bitter humour, thankful for the
+humour, if hurt by its bitterness.  He even contrived to laugh at times
+when his father grew increasingly sarcastic over the iniquities of
+Grimes; but it was the kind of laughter that was more painful than
+tears.
+
+More than once he tried to persuade his father to leave London
+altogether.  He pictured to him the life at Kootenay, the quiet, the
+freedom, the exhilarating sense of triumph over crude nature, with all
+the skill and eloquence at his command.  At times his father would
+listen with interest, asking many questions, but always at the end he
+would say, "No, no; it's too late for that.  I'm a have-been.  I can't
+begin again.  And, besides, it would look like running away, and I
+won't do that.  A man has to take his medicine, and I'm going to take
+mine."
+
+At times a strange religious vein showed itself in his conversation.
+He never went to church now, and, indeed, entertained a strong rancour
+against what he called "church-folk."  Scales had been an officer in
+the church, and was a rascal.  The church-folk had all deserted him in
+his downfall.  Clark, indeed, had called upon him, but had nothing to
+say.  It was all a kind of play-acting, very pleasant if you'd nothing
+better to do, and that was all.  "Churches are meant for comfortable
+people.  All very well while you've money in your pocket, and a good
+coat upon your back, but they aren't for the like of me," was one of
+his sayings.  "The Church don't know anything about real life," he
+would remark, "and it doesn't want to.  If it once saw things as they
+are, it would be frightened out of its wits.  So it draws the blind
+down, and won't look.  It's like folk sitting round a good fire on a
+winter night, and when the rain's coming down and a gale's blowing.
+The more the gale blows, the more comfortable you are.  What's the good
+of looking out of the window?  Why, they might see some poor wretch
+like me, and that would make them unhappy.  Better not look.  Stir the
+fire up, and forget all about it."
+
+"I don't believe the church-folk think like that, father."
+
+"Oh yes, they do.  I've done it myself, and I know."
+
+And then, amid these bitter criticisms and confessions, that curious
+authentic religious vein would struggle into light.  He would often sit
+up late reading those portions of the Scripture most characterised by
+melancholy wisdom.
+
+"Listen to this," he said on one of those occasions: "_'He that
+buildeth his house with other men's money is like one that gathereth
+himself stones for the tomb of his burial....  Weep for the dead, for
+he hath lost the light; and weep for the fool, for he wanteth
+understanding; make little weeping for the dead, for he is at rest; but
+the life of the fool is worse than death.'_  The man who wrote that
+knew something about life now, if you like.  Couldn't pay his mortgage,
+as like as not; been a bankrupt, I guess.  Just wanted to die, and be
+done with it all--like me.  Yet God let him have a hand in writing the
+Bible--queer thing that, isn't it?  And God must have known the kind of
+fool he was.  That's what I like about the Bible; it don't shirk
+things--tells you the truth every time.  It's a big thing is the
+Bible--big as a rock; and the Church is just a little limpet sticking
+on it.  Don't see how big it is; probably can't see it."  And then,
+with a sudden pale illumination on the strong worn face, "Well, I guess
+God's got to put up wi' me.  He's big enough to understand the sort I
+am.  And I'm not for apologising to Him.  I reckon He don't want me to."
+
+Gradually there seemed to settle on him a languor, which expressed
+itself in a kind of patience which Arthur found infinitely pathetic.
+He went to his work before daylight, came home weary, and often wet
+through, ate his coarsely cooked meal in silence, but made no
+complaint.  He had ceased to take interest in the outer world.  He
+received the news of Helen's marriage without remark, and displayed no
+curiosity.  Once only he was roused to any interest in her.  Bundy, in
+one of his numerous journeys to Paris, insisted on taking Arthur with
+him, and Arthur told his father that he would no doubt see Helen.
+
+"Paris, did you say?  Ah!  I was there once.  It was there they took
+me.  So she's living in Paris, is she?"
+
+He left the room and went upstairs.  Arthur could hear him moving to
+and fro for a long time.  When he came down, he held a little parcel in
+his hand.
