THE COMPLETE WORKS OF

F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

(1896-1940)

Contents

The Novels

THIS SIDE OF PARADISE

THE BEAUTIFUL AND DAMNED

THE GREAT GATSBY

TENDER IS THE NIGHT

THE LOVE OF THE LAST TYCOON

The Short Story Collections

FLAPPERS AND PHILOSOPHERS

TALES FROM THE JAZZ AGE

ALL THE SAD YOUNG MEN

TAPS AT REVEILLE

THE PAT HOBBY STORIES

MISCELLANEOUS STORIES

The Short Stories

CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF SHORT STORIES

ALPHABETICAL LIST OF SHORT STORIES

The Plays and Screenplays

THE GIRL FROM LAZY J

THE CAPTURED SHADOW

COWARD

ASSORTED SPIRITS

SHADOW LAURELS

PORCELAIN AND PINK

MR. ICKY

THE VEGETABLE,

“SEND ME IN, COACH”

THREE COMRADES

INFIDELITY

The Poetry

LIST OF POETRY

The Non-Fiction

LIST OF ESSAYS AND ARTICLES

The Letters

LIST OF CORRESPONDENTS

© Delphi Classics 2012

Version 2

THE COMPLETE WORKS OF

F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

The Novels

Fitzgerald’s birthplace - St. Paul, Minnesota

THIS SIDE OF PARADISE

Fitzgerald’s first novel was published in 1920, taking its title from the Rupert Brooke poem Tiare Tahiti.  The novel examines the society issues facing American youths in the aftermath of World War I.  The protagonist Amory Blaine is a Princeton student who dabbles in literature. The novel sold out in three days, earning Fitzgerald overnight fame. On March 30, four days after publication and one day after selling out the first printing, Scott wired for Zelda, a young lady with whom he was infatuated and wanted to impress, to come to New York and get married that weekend. Barely a week after publication, Zelda and Scott married in New York on April 3, 1920.  The novel went through 12 printings in 1920 and 1921, for a total of 49,075 copies.

The first edition

Fitzgerald, aged three

CONTENTS

BOOK ONE — The Romantic Egotist

CHAPTER 1. Amory, Son of Beatrice

CHAPTER 2. Spires and Gargoyles

CHAPTER 3. The Egotist Considers

CHAPTER 4. Narcissus Off Duty

INTERLUDE

BOOK TWO — The Education of a Personage

CHAPTER 1. The Debutante

CHAPTER 2. Experiments in Convalescence

CHAPTER 3. Young Irony

CHAPTER 4. The Supercilious Sacrifice

CHAPTER 5. The Egotist Becomes a Personage

Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda, soon after publication

BOOK ONE — The Romantic Egotist

CHAPTER 1. Amory, Son of Beatrice

Amory Blaine inherited from his mother every trait, except the stray inexpressible few, that made him worth while. His father, an ineffectual, inarticulate man with a taste for Byron and a habit of drowsing over the Encyclopedia Britannica, grew wealthy at thirty through the death of two elder brothers, successful Chicago brokers, and in the first flush of feeling that the world was his, went to Bar Harbor and met Beatrice O’Hara. In consequence, Stephen Blaine handed down to posterity his height of just under six feet and his tendency to waver at crucial moments, these two abstractions appearing in his son Amory. For many years he hovered in the background of his family’s life, an unassertive figure with a face half-obliterated by lifeless, silky hair, continually occupied in “taking care” of his wife, continually harassed by the idea that he didn’t and couldn’t understand her.

But Beatrice Blaine! There was a woman! Early pictures taken on her father’s estate at Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, or in Rome at the Sacred Heart Convent — an educational extravagance that in her youth was only for the daughters of the exceptionally wealthy — showed the exquisite delicacy of her features, the consummate art and simplicity of her clothes. A brilliant education she had — her youth passed in renaissance glory, she was versed in the latest gossip of the Older Roman Families; known by name as a fabulously wealthy American girl to Cardinal Vitori and Queen Margherita and more subtle celebrities that one must have had some culture even to have heard of. She learned in England to prefer whiskey and soda to wine, and her small talk was broadened in two senses during a winter in Vienna. All in all Beatrice O’Hara absorbed the sort of education that will be quite impossible ever again; a tutelage measured by the number of things and people one could be contemptuous of and charming about; a culture rich in all arts and traditions, barren of all ideas, in the last of those days when the great gardener clipped the inferior roses to produce one perfect bud.

In her less important moments she returned to America, met Stephen Blaine and married him — this almost entirely because she was a little bit weary, a little bit sad. Her only child was carried through a tiresome season and brought into the world on a spring day in ninety-six.

When Amory was five he was already a delightful companion for her. He was an auburn-haired boy, with great, handsome eyes which he would grow up to in time, a facile imaginative mind and a taste for fancy dress. From his fourth to his tenth year he did the country with his mother in her father’s private car, from Coronado, where his mother became so bored that she had a nervous breakdown in a fashionable hotel, down to Mexico City, where she took a mild, almost epidemic consumption. This trouble pleased her, and later she made use of it as an intrinsic part of her atmosphere — especially after several astounding bracers.

So, while more or less fortunate little rich boys were defying governesses on the beach at Newport, or being spanked or tutored or read to from “Do and Dare,” or “Frank on the Mississippi,” Amory was biting acquiescent bell-boys in the Waldorf, outgrowing a natural repugnance to chamber music and symphonies, and deriving a highly specialized education from his mother.

“Amory.”

“Yes, Beatrice.” (Such a quaint name for his mother; she encouraged it.)

“Dear, don’t think of getting out of bed yet. I’ve always suspected that early rising in early life makes one nervous. Clothilde is having your breakfast brought up.”

“All right.”

“I am feeling very old to-day, Amory,” she would sigh, her face a rare cameo of pathos, her voice exquisitely modulated, her hands as facile as Bernhardt’s. “My nerves are on edge — on edge. We must leave this terrifying place to-morrow and go searching for sunshine.”

Amory’s penetrating green eyes would look out through tangled hair at his mother. Even at this age he had no illusions about her.

“Amory.”

“Oh, yes.”

“I want you to take a red-hot bath as hot as you can bear it, and just relax your nerves. You can read in the tub if you wish.”

She fed him sections of the “Fetes Galantes” before he was ten; at eleven he could talk glibly, if rather reminiscently, of Brahms and Mozart and Beethoven. One afternoon, when left alone in the hotel at Hot Springs, he sampled his mother’s apricot cordial, and as the taste pleased him, he became quite tipsy. This was fun for a while, but he essayed a cigarette in his exaltation, and succumbed to a vulgar, plebeian reaction. Though this incident horrified Beatrice, it also secretly amused her and became part of what in a later generation would have been termed her “line.”

“This son of mine,” he heard her tell a room full of awestruck, admiring women one day, “is entirely sophisticated and quite charming — but delicate — we’re all delicate; here, you know.” Her hand was radiantly outlined against her beautiful bosom; then sinking her voice to a whisper, she told them of the apricot cordial. They rejoiced, for she was a brave raconteuse, but many were the keys turned in sideboard locks that night against the possible defection of little Bobby or Barbara....

These domestic pilgrimages were invariably in state; two maids, the private car, or Mr. Blaine when available, and very often a physician. When Amory had the whooping-cough four disgusted specialists glared at each other hunched around his bed; when he took scarlet fever the number of attendants, including physicians and nurses, totalled fourteen. However, blood being thicker than broth, he was pulled through.

The Blaines were attached to no city. They were the Blaines of Lake Geneva; they had quite enough relatives to serve in place of friends, and an enviable standing from Pasadena to Cape Cod. But Beatrice grew more and more prone to like only new acquaintances, as there were certain stories, such as the history of her constitution and its many amendments, memories of her years abroad, that it was necessary for her to repeat at regular intervals. Like Freudian dreams, they must be thrown off, else they would sweep in and lay siege to her nerves. But Beatrice was critical about American women, especially the floating population of ex-Westerners.

“They have accents, my dear,” she told Amory, “not Southern accents or Boston accents, not an accent attached to any locality, just an accent” — she became dreamy. “They pick up old, moth-eaten London accents that are down on their luck and have to be used by some one. They talk as an English butler might after several years in a Chicago grand-opera company.” She became almost incoherent — “Suppose — time in every Western woman’s life — she feels her husband is prosperous enough for her to have — accent — they try to impress me, my dear — “

Though she thought of her body as a mass of frailties, she considered her soul quite as ill, and therefore important in her life. She had once been a Catholic, but discovering that priests were infinitely more attentive when she was in process of losing or regaining faith in MotherChurch, she maintained an enchantingly wavering attitude. Often she deplored the bourgeois quality of the American Catholic clergy, and was quite sure that had she lived in the shadow of the great Continental cathedrals her soul would still be a thin flame on the mighty altar of Rome. Still, next to doctors, priests were her favorite sport.

“Ah, Bishop Wiston,” she would declare, “I do not want to talk of myself. I can imagine the stream of hysterical women fluttering at your doors, beseeching you to be simpatico” — then after an interlude filled by the clergyman — “but my mood — is — oddly dissimilar.”

Only to bishops and above did she divulge her clerical romance. When she had first returned to her country there had been a pagan, Swinburnian young man in Asheville, for whose passionate kisses and unsentimental conversations she had taken a decided penchant — they had discussed the matter pro and con with an intellectual romancing quite devoid of sappiness. Eventually she had decided to marry for background, and the young pagan from Asheville had gone through a spiritual crisis, joined the Catholic Church, and was now — Monsignor Darcy.

“Indeed, Mrs. Blaine, he is still delightful company — quite the cardinal’s right-hand man.”

“Amory will go to him one day, I know,” breathed the beautiful lady, “and Monsignor Darcy will understand him as he understood me.”

Amory became thirteen, rather tall and slender, and more than ever on to his Celtic mother. He had tutored occasionally — the idea being that he was to “keep up,” at each place “taking up the work where he left off,” yet as no tutor ever found the place he left off, his mind was still in very good shape. What a few more years of this life would have made of him is problematical. However, four hours out from land, Italy bound, with Beatrice, his appendix burst, probably from too many meals in bed, and after a series of frantic telegrams to Europe and America, to the amazement of the passengers the great ship slowly wheeled around and returned to New York to deposit Amory at the pier. You will admit that if it was not life it was magnificent.

After the operation Beatrice had a nervous breakdown that bore a suspicious resemblance to delirium tremens, and Amory was left in Minneapolis, destined to spend the ensuing two years with his aunt and uncle. There the crude, vulgar air of Western civilization first catches him — in his underwear, so to speak.

A KISS FOR AMORY

His lip curled when he read it.

“I am going to have a bobbing party,” it said, “on Thursday,

December the seventeenth, at five o’clock, and I would like it

very much if you could come.

Yours truly,

R.S.V.P.                                     Myra St. Claire.

He had been two months in Minneapolis, and his chief struggle had been the concealing from “the other guys at school” how particularly superior he felt himself to be, yet this conviction was built upon shifting sands. He had shown off one day in French class (he was in senior French class) to the utter confusion of Mr. Reardon, whose accent Amory damned contemptuously, and to the delight of the class. Mr. Reardon, who had spent several weeks in Paris ten years before, took his revenge on the verbs, whenever he had his book open. But another time Amory showed off in history class, with quite disastrous results, for the boys there were his own age, and they shrilled innuendoes at each other all the following week:

“Aw — I b’lieve, doncherknow, the Umuricun revolution was lawgely an affair of the middul clawses,” or

“Washington came of very good blood — aw, quite good — I b’lieve.”

Amory ingeniously tried to retrieve himself by blundering on purpose. Two years before he had commenced a history of the United States which, though it only got as far as the Colonial Wars, had been pronounced by his mother completely enchanting.

His chief disadvantage lay in athletics, but as soon as he discovered that it was the touchstone of power and popularity at school, he began to make furious, persistent efforts to excel in the winter sports, and with his ankles aching and bending in spite of his efforts, he skated valiantly around the Lorelie rink every afternoon, wondering how soon he would be able to carry a hockey-stick without getting it inexplicably tangled in his skates.

The invitation to Miss Myra St. Claire’s bobbing party spent the morning in his coat pocket, where it had an intense physical affair with a dusty piece of peanut brittle. During the afternoon he brought it to light with a sigh, and after some consideration and a preliminary draft in the back of Collar and Daniel’s “First-Year Latin,” composed an answer:

My dear Miss St. Claire:

Your truly charming envitation for the evening of next Thursday

evening was truly delightful to receive this morning.  I will be

charm and inchanted indeed to present my compliments on next

Thursday evening.

Faithfully,

Amory Blaine.

On Thursday, therefore, he walked pensively along the slippery, shovel-scraped sidewalks, and came in sight of Myra’s house, on the half-hour after five, a lateness which he fancied his mother would have favored. He waited on the door-step with his eyes nonchalantly half-closed, and planned his entrance with precision. He would cross the floor, not too hastily, to Mrs. St. Claire, and say with exactly the correct modulation:

“My dear Mrs. St. Claire, I’m frightfully sorry to be late, but my maid” — he paused there and realized he would be quoting — “but my uncle and I had to see a fella — Yes, I’ve met your enchanting daughter at dancing-school.”

Then he would shake hands, using that slight, half-foreign bow, with all the starchy little females, and nod to the fellas who would be standing ‘round, paralyzed into rigid groups for mutual protection.

A butler (one of the three in Minneapolis) swung open the door. Amory stepped inside and divested himself of cap and coat. He was mildly surprised not to hear the shrill squawk of conversation from the next room, and he decided it must be quite formal. He approved of that — as he approved of the butler.

“Miss Myra,” he said.

To his surprise the butler grinned horribly.

“Oh, yeah,” he declared, “she’s here.” He was unaware that his failure to be cockney was ruining his standing. Amory considered him coldly.

“But,” continued the butler, his voice rising unnecessarily, “she’s the only one what is here. The party’s gone.”

Amory gasped in sudden horror.

“What?”

“She’s been waitin’ for Amory Blaine. That’s you, ain’t it? Her mother says that if you showed up by five-thirty you two was to go after ‘em in the Packard.”

Amory’s despair was crystallized by the appearance of Myra herself, bundled to the ears in a polo coat, her face plainly sulky, her voice pleasant only with difficulty.

“‘Lo, Amory.”

“‘Lo, Myra.” He had described the state of his vitality.

“Well — you got here, anyways.”

“Well — I’ll tell you. I guess you don’t know about the auto accident,” he romanced.

Myra’s eyes opened wide.

“Who was it to?”

“Well,” he continued desperately, “uncle ‘n aunt ‘n I.”

“Was any one killed?”

Amory paused and then nodded.

“Your uncle?” — alarm.

“Oh, no just a horse — a sorta gray horse.”

At this point the Erse butler snickered.

“Probably killed the engine,” he suggested. Amory would have put him on the rack without a scruple.

“We’ll go now,” said Myra coolly. “You see, Amory, the bobs were ordered for five and everybody was here, so we couldn’t wait — “

“Well, I couldn’t help it, could I?”

“So mama said for me to wait till ha’past five. We’ll catch the bobs before it gets to the Minnehaha Club, Amory.”

Amory’s shredded poise dropped from him. He pictured the happy party jingling along snowy streets, the appearance of the limousine, the horrible public descent of him and Myra before sixty reproachful eyes, his apology — a real one this time. He sighed aloud.

“What?” inquired Myra.

“Nothing. I was just yawning. Are we going to surely catch up with ‘em before they get there?” He was encouraging a faint hope that they might slip into the Minnehaha Club and meet the others there, be found in blasé seclusion before the fire and quite regain his lost attitude.

“Oh, sure Mike, we’ll catch ‘em all right — let’s hurry.”

He became conscious of his stomach. As they stepped into the machine he hurriedly slapped the paint of diplomacy over a rather box-like plan he had conceived. It was based upon some “trade-lasts” gleaned at dancing-school, to the effect that he was “awful good-looking and English, sort of.”

“Myra,” he said, lowering his voice and choosing his words carefully, “I beg a thousand pardons. Can you ever forgive me?” She regarded him gravely, his intent green eyes, his mouth, that to her thirteen-year-old, arrow-collar taste was the quintessence of romance. Yes, Myra could forgive him very easily.

“Why — yes — sure.”

He looked at her again, and then dropped his eyes. He had lashes.

“I’m awful,” he said sadly. “I’m diff’runt. I don’t know why I make faux pas. ‘Cause I don’t care, I s’pose.” Then, recklessly: “I been smoking too much. I’ve got t’bacca heart.”

Myra pictured an all-night tobacco debauch, with Amory pale and reeling from the effect of nicotined lungs. She gave a little gasp.

“Oh, Amory, don’t smoke. You’ll stunt your growth!”

“I don’t care,” he persisted gloomily. “I gotta. I got the habit. I’ve done a lot of things that if my fambly knew” — he hesitated, giving her imagination time to picture dark horrors — “I went to the burlesque show last week.”

Myra was quite overcome. He turned the green eyes on her again. “You’re the only girl in town I like much,” he exclaimed in a rush of sentiment. “You’re simpatico.”

Myra was not sure that she was, but it sounded stylish though vaguely improper.

Thick dusk had descended outside, and as the limousine made a sudden turn she was jolted against him; their hands touched.

“You shouldn’t smoke, Amory,” she whispered. “Don’t you know that?”

He shook his head.

“Nobody cares.”

Myra hesitated.

“I care.”

Something stirred within Amory.

“Oh, yes, you do! You got a crush on Froggy Parker. I guess everybody knows that.”

“No, I haven’t,” very slowly.

A silence, while Amory thrilled. There was something fascinating about Myra, shut away here cosily from the dim, chill air. Myra, a little bundle of clothes, with strands of yellow hair curling out from under her skating cap.

“Because I’ve got a crush, too — “ He paused, for he heard in the distance the sound of young laughter, and, peering through the frosted glass along the lamp-lit street, he made out the dark outline of the bobbing party. He must act quickly. He reached over with a violent, jerky effort, and clutched Myra’s hand — her thumb, to be exact.

“Tell him to go to the Minnehaha straight,” he whispered. “I wanta talk to you — I got to talk to you.”

Myra made out the party ahead, had an instant vision of her mother, and then — alas for convention — glanced into the eyes beside. “Turn down this side street, Richard, and drive straight to the Minnehaha Club!” she cried through the speaking tube. Amory sank back against the cushions with a sigh of relief.

“I can kiss her,” he thought. “I’ll bet I can. I’ll bet I can!”

Overhead the sky was half crystalline, half misty, and the night around was chill and vibrant with rich tension. From the Country Club steps the roads stretched away, dark creases on the white blanket; huge heaps of snow lining the sides like the tracks of giant moles. They lingered for a moment on the steps, and watched the white holiday moon.

“Pale moons like that one” — Amory made a vague gesture — “make people mysterieuse. You look like a young witch with her cap off and her hair sorta mussed” — her hands clutched at her hair — “Oh, leave it, it looks good.”

They drifted up the stairs and Myra led the way into the little den of his dreams, where a cosy fire was burning before a big sink-down couch. A few years later this was to be a great stage for Amory, a cradle for many an emotional crisis. Now they talked for a moment about bobbing parties.

“There’s always a bunch of shy fellas,” he commented, “sitting at the tail of the bob, sorta lurkin’ an’ whisperin’ an’ pushin’ each other off. Then there’s always some crazy cross-eyed girl” — he gave a terrifying imitation — “she’s always talkin’ hard, sorta, to the chaperon.”

“You’re such a funny boy,” puzzled Myra.

“How d’y’ mean?” Amory gave immediate attention, on his own ground at last.

“Oh — always talking about crazy things. Why don’t you come ski-ing with Marylyn and I to-morrow?”

“I don’t like girls in the daytime,” he said shortly, and then, thinking this a bit abrupt, he added: “But I like you.” He cleared his throat. “I like you first and second and third.”

Myra’s eyes became dreamy. What a story this would make to tell Marylyn! Here on the couch with this wonderful-looking boy — the little fire — the sense that they were alone in the great building —

Myra capitulated. The atmosphere was too appropriate.

“I like you the first twenty-five,” she confessed, her voice trembling, “and Froggy Parker twenty-sixth.”

Froggy had fallen twenty-five places in one hour. As yet he had not even noticed it.

But Amory, being on the spot, leaned over quickly and kissed Myra’s cheek. He had never kissed a girl before, and he tasted his lips curiously, as if he had munched some new fruit. Then their lips brushed like young wild flowers in the wind.

“We’re awful,” rejoiced Myra gently. She slipped her hand into his, her head drooped against his shoulder. Sudden revulsion seized Amory, disgust, loathing for the whole incident. He desired frantically to be away, never to see Myra again, never to kiss any one; he became conscious of his face and hers, of their clinging hands, and he wanted to creep out of his body and hide somewhere safe out of sight, up in the corner of his mind.

“Kiss me again.” Her voice came out of a great void.

“I don’t want to,” he heard himself saying. There was another pause.

“I don’t want to!” he repeated passionately.

Myra sprang up, her cheeks pink with bruised vanity, the great bow on the back of her head trembling sympathetically.

“I hate you!” she cried. “Don’t you ever dare to speak to me again!”

“What?” stammered Amory.

“I’ll tell mama you kissed me! I will too! I will too! I’ll tell mama, and she won’t let me play with you!”

Amory rose and stared at her helplessly, as though she were a new animal of whose presence on the earth he had not heretofore been aware.

The door opened suddenly, and Myra’s mother appeared on the threshold, fumbling with her lorgnette.

“Well,” she began, adjusting it benignantly, “the man at the desk told me you two children were up here — How do you do, Amory.”

Amory watched Myra and waited for the crash — but none came. The pout faded, the high pink subsided, and Myra’s voice was placid as a summer lake when she answered her mother.

“Oh, we started so late, mama, that I thought we might as well — “

He heard from below the shrieks of laughter, and smelled the vapid odor of hot chocolate and tea-cakes as he silently followed mother and daughter down-stairs. The sound of the graphophone mingled with the voices of many girls humming the air, and a faint glow was born and spread over him:

“Casey-Jones — mounted to the cab-un

Casey-Jones — ‘th his orders in his hand.

Casey-Jones — mounted to the cab-un

Took his farewell journey to the prom-ised land.”

SNAPSHOTS OF THE YOUNG EGOTIST

Amory spent nearly two years in Minneapolis. The first winter he wore moccasins that were born yellow, but after many applications of oil and dirt assumed their mature color, a dirty, greenish brown; he wore a gray plaid mackinaw coat, and a red toboggan cap. His dog, Count Del Monte, ate the red cap, so his uncle gave him a gray one that pulled down over his face. The trouble with this one was that you breathed into it and your breath froze; one day the darn thing froze his cheek. He rubbed snow on his cheek, but it turned bluish-black just the same.

The Count Del Monte ate a box of bluing once, but it didn’t hurt him. Later, however, he lost his mind and ran madly up the street, bumping into fences, rolling in gutters, and pursuing his eccentric course out of Amory’s life. Amory cried on his bed.

“Poor little Count,” he cried. “Oh, poor little Count!”

After several months he suspected Count of a fine piece of emotional acting.

Amory and Frog Parker considered that the greatest line in literature occurred in Act III of “Arsene Lupin.”

They sat in the first row at the Wednesday and Saturday matinees. The line was:

“If one can’t be a great artist or a great soldier, the next best thing is to be a great criminal.”

Amory fell in love again, and wrote a poem. This was it:

“Marylyn and Sallee,

Those are the girls for me.

Marylyn stands above

Sallee in that sweet, deep love.”

He was interested in whether McGovern of Minnesota would make the first or second All-American, how to do the card-pass, how to do the coin-pass, chameleon ties, how babies were born, and whether Three-fingered Brown was really a better pitcher than Christie Mathewson.

Among other things he read: “For the Honor of the School,” “Little Women” (twice), “The Common Law,” “Sapho,” “Dangerous Dan McGrew,” “The Broad Highway” (three times), “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “Three Weeks,” “Mary Ware, the Little Colonel’s Chum,” “Gunga Din,” The Police Gazette, and Jim-Jam Jems.

He had all the Henty biasses in history, and was particularly fond of the cheerful murder stories of Mary Roberts Rinehart.

School ruined his French and gave him a distaste for standard authors. His masters considered him idle, unreliable and superficially clever.

He collected locks of hair from many girls. He wore the rings of several. Finally he could borrow no more rings, owing to his nervous habit of chewing them out of shape. This, it seemed, usually aroused the jealous suspicions of the next borrower.

All through the summer months Amory and Frog Parker went each week to the Stock Company. Afterward they would stroll home in the balmy air of August night, dreaming along Hennepin and Nicollet Avenues, through the gay crowd. Amory wondered how people could fail to notice that he was a boy marked for glory, and when faces of the throng turned toward him and ambiguous eyes stared into his, he assumed the most romantic of expressions and walked on the air cushions that lie on the asphalts of fourteen.

Always, after he was in bed, there were voices — indefinite, fading, enchanting — just outside his window, and before he fell asleep he would dream one of his favorite waking dreams, the one about becoming a great half-back, or the one about the Japanese invasion, when he was rewarded by being made the youngest general in the world. It was always the becoming he dreamed of, never the being. This, too, was quite characteristic of Amory.

CODE OF THE YOUNG EGOTIST

Before he was summoned back to Lake Geneva, he had appeared, shy but inwardly glowing, in his first long trousers, set off by a purple accordion tie and a “Belmont” collar with the edges unassailably meeting, purple socks, and handkerchief with a purple border peeping from his breast pocket. But more than that, he had formulated his first philosophy, a code to live by, which, as near as it can be named, was a sort of aristocratic egotism.

He had realized that his best interests were bound up with those of a certain variant, changing person, whose label, in order that his past might always be identified with him, was Amory Blaine. Amory marked himself a fortunate youth, capable of infinite expansion for good or evil. He did not consider himself a “strong char’c’ter,” but relied on his facility (learn things sorta quick) and his superior mentality (read a lotta deep books). He was proud of the fact that he could never become a mechanical or scientific genius. From no other heights was he debarred.

Physically. — Amory thought that he was exceedingly handsome. He was. He fancied himself an athlete of possibilities and a supple dancer.

Socially. — Here his condition was, perhaps, most dangerous. He granted himself personality, charm, magnetism, poise, the power of dominating all contemporary males, the gift of fascinating all women.

Mentally. — Complete, unquestioned superiority.

Now a confession will have to be made. Amory had rather a Puritan conscience. Not that he yielded to it — later in life he almost completely slew it — but at fifteen it made him consider himself a great deal worse than other boys... unscrupulousness... the desire to influence people in almost every way, even for evil... a certain coldness and lack of affection, amounting sometimes to cruelty... a shifting sense of honor... an unholy selfishness... a puzzled, furtive interest in everything concerning sex.

There was, also, a curious strain of weakness running crosswise through his make-up... a harsh phrase from the lips of an older boy (older boys usually detested him) was liable to sweep him off his poise into surly sensitiveness, or timid stupidity... he was a slave to his own moods and he felt that though he was capable of recklessness and audacity, he possessed neither courage, perseverance, nor self-respect.

Vanity, tempered with self-suspicion if not self-knowledge, a sense of people as automatons to his will, a desire to “pass” as many boys as possible and get to a vague top of the world... with this background did Amory drift into adolescence.

PREPARATORY TO THE GREAT ADVENTURE

The train slowed up with midsummer languor at Lake Geneva, and Amory caught sight of his mother waiting in her electric on the gravelled station drive. It was an ancient electric, one of the early types, and painted gray. The sight of her sitting there, slenderly erect, and of her face, where beauty and dignity combined, melting to a dreamy recollected smile, filled him with a sudden great pride of her. As they kissed coolly and he stepped into the electric, he felt a quick fear lest he had lost the requisite charm to measure up to her.

“Dear boy — you’re so tall... look behind and see if there’s anything coming...”

She looked left and right, she slipped cautiously into a speed of two miles an hour, beseeching Amory to act as sentinel; and at one busy crossing she made him get out and run ahead to signal her forward like a traffic policeman. Beatrice was what might be termed a careful driver.

“You are tall — but you’re still very handsome — you’ve skipped the awkward age, or is that sixteen; perhaps it’s fourteen or fifteen; I can never remember; but you’ve skipped it.”

“Don’t embarrass me,” murmured Amory.

“But, my dear boy, what odd clothes! They look as if they were a set — don’t they? Is your underwear purple, too?”

Amory grunted impolitely.

“You must go to Brooks’ and get some really nice suits. Oh, we’ll have a talk to-night or perhaps to-morrow night. I want to tell you about your heart — you’ve probably been neglecting your heart — and you don’t know.”

Amory thought how superficial was the recent overlay of his own generation. Aside from a minute shyness, he felt that the old cynical kinship with his mother had not been one bit broken. Yet for the first few days he wandered about the gardens and along the shore in a state of superloneliness, finding a lethargic content in smoking “Bull” at the garage with one of the chauffeurs.

The sixty acres of the estate were dotted with old and new summer houses and many fountains and white benches that came suddenly into sight from foliage-hung hiding-places; there was a great and constantly increasing family of white cats that prowled the many flower-beds and were silhouetted suddenly at night against the darkening trees. It was on one of the shadowy paths that Beatrice at last captured Amory, after Mr. Blaine had, as usual, retired for the evening to his private library. After reproving him for avoiding her, she took him for a long tete-a-tete in the moonlight. He could not reconcile himself to her beauty, that was mother to his own, the exquisite neck and shoulders, the grace of a fortunate woman of thirty.

“Amory, dear,” she crooned softly, “I had such a strange, weird time after I left you.”

“Did you, Beatrice?”

“When I had my last breakdown” — she spoke of it as a sturdy, gallant feat.

“The doctors told me” — her voice sang on a confidential note — “that if any man alive had done the consistent drinking that I have, he would have been physically shattered, my dear, and in his grave — long in his grave.”

Amory winced, and wondered how this would have sounded to Froggy Parker.

“Yes,” continued Beatrice tragically, “I had dreams — wonderful visions.” She pressed the palms of her hands into her eyes. “I saw bronze rivers lapping marble shores, and great birds that soared through the air, parti-colored birds with iridescent plumage. I heard strange music and the flare of barbaric trumpets — what?”

Amory had snickered.

“What, Amory?”

“I said go on, Beatrice.”

“That was all — it merely recurred and recurred — gardens that flaunted coloring against which this would be quite dull, moons that whirled and swayed, paler than winter moons, more golden than harvest moons — “

“Are you quite well now, Beatrice?”

“Quite well — as well as I will ever be. I am not understood, Amory. I know that can’t express it to you, Amory, but — I am not understood.”

Amory was quite moved. He put his arm around his mother, rubbing his head gently against her shoulder.

“Poor Beatrice — poor Beatrice.”

“Tell me about you, Amory. Did you have two horrible years?”

Amory considered lying, and then decided against it.

“No, Beatrice. I enjoyed them. I adapted myself to the bourgeoisie. I became conventional.” He surprised himself by saying that, and he pictured how Froggy would have gaped.

“Beatrice,” he said suddenly, “I want to go away to school. Everybody in Minneapolis is going to go away to school.”

Beatrice showed some alarm.

“But you’re only fifteen.”

“Yes, but everybody goes away to school at fifteen, and I want to, Beatrice.”

On Beatrice’s suggestion the subject was dropped for the rest of the walk, but a week later she delighted him by saying:

“Amory, I have decided to let you have your way. If you still want to, you can go to school.”

“Yes?”

“To St. Regis’s in Connecticut.”

Amory felt a quick excitement.

“It’s being arranged,” continued Beatrice. “It’s better that you should go away. I’d have preferred you to have gone to Eton, and then to ChristChurch, Oxford, but it seems impracticable now — and for the present we’ll let the university question take care of itself.”

“What are you going to do, Beatrice?”

“Heaven knows. It seems my fate to fret away my years in this country. Not for a second do I regret being American — indeed, I think that a regret typical of very vulgar people, and I feel sure we are the great coming nation — yet” — and she sighed — “I feel my life should have drowsed away close to an older, mellower civilization, a land of greens and autumnal browns — “

Amory did not answer, so his mother continued:

“My regret is that you haven’t been abroad, but still, as you are a man, it’s better that you should grow up here under the snarling eagle — is that the right term?”

Amory agreed that it was. She would not have appreciated the Japanese invasion.

“When do I go to school?”

“Next month. You’ll have to start East a little early to take your examinations. After that you’ll have a free week, so I want you to go up the Hudson and pay a visit.”

“To who?”

“To Monsignor Darcy, Amory. He wants to see you. He went to Harrow and then to Yale — became a Catholic. I want him to talk to you — I feel he can be such a help — “ She stroked his auburn hair gently. “Dear Amory, dear Amory — “

“Dear Beatrice — “

So early in September Amory, provided with “six suits summer underwear, six suits winter underwear, one sweater or T shirt, one jersey, one overcoat, winter, etc.,” set out for New England, the land of schools.

There were Andover and Exeter with their memories of New England dead — large, college-like democracies; St. Mark’s, Groton, St. Regis’ — recruited from Boston and the Knickerbocker families of New York; St. Paul’s, with its great rinks; Pomfret and St. George’s, prosperous and well-dressed; Taft and Hotchkiss, which prepared the wealth of the Middle West for social success at Yale; Pawling, Westminster, Choate, Kent, and a hundred others; all milling out their well-set-up, conventional, impressive type, year after year; their mental stimulus the college entrance exams; their vague purpose set forth in a hundred circulars as “To impart a Thorough Mental, Moral, and Physical Training as a Christian Gentleman, to fit the boy for meeting the problems of his day and generation, and to give a solid foundation in the Arts and Sciences.”

At St. Regis’ Amory stayed three days and took his exams with a scoffing confidence, then doubling back to New York to pay his tutelary visit. The metropolis, barely glimpsed, made little impression on him, except for the sense of cleanliness he drew from the tall white buildings seen from a Hudson River steamboat in the early morning. Indeed, his mind was so crowded with dreams of athletic prowess at school that he considered this visit only as a rather tiresome prelude to the great adventure. This, however, it did not prove to be.

Monsignor Darcy’s house was an ancient, rambling structure set on a hill overlooking the river, and there lived its owner, between his trips to all parts of the Roman-Catholic world, rather like an exiled Stuart king waiting to be called to the rule of his land. Monsignor was forty-four then, and bustling — a trifle too stout for symmetry, with hair the color of spun gold, and a brilliant, enveloping personality. When he came into a room clad in his full purple regalia from thatch to toe, he resembled a Turner sunset, and attracted both admiration and attention. He had written two novels: one of them violently anti-Catholic, just before his conversion, and five years later another, in which he had attempted to turn all his clever jibes against Catholics into even cleverer innuendoes against Episcopalians. He was intensely ritualistic, startlingly dramatic, loved the idea of God enough to be a celibate, and rather liked his neighbor.

Children adored him because he was like a child; youth revelled in his company because he was still a youth, and couldn’t be shocked. In the proper land and century he might have been a Richelieu — at present he was a very moral, very religious (if not particularly pious) clergyman, making a great mystery about pulling rusty wires, and appreciating life to the fullest, if not entirely enjoying it.

He and Amory took to each other at first sight — the jovial, impressive prelate who could dazzle an embassy ball, and the green-eyed, intent youth, in his first long trousers, accepted in their own minds a relation of father and son within a half-hour’s conversation.

“My dear boy, I’ve been waiting to see you for years. Take a big chair and we’ll have a chat.”

“I’ve just come from school — St. Regis’s, you know.”

“So your mother says — a remarkable woman; have a cigarette — I’m sure you smoke. Well, if you’re like me, you loathe all science and mathematics — “

Amory nodded vehemently.

“Hate ‘em all. Like English and history.”

“Of course. You’ll hate school for a while, too, but I’m glad you’re going to St. Regis’s.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s a gentleman’s school, and democracy won’t hit you so early. You’ll find plenty of that in college.”

“I want to go to Princeton,” said Amory. “I don’t know why, but I think of all Harvard men as sissies, like I used to be, and all Yale men as wearing big blue sweaters and smoking pipes.”

Monsignor chuckled.

“I’m one, you know.”

“Oh, you’re different — I think of Princeton as being lazy and good-looking and aristocratic — you know, like a spring day. Harvard seems sort of indoors — “

“And Yale is November, crisp and energetic,” finished Monsignor.

“That’s it.”

They slipped briskly into an intimacy from which they never recovered.

“I was for Bonnie Prince Charlie,” announced Amory.

“Of course you were — and for Hannibal — “

“Yes, and for the Southern Confederacy.” He was rather sceptical about being an Irish patriot — he suspected that being Irish was being somewhat common — but Monsignor assured him that Ireland was a romantic lost cause and Irish people quite charming, and that it should, by all means, be one of his principal biasses.

After a crowded hour which included several more cigarettes, and during which Monsignor learned, to his surprise but not to his horror, that Amory had not been brought up a Catholic, he announced that he had another guest. This turned out to be the Honorable Thornton Hancock, of Boston, ex-minister to The Hague, author of an erudite history of the Middle Ages and the last of a distinguished, patriotic, and brilliant family.

“He comes here for a rest,” said Monsignor confidentially, treating Amory as a contemporary. “I act as an escape from the weariness of agnosticism, and I think I’m the only man who knows how his staid old mind is really at sea and longs for a sturdy spar like the Church to cling to.”

Their first luncheon was one of the memorable events of Amory’s early life. He was quite radiant and gave off a peculiar brightness and charm. Monsignor called out the best that he had thought by question and suggestion, and Amory talked with an ingenious brilliance of a thousand impulses and desires and repulsions and faiths and fears. He and Monsignor held the floor, and the older man, with his less receptive, less accepting, yet certainly not colder mentality, seemed content to listen and bask in the mellow sunshine that played between these two. Monsignor gave the effect of sunlight to many people; Amory gave it in his youth and, to some extent, when he was very much older, but never again was it quite so mutually spontaneous.

“He’s a radiant boy,” thought Thornton Hancock, who had seen the splendor of two continents and talked with Parnell and Gladstone and Bismarck — and afterward he added to Monsignor: “But his education ought not to be intrusted to a school or college.”

But for the next four years the best of Amory’s intellect was concentrated on matters of popularity, the intricacies of a university social system and American Society as represented by Biltmore Teas and Hot Springs golf-links.

... In all, a wonderful week, that saw Amory’s mind turned inside out, a hundred of his theories confirmed, and his joy of life crystallized to a thousand ambitions. Not that the conversation was scholastic — heaven forbid! Amory had only the vaguest idea as to what Bernard Shaw was — but Monsignor made quite as much out of “The Beloved Vagabond” and “Sir Nigel,” taking good care that Amory never once felt out of his depth.

But the trumpets were sounding for Amory’s preliminary skirmish with his own generation.

“You’re not sorry to go, of course. With people like us our home is where we are not,” said Monsignor.

“I am sorry — “

“No, you’re not. No one person in the world is necessary to you or to me.”

“Well — “

“Good-by.”

THE EGOTIST DOWN

Amory’s two years at St. Regis’, though in turn painful and triumphant, had as little real significance in his own life as the American “prep” school, crushed as it is under the heel of the universities, has to American life in general. We have no Eton to create the self-consciousness of a governing class; we have, instead, clean, flaccid and innocuous preparatory schools.

He went all wrong at the start, was generally considered both conceited and arrogant, and universally detested. He played football intensely, alternating a reckless brilliancy with a tendency to keep himself as safe from hazard as decency would permit. In a wild panic he backed out of a fight with a boy his own size, to a chorus of scorn, and a week later, in desperation, picked a battle with another boy very much bigger, from which he emerged badly beaten, but rather proud of himself.

He was resentful against all those in authority over him, and this, combined with a lazy indifference toward his work, exasperated every master in school. He grew discouraged and imagined himself a pariah; took to sulking in corners and reading after lights. With a dread of being alone he attached a few friends, but since they were not among the elite of the school, he used them simply as mirrors of himself, audiences before which he might do that posing absolutely essential to him. He was unbearably lonely, desperately unhappy.

There were some few grains of comfort. Whenever Amory was submerged, his vanity was the last part to go below the surface, so he could still enjoy a comfortable glow when “Wookey-wookey,” the deaf old housekeeper, told him that he was the best-looking boy she had ever seen. It had pleased him to be the lightest and youngest man on the first football squad; it pleased him when Doctor Dougall told him at the end of a heated conference that he could, if he wished, get the best marks in school. But Doctor Dougall was wrong. It was temperamentally impossible for Amory to get the best marks in school.

Miserable, confined to bounds, unpopular with both faculty and students — that was Amory’s first term. But at Christmas he had returned to Minneapolis, tight-lipped and strangely jubilant.

“Oh, I was sort of fresh at first,” he told Frog Parker patronizingly, “but I got along fine — lightest man on the squad. You ought to go away to school, Froggy. It’s great stuff.”

INCIDENT OF THE WELL-MEANING PROFESSOR

On the last night of his first term, Mr. Margotson, the senior master, sent word to study hall that Amory was to come to his room at nine. Amory suspected that advice was forthcoming, but he determined to be courteous, because this Mr. Margotson had been kindly disposed toward him.

His summoner received him gravely, and motioned him to a chair. He hemmed several times and looked consciously kind, as a man will when he knows he’s on delicate ground.

“Amory,” he began. “I’ve sent for you on a personal matter.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’ve noticed you this year and I — I like you. I think you have in you the makings of a — a very good man.”

“Yes, sir,” Amory managed to articulate. He hated having people talk as if he were an admitted failure.

“But I’ve noticed,” continued the older man blindly, “that you’re not very popular with the boys.”

“No, sir.” Amory licked his lips.

“Ah — I thought you might not understand exactly what it was they — ah — objected to. I’m going to tell you, because I believe — ah — that when a boy knows his difficulties he’s better able to cope with them — to conform to what others expect of him.” He a-hemmed again with delicate reticence, and continued: “They seem to think that you’re — ah — rather too fresh — “

Amory could stand no more. He rose from his chair, scarcely controlling his voice when he spoke.

“I know — oh, don’t you s’pose I know.” His voice rose. “I know what they think; do you s’pose you have to tell me!” He paused. “I’m — I’ve got to go back now — hope I’m not rude — “

He left the room hurriedly. In the cool air outside, as he walked to his house, he exulted in his refusal to be helped.

“That damn old fool!” he cried wildly. “As if I didn’t know!”

He decided, however, that this was a good excuse not to go back to study hall that night, so, comfortably couched up in his room, he munched Nabiscos and finished “The White Company.”

INCIDENT OF THE WONDERFUL GIRL

There was a bright star in February. New York burst upon him on Washington’s Birthday with the brilliance of a long-anticipated event. His glimpse of it as a vivid whiteness against a deep-blue sky had left a picture of splendor that rivalled the dream cities in the Arabian Nights; but this time he saw it by electric light, and romance gleamed from the chariot-race sign on Broadway and from the women’s eyes at the Astor, where he and young Paskert from St. Regis’ had dinner. When they walked down the aisle of the theatre, greeted by the nervous twanging and discord of untuned violins and the sensuous, heavy fragrance of paint and powder, he moved in a sphere of epicurean delight. Everything enchanted him. The play was “The Little Millionaire,” with George M. Cohan, and there was one stunning young brunette who made him sit with brimming eyes in the ecstasy of watching her dance.

“Oh — you — wonderful girl,

What a wonderful girl you are — “

sang the tenor, and Amory agreed silently, but passionately.

“All — your — wonderful words

Thrill me through — “

The violins swelled and quavered on the last notes, the girl sank to a crumpled butterfly on the stage, a great burst of clapping filled the house. Oh, to fall in love like that, to the languorous magic melody of such a tune!

The last scene was laid on a roof-garden, and the ‘cellos sighed to the musical moon, while light adventure and facile froth-like comedy flitted back and forth in the calcium. Amory was on fire to be an habitui of roof-gardens, to meet a girl who should look like that — better, that very girl; whose hair would be drenched with golden moonlight, while at his elbow sparkling wine was poured by an unintelligible waiter. When the curtain fell for the last time he gave such a long sigh that the people in front of him twisted around and stared and said loud enough for him to hear:

“What a remarkable-looking boy!”

This took his mind off the play, and he wondered if he really did seem handsome to the population of New York.

Paskert and he walked in silence toward their hotel. The former was the first to speak. His uncertain fifteen-year-old voice broke in in a melancholy strain on Amory’s musings:

“I’d marry that girl to-night.”

There was no need to ask what girl he referred to.

“I’d be proud to take her home and introduce her to my people,” continued Paskert.

Amory was distinctly impressed. He wished he had said it instead of Paskert. It sounded so mature.

“I wonder about actresses; are they all pretty bad?”

“No, sir, not by a darn sight,” said the worldly youth with emphasis, “and I know that girl’s as good as gold. I can tell.”

They wandered on, mixing in the Broadway crowd, dreaming on the music that eddied out of the cafes. New faces flashed on and off like myriad lights, pale or rouged faces, tired, yet sustained by a weary excitement. Amory watched them in fascination. He was planning his life. He was going to live in New York, and be known at every restaurant and cafe, wearing a dress-suit from early evening to early morning, sleeping away the dull hours of the forenoon.

“Yes, sir, I’d marry that girl to-night!”

HEROIC IN GENERAL TONE

October of his second and last year at St. Regis’ was a high point in Amory’s memory. The game with Groton was played from three of a snappy, exhilarating afternoon far into the crisp autumnal twilight, and Amory at quarter-back, exhorting in wild despair, making impossible tackles, calling signals in a voice that had diminished to a hoarse, furious whisper, yet found time to revel in the blood-stained bandage around his head, and the straining, glorious heroism of plunging, crashing bodies and aching limbs. For those minutes courage flowed like wine out of the November dusk, and he was the eternal hero, one with the sea-rover on the prow of a Norse galley, one with Roland and Horatius, Sir Nigel and Ted Coy, scraped and stripped into trim and then flung by his own will into the breach, beating back the tide, hearing from afar the thunder of cheers... finally bruised and weary, but still elusive, circling an end, twisting, changing pace, straight-arming... falling behind the Groton goal with two men on his legs, in the only touchdown of the game.

THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE SLICKER

From the scoffing superiority of sixth-form year and success Amory looked back with cynical wonder on his status of the year before. He was changed as completely as Amory Blaine could ever be changed. Amory plus Beatrice plus two years in Minneapolis — these had been his ingredients when he entered St. Regis’. But the Minneapolis years were not a thick enough overlay to conceal the “Amory plus Beatrice” from the ferreting eyes of a boarding-school, so St. Regis’ had very painfully drilled Beatrice out of him, and begun to lay down new and more conventional planking on the fundamental Amory. But both St. Regis’ and Amory were unconscious of the fact that this fundamental Amory had not in himself changed. Those qualities for which he had suffered, his moodiness, his tendency to pose, his laziness, and his love of playing the fool, were now taken as a matter of course, recognized eccentricities in a star quarter-back, a clever actor, and the editor of the St. Regis Tattler: it puzzled him to see impressionable small boys imitating the very vanities that had not long ago been contemptible weaknesses.

After the football season he slumped into dreamy content. The night of the pre-holiday dance he slipped away and went early to bed for the pleasure of hearing the violin music cross the grass and come surging in at his window. Many nights he lay there dreaming awake of secret cafes in Mont Martre, where ivory women delved in romantic mysteries with diplomats and soldiers of fortune, while orchestras played Hungarian waltzes and the air was thick and exotic with intrigue and moonlight and adventure. In the spring he read “L’Allegro,” by request, and was inspired to lyrical outpourings on the subject of Arcady and the pipes of Pan. He moved his bed so that the sun would wake him at dawn that he might dress and go out to the archaic swing that hung from an apple-tree near the sixth-form house. Seating himself in this he would pump higher and higher until he got the effect of swinging into the wide air, into a fairyland of piping satyrs and nymphs with the faces of fair-haired girls he passed in the streets of Eastchester. As the swing reached its highest point, Arcady really lay just over the brow of a certain hill, where the brown road dwindled out of sight in a golden dot.

He read voluminously all spring, the beginning of his eighteenth year: “The Gentleman from Indiana,” “The New Arabian Nights,” “The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne,” “The Man Who Was Thursday,” which he liked without understanding; “Stover at Yale,” that became somewhat of a text-book; “Dombey and Son,” because he thought he really should read better stuff; Robert Chambers, David Graham Phillips, and E. Phillips Oppenheim complete, and a scattering of Tennyson and Kipling. Of all his class work only “L’Allegro” and some quality of rigid clarity in solid geometry stirred his languid interest.

As June drew near, he felt the need of conversation to formulate his own ideas, and, to his surprise, found a co-philosopher in Rahill, the president of the sixth form. In many a talk, on the highroad or lying belly-down along the edge of the baseball diamond, or late at night with their cigarettes glowing in the dark, they threshed out the questions of school, and there was developed the term “slicker.”

“Got tobacco?” whispered Rahill one night, putting his head inside the door five minutes after lights.

“Sure.”

“I’m coming in.”

“Take a couple of pillows and lie in the window-seat, why don’t you.”

Amory sat up in bed and lit a cigarette while Rahill settled for a conversation. Rahill’s favorite subject was the respective futures of the sixth form, and Amory never tired of outlining them for his benefit.

“Ted Converse? ‘At’s easy. He’ll fail his exams, tutor all summer at Harstrum’s, get into Sheff with about four conditions, and flunk out in the middle of the freshman year. Then he’ll go back West and raise hell for a year or so; finally his father will make him go into the paint business. He’ll marry and have four sons, all bone heads. He’ll always think St. Regis’s spoiled him, so he’ll send his sons to day school in Portland. He’ll die of locomotor ataxia when he’s forty-one, and his wife will give a baptizing stand or whatever you call it to the Presbyterian Church, with his name on it — “

“Hold up, Amory. That’s too darned gloomy. How about yourself?”

“I’m in a superior class. You are, too. We’re philosophers.”

“I’m not.”

“Sure you are. You’ve got a darn good head on you.” But Amory knew that nothing in the abstract, no theory or generality, ever moved Rahill until he stubbed his toe upon the concrete minutiae of it.

“Haven’t,” insisted Rahill. “I let people impose on me here and don’t get anything out of it. I’m the prey of my friends, damn it — do their lessons, get ‘em out of trouble, pay ‘em stupid summer visits, and always entertain their kid sisters; keep my temper when they get selfish and then they think they pay me back by voting for me and telling me I’m the ‘big man’ of St. Regis’s. I want to get where everybody does their own work and I can tell people where to go. I’m tired of being nice to every poor fish in school.”

“You’re not a slicker,” said Amory suddenly.

“A what?”

“A slicker.”

“What the devil’s that?”

“Well, it’s something that — that — there’s a lot of them. You’re not one, and neither am I, though I am more than you are.”

“Who is one? What makes you one?”

Amory considered.

“Why — why, I suppose that the sign of it is when a fellow slicks his hair back with water.”

“Like Carstairs?”

“Yes — sure. He’s a slicker.”

They spent two evenings getting an exact definition. The slicker was good-looking or clean-looking; he had brains, social brains, that is, and he used all means on the broad path of honesty to get ahead, be popular, admired, and never in trouble. He dressed well, was particularly neat in appearance, and derived his name from the fact that his hair was inevitably worn short, soaked in water or tonic, parted in the middle, and slicked back as the current of fashion dictated. The slickers of that year had adopted tortoise-shell spectacles as badges of their slickerhood, and this made them so easy to recognize that Amory and Rahill never missed one. The slicker seemed distributed through school, always a little wiser and shrewder than his contemporaries, managing some team or other, and keeping his cleverness carefully concealed.

Amory found the slicker a most valuable classification until his junior year in college, when the outline became so blurred and indeterminate that it had to be subdivided many times, and became only a quality. Amory’s secret ideal had all the slicker qualifications, but, in addition, courage and tremendous brains and talents — also Amory conceded him a bizarre streak that was quite irreconcilable to the slicker proper.

This was a first real break from the hypocrisy of school tradition. The slicker was a definite element of success, differing intrinsically from the prep school “big man.”

“THE SLICKER”

1. Clever sense of social values.

2. Dresses well.  Pretends that dress is superficial — but knows that it isn’t.

3. Goes into such activities as he can shine in.

4. Gets to college and is, in a worldly way, successful.

5. Hair slicked.

“THE BIG MAN”

1. Inclined to stupidity and unconscious of social values.

2. Thinks dress is superficial, and is inclined to be

careless about it.

3. Goes out for everything from a sense of duty.

4. Gets to college and has a problematical future.  Feels lost

without his circle, and always says that school days were

happiest, after all.  Goes back to school and makes speeches

about what St. Regis’s boys are doing.

5. Hair not slicked.

Amory had decided definitely on Princeton, even though he would be the only boy entering that year from St. Regis’. Yale had a romance and glamour from the tales of Minneapolis, and St. Regis’ men who had been “tapped for Skull and Bones,” but Princeton drew him most, with its atmosphere of bright colors and its alluring reputation as the pleasantest country club in America. Dwarfed by the menacing college exams, Amory’s school days drifted into the past. Years afterward, when he went back to St. Regis’, he seemed to have forgotten the successes of sixth-form year, and to be able to picture himself only as the unadjustable boy who had hurried down corridors, jeered at by his rabid contemporaries mad with common sense.

CHAPTER 2. Spires and Gargoyles

At first Amory noticed only the wealth of sunshine creeping across the long, green swards, dancing on the leaded window-panes, and swimming around the tops of spires and towers and battlemented walls. Gradually he realized that he was really walking up University Place, self-conscious about his suitcase, developing a new tendency to glare straight ahead when he passed any one. Several times he could have sworn that men turned to look at him critically. He wondered vaguely if there was something the matter with his clothes, and wished he had shaved that morning on the train. He felt unnecessarily stiff and awkward among these white-flannelled, bareheaded youths, who must be juniors and seniors, judging from the savoir faire with which they strolled.

He found that 12 University Place was a large, dilapidated mansion, at present apparently uninhabited, though he knew it housed usually a dozen freshmen. After a hurried skirmish with his landlady he sallied out on a tour of exploration, but he had gone scarcely a block when he became horribly conscious that he must be the only man in town who was wearing a hat. He returned hurriedly to 12 University, left his derby, and, emerging bareheaded, loitered down Nassau Street, stopping to investigate a display of athletic photographs in a store window, including a large one of Allenby, the football captain, and next attracted by the sign “Jigger Shop” over a confectionary window. This sounded familiar, so he sauntered in and took a seat on a high stool.

“Chocolate sundae,” he told a colored person.

“Double chocolate jiggah? Anything else?”

“Why — yes.”

“Bacon bun?”

“Why — yes.”

He munched four of these, finding them of pleasing savor, and then consumed another double-chocolate jigger before ease descended upon him. After a cursory inspection of the pillow-cases, leather pennants, and Gibson Girls that lined the walls, he left, and continued along Nassau Street with his hands in his pockets. Gradually he was learning to distinguish between upper classmen and entering men, even though the freshman cap would not appear until the following Monday. Those who were too obviously, too nervously at home were freshmen, for as each train brought a new contingent it was immediately absorbed into the hatless, white-shod, book-laden throng, whose function seemed to be to drift endlessly up and down the street, emitting great clouds of smoke from brand-new pipes. By afternoon Amory realized that now the newest arrivals were taking him for an upper classman, and he tried conscientiously to look both pleasantly blasé and casually critical, which was as near as he could analyze the prevalent facial expression.

At five o’clock he felt the need of hearing his own voice, so he retreated to his house to see if any one else had arrived. Having climbed the rickety stairs he scrutinized his room resignedly, concluding that it was hopeless to attempt any more inspired decoration than class banners and tiger pictures. There was a tap at the door.

“Come in!”

A slim face with gray eyes and a humorous smile appeared in the doorway.

“Got a hammer?”

“No — sorry. Maybe Mrs. Twelve, or whatever she goes by, has one.”

The stranger advanced into the room.

“You an inmate of this asylum?”

Amory nodded.

“Awful barn for the rent we pay.”

Amory had to agree that it was.

“I thought of the campus,” he said, “but they say there’s so few freshmen that they’re lost. Have to sit around and study for something to do.”

The gray-eyed man decided to introduce himself.

“My name’s Holiday.”

“Blaine’s my name.”

They shook hands with the fashionable low swoop. Amory grinned.

“Where’d you prep?”

“Andover — where did you?”

“St. Regis’s.”

“Oh, did you? I had a cousin there.”

They discussed the cousin thoroughly, and then Holiday announced that he was to meet his brother for dinner at six.

“Come along and have a bite with us.”

“All right.”

At the Kenilworth Amory met Burne Holiday — he of the gray eyes was Kerry — and during a limpid meal of thin soup and anaemic vegetables they stared at the other freshmen, who sat either in small groups looking very ill at ease, or in large groups seeming very much at home.

“I hear Commons is pretty bad,” said Amory.

“That’s the rumor. But you’ve got to eat there — or pay anyways.”

“Crime!”

“Imposition!”

“Oh, at Princeton you’ve got to swallow everything the first year. It’s like a damned prep school.”

Amory agreed.

“Lot of pep, though,” he insisted. “I wouldn’t have gone to Yale for a million.”

“Me either.”

“You going out for anything?” inquired Amory of the elder brother.

“Not me — Burne here is going out for the Prince — the Daily Princetonian, you know.”

“Yes, I know.”

“You going out for anything?”

“Why — yes. I’m going to take a whack at freshman football.”

“Play at St. Regis’s?”

“Some,” admitted Amory depreciatingly, “but I’m getting so damned thin.”

“You’re not thin.”

“Well, I used to be stocky last fall.”

“Oh!”

After supper they attended the movies, where Amory was fascinated by the glib comments of a man in front of him, as well as by the wild yelling and shouting.

“Yoho!”

“Oh, honey-baby — you’re so big and strong, but oh, so gentle!”

“Clinch!”

“Oh, Clinch!”

“Kiss her, kiss ‘at lady, quick!”

“Oh-h-h — !”

A group began whistling “By the Sea,” and the audience took it up noisily. This was followed by an indistinguishable song that included much stamping and then by an endless, incoherent dirge.

“Oh-h-h-h-h

She works in a Jam Factoree

And — that-may-be-all-right

But you can’t-fool-me

For I know — DAMN — WELL

That she DON’T-make-jam-all-night!

Oh-h-h-h!”

As they pushed out, giving and receiving curious impersonal glances, Amory decided that he liked the movies, wanted to enjoy them as the row of upper classmen in front had enjoyed them, with their arms along the backs of the seats, their comments Gaelic and caustic, their attitude a mixture of critical wit and tolerant amusement.

“Want a sundae — I mean a jigger?” asked Kerry.

“Sure.”

They suppered heavily and then, still sauntering, eased back to 12.

“Wonderful night.”

“It’s a whiz.”

“You men going to unpack?”

“Guess so. Come on, Burne.”

Amory decided to sit for a while on the front steps, so he bade them good night.

The great tapestries of trees had darkened to ghosts back at the last edge of twilight. The early moon had drenched the arches with pale blue, and, weaving over the night, in and out of the gossamer rifts of moon, swept a song, a song with more than a hint of sadness, infinitely transient, infinitely regretful.

He remembered that an alumnus of the nineties had told him of one of Booth Tarkington’s amusements: standing in mid-campus in the small hours and singing tenor songs to the stars, arousing mingled emotions in the couched undergraduates according to the sentiment of their moods.

Now, far down the shadowy line of University Place a white-clad phalanx broke the gloom, and marching figures, white-shirted, white-trousered, swung rhythmically up the street, with linked arms and heads thrown back:

“Going back — going back,

Going — back — to — Nas-sau — Hall,

Going back — going back —

To the — Best — Old — Place — of — All.

Going back — going back,

From all — this — earth-ly — ball,

We’ll — clear — the — track — as — we — go — back —

Going — back — to — Nas-sau — Hall!”

Amory closed his eyes as the ghostly procession drew near. The song soared so high that all dropped out except the tenors, who bore the melody triumphantly past the danger-point and relinquished it to the fantastic chorus. Then Amory opened his eyes, half afraid that sight would spoil the rich illusion of harmony.

He sighed eagerly. There at the head of the white platoon marched Allenby, the football captain, slim and defiant, as if aware that this year the hopes of the college rested on him, that his hundred-and-sixty pounds were expected to dodge to victory through the heavy blue and crimson lines.

Fascinated, Amory watched each rank of linked arms as it came abreast, the faces indistinct above the polo shirts, the voices blent in a paean of triumph — and then the procession passed through shadowy Campbell Arch, and the voices grew fainter as it wound eastward over the campus.

The minutes passed and Amory sat there very quietly. He regretted the rule that would forbid freshmen to be outdoors after curfew, for he wanted to ramble through the shadowy scented lanes, where Witherspoon brooded like a dark mother over Whig and Clio, her Attic children, where the black Gothic snake of Little curled down to Cuyler and Patton, these in turn flinging the mystery out over the placid slope rolling to the lake.

Princeton of the daytime filtered slowly into his consciousness — West and Reunion, redolent of the sixties, Seventy-nine Hall, brick-red and arrogant, Upper and Lower Pyne, aristocratic Elizabethan ladies not quite content to live among shopkeepers, and, topping all, climbing with clear blue aspiration, the great dreaming spires of Holder and Cleveland towers.

From the first he loved Princeton — its lazy beauty, its half-grasped significance, the wild moonlight revel of the rushes, the handsome, prosperous big-game crowds, and under it all the air of struggle that pervaded his class. From the day when, wild-eyed and exhausted, the jerseyed freshmen sat in the gymnasium and elected some one from Hill School class president, a Lawrenceville celebrity vice-president, a hockey star from St. Paul’s secretary, up until the end of sophomore year it never ceased, that breathless social system, that worship, seldom named, never really admitted, of the bogey “Big Man.”

First it was schools, and Amory, alone from St. Regis’, watched the crowds form and widen and form again; St. Paul’s, Hill, Pomfret, eating at certain tacitly reserved tables in Commons, dressing in their own corners of the gymnasium, and drawing unconsciously about them a barrier of the slightly less important but socially ambitious to protect them from the friendly, rather puzzled high-school element. From the moment he realized this Amory resented social barriers as artificial distinctions made by the strong to bolster up their weak retainers and keep out the almost strong.

Having decided to be one of the gods of the class, he reported for freshman football practice, but in the second week, playing quarter-back, already paragraphed in corners of the Princetonian, he wrenched his knee seriously enough to put him out for the rest of the season. This forced him to retire and consider the situation.

“12 Univee” housed a dozen miscellaneous question-marks. There were three or four inconspicuous and quite startled boys from Lawrenceville, two amateur wild men from a New York private school (Kerry Holiday christened them the “plebeian drunks”), a Jewish youth, also from New York, and, as compensation for Amory, the two Holidays, to whom he took an instant fancy.

The Holidays were rumored twins, but really the dark-haired one, Kerry, was a year older than his blond brother, Burne. Kerry was tall, with humorous gray eyes, and a sudden, attractive smile; he became at once the mentor of the house, reaper of ears that grew too high, censor of conceit, vendor of rare, satirical humor. Amory spread the table of their future friendship with all his ideas of what college should and did mean. Kerry, not inclined as yet to take things seriously, chided him gently for being curious at this inopportune time about the intricacies of the social system, but liked him and was both interested and amused.

Burne, fair-haired, silent, and intent, appeared in the house only as a busy apparition, gliding in quietly at night and off again in the early morning to get up his work in the library — he was out for the Princetonian, competing furiously against forty others for the coveted first place. In December he came down with diphtheria, and some one else won the competition, but, returning to college in February, he dauntlessly went after the prize again. Necessarily, Amory’s acquaintance with him was in the way of three-minute chats, walking to and from lectures, so he failed to penetrate Burne’s one absorbing interest and find what lay beneath it.

Amory was far from contented. He missed the place he had won at St. Regis’, the being known and admired, yet Princeton stimulated him, and there were many things ahead calculated to arouse the Machiavelli latent in him, could he but insert a wedge. The upper-class clubs, concerning which he had pumped a reluctant graduate during the previous summer, excited his curiosity: Ivy, detached and breathlessly aristocratic; Cottage, an impressive mélange of brilliant adventurers and well-dressed philanderers; Tiger Inn, broad-shouldered and athletic, vitalized by an honest elaboration of prep-school standards; Cap and Gown, anti-alcoholic, faintly religious and politically powerful; flamboyant Colonial; literary Quadrangle; and the dozen others, varying in age and position.

Anything which brought an under classman into too glaring a light was labelled with the damning brand of “running it out.” The movies thrived on caustic comments, but the men who made them were generally running it out; talking of clubs was running it out; standing for anything very strongly, as, for instance, drinking parties or teetotalling, was running it out; in short, being personally conspicuous was not tolerated, and the influential man was the non-committal man, until at club elections in sophomore year every one should be sewed up in some bag for the rest of his college career.

Amory found that writing for the Nassau Literary Magazine would get him nothing, but that being on the board of the Daily Princetonian would get any one a good deal. His vague desire to do immortal acting with the English Dramatic Association faded out when he found that the most ingenious brains and talents were concentrated upon the Triangle Club, a musical comedy organization that every year took a great Christmas trip. In the meanwhile, feeling strangely alone and restless in Commons, with new desires and ambitions stirring in his mind, he let the first term go by between an envy of the embryo successes and a puzzled fretting with Kerry as to why they were not accepted immediately among the elite of the class.

Many afternoons they lounged in the windows of 12 Univee and watched the class pass to and from Commons, noting satellites already attaching themselves to the more prominent, watching the lonely grind with his hurried step and downcast eye, envying the happy security of the big school groups.

“We’re the damned middle class, that’s what!” he complained to Kerry one day as he lay stretched out on the sofa, consuming a family of Fatimas with contemplative precision.

“Well, why not? We came to Princeton so we could feel that way toward the small colleges — have it on ‘em, more self-confidence, dress better, cut a swathe — “

“Oh, it isn’t that I mind the glittering caste system,” admitted Amory. “I like having a bunch of hot cats on top, but gosh, Kerry, I’ve got to be one of them.”

“But just now, Amory, you’re only a sweaty bourgeois.”

Amory lay for a moment without speaking.

“I won’t be — long,” he said finally. “But I hate to get anywhere by working for it. I’ll show the marks, don’t you know.”

“Honorable scars.” Kerry craned his neck suddenly at the street. “There’s Langueduc, if you want to see what he looks like — and Humbird just behind.”

Amory rose dynamically and sought the windows.

“Oh,” he said, scrutinizing these worthies, “Humbird looks like a knock-out, but this Langueduc — he’s the rugged type, isn’t he? I distrust that sort. All diamonds look big in the rough.”

“Well,” said Kerry, as the excitement subsided, “you’re a literary genius. It’s up to you.”

“I wonder” — Amory paused — “if I could be. I honestly think so sometimes. That sounds like the devil, and I wouldn’t say it to anybody except you.”

“Well — go ahead. Let your hair grow and write poems like this guy D’Invilliers in the Lit.”

Amory reached lazily at a pile of magazines on the table.

“Read his latest effort?”

“Never miss ‘em. They’re rare.”

Amory glanced through the issue.

“Hello!” he said in surprise, “he’s a freshman, isn’t he?”

“Yeah.”

“Listen to this! My God!

“‘A serving lady speaks:

Black velvet trails its folds over the day,

White tapers, prisoned in their silver frames,

Wave their thin flames like shadows in the wind,

Pia, Pompia, come — come away — ‘

“Now, what the devil does that mean?”

“It’s a pantry scene.”

“‘Her toes are stiffened like a stork’s in flight;

She’s laid upon her bed, on the white sheets,

Her hands pressed on her smooth bust like a saint,

Bella Cunizza, come into the light!’

“My gosh, Kerry, what in hell is it all about? I swear I don’t get him at all, and I’m a literary bird myself.”

“It’s pretty tricky,” said Kerry, “only you’ve got to think of hearses and stale milk when you read it. That isn’t as pash as some of them.”

Amory tossed the magazine on the table.

“Well,” he sighed, “I sure am up in the air. I know I’m not a regular fellow, yet I loathe anybody else that isn’t. I can’t decide whether to cultivate my mind and be a great dramatist, or to thumb my nose at the Golden Treasury and be a Princeton slicker.”

“Why decide?” suggested Kerry. “Better drift, like me. I’m going to sail into prominence on Burne’s coat-tails.”

“I can’t drift — I want to be interested. I want to pull strings, even for somebody else, or be Princetonian chairman or Triangle president. I want to be admired, Kerry.”

“You’re thinking too much about yourself.”

Amory sat up at this.

“No. I’m thinking about you, too. We’ve got to get out and mix around the class right now, when it’s fun to be a snob. I’d like to bring a sardine to the prom in June, for instance, but I wouldn’t do it unless I could be damn debonaire about it — introduce her to all the prize parlor-snakes, and the football captain, and all that simple stuff.”

“Amory,” said Kerry impatiently, “you’re just going around in a circle. If you want to be prominent, get out and try for something; if you don’t, just take it easy.” He yawned. “Come on, let’s let the smoke drift off. We’ll go down and watch football practice.”

Amory gradually accepted this point of view, decided that next fall would inaugurate his career, and relinquished himself to watching Kerry extract joy from 12 Univee.

They filled the Jewish youth’s bed with lemon pie; they put out the gas all over the house every night by blowing into the jet in Amory’s room, to the bewilderment of Mrs. Twelve and the local plumber; they set up the effects of the plebeian drunks — pictures, books, and furniture — in the bathroom, to the confusion of the pair, who hazily discovered the transposition on their return from a Trenton spree; they were disappointed beyond measure when the plebeian drunks decided to take it as a joke; they played red-dog and twenty-one and jackpot from dinner to dawn, and on the occasion of one man’s birthday persuaded him to buy sufficient champagne for a hilarious celebration. The donor of the party having remained sober, Kerry and Amory accidentally dropped him down two flights of stairs and called, shame-faced and penitent, at the infirmary all the following week.

“Say, who are all these women?” demanded Kerry one day, protesting at the size of Amory’s mail. “I’ve been looking at the postmarks lately — Farmington and Dobbs and Westover and Dana Hall — what’s the idea?”

Amory grinned.

“All from the Twin Cities.” He named them off. “There’s Marylyn De Witt — she’s pretty, got a car of her own and that’s damn convenient; there’s Sally Weatherby — she’s getting too fat; there’s Myra St. Claire, she’s an old flame, easy to kiss if you like it — “

“What line do you throw ‘em?” demanded Kerry. “I’ve tried everything, and the mad wags aren’t even afraid of me.”

“You’re the ‘nice boy’ type,” suggested Amory.

“That’s just it. Mother always feels the girl is safe if she’s with me. Honestly, it’s annoying. If I start to hold somebody’s hand, they laugh at me, and let me, just as if it wasn’t part of them. As soon as I get hold of a hand they sort of disconnect it from the rest of them.”

“Sulk,” suggested Amory. “Tell ‘em you’re wild and have ‘em reform you — go home furious — come back in half an hour — startle ‘em.”

Kerry shook his head.

“No chance. I wrote a St. Timothy girl a really loving letter last year. In one place I got rattled and said: ‘My God, how I love you!’ She took a nail scissors, clipped out the ‘My God’ and showed the rest of the letter all over school. Doesn’t work at all. I’m just ‘good old Kerry’ and all that rot.”

Amory smiled and tried to picture himself as “good old Amory.” He failed completely.

February dripped snow and rain, the cyclonic freshman mid-years passed, and life in 12 Univee continued interesting if not purposeful. Once a day Amory indulged in a club sandwich, cornflakes, and Julienne potatoes at “Joe’s,” accompanied usually by Kerry or Alec Connage. The latter was a quiet, rather aloof slicker from Hotchkiss, who lived next door and shared the same enforced singleness as Amory, due to the fact that his entire class had gone to Yale. “Joe’s” was unaesthetic and faintly unsanitary, but a limitless charge account could be opened there, a convenience that Amory appreciated. His father had been experimenting with mining stocks and, in consequence, his allowance, while liberal, was not at all what he had expected.

“Joe’s” had the additional advantage of seclusion from curious upper-class eyes, so at four each afternoon Amory, accompanied by friend or book, went up to experiment with his digestion. One day in March, finding that all the tables were occupied, he slipped into a chair opposite a freshman who bent intently over a book at the last table. They nodded briefly. For twenty minutes Amory sat consuming bacon buns and reading “Mrs. Warren’s Profession” (he had discovered Shaw quite by accident while browsing in the library during mid-years); the other freshman, also intent on his volume, meanwhile did away with a trio of chocolate malted milks.

By and by Amory’s eyes wandered curiously to his fellow-luncher’s book. He spelled out the name and title upside down — “Marpessa,” by Stephen Phillips. This meant nothing to him, his metrical education having been confined to such Sunday classics as “Come into the Garden, Maude,” and what morsels of Shakespeare and Milton had been recently forced upon him.

Moved to address his vis-a-vis, he simulated interest in his book for a moment, and then exclaimed aloud as if involuntarily:

“Ha! Great stuff!”

The other freshman looked up and Amory registered artificial embarrassment.

“Are you referring to your bacon buns?” His cracked, kindly voice went well with the large spectacles and the impression of a voluminous keenness that he gave.

“No,” Amory answered. “I was referring to Bernard Shaw.” He turned the book around in explanation.

“I’ve never read any Shaw. I’ve always meant to.” The boy paused and then continued: “Did you ever read Stephen Phillips, or do you like poetry?”

“Yes, indeed,” Amory affirmed eagerly. “I’ve never read much of Phillips, though.” (He had never heard of any Phillips except the late David Graham.)

“It’s pretty fair, I think. Of course he’s a Victorian.” They sallied into a discussion of poetry, in the course of which they introduced themselves, and Amory’s companion proved to be none other than “that awful highbrow, Thomas Parke D’Invilliers,” who signed the passionate love-poems in the Lit. He was, perhaps, nineteen, with stooped shoulders, pale blue eyes, and, as Amory could tell from his general appearance, without much conception of social competition and such phenomena of absorbing interest. Still, he liked books, and it seemed forever since Amory had met any one who did; if only that St. Paul’s crowd at the next table would not mistake him for a bird, too, he would enjoy the encounter tremendously. They didn’t seem to be noticing, so he let himself go, discussed books by the dozens — books he had read, read about, books he had never heard of, rattling off lists of titles with the facility of a Brentano’s clerk. D’Invilliers was partially taken in and wholly delighted. In a good-natured way he had almost decided that Princeton was one part deadly Philistines and one part deadly grinds, and to find a person who could mention Keats without stammering, yet evidently washed his hands, was rather a treat.

“Ever read any Oscar Wilde?” he asked.

“No. Who wrote it?”

“It’s a man — don’t you know?”

“Oh, surely.” A faint chord was struck in Amory’s memory. “Wasn’t the comic opera, ‘Patience,’ written about him?”

“Yes, that’s the fella. I’ve just finished a book of his, ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray,’ and I certainly wish you’d read it. You’d like it. You can borrow it if you want to.”

“Why, I’d like it a lot — thanks.”

“Don’t you want to come up to the room? I’ve got a few other books.”

Amory hesitated, glanced at the St. Paul’s group — one of them was the magnificent, exquisite Humbird — and he considered how determinate the addition of this friend would be. He never got to the stage of making them and getting rid of them — he was not hard enough for that — so he measured Thomas Parke D’Invilliers’ undoubted attractions and value against the menace of cold eyes behind tortoise-rimmed spectacles that he fancied glared from the next table.

“Yes, I’ll go.”

So he found “Dorian Gray” and the “Mystic and Somber Dolores” and the “Belle Dame sans Merci”; for a month was keen on naught else. The world became pale and interesting, and he tried hard to look at Princeton through the satiated eyes of Oscar Wilde and Swinburne — or “Fingal O’Flaherty” and “Algernon Charles,” as he called them in precieuse jest. He read enormously every night — Shaw, Chesterton, Barrie, Pinero, Yeats, Synge, Ernest Dowson, Arthur Symons, Keats, Sudermann, Robert Hugh Benson, the Savoy Operas — just a heterogeneous mixture, for he suddenly discovered that he had read nothing for years.

Tom D’Invilliers became at first an occasion rather than a friend. Amory saw him about once a week, and together they gilded the ceiling of Tom’s room and decorated the walls with imitation tapestry, bought at an auction, tall candlesticks and figured curtains. Amory liked him for being clever and literary without effeminacy or affectation. In fact, Amory did most of the strutting and tried painfully to make every remark an epigram, than which, if one is content with ostensible epigrams, there are many feats harder. 12 Univee was amused. Kerry read “Dorian Gray” and simulated Lord Henry, following Amory about, addressing him as “Dorian” and pretending to encourage in him wicked fancies and attenuated tendencies to ennui. When he carried it into Commons, to the amazement of the others at table, Amory became furiously embarrassed, and after that made epigrams only before D’Invilliers or a convenient mirror.

One day Tom and Amory tried reciting their own and Lord Dunsany’s poems to the music of Kerry’s graphophone.

“Chant!” cried Tom. “Don’t recite! Chant!”

Amory, who was performing, looked annoyed, and claimed that he needed a record with less piano in it. Kerry thereupon rolled on the floor in stifled laughter.

“Put on ‘Hearts and Flowers’!” he howled. “Oh, my Lord, I’m going to cast a kitten.”

“Shut off the damn graphophone,” Amory cried, rather red in the face. “I’m not giving an exhibition.”

In the meanwhile Amory delicately kept trying to awaken a sense of the social system in D’Invilliers, for he knew that this poet was really more conventional than he, and needed merely watered hair, a smaller range of conversation, and a darker brown hat to become quite regular. But the liturgy of Livingstone collars and dark ties fell on heedless ears; in fact D’Invilliers faintly resented his efforts; so Amory confined himself to calls once a week, and brought him occasionally to 12 Univee. This caused mild titters among the other freshmen, who called them “Doctor Johnson and Boswell.”

Alec Connage, another frequent visitor, liked him in a vague way, but was afraid of him as a highbrow. Kerry, who saw through his poetic patter to the solid, almost respectable depths within, was immensely amused and would have him recite poetry by the hour, while he lay with closed eyes on Amory’s sofa and listened:

“Asleep or waking is it? for her neck

Kissed over close, wears yet a purple speck

Wherein the pained blood falters and goes out;

Soft and stung softly — fairer for a fleck...”

“That’s good,” Kerry would say softly. “It pleases the elder Holiday. That’s a great poet, I guess.” Tom, delighted at an audience, would ramble through the “Poems and Ballades” until Kerry and Amory knew them almost as well as he.

Amory took to writing poetry on spring afternoons, in the gardens of the big estates near Princeton, while swans made effective atmosphere in the artificial pools, and slow clouds sailed harmoniously above the willows. May came too soon, and suddenly unable to bear walls, he wandered the campus at all hours through starlight and rain.

A DAMP SYMBOLIC INTERLUDE

The night mist fell. From the moon it rolled, clustered about the spires and towers, and then settled below them, so that the dreaming peaks were still in lofty aspiration toward the sky. Figures that dotted the day like ants now brushed along as shadowy ghosts, in and out of the foreground. The Gothic halls and cloisters were infinitely more mysterious as they loomed suddenly out of the darkness, outlined each by myriad faint squares of yellow light. Indefinitely from somewhere a bell boomed the quarter-hour, and Amory, pausing by the sun-dial, stretched himself out full length on the damp grass. The cool bathed his eyes and slowed the flight of time — time that had crept so insidiously through the lazy April afternoons, seemed so intangible in the long spring twilights. Evening after evening the senior singing had drifted over the campus in melancholy beauty, and through the shell of his undergraduate consciousness had broken a deep and reverent devotion to the gray walls and Gothic peaks and all they symbolized as warehouses of dead ages.

The tower that in view of his window sprang upward, grew into a spire, yearning higher until its uppermost tip was half invisible against the morning skies, gave him the first sense of the transiency and unimportance of the campus figures except as holders of the apostolic succession. He liked knowing that Gothic architecture, with its upward trend, was peculiarly appropriate to universities, and the idea became personal to him. The silent stretches of green, the quiet halls with an occasional late-burning scholastic light held his imagination in a strong grasp, and the chastity of the spire became a symbol of this perception.

“Damn it all,” he whispered aloud, wetting his hands in the damp and running them through his hair. “Next year I work!” Yet he knew that where now the spirit of spires and towers made him dreamily acquiescent, it would then overawe him. Where now he realized only his own inconsequence, effort would make him aware of his own impotency and insufficiency.

The college dreamed on — awake. He felt a nervous excitement that might have been the very throb of its slow heart. It was a stream where he was to throw a stone whose faint ripple would be vanishing almost as it left his hand. As yet he had given nothing, he had taken nothing.

A belated freshman, his oilskin slicker rasping loudly, slushed along the soft path. A voice from somewhere called the inevitable formula, “Stick out your head!” below an unseen window. A hundred little sounds of the current drifting on under the fog pressed in finally on his consciousness.

“Oh, God!” he cried suddenly, and started at the sound of his voice in the stillness. The rain dripped on. A minute longer he lay without moving, his hands clinched. Then he sprang to his feet and gave his clothes a tentative pat.

“I’m very damn wet!” he said aloud to the sun-dial.

HISTORICAL

The war began in the summer following his freshman year. Beyond a sporting interest in the German dash for Paris the whole affair failed either to thrill or interest him. With the attitude he might have held toward an amusing melodrama he hoped it would be long and bloody. If it had not continued he would have felt like an irate ticket-holder at a prize-fight where the principals refused to mix it up.

That was his total reaction.

“HA-HA HORTENSE!”

“All right, ponies!”

“Shake it up!”

“Hey, ponies — how about easing up on that crap game and shaking a mean hip?”

“Hey, ponies!”

The coach fumed helplessly, the Triangle Club president, glowering with anxiety, varied between furious bursts of authority and fits of temperamental lassitude, when he sat spiritless and wondered how the devil the show was ever going on tour by Christmas.

“All right. We’ll take the pirate song.”

The ponies took last drags at their cigarettes and slumped into place; the leading lady rushed into the foreground, setting his hands and feet in an atmospheric mince; and as the coach clapped and stamped and tumped and da-da’d, they hashed out a dance.

A great, seething ant-hill was the Triangle Club. It gave a musical comedy every year, travelling with cast, chorus, orchestra, and scenery all through Christmas vacation. The play and music were the work of undergraduates, and the club itself was the most influential of institutions, over three hundred men competing for it every year.

Amory, after an easy victory in the first sophomore Princetonian competition, stepped into a vacancy of the cast as Boiling Oil, a Pirate Lieutenant. Every night for the last week they had rehearsed “Ha-Ha Hortense!” in the Casino, from two in the afternoon until eight in the morning, sustained by dark and powerful coffee, and sleeping in lectures through the interim. A rare scene, the Casino. A big, barnlike auditorium, dotted with boys as girls, boys as pirates, boys as babies; the scenery in course of being violently set up; the spotlight man rehearsing by throwing weird shafts into angry eyes; over all the constant tuning of the orchestra or the cheerful tumpty-tump of a Triangle tune. The boy who writes the lyrics stands in the corner, biting a pencil, with twenty minutes to think of an encore; the business manager argues with the secretary as to how much money can be spent on “those damn milkmaid costumes”; the old graduate, president in ninety-eight, perches on a box and thinks how much simpler it was in his day.

How a Triangle show ever got off was a mystery, but it was a riotous mystery, anyway, whether or not one did enough service to wear a little gold Triangle on his watch-chain. “Ha-Ha Hortense!” was written over six times and had the names of nine collaborators on the programme. All Triangle shows started by being “something different — not just a regular musical comedy,” but when the several authors, the president, the coach and the faculty committee finished with it, there remained just the old reliable Triangle show with the old reliable jokes and the star comedian who got expelled or sick or something just before the trip, and the dark-whiskered man in the pony-ballet, who “absolutely won’t shave twice a day, doggone it!”

There was one brilliant place in “Ha-Ha Hortense!” It is a Princeton tradition that whenever a Yale man who is a member of the widely advertised “Skull and Bones” hears the sacred name mentioned, he must leave the room. It is also a tradition that the members are invariably successful in later life, amassing fortunes or votes or coupons or whatever they choose to amass. Therefore, at each performance of “Ha-Ha Hortense!” half-a-dozen seats were kept from sale and occupied by six of the worst-looking vagabonds that could be hired from the streets, further touched up by the Triangle make-up man. At the moment in the show where Firebrand, the Pirate Chief, pointed at his black flag and said, “I am a Yale graduate — note my Skull and Bones!” — at this very moment the six vagabonds were instructed to rise conspicuously and leave the theatre with looks of deep melancholy and an injured dignity. It was claimed though never proved that on one occasion the hired Elis were swelled by one of the real thing.

They played through vacation to the fashionable of eight cities. Amory liked Louisville and Memphis best: these knew how to meet strangers, furnished extraordinary punch, and flaunted an astonishing array of feminine beauty. Chicago he approved for a certain verve that transcended its loud accent — however, it was a Yale town, and as the Yale Glee Club was expected in a week the Triangle received only divided homage. In Baltimore, Princeton was at home, and every one fell in love. There was a proper consumption of strong waters all along the line; one man invariably went on the stage highly stimulated, claiming that his particular interpretation of the part required it. There were three private cars; however, no one slept except in the third car, which was called the “animal car,” and where were herded the spectacled wind-jammers of the orchestra. Everything was so hurried that there was no time to be bored, but when they arrived in Philadelphia, with vacation nearly over, there was rest in getting out of the heavy atmosphere of flowers and grease-paint, and the ponies took off their corsets with abdominal pains and sighs of relief.

When the disbanding came, Amory set out post haste for Minneapolis, for Sally Weatherby’s cousin, Isabelle Borge, was coming to spend the winter in Minneapolis while her parents went abroad. He remembered Isabelle only as a little girl with whom he had played sometimes when he first went to Minneapolis. She had gone to Baltimore to live — but since then she had developed a past.

Amory was in full stride, confident, nervous, and jubilant. Scurrying back to Minneapolis to see a girl he had known as a child seemed the interesting and romantic thing to do, so without compunction he wired his mother not to expect him... sat in the train, and thought about himself for thirty-six hours.

“PETTING”

On the Triangle trip Amory had come into constant contact with that great current American phenomenon, the “petting party.”

None of the Victorian mothers — and most of the mothers were Victorian — had any idea how casually their daughters were accustomed to be kissed. “Servant-girls are that way,” says Mrs. Huston-Carmelite to her popular daughter. “They are kissed first and proposed to afterward.”

But the Popular Daughter becomes engaged every six months between sixteen and twenty-two, when she arranges a match with young Hambell, of Cambell & Hambell, who fatuously considers himself her first love, and between engagements the P. D. (she is selected by the cut-in system at dances, which favors the survival of the fittest) has other sentimental last kisses in the moonlight, or the firelight, or the outer darkness.

Amory saw girls doing things that even in his memory would have been impossible: eating three-o’clock, after-dance suppers in impossible cafes, talking of every side of life with an air half of earnestness, half of mockery, yet with a furtive excitement that Amory considered stood for a real moral let-down. But he never realized how wide-spread it was until he saw the cities between New York and Chicago as one vast juvenile intrigue.

Afternoon at the Plaza, with winter twilight hovering outside and faint drums down-stairs... they strut and fret in the lobby, taking another cocktail, scrupulously attired and waiting. Then the swinging doors revolve and three bundles of fur mince in. The theatre comes afterward; then a table at the Midnight Frolic — of course, mother will be along there, but she will serve only to make things more secretive and brilliant as she sits in solitary state at the deserted table and thinks such entertainments as this are not half so bad as they are painted, only rather wearying. But the P. D. is in love again... it was odd, wasn’t it? — that though there was so much room left in the taxi the P. D. and the boy from Williams were somehow crowded out and had to go in a separate car. Odd! Didn’t you notice how flushed the P. D. was when she arrived just seven minutes late? But the P. D. “gets away with it.”

The “belle” had become the “flirt,” the “flirt” had become the “baby vamp.” The “belle” had five or six callers every afternoon. If the P. D., by some strange accident, has two, it is made pretty uncomfortable for the one who hasn’t a date with her. The “belle” was surrounded by a dozen men in the intermissions between dances. Try to find the P. D. between dances, just try to find her.

The same girl... deep in an atmosphere of jungle music and the questioning of moral codes. Amory found it rather fascinating to feel that any popular girl he met before eight he might quite possibly kiss before twelve.

“Why on earth are we here?” he asked the girl with the green combs one night as they sat in some one’s limousine, outside the Country Club in Louisville.

“I don’t know. I’m just full of the devil.”

“Let’s be frank — we’ll never see each other again. I wanted to come out here with you because I thought you were the best-looking girl in sight. You really don’t care whether you ever see me again, do you?”

“No — but is this your line for every girl? What have I done to deserve it?”

“And you didn’t feel tired dancing or want a cigarette or any of the things you said? You just wanted to be — “

“Oh, let’s go in,” she interrupted, “if you want to analyze. Let’s not talk about it.”

When the hand-knit, sleeveless jerseys were stylish, Amory, in a burst of inspiration, named them “petting shirts.” The name travelled from coast to coast on the lips of parlor-snakes and P. D.’s.

DESCRIPTIVE

Amory was now eighteen years old, just under six feet tall and exceptionally, but not conventionally, handsome. He had rather a young face, the ingenuousness of which was marred by the penetrating green eyes, fringed with long dark eyelashes. He lacked somehow that intense animal magnetism that so often accompanies beauty in men or women; his personality seemed rather a mental thing, and it was not in his power to turn it on and off like a water-faucet. But people never forgot his face.

ISABELLE

She paused at the top of the staircase. The sensations attributed to divers on spring-boards, leading ladies on opening nights, and lumpy, husky young men on the day of the Big Game, crowded through her. She should have descended to a burst of drums or a discordant blend of themes from “Thais” and “Carmen.” She had never been so curious about her appearance, she had never been so satisfied with it. She had been sixteen years old for six months.

“Isabelle!” called her cousin Sally from the doorway of the dressing-room.

“I’m ready.” She caught a slight lump of nervousness in her throat.

“I had to send back to the house for another pair of slippers. It’ll be just a minute.”

Isabelle started toward the dressing-room for a last peek in the mirror, but something decided her to stand there and gaze down the broad stairs of the Minnehaha Club. They curved tantalizingly, and she could catch just a glimpse of two pairs of masculine feet in the hall below. Pump-shod in uniform black, they gave no hint of identity, but she wondered eagerly if one pair were attached to Amory Blaine. This young man, not as yet encountered, had nevertheless taken up a considerable part of her day — the first day of her arrival. Coming up in the machine from the station, Sally had volunteered, amid a rain of question, comment, revelation, and exaggeration:

“You remember Amory Blaine, of course. Well, he’s simply mad to see you again. He’s stayed over a day from college, and he’s coming to-night. He’s heard so much about you — says he remembers your eyes.”

This had pleased Isabelle. It put them on equal terms, although she was quite capable of staging her own romances, with or without advance advertising. But following her happy tremble of anticipation, came a sinking sensation that made her ask:

“How do you mean he’s heard about me? What sort of things?”

Sally smiled. She felt rather in the capacity of a showman with her more exotic cousin.

“He knows you’re — you’re considered beautiful and all that” — she paused — “and I guess he knows you’ve been kissed.”

At this Isabelle’s little fist had clinched suddenly under the fur robe. She was accustomed to be thus followed by her desperate past, and it never failed to rouse in her the same feeling of resentment; yet — in a strange town it was an advantageous reputation. She was a “Speed,” was she? Well — let them find out.

Out of the window Isabelle watched the snow glide by in the frosty morning. It was ever so much colder here than in Baltimore; she had not remembered; the glass of the side door was iced, the windows were shirred with snow in the corners. Her mind played still with one subject. Did he dress like that boy there, who walked calmly down a bustling business street, in moccasins and winter-carnival costume? How very Western! Of course he wasn’t that way: he went to Princeton, was a sophomore or something. Really she had no distinct idea of him. An ancient snap-shot she had preserved in an old kodak book had impressed her by the big eyes (which he had probably grown up to by now). However, in the last month, when her winter visit to Sally had been decided on, he had assumed the proportions of a worthy adversary. Children, most astute of match-makers, plot their campaigns quickly, and Sally had played a clever correspondence sonata to Isabelle’s excitable temperament. Isabelle had been for some time capable of very strong, if very transient emotions....

They drew up at a spreading, white-stone building, set back from the snowy street. Mrs. Weatherby greeted her warmly and her various younger cousins were produced from the corners where they skulked politely. Isabelle met them tactfully. At her best she allied all with whom she came in contact — except older girls and some women. All the impressions she made were conscious. The half-dozen girls she renewed acquaintance with that morning were all rather impressed and as much by her direct personality as by her reputation. Amory Blaine was an open subject. Evidently a bit light of love, neither popular nor unpopular — every girl there seemed to have had an affair with him at some time or other, but no one volunteered any really useful information. He was going to fall for her.... Sally had published that information to her young set and they were retailing it back to Sally as fast as they set eyes on Isabelle. Isabelle resolved secretly that she would, if necessary, force herself to like him — she owed it to Sally. Suppose she were terribly disappointed. Sally had painted him in such glowing colors — he was good-looking, “sort of distinguished, when he wants to be,” had a line, and was properly inconstant. In fact, he summed up all the romance that her age and environment led her to desire. She wondered if those were his dancing-shoes that fox-trotted tentatively around the soft rug below.

All impressions and, in fact, all ideas were extremely kaleidoscopic to Isabelle. She had that curious mixture of the social and the artistic temperaments found often in two classes, society women and actresses. Her education or, rather, her sophistication, had been absorbed from the boys who had dangled on her favor; her tact was instinctive, and her capacity for love-affairs was limited only by the number of the susceptible within telephone distance. Flirt smiled from her large black-brown eyes and shone through her intense physical magnetism.

So she waited at the head of the stairs that evening while slippers were fetched. Just as she was growing impatient, Sally came out of the dressing-room, beaming with her accustomed good nature and high spirits, and together they descended to the floor below, while the shifting search-light of Isabelle’s mind flashed on two ideas: she was glad she had high color to-night, and she wondered if he danced well.

Down-stairs, in the club’s great room, she was surrounded for a moment by the girls she had met in the afternoon, then she heard Sally’s voice repeating a cycle of names, and found herself bowing to a sextet of black and white, terribly stiff, vaguely familiar figures. The name Blaine figured somewhere, but at first she could not place him. A very confused, very juvenile moment of awkward backings and bumpings followed, and every one found himself talking to the person he least desired to. Isabelle manoeuvred herself and Froggy Parker, freshman at Harvard, with whom she had once played hop-scotch, to a seat on the stairs. A humorous reference to the past was all she needed. The things Isabelle could do socially with one idea were remarkable. First, she repeated it rapturously in an enthusiastic contralto with a soupcon of Southern accent; then she held it off at a distance and smiled at it — her wonderful smile; then she delivered it in variations and played a sort of mental catch with it, all this in the nominal form of dialogue. Froggy was fascinated and quite unconscious that this was being done, not for him, but for the green eyes that glistened under the shining carefully watered hair, a little to her left, for Isabelle had discovered Amory. As an actress even in the fullest flush of her own conscious magnetism gets a deep impression of most of the people in the front row, so Isabelle sized up her antagonist. First, he had auburn hair, and from her feeling of disappointment she knew that she had expected him to be dark and of garter-advertisement slenderness.... For the rest, a faint flush and a straight, romantic profile; the effect set off by a close-fitting dress suit and a silk ruffled shirt of the kind that women still delight to see men wear, but men were just beginning to get tired of.

During this inspection Amory was quietly watching.

“Don’t you think so?” she said suddenly, turning to him, innocent-eyed.

There was a stir, and Sally led the way over to their table. Amory struggled to Isabelle’s side, and whispered:

“You’re my dinner partner, you know. We’re all coached for each other.”

Isabelle gasped — this was rather right in line. But really she felt as if a good speech had been taken from the star and given to a minor character.... She mustn’t lose the leadership a bit. The dinner-table glittered with laughter at the confusion of getting places and then curious eyes were turned on her, sitting near the head. She was enjoying this immensely, and Froggy Parker was so engrossed with the added sparkle of her rising color that he forgot to pull out Sally’s chair, and fell into a dim confusion. Amory was on the other side, full of confidence and vanity, gazing at her in open admiration. He began directly, and so did Froggy:

“I’ve heard a lot about you since you wore braids — “

“Wasn’t it funny this afternoon — “

Both stopped. Isabelle turned to Amory shyly. Her face was always enough answer for any one, but she decided to speak.

“How — from whom?”

“From everybody — for all the years since you’ve been away.” She blushed appropriately. On her right Froggy was hors de combat already, although he hadn’t quite realized it.

“I’ll tell you what I remembered about you all these years,” Amory continued. She leaned slightly toward him and looked modestly at the celery before her. Froggy sighed — he knew Amory, and the situations that Amory seemed born to handle. He turned to Sally and asked her if she was going away to school next year. Amory opened with grape-shot.

“I’ve got an adjective that just fits you.” This was one of his favorite starts — he seldom had a word in mind, but it was a curiosity provoker, and he could always produce something complimentary if he got in a tight corner.

“Oh — what?” Isabelle’s face was a study in enraptured curiosity.

Amory shook his head.

“I don’t know you very well yet.”

“Will you tell me — afterward?” she half whispered.

He nodded.

“We’ll sit out.”

Isabelle nodded.

“Did any one ever tell you, you have keen eyes?” she said.

Amory attempted to make them look even keener. He fancied, but he was not sure, that her foot had just touched his under the table. But it might possibly have been only the table leg. It was so hard to tell. Still it thrilled him. He wondered quickly if there would be any difficulty in securing the little den up-stairs.

BABES IN THE WOODS

Isabelle and Amory were distinctly not innocent, nor were they particularly brazen. Moreover, amateur standing had very little value in the game they were playing, a game that would presumably be her principal study for years to come. She had begun as he had, with good looks and an excitable temperament, and the rest was the result of accessible popular novels and dressing-room conversation culled from a slightly older set. Isabelle had walked with an artificial gait at nine and a half, and when her eyes, wide and starry, proclaimed the ingenue most. Amory was proportionately less deceived. He waited for the mask to drop off, but at the same time he did not question her right to wear it. She, on her part, was not impressed by his studied air of blasé sophistication. She had lived in a larger city and had slightly an advantage in range. But she accepted his pose — it was one of the dozen little conventions of this kind of affair. He was aware that he was getting this particular favor now because she had been coached; he knew that he stood for merely the best game in sight, and that he would have to improve his opportunity before he lost his advantage. So they proceeded with an infinite guile that would have horrified her parents.

After the dinner the dance began... smoothly. Smoothly? — boys cut in on Isabelle every few feet and then squabbled in the corners with: “You might let me get more than an inch!” and “She didn’t like it either — she told me so next time I cut in.” It was true — she told every one so, and gave every hand a parting pressure that said: “You know that your dances are making my evening.”

But time passed, two hours of it, and the less subtle beaux had better learned to focus their pseudo-passionate glances elsewhere, for eleven o’clock found Isabelle and Amory sitting on the couch in the little den off the reading-room up-stairs. She was conscious that they were a handsome pair, and seemed to belong distinctively in this seclusion, while lesser lights fluttered and chattered down-stairs.

Boys who passed the door looked in enviously — girls who passed only laughed and frowned and grew wise within themselves.

They had now reached a very definite stage. They had traded accounts of their progress since they had met last, and she had listened to much she had heard before. He was a sophomore, was on the Princetonian board, hoped to be chairman in senior year. He learned that some of the boys she went with in Baltimore were “terrible speeds” and came to dances in states of artificial stimulation; most of them were twenty or so, and drove alluring red Stutzes. A good half seemed to have already flunked out of various schools and colleges, but some of them bore athletic names that made him look at her admiringly. As a matter of fact, Isabelle’s closer acquaintance with the universities was just commencing. She had bowing acquaintance with a lot of young men who thought she was a “pretty kid — worth keeping an eye on.” But Isabelle strung the names into a fabrication of gayety that would have dazzled a Viennese nobleman. Such is the power of young contralto voices on sink-down sofas.

He asked her if she thought he was conceited. She said there was a difference between conceit and self-confidence. She adored self-confidence in men.

“Is Froggy a good friend of yours?” she asked.

“Rather — why?”

“He’s a bum dancer.”

Amory laughed.

“He dances as if the girl were on his back instead of in his arms.”

She appreciated this.

“You’re awfully good at sizing people up.”

Amory denied this painfully. However, he sized up several people for her. Then they talked about hands.

“You’ve got awfully nice hands,” she said. “They look as if you played the piano. Do you?”

I have said they had reached a very definite stage — nay, more, a very critical stage. Amory had stayed over a day to see her, and his train left at twelve-eighteen that night. His trunk and suitcase awaited him at the station; his watch was beginning to hang heavy in his pocket.

“Isabelle,” he said suddenly, “I want to tell you something.” They had been talking lightly about “that funny look in her eyes,” and Isabelle knew from the change in his manner what was coming — indeed, she had been wondering how soon it would come. Amory reached above their heads and turned out the electric light, so that they were in the dark, except for the red glow that fell through the door from the reading-room lamps. Then he began:

“I don’t know whether or not you know what you — what I’m going to say. Lordy, Isabelle — this sounds like a line, but it isn’t.”

“I know,” said Isabelle softly.

“Maybe we’ll never meet again like this — I have darned hard luck sometimes.” He was leaning away from her on the other arm of the lounge, but she could see his eyes plainly in the dark.

“You’ll meet me again — silly.” There was just the slightest emphasis on the last word — so that it became almost a term of endearment. He continued a bit huskily:

“I’ve fallen for a lot of people — girls — and I guess you have, too — boys, I mean, but, honestly, you — “ he broke off suddenly and leaned forward, chin on his hands: “Oh, what’s the use — you’ll go your way and I suppose I’ll go mine.”

Silence for a moment. Isabelle was quite stirred; she wound her handkerchief into a tight ball, and by the faint light that streamed over her, dropped it deliberately on the floor. Their hands touched for an instant, but neither spoke. Silences were becoming more frequent and more delicious. Outside another stray couple had come up and were experimenting on the piano in the next room. After the usual preliminary of “chopsticks,” one of them started “Babes in the Woods” and a light tenor carried the words into the den:

“Give me your hand

I’ll understand

We’re off to slumberland.”

Isabelle hummed it softly and trembled as she felt Amory’s hand close over hers.

“Isabelle,” he whispered. “You know I’m mad about you. You do give a darn about me.”

“Yes.”

“How much do you care — do you like any one better?”

“No.” He could scarcely hear her, although he bent so near that he felt her breath against his cheek.

“Isabelle, I’m going back to college for six long months, and why shouldn’t we — if I could only just have one thing to remember you by — “

“Close the door....” Her voice had just stirred so that he half wondered whether she had spoken at all. As he swung the door softly shut, the music seemed quivering just outside.

“Moonlight is bright,

Kiss me good night.”

What a wonderful song, she thought — everything was wonderful to-night, most of all this romantic scene in the den, with their hands clinging and the inevitable looming charmingly close. The future vista of her life seemed an unending succession of scenes like this: under moonlight and pale starlight, and in the backs of warm limousines and in low, cosy roadsters stopped under sheltering trees — only the boy might change, and this one was so nice. He took her hand softly. With a sudden movement he turned it and, holding it to his lips, kissed the palm.

“Isabelle!” His whisper blended in the music, and they seemed to float nearer together. Her breath came faster. “Can’t I kiss you, Isabelle — Isabelle?” Lips half parted, she turned her head to him in the dark. Suddenly the ring of voices, the sound of running footsteps surged toward them. Quick as a flash Amory reached up and turned on the light, and when the door opened and three boys, the wrathy and dance-craving Froggy among them, rushed in, he was turning over the magazines on the table, while she sat without moving, serene and unembarrassed, and even greeted them with a welcoming smile. But her heart was beating wildly, and she felt somehow as if she had been deprived.

It was evidently over. There was a clamor for a dance, there was a glance that passed between them — on his side despair, on hers regret, and then the evening went on, with the reassured beaux and the eternal cutting in.

At quarter to twelve Amory shook hands with her gravely, in the midst of a small crowd assembled to wish him good-speed. For an instant he lost his poise, and she felt a bit rattled when a satirical voice from a concealed wit cried:

“Take her outside, Amory!” As he took her hand he pressed it a little, and she returned the pressure as she had done to twenty hands that evening — that was all.

At two o’clock back at the Weatherbys’ Sally asked her if she and Amory had had a “time” in the den. Isabelle turned to her quietly. In her eyes was the light of the idealist, the inviolate dreamer of Joan-like dreams.

“No,” she answered. “I don’t do that sort of thing any more; he asked me to, but I said no.”

As she crept in bed she wondered what he’d say in his special delivery to-morrow. He had such a good-looking mouth — would she ever — ?

“Fourteen angels were watching o’er them,” sang Sally sleepily from the next room.

“Damn!” muttered Isabelle, punching the pillow into a luxurious lump and exploring the cold sheets cautiously. “Damn!”

CARNIVAL

Amory, by way of the Princetonian, had arrived. The minor snobs, finely balanced thermometers of success, warmed to him as the club elections grew nigh, and he and Tom were visited by groups of upper classmen who arrived awkwardly, balanced on the edge of the furniture and talked of all subjects except the one of absorbing interest. Amory was amused at the intent eyes upon him, and, in case the visitors represented some club in which he was not interested, took great pleasure in shocking them with unorthodox remarks.

“Oh, let me see — “ he said one night to a flabbergasted delegation, “what club do you represent?”

With visitors from Ivy and Cottage and Tiger Inn he played the “nice, unspoilt, ingenuous boy” very much at ease and quite unaware of the object of the call.

When the fatal morning arrived, early in March, and the campus became a document in hysteria, he slid smoothly into Cottage with Alec Connage and watched his suddenly neurotic class with much wonder.

There were fickle groups that jumped from club to club; there were friends of two or three days who announced tearfully and wildly that they must join the same club, nothing should separate them; there were snarling disclosures of long-hidden grudges as the Suddenly Prominent remembered snubs of freshman year. Unknown men were elevated into importance when they received certain coveted bids; others who were considered “all set” found that they had made unexpected enemies, felt themselves stranded and deserted, talked wildly of leaving college.

In his own crowd Amory saw men kept out for wearing green hats, for being “a damn tailor’s dummy,” for having “too much pull in heaven,” for getting drunk one night “not like a gentleman, by God,” or for unfathomable secret reasons known to no one but the wielders of the black balls.

This orgy of sociability culminated in a gigantic party at the Nassau Inn, where punch was dispensed from immense bowls, and the whole down-stairs became a delirious, circulating, shouting pattern of faces and voices.

“Hi, Dibby — ‘gratulations!”

“Goo’ boy, Tom, you got a good bunch in Cap.”

“Say, Kerry — “

“Oh, Kerry — I hear you went Tiger with all the weight-lifters!” “Well, I didn’t go Cottage — the parlor-snakes’ delight.”

“They say Overton fainted when he got his Ivy bid — Did he sign up the first day? — oh, no. Tore over to Murray-Dodge on a bicycle — afraid it was a mistake.”

“How’d you get into Cap — you old roue?”

“‘Gratulations!”

“‘Gratulations yourself. Hear you got a good crowd.”

When the bar closed, the party broke up into groups and streamed, singing, over the snow-clad campus, in a weird delusion that snobbishness and strain were over at last, and that they could do what they pleased for the next two years.

Long afterward Amory thought of sophomore spring as the happiest time of his life. His ideas were in tune with life as he found it; he wanted no more than to drift and dream and enjoy a dozen new-found friendships through the April afternoons.

Alec Connage came into his room one morning and woke him up into the sunshine and peculiar glory of Campbell Hall shining in the window.

“Wake up, Original Sin, and scrape yourself together. Be in front of Renwick’s in half an hour. Somebody’s got a car.” He took the bureau cover and carefully deposited it, with its load of small articles, upon the bed.

“Where’d you get the car?” demanded Amory cynically.

“Sacred trust, but don’t be a critical goopher or you can’t go!”

“I think I’ll sleep,” Amory said calmly, resettling himself and reaching beside the bed for a cigarette.

“Sleep!”

“Why not? I’ve got a class at eleven-thirty.”

“You damned gloom! Of course, if you don’t want to go to the coast — “

With a bound Amory was out of bed, scattering the bureau cover’s burden on the floor. The coast... he hadn’t seen it for years, since he and his mother were on their pilgrimage.

“Who’s going?” he demanded as he wriggled into his B. V. D.’s.

“Oh, Dick Humbird and Kerry Holiday and Jesse Ferrenby and — oh about five or six. Speed it up, kid!”

In ten minutes Amory was devouring cornflakes in Renwick’s, and at nine-thirty they bowled happily out of town, headed for the sands of DealBeach.

“You see,” said Kerry, “the car belongs down there. In fact, it was stolen from Asbury Park by persons unknown, who deserted it in Princeton and left for the West. Heartless Humbird here got permission from the city council to deliver it.”

“Anybody got any money?” suggested Ferrenby, turning around from the front seat.

There was an emphatic negative chorus.

“That makes it interesting.”

“Money — what’s money? We can sell the car.”

“Charge him salvage or something.”

“How’re we going to get food?” asked Amory.

“Honestly,” answered Kerry, eying him reprovingly, “do you doubt Kerry’s ability for three short days? Some people have lived on nothing for years at a time. Read the Boy Scout Monthly.”

“Three days,” Amory mused, “and I’ve got classes.”

“One of the days is the Sabbath.”

“Just the same, I can only cut six more classes, with over a month and a half to go.”

“Throw him out!”

“It’s a long walk back.”

“Amory, you’re running it out, if I may coin a new phrase.”

“Hadn’t you better get some dope on yourself, Amory?”

Amory subsided resignedly and drooped into a contemplation of the scenery. Swinburne seemed to fit in somehow.

“Oh, winter’s rains and ruins are over,

And all the seasons of snows and sins;

The days dividing lover and lover,

The light that loses, the night that wins;

And time remembered is grief forgotten,

And frosts are slain and flowers begotten,

And in green underwood and cover,

Blossom by blossom the spring begins.

“The full streams feed on flower of — “

“What’s the matter, Amory? Amory’s thinking about poetry, about the pretty birds and flowers. I can see it in his eye.”

“No, I’m not,” he lied. “I’m thinking about the Princetonian. I ought to make up to-night; but I can telephone back, I suppose.”

“Oh,” said Kerry respectfully, “these important men — “

Amory flushed and it seemed to him that Ferrenby, a defeated competitor, winced a little. Of course, Kerry was only kidding, but he really mustn’t mention the Princetonian.

It was a halcyon day, and as they neared the shore and the salt breezes scurried by, he began to picture the ocean and long, level stretches of sand and red roofs over blue sea. Then they hurried through the little town and it all flashed upon his consciousness to a mighty paean of emotion....

“Oh, good Lord! Look at it!” he cried.

“What?”

“Let me out, quick — I haven’t seen it for eight years! Oh, gentlefolk, stop the car!”

“What an odd child!” remarked Alec.

“I do believe he’s a bit eccentric.”

The car was obligingly drawn up at a curb, and Amory ran for the boardwalk. First, he realized that the sea was blue and that there was an enormous quantity of it, and that it roared and roared — really all the banalities about the ocean that one could realize, but if any one had told him then that these things were banalities, he would have gaped in wonder.

“Now we’ll get lunch,” ordered Kerry, wandering up with the crowd. “Come on, Amory, tear yourself away and get practical.”

“We’ll try the best hotel first,” he went on, “and thence and so forth.”

They strolled along the boardwalk to the most imposing hostelry in sight, and, entering the dining-room, scattered about a table.

“Eight Bronxes,” commanded Alec, “and a club sandwich and Juliennes. The food for one. Hand the rest around.”

Amory ate little, having seized a chair where he could watch the sea and feel the rock of it. When luncheon was over they sat and smoked quietly.

“What’s the bill?”

Some one scanned it.

“Eight twenty-five.”

“Rotten overcharge. We’ll give them two dollars and one for the waiter. Kerry, collect the small change.”

The waiter approached, and Kerry gravely handed him a dollar, tossed two dollars on the check, and turned away. They sauntered leisurely toward the door, pursued in a moment by the suspicious Ganymede.

“Some mistake, sir.”

Kerry took the bill and examined it critically.

“No mistake!” he said, shaking his head gravely, and, tearing it into four pieces, he handed the scraps to the waiter, who was so dumfounded that he stood motionless and expressionless while they walked out.

“Won’t he send after us?”

“No,” said Kerry; “for a minute he’ll think we’re the proprietor’s sons or something; then he’ll look at the check again and call the manager, and in the meantime — “

They left the car at Asbury and street-car’d to Allenhurst, where they investigated the crowded pavilions for beauty. At four there were refreshments in a lunch-room, and this time they paid an even smaller per cent on the total cost; something about the appearance and savoir-faire of the crowd made the thing go, and they were not pursued.

“You see, Amory, we’re Marxian Socialists,” explained Kerry. “We don’t believe in property and we’re putting it to the great test.”

“Night will descend,” Amory suggested.

“Watch, and put your trust in Holiday.”

They became jovial about five-thirty and, linking arms, strolled up and down the boardwalk in a row, chanting a monotonous ditty about the sad sea waves. Then Kerry saw a face in the crowd that attracted him and, rushing off, reappeared in a moment with one of the homeliest girls Amory had ever set eyes on. Her pale mouth extended from ear to ear, her teeth projected in a solid wedge, and she had little, squinty eyes that peeped ingratiatingly over the side sweep of her nose. Kerry presented them formally.

“Name of Kaluka, Hawaiian queen! Let me present Messrs. Connage, Sloane, Humbird, Ferrenby, and Blaine.”

The girl bobbed courtesies all around. Poor creature; Amory supposed she had never before been noticed in her life — possibly she was half-witted. While she accompanied them (Kerry had invited her to supper) she said nothing which could discountenance such a belief.

“She prefers her native dishes,” said Alec gravely to the waiter, “but any coarse food will do.”

All through supper he addressed her in the most respectful language, while Kerry made idiotic love to her on the other side, and she giggled and grinned. Amory was content to sit and watch the by-play, thinking what a light touch Kerry had, and how he could transform the barest incident into a thing of curve and contour. They all seemed to have the spirit of it more or less, and it was a relaxation to be with them. Amory usually liked men individually, yet feared them in crowds unless the crowd was around him. He wondered how much each one contributed to the party, for there was somewhat of a spiritual tax levied. Alec and Kerry were the life of it, but not quite the centre. Somehow the quiet Humbird, and Sloane, with his impatient superciliousness, were the centre.

Dick Humbird had, ever since freshman year, seemed to Amory a perfect type of aristocrat. He was slender but well-built — black curly hair, straight features, and rather a dark skin. Everything he said sounded intangibly appropriate. He possessed infinite courage, an averagely good mind, and a sense of honor with a clear charm and noblesse oblige that varied it from righteousness. He could dissipate without going to pieces, and even his most bohemian adventures never seemed “running it out.” People dressed like him, tried to talk as he did.... Amory decided that he probably held the world back, but he wouldn’t have changed him. ...

He differed from the healthy type that was essentially middle class — he never seemed to perspire. Some people couldn’t be familiar with a chauffeur without having it returned; Humbird could have lunched at Sherry’s with a colored man, yet people would have somehow known that it was all right. He was not a snob, though he knew only half his class. His friends ranged from the highest to the lowest, but it was impossible to “cultivate” him. Servants worshipped him, and treated him like a god. He seemed the eternal example of what the upper class tries to be.

“He’s like those pictures in the Illustrated London News of the English officers who have been killed,” Amory had said to Alec. “Well,” Alec had answered, “if you want to know the shocking truth, his father was a grocery clerk who made a fortune in Tacoma real estate and came to New York ten years ago.”

Amory had felt a curious sinking sensation.

This present type of party was made possible by the surging together of the class after club elections — as if to make a last desperate attempt to know itself, to keep together, to fight off the tightening spirit of the clubs. It was a let-down from the conventional heights they had all walked so rigidly.

After supper they saw Kaluka to the boardwalk, and then strolled back along the beach to Asbury. The evening sea was a new sensation, for all its color and mellow age was gone, and it seemed the bleak waste that made the Norse sagas sad; Amory thought of Kipling’s

“Beaches of Lukanon before the sealers came.”

It was still a music, though, infinitely sorrowful.

Ten o’clock found them penniless. They had suppered greatly on their last eleven cents and, singing, strolled up through the casinos and lighted arches on the boardwalk, stopping to listen approvingly to all band concerts. In one place Kerry took up a collection for the French War Orphans which netted a dollar and twenty cents, and with this they bought some brandy in case they caught cold in the night. They finished the day in a moving-picture show and went into solemn systematic roars of laughter at an ancient comedy, to the startled annoyance of the rest of the audience. Their entrance was distinctly strategic, for each man as he entered pointed reproachfully at the one just behind him. Sloane, bringing up the rear, disclaimed all knowledge and responsibility as soon as the others were scattered inside; then as the irate ticket-taker rushed in he followed nonchalantly.

They reassembled later by the Casino and made arrangements for the night. Kerry wormed permission from the watchman to sleep on the platform and, having collected a huge pile of rugs from the booths to serve as mattresses and blankets, they talked until midnight, and then fell into a dreamless sleep, though Amory tried hard to stay awake and watch that marvellous moon settle on the sea.

So they progressed for two happy days, up and down the shore by street-car or machine, or by shoe-leather on the crowded boardwalk; sometimes eating with the wealthy, more frequently dining frugally at the expense of an unsuspecting restaurateur. They had their photos taken, eight poses, in a quick-development store. Kerry insisted on grouping them as a “varsity” football team, and then as a tough gang from the East Side, with their coats inside out, and himself sitting in the middle on a cardboard moon. The photographer probably has them yet — at least, they never called for them. The weather was perfect, and again they slept outside, and again Amory fell unwillingly asleep.

Sunday broke stolid and respectable, and even the sea seemed to mumble and complain, so they returned to Princeton via the Fords of transient farmers, and broke up with colds in their heads, but otherwise none the worse for wandering.

Even more than in the year before, Amory neglected his work, not deliberately but lazily and through a multitude of other interests. Co-ordinate geometry and the melancholy hexameters of Corneille and Racine held forth small allurements, and even psychology, which he had eagerly awaited, proved to be a dull subject full of muscular reactions and biological phrases rather than the study of personality and influence. That was a noon class, and it always sent him dozing. Having found that “subjective and objective, sir,” answered most of the questions, he used the phrase on all occasions, and it became the class joke when, on a query being levelled at him, he was nudged awake by Ferrenby or Sloane to gasp it out.

Mostly there were parties — to Orange or the Shore, more rarely to New York and Philadelphia, though one night they marshalled fourteen waitresses out of Childs’ and took them to ride down Fifth Avenue on top of an auto bus. They all cut more classes than were allowed, which meant an additional course the following year, but spring was too rare to let anything interfere with their colorful ramblings. In May Amory was elected to the Sophomore Prom Committee, and when after a long evening’s discussion with Alec they made out a tentative list of class probabilities for the senior council, they placed themselves among the surest. The senior council was composed presumably of the eighteen most representative seniors, and in view of Alec’s football managership and Amory’s chance of nosing out Burne Holiday as Princetonian chairman, they seemed fairly justified in this presumption. Oddly enough, they both placed D’Invilliers as among the possibilities, a guess that a year before the class would have gaped at.

All through the spring Amory had kept up an intermittent correspondence with Isabelle Borge, punctuated by violent squabbles and chiefly enlivened by his attempts to find new words for love. He discovered Isabelle to be discreetly and aggravatingly unsentimental in letters, but he hoped against hope that she would prove not too exotic a bloom to fit the large spaces of spring as she had fitted the den in the Minnehaha Club. During May he wrote thirty-page documents almost nightly, and sent them to her in bulky envelopes exteriorly labelled “Part I” and “Part II.”

“Oh, Alec, I believe I’m tired of college,” he said sadly, as they walked the dusk together.

“I think I am, too, in a way.”

“All I’d like would be a little home in the country, some warm country, and a wife, and just enough to do to keep from rotting.”

“Me, too.”

“I’d like to quit.”

“What does your girl say?”

“Oh!” Amory gasped in horror. “She wouldn’t think of marrying... that is, not now. I mean the future, you know.”

“My girl would. I’m engaged.”

“Are you really?”

“Yes. Don’t say a word to anybody, please, but I am. I may not come back next year.”

“But you’re only twenty! Give up college?”

“Why, Amory, you were saying a minute ago — “

“Yes,” Amory interrupted, “but I was just wishing. I wouldn’t think of leaving college. It’s just that I feel so sad these wonderful nights. I sort of feel they’re never coming again, and I’m not really getting all I could out of them. I wish my girl lived here. But marry — not a chance. Especially as father says the money isn’t forthcoming as it used to be.”

“What a waste these nights are!” agreed Alec.

But Amory sighed and made use of the nights. He had a snap-shot of Isabelle, enshrined in an old watch, and at eight almost every night he would turn off all the lights except the desk lamp and, sitting by the open windows with the picture before him, write her rapturous letters.

... Oh it’s so hard to write you what I really feel when I

think about you so much; you’ve gotten to mean to me a dream that

I can’t put on paper any more.  Your last letter came and it was

wonderful!  I read it over about six times, especially the last

part, but I do wish, sometimes, you’d be more frank and tell me

what you really do think of me, yet your last letter was too good

to be true, and I can hardly wait until June!  Be sure and be able

to come to the prom.  It’ll be fine, I think, and I want to bring

you just at the end of a wonderful year.  I often think over what

you said on that night and wonder how much you meant.  If it were

anyone but you — but you see I thought you were fickle the first

time I saw you and you are so popular and everthing that I can’t

imagine you really liking me best.

Oh, Isabelle, dear — it’s a wonderful night.  Somebody is playing

“Love Moon” on a mandolin far across the campus, and the music

seems to bring you into the window.  Now he’s playing “Good-by,

Boys, I’m Through,” and how well it suits me.  For I am through

with everything.  I have decided never to take a cocktail again,

and I know I’ll never again fall in love — I couldn’t — you’ve been

too much a part of my days and nights to ever let me think of

another girl.  I meet them all the time and they don’t interest me.

I’m not pretending to be blasé, because it’s not that.  It’s just

that I’m in love.  Oh, dearest Isabelle (somehow I can’t call you

just Isabelle, and I’m afraid I’ll come out with the “dearest”

before your family this June), you’ve got to come to the prom,

and then I’ll come up to your house for a day and everything’ll be

perfect....

And so on in an eternal monotone that seemed to both of them infinitely charming, infinitely new.

June came and the days grew so hot and lazy that they could not worry even about exams, but spent dreamy evenings on the court of Cottage, talking of long subjects until the sweep of country toward Stony Brook became a blue haze and the lilacs were white around tennis-courts, and words gave way to silent cigarettes.... Then down deserted Prospect and along McCosh with song everywhere around them, up to the hot joviality of Nassau Street.

Tom D’Invilliers and Amory walked late in those days. A gambling fever swept through the sophomore class and they bent over the bones till three o’clock many a sultry night. After one session they came out of Sloane’s room to find the dew fallen and the stars old in the sky.

“Let’s borrow bicycles and take a ride,” Amory suggested.

“All right. I’m not a bit tired and this is almost the last night of the year, really, because the prom stuff starts Monday.”

They found two unlocked bicycles in Holder Court and rode out about half-past three along the Lawrenceville Road.

“What are you going to do this summer, Amory?”

“Don’t ask me — same old things, I suppose. A month or two in Lake Geneva — I’m counting on you to be there in July, you know — then there’ll be Minneapolis, and that means hundreds of summer hops, parlor-snaking, getting bored — But oh, Tom,” he added suddenly, “hasn’t this year been slick!”

“No,” declared Tom emphatically, a new Tom, clothed by Brooks, shod by Franks, “I’ve won this game, but I feel as if I never want to play another. You’re all right — you’re a rubber ball, and somehow it suits you, but I’m sick of adapting myself to the local snobbishness of this corner of the world. I want to go where people aren’t barred because of the color of their neckties and the roll of their coats.”

“You can’t, Tom,” argued Amory, as they rolled along through the scattering night; “wherever you go now you’ll always unconsciously apply these standards of ‘having it’ or ‘lacking it.’ For better or worse we’ve stamped you; you’re a Princeton type!”

“Well, then,” complained Tom, his cracked voice rising plaintively, “why do I have to come back at all? I’ve learned all that Princeton has to offer. Two years more of mere pedantry and lying around a club aren’t going to help. They’re just going to disorganize me, conventionalize me completely. Even now I’m so spineless that I wonder how I get away with it.”

“Oh, but you’re missing the real point, Tom,” Amory interrupted. “You’ve just had your eyes opened to the snobbishness of the world in a rather abrupt manner. Princeton invariably gives the thoughtful man a social sense.”

“You consider you taught me that, don’t you?” he asked quizzically, eying Amory in the half dark.

Amory laughed quietly.

“Didn’t I?”

“Sometimes,” he said slowly, “I think you’re my bad angel. I might have been a pretty fair poet.”

“Come on, that’s rather hard. You chose to come to an Eastern college. Either your eyes were opened to the mean scrambling quality of people, or you’d have gone through blind, and you’d hate to have done that — been like Marty Kaye.”

“Yes,” he agreed, “you’re right. I wouldn’t have liked it. Still, it’s hard to be made a cynic at twenty.”

“I was born one,” Amory murmured. “I’m a cynical idealist.” He paused and wondered if that meant anything.

They reached the sleeping school of Lawrenceville, and turned to ride back.

“It’s good, this ride, isn’t it?” Tom said presently.

“Yes; it’s a good finish, it’s knock-out; everything’s good to-night. Oh, for a hot, languorous summer and Isabelle!”

“Oh, you and your Isabelle! I’ll bet she’s a simple one... let’s say some poetry.”

So Amory declaimed “The Ode to a Nightingale” to the bushes they passed.

“I’ll never be a poet,” said Amory as he finished. “I’m not enough of a sensualist really; there are only a few obvious things that I notice as primarily beautiful: women, spring evenings, music at night, the sea; I don’t catch the subtle things like ‘silver-snarling trumpets.’ I may turn out an intellectual, but I’ll never write anything but mediocre poetry.”

They rode into Princeton as the sun was making colored maps of the sky behind the graduate school, and hurried to the refreshment of a shower that would have to serve in place of sleep. By noon the bright-costumed alumni crowded the streets with their bands and choruses, and in the tents there was great reunion under the orange-and-black banners that curled and strained in the wind. Amory looked long at one house which bore the legend “Sixty-nine.” There a few gray-haired men sat and talked quietly while the classes swept by in panorama of life.

UNDER THE ARC-LIGHT

Then tragedy’s emerald eyes glared suddenly at Amory over the edge of June. On the night after his ride to Lawrenceville a crowd sallied to New York in quest of adventure, and started back to Princeton about twelve o’clock in two machines. It had been a gay party and different stages of sobriety were represented. Amory was in the car behind; they had taken the wrong road and lost the way, and so were hurrying to catch up.

It was a clear night and the exhilaration of the road went to Amory’s head. He had the ghost of two stanzas of a poem forming in his mind. ...

So the gray car crept nightward in the dark and there was no life

stirred as it went by....  As the still ocean paths before the

shark in starred and glittering waterways, beauty-high, the

moon-swathed trees divided, pair on pair, while flapping

nightbirds cried across the air....

A moment by an inn of lamps and shades, a yellow inn under a

yellow moon — then silence, where crescendo laughter fades... the

car swung out again to the winds of June, mellowed the shadows

where the distance grew, then crushed the yellow shadows into

blue....

They jolted to a stop, and Amory peered up, startled. A woman was standing beside the road, talking to Alec at the wheel. Afterward he remembered the harpy effect that her old kimono gave her, and the cracked hollowness of her voice as she spoke:

“You Princeton boys?”

“Yes.”

“Well, there’s one of you killed here, and two others about dead.”

“My God!”

“Look!” She pointed and they gazed in horror. Under the full light of a roadside arc-light lay a form, face downward in a widening circle of blood.

They sprang from the car. Amory thought of the back of that head — that hair — that hair... and then they turned the form over.

“It’s Dick — Dick Humbird!”

“Oh, Christ!”

“Feel his heart!”

Then the insistent voice of the old crone in a sort of croaking triumph:

“He’s quite dead, all right. The car turned over. Two of the men that weren’t hurt just carried the others in, but this one’s no use.”

Amory rushed into the house and the rest followed with a limp mass that they laid on the sofa in the shoddy little front parlor. Sloane, with his shoulder punctured, was on another lounge. He was half delirious, and kept calling something about a chemistry lecture at 8:10.

“I don’t know what happened,” said Ferrenby in a strained voice. “Dick was driving and he wouldn’t give up the wheel; we told him he’d been drinking too much — then there was this damn curve — oh, my God!...” He threw himself face downward on the floor and broke into dry sobs.

The doctor had arrived, and Amory went over to the couch, where some one handed him a sheet to put over the body. With a sudden hardness, he raised one of the hands and let it fall back inertly. The brow was cold but the face not expressionless. He looked at the shoe-laces — Dick had tied them that morning. He had tied them — and now he was this heavy white mass. All that remained of the charm and personality of the Dick Humbird he had known — oh, it was all so horrible and unaristocratic and close to the earth. All tragedy has that strain of the grotesque and squalid — so useless, futile... the way animals die.... Amory was reminded of a cat that had lain horribly mangled in some alley of his childhood.

“Some one go to Princeton with Ferrenby.”

Amory stepped outside the door and shivered slightly at the late night wind — a wind that stirred a broken fender on the mass of bent metal to a plaintive, tinny sound.

CRESCENDO!

Next day, by a merciful chance, passed in a whirl. When Amory was by himself his thoughts zigzagged inevitably to the picture of that red mouth yawning incongruously in the white face, but with a determined effort he piled present excitement upon the memory of it and shut it coldly away from his mind.

Isabelle and her mother drove into town at four, and they rode up smiling Prospect Avenue, through the gay crowd, to have tea at Cottage. The clubs had their annual dinners that night, so at seven he loaned her to a freshman and arranged to meet her in the gymnasium at eleven, when the upper classmen were admitted to the freshman dance. She was all he had expected, and he was happy and eager to make that night the centre of every dream. At nine the upper classes stood in front of the clubs as the freshman torchlight parade rioted past, and Amory wondered if the dress-suited groups against the dark, stately backgrounds and under the flare of the torches made the night as brilliant to the staring, cheering freshmen as it had been to him the year before.

The next day was another whirl. They lunched in a gay party of six in a private dining-room at the club, while Isabelle and Amory looked at each other tenderly over the fried chicken and knew that their love was to be eternal. They danced away the prom until five, and the stags cut in on Isabelle with joyous abandon, which grew more and more enthusiastic as the hour grew late, and their wines, stored in overcoat pockets in the coat room, made old weariness wait until another day. The stag line is a most homogeneous mass of men. It fairly sways with a single soul. A dark-haired beauty dances by and there is a half-gasping sound as the ripple surges forward and some one sleeker than the rest darts out and cuts in. Then when the six-foot girl (brought by Kaye in your class, and to whom he has been trying to introduce you all evening) gallops by, the line surges back and the groups face about and become intent on far corners of the hall, for Kaye, anxious and perspiring, appears elbowing through the crowd in search of familiar faces.

“I say, old man, I’ve got an awfully nice — “

“Sorry, Kaye, but I’m set for this one. I’ve got to cut in on a fella.”

“Well, the next one?”

“What — ah — er — I swear I’ve got to go cut in — look me up when she’s got a dance free.”

It delighted Amory when Isabelle suggested that they leave for a while and drive around in her car. For a delicious hour that passed too soon they glided the silent roads about Princeton and talked from the surface of their hearts in shy excitement. Amory felt strangely ingenuous and made no attempt to kiss her.

Next day they rode up through the Jersey country, had luncheon in New York, and in the afternoon went to see a problem play at which Isabelle wept all through the second act, rather to Amory’s embarrassment — though it filled him with tenderness to watch her. He was tempted to lean over and kiss away her tears, and she slipped her hand into his under cover of darkness to be pressed softly.

Then at six they arrived at the Borges’ summer place on Long Island, and Amory rushed up-stairs to change into a dinner coat. As he put in his studs he realized that he was enjoying life as he would probably never enjoy it again. Everything was hallowed by the haze of his own youth. He had arrived, abreast of the best in his generation at Princeton. He was in love and his love was returned. Turning on all the lights, he looked at himself in the mirror, trying to find in his own face the qualities that made him see clearer than the great crowd of people, that made him decide firmly, and able to influence and follow his own will. There was little in his life now that he would have changed. ... Oxford might have been a bigger field.

Silently he admired himself. How conveniently well he looked, and how well a dinner coat became him. He stepped into the hall and then waited at the top of the stairs, for he heard footsteps coming. It was Isabelle, and from the top of her shining hair to her little golden slippers she had never seemed so beautiful.

“Isabelle!” he cried, half involuntarily, and held out his arms. As in the story-books, she ran into them, and on that half-minute, as their lips first touched, rested the high point of vanity, the crest of his young egotism.

CHAPTER 3. The Egotist Considers

“Ouch! Let me go!”

He dropped his arms to his sides.

“What’s the matter?”

“Your shirt stud — it hurt me — look!” She was looking down at her neck, where a little blue spot about the size of a pea marred its pallor.

“Oh, Isabelle,” he reproached himself, “I’m a goopher. Really, I’m sorry — I shouldn’t have held you so close.”

She looked up impatiently.

“Oh, Amory, of course you couldn’t help it, and it didn’t hurt much; but what are we going to do about it?”

“Do about it?” he asked. “Oh — that spot; it’ll disappear in a second.”

“It isn’t,” she said, after a moment of concentrated gazing, “it’s still there — and it looks like Old Nick — oh, Amory, what’ll we do! It’s just the height of your shoulder.”

“Massage it,” he suggested, repressing the faintest inclination to laugh.

She rubbed it delicately with the tips of her fingers, and then a tear gathered in the corner of her eye, and slid down her cheek.

“Oh, Amory,” she said despairingly, lifting up a most pathetic face, “I’ll just make my whole neck flame if I rub it. What’ll I do?”

A quotation sailed into his head and he couldn’t resist repeating it aloud.

“All the perfumes of Arabia will not whiten this little hand.”

She looked up and the sparkle of the tear in her eye was like ice.

“You’re not very sympathetic.”

Amory mistook her meaning.

“Isabelle, darling, I think it’ll — “

“Don’t touch me!” she cried. “Haven’t I enough on my mind and you stand there and laugh!”

Then he slipped again.

“Well, it is funny, Isabelle, and we were talking the other day about a sense of humor being — “

She was looking at him with something that was not a smile, rather the faint, mirthless echo of a smile, in the corners of her mouth.

“Oh, shut up!” she cried suddenly, and fled down the hallway toward her room. Amory stood there, covered with remorseful confusion.

“Damn!”

When Isabelle reappeared she had thrown a light wrap about her shoulders, and they descended the stairs in a silence that endured through dinner.

“Isabelle,” he began rather testily, as they arranged themselves in the car, bound for a dance at the Greenwich Country Club, “you’re angry, and I’ll be, too, in a minute. Let’s kiss and make up.”

Isabelle considered glumly.

“I hate to be laughed at,” she said finally.

“I won’t laugh any more. I’m not laughing now, am I?”

“You did.”

“Oh, don’t be so darned feminine.”

Her lips curled slightly.

“I’ll be anything I want.”

Amory kept his temper with difficulty. He became aware that he had not an ounce of real affection for Isabelle, but her coldness piqued him. He wanted to kiss her, kiss her a lot, because then he knew he could leave in the morning and not care. On the contrary, if he didn’t kiss her, it would worry him.... It would interfere vaguely with his idea of himself as a conqueror. It wasn’t dignified to come off second best, pleading, with a doughty warrior like Isabelle.

Perhaps she suspected this. At any rate, Amory watched the night that should have been the consummation of romance glide by with great moths overhead and the heavy fragrance of roadside gardens, but without those broken words, those little sighs....

Afterward they suppered on ginger ale and devil’s food in the pantry, and Amory announced a decision.

“I’m leaving early in the morning.”

“Why?”

“Why not?” he countered.

“There’s no need.”

“However, I’m going.”

“Well, if you insist on being ridiculous — “

“Oh, don’t put it that way,” he objected.

“ — just because I won’t let you kiss me. Do you think — “

“Now, Isabelle,” he interrupted, “you know it’s not that — even suppose it is. We’ve reached the stage where we either ought to kiss — or — or — nothing. It isn’t as if you were refusing on moral grounds.”

She hesitated.

“I really don’t know what to think about you,” she began, in a feeble, perverse attempt at conciliation. “You’re so funny.”

“How?”

“Well, I thought you had a lot of self-confidence and all that; remember you told me the other day that you could do anything you wanted, or get anything you wanted?”

Amory flushed. He had told her a lot of things.

“Yes.”

“Well, you didn’t seem to feel so self-confident to-night. Maybe you’re just plain conceited.”

“No, I’m not,” he hesitated. “At Princeton — “

“Oh, you and Princeton! You’d think that was the world, the way you talk! Perhaps you can write better than anybody else on your old Princetonian; maybe the freshmen do think you’re important — “

“You don’t understand — “

“Yes, I do,” she interrupted. “I do, because you’re always talking about yourself and I used to like it; now I don’t.”

“Have I to-night?”

“That’s just the point,” insisted Isabelle. “You got all upset to-night. You just sat and watched my eyes. Besides, I have to think all the time I’m talking to you — you’re so critical.”

“I make you think, do I?” Amory repeated with a touch of vanity.

“You’re a nervous strain” — this emphatically — “and when you analyze every little emotion and instinct I just don’t have ‘em.”

“I know.” Amory admitted her point and shook his head helplessly.

“Let’s go.” She stood up.

He rose abstractedly and they walked to the foot of the stairs.

“What train can I get?”

“There’s one about 9:11 if you really must go.”

“Yes, I’ve got to go, really. Good night.”

“Good night.”

They were at the head of the stairs, and as Amory turned into his room he thought he caught just the faintest cloud of discontent in her face. He lay awake in the darkness and wondered how much he cared — how much of his sudden unhappiness was hurt vanity — whether he was, after all, temperamentally unfitted for romance.

When he awoke, it was with a glad flood of consciousness. The early wind stirred the chintz curtains at the windows and he was idly puzzled not to be in his room at Princeton with his school football picture over the bureau and the Triangle Club on the wall opposite. Then the grandfather’s clock in the hall outside struck eight, and the memory of the night before came to him. He was out of bed, dressing, like the wind; he must get out of the house before he saw Isabelle. What had seemed a melancholy happening, now seemed a tiresome anticlimax. He was dressed at half past, so he sat down by the window; felt that the sinews of his heart were twisted somewhat more than he had thought. What an ironic mockery the morning seemed! — bright and sunny, and full of the smell of the garden; hearing Mrs. Borge’s voice in the sun-parlor below, he wondered where was Isabelle.

There was a knock at the door.

“The car will be around at ten minutes of nine, sir.”

He returned to his contemplation of the outdoors, and began repeating over and over, mechanically, a verse from Browning, which he had once quoted to Isabelle in a letter:

“Each life unfulfilled, you see,

It hangs still, patchy and scrappy;

We have not sighed deep, laughed free,

Starved, feasted, despaired — been happy.”

But his life would not be unfulfilled. He took a sombre satisfaction in thinking that perhaps all along she had been nothing except what he had read into her; that this was her high point, that no one else would ever make her think. Yet that was what she had objected to in him; and Amory was suddenly tired of thinking, thinking!

“Damn her!” he said bitterly, “she’s spoiled my year!”

THE SUPERMAN GROWS CARELESS

On a dusty day in September Amory arrived in Princeton and joined the sweltering crowd of conditioned men who thronged the streets. It seemed a stupid way to commence his upper-class years, to spend four hours a morning in the stuffy room of a tutoring school, imbibing the infinite boredom of conic sections. Mr. Rooney, pander to the dull, conducted the class and smoked innumerable Pall Malls as he drew diagrams and worked equations from six in the morning until midnight.

“Now, Langueduc, if I used that formula, where would my A point be?”

Langueduc lazily shifts his six-foot-three of football material and tries to concentrate.

“Oh — ah — I’m damned if I know, Mr. Rooney.”

“Oh, why of course, of course you can’t use that formula. That’s what I wanted you to say.”

“Why, sure, of course.”

“Do you see why?”

“You bet — I suppose so.”

“If you don’t see, tell me. I’m here to show you.”

“Well, Mr. Rooney, if you don’t mind, I wish you’d go over that again.”

“Gladly. Now here’s ‘A’...”

The room was a study in stupidity — two huge stands for paper, Mr. Rooney in his shirt-sleeves in front of them, and slouched around on chairs, a dozen men: Fred Sloane, the pitcher, who absolutely had to get eligible; “Slim” Langueduc, who would beat Yale this fall, if only he could master a poor fifty per cent; McDowell, gay young sophomore, who thought it was quite a sporting thing to be tutoring here with all these prominent athletes.

“Those poor birds who haven’t a cent to tutor, and have to study during the term are the ones I pity,” he announced to Amory one day, with a flaccid camaraderie in the droop of the cigarette from his pale lips. “I should think it would be such a bore, there’s so much else to do in New York during the term. I suppose they don’t know what they miss, anyhow.” There was such an air of “you and I” about Mr. McDowell that Amory very nearly pushed him out of the open window when he said this. ... Next February his mother would wonder why he didn’t make a club and increase his allowance... simple little nut....

Through the smoke and the air of solemn, dense earnestness that filled the room would come the inevitable helpless cry:

“I don’t get it! Repeat that, Mr. Rooney!” Most of them were so stupid or careless that they wouldn’t admit when they didn’t understand, and Amory was of the latter. He found it impossible to study conic sections; something in their calm and tantalizing respectability breathing defiantly through Mr. Rooney’s fetid parlors distorted their equations into insoluble anagrams. He made a last night’s effort with the proverbial wet towel, and then blissfully took the exam, wondering unhappily why all the color and ambition of the spring before had faded out. Somehow, with the defection of Isabelle the idea of undergraduate success had loosed its grasp on his imagination, and he contemplated a possible failure to pass off his condition with equanimity, even though it would arbitrarily mean his removal from the Princetonian board and the slaughter of his chances for the Senior Council.

There was always his luck.

He yawned, scribbled his honor pledge on the cover, and sauntered from the room.

“If you don’t pass it,” said the newly arrived Alec as they sat on the window-seat of Amory’s room and mused upon a scheme of wall decoration, “you’re the world’s worst goopher. Your stock will go down like an elevator at the club and on the campus.”

“Oh, hell, I know it. Why rub it in?”

“‘Cause you deserve it. Anybody that’d risk what you were in line for ought to be ineligible for Princetonian chairman.”

“Oh, drop the subject,” Amory protested. “Watch and wait and shut up. I don’t want every one at the club asking me about it, as if I were a prize potato being fattened for a vegetable show.” One evening a week later Amory stopped below his own window on the way to Renwick’s, and, seeing a light, called up:

“Oh, Tom, any mail?”

Alec’s head appeared against the yellow square of light.

“Yes, your result’s here.”

His heart clamored violently.

“What is it, blue or pink?”

“Don’t know. Better come up.”

He walked into the room and straight over to the table, and then suddenly noticed that there were other people in the room.

“‘Lo, Kerry.” He was most polite. “Ah, men of Princeton.” They seemed to be mostly friends, so he picked up the envelope marked “Registrar’s Office,” and weighed it nervously.

“We have here quite a slip of paper.”

“Open it, Amory.”

“Just to be dramatic, I’ll let you know that if it’s blue, my name is withdrawn from the editorial board of the Prince, and my short career is over.”

He paused, and then saw for the first time Ferrenby’s eyes, wearing a hungry look and watching him eagerly. Amory returned the gaze pointedly.

“Watch my face, gentlemen, for the primitive emotions.”

He tore it open and held the slip up to the light.

“Well?”

“Pink or blue?”

“Say what it is.”

“We’re all ears, Amory.”

“Smile or swear — or something.”

There was a pause... a small crowd of seconds swept by... then he looked again and another crowd went on into time.

“Blue as the sky, gentlemen....”

AFTERMATH

What Amory did that year from early September to late in the spring was so purposeless and inconsecutive that it seems scarcely worth recording. He was, of course, immediately sorry for what he had lost. His philosophy of success had tumbled down upon him, and he looked for the reasons.

“Your own laziness,” said Alec later.

“No — something deeper than that. I’ve begun to feel that I was meant to lose this chance.”

“They’re rather off you at the club, you know; every man that doesn’t come through makes our crowd just so much weaker.”

“I hate that point of view.”

“Of course, with a little effort you could still stage a comeback.”

“No — I’m through — as far as ever being a power in college is concerned.”

“But, Amory, honestly, what makes me the angriest isn’t the fact that you won’t be chairman of the Prince and on the Senior Council, but just that you didn’t get down and pass that exam.”

“Not me,” said Amory slowly; “I’m mad at the concrete thing. My own idleness was quite in accord with my system, but the luck broke.”

“Your system broke, you mean.”

“Maybe.”

“Well, what are you going to do? Get a better one quick, or just bum around for two more years as a has-been?”

“I don’t know yet...”

“Oh, Amory, buck up!”

“Maybe.”

Amory’s point of view, though dangerous, was not far from the true one. If his reactions to his environment could be tabulated, the chart would have appeared like this, beginning with his earliest years:

1. The fundamental Amory.

2. Amory plus Beatrice.

3. Amory plus Beatrice plus Minneapolis.

Then St. Regis’ had pulled him to pieces and started him over again:

4. Amory plus St. Regis’.

5. Amory plus St. Regis’ plus Princeton.

That had been his nearest approach to success through conformity. The fundamental Amory, idle, imaginative, rebellious, had been nearly snowed under. He had conformed, he had succeeded, but as his imagination was neither satisfied nor grasped by his own success, he had listlessly, half-accidentally chucked the whole thing and become again:

6. The fundamental Amory.

FINANCIAL

His father died quietly and inconspicuously at Thanksgiving. The incongruity of death with either the beauties of Lake Geneva or with his mother’s dignified, reticent attitude diverted him, and he looked at the funeral with an amused tolerance. He decided that burial was after all preferable to cremation, and he smiled at his old boyhood choice, slow oxidation in the top of a tree. The day after the ceremony he was amusing himself in the great library by sinking back on a couch in graceful mortuary attitudes, trying to determine whether he would, when his day came, be found with his arms crossed piously over his chest (Monsignor Darcy had once advocated this posture as being the most distinguished), or with his hands clasped behind his head, a more pagan and Byronic attitude.

What interested him much more than the final departure of his father from things mundane was a tri-cornered conversation between Beatrice, Mr. Barton, of Barton and Krogman, their lawyers, and himself, that took place several days after the funeral. For the first time he came into actual cognizance of the family finances, and realized what a tidy fortune had once been under his father’s management. He took a ledger labelled “1906” and ran through it rather carefully. The total expenditure that year had come to something over one hundred and ten thousand dollars. Forty thousand of this had been Beatrice’s own income, and there had been no attempt to account for it: it was all under the heading, “Drafts, checks, and letters of credit forwarded to Beatrice Blaine.” The dispersal of the rest was rather minutely itemized: the taxes and improvements on the Lake Geneva estate had come to almost nine thousand dollars; the general up-keep, including Beatrice’s electric and a French car, bought that year, was over thirty-five thousand dollars. The rest was fully taken care of, and there were invariably items which failed to balance on the right side of the ledger.

In the volume for 1912 Amory was shocked to discover the decrease in the number of bond holdings and the great drop in the income. In the case of Beatrice’s money this was not so pronounced, but it was obvious that his father had devoted the previous year to several unfortunate gambles in oil. Very little of the oil had been burned, but Stephen Blaine had been rather badly singed. The next year and the next and the next showed similar decreases, and Beatrice had for the first time begun using her own money for keeping up the house. Yet her doctor’s bill for 1913 had been over nine thousand dollars.

About the exact state of things Mr. Barton was quite vague and confused. There had been recent investments, the outcome of which was for the present problematical, and he had an idea there were further speculations and exchanges concerning which he had not been consulted.

It was not for several months that Beatrice wrote Amory the full situation. The entire residue of the Blaine and O’Hara fortunes consisted of the place at Lake Geneva and approximately a half million dollars, invested now in fairly conservative six-per-cent holdings. In fact, Beatrice wrote that she was putting the money into railroad and street-car bonds as fast as she could conveniently transfer it.

“I am quite sure,” she wrote to Amory, “that if there is one

thing we can be positive of, it is that people will not stay in

one place.  This Ford person has certainly made the most of that

idea.  So I am instructing Mr. Barton to specialize on such things

as Northern Pacific and these Rapid Transit Companies, as they

call the street-cars.  I shall never forgive myself for not buying

Bethlehem Steel.  I’ve heard the most fascinating stories.  You

must go into finance, Amory.  I’m sure you would revel in it.

You start as a messenger or a teller, I believe, and from that you

go up — almost indefinitely.  I’m sure if I were a man I’d love the

handling of money; it has become quite a senile passion with me.

Before I get any farther I want to discuss something.  A Mrs. Bispam,

an overcordial little lady whom I met at a tea the other day,

told me that her son, he is at Yale, wrote her that all the

boys there wore their summer underwear all during the winter,

and also went about with their heads wet and in low shoes on the

coldest days.  Now, Amory, I don’t know whether that is a fad at

Princeton too, but I don’t want you to be so foolish.  It not only

inclines a young man to pneumonia and infantile paralysis, but to

all forms of lung trouble, to which you are particularly

inclined.  You cannot experiment with your health.  I have found

that out.  I will not make myself ridiculous as some mothers no

doubt do, by insisting that you wear overshoes, though I remember

one Christmas you wore them around constantly without a single

buckle latched, making such a curious swishing sound, and you

refused to buckle them because it was not the thing to do.  The

very next Christmas you would not wear even rubbers, though I

begged you.  You are nearly twenty years old now, dear, and I

can’t be with you constantly to find whether you are doing the

sensible thing.

“This has been a very practical letter.  I warned you in my last

that the lack of money to do the things one wants to makes one

quite prosy and domestic, but there is still plenty for

everything if we are not too extravagant.  Take care of yourself,

my dear boy, and do try to write at least once a week, because I

imagine all sorts of horrible things if I don’t hear from you.

Affectionately,            MOTHER.”

FIRST APPEARANCE OF THE TERM “PERSONAGE”

Monsignor Darcy invited Amory up to the Stuart palace on the Hudson for a week at Christmas, and they had enormous conversations around the open fire. Monsignor was growing a trifle stouter and his personality had expanded even with that, and Amory felt both rest and security in sinking into a squat, cushioned chair and joining him in the middle-aged sanity of a cigar.

“I’ve felt like leaving college, Monsignor.”

“Why?”

“All my career’s gone up in smoke; you think it’s petty and all that, but — “

“Not at all petty. I think it’s most important. I want to hear the whole thing. Everything you’ve been doing since I saw you last.”

Amory talked; he went thoroughly into the destruction of his egotistic highways, and in a half-hour the listless quality had left his voice.

“What would you do if you left college?” asked Monsignor.

“Don’t know. I’d like to travel, but of course this tiresome war prevents that. Anyways, mother would hate not having me graduate. I’m just at sea. Kerry Holiday wants me to go over with him and join the Lafayette Esquadrille.”

“You know you wouldn’t like to go.”

“Sometimes I would — to-night I’d go in a second.”

“Well, you’d have to be very much more tired of life than I think you are. I know you.”

“I’m afraid you do,” agreed Amory reluctantly. “It just seemed an easy way out of everything — when I think of another useless, draggy year.”

“Yes, I know; but to tell you the truth, I’m not worried about you; you seem to me to be progressing perfectly naturally.”

“No,” Amory objected. “I’ve lost half my personality in a year.”

“Not a bit of it!” scoffed Monsignor. “You’ve lost a great amount of vanity and that’s all.”

“Lordy! I feel, anyway, as if I’d gone through another fifth form at St. Regis’s.”

“No.” Monsignor shook his head. “That was a misfortune; this has been a good thing. Whatever worth while comes to you, won’t be through the channels you were searching last year.”

“What could be more unprofitable than my present lack of pep?”

“Perhaps in itself... but you’re developing. This has given you time to think and you’re casting off a lot of your old luggage about success and the superman and all. People like us can’t adopt whole theories, as you did. If we can do the next thing, and have an hour a day to think in, we can accomplish marvels, but as far as any high-handed scheme of blind dominance is concerned — we’d just make asses of ourselves.”

“But, Monsignor, I can’t do the next thing.”

“Amory, between you and me, I have only just learned to do it myself. I can do the one hundred things beyond the next thing, but I stub my toe on that, just as you stubbed your toe on mathematics this fall.”

“Why do we have to do the next thing? It never seems the sort of thing I should do.”

“We have to do it because we’re not personalities, but personages.”

“That’s a good line — what do you mean?”

“A personality is what you thought you were, what this Kerry and Sloane you tell me of evidently are. Personality is a physical matter almost entirely; it lowers the people it acts on — I’ve seen it vanish in a long sickness. But while a personality is active, it overrides ‘the next thing.’ Now a personage, on the other hand, gathers. He is never thought of apart from what he’s done. He’s a bar on which a thousand things have been hung — glittering things sometimes, as ours are; but he uses those things with a cold mentality back of them.”

“And several of my most glittering possessions had fallen off when I needed them.” Amory continued the simile eagerly.

“Yes, that’s it; when you feel that your garnered prestige and talents and all that are hung out, you need never bother about anybody; you can cope with them without difficulty.”

“But, on the other hand, if I haven’t my possessions, I’m helpless!”

“Absolutely.”

“That’s certainly an idea.”

“Now you’ve a clean start — a start Kerry or Sloane can constitutionally never have. You brushed three or four ornaments down, and, in a fit of pique, knocked off the rest of them. The thing now is to collect some new ones, and the farther you look ahead in the collecting the better. But remember, do the next thing!”

“How clear you can make things!”

So they talked, often about themselves, sometimes of philosophy and religion, and life as respectively a game or a mystery. The priest seemed to guess Amory’s thoughts before they were clear in his own head, so closely related were their minds in form and groove.

“Why do I make lists?” Amory asked him one night. “Lists of all sorts of things?”

“Because you’re a mediaevalist,” Monsignor answered. “We both are. It’s the passion for classifying and finding a type.”

“It’s a desire to get something definite.”

“It’s the nucleus of scholastic philosophy.”

“I was beginning to think I was growing eccentric till I came up here. It was a pose, I guess.”

“Don’t worry about that; for you not posing may be the biggest pose of all. Pose — “

“Yes?”

“But do the next thing.”

After Amory returned to college he received several letters from Monsignor which gave him more egotistic food for consumption.

I am afraid that I gave you too much assurance of your inevitable

safety, and you must remember that I did that through faith in

your springs of effort; not in the silly conviction that you will

arrive without struggle.  Some nuances of character you will have

to take for granted in yourself, though you must be careful in

confessing them to others.  You are unsentimental, almost incapable

of affection, astute without being cunning and vain without being

proud.

Don’t let yourself feel worthless; often through life you will

really be at your worst when you seem to think best of yourself;

and don’t worry about losing your “personality,” as you persist

in calling it; at fifteen you had the radiance of early morning,

at twenty you will begin to have the melancholy brilliance of

the moon, and when you are my age you will give out, as I do,

the genial golden warmth of 4 P.M.

If you write me letters, please let them be natural ones.  Your

last, that dissertation on architecture, was perfectly awful —

so “highbrow” that I picture you living in an intellectual and

emotional vacuum; and beware of trying to classify people too

definitely into types; you will find that all through their youth

they will persist annoyingly in jumping from class to class, and

by pasting a supercilious label on every one you meet you are

merely packing a Jack-in-the-box that will spring up and leer at

you when you begin to come into really antagonistic contact with

the world.  An idealization of some such a man as Leonardo da

Vinci would be a more valuable beacon to you at present.

You are bound to go up and down, just as I did in my youth, but

do keep your clarity of mind, and if fools or sages dare to

criticise don’t blame yourself too much.

You say that convention is all that really keeps you straight in

this “woman proposition”; but it’s more than that, Amory; it’s

the fear that what you begin you can’t stop; you would run amuck,

and I know whereof I speak; it’s that half-miraculous sixth sense

by which you detect evil, it’s the half-realized fear of God in

your heart.

Whatever your metier proves to be — religion, architecture,

literature — I’m sure you would be much safer anchored to the

Church, but I won’t risk my influence by arguing with you even

though I am secretly sure that the “black chasm of Romanism”

yawns beneath you.  Do write me soon.

With affectionate regards,          THAYER DARCY.

Even Amory’s reading paled during this period; he delved further into the misty side streets of literature: Huysmans, Walter Pater, Theophile Gautier, and the racier sections of Rabelais, Boccaccio, Petronius, and Suetonius. One week, through general curiosity, he inspected the private libraries of his classmates and found Sloane’s as typical as any: sets of Kipling, O. Henry, John Fox, Jr., and Richard Harding Davis; “What Every Middle-Aged Woman Ought to Know,” “The Spell of the Yukon”; a “gift” copy of James Whitcomb Riley, an assortment of battered, annotated schoolbooks, and, finally, to his surprise, one of his own late discoveries, the collected poems of Rupert Brooke.

Together with Tom D’Invilliers, he sought among the lights of Princeton for some one who might found the Great American Poetic Tradition.

The undergraduate body itself was rather more interesting that year than had been the entirely Philistine Princeton of two years before. Things had livened surprisingly, though at the sacrifice of much of the spontaneous charm of freshman year. In the old Princeton they would never have discovered Tanaduke Wylie. Tanaduke was a sophomore, with tremendous ears and a way of saying, “The earth swirls down through the ominous moons of preconsidered generations!” that made them vaguely wonder why it did not sound quite clear, but never question that it was the utterance of a supersoul. At least so Tom and Amory took him. They told him in all earnestness that he had a mind like Shelley’s, and featured his ultrafree free verse and prose poetry in the Nassau Literary Magazine. But Tanaduke’s genius absorbed the many colors of the age, and he took to the Bohemian life, to their great disappointment. He talked of Greenwich Village now instead of “noon-swirled moons,” and met winter muses, unacademic, and cloistered by Forty-second Street and Broadway, instead of the Shelleyan dream-children with whom he had regaled their expectant appreciation. So they surrendered Tanaduke to the futurists, deciding that he and his flaming ties would do better there. Tom gave him the final advice that he should stop writing for two years and read the complete works of Alexander Pope four times, but on Amory’s suggestion that Pope for Tanaduke was like foot-ease for stomach trouble, they withdrew in laughter, and called it a coin’s toss whether this genius was too big or too petty for them.

Amory rather scornfully avoided the popular professors who dispensed easy epigrams and thimblefuls of Chartreuse to groups of admirers every night. He was disappointed, too, at the air of general uncertainty on every subject that seemed linked with the pedantic temperament; his opinions took shape in a miniature satire called “In a Lecture-Room,” which he persuaded Tom to print in the Nassau Lit.

“Good-morning, Fool...

Three times a week

You hold us helpless while you speak,

Teasing our thirsty souls with the

Sleek ‘yeas’ of your philosophy...

Well, here we are, your hundred sheep,

Tune up, play on, pour forth... we sleep...

You are a student, so they say;

You hammered out the other day

A syllabus, from what we know

Of some forgotten folio;

You’d sniffled through an era’s must,

Filling your nostrils up with dust,

And then, arising from your knees,

Published, in one gigantic sneeze...

But here’s a neighbor on my right,

An Eager Ass, considered bright;

Asker of questions....  How he’ll stand,

With earnest air and fidgy hand,

After this hour, telling you

He sat all night and burrowed through

Your book....  Oh, you’ll be coy and he

Will simulate precosity,

And pedants both, you’ll smile and smirk,

And leer, and hasten back to work....

‘Twas this day week, sir, you returned

A theme of mine, from which I learned

(Through various comment on the side

Which you had scrawled) that I defied

The highest rules of criticism

For cheap and careless witticism....

‘Are you quite sure that this could be?’

And

‘Shaw is no authority!’

But Eager Ass, with what he’s sent,

Plays havoc with your best per cent.

Still — still I meet you here and there...

When Shakespeare’s played you hold a chair,

And some defunct, moth-eaten star

Enchants the mental prig you are...

A radical comes down and shocks

The atheistic orthodox?

You’re representing Common Sense,

Mouth open, in the audience.

And, sometimes, even chapel lures

That conscious tolerance of yours,

That broad and beaming view of truth

(Including Kant and General Booth...)

And so from shock to shock you live,

A hollow, pale affirmative...

The hour’s up... and roused from rest

One hundred children of the blest

Cheat you a word or two with feet

That down the noisy aisle-ways beat...

Forget on narrow-minded earth

The Mighty Yawn that gave you birth.”

In April, Kerry Holiday left college and sailed for France to enroll in the Lafayette Esquadrille. Amory’s envy and admiration of this step was drowned in an experience of his own to which he never succeeded in giving an appropriate value, but which, nevertheless, haunted him for three years afterward.

THE DEVIL

Healy’s they left at twelve and taxied to Bistolary’s. There were Axia Marlowe and Phoebe Column, from the SummerGarden show, Fred Sloane and Amory. The evening was so very young that they felt ridiculous with surplus energy, and burst into the cafe like Dionysian revellers.

“Table for four in the middle of the floor,” yelled Phoebe. “Hurry, old dear, tell ‘em we’re here!”

“Tell ‘em to play ‘Admiration’!” shouted Sloane. “You two order; Phoebe and I are going to shake a wicked calf,” and they sailed off in the muddled crowd. Axia and Amory, acquaintances of an hour, jostled behind a waiter to a table at a point of vantage; there they took seats and watched.

“There’s Findle Margotson, from New Haven!” she cried above the uproar. “‘Lo, Findle! Whoo-ee!”

“Oh, Axia!” he shouted in salutation. “C’mon over to our table.” “No!” Amory whispered.

“Can’t do it, Findle; I’m with somebody else! Call me up to-morrow about one o’clock!”

Findle, a nondescript man-about-Bisty’s, answered incoherently and turned back to the brilliant blonde whom he was endeavoring to steer around the room.

“There’s a natural damn fool,” commented Amory.

“Oh, he’s all right. Here’s the old jitney waiter. If you ask me, I want a double Daiquiri.”

“Make it four.”

The crowd whirled and changed and shifted. They were mostly from the colleges, with a scattering of the male refuse of Broadway, and women of two types, the higher of which was the chorus girl. On the whole it was a typical crowd, and their party as typical as any. About three-fourths of the whole business was for effect and therefore harmless, ended at the door of the cafe, soon enough for the five-o’clock train back to Yale or Princeton; about one-fourth continued on into the dimmer hours and gathered strange dust from strange places. Their party was scheduled to be one of the harmless kind. Fred Sloane and Phoebe Column were old friends; Axia and Amory new ones. But strange things are prepared even in the dead of night, and the unusual, which lurks least in the cafe, home of the prosaic and inevitable, was preparing to spoil for him the waning romance of Broadway. The way it took was so inexpressibly terrible, so unbelievable, that afterward he never thought of it as experience; but it was a scene from a misty tragedy, played far behind the veil, and that it meant something definite he knew.

About one o’clock they moved to Maxim’s, and two found them in Deviniere’s. Sloane had been drinking consecutively and was in a state of unsteady exhilaration, but Amory was quite tiresomely sober; they had run across none of those ancient, corrupt buyers of champagne who usually assisted their New York parties. They were just through dancing and were making their way back to their chairs when Amory became aware that some one at a near-by table was looking at him. He turned and glanced casually... a middle-aged man dressed in a brown sack suit, it was, sitting a little apart at a table by himself and watching their party intently. At Amory’s glance he smiled faintly. Amory turned to Fred, who was just sitting down.

“Who’s that pale fool watching us?” he complained indignantly.

“Where?” cried Sloane. “We’ll have him thrown out!” He rose to his feet and swayed back and forth, clinging to his chair. “Where is he?”

Axia and Phoebe suddenly leaned and whispered to each other across the table, and before Amory realized it they found themselves on their way to the door.

“Where now?”

“Up to the flat,” suggested Phoebe. “We’ve got brandy and fizz — and everything’s slow down here to-night.”

Amory considered quickly. He hadn’t been drinking, and decided that if he took no more, it would be reasonably discreet for him to trot along in the party. In fact, it would be, perhaps, the thing to do in order to keep an eye on Sloane, who was not in a state to do his own thinking. So he took Axia’s arm and, piling intimately into a taxicab, they drove out over the hundreds and drew up at a tall, white-stone apartment-house. ... Never would he forget that street.... It was a broad street, lined on both sides with just such tall, white-stone buildings, dotted with dark windows; they stretched along as far as the eye could see, flooded with a bright moonlight that gave them a calcium pallor. He imagined each one to have an elevator and a colored hall-boy and a key-rack; each one to be eight stories high and full of three and four room suites. He was rather glad to walk into the cheeriness of Phoebe’s living-room and sink onto a sofa, while the girls went rummaging for food.

“Phoebe’s great stuff,” confided Sloane, sotto voce.

“I’m only going to stay half an hour,” Amory said sternly. He wondered if it sounded priggish.

“Hell y’ say,” protested Sloane. “We’re here now — don’t le’s rush.”

“I don’t like this place,” Amory said sulkily, “and I don’t want any food.”

Phoebe reappeared with sandwiches, brandy bottle, siphon, and four glasses.

“Amory, pour ‘em out,” she said, “and we’ll drink to Fred Sloane, who has a rare, distinguished edge.”

“Yes,” said Axia, coming in, “and Amory. I like Amory.” She sat down beside him and laid her yellow head on his shoulder.

“I’ll pour,” said Sloane; “you use siphon, Phoebe.”

They filled the tray with glasses.

“Ready, here she goes!”

Amory hesitated, glass in hand.

There was a minute while temptation crept over him like a warm wind, and his imagination turned to fire, and he took the glass from Phoebe’s hand. That was all; for at the second that his decision came, he looked up and saw, ten yards from him, the man who had been in the cafe, and with his jump of astonishment the glass fell from his uplifted hand. There the man half sat, half leaned against a pile of pillows on the corner divan. His face was cast in the same yellow wax as in the cafe, neither the dull, pasty color of a dead man — rather a sort of virile pallor — nor unhealthy, you’d have called it; but like a strong man who’d worked in a mine or done night shifts in a damp climate. Amory looked him over carefully and later he could have drawn him after a fashion, down to the merest details. His mouth was the kind that is called frank, and he had steady gray eyes that moved slowly from one to the other of their group, with just the shade of a questioning expression. Amory noticed his hands; they weren’t fine at all, but they had versatility and a tenuous strength... they were nervous hands that sat lightly along the cushions and moved constantly with little jerky openings and closings. Then, suddenly, Amory perceived the feet, and with a rush of blood to the head he realized he was afraid. The feet were all wrong ... with a sort of wrongness that he felt rather than knew.... It was like weakness in a good woman, or blood on satin; one of those terrible incongruities that shake little things in the back of the brain. He wore no shoes, but, instead, a sort of half moccasin, pointed, though, like the shoes they wore in the fourteenth century, and with the little ends curling up. They were a darkish brown and his toes seemed to fill them to the end.... They were unutterably terrible....

He must have said something, or looked something, for Axia’s voice came out of the void with a strange goodness.

“Well, look at Amory! Poor old Amory’s sick — old head going ‘round?”

“Look at that man!” cried Amory, pointing toward the corner divan.

“You mean that purple zebra!” shrieked Axia facetiously. “Ooo-ee! Amory’s got a purple zebra watching him!”

Sloane laughed vacantly.

“Ole zebra gotcha, Amory?”

There was a silence.... The man regarded Amory quizzically.... Then the human voices fell faintly on his ear:

“Thought you weren’t drinking,” remarked Axia sardonically, but her voice was good to hear; the whole divan that held the man was alive; alive like heat waves over asphalt, like wriggling worms....

“Come back! Come back!” Axia’s arm fell on his. “Amory, dear, you aren’t going, Amory!” He was half-way to the door.

“Come on, Amory, stick ‘th us!”

“Sick, are you?”

“Sit down a second!”

“Take some water.”

“Take a little brandy....”

The elevator was close, and the colored boy was half asleep, paled to a livid bronze... Axia’s beseeching voice floated down the shaft. Those feet... those feet...

As they settled to the lower floor the feet came into view in the sickly electric light of the paved hall.

IN THE ALLEY

Down the long street came the moon, and Amory turned his back on it and walked. Ten, fifteen steps away sounded the footsteps. They were like a slow dripping, with just the slightest insistence in their fall. Amory’s shadow lay, perhaps, ten feet ahead of him, and soft shoes was presumably that far behind. With the instinct of a child Amory edged in under the blue darkness of the white buildings, cleaving the moonlight for haggard seconds, once bursting into a slow run with clumsy stumblings. After that he stopped suddenly; he must keep hold, he thought. His lips were dry and he licked them.

If he met any one good — were there any good people left in the world or did they all live in white apartment-houses now? Was every one followed in the moonlight? But if he met some one good who’d know what he meant and hear this damned scuffle... then the scuffling grew suddenly nearer, and a black cloud settled over the moon. When again the pale sheen skimmed the cornices, it was almost beside him, and Amory thought he heard a quiet breathing. Suddenly he realized that the footsteps were not behind, had never been behind, they were ahead and he was not eluding but following... following. He began to run, blindly, his heart knocking heavily, his hands clinched. Far ahead a black dot showed itself, resolved slowly into a human shape. But Amory was beyond that now; he turned off the street and darted into an alley, narrow and dark and smelling of old rottenness. He twisted down a long, sinuous blackness, where the moonlight was shut away except for tiny glints and patches... then suddenly sank panting into a corner by a fence, exhausted. The steps ahead stopped, and he could hear them shift slightly with a continuous motion, like waves around a dock.

He put his face in his hands and covered eyes and ears as well as he could. During all this time it never occurred to him that he was delirious or drunk. He had a sense of reality such as material things could never give him. His intellectual content seemed to submit passively to it, and it fitted like a glove everything that had ever preceded it in his life. It did not muddle him. It was like a problem whose answer he knew on paper, yet whose solution he was unable to grasp. He was far beyond horror. He had sunk through the thin surface of that, now moved in a region where the feet and the fear of white walls were real, living things, things he must accept. Only far inside his soul a little fire leaped and cried that something was pulling him down, trying to get him inside a door and slam it behind him. After that door was slammed there would be only footfalls and white buildings in the moonlight, and perhaps he would be one of the footfalls.

During the five or ten minutes he waited in the shadow of the fence, there was somehow this fire... that was as near as he could name it afterward. He remembered calling aloud:

“I want some one stupid. Oh, send some one stupid!” This to the black fence opposite him, in whose shadows the footsteps shuffled ... shuffled. He supposed “stupid” and “good” had become somehow intermingled through previous association. When he called thus it was not an act of will at all — will had turned him away from the moving figure in the street; it was almost instinct that called, just the pile on pile of inherent tradition or some wild prayer from way over the night. Then something clanged like a low gong struck at a distance, and before his eyes a face flashed over the two feet, a face pale and distorted with a sort of infinite evil that twisted it like flame in the wind; but he knew, for the half instant that the gong tanged and hummed, that it was the face of Dick Humbird.

Minutes later he sprang to his feet, realizing dimly that there was no more sound, and that he was alone in the graying alley. It was cold, and he started on a steady run for the light that showed the street at the other end.

AT THE WINDOW

It was late morning when he woke and found the telephone beside his bed in the hotel tolling frantically, and remembered that he had left word to be called at eleven. Sloane was snoring heavily, his clothes in a pile by his bed. They dressed and ate breakfast in silence, and then sauntered out to get some air. Amory’s mind was working slowly, trying to assimilate what had happened and separate from the chaotic imagery that stacked his memory the bare shreds of truth. If the morning had been cold and gray he could have grasped the reins of the past in an instant, but it was one of those days that New York gets sometimes in May, when the air on Fifth Avenue is a soft, light wine. How much or how little Sloane remembered Amory did not care to know; he apparently had none of the nervous tension that was gripping Amory and forcing his mind back and forth like a shrieking saw.

Then Broadway broke upon them, and with the babel of noise and the painted faces a sudden sickness rushed over Amory.

“For God’s sake, let’s go back! Let’s get off of this — this place!”

Sloane looked at him in amazement.

“What do you mean?”

“This street, it’s ghastly! Come on! let’s get back to the Avenue!”

“Do you mean to say,” said Sloane stolidly, “that ‘cause you had some sort of indigestion that made you act like a maniac last night, you’re never coming on Broadway again?”

Simultaneously Amory classed him with the crowd, and he seemed no longer Sloane of the debonair humor and the happy personality, but only one of the evil faces that whirled along the turbid stream.

“Man!” he shouted so loud that the people on the corner turned and followed them with their eyes, “it’s filthy, and if you can’t see it, you’re filthy, too!”

“I can’t help it,” said Sloane doggedly. “What’s the matter with you? Old remorse getting you? You’d be in a fine state if you’d gone through with our little party.”

“I’m going, Fred,” said Amory slowly. His knees were shaking under him, and he knew that if he stayed another minute on this street he would keel over where he stood. “I’ll be at the Vanderbilt for lunch.” And he strode rapidly off and turned over to Fifth Avenue. Back at the hotel he felt better, but as he walked into the barber-shop, intending to get a head massage, the smell of the powders and tonics brought back Axia’s sidelong, suggestive smile, and he left hurriedly. In the doorway of his room a sudden blackness flowed around him like a divided river.

When he came to himself he knew that several hours had passed. He pitched onto the bed and rolled over on his face with a deadly fear that he was going mad. He wanted people, people, some one sane and stupid and good. He lay for he knew not how long without moving. He could feel the little hot veins on his forehead standing out, and his terror had hardened on him like plaster. He felt he was passing up again through the thin crust of horror, and now only could he distinguish the shadowy twilight he was leaving. He must have fallen asleep again, for when he next recollected himself he had paid the hotel bill and was stepping into a taxi at the door. It was raining torrents.

On the train for Princeton he saw no one he knew, only a crowd of fagged-looking Philadelphians. The presence of a painted woman across the aisle filled him with a fresh burst of sickness and he changed to another car, tried to concentrate on an article in a popular magazine. He found himself reading the same paragraphs over and over, so he abandoned this attempt and leaning over wearily pressed his hot forehead against the damp window-pane. The car, a smoker, was hot and stuffy with most of the smells of the state’s alien population; he opened a window and shivered against the cloud of fog that drifted in over him. The two hours’ ride were like days, and he nearly cried aloud with joy when the towers of Princeton loomed up beside him and the yellow squares of light filtered through the blue rain.

Tom was standing in the centre of the room, pensively relighting a cigar-stub. Amory fancied he looked rather relieved on seeing him.

“Had a hell of a dream about you last night,” came in the cracked voice through the cigar smoke. “I had an idea you were in some trouble.”

“Don’t tell me about it!” Amory almost shrieked. “Don’t say a word; I’m tired and pepped out.”

Tom looked at him queerly and then sank into a chair and opened his Italian note-book. Amory threw his coat and hat on the floor, loosened his collar, and took a Wells novel at random from the shelf. “Wells is sane,” he thought, “and if he won’t do I’ll read Rupert Brooke.”

Half an hour passed. Outside the wind came up, and Amory started as the wet branches moved and clawed with their finger-nails at the window-pane. Tom was deep in his work, and inside the room only the occasional scratch of a match or the rustle of leather as they shifted in their chairs broke the stillness. Then like a zigzag of lightning came the change. Amory sat bolt upright, frozen cold in his chair. Tom was looking at him with his mouth drooping, eyes fixed.

“God help us!” Amory cried.

“Oh, my heavens!” shouted Tom, “look behind!” Quick as a flash Amory whirled around. He saw nothing but the dark window-pane. “It’s gone now,” came Tom’s voice after a second in a still terror. “Something was looking at you.”

Trembling violently, Amory dropped into his chair again.

“I’ve got to tell you,” he said. “I’ve had one hell of an experience. I think I’ve — I’ve seen the devil or — something like him. What face did you just see? — or no,” he added quickly, “don’t tell me!”

And he gave Tom the story. It was midnight when he finished, and after that, with all lights burning, two sleepy, shivering boys read to each other from “The New Machiavelli,” until dawn came up out of Witherspoon Hall, and the Princetonian fell against the door, and the May birds hailed the sun on last night’s rain.

CHAPTER 4. Narcissus Off Duty

During Princeton’s transition period, that is, during Amory’s last two years there, while he saw it change and broaden and live up to its Gothic beauty by better means than night parades, certain individuals arrived who stirred it to its plethoric depths. Some of them had been freshmen, and wild freshmen, with Amory; some were in the class below; and it was in the beginning of his last year and around small tables at the Nassau Inn that they began questioning aloud the institutions that Amory and countless others before him had questioned so long in secret. First, and partly by accident, they struck on certain books, a definite type of biographical novel that Amory christened “quest” books. In the “quest” book the hero set off in life armed with the best weapons and avowedly intending to use them as such weapons are usually used, to push their possessors ahead as selfishly and blindly as possible, but the heroes of the “quest” books discovered that there might be a more magnificent use for them. “None Other Gods,” “Sinister Street,” and “The Research Magnificent” were examples of such books; it was the latter of these three that gripped Burne Holiday and made him wonder in the beginning of senior year how much it was worth while being a diplomatic autocrat around his club on Prospect Avenue and basking in the high lights of class office. It was distinctly through the channels of aristocracy that Burne found his way. Amory, through Kerry, had had a vague drifting acquaintance with him, but not until January of senior year did their friendship commence.

“Heard the latest?” said Tom, coming in late one drizzly evening with that triumphant air he always wore after a successful conversational bout.

“No. Somebody flunked out? Or another ship sunk?”

“Worse than that. About one-third of the junior class are going to resign from their clubs.”

“What!”

“Actual fact!”

“Why!”

“Spirit of reform and all that. Burne Holiday is behind it. The club presidents are holding a meeting to-night to see if they can find a joint means of combating it.”

“Well, what’s the idea of the thing?”

“Oh, clubs injurious to Princeton democracy; cost a lot; draw social lines, take time; the regular line you get sometimes from disappointed sophomores. Woodrow thought they should be abolished and all that.”

“But this is the real thing?”

“Absolutely. I think it’ll go through.”

“For Pete’s sake, tell me more about it.”

“Well,” began Tom, “it seems that the idea developed simultaneously in several heads. I was talking to Burne awhile ago, and he claims that it’s a logical result if an intelligent person thinks long enough about the social system. They had a ‘discussion crowd’ and the point of abolishing the clubs was brought up by some one — everybody there leaped at it — it had been in each one’s mind, more or less, and it just needed a spark to bring it out.”

“Fine! I swear I think it’ll be most entertaining. How do they feel up at Cap and Gown?”

“Wild, of course. Every one’s been sitting and arguing and swearing and getting mad and getting sentimental and getting brutal. It’s the same at all the clubs; I’ve been the rounds. They get one of the radicals in the corner and fire questions at him.”

“How do the radicals stand up?”

“Oh, moderately well. Burne’s a damn good talker, and so obviously sincere that you can’t get anywhere with him. It’s so evident that resigning from his club means so much more to him than preventing it does to us that I felt futile when I argued; finally took a position that was brilliantly neutral. In fact, I believe Burne thought for a while that he’d converted me.”

“And you say almost a third of the junior class are going to resign?”

“Call it a fourth and be safe.”

“Lord — who’d have thought it possible!”

There was a brisk knock at the door, and Burne himself came in. “Hello, Amory — hello, Tom.”

Amory rose.

“‘Evening, Burne. Don’t mind if I seem to rush; I’m going to Renwick’s.”

Burne turned to him quickly.

“You probably know what I want to talk to Tom about, and it isn’t a bit private. I wish you’d stay.”

“I’d be glad to.” Amory sat down again, and as Burne perched on a table and launched into argument with Tom, he looked at this revolutionary more carefully than he ever had before. Broad-browed and strong-chinned, with a fineness in the honest gray eyes that were like Kerry’s, Burne was a man who gave an immediate impression of bigness and security — stubborn, that was evident, but his stubbornness wore no stolidity, and when he had talked for five minutes Amory knew that this keen enthusiasm had in it no quality of dilettantism.

The intense power Amory felt later in Burne Holiday differed from the admiration he had had for Humbird. This time it began as purely a mental interest. With other men of whom he had thought as primarily first-class, he had been attracted first by their personalities, and in Burne he missed that immediate magnetism to which he usually swore allegiance. But that night Amory was struck by Burne’s intense earnestness, a quality he was accustomed to associate only with the dread stupidity, and by the great enthusiasm that struck dead chords in his heart. Burne stood vaguely for a land Amory hoped he was drifting toward — and it was almost time that land was in sight. Tom and Amory and Alec had reached an impasse; never did they seem to have new experiences in common, for Tom and Alec had been as blindly busy with their committees and boards as Amory had been blindly idling, and the things they had for dissection — college, contemporary personality and the like — they had hashed and rehashed for many a frugal conversational meal.

That night they discussed the clubs until twelve, and, in the main, they agreed with Burne. To the roommates it did not seem such a vital subject as it had in the two years before, but the logic of Burne’s objections to the social system dovetailed so completely with everything they had thought, that they questioned rather than argued, and envied the sanity that enabled this man to stand out so against all traditions.

Then Amory branched off and found that Burne was deep in other things as well. Economics had interested him and he was turning socialist. Pacifism played in the back of his mind, and he read The Masses and Lyoff Tolstoi faithfully.

“How about religion?” Amory asked him.

“Don’t know. I’m in a muddle about a lot of things — I’ve just discovered that I’ve a mind, and I’m starting to read.”

“Read what?”

“Everything. I have to pick and choose, of course, but mostly things to make me think. I’m reading the four gospels now, and the ‘Varieties of Religious Experience.’“

“What chiefly started you?”

“Wells, I guess, and Tolstoi, and a man named Edward Carpenter. I’ve been reading for over a year now — on a few lines, on what I consider the essential lines.”

“Poetry?”

“Well, frankly, not what you call poetry, or for your reasons — you two write, of course, and look at things differently. Whitman is the man that attracts me.”

“Whitman?”

“Yes; he’s a definite ethical force.”

“Well, I’m ashamed to say that I’m a blank on the subject of Whitman. How about you, Tom?”

Tom nodded sheepishly.

“Well,” continued Burne, “you may strike a few poems that are tiresome, but I mean the mass of his work. He’s tremendous — like Tolstoi. They both look things in the face, and, somehow, different as they are, stand for somewhat the same things.”

“You have me stumped, Burne,” Amory admitted. “I’ve read ‘Anna Karenina’ and the ‘Kreutzer Sonata’ of course, but Tolstoi is mostly in the original Russian as far as I’m concerned.”

“He’s the greatest man in hundreds of years,” cried Burne enthusiastically. “Did you ever see a picture of that shaggy old head of his?”

They talked until three, from biology to organized religion, and when Amory crept shivering into bed it was with his mind aglow with ideas and a sense of shock that some one else had discovered the path he might have followed. Burne Holiday was so evidently developing — and Amory had considered that he was doing the same. He had fallen into a deep cynicism over what had crossed his path, plotted the imperfectability of man and read Shaw and Chesterton enough to keep his mind from the edges of decadence — now suddenly all his mental processes of the last year and a half seemed stale and futile — a petty consummation of himself... and like a sombre background lay that incident of the spring before, that filled half his nights with a dreary terror and made him unable to pray. He was not even a Catholic, yet that was the only ghost of a code that he had, the gaudy, ritualistic, paradoxical Catholicism whose prophet was Chesterton, whose claqueurs were such reformed rakes of literature as Huysmans and Bourget, whose American sponsor was Ralph Adams Cram, with his adulation of thirteenth-century cathedrals — a Catholicism which Amory found convenient and ready-made, without priest or sacraments or sacrifice.

He could not sleep, so he turned on his reading-lamp and, taking down the “Kreutzer Sonata,” searched it carefully for the germs of Burne’s enthusiasm. Being Burne was suddenly so much realler than being clever. Yet he sighed... here were other possible clay feet.

He thought back through two years, of Burne as a hurried, nervous freshman, quite submerged in his brother’s personality. Then he remembered an incident of sophomore year, in which Burne had been suspected of the leading role.

Dean Hollister had been heard by a large group arguing with a taxi-driver, who had driven him from the junction. In the course of the altercation the dean remarked that he “might as well buy the taxicab.” He paid and walked off, but next morning he entered his private office to find the taxicab itself in the space usually occupied by his desk, bearing a sign which read “Property of Dean Hollister. Bought and Paid for.”... It took two expert mechanics half a day to dissemble it into its minutest parts and remove it, which only goes to prove the rare energy of sophomore humor under efficient leadership.

Then again, that very fall, Burne had caused a sensation. A certain Phyllis Styles, an intercollegiate prom-trotter, had failed to get her yearly invitation to the Harvard-Princeton game.

Jesse Ferrenby had brought her to a smaller game a few weeks before, and had pressed Burne into service — to the ruination of the latter’s misogyny.

“Are you coming to the Harvard game?” Burne had asked indiscreetly, merely to make conversation.

“If you ask me,” cried Phyllis quickly.

“Of course I do,” said Burne feebly. He was unversed in the arts of Phyllis, and was sure that this was merely a vapid form of kidding. Before an hour had passed he knew that he was indeed involved. Phyllis had pinned him down and served him up, informed him the train she was arriving by, and depressed him thoroughly. Aside from loathing Phyllis, he had particularly wanted to stag that game and entertain some Harvard friends.

“She’ll see,” he informed a delegation who arrived in his room to josh him. “This will be the last game she ever persuades any young innocent to take her to!”

“But, Burne — why did you invite her if you didn’t want her?”

“Burne, you know you’re secretly mad about her — that’s the real trouble.”

“What can you do, Burne? What can you do against Phyllis?”

But Burne only shook his head and muttered threats which consisted largely of the phrase: “She’ll see, she’ll see!”

The blithesome Phyllis bore her twenty-five summers gayly from the train, but on the platform a ghastly sight met her eyes. There were Burne and Fred Sloane arrayed to the last dot like the lurid figures on college posters. They had bought flaring suits with huge peg-top trousers and gigantic padded shoulders. On their heads were rakish college hats, pinned up in front and sporting bright orange-and-black bands, while from their celluloid collars blossomed flaming orange ties. They wore black arm-bands with orange “P’s,” and carried canes flying Princeton pennants, the effect completed by socks and peeping handkerchiefs in the same color motifs. On a clanking chain they led a large, angry tom-cat, painted to represent a tiger.

A good half of the station crowd was already staring at them, torn between horrified pity and riotous mirth, and as Phyllis, with her svelte jaw dropping, approached, the pair bent over and emitted a college cheer in loud, far-carrying voices, thoughtfully adding the name “Phyllis” to the end. She was vociferously greeted and escorted enthusiastically across the campus, followed by half a hundred village urchins — to the stifled laughter of hundreds of alumni and visitors, half of whom had no idea that this was a practical joke, but thought that Burne and Fred were two varsity sports showing their girl a collegiate time.

Phyllis’s feelings as she was paraded by the Harvard and Princeton stands, where sat dozens of her former devotees, can be imagined. She tried to walk a little ahead, she tried to walk a little behind — but they stayed close, that there should be no doubt whom she was with, talking in loud voices of their friends on the football team, until she could almost hear her acquaintances whispering:

“Phyllis Styles must be awfully hard up to have to come with those two.”

That had been Burne, dynamically humorous, fundamentally serious. From that root had blossomed the energy that he was now trying to orient with progress....

So the weeks passed and March came and the clay feet that Amory looked for failed to appear. About a hundred juniors and seniors resigned from their clubs in a final fury of righteousness, and the clubs in helplessness turned upon Burne their finest weapon: ridicule. Every one who knew him liked him — but what he stood for (and he began to stand for more all the time) came under the lash of many tongues, until a frailer man than he would have been snowed under.

“Don’t you mind losing prestige?” asked Amory one night. They had taken to exchanging calls several times a week.

“Of course I don’t. What’s prestige, at best?”

“Some people say that you’re just a rather original politician.”

He roared with laughter.

“That’s what Fred Sloane told me to-day. I suppose I have it coming.”

One afternoon they dipped into a subject that had interested Amory for a long time — the matter of the bearing of physical attributes on a man’s make-up. Burne had gone into the biology of this, and then:

“Of course health counts — a healthy man has twice the chance of being good,” he said.

“I don’t agree with you — I don’t believe in ‘muscular Christianity.’“

“I do — I believe Christ had great physical vigor.”

“Oh, no,” Amory protested. “He worked too hard for that. I imagine that when he died he was a broken-down man — and the great saints haven’t been strong.”

“Half of them have.”

“Well, even granting that, I don’t think health has anything to do with goodness; of course, it’s valuable to a great saint to be able to stand enormous strains, but this fad of popular preachers rising on their toes in simulated virility, bellowing that calisthenics will save the world — no, Burne, I can’t go that.”

“Well, let’s waive it — we won’t get anywhere, and besides I haven’t quite made up my mind about it myself. Now, here’s something I do know — personal appearance has a lot to do with it.”

“Coloring?” Amory asked eagerly.

“Yes.”

“That’s what Tom and I figured,” Amory agreed. “We took the year-books for the last ten years and looked at the pictures of the senior council. I know you don’t think much of that august body, but it does represent success here in a general way. Well, I suppose only about thirty-five per cent of every class here are blonds, are really light — yet two-thirds of every senior council are light. We looked at pictures of ten years of them, mind you; that means that out of every fifteen light-haired men in the senior class one is on the senior council, and of the dark-haired men it’s only one in fifty.”

“It’s true,” Burne agreed. “The light-haired man is a higher type, generally speaking. I worked the thing out with the Presidents of the United States once, and found that way over half of them were light-haired — yet think of the preponderant number of brunettes in the race.”

“People unconsciously admit it,” said Amory. “You’ll notice a blond person is expected to talk. If a blond girl doesn’t talk we call her a ‘doll’; if a light-haired man is silent he’s considered stupid. Yet the world is full of ‘dark silent men’ and ‘languorous brunettes’ who haven’t a brain in their heads, but somehow are never accused of the dearth.”

“And the large mouth and broad chin and rather big nose undoubtedly make the superior face.”

“I’m not so sure.” Amory was all for classical features.

“Oh, yes — I’ll show you,” and Burne pulled out of his desk a photographic collection of heavily bearded, shaggy celebrities — Tolstoi, Whitman, Carpenter, and others.

“Aren’t they wonderful?”

Amory tried politely to appreciate them, and gave up laughingly.

“Burne, I think they’re the ugliest-looking crowd I ever came across. They look like an old man’s home.”

“Oh, Amory, look at that forehead on Emerson; look at Tolstoi’s eyes.” His tone was reproachful.

Amory shook his head.

“No! Call them remarkable-looking or anything you want — but ugly they certainly are.”

Unabashed, Burne ran his hand lovingly across the spacious foreheads, and piling up the pictures put them back in his desk.

Walking at night was one of his favorite pursuits, and one night he persuaded Amory to accompany him.

“I hate the dark,” Amory objected. “I didn’t use to — except when I was particularly imaginative, but now, I really do — I’m a regular fool about it.”

“That’s useless, you know.”

“Quite possibly.”

“We’ll go east,” Burne suggested, “and down that string of roads through the woods.”

“Doesn’t sound very appealing to me,” admitted Amory reluctantly, “but let’s go.”

They set off at a good gait, and for an hour swung along in a brisk argument until the lights of Princeton were luminous white blots behind them.

“Any person with any imagination is bound to be afraid,” said Burne earnestly. “And this very walking at night is one of the things I was afraid about. I’m going to tell you why I can walk anywhere now and not be afraid.”

“Go on,” Amory urged eagerly. They were striding toward the woods, Burne’s nervous, enthusiastic voice warming to his subject.

“I used to come out here alone at night, oh, three months ago, and I always stopped at that cross-road we just passed. There were the woods looming up ahead, just as they do now, there were dogs howling and the shadows and no human sound. Of course, I peopled the woods with everything ghastly, just like you do; don’t you?”

“I do,” Amory admitted.

“Well, I began analyzing it — my imagination persisted in sticking horrors into the dark — so I stuck my imagination into the dark instead, and let it look out at me — I let it play stray dog or escaped convict or ghost, and then saw myself coming along the road. That made it all right — as it always makes everything all right to project yourself completely into another’s place. I knew that if I were the dog or the convict or the ghost I wouldn’t be a menace to Burne Holiday any more than he was a menace to me. Then I thought of my watch. I’d better go back and leave it and then essay the woods. No; I decided, it’s better on the whole that I should lose a watch than that I should turn back — and I did go into them — not only followed the road through them, but walked into them until I wasn’t frightened any more — did it until one night I sat down and dozed off in there; then I knew I was through being afraid of the dark.”

“Lordy,” Amory breathed. “I couldn’t have done that. I’d have come out half-way, and the first time an automobile passed and made the dark thicker when its lamps disappeared, I’d have come in.”

“Well,” Burne said suddenly, after a few moments’ silence, “we’re half-way through, let’s turn back.”

On the return he launched into a discussion of will.

“It’s the whole thing,” he asserted. “It’s the one dividing line between good and evil. I’ve never met a man who led a rotten life and didn’t have a weak will.”

“How about great criminals?”

“They’re usually insane. If not, they’re weak. There is no such thing as a strong, sane criminal.”

“Burne, I disagree with you altogether; how about the superman?”

“Well?”

“He’s evil, I think, yet he’s strong and sane.”

“I’ve never met him. I’ll bet, though, that he’s stupid or insane.”

“I’ve met him over and over and he’s neither. That’s why I think you’re wrong.”

“I’m sure I’m not — and so I don’t believe in imprisonment except for the insane.”

On this point Amory could not agree. It seemed to him that life and history were rife with the strong criminal, keen, but often self-deluding; in politics and business one found him and among the old statesmen and kings and generals; but Burne never agreed and their courses began to split on that point.

Burne was drawing farther and farther away from the world about him. He resigned the vice-presidency of the senior class and took to reading and walking as almost his only pursuits. He voluntarily attended graduate lectures in philosophy and biology, and sat in all of them with a rather pathetically intent look in his eyes, as if waiting for something the lecturer would never quite come to. Sometimes Amory would see him squirm in his seat; and his face would light up; he was on fire to debate a point.

He grew more abstracted on the street and was even accused of becoming a snob, but Amory knew it was nothing of the sort, and once when Burne passed him four feet off, absolutely unseeingly, his mind a thousand miles away, Amory almost choked with the romantic joy of watching him. Burne seemed to be climbing heights where others would be forever unable to get a foothold.

“I tell you,” Amory declared to Tom, “he’s the first contemporary I’ve ever met whom I’ll admit is my superior in mental capacity.”

“It’s a bad time to admit it — people are beginning to think he’s odd.”

“He’s way over their heads — you know you think so yourself when you talk to him — Good Lord, Tom, you used to stand out against ‘people.’ Success has completely conventionalized you.”

Tom grew rather annoyed.

“What’s he trying to do — be excessively holy?”

“No! not like anybody you’ve ever seen. Never enters the Philadelphian Society. He has no faith in that rot. He doesn’t believe that public swimming-pools and a kind word in time will right the wrongs of the world; moreover, he takes a drink whenever he feels like it.”

“He certainly is getting in wrong.”

“Have you talked to him lately?”

“No.”

“Then you haven’t any conception of him.”

The argument ended nowhere, but Amory noticed more than ever how the sentiment toward Burne had changed on the campus.

“It’s odd,” Amory said to Tom one night when they had grown more amicable on the subject, “that the people who violently disapprove of Burne’s radicalism are distinctly the Pharisee class — I mean they’re the best-educated men in college — the editors of the papers, like yourself and Ferrenby, the younger professors.... The illiterate athletes like Langueduc think he’s getting eccentric, but they just say, ‘Good old Burne has got some queer ideas in his head,’ and pass on — the Pharisee class — Gee! they ridicule him unmercifully.”

The next morning he met Burne hurrying along McCosh walk after a recitation.

“Whither bound, Tsar?”

“Over to the Prince office to see Ferrenby,” he waved a copy of the morning’s Princetonian at Amory. “He wrote this editorial.”

“Going to flay him alive?”

“No — but he’s got me all balled up. Either I’ve misjudged him or he’s suddenly become the world’s worst radical.”

Burne hurried on, and it was several days before Amory heard an account of the ensuing conversation. Burne had come into the editor’s sanctum displaying the paper cheerfully.

“Hello, Jesse.”

“Hello there, Savonarola.”

“I just read your editorial.”

“Good boy — didn’t know you stooped that low.”

“Jesse, you startled me.”

“How so?”

“Aren’t you afraid the faculty’ll get after you if you pull this irreligious stuff?”

“What?”

“Like this morning.”

“What the devil — that editorial was on the coaching system.”

“Yes, but that quotation — “

Jesse sat up.

“What quotation?”

“You know: ‘He who is not with me is against me.’“

“Well — what about it?”

Jesse was puzzled but not alarmed.

“Well, you say here — let me see.” Burne opened the paper and read: “‘He who is not with me is against me, as that gentleman said who was notoriously capable of only coarse distinctions and puerile generalities.’“

“What of it?” Ferrenby began to look alarmed. “Oliver Cromwell said it, didn’t he? or was it Washington, or one of the saints? Good Lord, I’ve forgotten.”

Burne roared with laughter.

“Oh, Jesse, oh, good, kind Jesse.”

“Who said it, for Pete’s sake?”

“Well,” said Burne, recovering his voice, “St. Matthew attributes it to Christ.”

“My God!” cried Jesse, and collapsed backward into the waste-basket.

AMORY WRITES A POEM

The weeks tore by. Amory wandered occasionally to New York on the chance of finding a new shining green auto-bus, that its stick-of-candy glamour might penetrate his disposition. One day he ventured into a stock-company revival of a play whose name was faintly familiar. The curtain rose — he watched casually as a girl entered. A few phrases rang in his ear and touched a faint chord of memory. Where — ? When — ?

Then he seemed to hear a voice whispering beside him, a very soft, vibrant voice: “Oh, I’m such a poor little fool; do tell me when I do wrong.”

The solution came in a flash and he had a quick, glad memory of Isabelle.

He found a blank space on his programme, and began to scribble rapidly:

“Here in the figured dark I watch once more,

There, with the curtain, roll the years away;

Two years of years — there was an idle day

Of ours, when happy endings didn’t bore

Our unfermented souls; I could adore

Your eager face beside me, wide-eyed, gay,

Smiling a repertoire while the poor play

Reached me as a faint ripple reaches shore.

“Yawning and wondering an evening through,

I watch alone... and chatterings, of course,

Spoil the one scene which, somehow, did have charms;

You wept a bit, and I grew sad for you

Right here!  Where Mr. X defends divorce

And What’s-Her-Name falls fainting in his arms.”

STILL CALM

“Ghosts are such dumb things,” said Alec, “they’re slow-witted. I can always outguess a ghost.”

“How?” asked Tom.

“Well, it depends where. Take a bedroom, for example. If you use any discretion a ghost can never get you in a bedroom.”

“Go on, s’pose you think there’s maybe a ghost in your bedroom — what measures do you take on getting home at night?” demanded Amory, interested.

“Take a stick” answered Alec, with ponderous reverence, “one about the length of a broom-handle. Now, the first thing to do is to get the room cleared — to do this you rush with your eyes closed into your study and turn on the lights — next, approaching the closet, carefully run the stick in the door three or four times. Then, if nothing happens, you can look in. Always, always run the stick in viciously first — never look first!”

“Of course, that’s the ancient Celtic school,” said Tom gravely.

“Yes — but they usually pray first. Anyway, you use this method to clear the closets and also for behind all doors — “

“And the bed,” Amory suggested.

“Oh, Amory, no!” cried Alec in horror. “That isn’t the way — the bed requires different tactics — let the bed alone, as you value your reason — if there is a ghost in the room and that’s only about a third of the time, it is almost always under the bed.”

“Well” Amory began.

Alec waved him into silence.

“Of course you never look. You stand in the middle of the floor and before he knows what you’re going to do make a sudden leap for the bed — never walk near the bed; to a ghost your ankle is your most vulnerable part — once in bed, you’re safe; he may lie around under the bed all night, but you’re safe as daylight. If you still have doubts pull the blanket over your head.”

“All that’s very interesting, Tom.”

“Isn’t it?” Alec beamed proudly. “All my own, too — the Sir Oliver Lodge of the new world.”

Amory was enjoying college immensely again. The sense of going forward in a direct, determined line had come back; youth was stirring and shaking out a few new feathers. He had even stored enough surplus energy to sally into a new pose.

“What’s the idea of all this ‘distracted’ stuff, Amory?” asked Alec one day, and then as Amory pretended to be cramped over his book in a daze: “Oh, don’t try to act Burne, the mystic, to me.”

Amory looked up innocently.

“What?”

“What?” mimicked Alec. “Are you trying to read yourself into a rhapsody with — let’s see the book.”

He snatched it; regarded it derisively.

“Well?” said Amory a little stiffly.

“‘The Life of St. Teresa,’“ read Alec aloud. “Oh, my gosh!”

“Say, Alec.”

“What?”

“Does it bother you?”

“Does what bother me?”

“My acting dazed and all that?”

“Why, no — of course it doesn’t bother me.”

“Well, then, don’t spoil it. If I enjoy going around telling people guilelessly that I think I’m a genius, let me do it.”

“You’re getting a reputation for being eccentric,” said Alec, laughing, “if that’s what you mean.”

Amory finally prevailed, and Alec agreed to accept his face value in the presence of others if he was allowed rest periods when they were alone; so Amory “ran it out” at a great rate, bringing the most eccentric characters to dinner, wild-eyed grad students, preceptors with strange theories of God and government, to the cynical amazement of the supercilious Cottage Club.

As February became slashed by sun and moved cheerfully into March, Amory went several times to spend week-ends with Monsignor; once he took Burne, with great success, for he took equal pride and delight in displaying them to each other. Monsignor took him several times to see Thornton Hancock, and once or twice to the house of a Mrs. Lawrence, a type of Rome-haunting American whom Amory liked immediately.

Then one day came a letter from Monsignor, which appended an interesting P. S.:

“Do you know,” it ran, “that your third cousin, Clara Page,

widowed six months and very poor, is living in Philadelphia?

I don’t think you’ve ever met her, but I wish, as a favor to me,

you’d go to see her.  To my mind, she’s rather a remarkable woman,

and just about your age.”

Amory sighed and decided to go, as a favor....

CLARA

She was immemorial.... Amory wasn’t good enough for Clara, Clara of ripply golden hair, but then no man was. Her goodness was above the prosy morals of the husband-seeker, apart from the dull literature of female virtue.

Sorrow lay lightly around her, and when Amory found her in Philadelphia he thought her steely blue eyes held only happiness; a latent strength, a realism, was brought to its fullest development by the facts that she was compelled to face. She was alone in the world, with two small children, little money, and, worst of all, a host of friends. He saw her that winter in Philadelphia entertaining a houseful of men for an evening, when he knew she had not a servant in the house except the little colored girl guarding the babies overhead. He saw one of the greatest libertines in that city, a man who was habitually drunk and notorious at home and abroad, sitting opposite her for an evening, discussing girls’ boarding-schools with a sort of innocent excitement. What a twist Clara had to her mind! She could make fascinating and almost brilliant conversation out of the thinnest air that ever floated through a drawing-room.

The idea that the girl was poverty-stricken had appealed to Amory’s sense of situation. He arrived in Philadelphia expecting to be told that 921 Ark Street was in a miserable lane of hovels. He was even disappointed when it proved to be nothing of the sort. It was an old house that had been in her husband’s family for years. An elderly aunt, who objected to having it sold, had put ten years’ taxes with a lawyer and pranced off to Honolulu, leaving Clara to struggle with the heating-problem as best she could. So no wild-haired woman with a hungry baby at her breast and a sad Amelia-like look greeted him. Instead, Amory would have thought from his reception that she had not a care in the world.

A calm virility and a dreamy humor, marked contrasts to her level-headedness — into these moods she slipped sometimes as a refuge. She could do the most prosy things (though she was wise enough never to stultify herself with such “household arts” as knitting and embroidery), yet immediately afterward pick up a book and let her imagination rove as a formless cloud with the wind. Deepest of all in her personality was the golden radiance that she diffused around her. As an open fire in a dark room throws romance and pathos into the quiet faces at its edge, so she cast her lights and shadows around the rooms that held her, until she made of her prosy old uncle a man of quaint and meditative charm, metamorphosed the stray telegraph boy into a Puck-like creature of delightful originality. At first this quality of hers somehow irritated Amory. He considered his own uniqueness sufficient, and it rather embarrassed him when she tried to read new interests into him for the benefit of what other adorers were present. He felt as if a polite but insistent stage-manager were attempting to make him give a new interpretation of a part he had conned for years.

But Clara talking, Clara telling a slender tale of a hatpin and an inebriated man and herself.... People tried afterward to repeat her anecdotes but for the life of them they could make them sound like nothing whatever. They gave her a sort of innocent attention and the best smiles many of them had smiled for long; there were few tears in Clara, but people smiled misty-eyed at her.

Very occasionally Amory stayed for little half-hours after the rest of the court had gone, and they would have bread and jam and tea late in the afternoon or “maple-sugar lunches,” as she called them, at night.

“You are remarkable, aren’t you!” Amory was becoming trite from where he perched in the centre of the dining-room table one six o’clock.

“Not a bit,” she answered. She was searching out napkins in the sideboard. “I’m really most humdrum and commonplace. One of those people who have no interest in anything but their children.”

“Tell that to somebody else,” scoffed Amory. “You know you’re perfectly effulgent.” He asked her the one thing that he knew might embarrass her. It was the remark that the first bore made to Adam.

“Tell me about yourself.” And she gave the answer that Adam must have given.

“There’s nothing to tell.”

But eventually Adam probably told the bore all the things he thought about at night when the locusts sang in the sandy grass, and he must have remarked patronizingly how different he was from Eve, forgetting how different she was from him... at any rate, Clara told Amory much about herself that evening. She had had a harried life from sixteen on, and her education had stopped sharply with her leisure. Browsing in her library, Amory found a tattered gray book out of which fell a yellow sheet that he impudently opened. It was a poem that she had written at school about a gray convent wall on a gray day, and a girl with her cloak blown by the wind sitting atop of it and thinking about the many-colored world. As a rule such sentiment bored him, but this was done with so much simplicity and atmosphere, that it brought a picture of Clara to his mind, of Clara on such a cool, gray day with her keen blue eyes staring out, trying to see her tragedies come marching over the gardens outside. He envied that poem. How he would have loved to have come along and seen her on the wall and talked nonsense or romance to her, perched above him in the air. He began to be frightfully jealous of everything about Clara: of her past, of her babies, of the men and women who flocked to drink deep of her cool kindness and rest their tired minds as at an absorbing play.

“Nobody seems to bore you,” he objected.

“About half the world do,” she admitted, “but I think that’s a pretty good average, don’t you?” and she turned to find something in Browning that bore on the subject. She was the only person he ever met who could look up passages and quotations to show him in the middle of the conversation, and yet not be irritating to distraction. She did it constantly, with such a serious enthusiasm that he grew fond of watching her golden hair bent over a book, brow wrinkled ever so little at hunting her sentence.

Through early March he took to going to Philadelphia for week-ends. Almost always there was some one else there and she seemed not anxious to see him alone, for many occasions presented themselves when a word from her would have given him another delicious half-hour of adoration. But he fell gradually in love and began to speculate wildly on marriage. Though this design flowed through his brain even to his lips, still he knew afterward that the desire had not been deeply rooted. Once he dreamt that it had come true and woke up in a cold panic, for in his dream she had been a silly, flaxen Clara, with the gold gone out of her hair and platitudes falling insipidly from her changeling tongue. But she was the first fine woman he ever knew and one of the few good people who ever interested him. She made her goodness such an asset. Amory had decided that most good people either dragged theirs after them as a liability, or else distorted it to artificial geniality, and of course there were the ever-present prig and Pharisee — (but Amory never included them as being among the saved).

ST. CECILIA

“Over her gray and velvet dress,

Under her molten, beaten hair,

Color of rose in mock distress

Flushes and fades and makes her fair;

Fills the air from her to him

With light and languor and little sighs,

Just so subtly he scarcely knows...

Laughing lightning, color of rose.”

“Do you like me?”

“Of course I do,” said Clara seriously.

“Why?”

“Well, we have some qualities in common. Things that are spontaneous in each of us — or were originally.”

“You’re implying that I haven’t used myself very well?”

Clara hesitated.

“Well, I can’t judge. A man, of course, has to go through a lot more, and I’ve been sheltered.”

“Oh, don’t stall, please, Clara,” Amory interrupted; “but do talk about me a little, won’t you?”

“Surely, I’d adore to.” She didn’t smile.

“That’s sweet of you. First answer some questions. Am I painfully conceited?”

“Well — no, you have tremendous vanity, but it’ll amuse the people who notice its preponderance.”

“I see.”

“You’re really humble at heart. You sink to the third hell of depression when you think you’ve been slighted. In fact, you haven’t much self-respect.”

“Centre of target twice, Clara. How do you do it? You never let me say a word.”

“Of course not — I can never judge a man while he’s talking. But I’m not through; the reason you have so little real self-confidence, even though you gravely announce to the occasional philistine that you think you’re a genius, is that you’ve attributed all sorts of atrocious faults to yourself and are trying to live up to them. For instance, you’re always saying that you are a slave to high-balls.”

“But I am, potentially.”

“And you say you’re a weak character, that you’ve no will.”

“Not a bit of will — I’m a slave to my emotions, to my likes, to my hatred of boredom, to most of my desires — “

“You are not!” She brought one little fist down onto the other. “You’re a slave, a bound helpless slave to one thing in the world, your imagination.”

“You certainly interest me. If this isn’t boring you, go on.”

“I notice that when you want to stay over an extra day from college you go about it in a sure way. You never decide at first while the merits of going or staying are fairly clear in your mind. You let your imagination shinny on the side of your desires for a few hours, and then you decide. Naturally your imagination, after a little freedom, thinks up a million reasons why you should stay, so your decision when it comes isn’t true. It’s biassed.”

“Yes,” objected Amory, “but isn’t it lack of will-power to let my imagination shinny on the wrong side?”

“My dear boy, there’s your big mistake. This has nothing to do with will-power; that’s a crazy, useless word, anyway; you lack judgment — the judgment to decide at once when you know your imagination will play you false, given half a chance.”

“Well, I’ll be darned!” exclaimed Amory in surprise, “that’s the last thing I expected.”

Clara didn’t gloat. She changed the subject immediately. But she had started him thinking and he believed she was partly right. He felt like a factory-owner who after accusing a clerk of dishonesty finds that his own son, in the office, is changing the books once a week. His poor, mistreated will that he had been holding up to the scorn of himself and his friends, stood before him innocent, and his judgment walked off to prison with the unconfinable imp, imagination, dancing in mocking glee beside him. Clara’s was the only advice he ever asked without dictating the answer himself — except, perhaps, in his talks with Monsignor Darcy.

How he loved to do any sort of thing with Clara! Shopping with her was a rare, epicurean dream. In every store where she had ever traded she was whispered about as the beautiful Mrs. Page.

“I’ll bet she won’t stay single long.”

“Well, don’t scream it out. She ain’t lookin’ for no advice.”

“Ain’t she beautiful!”

(Enter a floor-walker — silence till he moves forward, smirking.)

“Society person, ain’t she?”

“Yeah, but poor now, I guess; so they say.”

“Gee! girls, ain’t she some kid!”

And Clara beamed on all alike. Amory believed that tradespeople gave her discounts, sometimes to her knowledge and sometimes without it. He knew she dressed very well, had always the best of everything in the house, and was inevitably waited upon by the head floor-walker at the very least.

Sometimes they would go to church together on Sunday and he would walk beside her and revel in her cheeks moist from the soft water in the new air. She was very devout, always had been, and God knows what heights she attained and what strength she drew down to herself when she knelt and bent her golden hair into the stained-glass light.

“St. Cecelia,” he cried aloud one day, quite involuntarily, and the people turned and peered, and the priest paused in his sermon and Clara and Amory turned to fiery red.

That was the last Sunday they had, for he spoiled it all that night. He couldn’t help it.

They were walking through the March twilight where it was as warm as June, and the joy of youth filled his soul so that he felt he must speak.

“I think,” he said and his voice trembled, “that if I lost faith in you I’d lose faith in God.”

She looked at him with such a startled face that he asked her the matter.

“Nothing,” she said slowly, “only this: five men have said that to me before, and it frightens me.”

“Oh, Clara, is that your fate!”

She did not answer.

“I suppose love to you is — “ he began.

She turned like a flash.

“I have never been in love.”

They walked along, and he realized slowly how much she had told him... never in love.... She seemed suddenly a daughter of light alone. His entity dropped out of her plane and he longed only to touch her dress with almost the realization that Joseph must have had of Mary’s eternal significance. But quite mechanically he heard himself saying:

“And I love you — any latent greatness that I’ve got is... oh, I can’t talk, but Clara, if I come back in two years in a position to marry you — “

She shook her head.

“No,” she said; “I’d never marry again. I’ve got my two children and I want myself for them. I like you — I like all clever men, you more than any — but you know me well enough to know that I’d never marry a clever man — “ She broke off suddenly.

“Amory.”

“What?”

“You’re not in love with me. You never wanted to marry me, did you?”

“It was the twilight,” he said wonderingly. “I didn’t feel as though I were speaking aloud. But I love you — or adore you — or worship you — “

“There you go — running through your catalogue of emotions in five seconds.”

He smiled unwillingly.

“Don’t make me out such a light-weight, Clara; you are depressing sometimes.”

“You’re not a light-weight, of all things,” she said intently, taking his arm and opening wide her eyes — he could see their kindliness in the fading dusk. “A light-weight is an eternal nay.”

“There’s so much spring in the air — there’s so much lazy sweetness in your heart.”

She dropped his arm.

“You’re all fine now, and I feel glorious. Give me a cigarette. You’ve never seen me smoke, have you? Well, I do, about once a month.”

And then that wonderful girl and Amory raced to the corner like two mad children gone wild with pale-blue twilight.

“I’m going to the country for to-morrow,” she announced, as she stood panting, safe beyond the flare of the corner lamp-post. “These days are too magnificent to miss, though perhaps I feel them more in the city.”

“Oh, Clara!” Amory said; “what a devil you could have been if the Lord had just bent your soul a little the other way!”

“Maybe,” she answered; “but I think not. I’m never really wild and never have been. That little outburst was pure spring.”

“And you are, too,” said he.

They were walking along now.

“No — you’re wrong again, how can a person of your own self-reputed brains be so constantly wrong about me? I’m the opposite of everything spring ever stood for. It’s unfortunate, if I happen to look like what pleased some soppy old Greek sculptor, but I assure you that if it weren’t for my face I’d be a quiet nun in the convent without” — then she broke into a run and her raised voice floated back to him as he followed — “my precious babies, which I must go back and see.”

She was the only girl he ever knew with whom he could understand how another man might be preferred. Often Amory met wives whom he had known as debutantes, and looking intently at them imagined that he found something in their faces which said:

“Oh, if I could only have gotten you!” Oh, the enormous conceit of the man!

But that night seemed a night of stars and singing and Clara’s bright soul still gleamed on the ways they had trod.

“Golden, golden is the air — “ he chanted to the little pools of water. ... “Golden is the air, golden notes from golden mandolins, golden frets of golden violins, fair, oh, wearily fair.... Skeins from braided basket, mortals may not hold; oh, what young extravagant God, who would know or ask it?... who could give such gold...”

AMORY IS RESENTFUL

Slowly and inevitably, yet with a sudden surge at the last, while Amory talked and dreamed, war rolled swiftly up the beach and washed the sands where Princeton played. Every night the gymnasium echoed as platoon after platoon swept over the floor and shuffled out the basket-ball markings. When Amory went to Washington the next week-end he caught some of the spirit of crisis which changed to repulsion in the Pullman car coming back, for the berths across from him were occupied by stinking aliens — Greeks, he guessed, or Russians. He thought how much easier patriotism had been to a homogeneous race, how much easier it would have been to fight as the Colonies fought, or as the Confederacy fought. And he did no sleeping that night, but listened to the aliens guffaw and snore while they filled the car with the heavy scent of latest America.

In Princeton every one bantered in public and told themselves privately that their deaths at least would be heroic. The literary students read Rupert Brooke passionately; the lounge-lizards worried over whether the government would permit the English-cut uniform for officers; a few of the hopelessly lazy wrote to the obscure branches of the War Department, seeking an easy commission and a soft berth.

Then, after a week, Amory saw Burne and knew at once that argument would be futile — Burne had come out as a pacifist. The socialist magazines, a great smattering of Tolstoi, and his own intense longing for a cause that would bring out whatever strength lay in him, had finally decided him to preach peace as a subjective ideal.

“When the German army entered Belgium,” he began, “if the inhabitants had gone peaceably about their business, the German army would have been disorganized in — “

“I know,” Amory interrupted, “I’ve heard it all. But I’m not going to talk propaganda with you. There’s a chance that you’re right — but even so we’re hundreds of years before the time when non-resistance can touch us as a reality.”

“But, Amory, listen — “

“Burne, we’d just argue — “

“Very well.”

“Just one thing — I don’t ask you to think of your family or friends, because I know they don’t count a picayune with you beside your sense of duty — but, Burne, how do you know that the magazines you read and the societies you join and these idealists you meet aren’t just plain German?”

“Some of them are, of course.”

“How do you know they aren’t all pro-German — just a lot of weak ones — with German-Jewish names.”

“That’s the chance, of course,” he said slowly. “How much or how little I’m taking this stand because of propaganda I’ve heard, I don’t know; naturally I think that it’s my most innermost conviction — it seems a path spread before me just now.”

Amory’s heart sank.

“But think of the cheapness of it — no one’s really going to martyr you for being a pacifist — it’s just going to throw you in with the worst — “

“I doubt it,” he interrupted.

“Well, it all smells of Bohemian New York to me.”

“I know what you mean, and that’s why I’m not sure I’ll agitate.”

“You’re one man, Burne — going to talk to people who won’t listen — with all God’s given you.”

“That’s what Stephen must have thought many years ago. But he preached his sermon and they killed him. He probably thought as he was dying what a waste it all was. But you see, I’ve always felt that Stephen’s death was the thing that occurred to Paul on the road to Damascus, and sent him to preach the word of Christ all over the world.”

“Go on.”

“That’s all — this is my particular duty. Even if right now I’m just a pawn — just sacrificed. God! Amory — you don’t think I like the Germans!”

“Well, I can’t say anything else — I get to the end of all the logic about non-resistance, and there, like an excluded middle, stands the huge spectre of man as he is and always will be. And this spectre stands right beside the one logical necessity of Tolstoi’s, and the other logical necessity of Nietzsche’s — “ Amory broke off suddenly. “When are you going?”

“I’m going next week.”

“I’ll see you, of course.”

As he walked away it seemed to Amory that the look in his face bore a great resemblance to that in Kerry’s when he had said good-by under Blair Arch two years before. Amory wondered unhappily why he could never go into anything with the primal honesty of those two.

“Burne’s a fanatic,” he said to Tom, “and he’s dead wrong and, I’m inclined to think, just an unconscious pawn in the hands of anarchistic publishers and German-paid rag wavers — but he haunts me — just leaving everything worth while — “

Burne left in a quietly dramatic manner a week later. He sold all his possessions and came down to the room to say good-by, with a battered old bicycle, on which he intended to ride to his home in Pennsylvania.

“Peter the Hermit bidding farewell to Cardinal Richelieu,” suggested Alec, who was lounging in the window-seat as Burne and Amory shook hands.

But Amory was not in a mood for that, and as he saw Burne’s long legs propel his ridiculous bicycle out of sight beyond Alexander Hall, he knew he was going to have a bad week. Not that he doubted the war — Germany stood for everything repugnant to him; for materialism and the direction of tremendous licentious force; it was just that Burne’s face stayed in his memory and he was sick of the hysteria he was beginning to hear.

“What on earth is the use of suddenly running down Goethe,” he declared to Alec and Tom. “Why write books to prove he started the war — or that that stupid, overestimated Schiller is a demon in disguise?”

“Have you ever read anything of theirs?” asked Tom shrewdly.

“No,” Amory admitted.

“Neither have I,” he said laughing.

“People will shout,” said Alec quietly, “but Goethe’s on his same old shelf in the library — to bore any one that wants to read him!”

Amory subsided, and the subject dropped.

“What are you going to do, Amory?”

“Infantry or aviation, I can’t make up my mind — I hate mechanics, but then of course aviation’s the thing for me — “

“I feel as Amory does,” said Tom. “Infantry or aviation — aviation sounds like the romantic side of the war, of course — like cavalry used to be, you know; but like Amory I don’t know a horse-power from a piston-rod.”

Somehow Amory’s dissatisfaction with his lack of enthusiasm culminated in an attempt to put the blame for the whole war on the ancestors of his generation... all the people who cheered for Germany in 1870.... All the materialists rampant, all the idolizers of German science and efficiency. So he sat one day in an English lecture and heard “Locksley Hall” quoted and fell into a brown study with contempt for Tennyson and all he stood for — for he took him as a representative of the Victorians.

Victorians, Victorians, who never learned to weep

Who sowed the bitter harvest that your children go to reap —

scribbled Amory in his note-book. The lecturer was saying something about Tennyson’s solidity and fifty heads were bent to take notes. Amory turned over to a fresh page and began scrawling again.

“They shuddered when they found what Mr. Darwin was about,

They shuddered when the waltz came in and Newman hurried out — “

But the waltz came in much earlier; he crossed that out.

“And entitled A Song in the Time of Order,” came the professor’s voice, droning far away. “Time of Order” — Good Lord! Everything crammed in the box and the Victorians sitting on the lid smiling serenely.... With Browning in his Italian villa crying bravely: “All’s for the best.” Amory scribbled again.

“You knelt up in the temple and he bent to hear you pray,

You thanked him for your ‘glorious gains’ — reproached him for

‘Cathay.’“

Why could he never get more than a couplet at a time? Now he needed something to rhyme with:

“You would keep Him straight with science, tho He had gone wrong

before...”

Well, anyway....

“You met your children in your home — ‘I’ve fixed it up!’ you cried,

Took your fifty years of Europe, and then virtuously — died.”

“That was to a great extent Tennyson’s idea,” came the lecturer’s voice. “Swinburne’s Song in the Time of Order might well have been Tennyson’s title. He idealized order against chaos, against waste.”

At last Amory had it. He turned over another page and scrawled vigorously for the twenty minutes that was left of the hour. Then he walked up to the desk and deposited a page torn out of his note-book.

“Here’s a poem to the Victorians, sir,” he said coldly.

The professor picked it up curiously while Amory backed rapidly through the door.

Here is what he had written:

“Songs in the time of order

You left for us to sing,

Proofs with excluded middles,

Answers to life in rhyme,

Keys of the prison warder

And ancient bells to ring,

Time was the end of riddles,

We were the end of time...

Here were domestic oceans

And a sky that we might reach,

Guns and a guarded border,

Gantlets — but not to fling,

Thousands of old emotions

And a platitude for each,

Songs in the time of order —

And tongues, that we might sing.”

THE END OF MANY THINGS

Early April slipped by in a haze — a haze of long evenings on the club veranda with the graphophone playing “Poor Butterfly” inside... for “Poor Butterfly” had been the song of that last year. The war seemed scarcely to touch them and it might have been one of the senior springs of the past, except for the drilling every other afternoon, yet Amory realized poignantly that this was the last spring under the old regime.

“This is the great protest against the superman,” said Amory.

“I suppose so,” Alec agreed.

“He’s absolutely irreconcilable with any Utopia. As long as he occurs, there’s trouble and all the latent evil that makes a crowd list and sway when he talks.”

“And of course all that he is is a gifted man without a moral sense.”

“That’s all. I think the worst thing to contemplate is this — it’s all happened before, how soon will it happen again? Fifty years after Waterloo Napoleon was as much a hero to English school children as Wellington. How do we know our grandchildren won’t idolize Von Hindenburg the same way?”

“What brings it about?”

“Time, damn it, and the historian. If we could only learn to look on evil as evil, whether it’s clothed in filth or monotony or magnificence.”

“God! Haven’t we raked the universe over the coals for four years?”

Then the night came that was to be the last. Tom and Amory, bound in the morning for different training-camps, paced the shadowy walks as usual and seemed still to see around them the faces of the men they knew.

“The grass is full of ghosts to-night.”

“The whole campus is alive with them.”

They paused by Little and watched the moon rise, to make silver of the slate roof of Dodd and blue the rustling trees.

“You know,” whispered Tom, “what we feel now is the sense of all the gorgeous youth that has rioted through here in two hundred years.”

A last burst of singing flooded up from Blair Arch — broken voices for some long parting.

“And what we leave here is more than this class; it’s the whole heritage of youth. We’re just one generation — we’re breaking all the links that seemed to bind us here to top-booted and high-stocked generations. We’ve walked arm and arm with Burr and Light-Horse Harry Lee through half these deep-blue nights.”

“That’s what they are,” Tom tangented off, “deep blue — a bit of color would spoil them, make them exotic. Spires, against a sky that’s a promise of dawn, and blue light on the slate roofs — it hurts... rather — “

“Good-by, Aaron Burr,” Amory called toward deserted Nassau Hall, “you and I knew strange corners of life.”

His voice echoed in the stillness.

“The torches are out,” whispered Tom. “Ah, Messalina, the long shadows are building minarets on the stadium — “

For an instant the voices of freshman year surged around them and then they looked at each other with faint tears in their eyes.

“Damn!”

“Damn!”

The last light fades and drifts across the land — the low, long land, the sunny land of spires; the ghosts of evening tune again their lyres and wander singing in a plaintive band down the long corridors of trees; pale fires echo the night from tower top to tower: Oh, sleep that dreams, and dream that never tires, press from the petals of the lotus flower something of this to keep, the essence of an hour.

No more to wait the twilight of the moon in this sequestered vale of star and spire, for one eternal morning of desire passes to time and earthy afternoon. Here, Heraclitus, did you find in fire and shifting things the prophecy you hurled down the dead years; this midnight my desire will see, shadowed among the embers, furled in flame, the splendor and the sadness of the world.

INTERLUDE

May, 1917-February, 1919

A letter dated January, 1918, written by Monsignor Darcy to Amory, who is a second lieutenant in the 171st Infantry, Port of Embarkation, CampMills, Long Island.

MY DEAR BOY:

All you need tell me of yourself is that you still are; for the rest I merely search back in a restive memory, a thermometer that records only fevers, and match you with what I was at your age. But men will chatter and you and I will still shout our futilities to each other across the stage until the last silly curtain falls plump! upon our bobbing heads. But you are starting the spluttering magic-lantern show of life with much the same array of slides as I had, so I need to write you if only to shriek the colossal stupidity of people....

This is the end of one thing: for better or worse you will never again be quite the Amory Blaine that I knew, never again will we meet as we have met, because your generation is growing hard, much harder than mine ever grew, nourished as they were on the stuff of the nineties.

Amory, lately I reread Aeschylus and there in the divine irony of the “Agamemnon” I find the only answer to this bitter age — all the world tumbled about our ears, and the closest parallel ages back in that hopeless resignation. There are times when I think of the men out there as Roman legionaries, miles from their corrupt city, stemming back the hordes... hordes a little more menacing, after all, than the corrupt city... another blind blow at the race, furies that we passed with ovations years ago, over whose corpses we bleated triumphantly all through the Victorian era....

And afterward an out-and-out materialistic world — and the Catholic Church. I wonder where you’ll fit in. Of one thing I’m sure — Celtic you’ll live and Celtic you’ll die; so if you don’t use heaven as a continual referendum for your ideas you’ll find earth a continual recall to your ambitions.

Amory, I’ve discovered suddenly that I’m an old man. Like all old men, I’ve had dreams sometimes and I’m going to tell you of them. I’ve enjoyed imagining that you were my son, that perhaps when I was young I went into a state of coma and begat you, and when I came to, had no recollection of it... it’s the paternal instinct, Amory — celibacy goes deeper than the flesh....

Sometimes I think that the explanation of our deep resemblance is some common ancestor, and I find that the only blood that the Darcys and the O’Haras have in common is that of the O’Donahues... Stephen was his name, I think....

When the lightning strikes one of us it strikes both: you had hardly arrived at the port of embarkation when I got my papers to start for Rome, and I am waiting every moment to be told where to take ship. Even before you get this letter I shall be on the ocean; then will come your turn. You went to war as a gentleman should, just as you went to school and college, because it was the thing to do. It’s better to leave the blustering and tremulo-heroism to the middle classes; they do it so much better.

Do you remember that week-end last March when you brought Burne Holiday from Princeton to see me? What a magnificent boy he is! It gave me a frightful shock afterward when you wrote that he thought me splendid; how could he be so deceived? Splendid is the one thing that neither you nor I are. We are many other things — we’re extraordinary, we’re clever, we could be said, I suppose, to be brilliant. We can attract people, we can make atmosphere, we can almost lose our Celtic souls in Celtic subtleties, we can almost always have our own way; but splendid — rather not!

I am going to Rome with a wonderful dossier and letters of introduction that cover every capital in Europe, and there will be “no small stir” when I get there. How I wish you were with me! This sounds like a rather cynical paragraph, not at all the sort of thing that a middle-aged clergyman should write to a youth about to depart for the war; the only excuse is that the middle-aged clergyman is talking to himself. There are deep things in us and you know what they are as well as I do. We have great faith, though yours at present is uncrystallized; we have a terrible honesty that all our sophistry cannot destroy and, above all, a childlike simplicity that keeps us from ever being really malicious.

I have written a keen for you which follows. I am sorry your cheeks are not up to the description I have written of them, but you will smoke and read all night —

At any rate here it is:

A Lament for a Foster Son, and He going to the War Against the King of Foreign.

“Ochone

He is gone from me the son of my mind

And he in his golden youth like Angus Oge

Angus of the bright birds

And his mind strong and subtle like the mind of Cuchulin on

Muirtheme.

Awirra sthrue

His brow is as white as the milk of the cows of Maeve

And his cheeks like the cherries of the tree

And it bending down to Mary and she feeding the Son of God.

Aveelia Vrone

His hair is like the golden collar of the Kings at Tara

And his eyes like the four gray seas of Erin.

And they swept with the mists of rain.

Mavrone go Gudyo

He to be in the joyful and red battle

Amongst the chieftains and they doing great deeds of valor

His life to go from him

It is the chords of my own soul would be loosed.

A Vich Deelish

My heart is in the heart of my son

And my life is in his life surely

A man can be twice young

In the life of his sons only.

Jia du Vaha Alanav

May the Son of God be above him and beneath him, before him and

behind him

May the King of the elements cast a mist over the eyes of the

King of Foreign,

May the Queen of the Graces lead him by the hand the way he can

go through the midst of his enemies and they not seeing him

May Patrick of the Gael and Collumb of the Churches and the five

thousand Saints of Erin be better than a shield to him

And he got into the fight.

Och Ochone.”

Amory — Amory — I feel, somehow, that this is all; one or both of us is not going to last out this war.... I’ve been trying to tell you how much this reincarnation of myself in you has meant in the last few years... curiously alike we are... curiously unlike. Good-by, dear boy, and God be with you. THAYER DARCY.

EMBARKING AT NIGHT

Amory moved forward on the deck until he found a stool under an electric light. He searched in his pocket for note-book and pencil and then began to write, slowly, laboriously:

“We leave to-night...

Silent, we filled the still, deserted street,

A column of dim gray,

And ghosts rose startled at the muffled beat

Along the moonless way;

The shadowy shipyards echoed to the feet

That turned from night and day.

And so we linger on the windless decks,

See on the spectre shore

Shades of a thousand days, poor gray-ribbed wrecks...

Oh, shall we then deplore

Those futile years!

See how the sea is white!

The clouds have broken and the heavens burn

To hollow highways, paved with gravelled light

The churning of the waves about the stern

Rises to one voluminous nocturne,

... We leave to-night.”

A letter from Amory, headed “Brest, March 11th, 1919,” to Lieutenant T. P. D’Invilliers, Camp Gordon, Ga.

DEAR BAUDELAIRE: —

We meet in Manhattan on the 30th of this very mo.; we then proceed to take a very sporty apartment, you and I and Alec, who is at me elbow as I write. I don’t know what I’m going to do but I have a vague dream of going into politics. Why is it that the pick of the young Englishmen from Oxford and Cambridge go into politics and in the U. S. A. we leave it to the muckers? — raised in the ward, educated in the assembly and sent to Congress, fat-paunched bundles of corruption, devoid of “both ideas and ideals” as the debaters used to say. Even forty years ago we had good men in politics, but we, we are brought up to pile up a million and “show what we are made of.” Sometimes I wish I’d been an Englishman; American life is so damned dumb and stupid and healthy.

Since poor Beatrice died I’ll probably have a little money, but very darn little. I can forgive mother almost everything except the fact that in a sudden burst of religiosity toward the end, she left half of what remained to be spent in stained-glass windows and seminary endowments. Mr. Barton, my lawyer, writes me that my thousands are mostly in street railways and that the said Street R.R. s are losing money because of the five-cent fares. Imagine a salary list that gives $350 a month to a man that can’t read and write! — yet I believe in it, even though I’ve seen what was once a sizable fortune melt away between speculation, extravagance, the democratic administration, and the income tax — modern, that’s me all over, Mabel.

At any rate we’ll have really knock-out rooms — you can get a job on some fashion magazine, and Alec can go into the Zinc Company or whatever it is that his people own — he’s looking over my shoulder and he says it’s a brass company, but I don’t think it matters much, do you? There’s probably as much corruption in zinc-made money as brass-made money. As for the well-known Amory, he would write immortal literature if he were sure enough about anything to risk telling any one else about it. There is no more dangerous gift to posterity than a few cleverly turned platitudes.

Tom, why don’t you become a Catholic? Of course to be a good one you’d have to give up those violent intrigues you used to tell me about, but you’d write better poetry if you were linked up to tall golden candlesticks and long, even chants, and even if the American priests are rather burgeois, as Beatrice used to say, still you need only go to the sporty churches, and I’ll introduce you to Monsignor Darcy who really is a wonder.

Kerry’s death was a blow, so was Jesse’s to a certain extent. And I have a great curiosity to know what queer corner of the world has swallowed Burne. Do you suppose he’s in prison under some false name? I confess that the war instead of making me orthodox, which is the correct reaction, has made me a passionate agnostic. The Catholic Church has had its wings clipped so often lately that its part was timidly negligible, and they haven’t any good writers any more. I’m sick of Chesterton.

I’ve only discovered one soldier who passed through the much-advertised spiritual crisis, like this fellow, Donald Hankey, and the one I knew was already studying for the ministry, so he was ripe for it. I honestly think that’s all pretty much rot, though it seemed to give sentimental comfort to those at home; and may make fathers and mothers appreciate their children. This crisis-inspired religion is rather valueless and fleeting at best. I think four men have discovered Paris to one that discovered God.

But us — you and me and Alec — oh, we’ll get a Jap butler and dress for dinner and have wine on the table and lead a contemplative, emotionless life until we decide to use machine-guns with the property owners — or throw bombs with the Bolshevik God! Tom, I hope something happens. I’m restless as the devil and have a horror of getting fat or falling in love and growing domestic.

The place at Lake Geneva is now for rent but when I land I’m going West to see Mr. Barton and get some details. Write me care of the Blackstone, Chicago.

S’ever, dear Boswell,

SAMUEL JOHNSON.

BOOK TWO — The Education of a Personage

CHAPTER 1. The Debutante

The time is February. The place is a large, dainty bedroom in the Connage house on Sixty-eighth Street, New York. A girl’s room: pink walls and curtains and a pink bedspread on a cream-colored bed. Pink and cream are the motifs of the room, but the only article of furniture in full view is a luxurious dressing-table with a glass top and a three-sided mirror. On the walls there is an expensive print of “Cherry Ripe,” a few polite dogs by Landseer, and the “King of the Black Isles,” by Maxfield Parrish.

Great disorder consisting of the following items: (1) seven or eight empty cardboard boxes, with tissue-paper tongues hanging panting from their mouths; (2) an assortment of street dresses mingled with their sisters of the evening, all upon the table, all evidently new; (3) a roll of tulle, which has lost its dignity and wound itself tortuously around everything in sight, and (4) upon the two small chairs, a collection of lingerie that beggars description. One would enjoy seeing the bill called forth by the finery displayed and one is possessed by a desire to see the princess for whose benefit — Look! There’s some one! Disappointment! This is only a maid hunting for something — she lifts a heap from a chair — Not there; another heap, the dressing-table, the chiffonier drawers. She brings to light several beautiful chemises and an amazing pajama but this does not satisfy her — she goes out.

An indistinguishable mumble from the next room.

Now, we are getting warm. This is Alec’s mother, Mrs. Connage, ample, dignified, rouged to the dowager point and quite worn out. Her lips move significantly as she looks for IT. Her search is less thorough than the maid’s but there is a touch of fury in it, that quite makes up for its sketchiness. She stumbles on the tulle and her “damn” is quite audible. She retires, empty-handed.

More chatter outside and a girl’s voice, a very spoiled voice, says: “Of all the stupid people — “

After a pause a third seeker enters, not she of the spoiled voice, but a younger edition. This is Cecelia Connage, sixteen, pretty, shrewd, and constitutionally good-humored. She is dressed for the evening in a gown the obvious simplicity of which probably bores her. She goes to the nearest pile, selects a small pink garment and holds it up appraisingly.

CECELIA: Pink?

ROSALIND: (Outside) Yes!

CECELIA: Very snappy?

ROSALIND: Yes!

CECELIA: I’ve got it!

(She sees herself in the mirror of the dressing-table and commences to shimmy enthusiastically.)

ROSALIND: (Outside) What are you doing — trying it on?

(CECELIA ceases and goes out carrying the garment at the right shoulder.

From the other door, enters ALEC CONNAGE. He looks around quickly and in a huge voice shouts: Mama! There is a chorus of protest from next door and encouraged he starts toward it, but is repelled by another chorus.)

ALEC: So that’s where you all are! Amory Blaine is here.

CECELIA: (Quickly) Take him down-stairs.

ALEC: Oh, he is down-stairs.

MRS. CONNAGE: Well, you can show him where his room is. Tell him I’m sorry that I can’t meet him now.

ALEC: He’s heard a lot about you all. I wish you’d hurry. Father’s telling him all about the war and he’s restless. He’s sort of temperamental.

(This last suffices to draw CECELIA into the room.)

CECELIA: (Seating herself high upon lingerie) How do you mean — temperamental? You used to say that about him in letters.

ALEC: Oh, he writes stuff.

CECELIA: Does he play the piano?

ALEC: Don’t think so.

CECELIA: (Speculatively) Drink?

ALEC: Yes — nothing queer about him.

CECELIA: Money?

ALEC: Good Lord — ask him, he used to have a lot, and he’s got some income now.

(MRS. CONNAGE appears.)

MRS. CONNAGE: Alec, of course we’re glad to have any friend of yours —

ALEC: You certainly ought to meet Amory.

MRS. CONNAGE: Of course, I want to. But I think it’s so childish of you to leave a perfectly good home to go and live with two other boys in some impossible apartment. I hope it isn’t in order that you can all drink as much as you want. (She pauses.) He’ll be a little neglected to-night. This is Rosalind’s week, you see. When a girl comes out, she needs all the attention.

ROSALIND: (Outside) Well, then, prove it by coming here and hooking me.

(MRS. CONNAGE goes.)

ALEC: Rosalind hasn’t changed a bit.

CECELIA: (In a lower tone) She’s awfully spoiled.

ALEC: She’ll meet her match to-night.

CECELIA: Who — Mr. Amory Blaine?

(ALEC nods.)

CECELIA: Well, Rosalind has still to meet the man she can’t outdistance. Honestly, Alec, she treats men terribly. She abuses them and cuts them and breaks dates with them and yawns in their faces — and they come back for more.

ALEC: They love it.

CECELIA: They hate it. She’s a — she’s a sort of vampire, I think — and she can make girls do what she wants usually — only she hates girls.

ALEC: Personality runs in our family.

CECELIA: (Resignedly) I guess it ran out before it got to me.

ALEC: Does Rosalind behave herself?

CECELIA: Not particularly well. Oh, she’s average — smokes sometimes, drinks punch, frequently kissed — Oh, yes — common knowledge — one of the effects of the war, you know.

(Emerges MRS. CONNAGE.)

MRS. CONNAGE: Rosalind’s almost finished so I can go down and meet your friend.

(ALEC and his mother go out.)

ROSALIND: (Outside) Oh, mother —

CECELIA: Mother’s gone down.

(And now ROSALIND enters. ROSALIND is — utterly ROSALIND. She is one of those girls who need never make the slightest effort to have men fall in love with them. Two types of men seldom do: dull men are usually afraid of her cleverness and intellectual men are usually afraid of her beauty. All others are hers by natural prerogative.

If ROSALIND could be spoiled the process would have been complete by this time, and as a matter of fact, her disposition is not all it should be; she wants what she wants when she wants it and she is prone to make every one around her pretty miserable when she doesn’t get it — but in the true sense she is not spoiled. Her fresh enthusiasm, her will to grow and learn, her endless faith in the inexhaustibility of romance, her courage and fundamental honesty — these things are not spoiled.

There are long periods when she cordially loathes her whole family. She is quite unprincipled; her philosophy is carpe diem for herself and laissez faire for others. She loves shocking stories: she has that coarse streak that usually goes with natures that are both fine and big. She wants people to like her, but if they do not it never worries her or changes her. She is by no means a model character.

The education of all beautiful women is the knowledge of men. ROSALIND had been disappointed in man after man as individuals, but she had great faith in man as a sex. Women she detested. They represented qualities that she felt and despised in herself — incipient meanness, conceit, cowardice, and petty dishonesty. She once told a roomful of her mother’s friends that the only excuse for women was the necessity for a disturbing element among men. She danced exceptionally well, drew cleverly but hastily, and had a startling facility with words, which she used only in love-letters.

But all criticism of ROSALIND ends in her beauty. There was that shade of glorious yellow hair, the desire to imitate which supports the dye industry. There was the eternal kissable mouth, small, slightly sensual, and utterly disturbing. There were gray eyes and an unimpeachable skin with two spots of vanishing color. She was slender and athletic, without underdevelopment, and it was a delight to watch her move about a room, walk along a street, swing a golf club, or turn a “cartwheel.”

A last qualification — her vivid, instant personality escaped that conscious, theatrical quality that AMORY had found in ISABELLE. MONSIGNOR DARCY would have been quite up a tree whether to call her a personality or a personage. She was perhaps the delicious, inexpressible, once-in-a-century blend.

On the night of her debut she is, for all her strange, stray wisdom, quite like a happy little girl. Her mother’s maid has just done her hair, but she has decided impatiently that she can do a better job herself. She is too nervous just now to stay in one place. To that we owe her presence in this littered room. She is going to speak. ISABELLE’S alto tones had been like a violin, but if you could hear ROSALIND, you would say her voice was musical as a waterfall.)

ROSALIND: Honestly, there are only two costumes in the world that I really enjoy being in — (Combing her hair at the dressing-table.) One’s a hoop skirt with pantaloons; the other’s a one-piece bathing-suit. I’m quite charming in both of them.

CECELIA: Glad you’re coming out?

ROSALIND: Yes; aren’t you?

CECELIA: (Cynically) You’re glad so you can get married and live on Long Island with the fast younger married set. You want life to be a chain of flirtation with a man for every link.

ROSALIND: Want it to be one! You mean I’ve found it one.

CECELIA: Ha!

ROSALIND: Cecelia, darling, you don’t know what a trial it is to be — like me. I’ve got to keep my face like steel in the street to keep men from winking at me. If I laugh hard from a front row in the theatre, the comedian plays to me for the rest of the evening. If I drop my voice, my eyes, my handkerchief at a dance, my partner calls me up on the ‘phone every day for a week.

CECELIA: It must be an awful strain.

ROSALIND: The unfortunate part is that the only men who interest me at all are the totally ineligible ones. Now — if I were poor I’d go on the stage.

CECELIA: Yes, you might as well get paid for the amount of acting you do.

ROSALIND: Sometimes when I’ve felt particularly radiant I’ve thought, why should this be wasted on one man?

CECELIA: Often when you’re particularly sulky, I’ve wondered why it should all be wasted on just one family. (Getting up.) I think I’ll go down and meet Mr. Amory Blaine. I like temperamental men.

ROSALIND: There aren’t any. Men don’t know how to be really angry or really happy — and the ones that do, go to pieces.

CECELIA: Well, I’m glad I don’t have all your worries. I’m engaged.

ROSALIND: (With a scornful smile) Engaged? Why, you little lunatic! If mother heard you talking like that she’d send you off to boarding-school, where you belong.

CECELIA: You won’t tell her, though, because I know things I could tell — and you’re too selfish!

ROSALIND: (A little annoyed) Run along, little girl! Who are you engaged to, the iceman? the man that keeps the candy-store?

CECELIA: Cheap wit — good-by, darling, I’ll see you later.

ROSALIND: Oh, be sure and do that — you’re such a help.

(Exit CECELIA. ROSALIND finished her hair and rises, humming. She goes up to the mirror and starts to dance in front of it on the soft carpet. She watches not her feet, but her eyes — never casually but always intently, even when she smiles. The door suddenly opens and then slams behind AMORY, very cool and handsome as usual. He melts into instant confusion.)

HE: Oh, I’m sorry. I thought —

SHE: (Smiling radiantly) Oh, you’re Amory Blaine, aren’t you?

HE: (Regarding her closely) And you’re Rosalind?

SHE: I’m going to call you Amory — oh, come in — it’s all right — mother’ll be right in — (under her breath) unfortunately.

HE: (Gazing around) This is sort of a new wrinkle for me.

SHE: This is No Man’s Land.

HE: This is where you — you — (pause)

SHE: Yes — all those things. (She crosses to the bureau.) See, here’s my rouge — eye pencils.

HE: I didn’t know you were that way.

SHE: What did you expect?

HE: I thought you’d be sort of — sort of — sexless, you know, swim and play golf.

SHE: Oh, I do — but not in business hours.

HE: Business?

SHE: Six to two — strictly.

HE: I’d like to have some stock in the corporation.

SHE: Oh, it’s not a corporation — it’s just “Rosalind, Unlimited.” Fifty-one shares, name, good-will, and everything goes at $25,000 a year.

HE: (Disapprovingly) Sort of a chilly proposition.

SHE: Well, Amory, you don’t mind — do you? When I meet a man that doesn’t bore me to death after two weeks, perhaps it’ll be different.

HE: Odd, you have the same point of view on men that I have on women.

SHE: I’m not really feminine, you know — in my mind.

HE: (Interested) Go on.

SHE: No, you — you go on — you’ve made me talk about myself. That’s against the rules.

HE: Rules?

SHE: My own rules — but you — Oh, Amory, I hear you’re brilliant. The family expects so much of you.

HE: How encouraging!

SHE: Alec said you’d taught him to think. Did you? I didn’t believe any one could.

HE: No. I’m really quite dull.

(He evidently doesn’t intend this to be taken seriously.)

SHE: Liar.

HE: I’m — I’m religious — I’m literary. I’ve — I’ve even written poems.

SHE: Vers libre — splendid! (She declaims.)

“The trees are green,

The birds are singing in the trees,

The girl sips her poison

The bird flies away the girl dies.”

HE: (Laughing) No, not that kind.

SHE: (Suddenly) I like you.

HE: Don’t.

SHE: Modest too —

HE: I’m afraid of you. I’m always afraid of a girl — until I’ve kissed her.

SHE: (Emphatically) My dear boy, the war is over.

HE: So I’ll always be afraid of you.

SHE: (Rather sadly) I suppose you will.

(A slight hesitation on both their parts.)

HE: (After due consideration) Listen. This is a frightful thing to ask.

SHE: (Knowing what’s coming) After five minutes.

HE: But will you — kiss me? Or are you afraid?

SHE: I’m never afraid — but your reasons are so poor.

HE: Rosalind, I really want to kiss you.

SHE: So do I.

(They kiss — definitely and thoroughly.)

HE: (After a breathless second) Well, is your curiosity satisfied?

SHE: Is yours?

HE: No, it’s only aroused.

(He looks it.)

SHE: (Dreamily) I’ve kissed dozens of men. I suppose I’ll kiss dozens more.

HE: (Abstractedly) Yes, I suppose you could — like that.

SHE: Most people like the way I kiss.

HE: (Remembering himself) Good Lord, yes. Kiss me once more, Rosalind.

SHE: No — my curiosity is generally satisfied at one.

HE: (Discouraged) Is that a rule?

SHE: I make rules to fit the cases.

HE: You and I are somewhat alike — except that I’m years older in experience.

SHE: How old are you?

HE: Almost twenty-three. You?

SHE: Nineteen — just.

HE: I suppose you’re the product of a fashionable school.

SHE: No — I’m fairly raw material. I was expelled from Spence — I’ve forgotten why.

HE: What’s your general trend?

SHE: Oh, I’m bright, quite selfish, emotional when aroused, fond of admiration —

HE: (Suddenly) I don’t want to fall in love with you —

SHE: (Raising her eyebrows) Nobody asked you to.

HE: (Continuing coldly) But I probably will. I love your mouth.

SHE: Hush! Please don’t fall in love with my mouth — hair, eyes, shoulders, slippers — but not my mouth. Everybody falls in love with my mouth.

HE: It’s quite beautiful.

SHE: It’s too small.

HE: No it isn’t — let’s see.

(He kisses her again with the same thoroughness.)

SHE: (Rather moved) Say something sweet.

HE: (Frightened) Lord help me.

SHE: (Drawing away) Well, don’t — if it’s so hard.

HE: Shall we pretend? So soon?

SHE: We haven’t the same standards of time as other people.

HE: Already it’s — other people.

SHE: Let’s pretend.

HE: No — I can’t — it’s sentiment.

SHE: You’re not sentimental?

HE: No, I’m romantic — a sentimental person thinks things will last — a romantic person hopes against hope that they won’t. Sentiment is emotional.

SHE: And you’re not? (With her eyes half-closed.) You probably flatter yourself that that’s a superior attitude.

HE: Well — Rosalind, Rosalind, don’t argue — kiss me again.

SHE: (Quite chilly now) No — I have no desire to kiss you.

HE: (Openly taken aback) You wanted to kiss me a minute ago.

SHE: This is now.

HE: I’d better go.

SHE: I suppose so.

(He goes toward the door.)

SHE: Oh!

(He turns.)

SHE: (Laughing) Score — Home Team: One hundred — Opponents: Zero.

(He starts back.)

SHE: (Quickly) Rain — no game.

(He goes out.)

(She goes quietly to the chiffonier, takes out a cigarette-case and hides it in the side drawer of a desk. Her mother enters, note-book in hand.)

MRS. CONNAGE: Good — I’ve been wanting to speak to you alone before we go down-stairs.

ROSALIND: Heavens! you frighten me!

MRS. CONNAGE: Rosalind, you’ve been a very expensive proposition.

ROSALIND: (Resignedly) Yes.

MRS. CONNAGE: And you know your father hasn’t what he once had.

ROSALIND: (Making a wry face) Oh, please don’t talk about money.

MRS. CONNAGE: You can’t do anything without it. This is our last year in this house — and unless things change Cecelia won’t have the advantages you’ve had.

ROSALIND: (Impatiently) Well — what is it?

MRS. CONNAGE: So I ask you to please mind me in several things I’ve put down in my note-book. The first one is: don’t disappear with young men. There may be a time when it’s valuable, but at present I want you on the dance-floor where I can find you. There are certain men I want to have you meet and I don’t like finding you in some corner of the conservatory exchanging silliness with any one — or listening to it.

ROSALIND: (Sarcastically) Yes, listening to it is better.

MRS. CONNAGE: And don’t waste a lot of time with the college set — little boys nineteen and twenty years old. I don’t mind a prom or a football game, but staying away from advantageous parties to eat in little cafes down-town with Tom, Dick, and Harry —

ROSALIND: (Offering her code, which is, in its way, quite as high as her mother’s) Mother, it’s done — you can’t run everything now the way you did in the early nineties.

MRS. CONNAGE: (Paying no attention) There are several bachelor friends of your father’s that I want you to meet to-night — youngish men.

ROSALIND: (Nodding wisely) About forty-five?

MRS. CONNAGE: (Sharply) Why not?

ROSALIND: Oh, quite all right — they know life and are so adorably tired looking (shakes her head) — but they will dance.

MRS. CONNAGE: I haven’t met Mr. Blaine — but I don’t think you’ll care for him. He doesn’t sound like a money-maker.

ROSALIND: Mother, I never think about money.

MRS. CONNAGE: You never keep it long enough to think about it.

ROSALIND: (Sighs) Yes, I suppose some day I’ll marry a ton of it — out of sheer boredom.

MRS. CONNAGE: (Referring to note-book) I had a wire from Hartford. Dawson Ryder is coming up. Now there’s a young man I like, and he’s floating in money. It seems to me that since you seem tired of Howard Gillespie you might give Mr. Ryder some encouragement. This is the third time he’s been up in a month.