+
+"I suppose my creditors ought to have had this," he said.  "Only they
+didn't get it."
+
+"What is it, father?"
+
+He slowly undid the parcel, and put upon the table a small gold watch.
+
+"It didn't rightly belong to the creditors, either," he said in a low
+voice.  "It was hers."
+
+"Whose, father?"
+
+"Your mother's.  The first thing I gave her after we'd begun to get on
+a bit.  I can mind how pleased she was.  Lord! it seems like yesterday.
+And then her face kind of clouded over, and she said, 'But can you
+afford it?'  That was just like your mother--always afraid I couldn't
+afford things."
+
+He became silent, and stood with wide intent eyes, as if he saw that
+far distant past limned upon the air.  He had never spoken of his dead
+wife before.  The mention of her name invoked God knows what sweet and
+painful memories.
+
+"Thought I couldn't afford it," he repeated softly.  "Put it away in a
+drawer, didn't like to wear it, thought it too good for her.  Some
+women are like that--not many, though.  I guess Helen isn't like
+that...."  And then, with a sudden lifting of the head, as though he
+emerged from a sea of dreams, "Well, I want you to give the watch to
+Helen.  I haven't given her a wedding-present.  That's about all I have
+to give.  I hope she'll value it."
+
+In due course Arthur gave the watch to Helen.  She glanced at it with
+an air of insolent depreciation.  "It isn't likely I'm going to wear an
+old thing like that!" was her sole remark.  She also put it in a
+drawer, where it was forgotten.  When she left the Hotel Continental, a
+year later, it was lost.  She never missed it.
+
+It was on his return from this journey to Paris that Arthur noticed for
+the first time a distinct physical change in his father.  The big frame
+remained, but the flesh was shrunken.
+
+"Aren't you well, father?" he asked.
+
+"Oh yes, I'm well--a bit thinner, that's all.  I'd begun to run to fat,
+you know, sitting about in offices.  There's nothing like hard work to
+take your flesh down."
+
+That night, as they sat beside the fire, he talked with an interest he
+had never shown before about Arthur's prospects in life.  He drew from
+him a particular account of his work upon the ranch, the scenery, the
+business possibilities in fruit-growing, and so forth.
+
+"I suppose now men get rich out there pretty quick, don't they?"
+
+"A few."
+
+"But there's gold and copper in those hills, isn't there?"
+
+"So they say.  There are old men who have been looking for it all their
+lives, though, and they haven't found it."
+
+"But you might find it, eh?  You've education, and that counts for a
+lot anywhere.  And you've brains--you could organise things.  I
+wouldn't wonder if you were rich some day."
+
+"I don't want to be rich, father.  The rich people appear to me the
+unhappiest people in the world."
+
+"Ah, that's true, too!  It's the same everywhere.  You see, if a man's
+_born_ rich, he grows up to it, and knows how to behave.  But when he
+_gets_ rich, he generally makes a mess of things.  Isn't used to it,
+and it goes to his head like wine."  A long pause--and then, "What's
+the verse about choosing the better part?  Well, I reckon you've chosen
+the better part.  I didn't think so once, but I've begun to see a lot
+of new things of late, and that's one of them."
+
+"Then you forgive me for going away, father?"
+
+"Oh!  I don't know about that.  Isn't it enough if I say that I think
+you did the wise thing?  It's pretty hard for me to say that, and you
+must be content with it."
+
+He talked on for an hour or so, in a quiet, musing voice, recalling the
+histories of men he had known, most of them dead.  He recalled their
+struggles, their ambitions, their infrequent victories, their frequent
+defeats, their occasional rise into social eminence, and the domestic
+infelicities that poisoned their success.  It was a sorry record, a
+kind of epitome of modern covetousness, through which wailed the sombre
+note of the Hebrew moralist, _Vanitas Vanitatum_!  Arthur could not but
+notice that he spoke no longer as a participant in the strife, but as a
+mere spectator.  He saw the frantic whirl of men in pursuit of gold as
+something far off, unimportant, inherently mean and despicable.  And he
+himself spoke as a man completely disillusioned, a derider and a
+mocker, whose dominant temper was ironic pity.