ROSALIND: How did you know I was tired of Howard Gillespie?

MRS. CONNAGE: The poor boy looks so miserable every time he comes.

ROSALIND: That was one of those romantic, pre-battle affairs. They’re all wrong.

MRS. CONNAGE: (Her say said) At any rate, make us proud of you to-night.

ROSALIND: Don’t you think I’m beautiful?

MRS. CONNAGE: You know you are.

(From down-stairs is heard the moan of a violin being tuned, the roll of a drum. MRS. CONNAGE turns quickly to her daughter.)

MRS. CONNAGE: Come!

ROSALIND: One minute!

(Her mother leaves. ROSALIND goes to the glass where she gazes at herself with great satisfaction. She kisses her hand and touches her mirrored mouth with it. Then she turns out the lights and leaves the room. Silence for a moment. A few chords from the piano, the discreet patter of faint drums, the rustle of new silk, all blend on the staircase outside and drift in through the partly opened door. Bundled figures pass in the lighted hall. The laughter heard below becomes doubled and multiplied. Then some one comes in, closes the door, and switches on the lights. It is CECELIA. She goes to the chiffonier, looks in the drawers, hesitates — then to the desk whence she takes the cigarette-case and extracts one. She lights it and then, puffing and blowing, walks toward the mirror.)

CECELIA: (In tremendously sophisticated accents) Oh, yes, coming out is such a farce nowadays, you know. One really plays around so much before one is seventeen, that it’s positively anticlimax. (Shaking hands with a visionary middle-aged nobleman.) Yes, your grace — I b’lieve I’ve heard my sister speak of you. Have a puff — they’re very good. They’re — they’re Coronas. You don’t smoke? What a pity! The king doesn’t allow it, I suppose. Yes, I’ll dance.

(So she dances around the room to a tune from down-stairs, her arms outstretched to an imaginary partner, the cigarette waving in her hand.)

SEVERAL HOURS LATER

The corner of a den down-stairs, filled by a very comfortable leather lounge. A small light is on each side above, and in the middle, over the couch hangs a painting of a very old, very dignified gentleman, period 1860. Outside the music is heard in a fox-trot.

ROSALIND is seated on the lounge and on her left is HOWARD GILLESPIE, a vapid youth of about twenty-four. He is obviously very unhappy, and she is quite bored.

GILLESPIE: (Feebly) What do you mean I’ve changed. I feel the same toward you.

ROSALIND: But you don’t look the same to me.

GILLESPIE: Three weeks ago you used to say that you liked me because I was so blasé, so indifferent — I still am.

ROSALIND: But not about me. I used to like you because you had brown eyes and thin legs.

GILLESPIE: (Helplessly) They’re still thin and brown. You’re a vampire, that’s all.

ROSALIND: The only thing I know about vamping is what’s on the piano score. What confuses men is that I’m perfectly natural. I used to think you were never jealous. Now you follow me with your eyes wherever I go.

GILLESPIE: I love you.

ROSALIND: (Coldly) I know it.

GILLESPIE: And you haven’t kissed me for two weeks. I had an idea that after a girl was kissed she was — was — won.

ROSALIND: Those days are over. I have to be won all over again every time you see me.

GILLESPIE: Are you serious?

ROSALIND: About as usual. There used to be two kinds of kisses: First when girls were kissed and deserted; second, when they were engaged. Now there’s a third kind, where the man is kissed and deserted. If Mr. Jones of the nineties bragged he’d kissed a girl, every one knew he was through with her. If Mr. Jones of 1919 brags the same every one knows it’s because he can’t kiss her any more. Given a decent start any girl can beat a man nowadays.

GILLESPIE: Then why do you play with men?

ROSALIND: (Leaning forward confidentially) For that first moment, when he’s interested. There is a moment — Oh, just before the first kiss, a whispered word — something that makes it worth while.

GILLESPIE: And then?

ROSALIND: Then after that you make him talk about himself. Pretty soon he thinks of nothing but being alone with you — he sulks, he won’t fight, he doesn’t want to play — Victory!

(Enter DAWSON RYDER, twenty-six, handsome, wealthy, faithful to his own, a bore perhaps, but steady and sure of success.)

RYDER: I believe this is my dance, Rosalind.

ROSALIND: Well, Dawson, so you recognize me. Now I know I haven’t got too much paint on. Mr. Ryder, this is Mr. Gillespie.

(They shake hands and GILLESPIE leaves, tremendously downcast.)

RYDER: Your party is certainly a success.

ROSALIND: Is it — I haven’t seen it lately. I’m weary — Do you mind sitting out a minute?

RYDER: Mind — I’m delighted. You know I loathe this “rushing” idea. See a girl yesterday, to-day, to-morrow.

ROSALIND: Dawson!

RYDER: What?

ROSALIND: I wonder if you know you love me.

RYDER: (Startled) What — Oh — you know you’re remarkable!

ROSALIND: Because you know I’m an awful proposition. Any one who marries me will have his hands full. I’m mean — mighty mean.

RYDER: Oh, I wouldn’t say that.

ROSALIND: Oh, yes, I am — especially to the people nearest to me. (She rises.) Come, let’s go. I’ve changed my mind and I want to dance. Mother is probably having a fit.

(Exeunt. Enter ALEC and CECELIA.)

CECELIA: Just my luck to get my own brother for an intermission.

ALEC: (Gloomily) I’ll go if you want me to.

CECELIA: Good heavens, no — with whom would I begin the next dance? (Sighs.) There’s no color in a dance since the French officers went back.

ALEC: (Thoughtfully) I don’t want Amory to fall in love with Rosalind.

CECELIA: Why, I had an idea that that was just what you did want.

ALEC: I did, but since seeing these girls — I don’t know. I’m awfully attached to Amory. He’s sensitive and I don’t want him to break his heart over somebody who doesn’t care about him.

CECELIA: He’s very good looking.

ALEC: (Still thoughtfully) She won’t marry him, but a girl doesn’t have to marry a man to break his heart.

CECELIA: What does it? I wish I knew the secret.

ALEC: Why, you cold-blooded little kitty. It’s lucky for some that the Lord gave you a pug nose.

(Enter MRS. CONNAGE.)

MRS. CONNAGE: Where on earth is Rosalind?

ALEC: (Brilliantly) Of course you’ve come to the best people to find out. She’d naturally be with us.

MRS. CONNAGE: Her father has marshalled eight bachelor millionaires to meet her.

ALEC: You might form a squad and march through the halls.

MRS. CONNAGE: I’m perfectly serious — for all I know she may be at the Cocoanut Grove with some football player on the night of her debut. You look left and I’ll —

ALEC: (Flippantly) Hadn’t you better send the butler through the cellar?

MRS. CONNAGE: (Perfectly serious) Oh, you don’t think she’d be there?

CECELIA: He’s only joking, mother.

ALEC: Mother had a picture of her tapping a keg of beer with some high hurdler.

MRS. CONNAGE: Let’s look right away.

(They go out. ROSALIND comes in with GILLESPIE.)

GILLESPIE: Rosalind — Once more I ask you. Don’t you care a blessed thing about me?

(AMORY walks in briskly.)

AMORY: My dance.

ROSALIND: Mr. Gillespie, this is Mr. Blaine.

GILLESPIE: I’ve met Mr. Blaine. From Lake Geneva, aren’t you?

AMORY: Yes.

GILLESPIE: (Desperately) I’ve been there. It’s in the — the Middle West, isn’t it?

AMORY: (Spicily) Approximately. But I always felt that I’d rather be provincial hot-tamale than soup without seasoning.

GILLESPIE: What!

AMORY: Oh, no offense.

(GILLESPIE bows and leaves.)

ROSALIND: He’s too much people.

AMORY: I was in love with a people once.

ROSALIND: So?

AMORY: Oh, yes — her name was Isabelle — nothing at all to her except what I read into her.

ROSALIND: What happened?

AMORY: Finally I convinced her that she was smarter than I was — then she threw me over. Said I was critical and impractical, you know.

ROSALIND: What do you mean impractical?

AMORY: Oh — drive a car, but can’t change a tire.

ROSALIND: What are you going to do?

AMORY: Can’t say — run for President, write —

ROSALIND: Greenwich Village?

AMORY: Good heavens, no — I said write — not drink.

ROSALIND: I like business men. Clever men are usually so homely.

AMORY: I feel as if I’d known you for ages.

ROSALIND: Oh, are you going to commence the “pyramid” story?

AMORY: No — I was going to make it French. I was Louis XIV and you were one of my — my — (Changing his tone.) Suppose — we fell in love.

ROSALIND: I’ve suggested pretending.

AMORY: If we did it would be very big.

ROSALIND: Why?

AMORY: Because selfish people are in a way terribly capable of great loves.

ROSALIND: (Turning her lips up) Pretend.

(Very deliberately they kiss.)

AMORY: I can’t say sweet things. But you are beautiful.

ROSALIND: Not that.

AMORY: What then?

ROSALIND: (Sadly) Oh, nothing — only I want sentiment, real sentiment — and I never find it.

AMORY: I never find anything else in the world — and I loathe it.

ROSALIND: It’s so hard to find a male to gratify one’s artistic taste.

(Some one has opened a door and the music of a waltz surges into the room. ROSALIND rises.)

ROSALIND: Listen! they’re playing “Kiss Me Again.”

(He looks at her.)

AMORY: Well?

ROSALIND: Well?

AMORY: (Softly — the battle lost) I love you.

ROSALIND: I love you — now.

(They kiss.)

AMORY: Oh, God, what have I done?

ROSALIND: Nothing. Oh, don’t talk. Kiss me again.

AMORY: I don’t know why or how, but I love you — from the moment I saw you.

ROSALIND: Me too — I — I — oh, to-night’s to-night.

(Her brother strolls in, starts and then in a loud voice says: “Oh, excuse me,” and goes.)

ROSALIND: (Her lips scarcely stirring) Don’t let me go — I don’t care who knows what I do.

AMORY: Say it!

ROSALIND: I love you — now. (They part.) Oh — I am very youthful, thank God — and rather beautiful, thank God — and happy, thank God, thank God — (She pauses and then, in an odd burst of prophecy, adds) Poor Amory!

(He kisses her again.)

KISMET

Within two weeks Amory and Rosalind were deeply and passionately in love. The critical qualities which had spoiled for each of them a dozen romances were dulled by the great wave of emotion that washed over them.

“It may be an insane love-affair,” she told her anxious mother, “but it’s not inane.”

The wave swept Amory into an advertising agency early in March, where he alternated between astonishing bursts of rather exceptional work and wild dreams of becoming suddenly rich and touring Italy with Rosalind.

They were together constantly, for lunch, for dinner, and nearly every evening — always in a sort of breathless hush, as if they feared that any minute the spell would break and drop them out of this paradise of rose and flame. But the spell became a trance, seemed to increase from day to day; they began to talk of marrying in July — in June. All life was transmitted into terms of their love, all experience, all desires, all ambitions, were nullified — their senses of humor crawled into corners to sleep; their former love-affairs seemed faintly laughable and scarcely regretted juvenalia.

For the second time in his life Amory had had a complete bouleversement and was hurrying into line with his generation.

A LITTLE INTERLUDE

Amory wandered slowly up the avenue and thought of the night as inevitably his — the pageantry and carnival of rich dusk and dim streets ... it seemed that he had closed the book of fading harmonies at last and stepped into the sensuous vibrant walks of life. Everywhere these countless lights, this promise of a night of streets and singing — he moved in a half-dream through the crowd as if expecting to meet Rosalind hurrying toward him with eager feet from every corner.... How the unforgettable faces of dusk would blend to her, the myriad footsteps, a thousand overtures, would blend to her footsteps; and there would be more drunkenness than wine in the softness of her eyes on his. Even his dreams now were faint violins drifting like summer sounds upon the summer air.

The room was in darkness except for the faint glow of Tom’s cigarette where he lounged by the open window. As the door shut behind him, Amory stood a moment with his back against it.

“Hello, Benvenuto Blaine. How went the advertising business to-day?”

Amory sprawled on a couch.

“I loathed it as usual!” The momentary vision of the bustling agency was displaced quickly by another picture.

“My God! She’s wonderful!”

Tom sighed.

“I can’t tell you,” repeated Amory, “just how wonderful she is. I don’t want you to know. I don’t want any one to know.”

Another sigh came from the window — quite a resigned sigh.

“She’s life and hope and happiness, my whole world now.”

He felt the quiver of a tear on his eyelid.

“Oh, Golly, Tom!”

BITTER SWEET

“Sit like we do,” she whispered.

He sat in the big chair and held out his arms so that she could nestle inside them.

“I knew you’d come to-night,” she said softly, “like summer, just when I needed you most... darling... darling...”

His lips moved lazily over her face.

“You taste so good,” he sighed.

“How do you mean, lover?”

“Oh, just sweet, just sweet...” he held her closer.

“Amory,” she whispered, “when you’re ready for me I’ll marry you.”

“We won’t have much at first.”

“Don’t!” she cried. “It hurts when you reproach yourself for what you can’t give me. I’ve got your precious self — and that’s enough for me.”

“Tell me...”

“You know, don’t you? Oh, you know.”

“Yes, but I want to hear you say it.”

“I love you, Amory, with all my heart.”

“Always, will you?”

“All my life — Oh, Amory — “

“What?”

“I want to belong to you. I want your people to be my people. I want to have your babies.”

“But I haven’t any people.”

“Don’t laugh at me, Amory. Just kiss me.”

“I’ll do what you want,” he said.

“No, I’ll do what you want. We’re you — not me. Oh, you’re so much a part, so much all of me...”

He closed his eyes.

“I’m so happy that I’m frightened. Wouldn’t it be awful if this was — was the high point?...”

She looked at him dreamily.

“Beauty and love pass, I know.... Oh, there’s sadness, too. I suppose all great happiness is a little sad. Beauty means the scent of roses and then the death of roses — “

“Beauty means the agony of sacrifice and the end of agony....”

“And, Amory, we’re beautiful, I know. I’m sure God loves us — “

“He loves you. You’re his most precious possession.”

“I’m not his, I’m yours. Amory, I belong to you. For the first time I regret all the other kisses; now I know how much a kiss can mean.”

Then they would smoke and he would tell her about his day at the office — and where they might live. Sometimes, when he was particularly loquacious, she went to sleep in his arms, but he loved that Rosalind — all Rosalinds — as he had never in the world loved any one else. Intangibly fleeting, unrememberable hours.

AQUATIC INCIDENT

One day Amory and Howard Gillespie meeting by accident down-town took lunch together, and Amory heard a story that delighted him. Gillespie after several cocktails was in a talkative mood; he began by telling Amory that he was sure Rosalind was slightly eccentric.

He had gone with her on a swimming party up in WestchesterCounty, and some one mentioned that Annette Kellerman had been there one day on a visit and had dived from the top of a rickety, thirty-foot summer-house. Immediately Rosalind insisted that Howard should climb up with her to see what it looked like.

A minute later, as he sat and dangled his feet on the edge, a form shot by him; Rosalind, her arms spread in a beautiful swan dive, had sailed through the air into the clear water.

“Of course I had to go, after that — and I nearly killed myself. I thought I was pretty good to even try it. Nobody else in the party tried it. Well, afterward Rosalind had the nerve to ask me why I stooped over when I dove. ‘It didn’t make it any easier,’ she said, ‘it just took all the courage out of it.’ I ask you, what can a man do with a girl like that? Unnecessary, I call it.”

Gillespie failed to understand why Amory was smiling delightedly all through lunch. He thought perhaps he was one of these hollow optimists.

FIVE WEEKS LATER

Again the library of the Connage house. ROSALIND is alone, sitting on the lounge staring very moodily and unhappily at nothing. She has changed perceptibly — she is a trifle thinner for one thing; the light in her eyes is not so bright; she looks easily a year older.

Her mother comes in, muffled in an opera-cloak. She takes in ROSALIND with a nervous glance.

MRS. CONNAGE: Who is coming to-night?

(ROSALIND fails to hear her, at least takes no notice.)

MRS. CONNAGE: Alec is coming up to take me to this Barrie play, “Et tu, Brutus.” (She perceives that she is talking to herself.) Rosalind! I asked you who is coming to-night?

ROSALIND: (Starting) Oh — what — oh — Amory —

MRS. CONNAGE: (Sarcastically) You have so many admirers lately that I couldn’t imagine which one. (ROSALIND doesn’t answer.) Dawson Ryder is more patient than I thought he’d be. You haven’t given him an evening this week.

ROSALIND: (With a very weary expression that is quite new to her face.) Mother — please —

MRS. CONNAGE: Oh, I won’t interfere. You’ve already wasted over two months on a theoretical genius who hasn’t a penny to his name, but go ahead, waste your life on him. I won’t interfere.

ROSALIND: (As if repeating a tiresome lesson) You know he has a little income — and you know he’s earning thirty-five dollars a week in advertising —

MRS. CONNAGE: And it wouldn’t buy your clothes. (She pauses but ROSALIND makes no reply.) I have your best interests at heart when I tell you not to take a step you’ll spend your days regretting. It’s not as if your father could help you. Things have been hard for him lately and he’s an old man. You’d be dependent absolutely on a dreamer, a nice, well-born boy, but a dreamer — merely clever. (She implies that this quality in itself is rather vicious.)

ROSALIND: For heaven’s sake, mother —

(A maid appears, announces Mr. Blaine who follows immediately. AMORY’S friends have been telling him for ten days that he “looks like the wrath of God,” and he does. As a matter of fact he has not been able to eat a mouthful in the last thirty-six hours.)

AMORY: Good evening, Mrs. Connage.

MRS. CONNAGE: (Not unkindly) Good evening, Amory.

(AMORY and ROSALIND exchange glances — and ALEC comes in. ALEC’S attitude throughout has been neutral. He believes in his heart that the marriage would make AMORY mediocre and ROSALIND miserable, but he feels a great sympathy for both of them.)

ALEC: Hi, Amory!

AMORY: Hi, Alec! Tom said he’d meet you at the theatre.

ALEC: Yeah, just saw him. How’s the advertising to-day? Write some brilliant copy?

AMORY: Oh, it’s about the same. I got a raise — (Every one looks at him rather eagerly) — of two dollars a week. (General collapse.)

MRS. CONNAGE: Come, Alec, I hear the car.

(A good night, rather chilly in sections. After MRS. CONNAGE and ALEC go out there is a pause. ROSALIND still stares moodily at the fireplace. AMORY goes to her and puts his arm around her.)

AMORY: Darling girl.

(They kiss. Another pause and then she seizes his hand, covers it with kisses and holds it to her breast.)

ROSALIND: (Sadly) I love your hands, more than anything. I see them often when you’re away from me — so tired; I know every line of them. Dear hands!

(Their eyes meet for a second and then she begins to cry — a tearless sobbing.)

AMORY: Rosalind!

ROSALIND: Oh, we’re so darned pitiful!

AMORY: Rosalind!

ROSALIND: Oh, I want to die!

AMORY: Rosalind, another night of this and I’ll go to pieces. You’ve been this way four days now. You’ve got to be more encouraging or I can’t work or eat or sleep. (He looks around helplessly as if searching for new words to clothe an old, shopworn phrase.) We’ll have to make a start. I like having to make a start together. (His forced hopefulness fades as he sees her unresponsive.) What’s the matter? (He gets up suddenly and starts to pace the floor.) It’s Dawson Ryder, that’s what it is. He’s been working on your nerves. You’ve been with him every afternoon for a week. People come and tell me they’ve seen you together, and I have to smile and nod and pretend it hasn’t the slightest significance for me. And you won’t tell me anything as it develops.

ROSALIND: Amory, if you don’t sit down I’ll scream.

AMORY: (Sitting down suddenly beside her) Oh, Lord.

ROSALIND: (Taking his hand gently) You know I love you, don’t you?

AMORY: Yes.

ROSALIND: You know I’ll always love you —

AMORY: Don’t talk that way; you frighten me. It sounds as if we weren’t going to have each other. (She cries a little and rising from the couch goes to the armchair.) I’ve felt all afternoon that things were worse. I nearly went wild down at the office — couldn’t write a line. Tell me everything.

ROSALIND: There’s nothing to tell, I say. I’m just nervous.

AMORY: Rosalind, you’re playing with the idea of marrying Dawson Ryder.

ROSALIND: (After a pause) He’s been asking me to all day.

AMORY: Well, he’s got his nerve!

ROSALIND: (After another pause) I like him.

AMORY: Don’t say that. It hurts me.

ROSALIND: Don’t be a silly idiot. You know you’re the only man I’ve ever loved, ever will love.

AMORY: (Quickly) Rosalind, let’s get married — next week.

ROSALIND: We can’t.

AMORY: Why not?

ROSALIND: Oh, we can’t. I’d be your squaw — in some horrible place.

AMORY: We’ll have two hundred and seventy-five dollars a month all told.

ROSALIND: Darling, I don’t even do my own hair, usually.

AMORY: I’ll do it for you.

ROSALIND: (Between a laugh and a sob) Thanks.

AMORY: Rosalind, you can’t be thinking of marrying some one else. Tell me! You leave me in the dark. I can help you fight it out if you’ll only tell me.

ROSALIND: It’s just — us. We’re pitiful, that’s all. The very qualities I love you for are the ones that will always make you a failure.

AMORY: (Grimly) Go on.

ROSALIND: Oh — it is Dawson Ryder. He’s so reliable, I almost feel that he’d be a — a background.

AMORY: You don’t love him.

ROSALIND: I know, but I respect him, and he’s a good man and a strong one.

AMORY: (Grudgingly) Yes — he’s that.

ROSALIND: Well — here’s one little thing. There was a little poor boy we met in Rye Tuesday afternoon — and, oh, Dawson took him on his lap and talked to him and promised him an Indian suit — and next day he remembered and bought it — and, oh, it was so sweet and I couldn’t help thinking he’d be so nice to — to our children — take care of them — and I wouldn’t have to worry.

AMORY: (In despair) Rosalind! Rosalind!

ROSALIND: (With a faint roguishness) Don’t look so consciously suffering.

AMORY: What power we have of hurting each other!

ROSALIND: (Commencing to sob again) It’s been so perfect — you and I. So like a dream that I’d longed for and never thought I’d find. The first real unselfishness I’ve ever felt in my life. And I can’t see it fade out in a colorless atmosphere!

AMORY: It won’t — it won’t!

ROSALIND: I’d rather keep it as a beautiful memory — tucked away in my heart.

AMORY: Yes, women can do that — but not men. I’d remember always, not the beauty of it while it lasted, but just the bitterness, the long bitterness.

ROSALIND: Don’t!

AMORY: All the years never to see you, never to kiss you, just a gate shut and barred — you don’t dare be my wife.

ROSALIND: No — no — I’m taking the hardest course, the strongest course. Marrying you would be a failure and I never fail — if you don’t stop walking up and down I’ll scream!

(Again he sinks despairingly onto the lounge.)

AMORY: Come over here and kiss me.

ROSALIND: No.

AMORY: Don’t you want to kiss me?

ROSALIND: To-night I want you to love me calmly and coolly.

AMORY: The beginning of the end.

ROSALIND: (With a burst of insight) Amory, you’re young. I’m young. People excuse us now for our poses and vanities, for treating people like Sancho and yet getting away with it. They excuse us now. But you’ve got a lot of knocks coming to you —

AMORY: And you’re afraid to take them with me.

ROSALIND: No, not that. There was a poem I read somewhere — you’ll say Ella Wheeler Wilcox and laugh — but listen:

“For this is wisdom — to love and live,

To take what fate or the gods may give,

To ask no question, to make no prayer,

To kiss the lips and caress the hair,

Speed passion’s ebb as we greet its flow,

To have and to hold, and, in time — let go.”

AMORY: But we haven’t had.

ROSALIND: Amory, I’m yours — you know it. There have been times in the last month I’d have been completely yours if you’d said so. But I can’t marry you and ruin both our lives.

AMORY: We’ve got to take our chance for happiness.

ROSALIND: Dawson says I’d learn to love him.

(AMORY with his head sunk in his hands does not move. The life seems suddenly gone out of him.)

ROSALIND: Lover! Lover! I can’t do with you, and I can’t imagine life without you.

AMORY: Rosalind, we’re on each other’s nerves. It’s just that we’re both high-strung, and this week —

(His voice is curiously old. She crosses to him and taking his face in her hands, kisses him.)

ROSALIND: I can’t, Amory. I can’t be shut away from the trees and flowers, cooped up in a little flat, waiting for you. You’d hate me in a narrow atmosphere. I’d make you hate me.

(Again she is blinded by sudden uncontrolled tears.)

AMORY: Rosalind —

ROSALIND: Oh, darling, go — Don’t make it harder! I can’t stand it —

AMORY: (His face drawn, his voice strained) Do you know what you’re saying? Do you mean forever?

(There is a difference somehow in the quality of their suffering.)

ROSALIND: Can’t you see —

AMORY: I’m afraid I can’t if you love me. You’re afraid of taking two years’ knocks with me.

ROSALIND: I wouldn’t be the Rosalind you love.

AMORY: (A little hysterically) I can’t give you up! I can’t, that’s all! I’ve got to have you!

ROSALIND: (A hard note in her voice) You’re being a baby now.

AMORY: (Wildly) I don’t care! You’re spoiling our lives!

ROSALIND: I’m doing the wise thing, the only thing.

AMORY: Are you going to marry Dawson Ryder?

ROSALIND: Oh, don’t ask me. You know I’m old in some ways — in others — well, I’m just a little girl. I like sunshine and pretty things and cheerfulness — and I dread responsibility. I don’t want to think about pots and kitchens and brooms. I want to worry whether my legs will get slick and brown when I swim in the summer.

AMORY: And you love me.

ROSALIND: That’s just why it has to end. Drifting hurts too much. We can’t have any more scenes like this.

(She draws his ring from her finger and hands it to him. Their eyes blind again with tears.)

AMORY: (His lips against her wet cheek) Don’t! Keep it, please — oh, don’t break my heart!

(She presses the ring softly into his hand.)

ROSALIND: (Brokenly) You’d better go.

AMORY: Good-by —

(She looks at him once more, with infinite longing, infinite sadness.)

ROSALIND: Don’t ever forget me, Amory —

AMORY: Good-by —

(He goes to the door, fumbles for the knob, finds it — she sees him throw back his head — and he is gone. Gone — she half starts from the lounge and then sinks forward on her face into the pillows.)

ROSALIND: Oh, God, I want to die! (After a moment she rises and with her eyes closed feels her way to the door. Then she turns and looks once more at the room. Here they had sat and dreamed: that tray she had so often filled with matches for him; that shade that they had discreetly lowered one long Sunday afternoon. Misty-eyed she stands and remembers; she speaks aloud.) Oh, Amory, what have I done to you?

(And deep under the aching sadness that will pass in time, Rosalind feels that she has lost something, she knows not what, she knows not why.)

CHAPTER 2. Experiments in Convalescence

The Knickerbocker Bar, beamed upon by Maxfield Parrish’s jovial, colorful “Old King Cole,” was well crowded. Amory stopped in the entrance and looked at his wrist-watch; he wanted particularly to know the time, for something in his mind that catalogued and classified liked to chip things off cleanly. Later it would satisfy him in a vague way to be able to think “that thing ended at exactly twenty minutes after eight on Thursday, June 10, 1919.” This was allowing for the walk from her house — a walk concerning which he had afterward not the faintest recollection.

He was in rather grotesque condition: two days of worry and nervousness, of sleepless nights, of untouched meals, culminating in the emotional crisis and Rosalind’s abrupt decision — the strain of it had drugged the foreground of his mind into a merciful coma. As he fumbled clumsily with the olives at the free-lunch table, a man approached and spoke to him, and the olives dropped from his nervous hands.

“Well, Amory...”

It was some one he had known at Princeton; he had no idea of the name.

“Hello, old boy — “ he heard himself saying.

“Name’s Jim Wilson — you’ve forgotten.”

“Sure, you bet, Jim. I remember.”

“Going to reunion?”

“You know!” Simultaneously he realized that he was not going to reunion.

“Get overseas?”

Amory nodded, his eyes staring oddly. Stepping back to let some one pass, he knocked the dish of olives to a crash on the floor.

“Too bad,” he muttered. “Have a drink?”

Wilson, ponderously diplomatic, reached over and slapped him on the back.

“You’ve had plenty, old boy.”

Amory eyed him dumbly until Wilson grew embarrassed under the scrutiny.

“Plenty, hell!” said Amory finally. “I haven’t had a drink to-day.”

Wilson looked incredulous.

“Have a drink or not?” cried Amory rudely.

Together they sought the bar.

“Rye high.”

“I’ll just take a Bronx.”

Wilson had another; Amory had several more. They decided to sit down. At ten o’clock Wilson was displaced by Carling, class of ‘15. Amory, his head spinning gorgeously, layer upon layer of soft satisfaction setting over the bruised spots of his spirit, was discoursing volubly on the war.

“‘S a mental was’e,” he insisted with owl-like wisdom. “Two years my life spent inalleshual vacuity. Los’ idealism, got be physcal anmal,” he shook his fist expressively at Old King Cole, “got be Prussian ‘bout ev’thing, women ‘specially. Use’ be straight ‘bout women college. Now don’givadam.” He expressed his lack of principle by sweeping a seltzer bottle with a broad gesture to noisy extinction on the floor, but this did not interrupt his speech. “Seek pleasure where find it for to-morrow die. ‘At’s philos’phy for me now on.”

Carling yawned, but Amory, waxing brilliant, continued:

“Use’ wonder ‘bout things — people satisfied compromise, fif’y-fif’y att’tude on life. Now don’ wonder, don’ wonder — “ He became so emphatic in impressing on Carling the fact that he didn’t wonder that he lost the thread of his discourse and concluded by announcing to the bar at large that he was a “physcal anmal.”

“What are you celebrating, Amory?”

Amory leaned forward confidentially.

“Cel’brating blowmylife. Great moment blow my life. Can’t tell you ‘bout it — “

He heard Carling addressing a remark to the bartender:

“Give him a bromo-seltzer.”

Amory shook his head indignantly.

“None that stuff!”

“But listen, Amory, you’re making yourself sick. You’re white as a ghost.”

Amory considered the question. He tried to look at himself in the mirror but even by squinting up one eye could only see as far as the row of bottles behind the bar.

“Like som’n solid. We go get some — some salad.”

He settled his coat with an attempt at nonchalance, but letting go of the bar was too much for him, and he slumped against a chair.

“We’ll go over to Shanley’s,” suggested Carling, offering an elbow.

With this assistance Amory managed to get his legs in motion enough to propel him across Forty-second Street.

Shanley’s was very dim. He was conscious that he was talking in a loud voice, very succinctly and convincingly, he thought, about a desire to crush people under his heel. He consumed three club sandwiches, devouring each as though it were no larger than a chocolate-drop. Then Rosalind began popping into his mind again, and he found his lips forming her name over and over. Next he was sleepy, and he had a hazy, listless sense of people in dress suits, probably waiters, gathering around the table....

... He was in a room and Carling was saying something about a knot in his shoe-lace.

“Nemmine,” he managed to articulate drowsily. “Sleep in ‘em....”

STILL ALCOHOLIC

He awoke laughing and his eyes lazily roamed his surroundings, evidently a bedroom and bath in a good hotel. His head was whirring and picture after picture was forming and blurring and melting before his eyes, but beyond the desire to laugh he had no entirely conscious reaction. He reached for the ‘phone beside his bed.

“Hello — what hotel is this — ?

“Knickerbocker? All right, send up two rye high-balls — “

He lay for a moment and wondered idly whether they’d send up a bottle or just two of those little glass containers. Then, with an effort, he struggled out of bed and ambled into the bathroom.

When he emerged, rubbing himself lazily with a towel, he found the bar boy with the drinks and had a sudden desire to kid him. On reflection he decided that this would be undignified, so he waved him away.

As the new alcohol tumbled into his stomach and warmed him, the isolated pictures began slowly to form a cinema reel of the day before. Again he saw Rosalind curled weeping among the pillows, again he felt her tears against his cheek. Her words began ringing in his ears: “Don’t ever forget me, Amory — don’t ever forget me — “

“Hell!” he faltered aloud, and then he choked and collapsed on the bed in a shaken spasm of grief. After a minute he opened his eyes and regarded the ceiling.

“Damned fool!” he exclaimed in disgust, and with a voluminous sigh rose and approached the bottle. After another glass he gave way loosely to the luxury of tears. Purposely he called up into his mind little incidents of the vanished spring, phrased to himself emotions that would make him react even more strongly to sorrow.

“We were so happy,” he intoned dramatically, “so very happy.” Then he gave way again and knelt beside the bed, his head half-buried in the pillow.

“My own girl — my own — Oh — “

He clinched his teeth so that the tears streamed in a flood from his eyes.

“Oh... my baby girl, all I had, all I wanted!... Oh, my girl, come back, come back! I need you... need you... we’re so pitiful ... just misery we brought each other.... She’ll be shut away from me.... I can’t see her; I can’t be her friend. It’s got to be that way — it’s got to be — “

And then again:

“We’ve been so happy, so very happy....”

He rose to his feet and threw himself on the bed in an ecstasy of sentiment, and then lay exhausted while he realized slowly that he had been very drunk the night before, and that his head was spinning again wildly. He laughed, rose, and crossed again to Lethe....

At noon he ran into a crowd in the Biltmore bar, and the riot began again. He had a vague recollection afterward of discussing French poetry with a British officer who was introduced to him as “Captain Corn, of his Majesty’s Foot,” and he remembered attempting to recite “Clair de Lune” at luncheon; then he slept in a big, soft chair until almost five o’clock when another crowd found and woke him; there followed an alcoholic dressing of several temperaments for the ordeal of dinner. They selected theatre tickets at Tyson’s for a play that had a four-drink programme — a play with two monotonous voices, with turbid, gloomy scenes, and lighting effects that were hard to follow when his eyes behaved so amazingly. He imagined afterward that it must have been “The Jest.”...

... Then the Cocoanut Grove, where Amory slept again on a little balcony outside. Out in Shanley’s, Yonkers, he became almost logical, and by a careful control of the number of high-balls he drank, grew quite lucid and garrulous. He found that the party consisted of five men, two of whom he knew slightly; he became righteous about paying his share of the expense and insisted in a loud voice on arranging everything then and there to the amusement of the tables around him....

Some one mentioned that a famous cabaret star was at the next table, so Amory rose and, approaching gallantly, introduced himself... this involved him in an argument, first with her escort and then with the headwaiter — Amory’s attitude being a lofty and exaggerated courtesy... he consented, after being confronted with irrefutable logic, to being led back to his own table.

“Decided to commit suicide,” he announced suddenly.

“When? Next year?”

“Now. To-morrow morning. Going to take a room at the Commodore, get into a hot bath and open a vein.”

“He’s getting morbid!”

“You need another rye, old boy!”

“We’ll all talk it over to-morrow.”

But Amory was not to be dissuaded, from argument at least.

“Did you ever get that way?” he demanded confidentially fortaccio.

“Sure!”

“Often?”

“My chronic state.”

This provoked discussion. One man said that he got so depressed sometimes that he seriously considered it. Another agreed that there was nothing to live for. “Captain Corn,” who had somehow rejoined the party, said that in his opinion it was when one’s health was bad that one felt that way most. Amory’s suggestion was that they should each order a Bronx, mix broken glass in it, and drink it off. To his relief no one applauded the idea, so having finished his high-ball, he balanced his chin in his hand and his elbow on the table — a most delicate, scarcely noticeable sleeping position, he assured himself — and went into a deep stupor....

He was awakened by a woman clinging to him, a pretty woman, with brown, disarranged hair and dark blue eyes.

“Take me home!” she cried.

“Hello!” said Amory, blinking.

“I like you,” she announced tenderly.

“I like you too.”

He noticed that there was a noisy man in the background and that one of his party was arguing with him.

“Fella I was with’s a damn fool,” confided the blue-eyed woman. “I hate him. I want to go home with you.”

“You drunk?” queried Amory with intense wisdom.

She nodded coyly.

“Go home with him,” he advised gravely. “He brought you.”

At this point the noisy man in the background broke away from his detainers and approached.

“Say!” he said fiercely. “I brought this girl out here and you’re butting in!”

Amory regarded him coldly, while the girl clung to him closer.

“You let go that girl!” cried the noisy man.

Amory tried to make his eyes threatening.

“You go to hell!” he directed finally, and turned his attention to the girl.

“Love first sight,” he suggested.

“I love you,” she breathed and nestled close to him. She did have beautiful eyes.

Some one leaned over and spoke in Amory’s ear.

“That’s just Margaret Diamond. She’s drunk and this fellow here brought her. Better let her go.”

“Let him take care of her, then!” shouted Amory furiously. “I’m no W. Y. C. A. worker, am I? — am I?”

“Let her go!”

“It’s her hanging on, damn it! Let her hang!”

The crowd around the table thickened. For an instant a brawl threatened, but a sleek waiter bent back Margaret Diamond’s fingers until she released her hold on Amory, whereupon she slapped the waiter furiously in the face and flung her arms about her raging original escort.

“Oh, Lord!” cried Amory.

“Let’s go!”

“Come on, the taxis are getting scarce!”

“Check, waiter.”

“C’mon, Amory. Your romance is over.”

Amory laughed.

“You don’t know how true you spoke. No idea. ‘At’s the whole trouble.”

AMORY ON THE LABOR QUESTION

Two mornings later he knocked at the president’s door at Bascome and Barlow’s advertising agency.

“Come in!”

Amory entered unsteadily.

“‘Morning, Mr. Barlow.”

Mr. Barlow brought his glasses to the inspection and set his mouth slightly ajar that he might better listen.

“Well, Mr. Blaine. We haven’t seen you for several days.”

“No,” said Amory. “I’m quitting.”

“Well — well — this is — “

“I don’t like it here.”

“I’m sorry. I thought our relations had been quite — ah — pleasant. You seemed to be a hard worker — a little inclined perhaps to write fancy copy — “

“I just got tired of it,” interrupted Amory rudely. “It didn’t matter a damn to me whether Harebell’s flour was any better than any one else’s. In fact, I never ate any of it. So I got tired of telling people about it — oh, I know I’ve been drinking — “

Mr. Barlow’s face steeled by several ingots of expression.

“You asked for a position — “

Amory waved him to silence.

“And I think I was rottenly underpaid. Thirty-five dollars a week — less than a good carpenter.”

“You had just started. You’d never worked before,” said Mr. Barlow coolly.

“But it took about ten thousand dollars to educate me where I could write your darned stuff for you. Anyway, as far as length of service goes, you’ve got stenographers here you’ve paid fifteen a week for five years.”

“I’m not going to argue with you, sir,” said Mr. Barlow rising.

“Neither am I. I just wanted to tell you I’m quitting.”

They stood for a moment looking at each other impassively and then Amory turned and left the office.

A LITTLE LULL

Four days after that he returned at last to the apartment. Tom was engaged on a book review for The New Democracy on the staff of which he was employed. They regarded each other for a moment in silence.

“Well?”

“Well?”

“Good Lord, Amory, where’d you get the black eye — and the jaw?”

Amory laughed.

“That’s a mere nothing.”

He peeled off his coat and bared his shoulders.

“Look here!”

Tom emitted a low whistle.

“What hit you?”

Amory laughed again.

“Oh, a lot of people. I got beaten up. Fact.” He slowly replaced his shirt. “It was bound to come sooner or later and I wouldn’t have missed it for anything.”

“Who was it?”

“Well, there were some waiters and a couple of sailors and a few stray pedestrians, I guess. It’s the strangest feeling. You ought to get beaten up just for the experience of it. You fall down after a while and everybody sort of slashes in at you before you hit the ground — then they kick you.”

Tom lighted a cigarette.

“I spent a day chasing you all over town, Amory. But you always kept a little ahead of me. I’d say you’ve been on some party.”

Amory tumbled into a chair and asked for a cigarette.

“You sober now?” asked Tom quizzically.

“Pretty sober. Why?”

“Well, Alec has left. His family had been after him to go home and live, so he — “

A spasm of pain shook Amory.

“Too bad.”

“Yes, it is too bad. We’ll have to get some one else if we’re going to stay here. The rent’s going up.”

“Sure. Get anybody. I’ll leave it to you, Tom.”

Amory walked into his bedroom. The first thing that met his glance was a photograph of Rosalind that he had intended to have framed, propped up against a mirror on his dresser. He looked at it unmoved. After the vivid mental pictures of her that were his portion at present, the portrait was curiously unreal. He went back into the study.

“Got a cardboard box?”

“No,” answered Tom, puzzled. “Why should I have? Oh, yes — there may be one in Alec’s room.”

Eventually Amory found what he was looking for and, returning to his dresser, opened a drawer full of letters, notes, part of a chain, two little handkerchiefs, and some snap-shots. As he transferred them carefully to the box his mind wandered to some place in a book where the hero, after preserving for a year a cake of his lost love’s soap, finally washed his hands with it. He laughed and began to hum “After you’ve gone” ... ceased abruptly...

The string broke twice, and then he managed to secure it, dropped the package into the bottom of his trunk, and having slammed the lid returned to the study.

“Going out?” Tom’s voice held an undertone of anxiety.

“Uh-huh.”

“Where?”

“Couldn’t say, old keed.”

“Let’s have dinner together.”

“Sorry. I told Sukey Brett I’d eat with him.”

“Oh.”

“By-by.”

Amory crossed the street and had a high-ball; then he walked to Washington Square and found a top seat on a bus. He disembarked at Forty-third Street and strolled to the Biltmore bar.

“Hi, Amory!”

“What’ll you have?”

“Yo-ho! Waiter!”

TEMPERATURE NORMAL

The advent of prohibition with the “thirsty-first” put a sudden stop to the submerging of Amory’s sorrows, and when he awoke one morning to find that the old bar-to-bar days were over, he had neither remorse for the past three weeks nor regret that their repetition was impossible. He had taken the most violent, if the weakest, method to shield himself from the stabs of memory, and while it was not a course he would have prescribed for others, he found in the end that it had done its business: he was over the first flush of pain.

Don’t misunderstand! Amory had loved Rosalind as he would never love another living person. She had taken the first flush of his youth and brought from his unplumbed depths tenderness that had surprised him, gentleness and unselfishness that he had never given to another creature. He had later love-affairs, but of a different sort: in those he went back to that, perhaps, more typical frame of mind, in which the girl became the mirror of a mood in him. Rosalind had drawn out what was more than passionate admiration; he had a deep, undying affection for Rosalind.

But there had been, near the end, so much dramatic tragedy, culminating in the arabesque nightmare of his three weeks’ spree, that he was emotionally worn out. The people and surroundings that he remembered as being cool or delicately artificial, seemed to promise him a refuge. He wrote a cynical story which featured his father’s funeral and despatched it to a magazine, receiving in return a check for sixty dollars and a request for more of the same tone. This tickled his vanity, but inspired him to no further effort.

He read enormously. He was puzzled and depressed by “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”; intensely interested by “Joan and Peter” and “The Undying Fire,” and rather surprised by his discovery through a critic named Mencken of several excellent American novels: “Vandover and the Brute,” “The Damnation of Theron Ware,” and “Jennie Gerhardt.” Mackenzie, Chesterton, Galsworthy, Bennett, had sunk in his appreciation from sagacious, life-saturated geniuses to merely diverting contemporaries. Shaw’s aloof clarity and brilliant consistency and the gloriously intoxicated efforts of H. G. Wells to fit the key of romantic symmetry into the elusive lock of truth, alone won his rapt attention.

He wanted to see Monsignor Darcy, to whom he had written when he landed, but he had not heard from him; besides he knew that a visit to Monsignor would entail the story of Rosalind, and the thought of repeating it turned him cold with horror.

In his search for cool people he remembered Mrs. Lawrence, a very intelligent, very dignified lady, a convert to the church, and a great devotee of Monsignor’s.

He called her on the ‘phone one day. Yes, she remembered him perfectly; no, Monsignor wasn’t in town, was in Boston she thought; he’d promised to come to dinner when he returned. Couldn’t Amory take luncheon with her?

“I thought I’d better catch up, Mrs. Lawrence,” he said rather ambiguously when he arrived.

“Monsignor was here just last week,” said Mrs. Lawrence regretfully. “He was very anxious to see you, but he’d left your address at home.”

“Did he think I’d plunged into Bolshevism?” asked Amory, interested.

“Oh, he’s having a frightful time.”

“Why?”

“About the IrishRepublic. He thinks it lacks dignity.”

“So?”

“He went to Boston when the Irish President arrived and he was greatly distressed because the receiving committee, when they rode in an automobile, would put their arms around the President.”

“I don’t blame him.”

“Well, what impressed you more than anything while you were in the army? You look a great deal older.”

“That’s from another, more disastrous battle,” he answered, smiling in spite of himself. “But the army — let me see — well, I discovered that physical courage depends to a great extent on the physical shape a man is in. I found that I was as brave as the next man — it used to worry me before.”

“What else?”

“Well, the idea that men can stand anything if they get used to it, and the fact that I got a high mark in the psychological examination.”

Mrs. Lawrence laughed. Amory was finding it a great relief to be in this cool house on Riverside Drive, away from more condensed New York and the sense of people expelling great quantities of breath into a little space. Mrs. Lawrence reminded him vaguely of Beatrice, not in temperament, but in her perfect grace and dignity. The house, its furnishings, the manner in which dinner was served, were in immense contrast to what he had met in the great places on Long Island, where the servants were so obtrusive that they had positively to be bumped out of the way, or even in the houses of more conservative “Union Club” families. He wondered if this air of symmetrical restraint, this grace, which he felt was continental, was distilled through Mrs. Lawrence’s New England ancestry or acquired in long residence in Italy and Spain.

Two glasses of sauterne at luncheon loosened his tongue, and he talked, with what he felt was something of his old charm, of religion and literature and the menacing phenomena of the social order. Mrs. Lawrence was ostensibly pleased with him, and her interest was especially in his mind; he wanted people to like his mind again — after a while it might be such a nice place in which to live.

“Monsignor Darcy still thinks that you’re his reincarnation, that your faith will eventually clarify.”

“Perhaps,” he assented. “I’m rather pagan at present. It’s just that religion doesn’t seem to have the slightest bearing on life at my age.”

When he left her house he walked down Riverside Drive with a feeling of satisfaction. It was amusing to discuss again such subjects as this young poet, Stephen Vincent Benet, or the IrishRepublic. Between the rancid accusations of Edward Carson and Justice Cohalan he had completely tired of the Irish question; yet there had been a time when his own Celtic traits were pillars of his personal philosophy.

There seemed suddenly to be much left in life, if only this revival of old interests did not mean that he was backing away from it again — backing away from life itself.

RESTLESSNESS

“I’m tres old and tres bored, Tom,” said Amory one day, stretching himself at ease in the comfortable window-seat. He always felt most natural in a recumbent position.

“You used to be entertaining before you started to write,” he continued. “Now you save any idea that you think would do to print.”

Existence had settled back to an ambitionless normality. They had decided that with economy they could still afford the apartment, which Tom, with the domesticity of an elderly cat, had grown fond of. The old English hunting prints on the wall were Tom’s, and the large tapestry by courtesy, a relic of decadent days in college, and the great profusion of orphaned candlesticks and the carved Louis XV chair in which no one could sit more than a minute without acute spinal disorders — Tom claimed that this was because one was sitting in the lap of Montespan’s wraith — at any rate, it was Tom’s furniture that decided them to stay.

They went out very little: to an occasional play, or to dinner at the Ritz or the Princeton Club. With prohibition the great rendezvous had received their death wounds; no longer could one wander to the Biltmore bar at twelve or five and find congenial spirits, and both Tom and Amory had outgrown the passion for dancing with mid-Western or New Jersey debbies at the Club-de-Vingt (surnamed the “Club de Gink”) or the Plaza Rose Room — besides even that required several cocktails “to come down to the intellectual level of the women present,” as Amory had once put it to a horrified matron.

Amory had lately received several alarming letters from Mr. Barton — the Lake Geneva house was too large to be easily rented; the best rent obtainable at present would serve this year to little more than pay for the taxes and necessary improvements; in fact, the lawyer suggested that the whole property was simply a white elephant on Amory’s hands. Nevertheless, even though it might not yield a cent for the next three years, Amory decided with a vague sentimentality that for the present, at any rate, he would not sell the house.

This particular day on which he announced his ennui to Tom had been quite typical. He had risen at noon, lunched with Mrs. Lawrence, and then ridden abstractedly homeward atop one of his beloved buses.

“Why shouldn’t you be bored,” yawned Tom. “Isn’t that the conventional frame of mind for the young man of your age and condition?”

“Yes,” said Amory speculatively, “but I’m more than bored; I am restless.”

“Love and war did for you.”

“Well,” Amory considered, “I’m not sure that the war itself had any great effect on either you or me — but it certainly ruined the old backgrounds, sort of killed individualism out of our generation.”

Tom looked up in surprise.

“Yes it did,” insisted Amory. “I’m not sure it didn’t kill it out of the whole world. Oh, Lord, what a pleasure it used to be to dream I might be a really great dictator or writer or religious or political leader — and now even a Leonardo da Vinci or Lorenzo de Medici couldn’t be a real old-fashioned bolt in the world. Life is too huge and complex. The world is so overgrown that it can’t lift its own fingers, and I was planning to be such an important finger — “

“I don’t agree with you,” Tom interrupted. “There never were men placed in such egotistic positions since — oh, since the French Revolution.”

Amory disagreed violently.

“You’re mistaking this period when every nut is an individualist for a period of individualism. Wilson has only been powerful when he has represented; he’s had to compromise over and over again. Just as soon as Trotsky and Lenin take a definite, consistent stand they’ll become merely two-minute figures like Kerensky. Even Foch hasn’t half the significance of Stonewall Jackson. War used to be the most individualistic pursuit of man, and yet the popular heroes of the war had neither authority nor responsibility: Guynemer and Sergeant York. How could a schoolboy make a hero of Pershing? A big man has no time really to do anything but just sit and be big.”

“Then you don’t think there will be any more permanent world heroes?”

“Yes — in history — not in life. Carlyle would have difficulty getting material for a new chapter on ‘The Hero as a Big Man.’“

“Go on. I’m a good listener to-day.”

“People try so hard to believe in leaders now, pitifully hard. But we no sooner get a popular reformer or politician or soldier or writer or philosopher — a Roosevelt, a Tolstoi, a Wood, a Shaw, a Nietzsche, than the cross-currents of criticism wash him away. My Lord, no man can stand prominence these days. It’s the surest path to obscurity. People get sick of hearing the same name over and over.”

“Then you blame it on the press?”

“Absolutely. Look at you; you’re on The New Democracy, considered the most brilliant weekly in the country, read by the men who do things and all that. What’s your business? Why, to be as clever, as interesting, and as brilliantly cynical as possible about every man, doctrine, book, or policy that is assigned you to deal with. The more strong lights, the more spiritual scandal you can throw on the matter, the more money they pay you, the more the people buy the issue. You, Tom d’Invilliers, a blighted Shelley, changing, shifting, clever, unscrupulous, represent the critical consciousness of the race — Oh, don’t protest, I know the stuff. I used to write book reviews in college; I considered it rare sport to refer to the latest honest, conscientious effort to propound a theory or a remedy as a ‘welcome addition to our light summer reading.’ Come on now, admit it.”

Tom laughed, and Amory continued triumphantly.

“We want to believe. Young students try to believe in older authors, constituents try to believe in their Congressmen, countries try to believe in their statesmen, but they can’t. Too many voices, too much scattered, illogical, ill-considered criticism. It’s worse in the case of newspapers. Any rich, unprogressive old party with that particularly grasping, acquisitive form of mentality known as financial genius can own a paper that is the intellectual meat and drink of thousands of tired, hurried men, men too involved in the business of modern living to swallow anything but predigested food. For two cents the voter buys his politics, prejudices, and philosophy. A year later there is a new political ring or a change in the paper’s ownership, consequence: more confusion, more contradiction, a sudden inrush of new ideas, their tempering, their distillation, the reaction against them — “

He paused only to get his breath.

“And that is why I have sworn not to put pen to paper until my ideas either clarify or depart entirely; I have quite enough sins on my soul without putting dangerous, shallow epigrams into people’s heads; I might cause a poor, inoffensive capitalist to have a vulgar liaison with a bomb, or get some innocent little Bolshevik tangled up with a machine-gun bullet — “

Tom was growing restless under this lampooning of his connection with The New Democracy.

“What’s all this got to do with your being bored?”

Amory considered that it had much to do with it.

“How’ll I fit in?” he demanded. “What am I for? To propagate the race? According to the American novels we are led to believe that the ‘healthy American boy’ from nineteen to twenty-five is an entirely sexless animal. As a matter of fact, the healthier he is the less that’s true. The only alternative to letting it get you is some violent interest. Well, the war is over; I believe too much in the responsibilities of authorship to write just now; and business, well, business speaks for itself. It has no connection with anything in the world that I’ve ever been interested in, except a slim, utilitarian connection with economics. What I’d see of it, lost in a clerkship, for the next and best ten years of my life would have the intellectual content of an industrial movie.”

“Try fiction,” suggested Tom.

“Trouble is I get distracted when I start to write stories — get afraid I’m doing it instead of living — get thinking maybe life is waiting for me in the Japanese gardens at the Ritz or at Atlantic City or on the lower East Side.

“Anyway,” he continued, “I haven’t the vital urge. I wanted to be a regular human being but the girl couldn’t see it that way.”

“You’ll find another.”

“God! Banish the thought. Why don’t you tell me that ‘if the girl had been worth having she’d have waited for you’? No, sir, the girl really worth having won’t wait for anybody. If I thought there’d be another I’d lose my remaining faith in human nature. Maybe I’ll play — but Rosalind was the only girl in the wide world that could have held me.”

“Well,” yawned Tom, “I’ve played confidant a good hour by the clock. Still, I’m glad to see you’re beginning to have violent views again on something.”

“I am,” agreed Amory reluctantly. “Yet when I see a happy family it makes me sick at my stomach — “

“Happy families try to make people feel that way,” said Tom cynically.

TOM THE CENSOR

There were days when Amory listened. These were when Tom, wreathed in smoke, indulged in the slaughter of American literature. Words failed him.

“Fifty thousand dollars a year,” he would cry. “My God! Look at them, look at them — Edna Ferber, Gouverneur Morris, Fanny Hurst, Mary Roberts Rinehart — not producing among ‘em one story or novel that will last ten years. This man Cobb — I don’t tink he’s either clever or amusing — and what’s more, I don’t think very many people do, except the editors. He’s just groggy with advertising. And — oh Harold Bell Wright oh Zane Grey — “

“They try.”

“No, they don’t even try. Some of them can write, but they won’t sit down and do one honest novel. Most of them can’t write, I’ll admit. I believe Rupert Hughes tries to give a real, comprehensive picture of American life, but his style and perspective are barbarous. Ernest Poole and Dorothy Canfield try but they’re hindered by their absolute lack of any sense of humor; but at least they crowd their work instead of spreading it thin. Every author ought to write every book as if he were going to be beheaded the day he finished it.”

“Is that double entente?”

“Don’t slow me up! Now there’s a few of ‘em that seem to have some cultural background, some intelligence and a good deal of literary felicity but they just simply won’t write honestly; they’d all claim there was no public for good stuff. Then why the devil is it that Wells, Conrad, Galsworthy, Shaw, Bennett, and the rest depend on America for over half their sales?”

“How does little Tommy like the poets?”

Tom was overcome. He dropped his arms until they swung loosely beside the chair and emitted faint grunts.

“I’m writing a satire on ‘em now, calling it ‘Boston Bards and Hearst Reviewers.’“

“Let’s hear it,” said Amory eagerly.

“I’ve only got the last few lines done.”

“That’s very modern. Let’s hear ‘em, if they’re funny.”

Tom produced a folded paper from his pocket and read aloud, pausing at intervals so that Amory could see that it was free verse:

“So

Walter Arensberg,

Alfred Kreymborg,

Carl Sandburg,

Louis Untermeyer,

Eunice Tietjens,

Clara Shanafelt,

James Oppenheim,

Maxwell Bodenheim,

Richard Glaenzer,

Scharmel Iris,

Conrad Aiken,

I place your names here

So that you may live

If only as names,

Sinuous, mauve-colored names,

In the Juvenalia

Of my collected editions.”

Amory roared.

“You win the iron pansy. I’ll buy you a meal on the arrogance of the last two lines.”

Amory did not entirely agree with Tom’s sweeping damnation of American novelists and poets. He enjoyed both Vachel Lindsay and Booth Tarkington, and admired the conscientious, if slender, artistry of Edgar Lee Masters.

“What I hate is this idiotic drivel about ‘I am God — I am man — I ride the winds — I look through the smoke — I am the life sense.’“

“It’s ghastly!”

“And I wish American novelists would give up trying to make business romantically interesting. Nobody wants to read about it, unless it’s crooked business. If it was an entertaining subject they’d buy the life of James J. Hill and not one of these long office tragedies that harp along on the significance of smoke — “

“And gloom,” said Tom. “That’s another favorite, though I’ll admit the Russians have the monopoly. Our specialty is stories about little girls who break their spines and get adopted by grouchy old men because they smile so much. You’d think we were a race of cheerful cripples and that the common end of the Russian peasant was suicide — “

“Six o’clock,” said Amory, glancing at his wrist-watch. “I’ll buy you a grea’ big dinner on the strength of the Juvenalia of your collected editions.”

LOOKING BACKWARD

July sweltered out with a last hot week, and Amory in another surge of unrest realized that it was just five months since he and Rosalind had met. Yet it was already hard for him to visualize the heart-whole boy who had stepped off the transport, passionately desiring the adventure of life. One night while the heat, overpowering and enervating, poured into the windows of his room he struggled for several hours in a vague effort to immortalize the poignancy of that time.

The February streets, wind-washed by night, blow full of strange

half-intermittent damps, bearing on wasted walks in shining sight

wet snow plashed into gleams under the lamps, like golden oil

from some divine machine, in an hour of thaw and stars.

Strange damps — full of the eyes of many men, crowded with life

borne in upon a lull....  Oh, I was young, for I could turn

again to you, most finite and most beautiful, and taste the stuff

of half-remembered dreams, sweet and new on your mouth.

... There was a tanging in the midnight air — silence was dead and

sound not yet awoken — Life cracked like ice! — one brilliant note

and there, radiant and pale, you stood... and spring had broken.

(The icicles were short upon the roofs and the changeling city

swooned.)

Our thoughts were frosty mist along the eaves; our two ghosts

kissed, high on the long, mazed wires — eerie half-laughter echoes

here and leaves only a fatuous sigh for young desires; regret has

followed after things she loved, leaving the great husk.

ANOTHER ENDING

In mid-August came a letter from Monsignor Darcy, who had evidently just stumbled on his address:

MY DEAR BOY: —

Your last letter was quite enough to make me worry about you. It was not a bit like yourself. Reading between the lines I should imagine that your engagement to this girl is making you rather unhappy, and I see you have lost all the feeling of romance that you had before the war. You make a great mistake if you think you can be romantic without religion. Sometimes I think that with both of us the secret of success, when we find it, is the mystical element in us: something flows into us that enlarges our personalities, and when it ebbs out our personalities shrink; I should call your last two letters rather shrivelled. Beware of losing yourself in the personality of another being, man or woman.

His Eminence Cardinal O’Neill and the Bishop of Boston are staying with me at present, so it is hard for me to get a moment to write, but I wish you would come up here later if only for a week-end. I go to Washington this week.

What I shall do in the future is hanging in the balance. Absolutely between ourselves I should not be surprised to see the red hat of a cardinal descend upon my unworthy head within the next eight months. In any event, I should like to have a house in New York or Washington where you could drop in for week-ends.

Amory, I’m very glad we’re both alive; this war could easily have been the end of a brilliant family. But in regard to matrimony, you are now at the most dangerous period of your life. You might marry in haste and repent at leisure, but I think you won’t. From what you write me about the present calamitous state of your finances, what you want is naturally impossible. However, if I judge you by the means I usually choose, I should say that there will be something of an emotional crisis within the next year.

Do write me. I feel annoyingly out of date on you.

With greatest affection,

THAYER DARCY.

Within a week after the receipt of this letter their little household fell precipitously to pieces. The immediate cause was the serious and probably chronic illness of Tom’s mother. So they stored the furniture, gave instructions to sublet and shook hands gloomily in the Pennsylvania Station. Amory and Tom seemed always to be saying good-by.

Feeling very much alone, Amory yielded to an impulse and set off southward, intending to join Monsignor in Washington. They missed connections by two hours, and, deciding to spend a few days with an ancient, remembered uncle, Amory journeyed up through the luxuriant fields of Maryland into RamillyCounty. But instead of two days his stay lasted from mid-August nearly through September, for in Maryland he met Eleanor.

CHAPTER 3. Young Irony

For years afterward when Amory thought of Eleanor he seemed still to hear the wind sobbing around him and sending little chills into the places beside his heart. The night when they rode up the slope and watched the cold moon float through the clouds, he lost a further part of him that nothing could restore; and when he lost it he lost also the power of regretting it. Eleanor was, say, the last time that evil crept close to Amory under the mask of beauty, the last weird mystery that held him with wild fascination and pounded his soul to flakes.

With her his imagination ran riot and that is why they rode to the highest hill and watched an evil moon ride high, for they knew then that they could see the devil in each other. But Eleanor — did Amory dream her? Afterward their ghosts played, yet both of them hoped from their souls never to meet. Was it the infinite sadness of her eyes that drew him or the mirror of himself that he found in the gorgeous clarity of her mind? She will have no other adventure like Amory, and if she reads this she will say:

“And Amory will have no other adventure like me.”

Nor will she sigh, any more than he would sigh.

Eleanor tried to put it on paper once:

“The fading things we only know

We’ll have forgotten...

Put away...

Desires that melted with the snow,

And dreams begotten

This to-day:

The sudden dawns we laughed to greet,

That all could see, that none could share,

Will be but dawns... and if we meet

We shall not care.

Dear... not one tear will rise for this...

A little while hence

No regret

Will stir for a remembered kiss —

Not even silence,

When we’ve met,

Will give old ghosts a waste to roam,

Or stir the surface of the sea...

If gray shapes drift beneath the foam

We shall not see.”

They quarrelled dangerously because Amory maintained that sea and see couldn’t possibly be used as a rhyme. And then Eleanor had part of another verse that she couldn’t find a beginning for:

“... But wisdom passes... still the years

Will feed us wisdom....  Age will go

Back to the old —

For all our tears

We shall not know.”

Eleanor hated Maryland passionately. She belonged to the oldest of the old families of RamillyCounty and lived in a big, gloomy house with her grandfather. She had been born and brought up in France.... I see I am starting wrong. Let me begin again.

Amory was bored, as he usually was in the country. He used to go for far walks by himself — and wander along reciting “Ulalume” to the corn-fields, and congratulating Poe for drinking himself to death in that atmosphere of smiling complacency. One afternoon he had strolled for several miles along a road that was new to him, and then through a wood on bad advice from a colored woman... losing himself entirely. A passing storm decided to break out, and to his great impatience the sky grew black as pitch and the rain began to splatter down through the trees, become suddenly furtive and ghostly. Thunder rolled with menacing crashes up the valley and scattered through the woods in intermittent batteries. He stumbled blindly on, hunting for a way out, and finally, through webs of twisted branches, caught sight of a rift in the trees where the unbroken lightning showed open country. He rushed to the edge of the woods and then hesitated whether or not to cross the fields and try to reach the shelter of the little house marked by a light far down the valley. It was only half past five, but he could see scarcely ten steps before him, except when the lightning made everything vivid and grotesque for great sweeps around.

Suddenly a strange sound fell on his ears. It was a song, in a low, husky voice, a girl’s voice, and whoever was singing was very close to him. A year before he might have laughed, or trembled; but in his restless mood he only stood and listened while the words sank into his consciousness:

“Les sanglots longs

Des violons

De l’automne

Blessent mon coeur

D’une langueur

Monotone.”

The lightning split the sky, but the song went on without a quaver. The girl was evidently in the field and the voice seemed to come vaguely from a haystack about twenty feet in front of him.

Then it ceased: ceased and began again in a weird chant that soared and hung and fell and blended with the rain:

“Tout suffocant

Et bleme quand

Sonne l’heure

Je me souviens

Des jours anciens

Et je pleure....”

“Who the devil is there in RamillyCounty,” muttered Amory aloud, “who would deliver Verlaine in an extemporaneous tune to a soaking haystack?”

“Somebody’s there!” cried the voice unalarmed. “Who are you? — Manfred, St. Christopher, or Queen Victoria?”

“I’m Don Juan!” Amory shouted on impulse, raising his voice above the noise of the rain and the wind.

A delighted shriek came from the haystack.

“I know who you are — you’re the blond boy that likes ‘Ulalume’ — I recognize your voice.”

“How do I get up?” he cried from the foot of the haystack, whither he had arrived, dripping wet. A head appeared over the edge — it was so dark that Amory could just make out a patch of damp hair and two eyes that gleamed like a cat’s.

“Run back!” came the voice, “and jump and I’ll catch your hand — no, not there — on the other side.”

He followed directions and as he sprawled up the side, knee-deep in hay, a small, white hand reached out, gripped his, and helped him onto the top.

“Here you are, Juan,” cried she of the damp hair. “Do you mind if I drop the Don?”

“You’ve got a thumb like mine!” he exclaimed.

“And you’re holding my hand, which is dangerous without seeing my face.” He dropped it quickly.

As if in answer to his prayers came a flash of lightning and he looked eagerly at her who stood beside him on the soggy haystack, ten feet above the ground. But she had covered her face and he saw nothing but a slender figure, dark, damp, bobbed hair, and the small white hands with the thumbs that bent back like his.

“Sit down,” she suggested politely, as the dark closed in on them. “If you’ll sit opposite me in this hollow you can have half of the raincoat, which I was using as a water-proof tent until you so rudely interrupted me.”

“I was asked,” Amory said joyfully; “you asked me — you know you did.”

“Don Juan always manages that,” she said, laughing, “but I shan’t call you that any more, because you’ve got reddish hair. Instead you can recite ‘Ulalume’ and I’ll be Psyche, your soul.”

Amory flushed, happily invisible under the curtain of wind and rain. They were sitting opposite each other in a slight hollow in the hay with the raincoat spread over most of them, and the rain doing for the rest. Amory was trying desperately to see Psyche, but the lightning refused to flash again, and he waited impatiently. Good Lord! supposing she wasn’t beautiful — supposing she was forty and pedantic — heavens! Suppose, only suppose, she was mad. But he knew the last was unworthy. Here had Providence sent a girl to amuse him just as it sent Benvenuto Cellini men to murder, and he was wondering if she was mad, just because she exactly filled his mood.

“I’m not,” she said.

“Not what?”

“Not mad. I didn’t think you were mad when I first saw you, so it isn’t fair that you should think so of me.”

“How on earth — “

As long as they knew each other Eleanor and Amory could be “on a subject” and stop talking with the definite thought of it in their heads, yet ten minutes later speak aloud and find that their minds had followed the same channels and led them each to a parallel idea, an idea that others would have found absolutely unconnected with the first.

“Tell me,” he demanded, leaning forward eagerly, “how do you know about ‘Ulalume’ — how did you know the color of my hair? What’s your name? What were you doing here? Tell me all at once!”

Suddenly the lightning flashed in with a leap of overreaching light and he saw Eleanor, and looked for the first time into those eyes of hers. Oh, she was magnificent — pale skin, the color of marble in starlight, slender brows, and eyes that glittered green as emeralds in the blinding glare. She was a witch, of perhaps nineteen, he judged, alert and dreamy and with the tell-tale white line over her upper lip that was a weakness and a delight. He sank back with a gasp against the wall of hay.

“Now you’ve seen me,” she said calmly, “and I suppose you’re about to say that my green eyes are burning into your brain.”

“What color is your hair?” he asked intently. “It’s bobbed, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it’s bobbed. I don’t know what color it is,” she answered, musing, “so many men have asked me. It’s medium, I suppose — No one ever looks long at my hair. I’ve got beautiful eyes, though, haven’t I. I don’t care what you say, I have beautiful eyes.”

“Answer my question, Madeline.”

“Don’t remember them all — besides my name isn’t Madeline, it’s Eleanor.”

“I might have guessed it. You look like Eleanor — you have that Eleanor look. You know what I mean.”

There was a silence as they listened to the rain.

“It’s going down my neck, fellow lunatic,” she offered finally.

“Answer my questions.”

“Well — name of Savage, Eleanor; live in big old house mile down road; nearest living relation to be notified, grandfather — Ramilly Savage; height, five feet four inches; number on watch-case, 3077 W; nose, delicate aquiline; temperament, uncanny — “

“And me,” Amory interrupted, “where did you see me?”

“Oh, you’re one of those men,” she answered haughtily, “must lug old self into conversation. Well, my boy, I was behind a hedge sunning myself one day last week, and along comes a man saying in a pleasant, conceited way of talking:

“‘And now when the night was senescent’

(says he)

‘And the star dials pointed to morn

At the end of the path a liquescent’

(says he)

‘And nebulous lustre was born.’

“So I poked my eyes up over the hedge, but you had started to run, for some unknown reason, and so I saw but the back of your beautiful head. ‘Oh!’ says I, ‘there’s a man for whom many of us might sigh,’ and I continued in my best Irish — “

“All right,” Amory interrupted. “Now go back to yourself.”

“Well, I will. I’m one of those people who go through the world giving other people thrills, but getting few myself except those I read into men on such nights as these. I have the social courage to go on the stage, but not the energy; I haven’t the patience to write books; and I never met a man I’d marry. However, I’m only eighteen.”

The storm was dying down softly and only the wind kept up its ghostly surge and made the stack lean and gravely settle from side to side. Amory was in a trance. He felt that every moment was precious. He had never met a girl like this before — she would never seem quite the same again. He didn’t at all feel like a character in a play, the appropriate feeling in an unconventional situation — instead, he had a sense of coming home.

“I have just made a great decision,” said Eleanor after another pause, “and that is why I’m here, to answer another of your questions. I have just decided that I don’t believe in immortality.”

“Really! how banal!”

“Frightfully so,” she answered, “but depressing with a stale, sickly depression, nevertheless. I came out here to get wet — like a wet hen; wet hens always have great clarity of mind,” she concluded.

“Go on,” Amory said politely.

“Well — I’m not afraid of the dark, so I put on my slicker and rubber boots and came out. You see I was always afraid, before, to say I didn’t believe in God — because the lightning might strike me — but here I am and it hasn’t, of course, but the main point is that this time I wasn’t any more afraid of it than I had been when I was a Christian Scientist, like I was last year. So now I know I’m a materialist and I was fraternizing with the hay when you came out and stood by the woods, scared to death.”

“Why, you little wretch — “ cried Amory indignantly. “Scared of what?”

“Yourself!” she shouted, and he jumped. She clapped her hands and laughed. “See — see! Conscience — kill it like me! Eleanor Savage, materiologist — no jumping, no starting, come early — “

“But I have to have a soul,” he objected. “I can’t be rational — and I won’t be molecular.”

She leaned toward him, her burning eyes never leaving his own and whispered with a sort of romantic finality:

“I thought so, Juan, I feared so — you’re sentimental. You’re not like me. I’m a romantic little materialist.”

“I’m not sentimental — I’m as romantic as you are. The idea, you know, is that the sentimental person thinks things will last — the romantic person has a desperate confidence that they won’t.” (This was an ancient distinction of Amory’s.)

“Epigrams. I’m going home,” she said sadly. “Let’s get off the haystack and walk to the cross-roads.”

They slowly descended from their perch. She would not let him help her down and motioning him away arrived in a graceful lump in the soft mud where she sat for an instant, laughing at herself. Then she jumped to her feet and slipped her hand into his, and they tiptoed across the fields, jumping and swinging from dry spot to dry spot. A transcendent delight seemed to sparkle in every pool of water, for the moon had risen and the storm had scurried away into western Maryland. When Eleanor’s arm touched his he felt his hands grow cold with deadly fear lest he should lose the shadow brush with which his imagination was painting wonders of her. He watched her from the corners of his eyes as ever he did when he walked with her — she was a feast and a folly and he wished it had been his destiny to sit forever on a haystack and see life through her green eyes. His paganism soared that night and when she faded out like a gray ghost down the road, a deep singing came out of the fields and filled his way homeward. All night the summer moths flitted in and out of Amory’s window; all night large looming sounds swayed in mystic revery through the silver grain — and he lay awake in the clear darkness.

SEPTEMBER

Amory selected a blade of grass and nibbled at it scientifically.

“I never fall in love in August or September,” he proffered.

“When then?”

“Christmas or Easter. I’m a liturgist.”

“Easter!” She turned up her nose. “Huh! Spring in corsets!”

“Easter would bore spring, wouldn’t she? Easter has her hair braided, wears a tailored suit.”

“Bind on thy sandals, oh, thou most fleet.

Over the splendor and speed of thy feet — “

quoted Eleanor softly, and then added: “I suppose Hallowe’en is a better day for autumn than Thanksgiving.”

“Much better — and Christmas eve does very well for winter, but summer...”

“Summer has no day,” she said. “We can’t possibly have a summer love. So many people have tried that the name’s become proverbial. Summer is only the unfulfilled promise of spring, a charlatan in place of the warm balmy nights I dream of in April. It’s a sad season of life without growth.... It has no day.”

“Fourth of July,” Amory suggested facetiously.

“Don’t be funny!” she said, raking him with her eyes.

“Well, what could fulfil the promise of spring?”

She thought a moment.

“Oh, I suppose heaven would, if there was one,” she said finally, “a sort of pagan heaven — you ought to be a materialist,” she continued irrelevantly.

“Why?”

“Because you look a good deal like the pictures of Rupert Brooke.”

To some extent Amory tried to play Rupert Brooke as long as he knew Eleanor. What he said, his attitude toward life, toward her, toward himself, were all reflexes of the dead Englishman’s literary moods. Often she sat in the grass, a lazy wind playing with her short hair, her voice husky as she ran up and down the scale from Grantchester to Waikiki. There was something most passionate in Eleanor’s reading aloud. They seemed nearer, not only mentally, but physically, when they read, than when she was in his arms, and this was often, for they fell half into love almost from the first. Yet was Amory capable of love now? He could, as always, run through the emotions in a half hour, but even while they revelled in their imaginations, he knew that neither of them could care as he had cared once before — I suppose that was why they turned to Brooke, and Swinburne, and Shelley. Their chance was to make everything fine and finished and rich and imaginative; they must bend tiny golden tentacles from his imagination to hers, that would take the place of the great, deep love that was never so near, yet never so much of a dream.

One poem they read over and over; Swinburne’s “Triumph of Time,” and four lines of it rang in his memory afterward on warm nights when he saw the fireflies among dusky tree trunks and heard the low drone of many frogs. Then Eleanor seemed to come out of the night and stand by him, and he heard her throaty voice, with its tone of a fleecy-headed drum, repeating:

“Is it worth a tear, is it worth an hour,

To think of things that are well outworn;

Of fruitless husk and fugitive flower,

The dream foregone and the deed foreborne?”

They were formally introduced two days later, and his aunt told him her history. The Ramillys were two: old Mr. Ramilly and his granddaughter, Eleanor. She had lived in France with a restless mother whom Amory imagined to have been very like his own, on whose death she had come to America, to live in Maryland. She had gone to Baltimore first to stay with a bachelor uncle, and there she insisted on being a debutante at the age of seventeen. She had a wild winter and arrived in the country in March, having quarrelled frantically with all her Baltimore relatives, and shocked them into fiery protest. A rather fast crowd had come out, who drank cocktails in limousines and were promiscuously condescending and patronizing toward older people, and Eleanor with an esprit that hinted strongly of the boulevards, led many innocents still redolent of St. Timothy’s and Farmington, into paths of Bohemian naughtiness. When the story came to her uncle, a forgetful cavalier of a more hypocritical era, there was a scene, from which Eleanor emerged, subdued but rebellious and indignant, to seek haven with her grandfather who hovered in the country on the near side of senility. That’s as far as her story went; she told him the rest herself, but that was later.

Often they swam and as Amory floated lazily in the water he shut his mind to all thoughts except those of hazy soap-bubble lands where the sun splattered through wind-drunk trees. How could any one possibly think or worry, or do anything except splash and dive and loll there on the edge of time while the flower months failed. Let the days move over — sadness and memory and pain recurred outside, and here, once more, before he went on to meet them he wanted to drift and be young.

There were days when Amory resented that life had changed from an even progress along a road stretching ever in sight, with the scenery merging and blending, into a succession of quick, unrelated scenes — two years of sweat and blood, that sudden absurd instinct for paternity that Rosalind had stirred; the half-sensual, half-neurotic quality of this autumn with Eleanor. He felt that it would take all time, more than he could ever spare, to glue these strange cumbersome pictures into the scrap-book of his life. It was all like a banquet where he sat for this half-hour of his youth and tried to enjoy brilliant epicurean courses.

Dimly he promised himself a time where all should be welded together. For months it seemed that he had alternated between being borne along a stream of love or fascination, or left in an eddy, and in the eddies he had not desired to think, rather to be picked up on a wave’s top and swept along again.

“The despairing, dying autumn and our love — how well they harmonize!” said Eleanor sadly one day as they lay dripping by the water.

“The Indian summer of our hearts — “ he ceased.

“Tell me,” she said finally, “was she light or dark?”

“Light.”

“Was she more beautiful than I am?”

“I don’t know,” said Amory shortly.

One night they walked while the moon rose and poured a great burden of glory over the garden until it seemed fairyland with Amory and Eleanor, dim phantasmal shapes, expressing eternal beauty in curious elfin love moods. Then they turned out of the moonlight into the trellised darkness of a vine-hung pagoda, where there were scents so plaintive as to be nearly musical.

“Light a match,” she whispered. “I want to see you.”

Scratch! Flare!

The night and the scarred trees were like scenery in a play, and to be there with Eleanor, shadowy and unreal, seemed somehow oddly familiar. Amory thought how it was only the past that ever seemed strange and unbelievable. The match went out.

“It’s black as pitch.”

“We’re just voices now,” murmured Eleanor, “little lonesome voices. Light another.”

“That was my last match.”

Suddenly he caught her in his arms.

“You are mine — you know you’re mine!” he cried wildly... the moonlight twisted in through the vines and listened... the fireflies hung upon their whispers as if to win his glance from the glory of their eyes.

THE END OF SUMMER

“No wind is stirring in the grass; not one wind stirs... the water in the hidden pools, as glass, fronts the full moon and so inters the golden token in its icy mass,” chanted Eleanor to the trees that skeletoned the body of the night. “Isn’t it ghostly here? If you can hold your horse’s feet up, let’s cut through the woods and find the hidden pools.”

“It’s after one, and you’ll get the devil,” he objected, “and I don’t know enough about horses to put one away in the pitch dark.”

“Shut up, you old fool,” she whispered irrelevantly, and, leaning over, she patted him lazily with her riding-crop. “You can leave your old plug in our stable and I’ll send him over to-morrow.”

“But my uncle has got to drive me to the station with this old plug at seven o’clock.”

“Don’t be a spoil-sport — remember, you have a tendency toward wavering that prevents you from being the entire light of my life.”

Amory drew his horse up close beside, and, leaning toward her, grasped her hand.

“Say I am — quick, or I’ll pull you over and make you ride behind me.”

She looked up and smiled and shook her head excitedly.

“Oh, do! — or rather, don’t! Why are all the exciting things so uncomfortable, like fighting and exploring and ski-ing in Canada? By the way, we’re going to ride up Harper’s Hill. I think that comes in our programme about five o’clock.”

“You little devil,” Amory growled. “You’re going to make me stay up all night and sleep in the train like an immigrant all day to-morrow, going back to New York.”

“Hush! some one’s coming along the road — let’s go! Whoo-ee-oop!” And with a shout that probably gave the belated traveller a series of shivers, she turned her horse into the woods and Amory followed slowly, as he had followed her all day for three weeks.

The summer was over, but he had spent the days in watching Eleanor, a graceful, facile Manfred, build herself intellectual and imaginative pyramids while she revelled in the artificialities of the temperamental teens and they wrote poetry at the dinner-table.

When Vanity kissed Vanity, a hundred happy Junes ago, he

pondered o’er her breathlessly, and, that all men might ever

know, he rhymed her eyes with life and death:

“Thru Time I’ll save my love!” he said... yet Beauty

vanished with his breath, and, with her lovers, she was dead...

— Ever his wit and not her eyes, ever his art and not her hair:

“Who’d learn a trick in rhyme, be wise and pause before his

sonnet there”...  So all my words, however true, might sing

you to a thousandth June, and no one ever know that you were

Beauty for an afternoon.

So he wrote one day, when he pondered how coldly we thought of the “Dark Lady of the Sonnets,” and how little we remembered her as the great man wanted her remembered. For what Shakespeare must have desired, to have been able to write with such divine despair, was that the lady should live... and now we have no real interest in her.... The irony of it is that if he had cared more for the poem than for the lady the sonnet would be only obvious, imitative rhetoric and no one would ever have read it after twenty years....

This was the last night Amory ever saw Eleanor. He was leaving in the morning and they had agreed to take a long farewell trot by the cold moonlight. She wanted to talk, she said — perhaps the last time in her life that she could be rational (she meant pose with comfort). So they had turned into the woods and rode for half an hour with scarcely a word, except when she whispered “Damn!” at a bothersome branch — whispered it as no other girl was ever able to whisper it. Then they started up Harper’s Hill, walking their tired horses.

“Good Lord! It’s quiet here!” whispered Eleanor; “much more lonesome than the woods.”

“I hate woods,” Amory said, shuddering. “Any kind of foliage or underbrush at night. Out here it’s so broad and easy on the spirit.”

“The long slope of a long hill.”

“And the cold moon rolling moonlight down it.”

“And thee and me, last and most important.”

It was quiet that night — the straight road they followed up to the edge of the cliff knew few footsteps at any time. Only an occasional negro cabin, silver-gray in the rock-ribbed moonlight, broke the long line of bare ground; behind lay the black edge of the woods like a dark frosting on white cake, and ahead the sharp, high horizon. It was much colder — so cold that it settled on them and drove all the warm nights from their minds.

“The end of summer,” said Eleanor softly. “Listen to the beat of our horses’ hoofs — ‘tump-tump-tump-a-tump.’ Have you ever been feverish and had all noises divide into ‘tump-tump-tump’ until you could swear eternity was divisible into so many tumps? That’s the way I feel — old horses go tump-tump.... I guess that’s the only thing that separates horses and clocks from us. Human beings can’t go ‘tump-tump-tump’ without going crazy.”

The breeze freshened and Eleanor pulled her cape around her and shivered.

“Are you very cold?” asked Amory.

“No, I’m thinking about myself — my black old inside self, the real one, with the fundamental honesty that keeps me from being absolutely wicked by making me realize my own sins.”

They were riding up close by the cliff and Amory gazed over. Where the fall met the ground a hundred feet below, a black stream made a sharp line, broken by tiny glints in the swift water.

“Rotten, rotten old world,” broke out Eleanor suddenly, “and the wretchedest thing of all is me — oh, why am I a girl? Why am I not a stupid — ? Look at you; you’re stupider than I am, not much, but some, and you can lope about and get bored and then lope somewhere else, and you can play around with girls without being involved in meshes of sentiment, and you can do anything and be justified — and here am I with the brains to do everything, yet tied to the sinking ship of future matrimony. If I were born a hundred years from now, well and good, but now what’s in store for me — I have to marry, that goes without saying. Who? I’m too bright for most men, and yet I have to descend to their level and let them patronize my intellect in order to get their attention. Every year that I don’t marry I’ve got less chance for a first-class man. At the best I can have my choice from one or two cities and, of course, I have to marry into a dinner-coat.

“Listen,” she leaned close again, “I like clever men and good-looking men, and, of course, no one cares more for personality than I do. Oh, just one person in fifty has any glimmer of what sex is. I’m hipped on Freud and all that, but it’s rotten that every bit of real love in the world is ninety-nine per cent passion and one little soupcon of jealousy.” She finished as suddenly as she began.

“Of course, you’re right,” Amory agreed. “It’s a rather unpleasant overpowering force that’s part of the machinery under everything. It’s like an actor that lets you see his mechanics! Wait a minute till I think this out....”

He paused and tried to get a metaphor. They had turned the cliff and were riding along the road about fifty feet to the left.

“You see every one’s got to have some cloak to throw around it. The mediocre intellects, Plato’s second class, use the remnants of romantic chivalry diluted with Victorian sentiment — and we who consider ourselves the intellectuals cover it up by pretending that it’s another side of us, has nothing to do with our shining brains; we pretend that the fact that we realize it is really absolving us from being a prey to it. But the truth is that sex is right in the middle of our purest abstractions, so close that it obscures vision.... I can kiss you now and will. ...” He leaned toward her in his saddle, but she drew away.

“I can’t — I can’t kiss you now — I’m more sensitive.”

“You’re more stupid then,” he declared rather impatiently. “Intellect is no protection from sex any more than convention is...”

“What is?” she fired up. “The Catholic Church or the maxims of Confucius?”

Amory looked up, rather taken aback.

“That’s your panacea, isn’t it?” she cried. “Oh, you’re just an old hypocrite, too. Thousands of scowling priests keeping the degenerate Italians and illiterate Irish repentant with gabble-gabble about the sixth and ninth commandments. It’s just all cloaks, sentiment and spiritual rouge and panaceas. I’ll tell you there is no God, not even a definite abstract goodness; so it’s all got to be worked out for the individual by the individual here in high white foreheads like mine, and you’re too much the prig to admit it.” She let go her reins and shook her little fists at the stars.

“If there’s a God let him strike me — strike me!”

“Talking about God again after the manner of atheists,” Amory said sharply. His materialism, always a thin cloak, was torn to shreds by Eleanor’s blasphemy.... She knew it and it angered him that she knew it.

“And like most intellectuals who don’t find faith convenient,” he continued coldly, “like Napoleon and Oscar Wilde and the rest of your type, you’ll yell loudly for a priest on your death-bed.”

Eleanor drew her horse up sharply and he reined in beside her.

“Will I?” she said in a queer voice that scared him. “Will I? Watch! I’m going over the cliff!” And before he could interfere she had turned and was riding breakneck for the end of the plateau.

He wheeled and started after her, his body like ice, his nerves in a vast clangor. There was no chance of stopping her. The moon was under a cloud and her horse would step blindly over. Then some ten feet from the edge of the cliff she gave a sudden shriek and flung herself sideways — plunged from her horse and, rolling over twice, landed in a pile of brush five feet from the edge. The horse went over with a frantic whinny. In a minute he was by Eleanor’s side and saw that her eyes were open.

“Eleanor!” he cried.

She did not answer, but her lips moved and her eyes filled with sudden tears.

“Eleanor, are you hurt?”

“No; I don’t think so,” she said faintly, and then began weeping.

“My horse dead?”

“Good God — Yes!”

“Oh!” she wailed. “I thought I was going over. I didn’t know — “

He helped her gently to her feet and boosted her onto his saddle. So they started homeward; Amory walking and she bent forward on the pommel, sobbing bitterly.

“I’ve got a crazy streak,” she faltered, “twice before I’ve done things like that. When I was eleven mother went — went mad — stark raving crazy. We were in Vienna — “

All the way back she talked haltingly about herself, and Amory’s love waned slowly with the moon. At her door they started from habit to kiss good night, but she could not run into his arms, nor were they stretched to meet her as in the week before. For a minute they stood there, hating each other with a bitter sadness. But as Amory had loved himself in Eleanor, so now what he hated was only a mirror. Their poses were strewn about the pale dawn like broken glass. The stars were long gone and there were left only the little sighing gusts of wind and the silences between... but naked souls are poor things ever, and soon he turned homeward and let new lights come in with the sun.

A POEM THAT ELEANOR SENT AMORY SEVERAL YEARS LATER

“Here, Earth-born, over the lilt of the water,

Lisping its music and bearing a burden of light,

Bosoming day as a laughing and radiant daughter...

Here we may whisper unheard, unafraid of the night.

Walking alone... was it splendor, or what, we were bound with,

Deep in the time when summer lets down her hair?

Shadows we loved and the patterns they covered the ground with

Tapestries, mystical, faint in the breathless air.

That was the day... and the night for another story,

Pale as a dream and shadowed with pencilled trees —

Ghosts of the stars came by who had sought for glory,

Whispered to us of peace in the plaintive breeze,

Whispered of old dead faiths that the day had shattered,

Youth the penny that bought delight of the moon;

That was the urge that we knew and the language that mattered

That was the debt that we paid to the usurer June.

Here, deepest of dreams, by the waters that bring not

Anything back of the past that we need not know,

What if the light is but sun and the little streams sing not,

We are together, it seems... I have loved you so...

What did the last night hold, with the summer over,

Drawing us back to the home in the changing glade?

What leered out of the dark in the ghostly clover?

God!... till you stirred in your sleep... and were wild

afraid...

Well... we have passed... we are chronicle now to the eerie.

Curious metal from meteors that failed in the sky;

Earth-born the tireless is stretched by the water, quite weary,

Close to this ununderstandable changeling that’s I...

Fear is an echo we traced to Security’s daughter;

Now we are faces and voices... and less, too soon,

Whispering half-love over the lilt of the water...

Youth the penny that bought delight of the moon.”

A POEM AMORY SENT TO ELEANOR AND WHICH HE CALLED “SUMMER STORM”

“Faint winds, and a song fading and leaves falling,

Faint winds, and far away a fading laughter...

And the rain and over the fields a voice calling...

Our gray blown cloud scurries and lifts above,

Slides on the sun and flutters there to waft her

Sisters on.  The shadow of a dove

Falls on the cote, the trees are filled with wings;

And down the valley through the crying trees

The body of the darker storm flies; brings

With its new air the breath of sunken seas

And slender tenuous thunder...

But I wait...

Wait for the mists and for the blacker rain —

Heavier winds that stir the veil of fate,

Happier winds that pile her hair;

Again

They tear me, teach me, strew the heavy air

Upon me, winds that I know, and storm.

There was a summer every rain was rare;

There was a season every wind was warm....

And now you pass me in the mist... your hair

Rain-blown about you, damp lips curved once more

In that wild irony, that gay despair

That made you old when we have met before;

Wraith-like you drift on out before the rain,

Across the fields, blown with the stemless flowers,

With your old hopes, dead leaves and loves again —

Dim as a dream and wan with all old hours

(Whispers will creep into the growing dark...

Tumult will die over the trees)

Now night

Tears from her wetted breast the splattered blouse

Of day, glides down the dreaming hills, tear-bright,

To cover with her hair the eerie green...

Love for the dusk... Love for the glistening after;

Quiet the trees to their last tops... serene...

Faint winds, and far away a fading laughter...”

CHAPTER 4. The Supercilious Sacrifice

Atlantic City. Amory paced the board walk at day’s end, lulled by the everlasting surge of changing waves, smelling the half-mournful odor of the salt breeze. The sea, he thought, had treasured its memories deeper than the faithless land. It seemed still to whisper of Norse galleys ploughing the water world under raven-figured flags, of the British dreadnoughts, gray bulwarks of civilization steaming up through the fog of one dark July into the North Sea.

“Well — Amory Blaine!”

Amory looked down into the street below. A low racing car had drawn to a stop and a familiar cheerful face protruded from the driver’s seat.

“Come on down, goopher!” cried Alec.

Amory called a greeting and descending a flight of wooden steps approached the car. He and Alec had been meeting intermittently, but the barrier of Rosalind lay always between them. He was sorry for this; he hated to lose Alec.

“Mr. Blaine, this is Miss Waterson, Miss Wayne, and Mr. Tully.”

“How d’y do?”

“Amory,” said Alec exuberantly, “if you’ll jump in we’ll take you to some secluded nook and give you a wee jolt of Bourbon.”

Amory considered.

“That’s an idea.”

“Step in — move over, Jill, and Amory will smile very handsomely at you.”

Amory squeezed into the back seat beside a gaudy, vermilion-lipped blonde.

“Hello, Doug Fairbanks,” she said flippantly. “Walking for exercise or hunting for company?”

“I was counting the waves,” replied Amory gravely. “I’m going in for statistics.”

“Don’t kid me, Doug.”

When they reached an unfrequented side street Alec stopped the car among deep shadows.

“What you doing down here these cold days, Amory?” he demanded, as he produced a quart of Bourbon from under the fur rug.

Amory avoided the question. Indeed, he had had no definite reason for coming to the coast.

“Do you remember that party of ours, sophomore year?” he asked instead.

“Do I? When we slept in the pavilions up in Asbury Park — “

“Lord, Alec! It’s hard to think that Jesse and Dick and Kerry are all three dead.”

Alec shivered.

“Don’t talk about it. These dreary fall days depress me enough.”

Jill seemed to agree.

“Doug here is sorta gloomy anyways,” she commented. “Tell him to drink deep — it’s good and scarce these days.”

“What I really want to ask you, Amory, is where you are — “

“Why, New York, I suppose — “

“I mean to-night, because if you haven’t got a room yet you’d better help me out.”

“Glad to.”

“You see, Tully and I have two rooms with bath between at the Ranier, and he’s got to go back to New York. I don’t want to have to move. Question is, will you occupy one of the rooms?”

Amory was willing, if he could get in right away.

“You’ll find the key in the office; the rooms are in my name.”

Declining further locomotion or further stimulation, Amory left the car and sauntered back along the board walk to the hotel.

He was in an eddy again, a deep, lethargic gulf, without desire to work or write, love or dissipate. For the first time in his life he rather longed for death to roll over his generation, obliterating their petty fevers and struggles and exultations. His youth seemed never so vanished as now in the contrast between the utter loneliness of this visit and that riotous, joyful party of four years before. Things that had been the merest commonplaces of his life then, deep sleep, the sense of beauty around him, all desire, had flown away and the gaps they left were filled only with the great listlessness of his disillusion.

“To hold a man a woman has to appeal to the worst in him.” This sentence was the thesis of most of his bad nights, of which he felt this was to be one. His mind had already started to play variations on the subject. Tireless passion, fierce jealousy, longing to possess and crush — these alone were left of all his love for Rosalind; these remained to him as payment for the loss of his youth — bitter calomel under the thin sugar of love’s exaltation.

In his room he undressed and wrapping himself in blankets to keep out the chill October air drowsed in an armchair by the open window.

He remembered a poem he had read months before:

“Oh staunch old heart who toiled so long for me,

I waste my years sailing along the sea — “

Yet he had no sense of waste, no sense of the present hope that waste implied. He felt that life had rejected him.

“Rosalind! Rosalind!” He poured the words softly into the half-darkness until she seemed to permeate the room; the wet salt breeze filled his hair with moisture, the rim of a moon seared the sky and made the curtains dim and ghostly. He fell asleep.

When he awoke it was very late and quiet. The blanket had slipped partly off his shoulders and he touched his skin to find it damp and cold.

Then he became aware of a tense whispering not ten feet away.

He became rigid.

“Don’t make a sound!” It was Alec’s voice. “Jill — do you hear me?”

“Yes — “ breathed very low, very frightened. They were in the bathroom.

Then his ears caught a louder sound from somewhere along the corridor outside. It was a mumbling of men’s voices and a repeated muffled rapping. Amory threw off the blankets and moved close to the bathroom door.

“My God!” came the girl’s voice again. “You’ll have to let them in.”

“Sh!”

Suddenly a steady, insistent knocking began at Amory’s hall door and simultaneously out of the bathroom came Alec, followed by the vermilion-lipped girl. They were both clad in pajamas.

“Amory!” an anxious whisper.

“What’s the trouble?”

“It’s house detectives. My God, Amory — they’re just looking for a test-case — “

“Well, better let them in.”

“You don’t understand. They can get me under the Mann Act.”

The girl followed him slowly, a rather miserable, pathetic figure in the darkness.

Amory tried to plan quickly.

“You make a racket and let them in your room,” he suggested anxiously, “and I’ll get her out by this door.”

“They’re here too, though. They’ll watch this door.”

“Can’t you give a wrong name?”

“No chance. I registered under my own name; besides, they’d trail the auto license number.”

“Say you’re married.”

“Jill says one of the house detectives knows her.”

The girl had stolen to the bed and tumbled upon it; lay there listening wretchedly to the knocking which had grown gradually to a pounding. Then came a man’s voice, angry and imperative:

“Open up or we’ll break the door in!”

In the silence when this voice ceased Amory realized that there were other things in the room besides people... over and around the figure crouched on the bed there hung an aura, gossamer as a moonbeam, tainted as stale, weak wine, yet a horror, diffusively brooding already over the three of them... and over by the window among the stirring curtains stood something else, featureless and indistinguishable, yet strangely familiar.... Simultaneously two great cases presented themselves side by side to Amory; all that took place in his mind, then, occupied in actual time less than ten seconds.

The first fact that flashed radiantly on his comprehension was the great impersonality of sacrifice — he perceived that what we call love and hate, reward and punishment, had no more to do with it than the date of the month. He quickly recapitulated the story of a sacrifice he had heard of in college: a man had cheated in an examination; his roommate in a gust of sentiment had taken the entire blame — due to the shame of it the innocent one’s entire future seemed shrouded in regret and failure, capped by the ingratitude of the real culprit. He had finally taken his own life — years afterward the facts had come out. At the time the story had both puzzled and worried Amory. Now he realized the truth; that sacrifice was no purchase of freedom. It was like a great elective office, it was like an inheritance of power — to certain people at certain times an essential luxury, carrying with it not a guarantee but a responsibility, not a security but an infinite risk. Its very momentum might drag him down to ruin — the passing of the emotional wave that made it possible might leave the one who made it high and dry forever on an island of despair.

... Amory knew that afterward Alec would secretly hate him for having done so much for him....

... All this was flung before Amory like an opened scroll, while ulterior to him and speculating upon him were those two breathless, listening forces: the gossamer aura that hung over and about the girl and that familiar thing by the window.

Sacrifice by its very nature was arrogant and impersonal; sacrifice should be eternally supercilious.

Weep not for me but for thy children.

That — thought Amory — would be somehow the way God would talk to me.

Amory felt a sudden surge of joy and then like a face in a motion-picture the aura over the bed faded out; the dynamic shadow by the window, that was as near as he could name it, remained for the fraction of a moment and then the breeze seemed to lift it swiftly out of the room. He clinched his hands in quick ecstatic excitement... the ten seconds were up....

“Do what I say, Alec — do what I say. Do you understand?”

Alec looked at him dumbly — his face a tableau of anguish.

“You have a family,” continued Amory slowly. “You have a family and it’s important that you should get out of this. Do you hear me?” He repeated clearly what he had said. “Do you hear me?”

“I hear you.” The voice was curiously strained, the eyes never for a second left Amory’s.

“Alec, you’re going to lie down here. If any one comes in you act drunk. You do what I say — if you don’t I’ll probably kill you.”

There was another moment while they stared at each other. Then Amory went briskly to the bureau and, taking his pocket-book, beckoned peremptorily to the girl. He heard one word from Alec that sounded like “penitentiary,” then he and Jill were in the bathroom with the door bolted behind them.

“You’re here with me,” he said sternly. “You’ve been with me all evening.”

She nodded, gave a little half cry.

In a second he had the door of the other room open and three men entered. There was an immediate flood of electric light and he stood there blinking.

“You’ve been playing a little too dangerous a game, young man!”

Amory laughed.

“Well?”

The leader of the trio nodded authoritatively at a burly man in a check suit.

“All right, Olson.”

“I got you, Mr. O’May,” said Olson, nodding. The other two took a curious glance at their quarry and then withdrew, closing the door angrily behind them.

The burly man regarded Amory contemptuously.

“Didn’t you ever hear of the Mann Act? Coming down here with her,” he indicated the girl with his thumb, “with a New York license on your car — to a hotel like this.” He shook his head implying that he had struggled over Amory but now gave him up.

“Well,” said Amory rather impatiently, “what do you want us to do?”

“Get dressed, quick — and tell your friend not to make such a racket.” Jill was sobbing noisily on the bed, but at these words she subsided sulkily and, gathering up her clothes, retired to the bathroom. As Amory slipped into Alec’s B. V. D.’s he found that his attitude toward the situation was agreeably humorous. The aggrieved virtue of the burly man made him want to laugh.

“Anybody else here?” demanded Olson, trying to look keen and ferret-like.

“Fellow who had the rooms,” said Amory carelessly. “He’s drunk as an owl, though. Been in there asleep since six o’clock.”

“I’ll take a look at him presently.”

“How did you find out?” asked Amory curiously.

“Night clerk saw you go up-stairs with this woman.”

Amory nodded; Jill reappeared from the bathroom, completely if rather untidily arrayed.

“Now then,” began Olson, producing a note-book, “I want your real names — no damn John Smith or Mary Brown.”

“Wait a minute,” said Amory quietly. “Just drop that big-bully stuff. We merely got caught, that’s all.”

Olson glared at him.

“Name?” he snapped.

Amory gave his name and New York address.

“And the lady?”

“Miss Jill — “

“Say,” cried Olson indignantly, “just ease up on the nursery rhymes. What’s your name? Sarah Murphy? Minnie Jackson?”

“Oh, my God!” cried the girl cupping her tear-stained face in her hands. “I don’t want my mother to know. I don’t want my mother to know.”

“Come on now!”

“Shut up!” cried Amory at Olson.

An instant’s pause.

“Stella Robbins,” she faltered finally. “General Delivery, Rugway, New Hampshire.”

Olson snapped his note-book shut and looked at them very ponderously.

“By rights the hotel could turn the evidence over to the police and you’d go to penitentiary, you would, for bringin’ a girl from one State to ‘nother f’r immoral purp’ses — “ He paused to let the majesty of his words sink in. “But — the hotel is going to let you off.”

“It doesn’t want to get in the papers,” cried Jill fiercely. “Let us off! Huh!”

A great lightness surrounded Amory. He realized that he was safe and only then did he appreciate the full enormity of what he might have incurred.

“However,” continued Olson, “there’s a protective association among the hotels. There’s been too much of this stuff, and we got a ‘rangement with the newspapers so that you get a little free publicity. Not the name of the hotel, but just a line sayin’ that you had a little trouble in ‘lanticCity. See?”

“I see.”

“You’re gettin’ off light — damn light — but — “

“Come on,” said Amory briskly. “Let’s get out of here. We don’t need a valedictory.”

Olson walked through the bathroom and took a cursory glance at Alec’s still form. Then he extinguished the lights and motioned them to follow him. As they walked into the elevator Amory considered a piece of bravado — yielded finally. He reached out and tapped Olson on the arm.

“Would you mind taking off your hat? There’s a lady in the elevator.”

Olson’s hat came off slowly. There was a rather embarrassing two minutes under the lights of the lobby while the night clerk and a few belated guests stared at them curiously; the loudly dressed girl with bent head, the handsome young man with his chin several points aloft; the inference was quite obvious. Then the chill outdoors — where the salt air was fresher and keener still with the first hints of morning.

“You can get one of those taxis and beat it,” said Olson, pointing to the blurred outline of two machines whose drivers were presumably asleep inside.

“Good-by,” said Olson. He reached in his pocket suggestively, but Amory snorted, and, taking the girl’s arm, turned away.

“Where did you tell the driver to go?” she asked as they whirled along the dim street.

“The station.”

“If that guy writes my mother — “

“He won’t. Nobody’ll ever know about this — except our friends and enemies.”

Dawn was breaking over the sea.

“It’s getting blue,” she said.

“It does very well,” agreed Amory critically, and then as an after-thought: “It’s almost breakfast-time — do you want something to eat?”

“Food — “ she said with a cheerful laugh. “Food is what queered the party. We ordered a big supper to be sent up to the room about two o’clock. Alec didn’t give the waiter a tip, so I guess the little bastard snitched.”

Jill’s low spirits seemed to have gone faster than the scattering night. “Let me tell you,” she said emphatically, “when you want to stage that sorta party stay away from liquor, and when you want to get tight stay away from bedrooms.”

“I’ll remember.”

He tapped suddenly at the glass and they drew up at the door of an all-night restaurant.

“Is Alec a great friend of yours?” asked Jill as they perched themselves on high stools inside, and set their elbows on the dingy counter.

“He used to be. He probably won’t want to be any more — and never understand why.”

“It was sorta crazy you takin’ all that blame. Is he pretty important? Kinda more important than you are?”

Amory laughed.

“That remains to be seen,” he answered. “That’s the question.”

THE COLLAPSE OF SEVERAL PILLARS

Two days later back in New York Amory found in a newspaper what he had been searching for — a dozen lines which announced to whom it might concern that Mr. Amory Blaine, who “gave his address” as, etc., had been requested to leave his hotel in Atlantic City because of entertaining in his room a lady not his wife.

Then he started, and his fingers trembled, for directly above was a longer paragraph of which the first words were:

“Mr. and Mrs. Leland R. Connage are announcing the engagement of their daughter, Rosalind, to Mr. J. Dawson Ryder, of Hartford, Connecticut — “

He dropped the paper and lay down on his bed with a frightened, sinking sensation in the pit of his stomach. She was gone, definitely, finally gone. Until now he had half unconsciously cherished the hope deep in his heart that some day she would need him and send for him, cry that it had been a mistake, that her heart ached only for the pain she had caused him. Never again could he find even the sombre luxury of wanting her — not this Rosalind, harder, older — nor any beaten, broken woman that his imagination brought to the door of his forties — Amory had wanted her youth, the fresh radiance of her mind and body, the stuff that she was selling now once and for all. So far as he was concerned, young Rosalind was dead.

A day later came a crisp, terse letter from Mr. Barton in Chicago, which informed him that as three more street-car companies had gone into the hands of receivers he could expect for the present no further remittances. Last of all, on a dazed Sunday night, a telegram told him of Monsignor Darcy’s sudden death in Philadelphia five days before.

He knew then what it was that he had perceived among the curtains of the room in Atlantic City.

CHAPTER 5. The Egotist Becomes a Personage

“A fathom deep in sleep I lie

With old desires, restrained before,

To clamor lifeward with a cry,

As dark flies out the greying door;

And so in quest of creeds to share

I seek assertive day again...

But old monotony is there:

Endless avenues of rain.

Oh, might I rise again!  Might I

Throw off the heat of that old wine,

See the new morning mass the sky

With fairy towers, line on line;

Find each mirage in the high air

A symbol, not a dream again...

But old monotony is there:

Endless avenues of rain.”

Under the glass portcullis of a theatre Amory stood, watching the first great drops of rain splatter down and flatten to dark stains on the sidewalk. The air became gray and opalescent; a solitary light suddenly outlined a window over the way; then another light; then a hundred more danced and glimmered into vision. Under his feet a thick, iron-studded skylight turned yellow; in the street the lamps of the taxi-cabs sent out glistening sheens along the already black pavement. The unwelcome November rain had perversely stolen the day’s last hour and pawned it with that ancient fence, the night.

The silence of the theatre behind him ended with a curious snapping sound, followed by the heavy roaring of a rising crowd and the interlaced clatter of many voices. The matinee was over.

He stood aside, edged a little into the rain to let the throng pass. A small boy rushed out, sniffed in the damp, fresh air and turned up the collar of his coat; came three or four couples in a great hurry; came a further scattering of people whose eyes as they emerged glanced invariably, first at the wet street, then at the rain-filled air, finally at the dismal sky; last a dense, strolling mass that depressed him with its heavy odor compounded of the tobacco smell of the men and the fetid sensuousness of stale powder on women. After the thick crowd came another scattering; a stray half-dozen; a man on crutches; finally the rattling bang of folding seats inside announced that the ushers were at work.

New York seemed not so much awakening as turning over in its bed. Pallid men rushed by, pinching together their coat-collars; a great swarm of tired, magpie girls from a department-store crowded along with shrieks of strident laughter, three to an umbrella; a squad of marching policemen passed, already miraculously protected by oilskin capes.

The rain gave Amory a feeling of detachment, and the numerous unpleasant aspects of city life without money occurred to him in threatening procession. There was the ghastly, stinking crush of the subway — the car cards thrusting themselves at one, leering out like dull bores who grab your arm with another story; the querulous worry as to whether some one isn’t leaning on you; a man deciding not to give his seat to a woman, hating her for it; the woman hating him for not doing it; at worst a squalid phantasmagoria of breath, and old cloth on human bodies and the smells of the food men ate — at best just people — too hot or too cold, tired, worried.

He pictured the rooms where these people lived — where the patterns of the blistered wall-papers were heavy reiterated sunflowers on green and yellow backgrounds, where there were tin bathtubs and gloomy hallways and verdureless, unnamable spaces in back of the buildings; where even love dressed as seduction — a sordid murder around the corner, illicit motherhood in the flat above. And always there was the economical stuffiness of indoor winter, and the long summers, nightmares of perspiration between sticky enveloping walls... dirty restaurants where careless, tired people helped themselves to sugar with their own used coffee-spoons, leaving hard brown deposits in the bowl.

It was not so bad where there were only men or else only women; it was when they were vilely herded that it all seemed so rotten. It was some shame that women gave off at having men see them tired and poor — it was some disgust that men had for women who were tired and poor. It was dirtier than any battle-field he had seen, harder to contemplate than any actual hardship moulded of mire and sweat and danger, it was an atmosphere wherein birth and marriage and death were loathsome, secret things.

He remembered one day in the subway when a delivery boy had brought in a great funeral wreath of fresh flowers, how the smell of it had suddenly cleared the air and given every one in the car a momentary glow.

“I detest poor people,” thought Amory suddenly. “I hate them for being poor. Poverty may have been beautiful once, but it’s rotten now. It’s the ugliest thing in the world. It’s essentially cleaner to be corrupt and rich than it is to be innocent and poor.” He seemed to see again a figure whose significance had once impressed him — a well-dressed young man gazing from a club window on Fifth Avenue and saying something to his companion with a look of utter disgust. Probably, thought Amory, what he said was: “My God! Aren’t people horrible!”

Never before in his life had Amory considered poor people. He thought cynically how completely he was lacking in all human sympathy. O. Henry had found in these people romance, pathos, love, hate — Amory saw only coarseness, physical filth, and stupidity. He made no self-accusations: never any more did he reproach himself for feelings that were natural and sincere. He accepted all his reactions as a part of him, unchangeable, unmoral. This problem of poverty transformed, magnified, attached to some grander, more dignified attitude might some day even be his problem; at present it roused only his profound distaste.

He walked over to Fifth Avenue, dodging the blind, black menace of umbrellas, and standing in front of Delmonico’s hailed an auto-bus. Buttoning his coat closely around him he climbed to the roof, where he rode in solitary state through the thin, persistent rain, stung into alertness by the cool moisture perpetually reborn on his cheek. Somewhere in his mind a conversation began, rather resumed its place in his attention. It was composed not of two voices, but of one, which acted alike as questioner and answerer:

Question. — Well — what’s the situation?

Answer. — That I have about twenty-four dollars to my name.

Q. — You have the Lake Geneva estate.

A. — But I intend to keep it.

Q. — Can you live?

A. — I can’t imagine not being able to. People make money in books and I’ve found that I can always do the things that people do in books. Really they are the only things I can do.

Q. — Be definite.

A. — I don’t know what I’ll do — nor have I much curiosity. To-morrow I’m going to leave New York for good. It’s a bad town unless you’re on top of it.

Q. — Do you want a lot of money?

A. — No. I am merely afraid of being poor.

Q. — Very afraid?

A. — Just passively afraid.

Q. — Where are you drifting?

A. — Don’t ask me!

Q. — Don’t you care?

A. — Rather. I don’t want to commit moral suicide.

Q. — Have you no interests left?

A. — None. I’ve no more virtue to lose. Just as a cooling pot gives off heat, so all through youth and adolescence we give off calories of virtue. That’s what’s called ingenuousness.

Q. — An interesting idea.

A. — That’s why a “good man going wrong” attracts people. They stand around and literally warm themselves at the calories of virtue he gives off. Sarah makes an unsophisticated remark and the faces simper in delight — “How innocent the poor child is!” They’re warming themselves at her virtue. But Sarah sees the simper and never makes that remark again. Only she feels a little colder after that.

Q. — All your calories gone?

A. — All of them. I’m beginning to warm myself at other people’s virtue.

Q. — Are you corrupt?

A. — I think so. I’m not sure. I’m not sure about good and evil at all any more.

Q. — Is that a bad sign in itself?

A. — Not necessarily.

Q. — What would be the test of corruption?

A. — Becoming really insincere — calling myself “not such a bad fellow,” thinking I regretted my lost youth when I only envy the delights of losing it. Youth is like having a big plate of candy. Sentimentalists think they want to be in the pure, simple state they were in before they ate the candy. They don’t. They just want the fun of eating it all over again. The matron doesn’t want to repeat her girlhood — she wants to repeat her honeymoon. I don’t want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.

Q. — Where are you drifting?

This dialogue merged grotesquely into his mind’s most familiar state — a grotesque blending of desires, worries, exterior impressions and physical reactions.

One Hundred and Twenty-seventh Street — or One Hundred and Thirty-seventh Street.... Two and three look alike — no, not much. Seat damp... are clothes absorbing wetness from seat, or seat absorbing dryness from clothes?... Sitting on wet substance gave appendicitis, so Froggy Parker’s mother said. Well, he’d had it — I’ll sue the steamboat company, Beatrice said, and my uncle has a quarter interest — did Beatrice go to heaven?... probably not — He represented Beatrice’s immortality, also love-affairs of numerous dead men who surely had never thought of him... if it wasn’t appendicitis, influenza maybe. What? One Hundred and Twentieth Street? That must have been One Hundred and Twelfth back there. One O Two instead of One Two Seven. Rosalind not like Beatrice, Eleanor like Beatrice, only wilder and brainier. Apartments along here expensive — probably hundred and fifty a month — maybe two hundred. Uncle had only paid hundred a month for whole great big house in Minneapolis. Question — were the stairs on the left or right as you came in? Anyway, in 12 Univee they were straight back and to the left. What a dirty river — want to go down there and see if it’s dirty — French rivers all brown or black, so were Southern rivers. Twenty-four dollars meant four hundred and eighty doughnuts. He could live on it three months and sleep in the park. Wonder where Jill was — Jill Bayne, Fayne, Sayne — what the devil — neck hurts, darned uncomfortable seat. No desire to sleep with Jill, what could Alec see in her? Alec had a coarse taste in women. Own taste the best; Isabelle, Clara, Rosalind, Eleanor, were all-American. Eleanor would pitch, probably southpaw. Rosalind was outfield, wonderful hitter, Clara first base, maybe. Wonder what Humbird’s body looked like now. If he himself hadn’t been bayonet instructor he’d have gone up to line three months sooner, probably been killed. Where’s the darned bell —

The street numbers of Riverside Drive were obscured by the mist and dripping trees from anything but the swiftest scrutiny, but Amory had finally caught sight of one — One Hundred and Twenty-seventh Street. He got off and with no distinct destination followed a winding, descending sidewalk and came out facing the river, in particular a long pier and a partitioned litter of shipyards for miniature craft: small launches, canoes, rowboats, and catboats. He turned northward and followed the shore, jumped a small wire fence and found himself in a great disorderly yard adjoining a dock. The hulls of many boats in various stages of repair were around him; he smelled sawdust and paint and the scarcely distinguishable fiat odor of the Hudson. A man approached through the heavy gloom.

“Hello,” said Amory.

“Got a pass?”

“No. Is this private?”

“This is the Hudson River Sporting and Yacht Club.”

“Oh! I didn’t know. I’m just resting.”

“Well — “ began the man dubiously.

“I’ll go if you want me to.”

The man made non-committal noises in his throat and passed on. Amory seated himself on an overturned boat and leaned forward thoughtfully until his chin rested in his hand.

“Misfortune is liable to make me a damn bad man,” he said slowly.

IN THE DROOPING HOURS

While the rain drizzled on Amory looked futilely back at the stream of his life, all its glitterings and dirty shallows. To begin with, he was still afraid — not physically afraid any more, but afraid of people and prejudice and misery and monotony. Yet, deep in his bitter heart, he wondered if he was after all worse than this man or the next. He knew that he could sophisticate himself finally into saying that his own weakness was just the result of circumstances and environment; that often when he raged at himself as an egotist something would whisper ingratiatingly: “No. Genius!” That was one manifestation of fear, that voice which whispered that he could not be both great and good, that genius was the exact combination of those inexplicable grooves and twists in his mind, that any discipline would curb it to mediocrity. Probably more than any concrete vice or failing Amory despised his own personality — he loathed knowing that to-morrow and the thousand days after he would swell pompously at a compliment and sulk at an ill word like a third-rate musician or a first-class actor. He was ashamed of the fact that very simple and honest people usually distrusted him; that he had been cruel, often, to those who had sunk their personalities in him — several girls, and a man here and there through college, that he had been an evil influence on; people who had followed him here and there into mental adventures from which he alone rebounded unscathed.

Usually, on nights like this, for there had been many lately, he could escape from this consuming introspection by thinking of children and the infinite possibilities of children — he leaned and listened and he heard a startled baby awake in a house across the street and lend a tiny whimper to the still night. Quick as a flash he turned away, wondering with a touch of panic whether something in the brooding despair of his mood had made a darkness in its tiny soul. He shivered. What if some day the balance was overturned, and he became a thing that frightened children and crept into rooms in the dark, approached dim communion with those phantoms who whispered shadowy secrets to the mad of that dark continent upon the moon....

Amory smiled a bit.

“You’re too much wrapped up in yourself,” he heard some one say. And again —

“Get out and do some real work — “

“Stop worrying — “

He fancied a possible future comment of his own.

“Yes — I was perhaps an egotist in youth, but I soon found it made me morbid to think too much about myself.”

Suddenly he felt an overwhelming desire to let himself go to the devil — not to go violently as a gentleman should, but to sink safely and sensuously out of sight. He pictured himself in an adobe house in Mexico, half-reclining on a rug-covered couch, his slender, artistic fingers closed on a cigarette while he listened to guitars strumming melancholy undertones to an age-old dirge of Castile and an olive-skinned, carmine-lipped girl caressed his hair. Here he might live a strange litany, delivered from right and wrong and from the hound of heaven and from every God (except the exotic Mexican one who was pretty slack himself and rather addicted to Oriental scents) — delivered from success and hope and poverty into that long chute of indulgence which led, after all, only to the artificial lake of death.

There were so many places where one might deteriorate pleasantly: Port Said, Shanghai, parts of Turkestan, Constantinople, the South Seas — all lands of sad, haunting music and many odors, where lust could be a mode and expression of life, where the shades of night skies and sunsets would seem to reflect only moods of passion: the colors of lips and poppies.

STILL WEEDING

Once he had been miraculously able to scent evil as a horse detects a broken bridge at night, but the man with the queer feet in Phoebe’s room had diminished to the aura over Jill. His instinct perceived the fetidness of poverty, but no longer ferreted out the deeper evils in pride and sensuality.

There were no more wise men; there were no more heroes; Burne Holiday was sunk from sight as though he had never lived; Monsignor was dead. Amory had grown up to a thousand books, a thousand lies; he had listened eagerly to people who pretended to know, who knew nothing. The mystical reveries of saints that had once filled him with awe in the still hours of night, now vaguely repelled him. The Byrons and Brookes who had defied life from mountain tops were in the end but flaneurs and poseurs, at best mistaking the shadow of courage for the substance of wisdom. The pageantry of his disillusion took shape in a world-old procession of Prophets, Athenians, Martyrs, Saints, Scientists, Don Juans, Jesuits, Puritans, Fausts, Poets, Pacifists; like costumed alumni at a college reunion they streamed before him as their dreams, personalities, and creeds had in turn thrown colored lights on his soul; each had tried to express the glory of life and the tremendous significance of man; each had boasted of synchronizing what had gone before into his own rickety generalities; each had depended after all on the set stage and the convention of the theatre, which is that man in his hunger for faith will feed his mind with the nearest and most convenient food.

Women — of whom he had expected so much; whose beauty he had hoped to transmute into modes of art; whose unfathomable instincts, marvellously incoherent and inarticulate, he had thought to perpetuate in terms of experience — had become merely consecrations to their own posterity. Isabelle, Clara, Rosalind, Eleanor, were all removed by their very beauty, around which men had swarmed, from the possibility of contributing anything but a sick heart and a page of puzzled words to write.

Amory based his loss of faith in help from others on several sweeping syllogisms. Granted that his generation, however bruised and decimated from this Victorian war, were the heirs of progress. Waving aside petty differences of conclusions which, although they might occasionally cause the deaths of several millions of young men, might be explained away — supposing that after all Bernard Shaw and Bernhardi, Bonar Law and Bethmann-Hollweg were mutual heirs of progress if only in agreeing against the ducking of witches — waiving the antitheses and approaching individually these men who seemed to be the leaders, he was repelled by the discrepancies and contradictions in the men themselves.

There was, for example, Thornton Hancock, respected by half the intellectual world as an authority on life, a man who had verified and believed the code he lived by, an educator of educators, an adviser to Presidents — yet Amory knew that this man had, in his heart, leaned on the priest of another religion.

And Monsignor, upon whom a cardinal rested, had moments of strange and horrible insecurity — inexplicable in a religion that explained even disbelief in terms of its own faith: if you doubted the devil it was the devil that made you doubt him. Amory had seen Monsignor go to the houses of stolid philistines, read popular novels furiously, saturate himself in routine, to escape from that horror.

And this priest, a little wiser, somewhat purer, had been, Amory knew, not essentially older than he.

Amory was alone — he had escaped from a small enclosure into a great labyrinth. He was where Goethe was when he began “Faust”; he was where Conrad was when he wrote “Almayer’s Folly.”

Amory said to himself that there were essentially two sorts of people who through natural clarity or disillusion left the enclosure and sought the labyrinth. There were men like Wells and Plato, who had, half unconsciously, a strange, hidden orthodoxy, who would accept for themselves only what could be accepted for all men — incurable romanticists who never, for all their efforts, could enter the labyrinth as stark souls; there were on the other hand sword-like pioneering personalities, Samuel Butler, Renan, Voltaire, who progressed much slower, yet eventually much further, not in the direct pessimistic line of speculative philosophy but concerned in the eternal attempt to attach a positive value to life....

Amory stopped. He began for the first time in his life to have a strong distrust of all generalities and epigrams. They were too easy, too dangerous to the public mind. Yet all thought usually reached the public after thirty years in some such form: Benson and Chesterton had popularized Huysmans and Newman; Shaw had sugar-coated Nietzsche and Ibsen and Schopenhauer. The man in the street heard the conclusions of dead genius through some one else’s clever paradoxes and didactic epigrams.

Life was a damned muddle... a football game with every one off-side and the referee gotten rid of — every one claiming the referee would have been on his side....

Progress was a labyrinth... people plunging blindly in and then rushing wildly back, shouting that they had found it... the invisible king — the elan vital — the principle of evolution... writing a book, starting a war, founding a school....

Amory, even had he not been a selfish man, would have started all inquiries with himself. He was his own best example — sitting in the rain, a human creature of sex and pride, foiled by chance and his own temperament of the balm of love and children, preserved to help in building up the living consciousness of the race.

In self-reproach and loneliness and disillusion he came to the entrance of the labyrinth.

Another dawn flung itself across the river, a belated taxi hurried along the street, its lamps still shining like burning eyes in a face white from a night’s carouse. A melancholy siren sounded far down the river.

MONSIGNOR

Amory kept thinking how Monsignor would have enjoyed his own funeral. It was magnificently Catholic and liturgical. Bishop O’Neill sang solemn high mass and the cardinal gave the final absolutions. Thornton Hancock, Mrs. Lawrence, the British and Italian ambassadors, the papal delegate, and a host of friends and priests were there — yet the inexorable shears had cut through all these threads that Monsignor had gathered into his hands. To Amory it was a haunting grief to see him lying in his coffin, with closed hands upon his purple vestments. His face had not changed, and, as he never knew he was dying, it showed no pain or fear. It was Amory’s dear old friend, his and the others’ — for the church was full of people with daft, staring faces, the most exalted seeming the most stricken.

The cardinal, like an archangel in cope and mitre, sprinkled the holy water; the organ broke into sound; the choir began to sing the Requiem Eternam.

All these people grieved because they had to some extent depended upon Monsignor. Their grief was more than sentiment for the “crack in his voice or a certain break in his walk,” as Wells put it. These people had leaned on Monsignor’s faith, his way of finding cheer, of making religion a thing of lights and shadows, making all light and shadow merely aspects of God. People felt safe when he was near.

Of Amory’s attempted sacrifice had been born merely the full realization of his disillusion, but of Monsignor’s funeral was born the romantic elf who was to enter the labyrinth with him. He found something that he wanted, had always wanted and always would want — not to be admired, as he had feared; not to be loved, as he had made himself believe; but to be necessary to people, to be indispensable; he remembered the sense of security he had found in Burne.

Life opened up in one of its amazing bursts of radiance and Amory suddenly and permanently rejected an old epigram that had been playing listlessly in his mind: “Very few things matter and nothing matters very much.”

On the contrary, Amory felt an immense desire to give people a sense of security.

THE BIG MAN WITH GOGGLES

On the day that Amory started on his walk to Princeton the sky was a colorless vault, cool, high and barren of the threat of rain. It was a gray day, that least fleshly of all weathers; a day of dreams and far hopes and clear visions. It was a day easily associated with those abstract truths and purities that dissolve in the sunshine or fade out in mocking laughter by the light of the moon. The trees and clouds were carved in classical severity; the sounds of the countryside had harmonized to a monotone, metallic as a trumpet, breathless as the Grecian urn.

The day had put Amory in such a contemplative mood that he caused much annoyance to several motorists who were forced to slow up considerably or else run him down. So engrossed in his thoughts was he that he was scarcely surprised at that strange phenomenon — cordiality manifested within fifty miles of Manhattan — when a passing car slowed down beside him and a voice hailed him. He looked up and saw a magnificent Locomobile in which sat two middle-aged men, one of them small and anxious looking, apparently an artificial growth on the other who was large and begoggled and imposing.

“Do you want a lift?” asked the apparently artificial growth, glancing from the corner of his eye at the imposing man as if for some habitual, silent corroboration.

“You bet I do. Thanks.”

The chauffeur swung open the door, and, climbing in, Amory settled himself in the middle of the back seat. He took in his companions curiously. The chief characteristic of the big man seemed to be a great confidence in himself set off against a tremendous boredom with everything around him. That part of his face which protruded under the goggles was what is generally termed “strong”; rolls of not undignified fat had collected near his chin; somewhere above was a wide thin mouth and the rough model for a Roman nose, and, below, his shoulders collapsed without a struggle into the powerful bulk of his chest and belly. He was excellently and quietly dressed. Amory noticed that he was inclined to stare straight at the back of the chauffeur’s head as if speculating steadily but hopelessly some baffling hirsute problem.

The smaller man was remarkable only for his complete submersion in the personality of the other. He was of that lower secretarial type who at forty have engraved upon their business cards: “Assistant to the President,” and without a sigh consecrate the rest of their lives to second-hand mannerisms.

“Going far?” asked the smaller man in a pleasant disinterested way.

“Quite a stretch.”

“Hiking for exercise?”

“No,” responded Amory succinctly, “I’m walking because I can’t afford to ride.”

“Oh.”

Then again:

“Are you looking for work? Because there’s lots of work,” he continued rather testily. “All this talk of lack of work. The West is especially short of labor.” He expressed the West with a sweeping, lateral gesture. Amory nodded politely.

“Have you a trade?”

No — Amory had no trade.

“Clerk, eh?”

No — Amory was not a clerk.

“Whatever your line is,” said the little man, seeming to agree wisely with something Amory had said, “now is the time of opportunity and business openings.” He glanced again toward the big man, as a lawyer grilling a witness glances involuntarily at the jury.

Amory decided that he must say something and for the life of him could think of only one thing to say.

“Of course I want a great lot of money — “

The little man laughed mirthlessly but conscientiously.

“That’s what every one wants nowadays, but they don’t want to work for it.”

“A very natural, healthy desire. Almost all normal people want to be rich without great effort — except the financiers in problem plays, who want to ‘crash their way through.’ Don’t you want easy money?”

“Of course not,” said the secretary indignantly.

“But,” continued Amory disregarding him, “being very poor at present I am contemplating socialism as possibly my forte.”

Both men glanced at him curiously.

“These bomb throwers — “ The little man ceased as words lurched ponderously from the big man’s chest.

“If I thought you were a bomb thrower I’d run you over to the Newark jail. That’s what I think of Socialists.”

Amory laughed.

“What are you,” asked the big man, “one of these parlor Bolsheviks, one of these idealists? I must say I fail to see the difference. The idealists loaf around and write the stuff that stirs up the poor immigrants.”

“Well,” said Amory, “if being an idealist is both safe and lucrative, I might try it.”

“What’s your difficulty? Lost your job?”

“Not exactly, but — well, call it that.”

“What was it?”

“Writing copy for an advertising agency.”

“Lots of money in advertising.”

Amory smiled discreetly.

“Oh, I’ll admit there’s money in it eventually. Talent doesn’t starve any more. Even art gets enough to eat these days. Artists draw your magazine covers, write your advertisements, hash out rag-time for your theatres. By the great commercializing of printing you’ve found a harmless, polite occupation for every genius who might have carved his own niche. But beware the artist who’s an intellectual also. The artist who doesn’t fit — the Rousseau, the Tolstoi, the Samuel Butler, the Amory Blaine — “

“Who’s he?” demanded the little man suspiciously.

“Well,” said Amory, “he’s a — he’s an intellectual personage not very well known at present.”

The little man laughed his conscientious laugh, and stopped rather suddenly as Amory’s burning eyes turned on him.

“What are you laughing at?”

“These intellectual people — “

“Do you know what it means?”

The little man’s eyes twitched nervously.

“Why, it usually means — “

“It always means brainy and well-educated,” interrupted Amory. “It means having an active knowledge of the race’s experience.” Amory decided to be very rude. He turned to the big man. “The young man,” he indicated the secretary with his thumb, and said young man as one says bell-boy, with no implication of youth, “has the usual muddled connotation of all popular words.”

“You object to the fact that capital controls printing?” said the big man, fixing him with his goggles.

“Yes — and I object to doing their mental work for them. It seemed to me that the root of all the business I saw around me consisted in overworking and underpaying a bunch of dubs who submitted to it.”

“Here now,” said the big man, “you’ll have to admit that the laboring man is certainly highly paid — five and six hour days — it’s ridiculous. You can’t buy an honest day’s work from a man in the trades-unions.”

“You’ve brought it on yourselves,” insisted Amory. “You people never make concessions until they’re wrung out of you.”

“What people?”

“Your class; the class I belonged to until recently; those who by inheritance or industry or brains or dishonesty have become the moneyed class.”

“Do you imagine that if that road-mender over there had the money he’d be any more willing to give it up?”

“No, but what’s that got to do with it?”

The older man considered.

“No, I’ll admit it hasn’t. It rather sounds as if it had though.”

“In fact,” continued Amory, “he’d be worse. The lower classes are narrower, less pleasant and personally more selfish — certainly more stupid. But all that has nothing to do with the question.”

“Just exactly what is the question?”

Here Amory had to pause to consider exactly what the question was.

AMORY COINS A PHRASE

“When life gets hold of a brainy man of fair education,” began Amory slowly, “that is, when he marries he becomes, nine times out of ten, a conservative as far as existing social conditions are concerned. He may be unselfish, kind-hearted, even just in his own way, but his first job is to provide and to hold fast. His wife shoos him on, from ten thousand a year to twenty thousand a year, on and on, in an enclosed treadmill that hasn’t any windows. He’s done! Life’s got him! He’s no help! He’s a spiritually married man.”

Amory paused and decided that it wasn’t such a bad phrase.

“Some men,” he continued, “escape the grip. Maybe their wives have no social ambitions; maybe they’ve hit a sentence or two in a ‘dangerous book’ that pleased them; maybe they started on the treadmill as I did and were knocked off. Anyway, they’re the congressmen you can’t bribe, the Presidents who aren’t politicians, the writers, speakers, scientists, statesmen who aren’t just popular grab-bags for a half-dozen women and children.”

“He’s the natural radical?”

“Yes,” said Amory. “He may vary from the disillusioned critic like old Thornton Hancock, all the way to Trotsky. Now this spiritually unmarried man hasn’t direct power, for unfortunately the spiritually married man, as a by-product of his money chase, has garnered in the great newspaper, the popular magazine, the influential weekly — so that Mrs. Newspaper, Mrs. Magazine, Mrs. Weekly can have a better limousine than those oil people across the street or those cement people ‘round the corner.”

“Why not?”

“It makes wealthy men the keepers of the world’s intellectual conscience and, of course, a man who has money under one set of social institutions quite naturally can’t risk his family’s happiness by letting the clamor for another appear in his newspaper.”

“But it appears,” said the big man.

“Where? — in the discredited mediums. Rotten cheap-papered weeklies.”

“All right — go on.”

“Well, my first point is that through a mixture of conditions of which the family is the first, there are these two sorts of brains. One sort takes human nature as it finds it, uses its timidity, its weakness, and its strength for its own ends. Opposed is the man who, being spiritually unmarried, continually seeks for new systems that will control or counteract human nature. His problem is harder. It is not life that’s complicated, it’s the struggle to guide and control life. That is his struggle. He is a part of progress — the spiritually married man is not.”

The big man produced three big cigars, and proffered them on his huge palm. The little man took one, Amory shook his head and reached for a cigarette.

“Go on talking,” said the big man. “I’ve been wanting to hear one of you fellows.”

GOING FASTER

“Modern life,” began Amory again, “changes no longer century by century, but year by year, ten times faster than it ever has before — populations doubling, civilizations unified more closely with other civilizations, economic interdependence, racial questions, and — we’re dawdling along. My idea is that we’ve got to go very much faster.” He slightly emphasized the last words and the chauffeur unconsciously increased the speed of the car. Amory and the big man laughed; the little man laughed, too, after a pause.

“Every child,” said Amory, “should have an equal start. If his father can endow him with a good physique and his mother with some common sense in his early education, that should be his heritage. If the father can’t give him a good physique, if the mother has spent in chasing men the years in which she should have been preparing herself to educate her children, so much the worse for the child. He shouldn’t be artificially bolstered up with money, sent to these horrible tutoring schools, dragged through college... Every boy ought to have an equal start.”

“All right,” said the big man, his goggles indicating neither approval nor objection.

“Next I’d have a fair trial of government ownership of all industries.”

“That’s been proven a failure.”

“No — it merely failed. If we had government ownership we’d have the best analytical business minds in the government working for something besides themselves. We’d have Mackays instead of Burlesons; we’d have Morgans in the Treasury Department; we’d have Hills running interstate commerce. We’d have the best lawyers in the Senate.”

“They wouldn’t give their best efforts for nothing. McAdoo — “

“No,” said Amory, shaking his head. “Money isn’t the only stimulus that brings out the best that’s in a man, even in America.”

“You said a while ago that it was.”

“It is, right now. But if it were made illegal to have more than a certain amount the best men would all flock for the one other reward which attracts humanity — honor.”

The big man made a sound that was very like boo.

“That’s the silliest thing you’ve said yet.”

“No, it isn’t silly. It’s quite plausible. If you’d gone to college you’d have been struck by the fact that the men there would work twice as hard for any one of a hundred petty honors as those other men did who were earning their way through.”

“Kids — child’s play!” scoffed his antagonist.

“Not by a darned sight — unless we’re all children. Did you ever see a grown man when he’s trying for a secret society — or a rising family whose name is up at some club? They’ll jump when they hear the sound of the word. The idea that to make a man work you’ve got to hold gold in front of his eyes is a growth, not an axiom. We’ve done that for so long that we’ve forgotten there’s any other way. We’ve made a world where that’s necessary. Let me tell you” — Amory became emphatic — “if there were ten men insured against either wealth or starvation, and offered a green ribbon for five hours’ work a day and a blue ribbon for ten hours’ work a day, nine out of ten of them would be trying for the blue ribbon. That competitive instinct only wants a badge. If the size of their house is the badge they’ll sweat their heads off for that. If it’s only a blue ribbon, I damn near believe they’ll work just as hard. They have in other ages.”

“I don’t agree with you.”

“I know it,” said Amory nodding sadly. “It doesn’t matter any more though. I think these people are going to come and take what they want pretty soon.”

A fierce hiss came from the little man.

“Machine-guns!”

“Ah, but you’ve taught them their use.”

The big man shook his head.

“In this country there are enough property owners not to permit that sort of thing.”

Amory wished he knew the statistics of property owners and non-property owners; he decided to change the subject.

But the big man was aroused.

“When you talk of ‘taking things away,’ you’re on dangerous ground.”

“How can they get it without taking it? For years people have been stalled off with promises. Socialism may not be progress, but the threat of the red flag is certainly the inspiring force of all reform. You’ve got to be sensational to get attention.”

“Russia is your example of a beneficent violence, I suppose?”

“Quite possibly,” admitted Amory. “Of course, it’s overflowing just as the French Revolution did, but I’ve no doubt that it’s really a great experiment and well worth while.”

“Don’t you believe in moderation?”

“You won’t listen to the moderates, and it’s almost too late. The truth is that the public has done one of those startling and amazing things that they do about once in a hundred years. They’ve seized an idea.”

“What is it?”

“That however the brains and abilities of men may differ, their stomachs are essentially the same.”

THE LITTLE MAN GETS HIS

“If you took all the money in the world,” said the little man with much profundity, “and divided it up in equ — “

“Oh, shut up!” said Amory briskly and, paying no attention to the little man’s enraged stare, he went on with his argument.

“The human stomach — “ he began; but the big man interrupted rather impatiently.

“I’m letting you talk, you know,” he said, “but please avoid stomachs. I’ve been feeling mine all day. Anyway, I don’t agree with one-half you’ve said. Government ownership is the basis of your whole argument, and it’s invariably a beehive of corruption. Men won’t work for blue ribbons, that’s all rot.”

When he ceased the little man spoke up with a determined nod, as if resolved this time to have his say out.

“There are certain things which are human nature,” he asserted with an owl-like look, “which always have been and always will be, which can’t be changed.”

Amory looked from the small man to the big man helplessly.

“Listen to that! That’s what makes me discouraged with progress. Listen to that! I can name offhand over one hundred natural phenomena that have been changed by the will of man — a hundred instincts in man that have been wiped out or are now held in check by civilization. What this man here just said has been for thousands of years the last refuge of the associated mutton-heads of the world. It negates the efforts of every scientist, statesman, moralist, reformer, doctor, and philosopher that ever gave his life to humanity’s service. It’s a flat impeachment of all that’s worth while in human nature. Every person over twenty-five years old who makes that statement in cold blood ought to be deprived of the franchise.”

The little man leaned back against the seat, his face purple with rage. Amory continued, addressing his remarks to the big man.

“These quarter-educated, stale-minded men such as your friend here, who think they think, every question that comes up, you’ll find his type in the usual ghastly muddle. One minute it’s ‘the brutality and inhumanity of these Prussians’ — the next it’s ‘we ought to exterminate the whole German people.’ They always believe that ‘things are in a bad way now,’ but they ‘haven’t any faith in these idealists.’ One minute they call Wilson ‘just a dreamer, not practical’ — a year later they rail at him for making his dreams realities. They haven’t clear logical ideas on one single subject except a sturdy, stolid opposition to all change. They don’t think uneducated people should be highly paid, but they won’t see that if they don’t pay the uneducated people their children are going to be uneducated too, and we’re going round and round in a circle. That — is the great middle class!”

The big man with a broad grin on his face leaned over and smiled at the little man.

“You’re catching it pretty heavy, Garvin; how do you feel?”

The little man made an attempt to smile and act as if the whole matter were so ridiculous as to be beneath notice. But Amory was not through.

“The theory that people are fit to govern themselves rests on this man. If he can be educated to think clearly, concisely, and logically, freed of his habit of taking refuge in platitudes and prejudices and sentimentalisms, then I’m a militant Socialist. If he can’t, then I don’t think it matters much what happens to man or his systems, now or hereafter.”

“I am both interested and amused,” said the big man. “You are very young.”

“Which may only mean that I have neither been corrupted nor made timid by contemporary experience. I possess the most valuable experience, the experience of the race, for in spite of going to college I’ve managed to pick up a good education.”

“You talk glibly.”

“It’s not all rubbish,” cried Amory passionately. “This is the first time in my life I’ve argued Socialism. It’s the only panacea I know. I’m restless. My whole generation is restless. I’m sick of a system where the richest man gets the most beautiful girl if he wants her, where the artist without an income has to sell his talents to a button manufacturer. Even if I had no talents I’d not be content to work ten years, condemned either to celibacy or a furtive indulgence, to give some man’s son an automobile.”

“But, if you’re not sure — “

“That doesn’t matter,” exclaimed Amory. “My position couldn’t be worse. A social revolution might land me on top. Of course I’m selfish. It seems to me I’ve been a fish out of water in too many outworn systems. I was probably one of the two dozen men in my class at college who got a decent education; still they’d let any well-tutored flathead play football and I was ineligible, because some silly old men thought we should all profit by conic sections. I loathed the army. I loathed business. I’m in love with change and I’ve killed my conscience — “

“So you’ll go along crying that we must go faster.”

“That, at least, is true,” Amory insisted. “Reform won’t catch up to the needs of civilization unless it’s made to. A laissez-faire policy is like spoiling a child by saying he’ll turn out all right in the end. He will — if he’s made to.”

“But you don’t believe all this Socialist patter you talk.”

“I don’t know. Until I talked to you I hadn’t thought seriously about it. I wasn’t sure of half of what I said.”

“You puzzle me,” said the big man, “but you’re all alike. They say Bernard Shaw, in spite of his doctrines, is the most exacting of all dramatists about his royalties. To the last farthing.”

“Well,” said Amory, “I simply state that I’m a product of a versatile mind in a restless generation — with every reason to throw my mind and pen in with the radicals. Even if, deep in my heart, I thought we were all blind atoms in a world as limited as a stroke of a pendulum, I and my sort would struggle against tradition; try, at least, to displace old cants with new ones. I’ve thought I was right about life at various times, but faith is difficult. One thing I know. If living isn’t a seeking for the grail it may be a damned amusing game.”

For a minute neither spoke and then the big man asked:

“What was your university?”

“Princeton.”

The big man became suddenly interested; the expression of his goggles altered slightly.

“I sent my son to Princeton.”

“Did you?”

“Perhaps you knew him. His name was Jesse Ferrenby. He was killed last year in France.”

“I knew him very well. In fact, he was one of my particular friends.”

“He was — a — quite a fine boy. We were very close.”

Amory began to perceive a resemblance between the father and the dead son and he told himself that there had been all along a sense of familiarity. Jesse Ferrenby, the man who in college had borne off the crown that he had aspired to. It was all so far away. What little boys they had been, working for blue ribbons —

The car slowed up at the entrance to a great estate, ringed around by a huge hedge and a tall iron fence.

“Won’t you come in for lunch?”

Amory shook his head.

“Thank you, Mr. Ferrenby, but I’ve got to get on.”

The big man held out his hand. Amory saw that the fact that he had known Jesse more than outweighed any disfavor he had created by his opinions. What ghosts were people with which to work! Even the little man insisted on shaking hands.

“Good-by!” shouted Mr. Ferrenby, as the car turned the corner and started up the drive. “Good luck to you and bad luck to your theories.”

“Same to you, sir,” cried Amory, smiling and waving his hand.

“OUT OF THE FIRE, OUT OF THE LITTLE ROOM”

Eight hours from Princeton Amory sat down by the Jersey roadside and looked at the frost-bitten country. Nature as a rather coarse phenomenon composed largely of flowers that, when closely inspected, appeared moth-eaten, and of ants that endlessly traversed blades of grass, was always disillusioning; nature represented by skies and waters and far horizons was more likable. Frost and the promise of winter thrilled him now, made him think of a wild battle between St. Regis and Groton, ages ago, seven years ago — and of an autumn day in France twelve months before when he had lain in tall grass, his platoon flattened down close around him, waiting to tap the shoulders of a Lewis gunner. He saw the two pictures together with somewhat the same primitive exaltation — two games he had played, differing in quality of acerbity, linked in a way that differed them from Rosalind or the subject of labyrinths which were, after all, the business of life.

“I am selfish,” he thought.

“This is not a quality that will change when I ‘see human suffering’ or ‘lose my parents’ or ‘help others.’

“This selfishness is not only part of me. It is the most living part.

“It is by somehow transcending rather than by avoiding that selfishness that I can bring poise and balance into my life.

“There is no virtue of unselfishness that I cannot use. I can make sacrifices, be charitable, give to a friend, endure for a friend, lay down my life for a friend — all because these things may be the best possible expression of myself; yet I have not one drop of the milk of human kindness.”

The problem of evil had solidified for Amory into the problem of sex. He was beginning to identify evil with the strong phallic worship in Brooke and the early Wells. Inseparably linked with evil was beauty — beauty, still a constant rising tumult; soft in Eleanor’s voice, in an old song at night, rioting deliriously through life like superimposed waterfalls, half rhythm, half darkness. Amory knew that every time he had reached toward it longingly it had leered out at him with the grotesque face of evil. Beauty of great art, beauty of all joy, most of all the beauty of women.

After all, it had too many associations with license and indulgence. Weak things were often beautiful, weak things were never good. And in this new loneness of his that had been selected for what greatness he might achieve, beauty must be relative or, itself a harmony, it would make only a discord.

In a sense this gradual renunciation of beauty was the second step after his disillusion had been made complete. He felt that he was leaving behind him his chance of being a certain type of artist. It seemed so much more important to be a certain sort of man.

His mind turned a corner suddenly and he found himself thinking of the Catholic Church. The idea was strong in him that there was a certain intrinsic lack in those to whom orthodox religion was necessary, and religion to Amory meant the Church of Rome. Quite conceivably it was an empty ritual but it was seemingly the only assimilative, traditionary bulwark against the decay of morals. Until the great mobs could be educated into a moral sense some one must cry: “Thou shalt not!” Yet any acceptance was, for the present, impossible. He wanted time and the absence of ulterior pressure. He wanted to keep the tree without ornaments, realize fully the direction and momentum of this new start.

The afternoon waned from the purging good of three o’clock to the golden beauty of four. Afterward he walked through the dull ache of a setting sun when even the clouds seemed bleeding and at twilight he came to a graveyard. There was a dusky, dreamy smell of flowers and the ghost of a new moon in the sky and shadows everywhere. On an impulse he considered trying to open the door of a rusty iron vault built into the side of a hill; a vault washed clean and covered with late-blooming, weepy watery-blue flowers that might have grown from dead eyes, sticky to the touch with a sickening odor.

Amory wanted to feel “William Dayfield, 1864.”

He wondered that graves ever made people consider life in vain. Somehow he could find nothing hopeless in having lived. All the broken columns and clasped hands and doves and angels meant romances. He fancied that in a hundred years he would like having young people speculate as to whether his eyes were brown or blue, and he hoped quite passionately that his grave would have about it an air of many, many years ago. It seemed strange that out of a row of Union soldiers two or three made him think of dead loves and dead lovers, when they were exactly like the rest, even to the yellowish moss.

Long after midnight the towers and spires of Princeton were visible, with here and there a late-burning light — and suddenly out of the clear darkness the sound of bells. As an endless dream it went on; the spirit of the past brooding over a new generation, the chosen youth from the muddled, unchastened world, still fed romantically on the mistakes and half-forgotten dreams of dead statesmen and poets. Here was a new generation, shouting the old cries, learning the old creeds, through a revery of long days and nights; destined finally to go out into that dirty gray turmoil to follow love and pride; a new generation dedicated more than the last to the fear of poverty and the worship of success; grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken....

Amory, sorry for them, was still not sorry for himself — art, politics, religion, whatever his medium should be, he knew he was safe now, free from all hysteria — he could accept what was acceptable, roam, grow, rebel, sleep deep through many nights....

There was no God in his heart, he knew; his ideas were still in riot; there was ever the pain of memory; the regret for his lost youth — yet the waters of disillusion had left a deposit on his soul, responsibility and a love of life, the faint stirring of old ambitions and unrealized dreams. But — oh, Rosalind! Rosalind!...

“It’s all a poor substitute at best,” he said sadly.

And he could not tell why the struggle was worth while, why he had determined to use to the utmost himself and his heritage from the personalities he had passed....

He stretched out his arms to the crystalline, radiant sky.

“I know myself,” he cried, “but that is all.”

THE BEAUTIFUL AND DAMNED

First published in 1922, Fitzgerald’s second novel is a portrait of the Eastern elite during the Jazz Age, set in New York. The Beautiful and the Damned tells the story of Anthony Patch, a socialite heir to a tycoon’s fortune, and his tenuous relationship with his wife Gloria.  The novel also deals with the character’s service in the army and the issue of alcoholism.

Fitzgerald wrote the novel quickly, following editorial suggestions from his friend Edmund Wilson and his editor Max Perkins. It was serialised in Metropolitan Magazine in 1921 and in March of 1922 published in book format.

The first edition

CONTENTS

BOOK ONE

CHAPTER I

ANTHONY PATCH

CHAPTER II

PORTRAIT OF A SIREN

CHAPTER III

THE CONNOISSEUR OF KISSES

BOOK TWO

CHAPTER I

THE RADIANT HOUR

CHAPTER II

SYMPOSIUM

CHAPTER III

THE BROKEN LUTE

BOOK THREE

CHAPTER I

A MATTER OF CIVILIZATION

CHAPTER II

A MATTER OF AESTHETICS

CHAPTER III

NO MATTER!

Fitzgerald’s mother –an avid reader of novels

BOOK ONE

CHAPTER I

ANTHONY PATCH

In 1913, when Anthony Patch was twenty-five, two years were already gone since irony, the Holy Ghost of this later day, had, theoretically at least, descended upon him. Irony was the final polish of the shoe, the ultimate dab of the clothes-brush, a sort of intellectual “There!” — yet at the brink of this story he has as yet gone no further than the conscious stage. As you first see him he wonders frequently whether he is not without honor and slightly mad, a shameful and obscene thinness glistening on the surface of the world like oil on a clean pond, these occasions being varied, of course, with those in which he thinks himself rather an exceptional young man, thoroughly sophisticated, well adjusted to his environment, and somewhat more significant than any one else he knows.

This was his healthy state and it made him cheerful, pleasant, and very attractive to intelligent men and to all women. In this state he considered that he would one day accomplish some quiet subtle thing that the elect would deem worthy and, passing on, would join the dimmer stars in a nebulous, indeterminate heaven half-way between death and immortality. Until the time came for this effort he would be Anthony Patch — not a portrait of a man but a distinct and dynamic personality, opinionated, contemptuous, functioning from within outward — a man who was aware that there could be no honor and yet had honor, who knew the sophistry of courage and yet was brave.

A WORTHY MAN AND HIS GIFTED SON

Anthony drew as much consciousness of social security from being the grandson of Adam J. Patch as he would have had from tracing his line over the sea to the crusaders. This is inevitable; Virginians and Bostonians to the contrary notwithstanding, an aristocracy founded sheerly on money postulates wealth in the particular.

Now Adam J. Patch, more familiarly known as “Cross Patch,” left his father’s farm in Tarrytown early in sixty-one to join a New York cavalry regiment. He came home from the war a major, charged into Wall Street, and amid much fuss, fume, applause, and ill will he gathered to himself some seventy-five million dollars.

This occupied his energies until he was fifty-seven years old. It was then that he determined, after a severe attack of sclerosis, to consecrate the remainder of his life to the moral regeneration of the world. He became a reformer among reformers. Emulating the magnificent efforts of Anthony Comstock, after whom his grandson was named, he levelled a varied assortment of uppercuts and body-blows at liquor, literature, vice, art, patent medicines, and Sunday theatres. His mind, under the influence of that insidious mildew which eventually forms on all but the few, gave itself up furiously to every indignation of the age. From an armchair in the office of his Tarrytown estate he directed against the enormous hypothetical enemy, unrighteousness, a campaign which went on through fifteen years, during which he displayed himself a rabid monomaniac, an unqualified nuisance, and an intolerable bore. The year in which this story opens found him wearying; his campaign had grown desultory; 1861 was creeping up slowly on 1895; his thoughts ran a great deal on the Civil War, somewhat on his dead wife and son, almost infinitesimally on his grandson Anthony.

Early in his career Adam Patch had married an anemic lady of thirty, Alicia Withers, who brought him one hundred thousand dollars and an impeccable entré into the banking circles of New York. Immediately and rather spunkily she had borne him a son and, as if completely devitalized by the magnificence of this performance, she had thenceforth effaced herself within the shadowy dimensions of the nursery. The boy, Adam Ulysses Patch, became an inveterate joiner of clubs, connoisseur of good form, and driver of tandems — at the astonishing age of twenty-six he began his memoirs under the title “New York Society as I Have Seen It.” On the rumor of its conception this work was eagerly bid for among publishers, but as it proved after his death to be immoderately verbose and overpoweringly dull, it never obtained even a private printing.

This Fifth AvenueChesterfield married at twenty-two. His wife was Henrietta Lebrune, the Boston “Society Contralto,” and the single child of the union was, at the request of his grandfather, christened Anthony Comstock Patch. When he went to Harvard, the Comstock dropped out of his name to a nether hell of oblivion and was never heard of thereafter.

Young Anthony had one picture of his father and mother together — so often had it faced his eyes in childhood that it had acquired the impersonality of furniture, but every one who came into his bedroom regarded it with interest. It showed a dandy of the nineties, spare and handsome, standing beside a tall dark lady with a muff and the suggestion of a bustle. Between them was a little boy with long brown curls, dressed in a velvet Lord Fauntleroy suit. This was Anthony at five, the year of his mother’s death.

His memories of the Boston Society Contralto were nebulous and musical. She was a lady who sang, sang, sang, in the music room of their house on Washington Square — sometimes with guests scattered all about her, the men with their arms folded, balanced breathlessly on the edges of sofas, the women with their hands in their laps, occasionally making little whispers to the men and always clapping very briskly and uttering cooing cries after each song — and often she sang to Anthony alone, in Italian or French or in a strange and terrible dialect which she imagined to be the speech of the Southern negro.

His recollections of the gallant Ulysses, the first man in America to roll the lapels of his coat, were much more vivid. After Henrietta Lebrune Patch had “joined another choir,” as her widower huskily remarked from time to time, father and son lived up at grampa’s in Tarrytown, and Ulysses came daily to Anthony’s nursery and expelled pleasant, thick-smelling words for sometimes as much as an hour. He was continually promising Anthony hunting trips and fishing trips and excursions to Atlantic City, “oh, some time soon now”; but none of them ever materialized. One trip they did take; when Anthony was eleven they went abroad, to England and Switzerland, and there in the best hotel in Lucerne his father died with much sweating and grunting and crying aloud for air. In a panic of despair and terror Anthony was brought back to America, wedded to a vague melancholy that was to stay beside him through the rest of his life.

PAST AND PERSON OF THE HERO

At eleven he had a horror of death. Within six impressionable years his parents had died and his grandmother had faded off almost imperceptibly, until, for the first time since her marriage, her person held for one day an unquestioned supremacy over her own drawing room. So to Anthony life was a struggle against death, that waited at every corner. It was as a concession to his hypochondriacal imagination that he formed the habit of reading in bed — it soothed him. He read until he was tired and often fell asleep with the lights still on.

His favorite diversion until he was fourteen was his stamp collection; enormous, as nearly exhaustive as a boy’s could be — his grandfather considered fatuously that it was teaching him geography. So Anthony kept up a correspondence with a half dozen “Stamp and Coin” companies and it was rare that the mail failed to bring him new stamp-books or packages of glittering approval sheets — there was a mysterious fascination in transferring his acquisitions interminably from one book to another. His stamps were his greatest happiness and he bestowed impatient frowns on any one who interrupted him at play with them; they devoured his allowance every month, and he lay awake at night musing untiringly on their variety and many-colored splendor.

At sixteen he had lived almost entirely within himself, an inarticulate boy, thoroughly un-American, and politely bewildered by his contemporaries. The two preceding years had been spent in Europe with a private tutor, who persuaded him that Harvard was the thing; it would “open doors,” it would be a tremendous tonic, it would give him innumerable self-sacrificing and devoted friends. So he went to Harvard — there was no other logical thing to be done with him.

Oblivious to the social system, he lived for a while alone and unsought in a high room in Beck Hall — a slim dark boy of medium height with a shy sensitive mouth. His allowance was more than liberal. He laid the foundations for a library by purchasing from a wandering bibliophile first editions of Swinburne, Meredith, and Hardy, and a yellowed illegible autograph letter of Keats’s, finding later that he had been amazingly overcharged. He became an exquisite dandy, amassed a rather pathetic collection of silk pajamas, brocaded dressing-gowns, and neckties too flamboyant to wear; in this secret finery he would parade before a mirror in his room or lie stretched in satin along his window-seat looking down on the yard and realizing dimly this clamor, breathless and immediate, in which it seemed he was never to have a part.

Curiously enough he found in senior year that he had acquired a position in his class. He learned that he was looked upon as a rather romantic figure, a scholar, a recluse, a tower of erudition. This amused him but secretly pleased him — he began going out, at first a little and then a great deal. He made the Pudding. He drank — quietly and in the proper tradition. It was said of him that had he not come to college so young he might have “done extremely well.” In 1909, when he graduated, he was only twenty years old.

Then abroad again — to Rome this time, where he dallied with architecture and painting in turn, took up the violin, and wrote some ghastly Italian sonnets, supposedly the ruminations of a thirteenth-century monk on the joys of the contemplative life. It became established among his Harvard intimates that he was in Rome, and those of them who were abroad that year looked him up and discovered with him, on many moonlight excursions, much in the city that was older than the Renaissance or indeed than the republic. Maury Noble, from Philadelphia, for instance, remained two months, and together they realized the peculiar charm of Latin women and had a delightful sense of being very young and free in a civilization that was very old and free. Not a few acquaintances of his grandfather’s called on him, and had he so desired he might have been persona grata with the diplomatic set — indeed, he found that his inclinations tended more and more toward conviviality, but that long adolescent aloofness and consequent shyness still dictated to his conduct.

He returned to America in 1912 because of one of his grandfather’s sudden illnesses, and after an excessively tiresome talk with the perpetually convalescent old man he decided to put off until his grandfather’s death the idea of living permanently abroad. After a prolonged search he took an apartment on Fifty-second Street and to all appearances settled down.

In 1913 Anthony Patch’s adjustment of himself to the universe was in process of consummation. Physically, he had improved since his undergraduate days — he was still too thin but his shoulders had widened and his brunette face had lost the frightened look of his freshman year. He was secretly orderly and in person spick and span — his friends declared that they had never seen his hair rumpled. His nose was too sharp; his mouth was one of those unfortunate mirrors of mood inclined to droop perceptibly in moments of unhappiness, but his blue eyes were charming, whether alert with intelligence or half closed in an expression of melancholy humor.

One of those men devoid of the symmetry of feature essential to the Aryan ideal, he was yet, here and there, considered handsome — moreover, he was very clean, in appearance and in reality, with that especial cleanness borrowed from beauty.

THE REPROACHLESS APARTMENT

Fifth and Sixth Avenues, it seemed to Anthony, were the uprights of a gigantic ladder stretching from Washington Square to Central Park. Coming up-town on top of a bus toward Fifty-second Street invariably gave him the sensation of hoisting himself hand by hand on a series of treacherous rungs, and when the bus jolted to a stop at his own rung he found something akin to relief as he descended the reckless metal steps to the sidewalk.

After that, he had but to walk down Fifty-second Street half a block, pass a stodgy family of brownstone houses — and then in a jiffy he was under the high ceilings of his great front room. This was entirely satisfactory. Here, after all, life began. Here he slept, breakfasted, read, and entertained.

The house itself was of murky material, built in the late nineties; in response to the steadily growing need of small apartments each floor had been thoroughly remodelled and rented individually. Of the four apartments Anthony’s, on the second floor, was the most desirable.

The front room had fine high ceilings and three large windows that loomed down pleasantly upon Fifty-second Street. In its appointments it escaped by a safe margin being of any particular period; it escaped stiffness, stuffiness, bareness, and decadence. It smelt neither of smoke nor of incense — it was tall and faintly blue. There was a deep lounge of the softest brown leather with somnolence drifting about it like a haze. There was a high screen of Chinese lacquer chiefly concerned with geometrical fishermen and huntsmen in black and gold; this made a corner alcove for a voluminous chair guarded by an orange-colored standing lamp. Deep in the fireplace a quartered shield was burned to a murky black.

Passing through the dining-room, which, as Anthony took only breakfast at home, was merely a magnificent potentiality, and down a comparatively long hall, one came to the heart and core of the apartment — Anthony’s bedroom and bath.

Both of them were immense. Under the ceilings of the former even the great canopied bed seemed of only average size. On the floor an exotic rug of crimson velvet was soft as fleece on his bare feet. His bathroom, in contrast to the rather portentous character of his bedroom, was gay, bright, extremely habitable and even faintly facetious. Framed around the walls were photographs of four celebrated thespian beauties of the day: Julia Sanderson as “The Sunshine Girl,” Ina Claire as “The Quaker Girl,” Billie Burke as “The Mind-the-Paint Girl,” and Hazel Dawn as “The Pink Lady.” Between Billie Burke and Hazel Dawn hung a print representing a great stretch of snow presided over by a cold and formidable sun — this, claimed Anthony, symbolized the cold shower.

The bathtub, equipped with an ingenious bookholder, was low and large. Beside it a wall wardrobe bulged with sufficient linen for three men and with a generation of neckties. There was no skimpy glorified towel of a carpet — instead, a rich rug, like the one in his bedroom a miracle of softness, that seemed almost to massage the wet foot emerging from the tub….

All in all a room to conjure with — it was easy to see that Anthony dressed there, arranged his immaculate hair there, in fact did everything but sleep and eat there. It was his pride, this bathroom. He felt that if he had a love he would have hung her picture just facing the tub so that, lost in the soothing steamings of the hot water, he might lie and look up at her and muse warmly and sensuously on her beauty.

NOR DOES HE SPIN

The apartment was kept clean by an English servant with the singularly, almost theatrically, appropriate name of Bounds, whose technic was marred only by the fact that he wore a soft collar. Had he been entirely Anthony’s Bounds this defect would have been summarily remedied, but he was also the Bounds of two other gentlemen in the neighborhood. From eight until eleven in the morning he was entirely Anthony’s. He arrived with the mail and cooked breakfast. At nine-thirty he pulled the edge of Anthony’s blanket and spoke a few terse words — Anthony never remembered clearly what they were and rather suspected they were deprecative; then he served breakfast on a card-table in the front room, made the bed and, after asking with some hostility if there was anything else, withdrew.

In the mornings, at least once a week, Anthony went to see his broker. His income was slightly under seven thousand a year, the interest on money inherited from his mother. His grandfather, who had never allowed his own son to graduate from a very liberal allowance, judged that this sum was sufficient for young Anthony’s needs. Every Christmas he sent him a five-hundred-dollar bond, which Anthony usually sold, if possible, as he was always a little, not very, hard up.

The visits to his broker varied from semi-social chats to discussions of the safety of eight per cent investments, and Anthony always enjoyed them. The big trust company building seemed to link him definitely to the great fortunes whose solidarity he respected and to assure him that he was adequately chaperoned by the hierarchy of finance. From these hurried men he derived the same sense of safety that he had in contemplating his grandfather’s money — even more, for the latter appeared, vaguely, a demand loan made by the world to Adam Patch’s own moral righteousness, while this money down-town seemed rather to have been grasped and held by sheer indomitable strengths and tremendous feats of will; in addition, it seemed more definitely and explicitly — money.

Closely as Anthony trod on the heels of his income, he considered it to be enough. Some golden day, of course, he would have many millions; meanwhile he possessed a raison d’etre in the theoretical creation of essays on the popes of the Renaissance. This flashes back to the conversation with his grandfather immediately upon his return from Rome.

He had hoped to find his grandfather dead, but had learned by telephoning from the pier that Adam Patch was comparatively well again — the next day he had concealed his disappointment and gone out to Tarrytown. Five miles from the station his taxicab entered an elaborately groomed drive that threaded a veritable maze of walls and wire fences guarding the estate — this, said the public, was because it was definitely known that if the Socialists had their way, one of the first men they’d assassinate would be old Cross Patch.

Anthony was late and the venerable philanthropist was awaiting him in a glass-walled sun parlor, where he was glancing through the morning papers for the second time. His secretary, Edward Shuttleworth — who before his regeneration had been gambler, saloon-keeper, and general reprobate — ushered Anthony into the room, exhibiting his redeemer and benefactor as though he were displaying a treasure of immense value.

They shook hands gravely. “I’m awfully glad to hear you’re better,”

Anthony said.

The senior Patch, with an air of having seen his grandson only last week, pulled out his watch.

“Train late?” he asked mildly.

It had irritated him to wait for Anthony. He was under the delusion not only that in his youth he had handled his practical affairs with the utmost scrupulousness, even to keeping every engagement on the dot, but also that this was the direct and primary cause of his success.

“It’s been late a good deal this month,” he remarked with a shade of meek accusation in his voice — and then after a long sigh, “Sit down.”

Anthony surveyed his grandfather with that tacit amazement which always attended the sight. That this feeble, unintelligent old man was possessed of such power that, yellow journals to the contrary, the men in the republic whose souls he could not have bought directly or indirectly would scarcely have populated White Plains, seemed as impossible to believe as that he had once been a pink-and-white baby.

The span of his seventy-five years had acted as a magic bellows — the first quarter-century had blown him full with life, and the last had sucked it all back. It had sucked in the cheeks and the chest and the girth of arm and leg. It had tyrannously demanded his teeth, one by one, suspended his small eyes in dark-bluish sacks, tweeked out his hairs, changed him from gray to white in some places, from pink to yellow in others — callously transposing his colors like a child trying over a paintbox. Then through his body and his soul it had attacked his brain. It had sent him night-sweats and tears and unfounded dreads. It had split his intense normality into credulity and suspicion. Out of the coarse material of his enthusiasm it had cut dozens of meek but petulant obsessions; his energy was shrunk to the bad temper of a spoiled child, and for his will to power was substituted a fatuous puerile desire for a land of harps and canticles on earth.

The amenities having been gingerly touched upon, Anthony felt that he was expected to outline his intentions — and simultaneously a glimmer in the old man’s eye warned him against broaching, for the present, his desire to live abroad. He wished that Shuttleworth would have tact enough to leave the room — he detested Shuttleworth — but the secretary had settled blandly in a rocker and was dividing between the two Patches the glances of his faded eyes.

“Now that you’re here you ought to do something,” said his grandfather softly, “accomplish something.”

Anthony waited for him to speak of “leaving something done when you pass on.” Then he made a suggestion:

“I thought — it seemed to me that perhaps I’m best qualified to write — “

Adam Patch winced, visualizing a family poet with a long hair and three mistresses.

“ — history,” finished Anthony.

“History? History of what? The Civil War? The Revolution?”

“Why — no, sir. A history of the Middle Ages.” Simultaneously an idea was born for a history of the Renaissance popes, written from some novel angle. Still, he was glad he had said “Middle Ages.”

“Middle Ages? Why not your own country? Something you know about?”

“Well, you see I’ve lived so much abroad — “

“Why you should write about the Middle Ages, I don’t know. Dark Ages, we used to call ‘em. Nobody knows what happened, and nobody cares, except that they’re over now.” He continued for some minutes on the uselessness of such information, touching, naturally, on the Spanish Inquisition and the “corruption of the monasteries.” Then:

“Do you think you’ll be able to do any work in New York — or do you really intend to work at all?” This last with soft, almost imperceptible, cynicism.

“Why, yes, I do, sir.”

“When’ll you be done?”

“Well, there’ll be an outline, you see — and a lot of preliminary reading.”

“I should think you’d have done enough of that already.”

The conversation worked itself jerkily toward a rather abrupt conclusion, when Anthony rose, looked at his watch, and remarked that he had an engagement with his broker that afternoon. He had intended to stay a few days with his grandfather, but he was tired and irritated from a rough crossing, and quite unwilling to stand a subtle and sanctimonious browbeating. He would come out again in a few days, he said.

Nevertheless, it was due to this encounter that work had come into his life as a permanent idea. During the year that had passed since then, he had made several lists of authorities, he had even experimented with chapter titles and the division of his work into periods, but not one line of actual writing existed at present, or seemed likely ever to exist. He did nothing — and contrary to the most accredited copy-book logic, he managed to divert himself with more than average content.

AFTERNOON

It was October in 1913, midway in a week of pleasant days, with the sunshine loitering in the cross-streets and the atmosphere so languid as to seem weighted with ghostly falling leaves. It was pleasant to sit lazily by the open window finishing a chapter of “Erewhon.” It was pleasant to yawn about five, toss the book on a table, and saunter humming along the hall to his bath.

“To … you … beaut-if-ul lady,”

he was singing as he turned on the tap.

“I raise … my … eyes;

To … you … beaut-if-ul la-a-dy

My … heart … cries — “

He raised his voice to compete with the flood of water pouring into the tub, and as he looked at the picture of Hazel Dawn upon the wall he put an imaginary violin to his shoulder and softly caressed it with a phantom bow. Through his closed lips he made a humming noise, which he vaguely imagined resembled the sound of a violin. After a moment his hands ceased their gyrations and wandered to his shirt, which he began to unfasten. Stripped, and adopting an athletic posture like the tiger-skin man in the advertisement, he regarded himself with some satisfaction in the mirror, breaking off to dabble a tentative foot in the tub. Readjusting a faucet and indulging in a few preliminary grunts, he slid in.

Once accustomed to the temperature of the water he relaxed into a state of drowsy content. When he finished his bath he would dress leisurely and walk down Fifth Avenue to the Ritz, where he had an appointment for dinner with his two most frequent companions, Dick Caramel and Maury Noble. Afterward he and Maury were going to the theatre — Caramel would probably trot home and work on his book, which ought to be finished pretty soon.

Anthony was glad he wasn’t going to work on his book. The notion of sitting down and conjuring up, not only words in which to clothe thoughts but thoughts worthy of being clothed — the whole thing was absurdly beyond his desires.

Emerging from his bath he polished himself with the meticulous attention of a bootblack. Then he wandered into the bedroom, and whistling the while a weird, uncertain melody, strolled here and there buttoning, adjusting, and enjoying the warmth of the thick carpet on his feet.

He lit a cigarette, tossed the match out the open top of the window, then paused in his tracks with the cigarette two inches from his mouth — which fell faintly ajar. His eyes were focussed upon a spot of brilliant color on the roof of a house farther down the alley.

It was a girl in a red negligé, silk surely, drying her hair by the still hot sun of late afternoon. His whistle died upon the stiff air of the room; he walked cautiously another step nearer the window with a sudden impression that she was beautiful. Sitting on the stone parapet beside her was a cushion the same color as her garment and she was leaning both arms upon it as she looked down into the sunny areaway, where Anthony could hear children playing.

He watched her for several minutes. Something was stirred in him, something not accounted for by the warm smell of the afternoon or the triumphant vividness of red. He felt persistently that the girl was beautiful — then of a sudden he understood: it was her distance, not a rare and precious distance of soul but still distance, if only in terrestrial yards. The autumn air was between them, and the roofs and the blurred voices. Yet for a not altogether explained second, posing perversely in time, his emotion had been nearer to adoration than in the deepest kiss he had ever known.

He finished his dressing, found a black bow tie and adjusted it carefully by the three-sided mirror in the bathroom. Then yielding to an impulse he walked quickly into the bedroom and again looked out the window. The woman was standing up now; she had tossed her hair back and he had a full view of her. She was fat, full thirty-five, utterly undistinguished. Making a clicking noise with his mouth he returned to the bathroom and reparted his hair.

“To … you … beaut-if-ul lady,”

he sang lightly,

“I raise … my … eyes — “

Then with a last soothing brush that left an iridescent surface of sheer gloss he left his bathroom and his apartment and walked down Fifth Avenue to the Ritz-Carlton.

THREE MEN

At seven Anthony and his friend Maury Noble are sitting at a corner table on the cool roof. Maury Noble is like nothing so much as a large slender and imposing cat. His eyes are narrow and full of incessant, protracted blinks. His hair is smooth and flat, as though it has been licked by a possible — and, if so, Herculean — mother-cat. During Anthony’s time at Harvard he had been considered the most unique figure in his class, the most brilliant, the most original — smart, quiet and among the saved.

This is the man whom Anthony considers his best friend. This is the only man of all his acquaintance whom he admires and, to a bigger extent than he likes to admit to himself, envies.

They are glad to see each other now — their eyes are full of kindness as each feels the full effect of novelty after a short separation. They are drawing a relaxation from each other’s presence, a new serenity; Maury Noble behind that fine and absurdly catlike face is all but purring. And Anthony, nervous as a will-o’-the-wisp, restless — he is at rest now.

They are engaged in one of those easy short-speech conversations that only men under thirty or men under great stress indulge in.

ANTHONY: Seven o’clock. Where’s the Caramel? (Impatiently.) I wish he’d finish that interminable novel. I’ve spent more time hungry —  —

MAURY: He’s got a new name for it. “The Demon Lover “ — not bad, eh?

ANTHONY: (interested) “The Demon Lover”? Oh “woman wailing” — No — not a bit bad! Not bad at all — d’you think?

MAURY: Rather good. What time did you say?

ANTHONY: Seven.

MAURY:(His eyes narrowing — not unpleasantly, but to express a faint disapproval) Drove me crazy the other day.

ANTHONY: How?

MAURY: That habit of taking notes.

ANTHONY: Me, too. Seems I’d said something night before that he considered material but he’d forgotten it — so he had at me. He’d say “Can’t you try to concentrate?” And I’d say “You bore me to tears. How do I remember?”

(MAURY laughs noiselessly, by a sort of bland and appreciative widening of his features.)

MAURY: Dick doesn’t necessarily see more than any one else. He merely can put down a larger proportion of what he sees.

ANTHONY: That rather impressive talent —  —

MAURY: Oh, yes. Impressive!

ANTHONY: And energy — ambitious, well-directed energy. He’s so entertaining — he’s so tremendously stimulating and exciting. Often there’s something breathless in being with him.

MAURY: Oh, yes. (Silence, and then:)

ANTHONY: (With his thin, somewhat uncertain face at its most convinced) But not indomitable energy. Some day, bit by bit, it’ll blow away, and his rather impressive talent with it, and leave only a wisp of a man, fretful and egotistic and garrulous.

MAURY: (With laughter) Here we sit vowing to each other that little Dick sees less deeply into things than we do. And I’ll bet he feels a measure of superiority on his side — creative mind over merely critical mind and all that.

ANTHONY: Oh, yes. But he’s wrong. He’s inclined to fall for a million silly enthusiasms. If it wasn’t that he’s absorbed in realism and therefore has to adopt the garments of the cynic he’d be — he’d be credulous as a college religious leader. He’s an idealist. Oh, yes. He thinks he’s not, because he’s rejected Christianity. Remember him in college? just swallow every writer whole, one after another, ideas, technic, and characters, Chesterton, Shaw, Wells, each one as easily as the last.

MAURY:(Still considering his own last observation) I remember.

ANTHONY: It’s true. Natural born fetich-worshipper. Take art —

MAURY: Let’s order. He’ll be —

ANTHONY: Sure. Let’s order. I told him —

MAURY: Here he comes. Look — he’s going to bump that waiter. (He lifts his finger as a signal — lifts it as though it were a soft and friendly claw.) Here y’are, Caramel.

A NEW VOICE: (Fiercely) Hello, Maury. Hello, Anthony Comstock Patch.

How is old Adam’s grandson? Débutantes still after you, eh?

In person RICHARD CARAMEL is short and fair — he is to be bald at thirty-five. He has yellowish eyes — one of them startlingly clear, the other opaque as a muddy pool — and a bulging brow like a funny-paper baby. He bulges in other places — his paunch bulges, prophetically, his words have an air of bulging from his mouth, even his dinner coat pockets bulge, as though from contamination, with a dog-eared collection of time-tables, programmes, and miscellaneous scraps — on these he takes his notes with great screwings up of his unmatched yellow eyes and motions of silence with his disengaged left hand.

When he reaches the table he shakes hands with ANTHONY and MAURY. He is one of those men who invariably shake hands, even with people whom they have seen an hour before.

ANTHONY: Hello, Caramel. Glad you’re here. We needed a comic relief.

MAURY: You’re late. Been racing the postman down the block? We’ve been clawing over your character.

DICK: (Fixing ANTHONY eagerly with the bright eye) What’d you say? Tell me and I’ll write it down. Cut three thousand words out of Part One this afternoon.

MAURY: Noble aesthete. And I poured alcohol into my stomach.

DICK: I don’t doubt it. I bet you two have been sitting here for an hour talking about liquor.

ANTHONY: We never pass out, my beardless boy.

MAURY: We never go home with ladies we meet when we’re lit.

ANTHONY: All in our parties are characterized by a certain haughty distinction.

DICK: The particularly silly sort who boast about being “tanks”! Trouble is you’re both in the eighteenth century. School of the Old English Squire. Drink quietly until you roll under the table. Never have a good time. Oh, no, that isn’t done at all.

ANTHONY: This from Chapter Six, I’ll bet.

DICK: Going to the theatre?

MAURY: Yes. We intend to spend the evening doing some deep thinking over of life’s problems. The thing is tersely called “The Woman.” I presume that she will “pay.”

ANTHONY: My God! Is that what it is? Let’s go to the Follies again.

MAURY: I’m tired of it. I’ve seen it three times. (To DICK:) The first time, we went out after Act One and found a most amazing bar. When we came back we entered the wrong theatre.

ANTHONY: Had a protracted dispute with a scared young couple we thought were in our seats.

DICK: (As though talking to himself) I think — that when I’ve done another novel and a play, and maybe a book of short stories, I’ll do a musical comedy.

MAURY: I know — with intellectual lyrics that no one will listen to. And all the critics will groan and grunt about “Dear old Pinafore.” And I shall go on shining as a brilliantly meaningless figure in a meaningless world.

DICK: (Pompously) Art isn’t meaningless.

MAURY: It is in itself. It isn’t in that it tries to make life less so.

ANTHONY: In other words, Dick, you’re playing before a grand stand peopled with ghosts.

MAURY: Give a good show anyhow.

ANTHONY:(To MAURY) On the contrary, I’d feel that it being a meaningless world, why write? The very attempt to give it purpose is purposeless.

DICK: Well, even admitting all that, be a decent pragmatist and grant a poor man the instinct to live. Would you want every one to accept that sophistic rot?

ANTHONY: Yeah, I suppose so.

MAURY: No, sir! I believe that every one in America but a selected thousand should be compelled to accept a very rigid system of morals — Roman Catholicism, for instance. I don’t complain of conventional morality. I complain rather of the mediocre heretics who seize upon the findings of sophistication and adopt the pose of a moral freedom to which they are by no means entitled by their intelligences.

(Here the soup arrives and what MAURY might have gone on to say is lost for all time.)

NIGHT

Afterward they visited a ticket speculator and, at a price, obtained seats for a new musical comedy called “High Jinks.” In the foyer of the theatre they waited a few moments to see the first-night crowd come in. There were opera cloaks stitched of myriad, many-colored silks and furs; there were jewels dripping from arms and throats and ear-tips of white and rose; there were innumerable broad shimmers down the middles of innumerable silk hats; there were shoes of gold and bronze and red and shining black; there were the high-piled, tight-packed coiffures of many women and the slick, watered hair of well-kept men — most of all there was the ebbing, flowing, chattering, chuckling, foaming, slow-rolling wave effect of this cheerful sea of people as to-night it poured its glittering torrent into the artificial lake of laughter….

After the play they parted — Maury was going to a dance at Sherry’s,

Anthony homeward and to bed.

He found his way slowly over the jostled evening mass of Times Square, which the chariot race and its thousand satellites made rarely beautiful and bright and intimate with carnival. Faces swirled about him, a kaleidoscope of girls, ugly, ugly as sin — too fat, too lean, yet floating upon this autumn air as upon their own warm and passionate breaths poured out into the night. Here, for all their vulgarity, he thought, they were faintly and subtly mysterious. He inhaled carefully, swallowing into his lungs perfume and the not unpleasant scent of many cigarettes. He caught the glance of a dark young beauty sitting alone in a closed taxicab. Her eyes in the half-light suggested night and violets, and for a moment he stirred again to that half-forgotten remoteness of the afternoon.

Two young Jewish men passed him, talking in loud voices and craning their necks here and there in fatuous supercilious glances. They were dressed in suits of the exaggerated tightness then semi-fashionable; their turned over collars were notched at the Adam’s apple; they wore gray spats and carried gray gloves on their cane handles.

Passed a bewildered old lady borne along like a basket of eggs between two men who exclaimed to her of the wonders of Times Square — explained them so quickly that the old lady, trying to be impartially interested, waved her head here and there like a piece of wind-worried old orange-peel. Anthony heard a snatch of their conversation:

“There’s the Astor, mama!”

“Look! See the chariot race sign —  — “

“There’s where we were to-day. No, there!”

“Good gracious! …”

“You should worry and grow thin like a dime.” He recognized the current witticism of the year as it issued stridently from one of the pairs at his elbow.

“And I says to him, I says —  — “

The soft rush of taxis by him, and laughter, laughter hoarse as a crow’s, incessant and loud, with the rumble of the subways underneath — and over all, the revolutions of light, the growings and recedings of light — light dividing like pearls — forming and reforming in glittering bars and circles and monstrous grotesque figures cut amazingly on the sky.

He turned thankfully down the hush that blew like a dark wind out of a cross-street, passed a bakery-restaurant in whose windows a dozen roast chickens turned over and over on an automatic spit. From the door came a smell that was hot, doughy, and pink. A drug-store next, exhaling medicines, spilt soda water and a pleasant undertone from the cosmetic counter; then a Chinese laundry, still open, steamy and stifling, smelling folded and vaguely yellow. All these depressed him; reaching Sixth Avenue he stopped at a corner cigar store and emerged feeling better — the cigar store was cheerful, humanity in a navy blue mist, buying a luxury ….

Once in his apartment he smoked a last cigarette, sitting in the dark by his open front window. For the first time in over a year he found himself thoroughly enjoying New York. There was a rare pungency in it certainly, a quality almost Southern. A lonesome town, though. He who had grown up alone had lately learned to avoid solitude. During the past several months he had been careful, when he had no engagement for the evening, to hurry to one of his clubs and find some one. Oh, there was a loneliness here —  —

His cigarette, its smoke bordering the thin folds of curtain with rims of faint white spray, glowed on until the clock in St. Anne’s down the street struck one with a querulous fashionable beauty. The elevated, half a quiet block away, sounded a rumble of drums — and should he lean from his window he would see the train, like an angry eagle, breasting the dark curve at the corner. He was reminded of a fantastic romance he had lately read in which cities had been bombed from aerial trains, and for a moment he fancied that Washington Square had declared war on Central Park and that this was a north-bound menace loaded with battle and sudden death. But as it passed the illusion faded; it diminished to the faintest of drums — then to a far-away droning eagle.

There were the bells and the continued low blur of auto horns from Fifth Avenue, but his own street was silent and he was safe in here from all the threat of life, for there was his door and the long hall and his guardian bedroom — safe, safe! The arc-light shining into his window seemed for this hour like the moon, only brighter and more beautiful than the moon.

A FLASH-BACK IN PARADISE

Beauty, who was born anew every hundred years, sat in a sort of outdoor waiting room through which blew gusts of white wind and occasionally a breathless hurried star. The stars winked at her intimately as they went by and the winds made a soft incessant flurry in her hair. She was incomprehensible, for, in her, soul and spirit were one — the beauty of her body was the essence of her soul. She was that unity sought for by philosophers through many centuries. In this outdoor waiting room of winds and stars she had been sitting for a hundred years, at peace in the contemplation of herself.

It became known to her, at length, that she was to be born again. Sighing, she began a long conversation with a voice that was in the white wind, a conversation that took many hours and of which I can give only a fragment here.

BEAUTY: (Her lips scarcely stirring, her eyes turned, as always, inward upon herself) Whither shall I journey now?

THE VOICE: To a new country — a land you have never seen before.

BEAUTY: (Petulantly) I loathe breaking into these new civilizations.

How long a stay this time?

THE VOICE: Fifteen years.

BEAUTY: And what’s the name of the place?

THE VOICE: It is the most opulent, most gorgeous land on earth — a land whose wisest are but little wiser than its dullest; a land where the rulers have minds like little children and the law-givers believe in Santa Claus; where ugly women control strong men —  —

BEAUTY: (In astonishment) What?

THE VOICE: (Very much depressed) Yes, it is truly a melancholy spectacle. Women with receding chins and shapeless noses go about in broad daylight saying “Do this!” and “Do that!” and all the men, even those of great wealth, obey implicitly their women to whom they refer sonorously either as “Mrs. So-and-so” or as “the wife.”

BEAUTY: But this can’t be true! I can understand, of course, their obedience to women of charm — but to fat women? to bony women? to women with scrawny cheeks?

THE VOICE: Even so.

BEAUTY: What of me? What chance shall I have?

THE VOICE: It will be “harder going,” if I may borrow a phrase.

BEAUTY: (After a dissatisfied pause) Why not the old lands, the land of grapes and soft-tongued men or the land of ships and seas?

THE VOICE: It’s expected that they’ll be very busy shortly.

BEAUTY: Oh!

THE VOICE: Your life on earth will be, as always, the interval between two significant glances in a mundane mirror.

BEAUTY: What will I be? Tell me?

THE VOICE: At first it was thought that you would go this time as an actress in the motion pictures but, after all, it’s not advisable. You will be disguised during your fifteen years as what is called a “susciety gurl.”

BEAUTY: What’s that?

(There is a new sound in the wind which must for our purposes be interpreted as THE VOICE scratching its head.)

THE VOICE: (At length) It’s a sort of bogus aristocrat.

BEAUTY: Bogus? What is bogus?

THE VOICE: That, too, you will discover in this land. You will find much that is bogus. Also, you will do much that is bogus.

BEAUTY: (Placidly) It all sounds so vulgar.

THE VOICE: Not half as vulgar as it is. You will be known during your fifteen years as a ragtime kid, a flapper, a jazz-baby, and a baby vamp. You will dance new dances neither more nor less gracefully than you danced the old ones.

BEAUTY: (In a whisper) Will I be paid?

THE VOICE: Yes, as usual — in love.

BEAUTY: (With a faint laugh which disturbs only momentarily the immobility of her lips) And will I like being called a jazz-baby?

THE VOICE: (Soberly) You will love it….

(The dialogue ends here, with BEAUTY still sitting quietly, the stars pausing in an ecstasy of appreciation, the wind, white and gusty, blowing through her hair.

All this took place seven years before ANTHONY sat by the front windows of his apartment and listened to the chimes of St. Anne’s.)

CHAPTER II

PORTRAIT OF A SIREN

Crispness folded down upon New York a month later, bringing November and the three big football games and a great fluttering of furs along Fifth Avenue. It brought, also, a sense of tension to the city, and suppressed excitement. Every morning now there were invitations in Anthony’s mail. Three dozen virtuous females of the first layer were proclaiming their fitness, if not their specific willingness, to bear children unto three dozen millionaires. Five dozen virtuous females of the second layer were proclaiming not only this fitness, but in addition a tremendous undaunted ambition toward the first three dozen young men, who were of course invited to each of the ninety-six parties — as were the young lady’s group of family friends, acquaintances, college boys, and eager young outsiders. To continue, there was a third layer from the skirts of the city, from Newark and the Jersey suburbs up to bitter Connecticut and the ineligible sections of Long Island — and doubtless contiguous layers down to the city’s shoes: Jewesses were coming out into a society of Jewish men and women, from Riverside to the Bronx, and looking forward to a rising young broker or jeweller and a kosher wedding; Irish girls were casting their eyes, with license at last to do so, upon a society of young Tammany politicians, pious undertakers, and grown-up choirboys.

And, naturally, the city caught the contagious air of entré — the working girls, poor ugly souls, wrapping soap in the factories and showing finery in the big stores, dreamed that perhaps in the spectacular excitement of this winter they might obtain for themselves the coveted male — as in a muddled carnival crowd an inefficient pickpocket may consider his chances increased. And the chimneys commenced to smoke and the subway’s foulness was freshened. And the actresses came out in new plays and the publishers came out with new books and the Castles came out with new dances. And the railroads came out with new schedules containing new mistakes instead of the old ones that the commuters had grown used to….

The City was coming out!

Anthony, walking along Forty-second Street one afternoon under a steel-gray sky, ran unexpectedly into Richard Caramel emerging from the Manhattan Hotel barber shop. It was a cold day, the first definitely cold day, and Caramel had on one of those knee-length, sheep-lined coats long worn by the working men of the Middle West, that were just coming into fashionable approval. His soft hat was of a discreet dark brown, and from under it his clear eye flamed like a topaz. He stopped Anthony enthusiastically, slapping him on the arms more from a desire to keep himself warm than from playfulness, and, after his inevitable hand shake, exploded into sound.

“Cold as the devil — Good Lord, I’ve been working like the deuce all day till my room got so cold I thought I’d get pneumonia. Darn landlady economizing on coal came up when I yelled over the stairs for her for half an hour. Began explaining why and all. God! First she drove me crazy, then I began to think she was sort of a character, and took notes while she talked — so she couldn’t see me, you know, just as though I were writing casually — “

He had seized Anthony’s arm and walking him briskly up Madison Avenue.

“Where to?”

“Nowhere in particular.”

“Well, then what’s the use?” demanded Anthony.

They stopped and stared at each other, and Anthony wondered if the cold made his own face as repellent as Dick Caramel’s, whose nose was crimson, whose bulging brow was blue, whose yellow unmatched eyes were red and watery at the rims. After a moment they began walking again.

“Done some good work on my novel.” Dick was looking and talking emphatically at the sidewalk. “But I have to get out once in a while.” He glanced at Anthony apologetically, as though craving encouragement.

“I have to talk. I guess very few people ever really think, I mean sit down and ponder and have ideas in sequence. I do my thinking in writing or conversation. You’ve got to have a start, sort of — something to defend or contradict — don’t you think?”

Anthony grunted and withdrew his arm gently.

“I don’t mind carrying you, Dick, but with that coat — “

“I mean,” continued Richard Caramel gravely, “that on paper your first paragraph contains the idea you’re going to damn or enlarge on. In conversation you’ve got your vis-à-vis’s last statement — but when you simply ponder, why, your ideas just succeed each other like magic-lantern pictures and each one forces out the last.”

They passed Forty-fifth Street and slowed down slightly. Both of them lit cigarettes and blew tremendous clouds of smoke and frosted breath into the air.

“Let’s walk up to the Plaza and have an egg-nog,” suggested Anthony. “Do you good. Air’ll get the rotten nicotine out of your lungs. Come on — I’ll let you talk about your book all the way.”

“I don’t want to if it bores you. I mean you needn’t do it as a favor.”

The words tumbled out in haste, and though he tried to keep his face

casual it screwed up uncertainly. Anthony was compelled to protest:

“Bore me? I should say not!”

“Got a cousin — “ began Dick, but Anthony interrupted by stretching out his arms and breathing forth a low cry of exultation.

“Good weather!” he exclaimed, “isn’t it? Makes me feel about ten. I mean it makes me feel as I should have felt when I was ten. Murderous! Oh, God! one minute it’s my world, and the next I’m the world’s fool. To-day it’s my world and everything’s easy, easy. Even Nothing is easy!”

“Got a cousin up at the Plaza. Famous girl. We can go up and meet her. She lives there in the winter — has lately anyway — with her mother and father.”

“Didn’t know you had cousins in New York.”

“Her name’s Gloria. She’s from home — Kansas City. Her mother’s a practising Bilphist, and her father’s quite dull but a perfect gentleman.”

“What are they? Literary material?”

“They try to be. All the old man does is tell me he just met the most wonderful character for a novel. Then he tells me about some idiotic friend of his and then he says: ‘There’s a character for you! Why don’t you write him up? Everybody’d be interested in him.’ Or else he tells me about Japan or Paris, or some other very obvious place, and says: ‘Why don’t you write a story about that place? That’d be a wonderful setting for a story!’“

“How about the girl?” inquired Anthony casually, “Gloria — Gloria what?”

“Gilbert. Oh, you’ve heard of her — Gloria Gilbert. Goes to dances at colleges — all that sort of thing.”

“I’ve heard her name.”

“Good-looking — in fact damned attractive.”

They reached Fiftieth Street and turned over toward the Avenue.

“I don’t care for young girls as a rule,” said Anthony, frowning.

This was not strictly true. While it seemed to him that the average debutante spent every hour of her day thinking and talking about what the great world had mapped out for her to do during the next hour, any girl who made a living directly on her prettiness interested him enormously.

“Gloria’s darn nice — not a brain in her head.”

Anthony laughed in a one-syllabled snort.

“By that you mean that she hasn’t a line of literary patter.”

“No, I don’t.”

“Dick, you know what passes as brains in a girl for you. Earnest young women who sit with you in a corner and talk earnestly about life. The kind who when they were sixteen argued with grave faces as to whether kissing was right or wrong — and whether it was immoral for freshmen to drink beer.”

Richard Caramel was offended. His scowl crinkled like crushed paper.

“No — “ he began, but Anthony interrupted ruthlessly.

“Oh, yes; kind who just at present sit in corners and confer on the latest Scandinavian Dante available in English translation.”

Dick turned to him, a curious falling in his whole countenance. His question was almost an appeal.

“What’s the matter with you and Maury? You talk sometimes as though I were a sort of inferior.”

Anthony was confused, but he was also cold and a little uncomfortable, so he took refuge in attack.

“I don’t think your brains matter, Dick.”

“Of course they matter!” exclaimed Dick angrily. “What do you mean? Why don’t they matter?”

“You might know too much for your pen.”

“I couldn’t possibly.”

“I can imagine,” insisted Anthony, “a man knowing too much for his talent to express. Like me. Suppose, for instance, I have more wisdom than you, and less talent. It would tend to make me inarticulate. You, on the contrary, have enough water to fill the pail and a big enough pail to hold the water.”

“I don’t follow you at all,” complained Dick in a crestfallen tone. Infinitely dismayed, he seemed to bulge in protest. He was staring intently at Anthony and caroming off a succession of passers-by, who reproached him with fierce, resentful glances.

“I simply mean that a talent like Wells’s could carry the intelligence of a Spencer. But an inferior talent can only be graceful when it’s carrying inferior ideas. And the more narrowly you can look at a thing the more entertaining you can be about it.”

Dick considered, unable to decide the exact degree of criticism intended by Anthony’s remarks. But Anthony, with that facility which seemed so frequently to flow from him, continued, his dark eyes gleaming in his thin face, his chin raised, his voice raised, his whole physical being raised:

“Say I am proud and sane and wise — an Athenian among Greeks. Well, I might fail where a lesser man would succeed. He could imitate, he could adorn, he could be enthusiastic, he could be hopefully constructive. But this hypothetical me would be too proud to imitate, too sane to be enthusiastic, too sophisticated to be Utopian, too Grecian to adorn.”

“Then you don’t think the artist works from his intelligence?”

“No. He goes on improving, if he can, what he imitates in the way of style, and choosing from his own interpretation of the things around him what constitutes material. But after all every writer writes because it’s his mode of living. Don’t tell me you like this ‘Divine Function of the Artist’ business?”

“I’m not accustomed even to refer to myself as an artist.”

“Dick,” said Anthony, changing his tone, “I want to beg your pardon.”

“Why?”

“For that outburst. I’m honestly sorry. I was talking for effect.”

Somewhat mollified, Dick rejoined:

“I’ve often said you were a Philistine at heart.”

It was a crackling dusk when they turned in under the white façade of the Plaza and tasted slowly the foam and yellow thickness of an egg-nog. Anthony looked at his companion. Richard Caramel’s nose and brow were slowly approaching a like pigmentation; the red was leaving the one, the blue deserting the other. Glancing in a mirror, Anthony was glad to find that his own skin had not discolored. On the contrary, a faint glow had kindled in his cheeks — he fancied that he had never looked so well.

“Enough for me,” said Dick, his tone that of an athlete in training. “I want to go up and see the Gilberts. Won’t you come?”

“Why — yes. If you don’t dedicate me to the parents and dash off in the corner with Dora.”

“Not Dora — Gloria.”

A clerk announced them over the phone, and ascending to the tenth floor they followed a winding corridor and knocked at 1088. The door was answered by a middle-aged lady — Mrs. Gilbert herself.

“How do you do?” She spoke in the conventional American lady-lady language. “Well, I’m awfully glad to see you — “

Hasty interjections by Dick, and then:

“Mr. Pats? Well, do come in, and leave your coat there.” She pointed to a chair and changed her inflection to a deprecatory laugh full of minute gasps. “This is really lovely — lovely. Why, Richard, you haven’t been here for so long — no! — no!” The latter monosyllables served half as responses, half as periods, to some vague starts from Dick. “Well, do sit down and tell me what you’ve been doing.”

One crossed and recrossed; one stood and bowed ever so gently; one smiled again and again with helpless stupidity; one wondered if she would ever sit down at length one slid thankfully into a chair and settled for a pleasant call.

“I suppose it’s because you’ve been busy — as much as anything else,” smiled Mrs. Gilbert somewhat ambiguously. The “as much as anything else” she used to balance all her more rickety sentences. She had two other ones: “at least that’s the way I look at it” and “pure and simple” — these three, alternated, gave each of her remarks an air of being a general reflection on life, as though she had calculated all causes and, at length, put her finger on the ultimate one.

Richard Caramel’s face, Anthony saw, was now quite normal. The brow and cheeks were of a flesh color, the nose politely inconspicuous. He had fixed his aunt with the bright-yellow eye, giving her that acute and exaggerated attention that young males are accustomed to render to all females who are of no further value.

“Are you a writer too, Mr. Pats? … Well, perhaps we can all bask in

Richard’s fame.” — Gentle laughter led by Mrs. Gilbert.

“Gloria’s out,” she said, with an air of laying down an axiom from which she would proceed to derive results. “She’s dancing somewhere. Gloria goes, goes, goes. I tell her I don’t see how she stands it. She dances all afternoon and all night, until I think she’s going to wear herself to a shadow. Her father is very worried about her.”

She smiled from one to the other. They both smiled.

She was composed, Anthony perceived, of a succession of semicircles and parabolas, like those figures that gifted folk make on the typewriter: head, arms, bust, hips, thighs, and ankles were in a bewildering tier of roundnesses. Well ordered and clean she was, with hair of an artificially rich gray; her large face sheltered weather-beaten blue eyes and was adorned with just the faintest white mustache.

“I always say,” she remarked to Anthony, “that Richard is an ancient soul.”

In the tense pause that followed, Anthony considered a pun — something about Dick having been much walked upon.

“We all have souls of different ages,” continued Mrs. Gilbert radiantly; “at least that’s what I say.”

“Perhaps so,” agreed Anthony with an air of quickening to a hopeful idea. The voice bubbled on:

“Gloria has a very young soul — irresponsible, as much as anything else.

She has no sense of responsibility.”

“She’s sparkling, Aunt Catherine,” said Richard pleasantly. “A sense of responsibility would spoil her. She’s too pretty.”

“Well,” confessed Mrs. Gilbert, “all I know is that she goes and goes and goes — “

The number of goings to Gloria’s discredit was lost in the rattle of the door-knob as it turned to admit Mr. Gilbert.

He was a short man with a mustache resting like a small white cloud beneath his undistinguished nose. He had reached the stage where his value as a social creature was a black and imponderable negative. His ideas were the popular delusions of twenty years before; his mind steered a wabbly and anaemic course in the wake of the daily newspaper editorials. After graduating from a small but terrifying Western university, he had entered the celluloid business, and as this required only the minute measure of intelligence he brought to it, he did well for several years — in fact until about 1911, when he began exchanging contracts for vague agreements with the moving picture industry. The moving picture industry had decided about 1912 to gobble him up, and at this time he was, so to speak, delicately balanced on its tongue. Meanwhile he was supervising manager of the Associated Mid-western Film Materials Company, spending six months of each year in New York and the remainder in Kansas City and St. Louis. He felt credulously that there was a good thing coming to him — and his wife thought so, and his daughter thought so too.

He disapproved of Gloria: she stayed out late, she never ate her meals, she was always in a mix-up — he had irritated her once and she had used toward him words that he had not thought were part of her vocabulary. His wife was easier. After fifteen years of incessant guerilla warfare he had conquered her — it was a war of muddled optimism against organized dulness, and something in the number of “yes’s” with which he could poison a conversation had won him the victory.

“Yes-yes-yes-yes,” he would say, “yes-yes-yes-yes. Let me see. That was the summer of — let me see — ninety-one or ninety-two — Yes-yes-yes-yes —  — “

Fifteen years of yes’s had beaten Mrs. Gilbert. Fifteen further years of that incessant unaffirmative affirmative, accompanied by the perpetual flicking of ash-mushrooms from thirty-two thousand cigars, had broken her. To this husband of hers she made the last concession of married life, which is more complete, more irrevocable, than the first — she listened to him. She told herself that the years had brought her tolerance — actually they had slain what measure she had ever possessed of moral courage.

She introduced him to Anthony.

“This is Mr. Pats,” she said.

The young man and the old touched flesh; Mr. Gilbert’s hand was soft, worn away to the pulpy semblance of a squeezed grapefruit. Then husband and wife exchanged greetings — he told her it had grown colder out; he said he had walked down to a news-stand on Forty-fourth Street for a Kansas City paper. He had intended to ride back in the bus but he had found it too cold, yes, yes, yes, yes, too cold.

Mrs. Gilbert added flavor to his adventure by being impressed with his courage in braving the harsh air.

“Well, you are spunky!” she exclaimed admiringly. “You are spunky. I wouldn’t have gone out for anything.”

Mr. Gilbert with true masculine impassivity disregarded the awe he had excited in his wife. He turned to the two young men and triumphantly routed them on the subject of the weather. Richard Caramel was called on to remember the month of November in Kansas. No sooner had the theme been pushed toward him, however, than it was violently fished back to be lingered over, pawed over, elongated, and generally devitalized by its sponsor.

The immemorial thesis that the days somewhere were warm but the nights very pleasant was successfully propounded and they decided the exact distance on an obscure railroad between two points that Dick had inadvertently mentioned. Anthony fixed Mr. Gilbert with a steady stare and went into a trance through which, after a moment, Mrs. Gilbert’s smiling voice penetrated:

“It seems as though the cold were damper here — it seems to eat into my bones.”

As this remark, adequately yessed, had been on the tip of Mr. Gilbert’s tongue, he could not be blamed for rather abruptly changing the subject.

“Where’s Gloria?”

“She ought to be here any minute.”

“Have you met my daughter, Mr. —  — ?”

“Haven’t had the pleasure. I’ve heard Dick speak of her often.”

“She and Richard are cousins.”

“Yes?” Anthony smiled with some effort. He was not used to the society of his seniors, and his mouth was stiff from superfluous cheerfulness. It was such a pleasant thought about Gloria and Dick being cousins. He managed within the next minute to throw an agonized glance at his friend.

Richard Caramel was afraid they’d have to toddle off.

Mrs. Gilbert was tremendously sorry.

Mr. Gilbert thought it was too bad.

Mrs. Gilbert had a further idea — something about being glad they’d come, anyhow, even if they’d only seen an old lady ‘way too old to flirt with them. Anthony and Dick evidently considered this a sly sally, for they laughed one bar in three-four time.

Would they come again soon?

“Oh, yes.”

Gloria would be awfully sorry!

“Good-by —  — “

“Good-by —  — “

Smiles!

Smiles!

Bang!

Two disconsolate young men walking down the tenth-floor corridor of the

Plaza in the direction of the elevator.

A LADY’S LEGS

Behind Maury Noble’s attractive indolence, his irrelevance and his easy mockery, lay a surprising and relentless maturity of purpose. His intention, as he stated it in college, had been to use three years in travel, three years in utter leisure — and then to become immensely rich as quickly as possible.

His three years of travel were over. He had accomplished the globe with an intensity and curiosity that in any one else would have seemed pedantic, without redeeming spontaneity, almost the self-editing of a human Baedeker; but, in this case, it assumed an air of mysterious purpose and significant design — as though Maury Noble were some predestined anti-Christ, urged by a preordination to go everywhere there was to go along the earth and to see all the billions of humans who bred and wept and slew each other here and there upon it.

Back in America, he was sallying into the search for amusement with the same consistent absorption. He who had never taken more than a few cocktails or a pint of wine at a sitting, taught himself to drink as he would have taught himself Greek — like Greek it would be the gateway to a wealth of new sensations, new psychic states, new reactions in joy or misery.

His habits were a matter for esoteric speculation. He had three rooms in a bachelor apartment on Forty-forth street, but he was seldom to be found there. The telephone girl had received the most positive instructions that no one should even have his ear without first giving a name to be passed upon. She had a list of half a dozen people to whom he was never at home, and of the same number to whom he was always at home. Foremost on the latter list were Anthony Patch and Richard Caramel.

Maury’s mother lived with her married son in Philadelphia, and there Maury went usually for the week-ends, so one Saturday night when Anthony, prowling the chilly streets in a fit of utter boredom, dropped in at the Molton Arms he was overjoyed to find that Mr. Noble was at home.

His spirits soared faster than the flying elevator. This was so good, so extremely good, to be about to talk to Maury — who would be equally happy at seeing him. They would look at each other with a deep affection just behind their eyes which both would conceal beneath some attenuated raillery. Had it been summer they would have gone out together and indolently sipped two long Tom Collinses, as they wilted their collars and watched the faintly diverting round of some lazy August cabaret. But it was cold outside, with wind around the edges of the tall buildings and December just up the street, so better far an evening together under the soft lamplight and a drink or two of Bushmill’s, or a thimbleful of Maury’s Grand Marnier, with the books gleaming like ornaments against the walls, and Maury radiating a divine inertia as he rested, large and catlike, in his favorite chair.

There he was! The room closed about Anthony, warmed him. The glow of that strong persuasive mind, that temperament almost Oriental in its outward impassivity, warmed Anthony’s restless soul and brought him a peace that could be likened only to the peace a stupid woman gives. One must understand all — else one must take all for granted. Maury filled the room, tigerlike, godlike. The winds outside were stilled; the brass candlesticks on the mantel glowed like tapers before an altar.

“What keeps you here to-day?” Anthony spread himself over a yielding sofa and made an elbow-rest among the pillows.

“Just been here an hour. Tea dance — and I stayed so late I missed my train to Philadelphia.”

“Strange to stay so long,” commented Anthony curiously.

“Rather. What’d you do?”

“Geraldine. Little usher at Keith’s. I told you about her.”

“Oh!”

“Paid me a call about three and stayed till five. Peculiar little soul — she gets me. She’s so utterly stupid.”

Maury was silent.

“Strange as it may seem,” continued Anthony, “so far as I’m concerned, and even so far as I know, Geraldine is a paragon of virtue.”

He had known her a month, a girl of nondescript and nomadic habits. Someone had casually passed her on to Anthony, who considered her amusing and rather liked the chaste and fairylike kisses she had given him on the third night of their acquaintance, when they had driven in a taxi through the Park. She had a vague family — a shadowy aunt and uncle who shared with her an apartment in the labyrinthine hundreds. She was company, familiar and faintly intimate and restful. Further than that he did not care to experiment — not from any moral compunction, but from a dread of allowing any entanglement to disturb what he felt was the growing serenity of his life.

“She has two stunts,” he informed Maury; “one of them is to get her hair over her eyes some way and then blow it out, and the other is to say ‘You cra-a-azy!’ when some one makes a remark that’s over her head. It fascinates me. I sit there hour after hour, completely intrigued by the maniacal symptoms she finds in my imagination.”

Maury stirred in his chair and spoke.

“Remarkable that a person can comprehend so little and yet live in such a complex civilization. A woman like that actually takes the whole universe in the most matter-of-fact way. From the influence of Rousseau to the bearing of the tariff rates on her dinner, the whole phenomenon is utterly strange to her. She’s just been carried along from an age of spearheads and plunked down here with the equipment of an archer for going into a pistol duel. You could sweep away the entire crust of history and she’d never know the difference.”

“I wish our Richard would write about her.”

“Anthony, surely you don’t think she’s worth writing about.”

“As much as anybody,” he answered, yawning. “You know I was thinking to-day that I have a great confidence in Dick. So long as he sticks to people and not to ideas, and as long as his inspirations come from life and not from art, and always granting a normal growth, I believe he’ll be a big man.”

“I should think the appearance of the black note-book would prove that he’s going to life.”

Anthony raised himself on his elbow and answered eagerly:

“He tries to go to life. So does every author except the very worst, but after all most of them live on predigested food. The incident or character may be from life, but the writer usually interprets it in terms of the last book he read. For instance, suppose he meets a sea captain and thinks he’s an original character. The truth is that he sees the resemblance between the sea captain and the last sea captain Dana created, or who-ever creates sea captains, and therefore he knows how to set this sea captain on paper. Dick, of course, can set down any consciously picturesque, character-like character, but could he accurately transcribe his own sister?”

Then they were off for half an hour on literature.

“A classic,” suggested Anthony, “is a successful book that has survived the reaction of the next period or generation. Then it’s safe, like a style in architecture or furniture. It’s acquired a picturesque dignity to take the place of its fashion….”

After a time the subject temporarily lost its tang. The interest of the two young men was not particularly technical. They were in love with generalities. Anthony had recently discovered Samuel Butler and the brisk aphorisms in the note-book seemed to him the quintessence of criticism. Maury, his whole mind so thoroughly mellowed by the very hardness of his scheme of life, seemed inevitably the wiser of the two, yet in the actual stuff of their intelligences they were not, it seemed, fundamentally different.

They drifted from letters to the curiosities of each other’s day.

“Whose tea was it?”

“People named Abercrombie.”

“Why’d you stay late? Meet a luscious débutante?”

“Yes.”

“Did you really?” Anthony’s voice lifted in surprise.

“Not a débutante exactly. Said she came out two winters ago in Kansas

City.”

“Sort of left-over?”

“No,” answered Maury with some amusement, “I think that’s the last thing

I’d say about her. She seemed — well, somehow the youngest person there.”

“Not too young to make you miss a train.”

“Young enough. Beautiful child.”

Anthony chuckled in his one-syllable snort.

“Oh, Maury, you’re in your second childhood. What do you mean by beautiful?”

Maury gazed helplessly into space.

“Well, I can’t describe her exactly — except to say that she was beautiful. She was — tremendously alive. She was eating gum-drops.”

“What!”

“It was a sort of attenuated vice. She’s a nervous kind — said she always ate gum-drops at teas because she had to stand around so long in one place.”

“What’d you talk about — Bergson? Bilphism? Whether the one-step is immoral?”

Maury was unruffled; his fur seemed to run all ways.

“As a matter of fact we did talk on Bilphism. Seems her mother’s a

Bilphist. Mostly, though, we talked about legs.”

Anthony rocked in glee.

“My God! Whose legs?”

“Hers. She talked a lot about hers. As though they were a sort of choice bric-à-brac. She aroused a great desire to see them.”

“What is she — a dancer?”

“No, I found she was a cousin of Dick’s.”

Anthony sat upright so suddenly that the pillow he released stood on end like a live thing and dove to the floor.

“Name’s Gloria Gilbert?” he cried.

“Yes. Isn’t she remarkable?”

“I’m sure I don’t know — but for sheer dulness her father — “

“Well,” interrupted Maury with implacable conviction, “her family may be as sad as professional mourners but I’m inclined to think that she’s a quite authentic and original character. The outer signs of the cut-and-dried Yale prom girl and all that — but different, very emphatically different.”

“Go on, go on!” urged Anthony. “Soon as Dick told me she didn’t have a brain in her head I knew she must be pretty good.”

“Did he say that?”

“Swore to it,” said Anthony with another snorting laugh.

“Well, what he means by brains in a woman is — “

“I know,” interrupted Anthony eagerly, “he means a smattering of literary misinformation.”

“That’s it. The kind who believes that the annual moral let-down of the country is a very good thing or the kind who believes it’s a very ominous thing. Either pince-nez or postures. Well, this girl talked about legs. She talked about skin too — her own skin. Always her own. She told me the sort of tan she’d like to get in the summer and how closely she usually approximated it.”

“You sat enraptured by her low alto?”

“By her low alto! No, by tan! I began thinking about tan. I began to think what color I turned when I made my last exposure about two years ago. I did use to get a pretty good tan. I used to get a sort of bronze, if I remember rightly.”

Anthony retired into the cushions, shaken with laughter.

“She’s got you going — oh, Maury! Maury the Connecticut life-saver. The human nutmeg. Extra! Heiress elopes with coast-guard because of his luscious pigmentation! Afterward found to be Tasmanian strain in his family!”

Maury sighed; rising he walked to the window and raised the shade.

“Snowing hard.”

Anthony, still laughing quietly to himself, made no answer.

“Another winter.” Maury’s voice from the window was almost a whisper. “We’re growing old, Anthony. I’m twenty-seven, by God! Three years to thirty, and then I’m what an undergraduate calls a middle-aged man.”

Anthony was silent for a moment.

“You are old, Maury,” he agreed at length. “The first signs of a very dissolute and wabbly senescence — you have spent the afternoon talking about tan and a lady’s legs.”

Maury pulled down the shade with a sudden harsh snap.

“Idiot!” he cried, “that from you! Here I sit, young Anthony, as I’ll sit for a generation or more and watch such gay souls as you and Dick and Gloria Gilbert go past me, dancing and singing and loving and hating one another and being moved, being eternally moved. And I am moved only by my lack of emotion. I shall sit and the snow will come — oh, for a Caramel to take notes — and another winter and I shall be thirty and you and Dick and Gloria will go on being eternally moved and dancing by me and singing. But after you’ve all gone I’ll be saying things for new Dicks to write down, and listening to the disillusions and cynicisms and emotions of new Anthonys — yes, and talking to new Glorias about the tans of summers yet to come.”

The firelight flurried up on the hearth. Maury left the window, stirred the blaze with a poker, and dropped a log upon the andirons. Then he sat back in his chair and the remnants of his voice faded in the new fire that spit red and yellow along the bark.

“After all, Anthony, it’s you who are very romantic and young. It’s you who are infinitely more susceptible and afraid of your calm being broken. It’s me who tries again and again to be moved — let myself go a thousand times and I’m always me. Nothing — quite — stirs me.

“Yet,” he murmured after another long pause, “there was something about that little girl with her absurd tan that was eternally old — like me.”

TURBULENCE

Anthony turned over sleepily in his bed, greeting a patch of cold sun on his counterpane, crisscrossed with the shadows of the leaded window. The room was full of morning. The carved chest in the corner, the ancient and inscrutable wardrobe, stood about the room like dark symbols of the obliviousness of matter; only the rug was beckoning and perishable to his perishable feet, and Bounds, horribly inappropriate in his soft collar, was of stuff as fading as the gauze of frozen breath he uttered. He was close to the bed, his hand still lowered where he had been jerking at the upper blanket, his dark-brown eyes fixed imperturbably upon his master.

“Bows!” muttered the drowsy god. “Thachew, Bows?”

“It’s I, sir.”

Anthony moved his head, forced his eyes wide, and blinked triumphantly.

“Bounds.”

“Yes, sir?”

“Can you get off — yeow-ow-oh-oh-oh God! — “ Anthony yawned insufferably and the contents of his brain seemed to fall together in a dense hash. He made a fresh start.

“Can you come around about four and serve some tea and sandwiches or something?”

“Yes, sir.”

Anthony considered with chilling lack of inspiration. “Some sandwiches,” he repeated helplessly, “oh, some cheese sandwiches and jelly ones and chicken and olive, I guess. Never mind breakfast.”

The strain of invention was too much. He shut his eyes wearily, let his head roll to rest inertly, and quickly relaxed what he had regained of muscular control. Out of a crevice of his mind crept the vague but inevitable spectre of the night before — but it proved in this case to be nothing but a seemingly interminable conversation with Richard Caramel, who had called on him at midnight; they had drunk four bottles of beer and munched dry crusts of bread while Anthony listened to a reading of the first part of “The Demon Lover.”

— Came a voice now after many hours. Anthony disregarded it, as sleep closed over him, folded down upon him, crept up into the byways of his mind.

Suddenly he was awake, saying: “What?”

“For how many, sir?” It was still Bounds, standing patient and motionless at the foot of the bed — Bounds who divided his manner among three gentlemen.

“How many what?”

“I think, sir, I’d better know how many are coming. I’ll have to plan for the sandwiches, sir.”

“Two,” muttered Anthony huskily; “lady and a gentleman.”

Bounds said, “Thank you, sir,” and moved away, bearing with him his humiliating reproachful soft collar, reproachful to each of the three gentlemen, who only demanded of him a third.

After a long time Anthony arose and drew an opalescent dressing grown of brown and blue over his slim pleasant figure. With a last yawn he went into the bathroom, and turning on the dresser light (the bathroom had no outside exposure) he contemplated himself in the mirror with some interest. A wretched apparition, he thought; he usually thought so in the morning — sleep made his face unnaturally pale. He lit a cigarette and glanced through several letters and the morning Tribune.

An hour later, shaven and dressed, he was sitting at his desk looking at a small piece of paper he had taken out of his wallet. It was scrawled with semi-legible memoranda: “See Mr. Howland at five. Get hair-cut. See about Rivers’ bill. Go book-store.”

— And under the last: “Cash in bank, $690 (crossed out), $612 (crossed out), $607.”

Finally, down at the bottom and in a hurried scrawl: “Dick and Gloria

Gilbert for tea.”

This last item brought him obvious satisfaction. His day, usually a jelly-like creature, a shapeless, spineless thing, had attained Mesozoic structure. It was marching along surely, even jauntily, toward a climax, as a play should, as a day should. He dreaded the moment when the backbone of the day should be broken, when he should have met the girl at last, talked to her, and then bowed her laughter out the door, returning only to the melancholy dregs in the teacups and the gathering staleness of the uneaten sandwiches.

There was a growing lack of color in Anthony’s days. He felt it constantly and sometimes traced it to a talk he had had with Maury Noble a month before. That anything so ingenuous, so priggish, as a sense of waste should oppress him was absurd, but there was no denying the fact that some unwelcome survival of a fetish had drawn him three weeks before down to the public library, where, by the token of Richard Caramel’s card, he had drawn out half a dozen books on the Italian Renaissance. That these books were still piled on his desk in the original order of carriage, that they were daily increasing his liabilities by twelve cents, was no mitigation of their testimony. They were cloth and morocco witnesses to the fact of his defection. Anthony had had several hours of acute and startling panic.

In justification of his manner of living there was first, of course, The Meaninglessness of Life. As aides and ministers, pages and squires, butlers and lackeys to this great Khan there were a thousand books glowing on his shelves, there was his apartment and all the money that was to be his when the old man up the river should choke on his last morality. From a world fraught with the menace of débutantes and the stupidity of many Geraldines he was thankfully delivered — rather should he emulate the feline immobility of Maury and wear proudly the culminative wisdom of the numbered generations.

Over and against these things was something which his brain persistently analyzed and dealt with as a tiresome complex but which, though logically disposed of and bravely trampled under foot, had sent him out through the soft slush of late November to a library which had none of the books he most wanted. It is fair to analyze Anthony as far as he could analyze himself; further than that it is, of course, presumption. He found in himself a growing horror and loneliness. The idea of eating alone frightened him; in preference he dined often with men he detested. Travel, which had once charmed him, seemed at length, unendurable, a business of color without substance, a phantom chase after his own dream’s shadow.

— If I am essentially weak, he thought, I need work to do, work to do. It worried him to think that he was, after all, a facile mediocrity, with neither the poise of Maury nor the enthusiasm of Dick. It seemed a tragedy to want nothing — and yet he wanted something, something. He knew in flashes what it was — some path of hope to lead him toward what he thought was an imminent and ominous old age.

After cocktails and luncheon at the University Club Anthony felt better. He had run into two men from his class at Harvard, and in contrast to the gray heaviness of their conversation his life assumed color. Both of them were married: one spent his coffee time in sketching an extra-nuptial adventure to the bland and appreciative smiles of the other. Both of them, he thought, were Mr. Gilberts in embryo; the number of their “yes’s” would have to be quadrupled, their natures crabbed by twenty years — then they would be no more than obsolete and broken machines, pseudo-wise and valueless, nursed to an utter senility by the women they had broken.

Ah, he was more than that, as he paced the long carpet in the lounge after dinner, pausing at the window to look into the harried street. He was Anthony Patch, brilliant, magnetic, the heir of many years and many men. This was his world now — and that last strong irony he craved lay in the offing.

With a stray boyishness he saw himself a power upon the earth; with his grandfather’s money he might build his own pedestal and be a Talleyrand, a Lord Verulam. The clarity of his mind, its sophistication, its versatile intelligence, all at their maturity and dominated by some purpose yet to be born would find him work to do. On this minor his dream faded — work to do: he tried to imagine himself in Congress rooting around in the litter of that incredible pigsty with the narrow and porcine brows he saw pictured sometimes in the rotogravure sections of the Sunday newspapers, those glorified proletarians babbling blandly to the nation the ideas of high school seniors! Little men with copy-book ambitions who by mediocrity had thought to emerge from mediocrity into the lustreless and unromantic heaven of a government by the people — and the best, the dozen shrewd men at the top, egotistic and cynical, were content to lead this choir of white ties and wire collar-buttons in a discordant and amazing hymn, compounded of a vague confusion between wealth as a reward of virtue and wealth as a proof of vice, and continued cheers for God, the Constitution, and the Rocky Mountains!

Lord Verulam! Talleyrand!

Back in his apartment the grayness returned. His cocktails had died, making him sleepy, somewhat befogged and inclined to be surly. Lord Verulam — he? The very thought was bitter. Anthony Patch with no record of achievement, without courage, without strength to be satisfied with truth when it was given him. Oh, he was a pretentious fool, making careers out of cocktails and meanwhile regretting, weakly and secretly, the collapse of an insufficient and wretched idealism. He had garnished his soul in the subtlest taste and now he longed for the old rubbish. He was empty, it seemed, empty as an old bottle —

The buzzer rang at the door. Anthony sprang up and lifted the tube to his ear. It was Richard Caramel’s voice, stilted and facetious:

“Announcing Miss Gloria Gilbert.”

“How do you do?” he said, smiling and holding the door ajar.

Dick bowed.

“Gloria, this is Anthony.”

“Well!” she cried, holding out a little gloved hand. Under her fur coat her dress was Alice-blue, with white lace crinkled stiffly about her throat.

“Let me take your things.”

Anthony stretched out his arms and the brown mass of fur tumbled into them.

“Thanks.”

“What do you think of her, Anthony?” Richard Caramel demanded barbarously. “Isn’t she beautiful?”

“Well!” cried the girl defiantly — withal unmoved.

She was dazzling — alight; it was agony to comprehend her beauty in a glance. Her hair, full of a heavenly glamour, was gay against the winter color of the room.

Anthony moved about, magician-like, turning the mushroom lamp into an orange glory. The stirred fire burnished the copper andirons on the hearth —

“I’m a solid block of ice,” murmured Gloria casually, glancing around with eyes whose irises were of the most delicate and transparent bluish white. “What a slick fire! We found a place where you could stand on an iron-bar grating, sort of, and it blew warm air up at you — but Dick wouldn’t wait there with me. I told him to go on alone and let me be happy.”

Conventional enough this. She seemed talking for her own pleasure, without effort. Anthony, sitting at one end of the sofa, examined her profile against the foreground of the lamp: the exquisite regularity of nose and upper lip, the chin, faintly decided, balanced beautifully on a rather short neck. On a photograph she must have been completely classical, almost cold — but the glow of her hair and cheeks, at once flushed and fragile, made her the most living person he had ever seen.

“… Think you’ve got the best name I’ve heard,” she was saying, still apparently to herself; her glance rested on him a moment and then flitted past him — to the Italian bracket-lamps clinging like luminous yellow turtles at intervals along the walls, to the books row upon row, then to her cousin on the other side. “Anthony Patch. Only you ought to look sort of like a horse, with a long narrow face — and you ought to be in tatters.”

“That’s all the Patch part, though. How should Anthony look?”

“You look like Anthony,” she assured him seriously — he thought she had scarcely seen him — “rather majestic,” she continued, “and solemn.”

Anthony indulged in a disconcerted smile.

“Only I like alliterative names,” she went on, “all except mine. Mine’s too flamboyant. I used to know two girls named Jinks, though, and just think if they’d been named anything except what they were named — Judy Jinks and Jerry Jinks. Cute, what? Don’t you think?” Her childish mouth was parted, awaiting a rejoinder.

“Everybody in the next generation,” suggested Dick, “will be named Peter or Barbara — because at present all the piquant literary characters are named Peter or Barbara.”

Anthony continued the prophecy:

“Of course Gladys and Eleanor, having graced the last generation of heroines and being at present in their social prime, will be passed on to the next generation of shop-girls — “

“Displacing Ella and Stella,” interrupted Dick.

“And Pearl and Jewel,” Gloria added cordially, “and Earl and Elmer and

Minnie.”

“And then I’ll come along,” remarked Dick, “and picking up the obsolete name, Jewel, I’ll attach it to some quaint and attractive character and it’ll start its career all over again.”

Her voice took up the thread of subject and wove along with faintly upturning, half-humorous intonations for sentence ends — as though defying interruption — and intervals of shadowy laughter. Dick had told her that Anthony’s man was named Bounds — she thought that was wonderful! Dick had made some sad pun about Bounds doing patchwork, but if there was one thing worse than a pun, she said, it was a person who, as the inevitable come-back to a pun, gave the perpetrator a mock-reproachful look.

“Where are you from?” inquired Anthony. He knew, but beauty had rendered him thoughtless.

“Kansas City, Missouri.”

“They put her out the same time they barred cigarettes.”

“Did they bar cigarettes? I see the hand of my holy grandfather.”

“He’s a reformer or something, isn’t he?”

“I blush for him.”

“So do I,” she confessed. “I detest reformers, especially the sort who try to reform me.”

“Are there many of those?”

“Dozens. It’s ‘Oh, Gloria, if you smoke so many cigarettes you’ll lose your pretty complexion!’ and ‘Oh, Gloria, why don’t you marry and settle down?’“

Anthony agreed emphatically while he wondered who had had the temerity to speak thus to such a personage.

“And then,” she continued, “there are all the subtle reformers who tell you the wild stories they’ve heard about you and how they’ve been sticking up for you.”

He saw, at length, that her eyes were gray, very level and cool, and when they rested on him he understood what Maury had meant by saying she was very young and very old. She talked always about herself as a very charming child might talk, and her comments on her tastes and distastes were unaffected and spontaneous.

“I must confess,” said Anthony gravely, “that even I’ve heard one thing about you.”

Alert at once, she sat up straight. Those eyes, with the grayness and eternity of a cliff of soft granite, caught his.

“Tell me. I’ll believe it. I always believe anything any one tells me about myself — don’t you?”

“Invariably!” agreed the two men in unison.

“Well, tell me.”

“I’m not sure that I ought to,” teased Anthony, smiling unwillingly. She was so obviously interested, in a state of almost laughable self-absorption.

“He means your nickname,” said her cousin.

“What name?” inquired Anthony, politely puzzled.

Instantly she was shy — then she laughed, rolled back against the cushions, and turned her eyes up as she spoke:

“Coast-to-Coast Gloria.” Her voice was full of laughter, laughter undefined as the varying shadows playing between fire and lamp upon her hair. “O Lord!”

Still Anthony was puzzled.

“What do you mean?”

“Me, I mean. That’s what some silly boys coined for me.”

“Don’t you see, Anthony,” explained Dick, “traveller of a nation-wide notoriety and all that. Isn’t that what you’ve heard? She’s been called that for years — since she was seventeen.”

Anthony’s eyes became sad and humorous.

“Who’s this female Methuselah you’ve brought in here, Caramel?”

She disregarded this, possibly rather resented it, for she switched back to the main topic.

“What have you heard of me?”

“Something about your physique.”

“Oh,” she said, coolly disappointed, “that all?”

“Your tan.”

“My tan?” She was puzzled. Her hand rose to her throat, rested there an instant as though the fingers were feeling variants of color.

“Do you remember Maury Noble? Man you met about a month ago. You made a great impression.”

She thought a moment.

“I remember — but he didn’t call me up.”

“He was afraid to, I don’t doubt.”

It was black dark without now and Anthony wondered that his apartment had ever seemed gray — so warm and friendly were the books and pictures on the walls and the good Bounds offering tea from a respectful shadow and the three nice people giving out waves of interest and laughter back and forth across the happy fire.

DISSATISFACTION

On Thursday afternoon Gloria and Anthony had tea together in the grill room at the Plaza. Her fur-trimmed suit was gray — “because with gray you have to wear a lot of paint,” she explained — and a small toque sat rakishly on her head, allowing yellow ripples of hair to wave out in jaunty glory. In the higher light it seemed to Anthony that her personality was infinitely softer — she seemed so young, scarcely eighteen; her form under the tight sheath, known then as a hobble-skirt, was amazingly supple and slender, and her hands, neither “artistic” nor stubby, were small as a child’s hands should be.

As they entered, the orchestra were sounding the preliminary whimpers to a maxixe, a tune full of castanets and facile faintly languorous violin harmonies, appropriate to the crowded winter grill teeming with an excited college crowd, high-spirited at the approach of the holidays. Carefully, Gloria considered several locations, and rather to Anthony’s annoyance paraded him circuitously to a table for two at the far side of the room. Reaching it she again considered. Would she sit on the right or on the left? Her beautiful eyes and lips were very grave as she made her choice, and Anthony thought again how naïve was her every gesture; she took all the things of life for hers to choose from and apportion, as though she were continually picking out presents for herself from an inexhaustible counter.

Abstractedly she watched the dancers for a few moments, commenting murmurously as a couple eddied near.

“There’s a pretty girl in blue” — and as Anthony looked obediently — “ there! No. behind you — there!”

“Yes,” he agreed helplessly.

“You didn’t see her.”

“I’d rather look at you.”

“I know, but she was pretty. Except that she had big ankles.”

“Was she? — I mean, did she?” he said indifferently.

A girl’s salutation came from a couple dancing close to them.

“Hello, Gloria! O Gloria!”

“Hello there.”

“Who’s that?” he demanded.

“I don’t know. Somebody.” She caught sight of another face. “Hello, Muriel!” Then to Anthony: “There’s Muriel Kane. Now I think she’s attractive, ‘cept not very.”

Anthony chuckled appreciatively.

“Attractive, ‘cept not very,” he repeated.

She smiled — was interested immediately.

“Why is that funny?” Her tone was pathetically intent.

“It just was.”

“Do you want to dance?”

“Do you?”

“Sort of. But let’s sit,” she decided.

“And talk about you? You love to talk about you, don’t you?”

“Yes.” Caught in a vanity, she laughed.

“I imagine your autobiography would be a classic.”

“Dick says I haven’t got one.”

“Dick!” he exclaimed. “What does he know about you?”

“Nothing. But he says the biography of every woman begins with the first kiss that counts, and ends when her last child is laid in her arms.”

“He’s talking from his book.”

“He says unloved women have no biographies — they have histories.”

Anthony laughed again.

“Surely you don’t claim to be unloved!”

“Well, I suppose not.”

“Then why haven’t you a biography? Haven’t you ever had a kiss that counted?” As the words left his lips he drew in his breath sharply as though to suck them back. This baby!

“I don’t know what you mean ‘counts,’“ she objected.

“I wish you’d tell me how old you are.”

“Twenty-two,” she said, meeting his eyes gravely. “How old did you think?”

“About eighteen.”

“I’m going to start being that. I don’t like being twenty-two. I hate it more than anything in the world.”

“Being twenty-two?”

“No. Getting old and everything. Getting married.”

“Don’t you ever want to marry?”

“I don’t want to have responsibility and a lot of children to take care of.”

Evidently she did not doubt that on her lips all things were good. He waited rather breathlessly for her next remark, expecting it to follow up her last. She was smiling, without amusement but pleasantly, and after an interval half a dozen words fell into the space between them:

“I wish I had some gum-drops.”

“You shall!” He beckoned to a waiter and sent him to the cigar counter.

“D’you mind? I love gum-drops. Everybody kids me about it because I’m always whacking away at one — whenever my daddy’s not around.”

“Not at all. — Who are all these children?” he asked suddenly. “Do you know them all?”

“Why — no, but they’re from — oh, from everywhere, I suppose. Don’t you ever come here?”

“Very seldom. I don’t care particularly for ‘nice girls.’“

Immediately he had her attention. She turned a definite shoulder to the dancers, relaxed in her chair, and demanded:

“What do you do with yourself?”

Thanks to a cocktail Anthony welcomed the question. In a mood to talk, he wanted, moreover, to impress this girl whose interest seemed so tantalizingly elusive — she stopped to browse in unexpected pastures, hurried quickly over the inobviously obvious. He wanted to pose. He wanted to appear suddenly to her in novel and heroic colors. He wanted to stir her from that casualness she showed toward everything except herself.

“I do nothing,” he began, realizing simultaneously that his words were to lack the debonair grace he craved for them. “I do nothing, for there’s nothing I can do that’s worth doing.”

“Well?” He had neither surprised her nor even held her, yet she had certainly understood him, if indeed he had said aught worth understanding.

“Don’t you approve of lazy men?”

She nodded.

“I suppose so, if they’re gracefully lazy. Is that possible for an

American?”

“Why not?” he demanded, discomfited.

But her mind had left the subject and wandered up ten floors.

“My daddy’s mad at me,” she observed dispassionately.

“Why? But I want to know just why it’s impossible for an American to be gracefully idle” — his words gathered conviction — “it astonishes me. It — it — I don’t understand why people think that every young man ought to go down-town and work ten hours a day for the best twenty years of his life at dull, unimaginative work, certainly not altruistic work.”

He broke off. She watched him inscrutably. He waited for her to agree or disagree, but she did neither.

“Don’t you ever form judgments on things?” he asked with some exasperation.

She shook her head and her eyes wandered back to the dancers as she answered:

“I don’t know. I don’t know anything about — what you should do, or what anybody should do.”

She confused him and hindered the flow of his ideas. Self-expression had never seemed at once so desirable and so impossible.

“Well,” he admitted apologetically, “neither do I, of course, but — “

“I just think of people,” she continued, “whether they seem right where they are and fit into the picture. I don’t mind if they don’t do anything. I don’t see why they should; in fact it always astonishes me when anybody does anything.”

“You don’t want to do anything?”

“I want to sleep.”

For a second he was startled, almost as though she had meant this literally.

“Sleep?”

“Sort of. I want to just be lazy and I want some of the people around me to be doing things, because that makes me feel comfortable and safe — and I want some of them to be doing nothing at all, because they can be graceful and companionable for me. But I never want to change people or get excited over them.”

“You’re a quaint little determinist,” laughed Anthony. “It’s your world, isn’t it?”

“Well — “ she said with a quick upward glance, “isn’t it? As long as

I’m — young.”

She had paused slightly before the last word and Anthony suspected that she had started to say “beautiful.” It was undeniably what she had intended.

Her eyes brightened and he waited for her to enlarge on the theme. He had drawn her out, at any rate — he bent forward slightly to catch the words.

But “Let’s dance!” was all she said.

That winter afternoon at the Plaza was the first of a succession of “dates” Anthony made with her in the blurred and stimulating days before Christmas. Invariably she was busy. What particular strata of the city’s social life claimed her he was a long time finding out. It seemed to matter very little. She attended the semi-public charity dances at the big hotels; he saw her several times at dinner parties in Sherry’s, and once as he waited for her to dress, Mrs. Gilbert, apropos of her daughter’s habit of “going,” rattled off an amazing holiday programme that included half a dozen dances to which Anthony had received cards.

He made engagements with her several times for lunch and tea — the former were hurried and, to him at least, rather unsatisfactory occasions, for she was sleepy-eyed and casual, incapable of concentrating upon anything or of giving consecutive attention to his remarks. When after two of these sallow meals he accused her of tendering him the skin and bones of the day she laughed and gave him a tea-time three days off. This was infinitely more satisfactory.

One Sunday afternoon just before Christmas he called up and found her in the lull directly after some important but mysterious quarrel: she informed him in a tone of mingled wrath and amusement that she had sent a man out of her apartment — here Anthony speculated violently — and that the man had been giving a little dinner for her that very night and that of course she wasn’t going. So Anthony took her to supper.

“Let’s go to something!” she proposed as they went down in the elevator.

“I want to see a show, don’t you?”

Inquiry at the hotel ticket desk disclosed only two Sunday night “concerts.”

“They’re always the same,” she complained unhappily, “same old Yiddish comedians. Oh, let’s go somewhere!”

To conceal a guilty suspicion that he should have arranged a performance of some kind for her approval Anthony affected a knowing cheerfulness.

“We’ll go to a good cabaret.”

“I’ve seen every one in town.”

“Well, we’ll find a new one.”

She was in wretched humor; that was evident. Her gray eyes were granite now indeed. When she wasn’t speaking she stared straight in front of her as if at some distasteful abstraction in the lobby.

“Well, come on, then.”

He followed her, a graceful girl even in her enveloping fur, out to a taxicab, and, with an air of having a definite place in mind, instructed the driver to go over to Broadway and then turn south. He made several casual attempts at conversation but as she adopted an impenetrable armor of silence and answered him in sentences as morose as the cold darkness of the taxicab he gave up, and assuming a like mood fell into a dim gloom.

A dozen blocks down Broadway Anthony’s eyes were caught by a large and unfamiliar electric sign spelling “Marathon” in glorious yellow script, adorned with electrical leaves and flowers that alternately vanished and beamed upon the wet and glistening street. He leaned and rapped on the taxi-window and in a moment was receiving information from a colored doorman: Yes, this was a cabaret. Fine cabaret. Bes’ showina city!

“Shall we try it?”

With a sigh Gloria tossed her cigarette out the open door and prepared to follow it; then they had passed under the screaming sign, under the wide portal, and up by a stuffy elevator into this unsung palace of pleasure.

The gay habitats of the very rich and the very poor, the very dashing and the very criminal, not to mention the lately exploited very Bohemian, are made known to the awed high school girls of Augusta, Georgia, and Redwing, Minnesota, not only through the bepictured and entrancing spreads of the Sunday theatrical supplements but through the shocked and alarmful eyes of Mr. Rupert Hughes and other chroniclers of the mad pace of America. But the excursions of Harlem onto Broadway, the deviltries of the dull and the revelries of the respectable are a matter of esoteric knowledge only to the participants themselves.

A tip circulates — and in the place knowingly mentioned, gather the lower moral-classes on Saturday and Sunday nights — the little troubled men who are pictured in the comics as “the Consumer” or “the Public.” They have made sure that the place has three qualifications: it is cheap; it imitates with a sort of shoddy and mechanical wistfulness the glittering antics of the great cafes in the theatre district; and — this, above all, important — it is a place where they can “take a nice girl,” which means, of course, that every one has become equally harmless, timid, and uninteresting through lack of money and imagination.

There on Sunday nights gather the credulous, sentimental, underpaid, overworked people with hyphenated occupations: book-keepers, ticket-sellers, office-managers, salesmen, and, most of all, clerks — clerks of the express, of the mail, of the grocery, of the brokerage, of the bank. With them are their giggling, over-gestured, pathetically pretentious women, who grow fat with them, bear them too many babies, and float helpless and uncontent in a colorless sea of drudgery and broken hopes.

They name these brummagem cabarets after Pullman cars. The “Marathon”! Not for them the salacious similes borrowed from the cafés of Paris! This is where their docile patrons bring their “nice women,” whose starved fancies are only too willing to believe that the scene is comparatively gay and joyous, and even faintly immoral. This is life! Who cares for the morrow?

Abandoned people!

Anthony and Gloria, seated, looked about them. At the next table a party of four were in process of being joined by a party of three, two men and a girl, who were evidently late — and the manner of the girl was a study in national sociology. She was meeting some new men — and she was pretending desperately. By gesture she was pretending and by words and by the scarcely perceptible motionings of her eyelids that she belonged to a class a little superior to the class with which she now had to do, that a while ago she had been, and presently would again be, in a higher, rarer air. She was almost painfully refined — she wore a last year’s hat covered with violets no more yearningly pretentious and palpably artificial than herself.

Fascinated, Anthony and Gloria watched the girl sit down and radiate the impression that she was only condescendingly present. For me, her eyes said, this is practically a slumming expedition, to be cloaked with belittling laughter and semi-apologetics.

— And the other women passionately poured out the impression that though they were in the crowd they were not of it. This was not the sort of place to which they were accustomed; they had dropped in because it was near by and convenient — every party in the restaurant poured out that impression … who knew? They were forever changing class, all of them — the women often marrying above their opportunities, the men striking suddenly a magnificent opulence: a sufficiently preposterous advertising scheme, a celestialized ice cream cone. Meanwhile, they met here to eat, closing their eyes to the economy displayed in infrequent changings of table-cloths, in the casualness of the cabaret performers, most of all in the colloquial carelessness and familiarity of the waiters. One was sure that these waiters were not impressed by their patrons. One expected that presently they would sit at the tables …

“Do you object to this?” inquired Anthony.

Gloria’s face warmed and for the first time that evening she smiled.

“I love it,” she said frankly. It was impossible to doubt her. Her gray eyes roved here and there, drowsing, idle or alert, on each group, passing to the next with unconcealed enjoyment, and to Anthony were made plain the different values of her profile, the wonderfully alive expressions of her mouth, and the authentic distinction of face and form and manner that made her like a single flower amidst a collection of cheap bric-à-brac. At her happiness, a gorgeous sentiment welled into his eyes, choked him up, set his nerves a-tingle, and filled his throat with husky and vibrant emotion. There was a hush upon the room. The careless violins and saxophones, the shrill rasping complaint of a child near by, the voice of the violet-hatted girl at the next table, all moved slowly out, receded, and fell away like shadowy reflections on the shining floor — and they two, it seemed to him, were alone and infinitely remote, quiet. Surely the freshness of her cheeks was a gossamer projection from a land of delicate and undiscovered shades; her hand gleaming on the stained table-cloth was a shell from some far and wildly virginal sea….

Then the illusion snapped like a nest of threads; the room grouped itself around him, voices, faces, movement; the garish shimmer of the lights overhead became real, became portentous; breath began, the slow respiration that she and he took in time with this docile hundred, the rise and fall of bosoms, the eternal meaningless play and interplay and tossing and reiterating of word and phrase — all these wrenched his senses open to the suffocating pressure of life — and then her voice came at him, cool as the suspended dream he had left behind.

“I belong here,” she murmured, “I’m like these people.”

For an instant this seemed a sardonic and unnecessary paradox hurled at him across the impassable distances she created about herself. Her entrancement had increased — her eyes rested upon a Semitic violinist who swayed his shoulders to the rhythm of the year’s mellowest fox-trot:

“Something — goes

Ring-a-ting-a-ling-a-ling

Right in-your ear — “

Again she spoke, from the centre of this pervasive illusion of her own.

It amazed him. It was like blasphemy from the mouth of a child.

“I’m like they are — like Japanese lanterns and crape paper, and the music of that orchestra.”

“You’re a young idiot!” he insisted wildly. She shook her blond head.

“No, I’m not. I am like them…. You ought to see…. You don’t know me.” She hesitated and her eyes came back to him, rested abruptly on his, as though surprised at the last to see him there. “I’ve got a streak of what you’d call cheapness. I don’t know where I get it but it’s — oh, things like this and bright colors and gaudy vulgarity. I seem to belong here. These people could appreciate me and take me for granted, and these men would fall in love with me and admire me, whereas the clever men I meet would just analyze me and tell me I’m this because of this or that because of that.”

— Anthony for the moment wanted fiercely to paint her, to set her down now, as she was, as, as with each relentless second she could never be again.

“What were you thinking?” she asked.

“Just that I’m not a realist,” he said, and then: “No, only the romanticist preserves the things worth preserving.”

Out of the deep sophistication of Anthony an understanding formed, nothing atavistic or obscure, indeed scarcely physical at all, an understanding remembered from the romancings of many generations of minds that as she talked and caught his eyes and turned her lovely head, she moved him as he had never been moved before. The sheath that held her soul had assumed significance — that was all. She was a sun, radiant, growing, gathering light and storing it — then after an eternity pouring it forth in a glance, the fragment of a sentence, to that part of him that cherished all beauty and all illusion.

CHAPTER III

THE CONNOISSEUR OF KISSES

From his undergraduate days as editor of The Harvard Crimson Richard Caramel had desired to write. But as a senior he had picked up the glorified illusion that certain men were set aside for “service” and, going into the world, were to accomplish a vague yearnful something which would react either in eternal reward or, at the least, in the personal satisfaction of having striven for the greatest good of the greatest number.

This spirit has long rocked the colleges in America. It begins, as a rule, during the immaturities and facile impressions of freshman year — sometimes back in preparatory school. Prosperous apostles known for their emotional acting go the rounds of the universities and, by frightening the amiable sheep and dulling the quickening of interest and intellectual curiosity which is the purpose of all education, distil a mysterious conviction of sin, harking back to childhood crimes and to the ever-present menace of “women.” To these lectures go the wicked youths to cheer and joke and the timid to swallow the tasty pills, which would be harmless if administered to farmers’ wives and pious drug-clerks but are rather dangerous medicine for these “future leaders of men.”

This octopus was strong enough to wind a sinuous tentacle about Richard Caramel. The year after his graduation it called him into the slums of New York to muck about with bewildered Italians as secretary to an “Alien Young Men’s Rescue Association.” He labored at it over a year before the monotony began to weary him. The aliens kept coming inexhaustibly — Italians, Poles, Scandinavians, Czechs, Armenians — with the same wrongs, the same exceptionally ugly faces and very much the same smells, though he fancied that these grew more profuse and diverse as the months passed. His eventual conclusions about the expediency of service were vague, but concerning his own relation to it they were abrupt and decisive. Any amiable young man, his head ringing with the latest crusade, could accomplish as much as he could with the débris of Europe — and it was time for him to write.

He had been living in a down-town Y.M.C.A., but when he quit the task of making sow-ear purses out of sows’ ears, he moved up-town and went to work immediately as a reporter for The Sun. He kept at this for a year, doing desultory writing on the side, with little success, and then one day an infelicitous incident peremptorily closed his newspaper career. On a February afternoon he was assigned to report a parade of Squadron A. Snow threatening, he went to sleep instead before a hot fire, and when he woke up did a smooth column about the muffled beats of the horses’ hoofs in the snow… This he handed in. Next morning a marked copy of the paper was sent down to the City Editor with a scrawled note: “Fire the man who wrote this.” It seemed that Squadron A had also seen the snow threatening — had postponed the parade until another day.

A week later he had begun “The Demon Lover.”…

In January, the Monday of the months, Richard Caramel’s nose was blue constantly, a sardonic blue, vaguely suggestive of the flames licking around a sinner. His book was nearly ready, and as it grew in completeness it seemed to grow also in its demands, sapping him, overpowering him, until he walked haggard and conquered in its shadow. Not only to Anthony and Maury did he pour out his hopes and boasts and indecisions, but to any one who could be prevailed upon to listen. He called on polite but bewildered publishers, he discussed it with his casual vis-à-vis at the Harvard Club; it was even claimed by Anthony that he had been discovered, one Sunday night, debating the transposition of Chapter Two with a literary ticket-collector in the chill and dismal recesses of a Harlem subway station. And latest among his confidantes was Mrs. Gilbert, who sat with him by the hour and alternated between Bilphism and literature in an intense cross-fire.

“Shakespeare was a Bilphist,” she assured him through a fixed smile.

“Oh, yes! He was a Bilphist. It’s been proved.”

At this Dick would look a bit blank.

“If you’ve read ‘Hamlet’ you can’t help but see.”

“Well, he — he lived in a more credulous age — a more religious age.”

But she demanded the whole loaf:

“Oh, yes, but you see Bilphism isn’t a religion. It’s the science of all religions.” She smiled defiantly at him. This was the bon mot of her belief. There was something in the arrangement of words which grasped her mind so definitely that the statement became superior to any obligation to define itself. It is not unlikely that she would have accepted any idea encased in this radiant formula — which was perhaps not a formula; it was the reductio ad absurdum of all formulas.

Then eventually, but gorgeously, would come Dick’s turn.

“You’ve heard of the new poetry movement. You haven’t? Well, it’s a lot of young poets that are breaking away from the old forms and doing a lot of good. Well, what I was going to say was that my book is going to start a new prose movement, a sort of renaissance.”

“I’m sure it will,” beamed Mrs. Gilbert. “I’m sure it will. I went to Jenny Martin last Tuesday, the palmist, you know, that every one’s mad about. I told her my nephew was engaged upon a work and she said she knew I’d be glad to hear that his success would be extraordinary. But she’d never seen you or known anything about you — not even your name.”

Having made the proper noises to express his amazement at this astounding phenomenon, Dick waved her theme by him as though he were an arbitrary traffic policeman, and, so to speak, beckoned forward his own traffic.

“I’m absorbed, Aunt Catherine,” he assured her, “I really am. All my friends are joshing me — oh, I see the humor in it and I don’t care. I think a person ought to be able to take joshing. But I’ve got a sort of conviction,” he concluded gloomily.

“You’re an ancient soul, I always say.”

“Maybe I am.” Dick had reached the stage where he no longer fought, but submitted. He must be an ancient soul, he fancied grotesquely; so old as to be absolutely rotten. However, the reiteration of the phrase still somewhat embarrassed him and sent uncomfortable shivers up his back. He changed the subject.

“Where is my distinguished cousin Gloria?”

“She’s on the go somewhere, with some one.”

Dick paused, considered, and then, screwing up his face into what was evidently begun as a smile but ended as a terrifying frown, delivered a comment.

“I think my friend Anthony Patch is in love with her.”

Mrs. Gilbert started, beamed half a second too late, and breathed her

“Really?” in the tone of a detective play-whisper.

“I think so,” corrected Dick gravely. “She’s the first girl I’ve ever seen him with, so much.”

“Well, of course,” said Mrs. Gilbert with meticulous carelessness,

“Gloria never makes me her confidante. She’s very secretive. Between you

and me” — she bent forward cautiously, obviously determined that only

Heaven and her nephew should share her confession — “between you and me,

I’d like to see her settle down.”

Dick arose and paced the floor earnestly, a small, active, already rotund young man, his hands thrust unnaturally into his bulging pockets.

“I’m not claiming I’m right, mind you,” he assured the infinitely-of-the-hotel steel-engraving which smirked respectably back at him. “I’m saying nothing that I’d want Gloria to know. But I think Mad Anthony is interested — tremendously so. He talks about her constantly. In any one else that’d be a bad sign.”

“Gloria is a very young soul — “ began Mrs. Gilbert eagerly, but her nephew interrupted with a hurried sentence:

“Gloria’d be a very young nut not to marry him.” He stopped and faced her, his expression a battle map of lines and dimples, squeezed and strained to its ultimate show of intensity — this as if to make up by his sincerity for any indiscretion in his words. “Gloria’s a wild one, Aunt Catherine. She’s uncontrollable. How she’s done it I don’t know, but lately she’s picked up a lot of the funniest friends. She doesn’t seem to care. And the men she used to go with around New York were — “ He paused for breath.

“Yes-yes-yes,” interjected Mrs. Gilbert, with an anaemic attempt to hide the immense interest with which she listened.

“Well,” continued Richard Caramel gravely, “there it is. I mean that the men she went with and the people she went with used to be first rate. Now they aren’t.”

Mrs. Gilbert blinked very fast — her bosom trembled, inflated, remained so for an instant, and with the exhalation her words flowed out in a torrent.

She knew, she cried in a whisper; oh, yes, mothers see these things. But what could she do? He knew Gloria. He’d seen enough of Gloria to know how hopeless it was to try to deal with her. Gloria had been so spoiled — in a rather complete and unusual way. She had been suckled until she was three, for instance, when she could probably have chewed sticks. Perhaps — one never knew — it was this that had given that health and hardiness to her whole personality. And then ever since she was twelve years old she’d had boys about her so thick — oh, so thick one couldn’t move. At sixteen she began going to dances at preparatory schools, and then came the colleges; and everywhere she went, boys, boys, boys. At first, oh, until she was eighteen there had been so many that it never seemed one any more than the others, but then she began to single them out.

She knew there had been a string of affairs spread over about three years, perhaps a dozen of them altogether. Sometimes the men were undergraduates, sometimes just out of college — they lasted on an average of several months each, with short attractions in between. Once or twice they had endured longer and her mother had hoped she would be engaged, but always a new one came — a new one —

The men? Oh, she made them miserable, literally! There was only one who had kept any sort of dignity, and he had been a mere child, young Carter Kirby, of Kansas City, who was so conceited anyway that he just sailed out on his vanity one afternoon and left for Europe next day with his father. The others had been — wretched. They never seemed to know when she was tired of them, and Gloria had seldom been deliberately unkind. They would keep phoning, writing letters to her, trying to see her, making long trips after her around the country. Some of them had confided in Mrs. Gilbert, told her with tears in their eyes that they would never get over Gloria … at least two of them had since married, though…. But Gloria, it seemed, struck to kill — to this day Mr. Carstairs called up once a week, and sent her flowers which she no longer bothered to refuse.