+
+"Poor Sandy Macphail--I knew him when he earned a pound a week."  And
+then would come a caustic sketch of Sandy, lying for his life in some
+crisis of his fortunes, "eating dirt," as he put it, to creep into a
+big man's favour, dragging with him into social light a wife who was
+the laughing-stock of unfamiliar drawing-rooms, and his cubs of boys,
+who took to drink or gambling--ending with the grim comment, "Spent his
+last years wheeled about in a chair, did Sandy--paralysed, you know."
+
+Or it would be, "There's Steiner, South African millionaire, you know.
+I met him once in my great days.  Poor wreck of a man, nerves all gone,
+took drugs, so they said.  Committed suicide, did Steiner."
+
+It was a long, almost involuntary unfolding of the filaments of memory.
+Man after man appeared in that phantasmagoric vision, foolish,
+pitiable, misguided, and sank out of sight pierced by the shaft of some
+ironic phrase.
+
+"Well, I'm out of it all, and a good job, too," he concluded.  "They'll
+be saying the same things about me when I'm dead.  My! it's twelve
+o'clock!  An old bankrupt fellow that works for Grimes ought to ha'
+been a-bed long ago.  These are no hours for the British working man."
+
+The next day was Sunday.  To Arthur's surprise his father appeared
+after breakfast clothed in the fashion of his former life.  The worn
+serge suit and low hat were laid aside; they were replaced by a black
+frock coat, a white waistcoat, and a top hat.  He looked once more the
+city magnate--rather faded.  And in some subtle way the better clothes
+had affected the physical aspect of the man.  He no longer stooped; he
+stood erect, held himself well, had something of his former air of
+command.
+
+"I've a fancy for a walk," he said.  "Do you care to come?"
+
+It was one of those mild and exquisite days which are the stars in the
+dreary firmament of winter.  A soft wind blew out of the south-west,
+soft clouds moved across a blue-gray sky, and the air was pure and
+sparkling.  Even Tottenham was touched with the spirit of a brief
+vivacity.  The normal cloud of dinginess was miraculously dissolved,
+the sunlight glittered on the rain-pools, and a Sabbath calm lay upon
+the streets.  It was the kind of day which the country-man calls "a
+weather-breeder"; which the less wise Londoner hails as the first
+pledge of returning summer.
+
+They wandered forth, apparently without aim, but steadily moving
+westward.  They reached Hyde Park, where they sat for some time
+watching the gaily dressed people who flowed past like a coloured
+river.  Here and there Masterman discerned a known face, and made brief
+comments on it.  From Hyde Park they turned toward the city.  Through
+the mitigated clamour of the Strand, and the almost total silence of
+Cheapside, they passed, till they came to the network of lanes and
+alleys round the Mansion House.  They were strangely hushed.  Where,
+day by day, so many thousands passed, driven by eagerness and haste, in
+an unnoticeable throng, a single footfall now roused clamant echoes.
+
+"It's a queer thing, but I've never been in the city on a Sunday
+before," Masterman remarked.  "I couldn't have believed it was so
+silent.  It's like going to sleep in a thunderstorm, and waking up in a
+vault, with the coffin-lid nailed over you."
+
+He paused at last before the high narrow building where he had had his
+offices.
+
+"Wonder whether the caretaker's here.  Let us see."
+
+A little dark man answered the door.
+
+"Why, it's Mr. Masterman!" he cried in astonishment.  "Come in, sir!"
+
+"So you remember me, Perkins?"
+
+"Of course, sir.  And there's no one sorrier than me for what has
+happened."
+
+"Who's got my offices now?"
+
+"They're still to let, sir.  P'raps you'd like to see them."
+
+"Yes, I should."
+
+They went up into the rooms.  Masterman's name was still upon the glass
+door of the outer office.  The desk that he had used was in its place
+beneath the window.  But there was dust upon the furniture, dust upon
+the windows, and a kind of ghostly loneliness in the deserted rooms.