Several times, twice, at least, Mrs. Gilbert knew it had gone as far as a private engagement — with Tudor Baird and that Holcome boy at Pasadena. She was sure it had, because — this must go no further — she had come in unexpectedly and found Gloria acting, well, very much engaged indeed. She had not spoken to her daughter, of course. She had had a certain sense of delicacy and, besides, each time she had expected an announcement in a few weeks. But the announcement never came; instead, a new man came.

Scenes! Young men walking up and down the library like caged tigers! Young men glaring at each other in the hall as one came and the other left! Young men calling up on the telephone and being hung up upon in desperation! Young men threatening South America! … Young men writing the most pathetic letters! (She said nothing to this effect, but Dick fancied that Mrs. Gilbert’s eyes had seen some of these letters.)

… And Gloria, between tears and laughter, sorry, glad, out of love and in love, miserable, nervous, cool, amidst a great returning of presents, substitution of pictures in immemorial frames, and taking of hot baths and beginning again — with the next.

That state of things continued, assumed an air of permanency. Nothing harmed Gloria or changed her or moved her. And then out of a clear sky one day she informed her mother that undergraduates wearied her. She was absolutely going to no more college dances.

This had begun the change — not so much in her actual habits, for she danced, and had as many “dates” as ever — but they were dates in a different spirit. Previously it had been a sort of pride, a matter of her own vainglory. She had been, probably, the most celebrated and sought-after young beauty in the country. Gloria Gilbert of Kansas City! She had fed on it ruthlessly — enjoying the crowds around her, the manner in which the most desirable men singled her out; enjoying the fierce jealousy of other girls; enjoying the fabulous, not to say scandalous, and, her mother was glad to say, entirely unfounded rumors about her — for instance, that she had gone in the Yale swimming-pool one night in a chiffon evening dress.

And from loving it with a vanity that was almost masculine — it had been in the nature of a triumphant and dazzling career — she became suddenly anaesthetic to it. She retired. She who had dominated countless parties, who had blown fragrantly through many ballrooms to the tender tribute of many eyes, seemed to care no longer. He who fell in love with her now was dismissed utterly, almost angrily. She went listlessly with the most indifferent men. She continually broke engagements, not as in the past from a cool assurance that she was irreproachable, that the man she insulted would return like a domestic animal — but indifferently, without contempt or pride. She rarely stormed at men any more — she yawned at them. She seemed — and it was so strange — she seemed to her mother to be growing cold.

Richard Caramel listened. At first he had remained standing, but as his aunt’s discourse waxed in content — it stands here pruned by half, of all side references to the youth of Gloria’s soul and to Mrs. Gilbert’s own mental distresses — he drew a chair up and attended rigorously as she floated, between tears and plaintive helplessness, down the long story of Gloria’s life. When she came to the tale of this last year, a tale of the ends of cigarettes left all over New York in little trays marked “Midnight Frolic” and “Justine Johnson’s Little Club,” he began nodding his head slowly, then faster and faster, until, as she finished on a staccato note, it was bobbing briskly up and down, absurdly like a doll’s wired head, expressing — almost anything.

In a sense Gloria’s past was an old story to him. He had followed it with the eyes of a journalist, for he was going to write a book about her some day. But his interests, just at present, were family interests. He wanted to know, in particular, who was this Joseph Bloeckman that he had seen her with several times; and those two girls she was with constantly, “this” Rachael Jerryl and “this” Miss Kane — surely Miss Kane wasn’t exactly the sort one would associate with Gloria!

But the moment had passed. Mrs. Gilbert having climbed the hill of exposition was about to glide swiftly down the ski-jump of collapse. Her eyes were like a blue sky seen through two round, red window-casements. The flesh about her mouth was trembling.

And at the moment the door opened, admitting into the room Gloria and the two young ladies lately mentioned.

TWO YOUNG WOMEN

“Well!”

“How do you do, Mrs. Gilbert!”

Miss Kane and Miss Jerryl are presented to Mr. Richard Caramel. “This is

Dick” (laughter).

“I’ve heard so much about you,” says Miss Kane between a giggle and a shout.

“How do you do,” says Miss Jerryl shyly.

Richard Caramel tries to move about as if his figure were better. He is torn between his innate cordiality and the fact that he considers these girls rather common — not at all the Farmover type.

Gloria has disappeared into the bedroom.

“Do sit down,” beams Mrs. Gilbert, who is by now quite herself. “Take off your things.” Dick is afraid she will make some remark about the age of his soul, but he forgets his qualms in completing a conscientious, novelist’s examination of the two young women.

Muriel Kane had originated in a rising family of East Orange. She was short rather than small, and hovered audaciously between plumpness and width. Her hair was black and elaborately arranged. This, in conjunction with her handsome, rather bovine eyes, and her over-red lips, combined to make her resemble Theda Bara, the prominent motion picture actress. People told her constantly that she was a “vampire,” and she believed them. She suspected hopefully that they were afraid of her, and she did her utmost under all circumstances to give the impression of danger. An imaginative man could see the red flag that she constantly carried, waving it wildly, beseechingly — and, alas, to little spectacular avail. She was also tremendously timely: she knew the latest songs, all the latest songs — when one of them was played on the phonograph she would rise to her feet and rock her shoulders back and forth and snap her fingers, and if there was no music she would accompany herself by humming.

Her conversation was also timely: “I don’t care,” she would say, “I should worry and lose my figure” — and again: “I can’t make my feet behave when I hear that tune. Oh, baby!”

Her finger-nails were too long and ornate, polished to a pink and unnatural fever. Her clothes were too tight, too stylish, too vivid, her eyes too roguish, her smile too coy. She was almost pitifully overemphasized from head to foot.

The other girl was obviously a more subtle personality. She was an exquisitely dressed Jewess with dark hair and a lovely milky pallor. She seemed shy and vague, and these two qualities accentuated a rather delicate charm that floated about her. Her family were “Episcopalians,” owned three smart women’s shops along Fifth Avenue, and lived in a magnificent apartment on Riverside Drive. It seemed to Dick, after a few moments, that she was attempting to imitate Gloria — he wondered that people invariably chose inimitable people to imitate.

“We had the most hectic time!” Muriel was exclaiming enthusiastically. “There was a crazy woman behind us on the bus. She was absitively, posolutely nutty! She kept talking to herself about something she’d like to do to somebody or something. I was petrified, but Gloria simply wouldn’t get off.”

Mrs. Gilbert opened her mouth, properly awed.

“Really?”

“Oh, she was crazy. But we should worry, she didn’t hurt us. Ugly! Gracious! The man across from us said her face ought to be on a night-nurse in a home for the blind, and we all howled, naturally, so the man tried to pick us up.”

Presently Gloria emerged from her bedroom and in unison every eye turned on her. The two girls receded into a shadowy background, unperceived, unmissed.

“We’ve been talking about you,” said Dick quickly, “ — your mother and

I.”

“Well,” said Gloria.

A pause — Muriel turned to Dick.

“You’re a great writer, aren’t you?”

“I’m a writer,” he confessed sheepishly.

“I always say,” said Muriel earnestly, “that if I ever had time to write down all my experiences it’d make a wonderful book.”

Rachael giggled sympathetically; Richard Caramel’s bow was almost stately. Muriel continued:

“But I don’t see how you can sit down and do it. And poetry! Lordy, I can’t make two lines rhyme. Well, I should worry!”

Richard Caramel with difficulty restrained a shout of laughter. Gloria was chewing an amazing gum-drop and staring moodily out the window. Mrs. Gilbert cleared her throat and beamed.

“But you see,” she said in a sort of universal exposition, “you’re not an ancient soul — like Richard.”

The Ancient Soul breathed a gasp of relief — it was out at last.

Then as if she had been considering it for five minutes, Gloria made a sudden announcement:

“I’m going to give a party.”

“Oh, can I come?” cried Muriel with facetious daring.

“A dinner. Seven people: Muriel and Rachael and I, and you, Dick, and

Anthony, and that man named Noble — I liked him — and Bloeckman.”

Muriel and Rachael went into soft and purring ecstasies of enthusiasm. Mrs. Gilbert blinked and beamed. With an air of casualness Dick broke in with a question:

“Who is this fellow Bloeckman, Gloria?”

Scenting a faint hostility, Gloria turned to him.

“Joseph Bloeckman? He’s the moving picture man. Vice-president of ‘Films

Par Excellence.’ He and father do a lot of business.”

“Oh!”

“Well, will you all come?”

They would all come. A date was arranged within the week. Dick rose, adjusted hat, coat, and muffler, and gave out a general smile.

“By-by,” said Muriel, waving her hand gaily, “call me up some time.”

Richard Caramel blushed for her.

DEPLORABLE END OF THE CHEVALIER O’KEEFE

It was Monday and Anthony took Geraldine Burke to luncheon at the Beaux Arts — afterward they went up to his apartment and he wheeled out the little rolling-table that held his supply of liquor, selecting vermouth, gin, and absinthe for a proper stimulant.

Geraldine Burke, usher at Keith’s, had been an amusement of several months. She demanded so little that he liked her, for since a lamentable affair with a débutante the preceding summer, when he had discovered that after half a dozen kisses a proposal was expected, he had been wary of girls of his own class. It was only too easy to turn a critical eye on their imperfections: some physical harshness or a general lack of personal delicacy — but a girl who was usher at Keith’s was approached with a different attitude. One could tolerate qualities in an intimate valet that would be unforgivable in a mere acquaintance on one’s social level.

Geraldine, curled up at the foot of the lounge, considered him with narrow slanting eyes.

“You drink all the time, don’t you?” she said suddenly.

“Why, I suppose so,” replied Anthony in some surprise. “Don’t you?”

“Nope. I go on parties sometimes — you know, about once a week, but I only take two or three drinks. You and your friends keep on drinking all the time. I should think you’d ruin your health.”

Anthony was somewhat touched.

“Why, aren’t you sweet to worry about me!”

“Well, I do.”

“I don’t drink so very much,” he declared. “Last month I didn’t touch a drop for three weeks. And I only get really tight about once a week.”

“But you have something to drink every day and you’re only twenty-five.

Haven’t you any ambition? Think what you’ll be at forty?”

“I sincerely trust that I won’t live that long.”

She clicked her tongue with her teeth.

“You cra-azy!” she said as he mixed another cocktail — and then: “Are you any relation to Adam Patch?”

“Yes, he’s my grandfather.”

“Really?” She was obviously thrilled.

“Absolutely.”

“That’s funny. My daddy used to work for him.”

“He’s a queer old man.”

“Is he nice?” she demanded.

“Well, in private life he’s seldom unnecessarily disagreeable.”

“Tell us about him.”

“Why,” Anthony considered “ — he’s all shrunken up and he’s got the remains of some gray hair that always looks as though the wind were in it. He’s very moral.”

“He’s done a lot of good,” said Geraldine with intense gravity.

“Rot!” scoffed Anthony. “He’s a pious ass — a chickenbrain.”

Her mind left the subject and flitted on.

“Why don’t you live with him?”

“Why don’t I board in a Methodist parsonage?”

“You cra-azy!”

Again she made a little clicking sound to express disapproval. Anthony thought how moral was this little waif at heart — how completely moral she would still be after the inevitable wave came that would wash her off the sands of respectability.

“Do you hate him?”

“I wonder. I never liked him. You never like people who do things for you.”

“Does he hate you?”

“My dear Geraldine,” protested Anthony, frowning humorously, “do have another cocktail. I annoy him. If I smoke a cigarette he comes into the room sniffing. He’s a prig, a bore, and something of a hypocrite. I probably wouldn’t be telling you this if I hadn’t had a few drinks, but I don’t suppose it matters.”

Geraldine was persistently interested. She held her glass, untasted, between finger and thumb and regarded him with eyes in which there was a touch of awe.

“How do you mean a hypocrite?”

“Well,” said Anthony impatiently, “maybe he’s not. But he doesn’t like the things that I like, and so, as far as I’m concerned, he’s uninteresting.”

“Hm.” Her curiosity seemed, at length, satisfied. She sank back into the sofa and sipped her cocktail.

“You’re a funny one,” she commented thoughtfully. “Does everybody want to marry you because your grandfather is rich?”

“They don’t — but I shouldn’t blame them if they did. Still, you see, I never intend to marry.”

She scorned this.

“You’ll fall in love someday. Oh, you will — I know.” She nodded wisely.

“It’d be idiotic to be overconfident. That’s what ruined the Chevalier

O’Keefe.”

“Who was he?”

“A creature of my splendid mind. He’s my one creation, the Chevalier.”

“Cra-a-azy!” she murmured pleasantly, using the clumsy rope ladder with which she bridged all gaps and climbed after her mental superiors. Subconsciously she felt that it eliminated distances and brought the person whose imagination had eluded her back within range.

“Oh, no!” objected Anthony, “oh, no, Geraldine. You mustn’t play the alienist upon the Chevalier. If you feel yourself unable to understand him I won’t bring him in. Besides, I should feel a certain uneasiness because of his regrettable reputation.”

“I guess I can understand anything that’s got any sense to it,” answered

Geraldine a bit testily.

“In that case there are various episodes in the life of the Chevalier which might prove diverting.”

“Well?”

“It was his untimely end that caused me to think of him and made him apropos in the conversation. I hate to introduce him end foremost, but it seems inevitable that the Chevalier must back into your life.”

“Well, what about him? Did he die?”

“He did! In this manner. He was an Irishman, Geraldine, a semi-fictional Irishman — the wild sort with a genteel brogue and ‘reddish hair.’ He was exiled from Erin in the late days of chivalry and, of course, crossed over to France. Now the Chevalier O’Keefe, Geraldine, had, like me, one weakness. He was enormously susceptible to all sorts and conditions of women. Besides being a sentimentalist he was a romantic, a vain fellow, a man of wild passions, a little blind in one eye and almost stone-blind in the other. Now a male roaming the world in this condition is as helpless as a lion without teeth, and in consequence the Chevalier was made utterly miserable for twenty years by a series of women who hated him, used him, bored him, aggravated him, sickened him, spent his money, made a fool of him — in brief, as the world has it, loved him.

“This was bad, Geraldine, and as the Chevalier, save for this one weakness, this exceeding susceptibility, was a man of penetration, he decided that he would rescue himself once and for all from these drains upon him. With this purpose he went to a very famous monastery in Champagne called — well, anachronistically known as St. Voltaire’s. It was the rule at St. Voltaire’s that no monk could descend to the ground story of the monastery so long as he lived, but should exist engaged in prayer and contemplation in one of the four towers, which were called after the four commandments of the monastery rule: Poverty, Chastity, Obedience, and Silence.

“When the day came that was to witness the Chevalier’s farewell to the world he was utterly happy. He gave all his Greek books to his landlady, and his sword he sent in a golden sheath to the King of France, and all his mementos of Ireland he gave to the young Huguenot who sold fish in the street where he lived.

“Then he rode out to St. Voltaire’s, slew his horse at the door, and presented the carcass to the monastery cook.

“At five o’clock that night he felt, for the first time, free — forever free from sex. No woman could enter the monastery; no monk could descend below the second story. So as he climbed the winding stair that led to his cell at the very top of the Tower of Chastity he paused for a moment by an open window which looked down fifty feet on to a road below. It was all so beautiful, he thought, this world that he was leaving, the golden shower of sun beating down upon the long fields, the spray of trees in the distance, the vineyards, quiet and green, freshening wide miles before him. He leaned his elbows on the window casement and gazed at the winding road.

“Now, as it happened, Thérèse, a peasant girl of sixteen from a neighboring village, was at that moment passing along this same road that ran in front of the monastery. Five minutes before, the little piece of ribbon which held up the stocking on her pretty left leg had worn through and broken. Being a girl of rare modesty she had thought to wait until she arrived home before repairing it, but it had bothered her to such an extent that she felt she could endure it no longer. So, as she passed the Tower of Chastity, she stopped and with a pretty gesture lifted her skirt — as little as possible, be it said to her credit — to adjust her garter.

“Up in the tower the newest arrival in the ancient monastery of St. Voltaire, as though pulled forward by a gigantic and irresistible hand, leaned from the window. Further he leaned and further until suddenly one of the stones loosened under his weight, broke from its cement with a soft powdery sound — and, first headlong, then head over heels, finally in a vast and impressive revolution tumbled the Chevalier O’Keefe, bound for the hard earth and eternal damnation.

“Thérèse was so much upset by the occurrence that she ran all the way home and for ten years spent an hour a day in secret prayer for the soul of the monk whose neck and vows were simultaneously broken on that unfortunate Sunday afternoon.

“And the Chevalier O’Keefe, being suspected of suicide, was not buried in consecrated ground, but tumbled into a field near by, where he doubtless improved the quality of the soil for many years afterward. Such was the untimely end of a very brave and gallant gentleman. What do you think, Geraldine?”

But Geraldine, lost long before, could only smile roguishly, wave her first finger at him, and repeat her bridge-all, her explain-all:

“Crazy!” she said, “you cra-a-azy!”

His thin face was kindly, she thought, and his eyes quite gentle. She liked him because he was arrogant without being conceited, and because, unlike the men she met about the theatre, he had a horror of being conspicuous. What an odd, pointless story! But she had enjoyed the part about the stocking!

After the fifth cocktail he kissed her, and between laughter and bantering caresses and a half-stifled flare of passion they passed an hour. At four-thirty she claimed an engagement, and going into the bathroom she rearranged her hair. Refusing to let him order her a taxi she stood for a moment in the doorway.

“You will get married,” she was insisting, “you wait and see.”

Anthony was playing with an ancient tennis ball, and he bounced it carefully on the floor several times before he answered with a soupçon of acidity:

“You’re a little idiot, Geraldine.”

She smiled provokingly.

“Oh, I am, am I? Want to bet?”

“That’d be silly too.”

“Oh, it would, would it? Well, I’ll just bet you’ll marry somebody inside of a year.”

Anthony bounced the tennis ball very hard. This was one of his handsome days, she thought; a sort of intensity had displaced the melancholy in his dark eyes.

“Geraldine,” he said, at length, “in the first place I have no one I want to marry; in the second place I haven’t enough money to support two people; in the third place I am entirely opposed to marriage for people of my type; in the fourth place I have a strong distaste for even the abstract consideration of it.”

But Geraldine only narrowed her eyes knowingly, made her clicking sound, and said she must be going. It was late.

“Call me up soon,” she reminded him as he kissed her goodbye, “you haven’t for three weeks, you know.”

“I will,” he promised fervently.

He shut the door and coming back into the room stood for a moment lost in thought with the tennis ball still clasped in his hand. There was one of his lonelinesses coming, one of those times when he walked the streets or sat, aimless and depressed, biting a pencil at his desk. It was a self-absorption with no comfort, a demand for expression with no outlet, a sense of time rushing by, ceaselessly and wastefully — assuaged only by that conviction that there was nothing to waste, because all efforts and attainments were equally valueless.

He thought with emotion — aloud, ejaculative, for he was hurt and confused.

“No idea of getting married, by God!”

Of a sudden he hurled the tennis ball violently across the room, where it barely missed the lamp, and, rebounding here and there for a moment, lay still upon the floor.

SIGNLIGHT AND MOONLIGHT

For her dinner Gloria had taken a table in the Cascades at the Biltmore, and when the men met in the hall outside a little after eight, “that person Bloeckman” was the target of six masculine eyes. He was a stoutening, ruddy Jew of about thirty-five, with an expressive face under smooth sandy hair — and, no doubt, in most business gatherings his personality would have been considered ingratiating. He sauntered up to the three younger men, who stood in a group smoking as they waited for their hostess, and introduced himself with a little too evident assurance — nevertheless it is to be doubted whether he received the intended impression of faint and ironic chill: there was no hint of understanding in his manner.

“You related to Adam J. Patch?” he inquired of Anthony, emitting two slender strings of smoke from nostrils overwide.

Anthony admitted it with the ghost of a smile.

“He’s a fine man,” pronounced Bloeckman profoundly. “He’s a fine example of an American.”

“Yes,” agreed Anthony, “he certainly is.”

— I detest these underdone men, he thought coldly. Boiled looking! Ought to be shoved back in the oven; just one more minute would do it.

Bloeckman squinted at his watch.

“Time these girls were showing up …”

— Anthony waited breathlessly; it came —

“… but then,” with a widening smile, “you know how women are.”

The three young men nodded; Bloeckman looked casually about him, his eyes resting critically on the ceiling and then passing lower. His expression combined that of a Middle Western farmer appraising his wheat crop and that of an actor wondering whether he is observed — the public manner of all good Americans. As he finished his survey he turned back quickly to the reticent trio, determined to strike to their very heart and core.

“You college men? … Harvard, eh. I see the Princeton boys beat you fellows in hockey.”

Unfortunate man. He had drawn another blank. They had been three years out and heeded only the big football games. Whether, after the failure of this sally, Mr. Bloeckman would have perceived himself to be in a cynical atmosphere is problematical, for —

Gloria arrived. Muriel arrived. Rachael arrived. After a hurried “Hello, people!” uttered by Gloria and echoed by the other two, the three swept by into the dressing room.

A moment later Muriel appeared in a state of elaborate undress and crept toward them. She was in her element: her ebony hair was slicked straight back on her head; her eyes were artificially darkened; she reeked of insistent perfume. She was got up to the best of her ability as a siren, more popularly a “vamp” — a picker up and thrower away of men, an unscrupulous and fundamentally unmoved toyer with affections. Something in the exhaustiveness of her attempt fascinated Maury at first sight — a woman with wide hips affecting a panther-like litheness! As they waited the extra three minutes for Gloria, and, by polite assumption, for Rachael, he was unable to take his eyes from her. She would turn her head away, lowering her eyelashes and biting her nether lip in an amazing exhibition of coyness. She would rest her hands on her hips and sway from side to side in tune to the music, saying:

“Did you ever hear such perfect ragtime? I just can’t make my shoulders behave when I hear that.”

Mr. Bloeckman clapped his hands gallantly.

“You ought to be on the stage.”

“I’d like to be!” cried Muriel; “will you back me?”

“I sure will.”

With becoming modesty Muriel ceased her motions and turned to Maury, asking what he had “seen” this year. He interpreted this as referring to the dramatic world, and they had a gay and exhilarating exchange of titles, after this manner:

MURIEL: Have you seen “Peg o’ My Heart”?

MAURY: No, I haven’t.

MURIEL: (Eagerly) It’s wonderful! You want to see it.

MAURY: Have you seen “Omar, the Tentmaker”?

MURIEL: No, but I hear it’s wonderful. I’m very anxious to see it. Have you seen “Fair and Warmer”?

MAURY: (Hopefully) Yes.

MURIEL: I don’t think it’s very good. It’s trashy.

MAURY: (Faintly) Yes, that’s true.

MURIEL: But I went to “Within the Law” last night and I thought it was fine. Have you seen “The Little Cafe”?…

This continued until they ran out of plays. Dick, meanwhile, turned to Mr. Bloeckman, determined to extract what gold he could from this unpromising load.

“I hear all the new novels are sold to the moving pictures as soon as they come out.”

“That’s true. Of course the main thing in a moving picture is a strong story.”

“Yes, I suppose so.”

“So many novels are all full of talk and psychology. Of course those aren’t as valuable to us. It’s impossible to make much of that interesting on the screen.”

“You want plots first,” said Richard brilliantly.

“Of course. Plots first — “ He paused, shifted his gaze. His pause spread, included the others with all the authority of a warning finger. Gloria followed by Rachael was coming out of the dressing room.

Among other things it developed during dinner that Joseph Bloeckman never danced, but spent the music time watching the others with the bored tolerance of an elder among children. He was a dignified man and a proud one. Born in Munich he had begun his American career as a peanut vender with a travelling circus. At eighteen he was a side show ballyhoo; later, the manager of the side show, and, soon after, the proprietor of a second-class vaudeville house. Just when the moving picture had passed out of the stage of a curiosity and become a promising industry he was an ambitious young man of twenty-six with some money to invest, nagging financial ambitions and a good working knowledge of the popular show business. That had been nine years before. The moving picture industry had borne him up with it where it threw off dozens of men with more financial ability, more imagination, and more practical ideas…and now he sat here and contemplated the immortal Gloria for whom young Stuart Holcome had gone from New York to Pasadena — watched her, and knew that presently she would cease dancing and come back to sit on his left hand.

He hoped she would hurry. The oysters had been standing some minutes.

Meanwhile Anthony, who had been placed on Gloria’s left hand, was dancing with her, always in a certain fourth of the floor. This, had there been stags, would have been a delicate tribute to the girl, meaning “Damn you, don’t cut in!” It was very consciously intimate.

“Well,” he began, looking down at her, “you look mighty sweet to-night.”

She met his eyes over the horizontal half foot that separated them.

“Thank you — Anthony.”

“In fact you’re uncomfortably beautiful,” he added. There was no smile this time.

“And you’re very charming.”

“Isn’t this nice?” he laughed. “We actually approve of each other.”

“Don’t you, usually?” She had caught quickly at his remark, as she always did at any unexplained allusion to herself, however faint.

He lowered his voice, and when he spoke there was in it no more than a wisp of badinage.

“Does a priest approve the Pope?”

“I don’t know — but that’s probably the vaguest compliment I ever received.”

“Perhaps I can muster a few bromides.”

“Well, I wouldn’t have you strain yourself. Look at Muriel! Right here next to us.”

He glanced over his shoulder. Muriel was resting her brilliant cheek against the lapel of Maury Noble’s dinner coat and her powdered left arm was apparently twisted around his head. One was impelled to wonder why she failed to seize the nape of his neck with her hand. Her eyes, turned ceiling-ward, rolled largely back and forth; her hips swayed, and as she danced she kept up a constant low singing. This at first seemed to be a translation of the song into some foreign tongue but became eventually apparent as an attempt to fill out the metre of the song with the only words she knew — the words of the title —

“He’s a rag-picker,

A rag-picker;

A rag-time picking man,

Rag-picking, picking, pick, pick,

Rag-pick, pick, pick.”

— and so on, into phrases still more strange and barbaric. When she caught the amused glances of Anthony and Gloria she acknowledged them only with a faint smile and a half-closing of her eyes, to indicate that the music entering into her soul had put her into an ecstatic and exceedingly seductive trance.

The music ended and they returned to their table, whose solitary but dignified occupant arose and tendered each of them a smile so ingratiating that it was as if he were shaking their hands and congratulating them on a brilliant performance.

“Blockhead never will dance! I think he has a wooden leg,” remarked Gloria to the table at large. The three young men started and the gentleman referred to winced perceptibly.

This was the one rough spot in the course of Bloeckman’s acquaintance with Gloria. She relentlessly punned on his name. First it had been “Block-house.” lately, the more invidious “Blockhead.” He had requested with a strong undertone of irony that she use his first name, and this she had done obediently several times — then slipping, helpless, repentant but dissolved in laughter, back into “Blockhead.”

It was a very sad and thoughtless thing.

“I’m afraid Mr. Bloeckman thinks we’re a frivolous crowd,” sighed

Muriel, waving a balanced oyster in his direction.

“He has that air,” murmured Rachael. Anthony tried to remember whether she had said anything before. He thought not. It was her initial remark.

Mr. Bloeckman suddenly cleared his throat and said in a loud, distinct voice:

“On the contrary. When a man speaks he’s merely tradition. He has at best a few thousand years back of him. But woman, why, she is the miraculous mouthpiece of posterity.”

In the stunned pause that followed this astounding remark, Anthony choked suddenly on an oyster and hurried his napkin to his face. Rachael and Muriel raised a mild if somewhat surprised laugh, in which Dick and Maury joined, both of them red in the face and restraining uproariousness with the most apparent difficulty.

“ — My God!” thought Anthony. “It’s a subtitle from one of his movies.

The man’s memorized it!”

Gloria alone made no sound. She fixed Mr. Bloeckman with a glance of silent reproach.

“Well, for the love of Heaven! Where on earth did you dig that up?”

Bloeckman looked at her uncertainly, not sure of her intention. But in a moment he recovered his poise and assumed the bland and consciously tolerant smile of an intellectual among spoiled and callow youth.

The soup came up from the kitchen — but simultaneously the orchestra leader came up from the bar, where he had absorbed the tone color inherent in a seidel of beer. So the soup was left to cool during the delivery of a ballad entitled “Everything’s at Home Except Your Wife.”

Then the champagne — and the party assumed more amusing proportions. The men, except Richard Caramel, drank freely; Gloria and Muriel sipped a glass apiece; Rachael Jerryl took none. They sat out the waltzes but danced to everything else — all except Gloria, who seemed to tire after a while and preferred to sit smoking at the table, her eyes now lazy, now eager, according to whether she listened to Bloeckman or watched a pretty woman among the dancers. Several times Anthony wondered what Bloeckman was telling her. He was chewing a cigar back and forth in his mouth, and had expanded after dinner to the extent of violent gestures.

Ten o’clock found Gloria and Anthony beginning a dance. Just as they were out of ear-shot of the table she said in a low voice:

“Dance over by the door. I want to go down to the drug-store.”

Obediently Anthony guided her through the crowd in the designated direction; in the hall she left him for a moment, to reappear with a cloak over her arm.

“I want some gum-drops,” she said, humorously apologetic; “you can’t guess what for this time. It’s just that I want to bite my finger-nails, and I will if I don’t get some gum-drops.” She sighed, and resumed as they stepped into the empty elevator: “I’ve been biting ‘em all day. A bit nervous, you see. Excuse the pun. It was unintentional — the words just arranged themselves. Gloria Gilbert, the female wag.”

Reaching the ground floor they naïvely avoided the hotel candy counter, descended the wide front staircase, and walking through several corridors found a drug-store in the Grand Central Station. After an intense examination of the perfume counter she made her purchase. Then on some mutual unmentioned impulse they strolled, arm in arm, not in the direction from which they had come, but out into Forty-third Street.

The night was alive with thaw; it was so nearly warm that a breeze drifting low along the sidewalk brought to Anthony a vision of an unhoped-for hyacinthine spring. Above in the blue oblong of sky, around them in the caress of the drifting air, the illusion of a new season carried relief from the stiff and breathed-over atmosphere they had left, and for a hushed moment the traffic sounds and the murmur of water flowing in the gutters seemed an illusive and rarefied prolongation of that music to which they had lately danced. When Anthony spoke it was with surety that his words came from something breathless and desirous that the night had conceived in their two hearts.

“Let’s take a taxi and ride around a bit!” he suggested, without looking at her.

Oh, Gloria, Gloria!

A cab yawned at the curb. As it moved off like a boat on a labyrinthine ocean and lost itself among the inchoate night masses of the great buildings, among the now stilled, now strident, cries and clangings, Anthony put his arm around the girl, drew her over to him and kissed her damp, childish mouth.

She was silent. She turned her face up to him, pale under the wisps and patches of light that trailed in like moonshine through a foliage. Her eyes were gleaming ripples in the white lake of her face; the shadows of her hair bordered the brow with a persuasive unintimate dusk. No love was there, surely; nor the imprint of any love. Her beauty was cool as this damp breeze, as the moist softness of her own lips.

“You’re such a swan in this light,” he whispered after a moment. There were silences as murmurous as sound. There were pauses that seemed about to shatter and were only to be snatched back to oblivion by the tightening of his arms about her and the sense that she was resting there as a caught, gossamer feather, drifted in out of the dark. Anthony laughed, noiselessly and exultantly, turning his face up and away from her, half in an overpowering rush of triumph, half lest her sight of him should spoil the splendid immobility of her expression. Such a kiss — it was a flower held against the face, never to be described, scarcely to be remembered; as though her beauty were giving off emanations of itself which settled transiently and already dissolving upon his heart.

… The buildings fell away in melted shadows; this was the Park now, and after a long while the great white ghost of the MetropolitanMuseum moved majestically past, echoing sonorously to the rush of the cab.

“Why, Gloria! Why, Gloria!”

Her eyes appeared to regard him out of many thousand years: all emotion she might have felt, all words she might have uttered, would have seemed inadequate beside the adequacy of her silence, ineloquent against the eloquence of her beauty — and of her body, close to him, slender and cool.

“Tell him to turn around,” she murmured, “and drive pretty fast going back….”

Up in the supper room the air was hot. The table, littered with napkins and ash-trays, was old and stale. It was between dances as they entered, and Muriel Kane looked up with roguishness extraordinary.

“Well, where have you been?”

“To call up mother,” answered Gloria coolly. “I promised her I would.

Did we miss a dance?”

Then followed an incident that though slight in itself Anthony had cause to reflect on many years afterward. Joseph Bloeckman, leaning well back in his chair, fixed him with a peculiar glance, in which several emotions were curiously and inextricably mingled. He did not greet Gloria except by rising, and he immediately resumed a conversation with Richard Caramel about the influence of literature on the moving pictures.

MAGIC

The stark and unexpected miracle of a night fades out with the lingering death of the last stars and the premature birth of the first newsboys. The flame retreats to some remote and platonic fire; the white heat has gone from the iron and the glow from the coal.

Along the shelves of Anthony’s library, filling a wall amply, crept a chill and insolent pencil of sunlight touching with frigid disapproval Thérèse of France and Ann the Superwoman, Jenny of the Orient Ballet and Zuleika the Conjurer — and Hoosier Cora — then down a shelf and into the years, resting pityingly on the over-invoked shades of Helen, Thaïs, Salome, and Cleopatra.

Anthony, shaved and bathed, sat in his most deeply cushioned chair and watched it until at the steady rising of the sun it lay glinting for a moment on the silk ends of the rug — and went out.

It was ten o’clock. The Sunday Times, scattered about his feet, proclaimed by rotogravure and editorial, by social revelation and sporting sheet, that the world had been tremendously engrossed during the past week in the business of moving toward some splendid if somewhat indeterminate goal. For his part Anthony had been once to his grandfather’s, twice to his broker’s, and three times to his tailor’s — and in the last hour of the week’s last day he had kissed a very beautiful and charming girl.

When he reached home his imagination had been teeming with high pitched, unfamiliar dreams. There was suddenly no question on his mind, no eternal problem for a solution and resolution. He had experienced an emotion that was neither mental nor physical, nor merely a mixture of the two, and the love of life absorbed him for the present to the exclusion of all else. He was content to let the experiment remain isolated and unique. Almost impersonally he was convinced that no woman he had ever met compared in any way with Gloria. She was deeply herself; she was immeasurably sincere — of these things he was certain. Beside her the two dozen schoolgirls and debutantes, young married women and waifs and strays whom he had known were so many females, in the word’s most contemptuous sense, breeders and bearers, exuding still that faintly odorous atmosphere of the cave and the nursery.

So far as he could see, she had neither submitted to any will of his nor caressed his vanity — except as her pleasure in his company was a caress. Indeed he had no reason for thinking she had given him aught that she did not give to others. This was as it should be. The idea of an entanglement growing out of the evening was as remote as it would have been repugnant. And she had disclaimed and buried the incident with a decisive untruth. Here were two young people with fancy enough to distinguish a game from its reality — who by the very casualness with which they met and passed on would proclaim themselves unharmed.

Having decided this he went to the phone and called up the Plaza Hotel.

Gloria was out. Her mother knew neither where she had gone nor when she would return.

It was somehow at this point that the first wrongness in the case asserted itself. There was an element of callousness, almost of indecency, in Gloria’s absence from home. He suspected that by going out she had intrigued him into a disadvantage. Returning she would find his name, and smile. Most discreetly! He should have waited a few hours in order to drive home the utter inconsequence with which he regarded the incident. What an asinine blunder! She would think he considered himself particularly favored. She would think he was reacting with the most inept intimacy to a quite trivial episode.

He remembered that during the previous month his janitor, to whom he had delivered a rather muddled lecture on the “brother-hoove man,” had come up next day and, on the basis of what had happened the night before, seated himself in the window seat for a cordial and chatty half-hour. Anthony wondered in horror if Gloria would regard him as he had regarded that man. Him — Anthony Patch! Horror!

It never occurred to him that he was a passive thing, acted upon by an influence above and beyond Gloria, that he was merely the sensitive plate on which the photograph was made. Some gargantuan photographer had focussed the camera on Gloria and snap! — the poor plate could but develop, confined like all things to its nature.

But Anthony, lying upon his couch and staring at the orange lamp, passed his thin fingers incessantly through his dark hair and made new symbols for the hours. She was in a shop now, it seemed, moving lithely among the velvets and the furs, her own dress making, as she walked, a debonair rustle in that world of silken rustles and cool soprano laughter and scents of many slain but living flowers. The Minnies and Pearls and jewels and jennies would gather round her like courtiers, bearing wispy frailties of Georgette crepe, delicate chiffon to echo her cheeks in faint pastel, milky lace to rest in pale disarray against her neck — damask was used but to cover priests and divans in these days, and cloth of Samarand was remembered only by the romantic poets.

She would go elsewhere after a while, tilting her head a hundred ways under a hundred bonnets, seeking in vain for mock cherries to match her lips or plumes that were graceful as her own supple body.

Noon would come — she would hurry along Fifth Avenue, a Nordic Ganymede, her fur coat swinging fashionably with her steps, her cheeks redder by a stroke of the wind’s brush, her breath a delightful mist upon the bracing air — and the doors of the Ritz would revolve, the crowd would divide, fifty masculine eyes would start, stare, as she gave back forgotten dreams to the husbands of many obese and comic women.

One o’clock. With her fork she would tantalize the heart of an adoring artichoke, while her escort served himself up in the thick, dripping sentences of an enraptured man.

Four o’clock: her little feet moving to melody, her face distinct in the crowd, her partner happy as a petted puppy and mad as the immemorial hatter…. Then — then night would come drifting down and perhaps another damp. The signs would spill their light into the street. Who knew? No wiser than he, they haply sought to recapture that picture done in cream and shadow they had seen on the hushed Avenue the night before. And they might, ah, they might! A thousand taxis would yawn at a thousand corners, and only to him was that kiss forever lost and done. In a thousand guises Thaïs would hail a cab and turn up her face for loving. And her pallor would be virginal and lovely, and her kiss chaste as the moon….

He sprang excitedly to his feet. How inappropriate that she should be out! He had realized at last what he wanted — to kiss her again, to find rest in her great immobility. She was the end of all restlessness, all malcontent.

Anthony dressed and went out, as he should have done long before, and down to Richard Caramel’s room to hear the last revision of the last chapter of “The Demon Lover.” He did not call Gloria again until six. He did not find her in until eight and — oh, climax of anticlimaxes! — she could give him no engagement until Tuesday afternoon. A broken piece of gutta-percha clattered to the floor as he banged up the phone.

BLACK MAGIC

Tuesday was freezing cold. He called at a bleak two o’clock and as they shook hands he wondered confusedly whether he had ever kissed her; it was almost unbelievable — he seriously doubted if she remembered it.

“I called you four times on Sunday,” he told her.

“Did you?”

There was surprise in her voice and interest in her expression. Silently he cursed himself for having told her. He might have known her pride did not deal in such petty triumphs. Even then he had not guessed at the truth — that never having had to worry about men she had seldom used the wary subterfuges, the playings out and haulings in, that were the stock in trade of her sisterhood. When she liked a man, that was trick enough. Did she think she loved him — there was an ultimate and fatal thrust. Her charm endlessly preserved itself.

“I was anxious to see you,” he said simply. “I want to talk to you — I mean really talk, somewhere where we can be alone. May I?”

“What do you mean?”

He swallowed a sudden lump of panic. He felt that she knew what he wanted.

“I mean, not at a tea table,” he said.

“Well, all right, but not to-day. I want to get some exercise. Let’s walk!”

It was bitter and raw. All the evil hate in the mad heart of February was wrought into the forlorn and icy wind that cut its way cruelly across Central Park and down along Fifth Avenue. It was almost impossible to talk, and discomfort made him distracted, so much so that he turned at Sixty-first Street to find that she was no longer beside him. He looked around. She was forty feet in the rear standing motionless, her face half hidden in her fur coat collar, moved either by anger or laughter — he could not determine which. He started back.

“Don’t let me interrupt your walk!” she called.

“I’m mighty sorry,” he answered in confusion. “Did I go too fast?”

“I’m cold,” she announced. “I want to go home. And you walk too fast.”

“I’m very sorry.”

Side by side they started for the Plaza. He wished he could see her face.

“Men don’t usually get so absorbed in themselves when they’re with me.”

“I’m sorry.”

“That’s very interesting.”

“It is rather too cold to walk,” he said, briskly, to hide his annoyance.

She made no answer and he wondered if she would dismiss him at the hotel entrance. She walked in without speaking, however, and to the elevator, throwing him a single remark as she entered it:

“You’d better come up.”

He hesitated for the fraction of a moment.

“Perhaps I’d better call some other time.”

“Just as you say.” Her words were murmured as an aside. The main concern of life was the adjusting of some stray wisps of hair in the elevator mirror. Her cheeks were brilliant, her eyes sparkled — she had never seemed so lovely, so exquisitely to be desired.

Despising himself, he found that he was walking down the tenth-floor corridor a subservient foot behind her; was in the sitting room while she disappeared to shed her furs. Something had gone wrong — in his own eyes he had lost a shred of dignity; in an unpremeditated yet significant encounter he had been completely defeated.

However, by the time she reappeared in the sitting-room he had explained himself to himself with sophistic satisfaction. After all he had done the strongest thing, he thought. He had wanted to come up, he had come. Yet what happened later on that afternoon must be traced to the indignity he had experienced in the elevator; the girl was worrying him intolerably, so much so that when she came out he involuntarily drifted into criticism.

“Who’s this Bloeckman, Gloria?”

“A business friend of father’s.”

“Odd sort of fellow!”

“He doesn’t like you either,” she said with a sudden smile.

Anthony laughed.

“I’m flattered at his notice. He evidently considers me a — “ He broke off with “Is he in love with you?”

“I don’t know.”

“The deuce you don’t,” he insisted. “Of course he is. I remember the look he gave me when we got back to the table. He’d probably have had me quietly assaulted by a delegation of movie supes if you hadn’t invented that phone call.”

“He didn’t mind. I told him afterward what really happened.”

“You told him!”

“He asked me.”

“I don’t like that very well,” he remonstrated.

She laughed again.

“Oh, you don’t?”

“What business is it of his?”

“None. That’s why I told him.”

Anthony in a turmoil bit savagely at his mouth.

“Why should I lie?” she demanded directly. “I’m not ashamed of anything I do. It happened to interest him to know that I kissed you, and I happened to be in a good humor, so I satisfied his curiosity by a simple and precise ‘yes.’ Being rather a sensible man, after his fashion, he dropped the subject.”

“Except to say that he hated me.”

“Oh, it worries you? Well, if you must probe this stupendous matter to its depths he didn’t say he hated you. I simply know he does.”

“It doesn’t wor —  — “

“Oh, let’s drop it!” she cried spiritedly. “It’s a most uninteresting matter to me.”

With a tremendous effort Anthony made his acquiescence a twist of subject, and they drifted into an ancient question-and-answer game concerned with each other’s pasts, gradually warming as they discovered the age-old, immemorial resemblances in tastes and ideas. They said things that were more revealing than they intended — but each pretended to accept the other at face, or rather word, value.

The growth of intimacy is like that. First one gives off his best picture, the bright and finished product mended with bluff and falsehood and humor. Then more details are required and one paints a second portrait, and a third — before long the best lines cancel out — and the secret is exposed at last; the planes of the pictures have intermingled and given us away, and though we paint and paint we can no longer sell a picture. We must be satisfied with hoping that such fatuous accounts of ourselves as we make to our wives and children and business associates are accepted as true.

“It seems to me,” Anthony was saying earnestly, “that the position of a man with neither necessity nor ambition is unfortunate. Heaven knows it’d be pathetic of me to be sorry for myself — yet, sometimes I envy Dick.”

Her silence was encouragement. It was as near as she ever came to an intentional lure.

“ — And there used to be dignified occupations for a gentleman who had leisure, things a little more constructive than filling up the landscape with smoke or juggling some one else’s money. There’s science, of course: sometimes I wish I’d taken a good foundation, say at Boston Tech. But now, by golly, I’d have to sit down for two years and struggle through the fundamentals of physics and chemistry.”

She yawned.

“I’ve told you I don’t know what anybody ought to do,” she said ungraciously, and at her indifference his rancor was born again.

“Aren’t you interested in anything except yourself?”

“Not much.”

He glared; his growing enjoyment in the conversation was ripped to shreds. She had been irritable and vindictive all day, and it seemed to him that for this moment he hated her hard selfishness. He stared morosely at the fire.

Then a strange thing happened. She turned to him and smiled, and as he saw her smile every rag of anger and hurt vanity dropped from him — as though his very moods were but the outer ripples of her own, as though emotion rose no longer in his breast unless she saw fit to pull an omnipotent controlling thread.

He moved closer and taking her hand pulled her ever so gently toward him until she half lay against his shoulder. She smiled up at him as he kissed her.

“Gloria,” he whispered very softly. Again she had made a magic, subtle and pervading as a spilt perfume, irresistible and sweet.

Afterward, neither the next day nor after many years, could he remember the important things of that afternoon. Had she been moved? In his arms had she spoken a little — or at all? What measure of enjoyment had she taken in his kisses? And had she at any time lost herself ever so little?

Oh, for him there was no doubt. He had risen and paced the floor in sheer ecstasy. That such a girl should be; should poise curled in a corner of the couch like a swallow newly landed from a clean swift flight, watching him with inscrutable eyes. He would stop his pacing and, half shy each time at first, drop his arm around her and find her kiss.

She was fascinating, he told her. He had never met any one like her before. He besought her jauntily but earnestly to send him away; he didn’t want to fall in love. He wasn’t coming to see her any more — already she had haunted too many of his ways.

What delicious romance! His true reaction was neither fear nor sorrow — only this deep delight in being with her that colored the banality of his words and made the mawkish seem sad and the posturing seem wise. He would come back — eternally. He should have known!

“This is all. It’s been very rare to have known you, very strange and wonderful. But this wouldn’t do — and wouldn’t last.” As he spoke there was in his heart that tremulousness that we take for sincerity in ourselves.

Afterward he remembered one reply of hers to something he had asked her. He remembered it in this form — perhaps he had unconsciously arranged and polished it:

“A woman should be able to kiss a man beautifully and romantically without any desire to be either his wife or his mistress.”

As always when he was with her she seemed to grow gradually older until at the end ruminations too deep for words would be wintering in her eyes.

An hour passed, and the fire leaped up in little ecstasies as though its fading life was sweet. It was five now, and the clock over the mantel became articulate in sound. Then as if a brutish sensibility in him was reminded by those thin, tinny beats that the petals were falling from the flowered afternoon, Anthony pulled her quickly to her feet and held her helpless, without breath, in a kiss that was neither a game nor a tribute.

Her arms fell to her side. In an instant she was free.

“Don’t!” she said quietly. “I don’t want that.”

She sat down on the far side of the lounge and gazed straight before her. A frown had gathered between her eyes. Anthony sank down beside her and closed his hand over hers. It was lifeless and unresponsive.

“Why, Gloria!” He made a motion as if to put his arm about her but she drew away.

“I don’t want that,” she repeated.

“I’m very sorry,” he said, a little impatiently. “I — I didn’t know you made such fine distinctions.”

She did not answer.

“Won’t you kiss me, Gloria?”

“I don’t want to.” It seemed to him she had not moved for hours.

“A sudden change, isn’t it?” Annoyance was growing in his voice.

“Is it?” She appeared uninterested. It was almost as though she were looking at some one else.

“Perhaps I’d better go.”

No reply. He rose and regarded her angrily, uncertainly. Again he sat down.

“Gloria, Gloria, won’t you kiss me?”

“No.” Her lips, parting for the word, had just faintly stirred.

Again he got to his feet, this time with less decision, less confidence.

“Then I’ll go.”

Silence.

“All right — I’ll go.”

He was aware of a certain irremediable lack of originality in his remarks. Indeed he felt that the whole atmosphere had grown oppressive. He wished she would speak, rail at him, cry out upon him, anything but this pervasive and chilling silence. He cursed himself for a weak fool; his clearest desire was to move her, to hurt her, to see her wince. Helplessly, involuntarily, he erred again.

“If you’re tired of kissing me I’d better go.”

He saw her lips curl slightly and his last dignity left him. She spoke, at length:

“I believe you’ve made that remark several times before.”

He looked about him immediately, saw his hat and coat on a chair — blundered into them, during an intolerable moment. Looking again at the couch he perceived that she had not turned, not even moved. With a shaken, immediately regretted “good-by” he went quickly but without dignity from the room.

For over a moment Gloria made no sound. Her lips were still curled; her glance was straight, proud, remote. Then her eyes blurred a little, and she murmured three words half aloud to the death-bound fire:

“Good-by, you ass!” she said.

PANIC

The man had had the hardest blow of his life. He knew at last what he wanted, but in finding it out it seemed that he had put it forever beyond his grasp. He reached home in misery, dropped into an armchair without even removing his overcoat, and sat there for over an hour, his mind racing the paths of fruitless and wretched self-absorption. She had sent him away! That was the reiterated burden of his despair. Instead of seizing the girl and holding her by sheer strength until she became passive to his desire, instead of beating down her will by the force of his own, he had walked, defeated and powerless, from her door, with the corners of his mouth drooping and what force there might have been in his grief and rage hidden behind the manner of a whipped schoolboy. At one minute she had liked him tremendously — ah, she had nearly loved him. In the next he had become a thing of indifference to her, an insolent and efficiently humiliated man.

He had no great self-reproach — some, of course, but there were other things dominant in him now, far more urgent. He was not so much in love with Gloria as mad for her. Unless he could have her near him again, kiss her, hold her close and acquiescent, he wanted nothing more from life. By her three minutes of utter unwavering indifference the girl had lifted herself from a high but somehow casual position in his mind, to be instead his complete preoccupation. However much his wild thoughts varied between a passionate desire for her kisses and an equally passionate craving to hurt and mar her, the residue of his mind craved in finer fashion to possess the triumphant soul that had shone through those three minutes. She was beautiful — but especially she was without mercy. He must own that strength that could send him away.

At present no such analysis was possible to Anthony. His clarity of mind, all those endless resources which he thought his irony had brought him were swept aside. Not only for that night but for the days and weeks that followed his books were to be but furniture and his friends only people who lived and walked in a nebulous outer world from which he was trying to escape — that world was cold and full of bleak wind, and for a little while he had seen into a warm house where fires shone.

About midnight he began to realize that he was hungry. He went down into Fifty-second Street, where it was so cold that he could scarcely see; the moisture froze on his lashes and in the corners of his lips. Everywhere dreariness had come down from the north, settling upon the thin and cheerless street, where black bundled figures blacker still against the night, moved stumbling along the sidewalk through the shrieking wind, sliding their feet cautiously ahead as though they were on skis. Anthony turned over toward Sixth Avenue, so absorbed in his thoughts as not to notice that several passers-by had stared at him. His overcoat was wide open, and the wind was biting in, hard and full of merciless death.

… After a while a waitress spoke to him, a fat waitress with black-rimmed eye-glasses from which dangled a long black cord.

“Order, please!”

Her voice, he considered, was unnecessarily loud. He looked up resentfully.

“You wanna order or doncha?”

“Of course,” he protested.

“Well, I ast you three times. This ain’t no rest-room.”

He glanced at the big clock and discovered with a start that it was after two. He was down around Thirtieth Street somewhere, and after a moment he found and translated the

[Illustration: S’DLIHC] [Transcribers note: The illustration shows the word “CHILD’s” in mirror image.]

in a white semicircle of letters upon the glass front. The place was inhabited sparsely by three or four bleak and half-frozen night-hawks.

“Give me some bacon and eggs and coffee, please.”

The waitress bent upon him a last disgusted glance and, looking ludicrously intellectual in her corded glasses, hurried away.

God! Gloria’s kisses had been such flowers. He remembered as though it had been years ago the low freshness of her voice, the beautiful lines of her body shining through her clothes, her face lily-colored under the lamps of the street — under the lamps.

Misery struck at him again, piling a sort of terror upon the ache and yearning. He had lost her. It was true — no denying it, no softening it. But a new idea had seared his sky — what of Bloeckman! What would happen now? There was a wealthy man, middle-aged enough to be tolerant with a beautiful wife, to baby her whims and indulge her unreason, to wear her as she perhaps wished to be worn — a bright flower in his button-hole, safe and secure from the things she feared. He felt that she had been playing with the idea of marrying Bloeckman, and it was well possible that this disappointment in Anthony might throw her on sudden impulse into Bloeckman’s arms.

The idea drove him childishly frantic. He wanted to kill Bloeckman and make him suffer for his hideous presumption. He was saying this over and over to himself with his teeth tight shut, and a perfect orgy of hate and fright in his eyes.

But, behind this obscene jealousy, Anthony was in love at last, profoundly and truly in love, as the word goes between man and woman.

His coffee appeared at his elbow and gave off for a certain time a gradually diminishing wisp of steam. The night manager, seated at his desk, glanced at the motionless figure alone at the last table, and then with a sigh moved down upon him just as the hour hand crossed the figure three on the big clock.

WISDOM

After another day the turmoil subsided and Anthony began to exercise a measure of reason. He was in love — he cried it passionately to himself. The things that a week before would have seemed insuperable obstacles, his limited income, his desire to be irresponsible and independent, had in this forty hours become the merest chaff before the wind of his infatuation. If he did not marry her his life would be a feeble parody on his own adolescence. To be able to face people and to endure the constant reminder of Gloria that all existence had become, it was necessary for him to have hope. So he built hope desperately and tenaciously out of the stuff of his dream, a hope flimsy enough, to be sure, a hope that was cracked and dissipated a dozen times a day, a hope mothered by mockery, but, nevertheless, a hope that would be brawn and sinew to his self-respect.

Out of this developed a spark of wisdom, a true perception of his own from out the effortless past.

“Memory is short,” he thought.

So very short. At the crucial point the Trust President is on the stand, a potential criminal needing but one push to be a jailbird, scorned by the upright for leagues around. Let him be acquitted — and in a year all is forgotten. “Yes, he did have some trouble once, just a technicality, I believe.” Oh, memory is very short!

Anthony had seen Gloria altogether about a dozen times, say two dozen hours. Supposing he left her alone for a month, made no attempt to see her or speak to her, and avoided every place where she might possibly be. Wasn’t it possible, the more possible because she had never loved him, that at the end of that time the rush of events would efface his personality from her conscious mind, and with his personality his offense and humiliation? She would forget, for there would be other men. He winced. The implication struck out at him — other men. Two months — God! Better three weeks, two weeks —  —

He thought this the second evening after the catastrophe when he was undressing, and at this point he threw himself down on the bed and lay there, trembling very slightly and looking at the top of the canopy.

Two weeks — that was worse than no time at all. In two weeks he would approach her much as he would have to now, without personality or confidence — remaining still the man who had gone too far and then for a period that in time was but a moment but in fact an eternity, whined. No, two weeks was too short a time. Whatever poignancy there had been for her in that afternoon must have time to dull. He must give her a period when the incident should fade, and then a new period when she should gradually begin to think of him, no matter how dimly, with a true perspective that would remember his pleasantness as well as his humiliation.

He fixed, finally, on six weeks as approximately the interval best suited to his purpose, and on a desk calendar he marked the days off, finding that it would fall on the ninth of April. Very well, on that day he would phone and ask her if he might call. Until then — silence.

After his decision a gradual improvement was manifest. He had taken at least a step in the direction to which hope pointed, and he realized that the less he brooded upon her the better he would be able to give the desired impression when they met.

In another hour he fell into a deep sleep.

THE INTERVAL

Nevertheless, though, as the days passed, the glory of her hair dimmed perceptibly for him and in a year of separation might have departed completely, the six weeks held many abominable days. He dreaded the sight of Dick and Maury, imagining wildly that they knew all — but when the three met it was Richard Caramel and not Anthony who was the centre of attention; “The Demon Lover” had been accepted for immediate publication. Anthony felt that from now on he moved apart. He no longer craved the warmth and security of Maury’s society which had cheered him no further back than November. Only Gloria could give that now and no one else ever again. So Dick’s success rejoiced him only casually and worried him not a little. It meant that the world was going ahead — writing and reading and publishing — and living. And he wanted the world to wait motionless and breathless for six weeks — while Gloria forgot.

TWO ENCOUNTERS

His greatest satisfaction was in Geraldine’s company. He took her once to dinner and the theatre and entertained her several times in his apartment. When he was with her she absorbed him, not as Gloria had, but quieting those erotic sensibilities in him that worried over Gloria. It didn’t matter how he kissed Geraldine. A kiss was a kiss — to be enjoyed to the utmost for its short moment. To Geraldine things belonged in definite pigeonholes: a kiss was one thing, anything further was quite another; a kiss was all right; the other things were “bad.”

When half the interval was up two incidents occurred on successive days that upset his increasing calm and caused a temporary relapse.

The first was — he saw Gloria. It was a short meeting. Both bowed. Both spoke, yet neither heard the other. But when it was over Anthony read down a column of The Sun three times in succession without understanding a single sentence.

One would have thought Sixth Avenue a safe street! Having forsworn his barber at the Plaza he went around the corner one morning to be shaved, and while waiting his turn he took off coat and vest, and with his soft collar open at the neck stood near the front of the shop. The day was an oasis in the cold desert of March and the sidewalk was cheerful with a population of strolling sun-worshippers. A stout woman upholstered in velvet, her flabby cheeks too much massaged, swirled by with her poodle straining at its leash — the effect being given of a tug bringing in an ocean liner. Just behind them a man in a striped blue suit, walking slue-footed in white-spatted feet, grinned at the sight and catching Anthony’s eye, winked through the glass. Anthony laughed, thrown immediately into that humor in which men and women were graceless and absurd phantasms, grotesquely curved and rounded in a rectangular world of their own building. They inspired the same sensations in him as did those strange and monstrous fish who inhabit the esoteric world of green in the aquarium.

Two more strollers caught his eye casually, a man and a girl — then in a horrified instant the girl resolved herself into Gloria. He stood here powerless; they came nearer and Gloria, glancing in, saw him. Her eyes widened and she smiled politely. Her lips moved. She was less than five feet away.

“How do you do?” he muttered inanely.

Gloria, happy, beautiful, and young — with a man he had never seen before!

It was then that the barber’s chair was vacated and he read down the newspaper column three times in succession.

The second incident took place the next day. Going into the Manhattan bar about seven he was confronted with Bloeckman. As it happened, the room was nearly deserted, and before the mutual recognition he had stationed himself within a foot of the older man and ordered his drink, so it was inevitable that they should converse.

“Hello, Mr. Patch,” said Bloeckman amiably enough.

Anthony took the proffered hand and exchanged a few aphorisms on the fluctuations of the mercury.

“Do you come in here much?” inquired Bloeckman.

“No, very seldom.” He omitted to add that the Plaza bar had, until lately, been his favorite.

“Nice bar. One of the best bars in town.”

Anthony nodded. Bloeckman emptied his glass and picked up his cane. He was in evening dress.

“Well, I’ll be hurrying on. I’m going to dinner with Miss Gilbert.”

Death looked suddenly out at him from two blue eyes. Had he announced himself as his vis-à-vis’s prospective murderer he could not have struck a more vital blow at Anthony. The younger man must have reddened visibly, for his every nerve was in instant clamor. With tremendous effort he mustered a rigid — oh, so rigid — smile, and said a conventional good-by. But that night he lay awake until after four, half wild with grief and fear and abominable imaginings.

WEAKNESS

And one day in the fifth week he called her up. He had been sitting in his apartment trying to read “L’Education Sentimental,” and something in the book had sent his thoughts racing in the direction that, set free, they always took, like horses racing for a home stable. With suddenly quickened breath he walked to the telephone. When he gave the number it seemed to him that his voice faltered and broke like a schoolboy’s. The Central must have heard the pounding of his heart. The sound of the receiver being taken up at the other end was a crack of doom, and Mrs. Gilbert’s voice, soft as maple syrup running into a glass container, had for him a quality of horror in its single “Hello-o-ah?”

“Miss Gloria’s not feeling well. She’s lying down, asleep. Who shall I say called?”

“Nobody!” he shouted.

In a wild panic he slammed down the receiver; collapsed into his armchair in the cold sweat of breathless relief.

SERENADE

The first thing he said to her was: “Why, you’ve bobbed your hair!” and she answered: “Yes, isn’t it gorgeous?”

It was not fashionable then. It was to be fashionable in five or six years. At that time it was considered extremely daring.

“It’s all sunshine outdoors,” he said gravely. “Don’t you want to take a walk?”

She put on a light coat and a quaintly piquant Napoleon hat of Alice Blue, and they walked along the Avenue and into the Zoo, where they properly admired the grandeur of the elephant and the collar-height of the giraffe, but did not visit the monkey house because Gloria said that monkeys smelt so bad.

Then they returned toward the Plaza, talking about nothing, but glad for the spring singing in the air and for the warm balm that lay upon the suddenly golden city. To their right was the Park, while at the left a great bulk of granite and marble muttered dully a millionaire’s chaotic message to whosoever would listen: something about “I worked and I saved and I was sharper than all Adam and here I sit, by golly, by golly!”

All the newest and most beautiful designs in automobiles were out on Fifth Avenue, and ahead of them the Plaza loomed up rather unusually white and attractive. The supple, indolent Gloria walked a short shadow’s length ahead of him, pouring out lazy casual comments that floated a moment on the dazzling air before they reached his ear.

“Oh!” she cried, “I want to go south to Hot Springs! I want to get out in the air and just roll around on the new grass and forget there’s ever been any winter.”

“Don’t you, though!”

“I want to hear a million robins making a frightful racket. I sort of like birds.”

“All women are birds,” he ventured.

“What kind am I?” — quick and eager.

“A swallow, I think, and sometimes a bird of paradise. Most girls are sparrows, of course — see that row of nurse-maids over there? They’re sparrows — or are they magpies? And of course you’ve met canary girls — and robin girls.”

“And swan girls and parrot girls. All grown women are hawks, I think, or owls.”

“What am I — a buzzard?”

She laughed and shook her head.

“Oh, no, you’re not a bird at all, do you think? You’re a Russian wolfhound.”

Anthony remembered that they were white and always looked unnaturally hungry. But then they were usually photographed with dukes and princesses, so he was properly flattered.

“Dick’s a fox terrier, a trick fox terrier,” she continued.

“And Maury’s a cat.” Simultaneously it occurred to him how like Bloeckman was to a robust and offensive hog. But he preserved a discreet silence.

Later, as they parted, Anthony asked when he might see her again.

“Don’t you ever make long engagements?” he pleaded, “even if it’s a week ahead, I think it’d be fun to spend a whole day together, morning and afternoon both.”

“It would be, wouldn’t it?” She thought for a moment. “Let’s do it next

Sunday.”

“All right. I’ll map out a programme that’ll take up every minute.”

He did. He even figured to a nicety what would happen in the two hours when she would come to his apartment for tea: how the good Bounds would have the windows wide to let in the fresh breeze — but a fire going also lest there be chill in the air — and how there would be clusters of flowers about in big cool bowls that he would buy for the occasion. They would sit on the lounge.

And when the day came they did sit upon the lounge. After a while Anthony kissed her because it came about quite naturally; he found sweetness sleeping still upon her lips, and felt that he had never been away. The fire was bright and the breeze sighing in through the curtains brought a mellow damp, promising May and world of summer. His soul thrilled to remote harmonies; he heard the strum of far guitars and waters lapping on a warm Mediterranean shore — for he was young now as he would never be again, and more triumphant than death.

Six o’clock stole down too soon and rang the querulous melody of St. Anne’s chimes on the corner. Through the gathering dusk they strolled to the Avenue, where the crowds, like prisoners released, were walking with elastic step at last after the long winter, and the tops of the busses were thronged with congenial kings and the shops full of fine soft things for the summer, the rare summer, the gay promising summer that seemed for love what the winter was for money. Life was singing for his supper on the corner! Life was handing round cocktails in the street! Old women there were in that crowd who felt that they could have run and won a hundred-yard dash!

In bed that night with the lights out and the cool room swimming with moonlight, Anthony lay awake and played with every minute of the day like a child playing in turn with each one of a pile of long-wanted Christmas toys. He had told her gently, almost in the middle of a kiss, that he loved her, and she had smiled and held him closer and murmured, “I’m glad,” looking into his eyes. There had been a new quality in her attitude, a new growth of sheer physical attraction toward him and a strange emotional tenseness, that was enough to make him clinch his hands and draw in his breath at the recollection. He had felt nearer to her than ever before. In a rare delight he cried aloud to the room that he loved her.

He phoned next morning — no hesitation now, no uncertainty — instead a delirious excitement that doubled and trebled when he heard her voice:

“Good morning — Gloria.”

“Good morning.”

“That’s all I called you up to say-dear.”

“I’m glad you did.”

“I wish I could see you.”

“You will, to-morrow night.”

“That’s a long time, isn’t it?”

“Yes — “ Her voice was reluctant. His hand tightened on the receiver.

“Couldn’t I come to-night?” He dared anything in the glory and revelation of that almost whispered “yes.”

“I have a date.”

“Oh — “

“But I might — I might be able to break it.”

“Oh!” — a sheer cry, a rhapsody. “Gloria?”

“What?”

“I love you.”

Another pause and then:

“I — I’m glad.”

Happiness, remarked Maury Noble one day, is only the first hour after the alleviation of some especially intense misery. But oh, Anthony’s face as he walked down the tenth-floor corridor of the Plaza that night! His dark eyes were gleaming — around his mouth were lines it was a kindness to see. He was handsome then if never before, bound for one of those immortal moments which come so radiantly that their remembered light is enough to see by for years.

He knocked and, at a word, entered. Gloria, dressed in simple pink, starched and fresh as a flower, was across the room, standing very still, and looking at him wide-eyed.

As he closed the door behind him she gave a little cry and moved swiftly over the intervening space, her arms rising in a premature caress as she came near. Together they crushed out the stiff folds of her dress in one triumphant and enduring embrace.

BOOK TWO

CHAPTER I

THE RADIANT HOUR

After a fortnight Anthony and Gloria began to indulge in “practical discussions,” as they called those sessions when under the guise of severe realism they walked in an eternal moonlight.

“Not as much as I do you,” the critic of belles-lettres would insist.

“If you really loved me you’d want every one to know it.”

“I do,” she protested; “I want to stand on the street corner like a sandwich man, informing all the passers-by.”

“Then tell me all the reasons why you’re going to marry me in June.”

“Well, because you’re so clean. You’re sort of blowy clean, like I am. There’s two sorts, you know. One’s like Dick: he’s clean like polished pans. You and I are clean like streams and winds. I can tell whenever I see a person whether he is clean, and if so, which kind of clean he is.”

“We’re twins.”

Ecstatic thought!

“Mother says” — she hesitated uncertainly — “mother says that two souls are sometimes created together and — and in love before they’re born.”

Bilphism gained its easiest convert…. After a while he lifted up his head and laughed soundlessly toward the ceiling. When his eyes came back to her he saw that she was angry.

“Why did you laugh?” she cried, “you’ve done that twice before. There’s nothing funny about our relation to each other. I don’t mind playing the fool, and I don’t mind having you do it, but I can’t stand it when we’re together.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Oh, don’t say you’re sorry! If you can’t think of anything better than that, just keep quiet!”

“I love you.”

“I don’t care.”

There was a pause. Anthony was depressed…. At length Gloria murmured:

“I’m sorry I was mean.”

“You weren’t. I was the one.”

Peace was restored — the ensuing moments were so much more sweet and sharp and poignant. They were stars on this stage, each playing to an audience of two: the passion of their pretense created the actuality. Here, finally, was the quintessence of self-expression — yet it was probable that for the most part their love expressed Gloria rather than Anthony. He felt often like a scarcely tolerated guest at a party she was giving.

Telling Mrs. Gilbert had been an embarrassed matter. She sat stuffed into a small chair and listened with an intense and very blinky sort of concentration. She must have known it — for three weeks Gloria had seen no one else — and she must have noticed that this time there was an authentic difference in her daughter’s attitude. She had been given special deliveries to post; she had heeded, as all mothers seem to heed, the hither end of telephone conversations, disguised but still rather warm —

— Yet she had delicately professed surprise and declared herself immensely pleased; she doubtless was; so were the geranium plants blossoming in the window-boxes, and so were the cabbies when the lovers sought the romantic privacy of hansom cabs — quaint device — and the staid bill of fares on which they scribbled “you know I do,” pushing it over for the other to see.

But between kisses Anthony and this golden girl quarrelled incessantly.

“Now, Gloria,” he would cry, “please let me explain!”

“Don’t explain. Kiss me.”

“I don’t think that’s right. If I hurt your feelings we ought to discuss it. I don’t like this kiss-and-forget.”

“But I don’t want to argue. I think it’s wonderful that we can kiss and forget, and when we can’t it’ll be time to argue.”

At one time some gossamer difference attained such bulk that Anthony arose and punched himself into his overcoat — for a moment it appeared that the scene of the preceding February was to be repeated, but knowing how deeply she was moved he retained his dignity with his pride, and in a moment Gloria was sobbing in his arms, her lovely face miserable as a frightened little girl’s.

Meanwhile they kept unfolding to each other, unwillingly, by curious reactions and evasions, by distastes and prejudices and unintended hints of the past. The girl was proudly incapable of jealousy and, because he was extremely jealous, this virtue piqued him. He told her recondite incidents of his own life on purpose to arouse some spark of it, but to no avail. She possessed him now — nor did she desire the dead years.

“Oh, Anthony,” she would say, “always when I’m mean to you I’m sorry afterward. I’d give my right hand to save you one little moment’s pain.”

And in that instant her eyes were brimming and she was not aware that she was voicing an illusion. Yet Anthony knew that there were days when they hurt each other purposely — taking almost a delight in the thrust. Incessantly she puzzled him: one hour so intimate and charming, striving desperately toward an unguessed, transcendent union; the next, silent and cold, apparently unmoved by any consideration of their love or anything he could say. Often he would eventually trace these portentous reticences to some physical discomfort — of these she never complained until they were over — or to some carelessness or presumption in him, or to an unsatisfactory dish at dinner, but even then the means by which she created the infinite distances she spread about herself were a mystery, buried somewhere back in those twenty-two years of unwavering pride.

“Why do you like Muriel?” he demanded one day.

“I don’t very much.”

“Then why do you go with her?”

“Just for some one to go with. They’re no exertion, those girls. They sort of believe everything I tell them — but I rather like Rachael. I think she’s cute — and so clean and slick, don’t you? I used to have other friends — in Kansas City and at school — casual, all of them, girls who just flitted into my range and out of it for no more reason than that boys took us places together. They didn’t interest me after environment stopped throwing us together. Now they’re mostly married. What does it matter — they were all just people.”

“You like men better, don’t you?”

“Oh, much better. I’ve got a man’s mind.”

“You’ve got a mind like mine. Not strongly gendered either way.”

Later she told him about the beginnings of her friendship with Bloeckman. One day in Delmonico’s, Gloria and Rachael had come upon Bloeckman and Mr. Gilbert having luncheon and curiosity had impelled her to make it a party of four. She had liked him — rather. He was a relief from younger men, satisfied as he was with so little. He humored her and he laughed, whether he understood her or not. She met him several times, despite the open disapproval of her parents, and within a month he had asked her to marry him, tendering her everything from a villa in Italy to a brilliant career on the screen. She had laughed in his face — and he had laughed too.

But he had not given up. To the time of Anthony’s arrival in the arena he had been making steady progress. She treated him rather well — except that she had called him always by an invidious nickname — perceiving, meanwhile, that he was figuratively following along beside her as she walked the fence, ready to catch her if she should fall.

The night before the engagement was announced she told Bloeckman. It was a heavy blow. She did not enlighten Anthony as to the details, but she implied that he had not hesitated to argue with her. Anthony gathered that the interview had terminated on a stormy note, with Gloria very cool and unmoved lying in her corner of the sofa and Joseph Bloeckman of “Films Par Excellence” pacing the carpet with eyes narrowed and head bowed. Gloria had been sorry for him but she had judged it best not to show it. In a final burst of kindness she had tried to make him hate her, there at the last. But Anthony, understanding that Gloria’s indifference was her strongest appeal, judged how futile this must have been. He wondered, often but quite casually, about Bloeckman — finally he forgot him entirely.

HEYDAY

One afternoon they found front seats on the sunny roof of a bus and rode for hours from the fading Square up along the sullied river, and then, as the stray beams fled the westward streets, sailed down the turgid Avenue, darkening with ominous bees from the department stores. The traffic was clotted and gripped in a patternless jam; the busses were packed four deep like platforms above the crowd as they waited for the moan of the traffic whistle.

“Isn’t it good!” cried Gloria. “Look!”

A miller’s wagon, stark white with flour, driven by a powdery clown, passed in front of them behind a white horse and his black team-mate.

“What a pity!” she complained; “they’d look so beautiful in the dusk, if only both horses were white. I’m mighty happy just this minute, in this city.”

Anthony shook his head in disagreement.

“I think the city’s a mountebank. Always struggling to approach the tremendous and impressive urbanity ascribed to it. Trying to be romantically metropolitan.”

“I don’t. I think it is impressive.”

“Momentarily. But it’s really a transparent, artificial sort of spectacle. It’s got its press-agented stars and its flimsy, unenduring stage settings and, I’ll admit, the greatest army of supers ever assembled — “ He paused, laughed shortly, and added: “Technically excellent, perhaps, but not convincing.”

“I’ll bet policemen think people are fools,” said Gloria thoughtfully, as she watched a large but cowardly lady being helped across the street. “He always sees them frightened and inefficient and old — they are,” she added. And then: “We’d better get off. I told mother I’d have an early supper and go to bed. She says I look tired, damn it.”

“I wish we were married,” he muttered soberly; “there’ll be no good night then and we can do just as we want.”

“Won’t it be good! I think we ought to travel a lot. I want to go to the Mediterranean and Italy. And I’d like to go on the stage some time — say for about a year.”

“You bet. I’ll write a play for you.”

“Won’t that be good! And I’ll act in it. And then some time when we have more money” — old Adam’s death was always thus tactfully alluded to — “we’ll build a magnificent estate, won’t we?”

“Oh, yes, with private swimming pools.”

“Dozens of them. And private rivers. Oh, I wish it were now.”

Odd coincidence — he had just been wishing that very thing. They plunged like divers into the dark eddying crowd and emerging in the cool fifties sauntered indolently homeward, infinitely romantic to each other … both were walking alone in a dispassionate garden with a ghost found in a dream.

Halcyon days like boats drifting along slow-moving rivers; spring evenings full of a plaintive melancholy that made the past beautiful and bitter, bidding them look back and see that the loves of other summers long gone were dead with the forgotten waltzes of their years. Always the most poignant moments were when some artificial barrier kept them apart: in the theatre their hands would steal together, join, give and return gentle pressures through the long dark; in crowded rooms they would form words with their lips for each other’s eyes — not knowing that they were but following in the footsteps of dusty generations but comprehending dimly that if truth is the end of life happiness is a mode of it, to be cherished in its brief and tremulous moment. And then, one fairy night, May became June. Sixteen days now — fifteen — fourteen —  —

THREE DIGRESSIONS

Just before the engagement was announced Anthony had gone up to Tarrytown to see his grandfather, who, a little more wizened and grizzly as time played its ultimate chuckling tricks, greeted the news with profound cynicism.

“Oh, you’re going to get married, are you?” He said this with such a dubious mildness and shook his head up and down so many times that Anthony was not a little depressed. While he was unaware of his grandfather’s intentions he presumed that a large part of the money would come to him. A good deal would go in charities, of course; a good deal to carry on the business of reform.

“Are you going to work?”

“Why — “ temporized Anthony, somewhat disconcerted. “I am working. You know — “

“Ah, I mean work,” said Adam Patch dispassionately.

“I’m not quite sure yet what I’ll do. I’m not exactly a beggar, grampa,” he asserted with some spirit.

The old man considered this with eyes half closed. Then almost apologetically he asked:

“How much do you save a year?”

“Nothing so far — “

“And so after just managing to get along on your money you’ve decided that by some miracle two of you can get along on it.”

“Gloria has some money of her own. Enough to buy clothes.”

“How much?”

Without considering this question impertinent, Anthony answered it.

“About a hundred a month.”

“That’s altogether about seventy-five hundred a year.” Then he added softly: “It ought to be plenty. If you have any sense it ought to be plenty. But the question is whether you have any or not.”

“I suppose it is.” It was shameful to be compelled to endure this pious browbeating from the old man, and his next words were stiffened with vanity. “I can manage very well. You seem convinced that I’m utterly worthless. At any rate I came up here simply to tell you that I’m getting married in June. Good-by, sir.” With this he turned away and headed for the door, unaware that in that instant his grandfather, for the first time, rather liked him.

“Wait!” called Adam Patch, “I want to talk to you.”

Anthony faced about.

“Well, sir?”

“Sit down. Stay all night.”

Somewhat mollified, Anthony resumed his seat.

“I’m sorry, sir, but I’m going to see Gloria to-night.”

“What’s her name?”

“Gloria Gilbert.”

“New York girl? Someone you know?”

“She’s from the Middle West.”

“What business her father in?”

“In a celluloid corporation or trust or something. They’re from Kansas

City.”

“You going to be married out there?”

“Why, no, sir. We thought we’d be married in New York — rather quietly.”

“Like to have the wedding out here?”

Anthony hesitated. The suggestion made no appeal to him, but it was certainly the part of wisdom to give the old man, if possible, a proprietary interest in his married life. In addition Anthony was a little touched.

“That’s very kind of you, grampa, but wouldn’t it be a lot of trouble?”

“Everything’s a lot of trouble. Your father was married here — but in the old house.”

“Why — I thought he was married in Boston.”

Adam Patch considered.

“That’s true. He was married in Boston.”

Anthony felt a moment’s embarrassment at having made the correction, and he covered it up with words.

“Well, I’ll speak to Gloria about it. Personally I’d like to, but of course it’s up to the Gilberts, you see.”

His grandfather drew a long sigh, half closed his eyes, and sank back in his chair.

“In a hurry?” he asked in a different tone.

“Not especially.”

“I wonder,” began Adam Patch, looking out with a mild, kindly glance at the lilac bushes that rustled against the windows, “I wonder if you ever think about the after-life.”

“Why — sometimes.”

“I think a great deal about the after-life.” His eyes were dim but his voice was confident and clear. “I was sitting here to-day thinking about what’s lying in wait for us, and somehow I began to remember an afternoon nearly sixty-five years ago, when I was playing with my little sister Annie, down where that summer-house is now.” He pointed out into the long flower-garden, his eyes trembling of tears, his voice shaking.

“I began thinking — and it seemed to me that you ought to think a little more about the after-life. You ought to be — steadier” — he paused and seemed to grope about for the right word — “more industrious — why — “

Then his expression altered, his entire personality seemed to snap together like a trap, and when he continued the softness had gone from his voice.

“ — Why, when I was just two years older than you,” he rasped with a cunning chuckle, “I sent three members of the firm of Wrenn and Hunt to the poorhouse.”

Anthony started with embarrassment.

“Well, good-by,” added his grandfather suddenly, “you’ll miss your train.”

Anthony left the house unusually elated, and strangely sorry for the old man; not because his wealth could buy him “neither youth nor digestion” but because he had asked Anthony to be married there, and because he had forgotten something about his son’s wedding that he should have remembered.

Richard Caramel, who was one of the ushers, caused Anthony and Gloria much distress in the last few weeks by continually stealing the rays of their spot-light. “The Demon Lover” had been published in April, and it interrupted the love affair as it may be said to have interrupted everything its author came in contact with. It was a highly original, rather overwritten piece of sustained description concerned with a Don Juan of the New York slums. As Maury and Anthony had said before, as the more hospitable critics were saying then, there was no writer in America with such power to describe the atavistic and unsubtle reactions of that section of society.

The book hesitated and then suddenly “went.” Editions, small at first, then larger, crowded each other week by week. A spokesman of the Salvation Army denounced it as a cynical misrepresentation of all the uplift taking place in the underworld. Clever press-agenting spread the unfounded rumor that “Gypsy” Smith was beginning a libel suit because one of the principal characters was a burlesque of himself. It was barred from the public library of Burlington, Iowa, and a Mid-Western columnist announced by innuendo that Richard Caramel was in a sanitarium with delirium tremens.

The author, indeed, spent his days in a state of pleasant madness. The book was in his conversation three-fourths of the time — he wanted to know if one had heard “the latest”; he would go into a store and in a loud voice order books to be charged to him, in order to catch a chance morsel of recognition from clerk or customer. He knew to a town in what sections of the country it was selling best; he knew exactly what he cleared on each edition, and when he met any one who had not read it, or, as it happened only too often, had not heard of it, he succumbed to moody depression.

So it was natural for Anthony and Gloria to decide, in their jealousy, that he was so swollen with conceit as to be a bore. To Dick’s great annoyance Gloria publicly boasted that she had never read “The Demon Lover,” and didn’t intend to until every one stopped talking about it. As a matter of fact, she had no time to read now, for the presents were pouring in — first a scattering, then an avalanche, varying from the bric-à-brac of forgotten family friends to the photographs of forgotten poor relations.

Maury gave them an elaborate “drinking set,” which included silver goblets, cocktail shaker, and bottle-openers. The extortion from Dick was more conventional — a tea set from Tiffany’s. From Joseph Bloeckman came a simple and exquisite travelling clock, with his card. There was even a cigarette-holder from Bounds; this touched Anthony and made him want to weep — indeed, any emotion short of hysteria seemed natural in the half-dozen people who were swept up by this tremendous sacrifice to convention. The room set aside in the Plaza bulged with offerings sent by Harvard friends and by associates of his grandfather, with remembrances of Gloria’s Farmover days, and with rather pathetic trophies from her former beaux, which last arrived with esoteric, melancholy messages, written on cards tucked carefully inside, beginning “I little thought when — “ or “I’m sure I wish you all the happiness — “ or even “When you get this I shall be on my way to — “

The most munificent gift was simultaneously the most disappointing. It was a concession of Adam Patch’s — a check for five thousand dollars.

To most of the presents Anthony was cold. It seemed to him that they would necessitate keeping a chart of the marital status of all their acquaintances during the next half-century. But Gloria exulted in each one, tearing at the tissue-paper and excelsior with the rapaciousness of a dog digging for a bone, breathlessly seizing a ribbon or an edge of metal and finally bringing to light the whole article and holding it up critically, no emotion except rapt interest in her unsmiling face.

“Look, Anthony!”

“Darn nice, isn’t it!”

No answer until an hour later when she would give him a careful account of her precise reaction to the gift, whether it would have been improved by being smaller or larger, whether she was surprised at getting it, and, if so, just how much surprised.

Mrs. Gilbert arranged and rearranged a hypothetical house, distributing the gifts among the different rooms, tabulating articles as “second-best clock” or “silver to use every day,” and embarrassing Anthony and Gloria by semi-facetious references to a room she called the nursery. She was pleased by old Adam’s gift and thereafter had it that he was a very ancient soul, “as much as anything else.” As Adam Patch never quite decided whether she referred to the advancing senility of his mind or to some private and psychic schema of her own, it cannot be said to have pleased him. Indeed he always spoke of her to Anthony as “that old woman, the mother,” as though she were a character in a comedy he had seen staged many times before. Concerning Gloria he was unable to make up his mind. She attracted him but, as she herself told Anthony, he had decided that she was frivolous and was afraid to approve of her.

Five days! — A dancing platform was being erected on the lawn at Tarrytown. Four days! — A special train was chartered to convey the guests to and from New York. Three days! —  —

THE DIARY

She was dressed in blue silk pajamas and standing by her bed with her hand on the light to put the room in darkness, when she changed her mind and opening a table drawer brought out a little black book — a “Line-a-day” diary. This she had kept for seven years. Many of the pencil entries were almost illegible and there were notes and references to nights and afternoons long since forgotten, for it was not an intimate diary, even though it began with the immemorial “I am going to keep a diary for my children.” Yet as she thumbed over the pages the eyes of many men seemed to look out at her from their half-obliterated names. With one she had gone to New Haven for the first time — in 1908, when she was sixteen and padded shoulders were fashionable at Yale — she had been flattered because “Touch down” Michaud had “rushed” her all evening. She sighed, remembering the grown-up satin dress she had been so proud of and the orchestra playing “Yama-yama, My Yama Man” and “Jungle-Town.” So long ago! — the names: Eltynge Reardon, Jim Parsons, “Curly” McGregor, Kenneth Cowan, “Fish-eye” Fry (whom she had liked for being so ugly), Carter Kirby — he had sent her a present; so had Tudor Baird; — Marty Reffer, the first man she had been in love with for more than a day, and Stuart Holcome, who had run away with her in his automobile and tried to make her marry him by force. And Larry Fenwick, whom she had always admired because he had told her one night that if she wouldn’t kiss him she could get out of his car and walk home. What a list!

… And, after all, an obsolete list. She was in love now, set for the eternal romance that was to be the synthesis of all romance, yet sad for these men and these moonlights and for the “thrills” she had had — and the kisses. The past — her past, oh, what a joy! She had been exuberantly happy.

Turning over the pages her eyes rested idly on the scattered entries of the past four months. She read the last few carefully.

“April 1st. — I know Bill Carstairs hates me because I was so disagreeable, but I hate to be sentimentalized over sometimes. We drove out to the Rockyear Country Club and the most wonderful moon kept shining through the trees. My silver dress is getting tarnished. Funny how one forgets the other nights at Rockyear — with Kenneth Cowan when I loved him so!

“April 3rd. — After two hours of Schroeder who, they inform me, has millions, I’ve decided that this matter of sticking to things wears one out, particularly when the things concerned are men. There’s nothing so often overdone and from to-day I swear to be amused. We talked about ‘love’ — how banal! With how many men have I talked about love?

“April 11th. — Patch actually called up to-day! and when he forswore me about a month ago he fairly raged out the door. I’m gradually losing faith in any man being susceptible to fatal injuries.

“April 20th. — Spent the day with Anthony. Maybe I’ll marry him some time. I kind of like his ideas — he stimulates all the originality in me. Blockhead came around about ten in his new car and took me out Riverside Drive. I liked him to-night: he’s so considerate. He knew I didn’t want to talk so he was quiet all during the ride.

“April 21st. — Woke up thinking of Anthony and sure enough he called and sounded sweet on the phone — so I broke a date for him. To-day I feel I’d break anything for him, including the ten commandments and my neck. He’s coming at eight and I shall wear pink and look very fresh and starched —  — “

She paused here, remembering that after he had gone that night she had undressed with the shivering April air streaming in the windows. Yet it seemed she had not felt the cold, warmed by the profound banalities burning in her heart.

The next entry occurred a few days later:

“April 24th. — I want to marry Anthony, because husbands are so often ‘husbands’ and I must marry a lover.

“There are four general types of husbands.

“(1) The husband who always wants to stay in in the evening, has no vices and works for a salary. Totally undesirable!

“(2) The atavistic master whose mistress one is, to wait on his pleasure. This sort always considers every pretty woman ‘shallow,’ a sort of peacock with arrested development.

“(3) Next comes the worshipper, the idolater of his wife and all that is his, to the utter oblivion of everything else. This sort demands an emotional actress for a wife. God! it must be an exertion to be thought righteous.

“(4) And Anthony — a temporarily passionate lover with wisdom enough to realize when it has flown and that it must fly. And I want to get married to Anthony.

“What grubworms women are to crawl on their bellies through colorless marriages! Marriage was created not to be a background but to need one. Mine is going to be outstanding. It can’t, shan’t be the setting — it’s going to be the performance, the live, lovely, glamourous performance, and the world shall be the scenery. I refuse to dedicate my life to posterity. Surely one owes as much to the current generation as to one’s unwanted children. What a fate — to grow rotund and unseemly, to lose my self-love, to think in terms of milk, oatmeal, nurse, diapers…. Dear dream children, how much more beautiful you are, dazzling little creatures who flutter (all dream children must flutter) on golden, golden wings —  —

“Such children, however, poor dear babies, have little in common with the wedded state.

“June 7th. — Moral question: Was it wrong to make Bloeckman love me? Because I did really make him. He was almost sweetly sad to-night. How opportune it was that my throat is swollen plunk together and tears were easy to muster. But he’s just the past — buried already in my plentiful lavender.

“June 8th. — And to-day I’ve promised not to chew my mouth. Well, I won’t, I suppose — but if he’d only asked me not to eat!

“Blowing bubbles — that’s what we’re doing, Anthony and me. And we blew such beautiful ones to-day, and they’ll explode and then we’ll blow more and more, I guess — bubbles just as big and just as beautiful, until all the soap and water is used up.”

On this note the diary ended. Her eyes wandered up the page, over the June 8th’s of 1912, 1910, 1907. The earliest entry was scrawled in the plump, bulbous hand of a sixteen-year-old girl — it was the name, Bob Lamar, and a word she could not decipher. Then she knew what it was — and, knowing, she found her eyes misty with tears. There in a graying blur was the record of her first kiss, faded as its intimate afternoon, on a rainy veranda seven years before. She seemed to remember something one of them had said that day and yet she could not remember. Her tears came faster, until she could scarcely see the page. She was crying, she told herself, because she could remember only the rain and the wet flowers in the yard and the smell of the damp grass.

… After a moment she found a pencil and holding it unsteadily drew three parallel lines beneath the last entry. Then she printed FINIS in large capitals, put the book back in the drawer, and crept into bed.

BREATH OF THE CAVE

Back in his apartment after the bridal dinner, Anthony snapped out his lights and, feeling impersonal and fragile as a piece of china waiting on a serving table, got into bed. It was a warm night — a sheet was enough for comfort — and through his wide-open windows came sound, evanescent and summery, alive with remote anticipation. He was thinking that the young years behind him, hollow and colorful, had been lived in facile and vacillating cynicism upon the recorded emotions of men long dust. And there was something beyond that; he knew now. There was the union of his soul with Gloria’s, whose radiant fire and freshness was the living material of which the dead beauty of books was made.

From the night into his high-walled room there came, persistently, that evanescent and dissolving sound — something the city was tossing up and calling back again, like a child playing with a ball. In Harlem, the Bronx, Gramercy Park, and along the water-fronts, in little parlors or on pebble-strewn, moon-flooded roofs, a thousand lovers were making this sound, crying little fragments of it into the air. All the city was playing with this sound out there in the blue summer dark, throwing it up and calling it back, promising that, in a little while, life would be beautiful as a story, promising happiness — and by that promise giving it. It gave love hope in its own survival. It could do no more.

It was then that a new note separated itself jarringly from the soft crying of the night. It was a noise from an areaway within a hundred feet from his rear window, the noise of a woman’s laughter. It began low, incessant and whining — some servant-maid with her fellow, he thought — and then it grew in volume and became hysterical, until it reminded him of a girl he had seen overcome with nervous laughter at a vaudeville performance. Then it sank, receded, only to rise again and include words — a coarse joke, some bit of obscure horseplay he could not distinguish. It would break off for a moment and he would just catch the low rumble of a man’s voice, then begin again — interminably; at first annoying, then strangely terrible. He shivered, and getting up out of bed went to the window. It had reached a high point, tensed and stifled, almost the quality of a scream — then it ceased and left behind it a silence empty and menacing as the greater silence overhead. Anthony stood by the window a moment longer before he returned to his bed. He found himself upset and shaken. Try as he might to strangle his reaction, some animal quality in that unrestrained laughter had grasped at his imagination, and for the first time in four months aroused his old aversion and horror toward all the business of life. The room had grown smothery. He wanted to be out in some cool and bitter breeze, miles above the cities, and to live serene and detached back in the corners of his mind. Life was that sound out there, that ghastly reiterated female sound.

“Oh, my God!” he cried, drawing in his breath sharply.

Burying his face in the pillows he tried in vain to concentrate upon the details of the next day.

MORNING

In the gray light he found that it was only five o’clock. He regretted nervously that he had awakened so early — he would appear fagged at the wedding. He envied Gloria who could hide her fatigue with careful pigmentation.

In his bathroom he contemplated himself in the mirror and saw that he was unusually white — half a dozen small imperfections stood out against the morning pallor of his complexion, and overnight he had grown the faint stubble of a beard — the general effect, he fancied, was unprepossessing, haggard, half unwell.

On his dressing table were spread a number of articles which he told over carefully with suddenly fumbling fingers — their tickets to California, the book of traveller’s checks, his watch, set to the half minute, the key to his apartment, which he must not forget to give to Maury, and, most important of all, the ring. It was of platinum set around with small emeralds; Gloria had insisted on this; she had always wanted an emerald wedding ring, she said.

It was the third present he had given her; first had come the engagement ring, and then a little gold cigarette-case. He would be giving her many things now — clothes and jewels and friends and excitement. It seemed absurd that from now on he would pay for all her meals. It was going to cost: he wondered if he had not underestimated for this trip, and if he had not better cash a larger check. The question worried him.

Then the breathless impendency of the event swept his mind clear of details. This was the day — unsought, unsuspected six months before, but now breaking in yellow light through his east window, dancing along the carpet as though the sun were smiling at some ancient and reiterated gag of his own.

Anthony laughed in a nervous one-syllable snort.

“By God!” he muttered to himself, “I’m as good as married!”

THE USHERS

Six young men in CROSS PATCH’S library growing more and more cheery under the influence of Mumm’s Extra Dry, set surreptitiously in cold pails by the bookcases.

THE FIRST YOUNG MAN: By golly! Believe me, in my next book I’m going to do a wedding scene that’ll knock ‘em cold!

THE SECOND YOUNG MAN: Met a débutante th’other day said she thought your book was powerful. As a rule young girls cry for this primitive business.

THE THIRD YOUNG MAN: Where’s Anthony?

THE FOURTH YOUNG MAN: Walking up and down outside talking to himself.

SECOND YOUNG MAN: Lord! Did you see the minister? Most peculiar looking teeth.

FIFTH YOUNG MAN: Think they’re natural. Funny thing people having gold teeth.

SIXTH YOUNG MAN: They say they love ‘em. My dentist told me once a woman came to him and insisted on having two of her teeth covered with gold. No reason at all. All right the way they were.

FOURTH YOUNG MAN: Hear you got out a book, Dicky. ‘Gratulations!

DICK: (Stiffly) Thanks.

FOURTH YOUNG MAN: (Innocently) What is it? College stories?

DICK: (More stiffly) No. Not college stories.

FOURTH YOUNG MAN: Pity! Hasn’t been a good book about Harvard for years.

DICK: (Touchily) Why don’t you supply the lack?

THIRD YOUNG MAN: I think I saw a squad of guests turn the drive in a

Packard just now.

SIXTH YOUNG MAN: Might open a couple more bottles on the strength of that.

THIRD YOUNG MAN: It was the shock of my life when I heard the old man was going to have a wet wedding. Rabid prohibitionist, you know.

FOURTH YOUNG MAN: (Snapping his fingers excitedly) By gad! I knew I’d forgotten something. Kept thinking it was my vest.

DICK: What was it?

FOURTH YOUNG MAN: By gad! By gad!

SIXTH YOUNG MAN: Here! Here! Why the tragedy?

SECOND YOUNG MAN: What’d you forget? The way home?

DICK: (Maliciously) He forgot the plot for his book of Harvard stories.

FOURTH YOUNG MAN: No, sir, I forgot the present, by George! I forgot to buy old Anthony a present. I kept putting it off and putting it off, and by gad I’ve forgotten it! What’ll they think?

SIXTH YOUNG MAN: (Facetiously) That’s probably what’s been holding up the wedding.

(THE FOURTH YOUNG MAN looks nervously at his watch. Laughter.)

FOURTH YOUNG MAN: By gad! What an ass I am!

SECOND YOUNG MAN: What d’you make of the bridesmaid who thinks she’s

Nora Bayes? Kept telling me she wished this was a ragtime wedding.

Name’s Haines or Hampton.

DICK: (Hurriedly spurring his imagination) Kane, you mean, Muriel Kane. She’s a sort of debt of honor, I believe. Once saved Gloria from drowning, or something of the sort.

SECOND YOUNG MAN: I didn’t think she could stop that perpetual swaying long enough to swim. Fill up my glass, will you? Old man and I had a long talk about the weather just now.

MAURY: Who? Old Adam?

SECOND YOUNG MAN: No, the bride’s father. He must be with a weather bureau.

DICK: He’s my uncle, Otis.

OTIS: Well, it’s an honorable profession. (Laughter.)

SIXTH YOUNG MAN: Bride your cousin, isn’t she?

DICK: Yes, Cable, she is.

CABLE: She certainly is a beauty. Not like you, Dicky. Bet she brings old Anthony to terms.

MAURY: Why are all grooms given the title of “old”? I think marriage is an error of youth.

DICK: Maury, the professional cynic.

MAURY: Why, you intellectual faker!

FIFTH YOUNG MAN: Battle of the highbrows here, Otis. Pick up what crumbs you can.

DICK: Faker yourself! What do you know?

MAURY: What do you know?

LICK: Ask me anything. Any branch of knowledge.

MAURY: All right. What’s the fundamental principle of biology?

DICK: You don’t know yourself.

MAURY: Don’t hedge!

DICK: Well, natural selection?

MAURY: Wrong.

DICK: I give it up.

MAURY: Ontogony recapitulates phyllogony.

FIFTH YOUNG MAN: Take your base!

MAURY: Ask you another. What’s the influence of mice on the clover crop? (Laughter.)

FOURTH YOUNG MAN: What’s the influence of rats on the Decalogue?

MAURY: Shut up, you saphead. There is a connection.

DICK: What is it then?

MAURY: (Pausing a moment in growing disconcertion) Why, let’s see. I seem to have forgotten exactly. Something about the bees eating the clover.

FOURTH YOUNG MAN: And the clover eating the mice! Haw! Haw!

MAURY: (Frowning) Let me just think a minute.

DICK: (Sitting up suddenly) Listen!

(A volley of chatter explodes in the adjoining room. The six young men arise, feeling at their neckties.)

DICK: (Weightily) We’d better join the firing squad. They’re going to take the picture, I guess. No, that’s afterward.

OTIS: Cable, you take the ragtime bridesmaid.

FOURTH YOUNG MAN: I wish to God I’d sent that present.

MAURY: If you’ll give me another minute I’ll think of that about the mice.

OTIS: I was usher last month for old Charlie McIntyre and —  —

(They move slowly toward the door as the chatter becomes a babel and the practising preliminary to the overture issues in long pious groans from ADAM PATCH’S organ.)

ANTHONY

There were five hundred eyes boring through the back of his cutaway and the sun glinting on the clergyman’s inappropriately bourgeois teeth. With difficulty he restrained a laugh. Gloria was saying something in a clear proud voice and he tried to think that the affair was irrevocable, that every second was significant, that his life was being slashed into two periods and that the face of the world was changing before him. He tried to recapture that ecstatic sensation of ten weeks before. All these emotions eluded him, he did not even feel the physical nervousness of that very morning — it was all one gigantic aftermath. And those gold teeth! He wondered if the clergyman were married; he wondered perversely if a clergyman could perform his own marriage service….

But as he took Gloria into his arms he was conscious of a strong reaction. The blood was moving in his veins now. A languorous and pleasant content settled like a weight upon him, bringing responsibility and possession. He was married.

GLORIA

So many, such mingled emotions, that no one of them was separable from the others! She could have wept for her mother, who was crying quietly back there ten feet and for the loveliness of the June sunlight flooding in at the windows. She was beyond all conscious perceptions. Only a sense, colored with delirious wild excitement, that the ultimately important was happening — and a trust, fierce and passionate, burning in her like a prayer, that in a moment she would be forever and securely safe.

Late one night they arrived in Santa Barbara, where the night clerk at the Hotel Lafcadio refused to admit them, on the grounds that they were not married.

The clerk thought that Gloria was beautiful. He did not think that anything so beautiful as Gloria could be moral.

“CON AMORE”

That first half-year — the trip West, the long months’ loiter along the California coast, and the gray house near Greenwich where they lived until late autumn made the country dreary — those days, those places, saw the enraptured hours. The breathless idyl of their engagement gave way, first, to the intense romance of the more passionate relationship. The breathless idyl left them, fled on to other lovers; they looked around one day and it was gone, how they scarcely knew. Had either of them lost the other in the days of the idyl, the love lost would have been ever to the loser that dim desire without fulfilment which stands back of all life. But magic must hurry on, and the lovers remain….

The idyl passed, bearing with it its extortion of youth. Came a day when Gloria found that other men no longer bored her; came a day when Anthony discovered that he could sit again late into the evening, talking with Dick of those tremendous abstractions that had once occupied his world. But, knowing they had had the best of love, they clung to what remained. Love lingered — by way of long conversations at night into those stark hours when the mind thins and sharpens and the borrowings from dreams become the stuff of all life, by way of deep and intimate kindnesses they developed toward each other, by way of their laughing at the same absurdities and thinking the same things noble and the same things sad.

It was, first of all, a time of discovery. The things they found in each other were so diverse, so intermixed and, moreover, so sugared with love as to seem at the time not so much discoveries as isolated phenomena — to be allowed for, and to be forgotten. Anthony found that he was living with a girl of tremendous nervous tension and of the most high-handed selfishness. Gloria knew within a month that her husband was an utter coward toward any one of a million phantasms created by his imagination. Her perception was intermittent, for this cowardice sprang out, became almost obscenely evident, then faded and vanished as though it had been only a creation of her own mind. Her reactions to it were not those attributed to her sex — it roused her neither to disgust nor to a premature feeling of motherhood. Herself almost completely without physical fear, she was unable to understand, and so she made the most of what she felt to be his fear’s redeeming feature, which was that though he was a coward under a shock and a coward under a strain — when his imagination was given play — he had yet a sort of dashing recklessness that moved her on its brief occasions almost to admiration, and a pride that usually steadied him when he thought he was observed.

The trait first showed itself in a dozen incidents of little more than nervousness — his warning to a taxi-driver against fast driving, in Chicago; his refusal to take her to a certain tough café she had always wished to visit; these of course admitted the conventional interpretation — that it was of her he had been thinking; nevertheless, their culminative weight disturbed her. But something that occurred in a San Francisco hotel, when they had been married a week, gave the matter certainty.

It was after midnight and pitch dark in their room. Gloria was dozing off and Anthony’s even breathing beside her made her suppose that he was asleep, when suddenly she saw him raise himself on his elbow and stare at the window.

“What is it, dearest?” she murmured.

“Nothing” — he had relaxed to his pillow and turned toward her — “nothing, my darling wife.”

“Don’t say ‘wife.’ I’m your mistress. Wife’s such an ugly word. Your ‘permanent mistress’ is so much more tangible and desirable…. Come into my arms,” she added in a rush of tenderness; “I can sleep so well, so well with you in my arms.”

Coming into Gloria’s arms had a quite definite meaning. It required that he should slide one arm under her shoulder, lock both arms about her, and arrange himself as nearly as possible as a sort of three-sided crib for her luxurious ease. Anthony, who tossed, whose arms went tinglingly to sleep after half an hour of that position, would wait until she was asleep and roll her gently over to her side of the bed — then, left to his own devices, he would curl himself into his usual knots.

Gloria, having attained sentimental comfort, retired into her doze. Five minutes ticked away on Bloeckman’s travelling clock; silence lay all about the room, over the unfamiliar, impersonal furniture and the half-oppressive ceiling that melted imperceptibly into invisible walls on both sides. Then there was suddenly a rattling flutter at the window, staccato and loud upon the hushed, pent air.

With a leap Anthony was out of the bed and standing tense beside it.

“Who’s there?” he cried in an awful voice.

Gloria lay very still, wide awake now and engrossed not so much in the rattling as in the rigid breathless figure whose voice had reached from the bedside into that ominous dark.

The sound stopped; the room was quiet as before — then Anthony pouring words in at the telephone.

“Some one just tried to get into the room! …

“There’s some one at the window!” His voice was emphatic now, faintly terrified.

“All right! Hurry!” He hung up the receiver; stood motionless.

… There was a rush and commotion at the door, a knocking — Anthony went to open it upon an excited night clerk with three bell-boys grouped staring behind him. Between thumb and finger the night clerk held a wet pen with the threat of a weapon; one of the bell-boys had seized a telephone directory and was looking at it sheepishly. Simultaneously the group was joined by the hastily summoned house-detective, and as one man they surged into the room.

Lights sprang on with a click. Gathering a piece of sheet about her Gloria dove away from sight, shutting her eyes to keep out the horror of this unpremeditated visitation. There was no vestige of an idea in her stricken sensibilities save that her Anthony was at grievous fault.

… The night clerk was speaking from the window, his tone half of the servant, half of the teacher reproving a schoolboy.

“Nobody out there,” he declared conclusively; “my golly, nobody could be out there. This here’s a sheer fall to the street of fifty feet. It was the wind you heard, tugging at the blind.”

“Oh.”

Then she was sorry for him. She wanted only to comfort him and draw him back tenderly into her arms, to tell them to go away because the thing their presence connotated was odious. Yet she could not raise her head for shame. She heard a broken sentence, apologies, conventions of the employee and one unrestrained snicker from a bell-boy.

“I’ve been nervous as the devil all evening,” Anthony was saying; “somehow that noise just shook me — I was only about half awake.”

“Sure, I understand,” said the night clerk with comfortable tact; “been that way myself.”

The door closed; the lights snapped out; Anthony crossed the floor quietly and crept into bed. Gloria, feigning to be heavy with sleep, gave a quiet little sigh and slipped into his arms.

“What was it, dear?”

“Nothing,” he answered, his voice still shaken; “I thought there was somebody at the window, so I looked out, but I couldn’t see any one and the noise kept up, so I phoned down-stairs. Sorry if I disturbed you, but I’m awfully darn nervous to-night.”

Catching the lie, she gave an interior start — he had not gone to the window, nor near the window. He had stood by the bed and then sent in his call of fear.

“Oh,” she said — and then: “I’m so sleepy.”

For an hour they lay awake side by side, Gloria with her eyes shut so tight that blue moons formed and revolved against backgrounds of deepest mauve, Anthony staring blindly into the darkness overhead.

After many weeks it came gradually out into the light, to be laughed and joked at. They made a tradition to fit over it — whenever that overpowering terror of the night attacked Anthony, she would put her arms about him and croon, soft as a song:

“I’ll protect my Anthony. Oh, nobody’s ever going to harm my Anthony!”

He would laugh as though it were a jest they played for their mutual amusement, but to Gloria it was never quite a jest. It was, at first, a keen disappointment; later, it was one of the times when she controlled her temper.

The management of Gloria’s temper, whether it was aroused by a lack of hot water for her bath or by a skirmish with her husband, became almost the primary duty of Anthony’s day. It must be done just so — by this much silence, by that much pressure, by this much yielding, by that much force. It was in her angers with their attendant cruelties that her inordinate egotism chiefly displayed itself. Because she was brave, because she was “spoiled,” because of her outrageous and commendable independence of judgment, and finally because of her arrogant consciousness that she had never seen a girl as beautiful as herself, Gloria had developed into a consistent, practising Nietzschean. This, of course, with overtones of profound sentiment.

There was, for example, her stomach. She was used to certain dishes, and she had a strong conviction that she could not possibly eat anything else. There must be a lemonade and a tomato sandwich late in the morning, then a light lunch with a stuffed tomato. Not only did she require food from a selection of a dozen dishes, but in addition this food must be prepared in just a certain way. One of the most annoying half hours of the first fortnight occurred in Los Angeles, when an unhappy waiter brought her a tomato stuffed with chicken salad instead of celery.

“We always serve it that way, madame,” he quavered to the gray eyes that regarded him wrathfully.

Gloria made no answer, but when the waiter had turned discreetly away she banged both fists upon the table until the china and silver rattled.

“Poor Gloria!” laughed Anthony unwittingly, “you can’t get what you want ever, can you?”

“I can’t eat stuff!” she flared up.

“I’ll call back the waiter.”

“I don’t want you to! He doesn’t know anything, the darn fool!”

“Well, it isn’t the hotel’s fault. Either send it back, forget it, or be a sport and eat it.”

“Shut up!” she said succinctly.

“Why take it out on me?”

“Oh, I’m not,” she wailed, “but I simply can’t eat it.”

Anthony subsided helplessly.

“We’ll go somewhere else,” he suggested.

“I don’t want to go anywhere else. I’m tired of being trotted around to a dozen cafés and not getting one thing fit to eat.”

“When did we go around to a dozen cafés?”

“You’d have to in this town,” insisted Gloria with ready sophistry.

Anthony, bewildered, tried another tack.

“Why don’t you try to eat it? It can’t be as bad as you think.”

“Just — because — I — don’t — like — chicken!”

She picked up her fork and began poking contemptuously at the tomato, and Anthony expected her to begin flinging the stuffings in all directions. He was sure that she was approximately as angry as she had ever been — for an instant he had detected a spark of hate directed as much toward him as toward any one else — and Gloria angry was, for the present, unapproachable.

Then, surprisingly, he saw that she had tentatively raised the fork to her lips and tasted the chicken salad. Her frown had not abated and he stared at her anxiously, making no comment and daring scarcely to breathe. She tasted another forkful — in another moment she was eating. With difficulty Anthony restrained a chuckle; when at length he spoke his words had no possible connection with chicken salad.

This incident, with variations, ran like a lugubrious fugue through the first year of marriage; always it left Anthony baffled, irritated, and depressed. But another rough brushing of temperaments, a question of laundry-bags, he found even more annoying as it ended inevitably in a decisive defeat for him.

One afternoon in Coronado, where they made the longest stay of their trip, more than three weeks, Gloria was arraying herself brilliantly for tea. Anthony, who had been down-stairs listening to the latest rumor bulletins of war in Europe, entered the room, kissed the back of her powdered neck, and went to his dresser. After a great pulling out and pushing in of drawers, evidently unsatisfactory, he turned around to the Unfinished Masterpiece.

“Got any handkerchiefs, Gloria?” he asked. Gloria shook her golden head.

“Not a one. I’m using one of yours.”

“The last one, I deduce.” He laughed dryly.

“Is it?” She applied an emphatic though very delicate contour to her lips.

“Isn’t the laundry back?”

“I don’t know.”

Anthony hesitated — then, with sudden discernment, opened the closet door. His suspicions were verified. On the hook provided hung the blue bag furnished by the hotel. This was full of his clothes — he had put them there himself. The floor beneath it was littered with an astonishing mass of finery — lingerie, stockings, dresses, nightgowns, and pajamas — most of it scarcely worn but all of it coming indubitably under the general heading of Gloria’s laundry.

He stood holding the closet door open.

“Why, Gloria!”

“What?”

The lip line was being erased and corrected according to some mysterious perspective; not a finger trembled as she manipulated the lip-stick, not a glance wavered in his direction. It was a triumph of concentration.

“Haven’t you ever sent out the laundry?”

“Is it there?”

“It most certainly is.”

“Well, I guess I haven’t, then.”

“Gloria,” began Anthony, sitting down on the bed and trying to catch her mirrored eyes, “you’re a nice fellow, you are! I’ve sent it out every time it’s been sent since we left New York, and over a week ago you promised you’d do it for a change. All you’d have to do would be to cram your own junk into that bag and ring for the chambermaid.”

“Oh, why fuss about the laundry?” exclaimed Gloria petulantly, “I’ll take care of it.”

“I haven’t fussed about it. I’d just as soon divide the bother with you, but when we run out of handkerchiefs it’s darn near time something’s done.”

Anthony considered that he was being extraordinarily logical. But Gloria, unimpressed, put away her cosmetics and casually offered him her back.

“Hook me up,” she suggested; “Anthony, dearest, I forgot all about it. I meant to, honestly, and I will to-day. Don’t be cross with your sweetheart.”

What could Anthony do then but draw her down upon his knee and kiss a shade of color from her lips.

“But I don’t mind,” she murmured with a smile, radiant and magnanimous.

“You can kiss all the paint off my lips any time you want.”

They went down to tea. They bought some handkerchiefs in a notion store near by. All was forgotten.

But two days later Anthony looked in the closet and saw the bag still hung limp upon its hook and that the gay and vivid pile on the floor had increased surprisingly in height.

“Gloria!” he cried.

“Oh — “ Her voice was full of real distress. Despairingly Anthony went to the phone and called the chambermaid.

“It seems to me,” he said impatiently, “that you expect me to be some sort of French valet to you.”

Gloria laughed, so infectiously that Anthony was unwise enough to smile. Unfortunate man! In some intangible manner his smile made her mistress of the situation — with an air of injured righteousness she went emphatically to the closet and began pushing her laundry violently into the bag. Anthony watched her — ashamed of himself.

“There!” she said, implying that her fingers had been worked to the bone by a brutal taskmaster.

He considered, nevertheless, that he had given her an object-lesson and that the matter was closed, but on the contrary it was merely beginning. Laundry pile followed laundry pile — at long intervals; dearth of handkerchief followed dearth of handkerchief — at short ones; not to mention dearth of sock, of shirt, of everything. And Anthony found at length that either he must send it out himself or go through the increasingly unpleasant ordeal of a verbal battle with Gloria.

GLORIA AND GENERAL LEE

On their way East they stopped two days in Washington, strolling about with some hostility in its atmosphere of harsh repellent light, of distance without freedom, of pomp without splendor — it seemed a pasty-pale and self-conscious city. The second day they made an ill-advised trip to General Lee’s old home at Arlington.

The bus which bore them was crowded with hot, unprosperous people, and Anthony, intimate to Gloria, felt a storm brewing. It broke at the Zoo, where the party stopped for ten minutes. The Zoo, it seemed, smelt of monkeys. Anthony laughed; Gloria called down the curse of Heaven upon monkeys, including in her malevolence all the passengers of the bus and their perspiring offspring who had hied themselves monkey-ward.

Eventually the bus moved on to Arlington. There it met other busses and immediately a swarm of women and children were leaving a trail of peanut-shells through the halls of General Lee and crowding at length into the room where he was married. On the wall of this room a pleasing sign announced in large red letters “Ladies’ Toilet.” At this final blow Gloria broke down.

“I think it’s perfectly terrible!” she said furiously, “the idea of letting these people come here! And of encouraging them by making these houses show-places.”

“Well,” objected Anthony, “if they weren’t kept up they’d go to pieces.”

“What if they did!” she exclaimed as they sought the wide pillared porch. “Do you think they’ve left a breath of 1860 here? This has become a thing of 1914.”

“Don’t you want to preserve old things?”

“But you can’t, Anthony. Beautiful things grow to a certain height and then they fail and fade off, breathing out memories as they decay. And just as any period decays in our minds, the things of that period should decay too, and in that way they’re preserved for a while in the few hearts like mine that react to them. That graveyard at Tarrytown, for instance. The asses who give money to preserve things have spoiled that too. Sleepy Hollow’s gone; Washington Irving’s dead and his books are rotting in our estimation year by year — then let the graveyard rot too, as it should, as all things should. Trying to preserve a century by keeping its relics up to date is like keeping a dying man alive by stimulants.”

“So you think that just as a time goes to pieces its houses ought to go too?”

“Of course! Would you value your Keats letter if the signature was traced over to make it last longer? It’s just because I love the past that I want this house to look back on its glamourous moment of youth and beauty, and I want its stairs to creak as if to the footsteps of women with hoop skirts and men in boots and spurs. But they’ve made it into a blondined, rouged-up old woman of sixty. It hasn’t any right to look so prosperous. It might care enough for Lee to drop a brick now and then. How many of these — these animals” — she waved her hand around — “get anything from this, for all the histories and guide-books and restorations in existence? How many of them who think that, at best, appreciation is talking in undertones and walking on tiptoes would even come here if it was any trouble? I want it to smell of magnolias instead of peanuts and I want my shoes to crunch on the same gravel that Lee’s boots crunched on. There’s no beauty without poignancy and there’s no poignancy without the feeling that it’s going, men, names, books, houses — bound for dust — mortal — “

A small boy appeared beside them and, swinging a handful of banana-peels, flung them valiantly in the direction of the Potomac.

SENTIMENT

Simultaneously with the fall of Liège, Anthony and Gloria arrived in New York. In retrospect the six weeks seemed miraculously happy. They had found to a great extent, as most young couples find in some measure, that they possessed in common many fixed ideas and curiosities and odd quirks of mind; they were essentially companionable.

But it had been a struggle to keep many of their conversations on the level of discussions. Arguments were fatal to Gloria’s disposition. She had all her life been associated either with her mental inferiors or with men who, under the almost hostile intimidation of her beauty, had not dared to contradict her; naturally, then, it irritated her when Anthony emerged from the state in which her pronouncements were an infallible and ultimate decision.

He failed to realize, at first, that this was the result partly of her “female” education and partly of her beauty, and he was inclined to include her with her entire sex as curiously and definitely limited. It maddened him to find she had no sense of justice. But he discovered that, when a subject did interest her, her brain tired less quickly than his. What he chiefly missed in her mind was the pedantic teleology — the sense of order and accuracy, the sense of life as a mysteriously correlated piece of patchwork, but he understood after a while that such a quality in her would have been incongruous.

Of the things they possessed in common, greatest of all was their almost uncanny pull at each other’s hearts. The day they left the hotel in Coronado she sat down on one of the beds while they were packing, and began to weep bitterly.

“Dearest — “ His arms were around her; he pulled her head down upon his shoulder. “What is it, my own Gloria? Tell me.”

“We’re going away,” she sobbed. “Oh, Anthony, it’s sort of the first place we’ve lived together. Our two little beds here — side by side — they’ll be always waiting for us, and we’re never coming back to ‘em any more.”

She was tearing at his heart as she always could. Sentiment came over him, rushed into his eyes.

“Gloria, why, we’re going on to another room. And two other little beds.

We’re going to be together all our lives.”

Words flooded from her in a low husky voice.

“But it won’t be — like our two beds — ever again. Everywhere we go and move on and change, something’s lost — something’s left behind. You can’t ever quite repeat anything, and I’ve been so yours, here — “

He held her passionately near, discerning far beyond any criticism of her sentiment, a wise grasping of the minute, if only an indulgence of her desire to cry — Gloria the idler, caresser of her own dreams, extracting poignancy from the memorable things of life and youth.

Later in the afternoon when he returned from the station with the tickets he found her asleep on one of the beds, her arm curled about a black object which he could not at first identify. Coming closer he found it was one of his shoes, not a particularly new one, nor clean one, but her face, tear-stained, was pressed against it, and he understood her ancient and most honorable message. There was almost ecstasy in waking her and seeing her smile at him, shy but well aware of her own nicety of imagination.

With no appraisal of the worth or dross of these two things, it seemed to Anthony that they lay somewhere near the heart of love.

THE GRAY HOUSE

It is in the twenties that the actual momentum of life begins to slacken, and it is a simple soul indeed to whom as many things are significant and meaningful at thirty as at ten years before. At thirty an organ-grinder is a more or less moth-eaten man who grinds an organ — and once he was an organ-grinder! The unmistakable stigma of humanity touches all those impersonal and beautiful things that only youth ever grasps in their impersonal glory. A brilliant ball, gay with light romantic laughter, wears through its own silks and satins to show the bare framework of a man-made thing — oh, that eternal hand! — a play, most tragic and most divine, becomes merely a succession of speeches, sweated over by the eternal plagiarist in the clammy hours and acted by men subject to cramps, cowardice, and manly sentiment.

And this time with Gloria and Anthony, this first year of marriage, and the gray house caught them in that stage when the organ-grinder was slowly undergoing his inevitable metamorphosis. She was twenty-three; he was twenty-six.

The gray house was, at first, of sheerly pastoral intent. They lived impatiently in Anthony’s apartment for the first fortnight after the return from California, in a stifled atmosphere of open trunks, too many callers, and the eternal laundry-bags. They discussed with their friends the stupendous problem of their future. Dick and Maury would sit with them agreeing solemnly, almost thoughtfully, as Anthony ran through his list of what they “ought” to do, and where they “ought” to live.

“I’d like to take Gloria abroad,” he complained, “except for this damn war — and next to that I’d sort of like to have a place in the country, somewhere near New York, of course, where I could write — or whatever I decide to do.”

Gloria laughed.

“Isn’t he cute?” she required of Maury. “‘Whatever he decides to do!’ But what am I going to do if he works? Maury, will you take me around if Anthony works?”

“Anyway, I’m not going to work yet,” said Anthony quickly.

It was vaguely understood between them that on some misty day he would enter a sort of glorified diplomatic service and be envied by princes and prime ministers for his beautiful wife.

“Well,” said Gloria helplessly, “I’m sure I don’t know. We talk and talk and never get anywhere, and we ask all our friends and they just answer the way we want ‘em to. I wish somebody’d take care of us.”

“Why don’t you go out to — out to Greenwich or something?” suggested

Richard Caramel.

“I’d like that,” said Gloria, brightening. “Do you think we could get a house there?”

Dick shrugged his shoulders and Maury laughed.

“You two amuse me,” he said. “Of all the unpractical people! As soon as a place is mentioned you expect us to pull great piles of photographs out of our pockets showing the different styles of architecture available in bungalows.”

“That’s just what I don’t want,” wailed Gloria, “a hot stuffy bungalow, with a lot of babies next door and their father cutting the grass in his shirt sleeves — “

“For Heaven’s sake, Gloria,” interrupted Maury, “nobody wants to lock you up in a bungalow. Who in God’s name brought bungalows into the conversation? But you’ll never get a place anywhere unless you go out and hunt for it.”

“Go where? You say ‘go out and hunt for it,’ but where?”

With dignity Maury waved his hand paw-like about the room.

“Out anywhere. Out in the country. There’re lots of places.”

“Thanks.”

“Look here!” Richard Caramel brought his yellow eye rakishly into play. “The trouble with you two is that you’re all disorganized. Do you know anything about New York State? Shut up, Anthony, I’m talking to Gloria.”

“Well,” she admitted finally, “I’ve been to two or three house parties in Portchester and around in Connecticut — but, of course, that isn’t in New York State, is it? And neither is Morristown,” she finished with drowsy irrelevance.

There was a shout of laughter.

“Oh, Lord!” cried Dick, “neither is Morristown!’ No, and neither is

Santa Barbara, Gloria. Now listen. To begin with, unless you have a

fortune there’s no use considering any place like Newport or

Southhampton or Tuxedo. They’re out of the question.”

They all agreed to this solemnly.

“And personally I hate New Jersey. Then, of course, there’s upper New

York, above Tuxedo.”

“Too cold,” said Gloria briefly. “I was there once in an automobile.”

“Well, it seems to me there’re a lot of towns like Rye between New York and Greenwich where you could buy a little gray house of some — “

Gloria leaped at the phrase triumphantly. For the first time since their return East she knew what she wanted.

“Oh, yes!” she cried. “Oh, yes! that’s it: a little gray house with sort of white around and a whole lot of swamp maples just as brown and gold as an October picture in a gallery. Where can we find one?”

“Unfortunately, I’ve mislaid my list of little gray houses with swamp maples around them — but I’ll try to find it. Meanwhile you take a piece of paper and write down the names of seven possible towns. And every day this week you take a trip to one of those towns.”

“Oh, gosh!” protested Gloria, collapsing mentally, “why won’t you do it for us? I hate trains.”

“Well, hire a car, and — “

Gloria yawned.

“I’m tired of discussing it. Seems to me all we do is talk about where to live.”

“My exquisite wife wearies of thought,” remarked Anthony ironically. “She must have a tomato sandwich to stimulate her jaded nerves. Let’s go out to tea.”

As the unfortunate upshot of this conversation, they took Dick’s advice literally, and two days later went out to Rye, where they wandered around with an irritated real estate agent, like bewildered babes in the wood. They were shown houses at a hundred a month which closely adjoined other houses at a hundred a month; they were shown isolated houses to which they invariably took violent dislikes, though they submitted weakly to the agent’s desire that they “look at that stove — some stove!” and to a great shaking of doorposts and tapping of walls, intended evidently to show that the house would not immediately collapse, no matter how convincingly it gave that impression. They gazed through windows into interiors furnished either “commercially” with slab-like chairs and unyielding settees, or “home-like” with the melancholy bric-à-brac of other summers — crossed tennis rackets, fit-form couches, and depressing Gibson girls. With a feeling of guilt they looked at a few really nice houses, aloof, dignified, and cool — at three hundred a month. They went away from Rye thanking the real estate agent very much indeed.

On the crowded train back to New York the seat behind was occupied by a super-respirating Latin whose last few meals had obviously been composed entirely of garlic. They reached the apartment gratefully, almost hysterically, and Gloria rushed for a hot bath in the reproachless bathroom. So far as the question of a future abode was concerned both of them were incapacitated for a week.

The matter eventually worked itself out with unhoped-for romance. Anthony ran into the living room one afternoon fairly radiating “the idea.”

“I’ve got it,” he was exclaiming as though he had just caught a mouse.

“We’ll get a car.”

“Gee whiz! Haven’t we got troubles enough taking care of ourselves?”

“Give me a second to explain, can’t you? just let’s leave our stuff with Dick and just pile a couple of suitcases in our car, the one we’re going to buy — we’ll have to have one in the country anyway — and just start out in the direction of New Haven. You see, as we get out of commuting distance from New York, the rents’ll get cheaper, and as soon as we find a house we want we’ll just settle down.”

By his frequent and soothing interpolation of the word “just” he aroused her lethargic enthusiasm. Strutting violently about the room, he simulated a dynamic and irresistible efficiency. “We’ll buy a car to-morrow.”

Life, limping after imagination’s ten-league boots, saw them out of town a week later in a cheap but sparkling new roadster, saw them through the chaotic unintelligible Bronx, then over a wide murky district which alternated cheerless blue-green wastes with suburbs of tremendous and sordid activity. They left New York at eleven and it was well past a hot and beatific noon when they moved rakishly through Pelham.

“These aren’t towns,” said Gloria scornfully, “these are just city blocks plumped down coldly into waste acres. I imagine all the men here have their mustaches stained from drinking their coffee too quickly in the morning.”

“And play pinochle on the commuting trains.”

“What’s pinochle?”

“Don’t be so literal. How should I know? But it sounds as though they ought to play it.”

“I like it. It sounds as if it were something where you sort of cracked your knuckles or something…. Let me drive.”

Anthony looked at her suspiciously.

“You swear you’re a good driver?”

“Since I was fourteen.”

He stopped the car cautiously at the side of the road and they changed seats. Then with a horrible grinding noise the car was put in gear, Gloria adding an accompaniment of laughter which seemed to Anthony disquieting and in the worst possible taste.

“Here we go!” she yelled. “Whoo-oop!”

Their heads snapped back like marionettes on a single wire as the car leaped ahead and curved retchingly about a standing milk-wagon, whose driver stood up on his seat and bellowed after them. In the immemorial tradition of the road Anthony retorted with a few brief epigrams as to the grossness of the milk-delivering profession. He cut his remarks short, however, and turned to Gloria with the growing conviction that he had made a grave mistake in relinquishing control and that Gloria was a driver of many eccentricities and of infinite carelessness.

“Remember now!” he warned her nervously, “the man said we oughtn’t to go over twenty miles an hour for the first five thousand miles.”

She nodded briefly, but evidently intending to accomplish the prohibitive distance as quickly as possible, slightly increased her speed. A moment later he made another attempt.

“See that sign? Do you want to get us pinched?”

“Oh, for Heaven’s sake,” cried Gloria in exasperation, “you always exaggerate things so!”

“Well, I don’t want to get arrested.”

“Who’s arresting you? You’re so persistent — just like you were about my cough medicine last night.”

“It was for your own good.”

“Ha! I might as well be living with mama.”

“What a thing to say to me!”

A standing policeman swerved into view, was hastily passed.

“See him?” demanded Anthony.

“Oh, you drive me crazy! He didn’t arrest us, did he?”

“When he does it’ll be too late,” countered Anthony brilliantly.

Her reply was scornful, almost injured.

“Why, this old thing won’t go over thirty-five.”

“It isn’t old.”

“It is in spirit.”

That afternoon the car joined the laundry-bags and Gloria’s appetite as one of the trinity of contention. He warned her of railroad tracks; he pointed out approaching automobiles; finally he insisted on taking the wheel and a furious, insulted Gloria sat silently beside him between the towns of Larchmont and Rye.

But it was due to this furious silence of hers that the gray house materialized from its abstraction, for just beyond Rye he surrendered gloomily to it and re-relinquished the wheel. Mutely he beseeched her and Gloria, instantly cheered, vowed to be more careful. But because a discourteous street-car persisted callously in remaining upon its track Gloria ducked down a side-street — and thereafter that afternoon was never able to find her way back to the Post Road. The street they finally mistook for it lost its Post-Road aspect when it had gone five miles from Cos Cob. Its macadam became gravel, then dirt — moreover, it narrowed and developed a border of maple trees, through which filtered the weltering sun, making its endless experiments with shadow designs upon the long grass.

“We’re lost now,” complained Anthony.

“Read that sign!”

“Marietta — Five Miles. What’s Marietta?”

“Never heard of it, but let’s go on. We can’t turn here and there’s probably a detour back to the Post Road.”

The way became scarred with deepening ruts and insidious shoulders of stone. Three farmhouses faced them momentarily, slid by. A town sprang up in a cluster of dull roofs around a white tall steeple.

Then Gloria, hesitating between two approaches, and making her choice too late, drove over a fire-hydrant and ripped the transmission violently from the car.

It was dark when the real-estate agent of Marietta showed them the gray house. They came upon it just west of the village, where it rested against a sky that was a warm blue cloak buttoned with tiny stars. The gray house had been there when women who kept cats were probably witches, when Paul Revere made false teeth in Boston preparatory to arousing the great commercial people, when our ancestors were gloriously deserting Washington in droves. Since those days the house had been bolstered up in a feeble corner, considerably repartitioned and newly plastered inside, amplified by a kitchen and added to by a side-porch — but, save for where some jovial oaf had roofed the new kitchen with red tin, Colonial it defiantly remained.

“How did you happen to come to Marietta?” demanded the real-estate agent in a tone that was first cousin to suspicion. He was showing them through four spacious and airy bedrooms.

“We broke down,” explained Gloria. “I drove over a fire-hydrant and we had ourselves towed to the garage and then we saw your sign.”

The man nodded, unable to follow such a sally of spontaneity. There was something subtly immoral in doing anything without several months’ consideration.

They signed a lease that night and, in the agent’s car, returned jubilantly to the somnolent and dilapidated Marietta Inn, which was too broken for even the chance immoralities and consequent gaieties of a country road-house. Half the night they lay awake planning the things they were to do there. Anthony was going to work at an astounding pace on his history and thus ingratiate himself with his cynical grandfather…. When the car was repaired they would explore the country and join the nearest “really nice” club, where Gloria would play golf “or something” while Anthony wrote. This, of course, was Anthony’s idea — Gloria was sure she wanted but to read and dream and be fed tomato sandwiches and lemonades by some angelic servant still in a shadowy hinterland. Between paragraphs Anthony would come and kiss her as she lay indolently in the hammock…. The hammock! a host of new dreams in tune to its imagined rhythm, while the wind stirred it and waves of sun undulated over the shadows of blown wheat, or the dusty road freckled and darkened with quiet summer rain….

And guests — here they had a long argument, both of them trying to be extraordinarily mature and far-sighted. Anthony claimed that they would need people at least every other week-end “as a sort of change.” This provoked an involved and extremely sentimental conversation as to whether Anthony did not consider Gloria change enough. Though he assured her that he did, she insisted upon doubting him…. Eventually the conversation assumed its eternal monotone: “What then? Oh, what’ll we do then?”

“Well, we’ll have a dog,” suggested Anthony.

“I don’t want one. I want a kitty.” She went thoroughly and with great enthusiasm into the history, habits, and tastes of a cat she had once possessed. Anthony considered that it must have been a horrible character with neither personal magnetism nor a loyal heart.

Later they slept, to wake an hour before dawn with the gray house dancing in phantom glory before their dazzled eyes.

THE SOUL OF GLORIA

For that autumn the gray house welcomed them with a rush of sentiment that falsified its cynical old age. True, there were the laundry-bags, there was Gloria’s appetite, there was Anthony’s tendency to brood and his imaginative “nervousness,” but there were intervals also of an unhoped-for serenity. Close together on the porch they would wait for the moon to stream across the silver acres of farmland, jump a thick wood and tumble waves of radiance at their feet. In such a moonlight Gloria’s face was of a pervading, reminiscent white, and with a modicum of effort they would slip off the blinders of custom and each would find in the other almost the quintessential romance of the vanished June.

One night while her head lay upon his heart and their cigarettes glowed in swerving buttons of light through the dome of darkness over the bed, she spoke for the first time and fragmentarily of the men who had hung for brief moments on her beauty.

“Do you ever think of them?” he asked her.

“Only occasionally — when something happens that recalls a particular man.”

“What do you remember — their kisses?”

“All sorts of things…. Men are different with women.”

“Different in what way?”

“Oh, entirely — and quite inexpressibly. Men who had the most firmly rooted reputation for being this way or that would sometimes be surprisingly inconsistent with me. Brutal men were tender, negligible men were astonishingly loyal and lovable, and, often, honorable men took attitudes that were anything but honorable.”

“For instance?”

“Well, there was a boy named Percy Wolcott from Cornell who was quite a hero in college, a great athlete, and saved a lot of people from a fire or something like that. But I soon found he was stupid in a rather dangerous way.”

“What way?”

“It seems he had some naïve conception of a woman ‘fit to be his wife,’ a particular conception that I used to run into a lot and that always drove me wild. He demanded a girl who’d never been kissed and who liked to sew and sit home and pay tribute to his self-esteem. And I’ll bet a hat if he’s gotten an idiot to sit and be stupid with him he’s tearing out on the side with some much speedier lady.”

“I’d be sorry for his wife.”

“I wouldn’t. Think what an ass she’d be not to realize it before she married him. He’s the sort whose idea of honoring and respecting a woman would be never to give her any excitement. With the best intentions, he was deep in the dark ages.”

“What was his attitude toward you?”

“I’m coming to that. As I told you — or did I tell you? — he was mighty good-looking: big brown honest eyes and one of those smiles that guarantee the heart behind it is twenty-karat gold. Being young and credulous, I thought he had some discretion, so I kissed him fervently one night when we were riding around after a dance at the Homestead at Hot Springs. It had been a wonderful week, I remember — with the most luscious trees spread like green lather, sort of, all over the valley and a mist rising out of them on October mornings like bonfires lit to turn them brown — “

“How about your friend with the ideals?” interrupted Anthony.

“It seems that when he kissed me he began to think that perhaps he could get away with a little more, that I needn’t be ‘respected’ like this Beatrice Fairfax glad-girl of his imagination.”

“What’d he do?”

“Not much. I pushed him off a sixteen-foot embankment before he was well started.”

“Hurt him?” inquired Anthony with a laugh.

“Broke his arm and sprained his ankle. He told the story all over Hot Springs, and when his arm healed a man named Barley who liked me fought him and broke it over again. Oh, it was all an awful mess. He threatened to sue Barley, and Barley — he was from Georgia — was seen buying a gun in town. But before that mama had dragged me North again, much against my will, so I never did find out all that happened — though I saw Barley once in the Vanderbilt lobby.”

Anthony laughed long and loud.

“What a career! I suppose I ought to be furious because you’ve kissed so many men. I’m not, though.”

At this she sat up in bed.

“It’s funny, but I’m so sure that those kisses left no mark on me — no taint of promiscuity, I mean — even though a man once told me in all seriousness that he hated to think I’d been a public drinking glass.”

“He had his nerve.”

“I just laughed and told him to think of me rather as a loving-cup that goes from hand to hand but should be valued none the less.”

“Somehow it doesn’t bother me — on the other hand it would, of course, if you’d done any more than kiss them. But I believe you’re absolutely incapable of jealousy except as hurt vanity. Why don’t you care what I’ve done? Wouldn’t you prefer it if I’d been absolutely innocent?”

“It’s all in the impression it might have made on you. My kisses were because the man was good-looking, or because there was a slick moon, or even because I’ve felt vaguely sentimental and a little stirred. But that’s all — it’s had utterly no effect on me. But you’d remember and let memories haunt you and worry you.”

“Haven’t you ever kissed any one like you’ve kissed me?”

“No,” she answered simply. “As I’ve told you, men have tried — oh, lots of things. Any pretty girl has that experience…. You see,” she resumed, “it doesn’t matter to me how many women you’ve stayed with in the past, so long as it was merely a physical satisfaction, but I don’t believe I could endure the idea of your ever having lived with another woman for a protracted period or even having wanted to marry some possible girl. It’s different somehow. There’d be all the little intimacies remembered — and they’d dull that freshness that after all is the most precious part of love.”

Rapturously he pulled her down beside him on the pillow.

“Oh, my darling,” he whispered, “as if I remembered anything but your dear kisses.”

Then Gloria, in a very mild voice:

“Anthony, did I hear anybody say they were thirsty?”

Anthony laughed abruptly and with a sheepish and amused grin got out of bed.

“With just a little piece of ice in the water,” she added. “Do you suppose I could have that?”

Gloria used the adjective “little” whenever she asked a favor — it made the favor sound less arduous. But Anthony laughed again — whether she wanted a cake of ice or a marble of it, he must go down-stairs to the kitchen…. Her voice followed him through the hall: “And just a little cracker with just a little marmalade on it….”

“Oh, gosh!” sighed Anthony in rapturous slang, “she’s wonderful, that girl! She has it!”

“When we have a baby,” she began one day — this, it had already been decided, was to be after three years — “I want it to look like you.”

“Except its legs,” he insinuated slyly.

“Oh, yes, except his legs. He’s got to have my legs. But the rest of him can be you.”

“My nose?”

Gloria hesitated.

“Well, perhaps my nose. But certainly your eyes — and my mouth, and I guess my shape of the face. I wonder; I think he’d be sort of cute if he had my hair.”

“My dear Gloria, you’ve appropriated the whole baby.”

“Well, I didn’t mean to,” she apologized cheerfully.

“Let him have my neck at least,” he urged, regarding himself gravely in the glass. “You’ve often said you liked my neck because the Adam’s apple doesn’t show, and, besides, your neck’s too short.”

“Why, it is not!” she cried indignantly, turning to the mirror, “it’s just right. I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a better neck.”

“It’s too short,” he repeated teasingly.

“Short?” Her tone expressed exasperated wonder.

“Short? You’re crazy!” She elongated and contracted it to convince herself of its reptilian sinuousness. “Do you call that a short neck?”

“One of the shortest I’ve ever seen.”

For the first time in weeks tears started from Gloria’s eyes and the look she gave him had a quality of real pain.

“Oh, Anthony — “

“My Lord, Gloria!” He approached her in bewilderment and took her elbows in his hands. “Don’t cry, please! Didn’t you know I was only kidding? Gloria, look at me! Why, dearest, you’ve got the longest neck I’ve ever seen. Honestly.”

Her tears dissolved in a twisted smile.

“Well — you shouldn’t have said that, then. Let’s talk about the b-baby.”

Anthony paced the floor and spoke as though rehearsing for a debate.

“To put it briefly, there are two babies we could have, two distinct and logical babies, utterly differentiated. There’s the baby that’s the combination of the best of both of us. Your body, my eyes, my mind, your intelligence — and then there is the baby which is our worst — my body, your disposition, and my irresolution.”

“I like that second baby,” she said.

“What I’d really like,” continued Anthony, “would be to have two sets of triplets one year apart and then experiment with the six boys — “

“Poor me,” she interjected.

“ — I’d educate them each in a different country and by a different system and when they were twenty-three I’d call them together and see what they were like.”

“Let’s have ‘em all with my neck,” suggested Gloria.

THE END OF A CHAPTER

The car was at length repaired and with a deliberate vengeance took up where it left off the business of causing infinite dissension. Who should drive? How fast should Gloria go? These two questions and the eternal recriminations involved ran through the days. They motored to the Post-Road towns, Rye, Portchester, and Greenwich, and called on a dozen friends, mostly Gloria’s, who all seemed to be in different stages of having babies and in this respect as well as in others bored her to a point of nervous distraction. For an hour after each visit she would bite her fingers furiously and be inclined to take out her rancor on Anthony.

“I loathe women,” she cried in a mild temper. “What on earth can you say to them — except talk ‘lady-lady’? I’ve enthused over a dozen babies that I’ve wanted only to choke. And every one of those girls is either incipiently jealous and suspicious of her husband if he’s charming or beginning to be bored with him if he isn’t.”

“Don’t you ever intend to see any women?”

“I don’t know. They never seem clean to me — never — never. Except just a few. Constance Shaw — you know, the Mrs. Merriam who came over to see us last Tuesday — is almost the only one. She’s so tall and fresh-looking and stately.”

“I don’t like them so tall.”

Though they went to several dinner dances at various country clubs, they decided that the autumn was too nearly over for them to “go out” on any scale, even had they been so inclined. He hated golf; Gloria liked it only mildly, and though she enjoyed a violent rush that some undergraduates gave her one night and was glad that Anthony should be proud of her beauty, she also perceived that their hostess for the evening, a Mrs. Granby, was somewhat disquieted by the fact that Anthony’s classmate, Alec Granby, joined with enthusiasm in the rush. The Granbys never phoned again, and though Gloria laughed, it piqued her not a little.

“You see,” she explained to Anthony, “if I wasn’t married it wouldn’t worry her — but she’s been to the movies in her day and she thinks I may be a vampire. But the point is that placating such people requires an effort that I’m simply unwilling to make…. And those cute little freshmen making eyes at me and paying me idiotic compliments! I’ve grown up, Anthony.”

Marietta itself offered little social life. Half a dozen farm-estates formed a hectagon around it, but these belonged to ancient men who displayed themselves only as inert, gray-thatched lumps in the back of limousines on their way to the station, whither they were sometimes accompanied by equally ancient and doubly massive wives. The townspeople were a particularly uninteresting type — unmarried females were predominant for the most part — with school-festival horizons and souls bleak as the forbidding white architecture of the three churches. The only native with whom they came into close contact was the broad-hipped, broad-shouldered Swedish girl who came every day to do their work. She was silent and efficient, and Gloria, after finding her weeping violently into her bowed arms upon the kitchen table, developed an uncanny fear of her and stopped complaining about the food. Because of her untold and esoteric grief the girl stayed on.

Gloria’s penchant for premonitions and her bursts of vague supernaturalism were a surprise to Anthony. Either some complex, properly and scientifically inhibited in the early years with her Bilphistic mother, or some inherited hypersensitiveness, made her susceptible to any suggestion of the psychic, and, far from gullible about the motives of people, she was inclined to credit any extraordinary happening attributed to the whimsical perambulations of the buried. The desperate squeakings about the old house on windy nights that to Anthony were burglars with revolvers ready in hand represented to Gloria the auras, evil and restive, of dead generations, expiating the inexpiable upon the ancient and romantic hearth. One night, because of two swift bangs down-stairs, which Anthony fearfully but unavailingly investigated, they lay awake nearly until dawn asking each other examination-paper questions about the history of the world.

In October Muriel came out for a two weeks’ visit. Gloria had called her on long-distance, and Miss Kane ended the conversation characteristically by saying “All-ll-ll righty. I’ll be there with bells!” She arrived with a dozen popular songs under her arm.

“You ought to have a phonograph out here in the country,” she said, “just a little Vic — they don’t cost much. Then whenever you’re lonesome you can have Caruso or Al Jolson right at your door.”

She worried Anthony to distraction by telling him that “he was the first clever man she had ever known and she got so tired of shallow people.” He wondered that people fell in love with such women. Yet he supposed that under a certain impassioned glance even she might take on a softness and promise.

But Gloria, violently showing off her love for Anthony, was diverted into a state of purring content.

Finally Richard Caramel arrived for a garrulous and to Gloria painfully literary week-end, during which he discussed himself with Anthony long after she lay in childlike sleep up-stairs.

“It’s been mighty funny, this success and all,” said Dick. “Just before the novel appeared I’d been trying, without success, to sell some short stories. Then, after my book came out, I polished up three and had them accepted by one of the magazines that had rejected them before. I’ve done a lot of them since; publishers don’t pay me for my book till this winter.”

“Don’t let the victor belong to the spoils.”

“You mean write trash?” He considered. “If you mean deliberately injecting a slushy fade-out into each one, I’m not. But I don’t suppose I’m being so careful. I’m certainly writing faster and I don’t seem to be thinking as much as I used to. Perhaps it’s because I don’t get any conversation, now that you’re married and Maury’s gone to Philadelphia. Haven’t the old urge and ambition. Early success and all that.”

“Doesn’t it worry you?”

“Frantically. I get a thing I call sentence-fever that must be like buck-fever — it’s a sort of intense literary self-consciousness that comes when I try to force myself. But the really awful days aren’t when I think I can’t write. They’re when I wonder whether any writing is worth while at all — I mean whether I’m not a sort of glorified buffoon.”

“I like to hear you talk that way,” said Anthony with a touch of his old patronizing insolence. “I was afraid you’d gotten a bit idiotic over your work. Read the damnedest interview you gave out —  — “

Dick interrupted with an agonized expression.

“Good Lord! Don’t mention it. Young lady wrote it — most admiring young lady. Kept telling me my work was ‘strong,’ and I sort of lost my head and made a lot of strange pronouncements. Some of it was good, though, don’t you think?”

“Oh, yes; that part about the wise writer writing for the youth of his generation, the critic of the next, and the schoolmaster of ever afterward.”

“Oh, I believe a lot of it,” admitted Richard Caramel with a faint beam.

“It simply was a mistake to give it out.”

In November they moved into Anthony’s apartment, from which they sallied triumphantly to the Yale-Harvard and Harvard-Princeton football games, to the St. Nicholas ice-skating rink, to a thorough round of the theatres and to a miscellany of entertainments — from small, staid dances to the great affairs that Gloria loved, held in those few houses where lackeys with powdered wigs scurried around in magnificent Anglomania under the direction of gigantic majordomos. Their intention was to go abroad the first of the year or, at any rate, when the war was over. Anthony had actually completed a Chestertonian essay on the twelfth century by way of introduction to his proposed book and Gloria had done some extensive research work on the question of Russian sable coats — in fact the winter was approaching quite comfortably, when the Bilphistic demiurge decided suddenly in mid-December that Mrs. Gilbert’s soul had aged sufficiently in its present incarnation. In consequence Anthony took a miserable and hysterical Gloria out to Kansas City, where, in the fashion of mankind, they paid the terrible and mind-shaking deference to the dead.

Mr. Gilbert became, for the first and last time in his life, a truly pathetic figure. That woman he had broken to wait upon his body and play congregation to his mind had ironically deserted him — just when he could not much longer have supported her. Never again would he be able so satisfactorily to bore and bully a human soul.

CHAPTER II

SYMPOSIUM

Gloria had lulled Anthony’s mind to sleep. She, who seemed of all women the wisest and the finest, hung like a brilliant curtain across his doorways, shutting out the light of the sun. In those first years what he believed bore invariably the stamp of Gloria; he saw the sun always through the pattern of the curtain.

It was a sort of lassitude that brought them back to Marietta for another summer. Through a golden enervating spring they had loitered, restive and lazily extravagant, along the California coast, joining other parties intermittently and drifting from Pasadena to Coronado, from Coronado to Santa Barbara, with no purpose more apparent than Gloria’s desire to dance by different music or catch some infinitesimal variant among the changing colors of the sea. Out of the Pacific there rose to greet them savage rocklands and equally barbaric hostelries built that at tea-time one might drowse into a languid wicker bazaar glorified by the polo costumes of Southhampton and Lake Forest and Newport and Palm Beach. And, as the waves met and splashed and glittered in the most placid of the bays, so they joined this group and that, and with them shifted stations, murmuring ever of those strange unsubstantial gaieties in wait just over the next green and fruitful valley.

A simple healthy leisure class it was — the best of the men not unpleasantly undergraduate — they seemed to be on a perpetual candidates list for some etherealized “Porcellian” or “Skull and Bones” extended out indefinitely into the world; the women, of more than average beauty, fragilely athletic, somewhat idiotic as hostesses but charming and infinitely decorative as guests. Sedately and gracefully they danced the steps of their selection in the balmy tea hours, accomplishing with a certain dignity the movements so horribly burlesqued by clerk and chorus girl the country over. It seemed ironic that in this lone and discredited offspring of the arts Americans should excel, unquestionably.

Having danced and splashed through a lavish spring, Anthony and Gloria found that they had spent too much money and for this must go into retirement for a certain period. There was Anthony’s “work,” they said. Almost before they knew it they were back in the gray house, more aware now that other lovers had slept there, other names had been called over the banisters, other couples had sat upon the porch steps watching the gray-green fields and the black bulk of woods beyond.

It was the same Anthony, more restless, inclined to quicken only under the stimulus of several high-balls, faintly, almost imperceptibly, apathetic toward Gloria. But Gloria — she would be twenty-four in August and was in an attractive but sincere panic about it. Six years to thirty! Had she been less in love with Anthony her sense of the flight of time would have expressed itself in a reawakened interest in other men, in a deliberate intention of extracting a transient gleam of romance from every potential lover who glanced at her with lowered brows over a shining dinner table. She said to Anthony one day:

“How I feel is that if I wanted anything I’d take it. That’s what I’ve always thought all my life. But it happens that I want you, and so I just haven’t room for any other desires.”

They were bound eastward through a parched and lifeless Indiana, and she had looked up from one of her beloved moving picture magazines to find a casual conversation suddenly turned grave.

Anthony frowned out the car window. As the track crossed a country road a farmer appeared momentarily in his wagon; he was chewing on a straw and was apparently the same farmer they had passed a dozen times before, sitting in silent and malignant symbolism. As Anthony turned to Gloria his frown intensified.

“You worry me,” he objected; “I can imagine wanting another woman under certain transitory circumstances, but I can’t imagine taking her.”

“But I don’t feel that way, Anthony. I can’t be bothered resisting things I want. My way is not to want them — to want nobody but you.”

“Yet when I think that if you just happened to take a fancy to some one — “

“Oh, don’t be an idiot!” she exclaimed. “There’d be nothing casual about it. And I can’t even imagine the possibility.”

This emphatically closed the conversation. Anthony’s unfailing appreciation made her happier in his company than in any one’s else. She definitely enjoyed him — she loved him. So the summer began very much as had the one before.

There was, however, one radical change in ménage. The icy-hearted Scandinavian, whose austere cooking and sardonic manner of waiting on table had so depressed Gloria, gave way to an exceedingly efficient Japanese whose name was Tanalahaka, but who confessed that he heeded any summons which included the dissyllable “Tana.”

Tana was unusually small even for a Japanese, and displayed a somewhat naïve conception of himself as a man of the world. On the day of his arrival from “R. Gugimoniki, Japanese Reliable Employment Agency,” he called Anthony into his room to see the treasures of his trunk. These included a large collection of Japanese post cards, which he was all for explaining to his employer at once, individually and at great length. Among them were half a dozen of pornographic intent and plainly of American origin, though the makers had modestly omitted both their names and the form for mailing. He next brought out some of his own handiwork — a pair of American pants, which he had made himself, and two suits of solid silk underwear. He informed Anthony confidentially as to the purpose for which these latter were reserved. The next exhibit was a rather good copy of an etching of Abraham Lincoln, to whose face he had given an unmistakable Japanese cast. Last came a flute; he had made it himself but it was broken: he was going to fix it soon.

After these polite formalities, which Anthony conjectured must be native to Japan, Tana delivered a long harangue in splintered English on the relation of master and servant from which Anthony gathered that he had worked on large estates but had always quarrelled with the other servants because they were not honest. They had a great time over the word “honest,” and in fact became rather irritated with each other, because Anthony persisted stubbornly that Tana was trying to say “hornets,” and even went to the extent of buzzing in the manner of a bee and flapping his arms to imitate wings.

After three-quarters of an hour Anthony was released with the warm assurance that they would have other nice chats in which Tana would tell “how we do in my countree.”

Such was Tana’s garrulous première in the gray house — and he fulfilled its promise. Though he was conscientious and honorable, he was unquestionably a terrific bore. He seemed unable to control his tongue, sometimes continuing from paragraph to paragraph with a look akin to pain in his small brown eyes.

Sunday and Monday afternoons he read the comic sections of the newspapers. One cartoon which contained a facetious Japanese butler diverted him enormously, though he claimed that the protagonist, who to Anthony appeared clearly Oriental, had really an American face. The difficulty with the funny paper was that when, aided by Anthony, he had spelled out the last three pictures and assimilated their context with a concentration surely adequate for Kant’s “Critique,” he had entirely forgotten what the first pictures were about.

In the middle of June Anthony and Gloria celebrated their first anniversary by having a “date.” Anthony knocked at the door and she ran to let him in. Then they sat together on the couch calling over those names they had made for each other, new combinations of endearments ages old. Yet to this “date” was appended no attenuated good-night with its ecstasy of regret.

Later in June horror leered out at Gloria, struck at her and frightened her bright soul back half a generation. Then slowly it faded out, faded back into that impenetrable darkness whence it had come — taking relentlessly its modicum of youth.

With an infallible sense of the dramatic it chose a little railroad station in a wretched village near Portchester. The station platform lay all day bare as a prairie, exposed to the dusty yellow sun and to the glance of that most obnoxious type of countryman who lives near a metropolis and has attained its cheap smartness without its urbanity. A dozen of these yokels, red-eyed, cheerless as scarecrows, saw the incident. Dimly it passed across their confused and uncomprehending minds, taken at its broadest for a coarse joke, at its subtlest for a “shame.” Meanwhile there upon the platform a measure of brightness faded from the world.

With Eric Merriam, Anthony had been sitting over a decanter of Scotch all the hot summer afternoon, while Gloria and Constance Merriam swam and sunned themselves at the Beach Club, the latter under a striped parasol-awning, Gloria stretched sensuously upon the soft hot sand, tanning her inevitable legs. Later they had all four played with inconsequential sandwiches; then Gloria had risen, tapping Anthony’s knee with her parasol to get his attention.

“We’ve got to go, dear.”

“Now?” He looked at her unwillingly. At that moment nothing seemed of more importance than to idle on that shady porch drinking mellowed Scotch, while his host reminisced interminably on the byplay of some forgotten political campaign.

“We’ve really got to go,” repeated Gloria. “We can get a taxi to the station…. Come on, Anthony!” she commanded a bit more imperiously.

“Now see here — “ Merriam, his yarn cut off, made conventional objections, meanwhile provocatively filling his guest’s glass with a high-ball that should have been sipped through ten minutes. But at Gloria’s annoyed “We really must!” Anthony drank it off, got to his feet and made an elaborate bow to his hostess.

“It seems we ‘must,’“ he said, with little grace.

In a minute he was following Gloria down a garden-walk between tall rose-bushes, her parasol brushing gently the June-blooming leaves. Most inconsiderate, he thought, as they reached the road. He felt with injured naïvete that Gloria should not have interrupted such innocent and harmless enjoyment. The whiskey had both soothed and clarified the restless things in his mind. It occurred to him that she had taken this same attitude several times before. Was he always to retreat from pleasant episodes at a touch of her parasol or a flicker of her eye? His unwillingness blurred to ill will, which rose within him like a resistless bubble. He kept silent, perversely inhibiting a desire to reproach her. They found a taxi in front of the Inn; rode silently to the little station….

Then Anthony knew what he wanted — to assert his will against this cool and impervious girl, to obtain with one magnificent effort a mastery that seemed infinitely desirable.

“Let’s go over to see the Barneses,” he said without looking at her. “I don’t feel like going home.”

— Mrs. Barnes, née Rachael Jerryl, had a summer place several miles from

Redgate.

“We went there day before yesterday,” she answered shortly.

“I’m sure they’d be glad to see us.” He felt that that was not a strong enough note, braced himself stubbornly, and added: “I want to see the Barneses. I haven’t any desire to go home.”

“Well, I haven’t any desire to go to the Barneses.”

Suddenly they stared at each other.

“Why, Anthony,” she said with annoyance, “this is Sunday night and they probably have guests for supper. Why we should go in at this hour — “

“Then why couldn’t we have stayed at the Merriams’?” he burst out. “Why go home when we were having a perfectly decent time? They asked us to supper.”

“They had to. Give me the money and I’ll get the railroad tickets.”

“I certainly will not! I’m in no humour for a ride in that damn hot train.”

Gloria stamped her foot on the platform.

“Anthony, you act as if you’re tight!”

“On the contrary, I’m perfectly sober.”

But his voice had slipped into a husky key and she knew with certainty that this was untrue.

“If you’re sober you’ll give me the money for the tickets.”

But it was too late to talk to him that way. In his mind was but one idea — that Gloria was being selfish, that she was always being selfish and would continue to be unless here and now he asserted himself as her master. This was the occasion of all occasions, since for a whim she had deprived him of a pleasure. His determination solidified, approached momentarily a dull and sullen hate.

“I won’t go in the train,” he said, his voice trembling a little with anger. “We’re going to the Barneses.”

“I’m not!” she cried. “If you go I’m going home alone.”

“Go on, then.”

Without a word she turned toward the ticket office; simultaneously he remembered that she had some money with her and that this was not the sort of victory he wanted, the sort he must have. He took a step after her and seized her arm.

“See here!” he muttered, “you’re not going alone!”

“I certainly am — why, Anthony!” This exclamation as she tried to pull away from him and he only tightened his grasp.

He looked at her with narrowed and malicious eyes.

“Let go!” Her cry had a quality of fierceness. “If you have any decency you’ll let go.”

“Why?” He knew why. But he took a confused and not quite confident pride in holding her there.

“I’m going home, do you understand? And you’re going to let me go!”

“No, I’m not.”

Her eyes were burning now.

“Are you going to make a scene here?”

“I say you’re not going! I’m tired of your eternal selfishness!”

“I only want to go home.” Two wrathful tears started from her eyes.

“This time you’re going to do what I say.”

Slowly her body straightened: her head went back in a gesture of infinite scorn.

“I hate you!” Her low words were expelled like venom through her clenched teeth. “Oh, let me go! Oh, I hate you!” She tried to jerk herself away but he only grasped the other arm. “I hate you! I hate you!”

At Gloria’s fury his uncertainty returned, but he felt that now he had gone too far to give in. It seemed that he had always given in and that in her heart she had despised him for it. Ah, she might hate him now, but afterward she would admire him for his dominance.

The approaching train gave out a premonitory siren that tumbled melodramatically toward them down the glistening blue tracks. Gloria tugged and strained to free herself, and words older than the Book of Genesis came to her lips.

“Oh, you brute!” she sobbed. “Oh, you brute! Oh, I hate you! Oh, you brute! Oh — “

On the station platform other prospective passengers were beginning to turn and stare; the drone of the train was audible, it increased to a clamor. Gloria’s efforts redoubled, then ceased altogether, and she stood there trembling and hot-eyed at this helpless humiliation, as the engine roared and thundered into the station.

Low, below the flood of steam and the grinding of the brakes came her voice:

“Oh, if there was one man here you couldn’t do this! You couldn’t do this! You coward! You coward, oh, you coward!”

Anthony, silent, trembling himself, gripped her rigidly, aware that faces, dozens of them, curiously unmoved, shadows of a dream, were regarding him. Then the bells distilled metallic crashes that were like physical pain, the smoke-stacks volleyed in slow acceleration at the sky, and in a moment of noise and gray gaseous turbulence the line of faces ran by, moved off, became indistinct — until suddenly there was only the sun slanting east across the tracks and a volume of sound decreasing far off like a train made out of tin thunder. He dropped her arms. He had won.

Now, if he wished, he might laugh. The test was done and he had sustained his will with violence. Let leniency walk in the wake of victory.

“We’ll hire a car here and drive back to Marietta,” he said with fine reserve.

For answer Gloria seized his hand with both of hers and raising it to her mouth bit deeply into his thumb. He scarcely noticed the pain; seeing the blood spurt he absent-mindedly drew out his handkerchief and wrapped the wound. That too was part of the triumph he supposed — it was inevitable that defeat should thus be resented — and as such was beneath notice.

She was sobbing, almost without tears, profoundly and bitterly.

“I won’t go! I won’t go! You — can’t — make — me — go! You’ve — you’ve killed any love I ever had for you, and any respect. But all that’s left in me would die before I’d move from this place. Oh, if I’d thought you’d lay your hands on me — “

“You’re going with me,” he said brutally, “if I have to carry you.”

He turned, beckoned to a taxicab, told the driver to go to Marietta. The man dismounted and swung the door open. Anthony faced his wife and said between his clenched teeth:

“Will you get in? — or will I put you in?”

With a subdued cry of infinite pain and despair she yielded herself up and got into the car.

All the long ride, through the increasing dark of twilight, she sat huddled in her side of the car, her silence broken by an occasional dry and solitary sob. Anthony stared out the window, his mind working dully on the slowly changing significance of what had occurred. Something was wrong — that last cry of Gloria’s had struck a chord which echoed posthumously and with incongruous disquiet in his heart. He must be right — yet, she seemed such a pathetic little thing now, broken and dispirited, humiliated beyond the measure of her lot to bear. The sleeves of her dress were torn; her parasol was gone, forgotten on the platform. It was a new costume, he remembered, and she had been so proud of it that very morning when they had left the house…. He began wondering if any one they knew had seen the incident. And persistently there recurred to him her cry:

“All that’s left in me would die — “

This gave him a confused and increasing worry. It fitted so well with the Gloria who lay in the corner — no longer a proud Gloria, nor any Gloria he had known. He asked himself if it were possible. While he did not believe she would cease to love him — this, of course, was unthinkable — it was yet problematical whether Gloria without her arrogance, her independence, her virginal confidence and courage, would be the girl of his glory, the radiant woman who was precious and charming because she was ineffably, triumphantly herself.

He was very drunk even then, so drunk as not to realize his own drunkenness. When they reached the gray house he went to his own room and, his mind still wrestling helplessly and sombrely with what he had done, fell into a deep stupor on his bed.

It was after one o’clock and the hall seemed extraordinarily quiet when Gloria, wide-eyed and sleepless, traversed it and pushed open the door of his room. He had been too befuddled to open the windows and the air was stale and thick with whiskey. She stood for a moment by his bed, a slender, exquisitely graceful figure in her boyish silk pajamas — then with abandon she flung herself upon him, half waking him in the frantic emotion of her embrace, dropping her warm tears upon his throat.

“Oh, Anthony!” she cried passionately, “oh, my darling, you don’t know what you did!”

Yet in the morning, coming early into her room, he knelt down by her bed and cried like a little boy, as though it was his heart that had been broken.

“It seemed, last night,” she said gravely, her fingers playing in his hair, “that all the part of me you loved, the part that was worth knowing, all the pride and fire, was gone. I knew that what was left of me would always love you, but never in quite the same way.”

Nevertheless, she was aware even then that she would forget in time and that it is the manner of life seldom to strike but always to wear away. After that morning the incident was never mentioned and its deep wound healed with Anthony’s hand — and if there was triumph some darker force than theirs possessed it, possessed the knowledge and the victory.

NIETZSCHEAN INCIDENT

Gloria’s independence, like all sincere and profound qualities, had begun unconsciously, but, once brought to her attention by Anthony’s fascinated discovery of it, it assumed more nearly the proportions of a formal code. From her conversation it might be assumed that all her energy and vitality went into a violent affirmation of the negative principle “Never give a damn.”

“Not for anything or anybody,” she said, “except myself and, by implication, for Anthony. That’s the rule of all life and if it weren’t I’d be that way anyhow. Nobody’d do anything for me if it didn’t gratify them to, and I’d do as little for them.”

She was on the front porch of the nicest lady in Marietta when she said this, and as she finished she gave a curious little cry and sank in a dead faint to the porch floor.

The lady brought her to and drove her home in her car. It had occurred to the estimable Gloria that she was probably with child.

She lay upon the long lounge down-stairs. Day was slipping warmly out the window, touching the late roses on the porch pillars.

“All I think of ever is that I love you,” she wailed. “I value my body because you think it’s beautiful. And this body of mine — of yours — to have it grow ugly and shapeless? It’s simply intolerable. Oh, Anthony, I’m not afraid of the pain.”

He consoled her desperately — but in vain. She continued:

“And then afterward I might have wide hips and be pale, with all my freshness gone and no radiance in my hair.”

He paced the floor with his hands in his pockets, asking:

“Is it certain?”

“I don’t know anything. I’ve always hated obstrics, or whatever you call them. I thought I’d have a child some time. But not now.”

“Well, for God’s sake don’t lie there and go to pieces.”

Her sobs lapsed. She drew down a merciful silence from the twilight which filled the room. “Turn on the lights,” she pleaded. “These days seem so short — June seemed — to — have — longer days when I was a little girl.”

The lights snapped on and it was as though blue drapes of softest silk had been dropped behind the windows and the door. Her pallor, her immobility, without grief now, or joy, awoke his sympathy.

“Do you want me to have it?” she asked listlessly.

“I’m indifferent. That is, I’m neutral. If you have it I’ll probably be glad. If you don’t — well, that’s all right too.”

“I wish you’d make up your mind one way or the other!”

“Suppose you make up your mind.”

She looked at him contemptuously, scorning to answer.

“You’d think you’d been singled out of all the women in the world for this crowning indignity.”

“What if I do!” she cried angrily. “It isn’t an indignity for them. It’s their one excuse for living. It’s the one thing they’re good for. It is an indignity for me.

“See here, Gloria, I’m with you whatever you do, but for God’s sake be a sport about it.”

“Oh, don’t fuss at me!” she wailed.

They exchanged a mute look of no particular significance but of much stress. Then Anthony took a book from the shelf and dropped into a chair.

Half an hour later her voice came out of the intense stillness that pervaded the room and hung like incense on the air.

“I’ll drive over and see Constance Merriam to-morrow.”

“All right. And I’ll go to Tarrytown and see Grampa.”

“ — You see,” she added, “it isn’t that I’m afraid — of this or anything else. I’m being true to me, you know.”

“I know,” he agreed.

THE PRACTICAL MEN

Adam Patch, in a pious rage against the Germans, subsisted on the war news. Pin maps plastered his walls; atlases were piled deep on tables convenient to his hand together with “Photographic Histories of the World War,” official Explain-alls, and the “Personal Impressions” of war correspondents and of Privates X, Y, and Z. Several times during Anthony’s visit his grandfather’s secretary, Edward Shuttleworth, the one-time “Accomplished Gin-physician” of “Pat’s Place” in Hoboken, now shod with righteous indignation, would appear with an extra. The old man attacked each paper with untiring fury, tearing out those columns which appeared to him of sufficient pregnancy for preservation and thrusting them into one of his already bulging files.

“Well, what have you been doing?” he asked Anthony blandly. “Nothing? Well, I thought so. I’ve been intending to drive over and see you, all summer.”

“I’ve been writing. Don’t you remember the essay I sent you — the one I sold to The Florentine last winter?”

“Essay? You never sent me any essay.”

“Oh, yes, I did. We talked about it.”

Adam Patch shook his head mildly.

“Oh, no. You never sent me any essay. You may have thought you sent it but it never reached me.”

“Why, you read it, Grampa,” insisted Anthony, somewhat exasperated, “you read it and disagreed with it.”

The old man suddenly remembered, but this was made apparent only by a partial falling open of his mouth, displaying rows of gray gums. Eying Anthony with a green and ancient stare he hesitated between confessing his error and covering it up.

“So you’re writing,” he said quickly. “Well, why don’t you go over and write about these Germans? Write something real, something about what’s going on, something people can read.”

“Anybody can’t be a war correspondent,” objected Anthony. “You have to have some newspaper willing to buy your stuff. And I can’t spare the money to go over as a free-lance.”

“I’ll send you over,” suggested his grandfather surprisingly. “I’ll get you over as an authorized correspondent of any newspaper you pick out.”

Anthony recoiled from the idea — almost simultaneously he bounded toward it.

“I — don’t — know — “

He would have to leave Gloria, whose whole life yearned toward him and enfolded him. Gloria was in trouble. Oh, the thing wasn’t feasible — yet — he saw himself in khaki, leaning, as all war correspondents lean, upon a heavy stick, portfolio at shoulder — trying to look like an Englishman. “I’d like to think it over,” he, confessed. “It’s certainly very kind of you. I’ll think it over and I’ll let you know.”

Thinking it over absorbed him on the journey to New York. He had had one of those sudden flashes of illumination vouchsafed to all men who are dominated by a strong and beloved woman, which show them a world of harder men, more fiercely trained and grappling with the abstractions of thought and war. In that world the arms of Gloria would exist only as the hot embrace of a chance mistress, coolly sought and quickly forgotten….

These unfamiliar phantoms were crowding closely about him when he boarded his train for Marietta, in the Grand Central Station. The car was crowded; he secured the last vacant seat and it was only after several minutes that he gave even a casual glance to the man beside him. When he did he saw a heavy lay of jaw and nose, a curved chin and small, puffed-under eyes. In a moment he recognized Joseph Bloeckman.

Simultaneously they both half rose, were half embarrassed, and exchanged what amounted to a half handshake. Then, as though to complete the matter, they both half laughed.

“Well,” remarked Anthony without inspiration, “I haven’t seen you for a long time.” Immediately he regretted his words and started to add: “I didn’t know you lived out this way.” But Bloeckman anticipated him by asking pleasantly:

“How’s your wife? …”

“She’s very well. How’ve you been?”

“Excellent.” His tone amplified the grandeur of the word.

It seemed to Anthony that during the last year Bloeckman had grown tremendously in dignity. The boiled look was gone, he seemed “done” at last. In addition he was no longer overdressed. The inappropriate facetiousness he had affected in ties had given way to a sturdy dark pattern, and his right hand, which had formerly displayed two heavy rings, was now innocent of ornament and even without the raw glow of a manicure.

This dignity appeared also in his personality. The last aura of the successful travelling-man had faded from him, that deliberate ingratiation of which the lowest form is the bawdy joke in the Pullman smoker. One imagined that, having been fawned upon financially, he had attained aloofness; having been snubbed socially, he had acquired reticence. But whatever had given him weight instead of bulk, Anthony no longer felt a correct superiority in his presence.

“D’you remember Caramel, Richard Caramel? I believe you met him one night.”

“I remember. He was writing a book.”

“Well, he sold it to the movies. Then they had some scenario man named Jordan work on it. Well, Dick subscribes to a clipping bureau and he’s furious because about half the movie reviewers speak of the ‘power and strength of William Jordan’s “Demon Lover.”‘ Didn’t mention old Dick at all. You’d think this fellow Jordan had actually conceived and developed the thing.”

Bloeckman nodded comprehensively.

“Most of the contracts state that the original writer’s name goes into all the paid publicity. Is Caramel still writing?”

“Oh, yes. Writing hard. Short stories.”

“Well, that’s fine, that’s fine…. You on this train often?”

“About once a week. We live in Marietta.”

“Is that so? Well, well! I live near Cos Cob myself. Bought a place there only recently. We’re only five miles apart.”

“You’ll have to come and see us.” Anthony was surprised at his own courtesy. “I’m sure Gloria’d be delighted to see an old friend. Anybody’ll tell you where the house is — it’s our second season there.”

“Thank you.” Then, as though returning a complementary politeness: “How is your grandfather?”

“He’s been well. I had lunch with him to-day.”

“A great character,” said Bloeckman severely. “A fine example of an

American.”

THE TRIUMPH OF LETHARGY

Anthony found his wife deep in the porch hammock voluptuously engaged with a lemonade and a tomato sandwich and carrying on an apparently cheery conversation with Tana upon one of Tana’s complicated themes.

“In my countree,” Anthony recognized his invariable preface, “all time — peoples — eat rice — because haven’t got. Cannot eat what no have got.” Had his nationality not been desperately apparent one would have thought he had acquired his knowledge of his native land from American primary-school geographies.

When the Oriental had been squelched and dismissed to the kitchen,

Anthony turned questioningly to Gloria:

“It’s all right,” she announced, smiling broadly. “And it surprised me more than it does you.”

“There’s no doubt?”

“None! Couldn’t be!”

They rejoiced happily, gay again with reborn irresponsibility. Then he told her of his opportunity to go abroad, and that he was almost ashamed to reject it.

“What do you think? Just tell me frankly.”

“Why, Anthony!” Her eyes were startled. “Do you want to go? Without me?”

His face fell — yet he knew, with his wife’s question, that it was too late. Her arms, sweet and strangling, were around him, for he had made all such choices back in that room in the Plaza the year before. This was an anachronism from an age of such dreams.

“Gloria,” he lied, in a great burst of comprehension, “of course I don’t. I was thinking you might go as a nurse or something.” He wondered dully if his grandfather would consider this.

As she smiled he realized again how beautiful she was, a gorgeous girl of miraculous freshness and sheerly honorable eyes. She embraced his suggestion with luxurious intensity, holding it aloft like a sun of her own making and basking in its beams. She strung together an amazing synopsis for an extravaganza of martial adventure.

After supper, surfeited with the subject, she yawned. She wanted not to talk but only to read “Penrod,” stretched upon the lounge until at midnight she fell asleep. But Anthony, after he had carried her romantically up the stairs, stayed awake to brood upon the day, vaguely angry with her, vaguely dissatisfied.

“What am I going to do?” he began at breakfast. “Here we’ve been married a year and we’ve just worried around without even being efficient people of leisure.”

“Yes, you ought to do something,” she admitted, being in an agreeable and loquacious humor. This was not the first of these discussions, but as they usually developed Anthony in the rôle of protagonist, she had come to avoid them.

“It’s not that I have any moral compunctions about work,” he continued, “but grampa may die to-morrow and he may live for ten years. Meanwhile we’re living above our income and all we’ve got to show for it is a farmer’s car and a few clothes. We keep an apartment that we’ve only lived in three months and a little old house way off in nowhere. We’re frequently bored and yet we won’t make any effort to know any one except the same crowd who drift around California all summer wearing sport clothes and waiting for their families to die.”

“How you’ve changed!” remarked Gloria. “Once you told me you didn’t see why an American couldn’t loaf gracefully.”

“Well, damn it, I wasn’t married. And the old mind was working at top speed and now it’s going round and round like a cog-wheel with nothing to catch it. As a matter of fact I think that if I hadn’t met you I would have done something. But you make leisure so subtly attractive — “

“Oh, it’s all my fault — “

“I didn’t mean that, and you know I didn’t. But here I’m almost twenty-seven and — “

“Oh,” she interrupted in vexation, “you make me tired! Talking as though

I were objecting or hindering you!”

“I was just discussing it, Gloria. Can’t I discuss — “

“I should think you’d be strong enough to settle — “

“ — something with you without — “

“ — your own problems without coming to me. You talk a lot about going to work. I could use more money very easily, but I’m not complaining. Whether you work or not I love you.” Her last words were gentle as fine snow upon hard ground. But for the moment neither was attending to the other — they were each engaged in polishing and perfecting his own attitude.

“I have worked — some.” This by Anthony was an imprudent bringing up of raw reserves. Gloria laughed, torn between delight and derision; she resented his sophistry as at the same time she admired his nonchalance. She would never blame him for being the ineffectual idler so long as he did it sincerely, from the attitude that nothing much was worth doing.

“Work!” she scoffed. “Oh, you sad bird! You bluffer! Work — that means a great arranging of the desk and the lights, a great sharpening of pencils, and ‘Gloria, don’t sing!’ and ‘Please keep that damn Tana away from me,’ and ‘Let me read you my opening sentence,’ and ‘I won’t be through for a long time, Gloria, so don’t stay up for me,’ and a tremendous consumption of tea or coffee. And that’s all. In just about an hour I hear the old pencil stop scratching and look over. You’ve got out a book and you’re ‘looking up’ something. Then you’re reading. Then yawns — then bed and a great tossing about because you’re all full of caffeine and can’t sleep. Two weeks later the whole performance over again.”

With much difficulty Anthony retained a scanty breech-clout of dignity.

“Now that’s a slight exaggeration. You know darn well I sold an essay to The Florentine — and it attracted a lot of attention considering the circulation of The Florentine. And what’s more, Gloria, you know I sat up till five o’clock in the morning finishing it.”

She lapsed into silence, giving him rope. And if he had not hanged himself he had certainly come to the end of it.

“At least,” he concluded feebly, “I’m perfectly willing to be a war correspondent.”

But so was Gloria. They were both willing — anxious; they assured each other of it. The evening ended on a note of tremendous sentiment, the majesty of leisure, the ill health of Adam Patch, love at any cost.

“Anthony!” she called over the banister one afternoon a week later, “there’s some one at the door.” Anthony, who had been lolling in the hammock on the sun-speckled south porch, strolled around to the front of the house. A foreign car, large and impressive, crouched like an immense and saturnine bug at the foot of the path. A man in a soft pongee suit, with cap to match, hailed him.

“Hello there, Patch. Ran over to call on you.”

It was Bloeckman; as always, infinitesimally improved, of subtler intonation, of more convincing ease.

“I’m awfully glad you did.” Anthony raised his voice to a vine-covered window: “Glor-i-a! We’ve got a visitor!”

“I’m in the tub,” wailed Gloria politely.

With a smile the two men acknowledged the triumph of her alibi.

“She’ll be down. Come round here on the side-porch. Like a drink?

Gloria’s always in the tub — good third of every day.”

“Pity she doesn’t live on the Sound.”

“Can’t afford it.”

As coming from Adam Patch’s grandson, Bloeckman took this as a form of pleasantry. After fifteen minutes filled with estimable brilliancies, Gloria appeared, fresh in starched yellow, bringing atmosphere and an increase of vitality.

“I want to be a successful sensation in the movies,” she announced. “I hear that Mary Pickford makes a million dollars annually.”

“You could, you know,” said Bloeckman. “I think you’d film very well.”

“Would you let me, Anthony? If I only play unsophisticated rôles?”

As the conversation continued in stilted commas, Anthony wondered that to him and Bloeckman both this girl had once been the most stimulating, the most tonic personality they had ever known — and now the three sat like overoiled machines, without conflict, without fear, without elation, heavily enamelled little figures secure beyond enjoyment in a world where death and war, dull emotion and noble savagery were covering a continent with the smoke of terror.

In a moment he would call Tana and they would pour into themselves a gay and delicate poison which would restore them momentarily to the pleasurable excitement of childhood, when every face in a crowd had carried its suggestion of splendid and significant transactions taking place somewhere to some magnificent and illimitable purpose…. Life was no more than this summer afternoon; a faint wind stirring the lace collar of Gloria’s dress; the slow baking drowsiness of the veranda…. Intolerably unmoved they all seemed, removed from any romantic imminency of action. Even Gloria’s beauty needed wild emotions, needed poignancy, needed death….

“… Any day next week,” Bloeckman was saying to Gloria. “Here — take this card. What they do is to give you a test of about three hundred feet of film, and they can tell pretty accurately from that.”

“How about Wednesday?”

“Wednesday’s fine. Just phone me and I’ll go around with you — “

He was on his feet, shaking hands briskly — then his car was a wraith of dust down the road. Anthony turned to his wife in bewilderment.

“Why, Gloria!”

“You don’t mind if I have a trial, Anthony. Just a trial? I’ve got to go to town Wednesday, anyhow.”

“But it’s so silly! You don’t want to go into the movies — moon around a studio all day with a lot of cheap chorus people.”

“Lot of mooning around Mary Pickford does!”

“Everybody isn’t a Mary Pickford.”

“Well, I can’t see how you’d object to my trying.”

“I do, though. I hate actors.”

“Oh, you make me tired. Do you imagine I have a very thrilling time dozing on this damn porch?”

“You wouldn’t mind if you loved me.”

“Of course I love you,” she said impatiently, making out a quick case for herself. “It’s just because I do that I hate to see you go to pieces by just lying around and saying you ought to work. Perhaps if I did go into this for a while it’d stir you up so you’d do something.”

“It’s just your craving for excitement, that’s all it is.”

“Maybe it is! It’s a perfectly natural craving, isn’t it?”

“Well, I’ll tell you one thing. If you go to the movies I’m going to

Europe.”

“Well, go on then! I’m not stopping you!”

To show she was not stopping him she melted into melancholy tears. Together they marshalled the armies of sentiment — words, kisses, endearments, self-reproaches. They attained nothing. Inevitably they attained nothing. Finally, in a burst of gargantuan emotion each of them sat down and wrote a letter. Anthony’s was to his grandfather; Gloria’s was to Joseph Bloeckman. It was a triumph of lethargy.

One day early in July Anthony, returned from an afternoon in New York, called up-stairs to Gloria. Receiving no answer he guessed she was asleep and so went into the pantry for one of the little sandwiches that were always prepared for them. He found Tana seated at the kitchen table before a miscellaneous assortment of odds and ends — cigar-boxes, knives, pencils, the tops of cans, and some scraps of paper covered with elaborate figures and diagrams.

“What the devil you doing?” demanded Anthony curiously.

Tana politely grinned.

“I show you,” he exclaimed enthusiastically. “I tell — “

“You making a dog-house?”

“No, sa.” Tana grinned again. “Make typewutta.”

“Typewriter?”

“Yes, sa. I think, oh all time I think, lie in bed think ‘bout typewutta.”

“So you thought you’d make one, eh?”

“Wait. I tell.”

Anthony, munching a sandwich, leaned leisurely against the sink. Tana opened and closed his mouth several times as though testing its capacity for action. Then with a rush he began:

“I been think — typewutta — has, oh, many many many many thing. Oh many many many many.” “Many keys. I see.”

“No-o? Yes-key! Many many many many lettah. Like so a-b-c.”

“Yes, you’re right.”

“Wait. I tell.” He screwed his face up in a tremendous effort to express himself: “I been think — many words — end same. Like i-n-g.”

“You bet. A whole raft of them.”

“So — I make — typewutta — quick. Not so many lettah — “

“That’s a great idea, Tana. Save time. You’ll make a fortune. Press one key and there’s ‘ing.’ Hope you work it out.”

Tana laughed disparagingly. “Wait. I tell — “ “Where’s Mrs. Patch?”

“She out. Wait, I tell — “ Again he screwed up his face for action. “My typewutta —  — “

“Where is she?”

“Here — I make.” He pointed to the miscellany of junk on the table.

“I mean Mrs. Patch.”

“She out.” Tana reassured him. “She be back five o’clock, she say.”

“Down in the village?”

“No. Went off before lunch. She go Mr. Bloeckman.”

Anthony started.

“Went out with Mr. Bloeckman?”

“She be back five.”

Without a word Anthony left the kitchen with Tana’s disconsolate “I tell” trailing after him. So this was Gloria’s idea of excitement, by God! His fists were clenched; within a moment he had worked himself up to a tremendous pitch of indignation. He went to the door and looked out; there was no car in sight and his watch stood at four minutes of five. With furious energy he dashed down to the end of the path — as far as the bend of the road a mile off he could see no car — except — but it was a farmer’s flivver. Then, in an undignified pursuit of dignity, he rushed back to the shelter of the house as quickly as he had rushed out.

Pacing up and down the living room he began an angry rehearsal of the speech he would make to her when she came in —

“So this is love!” he would begin — or no, it sounded too much like the popular phrase “So this is Paris!” He must be dignified, hurt, grieved. Anyhow — “So this is what you do when I have to go up and trot all day around the hot city on business. No wonder I can’t write! No wonder I don’t dare let you out of my sight!” He was expanding now, warming to his subject. “I’ll tell you,” he continued, “I’ll tell you — “ He paused, catching a familiar ring in the words — then he realized — it was Tana’s “I tell.”

Yet Anthony neither laughed nor seemed absurd to himself. To his frantic

imagination it was already six — seven — eight, and she was never coming!

Bloeckman finding her bored and unhappy had persuaded her to go to

California with him….

— There was a great to-do out in front, a joyous “Yoho, Anthony!” and he rose trembling, weakly happy to see her fluttering up the path. Bloeckman was following, cap in hand.

“Dearest!” she cried.

“We’ve been for the best jaunt — all over New York State.”

“I’ll have to be starting home,” said Bloeckman, almost immediately.

“Wish you’d both been here when I came.”

“I’m sorry I wasn’t,” answered Anthony dryly. When he had departed Anthony hesitated. The fear was gone from his heart, yet he felt that some protest was ethically apropos. Gloria resolved his uncertainty.

“I knew you wouldn’t mind. He came just before lunch and said he had to go to Garrison on business and wouldn’t I go with him. He looked so lonesome, Anthony. And I drove his car all the way.”

Listlessly Anthony dropped into a chair, his mind tired — tired with nothing, tired with everything, with the world’s weight he had never chosen to bear. He was ineffectual and vaguely helpless here as he had always been. One of those personalities who, in spite of all their words, are inarticulate, he seemed to have inherited only the vast tradition of human failure — that, and the sense of death.

“I suppose I don’t care,” he answered.

One must be broad about these things, and Gloria being young, being beautiful, must have reasonable privileges. Yet it wearied him that he failed to understand.

WINTER

She rolled over on her back and lay still for a moment in the great bed watching the February sun suffer one last attenuated refinement in its passage through the leaded panes into the room. For a time she had no accurate sense of her whereabouts or of the events of the day before, or the day before that; then, like a suspended pendulum, memory began to beat out its story, releasing with each swing a burdened quota of time until her life was given back to her.

She could hear, now, Anthony’s troubled breathing beside her; she could smell whiskey and cigarette smoke. She noticed that she lacked complete muscular control; when she moved it was not a sinuous motion with the resultant strain distributed easily over her body — it was a tremendous effort of her nervous system as though each time she were hypnotizing herself into performing an impossible action….

She was in the bathroom, brushing her teeth to get rid of that intolerable taste; then back by the bedside listening to the rattle of Bounds’s key in the outer door.

“Wake up, Anthony!” she said sharply.

She climbed into bed beside him and closed her eyes. Almost the last thing she remembered was a conversation with Mr. and Mrs. Lacy. Mrs. Lacy had said, “Sure you don’t want us to get you a taxi?” and Anthony had replied that he guessed they could walk over to Fifth all right. Then they had both attempted, imprudently, to bow — and collapsed absurdly into a battalion of empty milk bottles just outside the door. There must have been two dozen milk bottles standing open-mouthed in the dark. She could conceive of no plausible explanation of those milk bottles. Perhaps they had been attracted by the singing in the Lacy house and had hurried over agape with wonder to see the fun. Well, they’d had the worst of it — though it seemed that she and Anthony never would get up, the perverse things rolled so….

Still, they had found a taxi. “My meter’s broken and it’ll cost you a dollar and a half to get home,” said the taxi driver. “Well,” said Anthony, “I’m young Packy McFarland and if you’ll come down here I’ll beat you till you can’t stand up.” …At that point the man had driven off without them. They must have found another taxi, for they were in the apartment….

“What time is it?” Anthony was sitting up in bed, staring at her with owlish precision.

This was obviously a rhetorical question. Gloria could think of no reason why she should be expected to know the time.

“Golly, I feel like the devil!” muttered Anthony dispassionately.

Relaxing, he tumbled back upon his pillow. “Bring on your grim reaper!”

“Anthony, how’d we finally get home last night?”

“Taxi.”

“Oh!” Then, after a pause: “Did you put me to bed?”

“I don’t know. Seems to me you put me to bed. What day is it?”

“Tuesday.”

“Tuesday? I hope so. If it’s Wednesday, I’ve got to start work at that idiotic place. Supposed to be down at nine or some such ungodly hour.”

“Ask Bounds,” suggested Gloria feebly.

“Bounds!” he called.

Sprightly, sober — a voice from a world that it seemed in the past two days they had left forever, Bounds sprang in short steps down the hall and appeared in the half darkness of the door.

“What day, Bounds?”

“February the twenty-second, I think, sir.”

“I mean day of the week.”

“Tuesday, sir.” “Thanks.” After a pause: “Are you ready for breakfast, sir?”

“Yes, and Bounds, before you get it, will you make a pitcher of water, and set it here beside the bed? I’m a little thirsty.”

“Yes, sir.”

Bounds retreated in sober dignity down the hallway.

“Lincoln’s birthday,” affirmed Anthony without enthusiasm, “or St.

Valentine’s or somebody’s. When did we start on this insane party?”

“Sunday night.”

“After prayers?” he suggested sardonically.

“We raced all over town in those hansoms and Maury sat up with his driver, don’t you remember? Then we came home and he tried to cook some bacon — came out of the pantry with a few blackened remains, insisting it was ‘fried to the proverbial crisp.’“

Both of them laughed, spontaneously but with some difficulty, and lying there side by side reviewed the chain of events that had ended in this rusty and chaotic dawn.

They had been in New York for almost four months, since the country had grown too cool in late October. They had given up California this year, partly because of lack of funds, partly with the idea of going abroad should this interminable war, persisting now into its second year, end during the winter. Of late their income had lost elasticity; no longer did it stretch to cover gay whims and pleasant extravagances, and Anthony had spent many puzzled and unsatisfactory hours over a densely figured pad, making remarkable budgets that left huge margins for “amusements, trips, etc.,” and trying to apportion, even approximately, their past expenditures.

He remembered a time when in going on a “party” with his two best friends, he and Maury had invariably paid more than their share of the expenses. They would buy the tickets for the theatre or squabble between themselves for the dinner check. It had seemed fitting; Dick, with his naïveté and his astonishing fund of information about himself, had been a diverting, almost juvenile, figure — court jester to their royalty. But this was no longer true. It was Dick who always had money; it was Anthony who entertained within limitations — always excepting occasional wild, wine-inspired, check-cashing parties — and it was Anthony who was solemn about it next morning and told the scornful and disgusted Gloria that they’d have to be “more careful next time.”

In the two years since the publication of “The Demon Lover,” Dick had made over twenty-five thousand dollars, most of it lately, when the reward of the author of fiction had begun to swell unprecedentedly as a result of the voracious hunger of the motion pictures for plots. He received seven hundred dollars for every story, at that time a large emolument for such a young man — he was not quite thirty — and for every one that contained enough “action” (kissing, shooting, and sacrificing) for the movies, he obtained an additional thousand. His stories varied; there was a measure of vitality and a sort of instinctive in all of them, but none attained the personality of “The Demon Lover,” and there were several that Anthony considered downright cheap. These, Dick explained severely, were to widen his audience. Wasn’t it true that men who had attained real permanence from Shakespeare to Mark Twain had appealed to the many as well as to the elect?

Though Anthony and Maury disagreed, Gloria told him to go ahead and make as much money as he could — that was the only thing that counted anyhow….

Maury, a little stouter, faintly mellower, and more complaisant, had gone to work in Philadelphia. He came to New York once or twice a month and on such occasions the four of them travelled the popular routes from dinner to the theatre, thence to the Frolic or, perhaps, at the urging of the ever-curious Gloria, to one of the cellars of Greenwich Village, notorious through the furious but short-lived vogue of the “new poetry movement.”

In January, after many monologues directed at his reticent wife, Anthony determined to “get something to do,” for the winter at any rate. He wanted to please his grandfather and even, in a measure, to see how he liked it himself. He discovered during several tentative semi-social calls that employers were not interested in a young man who was only going to “try it for a few months or so.” As the grandson of Adam Patch he was received everywhere with marked courtesy, but the old man was a back number now — the heyday of his fame as first an “oppressor” and then an uplifter of the people had been during the twenty years preceding his retirement. Anthony even found several of the younger men who were under the impression that Adam Patch had been dead for some years.

Eventually Anthony went to his grandfather and asked his advice, which turned out to be that he should enter the bond business as a salesman, a tedious suggestion to Anthony, but one that in the end he determined to follow. Sheer money in deft manipulation had fascinations under all circumstances, while almost any side of manufacturing would be insufferably dull. He considered newspaper work but decided that the hours were not ordered for a married man. And he lingered over pleasant fancies of himself either as editor of a brilliant weekly of opinion, an American Mercure de France, or as scintillant producer of satiric comedy and Parisian musical revue. However, the approaches to these latter guilds seemed to be guarded by professional secrets. Men drifted into them by the devious highways of writing and acting. It was palpably impossible to get on a magazine unless you had been on one before.

So in the end he entered, by way of his grandfather’s letter, that Sanctum Americanum where sat the president of Wilson, Hiemer and Hardy at his “cleared desk,” and issued therefrom employed. He was to begin work on the twenty-third of February.

In tribute to the momentous occasion this two-day revel had been planned, since, he said, after he began working he’d have to get to bed early during the week. Maury Noble had arrived from Philadelphia on a trip that had to do with seeing some man in Wall Street (whom, incidentally, he failed to see), and Richard Caramel had been half persuaded, half tricked into joining them. They had condescended to a wet and fashionable wedding on Monday afternoon, and in the evening had occurred the dénouement: Gloria, going beyond her accustomed limit of four precisely timed cocktails, led them on as gay and joyous a bacchanal as they had ever known, disclosing an astonishing knowledge of ballet steps, and singing songs which she confessed had been taught her by her cook when she was innocent and seventeen. She repeated these by request at intervals throughout the evening with such frank conviviality that Anthony, far from being annoyed, was gratified at this fresh source of entertainment. The occasion was memorable in other ways — a long conversation between Maury and a defunct crab, which he was dragging around on the end of a string, as to whether the crab was fully conversant with the applications of the binomial theorem, and the aforementioned race in two hansom cabs with the sedate and impressive shadows of Fifth Avenue for audience, ending in a labyrinthine escape into the darkness of Central Park. Finally Anthony and Gloria had paid a call on some wild young married people — the Lacys — and collapsed in the empty milk bottles.

Morning now — theirs to add up the checks cashed here and there in clubs, stores, restaurants. Theirs to air the dank staleness of wine and cigarettes out of the tall blue front room, to pick up the broken glass and brush at the stained fabric of chairs and sofas; to give Bounds suits and dresses for the cleaners; finally, to take their smothery half-feverish bodies and faded depressed spirits out into the chill air of February, that life might go on and Wilson, Hiemer and Hardy obtain the services of a vigorous man at nine next morning.

“Do you remember,” called Anthony from the bathroom, “when Maury got out at the corner of One Hundred and Tenth Street and acted as a traffic cop, beckoning cars forward and motioning them back? They must have thought he was a private detective.”

After each reminiscence they both laughed inordinately, their overwrought nerves responding as acutely and janglingly to mirth as to depression.

Gloria at the mirror was wondering at the splendid color and freshness of her face — it seemed that she had never looked so well, though her stomach hurt her and her head was aching furiously.

The day passed slowly. Anthony, riding in a taxi to his broker’s to borrow money on a bond, found that he had only two dollars in his pocket. The fare would cost all of that, but he felt that on this particular afternoon he could not have endured the subway. When the taximetre reached his limit he must get out and walk.

With this his mind drifted off into one of its characteristic day-dreams…. In this dream he discovered that the metre was going too fast — the driver had dishonestly adjusted it. Calmly he reached his destination and then nonchalantly handed the man what he justly owed him. The man showed fight, but almost before his hands were up Anthony had knocked him down with one terrific blow. And when he rose Anthony quickly sidestepped and floored him definitely with a crack in the temple.

… He was in court now. The judge had fined him five dollars and he had no money. Would the court take his check? Ah, but the court did not know him. Well, he could identify himself by having them call his apartment.

… They did so. Yes, it was Mrs. Anthony Patch speaking — but how did she know that this man was her husband? How could she know? Let the police sergeant ask her if she remembered the milk bottles …

He leaned forward hurriedly and tapped at the glass. The taxi was only at Brooklyn Bridge, but the metre showed a dollar and eighty cents, and Anthony would never have omitted the ten per cent tip.

Later in the afternoon he returned to the apartment. Gloria had also been out — shopping — and was asleep, curled in a corner of the sofa with her purchase locked securely in her arms. Her face was as untroubled as a little girl’s, and the bundle that she pressed tightly to her bosom was a child’s doll, a profound and infinitely healing balm to her disturbed and childish heart.

DESTINY

It was with this party, more especially with Gloria’s part in it, that a decided change began to come over their way of living. The magnificent attitude of not giving a damn altered overnight; from being a mere tenet of Gloria’s it became the entire solace and justification for what they chose to do and what consequence it brought. Not to be sorry, not to loose one cry of regret, to live according to a clear code of honor toward each other, and to seek the moment’s happiness as fervently and persistently as possible.

“No one cares about us but ourselves, Anthony,” she said one day. “It’d be ridiculous for me to go about pretending I felt any obligations toward the world, and as for worrying what people think about me, I simply don’t, that’s all. Since I was a little girl in dancing-school I’ve been criticised by the mothers of all the little girls who weren’t as popular as I was, and I’ve always looked on criticism as a sort of envious tribute.”

This was because of a party in the “Boul’ Mich’“ one night, where Constance Merriam had seen her as one of a highly stimulated party of four. Constance Merriam, “as an old school friend,” had gone to the trouble of inviting her to lunch next day in order to inform her how terrible it was.

“I told her I couldn’t see it,” Gloria told Anthony. “Eric Merriam is a sort of sublimated Percy Wolcott — you remember that man in Hot Springs I told you about — his idea of respecting Constance is to leave her at home with her sewing and her baby and her book, and such innocuous amusements, whenever he’s going on a party that promises to be anything but deathly dull.”

“Did you tell her that?”

“I certainly did. And I told her that what she really objected to was that I was having a better time than she was.”

Anthony applauded her. He was tremendously proud of Gloria, proud that she never failed to eclipse whatever other women might be in the party, proud that men were always glad to revel with her in great rowdy groups, without any attempt to do more than enjoy her beauty and the warmth of her vitality.

These “parties” gradually became their chief source of entertainment. Still in love, still enormously interested in each other, they yet found as spring drew near that staying at home in the evening palled on them; books were unreal; the old magic of being alone had long since vanished — instead they preferred to be bored by a stupid musical comedy, or to go to dinner with the most uninteresting of their acquaintances, so long as there would be enough cocktails to keep the conversation from becoming utterly intolerable. A scattering of younger married people who had been their friends in school or college, as well as a varied assortment of single men, began to think instinctively of them whenever color and excitement were needed, so there was scarcely a day without its phone call, its “Wondered what you were doing this evening.” Wives, as a rule, were afraid of Gloria — her facile attainment of the centre of the stage, her innocent but nevertheless disturbing way of becoming a favorite with husbands — these things drove them instinctively into an attitude of profound distrust, heightened by the fact that Gloria was largely unresponsive to any intimacy shown her by a woman.

On the appointed Wednesday in February Anthony had gone to the imposing offices of Wilson, Hiemer and Hardy and listened to many vague instructions delivered by an energetic young man of about his own age, named Kahler, who wore a defiant yellow pompadour, and in announcing himself as an assistant secretary gave the impression that it was a tribute to exceptional ability.

“There’s two kinds of men here, you’ll find,” he said. “There’s the man who gets to be an assistant secretary or treasurer, gets his name on our folder here, before he’s thirty, and there’s the man who gets his name there at forty-five. The man who gets his name there at forty-five stays there the rest of his life.”

“How about the man who gets it there at thirty?” inquired Anthony politely.

“Why, he gets up here, you see.” He pointed to a list of assistant vice-presidents upon the folder. “Or maybe he gets to be president or secretary or treasurer.”

“And what about these over here?”

“Those? Oh, those are the trustees — the men with capital.”

“I see.”

“Now some people,” continued Kahler, “think that whether a man gets started early or late depends on whether he’s got a college education. But they’re wrong.”

“I see.”

“I had one; I was Buckleigh, class of nineteen-eleven, but when I came down to the Street I soon found that the things that would help me here weren’t the fancy things I learned in college. In fact, I had to get a lot of fancy stuff out of my head.”

Anthony could not help wondering what possible “fancy stuff” he had learned at Buckleigh in nineteen-eleven. An irrepressible idea that it was some sort of needlework recurred to him throughout the rest of the conversation.

“See that fellow over there?” Kahler pointed to a youngish-looking man with handsome gray hair, sitting at a desk inside a mahogany railing. “That’s Mr. Ellinger, the first vice-president. Been everywhere, seen everything; got a fine education.”

In vain did Anthony try to open his mind to the romance of finance; he could think of Mr. Ellinger only as one of the buyers of the handsome leather sets of Thackeray, Balzac, Hugo, and Gibbon that lined the walls of the big bookstores.

Through the damp and uninspiring month of March he was prepared for salesmanship. Lacking enthusiasm he was capable of viewing the turmoil and bustle that surrounded him only as a fruitless circumambient striving toward an incomprehensible goal, tangibly evidenced only by the rival mansions of Mr. Frick and Mr. Carnegie on Fifth Avenue. That these portentous vice-presidents and trustees should be actually the fathers of the “best men” he had known at Harvard seemed to him incongruous.

He ate in an employees’ lunch-room up-stairs with an uneasy suspicion that he was being uplifted, wondering through that first week if the dozens of young clerks, some of them alert and immaculate, and just out of college, lived in flamboyant hope of crowding onto that narrow slip of cardboard before the catastrophic thirties. The conversation that interwove with the pattern of the day’s work was all much of a piece. One discussed how Mr. Wilson had made his money, what method Mr. Hiemer had employed, and the means resorted to by Mr. Hardy. One related age-old but eternally breathless anecdotes of the fortunes stumbled on precipitously in the Street by a “butcher” or a “bartender,” or “a darn messenger boy, by golly!” and then one talked of the current gambles, and whether it was best to go out for a hundred thousand a year or be content with twenty. During the preceding year one of the assistant secretaries had invested all his savings in Bethlehem Steel. The story of his spectacular magnificence, of his haughty resignation in January, and of the triumphal palace he was now building in California, was the favorite office subject. The man’s very name had acquired a magic significance, symbolizing as he did the aspirations of all good Americans. Anecdotes were told about him — how one of the vice-presidents had advised him to sell, by golly, but he had hung on, even bought on margin, “and now look where he is!”

Such, obviously, was the stuff of life — a dizzy triumph dazzling the eyes of all of them, a gypsy siren to content them with meagre wage and with the arithmetical improbability of their eventual success.

To Anthony the notion became appalling. He felt that to succeed here the idea of success must grasp and limit his mind. It seemed to him that the essential element in these men at the top was their faith that their affairs were the very core of life. All other things being equal, self-assurance and opportunism won out over technical knowledge; it was obvious that the more expert work went on near the bottom — so, with appropriate efficiency, the technical experts were kept there.

His determination to stay in at night during the week did not survive, and a good half of the time he came to work with a splitting, sickish headache and the crowded horror of the morning subway ringing in his ears like an echo of hell.

Then, abruptly, he quit. He had remained in bed all one Monday, and late in the evening, overcome by one of those attacks of moody despair to which he periodically succumbed, he wrote and mailed a letter to Mr. Wilson, confessing that he considered himself ill adapted to the work. Gloria, coming in from the theatre with Richard Caramel, found him on the lounge, silently staring at the high ceiling, more depressed and discouraged than he had been at any time since their marriage.

She wanted him to whine. If he had she would have reproached him bitterly, for she was not a little annoyed, but he only lay there so utterly miserable that she felt sorry for him, and kneeling down she stroked his head, saying how little it mattered, how little anything mattered so long as they loved each other. It was like their first year, and Anthony, reacting to her cool hand, to her voice that was soft as breath itself upon his ear, became almost cheerful, and talked with her of his future plans. He even regretted, silently, before he went to bed that he had so hastily mailed his resignation.

“Even when everything seems rotten you can’t trust that judgment,”

Gloria had said. “It’s the sum of all your judgments that counts.”

In mid-April came a letter from the real-estate agent in Marietta, encouraging them to take the gray house for another year at a slightly increased rental, and enclosing a lease made out for their signatures. For a week lease and letter lay carelessly neglected on Anthony’s desk. They had no intention of returning to Marietta. They were weary of the place, and had been bored most of the preceding summer. Besides, their car had deteriorated to a rattling mass of hypochondriacal metal, and a new one was financially inadvisable.

But because of another wild revel, enduring through four days and participated in, at one time or another, by more than a dozen people, they did sign the lease; to their utter horror they signed it and sent it, and immediately it seemed as though they heard the gray house, drably malevolent at last, licking its white chops and waiting to devour them.

“Anthony, where’s that lease?” she called in high alarm one Sunday morning, sick and sober to reality. “Where did you leave it? It was here!”

Then she knew where it was. She remembered the house party they had planned on the crest of their exuberance; she remembered a room full of men to whose less exhilarated moments she and Anthony were of no importance, and Anthony’s boast of the transcendent merit and seclusion of the gray house, that it was so isolated that it didn’t matter how much noise went on there. Then Dick, who had visited them, cried enthusiastically that it was the best little house imaginable, and that they were idiotic not to take it for another summer. It had been easy to work themselves up to a sense of how hot and deserted the city was getting, of how cool and ambrosial were the charms of Marietta. Anthony had picked up the lease and waved it wildly, found Gloria happily acquiescent, and with one last burst of garrulous decision during which all the men agreed with solemn handshakes that they would come out for a visit …

“Anthony,” she cried, “we’ve signed and sent it!”

“What?”

“The lease!”

“What the devil!”

“Oh, Anthony!” There was utter misery in her voice. For the summer, for eternity, they had built themselves a prison. It seemed to strike at the last roots of their stability. Anthony thought they might arrange it with the real-estate agent. They could no longer afford the double rent, and going to Marietta meant giving up his apartment, his reproachless apartment with the exquisite bath and the rooms for which he had bought his furniture and hangings — it was the closest to a home that he had ever had — familiar with memories of four colorful years.

But it was not arranged with the real-estate agent, nor was it arranged at all. Dispiritedly, without even any talk of making the best of it, without even Gloria’s all-sufficing “I don’t care,” they went back to the house that they now knew heeded neither youth nor love — only those austere and incommunicable memories that they could never share.

THE SINISTER SUMMER

There was a horror in the house that summer. It came with them and settled itself over the place like a sombre pall, pervasive through the lower rooms, gradually spreading and climbing up the narrow stairs until it oppressed their very sleep. Anthony and Gloria grew to hate being there alone. Her bedroom, which had seemed so pink and young and delicate, appropriate to her pastel-shaded lingerie tossed here and there on chair and bed, seemed now to whisper with its rustling curtains:

“Ah, my beautiful young lady, yours is not the first daintiness and delicacy that has faded here under the summer suns … generations of unloved women have adorned themselves by that glass for rustic lovers who paid no heed…. Youth has come into this room in palest blue and left it in the gray cerements of despair, and through long nights many girls have lain awake where that bed stands pouring out waves of misery into the darkness.”

Gloria finally tumbled all her clothes and unguents ingloriously out of it, declaring that she had come to live with Anthony, and making the excuse that one of her screens was rotten and admitted bugs. So her room was abandoned to insensitive guests, and they dressed and slept in her husband’s chamber, which Gloria considered somehow “good,” as though Anthony’s presence there had acted as exterminator of any uneasy shadows of the past that might have hovered about its walls.

The distinction between “good” and “bad,” ordered early and summarily out of both their lives, had been reinstated in another form. Gloria insisted that any one invited to the gray house must be “good,” which, in the case of a girl, meant that she must be either simple and reproachless or, if otherwise, must possess a certain solidity and strength. Always intensely sceptical of her sex, her judgments were now concerned with the question of whether women were or were not clean. By uncleanliness she meant a variety of things, a lack of pride, a slackness in fibre and, most of all, the unmistakable aura of promiscuity.

“Women soil easily,” she said, “far more easily than men. Unless a girl’s very young and brave it’s almost impossible for her to go down-hill without a certain hysterical animality, the cunning, dirty sort of animality. A man’s different — and I suppose that’s why one of the commonest characters of romance is a man going gallantly to the devil.”

She was disposed to like many men, preferably those who gave her frank homage and unfailing entertainment — but often with a flash of insight she told Anthony that some one of his friends was merely using him, and consequently had best be left alone. Anthony customarily demurred, insisting that the accused was a “good one,” but he found that his judgment was more fallible than hers, memorably when, as it happened on several occasions, he was left with a succession of restaurant checks for which to render a solitary account.

More from their fear of solitude than from any desire to go through the fuss and bother of entertaining, they filled the house with guests every week-end, and often on through the week. The week-end parties were much the same. When the three or four men invited had arrived, drinking was more or less in order, followed by a hilarious dinner and a ride to the Cradle Beach Country Club, which they had joined because it was inexpensive, lively if not fashionable, and almost a necessity for just such occasions as these. Moreover, it was of no great moment what one did there, and so long as the Patch party were reasonably inaudible, it mattered little whether or not the social dictators of Cradle Beach saw the gay Gloria imbibing cocktails in the supper room at frequent intervals during the evening.

Saturday ended, generally, in a glamourous confusion — it proving often necessary to assist a muddled guest to bed. Sunday brought the New York papers and a quiet morning of recuperating on the porch — and Sunday afternoon meant good-by to the one or two guests who must return to the city, and a great revival of drinking among the one or two who remained until next day, concluding in a convivial if not hilarious evening.

The faithful Tana, pedagogue by nature and man of all work by profession, had returned with them. Among their more frequent guests a tradition had sprung up about him. Maury Noble remarked one afternoon that his real name was Tannenbaum, and that he was a German agent kept in this country to disseminate Teutonic propaganda through Westchester County, and, after that, mysterious letters began to arrive from Philadelphia addressed to the bewildered Oriental as “Lt. Emile Tannenbaum,” containing a few cryptic messages signed “General Staff,” and adorned with an atmospheric double column of facetious Japanese. Anthony always handed them to Tana without a smile; hours afterward the recipient could be found puzzling over them in the kitchen and declaring earnestly that the perpendicular symbols were not Japanese, nor anything resembling Japanese.

Gloria had taken a strong dislike to the man ever since the day when, returning unexpectedly from the village, she had discovered him reclining on Anthony’s bed, puzzling out a newspaper. It was the instinct of all servants to be fond of Anthony and to detest Gloria, and Tana was no exception to the rule. But he was thoroughly afraid of her and made plain his aversion only in his moodier moments by subtly addressing Anthony with remarks intended for her ear:

“What Miz Pats want dinner?” he would say, looking at his master. Or else he would comment about the bitter selfishness of “‘Merican peoples” in such manner that there was no doubt who were the “peoples” referred to.

But they dared not dismiss him. Such a step would have been abhorrent to their inertia. They endured Tana as they endured ill weather and sickness of the body and the estimable Will of God — as they endured all things, even themselves.

IN DARKNESS

One sultry afternoon late in July Richard Caramel telephoned from New York that he and Maury were coming out, bringing a friend with them. They arrived about five, a little drunk, accompanied by a small, stocky man of thirty-five, whom they introduced as Mr. Joe Hull, one of the best fellows that Anthony and Gloria had ever met.

Joe Hull had a yellow beard continually fighting through his skin and a low voice which varied between basso profundo and a husky whisper. Anthony, carrying Maury’s suitcase up-stairs, followed into the room and carefully closed the door.

“Who is this fellow?” he demanded.

Maury chuckled enthusiastically.

“Who, Hull? Oh, he’s all right. He’s a good one.”

“Yes, but who is he?”

“Hull? He’s just a good fellow. He’s a prince.” His laughter redoubled, culminating in a succession of pleasant catlike grins. Anthony hesitated between a smile and a frown.

“He looks sort of funny to me. Weird-looking clothes” — he paused — “I’ve got a sneaking suspicion you two picked him up somewhere last night.”

“Ridiculous,” declared Maury. “Why, I’ve known him all my life.”

However, as he capped this statement with another series of chuckles,

Anthony was impelled to remark: “The devil you have!”

Later, just before dinner, while Maury and Dick were conversing uproariously, with Joe Hull listening in silence as he sipped his drink, Gloria drew Anthony into the dining room:

“I don’t like this man Hull,” she said. “I wish he’d use Tana’s bathtub.”

“I can’t very well ask him to.”

“Well, I don’t want him in ours.”

“He seems to be a simple soul.”

“He’s got on white shoes that look like gloves. I can see his toes right through them. Uh! Who is he, anyway?”

“You’ve got me.”

“Well, I think they’ve got their nerve to bring him out here. This isn’t a Sailor’s Rescue Home!”

“They were tight when they phoned. Maury said they’ve been on a party since yesterday afternoon.”

Gloria shook her head angrily, and saying no more returned to the porch. Anthony saw that she was trying to forget her uncertainty and devote herself to enjoying the evening.

It had been a tropical day, and even into late twilight the heat-waves emanating from the dry road were quivering faintly like undulating panes of isinglass. The sky was cloudless, but far beyond the woods in the direction of the Sound a faint and persistent rolling had commenced. When Tana announced dinner the men, at a word from Gloria, remained coatless and went inside.

Maury began a song, which they accomplished in harmony during the first course. It had two lines and was sung to a popular air called Daisy Dear. The lines were:

“The — pan-ic — has — come — over us, So ha-a-as — the moral decline!”

Each rendition was greeted with bursts of enthusiasm and prolonged applause.

“Cheer up, Gloria!” suggested Maury. “You seem the least bit depressed.”

“I’m not,” she lied.

“Here, Tannenbaum!” he called over his shoulder. “I’ve filled you a drink. Come on!”

Gloria tried to stay his arm.

“Please don’t, Maury!”

“Why not? Maybe he’ll play the flute for us after dinner. Here, Tana.”

Tana, grinning, bore the glass away to the kitchen. In a few moments

Maury gave him another.

“Cheer up, Gloria!” he cried. “For Heaven’s sakes everybody, cheer up

Gloria.”

“Dearest, have another drink,” counselled Anthony.

“Do, please!”

“Cheer up, Gloria,” said Joe Hull easily.

Gloria winced at this uncalled-for use of her first name, and glanced around to see if any one else had noticed it. The word coming so glibly from the lips of a man to whom she had taken an inordinate dislike repelled her. A moment later she noticed that Joe Hull had given Tana another drink, and her anger increased, heightened somewhat from the effects of the alcohol.

“ — and once,” Maury was saying, “Peter Granby and I went into a Turkish bath in Boston, about two o’clock at night. There was no one there but the proprietor, and we jammed him into a closet and locked the door. Then a fella came in and wanted a Turkish bath. Thought we were the rubbers, by golly! Well, we just picked him up and tossed him into the pool with all his clothes on. Then we dragged him out and laid him on a slab and slapped him until he was black and blue. ‘Not so rough, fellows!’ he’d say in a little squeaky voice, ‘please! …’“

— Was this Maury? thought Gloria. From any one else the story would have amused her, but from Maury, the infinitely appreciative, the apotheosis of tact and consideration….

“The — pan-ic — has — come — over us, So ha-a-as — “

A drum of thunder from outside drowned out the rest of the song; Gloria shivered and tried to empty her glass, but the first taste nauseated her, and she set it down. Dinner was over and they all marched into the big room, bearing several bottles and decanters. Some one had closed the porch door to keep out the wind, and in consequence circular tentacles of cigar smoke were twisting already upon the heavy air.

“Paging Lieutenant Tannenbaum!” Again it was the changeling Maury.

“Bring us the flute!”

Anthony and Maury rushed into the kitchen; Richard Caramel started the phonograph and approached Gloria.

“Dance with your well-known cousin.”

“I don’t want to dance.”

“Then I’m going to carry you around.”

As though he were doing something of overpowering importance, he picked her up in his fat little arms and started trotting gravely about the room.

“Set me down, Dick! I’m dizzy!” she insisted.

He dumped her in a bouncing bundle on the couch, and rushed off to the kitchen, shouting “Tana! Tana!”

Then, without warning, she felt other arms around her, felt herself lifted from the lounge. Joe Hull had picked her up and was trying, drunkenly, to imitate Dick.

“Put me down!” she said sharply.

His maudlin laugh, and the sight of that prickly yellow jaw close to her face stirred her to intolerable disgust.

“At once!”

“The — pan-ic — “ he began, but got no further, for Gloria’s hand swung around swiftly and caught him in the cheek. At this he all at once let go of her, and she fell to the floor, her shoulder hitting the table a glancing blow in transit….

Then the room seemed full of men and smoke. There was Tana in his white coat reeling about supported by Maury. Into his flute he was blowing a weird blend of sound that was known, cried Anthony, as the Japanese train-song. Joe Hull had found a box of candles and was juggling them, yelling “One down!” every time he missed, and Dick was dancing by himself in a fascinated whirl around and about the room. It appeared to her that everything in the room was staggering in grotesque fourth-dimensional gyrations through intersecting planes of hazy blue.

Outside, the storm had come up amazingly — the lulls within were filled with the scrape of the tall bushes against the house and the roaring of the rain on the tin roof of the kitchen. The lightning was interminable, letting down thick drips of thunder like pig iron from the heart of a white-hot furnace. Gloria could see that the rain was spitting in at three of the windows — but she could not move to shut them….

… She was in the hall. She had said good night but no one had heard or heeded her. It seemed for an instant as though something had looked down over the head of the banister, but she could not have gone back into the living room — better madness than the madness of that clamor…. Up-stairs she fumbled for the electric switch and missed it in the darkness; a roomful of lightning showed her the button plainly on the wall. But when the impenetrable black shut down, it again eluded her fumbling fingers, so she slipped off her dress and petticoat and threw herself weakly on the dry side of the half-drenched bed.

She shut her eyes. From down-stairs arose the babel of the drinkers, punctured suddenly by a tinkling shiver of broken glass, and then another, and by a soaring fragment of unsteady, irregular song….

She lay there for something over two hours — so she calculated afterward, sheerly by piecing together the bits of time. She was conscious, even aware, after a long while that the noise down-stairs had lessened, and that the storm was moving off westward, throwing back lingering showers of sound that fell, heavy and lifeless as her soul, into the soggy fields. This was succeeded by a slow, reluctant scattering of the rain and wind, until there was nothing outside her windows but a gentle dripping and the swishing play of a cluster of wet vine against the sill. She was in a state half-way between sleeping and waking, with neither condition predominant … and she was harassed by a desire to rid herself of a weight pressing down upon her breast. She felt that if she could cry the weight would be lifted, and forcing the lids of her eyes together she tried to raise a lump in her throat … to no avail….

Drip! Drip! Drip! The sound was not unpleasant — like spring, like a cool rain of her childhood, that made cheerful mud in her back yard and watered the tiny garden she had dug with miniature rake and spade and hoe. Drip — dri-ip! It was like days when the rain came out of yellow skies that melted just before twilight and shot one radiant shaft of sunlight diagonally down the heavens into the damp green trees. So cool, so clear and clean — and her mother there at the centre of the world, at the centre of the rain, safe and dry and strong. She wanted her mother now, and her mother was dead, beyond sight and touch forever. And this weight was pressing on her, pressing on her — oh, it pressed on her so!

She became rigid. Some one had come to the door and was standing regarding her, very quiet except for a slight swaying motion. She could see the outline of his figure distinct against some indistinguishable light. There was no sound anywhere, only a great persuasive silence — even the dripping had ceased … only this figure, swaying, swaying in the doorway, an indiscernible and subtly menacing terror, a personality filthy under its varnish, like smallpox spots under a layer of powder. Yet her tired heart, beating until it shook her breasts, made her sure that there was still life in her, desperately shaken, threatened….

The minute or succession of minutes prolonged itself interminably, and a swimming blur began to form before her eyes, which tried with childish persistence to pierce the gloom in the direction of the door. In another instant it seemed that some unimaginable force would shatter her out of existence … and then the figure in the doorway — it was Hull, she saw, Hull — turned deliberately and, still slightly swaying, moved back and off, as if absorbed into that incomprehensible light that had given him dimension.

Blood rushed back into her limbs, blood and life together. With a start of energy she sat upright, shifting her body until her feet touched the floor over the side of the bed. She knew what she must do — now, now, before it was too late. She must go out into this cool damp, out, away, to feel the wet swish of the grass around her feet and the fresh moisture on her forehead. Mechanically she struggled into her clothes, groping in the dark of the closet for a hat. She must go from this house where the thing hovered that pressed upon her bosom, or else made itself into stray, swaying figures in the gloom.

In a panic she fumbled clumsily at her coat, found the sleeve just as she heard Anthony’s footsteps on the lower stair. She dared not wait; he might not let her go, and even Anthony was part of this weight, part of this evil house and the sombre darkness that was growing up about it….

Through the hall then … and down the back stairs, hearing Anthony’s voice in the bedroom she had just left —

“Gloria! Gloria!”

But she had reached the kitchen now, passed out through the doorway into the night. A hundred drops, startled by a flare of wind from a dripping tree, scattered on her and she pressed them gladly to her face with hot hands.

“Gloria! Gloria!”

The voice was infinitely remote, muffed and made plaintive by the walls she had just left. She rounded the house and started down the front path toward the road, almost exultant as she turned into it, and followed the carpet of short grass alongside, moving with caution in the intense darkness.

“Gloria!”

She broke into a run, stumbled over the segment of a branch twisted off by the wind. The voice was outside the house now. Anthony, finding the bedroom deserted, had come onto the porch. But this thing was driving her forward; it was back there with Anthony, and she must go on in her flight under this dim and oppressive heaven, forcing herself through the silence ahead as though it were a tangible barrier before her.

She had gone some distance along the barely discernible road, probably half a mile, passed a single deserted barn that loomed up, black and foreboding, the only building of any sort between the gray house and Marietta; then she turned the fork, where the road entered the wood and ran between two high walls of leaves and branches that nearly touched overhead. She noticed suddenly a thin, longitudinal gleam of silver upon the road before her, like a bright sword half embedded in the mud. As she came closer she gave a little cry of satisfaction — it was a wagon-rut full of water, and glancing heavenward she saw a light rift of sky and knew that the moon was out.

“Gloria!”

She started violently. Anthony was not two hundred feet behind her.

“Gloria, wait for me!”

She shut her lips tightly to keep from screaming, and increased her gait. Before she had gone another hundred yards the woods disappeared, rolling back like a dark stocking from the leg of the road. Three minutes’ walk ahead of her, suspended in the now high and limitless air, she saw a thin interlacing of attenuated gleams and glitters, centred in a regular undulation on some one invisible point. Abruptly she knew where she would go. That was the great cascade of wires that rose high over the river, like the legs of a gigantic spider whose eye was the little green light in the switch-house, and ran with the railroad bridge in the direction of the station. The station! There would be the train to take her away.

“Gloria, it’s me! It’s Anthony! Gloria, I won’t try to stop you! For

God’s sake, where are you?”

She made no answer but began to run, keeping on the high side of the road and leaping the gleaming puddles — dimensionless pools of thin, unsubstantial gold. Turning sharply to the left, she followed a narrow wagon road, serving to avoid a dark body on the ground. She looked up as an owl hooted mournfully from a solitary tree. Just ahead of her she could see the trestle that led to the railroad bridge and the steps mounting up to it. The station lay across the river.

Another sounds startled her, the melancholy siren of an approaching train, and almost simultaneously, a repeated call, thin now and far away.

“Gloria! Gloria!”

Anthony must have followed the main road. She laughed with a sort of malicious cunning at having eluded him; she could spare the time to wait until the train went by.

The siren soared again, closer at hand, and then, with no anticipatory roar and clamor, a dark and sinuous body curved into view against the shadows far down the high-banked track, and with no sound but the rush of the cleft wind and the clocklike tick of the rails, moved toward the bridge — it was an electric train. Above the engine two vivid blurs of blue light formed incessantly a radiant crackling bar between them, which, like a spluttering flame in a lamp beside a corpse, lit for an instant the successive rows of trees and caused Gloria to draw back instinctively to the far side of the road. The light was tepid, the temperature of warm blood…. The clicking blended suddenly with itself in a rush of even sound, and then, elongating in sombre elasticity, the thing roared blindly by her and thundered onto the bridge, racing the lurid shaft of fire it cast into the solemn river alongside. Then it contracted swiftly, sucking in its sound until it left only a reverberant echo, which died upon the farther bank.

Silence crept down again over the wet country; the faint dripping resumed, and suddenly a great shower of drops tumbled upon Gloria stirring her out of the trance-like torpor which the passage of the train had wrought. She ran swiftly down a descending level to the bank and began climbing the iron stairway to the bridge, remembering that it was something she had always wanted to do, and that she would have the added excitement of traversing the yard-wide plank that ran beside the tracks over the river.

There! This was better. She was at the top now and could see the lands about her as successive sweeps of open country, cold under the moon, coarsely patched and seamed with thin rows and heavy clumps of trees. To her right, half a mile down the river, which trailed away behind the light like the shiny, slimy path of a snail, winked the scattered lights of Marietta. Not two hundred yards away at the end of the bridge squatted the station, marked by a sullen lantern. The oppression was lifted now — the tree-tops below her were rocking the young starlight to a haunted doze. She stretched out her arms with a gesture of freedom. This was what she had wanted, to stand alone where it was high and cool.

“Gloria!”

Like a startled child she scurried along the plank, hopping, skipping, jumping, with an ecstatic sense of her own physical lightness. Let him come now — she no longer feared that, only she must first reach the station, because that was part of the game. She was happy. Her hat, snatched off, was clutched tightly in her hand, and her short curled hair bobbed up and down about her ears. She had thought she would never feel so young again, but this was her night, her world. Triumphantly she laughed as she left the plank, and reaching the wooden platform flung herself down happily beside an iron roof-post.

“Here I am!” she called, gay as the dawn in her elation. “Here I am,

Anthony, dear — old, worried Anthony.”

“Gloria!” He reached the platform, ran toward her. “Are you all right?”

Coming up he knelt and took her in his arms.

“Yes.”

“What was the matter? Why did you leave?” he queried anxiously.

“I had to — there was something” — she paused and a flicker of uneasiness lashed at her mind — “there was something sitting on me — here.” She put her hand on her breast. “I had to go out and get away from it.”

“What do you mean by ‘something’?”

“I don’t know — that man Hull — “

“Did he bother you?”

“He came to my door, drunk. I think I’d gotten sort of crazy by that time.”

“Gloria, dearest — “

Wearily she laid her head upon his shoulder.

“Let’s go back,” he suggested.

She shivered.

“Uh! No, I couldn’t. It’d come and sit on me again.” Her voice rose to a cry that hung plaintive on the darkness. “That thing — “

“There — there,” he soothed her, pulling her close to him. “We won’t do anything you don’t want to do. What do you want to do? Just sit here?”

“I want — I want to go away.”

“Where?”

“Oh — anywhere.”

“By golly, Gloria,” he cried, “you’re still tight!”

“No, I’m not. I haven’t been, all evening. I went up-stairs about, oh, I don’t know, about half an hour after dinner …Ouch!”

He had inadvertently touched her right shoulder.

“It hurts me. I hurt it some way. I don’t know — somebody picked me up and dropped me.”

“Gloria, come home. It’s late and damp.”

“I can’t,” she wailed. “Oh, Anthony, don’t ask me to! I will to-morrow.

You go home and I’ll wait here for a train. I’ll go to a hotel — “

“I’ll go with you.”

“No, I don’t want you with me. I want to be alone. I want to sleep — oh, I want to sleep. And then to-morrow, when you’ve got all the smell of whiskey and cigarettes out of the house, and everything straight, and Hull is gone, then I’ll come home. If I went now, that thing — oh — !” She covered her eyes with her hand; Anthony saw the futility of trying to persuade her.

“I was all sober when you left,” he said. “Dick was asleep on the lounge and Maury and I were having a discussion. That fellow Hull had wandered off somewhere. Then I began to realize I hadn’t seen you for several hours, so I went up-stairs — “

He broke off as a salutatory “Hello, there!” boomed suddenly out of the darkness. Gloria sprang to her feet and he did likewise.

“It’s Maury’s voice,” she cried excitedly. “If it’s Hull with him, keep them away, keep them away!”

“Who’s there?” Anthony called.

“Just Dick and Maury,” returned two voices reassuringly.

“Where’s Hull?”

“He’s in bed. Passed out.”

Their figures appeared dimly on the platform.

“What the devil are you and Gloria doing here?” inquired Richard Caramel with sleepy bewilderment.

“What are you two doing here?”

Maury laughed.

“Damned if I know. We followed you, and had the deuce of a time doing it. I heard you out on the porch yelling for Gloria, so I woke up the Caramel here and got it through his head, with some difficulty, that if there was a search-party we’d better be on it. He slowed me up by sitting down in the road at intervals and asking me what it was all about. We tracked you by the pleasant scent of Canadian Club.”

There was a rattle of nervous laughter under the low train-shed.

“How did you track us, really?”

“Well, we followed along down the road and then we suddenly lost you. Seems you turned off at a wagontrail. After a while somebody hailed us and asked us if we were looking for a young girl. Well, we came up and found it was a little shivering old man, sitting on a fallen tree like somebody in a fairy tale. ‘She turned down here,’ he said, ‘and most steppud on me, goin’ somewhere in an awful hustle, and then a fella in short golfin’ pants come runnin’ along and went after her. He throwed me this.’ The old fellow had a dollar bill he was waving around — “

“Oh, the poor old man!” ejaculated Gloria, moved.

“I threw him another and we went on, though he asked us to stay and tell him what it was all about.”

“Poor old man,” repeated Gloria dismally.

Dick sat down sleepily on a box.

“And now what?” he inquired in the tone of stoic resignation.

“Gloria’s upset,” explained Anthony. “She and I are going to the city by the next train.”

Maury in the darkness had pulled a time-table from his pocket.

“Strike a match.”

A tiny flare leaped out of the opaque background illuminating the four faces, grotesque and unfamiliar here in the open night.

“Let’s see. Two, two-thirty — no, that’s evening. By gad, you won’t get a train till five-thirty.”

Anthony hesitated.

“Well,” he muttered uncertainly, “we’ve decided to stay here and wait for it. You two might as well go back and sleep.”

“You go, too, Anthony,” urged Gloria; “I want you to have some sleep, dear. You’ve been as pale as a ghost all day.”

“Why, you little idiot!”

Dick yawned.

“Very well. You stay, we stay.”

He walked out from under the shed and surveyed the heavens.

“Rather a nice night, after all. Stars are out and everything.

Exceptionally tasty assortment of them.”

“Let’s see.” Gloria moved after him and the other two followed her.

“Let’s sit out here,” she suggested. “I like it much better.”

Anthony and Dick converted a long box into a backrest and found a board dry enough for Gloria to sit on. Anthony dropped down beside her and with some effort Dick hoisted himself onto an apple-barrel near them.

“Tana went to sleep in the porch hammock,” he remarked. “We carried him in and left him next to the kitchen stove to dry. He was drenched to the skin.”

“That awful little man!” sighed Gloria.

“How do you do!” The voice, sonorous and funereal, had come from above, and they looked up startled to find that in some manner Maury had climbed to the roof of the shed, where he sat dangling his feet over the edge, outlined as a shadowy and fantastic gargoyle against the now brilliant sky.

“It must be for such occasions as this,” he began softly, his words having the effect of floating down from an immense height and settling softly upon his auditors, “that the righteous of the land decorate the railroads with bill-boards asserting in red and yellow that ‘Jesus Christ is God,’ placing them, appropriately enough, next to announcements that ‘Gunter’s Whiskey is Good.’“

There was gentle laughter and the three below kept their heads tilted upward.

“I think I shall tell you the story of my education,” continued Maury, “under these sardonic constellations.”

“Do! Please!”

“Shall I, really?”

They waited expectantly while he directed a ruminative yawn toward the white smiling moon.

“Well,” he began, “as an infant I prayed. I stored up prayers against future wickedness. One year I stored up nineteen hundred ‘Now I lay me’s.’“

“Throw down a cigarette,” murmured some one.

A small package reached the platform simultaneously with the stentorian command:

“Silence! I am about to unburden myself of many memorable remarks reserved for the darkness of such earths and the brilliance of such skies.”

Below, a lighted match was passed from cigarette to cigarette. The voice resumed:

“I was adept at fooling the deity. I prayed immediately after all crimes until eventually prayer and crime became indistinguishable to me. I believed that because a man cried out ‘My God!’ when a safe fell on him, it proved that belief was rooted deep in the human breast. Then I went to school. For fourteen years half a hundred earnest men pointed to ancient flint-locks and cried to me: ‘There’s the real thing. These new rifles are only shallow, superficial imitations.’ They damned the books I read and the things I thought by calling them immoral; later the fashion changed, and they damned things by calling them ‘clever’.

“And so I turned, canny for my years, from the professors to the poets, listening — to the lyric tenor of Swinburne and the tenor robusto of Shelley, to Shakespeare with his first bass and his fine range, to Tennyson with his second bass and his occasional falsetto, to Milton and Marlow, bassos profundo. I gave ear to Browning chatting, Byron declaiming, and Wordsworth droning. This, at least, did me no harm. I learned a little of beauty — enough to know that it had nothing to do with truth — and I found, moreover, that there was no great literary tradition; there was only the tradition of the eventful death of every literary tradition….

“Then I grew up, and the beauty of succulent illusions fell away from me. The fibre of my mind coarsened and my eyes grew miserably keen. Life rose around my island like a sea, and presently I was swimming.

“The transition was subtle — the thing had lain in wait for me for some time. It has its insidious, seemingly innocuous trap for every one. With me? No — I didn’t try to seduce the janitor’s wife — nor did I run through the streets unclothed, proclaiming my virility. It is never quite passion that does the business — it is the dress that passion wears. I became bored — that was all. Boredom, which is another name and a frequent disguise for vitality, became the unconscious motive of all my acts. Beauty was behind me, do you understand? — I was grown.” He paused. “End of school and college period. Opening of Part Two.”

Three quietly active points of light showed the location of his listeners. Gloria was now half sitting, half lying, in Anthony’s lap. His arm was around her so tightly that she could hear the beating of his heart. Richard Caramel, perched on the apple-barrel, from time to time stirred and gave off a faint grunt.

“I grew up then, into this land of jazz, and fell immediately into a state of almost audible confusion. Life stood over me like an immoral schoolmistress, editing my ordered thoughts. But, with a mistaken faith in intelligence, I plodded on. I read Smith, who laughed at charity and insisted that the sneer was the highest form of self-expression — but Smith himself replaced charity as an obscurer of the light. I read Jones, who neatly disposed of individualism — and behold! Jones was still in my way. I did not think — I was a battle-ground for the thoughts of many men; rather was I one of those desirable but impotent countries over which the great powers surge back and forth.

“I reached maturity under the impression that I was gathering the experience to order my life for happiness. Indeed, I accomplished the not unusual feat of solving each question in my mind long before it presented itself to me in life — and of being beaten and bewildered just the same.

“But after a few tastes of this latter dish I had had enough. Here! I said, Experience is not worth the getting. It’s not a thing that happens pleasantly to a passive you — it’s a wall that an active you runs up against. So I wrapped myself in what I thought was my invulnerable scepticism and decided that my education was complete. But it was too late. Protect myself as I might by making no new ties with tragic and predestined humanity, I was lost with the rest. I had traded the fight against love for the fight against loneliness, the fight against life for the fight against death.”

He broke off to give emphasis to his last observation — after a moment he yawned and resumed.

“I suppose that the beginning of the second phase of my education was a ghastly dissatisfaction at being used in spite of myself for some inscrutable purpose of whose ultimate goal I was unaware — if, indeed, there was an ultimate goal. It was a difficult choice. The schoolmistress seemed to be saying, ‘We’re going to play football and nothing but football. If you don’t want to play football you can’t play at all — ‘

“What was I to do — the playtime was so short!

“You see, I felt that we were even denied what consolation there might have been in being a figment of a corporate man rising from his knees. Do you think that I leaped at this pessimism, grasped it as a sweetly smug superior thing, no more depressing really than, say, a gray autumn day before a fire? — I don’t think I did that. I was a great deal too warm for that, and too alive.

“For it seemed to me that there was no ultimate goal for man. Man was beginning a grotesque and bewildered fight with nature — nature, that by the divine and magnificent accident had brought us to where we could fly in her face. She had invented ways to rid the race of the inferior and thus give the remainder strength to fill her higher — or, let us say, her more amusing — though still unconscious and accidental intentions. And, actuated by the highest gifts of the enlightenment, we were seeking to circumvent her. In this republic I saw the black beginning to mingle with the white — in Europe there was taking place an economic catastrophe to save three or four diseased and wretchedly governed races from the one mastery that might organize them for material prosperity.

“We produce a Christ who can raise up the leper — and presently the breed of the leper is the salt of the earth. If any one can find any lesson in that, let him stand forth.”

“There’s only one lesson to be learned from life, anyway,” interrupted

Gloria, not in contradiction but in a sort of melancholy agreement.

“What’s that?” demanded Maury sharply.

“That there’s no lesson to be learned from life.”

After a short silence Maury said:

“Young Gloria, the beautiful and merciless lady, first looked at the world with the fundamental sophistication I have struggled to attain, that Anthony never will attain, that Dick will never fully understand.”

There was a disgusted groan from the apple-barrel. Anthony, grown accustomed to the dark, could see plainly the flash of Richard Caramel’s yellow eye and the look of resentment on his face as he cried:

“You’re crazy! By your own statement I should have attained some experience by trying.”

“Trying what?” cried Maury fiercely. “Trying to pierce the darkness of political idealism with some wild, despairing urge toward truth? Sitting day after day supine in a rigid chair and infinitely removed from life staring at the tip of a steeple through the trees, trying to separate, definitely and for all time, the knowable from the unknowable? Trying to take a piece of actuality and give it glamour from your own soul to make for that inexpressible quality it possessed in life and lost in transit to paper or canvas? Struggling in a laboratory through weary years for one iota of relative truth in a mass of wheels or a test tube — “

“Have you?”

Maury paused, and in his answer, when it came, there was a measure of weariness, a bitter overnote that lingered for a moment in those three minds before it floated up and off like a bubble bound for the moon.

“Not I,” he said softly. “I was born tired — but with the quality of mother wit, the gift of women like Gloria — to that, for all my talking and listening, my waiting in vain for the eternal generality that seems to lie just beyond every argument and every speculation, to that I have added not one jot.”

In the distance a deep sound that had been audible for some moments identified itself by a plaintive mooing like that of a gigantic cow and by the pearly spot of a headlight apparent half a mile away. It was a steam-driven train this time, rumbling and groaning, and as it tumbled by with a monstrous complaint it sent a shower of sparks and cinders over the platform.

“Not one jot!” Again Maury’s voice dropped down to them as from a great height. “What a feeble thing intelligence is, with its short steps, its waverings, its pacings back and forth, its disastrous retreats! Intelligence is a mere instrument of circumstances. There are people who say that intelligence must have built the universe — why, intelligence never built a steam engine! Circumstances built a steam engine. Intelligence is little more than a short foot-rule by which we measure the infinite achievements of Circumstances.

“I could quote you the philosophy of the hour — but, for all we know, fifty years may see a complete reversal of this abnegation that’s absorbing the intellectuals to-day, the triumph of Christ over Anatole France — “ He hesitated, and then added: “But all I know — the tremendous importance of myself to me, and the necessity of acknowledging that importance to myself — these things the wise and lovely Gloria was born knowing these things and the painful futility of trying to know anything else.

“Well, I started to tell you of my education, didn’t I? But I learned nothing, you see, very little even about myself. And if I had I should die with my lips shut and the guard on my fountain pen — as the wisest men have done since — oh, since the failure of a certain matter — a strange matter, by the way. It concerned some sceptics who thought they were far-sighted, just as you and I. Let me tell you about them by way of an evening prayer before you all drop off to sleep.

“Once upon a time all the men of mind and genius in the world became of one belief — that is to say, of no belief. But it wearied them to think that within a few years after their death many cults and systems and prognostications would be ascribed to them which they had never meditated nor intended. So they said to one another:

“‘Let’s join together and make a great book that will last forever to mock the credulity of man. Let’s persuade our more erotic poets to write about the delights of the flesh, and induce some of our robust journalists to contribute stories of famous amours. We’ll include all the most preposterous old wives’ tales now current. We’ll choose the keenest satirist alive to compile a deity from all the deities worshipped by mankind, a deity who will be more magnificent than any of them, and yet so weakly human that he’ll become a byword for laughter the world over — and we’ll ascribe to him all sorts of jokes and vanities and rages, in which he’ll be supposed to indulge for his own diversion, so that the people will read our book and ponder it, and there’ll be no more nonsense in the world.

“‘Finally, let us take care that the book possesses all the virtues of style, so that it may last forever as a witness to our profound scepticism and our universal irony.’

“So the men did, and they died.

“But the book lived always, so beautifully had it been written, and so astounding the quality of imagination with which these men of mind and genius had endowed it. They had neglected to give it a name, but after they were dead it became known as the Bible.”

When he concluded there was no comment. Some damp languor sleeping on the air of night seemed to have bewitched them all.

“As I said, I started on the story of my education. But my high-balls are dead and the night’s almost over, and soon there’ll be an awful jabbering going on everywhere, in the trees and the houses, and the two little stores over there behind the station, and there’ll be a great running up and down upon the earth for a few hours — Well,” he concluded with a laugh, “thank God we four can all pass to our eternal rest knowing we’ve left the world a little better for having lived in it.”

A breeze sprang up, blowing with it faint wisps of life which flattened against the sky.

“Your remarks grow rambling and inconclusive,” said Anthony sleepily. “You expected one of those miracles of illumination by which you say your most brilliant and pregnant things in exactly the setting that should provoke the ideal symposium. Meanwhile Gloria has shown her far-sighted detachment by falling asleep — I can tell that by the fact that she has managed to concentrate her entire weight upon my broken body.”

“Have I bored you?” inquired Maury, looking down with some concern.

“No, you have disappointed us. You’ve shot a lot of arrows but did you shoot any birds?”

“I leave the birds to Dick,” said Maury hurriedly. “I speak erratically, in disassociated fragments.”

“You can get no rise from me,” muttered Dick. “My mind is full of any number of material things. I want a warm bath too much to worry about the importance of my work or what proportion of us are pathetic figures.”

Dawn made itself felt in a gathering whiteness eastward over the river and an intermittent cheeping in the near-by trees.

“Quarter to five,” sighed Dick; “almost another hour to wait. Look! Two gone.” He was pointing to Anthony, whose lids had sagged over his eyes. “Sleep of the Patch family — “

But in another five minutes, despite the amplifying cheeps and chirrups, his own head had fallen forward, nodded down twice, thrice….

Only Maury Noble remained awake, seated upon the station roof, his eyes wide open and fixed with fatigued intensity upon the distant nucleus of morning. He was wondering at the unreality of ideas, at the fading radiance of existence, and at the little absorptions that were creeping avidly into his life, like rats into a ruined house. He was sorry for no one now — on Monday morning there would be his business, and later there would be a girl of another class whose whole life he was; these were the things nearest his heart. In the strangeness of the brightening day it seemed presumptuous that with this feeble, broken instrument of his mind he had ever tried to think.

There was the sun, letting down great glowing masses of heat; there was life, active and snarling, moving about them like a fly swarm — the dark pants of smoke from the engine, a crisp “all aboard!” and a bell ringing. Confusedly Maury saw eyes in the milk train staring curiously up at him, heard Gloria and Anthony in quick controversy as to whether he should go to the city with her, then another clamor and she was gone and the three men, pale as ghosts, were standing alone upon the platform while a grimy coal-heaver went down the road on top of a motor truck, carolling hoarsely at the summer morning.

CHAPTER III

THE BROKEN LUTE

It is seven-thirty of an August evening. The windows in the living room of the gray house are wide open, patiently exchanging the tainted inner atmosphere of liquor and smoke for the fresh drowsiness of the late hot dusk. There are dying flower scents upon the air, so thin, so fragile, as to hint already of a summer laid away in time. But August is still proclaimed relentlessly by a thousand crickets around the side-porch, and by one who has broken into the house and concealed himself confidently behind a bookcase, from time to time shrieking of his cleverness and his indomitable will.

The room itself is in messy disorder. On the table is a dish of fruit, which is real but appears artificial. Around it are grouped an ominous assortment of decanters, glasses, and heaped ash-trays, the latter still raising wavy smoke-ladders into the stale air, the effect on the whole needing but a skull to resemble that venerable chromo, once a fixture in every “den,” which presents the appendages to the life of pleasure with delightful and awe-inspiring sentiment.

After a while the sprightly solo of the supercricket is interrupted rather than joined by a new sound — the melancholy wail of an erratically fingered flute. It is obvious that the musician is practising rather than performing, for from time to time the gnarled strain breaks off and, after an interval of indistinct mutterings, recommences.

Just prior to the seventh false start a third sound contributes to the subdued discord. It is a taxi outside. A minute’s silence, then the taxi again, its boisterous retreat almost obliterating the scrape of footsteps on the cinder walk. The door-bell shrieks alarmingly through the house.

From the kitchen enters a small, fatigued Japanese, hastily buttoning a servant’s coat of white duck. He opens the front screen-door and admits a handsome young man of thirty, clad in the sort of well-intentioned clothes peculiar to those who serve mankind. To his whole personality clings a well-intentioned air: his glance about the room is compounded of curiosity and a determined optimism; when he looks at Tana the entire burden of uplifting the godless Oriental is in his eyes. His name is FREDERICK E. PARAMORE. He was at Harvard with ANTHONY, where because of the initials of their surnames they were constantly placed next to each other in classes. A fragmentary acquaintance developed — but since that time they have never met.

Nevertheless, PARAMORE enters the room with a certain air of arriving for the evening.

Tana is answering a question.

TANA: (Grinning with ingratiation) Gone to Inn for dinnah. Be back half-hour. Gone since ha’ past six.

PARAMORE: (Regarding the glasses on the table) Have they company?

TANA: Yes. Company. Mistah Caramel, Mistah and Missays Barnes, Miss

Kane, all stay here.

PARAMORE: I see. (Kindly) They’ve been having a spree, I see.

TANA: I no un’stan’.

PARAMORE: They’ve been having a fling.

TANA: Yes, they have drink. Oh, many, many, many drink.

PARAMORE: (Receding delicately from the subject) “Didn’t I hear the sounds of music as I approached the house”?

TANA:(With a spasmodic giggle)Yes, I play.

PARAMORE: One of the Japanese instruments.

(He is quite obviously a subscriber to the “National Geographic Magazine.”)

TANA: I play flu-u-ute, Japanese flu-u-ute.

PARAMORE: What song were you playing? One of your Japanese melodies?

TANA:(His brow undergoing preposterous contraction) I play train song. How you call? — railroad song. So call in my countree. Like train. It go so-o-o; that mean whistle; train start. Then go so-o-o; that mean train go. Go like that. Vera nice song in my countree. Children song.

PARAMORE: It sounded very nice. (It is apparent at this point that only a gigantic effort at control restrains Tana from rushing up-stairs for his post cards, including the six made in America.)

TANA: I fix high-ball for gentleman?

PARAMORE: “No, thanks. I don’t use it”. (He smiles.)

(TANA withdraws into the kitchen, leaving the intervening door slightly ajar. From the crevice there suddenly issues again the melody of the Japanese train song — this time not a practice, surely, but a performance, a lusty, spirited performance.

The phone rings. TANA, absorbed in his harmonics, gives no heed, so PARAMORE takes up the receiver.)

PARAMORE: Hello…. Yes…. No, he’s not here now, but he’ll be back any moment…. Butterworth? Hello, I didn’t quite catch the name…. Hello, hello, hello. Hello! … Huh!

(The phone obstinately refuses to yield up any more sound. Paramore replaces the receiver.

At this point the taxi motif re-enters, wafting with it a second young man; he carries a suitcase and opens the front door without ringing the bell.)

MAURY: (In the hall) “Oh, Anthony! Yoho”! (He comes into the large room and sees PARAMORE) How do?

PARAMORE: (Gazing at him with gathering intensity) Is this — is this

Maury Noble?

MAURY: “That’s it”. (He advances, smiling, and holding out his hand)

How are you, old boy? Haven’t seen you for years.

(He has vaguely associated the face with Harvard, but is not even positive about that. The name, if he ever knew it, he has long since forgotten. However, with a fine sensitiveness and an equally commendable charity PARAMORE recognizes the fact and tactfully relieves the situation.)

PARAMORE: You’ve forgotten Fred Paramore? We were both in old Unc

Robert’s history class.

MAURY: No, I haven’t, Unc — I mean Fred. Fred was — I mean Unc was a great old fellow, wasn’t he?

PARAMORE: (Nodding his head humorously several times) Great old character. Great old character.

MAURY: (After a short pause) Yes — he was. Where’s Anthony?

PARAMORE: The Japanese servant told me he was at some inn. Having dinner, I suppose.

MAURY: (Looking at his watch) Gone long?

PARAMORE: I guess so. The Japanese told me they’d be back shortly.

MAURY: Suppose we have a drink.

PARAMORE: No, thanks. I don’t use it. (He smiles.)

MAURY: Mind if I do? (Yawning as he helps himself from a bottle) What have you been doing since you left college?

PARAMORE: Oh, many things. I’ve led a very active life. Knocked about here and there. (His tone implies anything front lion-stalking to organized crime.)

MAURY: Oh, been over to Europe?

PARAMORE: No, I haven’t — unfortunately.

MAURY: I guess we’ll all go over before long.

PARAMORE: Do you really think so?

MAURY: Sure! Country’s been fed on sensationalism for more than two years. Everybody getting restless. Want to have some fun.

PARAMORE: Then you don’t believe any ideals are at stake?

MAURY: Nothing of much importance. People want excitement every so often.

PARAMORE: (Intently) It’s very interesting to hear you say that. Now I was talking to a man who’d been over there —  —

(During the ensuing testament, left to be filled in by the reader with such phrases as “Saw with his own eyes,” “Splendid spirit of France,” and “Salvation of civilization,” MAURY sits with lowered eyelids, dispassionately bored.)

MAURY: (At the first available opportunity) By the way, do you happen to know that there’s a German agent in this very house?

PARAMORE: (Smiling cautiously) Are you serious?

MAURY: Absolutely. Feel it my duty to warn you.

PARAMORE: (Convinced) A governess?

MAURY: (In a whisper, indicating the kitchen with his thumb) Tana! That’s not his real name. I understand he constantly gets mail addressed to Lieutenant Emile Tannenbaum.

PARAMORE: (Laughing with hearty tolerance) You were kidding me.

MAURY: I may be accusing him falsely. But, you haven’t told me what you’ve been doing.

PARAMORE: For one thing — writing.

MAURY: Fiction?

PARAMORE: No. Non-fiction.

MAURY: What’s that? A sort of literature that’s half fiction and half fact?

PARAMORE: Oh, I’ve confined myself to fact. I’ve been doing a good deal of social-service work.

MAURY: Oh!

(An immediate glow of suspicion leaps into his eyes. It is as though PARAMORE had announced himself as an amateur pickpocket.)

PARAMORE: At present I’m doing service work in Stamford. Only last week some one told me that Anthony Patch lived so near.

(They are interrupted by a clamor outside, unmistakable as that of two sexes in conversation and laughter. Then there enter the room in a body ANTHONY, GLORIA, RICHARD CARAMEL, MURIEL KANE, RACHAEL BARNES and RODMAN BARNES, her husband. They surge about MAURY, illogically replying “Fine!” to his general “Hello.” … ANTHONY, meanwhile, approaches his other guest.)

ANTHONY: Well, I’ll be darned. How are you? Mighty glad to see you.

PARAMORE: It’s good to see you, Anthony. I’m stationed in Stamford, so I thought I’d run over. (Roguishly) We have to work to beat the devil most of the time, so we’re entitled to a few hours’ vacation.

(In an agony of concentration ANTHONY tries to recall the name. After a struggle of parturition his memory gives up the fragment “Fred,” around which he hastily builds the sentence “Glad you did, Fred!” Meanwhile the slight hush prefatory to an introduction has fallen upon the company. MAURY, who could help, prefers to look on in malicious enjoyment.)

ANTHONY: (In desperation) Ladies and gentlemen, this is — this is Fred.

MURIEL: (With obliging levity) Hello, Fred!

(RICHARD CARAMEL and PARAMORE greet each other intimately by their first names, the latter recollecting that DICK was one of the men in his class who had never before troubled to speak to him. DICK fatuously imagines that PARAMORE is some one he has previously met in ANTHONY’S house.

The three young women go up-stairs.)

MAURY: (In an undertone to DICK) Haven’t seen Muriel since Anthony’s wedding.

DICK: She’s now in her prime. Her latest is “I’ll say so!”

(ANTHONY struggles for a while with PARAMORE and at length attempts to make the conversation general by asking every one to have a drink.)

MAURY: I’ve done pretty well on this bottle. I’ve gone from “Proof” down to “Distillery.” (He indicates the words on the label.)

ANTHONY: (To PARAMORE) Never can tell when these two will turn up. Said good-by to them one afternoon at five and darned if they didn’t appear about two in the morning. A big hired touring-car from New York drove up to the door and out they stepped, drunk as lords, of course.

(In an ecstasy of consideration PARAMORE regards the cover of a book which he holds in his hand. MAURY and DICK exchange a glance.)

DICK: (Innocently, to PARAMORE) You work here in town?

PARAMORE: No, I’m in the Laird Street Settlement in Stamford. (To

ANTHONY) You have no idea of the amount of poverty in these small

Connecticut towns. Italians and other immigrants. Catholics mostly, you

know, so it’s very hard to reach them.

ANTHONY: (Politely) Lot of crime?

PARAMORE: Not so much crime as ignorance and dirt.

MAURY: That’s my theory: immediate electrocution of all ignorant and dirty people. I’m all for the criminals — give color to life. Trouble is if you started to punish ignorance you’d have to begin in the first families, then you could take up the moving picture people, and finally Congress and the clergy.