+
+"I've a fancy for sitting at that desk again, Arthur."
+
+He sat quite silent, his hat tilted back, his fingers drumming on the
+elbows of the chair.
+
+"Let us go, father.  It's too lonely."
+
+"Yes--lonely," he said in a low voice.  "The place that knew you knows
+you no more for ever.  It's a queer sensation.  No more--for ever!"
+
+They left the room, went downstairs; and Arthur noticed with
+astonishment that Masterman gave the obsequious Perkins a sovereign.
+
+"Oh! you needn't look like that," said Masterman.  "I can afford it.
+And if I couldn't afford it I should do it.  Perkins still has his
+illusions concerning me, and it isn't worth while destroying them.  He
+very likely thinks I'm going to rent the offices again.  Well, let him
+think it."
+
+They left the city and turned northward.  The evening had fallen when
+they reached Highbourne Gardens.  The church shone with lighted
+windows, and on the misty air there floated out the sound of
+hymn-music.  Eagle House reared a dim bulk through the mist.  A
+white-painted board, just beside the gate, informed the public that the
+house was to be sold.
+
+"Come away," said Arthur.  "I can't bear it!"
+
+For at last he saw that in this aimless wandering there had been an
+aim; his father was revisiting old scenes to take farewell of them.
+
+"Hush!" said Masterman.  "Listen!"
+
+As they listened, the hymn-music became recognisable.
+
+  Swift to its close ebbs out life's little day;
+  Earth's joys grow dim, its glories pass away;
+  Change and decay in all around I see...
+
+
+The hymn ceased.
+
+"Give me your arm, Arthur; I feel a little faint.  That's right.  Now
+let us go back."
+
+The rain had begun to fall, and the wind was rising.  It was nine
+o'clock when they reached Tottenham, and both were wet through.
+
+The next day he went to his work as usual.  The weather was miserable.
+A raw north-east wind blew, bringing with it snow.  The snow became
+sleet, and the wind changed to the south-east, bearing on its wings
+continuous rain.  After the rain came black, impenetrable fog.
+Tottenham was submerged beneath the clammy vapour.
+
+On the Thursday, when Arthur returned from Bundy's, he found his father
+huddled over the fire, coughing violently.
+
+"Are you ill, father?" he asked in alarm.
+
+"Oh! just a cold.  Nothing to be troubled over."
+
+But the next morning he did not rise from his bed.  Bronchitis had
+declared itself.  A local doctor, hastily called in, hinted at some
+injury to the lungs, and spoke guardedly of a possible weakness of the
+heart.  From that hour Arthur never left his father's bedside.
+
+Mrs. Bundy no sooner heard the news than she flew to the rescue.  The
+astonished street beheld a carriage with prancing horses at the door,
+from which emerged a lady in a long sealskin jacket, who entered the
+humble house, and did not return.  She had established herself as
+Masterman's nurse, glad to exchange the idle trivialities of Kensington
+for these hard duties of helpful service.  Bundy sent his own
+physician, a famous specialist, who took Arthur aside, and asked him
+gravely what his father's habits of life had been.  When Arthur told
+him who his father was, and how he had lived since he came to
+Tottenham, he became yet more grave.
+
+"I think I see," he said.  "You won't mind my saying that a sudden
+change of life at your father's age was a great mistake."
+
+"My father would have it so."
+
+"I understand."
+
+"Is there any danger?"
+
+"There is always danger where there is serious illness.  I ought to
+tell you, your father's condition is precarious.  There is such a thing
+as a man's loosening his grasp on life--doing it purposely, I mean.
+Against that condition the best medical skill is useless."
+
+"Then you think he will die?"
+
+"Yes; his troubles are nearly over."
+
+Arthur returned to the sick-room with a sinking heart.  It seemed an
+inconceivable thing that that strong frame, the vehicle of so many
+energies, should be in process of dissolution.  It had fulfilled the
+intention of its Maker for so many years, borne heat and cold, the
+strain of struggle and fatigue, with such a perfect adaptation, with
+such indefatigable vigour, its every atom mutely obedient to the
+guiding will; and now it must be numbered with the spent forces of
+creation.  It must return to the womb of Nature from which it sprang,
+and become part of the innumerable dust of perished generations.  Such
+was the law of waste that ruled the world--an awful thought to a son
+beside a father's death-bed.  And against the certain working of that
+law, what had man to place but frail and feeble hopes; what, at best,
+but the solemn asseveration of a faith daily contradicted by the
+incontrovertible realities of physical dissolution, by the stark facts
+of departure, disappearance? ... An awful thought, indeed, before which
+the stoutest hearts have trembled.
+
+His father lay quite silent.  He had not spoken for many hours.  There
+was no sound but the soft hissing of the steam in the bronchitis
+kettle, and the dropping of a cinder on the hearth.
+
+Towards dawn he spoke.
+
+"Well...  well! ... Seems as if it was all a mistake....  A-striving
+and a-struggling, and nothing come of it.  Folk'll laugh....  Him as
+had the city at his feet, working for poor old Grimes.  It's a poor
+end!--a poor end!"
+
+"Father, don't you know me?"
+
+"It isn't Helen, is it?  No, she went away.  Poor little girl!"
+
+The mind pursued its own sad communings.
+
+"Well, I guess God's got to put up wi' me.  He's big enough to
+understand.  He don't want apologies.  I am what I am."
+
+The grayness of the dawn filled the room.
+
+Suddenly he raised himself slightly on his pillow.  He grasped Arthur's
+hand.  There came into the tired eyes a new light, a long, intense
+wonder-look.
+
+"_Mary!_"
+
+It was his wife's name.
+
+Then the strong face grew slowly empty of expression, the eyes closed.
+
+Archibold Masterman had laid himself down to rest among the generations
+of the dead, and all his love and hatred had perished with him, neither
+had he any more a portion in anything that is done under the sun.
+
+
+
+
+XXIV
+
+THE NEW WORLD
+
+Against the main-line platform of Waterloo Station the special
+boat-train was drawn up.  It was half-past eight in the morning.
+Almost momently suburban trains arrived, discharging their crowds of
+workers, who passed in long files toward the portals of the station,
+and were swallowed up, like so many tiny streams, in the great sea of
+London.  Some of them turned their eyes curiously, perhaps a little
+yearningly, toward the boat-train; but for the most part these arriving
+throngs passed on with sedate, indifferent faces.  The boat-train
+represented liberty--it was the symbol of things free and large; but
+their thoughts did not go so far as that.  For them, life offered no
+release; there was no discharge in their warfare; to the end of their
+days they would tread the city streets, push their humble fortunes as
+they best could amid its clangour, and sink into rest at last beneath
+its gray skies.
+
+Yet this morning the skies were not gray.  The magic of June lay upon
+the city.  The toil-worn metropolis had dressed itself in shining
+raiment, as if it would fain remind its departing sons that it also
+could be fair; as if it meant that this last vision of its fairness
+should be for them a rebuke and a torturing memory through all the
+years of absence.
+
+A man and a woman crossed the platform, closely observing the labels on
+the windows of the carriages.
+
+"Ah! here it is!  'Masterman and party,'" said Bundy.
+
+"They should be here by this time, shouldn't they?" said Mrs. Bundy.
+
+"No, there's plenty of time--nearly half an hour."
+
+They stood beside the train, talking in eager tones.
+
+"You ordered flowers for their cabin, didn't you?"
+
+"Yes; and I've done something else.  I've got a suite of rooms for
+them.  But they won't know that till they get aboard."
+
+"Ah!  I'm glad of that!  I suppose it's the last thing we can do for
+them."
+
+"Pray don't be melancholy," said Bundy, with an attempt at
+cheerfulness.  "They're going to be very happy.  Let us see them off
+with smiles."