PARAMORE: (Smiling uneasily) I was speaking of the more fundamental ignorance — of even our language.

MAURY: (Thoughtfully) I suppose it is rather hard. Can’t even keep up with the new poetry.

PARAMORE: It’s only when the settlement work has gone on for months that one realizes how bad things are. As our secretary said to me, your finger-nails never seem dirty until you wash your hands. Of course we’re already attracting much attention.

MAURY: (Rudely) As your secretary might say, if you stuff paper into a grate it’ll burn brightly for a moment.

(At this point GLORIA, freshly tinted and lustful of admiration and entertainment, rejoins the party, followed by her two friends. For several moments the conversation becomes entirely fragmentary. GLORIA calls ANTHONY aside.)

GLORIA: Please don’t drink much, Anthony.

ANTHONY: Why?

GLORIA: Because you’re so simple when you’re drunk.

ANTHONY: Good Lord! What’s the matter now?

GLORIA: (After a pause during which her eyes gaze coolly into his) Several things. In the first place, why do you insist on paying for everything? Both those men have more money than you!

ANTHONY: Why, Gloria! They’re my guests!

GLORIA: That’s no reason why you should pay for a bottle of champagne Rachael Barnes smashed. Dick tried to fix that second taxi bill, and you wouldn’t let him.

ANTHONY: Why, Gloria —

GLORIA: When we have to keep selling bonds to even pay our bills, it’s time to cut down on excess generosities. Moreover, I wouldn’t be quite so attentive to Rachael Barnes. Her husband doesn’t like it any more than I do!

ANTHONY: Why, Gloria —

GLORIA: (Mimicking him sharply) “Why, Gloria!” But that’s happened a little too often this summer — with every pretty woman you meet. It’s grown to be a sort of habit, and I’m not going to stand it! If you can play around, I can, too. (Then, as an afterthought) By the way, this Fred person isn’t a second Joe Hull, is he?

ANTHONY: Heavens, no! He probably came up to get me to wheedle some money out of grandfather for his flock.

(GLORIA turns away from a very depressed ANTHONY and returns to her guests.

By nine o’clock these can be divided into two classes — those who have been drinking consistently and those who have taken little or nothing. In the second group are the BARNESES, MURIEL, and FREDERICK E. PARAMORE.)

MURIEL: I wish I could write. I get these ideas but I never seem to be able to put them in words.

DICK: As Goliath said, he understood how David felt, but he couldn’t express himself. The remark was immediately adopted for a motto by the Philistines.

MURIEL: I don’t get you. I must be getting stupid in my old age.

GLORIA: (Weaving unsteadily among the company like an exhilarated angel) If any one’s hungry there’s some French pastry on the dining room table.

MAURY: Can’t tolerate those Victorian designs it comes in.

MURIEL: (Violently amused) I’ll say you’re tight, Maury.

(Her bosom is still a pavement that she offers to the hoofs of many passing stallions, hoping that their iron shoes may strike even a spark of romance in the darkness …

Messrs. BARNES and PARAMORE have been engaged in conversation upon some wholesome subject, a subject so wholesome that MR. BARNES has been trying for several moments to creep into the more tainted air around the central lounge. Whether PARAMORE is lingering in the gray house out of politeness or curiosity, or in order at some future time to make a sociological report on the decadence of American life, is problematical.)

MAURY: Fred, I imagined you were very broad-minded.

PARAMORE: I am.

MURIEL: Me, too. I believe one religion’s as good as another and everything.

PARAMORE: There’s some good in all religions.

MURIEL: I’m a Catholic but, as I always say, I’m not working at it.

PARAMORE: (With a tremendous burst of tolerance) The Catholic religion is a very — a very powerful religion.

MAURY: Well, such a broad-minded man should consider the raised plane of sensation and the stimulated optimism contained in this cocktail.

PARAMORE: (Taking the drink, rather defiantly) Thanks, I’ll try — one.

MAURY: One? Outrageous! Here we have a class of ‘nineteen ten reunion, and you refuse to be even a little pickled. Come on!

“Here’s a health to King Charles, Here’s a health to King Charles, Bring the bowl that you boast —  — “

(PARAMORE joins in with a hearty voice.)

MAURY: Fill the cup, Frederick. You know everything’s subordinated to nature’s purposes with us, and her purpose with you is to make you a rip-roaring tippler.

PARAMORE: If a fellow can drink like a gentleman —

MAURY: What is a gentleman, anyway?

ANTHONY: A man who never has pins under his coat lapel.

MAURY: Nonsense! A man’s social rank is determined by the amount of bread he eats in a sandwich.

DICK: He’s a man who prefers the first edition of a book to the last edition of a newspaper.

RACHAEL: A man who never gives an impersonation of a dope-fiend.

MAURY: An American who can fool an English butler into thinking he’s one.

MURIEL: A man who comes from a good family and went to Yale or Harvard or Princeton, and has money and dances well, and all that.

MAURY: At last — the perfect definition! Cardinal Newman’s is now a back number.

PARAMORE: I think we ought to look on the question more broad-mindedly. Was it Abraham Lincoln who said that a gentleman is one who never inflicts pain?

MAURY: It’s attributed, I believe, to General Ludendorff.

PARAMORE: Surely you’re joking.

MAURY: Have another drink.

PARAMORE: I oughtn’t to. (Lowering his voice for MAURY’S ear alone) What if I were to tell you this is the third drink I’ve ever taken in my life?

(DICK starts the phonograph, which provokes MURIEL to rise and sway from side to side, her elbows against her ribs, her forearms perpendicular to her body and out like fins.)

MURIEL: Oh, let’s take up the rugs and dance!

(This suggestion is received by ANTHONY and GLORIA with interior groans and sickly smiles of acquiescence.)

MURIEL: Come on, you lazy-bones. Get up and move the furniture back.

DICK: Wait till I finish my drink.

MAURY: (Intent on his purpose toward PARAMORE) I’ll tell you what.

Let’s each fill one glass, drink it off and then we’ll dance.

(A wave of protest which breaks against the rock of MAURY’S insistence.)

MURIEL: My head is simply going round now.

RACHAEL: (In an undertone to ANTHONY) Did Gloria tell you to stay away from me?

ANTHONY: (Confused) Why, certainly not. Of course not.

(RACHAEL smiles at him inscrutably. Two years have given her a sort of hard, well-groomed beauty.)

MAURY: (Holding up his glass) Here’s to the defeat of democracy and the fall of Christianity.

MURIEL: Now really!

(She flashes a mock-reproachful glance at MAURY and then drinks.

They all drink, with varying degrees of difficulty.)

MURIEL: Clear the floor!

(It seems inevitable that this process is to be gone through, so ANTHONY and GLORIA join in the great moving of tables, piling of chairs, rolling of carpets, and breaking of lamps. When the furniture has been stacked in ugly masses at the sides, there appears a space about eight feet square.)

MURIEL: Oh, let’s have music!

MAURY: Tana will render the love song of an eye, ear, nose, and throat specialist.

(Amid some confusion due to the fact that TANA has retired for the night, preparations are made for the performance. The pajamaed Japanese, flute in hand, is wrapped in a comforter and placed in a chair atop one of the tables, where he makes a ludicrous and grotesque spectacle. PARAMORE is perceptibly drunk and so enraptured with the notion that he increases the effect by simulating funny-paper staggers and even venturing on an occasional hiccough.)

PARAMORE: (To GLORIA) Want to dance with me?

GLORIA: No, sir! Want to do the swan dance. Can you do it?

PARAMORE: Sure. Do them all.

GLORIA: All right. You start from that side of the room and I’ll start from this.

MURIEL: Let’s go!

(Then Bedlam creeps screaming out of the bottles: TANA plunges into the recondite mazes of the train song, the plaintive “tootle toot-toot” blending its melancholy cadences with the “Poor Butter-fly (tink-atink), by the blossoms wait-ing” of the phonograph. MURIEL is too weak with laughter to do more than cling desperately to BARNES, who, dancing with the ominous rigidity of an army officer, tramps without humor around the small space. ANTHONY is trying to hear RACHAEL’S whisper — without attracting GLORIA’s attention….

But the grotesque, the unbelievable, the histrionic incident is about to occur, one of those incidents in which life seems set upon the passionate imitation of the lowest forms of literature. PARAMORE has been trying to emulate GLORIA, and as the commotion reaches its height he begins to spin round and round, more and more dizzily — he staggers, recovers, staggers again and then falls in the direction of the hall … almost into the arms of old ADAM PATCH, whose approach has been rendered inaudible by the pandemonium in the room.

ADAM PATCH is very white. He leans upon a stick. The man with him is EDWARD SHUTTLEWORTH, and it is he who seizes PARAMORE by the shoulder and deflects the course of his fall away from the venerable philanthropist.

The time required for quiet to descend upon the room like a monstrous pall may be estimated at two minutes, though for a short period after that the phonograph gags and the notes of the Japanese train song dribble from the end of TANA’S flute. Of the nine people only BARNES, PARAMORE, and TANA are unaware of the late-comer’s identity. Of the nine not one is aware that ADAM PATCH has that morning made a contribution of fifty thousand dollars to the cause of national prohibition.

It is given to PARAMORE to break the gathering silence; the high tide of his life’s depravity is reached in his incredible remark.)

PARAMORE: (Crawling rapidly toward the kitchen on his hands and knees)

I’m not a guest here — I work here.

(Again silence falls — so deep now, so weighted with intolerably contagious apprehension, that RACHAEL gives a nervous little giggle, and DICK finds himself telling over and over a line from Swinburne, grotesquely appropriate to the scene:

“One gaunt bleak blossom of scentless breath.”

… Out of the hush the voice of ANTHONY, sober and strained, saying something to ADAM PATCH; then this, too, dies away.)

SHUTTLEWORTH: (Passionately) Your grandfather thought he would motor over to see your house. I phoned from Rye and left a message.

(A series of little gasps, emanating, apparently, from nowhere, from no one, fall into the next pause. ANTHONY is the color of chalk. GLORIA’S lips are parted and her level gaze at the old man is tense and frightened. There is not one smile in the room. Not one? Or does CROSS PATCH’S drawn mouth tremble slightly open, to expose the even rows of his thin teeth? He speaks — five mild and simple words.)

ADAM PATCH: We’ll go back now, Shuttleworth — (And that is all. He turns, and assisted by his cane goes out through the hall, through the front door, and with hellish portentousness his uncertain footsteps crunch on the gravel path under the August moon.)

RETROSPECT

In this extremity they were like two goldfish in a bowl from which all the water had been drawn; they could not even swim across to each other.

Gloria would be twenty-six in May. There was nothing, she had said, that she wanted, except to be young and beautiful for a long time, to be gay and happy, and to have money and love. She wanted what most women want, but she wanted it much more fiercely and passionately. She had been married over two years. At first there had been days of serene understanding, rising to ecstasies of proprietorship and pride. Alternating with these periods had occurred sporadic hates, enduring a short hour, and forgetfulnesses lasting no longer than an afternoon. That had been for half a year.

Then the serenity, the content, had become less jubilant, had become, gray — very rarely, with the spur of jealousy or forced separation, the ancient ecstasies returned, the apparent communion of soul and soul, the emotional excitement. It was possible for her to hate Anthony for as much as a full day, to be carelessly incensed at him for as long as a week. Recrimination had displaced affection as an indulgence, almost as an entertainment, and there were nights when they would go to sleep trying to remember who was angry and who should be reserved next morning. And as the second year waned there had entered two new elements. Gloria realized that Anthony had become capable of utter indifference toward her, a temporary indifference, more than half lethargic, but one from which she could no longer stir him by a whispered word, or a certain intimate smile. There were days when her caresses affected him as a sort of suffocation. She was conscious of these things; she never entirely admitted them to herself.

It was only recently that she perceived that in spite of her adoration of him, her jealousy, her servitude, her pride, she fundamentally despised him — and her contempt blended indistinguishably with her other emotions…. All this was her love — the vital and feminine illusion that had directed itself toward him one April night, many months before.

On Anthony’s part she was, in spite of these qualifications, his sole preoccupation. Had he lost her he would have been a broken man, wretchedly and sentimentally absorbed in her memory for the remainder of life. He seldom took pleasure in an entire day spent alone with her — except on occasions he preferred to have a third person with them. There were times when he felt that if he were not left absolutely alone he would go mad — there were a few times when he definitely hated her. In his cups he was capable of short attractions toward other women, the hitherto-suppressed outcroppings of an experimental temperament.

That spring, that summer, they had speculated upon future happiness — how they were to travel from summer land to summer land, returning eventually to a gorgeous estate and possible idyllic children, then entering diplomacy or politics, to accomplish, for a while, beautiful and important things, until finally as a white-haired (beautifully, silkily, white-haired) couple they were to loll about in serene glory, worshipped by the bourgeoisie of the land…. These times were to begin “when we get our money”; it was on such dreams rather than on any satisfaction with their increasingly irregular, increasingly dissipated life that their hope rested. On gray mornings when the jests of the night before had shrunk to ribaldries without wit or dignity, they could, after a fashion, bring out this batch of common hopes and count them over, then smile at each other and repeat, by way of clinching the matter, the terse yet sincere Nietzscheanism of Gloria’s defiant “I don’t care!”

Things had been slipping perceptibly. There was the money question, increasingly annoying, increasingly ominous; there was the realization that liquor had become a practical necessity to their amusement — not an uncommon phenomenon in the British aristocracy of a hundred years ago, but a somewhat alarming one in a civilization steadily becoming more temperate and more circumspect. Moreover, both of them seemed vaguely weaker in fibre, not so much in what they did as in their subtle reactions to the civilization about them. In Gloria had been born something that she had hitherto never needed — the skeleton, incomplete but nevertheless unmistakable, of her ancient abhorrence, a conscience. This admission to herself was coincidental with the slow decline of her physical courage.

Then, on the August morning after Adam Patch’s unexpected call, they awoke, nauseated and tired, dispirited with life, capable only of one pervasive emotion — fear.

PANIC

“Well?” Anthony sat up in bed and looked down at her. The corners of his lips were drooping with depression, his voice was strained and hollow.

Her reply was to raise her hand to her mouth and begin a slow, precise nibbling at her finger.

“We’ve done it,” he said after a pause; then, as she was still silent, he became exasperated. “Why don’t you say something?”

“What on earth do you want me to say?”

“What are you thinking?”

“Nothing.”

“Then stop biting your finger!”

Ensued a short confused discussion of whether or not she had been thinking. It seemed essential to Anthony that she should muse aloud upon last night’s disaster. Her silence was a method of settling the responsibility on him. For her part she saw no necessity for speech — the moment required that she should gnaw at her finger like a nervous child.

“I’ve got to fix up this damn mess with my grandfather,” he said with uneasy conviction. A faint newborn respect was indicated by his use of “my grandfather” instead of “grampa.”

“You can’t,” she affirmed abruptly. “You can’t — ever. He’ll never forgive you as long as he lives.”

“Perhaps not,” agreed Anthony miserably. “Still — I might possibly square myself by some sort of reformation and all that sort of thing — “

“He looked sick,” she interrupted, “pale as flour.”

“He is sick. I told you that three months ago.”

“I wish he’d died last week!” she said petulantly. “Inconsiderate old fool!”

Neither of them laughed.

“But just let me say,” she added quietly, “the next time I see you acting with any woman like you did with Rachael Barnes last night, I’ll leave you — just — like — that! I’m simply not going to stand it!”

Anthony quailed.

“Oh, don’t be absurd,” he protested. “You know there’s no woman in the world for me except you — none, dearest.”

His attempt at a tender note failed miserably — the more imminent danger stalked back into the foreground.

“If I went to him,” suggested Anthony, “and said with appropriate biblical quotations that I’d walked too long in the way of unrighteousness and at last seen the light — “ He broke off and glanced with a whimsical expression at his wife. “I wonder what he’d do?”

“I don’t know.”

She was speculating as to whether or not their guests would have the acumen to leave directly after breakfast.

Not for a week did Anthony muster the courage to go to Tarrytown. The prospect was revolting and left alone he would have been incapable of making the trip — but if his will had deteriorated in these past three years, so had his power to resist urging. Gloria compelled him to go. It was all very well to wait a week, she said, for that would give his grandfather’s violent animosity time to cool — but to wait longer would be an error — it would give it a chance to harden.

He went, in trepidation … and vainly. Adam Patch was not well, said Shuttleworth indignantly. Positive instructions had been given that no one was to see him. Before the ex-”gin-physician’s” vindictive eye Anthony’s front wilted. He walked out to his taxicab with what was almost a slink — recovering only a little of his self-respect as he boarded the train; glad to escape, boylike, to the wonder palaces of consolation that still rose and glittered in his own mind.

Gloria was scornful when he returned to Marietta. Why had he not forced his way in? That was what she would have done!

Between them they drafted a letter to the old man, and after considerable revision sent it off. It was half an apology, half a manufactured explanation. The letter was not answered.

Came a day in September, a day slashed with alternate sun and rain, sun without warmth, rain without freshness. On that day they left the gray house, which had seen the flower of their love. Four trunks and three monstrous crates were piled in the dismantled room where, two years before, they had sprawled lazily, thinking in terms of dreams, remote, languorous, content. The room echoed with emptiness. Gloria, in a new brown dress edged with fur, sat upon a trunk in silence, and Anthony walked nervously to and fro smoking, as they waited for the truck that would take their things to the city.

“What are those?” she demanded, pointing to some books piled upon one of the crates.

“That’s my old stamp collection,” he confessed sheepishly. “I forgot to pack it.”

“Anthony, it’s so silly to carry it around.”

“Well, I was looking through it the day we left the apartment last spring, and I decided not to store it.”

“Can’t you sell it? Haven’t we enough junk?”

“I’m sorry,” he said humbly.

With a thunderous rattling the truck rolled up to the door. Gloria shook her fist defiantly at the four walls.

“I’m so glad to go!” she cried, “so glad. Oh, my God, how I hate this house!”

So the brilliant and beautiful lady went up with her husband to New York. On the very train that bore them away they quarrelled — her bitter words had the frequency, the regularity, the inevitability of the stations they passed.

“Don’t be cross,” begged Anthony piteously. “We’ve got nothing but each other, after all.”

“We haven’t even that, most of the time,” cried Gloria.

“When haven’t we?”

“A lot of times — beginning with one occasion on the station platform at

Redgate.”

“You don’t mean to say that — “

“No,” she interrupted coolly, “I don’t brood over it. It came and went — and when it went it took something with it.”

She finished abruptly. Anthony sat in silence, confused, depressed. The drab visions of train-side Mamaroneck, Larchmont, Rye, Pelham Manor, succeeded each other with intervals of bleak and shoddy wastes posing ineffectually as country. He found himself remembering how on one summer morning they two had started from New York in search of happiness. They had never expected to find it, perhaps, yet in itself that quest had been happier than anything he expected forevermore. Life, it seemed, must be a setting up of props around one — otherwise it was disaster. There was no rest, no quiet. He had been futile in longing to drift and dream; no one drifted except to maelstroms, no one dreamed, without his dreams becoming fantastic nightmares of indecision and regret.

Pelham! They had quarrelled in Pelham because Gloria must drive. And when she set her little foot on the accelerator the car had jumped off spunkily, and their two heads had jerked back like marionettes worked by a single string.

The Bronx — the houses gathering and gleaming in the sun, which was falling now through wide refulgent skies and tumbling caravans of light down into the streets. New York, he supposed, was home — the city of luxury and mystery, of preposterous hopes and exotic dreams. Here on the outskirts absurd stucco palaces reared themselves in the cool sunset, poised for an instant in cool unreality, glided off far away, succeeded by the mazed confusion of the Harlem River. The train moved in through the deepening twilight, above and past half a hundred cheerful sweating streets of the upper East Side, each one passing the car window like the space between the spokes of a gigantic wheel, each one with its vigorous colorful revelation of poor children swarming in feverish activity like vivid ants in alleys of red sand. From the tenement windows leaned rotund, moon-shaped mothers, as constellations of this sordid heaven; women like dark imperfect jewels, women like vegetables, women like great bags of abominably dirty laundry.

“I like these streets,” observed Anthony aloud. “I always feel as though it’s a performance being staged for me; as though the second I’ve passed they’ll all stop leaping and laughing and, instead, grow very sad, remembering how poor they are, and retreat with bowed heads into their houses. You often get that effect abroad, but seldom in this country.”

Down in a tall busy street he read a dozen Jewish names on a line of stores; in the door of each stood a dark little man watching the passers from intent eyes — eyes gleaming with suspicion, with pride, with clarity, with cupidity, with comprehension. New York — he could not dissociate it now from the slow, upward creep of this people — the little stores, growing, expanding, consolidating, moving, watched over with hawk’s eyes and a bee’s attention to detail — they slathered out on all sides. It was impressive — in perspective it was tremendous.

Gloria’s voice broke in with strange appropriateness upon his thoughts.

“I wonder where Bloeckman’s been this summer.”

THE APARTMENT

After the sureties of youth there sets in a period of intense and intolerable complexity. With the soda-jerker this period is so short as to be almost negligible. Men higher in the scale hold out longer in the attempt to preserve the ultimate niceties of relationship, to retain “impractical” ideas of integrity. But by the late twenties the business has grown too intricate, and what has hitherto been imminent and confusing has become gradually remote and dim. Routine comes down like twilight on a harsh landscape, softening it until it is tolerable. The complexity is too subtle, too varied; the values are changing utterly with each lesion of vitality; it has begun to appear that we can learn nothing from the past with which to face the future — so we cease to be impulsive, convincible men, interested in what is ethically true by fine margins, we substitute rules of conduct for ideas of integrity, we value safety above romance, we become, quite unconsciously, pragmatic. It is left to the few to be persistently concerned with the nuances of relationships — and even this few only in certain hours especially set aside for the task.

Anthony Patch had ceased to be an individual of mental adventure, of curiosity, and had become an individual of bias and prejudice, with a longing to be emotionally undisturbed. This gradual change had taken place through the past several years, accelerated by a succession of anxieties preying on his mind. There was, first of all, the sense of waste, always dormant in his heart, now awakened by the circumstances of his position. In his moments of insecurity he was haunted by the suggestion that life might be, after all, significant. In his early twenties the conviction of the futility of effort, of the wisdom of abnegation, had been confirmed by the philosophies he had admired as well as by his association with Maury Noble, and later with his wife. Yet there had been occasions — just before his first meeting with Gloria, for example, and when his grandfather had suggested that he should go abroad as a war correspondent — upon which his dissatisfaction had driven him almost to a positive step.

One day just before they left Marietta for the last time, in carelessly turning over the pages of a Harvard Alumni Bulletin, he had found a column which told him what his contemporaries had been about in this six years since graduation. Most of them were in business, it was true, and several were converting the heathen of China or America to a nebulous protestantism; but a few, he found, were working constructively at jobs that were neither sinecures nor routines. There was Calvin Boyd, for instance, who, though barely out of medical school, had discovered a new treatment for typhus, had shipped abroad and was mitigating some of the civilization that the Great Powers had brought to Servia; there was Eugene Bronson, whose articles in The New Democracy were stamping him as a man with ideas transcending both vulgar timeliness and popular hysteria; there was a man named Daly who had been suspended from the faculty of a righteous university for preaching Marxian doctrines in the classroom: in art, science, politics, he saw the authentic personalities of his time emerging — there was even Severance, the quarter-back, who had given up his life rather neatly and gracefully with the Foreign Legion on the Aisne.

He laid down the magazine and thought for a while about these diverse men. In the days of his integrity he would have defended his attitude to the last — an Epicurus in Nirvana, he would have cried that to struggle was to believe, to believe was to limit. He would as soon have become a churchgoer because the prospect of immortality gratified him as he would have considered entering the leather business because the intensity of the competition would have kept him from unhappiness. But at present he had no such delicate scruples. This autumn, as his twenty-ninth year began, he was inclined to close his mind to many things, to avoid prying deeply into motive and first causes, and mostly to long passionately for security from the world and from himself. He hated to be alone, as has been said he often dreaded being alone with Gloria.

Because of the chasm which his grandfather’s visit had opened before him, and the consequent revulsion from his late mode of life, it was inevitable that he should look around in this suddenly hostile city for the friends and environments that had once seemed the warmest and most secure. His first step was a desperate attempt to get back his old apartment.

In the spring of 1912 he had signed a four-year lease at seventeen hundred a year, with an option of renewal. This lease had expired the previous May. When he had first rented the rooms they had been mere potentialities, scarcely to be discerned as that, but Anthony had seen into these potentialities and arranged in the lease that he and the landlord should each spend a certain amount in improvements. Rents had gone up in the past four years, and last spring when Anthony had waived his option the landlord, a Mr. Sohenberg, had realized that he could get a much bigger price for what was now a prepossessing apartment. Accordingly, when Anthony approached him on the subject in September he was met with Sohenberg’s offer of a three-year lease at twenty-five hundred a year. This, it seemed to Anthony, was outrageous. It meant that well over a third of their income would be consumed in rent. In vain he argued that his own money, his own ideas on the repartitioning, had made the rooms attractive.

In vain he offered two thousand dollars — twenty-two hundred, though they could ill afford it: Mr. Sohenberg was obdurate. It seemed that two other gentlemen were considering it; just that sort of an apartment was in demand for the moment, and it would scarcely be business to give it to Mr. Patch. Besides, though he had never mentioned it before, several of the other tenants had complained of noise during the previous winter — singing and dancing late at night, that sort of thing.

Internally raging Anthony hurried back to the Ritz to report his discomfiture to Gloria.

“I can just see you,” she stormed, “letting him back you down!”

“What could I say?”

“You could have told him what he was. I wouldn’t have stood it. No other man in the world would have stood it! You just let people order you around and cheat you and bully you and take advantage of you as if you were a silly little boy. It’s absurd!”

“Oh, for Heaven’s sake, don’t lose your temper.”

“I know, Anthony, but you are such an ass!”

“Well, possibly. Anyway, we can’t afford that apartment. But we can afford it better than living here at the Ritz.”

“You were the one who insisted on coming here.”

“Yes, because I knew you’d be miserable in a cheap hotel.”

“Of course I would!”

“At any rate we’ve got to find a place to live.”

“How much can we pay?” she demanded.

“Well, we can pay even his price if we sell more bonds, but we agreed last night that until I had gotten something definite to do we-”

“Oh, I know all that. I asked you how much we can pay out of just our income.”

“They say you ought not to pay more than a fourth.”

“How much is a fourth?”

“One hundred and fifty a month.”

“Do you mean to say we’ve got only six hundred dollars coming in every month?” A subdued note crept into her voice.

“Of course!” he answered angrily. “Do you think we’ve gone on spending more than twelve thousand a year without cutting way into our capital?”

“I knew we’d sold bonds, but — have we spent that much a year? How did we?” Her awe increased.

“Oh, I’ll look in those careful account-books we kept,” he remarked ironically, and then added: “Two rents a good part of the time, clothes, travel — why, each of those springs in California cost about four thousand dollars. That darn car was an expense from start to finish. And parties and amusements and — oh, one thing or another.”

They were both excited now and inordinately depressed. The situation seemed worse in the actual telling Gloria than it had when he had first made the discovery himself.

“You’ve got to make some money,” she said suddenly.

“I know it.”

“And you’ve got to make another attempt to see your grandfather.”

“I will.”

“When?”

“When we get settled.”

This eventuality occurred a week later. They rented a small apartment on Fifty-seventh Street at one hundred and fifty a month. It included bedroom, living-room, kitchenette, and bath, in a thin, white-stone apartment house, and though the rooms were too small to display Anthony’s best furniture, they were clean, new, and, in a blonde and sanitary way, not unattractive. Bounds had gone abroad to enlist in the British army, and in his place they tolerated rather than enjoyed the services of a gaunt, big-boned Irishwoman, whom Gloria loathed because she discussed the glories of Sinn Fein as she served breakfast. But they vowed they would have no more Japanese, and English servants were for the present hard to obtain. Like Bounds, the woman prepared only breakfast. Their other meals they took at restaurants and hotels.

What finally drove Anthony post-haste up to Tarrytown was an announcement in several New York papers that Adam Patch, the multimillionaire, the philanthropist, the venerable uplifter, was seriously ill and not expected to recover.

THE KITTEN

Anthony could not see him. The doctors’ instructions were that he was to talk to no one, said Mr. Shuttleworth — who offered kindly to take any message that Anthony might care to intrust with him, and deliver it to Adam Patch when his condition permitted. But by obvious innuendo he confirmed Anthony’s melancholy inference that the prodigal grandson would be particularly unwelcome at the bedside. At one point in the conversation Anthony, with Gloria’s positive instructions in mind, made a move as though to brush by the secretary, but Shuttleworth with a smile squared his brawny shoulders, and Anthony saw how futile such an attempt would be.

Miserably intimidated, he returned to New York, where husband and wife passed a restless week. A little incident that occurred one evening indicated to what tension their nerves were drawn.

Walking home along a cross-street after dinner, Anthony noticed a night-bound cat prowling near a railing.

“I always have an instinct to kick a cat,” he said idly.

“I like them.”

“I yielded to it once.”

“When?”

“Oh, years ago; before I met you. One night between the acts of a show. Cold night, like this, and I was a little tight — one of the first times I was ever tight,” he added. “The poor little beggar was looking for a place to sleep, I guess, and I was in a mean mood, so it took my fancy to kick it — “

“Oh, the poor kitty!” cried Gloria, sincerely moved. Inspired with the narrative instinct, Anthony enlarged on the theme.

“It was pretty bad,” he admitted. “The poor little beast turned around and looked at me rather plaintively as though hoping I’d pick him up and be kind to him — he was really just a kitten — and before he knew it a big foot launched out at him and caught his little back”

“Oh!” Gloria’s cry was full of anguish.

“It was such a cold night,” he continued, perversely, keeping his voice upon a melancholy note. “I guess it expected kindness from somebody, and it got only pain — “

He broke off suddenly — Gloria was sobbing. They had reached home, and when they entered the apartment she threw herself upon the lounge, crying as though he had struck at her very soul.

“Oh, the poor little kitty!” she repeated piteously, “the poor little kitty. So cold — “

“Gloria”

“Don’t come near me! Please, don’t come near me. You killed the soft little kitty.”

Touched, Anthony knelt beside her.

“Dear,” he said. “Oh, Gloria, darling. It isn’t true. I invented it — every word of it.”

But she would not believe him. There had been something in the details he had chosen to describe that made her cry herself asleep that night, for the kitten, for Anthony for herself, for the pain and bitterness and cruelty of all the world.

THE PASSING OF AN AMERICAN MORALIST

Old Adam died on a midnight of late November with a pious compliment to his God on his thin lips. He, who had been flattered so much, faded out flattering the Omnipotent Abstraction which he fancied he might have angered in the more lascivious moments of his youth. It was announced that he had arranged some sort of an armistice with the deity, the terms of which were not made public, though they were thought to have included a large cash payment. All the newspapers printed his biography, and two of them ran short editorials on his sterling worth, and his part in the drama of industrialism, with which he had grown up. They referred guardedly to the reforms he had sponsored and financed. The memories of Comstock and Cato the Censor were resuscitated and paraded like gaunt ghosts through the columns.

Every newspaper remarked that he was survived by a single grandson,

Anthony Comstock Patch, of New York.

The burial took place in the family plot at Tarrytown. Anthony and Gloria rode in the first carriage, too worried to feel grotesque, both trying desperately to glean presage of fortune from the faces of retainers who had been with him at the end.

They waited a frantic week for decency, and then, having received no notification of any kind, Anthony called up his grandfather’s lawyer. Mr. Brett was not he was expected back in an hour. Anthony left his telephone number.

It was the last day of November, cool and crackling outside, with a lustreless sun peering bleakly in at the windows. While they waited for the call, ostensibly engaged in reading, the atmosphere, within and without, seemed pervaded with a deliberate rendition of the pathetic fallacy. After an interminable while, the bell jingled, and Anthony, starting violently, took up the receiver.

“Hello …” His voice was strained and hollow. “Yes — I did leave word.

Who is this, please? … Yes…. Why, it was about the estate. Naturally

I’m interested, and I’ve received no word about the reading of the

will — I thought you might not have my address…. What? … Yes …”

Gloria fell on her knees. The intervals between Anthony’s speeches were like tourniquets winding on her heart. She found herself helplessly twisting the large buttons from a velvet cushion. Then:

“That’s — that’s very, very odd — that’s very odd — that’s very odd. Not even any — ah — mention or any — ah — reason?”

His voice sounded faint and far away. She uttered a little sound, half gasp, half cry.

“Yes, I’ll see…. All right, thanks … thanks….”

The phone clicked. Her eyes looking along the floor saw his feet cut the pattern of a patch of sunlight on the carpet. She arose and faced him with a gray, level glance just as his arms folded about her.

“My dearest,” he whispered huskily. “He did it, God damn him!”

NEXT DAY

“Who are the heirs?” asked Mr. Haight. “You see when you can tell me so little about it — “

Mr. Haight was tall and bent and beetle-browed. He had been recommended to Anthony as an astute and tenacious lawyer.

“I only know vaguely,” answered Anthony. “A man named Shuttleworth, who was a sort of pet of his, has the whole thing in charge as administrator or trustee or something — all except the direct bequests to charity and the provisions for servants and for those two cousins in Idaho.”

“How distant are the cousins?”

“Oh, third or fourth, anyway. I never even heard of them.”

Mr. Haight nodded comprehensively.

“And you want to contest a provision of the will?”

“I guess so,” admitted Anthony helplessly. “I want to do what sounds most hopeful — that’s what I want you to tell me.”

“You want them to refuse probate to the will?”

Anthony shook his head.

“You’ve got me. I haven’t any idea what ‘probate’ is. I want a share of the estate.”

“Suppose you tell me some more details. For instance, do you know why the testator disinherited you?”

“Why — yes,” began Anthony. “You see he was always a sucker for moral reform, and all that — “

“I know,” interjected Mr. Haight humorlessly.

“ — and I don’t suppose he ever thought I was much good. I didn’t go into business, you see. But I feel certain that up to last summer I was one of the beneficiaries. We had a house out in Marietta, and one night grandfather got the notion he’d come over and see us. It just happened that there was a rather gay party going on and he arrived without any warning. Well, he took one look, he and this fellow Shuttleworth, and then turned around and tore right back to Tarrytown. After that he never answered my letters or even let me see him.”

“He was a prohibitionist, wasn’t he?”

“He was everything — regular religious maniac.”

“How long before his death was the will made that disinherited you?”

“Recently — I mean since August.”

“And you think that the direct reason for his not leaving you the majority of the estate was his displeasure with your recent actions?”

“Yes.”

Mr. Haight considered. Upon what grounds was Anthony thinking of contesting the will?

“Why, isn’t there something about evil influence?”

“Undue influence is one ground — but it’s the most difficult. You would have to show that such pressure was brought to bear so that the deceased was in a condition where he disposed of his property contrary to his intentions — “

“Well, suppose this fellow Shuttleworth dragged him over to Marietta just when he thought some sort of a celebration was probably going on?”

“That wouldn’t have any bearing on the case. There’s a strong division between advice and influence. You’d have to prove that the secretary had a sinister intention. I’d suggest some other grounds. A will is automatically refused probate in case of insanity, drunkenness” — here Anthony smiled — “or feeble-mindedness through premature old age.”

“But,” objected Anthony, “his private physician, being one of the beneficiaries, would testify that he wasn’t feeble-minded. And he wasn’t. As a matter of fact he probably did just what he intended to with his money — it was perfectly consistent with everything he’d ever done in his life — “

“Well, you see, feeble-mindedness is a great deal like undue influence — it implies that the property wasn’t disposed of as originally intended. The most common ground is duress — physical pressure.”

Anthony shook his head.

“Not much chance on that, I’m afraid. Undue influence sounds best to me.”

After more discussion, so technical as to be largely unintelligible to Anthony, he retained Mr. Haight as counsel. The lawyer proposed an interview with Shuttleworth, who, jointly with Wilson, Hiemer and Hardy, was executor of the will. Anthony was to come back later in the week.

It transpired that the estate consisted of approximately forty million dollars. The largest bequest to an individual was of one million, to Edward Shuttleworth, who received in addition thirty thousand a year salary as administrator of the thirty-million-dollar trust fund, left to be doled out to various charities and reform societies practically at his own discretion. The remaining nine millions were proportioned among the two cousins in Idaho and about twenty-five other beneficiaries: friends, secretaries, servants, and employees, who had, at one time or another, earned the seal of Adam Patch’s approval.

At the end of another fortnight Mr. Haight, on a retainer’s fee of fifteen thousand dollars, had begun preparations for contesting the will.

THE WINTER OF DISCONTENT

Before they had been two months in the little apartment on Fifty-seventh Street, it had assumed for both of them the same indefinable but almost material taint that had impregnated the gray house in Marietta. There was the odor of tobacco always — both of them smoked incessantly; it was in their clothes, their blankets, the curtains, and the ash-littered carpets. Added to this was the wretched aura of stale wine, with its inevitable suggestion of beauty gone foul and revelry remembered in disgust. About a particular set of glass goblets on the sideboard the odor was particularly noticeable, and in the main room the mahogany table was ringed with white circles where glasses had been set down upon it. There had been many parties — people broke things; people became sick in Gloria’s bathroom; people spilled wine; people made unbelievable messes of the kitchenette.

These things were a regular part of their existence. Despite the resolutions of many Mondays it was tacitly understood as the week end approached that it should be observed with some sort of unholy excitement. When Saturday came they would not discuss the matter, but would call up this person or that from among their circle of sufficiently irresponsible friends, and suggest a rendezvous. Only after the friends had gathered and Anthony had set out decanters, would he murmur casually “I guess I’ll have just one high-ball myself — “

Then they were off for two days — realizing on a wintry dawn that they had been the noisiest and most conspicuous members of the noisiest and most conspicuous party at the Boul’ Mich’, or the Club Ramée, or at other resorts much less particular about the hilarity of their clientèle. They would find that they had, somehow, squandered eighty or ninety dollars, how, they never knew; they customarily attributed it to the general penury of the “friends” who had accompanied them.

It began to be not unusual for the more sincere of their friends to remonstrate with them, in the very course of a party, and to predict a sombre end for them in the loss of Gloria’s “looks” and Anthony’s “constitution.”

The story of the summarily interrupted revel in Marietta had, of course, leaked out in detail — “Muriel doesn’t mean to tell every one she knows,” said Gloria to Anthony, “but she thinks every one she tells is the only one she’s going to tell” — and, diaphanously veiled, the tale had been given a conspicuous place in Town Tattle. When the terms of Adam Patch’s will were made public and the newspapers printed items concerning Anthony’s suit, the story was beautifully rounded out — to Anthony’s infinite disparagement. They began to hear rumors about themselves from all quarters, rumors founded usually on a soupcon of truth, but overlaid with preposterous and sinister detail.

Outwardly they showed no signs of deterioration. Gloria at twenty-six was still the Gloria of twenty; her complexion a fresh damp setting for her candid eyes; her hair still a childish glory, darkening slowly from corn color to a deep russet gold; her slender body suggesting ever a nymph running and dancing through Orphic groves. Masculine eyes, dozens of them, followed her with a fascinated stare when she walked through a hotel lobby or down the aisle of a theatre. Men asked to be introduced to her, fell into prolonged states of sincere admiration, made definite love to her — for she was still a thing of exquisite and unbelievable beauty. And for his part Anthony had rather gained than lost in appearance; his face had taken on a certain intangible air of tragedy, romantically contrasted with his trim and immaculate person.

Early in the winter, when all conversation turned on the probability of America’s going into the war, when Anthony was making a desperate and sincere attempt to write, Muriel Kane arrived in New York and came immediately to see them. Like Gloria, she seemed never to change. She knew the latest slang, danced the latest dances, and talked of the latest songs and plays with all the fervor of her first season as a New York drifter. Her coyness was eternally new, eternally ineffectual; her clothes were extreme; her black hair was bobbed, now, like Gloria’s.

“I’ve come up for the midwinter prom at New Haven,” she announced, imparting her delightful secret. Though she must have been older then than any of the boys in college, she managed always to secure some sort of invitation, imagining vaguely that at the next party would occur the flirtation which was to end at the romantic altar.

“Where’ve you been?” inquired Anthony, unfailingly amused.

“I’ve been at Hot Springs. It’s been slick and peppy this fall — more men!”

“Are you in love, Muriel?”

“What do you mean ‘love’?” This was the rhetorical question of the year. “I’m going to tell you something,” she said, switching the subject abruptly. “I suppose it’s none of my business, but I think it’s time for you two to settle down.”

“Why, we are settled down.”

“Yes, you are!” she scoffed archly. “Everywhere I go I hear stories of your escapades. Let me tell you, I have an awful time sticking up for you.”

“You needn’t bother,” said Gloria coldly.

“Now, Gloria,” she protested, “you know I’m one of your best friends.”

Gloria was silent. Muriel continued:

“It’s not so much the idea of a woman drinking, but Gloria’s so pretty, and so many people know her by sight all around, that it’s naturally conspicuous — “

“What have you heard recently?” demanded Gloria, her dignity going down before her curiosity.

“Well, for instance, that that party in Marietta killed Anthony’s grandfather.”

Instantly husband and wife were tense with annoyance.

“Why, I think that’s outrageous.”

“That’s what they say,” persisted Muriel stubbornly.

Anthony paced the room. “It’s preposterous!” he declared. “The very people we take on parties shout the story around as a great joke — and eventually it gets back to us in some such form as this.”

Gloria began running her finger through a stray red-dish curl. Muriel licked her veil as she considered her next remark.

“You ought to have a baby.”

Gloria looked up wearily.

“We can’t afford it.”

“All the people in the slums have them,” said Muriel triumphantly.

Anthony and Gloria exchanged a smile. They had reached the stage of violent quarrels that were never made up, quarrels that smouldered and broke out again at intervals or died away from sheer indifference — but this visit of Muriel’s drew them temporarily together. When the discomfort under which they were living was remarked upon by a third party, it gave them the impetus to face this hostile world together. It was very seldom, now, that the impulse toward reunion sprang from within.

Anthony found himself associating his own existence with that of the apartment’s night elevator man, a pale, scraggly bearded person of about sixty, with an air of being somewhat above his station. It was probably because of this quality that he had secured the position; it made him a pathetic and memorable figure of failure. Anthony recollected, without humor, a hoary jest about the elevator man’s career being a matter of ups and downs — it was, at any rate, an enclosed life of infinite dreariness. Each time Anthony stepped into the car he waited breathlessly for the old man’s “Well, I guess we’re going to have some sunshine to-day.” Anthony thought how little rain or sunshine he would enjoy shut into that close little cage in the smoke-colored, windowless hall.

A darkling figure, he attained tragedy in leaving the life that had used him so shabbily. Three young gunmen came in one night, tied him up and left him on a pile of coal in the cellar while they went through the trunk room. When the janitor found him next morning he had collapsed from chill. He died of pneumonia four days later.

He was replaced by a glib Martinique negro, with an incongruous British accent and a tendency to be surly, whom Anthony detested. The passing of the old man had approximately the same effect on him that the kitten story had had on Gloria. He was reminded of the cruelty of all life and, in consequence, of the increasing bitterness of his own.

He was writing — and in earnest at last. He had gone to Dick and listened for a tense hour to an elucidation of those minutiae of procedure which hitherto he had rather scornfully looked down upon. He needed money immediately — he was selling bonds every month to pay their bills. Dick was frank and explicit:

“So far as articles on literary subjects in these obscure magazines go, you couldn’t make enough to pay your rent. Of course if a man has the gift of humor, or a chance at a big biography, or some specialized knowledge, he may strike it rich. But for you, fiction’s the only thing. You say you need money right away?”

“I certainly do.”

“Well, it’d be a year and a half before you’d make any money out of a novel. Try some popular short stories. And, by the way, unless they’re exceptionally brilliant they have to be cheerful and on the side of the heaviest artillery to make you any money.”

Anthony thought of Dick’s recent output, which had been appearing in a well-known monthly. It was concerned chiefly with the preposterous actions of a class of sawdust effigies who, one was assured, were New York society people, and it turned, as a rule, upon questions of the heroine’s technical purity, with mock-sociological overtones about the “mad antics of the four hundred.”

“But your stories — “ exclaimed Anthony aloud, almost involuntarily.

“Oh, that’s different,” Dick asserted astoundingly. “I have a reputation, you see, so I’m expected to deal with strong themes.”

Anthony gave an interior start, realizing with this remark how much Richard Caramel had fallen off. Did he actually think that these amazing latter productions were as good as his first novel?

Anthony went back to the apartment and set to work. He found that the business of optimism was no mean task. After half a dozen futile starts he went to the public library and for a week investigated the files of a popular magazine. Then, better equipped, he accomplished his first story, “The Dictaphone of Fate.” It was founded upon one of his few remaining impressions of that six weeks in Wall Street the year before. It purported to be the sunny tale of an office boy who, quite by accident, hummed a wonderful melody into the dictaphone. The cylinder was discovered by the boss’s brother, a well-known producer of musical comedy — and then immediately lost. The body of the story was concerned with the pursuit of the missing cylinder and the eventual marriage of the noble office boy (now a successful composer) to Miss Rooney, the virtuous stenographer, who was half Joan of Arc and half Florence Nightingale.

He had gathered that this was what the magazines wanted. He offered, in his protagonists, the customary denizens of the pink-and-blue literary world, immersing them in a saccharine plot that would offend not a single stomach in Marietta. He had it typed in double space — this last as advised by a booklet, “Success as a Writer Made Easy,” by R. Meggs Widdlestien, which assured the ambitious plumber of the futility of perspiration, since after a six-lesson course he could make at least a thousand dollars a month.

After reading it to a bored Gloria and coaxing from her the immemorial remark that it was “better than a lot of stuff that gets published,” he satirically affixed the nom de plume of “Gilles de Sade,” enclosed the proper return envelope, and sent it off.

Following the gigantic labor of conception he decided to wait until he heard from the first story before beginning another. Dick had told him that he might get as much as two hundred dollars. If by any chance it did happen to be unsuited, the editor’s letter would, no doubt, give him an idea of what changes should be made.

“It is, without question, the most abominable piece of writing in existence,” said Anthony.

The editor quite conceivably agreed with him. He returned the manuscript with a rejection slip. Anthony sent it off elsewhere and began another story. The second one was called “The Little Open Doors”; it was written in three days. It concerned the occult: an estranged couple were brought together by a medium in a vaudeville show.

There were six altogether, six wretched and pitiable efforts to “write down” by a man who had never before made a consistent effort to write at all. Not one of them contained a spark of vitality, and their total yield of grace and felicity was less than that of an average newspaper column. During their circulation they collected, all told, thirty-one rejection slips, headstones for the packages that he would find lying like dead bodies at his door.

In mid-January Gloria’s father died, and they went again to Kansas City — a miserable trip, for Gloria brooded interminably, not upon her father’s death, but on her mother’s. Russel Gilbert’s affairs having been cleared up they came into possession of about three thousand dollars, and a great amount of furniture. This was in storage, for he had spent his last days in a small hotel. It was due to his death that Anthony made a new discovery concerning Gloria. On the journey East she disclosed herself, astonishingly, as a Bilphist.

“Why, Gloria,” he cried, “you don’t mean to tell me you believe that stuff.”

“Well,” she said defiantly, “why not?”

“Because it’s — it’s fantastic. You know that in every sense of the word you’re an agnostic. You’d laugh at any orthodox form of Christianity — and then you come out with the statement that you believe in some silly rule of reincarnation.”

“What if I do? I’ve heard you and Maury, and every one else for whose intellect I have the slightest respect, agree that life as it appears is utterly meaningless. But it’s always seemed to me that if I were unconsciously learning something here it might not be so meaningless.”

“You’re not learning anything — you’re just getting tired. And if you must have a faith to soften things, take up one that appeals to the reason of some one beside a lot of hysterical women. A person like you oughtn’t to accept anything unless it’s decently demonstrable.”

“I don’t care about truth. I want some happiness.”

“Well, if you’ve got a decent mind the second has got to be qualified by the first. Any simple soul can delude himself with mental garbage.”

“I don’t care,” she held out stoutly, “and, what’s more, I’m not propounding any doctrine.”

The argument faded off, but reoccurred to Anthony several times thereafter. It was disturbing to find this old belief, evidently assimilated from her mother, inserting itself again under its immemorial disguise as an innate idea.

They reached New York in March after an expensive and ill-advised week spent in Hot Springs, and Anthony resumed his abortive attempts at fiction. As it became plainer to both of them that escape did not lie in the way of popular literature, there was a further slipping of their mutual confidence and courage. A complicated struggle went on incessantly between them. All efforts to keep down expenses died away from sheer inertia, and by March they were again using any pretext as an excuse for a “party.” With an assumption of recklessness Gloria tossed out the suggestion that they should take all their money and go on a real spree while it lasted — anything seemed better than to see it go in unsatisfactory driblets.

“Gloria, you want parties as much as I do.”

“It doesn’t matter about me. Everything I do is in accordance with my ideas: to use every minute of these years, when I’m young, in having the best time I possibly can.”

“How about after that?”

“After that I won’t care.”

“Yes, you will.”

“Well, I may — but I won’t be able to do anything about it. And I’ll have had my good time.”

“You’ll be the same then. After a fashion, we have had our good time, raised the devil, and we’re in the state of paying for it.”

Nevertheless, the money kept going. There would be two days of gaiety, two days of moroseness — an endless, almost invariable round. The sharp pull-ups, when they occurred, resulted usually in a spurt of work for Anthony, while Gloria, nervous and bored, remained in bed or else chewed abstractedly at her fingers. After a day or so of this, they would make an engagement, and then — Oh, what did it matter? This night, this glow, the cessation of anxiety and the sense that if living was not purposeful it was, at any rate, essentially romantic! Wine gave a sort of gallantry to their own failure.

Meanwhile the suit progressed slowly, with interminable examinations of witnesses and marshallings of evidence. The preliminary proceedings of settling the estate were finished. Mr. Haight saw no reason why the case should not come up for trial before summer.

Bloeckman appeared in New York late in March; he had been in England for nearly a year on matters concerned with “Films Par Excellence.” The process of general refinement was still in progress — always he dressed a little better, his intonation was mellower, and in his manner there was perceptibly more assurance that the fine things of the world were his by a natural and inalienable right. He called at the apartment, remained only an hour, during which he talked chiefly of the war, and left telling them he was coming again. On his second visit Anthony was not at home, but an absorbed and excited Gloria greeted her husband later in the afternoon.

“Anthony,” she began, “would you still object if I went in the movies?”

His whole heart hardened against the idea. As she seemed to recede from him, if only in threat, her presence became again not so much precious as desperately necessary.

“Oh, Gloria — !”

“Blockhead said he’d put me in — only if I’m ever going to do anything I’ll have to start now. They only want young women. Think of the money, Anthony!”

“For you — yes. But how about me?”

“Don’t you know that anything I have is yours too?”

“It’s such a hell of a career!” he burst out, the moral, the infinitely circumspect Anthony, “and such a hell of a bunch. And I’m so utterly tired of that fellow Bloeckman coming here and interfering. I hate theatrical things.”

“It isn’t theatrical! It’s utterly different.”

“What am I supposed to do? Chase you all over the country? Live on your money?”

“Then make some yourself.”

The conversation developed into one of the most violent quarrels they had ever had. After the ensuing reconciliation and the inevitable period of moral inertia, she realized that he had taken the life out of the project. Neither of them ever mentioned the probability that Bloeckman was by no means disinterested, but they both knew that it lay back of Anthony’s objection.

In April war was declared with Germany. Wilson and his cabinet — a cabinet that in its lack of distinction was strangely reminiscent of the twelve apostles — let loose the carefully starved dogs of war, and the press began to whoop hysterically against the sinister morals, sinister philosophy, and sinister music produced by the Teutonic temperament. Those who fancied themselves particularly broad-minded made the exquisite distinction that it was only the German Government which aroused them to hysteria; the rest were worked up to a condition of retching indecency. Any song which contained the word “mother” and the word “kaiser” was assured of a tremendous success. At last every one had something to talk about — and almost every one fully enjoyed it, as though they had been cast for parts in a sombre and romantic play.

Anthony, Maury, and Dick sent in their applications for officers’ training-camps and the two latter went about feeling strangely exalted and reproachless; they chattered to each other, like college boys, of war’s being the one excuse for, and justification of, the aristocrat, and conjured up an impossible caste of officers, to be composed, it appeared, chiefly of the more attractive alumni of three or four Eastern colleges. It seemed to Gloria that in this huge red light streaming across the nation even Anthony took on a new glamour.

The Tenth Infantry, arriving in New York from Panama, were escorted from saloon to saloon by patriotic citizens, to their great bewilderment. West Pointers began to be noticed for the first time in years, and the general impression was that everything was glorious, but not half so glorious as it was going to be pretty soon, and that everybody was a fine fellow, and every race a great race — always excepting the Germans — and in every strata of society outcasts and scapegoats had but to appear in uniform to be forgiven, cheered, and wept over by relatives, ex-friends, and utter strangers.

Unfortunately, a small and precise doctor decided that there was something the matter with Anthony’s blood-pressure. He could not conscientiously pass him for an officers’ training-camp.

THE BROKEN LUTE

Their third anniversary passed, uncelebrated, unnoticed. The season warmed in thaw, melted into hotter summer, simmered and boiled away. In July the will was offered for probate, and upon the contestation was assigned by the surrogate to trial term for trial. The matter was prolonged into September — there was difficulty in empanelling an unbiassed jury because of the moral sentiments involved. To Anthony’s disappointment a verdict was finally returned in favor of the testator, whereupon Mr. Haight caused a notice of appeal to be served upon Edward Shuttleworth.

As the summer waned Anthony and Gloria talked of the things they were to do when the money was theirs, and of the places they were to go to after the war, when they would “agree on things again,” for both of them looked forward to a time when love, springing like the phoenix from its own ashes, should be born again in its mysterious and unfathomable haunts.

He was drafted early in the fall, and the examining doctor made no mention of low blood-pressure. It was all very purposeless and sad when Anthony told Gloria one night that he wanted, above all things, to be killed. But, as always, they were sorry for each other for the wrong things at the wrong times….

They decided that for the present she was not to go with him to the Southern camp where his contingent was ordered. She would remain in New York to “use the apartment,” to save money, and to watch the progress of the case — which was pending now in the Appellate Division, of which the calendar, Mr. Haight told them, was far behind.

Almost their last conversation was a senseless quarrel about the proper division of the income — at a word either would have given it all to the other. It was typical of the muddle and confusion of their lives that on the October night when Anthony reported at the Grand Central Station for the journey to camp, she arrived only in time to catch his eye over the anxious heads of a gathered crowd. Through the dark light of the enclosed train-sheds their glances stretched across a hysterical area, foul with yellow sobbing and the smells of poor women. They must have pondered upon what they had done to one another, and each must have accused himself of drawing this sombre pattern through which they were tracing tragically and obscurely. At the last they were too far away for either to see the other’s tears.

BOOK THREE

CHAPTER I

A MATTER OF CIVILIZATION

At a frantic command from some invisible source, Anthony groped his way inside. He was thinking that for the first time in more than three years he was to remain longer than a night away from Gloria. The finality of it appealed to him drearily. It was his clean and lovely girl that he was leaving.

They had arrived, he thought, at the most practical financial settlement: she was to have three hundred and seventy-five dollars a month — not too much considering that over half of that would go in rent — and he was taking fifty to supplement his pay. He saw no need for more: food, clothes, and quarters would be provided — there were no social obligations for a private.

The car was crowded and already thick with breath. It was one of the type known as “tourist” cars, a sort of brummagem Pullman, with a bare floor, and straw seats that needed cleaning. Nevertheless, Anthony greeted it with relief. He had vaguely expected that the trip South would be made in a freight-car, in one end of which would stand eight horses and in the other forty men. He had heard the “hommes 40, chevaux 8” story so often that it had become confused and ominous.

As he rocked down the aisle with his barrack-bag slung at his shoulder like a monstrous blue sausage, he saw no vacant seats, but after a moment his eye fell on a single space at present occupied by the feet of a short swarthy Sicilian, who, with his hat drawn over his eyes, hunched defiantly in the corner. As Anthony stopped beside him he stared up with a scowl, evidently intended to be intimidating; he must have adopted it as a defense against this entire gigantic equation. At Anthony’s sharp “That seat taken?” he very slowly lifted the feet as though they were a breakable package, and placed them with some care upon the floor. His eyes remained on Anthony, who meanwhile sat down and unbuttoned the uniform coat issued him at CampUpton the day before. It chafed him under the arms.

Before Anthony could scrutinize the other occupants of the section a young second lieutenant blew in at the upper end of the car and wafted airily down the aisle, announcing in a voice of appalling acerbity:

“There will be no smoking in this car! No smoking! Don’t smoke, men, in this car!”

As he sailed out at the other end a dozen little clouds of expostulation arose on all sides.

“Oh, cripe!”

“Jeese!”

“No smokin’?”

“Hey, come back here, fella!”

“What’s ‘ee idea?”

Two or three cigarettes were shot out through the open windows. Others were retained inside, though kept sketchily away from view. From here and there in accents of bravado, of mockery, of submissive humor, a few remarks were dropped that soon melted into the listless and pervasive silence.

The fourth occupant of Anthony’s section spoke up suddenly.

“G’by, liberty,” he said sullenly. “G’by, everything except bein’ an officer’s dog.”

Anthony looked at him. He was a tall Irishman with an expression moulded of indifference and utter disdain. His eyes fell on Anthony, as though he expected an answer, and then upon the others. Receiving only a defiant stare from the Italian he groaned and spat noisily on the floor by way of a dignified transition back into taciturnity.

A few minutes later the door opened again and the second lieutenant was borne in upon his customary official zephyr, this time singing out a different tiding:

“All right, men, smoke if you want to! My mistake, men! It’s all right, men! Go on and smoke — my mistake!”

This time Anthony had a good look at him. He was young, thin, already faded; he was like his own mustache; he was like a great piece of shiny straw. His chin receded, faintly; this was offset by a magnificent and unconvincing scowl, a scowl that Anthony was to connect with the faces of many young officers during the ensuing year.

Immediately every one smoked — whether they had previously desired to or not. Anthony’s cigarette contributed to the hazy oxidation which seemed to roll back and forth in opalescent clouds with every motion of the train. The conversation, which had lapsed between the two impressive visits of the young officer, now revived tepidly; the men across the aisle began making clumsy experiments with their straw seats’ capacity for comparative comfort; two card games, half-heartedly begun, soon drew several spectators to sitting positions on the arms of seats. In a few minutes Anthony became aware of a persistently obnoxious sound — the small, defiant Sicilian had fallen audibly asleep. It was wearisome to contemplate that animate protoplasm, reasonable by courtesy only, shut up in a car by an incomprehensible civilization, taken somewhere, to do a vague something without aim or significance or consequence. Anthony sighed, opened a newspaper which he had no recollection of buying, and began to read by the dim yellow light.

Ten o’clock bumped stuffily into eleven; the hours clogged and caught and slowed down. Amazingly the train halted along the dark countryside, from time to time indulging in short, deceitful movements backward or forward, and whistling harsh paeans into the high October night. Having read his newspaper through, editorials, cartoons, and war-poems, his eye fell on a half-column headed Shakespeareville, Kansas. It seemed that the Shakespeareville Chamber of Commerce had recently held an enthusiastic debate as to whether the American soldiers should be known as “Sammies” or “Battling Christians.” The thought gagged him. He dropped the newspaper, yawned, and let his mind drift off at a tangent. He wondered why Gloria had been late. It seemed so long ago already — he had a pang of illusive loneliness. He tried to imagine from what angle she would regard her new position, what place in her considerations he would continue to hold. The thought acted as a further depressant — he opened his paper and began to read again.

The members of the Chamber of Commerce in Shakespeareville had decided upon “Liberty Lads.”

For two nights and two days they rattled southward, making mysterious inexplicable stops in what were apparently arid wastes, and then rushing through large cities with a pompous air of hurry. The whimsicalities of this train foreshadowed for Anthony the whimsicalities of all army administration.

In the arid wastes they were served from the baggage-car with beans and bacon that at first he was unable to eat — he dined scantily on some milk chocolate distributed by a village canteen. But on the second day the baggage-car’s output began to appear surprisingly palatable. On the third morning the rumor was passed along that within the hour they would arrive at their destination, CampHooker.

It had become intolerably hot in the car, and the men were all in shirt sleeves. The sun came in through the windows, a tired and ancient sun, yellow as parchment and stretched out of shape in transit. It tried to enter in triumphant squares and produced only warped splotches — but it was appallingly steady; so much so that it disturbed Anthony not to be the pivot of all the inconsequential sawmills and trees and telegraph poles that were turning around him so fast. Outside it played its heavy tremolo over olive roads and fallow cotton-fields, back of which ran a ragged line of woods broken with eminences of gray rock. The foreground was dotted sparsely with wretched, ill-patched shanties, among which there would flash by, now and then, a specimen of the languid yokelry of South Carolina, or else a strolling darky with sullen and bewildered eyes.

Then the woods moved off and they rolled into a broad space like the baked top of a gigantic cake, sugared with an infinity of tents arranged in geometric figures over its surface. The train came to an uncertain stop, and the sun and the poles and the trees faded, and his universe rocked itself slowly back to its old usualness, with Anthony Patch in the centre. As the men, weary and perspiring, crowded out of the car, he smelt that unforgetable aroma that impregnates all permanent camps — the odor of garbage.

CampHooker was an astonishing and spectacular growth, suggesting “A Mining Town in 1870 — The Second Week.” It was a thing of wooden shacks and whitish-gray tents, connected by a pattern of roads, with hard tan drill-grounds fringed with trees. Here and there stood green Y.M.C.A. houses, unpromising oases, with their muggy odor of wet flannels and closed telephone-booths — and across from each of them there was usually a canteen, swarming with life, presided over indolently by an officer who, with the aid of a side-car, usually managed to make his detail a pleasant and chatty sinecure.

Up and down the dusty roads sped the soldiers of the quartermaster corps, also in side-cars. Up and down drove the generals in their government automobiles, stopping now and then to bring unalert details to attention, to frown heavily upon captains marching at the heads of companies, to set the pompous pace in that gorgeous game of showing off which was taking place triumphantly over the entire area.

The first week after the arrival of Anthony’s draft was filled with a series of interminable inoculations and physical examinations, and with the preliminary drilling. The days left him desperately tired. He had been issued the wrong size shoes by a popular, easy-going supply-sergeant, and in consequence his feet were so swollen that the last hours of the afternoon were an acute torture. For the first time in his life he could throw himself down on his cot between dinner and afternoon drill-call, and seeming to sink with each moment deeper into a bottomless bed, drop off immediately to sleep, while the noise and laughter around him faded to a pleasant drone of drowsy summer sound. In the morning he awoke stiff and aching, hollow as a ghost, and hurried forth to meet the other ghostly figures who swarmed in the wan company streets, while a harsh bugle shrieked and spluttered at the gray heavens.

He was in a skeleton infantry company of about a hundred men. After the invariable breakfast of fatty bacon, cold toast, and cereal, the entire hundred would rush for the latrines, which, however well-policed, seemed always intolerable, like the lavatories in cheap hotels. Out on the field, then, in ragged order — the lame man on his left grotesquely marring Anthony’s listless efforts to keep in step, the platoon sergeants either showing off violently to impress the officers and recruits, or else quietly lurking in close to the line of march, avoiding both labor and unnecessary visibility.

When they reached the field, work began immediately — they peeled off their shirts for calisthenics. This was the only part of the day that Anthony enjoyed. Lieutenant Kretching, who presided at the antics, was sinewy and muscular, and Anthony, followed his movements faithfully, with a feeling that he was doing something of positive value to himself. The other officers and sergeants walked about among the men with the malice of schoolboys, grouping here and there around some unfortunate who lacked muscular control, giving him confused instructions and commands. When they discovered a particularly forlorn, ill-nourished specimen, they would linger the full half-hour making cutting remarks and snickering among themselves.

One little officer named Hopkins, who had been a sergeant in the regular army, was particularly annoying. He took the war as a gift of revenge from the high gods to himself, and the constant burden of his harangues was that these rookies did not appreciate the full gravity and responsibility of “the service.” He considered that by a combination of foresight and dauntless efficiency he had raised himself to his current magnificence. He aped the particular tyrannies of every officer under whom he had served in times gone by. His frown was frozen on his brow — before giving a private a pass to go to town he would ponderously weigh the effect of such an absence upon the company, the army, and the welfare of the military profession the world over.

Lieutenant Kretching, blond, dull and phlegmatic, introduced Anthony ponderously to the problems of attention, right face, about face, and at ease. His principal defect was his forgetfulness. He often kept the company straining and aching at attention for five minutes while he stood out in front and explained a new movement — as a result only the men in the centre knew what it was all about — those on both flanks had been too emphatically impressed with the necessity of staring straight ahead.

The drill continued until noon. It consisted of stressing a succession of infinitely remote details, and though Anthony perceived that this was consistent with the logic of war, it none the less irritated him. That the same faulty blood-pressure which would have been indecent in an officer did not interfere with the duties of a private was a preposterous incongruity. Sometimes, after listening to a sustained invective concerned with a dull and, on the face of it, absurd subject known as military “courtesy,” he suspected that the dim purpose of the war was to let the regular army officers — men with the mentality and aspirations of schoolboys — have their fling with some real slaughter. He was being grotesquely sacrificed to the twenty-year patience of a Hopkins!

Of his three tent-mates — a flat-faced, conscientious objector from Tennessee, a big, scared Pole, and the disdainful Celt whom he had sat beside on the train — the two former spent the evenings in writing eternal letters home, while the Irishman sat in the tent door whistling over and over to himself half a dozen shrill and monotonous bird-calls. It was rather to avoid an hour of their company than with any hope of diversion that, when the quarantine was lifted at the end of the week, he went into town. He caught one of the swarm of jitneys that overran the camp each evening, and in half an hour was set down in front of the Stonewall Hotel on the hot and drowsy main street.

Under the gathering twilight the town was unexpectedly attractive. The sidewalks were peopled by vividly dressed, overpainted girls, who chattered volubly in low, lazy voices, by dozens of taxi-drivers who assailed passing officers with “Take y’ anywheh, Lieutenant,” and by an intermittent procession of ragged, shuffling, subservient negroes. Anthony, loitering along through the warm dusk, felt for the first time in years the slow, erotic breath of the South, imminent in the hot softness of the air, in the pervasive lull, of thought and time.

He had gone about a block when he was arrested suddenly by a harsh command at his elbow.

“Haven’t you been taught to salute officers?”

He looked dumbly at the man who addressed him, a stout, black-haired captain, who fixed him menacingly with brown pop-eyes.

“Come to attention!” The words were literally thundered. A few pedestrians near by stopped and stared. A soft-eyed girl in a lilac dress tittered to her companion.

Anthony came to attention.

“What’s your regiment and company?”

Anthony told him.

“After this when you pass an officer on the street you straighten up and salute!”

“All right!”

“Say ‘Yes, sir!’“

“Yes, sir.”

The stout officer grunted, turned sharply, and marched down the street. After a moment Anthony moved on; the town was no longer indolent and exotic; the magic was suddenly gone out of the dusk. His eyes were turned precipitately inward upon the indignity of his position. He hated that officer, every officer — life was unendurable.

After he had gone half a block he realized that the girl in the lilac dress who had giggled at his discomfiture was walking with her friend about ten paces ahead of him. Several times she had turned and stared at Anthony, with cheerful laughter in the large eyes that seemed the same color as her gown.

At the corner she and her companion visibly slackened their pace — he must make his choice between joining them and passing obliviously by. He passed, hesitated, then slowed down. In a moment the pair were abreast of him again, dissolved in laughter now — not such strident mirth as he would have expected in the North from actresses in this familiar comedy, but a soft, low rippling, like the overflow from some subtle joke, into which he had inadvertently blundered.

“How do you do?” he said.

Her eyes were soft as shadows. Were they violet, or was it their blue darkness mingling with the gray hues of dusk?

“Pleasant evening,” ventured Anthony uncertainly.

“Sure is,” said the second girl.

“Hasn’t been a very pleasant evening for you,” sighed the girl in lilac. Her voice seemed as much a part of the night as the drowsy breeze stirring the wide brim of her hat.

“He had to have a chance to show off,” said Anthony with a scornful laugh.

“Reckon so,” she agreed.

They turned the corner and moved lackadaisically up a side street, as if following a drifting cable to which they were attached. In this town it seemed entirely natural to turn corners like that, it seemed natural to be bound nowhere in particular, to be thinking nothing…. The side street was dark, a sudden offshoot into a district of wild rose hedges and little quiet houses set far back from the street.

“Where’re you going?” he inquired politely.

“Just goin’.” The answer was an apology, a question, an explanation.

“Can I stroll along with you?”

“Reckon so.”

It was an advantage that her accent was different. He could not have determined the social status of a Southerner from her talk — in New York a girl of a lower class would have been raucous, unendurable — except through the rosy spectacles of intoxication.

Dark was creeping down. Talking little — Anthony in careless, casual questions, the other two with provincial economy of phrase and burden — they sauntered past another corner, and another. In the middle of a block they stopped beneath a lamp-post.

“I live near here,” explained the other girl.

“I live around the block,” said the girl in lilac.

“Can I see you home?”

“To the corner, if you want to.”

The other girl took a few steps backward. Anthony removed his hat.

“You’re supposed to salute,” said the girl in lilac with a laugh. “All the soldiers salute.”

“I’ll learn,” he responded soberly.

The other girl said, “Well — “ hesitated, then added, “call me up to-morrow, Dot,” and retreated from the yellow circle of the street-lamp. Then, in silence, Anthony and the girl in lilac walked the three blocks to the small rickety house which was her home. Outside the wooden gate she hesitated.

“Well — thanks.”

“Must you go in so soon?”

“I ought to.”

“Can’t you stroll around a little longer?” She regarded him dispassionately.

“I don’t even know you.”

Anthony laughed.

“It’s not too late.”

“I reckon I better go in.”

“I thought we might walk down and see a movie.”

“I’d like to.”

“Then I could bring you home. I’d have just enough time. I’ve got to be in camp by eleven.”

It was so dark that he could scarcely see her now. She was a dress swayed infinitesimally by the wind, two limpid, reckless eyes …

“Why don’t you come — Dot? Don’t you like movies? Better come.”

She shook her head.

“I oughtn’t to.”

He liked her, realizing that she was temporizing for the effect on him.

He came closer and took her hand.

“If we get back by ten, can’t you? just to the movies?”

“Well — I reckon so — “

Hand in hand they walked back toward down-town, along a hazy, dusky street where a negro newsboy was calling an extra in the cadence of the local venders’ tradition, a cadence that was as musical as song.

Dot

Anthony’s affair with Dorothy Raycroft was an inevitable result of his increasing carelessness about himself. He did not go to her desiring to possess the desirable, nor did he fall before a personality more vital, more compelling than his own, as he had done with Gloria four years before. He merely slid into the matter through his inability to make definite judgments. He could say “No!” neither to man nor woman; borrower and temptress alike found him tender-minded and pliable. Indeed he seldom made decisions at all, and when he did they were but half-hysterical resolves formed in the panic of some aghast and irreparable awakening.

The particular weakness he indulged on this occasion was his need of excitement and stimulus from without. He felt that for the first time in four years he could express and interpret himself anew. The girl promised rest; the hours in her company each evening alleviated the morbid and inevitably futile poundings of his imagination. He had become a coward in earnest — completely the slave of a hundred disordered and prowling thoughts which were released by the collapse of the authentic devotion to Gloria that had been the chief jailer of his insufficiency.

On that first night, as they stood by the gate, he kissed Dorothy and made an engagement to meet her the following Saturday. Then he went out to camp, and with the light burning lawlessly in his tent, he wrote a long letter to Gloria, a glowing letter, full of the sentimental dark, full of the remembered breath of flowers, full of a true and exceeding tenderness — these things he had learned again for a moment in a kiss given and taken under a rich warm moonlight just an hour before.

When Saturday night came he found Dot waiting at the entrance of the Bijou Moving Picture Theatre. She was dressed as on the preceding Wednesday in her lilac gown of frailest organdy, but it had evidently been washed and starched since then, for it was fresh and unrumpled. Daylight confirmed the impression he had received that in a sketchy, faulty way she was lovely. She was clean, her features were small, irregular, but eloquent and appropriate to each other. She was a dark, unenduring little flower — yet he thought he detected in her some quality of spiritual reticence, of strength drawn from her passive acceptance of all things. In this he was mistaken.

Dorothy Raycroft was nineteen. Her father had kept a small, unprosperous corner store, and she had graduated from high school in the lowest fourth of her class two days before he died. At high school she had enjoyed a rather unsavory reputation. As a matter of fact her behavior at the class picnic, where the rumors started, had been merely indiscreet — she had retained her technical purity until over a year later. The boy had been a clerk in a store on Jackson Street, and on the day after the incident he departed unexpectedly to New York. He had been intending to leave for some time, but had tarried for the consummation of his amorous enterprise.

After a while she confided the adventure to a girl friend, and later, as she watched her friend disappear down the sleepy street of dusty sunshine she knew in a flash of intuition that her story was going out into the world. Yet after telling it she felt much better, and a little bitter, and made as near an approach to character as she was capable of by walking in another direction and meeting another man with the honest intention of gratifying herself again. As a rule things happened to Dot. She was not weak, because there was nothing in her to tell her she was being weak. She was not strong, because she never knew that some of the things she did were brave. She neither defied nor conformed nor compromised.

She had no sense of humor, but, to take its place, a happy disposition that made her laugh at the proper times when she was with men. She had no definite intentions — sometimes she regretted vaguely that her reputation precluded what chance she had ever had for security. There had been no open discovery: her mother was interested only in starting her off on time each morning for the jewelry store where she earned fourteen dollars a week. But some of the boys she had known in high school now looked the other way when they were walking with “nice girls,” and these incidents hurt her feelings. When they occurred she went home and cried.

Besides the Jackson Street clerk there had been two other men, of whom the first was a naval officer, who passed through town during the early days of the war. He had stayed over a night to make a connection, and was leaning idly against one of the pillars of the Stonewall Hotel when she passed by. He remained in town four days. She thought she loved him — lavished on him that first hysteria of passion that would have gone to the pusillanimous clerk. The naval officer’s uniform — there were few of them in those days — had made the magic. He left with vague promises on his lips, and, once on the train, rejoiced that he had not told her his real name.

Her resultant depression had thrown her into the arms of Cyrus Fielding, the son of a local clothier, who had hailed her from his roadster one day as she passed along the sidewalk. She had always known him by name. Had she been born to a higher stratum he would have known her before. She had descended a little lower — so he met her after all. After a month he had gone away to training-camp, a little afraid of the intimacy, a little relieved in perceiving that she had not cared deeply for him, and that she was not the sort who would ever make trouble. Dot romanticized this affair and conceded to her vanity that the war had taken these men away from her. She told herself that she could have married the naval officer. Nevertheless, it worried her that within eight months there had been three men in her life. She thought with more fear than wonder in her heart that she would soon be like those “bad girls” on Jackson Street at whom she and her gum-chewing, giggling friends had stared with fascinated glances three years before.

For a while she attempted to be more careful. She let men “pick her up”; she let them kiss her, and even allowed certain other liberties to be forced upon her, but she did not add to her trio. After several months the strength of her resolution — or rather the poignant expediency of her fears — was worn away. She grew restless drowsing there out of life and time while the summer months faded. The soldiers she met were either obviously below her or, less obviously, above her — in which case they desired only to use her; they were Yankees, harsh and ungracious; they swarmed in large crowds…. And then she met Anthony.

On that first evening he had been little more than a pleasantly unhappy face, a voice, the means with which to pass an hour, but when she kept her engagement with him on Saturday she regarded him with consideration. She liked him. Unknowingly she saw her own tragedies mirrored in his face.

Again they went to the movies, again they wandered along the shadowy, scented streets, hand in hand this time, speaking a little in hushed voices. They passed through the gate — up toward the little porch —

“I can stay a while, can’t I?”

“Sh!” she whispered, “we’ve got to be very quiet. Mother sits up reading Snappy Stories.” In confirmation he heard the faint crackling inside as a page was turned. The open-shutter slits emitted horizontal rods of light that fell in thin parallels across Dorothy’s skirt. The street was silent save for a group on the steps of a house across the way, who, from time to time, raised their voices in a soft, bantering song.

“ — When you wa-ake You shall ha-ave All the pretty little hawsiz — “

Then, as though it had been waiting on a near-by roof for their arrival, the moon came slanting suddenly through the vines and turned the girl’s face to the color of white roses.

Anthony had a start of memory, so vivid that before his closed eyes there formed a picture, distinct as a flashback on a screen — a spring night of thaw set out of time in a half-forgotten winter five years before — another face, radiant, flower-like, upturned to lights as transforming as the stars —

Ah, la belle dame sans merci who lived in his heart, made known to him in transitory fading splendor by dark eyes in the Ritz-Carlton, by a shadowy glance from a passing carriage in the Bois de Boulogne! But those nights were only part of a song, a remembered glory — here again were the faint winds, the illusions, the eternal present with its promise of romance.

“Oh,” she whispered, “do you love me? Do you love me?”

The spell was broken — the drifted fragments of the stars became only light, the singing down the street diminished to a monotone, to the whimper of locusts in the grass. With almost a sigh he kissed her fervent mouth, while her arms crept up about his shoulders.

THE MAN-AT-ARMS

As the weeks dried up and blew away, the range of Anthony’s travels extended until he grew to comprehend the camp and its environment. For the first time in his life he was in constant personal contact with the waiters to whom he had given tips, the chauffeurs who had touched their hats to him, the carpenters, plumbers, barbers, and farmers who had previously been remarkable only in the subservience of their professional genuflections. During his first two months in camp he did not hold ten minutes’ consecutive conversation with a single man.

On the service record his occupation stood as “student”; on the original questionnaire he had prematurely written “author”; but when men in his company asked his business he commonly gave it as bank clerk — had he told the truth, that he did no work, they would have been suspicious of him as a member of the leisure class.

His platoon sergeant, Pop Donnelly, was a scraggly “old soldier,” worn thin with drink. In the past he had spent unnumbered weeks in the guard-house, but recently, thanks to the drill-master famine, he had been elevated to his present pinnacle. His complexion was full of shell-holes — it bore an unmistakable resemblance to those aerial photographs of “the battle-field at Blank.” Once a week he got drunk down-town on white liquor, returned quietly to camp and collapsed upon his bunk, joining the company at reveille looking more than ever like a white mask of death.

He nursed the astounding delusion that he was astutely “slipping it over” on the government — he had spent eighteen years in its service at a minute wage, and he was soon to retire (here he usually winked) on the impressive income of fifty-five dollars a month. He looked upon it as a gorgeous joke that he had played upon the dozens who had bullied and scorned him since he was a Georgia country boy of nineteen.

At present there were but two lieutenants — Hopkins and the popular Kretching. The latter was considered a good fellow and a fine leader, until a year later, when he disappeared with a mess fund of eleven hundred dollars and, like so many leaders, proved exceedingly difficult to follow.

Eventually there was Captain Dunning, god of this brief but self-sufficing microcosm. He was a reserve officer, nervous, energetic, and enthusiastic. This latter quality, indeed, often took material form and was visible as fine froth in the corners of his mouth. Like most executives he saw his charges strictly from the front, and to his hopeful eyes his command seemed just such an excellent unit as such an excellent war deserved. For all his anxiety and absorption he was having the time of his life.

Baptiste, the little Sicilian of the train, fell foul of him the second week of drill. The captain had several times ordered the men to be clean-shaven when they fell in each morning. One day there was disclosed an alarming breech of this rule, surely a case of Teutonic connivance — during the night four men had grown hair upon their faces. The fact that three of the four understood a minimum of English made a practical object-lesson only the more necessary, so Captain Dunning resolutely sent a volunteer barber back to the company street for a razor. Whereupon for the safety of democracy a half-ounce of hair was scraped dry from the cheeks of three Italians and one Pole.

Outside the world of the company there appeared, from time to time, the colonel, a heavy man with snarling teeth, who circumnavigated the battalion drill-field upon a handsome black horse. He was a West Pointer, and, mimetically, a gentleman. He had a dowdy wife and a dowdy mind, and spent much of his time in town taking advantage of the army’s lately exalted social position. Last of all was the general, who traversed the roads of the camp preceded by his flag — a figure so austere, so removed, so magnificent, as to be scarcely comprehensible.

December. Cool winds at night now, and damp, chilly mornings on the drill-grounds. As the heat faded, Anthony found himself increasingly glad to be alive. Renewed strangely through his body, he worried little and existed in the present with a sort of animal content. It was not that Gloria or the life that Gloria represented was less often in his thoughts — it was simply that she became, day by day, less real, less vivid. For a week they had corresponded passionately, almost hysterically — then by an unwritten agreement they had ceased to write more than twice, and then once, a week. She was bored, she said; if his brigade was to be there a long time she was coming down to join him. Mr. Haight was going to be able to submit a stronger brief than he had expected, but doubted that the appealed case would come up until late spring. Muriel was in the city doing Red Cross work, and they went out together rather often. What would Anthony think if she went into the Red Cross? Trouble was she had heard that she might have to bathe negroes in alcohol, and after that she hadn’t felt so patriotic. The city was full of soldiers and she’d seen a lot of boys she hadn’t laid eyes on for years….

Anthony did not want her to come South. He told himself that this was for many reasons — he needed a rest from her and she from him. She would be bored beyond measure in town, and she would be able to see Anthony for only a few hours each day. But in his heart he feared that it was because he was attracted to Dorothy. As a matter of fact he lived in terror that Gloria should learn by some chance or intention of the relation he had formed. By the end of a fortnight the entanglement began to give him moments of misery at his own faithlessness. Nevertheless, as each day ended he was unable to withstand the lure that would draw him irresistibly out of his tent and over to the telephone at the Y.M.C.A.

“Dot.”

“Yes?”

“I may be able to get in to-night.”

“I’m so glad.”

“Do you want to listen to my splendid eloquence for a few starry hours?”

“Oh, you funny — “ For an instant he had a memory of five years before — of Geraldine. Then —

“I’ll arrive about eight.”

At seven he would be in a jitney bound for the city, where hundreds of little Southern girls were waiting on moonlit porches for their lovers. He would be excited already for her warm retarded kisses, for the amazed quietude of the glances she gave him — glances nearer to worship than any he had ever inspired. Gloria and he had been equals, giving without thought of thanks or obligation. To this girl his very caresses were an inestimable boon. Crying quietly she had confessed to him that he was not the first man in her life; there had been one other — he gathered that the affair had no sooner commenced than it had been over.

Indeed, so far as she was concerned, she spoke the truth. She had forgotten the clerk, the naval officer, the clothier’s son, forgotten her vividness of emotion, which is true forgetting. She knew that in some opaque and shadowy existence some one had taken her — it was as though it had occurred in sleep.

Almost every night Anthony came to town. It was too cool now for the porch, so her mother surrendered to them the tiny sitting room, with its dozens of cheaply framed chromos, its yard upon yard of decorative fringe, and its thick atmosphere of several decades in the proximity of the kitchen. They would build a fire — then, happily, inexhaustibly, she would go about the business of love. Each evening at ten she would walk with him to the door, her black hair in disarray, her face pale without cosmetics, paler still under the whiteness of the moon. As a rule it would be bright and silver outside; now and then there was a slow warm rain, too indolent, almost, to reach the ground.

“Say you love me,” she would whisper.

“Why, of course, you sweet baby.”

“Am I a baby?” This almost wistfully.

“Just a little baby.”

She knew vaguely of Gloria. It gave her pain to think of it, so she imagined her to be haughty and proud and cold. She had decided that Gloria must be older than Anthony, and that there was no love between husband and wife. Sometimes she let herself dream that after the war Anthony would get a divorce and they would be married — but she never mentioned this to Anthony, she scarcely knew why. She shared his company’s idea that he was a sort of bank clerk — she thought that he was respectable and poor. She would say:

“If I had some money, darlin’, I’d give ev’y bit of it to you…. I’d like to have about fifty thousand dollars.”

“I suppose that’d be plenty,” agreed Anthony.

— In her letter that day Gloria had written: “I suppose if we could settle for a million it would be better to tell Mr. Haight to go ahead and settle. But it’d seem a pity….”

… “We could have an automobile,” exclaimed Dot, in a final burst of triumph.

AN IMPRESSIVE OCCASION

Captain Dunning prided himself on being a great reader of character. Half an hour after meeting a man he was accustomed to place him in one of a number of astonishing categories — fine man, good man, smart fellow, theorizer, poet, and “worthless.” One day early in February he caused Anthony to be summoned to his presence in the orderly tent.

“Patch,” he said sententiously, “I’ve had my eye on you for several weeks.”

Anthony stood erect and motionless.

“And I think you’ve got the makings of a good soldier.”

He waited for the warm glow, which this would naturally arouse, to cool — and then continued:

“This is no child’s play,” he said, narrowing his brows.

Anthony agreed with a melancholy “No, sir.”

“It’s a man’s game — and we need leaders.” Then the climax, swift, sure, and electric: “Patch, I’m going to make you a corporal.”

At this point Anthony should have staggered slightly backward, overwhelmed. He was to be one of the quarter million selected for that consummate trust. He was going to be able to shout the technical phrase, “Follow me!” to seven other frightened men.

“You seem to be a man of some education,” said Captain Dunning.

“Yes, Sir.”

“That’s good, that’s good. Education’s a great thing, but don’t let it go to your head. Keep on the way you’re doing and you’ll be a good soldier.”

With these parting words lingering in his ears, Corporal Patch saluted, executed a right about face, and left the tent.

Though the conversation amused Anthony, it did generate the idea that life would be more amusing as a sergeant or, should he find a less exacting medical examiner, as an officer. He was little interested in the work, which seemed to belie the army’s boasted gallantry. At the inspections one did not dress up to look well, one dressed up to keep from looking badly.

But as winter wore away — the short, snowless winter marked by damp nights and cool, rainy days — he marvelled at how quickly the system had grasped him. He was a soldier — all who were not soldiers were civilians. The world was divided primarily into those two classifications.

It occurred to him that all strongly accentuated classes, such as the military, divided men into two kinds: their own kind — and those without. To the clergyman there were clergy and laity, to the Catholic there were Catholics and non-Catholics, to the negro there were blacks and whites, to the prisoner there were the imprisoned and the free, and to the sick man there were the sick and the well…. So, without thinking of it once in his lifetime, he had been a civilian, a layman, a non-Catholic, a Gentile, white, free, and well….

As the American troops were poured into the French and British trenches he began to find the names of many Harvard men among the casualties recorded in the Army and Navy Journal. But for all the sweat and blood the situation appeared unchanged, and he saw no prospect of the war’s ending in the perceptible future. In the old chronicles the right wing of one army always defeated the left wing of the other, the left wing being, meanwhile, vanquished by the enemy’s right. After that the mercenaries fled. It had been so simple, in those days, almost as if prearranged….

Gloria wrote that she was reading a great deal. What a mess they had made of their affairs, she said. She had so little to do now that she spent her time imagining how differently things might have turned out. Her whole environment appeared insecure — and a few years back she had seemed to hold all the strings in her own little hand….

In June her letters grew hurried and less frequent. She suddenly ceased to write about coming South.

DEFEAT

March in the country around was rare with jasmine and jonquils and patches of violets in the warming grass. Afterward he remembered especially one afternoon of such a fresh and magic glamour that as he stood in the rifle-pit marking targets he recited “Atalanta in Calydon” to an uncomprehending Pole, his voice mingling with the rip, sing, and splatter of the bullets overhead.

“When the hounds of spring …”

Spang!

“Are on winter’s traces …”

Whirr-r-r-r! …

“The mother of months …”

“Hey! Come to! Mark three-e-e! …”

In town the streets were in a sleepy dream again, and together Anthony and Dot idled in their own tracks of the previous autumn until he began to feel a drowsy attachment for this South — a South, it seemed, more of Algiers than of Italy, with faded aspirations pointing back over innumerable generations to some warm, primitive Nirvana, without hope or care. Here there was an inflection of cordiality, of comprehension, in every voice. “Life plays the same lovely and agonizing joke on all of us,” they seemed to say in their plaintive pleasant cadence, in the rising inflection terminating on an unresolved minor.

He liked his barber shop where he was “Hi, corporal!” to a pale, emaciated young man, who shaved him and pushed a cool vibrating machine endlessly over his insatiable head. He liked “Johnston’s Gardens” where they danced, where a tragic negro made yearning, aching music on a saxophone until the garish hall became an enchanted jungle of barbaric rhythms and smoky laughter, where to forget the uneventful passage of time upon Dorothy’s soft sighs and tender whisperings was the consummation of all aspiration, of all content.

There was an undertone of sadness in her character, a conscious evasion of all except the pleasurable minutiae of life. Her violet eyes would remain for hours apparently insensate as, thoughtless and reckless, she basked like a cat in the sun. He wondered what the tired, spiritless mother thought of them, and whether in her moments of uttermost cynicism she ever guessed at their relationship.

On Sunday afternoons they walked along the countryside, resting at intervals on the dry moss in the outskirts of a wood. Here the birds had gathered and the clusters of violets and white dogwood; here the hoar trees shone crystalline and cool, oblivious to the intoxicating heat that waited outside; here he would talk, intermittently, in a sleepy monologue, in a conversation of no significance, of no replies.

July came scorching down. Captain Dunning was ordered to detail one of his men to learn blacksmithing. The regiment was filling up to war strength, and he needed most of his veterans for drill-masters, so he selected the little Italian, Baptiste, whom he could most easily spare. Little Baptiste had never had anything to do with horses. His fear made matters worse. He reappeared in the orderly room one day and told Captain Dunning that he wanted to die if he couldn’t be relieved. The horses kicked at him, he said; he was no good at the work. Finally he fell on his knees and besought Captain Dunning, in a mixture of broken English and scriptural Italian, to get him out of it. He had not slept for three days; monstrous stallions reared and cavorted through his dreams.

Captain Dunning reproved the company clerk (who had burst out laughing), and told Baptiste he would do what he could. But when he thought it over he decided that he couldn’t spare a better man. Little Baptiste went from bad to worse. The horses seemed to divine his fear and take every advantage of it. Two weeks later a great black mare crushed his skull in with her hoofs while he was trying to lead her from her stall.

In mid-July came rumors, and then orders, that concerned a change of camp. The brigade was to move to an empty cantonment, a hundred miles farther south, there to be expanded into a division. At first the men thought they were departing for the trenches, and all evening little groups jabbered in the company street, shouting to each other in swaggering exclamations: “Su-u-ure we are!” When the truth leaked out, it was rejected indignantly as a blind to conceal their real destination. They revelled in their own importance. That night they told their girls in town that they were “going to get the Germans.” Anthony circulated for a while among the groups — then, stopping a jitney, rode down to tell Dot that he was going away.

She was waiting on the dark veranda in a cheap white dress that accentuated the youth and softness of her face.

“Oh,” she whispered, “I’ve wanted you so, honey. All this day.”

“I have something to tell you.”

She drew him down beside her on the swinging seat, not noticing his ominous tone.

“Tell me.”

“We’re leaving next week.”

Her arms seeking his shoulders remained poised upon the dark air, her chin tipped up. When she spoke the softness was gone from her voice.

“Leaving for France?”

“No. Less luck than that. Leaving for some darn camp in Mississippi.”

She shut her eyes and he could see that the lids were trembling.

“Dear little Dot, life is so damned hard.”

She was crying upon his shoulder.

“So damned hard, so damned hard,” he repeated aimlessly; “it just hurts people and hurts people, until finally it hurts them so that they can’t be hurt ever any more. That’s the last and worst thing it does.”

Frantic, wild with anguish, she strained him to her breast.

“Oh, God!” she whispered brokenly, “you can’t go way from me. I’d die.”

He was finding it impossible to pass off his departure as a common, impersonal blow. He was too near to her to do more than repeat “Poor little Dot. Poor little Dot.”

“And then what?” she demanded wearily.

“What do you mean?”

“You’re my whole life, that’s all. I’d die for you right now if you said so. I’d get a knife and kill myself. You can’t leave me here.”

Her tone frightened him.

“These things happen,” he said evenly.

“Then I’m going with you.” Tears were streaming down her checks. Her mouth was trembling in an ecstasy of grief and fear.

“Sweet,” he muttered sentimentally, “sweet little girl. Don’t you see we’d just be putting off what’s bound to happen? I’ll be going to France in a few months — “

She leaned away from him and clinching her fists lifted her face toward the sky.

“I want to die,” she said, as if moulding each word carefully in her heart.

“Dot,” he whispered uncomfortably, “you’ll forget. Things are sweeter when they’re lost. I know — because once I wanted something and got it. It was the only thing I ever wanted badly, Dot. And when I got it it turned to dust in my hands.”

“All right.”

Absorbed in himself, he continued:

“I’ve often thought that if I hadn’t got what I wanted things might have been different with me. I might have found something in my mind and enjoyed putting it in circulation. I might have been content with the work of it, and had some sweet vanity out of the success. I suppose that at one time I could have had anything I wanted, within reason, but that was the only thing I ever wanted with any fervor. God! And that taught me you can’t have anything, you can’t have anything at all. Because desire just cheats you. It’s like a sunbeam skipping here and there about a room. It stops and gilds some inconsequential object, and we poor fools try to grasp it — but when we do the sunbeam moves on to something else, and you’ve got the inconsequential part, but the glitter that made you want it is gone — “ He broke off uneasily. She had risen and was standing, dry-eyed, picking little leaves from a dark vine.

“Dot — “

“Go way,” she said coldly. “What? Why?”

“I don’t want just words. If that’s all you have for me you’d better go.”

“Why, Dot — “

“What’s death to me is just a lot of words to you. You put ‘em together so pretty.”

“I’m sorry. I was talking about you, Dot.”

“Go way from here.”

He approached her with arms outstretched, but she held him away.

“You don’t want me to go with you,” she said evenly; “maybe you’re going to meet that — that girl — “ She could not bring herself to say wife. “How do I know? Well, then, I reckon you’re not my fellow any more. So go way.”

For a moment, while conflicting warnings and desires prompted Anthony, it seemed one of those rare times when he would take a step prompted from within. He hesitated. Then a wave of weariness broke against him. It was too late — everything was too late. For years now he had dreamed the world away, basing his decisions upon emotions unstable as water. The little girl in the white dress dominated him, as she approached beauty in the hard symmetry of her desire. The fire blazing in her dark and injured heart seemed to glow around her like a flame. With some profound and uncharted pride she had made herself remote and so achieved her purpose.

“I didn’t — mean to seem so callous, Dot.”

“It don’t matter.”

The fire rolled over Anthony. Something wrenched at his bowels, and he stood there helpless and beaten.

“Come with me, Dot — little loving Dot. Oh, come with me. I couldn’t leave you now — “

With a sob she wound her arms around him and let him support her weight while the moon, at its perennial labor of covering the bad complexion of the world, showered its illicit honey over the drowsy street.

THE CATASTROPHE

Early September in Camp Boone, Mississippi. The darkness, alive with insects, beat in upon the mosquito-netting, beneath the shelter of which Anthony was trying to write a letter. An intermittent chatter over a poker game was going on in the next tent, and outside a man was strolling up the company street singing a current bit of doggerel about “K-K-K-Katy.”

With an effort Anthony hoisted himself to his elbow and, pencil in hand, looked down at his blank sheet of paper. Then, omitting any heading, he began:

I can’t imagine what the matter is, Gloria. I haven’t had a line from you for two weeks and it’s only natural to be worried —

He threw this away with a disturbed grunt and began again:

I don’t know what to think, Gloria. Your last letter, short, cold, without a word of affection or even a decent account of what you’ve been doing, came two weeks ago. It’s only natural that I should wonder. If your love for me isn’t absolutely dead it seems that you’d at least keep me from worry —

Again he crumpled the page and tossed it angrily through a tear in the tent wall, realizing simultaneously that he would have to pick it up in the morning. He felt disinclined to try again. He could get no warmth into the lines — only a persistent jealousy and suspicion. Since midsummer these discrepancies in Gloria’s correspondence had grown more and more noticeable. At first he had scarcely perceived them. He was so inured to the perfunctory “dearest” and “darlings” scattered through her letters that he was oblivious to their presence or absence. But in this last fortnight he had become increasingly aware that there was something amiss.

He had sent her a night-letter saying that he had passed his examinations for an officers’ training-camp, and expected to leave for Georgia shortly. She had not answered. He had wired again — when he received no word he imagined that she might be out of town. But it occurred and recurred to him that she was not out of town, and a series of distraught imaginings began to plague him. Supposing Gloria, bored and restless, had found some one, even as he had. The thought terrified him with its possibility — it was chiefly because he had been so sure of her personal integrity that he had considered her so sparingly during the year. And now, as a doubt was born, the old angers, the rages of possession, swarmed back a thousandfold. What more natural than that she should be in love again?

He remembered the Gloria who promised that should she ever want anything, she would take it, insisting that since she would act entirely for her own satisfaction she could go through such an affair unsmirched — it was only the effect on a person’s mind that counted, anyhow, she said, and her reaction would be the masculine one, of satiation and faint dislike.

But that had been when they were first married. Later, with the discovery that she could be jealous of Anthony, she had, outwardly at least, changed her mind. There were no other men in the world for her. This he had known only too surely. Perceiving that a certain fastidiousness would restrain her, he had grown lax in preserving the completeness of her love — which, after all, was the keystone of the entire structure.

Meanwhile all through the summer he had been maintaining Dot in a boarding-house down-town. To do this it had been necessary to write to his broker for money. Dot had covered her journey south by leaving her house a day before the brigade broke camp, informing her mother in a note that she had gone to New York. On the evening following Anthony had called as though to see her. Mrs. Raycroft was in a state of collapse and there was a policeman in the parlor. A questionnaire had ensued, from which Anthony had extricated himself with some difficulty.

In September, with his suspicions of Gloria, the company of Dot had become tedious, then almost intolerable. He was nervous and irritable from lack of sleep; his heart was sick and afraid. Three days ago he had gone to Captain Dunning and asked for a furlough, only to be met with benignant procrastination. The division was starting overseas, while Anthony was going to an officers’ training-camp; what furloughs could be given must go to the men who were leaving the country.

Upon this refusal Anthony had started to the telegraph office intending to wire Gloria to come South — he reached the door and receded despairingly, seeing the utter impracticability of such a move. Then he had spent the evening quarrelling irritably with Dot, and returned to camp morose and angry with the world. There had been a disagreeable scene, in the midst of which he had precipitately departed. What was to be done with her did not seem to concern him vitally at present — he was completely absorbed in the disheartening silence of his wife….

The flap of the tent made a sudden triangle back upon itself, and a dark head appeared against the night.

“Sergeant Patch?” The accent was Italian, and Anthony saw by the belt that the man was a headquarters orderly.

“Want me?”

“Lady call up headquarters ten minutes ago. Say she have speak with you.

Ver’ important.”

Anthony swept aside the mosquito-netting and stood up. It might be a wire from Gloria telephoned over.

“She say to get you. She call again ten o’clock.”

“All right, thanks.” He picked up his hat and in a moment was striding beside the orderly through the hot, almost suffocating, darkness. Over in the headquarters shack he saluted a dozing night-service officer.

“Sit down and wait,” suggested the lieutenant nonchalantly. “Girl seemed awful anxious to speak to you.”

Anthony’s hopes fell away.

“Thank you very much, sir.” And as the phone squeaked on the side-wall he knew who was calling.

“This is Dot,” came an unsteady voice, “I’ve got to see you.”

“Dot, I told you I couldn’t get down for several days.”

“I’ve got to see you to-night. It’s important.”

“It’s too late,” he said coldly; “it’s ten o’clock, and I have to be in camp at eleven.”

“All right.” There was so much wretchedness compressed into the two words that Anthony felt a measure of compunction.

“What’s the matter?”

“I want to tell you good-by.

“Oh, don’t be a little idiot!” he exclaimed. But his spirits rose. What luck if she should leave town this very night! What a burden from his soul. But he said: “You can’t possibly leave before to-morrow.”

Out of the corner of his eye he saw the night-service officer regarding him quizzically. Then, startlingly, came Dot’s next words:

“I don’t mean ‘leave’ that way.”

Anthony’s hand clutched the receiver fiercely. He felt his nerves turning cold as if the heat was leaving his body.

“What?”

Then quickly in a wild broken voice he heard:

“Good-by — oh, good-by!”

Cul-lup! She had hung up the receiver. With a sound that was half a gasp, half a cry, Anthony hurried from the headquarters building. Outside, under the stars that dripped like silver tassels through the trees of the little grove, he stood motionless, hesitating. Had she meant to kill herself? — oh, the little fool! He was filled with bitter hate toward her. In this dénouement he found it impossible to realize that he had ever begun such an entanglement, such a mess, a sordid mélange of worry and pain.

He found himself walking slowly away, repeating over and over that it was futile to worry. He had best go back to his tent and sleep. He needed sleep. God! Would he ever sleep again? His mind was in a vast clamor and confusion; as he reached the road he turned around in a panic and began running, not toward his company but away from it. Men were returning now — he could find a taxicab. After a minute two yellow eyes appeared around a bend. Desperately he ran toward them.

“Jitney! Jitney!” … It was an empty Ford…. “I want to go to town.”

“Cost you a dollar.”

“All right. If you’ll just hurry — “

After an interminable time he ran up the steps of a dark ramshackle little house, and through the door, almost knocking over an immense negress who was walking, candle in hand, along the hall.

“Where’s my wife?” he cried wildly.

“She gone to bed.”

Up the stairs three at a time, down the creaking passage. The room was dark and silent, and with trembling fingers he struck a match. Two wide eyes looked up at him from a wretched ball of clothes on the bed.

“Ah, I knew you’d come,” she murmured brokenly.

Anthony grew cold with anger.

“So it was just a plan to get me down here, get me in trouble!” he said.

“God damn it, you’ve shouted ‘wolf’ once too often!”

She regarded him pitifully.

“I had to see you. I couldn’t have lived. Oh, I had to see you — “

He sat down on the side of the bed and slowly shook his head.

“You’re no good,” he said decisively, talking unconsciously as Gloria might have talked to him. “This sort of thing isn’t fair to me, you know.”

“Come closer.” Whatever he might say Dot was happy now. He cared for her. She had brought him to her side.

“Oh, God,” said Anthony hopelessly. As weariness rolled along its inevitable wave his anger subsided, receded, vanished. He collapsed suddenly, fell sobbing beside her on the bed.

“Oh, my darling,” she begged him, “don’t cry! Oh, don’t cry!”

She took his head upon her breast and soothed him, mingled her happy tears with the bitterness of his. Her hand played gently with his dark hair.

“I’m such a little fool,” she murmured brokenly, “but I love you, and when you’re cold to me it seems as if it isn’t worth while to go on livin’.”

After all, this was peace — the quiet room with the mingled scent of women’s powder and perfume, Dot’s hand soft as a warm wind upon his hair, the rise and fall of her bosom as she took breath — for a moment it was as though it were Gloria there, as though he were at rest in some sweeter and safer home than he had ever known.

An hour passed. A clock began to chime in the hall. He jumped to his feet and looked at the phosphorescent hands of his wrist watch. It was twelve o’clock.

He had trouble in finding a taxi that would take him out at that hour. As he urged the driver faster along the road he speculated on the best method of entering camp. He had been late several times recently, and he knew that were he caught again his name would probably be stricken from the list of officer candidates. He wondered if he had not better dismiss the taxi and take a chance on passing the sentry in the dark. Still, officers often rode past the sentries after midnight….

“Halt!” The monosyllable came from the yellow glare that the headlights dropped upon the changing road. The taxi-driver threw out his clutch and a sentry walked up, carrying his rifle at the port. With him, by an ill chance, was the officer of the guard.

“Out late, sergeant.”

“Yes, sir. Got delayed.”

“Too bad. Have to take your name.”

As the officer waited, note-book and pencil in hand, something not fully intended crowded to Anthony’s lips, something born of panic, of muddle, of despair.

“Sergeant R.A. Foley,” he answered breathlessly.

“And the outfit?”

“Company Q, Eighty-third Infantry.”

“All right. You’ll have to walk from here, sergeant.”

Anthony saluted, quickly paid his taxi-driver, and set off for a run toward the regiment he had named. When he was out of sight he changed his course, and with his heart beating wildly, hurried to his company, feeling that he had made a fatal error of judgment.

Two days later the officer who had been in command of the guard recognized him in a barber shop down-town. In charge of a military policeman he was taken back to the camp, where he was reduced to the ranks without trial, and confined for a month to the limits of his company street.

With this blow a spell of utter depression overtook him, and within a week he was again caught down-town, wandering around in a drunken daze, with a pint of bootleg whiskey in his hip pocket. It was because of a sort of craziness in his behavior at the trial that his sentence to the guard-house was for only three weeks.

NIGHTMARE

Early in his confinement the conviction took root in him that he was going mad. It was as though there were a quantity of dark yet vivid personalities in his mind, some of them familiar, some of them strange and terrible, held in check by a little monitor, who sat aloft somewhere and looked on. The thing that worried him was that the monitor was sick, and holding out with difficulty. Should he give up, should he falter for a moment, out would rush these intolerable things — only Anthony could know what a state of blackness there would be if the worst of him could roam his consciousness unchecked.

The heat of the day had changed, somehow, until it was a burnished darkness crushing down upon a devastated land. Over his head the blue circles of ominous uncharted suns, of unnumbered centres of fire, revolved interminably before his eyes as though he were lying constantly exposed to the hot light and in a state of feverish coma. At seven in the morning something phantasmal, something almost absurdly unreal that he knew was his mortal body, went out with seven other prisoners and two guards to work on the camp roads. One day they loaded and unloaded quantities of gravel, spread it, raked it — the next day they worked with huge barrels of red-hot tar, flooding the gravel with black, shining pools of molten heat. At night, locked up in the guard-house, he would lie without thought, without courage to compass thought, staring at the irregular beams of the ceiling overhead until about three o’clock, when he would slip into a broken, troubled sleep.

During the work hours he labored with uneasy haste, attempting, as the day bore toward the sultry Mississippi sunset, to tire himself physically so that in the evening he might sleep deeply from utter exhaustion…. Then one afternoon in the second week he had a feeling that two eyes were watching him from a place a few feet beyond one of the guards. This aroused him to a sort of terror. He turned his back on the eyes and shovelled feverishly, until it became necessary for him to face about and go for more gravel. Then they entered his vision again, and his already taut nerves tightened up to the breaking-point. The eyes were leering at him. Out of a hot silence he heard his name called in a tragic voice, and the earth tipped absurdly back and forth to a babel of shouting and confusion.

When next he became conscious he was back in the guard-house, and the other prisoners were throwing him curious glances. The eyes returned no more. It was many days before he realized that the voice must have been Dot’s, that she had called out to him and made some sort of disturbance. He decided this just previous to the expiration of his sentence, when the cloud that oppressed him had lifted, leaving him in a deep, dispirited lethargy. As the conscious mediator, the monitor who kept that fearsome ménage of horror, grew stronger, Anthony became physically weaker. He was scarcely able to get through the two days of toil, and when he was released, one rainy afternoon, and returned to his company, he reached his tent only to fall into a heavy doze, from which he awoke before dawn, aching and unrefreshed. Beside his cot were two letters that had been awaiting him in the orderly tent for some time. The first was from Gloria; it was short and cool:

* * * * *

The case is coming to trial late in November. Can you possibly get leave?

I’ve tried to write you again and again but it just seems to make things worse. I want to see you about several matters, but you know that you have once prevented me from coming and I am disinclined to try again. In view of a number of things it seems necessary that we have a conference. I’m very glad about your appointment.

GLORIA.

* * * * *

He was too tired to try to understand — or to care. Her phrases, her intentions, were all very far away in an incomprehensible past. At the second letter he scarcely glanced; it was from Dot — an incoherent, tear-swollen scrawl, a flood of protest, endearment, and grief. After a page he let it slip from his inert hand and drowsed back into a nebulous hinterland of his own. At drill-call he awoke with a high fever and fainted when he tried to leave his tent — at noon he was sent to the base hospital with influenza.

He was aware that this sickness was providential. It saved him from a hysterical relapse — and he recovered in time to entrain on a damp November day for New York, and for the interminable massacre beyond.

When the regiment reached CampMills, Long Island, Anthony’s single idea was to get into the city and see Gloria as soon as possible. It was now evident that an armistice would be signed within the week, but rumor had it that in any case troops would continue to be shipped to France until the last moment. Anthony was appalled at the notion of the long voyage, of a tedious debarkation at a French port, and of being kept abroad for a year, possibly, to replace the troops who had seen actual fighting.

His intention had been to obtain a two-day furlough, but CampMills proved to be under a strict influenza quarantine — it was impossible for even an officer to leave except on official business. For a private it was out of the question.

The camp itself was a dreary muddle, cold, wind-swept, and filthy, with the accumulated dirt incident to the passage through of many divisions. Their train came in at seven one night, and they waited in line until one while a military tangle was straightened out somewhere ahead. Officers ran up and down ceaselessly, calling orders and making a great uproar. It turned out that the trouble was due to the colonel, who was in a righteous temper because he was a West Pointer, and the war was going to stop before he could get overseas. Had the militant governments realized the number of broken hearts among the older West Pointers during that week, they would indubitably have prolonged the slaughter another month. The thing was pitiable!

Gazing out at the bleak expanse of tents extending for miles over a trodden welter of slush and snow, Anthony saw the impracticability of trudging to a telephone that night. He would call her at the first opportunity in the morning.

Aroused in the chill and bitter dawn he stood at reveille and listened to a passionate harangue from Captain Dunning:

“You men may think the war is over. Well, let me tell you, it isn’t! Those fellows aren’t going to sign the armistice. It’s another trick, and we’d be crazy to let anything slacken up here in the company, because, let me tell you, we’re going to sail from here within a week, and when we do we’re going to see some real fighting.” He paused that they might get the full effect of his pronouncement. And then: “If you think the war’s over, just talk to any one who’s been in it and see if they think the Germans are all in. They don’t. Nobody does. I’ve talked to the people that know, and they say there’ll be, anyways, a year longer of war. They don’t think it’s over. So you men better not get any foolish ideas that it is.”

Doubly stressing this final admonition, he ordered the company dismissed.

At noon Anthony set off at a run for the nearest canteen telephone. As he approached what corresponded to the down-town of the camp, he noticed that many other soldiers were running also, that a man near him had suddenly leaped into the air and clicked his heels together. The tendency to run became general, and from little excited groups here and there came the sounds of cheering. He stopped and listened — over the cold country whistles were blowing and the chimes of the Garden City churches broke suddenly into reverberatory sound.

Anthony began to run again. The cries were clear and distinct now as they rose with clouds of frosted breath into the chilly air:

“Germany’s surrendered! Germany’s surrendered!”

THE FALSE ARMISTICE

That evening in the opaque gloom of six o’clock Anthony slipped between two freight-cars, and once over the railroad, followed the track along to Garden City, where he caught an electric train for New York. He stood some chance of apprehension — he knew that the military police were often sent through the cars to ask for passes, but he imagined that to-night the vigilance would be relaxed. But, in any event, he would have tried to slip through, for he had been unable to locate Gloria by telephone, and another day of suspense would have been intolerable.

After inexplicable stops and waits that reminded him of the night he had left New York, over a year before, they drew into the Pennsylvania Station, and he followed the familiar way to the taxi-stand, finding it grotesque and oddly stimulating to give his own address.

Broadway was a riot of light, thronged as he had never seen it with a carnival crowd which swept its glittering way through scraps of paper, piled ankle-deep on the sidewalks. Here and there, elevated upon benches and boxes, soldiers addressed the heedless mass, each face in which was clear cut and distinct under the white glare overhead. Anthony picked out half a dozen figures — a drunken sailor, tipped backward and supported by two other gobs, was waving his hat and emitting a wild series of roars; a wounded soldier, crutch in hand, was borne along in an eddy on the shoulders of some shrieking civilians; a dark-haired girl sat cross-legged and meditative on top of a parked taxicab. Here surely the victory had come in time, the climax had been scheduled with the uttermost celestial foresight. The great rich nation had made triumphant war, suffered enough for poignancy but not enough for bitterness — hence the carnival, the feasting, the triumph. Under these bright lights glittered the faces of peoples whose glory had long since passed away, whose very civilizations were dead-men whose ancestors had heard the news of victory in Babylon, in Nineveh, in Bagdad, in Tyre, a hundred generations before; men whose ancestors had seen a flower-decked, slave-adorned cortege drift with its wake of captives down the avenues of Imperial Rome….

Past the Rialto, the glittering front of the Astor, the jewelled magnificence of Times Square … a gorgeous alley of incandescence ahead…. Then — was it years later? — he was paying the taxi-driver in front of a white building on Fifty-seventh Street. He was in the hall — ah, there was the negro boy from Martinique, lazy, indolent, unchanged.

“Is Mrs. Patch in?”

“I have just came on, sah,” the man announced with his incongruous

British accent.

“Take me up — “

Then the slow drone of the elevator, the three steps to the door, which swung open at the impetus of his knock.

“Gloria!” His voice was trembling. No answer. A faint string of smoke was rising from a cigarette-tray — a number of Vanity Fair sat astraddle on the table.

“Gloria!”

He ran into the bedroom, the bath. She was not there. A negligée of robin’s-egg blue laid out upon the bed diffused a faint perfume, illusive and familiar. On a chair were a pair of stockings and a street dress; an open powder box yawned upon the bureau. She must just have gone out.

The telephone rang abruptly and he started — answered it with all the sensations of an impostor.

“Hello. Is Mrs. Patch there?”

“No, I’m looking for her myself. Who is this?”

“This is Mr. Crawford.”

“This is Mr. Patch speaking. I’ve just arrived unexpectedly, and I don’t know where to find her.”

“Oh.” Mr. Crawford sounded a bit taken aback. “Why, I imagine she’s at the Armistice Ball. I know she intended going, but I didn’t think she’d leave so early.”

“Where’s the Armistice Ball?”

“At the Astor.”

“Thanks.”

Anthony hung up sharply and rose. Who was Mr. Crawford? And who was it that was taking her to the ball? How long had this been going on? All these questions asked and answered themselves a dozen times, a dozen ways. His very proximity to her drove him half frantic.

In a frenzy of suspicion he rushed here and there about the apartment, hunting for some sign of masculine occupation, opening the bathroom cupboard, searching feverishly through the bureau drawers. Then he found something that made him stop suddenly and sit down on one of the twin beds, the corners of his mouth drooping as though he were about to weep. There in a corner of her drawer, tied with a frail blue ribbon, were all the letters and telegrams he had written her during the year past. He was suffused with happy and sentimental shame.

“I’m not fit to touch her,” he cried aloud to the four walls. “I’m not fit to touch her little hand.”

Nevertheless, he went out to look for her.

In the Astor lobby he was engulfed immediately in a crowd so thick as to make progress almost impossible. He asked the direction of the ballroom from half a dozen people before he could get a sober and intelligible answer. Eventually, after a last long wait, he checked his military overcoat in the hall.

It was only nine but the dance was in full blast. The panorama was incredible. Women, women everywhere — girls gay with wine singing shrilly above the clamor of the dazzling confetti-covered throng; girls set off by the uniforms of a dozen nations; fat females collapsing without dignity upon the floor and retaining self-respect by shouting “Hurraw for the Allies!”; three women with white hair dancing hand in hand around a sailor, who revolved in a dizzying spin upon the floor, clasping to his heart an empty bottle of champagne.

Breathlessly Anthony scanned the dancers, scanned the muddled lines trailing in single file in and out among the tables, scanned the horn-blowing, kissing, coughing, laughing, drinking parties under the great full-bosomed flags which leaned in glowing color over the pageantry and the sound.

Then he saw Gloria. She was sitting at a table for two directly across the room. Her dress was black, and above it her animated face, tinted with the most glamourous rose, made, he thought, a spot of poignant beauty on the room. His heart leaped as though to a new music. He jostled his way toward her and called her name just as the gray eyes looked up and found him. For that instant as their bodies met and melted, the world, the revel, the tumbling whimper of the music faded to an ecstatic monotone hushed as a song of bees.

“Oh, my Gloria!” he cried.

Her kiss was a cool rill flowing from her heart.

CHAPTER II

A MATTER OF AESTHETICS

On the night when Anthony had left for Camp Hooker one year before, all that was left of the beautiful Gloria Gilbert — her shell, her young and lovely body — moved up the broad marble steps of the Grand Central Station with the rhythm of the engine beating in her ears like a dream, and out onto Vanderbilt Avenue, where the huge bulk of the Biltmore overhung, the street and, down at its low, gleaming entrance, sucked in the many-colored opera-cloaks of gorgeously dressed girls. For a moment she paused by the taxi-stand and watched them — wondering that but a few years before she had been of their number, ever setting out for a radiant Somewhere, always just about to have that ultimate passionate adventure for which the girls’ cloaks were delicate and beautifully furred, for which their cheeks were painted and their hearts higher than the transitory dome of pleasure that would engulf them, coiffure, cloak, and all.

It was growing colder and the men passing had flipped up the collars of their overcoats. This change was kind to her. It would have been kinder still had everything changed, weather, streets, and people, and had she been whisked away, to wake in some high, fresh-scented room, alone, and statuesque within and without, as in her virginal and colorful past.

Inside the taxicab she wept impotent tears. That she had not been happy with Anthony for over a year mattered little. Recently his presence had been no more than what it would awake in her of that memorable June. The Anthony of late, irritable, weak, and poor, could do no less than make her irritable in turn — and bored with everything except the fact that in a highly imaginative and eloquent youth they had come together in an ecstatic revel of emotion. Because of this mutually vivid memory she would have done more for Anthony than for any other human — so when she got into the taxicab she wept passionately, and wanted to call his name aloud.

Miserable, lonesome as a forgotten child, she sat in the quiet apartment and wrote him a letter full of confused sentiment:

* * * * *

… I can almost look down the tracks and see you going but without you, dearest, dearest, I can’t see or hear or feel or think. Being apart — whatever has happened or will happen to us — is like begging for mercy from a storm, Anthony; it’s like growing old. I want to kiss you so — in the back of your neck where your old black hair starts. Because I love you and whatever we do or say to each other, or have done, or have said, you’ve got to feel how much I do, how inanimate I am when you’re gone. I can’t even hate the damnable presence of PEOPLE, those people in the station who haven’t any right to live — I can’t resent them even though they’re dirtying up our world, because I’m engrossed in wanting you so.

If you hated me, if you were covered with sores like a leper, if you ran away with another woman or starved me or beat me — how absurd this sounds — I’d still want you, I’d still love you. I KNOW, my darling.

It’s late — I have all the windows open and the air outside, is just as soft as spring, yet, somehow, much more young and frail than spring. Why do they make spring a young girl, why does that illusion dance and yodel its way for three months through the world’s preposterous barrenness. Spring is a lean old plough horse with its ribs showing — it’s a pile of refuse in a field, parched by the sun and the rain to an ominous cleanliness.

In a few hours you’ll wake up, my darling — and you’ll be miserable, and disgusted with life. You’ll be in Delaware or Carolina or somewhere and so unimportant. I don’t believe there’s any one alive who can contemplate themselves as an impermanent institution, as a luxury or an unnecessary evil. Very few of the people who accentuate the futility of life remark the futility of themselves. Perhaps they think that in proclaiming the evil of living they somehow salvage their own worth from the ruin — but they don’t, even you and I….

… Still I can see you. There’s blue haze about the trees where you’ll be passing, too beautiful to be predominant. No, the fallow squares of earth will be most frequent — they’ll be along beside the track like dirty coarse brown sheets drying in the sun, alive, mechanical, abominable. Nature, slovenly old hag, has been sleeping in them with every old farmer or negro or immigrant who happened to covet her….

So you see that now you’re gone I’ve written a letter all full of contempt and despair. And that just means that I love you, Anthony, with all there is to love with in your

GLORIA.

* * * * *

When she had addressed the letter she went to her twin bed and lay down upon it, clasping Anthony’s pillow in her arms as though by sheer force of emotion she could metamorphize it into his warm and living body. Two o’clock saw her dry-eyed, staring with steady persistent grief into the darkness, remembering, remembering unmercifully, blaming herself for a hundred fancied unkindnesses, making a likeness of Anthony akin to some martyred and transfigured Christ. For a time she thought of him as he, in his more sentimental moments, probably thought of himself.

At five she was still awake. A mysterious grinding noise that went on every morning across the areaway told her the hour. She heard an alarm clock ring, and saw a light make a yellow square on an illusory blank wall opposite. With the half-formed resolution of following him South immediately, her sorrow grew remote and unreal, and moved off from her as the dark moved westward. She fell asleep.

When she awoke the sight of the empty bed beside her brought a renewal of misery, dispelled shortly, however, by the inevitable callousness of the bright morning. Though she was not conscious of it, there was relief in eating breakfast without Anthony’s tired and worried face opposite her. Now that she was alone she lost all desire to complain about the food. She would change her breakfasts, she thought — have a lemonade and a tomato sandwich instead of the sempiternal bacon and eggs and toast.

Nevertheless, at noon when she had called up several of her acquaintances, including the martial Muriel, and found each one engaged for lunch, she gave way to a quiet pity for herself and her loneliness. Curled on the bed with pencil and paper she wrote Anthony another letter.

Late in the afternoon arrived a special delivery, mailed from some small New Jersey town, and the familiarity of the phrasing, the almost audible undertone of worry and discontent, were so familiar that they comforted her. Who knew? Perhaps army discipline would harden Anthony and accustom him to the idea of work. She had immutable faith that the war would be over before he was called upon to fight, and meanwhile the suit would be won, and they could begin again, this time on a different basis. The first thing different would be that she would have a child. It was unbearable that she should be so utterly alone.

It was a week before she could stay in the apartment with the probability of remaining dry-eyed. There seemed little in the city that was amusing. Muriel had been shifted to a hospital in New Jersey, from which she took a metropolitan holiday only every other week, and with this defection Gloria grew to realize how few were the friends she had made in all these years of New York. The men she knew were in the army. “Men she knew”? — she had conceded vaguely to herself that all the men who had ever been in love with her were her friends. Each one of them had at a certain considerable time professed to value her favor above anything in life. But now — where were they? At least two were dead, half a dozen or more were married, the rest scattered from France to the Philippines. She wondered whether any of them thought of her, and how often, and in what respect. Most of them must still picture the little girl of seventeen or so, the adolescent siren of nine years before.

The girls, too, were gone far afield. She had never been popular in school. She had been too beautiful, too lazy, not sufficiently conscious of being a Farmover girl and a “Future Wife and Mother” in perpetual capital letters. And girls who had never been kissed hinted, with shocked expressions on their plain but not particularly wholesome faces, that Gloria had. Then these girls had gone east or west or south, married and become “people,” prophesying, if they prophesied about Gloria, that she would come to a bad end — not knowing that no endings were bad, and that they, like her, were by no means the mistresses of their destinies.

Gloria told over to herself the people who had visited them in the gray house at Marietta. It had seemed at the time that they were always having company — she had indulged in an unspoken conviction that each guest was ever afterward slightly indebted to her. They owed her a sort of moral ten dollars apiece, and should she ever be in need she might, so to speak, borrow from them this visionary currency. But they were gone, scattered like chaff, mysteriously and subtly vanished in essence or in fact.

By Christmas, Gloria’s conviction that she should join Anthony had returned, no longer as a sudden emotion, but as a recurrent need. She decided to write him word of her coming, but postponed the announcement upon the advice of Mr. Haight, who expected almost weekly that the case was coming up for trial.

One day, early in January, as she was walking on Fifth Avenue, bright now with uniforms and hung with the flags of the virtuous nations, she met Rachael Barnes, whom she had not seen for nearly a year. Even Rachael, whom she had grown to dislike, was a relief from ennui, and together they went to the Ritz for tea.

After a second cocktail they became enthusiastic. They liked each other. They talked about their husbands, Rachael in that tone of public vainglory, with private reservations, in which wives are wont to speak.

“Rodman’s abroad in the Quartermaster Corps. He’s a captain. He was bound he would go, and he didn’t think he could get into anything else.”

“Anthony’s in the Infantry.” The words in their relation to the cocktail gave Gloria a sort of glow. With each sip she approached a warm and comforting patriotism.

“By the way,” said Rachael half an hour later, as they were leaving, “can’t you come up to dinner to-morrow night? I’m having two awfully sweet officers who are just going overseas. I think we ought to do all we can to make it attractive for them.”

Gloria accepted gladly. She took down the address — recognizing by its number a fashionable apartment building on Park Avenue.

“It’s been awfully good to have seen you, Rachael.”

“It’s been wonderful. I’ve wanted to.”

With these three sentences a certain night in Marietta two summers before, when Anthony and Rachael had been unnecessarily attentive to each other, was forgiven — Gloria forgave Rachael, Rachael forgave Gloria. Also it was forgiven that Rachael had been witness to the greatest disaster in the lives of Mr. and Mrs. Anthony Patch —

Compromising with events time moves along.

THE WILES OF CAPTAIN COLLINS

The two officers were captains of the popular craft, machine gunnery. At dinner they referred to themselves with conscious boredom as members of the “Suicide Club” — in those days every recondite branch of the service referred to itself as the Suicide Club. One of the captains — Rachael’s captain, Gloria observed — was a tall horsy man of thirty with a pleasant mustache and ugly teeth. The other, Captain Collins, was chubby, pink-faced, and inclined to laugh with abandon every time he caught Gloria’s eye. He took an immediate fancy to her, and throughout dinner showered her with inane compliments. With her second glass of champagne Gloria decided that for the first time in months she was thoroughly enjoying herself.

After dinner it was suggested that they all go somewhere and dance. The two officers supplied themselves with bottles of liquor from Rachael’s sideboard — a law forbade service to the military — and so equipped they went through innumerable fox trots in several glittering caravanseries along Broadway, faithfully alternating partners — while Gloria became more and more uproarious and more and more amusing to the pink-faced captain, who seldom bothered to remove his genial smile at all.

At eleven o’clock to her great surprise she was in the minority for staying out. The others wanted to return to Rachael’s apartment — to get some more liquor, they said. Gloria argued persistently that Captain Collins’s flask was half full — she had just seen it — then catching Rachael’s eye she received an unmistakable wink. She deduced, confusedly, that her hostess wanted to get rid of the officers and assented to being bundled into a taxicab outside.

Captain Wolf sat on the left with Rachael on his knees. Captain Collins sat in the middle, and as he settled himself he slipped his arm about Gloria’s shoulder. It rested there lifelessly for a moment and then tightened like a vise. He leaned over her.

“You’re awfully pretty,” he whispered.

“Thank you kindly, sir.” She was neither pleased nor annoyed. Before Anthony came so many arms had done likewise that it had become little more than a gesture, sentimental but without significance.

Up in Rachael’s long front room a low fire and two lamps shaded with orange silk gave all the light, so that the corners were full of deep and somnolent shadows. The hostess, moving about in a dark-figured gown of loose chiffon, seemed to accentuate the already sensuous atmosphere. For a while they were all four together, tasting the sandwiches that waited on the tea table — then Gloria found herself alone with Captain Collins on the fireside lounge; Rachael and Captain Wolf had withdrawn to the other side of the room, where they were conversing in subdued voices.

“I wish you weren’t married,” said Collins, his face a ludicrous travesty of “in all seriousness.”

“Why?” She held out her glass to be filled with a high-ball.

“Don’t drink any more,” he urged her, frowning.

“Why not?”

“You’d be nicer — if you didn’t.”

Gloria caught suddenly the intended suggestion of the remark, the atmosphere he was attempting to create. She wanted to laugh — yet she realized that there was nothing to laugh at. She had been enjoying the evening, and she had no desire to go home — at the same time it hurt her pride to be flirted with on just that level.

“Pour me another drink,” she insisted.

“Please — “

“Oh, don’t be ridiculous!” she cried in exasperation.

“Very well.” He yielded with ill grace.

Then his arm was about her again, and again she made no protest. But when his pink cheek came close she leaned away.

“You’re awfully sweet,” he said with an aimless air.

She began to sing softly, wishing now that he would take down his arm.

Suddenly her eye fell on an intimate scene across the room — Rachael and

Captain Wolf were engrossed in a long kiss. Gloria shivered

slightly — she knew not why…. Pink face approached again.

“You shouldn’t look at them,” he whispered. Almost immediately his other arm was around her … his breath was on her cheek. Again absurdity triumphed over disgust, and her laugh was a weapon that needed no edge of words.

“Oh, I thought you were a sport,” he was saying.

“What’s a sport?”

“Why, a person that likes to — to enjoy life.”

“Is kissing you generally considered a joyful affair?”

They were interrupted as Rachael and Captain Wolf appeared suddenly before them.

“It’s late, Gloria,” said Rachael — she was flushed and her hair was dishevelled. “You’d better stay here all night.”

For an instant Gloria thought the officers were being dismissed. Then she understood, and, understanding, got to her feet as casually as she was able.

Uncomprehendingly Rachael continued:

“You can have the room just off this one. I can lend you everything you need.”

Collins’s eyes implored her like a dog’s; Captain Wolf’s arm had settled familiarly around Rachael’s waist; they were waiting.

But the lure of promiscuity, colorful, various, labyrinthine, and ever a little odorous and stale, had no call or promise for Gloria. Had she so desired she would have remained, without hesitation, without regret; as it was she could face coolly the six hostile and offended eyes that followed her out into the hall with forced politeness and hollow words.

“He wasn’t even sport, enough to try to take me home,” she thought in the taxi, and then with a quick surge of resentment: “How utterly common!”

GALLANTRY

In February she had an experience of quite a different sort. Tudor Baird, an ancient flame, a young man whom at one time she had fully intended to marry, came to New York by way of the Aviation Corps, and called upon her. They went several times to the theatre, and within a week, to her great enjoyment, he was as much in love with her as ever. Quite deliberately she brought it about, realizing too late that she had done a mischief. He reached the point of sitting with her in miserable silence whenever they went out together.

A Scroll and Keys man at Yale, he possessed the correct reticences of a “good egg,” the correct notions of chivalry and noblesse oblige — and, of course but unfortunately, the correct biases and the correct lack of ideas — all those traits which Anthony had taught her to despise, but which, nevertheless, she rather admired. Unlike the majority of his type, she found that he was not a bore. He was handsome, witty in a light way, and when she was with him she felt that because of some quality he possessed — call it stupidity, loyalty, sentimentality, or something not quite as definite as any of the three — he would have done anything in his power to please her.

He told her this among other things, very correctly and with a ponderous manliness that masked a real suffering. Loving him not at all she grew sorry for him and kissed him sentimentally one night because he was so charming, a relic of a vanishing generation which lived a priggish and graceful illusion and was being replaced by less gallant fools. Afterward she was glad she had kissed him, for next day when his plane fell fifteen hundred feet at Mineola a piece of a gasolene engine smashed through his heart.

GLORIA ALONE

When Mr. Haight told her that the trial would not take place until autumn she decided that without telling Anthony she would go into the movies. When he saw her successful, both histrionically and financially, when he saw that she could have her will of Joseph Bloeckman, yielding nothing in return, he would lose his silly prejudices. She lay awake half one night planning her career and enjoying her successes in anticipation, and the next morning she called up “Films Par Excellence.” Mr. Bloeckman was in Europe.

But the idea had gripped her so strongly this time that she decided to go the rounds of the moving picture employment agencies. As so often had been the case, her sense of smell worked against her good intentions. The employment agency smelt as though it had been dead a very long time. She waited five minutes inspecting her unprepossessing competitors — then she walked briskly out into the farthest recesses of Central Park and remained so long that she caught a cold. She was trying to air the employment agency out of her walking suit.

In the spring she began to gather from Anthony’s letters — not from any one in particular but from their culminative effect — that he did not want her to come South. Curiously repeated excuses that seemed to haunt him by their very insufficiency occurred with Freudian regularity. He set them down in each letter as though he feared he had forgotten them the last time, as though it were desperately necessary to impress her with them. And the dilutions of his letters with affectionate diminutives began to be mechanical and unspontaneous — almost as though, having completed the letter, he had looked it over and literally stuck them in, like epigrams in an Oscar Wilde play. She jumped to the solution, rejected it, was angry and depressed by turns — finally she shut her mind to it proudly, and allowed an increasing coolness to creep into her end of the correspondence.

Of late she had found a good deal to occupy her attention. Several aviators whom she had met through Tudor Baird came into New York to see her and two other ancient beaux turned up, stationed at CampDix. As these men were ordered overseas they, so to speak, handed her down to their friends. But after another rather disagreeable experience with a potential Captain Collins she made it plain that when any one was introduced to her he should be under no misapprehensions as to her status and personal intentions.

When summer came she learned, like Anthony, to watch the officers’ casualty list, taking a sort of melancholy pleasure in hearing of the death of some one with whom she had once danced a german and in identifying by name the younger brothers of former suitors — thinking, as the drive toward Paris progressed, that here at length went the world to inevitable and well-merited destruction.

She was twenty-seven. Her birthday fled by scarcely noticed. Years before it had frightened her when she became twenty, to some extent when she reached twenty-six — but now she looked in the glass with calm self-approval seeing the British freshness of her complexion and her figure boyish and slim as of old.

She tried not to think of Anthony. It was as though she were writing to a stranger. She told her friends that he had been made a corporal and was annoyed when they were politely unimpressed. One night she wept because she was sorry for him — had he been even slightly responsive she would have gone to him without hesitation on the first train-whatever he was doing he needed to be taken care of spiritually, and she felt that now she would be able to do even that. Recently, without his continual drain upon her moral strength she found herself wonderfully revived. Before he left she had been inclined through sheer association to brood on her wasted opportunities — now she returned to her normal state of mind, strong, disdainful, existing each day for each day’s worth. She bought a doll and dressed it; one week she wept over “Ethan Frome”; the next she revelled in some novels of Galsworthy’s, whom she liked for his power of recreating, by spring in darkness, that illusion of young romantic love to which women look forever forward and forever back.

In October Anthony’s letters multiplied, became almost frantic — then suddenly ceased. For a worried month it needed all her powers of control to refrain from leaving immediately for Mississippi. Then a telegram told her that he had been in the hospital and that she could expect him in New York within ten days. Like a figure in a dream he came back into her life across the ballroom on that November evening — and all through long hours that held familiar gladness she took him close to her breast, nursing an illusion of happiness and security she had not thought that she would know again.

DISCOMFITURE OF THE GENERALS

After a week Anthony’s regiment went back to the Mississippi camp to be discharged. The officers shut themselves up in the compartments on the Pullman cars and drank the whiskey they had bought in New York, and in the coaches the soldiers got as drunk as possible also — and pretended whenever the train stopped at a village that they were just returned from France, where they had practically put an end to the German army. As they all wore overseas caps and claimed that they had not had time to have their gold service stripes sewed on, the yokelry of the seaboard were much impressed and asked them how they liked the trenches — to which they replied “Oh, boy!” with great smacking of tongues and shaking of heads. Some one took a piece of chalk and scrawled on the side of the train, “We won the war — now we’re going home,” and the officers laughed and let it stay. They were all getting what swagger they could out of this ignominious return.

As they rumbled on toward camp, Anthony was uneasy lest he should find Dot awaiting him patiently at the station. To his relief he neither saw nor heard anything of her and thinking that were she still in town she would certainly attempt to communicate with him, he concluded that she had gone — whither he neither knew nor cared. He wanted only to return to Gloria — Gloria reborn and wonderfully alive. When eventually he was discharged he left his company on the rear of a great truck with a crowd who had given tolerant, almost sentimental, cheers for their officers, especially for Captain Dunning. The captain, on his part, had addressed them with tears in his eyes as to the pleasure, etc., and the work, etc., and time not wasted, etc., and duty, etc. It was very dull and human; having given ear to it Anthony, whose mind was freshened by his week in New York, renewed his deep loathing for the military profession and all it connoted. In their childish hearts two out of every three professional officers considered that wars were made for armies and not armies for wars. He rejoiced to see general and field-officers riding desolately about the barren camp deprived of their commands. He rejoiced to hear the men in his company laugh scornfully at the inducements tendered them to remain in the army. They were to attend “schools.” He knew what these “schools” were.

Two days later he was with Gloria in New York.

ANOTHER WINTER

Late one February afternoon Anthony came into the apartment and groping through the little hall, pitch-dark in the winter dusk, found Gloria sitting by the window. She turned as he came in.

“What did Mr. Haight have to say?” she asked listlessly.

“Nothing,” he answered, “usual thing. Next month, perhaps.”

She looked at him closely; her ear attuned to his voice caught the slightest thickness in the dissyllable.

“You’ve been drinking,” she remarked dispassionately.

“Couple glasses.”

“Oh.”

He yawned in the armchair and there was a moment’s silence between them.

Then she demanded suddenly:

“Did you go to Mr. Haight? Tell me the truth.”

“No.” He smiled weakly. “As a matter of fact I didn’t have time.”

“I thought you didn’t go…. He sent for you.”

“I don’t give a damn. I’m sick of waiting around his office. You’d think he was doing me a favor.” He glanced at Gloria as though expecting moral support, but she had turned back to her contemplation of the dubious and unprepossessing out-of-doors.

“I feel rather weary of life to-day,” he offered tentatively. Still she was silent. “I met a fellow and we talked in the Biltmore bar.”

The dusk had suddenly deepened but neither of them made any move to turn on the lights. Lost in heaven knew what contemplation, they sat there until a flurry of snow drew a languid sigh from Gloria.

“What’ve you been doing?” he asked, finding the silence oppressive.

“Reading a magazine — all full of idiotic articles by prosperous authors about how terrible it is for poor people to buy silk shirts. And while I was reading it I could think of nothing except how I wanted a gray squirrel coat — and how we can’t afford one.”

“Yes, we can.”

“Oh, no.”

“Oh, yes! If you want a fur coat you can have one.”

Her voice coming through the dark held an implication of scorn.

“You mean we can sell another bond?”

“If necessary. I don’t want to go without things. We have spent a lot, though, since I’ve been back.”

“Oh, shut up!” she said in irritation.

“Why?”

“Because I’m sick and tired of hearing you talk about what we’ve spent or what we’ve done. You came back two months ago and we’ve been on some sort of a party practically every night since. We’ve both wanted to go out, and we’ve gone. Well, you haven’t heard me complain, have you? But all you do is whine, whine, whine. I don’t care any more what we do or what becomes of us and at least I’m consistent. But I will not tolerate your complaining and calamity-howling —  — “

“You’re not very pleasant yourself sometimes, you know.”

“I’m under no obligations to be. You’re not making any attempt to make things different.”

“But I am — “

“Huh! Seems to me I’ve heard that before. This morning you weren’t going to touch another thing to drink until you’d gotten a position. And you didn’t even have the spunk to go to Mr. Haight when he sent for you about the suit.”

Anthony got to his feet and switched on the lights.

“See here!” he cried, blinking, “I’m getting sick of that sharp tongue of yours.”

“Well, what are you going to do about it?”

“Do you think I’m particularly happy?” he continued, ignoring her question. “Do you think I don’t know we’re not living as we ought to?”

In an instant Gloria stood trembling beside him.

“I won’t stand it!” she burst out. “I won’t be lectured to. You and your suffering! You’re just a pitiful weakling and you always have been!”

They faced one another idiotically, each of them unable to impress the other, each of them tremendously, achingly, bored. Then she went into the bedroom and shut the door behind her.

His return had brought into the foreground all their pre-bellum exasperations. Prices had risen alarmingly and in perverse ratio their income had shrunk to a little over half of its original size. There had been the large retainer’s fee to Mr. Haight; there were stocks bought at one hundred, now down to thirty and forty and other investments that were not paying at all. During the previous spring Gloria had been given the alternative of leaving the apartment or of signing a year’s lease at two hundred and twenty-five a month. She had signed it. Inevitably as the necessity for economy had increased they found themselves as a pair quite unable to save. The old policy of prevarication was resorted to. Weary of their incapabilities they chattered of what they would do — oh — to-morrow, of how they would “stop going on parties” and of how Anthony would go to work. But when dark came down Gloria, accustomed to an engagement every night, would feel the ancient restlessness creeping over her. She would stand in the doorway of the bedroom, chewing furiously at her fingers and sometimes meeting Anthony’s eyes as he glanced up from his book. Then the telephone, and her nerves would relax, she would answer it with ill-concealed eagerness. Some one was coming up “for just a few minutes” — and oh, the weariness of pretense, the appearance of the wine table, the revival of their jaded spirits — and the awakening, like the mid-point of a sleepless night in which they moved.

As the winter passed with the march of the returning troops along Fifth Avenue they became more and more aware that since Anthony’s return their relations had entirely changed. After that reflowering of tenderness and passion each of them had returned into some solitary dream unshared by the other and what endearments passed between them passed, it seemed, from empty heart to empty heart, echoing hollowly the departure of what they knew at last was gone.

Anthony had again made the rounds of the metropolitan newspapers and had again been refused encouragement by a motley of office boys, telephone girls, and city editors. The word was: “We’re keeping any vacancies open for our own men who are still in France.” Then, late in March, his eye fell on an advertisement in the morning paper and in consequence he found at last the semblance of an occupation.

* * * * *

YOU CAN SELL!!!

Why not earn while you learn?

Our salesmen make $50-$200 weekly.

* * * * *

There followed an address on Madison Avenue, and instructions to appear at one o’clock that afternoon. Gloria, glancing over his shoulder after one of their usual late breakfasts, saw him regarding it idly.

“Why don’t you try it?” she suggested.

“Oh — it’s one of these crazy schemes.”

“It might not be. At least it’d be experience.”

At her urging he went at one o’clock to the appointed address, where he found himself one of a dense miscellany of men waiting in front of the door. They ranged from a messenger-boy evidently misusing his company’s time to an immemorial individual with a gnarled body and a gnarled cane. Some of the men were seedy, with sunken cheeks and puffy pink eyes — others were young; possibly still in high school. After a jostled fifteen minutes during which they all eyed one another with apathetic suspicion there appeared a smart young shepherd clad in a “waist-line” suit and wearing the manner of an assistant rector who herded them up-stairs into a large room, which resembled a school-room and contained innumerable desks. Here the prospective salesmen sat down — and again waited. After an interval a platform at the end of the hall was clouded with half a dozen sober but sprightly men who, with one exception, took seats in a semicircle facing the audience.

The exception was the man who seemed the soberest, the most sprightly and the youngest of the lot, and who advanced to the front of the platform. The audience scrutinized him hopefully. He was rather small and rather pretty, with the commercial rather than the thespian sort of prettiness. He had straight blond bushy brows and eyes that were almost preposterously honest, and as he reached the edge of his rostrum he seemed to throw these eyes out into the audience, simultaneously extending his arm with two fingers outstretched. Then while he rocked himself to a state of balance an expectant silence settled over the hall. With perfect assurance the young man had taken his listeners in hand and his words when they came were steady and confident and of the school of “straight from the shoulder.”

“Men!” — he began, and paused. The word died with a prolonged echo at the end of the hall, the faces regarding him, hopefully, cynically, wearily, were alike arrested, engrossed. Six hundred eyes were turned slightly upward. With an even graceless flow that reminded Anthony of the rolling of bowling balls he launched himself into the sea of exposition.

“This bright and sunny morning you picked up your favorite newspaper and you found an advertisement which made the plain, unadorned statement that you could sell. That was all it said — it didn’t say ‘what,’ it didn’t say ‘how,’ it didn’t say ‘why.’ It just made one single solitary assertion that you and you and you” — business of pointing — “could sell. Now my job isn’t to make a success of you, because every man is born a success, he makes himself a failure; it’s not to teach you how to talk, because each man is a natural orator and only makes himself a clam; my business is to tell you one thing in a way that will make you know it — it’s to tell you that you and you and you have the heritage of money and prosperity waiting for you to come and claim it.”

At this point an Irishman of saturnine appearance rose from his desk near the rear of the hall and went out.

“That man thinks he’ll go look for it in the beer parlor around the corner. (Laughter.) He won’t find it there. Once upon a time I looked for it there myself (laughter), but that was before I did what every one of you men no matter how young or how old, how poor or how rich (a faint ripple of satirical laughter), can do. It was before I found — myself!

“Now I wonder if any of you men know what a ‘Heart Talk’ is. A ‘Heart Talk’ is a little book in which I started, about five years ago, to write down what I had discovered were the principal reasons for a man’s failure and the principal reasons for a man’s success — from John D. Rockerfeller back to John D. Napoleon (laughter), and before that, back in the days when Abel sold his birthright for a mess of pottage. There are now one hundred of these ‘Heart Talks.’ Those of you who are sincere, who are interested in our proposition, above all who are dissatisfied with the way things are breaking for you at present will be handed one to take home with you as you go out yonder door this afternoon.

“Now in my own pocket I have four letters just received concerning ‘Heart Talks.’ These letters have names signed to them that are familiar in every house-hold in the U.S.A. Listen to this one from Detroit:

* * * * *

“DEAR MR. CARLETON:

“I want to order three thousand more copies of ‘Heart Talks’ for distribution among my salesmen. They have done more for getting work out of the men than any bonus proposition ever considered. I read them myself constantly, and I desire to heartily congratulate you on getting at the roots of the biggest problem that faces our generation to-day — the problem of salesmanship. The rock bottom on which the country is founded is the problem of salesmanship. With many felicitations I am

“Yours very cordially,

“HENRY W. TERRAL.”

* * * * *

He brought the name out in three long booming triumphancies — pausing for it to produce its magical effect. Then he read two more letters, one from a manufacturer of vacuum cleaners and one from the president of the Great Northern Doily Company.

“And now,” he continued, “I’m going to tell you in a few words what the proposition is that’s going to make those of you who go into it in the right spirit. Simply put, it’s this: ‘Heart Talks’ have been incorporated as a company. We’re going to put these little pamphlets into the hands of every big business organization, every salesman, and every man who knows — I don’t say ‘thinks,’ I say ‘knows’ — that he can sell! We are offering some of the stock of the ‘Heart Talks’ concern upon the market, and in order that the distribution may be as wide as possible, and in order also that we can furnish a living, concrete, flesh-and-blood example of what salesmanship is, or rather what it may be, we’re going to give those of you who are the real thing a chance to sell that stock. Now, I don’t care what you’ve tried to sell before or how you’ve tried to sell it. It don’t matter how old you are or how young you are. I only want to know two things — first, do you want success, and, second, will you work for it?

“My name is Sammy Carleton. Not ‘Mr.’ Carleton, but just plain Sammy. I’m a regular no-nonsense man with no fancy frills about me. I want you to call me Sammy.

“Now this is all I’m going to say to you to-day. To-morrow I want those of you who have thought it over and have read the copy of ‘Heart Talks’ which will be given to you at the door, to come back to this same room at this same time, then we’ll, go into the proposition further and I’ll explain to you what I’ve found the principles of success to be. I’m going to make you feel that you and you and you can sell!”

Mr. Carleton’s voice echoed for a moment through the hall and then died away. To the stamping of many feet Anthony was pushed and jostled with the crowd out of the room.

FURTHER ADVENTURES WITH “HEART TALKS”

With an accompaniment of ironic laughter Anthony told Gloria the story of his commercial adventure. But she listened without amusement.

“You’re going to give up again?” she demanded coldly.

“Why — you don’t expect me to — “

“I never expected anything of you.”

He hesitated.

“Well — I can’t see the slightest benefit in laughing myself sick over this sort of affair. If there’s anything older than the old story, it’s the new twist.”

It required an astonishing amount of moral energy on Gloria’s part to intimidate him into returning, and when he reported next day, somewhat depressed from his perusal of the senile bromides skittishly set forth in “Heart Talks on Ambition,” he found only fifty of the original three hundred awaiting the appearance of the vital and compelling Sammy Carleton. Mr. Carleton’s powers of vitality and compulsion were this time exercised in elucidating that magnificent piece of speculation — how to sell. It seemed that the approved method was to state one’s proposition and then to say not “And now, will you buy?” — this was not the way — oh, no! — the way was to state one’s proposition and then, having reduced one’s adversary to a state of exhaustion, to deliver oneself of the categorical imperative: “Now see here! You’ve taken up my time explaining this matter to you. You’ve admitted my points — all I want to ask is how many do you want?”

As Mr. Carleton piled assertion upon assertion Anthony began to feel a sort of disgusted confidence in him. The man appeared to know what he was talking about. Obviously prosperous, he had risen to the position of instructing others. It did not occur to Anthony that the type of man who attains commercial success seldom knows how or why, and, as in his grandfather’s case, when he ascribes reasons, the reasons are generally inaccurate and absurd.

Anthony noted that of the numerous old men who had answered the original advertisement, only two had returned, and that among the thirty odd who assembled on the third day to get actual selling instructions from Mr. Carleton, only one gray head was in evidence. These thirty were eager converts; with their mouths they followed the working of Mr. Carleton’s mouth; they swayed in their seats with enthusiasm, and in the intervals of his talk they spoke to each other in tense approving whispers. Yet of the chosen few who, in the words of Mr. Carleton, “were determined to get those deserts that rightly and truly belonged to them,” less than half a dozen combined even a modicum of personal appearance with that great gift of being a “pusher.” But they were told that they were all natural pushers — it was merely necessary that they should believe with a sort of savage passion in what they were selling. He even urged each one to buy some stock himself, if possible, in order to increase his own sincerity.

On the fifth day then, Anthony sallied into the street with all the sensations of a man wanted by the police. Acting according to instructions he selected a tall office building in order that he might ride to the top story and work downward, stopping in every office that had a name on the door. But at the last minute he hesitated. Perhaps it would be more practicable to acclimate himself to the chilly atmosphere which he felt was awaiting him by trying a few offices on, say, Madison Avenue. He went into an arcade that seemed only semi-prosperous, and seeing a sign which read Percy B. Weatherbee, Architect, he opened the door heroically and entered. A starchy young woman looked up questioningly.

“Can I see Mr. Weatherbee?” He wondered if his voice sounded tremulous.

She laid her hand tentatively on the telephone-receiver.

“What’s the name, please?”

“He wouldn’t — ah — know me. He wouldn’t know my name.”

“What’s your business with him? You an insurance agent?”

“Oh, no, nothing like that!” denied Anthony hurriedly. “Oh, no. It’s a — it’s a personal matter.” He wondered if he should have said this. It had all sounded so simple when Mr. Carleton had enjoined his flock:

“Don’t allow yourself to be kept out! Show them you’ve made up your mind to talk to them, and they’ll listen.”

The girl succumbed to Anthony’s pleasant, melancholy face, and in a moment the door to the inner room opened and admitted a tall, splay-footed man with slicked hair. He approached Anthony with ill-concealed impatience.

“You wanted to see me on a personal matter?”

Anthony quailed.

“I wanted to talk to you,” he said defiantly.

“About what?”

“It’ll take some time to explain.”

“Well, what’s it about?” Mr. Weatherbee’s voice indicated rising irritation.

Then Anthony, straining at each word, each syllable, began:

“I don’t know whether or not you’ve ever heard of a series of pamphlets called ‘Heart Talks’ — “

“Good grief!” cried Percy B. Weatherbee, Architect, “are you trying to touch my heart?”

“No, it’s business. ‘Heart Talks’ have been incorporated and we’re putting some shares on the market — “

His voice faded slowly off, harassed by a fixed and contemptuous stare from his unwilling prey. For another minute he struggled on, increasingly sensitive, entangled in his own words. His confidence oozed from him in great retching emanations that seemed to be sections of his own body. Almost mercifully Percy B. Weatherbee, Architect, terminated the interview:

“Good grief!” he exploded in disgust, “and you call that a personal matter!” He whipped about and strode into his private office, banging the door behind him. Not daring to look at the stenographer, Anthony in some shameful and mysterious way got himself from the room. Perspiring profusely he stood in the hall wondering why they didn’t come and arrest him; in every hurried look he discerned infallibly a glance of scorn.

After an hour and with the help of two strong whiskies he brought himself up to another attempt. He walked into a plumber’s shop, but when he mentioned his business the plumber began pulling on his coat in a great hurry, gruffly announcing that he had to go to lunch. Anthony remarked politely that it was futile to try to sell a man anything when he was hungry, and the plumber heartily agreed.

This episode encouraged Anthony; he tried to think that had the plumber not been bound for lunch he would at least have listened.

Passing by a few glittering and formidable bazaars he entered a grocery store. A talkative proprietor told him that before buying any stocks he was going to see how the armistice affected the market. To Anthony this seemed almost unfair. In Mr. Carleton’s salesman’s Utopia the only reason prospective buyers ever gave for not purchasing stock was that they doubted it to be a promising investment. Obviously a man in that state was almost ludicrously easy game, to be brought down merely by the judicious application of the correct selling points. But these men — why, actually they weren’t considering buying anything at all.

Anthony took several more drinks before he approached his fourth man, a real-estate agent; nevertheless, he was floored with a coup as decisive as a syllogism. The real-estate agent said that he had three brothers in the investment business. Viewing himself as a breaker-up of homes Anthony apologized and went out.

After another drink he conceived the brilliant plan of selling the stock to the bartenders along Lexington Avenue. This occupied several hours, for it was necessary to take a few drinks in each place in order to get the proprietor in the proper frame of mind to talk business. But the bartenders one and all contended that if they had any money to buy bonds they would not be bartenders. It was as though they had all convened and decided upon that rejoinder. As he approached a dark and soggy five o’clock he found that they were developing a still more annoying tendency to turn him off with a jest.

At five, then, with a tremendous effort at concentration he decided that he must put more variety into his canvassing. He selected a medium-sized delicatessen store, and went in. He felt, illuminatingly, that the thing to do was to cast a spell not only over the storekeeper but over all the customers as well — and perhaps through the psychology of the herd instinct they would buy as an astounded and immediately convinced whole.

“Af’ernoon,” he began in a loud thick voice. “Ga l’il prop’sition.”

If he had wanted silence he obtained it. A sort of awe descended upon the half-dozen women marketing and upon the gray-haired ancient who in cap and apron was slicing chicken.

Anthony pulled a batch of papers from his flapping briefcase and waved them cheerfully.

“Buy a bon’,” he suggested, “good as liberty bon’!” The phrase pleased him and he elaborated upon it. “Better’n liberty bon’. Every one these bon’s worth two liberty bon’s.” His mind made a hiatus and skipped to his peroration, which he delivered with appropriate gestures, these being somewhat marred by the necessity of clinging to the counter with one or both hands.

“Now see here. You taken up my time. I don’t want know why you won’t buy. I just want you say why. Want you say how many!”

At this point they should have approached him with check-books and fountain pens in hand. Realizing that they must have missed a cue Anthony, with the instincts of an actor, went back and repeated his finale.

“Now see here! You taken up my time. You followed prop’sition. You agreed ‘th reasonin’? Now, all I want from you is, how many lib’ty bon’s?”

“See here!” broke in a new voice. A portly man whose face was adorned with symmetrical scrolls of yellow hair had come out of a glass cage in the rear of the store and was bearing down upon Anthony. “See here, you!”

“How many?” repeated the salesman sternly. “You taken up my time — “

“Hey, you!” cried the proprietor, “I’ll have you taken up by the police.”

“You mos’ cert’nly won’t!” returned Anthony with fine defiance. “All I want know is how many.”

From here and there in the store went up little clouds of comment and expostulation.

“How terrible!”

“He’s a raving maniac.”

“He’s disgracefully drunk.”

The proprietor grasped Anthony’s arm sharply.

“Get out, or I’ll call a policeman.”

Some relics of rationality moved Anthony to nod and replace his bonds clumsily in the case.

“How many?” he reiterated doubtfully.

“The whole force if necessary!” thundered his adversary, his yellow mustache trembling fiercely.

“Sell ‘em all a bon’.”

With this Anthony turned, bowed gravely to his late auditors, and wabbled from the store. He found a taxicab at the corner and rode home to the apartment. There he fell sound asleep on the sofa, and so Gloria found him, his breath filling the air with an unpleasant pungency, his hand still clutching his open brief case.

Except when Anthony was drinking, his range of sensation had become less than that of a healthy old man and when prohibition came in July he found that, among those who could afford it, there was more drinking than ever before. One’s host now brought out a bottle upon the slightest pretext. The tendency to display liquor was a manifestation of the same instinct that led a man to deck his wife with jewels. To have liquor was a boast, almost a badge of respectability.

In the mornings Anthony awoke tired, nervous, and worried. Halcyon summer twilights and the purple chill of morning alike left him unresponsive. Only for a brief moment every day in the warmth and renewed life of a first high-ball did his mind turn to those opalescent dreams of future pleasure — the mutual heritage of the happy and the damned. But this was only for a little while. As he grew drunker the dreams faded and he became a confused spectre, moving in odd crannies of his own mind, full of unexpected devices, harshly contemptuous at best and reaching sodden and dispirited depths. One night in June he had quarrelled violently with Maury over a matter of the utmost triviality. He remembered dimly next morning that it had been about a broken pint bottle of champagne. Maury had told him to sober up and Anthony’s feelings had been hurt, so with an attempted gesture of dignity he had risen from the table and seizing Gloria’s arm half led, half shamed her into a taxicab outside, leaving Maury with three dinners ordered and tickets for the opera.

This sort of semi-tragic fiasco had become so usual that when they occurred he was no longer stirred into making amends. If Gloria protested — and of late she was more likely to sink into contemptuous silence — he would either engage in a bitter defense of himself or else stalk dismally from the apartment. Never since the incident on the station platform at Redgate had he laid his hands on her in anger — though he was withheld often only by some instinct that itself made him tremble with rage. Just as he still cared more for her than for any other creature, so did he more intensely and frequently hate her.

So far, the judges of the Appellate Division had failed to hand down a decision, but after another postponement they finally affirmed the decree of the lower court — two justices dissenting. A notice of appeal was served upon Edward Shuttleworth. The case was going to the court of last resort, and they were in for another interminable wait. Six months, perhaps a year. It had grown enormously unreal to them, remote and uncertain as heaven.

Throughout the previous winter one small matter had been a subtle and omnipresent irritant — the question of Gloria’s gray fur coat. At that time women enveloped in long squirrel wraps could be seen every few yards along Fifth Avenue. The women were converted to the shape of tops. They seemed porcine and obscene; they resembled kept women in the concealing richness, the feminine animality of the garment. Yet — Gloria wanted a gray squirrel coat.

Discussing the matter — or, rather, arguing it, for even more than in the first year of their marriage did every discussion take the form of bitter debate full of such phrases as “most certainly,” “utterly outrageous,” “it’s so, nevertheless,” and the ultra-emphatic “regardless” — they concluded that they could not afford it. And so gradually it began to stand as a symbol of their growing financial anxiety.

To Gloria the shrinkage of their income was a remarkable phenomenon, without explanation or precedent — that it could happen at all within the space of five years seemed almost an intended cruelty, conceived and executed by a sardonic God. When they were married seventy-five hundred a year had seemed ample for a young couple, especially when augmented by the expectation of many millions. Gloria had failed to realize that it was decreasing not only in amount but in purchasing power until the payment of Mr. Haight’s retaining fee of fifteen thousand dollars made the fact suddenly and startlingly obvious. When Anthony was drafted they had calculated their income at over four hundred a month, with the dollar even then decreasing in value, but on his return to New York they discovered an even more alarming condition of affairs. They were receiving only forty-five hundred a year from their investments. And though the suit over the will moved ahead of them like a persistent mirage and the financial danger-mark loomed up in the near distance they found, nevertheless, that living within their income was impossible.

So Gloria went without the squirrel coat and every day upon Fifth Avenue she was a little conscious of her well-worn, half-length leopard skin, now hopelessly old-fashioned. Every other month they sold a bond, yet when the bills were paid it left only enough to be gulped down hungrily by their current expenses. Anthony’s calculations showed that their capital would last about seven years longer. So Gloria’s heart was very bitter, for in one week, on a prolonged hysterical party during which Anthony whimsically divested himself of coat, vest, and shirt in a theatre and was assisted out by a posse of ushers, they spent twice what the gray squirrel coat would have cost.

It was November, Indian summer rather, and a warm, warm night — which was unnecessary, for the work of the summer was done. Babe Ruth had smashed the home-run record for the first time and Jack Dempsey had broken Jess Willard’s cheek-bone out in Ohio. Over in Europe the usual number of children had swollen stomachs from starvation, and the diplomats were at their customary business of making the world safe for new wars. In New York City the proletariat were being “disciplined,” and the odds on Harvard were generally quoted at five to three. Peace had come down in earnest, the beginning of new days.

Up in the bedroom of the apartment on Fifty-seventh Street Gloria lay upon her bed and tossed from side to side, sitting up at intervals to throw off a superfluous cover and once asking Anthony, who was lying awake beside her, to bring her a glass of ice-water. “Be sure and put ice in it,” she said with insistence; “it isn’t cold enough the way it comes from the faucet.”

Looking through the frail curtains she could see the rounded moon over the roofs and beyond it on the sky the yellow glow from Times Square — and watching the two incongruous lights, her mind worked over an emotion, or rather an interwoven complex of emotions, that had occupied it through the day, and the day before that and back to the last time when she could remember having thought clearly and consecutively about anything — which must have been while Anthony was in the army.

She would be twenty-nine in February. The month assumed an ominous and inescapable significance — making her wonder, through these nebulous half-fevered hours whether after all she had not wasted her faintly tired beauty, whether there was such a thing as use for any quality bounded by a harsh and inevitable mortality.

Years before, when she was twenty-one, she had written in her diary: “Beauty is only to be admired, only to be loved-to be harvested carefully and then flung at a chosen lover like a gift of roses. It seems to me, so far as I can judge clearly at all, that my beauty should be used like that….”

And now, all this November day, all this desolate day, under a sky dirty and white, Gloria had been thinking that perhaps she had been wrong. To preserve the integrity of her first gift she had looked no more for love. When the first flame and ecstasy had grown dim, sunk down, departed, she had begun preserving — what? It puzzled her that she no longer knew just what she was preserving — a sentimental memory or some profound and fundamental concept of honor. She was doubting now whether there had been any moral issue involved in her way of life — to walk unworried and unregretful along the gayest of all possible lanes and to keep her pride by being always herself and doing what it seemed beautiful that she should do. From the first little boy in an Eton collar whose “girl” she had been, down to the latest casual man whose eyes had grown alert and appreciative as they rested upon her, there was needed only that matchless candor she could throw into a look or clothe with an inconsequent clause — for she had talked always in broken clauses — to weave about her immeasurable illusions, immeasurable distances, immeasurable light. To create souls in men, to create fine happiness and fine despair she must remain deeply proud — proud to be inviolate, proud also to be melting, to be passionate and possessed.

She knew that in her breast she had never wanted children. The reality, the earthiness, the intolerable sentiment of child-bearing, the menace to her beauty — had appalled her. She wanted to exist only as a conscious flower, prolonging and preserving itself. Her sentimentality could cling fiercely to her own illusions, but her ironic soul whispered that motherhood was also the privilege of the female baboon. So her dreams were of ghostly children only — the early, the perfect symbols of her early and perfect love for Anthony.

In the end then, her beauty was all that never failed her. She had never seen beauty like her own. What it meant ethically or aesthetically faded before the gorgeous concreteness of her pink-and-white feet, the clean perfectness of her body, and the baby mouth that was like the material symbol of a kiss.

She would be twenty-nine in February. As the long night waned she grew supremely conscious that she and beauty were going to make use of these next three months. At first she was not sure for what, but the problem resolved itself gradually into the old lure of the screen. She was in earnest now. No material want could have moved her as this fear moved her. No matter for Anthony, Anthony the poor in spirit, the weak and broken man with bloodshot eyes, for whom she still had moments of tenderness. No matter. She would be twenty-nine in February — a hundred days, so many days; she would go to Bloeckman to-morrow.

With the decision came relief. It cheered her that in some manner the illusion of beauty could be sustained, or preserved perhaps in celluloid after the reality had vanished. Well — to-morrow.

The next day she felt weak and ill. She tried to go out, and saved herself from collapse only by clinging to a mail box near the front door. The Martinique elevator boy helped her up-stairs, and she waited on the bed for Anthony’s return without energy to unhook her brassiere.

For five days she was down with influenza, which, just as the month turned the corner into winter, ripened into double pneumonia. In the feverish perambulations of her mind she prowled through a house of bleak unlighted rooms hunting for her mother. All she wanted was to be a little girl, to be efficiently taken care of by some yielding yet superior power, stupider and steadier than herself. It seemed that the only lover she had ever wanted was a lover in a dream.

“ODI PROFANUM VULGUS”

One day in the midst of Gloria’s illness there occurred a curious incident that puzzled Miss McGovern, the trained nurse, for some time afterward. It was noon, but the room in which the patient lay was dark and quiet. Miss McGovern was standing near the bed mixing some medicine, when Mrs. Patch, who had apparently been sound asleep, sat up and began to speak vehemently:

“Millions of people,” she said, “swarming like rats, chattering like apes, smelling like all hell … monkeys! Or lice, I suppose. For one really exquisite palace … on Long Island, say — or even in Greenwich … for one palace full of pictures from the Old World and exquisite things — with avenues of trees and green lawns and a view of the blue sea, and lovely people about in slick dresses … I’d sacrifice a hundred thousand of them, a million of them.” She raised her hand feebly and snapped her fingers. “I care nothing for them — understand me?”

The look she bent upon Miss McGovern at the conclusion of this speech was curiously elfin, curiously intent. Then she gave a short little laugh polished with scorn, and tumbling backward fell off again to sleep.

Miss McGovern was bewildered. She wondered what were the hundred thousand things that Mrs. Patch would sacrifice for her palace. Dollars, she supposed — yet it had not sounded exactly like dollars.

THE MOVIES

It was February, seven days before her birthday, and the great snow that had filled up the cross-streets as dirt fills the cracks in a floor had turned to slush and was being escorted to the gutters by the hoses of the street-cleaning department. The wind, none the less bitter for being casual, whipped in through the open windows of the living room bearing with it the dismal secrets of the areaway and clearing the Patch apartment of stale smoke in its cheerless circulation.

Gloria, wrapped in a warm kimona, came into the chilly room and taking up the telephone receiver called Joseph Bloeckman.

“Do you mean Mr. Joseph Black?” demanded the telephone girl at “Films

Par Excellence.”

“Bloeckman, Joseph Bloeckman. B-l-o — “

“Mr. Joseph Bloeckman has changed his name to Black. Do you want him?”

“Why — yes.” She remembered nervously that she had once called him

“Blockhead” to his face.

His office was reached by courtesy of two additional female voices; the last was a secretary who took her name. Only with the flow through the transmitter of his own familiar but faintly impersonal tone did she realize that it had been three years since they had met. And he had changed his name to Black.

“Can you see me?” she suggested lightly. “It’s on a business matter, really. I’m going into the movies at last — if I can.”

“I’m awfully glad. I’ve always thought you’d like it.”

“Do you think you can get me a trial?” she demanded with the arrogance peculiar to all beautiful women, to all women who have ever at any time considered themselves beautiful.

He assured her that it was merely a question of when she wanted the trial. Any time? Well, he’d phone later in the day and let her know a convenient hour. The conversation closed with conventional padding on both sides. Then from three o’clock to five she sat close to the telephone — with no result.

But next morning came a note that contented and excited her:

* * * * *

My dear Gloria:

Just by luck a matter came to my attention that I think will be just suited to you. I would like to see you start with something that would bring you notice. At the same time if a very beautiful girl of your sort is put directly into a picture next to one of the rather shop-worn stars with which every company is afflicted, tongues would very likely wag. But there is a “flapper” part in a Percy B. Debris production that I think would be just suited to you and would bring you notice. Willa Sable plays opposite Gaston Mears in a sort of character part and your part I believe would be her younger sister.

Anyway Percy B. Debris who is directing the picture says if you’ll come to the studios day after to-morrow (Thursday) he will run off a test. If ten o’clock is suited to you I will meet you there at that time.

With all good wishes

Ever Faithfully

JOSEPH BLACK.

* * * * *

Gloria had decided that Anthony was to know nothing of this until she had obtained a definite position, and accordingly she was dressed and out of the apartment next morning before he awoke. Her mirror had given her, she thought, much the same account as ever. She wondered if there were any lingering traces of her sickness. She was still slightly under weight, and she had fancied, a few days before, that her cheeks were a trifle thinner — but she felt that those were merely transitory conditions and that on this particular day she looked as fresh as ever. She had bought and charged a new hat, and as the day was warm she had left the leopard skin coat at home.

At the “Films Par Excellence” studios she was announced over the telephone and told that Mr. Black would be down directly. She looked around her. Two girls were being shown about by a little fat man in a slash-pocket coat, and one of them had indicated a stack of thin parcels, piled breast-high against the wall, and extending along for twenty feet.

“That’s studio mail,” explained the fat man. “Pictures of the stars who are with ‘Films Par Excellence.’“

“Oh.”

“Each one’s autographed by Florence Kelley or Gaston Mears or Mack

Dodge — “ He winked confidentially. “At least when Minnie McGlook out in

SaukCenter gets the picture she wrote for, she thinks it’s

autographed.”

“Just a stamp?”

“Sure. It’d take ‘em a good eight-hour day to autograph half of ‘em.

They say Mary Pickford’s studio mail costs her fifty thousand a year.”

“Say!”

“Sure. Fifty thousand. But it’s the best kinda advertising there is — “

They drifted out of earshot and almost immediately Bloeckman appeared — Bloeckman, a dark suave gentleman, gracefully engaged in the middle forties, who greeted her with courteous warmth and told her she had not changed a bit in three years. He led the way into a great hall, as large as an armory and broken intermittently with busy sets and blinding rows of unfamiliar light. Each piece of scenery was marked in large white letters “Gaston Mears Company,” “Mack Dodge Company,” or simply “Films Par Excellence.”

“Ever been in a studio before?”

“Never have.”

She liked it. There was no heavy closeness of greasepaint, no scent of soiled and tawdry costumes which years before had revolted her behind the scenes of a musical comedy. This work was done in the clean mornings; the appurtenances seemed rich and gorgeous and new. On a set that was joyous with Manchu hangings a perfect Chinaman was going through a scene according to megaphone directions as the great glittering machine ground out its ancient moral tale for the edification of the national mind.

A red-headed man approached them and spoke with familiar deference to

Bloeckman, who answered:

“Hello, Debris. Want you to meet Mrs. Patch…. Mrs. Patch wants to go into pictures, as I explained to you…. All right, now, where do we go?”

Mr. Debris — the great Percy B. Debris, thought Gloria — showed them to a set which represented the interior of an office. Some chairs were drawn up around the camera, which stood in front of it, and the three of them sat down.

“Ever been in a studio before?” asked Mr. Debris, giving her a glance that was surely the quintessence of keenness. “No? Well, I’ll explain exactly what’s going to happen. We’re going to take what we call a test in order to see how your features photograph and whether you’ve got natural stage presence and how you respond to coaching. There’s no need to be nervous over it. I’ll just have the camera-man take a few hundred feet in an episode I’ve got marked here in the scenario. We can tell pretty much what we want to from that.”

He produced a typewritten continuity and explained to her the episode she was to enact. It developed that one Barbara Wainwright had been secretly married to the junior partner of the firm whose office was there represented. Entering the deserted office one day by accident she was naturally interested in seeing where her husband worked. The telephone rang and after some hesitation she answered it. She learned that her husband had been struck by an automobile and instantly killed. She was overcome. At first she was unable to realize the truth, but finally she succeeded in comprehending it, and went into a dead faint on the floor.

“Now that’s all we want,” concluded Mr. Debris. “I’m going to stand here and tell you approximately what to do, and you’re to act as though I wasn’t here, and just go on do it your own way. You needn’t be afraid we’re going to judge this too severely. We simply want to get a general idea of your screen personality.”

“I see.”

“You’ll find make-up in the room in back of the set. Go light on it.

Very little red.”

“I see,” repeated Gloria, nodding. She touched her lips nervously with the tip of her tongue.

THE TEST

As she came into the set through the real wooden door and closed it carefully behind her, she found herself inconveniently dissatisfied with her clothes. She should have bought a “misses’“ dress for the occasion — she could still wear them, and it might have been a good investment if it had accentuated her airy youth.

Her mind snapped sharply into the momentous present as Mr. Debris’s voice came from the glare of the white lights in front.

“You look around for your husband…. Now — you don’t see him … you’re curious about the office….”

She became conscious of the regular sound of the camera. It worried her. She glanced toward it involuntarily and wondered if she had made up her face correctly. Then, with a definite effort she forced herself to act — and she had never felt that the gestures of her body were so banal, so awkward, so bereft of grace or distinction. She strolled around the office, picking up articles here and there and looking at them inanely. Then she scrutinized the ceiling, the floor, and thoroughly inspected an inconsequential lead pencil on the desk. Finally, because she could think of nothing else to do, and less than nothing to express, she forced a smile.

“All right. Now the phone rings. Ting-a-ling-a-ling! Hesitate, and then answer it.”

She hesitated — and then, too quickly, she thought, picked up the receiver.

“Hello.”

Her voice was hollow and unreal. The words rang in the empty set like the ineffectualities of a ghost. The absurdities of their requirements appalled her — Did they expect that on an instant’s notice she could put herself in the place of this preposterous and unexplained character?

“… No … no…. Not yet! Now listen: ‘John Sumner has just been knocked over by an automobile and instantly killed!’“

Gloria let her baby mouth drop slowly open. Then:

“Now hang up! With a bang!”

She obeyed, clung to the table with her eyes wide and staring. At length she was feeling slightly encouraged and her confidence increased.

“My God!” she cried. Her voice was good, she thought. “Oh, my God!”

“Now faint.”

She collapsed forward to her knees and throwing her body outward on the ground lay without breathing.

“All right!” called Mr. Debris. “That’s enough, thank you. That’s plenty. Get up — that’s enough.”

Gloria arose, mustering her dignity and brushing off her skirt.

“Awful!” she remarked with a cool laugh, though her heart was bumping tumultuously. “Terrible, wasn’t it?”

“Did you mind it?” said Mr. Debris, smiling blandly. “Did it seem hard?

I can’t tell anything about it until I have it run off.”

“Of course not,” she agreed, trying to attach some sort of meaning to his remark — and failing. It was just the sort of thing he would have said had he been trying not to encourage her.

A few moments later she left the studio. Bloeckman had promised that she should hear the result of the test within the next few days. Too proud to force any definite comment she felt a baffling uncertainty and only now when the step had at last been taken did she realize how the possibility of a successful screen career had played in the back of her mind for the past three years. That night she tried to tell over to herself the elements that might decide for or against her. Whether or not she had used enough make-up worried her, and as the part was that of a girl of twenty, she wondered if she had not been just a little too grave. About her acting she was least of all satisfied. Her entrance had been abominable — in fact not until she reached the phone had she displayed a shred of poise — and then the test had been over. If they had only realized! She wished that she could try it again. A mad plan to call up in the morning and ask for a new trial took possession of her, and as suddenly faded. It seemed neither politic nor polite to ask another favor of Bloeckman.

The third day of waiting found her in a highly nervous condition. She had bitten the insides of her mouth until they were raw and smarting, and burnt unbearably when she washed them with listerine. She had quarrelled so persistently with Anthony that he had left the apartment in a cold fury. But because he was intimidated by her exceptional frigidity, he called up an hour afterward, apologized and said he was having dinner at the Amsterdam Club, the only one in which he still retained membership.

It was after one o’clock and she had breakfasted at eleven, so, deciding to forego luncheon, she started for a walk in the Park. At three there would be a mail. She would be back by three.

It was an afternoon of premature spring. Water was drying on the walks and in the Park little girls were gravely wheeling white doll-buggies up and down under the thin trees while behind them followed bored nursery-maids in two’s, discussing with each other those tremendous secrets that are peculiar to nursery-maids.

Two o’clock by her little gold watch. She should have a new watch, one made in a platinum oblong and incrusted with diamonds — but those cost even more than squirrel coats and of course they were out of her reach now, like everything else — unless perhaps the right letter was awaiting her … in about an hour … fifty-eight minutes exactly. Ten to get there left forty-eight … forty-seven now …

Little girls soberly wheeling their buggies along the damp sunny walks. The nursery-maids chattering in pairs about their inscrutable secrets. Here and there a raggedy man seated upon newspapers spread on a drying bench, related not to the radiant and delightful afternoon but to the dirty snow that slept exhausted in obscure corners, waiting for extermination….

Ages later, coming into the dim hall she saw the Martinique elevator boy standing incongruously in the light of the stained-glass window.

“Is there any mail for us?” she asked.

“Up-stays, madame.”

The switchboard squawked abominably and Gloria waited while he ministered to the telephone. She sickened as the elevator groaned its way up — the floors passed like the slow lapse of centuries, each one ominous, accusing, significant. The letter, a white leprous spot, lay upon the dirty tiles of the hall….

* * * * *

My dear Gloria:

We had the test run off yesterday afternoon, and Mr. Debris seemed to think that for the part he had in mind he needed a younger woman. He said that the acting was not bad, and that there was a small character part supposed to be a very haughty rich widow that he thought you might —  —

* * * * *

Desolately Gloria raised her glance until it fell out across the areaway. But she found she could not see the opposite wall, for her gray eyes were full of tears. She walked into the bedroom, the letter crinkled tightly in her hand, and sank down upon her knees before the long mirror on the wardrobe floor. This was her twenty-ninth birthday, and the world was melting away before her eyes. She tried to think that it had been the make-up, but her emotions were too profound, too overwhelming for any consolation that the thought conveyed.

She strained to see until she could feel the flesh on her temples pull forward. Yes — the cheeks were ever so faintly thin, the corners of the eyes were lined with tiny wrinkles. The eyes were different. Why, they were different! … And then suddenly she knew how tired her eyes were.

“Oh, my pretty face,” she whispered, passionately grieving. “Oh, my pretty face! Oh, I don’t want to live without my pretty face! Oh, what’s happened?”

Then she slid toward the mirror and, as in the test, sprawled face downward upon the floor — and lay there sobbing. It was the first awkward movement she had ever made.

CHAPTER III

NO MATTER!

Within another year Anthony and Gloria had become like players who had lost their costumes, lacking the pride to continue on the note of tragedy — so that when Mrs. and Miss Hulme of Kansas City cut them dead in the Plaza one evening, it was only that Mrs. and Miss Hulme, like most people, abominated mirrors of their atavistic selves.

Their new apartment, for which they paid eighty-five dollars a month, was situated on Claremont Avenue, which is two blocks from the Hudson in the dim hundreds. They had lived there a month when Muriel Kane came to see them late one afternoon.

It was a reproachless twilight on the summer side of spring. Anthony lay upon the lounge looking up One Hundred and Twenty-seventh Street toward the river, near which he could just see a single patch of vivid green trees that guaranteed the brummagem umbrageousness of Riverside Drive. Across the water were the Palisades, crowned by the ugly framework of the amusement park — yet soon it would be dusk and those same iron cobwebs would be a glory against the heavens, an enchanted palace set over the smooth radiance of a tropical canal.

The streets near the apartment, Anthony had found, were streets where children played — streets a little nicer than those he had been used to pass on his way to Marietta, but of the same general sort, with an occasional hand organ or hurdy-gurdy, and in the cool of the evening many pairs of young girls walking down to the corner drug-store for ice cream soda and dreaming unlimited dreams under the low heavens.

Dusk in the streets now, and children playing, shouting up incoherent ecstatic words that faded out close to the open window — and Muriel, who had come to find Gloria, chattering to him from an opaque gloom over across the room.

“Light the lamp, why don’t we?” she suggested. “It’s getting ghostly in here.”

With a tired movement he arose and obeyed; the gray window-panes vanished. He stretched himself. He was heavier now, his stomach was a limp weight against his belt; his flesh had softened and expanded. He was thirty-two and his mind was a bleak and disordered wreck.

“Have a little drink, Muriel?”

“Not me, thanks. I don’t use it anymore. What’re you doing these days,

Anthony?” she asked curiously.

“Well, I’ve been pretty busy with this lawsuit,” he answered indifferently. “It’s gone to the Court of Appeals — ought to be settled up one way or another by autumn. There’s been some objection as to whether the Court of Appeals has jurisdiction over the matter.”

Muriel made a clicking sound with her tongue and cocked her head on one side.

“Well, you tell’em! I never heard of anything taking so long.”

“Oh, they all do,” he replied listlessly; “all will cases. They say it’s exceptional to have one settled under four or five years.”

“Oh …” Muriel daringly changed her tack, “why don’t you go to work, you la-azy!”

“At what?” he demanded abruptly.

“Why, at anything, I suppose. You’re still a young man.”

“If that’s encouragement, I’m much obliged,” he answered dryly — and then with sudden weariness: “Does it bother you particularly that I don’t want to work?”

“It doesn’t bother me — but, it does bother a lot of people who claim — “

“Oh, God!” he said brokenly, “it seems to me that for three years I’ve heard nothing about myself but wild stories and virtuous admonitions. I’m tired of it. If you don’t want to see us, let us alone. I don’t bother my former friends.’ But I need no charity calls, and no criticism disguised as good advice — “ Then he added apologetically: “I’m sorry — but really, Muriel, you mustn’t talk like a lady slum-worker even if you are visiting the lower middle classes.” He turned his bloodshot eyes on her reproachfully — eyes that had once been a deep, clear blue, that were weak now, strained, and half-ruined from reading when he was drunk.

“Why do you say such awful things?” she protested. You talk as if you and Gloria were in the middle classes.”

“Why pretend we’re not? I hate people who claim to be great aristocrats when they can’t even keep up the appearances of it.”

“Do you think a person has to have money to be aristocratic?”

Muriel … the horrified democrat …!

“Why, of course. Aristocracy’s only an admission that certain traits which we call fine — courage and honor and beauty and all that sort of thing — can best be developed in a favorable environment, where you don’t have the warpings of ignorance and necessity.”

Muriel bit her lower lip and waved her head from side to side.

“Well, all I say is that if a person comes from a good family they’re always nice people. That’s the trouble with you and Gloria. You think that just because things aren’t going your way right now all your old friends are trying to avoid you. You’re too sensitive — “

“As a matter of fact,” said Anthony, “you know nothing at all about it. With me it’s simply a matter of pride, and for once Gloria’s reasonable enough to agree that we oughtn’t go where we’re not wanted. And people don’t want us. We’re too much the ideal bad examples.”

“Nonsense! You can’t park your pessimism in my little sun parlor. I think you ought to forget all those morbid speculations and go to work.”

“Here I am, thirty-two. Suppose I did start in at some idiotic business. Perhaps in two years I might rise to fifty dollars a week — with luck. That’s if I could get a job at all; there’s an awful lot of unemployment. Well, suppose I made fifty a week. Do you think I’d be any happier? Do you think that if I don’t get this money of my grandfather’s life will be endurable?”

Muriel smiled complacently.

“Well,” she said, “that may be clever but it isn’t common sense.”

A few minutes later Gloria came in seeming to bring with her into the room some dark color, indeterminate and rare. In a taciturn way she was happy to see Muriel. She greeted Anthony with a casual “Hi!”

“I’ve been talking philosophy with your husband,” cried the irrepressible Miss Kane.

“We took up some fundamental concepts,” said Anthony, a faint smile disturbing his pale cheeks, paler still under two days’ growth of beard.

Oblivious to his irony Muriel rehashed her contention. When she had done, Gloria said quietly:

“Anthony’s right. It’s no fun to go around when you have the sense that people are looking at you in a certain way.”

He broke in plaintively:

“Don’t you think that when even Maury Noble, who was my best friend, won’t come to see us it’s high time to stop calling people up?” Tears were standing in his eyes.

“That was your fault about Maury Noble,” said Gloria coolly.

“It wasn’t.”

“It most certainly was.”

Muriel intervened quickly:

“I met a girl who knew Maury, the other day, and she says he doesn’t drink any more. He’s getting pretty cagey.”

“Doesn’t?”

“Practically not at all. He’s making piles of money. He’s sort of changed since the war. He’s going to marry a girl in Philadelphia who has millions, Ceci Larrabee — anyhow, that’s what Town Tattle said.”

“He’s thirty-three,” said Anthony, thinking aloud. But it’s odd to imagine his getting married. I used to think he was so brilliant.”

“He was,” murmured Gloria, “in a way.”

“But brilliant people don’t settle down in business — or do they? Or what do they do? Or what becomes of everybody you used to know and have so much in common with?”

“You drift apart,” suggested Muriel with the appropriate dreamy look.

“They change,” said Gloria. “All the qualities that they don’t use in their daily lives get cobwebbed up.”

“The last thing he said to me,” recollected Anthony, “was that he was going to work so as to forget that there was nothing worth working for.”

Muriel caught at this quickly.

“That’s what you ought to do,” she exclaimed triumphantly. “Of course I shouldn’t think anybody would want to work for nothing. But it’d give you something to do. What do you do with yourselves, anyway? Nobody ever sees you at Montmartre or — or anywhere. Are you economizing?”

Gloria laughed scornfully, glancing at Anthony from the corners of her eyes.

“Well,” he demanded, “what are you laughing at?” “You know what I’m laughing at,” she answered coldly.

“At that case of whiskey?”

“Yes” — she turned to Muriel — “he paid seventy-five dollars for a case of whiskey yesterday.”

“What if I did? It’s cheaper that way than if you get it by the bottle.

You needn’t pretend that you won’t drink any of it.”

“At least I don’t drink in the daytime.”

“That’s a fine distinction!” he cried, springing to his feet in a weak rage. “What’s more, I’ll be damned if you can hurl that at me every few minutes!”

“It’s true.”

“It is not! And I’m getting sick of this eternal business of criticising me before visitors!” He had worked himself up to such a state that his arms and shoulders were visibly trembling. “You’d think everything was my fault. You’d think you hadn’t encouraged me to spend money — and spent a lot more on yourself than I ever did by a long shot.”

Now Gloria rose to her feet.

“I won’t let you talk to me that way!”

“All right, then; by Heaven, you don’t have to!”

In a sort of rush he left the room. The two women heard his steps in the hall and then the front door banged. Gloria sank back into her chair. Her face was lovely in the lamplight, composed, inscrutable.

“Oh — !” cried Muriel in distress. “Oh, what is the matter?”

“Nothing particularly. He’s just drunk.”

“Drunk? Why, he’s perfectly sober. He talked —  — “

Gloria shook her head.

“Oh, no, he doesn’t show it any more unless he can hardly stand up, and he talks all right until he gets excited. He talks much better than he does when he’s sober. But he’s been sitting here all day drinking — except for the time it took him to walk to the corner for a newspaper.”

“Oh, how terrible!” Muriel was sincerely moved. Her eyes filled with tears. “Has this happened much?”

“Drinking, you mean?”

“No, this — leaving you?”

“Oh, yes. Frequently. He’ll come in about midnight — and weep and ask me to forgive him.”

“And do you?”

“I don’t know. We just go on.”

The two women sat there in the lamplight and looked at each other, each in a different way helpless before this thing. Gloria was still pretty, as pretty as she would ever be again — her cheeks were flushed and she was wearing a new dress that she had bought — imprudently — for fifty dollars. She had hoped she could persuade Anthony to take her out to-night, to a restaurant or even to one of the great, gorgeous moving picture palaces where there would be a few people to look at her, at whom she could bear to look in turn. She wanted this because she knew her cheeks were flushed and because her dress was new and becomingly fragile. Only very occasionally, now, did they receive any invitations. But she did not tell these things to Muriel.

“Gloria, dear, I wish we could have dinner together, but I promised a man and it’s seven-thirty already. I’ve got to tear.”

“Oh, I couldn’t, anyway. In the first place I’ve been ill all day. I couldn’t eat a thing.”

After she had walked with Muriel to the door, Gloria came back into the room, turned out the lamp, and leaning her elbows on the window sill looked out at PalisadesPark, where the brilliant revolving circle of the Ferris wheel was like a trembling mirror catching the yellow reflection of the moon. The street was quiet now; the children had gone in — over the way she could see a family at dinner. Pointlessly, ridiculously, they rose and walked about the table; seen thus, all that they did appeared incongruous — it was as though they were being jiggled carelessly and to no purpose by invisible overhead wires.

She looked at her watch — it was eight o’clock. She had been pleased for a part of the day — the early afternoon — in walking along that Broadway of Harlem, One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street, with her nostrils alert to many odors, and her mind excited by the extraordinary beauty of some Italian children. It affected her curiously — as Fifth Avenue had affected her once, in the days when, with the placid confidence of beauty, she had known that it was all hers, every shop and all it held, every adult toy glittering in a window, all hers for the asking. Here on One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street there were Salvation Army bands and spectrum-shawled old ladies on door-steps and sugary, sticky candy in the grimy hands of shiny-haired children — and the late sun striking down on the sides of the tall tenements. All very rich and racy and savory, like a dish by a provident French chef that one could not help enjoying, even though one knew that the ingredients were probably left-overs….

Gloria shuddered suddenly as a river siren came moaning over the dusky roofs, and leaning back in till the ghostly curtains fell from her shoulder, she turned on the electric lamp. It was growing late. She knew there was some change in her purse, and she considered whether she would go down and have some coffee and rolls where the liberated subway made a roaring cave of Manhattan Street or eat the devilled ham and bread in the kitchen. Her purse decided for her. It contained a nickel and two pennies.

After an hour the silence of the room had grown unbearable, and she found that her eyes were wandering from her magazine to the ceiling, toward which she stared without thought. Suddenly she stood up, hesitated for a moment, biting at her finger — then she went to the pantry, took down a bottle of whiskey from the shelf and poured herself a drink. She filled up the glass with ginger ale, and returning to her chair finished an article in the magazine. It concerned the last revolutionary widow, who, when a young girl, had married an ancient veteran of the Continental Army and who had died in 1906. It seemed strange and oddly romantic to Gloria that she and this woman had been contemporaries.

She turned a page and learned that a candidate for Congress was being accused of atheism by an opponent. Gloria’s surprise vanished when she found that the charges were false. The candidate had merely denied the miracle of the loaves and fishes. He admitted, under pressure, that he gave full credence to the stroll upon the water.

Finishing her first drink, Gloria got herself a second. After slipping on a negligée and making herself comfortable on the lounge, she became conscious that she was miserable and that the tears were rolling down her cheeks. She wondered if they were tears of self-pity, and tried resolutely not to cry, but this existence without hope, without happiness, oppressed her, and she kept shaking her head from side to side, her mouth drawn down tremulously in the corners, as though she were denying an assertion made by some one, somewhere. She did not know that this gesture of hers was years older than history, that, for a hundred generations of men, intolerable and persistent grief has offered that gesture, of denial, of protest, of bewilderment, to something more profound, more powerful than the God made in the image of man, and before which that God, did he exist, would be equally impotent. It is a truth set at the heart of tragedy that this force never explains, never answers — this force intangible as air, more definite than death.

RICHARD CARAMEL

Early in the summer Anthony resigned from his last club, the Amsterdam. He had come to visit it hardly twice a year, and the dues were a recurrent burden. He had joined it on his return from Italy because it had been his grandfather’s club and his father’s, and because it was a club that, given the opportunity, one indisputably joined — but as a matter of fact he had preferred the Harvard Club, largely because of Dick and Maury. However, with the decline of his fortunes, it had seemed an increasingly desirable bauble to cling to…. It was relinquished at the last, with some regret….

His companions numbered now a curious dozen. Several of them he had met in a place called “Sammy’s,” on Forty-third Street, where, if one knocked on the door and were favorably passed on from behind a grating, one could sit around a great round table drinking fairly good whiskey. It was here that he encountered a man named Parker Allison, who had been exactly the wrong sort of rounder at Harvard, and who was running through a large “yeast” fortune as rapidly as possible. Parker Allison’s notion of distinction consisted in driving a noisy red-and-yellow racing-car up Broadway with two glittering, hard-eyed girls beside him. He was the sort who dined with two girls rather than with one — his imagination was almost incapable of sustaining a dialogue.

Besides Allison there was Pete Lytell, who wore a gray derby on the side of his head. He always had money and he was customarily cheerful, so Anthony held aimless, long-winded conversation with him through many afternoons of the summer and fall. Lytell, he found, not only talked but reasoned in phrases. His philosophy was a series of them, assimilated here and there through an active, thoughtless life. He had phrases about Socialism — the immemorial ones; he had phrases pertaining to the existence of a personal deity — something about one time when he had been in a railroad accident; and he had phrases about the Irish problem, the sort of woman he respected, and the futility of prohibition. The only time his conversation ever rose superior to these muddled clauses, with which he interpreted the most rococo happenings in a life that had been more than usually eventful, was when he got down to the detailed discussion of his most animal existence: he knew, to a subtlety, the foods, the liquor, and the women that he preferred.

He was at once the commonest and the most remarkable product of civilization. He was nine out of ten people that one passes on a city street — and he was a hairless ape with two dozen tricks. He was the hero of a thousand romances of life and art — and he was a virtual moron, performing staidly yet absurdly a series of complicated and infinitely astounding epics over a span of threescore years.

With such men as these two Anthony Patch drank and discussed and drank and argued. He liked them because they knew nothing about him, because they lived in the obvious and had not the faintest conception of the inevitable continuity of life. They sat not before a motion picture with consecutive reels, but at a musty old-fashioned travelogue with all values stark and hence all implications confused. Yet they themselves were not confused, because there was nothing in them to be confused — they changed phrases from month to month as they changed neckties.

Anthony, the courteous, the subtle, the perspicacious, was drunk each day — in Sammy’s with these men, in the apartment over a book, some book he knew, and, very rarely, with Gloria, who, in his eyes, had begun to develop the unmistakable outlines of a quarrelsome and unreasonable woman. She was not the Gloria of old, certainly — the Gloria who, had she been sick, would have preferred to inflict misery upon every one around her, rather than confess that she needed sympathy or assistance. She was not above whining now; she was not above being sorry for herself. Each night when she prepared for bed she smeared her face with some new unguent which she hoped illogically would give back the glow and freshness to her vanishing beauty. When Anthony was drunk he taunted her about this. When he was sober he was polite to her, on occasions even tender; he seemed to show for short hours a trace of that old quality of understanding too well to blame — that quality which was the best of him and had worked swiftly and ceaselessly toward his ruin.

But he hated to be sober. It made him conscious of the people around him, of that air of struggle, of greedy ambition, of hope more sordid than despair, of incessant passage up or down, which in every metropolis is most in evidence through the unstable middle class. Unable to live with the rich he thought that his next choice would have been to live with the very poor. Anything was better than this cup of perspiration and tears.

The sense of the enormous panorama of life, never strong in Anthony, had become dim almost to extinction. At long intervals now some incident, some gesture of Gloria’s, would take his fancy — but the gray veils had come down in earnest upon him. As he grew older those things faded — after that there was wine.

There was a kindliness about intoxication — there was that indescribable gloss and glamour it gave, like the memories of ephemeral and faded evenings. After a few high-balls there was magic in the tall glowing Arabian night of the BushTerminal Building — its summit a peak of sheer grandeur, gold and dreaming against the inaccessible sky. And Wall Street, the crass, the banal — again it was the triumph of gold, a gorgeous sentient spectacle; it was where the great kings kept the money for their wars….

… The fruit of youth or of the grape, the transitory magic of the brief passage from darkness to darkness — the old illusion that truth and beauty were in some way entwined.

As he stood in front of Delmonico’s lighting a cigarette one night he saw two hansoms drawn up close to the curb, waiting for a chance drunken fare. The outmoded cabs were worn and dirty — the cracked patent leather wrinkled like an old man’s face, the cushions faded to a brownish lavender; the very horses were ancient and weary, and so were the white-haired men who sat aloft, cracking their whips with a grotesque affectation of gallantry. A relic of vanished gaiety!

Anthony Patch walked away in a sudden fit of depression, pondering the bitterness of such survivals. There was nothing, it seemed, that grew stale so soon as pleasure.

On Forty-second Street one afternoon he met Richard Caramel for the first time in many months, a prosperous, fattening Richard Caramel, whose face was filling out to match the Bostonian brow.

“Just got in this week from the coast. Was going to call you up, but I didn’t know your new address.”

“We’ve moved.”

Richard Caramel noticed that Anthony was wearing a soiled shirt, that his cuffs were slightly but perceptibly frayed, that his eyes were set in half-moons the color of cigar smoke.

“So I gathered,” he said, fixing his friend with his bright-yellow eye. “But where and how is Gloria? My God, Anthony, I’ve been hearing the dog-gonedest stories about you two even out in California — and when I get back to New York I find you’ve sunk absolutely out of sight. Why don’t you pull yourself together?”

“Now, listen,” chattered Anthony unsteadily, “I can’t stand a long lecture. We’ve lost money in a dozen ways, and naturally people have talked — on account of the lawsuit, but the thing’s coming to a final decision this winter, surely — “

“You’re talking so fast that I can’t understand you,” interrupted Dick calmly.

“Well, I’ve said all I’m going to say,” snapped Anthony. “Come and see us if you like — or don’t!”

With this he turned and started to walk off in the crowd, but Dick overtook him immediately and grasped his arm.

“Say, Anthony, don’t fly off the handle so easily! You know Gloria’s my cousin, and you’re one of my oldest friends, so it’s natural for me to be interested when I hear that you’re going to the dogs — and taking her with you.”

“I don’t want to be preached to.”

“Well, then, all right — How about coming up to my apartment and having a drink? I’ve just got settled. I’ve bought three cases of Gordon gin from a revenue officer.”

As they walked along he continued in a burst of exasperation:

“And how about your grandfather’s money — you going to get it?”

“Well,” answered Anthony resentfully, “that old fool Haight seems hopeful, especially because people are tired of reformers right now — you know it might make a slight difference, for instance, if some judge thought that Adam Patch made it harder for him to get liquor.”

“You can’t do without money,” said Dick sententiously. “Have you tried to write any — lately?”

Anthony shook his head silently.

“That’s funny,” said Dick. “I always thought that you and Maury would write some day, and now he’s grown to be a sort of tight-fisted aristocrat, and you’re — “

“I’m the bad example.”

“I wonder why?”

“You probably think you know,” suggested Anthony, with an effort at concentration. “The failure and the success both believe in their hearts that they have accurately balanced points of view, the success because he’s succeeded, and the failure because he’s failed. The successful man tells his son to profit by his father’s good fortune, and the failure tells his son to profit by his father’s mistakes.”

“I don’t agree with you,” said the author of “A Shave-tail in France.” “I used to listen to you and Maury when we were young, and I used to be impressed because you were so consistently cynical, but now — well, after all, by God, which of us three has taken to the — to the intellectual life? I don’t want to sound vainglorious, but — it’s me, and I’ve always believed that moral values existed, and I always will.”

“Well,” objected Anthony, who was rather enjoying himself, “even granting that, you know that in practice life never presents problems as clear cut, does it?”

“It does to me. There’s nothing I’d violate certain principles for.”

“But how do you know when you’re violating them? You have to guess at things just like most people do. You have to apportion the values when you look back. You finish up the portrait then — paint in the details and shadows.”

Dick shook his head with a lofty stubbornness. “Same old futile cynic,” he said. “It’s just a mode of being sorry for yourself. You don’t do anything — so nothing matters.”

“Oh, I’m quite capable of self-pity,” admitted Anthony, “nor am I claiming that I’m getting as much fun out of life as you are.”

“You say — at least you used to — that happiness is the only thing worth while in life. Do you think you’re any happier for being a pessimist?”

Anthony grunted savagely. His pleasure in the conversation began to wane. He was nervous and craving for a drink.

“My golly!” he cried, “where do you live? I can’t keep walking forever.”

“Your endurance is all mental, eh?” returned Dick sharply. “Well, I live right here.”

He turned in at the apartment house on Forty-ninth Street, and a few minutes later they were in a large new room with an open fireplace and four walls lined with books. A colored butler served them gin rickeys, and an hour vanished politely with the mellow shortening of their drinks and the glow of a light mid-autumn fire.

“The arts are very old,” said Anthony after a while. With a few glasses the tension of his nerves relaxed and he found that he could think again.

“Which art?”

“All of them. Poetry is dying first. It’ll be absorbed into prose sooner or later. For instance, the beautiful word, the colored and glittering word, and the beautiful simile belong in prose now. To get attention poetry has got to strain for the unusual word, the harsh, earthy word that’s never been beautiful before. Beauty, as the sum of several beautiful parts, reached its apotheosis in Swinburne. It can’t go any further — except in the novel, perhaps.”

Dick interrupted him impatiently:

“You know these new novels make me tired. My God! Everywhere I go some silly girl asks me if I’ve read ‘This Side of Paradise.’ Are our girls really like that? If it’s true to life, which I don’t believe, the next generation is going to the dogs. I’m sick of all this shoddy realism. I think there’s a place for the romanticist in literature.”

Anthony tried to remember what he had read lately of Richard Caramel’s. There was “A Shave-tail in France,” a novel called “The Land of Strong Men,” and several dozen short stories, which were even worse. It had become the custom among young and clever reviewers to mention Richard Caramel with a smile of scorn. “Mr.” Richard Caramel, they called him. His corpse was dragged obscenely through every literary supplement. He was accused of making a great fortune by writing trash for the movies. As the fashion in books shifted he was becoming almost a byword of contempt.

While Anthony was thinking this, Dick had got to his feet and seemed to be hesitating at an avowal.

“I’ve gathered quite a few books,” he said suddenly.

“So I see.”

“I’ve made an exhaustive collection of good American stuff, old and new. I don’t mean the usual Longfellow-Whittier thing — in fact, most of it’s modern.”

He stepped to one of the walls and, seeing that it was expected of him,

Anthony arose and followed.

“Look!”

Under a printed tag Americana he displayed six long rows of books, beautifully bound and, obviously, carefully chosen.

“And here are the contemporary novelists.”

Then Anthony saw the joker. Wedged in between Mark Twain and Dreiser were eight strange and inappropriate volumes, the works of Richard Caramel — “The Demon Lover,” true enough … but also seven others that were execrably awful, without sincerity or grace.

Unwillingly Anthony glanced at Dick’s face and caught a slight uncertainty there.

“I’ve put my own books in, of course,” said Richard Caramel hastily, “though one or two of them are uneven — I’m afraid I wrote a little too fast when I had that magazine contract. But I don’t believe in false modesty. Of course some of the critics haven’t paid so much attention to me since I’ve been established — but, after all, it’s not the critics that count. They’re just sheep.”

For the first time in so long that he could scarcely remember, Anthony felt a touch of the old pleasant contempt for his friend. Richard Caramel continued:

“My publishers, you know, have been advertising me as the Thackeray of

America — because of my New York novel.”

“Yes,” Anthony managed to muster, “I suppose there’s a good deal in what you say.”

He knew that his contempt was unreasonable. He, knew that he would have changed places with Dick unhesitatingly. He himself had tried his best to write with his tongue in his cheek. Ah, well, then — can a man disparage his life-work so readily? …

— And that night while Richard Caramel was hard at toil, with great hittings of the wrong keys and screwings up of his weary, unmatched eyes, laboring over his trash far into those cheerless hours when the fire dies down, and the head is swimming from the effect of prolonged concentration — Anthony, abominably drunk, was sprawled across the back seat of a taxi on his way to the flat on Claremont Avenue.

THE BEATING

As winter approached it seemed that a sort of madness seized upon Anthony. He awoke in the morning so nervous that Gloria could feel him trembling in the bed before he could muster enough vitality to stumble into the pantry for a drink. He was intolerable now except under the influence of liquor, and as he seemed to decay and coarsen under her eyes, Gloria’s soul and body shrank away from him; when he stayed out all night, as he did several times, she not only failed to be sorry but even felt a measure of relief. Next day he would be faintly repentant, and would remark in a gruff, hang-dog fashion that he guessed he was drinking a little too much.

For hours at a time he would sit in the great armchair that had been in his apartment, lost in a sort of stupor — even his interest in reading his favorite books seemed to have departed, and though an incessant bickering went on between husband and wife, the one subject upon which they ever really conversed was the progress of the will case. What Gloria hoped in the tenebrous depths of her soul, what she expected that great gift of money to bring about, is difficult to imagine. She was being bent by her environment into a grotesque similitude of a housewife. She who until three years before had never made coffee, prepared sometimes three meals a day. She walked a great deal in the afternoons, and in the evenings she read — books, magazines, anything she found at hand. If now she wished for a child, even a child of the Anthony who sought her bed blind drunk, she neither said so nor gave any show or sign of interest in children. It is doubtful if she could have made it clear to any one what it was she wanted, or indeed what there was to want — a lonely, lovely woman, thirty now, retrenched behind some impregnable inhibition born and coexistent with her beauty.

One afternoon when the snow was dirty again along Riverside Drive, Gloria, who had been to the grocer’s, entered the apartment to find Anthony pacing the floor in a state of aggravated nervousness. The feverish eyes he turned on her were traced with tiny pink lines that reminded her of rivers on a map. For a moment she received the impression that he was suddenly and definitely old.

“Have you any money?” he inquired of her precipitately.

“What? What do you mean?”

“Just what I said. Money! Money! Can’t you speak English?”

She paid no attention but brushed by him and into the pantry to put the bacon and eggs in the ice-box. When his drinking had been unusually excessive he was invariably in a whining mood. This time he followed her and, standing in the pantry door, persisted in his question.

“You heard what I said. Have you any money?”

She turned about from the ice-box and faced him.

“Why, Anthony, you must be crazy! You know I haven’t any money — except a dollar in change.”

He executed an abrupt about-face and returned to the living room, where he renewed his pacing. It was evident that he had something portentous on his mind — he quite obviously wanted to be asked what was the matter. Joining him a moment later she sat upon the long lounge and began taking down her hair. It was no longer bobbed, and it had changed in the last year from a rich gold dusted with red to an unresplendent light brown. She had bought some shampoo soap and meant to wash it now; she had considered putting a bottle of peroxide into the rinsing water.

“ — Well?” she implied silently.

“That darn bank!” he quavered. “They’ve had my account for over ten years — ten years. Well, it seems they’ve got some autocratic rule that you have to keep over five hundred dollars there or they won’t carry you. They wrote me a letter a few months ago and told me I’d been running too low. Once I gave out two bum checks — remember? that night in Reisenweber’s? — but I made them good the very next day. Well, I promised old Halloran — he’s the manager, the greedy Mick — that I’d watch out. And I thought I was going all right; I kept up the stubs in my check-book pretty regular. Well, I went in there to-day to cash a check, and Halloran came up and told me they’d have to close my account. Too many bad checks, he said, and I never had more than five hundred to my credit — and that only for a day or so at a time. And by God! What do you think he said then?”

“What?”

“He said this was a good time to do it because I didn’t have a damn penny in there!”

“You didn’t?”

“That’s what he told me. Seems I’d given these Bedros people a check for sixty for that last case of liquor — and I only had forty-five dollars in the bank. Well, the Bedros people deposited fifteen dollars to my account and drew the whole thing out.”

In her ignorance Gloria conjured up a spectre of imprisonment and disgrace.

“Oh, they won’t do anything,” he assured her. “Bootlegging’s too risky a business. They’ll send me a bill for fifteen dollars and I’ll pay it.”

“Oh.” She considered a moment. “ — Well, we can sell another bond.”

He laughed sarcastically.

“Oh, yes, that’s always easy. When the few bonds we have that are paying any interest at all are only worth between fifty and eighty cents on the dollar. We lose about half the bond every time we sell.”

“What else can we do?”

“Oh, we’ll sell something — as usual. We’ve got paper worth eighty thousand dollars at par.” Again he laughed unpleasantly. “Bring about thirty thousand on the open market.”

“I distrusted those ten per cent investments.”

“The deuce you did!” he said. “You pretended you did, so you could claw at me if they went to pieces, but you wanted to take a chance as much as I did.”

She was silent for a moment as if considering, then:

“Anthony,” she cried suddenly, “two hundred a month is worse than nothing. Let’s sell all the bonds and put the thirty thousand dollars in the bank — and if we lose the case we can live in Italy for three years, and then just die.” In her excitement as she talked she was aware of a faint flush of sentiment, the first she had felt in many days.

“Three years,” he said nervously, “three years! You’re crazy. Mr. Haight’ll take more than that if we lose. Do you think he’s working for charity?”

“I forgot that.”

“ — And here it is Saturday,” he continued, “and I’ve only got a dollar and some change, and we’ve got to live till Monday, when I can get to my broker’s…. And not a drink in the house,” he added as a significant afterthought.

“Can’t you call up Dick?”

“I did. His man says he’s gone down to Princeton to address a literary club or some such thing. Won’t be back till Monday.”

“Well, let’s see — Don’t you know some friend you might go to?”

“I tried a couple of fellows. Couldn’t find anybody in. I wish I’d sold that Keats letter like I started to last week.”

“How about those men you play cards with in that Sammy place?”

“Do you think I’d ask them?” His voice rang with righteous horror.

Gloria winced. He would rather contemplate her active discomfort than

feel his own skin crawl at asking an inappropriate favor. “I thought of

Muriel,” he suggested.

“She’s in California.”

“Well, how about some of those men who gave you such a good time while I was in the army? You’d think they might be glad to do a little favor for you.”

She looked at him contemptuously, but he took no notice.

“Or how about your old friend Rachael — or Constance Merriam?”

“Constance Merriam’s been dead a year, and I wouldn’t ask Rachael.”

“Well, how about that gentleman who was so anxious to help you once that he could hardly restrain himself, Bloeckman?”

“Oh — !” He had hurt her at last, and he was not too obtuse or too careless to perceive it.

“Why not him?” he insisted callously.

“Because — he doesn’t like me any more,” she said with difficulty, and then as he did not answer but only regarded her cynically: “If you want to know why, I’ll tell you. A year ago I went to Bloeckman — he’s changed his name to Black — and asked him to put me into pictures.”

“You went to Bloeckman?”

“Yes.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” he demanded incredulously, the smile fading from his face.

“Because you were probably off drinking somewhere. He had them give me a test, and they decided that I wasn’t young enough for anything except a character part.”

“A character part?”

“The ‘woman of thirty’ sort of thing. I wasn’t thirty, and I didn’t think I — looked thirty.”

“Why, damn him!” cried Anthony, championing her violently with a curious perverseness of emotion, “why — “

“Well, that’s why I can’t go to him.”

“Why, the insolence!” insisted Anthony nervously, “the insolence!”

“Anthony, that doesn’t matter now; the thing is we’ve got to live over Sunday and there’s nothing in the house but a loaf of bread and a half-pound of bacon and two eggs for breakfast.” She handed him the contents of her purse. “There’s seventy, eighty, a dollar fifteen. With what you have that makes about two and a half altogether, doesn’t it? Anthony, we can get along on that. We can buy lots of food with that — more than we can possibly eat.”

Jingling the change in his hand he shook his head. “No. I’ve got to have a drink. I’m so darn nervous that I’m shivering.” A thought struck him. “Perhaps Sammy’d cash a check. And then Monday I could rush down to the bank with the money.” “But they’ve closed your account.”

“That’s right, that’s right — I’d forgotten. I’ll tell you what: I’ll go down to Sammy’s and I’ll find somebody there who’ll lend me something. I hate like the devil to ask them, though….” He snapped his fingers suddenly. “I know what I’ll do. I’ll hock my watch. I can get twenty dollars on it, and get it back Monday for sixty cents extra. It’s been hocked before — when I was at Cambridge.”

He had put on his overcoat, and with a brief good-by he started down the hall toward the outer door.

Gloria got to her feet. It had suddenly occurred to her where he would probably go first.

“Anthony!” she called after him, “hadn’t you better leave two dollars with me? You’ll only need car-fare.”

The outer door slammed — he had pretended not to hear her. She stood for a moment looking after him; then she went into the bathroom among her tragic unguents and began preparations for washing her hair.

Down at Sammy’s he found Parker Allison and Pete Lytell sitting alone at a table, drinking whiskey sours. It was just after six o’clock, and Sammy, or Samuele Bendiri, as he had been christened, was sweeping an accumulation of cigarette butts and broken glass into a corner.

“Hi, Tony!” called Parker Allison to Anthony. Sometimes he addressed him as Tony, at other times it was Dan. To him all Anthonys must sail under one of these diminutives.

“Sit down. What’ll you have?”

On the subway Anthony had counted his money and found that he had almost four dollars. He could pay for two rounds at fifty cents a drink — which meant that he would have six drinks. Then he would go over to Sixth Avenue and get twenty dollars and a pawn ticket in exchange for his watch.

“Well, roughnecks,” he said jovially, “how’s the life of crime?”

“Pretty good,” said Allison. He winked at Pete Lytell. “Too bad you’re a married man. We’ve got some pretty good stuff lined up for about eleven o’clock, when the shows let out. Oh, boy! Yes, sir — too bad he’s married — isn’t it, Pete?”

“‘Sa shame.”

At half past seven, when they had completed the six rounds, Anthony found that his intentions were giving audience to his desires. He was happy and cheerful now — thoroughly enjoying himself. It seemed to him that the story which Pete had just finished telling was unusually and profoundly humorous — and he decided, as he did every day at about this point, that they were “damn good fellows, by golly!” who would do a lot more for him than any one else he knew. The pawnshops would remain open until late Saturday nights, and he felt that if he took just one more drink he would attain a gorgeous rose-colored exhilaration.

Artfully, he fished in his vest pockets, brought up his two quarters, and stared at them as though in surprise.

“Well, I’ll be darned,” he protested in an aggrieved tone, “here I’ve come out without my pocketbook.”

“Need some cash?” asked Lytell easily.

“I left my money on the dresser at home. And I wanted to buy you another drink.”

“Oh — knock it.” Lytell waved the suggestion away disparagingly. “I guess we can blow a good fella to all the drinks he wants. What’ll you have — same?”

“I tell you,” suggested Parker Allison, “suppose we send Sammy across the street for some sandwiches and eat dinner here.”

The other two agreed.

“Good idea.”

“Hey, Sammy, wantcha do somep’m for us….”

Just after nine o’clock Anthony staggered to his feet and, bidding them a thick good night, walked unsteadily to the door, handing Sammy one of his two quarters as he passed out. Once in the street he hesitated uncertainly and then started in the direction of Sixth Avenue, where he remembered to have frequently passed several loan offices. He went by a news-stand and two drug-stores — and then he realized that he was standing in front of the place which he sought, and that it was shut and barred. Unperturbed he continued; another one, half a block down, was also closed — so were two more across the street, and a fifth in the square below. Seeing a faint light in the last one, he began to knock on the glass door; he desisted only when a watchman appeared in the back of the shop and motioned him angrily to move on. With growing discouragement, with growing befuddlement, he crossed the street and walked back toward Forty-third. On the corner near Sammy’s he paused undecided — if he went back to the apartment, as he felt his body required, he would lay himself open to bitter reproach; yet, now that the pawnshops were closed, he had no notion where to get the money. He decided finally that he might ask Parker Allison, after all — but he approached Sammy’s only to find the door locked and the lights out. He looked at his watch; nine-thirty. He began walking.

Ten minutes later he stopped aimlessly at the corner of Forty-third Street and Madison Avenue, diagonally across from the bright but nearly deserted entrance to the Biltmore Hotel. Here he stood for a moment, and then sat down heavily on a damp board amid some debris of construction work. He rested there for almost half an hour, his mind a shifting pattern of surface thoughts, chiefest among which were that he must obtain some money and get home before he became too sodden to find his way.

Then, glancing over toward the Biltmore, he saw a man standing directly under the overhead glow of the porte-cochère lamps beside a woman in an ermine coat. As Anthony watched, the couple moved forward and signalled to a taxi. Anthony perceived by the infallible identification that lurks in the walk of a friend that it was Maury Noble.

He rose to his feet.

“Maury!” he shouted.

Maury looked in his direction, then turned back to the girl just as the

taxi came up into place. With the chaotic idea of borrowing ten dollars,

Anthony began to run as fast as he could across Madison Avenue and along

Forty-third Street.

As he came up Maury was standing beside the yawning door of the taxicab.

His companion turned and looked curiously at Anthony.

“Hello, Maury!” he said, holding out his hand. “How are you?”

“Fine, thank you.”

Their hands dropped and Anthony hesitated. Maury made no move to introduce him, but only stood there regarding him with an inscrutable feline silence.

“I wanted to see you — “ began Anthony uncertainly. He did not feel that he could ask for a loan with the girl not four feet away, so he broke off and made a perceptible motion of his head as if to beckon Maury to one side.

“I’m in rather a big hurry, Anthony.”

“I know — but can you, can you — “ Again he hesitated.

“I’ll see you some other time,” said Maury. “It’s important.”

“I’m sorry, Anthony.”

Before Anthony could make up his mind to blurt out his request, Maury had turned coolly to the girl, helped her into the car and, with a polite “good evening,” stepped in after her. As he nodded from the window it seemed to Anthony that his expression had not changed by a shade or a hair. Then with a fretful clatter the taxi moved off, and Anthony was left standing there alone under the lights.

Anthony went on into the Biltmore, for no reason in particular except that the entrance was at hand, and ascending the wide stair found a seat in an alcove. He was furiously aware that he had been snubbed; he was as hurt and angry as it was possible for him to be when in that condition. Nevertheless, he was stubbornly preoccupied with the necessity of obtaining some money before he went home, and once again he told over on his fingers the acquaintances he might conceivably call on in this emergency. He thought, eventually, that he might approach Mr. Howland, his broker, at his home.

After a long wait he found that Mr. Howland was out. He returned to the operator, leaning over her desk and fingering his quarter as though loath to leave unsatisfied.

“Call Mr. Bloeckman,” he said suddenly. His own words surprised him. The name had come from some crossing of two suggestions in his mind.

“What’s the number, please?”

Scarcely conscious of what he did, Anthony looked up Joseph Bloeckman in the telephone directory. He could find no such person, and was about to close the book when it flashed into his mind that Gloria had mentioned a change of name. It was the matter of a minute to find Joseph Black — then he waited in the booth while central called the number.

“Hello-o. Mr. Bloeckman — I mean Mr. Black in?”

“No, he’s out this evening. Is there any message?” The intonation was cockney; it reminded him of the rich vocal deferences of Bounds.

“Where is he?”

“Why, ah, who is this, please, sir?”

“This Mr. Patch. Matter of vi’al importance.” “Why, he’s with a party at the Boul’ Mich’, sir.” “Thanks.”

Anthony got his five cents change and started for the Boul’ Mich’, a popular dancing resort on Forty-fifth Street. It was nearly ten but the streets were dark and sparsely peopled until the theatres should eject their spawn an hour later. Anthony knew the Boul’ Mich’, for he had been there with Gloria during the year before, and he remembered the existence of a rule that patrons must be in evening dress. Well, he would not go up-stairs — he would send a boy up for Bloeckman and wait for him in the lower hall. For a moment he did not doubt that the whole project was entirely natural and graceful. To his distorted imagination Bloeckman had become simply one of his old friends.

The entrance hall of the Boul’ Mich’ was warm. There were high yellow lights over a thick green carpet, from the centre of which a white stairway rose to the dancing floor.

Anthony spoke to the hallboy:

“I want to see Mr. Bloeckman — Mr. Black,” he said. “He’s up-stairs — have him paged.”

The boy shook his head.

“‘Sagainsa rules to have him paged. You know what table he’s at?”

“No. But I’ve got see him.”

“Wait an’ I’ll getcha waiter.”

After a short interval a head waiter appeared, bearing a card on which were charted the table reservations. He darted a cynical look at Anthony — which, however, failed of its target. Together they bent over the cardboard and found the table without difficulty — a party of eight, Mr. Black’s own.

“Tell him Mr. Patch. Very, very important.”

Again he waited, leaning against the banister and listening to the confused harmonies of “Jazz-mad” which came floating down the stairs. A check-girl near him was singing:

“Out in — the shimmee sanitarium

The jazz-mad nuts reside.

Out in — the shimmee sanitarium

I left my blushing bride.

She went and shook herself insane,

So let her shiver back again — “

Then he saw Bloeckman descending the staircase, and took a step forward to meet him and shake hands.

“You wanted to see me?” said the older man coolly.

“Yes,” answered Anthony, nodding, “personal matter. Can you jus’ step over here?”

Regarding him narrowly Bloeckman followed Anthony to a half bend made by the staircase where they were beyond observation or earshot of any one entering or leaving the restaurant.

“Well?” he inquired.

“Wanted talk to you.”

“What about?”

Anthony only laughed — a silly laugh; he intended it to sound casual.

“What do you want to talk to me about?” repeated Bloeckman.

“Wha’s hurry, old man?” He tried to lay his hand in a friendly gesture upon Bloeckman’s shoulder, but the latter drew away slightly. “How’ve been?”

“Very well, thanks…. See here, Mr. Patch, I’ve got a party up-stairs. They’ll think it’s rude if I stay away too long. What was it you wanted to see me about?”

For the second time that evening Anthony’s mind made an abrupt jump, and what he said was not at all what he had intended to say.

“Un’erstand you kep’ my wife out of the movies.” “What?” Bloeckman’s ruddy face darkened in parallel planes of shadows.

“You heard me.”

“Look here, Mr. Patch,” said Bloeckman, evenly and without changing his expression, “you’re drunk. You’re disgustingly and insultingly drunk.”

“Not too drunk talk to you,” insisted Anthony with a leer. “Firs’ place, my wife wants nothin’ whatever do with you. Never did. Un’erstand me?”

“Be quiet!” said the older man angrily. “I should think you’d respect your wife enough not to bring her into the conversation under these circumstances.”

“Never you min’ how I expect my wife. One thing — you leave her alone.

You go to hell!”

“See here — I think you’re a little crazy!” exclaimed Bloeckman. He took two paces forward as though to pass by, but Anthony stepped in his way.

“Not so fas’, you Goddam Jew.”

For a moment they stood regarding each other, Anthony swaying gently from side to side, Bloeckman almost trembling with fury.

“Be careful!” he cried in a strained voice.

Anthony might have remembered then a certain look Bloeckman had given him in the Biltmore Hotel years before. But he remembered nothing, nothing —  —

“I’ll say it again, you God —  — “

Then Bloeckman struck out, with all the strength in the arm of a well-conditioned man of forty-five, struck out and caught Anthony squarely in the mouth. Anthony cracked up against the staircase, recovered himself and made a wild drunken swing at his opponent, but Bloeckman, who took exercise every day and knew something of sparring, blocked it with ease and struck him twice in the face with two swift smashing jabs. Anthony gave a little grunt and toppled over onto the green plush carpet, finding, as he fell, that his mouth was full of blood and seemed oddly loose in front. He struggled to his feet, panting and spitting, and then as he started toward Bloeckman, who stood a few feet away, his fists clenched but not up, two waiters who had appeared from nowhere seized his arms and held him, helpless. In back of them a dozen people had miraculously gathered.

“I’ll kill him,” cried Anthony, pitching and straining from side to side. “Let me kill —  — “

“Throw him out!” ordered Bloeckman excitedly, just as a small man with a pockmarked face pushed his way hurriedly through the spectators.

“Any trouble, Mr. Black?”

“This bum tried to blackmail me!” said Bloeckman, and then, his voice rising to a faintly shrill note of pride: “He got what was coming to him!”

The little man turned to a waiter.

“Call a policeman!” he commanded.

“Oh, no,” said Bloeckman quickly. “I can’t be bothered. Just throw him out in the street…. Ugh! What an outrage!” He turned and with conscious dignity walked toward the wash-room just as six brawny hands seized upon Anthony and dragged him toward the door. The “bum” was propelled violently to the sidewalk, where he landed on his hands and knees with a grotesque slapping sound and rolled over slowly onto his side.

The shock stunned him. He lay there for a moment in acute distributed pain. Then his discomfort became centralized in his stomach, and he regained consciousness to discover that a large foot was prodding him.

“You’ve got to move on, y’ bum! Move on!”

It was the bulky doorman speaking. A town car had stopped at the curb and its occupants had disembarked — that is, two of the women were standing on the dashboard, waiting in offended delicacy until this obscene obstacle should be removed from their path.

“Move on! Or else I’ll throw y’on!”

“Here — I’ll get him.”

This was a new voice; Anthony imagined that it was somehow more tolerant, better disposed than the first. Again arms were about him, half lifting, half dragging him into a welcome shadow four doors up the street and propping him against the stone front of a millinery shop.

“Much obliged,” muttered Anthony feebly. Some one pushed his soft hat down upon his head and he winced.

“Just sit still, buddy, and you’ll feel better. Those guys sure give you a bump.”

“I’m going back and kill that dirty — “ He tried to get to his feet but collapsed backward against the wall.

“You can’t do nothin’ now,” came the voice. “Get ‘em some other time.

I’m tellin’ you straight, ain’t I? I’m helpin’ you.”

Anthony nodded.

“An’ you better go home. You dropped a tooth to-night, buddy. You know that?”

Anthony explored his mouth with his tongue, verifying the statement.

Then with an effort he raised his hand and located the gap.

“I’m agoin’ to get you home, friend. Whereabouts do you live — “

“Oh, by God! By God!” interrupted Anthony, clenching his fists passionately. “I’ll show the dirty bunch. You help me show ‘em and I’ll fix it with you. My grandfather’s Adam Patch, of Tarrytown” —

“Who?”

“Adam Patch, by God!”

“You wanna go all the way to Tarrytown?”

“No.”

“Well, you tell me where to go, friend, and I’ll get a cab.”

Anthony made out that his Samaritan was a short, broad-shouldered individual, somewhat the worse for wear.

“Where d’you live, hey?”

Sodden and shaken as he was, Anthony felt that his address would be poor collateral for his wild boast about his grandfather.

“Get me a cab,” he commanded, feeling in his pockets.

A taxi drove up. Again Anthony essayed to rise, but his ankle swung loose, as though it were in two sections. The Samaritan must needs help him in — and climb in after him.

“See here, fella,” said he, “you’re soused and you’re bunged up, and you won’t be able to get in your house ‘less somebody carries you in, so I’m going with you, and I know you’ll make it all right with me. Where d’you live?”

With some reluctance Anthony gave his address. Then, as the cab moved off, he leaned his head against the man’s shoulder and went into a shadowy, painful torpor. When he awoke, the man had lifted him from the cab in front of the apartment on Claremont Avenue and was trying to set him on his feet.

“Can y’ walk?”

“Yes — sort of. You better not come in with me.” Again he felt helplessly in his pockets. “Say,” he continued, apologetically, swaying dangerously on his feet, “I’m afraid I haven’t got a cent.”

“Huh?”

“I’m cleaned out.”

“Sa-a-ay! Didn’t I hear you promise you’d fix it with me? Who’s goin’ to pay the taxi bill?” He turned to the driver for confirmation. “Didn’t you hear him say he’d fix it? All that about his grandfather?”

“Matter of fact,” muttered Anthony imprudently, “it was you did all the talking; however, if you come round, to-morrow — “

At this point the taxi-driver leaned from his cab and said ferociously:

“Ah, poke him one, the dirty cheap skate. If he wasn’t a bum they wouldn’ta throwed him out.”

In answer to this suggestion the fist of the Samaritan shot out like a battering-ram and sent Anthony crashing down against the stone steps of the apartment-house, where he lay without movement, while the tall buildings rocked to and fro above him….

After a long while he awoke and was conscious that it had grown much colder. He tried to move himself but his muscles refused to function. He was curiously anxious to know the time, but he reached for his watch, only to find the pocket empty. Involuntarily his lips formed an immemorial phrase:

“What a night!”

Strangely enough, he was almost sober. Without moving his head he looked up to where the moon was anchored in mid-sky, shedding light down into Claremont Avenue as into the bottom of a deep and uncharted abyss. There was no sign or sound of life save for the continuous buzzing in his own ears, but after a moment Anthony himself broke the silence with a distinct and peculiar murmur. It was the sound that he had consistently attempted to make back there in the Boul’ Mich’, when he had been face to face with Bloeckman — the unmistakable sound of ironic laughter. And on his torn and bleeding lips it was like a pitiful retching of the soul.

Three weeks later the trial came to an end. The seemingly endless spool of legal red tape having unrolled over a period of four and a half years, suddenly snapped off. Anthony and Gloria and, on the other side, Edward Shuttleworth and a platoon of beneficiaries testified and lied and ill-behaved generally in varying degrees of greed and desperation. Anthony awoke one morning in March realizing that the verdict was to be given at four that afternoon, and at the thought he got up out of his bed and began to dress. With his extreme nervousness there was mingled an unjustified optimism as to the outcome. He believed that the decision of the lower court would be reversed, if only because of the reaction, due to excessive prohibition, that had recently set in against reforms and reformers. He counted more on the personal attacks that they had levelled at Shuttleworth than on the more sheerly legal aspects of the proceedings.

Dressed, he poured himself a drink of whiskey and then went into Gloria’s room, where he found her already wide awake. She had been in bed for a week, humoring herself, Anthony fancied, though the doctor had said that she had best not be disturbed.

“Good morning,” she murmured, without smiling. Her eyes seemed unusually large and dark.

“How do you feel?” he asked grudgingly. “Better?”

“Yes.”

“Much?”

“Yes.”

“Do you feel well enough to go down to court with me this afternoon?”

She nodded.

“Yes. I want to. Dick said yesterday that if the weather was nice he was coming up in his car and take me for a ride in Central Park — and look, the room’s all full of sunshine.”

Anthony glanced mechanically out the window and then sat down upon the bed.

“God, I’m nervous!” he exclaimed.

“Please don’t sit there,” she said quickly.

“Why not?”

“You smell of whiskey. I can’t stand it.”

He got up absent-mindedly and left the room. A little later she called to him and he went out and brought her some potato salad and cold chicken from the delicatessen.

At two o’clock Richard Caramel’s car arrived at the door and, when he phoned up, Anthony took Gloria down in the elevator and walked with her to the curb.

She told her cousin that it was sweet of him to take her riding. “Don’t be simple,” Dick replied disparagingly. “It’s nothing.”

But he did not mean that it was nothing and this was a curious thing. Richard Caramel had forgiven many people for many offenses. But he had never forgiven his cousin, Gloria Gilbert, for a statement she had made just prior to her wedding, seven years before. She had said that she did not intend to read his book.

Richard Caramel remembered this — he had remembered it well for seven years.

“What time will I expect you back?” asked Anthony.

“We won’t come back,” she answered, “we’ll meet you down there at four.”

“All right,” he muttered, “I’ll meet you.”

Up-stairs he found a letter waiting for him. It was a mimeographed notice urging “the boys” in condescendingly colloquial language to pay the dues of the American Legion. He threw it impatiently into the waste-basket and sat down with his elbows on the window sill, looking down blindly into the sunny street.

Italy — if the verdict was in their favor it meant Italy. The word had become a sort of talisman to him, a land where the intolerable anxieties of life would fall away like an old garment. They would go to the watering-places first and among the bright and colorful crowds forget the gray appendages of despair. Marvellously renewed, he would walk again in the Piazza di Spanga at twilight, moving in that drifting flotsam of dark women and ragged beggars, of austere, barefooted friars. The thought of Italian women stirred him faintly — when his purse hung heavy again even romance might fly back to perch upon it — the romance of blue canals in Venice, of the golden green hills of Fiesole after rain, and of women, women who changed, dissolved, melted into other women and receded from his life, but who were always beautiful and always young.

But it seemed to him that there should be a difference in his attitude. All the distress that he had ever known, the sorrow and the pain, had been because of women. It was something that in different ways they did to him, unconsciously, almost casually — perhaps finding him tender-minded and afraid, they killed the things in him that menaced their absolute sway.

Turning about from the window he faced his reflection in the mirror, contemplating dejectedly the wan, pasty face, the eyes with their crisscross of lines like shreds of dried blood, the stooped and flabby figure whose very sag was a document in lethargy. He was thirty three — he looked forty. Well, things would be different.

The door-bell rang abruptly and he started as though he had been dealt a blow. Recovering himself, he went into the hall and opened the outer dour. It was Dot.

THE ENCOUNTER

He retreated before her into the living room, comprehending only a word here and there in the slow flood of sentences that poured from her steadily, one after the other, in a persistent monotone. She was decently and shabbily dressed — a somehow pitiable little hat adorned with pink and blue flowers covered and hid her dark hair. He gathered from her words that several days before she had seen an item in the paper concerning the lawsuit, and had obtained his address from the clerk of the Appellate Division. She had called up the apartment and had been told that Anthony was out by a woman to whom she had refused to give her name.

In a living room he stood by the door regarding her with a sort of stupefied horror as she rattled on…. His predominant sensation was that all the civilization and convention around him was curiously unreal…. She was in a milliner’s shop on Sixth Avenue, she said. It was a lonesome life. She had been sick for a long while after he left for CampMills; her mother had come down and taken her home again to Carolina…. She had come to New York with the idea of finding Anthony.

She was appallingly in earnest. Her violet eyes were red with tears; her soft intonation was ragged with little gasping sobs.

That was all. She had never changed. She wanted him now, and if she couldn’t have him she must die….

“You’ll have to get out,” he said at length, speaking with tortuous intensity. “Haven’t I enough to worry me now without you coming here? My God! You’ll have to get out!”

Sobbing, she sat down in a chair.

“I love you,” she cried; “I don’t care what you say to me! I love you.”

“I don’t care!” he almost shrieked; “get out — oh, get out! Haven’t you done me harm enough? Haven’t — you — done — enough?”

“Hit me!” she implored him — wildly, stupidly. “Oh, hit me, and I’ll kiss the hand you hit me with!”

His voice rose until it was pitched almost at a scream. “I’ll kill you!” he cried. “If you don’t get out I’ll kill you, I’ll kill you!”

There was madness in his eyes now, but, unintimidated, Dot rose and took a step toward him.

“Anthony! Anthony! — “

He made a little clicking sound with his teeth and drew back as though to spring at her — then, changing his purpose, he looked wildly about him on the floor and wall.

“I’ll kill you!” he was muttering in short, broken gasps. “I’ll kill you!” He seemed to bite at the word as though to force it into materialization. Alarmed at last she made no further movement forward, but meeting his frantic eyes took a step back toward the door. Anthony began to race here and there on his side of the room, still giving out his single cursing cry. Then he found what he had been seeking — a stiff oaken chair that stood beside the table. Uttering a harsh, broken shout, he seized it, swung it above his head and let it go with all his raging strength straight at the white, frightened face across the room … then a thick, impenetrable darkness came down upon him and blotted out thought, rage, and madness together — with almost a tangible snapping sound the face of the world changed before his eyes….

Gloria and Dick came in at five and called his name. There was no answer — they went into the living room and found a chair with its back smashed lying in the doorway, and they noticed that all about the room there was a sort of disorder — the rugs had slid, the pictures and bric-à-brac were upset upon the centre table. The air was sickly sweet with cheap perfume.

They found Anthony sitting in a patch of sunshine on the floor of his bedroom. Before him, open, were spread his three big stamp-books, and when they entered he was running his hands through a great pile of stamps that he had dumped from the back of one of them. Looking up and seeing Dick and Gloria he put his head critically on one side and motioned them back.

“Anthony!” cried Gloria tensely, “we’ve won! They reversed the decision!”

“Don’t come in,” he murmured wanly, “you’ll muss them. I’m sorting, and

I know you’ll step in them. Everything always gets mussed.”

“What are you doing?” demanded Dick in astonishment. “Going back to childhood? Don’t you realize you’ve won the suit? They’ve reversed the decision of the lower courts. You’re worth thirty millions!”

Anthony only looked at him reproachfully.

“Shut the door when you go out.” He spoke like a pert child.

With a faint horror dawning in her eyes, Gloria gazed at him —

“Anthony!” she cried, “what is it? What’s the matter? Why didn’t you come — why, what is it?”

“See here,” said Anthony softly, “you two get out — now, both of you. Or else I’ll tell my grandfather.”

He held up a handful of stamps and let them come drifting down about him like leaves, varicolored and bright, turning and fluttering gaudily upon the sunny air: stamps of England and Ecuador, Venezuela and Spain — Italy….

TOGETHER WITH THE SPARROWS

That exquisite heavenly irony which has tabulated the demise of so many generations of sparrows doubtless records the subtlest verbal inflections of the passengers of such ships as The Berengaria. And doubtless it was listening when the young man in the plaid cap crossed the deck quickly and spoke to the pretty girl in yellow.

“That’s him,” he said, pointing to a bundled figure seated in a wheel chair near the rail. “That’s Anthony Patch. First time he’s been on deck.”

“Oh — that’s him?”

“Yes. He’s been a little crazy, they say, ever since he got his money, four or five months ago. You see, the other fellow, Shuttleworth, the religious fellow, the one that didn’t get the money, he locked himself up in a room in a hotel and shot himself —

“Oh, he did — “

“But I guess Anthony Patch don’t care much. He got his thirty million. And he’s got his private physician along in case he doesn’t feel just right about it. Has she been on deck?” he asked.

The pretty girl in yellow looked around cautiously.

“She was here a minute ago. She had on a Russian-sable coat that must have cost a small fortune.” She frowned and then added decisively: “I can’t stand her, you know. She seems sort of — sort of dyed and unclean, if you know what I mean. Some people just have that look about them whether they are or not.”

“Sure, I know,” agreed the man with the plaid cap. “She’s not bad-looking, though.” He paused. “Wonder what he’s thinking about — his money, I guess, or maybe he’s got remorse about that fellow Shuttleworth.”

“Probably….”

But the man in the plaid cap was quite wrong. Anthony Patch, sitting near the rail and looking out at the sea, was not thinking of his money, for he had seldom in his life been really preoccupied with material vainglory, nor of Edward Shuttleworth, for it is best to look on the sunny side of these things. No — he was concerned with a series of reminiscences, much as a general might look back upon a successful campaign and analyze his victories. He was thinking of the hardships, the insufferable tribulations he had gone through. They had tried to penalize him for the mistakes of his youth. He had been exposed to ruthless misery, his very craving for romance had been punished, his friends had deserted him — even Gloria had turned against him. He had been alone, alone — facing it all.

Only a few months before people had been urging him to give in, to submit to mediocrity, to go to work. But he had known that he was justified in his way of life — and he had stuck it out stanchly. Why, the very friends who had been most unkind had come to respect him, to know he had been right all along. Had not the Lacys and the Merediths and the Cartwright-Smiths called on Gloria and him at the Ritz-Carlton just a week before they sailed?

Great tears stood in his eyes, and his voice was tremulous as he whispered to himself.

“I showed them,” he was saying. “It was a hard fight, but I didn’t give up and I came through!”

THE GREAT GATSBY

Fitzgerald’s most famous work, The Great Gatsby is now considered to be one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century. First published in 1925, the novel is set on Long Island’s NorthShore and in New York City in the year 1922.  The novel is famous for its portrayal of the ‘roaring’ 1920s, when the US economy soared, prior to the Great Depression.

Fitzgerald started planning the novel in June 1922, after completing his play The Vegetable. He ended up discarding most of it as a false start, some of which resurfaced in the short story Absolution.  Unlike his previous novels, Fitzgerald intended to edit and reshape The Great Gatsby thoroughly, believing in its potential literary acclaim.

The first edition

CONTENTS

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

A young Fitzgerald with his father, a stern moralist

The Great Gatsby

Then wear the gold hat, if that will move her;

If you can bounce high, bounce for her too,

Till she cry “Lover, gold-hatted, high-bouncing lover,

I must have you!”

THOMAS PARKE D’INVILLIERS

CHAPTER 1

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.

“Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”

He didn’t say any more but we’ve always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence I’m inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought--frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon--for the intimate revelations of young men or at least the terms in which they express them are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions. Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.

And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit. Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes but after a certain point I don’t care what it’s founded on. When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction--Gatsby who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn. If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the “creative temperament”--it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again. No--Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.

My family have been prominent, well-to-do people in this middle-western city for three generations. The Carraways are something of a clan and we have a tradition that we’re descended from the Dukes of Buccleuch, but the actual founder of my line was my grandfather’s brother who came here in fifty-one, sent a substitute to the Civil War and started the wholesale hardware business that my father carries on today.

I never saw this great-uncle but I’m supposed to look like him--with special reference to the rather hard-boiled painting that hangs in Father’s office. I graduated from New Haven in 1915, just a quarter of a century after my father, and a little later I participated in that delayed Teutonic migration known as the Great War. I enjoyed the counter-raid so thoroughly that I came back restless. Instead of being the warm center of the world the middle-west now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe--so I decided to go east and learn the bond business. Everybody I knew was in the bond business so I supposed it could support one more single man. All my aunts and uncles talked it over as if they were choosing a prep-school for me and finally said, “Why--ye-es” with very grave, hesitant faces. Father agreed to finance me for a year and after various delays I came east, permanently, I thought, in the spring of twenty-two.

The practical thing was to find rooms in the city but it was a warm season and I had just left a country of wide lawns and friendly trees, so when a young man at the office suggested that we take a house together in a commuting town it sounded like a great idea. He found the house, a weather beaten cardboard bungalow at eighty a month, but at the last minute the firm ordered him to Washington and I went out to the country alone. I had a dog, at least I had him for a few days until he ran away, and an old Dodge and a Finnish woman who made my bed and cooked breakfast and muttered Finnish wisdom to herself over the electric stove.

It was lonely for a day or so until one morning some man, more recently arrived than I, stopped me on the road.

“How do you get to West Egg village?” he asked helplessly.

I told him. And as I walked on I was lonely no longer. I was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler. He had casually conferred on me the freedom of the neighborhood.

And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees--just as things grow in fast movies--I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.

There was so much to read for one thing and so much fine health to be pulled down out of the young breath-giving air. I bought a dozen volumes on banking and credit and investment securities and they stood on my shelf in red and gold like new money from the mint, promising to unfold the shining secrets that only Midas and Morgan and Maecenas knew. And I had the high intention of reading many other books besides. I was rather literary in college--one year I wrote a series of very solemn and obvious editorials for the “Yale News”--and now I was going to bring back all such things into my life and become again that most limited of all specialists, the “well-rounded man.” This isn’t just an epigram--life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all.

It was a matter of chance that I should have rented a house in one of the strangest communities in North America. It was on that slender riotous island which extends itself due east of New York and where there are, among other natural curiosities, two unusual formations of land. Twenty miles from the city a pair of enormous eggs, identical in contour and separated only by a courtesy bay, jut out into the most domesticated body of salt water in the Western Hemisphere, the great wet barnyard of Long Island Sound. They are not perfect ovals--like the egg in the Columbus story they are both crushed flat at the contact end--but their physical resemblance must be a source of perpetual confusion to the gulls that fly overhead. To the wingless a more arresting phenomenon is their dissimilarity in every particular except shape and size.

I lived at West Egg, the--well, the less fashionable of the two, though this is a most superficial tag to express the bizarre and not a little sinister contrast between them. My house was at the very tip of the egg, only fifty yards from the Sound, and squeezed between two huge places that rented for twelve or fifteen thousand a season. The one on my right was a colossal affair by any standard--it was a factual imitation of some Hôtel de Ville in Normandy, with a tower on one side, spanking new under a thin beard of raw ivy, and a marble swimming pool and more than forty acres of lawn and garden. It was Gatsby’s mansion. Or rather, as I didn’t know Mr. Gatsby it was a mansion inhabited by a gentleman of that name. My own house was an eye-sore, but it was a small eye-sore, and it had been overlooked, so I had a view of the water, a partial view of my neighbor’s lawn, and the consoling proximity of millionaires--all for eighty dollars a month.

Across the courtesy bay the white palaces of fashionable East Egg glittered along the water, and the history of the summer really begins on the evening I drove over there to have dinner with the Tom Buchanans. Daisy was my second cousin once removed and I’d known Tom in college. And just after the war I spent two days with them in Chicago.

Her husband, among various physical accomplishments, had been one of the most powerful ends that ever played football at New Haven--a national figure in a way, one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savors of anti-climax. His family were enormously wealthy--even in college his freedom with money was a matter for reproach--but now he’d left Chicago and come east in a fashion that rather took your breath away: for instance he’d brought down a string of polo ponies from Lake Forest. It was hard to realize that a man in my own generation was wealthy enough to do that.

Why they came east I don’t know. They had spent a year in France, for no particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together. This was a permanent move, said Daisy over the telephone, but I didn’t believe it--I had no sight into Daisy’s heart but I felt that Tom would drift on forever seeking a little wistfully for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game.

And so it happened that on a warm windy evening I drove over to East Egg to see two old friends whom I scarcely knew at all. Their house was even more elaborate than I expected, a cheerful red and white Georgian Colonial mansion overlooking the bay. The lawn started at the beach and ran toward the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sun-dials and brick walks and burning gardens--finally when it reached the house drifting up the side in bright vines as though from the momentum of its run. The front was broken by a line of French windows, glowing now with reflected gold, and wide open to the warm windy afternoon, and Tom Buchanan in riding clothes was standing with his legs apart on the front porch.

He had changed since his New Haven years. Now he was a sturdy, straw haired man of thirty with a rather hard mouth and a supercilious manner. Two shining, arrogant eyes had established dominance over his face and gave him the appearance of always leaning aggressively forward. Not even the effeminate swank of his riding clothes could hide the enormous power of that body--he seemed to fill those glistening boots until he strained the top lacing and you could see a great pack of muscle shifting when his shoulder moved under his thin coat. It was a body capable of enormous leverage--a cruel body.

His speaking voice, a gruff husky tenor, added to the impression of fractiousness he conveyed. There was a touch of paternal contempt in it, even toward people he liked--and there were men at New Haven who had hated his guts.

“Now, don’t think my opinion on these matters is final,” he seemed to say, “just because I’m stronger and more of a man than you are.” We were in the same Senior Society, and while we were never intimate I always had the impression that he approved of me and wanted me to like him with some harsh, defiant wistfulness of his own.

We talked for a few minutes on the sunny porch.

“I’ve got a nice place here,” he said, his eyes flashing about restlessly.

Turning me around by one arm he moved a broad flat hand along the front vista, including in its sweep a sunken Italian garden, a half acre of deep pungent roses and a snub-nosed motor boat that bumped the tide off shore.

“It belonged to Demaine the oil man.” He turned me around again, politely and abruptly. “We’ll go inside.”

We walked through a high hallway into a bright rosy-colored space, fragilely bound into the house by French windows at either end. The windows were ajar and gleaming white against the fresh grass outside that seemed to grow a little way into the house. A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding cake of the ceiling--and then rippled over the wine-colored rug, making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea.

The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon. They were both in white and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house. I must have stood for a few moments listening to the whip and snap of the curtains and the groan of a picture on the wall. Then there was a boom as Tom Buchanan shut the rear windows and the caught wind died out about the room and the curtains and the rugs and the two young women ballooned slowly to the floor.

The younger of the two was a stranger to me. She was extended full length at her end of the divan, completely motionless and with her chin raised a little as if she were balancing something on it which was quite likely to fall. If she saw me out of the corner of her eyes she gave no hint of it--indeed, I was almost surprised into murmuring an apology for having disturbed her by coming in.

The other girl, Daisy, made an attempt to rise--she leaned slightly forward with a conscientious expression--then she laughed, an absurd, charming little laugh, and I laughed too and came forward into the room.

“I’m p-paralyzed with happiness.”

She laughed again, as if she said something very witty, and held my hand for a moment, looking up into my face, promising that there was no one in the world she so much wanted to see. That was a way she had. She hinted in a murmur that the surname of the balancing girl was Baker. (I’ve heard it said that Daisy’s murmur was only to make people lean toward her; an irrelevant criticism that made it no less charming.)

At any rate Miss Baker’s lips fluttered, she nodded at me almost imperceptibly and then quickly tipped her head back again--the object she was balancing had obviously tottered a little and given her something of a fright. Again a sort of apology arose to my lips. Almost any exhibition of complete self sufficiency draws a stunned tribute from me.

I looked back at my cousin who began to ask me questions in her low, thrilling voice. It was the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down as if each speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again. Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth--but there was an excitement in her voice that men who had cared for her found difficult to forget: a singing compulsion, a whispered “Listen,” a promise that she had done gay, exciting things just a while since and that there were gay, exciting things hovering in the next hour.

I told her how I had stopped off in Chicago for a day on my way east and how a dozen people had sent their love through me.

“Do they miss me?” she cried ecstatically.

“The whole town is desolate. All the cars have the left rear wheel painted black as a mourning wreath and there’s a persistent wail all night along the NorthShore.”

“How gorgeous! Let’s go back, Tom. Tomorrow!” Then she added irrelevantly, “You ought to see the baby.”

“I’d like to.”

“She’s asleep. She’s two years old. Haven’t you ever seen her?”

“Never.”

“Well, you ought to see her. She’s----”

Tom Buchanan who had been hovering restlessly about the room stopped and rested his hand on my shoulder.

“What you doing, Nick?”

“I’m a bond man.”

“Who with?”

I told him.

“Never heard of them,” he remarked decisively.

This annoyed me.

“You will,” I answered shortly. “You will if you stay in the East.”

“Oh, I’ll stay in the East, don’t you worry,” he said, glancing at Daisy and then back at me, as if he were alert for something more. “I’d be a God Damned fool to live anywhere else.”

At this point Miss Baker said “Absolutely!” with such suddenness that I started--it was the first word she uttered since I came into the room. Evidently it surprised her as much as it did me, for she yawned and with a series of rapid, deft movements stood up into the room.

“I’m stiff,” she complained, “I’ve been lying on that sofa for as long as I can remember.”

“Don’t look at me,” Daisy retorted. “I’ve been trying to get you to New York all afternoon.”

“No, thanks,” said Miss Baker to the four cocktails just in from the pantry, “I’m absolutely in training.”

Her host looked at her incredulously.

“You are!” He took down his drink as if it were a drop in the bottom of a glass. “How you ever get anything done is beyond me.”

I looked at Miss Baker wondering what it was she “got done.” I enjoyed looking at her. She was a slender, small-breasted girl, with an erect carriage which she accentuated by throwing her body backward at the shoulders like a young cadet. Her grey sun-strained eyes looked back at me with polite reciprocal curiosity out of a wan, charming discontented face. It occurred to me now that I had seen her, or a picture of her, somewhere before.

“You live in West Egg,” she remarked contemptuously. “I know somebody there.”

“I don’t know a single----”

“You must know Gatsby.”

“Gatsby?” demanded Daisy. “What Gatsby?”

Before I could reply that he was my neighbor dinner was announced; wedging his tense arm imperatively under mine Tom Buchanan compelled me from the room as though he were moving a checker to another square.

Slenderly, languidly, their hands set lightly on their hips the two young women preceded us out onto a rosy-colored porch open toward the sunset where four candles flickered on the table in the diminished wind.

“Why candles?” objected Daisy, frowning. She snapped them out with her fingers. “In two weeks it’ll be the longest day in the year.” She looked at us all radiantly. “Do you always watch for the longest day of the year and then miss it? I always watch for the longest day in the year and then miss it.”

“We ought to plan something,” yawned Miss Baker, sitting down at the table as if she were getting into bed.

“All right,” said Daisy. “What’ll we plan?” She turned to me helplessly. “What do people plan?”

Before I could answer her eyes fastened with an awed expression on her little finger.

“Look!” she complained. “I hurt it.”

We all looked--the knuckle was black and blue.

“You did it, Tom,” she said accusingly. “I know you didn’t mean to but you did do it. That’s what I get for marrying a brute of a man, a great big hulking physical specimen of a — “

“I hate that word hulking,” objected Tom crossly, “even in kidding.”

“Hulking,” insisted Daisy.

Sometimes she and Miss Baker talked at once, unobtrusively and with a bantering inconsequence that was never quite chatter, that was as cool as their white dresses and their impersonal eyes in the absence of all desire. They were here--and they accepted Tom and me, making only a polite pleasant effort to entertain or to be entertained. They knew that presently dinner would be over and a little later the evening too would be over and casually put away. It was sharply different from the West where an evening was hurried from phase to phase toward its close in a continually disappointed anticipation or else in sheer nervous dread of the moment itself.

“You make me feel uncivilized, Daisy,” I confessed on my second glass of corky but rather impressive claret. “Can’t you talk about crops or something?”

I meant nothing in particular by this remark but it was taken up in an unexpected way.

“Civilization’s going to pieces,” broke out Tom violently. “I’ve gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read ‘The Rise of the Coloured Empires’ by this man Goddard?”

“Why, no,” I answered, rather surprised by his tone.

“Well, it’s a fine book, and everybody ought to read it. The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be--will be utterly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved.”

“Tom’s getting very profound,” said Daisy with an expression of unthoughtful sadness. “He reads deep books with long words in them. What was that word we----”

“Well, these books are all scientific,” insisted Tom, glancing at her impatiently. “This fellow has worked out the whole thing. It’s up to us who are the dominant race to watch out or these other races will have control of things.”

“We’ve got to beat them down,” whispered Daisy, winking ferociously toward the fervent sun.

“You ought to live in California--” began Miss Baker but Tom interrupted her by shifting heavily in his chair.

“This idea is that we’re Nordics. I am, and you are and you are and----” After an infinitesimal hesitation he included Daisy with a slight nod and she winked at me again. “--and we’ve produced all the things that go to make civilization--oh, science and art and all that. Do you see?”

There was something pathetic in his concentration as if his complacency, more acute than of old, was not enough to him any more. When, almost immediately, the telephone rang inside and the butler left the porch Daisy seized upon the momentary interruption and leaned toward me.

“I’ll tell you a family secret,” she whispered enthusiastically. “It’s about the butler’s nose. Do you want to hear about the butler’s nose?”

“That’s why I came over tonight.”

“Well, he wasn’t always a butler; he used to be the silver polisher for some people in New York that had a silver service for two hundred people. He had to polish it from morning till night until finally it began to affect his nose----”

“Things went from bad to worse,” suggested Miss Baker.

“Yes. Things went from bad to worse until finally he had to give up his position.”

For a moment the last sunshine fell with romantic affection upon her glowing face; her voice compelled me forward breathlessly as I listened--then the glow faded, each light deserting her with lingering regret like children leaving a pleasant street at dusk.

The butler came back and murmured something close to Tom’s ear whereupon Tom frowned, pushed back his chair and without a word went inside. As if his absence quickened something within her Daisy leaned forward again, her voice glowing and singing.

“I love to see you at my table, Nick. You remind me of a--of a rose, an absolute rose. Doesn’t he?” She turned to Miss Baker for confirmation. “An absolute rose?”

This was untrue. I am not even faintly like a rose. She was only extemporizing but a stirring warmth flowed from her as if her heart was trying to come out to you concealed in one of those breathless, thrilling words. Then suddenly she threw her napkin on the table and excused herself and went into the house.

Miss Baker and I exchanged a short glance consciously devoid of meaning. I was about to speak when she sat up alertly and said “Sh!” in a warning voice. A subdued impassioned murmur was audible in the room beyond and Miss Baker leaned forward, unashamed, trying to hear. The murmur trembled on the verge of coherence, sank down, mounted excitedly, and then ceased altogether.

“This Mr. Gatsby you spoke of is my neighbor----” I said.

“Don’t talk. I want to hear what happens.”

“Is something happening?” I inquired innocently.

“You mean to say you don’t know?” said Miss Baker, honestly surprised. “I thought everybody knew.”

“I don’t.”

“Why----” she said hesitantly, “Tom’s got some woman in New York.”

“Got some woman?” I repeated blankly.

Miss Baker nodded.

“She might have the decency not to telephone him at dinner-time. Don’t you think?”

Almost before I had grasped her meaning there was the flutter of a dress and the crunch of leather boots and Tom and Daisy were back at the table.

“It couldn’t be helped!” cried Daisy with tense gayety.

She sat down, glanced searchingly at Miss Baker and then at me and continued: “I looked outdoors for a minute and it’s very romantic outdoors. There’s a bird on the lawn that I think must be a nightingale come over on the Cunard or White Star Line. He’s singing away----” her voice sang “----It’s romantic, isn’t it, Tom?”

“Very romantic,” he said, and then miserably to me: “If it’s light enough after dinner I want to take you down to the stables.”

The telephone rang inside, startlingly, and as Daisy shook her head decisively at Tom the subject of the stables, in fact all subjects, vanished into air. Among the broken fragments of the last five minutes at table I remember the candles being lit again, pointlessly, and I was conscious of wanting to look squarely at every one and yet to avoid all eyes. I couldn’t guess what Daisy and Tom were thinking but I doubt if even Miss Baker who seemed to have mastered a certain hardy skepticism was able utterly to put this fifth guest’s shrill metallic urgency out of mind. To a certain temperament the situation might have seemed intriguing--my own instinct was to telephone immediately for the police.

The horses, needless to say, were not mentioned again. Tom and Miss Baker, with several feet of twilight between them strolled back into the library, as if to a vigil beside a perfectly tangible body, while trying to look pleasantly interested and a little deaf I followed Daisy around a chain of connecting verandas to the porch in front. In its deep gloom we sat down side by side on a wicker settee.

Daisy took her face in her hands, as if feeling its lovely shape, and her eyes moved gradually out into the velvet dusk. I saw that turbulent emotions possessed her, so I asked what I thought would be some sedative questions about her little girl.

“We don’t know each other very well, Nick,” she said suddenly. “Even if we are cousins. You didn’t come to my wedding.”

“I wasn’t back from the war.”

“That’s true.” She hesitated. “Well, I’ve had a very bad time, Nick, and I’m pretty cynical about everything.”

Evidently she had reason to be. I waited but she didn’t say any more, and after a moment I returned rather feebly to the subject of her daughter.

“I suppose she talks, and--eats, and everything.”

“Oh, yes.” She looked at me absently. “Listen, Nick; let me tell you what I said when she was born. Would you like to hear?”

“Very much.”

“It’ll show you how I’ve gotten to feel about--things. Well, she was less than an hour old and Tom was God knows where. I woke up out of the ether with an utterly abandoned feeling and asked the nurse right away if it was a boy or a girl. She told me it was a girl, and so I turned my head away and wept. ‘All right,’ I said, ‘I’m glad it’s a girl. And I hope she’ll be a fool--that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.”

“You see I think everything’s terrible anyhow,” she went on in a convinced way. “Everybody thinks so--the most advanced people. And I know. I’ve been everywhere and seen everything and done everything.” Her eyes flashed around her in a defiant way, rather like Tom’s, and she laughed with thrilling scorn. “Sophisticated--God, I’m sophisticated!”

The instant her voice broke off, ceasing to compel my attention, my belief, I felt the basic insincerity of what she had said. It made me uneasy, as though the whole evening had been a trick of some sort to exact a contributory emotion from me. I waited, and sure enough, in a moment she looked at me with an absolute smirk on her lovely face as if she had asserted her membership in a rather distinguished secret society to which she and Tom belonged.

Inside, the crimson room bloomed with light. Tom and Miss Baker sat at either end of the long couch and she read aloud to him from the “Saturday Evening Post”--the words, murmurous and uninflected, running together in a soothing tune. The lamp-light, bright on his boots and dull on the autumn-leaf yellow of her hair, glinted along the paper as she turned a page with a flutter of slender muscles in her arms.

When we came in she held us silent for a moment with a lifted hand.

“To be continued,” she said, tossing the magazine on the table, “in our very next issue.”

Her body asserted itself with a restless movement of her knee, and she stood up.

“Ten o’clock,” she remarked, apparently finding the time on the ceiling. “Time for this good girl to go to bed.”

“Jordan’s going to play in the tournament tomorrow,” explained Daisy, “over at Westchester.”

“Oh,--you’re Jordan Baker.”

I knew now why her face was familiar--its pleasing contemptuous expression had looked out at me from many rotogravure pictures of the sporting life at Asheville and Hot Springs and Palm Beach. I had heard some story of her too, a critical, unpleasant story, but what it was I had forgotten long ago.

“Good night,” she said softly. “Wake me at eight, won’t you.”

“If you’ll get up.”

“I will. Good night, Mr. Carraway. See you anon.”

“Of course you will,” confirmed Daisy. “In fact I think I’ll arrange a marriage. Come over often, Nick, and I’ll sort of--oh--fling you together. You know--lock you up accidentally in linen closets and push you out to sea in a boat, and all that sort of thing----”

“Good night,” called Miss Baker from the stairs. “I haven’t heard a word.”

“She’s a nice girl,” said Tom after a moment. “They oughtn’t to let her run around the country this way.”

“Who oughtn’t to?” inquired Daisy coldly.

“Her family.”

“Her family is one aunt about a thousand years old. Besides, Nick’s going to look after her, aren’t you, Nick? She’s going to spend lots of week-ends out here this summer. I think the home influence will be very good for her.”

Daisy and Tom looked at each other for a moment in silence.

“Is she from New York?” I asked quickly.

“From Louisville. Our white girlhood was passed together there. Our beautiful white----”

“Did you give Nick a little heart to heart talk on the veranda?” demanded Tom suddenly.

“Did I?” She looked at me. “I can’t seem to remember, but I think we talked about the Nordic race. Yes, I’m sure we did. It sort of crept up on us and first thing you know----”

“Don’t believe everything you hear, Nick,” he advised me.

I said lightly that I had heard nothing at all, and a few minutes later I got up to go home. They came to the door with me and stood side by side in a cheerful square of light. As I started my motor Daisy peremptorily called “Wait!

“I forgot to ask you something, and it’s important. We heard you were engaged to a girl out West.”

“That’s right,” corroborated Tom kindly. “We heard that you were engaged.”

“It’s libel. I’m too poor.”

“But we heard it,” insisted Daisy, surprising me by opening up again in a flower-like way. “We heard it from three people so it must be true.”

Of course I knew what they were referring to, but I wasn’t even vaguely engaged. The fact that gossip had published the banns was one of the reasons I had come east. You can’t stop going with an old friend on account of rumors and on the other hand I had no intention of being rumored into marriage.

Their interest rather touched me and made them less remotely rich--nevertheless, I was confused and a little disgusted as I drove away. It seemed to me that the thing for Daisy to do was to rush out of the house, child in arms--but apparently there were no such intentions in her head. As for Tom, the fact that he “had some woman in New York” was really less surprising than that he had been depressed by a book. Something was making him nibble at the edge of stale ideas as if his sturdy physical egotism no longer nourished his peremptory heart.

Already it was deep summer on roadhouse roofs and in front of wayside garages, where new red gas-pumps sat out in pools of light, and when I reached my estate at West Egg I ran the car under its shed and sat for a while on an abandoned grass roller in the yard. The wind had blown off, leaving a loud bright night with wings beating in the trees and a persistent organ sound as the full bellows of the earth blew the frogs full of life. The silhouette of a moving cat wavered across the moonlight and turning my head to watch it I saw that I was not alone--fifty feet away a figure had emerged from the shadow of my neighbor’s mansion and was standing with his hands in his pockets regarding the silver pepper of the stars. Something in his leisurely movements and the secure position of his feet upon the lawn suggested that it was Mr. Gatsby himself, come out to determine what share was his of our local heavens.

I decided to call to him. Miss Baker had mentioned him at dinner, and that would do for an introduction. But I didn’t call to him for he gave a sudden intimation that he was content to be alone--he stretched out his arms toward the dark water in a curious way, and far as I was from him I could have sworn he was trembling. Involuntarily I glanced seaward--and distinguished nothing except a single green light, minute and far away, that might have been the end of a dock. When I looked once more for Gatsby he had vanished, and I was alone again in the unquiet darkness.

CHAPTER 2

About half way between West Egg and New York the motor-road hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land. This is a valley of ashes--a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of grey cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-grey men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud which screens their obscure operations from your sight.

But above the grey land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg. The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic--their retinas are one yard high. They look out of no face but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a nonexistent nose. Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set them there to fatten his practice in the borough of Queens, and then sank down himself into eternal blindness or forgot them and moved away. But his eyes, dimmed a little by many paintless days under sun and rain, brood on over the solemn dumping ground.

The valley of ashes is bounded on one side by a small foul river, and when the drawbridge is up to let barges through, the passengers on waiting trains can stare at the dismal scene for as long as half an hour. There is always a halt there of at least a minute and it was because of this that I first met Tom Buchanan’s mistress.

The fact that he had one was insisted upon wherever he was known. His acquaintances resented the fact that he turned up in popular restaurants with her and, leaving her at a table, sauntered about, chatting with whomsoever he knew. Though I was curious to see her I had no desire to meet her--but I did. I went up to New York with Tom on the train one afternoon and when we stopped by the ashheaps he jumped to his feet and taking hold of my elbow literally forced me from the car.

“We’re getting off!” he insisted. “I want you to meet my girl.”

I think he’d tanked up a good deal at luncheon and his determination to have my company bordered on violence. The supercilious assumption was that on Sunday afternoon I had nothing better to do.

I followed him over a low white-washed railroad fence and we walked back a hundred yards along the road under Doctor Eckleburg’s persistent stare. The only building in sight was a small block of yellow brick sitting on the edge of the waste land, a sort of compact Main Street ministering to it and contiguous to absolutely nothing. One of the three shops it contained was for rent and another was an all-night restaurant approached by a trail of ashes; the third was a garage--Repairs. GEORGE B. WILSON. Cars Bought and Sold--and I followed Tom inside.

The interior was unprosperous and bare; the only car visible was the dust-covered wreck of a Ford which crouched in a dim corner. It had occurred to me that this shadow of a garage must be a blind and that sumptuous and romantic apartments were concealed overhead when the proprietor himself appeared in the door of an office, wiping his hands on a piece of waste. He was a blonde, spiritless man, anaemic, and faintly handsome. When he saw us a damp gleam of hope sprang into his light blue eyes.

“Hello, Wilson, old man,” said Tom, slapping him jovially on the shoulder. “How’s business?”

“I can’t complain,” answered Wilson unconvincingly. “When are you going to sell me that car?”

“Next week; I’ve got my man working on it now.”

“Works pretty slow, don’t he?”

“No, he doesn’t,” said Tom coldly. “And if you feel that way about it, maybe I’d better sell it somewhere else after all.”

“I don’t mean that,” explained Wilson quickly. “I just meant----”

His voice faded off and Tom glanced impatiently around the garage. Then I heard footsteps on a stairs and in a moment the thickish figure of a woman blocked out the light from the office door. She was in the middle thirties, and faintly stout, but she carried her surplus flesh sensuously as some women can. Her face, above a spotted dress of dark blue crepe-de-chine, contained no facet or gleam of beauty but there was an immediately perceptible vitality about her as if the nerves of her body were continually smouldering. She smiled slowly and walking through her husband as if he were a ghost shook hands with Tom, looking him flush in the eye. Then she wet her lips and without turning around spoke to her husband in a soft, coarse voice:

“Get some chairs, why don’t you, so somebody can sit down.”

“Oh, sure,” agreed Wilson hurriedly and went toward the little office, mingling immediately with the cement color of the walls. A white ashen dust veiled his dark suit and his pale hair as it veiled everything in the vicinity--except his wife, who moved close to Tom.

“I want to see you,” said Tom intently. “Get on the next train.”

“All right.”

“I’ll meet you by the news-stand on the lower level.”

She nodded and moved away from him just as George Wilson emerged with two chairs from his office door.

We waited for her down the road and out of sight. It was a few days before the Fourth of July, and a grey, scrawny Italian child was setting torpedoes in a row along the railroad track.

“Terrible place, isn’t it,” said Tom, exchanging a frown with Doctor Eckleburg.

“Awful.”

“It does her good to get away.”

“Doesn’t her husband object?”

“Wilson? He thinks she goes to see her sister in New York. He’s so dumb he doesn’t know he’s alive.”

So Tom Buchanan and his girl and I went up together to New York--or not quite together, for Mrs. Wilson sat discreetly in another car. Tom deferred that much to the sensibilities of those East Eggers who might be on the train.

She had changed her dress to a brown figured muslin which stretched tight over her rather wide hips as Tom helped her to the platform in New York. At the news-stand she bought a copy of “Town Tattle” and a moving-picture magazine and, in the station drug store, some cold cream and a small flask of perfume. Upstairs, in the solemn echoing drive she let four taxi cabs drive away before she selected a new one, lavender-colored with grey upholstery, and in this we slid out from the mass of the station into the glowing sunshine. But immediately she turned sharply from the window and leaning forward tapped on the front glass.

“I want to get one of those dogs,” she said earnestly. “I want to get one for the apartment. They’re nice to have--a dog.”

We backed up to a grey old man who bore an absurd resemblance to John D. Rockefeller. In a basket, swung from his neck, cowered a dozen very recent puppies of an indeterminate breed.

“What kind are they?” asked Mrs. Wilson eagerly as he came to the taxi-window.

“All kinds. What kind do you want, lady?”

“I’d like to get one of those police dogs; I don’t suppose you got that kind?”

The man peered doubtfully into the basket, plunged in his hand and drew one up, wriggling, by the back of the neck.

“That’s no police dog,” said Tom.

“No, it’s not exactly a police dog,” said the man with disappointment in his voice. “It’s more of an airedale.” He passed his hand over the brown wash-rag of a back. “Look at that coat. Some coat. That’s a dog that’ll never bother you with catching cold.”

“I think it’s cute,” said Mrs. Wilson enthusiastically. “How much is it?”

“That dog?” He looked at it admiringly. “That dog will cost you ten dollars.”

The airedale--undoubtedly there was an airedale concerned in it somewhere though its feet were startlingly white--changed hands and settled down into Mrs. Wilson’s lap, where she fondled the weather-proof coat with rapture.

“Is it a boy or a girl?” she asked delicately.

“That dog? That dog’s a boy.”

“It’s a bitch,” said Tom decisively. “Here’s your money. Go and buy ten more dogs with it.”

We drove over to Fifth Avenue, so warm and soft, almost pastoral, on the summer Sunday afternoon that I wouldn’t have been surprised to see a great flock of white sheep turn the corner.

“Hold on,” I said, “I have to leave you here.”

“No, you don’t,” interposed Tom quickly. “Myrtle’ll be hurt if you don’t come up to the apartment. Won’t you, Myrtle?”

“Come on,” she urged. “I’ll telephone my sister Catherine. She’s said to be very beautiful by people who ought to know.”

“Well, I’d like to, but----”

We went on, cutting back again over the Park toward the West Hundreds. At 158th Street the cab stopped at one slice in a long white cake of apartment houses. Throwing a regal homecoming glance around the neighborhood, Mrs. Wilson gathered up her dog and her other purchases and went haughtily in.

“I’m going to have the McKees come up,” she announced as we rose in the elevator. “And of course I got to call up my sister, too.”

The apartment was on the top floor--a small living room, a small dining room, a small bedroom and a bath. The living room was crowded to the doors with a set of tapestried furniture entirely too large for it so that to move about was to stumble continually over scenes of ladies swinging in the gardens of Versailles. The only picture was an over-enlarged photograph, apparently a hen sitting on a blurred rock. Looked at from a distance however the hen resolved itself into a bonnet and the countenance of a stout old lady beamed down into the room. Several old copies of “Town Tattle” lay on the table together with a copy of “Simon Called Peter” and some of the small scandal magazines of Broadway. Mrs. Wilson was first concerned with the dog. A reluctant elevator boy went for a box full of straw and some milk to which he added on his own initiative a tin of large hard dog biscuits--one of which decomposed apathetically in the saucer of milk all afternoon. Meanwhile Tom brought out a bottle of whiskey from a locked bureau door.

I have been drunk just twice in my life and the second time was that afternoon so everything that happened has a dim hazy cast over it although until after eight o’clock the apartment was full of cheerful sun. Sitting on Tom’s lap Mrs. Wilson called up several people on the telephone; then there were no cigarettes and I went out to buy some at the drug store on the corner. When I came back they had disappeared so I sat down discreetly in the living room and read a chapter of “Simon Called Peter”--either it was terrible stuff or the whiskey distorted things because it didn’t make any sense to me.

Just as Tom and Myrtle--after the first drink Mrs. Wilson and I called each other by our first names--reappeared, company commenced to arrive at the apartment door.

The sister, Catherine, was a slender, worldly girl of about thirty with a solid sticky bob of red hair and a complexion powdered milky white. Her eyebrows had been plucked and then drawn on again at a more rakish angle but the efforts of nature toward the restoration of the old alignment gave a blurred air to her face. When she moved about there was an incessant clicking as innumerable pottery bracelets jingled up and down upon her arms. She came in with such a proprietary haste and looked around so possessively at the furniture that I wondered if she lived here. But when I asked her she laughed immoderately, repeated my question aloud and told me she lived with a girl friend at a hotel.

Mr. McKee was a pale feminine man from the flat below. He had just shaved for there was a white spot of lather on his cheekbone and he was most respectful in his greeting to everyone in the room. He informed me that he was in the “artistic game” and I gathered later that he was a photographer and had made the dim enlargement of Mrs. Wilson’s mother which hovered like an ectoplasm on the wall. His wife was shrill, languid, handsome and horrible. She told me with pride that her husband had photographed her a hundred and twenty-seven times since they had been married.

Mrs. Wilson had changed her costume some time before and was now attired in an elaborate afternoon dress of cream colored chiffon, which gave out a continual rustle as she swept about the room. With the influence of the dress her personality had also undergone a change. The intense vitality that had been so remarkable in the garage was converted into impressive hauteur. Her laughter, her gestures, her assertions became more violently affected moment by moment and as she expanded the room grew smaller around her until she seemed to be revolving on a noisy, creaking pivot through the smoky air.

“My dear,” she told her sister in a high mincing shout, “most of these fellas will cheat you every time. All they think of is money. I had a woman up here last week to look at my feet and when she gave me the bill you’d of thought she had my appendicitus out.”

“What was the name of the woman?” asked Mrs. McKee.

“Mrs. Eberhardt. She goes around looking at people’s feet in their own homes.”

“I like your dress,” remarked Mrs. McKee, “I think it’s adorable.”

Mrs. Wilson rejected the compliment by raising her eyebrow in disdain.

“It’s just a crazy old thing,” she said. “I just slip it on sometimes when I don’t care what I look like.”

“But it looks wonderful on you, if you know what I mean,” pursued Mrs. McKee. “If Chester could only get you in that pose I think he could make something of it.”

We all looked in silence at Mrs. Wilson who removed a strand of hair from over her eyes and looked back at us with a brilliant smile. Mr. McKee regarded her intently with his head on one side and then moved his hand back and forth slowly in front of his face.

“I should change the light,” he said after a moment. “I’d like to bring out the modelling of the features. And I’d try to get hold of all the back hair.”

“I wouldn’t think of changing the light,” cried Mrs. McKee. “I think it’s----”

Her husband said “Sh! “ and we all looked at the subject again whereupon Tom Buchanan yawned audibly and got to his feet.

“You McKees have something to drink,” he said. “Get some more ice and mineral water, Myrtle, before everybody goes to sleep.”

“I told that boy about the ice.” Myrtle raised her eyebrows in despair at the shiftlessness of the lower orders. “These people! You have to keep after them all the time.”

She looked at me and laughed pointlessly. Then she flounced over to the dog, kissed it with ecstasy and swept into the kitchen, implying that a dozen chefs awaited her orders there.

“I’ve done some nice things out on Long Island,” asserted Mr. McKee.

Tom looked at him blankly.

“Two of them we have framed downstairs.”

“Two what?” demanded Tom.

“Two studies. One of them I call ‘Montauk Point--the Gulls,’ and the other I call ‘Montauk Point--the Sea.’ “

The sister Catherine sat down beside me on the couch.

“Do you live down on Long Island, too?” she inquired.

“I live at West Egg.”

“Really? I was down there at a party about a month ago. At a man named Gatsby’s. Do you know him?”

“I live next door to him.”

“Well, they say he’s a nephew or a cousin of Kaiser Wilhelm’s. That’s where all his money comes from.”

“Really?”

She nodded.

“I’m scared of him. I’d hate to have him get anything on me.”

This absorbing information about my neighbor was interrupted by Mrs. McKee’s pointing suddenly at Catherine:

“Chester, I think you could do something with her,” she broke out, but Mr. McKee only nodded in a bored way and turned his attention to Tom.

“I’d like to do more work on Long Island if I could get the entry. All I ask is that they should give me a start.”

“Ask Myrtle,” said Tom, breaking into a short shout of laughter as Mrs. Wilson entered with a tray. “She’ll give you a letter of introduction, won’t you, Myrtle?”

“Do what?” she asked, startled.

“You’ll give McKee a letter of introduction to your husband, so he can do some studies of him.” His lips moved silently for a moment as he invented. “ ‘George B. Wilson at the Gasoline Pump,’ or something like that.”

Catherine leaned close to me and whispered in my ear: “Neither of them can stand the person they’re married to.”

“Can’t they?”

“Can’t stand them.” She looked at Myrtle and then at Tom. “What I say is, why go on living with them if they can’t stand them? If I was them I’d get a divorce and get married to each other right away.”

“Doesn’t she like Wilson either?”

The answer to this was unexpected. It came from Myrtle who had overheard the question and it was violent and obscene.

“You see?” cried Catherine triumphantly. She lowered her voice again. “It’s really his wife that’s keeping them apart. She’s a Catholic and they don’t believe in divorce.”

Daisy was not a Catholic and I was a little shocked at the elaborateness of the lie.

“When they do get married,” continued Catherine, “they’re going west to live for a while until it blows over.”

“It’d be more discreet to go to Europe.”

“Oh, do you like Europe?” she exclaimed surprisingly. “I just got back from Monte Carlo.”

“Really.”

“Just last year. I went over there with another girl.”

“Stay long?”

“No, we just went to Monte Carlo and back. We went by way of Marseilles. We had over twelve hundred dollars when we started but we got gypped out of it all in two days in the private rooms. We had an awful time getting back, I can tell you. God, how I hated that town!”

The late afternoon sky bloomed in the window for a moment like the blue honey of the Mediterranean--then the shrill voice of Mrs. McKee called me back into the room.

“I almost made a mistake, too,” she declared vigorously. “I almost married a little kyke who’d been after me for years. I knew he was below me. Everybody kept saying to me: ‘Lucille, that man’s way below you!’ But if I hadn’t met Chester, he’d of got me sure.”

“Yes, but listen,” said Myrtle Wilson, nodding her head up and down, “at least you didn’t marry him.”

“I know I didn’t.”

“Well, I married him,” said Myrtle, ambiguously. “And that’s the difference between your case and mine.”

“Why did you, Myrtle?” demanded Catherine. “Nobody forced you to.”

Myrtle considered.

“I married him because I thought he was a gentleman,” she said finally. “I thought he knew something about breeding, but he wasn’t fit to lick my shoe.”

“You were crazy about him for a while,” said Catherine.

“Crazy about him!” cried Myrtle incredulously. “Who said I was crazy about him? I never was any more crazy about him than I was about that man there.”

She pointed suddenly at me, and every one looked at me accusingly. I tried to show by my expression that I had played no part in her past.

“The only crazy I was was when I married him. I knew right away I made a mistake. He borrowed somebody’s best suit to get married in and never even told me about it, and the man came after it one day when he was out. She looked around to see who was listening: “ ‘Oh, is that your suit?’ I said. ‘This is the first I ever heard about it.’ But I gave it to him and then I lay down and cried to beat the band all afternoon.”

“She really ought to get away from him,” resumed Catherine to me. “They’ve been living over that garage for eleven years. And Tom’s the first sweetie she ever had.”

The bottle of whiskey--a second one--was now in constant demand by all present, excepting Catherine who “felt just as good on nothing at all.” Tom rang for the janitor and sent him for some celebrated sandwiches, which were a complete supper in themselves. I wanted to get out and walk eastward toward the park through the soft twilight but each time I tried to go I became entangled in some wild strident argument which pulled me back, as if with ropes, into my chair. Yet high over the city our line of yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening streets, and I was him too, looking up and wondering. I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.

Myrtle pulled her chair close to mine, and suddenly her warm breath poured over me the story of her first meeting with Tom.

“It was on the two little seats facing each other that are always the last ones left on the train. I was going up to New York to see my sister and spend the night. He had on a dress suit and patent leather shoes and I couldn’t keep my eyes off him but every time he looked at me I had to pretend to be looking at the advertisement over his head. When we came into the station he was next to me and his white shirt-front pressed against my arm--and so I told him I’d have to call a policeman, but he knew I lied. I was so excited that when I got into a taxi with him I didn’t hardly know I wasn’t getting into a subway train. All I kept thinking about, over and over, was ‘You can’t live forever, you can’t live forever.’ “

She turned to Mrs. McKee and the room rang full of her artificial laughter.

“My dear,” she cried, “I’m going to give you this dress as soon as I’m through with it. I’ve got to get another one tomorrow. I’m going to make a list of all the things I’ve got to get. A massage and a wave and a collar for the dog and one of those cute little ash-trays where you touch a spring, and a wreath with a black silk bow for mother’s grave that’ll last all summer. I got to write down a list so I won’t forget all the things I got to do.”

It was nine o’clock--almost immediately afterward I looked at my watch and found it was ten. Mr. McKee was asleep on a chair with his fists clenched in his lap, like a photograph of a man of action. Taking out my handkerchief I wiped from his cheek the remains of the spot of dried lather that had worried me all the afternoon.

The little dog was sitting on the table looking with blind eyes through the smoke and from time to time groaning faintly. People disappeared, reappeared, made plans to go somewhere, and then lost each other, searched for each other, found each other a few feet away. Some time toward midnight Tom Buchanan and Mrs. Wilson stood face to face discussing in impassioned voices whether Mrs. Wilson had any right to mention Daisy’s name.

“Daisy! Daisy! Daisy!” shouted Mrs. Wilson. “I’ll say it whenever I want to! Daisy! Dai----”

Making a short deft movement Tom Buchanan broke her nose with his open hand.

Then there were bloody towels upon the bathroom floor, and women’s voices scolding, and high over the confusion a long broken wail of pain. Mr. McKee awoke from his doze and started in a daze toward the door. When he had gone half way he turned around and stared at the scene--his wife and Catherine scolding and consoling as they stumbled here and there among the crowded furniture with articles of aid, and the despairing figure on the couch bleeding fluently and trying to spread a copy of “Town Tattle” over the tapestry scenes of Versailles. Then Mr. McKee turned and continued on out the door. Taking my hat from the chandelier I followed.

“Come to lunch some day,” he suggested, as we groaned down in the elevator.

“Where?”

“Anywhere.”

“Keep your hands off the lever,” snapped the elevator boy.

“I beg your pardon,” said Mr. McKee with dignity, “I didn’t know I was touching it.”

“All right,” I agreed, “I’ll be glad to.”

. . . I was standing beside his bed and he was sitting up between the sheets, clad in his underwear, with a great portfolio in his hands.

“Beauty and the Beast . . . Loneliness . . . Old Grocery Horse . . . Brook’n Bridge . . . .”

Then I was lying half asleep in the cold lower level of the Pennsylvania Station, staring at the morning “Tribune” and waiting for the four o’clock train.

CHAPTER 3

There was music from my neighbor’s house through the summer nights. In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars. At high tide in the afternoon I watched his guests diving from the tower of his raft or taking the sun on the hot sand of his beach while his two motor-boats slit the waters of the Sound, drawing aquaplanes over cataracts of foam. On week-ends his Rolls-Royce became an omnibus, bearing parties to and from the city, between nine in the morning and long past midnight, while his station wagon scampered like a brisk yellow bug to meet all trains. And on Mondays eight servants including an extra gardener toiled all day with mops and scrubbing-brushes and hammers and garden-shears, repairing the ravages of the night before.

Every Friday five crates of oranges and lemons arrived from a fruiterer in New York--every Monday these same oranges and lemons left his back door in a pyramid of pulpless halves. There was a machine in the kitchen which could extract the juice of two hundred oranges in half an hour, if a little button was pressed two hundred times by a butler’s thumb.

At least once a fortnight a corps of caterers came down with several hundred feet of canvas and enough colored lights to make a Christmas tree of Gatsby’s enormous garden. On buffet tables, garnished with glistening hors-d’oeuvre, spiced baked hams crowded against salads of harlequin designs and pastry pigs and turkeys bewitched to a dark gold. In the main hall a bar with a real brass rail was set up, and stocked with gins and liquors and with cordials so long forgotten that most of his female guests were too young to know one from another.

By seven o’clock the orchestra has arrived--no thin five-piece affair but a whole pitful of oboes and trombones and saxophones and viols and cornets and piccolos and low and high drums. The last swimmers have come in from the beach now and are dressing upstairs; the cars from New York are parked five deep in the drive, and already the halls and salons and verandas are gaudy with primary colors and hair shorn in strange new ways and shawls beyond the dreams of Castile. The bar is in full swing and floating rounds of cocktails permeate the garden outside until the air is alive with chatter and laughter and casual innuendo and introductions forgotten on the spot and enthusiastic meetings between women who never knew each other’s names.

The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun and now the orchestra is playing yellow cocktail music and the opera of voices pitches a key higher. Laughter is easier, minute by minute, spilled with prodigality, tipped out at a cheerful word. The groups change more swiftly, swell with new arrivals, dissolve and form in the same breath--already there are wanderers, confident girls who weave here and there among the stouter and more stable, become for a sharp, joyous moment the center of a group and then excited with triumph glide on through the sea-change of faces and voices and color under the constantly changing light.

Suddenly one of these gypsies in trembling opal, seizes a cocktail out of the air, dumps it down for courage and moving her hands like Frisco dances out alone on the canvas platform. A momentary hush; the orchestra leader varies his rhythm obligingly for her and there is a burst of chatter as the erroneous news goes around that she is Gilda Gray’s understudy from the “Follies.” The party has begun.

I believe that on the first night I went to Gatsby’s house I was one of the few guests who had actually been invited. People were not invited--they went there. They got into automobiles which bore them out to Long Island and somehow they ended up at Gatsby’s door. Once there they were introduced by somebody who knew Gatsby and after that they conducted themselves according to the rules of behavior associated with amusement parks. Sometimes they came and went without having met Gatsby at all, came for the party with a simplicity of heart that was its own ticket of admission.

I had been actually invited. A chauffeur in a uniform of robin’s egg blue crossed my lawn early that Saturday morning with a surprisingly formal note from his employer--the honor would be entirely Gatsby’s, it said, if I would attend his “little party” that night. He had seen me several times and had intended to call on me long before but a peculiar combination of circumstances had prevented it--signed Jay Gatsby in a majestic hand.

Dressed up in white flannels I went over to his lawn a little after seven and wandered around rather ill-at-ease among swirls and eddies of people I didn’t know--though here and there was a face I had noticed on the commuting train. I was immediately struck by the number of young Englishmen dotted about; all well dressed, all looking a little hungry and all talking in low earnest voices to solid and prosperous Americans. I was sure that they were selling something: bonds or insurance or automobiles. They were, at least, agonizingly aware of the easy money in the vicinity and convinced that it was theirs for a few words in the right key.

As soon as I arrived I made an attempt to find my host but the two or three people of whom I asked his whereabouts stared at me in such an amazed way and denied so vehemently any knowledge of his movements that I slunk off in the direction of the cocktail table--the only place in the garden where a single man could linger without looking purposeless and alone.

I was on my way to get roaring drunk from sheer embarrassment when Jordan Baker came out of the house and stood at the head of the marble steps, leaning a little backward and looking with contemptuous interest down into the garden.

Welcome or not, I found it necessary to attach myself to someone before I should begin to address cordial remarks to the passers-by.

“Hello!” I roared, advancing toward her. My voice seemed unnaturally loud across the garden.

“I thought you might be here,” she responded absently as I came up. “I remembered you lived next door to----”

She held my hand impersonally, as a promise that she’d take care of me in a minute, and gave ear to two girls in twin yellow dresses who stopped at the foot of the steps.

“Hello!” they cried together. “Sorry you didn’t win.”

That was for the golf tournament. She had lost in the finals the week before.

“You don’t know who we are,” said one of the girls in yellow, “but we met you here about a month ago.”

“You’ve dyed your hair since then,” remarked Jordan, and I started but the girls had moved casually on and her remark was addressed to the premature moon, produced like the supper, no doubt, out of a caterer’s basket. With Jordan’s slender golden arm resting in mine we descended the steps and sauntered about the garden. A tray of cocktails floated at us through the twilight and we sat down at a table with the two girls in yellow and three men, each one introduced to us as Mr. Mumble.

“Do you come to these parties often?” inquired Jordan of the girl beside her.

“The last one was the one I met you at,” answered the girl, in an alert, confident voice. She turned to her companion: “Wasn’t it for you, Lucille?”

It was for Lucille, too.

“I like to come,” Lucille said. “I never care what I do, so I always have a good time. When I was here last I tore my gown on a chair, and he asked me my name and address--inside of a week I got a package from Croirier’s with a new evening gown in it.”

“Did you keep it?” asked Jordan.

“Sure I did. I was going to wear it tonight, but it was too big in the bust and had to be altered. It was gas blue with lavender beads. Two hundred and sixty-five dollars.”

“There’s something funny about a fellow that’ll do a thing like that,” said the other girl eagerly. “He doesn’t want any trouble with anybody.”

“Who doesn’t?” I inquired.

“Gatsby. Somebody told me----”

The two girls and Jordan leaned together confidentially.

“Somebody told me they thought he killed a man once.”

A thrill passed over all of us. The three Mr. Mumbles bent forward and listened eagerly.

“I don’t think it’s so much that,” argued Lucille skeptically; “it’s more that he was a German spy during the war.”

One of the men nodded in confirmation.

“I heard that from a man who knew all about him, grew up with him in Germany,” he assured us positively.

“Oh, no,” said the first girl, “it couldn’t be that, because he was in the American army during the war.” As our credulity switched back to her she leaned forward with enthusiasm. “You look at him sometimes when he thinks nobody’s looking at him. I’ll bet he killed a man.”

She narrowed her eyes and shivered. Lucille shivered. We all turned and looked around for Gatsby. It was testimony to the romantic speculation he inspired that there were whispers about him from those who found little that it was necessary to whisper about in this world.

The first supper--there would be another one after midnight--was now being served, and Jordan invited me to join her own party who were spread around a table on the other side of the garden. There were three married couples and Jordan’s escort, a persistent undergraduate given to violent innuendo and obviously under the impression that sooner or later Jordan was going to yield him up her person to a greater or lesser degree. Instead of rambling this party had preserved a dignified homogeneity, and assumed to itself the function of representing the staid nobility of the countryside--East Egg condescending to West Egg, and carefully on guard against its spectroscopic gayety.

“Let’s get out,” whispered Jordan, after a somehow wasteful and inappropriate half hour. “This is much too polite for me.”

We got up, and she explained that we were going to find the host--I had never met him, she said, and it was making me uneasy. The undergraduate nodded in a cynical, melancholy way.

The bar, where we glanced first, was crowded but Gatsby was not there. She couldn’t find him from the top of the steps, and he wasn’t on the veranda. On a chance we tried an important-looking door, and walked into a high Gothic library, panelled with carved English oak, and probably transported complete from some ruin overseas.

A stout, middle-aged man with enormous owl-eyed spectacles was sitting somewhat drunk on the edge of a great table, staring with unsteady concentration at the shelves of books. As we entered he wheeled excitedly around and examined Jordan from head to foot.

“What do you think?” he demanded impetuously.

“About what?”

He waved his hand toward the book-shelves.

“About that. As a matter of fact you needn’t bother to ascertain. I ascertained. They’re real.”

“The books?”

He nodded.

“Absolutely real--have pages and everything. I thought they’d be a nice durable cardboard. Matter of fact, they’re absolutely real. Pages and--Here! Lemme show you.”

Taking our skepticism for granted, he rushed to the bookcases and returned with Volume One of the “Stoddard Lectures.”

“See!” he cried triumphantly. “It’s a bona fide piece of printed matter. It fooled me. This fella’s a regular Belasco. It’s a triumph. What thoroughness! What realism! Knew when to stop too--didn’t cut the pages. But what do you want? What do you expect?”

He snatched the book from me and replaced it hastily on its shelf muttering that if one brick was removed the whole library was liable to collapse.

“Who brought you?” he demanded. “Or did you just come? I was brought. Most people were brought.”

Jordan looked at him alertly, cheerfully without answering.

“I was brought by a woman named Roosevelt,” he continued. “Mrs. Claud Roosevelt. Do you know her? I met her somewhere last night. I’ve been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library.”

“Has it?”

“A little bit, I think. I can’t tell yet. I’ve only been here an hour. Did I tell you about the books? They’re real. They’re----”

“You told us.”

We shook hands with him gravely and went back outdoors.

There was dancing now on the canvas in the garden, old men pushing young girls backward in eternal graceless circles, superior couples holding each other tortuously, fashionably and keeping in the corners--and a great number of single girls dancing individualistically or relieving the orchestra for a moment of the burden of the banjo or the traps. By midnight the hilarity had increased. A celebrated tenor had sung in Italian and a notorious contralto had sung in jazz and between the numbers people were doing “stunts” all over the garden, while happy vacuous bursts of laughter rose toward the summer sky. A pair of stage “twins”--who turned out to be the girls in yellow--did a baby act in costume and champagne was served in glasses bigger than finger bowls. The moon had risen higher, and floating in the Sound was a triangle of silver scales, trembling a little to the stiff, tinny drip of the banjoes on the lawn.

I was still with Jordan Baker. We were sitting at a table with a man of about my age and a rowdy little girl who gave way upon the slightest provocation to uncontrollable laughter. I was enjoying myself now. I had taken two finger bowls of champagne and the scene had changed before my eyes into something significant, elemental and profound.

At a lull in the entertainment the man looked at me and smiled.

“Your face is familiar,” he said, politely. “Weren’t you in the Third Division during the war?”

“Why, yes. I was in the Ninth Machine-Gun Battalion.”

“I was in the Seventh Infantry until June nineteen-eighteen. I knew I’d seen you somewhere before.”

We talked for a moment about some wet, grey little villages in France. Evidently he lived in this vicinity for he told me that he had just bought a hydroplane and was going to try it out in the morning.

“Want to go with me, old sport? Just near the shore along the Sound.”

“What time?”

“Any time that suits you best.”

It was on the tip of my tongue to ask his name when Jordan looked around and smiled.

“Having a gay time now?” she inquired.

“Much better.” I turned again to my new acquaintance. “This is an unusual party for me. I haven’t even seen the host. I live over there----” I waved my hand at the invisible hedge in the distance, “and this man Gatsby sent over his chauffeur with an invitation.”

For a moment he looked at me as if he failed to understand.

“I’m Gatsby,” he said suddenly.

“What!” I exclaimed. “Oh, I beg your pardon.”

“I thought you knew, old sport. I’m afraid I’m not a very good host.”

He smiled understandingly--much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced--or seemed to face--the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey. Precisely at that point it vanished--and I was looking at an elegant young rough-neck, a year or two over thirty, whose elaborate formality of speech just missed being absurd. Some time before he introduced himself I’d got a strong impression that he was picking his words with care.

Almost at the moment when Mr. Gatsby identified himself a butler hurried toward him with the information that Chicago was calling him on the wire. He excused himself with a small bow that included each of us in turn.

“If you want anything just ask for it, old sport,” he urged me. “Excuse me. I will rejoin you later.”

When he was gone I turned immediately to Jordan--constrained to assure her of my surprise. I had expected that Mr. Gatsby would be a florid and corpulent person in his middle years.

“Who is he?” I demanded. “Do you know?”

“He’s just a man named Gatsby.”

“Where is he from, I mean? And what does he do?”

“Now you’re started on the subject,” she answered with a wan smile. “Well,--he told me once he was an Oxford man.”

A dim background started to take shape behind him but at her next remark it faded away.

“However, I don’t believe it.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know,” she insisted, “I just don’t think he went there.”

Something in her tone reminded me of the other girl’s “I think he killed a man,” and had the effect of stimulating my curiosity. I would have accepted without question the information that Gatsby sprang from the swamps of Louisiana or from the lower East Side of New York. That was comprehensible. But young men didn’t--at least in my provincial inexperience I believed they didn’t--drift coolly out of nowhere and buy a palace on Long Island Sound.

“Anyhow he gives large parties,” said Jordan, changing the subject with an urbane distaste for the concrete. “And I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.”

There was the boom of a bass drum, and the voice of the orchestra leader rang out suddenly above the echolalia of the garden.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he cried. “At the request of Mr. Gatsby we are going to play for you Mr. Vladimir Tostoff’s latest work which attracted so much attention at Carnegie Hall last May. If you read the papers you know there was a big sensation.” He smiled with jovial condescension and added “Some sensation!” whereupon everybody laughed.

“The piece is known,” he concluded lustily, “as ‘Vladimir Tostoff’s Jazz History of the World.’ “

The nature of Mr. Tostoff’s composition eluded me, because just as it began my eyes fell on Gatsby, standing alone on the marble steps and looking from one group to another with approving eyes. His tanned skin was drawn attractively tight on his face and his short hair looked as though it were trimmed every day. I could see nothing sinister about him. I wondered if the fact that he was not drinking helped to set him off from his guests, for it seemed to me that he grew more correct as the fraternal hilarity increased. When the “Jazz History of the World” was over girls were putting their heads on men’s shoulders in a puppyish, convivial way, girls were swooning backward playfully into men’s arms, even into groups knowing that some one would arrest their falls--but no one swooned backward on Gatsby and no French bob touched Gatsby’s shoulder and no singing quartets were formed with Gatsby’s head for one link.

“I beg your pardon.”

Gatsby’s butler was suddenly standing beside us.

“Miss Baker?” he inquired. “I beg your pardon but Mr. Gatsby would like to speak to you alone.”

“With me?” she exclaimed in surprise.

“Yes, madame.”

She got up slowly, raising her eyebrows at me in astonishment, and followed the butler toward the house. I noticed that she wore her evening dress, all her dresses, like sports clothes--there was a jauntiness about her movements as if she had first learned to walk upon golf courses on clean, crisp mornings.

I was alone and it was almost two. For some time confused and intriguing sounds had issued from a long many-windowed room which overhung the terrace. Eluding Jordan’s undergraduate who was now engaged in an obstetrical conversation with two chorus girls, and who implored me to join him, I went inside.

The large room was full of people. One of the girls in yellow was playing the piano and beside her stood a tall, red haired young lady from a famous chorus, engaged in song. She had drunk a quantity of champagne and during the course of her song she had decided ineptly that everything was very very sad--she was not only singing, she was weeping too. Whenever there was a pause in the song she filled it with gasping broken sobs and then took up the lyric again in a quavering soprano. The tears coursed down her cheeks--not freely, however, for when they came into contact with her heavily beaded eyelashes they assumed an inky color, and pursued the rest of their way in slow black rivulets. A humorous suggestion was made that she sing the notes on her face whereupon she threw up her hands, sank into a chair and went off into a deep vinous sleep.

“She had a fight with a man who says he’s her husband,” explained a girl at my elbow.

I looked around. Most of the remaining women were now having fights with men said to be their husbands. Even Jordan’s party, the quartet from East Egg, were rent asunder by dissension. One of the men was talking with curious intensity to a young actress, and his wife after attempting to laugh at the situation in a dignified and indifferent way broke down entirely and resorted to flank attacks--at intervals she appeared suddenly at his side like an angry diamond, and hissed “You promised!” into his ear.

The reluctance to go home was not confined to wayward men. The hall was at present occupied by two deplorably sober men and their highly indignant wives. The wives were sympathizing with each other in slightly raised voices.

“Whenever he sees I’m having a good time he wants to go home.”

“Never heard anything so selfish in my life.”

“We’re always the first ones to leave.”

“So are we.”

“Well, we’re almost the last tonight,” said one of the men sheepishly. “The orchestra left half an hour ago.”

In spite of the wives’ agreement that such malevolence was beyond credibility, the dispute ended in a short struggle, and both wives were lifted kicking into the night.

As I waited for my hat in the hall the door of the library opened and Jordan Baker and Gatsby came out together. He was saying some last word to her but the eagerness in his manner tightened abruptly into formality as several people approached him to say goodbye.

Jordan’s party were calling impatiently to her from the porch but she lingered for a moment to shake hands.

“I’ve just heard the most amazing thing,” she whispered. “How long were we in there?”

“Why,--about an hour.”

“It was--simply amazing,” she repeated abstractedly. “But I swore I wouldn’t tell it and here I am tantalizing you.” She yawned gracefully in my face. “Please come and see me. . . . Phone book. . . . Under the name of Mrs. Sigourney Howard. . . . My aunt. . . .” She was hurrying off as she talked--her brown hand waved a jaunty salute as she melted into her party at the door.

Rather ashamed that on my first appearance I had stayed so late, I joined the last of Gatsby’s guests who were clustered around him. I wanted to explain that I’d hunted for him early in the evening and to apologize for not having known him in the garden.

“Don’t mention it,” he enjoined me eagerly. “Don’t give it another thought, old sport.” The familiar expression held no more familiarity than the hand which reassuringly brushed my shoulder. “And don’t forget we’re going up in the hydroplane tomorrow morning at nine o’clock.”

Then the butler, behind his shoulder:

“Philadelphia wants you on the phone, sir.”

“All right, in a minute. Tell them I’ll be right there. . . . good night.”

“Good night.”

“Good night.” He smiled--and suddenly there seemed to be a pleasant significance in having been among the last to go, as if he had desired it all the time. “Good night, old sport. . . . Good night.”

But as I walked down the steps I saw that the evening was not quite over. Fifty feet from the door a dozen headlights illuminated a bizarre and tumultuous scene. In the ditch beside the road, right side up but violently shorn of one wheel, rested a new coupé which had left Gatsby’s drive not two minutes before. The sharp jut of a wall accounted for the detachment of the wheel which was now getting considerable attention from half a dozen curious chauffeurs. However, as they had left their cars blocking the road a harsh discordant din from those in the rear had been audible for some time and added to the already violent confusion of the scene.

A man in a long duster had dismounted from the wreck and now stood in the middle of the road, looking from the car to the tire and from the tire to the observers in a pleasant, puzzled way.

“See!” he explained. “It went in the ditch.”

The fact was infinitely astonishing to him--and I recognized first the unusual quality of wonder and then the man--it was the late patron of Gatsby’s library.

“How’d it happen?”

He shrugged his shoulders.

“I know nothing whatever about mechanics,” he said decisively.

“But how did it happen? Did you run into the wall?”

“Don’t ask me,” said Owl Eyes, washing his hands of the whole matter. “I know very little about driving--next to nothing. It happened, and that’s all I know.”

“Well, if you’re a poor driver you oughtn’t to try driving at night.”

“But I wasn’t even trying,” he explained indignantly, “I wasn’t even trying.”

An awed hush fell upon the bystanders.

“Do you want to commit suicide?”

“You’re lucky it was just a wheel! A bad driver and not even trying!”

“You don’t understand,” explained the criminal. “I wasn’t driving. There’s another man in the car.”

The shock that followed this declaration found voice in a sustained “Ah-h-h!” as the door of the coupé swung slowly open. The crowd--it was now a crowd--stepped back involuntarily and when the door had opened wide there was a ghostly pause. Then, very gradually, part by part, a pale dangling individual stepped out of the wreck, pawing tentatively at the ground with a large uncertain dancing shoe.

Blinded by the glare of the headlights and confused by the incessant groaning of the horns the apparition stood swaying for a moment before he perceived the man in the duster.

“Wha’s matter?” he inquired calmly. “Did we run outa gas?”

“Look!”

Half a dozen fingers pointed at the amputated wheel--he stared at it for a moment and then looked upward as though he suspected that it had dropped from the sky.

“It came off,” some one explained.

He nodded.

“At first I din’ notice we’d stopped.”

A pause. Then, taking a long breath and straightening his shoulders he remarked in a determined voice:

“Wonder’ff tell me where there’s a gas’line station?”

At least a dozen men, some of them little better off than he was, explained to him that wheel and car were no longer joined by any physical bond.

“Back out,” he suggested after a moment. “Put her in reverse.”

“But the wheel’s off!”

He hesitated.

“No harm in trying,” he said.

The caterwauling horns had reached a crescendo and I turned away and cut across the lawn toward home. I glanced back once. A wafer of a moon was shining over Gatsby’s house, making the night fine as before and surviving the laughter and the sound of his still glowing garden. A sudden emptiness seemed to flow now from the windows and the great doors, endowing with complete isolation the figure of the host who stood on the porch, his hand up in a formal gesture of farewell.

Reading over what I have written so far I see I have given the impression that the events of three nights several weeks apart were all that absorbed me. On the contrary they were merely casual events in a crowded summer and, until much later, they absorbed me infinitely less than my personal affairs.

Most of the time I worked. In the early morning the sun threw my shadow westward as I hurried down the white chasms of lower New York to the Probity Trust. I knew the other clerks and young bond-salesmen by their first names and lunched with them in dark crowded restaurants on little pig sausages and mashed potatoes and coffee. I even had a short affair with a girl who lived in Jersey City and worked in the accounting department, but her brother began throwing mean looks in my direction so when she went on her vacation in July I let it blow quietly away.

I took dinner usually at the Yale Club--for some reason it was the gloomiest event of my day--and then I went upstairs to the library and studied investments and securities for a conscientious hour. There were generally a few rioters around but they never came into the library so it was a good place to work. After that, if the night was mellow I strolled down Madison Avenue past the old Murray Hill Hotel and over Thirty-third Street to the Pennsylvania Station.

I began to like New York, the racy, adventurous feel of it at night and the satisfaction that the constant flicker of men and women and machines gives to the restless eye. I liked to walk up Fifth Avenue and pick out romantic women from the crowd and imagine that in a few minutes I was going to enter into their lives, and no one would ever know or disapprove. Sometimes, in my mind, I followed them to their apartments on the corners of hidden streets, and they turned and smiled back at me before they faded through a door into warm darkness. At the enchanted metropolitan twilight I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others--poor young clerks who loitered in front of windows waiting until it was time for a solitary restaurant dinner--young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.

Again at eight o’clock, when the dark lanes of the Forties were five deep with throbbing taxi cabs, bound for the theatre district, I felt a sinking in my heart. Forms leaned together in the taxis as they waited, and voices sang, and there was laughter from unheard jokes, and lighted cigarettes outlined unintelligible gestures inside. Imagining that I, too, was hurrying toward gayety and sharing their intimate excitement, I wished them well.

For a while I lost sight of Jordan Baker, and then in midsummer I found her again. At first I was flattered to go places with her because she was a golf champion and every one knew her name. Then it was something more. I wasn’t actually in love, but I felt a sort of tender curiosity. The bored haughty face that she turned to the world concealed something--most affectations conceal something eventually, even though they don’t in the beginning--and one day I found what it was. When we were on a house-party together up in Warwick, she left a borrowed car out in the rain with the top down, and then lied about it--and suddenly I remembered the story about her that had eluded me that night at Daisy’s. At her first big golf tournament there was a row that nearly reached the newspapers--a suggestion that she had moved her ball from a bad lie in the semi-final round. The thing approached the proportions of a scandal--then died away. A caddy retracted his statement and the only other witness admitted that he might have been mistaken. The incident and the name had remained together in my mind.

Jordan Baker instinctively avoided clever shrewd men and now I saw that this was because she felt safer on a plane where any divergence from a code would be thought impossible. She was incurably dishonest. She wasn’t able to endure being at a disadvantage, and given this unwillingness I suppose she had begun dealing in subterfuges when she was very young in order to keep that cool, insolent smile turned to the world and yet satisfy the demands of her hard jaunty body.

It made no difference to me. Dishonesty in a woman is a thing you never blame deeply--I was casually sorry, and then I forgot. It was on that same house party that we had a curious conversation about driving a car. It started because she passed so close to some workmen that our fender flicked a button on one man’s coat.

“You’re a rotten driver,” I protested. “Either you ought to be more careful or you oughtn’t to drive at all.”

“I am careful.”

“No, you’re not.”

“Well, other people are,” she said lightly.

“What’s that got to do with it?”

“They’ll keep out of my way,” she insisted. “It takes two to make an accident.”

“Suppose you met somebody just as careless as yourself.”

“I hope I never will,” she answered. “I hate careless people. That’s why I like you.”

Her grey, sun-strained eyes stared straight ahead, but she had deliberately shifted our relations, and for a moment I thought I loved her. But I am slow-thinking and full of interior rules that act as brakes on my desires, and I knew that first I had to get myself definitely out of that tangle back home. I’d been writing letters once a week and signing them: “Love, Nick,” and all I could think of was how, when that certain girl played tennis, a faint mustache of perspiration appeared on her upper lip. Nevertheless there was a vague understanding that had to be tactfully broken off before I was free.

Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known.

CHAPTER 4

On Sunday morning while church bells rang in the villages along shore the world and its mistress returned to Gatsby’s house and twinkled hilariously on his lawn.

“He’s a bootlegger,” said the young ladies, moving somewhere between his cocktails and his flowers. “One time he killed a man who had found out that he was nephew to von Hindenburg and second cousin to the devil. Reach me a rose, honey, and pour me a last drop into that there crystal glass.”

Once I wrote down on the empty spaces of a time-table the names of those who came to Gatsby’s house that summer. It is an old time-table now, disintegrating at its folds and headed “This schedule in effect July 5th, 1922.” But I can still read the grey names and they will give you a better impression than my generalities of those who accepted Gatsby’s hospitality and paid him the subtle tribute of knowing nothing whatever about him.

From East Egg, then, came the Chester Beckers and the Leeches and a man named Bunsen whom I knew at Yale and Doctor Webster Civet who was drowned last summer up in Maine. And the Hornbeams and the Willie Voltaires and a whole clan named Blackbuck who always gathered in a corner and flipped up their noses like goats at whosoever came near. And the Ismays and the Chrysties (or rather Hubert Auerbach and Mr. Chrystie’s wife) and Edgar Beaver, whose hair they say turned cotton-white one winter afternoon for no good reason at all.

Clarence Endive was from East Egg, as I remember. He came only once, in white knickerbockers, and had a fight with a bum named Etty in the garden. From farther out on the Island came the Cheadles and the O. R. P. Schraeders and the Stonewall Jackson Abrams of Georgia and the Fishguards and the Ripley Snells. Snell was there three days before he went to the penitentiary, so drunk out on the gravel drive that Mrs. Ulysses Swett’s automobile ran over his right hand. The Dancies came too and S. B. Whitebait, who was well over sixty, and Maurice A. Flink and the Hammerheads and Beluga the tobacco importer and Beluga’s girls.

From West Egg came the Poles and the Mulreadys and Cecil Roebuck and Cecil Schoen and Gulick the state senator and Newton Orchid who controlled Films Par Excellence and Eckhaust and Clyde Cohen and Don S. Schwartze (the son) and Arthur McCarty, all connected with the movies in one way or another. And the Catlips and the Bembergs and G. Earl Muldoon, brother to that Muldoon who afterward strangled his wife. Da Fontano the promoter came there, and Ed Legros and James B. (“Rot-Gut”) Ferret and the De Jongs and Ernest Lilly--they came to gamble and when Ferret wandered into the garden it meant he was cleaned out and Associated Traction would have to fluctuate profitably next day.

A man named Klipspringer was there so often and so long that he became known as “the boarder”--I doubt if he had any other home. Of theatrical people there were Gus Waize and Horace O’Donavan and Lester Meyer and George Duckweed and Francis Bull. Also from New York were the Chromes and the Backhyssons and the Dennickers and Russel Betty and the Corrigans and the Kellehers and the Dewars and the Scullys and S. W. Belcher and the Smirkes and the young Quinns, divorced now, and Henry L. Palmetto who killed himself by jumping in front of a subway train in Times Square.

Benny McClenahan arrived always with four girls. They were never quite the same ones in physical person but they were so identical one with another that it inevitably seemed they had been there before. I have forgotten their names--Jaqueline, I think, or else Consuela or Gloria or Judy or June, and their last names were either the melodious names of flowers and months or the sterner ones of the great American capitalists whose cousins, if pressed, they would confess themselves to be.

In addition to all these I can remember that Faustina O’Brien came there at least once and the Baedeker girls and young Brewer who had his nose shot off in the war and Mr. Albrucksburger and Miss Haag, his fiancée, and Ardita Fitz-Peters, and Mr. P. Jewett, once head of the American Legion, and Miss Claudia Hip with a man reputed to be her chauffeur, and a prince of something whom we called Duke and whose name, if I ever knew it, I have forgotten.

All these people came to Gatsby’s house in the summer.

At nine o’clock, one morning late in July Gatsby’s gorgeous car lurched up the rocky drive to my door and gave out a burst of melody from its three noted horn. It was the first time he had called on me though I had gone to two of his parties, mounted in his hydroplane, and, at his urgent invitation, made frequent use of his beach.

“Good morning, old sport. You’re having lunch with me today and I thought we’d ride up together.”

He was balancing himself on the dashboard of his car with that resourcefulness of movement that is so peculiarly American--that comes, I suppose, with the absence of lifting work or rigid sitting in youth and, even more, with the formless grace of our nervous, sporadic games. This quality was continually breaking through his punctilious manner in the shape of restlessness. He was never quite still; there was always a tapping foot somewhere or the impatient opening and closing of a hand.

He saw me looking with admiration at his car.

“It’s pretty, isn’t it, old sport.” He jumped off to give me a better view. “Haven’t you ever seen it before?”

I’d seen it. Everybody had seen it. It was a rich cream color, bright with nickel, swollen here and there in its monstrous length with triumphant hatboxes and supper-boxes and tool-boxes, and terraced with a labyrinth of windshields that mirrored a dozen suns. Sitting down behind many layers of glass in a sort of green leather conservatory we started to town.

I had talked with him perhaps half a dozen times in the past month and found, to my disappointment, that he had little to say. So my first impression, that he was a person of some undefined consequence, had gradually faded and he had become simply the proprietor of an elaborate roadhouse next door.

And then came that disconcerting ride. We hadn’t reached West Egg village before Gatsby began leaving his elegant sentences unfinished and slapping himself indecisively on the knee of his caramel-colored suit.

“Look here, old sport,” he broke out surprisingly. “What’s your opinion of me, anyhow?”

A little overwhelmed, I began the generalized evasions which that question deserves.

“Well, I’m going to tell you something about my life,” he interrupted. “I don’t want you to get a wrong idea of me from all these stories you hear.”

So he was aware of the bizarre accusations that flavored conversation in his halls.

“I’ll tell you God’s truth.” His right hand suddenly ordered divine retribution to stand by. “I am the son of some wealthy people in the middle-west--all dead now. I was brought up in America but educated at Oxford because all my ancestors have been educated there for many years. It is a family tradition.”

He looked at me sideways--and I knew why Jordan Baker had believed he was lying. He hurried the phrase “educated at Oxford,” or swallowed it or choked on it as though it had bothered him before. And with this doubt his whole statement fell to pieces and I wondered if there wasn’t something a little sinister about him after all.

“What part of the middle-west?” I inquired casually.

“San Francisco.”

“I see.”

“My family all died and I came into a good deal of money.”

His voice was solemn as if the memory of that sudden extinction of a clan still haunted him. For a moment I suspected that he was pulling my leg but a glance at him convinced me otherwise.

“After that I lived like a young rajah in all the capitals of Europe--Paris, Venice, Rome--collecting jewels, chiefly rubies, hunting big game, painting a little, things for myself only, and trying to forget something very sad that had happened to me long ago.”

With an effort I managed to restrain my incredulous laughter. The very phrases were worn so threadbare that they evoked no image except that of a turbaned “character” leaking sawdust at every pore as he pursued a tiger through the Bois de Boulogne.

“Then came the war, old sport. It was a great relief and I tried very hard to die but I seemed to bear an enchanted life. I accepted a commission as first lieutenant when it began. In the ArgonneForest I took two machine-gun detachments so far forward that there was a half mile gap on either side of us where the infantry couldn’t advance. We stayed there two days and two nights, a hundred and thirty men with sixteen Lewis guns, and when the infantry came up at last they found the insignia of three German divisions among the piles of dead. I was promoted to be a major and every Allied government gave me a decoration--even Montenegro, little Montenegro down on the Adriatic Sea!”

Little Montenegro! He lifted up the words and nodded at them--with his smile. The smile comprehended Montenegro’s troubled history and sympathized with the brave struggles of the Montenegrin people. It appreciated fully the chain of national circumstances which had elicited this tribute from Montenegro’s warm little heart. My incredulity was submerged in fascination now; it was like skimming hastily through a dozen magazines.

He reached in his pocket and a piece of metal, slung on a ribbon, fell into my palm.

“That’s the one from Montenegro.”

To my astonishment, the thing had an authentic look.

Orderi di Danilo, ran the circular legend, Montenegro, Nicolas Rex.

“Turn it.”

Major Jay Gatsby, I read, For Valour Extraordinary.

“Here’s another thing I always carry. A souvenir of Oxford days. It was taken in Trinity Quad--the man on my left is now the Earl of Dorcaster.”

It was a photograph of half a dozen young men in blazers loafing in an archway through which were visible a host of spires. There was Gatsby, looking a little, not much, younger--with a cricket bat in his hand.

Then it was all true. I saw the skins of tigers flaming in his palace on the Grand Canal; I saw him opening a chest of rubies to ease, with their crimson-lighted depths, the gnawings of his broken heart.

“I’m going to make a big request of you today,” he said, pocketing his souvenirs with satisfaction, “so I thought you ought to know something about me. I didn’t want you to think I was just some nobody. You see, I usually find myself among strangers because I drift here and there trying to forget the sad thing that happened to me.” He hesitated. “You’ll hear about it this afternoon.”

“At lunch?”

“No, this afternoon. I happened to find out that you’re taking Miss Baker to tea.”

“Do you mean you’re in love with Miss Baker?”

“No, old sport, I’m not. But Miss Baker has kindly consented to speak to you about this matter.”

I hadn’t the faintest idea what “this matter” was, but I was more annoyed than interested. I hadn’t asked Jordan to tea in order to discuss Mr. Jay Gatsby. I was sure the request would be something utterly fantastic and for a moment I was sorry I’d ever set foot upon his overpopulated lawn.

He wouldn’t say another word. His correctness grew on him as we neared the city. We passed Port Roosevelt, where there was a glimpse of red-belted ocean-going ships, and sped along a cobbled slum lined with the dark, undeserted saloons of the faded gilt nineteen-hundreds. Then the valley of ashes opened out on both sides of us, and I had a glimpse of Mrs. Wilson straining at the garage pump with panting vitality as we went by.

With fenders spread like wings we scattered light through half Astoria--only half, for as we twisted among the pillars of the elevated I heard the familiar “jug--jug--spat!” of a motor cycle, and a frantic policeman rode alongside.

“All right, old sport,” called Gatsby. We slowed down. Taking a white card from his wallet he waved it before the man’s eyes.

“Right you are,” agreed the policeman, tipping his cap. “Know you next time, Mr. Gatsby. Excuse me!”

“What was that?” I inquired. “The picture of Oxford?”

“I was able to do the commissioner a favor once, and he sends me a Christmas card every year.”

Over the great bridge, with the sunlight through the girders making a constant flicker upon the moving cars, with the city rising up across the river in white heaps and sugar lumps all built with a wish out of non-olfactory money. The city seen from the QueensboroBridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world.

A dead man passed us in a hearse heaped with blooms, followed by two carriages with drawn blinds and by more cheerful carriages for friends. The friends looked out at us with the tragic eyes and short upper lips of south-eastern Europe, and I was glad that the sight of Gatsby’s splendid car was included in their somber holiday. As we crossed Blackwell’s Island a limousine passed us, driven by a white chauffeur, in which sat three modish Negroes, two bucks and a girl. I laughed aloud as the yolks of their eyeballs rolled toward us in haughty rivalry.

“Anything can happen now that we’ve slid over this bridge,” I thought; “anything at all. . . .”

Even Gatsby could happen, without any particular wonder.

Roaring noon. In a well-fanned Forty-second Street cellar I met Gatsby for lunch. Blinking away the brightness of the street outside my eyes picked him out obscurely in the anteroom, talking to another man.

“Mr. Carraway this is my friend Mr. Wolfshiem.”

A small, flat-nosed Jew raised his large head and regarded me with two fine growths of hair which luxuriated in either nostril. After a moment I discovered his tiny eyes in the half darkness.

“--so I took one look at him--” said Mr. Wolfshiem, shaking my hand earnestly, “--and what do you think I did?”

“What?” I inquired politely.

But evidently he was not addressing me for he dropped my hand and covered Gatsby with his expressive nose.

“I handed the money to Katspaugh and I sid, ‘All right, Katspaugh, don’t pay him a penny till he shuts his mouth.’ He shut it then and there.”

Gatsby took an arm of each of us and moved forward into the restaurant whereupon Mr. Wolfshiem swallowed a new sentence he was starting and lapsed into a somnambulatory abstraction.

“Highballs?” asked the head waiter.

“This is a nice restaurant here,” said Mr. Wolfshiem looking at the Presbyterian nymphs on the ceiling. “But I like across the street better!”

“Yes, highballs,” agreed Gatsby, and then to Mr. Wolfshiem: “It’s too hot over there.”

“Hot and small--yes,” said Mr. Wolfshiem, “but full of memories.”

“What place is that?” I asked.

“The old Metropole.

“The old Metropole,” brooded Mr. Wolfshiem gloomily. “Filled with faces dead and gone. Filled with friends gone now forever. I can’t forget so long as I live the night they shot Rosy Rosenthal there. It was six of us at the table and Rosy had eat and drunk a lot all evening. When it was almost morning the waiter came up to him with a funny look and says somebody wants to speak to him outside. ‘All right,’ says Rosy and begins to get up and I pulled him down in his chair.

“ ‘Let the bastards come in here if they want you, Rosy, but don’t you, so help me, move outside this room.’

“It was four o’clock in the morning then, and if we’d of raised the blinds we’d of seen daylight.”

“Did he go?” I asked innocently.

“Sure he went,”--Mr. Wolfshiem’s nose flashed at me indignantly--”He turned around in the door and says, ‘Don’t let that waiter take away my coffee!’ Then he went out on the sidewalk and they shot him three times in his full belly and drove away.”

“Four of them were electrocuted,” I said, remembering.

“Five with Becker.” His nostrils turned to me in an interested way. “I understand you’re looking for a business gonnegtion.”

The juxtaposition of these two remarks was startling. Gatsby answered for me:

“Oh, no,” he exclaimed, “this isn’t the man!”

“No?” Mr. Wolfshiem seemed disappointed.

“This is just a friend. I told you we’d talk about that some other time.”

“I beg your pardon,” said Mr. Wolfshiem, “I had a wrong man.”

A succulent hash arrived, and Mr. Wolfshiem, forgetting the more sentimental atmosphere of the old Metropole, began to eat with ferocious delicacy. His eyes, meanwhile, roved very slowly all around the room--he completed the arc by turning to inspect the people directly behind. I think that, except for my presence, he would have taken one short glance beneath our own table.

“Look here, old sport,” said Gatsby, leaning toward me, “I’m afraid I made you a little angry this morning in the car.”

There was the smile again, but this time I held out against it.

“I don’t like mysteries,” I answered. “And I don’t understand why you won’t come out frankly and tell me what you want. Why has it all got to come through Miss Baker?”

“Oh, it’s nothing underhand,” he assured me. “Miss Baker’s a great sportswoman, you know, and she’d never do anything that wasn’t all right.”

Suddenly he looked at his watch, jumped up and hurried from the room leaving me with Mr. Wolfshiem at the table.

“He has to telephone,” said Mr. Wolfshiem, following him with his eyes. “Fine fellow, isn’t he? Handsome to look at and a perfect gentleman.”

“Yes.”

“He’s an Oggsford man.”

“Oh!”

“He went to OggsfordCollege in England. You know OggsfordCollege?”

“I’ve heard of it.”

“It’s one of the most famous colleges in the world.”

“Have you known Gatsby for a long time?” I inquired.

“Several years,” he answered in a gratified way. “I made the pleasure of his acquaintance just after the war. But I knew I had discovered a man of fine breeding after I talked with him an hour. I said to myself: ‘There’s the kind of man you’d like to take home and introduce to your mother and sister.’ “ He paused. “I see you’re looking at my cuff buttons.”

I hadn’t been looking at them, but I did now. They were composed of oddly familiar pieces of ivory.

“Finest specimens of human molars,” he informed me.

“Well!” I inspected them. “That’s a very interesting idea.”

“Yeah.” He flipped his sleeves up under his coat. “Yeah, Gatsby’s very careful about women. He would never so much as look at a friend’s wife.”

When the subject of this instinctive trust returned to the table and sat down Mr. Wolfshiem drank his coffee with a jerk and got to his feet.

“I have enjoyed my lunch,” he said, “and I’m going to run off from you two young men before I outstay my welcome.”

“Don’t hurry, Meyer,” said Gatsby, without enthusiasm. Mr. Wolfshiem raised his hand in a sort of benediction.

“You’re very polite but I belong to another generation,” he announced solemnly. “You sit here and discuss your sports and your young ladies and your----” He supplied an imaginary noun with another wave of his hand--”As for me, I am fifty years old, and I won’t impose myself on you any longer.”

As he shook hands and turned away his tragic nose was trembling. I wondered if I had said anything to offend him.

“He becomes very sentimental sometimes,” explained Gatsby. “This is one of his sentimental days. He’s quite a character around New York--a denizen of Broadway.”

“Who is he anyhow--an actor?”

“No.”

“A dentist?”

“Meyer Wolfshiem? No, he’s a gambler.” Gatsby hesitated, then added coolly: “He’s the man who fixed the World’s Series back in 1919.”

“Fixed the World’s Series?” I repeated.

The idea staggered me. I remembered of course that the World’s Series had been fixed in 1919 but if I had thought of it at all I would have thought of it as a thing that merely happened, the end of some inevitable chain. It never occurred to me that one man could start to play with the faith of fifty million people--with the single-mindedness of a burglar blowing a safe.

“How did he happen to do that?” I asked after a minute.

“He just saw the opportunity.”

“Why isn’t he in jail?”

“They can’t get him, old sport. He’s a smart man.”

I insisted on paying the check. As the waiter brought my change I caught sight of Tom Buchanan across the crowded room.

“Come along with me for a minute,” I said. “I’ve got to say hello to someone.”

When he saw us Tom jumped up and took half a dozen steps in our direction.

“Where’ve you been?” he demanded eagerly. “Daisy’s furious because you haven’t called up.”

“This is Mr. Gatsby, Mr. Buchanan.”

They shook hands briefly and a strained, unfamiliar look of embarrassment came over Gatsby’s face.

“How’ve you been, anyhow?” demanded Tom of me. “How’d you happen to come up this far to eat?”

“I’ve been having lunch with Mr. Gatsby.”

I turned toward Mr. Gatsby, but he was no longer there.

One October day in nineteen-seventeen---- (said Jordan Baker that afternoon, sitting up very straight on a straight chair in the tea-garden at the Plaza Hotel) --I was walking along from one place to another half on the sidewalks and half on the lawns. I was happier on the lawns because I had on shoes from England with rubber nobs on the soles that bit into the soft ground. I had on a new plaid skirt also that blew a little in the wind and whenever this happened the red, white and blue banners in front of all the houses stretched out stiff and said tut-tut-tut-tut in a disapproving way.

The largest of the banners and the largest of the lawns belonged to Daisy Fay’s house. She was just eighteen, two years older than me, and by far the most popular of all the young girls in Louisville. She dressed in white, and had a little white roadster and all day long the telephone rang in her house and excited young officers from Camp Taylor demanded the privilege of monopolizing her that night, “anyways, for an hour!”

When I came opposite her house that morning her white roadster was beside the curb, and she was sitting in it with a lieutenant I had never seen before. They were so engrossed in each other that she didn’t see me until I was five feet away.

“Hello Jordan,” she called unexpectedly. “Please come here.”

I was flattered that she wanted to speak to me, because of all the older girls I admired her most. She asked me if I was going to the Red Cross and make bandages. I was. Well, then, would I tell them that she couldn’t come that day? The officer looked at Daisy while she was speaking, in a way that every young girl wants to be looked at sometime, and because it seemed romantic to me I have remembered the incident ever since. His name was Jay Gatsby and I didn’t lay eyes on him again for over four years--even after I’d met him on Long Island I didn’t realize it was the same man.

That was nineteen-seventeen. By the next year I had a few beaux myself, and I began to play in tournaments, so I didn’t see Daisy very often. She went with a slightly older crowd--when she went with anyone at all. Wild rumors were circulating about her--how her mother had found her packing her bag one winter night to go to New York and say goodbye to a soldier who was going overseas. She was effectually prevented, but she wasn’t on speaking terms with her family for several weeks. After that she didn’t play around with the soldiers any more but only with a few flat-footed, short-sighted young men in town who couldn’t get into the army at all.

By the next autumn she was gay again, gay as ever. She had a debut after the Armistice, and in February she was presumably engaged to a man from New Orleans. In June she married Tom Buchanan of Chicago with more pomp and circumstance than Louisville ever knew before. He came down with a hundred people in four private cars and hired a whole floor of the Seelbach Hotel, and the day before the wedding he gave her a string of pearls valued at three hundred and fifty thousand dollars.

I was bridesmaid. I came into her room half an hour before the bridal dinner, and found her lying on her bed as lovely as the June night in her flowered dress--and as drunk as a monkey. She had a bottle of sauterne in one hand and a letter in the other.

“ ‘Gratulate me,” she muttered. “Never had a drink before but oh, how I do enjoy it.”

“What’s the matter, Daisy?”

I was scared, I can tell you; I’d never seen a girl like that before.

“Here, dearis.” She groped around in a waste-basket she had with her on the bed and pulled out the string of pearls. “Take ‘em downstairs and give ‘em back to whoever they belong to. Tell ‘em all Daisy’s change’ her mine. Say ‘Daisy’s change’ her mine!’.”

She began to cry--she cried and cried. I rushed out and found her mother’s maid and we locked the door and got her into a cold bath. She wouldn’t let go of the letter. She took it into the tub with her and squeezed it up into a wet ball, and only let me leave it in the soap dish when she saw that it was coming to pieces like snow.

But she didn’t say another word. We gave her spirits of ammonia and put ice on her forehead and hooked her back into her dress and half an hour later when we walked out of the room the pearls were around her neck and the incident was over. Next day at five o’clock she married Tom Buchanan without so much as a shiver and started off on a three months’ trip to the South Seas.

I saw them in Santa Barbara when they came back and I thought I’d never seen a girl so mad about her husband. If he left the room for a minute she’d look around uneasily and say “Where’s Tom gone?” and wear the most abstracted expression until she saw him coming in the door. She used to sit on the sand with his head in her lap by the hour rubbing her fingers over his eyes and looking at him with unfathomable delight. It was touching to see them together--it made you laugh in a hushed, fascinated way. That was in August. A week after I left Santa Barbara Tom ran into a wagon on the Ventura road one night and ripped a front wheel off his car. The girl who was with him got into the papers too because her arm was broken--she was one of the chambermaids in the Santa Barbara Hotel.

The next April Daisy had her little girl and they went to France for a year. I saw them one spring in Cannes and later in and then they came back to Chicago to settle down. Daisy was popular in Chicago, as you know. They moved with a fast crowd, all of them young and rich and wild, but she came out with an absolutely perfect reputation. Perhaps because she doesn’t drink. It’s a great advantage not to drink among hard-drinking people. You can hold your tongue and, moreover, you can time any little irregularity of your own so that everybody else is so blind that they don’t see or care. Perhaps Daisy never went in for amour at all--and yet there’s something in that voice of hers. . . .

Well, about six weeks ago, she heard the name Gatsby for the first time in years. It was when I asked you--do you remember?--if you knew Gatsby in West Egg. After you had gone home she came into my room and woke me up, and said “What Gatsby?” and when I described him--I was half asleep--she said in the strangest voice that it must be the man she used to know. It wasn’t until then that I connected this Gatsby with the officer in her white car.

When Jordan Baker had finished telling all this we had left the Plaza for half an hour and were driving in a Victoria through Central Park. The sun had gone down behind the tall apartments of the movie stars in the West Fifties and the clear voices of girls, already gathered like crickets on the grass, rose through the hot twilight:

I’m the Sheik of Araby,

Your love belongs to me.

At night when you’re are asleep,

Into your tent I’ll creep----

“It was a strange coincidence,” I said.

“But it wasn’t a coincidence at all.”

“Why not?”

“Gatsby bought that house so that Daisy would be just across the bay.”

Then it had not been merely the stars to which he had aspired on that June night. He came alive to me, delivered suddenly from the womb of his purposeless splendor.

“He wants to know--” continued Jordan “--if you’ll invite Daisy to your house some afternoon and then let him come over.”

The modesty of the demand shook me. He had waited five years and bought a mansion where he dispensed starlight to casual moths so that he could “come over” some afternoon to a stranger’s garden.

“Did I have to know all this before he could ask such a little thing?”

“He’s afraid. He’s waited so long. He thought you might be offended. You see he’s a regular tough underneath it all.”

Something worried me.

“Why didn’t he ask you to arrange a meeting?”

“He wants her to see his house,” she explained. “And your house is right next door.”

“Oh!”

“I think he half expected her to wander into one of his parties, some night,” went on Jordan, “but she never did. Then he began asking people casually if they knew her, and I was the first one he found. It was that night he sent for me at his dance, and you should have heard the elaborate way he worked up to it. Of course, I immediately suggested a luncheon in New York--and I thought he’d go mad:

“ ‘I don’t want to do anything out of the way!’ he kept saying. ‘I want to see her right next door.’

“When I said you were a particular friend of Tom’s he started to abandon the whole idea. He doesn’t know very much about Tom, though he says he’s read a Chicago paper for years just on the chance of catching a glimpse of Daisy’s name.”

It was dark now, and as we dipped under a little bridge I put my arm around Jordan’s golden shoulder and drew her toward me and asked her to dinner. Suddenly I wasn’t thinking of Daisy and Gatsby any more but of this clean, hard, limited person who dealt in universal skepticism and who leaned back jauntily just within the circle of my arm. A phrase began to beat in my ears with a sort of heady excitement: “There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.”

“And Daisy ought to have something in her life,” murmured Jordan to me.

“Does she want to see Gatsby?”

“She’s not to know about it. Gatsby doesn’t want her to know. You’re just supposed to invite her to tea.”

We passed a barrier of dark trees, and then the facade of Fifty-ninth Street, a block of delicate pale light, beamed down into the park. Unlike Gatsby and Tom Buchanan I had no girl whose disembodied face floated along the dark cornices and blinding signs and so I drew up the girl beside me, tightening my arms. Her wan, scornful mouth smiled and so I drew her up again, closer, this time to my face.

CHAPTER 5

When I came home to West Egg that night I was afraid for a moment that my house was on fire. Two o’clock and the whole corner of the peninsula was blazing with light which fell unreal on the shrubbery and made thin elongating glints upon the roadside wires. Turning a corner I saw that it was Gatsby’s house, lit from tower to cellar.

At first I thought it was another party, a wild rout that had resolved itself into “hide-and-go-seek” or “sardines-in-the-box” with all the house thrown open to the game. But there wasn’t a sound. Only wind in the trees which blew the wires and made the lights go off and on again as if the house had winked into the darkness. As my taxi groaned away I saw Gatsby walking toward me across his lawn.

“Your place looks like the world’s fair,” I said.

“Does it?” He turned his eyes toward it absently. “I have been glancing into some of the rooms. Let’s go to Coney Island, old sport. In my car.”

“It’s too late.”

“Well, suppose we take a plunge in the swimming pool? I haven’t made use of it all summer.”

“I’ve got to go to bed.”

“All right.”

He waited, looking at me with suppressed eagerness.

“I talked with Miss Baker,” I said after a moment. “I’m going to call up Daisy tomorrow and invite her over here to tea.”

“Oh, that’s all right,” he said carelessly. “I don’t want to put you to any trouble.”

“What day would suit you?”

“What day would suit you?” he corrected me quickly. “I don’t want to put you to any trouble, you see.”

“How about the day after tomorrow?” He considered for a moment. Then, with reluctance:

“I want to get the grass cut,” he said.

We both looked at the grass--there was a sharp line where my ragged lawn ended and the darker, well-kept expanse of his began. I suspected that he meant my grass.

“There’s another little thing,” he said uncertainly, and hesitated.

“Would you rather put it off for a few days?” I asked.

“Oh, it isn’t about that. At least----” He fumbled with a series of beginnings. “Why, I thought--why, look here, old sport, you don’t make much money, do you?”

“Not very much.”

This seemed to reassure him and he continued more confidently.

“I thought you didn’t, if you’ll pardon my--you see, I carry on a little business on the side, a sort of sideline, you understand. And I thought that if you don’t make very much--You’re selling bonds, aren’t you, old sport?”

“Trying to.”

“Well, this would interest you. It wouldn’t take up much of your time and you might pick up a nice bit of money. It happens to be a rather confidential sort of thing.”

I realize now that under different circumstances that conversation might have been one of the crises of my life. But, because the offer was obviously and tactlessly for a service to be rendered, I had no choice except to cut him off there.

“I’ve got my hands full,” I said. “I’m much obliged but I couldn’t take on any more work.”

“You wouldn’t have to do any business with Wolfshiem.” Evidently he thought that I was shying away from the “gonnegtion” mentioned at lunch, but I assured him he was wrong. He waited a moment longer, hoping I’d begin a conversation, but I was too absorbed to be responsive, so he went unwillingly home.

The evening had made me light-headed and happy; I think I walked into a deep sleep as I entered my front door. So I didn’t know whether or not Gatsby went to Coney Island or for how many hours he “glanced into rooms” while his house blazed gaudily on. I called up Daisy from the office next morning and invited her to come to tea.

“Don’t bring Tom,” I warned her.

“What?”

“Don’t bring Tom.”

“Who is ‘Tom’?” she asked innocently.

The day agreed upon was pouring rain. At eleven o’clock a man in a raincoat dragging a lawn-mower tapped at my front door and said that Mr. Gatsby had sent him over to cut my grass. This reminded me that I had forgotten to tell my Finn to come back so I drove into WestEggVillage to search for her among soggy white-washed alleys and to buy some cups and lemons and flowers.

The flowers were unnecessary, for at two o’clock a greenhouse arrived from Gatsby’s, with innumerable receptacles to contain it. An hour later the front door opened nervously, and Gatsby in a white flannel suit, silver shirt and gold-colored tie hurried in. He was pale and there were dark signs of sleeplessness beneath his eyes.

“Is everything all right?” he asked immediately.

“The grass looks fine, if that’s what you mean.”

“What grass?” he inquired blankly. “Oh, the grass in the yard.” He looked out the window at it, but judging from his expression I don’t believe he saw a thing.

“Looks very good,” he remarked vaguely. “One of the papers said they thought the rain would stop about four. I think it was ‘The Journal.’ Have you got everything you need in the shape of--of tea?”

I took him into the pantry where he looked a little reproachfully at the Finn. Together we scrutinized the twelve lemon cakes from the delicatessen shop.

“Will they do?” I asked.

“Of course, of course! They’re fine!” and he added hollowly, “. . .old sport.”

The rain cooled about half-past three to a damp mist through which occasional thin drops swam like dew. Gatsby looked with vacant eyes through a copy of Clay’s “Economics,” starting at the Finnish tread that shook the kitchen floor and peering toward the bleared windows from time to time as if a series of invisible but alarming happenings were taking place outside. Finally he got up and informed me in an uncertain voice that he was going home.

“Why’s that?”

“Nobody’s coming to tea. It’s too late!” He looked at his watch as if there was some pressing demand on his time elsewhere. “I can’t wait all day.”

“Don’t be silly; it’s just two minutes to four.”

He sat down, miserably, as if I had pushed him, and simultaneously there was the sound of a motor turning into my lane. We both jumped up and, a little harrowed myself, I went out into the yard.

Under the dripping bare lilac trees a large open car was coming up the drive. It stopped. Daisy’s face, tipped sideways beneath a three-cornered lavender hat, looked out at me with a bright ecstatic smile.

“Is this absolutely where you live, my dearest one?”

The exhilarating ripple of her voice was a wild tonic in the rain. I had to follow the sound of it for a moment, up and down, with my ear alone before any words came through. A damp streak of hair lay like a dash of blue paint across her cheek and her hand was wet with glistening drops as I took it to help her from the car.

“Are you in love with me,” she said low in my ear. “Or why did I have to come alone?”

“That’s the secret of Castle Rackrent. Tell your chauffeur to go far away and spend an hour.”

“Come back in an hour, Ferdie.” Then in a grave murmur, “His name is Ferdie.”

“Does the gasoline affect his nose?”

“I don’t think so,” she said innocently. “Why?”

We went in. To my overwhelming surprise the living room was deserted.

“Well, that’s funny!” I exclaimed.

“What’s funny?”

She turned her head as there was a light, dignified knocking at the front door. I went out and opened it. Gatsby, pale as death, with his hands plunged like weights in his coat pockets, was standing in a puddle of water glaring tragically into my eyes.

With his hands still in his coat pockets he stalked by me into the hall, turned sharply as if he were on a wire and disappeared into the living room. It wasn’t a bit funny. Aware of the loud beating of my own heart I pulled the door to against the increasing rain.

For half a minute there wasn’t a sound. Then from the living room I heard a sort of choking murmur and part of a laugh followed by Daisy’s voice on a clear artificial note.

“I certainly am awfully glad to see you again.”

A pause; it endured horribly. I had nothing to do in the hall so I went into the room.

Gatsby, his hands still in his pockets, was reclining against the mantelpiece in a strained counterfeit of perfect ease, even of boredom. His head leaned back so far that it rested against the face of a defunct mantelpiece clock and from this position his distraught eyes stared down at Daisy who was sitting frightened but graceful on the edge of a stiff chair.

“We’ve met before,” muttered Gatsby. His eyes glanced momentarily at me and his lips parted with an abortive attempt at a laugh. Luckily the clock took this moment to tilt dangerously at the pressure of his head, whereupon he turned and caught it with trembling fingers and set it back in place. Then he sat down, rigidly, his elbow on the arm of the sofa and his chin in his hand.

“I’m sorry about the clock,” he said.

My own face had now assumed a deep tropical burn. I couldn’t muster up a single commonplace out of the thousand in my head.

“It’s an old clock,” I told them idiotically.

I think we all believed for a moment that it had smashed in pieces on the floor.

“We haven’t met for many years,” said Daisy, her voice as matter-of-fact as it could ever be.

“Five years next November.”

The automatic quality of Gatsby’s answer set us all back at least another minute. I had them both on their feet with the desperate suggestion that they help me make tea in the kitchen when the demoniac Finn brought it in on a tray.

Amid the welcome confusion of cups and cakes a certain physical decency established itself. Gatsby got himself into a shadow and while Daisy and I talked looked conscientiously from one to the other of us with tense unhappy eyes. However, as calmness wasn’t an end in itself I made an excuse at the first possible moment and got to my feet.

“Where are you going?” demanded Gatsby in immediate alarm.

“I’ll be back.”

“I’ve got to speak to you about something before you go.”

He followed me wildly into the kitchen, closed the door and whispered: “Oh, God!” in a miserable way.

“What’s the matter?”

“This is a terrible mistake,” he said, shaking his head from side to side, “a terrible, terrible mistake.”

“You’re just embarrassed, that’s all,” and luckily I added: “Daisy’s embarrassed too.”

“She’s embarrassed?” he repeated incredulously.

“Just as much as you are.”

“Don’t talk so loud.”

“You’re acting like a little boy,” I broke out impatiently. “Not only that but you’re rude. Daisy’s sitting in there all alone.”

He raised his hand to stop my words, looked at me with unforgettable reproach and opening the door cautiously went back into the other room.

I walked out the back way--just as Gatsby had when he had made his nervous circuit of the house half an hour before--and ran for a huge black knotted tree whose massed leaves made a fabric against the rain. Once more it was pouring and my irregular lawn, well-shaved by Gatsby’s gardener, abounded in small muddy swamps and prehistoric marshes. There was nothing to look at from under the tree except Gatsby’s enormous house, so I stared at it, like Kant at his church steeple, for half an hour. A brewer had built it early in the “period” craze, a decade before, and there was a story that he’d agreed to pay five years’ taxes on all the neighboring cottages if the owners would have their roofs thatched with straw. Perhaps their refusal took the heart out of his plan to Found a Family--he went into an immediate decline. His children sold his house with the black wreath still on the door. Americans, while occasionally willing to be serfs, have always been obstinate about being peasantry.

After half an hour the sun shone again and the grocer’s automobile rounded Gatsby’s drive with the raw material for his servants’ dinner--I felt sure he wouldn’t eat a spoonful. A maid began opening the upper windows of his house, appeared momentarily in each, and, leaning from a large central bay, spat meditatively into the garden. It was time I went back. While the rain continued it had seemed like the murmur of their voices, rising and swelling a little, now and then, with gusts of emotion. But in the new silence I felt that silence had fallen within the house too.

I went in--after making every possible noise in the kitchen short of pushing over the stove--but I don’t believe they heard a sound. They were sitting at either end of the couch looking at each other as if some question had been asked or was in the air, and every vestige of embarrassment was gone. Daisy’s face was smeared with tears and when I came in she jumped up and began wiping at it with her handkerchief before a mirror. But there was a change in Gatsby that was simply confounding. He literally glowed; without a word or a gesture of exultation a new well-being radiated from him and filled the little room.

“Oh, hello, old sport,” he said, as if he hadn’t seen me for years. I thought for a moment he was going to shake hands.

“It’s stopped raining.”

“Has it?” When he realized what I was talking about, that there were twinkle-bells of sunshine in the room, he smiled like a weather man, like an ecstatic patron of recurrent light, and repeated the news to Daisy. “What do you think of that? It’s stopped raining.”

“I’m glad, Jay.” Her throat, full of aching, grieving beauty, told only of her unexpected joy.

“I want you and Daisy to come over to my house,” he said, “I’d like to show her around.”

“You’re sure you want me to come?”

“Absolutely, old sport.”

Daisy went upstairs to wash her face--too late I thought with humiliation of my towels--while Gatsby and I waited on the lawn.

“My house looks well, doesn’t it?” he demanded. “See how the whole front of it catches the light.”

I agreed that it was splendid.

“Yes.” His eyes went over it, every arched door and square tower. “It took me just three years to earn the money that bought it.”

“I thought you inherited your money.”

“I did, old sport,” he said automatically, “but I lost most of it in the big panic--the panic of the war.”

I think he hardly knew what he was saying, for when I asked him what business he was in he answered “That’s my affair,” before he realized that it wasn’t the appropriate reply.

“Oh, I’ve been in several things,” he corrected himself. “I was in the drug business and then I was in the oil business. But I’m not in either one now.” He looked at me with more attention. “Do you mean you’ve been thinking over what I proposed the other night?”

Before I could answer, Daisy came out of the house and two rows of brass buttons on her dress gleamed in the sunlight.

“That huge place there?” she cried pointing.

“Do you like it?”

“I love it, but I don’t see how you live there all alone.”

“I keep it always full of interesting people, night and day. People who do interesting things. Celebrated people.”

Instead of taking the short cut along the Sound we went down the road and entered by the big postern. With enchanting murmurs Daisy admired this aspect or that of the feudal silhouette against the sky, admired the gardens, the sparkling odor of jonquils and the frothy odor of hawthorn and plum blossoms and the pale gold odor of kiss-me-at-the-gate. It was strange to reach the marble steps and find no stir of bright dresses in and out the door, and hear no sound but bird voices in the trees.

And inside as we wandered through Marie Antoinette music rooms and Restoration salons I felt that there were guests concealed behind every couch and table, under orders to be breathlessly silent until we had passed through. As Gatsby closed the door of “the Merton College Library” I could have sworn I heard the owl-eyed man break into ghostly laughter.

We went upstairs, through period bedrooms swathed in rose and lavender silk and vivid with new flowers, through dressing rooms and poolrooms, and bathrooms with sunken baths--intruding into one chamber where a dishevelled man in pajamas was doing liver exercises on the floor. It was Mr. Klipspringer, the “boarder.” I had seen him wandering hungrily about the beach that morning. Finally we came to Gatsby’s own apartment, a bedroom and a bath and an Adam study, where we sat down and drank a glass of some Chartreuse he took from a cupboard in the wall.

He hadn’t once ceased looking at Daisy and I think he revalued everything in his house according to the measure of response it drew from her well-loved eyes. Sometimes, too, he stared around at his possessions in a dazed way as though in her actual and astounding presence none of it was any longer real. Once he nearly toppled down a flight of stairs.

His bedroom was the simplest room of all--except where the dresser was garnished with a toilet set of pure dull gold. Daisy took the brush with delight and smoothed her hair, whereupon Gatsby sat down and shaded his eyes and began to laugh.

“It’s the funniest thing, old sport,” he said hilariously. “I can’t--when I try to----”

He had passed visibly through two states and was entering upon a third. After his embarrassment and his unreasoning joy he was consumed with wonder at her presence. He had been full of the idea so long, dreamed it right through to the end, waited with his teeth set, so to speak, at an inconceivable pitch of intensity. Now, in the reaction, he was running down like an overwound clock.

Recovering himself in a minute he opened for us two hulking patent cabinets which held his massed suits and dressing-gowns and ties, and his shirts, piled like bricks in stacks a dozen high.

“I’ve got a man in England who buys me clothes. He sends over a selection of things at the beginning of each season, spring and fall.”

He took out a pile of shirts and began throwing them, one by one before us, shirts of sheer linen and thick silk and fine flannel which lost their folds as they fell and covered the table in many-colored disarray. While we admired he brought more and the soft rich heap mounted higher--shirts with stripes and scrolls and plaids in coral and apple-green and lavender and faint orange with monograms of Indian blue. Suddenly with a strained sound, Daisy bent her head into the shirts and began to cry stormily.

“They’re such beautiful shirts,” she sobbed, her voice muffled in the thick folds. “It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such--such beautiful shirts before.”

After the house, we were to see the grounds and the swimming pool, and the hydroplane and the midsummer flowers--but outside Gatsby’s window it began to rain again so we stood in a row looking at the corrugated surface of the Sound.

“If it wasn’t for the mist we could see your home across the bay,” said Gatsby. “You always have a green light that burns all night at the end of your dock.”

Daisy put her arm through his abruptly but he seemed absorbed in what he had just said. Possibly it had occurred to him that the colossal significance of that light had now vanished forever. Compared to the great distance that had separated him from Daisy it had seemed very near to her, almost touching her. It had seemed as close as a star to the moon. Now it was again a green light on a dock. His count of enchanted objects had diminished by one.

I began to walk about the room, examining various indefinite objects in the half darkness. A large photograph of an elderly man in yachting costume attracted me, hung on the wall over his desk.

“Who’s this?”

“That? That’s Mr. Dan Cody, old sport.”

The name sounded faintly familiar.

“He’s dead now. He used to be my best friend years ago.”

There was a small picture of Gatsby, also in yachting costume, on the bureau--Gatsby with his head thrown back defiantly--taken apparently when he was about eighteen.

“I adore it!” exclaimed Daisy. “The pompadour! You never told me you had a pompadour--or a yacht.”

“Look at this,” said Gatsby quickly. “Here’s a lot of clippings--about you.”

They stood side by side examining it. I was going to ask to see the rubies when the phone rang and Gatsby took up the receiver.

“Yes. . . . Well, I can’t talk now. . . . I can’t talk now, old sport. . . . I said a small town. . . . He must know what a small town is. . . . Well, he’s no use to us if Detroit is his idea of a small town. . . .”

He rang off.

“Come here quick!” cried Daisy at the window.

The rain was still falling, but the darkness had parted in the west, and there was a pink and golden billow of foamy clouds above the sea.

“Look at that,” she whispered, and then after a moment: “I’d like to just get one of those pink clouds and put you in it and push you around.”

I tried to go then, but they wouldn’t hear of it; perhaps my presence made them feel more satisfactorily alone.

“I know what we’ll do,” said Gatsby, “we’ll have Klipspringer play the piano.”

He went out of the room calling “Ewing!” and returned in a few minutes accompanied by an embarrassed, slightly worn young man with shell-rimmed glasses and scanty blonde hair. He was now decently clothed in a “sport shirt” open at the neck, sneakers and duck trousers of a nebulous hue.

“Did we interrupt your exercises?” inquired Daisy politely.

“I was asleep,” cried Mr. Klipspringer, in a spasm of embarrassment. “That is, I’d been asleep. Then I got up. . . .”

“Klipspringer plays the piano,” said Gatsby, cutting him off. “Don’t you, Ewing, old sport?”

“I don’t play well. I don’t--I hardly play at all. I’m all out of prac----”

“We’ll go downstairs,” interrupted Gatsby. He flipped a switch. The grey windows disappeared as the house glowed full of light.

In the music room Gatsby turned on a solitary lamp beside the piano. He lit Daisy’s cigarette from a trembling match, and sat down with her on a couch far across the room where there was no light save what the gleaming floor bounced in from the hall.

When Klipspringer had played “The Love Nest” he turned around on the bench and searched unhappily for Gatsby in the gloom.

“I’m all out of practice, you see. I told you I couldn’t play. I’m all out of prac----”

“Don’t talk so much, old sport,” commanded Gatsby. “Play!”

In the morning,

In the evening,

Ain’t we got fun----

Outside the wind was loud and there was a faint flow of thunder along the Sound. All the lights were going on in West Egg now; the electric trains, men-carrying, were plunging home through the rain from New York. It was the hour of a profound human change, and excitement was generating on the air.

One thing’s sure and nothing’s surer

The rich get richer and the poor get--children.

In the meantime,

In between time----

As I went over to say goodbye I saw that the expression of bewilderment had come back into Gatsby’s face, as though a faint doubt had occurred to him as to the quality of his present happiness. Almost five years! There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams--not through her own fault but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.

As I watched him he adjusted himself a little, visibly. His hand took hold of hers and as she said something low in his ear he turned toward her with a rush of emotion. I think that voice held him most with its fluctuating, feverish warmth because it couldn’t be over-dreamed--that voice was a deathless song.

They had forgotten me, but Daisy glanced up and held out her hand; Gatsby didn’t know me now at all. I looked once more at them and they looked back at me, remotely, possessed by intense life. Then I went out of the room and down the marble steps into the rain, leaving them there together.

CHAPTER 6

About this time an ambitious young reporter from New York arrived one morning at Gatsby’s door and asked him if he had anything to say.

“Anything to say about what?” inquired Gatsby politely.

“Why,--any statement to give out.”

It transpired after a confused five minutes that the man had heard Gatsby’s name around his office in a connection which he either wouldn’t reveal or didn’t fully understand. This was his day off and with laudable initiative he had hurried out “to see.”

It was a random shot, and yet the reporter’s instinct was right. Gatsby’s notoriety, spread about by the hundreds who had accepted his hospitality and so become authorities on his past, had increased all summer until he fell just short of being news. Contemporary legends such as the “underground pipe-line to Canada” attached themselves to him, and there was one persistent story that he didn’t live in a house at all, but in a boat that looked like a house and was moved secretly up and down the Long Island shore. Just why these inventions were a source of satisfaction to James Gatz of North Dakota, isn’t easy to say.

James Gatz--that was really, or at least legally, his name. He had changed it at the age of seventeen and at the specific moment that witnessed the beginning of his career--when he saw Dan Cody’s yacht drop anchor over the most insidious flat on Lake Superior. It was James Gatz who had been loafing along the beach that afternoon in a torn green jersey and a pair of canvas pants, but it was already Jay Gatsby who borrowed a row-boat, pulled out to the Tuolomee and informed Cody that a wind might catch him and break him up in half an hour.

I suppose he’d had the name ready for a long time, even then. His parents were shiftless and unsuccessful farm people--his imagination had never really accepted them as his parents at all. The truth was that Jay Gatsby, of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God--a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that--and he must be about His Father’s Business, the service of a vast, vulgar and meretricious beauty. So he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen-year-old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end.

For over a year he had been beating his way along the south shore of Lake Superior as a clam digger and a salmon fisher or in any other capacity that brought him food and bed. His brown, hardening body lived naturally through the half fierce, half lazy work of the bracing days. He knew women early and since they spoiled him he became contemptuous of them, of young virgins because they were ignorant, of the others because they were hysterical about things which in his overwhelming self-absorption he took for granted.

But his heart was in a constant, turbulent riot. The most grotesque and fantastic conceits haunted him in his bed at night. A universe of ineffable gaudiness spun itself out in his brain while the clock ticked on the wash-stand and the moon soaked with wet light his tangled clothes upon the floor. Each night he added to the pattern of his fancies until drowsiness closed down upon some vivid scene with an oblivious embrace. For a while these reveries provided an outlet for his imagination; they were a satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy’s wing.

An instinct toward his future glory had led him, some months before, to the small Lutheran college of St. Olaf in southern Minnesota. He stayed there two weeks, dismayed at its ferocious indifference to the drums of his destiny, to destiny itself, and despising the janitor’s work with which he was to pay his way through. Then he drifted back to Lake Superior, and he was still searching for something to do on the day that Dan Cody’s yacht dropped anchor in the shallows along shore.

Cody was fifty years old then, a product of the Nevada silver fields, of the Yukon, of every rush for metal since Seventy-five. The transactions in Montana copper that made him many times a millionaire found him physically robust but on the verge of soft-mindedness, and, suspecting this an infinite number of women tried to separate him from his money. The none too savory ramifications by which Ella Kaye, the newspaper woman, played Madame de Maintenon to his weakness and sent him to sea in a yacht, were common knowledge to the turgid journalism of 1902. He had been coasting along all too hospitable shores for five years when he turned up as James Gatz’s destiny at Little Girl Bay.

To the young Gatz, resting on his oars and looking up at the railed deck, the yacht represented all the beauty and glamor in the world. I suppose he smiled at Cody--he had probably discovered that people liked him when he smiled. At any rate Cody asked him a few questions (one of them elicited the brand new name) and found that he was quick, and extravagantly ambitious. A few days later he took him to Duluth and bought him a blue coat, six pair of white duck trousers and a yachting cap. And when the Tuolomee left for the West Indies and the Barbary Coast Gatsby left too.

He was employed in a vague personal capacity--while he remained with Cody he was in turn steward, mate, skipper, secretary, and even jailor, for Dan Cody sober knew what lavish doings Dan Cody drunk might soon be about and he provided for such contingencies by reposing more and more trust in Gatsby. The arrangement lasted five years during which the boat went three times around the continent. It might have lasted indefinitely except for the fact that Ella Kaye came on board one night in Boston and a week later Dan Cody inhospitably died.

I remember the portrait of him up in Gatsby’s bedroom, a grey, florid man with a hard empty face--the pioneer debauchee who during one phase of American life brought back to the eastern seaboard the savage violence of the frontier brothel and saloon. It was indirectly due to Cody that Gatsby drank so little. Sometimes in the course of gay parties women used to rub champagne into his hair; for himself he formed the habit of letting liquor alone.

And it was from Cody that he inherited money--a legacy of twenty-five thousand dollars. He didn’t get it. He never understood the legal device that was used against him but what remained of the millions went intact to Ella Kaye. He was left with his singularly appropriate education; the vague contour of Jay Gatsby had filled out to the substantiality of a man.

He told me all this very much later, but I’ve put it down here with the idea of exploding those first wild rumors about his antecedents, which weren’t even faintly true. Moreover he told it to me at a time of confusion, when I had reached the point of believing everything and nothing about him. So I take advantage of this short halt, while Gatsby, so to speak, caught his breath, to clear this set of misconceptions away.

It was a halt, too, in my association with his affairs. For several weeks I didn’t see him or hear his voice on the phone--mostly I was in New York, trotting around with Jordan and trying to ingratiate myself with her senile aunt--but finally I went over to his house one Sunday afternoon. I hadn’t been there two minutes when somebody brought Tom Buchanan in for a drink. I was startled, naturally, but the really surprising thing was that it hadn’t happened before.

They were a party of three on horseback--Tom and a man named Sloane and a pretty woman in a brown riding habit who had been there previously.

“I’m delighted to see you,” said Gatsby standing on his porch. “I’m delighted that you dropped in.”

As though they cared!

“Sit right down. Have a cigarette or a cigar.” He walked around the room quickly, ringing bells. “I’ll have something to drink for you in just a minute.”

He was profoundly affected by the fact that Tom was there. But he would be uneasy anyhow until he had given them something, realizing in a vague way that that was all they came for. Mr. Sloane wanted nothing. A lemonade? No, thanks. A little champagne? Nothing at all, thanks. . . . I’m sorry----

“Did you have a nice ride?”

“Very good roads around here.”

“I suppose the automobiles----”

“Yeah.”

Moved by an irresistible impulse, Gatsby turned to Tom who had accepted the introduction as a stranger.

“I believe we’ve met somewhere before, Mr. Buchanan.”

“Oh, yes,” said Tom, gruffly polite but obviously not remembering. “So we did. I remember very well.”

“About two weeks ago.”

“That’s right. You were with Nick here.”

“I know your wife,” continued Gatsby, almost aggressively.

“That so?”

Tom turned to me.

“You live near here, Nick?”

“Next door.”

“That so?”

Mr. Sloane didn’t enter into the conversation but lounged back haughtily in his chair; the woman said nothing either--until unexpectedly, after two highballs, she became cordial.

“We’ll all come over to your next party, Mr. Gatsby,” she suggested. “What do you say?”

“Certainly. I’d be delighted to have you.”

“Be ver’ nice,” said Mr. Sloane, without gratitude. “Well--think ought to be starting home.”

“Please don’t hurry,” Gatsby urged them. He had control of himself now and he wanted to see more of Tom. “Why don’t you--why don’t you stay for supper? I wouldn’t be surprised if some other people dropped in from New York.”

“You come to supper with me,” said the lady enthusiastically. “Both of you.”

This included me. Mr. Sloane got to his feet.

“Come along,” he said--but to her only.

“I mean it,” she insisted. “I’d love to have you. Lots of room.”

Gatsby looked at me questioningly. He wanted to go and he didn’t see that Mr. Sloane had determined he shouldn’t.

“I’m afraid I won’t be able to,” I said.

“Well, you come,” she urged, concentrating on Gatsby.

Mr. Sloane murmured something close to her ear.

“We won’t be late if we start now,” she insisted aloud.

“I haven’t got a horse,” said Gatsby. “I used to ride in the army but I’ve never bought a horse. I’ll have to follow you in my car. Excuse me for just a minute.”

The rest of us walked out on the porch, where Sloane and the lady began an impassioned conversation aside.

“My God, I believe the man’s coming,” said Tom. “Doesn’t he know she doesn’t want him?”

“She says she does want him.”

“She has a big dinner party and he won’t know a soul there.” He frowned. “I wonder where in the devil he met Daisy. By God, I may be old-fashioned in my ideas, but women run around too much these days to suit me. They meet all kinds of crazy fish.”

Suddenly Mr. Sloane and the lady walked down the steps and mounted their horses.

“Come on,” said Mr. Sloane to Tom, “we’re late. We’ve got to go.” And then to me: “Tell him we couldn’t wait, will you?”

Tom and I shook hands, the rest of us exchanged a cool nod and they trotted quickly down the drive, disappearing under the August foliage just as Gatsby with hat and light overcoat in hand came out the front door.

Tom was evidently perturbed at Daisy’s running around alone, for on the following Saturday night he came with her to Gatsby’s party. Perhaps his presence gave the evening its peculiar quality of oppressiveness--it stands out in my memory from Gatsby’s other parties that summer. There were the same people, or at least the same sort of people, the same profusion of champagne, the same many-colored, many-keyed commotion, but I felt an unpleasantness in the air, a pervading harshness that hadn’t been there before. Or perhaps I had merely grown used to it, grown to accept West Egg as a world complete in itself, with its own standards and its own great figures, second to nothing because it had no consciousness of being so, and now I was looking at it again, through Daisy’s eyes. It is invariably saddening to look through new eyes at things upon which you have expended your own powers of adjustment.

They arrived at twilight and as we strolled out among the sparkling hundreds Daisy’s voice was playing murmurous tricks in her throat.

“These things excite me so,” she whispered. “If you want to kiss me any time during the evening, Nick, just let me know and I’ll be glad to arrange it for you. Just mention my name. Or present a green card. I’m giving out green----”

“Look around,” suggested Gatsby.

“I’m looking around. I’m having a marvelous----”

“You must see the faces of many people you’ve heard about.”

Tom’s arrogant eyes roamed the crowd.

“We don’t go around very much,” he said. “In fact I was just thinking I don’t know a soul here.”

“Perhaps you know that lady.” Gatsby indicated a gorgeous, scarcely human orchid of a woman who sat in state under a white plum tree. Tom and Daisy stared, with that peculiarly unreal feeling that accompanies the recognition of a hitherto ghostly celebrity of the movies.

“She’s lovely,” said Daisy.

“The man bending over her is her director.”

He took them ceremoniously from group to group:

“Mrs. Buchanan . . . and Mr. Buchanan----” After an instant’s hesitation he added: “the polo player.”

“Oh no,” objected Tom quickly, “Not me.”

But evidently the sound of it pleased Gatsby for Tom remained “the polo player” for the rest of the evening.

“I’ve never met so many celebrities!” Daisy exclaimed. “I liked that man--what was his name?--with the sort of blue nose.”

Gatsby identified him, adding that he was a small producer.

“Well, I liked him anyhow.”

“I’d a little rather not be the polo player,” said Tom pleasantly, “I’d rather look at all these famous people in--in oblivion.”

Daisy and Gatsby danced. I remember being surprised by his graceful, conservative fox-trot--I had never seen him dance before. Then they sauntered over to my house and sat on the steps for half an hour while at her request I remained watchfully in the garden: “In case there’s a fire or a flood,” she explained, “or any act of God.”

Tom appeared from his oblivion as we were sitting down to supper together. “Do you mind if I eat with some people over here?” he said. “A fellow’s getting off some funny stuff.”

“Go ahead,” answered Daisy genially, “And if you want to take down any addresses here’s my little gold pencil. . . .” She looked around after a moment and told me the girl was “common but pretty,” and I knew that except for the half hour she’d been alone with Gatsby she wasn’t having a good time.

We were at a particularly tipsy table. That was my fault--Gatsby had been called to the phone and I’d enjoyed these same people only two weeks before. But what had amused me then turned septic on the air now.

“How do you feel, Miss Baedeker?”

The girl addressed was trying, unsuccessfully, to slump against my shoulder. At this inquiry she sat up and opened her eyes.

“Wha?”

A massive and lethargic woman, who had been urging Daisy to play golf with her at the local club tomorrow, spoke in Miss Baedeker’s defence:

“Oh, she’s all right now. When she’s had five or six cocktails she always starts screaming like that. I tell her she ought to leave it alone.”

“I do leave it alone,” affirmed the accused hollowly.

“We heard you yelling, so I said to Doc Civet here: ‘There’s somebody that needs your help, Doc.’ “

“She’s much obliged, I’m sure,” said another friend, without gratitude. “But you got her dress all wet when you stuck her head in the pool.”

“Anything I hate is to get my head stuck in a pool,” mumbled Miss Baedeker. “They almost drowned me once over in New Jersey.”

“Then you ought to leave it alone,” countered Doctor Civet.

“Speak for yourself!” cried Miss Baedeker violently. “Your hand shakes. I wouldn’t let you operate on me!”

It was like that. Almost the last thing I remember was standing with Daisy and watching the moving picture director and his Star. They were still under the white plum tree and their faces were touching except for a pale thin ray of moonlight between. It occurred to me that he had been very slowly bending toward her all evening to attain this proximity, and even while I watched I saw him stoop one ultimate degree and kiss at her cheek.

“I like her,” said Daisy, “I think she’s lovely.”

But the rest offended her--and inarguably, because it wasn’t a gesture but an emotion. She was appalled by West Egg, this unprecedented “place” that Broadway had begotten upon a Long Island fishing village--appalled by its raw vigor that chafed under the old euphemisms and by the too obtrusive fate that herded its inhabitants along a short cut from nothing to nothing. She saw something awful in the very simplicity she failed to understand.

I sat on the front steps with them while they waited for their car. It was dark here in front: only the bright door sent ten square feet of light volleying out into the soft black morning. Sometimes a shadow moved against a dressing-room blind above, gave way to another shadow, an indefinite procession of shadows, who rouged and powdered in an invisible glass.

“Who is this Gatsby anyhow?” demanded Tom suddenly. “Some big bootlegger?”

“Where’d you hear that?” I inquired.

“I didn’t hear it. I imagined it. A lot of these newly rich people are just big bootleggers, you know.”

“Not Gatsby,” I said shortly.

He was silent for a moment. The pebbles of the drive crunched under his feet.

“Well, he certainly must have strained himself to get this menagerie together.”

A breeze stirred the grey haze of Daisy’s fur collar.

“At least they’re more interesting than the people we know,” she said with an effort.

“You didn’t look so interested.”

“Well, I was.”

Tom laughed and turned to me.

“Did you notice Daisy’s face when that girl asked her to put her under a cold shower?”

Daisy began to sing with the music in a husky, rhythmic whisper, bringing out a meaning in each word that it had never had before and would never have again. When the melody rose, her voice broke up sweetly, following it, in a way contralto voices have, and each change tipped out a little of her warm human magic upon the air.

“Lots of people come who haven’t been invited,” she said suddenly. “That girl hadn’t been invited. They simply force their way in and he’s too polite to object.”

“I’d like to know who he is and what he does,” insisted Tom. “And I think I’ll make a point of finding out.”

“I can tell you right now,” she answered. “He owned some drug stores, a lot of drug stores. He built them up himself.”

The dilatory limousine came rolling up the drive.

“Good night, Nick,” said Daisy.

Her glance left me and sought the lighted top of the steps where “Three o’Clock in the Morning,” a neat, sad little waltz of that year, was drifting out the open door. After all, in the very casualness of Gatsby’s party there were romantic possibilities totally absent from her world. What was it up there in the song that seemed to be calling her back inside? What would happen now in the dim incalculable hours? Perhaps some unbelievable guest would arrive, a person infinitely rare and to be marvelled at, some authentically radiant young girl who with one fresh glance at Gatsby, one moment of magical encounter, would blot out those five years of unwavering devotion.

I stayed late that night. Gatsby asked me to wait until he was free and I lingered in the garden until the inevitable swimming party had run up, chilled and exalted, from the black beach, until the lights were extinguished in the guest rooms overhead. When he came down the steps at last the tanned skin was drawn unusually tight on his face, and his eyes were bright and tired.

“She didn’t like it,” he said immediately.

“Of course she did.”

“She didn’t like it,” he insisted. “She didn’t have a good time.”

He was silent and I guessed at his unutterable depression.

“I feel far away from her,” he said. “It’s hard to make her understand.”

“You mean about the dance?”

“The dance?” He dismissed all the dances he had given with a snap of his fingers. “Old sport, the dance is unimportant.”

He wanted nothing less of Daisy than that she should go to Tom and say: “I never loved you.” After she had obliterated three years with that sentence they could decide upon the more practical measures to be taken. One of them was that, after she was free, they were to go back to Louisville and be married from her house--just as if it were five years ago.

“And she doesn’t understand,” he said. “She used to be able to understand. We’d sit for hours----”

He broke off and began to walk up and down a desolate path of fruit rinds and discarded favors and crushed flowers.

“I wouldn’t ask too much of her,” I ventured. “You can’t repeat the past.”

“Can’t repeat the past?” he cried incredulously. “Why of course you can!”

He looked around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here in the shadow of his house, just out of reach of his hand.

“I’m going to fix everything just the way it was before,” he said, nodding determinedly. “She’ll see.”

He talked a lot about the past and I gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy. His life had been confused and disordered since then, but if he could once return to a certain starting place and go over it all slowly, he could find out what that thing was. . . .

. . . One autumn night, five years before, they had been walking down the street when the leaves were falling, and they came to a place where there were no trees and the sidewalk was white with moonlight. They stopped here and turned toward each other. Now it was a cool night with that mysterious excitement in it which comes at the two changes of the year. The quiet lights in the houses were humming out into the darkness and there was a stir and bustle among the stars. Out of the corner of his eye Gatsby saw that the blocks of the sidewalk really formed a ladder and mounted to a secret place above the trees--he could climb to it, if he climbed alone, and once there he could suck on the pap of life, gulp down the incomparable milk of wonder.

His heart beat faster and faster as Daisy’s white face came up to his own. He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips’ touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete.

Through all he said, even through his appalling sentimentality, I was reminded of something--an elusive rhythm, a fragment of lost words, that I had heard somewhere a long time ago. For a moment a phrase tried to take shape in my mouth and my lips parted like a dumb man’s, as though there was more struggling upon them than a wisp of startled air. But they made no sound and what I had almost remembered was uncommunicable forever.

CHAPTER 7

It was when curiosity about Gatsby was at its highest that the lights in his house failed to go on one Saturday night--and, as obscurely as it had begun, his career as Trimalchio was over.

Only gradually did I become aware that the automobiles which turned expectantly into his drive stayed for just a minute and then drove sulkily away. Wondering if he were sick I went over to find out--an unfamiliar butler with a villainous face squinted at me suspiciously from the door.

“Is Mr. Gatsby sick?”

“Nope.” After a pause he added “sir” in a dilatory, grudging way.

“I hadn’t seen him around, and I was rather worried. Tell him Mr. Carraway came over.”

“Who?” he demanded rudely.

“Carraway.”

“Carraway. All right, I’ll tell him.” Abruptly he slammed the door.

My Finn informed me that Gatsby had dismissed every servant in his house a week ago and replaced them with half a dozen others, who never went into West Egg Village to be bribed by the tradesmen, but ordered moderate supplies over the telephone. The grocery boy reported that the kitchen looked like a pigsty, and the general opinion in the village was that the new people weren’t servants at all.

Next day Gatsby called me on the phone.

“Going away?” I inquired.

“No, old sport.”

“I hear you fired all your servants.”

“I wanted somebody who wouldn’t gossip. Daisy comes over quite often--in the afternoons.”

So the whole caravansary had fallen in like a card house at the disapproval in her eyes.

“They’re some people Wolfshiem wanted to do something for. They’re all brothers and sisters. They used to run a small hotel.”

“I see.”

He was calling up at Daisy’s request--would I come to lunch at her house tomorrow? Miss Baker would be there. Half an hour later Daisy herself telephoned and seemed relieved to find that I was coming. Something was up. And yet I couldn’t believe that they would choose this occasion for a scene--especially for the rather harrowing scene that Gatsby had outlined in the garden.

The next day was broiling, almost the last, certainly the warmest, of the summer. As my train emerged from the tunnel into sunlight, only the hot whistles of the National Biscuit Company broke the simmering hush at noon. The straw seats of the car hovered on the edge of combustion; the woman next to me perspired delicately for a while into her white shirtwaist, and then, as her newspaper dampened under her fingers, lapsed despairingly into deep heat with a desolate cry. Her pocket-book slapped to the floor.

“Oh, my!” she gasped.

I picked it up with a weary bend and handed it back to her, holding it at arm’s length and by the extreme tip of the corners to indicate that I had no designs upon it--but every one near by, including the woman, suspected me just the same.

“Hot!” said the conductor to familiar faces. “Some weather! Hot! Hot! Hot! Is it hot enough for you? Is it hot? Is it . . . ?”

My commutation ticket came back to me with a dark stain from his hand. That any one should care in this heat whose flushed lips he kissed, whose head made damp the pajama pocket over his heart!

. . . Through the hall of the Buchanans’ house blew a faint wind, carrying the sound of the telephone bell out to Gatsby and me as we waited at the door.

“The master’s body!” roared the butler into the mouthpiece. “I’m sorry, madame, but we can’t furnish it--it’s far too hot to touch this noon!”

What he really said was: “Yes . . . yes . . . I’ll see.”

He set down the receiver and came toward us, glistening slightly, to take our stiff straw hats.

“Madame expects you in the salon!” he cried, needlessly indicating the direction. In this heat every extra gesture was an affront to the common store of life.

The room, shadowed well with awnings, was dark and cool. Daisy and Jordan lay upon an enormous couch, like silver idols, weighing down their own white dresses against the singing breeze of the fans.

“We can’t move,” they said together.

Jordan’s fingers, powdered white over their tan, rested for a moment in mine.

“And Mr. Thomas Buchanan, the athlete?” I inquired.

Simultaneously I heard his voice, gruff, muffled, husky, at the hall telephone.

Gatsby stood in the center of the crimson carpet and gazed around with fascinated eyes. Daisy watched him and laughed, her sweet, exciting laugh; a tiny gust of powder rose from her bosom into the air.

“The rumor is,” whispered Jordan, “that that’s Tom’s girl on the telephone.”

We were silent. The voice in the hall rose high with annoyance. “Very well, then, I won’t sell you the car at all. . . . I’m under no obligations to you at all. . . . And as for your bothering me about it at lunch time I won’t stand that at all!”

“Holding down the receiver,” said Daisy cynically.

“No, he’s not,” I assured her. “It’s a bona fide deal. I happen to know about it.”

Tom flung open the door, blocked out its space for a moment with his thick body, and hurried into the room.

“Mr. Gatsby!” He put out his broad, flat hand with well-concealed dislike. “I’m glad to see you, sir. . . . Nick. . . .”

“Make us a cold drink,” cried Daisy.

As he left the room again she got up and went over to Gatsby and pulled his face down kissing him on the mouth.

“You know I love you,” she murmured.

“You forget there’s a lady present,” said Jordan.

Daisy looked around doubtfully.

“You kiss Nick too.”

“What a low, vulgar girl!”

“I don’t care!” cried Daisy and began to clog on the brick fireplace. Then she remembered the heat and sat down guiltily on the couch just as a freshly laundered nurse leading a little girl came into the room.

“Bles-sed pre-cious,” she crooned, holding out her arms. “Come to your own mother that loves you.”

The child, relinquished by the nurse, rushed across the room and rooted shyly into her mother’s dress.

“The Bles-sed pre-cious! Did mother get powder on your old yellowy hair? Stand up now, and say How-de-do.”

Gatsby and I in turn leaned down and took the small reluctant hand. Afterward he kept looking at the child with surprise. I don’t think he had ever really believed in its existence before.

“I got dressed before luncheon,” said the child, turning eagerly to Daisy.

“That’s because your mother wanted to show you off.” Her face bent into the single wrinkle of the small white neck. “You dream, you. You absolute little dream.”

“Yes,” admitted the child calmly. “Aunt Jordan’s got on a white dress too.”

“How do you like mother’s friends?” Daisy turned her around so that she faced Gatsby. “Do you think they’re pretty?”

“Where’s Daddy?”

“She doesn’t look like her father,” explained Daisy. “She looks like me. She’s got my hair and shape of the face.”

Daisy sat back upon the couch. The nurse took a step forward and held out her hand.

“Come, Pammy.”

“Goodbye, sweetheart!”

With a reluctant backward glance the well-disciplined child held to her nurse’s hand and was pulled out the door, just as Tom came back, preceding four gin rickeys that clicked full of ice.

Gatsby took up his drink.

“They certainly look cool,” he said, with visible tension.

We drank in long greedy swallows.

“I read somewhere that the sun’s getting hotter every year,” said Tom genially. “It seems that pretty soon the earth’s going to fall into the sun--or wait a minute--it’s just the opposite--the sun’s getting colder every year.

“Come outside,” he suggested to Gatsby, “I’d like you to have a look at the place.”

I went with them out to the veranda. On the green Sound, stagnant in the heat, one small sail crawled slowly toward the fresher sea. Gatsby’s eyes followed it momentarily; he raised his hand and pointed across the bay.

“I’m right across from you.”

“So you are.”

Our eyes lifted over the rosebeds and the hot lawn and the weedy refuse of the dog days along shore. Slowly the white wings of the boat moved against the blue cool limit of the sky. Ahead lay the scalloped ocean and the abounding blessed isles.

“There’s sport for you,” said Tom, nodding. “I’d like to be out there with him for about an hour.”

We had luncheon in the dining-room, darkened, too, against the heat, and drank down nervous gayety with the cold ale.

“What’ll we do with ourselves this afternoon,” cried Daisy, “and the day after that, and the next thirty years?”

“Don’t be morbid,” Jordan said. “Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.”

“But it’s so hot,” insisted Daisy, on the verge of tears, “And everything’s so confused. Let’s all go to town!”

Her voice struggled on through the heat, beating against it, moulding its senselessness into forms.

“I’ve heard of making a garage out of a stable,” Tom was saying to Gatsby, “but I’m the first man who ever made a stable out of a garage.”

“Who wants to go to town?” demanded Daisy insistently. Gatsby’s eyes floated toward her. “Ah,” she cried, “you look so cool.”

Their eyes met, and they stared together at each other, alone in space. With an effort she glanced down at the table.

“You always look so cool,” she repeated.

She had told him that she loved him, and Tom Buchanan saw. He was astounded. His mouth opened a little and he looked at Gatsby and then back at Daisy as if he had just recognized her as some one he knew a long time ago.

“You resemble the advertisement of the man,” she went on innocently. “You know the advertisement of the man----”

“All right,” broke in Tom quickly, “I’m perfectly willing to go to town. Come on--we’re all going to town.”

He got up, his eyes still flashing between Gatsby and his wife. No one moved.

“Come on!” His temper cracked a little. “What’s the matter, anyhow? If we’re going to town let’s start.”

His hand, trembling with his effort at self control, bore to his lips the last of his glass of ale. Daisy’s voice got us to our feet and out on to the blazing gravel drive.

“Are we just going to go?” she objected. “Like this? Aren’t we going to let any one smoke a cigarette first?”

“Everybody smoked all through lunch.”

“Oh, let’s have fun,” she begged him. “It’s too hot to fuss.”

He didn’t answer.

“Have it your own way,” she said. “Come on, Jordan.”

They went upstairs to get ready while we three men stood there shuffling the hot pebbles with our feet. A silver curve of the moon hovered already in the western sky. Gatsby started to speak, changed his mind, but not before Tom wheeled and faced him expectantly.

“Have you got your stables here?” asked Gatsby with an effort.

“About a quarter of a mile down the road.”

“Oh.”

A pause.

“I don’t see the idea of going to town,” broke out Tom savagely. “Women get these notions in their heads----”

“Shall we take anything to drink?” called Daisy from an upper window.

“I’ll get some whiskey,” answered Tom. He went inside.

Gatsby turned to me rigidly:

“I can’t say anything in his house, old sport.”

“She’s got an indiscreet voice,” I remarked. “It’s full of----”

I hesitated.

“Her voice is full of money,” he said suddenly.

That was it. I’d never understood before. It was full of money--that was the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it, the cymbals’ song of it. . . . High in a white palace the king’s daughter, the golden girl. . . .

Tom came out of the house wrapping a quart bottle in a towel, followed by Daisy and Jordan wearing small tight hats of metallic cloth and carrying light capes over their arms.

“Shall we all go in my car?” suggested Gatsby. He felt the hot, green leather of the seat. “I ought to have left it in the shade.”

“Is it standard shift?” demanded Tom.

“Yes.”

“Well, you take my coupé and let me drive your car to town.”

The suggestion was distasteful to Gatsby.

“I don’t think there’s much gas,” he objected.

“Plenty of gas,” said Tom boisterously. He looked at the gauge. “And if it runs out I can stop at a drug store. You can buy anything at a drug store nowadays.”

A pause followed this apparently pointless remark. Daisy looked at Tom frowning and an indefinable expression, at once definitely unfamiliar and vaguely recognizable, as if I had only heard it described in words, passed over Gatsby’s face.

“Come on, Daisy,” said Tom, pressing her with his hand toward Gatsby’s car. “I’ll take you in this circus wagon.”

He opened the door but she moved out from the circle of his arm.

“You take Nick and Jordan. We’ll follow you in the coupé.”

She walked close to Gatsby, touching his coat with her hand. Jordan and Tom and I got into the front seat of Gatsby’s car, Tom pushed the unfamiliar gears tentatively and we shot off into the oppressive heat leaving them out of sight behind.

“Did you see that?” demanded Tom.

“See what?”

He looked at me keenly, realizing that Jordan and I must have known all along.

“You think I’m pretty dumb, don’t you?” he suggested. “Perhaps I am, but I have a--almost a second sight, sometimes, that tells me what to do. Maybe you don’t believe that, but science----”

He paused. The immediate contingency overtook him, pulled him back from the edge of the theoretical abyss.

“I’ve made a small investigation of this fellow,” he continued. “I could have gone deeper if I’d known----”

“Do you mean you’ve been to a medium?” inquired Jordan humorously.

“What?” Confused, he stared at us as we laughed. “A medium?”

“About Gatsby.”

“About Gatsby! No, I haven’t. I said I’d been making a small investigation of his past.”

“And you found he was an Oxford man,” said Jordan helpfully.

“An Oxford man!” He was incredulous. “Like hell he is! He wears a pink suit.”

“Nevertheless he’s an Oxford man.”

“Oxford, New Mexico,” snorted Tom contemptuously, “or something like that.”

“Listen, Tom. If you’re such a snob, why did you invite him to lunch?” demanded Jordan crossly.

“Daisy invited him; she knew him before we were married--God knows where!”

We were all irritable now with the fading ale and, aware of it, we drove for a while in silence. Then as Doctor T. J. Eckleburg’s faded eyes came into sight down the road, I remembered Gatsby’s caution about gasoline.

“We’ve got enough to get us to town,” said Tom.

“But there’s a garage right here,” objected Jordan. “I don’t want to get stalled in this baking heat.”

Tom threw on both brakes impatiently and we slid to an abrupt dusty stop under Wilson’s sign. After a moment the proprietor emerged from the interior of his establishment and gazed hollow-eyed at the car.

“Let’s have some gas!” cried Tom roughly. “What do you think we stopped for--to admire the view?”

“I’m sick,” said Wilson without moving. “I been sick all day.”

“What’s the matter?”

“I’m all run down.”

“Well, shall I help myself?” Tom demanded. “You sounded well enough on the phone.”

With an effort Wilson left the shade and support of the doorway and, breathing hard, unscrewed the cap of the tank. In the sunlight his face was green.

“I didn’t mean to interrupt your lunch,” he said. “But I need money pretty bad and I was wondering what you were going to do with your old car.”

“How do you like this one?” inquired Tom. “I bought it last week.”

“It’s a nice yellow one,” said Wilson, as he strained at the handle.

“Like to buy it?”

“Big chance,” Wilson smiled faintly. “No, but I could make some money on the other.”

“What do you want money for, all of a sudden?”

“I’ve been here too long. I want to get away. My wife and I want to go west.”

“Your wife does!” exclaimed Tom, startled.

“She’s been talking about it for ten years.” He rested for a moment against the pump, shading his eyes. “And now she’s going whether she wants to or not. I’m going to get her away.”

The coupé flashed by us with a flurry of dust and the flash of a waving hand.

“What do I owe you?” demanded Tom harshly.

“I just got wised up to something funny the last two days,” remarked Wilson. “That’s why I want to get away. That’s why I been bothering you about the car.”

“What do I owe you?”

“Dollar twenty.”

The relentless beating heat was beginning to confuse me and I had a bad moment there before I realized that so far his suspicions hadn’t alighted on Tom. He had discovered that Myrtle had some sort of life apart from him in another world and the shock had made him physically sick. I stared at him and then at Tom, who had made a parallel discovery less than an hour before--and it occurred to me that there was no difference between men, in intelligence or race, so profound as the difference between the sick and the well. Wilson was so sick that he looked guilty, unforgivably guilty--as if he had just got some poor girl with child.

“I’ll let you have that car,” said Tom. “I’ll send it over tomorrow afternoon.”

That locality was always vaguely disquieting, even in the broad glare of afternoon, and now I turned my head as though I had been warned of something behind. Over the ashheaps the giant eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg kept their vigil but I perceived, after a moment, that other eyes were regarding us with peculiar intensity from less than twenty feet away.

In one of the windows over the garage the curtains had been moved aside a little and Myrtle Wilson was peering down at the car. So engrossed was she that she had no consciousness of being observed and one emotion after another crept into her face like objects into a slowly developing picture. Her expression was curiously familiar--it was an expression I had often seen on women’s faces but on Myrtle Wilson’s face it seemed purposeless and inexplicable until I realized that her eyes, wide with jealous terror, were fixed not on Tom, but on Jordan Baker, whom she took to be his wife.

There is no confusion like the confusion of a simple mind, and as we drove away Tom was feeling the hot whips of panic. His wife and his mistress, until an hour ago secure and inviolate, were slipping precipitately from his control. Instinct made him step on the accelerator with the double purpose of overtaking Daisy and leaving Wilson behind, and we sped along toward Astoria at fifty miles an hour, until, among the spidery girders of the elevated, we came in sight of the easygoing blue coupé.

“Those big movies around Fiftieth Street are cool,” suggested Jordan. “I love New York on summer afternoons when every one’s away. There’s something very sensuous about it--overripe, as if all sorts of funny fruits were going to fall into your hands.”

The word “sensuous” had the effect of further disquieting Tom but before he could invent a protest the coupé came to a stop and Daisy signalled us to draw up alongside.

“Where are we going?” she cried.

“How about the movies?”

“It’s so hot,” she complained. “You go. We’ll ride around and meet you after.” With an effort her wit rose faintly, “We’ll meet you on some corner. I’ll be the man smoking two cigarettes.”

“We can’t argue about it here,” Tom said impatiently as a truck gave out a cursing whistle behind us. “You follow me to the south side of Central Park, in front of the Plaza.”

Several times he turned his head and looked back for their car, and if the traffic delayed them he slowed up until they came into sight. I think he was afraid they would dart down a side street and out of his life forever.

But they didn’t. And we all took the less explicable step of engaging the parlor of a suite in the Plaza Hotel.

The prolonged and tumultuous argument that ended by herding us into that room eludes me, though I have a sharp physical memory that, in the course of it, my underwear kept climbing like a damp snake around my legs and intermittent beads of sweat raced cool across my back. The notion originated with Daisy’s suggestion that we hire five bathrooms and take cold baths, and then assumed more tangible form as “a place to have a mint julep.” Each of us said over and over that it was a “crazy idea”--we all talked at once to a baffled clerk and thought, or pretended to think, that we were being very funny. . . .

The room was large and stifling, and, though it was already four o’clock, opening the windows admitted only a gust of hot shrubbery from the Park. Daisy went to the mirror and stood with her back to us, fixing her hair.

“It’s a swell suite,” whispered Jordan respectfully and every one laughed.

“Open another window,” commanded Daisy, without turning around.

“There aren’t any more.”

“Well, we’d better telephone for an axe----”

“The thing to do is to forget about the heat,” said Tom impatiently. “You make it ten times worse by crabbing about it.”

He unrolled the bottle of whiskey from the towel and put it on the table.

“Why not let her alone, old sport?” remarked Gatsby. “You’re the one that wanted to come to town.”

There was a moment of silence. The telephone book slipped from its nail and splashed to the floor, whereupon Jordan whispered “Excuse me”--but this time no one laughed.

“I’ll pick it up,” I offered.

“I’ve got it.” Gatsby examined the parted string, muttered “Hum!” in an interested way, and tossed the book on a chair.

“That’s a great expression of yours, isn’t it?” said Tom sharply.

“What is?”

“All this ‘old sport’ business. Where’d you pick that up?”

“Now see here, Tom,” said Daisy, turning around from the mirror, “if you’re going to make personal remarks I won’t stay here a minute. Call up and order some ice for the mint julep.”

As Tom took up the receiver the compressed heat exploded into sound and we were listening to the portentous chords of Mendelssohn’s Wedding March from the ballroom below.

“Imagine marrying anybody in this heat!” cried Jordan dismally.

“Still--I was married in the middle of June,” Daisy remembered, “Louisville in June! Somebody fainted. Who was it fainted, Tom?”

“Biloxi,” he answered shortly.

“A man named Biloxi. ‘Blocks’ Biloxi, and he made boxes--that’s a fact--and he was from Biloxi, Tennessee.”

“They carried him into my house,” appended Jordan, “because we lived just two doors from the church. And he stayed three weeks, until Daddy told him he had to get out. The day after he left Daddy died.” After a moment she added as if she might have sounded irreverent, “There wasn’t any connection.”

“I used to know a Bill Biloxi from Memphis,” I remarked.

“That was his cousin. I knew his whole family history before he left. He gave me an aluminum putter that I use today.”

The music had died down as the ceremony began and now a long cheer floated in at the window, followed by intermittent cries of “Yea--ea--ea!” and finally by a burst of jazz as the dancing began.

“We’re getting old,” said Daisy. “If we were young we’d rise and dance.”

“Remember Biloxi,” Jordan warned her. “Where’d you know him, Tom?”

“Biloxi?” He concentrated with an effort. “I didn’t know him. He was a friend of Daisy’s.”

“He was not,” she denied. “I’d never seen him before. He came down in the private car.”

“Well, he said he knew you. He said he was raised in Louisville. Asa Bird brought him around at the last minute and asked if we had room for him.”

Jordan smiled.

“He was probably bumming his way home. He told me he was president of your class at Yale.”

Tom and I looked at each other blankly.

“Biloxi?”

“First place, we didn’t have any president----”

Gatsby’s foot beat a short, restless tattoo and Tom eyed him suddenly.

“By the way, Mr. Gatsby, I understand you’re an Oxford man.”

“Not exactly.”

“Oh, yes, I understand you went to Oxford.”

“Yes--I went there.”

A pause. Then Tom’s voice, incredulous and insulting:

“You must have gone there about the time Biloxi went to New Haven.”

Another pause. A waiter knocked and came in with crushed mint and ice but the silence was unbroken by his “Thank you” and the soft closing of the door. This tremendous detail was to be cleared up at last.

“I told you I went there,” said Gatsby.

“I heard you, but I’d like to know when.”

“It was in nineteen-nineteen, I only stayed five months. That’s why I can’t really call myself an Oxford man.”

Tom glanced around to see if we mirrored his unbelief. But we were all looking at Gatsby.

“It was an opportunity they gave to some of the officers after the Armistice,” he continued. “We could go to any of the universities in England or France.”

I wanted to get up and slap him on the back. I had one of those renewals of complete faith in him that I’d experienced before.

Daisy rose, smiling faintly, and went to the table.

“Open the whiskey, Tom,” she ordered. “And I’ll make you a mint julep. Then you won’t seem so stupid to yourself. . . . Look at the mint!”

“Wait a minute,” snapped Tom, “I want to ask Mr. Gatsby one more question.”

“Go on,” Gatsby said politely.

“What kind of a row are you trying to cause in my house anyhow?”

They were out in the open at last and Gatsby was content.

“He isn’t causing a row.” Daisy looked desperately from one to the other. “You’re causing a row. Please have a little self control.”

“Self control!” repeated Tom incredulously. “I suppose the latest thing is to sit back and let Mr. Nobody from Nowhere make love to your wife. Well, if that’s the idea you can count me out. . . . Nowadays people begin by sneering at family life and family institutions and next they’ll throw everything overboard and have intermarriage between black and white.”

Flushed with his impassioned gibberish he saw himself standing alone on the last barrier of civilization.

“We’re all white here,” murmured Jordan.

“I know I’m not very popular. I don’t give big parties. I suppose you’ve got to make your house into a pigsty in order to have any friends--in the modern world.”

Angry as I was, as we all were, I was tempted to laugh whenever he opened his mouth. The transition from libertine to prig was so complete.

“I’ve got something to tell you, old sport,----” began Gatsby. But Daisy guessed at his intention.

“Please don’t!” she interrupted helplessly. “Please let’s all go home. Why don’t we all go home?”

“That’s a good idea.” I got up. “Come on, Tom. Nobody wants a drink.”

“I want to know what Mr. Gatsby has to tell me.”

“Your wife doesn’t love you,” said Gatsby. “She’s never loved you. She loves me.”

“You must be crazy!” exclaimed Tom automatically.

Gatsby sprang to his feet, vivid with excitement.

“She never loved you, do you hear?” he cried. “She only married you because I was poor and she was tired of waiting for me. It was a terrible mistake, but in her heart she never loved any one except me!”

At this point Jordan and I tried to go but Tom and Gatsby insisted with competitive firmness that we remain--as though neither of them had anything to conceal and it would be a privilege to partake vicariously of their emotions.

“Sit down Daisy.” Tom’s voice groped unsuccessfully for the paternal note. “What’s been going on? I want to hear all about it.”

“I told you what’s been going on,” said Gatsby. “Going on for five years--and you didn’t know.”

Tom turned to Daisy sharply.

“You’ve been seeing this fellow for five years?”

“Not seeing,” said Gatsby. “No, we couldn’t meet. But both of us loved each other all that time, old sport, and you didn’t know. I used to laugh sometimes--”but there was no laughter in his eyes, “to think that you didn’t know.”

“Oh--that’s all.” Tom tapped his thick fingers together like a clergyman and leaned back in his chair.

“You’re crazy!” he exploded. “I can’t speak about what happened five years ago, because I didn’t know Daisy then--and I’ll be damned if I see how you got within a mile of her unless you brought the groceries to the back door. But all the rest of that’s a God Damned lie. Daisy loved me when she married me and she loves me now.”

“No,” said Gatsby, shaking his head.

“She does, though. The trouble is that sometimes she gets foolish ideas in her head and doesn’t know what she’s doing.” He nodded sagely. “And what’s more, I love Daisy too. Once in a while I go off on a spree and make a fool of myself, but I always come back, and in my heart I love her all the time.”

“You’re revolting,” said Daisy. She turned to me, and her voice, dropping an octave lower, filled the room with thrilling scorn: “Do you know why we left Chicago? I’m surprised that they didn’t treat you to the story of that little spree.”

Gatsby walked over and stood beside her.

“Daisy, that’s all over now,” he said earnestly. “It doesn’t matter any more. Just tell him the truth--that you never loved him--and it’s all wiped out forever.”

She looked at him blindly. “Why,--how could I love him--possibly?”

“You never loved him.”

She hesitated. Her eyes fell on Jordan and me with a sort of appeal, as though she realized at last what she was doing--and as though she had never, all along, intended doing anything at all. But it was done now. It was too late.

“I never loved him,” she said, with perceptible reluctance.

“Not at Kapiolani?” demanded Tom suddenly.

“No.”

From the ballroom beneath, muffled and suffocating chords were drifting up on hot waves of air.

“Not that day I carried you down from the Punch Bowl to keep your shoes dry?” There was a husky tenderness in his tone. “. . . Daisy?”

“Please don’t.” Her voice was cold, but the rancour was gone from it. She looked at Gatsby. “There, Jay,” she said--but her hand as she tried to light a cigarette was trembling. Suddenly she threw the cigarette and the burning match on the carpet.

“Oh, you want too much!” she cried to Gatsby. “I love you now--isn’t that enough? I can’t help what’s past.” She began to sob helplessly. “I did love him once--but I loved you too.”

Gatsby’s eyes opened and closed.

“You loved me too?” he repeated.

“Even that’s a lie,” said Tom savagely. “She didn’t know you were alive. Why,--there’re things between Daisy and me that you’ll never know, things that neither of us can ever forget.”

The words seemed to bite physically into Gatsby.

“I want to speak to Daisy alone,” he insisted. “She’s all excited now----”

“Even alone I can’t say I never loved Tom,” she admitted in a pitiful voice. “It wouldn’t be true.”

“Of course it wouldn’t,” agreed Tom.

She turned to her husband.

“As if it mattered to you,” she said.

“Of course it matters. I’m going to take better care of you from now on.”

“You don’t understand,” said Gatsby, with a touch of panic. “You’re not going to take care of her any more.”

“I’m not?” Tom opened his eyes wide and laughed. He could afford to control himself now. “Why’s that?”

“Daisy’s leaving you.”

“Nonsense.”

“I am, though,” she said with a visible effort.

“She’s not leaving me!” Tom’s words suddenly leaned down over Gatsby. “Certainly not for a common swindler who’d have to steal the ring he put on her finger.”

“I won’t stand this!” cried Daisy. “Oh, please let’s get out.”

“Who are you, anyhow?” broke out Tom. “You’re one of that bunch that hangs around with Meyer Wolfshiem--that much I happen to know. I’ve made a little investigation into your affairs--and I’ll carry it further tomorrow.”

“You can suit yourself about that, old sport.” said Gatsby steadily.

“I found out what your ‘drug stores’ were.” He turned to us and spoke rapidly. “He and this Wolfshiem bought up a lot of side-street drug stores here and in Chicago and sold grain alcohol over the counter. That’s one of his little stunts. I picked him for a bootlegger the first time I saw him and I wasn’t far wrong.”

“What about it?” said Gatsby politely. “I guess your friend Walter Chase wasn’t too proud to come in on it.”

“And you left him in the lurch, didn’t you? You let him go to jail for a month over in New Jersey. God! You ought to hear Walter on the subject of you.”

“He came to us dead broke. He was very glad to pick up some money, old sport.”

“Don’t you call me ‘old sport’!” cried Tom. Gatsby said nothing. “Walter could have you up on the betting laws too, but Wolfshiem scared him into shutting his mouth.”

That unfamiliar yet recognizable look was back again in Gatsby’s face.

“That drug store business was just small change,” continued Tom slowly, “but you’ve got something on now that Walter’s afraid to tell me about.”

I glanced at Daisy who was staring terrified between Gatsby and her husband and at Jordan who had begun to balance an invisible but absorbing object on the tip of her chin. Then I turned back to Gatsby--and was startled at his expression. He looked--and this is said in all contempt for the babbled slander of his garden--as if he had “killed a man.” For a moment the set of his face could be described in just that fantastic way.

It passed, and he began to talk excitedly to Daisy, denying everything, defending his name against accusations that had not been made. But with every word she was drawing further and further into herself, so he gave that up and only the dead dream fought on as the afternoon slipped away, trying to touch what was no longer tangible, struggling unhappily, undespairingly, toward that lost voice across the room.

The voice begged again to go.

“Please, Tom! I can’t stand this any more.”

Her frightened eyes told that whatever intentions, whatever courage she had had, were definitely gone.

“You two start on home, Daisy,” said Tom. “In Mr. Gatsby’s car.”

She looked at Tom, alarmed now, but he insisted with magnanimous scorn.

“Go on. He won’t annoy you. I think he realizes that his presumptuous little flirtation is over.”

They were gone, without a word, snapped out, made accidental, isolated, like ghosts even from our pity.

After a moment Tom got up and began wrapping the unopened bottle of whiskey in the towel.

“Want any of this stuff? Jordan? . . . Nick?”

I didn’t answer.

“Nick?” He asked again.

“What?”

“Want any?”

“No . . . I just remembered that today’s my birthday.”

I was thirty. Before me stretched the portentous menacing road of a new decade.

It was seven o’clock when we got into the coupé with him and started for Long Island. Tom talked incessantly, exulting and laughing, but his voice was as remote from Jordan and me as the foreign clamor on the sidewalk or the tumult of the elevated overhead. Human sympathy has its limits and we were content to let all their tragic arguments fade with the city lights behind. Thirty--the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning brief-case of enthusiasm, thinning hair. But there was Jordan beside me who, unlike Daisy, was too wise ever to carry well-forgotten dreams from age to age. As we passed over the dark bridge her wan face fell lazily against my coat’s shoulder and the formidable stroke of thirty died away with the reassuring pressure of her hand.

So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight.

The young Greek, Michaelis, who ran the coffee joint beside the ashheaps was the principal witness at the inquest. He had slept through the heat until after five, when he strolled over to the garage and found George Wilson sick in his office--really sick, pale as his own pale hair and shaking all over. Michaelis advised him to go to bed but Wilson refused, saying that he’d miss a lot of business if he did. While his neighbor was trying to persuade him a violent racket broke out overhead.

“I’ve got my wife locked in up there,” explained Wilson calmly. “She’s going to stay there till the day after tomorrow and then we’re going to move away.”

Michaelis was astonished; they had been neighbors for four years and Wilson had never seemed faintly capable of such a statement. Generally he was one of these worn-out men: when he wasn’t working he sat on a chair in the doorway and stared at the people and the cars that passed along the road. When any one spoke to him he invariably laughed in an agreeable, colorless way. He was his wife’s man and not his own.

So naturally Michaelis tried to find out what had happened, but Wilson wouldn’t say a word--instead he began to throw curious, suspicious glances at his visitor and ask him what he’d been doing at certain times on certain days. Just as the latter was getting uneasy some workmen came past the door bound for his restaurant and Michaelis took the opportunity to get away, intending to come back later. But he didn’t. He supposed he forgot to, that’s all. When he came outside again a little after seven he was reminded of the conversation because he heard Mrs. Wilson’s voice, loud and scolding, downstairs in the garage.

“Beat me!” he heard her cry. “Throw me down and beat me, you dirty little coward!”

A moment later she rushed out into the dusk, waving her hands and shouting; before he could move from his door the business was over.

The “death car” as the newspapers called it, didn’t stop; it came out of the gathering darkness, wavered tragically for a moment and then disappeared around the next bend. Michaelis wasn’t even sure of its color--he told the first policeman that it was light green. The other car, the one going toward New York, came to rest a hundred yards beyond, and its driver hurried back to where Myrtle Wilson, her life violently extinguished, knelt in the road and mingled her thick, dark blood with the dust.

Michaelis and this man reached her first but when they had torn open her shirtwaist still damp with perspiration, they saw that her left breast was swinging loose like a flap and there was no need to listen for the heart beneath. The mouth was wide open and ripped at the corners as though she had choked a little in giving up the tremendous vitality she had stored so long.

We saw the three or four automobiles and the crowd when we were still some distance away.

“Wreck!” said Tom. “That’s good. Wilson’ll have a little business at last.”

He slowed down, but still without any intention of stopping until, as we came nearer, the hushed intent faces of the people at the garage door made him automatically put on the brakes.

“We’ll take a look,” he said doubtfully, “just a look.”

I became aware now of a hollow, wailing sound which issued incessantly from the garage, a sound which as we got out of the coupé and walked toward the door resolved itself into the words “Oh, my God!” uttered over and over in a gasping moan.

“There’s some bad trouble here,” said Tom excitedly.

He reached up on tiptoes and peered over a circle of heads into the garage which was lit only by a yellow light in a swinging wire basket overhead. Then he made a harsh sound in his throat and with a violent thrusting movement of his powerful arms pushed his way through.

The circle closed up again with a running murmur of expostulation; it was a minute before I could see anything at all. Then new arrivals disarranged the line and Jordan and I were pushed suddenly inside.

Myrtle Wilson’s body wrapped in a blanket and then in another blanket as though she suffered from a chill in the hot night lay on a work table by the wall and Tom, with his back to us, was bending over it, motionless. Next to him stood a motorcycle policeman taking down names with much sweat and correction in a little book. At first I couldn’t find the source of the high, groaning words that echoed clamorously through the bare garage--then I saw Wilson standing on the raised threshold of his office, swaying back and forth and holding to the doorposts with both hands. Some man was talking to him in a low voice and attempting from time to time to lay a hand on his shoulder, but Wilson neither heard nor saw. His eyes would drop slowly from the swinging light to the laden table by the wall and then jerk back to the light again and he gave out incessantly his high horrible call.

“O, my Ga-od! O, my Ga-od! Oh, Ga-od! Oh, my Ga-od!”

Presently Tom lifted his head with a jerk and after staring around the garage with glazed eyes addressed a mumbled incoherent remark to the policeman.

“M-a-v--” the policeman was saying, “--o----”

“No,--r--” corrected the man, “M-a-v-r-o----”

“Listen to me!” muttered Tom fiercely.

“r--” said the policeman, “o----”

“g----”

“g--” He looked up as Tom’s broad hand fell sharply on his shoulder. “What you want, fella?”

“What happened--that’s what I want to know!”

“Auto hit her. Ins’antly killed.”

“Instantly killed,” repeated Tom, staring.

“She ran out ina road. Son-of-a-bitch didn’t even stopus car.”

“There was two cars,” said Michaelis, “one comin’, one goin’, see?”

“Going where?” asked the policeman keenly.

“One goin’ each way. Well, she--” His hand rose toward the blankets but stopped half way and fell to his side, “--she ran out there an’ the one comin’ from N’York knock right into her goin’ thirty or forty miles an hour.”

“What’s the name of this place here?” demanded the officer.

“Hasn’t got any name.”

A pale, well-dressed Negro stepped near.

“It was a yellow car,” he said, “big yellow car. New.”

“See the accident?” asked the policeman.

“No, but the car passed me down the road, going faster’n forty. Going fifty, sixty.”

“Come here and let’s have your name. Look out now. I want to get his name.”

Some words of this conversation must have reached Wilson swaying in the office door, for suddenly a new theme found voice among his gasping cries.

“You don’t have to tell me what kind of car it was! I know what kind of car it was!”

Watching Tom I saw the wad of muscle back of his shoulder tighten under his coat. He walked quickly over to Wilson and standing in front of him seized him firmly by the upper arms.

“You’ve got to pull yourself together,” he said with soothing gruffness.

Wilson’s eyes fell upon Tom; he started up on his tiptoes and then would have collapsed to his knees had not Tom held him upright.

“Listen,” said Tom, shaking him a little. “I just got here a minute ago, from New York. I was bringing you that coupé we’ve been talking about. That yellow car I was driving this afternoon wasn’t mine, do you hear? I haven’t seen it all afternoon.”

Only the Negro and I were near enough to hear what he said but the policeman caught something in the tone and looked over with truculent eyes.

“What’s all that?” he demanded.

“I’m a friend of his.” Tom turned his head but kept his hands firm on Wilson’s body. “He says he knows the car that did it. . . . It was a yellow car.”

Some dim impulse moved the policeman to look suspiciously at Tom.

“And what color’s your car?”

“It’s a blue car, a coupé.”

“We’ve come straight from New York,” I said.

Some one who had been driving a little behind us confirmed this and the policeman turned away.

“Now, if you’ll let me have that name again correct----”

Picking up Wilson like a doll Tom carried him into the office, set him down in a chair and came back.

“If somebody’ll come here and sit with him!” he snapped authoritatively. He watched while the two men standing closest glanced at each other and went unwillingly into the room. Then Tom shut the door on them and came down the single step, his eyes avoiding the table. As he passed close to me he whispered “Let’s get out.”

Self consciously, with his authoritative arms breaking the way, we pushed through the still gathering crowd, passing a hurried doctor, case in hand, who had been sent for in wild hope half an hour ago.

Tom drove slowly until we were beyond the bend--then his foot came down hard and the coupé raced along through the night. In a little while I heard a low husky sob and saw that the tears were overflowing down his face.

“The God Damn coward!” he whimpered. “He didn’t even stop his car.”

The Buchanans’ house floated suddenly toward us through the dark rustling trees. Tom stopped beside the porch and looked up at the second floor where two windows bloomed with light among the vines.

“Daisy’s home,” he said. As we got out of the car he glanced at me and frowned slightly.

“I ought to have dropped you in West Egg, Nick. There’s nothing we can do tonight.”

A change had come over him and he spoke gravely, and with decision. As we walked across the moonlight gravel to the porch he disposed of the situation in a few brisk phrases.

“I’ll telephone for a taxi to take you home, and while you’re waiting you and Jordan better go in the kitchen and have them get you some supper--if you want any.” He opened the door. “Come in.”

“No thanks. But I’d be glad if you’d order me the taxi. I’ll wait outside.”

Jordan put her hand on my arm.

“Won’t you come in, Nick?”

“No thanks.”

I was feeling a little sick and I wanted to be alone. But Jordan lingered for a moment more.

“It’s only half past nine,” she said.

I’d be damned if I’d go in; I’d had enough of all of them for one day and suddenly that included Jordan too. She must have seen something of this in my expression for she turned abruptly away and ran up the porch steps into the house. I sat down for a few minutes with my head in my hands, until I heard the phone taken up inside and the butler’s voice calling a taxi. Then I walked slowly down the drive away from the house intending to wait by the gate.

I hadn’t gone twenty yards when I heard my name and Gatsby stepped from between two bushes into the path. I must have felt pretty weird by that time because I could think of nothing except the luminosity of his pink suit under the moon.

“What are you doing?” I inquired.

“Just standing here, old sport.”

Somehow, that seemed a despicable occupation. For all I knew he was going to rob the house in a moment; I wouldn’t have been surprised to see sinister faces, the faces of “Wolfshiem’s people,” behind him in the dark shrubbery.

“Did you see any trouble on the road?” he asked after a minute.

“Yes.”

He hesitated.

“Was she killed?”

“Yes.”

“I thought so; I told Daisy I thought so. It’s better that the shock should all come at once. She stood it pretty well.”

He spoke as if Daisy’s reaction was the only thing that mattered.

“I got to West Egg by a side road,” he went on, “and left the car in my garage. I don’t think anybody saw us but of course I can’t be sure.”

I disliked him so much by this time that I didn’t find it necessary to tell him he was wrong.

“Who was the woman?” he inquired.

“Her name was Wilson. Her husband owns the garage. How the devil did it happen?”

“Well, I tried to swing the wheel----” He broke off, and suddenly I guessed at the truth.

“Was Daisy driving?”

“Yes,” he said after a moment, “but of course I’ll say I was. You see, when we left New York she was very nervous and she thought it would steady her to drive--and this woman rushed out at us just as we were passing a car coming the other way. It all happened in a minute but it seemed to me that she wanted to speak to us, thought we were somebody she knew. Well, first Daisy turned away from the woman toward the other car, and then she lost her nerve and turned back. The second my hand reached the wheel I felt the shock--it must have killed her instantly.”

“It ripped her open----”

“Don’t tell me, old sport.” He winced. “Anyhow--Daisy stepped on it. I tried to make her stop, but she couldn’t so I pulled on the emergency brake. Then she fell over into my lap and I drove on.

“She’ll be all right tomorrow,” he said presently. “I’m just going to wait here and see if he tries to bother her about that unpleasantness this afternoon. She’s locked herself into her room and if he tries any brutality she’s going to turn the light out and on again.”

“He won’t touch her,” I said. “He’s not thinking about her.”

“I don’t trust him, old sport.”

“How long are you going to wait?”

“All night if necessary. Anyhow till they all go to bed.”

A new point of view occurred to me. Suppose Tom found out that Daisy had been driving. He might think he saw a connection in it--he might think anything. I looked at the house: there were two or three bright windows downstairs and the pink glow from Daisy’s room on the second floor.

“You wait here,” I said. “I’ll see if there’s any sign of a commotion.”

I walked back along the border of the lawn, traversed the gravel softly and tiptoed up the veranda steps. The drawing-room curtains were open, and I saw that the room was empty. Crossing the porch where we had dined that June night three months before I came to a small rectangle of light which I guessed was the pantry window. The blind was drawn but I found a rift at the sill.

Daisy and Tom were sitting opposite each other at the kitchen table with a plate of cold fried chicken between them and two bottles of ale. He was talking intently across the table at her and in his earnestness his hand had fallen upon and covered her own. Once in a while she looked up at him and nodded in agreement.

They weren’t happy, and neither of them had touched the chicken or the ale--and yet they weren’t unhappy either. There was an unmistakable air of natural intimacy about the picture and anybody would have said that they were conspiring together.

As I tiptoed from the porch I heard my taxi feeling its way along the dark road toward the house. Gatsby was waiting where I had left him in the drive.

“Is it all quiet up there?” he asked anxiously.

“Yes, it’s all quiet.” I hesitated. “You’d better come home and get some sleep.”

He shook his head.

“I want to wait here till Daisy goes to bed. Good night, old sport.”

He put his hands in his coat pockets and turned back eagerly to his scrutiny of the house, as though my presence marred the sacredness of the vigil. So I walked away and left him standing there in the moonlight--watching over nothing.

CHAPTER 8

I couldn’t sleep all night; a fog-horn was groaning incessantly on the Sound, and I tossed half-sick between grotesque reality and savage frightening dreams. Toward dawn I heard a taxi go up Gatsby’s drive and immediately I jumped out of bed and began to dress--I felt that I had something to tell him, something to warn him about and morning would be too late.

Crossing his lawn I saw that his front door was still open and he was leaning against a table in the hall, heavy with dejection or sleep.

“Nothing happened,” he said wanly. “I waited, and about four o’clock she came to the window and stood there for a minute and then turned out the light.”

His house had never seemed so enormous to me as it did that night when we hunted through the great rooms for cigarettes. We pushed aside curtains that were like pavilions and felt over innumerable feet of dark wall for electric light switches--once I tumbled with a sort of splash upon the keys of a ghostly piano. There was an inexplicable amount of dust everywhere and the rooms were musty as though they hadn’t been aired for many days. I found the humidor on an unfamiliar table with two stale dry cigarettes inside. Throwing open the French windows of the drawing-room we sat smoking out into the darkness.

“You ought to go away,” I said. “It’s pretty certain they’ll trace your car.”

“Go away now, old sport?”

“Go to Atlantic City for a week, or up to Montreal.”

He wouldn’t consider it. He couldn’t possibly leave Daisy until he knew what she was going to do. He was clutching at some last hope and I couldn’t bear to shake him free.

It was this night that he told me the strange story of his youth with Dan Cody--told it to me because “Jay Gatsby” had broken up like glass against Tom’s hard malice and the long secret extravaganza was played out. I think that he would have acknowledged anything, now, without reserve, but he wanted to talk about Daisy.

She was the first “nice” girl he had ever known. In various unrevealed capacities he had come in contact with such people but always with indiscernible barbed wire between. He found her excitingly desirable. He went to her house, at first with other officers from CampTaylor, then alone. It amazed him--he had never been in such a beautiful house before. But what gave it an air of breathless intensity was that Daisy lived there--it was as casual a thing to her as his tent out at camp was to him. There was a ripe mystery about it, a hint of bedrooms upstairs more beautiful and cool than other bedrooms, of gay and radiant activities taking place through its corridors and of romances that were not musty and laid away already in lavender but fresh and breathing and redolent of this year’s shining motor cars and of dances whose flowers were scarcely withered. It excited him too that many men had already loved Daisy--it increased her value in his eyes. He felt their presence all about the house, pervading the air with the shades and echoes of still vibrant emotions.

But he knew that he was in Daisy’s house by a colossal accident. However glorious might be his future as Jay Gatsby, he was at present a penniless young man without a past, and at any moment the invisible cloak of his uniform might slip from his shoulders. So he made the most of his time. He took what he could get, ravenously and unscrupulously--eventually he took Daisy one still October night, took her because he had no real right to touch her hand.

He might have despised himself, for he had certainly taken her under false pretenses. I don’t mean that he had traded on his phantom millions, but he had deliberately given Daisy a sense of security; he let her believe that he was a person from much the same stratum as herself--that he was fully able to take care of her. As a matter of fact he had no such facilities--he had no comfortable family standing behind him and he was liable at the whim of an impersonal government to be blown anywhere about the world.

But he didn’t despise himself and it didn’t turn out as he had imagined. He had intended, probably, to take what he could and go--but now he found that he had committed himself to the following of a grail. He knew that Daisy was extraordinary but he didn’t realize just how extraordinary a “nice” girl could be. She vanished into her rich house, into her rich, full life, leaving Gatsby--nothing. He felt married to her, that was all.

When they met again two days later it was Gatsby who was breathless, who was somehow betrayed. Her porch was bright with the bought luxury of star-shine; the wicker of the settee squeaked fashionably as she turned toward him and he kissed her curious and lovely mouth. She had caught a cold and it made her voice huskier and more charming than ever and Gatsby was overwhelmingly aware of the youth and mystery that wealth imprisons and preserves, of the freshness of many clothes and of Daisy, gleaming like silver, safe and proud above the hot struggles of the poor.

“I can’t describe to you how surprised I was to find out I loved her, old sport. I even hoped for a while that she’d throw me over, but she didn’t, because she was in love with me too. She thought I knew a lot because I knew different things from her. . . . Well, there I was, way off my ambitions, getting deeper in love every minute, and all of a sudden I didn’t care. What was the use of doing great things if I could have a better time telling her what I was going to do?”

On the last afternoon before he went abroad he sat with Daisy in his arms for a long, silent time. It was a cold fall day with fire in the room and her cheeks flushed. Now and then she moved and he changed his arm a little and once he kissed her dark shining hair. The afternoon had made them tranquil for a while as if to give them a deep memory for the long parting the next day promised. They had never been closer in their month of love nor communicated more profoundly one with another than when she brushed silent lips against his coat’s shoulder or when he touched the end of her fingers, gently, as though she were asleep.

He did extraordinarily well in the war. He was a captain before he went to the front and following the Argonne battles he got his majority and the command of the divisional machine guns. After the Armistice he tried frantically to get home but some complication or misunderstanding sent him to Oxford instead. He was worried now--there was a quality of nervous despair in Daisy’s letters. She didn’t see why he couldn’t come. She was feeling the pressure of the world outside and she wanted to see him and feel his presence beside her and be reassured that she was doing the right thing after all.

For Daisy was young and her artificial world was redolent of orchids and pleasant, cheerful snobbery and orchestras which set the rhythm of the year, summing up the sadness and suggestiveness of life in new tunes. All night the saxophones wailed the hopeless comment of the “Beale Street Blues” while a hundred pairs of golden and silver slippers shuffled the shining dust. At the grey tea hour there were always rooms that throbbed incessantly with this low sweet fever, while fresh faces drifted here and there like rose petals blown by the sad horns around the floor.

Through this twilight universe Daisy began to move again with the season; suddenly she was again keeping half a dozen dates a day with half a dozen men and drowsing asleep at dawn with the beads and chiffon of an evening dress tangled among dying orchids on the floor beside her bed. And all the time something within her was crying for a decision. She wanted her life shaped now, immediately--and the decision must be made by some force--of love, of money, of unquestionable practicality--that was close at hand.

That force took shape in the middle of spring with the arrival of Tom Buchanan. There was a wholesome bulkiness about his person and his position and Daisy was flattered. Doubtless there was a certain struggle and a certain relief. The letter reached Gatsby while he was still at Oxford.

It was dawn now on Long Island and we went about opening the rest of the windows downstairs, filling the house with grey turning, gold turning light. The shadow of a tree fell abruptly across the dew and ghostly birds began to sing among the blue leaves. There was a slow pleasant movement in the air, scarcely a wind, promising a cool lovely day.

“I don’t think she ever loved him.” Gatsby turned around from a window and looked at me challengingly. “You must remember, old sport, she was very excited this afternoon. He told her those things in a way that frightened her--that made it look as if I was some kind of cheap sharper. And the result was she hardly knew what she was saying.”

He sat down gloomily.

“Of course she might have loved him, just for a minute, when they were first married--and loved me more even then, do you see?”

Suddenly he came out with a curious remark:

“In any case,” he said, “it was just personal.”

What could you make of that, except to suspect some intensity in his conception of the affair that couldn’t be measured?

He came back from France when Tom and Daisy were still on their wedding trip, and made a miserable but irresistible journey to Louisville on the last of his army pay. He stayed there a week, walking the streets where their footsteps had clicked together through the November night and revisiting the out-of-the-way places to which they had driven in her white car. Just as Daisy’s house had always seemed to him more mysterious and gay than other houses so his idea of the city itself, even though she was gone from it, was pervaded with a melancholy beauty.

He left feeling that if he had searched harder he might have found her--that he was leaving her behind. The day-coach--he was penniless now--was hot. He went out to the open vestibule and sat down on a folding-chair, and the station slid away and the backs of unfamiliar buildings moved by. Then out into the spring fields, where a yellow trolley raced them for a minute with people in it who might once have seen the pale magic of her face along the casual street.

The track curved and now it was going away from the sun which, as it sank lower, seemed to spread itself in benediction over the vanishing city where she had drawn her breath. He stretched out his hand desperately as if to snatch only a wisp of air, to save a fragment of the spot that she had made lovely for him. But it was all going by too fast now for his blurred eyes and he knew that he had lost that part of it, the freshest and the best, forever.

It was nine o’clock when we finished breakfast and went out on the porch. The night had made a sharp difference in the weather and there was an autumn flavor in the air. The gardener, the last one of Gatsby’s former servants, came to the foot of the steps.

“I’m going to drain the pool today, Mr. Gatsby. Leaves’ll start falling pretty soon and then there’s always trouble with the pipes.”

“Don’t do it today,” Gatsby answered. He turned to me apologetically. “You know, old sport, I’ve never used that pool all summer?”

I looked at my watch and stood up.

“Twelve minutes to my train.”

I didn’t want to go to the city. I wasn’t worth a decent stroke of work but it was more than that--I didn’t want to leave Gatsby. I missed that train, and then another, before I could get myself away.

“I’ll call you up,” I said finally.

“Do, old sport.”

“I’ll call you about noon.”

We walked slowly down the steps.

“I suppose Daisy’ll call too.” He looked at me anxiously as if he hoped I’d corroborate this.

“I suppose so.”

“Well--goodbye.”

We shook hands and I started away. Just before I reached the hedge I remembered something and turned around.

“They’re a rotten crowd,” I shouted across the lawn. “You’re worth the whole damn bunch put together.”

I’ve always been glad I said that. It was the only compliment I ever gave him, because I disapproved of him from beginning to end. First he nodded politely, and then his face broke into that radiant and understanding smile, as if we’d been in ecstatic cahoots on that fact all the time. His gorgeous pink rag of a suit made a bright spot of color against the white steps and I thought of the night when I first came to his ancestral home three months before. The lawn and drive had been crowded with the faces of those who guessed at his corruption--and he had stood on those steps, concealing his incorruptible dream, as he waved them goodbye.

I thanked him for his hospitality. We were always thanking him for that--I and the others.

“Goodbye,” I called. “I enjoyed breakfast, Gatsby.”

Up in the city I tried for a while to list the quotations on an interminable amount of stock, then I fell asleep in my swivel-chair. Just before noon the phone woke me and I started up with sweat breaking out on my forehead. It was Jordan Baker; she often called me up at this hour because the uncertainty of her own movements between hotels and clubs and private houses made her hard to find in any other way. Usually her voice came over the wire as something fresh and cool as if a divot from a green golf links had come sailing in at the office window but this morning it seemed harsh and dry.

“I’ve left Daisy’s house,” she said. “I’m at Hempstead and I’m going down to Southampton this afternoon.”

Probably it had been tactful to leave Daisy’s house, but the act annoyed me and her next remark made me rigid.

“You weren’t so nice to me last night.”

“How could it have mattered then?”

Silence for a moment. Then--

“However--I want to see you.”

“I want to see you too.”

“Suppose I don’t go to Southampton, and come into town this afternoon?”

“No--I don’t think this afternoon.”

“Very well.”

“It’s impossible this afternoon. Various----”

We talked like that for a while and then abruptly we weren’t talking any longer. I don’t know which of us hung up with a sharp click but I know I didn’t care. I couldn’t have talked to her across a tea-table that day if I never talked to her again in this world.

I called Gatsby’s house a few minutes later, but the line was busy. I tried four times; finally an exasperated central told me the wire was being kept open for long distance from Detroit. Taking out my time-table I drew a small circle around the three-fifty train. Then I leaned back in my chair and tried to think. It was just noon.

When I passed the ashheaps on the train that morning I had crossed deliberately to the other side of the car. I suppose there’d be a curious crowd around there all day with little boys searching for dark spots in the dust and some garrulous man telling over and over what had happened until it became less and less real even to him and he could tell it no longer and Myrtle Wilson’s tragic achievement was forgotten. Now I want to go back a little and tell what happened at the garage after we left there the night before.

They had difficulty in locating the sister, Catherine. She must have broken her rule against drinking that night for when she arrived she was stupid with liquor and unable to understand that the ambulance had already gone to Flushing. When they convinced her of this she immediately fainted as if that was the intolerable part of the affair. Someone kind or curious took her in his car and drove her in the wake of her sister’s body.

Until long after midnight a changing crowd lapped up against the front of the garage while George Wilson rocked himself back and forth on the couch inside. For a while the door of the office was open and everyone who came into the garage glanced irresistibly through it. Finally someone said it was a shame and closed the door. Michaelis and several other men were with him--first four or five men, later two or three men. Still later Michaelis had to ask the last stranger to wait there fifteen minutes longer while he went back to his own place and made a pot of coffee. After that he stayed there alone with Wilson until dawn.

About three o’clock the quality of Wilson’s incoherent muttering changed--he grew quieter and began to talk about the yellow car. He announced that he had a way of finding out whom the yellow car belonged to, and then he blurted out that a couple of months ago his wife had come from the city with her face bruised and her nose swollen.

But when he heard himself say this, he flinched and began to cry “Oh, my God!” again in his groaning voice. Michaelis made a clumsy attempt to distract him.

“How long have you been married, George? Come on there, try and sit still a minute and answer my question. How long have you been married?”

“Twelve years.”

“Ever had any children? Come on, George, sit still--I asked you a question. Did you ever have any children?”

The hard brown beetles kept thudding against the dull light and whenever Michaelis heard a car go tearing along the road outside it sounded to him like the car that hadn’t stopped a few hours before. He didn’t like to go into the garage because the work bench was stained where the body had been lying so he moved uncomfortably around the office--he knew every object in it before morning--and from time to time sat down beside Wilson trying to keep him more quiet.

“Have you got a church you go to sometimes, George? Maybe even if you haven’t been there for a long time? Maybe I could call up the church and get a priest to come over and he could talk to you, see?”

“Don’t belong to any.”

“You ought to have a church, George, for times like this. You must have gone to church once. Didn’t you get married in a church? Listen, George, listen to me. Didn’t you get married in a church?”

“That was a long time ago.”

The effort of answering broke the rhythm of his rocking--for a moment he was silent. Then the same half knowing, half bewildered look came back into his faded eyes.

“Look in the drawer there,” he said, pointing at the desk.

“Which drawer?”

“That drawer--that one.”

Michaelis opened the drawer nearest his hand. There was nothing in it but a small expensive dog leash made of leather and braided silver. It was apparently new.

“This?” he inquired, holding it up.

Wilson stared and nodded.

“I found it yesterday afternoon. She tried to tell me about it but I knew it was something funny.”

“You mean your wife bought it?”

“She had it wrapped in tissue paper on her bureau.”

Michaelis didn’t see anything odd in that and he gave Wilson a dozen reasons why his wife might have bought the dog leash. But conceivably Wilson had heard some of these same explanations before, from Myrtle, because he began saying “Oh, my God!” again in a whisper--his comforter left several explanations in the air.

“Then he killed her,” said Wilson. His mouth dropped open suddenly.

“Who did?”

“I have a way of finding out.”

“You’re morbid, George,” said his friend. “This has been a strain to you and you don’t know what you’re saying. You’d better try and sit quiet till morning.”

“He murdered her.”

“It was an accident, George.”

Wilson shook his head. His eyes narrowed and his mouth widened slightly with the ghost of a superior “Hm!”

“I know,” he said definitely, “I’m one of these trusting fellas and I don’t think any harm to nobody, but when I get to know a thing I know it. It was the man in that car. She ran out to speak to him and he wouldn’t stop.”

Michaelis had seen this too but it hadn’t occurred to him that there was any special significance in it. He believed that Mrs. Wilson had been running away from her husband, rather than trying to stop any particular car.

“How could she of been like that?”

“She’s a deep one,” said Wilson, as if that answered the question. “Ah-h-h----”

He began to rock again and Michaelis stood twisting the leash in his hand.

“Maybe you got some friend that I could telephone for, George?”

This was a forlorn hope--he was almost sure that Wilson had no friend: there was not enough of him for his wife. He was glad a little later when he noticed a change in the room, a blue quickening by the window, and realized that dawn wasn’t far off. About five o’clock it was blue enough outside to snap off the light.

Wilson’s glazed eyes turned out to the ashheaps, where small grey clouds took on fantastic shape and scurried here and there in the faint dawn wind.

“I spoke to her,” he muttered, after a long silence. “I told her she might fool me but she couldn’t fool God. I took her to the window--” With an effort he got up and walked to the rear window and leaned with his face pressed against it, “--and I said ‘God knows what you’ve been doing, everything you’ve been doing. You may fool me but you can’t fool God!’ “

Standing behind him Michaelis saw with a shock that he was looking at the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg which had just emerged pale and enormous from the dissolving night.

“God sees everything,” repeated Wilson.

“That’s an advertisement,” Michaelis assured him. Something made him turn away from the window and look back into the room. But Wilson stood there a long time, his face close to the window pane, nodding into the twilight.

By six o’clock Michaelis was worn out and grateful for the sound of a car stopping outside. It was one of the watchers of the night before who had promised to come back so he cooked breakfast for three which he and the other man ate together. Wilson was quieter now and Michaelis went home to sleep; when he awoke four hours later and hurried back to the garage Wilson was gone.

His movements--he was on foot all the time--were afterward traced to Port Roosevelt and then to Gad’s Hill where he bought a sandwich that he didn’t eat and a cup of coffee. He must have been tired and walking slowly for he didn’t reach Gad’s Hill until noon. Thus far there was no difficulty in accounting for his time--there were boys who had seen a man “acting sort of crazy” and motorists at whom he stared oddly from the side of the road. Then for three hours he disappeared from view. The police, on the strength of what he said to Michaelis, that he “had a way of finding out,” supposed that he spent that time going from garage to garage thereabouts inquiring for a yellow car. On the other hand no garage man who had seen him ever came forward--and perhaps he had an easier, surer way of finding out what he wanted to know. By half past two he was in West Egg where he asked someone the way to Gatsby’s house. So by that time he knew Gatsby’s name.

At two o’clock Gatsby put on his bathing suit and left word with the butler that if any one phoned word was to be brought to him at the pool. He stopped at the garage for a pneumatic mattress that had amused his guests during the summer, and the chauffeur helped him pump it up. Then he gave instructions that the open car wasn’t to be taken out under any circumstances--and this was strange because the front right fender needed repair.

Gatsby shouldered the mattress and started for the pool. Once he stopped and shifted it a little, and the chauffeur asked him if he needed help, but he shook his head and in a moment disappeared among the yellowing trees.

No telephone message arrived but the butler went without his sleep and waited for it until four o’clock--until long after there was any one to give it to if it came. I have an idea that Gatsby himself didn’t believe it would come and perhaps he no longer cared. If that was true he must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream. He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about . . . like that ashen, fantastic figure gliding toward him through the amorphous trees.

The chauffeur--he was one of Wolfshiem’s protégés--heard the shots--afterward he could only say that he hadn’t thought anything much about them. I drove from the station directly to Gatsby’s house and my rushing anxiously up the front steps was the first thing that alarmed any one. But they knew then, I firmly believe. With scarcely a word said, four of us, the chauffeur, butler, gardener and I, hurried down to the pool.

There was a faint, barely perceptible movement of the water as the fresh flow from one end urged its way toward the drain at the other. With little ripples that were hardly the shadows of waves, the laden mattress moved irregularly down the pool. A small gust of wind that scarcely corrugated the surface was enough to disturb its accidental course with its accidental burden. The touch of a cluster of leaves revolved it slowly, tracing, like the leg of compass, a thin red circle in the water.

It was after we started with Gatsby toward the house that the gardener saw Wilson’s body a little way off in the grass, and the holocaust was complete.

CHAPTER 9

After two years I remember the rest of that day, and that night and the next day, only as an endless drill of police and photographers and newspaper men in and out of Gatsby’s front door. A rope stretched across the main gate and a policeman by it kept out the curious, but little boys soon discovered that they could enter through my yard and there were always a few of them clustered open-mouthed about the pool. Someone with a positive manner, perhaps a detective, used the expression “mad man” as he bent over Wilson’s body that afternoon, and the adventitious authority of his voice set the key for the newspaper reports next morning.

Most of those reports were a nightmare--grotesque, circumstantial, eager and untrue. When Michaelis’s testimony at the inquest brought to light Wilson’s suspicions of his wife I thought the whole tale would shortly be served up in racy pasquinade--but Catherine, who might have said anything, didn’t say a word. She showed a surprising amount of character about it too--looked at the coroner with determined eyes under that corrected brow of hers and swore that her sister had never seen Gatsby, that her sister was completely happy with her husband, that her sister had been into no mischief whatever. She convinced herself of it and cried into her handkerchief as if the very suggestion was more than she could endure. So Wilson was reduced to a man “deranged by grief” in order that the case might remain in its simplest form. And it rested there.

But all this part of it seemed remote and unessential. I found myself on Gatsby’s side, and alone. From the moment I telephoned news of the catastrophe to West Egg village, every surmise about him, and every practical question, was referred to me. At first I was surprised and confused; then, as he lay in his house and didn’t move or breathe or speak hour upon hour it grew upon me that I was responsible, because no one else was interested--interested, I mean, with that intense personal interest to which every one has some vague right at the end.

I called up Daisy half an hour after we found him, called her instinctively and without hesitation. But she and Tom had gone away early that afternoon, and taken baggage with them.

“Left no address?”

“No.”

“Say when they’d be back?”

“No.”

“Any idea where they are? How I could reach them?”

“I don’t know. Can’t say.”

I wanted to get somebody for him. I wanted to go into the room where he lay and reassure him: “I’ll get somebody for you, Gatsby. Don’t worry. Just trust me and I’ll get somebody for you----”

Meyer Wolfshiem’s name wasn’t in the phone book. The butler gave me his office address on Broadway and I called Information, but by the time I had the number it was long after five and no one answered the phone.

“Will you ring again?”

“I’ve rung them three times.”

“It’s very important.”

“Sorry. I’m afraid no one’s there.”

I went back to the drawing room and thought for an instant that they were chance visitors, all these official people who suddenly filled it. But as they drew back the sheet and looked at Gatsby with unmoved eyes, his protest continued in my brain.

“Look here, old sport, you’ve got to get somebody for me. You’ve got to try hard. I can’t go through this alone.”

Some one started to ask me questions but I broke away and going upstairs looked hastily through the unlocked parts of his desk--he’d never told me definitely that his parents were dead. But there was nothing--only the picture of Dan Cody, a token of forgotten violence staring down from the wall.

Next morning I sent the butler to New York with a letter to Wolfshiem which asked for information and urged him to come out on the next train. That request seemed superfluous when I wrote it. I was sure he’d start when he saw the newspapers, just as I was sure there’d be a wire from Daisy before noon--but neither a wire nor Mr. Wolfshiem arrived, no one arrived except more police and photographers and newspaper men. When the butler brought back Wolfshiem’s answer I began to have a feeling of defiance, of scornful solidarity between Gatsby and me against them all.

Dear Mr. Carraway.     This has been one of the most terrible shocks of my life to me I hardly can believe it that it is true at all. Such a mad act as that man did should make us all think. I cannot come down now as I am tied up in some very important business and cannot get mixed up in this thing now. If there is anything I can do a little later let me know in a letter by Edgar. I hardly know where I am when I hear about a thing like this and am completely knocked down and out.

Yours truly

MEYER WOLFSHIEM

and then hasty addenda beneath:

Let me know about the funeral etc do not know his family at all.

When the phone rang that afternoon and Long Distance said Chicago was calling I thought this would be Daisy at last. But the connection came through as a man’s voice, very thin and far away.

“This is Slagle speaking. . . .”

“Yes?” The name was unfamiliar.

“Hell of a note, isn’t it? Get my wire?”

“There haven’t been any wires.”

“Young Parke’s in trouble,” he said rapidly. “They picked him up when he handed the bonds over the counter. They got a circular from New York giving ‘em the numbers just five minutes before. What d’you know about that, hey? You never can tell in these hick towns----”

“Hello!” I interrupted breathlessly. “Look here--this isn’t Mr. Gatsby. Mr. Gatsby’s dead.”

There was a long silence on the other end of the wire, followed by an exclamation . . . then a quick squawk as the connection was broken.

I think it was on the third day that a telegram signed Henry C. Gatz arrived from a town in Minnesota. It said only that the sender was leaving immediately and to postpone the funeral until he came.

It was Gatsby’s father, a solemn old man very helpless and dismayed, bundled up in a long cheap ulster against the warm September day. His eyes leaked continuously with excitement and when I took the bag and umbrella from his hands he began to pull so incessantly at his sparse grey beard that I had difficulty in getting off his coat. He was on the point of collapse so I took him into the music room and made him sit down while I sent for something to eat. But he wouldn’t eat and the glass of milk spilled from his trembling hand.

“I saw it in the Chicago newspaper,” he said. “It was all in the Chicago newspaper. I started right away.”

“I didn’t know how to reach you.”

His eyes, seeing nothing, moved ceaselessly about the room.

“It was a mad man,” he said. “He must have been mad.”

“Wouldn’t you like some coffee?” I urged him.

“I don’t want anything. I’m all right now, Mr.----”

“Carraway.”

“Well, I’m all right now. Where have they got Jimmy?”

I took him into the drawing-room, where his son lay, and left him there. Some little boys had come up on the steps and were looking into the hall; when I told them who had arrived they went reluctantly away.

After a little while Mr. Gatz opened the door and came out, his mouth ajar, his face flushed slightly, his eyes leaking isolated and unpunctual tears. He had reached an age where death no longer has the quality of ghastly surprise, and when he looked around him now for the first time and saw the height and splendor of the hall and the great rooms opening out from it into other rooms his grief began to be mixed with an awed pride. I helped him to a bedroom upstairs; while he took off his coat and vest I told him that all arrangements had been deferred until he came.

“I didn’t know what you’d want, Mr. Gatsby----”

“Gatz is my name.”

“--Mr. Gatz. I thought you might want to take the body west.”

He shook his head.

“Jimmy always liked it better down East. He rose up to his position in the East. Were you a friend of my boy’s, Mr.--?”

“We were close friends.”

“He had a big future before him, you know. He was only a young man but he had a lot of brain power here.”

He touched his head impressively and I nodded.

“If he’d of lived he’d of been a great man. A man like James J. Hill. He’d of helped build up the country.”

“That’s true,” I said, uncomfortably.

He fumbled at the embroidered coverlet, trying to take it from the bed, and lay down stiffly--was instantly asleep.

That night an obviously frightened person called up and demanded to know who I was before he would give his name.

“This is Mr. Carraway,” I said.

“Oh--” He sounded relieved. “This is Klipspringer.”

I was relieved too for that seemed to promise another friend at Gatsby’s grave. I didn’t want it to be in the papers and draw a sightseeing crowd so I’d been calling up a few people myself. They were hard to find.

“The funeral’s tomorrow,” I said. “Three o’clock, here at the house. I wish you’d tell anybody who’d be interested.”

“Oh, I will,” he broke out hastily. “Of course I’m not likely to see anybody, but if I do.”

His tone made me suspicious.

“Of course you’ll be there yourself.”

“Well, I’ll certainly try. What I called up about is----”

“Wait a minute,” I interrupted. “How about saying you’ll come?”

“Well, the fact is--the truth of the matter is that I’m staying with some people up here in Greenwich and they rather expect me to be with them tomorrow. In fact there’s a sort of picnic or something. Of course I’ll do my very best to get away.”

I ejaculated an unrestrained “Huh!” and he must have heard me for he went on nervously:

“What I called up about was a pair of shoes I left there. I wonder if it’d be too much trouble to have the butler send them on. You see they’re tennis shoes and I’m sort of helpless without them. My address is care of B. F.----”

I didn’t hear the rest of the name because I hung up the receiver.

After that I felt a certain shame for Gatsby--one gentleman to whom I telephoned implied that he had got what he deserved. However, that was my fault, for he was one of those who used to sneer most bitterly at Gatsby on the courage of Gatsby’s liquor and I should have known better than to call him.

The morning of the funeral I went up to New York to see Meyer Wolfshiem; I couldn’t seem to reach him any other way. The door that I pushed open on the advice of an elevator boy was marked “The Swastika Holding Company” and at first there didn’t seem to be any one inside. But when I’d shouted “Hello” several times in vain an argument broke out behind a partition and presently a lovely Jewess appeared at an interior door and scrutinized me with black hostile eyes.

“Nobody’s in,” she said. “Mr. Wolfshiem’s gone to Chicago.”

The first part of this was obviously untrue for someone had begun to whistle “The Rosary,” tunelessly, inside.

“Please say that Mr. Carraway wants to see him.”

“I can’t get him back from Chicago, can I?”

At this moment a voice, unmistakably Wolfshiem’s called “Stella!” from the other side of the door.

“Leave your name on the desk,” she said quickly. “I’ll give it to him when he gets back.”

“But I know he’s there.”

She took a step toward me and began to slide her hands indignantly up and down her hips.

“You young men think you can force your way in here any time,” she scolded. “We’re getting sickantired of it. When I say he’s in Chicago, he’s in Chicago.”

I mentioned Gatsby.

“Oh--h!” She looked at me over again. “Will you just--what was your name?”

She vanished. In a moment Meyer Wolfshiem stood solemnly in the doorway, holding out both hands. He drew me into his office, remarking in a reverent voice that it was a sad time for all of us, and offered me a cigar.

“My memory goes back to when I first met him,” he said. “A young major just out of the army and covered over with medals he got in the war. He was so hard up he had to keep on wearing his uniform because he couldn’t buy some regular clothes. First time I saw him was when he come into Winebrenner’s poolroom at Forty-third Street and asked for a job. He hadn’t eat anything for a couple of days. ‘Come on have some lunch with me,’ I sid. He ate more than four dollars’ worth of food in half an hour.”

“Did you start him in business?” I inquired.

“Start him! I made him.”

“Oh.”

“I raised him up out of nothing, right out of the gutter. I saw right away he was a fine appearing, gentlemanly young man, and when he told me he was an Oggsford I knew I could use him good. I got him to join up in the American Legion and he used to stand high there. Right off he did some work for a client of mine up to Albany. We were so thick like that in everything--” He held up two bulbous fingers “--always together.”

I wondered if this partnership had included the World’s Series transaction in 1919.

“Now he’s dead,” I said after a moment. “You were his closest friend, so I know you’ll want to come to his funeral this afternoon.”

“I’d like to come.”

“Well, come then.”

The hair in his nostrils quivered slightly and as he shook his head his eyes filled with tears.

“I can’t do it--I can’t get mixed up in it,” he said.

“There’s nothing to get mixed up in. It’s all over now.”

“When a man gets killed I never like to get mixed up in it in any way. I keep out. When I was a young man it was different--if a friend of mine died, no matter how, I stuck with them to the end. You may think that’s sentimental but I mean it--to the bitter end.”

I saw that for some reason of his own he was determined not to come, so I stood up.

“Are you a college man?” he inquired suddenly.

For a moment I thought he was going to suggest a “gonnegtion” but he only nodded and shook my hand.

“Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead,” he suggested. “After that my own rule is to let everything alone.”

When I left his office the sky had turned dark and I got back to West Egg in a drizzle. After changing my clothes I went next door and found Mr. Gatz walking up and down excitedly in the hall. His pride in his son and in his son’s possessions was continually increasing and now he had something to show me.

“Jimmy sent me this picture.” He took out his wallet with trembling fingers. “Look there.”

It was a photograph of the house, cracked in the corners and dirty with many hands. He pointed out every detail to me eagerly. “Look there!” and then sought admiration from my eyes. He had shown it so often that I think it was more real to him now than the house itself.

“Jimmy sent it to me. I think it’s a very pretty picture. It shows up well.”

“Very well. Had you seen him lately?”

“He come out to see me two years ago and bought me the house I live in now. Of course we was broke up when he run off from home but I see now there was a reason for it. He knew he had a big future in front of him. And ever since he made a success he was very generous with me.”

He seemed reluctant to put away the picture, held it for another minute, lingeringly, before my eyes. Then he returned the wallet and pulled from his pocket a ragged old copy of a book called “Hopalong Cassidy.”

“Look here, this is a book he had when he was a boy. It just shows you.”

He opened it at the back cover and turned it around for me to see. On the last fly-leaf was printed the word SCHEDULE, and the date September 12th, 1906. And underneath:

Rise from bed . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  6.00       A.M.

Dumbbell exercise and wall-scaling . . . . . . 6.15-6.30   “

Study electricity, etc . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.15-8.15   “

Work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.30-4.30  P.M.

Baseball and sports . . . . . . . . . . . . .  4.30-5.00   “

Practice elocution, poise and how to attain it 5.00-6.00   “

Study needed inventions . . . . . . . . . . .  7.00-9.00   “

GENERAL RESOLVES

No wasting time at Shafters or [a name, indecipherable]

No more smokeing or chewing

Bath every other day

Read one improving book or magazine per week

Save $5.00 [crossed out] $3.00 per week

Be better to parents

“I come across this book by accident,” said the old man. “It just shows you, don’t it?”

“It just shows you.”

“Jimmy was bound to get ahead. He always had some resolves like this or something. Do you notice what he’s got about improving his mind? He was always great for that. He told me I et like a hog once and I beat him for it.”

He was reluctant to close the book, reading each item aloud and then looking eagerly at me. I think he rather expected me to copy down the list for my own use.

A little before three the Lutheran minister arrived from Flushing and I began to look involuntarily out the windows for other cars. So did Gatsby’s father. And as the time passed and the servants came in and stood waiting in the hall, his eyes began to blink anxiously and he spoke of the rain in a worried uncertain way. The minister glanced several times at his watch so I took him aside and asked him to wait for half an hour. But it wasn’t any use. Nobody came.

About five o’clock our procession of three cars reached the cemetery and stopped in a thick drizzle beside the gate--first a motor hearse, horribly black and wet, then Mr. Gatz and the minister and I in the limousine, and, a little later, four or five servants and the postman from West Egg in Gatsby’s station wagon, all wet to the skin. As we started through the gate into the cemetery I heard a car stop and then the sound of someone splashing after us over the soggy ground. I looked around. It was the man with owl-eyed glasses whom I had found marvelling over Gatsby’s books in the library one night three months before.

I’d never seen him since then. I don’t know how he knew about the funeral or even his name. The rain poured down his thick glasses and he took them off and wiped them to see the protecting canvas unrolled from Gatsby’s grave.

I tried to think about Gatsby then for a moment but he was already too far away and I could only remember, without resentment, that Daisy hadn’t sent a message or a flower. Dimly I heard someone murmur “Blessed are the dead that the rain falls on,” and then the owl-eyed man said “Amen to that,” in a brave voice.

We straggled down quickly through the rain to the cars. Owl-Eyes spoke to me by the gate.

“I couldn’t get to the house,” he remarked.

“Neither could anybody else.”

“Go on!” He started. “Why, my God! they used to go there by the hundreds.”

He took off his glasses and wiped them again outside and in.

“The poor son-of-a-bitch,” he said.

One of my most vivid memories is of coming back west from prep school and later from college at Christmas time. Those who went farther than Chicago would gather in the old dim Union Station at six o’clock of a December evening with a few Chicago friends already caught up into their own holiday gayeties to bid them a hasty goodbye. I remember the fur coats of the girls returning from Miss This or That’s and the chatter of frozen breath and the hands waving overhead as we caught sight of old acquaintances and the matchings of invitations: “Are you going to the Ordways’? the Herseys’? the Schultzes’?” and the long green tickets clasped tight in our gloved hands. And last the murky yellow cars of the Chicago Milwaukee and St. Paul Railroad looking cheerful as Christmas itself on the tracks beside the gate.

When we pulled out into the winter night and the real snow, our snow, began to stretch out beside us and twinkle against the windows, and the dim lights of small Wisconsin stations moved by, a sharp wild brace came suddenly into the air. We drew in deep breaths of it as we walked back from dinner through the cold vestibules, unutterably aware of our identity with this country for one strange hour before we melted indistinguishably into it again.

That’s my middle west--not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede towns but the thrilling, returning trains of my youth and the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of holly wreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow. I am part of that, a little solemn with the feel of those long winters, a little complacent from growing up in the Carraway house in a city where dwellings are still called through decades by a family’s name. I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all--Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life.

Even when the East excited me most, even when I was most keenly aware of its superiority to the bored, sprawling, swollen towns beyond the Ohio, with their interminable inquisitions which spared only the children and the very old--even then it had always for me a quality of distortion. West Egg especially still figures in my more fantastic dreams. I see it as a night scene by El Greco: a hundred houses, at once conventional and grotesque, crouching under a sullen, overhanging sky and a lustreless moon. In the foreground four solemn men in dress suits are walking along the sidewalk with a stretcher on which lies a drunken woman in a white evening dress. Her hand, which dangles over the side, sparkles cold with jewels. Gravely the men turn in at a house--the wrong house. But no one knows the woman’s name, and no one cares.

After Gatsby’s death the East was haunted for me like that, distorted beyond my eyes’ power of correction. So when the blue smoke of brittle leaves was in the air and the wind blew the wet laundry stiff on the line I decided to come back home.

There was one thing to be done before I left, an awkward, unpleasant thing that perhaps had better have been let alone. But I wanted to leave things in order and not just trust that obliging and indifferent sea to sweep my refuse away. I saw Jordan Baker and talked over and around what had happened to us together and what had happened afterward to me, and she lay perfectly still listening in a big chair.

She was dressed to play golf and I remember thinking she looked like a good illustration, her chin raised a little, jauntily, her hair the color of an autumn leaf, her face the same brown tint as the fingerless glove on her knee. When I had finished she told me without comment that she was engaged to another man. I doubted that though there were several she could have married at a nod of her head but I pretended to be surprised. For just a minute I wondered if I wasn’t making a mistake, then I thought it all over again quickly and got up to say goodbye.

“Nevertheless you did throw me over,” said Jordan suddenly. “You threw me over on the telephone. I don’t give a damn about you now but it was a new experience for me and I felt a little dizzy for a while.”

We shook hands.

“Oh, and do you remember--” she added, “----a conversation we had once about driving a car?”

“Why--not exactly.”

“You said a bad driver was only safe until she met another bad driver? Well, I met another bad driver, didn’t I? I mean it was careless of me to make such a wrong guess. I thought you were rather an honest, straightforward person. I thought it was your secret pride.”

“I’m thirty,” I said. “I’m five years too old to lie to myself and call it honor.”

She didn’t answer. Angry, and half in love with her, and tremendously sorry, I turned away.

One afternoon late in October I saw Tom Buchanan. He was walking ahead of me along Fifth Avenue in his alert, aggressive way, his hands out a little from his body as if to fight off interference, his head moving sharply here and there, adapting itself to his restless eyes. Just as I slowed up to avoid overtaking him he stopped and began frowning into the windows of a jewelry store. Suddenly he saw me and walked back holding out his hand.

“What’s the matter, Nick? Do you object to shaking hands with me?”

“Yes. You know what I think of you.”

“You’re crazy, Nick,” he said quickly. “Crazy as hell. I don’t know what’s the matter with you.”

“Tom,” I inquired, “what did you say to Wilson that afternoon?”

He stared at me without a word and I knew I had guessed right about those missing hours. I started to turn away but he took a step after me and grabbed my arm.

“I told him the truth,” he said. “He came to the door while we were getting ready to leave and when I sent down word that we weren’t in he tried to force his way upstairs. He was crazy enough to kill me if I hadn’t told him who owned the car. His hand was on a revolver in his pocket every minute he was in the house----” He broke off defiantly. “What if I did tell him? That fellow had it coming to him. He threw dust into your eyes just like he did in Daisy’s but he was a tough one. He ran over Myrtle like you’d run over a dog and never even stopped his car.”

There was nothing I could say, except the one unutterable fact that it wasn’t true.

“And if you think I didn’t have my share of suffering--look here, when I went to give up that flat and saw that damn box of dog biscuits sitting there on the sideboard I sat down and cried like a baby. By God it was awful----”

I couldn’t forgive him or like him but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified. It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy--they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made. . . .

I shook hands with him; it seemed silly not to, for I felt suddenly as though I were talking to a child. Then he went into the jewelry store to buy a pearl necklace--or perhaps only a pair of cuff buttons--rid of my provincial squeamishness forever.

Gatsby’s house was still empty when I left--the grass on his lawn had grown as long as mine. One of the taxi drivers in the village never took a fare past the entrance gate without stopping for a minute and pointing inside; perhaps it was he who drove Daisy and Gatsby over to East Egg the night of the accident and perhaps he had made a story about it all his own. I didn’t want to hear it and I avoided him when I got off the train.

I spent my Saturday nights in New York because those gleaming, dazzling parties of his were with me so vividly that I could still hear the music and the laughter faint and incessant from his garden and the cars going up and down his drive. One night I did hear a material car there and saw its lights stop at his front steps. But I didn’t investigate. Probably it was some final guest who had been away at the ends of the earth and didn’t know that the party was over.

On the last night, with my trunk packed and my car sold to the grocer, I went over and looked at that huge incoherent failure of a house once more. On the white steps an obscene word, scrawled by some boy with a piece of brick, stood out clearly in the moonlight and I erased it, drawing my shoe raspingly along the stone. Then I wandered down to the beach and sprawled out on the sand.

Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes--a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter--tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning----

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

THE END

TENDER IS THE NIGHT

Fitzgerald’s fourth and final completed novel was first published in Scribner’s Magazine in 1934 in four issues. The title is taken from John Keats’ poem Ode to a Nightingale.  In 1932, Fitzgerald’s wife Zelda was hospitalised for schizophrenia in Baltimore. At that time, Fitzgerald rented an estate in Towson to work on this novel, which is the story of the rise and fall of Dick Diver, a promising young psychoanalyst and his wife, Nicole, who is also one of his patients. It was Fitzgerald’s first work in nine years, and he ran into financial difficulties during its composition, having to write short stories to raise funds. These were the darkest years of his life, which are reflected by the novel’s bleak elements.

The firstedition

CONTENTS

BOOK 1

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

XVI

XVII

XVIII

XIX

XX

XXI

XXII

XXIII

XXIV

XXV

BOOK 2

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

XVI

XVII

XVIII

XIX

XX

XXI

XXII

XXIII

BOOK 3

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

Newman Boarding School, New Jersey, which Fitzgerald attending in his late teens,

TENDER IS THE NIGHT

Already with thee! tender is the night. . .

. . . But here there is no light,

Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown

Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.

--Ode to a Nightingale

TO

GERALD and SARA

MANY FÊTES

BOOK 1

I

On the pleasant shore of the French Riviera, about half way between Marseilles and the Italian border, stands a large, proud, rose-colored hotel. Deferential palms cool its flushed façade, and before it stretches a short dazzling beach. Lately it has become a summer resort of notable and fashionable people; a decade ago it was almost deserted after its English clientele went north in April. Now, many bungalows cluster near it, but when this story begins only the cupolas of a dozen old villas rotted like water lilies among the massed pines between Gausse’s Hôtel des Étrangers and Cannes, five miles away.

The hotel and its bright tan prayer rug of a beach were one. In the early morning the distant image of Cannes, the pink and cream of old fortifications, the purple Alp that bounded Italy, were cast across the water and lay quavering in the ripples and rings sent up by sea-plants through the clear shallows. Before eight a man came down to the beach in a blue bathrobe and with much preliminary application to his person of the chilly water, and much grunting and loud breathing, floundered a minute in the sea. When he had gone, beach and bay were quiet for an hour. Merchantmen crawled westward on the horizon; bus boys shouted in the hotel court; the dew dried upon the pines. In another hour the horns of motors began to blow down from the winding road along the low range of the Maures, which separates the littoral from true Provençal France.

A mile from the sea, where pines give way to dusty poplars, is an isolated railroad stop, whence one June morning in 1925 a victoria brought a woman and her daughter down to Gausse’s Hotel. The mother’s face was of a fading prettiness that would soon be patted with broken veins; her expression was both tranquil and aware in a pleasant way. However, one’s eye moved on quickly to her daughter, who had magic in her pink palms and her cheeks lit to a lovely flame, like the thrilling flush of children after their cold baths in the evening. Her fine forehead sloped gently up to where her hair, bordering it like an armorial shield, burst into lovelocks and waves and curlicues of ash blonde and gold. Her eyes were bright, big, clear, wet, and shining, the color of her cheeks was real, breaking close to the surface from the strong young pump of her heart. Her body hovered delicately on the last edge of childhood--she was almost eighteen, nearly complete, but the dew was still on her.

As sea and sky appeared below them in a thin, hot line the mother said:

“Something tells me we’re not going to like this place.”

“I want to go home anyhow,” the girl answered.

They both spoke cheerfully but were obviously without direction and bored by the fact--moreover, just any direction would not do. They wanted high excitement, not from the necessity of stimulating jaded nerves but with the avidity of prize-winning schoolchildren who deserved their vacations.

“We’ll stay three days and then go home. I’ll wire right away for steamer tickets.”

At the hotel the girl made the reservation in idiomatic but rather flat French, like something remembered. When they were installed on the ground floor she walked into the glare of the French windows and out a few steps onto the stone veranda that ran the length of the hotel. When she walked she carried herself like a ballet-dancer, not slumped down on her hips but held up in the small of her back. Out there the hot light clipped close her shadow and she retreated--it was too bright to see. Fifty yards away the Mediterranean yielded up its pigments, moment by moment, to the brutal sunshine; below the balustrade a faded Buick cooked on the hotel drive.

Indeed, of all the region only the beach stirred with activity. Three British nannies sat knitting the slow pattern of Victorian England, the pattern of the forties, the sixties, and the eighties, into sweaters and socks, to the tune of gossip as formalized as incantation; closer to the sea a dozen persons kept house under striped umbrellas, while their dozen children pursued unintimidated fish through the shallows or lay naked and glistening with cocoanut oil out in the sun.

As Rosemary came onto the beach a boy of twelve ran past her and dashed into the sea with exultant cries. Feeling the impactive scrutiny of strange faces, she took off her bathrobe and followed. She floated face down for a few yards and finding it shallow staggered to her feet and plodded forward, dragging slim legs like weights against the resistance of the water. When it was about breast high, she glanced back toward shore: a bald man in a monocle and a pair of tights, his tufted chest thrown out, his brash navel sucked in, was regarding her attentively. As Rosemary returned the gaze the man dislodged the monocle, which went into hiding amid the facetious whiskers of his chest, and poured himself a glass of something from a bottle in his hand.

Rosemary laid her face on the water and swam a choppy little four-beat crawl out to the raft. The water reached up for her, pulled her down tenderly out of the heat, seeped in her hair and ran into the corners of her body. She turned round and round in it, embracing it, wallowing in it. Reaching the raft she was out of breath, but a tanned woman with very white teeth looked down at her, and Rosemary, suddenly conscious of the raw whiteness of her own body, turned on her back and drifted toward shore. The hairy man holding the bottle spoke to her as she came out.

“I say--they have sharks out behind the raft.” He was of indeterminate nationality, but spoke English with a slow Oxford drawl. “Yesterday they devoured two British sailors from the flotte at Golfe Juan.”

“Heavens!” exclaimed Rosemary.

“They come in for the refuse from the flotte.”

Glazing his eyes to indicate that he had only spoken in order to warn her, he minced off two steps and poured himself another drink.

Not unpleasantly self-conscious, since there had been a slight sway of attention toward her during this conversation, Rosemary looked for a place to sit. Obviously each family possessed the strip of sand immediately in front of its umbrella; besides there was much visiting and talking back and forth--the atmosphere of a community upon which it would be presumptuous to intrude. Farther up, where the beach was strewn with pebbles and dead sea-weed, sat a group with flesh as white as her own. They lay under small hand-parasols instead of beach umbrellas and were obviously less indigenous to the place. Between the dark people and the light, Rosemary found room and spread out her peignoir on the sand.

Lying so, she first heard their voices and felt their feet skirt her body and their shapes pass between the sun and herself. The breath of an inquisitive dog blew warm and nervous on her neck; she could feel her skin broiling a little in the heat and hear the small exhausted wa-waa of the expiring waves. Presently her ear distinguished individual voices and she became aware that some one referred to scornfully as “that North guy” had kidnapped a waiter from a café in Cannes last night in order to saw him in two. The sponsor of the story was a white-haired woman in full evening dress, obviously a relic of the previous evening, for a tiara still clung to her head and a discouraged orchid expired from her shoulder. Rosemary, forming a vague antipathy to her and her companions, turned away.

Nearest her, on the other side, a young woman lay under a roof of umbrellas making out a list of things from a book open on the sand. Her bathing suit was pulled off her shoulders and her back, a ruddy, orange brown, set off by a string of creamy pearls, shone in the sun. Her face was hard and lovely and pitiful. Her eyes met Rosemary’s but did not see her. Beyond her was a fine man in a jockey cap and red-striped tights; then the woman Rosemary had seen on the raft, and who looked back at her, seeing her; then a man with a long face and a golden, leonine head, with blue tights and no hat, talking very seriously to an unmistakably Latin young man in black tights, both of them picking at little pieces of seaweed in the sand. She thought they were mostly Americans, but something made them unlike the Americans she had known of late.

After a while she realized that the man in the jockey cap was giving a quiet little performance for this group; he moved gravely about with a rake, ostensibly removing gravel and meanwhile developing some esoteric burlesque held in suspension by his grave face. Its faintest ramification had become hilarious, until whatever he said released a burst of laughter. Even those who, like herself, were too far away to hear, sent out antennæ of attention until the only person on the beach not caught up in it was the young woman with the string of pearls. Perhaps from modesty of possession she responded to each salvo of amusement by bending closer over her list.

The man of the monocle and bottle spoke suddenly out of the sky above Rosemary.

“You are a ripping swimmer.”

She demurred.

“Jolly good. My name is Campion. Here is a lady who says she saw you in Sorrento last week and knows who you are and would so like to meet you.”

Glancing around with concealed annoyance Rosemary saw the untanned people were waiting. Reluctantly she got up and went over to them.

“Mrs. Abrams--Mrs. McKisco--Mr. McKisco--Mr. Dumphry--

“We know who you are,” spoke up the woman in evening dress. “You’re Rosemary Hoyt and I recognized you in Sorrento and asked the hotel clerk and we all think you’re perfectly marvellous and we want to know why you’re not back in America making another marvellous moving picture.”

They made a superfluous gesture of moving over for her. The woman who had recognized her was not a Jewess, despite her name. She was one of those elderly “good sports” preserved by an imperviousness to experience and a good digestion into another generation.

“We wanted to warn you about getting burned the first day,” she continued cheerily, “because your skin is important, but there seems to be so darn much formality on this beach that we didn’t know whether you’d mind.”

II

“We thought maybe you were in the plot,” said Mrs. McKisco. She was a shabby-eyed, pretty young woman with a disheartening intensity. “We don’t know who’s in the plot and who isn’t. One man my husband had been particularly nice to turned out to be a chief character--practically the assistant hero.”

“The plot?” inquired Rosemary, half understanding. “Is there a plot?”

“My dear, we don’t know,” said Mrs. Abrams, with a convulsive, stout woman’s chuckle. “We’re not in it. We’re the gallery.”

Mr. Dumphry, a tow-headed effeminate young man, remarked: “Mama Abrams is a plot in herself,” and Campion shook his monocle at him, saying: “Now, Royal, don’t be too ghastly for words.” Rosemary looked at them all uncomfortably, wishing her mother had come down here with her. She did not like these people, especially in her immediate comparison of them with those who had interested her at the other end of the beach. Her mother’s modest but compact social gift got them out of unwelcome situations swiftly and firmly. But Rosemary had been a celebrity for only six months, and sometimes the French manners of her early adolescence and the democratic manners of America, these latter superimposed, made a certain confusion and let her in for just such things.

Mr. McKisco, a scrawny, freckle-and-red man of thirty, did not find the topic of the “plot” amusing. He had been staring at the sea--now after a swift glance at his wife he turned to Rosemary and demanded aggressively:

“Been here long?”

“Only a day.”

“Oh.”

Evidently feeling that the subject had been thoroughly changed, he looked in turn at the others.

“Going to stay all summer?” asked Mrs. McKisco, innocently. “If you do you can watch the plot unfold.”

“For God’s sake, Violet, drop the subject!” exploded her husband. “Get a new joke, for God’s sake!”

Mrs. McKisco swayed toward Mrs. Abrams and breathed audibly:

“He’s nervous.”

“I’m not nervous,” disagreed McKisco. “It just happens I’m not nervous at all.”

He was burning visibly--a grayish flush had spread over his face, dissolving all his expressions into a vast ineffectuality. Suddenly remotely conscious of his condition he got up to go in the water, followed by his wife, and seizing the opportunity Rosemary followed.

Mr. McKisco drew a long breath, flung himself into the shallows and began a stiff-armed batting of the Mediterranean, obviously intended to suggest a crawl--his breath exhausted he arose and looked around with an expression of surprise that he was still in sight of shore.

“I haven’t learned to breathe yet. I never quite understood how they breathed.” He looked at Rosemary inquiringly.

“I think you breathe out under water,” she explained. “And every fourth beat you roll your head over for air.”

“The breathing’s the hardest part for me. Shall we go to the raft?”

The man with the leonine head lay stretched out upon the raft, which tipped back and forth with the motion of the water. As Mrs. McKisco reached for it a sudden tilt struck her arm up roughly, whereupon the man started up and pulled her on board.

“I was afraid it hit you.” His voice was slow and shy; he had one of the saddest faces Rosemary had ever seen, the high cheekbones of an Indian, a long upper lip, and enormous deep-set dark golden eyes. He had spoken out of the side of his mouth, as if he hoped his words would reach Mrs. McKisco by a circuitous and unobtrusive route; in a minute he had shoved off into the water and his long body lay motionless toward shore.

Rosemary and Mrs. McKisco watched him. When he had exhausted his momentum he abruptly bent double, his thin thighs rose above the surface, and he disappeared totally, leaving scarcely a fleck of foam behind.

“He’s a good swimmer,” Rosemary said.

Mrs. McKisco’s answer came with surprising violence.

“Well, he’s a rotten musician.” She turned to her husband, who after two unsuccessful attempts had managed to climb on the raft, and having attained his balance was trying to make some kind of compensatory flourish, achieving only an extra stagger. “I was just saying that Abe North may be a good swimmer but he’s a rotten musician.”

“Yes,” agreed McKisco, grudgingly. Obviously he had created his wife’s world, and allowed her few liberties in it.

“Antheil’s my man.” Mrs. McKisco turned challengingly to Rosemary, “Anthiel and Joyce. I don’t suppose you ever hear much about those sort of people in Hollywood, but my husband wrote the first criticism of Ulysses that ever appeared in America.”

“I wish I had a cigarette,” said McKisco calmly. “That’s more important to me just now.”

“He’s got insides--don’t you think so, Albert?”

Her voice faded off suddenly. The woman of the pearls had joined her two children in the water, and now Abe North came up under one of them like a volcanic island, raising him on his shoulders. The child yelled with fear and delight and the woman watched with a lovely peace, without a smile.

“Is that his wife?” Rosemary asked.

“No, that’s Mrs. Diver. They’re not at the hotel.” Her eyes, photographic, did not move from the woman’s face. After a moment she turned vehemently to Rosemary.

“Have you been abroad before?”

“Yes--I went to school in Paris.”

“Oh! Well then you probably know that if you want to enjoy yourself here the thing is to get to know some real French families. What do these people get out of it?” She pointed her left shoulder toward shore. “They just stick around with each other in little cliques. Of course, we had letters of introduction and met all the best French artists and writers in Paris. That made it very nice.”

“I should think so.”

“My husband is finishing his first novel, you see.”

Rosemary said: “Oh, he is?” She was not thinking anything special, except wondering whether her mother had got to sleep in this heat.

“It’s on the idea of Ulysses,” continued Mrs. McKisco. “Only instead of taking twenty-four hours my husband takes a hundred years. He takes a decayed old French aristocrat and puts him in contrast with the mechanical age--”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Violet, don’t go telling everybody the idea,” protested McKisco. “I don’t want it to get all around before the book’s published.”

Rosemary swam back to the shore, where she threw her peignoir over her already sore shoulders and lay down again in the sun. The man with the jockey cap was now going from umbrella to umbrella carrying a bottle and little glasses in his hands; presently he and his friends grew livelier and closer together and now they were all under a single assemblage of umbrellas--she gathered that some one was leaving and that this was a last drink on the beach. Even the children knew that excitement was generating under that umbrella and turned toward it--and it seemed to Rosemary that it all came from the man in the jockey cap.

Noon dominated sea and sky--even the white line of Cannes, five miles off, had faded to a mirage of what was fresh and cool; a robin-breasted sailing boat pulled in behind it a strand from the outer, darker sea. It seemed that there was no life anywhere in all this expanse of coast except under the filtered sunlight of those umbrellas, where something went on amid the color and the murmur.

Campion walked near her, stood a few feet away and Rosemary closed her eyes, pretending to be asleep; then she half-opened them and watched two dim, blurred pillars that were legs. The man tried to edge his way into a sand-colored cloud, but the cloud floated off into the vast hot sky. Rosemary fell really asleep.

She awoke drenched with sweat to find the beach deserted save for the man in the jockey cap, who was folding a last umbrella. As Rosemary lay blinking, he walked nearer and said:

“I was going to wake you before I left. It’s not good to get too burned right away.”

“Thank you.” Rosemary looked down at her crimson legs.

“Heavens!”

She laughed cheerfully, inviting him to talk, but Dick Diver was already carrying a tent and a beach umbrella up to a waiting car, so she went into the water to wash off the sweat. He came back and gathering up a rake, a shovel, and a sieve, stowed them in a crevice of a rock. He glanced up and down the beach to see if he had left anything.

“Do you know what time it is?” Rosemary asked.

“It’s about half-past one.”

They faced the seascape together momentarily.

“It’s not a bad time,” said Dick Diver. “It’s not one of worst times of the day.”

He looked at her and for a moment she lived in the bright blue worlds of his eyes, eagerly and confidently. Then he shouldered his last piece of junk and went up to his car, and Rosemary came out of the water, shook out her peignoir and walked up to the hotel.

III

It was almost two when they went into the dining-room. Back and forth over the deserted tables a heavy pattern of beams and shadows swayed with the motion of the pines outside. Two waiters, piling plates and talking loud Italian, fell silent when they came in and brought them a tired version of the table d’hôte luncheon.

“I fell in love on the beach,” said Rosemary.

“Who with?”

“First with a whole lot of people who looked nice. Then with one man.”

“Did you talk to him?”

“Just a little. Very handsome. With reddish hair.” She was eating, ravenously. “He’s married though--it’s usually the way.”

Her mother was her best friend and had put every last possibility into the guiding of her, not so rare a thing in the theatrical profession, but rather special in that Mrs. Elsie Speers was not recompensing herself for a defeat of her own. She had no personal bitterness or resentments about life--twice satisfactorily married and twice widowed, her cheerful stoicism had each time deepened. One of her husbands had been a cavalry officer and one an army doctor, and they both left something to her that she tried to present intact to Rosemary. By not sparing Rosemary she had made her hard--by not sparing her own labor and devotion she had cultivated an idealism in Rosemary, which at present was directed toward herself and saw the world through her eyes. So that while Rosemary was a “simple” child she was protected by a double sheath of her mother’s armor and her own--she had a mature distrust of the trivial, the facile and the vulgar. However, with Rosemary’s sudden success in pictures Mrs. Speers felt that it was time she were spiritually weaned; it would please rather than pain her if this somewhat bouncing, breathless and exigent idealism would focus on something except herself.

“Then you like it here?” she asked.

“It might be fun if we knew those people. There were some other people, but they weren’t nice. They recognized me--no matter where we go everybody’s seen ‘Daddy’s Girl.’“

Mrs. Speers waited for the glow of egotism to subside; then she said in a matter-of-fact way: “That reminds me, when are you going to see Earl Brady?”

“I thought we might go this afternoon--if you’re rested.”

“You go--I’m not going.”

“We’ll wait till to-morrow then.”

“I want you to go alone. It’s only a short way--it isn’t as if you didn’t speak French.”

“Mother--aren’t there some things I don’t have to do?”

“Oh, well then go later--but some day before we leave.”

“All right, Mother.”

After lunch they were both overwhelmed by the sudden flatness that comes over American travellers in quiet foreign places. No stimuli worked upon them, no voices called them from without, no fragments of their own thoughts came suddenly from the minds of others, and missing the clamor of Empire they felt that life was not continuing here.

“Let’s only stay three days, Mother,” Rosemary said when they were back in their rooms. Outside a light wind blew the heat around, straining it through the trees and sending little hot gusts through the shutters.

“How about the man you fell in love with on the beach?”

“I don’t love anybody but you, Mother, darling.”

Rosemary stopped in the lobby and spoke to Gausse père about trains. The concierge, lounging in light-brown khaki by the desk, stared at her rigidly, then suddenly remembered the manners of his métier. She took the bus and rode with a pair of obsequious waiters to the station, embarrassed by their deferential silence, wanting to urge them: “Go on, talk, enjoy yourselves. It doesn’t bother me.”

The first-class compartment was stifling; the vivid advertising cards of the railroad companies--The Pont du Gard at Arles, the Amphitheatre at Orange, winter sports at Chamonix--were fresher than the long motionless sea outside. Unlike American trains that were absorbed in an intense destiny of their own, and scornful of people on another world less swift and breathless, this train was part of the country through which it passed. Its breath stirred the dust from the palm leaves, the cinders mingled with the dry dung in the gardens. Rosemary was sure she could lean from the window and pull flowers with her hand.

A dozen cabbies slept in their hacks outside the Cannes station. Over on the promenade the Casino, the smart shops, and the great hotels turned blank iron masks to the summer sea. It was unbelievable that there could ever have been a “season,” and Rosemary, half in the grip of fashion, became a little self-conscious, as though she were displaying an unhealthy taste for the moribund; as though people were wondering why she was here in the lull between the gaiety of last winter and next winter, while up north the true world thundered by.

As she came out of a drug store with a bottle of cocoanut oil, a woman, whom she recognized as Mrs. Diver, crossed her path with arms full of sofa cushions, and went to a car parked down the street. A long, low black dog barked at her, a dozing chauffeur woke with a start. She sat in the car, her lovely face set, controlled, her eyes brave and watchful, looking straight ahead toward nothing. Her dress was bright red and her brown legs were bare. She had thick, dark, gold hair like a chow’s.

With half an hour to wait for her train Rosemary sat down in the Café des Alliés on the Croisette, where the trees made a green twilight over the tables and an orchestra wooed an imaginary public of cosmopolites with the Nice Carnival Song and last year’s American tune. She had bought Le Temps and The Saturday Evening Post for her mother, and as she drank her citronade she opened the latter at the memoirs of a Russian princess, finding the dim conventions of the nineties realer and nearer than the headlines of the French paper. It was the same feeling that had oppressed her at the hotel--accustomed to seeing the starkest grotesqueries of a continent heavily underlined as comedy or tragedy, untrained to the task of separating out the essential for herself, she now began to feel that French life was empty and stale. This feeling was surcharged by listening to the sad tunes of the orchestra, reminiscent of the melancholy music played for acrobats in vaudeville. She was glad to go back to Gausse’s Hotel.

Her shoulders were too burned to swim with the next day, so she and her mother hired a car--after much haggling, for Rosemary had formed her valuations of money in France--and drove along the Riviera, the delta of many rivers. The chauffeur, a Russian Czar of the period of Ivan the Terrible, was a self-appointed guide, and the resplendent names--Cannes, Nice, Monte Carlo--began to glow through their torpid camouflage, whispering of old kings come here to dine or die, of rajahs tossing Buddha’s eyes to English ballerinas, of Russian princes turning the weeks into Baltic twilights in the lost caviare days. Most of all, there was the scent of the Russians along the coast--their closed book shops and grocery stores. Ten years ago, when the season ended in April, the doors of the Orthodox Church were locked, and the sweet champagnes they favored were put away until their return. “We’ll be back next season,” they said, but this was premature, for they were never coming back any more.

It was pleasant to drive back to the hotel in the late afternoon, above a sea as mysteriously colored as the agates and cornelians of childhood, green as green milk, blue as laundry water, wine dark. It was pleasant to pass people eating outside their doors, and to hear the fierce mechanical pianos behind the vines of country estaminets. When they turned off the Corniche d’Or and down to Gausse’s Hotel through the darkening banks of trees, set one behind another in many greens, the moon already hovered over the ruins of the aqueducts. . . .

Somewhere in the hills behind the hotel there was a dance, and Rosemary listened to the music through the ghostly moonshine of her mosquito net, realizing that there was gaiety too somewhere about, and she thought of the nice people on the beach. She thought she might meet them in the morning, but they obviously formed a self-sufficient little group, and once their umbrellas, bamboo rugs, dogs, and children were set out in place the part of the plage was literally fenced in. She resolved in any case not to spend her last two mornings with the other ones.

IV

The matter was solved for her. The McKiscos were not yet there and she had scarcely spread her peignoir when two men--the man with the jockey cap and the tall blonde man, given to sawing waiters in two--left the group and came down toward her.

“Good morning,” said Dick Diver. He broke down. “Look--sunburn or no sunburn, why did you stay away yesterday? We worried about you.”

She sat up and her happy little laugh welcomed their intrusion.

“We wondered,” Dick Diver said, “if you wouldn’t come over this morning. We go in, we take food and drink, so it’s a substantial invitation.”

He seemed kind and charming--his voice promised that he would take care of her, and that a little later he would open up whole new worlds for her, unroll an endless succession of magnificent possibilities. He managed the introduction so that her name wasn’t mentioned and then let her know easily that everyone knew who she was but were respecting the completeness of her private life--a courtesy that Rosemary had not met with save from professional people since her success.

Nicole Diver, her brown back hanging from her pearls, was looking through a recipe book for chicken Maryland. She was about twenty-four, Rosemary guessed--her face could have been described in terms of conventional prettiness, but the effect was that it had been made first on the heroic scale with strong structure and marking, as if the features and vividness of brow and coloring, everything we associate with temperament and character had been molded with a Rodinesque intention, and then chiseled away in the direction of prettiness to a point where a single slip would have irreparably diminished its force and quality. With the mouth the sculptor had taken desperate chances--it was the cupid’s bow of a magazine cover, yet it shared the distinction of the rest.

“Are you here for a long time?” Nicole asked. Her voice was low, almost harsh.

Suddenly Rosemary let the possibility enter her mind that they might stay another week.

“Not very long,” she answered vaguely. “We’ve been abroad a long time--we landed in Sicily in March and we’ve been slowly working our way north. I got pneumonia making a picture last January and I’ve been recuperating.”

“Mercy! How did that happen?”

“Well, it was from swimming,” Rosemary was rather reluctant at embarking upon personal revelations. “One day I happened to have the grippe and didn’t know it, and they were taking a scene where I dove into a canal in Venice. It was a very expensive set, so I had to dive and dive and dive all morning. Mother had a doctor right there, but it was no use--I got pneumonia.” She changed the subject determinedly before they could speak. “Do you like it here--this place?”

“They have to like it,” said Abe North slowly. “They invented it.” He turned his noble head slowly so that his eyes rested with tenderness and affection on the two Divers.

“Oh, did you?”

“This is only the second season that the hotel’s been open in summer,” Nicole explained. “We persuaded Gausse to keep on a cook and a garçon and a chasseur--it paid its way and this year it’s doing even better.”

“But you’re not in the hotel.”

“We built a house, up at Tarmes.”

“The theory is,” said Dick, arranging an umbrella to clip a square of sunlight off Rosemary’s shoulder, “that all the northern places, like Deauville, were picked out by Russians and English who don’t mind the cold, while half of us Americans come from tropical climates--that’s why we’re beginning to come here.”

The young man of Latin aspect had been turning the pages of The New York Herald.

“Well, what nationality are these people?” he demanded, suddenly, and read with a slight French intonation, “‘Registered at the Hotel Palace at Vevey are Mr. Pandely Vlasco, Mme. Bonneasse’--I don’t exaggerate--’Corinna Medonca, Mme. Pasche, Seraphim Tullio, Maria Amalia Roto Mais, Moises Teubel, Mme. Paragoris, Apostle Alexandre, Yolanda Yosfuglu and Geneveva de Momus!’ She attracts me most--Geneveva de Momus. Almost worth running up to Vevey to take a look at Geneveva de Momus.”

He stood up with sudden restlessness, stretching himself with one sharp movement. He was a few years younger than Diver or North. He was tall and his body was hard but overspare save for the bunched force gathered in his shoulders and upper arms. At first glance he seemed conventionally handsome--but there was a faint disgust always in his face which marred the full fierce lustre of his brown eyes. Yet one remembered them afterward, when one had forgotten the inability of the mouth to endure boredom and the young forehead with its furrows of fretful and unprofitable pain.

“We found some fine ones in the news of Americans last week,” said Nicole. “Mrs. Evelyn Oyster and--what were the others?”

“There was Mr. S. Flesh,” said Diver, getting up also. He took his rake and began to work seriously at getting small stones out of the sand.

“Oh, yes--S. Flesh--doesn’t he give you the creeps?”

It was quiet alone with Nicole--Rosemary found it even quieter than with her mother. Abe North and Barban, the Frenchman, were talking about Morocco, and Nicole having copied her recipe picked up a piece of sewing. Rosemary examined their appurtenances--four large parasols that made a canopy of shade, a portable bath house for dressing, a pneumatic rubber horse, new things that Rosemary had never seen, from the first burst of luxury manufacturing after the War, and probably in the hands of the first of purchasers. She had gathered that they were fashionable people, but though her mother had brought her up to beware such people as drones, she did not feel that way here. Even in their absolute immobility, complete as that of the morning, she felt a purpose, a working over something, a direction, an act of creation different from any she had known. Her immature mind made no speculations upon the nature of their relation to each other, she was only concerned with their attitude toward herself--but she perceived the web of some pleasant interrelation, which she expressed with the thought that they seemed to have a very good time.

She looked in turn at the three men, temporarily expropriating them. All three were personable in different ways; all were of a special gentleness that she felt was part of their lives, past and future, not circumstanced by events, not at all like the company manners of actors, and she detected also a far-reaching delicacy that was different from the rough and ready good fellowship of directors, who represented the intellectuals in her life. Actors and directors--those were the only men she had ever known, those and the heterogeneous, indistinguishable mass of college boys, interested only in love at first sight, whom she had met at the Yale prom last fall.

These three were different. Barban was less civilized, more skeptical and scoffing, his manners were formal, even perfunctory. Abe North had, under his shyness, a desperate humor that amused but puzzled her. Her serious nature distrusted its ability to make a supreme impression on him.

But Dick Diver--he was all complete there. Silently she admired him. His complexion was reddish and weather-burned, so was his short hair--a light growth of it rolled down his arms and hands. His eyes were of a bright, hard blue. His nose was somewhat pointed and there was never any doubt at whom he was looking or talking--and this is a flattering attention, for who looks at us?--glances fall upon us, curious or disinterested, nothing more. His voice, with some faint Irish melody running through it, wooed the world, yet she felt the layer of hardness in him, of self-control and of self-discipline, her own virtues. Oh, she chose him, and Nicole, lifting her head saw her choose him, heard the little sigh at the fact that he was already possessed.

Toward noon the McKiscos, Mrs. Abrams, Mr. Dumphry, and Signor Campion came on the beach. They had brought a new umbrella that they set up with side glances toward the Divers, and crept under with satisfied expressions--all save Mr. McKisco, who remained derisively without. In his raking Dick had passed near them and now he returned to the umbrellas.

“The two young men are reading the Book of Etiquette together,” he said in a low voice.

“Planning to mix wit de quality,” said Abe.

Mary North, the very tanned young woman whom Rosemary had encountered the first day on the raft, came in from swimming and said with a smile that was a rakish gleam:

“So Mr. and Mrs. Neverquiver have arrived.”

“They’re this man’s friends,” Nicole reminded her, indicating Abe. “Why doesn’t he go and speak to them? Don’t you think they’re attractive?”

“I think they’re very attractive,” Abe agreed. “I just don’t think they’re attractive, that’s all.”

“Well, I have felt there were too many people on the beach this summer,” Nicole admitted. “Our beach that Dick made out of a pebble pile.” She considered, and then lowering her voice out of the range of the trio of nannies who sat back under another umbrella. “Still, they’re preferable to those British last summer who kept shouting about: ‘Isn’t the sea blue? Isn’t the sky white? Isn’t little Nellie’s nose red?’“

Rosemary thought she would not like to have Nicole for an enemy.

“But you didn’t see the fight,” Nicole continued. “The day before you came, the married man, the one with the name that sounds like a substitute for gasoline or butter--”

“McKisco?”

“Yes--well they were having words and she tossed some sand in his face. So naturally he sat on top of her and rubbed her face in the sand. We were--electrified. I wanted Dick to interfere.”

“I think,” said Dick Diver, staring down abstractedly at the straw mat, “that I’ll go over and invite them to dinner.”

“No, you won’t,” Nicole told him quickly.

“I think it would be a very good thing. They’re here--let’s adjust ourselves.”

“We’re very well adjusted,” she insisted, laughing. “I’m not going to have my nose rubbed in the sand. I’m a mean, hard woman,” she explained to Rosemary, and then raising her voice, “Children, put on your bathing suits!”

Rosemary felt that this swim would become the typical one of her life, the one that would always pop up in her memory at the mention of swimming. Simultaneously the whole party moved toward the water, super-ready from the long, forced inaction, passing from the heat to the cool with the gourmandise of a tingling curry eaten with chilled white wine. The Divers’ day was spaced like the day of the older civilizations to yield the utmost from the materials at hand, and to give all the transitions their full value, and she did not know that there would be another transition presently from the utter absorption of the swim to the garrulity of the Provençal lunch hour. But again she had the sense that Dick was taking care of her, and she delighted in responding to the eventual movement as if it had been an order.

Nicole handed her husband the curious garment on which she had been working. He went into the dressing tent and inspired a commotion by appearing in a moment clad in transparent black lace drawers. Close inspection revealed that actually they were lined with flesh-colored cloth.

“Well, if that isn’t a pansys trick!” exclaimed Mr. McKisco contemptuously--then turning quickly to Mr. Dumphry and Mr. Campion, he added, “Oh, I beg your pardon.”

Rosemary bubbled with delight at the trunks. Her naïveté responded whole-heartedly to the expensive simplicity of the Divers, unaware of its complexity and its lack of innocence, unaware that it was all a selection of quality rather than quantity from the run of the world’s bazaar; and that the simplicity of behavior also, the nursery-like peace and good will, the emphasis on the simpler virtues, was part of a desperate bargain with the gods and had been attained through struggles she could not have guessed at. At that moment the Divers represented externally the exact furthermost evolution of a class, so that most people seemed awkward beside them--in reality a qualitative change had already set in that was not at all apparent to Rosemary.

She stood with them as they took sherry and ate crackers. Dick Diver looked at her with cold blue eyes; his kind, strong mouth said thoughtfully and deliberately:

“You’re the only girl I’ve seen for a long time that actually did look like something blooming.”

In her mother’s lap afterward Rosemary cried and cried.

“I love him, Mother. I’m desperately in love with him--I never knew I could feel that way about anybody. And he’s married and I like her too--it’s just hopeless. Oh, I love him so!”

“I’m curious to meet him.”

“She invited us to dinner Friday.”

“If you’re in love it ought to make you happy. You ought to laugh.”

Rosemary looked up and gave a beautiful little shiver of her face and laughed. Her mother always had a great influence on her.

V

Rosemary went to Monte Carlo nearly as sulkily as it was possible for her to be. She rode up the rugged hill to La Turbie, to an old Gaumont lot in process of reconstruction, and as she stood by the grilled entrance waiting for an answer to the message on her card, she might have been looking into Hollywood. The bizarre débris of some recent picture, a decayed street scene in India, a great cardboard whale, a monstrous tree bearing cherries large as basketballs, bloomed there by exotic dispensation, autochthonous as the pale amaranth, mimosa, cork oak or dwarfed pine. There were a quick-lunch shack and two barnlike stages and everywhere about the lot, groups of waiting, hopeful, painted faces.

After ten minutes a young man with hair the color of canary feathers hurried down to the gate.

“Come in, Miss Hoyt. Mr. Brady’s on the set, but he’s very anxious to see you. I’m sorry you were kept waiting, but you know some of these French dames are worse about pushing themselves in--”

The studio manager opened a small door in the blank wall of stage building and with sudden glad familiarity Rosemary followed him into half darkness. Here and there figures spotted the twilight, turning up ashen faces to her like souls in purgatory watching the passage of a mortal through. There were whispers and soft voices and, apparently from afar, the gentle tremolo of a small organ. Turning the corner made by some flats, they came upon the white crackling glow of a stage, where a French actor--his shirt front, collar, and cuffs tinted a brilliant pink--and an American actress stood motionless face to face. They stared at each other with dogged eyes, as though they had been in the same position for hours; and still for a long time nothing happened, no one moved. A bank of lights went off with a savage hiss, went on again; the plaintive tap of a hammer begged admission to nowhere in the distance; a blue face appeared among the blinding lights above, called something unintelligible into the upper blackness. Then the silence was broken by a voice in front of Rosemary.

“Baby, you don’t take off the stockings, you can spoil ten more pairs. That dress is fifteen pounds.”

Stepping backward the speaker ran against Rosemary, whereupon the studio manager said, “Hey, Earl--Miss Hoyt.”

They were meeting for the first time. Brady was quick and strenuous. As he took her hand she saw him look her over from head to foot, a gesture she recognized and that made her feel at home, but gave her always a faint feeling of superiority to whoever made it. If her person was property she could exercise whatever advantage was inherent in its ownership.

“I thought you’d be along any day now,” Brady said, in a voice that was just a little too compelling for private life, and that trailed with it a faintly defiant cockney accent. “Have a good trip?”

“Yes, but we’re glad to be going home.”

“No-o-o!” he protested. “Stay awhile--I want to talk to you. Let me tell you that was some picture of yours--that ‘Daddy’s Girl.’ I saw it in Paris. I wired the coast right away to see if you were signed.”

“I just had--I’m sorry.”

“God, what a picture!”

Not wanting to smile in silly agreement Rosemary frowned.

“Nobody wants to be thought of forever for just one picture,” she said.

“Sure--that’s right. What’re your plans?”

“Mother thought I needed a rest. When I get back we’ll probably either sign up with First National or keep on with Famous.”

“Who’s we?”

“My mother. She decides business matters. I couldn’t do without her.”

Again he looked her over completely, and, as he did, something in Rosemary went out to him. It was not liking, not at all the spontaneous admiration she had felt for the man on the beach this morning. It was a click. He desired her and, so far as her virginal emotions went, she contemplated a surrender with equanimity. Yet she knew she would forget him half an hour after she left him--like an actor kissed in a picture.

“Where are you staying?” Brady asked. “Oh, yes, at Gausse’s. Well, my plans are made for this year, too, but that letter I wrote you still stands. Rather make a picture with you than any girl since Connie Talmadge was a kid.”

“I feel the same way. Why don’t you come back to Hollywood?”

“I can’t stand the damn place. I’m fine here. Wait till after this shot and I’ll show you around.”

Walking onto the set he began to talk to the French actor in a low, quiet voice.

Five minutes passed--Brady talked on, while from time to time the Frenchman shifted his feet and nodded. Abruptly, Brady broke off, calling something to the lights that startled them into a humming glare. Los Angeles was loud about Rosemary now. Unappalled she moved once more through the city of thin partitions, wanting to be back there. But she did not want to see Brady in the mood she sensed he would be in after he had finished and she left the lot with a spell still upon her. The Mediterranean world was less silent now that she knew the studio was there. She liked the people on the streets and bought herself a pair of espadrilles on the way to the train.

Her mother was pleased that she had done so accurately what she was told to do, but she still wanted to launch her out and away. Mrs. Speers was fresh in appearance but she was tired; death beds make people tired indeed and she had watched beside a couple.

VI

Feeling good from the rosy wine at lunch, Nicole Diver folded her arms high enough for the artificial camellia on her shoulder to touch her cheek, and went out into her lovely grassless garden. The garden was bounded on one side by the house, from which it flowed and into which it ran, on two sides by the old village, and on the last by the cliff falling by ledges to the sea.

Along the walls on the village side all was dusty, the wriggling vines, the lemon and eucalyptus trees, the casual wheel-barrow, left only a moment since, but already grown into the path, atrophied and faintly rotten. Nicole was invariably somewhat surprised that by turning in the other direction past a bed of peonies she walked into an area so green and cool that the leaves and petals were curled with tender damp.

Knotted at her throat she wore a lilac scarf that even in the achromatic sunshine cast its color up to her face and down around her moving feet in a lilac shadow. Her face was hard, almost stern, save for the soft gleam of piteous doubt that looked from her green eyes. Her once fair hair had darkened, but she was lovelier now at twenty-four than she had been at eighteen, when her hair was brighter than she.

Following a walk marked by an intangible mist of bloom that followed the white border stones she came to a space overlooking the sea where there were lanterns asleep in the fig trees and a big table and wicker chairs and a great market umbrella from Sienna, all gathered about an enormous pine, the biggest tree in the garden. She paused there a moment, looking absently at a growth of nasturtiums and iris tangled at its foot, as though sprung from a careless handful of seeds, listening to the plaints and accusations of some nursery squabble in the house. When this died away on the summer air, she walked on, between kaleidoscopic peonies massed in pink clouds, black and brown tulips and fragile mauve-stemmed roses, transparent like sugar flowers in a confectioner’s window--until, as if the scherzo of color could reach no further intensity, it broke off suddenly in mid-air, and moist steps went down to a level five feet below.

Here there was a well with the boarding around it dank and slippery even on the brightest days. She went up the stairs on the other side and into the vegetable garden; she walked rather quickly; she liked to be active, though at times she gave an impression of repose that was at once static and evocative. This was because she knew few words and believed in none, and in the world she was rather silent, contributing just her share of urbane humor with a precision that approached meagreness. But at the moment when strangers tended to grow uncomfortable in the presence of this economy she would seize the topic and rush off with it, feverishly surprised with herself--then bring it back and relinquish it abruptly, almost timidly, like an obedient retriever, having been adequate and something more.

As she stood in the fuzzy green light of the vegetable garden, Dick crossed the path ahead of her going to his work house. Nicole waited silently till he had passed; then she went on through lines of prospective salads to a little menagerie where pigeons and rabbits and a parrot made a medley of insolent noises at her. Descending to another ledge she reached a low, curved wall and looked down seven hundred feet to the Mediterranean Sea.

She stood in the ancient hill village of Tarmes. The villa and its grounds were made out of a row of peasant dwellings that abutted on the cliff--five small houses had been combined to make the house and four destroyed to make the garden. The exterior walls were untouched so that from the road far below it was indistinguishable from the violet gray mass of the town.

For a moment Nicole stood looking down at the Mediterranean but there was nothing to do with that, even with her tireless hands. Presently Dick came out of his one-room house carrying a telescope and looked east toward Cannes. In a moment Nicole swam into his field of vision, whereupon he disappeared into his house and came out with a megaphone. He had many light mechanical devices.

“Nicole,” he shouted, “I forgot to tell you that as a final apostolic gesture I invited Mrs. Abrams, the woman with the white hair.”

“I suspected it. It’s an outrage.”

The ease with which her reply reached him seemed to belittle his megaphone, so she raised her voice and called, “Can you hear me?”

“Yes.” He lowered the megaphone and then raised it stubbornly. “I’m going to invite some more people too. I’m going to invite the two young men.”

“All right,” she agreed placidly.

“I want to give a really bad party. I mean it. I want to give a party where there’s a brawl and seductions and people going home with their feelings hurt and women passed out in the cabinet de toilette. You wait and see.”

He went back into his house and Nicole saw that one of his most characteristic moods was upon him, the excitement that swept everyone up into it and was inevitably followed by his own form of melancholy, which he never displayed but at which she guessed. This excitement about things reached an intensity out of proportion to their importance, generating a really extraordinary virtuosity with people. Save among a few of the tough-minded and perennially suspicious, he had the power of arousing a fascinated and uncritical love. The reaction came when he realized the waste and extravagance involved. He sometimes looked back with awe at the carnivals of affection he had given, as a general might gaze upon a massacre he had ordered to satisfy an impersonal blood lust.

But to be included in Dick Diver’s world for a while was a remarkable experience: people believed he made special reservations about them, recognizing the proud uniqueness of their destinies, buried under the compromises of how many years. He won everyone quickly with an exquisite consideration and a politeness that moved so fast and intuitively that it could be examined only in its effect. Then, without caution, lest the first bloom of the relation wither, he opened the gate to his amusing world. So long as they subscribed to it completely, their happiness was his preoccupation, but at the first flicker of doubt as to its all-inclusiveness he evaporated before their eyes, leaving little communicable memory of what he had said or done.

At eight-thirty that evening he came out to meet his first guests, his coat carried rather ceremoniously, rather promisingly, in his hand, like a toreador’s cape. It was characteristic that after greeting Rosemary and her mother he waited for them to speak first, as if to allow them the reassurance of their own voices in new surroundings.

To resume Rosemary’s point of view it should be said that, under the spell of the climb to Tarmes and the fresher air, she and her mother looked about appreciatively. Just as the personal qualities of extraordinary people can make themselves plain in an unaccustomed change of expression, so the intensely calculated perfection of Villa Diana transpired all at once through such minute failures as the chance apparition of a maid in the background or the perversity of a cork. While the first guests arrived bringing with them the excitement of the night, the domestic activity of the day receded past them gently, symbolized by the Diver children and their governess still at supper on the terrace.

“What a beautiful garden!” Mrs. Speers exclaimed.

“Nicole’s garden,” said Dick. “She won’t let it alone--she nags it all the time, worries about its diseases. Any day now I expect to have her come down with Powdery Mildew or Fly Speck, or Late Blight.” He pointed his forefinger decisively at Rosemary, saying with a lightness seeming to conceal a paternal interest, “I’m going to save your reason--I’m going to give you a hat to wear on the beach.”

He turned them from the garden to the terrace, where he poured a cocktail. Earl Brady arrived, discovering Rosemary with surprise. His manner was softer than at the studio, as if his differentness had been put on at the gate, and Rosemary, comparing him instantly with Dick Diver, swung sharply toward the latter. In comparison Earl Brady seemed faintly gross, faintly ill-bred; once more, though, she felt an electric response to his person.

He spoke familiarly to the children who were getting up from their outdoor supper.

“Hello, Lanier, how about a song? Will you and Topsy sing me a song?”

“What shall we sing?” agreed the little boy, with the odd chanting accent of American children brought up in France.

“That song about ‘Mon Ami Pierrot.’“

Brother and sister stood side by side without self-consciousness and their voices soared sweet and shrill upon the evening air.

“Au clair de la lune

Mon Ami Pierrot

Prête-moi ta plume

Pour écrire un mot

Ma chandelle est morte

Je n’ai plus de feu

Ouvre-moi ta porte

Pour l’amour de Dieu.”

The singing ceased and the children, their faces aglow with the late sunshine, stood smiling calmly at their success. Rosemary was thinking that the Villa Diana was the centre of the world. On such a stage some memorable thing was sure to happen. She lighted up higher as the gate tinkled open and the rest of the guests arrived in a body--the McKiscos, Mrs. Abrams, Mr. Dumphry, and Mr. Campion came up to the terrace.

Rosemary had a sharp feeling of disappointment--she looked quickly at Dick, as though to ask an explanation of this incongruous mingling. But there was nothing unusual in his expression. He greeted his new guests with a proud bearing and an obvious deference to their infinite and unknown possibilities. She believed in him so much that presently she accepted the rightness of the McKiscos’ presence as if she had expected to meet them all along.

“I’ve met you in Paris,” McKisco said to Abe North, who with his wife had arrived on their heels, “in fact I’ve met you twice.”

“Yes, I remember,” Abe said.

“Then where was it?” demanded McKisco, not content to let well enough alone.

“Why, I think--” Abe got tired of the game, “I can’t remember.”

The interchange filled a pause and Rosemary’s instinct was that something tactful should be said by somebody, but Dick made no attempt to break up the grouping formed by these late arrivals, not even to disarm Mrs. McKisco of her air of supercilious amusement. He did not solve this social problem because he knew it was not of importance at the moment and would solve itself. He was saving his newness for a larger effort, waiting a more significant moment for his guests to be conscious of a good time.

Rosemary stood beside Tommy Barban--he was in a particularly scornful mood and there seemed to be some special stimulus working upon him. He was leaving in the morning.

“Going home?”

“Home? I have no home. I am going to a war.”

“What war?”

“What war? Any war. I haven’t seen a paper lately but I suppose there’s a war--there always is.”

“Don’t you care what you fight for?”

“Not at all--so long as I’m well treated. When I’m in a rut I come to see the Divers, because then I know that in a few weeks I’ll want to go to war.”

Rosemary stiffened.

“You like the Divers,” she reminded him.

“Of course--especially her--but they make me want to go to war.”

She considered this, to no avail. The Divers made her want to stay near them forever.

“You’re half American,” she said, as if that should solve the problem.

“Also I’m half French, and I was educated in England and since I was eighteen I’ve worn the uniforms of eight countries. But I hope I did not give you the impression that I am not fond of the Divers--I am, especially of Nicole.”

“How could any one help it?” she said simply.

She felt far from him. The undertone of his words repelled her and she withdrew her adoration for the Divers from the profanity of his bitterness. She was glad he was not next to her at dinner and she was still thinking of his words “especially her” as they moved toward the table in the garden.

For a moment now she was beside Dick Diver on the path. Alongside his hard, neat brightness everything faded into the surety that he knew everything. For a year, which was forever, she had had money and a certain celebrity and contact with the celebrated, and these latter had presented themselves merely as powerful enlargements of the people with whom the doctor’s widow and her daughter had associated in a hôtel-pension in Paris. Rosemary was a romantic and her career had not provided many satisfactory opportunities on that score. Her mother, with the idea of a career for Rosemary, would not tolerate any such spurious substitutes as the excitations available on all sides, and indeed Rosemary was already beyond that--she was In the movies but not at all At them. So when she had seen approval of Dick Diver in her mother’s face it meant that he was “the real thing”; it meant permission to go as far as she could.

“I was watching you,” he said, and she knew he meant it. “We’ve grown very fond of you.”

“I fell in love with you the first time I saw you,” she said quietly. He pretended not to have heard, as if the compliment were purely formal.

“New friends,” he said, as if it were an important point, “can often have a better time together than old friends.”

With that remark, which she did not understand precisely, she found herself at the table, picked out by slowly emerging lights against the dark dusk. A chord of delight struck inside her when she saw that Dick had taken her mother on his right hand; for herself she was between Luis Campion and Brady.

Surcharged with her emotion she turned to Brady with the intention of confiding in him, but at her first mention of Dick a hard-boiled sparkle in his eyes gave her to understand that he refused the fatherly office. In turn she was equally firm when he tried to monopolize her hand, so they talked shop or rather she listened while he talked shop, her polite eyes never leaving his face, but her mind was so definitely elsewhere that she felt he must guess the fact. Intermittently she caught the gist of his sentences and supplied the rest from her subconscious, as one picks up the striking of a clock in the middle with only the rhythm of the first uncounted strokes lingering in the mind.