+
+"Ah! it's very well to talk.  But these partings make me miserable.  I
+couldn't have loved Arthur more if he'd been my own son.  But he won't
+want me any more now.  He'll have Elizabeth."
+
+"Well, aren't you glad of it?"
+
+"Oh yes, I'm glad.  It was a beautiful wedding.  And she is a sweet
+girl.  But there's nothing makes you feel so old as weddings, somehow.
+They make you realise how much of life lies behind you."
+
+This intimate talk was interrupted by the increasing crowd that
+thronged the platform.
+
+"Well, cheer up!  Here they come!" said Bundy.
+
+And Mrs. Bundy, instantly superior to grievous meditations, ran to meet
+the little group, with smiles and tenderness.  She made no scruple of
+kissing Arthur openly, embraced Elizabeth with fervour, wrung Vickars's
+hand, to the last moment bought them books, papers, and magazines, and
+whispered various occult directions for the attainment of health and
+happiness into Arthur's ear, much as she had done years before when he
+went to school for the first time.  And then came the crowded
+sensations of the moment when the shrill whistle sounded, the wheels
+moved, and the train sped into the spacious sunshine.
+
+For Arthur, newly married, was leaving the city of so many tragic
+memories for ever; Vickars also had decided to accompany Arthur and
+Elizabeth to Kootenay.  Each felt that with the death of Masterman the
+last tie to England was snapped.
+
+As the train flashed on past trim suburban villas, into the greenness
+of the open country, they talked in hushed tones of the life that lay
+behind them.
+
+"One feels a little like a recreant at leaving it all," said Vickars.
+"It is such a big thing, this London.  And, when all's said and done,
+there's far more heroism packed into those struggling, drudging London
+lives than is found in a thousand battlefields."
+
+"You've done your part, father.  You, at least, need have no
+compunctions," said Elizabeth.
+
+"I've done a little--how little!  You didn't think, when I was speaking
+of heroism, that I meant myself, did you, my child?"
+
+"I only meant what I said, father.  You have done your part."
+
+"Ah! an easy part," he said meditatively.  "I have sat apart, aloof and
+sheltered, writing books.  That is but an easy and little thing."
+
+He was silent for some moments, watching the green unfolding of the
+country, the quiet farms and cottages, the ancient churches lifting
+gray towers above their guardian elms, the bright water-courses, the
+level roads and sun-washed fields.
+
+"It comes to me," he said presently, "that there's another kind of life
+which I have never fully understood.  A man comes to London, young,
+strong, eager, and is speedily infected with a passion for success.  He
+is exposed daily to a hundred gross temptations.  If he had some
+original fineness of nature, it is soon blunted by the conditions of
+his life.  He fights for standing-room because that is the first law of
+his existence.  He then fights for conquest, and he conquers.  At last
+he receives a fatal wound.  But his courage does not fail him.  He
+stands lonely and weak, fighting to the last.  In the hour of his
+adversity he is wholly unconquered.  That is real heroism.  The final
+virtue of life is courage.  He has this courage, and it is so great
+that it eclipses the memory of his faults."
+
+"You are thinking of my father?" said Arthur, in a low voice.
+
+"Yes.  I who sat apart, criticising the world, am the sham hero.  He
+who endured the crucifixion of the world is the real hero.  Suffering
+does not necessarily ennoble men; but to suffer bravely is always
+noble.  Ah, Arthur! when I think of that lonely grave which lies behind
+us, I say, not 'what bitterness is hidden there!' but 'what fortitude!'
+With all its faults, the life hidden in that grave may teach us all a
+lesson."
+
+And that was the epitaph of Archibold Masterman.
+
+The train sped on.  The ancient towers of Winchester rose and sank; and
+were not they also the memorial of a Life not alone pure and gentle,
+but of a divine courage? ... And in that Life, as in multitudes of
+soiled and human lives, was not the final efficiency found in the
+fortitude that endures?
+
+"That is the real heroism," said Vickars.  "At least it is clear that
+without this fortitude no kind of heroism is possible."