VII

In a pause Rosemary looked away and up the table where Nicole sat between Tommy Barban and Abe North, her chow’s hair foaming and frothing in the candlelight. Rosemary listened, caught sharply by the rich clipped voice in infrequent speech:

“The poor man,” Nicole exclaimed. “Why did you want to saw him in two?”

“Naturally I wanted to see what was inside a waiter. Wouldn’t you like to know what was inside a waiter?”

“Old menus,” suggested Nicole with a short laugh. “Pieces of broken china and tips and pencil stubs.”

“Exactly--but the thing was to prove it scientifically. And of course doing it with that musical saw would have eliminated any sordidness.”

“Did you intend to play the saw while you performed the operation?” Tommy inquired.

“We didn’t get quite that far. We were alarmed by the screams. We thought he might rupture something.”

“All sounds very peculiar to me,” said Nicole. “Any musician that’ll use another musician’s saw to--”

They had been at table half an hour and a perceptible change had set in--person by person had given up something, a preoccupation, an anxiety, a suspicion, and now they were only their best selves and the Divers’ guests. Not to have been friendly and interested would have seemed to reflect on the Divers, so now they were all trying, and seeing this, Rosemary liked everyone--except McKisco, who had contrived to be the unassimilated member of the party. This was less from ill will than from his determination to sustain with wine the good spirits he had enjoyed on his arrival. Lying back in his place between Earl Brady, to whom he had addressed several withering remarks about the movies, and Mrs. Abrams, to whom he said nothing, he stared at Dick Diver with an expression of devastating irony, the effect being occasionally interrupted by his attempts to engage Dick in a cater-cornered conversation across the table.

“Aren’t you a friend of Van Buren Denby?” he would say.

“I don’t believe I know him.”

“I thought you were a friend of his,” he persisted irritably.

When the subject of Mr. Denby fell of its own weight, he essayed other equally irrelative themes, but each time the very deference of Dick’s attention seemed to paralyze him, and after a moment’s stark pause the conversation that he had interrupted would go on without him. He tried breaking into other dialogues, but it was like continually shaking hands with a glove from which the hand had been withdrawn--so finally, with a resigned air of being among children, he devoted his attention entirely to the champagne.

Rosemary’s glance moved at intervals around the table, eager for the others’ enjoyment, as if they were her future stepchildren. A gracious table light, emanating from a bowl of spicy pinks, fell upon Mrs. Abrams’ face, cooked to a turn in Veuve Cliquot, full of vigor, tolerance, adolescent good will; next to her sat Mr. Royal Dumphry, his girl’s comeliness less startling in the pleasure world of evening. Then Violet McKisco, whose prettiness had been piped to the surface of her, so that she ceased her struggle to make tangible to herself her shadowy position as the wife of an arriviste who had not arrived.

Then came Dick, with his arms full of the slack he had taken up from others, deeply merged in his own party.

Then her mother, forever perfect.

Then Barban talking to her mother with an urbane fluency that made Rosemary like him again. Then Nicole. Rosemary saw her suddenly in a new way and found her one of the most beautiful people she had ever known. Her face, the face of a saint, a viking Madonna, shone through the faint motes that snowed across the candlelight, drew down its flush from the wine-colored lanterns in the pine. She was still as still.

Abe North was talking to her about his moral code: “Of course I’ve got one,” he insisted, “--a man can’t live without a moral code. Mine is that I’m against the burning of witches. Whenever they burn a witch I get all hot under the collar.” Rosemary knew from Brady that he was a musician who after a brilliant and precocious start had composed nothing for seven years.

Next was Campion, managing somehow to restrain his most blatant effeminacy, and even to visit upon those near him a certain disinterested motherliness. Then Mary North with a face so merry that it was impossible not to smile back into the white mirrors of her teeth--the whole area around her parted lips was a lovely little circle of delight.

Finally Brady, whose heartiness became, moment by moment, a social thing instead of a crude assertion and reassertion of his own mental health, and his preservation of it by a detachment from the frailties of others.

Rosemary, as dewy with belief as a child from one of Mrs. Burnett’s vicious tracts, had a conviction of homecoming, of a return from the derisive and salacious improvisations of the frontier. There were fireflies riding on the dark air and a dog baying on some low and far-away ledge of the cliff. The table seemed to have risen a little toward the sky like a mechanical dancing platform, giving the people around it a sense of being alone with each other in the dark universe, nourished by its only food, warmed by its only lights. And, as if a curious hushed laugh from Mrs. McKisco were a signal that such a detachment from the world had been attained, the two Divers began suddenly to warm and glow and expand, as if to make up to their guests, already so subtly assured of their importance, so flattered with politeness, for anything they might still miss from that country well left behind. Just for a moment they seemed to speak to every one at the table, singly and together, assuring them of their friendliness, their affection. And for a moment the faces turned up toward them were like the faces of poor children at a Christmas tree. Then abruptly the table broke up--the moment when the guests had been daringly lifted above conviviality into the rarer atmosphere of sentiment, was over before it could be irreverently breathed, before they had half realized it was there.

But the diffused magic of the hot sweet South had withdrawn into them--the soft-pawed night and the ghostly wash of the Mediterranean far below--the magic left these things and melted into the two Divers and became part of them. Rosemary watched Nicole pressing upon her mother a yellow evening bag she had admired, saying, “I think things ought to belong to the people that like them”--and then sweeping into it all the yellow articles she could find, a pencil, a lipstick, a little note book, “because they all go together.”

Nicole disappeared and presently Rosemary noticed that Dick was no longer there; the guests distributed themselves in the garden or drifted in toward the terrace.

“Do you want,” Violet McKisco asked Rosemary, “to go to the bathroom?”

Not at that precise moment.

“I want,” insisted Mrs. McKisco, “to go to the bathroom.” As a frank outspoken woman she walked toward the house, dragging her secret after her, while Rosemary looked after with reprobation. Earl Brady proposed that they walk down to the sea wall but she felt that this was her time to have a share of Dick Diver when he reappeared, so she stalled, listening to McKisco quarrel with Barban.

“Why do you want to fight the Soviets?” McKisco said. “The greatest experiment ever made by humanity? And the Riff? It seems to me it would be more heroic to fight on the just side.”

“How do you find out which it is?” asked Barban dryly.

“Why--usually everybody intelligent knows.”

“Are you a Communist?”

“I’m a Socialist,” said McKisco, “I sympathize with Russia.”

“Well, I’m a soldier,” Barban answered pleasantly. “My business is to kill people. I fought against the Riff because I am a European, and I have fought the Communists because they want to take my property from me.”

“Of all the narrow-minded excuses,” McKisco looked around to establish a derisive liaison with some one else, but without success. He had no idea what he was up against in Barban, neither of the simplicity of the other man’s bag of ideas nor of the complexity of his training. McKisco knew what ideas were, and as his mind grew he was able to recognize and sort an increasing number of them--but faced by a man whom he considered “dumb,” one in whom he found no ideas he could recognize as such, and yet to whom he could not feel personally superior, he jumped at the conclusion that Barban was the end product of an archaic world, and as such, worthless. McKisco’s contacts with the princely classes in America had impressed upon him their uncertain and fumbling snobbery, their delight in ignorance and their deliberate rudeness, all lifted from the English with no regard paid to factors that make English philistinism and rudeness purposeful, and applied in a land where a little knowledge and civility buy more than they do anywhere else--an attitude which reached its apogee in the “Harvard manner” of about 1900. He thought that this Barban was of that type, and being drunk rashly forgot that he was in awe of him--this led up to the trouble in which he presently found himself.

Feeling vaguely ashamed for McKisco, Rosemary waited, placid but inwardly on fire, for Dick Diver’s return. From her chair at the deserted table with Barban, McKisco, and Abe she looked up along the path edged with shadowy myrtle and fern to the stone terrace, and falling in love with her mother’s profile against a lighted door, was about to go there when Mrs. McKisco came hurrying down from the house.

She exuded excitement. In the very silence with which she pulled out a chair and sat down, her eyes staring, her mouth working a little, they all recognized a person crop-full of news, and her husband’s “What’s the matter, Vi?” came naturally, as all eyes turned toward her.

“My dear--” she said at large, and then addressed Rosemary, “my dear--it’s nothing. I really can’t say a word.”

“You’re among friends,” said Abe.

“Well, upstairs I came upon a scene, my dears--”

Shaking her head cryptically she broke off just in time, for Tommy arose and addressed her politely but sharply:

“It’s inadvisable to comment on what goes on in this house.”

VIII

Violet breathed loud and hard once and with an effort brought another expression into her face.

Dick came finally and with a sure instinct he separated Barban and the McKiscos and became excessively ignorant and inquisitive about literature with McKisco--thus giving the latter the moment of superiority which he required. The others helped him carry lamps up--who would not be pleased at carrying lamps helpfully through the darkness? Rosemary helped, meanwhile responding patiently to Royal Dumphry’s inexhaustible curiosity about Hollywood.

Now--she was thinking--I’ve earned a time alone with him. He must know that because his laws are like the laws Mother taught me.

Rosemary was right--presently he detached her from the company on the terrace, and they were alone together, borne away from the house toward the seaside wall with what were less steps than irregularly spaced intervals through some of which she was pulled, through others blown.

They looked out over the Mediterranean. Far below, the last excursion boat from the Isles des Lerins floated across the bay like a Fourth-of-July balloon foot-loose in the heavens. Between the black isles it floated, softly parting the dark tide.

“I understand why you speak as you do of your mother,” he said. “Her attitude toward you is very fine, I think. She has a sort of wisdom that’s rare in America.”

“Mother is perfect,” she prayed.

“I was talking to her about a plan I have--she told me that how long you both stayed in France depended on you.”

On you, Rosemary all but said aloud.

“So since things are over down here--”

“Over?” she inquired.

“Well, this is over--this part of the summer is over. Last week Nicole’s sister left, to-morrow Tommy Barban leaves, Monday Abe and Mary North are leaving. Maybe we’ll have more fun this summer but this particular fun is over. I want it to die violently instead of fading out sentimentally--that’s why I gave this party. What I’m coming to is--Nicole and I are going up to Paris to see Abe North off for America--I wonder if you’d like to go with us.”

“What did Mother say?”

“She seemed to think it would be fine. She doesn’t want to go herself. She wants you to go alone.”

“I haven’t seen Paris since I’ve been grown,” said Rosemary. “I’d love to see it with you.”

“That’s nice of you.” Did she imagine that his voice was suddenly metallic? “Of course we’ve been excited about you from the moment you came on the beach. That vitality, we were sure it was professional--especially Nicole was. It’d never use itself up on any one person or group.”

Her instinct cried out to her that he was passing her along slowly toward Nicole and she put her own brakes on, saying with an equal harness:

“I wanted to know all of you too--especially you. I told you I fell in love with you the first time I saw you.”

She was right going at it that way. But the space between heaven and earth had cooled his mind, destroyed the impulsiveness that had led him to bring her here, and made him aware of the too obvious appeal, the struggle with an unrehearsed scene and unfamiliar words.

He tried now to make her want to go back to the house and it was difficult, and he did not quite want to lose her. She felt only the draft blowing as he joked with her good-humoredly.

“You don’t know what you want. You go and ask your mother what you want.”

She was stricken. She touched him, feeling the smooth cloth of his dark coat like a chasuble. She seemed about to fall to her knees--from that position she delivered her last shot.

“I think you’re the most wonderful person I ever met--except my mother.”

“You have romantic eyes.”

His laughter swept them on up toward the terrace where he delivered her to Nicole. . . .

Too soon it had become time to go and the Divers helped them all to go quickly. In the Divers’ big Isotta there would be Tommy Barban and his baggage--he was spending the night at the hotel to catch an early train--with Mrs. Abrams, the McKiscos and Campion. Earl Brady was going to drop Rosemary and her mother on his way to Monte Carlo, and Royal Dumphry rode with them because the Divers’ car was crowded. Down in the garden lanterns still glowed over the table where they had dined, as the Divers stood side by side in the gate, Nicole blooming away and filling the night with graciousness, and Dick bidding good-by to everyone by name. To Rosemary it seemed very poignant to drive away and leave them in their house. Again she wondered what Mrs. McKisco had seen in the bathroom.

IX

It was a limpid black night, hung as in a basket from a single dull star. The horn of the car ahead was muffled by the resistance of the thick air. Brady’s chauffeur drove slowly; the tail-light of the other car appeared from time to time at turnings--then not at all. But after ten minutes it came into sight again, drawn up at the side of the road. Brady’s chauffeur slowed up behind but immediately it began to roll forward slowly and they passed it. In the instant they passed it they heard a blur of voices from behind the reticence of the limousine and saw that the Divers’ chauffeur was grinning. Then they went on, going fast through the alternating banks of darkness and thin night, descending at last in a series of roller-coaster swoops, to the great bulk of Gausse’s hotel.

Rosemary dozed for three hours and then lay awake, suspended in the moonshine. Cloaked by the erotic darkness she exhausted the future quickly, with all the eventualities that might lead up to a kiss, but with the kiss itself as blurred as a kiss in pictures. She changed position in bed deliberately, the first sign of insomnia she had ever had, and tried to think with her mother’s mind about the question. In this process she was often acute beyond her experience, with remembered things from old conversations that had gone into her half-heard.

Rosemary had been brought up with the idea of work. Mrs. Speers had spent the slim leavings of the men who had widowed her on her daughter’s education, and when she blossomed out at sixteen with that extraordinary hair, rushed her to Aix-les-Bains and marched her unannounced into the suite of an American producer who was recuperating there. When the producer went to New York they went too. Thus Rosemary had passed her entrance examinations. With the ensuing success and the promise of comparative stability that followed, Mrs. Speers had felt free to tacitly imply tonight:

“You were brought up to work--not especially to marry. Now you’ve found your first nut to crack and it’s a good nut--go ahead and put whatever happens down to experience. Wound yourself or him--whatever happens it can’t spoil you because economically you’re a boy, not a girl.”

Rosemary had never done much thinking, save about the illimitability of her mother’s perfections, so this final severance of the umbilical cord disturbed her sleep. A false dawn sent the sky pressing through the tall French windows, and getting up she walked out on the terrace, warm to her bare feet. There were secret noises in the air, an insistent bird achieved an ill-natured triumph with regularity in the trees above the tennis court; footfalls followed a round drive in the rear of the hotel, taking their tone in turn from the dust road, the crushed-stone walk, the cement steps, and then reversing the process in going away. Beyond the inky sea and far up that high, black shadow of a hill lived the Divers. She thought of them both together, heard them still singing faintly a song like rising smoke, like a hymn, very remote in time and far away. Their children slept, their gate was shut for the night.

She went inside and dressing in a light gown and espadrilles went out her window again and along the continuous terrace toward the front door, going fast since she found that other private rooms, exuding sleep, gave upon it. She stopped at the sight of a figure seated on the wide white stairway of the formal entrance--then she saw that it was Luis Campion and that he was weeping.

He was weeping hard and quietly and shaking in the same parts as a weeping woman. A scene in a role she had played last year swept over her irresistibly and advancing she touched him on the shoulder. He gave a little yelp before he recognized her.

“What is it?” Her eyes were level and kind and not slanted into him with hard curiosity. “Can I help you?”

“Nobody can help me. I knew it. I have only myself to blame. It’s always the same.”

“What is it--do you want to tell me?”

He looked at her to see.

“No,” he decided. “When you’re older you’ll know what people who love suffer. The agony. It’s better to be cold and young than to love. It’s happened to me before but never like this--so accidental--just when everything was going well.”

His face was repulsive in the quickening light. Not by a flicker of her personality, a movement of the smallest muscle, did she betray her sudden disgust with whatever it was. But Campion’s sensitivity realized it and he changed the subject rather suddenly.

“Abe North is around here somewhere.”

“Why, he’s staying at the Divers’!”

“Yes, but he’s up--don’t you know what happened?”

A shutter opened suddenly in a room two stories above and an English voice spat distinctly:

“Will you kaindlay stup tucking!”

Rosemary and Luis Campion went humbly down the steps and to a bench beside the road to the beach.

“Then you have no idea what’s happened? My dear, the most extraordinary thing--” He was warming up now, hanging on to his revelation. “I’ve never seen a thing come so suddenly--I have always avoided violent people--they upset me so I sometimes have to go to bed for days.”

He looked at her triumphantly. She had no idea what he was talking about.

“My dear,” he burst forth, leaning toward her with his whole body as he touched her on the upper leg, to show it was no mere irresponsible venture of his hand--he was so sure of himself. “There’s going to be a duel.”

“Wh-at?”

“A duel with--we don’t know what yet.”

“Who’s going to duel?”

“I’ll tell you from the beginning.” He drew a long breath and then said, as if it were rather to her discredit but he wouldn’t hold it against her. “Of course, you were in the other automobile. Well, in a way you were lucky--I lost at least two years of my life, it came so suddenly.”

“What came?” she demanded.

“I don’t know what began it. First she began to talk--”

“Who?”

“Violet McKisco.” He lowered his voice as if there were people under the bench. “But don’t mention the Divers because he made threats against anybody who mentioned it.”

“Who did?”

“Tommy Barban, so don’t you say I so much as mentioned them. None of us ever found out anyhow what it was Violet had to say because he kept interrupting her, and then her husband got into it and now, my dear, we have the duel. This morning--at five o’clock--in an hour.” He sighed suddenly thinking of his own griefs. “I almost wish it were I. I might as well be killed now I have nothing to live for.” He broke off and rocked to and fro with sorrow.

Again the iron shutter parted above and the same British voice said:

“Rilly, this must stup immejetely.”

Simultaneously Abe North, looking somewhat distracted, came out of the hotel, perceived them against the sky, white over the sea. Rosemary shook her head warningly before he could speak and they moved another bench further down the road. Rosemary saw that Abe was a little tight.

“What are you doing up?” he demanded.

“I just got up.” She started to laugh, but remembering the voice above, she restrained herself.

“Plagued by the nightingale,” Abe suggested, and repeated, “probably plagued by the nightingale. Has this sewing-circle member told you what happened?”

Campion said with dignity:

“I only know what I heard with my own ears.”

He got up and walked swiftly away; Abe sat down beside Rosemary.

“Why did you treat him so badly?”

“Did I?” he asked surprised. “He’s been weeping around here all morning.”

“Well, maybe he’s sad about something.”

“Maybe he is.”

“What about a duel? Who’s going to duel? I thought there was something strange in that car. Is it true?”

“It certainly is coo-coo but it seems to be true.”

X

The trouble began at the time Earl Brady’s car passed the Divers’ car stopped on the road--Abe’s account melted impersonally into the thronged night--Violet McKisco was telling Mrs. Abrams something she had found out about the Divers--she had gone upstairs in their house and she had come upon something there which had made a great impression on her. But Tommy is a watch-dog about the Divers. As a matter of fact she is inspiring and formidable--but it’s a mutual thing, and the fact of The Divers together is more important to their friends than many of them realize. Of course it’s done at a certain sacrifice--sometimes they seem just rather charming figures in a ballet, and worth just the attention you give a ballet, but it’s more than that--you’d have to know the story. Anyhow Tommy is one of those men that Dick’s passed along to Nicole and when Mrs. McKisco kept hinting at her story, he called them on it. He said:

“Mrs. McKisco, please don’t talk further about Mrs. Diver.”

“I wasn’t talking to you,” she objected.

“I think it’s better to leave them out.”

“Are they so sacred?”

“Leave them out. Talk about something else.”

He was sitting on one of the two little seats beside Campion. Campion told me the story.

“Well, you’re pretty high-handed,” Violet came back.

You know how conversations are in cars late at night, some people murmuring and some not caring, giving up after the party, or bored or asleep. Well, none of them knew just what happened until the car stopped and Barban cried in a voice that shook everybody, a voice for cavalry.

“Do you want to step out here--we’re only a mile from the hotel and you can walk it or I’ll drag you there. You’ve got to shut up and shut your wife up!”

“You’re a bully,” said McKisco. “You know you’re stronger muscularly than I am. But I’m not afraid of you--what they ought to have is the code duello--”

There’s where he made his mistake because Tommy, being French, leaned over and clapped him one, and then the chauffeur drove on. That was where you passed them. Then the women began. That was still the state of things when the car got to the hotel.

Tommy telephoned some man in Cannes to act as second and McKisco said he wasn’t going to be seconded by Campion, who wasn’t crazy for the job anyhow, so he telephoned me not to say anything but to come right down. Violet McKisco collapsed and Mrs. Abrams took her to her room and gave her a bromide whereupon she fell comfortably asleep on the bed. When I got there I tried to argue with Tommy but the latter wouldn’t accept anything short of an apology and McKisco rather spunkily wouldn’t give it.

When Abe had finished Rosemary asked thoughtfully:

“Do the Divers know it was about them?”

“No--and they’re not ever going to know they had anything to do with it. That damn Campion had no business talking to you about it, but since he did--I told the chauffeur I’d get out the old musical saw if he opened his mouth about it. This fight’s between two men--what Tommy needs is a good war.”

“I hope the Divers don’t find out,” Rosemary said.

Abe peered at his watch.

“I’ve got to go up and see McKisco--do you want to come?--he feels sort of friendless--I bet he hasn’t slept.”

Rosemary had a vision of the desperate vigil that high-strung, badly organized man had probably kept. After a moment balanced between pity and repugnance she agreed, and full of morning energy, bounced upstairs beside Abe.

McKisco was sitting on his bed with his alcoholic combativeness vanished, in spite of the glass of champagne in his hand. He seemed very puny and cross and white. Evidently he had been writing and drinking all night. He stared confusedly at Abe and Rosemary and asked:

“Is it time?”

“No, not for half an hour.”

The table was covered with papers which he assembled with some difficulty into a long letter; the writing on the last pages was very large and illegible. In the delicate light of electric lamps fading, he scrawled his name at the bottom, crammed it into an envelope and handed it to Abe. “For my wife.”

“You better souse your head in cold water,” Abe suggested.

“You think I’d better?” inquired McKisco doubtfully. “I don’t want to get too sober.”

“Well, you look terrible now.”

Obediently McKisco went into the bathroom.

“I’m leaving everything in an awful mess,” he called. “I don’t know how Violet will get back to America. I don’t carry any insurance. I never got around to it.”

“Don’t talk nonsense, you’ll be right here eating breakfast in an hour.”

“Sure, I know.” He came back with his hair wet and looked at Rosemary as if he saw her for the first time. Suddenly tears stood in his eyes. “I never have finished my novel. That’s what makes me so sore. You don’t like me,” he said to Rosemary, “but that can’t be helped. I’m primarily a literary man.” He made a vague discouraged sound and shook his head helplessly. “I’ve made lots of mistakes in my life--many of them. But I’ve been one of the most prominent--in some ways--”

He gave this up and puffed at a dead cigarette.

“I do like you,” said Rosemary, “but I don’t think you ought to fight a duel.”

“Yeah, I should have tried to beat him up, but it’s done now. I’ve let myself be drawn into something that I had no right to be. I have a very violent temper--” He looked closely at Abe as if he expected the statement to be challenged. Then with an aghast laugh he raised the cold cigarette butt toward his mouth. His breathing quickened.

“The trouble was I suggested the duel--if Violet had only kept her mouth shut I could have fixed it. Of course even now I can just leave, or sit back and laugh at the whole thing--but I don’t think Violet would ever respect me again.”

“Yes, she would,” said Rosemary. “She’d respect you more.”

“No--you don’t know Violet. She’s very hard when she gets an advantage over you. We’ve been married twelve years, we had a little girl seven years old and she died and after that you know how it is. We both played around on the side a little, nothing serious but drifting apart--she called me a coward out there tonight.”

Troubled, Rosemary didn’t answer.

“Well, we’ll see there’s as little damage done as possible,” said Abe. He opened the leather case. “These are Barban’s duelling pistols--I borrowed them so you could get familiar with them. He carries them in his suitcase.” He weighed one of the archaic weapons in his hand. Rosemary gave an exclamation of uneasiness and McKisco looked at the pistols anxiously.

“Well--it isn’t as if we were going to stand up and pot each other with forty-fives,” he said.

“I don’t know,” said Abe cruelly; “the idea is you can sight better along a long barrel.”

“How about distance?” asked McKisco.

“I’ve inquired about that. If one or the other parties has to be definitely eliminated they make it eight paces, if they’re just good and sore it’s twenty paces, and if it’s only to vindicate their honor it’s forty paces. His second agreed with me to make it forty.”

“That’s good.”

“There’s a wonderful duel in a novel of Pushkin’s,” recollected Abe. “Each man stood on the edge of a precipice, so if he was hit at all he was done for.”

This seemed very remote and academic to McKisco, who stared at him and said, “What?”

“Do you want to take a quick dip and freshen up?”

“No--no, I couldn t swim.” He sighed. “I don’t see what it’s all about,” he said helplessly. “I don’t see why I’m doing it.”

It was the first thing he had ever done in his life. Actually he was one of those for whom the sensual world does not exist, and faced with a concrete fact he brought to it a vast surprise.

“We might as well be going,” said Abe, seeing him fail a little.

“All right.” He drank off a stiff drink of brandy, put the flask in his pocket, and said with almost a savage air: “What’ll happen if I kill him--will they throw me in jail?”

“I’ll run you over the Italian border.”

He glanced at Rosemary--and then said apologetically to Abe:

“Before we start there’s one thing I’d like to see you about alone.”

“I hope neither of you gets hurt,” Rosemary said. “I think it’s very foolish and you ought to try to stop it.”

XI

She found Campion downstairs in the deserted lobby.

“I saw you go upstairs,” he said excitedly. “Is he all right? When is the duel going to be?”

“I don’t know.” She resented his speaking of it as a circus, with McKisco as the tragic clown.

“Will you go with me?” he demanded, with the air of having seats. “I’ve hired the hotel car.”

“I don’t want to go.”

“Why not? I imagine it’ll take years off my life but I wouldn’t miss it for worlds. We could watch it from quite far away.”

“Why don’t you get Mr. Dumphry to go with you?”

His monocle fell out, with no whiskers to hide in--he drew himself up.

“I never want to see him again.”

“Well, I’m afraid I can’t go. Mother wouldn’t like it.”

As Rosemary entered her room Mrs. Speers stirred sleepily and called to her:

“Where’ve you been?”

“I just couldn’t sleep. You go back to sleep, Mother.”

“Come in my room.” Hearing her sit up in bed, Rosemary went in and told her what had happened.

“Why don’t you go and see it?” Mrs. Speers suggested. “You needn’t go up close and you might be able to help afterwards.”

Rosemary did not like the picture of herself looking on and she demurred, but Mrs. Speer’s consciousness was still clogged with sleep and she was reminded of night calls to death and calamity when she was the wife of a doctor. “I like you to go places and do things on your own initiative without me--you did much harder things for Rainy’s publicity stunts.”

Still Rosemary did not see why she should go, but she obeyed the sure, clear voice that had sent her into the stage entrance of the Odeon in Paris when she was twelve and greeted her when she came out again.

She thought she was reprieved when from the steps she saw Abe and McKisco drive away--but after a moment the hotel car came around the corner. Squealing delightedly Luis Campion pulled her in beside him.

“I hid there because they might not let us come. I’ve got my movie camera, you see.”

She laughed helplessly. He was so terrible that he was no longer terrible, only dehumanized.

“I wonder why Mrs. McKisco didn’t like the Divers?” she said. “They were very nice to her.”

“Oh, it wasn’t that. It was something she saw. We never did find exactly what it was because of Barban.”

“Then that wasn’t what made you so sad.”

“Oh, no,” he said, his voice breaking, “that was something else that happened when we got back to the hotel. But now I don’t care--I wash my hands of it completely.”

They followed the other car east along the shore past Juan les Pins, where the skeleton of the new Casino was rising. It was past four and under a blue-gray sky the first fishing boats were creaking out into a glaucous sea. Then they turned off the main road and into the back country.

“It’s the golf course,” cried Campion, “I’m sure that’s where it’s going to be.”

He was right. When Abe’s car pulled up ahead of them the east was crayoned red and yellow, promising a sultry day. Ordering the hotel car into a grove of pines Rosemary and Campion kept in the shadow of a wood and skirted the bleached fairway where Abe and McKisco were walking up and down, the latter raising his head at intervals like a rabbit scenting. Presently there were moving figures over by a farther tee and the watchers made out Barban and his French second--the latter carried the box of pistols under his arm.

Somewhat appalled, McKisco slipped behind Abe and took a long swallow of brandy. He walked on choking and would have marched directly up into the other party, but Abe stopped him and went forward to talk to the Frenchman. The sun was over the horizon.

Campion grabbed Rosemary’s arm.

“I can’t stand it,” he squeaked, almost voiceless. “It’s too much. This will cost me--”

“Let go,” Rosemary said peremptorily. She breathed a frantic prayer in French.

The principals faced each other, Barban with the sleeve rolled up from his arm. His eyes gleamed restlessly in the sun, but his motion was deliberate as he wiped his palm on the seam of his trousers. McKisco, reckless with brandy, pursed his lips in a whistle and pointed his long nose about nonchalantly, until Abe stepped forward with a handkerchief in his hand. The French second stood with his face turned away. Rosemary caught her breath in terrible pity and gritted her teeth with hatred for Barban; then:

“One--two--three!” Abe counted in a strained voice.

They fired at the same moment. McKisco swayed but recovered himself. Both shots had missed.

“Now, that’s enough!” cried Abe.

The duellists walked in, and everyone looked at Barban inquiringly.

“I declare myself unsatisfied.”

“What? Sure you’re satisfied,” said Abe impatiently. “You just don’t know it.”

“Your man refuses another shot?”

“You’re damn right, Tommy. You insisted on this and my client went through with it.”

Tommy laughed scornfully.

“The distance was ridiculous,” he said. “I’m not accustomed to such farces--your man must remember he’s not now in America.”

“No use cracking at America,” said Abe rather sharply. And then, in a more conciliatory tone, “This has gone far enough, Tommy.” They parleyed briskly for a moment--then Barban nodded and bowed coldly to his late antagonist.

“No shake hand?” suggested the French doctor.

“They already know each other,” said Abe.

He turned to McKisco.

“Come on, let’s get out.”

As they strode off, McKisco, in exultation, gripped his arm.

“Wait a minute!” Abe said. “Tommy wants his pistol back. He might need it again.”

McKisco handed it over.

“To hell with him,” he said in a tough voice. “Tell him he can--”

“Shall I tell him you want another shot?”

“Well, I did it,” cried McKisco, as they went along. “And I did it pretty well, didn’t I? I wasn’t yellow.”

“You were pretty drunk,” said Abe bluntly.

“No, I wasn’t.”

“All right, then, you weren’t.”

“Why would it make any difference if I had a drink or so?”

As his confidence mounted he looked resentfully at Abe.

“What difference does that make?” he repeated.

“If you can’t see it, there’s no use going into it.”

“Don’t you know everybody was drunk all the time during the war?”

“Well, let’s forget it.”

But the episode was not quite over. There were urgent footsteps in the heather behind them and the doctor drew up alongside.

“Pardon, Messieurs,” he panted. “Voulez-vous regler mes honorairies? Naturellement c’est pour soins médicaux seulement. M. Barban n’a qu’un billet de mille et ne peut pas les régler et l’autre a laissé son porte-monnaie chez lui.”

“Trust a Frenchman to think of that,” said Abe, and then to the doctor. “Combien?”

“Let me pay this,” said McKisco.

“No, I’ve got it. We were all in about the same danger.”

Abe paid the doctor while McKisco suddenly turned into the bushes and was sick there. Then paler than before he strutted on with Abe toward the car through the now rosy morning.

Campion lay gasping on his back in the shrubbery, the only casualty of the duel, while Rosemary suddenly hysterical with laughter kept kicking at him with her espadrille. She did this persistently until she roused him--the only matter of importance to her now was that in a few hours she would see the person whom she still referred to in her mind as “the Divers” on the beach.

XII

They were at Voisins waiting for Nicole, six of them, Rosemary, the Norths, Dick Diver and two young French musicians. They were looking over the other patrons of the restaurant to see if they had repose--Dick said no American men had any repose, except himself, and they were seeking an example to confront him with. Things looked black for them--not a man had come into the restaurant for ten minutes without raising his hand to his face.

“We ought never to have given up waxed mustaches,” said Abe. “Nevertheless Dick isn’t the only man with repose--”

“Oh, yes, I am.”

“--but he may be the only sober man with repose.”

A well-dressed American had come in with two women who swooped and fluttered unselfconsciously around a table. Suddenly, he perceived that he was being watched--whereupon his hand rose spasmodically and arranged a phantom bulge in his necktie. In another unseated party a man endlessly patted his shaven cheek with his palm, and his companion mechanically raised and lowered the stub of a cold cigar. The luckier ones fingered eyeglasses and facial hair, the unequipped stroked blank mouths, or even pulled desperately at the lobes of their ears.

A well-known general came in, and Abe, counting on the man’s first year at West Point--that year during which no cadet can resign and from which none ever recovers--made a bet with Dick of five dollars.

His hands hanging naturally at his sides, the general waited to be seated. Once his arms swung suddenly backward like a jumper’s and Dick said, “Ah!” supposing he had lost control, but the general recovered and they breathed again--the agony was nearly over, the garçon was pulling out his chair . . .

With a touch of fury the conqueror shot up his hand and scratched his gray immaculate head.

“You see,” said Dick smugly, “I’m the only one.”

Rosemary was quite sure of it and Dick, realizing that he never had a better audience, made the group into so bright a unit that Rosemary felt an impatient disregard for all who were not at their table. They had been two days in Paris but actually they were still under the beach umbrella. When, as at the ball of the Corps des Pages the night before, the surroundings seemed formidable to Rosemary, who had yet to attend a Mayfair party in Hollywood, Dick would bring the scene within range by greeting a few people, a sort of selection--the Divers seemed to have a large acquaintance, but it was always as if the person had not seen them for a long, long time, and was utterly bowled over, “Why, where do you keep yourselves?”--and then re-create the unity of his own party by destroying the outsiders softly but permanently with an ironic coup de grâce. Presently Rosemary seemed to have known those people herself in some deplorable past, and then got on to them, rejected them, discarded them.

Their own party was overwhelmingly American and sometimes scarcely American at all. It was themselves he gave back to them, blurred by the compromises of how many years.

Into the dark, smoky restaurant, smelling of the rich raw foods on the buffet, slid Nicole’s sky-blue suit like a stray segment of the weather outside. Seeing from their eyes how beautiful she was, she thanked them with a smile of radiant appreciation. They were all very nice people for a while, very courteous and all that. Then they grew tired of it and they were funny and bitter, and finally they made a lot of plans. They laughed at things that they would not remember clearly afterward--laughed a lot and the men drank three bottles of wine. The trio of women at the table were representative of the enormous flux of American life. Nicole was the granddaughter of a self-made American capitalist and the granddaughter of a Count of the House of Lippe Weissenfeld. Mary North was the daughter of a journeyman paper-hanger and a descendant of President Tyler. Rosemary was from the middle of the middle class, catapulted by her mother onto the uncharted heights of Hollywood. Their point of resemblance to each other and their difference from so many American women, lay in the fact that they were all happy to exist in a man’s world--they preserved their individuality through men and not by opposition to them. They would all three have made alternatively good courtesans or good wives not by the accident of birth but through the greater accident of finding their man or not finding him.

So Rosemary found it a pleasant party, that luncheon, nicer in that there were only seven people, about the limit of a good party. Perhaps, too, the fact that she was new to their world acted as a sort of catalytic agent to precipitate out all their old reservations about one another. After the table broke up, a waiter directed Rosemary back into the dark hinterland of all French restaurants, where she looked up a phone number by a dim orange bulb, and called Franco-American Films. Sure, they had a print of “Daddy’s Girl”--it was out for the moment, but they would run it off later in the week for her at 341 Rue des Saintes Anges--ask for Mr. Crowder.

The semi-booth gave on the vestiaire and as Rosemary hung up the receiver she heard two low voices not five feet from her on the other side of a row of coats.

“--So you love me?”

“Oh, do I!”

It Was Nicole--Rosemary hesitated in the door of the booth--then she heard Dick say:

“I want you terribly--let’s go to the hotel now.” Nicole gave a little gasping sigh. For a moment the words conveyed nothing at all to Rosemary--but the tone did. The vast secretiveness of it vibrated to herself.

“I want you.”

“I’ll be at the hotel at four.”

Rosemary stood breathless as the voices moved away. She was at first even astonished--she had seen them in their relation to each other as people without personal exigencies--as something cooler. Now a strong current of emotion flowed through her, profound and unidentified. She did not know whether she was attracted or repelled, but only that she was deeply moved. It made her feel very alone as she went back into the restaurant, but it was touching to look in upon, and the passionate gratitude of Nicole’s “Oh, do I!” echoed in her mind. The particular mood of the passage she had witnessed lay ahead of her; but however far she was from it her stomach told her it was all right--she had none of the aversion she had felt in the playing of certain love scenes in pictures.

Being far away from it she nevertheless irrevocably participated in it now, and shopping with Nicole she was much more conscious of the assignation than Nicole herself. She looked at Nicole in a new way, estimating her attractions. Certainly she was the most attractive woman Rosemary had ever met--with her hardness, her devotions and loyalties, and a certain elusiveness, which Rosemary, thinking now through her mother’s middle-class mind, associated with her attitude about money. Rosemary spent money she had earned--she was here in Europe due to the fact that she had gone in the pool six times that January day with her temperature roving from 99° in the early morning to 103°, when her mother stopped it.

With Nicole’s help Rosemary bought two dresses and two hats and four pairs of shoes with her money. Nicole bought from a great list that ran two pages, and bought the things in the windows besides. Everything she liked that she couldn’t possibly use herself, she bought as a present for a friend. She bought colored beads, folding beach cushions, artificial flowers, honey, a guest bed, bags, scarfs, love birds, miniatures for a doll’s house and three yards of some new cloth the color of prawns. She bought a dozen bathing suits, a rubber alligator, a travelling chess set of gold and ivory, big linen handkerchiefs for Abe, two chamois leather jackets of kingfisher blue and burning bush from Hermes--bought all these things not a bit like a high-class courtesan buying underwear and jewels, which were after all professional equipment and insurance--but with an entirely different point of view. Nicole was the product of much ingenuity and toil. For her sake trains began their run at Chicago and traversed the round belly of the continent to California; chicle factories fumed and link belts grew link by link in factories; men mixed toothpaste in vats and drew mouthwash out of copper hogsheads; girls canned tomatoes quickly in August or worked rudely at the Five-and-Tens on Christmas Eve; half-breed Indians toiled on Brazilian coffee plantations and dreamers were muscled out of patent rights in new tractors--these were some of the people who gave a tithe to Nicole, and as the whole system swayed and thundered onward it lent a feverish bloom to such processes of hers as wholesale buying, like the flush of a fireman’s face holding his post before a spreading blaze. She illustrated very simple principles, containing in herself her own doom, but illustrated them so accurately that there was grace in the procedure, and presently Rosemary would try to imitate it.

It was almost four. Nicole stood in a shop with a love bird on her shoulder, and had one of her infrequent outbursts of speech.

“Well, what if you hadn’t gone in that pool that day--I sometimes wonder about such things. Just before the war we were in Berlin--I was thirteen, it was just before Mother died. My sister was going to a court ball and she had three of the royal princes on her dance card, all arranged by a chamberlain and everything. Half an hour before she was going to start she had a side ache and a high fever. The doctor said it was appendicitis and she ought to be operated on. But Mother had her plans made, so Baby went to the ball and danced till two with an ice pack strapped on under her evening dress. She was operated on at seven o’clock next morning.”

It was good to be hard, then; all nice people were hard on themselves. But it was four o’clock and Rosemary kept thinking of Dick waiting for Nicole now at the hotel. She must go there, she must not make him wait for her. She kept thinking, “Why don’t you go?” and then suddenly, “Or let me go if you don’t want to.” But Nicole went to one more place to buy corsages for them both and sent one to Mary North. Only then she seemed to remember and with sudden abstraction she signalled for a taxi.

“Good-by,” said Nicole. “We had fun, didn’t we?”

“Loads of fun,” said Rosemary. It was more difficult than she thought and her whole self protested as Nicole drove away.

XIII

Dick turned the corner of the traverse and continued along the trench walking on the duckboard. He came to a periscope, looked through it a moment; then he got up on the step and peered over the parapet. In front of him beneath a dingy sky was Beaumont Hamel; to his left the tragic hill of Thiepval. Dick stared at them through his field glasses, his throat straining with sadness.

He went on along the trench, and found the others waiting for him in the next traverse. He was full of excitement and he wanted to communicate it to them, to make them understand about this, though actually Abe North had seen battle service and he had not.

“This land here cost twenty lives a foot that summer,” he said to Rosemary. She looked out obediently at the rather bare green plain with its low trees of six years’ growth. If Dick had added that they were now being shelled she would have believed him that afternoon. Her love had reached a point where now at last she was beginning to be unhappy, to be desperate. She didn’t know what to do--she wanted to talk to her mother.

“There are lots of people dead since and we’ll all be dead soon,” said Abe consolingly.

Rosemary waited tensely for Dick to continue.

“See that little stream--we could walk to it in two minutes. It took the British a month to walk to it--a whole empire walking very slowly, dying in front and pushing forward behind. And another empire walked very slowly backward a few inches a day, leaving the dead like a million bloody rugs. No Europeans will ever do that again in this generation.”

“Why, they’ve only just quit over in Turkey,” said Abe. “And in Morocco--”

“That’s different. This western-front business couldn’t be done again, not for a long time. The young men think they could do it but they couldn’t. They could fight the first Marne again but not this. This took religion and years of plenty and tremendous sureties and the exact relation that existed between the classes. The Russians and Italians weren’t any good on this front. You had to have a whole-souled sentimental equipment going back further than you could remember. You had to remember Christmas, and postcards of the Crown Prince and his fiancée, and little cafés in Valence and beer gardens in Unter den Linden and weddings at the mairie, and going to the Derby, and your grandfather’s whiskers.”

“General Grant invented this kind of battle at Petersburg in sixty-five.”

“No, he didn’t--he just invented mass butchery. This kind of battle was invented by Lewis Carroll and Jules Verne and whoever wrote Undine, and country deacons bowling and marraines in Marseilles and girls seduced in the back lanes of Wurtemburg and Westphalia. Why, this was a love battle--there was a century of middle-class love spent here. This was the last love battle.”

“You want to hand over this battle to D. H. Lawrence,” said Abe.

“All my beautiful lovely safe world blew itself up here with a great gust of high explosive love,” Dick mourned persistently. “Isn’t that true, Rosemary?”

“I don’t know,” she answered with a grave face. “You know everything.”

They dropped behind the others. Suddenly a shower of earth gobs and pebbles came down on them and Abe yelled from the next traverse:

“The war spirit’s getting into me again. I have a hundred years of Ohio love behind me and I’m going to bomb out this trench.” His head popped up over the embankment. “You’re dead--don’t you know the rules? That was a grenade.”

Rosemary laughed and Dick picked up a retaliatory handful of stones and then put them down.

“I couldn’t kid here,” he said rather apologetically. “The silver cord is cut and the golden bowl is broken and all that, but an old romantic like me can’t do anything about it.”

“I’m romantic too.”

They came out of the neat restored trench, and faced a memorial to the Newfoundland dead. Reading the inscription Rosemary burst into sudden tears. Like most women she liked to be told how she should feel, and she liked Dick’s telling her which things were ludicrous and which things were sad. But most of all she wanted him to know how she loved him, now that the fact was upsetting everything, now that she was walking over the battlefield in a thrilling dream.

After that they got in their car and started back toward Amiens. A thin warm rain was falling on the new scrubby woods and underbrush and they passed great funeral pyres of sorted duds, shells, bombs, grenades, and equipment, helmets, bayonets, gun stocks and rotten leather, abandoned six years in the ground. And suddenly around a bend the white caps of a great sea of graves. Dick asked the chauffeur to stop.

“There’s that girl--and she still has her wreath.”

They watched as he got out and went over to the girl, who stood uncertainly by the gate with a wreath in her hand. Her taxi waited. She was a red-haired girl from Tennessee whom they had met on the train this morning, come from Knoxville to lay a memorial on her brother’s grave. There were tears of vexation on her face.

“The War Department must have given me the wrong number,” she whimpered. “It had another name on it. I been lookin’ for it since two o’clock, and there’s so many graves.”

“Then if I were you I’d just lay it on any grave without looking at the name,” Dick advised her.

“You reckon that’s what I ought to do?”

“I think that’s what he’d have wanted you to do.”

It was growing dark and the rain was coming down harder.

She left the wreath on the first grave inside the gate, and accepted Dick’s suggestion that she dismiss her taxi-cab and ride back to Amiens with them.

Rosemary shed tears again when she heard of the mishap--altogether it had been a watery day, but she felt that she had learned something, though exactly what it was she did not know. Later she remembered all the hours of the afternoon as happy--one of those uneventful times that seem at the moment only a link between past and future pleasure but turn out to have been the pleasure itself.

Amiens was an echoing purple town, still sad with the war, as some railroad stations were:--the Gare du Nord and Waterloo station in London. In the daytime one is deflated by such towns, with their little trolley cars of twenty years ago crossing the great gray cobble-stoned squares in front of the cathedral, and the very weather seems to have a quality of the past, faded weather like that of old photographs. But after dark all that is most satisfactory in French life swims back into the picture--the sprightly tarts, the men arguing with a hundred Voilàs in the cafés, the couples drifting, head to head, toward the satisfactory inexpensiveness of nowhere. Waiting for the train they sat in a big arcade, tall enough to release the smoke and chatter and music upward and obligingly the orchestra launched into “Yes, We Have No Bananas,”--they clapped, because the leader looked so pleased with himself. The Tennessee girl forgot her sorrow and enjoyed herself, even began flirtations of tropical eye-rollings and pawings, with Dick and Abe. They teased her gently.

Then, leaving infinitesimal sections of Wurtemburgers, Prussian Guards, Chasseurs Alpins, Manchester mill hands and old Etonians to pursue their eternal dissolution under the warm rain, they took the train for Paris. They ate sandwiches of mortadel sausage and bel paese cheese made up in the station restaurant, and drank Beaujolais. Nicole was abstracted, biting her lip restlessly and reading over the guide-books to the battle-field that Dick had brought along--indeed, he had made a quick study of the whole affair, simplifying it always until it bore a faint resemblance to one of his own parties.

XIV

When they reached Paris Nicole was too tired to go on to the grand illumination at the Decorative Art Exposition as they had planned. They left her at the Hotel Roi George, and as she disappeared between the intersecting planes made by lobby lights of the glass doors, Rosemary’s oppression lifted. Nicole was a force--not necessarily well disposed or predictable like her mother--an incalculable force. Rosemary was somewhat afraid of her.

At eleven she sat with Dick and the Norths at a houseboat café just opened on the Seine. The river shimmered with lights from the bridges and cradled many cold moons. On Sundays sometimes when Rosemary and her mother had lived in Paris they had taken the little steamer up to Suresnes and talked about plans for the future. They had little money but Mrs. Speers was so sure of Rosemary’s beauty and had implanted in her so much ambition, that she was willing to gamble the money on “advantages”; Rosemary in turn was to repay her mother when she got her start. . . .

Since reaching Paris Abe North had had a thin vinous fur over him; his eyes were bloodshot from sun and wine. Rosemary realized for the first time that he was always stopping in places to get a drink, and she wondered how Mary North liked it. Mary was quiet, so quiet save for her frequent laughter that Rosemary had learned little about her. She liked the straight dark hair brushed back until it met some sort of natural cascade that took care of it--from time to time it eased with a jaunty slant over the corner of her temple, until it was almost in her eye when she tossed her head and caused it to fall sleek into place once more.

“We’ll turn in early to-night, Abe, after this drink.” Mary’s voice was light but it held a little flicker of anxiety. “You don’t want to be poured on the boat.”

“It’s pretty late now,” Dick said. “We’d all better go.”

The noble dignity of Abe’s face took on a certain stubbornness, and he remarked with determination:

“Oh, no.” He paused gravely. “Oh, no, not yet. We’ll have another bottle of champagne.”

“No more for me,” said Dick.

“It’s Rosemary I’m thinking of. She’s a natural alcoholic--keeps a bottle of gin in the bathroom and all that--her mother told me.”

He emptied what was left of the first bottle into Rosemary’s glass. She had made herself quite sick the first day in Paris with quarts of lemonade; after that she had taken nothing with them but now she raised the champagne and drank at it.

“But what’s this?” exclaimed Dick. “You told me you didn’t drink.”

“I didn’t say I was never going to.”

“What about your mother?”

“I’m just going to drink this one glass.” She felt some necessity for it. Dick drank, not too much, but he drank, and perhaps it would bring her closer to him, be a part of the equipment for what she had to do. She drank it quickly, choked and then said, “Besides, yesterday was my birthday--I was eighteen.”

“Why didn’t you tell us?” they said indignantly.

“I knew you’d make a fuss over it and go to a lot of trouble.” She finished the champagne. “So this is the celebration.”

“It most certainly is not,” Dick assured her. “The dinner tomorrow night is your birthday party and don’t forget it. Eighteen--why that’s a terribly important age.”

“I used to think until you’re eighteen nothing matters,” said Mary.

“That’s right,” Abe agreed. “And afterward it’s the same way.”

“Abe feels that nothing matters till he gets on the boat,” said Mary. “This time he really has got everything planned out when he gets to New York.” She spoke as though she were tired of saying things that no longer had a meaning for her, as if in reality the course that she and her husband followed, or failed to follow, had become merely an intention.

“He’ll be writing music in America and I’ll be working at singing in Munich, so when we get together again there’ll be nothing we can’t do.”

“That’s wonderful,” agreed Rosemary, feeling the champagne.

“Meanwhile, another touch of champagne for Rosemary. Then she’ll be more able to rationalize the acts of her lymphatic glands. They only begin to function at eighteen.”

Dick laughed indulgently at Abe, whom he loved, and in whom he had long lost hope: “That’s medically incorrect and we’re going.” Catching the faint patronage Abe said lightly:

“Something tells me I’ll have a new score on Broadway long before you’ve finished your scientific treatise.”

“I hope so,” said Dick evenly. “I hope so. I may even abandon what you call my ‘scientific treatise.’“

“Oh, Dick!” Mary’s voice was startled, was shocked. Rosemary had never before seen Dick’s face utterly expressionless; she felt that this announcement was something momentous and she was inclined to exclaim with Mary “Oh, Dick!”

But suddenly Dick laughed again, added to his remark “--abandon it for another one,” and got up from the table.

“But Dick, sit down. I want to know--”

“I’ll tell you some time. Good night, Abe. Good night, Mary.”

“Good night, dear Dick.” Mary smiled as if she were going to be perfectly happy sitting there on the almost deserted boat. She was a brave, hopeful woman and she was following her husband somewhere, changing herself to this kind of person or that, without being able to lead him a step out of his path, and sometimes realizing with discouragement how deep in him the guarded secret of her direction lay. And yet an air of luck clung about her, as if she were a sort of token. . . .

XV

“What is it you are giving up?” demanded Rosemary, facing Dick earnestly in the taxi.

“Nothing of importance.”

“Are you a scientist?”

“I’m a doctor of medicine.”

“Oh-h!” she smiled delightedly. “My father was a doctor too. Then why don’t you--” she stopped.

“There’s no mystery. I didn’t disgrace myself at the height of my career, and hide away on the Riviera. I’m just not practising. You can’t tell, I’ll probably practise again some day.”

Rosemary put up her face quietly to be kissed. He looked at her for a moment as if he didn’t understand. Then holding her in the hollow of his arm he rubbed his cheek against her cheek’s softness, and then looked down at her for another long moment.

“Such a lovely child,” he said gravely.

She smiled up at him; her hands playing conventionally with the lapels of his coat. “I’m in love with you and Nicole. Actually that’s my secret--I can’t even talk about you to anybody because I don’t want any more people to know how wonderful you are. Honestly--I love you and Nicole--I do.”

--So many times he had heard this--even the formula was the same.

Suddenly she came toward him, her youth vanishing as she passed inside the focus of his eyes and he had kissed her breathlessly as if she were any age at all. Then she lay back against his arm and sighed.

“I’ve decided to give you up,” she said.

Dick started--had he said anything to imply that she possessed any part of him?

“But that’s very mean,” he managed to say lightly, “just when I was getting interested.”

“I’ve loved you so--” As if it had been for years. She was weeping a little now. “I’ve loved you so-o-o.”

Then he should have laughed, but he heard himself saying, “Not only are you beautiful but you are somehow on the grand scale. Everything you do, like pretending to be in love or pretending to be shy gets across.”

In the dark cave of the taxi, fragrant with the perfume Rosemary had bought with Nicole, she came close again, clinging to him. He kissed her without enjoying it. He knew that there was passion there, but there was no shadow of it in her eyes or on her mouth; there was a faint spray of champagne on her breath. She clung nearer desperately and once more he kissed her and was chilled by the innocence of her kiss, by the glance that at the moment of contact looked beyond him out into the darkness of the night, the darkness of the world. She did not know yet that splendor is something in the heart; at the moment when she realized that and melted into the passion of the universe he could take her without question or regret.

Her room in the hotel was diagonally across from theirs and nearer the elevator. When they reached the door she said suddenly:

“I know you don’t love me--I don’t expect it. But you said I should have told you about my birthday. Well, I did, and now for my birthday present I want you to come into my room a minute while I tell you something. Just one minute.”

They went in and he closed the door, and Rosemary stood close to him, not touching him. The night had drawn the color from her face--she was pale as pale now, she was a white carnation left after a dance.

“When you smile--” He had recovered his paternal attitude, perhaps because of Nicole’s silent proximity, “I always think I’ll see a gap where you’ve lost some baby teeth.”

But he was too late--she came close up against him with a forlorn whisper.

“Take me.”

“Take you where?”

Astonishment froze him rigid.

“Go on,” she whispered. “Oh, please go on, whatever they do. I don’t care if I don’t like it--I never expected to--I’ve always hated to think about it but now I don’t. I want you to.”

She was astonished at herself--she had never imagined she could talk like that. She was calling on things she had read, seen, dreamed through a decade of convent hours. Suddenly she knew too that it was one of her greatest rôles and she flung herself into it more passionately.

“This is not as it should be,” Dick deliberated. “Isn’t it just the champagne? Let’s more or less forget it.”

“Oh, no, now. I want you to do it now, take me, show me, I’m absolutely yours and I want to be.”

“For one thing, have you thought how much it would hurt Nicole?”

“She won’t know--this won’t have anything to do with her.”

He continued kindly.

“Then there’s the fact that I love Nicole.”

“But you can love more than just one person, can’t you? Like I love Mother and I love you--more. I love you more now.”

“--the fourth place you’re not in love with me but you might be afterwards, and that would begin your life with a terrible mess.”

“No, I promise I’ll never see you again. I’ll get Mother and go to America right away.”

He dismissed this. He was remembering too vividly the youth and freshness of her lips. He took another tone.

“You’re just in that mood.”

“Oh, please, I don’t care even if I had a baby. I could go into Mexico like a girl at the studio. Oh, this is so different from anything I ever thought--I used to hate it when they kissed me seriously.” He saw she was still under the impression that it must happen. “Some of them had great big teeth, but you’re all different and beautiful. I want you to do it.”

“I believe you think people just kiss some way and you want me to kiss you.”

“Oh, don’t tease me--I’m not a baby. I know you’re not in love with me.” She was suddenly humble and quiet. “I didn’t expect that much. I know I must seem just nothing to you.”

“Nonsense. But you seem young to me.” His thoughts added, “--there’d be so much to teach you.”

Rosemary waited, breathing eagerly till Dick said: “And lastly things aren’t arranged so that this could be as you want.”

Her face drooped with dismay and disappointment and Dick said automatically, “We’ll have to simply--” He stopped himself, followed her to the bed, sat down beside her while she wept. He was suddenly confused, not about the ethics of the matter, for the impossibility of it was sheerly indicated from all angles but simply confused, and for a moment his usual grace, the tensile strength of his balance, was absent.

“I knew you wouldn’t,” she sobbed. “It was just a forlorn hope.”

He stood up.

“Good night, child. This is a damn shame. Let’s drop it out of the picture.” He gave her two lines of hospital patter to go to sleep on. “So many people are going to love you and it might be nice to meet your first love all intact, emotionally too. That’s an old-fashioned idea, isn’t it?” She looked up at him as he took a step toward the door; she looked at him without the slightest idea as to what was in his head, she saw him take another step in slow motion, turn and look at her again, and she wanted for a moment to hold him and devour him, wanted his mouth, his ears, his coat collar, wanted to surround him and engulf him; she saw his hand fall on the doorknob. Then she gave up and sank back on the bed. When the door closed she got up and went to the mirror, where she began brushing her hair, sniffling a little. One hundred and fifty strokes Rosemary gave it, as usual, then a hundred and fifty more. She brushed it until her arm ached, then she changed arms and went on brushing. . . .

XVI

She woke up cooled and shamed. The sight of her beauty in the mirror did not reassure her but only awakened the ache of yesterday and a letter, forwarded by her mother, from the boy who had taken her to the Yale prom last fall, which announced his presence in Paris was no help--all that seemed far away. She emerged from her room for the ordeal of meeting the Divers weighted with a double trouble. But it was hidden by a sheath as impermeable as Nicole’s when they met and went together to a series of fittings. It was consoling, though, when Nicole remarked, apropos of a distraught saleswoman: “Most people think everybody feels about them much more violently than they actually do--they think other people’s opinions of them swing through great arcs of approval or disapproval.” Yesterday in her expansiveness Rosemary would have resented that remark--to-day in her desire to minimize what had happened she welcomed it eagerly. She admired Nicole for her beauty and her wisdom, and also for the first time in her life she was jealous. Just before leaving Gausse’s hotel her mother had said in that casual tone, which Rosemary knew concealed her most significant opinions, that Nicole was a great beauty, with the frank implication that Rosemary was not. This did not bother Rosemary, who had only recently been allowed to learn that she was even personable; so that her prettiness never seemed exactly her own but rather an acquirement, like her French. Nevertheless, in the taxi she looked at Nicole, matching herself against her. There were all the potentialities for romantic love in that lovely body and in the delicate mouth, sometimes tight, sometimes expectantly half open to the world. Nicole had been a beauty as a young girl and she would be a beauty later when her skin stretched tight over her high cheekbones--the essential structure was there. She had been white-Saxon-blonde but she was more beautiful now that her hair had darkened than when it had been like a cloud and more beautiful than she.

“We lived there,” Rosemary suddenly pointed to a building in the Rue des Saints-Péres.

“That’s strange. Because when I was twelve Mother and Baby and I once spent a winter there,” and she pointed to a hotel directly across the street. The two dingy fronts stared at them, gray echoes of girlhood.

“We’d just built our Lake Forest house and we were economizing,” Nicole continued. “At least Baby and I and the governess economized and Mother travelled.”

“We were economizing too,” said Rosemary, realizing that the word meant different things to them.

“Mother always spoke of it very carefully as a small hotel--” Nicole gave her quick magnetic little laugh, “--I mean instead of saying a ‘cheap’ hotel. If any swanky friends asked us our address we’d never say, ‘We’re in a dingy little hole over in the apache quarter where we’re glad of running water,’--we’d say ‘We’re in a small hotel.’ As if all the big ones were too noisy and vulgar for us. Of course the friends always saw through us and told everyone about it, but Mother always said it showed we knew our way around Europe. She did, of course: she was born a German citizen. But her mother was American, and she was brought up in Chicago, and she was more American than European.”

They were meeting the others in two minutes, and Rosemary reconstructed herself once more as they got out of the taxi in the Rue Guynemer, across from the LuxembourgGardens. They were lunching in the Norths’ already dismantled apartment high above the green mass of leaves. The day seemed different to Rosemary from the day before--When she saw him face to face their eyes met and brushed like birds’ wings. After that everything was all right, everything was wonderful, she knew that he was beginning to fall in love with her. She felt wildly happy, felt the warm sap of emotion being pumped through her body. A cool, clear confidence deepened and sang in her. She scarcely looked at Dick but she knew everything was all right.

After luncheon the Divers and the Norths and Rosemary went to the Franco-American Films, to be joined by Collis Clay, her young man from New Haven, to whom she had telephoned. He was a Georgian, with the peculiarly regular, even stencilled ideas of Southerners who are educated in the North. Last winter she had thought him attractive--once they held hands in an automobile going from New Haven to New York; now he no longer existed for her.

In the projection room she sat between Collis Clay and Dick while the mechanic mounted the reels of Daddy’s Girl and a French executive fluttered about her trying to talk American slang. “Yes, boy,” he said when there was trouble with the projector, “I have not any benenas.” Then the lights went out, there was the sudden click and a flickering noise and she was alone with Dick at last. They looked at each other in the half darkness.

“Dear Rosemary,” he murmured. Their shoulders touched. Nicole stirred restlessly at the end of the row and Abe coughed convulsively and blew his nose; then they all settled down and the picture ran.

There she was--the school girl of a year ago, hair down her back and rippling out stiffly like the solid hair of a tanagra figure; there she was--so young and innocent--the product of her mother’s loving care; there she was--embodying all the immaturity of the race, cutting a new cardboard paper doll to pass before its empty harlot’s mind. She remembered how she had felt in that dress, especially fresh and new under the fresh young silk.

Daddy’s girl. Was it a ‘itty-bitty bravekins and did it suffer? Ooo-ooo-tweet, de tweetest thing, wasn’t she dest too tweet? Before her tiny fist the forces of lust and corruption rolled away; nay, the very march of destiny stopped; inevitable became evitable, syllogism, dialectic, all rationality fell away. Women would forget the dirty dishes at home and weep, even within the picture one woman wept so long that she almost stole the film away from Rosemary. She wept all over a set that cost a fortune, in a Duncan Phyfe dining-room, in an aviation port, and during a yacht-race that was only used in two flashes, in a subway and finally in a bathroom. But Rosemary triumphed. Her fineness of character, her courage and steadfastness intruded upon by the vulgarity of the world, and Rosemary showing what it took with a face that had not yet become mask-like--yet it was actually so moving that the emotions of the whole row of people went out to her at intervals during the picture. There was a break once and the light went on and after the chatter of applause Dick said to her sincerely: “I’m simply astounded. You’re going to be one of the best actresses on the stage.”

Then back to Daddy’s Girl: happier days now, and a lovely shot of Rosemary and her parent united at the last in a father complex so apparent that Dick winced for all psychologists at the vicious sentimentality. The screen vanished, the lights went on, the moment had come.

“I’ve arranged one other thing,” announced Rosemary to the company at large, “I’ve arranged a test for Dick.”

“A what?”

“A screen test, they’ll take one now.”

There was an awful silence--then an irrepressible chortle from the Norths. Rosemary watched Dick comprehend what she meant, his face moving first in an Irish way; simultaneously she realized that she had made some mistake in the playing of her trump and still she did not suspect that the card was at fault.

“I don’t want a test,” said Dick firmly; then, seeing the situation as a whole, he continued lightly, “Rosemary, I’m disappointed. The pictures make a fine career for a woman--but my God, they can’t photograph me. I’m an old scientist all wrapped up in his private life.”

Nicole and Mary urged him ironically to seize the opportunity; they teased him, both faintly annoyed at not having been asked for a sitting. But Dick closed the subject with a somewhat tart discussion of actors: “The strongest guard is placed at the gateway to nothing,” he said. “Maybe because the condition of emptiness is too shameful to be divulged.”

In the taxi with Dick and Collis Clay--they were dropping Collis, and Dick was taking Rosemary to a tea from which Nicole and the Norths had resigned in order to do the things Abe had left undone till the last--in the taxi Rosemary reproached him.

“I thought if the test turned out to be good I could take it to California with me. And then maybe if they liked it you’d come out and be my leading man in a picture.”

He was overwhelmed. “It was a darn sweet thought, but I’d rather look at you. You were about the nicest sight I ever looked at.”

“That’s a great picture,” said Collis. “I’ve seen it four times. I know one boy at New Haven who’s seen it a dozen times--he went all the way to Hartford to see it one time. And when I brought Rosemary up to New Haven he was so shy he wouldn’t meet her. Can you beat that? This little girl knocks them cold.”

Dick and Rosemary looked at each other, wanting to be alone, but Collis failed to understand.

“I’ll drop you where you’re going,” he suggested. “I’m staying at the Lutetia.”

“We’ll drop you,” said Dick.

“It’ll be easier for me to drop you. No trouble at all.”

“I think it will be better if we drop you.”

“But--” began Collis; he grasped the situation at last and began discussing with Rosemary when he would see her again.

Finally, he was gone, with the shadowy unimportance but the offensive bulk of the third party. The car stopped unexpectedly, unsatisfactorily, at the address Dick had given. He drew a long breath.

“Shall we go in?”

“I don’t care,” Rosemary said. “I’ll do anything you want.”

He considered.

“I almost have to go in--she wants to buy some pictures from a friend of mine who needs the money.”

Rosemary smoothed the brief expressive disarray of her hair.

“We’ll stay just five minutes,” he decided. “You’re not going to like these people.”

She assumed that they were dull and stereotyped people, or gross and drunken people, or tiresome, insistent people, or any of the sorts of people that the Divers avoided. She was entirely unprepared for the impression that the scene made on her.

XVII

It was a house hewn from the frame of Cardinal de Retz’s palace in the Rue Monsieur, but once inside the door there was nothing of the past, nor of any present that Rosemary knew. The outer shell, the masonry, seemed rather to enclose the future so that it was an electric-like shock, a definite nervous experience, perverted as a breakfast of oatmeal and hashish, to cross that threshold, if it could be so called, into the long hall of blue steel, silver-gilt, and the myriad facets of many oddly bevelled mirrors. The effect was unlike that of any part of the Decorative Arts Exhibition--for there were people in it, not in front of it. Rosemary had the detached false-and-exalted feeling of being on a set and she guessed that every one else present had that feeling too.

There were about thirty people, mostly women, and all fashioned by Louisa M. Alcott or Madame de Ségur; and they functioned on this set as cautiously, as precisely, as does a human hand picking up jagged broken glass. Neither individually nor as a crowd could they be said to dominate the environment, as one comes to dominate a work of art he may possess, no matter how esoteric, no one knew what this room meant because it was evolving into something else, becoming everything a room was not; to exist in it was as difficult as walking on a highly polished moving stairway, and no one could succeed at all save with the aforementioned qualities of a hand moving among broken glass--which qualities limited and defined the majority of those present.

These were of two sorts. There were the Americans and English who had been dissipating all spring and summer, so that now everything they did had a purely nervous inspiration. They were very quiet and lethargic at certain hours and then they exploded into sudden quarrels and breakdowns and seductions. The other class, who might be called the exploiters, was formed by the sponges, who were sober, serious people by comparison, with a purpose in life and no time for fooling. These kept their balance best in that environment, and what tone there was, beyond the apartment’s novel organization of light values, came from them.

The Frankenstein took down Dick and Rosemary at a gulp--it separated them immediately and Rosemary suddenly discovered herself to be an insincere little person, living all in the upper registers of her throat and wishing the director would come. There was however such a wild beating of wings in the room that she did not feel her position was more incongruous than any one else’s. In addition, her training told and after a series of semi-military turns, shifts, and marches she found herself presumably talking to a neat, slick girl with a lovely boy’s face, but actually absorbed by a conversation taking place on a sort of gun-metal ladder diagonally opposite her and four feet away.

There was a trio of young women sitting on the bench. They were all tall and slender with small heads groomed like manikins’ heads, and as they talked the heads waved gracefully about above their dark tailored suits, rather like long-stemmed flowers and rather like cobras’ hoods.

“Oh, they give a good show,” said one of them, in a deep rich voice. “Practically the best show in Paris--I’d be the last one to deny that. But after all--” She sighed. “Those phrases he uses over and over--’Oldest inhabitant gnawed by rodents.’ You laugh once.”

“I prefer people whose lives have more corrugated surfaces,” said the second, “and I don’t like her.”

“I’ve never really been able to get very excited about them, or their entourage either. Why, for example, the entirely liquid Mr. North?”

“He’s out,” said the first girl. “But you must admit that the party in question can be one of the most charming human beings you have ever met.”

It was the first hint Rosemary had had that they were talking about the Divers, and her body grew tense with indignation. But the girl talking to her, in the starched blue shirt with the bright blue eyes and the red cheeks and the very gray suit, a poster of a girl, had begun to play up. Desperately she kept sweeping things from between them, afraid that Rosemary couldn’t see her, sweeping them away until presently there was not so much as a veil of brittle humor hiding the girl, and with distaste Rosemary saw her plain.

“Couldn’t you have lunch, or maybe dinner, or lunch the day after?” begged the girl. Rosemary looked about for Dick, finding him with the hostess, to whom he had been talking since they came in. Their eyes met and he nodded slightly, and simultaneously the three cobra women noticed her; their long necks darted toward her and they fixed finely critical glances upon her. She looked back at them defiantly, acknowledging that she had heard what they said. Then she threw off her exigent vis-à-vis with a polite but clipped parting that she had just learned from Dick, and went over to join him. The hostess--she was another tall rich American girl, promenading insouciantly upon the national prosperity--was asking Dick innumerable questions about Gausse’s Hôtel, whither she evidently wanted to come, and battering persistently against his reluctance. Rosemary’s presence reminded her that she had been recalcitrant as a hostess and glancing about she said: “Have you met any one amusing, have you met Mr.--” Her eyes groped for a male who might interest Rosemary, but Dick said they must go. They left immediately, moving over the brief threshold of the future to the sudden past of the stone façade without.

“Wasn’t it terrible?” he said.

“Terrible,” she echoed obediently.

“Rosemary?”

She murmured, “What?” in an awed voice.

“I feel terribly about this.”

She was shaken with audibly painful sobs. “Have you got a handkerchief?” she faltered. But there was little time to cry, and lovers now they fell ravenously on the quick seconds while outside the taxi windows the green and cream twilight faded, and the fire-red, gas-blue, ghost-green signs began to shine smokily through the tranquil rain. It was nearly six, the streets were in movement, the bistros gleamed, the Place de la Concorde moved by in pink majesty as the cab turned north.

They looked at each other at last, murmuring names that were a spell. Softly the two names lingered on the air, died away more slowly than other words, other names, slower than music in the mind.

“I don’t know what came over me last night,” Rosemary said. “That glass of champagne? I’ve never done anything like that before.”

“You simply said you loved me.”

“I do love you--I can’t change that.” It was time for Rosemary to cry, so she cried a little in her handkerchief.

“I’m afraid I’m in love with you,” said Dick, “and that’s not the best thing that could happen.”

Again the names--then they lurched together as if the taxi had swung them. Her breasts crushed flat against him, her mouth was all new and warm, owned in common. They stopped thinking with an almost painful relief, stopped seeing; they only breathed and sought each other. They were both in the gray gentle world of a mild hangover of fatigue when the nerves relax in bunches like piano strings, and crackle suddenly like wicker chairs. Nerves so raw and tender must surely join other nerves, lips to lips, breast to breast. . . .

They were still in the happier stage of love. They were full of brave illusions about each other, tremendous illusions, so that the communion of self with self seemed to be on a plane where no other human relations mattered. They both seemed to have arrived there with an extraordinary innocence as though a series of pure accidents had driven them together, so many accidents that at last they were forced to conclude that they were for each other. They had arrived with clean hands, or so it seemed, after no traffic with the merely curious and clandestine.

But for Dick that portion of the road was short; the turning came before they reached the hotel.

“There’s nothing to do about it,” he said, with a feeling of panic. “I’m in love with you but it doesn’t change what I said last night.”

“That doesn’t matter now. I just wanted to make you love me--if you love me everything’s all right.”

“Unfortunately I do. But Nicole mustn’t know--she mustn’t suspect even faintly. Nicole and I have got to go on together. In a way that’s more important than just wanting to go on.”

“Kiss me once more.”

He kissed her, but momentarily he had left her.

“Nicole mustn’t suffer--she loves me and I love her--you understand that.”

She did understand--it was the sort of thing she understood well, not hurting people. She knew the Divers loved each other because it had been her primary assumption. She had thought however that it was a rather cooled relation, and actually rather like the love of herself and her mother. When people have so much for outsiders didn’t it indicate a lack of inner intensity?

“And I mean love,” he said, guessing her thoughts. “Active love--it’s more complicated than I can tell you. It was responsible for that crazy duel.”

“How did you know about the duel? I thought we were to keep it from you.”

“Do you think Abe can keep a secret?” He spoke with incisive irony. “Tell a secret over the radio, publish it in a tabloid, but never tell it to a man who drinks more than three or four a day.”

She laughed in agreement, staying close to him.

“So you understand my relations with Nicole are complicated. She’s not very strong--she looks strong but she isn’t. And this makes rather a mess.”

“Oh, say that later! But kiss me now--love me now. I’ll love you and never let Nicole see.”

“You darling.”

They reached the hotel and Rosemary walked a little behind him, to admire him, to adore him. His step was alert as if he had just come from some great doings and was hurrying on toward others. Organizer of private gaiety, curator of a richly incrusted happiness. His hat was a perfect hat and he carried a heavy stick and yellow gloves. She thought what a good time they would all have being with him to-night.

They walked upstairs--five flights. At the first landing they stopped and kissed; she was careful on the next landing, on the third more careful still. On the next--there were two more--she stopped half way and kissed him fleetingly good-by. At his urgency she walked down with him to the one below for a minute--and then up and up. Finally it was good-by with their hands stretching to touch along the diagonal of the banister and then the fingers slipping apart. Dick went back downstairs to make some arrangements for the evening--Rosemary ran to her room and wrote a letter to her mother; she was conscience-stricken because she did not miss her mother at all.

XVIII

Although the Divers were honestly apathetic to organized fashion, they were nevertheless too acute to abandon its contemporaneous rhythm and beat--Dick’s parties were all concerned with excitement, and a chance breath of fresh night air was the more precious for being experienced in the intervals of the excitement.

The party that night moved with the speed of a slapstick comedy. They were twelve, they were sixteen, they were quartets in separate motors bound on a quick Odyssey over Paris. Everything had been foreseen. People joined them as if by magic, accompanied them as specialists, almost guides, through a phase of the evening, dropped out and were succeeded by other people, so that it appeared as if the freshness of each one had been husbanded for them all day. Rosemary appreciated how different it was from any party in Hollywood, no matter how splendid in scale. There was, among many diversions, the car of the Shah of Persia. Where Dick had commandeered this vehicle, what bribery was employed, these were facts of irrelevance. Rosemary accepted it as merely a new facet of the fabulous, which for two years had filled her life. The car had been built on a special chassis in America. Its wheels were of silver, so was the radiator. The inside of the body was inlaid with innumerable brilliants which would be replaced with true gems by the court jeweller when the car arrived in Teheran the following week. There was only one real seat in back, because the Shah must ride alone, so they took turns riding in it and sitting on the marten fur that covered the floor.

But always there was Dick. Rosemary assured the image of her mother, ever carried with her, that never, never had she known any one so nice, so thoroughly nice as Dick was that night. She compared him with the two Englishmen, whom Abe addressed conscientiously as “Major Hengest and Mr. Horsa,” and with the heir to a Scandinavian throne and the novelist just back from Russia, and with Abe, who was desperate and witty, and with Collis Clay, who joined them somewhere and stayed along--and felt there was no comparison. The enthusiasm, the selflessness behind the whole performance ravished her, the technic of moving many varied types, each as immobile, as dependent on supplies of attention as an infantry battalion is dependent on rations, appeared so effortless that he still had pieces of his own most personal self for everyone.

--Afterward she remembered the times when she had felt the happiest. The first time was when she and Dick danced together and she felt her beauty sparkling bright against his tall, strong form as they floated, hovering like people in an amusing dream--he turned her here and there with such a delicacy of suggestion that she was like a bright bouquet, a piece of precious cloth being displayed before fifty eyes. There was a moment when they were not dancing at all, simply clinging together. Some time in the early morning they were alone, and her damp powdery young body came up close to him in a crush of tired cloth, and stayed there, crushed against a background of other people’s hats and wraps. . . .

The time she laughed most was later, when six of them, the best of them, noblest relics of the evening, stood in the dusky front lobby of the Ritz telling the night concierge that General Pershing was outside and wanted caviare and champagne. “He brooks no delay. Every man, every gun is at his service.” Frantic waiters emerged from nowhere, a table was set in the lobby, and Abe came in representing General Pershing while they stood up and mumbled remembered fragments of war songs at him. In the waiters’ injured reaction to this anti-climax they found themselves neglected, so they built a waiter trap--a huge and fantastic device constructed of all the furniture in the lobby and functioning like one of the bizarre machines of a Goldberg cartoon. Abe shook his head doubtfully at it.

“Perhaps it would be better to steal a musical saw and--”

“That’s enough,” Mary interrupted. “When Abe begins bringing up that it’s time to go home.” Anxiously she confided to Rosemary:

“I’ve got to get Abe home. His boat train leaves at eleven. It’s so important--I feel the whole future depends on his catching it, but whenever I argue with him he does the exact opposite.”

“I’ll try and persuade him,” offered Rosemary.

“Would you?” Mary said doubtfully. “Maybe you could.”

Then Dick came up to Rosemary:

“Nicole and I are going home and we thought you’d want to go with us.”

Her face was pale with fatigue in the false dawn. Two wan dark spots in her cheek marked where the color was by day.

“I can’t,” she said. “I promised Mary North to stay along with them--or Abe’ll never go to bed. Maybe you could do something.”

“Don’t you know you can’t do anything about people?” he advised her. “If Abe was my room-mate in college, tight for the first time, it’d be different. Now there’s nothing to do.”

“Well, I’ve got to stay. He says he’ll go to bed if we only come to the Halles with him,” she said, almost defiantly.

He kissed the inside of her elbow quickly.

“Don’t let Rosemary go home alone,” Nicole called to Mary as they left. “We feel responsible to her mother.”

--Later Rosemary and the Norths and a manufacturer of dolls’ voices from Newark and ubiquitous Collis and a big splendidly dressed oil Indian named George T. Horseprotection were riding along on top of thousands of carrots in a market wagon. The earth in the carrot beards was fragrant and sweet in the darkness, and Rosemary was so high up in the load that she could hardly see the others in the long shadow between infrequent street lamps. Their voices came from far off, as if they were having experiences different from hers, different and far away, for she was with Dick in her heart, sorry she had come with the Norths, wishing she was at the hotel and him asleep across the hall, or that he was here beside her with the warm darkness streaming down.

“Don’t come up,” she called to Collis, “the carrots will all roll.” She threw one at Abe who was sitting beside the driver, stiffly like an old man. . . .

Later she was homeward bound at last in broad daylight, with the pigeons already breaking over Saint-Sulpice. All of them began to laugh spontaneously because they knew it was still last night while the people in the streets had the delusion that it was bright hot morning.

“At last I’ve been on a wild party,” thought Rosemary, “but it’s no fun when Dick isn’t there.”

She felt a little betrayed and sad, but presently a moving object came into sight. It was a huge horse-chestnut tree in full bloom bound for the Champs Élysées, strapped now into a long truck and simply shaking with laughter--like a lovely person in an undignified position yet confident none the less of being lovely. Looking at it with fascination Rosemary identified herself with it, and laughed cheerfully with it, and everything all at once seemed gorgeous.

XIX

Abe left from the Gare Saint Lazare at eleven--he stood alone under the fouled glass dome, relic of the seventies, era of the CrystalPalace; his hands, of that vague gray color that only twenty-four hours can produce, were in his coat pockets to conceal the trembling fingers. With his hat removed it was plain that only the top layer of his hair was brushed back--the lower levels were pointed resolutely sidewise. He was scarcely recognizable as the man who had swum upon Gausse’s Beach a fortnight ago.

He was early; he looked from left to right with his eyes only; it would have taken nervous forces out of his control to use any other part of his body. New-looking baggage went past him; presently prospective passengers, with dark little bodies, were calling: “Jew-uls-Hoo-oo!” in dark piercing voices.

At the minute when he wondered whether or not he had time for a drink at the buffet, and began clutching at the soggy wad of thousand-franc notes in his pocket, one end of his pendulous glance came to rest upon the apparition of Nicole at the stairhead. He watched her--she was self-revelatory in her little expressions as people seem to some one waiting for them, who as yet is himself unobserved. She was frowning, thinking of her children, less gloating over them than merely animally counting them--a cat checking her cubs with a paw.

When she saw Abe, the mood passed out of her face; the glow of the morning skylight was sad, and Abe made a gloomy figure with dark circles that showed through the crimson tan under his eyes. They sat down on a bench.

“I came because you asked me,” said Nicole defensively. Abe seemed to have forgotten why he asked her and Nicole was quite content to look at the travellers passing by.

“That’s going to be the belle of your boat--that one with all the men to say good-by--you see why she bought that dress?” Nicole talked faster and faster. “You see why nobody else would buy it except the belle of the world cruise? See? No? Wake up! That’s a story dress--that extra material tells a story and somebody on world cruise would be lonesome enough to want to hear it.”

She bit close her last words; she had talked too much for her; and Abe found it difficult to gather from her serious set face that she had spoken at all. With an effort he drew himself up to a posture that looked as if he were standing up while he was sitting down.

“The afternoon you took me to that funny ball--you know, St. Genevieve’s--” he began.

“I remember. It was fun, wasn’t it?”

“No fun for me. I haven’t had fun seeing you this time. I’m tired of you both, but it doesn’t show because you’re even more tired of me--you know what I mean. If I had any enthusiasm, I’d go on to new people.”

There was a rough nap on Nicole’s velvet gloves as she slapped him back:

“Seems rather foolish to be unpleasant, Abe. Anyhow you don’t mean that. I can’t see why you’ve given up about everything.”

Abe considered, trying hard not to cough or blow his nose.

“I suppose I got bored; and then it was such a long way to go back in order to get anywhere.”

Often a man can play the helpless child in front of a woman, but he can almost never bring it off when he feels most like a helpless child.

“No excuse for it,” Nicole said crisply.

Abe was feeling worse every minute--he could think of nothing but disagreeable and sheerly nervous remarks. Nicole thought that the correct attitude for her was to sit staring straight ahead, hands in her lap. For a while there was no communication between them--each was racing away from the other, breathing only insofar as there was blue space ahead, a sky not seen by the other. Unlike lovers they possessed no past; unlike man and wife, they possessed no future; yet up to this morning Nicole had liked Abe better than any one except Dick--and he had been heavy, belly-frightened, with love for her for years.

“Tired of women’s worlds,” he spoke up suddenly.

“Then why don’t you make a world of your own?”

“Tired of friends. The thing is to have sycophants.”

Nicole tried to force the minute hand around on the station clock, but, “You agree?” he demanded.

“I am a woman and my business is to hold things together.”

“My business is to tear them apart.”

“When you get drunk you don’t tear anything apart except yourself,” she said, cold now, and frightened and unconfident. The station was filling but no one she knew came. After a moment her eyes fell gratefully on a tall girl with straw hair like a helmet, who was dropping letters in the mail slot.

“A girl I have to speak to, Abe. Abe, wake up! You fool!”

Patiently Abe followed her with his eyes. The woman turned in a startled way to greet Nicole, and Abe recognized her as some one he had seen around Paris. He took advantage of Nicole’s absence to cough hard and retchingly into his handkerchief, and to blow his nose loud. The morning was warmer and his underwear was soaked with sweat. His fingers trembled so violently that it took four matches to light a cigarette; it seemed absolutely necessary to make his way into the buffet for a drink, but immediately Nicole returned.

“That was a mistake,” she said with frosty humor. “After begging me to come and see her, she gave me a good snubbing. She looked at me as if I were rotted.” Excited, she did a little laugh, as with two fingers high in the scales. “Let people come to you.”

Abe recovered from a cigarette cough and remarked:

“Trouble is when you’re sober you don’t want to see anybody, and when you’re tight nobody wants to see you.”

“Who, me?” Nicole laughed again; for some reason the late encounter had cheered her.

“No--me.”

“Speak for yourself. I like people, a lot of people--I like--”

Rosemary and Mary North came in sight, walking slowly and searching for Abe, and Nicole burst forth grossly with “Hey! Hi! Hey!” and laughed and waved the package of handkerchiefs she had bought for Abe.

They stood in an uncomfortable little group weighted down by Abe’s gigantic presence: he lay athwart them like the wreck of a galleon, dominating with his presence his own weakness and self-indulgence, his narrowness and bitterness. All of them were conscious of the solemn dignity that flowed from him, of his achievement, fragmentary, suggestive and surpassed. But they were frightened at his survivant will, once a will to live, now become a will to die.

Dick Diver came and brought with him a fine glowing surface on which the three women sprang like monkeys with cries of relief, perching on his shoulders, on the beautiful crown of his hat or the gold head of his cane. Now, for a moment, they could disregard the spectacle of Abe’s gigantic obscenity. Dick saw the situation quickly and grasped it quietly. He pulled them out of themselves into the station, making plain its wonders. Nearby, some Americans were saying good-by in voices that mimicked the cadence of water running into a large old bathtub. Standing in the station, with Paris in back of them, it seemed as if they were vicariously leaning a little over the ocean, already undergoing a sea-change, a shifting about of atoms to form the essential molecule of a new people.

So the well-to-do Americans poured through the station onto the platforms with frank new faces, intelligent, considerate, thoughtless, thought-for. An occasional English face among them seemed sharp and emergent. When there were enough Americans on the platform the first impression of their immaculacy and their money began to fade into a vague racial dusk that hindered and blinded both them and their observers.

Nicole seized Dick’s arm crying, “Look!” Dick turned in time to see what took place in half a minute. At a Pullman entrance two cars off, a vivid scene detached itself from the tenor of many farewells. The young woman with the helmet-like hair to whom Nicole had spoken made an odd dodging little run away from the man to whom she was talking and plunged a frantic hand into her purse; then the sound of two revolver shots cracked the narrow air of the platform. Simultaneously the engine whistled sharply and the train began to move, momentarily dwarfing the shots in significance. Abe waved again from his window, oblivious to what had happened. But before the crowd closed in, the others had seen the shots take effect, seen the target sit down upon the platform.

Only after a hundred years did the train stop; Nicole, Mary, and Rosemary waited on the outskirts while Dick fought his way through. It was five minutes before he found them again--by this time the crowd had split into two sections, following, respectively, the man on a stretcher and the girl walking pale and firm between distraught gendarmes.

“It was Maria Wallis,” Dick said hurriedly. “The man she shot was an Englishman--they had an awful time finding out who, because she shot him through his identification card.” They were walking quickly from the train, swayed along with the crowd. “I found out what poste de police they’re taking her to so I’ll go there--”

“But her sister lives in Paris,” Nicole objected. “Why not phone her? Seems very peculiar nobody thought of that. She’s married to a Frenchman, and he can do more than we can.”

Dick hesitated, shook his head and started off.

“Wait!” Nicole cried after him. “That’s foolish--how can you do any good--with your French?”

“At least I’ll see they don’t do anything outrageous to her.”

“They’re certainly going to hold on to her,” Nicole assured him briskly. “She did shoot the man. The best thing is to phone right away to Laura--she can do more than we can.”

Dick was unconvinced--also he was showing off for Rosemary.

“You wait,” said Nicole firmly, and hurried off to a telephone booth.

“When Nicole takes things into her hands,” he said with affectionate irony, “there is nothing more to be done.”

He saw Rosemary for the first time that morning. They exchanged glances, trying to recognize the emotions of the day before. For a moment each seemed unreal to the other--then the slow warm hum of love began again.

“You like to help everybody, don’t you?” Rosemary said.

“I only pretend to.”

“Mother likes to help everybody--of course she can’t help as many people as you do.” She sighed. “Sometimes I think I’m the most selfish person in the world.”

For the first time the mention of her mother annoyed rather than amused Dick. He wanted to sweep away her mother, remove the whole affair from the nursery footing upon which Rosemary persistently established it. But he realized that this impulse was a loss of control--what would become of Rosemary’s urge toward him if, for even a moment, he relaxed. He saw, not without panic, that the affair was sliding to rest; it could not stand still, it must go on or go back; for the first time it occurred to him that Rosemary had her hand on the lever more authoritatively than he.

Before he had thought out a course of procedure, Nicole returned.

“I found Laura. It was the first news she had and her voice kept fading away and then getting loud again--as if she was fainting and then pulling herself together. She said she knew something was going to happen this morning.”

“Maria ought to be with Diaghileff,” said Dick in a gentle tone, in order to bring them back to quietude. “She has a nice sense of decor--not to say rhythm. Will any of us ever see a train pulling out without hearing a few shots?”

They bumped down the wide steel steps. “I’m sorry for the poor man,” Nicole said. “Course that’s why she talked so strange to me--she was getting ready to open fire.”

She laughed, Rosemary laughed too, but they were both horrified, and both of them deeply wanted Dick to make a moral comment on the matter and not leave it to them. This wish was not entirely conscious, especially on the part of Rosemary, who was accustomed to having shell fragments of such events shriek past her head. But a totality of shock had piled up in her too. For the moment, Dick was too shaken by the impetus of his newly recognized emotion to resolve things into the pattern of the holiday, so the women, missing something, lapsed into a vague unhappiness.

Then, as if nothing had happened, the lives of the Divers and their friends flowed out into the street.

However, everything had happened--Abe’s departure and Mary’s impending departure for Salzburg this afternoon had ended the time in Paris. Or perhaps the shots, the concussions that had finished God knew what dark matter, had terminated it. The shots had entered into all their lives: echoes of violence followed them out onto the pavement where two porters held a post-mortem beside them as they waited for a taxi.

“Tu as vu le revolver? Il était très petit, vraie perle--un jouet.”

“Mais, assez puissant!” said the other porter sagely. “Tu as vu sa chemise? Assez de sang pour se croire à la guerre.”

XX

In the square, as they came out, a suspended mass of gasoline exhaust cooked slowly in the July sun. It was a terrible thing--unlike pure heat it held no promise of rural escape but suggested only roads choked with the same foul asthma. During their luncheon, outdoors, across from the LuxembourgGardens, Rosemary had cramps and felt fretful and full of impatient lassitude--it was the foretaste of this that had inspired her self-accusation of selfishness in the station.

Dick had no suspicion of the sharpness of the change; he was profoundly unhappy and the subsequent increase of egotism tended momentarily to blind him to what was going on round about him, and deprive him of the long ground-swell of imagination that he counted on for his judgments.

After Mary North left them, accompanied by the Italian singing teacher who had joined them for coffee and was taking her to her train, Rosemary, too, stood up, bound for an engagement at her studio: “meet some officials.”

“And oh--” she proposed “--if Collis Clay, that Southern boy--if he comes while you are still sitting here, just tell him I couldn’t wait; tell him to call me to-morrow.”

Too insouciant, in reaction from the late disturbance, she had assumed the privileges of a child--the result being to remind the Divers of their exclusive love for their own children; Rosemary was sharply rebuked in a short passage between the women: “You’d better leave the message with a waiter,” Nicole’s voice was stern and unmodulated, “we’re leaving immediately.”

Rosemary got it, took it without resentment.

“I’ll let it go then. Good-by, you darlings.”

Dick asked for the check; the Divers relaxed, chewing tentatively on toothpicks.

“Well--” they said together.

He saw a flash of unhappiness on her mouth, so brief that only he would have noticed, and he could pretend not to have seen. What did Nicole think? Rosemary was one of a dozen people he had “worked over” in the past years: these had included a French circus clown, Abe and Mary North, a pair of dancers, a writer, a painter, a comedienne from the Grand Guignol, a half-crazy pederast from the Russian Ballet, a promising tenor they had staked to a year in Milan. Nicole well knew how seriously these people interpreted his interest and enthusiasm; but she realized also that, except while their children were being born, Dick had not spent a night apart from her since their marriage. On the other hand, there was a pleasingness about him that simply had to be used--those who possessed that pleasingness had to keep their hands in, and go along attaching people that they had no use to make of.

Now Dick hardened himself and let minutes pass without making any gesture of confidence, any representation of constantly renewed surprise that they were one together.

Collis Clay out of the South edged a passage between the closely packed tables and greeted the Divers cavalierly. Such salutations always astonished Dick--acquaintances saying “Hi!” to them, or speaking only to one of them. He felt so intensely about people that in moments of apathy he preferred to remain concealed; that one could parade a casualness into his presence was a challenge to the key on which he lived.

Collis, unaware that he was without a wedding garment, heralded his arrival with: “I reckon I’m late--the beyed has flown.” Dick had to wrench something out of himself before he could forgive him for not having first complimented Nicole.

She left almost immediately and he sat with Collis, finishing the last of his wine. He rather liked Collis--he was “post-war”; less difficult than most of the Southerners he had known at New Haven a decade previously. Dick listened with amusement to the conversation that accompanied the slow, profound stuffing of a pipe. In the early afternoon children and nurses were trekking into the Luxembourg Gardens; it was the first time in months that Dick had let this part of the day out of his hands.

Suddenly his blood ran cold as he realized the content of Collis’s confidential monologue.

“--she’s not so cold as you’d probably think. I admit I thought she was cold for a long time. But she got into a jam with a friend of mine going from New York to Chicago at Easter--a boy named Hillis she thought was pretty nutsey at New Haven--she had a compartment with a cousin of mine but she and Hillis wanted to be alone, so in the afternoon my cousin came and played cards in our compartment. Well, after about two hours we went back and there was Rosemary and Bill Hillis standing in the vestibule arguing with the conductor--Rosemary white as a sheet. Seems they locked the door and pulled down the blinds and I guess there was some heavy stuff going on when the conductor came for the tickets and knocked on the door. They thought it was us kidding them and wouldn’t let him in at first, and when they did, he was plenty sore. He asked Hillis if that was his compartment and whether he and Rosemary were married that they locked the door, and Hillis lost his temper trying to explain there was nothing wrong. He said the conductor had insulted Rosemary and he wanted him to fight, but that conductor could have made trouble--and believe me I had an awful time smoothing it over.”

With every detail imagined, with even envy for the pair’s community of misfortune in the vestibule, Dick felt a change taking place within him. Only the image of a third person, even a vanished one, entering into his relation with Rosemary was needed to throw him off his balance and send through him waves of pain, misery, desire, desperation. The vividly pictured hand on Rosemary’s cheek, the quicker breath, the white excitement of the event viewed from outside, the inviolable secret warmth within.

--Do you mind if I pull down the curtain?

--Please do. It’s too light in here.

Collis Clay was now speaking about fraternity politics at New Haven, in the same tone, with the same emphasis. Dick had gathered that he was in love with Rosemary in some curious way Dick could not have understood. The affair with Hillis seemed to have made no emotional impression on Collis save to give him the joyful conviction that Rosemary was “human.”

“Bones got a wonderful crowd,” he said. “We all did, as a matter of fact. New Haven’s so big now the sad thing is the men we have to leave out.”

--Do you mind if I pull down the curtain?

--Please do. It’s too light in here.

. . . Dick went over Paris to his bank--writing a check, he looked along the row of men at the desks deciding to which one he would present it for an O.K. As he wrote he engrossed himself in the material act, examining meticulously the pen, writing laboriously upon the high glass-topped desk. Once he raised glazed eyes to look toward the mail department, then glazed his spirit again by concentration upon the objects he dealt with.

Still he failed to decide to whom the check should be presented, which man in the line would guess least of the unhappy predicament in which he found himself and, also, which one would be least likely to talk. There was Perrin, the suave New Yorker, who had asked him to luncheons at the American Club, there was Casasus, the Spaniard, with whom he usually discussed a mutual friend in spite of the fact that the friend had passed out of his life a dozen years before; there was Muchhause, who always asked him whether he wanted to draw upon his wife’s money or his own.

As he entered the amount on the stub, and drew two lines under it, he decided to go to Pierce, who was young and for whom he would have to put on only a small show. It was often easier to give a show than to watch one.

He went to the mail desk first--as the woman who served him pushed up with her bosom a piece of paper that had nearly escaped the desk, he thought how differently women use their bodies from men. He took his letters aside to open: There was a bill for seventeen psychiatric books from a German concern, a bill from Brentano’s, a letter from Buffalo from his father, in a handwriting that year by year became more indecipherable; there was a card from Tommy Barban postmarked Fez and bearing a facetious communication; there were letters from doctors in Zurich, both in German; a disputed bill from a plasterer in Cannes; a bill from a furniture maker; a letter from the publisher of a medical journal in Baltimore, miscellaneous announcements and an invitation to a showing of pictures by an incipient artist; also there were three letters for Nicole, and a letter for Rosemary sent in his care.

--Do you mind if I pull down the curtain?

He went toward Pierce but he was engaged with a woman, and Dick saw with his heels that he would have to present his check to Casasus at the next desk, who was free.

“How are you, Diver?” Casasus was genial. He stood up, his mustache spreading with his smile. “We were talking about Featherstone the other day and I thought of you--he’s out in California now.”

Dick widened his eyes and bent forward a little.

“In California?”

“That’s what I heard.”

Dick held the check poised; to focus the attention of Casasus upon it he looked toward Pierce’s desk, holding the latter for a moment in a friendly eye-play conditioned by an old joke of three years before when Pierce had been involved with a Lithuanian countess. Pierce played up with a grin until Casasus had authorized the check and had no further recourse to detain Dick, whom he liked, than to stand up holding his pince-nez and repeat, “Yes, he’s in California.”

Meanwhile Dick had seen that Perrin, at the head of the line of desks, was in conversation with the heavyweight champion of the world; from a sidesweep of Perrin’s eye Dick saw that he was considering calling him over and introducing him, but that he finally decided against it.

Cutting across the social mood of Casasus with the intensity he had accumulated at the glass desk--which is to say he looked hard at the check, studying it, and then fixed his eyes on grave problems beyond the first marble pillar to the right of the banker’s head and made a business of shifting the cane, hat, and letters he carried--he said good-by and went out. He had long ago purchased the doorman; his taxi sprang to the curb.

“I want to go to the Films Par Excellence Studio--it’s on a little street in Passy. Go to the Muette. I’ll direct you from there.”

He was rendered so uncertain by the events of the last forty-eight hours that he was not even sure of what he wanted to do; he paid off the taxi at the Muette and walked in the direction of the studio, crossing to the opposite side of the street before he came to the building. Dignified in his fine clothes, with their fine accessories, he was yet swayed and driven as an animal. Dignity could come only with an overthrowing of his past, of the effort of the last six years. He went briskly around the block with the fatuousness of one of Tarkington’s adolescents, hurrying at the blind places lest he miss Rosemary’s coming out of the studio. It was a melancholy neighborhood. Next door to the place he saw a sign: “1000 chemises.” The shirts filled the window, piled, cravated, stuffed, or draped with shoddy grace on the showcase floor: “1000 chemises”--count them! On either side he read: “Papeterie,” “Pâtisserie,” “Solde,” “Réclame”--and Constance Talmadge in “Déjeuner de Soleil,” and farther away there were more sombre announcements: “Vêtements Ecclésiastiques,” “Déclaration de Décès” and “Pompes Funèbres.” Life and death.

He knew that what he was now doing marked a turning point in his life--it was out of line with everything that had preceded it--even out of line with what effect he might hope to produce upon Rosemary. Rosemary saw him always as a model of correctness--his presence walking around this block was an intrusion. But Dick’s necessity of behaving as he did was a projection of some submerged reality: he was compelled to walk there, or stand there, his shirt-sleeve fitting his wrist and his coat sleeve encasing his shirt-sleeve like a sleeve valve, his collar molded plastically to his neck, his red hair cut exactly, his hand holding his small briefcase like a dandy--just as another man once found it necessary to stand in front of a church in Ferrara, in sackcloth and ashes. Dick was paying some tribute to things unforgotten, unshriven, unexpurgated.

XXI

After three-quarters of an hour of standing around, he became suddenly involved in a human contact. It was just the sort of thing that was likely to happen to him when he was in the mood of not wanting to see any one. So rigidly did he sometimes guard his exposed self-consciousness that frequently he defeated his own purposes; as an actor who underplays a part sets up a craning forward, a stimulated emotional attention in an audience, and seems to create in others an ability to bridge the gap he has left open. Similarly we are seldom sorry for those who need and crave our pity--we reserve this for those who, by other means, make us exercise the abstract function of pity.

So Dick might, himself, have analyzed the incident that ensued. As he paced the Rue des Saintes-Anges he was spoken to by a thin-faced American, perhaps thirty, with an air of being scarred and a slight but sinister smile. As Dick gave him the light he requested, he placed him as one of a type of which he had been conscious since early youth--a type that loafed about tobacco stores with one elbow on the counter and watched, through heaven knew what small chink of the mind, the people who came in and out. Intimate to garages, where he had vague business conducted in undertones, to barber shops, to the lobbies of theatres--in such places, at any rate, Dick placed him. Sometimes the face bobbed up in one of Tad’s more savage cartoons--in boyhood Dick had often thrown an uneasy glance at the dim borderland of crime on which he stood.

“How do you like Paris, Buddy?”

Not waiting for an answer the man tried to fit in his footsteps with Dick’s: “Where you from?” he asked encouragingly.

“From Buffalo.”

“I’m from San Antone--but I been over here since the war.”

“You in the army?”

“I’ll say I was. Eighty-fourth Division--ever heard of that outfit?”

The man walked a little ahead of him and fixed him with eyes that were practically menacing.

“Staying in Paris awhile, Buddy? Or just passing through.”

“Passing through.”

“What hotel you staying at?”

Dick had begun laughing to himself--the party had the intention of rifling his room that night. His thoughts were read apparently without self-consciousness.

“With a build like yours you oughtn’t to be afraid of me, Buddy. There’s a lot of bums around just laying for American tourists, but you needn’t be afraid of me.”

Becoming bored, Dick stopped walking: “I just wonder why you’ve got so much time to waste.”

“I’m in business here in Paris.”

“In what line?”

“Selling papers.”

The contrast between the formidable manner and the mild profession was absurd--but the man amended it with:

“Don’t worry; I made plenty money last year--ten or twenty francs for a Sunny Times that cost six.”

He produced a newspaper clipping from a rusty wallet and passed it over to one who had become a fellow stroller--the cartoon showed a stream of Americans pouring from the gangplank of a liner freighted with gold.

“Two hundred thousand--spending ten million a summer.”

“What you doing out here in Passy?”

His companion looked around cautiously. “Movies,” he said darkly. “They got an American studio over there. And they need guys can speak English. I’m waiting for a break.”

Dick shook him off quickly and firmly.

It had become apparent that Rosemary either had escaped on one of his early circuits of the block or else had left before he came into the neighborhood; he went into the bistro on the corner, bought a lead disk and, squeezed in an alcove between the kitchen and the foul toilet, he called the Roi George. He recognized Cheyne-Stokes tendencies in his respiration--but like everything the symptom served only to turn him in toward his emotion. He gave the number of the hotel; then stood holding the phone and staring into the café; after a long while a strange little voice said hello.

“This is Dick--I had to call you.”

A pause from her--then bravely, and in key with his emotion: “I’m glad you did.”

“I came to meet you at your studio--I’m out in Passy across the way from it. I thought maybe we’d ride around through the Bois.”

“Oh, I only stayed there a minute! I’m so sorry.” A silence.

“Rosemary.”

“Yes, Dick.”

“Look, I’m in an extraordinary condition about you. When a child can disturb a middle-aged gent--things get difficult.”

“You’re not middle-aged, Dick--you’re the youngest person in the world.”

“Rosemary?” Silence while he stared at a shelf that held the humbler poisons of France--bottles of Otard, Rhum St. James, Marie Brizzard, Punch Orangeade, André Fernet Blanco, Cherry Rochet, and Armagnac.

“Are you alone?”

--Do you mind if I pull down the curtain?

“Who do you think I’d be with?”

“That’s the state I’m in. I’d like to be with you now.”

Silence, then a sigh and an answer. “I wish you were with me now.”

There was the hotel room where she lay behind a telephone number, and little gusts of music wailed around her--

“And two--for tea.

And me for you,

And you for me

Alow-own.”

There was the remembered dust of powder over her tan--when he kissed her face it was damp around the corners of her hair; there was the flash of a white face under his own, the arc of a shoulder.

“It’s impossible,” he said to himself. In a minute he was out in the street marching along toward the Muette, or away from it, his small brief-case still in his hand, his gold-headed stick held at a sword-like angle.

Rosemary returned to her desk and finished a letter to her mother.

“--I only saw him for a little while but I thought he was wonderful looking. I fell in love with him (Of course I Do Love Dick Best but you know what I mean). He really is going to direct the picture and is leaving immediately for Hollywood, and I think we ought to leave, too. Collis Clay has been here. I like him all right but have not seen much of him because of the Divers, who really are divine, about the Nicest People I ever Knew. I am feeling not very well to-day and am taking the Medicine, though see No need for it. I’m not even Going to Try to tell you All that’s Happened until I see You!!! So when you get this letter wire, wire, wire! Are you coming north or shall I come south with the Divers?”

At six Dick called Nicole.

“Have you any special plans?” he asked. “Would you like to do something quiet--dinner at the hotel and then a play?”

“Would you? I’ll do whatever you want. I phoned Rosemary a while ago and she’s having dinner in her room. I think this upset all of us, don’t you?”

“It didn’t upset me,” he objected. “Darling, unless you’re physically tired let’s do something. Otherwise we’ll get south and spend a week wondering why we didn’t see Boucher. It’s better than brooding--”

This was a blunder and Nicole took him up sharply.

“Brooding about what?”

“About Maria Wallis.”

She agreed to go to a play. It was a tradition between them that they should never be too tired for anything, and they found it made the days better on the whole and put the evenings more in order. When, inevitably, their spirits flagged they shifted the blame to the weariness and fatigue of others. Before they went out, as fine-looking a couple as could be found in Paris, they knocked softly at Rosemary’s door. There was no answer; judging that she was asleep they walked into a warm strident Paris night, snatching a vermouth and bitters in the shadow by Fouquet’s bar.

XXII

Nicole awoke late, murmuring something back into her dream before she parted her long lashes tangled with sleep. Dick’s bed was empty--only after a minute did she realize that she had been awakened by a knock at their salon door.

“Entrez!” she called, but there was no answer, and after a moment she slipped on a dressing-gown and went to open it. A sergent-de-ville confronted her courteously and stepped inside the door.

“Mr. Afghan North--he is here?”

“What? No--he’s gone to America.”

“When did he leave, Madame?”

“Yesterday morning.”

He shook his head and waved his forefinger at her in a quicker rhythm.

“He was in Paris last night. He is registered here but his room is not occupied. They told me I had better ask at this room.”

“Sounds very peculiar to me--we saw him off yesterday morning on the boat train.”

“Be that as it may, he has been seen here this morning. Even his carte d’identité has been seen. And there you are.”

“We know nothing about it,” she proclaimed in amazement.

He considered. He was an ill-smelling, handsome man.

“You were not with him at all last night?”

“But no.”

“We have arrested a Negro. We are convinced we have at last arrested the correct Negro.”

“I assure you that I haven’t an idea what you’re talking about. If it’s the Mr. Abraham North, the one we know, well, if he was in Paris last night we weren’t aware of it.”

The man nodded, sucked his upper lip, convinced but disappointed.

“What happened?” Nicole demanded.

He showed his palms, puffing out his closed mouth. He had begun to find her attractive and his eyes flickered at her.

“What do you wish, Madame? A summer affair. Mr. Afghan North was robbed and he made a complaint. We have arrested the miscreant. Mr. Afghan should come to identify him and make the proper charges.”

Nicole pulled her dressing-gown closer around her and dismissed him briskly. Mystified she took a bath and dressed. By this time it was after ten and she called Rosemary but got no answer--then she phoned the hotel office and found that Abe had indeed registered, at six-thirty this morning. His room, however, was still unoccupied. Hoping for a word from Dick she waited in the parlor of the suite; just as she had given up and decided to go out, the office called and announced:

“Meestaire Crawshow, un nègre.”

“On what business?” she demanded.

“He says he knows you and the doctaire. He says there is a Meestaire Freeman into prison that is a friend of all the world. He says there is injustice and he wishes to see Meestaire North before he himself is arrested.”

“We know nothing about it.” Nicole disclaimed the whole business with a vehement clap of the receiver. Abe’s bizarre reappearance made it plain to her how fatigued she was with his dissipation. Dismissing him from her mind she went out, ran into Rosemary at the dressmaker’s, and shopped with her for artificial flowers and all-colored strings of colored beads on the Rue de Rivoli. She helped Rosemary choose a diamond for her mother, and some scarfs and novel cigarette cases to take home to business associates in California. For her son she bought Greek and Roman soldiers, a whole army of them, costing over a thousand francs. Once again they spent their money in different ways and again Rosemary admired Nicole’s method of spending. Nicole was sure that the money she spent was hers--Rosemary still thought her money was miraculously lent to her and she must consequently be very careful of it.

It was fun spending money in the sunlight of the foreign city with healthy bodies under them that sent streams of color up to their faces; with arms and hands, legs and ankles that they stretched out confidently, reaching or stepping with the confidence of women lovely to men.

When they got back to the hotel and found Dick, all bright and new in the morning, both of them had a moment of complete childish joy.

He had just received a garbled telephone call from Abe who, so it appeared, had spent the forenoon in hiding.

“It was one of the most extraordinary telephone conversations I’ve ever held.”

Dick had talked not only to Abe but to a dozen others. On the phone these supernumeraries had been typically introduced as: “--man wants to talk to you is in the teput dome, well he says he was in it--what is it?

“Hey, somebody, shut-up--anyhow, he was in some shandel-scandal and he kaa possibly go home. My own personal is that--my personal is he’s had a--” Gulps sounded and thereafter what the party had, rested with the unknown.

The phone yielded up a supplementary offer:

“I thought it would appeal to you anyhow as a psychologist.” The vague personality who corresponded to this statement was eventually hung on to the phone; in the sequence he failed to appeal to Dick, as a psychologist, or indeed as anything else. Abe’s conversation flowed on as follows:

“Hello.”

“Well?”

“Well, hello.”

“Who are you?”

“Well.” There were interpolated snorts of laughter.

“Well, I’ll put somebody else on the line.”

Sometimes Dick could hear Abe’s voice, accompanied by scufflings, droppings of the receiver, far-away fragments such as, “No, I don’t, Mr. North. . . .” Then a pert decided voice had said: “If you are a friend of Mr. North you will come down and take him away.”

Abe cut in, solemn and ponderous, beating it all down with an overtone of earth-bound determination.

“Dick, I’ve launched a race riot in Montmartre. I’m going over and get Freeman out of jail. If a Negro from Copenhagen that makes shoe polish--hello, can you hear me--well, look, if anybody comes there--” Once again the receiver was a chorus of innumerable melodies.

“Why you back in Paris?” Dick demanded.

“I got as far as Evreux, and I decided to take a plane back so I could compare it with St. Sulpice. I mean I don’t intend to bring St. Sulpice back to Paris. I don’t even mean Baroque! I meant St. Germain. For God’s sake, wait a minute and I’ll put the chasseur on the wire.”

“For God’s sake, don’t.”

“Listen--did Mary get off all right?”

“Yes.”

“Dick, I want you to talk with a man I met here this morning, the son of a naval officer that’s been to every doctor in Europe. Let me tell you about him--”

Dick had rung off at this point--perhaps that was a piece of ingratitude for he needed grist for the grinding activity of his mind.

“Abe used to be so nice,” Nicole told Rosemary. “So nice. Long ago--when Dick and I were first married. If you had known him then. He’d come to stay with us for weeks and weeks and we scarcely knew he was in the house. Sometimes he’d play--sometimes he’d be in the library with a muted piano, making love to it by the hour--Dick, do you remember that maid? She thought he was a ghost and sometimes Abe used to meet her in the hall and moo at her, and it cost us a whole tea service once--but we didn’t care.”

So much fun--so long ago. Rosemary envied them their fun, imagining a life of leisure unlike her own. She knew little of leisure but she had the respect for it of those who have never had it. She thought of it as a resting, without realizing that the Divers were as far from relaxing as she was herself.

“What did this to him?” she asked. “Why does he have to drink?”

Nicole shook her head right and left, disclaiming responsibility for the matter: “So many smart men go to pieces nowadays.”

“And when haven’t they?” Dick asked. “Smart men play close to the line because they have to--some of them can’t stand it, so they quit.”

“It must lie deeper than that.” Nicole clung to her conversation; also she was irritated that Dick should contradict her before Rosemary. “Artists like--well, like Fernand don’t seem to have to wallow in alcohol. Why is it just Americans who dissipate?”

There were so many answers to this question that Dick decided to leave it in the air, to buzz victoriously in Nicole’s ears. He had become intensely critical of her. Though he thought she was the most attractive human creature he had ever seen, though he got from her everything he needed, he scented battle from afar, and subconsciously he had been hardening and arming himself, hour by hour. He was not given to self-indulgence and he felt comparatively graceless at this moment of indulging himself, blinding his eyes with the hope that Nicole guessed at only an emotional excitement about Rosemary. He was not sure--last night at the theatre she had referred pointedly to Rosemary as a child.

The trio lunched downstairs in an atmosphere of carpets and padded waiters, who did not march at the stomping quick-step of those men who brought good food to the tables whereon they had recently dined. Here there were families of Americans staring around at families of Americans, and trying to make conversation with one another.

There was a party at the next table that they could not account for. It consisted of an expansive, somewhat secretarial, would-you-mind-repeating young man, and a score of women. The women were neither young nor old nor of any particular social class; yet the party gave the impression of a unit, held more closely together for example than a group of wives stalling through a professional congress of their husbands. Certainly it was more of a unit than any conceivable tourist party.

An instinct made Dick suck back the grave derision that formed on his tongue; he asked the waiter to find out who they were.

“Those are the gold-star muzzers,” explained the waiter.

Aloud and in low voices they exclaimed. Rosemary’s eyes filled with tears.

“Probably the young ones are the wives,” said Nicole.

Over his wine Dick looked at them again; in their happy faces, the dignity that surrounded and pervaded the party, he perceived all the maturity of an older America. For a while the sobered women who had come to mourn for their dead, for something they could not repair, made the room beautiful. Momentarily, he sat again on his father’s knee, riding with Moseby while the old loyalties and devotions fought on around him. Almost with an effort he turned back to his two women at the table and faced the whole new world in which he believed.

--Do you mind if I pull down the curtain?

XXIII

Abe North was still in the Ritz bar, where he had been since nine in the morning. When he arrived seeking sanctuary the windows were open and great beams were busy at pulling up the dust from smoky carpets and cushions. Chasseurs tore through the corridors, liberated and disembodied, moving for the moment in pure space. The sit-down bar for women, across from the bar proper, seemed very small--it was hard to imagine what throngs it could accommodate in the afternoon.

The famous Paul, the concessionaire, had not arrived, but Claude, who was checking stock, broke off his work with no improper surprise to make Abe a pick-me-up. Abe sat on a bench against a wall. After two drinks he began to feel better--so much better that he mounted to the barber’s shop and was shaved. When he returned to the bar Paul had arrived--in his custom-built motor, from which he had disembarked correctly at the Boulevard des Capucines. Paul liked Abe and came over to talk.

“I was supposed to ship home this morning,” Abe said. “I mean yesterday morning, or whatever this is.”

“Why din you?” asked Paul.

Abe considered, and happened finally to a reason: “I was reading a serial in Liberty and the next installment was due here in Paris--so if I’d sailed I’d have missed it--then I never would have read it.”

“It must be a very good story.”

“It’s a terr-r-rible story.”

Paul arose chuckling and paused, leaning on the back of a chair:

“If you really want to get off, Mr. North, there are friends of yours going to-morrow on the France--Mister what is this name--and Slim Pearson. Mister--I’ll think of it--tall with a new beard.”

“Yardly,” Abe supplied.

“Mr. Yardly. They’re both going on the France.”

He was on his way to his duties but Abe tried to detain him: “If I didn’t have to go by way of Cherbourg. The baggage went that way.”

“Get your baggage in New York,” said Paul, receding.

The logic of the suggestion fitted gradually into Abe’s pitch--he grew rather enthusiastic about being cared for, or rather of prolonging his state of irresponsibility.

Other clients had meanwhile drifted in to the bar: first came a huge Dane whom Abe had somewhere encountered. The Dane took a seat across the room, and Abe guessed he would be there all the day, drinking, lunching, talking or reading newspapers. He felt a desire to out-stay him. At eleven the college boys began to step in, stepping gingerly lest they tear one another bag from bag. It was about then he had the chasseur telephone to the Divers; by the time he was in touch with them he was in touch also with other friends--and his hunch was to put them all on different phones at once--the result was somewhat general. From time to time his mind reverted to the fact that he ought to go over and get Freeman out of jail, but he shook off all facts as parts of the nightmare.

By one o’clock the bar was jammed; amidst the consequent mixture of voices the staff of waiters functioned, pinning down their clients to the facts of drink and money.

“That makes two stingers . . . and one more . . . two martinis and one . . . nothing for you, Mr. Quarterly . . . that makes three rounds. That makes seventy-five francs, Mr. Quarterly. Mr. Schaeffer said he had this--you had the last . . . I can only do what you say . . . thanks vera-much.”

In the confusion Abe had lost his seat; now he stood gently swaying and talking to some of the people with whom he had involved himself. A terrier ran a leash around his legs but Abe managed to extricate himself without upsetting and became the recipient of profuse apologies. Presently he was invited to lunch, but declined. It was almost Briglith, he explained, and there was something he had to do at Briglith. A little later, with the exquisite manners of the alcoholic that are like the manners of a prisoner or a family servant, he said good-by to an acquaintance, and turning around discovered that the bar’s great moment was over as precipitately as it had begun.

Across from him the Dane and his companions had ordered luncheon. Abe did likewise but scarcely touched it. Afterwards, he just sat, happy to live in the past. The drink made past happy things contemporary with the present, as if they were still going on, contemporary even with the future as if they were about to happen again.

At four the chasseur approached him:

“You wish to see a colored fellow of the name Jules Peterson?”

“God! How did he find me?”

“I didn’t tell him you were present.”

“Who did?” Abe fell over his glasses but recovered himself.

“Says he’s already been around to all the American bars and hotels.”

“Tell him I’m not here--” As the chasseur turned away Abe asked: “Can he come in here?”

“I’ll find out.”

Receiving the question Paul glanced over his shoulder; he shook his head, then seeing Abe he came over.

“I’m sorry; I can’t allow it.”

Abe got himself up with an effort and went out to the Rue Cambon.

XXIV

With his miniature leather brief-case in his hand Richard Diver walked from the seventh arrondisement--where he left a note for Maria Wallis signed “Dicole,” the word with which he and Nicole had signed communications in the first days of love--to his shirt-makers where the clerks made a fuss over him out of proportion to the money he spent. Ashamed at promising so much to these poor Englishmen, with his fine manners, his air of having the key to security, ashamed of making a tailor shift an inch of silk on his arm. Afterward he went to the bar of the Crillon and drank a small coffee and two fingers of gin.

As he entered the hotel the halls had seemed unnaturally bright; when he left he realized that it was because it had already turned dark outside. It was a windy four-o’clock night with the leaves on the Champs Élysées singing and failing, thin and wild. Dick turned down the Rue de Rivoli, walking two squares under the arcades to his bank where there was mail. Then he took a taxi and started up the Champs Élysées through the first patter of rain, sitting alone with his love.

Back at two o’clock in the Roi George corridor the beauty of Nicole had been to the beauty of Rosemary as the beauty of Leonardo’s girl was to that of the girl of an illustrator. Dick moved on through the rain, demoniac and frightened, the passions of many men inside him and nothing simple that he could see.

Rosemary opened her door full of emotions no one else knew of. She was now what is sometimes called a “little wild thing”--by twenty-four full hours she was not yet unified and she was absorbed in playing around with chaos; as if her destiny were a picture puzzle--counting benefits, counting hopes, telling off Dick, Nicole, her mother, the director she met yesterday, like stops on a string of beads.

When Dick knocked she had just dressed and been watching the rain, thinking of some poem, and of full gutters in Beverly Hills. When she opened the door she saw him as something fixed and Godlike as he had always been, as older people are to younger, rigid and unmalleable. Dick saw her with an inevitable sense of disappointment. It took him a moment to respond to the unguarded sweetness of her smile, her body calculated to a millimeter to suggest a bud yet guarantee a flower. He was conscious of the print of her wet foot on a rug through the bathroom door.

“Miss Television,” he said with a lightness he did not feel. He put his gloves, his brief-case on the dressing-table, his stick against the wall. His chin dominated the lines of pain around his mouth, forcing them up into his forehead and the corner of his eyes, like fear that cannot be shown in public.

“Come and sit on my lap close to me,” he said softly, “and let me see about your lovely mouth.”

She came over and sat there and while the dripping slowed down outside--drip--dri-i-ip, she laid her lips to the beautiful cold image she had created.

Presently she kissed him several times in the mouth, her face getting big as it came up to him; he had never seen anything so dazzling as the quality of her skin, and since sometimes beauty gives back the images of one’s best thoughts he thought of his responsibility about Nicole, and of the responsibility of her being two doors down across the corridor.

“The rain’s over,” he said. “Do you see the sun on the slate?”

Rosemary stood up and leaned down and said her most sincere thing to him:

“Oh, we’re such actors--you and I.”

She went to her dresser and the moment that she laid her comb flat against her hair there was a slow persistent knocking at the door.

They were shocked motionless; the knock was repeated insistently, and in the sudden realization that the door was not locked Rosemary finished her hair with one stroke, nodded at Dick who had quickly jerked the wrinkles out of the bed where they had been sitting, and started for the door. Dick said in quite a natural voice, not too loud:

“--so if you don’t feel up to going out, I’ll tell Nicole and we’ll have a very quiet last evening.”

The precautions were needless for the situation of the parties outside the door was so harassed as to preclude any but the most fleeting judgments on matters not pertinent to themselves. Standing there was Abe, aged by several months in the last twenty-four hours, and a very frightened, concerned colored man whom Abe introduced as Mr. Peterson of Stockholm.

“He’s in a terrible situation and it’s my fault,” said Abe. “We need some good advice.”

“Come in our rooms,” said Dick.

Abe insisted that Rosemary come too and they crossed the hall to the Divers’ suite. Jules Peterson, a small, respectable Negro, on the suave model that heels the Republican party in the border States, followed.

It appeared that the latter had been a legal witness to the early morning dispute in Montparnasse; he had accompanied Abe to the police station and supported his assertion that a thousand franc note had been seized out of his hand by a Negro, whose identification was one of the points of the case. Abe and Jules Peterson, accompanied by an agent of police, returned to the bistro and too hastily identified as the criminal a Negro, who, so it was established after an hour, had only entered the place after Abe left. The police had further complicated the situation by arresting the prominent Negro restaurateur, Freeman, who had only drifted through the alcoholic fog at a very early stage and then vanished. The true culprit, whose case, as reported by his friends, was that he had merely commandeered a fifty-franc note to pay for drinks that Abe had ordered, had only recently and in a somewhat sinister rôle, reappeared upon the scene.

In brief, Abe had succeeded in the space of an hour in entangling himself with the personal lives, consciences, and emotions of one Afro-European and three Afro-Americans inhabiting the French Latin quarter. The disentanglement was not even faintly in sight and the day had passed in an atmosphere of unfamiliar Negro faces bobbing up in unexpected places and around unexpected corners, and insistent Negro voices on the phone.

In person, Abe had succeeded in evading all of them, save Jules Peterson. Peterson was rather in the position of the friendly Indian who had helped a white. The Negroes who suffered from the betrayal were not so much after Abe as after Peterson, and Peterson was very much after what protection he might get from Abe.

Up in Stockholm Peterson had failed as a small manufacturer of shoe polish and now possessed only his formula and sufficient trade tools to fill a small box; however, his new protector had promised in the early hours to set him up in business in Versailles. Abe’s former chauffeur was a shoemaker there and Abe had handed Peterson two hundred francs on account.

Rosemary listened with distaste to this rigmarole; to appreciate its grotesquerie required a more robust sense of humor than hers. The little man with his portable manufactory, his insincere eyes that, from time to time, rolled white semicircles of panic into view; the figure of Abe, his face as blurred as the gaunt fine lines of it would permit--all this was as remote from her as sickness.

“I ask only a chance in life,” said Peterson with the sort of precise yet distorted intonation peculiar to colonial countries. “My methods are simple, my formula is so good that I was drove away from Stockholm, ruined, because I did not care to dispose of it.”

Dick regarded him politely--interest formed, dissolved, he turned to Abe:

“You go to some hotel and go to bed. After you’re all straight Mr. Peterson will come and see you.”

“But don’t you appreciate the mess that Peterson’s in?” Abe protested.

“I shall wait in the hall,” said Mr. Peterson with delicacy. “It is perhaps hard to discuss my problems in front of me.”

He withdrew after a short travesty of a French bow; Abe pulled himself to his feet with the deliberation of a locomotive.

“I don’t seem highly popular to-day.”

“Popular but not probable,” Dick advised him. “My advice is to leave this hotel--by way of the bar, if you want. Go to the Chambord, or if you’ll need a lot of service, go over to the Majestic.”

“Could I annoy you for a drink?”

“There’s not a thing up here,” Dick lied.

Resignedly Abe shook hands with Rosemary; he composed his face slowly, holding her hand a long time and forming sentences that did not emerge.

“You are the most--one of the most--”

She was sorry, and rather revolted at his dirty hands, but she laughed in a well-bred way, as though it were nothing unusual to her to watch a man walking in a slow dream. Often people display a curious respect for a man drunk, rather like the respect of simple races for the insane. Respect rather than fear. There is something awe-inspiring in one who has lost all inhibitions, who will do anything. Of course we make him pay afterward for his moment of superiority, his moment of impressiveness. Abe turned to Dick with a last appeal.

“If I go to a hotel and get all steamed and curry-combed, and sleep awhile, and fight off these Senegalese--could I come and spend the evening by the fireside?”

Dick nodded at him, less in agreement than in mockery and said: “You have a high opinion of your current capacities.”

“I bet if Nicole was here she’d let me come back.”

“All right.” Dick went to a trunk tray and brought a box to the central table; inside were innumerable cardboard letters.

“You can come if you want to play anagrams.”

Abe eyed the contents of the box with physical revulsion, as though he had been asked to eat them like oats.

“What are anagrams? Haven’t I had enough strange--”

“It’s a quiet game. You spell words with them--any word except alcohol.”

“I bet you can spell alcohol,” Abe plunged his hand among the counters. “Can I come back if I can spell alcohol?”

“You can come back if you want to play anagrams.”

Abe shook his head resignedly.

“If you’re in that frame of mind there’s no use--I’d just be in the way.” He waved his finger reproachfully at Dick. “But remember what George the third said, that if Grant was drunk he wished he would bite the other generals.”

With a last desperate glance at Rosemary from the golden corners of his eyes, he went out. To his relief Peterson was no longer in the corridor. Feeling lost and homeless he went back to ask Paul the name of that boat.

XXV

When he had tottered out, Dick and Rosemary embraced fleetingly. There was a dust of Paris over both of them through which they scented each other: the rubber guard on Dick’s fountain pen, the faintest odor of warmth from Rosemary’s neck and shoulders. For another half-minute Dick clung to the situation; Rosemary was first to return to reality.

“I must go, youngster,” she said.

They blinked at each other across a widening space, and Rosemary made an exit that she had learned young, and on which no director had ever tried to improve.

She opened the door of her room and went directly to her desk where she had suddenly remembered leaving her wristwatch. It was there; slipping it on she glanced down at the daily letter to her mother, finishing the last sentence in her mind. Then, rather gradually, she realized without turning about that she was not alone in the room.

In an inhabited room there are refracting objects only half noticed: varnished wood, more or less polished brass, silver and ivory, and beyond these a thousand conveyers of light and shadow so mild that one scarcely thinks of them as that, the tops of picture-frames, the edges of pencils or ash-trays, of crystal or china ornaments; the totality of this refraction--appealing to equally subtle reflexes of the vision as well as to those associational fragments in the subconscious that we seem to hang on to, as a glass-fitter keeps the irregularly shaped pieces that may do some time--this fact might account for what Rosemary afterward mystically described as “realizing” that there was some one in the room, before she could determine it. But when she did realize it she turned swift in a sort of ballet step and saw that a dead Negro was stretched upon her bed.

As she cried “aaouu!” and her still unfastened wristwatch banged against the desk she had the preposterous idea that it was Abe North. Then she dashed for the door and across the hall.

Dick was straightening up; he had examined the gloves worn that day and thrown them into a pile of soiled gloves in a corner of a trunk. He had hung up coat and vest and spread his shirt on another hanger--a trick of his own. “You’ll wear a shirt that’s a little dirty where you won’t wear a mussed shirt.” Nicole had come in and was dumping one of Abe’s extraordinary ash-trays into the waste-basket when Rosemary tore into the room.

“Dick! Dick! Come and see!”

Dick jogged across the hall into her room. He knelt to Peterson’s heart, and felt the pulse--the body was warm, the face, harassed and indirect in life, was gross and bitter in death; the box of materials was held under one arm but the shoe that dangled over the bedside was bare of polish and its sole was worn through. By French law Dick had no right to touch the body but he moved the arm a little to see something--there was a stain on the green coverlet, there would be faint blood on the blanket beneath.

Dick closed the door and stood thinking; he heard cautious steps in the corridor and then Nicole calling him by name. Opening the door he whispered: “Bring the couverture and top blanket from one of our beds--don’t let any one see you.” Then, noticing the strained look on her face, he added quickly, “Look here, you mustn’t get upset over this--it’s only some nigger scrap.”

“I want it to be over.”

The body, as Dick lifted it, was light and ill-nourished. He held it so that further hemorrhages from the wound would flow into the man’s clothes. Laying it beside the bed he stripped off the coverlet and top blanket and then opening the door an inch, listened--there was a clank of dishes down the hall followed by a loud patronizing “Merci, Madame,” but the waiter went in the other direction, toward the service stairway. Quickly Dick and Nicole exchanged bundles across the corridor; after spreading this covering on Rosemary’s bed, Dick stood sweating in the warm twilight, considering. Certain points had become apparent to him in the moment following his examination of the body; first, that Abe’s first hostile Indian had tracked the friendly Indian and discovered him in the corridor, and when the latter had taken desperate refuge in Rosemary’s room, had hunted down and slain him; second, that if the situation were allowed to develop naturally, no power on earth could keep the smear off Rosemary--the paint was scarcely dry on the Arbuckle case. Her contract was contingent upon an obligation to continue rigidly and unexceptionally as “Daddy’s Girl.”

Automatically Dick made the old motion of turning up his sleeves though he wore a sleeveless undershirt, and bent over the body. Getting a purchase on the shoulders of the coat he kicked open the door with his heel, and dragged the body quickly into a plausible position in the corridor. He came back into Rosemary’s room and smoothed back the grain of the plush floor rug. Then he went to the phone in his suite and called the manager-owner of the hotel.

“McBeth?--it’s Doctor Diver speaking--something very important. Are we on a more or less private line?”

It was good that he had made the extra effort which had firmly entrenched him with Mr. McBeth. Here was one use for all the pleasingness that Dick had expended over a large area he would never retrace. . . .

“Going out of the suite we came on a dead Negro . . . in the hall . . . no, no, he’s a civilian. Wait a minute now--I knew you didn’t want any guests to blunder on the body so I’m phoning you. Of course I must ask you to keep my name out of it. I don’t want any French red tape just because I discovered the man.”

What exquisite consideration for the hotel! Only because Mr. McBeth, with his own eyes, had seen these traits in Doctor Diver two nights before, could he credit the story without question.

In a minute Mr. McBeth arrived and in another minute he was joined by a gendarme. In the interval he found time to whisper to Dick, “You can be sure the name of any guest will be protected. I’m only too grateful to you for your pains.”

Mr. McBeth took an immediate step that may only be imagined, but that influenced the gendarme so as to make him pull his mustaches in a frenzy of uneasiness and greed. He made perfunctory notes and sent a telephone call to his post. Meanwhile with a celerity that Jules Peterson, as a business man, would have quite understood, the remains were carried into another apartment of one of the most fashionable hotels in the world.

Dick went back to his salon.

“What happened?” cried Rosemary. “Do all the Americans in Paris just shoot at each other all the time?”

“This seems to be the open season,” he answered. “Where’s Nicole?”

“I think she’s in the bathroom.”

She adored him for saving her--disasters that could have attended upon the event had passed in prophecy through her mind; and she had listened in wild worship to his strong, sure, polite voice making it all right. But before she reached him in a sway of soul and body his attention focussed on something else: he went into the bedroom and toward the bathroom. And now Rosemary, too, could hear, louder and louder, a verbal inhumanity that penetrated the keyholes and the cracks in the doors, swept into the suite and in the shape of horror took form again.

With the idea that Nicole had fallen in the bathroom and hurt herself, Rosemary followed Dick. That was not the condition of affairs at which she stared before Dick shouldered her back and brusquely blocked her view.

Nicole knelt beside the tub swaying sidewise and sidewise. “It’s you!” she cried, “--it’s you come to intrude on the only privacy I have in the world--with your spread with red blood on it. I’ll wear it for you--I’m not ashamed, though it was such a pity. On All Fools Day we had a party on the Zurichsee, and all the fools were there, and I wanted to come dressed in a spread but they wouldn’t let me--”

“Control yourself!”

“--so I sat in the bathroom and they brought me a domino and said wear that. I did. What else could I do?”

“Control yourself, Nicole!”

“I never expected you to love me--it was too late--only don’t come in the bathroom, the only place I can go for privacy, dragging spreads with red blood on them and asking me to fix them.”

“Control yourself. Get up--”

Rosemary, back in the salon, heard the bathroom door bang, and stood trembling: now she knew what Violet McKisco had seen in the bathroom at Villa Diana. She answered the ringing phone and almost cried with relief when she found it was Collis Clay, who had traced her to the Divers’ apartment. She asked him to come up while she got her hat, because she was afraid to go into her room alone.

BOOK 2

I

In the spring of 1917, when Doctor Richard Diver first arrived in Zurich, he was twenty-six years old, a fine age for a man, indeed the very acme of bachelorhood. Even in war-time days, it was a fine age for Dick, who was already too valuable, too much of a capital investment to be shot off in a gun. Years later it seemed to him that even in this sanctuary he did not escape lightly, but about that he never fully made up his mind--in 1917 he laughed at the idea, saying apologetically that the war didn’t touch him at all. Instructions from his local board were that he was to complete his studies in Zurich and take a degree as he had planned.

Switzerland was an island, washed on one side by the waves of thunder around Gorizia and on another by the cataracts along the Somme and the Aisne. For once there seemed more intriguing strangers than sick ones in the cantons, but that had to be guessed at--the men who whispered in the little cafés of Berne and Geneva were as likely to be diamond salesmen or commercial travellers. However, no one had missed the long trains of blinded or one-legged men, or dying trunks, that crossed each other between the bright lakes of Constance and Neuchâtel. In the beer-halls and shop-windows were bright posters presenting the Swiss defending their frontiers in 1914--with inspiring ferocity young men and old men glared down from the mountains at phantom French and Germans; the purpose was to assure the Swiss heart that it had shared the contagious glory of those days. As the massacre continued the posters withered away, and no country was more surprised than its sister republic when the United States bungled its way into the war.

Doctor Diver had seen around the edges of the war by that time: he was an Oxford Rhodes Scholar from Connecticut in 1914. He returned home for a final year at Johns Hopkins, and took his degree. In 1916 he managed to get to Vienna under the impression that, if he did not make haste, the great Freud would eventually succumb to an aeroplane bomb. Even then Vienna was old with death but Dick managed to get enough coal and oil to sit in his room in the Damenstiff Strasse and write the pamphlets that he later destroyed, but that, rewritten, were the backbone of the book he published in Zurich in 1920.

Most of us have a favorite, a heroic period, in our lives and that was Dick Diver’s. For one thing he had no idea that he was charming, that the affection he gave and inspired was anything unusual among healthy people. In his last year at New Haven some one referred to him as “lucky Dick”--the name lingered in his head.

“Lucky Dick, you big stiff,” he would whisper to himself, walking around the last sticks of flame in his room. “You hit it, my boy. Nobody knew it was there before you came along.”

At the beginning of 1917, when it was becoming difficult to find coal, Dick burned for fuel almost a hundred textbooks that he had accumulated; but only, as he laid each one on the fire, with an assurance chuckling inside him that he was himself a digest of what was within the book, that he could brief it five years from now, if it deserved to be briefed. This went on at any odd hour, if necessary, with a floor rug over his shoulders, with the fine quiet of the scholar which is nearest of all things to heavenly peace--but which, as will presently be told, had to end.

For its temporary continuance he thanked his body that had done the flying rings at New Haven, and now swam in the winter Danube. With Elkins, second secretary at the Embassy, he shared an apartment, and there were two nice girl visitors--which was that and not too much of it, nor too much of the Embassy either. His contact with Ed Elkins aroused in him a first faint doubt as to the quality of his mental processes; he could not feel that they were profoundly different from the thinking of Elkins--Elkins, who would name you all the quarterbacks in New Haven for thirty years.

“--And Lucky Dick can’t be one of these clever men; he must be less intact, even faintly destroyed. If life won’t do it for him it’s not a substitute to get a disease, or a broken heart, or an inferiority complex, though it’d be nice to build out some broken side till it was better than the original structure.”

He mocked at his reasoning, calling it specious and “American”--his criteria of uncerebral phrase-making was that it was American. He knew, though, that the price of his intactness was incompleteness.

“The best I can wish you, my child,” so said the Fairy Blackstick in Thackeray’s The Rose and the Ring, “is a little misfortune.”

In some moods he griped at his own reasoning: Could I help it that Pete Livingstone sat in the locker-room Tap Day when everybody looked all over hell for him? And I got an election when otherwise I wouldn’t have got Elihu, knowing so few men. He was good and right and I ought to have sat in the locker-room instead. Maybe I would, if I’d thought I had a chance at an election. But Mercer kept coming to my room all those weeks. I guess I knew I had a chance all right, all right. But it would have served me right if I’d swallowed my pin in the shower and set up a conflict.

After the lectures at the university he used to argue this point with a young Rumanian intellectual who reassured him: “There’s no evidence that Goethe ever had a ‘conflict’ in the modern sense, or a man like Jung, for instance. You’re not a romantic philosopher--you’re a scientist. Memory, force, character--especially good sense. That’s going to be your trouble--judgment about yourself--once I knew a man who worked two years on the brain of an armadillo, with the idea that he would sooner or later know more about the brain of an armadillo than any one. I kept arguing with him that he was not really pushing out the extension of the human range--it was too arbitrary. And sure enough, when he sent his work to the medical journal they refused it--they had just accepted a thesis by another man on the same subject.”

Dick got up to Zurich on less Achilles’ heels than would be required to equip a centipede, but with plenty--the illusions of eternal strength and health, and of the essential goodness of people; illusions of a nation, the lies of generations of frontier mothers who had to croon falsely, that there were no wolves outside the cabin door. After he took his degree, he received his orders to join a neurological unit forming in Bar-sur-Aube.

In France, to his disgust, the work was executive rather than practical. In compensation he found time to complete the short textbook and assemble the material for his next venture. He returned to Zurich in the spring of 1919 discharged.

The foregoing has the ring of a biography, without the satisfaction of knowing that the hero, like Grant, lolling in his general store in Galena, is ready to be called to an intricate destiny. Moreover it is confusing to come across a youthful photograph of some one known in a rounded maturity and gaze with a shock upon a fiery, wiry, eagle-eyed stranger. Best to be reassuring--Dick Diver’s moment now began.

II

It was a damp April day, with long diagonal clouds over the Albishorn and water inert in the low places. Zurich is not unlike an American city. Missing something ever since his arrival two days before, Dick perceived that it was the sense he had had in finite French lanes that there was nothing more. In Zurich there was a lot besides Zurich--the roofs upled the eyes to tinkling cow pastures, which in turn modified hilltops further up--so life was a perpendicular starting off to a postcard heaven. The Alpine lands, home of the toy and the funicular, the merry-go-round and the thin chime, were not a being here, as in France with French vines growing over one’s feet on the ground.

In Salzburg once Dick had felt the superimposed quality of a bought and borrowed century of music; once in the laboratories of the university in Zurich, delicately poking at the cervical of a brain, he had felt like a toy-maker rather than like the tornado who had hurried through the old red buildings of Hopkins, two years before, unstayed by the irony of the gigantic Christ in the entrance hall.

Yet he had decided to remain another two years in Zurich, for he did not underestimate the value of toy-making, in infinite precision, of infinite patience.

To-day he went out to see Franz Gregorovius at Dohmler’s clinic on the Zurichsee. Franz, resident pathologist at the clinic, a Vaudois by birth, a few years older than Dick, met him at the tram stop. He had a dark and magnificent aspect of Cagliostro about him, contrasted with holy eyes; he was the third of the Gregoroviuses--his grandfather had instructed Krapaelin when psychiatry was just emerging from the darkness of all time. In personality he was proud, fiery, and sheeplike--he fancied himself as a hypnotist. If the original genius of the family had grown a little tired, Franz would without doubt become a fine clinician.

On the way to the clinic he said: “Tell me of your experiences in the war. Are you changed like the rest? You have the same stupid and unaging American face, except I know you’re not stupid, Dick.”

“I didn’t see any of the war--you must have gathered that from my letters, Franz.”

“That doesn’t matter--we have some shell-shocks who merely heard an air raid from a distance. We have a few who merely read newspapers.”

“It sounds like nonsense to me.”

“Maybe it is, Dick. But, we’re a rich person’s clinic--we don’t use the word nonsense. Frankly, did you come down to see me or to see that girl?”

They looked sideways at each other; Franz smiled enigmatically.

“Naturally I saw all the first letters,” he said in his official basso. “When the change began, delicacy prevented me from opening any more. Really it had become your case.”

“Then she’s well?” Dick demanded.

“Perfectly well, I have charge of her, in fact I have charge of the majority of the English and American patients. They call me Doctor Gregory.”

“Let me explain about that girl,” Dick said. “I only saw her one time, that’s a fact. When I came out to say good-by to you just before I went over to France. It was the first time I put on my uniform and I felt very bogus in it--went around saluting private soldiers and all that.”

“Why didn’t you wear it to-day?”

“Hey! I’ve been discharged three weeks. Here’s the way I happened to see that girl. When I left you I walked down toward that building of yours on the lake to get my bicycle.”

“--toward the ‘Cedars’?”

“--a wonderful night, you know--moon over that mountain--”

“The Krenzegg.”

“--I caught up with a nurse and a young girl. I didn’t think the girl was a patient; I asked the nurse about tram times and we walked along. The girl was about the prettiest thing I ever saw.”

“She still is.”

“She’d never seen an American uniform and we talked, and I didn’t think anything about it.” He broke off, recognizing a familiar perspective, and then resumed: “--except, Franz, I’m not as hard-boiled as you are yet; when I see a beautiful shell like that I can’t help feeling a regret about what’s inside it. That was absolutely all--till the letters began to come.”

“It was the best thing that could have happened to her,” said Franz dramatically, “a transference of the most fortuitous kind. That’s why I came down to meet you on a very busy day. I want you to come into my office and talk a long time before you see her. In fact, I sent her into Zurich to do errands.” His voice was tense with enthusiasm. “In fact, I sent her without a nurse, with a less stable patient. I’m intensely proud of this case, which I handled, with your accidental assistance.”

The car had followed the shore of the Zurichsee into a fertile region of pasture farms and low hills, steepled with châlets. The sun swam out into a blue sea of sky and suddenly it was a Swiss valley at its best--pleasant sounds and murmurs and a good fresh smell of health and cheer.

Professor Dohmler’s plant consisted of three old buildings and a pair of new ones, between a slight eminence and the shore of the lake. At its founding, ten years before, it had been the first modern clinic for mental illness; at a casual glance no layman would recognize it as a refuge for the broken, the incomplete, the menacing, of this world, though two buildings were surrounded with vine-softened walls of a deceptive height. Some men raked straw in the sunshine; here and there, as they rode into the grounds, the car passed the white flag of a nurse waving beside a patient on a path.

After conducting Dick to his office, Franz excused himself for half an hour. Left alone Dick wandered about the room and tried to reconstruct Franz from the litter of his desk, from his books and the books of and by his father and grandfather; from the Swiss piety of a huge claret-colored photo of the former on the wall. There was smoke in the room; pushing open a French window, Dick let in a cone of sunshine. Suddenly his thoughts swung to the patient, the girl.

He had received about fifty letters from her written over a period of eight months. The first one was apologetic, explaining that she had heard from America how girls wrote to soldiers whom they did not know. She had obtained the name and address from Doctor Gregory and she hoped he would not mind if she sometimes sent word to wish him well, etc., etc.

So far it was easy to recognize the tone--from “Daddy-Long-Legs” and “Molly-Make-Believe,” sprightly and sentimental epistolary collections enjoying a vogue in the States. But there the resemblance ended.

The letters were divided into two classes, of which the first class, up to about the time of the armistice, was of marked pathological turn, and of which the second class, running from thence up to the present, was entirely normal, and displayed a richly maturing nature. For these latter letters Dick had come to wait eagerly in the last dull months at Bar-sur-Aube--yet even from the first letters he had pieced together more than Franz would have guessed of the story.

MON CAPITAINE:

I thought when I saw you in your uniform you were so handsome. Then I thought Je m’en fiche French too and German. You thought I was pretty too but I’ve had that before and a long time I’ve stood it. If you come here again with that attitude base and criminal and not even faintly what I had been taught to associate with the role of gentleman then heaven help you. However you seem quieter than the others,

(2)

all soft like a big cat. I have only gotten to like boys who are rather sissies. Are you a sissy? There were some somewhere.

Excuse all this, it is the third letter I have written you and will send immediately or will never send. I’ve thought a lot about moonlight too, and there are many witnesses I could find if I could only be out of here.

(3)

They said you were a doctor, but so long as you are a cat it is different. My head aches so, so excuse this walking there like an ordinary with a white cat will explain, I think. I can speak three languages, four with English, and am sure I could be useful interpreting if you arrange such thing in France I’m sure I could control everything with the belts all bound around everybody like it was Wednesday. It is now Saturday and

(4)

you are far away, perhaps killed.

Come back to me some day, for I will be here always on this green hill. Unless they will let me write my father, whom I loved dearly. Excuse this. I am not myself today. I will write when I feel better.

Cherio

NICOLE WARREN.

Excuse all this.

CAPTAIN DIVER:

I know introspection is not good for a highly nervous state like mine, but I would like you to know where I stand. Last year or whenever it was in Chicago when I got so I couldn’t speak to servants or walk in the street I kept waiting for some one to tell me. It was the duty of some one who understood. The blind must be led. Only no one would tell me everything--they would just tell me half and I was already too muddled to put two and two together. One man was nice--he was a French officer and he understood. He gave me a flower and said it was “plus petite et

(2)

moins entendue.” We were friends. Then he took it away. I grew sicker and there was no one to explain to me. They had a song about Joan of Arc that they used to sing at me but that was just mean--it would just make me cry, for there was nothing the matter with my head then. They kept making reference to sports, too, but I didn’t care by that time. So there was that day I went walking on Michigan Boulevard on and on for miles and finally they followed me in an automobile, but I wouldn’t get

(3)

in. Finally they pulled me in and there were nurses. After that time I began to realize it all, because I could feel what was happening in others. So you see how I stand. And what good can it be for me to stay here with the doctors harping constantly in the things I was here to get over. So today I have written my father to come and take me away. I am glad

(4)

you are so interested in examining people and sending them back. It must be so much fun.

And again, from another letter:

You might pass up your next examination and write me a letter. They just sent me some phonograph records in case I should forget my lesson and I broke them all so the nurse won’t speak to me. They were in English, so that the nurses would not understand. One doctor in Chicago said I was bluffing, but what he really meant was that I was a twin six and he had never seen one before. But I was very busy being mad then, so I didn’t care what he said, when I am very busy being mad I don’t usually care what they say, not if I were a million girls.

You told me that night you’d teach me to play. Well, I think love is all

(2)

there is or should be. Anyhow I am glad your interest in examinations keeps you busy.

Tout à vous,

NICOLE WARREN.

There were other letters among whose helpless cæsuras lurked darker rhythms.

DEAR CAPTAIN DIVER:

I write to you because there is no one else to whom I can turn and it seems to me if this farcicle situation is apparent to one as sick as me it should be apparent to you. The mental trouble is all over and besides that I am completely broken and humiliated, if that was what they wanted. My family have shamefully neglected me, there’s no use asking them for help or pity. I have had enough and it is simply ruining my health and wasting my time pretending that what is the matter with my

(2)

head is curable.

Here I am in what appears to be a semi-insane-asylum, all because nobody saw fit to tell me the truth about anything. If I had only known what was going on like I know now I could have stood it I guess for I am pretty strong, but those who should have, did not see fit to enlighten me.

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And now, when I know and have paid such a price for knowing, they sit there with their dogs lives and say I should believe what I did believe. Especially one does but I know now.

I am lonesome all the time far away from friends and family across the Atlantic I roam all over the place in a half daze. If you could get me a position as interpreter (I know French and German like a native, fair

(4)

Italian and a little Spanish) or in the Red Cross Ambulance or as a trained nurse, though I would have to train you would prove a great blessing.

And again:

Since you will not accept my explanation of what is the matter you could at least explain to me what you think, because you have a kind cat’s face, and not that funny look that seems to be so fashionable here. Dr. Gregory gave me a snapshot of you, not as handsome as you are in your uniform, but younger looking.

MON CAPITAINE:

It was fine to have your postcard. I am so glad you take such interest in disqualifying nurses--oh, I understood your note very well indeed. Only I thought from the moment I met you that you were different.

DEAR CAPITAINE:

I think one thing today and another tomorrow. That is really all that’s the matter with me, except a crazy defiance and a lack of proportion. I would gladly welcome any alienist you might suggest. Here they lie in their bath tubs and sing Play in Your Own Backyard as if I had my

(2)

backyard to play in or any hope which I can find by looking either backward or forward. They tried it again in the candy store again and I almost hit the man with the weight, but they held me.

I am not going to write you any more. I am too unstable.

And then a month with no letters. And then suddenly the change.

--I am slowly coming back to life . . .

--Today the flowers and the clouds . . .

--The war is over and I scarcely knew there was a war . . .

--How kind you have been! You must be very wise behind your face like a white cat, except you don’t look like that in the picture Dr. Gregory gave me . . .

--Today I went to Zurich, how strange a feeling to see a city again.

--Today we went to Berne, it was so nice with the clocks.

--Today we climbed high enough to find asphodel and edelweiss . . .

After that the letters were fewer, but he answered them all. There was one:

I wish someone were in love with me like boys were ages ago before I was sick. I suppose it will be years, though, before I could think of anything like that.

But when Dick’s answer was delayed for any reason, there was a fluttering burst of worry--like a worry of a lover: “Perhaps I have bored you,” and: “Afraid I have presumed,” and: “I keep thinking at night you have been sick.”

In actuality Dick was sick with the flu. When he recovered, all except the formal part of his correspondence was sacrificed to the consequent fatigue, and shortly afterward the memory of her became overlaid by the vivid presence of a Wisconsin telephone girl at headquarters in Bar-sur-Aube. She was red-lipped like a poster, and known obscenely in the messes as “The Switchboard.”

Franz came back into his office feeling self-important. Dick thought he would probably be a fine clinician, for the sonorous or staccato cadences by which he disciplined nurse or patient came not from his nervous system but from a tremendous and harmless vanity. His true emotions were more ordered and kept to himself.

“Now about the girl, Dick,” he said. “Of course, I want to find out about you and tell you about myself, but first about the girl, because I have been waiting to tell you about it so long.”

He searched for and found a sheaf of papers in a filing cabinet but after shuffling through them he found they were in his way and put them on his desk. Instead he told Dick the story.

III

About a year and a half before, Doctor Dohmler had some vague correspondence with an American gentleman living in Lausanne, a Mr. Devereux Warren, of the Warren family of Chicago. A meeting was arranged and one day Mr. Warren arrived at the clinic with his daughter Nicole, a girl of sixteen. She was obviously not well and the nurse who was with her took her to walk about the grounds while Mr. Warren had his consultation.

Warren was a strikingly handsome man looking less than forty. He was a fine American type in every way, tall, broad, well-made--”un homme très chic,” as Doctor Dohmler described him to Franz. His large gray eyes were sun-veined from rowing on Lake Geneva, and he had that special air about him of having known the best of this world. The conversation was in German, for it developed that he had been educated at Göttingen. He was nervous and obviously very moved by his errand.

“Doctor Dohmler, my daughter isn’t right in the head. I’ve had lots of specialists and nurses for her and she’s taken a couple of rest cures but the thing has grown too big for me and I’ve been strongly recommended to come to you.”

“Very well,” said Doctor Dohmler. “Suppose you start at the beginning and tell me everything.”

“There isn’t any beginning, at least there isn’t any insanity in the family that I know of, on either side. Nicole’s mother died when she was eleven and I’ve sort of been father and mother both to her, with the help of governesses--father and mother both to her.”

He was very moved as he said this. Doctor Dohmler saw that there were tears in the corners of his eyes and noticed for the first time that there was whiskey on his breath.

“As a child she was a darling thing--everybody was crazy about her, everybody that came in contact with her. She was smart as a whip and happy as the day is long. She liked to read or draw or dance or play the piano--anything. I used to hear my wife say she was the only one of our children who never cried at night. I’ve got an older girl, too, and there was a boy that died, but Nicole was--Nicole was--Nicole--”

He broke off and Doctor Dohmler helped him.

“She was a perfectly normal, bright, happy child.”

“Perfectly.”

Doctor Dohmler waited. Mr. Warren shook his head, blew a long sigh, glanced quickly at Doctor Dohmler and then at the floor again.

“About eight months ago, or maybe it was six months ago or maybe ten--I try to figure but I can’t remember exactly where we were when she began to do funny things--crazy things. Her sister was the first one to say anything to me about it--because Nicole was always the same to me,” he added rather hastily, as if some one had accused him of being to blame, “--the same loving little girl. The first thing was about a valet.”

“Oh, yes,” said Doctor Dohmler, nodding his venerable head, as if, like Sherlock Holmes, he had expected a valet and only a valet to be introduced at this point.

“I had a valet--been with me for years--Swiss, by the way.” He looked up for Doctor Dohmler’s patriotic approval. “And she got some crazy idea about him. She thought he was making up to her--of course, at the time I believed her and I let him go, but I know now it was all nonsense.”

“What did she claim he had done?”

“That was the first thing--the doctors couldn’t pin her down. She just looked at them as if they ought to know what he’d done. But she certainly meant he’d made some kind of indecent advances to her--she didn’t leave us in any doubt of that.”

“I see.”

“Of course, I’ve read about women getting lonesome and thinking there’s a man under the bed and all that, but why should Nicole get such an idea? She could have all the young men she wanted. We were in Lake Forest--that’s a summer place near Chicago where we have a place--and she was out all day playing golf or tennis with boys. And some of them pretty gone on her at that.”

All the time Warren was talking to the dried old package of Doctor Dohmler, one section of the latter’s mind kept thinking intermittently of Chicago. Once in his youth he could have gone to Chicago as fellow and docent at the university, and perhaps become rich there and owned his own clinic instead of being only a minor shareholder in a clinic. But when he had thought of what he considered his own thin knowledge spread over that whole area, over all those wheat fields, those endless prairies, he had decided against it. But he had read about Chicago in those days, about the great feudal families of Armour, Palmer, Field, Crane, Warren, Swift, and McCormick and many others, and since that time not a few patients had come to him from that stratum of Chicago and New York.

“She got worse,” continued Warren. “She had a fit or something--the things she said got crazier and crazier. Her sister wrote some of them down--” He handed a much-folded piece of paper to the doctor. “Almost always about men going to attack her, men she knew or men on the street--anybody--”

He told of their alarm and distress, of the horrors families go through under such circumstances, of the ineffectual efforts they had made in America, finally of the faith in a change of scene that had made him run the submarine blockade and bring his daughter to Switzerland.

“--on a United States cruiser,” he specified with a touch of hauteur. “It was possible for me to arrange that, by a stroke of luck. And, may I add,” he smiled apologetically, “that as they say: money is no object.”

“Certainly not,” agreed Dohmler dryly.

He was wondering why and about what the man was lying to him. Or, if he was wrong about that, what was the falsity that pervaded the whole room, the handsome figure in tweeds sprawling in his chair with a sportsman’s ease? That was a tragedy out there, in the February day, the young bird with wings crushed somehow, and inside here it was all too thin, thin and wrong.

“I would like--to talk to her--a few minutes now,” said Doctor Dohmler, going into English as if it would bring him closer to Warren.

Afterward when Warren had left his daughter and returned to Lausanne, and several days had passed, the doctor and Franz entered upon Nicole’s card:

Diagnostic: Schizophrénie. Phase aiguë en décroissance. La peur des hommes est un symptôme de la maladie, et n’est point constitutionnelle. . . . Le pronostic doit rester réservé.*

* Diagnosis: Divided Personality. Acute and down-hill phase of the illness. The fear of men is a symptom of the illness and is not at all constitutional. . . . The prognosis must be reserved.

And then they waited with increasing interest as the days passed for Mr. Warren’s promised second visit.

It was slow in coming. After a fortnight Doctor Dohmler wrote. Confronted with further silence he committed what was for those days “une folie,” and telephoned to the Grand Hotel at Vevey. He learned from Mr. Warren’s valet that he was at the moment packing to sail for America. But reminded that the forty francs Swiss for the call would show up on the clinic books, the blood of the Tuileries Guard rose to Doctor Dohmler’s aid and Mr. Warren was got to the phone.

“It is--absolutely necessary--that you come. Your daughter’s health--all depends. I can take no responsibility.”

“But look here, Doctor, that’s just what you’re for. I have a hurry call to go home!”

Doctor Dohmler had never yet spoken to any one so far away but he dispatched his ultimatum so firmly into the phone that the agonized American at the other end yielded. Half an hour after this second arrival on the Zurichsee, Warren had broken down, his fine shoulders shaking with awful sobs inside his easy fitting coat, his eyes redder than the very sun on Lake Geneva, and they had the awful story.

“It just happened,” he said hoarsely. “I don’t know--I don’t know.

“After her mother died when she was little she used to come into my bed every morning, sometimes she’d sleep in my bed. I was sorry for the little thing. Oh, after that, whenever we went places in an automobile or a train we used to hold hands. She used to sing to me. We used to say, ‘Now let’s not pay any attention to anybody else this afternoon--let’s just have each other--for this morning you’re mine.’“ A broken sarcasm came into his voice. “People used to say what a wonderful father and daughter we were--they used to wipe their eyes. We were just like lovers--and then all at once we were lovers--and ten minutes after it happened I could have shot myself--except I guess I’m such a Goddamned degenerate I didn’t have the nerve to do it.”

“Then what?” said Doctor Dohmler, thinking again of Chicago and of a mild pale gentleman with a pince-nez who had looked him over in Zurich thirty years before. “Did this thing go on?”

“Oh, no! She almost--she seemed to freeze up right away. She’d just say, ‘Never mind, never mind, Daddy. It doesn’t matter. Never mind.’“

“There were no consequences?”

“No.” He gave one short convulsive sob and blew his nose several times. “Except now there’re plenty of consequences.”

As the story concluded Dohmler sat back in the focal armchair of the middle class and said to himself sharply, “Peasant!”--it was one of the few absolute worldly judgments that he had permitted himself for twenty years. Then he said:

“I would like for you to go to a hotel in Zurich and spend the night and come see me in the morning.”

“And then what?”

Doctor Dohmler spread his hands wide enough to carry a young pig.

“Chicago,” he suggested.

IV

“Then we knew where we stood,” said Franz. “Dohmler told Warren we would take the case if he would agree to keep away from his daughter indefinitely, with an absolute minimum of five years. After Warren’s first collapse, he seemed chiefly concerned as to whether the story would ever leak back to America.”

“We mapped out a routine for her and waited. The prognosis was bad--as you know, the percentage of cures, even so-called social cures, is very low at that age.”

“Those first letters looked bad,” agreed Dick.

“Very bad--very typical. I hesitated about letting the first one get out of the clinic. Then I thought it will be good for Dick to know we’re carrying on here. It was generous of you to answer them.”

Dick sighed. “She was such a pretty thing--she enclosed a lot of snapshots of herself. And for a month there I didn’t have anything to do. All I said in my letters was ‘Be a good girl and mind the doctors.’“

“That was enough--it gave her somebody to think of outside. For a while she didn’t have anybody--only one sister that she doesn’t seem very close to. Besides, reading her letters helped us here--they were a measure of her condition.”

“I’m glad.”

“You see now what happened? She felt complicity--that’s neither here nor there, except as we want to revalue her ultimate stability and strength of character. First came this shock. Then she went off to a boarding-school and heard the girls talking--so from sheer self-protection she developed the idea that she had had no complicity--and from there it was easy to slide into a phantom world where all men, the more you liked them and trusted them, the more evil--”

“Did she ever go into the--horror directly?”

“No, and as a matter of fact when she began to seem normal, about October, we were in a predicament. If she had been thirty years old we would have let her make her own adjustment, but she was so young we were afraid she might harden with it all twisted inside her. So Doctor Dohmler said to her frankly, ‘Your duty now is to yourself. This doesn’t by any account mean the end of anything for you--your life is just at its beginning,’ and so forth and so forth. She really has an excellent mind, so he gave her a little Freud to read, not too much, and she was very interested. In fact, we’ve made rather a pet of her around here. But she is reticent,” he added; he hesitated: “We have wondered if in her recent letters to you which she mailed herself from Zurich, she has said anything that would be illuminating about her state of mind and her plans for the future.”

Dick considered.

“Yes and no--I’ll bring the letters out here if you want. She seems hopeful and normally hungry for life--even rather romantic. Sometimes she speaks of ‘the past’ as people speak who have been in prison. But you never know whether they refer to the crime or the imprisonment or the whole experience. After all I’m only a sort of stuffed figure in her life.”

“Of course, I understand your position exactly, and I express our gratitude once again. That was why I wanted to see you before you see her.”

Dick laughed.

“You think she’s going to make a flying leap at my person?”

“No, not that. But I want to ask you to go very gently. You are attractive to women, Dick.”

“Then God help me! Well, I’ll be gentle and repulsive--I’ll chew garlic whenever I’m going to see her and wear a stubble beard. I’ll drive her to cover.”

“Not garlic!” said Franz, taking him seriously. “You don’t want to compromise your career. But you’re partly joking.”

“--and I can limp a little. And there’s no real bathtub where I’m living, anyhow.”

“You’re entirely joking,” Franz relaxed--or rather assumed the posture of one relaxed. “Now tell me about yourself and your plans?”

“I’ve only got one, Franz, and that’s to be a good psychologist--maybe to be the greatest one that ever lived.”

Franz laughed pleasantly, but he saw that this time Dick wasn’t joking.

“That’s very good--and very American,” he said. “It’s more difficult for us.” He got up and went to the French window. “I stand here and I see Zurich--there is the steeple of the Gross-Münster. In its vault my grandfather is buried. Across the bridge from it lies my ancestor Lavater, who would not be buried in any church. Nearby is the statue of another ancestor, Heinrich Pestalozzi, and one of Doctor Alfred Escher. And over everything there is always Zwingli--I am continually confronted with a pantheon of heroes.”

“Yes, I see.” Dick got up. “I was only talking big. Everything’s just starting over. Most of the Americans in France are frantic to get home, but not me--I draw military pay all the rest of the year if I only attend lectures at the university. How’s that for a government on the grand scale that knows its future great men? Then I’m going home for a month and see my father. Then I’m coming back--I’ve been offered a job.”

“Where?”

“Your rivals--Gisler’s Clinic on Interlacken.”

“Don’t touch it,” Franz advised him. “They’ve had a dozen young men there in a year. Gisler’s a manic-depressive himself, his wife and her lover run the clinic--of course, you understand that’s confidential.”

“How about your old scheme for America?” asked Dick lightly. “We were going to New York and start an up-to-date establishment for billionaires.”

“That was students’ talk.”

Dick dined with Franz and his bride and a small dog with a smell of burning rubber, in their cottage on the edge of the grounds, He felt vaguely oppressed, not by the atmosphere of modest retrenchment, nor by Frau Gregorovius, who might have been prophesied, but by the sudden contracting of horizons to which Franz seemed so reconciled. For him the boundaries of asceticism were differently marked--he could see it as a means to an end, even as a carrying on with a glory it would itself supply, but it was hard to think of deliberately cutting life down to the scale of an inherited suit. The domestic gestures of Franz and his wife as they turned in a cramped space lacked grace and adventure. The post-war months in France, and the lavish liquidations taking place under the ægis of American splendor, had affected Dick’s outlook. Also, men and women had made much of him, and perhaps what had brought him back to the centre of the great Swiss watch, was an intuition that this was not too good for a serious man.

He made Kaethe Gregorovius feel charming, meanwhile becoming increasingly restless at the all-pervading cauliflower--simultaneously hating himself too for this incipience of he knew not what superficiality.

“God, am I like the rest after all?”--So he used to think starting awake at night--”Am I like the rest?”

This was poor material for a socialist but good material for those who do much of the world’s rarest work. The truth was that for some months he had been going through that partitioning of the things of youth wherein it is decided whether or not to die for what one no longer believes. In the dead white hours in Zurich staring into a stranger’s pantry across the upshine of a street-lamp, he used to think that he wanted to be good, he wanted to be kind, he wanted to be brave and wise, but it was all pretty difficult. He wanted to be loved, too, if he could fit it in.

V

The veranda of the central building was illuminated from open French windows, save where the black shadows of stripling walls and the fantastic shadows of iron chairs slithered down into a gladiola bed. From the figures that shuffled between the rooms Miss Warren emerged first in glimpses and then sharply when she saw him; as she crossed the threshold her face caught the room’s last light and brought it outside with her. She walked to a rhythm--all that week there had been singing in her ears, summer songs of ardent skies and wild shade, and with his arrival the singing had become so loud she could have joined in with it.

“How do you do, Captain,” she said, unfastening her eyes from his with difficulty, as though they had become entangled. “Shall we sit out here?” She stood still, her glance moving about for a moment. “It’s summer practically.”

A woman had followed her out, a dumpy woman in a shawl, and Nicole presented Dick: “Señora--”

Franz excused himself and Dick grouped three chairs together.

“The lovely night,” the Señora said.

“Muy bella,” agreed Nicole; then to Dick, “Are you here for a long time?”

“I’m in Zurich for a long time, if that’s what you mean.”

“This is really the first night of real spring,” the Señora suggested.

“To stay?”

“At least till July.”

“I’m leaving in June.”

“June is a lovely month here,” the Señora commented. “You should stay for June and then leave in July when it gets really too hot.”

“You’re going where?” Dick asked Nicole.

“Somewhere with my sister--somewhere exciting, I hope, because I’ve lost so much time. But perhaps they’ll think I ought to go to a quiet place at first--perhaps Como. Why don’t you come to Como?”

“Ah, Como--” began the Señora.

Within the building a trio broke into Suppe’s “Light Cavalry.” Nicole took advantage of this to stand up and the impression of her youth and beauty grew on Dick until it welled up inside him in a compact paroxysm of emotion. She smiled, a moving childish smile that was like all the lost youth in the world.

“The music’s too loud to talk against--suppose we walk around. Buenas noches, Señora.”

“G’t night--g’t night.”

They went down two steps to the path--where in a moment a shadow cut across it. She took his arm.

“I have some phonograph records my sister sent me from America,” she said. “Next time you come here I’ll play them for you--I know a place to put the phonograph where no one can hear.”

“That’ll be nice.”

“Do you know ‘Hindustan’?” she asked wistfully. “I’d never heard it before, but I like it. And I’ve got ‘Why Do They Call Them Babies?’ and ‘I’m Glad I Can Make You Cry.’ I suppose you’ve danced to all those tunes in Paris?”

“I haven’t been to Paris.”

Her cream-colored dress, alternately blue or gray as they walked, and her very blonde hair, dazzled Dick--whenever he turned toward her she was smiling a little, her face lighting up like an angel’s when they came into the range of a roadside arc. She thanked him for everything, rather as if he had taken her to some party, and as Dick became less and less certain of his relation to her, her confidence increased--there was that excitement about her that seemed to reflect all the excitement of the world.

“I’m not under any restraint at all,” she said. “I’ll play you two good tunes called ‘Wait Till the Cows Come Home’ and ‘Good-by, Alexander.’“

He was late the next time, a week later, and Nicole was waiting for him at a point in the path which he would pass walking from Franz’s house. Her hair drawn back of her ears brushed her shoulders in such a way that the face seemed to have just emerged from it, as if this were the exact moment when she was coming from a wood into clear moonlight. The unknown yielded her up; Dick wished she had no background, that she was just a girl lost with no address save the night from which she had come. They went to the cache where she had left the phonograph, turned a corner by the workshop, climbed a rock, and sat down behind a low wall, facing miles and miles of rolling night.

They were in America now, even Franz with his conception of Dick as an irresistible Lothario would never have guessed that they had gone so far away. They were so sorry, dear; they went down to meet each other in a taxi, honey; they had preferences in smiles and had met in Hindustan, and shortly afterward they must have quarrelled, for nobody knew and nobody seemed to care--yet finally one of them had gone and left the other crying, only to feel blue, to feel sad.

The thin tunes, holding lost times and future hopes in liaison, twisted upon the Valais night. In the lulls of the phonograph a cricket held the scene together with a single note. By and by Nicole stopped playing the machine and sang to him.

“Lay a silver dollar

On the ground

And watch it roll

Because it’s round--”

On the pure parting of her lips no breath hovered. Dick stood up suddenly.

“What’s the matter, you don’t like it?”

“Of course I do.”

“Our cook at home taught it to me:

“A woman never knows

What a good man she’s got

Till after she turns him down . . .”

“You like it?”

She smiled at him, making sure that the smile gathered up everything inside her and directed it toward him, making him a profound promise of herself for so little, for the beat of a response, the assurance of a complimentary vibration in him. Minute by minute the sweetness drained down into her out of the willow trees, out of the dark world.

She stood up too, and stumbling over the phonograph, was momentarily against him, leaning into the hollow of his rounded shoulder.

“I’ve got one more record,” she said. “--Have you heard ‘So Long, Letty’? I suppose you have.”

“Honestly, you don’t understand--I haven’t heard a thing.”

Nor known, nor smelt, nor tasted, he might have added; only hot-cheeked girls in hot secret rooms. The young maidens he had known at New Haven in 1914 kissed men, saying “There!”, hands at the man’s chest to push him away. Now there was this scarcely saved waif of disaster bringing him the essence of a continent. . . .

VI

It was May when he next found her. The luncheon in Zurich was a council of caution; obviously the logic of his life tended away from the girl; yet when a stranger stared at her from a nearby table, eyes burning disturbingly like an uncharted light, he turned to the man with an urbane version of intimidation and broke the regard.

“He was just a peeper,” he explained cheerfully. “He was just looking at your clothes. Why do you have so many different clothes?”

“Sister says we’re very rich,” she offered humbly. “Since Grandmother is dead.”

“I forgive you.”

He was enough older than Nicole to take pleasure in her youthful vanities and delights, the way she paused fractionally in front of the hall mirror on leaving the restaurant, so that the incorruptible quicksilver could give her back to herself. He delighted in her stretching out her hands to new octaves now that she found herself beautiful and rich. He tried honestly to divorce her from any obsession that he had stitched her together--glad to see her build up happiness and confidence apart from him; the difficulty was that, eventually, Nicole brought everything to his feet, gifts of sacrificial ambrosia, of worshipping myrtle.

The first week of summer found Dick re-established in Zurich. He had arranged his pamphlets and what work he had done in the Service into a pattern from which he intended to make his revise of “A Psychology for Psychiatrists.” He thought he had a publisher; he had established contact with a poor student who would iron out his errors in German. Franz considered it a rash business, but Dick pointed out the disarming modesty of the theme.

“This is stuff I’ll never know so well again,” he insisted. “I have a hunch it’s a thing that only fails to be basic because it’s never had material recognition. The weakness of this profession is its attraction for the man a little crippled and broken. Within the walls of the profession he compensates by tending toward the clinical, the ‘practical’--he has won his battle without a struggle.

“On the contrary, you are a good man, Franz, because fate selected you for your profession before you were born. You better thank God you had no ‘bent’--I got to be a psychiatrist because there was a girl at St. Hilda’s in Oxford that went to the same lectures. Maybe I’m getting trite but I don’t want to let my current ideas slide away with a few dozen glasses of beer.”

“All right,” Franz answered. “You are an American. You can do this without professional harm. I do not like these generalities. Soon you will be writing little books called ‘Deep Thoughts for the Layman,’ so simplified that they are positively guaranteed not to cause thinking. If my father were alive he would look at you and grunt, Dick. He would take his napkin and fold it so, and hold his napkin ring, this very one--” he held it up, a boar’s head was carved in the brown wood--”and he would say, ‘Well my impression is--’ then he would look at you and think suddenly ‘What is the use?’ then he would stop and grunt again; then we would be at the end of dinner.”

“I am alone to-day,” said Dick testily. “But I may not be alone to-morrow. After that I’ll fold up my napkin like your father and grunt.”

Franz waited a moment.

“How about our patient?” he asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Well, you should know about her by now.”

“I like her. She’s attractive. What do you want me to do--take her up in the edelweiss?”

“No, I thought since you go in for scientific books you might have an idea.”

“--devote my life to her?”

Franz called his wife in the kitchen: “Du lieber Gott! Bitte, bringe Dick noch ein Glas-Bier.”

“I don’t want any more if I’ve got to see Dohmler.”

“We think it’s best to have a program. Four weeks have passed away--apparently the girl is in love with you. That’s not our business if we were in the world, but here in the clinic we have a stake in the matter.”

“I’ll do whatever Doctor Dohmler says,” Dick agreed.

But he had little faith that Dohmler would throw much light on the matter; he himself was the incalculable element involved. By no conscious volition of his own, the thing had drifted into his hands. It reminded him of a scene in his childhood when everyone in the house was looking for the lost key to the silver closet, Dick knowing he had hid it under the handkerchiefs in his mother’s top drawer; at that time he had experienced a philosophical detachment, and this was repeated now when he and Franz went together to Professor Dohmler’s office.

The professor, his face beautiful under straight whiskers, like a vine-overgrown veranda of some fine old house, disarmed him. Dick knew some individuals with more talent, but no person of a class qualitatively superior to Dohmler.

--Six months later he thought the same way when he saw Dohmler dead, the light out on the veranda, the vines of his whiskers tickling his stiff white collar, the many battles that had swayed before the chink-like eyes stilled forever under the frail delicate lids--

“. . . Good morning, sir.” He stood formally, thrown back to the army.

Professor Dohmler interlaced his tranquil fingers. Franz spoke in terms half of liaison officer, half of secretary, till his senior cut through him in mid-sentence.

“We have gone a certain way,” he said mildly. “It’s you, Doctor Diver, who can best help us now.”

Routed out, Dick confessed: “I’m not so straight on it myself.”

“I have nothing to do with your personal reactions,” said Dohmler. “But I have much to do with the fact that this so-called ‘transference,’“ he darted a short ironic look at Franz which the latter returned in kind, “must be terminated. Miss Nicole does well indeed, but she is in no condition to survive what she might interpret as a tragedy.”

Again Franz began to speak, but Doctor Dohmler motioned him silent.

“I realize that your position has been difficult.”

“Yes, it has.”

Now the professor sat back and laughed, saying on the last syllable of his laughter, with his sharp little gray eyes shining through: “Perhaps you have got sentimentally involved yourself.”

Aware that he was being drawn on, Dick, too, laughed.

“She’s a pretty girl--anybody responds to that to a certain extent. I have no intention--”

Again Franz tried to speak--again Dohmler stopped him with a question directed pointedly at Dick. “Have you thought of going away?”

“I can’t go away.”

Doctor Dohmler turned to Franz: “Then we can send Miss Warren away.”

“As you think best, Professor Dohmler,” Dick conceded. “It’s certainly a situation.”

Professor Dohmler raised himself like a legless man mounting a pair of crutches.

“But it is a professional situation,” he cried quietly.

He sighed himself back into his chair, waiting for the reverberating thunder to die out about the room. Dick saw that Dohmler had reached his climax, and he was not sure that he himself had survived it. When the thunder had diminished Franz managed to get his word in.

“Doctor Diver is a man of fine character,” he said. “I feel he only has to appreciate the situation in order to deal correctly with it. In my opinion Dick can co-operate right here, without any one going away.”

“How do you feel about that?” Professor Dohmler asked Dick.

Dick felt churlish in the face of the situation; at the same time he realized in the silence after Dohmler’s pronouncement that the state of inanimation could not be indefinitely prolonged; suddenly he spilled everything.

“I’m half in love with her--the question of marrying her has passed through my mind.”

“Tch! Tch!” uttered Franz.

“Wait.” Dohmler warned him. Franz refused to wait: “What! And devote half your life to being doctor and nurse and all--never! I know what these cases are. One time in twenty it’s finished in the first push--better never see her again!”

“What do you think?” Dohmler asked Dick.

“Of course Franz is right.”

VII

It was late afternoon when they wound up the discussion as to what Dick should do, he must be most kind and yet eliminate himself. When the doctors stood up at last, Dick’s eyes fell outside the window to where a light rain was falling--Nicole was waiting, expectant, somewhere in that rain. When, presently, he went out buttoning his oil-skin at the throat, pulling down the brim of his hat, he came upon her immediately under the roof of the main entrance.

“I know a new place we can go,” she said. “When I was ill I didn’t mind sitting inside with the others in the evening--what they said seemed like everything else. Naturally now I see them as ill and it’s--it’s--”

“You’ll be leaving soon.”

“Oh, soon. My sister, Beth, but she’s always been called Baby, she’s coming in a few weeks to take me somewhere; after that I’ll be back here for a last month.”

“The older sister?”

“Oh, quite a bit older. She’s twenty-four--she’s very English. She lives in London with my father’s sister. She was engaged to an Englishman but he was killed--I never saw him.”

Her face, ivory gold against the blurred sunset that strove through the rain, had a promise Dick had never seen before: the high cheek-bones, the faintly wan quality, cool rather than feverish, was reminiscent of the frame of a promising colt--a creature whose life did not promise to be only a projection of youth upon a grayer screen, but instead, a true growing; the face would be handsome in middle life; it would be handsome in old age: the essential structure and the economy were there.

“What are you looking at?”

“I was just thinking that you’re going to be rather happy.”

Nicole was frightened: “Am I? All right--things couldn’t be worse than they have been.”

In the covered woodshed to which she had led him, she sat cross-legged upon her golf shoes, her burberry wound about her and her cheeks stung alive by the damp air. Gravely she returned his gaze, taking in his somewhat proud carriage that never quite yielded to the wooden post against which he leaned; she looked into his face that always tried to discipline itself into molds of attentive seriousness, after excursions into joys and mockeries of its own. That part of him which seemed to fit his reddish Irish coloring she knew least; she was afraid of it, yet more anxious to explore--this was his more masculine side: the other part, the trained part, the consideration in the polite eyes, she expropriated without question, as most women did.

“At least this institution has been good for languages,” said Nicole. “I’ve spoken French with two doctors, and German with the nurses, and Italian, or something like it, with a couple of scrub-women and one of the patients, and I’ve picked up a lot of Spanish from another.”

“That’s fine.”

He tried to arrange an attitude but no logic seemed forthcoming.

“--Music too. Hope you didn’t think I was only interested in ragtime. I practise every day--the last few months I’ve been taking a course in Zurich on the history of music. In fact it was all that kept me going at times--music and the drawing.” She leaned suddenly and twisted a loose strip from the sole of her shoe and then looked up. “I’d like to draw you just the way you are now.”

It made him sad when she brought out her accomplishments for his approval.

“I envy you. At present I don’t seem to be interested in anything except my work.”

“Oh, I think that’s fine for a man,” she said quickly. “But for a girl I think she ought to have lots of minor accomplishments and pass them on to her children.”

“I suppose so,” said Dick with deliberated indifference.

Nicole sat quiet. Dick wished she would speak so that he could play the easy rôle of wet blanket, but now she sat quiet.

“You’re all well,” he said. “Try to forget the past; don’t overdo things for a year or so. Go back to America and be a débutante and fall in love--and be happy.”

“I couldn’t fall in love.” Her injured shoe scraped a cocoon of dust from the log on which she sat.

“Sure you can,” Dick insisted. “Not for a year maybe, but sooner or later.” Then he added brutally: “You can have a perfectly normal life with a houseful of beautiful descendants. The very fact that you could make a complete comeback at your age proves that the precipitating factors were pretty near everything. Young woman, you’ll be pulling your weight long after your friends are carried off screaming.”

--But there was a look of pain in her eyes as she took the rough dose, the harsh reminder.

“I know I wouldn’t be fit to marry any one for a long time,” she said humbly.

Dick was too upset to say any more. He looked out into the grain field trying to recover his hard brassy attitude.

“You’ll be all right--everybody here believes in you. Why, Doctor Gregory is so proud of you that he’ll probably--”

“I hate Doctor Gregory.”

“Well, you shouldn’t.”

Nicole’s world had fallen to pieces, but it was only a flimsy and scarcely created world; beneath it her emotions and instincts fought on. Was it an hour ago she had waited by the entrance, wearing her hope like a corsage at her belt?

. . . Dress stay crisp for him, button stay put, bloom narcissus--air stay still and sweet.

“It will be nice to have fun again,” she fumbled on. For a moment she entertained a desperate idea of telling him how rich she was, what big houses she lived in, that really she was a valuable property--for a moment she made herself into her grandfather, Sid Warren, the horse-trader. But she survived the temptation to confuse all values and shut these matters into their Victorian side-chambers--even though there was no home left to her, save emptiness and pain.

“I have to go back to the clinic. It’s not raining now.”

Dick walked beside her, feeling her unhappiness, and wanting to drink the rain that touched her cheek.

“I have some new records,” she said. “I can hardly wait to play them. Do you know--”

After supper that evening, Dick thought, he would finish the break; also he wanted to kick Franz’s bottom for having partially introduced him to such a sordid business. He waited in the hall. His eyes followed a beret, not wet with waiting like Nicole’s beret, but covering a skull recently operated on. Beneath it human eyes peered, found him and came over:

“Bonjour, Docteur.”

“Bonjour, Monsieur.”

“Il fait beau temps.”

“Oui, merveilleux.”

“Vous êtes ici maintenant?”

“Non, pour la journée seulement.”

“Ah, bon. Alors--au revoir, Monsieur.”

Glad at having survived another contact, the wretch in the beret moved away. Dick waited. Presently a nurse came downstairs and delivered him a message.

“Miss Warren asks to be excused, Doctor. She wants to lie down. She wants to have dinner upstairs to-night.”

The nurse hung on his response, half expecting him to imply that Miss Warren’s attitude was pathological.

“Oh, I see. Well--” He rearranged the flow of his own saliva, the pulse of his heart. “I hope she feels better. Thanks.”

He was puzzled and discontent. At any rate it freed him.

Leaving a note for Franz begging off from supper, he walked through the countryside to the tram station. As he reached the platform, with spring twilight gilding the rails and the glass in the slot machines, he began to feel that the station, the hospital, was hovering between being centripetal and centrifugal. He felt frightened. He was glad when the substantial cobble-stones of Zurich clicked once more under his shoes.

He expected to hear from Nicole next day but there was no word. Wondering if she was ill, he called the clinic and talked to Franz.

“She came downstairs to luncheon yesterday and to-day,” said Franz. “She seemed a little abstracted and in the clouds. How did it go off?”

Dick tried to plunge over the Alpine crevasse between the sexes.

“We didn’t get to it--at least I didn’t think we did. I tried to be distant, but I didn’t think enough happened to change her attitude if it ever went deep.”

Perhaps his vanity had been hurt that there was no coup de grâce to administer.

“From some things she said to her nurse I’m inclined to think she understood.”

“All right.”

“It was the best thing that could have happened. She doesn’t seem over-agitated--only a little in the clouds.”

“All right, then.”

“Dick, come soon and see me.”

VIII

During the next weeks Dick experienced a vast dissatisfaction. The pathological origin and mechanistic defeat of the affair left a flat and metallic taste. Nicole’s emotions had been used unfairly--what if they turned out to have been his own? Necessarily he must absent himself from felicity a while--in dreams he saw her walking on the clinic path swinging her wide straw hat. . . .

One time he saw her in person; as he walked past the Palace Hotel, a magnificent Rolls curved into the half-moon entrance. Small within its gigantic proportions, and buoyed up by the power of a hundred superfluous horses, sat Nicole and a young woman whom he assumed was her sister. Nicole saw him and momentarily her lips parted in an expression of fright. Dick shifted his hat and passed, yet for a moment the air around him was loud with the circlings of all the goblins on the Gross-Münster. He tried to write the matter out of his mind in a memorandum that went into detail as to the solemn régime before her; the possibilities of another “push” of the malady under the stresses which the world would inevitably supply--in all a memorandum that would have been convincing to any one save to him who had written it.

The total value of this effort was to make him realize once more how far his emotions were involved; thenceforth he resolutely provided antidotes. One was the telephone girl from Bar-sur-Aube, now touring Europe from Nice to Coblenz, in a desperate roundup of the men she had known in her never-to-be-equalled holiday; another was the making of arrangements to get home on a government transport in August; a third was a consequent intensification of work on his proofs for the book that this autumn was to be presented to the German-speaking world of psychiatry.

Dick had outgrown the book; he wanted now to do more spade work; if he got an exchange fellowship he could count on plenty of routine.

Meanwhile he had projected a new work: An Attempt at a Uniform and Pragmatic Classification of the Neuroses and Psychoses, Based on an Examination of Fifteen Hundred Pre-Krapælin and Post-Krapælin Cases as they would be Diagnosed in the Terminology of the Different Contemporary Schools--and another sonorous paragraph--Together with a Chronology of Such Subdivisions of Opinion as Have Arisen Independently.

This title would look monumental in German.*

*Ein Versuch die Neurosen und Psychosen gleichmässig und pragmatisch zu klassifizieren auf Grund der Untersuchung von fünfzehn hundert pre-Krapaelin und post-Krapaelin Fällen wie siz diagnostiziert sein würden in der Terminologie von den verschiedenen Schulen der Gegenwart--and another sonorous paragraph--Zusammen mit einer Chronologic solcher Subdivisionen der Meinung welche unabhängig entstanden sind.

Going into Montreux Dick pedalled slowly, gaping at the Jugenhorn whenever possible, and blinded by glimpses of the lake through the alleys of the shore hotels. He was conscious of the groups of English, emergent after four years and walking with detective-story suspicion in their eyes, as though they were about to be assaulted in this questionable country by German trained-bands. There were building and awakening everywhere on this mound of débris formed by a mountain torrent. At Berne and at Lausanne on the way south, Dick had been eagerly asked if there would be Americans this year. “By August, if not in June?”

He wore leather shorts, an army shirt, mountain shoes. In his knapsack were a cotton suit and a change of underwear. At the Glion funicular he checked his bicycle and took a small beer on the terrace of the station buffet, meanwhile watching the little bug crawl down the eighty-degree slope of the hill. His ear was full of dried blood from La Tour de Pelz, where he had sprinted under the impression that he was a spoiled athlete. He asked for alcohol and cleared up the exterior while the funicular slid down port. He saw his bicycle embarked, slung his knapsack into the lower compartment of the car, and followed it in.

Mountain-climbing cars are built on a slant similar to the angle of a hat-brim of a man who doesn’t want to be recognized. As water gushed from the chamber under the car, Dick was impressed with the ingenuity of the whole idea--a complimentary car was now taking on mountain water at the top and would pull the lightened car up by gravity, as soon as the brakes were released. It must have been a great inspiration. In the seat across, a couple of British were discussing the cable itself.

“The ones made in England always last five or six years. Two years ago the Germans underbid us, and how long do you think their cable lasted?”

“How long?”

“A year and ten months. Then the Swiss sold it to the Italians. They don’t have rigid inspections of cables.”

“I can see it would be a terrible thing for Switzerland if a cable broke.”

The conductor shut a door; he telephoned his confrere among the undulati, and with a jerk the car was pulled upward, heading for a pinpoint on an emerald hill above. After it cleared the low roofs, the skies of Vaud, Valais, Swiss Savoy, and Geneva spread around the passengers in cyclorama. On the centre of the lake, cooled by the piercing current of the Rhône, lay the true centre of the Western World. Upon it floated swans like boats and boats like swans, both lost in the nothingness of the heartless beauty. It was a bright day, with sun glittering on the grass beach below and the white courts of the Kursal. The figures on the courts threw no shadows.

When Chillon and the island palace of Salagnon came into view Dick turned his eyes inward. The funicular was above the highest houses of the shore; on both sides a tangle of foliage and flowers culminated at intervals in masses of color. It was a rail-side garden, and in the car was a sign: Défense de cueillir les fleurs.

Though one must not pick flowers on the way up, the blossoms trailed in as they passed--Dorothy Perkins roses dragged patiently through each compartment slowly waggling with the motion of the funicular, letting go at the last to swing back to their rosy cluster. Again and again these branches went through the car.

In the compartment above and in front of Dick’s, a group of English were standing up and exclaiming upon the backdrop of sky, when suddenly there was a confusion among them--they parted to give passage to a couple of young people who made apologies and scrambled over into the rear compartment of the funicular--Dick’s compartment. The young man was a Latin with the eyes of a stuffed deer; the girl was Nicole.

The two climbers gasped momentarily from their efforts; as they settled into seats, laughing and crowding the English to the corners, Nicole said, “Hello.” She was lovely to look at; immediately Dick saw that something was different; in a second he realized it was her fine-spun hair, bobbed like Irene Castle’s and fluffed into curls. She wore a sweater of powder blue and a white tennis skirt--she was the first morning in May and every taint of the clinic was departed.

“Plunk!” she gasped. “Whoo-oo that guard. They’ll arrest us at the next stop. Doctor Diver, the Conte de Marmora.”

“Gee-imminy!” She felt her new hair, panting. “Sister bought first-class tickets--it’s a matter of principle with her.” She and Marmora exchanged glances and shouted: “Then we found that first-class is the hearse part behind the chauffeur--shut in with curtains for a rainy day, so you can’t see anything. But Sister’s very dignified--” Again Nicole and Marmora laughed with young intimacy.

“Where you bound?” asked Dick.

“Caux. You too?” Nicole looked at his costume. “That your bicycle they got up in front?”

“Yes. I’m going to coast down Monday.”

“With me on your handle-bars? I mean, really--will you? I can’t think of more fun.”

“But I will carry you down in my arms,” Marmora protested intensely. “I will roller-skate you--or I will throw you and you will fall slowly like a feather.”

The delight in Nicole’s face--to be a feather again instead of a plummet, to float and not to drag. She was a carnival to watch--at times primly coy, posing, grimacing and gesturing--sometimes the shadow fell and the dignity of old suffering flowed down into her finger tips. Dick wished himself away from her, fearing that he was a reminder of a world well left behind. He resolved to go to the other hotel.

When the funicular came to rest those new to it stirred in suspension between the blues of two heavens. It was merely for a mysterious exchange between the conductor of the car going up and the conductor of the car coming down. Then up and up over a forest path and a gorge--then again up a hill that became solid with narcissus, from passengers to sky. The people in Montreux playing tennis in the lakeside courts were pinpoints now. Something new was in the air; freshness--freshness embodying itself in music as the car slid into Glion and they heard the orchestra in the hotel garden.

When they changed to the mountain train the music was drowned by the rushing water released from the hydraulic chamber. Almost overhead was Caux, where the thousand windows of a hotel burned in the late sun.

But the approach was different--a leather-lunged engine pushed the passengers round and round in a corkscrew, mounting, rising; they chugged through low-level clouds and for a moment Dick lost Nicole’s face in the spray of the slanting donkey engine; they skirted a lost streak of wind with the hotel growing in size at each spiral, until with a vast surprise they were there, on top of the sunshine.

In the confusion of arrival, as Dick slung his knapsack and started forward on the platform to get his bicycle, Nicole was beside him.

“Aren’t you at our hotel?” she asked.

“I’m economizing.”

“Will you come down and have dinner?” Some confusion with baggage ensued. “This is my sister--Doctor Diver from Zurich.”

Dick bowed to a young woman of twenty-five, tall and confident. She was both formidable and vulnerable, he decided, remembering other women with flower-like mouths grooved for bits.

“I’ll drop in after dinner,” Dick promised. “First I must get acclimated.”

He wheeled off his bicycle, feeling Nicole’s eyes following him, feeling her helpless first love, feeling it twist around inside him. He went three hundred yards up the slope to the other hotel, he engaged a room and found himself washing without a memory of the intervening ten minutes, only a sort of drunken flush pierced with voices, unimportant voices that did not know how much he was loved.

IX

They were waiting for him and incomplete without him. He was still the incalculable element; Miss Warren and the young Italian wore their anticipation as obviously as Nicole. The salon of the hotel, a room of fabled acoustics, was stripped for dancing but there was a small gallery of Englishwomen of a certain age, with neckbands, dyed hair and faces powdered pinkish gray; and of American women of a certain age, with snowy-white transformations, black dresses and lips of cherry red. Miss Warren and Marmora were at a corner table--Nicole was diagonally across from them forty yards away, and as Dick arrived he heard her voice:

“Can you hear me? I’m speaking naturally.”

“Perfectly,”

“Hello, Doctor Diver.”

“What’s this?”

“You realize the people in the centre of the floor can’t hear what I say, but you can?”

“A waiter told us about it,” said Miss Warren. “Corner to corner--it’s like wireless.”

It was exciting up on the mountain, like a ship at sea. Presently Marmora’s parents joined them. They treated the Warrens with respect--Dick gathered that their fortunes had something to do with a bank in Milan that had something to do with the Warren fortunes. But Baby Warren wanted to talk to Dick, wanted to talk to him with the impetus that sent her out vagrantly toward all new men, as though she were on an inelastic tether and considered that she might as well get to the end of it as soon as possible. She crossed and recrossed her knees frequently in the manner of tall restless virgins.

“--Nicole told me that you took part care of her, and had a lot to do with her getting well. What I can’t understand is what we’re supposed to do--they were so indefinite at the sanitarium; they only told me she ought to be natural and gay. I knew the Marmoras were up here so I asked Tino to meet us at the funicular. And you see what happens--the very first thing Nicole has him crawling over the sides of the car as if they were both insane--”

“That was absolutely normal,” Dick laughed. “I’d call it a good sign. They were showing off for each other.”

“But how can I tell? Before I knew it, almost in front of my eyes, she had her hair cut off, in Zurich, because of a picture in ‘Vanity Fair.’“

“That’s all right. She’s a schizoid--a permanent eccentric. You can’t change that.”

“What is it?”

“Just what I said--an eccentric.”

“Well, how can any one tell what’s eccentric and what’s crazy?”

“Nothing is going to be crazy--Nicole is all fresh and happy, you needn’t be afraid.”

Baby shifted her knees about--she was a compendium of all the discontented women who had loved Byron a hundred years before, yet, in spite of the tragic affair with the guards’ officer there was something wooden and onanistic about her.

“I don’t mind the responsibility,” she declared, “but I’m in the air. We’ve never had anything like this in the family before--we know Nicole had some shock and my opinion is it was about a boy, but we don’t really know. Father says he would have shot him if he could have found out.”

The orchestra was playing “Poor Butterfly”; young Marmora was dancing with his mother. It was a tune new enough to them all. Listening, and watching Nicole’s shoulders as she chattered to the elder Marmora, whose hair was dashed with white like a piano keyboard, Dick thought of the shoulders of a violin, and then he thought of the dishonor, the secret. Oh, butterfly--the moments pass into hours--

“Actually I have a plan,” Baby continued with apologetic hardness. “It may seem absolutely impractical to you but they say Nicole will need to be looked after for a few years. I don’t know whether you know Chicago or not--”

“I don’t.”

“Well, there’s a North Side and a South Side and they’re very much separated. The North Side is chic and all that, and we’ve always lived over there, at least for many years, but lots of old families, old Chicago families, if you know what I mean, still live on the South Side. The University is there. I mean it’s stuffy to some people, but anyhow it’s different from the North Side. I don’t know whether you understand.”

He nodded. With some concentration he had been able to follow her.

“Now of course we have lots of connections there--Father controls certain chairs and fellowships and so forth at the University, and I thought if we took Nicole home and threw her with that crowd--you see she’s quite musical and speaks all these languages--what could be better in her condition than if she fell in love with some good doctor--”

A burst of hilarity surged up in Dick, the Warrens were going to buy Nicole a doctor--You got a nice doctor you can let us use? There was no use worrying about Nicole when they were in the position of being able to buy her a nice young doctor, the paint scarcely dry on him.

“But how about the doctor?” he said automatically.

“There must be many who’d jump at the chance.”

The dancers were back, but Baby whispered quickly:

“This is the sort of thing I mean. Now where is Nicole--she’s gone off somewhere. Is she upstairs in her room? What am I supposed to do? I never know whether it’s something innocent or whether I ought to go find her.”

“Perhaps she just wants to be by herself--people living alone get used to loneliness.” Seeing that Miss Warren was not listening he stopped. “I’ll take a look around.”

For a moment all the outdoors shut in with mist was like spring with the curtains drawn. Life was gathered near the hotel. Dick passed some cellar windows where bus boys sat on bunks and played cards over a litre of Spanish wine. As he approached the promenade, the stars began to come through the white crests of the high Alps. On the horseshoe walk overlooking the lakeNicole was the figure motionless between two lamp stands, and he approached silently across the grass. She turned to him with an expression of: “Here you are,” and for a moment he was sorry he had come.

“Your sister wondered.”

“Oh!” She was accustomed to being watched. With an effort she explained herself: “Sometimes I get a little--it gets a little too much. I’ve lived so quietly. To-night that music was too much. It made me want to cry--”

“I understand.”

“This has been an awfully exciting day.”

“I know.”

“I don’t want to do anything anti-social--I’ve caused everybody enough trouble. But to-night I wanted to get away.”

It occurred to Dick suddenly, as it might occur to a dying man that he had forgotten to tell where his will was, that Nicole had been “re-educated” by Dohmler and the ghostly generations behind him; it occurred to him also that there would be so much she would have to be told. But having recorded this wisdom within himself, he yielded to the insistent face-value of the situation and said:

“You’re a nice person--just keep using your own judgment about yourself.”

“You like me?”

“Of course.”

“Would you--” They were strolling along toward the dim end of the horseshoe, two hundred yards ahead. “If I hadn’t been sick would you--I mean, would I have been the sort of girl you might have--oh, slush, you know what I mean.”

He was in for it now, possessed by a vast irrationality. She was so near that he felt his breathing change but again his training came to his aid in a boy’s laugh and a trite remark.

“You’re teasing yourself, my dear. Once I knew a man who fell in love with his nurse--” The anecdote rambled on, punctuated by their footsteps. Suddenly Nicole interrupted in succinct Chicagoese: “Bull!”

“That’s a very vulgar expression.”

“What about it?” she flared up. “You don’t think I’ve got any common sense--before I was sick I didn’t have any, but I have now. And if I don’t know you’re the most attractive man I ever met you must think I’m still crazy. It’s my hard luck, all right--but don’t pretend I don’t know--I know everything about you and me.”

Dick was at an additional disadvantage. He remembered the statement of the elder Miss Warren as to the young doctors that could be purchased in the intellectual stockyards of the South Side of Chicago, and he hardened for a moment. “You’re a fetching kid, but I couldn’t fall in love.”

“You won’t give me a chance.”

“What!”

The impertinence, the right to invade implied, astounded him. Short of anarchy he could not think of any chance that Nicole Warren deserved.

“Give me a chance now.”

The voice fell low, sank into her breast and stretched the tight bodice over her heart as she came up close. He felt the young lips, her body sighing in relief against the arm growing stronger to hold her. There were now no more plans than if Dick had arbitrarily made some indissoluble mixture, with atoms joined and inseparable; you could throw it all out but never again could they fit back into atomic scale. As he held her and tasted her, and as she curved in further and further toward him, with her own lips, new to herself, drowned and engulfed in love, yet solaced and triumphant, he was thankful to have an existence at all, if only as a reflection in her wet eyes.

“My God,” he gasped, “you’re fun to kiss.”

That was talk, but Nicole had a better hold on him now and she held it; she turned coquette and walked away, leaving him as suspended as in the funicular of the afternoon. She felt: There, that’ll show him, how conceited; how he could do with me; oh, wasn’t it wonderful! I’ve got him, he’s mine. Now in the sequence came flight, but it was all so sweet and new that she dawdled, wanting to draw all of it in.

She shivered suddenly. Two thousand feet below she saw the necklace and bracelet of lights that were Montreux and Vevey, beyond them a dim pendant of Lausanne. From down there somewhere ascended a faint sound of dance music. Nicole was up in her head now, cool as cool, trying to collate the sentimentalities of her childhood, as deliberate as a man getting drunk after battle. But she was still afraid of Dick, who stood near her, leaning, characteristically, against the iron fence that rimmed the horseshoe; and this prompted her to say: “I can remember how I stood waiting for you in the garden--holding all my self in my arms like a basket of flowers. It was that to me anyhow--I thought I was sweet--waiting to hand that basket to you.”

He breathed over her shoulder and turned her insistently about; she kissed him several times, her face getting big every time she came close, her hands holding him by the shoulders.

“It’s raining hard.”

Suddenly there was a booming from the wine slopes across the lake; cannons were shooting at hail-bearing clouds in order to break them. The lights of the promenade went off, went on again. Then the storm came swiftly, first falling from the heavens, then doubly falling in torrents from the mountains and washing loud down the roads and stone ditches; with it came a dark, frightening sky and savage filaments of lightning and world-splitting thunder, while ragged, destroying clouds fled along past the hotel. Mountains and lake disappeared--the hotel crouched amid tumult, chaos and darkness.

By this time Dick and Nicole had reached the vestibule, where Baby Warren and the three Marmoras were anxiously awaiting them. It was exciting coming out of the wet fog--with the doors banging, to stand and laugh and quiver with emotion, wind in their ears and rain on their clothes. Now in the ballroom the orchestra was playing a Strauss waltz, high and confusing.

. . . For Doctor Diver to marry a mental patient? How did it happen? Where did it begin?

“Won’t you come back after you’ve changed?” Baby Warren asked after a close scrutiny.

“I haven’t got any change, except some shorts.”

As he trudged up to his hotel in a borrowed raincoat he kept laughing derisively in his throat.

“Big chance--oh, yes. My God!--they decided to buy a doctor? Well, they better stick to whoever they’ve got in Chicago.” Revolted by his harshness he made amends to Nicole, remembering that nothing had ever felt so young as her lips, remembering rain like tears shed for him that lay upon her softly shining porcelain cheeks . . . the silence of the storm ceasing woke him about three o’clock and he went to the window. Her beauty climbed the rolling slope, it came into the room, rustling ghostlike through the curtains. . . .

. . . He climbed two thousand meters to Rochers de Naye the following morning, amused by the fact that his conductor of the day before was using his day off to climb also.

Then Dick descended all the way to Montreux for a swim, got back to his hotel in time for dinner. Two notes awaited him.

“I’m not ashamed about last night--it was the nicest thing that ever happened to me and even if I never saw you again, Mon Capitaine, I would be glad it happened.”

That was disarming enough--the heavy shade of Dohmler retreated as Dick opened the second envelope:

DEAR DOCTOR DIVER: I phoned but you were out. I wonder if I may ask you a great big favor. Unforeseen circumstances call me back to Paris, and I find I can make better time by way of Lausanne. Can you let Nicole ride as far as Zurich with you, since you are going back Monday? and drop her at the sanitarium? Is this too much to ask?

Sincerely,

BETH EVAN WARREN.

Dick was furious--Miss Warren had known he had a bicycle with him; yet she had so phrased her note that it was impossible to refuse. Throw us together! Sweet propinquity and the Warren money!

He was wrong; Baby Warren had no such intentions. She had looked Dick over with worldly eyes, she had measured him with the warped rule of an Anglophile and found him wanting--in spite of the fact that she found him toothsome. But for her he was too “intellectual” and she pigeonholed him with a shabby-snobby crowd she had once known in London--he put himself out too much to be really of the correct stuff. She could not see how he could be made into her idea of an aristocrat.

In addition to that he was stubborn--she had seen him leave her conversation and get down behind his eyes in that odd way that people did, half a dozen times. She had not liked Nicole’s free and easy manner as a child and now she was sensibly habituated to thinking of her as a “gone coon”; and anyhow Doctor Diver was not the sort of medical man she could envisage in the family.

She only wanted to use him innocently as a convenience.

But her request had the effect that Dick assumed she desired. A ride in a train can be a terrible, heavy-hearted or comic thing; it can be a trial flight; it can be a prefiguration of another journey just as a given day with a friend can be long, from the taste of hurry in the morning up to the realization of both being hungry and taking food together. Then comes the afternoon with the journey fading and dying, but quickening again at the end. Dick was sad to see Nicole’s meagre joy; yet it was a relief for her, going back to the only home she knew. They made no love that day, but when he left her outside the sad door on the Zurichsee and she turned and looked at him he knew her problem was one they had together for good now.

X

In Zurich in September Doctor Diver had tea with Baby Warren.

“I think it’s ill advised,” she said, “I’m not sure I truly understand your motives.”

“Don’t let’s be unpleasant.”

“After all I’m Nicole’s sister.”

“That doesn’t give you the right to be unpleasant.” It irritated Dick that he knew so much that he could not tell her. “Nicole’s rich, but that doesn’t make me an adventurer.”

“That’s just it,” complained Baby stubbornly. “Nicole’s rich.”

“Just how much money has she got?” he asked.

She started; and with a silent laugh he continued, “You see how silly this is? I’d rather talk to some man in your family--”

“Everything’s been left to me,” she persisted. “It isn’t we think you’re an adventurer. We don’t know who you are.”

“I’m a doctor of medicine,” he said. “My father is a clergyman, now retired. We lived in Buffalo and my past is open to investigation. I went to New Haven; afterward I was a Rhodes scholar. My great-grandfather was Governor of North Carolina and I’m a direct descendant of Mad Anthony Wayne.”

“Who was Mad Anthony Wayne?” Baby asked suspiciously.

“Mad Anthony Wayne?”

“I think there’s enough madness in this affair.”

He shook his head hopelessly, just as Nicole came out on the hotel terrace and looked around for them.

“He was too mad to leave as much money as Marshall Field,” he said.

“That’s all very well--”

Baby was right and she knew it. Face to face, her father would have it on almost any clergyman. They were an American ducal family without a title--the very name written in a hotel register, signed to an introduction, used in a difficult situation, caused a psychological metamorphosis in people, and in return this change had crystallized her own sense of position. She knew these facts from the English, who had known them for over two hundred years. But she did not know that twice Dick had come close to flinging the marriage in her face. All that saved it this time was Nicole finding their table and glowing away, white and fresh and new in the September afternoon.

How do you do, lawyer. We’re going to Como tomorrow for a week and then back to Zurich. That’s why I wanted you and sister to settle this, because it doesn’t matter to us how much I’m allowed. We’re going to live very quietly in Zurich for two years and Dick has enough to take care of us. No, Baby, I’m more practical than you think--It’s only for clothes and things I’ll need it. . . . Why, that’s more than--can the estate really afford to give me all that? I know I’ll never manage to spend it. Do you have that much? Why do you have more--is it because I’m supposed to be incompetent? All right, let my share pile up then. . . . No, Dick refuses to have anything whatever to do with it. I’ll have to feel bloated for us both. . . . Baby, you have no more idea of what Dick is like than, than--Now where do I sign? Oh, I’m sorry.

. . . Isn’t it funny and lonely being together, Dick. No place to go except close. Shall we just love and love? Ah, but I love the most, and I can tell when you’re away from me, even a little. I think it’s wonderful to be just like everybody else, to reach out and find you all warm beside me in the bed.

. . . If you will kindly call my husband at the hospital. Yes, the little book is selling everywhere--they want it published in six languages. I was to do the French translation but I’m tired these days--I’m afraid of falling, I’m so heavy and clumsy--like a broken roly-poly that can’t stand up straight. The cold stethoscope against my heart and my strongest feeling “Je m’en fiche de tout.”--Oh, that poor woman in the hospital with the blue baby, much better dead. Isn’t it fine there are three of us now?

. . . That seems unreasonable, Dick--we have every reason for taking the bigger apartment. Why should we penalize ourselves just because there’s more Warren money than Diver money. Oh, thank you, cameriere, but we’ve changed our minds. This English clergyman tells us that your wine here in Orvieto is excellent. It doesn’t travel? That must be why we have never heard of it, because we love wine.

The lakes are sunk in the brown clay and the slopes have all the creases of a belly. The photographer gave us the picture of me, my hair limp over the rail on the boat to Capri. “Good-by, Blue Grotte,” sang the boatman, “come again soo-oon.” And afterward tracing down the hot sinister shin of the Italian boot with the wind soughing around those eerie castles, the dead watching from up on those hills.

. . . This ship is nice, with our heels hitting the deck together. This is the blowy corner and each time we turn it I slant forward against the wind and pull my coat together without losing step with Dick. We are chanting nonsense:

“Oh--oh--oh--oh

Other flamingoes than me,

Oh--oh--oh--oh

Other flamingoes than me--”

Life is fun with Dick--the people in deck chairs look at us, and a woman is trying to hear what we are singing. Dick is tired of singing it, so go on alone, Dick. You will walk differently alone, dear, through a thicker atmosphere, forcing your way through the shadows of chairs, through the dripping smoke of the funnels. You will feel your own reflection sliding along the eyes of those who look at you. You are no longer insulated; but I suppose you must touch life in order to spring from it.

Sitting on the stanchion of this life-boat I look seaward and let my hair blow and shine. I am motionless against the sky and the boat is made to carry my form onward into the blue obscurity of the future, I am Pallas Athene carved reverently on the front of a galley. The waters are lapping in the public toilets and the agate green foliage of spray changes and complains about the stern.

. . . We travelled a lot that year--from WoolloomoolooBay to Biskra. On the edge of the Sahara we ran into a plague of locusts and the chauffeur explained kindly that they were bumble-bees. The sky was low at night, full of the presence of a strange and watchful God. Oh, the poor little naked Ouled Naïl; the night was noisy with drums from Senegal and flutes and whining camels, and the natives pattering about in shoes made of old automobile tires.

But I was gone again by that time--trains and beaches they were all one. That was why he took me travelling but after my second child, my little girl, Topsy, was born everything got dark again.

. . . If I could get word to my husband who has seen fit to desert me here, to leave me in the hands of incompetents. You tell me my baby is black--that’s farcical, that’s very cheap. We went to Africa merely to see Timgad, since my principal interest in life is archeology. I am tired of knowing nothing and being reminded of it all the time.

. . . When I get well I want to be a fine person like you, Dick--I would study medicine except it’s too late. We must spend my money and have a house--I’m tired of apartments and waiting for you. You’re bored with Zurich and you can’t find time for writing here and you say that it’s a confession of weakness for a scientist not to write. And I’ll look over the whole field of knowledge and pick out something and really know about it, so I’ll have it to hang on to if I go to pieces again. You’ll help me, Dick, so I won’t feel so guilty. We’ll live near a warm beach where we can be brown and young together.

. . . This is going to be Dick’s work house. Oh, the idea came to us both at the same moment. We had passed Tarmes a dozen times and we rode up here and found the houses empty, except two stables. When we bought we acted through a Frenchman but the navy sent spies up here in no time when they found that Americans had bought part of a hill village. They looked for cannons all through the building material, and finally Baby had to twitch wires for us at the Affaires Etrangères in Paris.

No one comes to the Riviera in summer, so we expect to have a few guests and to work. There are some French people here--Mistinguet last week, surprised to find the hotel open, and Picasso and the man who wrote Pas sur la Bouche.

. . . Dick, why did you register Mr. and Mrs. Diver instead of Doctor and Mrs. Diver? I just wondered--it just floated through my mind.--You’ve taught me that work is everything and I believe you. You used to say a man knows things and when he stops knowing things he’s like anybody else, and the thing is to get power before he stops knowing things. If you want to turn things topsy-turvy, all right, but must your Nicole follow you walking on her hands, darling?

. . . Tommy says I am silent. Since I was well the first time I talked a lot to Dick late at night, both of us sitting up in bed and lighting cigarettes, then diving down afterward out of the blue dawn and into the pillows, to keep the light from our eyes. Sometimes I sing, and play with the animals, and I have a few friends too--Mary, for instance. When Mary and I talk neither of us listens to the other. Talk is men. When I talk I say to myself that I am probably Dick. Already I have even been my son, remembering how wise and slow he is. Sometimes I am Doctor Dohmler and one time I may even be an aspect of you, Tommy Barban. Tommy is in love with me, I think, but gently, reassuringly. Enough, though, so that he and Dick have begun to disapprove of each other. All in all, everything has never gone better. I am among friends who like me. I am here on this tranquil beach with my husband and two children. Everything is all right--if I can finish translating this damn recipe for chicken a la Maryland into French. My toes feel warm in the sand.

“Yes, I’ll look. More new people--oh, that girl--yes. Who did you say she looked like. . . . No, I haven’t, we don’t get much chance to see the new American pictures over here. Rosemary who? Well, we’re getting very fashionable for July--seems very peculiar to me. Yes, she’s lovely, but there can be too many people.”

XI

Doctor Richard Diver and Mrs. Elsie Speers sat in the Café des Alliées in August, under cool and dusty trees. The sparkle of the mica was dulled by the baked ground, and a few gusts of mistral from down the coast seeped through the Esterel and rocked the fishing boats in the harbor, pointing the masts here and there at a featureless sky.

“I had a letter this morning,” said Mrs. Speers. “What a terrible time you all must have had with those Negroes! But Rosemary said you were perfectly wonderful to her.”

“Rosemary ought to have a service stripe. It was pretty harrowing--the only person it didn’t disturb was Abe North--he flew off to Havre--he probably doesn’t know about it yet.”

“I’m sorry Mrs. Diver was upset,” she said carefully.

Rosemary had written:

Nicole seemed Out of her Mind. I didn’t want to come South with them because I felt Dick had enough on his hands.

“She’s all right now.” He spoke almost impatiently. “So you’re leaving to-morrow. When will you sail?”

“Right away.”

“My God, it’s awful to have you go.”

“We’re glad we came here. We’ve had a good time, thanks to you. You’re the first man Rosemary ever cared for.”

Another gust of wind strained around the porphyry hills of la Napoule. There was a hint in the air that the earth was hurrying on toward other weather; the lush midsummer moment outside of time was already over.

“Rosemary’s had crushes but sooner or later she always turned the man over to me--” Mrs. Speers laughed, “--for dissection.”

“So I was spared.”

“There was nothing I could have done. She was in love with you before I ever saw you. I told her to go ahead.”

He saw that no provision had been made for him, or for Nicole, in Mrs. Speers’ plans--and he saw that her amorality sprang from the conditions of her own withdrawal. It was her right, the pension on which her own emotions had retired. Women are necessarily capable of almost anything in their struggle for survival and can scarcely be convicted of such man-made crimes as “cruelty.” So long as the shuffle of love and pain went on within proper walls Mrs. Speers could view it with as much detachment and humor as a eunuch. She had not even allowed for the possibility of Rosemary’s being damaged--or was she certain that she couldn’t be?

“If what you say is true I don’t think it did her any harm.” He was keeping up to the end the pretense that he could still think objectively about Rosemary. “She’s over it already. Still--so many of the important times in life begin by seeming incidental.”

“This wasn’t incidental,” Mrs. Speers insisted. “You were the first man--you’re an ideal to her. In every letter she says that.”

“She’s so polite.”

“You and Rosemary are the politest people I’ve ever known, but she means this.”

“My politeness is a trick of the heart.”

This was partly true. From his father Dick had learned the somewhat conscious good manners of the young Southerner coming north after the Civil War. Often he used them and just as often he despised them because they were not a protest against how unpleasant selfishness was but against how unpleasant it looked.

“I’m in love with Rosemary,” he told her suddenly. “It’s a kind of self-indulgence saying that to you.”

It seemed very strange and official to him, as if the very tables and chairs in the Café des Alliées would remember it forever. Already he felt her absence from these skies: on the beach he could only remember the sun-torn flesh of her shoulder; at Tarmes he crushed out her footprints as he crossed the garden; and now the orchestra launching into the Nice Carnival Song, an echo of last year’s vanished gaieties, started the little dance that went on all about her. In a hundred hours she had come to possess all the world’s dark magic; the blinding belladonna, the caffein converting physical into nervous energy, the mandragora that imposes harmony.

With an effort he once more accepted the fiction that he shared Mrs. Speers’ detachment.

“You and Rosemary aren’t really alike,” he said. “The wisdom she got from you is all molded up into her persona, into the mask she faces the world with. She doesn’t think; her real depths are Irish and romantic and illogical.”

Mrs. Speers knew too that Rosemary, for all her delicate surface, was a young mustang, perceptibly by Captain Doctor Hoyt, U.S.A. Cross-sectioned, Rosemary would have displayed an enormous heart, liver and soul, all crammed close together under the lovely shell.

Saying good-by, Dick was aware of Elsie Speers’ full charm, aware that she meant rather more to him than merely a last unwillingly relinquished fragment of Rosemary. He could possibly have made up Rosemary--he could never have made up her mother. If the cloak, spurs and brilliants in which Rosemary had walked off were things with which he had endowed her, it was nice in contrast to watch her mother’s grace knowing it was surely something he had not evoked. She had an air of seeming to wait, as if for a man to get through with something more important than herself, a battle or an operation, during which he must not be hurried or interfered with. When the man had finished she would be waiting, without fret or impatience, somewhere on a highstool, turning the pages of a newspaper.

“Good-by--and I want you both to remember always how fond of you Nicole and I have grown.”

Back at the Villa Diana, he went to his work-room, and opened the shutters, closed against the mid-day glare. On his two long tables, in ordered confusion, lay the materials of his book. Volume I, concerned with Classification, had achieved some success in a small subsidized edition. He was negotiating for its reissue. Volume II was to be a great amplification of his first little book, A Psychology for Psychiatrists. Like so many men he had found that he had only one or two ideas--that his little collection of pamphlets now in its fiftieth German edition contained the germ of all he would ever think or know.

But he was currently uneasy about the whole thing. He resented the wasted years at New Haven, but mostly he felt a discrepancy between the growing luxury in which the Divers lived, and the need for display which apparently went along with it. Remembering his Rumanian friend’s story, about the man who had worked for years on the brain of an armadillo, he suspected that patient Germans were sitting close to the libraries of Berlin and Vienna callously anticipating him. He had about decided to brief the work in its present condition and publish it in an undocumented volume of a hundred thousand words as an introduction to more scholarly volumes to follow.

He confirmed this decision walking around the rays of late afternoon in his work-room. With the new plan he could be through by spring. It seemed to him that when a man with his energy was pursued for a year by increasing doubts, it indicated some fault in the plan.

He laid the bars of gilded metal that he used as paperweights along the sheaves of notes. He swept up, for no servant was allowed in here, treated his washroom sketchily with Bon Ami, repaired a screen and sent off an order to a publishing house in Zurich. Then he drank an ounce of gin with twice as much water.

He saw Nicole in the garden. Presently he must encounter her and the prospect gave him a leaden feeling. Before her he must keep up a perfect front, now and to-morrow, next week and next year. All night in Paris he had held her in his arms while she slept light under the luminol; in the early morning he broke in upon her confusion before it could form, with words of tenderness and protection, and she slept again with his face against the warm scent of her hair. Before she woke he had arranged everything at the phone in the next room. Rosemary was to move to another hotel. She was to be “Daddy’s Girl” and even to give up saying good-by to them. The proprietor of the hotel, Mr. McBeth, was to be the three Chinese monkeys. Packing amid the piled boxes and tissue paper of many purchases, Dick and Nicole left for the Riviera at noon.

Then there was a reaction. As they settled down in the wagon-lit Dick saw that Nicole was waiting for it, and it came quickly and desperately, before the train was out of the ceinture--his only instinct was to step off while the train was still going slow, rush back and see where Rosemary was, what she was doing. He opened a book and bent his pince-nez upon it, aware that Nicole was watching him from her pillow across the compartment. Unable to read, he pretended to be tired and shut his eyes but she was still watching him, and though still she was half asleep from the hangover of the drug, she was relieved and almost happy that he was hers again.

It was worse with his eyes shut for it gave a rhythm of finding and losing, finding and losing; but so as not to appear restless he lay like that until noon. At luncheon things were better--it was always a fine meal; a thousand lunches in inns and restaurants, wagon-lits, buffets, and aeroplanes were a mighty collation to have taken together. The familiar hurry of the train waiters, the little bottles of wine and mineral water, the excellent food of the Paris-Lyons-Méditerranee gave them the illusion that everything was the same as before, but it was almost the first trip he had ever taken with Nicole that was a going away rather than a going toward. He drank a whole bottle of wine save for Nicole’s single glass; they talked about the house and the children. But once back in the compartment a silence fell over them like the silence in the restaurant across from the Luxembourg. Receding from a grief, it seems necessary to retrace the same steps that brought us there. An unfamiliar impatience settled on Dick; suddenly Nicole said:

“It seemed too bad to leave Rosemary like that--do you suppose she’ll be all right?”

“Of course. She could take care of herself anywhere--” Lest this belittle Nicole’s ability to do likewise, he added, “After all, she’s an actress, and even though her mother’s in the background she has to look out for herself.”

“She’s very attractive.”

“She’s an infant.”

“She’s attractive though.”

They talked aimlessly back and forth, each speaking for the other.

“She’s not as intelligent as I thought,” Dick offered.

“She’s quite smart.”

“Not very, though--there’s a persistent aroma of the nursery.”

“She’s very--very pretty,” Nicole said in a detached, emphatic way, “and I thought she was very good in the picture.”

“She was well directed. Thinking it over, it wasn’t very individual.”

“I thought it was. I can see how she’d be very attractive to men.”

His heart twisted. To what men? How many men?

--Do you mind if I pull down the curtain?

--Please do, it’s too light in here.

Where now? And with whom?

“In a few years she’ll look ten years older than you.”

“On the contrary. I sketched her one night on a theatre program, I think she’ll last.”

They were both restless in the night. In a day or two Dick would try to banish the ghost of Rosemary before it became walled up with them, but for the moment he had no force to do it. Sometimes it is harder to deprive oneself of a pain than of a pleasure and the memory so possessed him that for the moment there was nothing to do but to pretend. This was more difficult because he was currently annoyed with Nicole, who, after all these years, should recognize symptoms of strain in herself and guard against them. Twice within a fortnight she had broken up: there had been the night of the dinner at Tarmes when he had found her in her bedroom dissolved in crazy laughter telling Mrs. McKisco she could not go in the bathroom because the key was thrown down the well. Mrs. McKisco was astonished and resentful, baffled and yet in a way comprehending. Dick had not been particularly alarmed then, for afterward Nicole was repentant. She called at Gausse’s Hotel but the McKiscos were gone.

The collapse in Paris was another matter, adding significance to the first one. It prophesied possibly a new cycle, a new pousse of the malady. Having gone through unprofessional agonies during her long relapse following Topsy’s birth, he had, perforce, hardened himself about her, making a cleavage between Nicole sick and Nicole well. This made it difficult now to distinguish between his self-protective professional detachment and some new coldness in his heart. As an indifference cherished, or left to atrophy, becomes an emptiness, to this extent he had learned to become empty of Nicole, serving her against his will with negations and emotional neglect. One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but there is no such thing in the life of an individual. There are open wounds, shrunk sometimes to the size of a pin-prick but wounds still. The marks of suffering are more comparable to the loss of a finger, or of the sight of an eye. We may not miss them, either, for one minute in a year, but if we should there is nothing to be done about it.

XII

He found Nicole in the garden with her arms folded high on her shoulders. She looked at him with straight gray eyes, with a child’s searching wonder.

“I went to Cannes,” he said. “I ran into Mrs. Speers. She’s leaving to-morrow. She wanted to come up and say good-by to you, but I slew the idea.”

“I’m sorry. I’d like to have seen her. I like her.”

“Who else do you think I saw--Bartholomew Tailor.”

“You didn’t.”

“I couldn’t have missed that face of his, the old experienced weasel. He was looking over the ground for Ciro’s Menagerie--they’ll all be down next year. I suspected Mrs. Abrams was a sort of outpost.”

“And Baby was outraged the first summer we came here.”

“They don’t really give a damn where they are, so I don’t see why they don’t stay and freeze in Deauville.”

“Can’t we start rumors about cholera or something?”

“I told Bartholomew that some categories died off like flies here--I told him the life of a suck was as short as the life of a machine-gunner in the war.”

“You didn’t.”

“No, I didn’t,” he admitted. “He was very pleasant. It was a beautiful sight, he and I shaking hands there on the boulevard. The meeting of Sigmund Freud and Ward McAllister.”

Dick didn’t want to talk--he wanted to be alone so that his thoughts about work and the future would overpower his thoughts of love and to-day. Nicole knew about it but only darkly and tragically, hating him a little in an animal way, yet wanting to rub against his shoulder.

“The darling,” Dick said lightly.

He went into the house, forgetting something he wanted to do there, and then remembering it was the piano. He sat down whistling and played by ear:

“Just picture you upon my knee

With tea for two and two for tea

And me for you and you for me--”

Through the melody flowed a sudden realization that Nicole, hearing it, would guess quickly at a nostalgia for the past fortnight. He broke off with a casual chord and left the piano.

It was hard to know where to go. He glanced about the house that Nicole had made, that Nicole’s grandfather had paid for. He owned only his work house and the ground on which it stood. Out of three thousand a year and what dribbled in from his publications he paid for his clothes and personal expenses, for cellar charges, and for Lanier’s education, so far confined to a nurse’s wage. Never had a move been contemplated without Dick’s figuring his share. Living rather ascetically, travelling third-class when he was alone, with the cheapest wine, and good care of his clothes, and penalizing himself for any extravagances, he maintained a qualified financial independence. After a certain point, though, it was difficult--again and again it was necessary to decide together as to the uses to which Nicole’s money should be put. Naturally Nicole, wanting to own him, wanting him to stand still forever, encouraged any slackness on his part, and in multiplying ways he was constantly inundated by a trickling of goods and money. The inception of the idea of the cliff villa which they had elaborated as a fantasy one day was a typical example of the forces divorcing them from the first simple arrangements in Zurich.

“Wouldn’t it be fun if--” it had been; and then, “Won’t it be fun when--”

It was not so much fun. His work became confused with Nicole’s problems; in addition, her income had increased so fast of late that it seemed to belittle his work. Also, for the purpose of her cure, he had for many years pretended to a rigid domesticity from which he was drifting away, and this pretense became more arduous in this effortless immobility, in which he was inevitably subjected to microscopic examination. When Dick could no longer play what he wanted to play on the piano, it was an indication that life was being refined down to a point. He stayed in the big room a long time listening to the buzz of the electric clock, listening to time.

In November the waves grew black and dashed over the sea wall onto the shore road--such summer life as had survived disappeared and the beaches were melancholy and desolate under the mistral and rain. Gausse’s Hotel was closed for repairs and enlargement and the scaffolding of the summer Casino at Juan les Pins grew larger and more formidable. Going into Cannes or Nice, Dick and Nicole met new people--members of orchestras, restaurateurs, horticultural enthusiasts, shipbuilders--for Dick had bought an old dinghy--and members of the Syndicat d’Initiative. They knew their servants well and gave thought to the children’s education. In December, Nicole seemed well-knit again; when a month had passed without tension, without the tight mouth, the unmotivated smile, the unfathomable remark, they went to the Swiss Alps for the Christmas holidays.

XIII

With his cap, Dick slapped the snow from his dark blue ski-suit before going inside. The great hall, its floor pockmarked by two decades of hobnails, was cleared for the tea dance, and four-score young Americans, domiciled in schools near Gstaad, bounced about to the frolic of “Don’t Bring Lulu,” or exploded violently with the first percussions of the Charleston. It was a colony of the young, simple, and expensive--the Sturmtruppen of the rich were at St. Moritz. Baby Warren felt that she had made a gesture of renunciation in joining the Divers here.

Dick picked out the two sisters easily across the delicately haunted, soft-swaying room--they were poster-like, formidable in their snow costumes, Nicole’s of cerulean blue, Baby’s of brick red. The young Englishman was talking to them; but they were paying no attention, lulled to the staring point by the adolescent dance.

Nicole’s snow-warm face lighted up further as she saw Dick. “Where is he?”

“He missed the train--I’m meeting him later.” Dick sat down, swinging a heavy boot over his knee. “You two look very striking together. Every once in a while I forget we’re in the same party and get a big shock at seeing you.”

Baby was a tall, fine-looking woman, deeply engaged in being almost thirty. Symptomatically she had pulled two men with her from London, one scarcely down from Cambridge, one old and hard with Victorian lecheries. Baby had certain spinsters’ characteristics--she was alien from touch, she started if she was touched suddenly, and such lingering touches as kisses and embraces slipped directly through the flesh into the forefront of her consciousness. She made few gestures with her trunk, her body proper--instead, she stamped her foot and tossed her head in almost an old-fashioned way. She relished the foretaste of death, prefigured by the catastrophes of friends--persistently she clung to the idea of Nicole’s tragic destiny.

Baby’s younger Englishman had been chaperoning the women down appropriate inclines and harrowing them on the bob-run. Dick, having turned an ankle in a too ambitious telemark, loafed gratefully about the “nursery slope” with the children or drank kvass with a Russian doctor at the hotel.

“Please be happy, Dick,” Nicole urged him. “Why don’t you meet some of these ickle durls and dance with them in the afternoon?”

“What would I say to them?”

Her low almost harsh voice rose a few notes, simulating a plaintive coquetry: “Say: ‘Ickle durl, oo is de pwettiest sing.’ What do you think you say?”

“I don’t like ickle durls. They smell of castile soap and peppermint. When I dance with them, I feel as if I’m pushing a baby carriage.”

It was a dangerous subject--he was careful, to the point of self-consciousness, to stare far over the heads of young maidens.

“There’s a lot of business,” said Baby. “First place, there’s news from home--the property we used to call the station property. The railroads only bought the centre of it at first. Now they’ve bought the rest, and it belonged to Mother. It’s a question of investing the money.”

Pretending to be repelled by this gross turn in the conversation, the Englishman made for a girl on the floor. Following him for an instant with the uncertain eyes of an American girl in the grip of a life-long Anglophilia, Baby continued defiantly:

“It’s a lot of money. It’s three hundred thousand apiece. I keep an eye on my own investments but Nicole doesn’t know anything about securities, and I don’t suppose you do either.”

“I’ve got to meet the train,” Dick said evasively.

Outside he inhaled damp snowflakes that he could no longer see against the darkening sky. Three children sledding past shouted a warning in some strange language; he heard them yell at the next bend and a little farther on he heard sleigh-bells coming up the hill in the dark. The holiday station glittered with expectancy, boys and girls waiting for new boys and girls, and by the time the train arrived, Dick had caught the rhythm, and pretended to Franz Gregorovius that he was clipping off a half-hour from an endless roll of pleasures. But Franz had some intensity of purpose at the moment that fought through any superimposition of mood on Dick’s part. “I may get up to Zurich for a day,” Dick had written, “or you can manage to come to Lausanne.” Franz had managed to come all the way to Gstaad.

He was forty. Upon his healthy maturity reposed a set of pleasant official manners, but he was most at home in a somewhat stuffy safety from which he could despise the broken rich whom he re-educated. His scientific heredity might have bequeathed him a wider world but he seemed to have deliberately chosen the standpoint of an humbler class, a choice typified by his selection of a wife. At the hotel Baby Warren made a quick examination of him, and failing to find any of the hall-marks she respected, the subtler virtues or courtesies by which the privileged classes recognized one another, treated him thereafter with her second manner. Nicole was always a little afraid of him. Dick liked him, as he liked his friends, without reservations.

For the evening they were sliding down the hill into the village, on those little sleds which serve the same purpose as gondolas do in Venice. Their destination was a hotel with an old-fashioned Swiss tap-room, wooden and resounding, a room of clocks, kegs, steins, and antlers. Many parties at long tables blurred into one great party and ate fondue--a peculiarly indigestible form of Welsh rarebit, mitigated by hot spiced wine.

It was jolly in the big room; the younger Englishman remarked it and Dick conceded that there was no other word. With the pert heady wine he relaxed and pretended that the world was all put together again by the gray-haired men of the golden nineties who shouted old glees at the piano, by the young voices and the bright costumes toned into the room by the swirling smoke. For a moment he felt that they were in a ship with landfall just ahead; in the faces of all the girls was the same innocent expectation of the possibilities inherent in the situation and the night. He looked to see if that special girl was there and got an impression that she was at the table behind them--then he forgot her and invented a rigmarole and tried to make his party have a good time.

“I must talk to you,” said Franz in English. “I have only twenty-four hours to spend here.”

“I suspected you had something on your mind.”

“I have a plan that is--so marvellous.” His hand fell upon Dick’s knee. “I have a plan that will be the making of us two.”

“Well?”

“Dick--there is a clinic we could have together--the old clinic of Braun on the Zugersee. The plant is all modern except for a few points. He is sick--he wants to go up in Austria, to die probably. It is a chance that is just insuperable. You and me--what a pair! Now don’t say anything yet until I finish.”

From the yellow glint in Baby’s eyes, Dick saw she was listening.

“We must undertake it together. It would not bind you too tight--it would give you a base, a laboratory, a centre. You could stay in residence say no more than half the year, when the weather is fine. In winter you could go to France or America and write your texts fresh from clinical experience.” He lowered his voice. “And for the convalescence in your family, there are the atmosphere and regularity of the clinic at hand.” Dick’s expression did not encourage this note so Franz dropped it with the punctuation of his tongue leaving his lip quickly. “We could be partners. I the executive manager, you the theoretician, the brilliant consultant and all that. I know myself--I know I have no genius and you have. But, in my way, I am thought very capable; I am utterly competent at the most modern clinical methods. Sometimes for months I have served as the practical head of the old clinic. The professor says this plan is excellent, he advises me to go ahead. He says he is going to live forever, and work up to the last minute.”

Dick formed imaginary pictures of the prospect as a preliminary to any exercise of judgment.

“What’s the financial angle?” he asked.

Franz threw up his chin, his eyebrows, the transient wrinkles of his forehead, his hands, his elbows, his shoulders; he strained up the muscles of his legs, so that the cloth of his trousers bulged, pushed up his heart into his throat and his voice into the roof of his mouth.

“There we have it! Money!” he bewailed. “I have little money. The price in American money is two hundred thousand dollars. The innovation--ary--” he tasted the coinage doubtfully, “--steps, that you will agree are necessary, will cost twenty thousand dollars American. But the clinic is a gold mine--I tell you, I haven’t seen the books. For an investment of two hundred and twenty thousand dollars we have an assured income of--”

Baby’s curiosity was such that Dick brought her into the conversation.

“In your experience, Baby,” he demanded, “have you found that when a European wants to see an American very pressingly it is invariably something concerned with money?”

“What is it?” she said innocently.

“This young Privat-dozent thinks that he and I ought to launch into big business and try to attract nervous breakdowns from America.”

Worried, Franz stared at Baby as Dick continued:

“But who are we, Franz? You bear a big name and I’ve written two textbooks. Is that enough to attract anybody? And I haven’t got that much money--I haven’t got a tenth of it.” Franz smiled cynically. “Honestly I haven’t. Nicole and Baby are rich as Croesus but I haven’t managed to get my hands on any of it yet.”

They were all listening now--Dick wondered if the girl at the table behind was listening too. The idea attracted him. He decided to let Baby speak for him, as one often lets women raise their voices over issues that are not in their hands. Baby became suddenly her grandfather, cool and experimental.

“I think it’s a suggestion you ought to consider, Dick. I don’t know what Doctor Gregory was saying--but it seems to me--”

Behind him the girl had leaned forward into a smoke ring and was picking up something from the floor. Nicole’s face, fitted into his own across the table--her beauty, tentatively nesting and posing, flowed into his love, ever braced to protect it.

“Consider it, Dick,” Franz urged excitedly. “When one writes on psychiatry, one should have actual clinical contacts. Jung writes, Bleuler writes, Freud writes, Forel writes, Adler writes--also they are in constant contact with mental disorder.”

“Dick has me,” laughed Nicole. “I should think that’d be enough mental disorder for one man.”

“That’s different,” said Franz cautiously.

Baby was thinking that if Nicole lived beside a clinic she would always feel quite safe about her.

“We must think it over carefully,” she said.

Though amused at her insolence, Dick did not encourage it.

“The decision concerns me, Baby,” he said gently. “It’s nice of you to want to buy me a clinic.”

Realizing she had meddled, Baby withdrew hurriedly:

“Of course, it’s entirely your affair.”

“A thing as important as this will take weeks to decide. I wonder how I like the picture of Nicole and me anchored to Zurich--” He turned to Franz, anticipating: “--I know. Zurich has a gashouse and running water and electric light--I lived there three years.”

“I will leave you to think it over,” said Franz. “I am confident--”

One hundred pair of five-pound boots had begun to clump toward the door, and they joined the press. Outside in the crisp moonlight, Dick saw the girl tying her sled to one of the sleighs ahead. They piled into their own sleigh and at the crisp-cracking whips the horses strained, breasting the dark air. Past them figures ran and scrambled, the younger ones shoving each other from sleds and runners, landing in the soft snow, then panting after the horses to drop exhausted on a sled or wail that they were abandoned. On either side the fields were beneficently tranquil; the space through which the cavalcade moved was high and limitless. In the country there was less noise as though they were all listening atavistically for wolves in the wide snow.

In Saanen, they poured into the municipal dance, crowded with cow herders, hotel servants, shop-keepers, ski teachers, guides, tourists, peasants. To come into the warm enclosed place after the pantheistic animal feeling without, was to reassume some absurd and impressive knightly name, as thunderous as spurred boots in war, as football cleats on the cement of a locker-room floor. There was conventional yodelling, and the familiar rhythm of it separated Dick from what he had first found romantic in the scene. At first he thought it was because he had hounded the girl out of his consciousness; then it came to him under the form of what Baby had said: “We must think it over carefully--” and the unsaid lines back of that: “We own you, and you’ll admit it sooner or later. It is absurd to keep up the pretense of independence.”

It had been years since Dick had bottled up malice against a creature--since freshman year at New Haven when he had come upon a popular essay about “mental hygiene.” Now he lost his temper at Baby and simultaneously tried to coop it up within him, resenting her cold rich insolence. It would be hundreds of years before any emergent Amazons would ever grasp the fact that a man is vulnerable only in his pride, but delicate as Humpty-Dumpty once that is meddled with--though some of them paid the fact a cautious lip-service. Doctor Diver’s profession of sorting the broken shells of another sort of egg had given him a dread of breakage. But:

“There’s too much good manners,” he said on the way back to Gstaad in the smooth sleigh.

“Well, I think that’s nice,” said Baby.

“No, it isn’t,” he insisted to the anonymous bundle of fur. “Good manners are an admission that everybody is so tender that they have to be handled with gloves. Now, human respect--you don’t call a man a coward or a liar lightly, but if you spend your life sparing people’s feelings and feeding their vanity, you get so you can’t distinguish what should be respected in them.”

“I think Americans take their manners rather seriously,” said the elder Englishman.

“I guess so,” said Dick. “My father had the kind of manners he inherited from the days when you shot first and apologized afterward. Men armed--why, you Europeans haven’t carried arms in civil life since the beginning of the eighteenth century--”

“Not actually, perhaps--”

“Not actually. Not really.”

“Dick, you’ve always had such beautiful manners,” said Baby conciliatingly.

The women were regarding him across the zoo of robes with some alarm. The younger Englishman did not understand--he was one of the kind who were always jumping around cornices and balconies, as if they thought they were in the rigging of a ship--and filled the ride to the hotel with a preposterous story about a boxing match with his best friend in which they loved and bruised each other for an hour, always with great reserve. Dick became facetious.

“So every time he hit you you considered him an even better friend?”

“I respected him more.”

“It’s the premise I don’t understand. You and your best friend scrap about a trivial matter--”

“If you don’t understand, I can’t explain it to you,” said the young Englishman coldly.

--This is what I’ll get if I begin saying what I think, Dick said to himself.

He was ashamed at baiting the man, realizing that the absurdity of the story rested in the immaturity of the attitude combined with the sophisticated method of its narration.

The carnival spirit was strong and they went with the crowd into the grill, where a Tunisian barman manipulated the illumination in a counterpoint, whose other melody was the moon off the ice rink staring in the big windows. In that light, Dick found the girl devitalized, and uninteresting--he turned from her to enjoy the darkness, the cigarette points going green and silver when the lights shone red, the band of white that fell across the dancers as the door to the bar was opened and closed.

“Now tell me, Franz,” he demanded, “do you think after sitting up all night drinking beer, you can go back and convince your patients that you have any character? Don’t you think they’ll see you’re a gastropath?”

“I’m going to bed,” Nicole announced. Dick accompanied her to the door of the elevator.

“I’d come with you but I must show Franz that I’m not intended for a clinician.”

Nicole walked into the elevator.

“Baby has lots of common sense,” she said meditatively.

“Baby is one of--”

The door slashed shut--facing a mechanical hum, Dick finished the sentence in his mind, “--Baby is a trivial, selfish woman.”

But two days later, sleighing to the station with Franz, Dick admitted that he thought favorably upon the matter.

“We’re beginning to turn in a circle,” he admitted. “Living on this scale, there’s an unavoidable series of strains, and Nicole doesn’t survive them. The pastoral quality down on the summer Riviera is all changing anyhow--next year they’ll have a Season.”

They passed the crisp green rinks where Wiener waltzes blared and the colors of many mountain schools flashed against the pale-blue skies.

“--I hope we’ll be able to do it, Franz. There’s nobody I’d rather try it with than you--”

Good-by, Gstaad! Good-by, fresh faces, cold sweet flowers, flakes in the darkness. Good-by, Gstaad, good-by!

XIV

Dick awoke at five after a long dream of war, walked to the window and stared out it at the Zugersee. His dream had begun in sombre majesty; navy blue uniforms crossed a dark plaza behind bands playing the second movement of Prokofieff’s “Love of Three Oranges.” Presently there were fire engines, symbols of disaster, and a ghastly uprising of the mutilated in a dressing station. He turned on his bed-lamp light and made a thorough note of it ending with the half-ironic phrase: “Non-combatant’s shell-shock.”

As he sat on the side of his bed, he felt the room, the house and the night as empty. In the next room Nicole muttered something desolate and he felt sorry for whatever loneliness she was feeling in her sleep. For him time stood still and then every few years accelerated in a rush, like the quick re-wind of a film, but for Nicole the years slipped away by clock and calendar and birthday, with the added poignance of her perishable beauty.

Even this past year and a half on the Zugersee seemed wasted time for her, the seasons marked only by the workmen on the road turning pink in May, brown in July, black in September, white again in Spring. She had come out of her first illness alive with new hopes, expecting so much, yet deprived of any subsistence except Dick, bringing up children she could only pretend gently to love, guided orphans. The people she liked, rebels mostly, disturbed her and were bad for her--she sought in them the vitality that had made them independent or creative or rugged, sought in vain--for their secrets were buried deep in childhood struggles they had forgotten. They were more interested in Nicole’s exterior harmony and charm, the other face of her illness. She led a lonely life owning Dick who did not want to be owned.

Many times he had tried unsuccessfully to let go his hold on her. They had many fine times together, fine talks between the loves of the white nights, but always when he turned away from her into himself he left her holding Nothing in her hands and staring at it, calling it many names, but knowing it was only the hope that he would come back soon.

He scrunched his pillow hard, lay down, and put the back of his neck against it as a Japanese does to slow the circulation, and slept again for a time. Later, while he shaved, Nicole awoke and marched around, giving abrupt, succinct orders to children and servants. Lanier came in to watch his father shave--living beside a psychiatric clinic he had developed an extraordinary confidence in and admiration for his father, together with an exaggerated indifference toward most other adults; the patients appeared to him either in their odd aspects, or else as devitalized, over-correct creatures without personality. He was a handsome, promising boy and Dick devoted much time to him, in the relationship of a sympathetic but exacting officer and respectful enlisted man.

“Why,” Lanier asked, “do you always leave a little lather on the top of your hair when you shave?”

Cautiously Dick parted soapy lips: “I have never been able to find out. I’ve often wondered. I think it’s because I get the first finger soapy when I make the line of my side-burn, but how it gets up on top of my head I don’t know.”

“I’m going to watch it all to-morrow.”

“That’s your only question before breakfast?”

“I don’t really call it a question.”

“That’s one on you.”

Half an hour later Dick started up to the administration building. He was thirty-eight--still declining a beard he yet had a more medical aura about him than he had worn upon the Riviera. For eighteen months now he had lived at the clinic--certainly one of the best-appointed in Europe. Like Dohmler’s it was of the modern type--no longer a single dark and sinister building but a small, scattered, yet deceitfully integrated village--Dick and Nicole had added much in the domain of taste, so that the plant was a thing of beauty, visited by every psychologist passing through Zurich. With the addition of a caddy house it might very well have been a country club. The Eglantine and the Beeches, houses for those sunk into eternal darkness, were screened by little copses from the main building, camouflaged strong-points. Behind was a large truck farm, worked partly by the patients. The workshops for ergo-therapy were three, placed under a single roof and there Doctor Diver began his morning’s inspection. The carpentry shop, full of sunlight, exuded the sweetness of sawdust, of a lost age of wood; always half a dozen men were there, hammering, planing, buzzing--silent men, who lifted solemn eyes from their work as he passed through. Himself a good carpenter, he discussed with them the efficiency of some tools for a moment in a quiet, personal, interested voice. Adjoining was the book-bindery, adapted to the most mobile of patients who were not always, however, those who had the greatest chance for recovery. The last chamber was devoted to beadwork, weaving and work in brass. The faces of the patients here wore the expression of one who had just sighed profoundly, dismissing something insoluble--but their sighs only marked the beginning of another ceaseless round of ratiocination, not in a line as with normal people but in the same circle. Round, round, and round. Around forever. But the bright colors of the stuffs they worked with gave strangers a momentary illusion that all was well, as in a kindergarten. These patients brightened as Doctor Diver came in. Most of them liked him better than they liked Doctor Gregorovius. Those who had once lived in the great world invariably liked him better. There were a few who thought he neglected them, or that he was not simple, or that he posed. Their responses were not dissimilar to those that Dick evoked in non-professional life, but here they were warped and distorted.

One Englishwoman spoke to him always about a subject which she considered her own.

“Have we got music to-night?”

“I don’t know,” he answered. “I haven’t seen Doctor Ladislau. How did you enjoy the music that Mrs. Sachs and Mr. Longstreet gave us last night?”

“It was so-so.”

“I thought it was fine--especially the Chopin.”

“I thought it was so-so.”

“When are you going to play for us yourself?”

She shrugged her shoulders, as pleased at this question as she had been for several years.

“Some time. But I only play so-so.”

They knew that she did not play at all--she had had two sisters who were brilliant musicians, but she had never been able to learn the notes when they had been young together.

From the workshop Dick went to visit the Eglantine and the Beeches. Exteriorly these houses were as cheerful as the others; Nicole had designed the decoration and the furniture on a necessary base of concealed grills and bars and immovable furniture. She had worked with so much imagination--the inventive quality, which she lacked, being supplied by the problem itself--that no instructed visitor would have dreamed that the light, graceful filagree work at a window was a strong, unyielding end of a tether, that the pieces reflecting modern tubular tendencies were stancher than the massive creations of the Edwardians--even the flowers lay in iron fingers and every casual ornament and fixture was as necessary as a girder in a skyscraper. Her tireless eyes had made each room yield up its greatest usefulness. Complimented, she referred to herself brusquely as a master plumber.

For those whose compasses were not depolarized there seemed many odd things in these houses. Doctor Diver was often amused in the Eglantine, the men’s building--here there was a strange little exhibitionist who thought that if he could walk unclothed and unmolested from the Êtoile to the Place de la Concorde he would solve many things--and, perhaps, Dick thought, he was quite right.

His most interesting case was in the main building. The patient was a woman of thirty who had been in the clinic six months; she was an American painter who had lived long in Paris. They had no very satisfactory history of her. A cousin had happened upon her all mad and gone and after an unsatisfactory interlude at one of the whoopee cures that fringed the city, dedicated largely to tourist victims of drug and drink, he had managed to get her to Switzerland. On her admittance she had been exceptionally pretty--now she was a living agonizing sore. All blood tests had failed to give a positive reaction and the trouble was unsatisfactorily catalogued as nervous eczema. For two months she had lain under it, as imprisoned as in the Iron Maiden. She was coherent, even brilliant, within the limits of her special hallucinations.

She was particularly his patient. During spells of overexcitement he was the only doctor who could “do anything with her.” Several weeks ago, on one of many nights that she had passed in sleepless torture Franz had succeeded in hypnotizing her into a few hours of needed rest, but he had never again succeeded. Hypnosis was a tool that Dick had distrusted and seldom used, for he knew that he could not always summon up the mood in himself--he had once tried it on Nicole and she had scornfully laughed at him.

The woman in room twenty could not see him when he came in--the area about her eyes was too tightly swollen. She spoke in a strong, rich, deep, thrilling voice.

“How long will this last? Is it going to be forever?”

“It’s not going to be very long now. Doctor Ladislau tells me there are whole areas cleared up.”

“If I knew what I had done to deserve this I could accept it with equanimity.”

“It isn’t wise to be mystical about it--we recognize it as a nervous phenomenon. It’s related to the blush--when you were a girl, did you blush easily?”

She lay with her face turned to the ceiling.

“I have found nothing to blush for since I cut my wisdom teeth.”

“Haven’t you committed your share of petty sins and mistakes?”

“I have nothing to reproach myself with.”

“You’re very fortunate.”

The woman thought a moment; her voice came up through her bandaged face afflicted with subterranean melodies:

“I’m sharing the fate of the women of my time who challenged men to battle.”

“To your vast surprise it was just like all battles,” he answered, adopting her formal diction.

“Just like all battles.” She thought this over. “You pick a set-up, or else win a Pyrrhic victory, or you’re wrecked and ruined--you’re a ghostly echo from a broken wall.”

“You are neither wrecked nor ruined,” he told her. “Are you quite sure you’ve been in a real battle?”

“Look at me!” she cried furiously.

“You’ve suffered, but many women suffered before they mistook themselves for men.” It was becoming an argument and he retreated. “In any case you mustn’t confuse a single failure with a final defeat.”

She sneered. “Beautiful words,” and the phrase transpiring up through the crust of pain humbled him.

“We would like to go into the true reasons that brought you here--” he began but she interrupted.

“I am here as a symbol of something. I thought perhaps you would know what it was.”

“You are sick,” he said mechanically.

“Then what was it I had almost found?”

“A greater sickness.”

“That’s all?”

“That’s all.” With disgust he heard himself lying, but here and now the vastness of the subject could only be compressed into a lie. “Outside of that there’s only confusion and chaos. I won’t lecture to you--we have too acute a realization of your physical suffering. But it’s only by meeting the problems of every day, no matter how trifling and boring they seem, that you can make things drop back into place again. After that--perhaps you’ll be able again to examine--”

He had slowed up to avoid the inevitable end of his thought: “--the frontiers of consciousness.” The frontiers that artists must explore were not for her, ever. She was fine-spun, inbred--eventually she might find rest in some quiet mysticism. Exploration was for those with a measure of peasant blood, those with big thighs and thick ankles who could take punishment as they took bread and salt, on every inch of flesh and spirit.

--Not for you, he almost said. It’s too tough a game for you.

Yet in the awful majesty of her pain he went out to her unreservedly, almost sexually. He wanted to gather her up in his arms, as he so often had Nicole, and cherish even her mistakes, so deeply were they part of her. The orange light through the drawn blind, the sarcophagus of her figure on the bed, the spot of face, the voice searching the vacuity of her illness and finding only remote abstractions.

As he arose the tears fled lava-like into her bandages.

“That is for something,” she whispered. “Something must come out of it.”

He stooped and kissed her forehead.

“We must all try to be good,” he said.

Leaving her room he sent the nurse in to her. There were other patients to see: an American girl of fifteen who had been brought up on the basis that childhood was intended to be all fun--his visit was provoked by the fact that she had just hacked off all her hair with a nail scissors. There was nothing much to be done for her--a family history of neurosis and nothing stable in her past to build on. The father, normal and conscientious himself, had tried to protect a nervous brood from life’s troubles and had succeeded merely in preventing them from developing powers of adjustment to life’s inevitable surprises. There was little that Dick could say: “Helen, when you’re in doubt you must ask a nurse, you must learn to take advice. Promise me you will.”

What was a promise with the head sick? He looked in upon a frail exile from the Caucasus buckled securely in a sort of hammock which in turn was submerged in a warm medical bath, and upon the three daughters of a Portuguese general who slid almost imperceptibly toward paresis. He went into the room next to them and told a collapsed psychiatrist that he was better, always better, and the man tried to read his face for conviction, since he hung on the real world only through such reassurance as he could find in the resonance, or lack of it, in Doctor Diver’s voice. After that Dick discharged a shiftless orderly and by then it was the lunch hour.

XV

Meals with the patients were a chore he approached with apathy. The gathering, which of course did not include residents at the Eglantine or the Beeches, was conventional enough at first sight, but over it brooded always a heavy melancholy. Such doctors as were present kept up a conversation but most of the patients, as if exhausted by their morning’s endeavor, or depressed by the company, spoke little, and ate looking into their plates.

Luncheon over, Dick returned to his villa. Nicole was in the salon wearing a strange expression.

“Read that,” she said.

He opened the letter. It was from a woman recently discharged, though with skepticism on the part of the faculty. It accused him in no uncertain terms of having seduced her daughter, who had been at her mother’s side during the crucial stage of the illness. It presumed that Mrs. Diver would be glad to have this information and learn what her husband was “really like.”

Dick read the letter again. Couched in clear and concise English he yet recognized it as the letter of a maniac. Upon a single occasion he had let the girl, a flirtatious little brunette, ride into Zurich with him, upon her request, and in the evening had brought her back to the clinic. In an idle, almost indulgent way, he kissed her. Later, she tried to carry the affair further, but he was not interested and subsequently, probably consequently, the girl had come to dislike him, and taken her mother away.

“This letter is deranged,” he said. “I had no relations of any kind with that girl. I didn’t even like her.”

“Yes, I’ve tried thinking that,” said Nicole.

“Surely you don’t believe it?”

“I’ve been sitting here.”

He sank his voice to a reproachful note and sat beside her.

“This is absurd. This is a letter from a mental patient.”

“I was a mental patient.”

He stood up and spoke more authoritatively.

“Suppose we don’t have any nonsense, Nicole. Go and round up the children and we’ll start.”

In the car, with Dick driving, they followed the little promontories of the lake, catching the burn of light and water in the windshield, tunnelling through cascades of evergreen. It was Dick’s car, a Renault so dwarfish that they all stuck out of it except the children, between whom Mademoiselle towered mastlike in the rear seat. They knew every kilometer of the road--where they would smell the pine needles and the black stove smoke. A high sun with a face traced on it beat fierce on the straw hats of the children.

Nicole was silent; Dick was uneasy at her straight hard gaze. Often he felt lonely with her, and frequently she tired him with the short floods of personal revelations that she reserved exclusively for him, “I’m like this--I’m more like that,” but this afternoon he would have been glad had she rattled on in staccato for a while and given him glimpses of her thoughts. The situation was always most threatening when she backed up into herself and closed the doors behind her.

At Zug Mademoiselle got out and left them. The Divers approached the Agiri Fair through a menagerie of mammoth steamrollers that made way for them. Dick parked the car, and as Nicole looked at him without moving, he said: “Come on, darl.” Her lips drew apart into a sudden awful smile, and his belly quailed, but as if he hadn’t seen it he repeated: “Come on. So the children can get out.”

“Oh, I’ll come all right,” she answered, tearing the words from some story spinning itself out inside her, too fast for him to grasp. “Don’t worry about that. I’ll come--”

“Then come.”

She turned from him as he walked beside her but the smile still flickered across her face, derisive and remote. Only when Lanier spoke to her several times did she manage to fix her attention upon an object, a Punch-and-Judy show, and to orient herself by anchoring to it.

Dick tried to think what to do. The dualism in his views of her--that of the husband, that of the psychiatrist--was increasingly paralyzing his faculties. In these six years she had several times carried him over the line with her, disarming him by exciting emotional pity or by a flow of wit, fantastic and disassociated, so that only after the episode did he realize with the consciousness of his own relaxation from tension, that she had succeeded in getting a point against his better judgment.

A discussion with Topsy about the guignol--as to whether the Punch was the same Punch they had seen last year in Cannes--having been settled, the family walked along again between the booths under the open sky. The women’s bonnets, perching over velvet vests, the bright, spreading skirts of many cantons, seemed demure against the blue and orange paint of the wagons and displays. There was the sound of a whining, tinkling hootchy-kootchy show.

Nicole began to run very suddenly, so suddenly that for a moment Dick did not miss her. Far ahead he saw her yellow dress twisting through the crowd, an ochre stitch along the edge of reality and unreality, and started after her. Secretly she ran and secretly he followed. As the hot afternoon went shrill and terrible with her flight he had forgotten the children; then he wheeled and ran back to them, drawing them this way and that by their arms, his eyes jumping from booth to booth.

“Madame,” he cried to a young woman behind a white lottery wheel, “Est-ce que je peux laisser ces petits avec vous deux minutes? C’est très urgent--je vous donnerai dix francs.”

“Mais oui.”

He headed the children into the booth. “Alors--restez avec cette gentille dame.”

“Oui, Dick.”

He darted off again but he had lost her; he circled the merry-go-round keeping up with it till he realized he was running beside it, staring always at the same horse. He elbowed through the crowd in the buvette; then remembering a predilection of Nicole’s he snatched up an edge of a fortuneteller’s tent and peered within. A droning voice greeted him: “La septième fille d’une septième fille née sur les rives du Nil--entrez, Monsieur--”

Dropping the flap he ran along toward where the plaisance terminated at the lake and a small ferris wheel revolved slowly against the sky. There he found her.

She was alone in what was momentarily the top boat of the wheel, and as it descended he saw that she was laughing hilariously; he slunk back in the crowd, a crowd which, at the wheel’s next revolution, spotted the intensity of Nicole’s hysteria.

“Regardez-moi ça!”

“Regarde donc cette Anglaise!”

Down she dropped again--this time the wheel and its music were slowing and a dozen people were around her car, all of them impelled by the quality of her laughter to smile in sympathetic idiocy. But when Nicole saw Dick her laughter died--she made a gesture of slipping by and away from him but he caught her arm and held it as they walked away.

“Why did you lose control of yourself like that?”

“You know very well why.”

“No, I don’t.”

“That’s just preposterous--let me loose--that’s an insult to my intelligence. Don’t you think I saw that girl look at you--that little dark girl. Oh, this is farcical--a child, not more than fifteen. Don’t you think I saw?”

“Stop here a minute and quiet down.”

They sat at a table, her eyes in a profundity of suspicion, her hand moving across her line of sight as if it were obstructed. “I want a drink--I want a brandy.”

“You can’t have brandy--you can have a bock if you want it.”

“Why can’t I have a brandy?”

“We won’t go into that. Listen to me--this business about a girl is a delusion, do you understand that word?”

“It’s always a delusion when I see what you don’t want me to see.”

He had a sense of guilt as in one of those nightmares where we are accused of a crime which we recognize as something undeniably experienced, but which upon waking we realize we have not committed. His eyes wavered from hers.

“I left the children with a gypsy woman in a booth. We ought to get them.”

“Who do you think you are?” she demanded. “Svengali?”

Fifteen minutes ago they had been a family. Now as she was crushed into a corner by his unwilling shoulder, he saw them all, child and man, as a perilous accident.

“We’re going home.”

“Home!” she roared in a voice so abandoned that its louder tones wavered and cracked. “And sit and think that we’re all rotting and the children’s ashes are rotting in every box I open? That filth!”

Almost with relief he saw that her words sterilized her, and Nicole, sensitized down to the corium of the skin, saw the withdrawal in his face. Her own face softened and she begged, “Help me, help me, Dick!”

A wave of agony went over him. It was awful that such a fine tower should not be erected, only suspended, suspended from him. Up to a point that was right: men were for that, beam and idea, girder and logarithm; but somehow Dick and Nicole had become one and equal, not opposite and complementary; she was Dick too, the drought in the marrow of his bones. He could not watch her disintegrations without participating in them. His intuition rilled out of him as tenderness and compassion--he could only take the characteristically modern course, to interpose--he would get a nurse from Zurich, to take her over to-night.

“You can help me.”

Her sweet bullying pulled him forward off his feet. “You’ve helped me before--you can help me now.”

“I can only help you the same old way.”

“Some one can help me.”

“Maybe so. You can help yourself most. Let’s find the children.”

There were numerous lottery booths with white wheels--Dick was startled when he inquired at the first and encountered blank disavowals. Evil-eyed, Nicole stood apart, denying the children, resenting them as part of a downright world she sought to make amorphous. Presently Dick found them, surrounded by women who were examining them with delight like fine goods, and by peasant children staring.

“Merci, Monsieur, ah Monsieur est trop généreux. C’était un plaisir, M’sieur, Madame. Au revoir, mes petits.”

They started back with a hot sorrow streaming down upon them; the car was weighted with their mutual apprehension and anguish, and the children’s mouths were grave with disappointment. Grief presented itself in its terrible, dark unfamiliar color. Somewhere around Zug, Nicole, with a convulsive effort, reiterated a remark she had made before about a misty yellow house set back from the road that looked like a painting not yet dry, but it was just an attempt to catch at a rope that was playing out too swiftly.

Dick tried to rest--the struggle would come presently at home and he might have to sit a long time, restating the universe for her. A “schizophrêne” is well named as a split personality--Nicole was alternately a person to whom nothing need be explained and one to whom nothing could be explained. It was necessary to treat her with active and affirmative insistence, keeping the road to reality always open, making the road to escape harder going. But the brilliance, the versatility of madness is akin to the resourcefulness of water seeping through, over and around a dike. It requires the united front of many people to work against it. He felt it necessary that this time Nicole cure herself; he wanted to wait until she remembered the other times, and revolted from them. In a tired way, he planned that they would again resume the régime relaxed a year before.

He had turned up a hill that made a short cut to the clinic, and now as he stepped on the accelerator for a short straightaway run parallel to the hillside the car swerved violently left, swerved right, tipped on two wheels and, as Dick, with Nicole’s voice screaming in his ear, crushed down the mad hand clutching the steering wheel, righted itself, swerved once more and shot off the road; it tore through low underbrush, tipped again and settled slowly at an angle of ninety degrees against a tree.

The children were screaming and Nicole was screaming and cursing and trying to tear at Dick’s face. Thinking first of the list of the car and unable to estimate it Dick bent away Nicole’s arm, climbed over the top side and lifted out the children; then he saw the car was in a stable position. Before doing anything else he stood there shaking and panting.

“You--!” he cried.

She was laughing hilariously, unashamed, unafraid, unconcerned. No one coming on the scene would have imagined that she had caused it; she laughed as after some mild escape of childhood.

“You were scared, weren’t you?” she accused him. “You wanted to live!”

She spoke with such force that in his shocked state Dick wondered if he had been frightened for himself--but the strained faces of the children, looking from parent to parent, made him want to grind her grinning mask into jelly.

Directly above them, half a kilometer by the winding road but only a hundred yards climbing, was an inn; one of its wings showed through the wooded hill.

“Take Topsy’s hand,” he said to Lanier, “like that, tight, and climb up that hill--see the little path? When you get to the inn tell them ‘La voiture Divare est cassée.’ Some one must come right down.”

Lanier, not sure what had happened, but suspecting the dark and unprecedented, asked:

“What will you do, Dick?”

“We’ll stay here with the car.”

Neither of them looked at their mother as they started off. “Be careful crossing the road up there! Look both ways!” Dick shouted after them.

He and Nicole looked at each other directly, their eyes like blazing windows across a court of the same house. Then she took out a compact, looked in its mirror, and smoothed back the temple hair. Dick watched the children climbing for a moment until they disappeared among the pines half way up; then he walked around the car to see the damage and plan how to get it back on the road. In the dirt he could trace the rocking course they had pursued for over a hundred feet; he was filled with a violent disgust that was not like anger.

In a few minutes the proprietor of the inn came running down.

“My God!” he exclaimed. “How did it happen, were you going fast? What luck! Except for that tree you’d have rolled down hill!”

Taking advantage of Emile’s reality, the wide black apron, the sweat upon the rolls of his face, Dick signalled to Nicole in a matter-of-fact way to let him help her from the car; whereupon she jumped over the lower side, lost her balance on the slope, fell to her knees and got up again. As she watched the men trying to move the car her expression became defiant. Welcoming even that mood Dick said:

“Go and wait with the children, Nicole.”

Only after she had gone did he remember that she had wanted cognac, and that there was cognac available up there--he told Emile never mind about the car; they would wait for the chauffeur and the big car to pull it up onto the road. Together they hurried up to the inn.

XVI

“I want to go away,” he told Franz. “For a month or so, for as long as I can.”

“Why not, Dick? That was our original arrangement--it was you who insisted on staying. If you and Nicole--”

“I don’t want to go away with Nicole. I want to go away alone. This last thing knocked me sideways--if I get two hours’ sleep in twenty-four, it’s one of Zwingli’s miracles.”

“You wish a real leave of abstinence.”

“The word is ‘absence.’ Look here: if I go to Berlin to the Psychiatric Congress could you manage to keep the peace? For three months she’s been all right and she likes her nurse. My God, you’re the only human being in this world I can ask this of.”

Franz grunted, considering whether or not he could be trusted to think always of his partner’s interest.

In Zurich the next week Dick drove to the airport and took the big plane for Munich. Soaring and roaring into the blue he felt numb, realizing how tired he was. A vast persuasive quiet stole over him, and he abandoned sickness to the sick, sound to the motors, direction to the pilot. He had no intention of attending so much as a single session of the congress--he could imagine it well enough, new pamphlets by Bleuler and the elder Forel that he could much better digest at home, the paper by the American who cured dementia præcox by pulling out his patient’s teeth or cauterizing their tonsils, the half-derisive respect with which this idea would be greeted, for no more reason than that America was such a rich and powerful country. The other delegates from America--red-headed Schwartz with his saint’s face and his infinite patience in straddling two worlds, as well as dozens of commercial alienists with hang-dog faces, who would be present partly to increase their standing, and hence their reach for the big plums of the criminal practice, partly to master novel sophistries that they could weave into their stock in trade, to the infinite confusion of all values. There would be cynical Latins, and some man of Freud’s from Vienna. Articulate among them would be the great Jung, bland, super-vigorous, on his rounds between the forests of anthropology and the neuroses of school-boys. At first there would be an American cast to the congress, almost Rotarian in its forms and ceremonies, then the closer-knit European vitality would fight through, and finally the Americans would play their trump card, the announcement of colossal gifts and endowments, of great new plants and training schools, and in the presence of the figures the Europeans would blanch and walk timidly. But he would not be there to see.

They skirted the Vorarlberg Alps, and Dick felt a pastoral delight in watching the villages. There were always four or five in sight, each one gathered around a church. It was simple looking at the earth from far off, simple as playing grim games with dolls and soldiers. This was the way statesmen and commanders and all retired people looked at things. Anyhow, it was a good draft of relief.

An Englishman spoke to him from across the aisle but he found something antipathetic in the English lately. England was like a rich man after a disastrous orgy who makes up to the household by chatting with them individually, when it is obvious to them that he is only trying to get back his self-respect in order to usurp his former power.

Dick had with him what magazines were available on the station quays: The Century, The Motion Picture, L’lllustration, and the Fliegende Blätter, but it was more fun to descend in his imagination into the villages and shake hands with the rural characters. He sat in the churches as he sat in his father’s church in Buffalo, amid the starchy must of Sunday clothes. He listened to the wisdom of the Near East, was Crucified, Died, and was Buried in the cheerful church, and once more worried between five or ten cents for the collection plate, because of the girl who sat in the pew behind.

The Englishman suddenly borrowed his magazines with a little small change of conversation, and Dick, glad to see them go, thought of the voyage ahead of him. Wolf-like under his sheep’s clothing of long-staple Australian wool, he considered the world of pleasure--the incorruptible Mediterranean with sweet old dirt caked in the olive trees, the peasant girl near Savona with a face as green and rose as the color of an illuminated missal. He would take her in his hands and snatch her across the border . . .

. . . but there he deserted her--he must press on toward the Isles of Greece, the cloudy waters of unfamiliar ports, the lost girl on shore, the moon of popular songs. A part of Dick’s mind was made up of the tawdry souvenirs of his boyhood. Yet in that somewhat littered Five-and-Ten, he had managed to keep alive the low painful fire of intelligence.

XVII

Tommy Barban was a ruler, Tommy was a hero--Dick happened upon him in the Marienplatz in Munich, in one of those cafés, where small gamblers diced on “tapestry” mats. The air was full of politics, and the slap of cards.

Tommy was at a table laughing his martial laugh: “Um-buh--ha-ha! Um-buh--ha-ha!” As a rule, he drank little; courage was his game and his companions were always a little afraid of him. Recently an eighth of the area of his skull had been removed by a Warsaw surgeon and was knitting under his hair, and the weakest person in the café could have killed him with a flip of a knotted napkin.

“--this is Prince Chillicheff--” A battered, powder-gray Russian of fifty, “--and Mr. McKibben--and Mr. Hannan--” the latter was a lively ball of black eyes and hair, a clown; and he said immediately to Dick:

“The first thing before we shake hands--what do you mean by fooling around with my aunt?”

“Why, I--”

“You heard me. What are you doing here in Munich anyhow?”

“Um-bah--ha-ha!” laughed Tommy.

“Haven’t you got aunts of your own? Why don’t you fool with them?”

Dick laughed, whereupon the man shifted his attack:

“Now let’s not have any more talk about aunts. How do I know you didn’t make up the whole thing? Here you are a complete stranger with an acquaintance of less than half an hour, and you come up to me with a cock-and-bull story about your aunts. How do I know what you have concealed about you?”

Tommy laughed again, then he said good-naturedly, but firmly, “That’s enough, Carly. Sit down, Dick--how’re you? How’s Nicole?”

He did not like any man very much nor feel their presence with much intensity--he was all relaxed for combat; as a fine athlete playing secondary defense in any sport is really resting much of the time, while a lesser man only pretends to rest and is at a continual and self-destroying nervous tension.

Hannan, not entirely suppressed, moved to an adjoining piano, and with recurring resentment on his face whenever he looked at Dick, played chords, from time to time muttering, “Your aunts,” and, in a dying cadence, “I didn’t say aunts anyhow. I said pants.”

“Well, how’re you?” repeated Tommy. “You don’t look so--” he fought for a word, “--so jaunty as you used to, so spruce, you know what I mean.”

The remark sounded too much like one of those irritating accusations of waning vitality and Dick was about to retort by commenting on the extraordinary suits worn by Tommy and Prince Chillicheff, suits of a cut and pattern fantastic enough to have sauntered down Beale Street on a Sunday--when an explanation was forthcoming.

“I see you are regarding our clothes,” said the Prince. “We have just come out of Russia.”

“These were made in Poland by the court tailor,” said Tommy. “That’s a fact--Pilsudski’s own tailor.”

“You’ve been touring?” Dick asked.

They laughed, the Prince inordinately meanwhile clapping Tommy on the back.

“Yes, we have been touring. That’s it, touring. We have made the grand Tour of all the Russias. In state.”

Dick waited for an explanation. It came from Mr. McKibben in two words.

“They escaped.”

“Have you been prisoners in Russia?”

“It was I,” explained Prince Chillicheff, his dead yellow eyes staring at Dick. “Not a prisoner but in hiding.”

“Did you have much trouble getting out?”

“Some trouble. We left three Red Guards dead at the border. Tommy left two--” He held up two fingers like a Frenchman--”I left one.”

“That’s the part I don’t understand,” said Mr. McKibben. “Why they should have objected to your leaving.”

Hannan turned from the piano and said, winking at the others: “Mac thinks a Marxian is somebody who went to St. Mark’s school.”

It was an escape story in the best tradition--an aristocrat hiding nine years with a former servant and working in a government bakery; the eighteen-year-old daughter in Paris who knew Tommy Barban. . . . During the narrative Dick decided that this parched papier mâché relic of the past was scarcely worth the lives of three young men. The question arose as to whether Tommy and Chillicheff had been frightened.

“When I was cold,” Tommy said. “I always get scared when I’m cold. During the war I was always frightened when I was cold.”

McKibben stood up.

“I must leave. To-morrow morning I’m going to Innsbruck by car with my wife and children--and the governess.”

“I’m going there to-morrow, too,” said Dick.

“Oh, are you?” exclaimed McKibben. “Why not come with us? It’s a big Packard and there’s only my wife and my children and myself--and the governess--”

“I can’t possibly--”

“Of course she’s not really a governess,” McKibben concluded, looking rather pathetically at Dick. “As a matter of fact my wife knows your sister-in-law, Baby Warren.”

But Dick was not to be drawn in a blind contract.

“I’ve promised to travel with two men.”

“Oh,” McKibben’s face fell. “Well, I’ll say good-by.” He unscrewed two blooded wire-hairs from a nearby table and departed; Dick pictured the jammed Packard pounding toward Innsbruck with the McKibbens and their children and their baggage and yapping dogs--and the governess.

“The paper says they know the man who killed him,” said Tommy. “But his cousins did not want it in the papers, because it happened in a speakeasy. What do you think of that?”

“It’s what’s known as family pride.”

Hannan played a loud chord on the piano to attract attention to himself.

“I don’t believe his first stuff holds up,” he said. “Even barring the Europeans there are a dozen Americans can do what North did.”

It was the first indication Dick had had that they were talking about Abe North.

“The only difference is that Abe did it first,” said Tommy.

“I don’t agree,” persisted Hannan. “He got the reputation for being a good musician because he drank so much that his friends had to explain him away somehow--”

“What’s this about Abe North? What about him? Is he in a jam?”

“Didn’t you read The Herald this morning?”

“No.”

“He’s dead. He was beaten to death in a speakeasy in New York. He just managed to crawl home to the Racquet Club to die--”

“Abe North?”

“Yes, sure, they--”

“Abe North?” Dick stood up. “Are you sure he’s dead?”

Hannan turned around to McKibben: “It wasn’t the Racquet Club he crawled to--it was the Harvard Club. I’m sure he didn’t belong to the Racquet.”

“The paper said so,” McKibben insisted.

“It must have been a mistake. I’m quite sure.”

“Beaten to death in a speakeasy.”

“But I happen to know most of the members of the Racquet Club,” said Hannan. “It must have been the Harvard Club.”

Dick got up, Tommy too. Prince Chillicheff started out of a wan study of nothing, perhaps of his chances of ever getting out of Russia, a study that had occupied him so long that it was doubtful if he could give it up immediately, and joined them in leaving.

“Abe North beaten to death.”

On the way to the hotel, a journey of which Dick was scarcely aware, Tommy said:

“We’re waiting for a tailor to finish some suits so we can get to Paris. I’m going into stock-broking and they wouldn’t take me if I showed up like this. Everybody in your country is making millions. Are you really leaving to-morrow? We can’t even have dinner with you. It seems the Prince had an old girl in Munich. He called her up but she’d been dead five years and we’re having dinner with the two daughters.”

The Prince nodded.

“Perhaps I could have arranged for Doctor Diver.”

“No, no,” said Dick hastily.

He slept deep and awoke to a slow mournful march passing his window. It was a long column of men in uniform, wearing the familiar helmet of 1914, thick men in frock coats and silk hats, burghers, aristocrats, plain men. It was a society of veterans going to lay wreaths on the tombs of the dead. The column marched slowly with a sort of swagger for a lost magnificence, a past effort, a forgotten sorrow. The faces were only formally sad but Dick’s lungs burst for a moment with regret for Abe’s death, and his own youth of ten years ago.

XVIII

He reached Innsbruck at dusk, sent his bags up to a hotel and walked into town. In the sunset the Emperor Maximilian knelt in prayer above his bronze mourners; a quartet of Jesuit novices paced and read in the university garden. The marble souvenirs of old sieges, marriages, anniversaries, faded quickly when the sun was down, and he had erbsen-suppe with würstchen cut up in it, drank four helles of Pilsener and refused a formidable dessert known as “kaiser-schmarren.”

Despite the overhanging mountains Switzerland was far away, Nicole was far away. Walking in the garden later when it was quite dark he thought about her with detachment, loving her for her best self. He remembered once when the grass was damp and she came to him on hurried feet, her thin slippers drenched with dew. She stood upon his shoes nestling close and held up her face, showing it as a book open at a page.

“Think how you love me,” she whispered. “I don’t ask you to love me always like this, but I ask you to remember. Somewhere inside me there’ll always be the person I am to-night.”

But Dick had come away for his soul’s sake, and he began thinking about that. He had lost himself--he could not tell the hour when, or the day or the week, the month or the year. Once he had cut through things, solving the most complicated equations as the simplest problems of his simplest patients. Between the time he found Nicole flowering under a stone on the Zurichsee and the moment of his meeting with Rosemary the spear had been blunted.

Watching his father’s struggles in poor parishes had wedded a desire for money to an essentially unacquisitive nature. It was not a healthy necessity for security--he had never felt more sure of himself, more thoroughly his own man, than at the time of his marriage to Nicole. Yet he had been swallowed up like a gigolo, and somehow permitted his arsenal to be locked up in the Warren safety-deposit vaults.

“There should have been a settlement in the Continental style; but it isn’t over yet. I’ve wasted eight years teaching the rich the ABC’s of human decency, but I’m not done. I’ve got too many unplayed trumps in my hand.”

He loitered among the fallow rose bushes and the beds of damp sweet indistinguishable fern. It was warm for October but cool enough to wear a heavy tweed coat buttoned by a little elastic tape at the neck. A figure detached itself from the black shape of a tree and he knew it was the woman whom he had passed in the lobby coming out. He was in love with every pretty woman he saw now, their forms at a distance, their shadows on a wall.

Her back was toward him as she faced the lights of the town. He scratched a match that she must have heard, but she remained motionless.

--Was it an invitation? Or an indication of obliviousness? He had long been outside of the world of simple desires and their fulfillments, and he was inept and uncertain. For all he knew there might be some code among the wanderers of obscure spas by which they found each other quickly.

--Perhaps the next gesture was his. Strange children should smile at each other and say, “Let’s play.”

He moved closer, the shadow moved sideways. Possibly he would be snubbed like the scapegrace drummers he had heard of in youth. His heart beat loud in contact with the unprobed, undissected, unanalyzed, unaccounted for. Suddenly he turned away, and, as he did, the girl, too, broke the black frieze she made with the foliage, rounded a bench at a moderate but determined pace and took the path back to the hotel.

With a guide and two other men, Dick started up the Birkkarspitze next morning. It was a fine feeling once they were above the cowbells of the highest pastures--Dick looked forward to the night in the shack, enjoying his own fatigue, enjoying the captaincy of the guide, feeling a delight in his own anonymity. But at mid-day the weather changed to black sleet and hail and mountain thunder. Dick and one of the other climbers wanted to go on but the guide refused. Regretfully they struggled back to Innsbruck to start again to-morrow.

After dinner and a bottle of heavy local wine in the deserted dining-room, he felt excited, without knowing why, until he began thinking of the garden. He had passed the girl in the lobby before supper and this time she had looked at him and approved of him, but it kept worrying him: Why? When I could have had a good share of the pretty women of my time for the asking, why start that now? With a wraith, with a fragment of my desire? Why?

His imagination pushed ahead--the old asceticism, the actual unfamiliarity, triumphed: God, I might as well go back to the Riviera and sleep with Janice Caricamento or the Wilburhazy girl. To belittle all these years with something cheap and easy?

He was still excited, though, and he turned from the veranda and went up to his room to think. Being alone in body and spirit begets loneliness, and loneliness begets more loneliness.

Upstairs he walked around thinking of the matter and laying out his climbing clothes advantageously on the faint heater; he again encountered Nicole’s telegram, still unopened, with which diurnally she accompanied his itinerary. He had delayed opening it before supper--perhaps because of the garden. It was a cablegram from Buffalo, forwarded through Zurich.

“Your father died peacefully tonight. HOLMES.”

He felt a sharp wince at the shock, a gathering of the forces of resistance; then it rolled up through his loins and stomach and throat.

He read the message again. He sat down on the bed, breathing and staring; thinking first the old selfish child’s thought that comes with the death of a parent, how will it affect me now that this earliest and strongest of protections is gone?

The atavism passed and he walked the room still, stopping from time to time to look at the telegram. Holmes was formally his father’s curate but actually, and for a decade, rector of the church. How did he die? Of old age--he was seventy-five. He had lived a long time.

Dick felt sad that he had died alone--he had survived his wife, and his brothers and sisters; there were cousins in Virginia but they were poor and not able to come North, and Holmes had had to sign the telegram. Dick loved his father--again and again he referred judgments to what his father would probably have thought or done. Dick was born several months after the death of two young sisters and his father, guessing what would be the effect on Dick’s mother, had saved him from a spoiling by becoming his moral guide. He was of tired stock yet he raised himself to that effort.

In the summer father and son walked downtown together to have their shoes shined--Dick in his starched duck sailor suit, his father always in beautifully cut clerical clothes--and the father was very proud of his handsome little boy. He told Dick all he knew about life, not much but most of it true, simple things, matters of behavior that came within his clergyman’s range. “Once in a strange town when I was first ordained, I went into a crowded room and was confused as to who was my hostess. Several people I knew came toward me, but I disregarded them because I had seen a gray-haired woman sitting by a window far across the room. I went over to her and introduced myself. After that I made many friends in that town.”

His father had done that from a good heart--his father had been sure of what he was, with a deep pride of the two proud widows who had raised him to believe that nothing could be superior to “good instincts,” honor, courtesy, and courage.

The father always considered that his wife’s small fortune belonged to his son, and in college and in medical school sent him a check for all of it four times a year. He was one of those about whom it was said with smug finality in the gilded age: “very much the gentleman, but not much get-up-and-go about him.”

. . . Dick sent down for a newspaper. Still pacing to and from the telegram open on his bureau, he chose a ship to go to America. Then he put in a call for Nicole in Zurich, remembering so many things as he waited, and wishing he had always been as good as he had intended to be.

XIX

For an hour, tied up with his profound reaction to his father’s death, the magnificent façade of the homeland, the harbor of New York, seemed all sad and glorious to Dick, but once ashore the feeling vanished, nor did he find it again in the streets or the hotels or the trains that bore him first to Buffalo, and then south to Virginia with his father’s body. Only as the local train shambled into the low-forested clayland of Westmoreland County, did he feel once more identified with his surroundings; at the station he saw a star he knew, and a cold moon bright over Chesapeake Bay; he heard the rasping wheels of buckboards turning, the lovely fatuous voices, the sound of sluggish primeval rivers flowing softly under soft Indian names.

Next day at the churchyard his father was laid among a hundred Divers, Dorseys, and Hunters. It was very friendly leaving him there with all his relations around him. Flowers were scattered on the brown unsettled earth. Dick had no more ties here now and did not believe he would come back. He knelt on the hard soil. These dead, he knew them all, their weather-beaten faces with blue flashing eyes, the spare violent bodies, the souls made of new earth in the forest-heavy darkness of the seventeenth century.

“Good-by, my father--good-by, all my fathers.”

On the long-roofed steamship piers one is in a country that is no longer here and not yet there. The hazy yellow vault is full of echoing shouts. There are the rumble of trucks and the clump of trunks, the strident chatter of cranes, the first salt smell of the sea. One hurries through, even though there’s time; the past, the continent, is behind; the future is the glowing mouth in the side of the ship; the dim, turbulent alley is too confusedly the present.

Up the gangplank and the vision of the world adjusts itself, narrows. One is a citizen of a commonwealth smaller than Andorra, no longer sure of anything. The men at the purser’s desk are as oddly shaped as the cabins; disdainful are the eyes of voyagers and their friends. Next the loud mournful whistles, the portentous vibration and the boat, the human idea--is in motion. The pier and its faces slide by and for a moment the boat is a piece accidentally split off from them; the faces become remote, voiceless, the pier is one of many blurs along the water front. The harbor flows swiftly toward the sea.

With it flowed Albert McKisco, labelled by the newspapers as its most precious cargo. McKisco was having a vogue. His novels were pastiches of the work of the best people of his time, a feat not to be disparaged, and in addition he possessed a gift for softening and debasing what he borrowed, so that many readers were charmed by the ease with which they could follow him. Success had improved him and humbled him. He was no fool about his capacities--he realized that he possessed more vitality than many men of superior talent, and he was resolved to enjoy the success he had earned. “I’ve done nothing yet,” he would say. “I don’t think I’ve got any real genius. But if I keep trying I may write a good book.” Fine dives have been made from flimsier spring-boards. The innumerable snubs of the past were forgotten. Indeed, his success was founded psychologically upon his duel with Tommy Barban, upon the basis of which, as it withered in his memory, he had created, afresh, a new self-respect.

Spotting Dick Diver the second day out, he eyed him tentatively, then introduced himself in a friendly way and sat down. Dick laid aside his reading and, after the few minutes that it took to realize the change in McKisco, the disappearance of the man’s annoying sense of inferiority, found himself pleased to talk to him. McKisco was “well-informed” on a range of subjects wider than Goethe’s--it was interesting to listen to the innumerable facile combinations that he referred to as his opinions. They struck up an acquaintance, and Dick had several meals with them. The McKiscos had been invited to sit at the captain’s table but with nascent snobbery they told Dick that they “couldn’t stand that bunch.”

Violet was very grand now, decked out by the grand couturières, charmed about the little discoveries that well-bred girls make in their teens. She could, indeed, have learned them from her mother in Boise but her soul was born dismally in the small movie houses of Idaho, and she had had no time for her mother. Now she “belonged”--together with several million other people--and she was happy, though her husband still shushed her when she grew violently naïve.

The McKiscos got off at Gibraltar. Next evening in Naples Dick picked up a lost and miserable family of two girls and their mother in the bus from the hotel to the station. He had seen them on the ship. An overwhelming desire to help, or to be admired, came over him: he showed them fragments of gaiety; tentatively he bought them wine, with pleasure saw them begin to regain their proper egotism. He pretended they were this and that, and falling in with his own plot, and drinking too much to sustain the illusion, and all this time the women, thought only that this was a windfall from heaven. He withdrew from them as the night waned and the train rocked and snorted at Cassino and Frosinone. After weird American partings in the station at Rome, Dick went to the Hotel Quirinal, somewhat exhausted.

At the desk he suddenly stared and upped his head. As if a drink were acting on him, warming the lining of his stomach, throwing a flush up into his brain, he saw the person he had come to see, the person for whom he had made the Mediterranean crossing.

Simultaneously Rosemary saw him, acknowledging him before placing him; she looked back startled, and, leaving the girl she was with, she hurried over. Holding himself erect, holding his breath, Dick turned to her. As she came across the lobby, her beauty all groomed, like a young horse dosed with Black-seed oil, and hoops varnished, shocked him awake; but it all came too quick for him to do anything except conceal his fatigue as best he could. To meet her starry-eyed confidence he mustered an insincere pantomime implying, “You would turn up here--of all the people in the world.”

Her gloved hands closed over his on the desk; “Dick--we’re making The Grandeur that was Rome--at least we think we are; we may quit any day.”

He looked at her hard, trying to make her a little self-conscious, so that she would observe less closely his unshaven face, his crumpled and slept-in collar. Fortunately, she was in a hurry.

“We begin early because the mists rise at eleven--phone me at two.”

In his room Dick collected his faculties. He left a call for noon, stripped off his clothes and dove literally into a heavy sleep.

He slept over the phone call but awoke at two, refreshed. Unpacking his bag, he sent out suits and laundry. He shaved, lay for half an hour in a warm bath and had breakfast. The sun had dipped into the Via Nazionale and he let it through the portières with a jingling of old brass rings. Waiting for a suit to be pressed, he discovered from the Corriere della Sera that “una novella di Sinclair Lewis ‘Wall Street’ nella quale autore analizza la vita sociale di una piccola citta Americana.” Then he tried to think about Rosemary.

At first he thought nothing. She was young and magnetic, but so was Topsy. He guessed that she had had lovers and had loved them in the last four years. Well, you never knew exactly how much space you occupied in people’s lives. Yet from this fog his affection emerged--the best contacts are when one knows the obstacles and still wants to preserve a relation. The past drifted back and he wanted to hold her eloquent giving-of-herself in its precious shell, till he enclosed it, till it no longer existed outside him. He tried to collect all that might attract her--it was less than it had been four years ago. Eighteen might look at thirty-four through a rising mist of adolescence; but twenty-two would see thirty-eight with discerning clarity. Moreover, Dick had been at an emotional peak at the time of the previous encounter; since then there had been a lesion of enthusiasm.

When the valet returned he put on a white shirt and collar and a black tie with a pearl; the cords of his reading-glasses passed through another pearl of the same size that swung a casual inch below. After sleep, his face had resumed the ruddy brown of many Riviera summers, and to limber himself up he stood on his hands on a chair until his fountain pen and coins fell out. At three he called Rosemary and was bidden to come up. Momentarily dizzy from his acrobatics, he stopped in the bar for a gin-and-tonic.

“Hi, Doctor Diver!”

Only because of Rosemary’s presence in the hotel did Dick place the man immediately as Collis Clay. He had his old confidence and an air of prosperity and big sudden jowls.

“Do you know Rosemary’s here?” Collis asked.

“I ran into her.”

“I was in Florence and I heard she was here so I came down last week. You’d never know Mama’s little girl.” He modified the remark, “I mean she was so carefully brought up and now she’s a woman of the world--if you know what I mean. Believe me, has she got some of these Roman boys tied up in bags! And how!”

“You studying in Florence?”

“Me? Sure, I’m studying architecture there. I go back Sunday--I’m staying for the races.”

With difficulty Dick restrained him from adding the drink to the account he carried in the bar, like a stock-market report.

XX

When Dick got out of the elevator he followed a tortuous corridor and turned at length toward a distant voice outside a lighted door. Rosemary was in black pajamas; a luncheon table was still in the room; she was having coffee.

“You’re still beautiful,” he said. “A little more beautiful than ever.”

“Do you want coffee, youngster?”

“I’m sorry I was so unpresentable this morning.”

“You didn’t look well--you all right now? Want coffee?”

“No, thanks.”

“You’re fine again, I was scared this morning. Mother’s coming over next month, if the company stays. She always asks me if I’ve seen you over here, as if she thought we were living next door. Mother always liked you--she always felt you were some one I ought to know.”

“Well, I’m glad she still thinks of me.”

“Oh, she does,” Rosemary reassured him. “A very great deal.”

“I’ve seen you here and there in pictures,” said Dick. “Once I had Daddy’s Girl run off just for myself!”

“I have a good part in this one if it isn’t cut.”

She crossed behind him, touching his shoulder as she passed. She phoned for the table to be taken away and settled in a big chair.

“I was just a little girl when I met you, Dick. Now I’m a woman.”

“I want to hear everything about you.”

“How is Nicole--and Lanier and Topsy?”

“They’re fine. They often speak of you--”

The phone rang. While she answered it Dick examined two novels--one by Edna Ferber, one by Albert McKisco. The waiter came for the table; bereft of its presence Rosemary seemed more alone in her black pajamas.

“. . . I have a caller. . . . No, not very well. I’ve got to go to the costumer’s for a long fitting. . . . No, not now . . .”

As though with the disappearance of the table she felt released, Rosemary smiled at Dick--that smile as if they two together had managed to get rid of all the trouble in the world and were now at peace in their own heaven . . .

“That’s done,” she said. “Do you realize I’ve spent the last hour getting ready for you?”

But again the phone called her. Dick got up to change his hat from the bed to the luggage stand, and in alarm Rosemary put her hand over the mouthpiece of the phone. “You’re not going!”

“No.”

When the communication was over he tried to drag the afternoon together saying: “I expect some nourishment from people now.”

“Me too,” Rosemary agreed. “The man that just phoned me once knew a second cousin of mine. Imagine calling anybody up for a reason like that!”

Now she lowered the lights for love. Why else should she want to shut off his view of her? He sent his words to her like letters, as though they left him some time before they reached her.

“Hard to sit here and be close to you, and not kiss you.” Then they kissed passionately in the centre of the floor. She pressed against him, and went back to her chair.

It could not go on being merely pleasant in the room. Forward or backward; when the phone rang once more he strolled into the bedchamber and lay down on her bed, opening Albert McKisco’s novel. Presently Rosemary came in and sat beside him.

“You have the longest eyelashes,” she remarked.

“We are now back at the Junior Prom. Among those present are Miss Rosemary Hoyt, the eyelash fancier--”

She kissed him and he pulled her down so that they lay side by side, and then they kissed till they were both breathless. Her breathing was young and eager and exciting. Her lips were faintly chapped but soft in the corners.

When they were still limbs and feet and clothes, struggles of his arms and back, and her throat and breasts, she whispered, “No, not now--those things are rhythmic.”

Disciplined he crushed his passion into a corner of his mind, but bearing up her fragility on his arms until she was poised half a foot above him, he said lightly:

“Darling--that doesn’t matter.”

Her face had changed with his looking up at it; there was the eternal moonlight in it.

“That would be poetic justice if it should be you,” she said. She twisted away from him, walked to the mirror, and boxed her disarranged hair with her hands. Presently she drew a chair close to the bed and stroked his cheek.

“Tell me the truth about you,” he demanded.

“I always have.”

“In a way--but nothing hangs together.”

They both laughed but he pursued.

“Are you actually a virgin?”

“No-o-o!” she sang. “I’ve slept with six hundred and forty men--if that’s the answer you want.”

“It’s none of my business.”

“Do you want me for a case in psychology?”

“Looking at you as a perfectly normal girl of twenty-two, living in the year nineteen twenty-eight, I guess you’ve taken a few shots at love.”

“It’s all been--abortive,” she said.

Dick couldn’t believe her. He could not decide whether she was deliberately building a barrier between them or whether this was intended to make an eventual surrender more significant.

“Let’s go walk in the Pincio,” he suggested.

He shook himself straight in his clothes and smoothed his hair. A moment had come and somehow passed. For three years Dick had been the ideal by which Rosemary measured other men and inevitably his stature had increased to heroic size. She did not want him to be like other men, yet here were the same exigent demands, as if he wanted to take some of herself away, carry it off in his pocket.

Walking on the greensward between cherubs and philosophers, fauns and falling water, she took his arm snugly, settling into it with a series of little readjustments, as if she wanted it to be right because it was going to be there forever. She plucked a twig and broke it, but she found no spring in it. Suddenly seeing what she wanted in Dick’s face she took his gloved hand and kissed it. Then she cavorted childishly for him until he smiled and she laughed and they began having a good time.

“I can’t go out with you to-night, darling, because I promised some people a long time ago. But if you’ll get up early I’ll take you out to the set to-morrow.”

He dined alone at the hotel, went to bed early, and met Rosemary in the lobby at half-past six. Beside him in the car she glowed away fresh and new in the morning sunshine. They went out through the Porta San Sebastiano and along the Appian Way until they came to the huge set of the forum, larger than the forum itself. Rosemary turned him over to a man who led him about the great props; the arches and tiers of seats and the sanded arena. She was working on a stage which represented a guard-room for Christian prisoners, and presently they went there and watched Nicotera, one of many hopeful Valentinos, strut and pose before a dozen female “captives,” their eyes melancholy and startling with mascara.

Rosemary appeared in a knee-length tunic.

“Watch this,” she whispered to Dick. “I want your opinion. Everybody that’s seen the rushes says--”

“What are the rushes?”

“When they run off what they took the day before. They say it’s the first thing I’ve had sex appeal in.”

“I don’t notice it.”

“You wouldn’t! But I have.”

Nicotera in his leopard skin talked attentively to Rosemary while the electrician discussed something with the director, meanwhile leaning on him. Finally the director pushed his hand off roughly and wiped a sweating forehead, and Dick’s guide remarked: “He’s on the hop again, and how!”

“Who?” asked Dick, but before the man could answer the director walked swiftly over to them.

“Who’s on the hop--you’re on the hop yourself.” He spoke vehemently to Dick, as if to a jury. “When he’s on the hop he always thinks everybody else is, and how!” He glared at the guide a moment longer, then he clapped his hands: “All right--everybody on the set.”

It was like visiting a great turbulent family. An actress approached Dick and talked to him for five minutes under the impression that he was an actor recently arrived from London. Discovering her mistake she scuttled away in panic. The majority of the company felt either sharply superior or sharply inferior to the world outside, but the former feeling prevailed. They were people of bravery and industry; they were risen to a position of prominence in a nation that for a decade had wanted only to be entertained.

The session ended as the light grew misty--a fine light for painters, but, for the camera, not to be compared with the clear California air. Nicotera followed Rosemary to the car and whispered something to her--she looked at him without smiling as she said good-by.

Dick and Rosemary had luncheon at the Castelli dei Cæsari, a splendid restaurant in a high-terraced villa overlooking the ruined forum of an undetermined period of the decadence. Rosemary took a cocktail and a little wine, and Dick took enough so that his feeling of dissatisfaction left him. Afterward they drove back to the hotel, all flushed and happy, in a sort of exalted quiet. She wanted to be taken and she was, and what had begun with a childish infatuation on a beach was accomplished at last.

XXI

Rosemary had another dinner date, a birthday party for a member of the company. Dick ran into Collis Clay in the lobby, but he wanted to dine alone, and pretended an engagement at the Excelsior. He drank a cocktail with Collis and his vague dissatisfaction crystallized as impatience--he no longer had an excuse for playing truant to the clinic. This was less an infatuation than a romantic memory. Nicole was his girl--too often he was sick at heart about her, yet she was his girl. Time with Rosemary was self-indulgence--time with Collis was nothing plus nothing.

In the doorway of the Excelsior he ran into Baby Warren. Her large beautiful eyes, looking precisely like marbles, stared at him with surprise and curiosity. “I thought you were in America, Dick! Is Nicole with you?”

“I came back by way of Naples.”

The black band on his arm reminded her to say: “I’m so sorry to hear of your trouble.”

Inevitably they dined together.

“Tell me about everything,” she demanded.

Dick gave her a version of the facts, and Baby frowned. She found it necessary to blame some one for the catastrophe in her sister’s life.

“Do you think Doctor Dohmler took the right course with her from the first?”

“There’s not much variety in treatment any more--of course you try to find the right personality to handle a particular case.”

“Dick, I don’t pretend to advise you or to know much about it but don’t you think a change might be good for her--to get out of that atmosphere of sickness and live in the world like other people?”

“But you were keen for the clinic,” he reminded her. “You told me you’d never feel really safe about her--”

“That was when you were leading that hermit’s life on the Riviera, up on a hill way off from anybody. I didn’t mean to go back to that life. I meant, for instance, London. The English are the best-balanced race in the world.”

“They are not,” he disagreed.

“They are. I know them, you see. I meant it might be nice for you to take a house in London for the spring season--I know a dove of a house in Talbot Square you could get, furnished. I mean, living with sane, well-balanced English people.”

She would have gone on to tell him all the old propaganda stories of 1914 if he had not laughed and said:

“I’ve been reading a book by Michael Arlen and if that’s--”

She ruined Michael Arlen with a wave of her salad spoon.

“He only writes about degenerates. I mean the worthwhile English.”

As she thus dismissed her friends they were replaced in Dick’s mind only by a picture of the alien, unresponsive faces that peopled the small hotels of Europe.

“Of course it’s none of my business,” Baby repeated, as a preliminary to a further plunge, “but to leave her alone in an atmosphere like that--”

“I went to America because my father died.”

“I understand that, I told you how sorry I was.” She fiddled with the glass grapes on her necklace. “But there’s so much money now. Plenty for everything, and it ought to be used to get Nicole well.”

“For one thing I can’t see myself in London.”

“Why not? I should think you could work there as well as anywhere else.”

He sat back and looked at her. If she had ever suspected the rotted old truth, the real reason for Nicole’s illness, she had certainly determined to deny it to herself, shoving it back in a dusty closet like one of the paintings she bought by mistake.

They continued the conversation in the Ulpia, where Collis Clay came over to their table and sat down, and a gifted guitar player thrummed and rumbled “Suona Fanfara Mia” in the cellar piled with wine casks.

“It’s possible that I was the wrong person for Nicole,” Dick said. “Still she would probably have married some one of my type, some one she thought she could rely on--indefinitely.”

“You think she’d be happier with somebody else?” Baby thought aloud suddenly. “Of course it could be arranged.”

Only as she saw Dick bend forward with helpless laughter did she realize the preposterousness of her remark.

“Oh, you understand,” she assured him. “Don’t think for a moment that we’re not grateful for all you’ve done. And we know you’ve had a hard time--”

“For God’s sake,” he protested. “If I didn’t love Nicole it might be different.”

“But you do love Nicole?” she demanded in alarm.

Collis was catching up with the conversation now and Dick switched it quickly: “Suppose we talk about something else--about you, for instance. Why don’t you get married? We heard you were engaged to Lord Paley, the cousin of the--”

“Oh, no.” She became coy and elusive. “That was last year.”

“Why don’t you marry?” Dick insisted stubbornly.

“I don’t know. One of the men I loved was killed in the war, and the other one threw me over.”

“Tell me about it. Tell me about your private life, Baby, and your opinions. You never do--we always talk about Nicole.”

“Both of them were Englishmen. I don’t think there’s any higher type in the world than a first-rate Englishman, do you? If there is I haven’t met him. This man--oh, it’s a long story. I hate long stories, don’t you?”

“And how!” said Collis.

“Why, no--I like them if they’re good.”

“That’s something you do so well, Dick. You can keep a party moving by just a little sentence or a saying here and there. I think that’s a wonderful talent.”

“It’s a trick,” he said gently. That made three of her opinions he disagreed with.

“Of course I like formality--I like things to be just so, and on the grand scale. I know you probably don’t but you must admit it’s a sign of solidity in me.”

Dick did not even bother to dissent from this.

“Of course I know people say, Baby Warren is racing around over Europe, chasing one novelty after another, and missing the best things in life, but I think on the contrary that I’m one of the few people who really go after the best things. I’ve known the most interesting people of my time.” Her voice blurred with the tinny drumming of another guitar number, but she called over it, “I’ve made very few big mistakes--”

“--Only the very big ones, Baby.”

She had caught something facetious in his eye and she changed the subject. It seemed impossible for them to hold anything in common. But he admired something in her, and he deposited her at the Excelsior with a series of compliments that left her shimmering.

Rosemary insisted on treating Dick to lunch next day. They went to a little trattoria kept by an Italian who had worked in America, and ate ham and eggs and waffles. Afterward, they went to the hotel. Dick’s discovery that he was not in love with her, nor she with him, had added to rather than diminished his passion for her. Now that he knew he would not enter further into her life, she became the strange woman for him. He supposed many men meant no more than that when they said they were in love--not a wild submergence of soul, a dipping of all colors into an obscuring dye, such as his love for Nicole had been. Certain thoughts about Nicole, that she should die, sink into mental darkness, love another man, made him physically sick.

Nicotera was in Rosemary’s sitting-room, chattering about a professional matter. When Rosemary gave him his cue to go, he left with humorous protests and a rather insolent wink at Dick. As usual the phone clamored and Rosemary was engaged at it for ten minutes, to Dick’s increasing impatience.

“Let’s go up to my room,” he suggested, and she agreed.

She lay across his knees on a big sofa; he ran his fingers through the lovely forelocks of her hair.

“Let me be curious about you again?” he asked.

“What do you want to know?”

“About men. I’m curious, not to say prurient.”

“You mean how long after I met you?”

“Or before.”

“Oh, no.” She was shocked. “There was nothing before. You were the first man I cared about. You’re still the only man I really care about.” She considered. “It was about a year, I think.”

“Who was it?”

“Oh, a man.”

He closed in on her evasion.

“I’ll bet I can tell you about it: the first affair was unsatisfactory and after that there was a long gap. The second was better, but you hadn’t been in love with the man in the first place. The third was all right--”

Torturing himself he ran on. “Then you had one real affair that fell of its own weight, and by that time you were getting afraid that you wouldn’t have anything to give to the man you finally loved.” He felt increasingly Victorian. “Afterwards there were half a dozen just episodic affairs, right up to the present. Is that close?”

She laughed between amusement and tears.

“It’s about as wrong as it could be,” she said, to Dick’s relief. “But some day I’m going to find somebody and love him and love him and never let him go.”

Now his phone rang and Dick recognized Nicotera’s voice, asking for Rosemary. He put his palm over the transmitter.

“Do you want to talk to him?”

She went to the phone and jabbered in a rapid Italian Dick could not understand.

“This telephoning takes time,” he said. “It’s after four and I have an engagement at five. You better go play with Signor Nicotera.”

“Don’t be silly.”

“Then I think that while I’m here you ought to count him out.”

“It’s difficult.” She was suddenly crying. “Dick, I do love you, never anybody like you. But what have you got for me?”

“What has Nicotera got for anybody?”

“That’s different.”

--Because youth called to youth.

“He’s a spic!” he said. He was frantic with jealousy, he didn’t want to be hurt again.

“He’s only a baby,” she said, sniffling. “You know I’m yours first.”

In reaction he put his arms about her but she relaxed wearily backward; he held her like that for a moment as in the end of an adagio, her eyes closed, her hair falling straight back like that of a girl drowned.

“Dick, let me go. I never felt so mixed up in my life.”

He was a gruff red bird and instinctively she drew away from him as his unjustified jealousy began to snow over the qualities of consideration and understanding with which she felt at home.

“I want to know the truth,” he said.

“Yes, then. We’re a lot together, he wants to marry me, but I don’t want to. What of it? What do you expect me to do? You never asked me to marry you. Do you want me to play around forever with half-wits like Collis Clay?”

“You were with Nicotera last night?”

“That’s none of your business,” she sobbed. “Excuse me, Dick, it is your business. You and Mother are the only two people in the world I care about.”

“How about Nicotera?”

“How do I know?”

She had achieved the elusiveness that gives hidden significance to the least significant remarks.

“Is it like you felt toward me in Paris?”

“I feel comfortable and happy when I’m with you. In Paris it was different. But you never know how you once felt. Do you?”

He got up and began collecting his evening clothes--if he had to bring all the bitterness and hatred of the world into his heart, he was not going to be in love with her again.

“I don’t care about Nicotera!” she declared. “But I’ve got to go to Livorno with the company to-morrow. Oh, why did this have to happen?” There was a new flood of tears. “It’s such a shame. Why did you come here? Why couldn’t we just have the memory anyhow? I feel as if I’d quarrelled with Mother.”

As he began to dress, she got up and went to the door.

“I won’t go to the party to-night.” It was her last effort. “I’ll stay with you. I don’t want to go anyhow.”

The tide began to flow again, but he retreated from it.

“I’ll be in my room,” she said. “Good-by, Dick.”

“Good-by.”

“Oh, such a shame, such a shame. Oh, such a shame. What’s it all about anyhow?”

“I’ve wondered for a long time.”

“But why bring it to me?”

“I guess I’m the Black Death,” he said slowly. “I don’t seem to bring people happiness any more.”

XXII

There were five people in the Quirinal bar after dinner, a high-class Italian frail who sat on a stool making persistent conversation against the bartender’s bored: “Si . . . Si . . . Si,” a light, snobbish Egyptian who was lonely but chary of the woman, and the two Americans.

Dick was always vividly conscious of his surroundings, while Collis Clay lived vaguely, the sharpest impressions dissolving upon a recording apparatus that had early atrophied, so the former talked and the latter listened, like a man sitting in a breeze.

Dick, worn away by the events of the afternoon, was taking it out on the inhabitants of Italy. He looked around the bar as if he hoped an Italian had heard him and would resent his words.

“This afternoon I had tea with my sister-in-law at the Excelsior. We got the last table and two men came up and looked around for a table and couldn’t find one. So one of them came up to us and said, ‘Isn’t this table reserved for the Princess Orsini?’ and I said: ‘There was no sign on it,’ and he said: ‘But I think it’s reserved for the Princess Orsini.’ I couldn’t even answer him.”

“What’d he do?”

“He retired.” Dick switched around in his chair. “I don’t like these people. The other day I left Rosemary for two minutes in front of a store and an officer started walking up and down in front of her, tipping his hat.”

“I don’t know,” said Collis after a moment. “I’d rather be here than up in Paris with somebody picking your pocket every minute.”

He had been enjoying himself, and he held out against anything that threatened to dull his pleasure.

“I don’t know,” he persisted. “I don’t mind it here.”

Dick evoked the picture that the few days had imprinted on his mind, and stared at it. The walk toward the American Express past the odorous confectioneries of the Via Nationale, through the foul tunnel up to the Spanish Steps, where his spirit soared before the flower stalls and the house where Keats had died. He cared only about people; he was scarcely conscious of places except for their weather, until they had been invested with color by tangible events. Rome was the end of his dream of Rosemary.

A bell-boy came in and gave him a note.

“Idid not go to the party,” it said. “I am in my room. We leave for Livorno early in the morning.”

Dick handed the note and a tip to the boy.

“Tell Miss Hoyt you couldn’t find me.” Turning to Collis he suggested the Bonbonieri.

They inspected the tart at the bar, granting her the minimum of interest exacted by her profession, and she stared back with bright boldness; they went through the deserted lobby oppressed by draperies holding Victorian dust in stuffy folds, and they nodded at the night concierge who returned the gesture with the bitter servility peculiar to night servants. Then in a taxi they rode along cheerless streets through a dank November night. There were no women in the streets, only pale men with dark coats buttoned to the neck, who stood in groups beside shoulders of cold stone.

“My God!” Dick sighed.

“What’s a matter?”

“I was thinking of that man this afternoon: ‘This table is reserved for the Princess Orsini.’ Do you know what these old Roman families are? They’re bandits, they’re the ones who got possession of the temples and palaces after Rome went to pieces and preyed on the people.”

“I like Rome,” insisted Collis. “Why won’t you try the races?”

“I don’t like races.”

“But all the women turn out--”

“I know I wouldn’t like anything here. I like France, where everybody thinks he’s Napoleon--down here everybody thinks he’s Christ.”

At the Bonbonieri they descended to a panelled cabaret, hopelessly impermanent amid the cold stone. A listless band played a tango and a dozen couples covered the wide floor with those elaborate and dainty steps so offensive to the American eye. A surplus of waiters precluded the stir and bustle that even a few busy men can create; over the scene as its form of animation brooded an air of waiting for something, for the dance, the night, the balance of forces which kept it stable, to cease. It assured the impressionable guest that whatever he was seeking he would not find it here.

This was plain as plain to Dick. He looked around, hoping his eye would catch on something, so that spirit instead of imagination could carry on for an hour. But there was nothing and after a moment he turned back to Collis. He had told Collis some of his current notions, and he was bored with his audience’s short memory and lack of response. After half an hour of Collis he felt a distinct lesion of his own vitality.

They drank a bottle of Italian mousseaux, and Dick became pale and somewhat noisy. He called the orchestra leader over to their table; this was a Bahama Negro, conceited and unpleasant, and in a few minutes there was a row.

“You asked me to sit down.”

“All right. And I gave you fifty lire, didn’t I?”

“All right. All right. All right.”

“All right, I gave you fifty lire, didn’t I? Then you come up and asked me to put some more in the horn!”

“You asked me to sit down, didn’t you? Didn’t you?”

“I asked you to sit down but I gave you fifty lire, didn’t I?”

“All right. All right.”

The Negro got up sourly and went away, leaving Dick in a still more evil humor. But he saw a girl smiling at him from across the room and immediately the pale Roman shapes around him receded into decent, humble perspective. She was a young English girl, with blonde hair and a healthy, pretty English face and she smiled at him again with an invitation he understood, that denied the flesh even in the act of tendering it.

“There’s a quick trick or else I don’t know bridge,” said Collis.

Dick got up and walked to her across the room.

“Won’t you dance?”

The middle-aged Englishman with whom she was sitting said, almost apologetically: “I’m going out soon.”

Sobered by excitement Dick danced. He found in the girl a suggestion of all the pleasant English things; the story of safe gardens ringed around by the sea was implicit in her bright voice and as he leaned back to look at her, he meant what he said to her so sincerely that his voice trembled. When her current escort should leave, she promised to come and sit with them. The Englishman accepted her return with repeated apologies and smiles.

Back at his table Dick ordered another bottle of spumante.

“She looks like somebody in the movies,” he said. “I can’t think who.” He glanced impatiently over his shoulder. “Wonder what’s keeping her?”

“I’d like to get in the movies,” said Collis thoughtfully. “I’m supposed to go into my father’s business but it doesn’t appeal to me much. Sit in an office in Birmingham for twenty years--”

His voice resisted the pressure of materialistic civilization.

“Too good for it?” suggested Dick.

“No, I don’t mean that.”

“Yes, you do.”

“How do you know what I mean? Why don’t you practise as a doctor, if you like to work so much?”

Dick had made them both wretched by this time, but simultaneously they had become vague with drink and in a moment they forgot; Collis left, and they shook hands warmly.

“Think it over,” said Dick sagely.

“Think what over?”

“You know.” It had been something about Collis going into his father’s business--good sound advice.

Clay walked off into space. Dick finished his bottle and then danced with the English girl again, conquering his unwilling body with bold revolutions and stern determined marches down the floor. The most remarkable thing suddenly happened. He was dancing with the girl, the music stopped--and she had disappeared.

“Have you seen her?”

“Seen who?”

“The girl I was dancing with. Su’nly disappeared. Must be in the building.”

“No! No! That’s the ladies’ room.”

He stood up by the bar. There were two other men there, but he could think of no way of starting a conversation. He could have told them all about Rome and the violent origins of the Colonna and Gaetani families but he realized that as a beginning that would be somewhat abrupt. A row of Yenci dolls on the cigar counter fell suddenly to the floor; there was a subsequent confusion and he had a sense of having been the cause of it, so he went back to the cabaret and drank a cup of black coffee. Collis was gone and the English girl was gone and there seemed nothing to do but go back to the hotel and lie down with his black heart. He paid his check and got his hat and coat.

There was dirty water in the gutters and between the rough cobblestones; a marshy vapor from the Campagna, a sweat of exhausted cultures tainted the morning air. A quartet of taxi-drivers, their little eyes bobbing in dark pouches, surrounded him. One who leaned insistently in his face he pushed harshly away.

“Quanto a Hotel Quirinal?”

“Cento lire.”

Six dollars. He shook his head and offered thirty lire which was twice the day-time fare, but they shrugged their shoulders as one pair, and moved off.

“Trente-cinque lire e mancie,” he said firmly.

“Cento lire.”

He broke into English.

“To go half a mile? You’ll take me for forty lire.”

“Oh, no.”

He was very tired. He pulled open the door of a cab and got in.

“Hotel Quirinal!” he said to the driver who stood obstinately outside the window. “Wipe that sneer off your face and take me to the Quirinal.”

“Ah, no.”

Dick got out. By the door of the Bonbonieri some one was arguing with the taxi-drivers, some one who now tried to explain their attitude to Dick; again one of the men pressed close, insisting and gesticulating and Dick shoved him away.

“I want to go to the Quirinal Hotel.”

“He says wan huner lire,” explained the interpreter.

“I understand. I’ll give him fif’y lire. Go on away.” This last to the insistent man who had edged up once more. The man looked at him and spat contemptuously.

The passionate impatience of the week leaped up in Dick and clothed itself like a flash in violence, the honorable, the traditional resource of his land; he stepped forward and slapped the man’s face.

They surged about him, threatening, waving their arms, trying ineffectually to close in on him--with his back against the wall Dick hit out clumsily, laughing a little and for a few minutes the mock fight, an affair of foiled rushes and padded, glancing blows, swayed back and forth in front of the door. Then Dick tripped and fell; he was hurt somewhere but he struggled up again wrestling in arms that suddenly broke apart. There was a new voice and a new argument but he leaned against the wall, panting and furious at the indignity of his position. He saw there was no sympathy for him but he was unable to believe that he was wrong.

They were going to the police station and settle it there. His hat was retrieved and handed to him, and with some one holding his arm lightly he strode around the corner with the taxi-men and entered a bare barrack where carabinieri lounged under a single dim light.

At a desk sat a captain, to whom the officious individual who had stopped the battle spoke at length in Italian, at times pointing at Dick, and letting himself be interrupted by the taxi-men who delivered short bursts of invective and denunciation. The captain began to nod impatiently. He held up his hand and the hydra-headed address, with a few parting exclamations, died away. Then he turned to Dick.

“Spick Italiano?” he asked.

“No.”

“Spick Français?”

“Oui,” said Dick, glowering.

“Alors. Écoute. Va au Quirinal. Espèce d’endormi. Écoute: vous êtes saoûl. Payez ce que le chauffeur demande. Comprenez-vous?”

Diver shook his head.

“Non, je ne veux pas.”

“Come?”

“Je paierai quarante lires. C’est bien assez.”

The captain stood up.

“Écoute!” he cried portentously. “Vous êtes saoûl. Vous avez battu le chauffeur. Comme ci, comme ça.” He struck the air excitedly with right hand and left, “C’est bon que je vous donne la liberté. Payez ce qu’il a dit--cento lire. Va au Quirinal.”

Raging with humiliation, Dick stared back at him.

“All right.” He turned blindly to the door--before him, leering and nodding, was the man who had brought him to the police station. “I’ll go home,” he shouted, “but first I’ll fix this baby.”

He walked past the staring carabinieri and up to the grinning face, hit it with a smashing left beside the jaw. The man dropped to the floor.

For a moment he stood over him in savage triumph--but even as a first pang of doubt shot through him the world reeled; he was clubbed down, and fists and boots beat on him in a savage tattoo. He felt his nose break like a shingle and his eyes jerk as if they had snapped back on a rubber band into his head. A rib splintered under a stamping heel. Momentarily he lost consciousness, regained it as he was raised to a sitting position and his wrists jerked together with handcuffs. He struggled automatically. The plainclothes lieutenant whom he had knocked down, stood dabbing his jaw with a handkerchief and looking into it for blood; he came over to Dick, poised himself, drew back his arm and smashed him to the floor.

When Doctor Diver lay quite still a pail of water was sloshed over him. One of his eyes opened dimly as he was being dragged along by the wrists through a bloody haze and he made out the human and ghastly face of one of the taxi-drivers.

“Go to the Excelsior hotel,” he cried faintly. “Tell Miss Warren. Two hundred lire! Miss Warren. Due centi lire! Oh, you dirty--you God--”

Still he was dragged along through the bloody haze, choking and sobbing, over vague irregular surfaces into some small place where he was dropped upon a stone floor. The men went out, a door clanged, he was alone.

XXIII

Until one o’clock Baby Warren lay in bed, reading one of Marion Crawford’s curiously inanimate Roman stories; then she went to a window and looked down into the street. Across from the hotel two carabinieri, grotesque in swaddling capes and harlequin hats, swung voluminously from this side and that, like mains’ls coming about, and watching them she thought of the guards’ officer who had stared at her so intensely at lunch. He had possessed the arrogance of a tall member of a short race, with no obligation save to be tall. Had he come up to her and said: “Let’s go along, you and I,” she would have answered: “Why not?”--at least it seemed so now, for she was still disembodied by an unfamiliar background.

Her thoughts drifted back slowly through the guardsman to the two carabinieri, to Dick--she got into bed and turned out the light.

A little before four she was awakened by a brusque knocking.

“Yes--what is it?”

“It’s the concierge, Madame.”

She pulled on her kimono and faced him sleepily.

“Your friend name Deever he’s in trouble. He had trouble with the police, and they have him in the jail. He sent a taxi up to tell, the driver says that he promised him two hundred lire.” He paused cautiously for this to be approved. “The driver says Mr. Deever in the bad trouble. He had a fight with the police and is terribly bad hurt.”

“I’ll be right down.”

She dressed to an accompaniment of anxious heartbeats and ten minutes later stepped out of the elevator into the dark lobby. The chauffeur who brought the message was gone; the concierge hailed another one and told him the location of the jail. As they rode, the darkness lifted and thinned outside and Baby’s nerves, scarcely awake, cringed faintly at the unstable balance between night and day. She began to race against the day; sometimes on the broad avenues she gained but whenever the thing that was pushing up paused for a moment, gusts of wind blew here and there impatiently and the slow creep of light began once more. The cab went past a loud fountain splashing in a voluminous shadow, turned into an alley so curved that the buildings were warped and strained following it, bumped and rattled over cobblestones, and stopped with a jerk where two sentry boxes were bright against a wall of green damp. Suddenly from the violet darkness of an archway came Dick’s voice, shouting and screaming.

“Are there any English? Are there any Americans? Are there any English? Are there any--oh, my God! You dirty Wops!”

His voice died away and she heard a dull sound of beating on the door. Then the voice began again.

“Are there any Americans? Are there any English?”

Following the voice she ran through the arch into a court, whirled about in momentary confusion and located the small guard-room whence the cries came. Two carabinieri started to their feet, but Baby brushed past them to the door of the cell.

“Dick!” she called. “What’s the trouble?”

“They’ve put out my eye,” he cried. “They handcuffed me and then they beat me, the goddamn--the--”

Flashing around Baby took a step toward the two carabinieri.

“What have you done to him?” she whispered so fiercely that they flinched before her gathering fury.

“Non capisco inglese.”

In French she execrated them; her wild, confident rage filled the room, enveloped them until they shrank and wriggled from the garments of blame with which she invested them. “Do something! Do something!”

“We can do nothing until we are ordered.”

“Bene. Bay-nay! Bene!”

Once more Baby let her passion scorch around them until they sweated out apologies for their impotence, looking at each other with the sense that something had after all gone terribly wrong. Baby went to the cell door, leaned against it, almost caressing it, as if that could make Dick feel her presence and power, and cried: “I’m going to the Embassy, I’ll be back.” Throwing a last glance of infinite menace at the carabinieri she ran out.

She drove to the American Embassy where she paid off the taxi-driver upon his insistence. It was still dark when she ran up the steps and pressed the bell. She had pressed it three times before a sleepy English porter opened the door to her.

“I want to see some one,” she said. “Any one--but right away.”

“No one’s awake, Madame. We don’t open until nine o’clock.”

Impatiently she waved the hour away.

“This is important. A man--an American has been terribly beaten. He’s in an Italian jail.”

“No one’s awake now. At nine o’clock--”

“I can’t wait. They’ve put out a man’s eye--my brother-in-law, and they won’t let him out of jail. I must talk to some one--can’t you see? Are you crazy? Are you an idiot, you stand there with that look in your face?”

“Hime unable to do anything, Madame.”

“You’ve got to wake some one up!” She seized him by the shoulders and jerked him violently. “It’s a matter of life and death. If you won’t wake some one a terrible thing will happen to you--”

“Kindly don’t lay hands on me, Madame.”

From above and behind the porter floated down a weary Groton voice.

“What is it there?”

The porter answered with relief.

“It’s a lady, sir, and she has shook me.” He had stepped back to speak and Baby pushed forward into the hall. On an upper landing, just aroused from sleep and wrapped in a white embroidered Persian robe, stood a singular young man. His face was of a monstrous and unnatural pink, vivid yet dead, and over his mouth was fastened what appeared to be a gag. When he saw Baby he moved his head back into a shadow.

“What is it?” he repeated.

Baby told him, in her agitation edging forward to the stairs. In the course of her story she realized that the gag was in reality a mustache bandage and that the man’s face was covered with pink cold cream, but the fact fitted quietly into the nightmare. The thing to do, she cried passionately, was for him to come to the jail with her at once and get Dick out.

“It’s a bad business,” he said.

“Yes,” she agreed conciliatingly. “Yes?”

“This trying to fight the police.” A note of personal affront crept into his voice, “I’m afraid there’s nothing to be done until nine o’clock.”

“Till nine o’clock,” she repeated aghast. “But you can do something, certainly! You can come to the jail with me and see that they don’t hurt him any more.”

“We aren’t permitted to do anything like that. The Consulate handles these things. The Consulate will be open at nine.”

His face, constrained to impassivity by the binding strap, infuriated Baby.

“I can’t wait until nine. My brother-in-law says they’ve put his eye out--he’s seriously hurt! I have to get to him. I have to find a doctor.” She let herself go and began to cry angrily as she talked, for she knew that he would respond to her agitation rather than her words. “You’ve got to do something about this. It’s your business to protect American citizens in trouble.”

But he was of the Eastern seaboard and too hard for her. Shaking his head patiently at her failure to understand his position he drew the Persian robe closer about him and came down a few steps.

“Write down the address of the Consulate for this lady,” he said to the porter, “and look up Doctor Colazzo’s address and telephone number and write that down too.” He turned to Baby, with the expression of an exasperated Christ. “My dear lady, the diplomatic corps represents the Government of the United States to the Government of Italy. It has nothing to do with the protection of citizens, except under specific instructions from the State Department. Your brother-in-law has broken the laws of this country and been put in jail, just as an Italian might be put in jail in New York. The only people who can let him go are the Italian courts and if your brother-in-law has a case you can get aid and advice from the Consulate, which protects the rights of American citizens. The consulate does not open until nine o’clock. Even if it were my brother I couldn’t do anything--”

“Can you phone the Consulate?” she broke in.

“We can’t interfere with the Consulate. When the Consul gets there at nine--”

“Can you give me his home address?”

After a fractional pause the man shook his head. He took the memorandum from the porter and gave it to her.

“Now I’ll ask you to excuse me.”

He had manoeuvred her to the door: for an instant the violet dawn fell shrilly upon his pink mask and upon the linen sack that supported his mustache; then Baby was standing on the front steps alone. She had been in the embassy ten minutes.

The piazza whereon it faced was empty save for an old man gathering cigarette butts with a spiked stick. Baby caught a taxi presently and went to the Consulate but there was no one there save a trio of wretched women scrubbing the stairs. She could not make them understand that she wanted the Consul’s home address--in a sudden resurgence of anxiety she rushed out and told the chauffeur to take her to the jail. He did not know where it was, but by the use of the words semper dritte, dextra and sinestra she manoeuvred him to its approximate locality, where she dismounted and explored a labyrinth of familiar alleys. But the buildings and the alleys all looked alike. Emerging from one trail into the Piazzo d’Espagna she saw the American Express Company and her heart lifted at the word “American” on the sign. There was a light in the window and hurrying across the square she tried the door, but it was locked, and inside the clock stood at seven. Then she thought of Collis Clay.

She remembered the name of his hotel, a stuffy villa sealed in red plush across from the Excelsior. The woman on duty at the office was not disposed to help her--she had no authority to disturb Mr. Clay, and refused to let Miss Warren go up to his room alone; convinced finally that this was not an affair of passion she accompanied her.

Collis lay naked upon his bed. He had come in tight and, awakening, it took him some moments to realize his nudity. He atoned for it by an excess of modesty. Taking his clothes into the bathroom he dressed in haste, muttering to himself “Gosh. She certainly musta got a good look at me.” After some telephoning, he and Baby found the jail and went to it.

The cell door was open and Dick was slumped on a chair in the guard-room. The carabinieri had washed some of the blood from his face, brushed him and set his hat concealingly upon his head.

Baby stood in the doorway trembling.

“Mr. Clay will stay with you,” she said. “I want to get the Consul and a doctor.”

“All right.”

“Just stay quiet.”

“All right.”

“I’ll be back.”

She drove to the Consulate; it was after eight now, and she was permitted to sit in the ante-room. Toward nine the Consul came in and Baby, hysterical with impotence and exhaustion, repeated her story. The Consul was disturbed. He warned her against getting into brawls in strange cities, but he was chiefly concerned that she should wait outside--with despair she read in his elderly eye that he wanted to be mixed up as little as possible in this catastrophe. Waiting on his action, she passed the minutes by phoning a doctor to go to Dick. There were other people in the ante-room and several were admitted to the Consul’s office. After half an hour she chose the moment of some one’s coming out and pushed past the secretary into the room.

“This is outrageous! An American has been beaten half to death and thrown into prison and you make no move to help.”

“Just a minute, Mrs--”

“I’ve waited long enough. You come right down to the jail and get him out!”

“Mrs--”

“We’re people of considerable standing in America--” Her mouth hardened as she continued. “If it wasn’t for the scandal we can--I shall see that your indifference to this matter is reported in the proper quarter. If my brother-in-law were a British citizen he’d have been free hours ago, but you’re more concerned with what the police will think than about what you’re here for.”

“Mrs.--”

“You put on your hat and come with me right away.”

The mention of his hat alarmed the Consul who began to clean his spectacles hurriedly and to ruffle his papers. This proved of no avail: the American Woman, aroused, stood over him; the clean-sweeping irrational temper that had broken the moral back of a race and made a nursery out of a continent, was too much for him. He rang for the vice-consul--Baby had won.

Dick sat in the sunshine that fell profusely through the guard-room window. Collis was with him and two carabinieri, and they were waiting for something to happen. With the narrowed vision of his one eye Dick could see the carabinieri; they were Tuscan peasants with short upper lips and he found it difficult to associate them with the brutality of last night. He sent one of them to fetch him a glass of beer.

The beer made him light-headed and the episode was momentarily illumined by a ray of sardonic humor. Collis was under the impression that the English girl had something to do with the catastrophe, but Dick was sure she had disappeared long before it happened. Collis was still absorbed by the fact that Miss Warren had found him naked on his bed.

Dick’s rage had retreated into him a little and he felt a vast criminal irresponsibility. What had happened to him was so awful that nothing could make any difference unless he could choke it to death, and, as this was unlikely, he was hopeless. He would be a different person henceforward, and in his raw state he had bizarre feelings of what the new self would be. The matter had about it the impersonal quality of an act of God. No mature Aryan is able to profit by a humiliation; when he forgives it has become part of his life, he has identified himself with the thing which has humiliated him--an upshot that in this case was impossible.

When Collis spoke of retribution, Dick shook his head and was silent. A lieutenant of carabinieri, pressed, burnished, vital, came into the room like three men and the guards jumped to attention. He seized the empty beer bottle and directed a stream of scolding at his men. The new spirit was in him, and the first thing was to get the beer bottle out of the guard-room. Dick looked at Collis and laughed.

The vice-consul, an over-worked young man named Swanson, arrived, and they started to the court; Collis and Swanson on either side of Dick and the two carabinieri close behind. It was a yellow, hazy morning; the squares and arcades were crowded and Dick, pulling his hat low over his head, walked fast, setting the pace, until one of the short-legged carabinieri ran alongside and protested. Swanson arranged matters.

“I’ve disgraced you, haven’t I?” said Dick jovially.

“You’re liable to get killed fighting Italians,” replied Swanson sheepishly. “They’ll probably let you go this time but if you were an Italian you’d get a couple of months in prison. And how!”

“Have you ever been in prison?”

Swanson laughed.

“I like him,” announced Dick to Clay. “He’s a very likeable young man and he gives people excellent advice, but I’ll bet he’s been to jail himself. Probably spent weeks at a time in jail.”

Swanson laughed.

“I mean you want to be careful. You don’t know how these people are.”

“Oh, I know how they are,” broke out Dick, irritably. “They’re god damn stinkers.” He turned around to the carabinieri: “Did you get that?”

“I’m leaving you here,” Swanson said quickly. “I told your sister-in-law I would--our lawyer will meet you upstairs in the courtroom. You want to be careful.”

“Good-by.” Dick shook hands politely. “Thank you very much. I feel you have a future--”

With another smile Swanson hurried away, resuming his official expression of disapproval.

Now they came into a courtyard on all four sides of which outer stairways mounted to the chambers above. As they crossed the flags a groaning, hissing, booing sound went up from the loiterers in the courtyard, voices full of fury and scorn. Dick stared about.

“What’s that?” he demanded, aghast.

One of the carabinieri spoke to a group of men and the sound died away.

They came into the court-room. A shabby Italian lawyer from the Consulate spoke at length to the judge while Dick and Collis waited aside. Some one who knew English turned from the window that gave on the yard and explained the sound that had accompanied their passage through. A native of Frascati had raped and slain a five-year-old child and was to be brought in that morning--the crowd had assumed it was Dick.

In a few minutes the lawyer told Dick that he was freed--the court considered him punished enough.

“Enough!” Dick cried. “Punished for what?”

“Come along,” said Collis. “You can’t do anything now.”

“But what did I do, except get into a fight with some taxi-men?”

“They claim you went up to a detective as if you were going to shake hands with him and hit him--”

“That’s not true! I told him I was going to hit him--I didn’t know he was a detective.”

“You better go along,” urged the lawyer.

“Come along.” Collis took his arm and they descended the steps.

“I want to make a speech,” Dick cried. “I want to explain to these people how I raped a five-year-old girl. Maybe I did--”

“Come along.”

Baby was waiting with a doctor in a taxi-cab. Dick did not want to look at her and he disliked the doctor, whose stern manner revealed him as one of that least palpable of European types, the Latin moralist. Dick summed up his conception of the disaster, but no one had much to say. In his room in the Quirinal the doctor washed off the rest of the blood and the oily sweat, set his nose, his fractured ribs and fingers, disinfected the smaller wounds and put a hopeful dressing on the eye. Dick asked for a quarter of a grain of morphine, for he was still wide awake and full of nervous energy. With the morphine he fell asleep; the doctor and Collis left and Baby waited with him until a woman could arrive from the English nursing home. It had been a hard night but she had the satisfaction of feeling that, whatever Dick’s previous record was, they now possessed a moral superiority over him for as long as he proved of any use.

BOOK 3

I

Frau Kaethe Gregorovius overtook her husband on the path of their villa.

“How was Nicole?” she asked mildly; but she spoke out of breath, giving away the fact that she had held the question in her mind during her run.

Franz looked at her in surprise.

“Nicole’s not sick. What makes you ask, dearest one?”

“You see her so much--I thought she must be sick.”

“We will talk of this in the house.”

Kaethe agreed meekly. His study was over in the administration building and the children were with their tutor in the living-room; they went up to the bedroom.

“Excuse me, Franz,” said Kaethe before he could speak. “Excuse me, dear, I had no right to say that. I know my obligations and I am proud of them. But there is a bad feeling between Nicole and me.”

“Birds in their little nests agree,” Franz thundered. Finding the tone inappropriate to the sentiment he repeated his command in the spaced and considered rhythm with which his old master, Doctor Dohmler, could cast significance on the tritest platitude. “Birds--in--their--nests--agree!”

“I realize that. You haven’t seen me fail in courtesy toward Nicole.”

“I see you failing in common sense. Nicole is half a patient--she will possibly remain something of a patient all her life. In the absence of Dick I am responsible.” He hesitated; sometimes as a quiet joke he tried to keep news from Kaethe. “There was a cable from Rome this morning. Dick has had grippe and is starting home to-morrow.”

Relieved, Kaethe pursued her course in a less personal tone:

“I think Nicole is less sick than any one thinks--she only cherishes her illness as an instrument of power. She ought to be in the cinema, like your Norma Talmadge--that’s where all American women would be happy.”

“Are you jealous of Norma Talmadge, on a film?”

“I don’t like Americans. They’re selfish, selfish!”

“You like Dick?”

“I like him,” she admitted. “He’s different, he thinks of others.”

--And so does Norma Talmadge, Franz said to himself. Norma Talmadge must be a fine, noble woman beyond her loveliness. They must compel her to play foolish rôles; Norma Talmadge must be a woman whom it would be a great privilege to know.

Kaethe had forgotten about Norma Talmadge, a vivid shadow that she had fretted bitterly upon one night as they were driving home from the movies in Zurich.

“--Dick married Nicole for her money,” she said. “That was his weakness--you hinted as much yourself one night.”

“You’re being malicious.”

“I shouldn’t have said that,” she retracted. “We must all live together like birds, as you say. But it’s difficult when Nicole acts as--when Nicole pulls herself back a little, as if she were holding her breath--as if I smelt bad!”

Kaethe had touched a material truth. She did most of her work herself, and, frugal, she bought few clothes. An American shopgirl, laundering two changes of underwear every night, would have noticed a hint of yesterday’s reawakened sweat about Kaethe’s person, less a smell than an ammoniacal reminder of the eternity of toil and decay. To Franz this was as natural as the thick dark scent of Kaethe’s hair, and he would have missed it equally; but to Nicole, born hating the smell of a nurse’s fingers dressing her, it was an offense only to be endured.

“And the children,” Kaethe continued. “She doesn’t like them to play with our children--” but Franz had heard enough:

“Hold your tongue--that kind of talk can hurt me professionally, since we owe this clinic to Nicole’s money. Let us have lunch.”

Kaethe realized that her outburst had been ill-advised, but Franz’s last remark reminded her that other Americans had money, and a week later she put her dislike of Nicole into new words.

The occasion was the dinner they tendered the Divers upon Dick’s return. Hardly had their footfalls ceased on the path when she shut the door and said to Franz:

“Did you see around his eyes? He’s been on a debauch!”

“Go gently,” Franz requested. “Dick told me about that as soon as he came home. He was boxing on the trans-Atlantic ship. The American passengers box a lot on these trans-Atlantic ships.”

“I believe that?” she scoffed. “It hurts him to move one of his arms and he has an unhealed scar on his temple--you can see where the hair’s been cut away.”

Franz had not noticed these details.

“But what?” Kaethe demanded. “Do you think that sort of thing does the Clinic any good? The liquor I smelt on him tonight, and several other times since he’s been back.”

She slowed her voice to fit the gravity of what she was about to say: “Dick is no longer a serious man.”

Franz rocked his shoulders up the stairs, shaking off her persistence. In their bedroom he turned on her.

“He is most certainly a serious man and a brilliant man. Of all the men who have recently taken their degrees in neuropathology in Zurich, Dick has been regarded as the most brilliant--more brilliant than I could ever be.”

“For shame!”

“It’s the truth--the shame would be not to admit it. I turn to Dick when cases are highly involved. His publications are still standard in their line--go into any medical library and ask. Most students think he’s an Englishman--they don’t believe that such thoroughness could come out of America.” He groaned domestically, taking his pajamas from under the pillow, “I can’t understand why you talk this way, Kaethe--I thought you liked him.”

“For shame!” Kaethe said. “You’re the solid one, you do the work. It’s a case of hare and tortoise--and in my opinion the hare’s race is almost done.”

“Tch! Tch!”

“Very well, then. It’s true.”

With his open hand he pushed down air briskly.

“Stop!”

The upshot was that they had exchanged viewpoints like debaters. Kaethe admitted to herself that she had been too hard on Dick, whom she admired and of whom she stood in awe, who had been so appreciative and understanding of herself. As for Franz, once Kaethe’s idea had had time to sink in, he never after believed that Dick was a serious person. And as time went on he convinced himself that he had never thought so.

II

Dick told Nicole an expurgated version of the catastrophe in Rome--in his version he had gone philanthropically to the rescue of a drunken friend. He could trust Baby Warren to hold her tongue, since he had painted the disastrous effect of the truth upon Nicole. All this, however, was a low hurdle compared to the lingering effect of the episode upon him.

In reaction he took himself for an intensified beating in his work, so that Franz, trying to break with him, could find no basis on which to begin a disagreement. No friendship worth the name was ever destroyed in an hour without some painful flesh being torn--so Franz let himself believe with ever-increasing conviction that Dick travelled intellectually and emotionally at such a rate of speed that the vibrations jarred him--this was a contrast that had previously been considered a virtue in their relation. So, for the shoddiness of needs, are shoes made out of last year’s hide.

Yet it was May before Franz found an opportunity to insert the first wedge. Dick came into his office white and tired one noon and sat down, saying:

“Well, she’s gone.”

“She’s dead?”

“The heart quit.”

Dick sat exhausted in the chair nearest the door. During three nights he had remained with the scabbed anonymous woman-artist he had come to love, formally to portion out the adrenaline, but really to throw as much wan light as he could into the darkness ahead.

Half appreciating his feeling, Franz travelled quickly over an opinion:

“It was neuro-syphilis. All the Wassermans we took won’t tell me differently. The spinal fluid--”

“Never mind,” said Dick. “Oh, God, never mind! If she cared enough about her secret to take it away with her, let it go at that.”

“You better lay off for a day.”

“Don’t worry, I’m going to.”

Franz had his wedge; looking up from the telegram that he was writing to the woman’s brother he inquired: “Or do you want to take a little trip?”

“Not now.”

“I don’t mean a vacation. There’s a case in Lausanne. I’ve been on the phone with a Chilian all morning--”

“She was so damn brave,” said Dick. “And it took her so long.” Franz shook his head sympathetically and Dick got himself together. “Excuse me for interrupting you.”

“This is just a change--the situation is a father’s problem with his son--the father can’t get the son up here. He wants somebody to come down there.”

“What is it? Alcoholism? Homosexuality? When you say Lausanne--”

“A little of everything.”

“I’ll go down. Is there any money in it?”

“Quite a lot, I’d say. Count on staying two or three days, and get the boy up here if he needs to be watched. In any case take your time, take your ease; combine business with pleasure.”

After two hours’ train sleep Dick felt renewed, and he approached the interview with Señor Pardo y Cuidad Real in good spirits.

These interviews were much of a type. Often the sheer hysteria of the family representative was as interesting psychologically as the condition of the patient. This one was no exception: Señor Pardo y Cuidad Real, a handsome iron-gray Spaniard, noble of carriage, with all the appurtenances of wealth and power, raged up and down his suite in the Hôtel de Trois Mondes and told the story of his son with no more self-control than a drunken woman.

“I am at the end of my invention. My son is corrupt. He was corrupt at Harrow, he was corrupt at King’s College, Cambridge. He’s incorrigibly corrupt. Now that there is this drinking it is more and more obvious how he is, and there is continual scandal. I have tried everything--I worked out a plan with a doctor friend of mine, sent them together for a tour of Spain. Every evening Francisco had an injection of cantharides and then the two went together to a reputable bordello--for a week or so it seemed to work but the result was nothing. Finally last week in this very room, rather in that bathroom--” he pointed at it, “--I made Francisco strip to the waist and lashed him with a whip--”

Exhausted with his emotion he sat down and Dick spoke:

“That was foolish--the trip to Spain was futile also--” He struggled against an upsurging hilarity--that any reputable medical man should have lent himself to such an amateurish experiment! “--Señor, I must tell you that in these cases we can promise nothing. In the case of the drinking we can often accomplish something--with proper co-operation. The first thing is to see the boy and get enough of his confidence to find whether he has any insight into the matter.”

--The boy, with whom he sat on the terrace, was about twenty, handsome and alert.

“I’d like to know your attitude,” Dick said. “Do you feel that the situation is getting worse? And do you want to do anything about it?”

“I suppose I do,” said Francisco, “I am very unhappy.”

“Do you think it’s from the drinking or from the abnormality?”

“I think the drinking is caused by the other.” He was serious for a while--suddenly an irrepressible facetiousness broke through and he laughed, saying, “It’s hopeless. At King’s I was known as the Queen of Chili. That trip to Spain--all it did was to make me nauseated by the sight of a woman.”

Dick caught him up sharply.

“If you’re happy in this mess, then I can’t help you and I’m wasting my time.”

“No, let’s talk--I despise most of the others so.” There was some manliness in the boy, perverted now into an active resistance to his father. But he had that typically roguish look in his eyes that homosexuals assume in discussing the subject.

“It’s a hole-and-corner business at best,” Dick told him. “You’ll spend your life on it, and its consequences, and you won’t have time or energy for any other decent or social act. If you want to face the world you’ll have to begin by controlling your sensuality--and, first of all, the drinking that provokes it--”

He talked automatically, having abandoned the case ten minutes before. They talked pleasantly through another hour about the boy’s home in Chili and about his ambitions. It was as close as Dick had ever come to comprehending such a character from any but the pathological angle--he gathered that this very charm made it possible for Francisco to perpetrate his outrages, and, for Dick, charm always had an independent existence, whether it was the mad gallantry of the wretch who had died in the clinic this morning, or the courageous grace which this lost young man brought to a drab old story. Dick tried to dissect it into pieces small enough to store away--realizing that the totality of a life may be different in quality from its segments, and also that life during the forties seemed capable of being observed only in segments. His love for Nicole and Rosemary, his friendship with Abe North, with Tommy Barban in the broken universe of the war’s ending--in such contacts the personalities had seemed to press up so close to him that he became the personality itself--there seemed some necessity of taking all or nothing; it was as if for the remainder of his life he was condemned to carry with him the egos of certain people, early met and early loved, and to be only as complete as they were complete themselves. There was some element of loneliness involved--so easy to be loved--so hard to love.

As he sat on the veranda with young Francisco, a ghost of the past swam into his ken. A tall, singularly swaying male detached himself from the shrubbery and approached Dick and Francisco with feeble resolution. For a moment he formed such an apologetic part of the vibrant landscape that Dick scarcely remarked him--then Dick was on his feet, shaking hands with an abstracted air, thinking, “My God, I’ve stirred up a nest!” and trying to collect the man’s name.

“This is Doctor Diver, isn’t it?”

“Well, well--Mr. Dumphry, isn’t it?”

“Royal Dumphry. I had the pleasure of having dinner one night in that lovely garden of yours.”

“Of course.” Trying to dampen Mr. Dumphry’s enthusiasm, Dick went into impersonal chronology. “It was in nineteen--twenty-four--or twenty-five--”

He had remained standing, but Royal Dumphry, shy as he had seemed at first, was no laggard with his pick and spade; he spoke to Francisco in a flip, intimate manner, but the latter, ashamed of him, joined Dick in trying to freeze him away.

“Doctor Diver--one thing I want to say before you go. I’ve never forgotten that evening in your garden--how nice you and your wife were. To me it’s one of the finest memories in my life, one of the happiest ones. I’ve always thought of it as the most civilized gathering of people that I have ever known.”

Dick continued a crab-like retreat toward the nearest door of the hotel.

“I’m glad you remembered it so pleasantly. Now I’ve got to see--”

“I understand,” Royal Dumphry pursued sympathetically. “I hear he’s dying.”

“Who’s dying?”

“Perhaps I shouldn’t have said that--but we have the same physician.”

Dick paused, regarding him in astonishment. “Who’re you talking about?”

“Why, your wife’s father--perhaps I--”

“My what?”

“I suppose--you mean I’m the first person--”

“You mean my wife’s father is here, in Lausanne?”

“Why, I thought you knew--I thought that was why you were here.”

“What doctor is taking care of him?”

Dick scrawled the name in a notebook, excused himself, and hurried to a telephone booth.

It was convenient for Doctor Dangeu to see Doctor Diver at his house immediately.

Doctor Dangeu was a young Génevois; for a moment he was afraid that he was going to lose a profitable patient, but, when Dick reassured him, he divulged the fact that Mr. Warren was indeed dying.

“He is only fifty but the liver has stopped restoring itself; the precipitating factor is alcoholism.”

“Doesn’t respond?”

“The man can take nothing except liquids--I give him three days, or at most, a week.”

“Does his elder daughter, Miss Warren, know his condition?”

“By his own wish no one knows except the man-servant. It was only this morning I felt I had to tell him--he took it excitedly, although he has been in a very religious and resigned mood from the beginning of his illness.”

Dick considered: “Well--” he decided slowly, “in any case I’ll take care of the family angle. But I imagine they would want a consultation.”

“As you like.”

“I know I speak for them when I ask you to call in one of the best-known medicine men around the lake--Herbrugge, from Geneva.”

“I was thinking of Herbrugge.”

“Meanwhile I’m here for a day at least and I’ll keep in touch with you.”

That evening Dick went to Señor Pardo y Cuidad Real and they talked.

“We have large estates in Chili--” said the old man. “My son could well be taking care of them. Or I can get him in any one of a dozen enterprises in Paris--” He shook his head and paced across the windows against a spring rain so cheerful that it didn’t even drive the swans to cover, “My only son! Can’t you take him with you?”

The Spaniard knelt suddenly at Dick’s feet.

“Can’t you cure my only son? I believe in you--you can take him with you, cure him.”

“It’s impossible to commit a person on such grounds. I wouldn’t if I could.”

The Spaniard got up from his knees.

“I have been hasty--I have been driven--”

Descending to the lobby Dick met Doctor Dangeu in the elevator.

“I was about to call your room,” the latter said. “Can we speak out on the terrace?”

“Is Mr. Warren dead?” Dick demanded.

“He is the same--the consultation is in the morning. Meanwhile he wants to see his daughter--your wife--with the greatest fervor. It seems there was some quarrel--”

“I know all about that.”

The doctors looked at each other, thinking.

“Why don’t you talk to him before you make up your mind?” Dangeu suggested. “His death will be graceful--merely a weakening and sinking.”

With an effort Dick consented.

“All right.”

The suite in which Devereux Warren was gracefully weakening and sinking was of the same size as that of the Señor Pardo y Cuidad Real--throughout this hotel there were many chambers wherein rich ruins, fugitives from justice, claimants to the thrones of mediatized principalities, lived on the derivatives of opium or barbitol listening eternally as to an inescapable radio, to the coarse melodies of old sins. This corner of Europe does not so much draw people as accept them without inconvenient questions. Routes cross here--people bound for private sanitariums or tuberculosis resorts in the mountains, people who are no longer persona gratis in France or Italy.

The suite was darkened. A nun with a holy face was nursing the man whose emaciated fingers stirred a rosary on the white sheet. He was still handsome and his voice summoned up a thick burr of individuality as he spoke to Dick, after Dangeu had left them together.

“We get a lot of understanding at the end of life. Only now, Doctor Diver, do I realize what it was all about.”

Dick waited.

“I’ve been a bad man. You must know how little right I have to see Nicole again, yet a Bigger Man than either of us says to forgive and to pity.” The rosary slipped from his weak hands and slid off the smooth bed covers. Dick picked it up for him. “If I could see Nicole for ten minutes I would go happy out of the world.”

“It’s not a decision I can make for myself,” said Dick. “Nicole is not strong.” He made his decision but pretended to hesitate. “I can put it up to my professional associate.”

“What your associate says goes with me--very well, Doctor. Let me tell you my debt to you is so large--”

Dick stood up quickly.

“I’ll let you know the result through Doctor Dangeu.”

In his room he called the clinic on the Zugersee. After a long time Kaethe answered from her own house.

“I want to get in touch with Franz.”

“Franz is up on the mountain. I’m going up myself--is it something I can tell him, Dick?”

“It’s about Nicole--her father is dying here in Lausanne. Tell Franz that, to show him it’s important; and ask him to phone me from up there.”

“I will.”

“Tell him I’ll be in my room here at the hotel from three to five, and again from seven to eight, and after that to page me in the dining-room.”

In plotting these hours he forgot to add that Nicole was not to be told; when he remembered it he was talking into a dead telephone. Certainly Kaethe should realize.

. . . Kaethe had no exact intention of telling Nicole about the call when she rode up the deserted hill of mountain wild-flowers and secret winds, where the patients were taken to ski in winter and to climb in spring. Getting off the train she saw Nicole shepherding the children through some organized romp. Approaching, she drew her arm gently along Nicole’s shoulder, saying: “You are clever with children--you must teach them more about swimming in the summer.”

In the play they had grown hot, and Nicole’s reflex in drawing away from Kaethe’s arm was automatic to the point of rudeness. Kaethe’s hand fell awkwardly into space, and then she too reacted, verbally, and deplorably.

“Did you think I was going to embrace you?” she demanded sharply. “It was only about Dick, I talked on the phone to him and I was sorry--”

“Is anything the matter with Dick?”

Kaethe suddenly realized her error, but she had taken a tactless course and there was no choice but to answer as Nicole pursued her with reiterated questions: “. . . then why were you sorry?”

“Nothing about Dick. I must talk to Franz.”

“It is about Dick.”

There was terror in her face and collaborating alarm in the faces of the Diver children, near at hand. Kaethe collapsed with: “Your father is ill in Lausanne--Dick wants to talk to Franz about it.”

“Is he very sick?” Nicole demanded--just as Franz came up with his hearty hospital manner. Gratefully Kaethe passed the remnant of the buck to him--but the damage was done.

“I’m going to Lausanne,” announced Nicole.

“One minute,” said Franz. “I’m not sure it’s advisable. I must first talk on the phone to Dick.”

“Then I’ll miss the train down,” Nicole protested, “and then I’ll miss the three o’clock from Zurich! If my father is dying I must--” She left this in the air, afraid to formulate it. “I must go. I’ll have to run for the train.” She was running even as she spoke toward the sequence of flat cars that crowned the bare hill with bursting steam and sound. Over her shoulder she called back, “If you phone Dick tell him I’m coming, Franz!” . . .

. . . Dick was in his own room in the hotel reading The New York Herald when the swallow-like nun rushed in--simultaneously the phone rang.

“Is he dead?” Dick demanded of the nun, hopefully.

“Monsieur, il est parti--he has gone away.”

“Comment?”

“Il est parti--his man and his baggage have gone away too!”

It was incredible. A man in that condition to arise and depart.

Dick answered the phone-call from Franz. “You shouldn’t have told Nicole,” he protested.

“Kaethe told her, very unwisely.”

“I suppose it was my fault. Never tell a thing to a woman till it’s done. However, I’ll meet Nicole . . . say, Franz, the craziest thing has happened down here--the old boy took up his bed and walked. . . .”

“At what? What did you say?”

“I say he walked, old Warren--he walked!”

“But why not?”

“He was supposed to be dying of general collapse . . . he got up and walked away, back to Chicago, I guess. . . . I don’t know, the nurse is here now. . . . I don’t know, Franz--I’ve just heard about it. . . . Call me later.”

He spent the better part of two hours tracing Warren’s movements. The patient had found an opportunity between the change of day and night nurses to resort to the bar where he had gulped down four whiskeys; he paid his hotel bill with a thousand dollar note, instructing the desk that the change should be sent after him, and departed, presumably for America. A last minute dash by Dick and Dangeu to overtake him at the station resulted only in Dick’s failing to meet Nicole; when they did meet in the lobby of the hotel she seemed suddenly tired, and there was a tight purse to her lips that disquieted him.

“How’s father?” she demanded.

“He’s much better. He seemed to have a good deal of reserve energy after all.” He hesitated, breaking it to her easy. “In fact he got up and went away.”

Wanting a drink, for the chase had occupied the dinner hour, he led her, puzzled, toward the grill, and continued as they occupied two leather easy-chairs and ordered a high-ball and a glass of beer: “The man who was taking care of him made a wrong prognosis or something--wait a minute, I’ve hardly had time to think the thing out myself.”

“He’s gone?”

“He got the evening train for Paris.”

They sat silent. From Nicole flowed a vast tragic apathy.

“It was instinct,” Dick said, finally. “He was really dying, but he tried to get a resumption of rhythm--he’s not the first person that ever walked off his death-bed--like an old clock--you know, you shake it and somehow from sheer habit it gets going again. Now your father--”

“Oh, don’t tell me,” she said.

“His principal fuel was fear,” he continued. “He got afraid, and off he went. He’ll probably live till ninety--”

“Please don’t tell me any more,” she said. “Please don’t--I couldn’t stand any more.”

“All right. The little devil I came down to see is hopeless. We may as well go back to-morrow.”

“I don’t see why you have to--come in contact with all this,” she burst forth.

“Oh, don’t you? Sometimes I don’t either.”

She put her hand on his.

“Oh, I’m sorry I said that, Dick.”

Some one had brought a phonograph into the bar and they sat listening to The Wedding of the Painted Doll.

III

One morning a week later, stopping at the desk for his mail, Dick became aware of some extra commotion outside: Patient Von Cohn Morris was going away. His parents, Australians, were putting his baggage vehemently into a large limousine, and beside them stood Doctor Ladislau protesting with ineffectual attitudes against the violent gesturings of Morris, senior. The young man was regarding his embarkation with aloof cynicism as Doctor Diver approached.

“Isn’t this a little sudden, Mr. Morris?”

Mr. Morris started as he saw Dick--his florid face and the large checks on his suit seemed to turn off and on like electric lights. He approached Dick as though to strike him.

“High time we left, we and those who have come with us,” he began, and paused for breath. “It is high time, Doctor Diver. High time.”

“Will you come in my office?” Dick suggested.

“Not I! I’ll talk to you, but I’m washing my hands of you and your place.”

He shook his finger at Dick. “I was just telling this doctor here. We’ve wasted our time and our money.”

Doctor Ladislau stirred in a feeble negative, signalling up a vague Slavic evasiveness. Dick had never liked Ladislau. He managed to walk the excited Australian along the path in the direction of his office, trying to persuade him to enter; but the man shook his head.

“It’s you, Doctor Diver, you, the very man. I went to Doctor Ladislau because you were not to be found, Doctor Diver, and because Doctor Gregorovius is not expected until the nightfall, and I would not wait. No, sir! I would not wait a minute after my son told me the truth.”

He came up menacingly to Dick, who kept his hands loose enough to drop him if it seemed necessary. “My son is here for alcoholism, and he told us he smelt liquor on your breath. Yes, sir!” He made a quick, apparently unsuccessful sniff. “Not once, but twice Von Cohn says he has smelt liquor on your breath. I and my lady have never touched a drop of it in our lives. We hand Von Cohn to you to be cured, and within a month he twice smells liquor on your breath! What kind of cure is that there?”

Dick hesitated; Mr. Morris was quite capable of making a scene on the clinic drive.

“After all, Mr. Morris, some people are not going to give up what they regard as food because of your son--”

“But you’re a doctor, man!” cried Morris furiously. “When the workmen drink their beer that’s bad ‘cess to them--but you’re here supposing to cure--”

“This has gone too far. Your son came to us because of kleptomania.”

“What was behind it?” The man was almost shrieking. “Drink--black drink. Do you know what color black is? It’s black! My own uncle was hung by the neck because of it, you hear? My son comes to a sanitarium, and a doctor reeks of it!”

“I must ask you to leave.”

“You ask me! We are leaving!”

“If you could be a little temperate we could tell you the results of the treatment to date. Naturally, since you feel as you do, we would not want your son as a patient--”

“You dare to use the word temperate to me?”

Dick called to Doctor Ladislau and as he approached, said: “Will you represent us in saying good-by to the patient and to his family?”

He bowed slightly to Morris and went into his office, and stood rigid for a moment just inside the door. He watched until they drove away, the gross parents, the bland, degenerate offspring: it was easy to prophesy the family’s swing around Europe, bullying their betters with hard ignorance and hard money. But what absorbed Dick after the disappearance of the caravan was the question as to what extent he had provoked this. He drank claret with each meal, took a nightcap, generally in the form of hot rum, and sometimes he tippled with gin in the afternoons--gin was the most difficult to detect on the breath. He was averaging a half-pint of alcohol a day, too much for his system to burn up.

Dismissing a tendency to justify himself, he sat down at his desk and wrote out, like a prescription, a régime that would cut his liquor in half. Doctors, chauffeurs, and Protestant clergymen could never smell of liquor, as could painters, brokers, cavalry leaders; Dick blamed himself only for indiscretion. But the matter was by no means clarified half an hour later when Franz, revivified by an Alpine fortnight, rolled up the drive, so eager to resume work that he was plunged in it before he reached his office. Dick met him there.

“How was Mount Everest?”

“We could very well have done Mount Everest the rate we were doing. We thought of it. How goes it all? How is my Kaethe, how is your Nicole?”

“All goes smooth domestically. But my God, Franz, we had a rotten scene this morning.”

“How? What was it?”

Dick walked around the room while Franz got in touch with his villa by telephone. After the family exchange was over, Dick said: “The Morris boy was taken away--there was a row.”

Franz’s buoyant face fell.

“I knew he’d left. I met Ladislau on the veranda.”

“What did Ladislau say?”

“Just that young Morris had gone--that you’d tell me about it. What about it?”

“The usual incoherent reasons.”

“He was a devil, that boy.”

“He was a case for anesthesia,” Dick agreed. “Anyhow, the father had beaten Ladislau into a colonial subject by the time I came along. What about Ladislau? Do we keep him? I say no--he’s not much of a man, he can’t seem to cope with anything.” Dick hesitated on the verge of the truth, swung away to give himself space within which to recapitulate. Franz perched on the edge of a desk, still in his linen duster and travelling gloves. Dick said:

“One of the remarks the boy made to his father was that your distinguished collaborator was a drunkard. The man is a fanatic, and the descendant seems to have caught traces of vin-du-pays on me.”

Franz sat down, musing on his lower lip. “You can tell me at length,” he said finally.

“Why not now?” Dick suggested. “You must know I’m the last man to abuse liquor.” His eyes and Franz’s glinted on each other, pair on pair. “Ladislau let the man get so worked up that I was on the defensive. It might have happened in front of patients, and you can imagine how hard it could be to defend yourself in a situation like that!”

Franz took off his gloves and coat. He went to the door and told the secretary, “Don’t disturb us.” Coming back into the room he flung himself at the long table and fooled with his mail, reasoning as little as is characteristic of people in such postures, rather summoning up a suitable mask for what he had to say.

“Dick, I know well that you are a temperate, well-balanced man, even though we do not entirely agree on the subject of alcohol. But a time has come--Dick, I must say frankly that I have been aware several times that you have had a drink when it was not the moment to have one. There is some reason. Why not try another leave of abstinence?”

“Absence,” Dick corrected him automatically. “It’s no solution for me to go away.”

They were both chafed, Franz at having his return marred and blurred.

“Sometimes you don’t use your common sense, Dick.”

“I never understood what common sense meant applied to complicated problems--unless it means that a general practitioner can perform a better operation than a specialist.”

He was seized by an overwhelming disgust for the situation. To explain, to patch--these were not natural functions at their age--better to continue with the cracked echo of an old truth in the ears.

“This is no go,” he said suddenly.

“Well, that’s occurred to me,” Franz admitted. “Your heart isn’t in this project any more, Dick.”

“I know. I want to leave--we could strike some arrangement about taking Nicole’s money out gradually.”

“I have thought about that too, Dick--I have seen this coming. I am able to arrange other backing, and it will be possible to take all your money out by the end of the year.”

Dick had not intended to come to a decision so quickly, nor was he prepared for Franz’s so ready acquiescence in the break, yet he was relieved. Not without desperation he had long felt the ethics of his profession dissolving into a lifeless mass.

IV

The Divers would return to the Riviera, which was home. The Villa Diana had been rented again for the summer, so they divided the intervening time between German spas and French cathedral towns where they were always happy for a few days. Dick wrote a little with no particular method; it was one of those parts of life that is an awaiting; not upon Nicole’s health, which seemed to thrive on travel, nor upon work, but simply an awaiting. The factor that gave purposefulness to the period was the children.

Dick’s interest in them increased with their ages, now eleven and nine. He managed to reach them over the heads of employees on the principle that both the forcing of children and the fear of forcing them were inadequate substitutes for the long, careful watchfulness, the checking and balancing and reckoning of accounts, to the end that there should be no slip below a certain level of duty. He came to know them much better than Nicole did, and in expansive moods over the wines of several countries he talked and played with them at length. They had that wistful charm, almost sadness, peculiar to children who have learned early not to cry or laugh with abandon; they were apparently moved to no extremes of emotion, but content with a simple regimentation and the simple pleasures allowed them. They lived on the even tenor found advisable in the experience of old families of the Western world, brought up rather than brought out. Dick thought, for example, that nothing was more conducive to the development of observation than compulsory silence.

Lanier was an unpredictable boy with an inhuman curiosity. “Well, how many Pomeranians would it take to lick a lion, father?” was typical of the questions with which he harassed Dick. Topsy was easier. She was nine and very fair and exquisitely made like Nicole, and in the past Dick had worried about that. Lately she had become as robust as any American child. He was satisfied with them both, but conveyed the fact to them only in a tacit way. They were not let off breaches of good conduct--”Either one learns politeness at home,” Dick said, “or the world teaches it to you with a whip and you may get hurt in the process. What do I care whether Topsy ‘adores’ me or not? I’m not bringing her up to be my wife.”

Another element that distinguished this summer and autumn for the Divers was a plenitude of money. Due to the sale of their interest in the clinic, and to developments in America, there was now so much that the mere spending of it, the care of goods, was an absorption in itself. The style in which they travelled seemed fabulous.

Regard them, for example, as the train slows up at Boyen where they are to spend a fortnight visiting. The shifting from the wagon-lit has begun at the Italian frontier. The governess’s maid and Madame Diver’s maid have come up from second class to help with the baggage and the dogs. Mlle. Bellois will superintend the hand-luggage, leaving the Sealyhams to one maid and the pair of Pekinese to the other. It is not necessarily poverty of spirit that makes a woman surround herself with life--it can be a superabundance of interest, and, except during her flashes of illness, Nicole was capable of being curator of it all. For example with the great quantity of heavy baggage--presently from the van would be unloaded four wardrobe trunks, a shoe trunk, three hat trunks, and two hat boxes, a chest of servants’ trunks, a portable filing-cabinet, a medicine case, a spirit lamp container, a picnic set, four tennis rackets in presses and cases, a phonograph, a typewriter. Distributed among the spaces reserved for family and entourage were two dozen supplementary grips, satchels and packages, each one numbered, down to the tag on the cane case. Thus all of it could be checked up in two minutes on any station platform, some for storage, some for accompaniment from the “light trip list” or the “heavy trip list,” constantly revised, and carried on metal-edged plaques in Nicole’s purse. She had devised the system as a child when travelling with her failing mother. It was equivalent to the system of a regimental supply officer who must think of the bellies and equipment of three thousand men.

The Divers flocked from the train into the early gathered twilight of the valley. The village people watched the debarkation with an awe akin to that which followed the Italian pilgrimages of Lord Byron a century before. Their hostess was the Contessa di Minghetti, lately Mary North. The journey that had begun in a room over the shop of a paperhanger in Newark had ended in an extraordinary marriage.

“Conte di Minghetti” was merely a papal title--the wealth of Mary’s husband flowed from his being ruler-owner of manganese deposits in southwestern Asia. He was not quite light enough to travel in a pullman south of Mason-Dixon; he was of the Kyble-Berber-Sabaean-Hindu strain that belts across north Africa and Asia, more sympathetic to the European than the mongrel faces of the ports.

When these princely households, one of the East, one of the West, faced each other on the station platform, the splendor of the Divers seemed pioneer simplicity by comparison. Their hosts were accompanied by an Italian major-domo carrying a staff, by a quartet of turbaned retainers on motorcycles, and by two half-veiled females who stood respectfully a little behind Mary and salaamed at Nicole, making her jump with the gesture.

To Mary as well as to the Divers the greeting was faintly comic; Mary gave an apologetic, belittling giggle; yet her voice, as she introduced her husband by his Asiatic title, flew proud and high.

In their rooms as they dressed for dinner, Dick and Nicole grimaced at each other in an awed way: such rich as want to be thought democratic pretend in private to be swept off their feet by swank.

“Little Mary North knows what she wants,” Dick muttered through his shaving cream. “Abe educated her, and now she’s married to a Buddha. If Europe ever goes Bolshevik she’ll turn up as the bride of Stalin.”

Nicole looked around from her dressing-case. “Watch your tongue, Dick, will you?” But she laughed. “They’re very swell. The warships all fire at them or salute them or something. Mary rides in the royal bus in London.”

“All right,” he agreed. As he heard Nicole at the door asking for pins, he called, “I wonder if I could have some whiskey; I feel the mountain air!”

“She’ll see to it,” presently Nicole called through the bathroom door. “It was one of those women who were at the station. She has her veil off.”

“What did Mary tell you about life?” he asked.

“She didn’t say so much--she was interested in high life--she asked me a lot of questions about my genealogy and all that sort of thing, as if I knew anything about it. But it seems the bridegroom has two very tan children by another marriage--one of them ill with some Asiatic thing they can’t diagnose. I’ve got to warn the children. Sounds very peculiar to me. Mary will see how we’d feel about it.” She stood worrying a minute.

“She’ll understand,” Dick reassured her. “Probably the child’s in bed.”

At dinner Dick talked to Hosain, who had been at an English public school. Hosain wanted to know about stocks and about Hollywood and Dick, whipping up his imagination with champagne, told him preposterous tales.

“Billions?” Hosain demanded.

“Trillions,” Dick assured him.

“I didn’t truly realize--”

“Well, perhaps millions,” Dick conceded. “Every hotel guest is assigned a harem--or what amounts to a harem.”

“Other than the actors and directors?”

“Every hotel guest--even travelling salesmen. Why, they tried to send me up a dozen candidates, but Nicole wouldn’t stand for it.”

Nicole reproved him when they were in their room alone. “Why so many highballs? Why did you use your word spic in front of him?”

“Excuse me, I meant smoke. The tongue slipped.”

“Dick, this isn’t faintly like you.”

“Excuse me again. I’m not much like myself any more.”

That night Dick opened a bathroom window, giving on a narrow and tubular court of the château, gray as rats but echoing at the moment to plaintive and peculiar music, sad as a flute. Two men were chanting in an Eastern language or dialect full of k’s and l’s--he leaned out but he could not see them; there was obviously a religious significance in the sounds, and tired and emotionless he let them pray for him too, but what for, save that he should not lose himself in his increasing melancholy, he did not know.

Next day, over a thinly wooded hillside they shot scrawny birds, distant poor relations to the partridge. It was done in a vague imitation of the English manner, with a corps of inexperienced beaters whom Dick managed to miss by firing only directly overhead.

On their return Lanier was waiting in their suite.

“Father, you said tell you immediately if we were near the sick boy.”

Nicole whirled about, immediately on guard.

“--so, Mother,” Lanier continued, turning to her, “the boy takes a bath every evening and to-night he took his bath just before mine and I had to take mine in his water, and it was dirty.”

“What? Now what?”

“I saw them take Tony out of it, and then they called me into it and the water was dirty.”

“But--did you take it?”

“Yes, Mother.”

“Heavens!” she exclaimed to Dick.

He demanded: “Why didn’t Lucienne draw your bath?”

“Lucienne can’t. It’s a funny heater--it reached out of itself and burned her arm last night and she’s afraid of it, so one of those two women--”

“You go in this bathroom and take a bath now.”

“Don’t say I told you,” said Lanier from the doorway.

Dick went in and sprinkled the tub with sulphur; closing the door he said to Nicole:

“Either we speak to Mary or we’d better get out.”

She agreed and he continued: “People think their children are constitutionally cleaner than other people’s, and their diseases are less contagious.”

Dick came in and helped himself from the decanter, chewing a biscuit savagely in the rhythm of the pouring water in the bathroom.

“Tell Lucienne that she’s got to learn about the heater--” he suggested. At that moment the Asiatic woman came in person to the door.

“El Contessa--”

Dick beckoned her inside and closed the door.

“Is the little sick boy better?” he inquired pleasantly.

“Better, yes, but he still has the eruptions frequently.”

“That’s too bad--I’m very sorry. But you see our children mustn’t be bathed in his water. That’s out of the question--I’m sure your mistress would be furious if she had known you had done a thing like that.”

“I?” She seemed thunderstruck. “Why, I merely saw your maid had difficulty with the heater--I told her about it and started the water.”

“But with a sick person you must empty the bathwater entirely out, and clean the tub.”

“I?”

Chokingly the woman drew a long breath, uttered a convulsed sob and rushed from the room.

“She mustn’t get up on western civilization at our expense,” he said grimly.

At dinner that night he decided that it must inevitably be a truncated visit: about his own country Hosain seemed to have observed only that there were many mountains and some goats and herders of goats. He was a reserved young man--to draw him out would have required the sincere effort that Dick now reserved for his family. Soon after dinner Hosain left Mary and the Divers to themselves, but the old unity was split--between them lay the restless social fields that Mary was about to conquer. Dick was relieved when, at nine-thirty, Mary received and read a note and got up.

“You’ll have to excuse me. My husband is leaving on a short trip--and I must be with him.”

Next morning, hard on the heels of the servant bringing coffee, Mary entered their room. She was dressed and they were not dressed, and she had the air of having been up for some time. Her face was toughened with quiet jerky fury.

“What is this story about Lanier having been bathed in a dirty bath?”

Dick began to protest, but she cut through:

“What is this story that you commanded my husband’s sister to clean Lanier’s tub?”

She remained on her feet staring at them, as they sat impotent as idols in their beds, weighted by their trays. Together they exclaimed: “His sister!”

“That you ordered one of his sisters to clean out a tub!”

“We didn’t--” their voices rang together saying the same thing, “--I spoke to the native servant--”

“You spoke to Hosain’s sister.”

Dick could only say: “I supposed they were two maids.”

“You were told they were Himadoun.”

“What?” Dick got out of bed and into a robe.

“I explained it to you at the piano night before last. Don’t tell me you were too merry to understand.”

“Was that what you said? I didn’t hear the beginning. I didn’t connect the--we didn’t make any connection, Mary. Well, all we can do is see her and apologize.”

“See her and apologize! I explained to you that when the oldest member of the family--when the oldest one marries, well, the two oldest sisters consecrate themselves to being Himadoun, to being his wife’s ladies-in-waiting.”

“Was that why Hosain left the house last night?”

Mary hesitated; then nodded.

“He had to--they all left. His honor makes it necessary.”

Now both the Divers were up and dressing; Mary went on:

“And what’s all that about the bathwater. As if a thing like that could happen in this house! We’ll ask Lanier about it.”

Dick sat on the bedside indicating in a private gesture to Nicole that she should take over. Meanwhile Mary went to the door and spoke to an attendant in Italian.

“Wait a minute,” Nicole said. “I won’t have that.”

“You accused us,” answered Mary, in a tone she had never used to Nicole before. “Now I have a right to see.”

“I won’t have the child brought in.” Nicole threw on her clothes as though they were chain mail.

“That’s all right,” said Dick. “Bring Lanier in. We’ll settle this bathtub matter--fact or myth.”

Lanier, half clothed mentally and physically, gazed at the angered faces of the adults.

“Listen, Lanier,” Mary demanded, “how did you come to think you were bathed in water that had been used before?”

“Speak up,” Dick added.

“It was just dirty, that was all.”

“Couldn’t you hear the new water running, from your room, next door?”

Lanier admitted the possibility but reiterated his point--the water was dirty. He was a little awed; he tried to see ahead:

“It couldn’t have been running, because--”

They pinned him down.

“Why not?”

He stood in his little kimono arousing the sympathy of his parents and further arousing Mary’s impatience--then he said:

“The water was dirty, it was full of soap-suds.”

“When you’re not sure what you’re saying--” Mary began, but Nicole interrupted.

“Stop it, Mary. If there were dirty suds in the water it was logical to think it was dirty. His father told him to come--”

“There couldn’t have been dirty suds in the water.”

Lanier looked reproachfully at his father, who had betrayed him. Nicole turned him about by the shoulders and sent him out of the room; Dick broke the tensity with a laugh.

Then, as if the sound recalled the past, the old friendship, Mary guessed how far away from them she had gone and said in a mollifying tone: “It’s always like that with children.”

Her uneasiness grew as she remembered the past. “You’d be silly to go--Hosain wanted to make this trip anyhow. After all, you’re my guests and you just blundered into the thing.” But Dick, made more angry by this obliqueness and the use of the word blunder, turned away and began arranging his effects, saying:

“It’s too bad about the young women. I’d like to apologize to the one who came in here.”

“If you’d only listened on the piano seat!”

“But you’ve gotten so damned dull, Mary. I listened as long as I could.”

“Be quiet!” Nicole advised him.

“I return his compliment,” said Mary bitterly. “Good-by, Nicole.” She went out.

After all that there was no question of her coming to see them off; the major-domo arranged the departure. Dick left formal notes for Hosain and the sisters. There was nothing to do except to go, but all of them, especially Lanier, felt bad about it.

“I insist,” insisted Lanier on the train, “that it was dirty bathwater.”

“That’ll do,” his father said. “You better forget it--unless you want me to divorce you. Did you know there was a new law in France that you can divorce a child?”

Lanier roared with delight and the Divers were unified again--Dick wondered how many more times it could be done.

V

Nicole went to the window and bent over the sill to take a look at the rising altercation on the terrace; the April sun shone pink on the saintly face of Augustine, the cook, and blue on the butcher’s knife she waved in her drunken hand. She had been with them since their return to Villa Diana in February.

Because of an obstruction of an awning she could see only Dick’s head and his hand holding one of his heavy canes with a bronze knob on it. The knife and the cane, menacing each other, were like tripos and short sword in a gladiatorial combat. Dick’s words reached her first:

“--care how much kitchen wine you drink but when I find you digging into a bottle of Chablis Moutonne--”

“You talk about drinking!” Augustine cried, flourishing her sabre. “You drink--all the time!”

Nicole called over the awning: “What’s the matter, Dick?” and he answered in English:

“The old girl has been polishing off the vintage wines. I’m firing her--at least I’m trying to.”

“Heavens! Well, don’t let her reach you with that knife.”

Augustine shook her knife up at Nicole. Her old mouth was made of two small intersecting cherries.

“I would like to say, Madame, if you knew that your husband drinks over at his Bastide comparatively as a day-laborer--”

“Shut up and get out!” interrupted Nicole. “We’ll get the gendarmes.”

“You’ll get the gendarmes! With my brother in the corps! You--a disgusting American?”

In English Dick called up to Nicole:

“Get the children away from the house till I settle this.”

“--disgusting Americans who come here and drink up our finest wines,” screamed Augustine with the voice of the commune.

Dick mastered a firmer tone.

“You must leave now! I’ll pay you what we owe you.”

“Very sure you’ll pay me! And let me tell you--” she came close and waved the knife so furiously that Dick raised his stick, whereupon she rushed into the kitchen and returned with the carving knife reinforced by a hatchet.

The situation was not prepossessing--Augustine was a strong woman and could be disarmed only at the risk of serious results to herself--and severe legal complications which were the lot of one who molested a French citizen. Trying a bluff Dick called up to Nicole:

“Phone the poste de police.” Then to Augustine, indicating her armament, “This means arrest for you.”

“Ha-ha!” she laughed demoniacally; nevertheless she came no nearer. Nicole phoned the police but was answered with what was almost an echo of Augustine’s laugh. She heard mumbles and passings of the word around--the connection was suddenly broken.

Returning to the window she called down to Dick: “Give her something extra!”

“If I could get to that phone!” As this seemed impracticable, Dick capitulated. For fifty francs, increased to a hundred as he succumbed to the idea of getting her out hastily, Augustine yielded her fortress, covering the retreat with stormy grenades of “Salaud!” She would leave only when her nephew could come for her baggage. Waiting cautiously in the neighborhood of the kitchen Dick heard a cork pop, but he yielded the point. There was no further trouble--when the nephew arrived, all apologetic, Augustine bade Dick a cheerful, convivial good-by and called up “All revoir, Madame! Bonne chance!” to Nicole’s window.

The Divers went to Nice and dined on a bouillabaisse, which is a stew of rock fish and small lobsters, highly seasoned with saffron, and a bottle of cold Chablis. He expressed pity for Augustine.

“I’m not sorry a bit,” said Nicole.

“I’m sorry--and yet I wish I’d shoved her over the cliff.”

There was little they dared talk about in these days; seldom did they find the right word when it counted, it arrived always a moment too late when one could not reach the other any more. To-night Augustine’s outburst had shaken them from their separate reveries; with the burn and chill of the spiced broth and the parching wine they talked.

“We can’t go on like this,” Nicole suggested. “Or can we?--what do you think?” Startled that for the moment Dick did not deny it, she continued, “Some of the time I think it’s my fault--I’ve ruined you.”

“So I’m ruined, am I?” he inquired pleasantly.

“I didn’t mean that. But you used to want to create things--now you seem to want to smash them up.”

She trembled at criticizing him in these broad terms--but his enlarging silence frightened her even more. She guessed that something was developing behind the silence, behind the hard, blue eyes, the almost unnatural interest in the children. Uncharacteristic bursts of temper surprised her--he would suddenly unroll a long scroll of contempt for some person, race, class, way of life, way of thinking. It was as though an incalculable story was telling itself inside him, about which she could only guess at in the moments when it broke through the surface.

“After all, what do you get out of this?” she demanded.

“Knowing you’re stronger every day. Knowing that your illness follows the law of diminishing returns.”

His voice came to her from far off, as though he were speaking of something remote and academic; her alarm made her exclaim, “Dick!” and she thrust her hand forward to his across the table. A reflex pulled Dick’s hand back and he added: “There’s the whole situation to think of, isn’t there? There’s not just you.” He covered her hand with his and said in the old pleasant voice of a conspirator for pleasure, mischief, profit, and delight:

“See that boat out there?”

It was the motor yacht of T. F. Golding lying placid among the little swells of the NiceanBay, constantly bound upon a romantic voyage that was not dependent upon actual motion. “We’ll go out there now and ask the people on board what’s the matter with them. We’ll find out if they’re happy.”

“We hardly know him,” Nicole objected.

“He urged us. Besides, Baby knows him--she practically married him, doesn’t she--didn’t she?”

When they put out from the port in a hired launch it was already summer dusk and lights were breaking out in spasms along the rigging of the Margin. As they drew up alongside, Nicole’s doubts reasserted themselves.

“He’s having a party--”

“It’s only a radio,” he guessed.

They were hailed--a huge white-haired man in a white suit looked down at them, calling:

“Do I recognize the Divers?”

“Boat ahoy, Margin!”

Their boat moved under the companionway; as they mounted Golding doubled his huge frame to give Nicole a hand.

“Just in time for dinner.”

A small orchestra was playing astern.

“I’m yours for the asking--but till then you can’t ask me to behave--”

And as Golding’s cyclonic arms blew them aft without touching them, Nicole was sorrier they had come, and more impatient at Dick. Having taken up an attitude of aloofness from the gay people here, at the time when Dick’s work and her health were incompatible with going about, they had a reputation as refusers. Riviera replacements during the ensuing years interpreted this as a vague unpopularity. Nevertheless, having taken such a stand, Nicole felt it should not be cheaply compromised for a momentary self-indulgence.

As they passed through the principal salon they saw ahead of them figures that seemed to dance in the half light of the circular stern. This was an illusion made by the enchantment of the music, the unfamiliar lighting, and the surrounding presence of water. Actually, save for some busy stewards, the guests loafed on a wide divan that followed the curve of the deck. There were a white, a red, a blurred dress, the laundered chests of several men, of whom one, detaching and identifying himself, brought from Nicole a rare little cry of delight.

“Tommy!”

Brushing aside the Gallicism of his formal dip at her hand, Nicole pressed her face against his. They sat, or rather lay down together on the Antoninian bench. His handsome face was so dark as to have lost the pleasantness of deep tan, without attaining the blue beauty of Negroes--it was just worn leather. The foreignness of his depigmentation by unknown suns, his nourishment by strange soils, his tongue awkward with the curl of many dialects, his reactions attuned to odd alarms--these things fascinated and rested Nicole--in the moment of meeting she lay on his bosom, spiritually, going out and out. . . . Then self-preservation reasserted itself and retiring to her own world she spoke lightly.

“You look just like all the adventurers in the movies--but why do you have to stay away so long?”

Tommy Barban looked at her, uncomprehending but alert; the pupils of his eyes flashed.

“Five years,” she continued, in throaty mimicry of nothing. “Much too long. Couldn’t you only slaughter a certain number of creatures and then come back, and breathe our air for a while?”

In her cherished presence Tommy Europeanized himself quickly.

“Mais pour nous héros,” he said, “il nous faut du temps, Nicole. Nous ne pouvons pas faire de petits exercises d’héroisme--il faut faire les grandes compositions.”

“Talk English to me, Tommy.”

“Parlez français avec moi, Nicole.”

“But the meanings are different--in French you can be heroic and gallant with dignity, and you know it. But in English you can’t be heroic and gallant without being a little absurd, and you know that too. That gives me an advantage.”

“But after all--” He chuckled suddenly. “Even in English I’m brave, heroic and all that.”

She pretended to be groggy with wonderment but he was not abashed.

“I only know what I see in the cinema,” he said.

“Is it all like the movies?”

“The movies aren’t so bad--now this Ronald Colman--have you seen his pictures about the Corps d’Afrique du Nord? They’re not bad at all.”

“Very well, whenever I go to the movies I’ll know you’re going through just that sort of thing at that moment.”

As she spoke, Nicole was aware of a small, pale, pretty young woman with lovely metallic hair, almost green in the deck lights, who had been sitting on the other side of Tommy and might have been part either of their conversation or of the one next to them. She had obviously had a monopoly of Tommy, for now she abandoned hope of his attention with what was once called ill grace, and petulantly crossed the crescent of the deck.

“After all, I am a hero,” Tommy said calmly, only half joking. “I have ferocious courage, usually, something like a lion, something like a drunken man.”

Nicole waited until the echo of his boast had died away in his mind--she knew he had probably never made such a statement before. Then she looked among the strangers, and found as usual, the fierce neurotics, pretending calm, liking the country only in horror of the city, of the sound of their own voices which had set the tone and pitch. . . . She asked:

“Who is the woman in white?”

“The one who was beside me? Lady Caroline Sibly-Biers.”--They listened for a moment to her voice across the way:

“The man’s a scoundrel, but he’s a cat of the stripe. We sat up all night playing two-handed chemin-de-fer, and he owes me a mille Swiss.”

Tommy laughed and said: “She is now the wickedest woman in London--whenever I come back to Europe there is a new crop of the wickedest women from London. She’s the very latest--though I believe there is now one other who’s considered almost as wicked.”

Nicole glanced again at the woman across the deck--she was fragile, tubercular--it was incredible that such narrow shoulders, such puny arms could bear aloft the pennon of decadence, last ensign of the fading empire. Her resemblance was rather to one of John Held’s flat-chested flappers than to the hierarchy of tall languid blondes who had posed for painters and novelists since before the war.

Golding approached, fighting down the resonance of his huge bulk, which transmitted his will as through a gargantuan amplifier, and Nicole, still reluctant, yielded to his reiterated points: that the Margin was starting for Cannes immediately after dinner; that they could always pack in some caviare and champagne, even though they had dined; that in any case Dick was now on the phone, telling their chauffeur in Nice to drive their car back to Cannes and leave it in front of the Café des Alliées where the Divers could retrieve it.

They moved into the dining salon and Dick was placed next to Lady Sibly-Biers. Nicole saw that his usually ruddy face was drained of blood; he talked in a dogmatic voice, of which only snatches reached Nicole:

“. . . It’s all right for you English, you’re doing a dance of death. . . . Sepoys in the ruined fort, I mean Sepoys at the gate and gaiety in the fort and all that. The green hat, the crushed hat, no future.”

Lady Caroline answered him in short sentences spotted with the terminal “What?” the double-edged “Quite!” the depressing “Cheerio!” that always had a connotation of imminent peril, but Dick appeared oblivious to the warning signals. Suddenly he made a particularly vehement pronouncement, the purport of which eluded Nicole, but she saw the young woman turn dark and sinewy, and heard her answer sharply:

“After all a chep’s a chep and a chum’s a chum.”

Again he had offended some one--couldn’t he hold his tongue a little longer? How long? To death then.

At the piano, a fair-haired young Scotsman from the orchestra (entitled by its drum “The Ragtime College Jazzes of Edinboro”) had begun singing in a Danny Deever monotone, accompanying himself with low chords on the piano. He pronounced his words with great precision, as though they impressed him almost intolerably.

“There was a young lady from hell,

Who jumped at the sound of a bell,

Because she was bad--bad--bad,

She jumped at the sound of a bell,

From hell (BOOMBOOM)

From hell (TOOTTOOT)

There was a young lady from hell--”

“What is all this?” whispered Tommy to Nicole.

The girl on the other side of him supplied the answer:

“Caroline Sibly-Biers wrote the words. He wrote the music.”

“Quelle enfanterie!” Tommy murmured as the next verse began, hinting at the jumpy lady’s further predilections. “On dirait qu’il récite Racine!”

On the surface at least, Lady Caroline was paying no attention to the performance of her work. Glancing at her again Nicole found herself impressed, neither with the character nor the personality, but with the sheer strength derived from an attitude; Nicole thought that she was formidable, and she was confirmed in this point of view as the party rose from table. Dick remained in his seat wearing an odd expression; then he crashed into words with a harsh ineptness.

“I don’t like innuendo in these deafening English whispers.”

Already half-way out of the room Lady Caroline turned and walked back to him; she spoke in a low clipped voice purposely audible to the whole company.

“You came to me asking for it--disparaging my countrymen, disparaging my friend, Mary Minghetti. I simply said you were observed associating with a questionable crowd in Lausanne. Is that a deafening whisper? Or does it simply deafen you?”

“It’s still not loud enough,” said Dick, a little too late. “So I am actually a notorious--”

Golding crushed out the phrase with his voice saying:

“What! What!” and moved his guests on out, with the threat of his powerful body. Turning the corner of the door Nicole saw that Dick was still sitting at the table. She was furious at the woman for her preposterous statement, equally furious at Dick for having brought them here, for having become fuddled, for having untipped the capped barbs of his irony, for having come off humiliated--she was a little more annoyed because she knew that her taking possession of Tommy Barban on their arrival had first irritated the Englishwoman.

A moment later she saw Dick standing in the gangway, apparently in complete control of himself as he talked with Golding; then for half an hour she did not see him anywhere about the deck and she broke out of an intricate Malay game, played with string and coffee beans, and said to Tommy:

“I’ve got to find Dick.”

Since dinner the yacht had been in motion westward. The fine night streamed away on either side, the Diesel engines pounded softly, there was a spring wind that blew Nicole’s hair abruptly when she reached the bow, and she had a sharp lesion of anxiety at seeing Dick standing in the angle by the flagstaff. His voice was serene as he recognized her.

“It’s a nice night.”

“I was worried.”

“Oh, you were worried?”

“Oh, don’t talk that way. It would give me so much pleasure to think of a little something I could do for you, Dick.”

He turned away from her, toward the veil of starlight over Africa.

“I believe that’s true, Nicole. And sometimes I believe that the littler it was, the more pleasure it would give you.”

“Don’t talk like that--don’t say such things.”

His face, wan in the light that the white spray caught and tossed back to the brilliant sky had none of the lines of annoyance she had expected. It was even detached; his eyes focussed upon her gradually as upon a chessman to be moved; in the same slow manner he caught her wrist and drew her near.

“You ruined me, did you?” he inquired blandly. “Then we’re both ruined. So--”

Cold with terror she put her other wrist into his grip. All right, she would go with him--again she felt the beauty of the night vividly in one moment of complete response and abnegation--all right, then--

--but now she was unexpectedly free and Dick turned his back sighing. “Tch! tch!”

Tears streamed down Nicole’s face--in a moment she heard some one approaching; it was Tommy.

“You found him! Nicole thought maybe you jumped overboard, Dick,” he said, “because that little English poule slanged you.”

“It’d be a good setting to jump overboard,” said Dick mildly.

“Wouldn’t it?” agreed Nicole hastily. “Let’s borrow life-preservers and jump over. I think we should do something spectacular. I feel that all our lives have been too restrained.”

Tommy sniffed from one to the other trying to breathe in the situation with the night. “We’ll go ask the Lady Beer-and-Ale what to do--she should know the latest things. And we should memorize her song ‘There was a young lady from l’enfer.’ I shall translate it, and make a fortune from its success at the Casino.”

“Are you rich, Tommy?” Dick asked him, as they retraced the length of the boat.

“Not as things go now. I got tired of the brokerage business and went away. But I have good stocks in the hands of friends who are holding it for me. All goes well.”

“Dick’s getting rich,” Nicole said. In reaction her voice had begun to tremble.

On the after deck Golding had fanned three pairs of dancers into action with his colossal paws. Nicole and Tommy joined them and Tommy remarked: “Dick seems to be drinking.”

“Only moderately,” she said loyally.

“There are those who can drink and those who can’t. Obviously Dick can’t. You ought to tell him not to.”

“I!” she exclaimed in amazement. “I tell Dick what he should do or shouldn’t do!”

But in a reticent way Dick was still vague and sleepy when they reached the pier at Cannes. Golding buoyed him down into the launch of the Margin whereupon Lady Caroline shifted her place conspicuously. On the dock he bowed good-by with exaggerated formality, and for a moment he seemed about to speed her with a salty epigram, but the bone of Tommy’s arm went into the soft part of his and they walked to the attendant car.

“I’ll drive you home,” Tommy suggested.

“Don’t bother--we can get a cab.”

“I’d like to, if you can put me up.”

On the back seat of the car Dick remained quiescent until the yellow monolith of Golfe Juan was passed, and then the constant carnival at Juan les Pins where the night was musical and strident in many languages. When the car turned up the hill toward Tarmes, he sat up suddenly, prompted by the tilt of the vehicle and delivered a peroration:

“A charming representative of the--” he stumbled momentarily, “--a firm of--bring me Brains addled a l’Anglaise.” Then he went into an appeased sleep, belching now and then contentedly into the soft warm darkness.

VI

Next morning Dick came early into Nicole’s room. “I waited till I heard you up. Needless to say I feel badly about the evening--but how about no postmortems?”

“I’m agreed,” she answered coolly, carrying her face to the mirror.

“Tommy drove us home? Or did I dream it?”

“You know he did.”

“Seems probable,” he admitted, “since I just heard him coughing. I think I’ll call on him.”

She was glad when he left her, for almost the first time in her life--his awful faculty of being right seemed to have deserted him at last.

Tommy was stirring in his bed, waking for café au lait.

“Feel all right?” Dick asked.

When Tommy complained of a sore throat he seized at a professional attitude.

“Better have a gargle or something.”

“You have one?”

“Oddly enough I haven’t--probably Nicole has.”

“Don’t disturb her.”

“She’s up.”

“How is she?”

Dick turned around slowly. “Did you expect her to be dead because I was tight?” His tone was pleasant. “Nicole is now made of--of Georgia pine, which is the hardest wood known, except lignum vitæ from New Zealand--”

Nicole, going downstairs, heard the end of the conversation. She knew, as she had always known, that Tommy loved her; she knew he had come to dislike Dick, and that Dick had realized it before he did, and would react in some positive way to the man’s lonely passion. This thought was succeeded by a moment of sheerly feminine satisfaction. She leaned over her children’s breakfast table and told off instructions to the governess, while upstairs two men were concerned about her.

Later in the garden she was happy; she did not want anything to happen, but only for the situation to remain in suspension as the two men tossed her from one mind to another; she had not existed for a long time, even as a ball.

“Nice, Rabbits, isn’t it--Or is it? Hey, Rabbit--hey you! Is it nice?--hey? Or does it sound very peculiar to you?”

The rabbit, after an experience of practically nothing else and cabbage leaves, agreed after a few tentative shiftings of the nose.

Nicole went on through her garden routine. She left the flowers she cut in designated spots to be brought to the house later by the gardener. Reaching the sea wall she fell into a communicative mood and no one to communicate with; so she stopped and deliberated. She was somewhat shocked at the idea of being interested in another man--but other women have lovers--why not me? In the fine spring morning the inhibitions of the male world disappeared and she reasoned as gaily as a flower, while the wind blew her hair until her head moved with it. Other women have had lovers--the same forces that last night had made her yield to Dick up to the point of death, now kept her head nodding to the wind, content and happy with the logic of, Why shouldn’t I?

She sat upon the low wall and looked down upon the sea. But from another sea, the wide swell of fantasy, she had fished out something tangible to lay beside the rest of her loot. If she need not, in her spirit, be forever one with Dick as he had appeared last night, she must be something in addition, not just an image on his mind, condemned to endless parades around the circumference of a medal.

Nicole had chosen this part of the wall on which to sit, because the cliff shaded to a slanting meadow with a cultivated vegetable garden. Through a cluster of boughs she saw two men carrying rakes and spades and talking in a counterpoint of Niçoise and Provençal. Attracted by their words and gestures she caught the sense:

“I laid her down here.”

“I took her behind the vines there.”

“She doesn’t care--neither does he. It was that sacred dog. Well, I laid her down here--”

“You got the rake?”

“You got it yourself, you clown.”

“Well, I don’t care where you laid her down. Until that night I never even felt a woman’s breast against my chest since I married--twelve years ago. And now you tell me--”

“But listen about the dog--”

Nicole watched them through the boughs; it seemed all right what they were saying--one thing was good for one person, another for another. Yet it was a man’s world she had overheard; going back to the house she became doubtful again.

Dick and Tommy were on the terrace. She walked through them and into the house, brought out a sketch pad and began a head of Tommy.

“Hands never idle--distaff flying,” Dick said lightly. How could he talk so trivially with the blood still drained down from his cheeks so that the auburn lather of beard showed red as his eyes? She turned to Tommy saying:

“I can always do something. I used to have a nice active little Polynesian ape and juggle him around for hours till people began to make the most dismal rough jokes--”

She kept her eyes resolutely away from Dick. Presently he excused himself and went inside--she saw him pour himself two glasses of water, and she hardened further.

“Nicole--” Tommy began but interrupted himself to clear the harshness from his throat.

“I’m going to get you some special camphor rub,” she suggested. “It’s American--Dick believes in it. I’ll be just a minute.”

“I must go really.”

Dick came out and sat down. “Believes in what?” When she returned with the jar neither of the men had moved, though she gathered they had had some sort of excited conversation about nothing.

The chauffeur was at the door, with a bag containing Tommy’s clothes of the night before. The sight of Tommy in clothes borrowed from Dick moved her sadly, falsely, as though Tommy were not able to afford such clothes.

“When you get to the hotel rub this into your throat and chest and then inhale it,” she said.

“Say, there,” Dick murmured as Tommy went down the steps, “don’t give Tommy the whole jar--it has to be ordered from Paris--it’s out of stock down here.”

Tommy came back within hearing and the three of them stood in the sunshine, Tommy squarely before the car so that it seemed by leaning forward he would tip it upon his back.

Nicole stepped down to the path.

“Now catch it,” she advised him. “It’s extremely rare.”

She heard Dick grow silent at her side; she took a step off from him and waved as the car drove off with Tommy and the special camphor rub. Then she turned to take her own medicine.

“There was no necessity for that gesture,” Dick said. “There are four of us here--and for years whenever there’s a cough--”

They looked at each other.

“We can always get another jar--” then she lost her nerve and presently followed him upstairs where he lay down on his own bed and said nothing.

“Do you want lunch to be brought up to you?” she asked.

He nodded and continued to lie quiescent, staring at the ceiling. Doubtfully she went to give the order. Upstairs again she looked into his room--the blue eyes, like searchlights, played on a dark sky. She stood a minute in the doorway, aware of the sin she had committed against him, half afraid to come in. . . . She put out her hand as if to rub his head, but he turned away like a suspicious animal. Nicole could stand the situation no longer; in a kitchen-maid’s panic she ran downstairs, afraid of what the stricken man above would feed on while she must still continue her dry suckling at his lean chest.

In a week Nicole forgot her flash about Tommy--she had not much memory for people and forgot them easily. But in the first hot blast of June she heard he was in Nice. He wrote a little note to them both--and she opened it under the parasol, together with other mail they had brought from the house. After reading it she tossed it over to Dick, and in exchange he threw a telegram into the lap of her beach pajamas:

Dears will be at Gausses to-morrow unfortunately without mother am counting on seeing you.

“I’ll be glad to see her,” said Nicole, grimly.

VII

But she went to the beach with Dick next morning with a renewal of her apprehension that Dick was contriving at some desperate solution. Since the evening on Golding’s yacht she had sensed what was going on. So delicately balanced was she between an old foothold that had always guaranteed her security, and the imminence of a leap from which she must alight changed in the very chemistry of blood and muscle, that she did not dare bring the matter into the true forefront of consciousness. The figures of Dick and herself, mutating, undefined, appeared as spooks caught up into a fantastic dance. For months every word had seemed to have an overtone of some other meaning, soon to be resolved under circumstances that Dick would determine. Though this state of mind was perhaps more hopeful,--the long years of sheer being had had an enlivening effect on the parts of her nature that early illness had killed, that Dick had not reached--through no fault of his but simply because no one nature can extend entirely inside another--it was still disquieting. The most unhappy aspect of their relations was Dick’s growing indifference, at present personified by too much drink; Nicole did not know whether she was to be crushed or spared--Dick’s voice, throbbing with insincerity, confused the issue; she couldn’t guess how he was going to behave next upon the tortuously slow unrolling of the carpet, nor what would happen at the end, at the moment of the leap.

For what might occur thereafter she had no anxiety--she suspected that that would be the lifting of a burden, an unblinding of eyes. Nicole had been designed for change, for flight, with money as fins and wings. The new state of things would be no more than if a racing chassis, concealed for years under the body of a family limousine, should be stripped to its original self. Nicole could feel the fresh breeze already--the wrench it was she feared, and the dark manner of its coming.

The Divers went out on the beach with her white suit and his white trunks very white against the color of their bodies. Nicole saw Dick peer about for the children among the confused shapes and shadows of many umbrellas, and as his mind temporarily left her, ceasing to grip her, she looked at him with detachment, and decided that he was seeking his children, not protectively but for protection. Probably it was the beach he feared, like a deposed ruler secretly visiting an old court. She had come to hate his world with its delicate jokes and politenesses, forgetting that for many years it was the only world open to her. Let him look at it--his beach, perverted now to the tastes of the tasteless; he could search it for a day and find no stone of the Chinese Wall he had once erected around it, no footprint of an old friend.

For a moment Nicole was sorry it was so; remembering the glass he had raked out of the old trash heap, remembering the sailor trunks and sweaters they had bought in a Nice back street--garments that afterward ran through a vogue in silk among the Paris couturiers, remembering the simple little French girls climbing on the breakwaters crying “Dites donc! Dites donc!” like birds, and the ritual of the morning time, the quiet restful extraversion toward sea and sun--many inventions of his, buried deeper than the sand under the span of so few years. . . .

Now the swimming place was a “club,” though, like the international society it represented, it would be hard to say who was not admitted.

Nicole hardened again as Dick knelt on the straw mat and looked about for Rosemary. Her eyes followed his, searching among the new paraphernalia, the trapezes over the water, the swinging rings, the portable bathhouses, the floating towers, the searchlights from last night’s fêtes, the modernistic buffet, white with a hackneyed motif of endless handlebars.

The water was almost the last place he looked for Rosemary, because few people swam any more in that blue paradise, children and one exhibitionistic valet who punctuated the morning with spectacular dives from a fifty-foot rock--most of Gausse’s guests stripped the concealing pajamas from their flabbiness only for a short hangover dip at one o’clock.

“There she is,” Nicole remarked.

She watched Dick’s eyes following Rosemary’s track from raft to raft; but the sigh that rocked out of her bosom was something left over from five years ago.

“Let’s swim out and speak to Rosemary,” he suggested.

“You go.”

“We’ll both go.” She struggled a moment against his pronouncement, but eventually they swam out together, tracing Rosemary by the school of little fish who followed her, taking their dazzle from her, the shining spoon of a trout hook.

Nicole stayed in the water while Dick hoisted himself up beside Rosemary, and the two sat dripping and talking, exactly as if they had never loved or touched each other. Rosemary was beautiful--her youth was a shock to Nicole, who rejoiced, however, that the young girl was less slender by a hairline than herself. Nicole swam around in little rings, listening to Rosemary who was acting amusement, joy, and expectation--more confident than she had been five years ago.

“I miss Mother so, but she’s meeting me in Paris, Monday.”

“Five years ago you came here,” said Dick. “And what a funny little thing you were, in one of those hotel peignoirs!”

“How you remember things! You always did--and always the nice things.”

Nicole saw the old game of flattery beginning again and she dove under water, coming up again to hear:

“I’m going to pretend it’s five years ago and I’m a girl of eighteen again. You could always make me feel some you know, kind of, you know, kind of happy way--you and Nicole. I feel as if you’re still on the beach there, under one of those umbrellas--the nicest people I’d ever known, maybe ever will.”

Swimming away, Nicole saw that the cloud of Dick’s heart-sickness had lifted a little as he began to play with Rosemary, bringing out his old expertness with people, a tarnished object of art; she guessed that with a drink or so he would have done his stunts on the swinging rings for her, fumbling through stunts he had once done with ease. She noticed that this summer, for the first time, he avoided high diving.

Later, as she dodged her way from raft to raft, Dick overtook her.

“Some of Rosemary’s friends have a speed boat, the one out there. Do you want to aquaplane? I think it would be amusing.”

Remembering that once he could stand on his hands on a chair at the end of a board, she indulged him as she might have indulged Lanier. Last summer on the Zugersee they had played at that pleasant water game, and Dick had lifted a two-hundred-pound man from the board onto his shoulders and stood up. But women marry all their husbands’ talents and naturally, afterwards, are not so impressed with them as they may keep up the pretense of being. Nicole had not even pretended to be impressed, though she had said “Yes” to him, and “Yes, I thought so too.”

She knew, though, that he was somewhat tired, that it was only the closeness of Rosemary’s exciting youth that prompted the impending effort--she had seen him draw the same inspiration from the new bodies of her children and she wondered coldly if he would make a spectacle of himself. The Divers were older than the others in the boat--the young people were polite, deferential, but Nicole felt an undercurrent of “Who are these Numbers anyhow?” and she missed Dick’s easy talent of taking control of situations and making them all right--he had concentrated on what he was going to try to do.

The motor throttled down two hundred yards from shore and one of the young men dove flat over the edge. He swam at the aimless twisting board, steadied it, climbed slowly to his knees on it--then got on his feet as the boat accelerated. Leaning back he swung his light vehicle ponderously from side to side in slow, breathless arcs that rode the trailing side-swell at the end of each swing. In the direct wake of the boat he let go his rope, balanced for a moment, then back-flipped into the water, disappearing like a statue of glory, and reappearing as an insignificant head while the boat made the circle back to him.

Nicole refused her turn; then Rosemary rode the board neatly and conservatively, with facetious cheers from her admirers. Three of them scrambled egotistically for the honor of pulling her into the boat, managing, among them, to bruise her knee and hip against the side.

“Now you. Doctor,” said the Mexican at the wheel.

Dick and the last young man dove over the side and swam to the board. Dick was going to try his lifting trick and Nicole began to watch with smiling scorn. This physical showing-off for Rosemary irritated her most of all.

When the men had ridden long enough to find their balance, Dick knelt, and putting the back of his neck in the other man’s crotch, found the rope through his legs, and slowly began to rise.

The people in the boat, watching closely, saw that he was having difficulties. He was on one knee; the trick was to straighten all the way up in the same motion with which he left his kneeling position. He rested for a moment, then his face contracted as he put his heart into the strain, and lifted.

The board was narrow, the man, though weighing less than a hundred and fifty, was awkward with his weight and grabbed clumsily at Dick’s head. When, with a last wrenching effort of his back, Dick stood upright, the board slid sidewise and the pair toppled into the sea.

In the boat Rosemary exclaimed: “Wonderful! They almost had it.”

But as they came back to the swimmers Nicole watched for a sight of Dick’s face. It was full of annoyance as she expected, because he had done the thing with ease only two years ago.

The second time he was more careful. He rose a little testing the balance of his burden, settled down again on his knee; then, grunting “Alley oop!” began to rise--but before he could really straighten out, his legs suddenly buckled and he shoved the board away with his feet to avoid being struck as they fell off.

This time when the Baby Gar came back it was apparent to all the passengers that he was angry.

“Do you mind if I try that once more?” he called, treading water. “We almost had it then.”

“Sure. Go ahead.”

To Nicole he looked white-around-the-gills, and she cautioned him:

“Don’t you think that’s enough for now?”

He didn’t answer. The first partner had had plenty and was hauled over the side, the Mexican driving the motor boat obligingly took his place.

He was heavier than the first man. As the boat gathered motion, Dick rested for a moment, belly-down on the board. Then he got beneath the man and took the rope, and his muscles flexed as he tried to rise.

He could not rise. Nicole saw him shift his position and strain upward again but at the instant when the weight of his partner was full upon his shoulders he became immovable. He tried again--lifting an inch, two inches--Nicole felt the sweat glands of her forehead open as she strained with him--then he was simply holding his ground, then he collapsed back down on his knees with a smack, and they went over, Dick’s head barely missing a kick of the board.

“Hurry back!” Nicole called to the driver; even as she spoke she saw him slide under water and she gave a little cry; but he came up again and turned on his back, and “Château” swam near to help. It seemed forever till the boat reached them but when they came alongside at last and Nicole saw Dick floating exhausted and expressionless, alone with the water and the sky, her panic changed suddenly to contempt.

“We’ll help you up, Doctor. . . . Get his foot . . . all right . . . now altogether. . . .”

Dick sat panting and looking at nothing.

“I knew you shouldn’t have tried it,” Nicole could not help saying.

“He’d tired himself the first two times,” said the Mexican.

“It was a foolish thing,” Nicole insisted. Rosemary tactfully said nothing.

After a minute Dick got his breath, panting, “I couldn’t have lifted a paper doll that time.”

An explosive little laugh relieved the tension caused by his failure. They were all attentive to Dick as he disembarked at the dock. But Nicole was annoyed--everything he did annoyed her now.

She sat with Rosemary under an umbrella while Dick went to the buffet for a drink--he returned presently with some sherry for them.

“The first drink I ever had was with you,” Rosemary said, and with a spurt of enthusiasm she added, “Oh, I’m so glad to see you and know you’re all right. I was worried--” Her sentence broke as she changed direction “that maybe you wouldn’t be.”

“Did you hear I’d gone into a process of deterioration?”

“Oh, no. I simply--just heard you’d changed. And I’m glad to see with my own eyes it isn’t true.”

“It is true,” Dick answered, sitting down with them. “The change came a long way back--but at first it didn’t show. The manner remains intact for some time after the morale cracks.”

“Do you practise on the Riviera?” Rosemary demanded hastily.

“It’d be a good ground to find likely specimens.” He nodded here and there at the people milling about in the golden sand. “Great candidates. Notice our old friend, Mrs. Abrams, playing duchess to Mary North’s queen? Don’t get jealous about it--think of Mrs. Abram’s long climb up the back stairs of the Ritz on her hands and knees and all the carpet dust she had to inhale.”

Rosemary interrupted him. “But is that really Mary North?” She was regarding a woman sauntering in their direction followed by a small group who behaved as if they were accustomed to being looked at. When they were ten feet away, Mary’s glance flickered fractionally over the Divers, one of those unfortunate glances that indicate to the glanced-upon that they have been observed but are to be overlooked, the sort of glance that neither the Divers nor Rosemary Hoyt had ever permitted themselves to throw at any one in their lives. Dick was amused when Mary perceived Rosemary, changed her plans and came over. She spoke to Nicole with pleasant heartiness, nodded unsmilingly to Dick as if he were somewhat contagious--whereupon he bowed in ironic respect--as she greeted Rosemary.

“I heard you were here. For how long?”

“Until to-morrow,” Rosemary answered.

She, too, saw how Mary had walked through the Divers to talk to her, and a sense of obligation kept her unenthusiastic. No, she could not dine to-night.

Mary turned to Nicole, her manner indicating affection blended with pity.

“How are the children?” she asked.

They came up at the moment, and Nicole gave ear to a request that she overrule the governess on a swimming point.

“No,” Dick answered for her. “What Mademoiselle says must go.”

Agreeing that one must support delegated authority, Nicole refused their request, whereupon Mary--who in the manner of an Anita Loos’ heroine had dealings only with Faits Accomplis, who indeed could not have house-broken a French poodle puppy--regarded Dick as though he were guilty of a most flagrant bullying. Dick, chafed by the tiresome performance, inquired with mock solicitude:

“How are your children--and their aunts?”

Mary did not answer; she left them, first draping a sympathetic hand over Lanier’s reluctant head. After she had gone Dick said: “When I think of the time I spent working over her.”

“I like her,” said Nicole.

Dick’s bitterness had surprised Rosemary, who had thought of him as all-forgiving, all-comprehending. Suddenly she recalled what it was she had heard about him. In conversation with some State Department people on the boat,--Europeanized Americans who had reached a position where they could scarcely have been said to belong to any nation at all, at least not to any great power though perhaps to a Balkan-like state composed of similar citizens--the name of the ubiquitously renowned Baby Warren had occurred and it was remarked that Baby’s younger sister had thrown herself away on a dissipated doctor. “He’s not received anywhere any more,” the woman said.

The phrase disturbed Rosemary, though she could not place the Divers as living in any relation to society where such a fact, if fact it was, could have any meaning, yet the hint of a hostile and organized public opinion rang in her ears. “He’s not received anywhere any more.” She pictured Dick climbing the steps of a mansion, presenting cards and being told by a butler: “We’re not receiving you any more”; then proceeding down an avenue only to be told the same thing by the countless other butlers of countless Ambassadors, Ministers, Chargés d’Affaires. . . .

Nicole wondered how she could get away. She guessed that Dick, stung into alertness, would grow charming and would make Rosemary respond to him. Sure enough, in a moment his voice managed to qualify everything unpleasant he had said:

“Mary’s all right--she’s done very well. But it’s hard to go on liking people who don’t like you.”

Rosemary, falling into line, swayed toward Dick and crooned:

“Oh, you’re so nice. I can’t imagine anybody not forgiving you anything, no matter what you did to them.” Then feeling that her exuberance had transgressed on Nicole’s rights, she looked at the sand exactly between them: “I wanted to ask you both what you thought of my latest pictures--if you saw them.”

Nicole said nothing, having seen one of them and thought little about it.

“It’ll take a few minutes to tell you,” Dick said. “Let’s suppose that Nicole says to you that Lanier is ill. What do you do in life? What does anyone do? They act--face, voice, words--the face shows sorrow, the voice shows shock, the words show sympathy.”

“Yes--I understand.”

“But in the theatre, No. In the theatre all the best comediennes have built up their reputations by burlesquing the correct emotional responses--fear and love and sympathy.”

“I see.” Yet she did not quite see.

Losing the thread of it, Nicole’s impatience increased as Dick continued:

“The danger to an actress is in responding. Again, let’s suppose that somebody told you, ‘Your lover is dead.’ In life you’d probably go to pieces. But on the stage you’re trying to entertain--the audience can do the ‘responding’ for themselves. First the actress has lines to follow, then she has to get the audience’s attention back on herself, away from the murdered Chinese or whatever the thing is. So she must do something unexpected. If the audience thinks the character is hard she goes soft on them--if they think she’s soft she goes hard. You go all out of character--you understand?”

“I don’t quite,” admitted Rosemary. “How do you mean out of character?”

“You do the unexpected thing until you’ve manoeuvred the audience back from the objective fact to yourself. Then you slide into character again.”

Nicole could stand no more. She stood up sharply, making no attempt to conceal her impatience. Rosemary, who had been for a few minutes half-conscious of this, turned in a conciliatory way to Topsy.

“Would you like to be an actress when you grow up? I think you’d make a fine actress.”

Nicole stared at her deliberately and in her grandfather’s voice said, slow and distinct:

“It’s absolutely out to put such ideas in the heads of other people’s children. Remember, we may have quite different plans for them.” She turned sharply to Dick. “I’m going to take the car home. I’ll send Michelle for you and the children.”

“You haven’t driven for months,” he protested.

“I haven’t forgotten how.”

Without a glance at Rosemary whose face was “responding” violently, Nicole left the umbrella.

In the bathhouse, she changed to pajamas, her expression still hard as a plaque. But as she turned into the road of arched pines and the atmosphere changed,--with a squirrel’s flight on a branch, a wind nudging at the leaves, a cock splitting distant air, with a creep of sunlight transpiring through the immobility, then the voices of the beach receded--Nicole relaxed and felt new and happy; her thoughts were clear as good bells--she had a sense of being cured and in a new way. Her ego began blooming like a great rich rose as she scrambled back along the labyrinths in which she had wandered for years. She hated the beach, resented the places where she had played planet to Dick’s sun.

“Why, I’m almost complete,” she thought. “I’m practically standing alone, without him.” And like a happy child, wanting the completion as soon as possible, and knowing vaguely that Dick had planned for her to have it, she lay on her bed as soon as she got home and wrote Tommy Barban in Nice a short provocative letter.

But that was for the daytime--toward evening with the inevitable diminution of nervous energy, her spirits flagged, and the arrows flew a little in the twilight. She was afraid of what was in Dick’s mind; again she felt that a plan underlay his current actions and she was afraid of his plans--they worked well and they had an all-inclusive logic about them which Nicole was not able to command. She had somehow given over the thinking to him, and in his absences her every action seemed automatically governed by what he would like, so that now she felt inadequate to match her intentions against his. Yet think she must; she knew at last the number on the dreadful door of fantasy, the threshold to the escape that was no escape; she knew that for her the greatest sin now and in the future was to delude herself. It had been a long lesson but she had learned it. Either you think--or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you.

They had a tranquil supper with Dick drinking much beer and being cheerful with the children in the dusky room. Afterward he played some Schubert songs and some new jazz from America that Nicole hummed in her harsh, sweet contralto over his shoulder.

“Thank y’ father-r

Thank y’ mother-r

Thanks for meetingup with one another--”

“I don’t like that one,” Dick said, starting to turn the page.

“Oh, play it!” she exclaimed. “Am I going through the rest of life flinching at the word ‘father’?”

“--Thank the horse that pulled the buggy that night!

Thank you both for being justabit tight--”

Later they sat with the children on the Moorish roof and watched the fireworks of two casinos, far apart, far down on the shore. It was lonely and sad to be so empty-hearted toward each other.

Next morning, back from shopping in Cannes, Nicole found a note saying that Dick had taken the small car and gone up into Provence for a few days by himself. Even as she read it the phone rang--it was Tommy Barban from Monte Carlo, saying that he had received her letter and was driving over. She felt her lips’ warmth in the receiver as she welcomed his coming.

VIII

She bathed and anointed herself and covered her body with a layer of powder, while her toes crunched another pile on a bath towel. She looked microscopically at the lines of her flanks, wondering how soon the fine, slim edifice would begin to sink squat and earthward. In about six years, but now I’ll do--in fact I’ll do as well as any one I know.

She was not exaggerating. The only physical disparity between Nicole at present and the Nicole of five years before was simply that she was no longer a young girl. But she was enough ridden by the current youth worship, the moving pictures with their myriad faces of girl-children, blandly represented as carrying on the work and wisdom of the world, to feel a jealousy of youth.

She put on the first ankle-length day dress that she had owned for many years, and crossed herself reverently with Chanel Sixteen. When Tommy drove up at one o’clock she had made her person into the trimmest of gardens.

How good to have things like this, to be worshipped again, to pretend to have a mystery! She had lost two of the great arrogant years in the life of a pretty girl--now she felt like making up for them; she greeted Tommy as if he were one of many men at her feet, walking ahead of him instead of beside him as they crossed the garden toward the market umbrella. Attractive women of nineteen and of twenty-nine are alike in their breezy confidence; on the contrary, the exigent womb of the twenties does not pull the outside world centripetally around itself. The former are ages of insolence, comparable the one to a young cadet, the other to a fighter strutting after combat.

But whereas a girl of nineteen draws her confidence from a surfeit of attention, a woman of twenty-nine is nourished on subtler stuff. Desirous, she chooses her apéritifs wisely, or, content, she enjoys the caviare of potential power. Happily she does not seem, in either case, to anticipate the subsequent years when her insight will often be blurred by panic, by the fear of stopping or the fear of going on. But on the landings of nineteen or twenty-nine she is pretty sure that there are no bears in the hall.

Nicole did not want any vague spiritual romance--she wanted an “affair”; she wanted a change. She realized, thinking with Dick’s thoughts, that from a superficial view it was a vulgar business to enter, without emotion, into an indulgence that menaced all of them. On the other hand, she blamed Dick for the immediate situation, and honestly thought that such an experiment might have a therapeutic value. All summer she had been stimulated by watching people do exactly what they were tempted to do and pay no penalty for it--moreover, in spite of her intention of no longer lying to herself, she preferred to consider that she was merely feeling her way and that at any moment she could withdraw. . . .

In the light shade Tommy caught her up in his white-duck arms and pulled her around to him, looking at her eyes.

“Don’t move,” he said. “I’m going to look at you a great deal from now on.”

There was some scent on his hair, a faint aura of soap from his white clothes. Her lips were tight, not smiling and they both simply looked for a moment.

“Do you like what you see?” she murmured.

“Parle français.”

“Very well,” and she asked again in French. “Do you like what you see?”

He pulled her closer.

“I like whatever I see about you.” He hesitated. “I thought I knew your face but it seems there are some things I didn’t know about it. When did you begin to have white crook’s eyes?”

She broke away, shocked and indignant, and cried in English:

“Is that why you wanted to talk French?” Her voice quieted as the butler came with sherry. “So you could be offensive more accurately?”

She parked her small seat violently on the cloth-of-silver chair cushion.

“I have no mirror here,” she said, again in French, but decisively, “but if my eyes have changed it’s because I’m well again. And being well perhaps I’ve gone back to my true self--I suppose my grandfather was a crook and I’m a crook by heritage, so there we are. Does that satisfy your logical mind?”

He scarcely seemed to know what she was talking about.

“Where’s Dick--is he lunching with us?”

Seeing that his remark had meant comparatively little to him she suddenly laughed away its effect.

“Dick’s on a tour,” she said. “Rosemary Hoyt turned up, and either they’re together or she upset him so much that he wants to go away and dream about her.”

“You know, you’re a little complicated after all.”

“Oh no,” she assured him hastily. “No, I’m not really--I’m just a--I’m just a whole lot of different simple people.”

Marius brought out melon and an ice pail, and Nicole, thinking irresistibly about her crook’s eyes did not answer; he gave one an entire nut to crack, this man, instead of giving it in fragments to pick at for meat.

“Why didn’t they leave you in your natural state?” Tommy demanded presently. “You are the most dramatic person I have known.”

She had no answer.

“All this taming of women!” he scoffed.

“In any society there are certain--” She felt Dick’s ghost prompting at her elbow but she subsided at Tommy’s overtone:

“I’ve brutalized many men into shape but I wouldn’t take a chance on half the number of women. Especially this ‘kind’ bullying--what good does it do anybody?--you or him or anybody?”

Her heart leaped and then sank faintly with a sense of what she owed Dick.

“I suppose I’ve got--”

“You’ve got too much money,” he said impatiently. “That’s the crux of the matter. Dick can’t beat that.”

She considered while the melons were removed.

“What do you think I ought to do?”

For the first time in ten years she was under the sway of a personality other than her husband’s. Everything Tommy said to her became part of her forever.

They drank the bottle of wine while a faint wind rocked the pine needles and the sensuous heat of early afternoon made blinding freckles on the checkered luncheon cloth. Tommy came over behind her and laid his arms along hers, clasping her hands. Their cheeks touched and then their lips and she gasped half with passion for him, half with the sudden surprise of its force. . . .

“Can’t you send the governess and the children away for the afternoon?”

“They have a piano lesson. Anyhow I don’t want to stay here.”

“Kiss me again.”

A little later, riding toward Nice, she thought: So I have white crook’s eyes, have I? Very well then, better a sane crook than a mad puritan.

His assertion seemed to absolve her from all blame or responsibility and she had a thrill of delight in thinking of herself in a new way. New vistas appeared ahead, peopled with the faces of many men, none of whom she need obey or even love. She drew in her breath, hunched her shoulders with a wriggle and turned to Tommy.

“Have we got to go all the way to your hotel at Monte Carlo?”

He brought the car to a stop with a squeak of tires.

“No!” he answered. “And, my God, I have never been so happy as I am this minute.”

They had passed through Nice following the blue coast and begun to mount to the middling-high Corniche. Now Tommy turned sharply down to the shore, ran out a blunt peninsula, and stopped in the rear of a small shore hotel.

Its tangibility frightened Nicole for a moment. At the desk an American was arguing interminably with the clerk about the rate of exchange. She hovered, outwardly tranquil but inwardly miserable, as Tommy filled out the police blanks--his real, hers false. Their room was a Mediterranean room, almost ascetic, almost clean, darkened to the glare of the sea. Simplest of pleasures--simplest of places. Tommy ordered two cognacs, and when the door closed behind the waiter, he sat in the only chair, dark, scarred and handsome, his eyebrows arched and upcurling, a fighting Puck, an earnest Satan.

Before they had finished the brandy they suddenly moved together and met standing up; then they were sitting on the bed and he kissed her hardy knees. Struggling a little still, like a decapitated animal she forgot about Dick and her new white eyes, forgot Tommy himself and sank deeper and deeper into the minutes and the moment.

. . . When he got up to open a shutter and find out what caused the increasing clamor below their windows, his figure was darker and stronger than Dick’s, with high lights along the rope-twists of muscle. Momentarily he had forgotten her too--almost in the second of his flesh breaking from hers she had a foretaste that things were going to be different than she had expected. She felt the nameless fear which precedes all emotions, joyous or sorrowful, inevitable as a hum of thunder precedes a storm.

Tommy peered cautiously from the balcony and reported.

“All I can see is two women on the balcony below this. They’re talking about weather and tipping back and forth in American rocking-chairs.”

“Making all that noise?”

“The noise is coming from somewhere below them. Listen.”

“Oh, way down South in the land of cotton

Hotels bum and business rotten

Look away--”

“It’s Americans.”

Nicole flung her arms wide on the bed and stared at the ceiling; the powder had dampened on her to make a milky surface. She liked the bareness of the room, the sound of the single fly navigating overhead. Tommy brought the chair over to the bed and swept the clothes off it to sit down; she liked the economy of the weightless dress and espadrilles that mingled with his ducks upon the floor.

He inspected the oblong white torso joined abruptly to the brown limbs and head, and said, laughing gravely:

“You are all new like a baby.”

“With white eyes.”

“I’ll take care of that.”

“It’s very hard taking care of white eyes--especially the ones made in Chicago.”

“I know all the old Languedoc peasant remedies.”

“Kiss me, on the lips, Tommy.”

“That’s so American,” he said, kissing her nevertheless. “When I was in America last there were girls who would tear you apart with their lips, tear themselves too, until their faces were scarlet with the blood around the lips all brought out in a patch--but nothing further.”

Nicole leaned up on one elbow.

“I like this room,” she said.

“I find it somewhat meagre. Darling, I’m glad you wouldn’t wait until we got to Monte Carlo.”

“Why only meagre? Why, this is a wonderful room, Tommy--like the bare tables in so many Cézannes and Picassos.”

“I don’t know.” He did not try to understand her. “There’s that noise again. My God, has there been a murder?”

He went to the window and reported once more:

“It seems to be two American sailors fighting and a lot more cheering them on. They are from your battleship off shore.” He wrapped a towel around himself and went farther out on the balcony. “They have poules with them. I have heard about this now--the women follow them from place to place wherever the ship goes. But what women! One would think with their pay they could find better women! Why the women who followed Korniloff! Why we never looked at anything less than a ballerina!”

Nicole was glad he had known so many women, so that the word itself meant nothing to him; she would be able to hold him so long as the person in her transcended the universals of her body.

“Hit him where it hurts!”

“Yah-h-h-h!”

“Hey, what I tell you get inside that right!”

“Come on, Dulschmit, you son!”

“Yaa-Yaa!”

“YA-YEH-YAH!”

Tommy turned away.

“This place seems to have outlived its usefulness, you agree?”

She agreed, but they clung together for a moment before dressing, and then for a while longer it seemed as good enough a palace as any. . . .

Dressing at last Tommy exclaimed:

“My God, those two women in the rocking-chairs on the balcony below us haven’t moved. They’re trying to talk this matter out of existence. They’re here on an economical holiday, and all the American navy and all the whores in Europe couldn’t spoil it.”

He came over gently and surrounded her, pulling the shoulder strap of her slip into place with his teeth; then a sound split the air outside: Cr-ACK--BOOM-M-m-m! It was the battleship sounding a recall.

Now, down below their window, it was pandemonium indeed--for the boat was moving to shores as yet unannounced. Waiters called accounts and demanded settlements in impassioned voices, there were oaths and denials; the tossing of bills too large and change too small; passouts were assisted to the boats, and the voices of the naval police chopped with quick commands through all voices. There were cries, tears, shrieks, promises as the first launch shoved off and the women crowded forward on the wharf, screaming and waving.

Tommy saw a girl rush out upon the balcony below waving a napkin, and before he could see whether or not the rocking Englishwomen gave in at last and acknowledged her presence, there was a knock at their own door. Outside, excited female voices made them agree to unlock it, disclosing two girls, young, thin and barbaric, unfound rather than lost, in the hall. One of them wept chokingly.

“Kwee wave off your porch?” implored the other in passionate American. “Kwee please? Wave at the boy friends? Kwee, please. The other rooms is all locked.”

“With pleasure,” Tommy said.

The girls rushed out on the balcony and presently their voices struck a loud treble over the din.

“‘By, Charlie! Charlie, look up!”

“Send a wire gen’al alivery Nice!”

“Charlie! He don’t see me.”

One of the girls hoisted her skirt suddenly, pulled and ripped at her pink step-ins and tore them to a sizable flag; then, screaming “Ben! Ben!” she waved it wildly. As Tommy and Nicole left the room it still fluttered against the blue sky. Oh, say can you see the tender color of remembered flesh?--while at the stern of the battleship arose in rivalry the Star-Spangled Banner.

They dined at the new Beach Casino at Monte Carlo . . . much later they swam in Beaulieu in a roofless cavern of white moonlight formed by a circlet of pale boulders about a cup of phosphorescent water, facing Monaco and the blur of Mentone. She liked his bringing her there to the eastward vision and the novel tricks of wind and water; it was all as new as they were to each other. Symbolically she lay across his saddle-bow as surely as if he had wolfed her away from Damascus and they had come out upon the Mongolian plain. Moment by moment all that Dick had taught her fell away and she was ever nearer to what she had been in the beginning, prototype of that obscure yielding up of swords that was going on in the world about her. Tangled with love in the moonlight she welcomed the anarchy of her lover.

They awoke together finding the moon gone down and the air cool. She struggled up demanding the time and Tommy called it roughly at three.

“I’ve got to go home then.”

“I thought we’d sleep in Monte Carlo.”

“No. There’s a governess and the children. I’ve got to roll in before daylight.”

“As you like.”

They dipped for a second, and when he saw her shivering he rubbed her briskly with a towel. As they got into the car with their heads still damp, their skins fresh and glowing, they were loath to start back. It was very bright where they were and as Tommy kissed her she felt him losing himself in the whiteness of her cheeks and her white teeth and her cool brow and the hand that touched his face. Still attuned to Dick, she waited for interpretation or qualification; but none was forthcoming. Reassured sleepily and happily that none would be, she sank low in the seat and drowsed until the sound of the motor changed and she felt them climbing toward Villa Diana. At the gate she kissed him an almost automatic good-by. The sound of her feet on the walk was changed, the night noises of the garden were suddenly in the past but she was glad, none the less, to be back. The day had progressed at a staccato rate, and in spite of its satisfactions she was not habituated to such strain.

IX

At four o’clock next afternoon a station taxi stopped at the gate and Dick got out. Suddenly off balance, Nicole ran from the terrace to meet him, breathless with her effort at self-control.

“Where’s the car?” she asked.

“I left it in Arles. I didn’t feel like driving any more.”

“I thought from your note that you’d be several days.”

“I ran into a mistral and some rain.”

“Did you have fun?”

“Just as much fun as anybody has running away from things. I drove Rosemary as far as Avignon and put her on her train there.” They walked toward the terrace together, where he deposited his bag. “I didn’t tell you in the note because I thought you’d imagine a lot of things.”

“That was very considerate of you.” Nicole felt surer of herself now.

“I wanted to find out if she had anything to offer--the only way was to see her alone.”

“Did she have--anything to offer?”

“Rosemary didn’t grow up,” he answered. “It’s probably better that way. What have you been doing?”

She felt her face quiver like a rabbit’s.

“I went dancing last night--with Tommy Barban. We went--”

He winced, interrupting her.

“Don’t tell me about it. It doesn’t matter what you do, only I don’t want to know anything definitely.”

“There isn’t anything to know.”

“All right, all right.” Then as if he had been away a week: “How are the children?”

The phone rang in the house.

“If it’s for me I’m not home,” said Dick turning away quickly. “I’ve got some things to do over in the work-room.”

Nicole waited till he was out of sight behind the well; then she went into the house and took up the phone.

“Nicole, comment vas-tu?”

“Dick’s home.”

He groaned.

“Meet me here in Cannes,” he suggested. “I’ve got to talk to you.”

“I can’t.”

“Tell me you love me.” Without speaking she nodded at the receiver; he repeated, “Tell me you love me.”

“Oh, I do,” she assured him. “But there’s nothing to be done right now.”

“Of course there is,” he said impatiently. “Dick sees it’s over between you two--it’s obvious he has quit. What does he expect you to do?”

“I don’t know. I’ll have to--” She stopped herself from saying “--to wait until I can ask Dick,” and instead finished with: “I’ll write and I’ll phone you to-morrow.”

She wandered about the house rather contentedly, resting on her achievement. She was a mischief, and that was a satisfaction; no longer was she a huntress of corralled game. Yesterday came back to her now in innumerable detail--detail that began to overlay her memory of similar moments when her love for Dick was fresh and intact. She began to slight that love, so that it seemed to have been tinged with sentimental habit from the first. With the opportunistic memory of women she scarcely recalled how she had felt when she and Dick had possessed each other in secret places around the corners of the world, during the month before they were married. Just so had she lied to Tommy last night, swearing to him that never before had she so entirely, so completely, so utterly. . . .

. . . then remorse for this moment of betrayal, which so cavalierly belittled a decade of her life, turned her walk toward Dick’s sanctuary.

Approaching noiselessly she saw him behind his cottage, sitting in a steamer chair by the cliff wall, and for a moment she regarded him silently. He was thinking, he was living a world completely his own and in the small motions of his face, the brow raised or lowered, the eyes narrowed or widened, the lips set and reset, the play of his hands, she saw him progress from phase to phase of his own story spinning out inside him, his own, not hers. Once he clenched his fists and leaned forward, once it brought into his face an expression of torment and despair--when this passed its stamp lingered in his eyes. For almost the first time in her life she was sorry for him--it is hard for those who have once been mentally afflicted to be sorry for those who are well, and though Nicole often paid lip service to the fact that he had led her back to the world she had forfeited, she had thought of him really as an inexhaustible energy, incapable of fatigue--she forgot the troubles she caused him at the moment when she forgot the troubles of her own that had prompted her. That he no longer controlled her--did he know that? Had he willed it all?--she felt as sorry for him as she had sometimes felt for Abe North and his ignoble destiny, sorry as for the helplessness of infants and the old.

She went up putting her arm around his shoulder and touching their heads together said:

“Don’t be sad.”

He looked at her coldly.

“Don’t touch me!” he said.

Confused she moved a few feet away.

“Excuse me,” he continued abstractedly. “I was just thinking what I thought of you--”

“Why not add the new classification to your book?”

“I have thought of it--’Furthermore and beyond the psychoses and the neuroses--’“

“I didn’t come over here to be disagreeable.”

“Then why did you come, Nicole? I can’t do anything for you any more. I’m trying to save myself.”

“From my contamination?”

“Profession throws me in contact with questionable company sometimes.”

She wept with anger at the abuse.

“You’re a coward! You’ve made a failure of your life, and you want to blame it on me.”

While he did not answer she began to feel the old hypnotism of his intelligence, sometimes exercised without power but always with substrata of truth under truth which she could not break or even crack. Again she struggled with it, fighting him with her small, fine eyes, with the plush arrogance of a top dog, with her nascent transference to another man, with the accumulated resentment of years; she fought him with her money and her faith that her sister disliked him and was behind her now; with the thought of the new enemies he was making with his bitterness, with her quick guile against his wine-ing and dine-ing slowness, her health and beauty against his physical deterioration, her unscrupulousness against his moralities--for this inner battle she used even her weaknesses--fighting bravely and courageously with the old cans and crockery and bottles, empty receptacles of her expiated sins, outrages, mistakes. And suddenly, in the space of two minutes she achieved her victory and justified herself to herself without lie or subterfuge, cut the cord forever. Then she walked, weak in the legs, and sobbing coolly, toward the household that was hers at last.

Dick waited until she was out of sight. Then he leaned his head forward on the parapet. The case was finished. Doctor Diver was at liberty.

X

At two o’clock that night the phone woke Nicole and she heard Dick answer it from what they called the restless bed, in the next room.

“Oui, oui . . . mais à qui est-ce-que je parle? . . . Oui . . .” His voice woke up with surprise. “But can I speak to one of the ladies, Sir the Officer? They are both ladies of the very highest prominence, ladies of connections that might cause political complications of the most serious. . . . It is a fact, I swear to you. . . . Very well, you will see.”

He got up and, as he absorbed the situation, his self-knowledge assured him that he would undertake to deal with it--the old fatal pleasingness, the old forceful charm, swept back with its cry of “Use me!” He would have to go fix this thing that he didn’t care a damn about, because it had early become a habit to be loved, perhaps from the moment when he had realized that he was the last hope of a decaying clan. On an almost parallel occasion, back in Dohmler’s clinic on the Zürichsee, realizing this power, he had made his choice, chosen Ophelia, chosen the sweet poison and drunk it. Wanting above all to be brave and kind, he had wanted, even more than that, to be loved. So it had been. So it would ever be, he saw, simultaneously with the slow archaic tinkle from the phone box as he rang off.

There was a long pause. Nicole called, “What is it? Who is it?”

Dick had begun to dress even as he hung up the phone.

“It’s the poste de police in Antibes--they’re holding Mary North and that Sibley-Biers. It’s something serious--the agent wouldn’t tell me; he kept saying ‘pas de mortes--pas d’automobiles’ but he implied it was just about everything else.”

“Why on earth did they call on you? It sounds very peculiar to me.”

“They’ve got to get out on bail to save their faces; and only some property owner in the Alpes Maritimes can give bail.”

“They had their nerve.”

“I don’t mind. However I’ll pick up Gausse at the hotel--”

Nicole stayed awake after he had departed wondering what offense they could have committed; then she slept. A little after three when Dick came in she sat up stark awake saying, “What?” as if to a character in her dream.

“It was an extraordinary story--” Dick said. He sat on the foot of her bed, telling her how he had roused old Gausse from an Alsatian coma, told him to clean out his cash drawer, and driven with him to the police station.

“I don’t like to do something for that Anglaise,” Gausse grumbled.

Mary North and Lady Caroline, dressed in the costume of French sailors, lounged on a bench outside the two dingy cells. The latter had the outraged air of a Briton who momentarily expected the Mediterranean fleet to steam up to her assistance. Mary Minghetti was in a condition of panic and collapse--she literally flung herself at Dick’s stomach as though that were the point of greatest association, imploring him to do something. Meanwhile the chief of police explained the matter to Gausse who listened to each word with reluctance, divided between being properly appreciative of the officer’s narrative gift and showing that, as the perfect servant, the story had no shocking effect on him. “It was merely a lark,” said Lady Caroline with scorn. “We were pretending to be sailors on leave, and we picked up two silly girls. They got the wind up and made a rotten scene in a lodging house.”

Dick nodded gravely, looking at the stone floor, like a priest in the confessional--he was torn between a tendency to ironic laughter and another tendency to order fifty stripes of the cat and a fortnight of bread and water. The lack, in Lady Caroline’s face, of any sense of evil, except the evil wrought by cowardly Provençal girls and stupid police, confounded him; yet he had long concluded that certain classes of English people lived upon a concentrated essence of the anti-social that, in comparison, reduced the gorgings of New York to something like a child contracting indigestion from ice cream.

“I’ve got to get out before Hosain hears about this,” Mary pleaded. “Dick, you can always arrange things--you always could. Tell ‘em we’ll go right home, tell ‘em we’ll pay anything.”

“I shall not,” said Lady Caroline disdainfully. “Not a shilling. But I shall jolly well find out what the Consulate in Cannes has to say about this.”

“No, no!” insisted Mary. “We’ve got to get out to-night.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” said Dick, and added, “but money will certainly have to change hands.” Looking at them as though they were the innocents that he knew they were not, he shook his head: “Of all the crazy stunts!”

Lady Caroline smiled complacently.

“You’re an insanity doctor, aren’t you? You ought to be able to help us--and Gausse has got to!”

At this point Dick went aside with Gausse and talked over the old man’s findings. The affair was more serious than had been indicated--one of the girls whom they had picked up was of a respectable family. The family were furious, or pretended to be; a settlement would have to be made with them. The other one, a girl of the port, could be more easily dealt with. There were French statutes that would make conviction punishable by imprisonment or, at the very least, public expulsion from the country. In addition to the difficulties, there was a growing difference in tolerance between such townspeople as benefited by the foreign colony and the ones who were annoyed by the consequent rise of prices. Gausse, having summarized the situation, turned it over to Dick. Dick called the chief of police into conference.

“Now you know that the French government wants to encourage American touring--so much so that in Paris this summer there’s an order that Americans can’t be arrested except for the most serious offenses.”

“This is serious enough, my God.”

“But look now--you have their Cartes d’Identité?”

“They had none. They had nothing--two hundred francs and some rings. Not even shoe-laces that they could have hung themselves with!”

Relieved that there had been no Cartes d’Identité Dick continued.

“The Italian Countess is still an American citizen. She is the grand-daughter--” he told a string of lies slowly and portentously, “of John D. Rockefeller Mellon. You have heard of him?”

“Yes, oh heavens, yes. You mistake me for a nobody?”

“In addition she is the niece of Lord Henry Ford and so connected with the Renault and Citroën companies--” He thought he had better stop here. However the sincerity of his voice had begun to affect the officer, so he continued: “To arrest her is just as if you arrested a great royalty of England. It might mean--War!”

“But how about the Englishwoman?”

“I’m coming to that. She is affianced to the brother of the Prince of Wales--the Duke of Buckingham.”

“She will be an exquisite bride for him.”

“Now we are prepared to give--” Dick calculated quickly, “one thousand francs to each of the girls--and an additional thousand to the father of the ‘serious’ one. Also two thousand in addition, for you to distribute as you think best--” he shrugged his shoulders, “--among the men who made the arrest, the lodging-house keeper and so forth. I shall hand you the five thousand and expect you to do the negotiating immediately. Then they can be released on bail on some charge like disturbing the peace, and whatever fine there is will be paid before the magistrate tomorrow--by messenger.”

Before the officer spoke Dick saw by his expression that it would be all right. The man said hesitantly, “I have made no entry because they have no Cartes d’Identité. I must see--give me the money.”

An hour later Dick and M. Gausse dropped the women by the Majestic Hotel, where Lady Caroline’s chauffeur slept in her landaulet.

“Remember,” said Dick, “you owe Monsieur Gausse a hundred dollars a piece.”

“All right,” Mary agreed, “I’ll give him a check to-morrow--and something more.”

“Not I!” Startled, they all turned to Lady Caroline, who, now entirely recovered, was swollen with righteousness. “The whole thing was an outrage. By no means did I authorize you to give a hundred dollars to those people.”

Little Gausse stood beside the car, his eyes blazing suddenly.

“You won’t pay me?”

“Of course she will,” said Dick.

Suddenly the abuse that Gausse had once endured as a bus boy in London flamed up and he walked through the moonlight up to Lady Caroline.

He whipped a string of condemnatory words about her, and as she turned away with a frozen laugh, he took a step after her and swiftly planted his little foot in the most celebrated of targets. Lady Caroline, taken by surprise, flung up her hands like a person shot as her sailor-clad form sprawled forward on the sidewalk.

Dick’s voice cut across her raging: “Mary, you quiet her down! or you’ll both be in leg-irons in ten minutes!”

On the way back to the hotel old Gausse said not a word, until they passed the Juan-les-Pins Casino, still sobbing and coughing with jazz; then he sighed forth:

“I have never seen women like this sort of women. I have known many of the great courtesans of the world, and for them I have much respect often, but women like these women I have never seen before.”

XI

Dick and Nicole were accustomed to go together to the barber, and have haircuts and shampoos in adjoining rooms. From Dick’s side Nicole could hear the snip of shears, the count of changes, the Voilàs and Pardons. The day after his return they went down to be shorn and washed in the perfumed breeze of the fans.

In front of the Carleton Hotel, its windows as stubbornly blank to the summer as so many cellar doors, a car passed them and Tommy Barban was in it. Nicole’s momentary glimpse of his expression, taciturn and thoughtful and, in the second of seeing her, wide-eyed and alert, disturbed her. She wanted to be going where he was going. The hour with the hair-dresser seemed one of the wasteful intervals that composed her life, another little prison. The coiffeuse in her white uniform, faintly sweating lip-rouge and cologne reminded her of many nurses.

In the next room Dick dozed under an apron and a lather of soap. The mirror in front of Nicole reflected the passage between the men’s side and the women’s, and Nicole started up at the sight of Tommy entering and wheeling sharply into the men’s shop. She knew with a flush of joy that there was going to be some sort of showdown.

She heard fragments of its beginning.

“Hello, I want to see you.”

“. . . serious.”

“. . . serious.”

“. . . perfectly agreeable.”

In a minute Dick came into Nicole’s booth, his expression emerging annoyed from behind the towel of his hastily rinsed face.

“Your friend has worked himself up into a state. He wants to see us together, so I agreed to have it over with. Come along!”

“But my hair--it’s half cut.”

“Nevermind--come along!”

Resentfully she had the staring coiffeuse remove the towels.

Feeling messy and unadorned she followed Dick from the hotel. Outside Tommy bent over her hand.

“We’ll go to the Café des Alliées,” said Dick.

“Wherever we can be alone,” Tommy agreed.

Under the arching trees, central in summer, Dick asked: “Will you take anything, Nicole?”

“A citron pressé.”

“For me a demi,” said Tommy.

“The Blackenwite with siphon,” said Dick.

“Il n’y a plus de Blackenwite. Nous n’avons que le Johnny Walkair.”

“Ca va.”

“She’s--not--wired for sound

but on the quiet

you ought to try it--”

“Your wife does not love you,” said Tommy suddenly. “She loves me.”

The two men regarded each other with a curious impotence of expression. There can be little communication between men in that position, for their relation is indirect, and consists of how much each of them has possessed or will possess of the woman in question, so that their emotions pass through her divided self as through a bad telephone connection.

“Wait a minute,” Dick said. “Donnez moi du gin et du siphon.”

“Bien, Monsieur.”

“All right, go on, Tommy.”

“It’s very plain to me that your marriage to Nicole has run its course. She is through. I’ve waited five years for that to be so.”

“What does Nicole say?”

They both looked at her.

“I’ve gotten very fond of Tommy, Dick.”

He nodded.

“You don’t care for me any more,” she continued. “It’s all just habit. Things were never the same after Rosemary.”

Unattracted to this angle, Tommy broke in sharply with:

“You don’t understand Nicole. You treat her always like a patient because she was once sick.”

They were suddenly interrupted by an insistent American, of sinister aspect, vending copies of The Herald and of The Times fresh from New York.

“Got everything here, Buddies,” he announced. “Been here long?”

“Cessez cela! Allez Ouste!” Tommy cried and then to Dick, “Now no woman would stand such--”

“Buddies,” interrupted the American again. “You think I’m wasting my time--but lots of others don’t.” He brought a gray clipping from his purse--and Dick recognized it as he saw it. It cartooned millions of Americans pouring from liners with bags of gold. “You think I’m not going to get part of that? Well, I am. I’m just over from Nice for the Tour de France.”

As Tommy got him off with a fierce “allez-vous-en,” Dick identified him as the man who had once hailed him in the Rue de Saints Anges, five years before.

“When does the Tour de France get here?” he called after him.

“Any minute now, Buddy.”

He departed at last with a cheery wave and Tommy returned to Dick.

“Elle doit avoir plus avec moi qu’avec vous.”

“Speak English! What do you mean ‘doit avoir’?”

“‘Doit avoir?’ Would have more happiness with me.”

“You’d be new to each other. But Nicole and I have had much happiness together, Tommy.”

“L’amour de famille,” Tommy said, scoffing.

“If you and Nicole married won’t that be ‘l’amour de famille’?” The increasing commotion made him break off; presently it came to a serpentine head on the promenade and a group, presently a crowd, of people sprung from hidden siestas, lined the curbstone.

Boys sprinted past on bicycles, automobiles jammed with elaborate betasselled sportsmen slid up the street, high horns tooted to announce the approach of the race, and unsuspected cooks in undershirts appeared at restaurant doors as around a bend a procession came into sight. First was a lone cyclist in a red jersey, toiling intent and confident out of the westering sun, passing to the melody of a high chattering cheer. Then three together in a harlequinade of faded color, legs caked yellow with dust and sweat, faces expressionless, eyes heavy and endlessly tired.

Tommy faced Dick, saying: “I think Nicole wants a divorce--I suppose you’ll make no obstacles?”

A troupe of fifty more swarmed after the first bicycle racers, strung out over two hundred yards; a few were smiling and self-conscious, a few obviously exhausted, most of them indifferent and weary. A retinue of small boys passed, a few defiant stragglers, a light truck carried the dupes of accident and defeat. They were back at the table. Nicole wanted Dick to take the initiative, but he seemed content to sit with his face half-shaved matching her hair half-washed.

“Isn’t it true you’re not happy with me any more?” Nicole continued. “Without me you could get to your work again--you could work better if you didn’t worry about me.”

Tommy moved impatiently.

“That is so useless. Nicole and I love each other, that’s all there is to it.”

“Well, then,” said the Doctor, “since it’s all settled, suppose we go back to the barber shop.”

Tommy wanted a row: “There are several points--”

“Nicole and I will talk things over,” said Dick equitably. “Don’t worry--I agree in principal, and Nicole and I understand each other. There’s less chance of unpleasantness if we avoid a three-cornered discussion.”

Unwillingly acknowledging Dick’s logic, Tommy was moved by an irresistible racial tendency to chisel for an advantage.

“Let it be understood that from this moment,” he said, “I stand in the position of Nicole’s protector until details can be arranged. And I shall hold you strictly accountable for any abuse of the fact that you continue to inhabit the same house.”

“I never did go in for making love to dry loins,” said Dick.

He nodded, and walked off toward the hotel with Nicole’s whitest eyes following him.

“He was fair enough,” Tommy conceded. “Darling, will we be together to-night?”

“I suppose so.”

So it had happened--and with a minimum of drama; Nicole felt outguessed, realizing that from the episode of the camphor-rub, Dick had anticipated everything. But also she felt happy and excited, and the odd little wish that she could tell Dick all about it faded quickly. But her eyes followed his figure until it became a dot and mingled with the other dots in the summer crowd.

XII

The day before Doctor Diver left the Riviera he spent all his time with his children. He was not young any more with a lot of nice thoughts and dreams to have about himself, so he wanted to remember them well. The children had been told that this winter they would be with their aunt in London and that soon they were going to come and see him in America. Fräulein was not to be discharged without his consent.

He was glad he had given so much to the little girl--about the boy he was more uncertain--always he had been uneasy about what he had to give to the ever-climbing, ever-clinging, breast-searching young. But, when he said good-by to them, he wanted to lift their beautiful heads off their necks and hold them close for hours.

He embraced the old gardener who had made the first garden at Villa Diana six years ago; he kissed the Provençal girl who helped with the children. She had been with them for almost a decade and she fell on her knees and cried until Dick jerked her to her feet and gave her three hundred francs. Nicole was sleeping late, as had been agreed upon--he left a note for her, and one for Baby Warren who was just back from Sardinia and staying at the house. Dick took a big drink from a bottle of brandy three feet high, holding ten quarts, that some one had presented them with.

Then he decided to leave his bags by the station in Cannes and take a last look at Gausse’s Beach.

The beach was peopled with only an advance guard of children when Nicole and her sister arrived that morning. A white sun, chivied of outline by a white sky, boomed over a windless day. Waiters were putting extra ice into the bar; an American photographer from the A. and P. worked with his equipment in a precarious shade and looked up quickly at every footfall descending the stone steps. At the hotel his prospective subjects slept late in darkened rooms upon their recent opiate of dawn.

When Nicole started out on the beach she saw Dick, not dressed for swimming, sitting on a rock above. She shrank back in the shadow of her dressing-tent. In a minute Baby joined her, saying:

“Dick’s still there.”

“I saw him.”

“I think he might have the delicacy to go.”

“This is his place--in a way, he discovered it. Old Gausse always says he owes everything to Dick.”

Baby looked calmly at her sister.

“We should have let him confine himself to his bicycle excursions,” she remarked. “When people are taken out of their depths they lose their heads, no matter how charming a bluff they put up.”

“Dick was a good husband to me for six years,” Nicole said. “All that time I never suffered a minute’s pain because of him, and he always did his best never to let anything hurt me.”

Baby’s lower jaw projected slightly as she said:

“That’s what he was educated for.”

The sisters sat in silence; Nicole wondering in a tired way about things; Baby considering whether or not to marry the latest candidate for her hand and money, an authenticated Hapsburg. She was not quite thinking about it. Her affairs had long shared such a sameness, that, as she dried out, they were more important for their conversational value than for themselves. Her emotions had their truest existence in the telling of them.

“Is he gone?” Nicole asked after a while. “I think his train leaves at noon.”

Baby looked.

“No. He’s moved up higher on the terrace and he’s talking to some women. Anyhow there are so many people now that he doesn’t have to see us.”

He had seen them though, as they left their pavilion, and he followed them with his eyes until they disappeared again. He sat with Mary Minghetti, drinking anisette.

“You were like you used to be the night you helped us,” she was saying, “except at the end, when you were horrid about Caroline. Why aren’t you nice like that always? You can be.”

It seemed fantastic to Dick to be in a position where Mary North could tell him about things.

“Your friends still like you, Dick. But you say awful things to people when you’ve been drinking. I’ve spent most of my time defending you this summer.”

“That remark is one of Doctor Eliot’s classics.”

“It’s true. Nobody cares whether you drink or not--” She hesitated, “even when Abe drank hardest, he never offended people like you do.”

“You’re all so dull,” he said.

“But we’re all there is!” cried Mary. “If you don’t like nice people, try the ones who aren’t nice, and see how you like that! All people want is to have a good time and if you make them unhappy you cut yourself off from nourishment.”

“Have I been nourished?” he asked.

Mary was having a good time, though she did not know it, as she had sat down with him only out of fear. Again she refused a drink and said: “Self-indulgence is back of it. Of course, after Abe you can imagine how I feel about it--since I watched the progress of a good man toward alcoholism--”

Down the steps tripped Lady Caroline Sibly-Biers with blithe theatricality.

Dick felt fine--he was already well in advance of the day; arrived at where a man should be at the end of a good dinner, yet he showed only a fine, considered, restrained interest in Mary. His eyes, for the moment clear as a child’s, asked her sympathy and stealing over him he felt the old necessity of convincing her that he was the last man in the world and she was the last woman.

. . . Then he would not have to look at those two other figures, a man and a woman, black and white and metallic against the sky. . . .

“You once liked me, didn’t you?” he asked.

“Liked you--I loved you. Everybody loved you. You could’ve had anybody you wanted for the asking--”

“There has always been something between you and me.”

She bit eagerly. “Has there, Dick?”

“Always--I knew your troubles and how brave you were about them.” But the old interior laughter had begun inside him and he knew he couldn’t keep it up much longer.

“I always thought you knew a lot,” Mary said enthusiastically. “More about me than any one has ever known. Perhaps that’s why I was so afraid of you when we didn’t get along so well.”

His glance fell soft and kind upon hers, suggesting an emotion underneath; their glances married suddenly, bedded, strained together. Then, as the laughter inside of him became so loud that it seemed as if Mary must hear it, Dick switched off the light and they were back in the Riviera sun.

“I must go,” he said. As he stood up he swayed a little; he did not feel well any more--his blood raced slow. He raised his right hand and with a papal cross he blessed the beach from the high terrace. Faces turned upward from several umbrellas.

“I’m going to him.” Nicole got to her knees.

“No, you’re not,” said Tommy, pulling her down firmly. “Let well enough alone.”

XIII

Nicole kept in touch with Dick after her new marriage; there were letters on business matters, and about the children. When she said, as she often did, “I loved Dick and I’ll never forget him,” Tommy answered, “Of course not--why should you?”

Dick opened an office in Buffalo, but evidently without success. Nicole did not find what the trouble was, but she heard a few months later that he was in a little town named Batavia, N.Y., practising general medicine, and later that he was in Lockport, doing the same thing. By accident she heard more about his life there than anywhere: that he bicycled a lot, was much admired by the ladies, and always had a big stack of papers on his desk that were known to be an important treatise on some medical subject, almost in process of completion. He was considered to have fine manners and once made a good speech at a public health meeting on the subject of drugs; but he became entangled with a girl who worked in a grocery store, and he was also involved in a lawsuit about some medical question; so he left Lockport.

After that he didn’t ask for the children to be sent to America and didn’t answer when Nicole wrote asking him if he needed money. In the last letter she had from him he told her that he was practising in Geneva, New York, and she got the impression that he had settled down with some one to keep house for him. She looked up Geneva in an atlas and found it was in the heart of the Finger Lakes Section and considered a pleasant place. Perhaps, so she liked to think, his career was biding its time, again like Grant’s in Galena; his latest note was post-marked from Hornell, New York, which is some distance from Geneva and a very small town; in any case he is almost certainly in that section of the country, in one town or another.

THE END

THE LOVE OF THE LAST TYCOON

A Western

This novel was unfinished at the time of Fitzgerald’s death in 1940, when he was aged 44. The notes for the novel were initially collected and edited by the literary critic Edmund Wilson, who was a close friend of Fitzgerald, and the unfinished novel was published in 1941 as The Last Tycoon, though many critics now agree that Fitzgerald intended the title to be The Love of the Last Tycoon.  It consists of seventeen extant chapters out of the thirty-one planned chapters.  The novel tells the story of Monroe Stahr and his rise to power in Hollywood, including his conflicts with rival Pat Brady, a character based on real-life studio head Louis B. Mayer.

The first edition

CONTENTS

Chapter I

Chapter 2

Episodes 4 and 5

Episode 6

Chapter 3

Episode 7

Episode 8

Episode 9

Episode 10

Chapter 4

Episode 11

Episode 12

Chapter 5

Episode 13

Section 14

Section 15

Episode 16

Chapter 6

Episode 17

SYNPOSIS OF THE REST OF THE NOVEL

FITZGERALD’S NOTES FOR The Last Tycoon

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chapter V

Chapter I

Though I haven’t ever been on the screen I was brought up in pictures. Rudolph Valentino came to my fifth birthday party — or so I was told. I put this down only to indicate that even before the age of reason I was in a position to watch the wheels go round.

I was going to write my memoirs once, “The Producer’s Daughter,” but at eighteen you never quite get around to anything like that. It’s just as well — it would have been as flat as an old column of Lolly Parsons’. My father was in the picture business as another man might be in cotton or steel, and I took it tranquilly. At the worst I accepted Hollywood with the resignation of a ghost assigned to a haunted house. I knew what you were supposed to think about it but I was obstinately unhorrified.

This is easy to say, but harder to make people understand. When I was at Bennington some of the English teachers who pretended an indifference to Hollywood or its products really hated it. Hated it way down deep as a threat to their existence. Even before that, when I was in a convent, a sweet little nun asked me to get her a script of a screen play so she could “teach her class about movie writing” as she had taught them about the essay and the short story. I got the script for her and I suppose she puzzled over it and puzzled over it but it was never mentioned in class and she gave it back to me with an air of offended surprise and not a single comment. That’s what I half expect to happen to this story.

You can take Hollywood for granted like I did, or you can dismiss it with the contempt we reserve for what we don’t understand. It can be understood too, but only dimly and in flashes. Not half a dozen men have ever been able to keep the whole equation of pictures in their heads. And perhaps the closest a woman can come to the set-up is to try and understand one of those men.

The world from an airplane I knew. Father always had us travel back and forth that way from school and college. After my sister died when I was a junior, I travelled to and fro alone and the journey always made me think of her, made me somewhat solemn and subdued. Sometimes there were picture people I knew on board the plane, and occasionally there was an attractive college boy — but not often during the Depression. I seldom really fell asleep during the trip, what with thoughts of Eleanor and the sense of that sharp rip between coast and coast — at least not till we had left those lonely little airports in Tennessee.

This trip was so rough that the passengers divided early into those who turned in right away and those who didn’t want to turn in at all. There were two of these latter right across from me and I was pretty sure from their fragmentary conversation that they were from Hollywood — one of them because he looked like it, a middle-aged Jew who alternately talked with nervous excitement or else crouched as if ready to spring, in a harrowing silence; the other a pale, plain, stocky man of thirty, whom I was sure I had seen before. He had been to the house or something. But it might have been when I was a little girl, and so I wasn’t offended that he didn’t recognize me.

The stewardess — she was tall, handsome and flashing dark, a type that they seemed to run to — asked me if she could make up my berth.

“ — and, dear, do you want an aspirin?” She perched on the side of the seat and rocked precariously to and fro with the June hurricane, “ — or a Nembutal?”

“No.”

“I’ve been so busy with everyone else that I’ve had no time to ask you.” She sat down beside me and buckled us both in. “Do you want some gum?”

This reminded me to get rid of the piece that had been boring me for hours. I wrapped it in a piece of magazine and put it into the automatic ash-holder.

“I can always tell people are nice — “ the stewardess said approvingly “ — if they wrap their gum in paper before they put it in there.”

We sat for a while in the half-light of the swaying car. It was vaguely like a swanky restaurant at that twilight time between meals. We were all lingering — and not quite on purpose. Even the stewardess, I think, had to keep reminding herself why she was there.

She and I talked about a young actress I knew, whom she had flown west with two years before. It was in the very lowest time of the Depression and the young actress kept staring out the window in such an intent way that the stewardess was afraid she was contemplating a leap. It appeared though that she was not afraid of poverty, but only of revolution.

“I know what Mother and I are going to do,” she confided to the stewardess. “We’re coming out to the Yellowstone and we’re just going to live simply till it all blows over. Then we’ll come back. They don’t kill artists — you know?”

The proposition pleased me. It conjured up a pretty picture of the actress and her mother being fed by kind Tory bears who brought them honey, and by gentle fawns who fetched extra milk from the does and then lingered near to make pillows for their heads at night. In turn I told the stewardess about the lawyer and the director who told their plans to Father one night in those brave days. If the bonus army conquered Washington the lawyer had a boat hidden in the Sacramento River, and he was going to row upstream for a few months and then come back “because they always needed lawyers after a revolution to straighten out the legal side.”

The director had tended more toward defeatism. He had an old suit, shirt and shoes in waiting — he never did say whether they were his own or whether he got them from the prop department — and he was going to Disappear into the Crowd. I remember Father saying: “But they’ll look at your hands! They’ll know you haven’t done manual work for years. And they’ll ask for your union card.” And I remember how the director’s face fell, and how gloomy he was while he ate his dessert, and how funny and puny they sounded to me.

“Is your father an actor, Miss Brady?” asked the stewardess. “I’ve certainly heard the name.”

At the name Brady both the men across the aisle looked up. Sidewise — that Hollywood look, that always seems thrown over one shoulder. Then the young, pale, stocky man unbuttoned his safety strap and stood in the aisle beside us.

“Are you Cecelia Brady?” he demanded accusingly, as if I’d been holding out on him. “I thought I recognized you. I’m Wylie White.”

He could have omitted this — for at the same moment a new voice said, “Watch your step, Wylie!” and another man brushed by him in the aisle and went forward in the direction of the cockpit. Wylie White started, and a little too late called after him defiantly.

“I only take orders from the pilot.”

I recognized the kind of pleasantry that goes on between the powers in Hollywood and their satellites.

The stewardess reproved him: “Not so loud, please — some of the passengers are asleep.”

I saw now that the other man across the aisle, the middle-aged Jew, was on his feet also, staring, with shameless economic lechery, after the man who had just gone by. Or rather at the back of the man, who gestured sideways with his hand in a sort of farewell, as he went out of my sight.

I asked the stewardess: “Is he the assistant pilot?”

She was unbuckling our belt, about to abandon me to Wylie White.

“No. That’s Mr. Smith. He has the private compartment, the ‘bridal suite’ — only he has it alone. The assistant pilot is always in uniform.” She stood up. “I want to find out if we’re going to be grounded in Nashville.”

Wylie White was aghast.

“Why?”

“It’s a storm coming up the MississippiValley.”

“Does that mean we’ll have to stay here all night?”

“If this keeps up!”

A sudden dip indicated that it would. It tipped Wylie White into the seat opposite me, shunted the stewardess precipitately down in the direction of the cockpit, and plunked the Jewish man into a sitting position. After the studied, unruffled exclamations of distaste that befitted the air-minded, we settled down. There was an introduction.

“Miss Brady — Mr. Schwartze,” said Wylie White. “He’s a great friend of your father’s too.”

Mr. Schwartze nodded so vehemently that I could almost hear him saying, “It’s true. As God is my judge, it’s true!”

He might have said this right out loud at one time in his life — but he was obviously a man to whom something had happened. Meeting him was like encountering a friend who has been in a fist fight or collision, and got flattened. You stare at your friend and say: “What happened to you?” And he answers something unintelligible through broken teeth and swollen lips. He can’t even tell you about it.

Mr. Schwartze was physically unmarked; the exaggerated Persian nose and oblique eye-shadow were as congenital as the tip-tilted Irish redness around my father’s nostrils.

“Nashville!” cried Wylie White. “That means we go to a hotel. We don’t get to the coast till tomorrow night — if then. My God! I was born in Nashville.”

“I should think you’d like to see it again.”

“Never — I’ve kept away for fifteen years. I hope I’ll never see it again.”

But he would — for the plane was unmistakably going down, down, down, like Alice in the rabbit hole. Cupping my hand against the window I saw the blur of the city far away on the left. The green sign “Fasten your belts — No smoking” had been on since we first rode into the storm.

“Did you hear what she said?” said Mr. Schwartze from one of his fiery silences across the aisle.

“Hear what?” asked Wylie.

“Hear what he’s calling himself,” said Schwartze. “Mr. Smith.”

“Why not?” asked Wylie.

“Oh nothing,” said Schwartze quickly. “I just thought it was funny. Smith.” I never heard a laugh with less mirth in it: “Smith!”

I suppose there has been nothing like the airports since the days of the stage-stops — nothing quite as lonely, as somber-silent. The old red-brick depots were built right into the towns they marked — people didn’t get off at those isolated stations unless they lived there. But airports lead you way back in history like oases, like the stops on the great trade routes. The sight of air travellers strolling in ones and twos into midnight airports will draw a small crowd any night up to two. The young people look at the planes, the older ones look at the passengers with a watchful incredulity. In the big transcontinental planes we were the coastal rich, who casually alighted from our cloud in mid-America. High adventure might be among us, disguised as a movie star. But mostly it wasn’t. And I always wished fervently that we looked more interesting than we did — just as I often have at premieres, when the fans look at you with scornful reproach because you’re not a star.

On the ground Wylie and I were suddenly friends, because he held out his arm to steady me when I got out of the plane. From then on, he made a dead set for me — and I didn’t mind. From the moment we walked into the airport it had become plain that if we were stranded here we were stranded here together. (It wasn’t like the time I lost my boy — the time my boy played the piano with that girl Reina in a little New England farm house near Bennington, and I realized at last I wasn’t wanted. Guy Lombarde was on the air playing “Top Hat” and “Cheek to Cheek” and she taught him the melodies. The keys falling like leaves and her hand splayed over his as she showed him a black chord. I was a freshman then.)

When we went into the airport Mr. Schwartze was along with us too but he seemed in a sort of dream. All the time we were trying to get accurate information at the desk he kept staring at the door that led out to the landing field, as if he were afraid the plane would leave without him. Then I excused myself for a few minutes and something happened that I didn’t see but when I came back he and White were standing close together. White talking and Schwartze looking twice as much as if a great truck had just backed up over him. He didn’t stare at the door to the landing field anymore. I heard the end of Wylie White’s remark….

“- I told you to shut up. It serves you right.”

“I only said -”

He broke off as I came up and asked if there was any news. It was then half past two in the morning.

“A little,” said Wylie White. “They don’t think we’ll be able to start for three hours anyhow, so some of the softies are going to a hotel. But I’d like to take you out to The Hermitage, Home of Andrew Jackson.”

“How could we see it in the dark?” demanded Schwartze.

“Hell, it’ll be sunrise in two hours.”

“You two go,” said Schwartze.

“All right — you take the bus to the hotel. It’s still waiting — he’s in there.” Wylie’s voice had a taunt in it. “Maybe it’d be a good thing.”

“No, I’ll go along with you,” said Schwartze hastily.

We took a taxi in the sudden country dark outside, and he seemed to cheer up. He patted my kneecap encouragingly.

“I should go along,” he said. “I should be chaperone. Once upon a time when I was in the big money, I had a daughter — a beautiful daughter.”

He spoke as if she had been sold to creditors as a tangible asset.

“You’ll have another,” Wylie assured him. “You’ll get it all back. Another turn of the wheel and you’ll be where Cecelia’s papa is, won’t he, Cecelia?”

“Where is this Hermitage?” asked Schwartze presently. “Far away at the end of nowhere? Will we miss the plane?”

“Skip it,” said Wylie. “We ought to’ve brought the stewardess along for you. Didn’t you admire the stewardess? I thought she was pretty cute.”

We drove for a long time over a bright level countryside, just a road and a tree and a shack and a tree, and then suddenly along a winding twist of woodland. I could feel even in the darkness that the trees of the woodland were green — that it was all different from the dusty olive-tint of California. Somewhere we passed a Negro driving three cows ahead of him, and they mooed as he scatted them to the side of the road. They were real cows, with warm fresh, silky flanks and the Negro grew gradually real out of the darkness with his big brown eyes staring at us close to the car, as Wylie gave him a quarter. He said “Thank you — thank you” and stood there and the cows mooed again into the night as we drove off.

I thought of the first sheep I ever remember seeing — hundreds of them, and how our car drove suddenly into them on the back lot of the old Laemmie studio. They were unhappy about being in pictures but the men in the car with us kept saying:

“Swell?”

“Is that what you wanted, Dick?”

“Isn’t that swell?” And the man named Dick kept standing up in the car as if he were Cortez or Balboa, looking over that grey fleecy undulation. If I ever knew what picture they were in I have long forgotten.

We had driven an hour. We crossed a brook over an old rattly iron bridge laid with planks. Now there were roosters crowing and blue-green shadows stirring every time we passed a farm house.

“I told you it’d be morning soon,” said Wylie. “I was born near here — the son of impoverished southern paupers. The family mansion is now used as an outhouse. We had four servants — my father, my mother and my two sisters. I refused to join the guild, and so I went to Memphis, to start my career, which has now reached a dead end.” He put his arm around me. “Cecelia, will you marry me, so I can share the Brady fortune?”

He was disarming enough so I let my head lie on his shoulder.

“What do you do, Celia? Go to school?”

“I go to Bennington. I’m a junior.”

“Oh, I beg your pardon. I should have known but I never had the advantage of college training. But a junior — why I read in ‘Esquire’ that juniors have nothing to learn, Cecelia.”

“Why do people think that college girls -”

“Don’t apologize — knowledge is power.”

“You’d know from the way you talk that we were on our way to Hollywood,” I said. “It’s always years and years behind the time.”

He pretended to be shocked.

“You mean girls in the East have no private lives?”

“That’s the point. They have got private lives. You’re bothering me, let go.”

“I can’t. It might wake Schwartze, and I think this is the first sleep he’s had for weeks. Listen, Cecelia, I once had an affair with the wife of a producer. A very short affair. When it was over she said to me in no uncertain terms, she said: ‘Don’t you ever tell about this or I’ll have you thrown out of Hollywood. My husband’s a much more important man than you.’”

I liked him again now, and presently the taxi turned down a long lane fragrant with honeysuckle and narcissus and stopped beside the great grey hulk of the Andrew Jackson house. The driver turned around to tell us something about it but Wylie shushed him, pointing at Schwartze, and we tiptoed out of the car.

“You can’t get into the Mansion now,” the taxi man told us politely.

Wylie and I went and sat against the wide pillars of the steps.

“What about Mr. Schwartze?” I asked. “Who is he?”

“To hell with Schwartze. He was the head of some combine once — First National? Paramount? United Artists? Now he’s down and out. But he’ll be back. You can’t flunk out of pictures unless you’re a dope or a drunk.”

“You don’t like Hollywood,” I suggested.

“Yes I do. Sure I do. Say! This isn’t anything to talk about on the steps of Andrew Jackson’s house — at dawn.”

“I like Hollywood,” I persisted.

“It’s all right. It’s a mining town in lotus land. Who said that? I did. It’s a good place for toughies but I went there from Savannah, Georgia. I went to a garden party the first day. My host shook hands and left me. It was all there — that swimming pool, green moss at two dollars an inch, beautiful felines having drinks and fun -

— And nobody spoke to me. Not a soul. I spoke to half a dozen people but they didn’t answer. That continued for an hour, two hours — then I got up from where I was sitting and ran out at a dog trot like a crazy man. I didn’t feel I had any rightful identity until I got back to the hotel and the clerk handed me a letter addressed to me in my name.”

Naturally I hadn’t ever had such an experience, but looking back on parties I’d been to, I realized that such things could happen. We don’t go for strangers in Hollywood unless they wear a sign saying that their axe has been thoroughly ground elsewhere, and that in any case it’s not going to fall on our necks — in other words unless they’re a celebrity. And they’d better look out even then.

“You should have risen above it,” I said smugly. “It’s not a slam at you when people are rude — it’s a slam at the people they’ve met before.”

“Such a pretty girl — to say such wise things.”

There was an eager to-do in the eastern sky, and Wylie could see me plain — thin with good features and lots of style, and the kicking fetus of a mind. I wonder what I looked like in that dawn, five years ago. A little rumpled and pale, I suppose, but at that age, when one has the young illusion that most adventures are good, I needed only a bath and a change to go on for hours.

Wylie stared at me with really flattering appreciation — and then suddenly we were not alone. Mr. Schwartze wandered apologetically into the pretty scene.

“I fell upon a large metal handle,” he said, touching the corner of his eye.

Wylie jumped up.

“Just in time, Mr. Schwartze,” he said. “The tour is just starting. Home of Old Hickory — America’s tenth president. The victor of New Orleans, opponent of the National Bank, and inventor of the Spoils System.”

Schwartze looked toward me as toward a jury.

“There’s a writer for you,” he said. “Knows everything and at the same time he knows nothing.”

“What’s that?” said Wylie, indignant.

It was my first inkling that he was a writer. And while I like writers — because if you ask a writer anything you usually get an answer — still it belittled him in my eyes. Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person. It’s like actors, who try so pathetically not to look in mirrors. Who lean backward trying — only to see their faces in the reflecting chandeliers.

“Ain’t writers like that, Celia?” demanded Schwartze. “I have no words for them. I only know it’s true.”

Wylie looked at him with slowly gathering indignation. “I’ve heard that before,” he said. “Look, Mannie, I’m a more practical man than you any day! I’ve sat in an office and listened to some mystic stalk up and down for hours spouting tripe that’d land him on a nut-farm anywhere outside of California — and then at the end tell me how practical he was, and I was a dreamer — and would I kindly go away and made sense out of what he’d said.”

Mr. Schwartze’s face fell into its more disintegrated alignments. One eye looked upward through the tall elms: He raised his hand and bit without interest at the cuticle on his second finger. There was a bird flying about the chimney of the house and his glance followed it. It perched on the chimney pot like a raven and Mr. Schwartze’s eyes remained fixed upon it as he said: “We can’t get in. And it’s time for you two to go back to the plane.”

It was still not quite dawn. The Hermitage looked like a nice big white box, but a little lonely, and vacated still, after a hundred years. We walked back to the car — only after we had gotten in, and Mr. Schwartze had surprisingly shut the taxi door on us, did we realize he didn’t intend to come along.

“I’m not going to the Coast — I decided that when I woke up. So I’ll stay here, and afterwards the driver could come back for me.” “Going back East?” said Wylie with surprise. “Just because -”

“I have decided,” said Schwartze, faintly smiling. “Once I used to be a regular man of decision — you’d be surprised.” He felt in his pocket, as the taxi driver warmed up the engine. “Will you give this note to Mr. Smith?”

“Shall I come in two hours?” the driver asked Schwartze. “Yes… sure. I shall be glad to entertain myself looking around.” I kept thinking of him all the way back to the airport — trying to fit him into that early hour and into that landscape. He had come a long way from some ghetto to present himself at that raw shrine. Mannie Schwartze and Andrew Jackson — it was hard to say them in the same sentence. It was doubtful if he knew who Andrew Jackson was as he wandered around, but perhaps he figured that if people had preserved his house Andrew Jackson must have been someone who was large and merciful, able to understand. At both ends of life man needed nourishment — a breast — a shrine. Something to lay himself beside when no one wanted him further, and shoot a bullet into his head.

Of course we did not know this for twenty hours. When we got to the airport we told the purser that Mr. Schwartze was not continuing, and then forgot about him. The storm had wandered away into eastern Tennessee and broken against the mountains, and we were taking off in less than an hour. Sleepy-eyed travellers appeared from the hotel and I dozed a few minutes on one of those iron maidens they use for couches. Slowly the idea of a perilous journey was recreated out of the debris of our failure: a new stewardess, tall, handsome, flashing dark, exactly like the other except she wore seersucker instead of Frenchy red-and-blue, went briskly past us with a suitcase. Wylie sat beside me as we waited.

“Did you give the note to Mr. Smith?” I asked, half asleep.

“Yeah.”

“Who is Mr. Smith? I suspect he spoiled Mr. Schwartze’s trip.”

“It was Schwartze’s fault.”

“I’m prejudiced against steam-rollers,” I said. “My father tries to be a steam-roller around the house, and I tell him to save it for the studio.”

I wondered if I was being fair; words are the palest counters at that time in the morning. “Still, he steam-rollered me into Bennington and I’ve always been grateful for that.”

“There would be quite a crash -” Wylie said, “- if steam-roller Brady met steam-roller Smith.”

“Is Mr. Smith a competitor of Father’s?”

“Not exactly. I should say no. But if he was a competitor I know where my money would be.”

“On Father?”

“I’m afraid not.”

It was too early in the morning for family patriotism. The pilot was at the desk with the purser and he shook his head as they regarded a prospective passenger who had put two nickels in the electric phonograph and lay alcoholically on a bench fighting off sleep. The first song he had chosen, “Lost,” thundered through the room, followed, after a slight interval, by his other choice, “Gone,” which was equally dogmatic and final. The pilot shook his head emphatically and walked over to the passenger.

“Afraid we’re not going to be able to carry you this time, old man.”

“Wha?”

The drunk sat up, awful looking, yet discernibly attractive, and I was sorry for him in spite of his passionately ill-chosen music.

“Go back to the hotel and get some sleep. There’ll be another plane tonight.”

“Only going up in ee air.”

“Not this time, old man.”

In his disappointment the drunk fell off the bench — and above the phonograph, a loudspeaker summoned us respectable people outside. In the corridor of the plane I ran into Monroe Stahr and fell all over him, or wanted to. There was a man any girl would go for, with or without encouragement. I was emphatically without it, but he liked me and sat down opposite till the plane took off.

“Let’s all ask for our money back,” he suggested. His dark eyes took me in, and I wondered what they would look like if he fell in love. They were kind, aloof and, though they often reasoned with you gently, somewhat superior. It was no fault of theirs if they saw so much. He darted in and out of the role of “one of the boys” with dexterity — but on the whole I should say he wasn’t one of them. But he knew how to shut up, how to draw into the background, how to listen. From where he stood (and though he was not a tall man it always seemed high up) he watched the multitudinous practicalities of his world like a proud young shepherd, to whom night and day had never mattered. He was born sleepless without a talent for rest or the desire for it.

We sat in unembarrassed silence — I had known him since he became Father’s partner a dozen years ago, when I was seven and Stahr was twenty — two. Wylie was across the aisle and I didn’t know whether or not to introduce them, but Stahr kept turning his ring so abstractedly that he made me feel young and invisible, and I didn’t dare. I never dared look quite away from him or quite at him, unless I had something important to say — and I knew he affected many other people in the same manner.

“I’ll give you this ring, Cecelia.”

“I beg your pardon. I didn’t realize that I was -”

“I’ve got half a dozen like it.”

He handed it to me, a gold nugget with the letter S in bold relief. I had been thinking how oddly its bulk contrasted with his fingers, which were delicate and slender like the rest of his body, and like his slender face with the arched eyebrows and the dark curly hair. He looked spiritual at times but he was a fighter — somebody out of his past knew him when he was one of a gang of kids in the Bronx, and gave me a description of how he walked always at the head of his gang, this rather frail boy, occasionally throwing a command backward out of the corner of his mouth.

Stahr folded my hand over the ring, stood up and addressed Wylie.

“Come up to the bridal suite,” he said. “See you later, Cecelia.”

Before they went out of hearing I heard Wylie’s question, “Did you open Schwartze’s note?” And Stahr:

“Not yet.”

I must be slow, for only then did I realize that Stahr was Mr. Smith.

Afterwards Wylie told me what was in the note. Written by the headlights of the taxi it was almost illegible.

Dear Monro, You are the best of them all I have always admired your mentality so when you turn against me I know it’s no use! I must be no good and am not going to continue the journey let me warn you once again

look out! I know.

Your friend MANNIE

Stahr read it twice, and raised his hand to the morning stubble on his chin.

“He’s a nervous wreck,” he said. “There’s nothing to be done, absolutely nothing. I’m sorry I was short with him — but I don’t like a man to approach me telling me it’s for my sake.”

“Maybe it was,” said Wylie.

“It’s poor technique.”

“I’d fall for it,” said Wylie. “I’m vain as a woman. If anybody pretends to be interested in me I’ll ask for more. I like advice.”

Stahr shook his head distastefully. Wylie kept on ribbing him — he was one of those to whom this privilege was permitted.

“You fall for some kinds of flattery,” he said. “This ‘little Napoleon stuff.’”

“It makes me sick,” said Stahr, “but it’s not as bad as some man trying to help you.”

“If you don’t like advice why do you pay we?”

“That’s a question of merchandise,” said Stahr. “I’m a merchant. I want to buy what’s in your mind.”

“You’re no merchant,” said Wylie. “I knew a lot of them when I was a publicity man and I agree with Charles Francis Adams.”

“What did he say?”

“He knew them all — Gould, Vanderbilt, Carnegie, Astor — and he said there wasn’t one he’d care to meet again in the hereafter. Well — they haven’t improved since then, and that’s why I say you’re no merchant.”

“Adams was probably a sour belly,” said Stahr. “He wanted to be head man himself but he didn’t have the judgement or else the character.”

“He had brains,” said Wylie rather tartly.

“It takes more than brains. You writers and artists poop out and get all mixed up and somebody has to come in and straighten you out.” He shrugged his shoulders. “You seem to take things so personally, hating people and worshipping them — always thinking people are so important — especially yourselves. You just ask to be kicked around. I like people and I like them to like me but I wear my heart where God put it — on the inside.”

He broke off.

“What did I say to Schwartze in the airport? Do you remember — exactly?”

“You said ‘Whatever you’re after, the answer is No.’”

Stahr was silent.

“He was sunk,” said Wylie, “but I laughed him out of it. We took Pat Brady’s daughter for a ride.”

Stahr rang for the stewardess.

“That pilot,” he said. “Would he mind if I sat up in front with him awhile?”

“That’s against the rules, Mr. Smith.”

“Ask him to step in here a minute when he’s free.”

Stahr sat up front all afternoon. While we slid off the endless desert and over the table — lands, dyed with many colors like the white sands we dyed with colors when I was a child. Then in the late afternoon, the peaks themselves — the Mountains of the Frozen Saw — slid under our propellers and we were close to home.

When I wasn’t dozing I was thinking that I wanted to marry Stahr, that I wanted to make him love me. Oh, the conceit! What on earth did I have to offer? But I didn’t think like that then. I had the pride of young women, which draws its strength from such sublime thoughts as “I’m as good as she is.” For my purposes I was just as beautiful as the great beauties who must have inevitably thrown themselves at his head. My little spurt of intellectual interest was of course making me fit to be a brilliant ornament of any salon.

I know now it was absurd. Though Stahr’s education was founded on nothing more than a night-school course in stenography, he had a long time ago run ahead through trackless wastes of perception into fields where very few men were able to follow him. But in my reckless conceit I matched my grey eyes against his brown ones for guile, my young golf-and-tennis heart-beats against his, which must be slowing a little after years of over-work. And I planned and I contrived and I plotted — any woman can tell you — but it never came to anything, as you will see. I still like to think that if he’d been a poor boy and nearer my age I could have managed it, but of course the real truth was that I had nothing to offer that he didn’t have; some of my more romantic ideas actually stemmed from pictures — “42nd Street,” for example, had a great influence on me. It’s more than possible that some of the pictures which Stahr himself conceived had shaped me into what I was.

So it was rather hopeless. Emotionally, at least, people can’t live by taking in each other’s washing.

But at that time it was different: Father might help, the stewardess might help. She might go up in the cockpit and say to Stahr: “If I ever saw love it’s in that girl’s eyes.”

The pilot might help: “Man are you blind? Why don’t you go back there?”

Wylie White might help — instead of standing in the aisle looking at me doubtfully, wondering whether I was awake or asleep.

“Sit down,” I said. “What’s new, where are we?”

“Up in the air.”

“Oh, so that’s it. Sit down.” I tried to show a cheerful interest. “What are you writing?”

“Heaven help me, I am writing about a Boy Scout — The Boy Scout.”

“Is it Stahr’s idea?”

“I don’t know — he told me to look into it. He may have ten writers working ahead of me or behind me, a system which he so thoughtfully invented. So you’re in love with him?”

“I should say not,” I said indignantly. “I’ve known him all my life.”

“Desperate, eh? Well, I’ll arrange it if you’ll use all your influence to advance me. I want a unit of my own.”

I closed my eyes again and drifted off. When I woke up the stewardess was putting a blanket over me.

“Almost there,” she said.

Out the window I could see by the sunset that we were in a greener land.

“I just heard something funny,” she volunteered. “Up in the cockpit — that Mr. Smith — or Mr. Stahr — I never remember seeing his name.”

“It’s never on any pictures,” I said.

“Oh. Well, he’s been asking the pilots a lot about flying — I mean he’s interested? You know?”

“I know.”

“I mean one of them told me he bet he could teach Mr. Stahr solo flying in ten minutes. He has such a fine mentality, that’s what he said.”

I was getting impatient.

“Well, what was so funny?”

“Well, finally one of the pilots asked Mr. Smith if he liked his business and Mr. Smith said, ‘Sure. Sure I like it. It’s nice being the only sound nut in a hatful of cracked ones.’”

The stewardess doubled up with laughter — and I could have spit at her.

“I mean calling all those people a hatful of nuts. I mean cracked nuts.” Her laughter stopped with unexpected suddenness and her face was grave as she stood up. “Well, I’ve got to finish my chart.”

“Good bye.”

Obviously Stahr had put the pilots right up on the throne with him and let them rule with him for a while. Years later I travelled with one of those same pilots and he told me one thing Stahr had said.

He was looking down at the mountains.

“Suppose you were a railroad man,” he said. “You have to send a tram through there somewhere. Well, you get your surveyors’ reports, and you find there’s three or four or half a dozen gaps, and not one is better than the other. You’ve got to decide — on what basis? You can’t test the best way — except by doing it. So you just do it.”

The pilot thought he had missed something.

“How do you mean?”

“You choose some one way for no reason at all — because that mountain’s pink or the blueprint is a better blue. You see?”

The pilot considered that this was very valuable advice. But he doubted if he’d ever be in a position to apply it.

“What I wanted to know,” he told me ruefully, “is how he ever got to be Mr. Stahr.”

I’m afraid Stahr could never have answered that one, for the embryo is not equipped with a memory. But I could answer a little. He had flown up very high to see, on strong wings when he was young. And while he was up there he had looked on all the kingdoms, with the kind of eyes that can stare straight into the sun. Beating his wings tenaciously — finally frantically — and keeping on beating them he had stayed up there longer than most of us, and then, remembering all he had seen from his great height of how things were, he had settled gradually to earth.

The motors were off and all our five senses began to readjust themselves for landing. I could see a line of lights for the Long Beach Naval Station ahead and to the left, and on the right a twinkling blur for Santa Monica. The California moon was out, huge and orange over the Pacific. However I happened to feel about these things — and they were home after all — I know that Stahr must have felt much more. These were the things I had first opened my eyes on, like the sheep on the back lot of the old Laemmle studio; but this was where Stahr had come to earth after that extraordinary illuminating flight where he saw which way we were going, and how we looked doing it, and how much of it mattered. You could say that this was where an accidental wind blew him but I don’t think so. I would rather think that in a “long shot” he saw a new way of measuring our jerky hopes and graceful rogueries and awkward sorrows, and that he came here from choice to be with us to the end. Like the plane coming down into the Glendale airport, into the warm darkness.

Chapter 2

Episodes 4 and 5

It was nine o’clock of a July night and there were still some extras in the drug store across from the studio — I could see them bent over the pin-games inside — as I parked my car. “Old” Johnny Swanson stood on the corner in his semi-cowboy clothes staring gloomily past the moon. Once he had been as big in pictures as Tom Mix or Bill Hart — now it was too sad to speak to him and I hurried across the street and through the front gate.

There is never a time when a studio is absolutely quiet. There is always a night shift of technicians in the laboratories and dubbing rooms and people on the maintenance staff dropping in at the commissary. But the sounds are all different — the padded hush of tires, the quiet tick of a motor running idle, the naked cry of a soprano singing into a nightbound microphone. Around a corner I came upon a man in rubber boots washing down a car in a wonderful white light — a fountain among the dead industrial shadows. I slowed up as I saw Mr. Marcus being hoisted into his car in front of the AdministrationBuilding, because he took so long to say anything, even goodnight — and while I waited I realized that the soprano was singing “Come! Come! I love you only” over and over; I remember this because she kept singing the same line during the earthquake. That didn’t come for five minutes yet.

Father’s offices were in the old building with the long balconies and iron rails with their suggestion of a perpetual tightrope. Father was on the second floor with Stahr on one side and Mr. Marcus on the other — this evening there were lights all along the row. My stomach dipped a little at the proximity to Stahr but that was in pretty good control now — I’d seen him only once in the month I’d been home.

There were a lot of strange things about Father’s office but I’ll make it brief. In the outer part were three poker — faced secretaries who had sat there like witches ever since I could remember — Birdy Peters, Maude something, and Rosemary Schmiel; I don’t know whether this was her name but she was the Dean of the trio, so to speak, and under her desk was the kick-lock that admitted you to Father’s throne room. All three of the secretaries were passionate capitalists and Birdy had invented the rule that if typists were seen eating together more than once in a single week they were hauled up on the carpet. At that time the studio feared mob rule.

I went on in. Nowadays all chief executives have huge drawing rooms but my father’s was the first. It was also the first to have oneway glass in the big French windows and I’ve heard a story about a trap in the floor that would drop unpleasant visitors to an oubliette below but believe it to be an invention. There was a big painting of Will Rogers, hung conspicuously and intended, I think, to suggest Father’s essential kinship with Hollywood’s St. Francis; there was a signed photograph of Minna Davis, Stahr’s dead wife, and photos of other studio celebrities and big chalk drawings of Mother and me. Tonight the one-way French windows were open and a big moon, rosy-gold with a haze around, was wedged helpless in one of them. Father and Jaques La Borwits and Rosemary Schmiel were down at the end around a big circular desk.

What did Father look like? I couldn’t describe him except for once in New York when I met him where I didn’t expect to; I was aware of a bulky, middle-aged man who looked a little ashamed of himself and I wished he’d move on — and then I saw he was Father. Afterward I was shocked at my impression. Father can be very magnetic — he has a tough jaw and an Irish smile.

But as for Jaques La Borwits I shall spare you. Let me just say he was an assistant producer which is something like a commissar, and let it go at that. Where Stahr picked up such mental cadavers or had them forced upon him — or especially how he got any use out of them — has always amazed me, as it amazed everyone fresh from the East who slapped up against them. Jaques La Borwits had his points, no doubt, but so have the sub-microscopic protozoa, so has a dog prowling for a bitch and a bone. Jaques La — oh, my!

From their expressions I was sure they had been talking about Stahr. Stahr had ordered something or forbidden something, or defied Father or junked one of La Borwits’ pictures or something catastrophic and they were sitting there in protest at night in a community of rebellion and helplessness. Rosemary Schmiel sat pad in hand as if ready to write down their dejection.

“I’m to drive you home dead or alive,” I told Father. “All those birthday presents rotting away in their packages!”

“A birthday!” cried Jaques in a flurry of apology. “How old? I didn’t know.”

“Forty-three,” said Father distinctly.

He was older than that — four years — and Jaques knew it; I saw him note it down in his account book to use sometime. Out here these account books are carried open in the hand. One can see the entries being made without recourse to lip reading and Rosemary Schmiel was compelled in emulation to make a mark on her pad. As she rubbed it out the earth quaked under us.

We didn’t get the full shock like at Long Beach where the upper stories of shops were spewed into the streets and small hotels drifted out to sea — but for a full minute our bowels were one with the bowels of the earth — like some nightmare attempt to attach our navel cords again and jerk us back to the womb of creation.

Mother’s picture fell off the wall revealing a small safe — Rosemary and I grabbed frantically for each other and did a strange screaming waltz across the room. Jaques fainted or at least disappeared and Father clung to his desk and shouted “Are you all right?” Outside the window the singer came to the climax of “I love you only,” held it a moment and then, I swear, started it all over. Or maybe they were playing it back to her from the recording machine.

The room stood still, shimmying a little. We made our way to the door, suddenly including Jaques who had reappeared, and tottered out dizzily through the ante-room on to the iron balcony. Almost all the lights were out and from here and there we could hear cries and calls. Momentarily we stood waiting for a second shock — then as with a common impulse we went into Stahr’s entry and through to his office.

The office was big but not as big as Father’s. Stahr sat on the side of his couch rubbing his eyes. When the quake came he had been asleep and he wasn’t sure yet whether he had dreamed it. When we convinced him he thought it was all rather funny — until the telephones began to ring. I watched him as unobtrusively as possible. He was grey with fatigue while he listened to the phone and Dictograph but as the reports came in, his eyes began to pick up shine.

“A couple of water mains have burst,” he said to Father, “- they’re heading into the back lot.”

“Gray’s shooting in the FrenchVillage,” said Father.

“It’s flooded around the Station too and in the Jungle and the City Corner, what the hell — nobody seems to be hurt.” In passing he shook my hands gravely. “Where’ve you been, Cecelia?”

“You going out there, Monroe?” Father asked.

“When all the news is in. One of the power lines is off too — I’ve sent for Robinson.”

He made me sit down with him on the couch and tell about the quake again.

“You look tired,” I said, cute and motherly.

“Yes,” he agreed, “I’ve got no place to go in the evenings so I just work.”

“I’ll arrange some evenings for you.”

“I used to play poker with a gang,” he said thoughtfully. “Before I was married. But they all drank themselves to death.”

Miss Doolan, his secretary, came in with fresh bad news.

“Robby’ll take care of everything when he comes,” Stahr assured Father. He turned to me. “Now there’s a man — that Robinson. He was a trouble-shooter — fixed the telephone wires in Minnesota blizzards — nothing stumps him. He’ll be here in a minute — you’ll like Robby.”

He said it as if it had been his life-long intention to bring us together, and he had arranged, the whole earthquake with just that in mind.

“Yes, you’ll like Robby,” he repeated. “When do you go back to college?”

“I’ve just come home.”

“You get the whole summer?”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ll go back as soon as I can.”

I was in a mist. It hadn’t failed to cross my mind that he might have some intention about me but if it was so, it was in an exasperatingly early stage — I was merely “a good property.” And the idea didn’t seem so attractive at that moment — like marrying a doctor. He seldom left the studio before eleven.

“How long -” he asked my father, “- before she graduates from college? That’s what I was trying to say.”

And I think I was about to sing out eagerly that I needn’t go back at all, that I was quite educated already — when the totally admirable Robinson came in. He was a bowlegged young redhead, all ready to go.

“This is Robby, Cecelia,” said Stahr. “Come on, Robby.”

So I met Robby. I can’t say it seemed like fate — but it was. For it was Robby who later told me how Stahr found his love that night.

Episode 6

Under the moon the back lot was thirty acres of fairyland — not because the locations really looked like African jungles and French chateaux and schooners at anchor and Broadway by night, but because they looked like the torn picture books of childhood, like fragments of stories dancing in an open fire. I never lived in a house with an attic but a back lot must be something like that and at night of course in an enchanted distorted way, it all comes true.

When Stahr and Robby arrived clusters of lights had already picked out the danger spots in the flood.

“We’ll pump it out into the swamp on Thirty-sixth Street,” said Robby after a moment. “It’s city property — but isn’t this an act of God? Say — look there!”

On top of a huge head of the god Siva, two women were floating down the current of an impromptu river. The idol had come unloosed from a set of Burma and it meandered earnestly on its way, stopping sometimes to waddle and bump in the shallows with the other debris of the tide. The two refugees had found sanctuary along a scroll of curls on its bald forehead and seemed at first glance to be sightseers on an interesting bus-ride through the scene of the flood.

“Will you look at that, Monroe!” said Robby. “Look at those dames!”

Dragging their legs through sudden bogs they made their way to the bank of the stream. Now they could see the women looking a little scared but brightening at the prospect of rescue.

“We ought to let ‘em drift out to the waste pipe,” said Robby gallantly, “but De Mille needs that head next week.”

He wouldn’t have hurt a fly though and presently he was hip deep in the water fishing for them with a pole and succeeding only in spinning it in a dizzy circle. Help arrived and the impression quickly got around that one of them was very pretty and then that they were people of importance. But they were just strays and Robby waited disgustedly to give them hell while the thing was brought finally into control and beached.

“Put that head back!” he called up to them. “You think it’s a souvenir?”

One of the women came sliding smoothly down the cheek of the idol and Robby caught and set her on solid ground; the other one hesitated and then followed. Robby turned to Stahr for judgement.

“What’ll we do with them, chief?”

Stahr did not answer. Smiling faintly at him from not four feet away was the face of his dead wife, identical even to the expression. Across the four feet of moonlight the eyes he knew looked back at him, a curl blew a little on a familiar forehead, the smile lingered changed a little according to pattern, the lips parted — the same. An awful fear went over him and he wanted to cry aloud. Back from the still sour room, the muffled glide of the limousine hearse, the falling concealing flowers, from out there in the dark — here now warm and glowing. The river passed him in a rush, the great spotlights swooped and blinked — and then he heard another voice speak that was not Minna’s voice.

“We’re sorry,” said the voice. “We followed a truck in through a gate.”

A little crowd had gathered — electricians, grips, truckers — and Robby began to nip at them like a sheep dog.

“… get the big pumps on the tanks on Stage 4… put a cable around this head… raft it up on a couple of two-by-fours… get the water out of the Jungle first for Christ’s sake… that big A pipe lay it down, all that stuff is plastic….”

Stahr stood watching the two women as they threaded their way after a policeman toward an exit gate. Then he took a tentative step to see if the weakness had gone out of his knees. A loud tractor came bumping through the slush and men began streaming by him — every second one glancing at him smiling speaking Hello Monroe… Hello Mr. Stahr… wet night Mr. Stahr… Monroe… Monroe… Stahr… Stahr… Stahr.

He spoke and waved back as the people streamed by in the darkness, looking I suppose a little like the Emperor and the Old Guard. There is no world so but it has its heroes and Stahr was the hero. Most of these men had been here a long time — through the beginnings and the great upset when sound came and the three years of Depression he had seen that no harm came to them. The old loyalties were trembling now — there were clay feet everywhere — but still he was their man, the last of the princes. And their greeting was a sort of low cheer as they went by.

Chapter 3

Episode 7

Between the night I got back and the quake I’d made many observations.

About Father, for example. I loved Father-in a sort of irregular graph with many low swoops — but I began to see that his strong will didn’t fill him out as a passable man. Most of what he accomplished boiled down to shrewd. He had acquired with luck and shrewdness a quarter interest in a booming circus — together with young Stahr. That was his life’s effort — all the rest was an instinct to hang on. Of course he talked that double talk to Wall Street about how mysterious it was to make a picture but Father didn’t know the ABC’s of dubbing or even cutting. Nor had he learned much about the feel of America as a bar boy in Ballyhegan nor have any more than a drummer’s sense of a story. On the other hand he didn’t have concealed paresis like —  — ; he came to the studio before noon, and with a suspiciousness developed like a muscle it was hard to put anything over on him.

Stahr had been his luck — and Stahr was something else again. He was a marker in industry like Edison and Lumiere and Griffith and Chaplin. He led pictures way up past the range and power of the theatre, reaching a sort of golden age before the censorship in 1933. Proof of his leadership was the spying that went on around him — not just for inside information or patented process secrets — but spying on his scent for a trend in taste, his guess as how things were going to be. Too much of his vitality was taken by the mere parrying of these attempts. It made his work secret in part, often devious, slow — and hard to describe as the plans of a general — where the psychological factors become too tenuous and we end by merely adding up the successes and failures. But I have determined to give you a glimpse of him functioning, which is my excuse for what follows. It is drawn partly from a paper I wrote in college on “A Producer’s Day” and partly from my imagination. More often I have blocked in the ordinary events myself, while the stranger ones are true.

In the early morning after the flood, a man walked up to the outside balcony of the AdministrationBuilding. He lingered there some time according to an eyewitness, then mounted to the iron railing and dove head first to the pavement below. Breakage — one arm.

Miss Doolan, Stahr’s secretary, told him about it when he buzzed for her at nine. He had slept in his office without hearing the small commotion.

“Pete Zavras!” Stahr exclaimed, “- the camera man?”

“They took him to a doctor’s office. It won’t be in the paper.”

“Hell of a thing,” he said, “I knew he’d gone to pot — but I don’t know why. He was all right when we used him two years ago — why should he come here? How did he get in?”

“He bluffed it with his old studio pass,” said Catherine Doolan. She was a dry hawk, the wife of an assistant director. “Perhaps the quake had something to do with it.”

“He was the best camera man in town,” Stahr said. When he had heard of the thousands dead at Long Beach he was still haunted by the abortive suicide at dawn. He told Catherine Doolan to trace the matter down.

The first Dictograph messages blew in through the warm morning. While he shaved and had coffee he talked and listened. Robby had left a message: “If Mr. Stahr wants me tell him to hell with it I’m in bed.” An actor was sick or thought so; the Governor of California was bringing a party out; a supervisor had beaten up his wife for the prints and must be “reduced to a writer” — these three affairs were Father’s job — unless the actor was under personal contract to Stahr. There was early snow on a location in Canada with the company already there — Stahr raced over the possibilities of salvage reviewing the story of the picture. Nothing. Stahr called Catherine Doolan.

“I want to speak to the cop who put two women off the back lot last night. I think his name’s Malone.”

“Yes, Mr. Stahr. I’ve got Joe Wyman — about the trousers.”

“Hello Joe,” said Stahr. “Listen — two people at the sneak preview complained that Morgan’s fly was open for half the picture… of course they’re exaggerating but even if it’s only ten feet… no, we can’t find the people but I want that picture run over and over until you find that footage. Get a lot of people in the projection room — somebody’ll spot it.”

Tout passe. — L’art robuste

Seul a l’eternite.

“And there’s the Prince from Denmark,” said Catherine Doolan. “He’s very handsome.” She was impelled to add pointlessly “ — for a tall man.”

“Thanks,” Stahr said. “Thank you, Catherine, I appreciate it that I am now the handsomest small man on the lot. Send the Prince out on the sets and tell him we’ll lunch at one.”

“And Mr. George Boxley — looking very angry in a British way.”

“I’ll see him for ten minutes.”

As she went out he asked:

“Did Robby phone in?”

“No.”

“Call Sound and if he’s been heard from call him and ask him this. Ask him this — did he hear that woman’s name last night. Either of those women. Or anything so they could be traced.”

“Anything else?”

“No, but tell him it’s important while he still remembers. What were they? I mean what kind of people — ask him that too. I mean were they -”

She waited, scratching his words on her pad without looking.

“- oh, were they — questionable? Were they theatrical? Never mind — skip that. Just ask if he knows how they can be traced.”

The policeman, Malone, had known nothing. Two dames and he had hustled ‘em you betcha. One of them was sore. Which one? One of them. They had a car, a Chewy, he thought of taking the license. Was it — the good looker who was sore? It was one of them.

Not which one — he had noticed nothing. Even on the lot here Minna was forgotten. In three years. So much for that then.

Episode 8

Stahr smiled at Mr. George Boxley. It was a kindly fatherly smile Stahr had developed inversely when he was a young man pushed into high places. Originally it had been a smile of respect toward his elders, then as his own decisions grew rapidly to displace theirs, a smile so that they should not feel it — finally emerging as what it was, a smile of kindness sometimes a little hurried and tired but always there, toward anyone who had not angered him within the hour. Or anyone he did not intend to insult aggressive and outright.

Mr. Boxley did not smile back. He came in with the air of being violently dragged though no one apparently had a hand on him. He stood in front of a chair and again it was as if two invisible attendants seized his arms and set him down forcibly into it. He sat there morosely. Even when he lit a cigarette on Stahr’s invitation one felt that the match was held to it by exterior forces he disdained to control.

Stahr looked at him courteously.

“Something not going well, Mr. Boxley?”

The novelist looked back at him in thunderous silence.

“I read your letter,” said Stahr. The tone of the pleasant young headmaster was gone. He spoke as to an equal but with a faint two — edged deference.

“I can’t get what I write on paper,” broke out Boxley. “You’ve all been very decent but it’s a sort of conspiracy. Those two hacks you’ve teamed me with listen to what I say but they spoil it — they seem to have a vocabulary of about a hundred words.”

“Why don’t you write it yourself?” asked Stahr.

“I have. I sent you some.”

“But it was just talk, back and forth,” said Stahr mildly. “Interesting talk but nothing more.”