+
+Through the trees the gray hospice of St. Cross was visible for a
+transient moment.  The high chalk downs succeeded, the green marshland,
+the broad estuary with its tossing boats and wide glimmering waters.
+
+An hour later a great ship loosed her moorings, and turned her bows
+toward the wider waters and the New World.
+
+
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+W. J. DAWSON'S WORKS
+
+Masterman and Son
+  12mo, cloth, $1.20 net
+
+A Soldier of the Future
+  12mo, cloth, $1.50.
+
+A Prophet in Babylon
+  A Story of Social Service.  Cloth, $1.50.
+
+Makers of Modern English
+  8 vols., leather, boxed, per set, $6.00 net.
+
+  MAKERS OF ENGLISH POETRY.  8vo, cloth, gilt top, $1.50 net.
+
+  MAKERS OF ENGLISH PROSE.  8vo, cloth, gilt top, $1.50 net.
+
+  MAKERS OF ENGLISH FICTION.  3d edition, 12mo, cloth, gilt top,
+      $1.50 net.
+
+"Mr. Dawson is an informing and delightful critic and his is the work
+of a real critic and a master of style."--_N. Y. Evening Sun_.
+
+The Threshold of Manhood
+  12mo, cloth, $1.25 net.
+
+The Empire of Love
+  12mo, cloth, $1.00 net.
+
+The Forgotten Secret
+  Art binding, 50 cents net.
+
+The Evangelistic Note
+  12mo, cloth, $1.25 net.
+
+The Reproach of Christ
+  With an Introduction by Newell Dwight Hillis.  Cloth, $1.00 net.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Masterman and Son, by W. J. Dawson
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MASTERMAN AND SON ***
+
+***** This file should be named 35608-8.txt or 35608-8.zip *****
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+        https://www.gutenberg.org/3/5/6/0/35608/
+
+Produced by Al Haines
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
+will be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
+one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
+(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
+permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
+set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
+copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
+protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
+Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
+charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
+do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
+rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
+such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
+research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
+practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
+subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
+redistribution.
+
+
+
+*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
+https://gutenberg.org/license).
+
+
+Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works
+
+1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
+all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
+If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
+terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
+entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
+
+1.B.  "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark.  It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
+paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
+and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.  See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
+or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
+collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
+individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
+located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
+copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
+works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
+are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
+Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
+freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
+this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
+the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
+keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
+a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
+the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
+before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
+creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
+Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
+the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
+States.
+
+1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
+access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
+whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
+phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
+copied or distributed:
+
+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
+
+1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
+from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
+posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
+and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
+or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
+with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the
+work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
+through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
+Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
+1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
+terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
+to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
+permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
+word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
+distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
+"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
+posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
+you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
+copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
+request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other
+form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
+that
+
+- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
+     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
+     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
+     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
+     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
+     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
+     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
+     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
+     address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
+     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+     License.  You must require such a user to return or
+     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
+     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
+     Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
+     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
+     of receipt of the work.
+
+- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
+forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
+both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
+Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
+Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
+collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
+"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
+property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
+computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
+your equipment.
+
+1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
+of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
+your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
+the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
+refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
+providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
+receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
+is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
+opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS' WITH NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
+WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
+If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
+law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
+interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
+the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
+provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
+with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
+promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
+harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
+that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
+or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
+work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
+Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
+
+
+Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
+including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
+because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
+people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
+To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
+and the Foundation web page at https://www.pglaf.org.
+
+
+Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
+Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service.  The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541.  Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at
+https://pglaf.org/fundraising.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
+permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
+Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
+throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at
+809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
+business@pglaf.org.  Email contact links and up to date contact
+information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official
+page at https://pglaf.org
+
+For additional contact information:
+     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+     Chief Executive and Director
+     gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+
+Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
+SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
+particular state visit https://pglaf.org
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including including checks, online payments and credit card
+donations.  To donate, please visit: https://pglaf.org/donate
+
+
+Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
+with anyone.  For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
+Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
+
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
+
+     https://www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.