Now it was all the two ghostly attendants could do to hold Boxley in the deep chair. He struggled to get up; he uttered a single quiet bark which had some relation to laughter but none to amusement, and said:

“I don’t think you people read things. The men are dueling when the conversation takes place. At the end one of them falls into a well and has to be hauled up in a bucket.”

He barked again and subsided.

“Would you write that in a book of your own, Mr. Boxley?”

“What? Naturally not.”

“You’d consider it too cheap.”

“Movie standards are different,” said Boxley hedging.

“Do you ever go to them?”

“No — almost never.”

“Isn’t it because people are always dueling and falling down wells?”

“Yes — and wearing strained facial expressions and talking incredible and unnatural dialogue.”

“Skip the dialogue for a minute,” said Stahr. “Granted your dialogue is more graceful than what these hacks can write — that’s why we brought you out here. But let’s imagine something that isn’t either bad dialogue or jumping down a well. Has your office got a stove in it that lights with a match?”

“I think it has,” said Boxley stiffly, “- but I never use it.”

“Suppose you’re in your office. You’ve been fighting duels or writing all day and you’re too tired to fight or write any more. You’re sitting there staring — dull, like we all get sometimes. A pretty stenographer that you’ve seen before comes into the room and you watch her — idly. She doesn’t see you though you’re very close to her. She takes off her gloves, opens her purse and dumps it out on a table -”

Stahr stood up, tossing his key-ring on his desk.

“She has two dimes and a nickle — and a cardboard match box. She leaves the nickle on the desk, puts the two dimes back into her purse and takes her black gloves to the stove, opens it and puts them inside. There is one match in the match box and she starts to light it kneeling by the stove. You notice that there’s a stiff wind blowing in the window — but just then your telephone rings. The girl picks it up, says hello — listens — and says deliberately into the phone ‘I’ve never owned a pair of black gloves in my life.’ She hangs up, kneels by the stove again, and just as she lights the match you glance around very suddenly and see that there’s another man in the office, watching every move the girl makes -”

Stahr paused. He picked up his keys and put them in his pocket.

“Go on,” said Boxley smiling. “What happens?”

“I don’t know,” said Stahr. “I was just making pictures.”

Boxley felt he was being put in the wrong.

“It’s just melodrama,” he said.

“Not necessarily,” said Stahr. “In any case nobody has moved violently or talked cheap dialogue or had any facial expression at all. There was only one bad line, and a writer like you could improve it. But you were interested.”

“What was the nickle for?” asked Boxley evasively.

“I don’t know,” said Stahr. Suddenly he laughed, “Oh yes — the nickle was for the movies.”

The two invisible attendants seemed to release Boxley. He relaxed, leaned back in his chair and laughed.

“What in hell do you pay me for?” he demanded. “I don’t understand the damn stuff.”

“You will,” said Stahr grinning. “Or you wouldn’t have asked about the nickle.”

A dark saucer-eyed man was waiting in the outer office as they came out.

“Mr. Boxley, this is Mr. Mike Van Dyke,” Stahr said. “What is it, Mike?”

“Nothing,” Mike said. “I just came up to see if you were real.”

“Why don’t you go to work?” Stahr said. “I haven’t had a laugh in the rushes for days.”

“I’m afraid of a nervous breakdown.”

“You ought to keep in form,” Stahr said. “Let’s see you peddle your stuff.” He turned to Boxley. “Mike’s a gag man — he was out here when I was in the cradle. Mike, show Mr. Boxley a double wing, clutch, kick and scram.”

“Here?” asked Mike.

“Here.”

“There isn’t much room. I wanted to ask you about -”

“There’s lots of room.”

“Well,” he looked around tentatively. “You shoot the gun.”

Miss Doolan’s assistant, Katie, took a paper bag, blew it open.

“It was a routine,” Mike said to Boxley “- back in the Keystone days.” He turned to Stahr. “Does he know what a routine is?”

“It means an act,” Stahr explained. “Georgie Jessel talks about ‘Lincoln’s Gettysburg routine.’”

Katie poised the neck of the blown up bag in her mouth. Mike stood with his back to her.

“Ready?” Katie asked. She brought her hand down on the side. Immediately Mike grabbed his bottom with both hands, jumped in the air, slid his feet out on the floor one after the other, remaining in place and flapping his arms twice like a bird -

“Double wing,” said Stahr.

— And then ran-out the screen door which the office boy held open for him and disappeared past the window of the balcony.

“Mr. Stahr,” said Miss Doolan, “Mr. Hanson is on the phone from New York.”

Ten minutes later he clicked his Dictograph and Miss Doolan came in. There was a male star waiting to see him in the outer office Miss Doolan said.

“Tell him I went out by the balcony,” Stahr advised her.

“All right. He’s been in four times this week. He seems very anxious.”

“Did he give you any hint of what he wanted? Isn’t it something he can see Mr. Brady about?”

“He didn’t say. You have a conference coming up. Miss Meloney and Mr. White are outside. Mr. Broaca is next door in Mr. Rienmund’s office.”

“Send -- in,” said Stahr. “Tell him I can see him only for a minute.”

When the handsome actor came in Stahr remained standing.

“What is it that can’t wait?” he asked pleasantly.

The actor waited carefully till Miss Doolan had gone out.

“Monroe, I’m through,” he said. “I had to see you.”

“Through!” said Stahr. “Have you seen ‘Variety’? Your picture’s held over at Roxy’s and did thirty-seven thousand in Chicago last week.”

“That’s the worst of it. That’s the tragedy. I get everything I want and now it means nothing.”

“Well, go on explain.”

“There’s nothing between Esther and me anymore. There never can be again.”

“A row.”

“Oh, no — worse — I can’t bear to mention it. My head’s in a daze. I wander around like a madman. I go through my part as if I was asleep.”

“I haven’t noticed it,” said Stahr. “You were great in your rushes yesterday.”

“Was I? That just shows you nobody ever guesses.”

“Are you trying to tell me that you and Esther are separating?”

“I suppose it’ll come to that. Yes — inevitably — it will.”

“What was it?” demanded Stahr impatiently. “Did she come in without knocking?”

“Oh, there’s nobody else. It’s just — me. I’m through.”

Stahr got it suddenly.

“How do you know?”

“It’s been true for six weeks.”

“It’s your imagination,” said Stahr. “Have you been to a doctor?”

The actor nodded.

“I’ve tried everything. I even — one day in desperation I went down to — to Claris. But it was hopeless. I’m washed up.”

Stahr had an impish temptation to tell him to go to Brady about it. Brady handled all matters of public relations. Or was this private relations. He turned away a moment, got his face in control, turned back.

“I’ve been to Pat Brady,” said the star, as if guessing the thought. “He gave me a lot of phoney advice and I tried it all but nothing doing. Esther and I sit opposite each other at dinner and I’m ashamed to look at her. She’s been a good sport about it but I’m ashamed. I’m ashamed all day long. I think ‘Rainy Day’ grossed 25,000 in Des Moines and broke all records in St. Louis and did 27,000 in Kansas City. My fan mail’s way up and there I am afraid to go home at night, afraid to go to bed.”

Stahr began to be faintly oppressed. When the actor first came in Stahr had intended to invite him to a cocktail party but now it scarcely seemed appropriate. What would he want with a cocktail party with this hanging over him. In his mind’s eye he saw him wandering haunted from guest to guest with a cocktail in his hand and his grosses up 28, 000.

“So I came to you, Monroe. I never saw a situation where you didn’t know a way out. I said to myself even if he advises me to kill myself I’ll ask Monroe.”

The buzzer sounded on Stahr’s desk — he switched on the Dictograph and heard Miss Doolan’s voice.

“Five minutes, Mr. Stahr.”

“I’m sorry,” said Stahr, “I’ll need a few minutes more.”

“Five hundred girls marched to my house from the high school,” the actor said gloomily. “And I stood behind the curtains and watched them. I couldn’t go out.”

“You sit down,” said Stahr. “We’ll take plenty of time and talk this over.”

In the outer office two members of the conference group had already waited ten minutes — Wylie White and Rose Meloney. The latter was a dried up little blonde of fifty about whom one could hear the fifty assorted opinions of Hollywood — “a sentimental dope,” “the best writer on construction in Hollywood,” “a veteran,” “that old hack,” “the smartest woman on the lot,” “the cleverest plagiarist in the biz,” and of course in addition a nymphomaniac, a virgin, a pushover, a lesbian and a faithful wife. Without being an old maid she was like most self-made women rather old maidish. She had ulcers of the stomach and her salary was over a hundred thousand a year. A complicated treatise could be written on whether she was “worth it” or more than that or nothing at all. Her value lay in such ordinary assets as the bare fact that she was a woman and adaptable, quick and trustworthy, “knew the game” and was without egotism. She had been a great friend of Minna’s and over a period of years he had managed to stifle what amounted to a sharp physical revulsion.

She and Wylie waited in silence — occasionally addressing a remark to Miss Doolan. Every few minutes Rienmund the supervisor called up from his office where he and Broaca the director were waiting. After ten minutes Stahr’s button went on and Miss Doolan called Rienmund and Broaca; simultaneously Stahr and the actor came out of Stahr’s office with Stahr holding the man’s arm. He was so wound up now that when Wylie White asked him how he was he opened his mouth and began to tell him then and there.

“Oh, I’ve had an awful time,” he said but Stahr interrupted sharply.

“No you haven’t. Now you go along and do the role the way I said.”

“Thank you, Monroe.”

Rose Meloney looked after him without speaking.

“Somebody been catching flies on him?” she asked, a phrase for stealing scenes.

“I’m sorry I kept you waiting,” Stahr said. “Come on in.”

Episode 9

It was noon already and the conferees were entitled to exactly an hour of Stahr’s time. No less, for such a conference could only be interrupted by a director who was held up in his shooting; seldom much more because every eight days the company must release a production as complex and costly as Reinhardt’s “Miracle.”

Occasionally, less often than five years ago, Stahr would work all through the night on a single picture. But after such a spree he felt bad for days. If he could go from problem to problem there was a certain rebirth of vitality with each change. And like those sleepers who can wake whenever they wish, he had set his psychological clock to run one hour.

The cast assembled included besides the writers Rienmund, one of the most favored of the supervisors, and John Broaca, the picture’s director.

Broaca, on the surface, was an engineer — large and without nerves, quietly resolute, popular. He was an ignoramus and Stahr often caught him making the same scenes over and over — one scene about a rich young girl occurred in all his pictures with the same action, the same business. A bunch of large dogs. entered the room and jumped around the girl. Later the girl went to a stable and slapped a horse on the rump. The explanation was probably not Freudian; more likely that at a drab moment in youth he had looked through a fence and seen a beautiful girl with dogs and horses. As a trademark for glamor it was stamped on his brain forever.

Rienmund was a handsome young opportunist, with a fairly good education. Originally a man of some character he was being daily forced by his anomalous position into devious ways of acting and thinking. He was a bad man now, as men go. At thirty he had none of the virtues which either native Americans or Jews are taught to think admirable. But he got his pictures out in time and by manifesting an almost homosexual fixation on Stahr, seemed to have dulled Stahr’s usual acuteness. Stahr liked him — considered him a good all around man.

Wylie White, of course, would have been recognizable in any country as an intellectual of the second order. He was civilized and voluble, both simple and acute, half dazed half saturnine. His jealousy of Stahr showed only in unguarded flashes, and was mingled with admiration and even affection.

“The production date for this picture is two weeks from Saturday,” said Stahr. “I think basically it’s all right — much improved.”

Rienmund and the two writers exchanged a glance of congratulation.

“Except for one thing,” said Stahr, thoughtfully. “I don’t see why it should be produced at all and I’ve decided to put it away.”

There was a moment of shocked silence — and then murmurs of protest, stricken queries.

“It’s not your fault,” Stahr said. “I thought there was something there that wasn’t there — that was all.” He hesitated, looking regretfully at Rienmund. “It’s too bad — it was a good play. We paid fifty thousand for it.”

“What’s the matter with it, Monroe?” asked Broaca bluntly.

“Well, it hardly seems worth while to go into it,” said Stahr.

Rienmund and Wylie White were both thinking of the professional effect on them. Rienmund had two pictures to his account this year — but Wylie White needed a credit to start his comeback to the scene. Rose Meloney was watching Stahr closely from little skull-like eyes.

“Couldn’t you give us some clue?” Rienmund asked. “This is a good deal of a blow, Monroe.”

“I just wouldn’t put Margaret Sullavan in it,” said Stahr. “Or Colman either. I wouldn’t advise them to play it -”

“Specifically, Monroe,” begged Wylie White. “What didn’t you like? The scenes? the dialogue? the humor? construction?”

Stahr picked up the script from his desk, let it fall as if it were physically too heavy to handle.

“I don’t like the people,” he said. “I wouldn’t like to meet them — if I knew they were going to be somewhere I’d go somewhere else.”

Rienmund smiled but there was worry in his eyes.

“Well, that’s a damning criticism,” he said. “I thought the people were rather interesting.”

“So did I,” said Broaca. “I thought Em was very sympathetic.”

“Did you?” asked Stahr sharply. “I could just barely believe she was alive. And when I came to the end I said to myself ‘So what?’”

“There must be something to do,” Rienmund said. “Naturally we feel bad about this. This is the structure we agreed on -”

“But it’s not the story,” said Stahr. “I’ve told you many times that the first thing I decide is the kind of story I want. We change in every other regard but once that is set we’ve got to work toward it with every line and movement. This is not the kind of a story I want. The story we bought had shine and glow — it was a happy story. This is all full of doubt and hesitation. The hero and heroine stop loving each other over trifles — then they start up again over trifles. After the first sequence you don’t care if she never sees him again or he her.”

“That’s my fault,” said Wylie suddenly. “You see, Monroe, I don’t think stenographers have the same dumb admiration for their bosses they had in 1929. They’ve been laid off — they’ve seen their bosses jittery. The world has moved on, that’s all.”

Stahr looked at him impatiently, gave a short nod.

“That’s not under discussion,” he said. “The premise of this story is that the girl did have dumb admiration for her boss if you want to call it that. And there wasn’t any evidence that he’d ever been jittery. When you make her doubt him in any way you have a different kind of story. Or rather you haven’t anything at all. These people are extraverts — get that straight — and I want them to extravert all over the lot. When I want to do a Eugene O’Neill play I’ll buy one.”

Rose Meloney who had never taken her eyes off Stahr knew it was going to be all right now. If he had really been going to abandon the picture he wouldn’t have gone at it like this. She had been in this game longer than any of them except Broaca with whom she had had a three day affair twenty years ago.

Stahr turned to Rienmund.

“You ought to have understood from the casting, Rieny, what kind of a picture I wanted. I started marking the lines that Carroll and MacMurray couldn’t say and got tired of it. Remember this in future — if I order a limousine I want that kind of car. And the fastest midget racer you ever saw wouldn’t do. Now -” He looked around. “Shall we go any farther? Now that I’ve told you I don’t even like the kind of picture this is? Shall we go on? We’ve got two weeks. At the end of that time I’m going to put Carroll and MacMurray into this or something else — is it worth while?”

“Well naturally,” said Rienmund, “I think it is. I feel bad about this. I should have warned Wylie. I thought he had some good ideas.”

“Monroe’s right,” said Broaca bluntly. “I felt this was wrong all the time but I couldn’t put my finger on it.”

Wylie and Rose looked at him contemptuously and exchanged a glance.

“Do you writers think you can get hot on it again?” asked Stahr, not unkindly. “Or shall I try somebody fresh?”

“I’d like another shot,” said Wylie.

“How about you, Rose?”

She nodded briefly.

“What do you think of the girl?” asked Stahr.

“Well — naturally I’m prejudiced in her favor.”

“You better forget it,” said Stahr warningly. “Ten million Americans would put thumbs down on that girl if she walked on the screen. We’ve got an hour and twenty-five minutes on the screen — you show a woman being unfaithful to a man for one-third of that time and you’ve given the impression that she’s one-third whore.”

“Is that a big proportion?” asked Rose slyly, and they laughed.

“It is for me,” said Stahr thoughtfully, “even if it wasn’t for the Hays office. If you want to paint a scarlet letter on her back it’s all right but that’s another story. Not this story. This is a future wife and mother. However — however -”

He pointed his pencil at Wylie White.

“- this has as much passion as that Oscar on my desk.”

“What the hell!” said Wylie. “She’s full of it. Why she goes to -”

“She’s loose enough,” said Stahr, “- but that’s all. There’s one scene in the play better than all this you cooked up and you’ve left it out. When she’s trying to make the time pass by changing her watch.”

“It didn’t seem to fit,” Wylie apologized.

“Now,” said Stahr, “I’ve got about fifty ideas. I’m going to call Miss Doolan.” He pressed a button. “- and if there’s anything you don’t understand speak up -”

Miss Doolan slid in almost imperceptibly. Pacing the floor swiftly Stahr began. In the first place he wanted to tell them what kind of a girl she was — what kind of a girl he approved of here. She was a perfect girl with a few small faults as in the play but a perfect girl not because the public wanted her that way but because it was the kind of girl that he, Stahr, liked to see in this sort of picture. Was that clear? It was no character role. She stood for health, vitality, ambition and love. What gave the play its importance was entirely a situation in which she found herself. She became possessed of a secret that affected a great many lives. There was a right thing and a wrong thing to do — at first it was not plain which was which but when it was she went right away and did it. That was the kind of story this was — thin, clean and shining. No doubts.

“She has never heard the word labor troubles,” he said with a sigh. “She might be living in 1929. Is it plain what kind of girl I want?”

“It’s very plain, Monroe.”

“Now about the things she does,” said Stahr. “At all times, at all moments when she is on the screen in our sight she wants to sleep with Ken Willard. Is that plain, Wylie?”

“Passionately plain.”

“Whatever she does it is in place of sleeping with Ken Willard. If she walks down the street she is walking to sleep with Ken Willard, if she eats her food it is to give her strength to sleep with Ken Willard. But at no time do you give the impression that she would ever consider sleeping with Ken Willard unless they were properly sanctified. I’m ashamed of having to tell you these kindergarten facts but they have somehow leaked out of the story.”

He opened the script and began to go through it page by page. Miss Doolan’s notes would be typed in quintuplicate and given to them but Rose Meloney made notes of her own. Broaca put his hand up to his half closed eyes — he could remember “when a director was something out here,” when writers were gag men or eager and ashamed young reporters full of whiskey — a director was all there was then. No supervisor — no Stahr.

He started wide awake as he heard his name.

“It would be nice, John, if you could put the boy on a pointed roof and let him walk around and keep the camera on him. You might get a nice feeling — not danger, not suspense, not pointing for anything — a kid on the roof in the morning.”

Broaca brought himself back in the room.

“All right,” he said. “- just an element of danger.”

“Not exactly,” said Stahr. “He doesn’t start to fall off the roof. Break into the next scene with it.”

“Through the window,” suggested Rose Meloney. “He could climb in his sister’s window.”

“That’s a good transition,” said Stahr. “Right into the diary scene.”

Broaca was wide awake now.

“I’ll shoot up at him,” he said. “Let him go away from the camera. Just a fixed shot from quite a distance — let him go away from the camera. Don’t follow him. Pick him up in a close shot and let him go away again. No attention on him except against the whole roof and the sky.” He liked the shot — it was a director’s shot that didn’t come up on every page any more. He might use a crane — it would be cheaper in the end than building the roof on the ground with a process sky. That was one thing about Stahr — the literal sky was the limit. He had worked with Jews too long to believe legends that they were small with money.

“In the third sequence have him hit the priest,” Stahr said. “What!” Wylie cried, “- and have the Catholics on our neck.” “I’ve talked to Joe Breen. Priests have been hit. It doesn’t reflect on them.”

His quiet voice ran on — stopped abruptly as Miss Doolan glanced at the clock.

“Is that too much to do before Monday?” he asked Wylie. Wylie looked at Rose and she looked back not even bothering to nod. He saw their week-end melting away, but he was a different man from when he entered the room. When you were paid fifteen hundred a week emergency work was one thing you did not skimp, nor when your picture was threatened. As a “free lance” writer Wylie had failed from lack of caring but here was Stahr to care, for all of them. The effect would not wear off when he left the office — not anywhere within the walls of the lot. He felt a great purposefulness. The mixture of common sense, wise sensibility, theatrical ingenuity, and a certain half naive conception of the common weal which Stahr had just stated aloud, inspired him to do his part, to get his block of stone in place, even if the effort were foredoomed, the result as dull as a pyramid.

Out the window Rose Meloney watched the trickle streaming toward the commissary. She would have her lunch in her office and knit a few rows while it came. The man was coming at one-fifteen with the French perfume smuggled over the Mexican border. That was no sin — it was like prohibition.

Broaca watched as Rienmund fawned upon Stahr. He sensed that Rienmund was on his way up — not yet. He received seven hundred and fifty a week for his partial authority over directors, writers and stars who got much more. He wore a cheap English shoe he bought near the Beverly Wilshire and Broaca hoped they hurt his feet, but soon now he would order his shoes from Peal’s and put away his little green alpine hat with a feather. Broaca was years ahead of him. He had a fine record in the war but he had never felt quite the same with himself since he had let Ike Franklin strike him in the face with his open hand.

There was smoke in the room and behind it, behind his great desk Stahr was withdrawing further and further, in all courtesy, still giving Rienmund an ear and Miss Doolan an ear. The conference was over.

[Stahr was to have received the Danish Prince Agge, who “wanted to learn about pictures from the Beginning” and who in the author’s cast of characters is described as an “early Fascist.” — Edmund Wilson’s explanation note]

“Any messages?”

“Mr. Robinson called in,” Miss Doolan said, as he started for the commissary. “One of the women told him her name but he’s forgotten it — he thinks it was Smith or Brown or Jones.”

“That’s a great help.”

“And he remembers she says she just moved to Los Angeles.”

“I remember she had a silver belt,” Stahr said, “with stars cut out of it.”

“I’m still trying to find out more about Pete Zavras. I talked to his wife.”

“What did she say?”

“Oh, they’ve had an awful time — given up their house — she’s been sick -”

“Is the eye trouble hopeless?”

“She didn’t seem to know anything about the state of his eyes. She didn’t even know he was going blind.”

“That’s funny.”

He thought about it on the way to luncheon but it was as confusing as the actor’s trouble this morning. Troubles about people’s health didn’t seem within his range — he gave no thought to his own. In the lane beside the commissary he stepped back as an open electric truck crammed with girls in the bright costumes of the regency came rolling in from the back lot. The dresses were fluttering in the wind, the young painted faces looked at him curiously and he smiled as it went by.

Episode 10

Eleven men and their guest Prince Agge sat at lunch in the private dining room of the studio commissary. They were the money men — they were the rulers and unless there was a guest they ate in broken silence, sometimes asking questions about each other’s wives and children, sometimes discharging a single absorption from the forefront of their consciousness. Eight out of the ten were Jews — five of the ten were foreign born, including a Greek and an Englishman — and they had all known each other for a long time: there was a rating in the group, from old Marcus down to old Leanbaum who had bought the most fortunate block of stock in the business and never was allowed to spend over a million a year producing.

Old Marcus functioned with disquieting resilience. Some never-atrophying instinct warned him of danger, of gangings up against him — he was never so dangerous himself as when others considered him surrounded. His grey face had attained such immobility that even those who were accustomed to watch the reflex of the inner corner of his eye could no longer see it — nature had grown a little white whisker there to conceal it; his armor was complete.

As he was the oldest, Stahr was the youngest of the group — not by many years at this date, though he had first sat with most of these men when he was a boy wonder of twenty-two. Then, more than now, he had been a money man among money men. Then he had been able to figure costs in his head with a speed and accuracy that dazzled them — for they were not wizards or even experts in that regard, despite the popular conception of Jews in finance. Most of them owed their success to different and incompatible qualities. But in a group a tradition carries along the less adept, and they were content to look at Stahr for the sublimated auditing and experience a sort of glow as if they had done it themselves like rooters at a football game.

Stahr, as will presently be seen, had grown away from that particular gift, though it was always there.

Prince Agge sat between Stahr and Mort Flieshacker the company lawyer and across from Joe Popolous the theatre owner. He was hostile to Jews in a vague general way that he tried to cure himself of. As a turbulent man, serving his time in the Foreign Legion, he thought that Jews were too fond of their own skins. But he was willing to concede that they might be different in America under different circumstances, and certainly he found Stahr was much of a man in every way. For the rest — he thought most business men were dull dogs — for final reference he reverted always to the blood of Bernadotte in his veins.

My father — I will call him Mr. Brady as Prince Agge did when he told me of this luncheon — was worried about a picture and when Leanbaum went out early he came up and took his chair opposite.

“How about the South America picture idea, Monroe?” he asked.

Prince Agge noticed a blink of attention toward them as distinct as if a dozen pair of eyelashes had made the sound of batting wings. Then silence again.

“We’re going ahead with it,” said Stahr.

“With that same budget?” Brady asked.

Stahr nodded.

“It’s out of proportion,” said Brady. “There won’t be any miracle in these bad times — no ‘Hell’s Angels’ or ‘Ben-Hur’ when you throw it away and get it back.”

Probably the attack was planned, for Popolous, the Greek, took up the matter in a sort of double talk that reminded Prince Agge of Mike Van Dyke except that it tried to be and succeeded in being clear instead of confusing.

“It’s not adoptable, Monroe, in as we wish adopt to this times in as it changes. It what could be done as we run the gamut of prosperity is scarcely conceptuable now.”

“What do you think, Mr. Marcus?” asked Stahr.

All eyes followed his down the table but as if forewarned Mr. Marcus had already signalled his private waiter behind him that he wished to rise, and was even now in a basket-like position in the waiter’s arms. He looked at them with such helplessness that it was hard to realize that in the evenings he sometimes went dancing with his young Canadian girl.

“Monroe is our production genius,” he said. “I count upon Monroe and lean heavily upon him. I have not seen the flood myself.”

There was a moment of silence as he moved from the room.

“There’s not a two million dollar gross in the country now,” said Brady.

“Is not,” agreed Popolous. “Even as if so you could grab them by the head and push them by and in, is not.”

“Probably not,” agreed Stahr. He paused as if to make sure that all were listening. “I think we can count on a million and a quarter from the road-show. Perhaps a million and a half altogether. And a quarter of a million abroad.”

Again there was silence — this time puzzled, a little confused. Over his shoulder Stahr asked the waiter to be connected with his office on the phone.

“But your budget?” said Flieshacker. “Your budget is seventeen hundred and fifty thousand, I understand. And your expectations only add up to that without profit.”

“Those aren’t my expectations,” said Stahr. “We’re not sure of more than a million and a half.”

The room had grown so motionless that Prince Agge could hear a grey chunk of ash fall from a cigar in midair. Flieshacker started to speak, his face fixed with amazement, but a phone had been handed over Stahr’s shoulder.

“Your office, Mr. Stahr.”

“Oh yes — oh, hello Miss Doolan. I’ve figured it out about Zavras. It’s one of these lousy rumors — I’ll bet my shirt on it…. Oh, you did. Good…. Good. Now here’s what to do — send him to my oculist this afternoon, Dr. John Kennedy, and have him get a report and have it photostated — you understand.”

He hung up — turned with a touch of passion to the table at large.

“Did any of you ever hear a story that Pete Zavras was going blind?”

There were a couple of nods. But most of those present were poised breathlessly on whether Stahr had slipped on his figures a minute before.

“It’s pure bunk. He says he’s never even been to an oculist — never knew why the studios turned against him,” said Stahr. “Somebody didn’t like him or somebody talked too much and he’s been out of work for a year.”

There was a conventional murmur of sympathy. Stahr signed the check and made as though to get up.

“Excuse me, Monroe,” said Flieshacker persistently, while Brady and Popolous watched, “I’m fairly new here and perhaps I fail to comprehend implicitly and explicitly.” He was talking fast but the veins on his forehead bulged with pride at the big words from N. Y. U. “Do I understand you to say you expect to gross a quarter million short of your budget?”

“It’s a quality picture,” said Stahr with assumed innocence.

It had dawned on them all now but they still felt there was a trick in it. Stahr really thought it would make money. No one in his senses -

“For two years we’ve played safe,” said Stahr. “It’s time we made a picture that’ll lose some money. Write it off as good will — this’ll bring in new customers.”

Some of them still thought he meant it was a flyer and a favorable one but he left them in no doubt.

“It’ll lose money,” he said as he stood up, his jaw just slightly out and his eyes smiling and shining. “It would be a bigger miracle than ‘Hell’s Angels’ if it broke even. But we have a certain duty to the public as Pat Brady says at Academy dinners. It’s a good thing for the production schedule to slip in a picture that’ll lose money.”

He nodded at Prince Agge. As the latter made his bows quickly he tried to take in with a last glance the general effect of what Stahr said, but he could tell nothing. The eyes not so much downcast as fixed upon an indefinite distance just above the table were all blinking quickly now but there was not a whisper in the room.

Coming out of the private dining room they passed through a corner of the commissary proper. Prince Agge drank it in — eagerly. It was gay with gypsies and with citizens and soldiers with the sideburns and braided coats of the First Empire. From a little distance they were men who lived and walked a hundred years ago and Agge wondered how he and the men of his time would look as extras in some future costume picture.

Then he saw Abraham Lincoln and his whole feeling suddenly changed. He had been brought up in the dawn of Scandanavian socialism where Nicolay’s biography was much read. He had been told Lincoln was a great man whom he should admire and he had hated him instead because he was forced upon him. But now seeing him sitting here, his legs crossed, his kindly face fixed on a forty cent dinner, including dessert, his shawl wrapped around him as if to protect himself from the erratic air — cooling — now Prince Agge, who was in America at last, stared as a tourist at the mummy of Lenin in the Kremlin. This then was Lincoln. Stahr had walked on far ahead of him, turned waiting for him — but still Agge stared.

— This then, he thought, was what they all meant to be.

Lincoln suddenly raised a triangle of pie and jammed it in his mouth and, a little frightened, Prince Agge hurried to join Stahr.

“I hope you’re getting what you want,” said Stahr feeling he had neglected him. “We’ll have some rushes in half an hour and then you can go on to as many sets as you want.”

“I should rather stay with you,” said Prince Agge.

“I’ll see what there is for me,” said Stahr. “Then we’ll go on together.”

There was the Japanese consul on the release of a spy story which might offend the national sensibilities of Japan. There were phone calls and telegrams. There was some further information from Robby.

“Now he remembers the name of the woman was Smith,” said Miss Doolan. “He asked her if she wanted to come on the lot and get some dry shoes and she said no — so she can’t sue.”

“That’s pretty bad for a total recall — ‘Smith.’ That’s a great help.” He thought a moment. “Ask the phone company for a list of Smiths that have taken new phones here in the last month. Call them all.”

“All right.”

Chapter 4

For Episode 11

“How you, Monroe,” said Red Ridingwood. “I’m glad you came down.”

Stahr walked past him, heading across the great stage toward a set that would be used tomorrow. Director Ridingwood followed, realizing suddenly that Stahr walked a step or two ahead. He recognized the indication of displeasure — his own metier was largely the “delivery” of situations through mimetic business. He didn’t know what the trouble was but he was a top director and not alarmed. Goldwyn had once interfered with him, and Ridingwood had led Goldwyn into trying to act out a pan in front of fifty actors — with the result that he anticipated. His own authority had been restored.

Stahr reached the set and stared at it.

“It’s no good,” said Ridingwood. “I don’t care how you light it -”

“Why did you call me about it?” Stahr asked standing close to him. “Why didn’t you take it up with Art?”

“I didn’t ask you to come down, Monroe.”

“You wanted to be your own supervisor.”

“I’m sorry, Monroe,” said Ridingwood patiently. “But I didn’t ask you to come down.”

Stahr turned suddenly and walked back toward the camera set up. The eyes and open mouths of a group of visitors moved momentarily off the heroine of the picture, took in Stahr and then moved vacantly back to the heroine again. They were Knights of Columbus. They had seen the Host carried in procession but this was the dream made flesh.

Stahr stopped beside her chair. She wore a low gown which displayed the bright eczema of her chest and back. Before each take the blemished surface was plastered over with an emollient, which was removed immediately after the take. Her hair was of the color and viscosity of drying blood but there was starlight that actually photographed in her eyes.

Before Stahr could speak he heard a helpful voice behind him:

“She’s radiunt. Absolutely radiunt.”

It was an assistant director and the intention was delicate compliment. The actress was being complimented so that she did not have to strain her poor skin to bend and hear. Stahr was being complimented for having her under contract. Ridingwood was being remotely complimented.

“Everything all right?” Stahr asked her pleasantly.

“Oh, it’s fine,” she agreed, “- except for the -ing publicity men.”

He winked at her gently.

“We’ll keep them away,” he said.

Her name had become currently synonymous with the expression “bitch.” Presumably she had modelled herself after one of those queens in the Tarzan comics who rule mysteriously over a nation of blacks. She regarded the rest of the world as black. She was a necessary evil, borrowed for a single picture.

Ridingwood walked with Stahr toward the door of the stage.

“Everything’s all right,” the director said. “She’s as good as she can be.”

They were out of hearing range and Stahr stopped suddenly and looked at Red with blazing eyes.

“You’ve been photographing crap,” he said. “Do you know what she reminds me of in the rushes — ‘Miss Foodstuffs.’”

“I’m trying to get the best performance -”

“Come along with me,” said Stahr abruptly.

“With you? Shall I tell them to rest?”

“Leave it as it is,” said Stahr, pushing the padded outer door.

His car and chauffeur waited outside. Minutes were precious most days.

“Get in,” said Stahr.

Red knew now it was serious. He even knew all at once what was the matter. The girl had got the whip hand on him the first day with her cold lashing tongue. He was a peace — loving man and he had let her walk through her part cold rather than cause trouble.

Stahr spoke into his thoughts.

“You can’t handle her,” he said. “I told you what I wanted. I wanted her mean — and she comes out bored. I’m afraid we’ll have to call it off, Red.”

“The picture?”

“No. I’m putting Harley on it.”

“All right, Monroe.”

“I’m sorry, Red. We’ll try something else another time.”

The car drew up in front of Stahr’s office.

“Shall I finish this take?” said Red.

“It’s being done now,” said Stahr grimly. “Harley’s in there.”

“What the hell -”

“He went in when we came out. I had him read the script last night.”

“Now listen, Monroe -”

“It’s my busy day, Red,” said Stahr tersely. “You lost interest about three days ago.”

It was a sorry mess Ridingwood thought. It meant he would have to do the next picture he was offered whether he liked it or not. It meant a slight, very slight loss of position — it probably meant that he could not have a third wife just now as he had planned. There wasn’t even the satisfaction in raising a row about it — if you disagreed with Stahr you did not advertise it. Stahr was his world’s great customer who was always — almost always right.

“How about my coat?” he asked suddenly. “I left it over a chair on the set.”

“I know you did,” said Stahr. “Here it is.”

He was trying so hard to be charitable about Ridingwood’s lapse that he had forgotten that he had it in his hand.

Episode 11

“Mr. Stahr’s Projection Room” was a miniature picture theatre with four rows of overstuffed chairs. In front of the front row ran long tables with dim lamps, buzzers and telephones. Against the wall was an upright piano, left there since the early days of sound. The room had been redecorated and reupholstered only a year before but already it was ragged again with work and hours.

Here Stahr sat at two-thirty and again at six-thirty watching the lengths of film taken during the day. There was often a savage tensity about the occasion — he was dealing with faits accomplis — the net result of months of buying, planning, writing and rewriting, casting, constructing, lighting, rehearsing and shooting — the fruit alike of brilliant hunches or counsels of despair, of lethargy, conspiracy and sweat. At this point the tortuous manoeuvre was staged and in suspension — these were reports from the battle-line.

Besides Stahr there were present the representatives of all technical departments together with the supervisors and unit managers of the pictures concerned. The directors did not appear at these showings — officially because their work was considered done — actually because few punches were pulled here as money ran out in silver spools. There had evolved a delicate staying away.

The staff was already assembled. Stahr came in and took his place quickly and the murmur of conversation died away. As he sat back and drew his thin knee up beside him in the chair the lights in the room went out. There was the flare of a match in the back row — then silence.

On the screen a troop of French Canadians pushed their canoes up a rapids. The scene had been photographed in a studio tank and at the end of each take after the director’s voice could be heard saying “Cut,” the actors on the screen relaxed and wiped their brows and sometimes laughed hilariously — and the water in the tank stopped flowing and the illusion ceased. Except to name his choice from each set of takes and to remark that it was “a good process,” Stahr made no comment.

The next scene, still in the rapids, called for dialogue between the Canadian girl (Claudette Colbert) and the coureur du bois (Ronald Colman) with her looking down at him from a canoe. After a few strips had run through Stahr spoke up suddenly.

“Has the tank been dismantled?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Monroe — they needed it for -”

Stahr cut in peremptorily.

“Have it set up again right away. Let’s have that second take again.”

The lights went on momentarily. One of the unit managers left his chair and came and stood in front of Stahr.

“A beautifully acted scene thrown away,” raged Stahr quietly. “It wasn’t centered. The camera was set up so it caught the beautiful top of Claudette’s head all the time she was talking. That’s) just what we want, isn’t it? That’s just what people go to see — the top of a beautiful girl’s head. Tell Tim he could have saved wear and tear by using her stand-in.”

The lights went out again. The unit manager squatted by Stahr’s chair to be out of the way. The take was run again.

“Do you see now?” asked Stahr. “And there’s a hair in the picture — there on the right, see it? Find out if it’s in the projector or the film.”

At the very end of the take Claudette Colbert slowly lifted her head revealing her great liquid eyes.

“That’s what we should have had all the way,” said Stahr. “She gave a fine performance too. See if you can fit it in tomorrow or late this afternoon.”

— Pete Zavras would not have made a slip like that. There were not six camera men in the industry you could entirely trust.

The lights went on; the supervisor and unit manager for that picture went out.

“Monroe, this stuff was shot yesterday — it came through late last night.”

The room darkened. On the screen appeared the head of Siva, immense and imperturbable, oblivious to the fact that in a few hours it was to be washed away in a flood. Around it milled a crowd of the faithful.

“When you take that scene again,” said Stahr suddenly, “put a couple of little kids up on top. You better check about whether it’s reverent or not but I think it’s all right. Kids’ll do anything.”

“Yes, Monroe.”

A silver belt with stars cut out of it…. Smith, Jones or Brown…. Personal — will the woman with the silver belt who — ?

With another picture the scene shifted to New York, a gangster story, and suddenly Stahr became restive.

“That scene’s trash,” he called suddenly in the darkness. “It’s badly written, it’s miscast, it accomplishes nothing. Those types aren’t tough. They look like a lot of dressed up lollypops — what the hell is the matter. Mort?”

“The scene was written on the set this morning,” said Mort Flieshacker. “Burton wanted to get all the stuff on Stage 6.”

“Well — it’s trash. And so is this one. There’s no use printing stuff like that. She doesn’t believe what she’s saying — neither does Cary. ‘I love you’ in a close-up — they’ll cluck you out of the house! And the girl’s overdressed.”

In the darkness a signal was given, the projector stopped, the lights went on. The room waited in utter silence. Stahr’s face was expressionless.

“Who wrote the scene?” he asked after a minute.

“Wylie White.”

“Is he sober?”

“Sure he is.”

Stahr considered.

“Put about four writers on that scene tonight,” he said. “See who we’ve got. Is Sidney Howard here yet?”

“He got in this morning.”

“Talk to him about it. Explain to him what I want there. The girl is in deadly terror — she’s stalling. It’s as simple as that. People don’t have three emotions at once. And Kapper -”

The art director leaned his head forward out of the second row.

“Yeah.”

“There’s something the matter with that set.”

There were little glances exchanged all over the room.

“What is it, Monroe?”

“You tell me,” said Stahr. “It’s crowded. It doesn’t carry your eye out. It looks cheap.”

“It wasn’t.”

“I know it wasn’t. There’s not much the matter but there’s something. Go over and take a look tonight. It may be too much furniture — or the wrong kind. Perhaps a window would help. Couldn’t you force the perspective in that hall a little more?”

“I’ll see what I can do.” Kapper edged his way out of the row looking at his watch.

“I’ll have to get at it right away,” he said. “I’ll work tonight and we’ll put it up in the morning.”

“All right. Mort, you can shoot around those scenes, can’t you?”

“I think so, Monroe.”

“I take the blame for this. Have you got the fight stuff?”

“Coming up now.”

Stahr nodded. Kapper hurried out and the room went dark again. On the screen four men staged a terrific socking match in a cellar. Stahr laughed.

“Look at Tracy,” he said. “Look at him go down after that guy. I bet he’s been in a few.”

The men fought over and over. Always the same fight. Always at the end they faced each other smiling, sometimes touching the opponent in a friendly gesture on the shoulder. The only one in danger was the stunt man, a pug who could have murdered the other three. He was in danger only if they swung wild and didn’t follow the blows he had taught them. Even so the youngest actor was afraid for his face and the director had covered his flinches with ingenious angles and interpositions.

And then two men met endlessly in a door, recognized each other and went on. They met, they started, they went on. They did it wrong. Again they met, they started, they went on.

Then a little girl read underneath a tree with a boy reading on a limb of the tree above. The little girl was bored and wanted to talk to the boy. He would pay no attention. The core of the apple he was eating fell on the little girl’s head.

A voice spoke up out of the darkness:

“It’s pretty long, isn’t it, Monroe?”

“Not a bit,” said Stahr. “It’s nice. It has nice feeling.”

“I just thought it was long.”

“Sometimes ten feet can be too long — sometimes a scene two hundred feet long can be too short. I want to speak to the cutter before he touches this scene — this is something that’ll be remembered in the picture.”

The oracle had spoken. There was nothing to question or argue. Stahr must be right always, not most of the time, but always — or the structure would melt down like gradual butter.

Another hour passed. Dreams hung in fragments at the far end of the room, suffered analysis, passed — to be dreamed in crowds, or else discarded. The end was signalled by two tests, a character man and a girl. After the rushes, which had a tense rhythm of their own, the tests were smooth and finished — the observers settled in their chairs — Stahr’s foot slipped to the floor. Opinions were welcome. One of the technical men let it be known that he would willingly cohabit with the girl — the rest were indifferent.

“Somebody sent up a test of that girl two years ago. She must be getting around — but she isn’t getting any better. But the man’s good. Can’t we use him as the old Russian Prince in ‘Steppes’?”

“He is an old Russian Prince,” said the casting director. “But he’s ashamed of it. He’s a Red. And that’s one part he says he wouldn’t play.”

“It’s the only part he could play,” said Stahr.

The lights went on. Stahr rolled his gum into its wrapper and put it in an ash-tray. He turned questionmgly to his secretary.

“The processes on Stage 2,” she said.

He looked in briefly at the processes, moving pictures taken against a background of other moving pictures by an ingenious device. There was a meeting in Marcus’ office on the subject of “Manon” with a happy ending and Stahr had his say on that as he had before — it had been making money without a happy ending for a century and a half. He was obdurate — at this time in the afternoon he was at his most fluent and the opposition faded into another subject — they would lend a dozen stars to the benefit for those the quake had made homeless at Long Beach. In a sudden burst of giving five of them all at once made up a purse of twenty-five thousand dollars. They gave well but not as poor men give. It was not charity.

At his office there was word from the oculist to whom he had sent Pete Zavras that the camera man’s eyes were 20/19, approximately perfect. He had written a letter that Zavras was having photostated. Stahr walked around his office cockily while Miss Doolan admired him. Prince Agge had dropped in to thank him for his afternoon on the sets and while they talked a cryptic word came from a supervisor that some writers named Marquand had “found out” and were about to quit.

“These are good writers,” Stahr explained to Prince Agge. “And we don’t have good writers out here.”

“Why you can hire anyone!” exclaimed his visitor in surprise.

“Oh we hire them but when they get out here they’re not good writers — so we have to work with the material we have.”

“Like what?”

“Anybody that’ll accept the system and stay decently sober — we have all sorts of people — disappointed poets, one-hit playwrights, college girls — we put them on an idea in pairs and if it slows down we put two more writers working behind them. I’ve had as many as three pairs working independently on the same idea.”

“Do they like that?”

“Not if they know about it. They’re not geniuses — none of them could make as much any other way. But these Marquands are a husband and wife team from the East — pretty good playwrights. They’ve just found out they’re not alone on the story and it shocks them — shocks their sense of unity — that’s the word they’ll use.”

“But what does make the — the unity?”

Stahr hesitated — his face was grim except that his eyes twinkled.

“I’m the unity,” he said. “Come and see us again.”

He saw the Marquands. He told them he liked their work, looking at Mrs. Marquand as if he could read her handwriting through the typescript. He told them kindly that he was taking them from the picture and putting them on another where there was less pressure, more time. As he had half expected they begged to stay on the first picture, seeing a quicker credit even though it was shared with others. The system was a shame, he admitted — gross, commercial, to be deplored. He had originated it — a fact that he did not mention.

When they had gone Miss Doolan came in triumphant.

“Mr. Stahr, the lady with the belt is on the phone.”

Stahr walked in to his office alone and sat down behind his desk and picked up the phone with a great sinking of his stomach. He did not know what he wanted. He had not thought about the matter as he had thought of the matter of Pete Zavras. At first he had only wanted to know if they were “professional” people, if the woman was an actress who had got herself up to look like Minna as he had once had a young actress made up like Claudette Colbert and photographed her from the same angles.

“Hello,” he said.

“Hello.”

As he searched the short, rather surprised word for a vibration of

last night, the feeling of terror began to steal over him and he choked it off with an effort of will.

“Well — you were hard to find,” he said. “Smith — and you moved here recently. That was all we had. And a silver belt.”

“Oh yes,” the voice said, still uneasy, unpoised, “I had on a silver belt last night.”

Now, where from here?

“Who are you?” the voice said, with a touch of flurried bourgeois dignity.

“My name is Monroe Stahr,” he said.

A pause. It was a name that never appeared on the screen and she seemed to have trouble placing it.

“Oh yes — yes. You were the husband of Minna Davis.”

“Yes.”

Was it a trick? As the whole vision of last night came back to him — the very skin with that peculiar radiance as if phosphorus had touched it, he thought if it were a trick to reach him from somewhere. Not Minna and yet Minna. The curtains blew suddenly into the room, the papers whispered on his desk and his heart cringed faintly at the intense reality of the day outside his window. If he could go out now this way what would happen if he saw her again — the starry veiled expression, the mouth strongly formed for poor brave human laughter.

“I’d like to see you. Would you like to come to the studio?”

Again the hesitancy — then a blank refusal.

“Oh, I don’t think I ought to. I’m awfully sorry.”

This last was purely formal, a brush off, a final axe. Ordinary skin-deep vanity came to Stahr’s aid, adding persuasion to his urgency.

“I’d like to see you,” he said. “There’s a reason.”

“Well — I’m afraid that -”

“Could I come and see you?”

A pause again not from hesitation, he felt, but to assemble her answer.

“There’s something you don’t know,” she said finally.

“Oh, you’re probably married.” He was impatient. “It has nothing to do with that. I asked you to come here openly, bring your husband if you have one.”

“It’s — it’s quite impossible.”

“Why?”

“I feel silly even talking to you but your secretary insisted — I thought I’d dropped something in the flood last night and you’d found it.”

“I want very much to see you for five minutes.”

“To put me in the movies.”

“That wasn’t my idea.”

There was such a long pause that he thought he had offended her.

“Where could I meet you?” she asked unexpectedly.

“Here? At your house?”

“No — somewhere outside.”

Suddenly Stahr could think of no place. His own house — a restaurant. Where did people meet — a house of assignation, a cocktail bar?

“I’ll meet you somewhere at nine o’clock,” she said.

“That’s impossible, I’m afraid.”

“Then never mind.”

“All right then nine o’clock, but can we make it near here? There’s a drug store on Wilshire -”

br>

It was quarter to six. There were two men outside who had come every day at this time only to be postponed. This was an hour of fatigue — the men’s business was not so important that it must be seen to, nor so insignificant that it could be ignored. So he postponed it again and sat motionless at his desk for a moment thinking about Russia. Not so much about Russia as about the picture about Russia which would consume a hopeless half hour presently. He knew there were many stories about Russia, not to mention The Story, and he had employed a squad of writers and research men for over a year but all the stories involved had the wrong feel. He felt it could be told in terms of the American thirteen states but it kept coming out different, in new terms that opened unpleasant possibilities and problems. He considered he was very fair to Russia — he had no desire to make anything but a sympathetic picture but it kept turning into a headache.

“Mr. Stahr — Mr. Drummon’s outside and Mr. Kirstoff and Mrs. Cornhill about the Russian picture.” “All right — send them in.”

Afterwards from six-thirty to seven-thirty he watched the afternoon rushes. Except for his engagement with the girl he would ordinarily have spent the early evening in the projection room or the dubbing room but it had been a late night with the earthquake and he decided to go to dinner. Coming in through his front office he found Pete Zavras waiting, his arm in a sling.

“You are the Aeschylus and the Diogenes of the moving picture,” said Zavras simply. “Also the Asclepius and the Menander.”

He bowed.

“Who are they?” asked Stahr smiling.

“They are my countrymen.”

“I didn’t know you made pictures in Greece.”

“You’re joking with me, Monroe,” said Zavras. “I want to say you are as dandy a fellow as they come. You have saved me one hundred percent.”

“You feel all right now?”

“My arm is nothing. It feels like someone kisses me there. It was worth doing what I did if this is the outcome.”

“How did you happen to do it here?” Stahr asked curiously.

“Before the oracle,” said Zavras. “The solver of Eleusinian mysteries. I wish I had my hands on the son-of-a-bitch who started the story.”

“You make me sorry I didn’t get an education,” said Stahr.

“It isn’t worth a damn,” said Pete. “I took my baccalaureate in Salonika and look how I ended up.”

“Not quite,” said Stahr.

“If you want anybody’s throat cut anytime day or night,” said Zavras, “my number is in the book.”

Stahr closed his eyes and opened them again. Zavras’ silhouette had blurred a little against the sun. He hung on to the table behind him and said in an ordinary voice:

“Good luck, Pete.”

The room was almost black but he made his feet move following a pattern into his office and waited till the door clicked shut before he felt for the pills. The water decanter clattered against the table; the glass clacked. He sat down in a big chair waiting for the benzedrine to take effect before he went to dinner.

Episode 12

As Stahr walked back from the commissary a hand waved at him from an open roadster. From the heads showing over the back he recognized a young actor and his girl, and watched them disappear through the gate already part of the summer twilight. Little by little he was losing the feel of such things, until it seemed that Minna had taken their poignancy with her; his apprehension of splendor was fading so that presently the luxury of eternal mourning would depart. A childish association of Minna with the material heavens made him, when he reached his office, order out his roadster for the first time this year. The big limousine seemed heavy with remembered conferences or exhausted sleep.

Leaving the studio he was still tense but the open car pulled the summer evening up close and he looked at it. There was a moon down at the end of the boulevard and it was a good illusion that it was a different moon every evening, every year. Other lights shone in Hollywood since Minna’s death: in the open markets lemons and grapefruit and green apples slanted a misty glare into the street. Ahead of him the stop-signal of a car winked violet and at another crossing he watched it wink again. Everywhere floodlights raked the sky. On an empty corner two mysterious men moved a gleaming drum in pointless arcs over the heavens.

In the drug store a woman stood by the candy counter. She was tall, almost as tall as Stahr, and embarrassed. Obviously it was a situation for her and if Stahr had not looked as he did — most considerate and polite — she would not have gone through with it. They said hello and walked out without another word, scarcely a glance — yet before they reached the curb Stahr knew: this was just exactly a pretty American woman and nothing more — no beauty like Minna.

“Where are we going?” she asked. “I thought there’d be a chauffeur. Never mind — I’m a good boxer.”

“Boxer?”

“That didn’t sound very polite.” She forced a smile. “But you people are supposed to be such horrors.”

The conception of himself as sinister amused Stahr-then suddenly it failed to amuse him.

“Why did you want to see me?” she asked as she got in.

He stood motionless, wanting to tell her get out immediately. But she had relaxed in the car and he knew the unfortunate situation was of his own making — he shut his teeth and walked around to get in. The street lamp fell full upon her face and it was difficult to believe that this was the girl of last night. He saw no resemblance to Minna at all.

“I’ll run you home,” he said. “Where do you live?”

“Run me home?” She was startled. “There’s no hurry — I’m sorry if I offended you.”

“No. It was nice of you to come. I’ve been stupid. Last night I had an idea that you were an exact double for someone I knew. It was dark and the light was in my eyes.”

She was offended — he had reproached her for not looking like someone else.

“It was just that!” she said. “That’s funny.”

They rode in silence for a minute.

“You were married to Minna Davis, weren’t you?” she said with a flash of intuition. “Excuse me for referring to it.”

He was driving as fast as he could without making it conspicuous.

“I’m quite a different type from Minna Davis,” she said, “- if that’s who you meant. You might have referred to the girl who was with me. She looks more like Minna Davis than I do.”

That was of no interest now. The thing was to get this over quick and forget it.

“Could it have been her?” she asked. “She lives next door.”

“Not possibly,” he said. “I remember the silver belt you wore.”

“That was me all right.”

They were northwest of Sunset, climbing one of the canyons through the hills. Lighted bungalows rose along the winding road and the electric current that animated them sweated into the evening air as radio sound.

“You see that last highest light — Kathleen lives there. I live just over the top of the hill.”

A moment later she said, “Stop here.”

“I thought you said over the top.”

“I want to stop at Kathleen’s.”

“I’m afraid I’m -”

“I want to get out here myself,” she said impatiently.

Stahr slid out after her. She started toward a new little house almost roofed over by a single willow tree, and automatically he followed her to the steps. She rang a bell and turned to say good night.

“I’m sorry you were disappointed,” she said.

He was sorry for her now — sorry for them both.

“It was my fault. Good night.”

A wedge of light came out the opening door and as a girl’s voice inquired “Who is it?” Stahr looked up.

There she was — face and form and smile against the light from inside. It was Minna’s face — the skin with its peculiar radiance as if phosphorus had touched it, the mouth with its warm line that never counted costs — and over all the haunting jollity that had fascinated a generation.

With a leap his heart went out of him as it had the night before, only this time it stayed out there with a vast beneficence.

“Oh Edna you can’t come in,” the girl said. “I’ve been cleaning and the house is full of ammonia smell.”

Edna began to laugh, bold and loud. “I believe it was you he wanted to see, Kathleen,” she said.

Stahr’s eyes and Kathleen’s met and tangled. For an instant they made love as no one ever dares to do after. Their glance was closer than an embrace, more urgent than a call.

“He telephoned me,” said Edna. “It seems he thought -” Stahr interrupted, stepping forward into the light.

“I was afraid we were rude at the studio, yesterday evening.”

But there were no words for what he really said. She listened

closely without shame. Life flared high in them both — Edna seemed at a distance and in darkness.

“You weren’t rude,” said Kathleen. A cool wind blew the brown curls around her forehead. “We had no business there.”

“I hope you’ll both, -” Stahr said, “- come and make a tour of the studio.”

“Who are you? Somebody important?”

“He was Minna Davis’ husband, he’s a producer,” said Edna as if it were a rare joke, “- and this isn’t at all what he just told me. I think he has a crush on you.”

“Shut up, Edna,” said Kathleen sharply.

As if suddenly realizing her offensiveness Edna said “Phone me, will you?” and stalked away toward the road. But she earned their secret with her — she had seen a spark pass between them in the darkness.

“I remember you,” Kathleen said to Stahr. “You got us out of the flood.”

— Now what? The other woman was more missed in her absence. They were alone and on too slim a basis for what had passed already. They existed nowhere. His world seemed far away — she had no world at all except the idol’s head, the half open door.

“You’re Irish,” he said, trying to build one for her.

She nodded.

“I’ve lived in London a long time — I didn’t think you could tell.”

The wild green eyes of a bus sped up the road in the darkness. They were silent until it went by.

“Your friend Edna didn’t like me,” he said. “I think it was the word Producer.”

“She’s just come out here too. She’s a silly creature who means no harm. I shouldn’t be afraid of you.”

She searched his face. She thought, like everyone, that he seemed tired — then she forgot it at the impression he gave of a brazier out of doors on a cool night.

“I suppose the girls are all after you to put them on the screen.”

“They’ve given up,” he said.

This was an understatement — they were all there, he knew, just over his threshold, but they had been there so long that their clamoring voices were no more than the sound of the traffic in the street. But his position remained more than royal — a king could make only one queen — Stahr, at least so they supposed, could make many.

“I’m thinking that it would turn you into a cynic,” she said. “You didn’t want to put me in the pictures.”

“No.”

“That’s good. I’m no actress. Once in London a man came up to me in the Carlton and asked me to make a test but I thought awhile and finally I didn’t go.”

They had been standing nearly motionless, as if in a moment he would leave and she would go in. Stahr laughed suddenly.

“I feel as if I had my foot in the door — like a collector.”

She laughed too.

“I’m sorry I can’t ask you in. Shall I get my reefer and sit outside?”

“No.” He scarcely knew why he felt it was time to go. He might see her again — he might not. It was just as well this way.

“You’ll come to the studio?” he said. “I can’t promise to go around with you, but if you come you must be sure to send word to my office.”

A frown, the shadow of a hair in breadth, appeared between her eyes.

“I’m not sure,” she said. “But I’m very much obliged.”

He knew that, for some reason, she would not come — in an instant she had slipped away from him. They both sensed that the moment was played out. He must go, even though he went nowhere and left with nothing. Practically, vulgarly, he did not have her telephone number — or even her name, but it seemed impossible to ask for them now.

She walked with him to the car, her glowing beauty and her unexplored novelty pressing up against him, but there was a foot of moonlight between them when they came out of the shadow.

“Is this all?” he said spontaneously.

He saw regret in her face — but there was a flick of the lip also, a bending of the smile toward some indirection, a momentary dropping and lifting of a curtain over a forbidden passage.

“I do hope we’ll meet again,” she said almost formally.

“I’d be sorry if we didn’t.”

They were distant for a moment. But as he turned his car in the next drive and came back with her still waiting, and waved and drove on he felt exalted and happy. He was glad that there was beauty in the world that would not be weighed in the scales of the casting department.

But at home he felt a curious loneliness as his butler made him tea in the samovar. It was the old hurt come back, heavy and delightful. When he took up the first of two scripts that were his evening stint, that presently he would visualize line by line on the screen, he waited a moment, thinking of Minna. He explained to her that it was really nothing, that no one could ever be like she was, that he was sorry.

That was substantially a day of Stahr’s. I don’t know about the illness, when it started, etc., because he was secretive but I know he fainted a couple of times that month because Father told me. Prince Agge is my authority for the luncheon in the commissary where he told them he was going to make a picture that would lose money — which was something considering the men he had to deal with and that he held a big block of stock and had a profit sharing contract.

And Wylie White told me a lot which I believed because he felt Stahr intensely with a mixture of jealousy and admiration. As for me I was head over heels in love with him then and you can take what I say for what it’s worth.

Chapter 5

Episode 13

Fresh as the morning I went up to see him a week later. Or so I thought; when Wylie called for me I had gotten into riding clothes to give the impression I’d been out in the dew since early morning.

“I’m going to throw myself under the wheel of Stahr’s car, this morning,” I said.

“How about this car,” he suggested. “It’s one of the best cars Mort Flieshacker ever sold second hand.”

“Not on your flowing veil,” I answered like a book. “You have a wife in the East.”

“She’s the past,” he said. “You’ve got one great card, Celia — your valuation of yourself. Do you think anybody would look at you if you weren’t Pat Brady’s daughter?”

We don’t take abuse like our mothers would have. Nothing — no remark from a contemporary means much. They tell you to be smart they’re marrying you for your money or you tell them. Everything’s simpler. Or is it? as we used to say.

But as I turned on the radio and the car raced up LaurelCanyon to “The Thundering Beat of My Heart,” I didn’t believe he was right. I had good features except my face was too round and a skin they seemed to love to touch and good legs and I didn’t have to wear a brassiere. I haven’t a sweet nature but who was Wylie to reproach me for that.

“Don’t you think I’m smart to go in the morning?” I asked.

“Yeah. To the busiest man in California. He’ll appreciate it. Why didn’t you wake him up at four?”

“That’s just it. At night he’s tired. He’s been looking at people all day and some of them not bad. I come in in the morning and start a tram of thought.”

“I don’t like it. It’s brazen.”

“What have you got to offer? And don’t be rough.”

“I love you,” he said without much conviction. “I love you more than I love your money and that’s plenty. Maybe your father would make me a supervisor.”

“I could marry the last man tapped for Bones this year and live in Southampton.”

I turned the dial and got either “Gone” or “Lost” — there were good songs that year. The music was getting better again. When I was young during the Depression it wasn’t so hot and the best numbers were from the twenties like Benny Goodman playing “Blue Heaven” or Paul Whiteman with “When Day Is Done.” There were only the bands to listen to. But now I liked almost everything except Father singing “Little Girl, You’ve Had a Busy Day” to try to create a sentimental father-and-daughter feeling.

“Lost” and “Gone” were the wrong mood so I turned again and

got “Lovely To Look At” which was my kind of poetry. I looked back as we crossed the crest of the foothills — with the air so clear you could see the leaves on SunsetMountain two miles away. It’s startling to you sometimes — just air, unobstructed, uncomplicated air.

“Lovely to look at-de-lightful to know-w-w,” I sang.

“Are you going to sing for Stahr?” Wylie said. “If you do, get in a line about my being a good supervisor.”

“Oh, this’ll be only Stahr and me,” I said. “He’s going to look at me and think ‘I’ve never really seen her before.’”

“We don’t use that line this year,” he said.

“ — Then he’ll say ‘Little Celia’ like he did the night of the earthquake. He’ll say he never noticed I have become a woman.”

“You won’t have to do a thing.”

“I’ll stand there and bloom. After he kisses me as you would a child — “

“That’s all in my script,” complained Wylie. “And I’ve got to show it to him tomorrow.”

“ — he’ll sit down and put his face in his hands and say he never thought of me like that.”

“You mean you get in a little fast work during the kiss.”

“I bloom, I told you. How often do I have to tell you I bloom.”

“It’s beginning to sound pretty randy to me,” said Wylie. “How about laying off — I’ve got to work this morning.”

“Then he says it seems as if he was always meant to be this way.”

“Right in the industry. Producer’s blood.” He pretended to shiver. “I’d hate to have a transfusion of that.”

“Then he says — “

“I know all his lines,” said Wylie. “What I want to know is what you say.”

“Somebody comes in,” I went on.

“And you jump up quickly off the casting couch smoothing your skirts.”

“Do you want me to walk out and get home?”

We were in Beverly Hills, getting very beautiful now with the tall Hawaiian pines. Hollywood is a perfectly zoned city so you know exactly what kind of people economically live in each section from executives and directors, through technicians in their bungalows right down to extras. This was the executive section and a very fancy lot of pastry. It wasn’t as romantic as the dingiest village of Virginia or New Hampshire but it looked nice this morning.

“They asked me how I knew,” sang the radio, “ — my true love was true.”

My heart was fire and smoke was in my eyes and everything but I figured my chance at about fifty-fifty. I would walk right up to him as if I was either going to walk through him or kiss him in the mouth — and stop a bare foot away and say Hello with disarming understatement.

And I did — though of course it wasn’t like I expected. Stahr’s beautiful dark eyes looking back into mine, knowing I am dead sure everything I was thinking — and not a bit embarrassed. I stood there an hour, I think, without moving and all he did was twitch the side of his mouth and put his hands in his pockets.

“Will you go with me to the ball tonight?” I asked.

“What ball?”

“The screen-writers’ ball down at the Ambassador.”

“Oh yes.” He considered. “I can’t go with you. I might just come in late. We’ve got a sneak preview in Glendale.”

How different it all was than what you’ve planned. When he sat down I went over and put my head among his telephones like a sort of desk appendage and looked at him and his dark eyes looked back so kind and nothing. Men don’t often know those times when a girl could be had for nothing. All I succeeded in putting into his head was:

“Why don’t you get married, Celia?”

Maybe he’d bring up Robby again, try to make a match there.

“What could I do to interest an interesting man?” I asked him.

“Tell him you’re in love with him.”

“Should I chase him?”

“Yes,” he said smiling.

“I don’t know. If it isn’t there it isn’t there.”

“I’d marry you,” he said unexpectedly. “I’m lonesome as hell. But I’m too old and tired to undertake anything.”

I went around the desk and stood beside him.

“Undertake me.”

He looked up in surprise, understanding for the first time that I was in deadly earnest.

“Oh no,” he said. He looked almost miserable for a minute. “Pictures are my girl. I haven’t got much time — “ He corrected himself quickly, “I mean any time. It’d be like marrying a doctor.”

“You couldn’t love me.”

“It’s not that,” he said and — right out of my dream but with a difference, “I never thought of you that way, Celia. I’ve known you so long. Somebody told me you were going to marry Wylie White.”

“And you had — no reaction.”

“Yes, I did. I was going to speak to you about it. Wait till he’s been sober for two years.”

“I’m not even considering it, Monroe.”

We were way off the track, and just as in my day-dream somebody came in — only I was quite sure Stahr had pressed a concealed button.

I’ll always think of that moment, when I felt Miss Doolan behind me with her pad, as the end of childhood, the end of the time when you cut out pictures. What I was looking at wasn’t Stahr but a picture of him I cut out over and over: the eyes that flashed a sophisticated understanding at you and then darted up too soon into his wide brow with its ten thousand plots and plans; the face that was ageing from within, so that there were no casual furrows of worry and vexation but a drawn asceticism as if from a silent self — set struggle — or a long illness. It was handsomer to me than all the rosy tan from Coronado to Del Monte. He was my picture, as sure as if he was pasted on the inside of my old locker in school. That’s what I told Wylie White and when a girl tells the man she likes second best about the other one — then she’s in love.

13 (continued)

I noticed the girl long before Stahr arrived at the dance. Not a pretty girl, for there are none of those in Los Angeles — one girl can be pretty but a dozen are only a chorus. Nor yet a professional beauty — they do all the breathing for everyone and finally even the men have to go outside for air. Just a girl, with the skin of one of Raphael’s corner angels and a style that made you look back twice to see if it were something she had on.

I noticed her and forgot her. She was sitting back behind the pillars at a table whose ornament was a faded semi-star who, in hopes of being noticed and getting a bit, rose and danced regularly with some scarecrow males. It reminded me shamefully of my first party where Mother made me dance over and over with the same boy to keep in the spotlight. The semi-star spoke to several people at our table but we were busy being Cafe Society and she got nowhere at all.

From our angle it appeared that they all wanted something.

“You’re expected to fling it around,” said Wylie, “ — like in the old days. When they find out you’re hanging on to it they get discouraged. That’s what all this brave gloom is about — the only way to keep their self respect is to be Hemingway characters. But underneath they hate you in a mournful way and you know it.”

He was right — I knew that since 1933 the rich could only be happy alone together.

I saw Stahr come into the half-light at the top of the wide steps and stand there with his hands in his pockets looking around. It was late and the lights seemed to have burned a little lower, though they were the same. The floor show was finished except for a man who still wore a placard which said that at midnight in the Hollywood Bowl Sonja Henie was going to skate on hot soup. You could see the sign as he danced becoming less and less funny on his back. A few years before there would have been drunks around. The faded actress seemed to be looking for them hopefully over her partner’s shoulder. I followed her with my eyes when she went back to her table —

— and there, to my surprise, was Stahr talking to the other girl. They were smiling at each other as if this was the beginning of the world.

Stahr had expected nothing like this when he stood at the head of the steps a few minutes earlier. The sneak preview had disappointe him and afterwards he had had a scene with Jaques La Borwits right in front of the theatre for which he was now sorry. He had started toward the Brady party when he saw Kathleen sitting in the middle of a long white table alone.

Immediately things changed. As he walked toward her the people shrank back against the walls till they were only murals; the white table lengthened and became an altar where the priestess sat alone. Vitality welled up in him and he could have stood a long time across the table from her, looking and smiling.

The incumbents of the table were crawling back — Stahr and Kathleen danced.

When she came close his several visions of her blurred; she was momentarily unreal. Usually a girl’s skull made her real but not this time — Stahr continued to be dazzled as they danced out along the floor — to the last edge, where they stepped through a mirror into another dance with new dancers whose faces were familiar but nothing more. In this new region he talked, fast and urgently.

“What’s your name?”

“Kathleen Moore.”

“Kathleen Moore,” he repeated.

“I have no telephone, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“When will you come to the studio?”

“It’s not possible. Truly.”

“Why isn’t it? Are you married?”

“No.”

“You’re not married?”

“No, nor never have been. But then I may be.”

“Someone there at the table.”

“No.” She laughed. “What curiosity!”

But she was deep in it with him, no matter what the words were. Her eyes invited him to a romantic communion of unbelievable intensity. As if she realized this she said, frightened:

“I must go back now. I promised this dance.”

“I don’t want to lose you. Couldn’t we have lunch or dinner?”

“It’s impossible.” But her expression helplessly amended the words to “It’s just possible. The door is still open by a chink if you could squeeze past. But quickly — so little time.”

“I must go back,” she repeated aloud. Then she dropped her arms, stopped dancing and looked at him, a laughing wanton.

“When I’m with you I don’t breathe quite right,” she said.

She turned, picked up her long dress, and stepped back through the mirror. Stahr followed until she stopped near her table.

“Thank you for the dance,” she said. “And now really, good night.”

Then she nearly ran.

Stahr went to the table where he was expected and sat down with the Cafe Society group — from Wall Street, Grand Street, LoudounCountyVirginia, and OdessaRussia. They were all talking with enthusiasm about a horse that had run very fast and Mr. Marcus was the most enthusiastic of all. Stahr guessed that Jews had taken over the worship of horses as a super-symbol — for years it had been the Cossacks mounted and the Jews on foot. Now the Jews had horses and it gave them a sense of extraordinary well-being and power. Stahr sat pretending to listen and even nodding when something was referred to him, but all the time watching the table behind the pillars. If everything had not happened as it had, even to his connecting the silver belt with the wrong girl, he might have thought it was some elaborate frame-up. But the elusiveness was beyond suspicion. For there in a moment he saw that she was escaping again — the pantomime at the table indicated good bye. She was leaving, she was gone.

“There — “ said Wylie White with malice, “ — goes Cinderella. Simply bring the slipper to the Regal Shoe Co., 812 South Broadway.”

Stahr overtook her in the long upper lobby where middle-aged women sat behind a roped-off space, watching the ballroom entrance.

“Am I responsible for this?” he asked.

“I was going anyhow.” But she added almost resentfully, “They talked as if I’d been dancing with the Prince of Wales. They all stared at me. One of the men wanted to draw my picture and another one wanted to see me tomorrow.”

“That’s just what I want,” said Stahr gently. “But I want to see you much more than he does.”

“You insist so,” she said wearily. “One reason I left England was that men always wanted their own way. I thought it was different here. Isn’t it enough that I don’t want to see you?”

“Ordinarily,” agreed Stahr. “Please believe me, I’m way out of my depth already. I feel like a fool. But I must see you again and talk to you.”

She hesitated.

“There’s no reason for feeling like a fool,” she said. “You’re too good a man to feel like a fool. But you should see this for what it is.”

“What is it?”

“You’ve fallen for me — completely. You’ve got me in your dreams.”

“I’d forgotten you,” he declared, “ — till the moment I walked in that door.”

“Forgotten me with your head perhaps. But I knew the first time I saw you that you were the kind that likes me — “

She stopped herself. Near them a man and woman from the party were saying good bye: “Tell her hello — tell her I love her dearly,” said the woman, “you both — all of you — the children.” Stahr could not talk like that, the way everyone talked now. He could think of nothing further to say as they walked toward the elevator except:

“I suppose you’re perfectly right.”

“Oh, you admit it?”

“No, I don’t,” he retracted. “It’s just the whole way you’re made. What you say — how you walk — the way you look right this minute — “ He saw she had melted a little and his hopes rose. “Tomorrow is Sunday and usually I work on Sunday but if there’s anything you’re curious about in Hollywood, any person you want to meet or see, please let me arrange it.”

They were standing by the elevator. It opened but she let it go.

“You’re very modest,” she said. “You always talk about showing me the studio and taking me around. Don’t you ever stay alone?”

“Tomorrow I’ll feel very much alone.”

“Oh, the poor man — I could weep for him. He could have all the stars jumping around him and he chooses me.”

He smiled — he had laid himself open to that one.

The elevator came again. She signalled for it to wait.

“I’m a weak woman,” she said. “If I meet you tomorrow will you leave me in peace? No, you won’t. You’ll make it worse. It wouldn’t do any good but harm so I’ll say no and thank you.”

She got into the elevator. Stahr got in too and they smiled as they dropped two floors to the hall cross-sectioned with small shops. Down at the end, held back by police was the crowd, their heads and shoulders leaning forward to look down the alley. Kathleen shivered.

“They looked so strange when I came in,” she said, “ — as if they were furious at me for not being someone famous.”

“I know another way out,” said Stahr.

They went through a drug store, down an alley and came out into the clear cool California night beside the car park. He felt detached from the dance now and she did too.

“A lot of picture people used to live down here,” he said. “John Barrymore and Pola Negri in those bungalows. And Connie Talmadge lived in that tall thin apartment house over the way.”

“Doesn’t anybody live here now?”

“The studios moved out into the country,” he said. “What used to be the country. I had some good times around here though.”

He did not mention that ten years ago Minna and her mother had lived in another apartment over the way.

“How old are you?” she asked suddenly.

“I’ve lost track — almost thirty-five I think.”

“They said at the table you were the boy wonder.”

“I’ll be that when I’m sixty,” he said grimly. “You will meet me tomorrow, won’t you?”

“I’ll meet you,” she said. “Where?”

Suddenly there was no place to meet. She would not go to a party at anyone’s house, nor to the country, nor swimming though she hesitated, nor to a well-known restaurant. She seemed hard to please but he knew there was some reason. He would find out in time. It occurred to him that she might be the sister or daughter of someone well-known, who was pledged to keep in the background. He suggested that he come for her and they could decide.

“That wouldn’t do,” she said. “What about right here — the same spot.”

He nodded — pointing up at the arch under which they stood. He put her into her car which would have brought eighty dollars from any kindly dealer, and watched it rasp away. Down by the entrance a cheer went up as a favorite emerged, and Stahr wondered whether to show himself and say good night.

This is Cecelia taking up the narrative in person. Stahr came back finally — it was about half past three — and asked me to dance.

“How are you?” he asked me, just as if he hadn’t seen me that morning. “I got involved in a long conversation with a man.”

It was secret too — he cared that much about it.

“I took him to ride,” he went on innocently. “I didn’t realize how much this part of Hollywood had changed.”

“Has it changed?”

“Oh yes,” he said. “Changed completely. Unrecognizable. I couldn’t tell you exactly but it’s all changed — everything. It’s like a new city.” After a moment he amplified, “I had no idea how much it had changed.”

“Who was the man?” I ventured.

“An old friend,” he said vaguely. “Someone I knew a long time ago.”

I had made Wylie try to find out quietly who she was. He had gone over and the ex-star had asked him excitedly to sit down. No — she didn’t know who the girl was — a friend of a friend of someone — even the man who had brought her didn’t know.

So Stahr and I danced to the beautiful music of Glenn Miller playing “I’m on a See-saw.” It was good dancing now with plenty of room. But it was lonely — lonelier than before the girl had gone. For me, as well as for Stahr, she took the evening with her, took along the stabbing pain I had felt — left the great ball-room empty and without emotion. Now it was nothing and I was dancing with an absent minded man who told me how much Los Angeles had changed.

Section 14

They met, next afternoon, as strangers in an unfamiliar country. Last night was gone, the girl he had danced with was gone. A misty rose-and-blue hat with a trifling veil came along the terrace to him and paused, searching his face. Stahr was strange too in a brown suit and black tie that blocked him out more tangibly than a formal dinner coat, or when he was simply a face and voice in the darkness when they first met.

He was the first to be sure it was the same person as before — the upper half of the face that was Minna’s, luminous, with creamy temples and opalescent brow — the coco-colored curly hair. He could have put his arm around her and pulled her close with an almost family familiarity — already he knew the down on her neck, the very set of her backbone, the corners of her eyes and how she breathed — the very texture of the clothes that she would wear.

“Did you wait here all night?” she said, in a voice that was like a whisper.

“I didn’t move — didn’t stir.”

Still a problem remained, the same one — there was no special place to go.

“I’d like tea,” she suggested, “ — if it’s some place you’re not known.”

“That sounds as if one of us had a bad reputation.”

“Doesn’t it?” she laughed.

“We’ll go to the shore,” Stahr suggested. “There’s a place there where I got out once and was chased by a trained seal.”

“Do you think the seal could make tea?”

“Well — he’s trained. And I don’t think he’ll talk — I don’t think his training got that far. What in hell are you trying to hide?”

After a moment she said lightly, “Perhaps the future,” in a way that might mean anything or nothing at all.

As they drove away she pointed at her jalopy in the parking lot.

“Do you think it’s safe?”

“I doubt it. I noticed some black-bearded foreigners snooping around.”

Kathleen looked at him alarmed.

“Really?” She saw he was smiling. “I believe everything you say,” she said. “You’ve got such a gentle way about you that I don’t see why they’re all so afraid of you.” She examined him with approval — fretting a little about his pallor, which was accentuated by the bright afternoon. “Do you work very hard? Do you really always work on Sundays?”

He responded to her interest — impersonal yet not perfunctory.

“Not always. Once we had — we had a house with a pool and all — and people came on Sunday. I played tennis and swam. I don’t swim any more.”

“Why not? It’s good for you. I thought all Americans swam.”

“My legs got very thin — a few years ago and it embarrassed me. There were other things I used to do — lots of things. I used to play handball when I was a kid, and sometimes out here — I had a court that was washed away in a storm.”

“You have a good build,” she said in formal compliment, meaning only that he was made with thin grace.

He rejected this with a shake of his head.

“I enjoy working most,” he said. “My work is very congenial.”

“Did you always want to be in movies?”

“No. When I was young I wanted to be a chief clerk — the one who knew where everything was.”

She smiled.

“That’s odd. And now you’re much more than that.”

“No, I’m still a chief clerk,” Stahr said. “That’s my gift, if I have one. Only when I got to be it I found out that no one knew where anything was. And I found out that you had to know why it was where it was, and whether it should be left there. They began throwing it all at me and it was a very complex office. Pretty soon I had all the keys. And they wouldn’t have remembered what locks they fitted if I gave them back.”

They stopped for a red light and a newsboy bleated at them: “Mickey Mouse Murdered! Randolph Hearst declares war on China!”

“We’ll have to buy his paper,” she said.

As they drove on she straightened her hat and preened herself. Seeing him looking at her she smiled.

She was alert and calm — qualities that were currently at a premium. There was lassitude in plenty — California was filling up with weary desperadoes. And there were tense young men and women who lived back East in spirit while they carried on a losing battle against the climate. But it was everyone’s secret that sustained effort was difficult here — a secret that Stahr scarcely admitted to himself. But he knew that people from other places spurted a pure rill of new energy for a while.

They were very friendly now. She had not made a move or a gesture that was out of keeping with her beauty, that pressed it out of its contour one way or another. It was all proper to itself. He judged her as he would a shot in a picture. She was not trash, she was not confused but clear — in his special meaning of the word which implied balance, delicacy and proportion, she was “nice.”

They reached Santa Monica where there were the stately houses of a dozen picture stars, penned in the middle of a crawling Coney Island. They turned down hill into the wide blue sky and sea and went on along the sea till the beach slid out again from under the bathers in a widening and narrowing yellow strand.

“I’m building a house out here,” Stahr said. “Much further on. I don’t know why I’m building it.”

“Perhaps it’s for me,” she said.

“Maybe it is.”

“I think it’s splendid for you to build a big house for me without even knowing what I looked like.”

“It isn’t so big. And it hasn’t any roof. I didn’t know what kind of roof you wanted.”

“We don’t want a roof. They told me it never rained here. It — “

She stopped so suddenly that he knew she was reminded of something.

“Just something that’s past,” she said.

“What was it?” he demanded. “Another house without a roof?”

“Yes. Another house without a roof.”

“Were you happy there?”

“I lived with a man,” she said. “A long, long time — too long. It was one of those awful mistakes people make. I lived with him a long time after I wanted to get out but he couldn’t let me go. He’d try but he couldn’t. So finally I ran away.”

He was listening, weighing but not judging. Nothing changed under the rose-and-blue hat. She was twenty-five or so. It would have been a waste if she had not loved and been loved.

“We were too close,” she said. “We should probably have had children — to stand between us. But you can’t have children when there’s no roof to the house.”

All right, he knew something of her. It would not be like last night when something kept saying, as in a story conference: “We know nothing about the girl. We don’t have to know much — but we have to know something.” A vague background spread behind her, something more tangible than the head of Siva in the moonlight.

They came to the restaurant, forbidding with many Sunday automobiles. When they got out the trained seal growled reminiscently at Stahr. The man who owned it said that the seal would never ride in the back seat of his car but always climbed over the back and up in front. It was plain that the man was in bondage to the seal, though he had not yet acknowledged it to himself.

“I’d like to see the house you’re building,” said Kathleen. “I don’t want tea — tea is the past.”

Kathleen drank a Coke instead and they drove on ten miles into a sun so bright that he took out two pairs of cheaters from a compartment. Five miles further on they turned down a small promontory and came to the fuselage of Stahr’s house.

A headwind blowing out of the sun threw spray up the rocks and over the car. Concrete mixers, raw yellow wood and builders’ rubble waited, an open wound in the sea-scape, for Sunday to be over. They walked around front where great boulders rose to what would be the terrace.

She looked at the feeble hills behind and winced faintly at the barren glitter, and Stahr saw —

“No use looking for what’s not here,” he said cheerfully. “Think of it as if you were standing on one of those globes with a map on it — I always wanted one when I was a boy.”

“I understand,” she said after a minute. “When you do that you can feel the earth turn, can’t you.”

He nodded.

“Yes. Otherwise it’s all just manana — waiting for the morning or the moon.”

They went in under the scaffolding. One room, which was to be the chief salon, was completed even to the built-in book shelves and the curtain rods and the trap in the floor for the motion picture projection machine. And, to her surprise, this opened out to a porch with cushioned chairs in place and a ping-pong table. There was another ping-pong table on the newly laid turf beyond.

“Last week I gave a premature luncheon,” he admitted. “I had some props brought out — some grass and things. I wanted to see how the place felt.”

She laughed suddenly.

“Isn’t that real grass?”

“Oh yes — it’s grass.”

Beyond the strip of anticipatory lawn was the excavation for a swimming pool, patronized now by a crowd of seagulls who saw them and took flight.

“Are you going to live here all alone?” she asked him. “Not even dancing girls?”

“Probably. I used to make plans but not any more. I thought this would be a nice place to read scripts. The studio is really home.”

“That’s what I’ve heard about American business men.”

He caught a lilt of criticism in her voice.

“You do what you’re born to do,” he said gently. “About once a month somebody tries to reform me, tells me what a barren old age I’ll have when I can’t work any more. But it’s not so simple.”

The wind was rising. It was time to go and he had his car keys out of his pocket, absent mindedly jingling them in his hand. There was the silvery “Hey!” of a telephone, coming from somewhere across the sunshine.

It was not from the house and they hurried here and there around the garden like children playing warmer and colder — closing in finally on a tool shack by the tennis court. The phone, irked with delay, barked at them suspiciously from the wall. Stahr hesitated.

“Shall I let the damn thing ring?”

“I couldn’t. Unless I was sure who it was.”

“Either it’s for somebody else or they’ve made a wild guess.”

He picked up the receiver.

“Hello…. Long distance from where? Yes, this is Mr. Stahr.”

His manner changed perceptibly. She saw what few people had seen for a decade — Stahr impressed. It was not discordant because he often pretended to be impressed but it made him momentarily a little younger.

“It’s the President,” he said to her, almost stiffly.

“Of your company?”

“No, of the United States.”

He was trying to be casual for her benefit but his voice was eager.

“All right, I’ll wait,” he said into the phone, and then to Kathleen, “I’ve talked to him before.”

She watched. He smiled at her and winked as an evidence that while he must give this his best attention he had not forgotten her.

“Hello,” he said presently. He listened. Then he said “Hello” again. He frowned.

“Can you talk a little louder,” he said politely, and then “Who?… What’s that?”

She saw a disgusted look come into his face.

“I don’t want to talk to him,” he said. “No!”

He turned to Kathleen.

“Believe it or not, it’s an orang-outang.”

He waited while something was explained to him at length; then he repeated:

“I don’t want to talk to it, Lew. I haven’t got anything to say that would interest an orang-outang.”

He beckoned to Kathleen and when she came close to the phone he held the receiver so that she heard odd breathing and a gruff growl. Then a voice:

“This is no phoney, Monroe. It can talk and it’s a dead ringer for McKinley. Mr. Horace Wickersham is with me here with a picture of McKinley in his hand — “

Stahr listened patiently.

“We’ve got a chimp,” he said after a minute. “He bit a chunk out of John Gilbert last year…. All right, put him on again.”

He spoke formally as if to a child.

“Hello Orang-outang.”

His face changed and he turned to Kathleen.

“He said hello.”

“Ask him his name,” suggested Kathleen.

“Hello Orang-outang-God, what a thing to be! — Do you know your name?… He doesn’t seem to know his name…. Listen, Lew. We’re not making anything like ‘King Kong’ and there is no monkey in ‘The Hairy Ape.’… Of course I’m sure. I’m sorry, Lew, good bye.”

He was annoyed with Lew because he had thought it was the President and changed his manner acting as if it were. He felt a little ridiculous but Kathleen felt sorry and liked him better because it had been an orang-outang.

They started back along the shore with the sun behind them. The house seemed kindlier when they left it, as if warmed by their visit — the hard glitter of the place was more endurable if they were not bound there like people on the shiny surface of a moon. Looking back from a curve of the shore, they saw the sky growing pink behind the indecisive structure and the point of land seemed a friendly island, not without promise of fine hours on a further day.

Past Malibu with its gaudy shacks and fishing barges they came into the range of human kind again, the cars stacked and piled along the road, the beaches like ant hills without a pattern, save for the dark drowned heads that sprinkled the sea.

Goods from the city were increasing in sight — blankets, matting, umbrellas, cookstoves, reticules full of clothing — the prisoners had laid out their shackles beside them on this sand. It was Stahr’s sea if he wanted it, or knew what to do with it — only by sufferance did these others wet their feet and fingers in the wild cool reservoirs of man’s world.

Stahr turned off the road by the sea and up a canyon and along a hill road and the people dropped away. The hill became the outskirts of the city. Stopping for gasoline he stood beside the car.

“We could have dinner,” he said almost anxiously.

“You have work you could do.”

“No — I haven’t planned anything. Couldn’t we have dinner?”

He knew that she had nothing to do either — no planned evening or special place to go.

She compromised.

“Do you want to get something in that drug store across the street?”

He looked at it tentatively.

“Is that really what you want?”

“I like to eat in American drug stores. It seems so queer and strange.”

They sat on high stools and had tomato broth and hot sandwiches. It was more intimate than anything they had done and they both felt a dangerous sort of loneliness and felt it in each other. They shared in varied scents of the drug store, bitter and sweet and sour, and the mystery of the waitress with only the outer part of her hair dyed and black beneath, and when it was over, the still life of their empty plates — a sliver of potato, a sliced pickle and an olive stone.

It was dusk in the street, it seemed nothing to smile at him now when they got into the car.

“Thank you so much. It’s been a nice afternoon.”

It was not far from her house. They felt the beginning of the hill and the louder sound of the car in second was the beginning of the end. Lights were on in the climbing bungalows — he turned on the headlights of the car. Stahr felt heavy in the pit of his stomach.

“We’ll go out again.”

“No,” she said quickly as if she had been expecting this. “I’ll write you a letter. I’m sorry I’ve been so mysterious — it was really a compliment because I like you so much. You should try not to work so hard. You ought to marry again.”

“Oh, that isn’t what you should say,” he broke out protestingly. “This has been you and me today. I may have meant nothing to you — it meant a lot to me. I’d like time to tell you about it.”

But if he were to take time it must be in her house for they were there and she was shaking her head as the car drew up to the door.

“I must go now. I do have an engagement. I didn’t tell you.”

“That’s not true. But it’s all right.”

He walked to the door with her and stood in his own footsteps of that other night while she felt in her bag for the key.

“Have you got it?”

“I’ve got it,” she said.

That was the moment to go in but she wanted to see him once more and she leaned her head to the left, then to the right trying to catch his face against the last twilight. She leaned too far and too long and it was natural when his hand touched the back of her upper arm and shoulder and pressed her forward into the darkness of his throat. She shut her eyes feeling the bevel of the key in her tight clutched hand. She said “Oh” in an expiring sigh and then “Oh” again as he pulled her in close and his chin pushed her cheek around gently. They were both smiling just faintly and she was frowning too as the inch between them melted into darkness.

When they were apart she shook her head still but more in wonder than in denial. It came like this then, it was your own fault, how far back, when was the moment. It came like this and every instant the burden of tearing herself away from them together, from it, was heavier and more unimaginable. He was exultant; she resented and could not blame him but she would not be part of his exultation for it was a defeat. So far it was a defeat. And then she thought that if she stopped it being a defeat, broke off and went inside, it was still not a victory. Then it was just nothing.

“This was not my idea,” she said. “Not at all my idea.”

“Can I come in?”

“Oh no — no.”

“Then let’s jump in the car and drive somewhere.”

With relief she caught at the exact phrasing — to get away from here immediately, that was accomplishment or sounded like one — as if she were fleeing from the spot of a crime. Then they were in the car going down hill with the breeze cool in their faces and she came slowly to herself. Now it was all clear in black and white.

“We’ll go back to your house on the beach,” she said.

“Back there?”

“Yes — we’ll go back to your house. Don’t let’s talk. I just want to ride.”

When they got to the coast again the sky was grey and at Santa Monica a sudden gust of rain bounced over them. Stahr halted beside the road, put on a raincoat and lifted the canvas top. “We’ve got a roof,” he said.

The windshield wiper ticked domestically as a grandfather clock. Sullen cars were leaving the wet beaches and starting back into the city. Further on they ran into fog — the road lost its boundaries on either side and the lights of cars coming toward them were stationary until just before they flared past.

They had left a part of themselves behind, and they felt light and free in the car. Fog fizzed in at a chink and Kathleen took off the rose-and-blue hat in a calm, slow way that made him watch tensely, and put it under a strip of canvas in the back seat. She shook out her hair and, when she saw that Stahr was looking at her, she smiled.

The trained seal’s restaurant was only a sheen of light off toward the ocean. Stahr cranked down a window and looked for landmarks but after a few more miles the fog fell away and just ahead of them the road turned off that led to his house. Out here a moon showed behind the clouds. There was still a shifting light over the sea.

The house had dissolved a little back into its elements. They found the dripping beams of a doorway and groped over mysterious waist-high obstacles to the single finished room, odorous of sawdust and wet wood. When he took her in his arms they could just see each other’s eyes in the half darkness. Presently his raincoat dropped to the floor.

“Wait,” she said.

She needed a minute. She did not see how any good could come from this and though this did not prevent her from being happy and desirous she needed a minute to think how it was, to go back an hour and know how it had happened. She waited in his arms, moving her head a little from side to side as she had before, only more slowly, and never taking her eyes from his. Then she discovered that he was trembling.

He discovered it at the same time and his arms relaxed. Immediately she spoke to him coarsely and provocatively and pulled his face down to hers. Then, with her knees she struggled out of something, still standing up and holding him with one arm, and kicked it off beside the coat. He was not trembling now and he held her again as they knelt down together and slid to the raincoat on the floor.

Afterwards they lay without speaking and then he was full of such tender love for her that he held her tight till a stitch tore in her dress. The small sound brought them to reality.

“I’ll help you up,” he said, taking her hands.

“Not just yet. I was thinking of something.”

She lay in the darkness thinking irrationally that it would be such a bright, indefatigable baby, but presently she let him help her up…. When she came back into the room, the room was lit from a single electric fixture.

“A one — bulb lighting system,” he said. “Shall I turn it off?”

“No. It’s very nice. I want to see you.”

They sat in the wooden frame of the window seat with the soles of shoes touching.

“You seem far away,” she said.

“So do you.”

“Are you surprised?”

“At what?”

“That we’re two people again. Don’t you always think — hope that you’ll be one person and then find you’re still two?”

“I feel very close to you.”

“So do I to you,” she said.

“Thank you.”

“Thank you.”

They laughed.

“Is this what you wanted?” she asked. “I mean last night.”

“Not consciously.”

“I wonder when it was settled,” she brooded. “There’s a moment when you needn’t and then there’s another moment when you know nothing in the world could keep it from happening.”

This had an experienced ring and to his surprise he liked her even more. In his mood which was passionately to repeat yet not recapitulate the past it was right that it should be that way.

“I am rather a trollop,” she said following his thoughts. “I suppose that’s why I didn’t get on to Edna.”

“Who is Edna?”

“The girl you thought was me. The one you phoned to — who lived across the road. She’s moved to Santa Barbara.”

“You mean she was a tart?”

“So it seems. She went to what you call call-houses.”

“That’s funny.”

“If she had been English I’d have known right away. But she seemed like everyone else. She only told me just before she went away.”

He saw her shiver and got up, putting the raincoat around her shoulders. He opened a closet and a pile of pillows and beach mattresses fell out on the floor. There was a box of candles and he lit them around the room, attaching the electric heater where the bulb had been.

“Why was Edna afraid of me?” he asked suddenly.

“Because you were a producer. She had some awful experience or a friend of hers did. Also I think she was extremely stupid.”

“How did you happen to know her?”

“She came over. Maybe she thought I was a fallen sister. She seemed quite pleasant. She said ‘Call me Edna’ all the time. ‘Please call me Edna’ — so finally I called her Edna and we were friends.”

She got off the window seat so he could lay pillows along it and behind her.

“What can I do?” she said. “I’m a parasite.”

“No, you’re not.” He put his arms around her. “Be still. Get warm.”

They sat for a while quiet.

“I know why you liked me at first,” she said. “Edna told me.”

“What did she tell you?”

“That I looked like — Minna Davis. Several people have told me that.”

He leaned away from her and nodded.

“It’s here,” she said, putting her hands on her cheekbones and distorting her cheeks slightly. “Here and here.”

“Yes,” said Stahr. “It was very strange. You look more like she actually looked than how she was on the screen.”

She got up, changing the subject with her gesture as if she were afraid of it.

“I’m warm now,” she said. She went to the closet and peered in, came back wearing a little apron with a crystalline pattern like a snowfall. She stared around critically.

“Of course we’ve just moved in,” she said, “ — and there’s a sort of echo.”

She opened the door of the verandah and pulled in two wicker chairs, drying them off. He watched her move, intently yet half afraid that her body would fail somewhere and break the spell. He had watched women in screen tests and seen their beauty vanish second by second as if a lovely statue had begun to walk with meagre joints of a paper doll. But Kathleen was ruggedly set on the balls of her feet — the fragility was, as it should be, an illusion.

“It’s stopped raining,” she said. “It rained the day I came. Such an awful rain — so loud — like horses weeing.”

He laughed.

“You’ll like it. Especially if you’ve got to stay here. Are you going to stay here? Can’t you tell me now? What’s the mystery?”

She shook her head.

“Not now — it’s not worth telling.”

“Come here then.”

She came over and stood near him and he pressed his cheek against the cool fabric of the apron.

“You’re a tired man,” she said putting her hand in his hair.

“Not that way.”

“I didn’t mean that way,” she said hastily. “I meant you’ll work yourself sick.”

“Don’t be a mother,” he said.

“All right. What shall I be?”

Be a trollop, he thought. He wanted the pattern of his life broken. If he was going to die soon, like the two doctors said, he wanted to stop being Stahr for a while and hunt for love like men who had no gifts to give, like young nameless men who looked along the streets in the dark.

“You’ve taken off my apron,” she said gently.

“Yes.”

“Would anyone be passing along the beach? Shall we put out the candles?”

“No, don’t put out the candles.”

Afterwards she lay half on a white cushion and smiled up at him.

“I feel like Venus on the half shell,” she said.

“What made you think of that?”

“Look at me. Isn’t it Botticelli?”

“I don’t know,” he said smiling. “It is if you say so.”

She yawned.

“I’ve had such a good time. And I’m very fond of you.”

“You know a lot, don’t you?”

“What do you mean?”

“Oh, from little things you’ve said. Or perhaps the way you say them.”

She deliberated.

“Not much,” she said. “I never went to a university if that’s what you mean. But the man I told you about knew everything and he had a passion for educating me. He made out schedules and made me take courses at the Sorbonne and go to museums. I picked up a little.”

“What was he?”

“He was a painter of sorts and a hell-cat. And a lot besides. He wanted me to read Spengler — everything was for that. All the history and philosphy and harmony was all so I could read Spengler and then I left him before we got to Spengler. At the end I think that was the chief reason he didn’t want me to go.”

“Who was Spengler?”

“I tell you we didn’t get to him,” she laughed. “And now I’m forgetting everything very patiently because it isn’t likely I’ll ever meet anyone like him again.”

“Oh, but you shouldn’t forget it,” said Stahr shocked. He had an intense respect for learning, a racial memory of the old shuls. “You shouldn’t forget.”

“It was just in place of babies.”

“You could teach your babies,” he said.

“Could I?”

“Sure you could. You could give it to them while they were young. When I want to know anything I’ve got to ask some drunken writer. Don’t throw it away.”

“All right,” she said getting up, “I’ll tell it to my children. But it’s so endless — the more you know the more there is just beyond and it keeps on coming. This man could have been anything if he hadn’t been a coward and a fool.”

“But you were in love with him.”

“Oh yes — with all my heart.” She looked through the window, shading her eyes. “It’s light out there. Let’s go down to the beach.”

He jumped up exclaiming:

“Why, I think it’s the grunion!”

“What?”

“It’s tonight. It’s in all the papers.” He hurried out the door and she heard him open the door of the car. Presently he returned with a newspaper.

“It’s at ten-sixteen. That’s five minutes.”

“An eclipse or something?”

“Very punctual fish,” he said. “Leave your shoes and stockings and come with me.”

It was a fine blue night. The tide was at the turn and the little silver fish rocked off shore waiting for 10: 16. A few seconds after the time they came swarming in with the tide and Stahr and Kathleen stepped over them barefoot as they flicked slip-slop in the sand. A Negro man came along the shore toward them collecting the grunion quickly like twigs into two pails. They came in twos and threes and platoons and companies, relentless and exalted and scornful around the great bare feet of the intruders, as they had come before Sir Francis Drake had nailed his plaque to the boulder on the shore.

“I wish for another pail,” the Negro man said, resting a moment.

“You’ve come a long way out,” said Stahr.

“I used to go to Malibu but they don’t like it those moving picture people.”

A wave came in and forced them back, receded swiftly leaving the sand alive again.

“Is it worth the trip?” Stahr asked.

“I don’t figure it that way. I really come out to read some Emerson. Have you ever read him?”

“I have,” said Kathleen. “Some.”

“I’ve got him inside my shirt. I got some Rosicrucian literature with me too but I’m fed up with them.”

The wind had changed a little — the waves were stronger further down and they walked along the foaming edge of the water.

“What’s your work?” the Negro asked Stahr.

“I work for the pictures.”

“Oh.” After a moment he added, “I never go to movies.”

“Why not?” asked Stahr sharply.

“There’s no profit. I never let my children go.”

Stahr watched him and Kathleen watched Stahr protectively.

“Some of them are good,” she said, against a wave of spray, but he did not hear her. She felt she could contradict him and said it again and this time he looked at her indifferently.

“Are the Rosicrucian brotherhood against pictures?” asked Stahr.

“Seems as if they don’t know what they are for. One week they for one thing and next week for another.”

Only the little fish were certain. Half an hour had gone and still they came. The Negro’s two pails were full and finally he went off over the beach toward the road, unaware that he had rocked an industry.

Stahr and Kathleen walked back to the house and she thought how to drive his momentary blues away.

“Poor old Sambo,” she said.

“What?”

“Don’t you call them poor old Sambo?”

“We don’t call them anything especially.” After a moment he said, “They have pictures of their own.”

In the house she drew on her shoes and stockings before the heater.

“I like California better,” she said deliberately. “I think I was a bit sex-starved.”

“That wasn’t quite all was it?”

“You know it wasn’t.”

“It’s nice to be near you.”

She gave a little sigh as she stood up so small that he did not notice it.

“I don’t want to lose you now,” he said. “I don’t know what you think of me or whether you think of me at all. As you’ve probably guessed my heart’s in the grave — “ He hesitated, wondering if this was quite true, “ — but you’re the most attractive woman I’ve met since I don’t know when. I can’t stop looking at you. I don’t know now exactly the color of your eyes but they make me sorry for everyone in the world — “

“Stop it, stop it!” she cried laughing. “You’ll have me looking in the mirror for weeks. My eyes aren’t any color — they’re just eyes to see with and I’m just as ordinary as I can be. I have nice teeth for an English girl — “

“You have beautiful teeth.”

“ — but I couldn’t hold a candle to these girls I see here — “ “You stop it,” he said. “What I said is true and I’m a cautious man.”

She stood motionless a moment — thinking. She looked at him, then she looked back into herself, then at him again — then she gave up her thought.

“We must go,” she said.

Now they were different people as they started back. Four times they had driven along the shore road today, each time a different pair. Curiosity, sadness and desire were behind them now; this was a true returning — to themselves and all their past and future and the encroaching presence of tomorrow. He asked her to sit close in the car and she did but they did not seem close because for that you have to seem to be growing closer. Nothing stands still. It was on his tongue to ask her to come to the house he rented and sleep there tonight — but he felt that it would make him sound lonely. As the car climbed the hill to her house Kathleen looked for something behind the seat cushion. “What have you lost?”

“It might have fallen out,” she said, feeling through her purse in the darkness. “What was it?” “An envelope.” “Was it important?” “No.”

But when they got to her house and Stahr turned on the dashboard light she helped take the cushions out and look again.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said as they walked to the door. “What’s your address where you really live?” “Just Bel-Air. There’s no number.” “Where is Bel-Air?”

“It’s a sort of development near Santa Monica. But you’d better call me at the studio.”

“All right… good night, Mr. Stahr.” “Mister Stahr,” he repeated, astonished. She corrected herself gently. “Well then, good night, Stahr. Is that better?” He felt as though he had been pushed away a little. “As you like,” he said. He refused to let the aloofness communicate itself. He kept looking at her and moved his head from side to side in her own gesture, saying without words “you know what’s happened to me.” She sighed. Then she came into his arms and for a moment was his again completely. Before anything could change Stahr whispered good night and turned away and went to his car.

Winding down the hill he listened inside himself as if something by an unknown composer, powerful and strange and strong, was about to be played for the first time. The theme would be stated presently but because the composer was always new, he would not recognize it as the theme right away. It would come in some such guise as the auto-horns from the technicolor boulevards below or be barely audible, a tattoo on the muffled drum of the moon. He strained to hear it, knowing only that music was beginning, new music that he liked and did not understand. It was hard to react to what one could entirely compass — this was new and confusing, nothing one could shut off in the middle and supply the rest from an old score.

Also, and persistently, and bound up with the other, there was the Negro on the sand. He was waiting at home for Stahr with his pails of silver fish, and he would be waiting at the studio in the morning. He had said that he did not allow his children to listen to Stahr’s story. He was prejudiced and wrong and he must be shown somehow, some way. A picture, many pictures, a decade of pictures, must be made to show him he was wrong. Since he had spoken, Stahr had thrown four pictures out of his plans — one that was going into production this week. They were borderline pictures in point of interest but at least he submitted the borderline pictures to the Negro and found them trash. And he put back on his list a difficult picture that he had tossed to the wolves, to Brady and Marcus and the rest, to get his way on something else. He rescued it for the Negro man.

When he drove up to his door the porch lights went on and his Filipino came down the steps to put away the car. In the library Stahr found a list of phone calls.

La Borwits

Marcus

Harlow

Rienmund

Fairbanks

Brady

Colman

Skouras

Flieshacker

The Filipino came into the room with a letter. “This fell out of the car,” he said.

“Thanks,” said Stahr, “I was looking for it.”

“Will you be running a picture tonight, Mr. Stahr?”

“No thanks — you can go to bed.”

The letter, to his surprise, was addressed to Monroe Stahr, Esq. He started to open it — then it occurred to him that she had wanted to recapture it, and possibly to withdraw it. If she had had a phone he would have called her for permission before opening it. He held it for a moment. It had been written before they met — it was odd to think that whatever it said was now invalidated; it possessed the interest of a souvenir by representing a mood that was gone.

Still he did not like to read it without asking her. He put it down beside a pile of scripts and sat down with the top script in his lap. He was proud of resisting his first impulse to open the letter. It seemed to prove that he was not “losing his head.” He had never lost his head about Minna even in the beginning — it had been the most appropriate and regal match imaginable. She had loved him always and just before she died all unwilling and surprised his tenderness had burst and surged toward her and he had been in love with her. In love with Minna and death together — with the world into which she looked so alone that he wanted to go with her there.

But “falling for dames” had never been an obsession — his brother had gone to pieces over a dame, or rather over dame after dame after dame. But Stahr, in his younger days, had them once and never more than once — like one drink. He had quite another sort of adventure reserved for his mind — something better than a series of emotional sprees. Like many brilliant men he had grown up dead cold. Beginning at about twelve probably with the total rejection common to those of extraordinary mental powers, the “see here — this is all wrong — a mess — all a lie — and a sham — “ he swept it all away, everything, as men of his type do and then instead of being a son-of-a-bitch as most of them are he looked around at the barrenness that was left and said to himself “This will never do.” And so he had learned tolerance, kindness, forbearance, and even affection like lessons.

The Filipino boy brought in a carafe of water and bowls of nuts and fruit and said good night. Stahr opened the first script and began to read.

He read for three hours — stopping from time to time, editing without a pencil. Sometimes he looked up, warm from some vague happy thought that was not in the script, and it took him a minute each time to remember what it was. Then he knew it was Kathleen and looked at the letter — it was nice to have a letter.

It was three o’clock when a vein began to bump in the back of his hand signalling that it was time to quit. Kathleen was really far away now with the waning night — the different aspects of her telescoped into the memory of a single thrilling stranger bound to him only by a few slender hours. It seemed perfectly all right to open the letter.

Dear Mr. Stahr:

In half an hour I will be keeping my date with you. When we say good bye I will hand you this letter. It is to tell you that I am to be married soon and that I won’t be able to see you after today.

I should have told you last night but it didn’t seem to concern you. And it would seem silly to spend this beautiful afternoon telling you about it and watching your interest fade. Let it fade all at once — now. I will have told you enough to convince you that I am Nobody’s Prize Potato. (I have] just learned that expression — from my hostess of last night who called and stayed an hour. She seems to believe that everyone is Nobody’s Prize Potato — except you. I think I am supposed to tell you she thinks this, so give her a job if you can.)

I am very flattered that anyone who sees so many lovely women I can’t finish this sentence but you know what I mean. And I will be late if I don’t go to meet you right now.

With All Good Wishes Kathleen Moore.

Stahr’s first feeling was like fear; his first thought was that the letter was invalidated — she had even tried to retrieve it. But then he remembered “Mister Stahr” just at the end, and that she had asked him his address — she had probably already written him another letter, which would also say good bye. Illogically he was shocked by the letter’s indifference to what had happened later. He read it again realizing that it foresaw nothing. Yet in front of the house she had decided to let it stand, belittling everything that had happened, curving her mind away from the fact that there had been no other man in her consciousness that afternoon. But he could not even believe this now and the whole adventure began to peel away even as he recapitulated it searchingly to himself. The car, the hill, the hat, the music, the letter itself blew off like the scraps of tar paper from the rubble of his house. And Kathleen departed, packing up her remembered gestures, her softly moving head, her sturdy eager body, her bare feet in the wet swirling sand. The skies paled and faded — the wind and rain turned dreary, washing the silver fish back to sea. It was only one more day, and nothing was left except the pile of scripts upon the table.

He went upstairs. Minna died again on the first landing and he forgot her lingeringly and miserably again, step by step to the top. The empty floor stretched around him — the doors with no one sleeping behind. In his room Stahr took off his tie, untied his shoes and sat on the side of his bed. It was all closed out except for something that he could not remember; then he remembered, her car was still down in the parking lot of the hotel. He set his clock to give him six hours’ sleep.

Section 15

This is Cecelia taking up the story. I think it would be most interesting to follow my own movements at this point, as this is a time in my life that I am ashamed of. What people are ashamed of usually makes a good story.

When I sent Wylie White over to Martha Dodd’s table he had no success in finding out who the girl was, but it had suddenly become my chief interest in life. Also I guessed — correctly — that it would be Martha Dodd’s: to have had at your table a girl who is admired by royalty, who may be tagged for a coronet in our little feudal system — and not even know her name.

I had only a speaking acquaintance with Martha and it would be too obvious to approach her directly, but I went out to the studio Monday and dropped in on Rose Meloney.

Rose Meloney was quite a friend of mine. I thought of her rather as a child thinks of a family dependent. I knew she was a writer but I grew up thinking that writer and secretary were the same except that a writer usually smelled of cocktails and came more often to meals. They were spoken of the same way when they were not around — except for a species called playwrights who came from the East. These were treated with respect if they did not stay long — if they did they sank with the others into the white collar class.

Rose’s office was in the “old writers’ building.” There was one on every lot, a row of iron maidens left over from silent days and still resounding the dull moans of cloistered hacks and bums. There was the story of the new producer who had gone down the line one day and then reported excitedly to the head office.

“Who are those men?”

“They’re supposed to be writers.”

“I thought so. Well, I watched them for ten minutes and there were two of them that didn’t write a line.”

Rose was at her typewriter about to break off for lunch. I told her frankly that I had a rival.

“It’s a dark horse,” I said. “I can’t even find out her name.”

“Oh,” said Rose. “Well, maybe I know something about that. I heard something from somebody.”

The somebody, of course, was her nephew Ned Sollinger, Stahr’s office boy. He had been her pride and hope. She had sent him through New YorkUniversity where he played on the football team. Then in his first year at medical school after a girl turned him down he dissected out the least publicized section of a lady corpse and sent it to the girl. Don’t ask me why. In disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes he had begun life at the bottom again, and was still there.

“What do you know?” I asked.

“It was the night of the earthquake. She fell into the lake on the back lot and he dove in and saved her life. Someone else told me it was his balcony she jumped off of and broke her arm.”

“Who was she?”

“Well, that’s funny too — “

Her phone rang and I waited restlessly during a long conversation she had with Joe Rienmund. He seemed to be trying to find out over the phone how good she was or whether she had ever written any pictures at all. And she was reputed to have been on the set the day Griffith invented the close-up! While he talked she groaned silently, writhed, made faces into the receiver, held it all in her lap so that the voice reached her faintly — and kept up a side chatter to me.

“What is he doing — killing time between appointments?… He’s asked me every one of these questions ten times… that’s all on a memorandum I sent him….”

And into the phone: “If this goes up to Monroe it won’t be my doing. I want to go right through to the end.”

She shut her eyes in agony again.

“Now he’s casting it… he’s casting the minor characters… he’s going to have Buddy Ebsen…. My God he just hasn’t anything to do… now he’s on Harry Davenport — he means Donald Crisp… he’s got a big casting directory open in his lap and I can hear him turn the pages… he’s a big important man this morning, a second Stahr, and for Christ sake I’ve got two scenes to do before lunch.”

Rienmund quit finally or was interrupted at his end. A waiter came in from the commissary with Rose’s luncheon and a Coca-Cola for me — I wasn’t lunching that summer. Rose wrote down one sentence on her typewriter before she ate. It interested me the way she wrote. One day I was there when she and a young man had just lifted a story out of “The Saturday Evening Post” — changing the characters and all. Then they began to write it making each line answer the line before it, and of course it sounded just like people do in life when they’re straining to be anything — funny or gentle or brave. I always wanted to see that one on the screen but I missed it somehow.

I found her as lovable as a cheap old toy. She made three thousand a week, and her husbands all drank and beat her nearly to death. But today I had an axe to grind.

“You don’t know her name?” I persisted.

“Oh — “ said Rose “ — that. Well, he kept calling her up afterwards and he told Katy Doolan it was the wrong name after all.”

“I think he found her,” I said. “Do you know Martha Dodd?”

“Hasn’t that little girl had a tough break though!” she exclaimed

with ready theatrical sympathy.

“Could you possibly invite her to lunch tomorrow?”

“Oh, I think she gets enough to eat all right. There’s a Mexican — “

I explained that my motives were not charitable. Rose agreed to

cooperate. She called Martha Dodd.

We had lunch next day at the Bev Brown Derby, a languid restaurant patronized for its food by clients who always look as if they’d like to lie down. There is some animation at lunch where the women put on a show for the first five minutes after they eat but we were a tepid threesome. I should have come right out with my curiosity. Martha Dodd was an agricultural girl who had never quite understood what had happened to her and had nothing to show for it except a washed out look about the eyes. She still believed that the life she had tasted was reality and this was only a long waiting.

“I had a beautiful place in 1928,” she told us. “Thirty acres, with a miniature golf course and a pool and a gorgeous view. All spring I was up to my ass in daisies.”

I ended by asking her to come over and meet Father. This was pure penance for having had “a mixed motive” and being ashamed of it. One doesn’t mix motives in Hollywood — it is confusing. Everybody understands, and the climate wears you down. A mixed motive is conspicuous waste.

Rose left us at the studio gate, disgusted by my cowardice. Martha had worked up inside to a pitch about her career — not a very high pitch because of seven years of neglect but a sort of nervous acquiescence and I was going to speak strongly to Father. They never did anything for people like Martha who had made them so much money at one time. They let them slip away into misery eked out with extra work — it would have been kinder to ship them out of town. And Father was being so proud of me this summer. I had to keep him from telling everybody) just how I was brought up to produce such a perfect jewel. And Bennington — oh what an exclusive — dear God my heart. I assured him there was the usual proportion of natural born skivies and biddies tastefully concealed by throw overs from Sex, Fifth Avenue; but Father had worked himself up to practically an alumnus. “You’ve had everything,” he used to say happily. Everything included roughly the two years in Florence where I managed against heavy odds to be the only virgin in school, and the courtesy debut in Boston, Massachusetts. I was a veritable flower of the fine old cost-and-gross aristocracy.

So I knew he would do something for Martha Dodd and as we went into his office I had great dreams of doing something for Johnny Swanson the cowboy too and Evelyn Brent and all sorts of discarded flowers. Father was a charming and sympathetic man — except for that time I had seen him unexpectedly in New York — and there was something touching about his being my father. After all he was my father — he would do anything in the world for me.

Only Rosemary Schmiel was in the outer office and she was on Birdy Peters’ phone. She waved for me to sit down but I was full of my plans and telling Martha to take it easy I pressed the clicker under Rosemary’s desk and went toward the opened door.

“Your father’s in conference,” Rosemary called. “Not in conference but I ought to — “

By this time I was through the door and a little vestibule and another door and caught Father in his shirt sleeves, very sweaty and trying to open a window. It was a hot day but I hadn’t realized it was that hot and thought he was ill.

“No, I’m all right,” he said. “What is it?”

I told him. I told him the whole theory of people like Martha Dodd, walking up and down his office. How he could use them and guarantee them regular employment. He seemed to take me up excitedly and kept nodding and agreeing, and I felt closer to him than I had for a long time. I came close and kissed him on his cheek. He was trembling and his shirt was soaked through.

“You’re not well,” I said. “Or you’re in some sort of stew.”

“No, I’m not at all.”

“What is it?”

“Oh it’s Monroe,” he said. “That God damn little Vine Street Jesus! He’s in my hair night and day!”

“What’s happened?” I asked, very much cooler.

“Oh, he sits like a little God damn priest or rabbi and says what he’ll do and he won’t do. I can’t tell you now — I’m half crazy. Why don’t you go along.”

“I won’t have you like this.”

“Go along I tell you!” I sniffed but he never drank.

“Go and brush your hair,” I said. “I want you to see Martha Dodd.”

“In here! I’d never get rid of her.”

“Out there then. Go wash up first. Put on another shirt.”

With an exaggerated gesture of despair he went into the little bathroom adjoining. It was hot in the office as if it had been closed for hours and maybe that was making him sick so I opened two more windows.

“You go along,” Father called from behind the closed door of the bathroom. “I’ll be there presently.”

“Be awfully nice to her,” I said. “No charity.”

As if it were Martha speaking for herself a long low moan came from somewhere in the room. I was startled — then transfixed as it came again not from the bathroom where Father was, not from outside but from a closet in the wall across from me. How I was brave enough I don’t know but I ran across to it and opened it and Father’s secretary Birdy Peters tumbled out stark naked — just like a corpse in the movies. With her came a gust of stifling, stuffy air. She flopped sideways on the floor with the one hand still clutching some clothes and lay on the floor bathed in sweat — just as Father came in from the bathroom. I could feel him standing behind me and without turning I knew exactly how he looked, for I had surprised him before.

“Cover her up,” I said, covering her up myself with a rug from the couch. “Cover her up!”

I left the office. Rosemary Schmiel saw my face as I came out and responded with a terrified expression. I never saw her again or Birdy Peters either. As Martha and I went out Martha asked “What’s the matter dear?” — and when I didn’t say anything, “You did your best. Probably it was the wrong time. I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll take you to see a very nice English girl. Did you see the girl that Stahr danced with at our table the other night?”

So at the price of a little immersion in the family drains I had what I wanted.

I don’t remember much about our call. She wasn’t at home was one reason. The screen door of her house was unlocked and Martha went in calling “Kathleen” with bright familiarity. The room we saw was bare and formal as a hotel; there were flowers about but they did not look like sent flowers. Also Martha found a note on the table which said, “Leave the dress. Have gone looking for a job. Will drop by tomorrow.”

Martha read it twice but it didn’t seem to be for Stahr, and we waited five minutes. People’s houses are very still when they are gone. Not that I expect them to be jumping around but I leave the observation for what it’s worth. Very still. Prim almost with just a fly holding down the place and paying no attention to you, and the corner of a curtain blowing.

“I wonder what kind of a job,” said Martha. “Last Sunday she went somewhere with Stahr.”

But I was no longer interested. It seemed awful to be here — producer’s blood, I thought in horror. And in quick panic I pulled her out into the placid sunshine. It was no use — I felt just black and awful. I had always been proud of my body — I had a way of thinking of it as geometric which made everything it did seem all right and there was probably not any kind of place, including churches and offices and shrines, where people had not embraced — but no one had ever stuffed me naked into a hole in the wall in the middle of a business day.

Episode 16

“If you were in a drug store,” said Stahr “ — having a prescription filled — “

“You mean a chemist?” Boxley asked.

“If you were in a chemist’s,” conceded Stahr, “and you were getting a prescription for some member of your family who was very sick — “

“ — Very ill?” queried Boxley.

“Very ill. Then whatever caught your attention through the window, whatever distracted you and held you would probably be material for pictures.”

“A murder outside the window, you mean.”

“There you go,” said Stahr smiling. “It might be a spider working on the pane.”

“Of course — I see.”

“I’m afraid you don’t, Mr. Boxley. You see it for your medium but not for ours. You keep the spiders for yourself and you try to pin the murders on us.”

“I might as well leave,” said Boxley. “I’m no good to you. I’ve been here three weeks and I’ve accomplished nothing. I make suggestions but no one writes them down.”

“I want you to stay. Something in you doesn’t like pictures, doesn’t like telling a story this way — “

“It’s such a damned bother,” exploded Boxley. “You can’t let yourself go — “

He checked himself. He knew that Stahr, the helmsman, was finding time for him in the middle of a constant stiff blow — that they were talking in the always creaking rigging of a ship sailing in great awkward tacks along an open sea. Or else — it seemed at times — they were in a huge quarry where even the newly cut marble bore the tracery of old pediments, half obliterated inscriptions of the past.

“I keep wishing you could start over,” Boxley said. “It’s this mass production.”

“That’s the condition,” said Stahr. “There’s always some lousy condition. We’re making a life of Rubens — suppose I asked you to do portraits of rich dopes like Pat Brady and me and Gary Cooper and Marcus when you wanted to paint Jesus Christ! Wouldn’t you feel you had a condition? Our condition is that we have to take people’s own favorite folklore and dress it up and give it back to them. Anything beyond that is sugar. So won’t you give us some sugar, Mr. Boxley?”

Boxley knew he could sit with Wylie White tonight at the Troc raging at Stahr, but he had been reading Lord Charnwood and he recognized that Stahr like Lincoln was a leader carrying on a long war on many fronts; almost single — handed he had moved pictures sharply forward through a decade, to a point where the content of the “A productions” was wider and richer than that of the stage. Stahr was an artist only as Mr. Lincoln was a general, perforce and as a layman.

“Come down to La Borwits’ office with me,” said Stahr. “They sure need some sugar there.”

In La Borwits’ office two writers, a shorthand secretary and a supervisor sat in a tense smokey stalemate where Stahr had left them three hours before. He looked at the faces one after another and found nothing. La Borwits spoke with awed reverence for his defeat.

“We’ve just got too many characters, Monroe.” Stahr snorted affably. “That’s the principal idea of the picture.” He took some change out of his pocket, looked up at the suspended light and tossed up half a dollar which clanked into the bowl. He looked at the coins in his hands and selected a quarter.

La Borwits watched miserably; he knew this was a favorite idea of Stahr’s and he saw the sands running out. At the moment everyone’s back was toward him. Suddenly he brought up his hands from their placid position under the desk and threw them high in the air, so high that they seemed to leave his wrists — and then he caught them neatly as they were descending. After that he felt better. He was in control.

One of the writers had taken out some coins also and presently rules were defined. “You have to toss your coin through the chains without hitting them. Whatever falls into the light is the kitty.”

They played for half an hour — all except Boxley who sat aside and dug into the script, and the secretary who kept tally. She calculated the cost of the four men’s time, arriving at a figure of sixteen hundred dollars. At the end La Borwits was winner by $5.50 and a janitor brought in a step-ladder to take the money out of the light.

Boxley spoke up suddenly.

“You have the stuffings of a tuhkey here,” he said.

“What!”

“It’s not pictures.”

They looked at him in astonishment. Stahr concealed a smile.

“So we’ve got a real picture man here!” exclaimed La Borwits.

“A lot of beautiful speeches,” said Boxley boldly. “But no situations. After all, you know, it’s not going to be a novel: and it’s too long. I can’t exactly describe how I feel but it’s not quite right. And it leaves me cold.”

He was giving them back what had been handed him for three weeks. Stahr turned away, watching the others out of he corner of his eye.

“We don’t need less characters,” said Boxley. “We need more. As I see it that’s the idea.”

“That’s the idea,” said the writers.

“Yes — that’s the idea,” said La Borwits.

Boxley was inspired by the attention he had created.

“Let each character see himself in the other’s place,” he said. “The policeman is about to arrest the thief when he sees that the thief actually has his face. I mean show it that way. You could almost call the thing ‘Put Yourself in My Place.’”

Suddenly they were at work again — taking up this new theme in turn like hepcats in a swing band and going to town with it. They might throw it out again tomorrow but life had come back for a moment. Pitching the coins had done it as much as Boxley. Stahr had recreated the proper atmosphere — never consenting to be a driver of the driven, but feeling like and acting like and sometimes even looking like a small boy getting up a show.

He left them, touching Boxley on the shoulder in passing — a deliberate accolade — he didn’t want them to gang up on him and break his spirit in an hour.

Doctor Baer was waiting in his inner office. With him was a colored man with a portable cardiograph like a huge suitcase. Stahr called it the lie detector. He stripped to the waist and the weekly examination began.

“How’ve you been feeling?”

“Oh — the usual,” said Stahr.

“Been hard at it? Getting any sleep?”

“No — about five hours. If I go to bed early I just lie there.”

“Take the sleeping pills.”

“The yellow one gives me a hangover.”

“Take two red ones then.”

“That’s a nightmare.”

“Take one of each — the yellow first.”

“All right — I’ll try. How’ve you been?”

“Say — I take care of myself, Monroe. I save myself.”

“The hell you do — you’re up all night sometimes.”

“Then I sleep all next day.”

After ten minutes Baer said:

“Seems O. K. The blood pressure’s up five points.”

“Good,” said Stahr. “That’s good isn’t it?”

“That’s good. I’ll develop the cardiograms tonight. When are you coming away with me?”

“Oh, some time,” said Stahr lightly. “In about six weeks things’ll ease up.”

Baer looked at him with a genuine looking that had grown over three years.

“You got better in thirty-three when you laid up,” he said. “Even for three weeks.”

“I will again.”

No he wouldn’t, Baer thought. With Minna’s help he had enforced a few short rests years ago and lately he had hinted around trying to find who Stahr considered his closest friends. Who could take him away and keep him away. It would almost surely be useless. He was due to die very soon now. Within six months one could say definitely. What was the use of developing the cardiograms? You couldn’t persuade a man like Stahr to stop and lie down and look at the sky for six months. He would much rather die. He said differently but what it added up to was the definite urge toward total exhaustion that he had run into before. Fatigue was a drug as well as a poison and Stahr apparently derived some rare almost physical pleasure from working lightheaded with weariness. It was a perversion of the life force he had seen before but he had almost stopped trying to interfere with it. He had cured a man or so — a hollow triumph of killing and preserving the shell.

“You hold your own,” he said.

They exchanged a glance. Did Stahr know? Probably. But he did not know when — he did not know how soon now.

“If I hold my own I can’t ask more,” said Stahr.

The colored man had finished packing the apparatus.

“Next week same time?”

“O. K., Bill,” said Stahr. “Good bye.”

As the door closed Stahr switched open the Dictograph. Miss Doolan’s voice came through immediately.

“Do you know a Miss Kathleen Moore?”

“What do you mean?” he asked startled.

“A Miss Kathleen Moore is on the line. She said you asked her to call.”

“Well, my God!” he exclaimed. He was swept with indignant rapture. It had been five days — this would never do at all.

“She’s on now?”

“Yes.”

“Well, all right then.”

In a moment he heard the voice up close to him.

“Are you married?” he asked, low and surly.

“No, not yet.”

His memory blocked out her face and form — as he sat down she seemed to lean down to his desk keeping level with his eyes.

“What’s on your mind?” he asked in the same surly voice. It was hard to talk that way.

“You did find the letter?” she asked.

“Yes. It turned up that night.”

“That’s what I want to speak to you about.”

He found an attitude at length — he was outraged.

“What is there to talk about?” he demanded.

“I tried to write you another letter but it wouldn’t write.”

“I know that too.”

There was a pause.

“Oh cheer up!” she said surprisingly. “This doesn’t sound like you. It is Stahr, isn’t it? That very nice Mr. Stahr?”

“I feel a little outraged,” he said almost pompously. “I don’t see the use of this. I had at least a pleasant memory of you.”

“I don’t believe it’s you,” she said. “Next thing you’ll wish me luck.” Suddenly she laughed. “Is this what you planned to say? I know how awful it gets when you plan to say anything — “

“I never expected to hear from you again,” he said with dignity; but it was no use, she laughed again — a woman’s laugh that is like a child’s, just one syllable, a crow and a cry of delight.

“Do you know how you make me feel?” she demanded. “Like one day in London during a caterpillar plague when a hot furry thing dropped in my mouth.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Oh please wake up,” she begged. “I want to see you. I can’t explain things on the phone. It was no fun for me either, you understand.”

“I’m very busy. There’s a sneak preview in Glendale tonight.”

“Is that an invitation?”

“George Boxley, the English writer, is going with me.” He surprised himself. “Do you want to come along?”

“How could we talk?”

She considered. “Why don’t you call for me afterwards,” she suggested. “We could ride around.”

Miss Doolan on the huge Dictograph was trying to cut in a shooting director — the only interruption ever permitted. He flipped the button and called “wait” impatiently into the machine.

“About eleven?” Kathleen was saying confidently. The idea of “Riding around” seemed so unwise that if he could have thought of the words to refuse her he would have spoken them but he did not want to be the caterpillar. Suddenly he had no attitude left except the sense that the day, at least, was complete. It had an evening — a beginning, a middle and an end.

He rapped on the screen door, heard her call from inside, and stood waiting where the level fell away. From below came the whir of a lawn mower — a man was cutting his grass at midnight. The moon was so bright that Stahr could see him plainly a hundred feet off and down as he stopped and rested on the handle before pushing it back across his garden. There was a midsummer restlessness abroad — early August with imprudent loves and impulsive crimes. With little more to expect from summer one tried anxiously to live in the present — or, if there was no present, to invent one.

She came at last. She was all different and delighted. She wore a suit with a skirt that she kept hitching up as they walked down to the car with a brave gay, stimulating reckless air of “Tighten up your belt, baby. Let’s get going — to any pole.” Stahr had brought his limousine with the chauffeur, and the intimacy of the four walls whisking them along a new curve in the dark took away any strangeness at once. In its way the little trip they made was one of the best times he had ever had in life. It was certainly one of the times when, if he knew he was going to die, it was not tonight.

She told him her story. She sat beside him cool and gleaming for a while, spinning on excitedly, carrying him to far places with her, meeting and knowing the people she had known. The story was vague at first. “This Man” was the one she had loved and lived with. “This American” was the one who had rescued her when she was sinking into a quicksand.

“Who is he — the American?”

Oh, names — what did they matter? No one important like Stahr, not rich. He had lived in London and now they would live out here. She was going to be a good wife, a real person. He was getting a divorce — not just on account of her — but that was the delay.

“But the first man?” asked Stahr. “How did you get into that?”

Oh, that was a blessing at first. From sixteen to twenty-one the thing was to eat. The day her stepmother presented her at Court they had one shilling to eat with so as not to feel faint. Sixpence apiece but the stepmother watched while she ate. After a few months the stepmother died and she would have sold out for that shilling but she was too weak to go into the streets. London can be harsh — oh quite.

Was there nobody?

There were friends in Ireland who sent butter. There was a soup kitchen. There was a visit to an uncle who made advances to her when she had a full stomach, and she held out and got fifty pounds out of him for not telling his wife.

“Couldn’t you work?” Stahr asked.

“I worked. I sold cars. Once I sold a car.”

“But couldn’t you get a regular job?”

“It’s hard — it’s different. There was a feeling that people like me forced other people out of jobs. A woman struck me when I tried to get a job as chambermaid in a hotel.”

“But you were presented at Court?”

“That was my stepmother who did that — on an off chance. I was nobody. My father was shot by the Black and Tans in twenty-two when I was a child. He wrote a book called ‘Last Blessing.’ Did you ever read it?”

“I don’t read.”

“I wish you’d buy it for the movies. It’s a good little book. I still get a royalty from it — ten shillings a year.”

Then she met “The Man” and they travelled the world around. She had been to all the places that Stahr made movies of, and lived in cities whose names he had never heard. Then The Man went to seed, drinking and sleeping with the housemaids and trying to force her off on his friends. They all tried to make her stick with him. They said she had saved him and should cleave to him longer now, indefinitely, to the end. It was her duty. They brought enormous pressure to bear. But she had met The American, and so finally she ran away.

“You should have run away before.”

“Well, you see it was difficult.” She hesitated, and plunged. “You see I ran away from a king.”

His moralities somehow collapsed — she had managed to top him. A confusion of thoughts raced through his head — one of them a faint old credo that all royalty was diseased.

“It wasn’t the King of England,” she said. “My king was out of job as he used to say. There are lots of kings in London.” She laughed — then added almost defiantly, “He was very attractive until he began drinking and raising hell.”

“What was he king of?”

She told him — and Stahr visualized the face out of old newsreels.

“He was a very learned man,” she said. “He could have taught all sorts of subjects. But he wasn’t much like a king. Not nearly as much as you. None of them were.”

This time Stahr laughed.

“They were the standard article,” he said.

“You know what I mean. They all felt old fashioned. Most of them tried so hard to keep up with things. They were always advised to keep up with things. One was a Syndicalist for instance. And one used to carry around a couple of clippings about a tennis tournament when he was in the semi-finals. I saw those clippings a dozen times.”

They rode through GriffithPark and out past the dark studios of Burbank, past the airports and along the way to Pasadena past the neon signs of roadside cabarets. Up in his head he wanted her but it was late and just the ride was an overwhelming joy. They held hands and once she came close in to his arms saying, “Oh you’re so nice. I do like to be with you.” But her mind was divided — this was not his night as the Sunday afternoon had been his. She was absorbed in herself, stung into excitement by telling of her own adventures; he could not help wondering if he was getting the story she had saved up for The American.

“How long have you known The American?” he asked.

“Oh I knew him for several months. We used to meet. We understand each other. He used to say ‘It looks like a cinch from now on.’”

“Then why did you call me up?”

She hesitated.

“I wanted to see you once more. Then too — he was supposed to arrive today but last night he wired that he’d be another week. I wanted to talk to a friend — after all you are my friend.”

He wanted her very much now but one part of his mind was cold and kept saying: she wants to see if I’m in love with her, if I want to marry her. Then she’d consider whether or not to throw this man over. She won’t consider it till I’ve committed myself. “Are you in love with The American?” he asked. “Oh yes. It’s absolutely arranged. He saved my life and my reason. He’s moving half way around the world for me. I insisted on that.”

“But are you in love with him?” “Oh yes, I’m in love with him.”

The “Oh yes” told him she was not — told him to speak for himself — that she would see. He took her in his arms and kissed her deliberately on the mouth and held her for a long time. It was so warm.

“Not tonight,” she whispered.

“All right.”

They passed over suicide bridge with the high new wire.

“I know what it is,” she said, “but how stupid. English people don’t kill themselves when they don’t get what they want.”

They turned around in the driveway of a hotel and started back. It was a dark night with no moon. The wave of desire had passed and neither spoke for a while. Her talk of kings had carried him oddly back in flashes to the pearly White Way of Main Street in Erie, Pennsylvania when he was fifteen. There was a restaurant with lobsters in the window and green weeds and bright light on a shell cavern and behind a red curtain the terribly strange brooding mystery of people and violin music. That was just before he left for New York. This girl reminded him of the fresh iced fish and lobsters in the window. She was Beautiful Doll. Minna had never been Beautiful Doll.

They looked at each other and her eyes asked “Shall I marry The American?” He did not answer. After a while he said:

“Let’s go somewhere for the week-end.”

She considered.

“Are you talking about tomorrow?”

“I’m afraid I am.”

“Well, I’ll tell you tomorrow,” she said.

“Tell me tonight. I’d be afraid — “

“ — find a note in the car?” she laughed. “No there’s no note in the car. You know almost everything now.”

“Almost everything.”

“Yes — almost. A few little things.”

He would have to know what they were. She would tell him tomorrow. He doubted — or he wanted to doubt — if there had been a maze of philandering — a fixation had held her to The Man, the king, firmly and long. Three years of a highly anomalous position — one foot in the Palace and one in the background. “You had to laugh a lot,” she said. “I learned to laugh a lot.”

“He could have married you — like Mrs. Simpson,” Stahr said in protest.

“Oh, he was married. And he wasn’t a romantic.” She stopped herself.

“Am I?”

“Yes,” she said unwillingly, as if she were laying down a trump. “Part of you is. You’re three or four different men but each of them out in the open. Like all Americans.”

“Don’t start trusting Americans too implicitly,” he said, smiling. “They may be out in the open but they change very fast.”

She looked concerned.

“Do they?”

“Very fast and all at once,” he said. “And nothing ever changes them back.”

“You frighten me. I always had a great sense of security with Americans.”

She seemed suddenly so alone that he took her hand.

“Where will we go tomorrow?” he said. “Maybe up in the mountains. I’ve got everything to do tomorrow but I won’t do any of it. We can start at four and get there by afternoon.”

“I’m not sure. I seem to be a little mixed up. This doesn’t seem to be quite the girl who came out to California for a new life.”

He could have said it then, said “It is a new life” for he knew it was, he knew he could not let her go now, but something else said to sleep on it as an adult, no romantic. And tell her tomorrow. Still she was looking at him her eyes wandering from his forehead to his chin and back again, and then up and down once more with that odd slowly waving motion of her head.

… It is your chance, Stahr. Better take it now. This is your girl. She can save you, she can worry you back to life. She will take looking after and you will grow strong to do it. But take her now — tell her and take her away. Neither of you knows it but far away over the night The American has changed his plans. At this moment his train is speeding through Albuquerque; the schedule is accurate. The engineer is on time. In the morning he will be here.

… The chauffeur turned up the hill to Kathleen’s house. It seemed warm even in darkness — wherever he had been near her was by way of being enchanted place for Stahr: this limousine — the rising house at the beach, the very distances they had already covered together over the sprawled city. The hill they climbed now gave forth a sort of glow, a sustained sound that struck his soul alert with delight.

As he said good bye he felt again that it was impossible to leave her, even for a few hours. There was only ten years between them but he felt that madness about it akin to the love of an ageing man for a young girl. It was a deep and desperate time-need, a clock ticking with his heart, and it urged him against the whole logic of his life to walk past her into the house now — and say “This is forever.”

Kathleen waited, irresolute herself — pink and silver frost waiting to melt with spring. She was a European, humble in the face of power, but there was a fierce self — respect that would only let her go so far. She had no illusions about the considerations that swayed princes.

“We’ll go to the mountains tomorrow,” said Stahr. Many thousands of people depended on his balanced judgement — you can suddenly blunt a quality you have lived by for twenty years.

He was very busy the next morning, Saturday. At two o’clock when he came from luncheon there was a stack of telegrams — a company ship was lost in the Arctic, a star was in disgrace, a writer was sueing for one million dollars, Jews were dead miserably beyond the sea. The last telegram stared up at him:

I WAS MARRIED AT NOON TODAY GOODBYE, and on a sticker attached “Send your answer by Western Union Telegram.”

Chapter 6

Episode 17

I knew nothing about any of this. I went up to Lake Louise and when I came back didn’t go near the studio. I think I would have started East in mid-August — if Stahr hadn’t called me up one day at home.

“I want you to arrange something, Cecelia — I want to meet a Communist Party member.”

“Which one?” I asked, somewhat startled.

“Any one.”

“Haven’t you got plenty out there?”

“I mean one of their organizers — from New York.”

The summer before I had been all politics — I could probably have arranged a meeting with Harry Bridges. But my boy had been killed in an auto accident after I went back to college and I was out of touch with such things. I had heard there was a man from “The New Masses” around somewhere.

“Will you promise him immunity?” I asked, joking.

“Oh yes,” Stahr answered seriously. “I won’t hurt him. Get one that can talk — tell him to bring one of his books along.”

He spoke as if he wanted to meet a member of the “I AM” cult.

“Do you want a blonde, or a brunette?”

“Oh, get a man,” he said hastily.

Hearing Stahr’s voice cheered me up — since I barged in on Father it had all seemed a paddling about in thin spittle. Stahr changed everything about it — changed the angle from which I saw it, changed the very air. He was like a brazier out of doors on a cool night.

“I don’t think your father ought to know,” he said. “Can we pretend the man is a Bulgarian musician or something?”

“Oh, they don’t dress up any more,” I said.

It was harder to arrange than I thought — Stahr’s negotiations with the Writers Guild, which had continued over a year, were approaching a dead end. Perhaps they were afraid of being corrupted, and I was asked what Stahr’s “proposition” was. Afterwards Stahr told me that he prepared for the meeting by running off the Russian Revolutionary Films that he had in his film library at home. He also ran off “Doctor Caligari” and Salvador Dali’s “Un Chien Andalou,” possibly suspecting that they had a bearing on the matter. He had been startled by the Russian Films back in the twenties and on Wylie White’s suggestion he had had the script department get him up a two-page “treatment” of the “Communist Manifesto.”

But his mind was closed on the subject. He was a rationalist who did his own reasoning without benefit of books — and he had just managed to climb out of a thousand years of Jewry into the late eighteenth century. He could not bear to see it melt away — he cherished the parvenu’s passionate loyalty to an imaginary past.

The meeting took place in what I called the “processed leather room” — it was one of six done for us by a decorator from Sloane’s years ago, and the term stuck in my head. It was the most decorator’s room — an angora wool carpet the color of dawn, the most delicate grey imaginable — you hardly dared walk on it; and the silver panelling and leather tables and creamy pictures and slim fragilities looked so easy to stain that we could not breathe hard in there, though it was wonderful to look into from the door when the windows were open and the curtains whimpered querulously against the breeze. It was a lineal descendant of the old American parlor that used to be closed except on Sunday. But it was exactly the room for the occasion and I hoped that whatever happened would give it character and make it henceforth part of our house.

Stahr arrived first. He was white and nervous and troubled — except for his voice which was always quiet and full of consideration. There was a brave personal quality in the way he would meet you — he would walk right up to you and put aside something that was in the way, and grow to know you all over as if he couldn’t help himself. I kissed him for some reason, and took him into the processed leather room.

“When do you go back to college?” he asked.

We had been over this fascinating ground before.

“Would you like me if I were a little shorter?” I asked. “I could wear low heels and plaster down my hair.”

“Let’s have dinner tonight,” he suggested. “People will think I’m your father but I don’t mind.”

“I love old men,” I assured him. “Unless the man has a crutch I feel it’s just a boy and girl affair.”

“Have you had many of those?”

“Enough.”

“People fall in and out of love all the time, don’t they.”

“Every three years so Fanny Brice says. I just read it in the paper.”

“I wonder how they manage it,” he said. “I know it’s true because I see them. But they look so convinced every time. And then suddenly they don’t look convinced. But they get convinced all over.”

“You’ve been making too many movies.”

“I wonder if they’re as convinced the second time or the third time or the fourth time,” he persisted.

“More each time,” I said. “Most of all the last time.”

He thought this over and seemed to agree.

“I suppose so. Most of all the last time.”

I didn’t like the way he said this and I suddenly saw that under the surface he was miserable.

“It’s a great nuisance,” he said. “It’ll be better when it’s over.”

“Wait a minute! Perhaps pictures are in the wrong hands.”

Brimmer, the Party Member, was announced and going to meet him I slid over to the door on one of those gossamer throw-rugs and practically into his arms.

He was a nice-looking man, this Brimmer — a little on the order of Spencer Tracy but with a stronger face and a wider range of reactions written up in it. I couldn’t help thinking as he and Stahr smiled and shook hands and squared off, that they were two of the most alert men I had ever seen. They were very conscious of each other immediately — both as polite to me as you please but with a softening of the ends of their sentences when they turned in my direction.

“What are you people trying to do?” demanded Stahr. “You’ve got my young men all upset.”

“That keeps them awake, doesn’t it?” said Brimmer.

“First we let half a dozen Russians study the plant,” said Stahr. “As a model plant, you understand. And then you try to break up the unity that makes it a model plant.”

“The unity?” Brimmer repeated. “Do you mean what’s known as the company spirit?”

“Oh, not that,” said Stahr, impatiently. “It seems to be me you’re after. Last week a writer came into my office — a drunk — a man who’s been floating around for years just two steps out of the bughouse — and began telling me my business.”

Brimmer smiled.

“You don’t look to me like a man who could be told his business, Mr. Stahr.”

They would both have tea. When I came back Stahr was telling a story about the Warner brothers and Brimmer was laughing with him.

“I’ll tell you another one,” Stahr said. “Balanchine the Russian dancer had them mixed up with the Ritz Brothers. He didn’t know which ones he was training and which ones he was working for. He used to go around saying ‘I cannot train those Warner Brothers to dance.’”

It looked like a quiet afternoon. Brimmer asked him why the producers didn’t back the Anti-Nazi League.

“Because of you people,” said Stahr. “It’s your way of getting at the writers. In the long view you’re wasting your time. Writers are children — even in normal times they can’t keep their minds on their work.”

“They’re the farmers in this business,” said Brimmer pleasantly. “They grow the grain but they’re not in at the feast. Their feeling toward the producer is like the farmers’ resentment of the city fellow.”

I was wondering about Stahr’s girl — whether it was all over between them. Later when I heard the whole thing from Kathleen, standing in the rain in a wretched road called Goldwyn Terrace, I figured out that this must have been a week after she sent him the telegram. She couldn’t help the telegram. The man got off the train unexpectedly and walked her to the registry office without a flicker of doubt that this was what she wanted. It was eight in the morning and Kathleen was in such a daze that she was chiefly concerned in how to get the telegram to Stahr. In theory you could stop and say “Listen I forgot to tell you but I met a man.” But this track had been laid down so thoroughly, with such confidence, such struggle, such relief that when it came along suddenly cutting across the other she found herself on it like a car on a closed switch. He watched her write the telegram, looking directly at it across the table, and she hoped he couldn’t read upside down….

When my mind came back into the room they had destroyed the poor writers — Brimmer had gone so far as to admit they were “unstable.”

“They are not equipped for authority,” said Stahr. “There is no substitute for will. Sometimes you have to fake will when you don’t feel it at all.”

“I’ve had that experience.”

“You have to say ‘It’s got to be like this — no other way’ — even if you’re not sure. A dozen times a week that happens to me. Situations where there is no real reason for anything. You pretend there is.”

“All leaders have felt that,” said Brimmer. “Labor leaders, and certainly military leaders.”

“So I’ve had to take an attitude in this Guild matter. It looks to me like a try for power and all I am going to give the writers is money.”

“You give some of them very little money. Thirty dollars a week.”

“Who gets that?” asked Stahr surprised.

“The ones who are commodities and easy to replace.”

“Not on my lot,” said Stahr.

“Oh yes,” said Brimmer. “Two men in your shorts department get thirty dollars a week.”

“Who?”

“Man named Ransome — man named O’Brien.”

Stahr and I smiled together.

“Those are not writers,” said Stahr. “Those are cousins of Cecelia’s father.”

“There are some in other studios,” said Brimmer.

Stahr took his teaspoon and poured himself some medicine from a little bottle.

“What’s a fink?” he asked suddenly.

“A fink? That’s a strike breaker or a Company Tec.”

“I thought so,” said Stahr. “I’ve got a fifteen hundred dollar writer that every time he walks through the commissary keeps saying ‘Fink!’ behind other writers’ chairs. If he didn’t scare hell out of them it’d be funny.”

Brimmer laughed.

“I’d like to see that,” he said.

“You wouldn’t like to spend a day with me over there?” suggested Stahr.

Brimmer laughed with genuine amusement.

“No, Mr. Stahr. But I don’t doubt but that I’d be impressed. I’ve heard you’re one of the hardest working and most efficient men in the entire West. It’d be a privilege to watch you but I’m afraid I’ll have to deny myself.”

Stahr looked at me.

“I like your friend,” he said. “He’s crazy but I like him.” He looked closely at Brimmer. “Born on this side?”

“Oh yes. Several generations.”

“Many of them like you?”

“My father was a Baptist minister.”

“I mean are many of the Reds. I’d like to meet this big Jew that tried to blow over the Ford factory. What’s his name -”

“Frankensteen?”

“That’s the man. I guess some of you believe in it.”

“Quite a few,” said Brimmer dryly.

“Not you,” said Stahr.

A shade of annoyance floated across Brimmer’s face.

“Oh yes,” he said.

“Oh no,” said Stahr. “Maybe you did once.”

Brimmer shrugged his shoulders.

“Perhaps the boot’s on the other foot,” he said. “At the bottom of your heart, Mr. Stahr, you know I’m right.”

“No,” said Stahr, “I think it’s a bunch of tripe.”

“- you think to yourself ‘He’s right’ but you think the system will last out your time.”

“You don’t really think you’re going to overthrow the government.”

“No, Mr. Stahr. But we think perhaps you are.”

They were nicking at each other — little pricking strokes like men do sometimes. Women do it too but it is a joined battle then with no quarter, but it is not pleasant to watch men do it because you never know what’s next. Certainly it wasn’t improving the tonal associations of the room for me and I moved them out the French window into our golden-yellow California garden.

It was midsummer but fresh water from the gasping sprinklers made the lawn glitter like spring. I could see Brimmer look at it with a sigh in his glance — a way they have. He opened up big outside — inches taller than I thought and broad-shouldered. He reminded me a little of Superman when he takes off his spectacles. I thought he was as attractive as men can be who don’t really care about women as such. We played a round robin game of ping-pong and he handled his bat well. I heard Father come into the house singing that damn “Little Man, You’ve Had a Busy Day” and then breaking off as if he remembered we weren’t speaking any more. It was half past six — my car was standing in the drive and I suggested we go down to the Trocadero for dinner.

Brimmer had that look that Father O’Ney had that time in New York when he turned his collar around and went with Father and me to the Russian Ballet. He hadn’t quite ought to be here. When Bernie the photographer, who was waiting there for some big game or other, came up to our table he looked trapped — Stahr made Bernie go away, and I would like to have had the picture.

Then, to my astonishment, Stahr had three cocktails one after the other.

“Now I know you’ve been disappointed in love,” I said.

“What makes you think that, Cecelia?”

“Cocktails.”

“Oh, I never drink, Cecelia. I get dyspepsia — I never have been tight.”

I counted them. “- two — three.”

“I didn’t realize. I couldn’t taste them. I thought there was something the matter.”

A silly glassy look darted into his eye — then passed away.

“This is my first drink in a week,” said Brimmer. “I did my drinking in the navy.”

The look was back in Stahr’s eye — he winked it fatuously at me and said:

“This soapbox son-of-a-bitch has been working on the navy.”

Brimmer didn’t know quite how to take this. Evidently he decided to include it with the evening for he smiled faintly and I saw Stahr was smiling too. I was relieved when I saw it was safely in the great American tradition and I tried to take hold of the conversation but Stahr seemed suddenly all right.

“Here’s my typical experience,” he said very succinctly and clearly to Brimmer. “The best director in Hollywood — a man I never interfere with — has some streak in him that wants to slip a pansy into every picture or something on that order. Something offensive. He stamps it in deep like a watermark so I can’t get it out. Every time he does it the Legion of Decency moves a step forward and something has to be sacrificed out of some honest film.”

“Typical organization trouble,” agreed Brimmer.

“Typical,” said Stahr. “It’s an endless battle. So now this director tells me it’s all right because he’s got a Directors Guild and I can’t oppress the poor. That’s how you add to my troubles.”

“It’s a little remote from us,” said Brimmer smiling. “I don’t think we’d make much headway with the directors.”

“The directors used to be my pals,” said Stahr proudly.

It was like Edward the VII’s boast that he had moved in the best society in Europe.

“But some of them have never forgiven me,” he continued, “- for bringing out stage directors when sound came in. It put them on their toes and made them learn their jobs all over but they never did really forgive me. That time we imported a whole new hogshead full of writers and I thought they were great fellows till they all went Red.”

Gary Cooper came in and sat down in a corner with a bunch of men who breathed whenever he did and looked as if they lived off him and weren’t budging an inch. A woman across the room looked around and turned out to be Carole Lombard — I was glad that Brimmer was at least getting an eyeful.

Stahr ordered a whiskey and soda and, almost immediately, another. He ate nothing but a few spoonfuls of soup and he said all the awful things about everybody being lazy so-and-so’s and none of it mattered to him because he had lots of money — it was the kind of talk you heard whenever Father and his friends were together. I think Stahr realized that it sounded pretty ugly outside of the proper company — maybe he had never heard how it sounded before. Anyhow he shut up and drank off a cup of black coffee. I loved him and what he said didn’t change that but I hated Brimmer to carry off this impression. I wanted him to see Stahr as a sort of technological virtuoso and here Stahr had been playing the wicked overseer to a point he would have called trash if he had watched it on the screen.

“I’m a production man,” he said as if to modify his previous attitude. “I like writers — I think I understand them. I don’t want to kick anybody out if they do their work.”

“We don’t want you to,” said Brimmer pleasantly. “We’d like to take you over as a going concern.”

Stahr nodded grimly.

“I’d like to put you in a roomful of my partners. They’ve all got a dozen reasons for having Fitts run you fellows out of town.”

“We appreciate your protection,” said Brimmer with a certain irony. “Frankly we do find you difficult, Mr. Stahr — precisely because you are a paternalistic employer and your influence is very great.”

Stahr was only half listening.

“I never thought,” he said, “- that I had more brains than a writer has. But I always thought that his brains belonged to me — because I knew how to use them. Like the Romans — I’ve heard that they never invented things but they knew what to do with them. Do you see? I don’t say it’s right. But it’s the way I’ve always felt — since I was a boy.”

This interested Brimmer — the first thing that had interested him for an hour.

“You know yourself very well, Mr. Stahr,” he said.

I think he wanted to get away. He had been curious to see what kind of man Stahr was and now he thought he knew. Still hoping things would be different I rashly urged him to ride home with us but when Stahr stopped by the bar for another drink I knew I’d made a mistake.

It was a gentle, harmless, motionless evening with a lot of Saturday cars. Stahr’s hand lay along the back of the seat touching my hair. Suddenly I wished it had been about ten years ago. I would have been nine. Brimmer about eighteen and working his way through some mid-western college and Stahr twenty-five just having inherited the world and full of confidence and joy. We would both have looked up to Stahr so, without question. And here we were in an adult conflict to which there was no peaceable solution, complicated now with exhaustion and drink.

We turned in at our drive and I drove around to the garden again.

“I must go along now,” said Brimmer. “I’ve got to meet some people.”

“No, stay,” said Stahr. “I never have said what I wanted. We’ll play ping-pong and have another drink and then we’ll tear into each other.”

Brimmer hesitated. Stahr turned on the floodlight and picked up his ping-pong bat and I went into the house for some whiskey — I wouldn’t have dared disobey him.

When I came back they were not playing but Stahr was batting a whole box of new balls across to Brimmer who turned them aside. When I arrived he quit and took the bottle and retired to a chair just out of the floodlight, watching in dark dangerous majesty. He was pale — he was so transparent that you could almost watch the alcohol mingle with the poison of his exhaustion.

“Time to relax on Saturday night,” he said.

“You’re not relaxing,” I said.

He was carrying on a losing battle with his instinct toward schizophrenia.

“I’m going to beat up Brimmer,” he announced after a moment. “I’m going to handle this thing personally.”

“Can’t you pay somebody to do it?” asked Brimmer.

I signalled him to keep quiet.

“I do my own dirty work,” said Stahr. “I’m going to beat hell out of you and put you on a train.”

He got up and came forward and I put my arms around him, gripping him.

“Please stop this!” I said. “Oh, you’re being so bad.”

“This fellow has an influence over you,” he said darkly. “Over all you young people. You don’t know what you’re doing.”

“Please go home,” I said to Brimmer.

Stahr’s suit was made of slippery cloth and suddenly he slipped away from me and went for Brimmer. Brimmer retreated backward around the table. There was an odd expression in his face and afterwards I thought it looked as if he were saying, “Is this all? This frail half sick person holding up the whole thing.”

Then Stahr came close, his hands going up. It seemed to me that Brimmer held him off with his left arm a minute and then I looked away — I couldn’t bear to watch.

When I looked back Stahr was out of sight below the level of the table and Brimmer was looking down at him.

“Please go home,” I said to Brimmer.

“All right.” He stood looking down at Stahr as I came around the table. “I always wanted to hit ten million dollars but I didn’t know it would be like this.”

Stahr lay motionless.

“Please go,” I said.

“I’m sorry. Can I help -”

“No. Please go. I understand.”

He looked again, a little awed at the depths of Stahr’s repose which he had created in a split second. Then he went quickly away over the grass and I knelt down and shook Stahr. In a moment he came awake with a terrific convulsion and bounced up on his feet.

“Where is he?” he shouted.

“Who?” I asked innocently.

“That American. Why in hell did you have to marry him, you damn fool.”

“Monroe — he’s gone. I didn’t marry anybody.”

I pushed him down in a chair.

“He’s been gone half an hour,” I lied.

The ping-pong balls lay around in the grass like a constellation of stars. I turned on a sprinkler and came back with a wet handkerchief but there was no mark on Stahr — he must have been hit in the side of the head. He went off behind some trees and was sick and I heard him kicking up some earth over it. After that he seemed all right but he wouldn’t go into the house till I got him some mouthwash so I took back the whiskey bottle and got a mouthwash bottle. His wretched essay at getting drunk was over. I’ve been out with college freshmen but for sheer ineptitude and absence of the Bacchic spirit it unquestionably took the cake. Every bad thing happened to him but that was all.

We went in the house; the cook said Father and Mr. Marcus and Flieshacker were on the verandah so we stayed in the “processed leather room.” We both sat down in a couple of places and seemed to slide off and finally I sat on a fur rug and Stahr on a footstool beside me.

“Did I hit him?” he asked.

“Oh, yes,” I said. “Quite badly.”

“I don’t believe it.” After a minute he added, “I didn’t want to hurt him. I just wanted to chase him out. I guess he got scared and hit me.”

If this was his interpretation of what had happened it was all right with me.

“Do you hold it against him?”

“Oh no,” he said. “I was drunk.” He looked around. “I’ve never been in here before — who did this room — somebody from the studio?”

“Somebody from New York.”

“Well, I’ll have to get you out of here,” he said in his old pleasant way. “How would you like to go out to Doug Fairbanks’ ranch and spend the night? He asked me — I know he’d love to have you.”

That’s how the two weeks started that he and I went around together. It only took one of them for Louella to have us married.

The manuscript stops at this point.

The following synopsis of the rest of the story was constructed from Fitzgerald’s notes:

SYNPOSIS OF THE REST OF THE NOVEL

Soon after his interview with Brimmer, Stahr makes a trip East. A wage-cut has been threatened in the studio, and Stahr has gone to talk to the stockholders — presumably with the idea of inducing them to retrench in some other way. He and Brady have long been working at cross-purposes, and the struggle between them for the control of the company is rapidly coming to a climax. We do not know about the results of this trip from the business point of view, but, whether or not on a business errand, Stahr for the first time visits Washington with the intention of seeing the city; and it is to be presumed that the author had meant to return here to the motif introduced in the first chapter with the visit of the Hollywood people to the home of Andrew Jackson and their failure to gain admittance or even to see the place clearly: the relation of the moving — picture industry to the American ideals and tradition. It is mid — summer; Washington is stifling; Stahr comes down with summer grippe and goes around the city in a daze of fever and heat. He never succeeds in becoming acquainted with it as he had hoped to.

When he recovers and gets back to Hollywood, he finds that Brady has taken advantage of his absence to put through a fifty percent pay — cut. Brady had called a meeting of writers and told them in a tearful speech that he and the other executives would take a cut themselves if the writers would consent to take one. If they would agree, it would not be necessary to reduce the salaries of the stenographers and the other low — paid employees. The writers had accepted this arrangement, but had then been double — crossed by Brady, who had proceeded to slash the stenographers just the same. Stahr is revolted by this; and he and Brady nave a violent falling-out. Stahr, though opposed to the unions, believing that any enterprising office-boy can make his way to the top as he has done, is an old-fashioned paternalistic employer, who likes to feel that the people who work for him are contented, and that he and they are on friendly terms. On the other hand, he quarrels also with Wylie White, who he finds has become truculently hostile to him, in spite of the fact that Stahr was not personally responsible for the pay — cut. Stahr has been patient in the past with White’s drinking and his practical jokes, and he is hurt that the writer should not feel toward him the same kind of personal loyalty — which is the only solidarity that Stahr understands in the field of business relations. “The Reds see him now as a conservative — Wall Street as a Red.” But he finds himself driven by the logic of the situation to fall in with the idea which has been proposed and is heartily approved by Brady, of setting up a company union.

As for his own position in the studio, he had in Washington already thought of quitting; but, intimately involved in the struggle, ill, unhappy and embittered though he is, it is difficult for him to surrender to Brady. In the meantime, he has been going around with Cecilia. The girl in a conversation with her father about the attentions Stahr has apparently been paying her, has carelessly let Brady know that Stahr is in love with someone else. Brady finds out about Kathleen, whom Stahr has been seeing again, and attempts to blackmail Stahr. Stahr in disgust with the Bradys abruptly drops Cecilia. He on his side has known for years — having learned it by way of his wife’s trained nurse — that Brady had had a hand in the death of the husband of a woman with whom he (Brady) had been in love. The two men threaten one another with no really conclusive evidence on either side.

But Brady has an instrument ready to his hand. The man whom Kathleen has married — whose name is W. Bronson Smith — is a technician working in the studios, who has been taking an active part in his union. It is impossible to tell precisely how Scott Fitzgerald imagined the labor situation in Hollywood for the purposes of his story. At the time of which he is writing, the various kinds of technicians had already been organized in the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees; and it is obvious that he intended to exploit the element of racketeering and gangsterism revealed in this organization by the case of William Bioff. Brady was to go to Kathleen’s husband and play upon his jealousy of his wife. We do not know what Fitzgerald intended that these two should try to do to Stahr. Robinson, the cutter (see the notes on this character), was originally to have undertaken to murder him; but it seems more probable from the author’s outline that Stahr was to be caught in some trap which would supply Kathleen’s husband with grounds for bringing a suit against Stahr for alienation of his wife’s affection. In Fitzgerald’s outline below, the theme of Chapter VIII is indicated by the words, “The suit and the price.” This is evidently partly explained by the following note of material which Fitzgerald intended to make use of, though it is impossible to tell how it was to be modified to meet the demands of the story: “One of the —  — brothers is accused by an employee of seducing his wife. Sued for alienation. They try to settle it out of court, but the man bringing suit is a labor leader and won’t be bought. Neither will he divorce his wife. He considers rougher measures. His price is that —  — shall go away for a year. —  — ‘s instinct is to stay and fight it, but the other brothers get to a doctor and pronounce death sentence on him and retire him. He tries to get the girl to go with him, but is afraid of the Mann Act. She is to follow him and they’ll go abroad.”

In any case, Stahr is to be saved by the intervention of the camera man, Pete Zavras, whom he has befriended at the beginning of the story, when Zavras had lost his standing with the studios.

In the meantime, Stahr is now seriously ill. He and Kathleen have been “taking breathless chances. “ They have succeeded in having “one last fling, “ which has taken place during an overpower’ ing heat wave in the early part of September. But their meetings have proved unsatisfactory. The author has indicated in an early sketch that Kathleen was to “come of very humble parents” — her father was to have been the captain of a Newfoundland fishing smack; and in another place he says that Stahr has found it difficult to accept her as a permanent part of his life because she is “poor, unfortunate, and tagged with a middle — class exterior which doesn’t fit in with the grandeur Stahr demands of life. “ It is possible that the labor conflict in which her husband has become involved was intended to alienate her and Stahr. Stahr is now being pushed into the past by Brady and by the unions alike. The split between the controllers of the movie industry, on the one hand, and the various groups of employees, on the other, is widening and leaving no place for real individualists of business like Stahr, whose successes are personal achievements and whose career has always been invested with a certain personal glamor. He has held himself directly responsible to everyone with whom he has worked; he has even wanted to beat up his enemies himself. In Hollywood he is “the last tycoon. “

Stahr has not been afraid, as we have seen in the conference in Chapter III, to risk money on unpopular films which would afford him some artistic satisfaction. He has had a craftsman’s interest inthe pictures, and it has been natural for him to want to make them better. But he has been “lying low” since the wage — cut and has ceased to make pictures altogether. There was to have been a second series of scenes showing him at a story conference, at the rushes and on the sets, which was to have contrasted with the similar series in Chapters III and IV, and to have shown the change that has taken place in his attitude and status.

He must, however, stand up to Brady, who he knows will stop at nothing. He evidently fears Brady will murder him, for he now decides to resort to Brady’s own methods and get his partner murdered. For this he apparently goes straight to the gangsters. It is not clear how the murder is to be accomplished; but in order to be away at the time, Stahr arranges a trip to New York. He sees Kathleen for the last time at the airport, and also meets Cecilia, who is going back to college on a different plane. On the plane he has a reaction of disgust against the course he has taken; he realizes that he has let himself be degraded to the same plane of brutality as Brady. He decides to call off the murder and intends to wire orders as soon as the plane descends at the next airport. But the plane has an accident and crashes before they reach the next stop. Stahr is killed, and the murder goes through. The ominous suicide of Schwartz in the opening chapter of the story is thus balanced by the death of Stahr. In the note that Schwartz had sent him, he had been trying to warn him against Brady, who had long wanted to get Stahr out of the company.

Stahr’s funeral, which was to have been described in detail, is an orgy of Hollywood servility and hypocrisy. Everybody is weeping copiously or conspicuously stifling emotion with an eye on the right people. Cecilia imagines Stahr present and can hear him saying “Trash!” The old cowboy actor, Johnny Swanson, who has been mentioned at the beginning of Chapter II and for whom in his forlorn situation Cecilia has later had the idea of trying to do something at the time of her visit to her father’s office, has been invited to the funeral by mistake — through the confusion of his name with someone else’s, — and asked to officiate as pall — bearer along with the most intimate and important of the dead producer’s friends. Johnny goes through with the ceremony, rather dazed; and then finds out, to his astonishment, that his fortunes have been gloriously restored. From this time on, he is deluged with offers of jobs.

In the meantime, a final glimpse of Fleishacker, the ambitious company lawyer, a man totally without conscience or creative brains, was to have shown him as prefiguring the immediate future of the moving — picture business. There was also to have been a passage toward the end between Fleishacker and Cecilia, in which the former, who has been to New YorkUniversity and who was perhaps to have tried to marry Cecilia, was to have attempted a conversation with her on an “intellectual” plane.

Cecilia, on the rebound from Stahr, has had an affair with a man she does not love — probably Wylie White, who has been after her from the first and who represents the opposition to Stahr. As a result of the death of Stahr and the murder of her father, she now breaks down completely. She develops tuberculosis, and we were to learn for the first time at the end that she has been putting together her story in a tuberculosis sanitarium. (See the first of the fragments under Cecilia.)

We were to have had a final picture of Kathleen standing outside the studio. She has presumably separated from her husband as a result of die plot against Stahr. It had been one of her chief attractions for Stahr that she did not belong to the Hollywood world; and now she knows that she is never to be part of it. She is always to remain on the outside of things — a situation which also has its tragedy.

FITZGERALD’S NOTES FOR The Last Tycoon

Chapter I

The author has written at the top of his last draft of the first chapter, as given here:

Rewrite from mood. Has become stilted with rewriting. Don’t look [at previous draft]. Rewrite from mood.

Page 20. Fitzgerald’s first sketch for the end of the chapter perhaps conveys his idea more completely than he had succeeded in doing in this draft:

This will be based on a conversation that I had with —  — the first time I was alone with him in 1927, the day that he said a thing about railroads. As near as I can remember what he said was this:

We sat in the old commissary at —  — and he said, “Scottie, supposing there’s got to be a road through a mountain — a railroad, and two or three surveyors and people come to you and you believe some of them and some of them you don’t believe, but all in all, there seem to be half a dozen possible roads through those mountains, each one of which, so far as you can determine, is as good as the other. Now suppose you happen to be the top man, there’s a point where you don’t exercise the faculty of judgment in the ordinary way, but simply the faculty of arbitrary decision. You say, ‘Well, I think we will put the road there,’ and you trace it with your finger and you know in your secret heart, and no one else knows, that you have no reason for putting the road there rather than in several other different courses, but you’re the only person that knows that you don’t know why you’re doing it and you’ve got to stick to that and you’ve got to pretend that you know and that you did it for specific reasons, even though you’re utterly assailed by doubtsat times as to the wisdom of your decision, because all these other possible decisions keep echoing in your ear. But when you’re planning a new enterprise on a grand scale, the people under you mustn’t ever know or guess that you’re in any doubt, because they’ve all got to have something to look up to and they mustn’t ever dream that you’re in doubt about any decision. Those things keep occurring.”

At that point, some other people came into the commissary and sat down, and the first thing I knew there was a group of four and the intimacy of the conversation was broken, but I was very much impressed by the shrewdness of what he said — something more than shrewdness — by the largeness of what he thought and how he reached it at the age of twenty — six, which he was then.

So I think that this last episode will be when Stahr goes up and sits with the pilot up in front and rides beside the pilot, and the pilot recognizes in Stahr someone who in his own field must be just as sure, just as determined, just as courageous as he himself is. Very few words are exchanged between Stahr and the pilot — in fact, it is an episode that we may see entirely through the eyes of Cecilia peeping in, of the stewardess reporting to Cecilia what she saw peeping through the cockpit, or Schwartz still trying to get to Stahr before they get to Los Angeles. It is quite possible that we may not be alone with Stahr through this entire episode down to the very end, but at the very end I want to go into that strong feeling that I had in that undeveloped note about the motor shutting off and the plane settling down to earth and the lights of Los Angeles, and for a minute there, I want to give an all — fireworks illumination of the intense passion in Stahr’s soul, his love of life, his love for the great thing that he’s built out here, his, perhaps not exactly, satisfaction, but his feeling certainly of coming home to an empire of his own — an empire he has made.

I want to contrast this sharply with the feeling of those who have merely gypped another person’s empire away from them like the four great railroad kings of the coast… or the feeling that —  — would have. He’s not interested in it because he owns it He’s interested in it as an artist because he has made it, and mixed up with his great feeling of triumph and happiness there must inevitably be a feeling of sadness with all acts of courage — a feeling that it is to someextent a finished thing, and doubt as to the next step as to how Ear he can go.

After the plane comes down, it may be best to finish the chapter with that fireworks — repeat my own fear when I landed in Los Angeles with the feeling of new worlds to conquer in 1937 transferred to Stahr, or it may be best to end with a cacophony of a rival.

Chapter II

Page 24. Fitzgerald had written Only fair opposite the paragraph which begins, “Robby’ll take care of everything when he comes,” Stahr assured Father. This was to have been the first appearance of a character who was to play an important role, and the author wanted presumably, at this casual introduction, to give a sharper impression of him. His notes on Robinson will be found below among the preliminary sketches for the characters.

Chapter III

This chapter had not been cut and organized to the author’s complete satisfaction. It is given here as it stands in the manuscript, with only a few changes to make it self — consistent.

In the manuscript, the passage on page 46 reads as follows:

Probably the attack was planned, for Popolos, the Greek, took up the matter in a sort of double talk that reminded Prince Agge of Mike Van Dyke, except that it tried to be and succeeded in being clear instead of confusing.

The author had written a scene with which he was dissatisfied, in which the Prince had encountered Mike Van Dyke, the old gagman; but the double talk, of Mike Van Dyke was intended to figure in some other place. The passages that deal with it follow:

“Hello, Mike,” said Monroe. He introduced him to the visitor: “Prince Agge, this is Mr. Van Dyke. You’ve laughed at his stuff many times. He’s the best gag — man in pictures.”

“In the world,” said the saucer-eyed man gravely, “ — the funniest man in the world. How are you, Prince?…”

Immediately the Prince found himself engaged in conversation with Mike Van Dyke. He answered politely without quite getting the gist of his words. Something about the commissary, where Mr. Van Dyke thought he had seen the Prince trying to order what sounded like “twisted fish and acat’s handlebar,” though the Prince was certain he misunderstood.

He tried to explain that he had not been to the commissary, but by this time they were so far into the subject that he thought the quickest way was to admit that he had, and merely parry Mr. Van Dyke’s mistaken statements as to what he had done there. Mr. Van Dyke was not so much insistent as convinced, and he seemed to talk very fast….

The Prince was introduced to Mr. Spurgeon and to Mr. and Mrs. Tarleton, but he was now so involved in the conversation with Mr. Van Dyke that he heard himself stammering, “I’m glad to meet me,” because he was explaining to Van Dyke that he had not seen Technigarbo in Gretacolor. Again he had misunderstood. Was his name Albert Edward Butch Arthur Agge David, Prince of Denmark? “That’s my cousin,” he almost said, his head reeling.

Stahr’s voice, clear and reassuring, brought him back to reality.

“That’s enough, Mike — That was ‘double — talk,” he explained to Prince Agge. “It’s considered funny here in the lower brackets. Do it slow, Mike.”

Mike demonstrated politely.

“In an income at the gate this morning — “ He pointed at Stahr. “ — or did he?”

Baffled, the Dane bit again.

“What? Did he what?” Then he smiled: “I see. It is like your Gertrude Stein.”

Chapter IV

Fitzgerald has the following note on the episode with the director at the beginning of this chapter:

What is missing in Ridingwood scene is passion and imagination, etc. What an extraordinary thing that it should all have been there for Ridingwood and then not there.

Chapter V

Page 97. After the words, And so he had learned tolerance, kindness, forbearance, and even affection like lessons, the author has written for his own guidance: (Now the idea about young and generous).

Note following the section that ends on page 98:

This may not be terse and clear enough here. Or perhaps I mean strong enough. It may be the place for the doctor’s verdict. I would like to leave him on a stronger note.

The Short Story Collections

The house where Fitzgerald spent most of his early years, Summit Avenue, St Paul

FLAPPERS AND PHILOSOPHERS

This is Fitzgerald’s first collection of short stories, published in 1920 and containing eight stories.

Fitzgerald, 1912

CONTENTS

The Offshore Pirate

The Ice Palace

Head and Shoulders

The Cut-Glass Bowl

Bernice Bobs Her Hair

Benediction

Dalyrimple Goes Wrong

The Four Fists

The Offshore Pirate

I

This unlikely story begins on a sea that was a blue dream, as colorful as blue-silk stockings, and beneath a sky as blue as the irises of children’s eyes. From the western half of the sky the sun was shying little golden disks at the sea — if you gazed intently enough you could see them skip from wave tip to wave tip until they joined a broad collar of golden coin that was collecting half a mile out and would eventually be a dazzling sunset. About half-way between the Florida shore and the golden collar a white steam-yacht, very young and graceful, was riding at anchor and under a blue-and-white awning aft a yellow-haired girl reclined in a wicker settee reading The Revolt of the Angels, by Anatole France.

She was about nineteen, slender and supple, with a spoiled alluring mouth and quick gray eyes full of a radiant curiosity. Her feet, stockingless, and adorned rather than clad in blue-satin slippers which swung nonchalantly from her toes, were perched on the arm of a settee adjoining the one she occupied. And as she read she intermittently regaled herself by a faint application to her tongue of a half-lemon that she held in her hand. The other half, sucked dry, lay on the deck at her feet and rocked very gently to and fro at the almost imperceptible motion of the tide.

The second half-lemon was well-nigh pulpless and the golden collar had grown astonishing in width, when suddenly the drowsy silence which enveloped the yacht was broken by the sound of heavy footsteps and an elderly man topped with orderly gray hair and clad in a white-flannel suit appeared at the head of the companionway. There he paused for a moment until his eyes became accustomed to the sun, and then seeing the girl under the awning he uttered a long even grunt of disapproval.

If he had intended thereby to obtain a rise of any sort he was doomed to disappointment. The girl calmly turned over two pages, turned back one, raised the lemon mechanically to tasting distance, and then very faintly but quite unmistakably yawned.

“Ardita!” said the gray-haired man sternly.

Ardita uttered a small sound indicating nothing.

“Ardita!” he repeated. “Ardita!”

Ardita raised the lemon languidly, allowing three words to slip out before it reached her tongue.

“Oh, shut up.”

“Ardita!”

“What?”

“Will you listen to me — or will I have to get a servant to hold you while I talk to you?”

The lemon descended very slowly and scornfully.

“Put it in writing.”

“Will you have the decency to close that abominable book and discard that damn lemon for two minutes?”

“Oh, can’t you lemme alone for a second?”

“Ardita, I have just received a telephone message from the shore —  — “

“Telephone?” She showed for the first time a faint interest.

“Yes, it was —  — “

“Do you mean to say,” she interrupted wonderingly, “‘at they let you run a wire out here?”

“Yes, and just now —  — “

“Won’t other boats bump into it?”

“No. It’s run along the bottom. Five min —  — “

“Well, I’ll be darned! Gosh! Science is golden or something — isn’t it?”

“Will you let me say what I started to?”

“Shoot!”

“Well it seems — well, I am up here — “ He paused and swallowed several times distractedly. “Oh, yes. Young woman, Colonel Moreland has called up again to ask me to be sure to bring you in to dinner. His son Toby has come all the way from New York to meet you and he’s invited several other young people. For the last time, will you —  — “

“No,” said Ardita shortly, “I won’t. I came along on this darn cruise with the one idea of going to Palm Beach, and you knew it, and I absolutely refuse to meet any darn old colonel or any darn young Toby or any darn old young people or to set foot in any other darn old town in this crazy state. So you either take me to Palm Beach or else shut up and go away.”

“Very well. This is the last straw. In your infatuation for this man. — a man who is notorious for his excesses — a man your father would not have allowed to so much as mention your name — you have rejected the demi-monde rather than the circles in which you have presumably grown up. From now on —  — “

“I know,” interrupted Ardita ironically, “from now on you go your way and I go mine. I’ve heard that story before. You know I’d like nothing better.”

“From now on,” he announced grandiloquently, “you are no niece of mine. I —  — “

“O-o-o-oh!” The cry was wrung from Ardita with the agony of a lost soul. “Will you stop boring me! Will you go ‘way! Will you jump overboard and drown! Do you want me to throw this book at you!”

“If you dare do any —  — “

Smack! The Revolt of the Angels sailed through the air, missed its target by the length of a short nose, and bumped cheerfully down the companionway.

The gray-haired man made an instinctive step backward and then two cautious steps forward. Ardita jumped to her five feet four and stared at him defiantly, her gray eyes blazing.

“Keep off!”

“How dare you!” he cried.

“Because I darn please!”

“You’ve grown unbearable! Your disposition —  — “

“You’ve made me that way! No child ever has a bad disposition unless it’s her fancy’s fault! Whatever I am, you did it.”

Muttering something under his breath her uncle turned and, walking forward called in a loud voice for the launch. Then he returned to the awning, where Ardita had again seated herself and resumed her attention to the lemon.

“I am going ashore,” he said slowly. “I will be out again at nine o’clock to-night. When I return we start back to New York, wither I shall turn you over to your aunt for the rest of your natural, or rather unnatural, life.” He paused and looked at her, and then all at once something in the utter childness of her beauty seemed to puncture his anger like an inflated tire, and render him helpless, uncertain, utterly fatuous.

“Ardita,” he said not unkindly, “I’m no fool. I’ve been round. I know men. And, child, confirmed libertines don’t reform until they’re tired — and then they’re not themselves — they’re husks of themselves.” He looked at her as if expecting agreement, but receiving no sight or sound of it he continued. “Perhaps the man loves you — that’s possible. He’s loved many women and he’ll love many more. Less than a month ago, one month, Ardita, he was involved in a notorious affair with that red-haired woman, Mimi Merril; promised to give her the diamond bracelet that the Czar of Russia gave his mother. You know — you read the papers.”

“Thrilling scandals by an anxious uncle,” yawned Ardita. “Have it filmed. Wicked clubman making eyes at virtuous flapper. Virtuous flapper conclusively vamped by his lurid past. Plans to meet him at Palm Beach. Foiled by anxious uncle.”

“Will you tell me why the devil you want to marry him?”

“I’m sure I couldn’t say,” said Audits shortly. “Maybe because he’s the only man I know, good or bad, who has an imagination and the courage of his convictions. Maybe it’s to get away from the young fools that spend their vacuous hours pursuing me around the country. But as for the famous Russian bracelet, you can set your mind at rest on that score. He’s going to give it to me at Palm Beach — if you’ll show a little intelligence.”

“How about the — red-haired woman?”

“He hasn’t seen her for six months,” she said angrily. “Don’t you suppose I have enough pride to see to that? Don’t you know by this time that I can do any darn thing with any darn man I want to?”

She put her chin in the air like the statue of France Aroused, and then spoiled the pose somewhat by raising the lemon for action.

“Is it the Russian bracelet that fascinates you?”

“No, I’m merely trying to give you the sort of argument that would appeal to your intelligence. And I wish you’d go ‘way,” she said, her temper rising again. “You know I never change my mind. You’ve been boring me for three days until I’m about to go crazy. I won’t go ashore! Won’t! Do you hear? Won’t!”

“Very well,” he said, “and you won’t go to Palm Beach either. Of all the selfish, spoiled, uncontrolled disagreeable, impossible girl I have —  — “

Splush! The half-lemon caught him in the neck. Simultaneously came a hail from over the side.

“The launch is ready, Mr. Farnam.”

Too full of words and rage to speak, Mr. Farnam cast one utterly condemning glance at his niece and, turning, ran swiftly down the ladder.

II

Five o’clock robed down from the sun and plumped soundlessly into the sea. The golden collar widened into a glittering island; and a faint breeze that had been playing with the edges of the awning and swaying one of the dangling blue slippers became suddenly freighted with song. It was a chorus of men in close harmony and in perfect rhythm to an accompanying sound of oars dealing the blue writers. Ardita lifted her head and listened.

“Carrots and Peas,

Beans on their knees,

Pigs in the seas,

Lucky fellows!

Blow us a breeze,

Blow us a breeze,

Blow us a breeze,

With your bellows.”

Ardita’s brow wrinkled in astonishment. Sitting very still she listened eagerly as the chorus took up a second verse.

“Onions and beans,

Marshalls and Deans,

Goldbergs and Greens

And Costellos.

Blow us a breeze,

Blow us a breeze,

Blow us a breeze,

With your bellows.”

With an exclamation she tossed her book to the desk, where it sprawled at a straddle, and hurried to the rail. Fifty feet away a large rowboat was approaching containing seven men, six of them rowing and one standing up in the stern keeping time to their song with an orchestra leader’s baton.

“Oysters and Rocks,

Sawdust and socks,

Who could make clocks

Out of cellos? —  — “

The leader’s eyes suddenly rested on Ardita, who was leaning over the rail spellbound with curiosity. He made a quick movement with his baton and the singing instantly ceased. She saw that he was the only white man in the boat — the six rowers were negroes.

“Narcissus ahoy!” he called politely.

“What’s the idea of all the discord?” demanded Ardita cheerfully. “Is this the varsity crew from the county nut farm?”

By this time the boat was scraping the side of the yacht and a great bulking negro in the bow turned round and grasped the ladder. Thereupon the leader left his position in the stern and before Ardita had realized his intention he ran up the ladder and stood breathless before her on the deck.

“The women and children will be spared!” he said briskly. “All crying babies will be immediately drowned and all males put in double irons!” Digging her hands excitedly down into the pockets of her dress Ardita stared at him, speechless with astonishment. He was a young man with a scornful mouth and the bright blue eyes of a healthy baby set in a dark sensitive face. His hair was pitch black, damp and curly — the hair of a Grecian statue gone brunette. He was trimly built, trimly dressed, and graceful as an agile quarter-back.

“Well, I’ll be a son of a gun!” she said dazedly.

They eyed each other coolly.

“Do you surrender the ship?”

“Is this an outburst of wit?” demanded Ardita. “Are you an idiot — or just being initiated to some fraternity?”

“I asked you if you surrendered the ship.”

“I thought the country was dry,” said Ardita disdainfully. “Have you been drinking finger-nail enamel? You better get off this yacht!”

“What?” the young man’s voice expressed incredulity.

“Get off the yacht! You heard me!”

He looked at her for a moment as if considering what she had said.

“No,” said his scornful mouth slowly; “No, I won’t get off the yacht. You can get off if you wish.”

Going to the rail be gave a curt command and immediately the crew of the rowboat scrambled up the ladder and ranged themselves in line before him, a coal-black and burly darky at one end and a miniature mulatto of four feet nine at to other. They seemed to be uniformly dressed in some sort of blue costume ornamented with dust, mud, and tatters; over the shoulder of each was slung a small, heavy-looking white sack, and under their arms they carried large black cases apparently containing musical instruments.

“‘Ten-shun!” commanded the young man, snapping his own heels together crisply. “Right driss! Front! Step out here, Babe!”

The smallest Negro took a quick step forward and saluted.

“Take command, go down below, catch the crew and tie ‘em up — all except the engineer. Bring him up to me. Oh, and pile those bags by the rail there.”

“Yas-suh!”

Babe saluted again and wheeling about motioned for the five others to gather about him. Then after a short whispered consultation they all filed noiselessly down the companionway.

“Now,” said the young man cheerfully to Ardita, who had witnessed this last scene in withering silence, “if you will swear on your honor as a flapper — which probably isn’t worth much — that you’ll keep that spoiled little mouth of yours tight shut for forty-eight hours, you can row yourself ashore in our rowboat.”

“Otherwise what?”

“Otherwise you’re going to sea in a ship.”

With a little sigh as for a crisis well passed, the young man sank into the settee Ardita had lately vacated and stretched his arms lazily. The corners of his mouth relaxed appreciatively as he looked round at the rich striped awning, the polished brass, and the luxurious fittings of the deck. His eye felt on the book, and then on the exhausted lemon.

“Hm,” he said, “Stonewall Jackson claimed that lemon-juice cleared his head. Your head feel pretty clear?”

Ardita disdained to answer.

“Because inside of five minutes you’ll have to make a clear decision whether it’s go or stay.”

He picked up the book and opened it curiously.

“The Revolt of the Angels. Sounds pretty good. French, eh?” He stared at her with new interest “You French?”

“No.”

“What’s your name?”

“Farnam.”

“Farnam what?”

“Ardita Farnam.”

“Well Ardita, no use standing up there and chewing out the insides of your mouth. You ought to break those nervous habits while you’re young. Come over here and sit down.”

Ardita took a carved jade case from her pocket, extracted a cigarette and lit it with a conscious coolness, though she knew her hand was trembling a little; then she crossed over with her supple, swinging walk, and sitting down in the other settee blew a mouthful of smoke at the awning.

“You can’t get me off this yacht,” she raid steadily; “and you haven’t got very much sense if you think you’ll get far with it. My uncle’ll have wirelesses zigzagging all over this ocean by half past six.”

“Hm.”

She looked quickly at his face, caught anxiety stamped there plainly in the faintest depression of the mouth’s corners.

“It’s all the same to me,” she said, shrugging her shoulders. “‘Tisn’t my yacht. I don’t mind going for a coupla hours’ cruise. I’ll even lend you that book so you’ll have something to read on the revenue boat that takes you up to Sing-Sing.”

He laughed scornfully.

“If that’s advice you needn’t bother. This is part of a plan arranged before I ever knew this yacht existed. If it hadn’t been this one it’d have been the next one we passed anchored along the coast.”

“Who are you?” demanded Ardita suddenly. “And what are you?”

“You’ve decided not to go ashore?”

“I never even faintly considered it.”

“We’re generally known,” he said “all seven of us, as Curtis Carlyle and his Six Black Buddies late of the Winter Garden and the Midnight Frolic.”

“You’re singers?”

“We were until to-day. At present, due to those white bags you see there we’re fugitives from justice and if the reward offered for our capture hasn’t by this time reached twenty thousand dollars I miss my guess.”

“What’s in the bags?” asked Ardita curiously.

“Well,” he said “for the present we’ll call it — mud — Florida mud.”

III

Within ten minutes after Curtis Carlyle’s interview with a very frightened engineer the yacht Narcissus was under way, steaming south through a balmy tropical twilight. The little mulatto, Babe, who seems to have Carlyle’s implicit confidence, took full command of the situation. Mr. Farnam’s valet and the chef, the only members of the crew on board except the engineer, having shown fight, were now reconsidering, strapped securely to their bunks below. Trombone Mose, the biggest negro, was set busy with a can of paint obliterating the name Narcissus from the bow, and substituting the name Hula Hula, and the others congregated aft and became intently involved in a game of craps.

Having given order for a meal to be prepared and served on deck at seven-thirty, Carlyle rejoined Ardita, and, sinking back into his settee, half closed his eyes and fell into a state of profound abstraction.

Ardita scrutinized him carefully — and classed him immediately as a romantic figure. He gave the effect of towering self-confidence erected on a slight foundation — just under the surface of each of his decisions she discerned a hesitancy that was in decided contrast to the arrogant curl of his lips.

“He’s not like me,” she thought “There’s a difference somewhere.” Being a supreme egotist Ardita frequently thought about herself; never having had her egotism disputed she did it entirely naturally and with no detraction from her unquestioned charm. Though she was nineteen she gave the effect of a high-spirited precocious child, and in the present glow of her youth and beauty all the men and women she had known were but driftwood on the ripples of her temperament. She had met other egotists — in fact she found that selfish people bored her rather less than unselfish people — but as yet there had not been one she had not eventually defeated and brought to her feet.

But though she recognized an egotist in the settee, she felt none of that usual shutting of doors in her mind which meant clearing ship for action; on the contrary her instinct told her that this man was somehow completely pregnable and quite defenseless. When Ardita defied convention — and of late it had been her chief amusement — it was from an intense desire to be herself, and she felt that this man, on the contrary, was preoccupied with his own defiance.

She was much more interested in him than she was in her own situation, which affected her as the prospect of a matineé might affect a ten-year-old child. She had implicit confidence in her ability to take care of herself under any and all circumstances.

The night deepened. A pale new moon smiled misty-eyed upon the sea, and as the shore faded dimly out and dark clouds were blown like leaves along the far horizon a great haze of moonshine suddenly bathed the yacht and spread an avenue of glittering mail in her swift path. From time to time there was the bright flare of a match as one of them lighted a cigarette, but except for the low under-tone of the throbbing engines and the even wash of the waves about the stern the yacht was quiet as a dream boat star-bound through the heavens. Round them bowed the smell of the night sea, bringing with it an infinite languor.

Carlyle broke the silence at last.

“Lucky girl,” he sighed “I’ve always wanted to be rich — and buy all this beauty.”

Ardita yawned.

“I’d rather be you,” she said frankly.

“You would — for about a day. But you do seem to possess a lot of nerve for a flapper.”

“I wish you wouldn’t call me that.”

“Beg your pardon.”

“As to nerve,” she continued slowly, “it’s my one redeemiug feature. I’m not afraid of anything in heaven or earth.”

“Hm, I am.”

“To be afraid,” said Ardita, “a person has either to be very great and strong — or else a coward. I’m neither.” She paused for a moment, and eagerness crept into her tone. “But I want to talk about you. What on earth have you done — and how did you do it?”

“Why?” he demanded cynically. “Going to write a movie, about me?”

“Go on,” she urged. “Lie to me by the moonlight. Do a fabulous story.”

A negro appeared, switched on a string of small lights under the awning, and began setting the wicker table for supper. And while they ate cold sliced chicken, salad, artichokes and strawberry jam from the plentiful larder below, Carlyle began to talk, hesitatingly at first, but eagerly as he saw she was interested. Ardita scarcely touched her food as she watched his dark young face — handsome, ironic faintly ineffectual.

He began life as a poor kid in a Tennessee town, he said, so poor that his people were the only white family in their street. He never remembered any white children — but there were inevitably a dozen pickaninnies streaming in his trail, passionate admirers whom he kept in tow by the vividness of his imagination and the amount of trouble he was always getting them in and out of. And it seemed that this association diverted a rather unusual musical gift into a strange channel.

There had been a colored woman named Belle Pope Calhoun who played the piano at parties given for white children — nice white children that would have passed Curtis Carlyle with a sniff. But the ragged little “poh white” used to sit beside her piano by the hour and try to get in an alto with one of those kazoos that boys hum through. Before he was thirteen he was picking up a living teasing ragtime out of a battered violin in little cafés round Nashville. Eight years later the ragtime craze hit the country, and he took six darkies on the Orpheum circuit. Five of them were boys he had grown up with; the other was the little mulatto, Babe Divine, who was a wharf nigger round New York, and long before that a plantation hand in Bermuda, until he stuck an eight-inch stiletto in his master’s back. Almost before Carlyle realized his good fortune he was on Broadway, with offers of engagements on all sides, and more money than he had ever dreamed of.

It was about then that a change began in his whole attitude, a rather curious, embittering change. It was when he realized that he was spending the golden years of his life gibbering round a stage with a lot of black men. His act was good of its kind — three trombones, three saxaphones, and Carlyle’s flute — and it was his own peculiar sense of rhythm that made all the difference; but he began to grow strangely sensitive about it, began to hate the thought of appearing, dreaded it from day to day.

They were making money — each contract he signed called for more — but when he went to managers and told them that he wanted to separate from his sextet and go on as a regular pianist, they laughed at him and told him he was crazy — it would be an artistic suicide. He used to laugh afterward at the phrase “artistic suicide.” They all used it.

Half a dozen times they played at private dances at three thousand dollars a night, and it seemed as if these crystallized all his distaste for his mode of livlihood. They took place in clubs and houses that he couldn’t have gone into in the daytime. After all, he was merely playing to rôle of the eternal monkey, a sort of sublimated chorus man. He was sick of the very smell of the theatre, of powder and rouge and the chatter of the greenroom, and the patronizing approval of the boxes. He couldn’t put his heart into it any more. The idea of a slow approach to the luxury of leisure drove him wild. He was, of course, progressing toward it, but, like a child, eating his ice-cream so slowly that he couldn’t taste it at all.

He wanted to have a lot of money and time and opportunity to read and play, and the sort of men and women round him that he could never have — the kind who, if they thought of him at all, would have considered him rather contemptible; in short he wanted all those things which he was beginning to lump under the general head of aristocracy, an aristocracy which it seemed almost any money could buy except money made as he was making it. He was twenty-five then, without family or education or any promise that he would succeed in a business career. He began speculating wildly, and within three weeks he had lost every cent he had saved.

Then the war came. He went to Plattsburg, and even there his profession followed him. A brigadier-general called him up to headquarters and told him he could serve his country better as a band leader — so he spent the war entertaining celebrities behind the line with a headquarters band. It was not so bad — except that when the infantry came limping back from the trenches he wanted to be one of them. The sweat and mud they wore seemed only one of those ineffable symbols of aristocracy that were forever eluding him.

“It was the private dances that did it. After I came back from the war the old routine started. We had an offer from a syndicate of Florida hotels. It was only a question of time then.”

He broke off and Ardita looked at him expectantly, but he shook his head.

“No,” he said, “I’m going to tell you about it. I’m enjoying it too much, and I’m afraid I’d lose a little of that enjoyment if I shared it with anyone else. I want to hang on to those few breathless, heroic moments when I stood out before them all and let them know I was more than a damn bobbing, squawking clown.”

From up forward came suddenly the low sound of singing. The negroes had gathered together on the deck and their voices rose together in a haunting melody that soared in poignant harmonics toward the moon. And Ardita listens in enchantment.

“Oh down —  —

oh down,

Mammy wanna take me down milky way,

Oh down,

oh down,

Pappy say to-morra-a-a-ah

But mammy say to-day,

Yes — mammy say to-day!”

Carlyle sighed and was silent for a moment looking up at the gathered host of stars blinking like arc-lights in the warm sky. The negroes’ song had died away to a plaintive humming and it seemed as if minute by minute the brightness and the great silence were increasing until he could almost hear the midnight toilet of the mermaids as they combed their silver dripping curls under the moon and gossiped to each other of the fine wrecks they lived on the green opalescent avenues below.

“You see,” said Carlyle softly, “this is the beauty I want. Beauty has got to be astonishing, astounding — it’s got to burst in on you like a dream, like the exquisite eyes of a girl.”

He turned to her, but she was silent.

“You see, don’t you, Anita — I mean, Ardita?”

Again she made no answer. She had been sound asleep for some time.

IV

In the dense sun-flooded noon of next day a spot in the sea before them resolved casually into a green-and-gray islet, apparently composed of a great granite cliff at its northern end which slanted south through a mile of vivid coppice and grass to a sandy beach melting lazily into the surf. When Ardita, reading in her favorite seat, came to the last page of The Revolt of the Angels, and slamming the book shut looked up and saw it, she gave a little cry of delight, and called to Carlyle, who was standing moodily by the rail.

“Is this it? Is this where you’re going?”

Carlyle shrugged his shoulders carelessly.

“You’ve got me.” He raised his voice and called up to the acting skipper: “Oh, Babe, is this your island?”

The mulatto’s miniature head appeared from round the corner of the deck-house.

“Yas-suh! This yeah’s it.”

Carlyle joined Ardita.

“Looks sort of sporting, doesn’t it?”

“Yes,” she agreed; “but it doesn’t look big enough to be much of a hiding-place.”

“You still putting your faith in those wirelesses your uncle was going to have zigzagging round?”

“No,” said Ardita frankly. “I’m all for you. I’d really like to see you make a get-away.”

He laughed.

“You’re our Lady Luck. Guess we’ll have to keep you with us as a mascot — for the present anyway.”

“You couldn’t very well ask me to swim back,” she said coolly. “If you do I’m going to start writing dime novels founded on that interminable history of your life you gave me last night.”

He flushed and stiffened slightly.

“I’m very sorry I bored you.”

“Oh, you didn’t — until just at the end with some story about how furious you were because you couldn’t dance with the ladies you played music for.”

He rose angrily.

“You have got a darn mean little tongue.”

“Excuse me,” she said melting into laughter, “but I’m not used to having men regale me with the story of their life ambitions — especially if they’ve lived such deathly platonic lives.”

“Why? What do men usually regale you with?”

“Oh, they talk about me,” she yawned. “They tell me I’m the spirit of youth and beauty.”

“What do you tell them?”

“Oh, I agree quietly.”

“Does every man you meet tell you he loves you?”

Ardita nodded.

“Why shouldn’t he? All life is just a progression toward, and then a recession from, one phrase — ‘I love you.’“

Carlyle laughed and sat down.

“That’s very true. That’s — that’s not bad. Did you make that up?”

“Yes — or rather I found it out. It doesn’t mean anything especially. It’s just clever.”

“It’s the sort of remark,” he said gravely, “that’s typical of your class.”

“Oh,” she interrupted impatiently, “don’t start that lecture on aristocracy again! I distrust people who can be intense at this hour in the morning. It’s a mild form of insanity — a sort of breakfast-food jag. Morning’s the time to sleep, swim, and be careless.”

Ten minutes later they had swung round in a wide circle as if to approach the island from the north.

“There’s a trick somewhere,” commented Ardita thoughtfully. “He can’t mean just to anchor up against this cliff.”

They were heading straight in now toward the solid rock, which must have been well over a hundred feet tall, and not until they were within fifty yards of it did Ardita see their objective. Then she clapped her hands in delight. There was a break in the cliff entirely hidden by a curious overlapping of rock, and through this break the yacht entered and very slowly traversed a narrow channel of crystal-clear water between high gray walls. Then they were riding at anchor in a miniature world of green and gold, a gilded bay smooth as glass and set round with tiny palms, the whole resembling the mirror lakes and twig trees that children set up in sand piles.

“Not so darned bad!” cried Carlyle excitedly.

“I guess that little coon knows his way round this corner of the Atlantic.”

His exuberance was contagious, and Ardita became quite jubilant.

“It’s an absolutely sure-fire hiding-place!”

“Lordy, yes! It’s the sort of island you read about.”

The rowboat was lowered into the golden lake and they pulled to shore.

“Come on,” said Carlyle as they landed in the slushy sand, “we’ll go exploring.”

The fringe of palms was in turn ringed in by a round mile of flat, sandy country. They followed it south and brushing through a farther rim of tropical vegetation came out on a pearl-gray virgin beach where Ardita kicked of her brown golf shoes — she seemed to have permanently abandoned stockings — and went wading. Then they sauntered back to the yacht, where the indefatigable Babe had luncheon ready for them. He had posted a lookout on the high cliff to the north to watch the sea on both sides, though he doubted if the entrance to the cliff was generally known — he had never even seen a map on which the island was marked.

“What’s its name,” asked Ardita — “the island, I mean?”

“No name ‘tall,” chuckled Babe. “Reckin she jus’ island, ‘at’s all.”

In the late afternoon they sat with their backs against great boulders on the highest part of the cliff and Carlyle sketched for her his vague plans. He was sure they were hot after him by this time. The total proceeds of the coup he had pulled off and concerning which he still refused to enlighten her, he estimated as just under a million dollars. He counted on lying up here several weeks and then setting off southward, keeping well outside the usual channels of travel rounding the Horn and heading for Callao, in Peru. The details of coaling and provisioning he was leaving entirely to Babe who, it seemed, had sailed these seas in every capacity from cabin-boy aboard a coffee trader to virtual first mate on a Brazillian pirate craft, whose skipper had long since been hung.

“If he’d been white he’d have been king of South America long ago,” said Carlyle emphatically. “When it comes to intelligence he makes Booker T. Washington look like a moron. He’s got the guile of every race and nationality whose blood is in his veins, and that’s half a dozen or I’m a liar. He worships me because I’m the only man in the world who can play better ragtime than he can. We used to sit together on the wharfs down on the New York water-front, he with a bassoon and me with an oboe, and we’d blend minor keys in African harmonics a thousand years old until the rats would crawl up the posts and sit round groaning and squeaking like dogs will in front of a phonograph.”

Ardita roared.

“How you can tell ‘em!”

Carlyle grinned.

“I swear that’s the gos —  — “

“What you going to do when you get to Callao?” she interrupted.

“Take ship for India. I want to be a rajah. I mean it. My idea is to go up into Afghanistan somewhere, buy up a palace and a reputation, and then after about five years appear in England with a foreign accent and a mysterious past. But India first. Do you know, they say that all the gold in the world drifts very gradually back to India. Something fascinating about that to me. And I want leisure to read — an immense amount.”

“How about after that?”

“Then,” he answered defiantly, “comes aristocracy. Laugh if you want to — but at least you’ll have to admit that I know what I want — which I imagine is more than you do.”

“On the contrary,” contradicted Ardita, reaching in her pocket for her cigarette case, “when I met you I was in the midst of a great uproar of all my friends and relatives because I did know what I wanted.”

“What was it?”

“A man.”

He started.

“You mean you were engaged?”

“After a fashion. If you hadn’t come aboard I had every intention of slipping ashore yesterday evening — how long ago it seems — and meeting him in Palm Beach. He’s waiting there for me with a bracelet that once belonged to Catherine of Russia. Now don’t mutter anything about aristocracy,” she put in quickly. “I liked him simply because he had had an imagination and the utter courage of his convictions.”

“But your family disapproved, eh?”

“What there is of it — only a silly uncle and a sillier aunt. It seems he got into some scandal with a red-haired woman name Mimi something — it was frightfully exaggerated, he said, and men don’t lie to me — and anyway I didn’t care what he’d done; it was the future that counted. And I’d see to that. When a man’s in love with me he doesn’t care for other amusements. I told him to drop her like a hot cake, and he did.”

“I feel rather jealous,” said Carlyle, frowning — and then he laughed. “I guess I’ll just keep you along with us until we get to Callao. Then I’ll lend you enough money to get back to the States. By that time you’ll have had a chance to think that gentleman over a little more.”

“Don’t talk to me like that!” fired up Ardita. “I won’t tolerate the parental attitude from anybody! Do you understand me?” He chuckled and then stopped, rather abashed, as her cold anger seemed to fold him about and chill him.

“I’m sorry,” he offered uncertainly.

“Oh, don’t apologize! I can’t stand men who say ‘I’m sorry’ in that manly, reserved tone. Just shut up!”

A pause ensued, a pause which Carlyle found rather awkward, but which Ardita seemed not to notice at all as she sat contentedly enjoying her cigarette and gazing out at the shining sea. After a minute she crawled out on the rock and lay with her face over the edge looking down. Carlyle, watching her, reflected how it seemed impossible for her to assume an ungraceful attitude.

“Oh, look,” she cried. “There’s a lot of sort of ledges down there. Wide ones of all different heights.”

“We’ll go swimming to-night!” she said excitedly. “By moonlight.”

“Wouldn’t you rather go in at the beach on the other end?”

“Not a chance. I like to dive. You can use my uncle’s bathing suit, only it’ll fit you like a gunny sack, because he’s a very flabby man. I’ve got a one-piece that’s shocked the natives all along the Atlantic coast from Biddeford Pool to St. Augustine.”

“I suppose you’re a shark.”

“Yes, I’m pretty good. And I look cute too. A sculptor up at Rye last summer told me my calves are worth five hundred dollars.”

There didn’t seem to be any answer to this, so Carlyle was silent, permitting himself only a discreet interior smile.

V

When the night crept down in shadowy blue and silver they threaded the shimmering channel in the rowboat and, tying it to a jutting rock, began climbing the cliff together. The first shelf was ten feet up, wide, and furnishing a natural diving platform. There they sat down in the bright moonlight and watched the faint incessant surge of the waters almost stilled now as the tide set seaward.

“Are you happy?” he asked suddenly.

She nodded.

“Always happy near the sea. You know,” she went on, “I’ve been thinking all day that you and I are somewhat alike. We’re both rebels — only for different reasons. Two years ago, when I was just eighteen and you were —  — “

“Twenty-five.”

“ —  — well, we were both conventional successes. I was an utterly devastating débutante and you were a prosperous musician just commissioned in the army —  — “

“Gentleman by act of Congress,” he put in ironically.

“Well, at any rate, we both fitted. If our corners were not rubbed off they were at least pulled in. But deep in us both was something that made us require more for happiness. I didn’t know what I wanted. I went from man to man, restless, impatient, month by month getting less acquiescent and more dissatisfied. I used to sit sometimes chewing at the insides of my mouth and thinking I was going crazy — I had a frightful sense of transiency. I wanted things now — now — now! Here I was — beautiful — I am, aren’t I?”

“Yes,” agreed Carlyle tentatively.

Ardita rose suddenly.

“Wait a second. I want to try this delightful-looking sea.”

She walked to the end of the ledge and shot out over the sea, doubling up in mid-air and then straightening out and entering to water straight as a blade in a perfect jack-knife dive.

In a minute her voice floated up to him.

“You see, I used to read all day and most of the night. I began to resent society —  — “

“Come on up here,” he interrupted. “What on earth are you doing?”

“Just floating round on my back. I’ll be up in a minute. Let me tell you. The only thing I enjoyed was shocking people; wearing something quite impossible and quite charming to a fancy-dress party, going round with the fastest men in New York, and getting into some of the most hellish scrapes imaginable.”

The sounds of splashing mingled with her words, and then he heard her hurried breathing as she began climbing up side to the ledge.

“Go on in!” she called

Obediently he rose and dived. When he emerged, dripping, and made the climb he found that she was no longer on the ledge, but after a second frightened he heard her light laughter from another shelf ten feet up. There he joined her and they both sat quietly for a moment, their arms clasped round their knees, panting a little from the climb.

“The family were wild,” she said suddenly. “They tried to marry me off. And then when I’d begun to feel that after all life was scarcely worth living I found something” — her eyes went skyward exultantly —  — “I found something!”

Carlyle waited and her words came with a rush.

“Courage — just that; courage as a rule of life, and something to cling to always. I began to build up this enormous faith in myself. I began to see that in all my idols in the past some manifestation of courage had unconsciously been the thing that attracted me. I began separating courage from the other things of life. All sorts of courage — the beaten, bloody prize-fighter coming up for more — I used to make men take me to prize-fights; the déclassé woman sailing through a nest of cats and looking at them as if they were mud under her feet; the liking what you like always; the utter disregard for other people’s opinions — just to live as I liked always and to die in my own way — Did you bring up the cigarettes?”

He handed one over and held a match for her gently.

“Still,” Ardita continued, “the men kept gathering — old men and young men, my mental and physical inferiors, most of them, but all intensely desiring to have me — to own this rather magnificent proud tradition I’d built up round me. Do you see?”

“Sort of. You never were beaten and you never apologized.”

“Never!”

She sprang to the edge, poised for a moment like a crucified figure against the sky; then describing a dark parabola plunked without a slash between two silver ripples twenty feet below.

Her voice floated up to him again.

“And courage to me meant ploughing through that dull gray mist that comes down on life — not only overriding people and circumstances but overriding the bleakness of living. A sort of insistence on the value of life and the worth of transient things.”

She was climbing up now, and at her last words her head, with the damp yellow hair slicked symmetrically back appeared on his level.

“All very well,” objected Carlyle. “You can call it courage, but your courage is really built, after all, on a pride of birth. You were bred to that defiant attitude. On my gray days even courage is one of the things that’s gray and lifeless.”

She was sitting near the edge, hugging her knees and gazing abstractedly at the white moon; he was farther back, crammed like a grotesque god into a niche in the rock.

“I don’t want to sound like Pollyanna,” she began, “but you haven’t grasped me yet. My courage is faith — faith in the eternal resilience of me — that joy’ll come back, and hope and spontaneity. And I feel that till it does I’ve got to keep my lips shut and my chin high, and my eyes wide — not necessarily any silly smiling. Oh, I’ve been through hell without a whine quite often — and the female hell is deadlier than the male.”

“But supposing,” suggested Carlyle, “that before joy and hope and all that came back the curtain was drawn on you for good?”

Ardita rose, and going to the wall climbed with some difficulty to the next ledge, another ten or fifteen feet above.

“Why,” she called back “then I’d have won!”

He edged out till he could see her.

“Better not dive from there! You’ll break your back,” he said quickly.

She laughed.

“Not I!”

Slowly she spread her arms and stood there swan-like, radiating a pride in her young perfection that lit a warm glow in Carlyle’s heart.

“We’re going through the black air with our arms wide and our feet straight out behind like a dolphin’s tail, and we’re going to think we’ll never hit the silver down there till suddenly it’ll be all warm round us and full of little kissing, caressing waves.”

Then she was in the air, and Carlyle involuntarily held his breath. He had not realized that the dive was nearly forty feet. It seemed an eternity before he heard the swift compact sound as she reached the sea.

And it was with his glad sigh of relief when her light watery laughter curled up the side of the cliff and into his anxious ears that he knew he loved her.

VI

Time, having no axe to grind, showered down upon them three days of afternoons. When the sun cleared the port-hole of Ardita’s cabin an hour after dawn she rose cheerily, donned her bathing-suit, and went up on deck. The negroes would leave their work when they saw her, and crowd, chuckling and chattering, to the rail as she floated, an agile minnow, on and under the surface of the clear water. Again in the cool of the afternoon she would swim — and loll and smoke with Carlyle upon the cliff; or else they would lie on their sides in the sands of the southern beach, talking little, but watching the day fade colorfully and tragically into the infinite langour of a tropical evening.

And with the long, sunny hours Ardita’s idea of the episode as incidental, madcap, a sprig of romance in a desert of reality, gradually left her. She dreaded the time when he would strike off southward; she dreaded all the eventualities that presented themselves to her; thoughts were suddenly troublesome and decisions odious. Had prayers found place in the pagan rituals of her soul she would have asked of life only to be unmolested for a while, lazily acquiescent to the ready, naïf flow of Carlyle’s ideas, his vivid boyish imagination, and the vein of monomania that seemed to run crosswise through his temperament and colored his every action.

But this is not a story of two on an island, nor concerned primarily with love bred of isolation. It is merely the presentation of two personalities, and its idyllic setting among the palms of the Gulf Stream is quite incidental. Most of us are content to exist and breed and fight for the right to do both, and the dominant idea, the foredoomed attest to control one’s destiny, is reserved for the fortunate or unfortunate few. To me the interesting thing about Ardita is the courage that will tarnish with her beauty and youth.

“Take me with you,” she said late one night as they sat lazily in the grass under the shadowy spreading palms. The negroes had brought ashore their musical instruments, and the sound of weird ragtime was drifting softly over on the warm breath of the night. “I’d love to reappear in ten years, as a fabulously wealthy high-caste Indian lady,” she continued.

Carlyle looked at her quickly.

“You can, you know.”

She laughed.

“Is it a proposal of marriage? Extra! Ardita Farnam becomes pirate’s bride. Society girl kidnapped by ragtime bank robber.”

“It wasn’t a bank.”

“What was it? Why won’t you tell me?”

“I don’t want to break down your illusions.”

“My dear man, I have no illusions about you.”

“I mean your illusions about yourself.”

She looked up in surprise.

“About myself! What on earth have I got to do with whatever stray felonies you’ve committed?”

“That remains to be seen.”

She reached over and patted his hand.

“Dear Mr. Curtis Carlyle,” she said softly, “are you in love with me?”

“As if it mattered.”

“But it does — because I think I’m in love with you.”

He looked at her ironically.

“Thus swelling your January total to half a dozen,” he suggested. “Suppose I call your bluff and ask you to come to India with me?”

“Shall I?”

He shrugged his shoulders.

“We can get married in Callao.”

“What sort of life can you offer me? I don’t mean that unkindly, but seriously; what would become of me if the people who want that twenty-thousand-dollar reward ever catch up with you?”

“I thought you weren’t afraid.”

“I never am — but I won’t throw my life away just to show one man I’m not.”

“I wish you’d been poor. Just a little poor girl dreaming over a fence in a warm cow country.”

“Wouldn’t it have been nice?”

“I’d have enjoyed astonishing you — watching your eyes open on things. If you only wanted things! Don’t you see?”

“I know — like girls who stare into the windows of jewelry-stores.”

“Yes — and want the big oblong watch that’s platinum and has diamonds all round the edge. Only you’d decide it was too expensive and choose one of white gold for a hundred dollar. Then I’d say: ‘Expensive? I should say not!’ And we’d go into the store and pretty soon the platinum one would be gleaming on your wrist.”

“That sounds so nice and vulgar — and fun, doesn’t it?” murmured Ardita.

“Doesn’t it? Can’t you see us travelling round and spending money right and left, and being worshipped by bell-boys and waiters? Oh, blessed are the simple rich for they inherit the earth!”

“I honestly wish we were that way.”

“I love you, Ardita,” he said gently.

Her face lost its childish look for moment and became oddly grave.

“I love to be with you,” she said, “more than with any man I’ve ever met. And I like your looks and your dark old hair, and the way you go over the side of the rail when we come ashore. In fact, Curtis Carlyle, I like all the things you do when you’re perfectly natural. I think you’ve got nerve and you know how I feel about that. Sometimes when you’re around I’ve been tempted to kiss you suddenly and tell you that you were just an idealistic boy with a lot of caste nonsense in his head. Perhaps if I were just a little bit older and a little more bored I’d go with you. As it is, I think I’ll go back and marry — that other man.”

Over across the silver lake the figures of the negroes writhed and squirmed in the moonlight like acrobats who, having been too long inactive, must go through their tacks from sheer surplus energy. In single file they marched, weaving in concentric circles, now with their heads thrown back, now bent over their instruments like piping fauns. And from trombone and saxaphone ceaselessly whined a blended melody, sometimes riotous and jubilant, sometimes haunting and plaintive as a death-dance from the Congo’s heart.

“Let’s dance,” cried Ardita. “I can’t sit still with that perfect jazz going on.”

Taking her hand he led her out into a broad stretch of hard sandy soil that the moon flooded with great splendor. They floated out like drifting moths under the rich hazy light, and as the fantastic symphony wept and exulted and wavered and despaired Ardita’s last sense of reality dropped away, and she abandoned her imagination to the dreamy summer scents of tropical flowers and the infinite starry spaces overhead, feeling that if she opened her eyes it would be to find herself dancing with a ghost in a land created by her own fancy.

“This is what I should call an exclusive private dance,” he whispered.

“I feel quite mad — but delightfully mad!”

“We’re enchanted. The shades of unnumbered generations of cannibals are watching us from high up on the side of the cliff there.”

“And I’ll bet the cannibal women are saying that we dance too close, and that it was immodest of me to come without my nose-ring.”

They both laughed softly — and then their laughter died as over across the lake they heard the trombones stop in the middle of a bar, and the saxaphones give a startled moan and fade out.

“What’s the matter?” called Carlyle.

After a moment’s silence they made out the dark figure of a man rounding the silver lake at a run. As he came closer they saw it was Babe in a state of unusual excitement. He drew up before them and gasped out his news in a breath.

“Ship stan’in’ off sho’ ‘bout half a mile suh. Mose, he uz on watch, he say look’s if she’s done ancho’d.”

“A ship — what kind of a ship?” demanded Carlyle anxiously.

Dismay was in his voice, and Ardita’s heart gave a sudden wrench as she saw his whole face suddenly droop.

“He say he don’t know, suh.”

“Are they landing a boat?”

“No, suh.”

“We’ll go up,” said Carlyle.

They ascended the hill in silence, Ardita’s hand still resting in Carlyle’s as it had when they finished dancing. She felt it clinch nervously from time to time as though he were unaware of the contact, but though he hurt her she made no attempt to remove it. It seemed an hour’s climb before they reached the top and crept cautiously across the silhouetted plateau to the edge of the cliff. After one short look Carlyle involuntarily gave a little cry. It was a revenue boat with six-inch guns mounted fore and aft.

“They know!” he said with a short intake of breath. “They know! They picked up the trail somewhere.”

“Are you sure they know about the channel? They may be only standing by to take a look at the island in the morning. From where they are they couldn’t see the opening in the cliff.”

“They could with field-glasses,” he said hopelessly. He looked at his wrist-watch. “It’s nearly two now. They won’t do anything until dawn, that’s certain. Of course there’s always the faint possibility that they’re waiting for some other ship to join; or for a coaler.”

“I suppose we may as well stay right here.”

The hour passed and they lay there side by side, very silently, their chins in their hands like dreaming children. In back of them squatted the negroes, patient, resigned, acquiescent, announcing now and then with sonorous snores that not even the presence of danger could subdue their unconquerable African craving for sleep.

Just before five o’clock Babe approached Carlyle. There were half a dozen rifles aboard the Narcissus he said. Had it been decided to offer no resistance?

A pretty good fight might be made, he thought, if they worked out some plan.

Carlyle laughed and shook his head.

“That isn’t a Spic army out there, Babe. That’s a revenue boat. It’d be like a bow and arrow trying to fight a machine-gun. If you want to bury those bags somewhere and take a chance on recovering them later, go on and do it. But it won’t work — they’d dig this island over from one end to the other. It’s a lost battle all round, Babe.”

Babe inclined his head silently and turned away, and Carlyle’s voice was husky as he turned to Ardita.

“There’s the best friend I ever had. He’d die for me, and be proud to, if I’d let him.”

“You’ve given up?”

“I’ve no choice. Of course there’s always one way out — the sure way — but that can wait. I wouldn’t miss my trial for anything — it’ll be an interesting experiment in notoriety. ‘Miss Farnam testifies that the pirate’s attitude to her was at all times that of a gentleman.’“

“Don’t!” she said. “I’m awfully sorry.”

When the color faded from the sky and lustreless blue changed to leaden gray a commotion was visible on the ship’s deck, and they made out a group of officers clad in white duck, gathered near the rail. They had field-glasses in their hands and were attentively examining the islet.

“It’s all up,” said Carlyle grimly.

“Damn,” whispered Ardita. She felt tears gathering in her eyes “We’ll go back to the yacht,” he said. “I prefer that to being hunted out up here like a ‘possum.”

Leaving the plateau they descended the hill, and reaching the lake were rowed out to the yacht by the silent negroes. Then, pale and weary, they sank into the settees and waited.

Half an hour later in the dim gray light the nose of the revenue boat appeared in the channel and stopped, evidently fearing that the bay might be too shallow. From the peaceful look of the yacht, the man and the girl in the settees, and the negroes lounging curiously against the rail, they evidently judged that there would be no resistance, for two boats were lowered casually over the side, one containing an officer and six bluejackets, and the other, four rowers and in the stern two gray-haired men in yachting flannels. Ardita and Carlyle stood up, and half unconsciously started toward each other.

Then he paused and putting his hand suddenly into his pocket he pulled out a round, glittering object and held it out to her.

“What is it?” she asked wonderingly.

“I’m not positive, but I think from the Russian inscription inside that it’s your promised bracelet.”

“Where — where on earth —  — “

“It came out of one of those bags. You see, Curtis Carlyle and his Six Black Buddies, in the middle of their performance in the tea-room of the hotel at Palm Beach, suddenly changed their instruments for automatics and held up the crowd. I took this bracelet from a pretty, overrouged woman with red hair.”

Ardita frowned and then smiled.

“So that’s what you did! You have got nerve!”

He bowed.

“A well-known bourgeois quality,” he said.

And then dawn slanted dynamically across the deck and flung the shadows reeling into gray corners. The dew rose and turned to golden mist, thin as a dream, enveloping them until they seemed gossamer relics of the late night, infinitely transient and already fading. For a moment sea and sky were breathless, and dawn held a pink hand over the young mouth of life — then from out in the lake came the complaint of a rowboat and the swish of oars.

Suddenly against the golden furnace low in the east their two graceful figures melted into one, and he was kissing her spoiled young mouth.

“It’s a sort of glory,” he murmured after a second.

She smiled up at him.

“Happy, are you?”

Her sigh was a benediction — an ecstatic surety that she was youth and beauty now as much as she would ever know. For another instant life was radiant and time a phantom and their strength eternal — then there was a bumping, scraping sound as the rowboat scraped alongside.

Up the ladder scrambled the two gray-haired men, the officer and two of the sailors with their hands on their revolvers. Mr. Farnam folded his arms and stood looking at his niece.

“So,” he said nodding his head slowly.

With a sigh her arms unwound from Carlyle’s neck, and her eyes, transfigured and far away, fell upon the boarding party. Her uncle saw her upper lip slowly swell into that arrogant pout he knew so well.

“So,” he repeated savagely. “So this is your idea of — of romance. A runaway affair, with a high-seas pirate.”

Ardita glanced at him carelessly.

“What an old fool you are!” she said quietly.

“Is that the best you can say for yourself?”

“No,” she said as if considering. “No, there’s something else. There’s that well-known phrase with which I have ended most of our conversations for the past few years — ‘Shut up!’“

And with that she turned, included the two old men, the officer, and the two sailors in a curt glance of contempt, and walked proudly down the companionway.

But had she waited an instant longer she would have heard a sound from her uncle quite unfamiliar in most of their interviews. He gave vent to a whole-hearted amused chuckle, in which the second old man joined.

The latter turned briskly to Carlyle, who had been regarding this scene with an air of cryptic amusement.

“Well Toby,” he said genially, “you incurable, hare-brained romantic chaser of rainbows, did you find that she was the person you wanted?”

Carlyle smiled confidently.

“Why — naturally,” he said “I’ve been perfectly sure ever since I first heard tell of her wild career. That’d why I had Babe send up the rocket last night.”

“I’m glad you did,” said Colonel Moreland gravely. “We’ve been keeping pretty close to you in case you should have trouble with those six strange niggers. And we hoped we’d find you two in some such compromising position,” he sighed. “Well, set a crank to catch a crank!”

“Your father and I sat up all night hoping for the best — or perhaps it’s the worst. Lord knows you’re welcome to her, my boy. She’s run me crazy. Did you give her the Russian bracelet my detective got from that Mimi woman?”

Carlyle nodded.

“Sh!” he said. “She’s coming on deck.”

Ardita appeared at the head of the companionway and gave a quick involuntary glance at Carlyle’s wrists. A puzzled look passed across her face. Back aft the negroes had begun to sing, and the cool lake, fresh with dawn, echoed serenely to their low voices.

“Ardita,” said Carlyle unsteadily.

She swayed a step toward him.

“Ardita,” he repeated breathlessly, “I’ve got to tell you the — the truth. It was all a plant, Ardita. My name isn’t Carlyle. It’s Moreland, Toby Moreland. The story was invented, Ardita, invented out of thin Florida air.”

She stared at him, bewildered, amazement, disbelief, and anger flowing in quick waves across her face. The three men held their breaths. Moreland, Senior, took a step toward her; Mr. Farnam’s mouth dropped a little open as he waited, panic-stricken, for the expected crash.

But it did not come. Ardita’s face became suddenly radiant, and with a little laugh she went swiftly to young Moreland and looked up at him without a trace of wrath in her gray eyes.

“Will you swear,” she said quietly “That it was entirely a product of your own brain?”

“I swear,” said young Moreland eagerly.

She drew his head down and kissed him gently.

“What an imagination!” she said softly and almost enviously. “I want you to lie to me just as sweetly as you know how for the rest of my life.”

The negroes’ voices floated drowsily back, mingled in an air that she had heard them singing before.

“Time is a thief;

Gladness and grief

Cling to the leaf

As it yellows —  — “

“What was in the bags?” she asked softly.

“Florida mud,” he answered. “That was one of the two true things I told you.”

“Perhaps I can guess the other one,” she said; and reaching up on her tiptoes she kissed him softly in the illustration.

The IcePalace

The sunlight dripped over the house like golden paint over an art jar, and the freckling shadows here and there only intensified the rigor of the bath of light. The Butterworth and Larkin houses flanking were entrenched behind great stodgy trees; only the Happer house took the full sun, and all day long faced the dusty road-street with a tolerant kindly patience. This was the city of Tarleton in southernmost Georgia, September afternoon.

Up in her bedroom window Sally Carrol Happer rested her nineteen-year-old chin on a fifty-two-year-old sill and watched Clark Darrow’s ancient Ford turn the corner. The car was hot — being partly metallic it retained all the heat it absorbed or evolved — and Clark Darrow sitting bolt upright at the wheel wore a pained, strained expression as though he considered himself a spare part, and rather likely to break. He laboriously crossed two dust ruts, the wheels squeaking indignantly at the encounter, and then with a terrifying expression he gave the steering-gear a final wrench and deposited self and car approximately in front of the Happer steps. There was a heaving sound, a death-rattle, followed by a short silence; and then the air was rent by a startling whistle.

Sally Carrol gazed down sleepily. She started to yawn, but finding this quite impossible unless she raised her chin from the window-sill, changed her mind and continued silently to regard the car, whose owner sat brilliantly if perfunctorily at attention as he waited for an answer to his signal. After a moment the whistle once more split the dusty air.

“Good mawnin’.”

With difficulty Clark twisted his tall body round and bent a distorted glance on the window.

“Tain’t mawnin’, Sally Carrol.”

“Isn’t it, sure enough?”

“What you doin’?”

“Eatin’ ‘n apple.”

“Come on go swimmin’ — want to?”

“Reckon so.”

“How ‘bout hurryin’ up?”

“Sure enough.”

Sally Carrol sighed voluminously and raised herself with profound inertia from the floor where she had been occupied in alternately destroyed parts of a green apple and painting paper dolls for her younger sister. She approached a mirror, regarded her expression with a pleased and pleasant languor, dabbed two spots of rouge on her lips and a grain of powder on her nose, and covered her bobbed corn-colored hair with a rose-littered sunbonnet. Then she kicked over the painting water, said, “Oh, damn!” — but let it lay — and left the room.

“How you, Clark?” she inquired a minute later as she slipped nimbly over the side of the car.

“Mighty fine, Sally Carrol.”

“Where we go swimmin’?”

“Out to Walley’s Pool. Told Marylyn we’d call by an’ get her an’ Joe Ewing.”

Clark was dark and lean, and when on foot was rather inclined to stoop. His eyes were ominous and his expression somewhat petulant except when startlingly illuminated by one of his frequent smiles. Clark had “a income” — just enough to keep himself in ease and his car in gasolene — and he had spent the two years since he graduated from Georgia Tech in dozing round the lazy streets of his home town, discussing how he could best invest his capital for an immediate fortune.

Hanging round he found not at all difficult; a crowd of little girls had grown up beautifully, the amazing Sally Carrol foremost among them; and they enjoyed being swum with and danced with and made love to in the flower-filled summery evenings — and they all liked Clark immensely. When feminine company palled there were half a dozen other youths who were always just about to do something, and meanwhile were quite willing to join him in a few holes of golf, or a game of billiards, or the consumption of a quart of “hard yella licker.” Every once in a while one of these contemporaries made a farewell round of calls before going up to New York or Philadelphia or Pittsburgh to go into business, but mostly they just stayed round in this languid paradise of dreamy skies and firefly evenings and noisy nigger street fairs — and especially of gracious, soft-voiced girls, who were brought up on memories instead of money.

The Ford having been excited into a sort of restless resentful life Clark and Sally Carrol rolled and rattled down Valley Avenue into Jefferson Street, where the dust road became a pavement; along opiate Millicent Place, where there were half a dozen prosperous, substantial mansions; and on into the down-town section. Driving was perilous here, for it was shopping time; the population idled casually across the streets and a drove of low-moaning oxen were being urged along in front of a placid street-car; even the shops seemed only yawning their doors and blinking their windows in the sunshine before retiring into a state of utter and finite coma.

“Sally Carrol,” said Clark suddenly, “it a fact that you’re engaged?”

She looked at him quickly.

“Where’d you hear that?”

“Sure enough, you engaged?”

“‘At’s a nice question!”

“Girl told me you were engaged to a Yankee you met up in Asheville last summer.”

Sally Carrol sighed.

“Never saw such an old town for rumors.”

“Don’t marry a Yankee, Sally Carrol. We need you round here.”

Sally Carrol was silent a moment.

“Clark,” she demanded suddenly, “who on earth shall I marry?”

“I offer my services.”

“Honey, you couldn’t support a wife,” she answered cheerfully. “Anyway, I know you too well to fall in love with you.”

“‘At doesn’t mean you ought to marry a Yankee,” he persisted.

“S’pose I love him?”

He shook his head.

“You couldn’t. He’d be a lot different from us, every way.”

He broke off as he halted the car in front of a rambling, dilapidated house. Marylyn Wade and Joe Ewing appeared in the doorway.

“‘Lo Sally Carrol.”

“Hi!”

“How you-all?”

“Sally Carrol,” demanded Marylyn as they started of again, “you engaged?”

“Lawdy, where’d all this start? Can’t I look at a man ‘thout everybody in town engagin’ me to him?”

Clark stared straight in front of him at a bolt on the clattering wind-shield.

“Sally Carrol,” he said with a curious intensity, “don’t you ‘like us?”

“What?”

“Us down here?”

“Why, Clark, you know I do. I adore all you boys.”

“Then why you gettin’ engaged to a Yankee?”

“Clark, I don’t know. I’m not sure what I’ll do, but — well, I want to go places and see people. I want my mind to grow. I want to live where things happen on a big scale.”

“What you mean?”

“Oh, Clark, I love you, and I love Joe here and Ben Arrot, and you-all, but you’ll — you’ll —  — “

“We’ll all be failures?”

“Yes. I don’t mean only money failures, but just sort of — of ineffectual and sad, and — oh, how can I tell you?”

“You mean because we stay here in Tarleton?”

“Yes, Clark; and because you like it and never want to change things or think or go ahead.”

He nodded and she reached over and pressed his hand.

“Clark,” she said softly, “I wouldn’t change you for the world. You’re sweet the way you are. The things that’ll make you fail I’ll love always — the living in the past, the lazy days and nights you have, and all your carelessness and generosity.”

“But you’re goin’ away?”

“Yes — because I couldn’t ever marry you. You’ve a place in my heart no one else ever could have, but tied down here I’d get restless. I’d feel I was — wastin’ myself. There’s two sides to me, you see. There’s the sleepy old side you love an’ there’s a sort of energy — the feeling that makes me do wild things. That’s the part of me that may be useful somewhere, that’ll last when I’m not beautiful any more.”

She broke of with characteristic suddenness and sighed, “Oh, sweet cooky!” as her mood changed.

Half closing her eyes and tipping back her head till it rested on the seat-back she let the savory breeze fan her eyes and ripple the fluffy curls of her bobbed hair. They were in the country now, hurrying between tangled growths of bright-green coppice and grass and tall trees that sent sprays of foliage to hang a cool welcome over the road. Here and there they passed a battered negro cabin, its oldest white-haired inhabitant smoking a corncob pipe beside the door, and half a dozen scantily clothed pickaninnies parading tattered dolls on the wild-grown grass in front. Farther out were lazy cotton-fields where even the workers seemed intangible shadows lent by the sun to the earth, not for toil, but to while away some age-old tradition in the golden September fields. And round the drowsy picturesqueness, over the trees and shacks and muddy rivers, flowed the heat, never hostile, only comforting, like a great warm nourishing bosom for the infant earth.

“Sally Carrol, we’re here!”

“Poor chile’s soun’ asleep.”

“Honey, you dead at last outa sheer laziness?”

“Water, Sally Carrol! Cool water waitin’ for you!”

Her eyes opened sleepily.

“Hi!” she murmured, smiling.

II

In November Harry Bellamy, tall, broad, and brisk, came down from his Northern city to spend four days. His intention was to settle a matter that had been hanging fire since he and Sally Carrol had met in Asheville, North Carolina, in midsummer. The settlement took only a quiet afternoon and an evening in front of a glowing open fire, for Harry Bellamy had everything she wanted; and, beside, she loved him — loved him with that side of her she kept especially for loving. Sally Carrol had several rather clearly defined sides.

On his last afternoon they walked, and she found their steps tending half-unconsciously toward one of her favorite haunts, the cemetery. When it came in sight, gray-white and golden-green under the cheerful late sun, she paused, irresolute, by the iron gate.

“Are you mournful by nature, Harry?” she asked with a faint smile.

“Mournful? Not I.”

“Then let’s go in here. It depresses some folks, but I like it.”

They passed through the gateway and followed a path that led through a wavy valley of graves — dusty-gray and mouldy for the fifties; quaintly carved with flowers and jars for the seventies; ornate and hideous for the nineties, with fat marble cherubs lying in sodden sleep on stone pillows, and great impossible growths of nameless granite flowers.

Occasionally they saw a kneeling figure with tributary flowers, but over most of the graves lay silence and withered leaves with only the fragrance that their own shadowy memories could waken in living minds.

They reached the top of a hill where they were fronted by a tall, round head-stone, freckled with dark spots of damp and half grown over with vines.

“Margery Lee,” she read; “1844-1873. Wasn’t she nice? She died when she was twenty-nine. Dear Margery Lee,” she added softly. “Can’t you see her, Harry?”

“Yes, Sally Carrol.”

He felt a little hand insert itself into his.

“She was dark, I think; and she always wore her hair with a ribbon in it, and gorgeous hoop-skirts of Alice blue and old rose.”

“Yes.”

“Oh, she was sweet, Harry! And she was the sort of girl born to stand on a wide, pillared porch and welcome folks in. I think perhaps a lot of men went away to war meanin’ to come back to her; but maybe none of ‘em ever did.”

He stooped down close to the stone, hunting for any record of marriage.

“There’s nothing here to show.”

“Of course not. How could there be anything there better than just ‘Margery Lee,’ and that eloquent date?”

She drew close to him and an unexpected lump came into his throat as her yellow hair brushed his cheek.

“You see how she was, don’t you Harry?”

“I see,” he agreed gently. “I see through your precious eyes. You’re beautiful now, so I know she must have been.”

Silent and close they stood, and he could feel her shoulders trembling a little. An ambling breeze swept up the hill and stirred the brim of her floppidy hat.

“Let’s go down there!”

She was pointing to a flat stretch on the other side of the hill where along the green turf were a thousand grayish-white crosses stretching in endless, ordered rows like the stacked arms of a battalion.

“Those are the Confederate dead,” said Sally Carrol simply.

They walked along and read the inscriptions, always only a name and a date, sometimes quite indecipherable.

“The last row is the saddest — see, ‘way over there. Every cross has just a date on it and the word ‘Unknown.’“

She looked at him and her eyes brimmed with tears.

“I can’t tell you how real it is to me, darling — if you don’t know.”

“How you feel about it is beautiful to me.”

“No, no, it’s not me, it’s them — that old time that I’ve tried to have live in me. These were just men, unimportant evidently or they wouldn’t have been ‘unknown’; but they died for the most beautiful thing in the world — the dead South. You see,” she continued, her voice still husky, her eyes glistening with tears, “people have these dreams they fasten onto things, and I’ve always grown up with that dream. It was so easy because it was all dead and there weren’t any disillusions comin’ to me. I’ve tried in a way to live up to those past standards of noblesse oblige — there’s just the last remnants of it, you know, like the roses of an old garden dying all round us — streaks of strange courtliness and chivalry in some of these boys an’ stories I used to hear from a Confederate soldier who lived next door, and a few old darkies. Oh, Harry, there was something, there was something! I couldn’t ever make you understand but it was there.”

“I understand,” he assured her again quietly.

Sally Carol smiled and dried her eyes on the tip of a handkerchief protruding from his breast pocket.

“You don’t feel depressed, do you, lover? Even when I cry I’m happy here, and I get a sort of strength from it.”

Hand in hand they turned and walked slowly away. Finding soft grass she drew him down to a seat beside her with their backs against the remnants of a low broken wall.

“Wish those three old women would clear out,” he complained. “I want to kiss you, Sally Carrol.”

“Me, too.”

They waited impatiently for the three bent figures to move off, and then she kissed him until the sky seemed to fade out and all her smiles and tears to vanish in an ecstasy of eternal seconds.

Afterward they walked slowly back together, while on the corners twilight played at somnolent black-and-white checkers with the end of day.

“You’ll be up about mid-January,” he said, “and you’ve got to stay a month at least. It’ll be slick. There’s a winter carnival on, and if you’ve never really seen snow it’ll be like fairy-land to you. There’ll be skating and skiing and tobogganing and sleigh-riding, and all sorts of torchlight parades on snow-shoes. They haven’t had one for years, so they’re gong to make it a knock-out.”

“Will I be cold, Harry?” she asked suddenly.

“You certainly won’t. You may freeze your nose, but you won’t be shivery cold. It’s hard and dry, you know.”

“I guess I’m a summer child. I don’t like any cold I’ve ever seen.”

She broke off and they were both silent for a minute.

“Sally Carol,” he said very slowly, “what do you say to — March?”

“I say I love you.”

“March?”

“March, Harry.”

III

All night in the Pullman it was very cold. She rang for the porter to ask for another blanket, and when he couldn’t give her one she tried vainly, by squeezing down into the bottom of her berth and doubling back the bedclothes, to snatch a few hours’ sleep. She wanted to look her best in the morning.

She rose at six and sliding uncomfortably into her clothes stumbled up to the diner for a cup of coffee. The snow had filtered into the vestibules and covered the door with a slippery coating. It was intriguing this cold, it crept in everywhere. Her breath was quite visible and she blew into the air with a naïve enjoyment. Seated in the diner she stared out the window at white hills and valleys and scattered pines whose every branch was a green platter for a cold feast of snow. Sometimes a solitary farmhouse would fly by, ugly and bleak and lone on the white waste; and with each one she had an instant of chill compassion for the souls shut in there waiting for spring.

As she left the diner and swayed back into the Pullman she experienced a surging rush of energy and wondered if she was feeling the bracing air of which Harry had spoken. This was the North, the North — her land now!

“Then blow, ye winds, heighho!

A-roving I will go,”

she chanted exultantly to herself.

“What’s ‘at?” inquired the porter politely.

“I said: ‘Brush me off.’“

The long wires of the telegraph poles doubled, two tracks ran up beside the train — three — four; came a succession of white-roofed houses, a glimpse of a trolley-car with frosted windows, streets — more streets — the city.

She stood for a dazed moment in the frosty station before she saw three fur-bundled figures descending upon her.

“There she is!”

“Oh, Sally Carrol!”

Sally Carrol dropped her bag.

“Hi!”

A faintly familiar icy-cold face kissed her, and then she was in a group of faces all apparently emitting great clouds of heavy smoke; she was shaking hands. There were Gordon, a short, eager man of thirty who looked like an amateur knocked-about model for Harry, and his wife, Myra, a listless lady with flaxen hair under a fur automobile cap. Almost immediately Sally Carrol thought of her as vaguely Scandinavian. A cheerful chauffeur adopted her bag, and amid ricochets of half-phrases, exclamations and perfunctory listless “my dears” from Myra, they swept each other from the station.

Then they were in a sedan bound through a crooked succession of snowy streets where dozens of little boys were hitching sleds behind grocery wagons and automobiles.

“Oh,” cried Sally Carrol, “I want to do that! Can we Harry?”

“That’s for kids. But we might —  — “

“It looks like such a circus!” she said regretfully.

Home was a rambling frame house set on a white lap of snow, and there she met a big, gray-haired man of whom she approved, and a lady who was like an egg, and who kissed her — these were Harry’s parents. There was a breathless indescribable hour crammed full of self-sentences, hot water, bacon and eggs and confusion; and after that she was alone with Harry in the library, asking him if she dared smoke.

It was a large room with a Madonna over the fireplace and rows upon rows of books in covers of light gold and dark gold and shiny red. All the chairs had little lace squares where one’s head should rest, the couch was just comfortable, the books looked as if they had been read — some — and Sally Carrol had an instantaneous vision of the battered old library at home, with her father’s huge medical books, and the oil-paintings of her three great-uncles, and the old couch that had been mended up for forty-five years and was still luxurious to dream in. This room struck her as being neither attractive nor particularly otherwise. It was simply a room with a lot of fairly expensive things in it that all looked about fifteen years old.

“What do you think of it up here?” demanded Harry eagerly. “Does it surprise you? Is it what you expected I mean?”

“You are, Harry,” she said quietly, and reached out her arms to him.

But after a brief kiss he seemed to extort enthusiasm from her.

“The town, I mean. Do you like it? Can you feel the pep in the air?”

“Oh, Harry,” she laughed, “you’ll have to give me time. You can’t just fling questions at me.”

She puffed at her cigarette with a sigh of contentment.

“One thing I want to ask you,” he began rather apologetically; “you Southerners put quite an emphasis on family, and all that — not that it isn’t quite all right, but you’ll find it a little different here. I mean — you’ll notice a lot of things that’ll seem to you sort of vulgar display at first, Sally Carrol; but just remember that this is a three-generation town. Everybody has a father, and about half of us have grandfathers. Back of that we don’t go.”

“Of course,” she murmured.

“Our grandfathers, you see, founded the place, and a lot of them had to take some pretty queer jobs while they were doing the founding. For instance there’s one woman who at present is about the social model for the town; well, her father was the first public ash man — things like that.”

“Why,” said Sally Carol, puzzled, “did you s’pose I was goin’ to make remarks about people?”

“Not at all,” interrupted Harry, “and I’m not apologizing for any one either. It’s just that — well, a Southern girl came up here last summer and said some unfortunate things, and — oh, I just thought I’d tell you.”

Sally Carrol felt suddenly indignant — as though she had been unjustly spanked — but Harry evidently considered the subject closed, for he went on with a great surge of enthusiasm.

“It’s carnival time, you know. First in ten years. And there’s an ice palace they’re building new that’s the first they’ve had since eighty-five. Built out of blocks of the clearest ice they could find — on a tremendous scale.”

She rose and walking to the window pushed aside the heavy Turkish portières and looked out.

“Oh!” she cried suddenly. “There’s two little boys makin’ a snow man! Harry, do you reckon I can go out an’ help ‘em?”

“You dream! Come here and kiss me.”

She left the window rather reluctantly.

“I don’t guess this is a very kissable climate, is it? I mean, it makes you so you don’t want to sit round, doesn’t it?”

“We’re not going to. I’ve got a vacation for the first week you’re here, and there’s a dinner-dance to-night.”

“Oh, Harry,” she confessed, subsiding in a heap, half in his lap, half in the pillows, “I sure do feel confused. I haven’t got an idea whether I’ll like it or not, an’ I don’t know what people expect, or anythin’. You’ll have to tell me, honey.”

“I’ll tell you,” he said softly, “if you’ll just tell me you’re glad to be here.”

“Glad — just awful glad!” she whispered, insinuating herself into his arms in her own peculiar way. “Where you are is home for me, Harry.”

And as she said this she had the feeling for almost the first time in her life that she was acting a part.

That night, amid the gleaming candles of a dinner-party, where the men seemed to do most of the talking while the girls sat in a haughty and expensive aloofness, even Harry’s presence on her left failed to make her feel at home.

“They’re a good-looking crowd, don’t you think?” he demanded. “Just look round. There’s Spud Hubbard, tackle at Princeton last year, and Junie Morton — he and the red-haired fellow next to him were both Yale hockey captains; Junie was in my class. Why, the best athletes in the world come from these States round here. This is a man’s country, I tell you. Look at John J. Fishburn!”

“Who’s he?” asked Sally Carrol innocently.

“Don’t you know?”

“I’ve heard the name.”

“Greatest wheat man in the Northwest, and one of the greatest financiers in the country.”

She turned suddenly to a voice on her right.

“I guess they forget to introduce us. My name’s Roger Patton.”

“My name is Sally Carrol Happer,” she said graciously.

“Yes, I know. Harry told me you were coming.”

“You a relative?”

“No, I’m a professor.”

“Oh,” she laughed.

“At the university. You’re from the South, aren’t you?”

“Yes; Tarleton, Georgia.”

She liked him immediately — a reddish-brown mustache under watery blue eyes that had something in them that these other eyes lacked, some quality of appreciation. They exchanged stray sentences through dinner, and she made up her mind to see him again.

After coffee she was introduced to numerous good-looking young men who danced with conscious precision and seemed to take it for granted that she wanted to talk about nothing except Harry.

“Heavens,” she thought, “They talk as if my being engaged made me older than they are — as if I’d tell their mothers on them!”

In the South an engaged girl, even a young married woman, expected the same amount of half-affectionate badinage and flattery that would be accorded a débutante, but here all that seemed banned. One young man after getting well started on the subject of Sally Carrol’s eyes and, how they had allured him ever since she entered the room, went into a violent convulsion when he found she was visiting the Bellamys — was Harry’s fiancée. He seemed to feel as though he had made some risqué and inexcusable blunder, became immediately formal and left her at the first opportunity.

She was rather glad when Roger Patton cut in on her and suggested that they sit out a while.

“Well,” he inquired, blinking cheerily, “how’s Carmen from the South?”

“Mighty fine. How’s — how’s Dangerous Dan McGrew? Sorry, but he’s the only Northerner I know much about.”

He seemed to enjoy that.

“Of course,” he confessed, “as a professor of literature I’m not supposed to have read Dangerous Dan McGrew.”

“Are you a native?”

“No, I’m a Philadelphian. Imported from Harvard to teach French. But I’ve been here ten years.”

“Nine years, three hundred an’ sixty-four days longer than me.”

“Like it here?”

“Uh-huh. Sure do!”

“Really?”

“Well, why not? Don’t I look as if I were havin’ a good time?”

“I saw you look out the window a minute ago — and shiver.”

“Just my imagination,” laughed Sally Carroll “I’m used to havin’ everythin’ quiet outside an’ sometimes I look out an’ see a flurry of snow an’ it’s just as if somethin’ dead was movin’.”

He nodded appreciatively.

“Ever been North before?”

“Spent two Julys in Asheville, North Carolina.”

“Nice-looking crowd aren’t they?” suggested Patton, indicating the swirling floor.

Sally Carrol started. This had been Harry’s remark.

“Sure are! They’re — canine.”

“What?”

She flushed.

“I’m sorry; that sounded worse than I meant it. You see I always think of people as feline or canine, irrespective of sex.”

“Which are you?”

“I’m feline. So are you. So are most Southern men an’ most of these girls here.”

“What’s Harry?”

“Harry’s canine distinctly. All the men I’ve to-night seem to be canine.”

“What does canine imply? A certain conscious masculinity as opposed to subtlety?”

“Reckon so. I never analyzed it — only I just look at people an’ say ‘canine’ or ‘feline’ right off. It’s right absurd I guess.”

“Not at all. I’m interested. I used to have a theory about these people. I think they’re freezing up.”

“What?”

“Well, they’re growing’ like Swedes — Ibsenesque, you know. Very gradually getting gloomy and melancholy. It’s these long winters. Ever read Ibsen?”

She shook her head.

“Well, you find in his characters a certain brooding rigidity. They’re righteous, narrow, and cheerless, without infinite possibilities for great sorrow or joy.”

“Without smiles or tears?”

“Exactly. That’s my theory. You see there are thousands of Swedes up here. They come, I imagine, because the climate is very much like their own, and there’s been a gradual mingling. There’re probably not half a dozen here to-night, but — we’ve had four Swedish governors. Am I boring you?”

“I’m mighty interested.”

“Your future sister-in-law is half Swedish. Personally I like her, but my theory is that Swedes react rather badly on us as a whole. Scandinavians, you know, have the largest suicide rate in the world.”

“Why do you live here if it’s so depressing?”

“Oh, it doesn’t get me. I’m pretty well cloistered, and I suppose books mean more than people to me anyway.”

“But writers all speak about the South being tragic. You know — Spanish señoritas, black hair and daggers an’ haunting music.”

He shook his head.

“No, the Northern races are the tragic races — they don’t indulge in the cheering luxury of tears.”

Sally Carrol thought of her graveyard. She supposed that that was vaguely what she had meant when she said it didn’t depress her.

“The Italians are about the gayest people in the world — but it’s a dull subject,” he broke off. “Anyway, I want to tell you you’re marrying a pretty fine man.”

Sally Carrol was moved by an impulse of confidence.

“I know. I’m the sort of person who wants to be taken care of after a certain point, and I feel sure I will be.”

“Shall we dance? You know,” he continued as they rose, “it’s encouraging to find a girl who knows what she’s marrying for. Nine-tenths of them think of it as a sort of walking into a moving-picture sunset.”

She laughed and liked him immensely.

Two hours later on the way home she nestled near Harry in the back seat.

“Oh, Harry,” she whispered “it’s so co-old!”

“But it’s warm in here, daring girl.”

“But outside it’s cold; and oh, that howling wind!”

She buried her face deep in his fur coat and trembled involuntarily as his cold lips kissed the tip of her ear.

IV

The first week of her visit passed in a whirl. She had her promised toboggan-ride at the back of an automobile through a chill January twilight. Swathed in furs she put in a morning tobogganing on the country-club hill; even tried skiing, to sail through the air for a glorious moment and then land in a tangled laughing bundle on a soft snow-drift. She liked all the winter sports, except an afternoon spent snow-shoeing over a glaring plain under pale yellow sunshine, but she soon realized that these things were for children — that she was being humored and that the enjoyment round her was only a reflection of her own.

At first the Bellamy family puzzled her. The men were reliable and she liked them; to Mr. Bellamy especially, with his iron-gray hair and energetic dignity, she took an immediate fancy, once she found that he was born in Kentucky; this made of him a link between the old life and the new. But toward the women she felt a definite hostility. Myra, her future sister-in-law, seemed the essence of spiritless conversationality. Her conversation was so utterly devoid of personality that Sally Carrol, who came from a country where a certain amount of charm and assurance could be taken for granted in the women, was inclined to despise her.

“If those women aren’t beautiful,” she thought, “they’re nothing. They just fade out when you look at them. They’re glorified domestics. Men are the centre of every mixed group.”

Lastly there was Mrs. Bellamy, whom Sally Carrol detested. The first day’s impression of an egg had been confirmed — an egg with a cracked, veiny voice and such an ungracious dumpiness of carriage that Sally Carrol felt that if she once fell she would surely scramble. In addition, Mrs. Bellamy seemed to typify the town in being innately hostile to strangers. She called Sally Carrol “Sally,” and could not be persuaded that the double name was anything more than a tedious ridiculous nickname. To Sally Carrol this shortening of her name was presenting her to the public half clothed. She loved “Sally Carrol”; she loathed “Sally.” She knew also that Harry’s mother disapproved of her bobbed hair; and she had never dared smoke down-stairs after that first day when Mrs. Bellamy had come into the library sniffing violently.

Of all the men she met she preferred Roger Patton, who was a frequent visitor at the house. He never again alluded to the Ibsenesque tendency of the populace, but when he came in one day and found her curled upon the sofa bent over “Peer Gynt” he laughed and told her to forget what he’d said — that it was all rot.

They had been walking homeward between mounds of high-piled snow and under a sun which Sally Carrol scarcely recognized. They passed a little girl done up in gray wool until she resembled a small Teddy bear, and Sally Carrol could not resist a gasp of maternal appreciation.

“Look! Harry!”

“What?”

“That little girl — did you see her face?”

“Yes, why?”

“It was red as a little strawberry. Oh, she was cute!”

“Why, your own face is almost as red as that already! Everybody’s healthy here. We’re out in the cold as soon as we’re old enough to walk. Wonderful climate!”

She looked at him and had to agree. He was mighty healthy-looking; so was his brother. And she had noticed the new red in her own cheeks that very morning.

Suddenly their glances were caught and held, and they stared for a moment at the street-corner ahead of them. A man was standing there, his knees bent, his eyes gazing upward with a tense expression as though he were about to make a leap toward the chilly sky. And then they both exploded into a shout of laughter, for coming closer they discovered it had been a ludicrous momentary illusion produced by the extreme bagginess of the man’s trousers.

“Reckon that’s one on us,” she laughed.

“He must be Southerner, judging by those trousers,” suggested Harry mischievously.

“Why, Harry!”

Her surprised look must have irritated him.

“Those damn Southerners!”

Sally Carrol’s eyes flashed.

“Don’t call ‘em that.”

“I’m sorry, dear,” said Harry, malignantly apologetic, “but you know what I think of them. They’re sort of — sort of degenerates — not at all like the old Southerners. They’ve lived so long down there with all the colored people that they’ve gotten lazy and shiftless.”

“Hush your mouth, Harry!” she cried angrily. “They’re not! They may be lazy — anybody would be in that climate — but they’re my best friends, an’ I don’t want to hear ‘em criticised in any such sweepin’ way. Some of ‘em are the finest men in the world.”

“Oh, I know. They’re all right when they come North to college, but of all the hangdog, ill-dressed, slovenly lot I ever saw, a bunch of small-town Southerners are the worst!”

Sally Carrol was clinching her gloved hands and biting her lip furiously.

“Why,” continued Harry, “if there was one in my class at New Haven, and we all thought that at last we’d found the true type of Southern aristocrat, but it turned out that he wasn’t an aristocrat at all — just the son of a Northern carpetbagger, who owned about all the cotton round Mobile.”

“A Southerner wouldn’t talk the way you’re talking now,” she said evenly.

“They haven’t the energy!”

“Or the somethin’ else.”

“I’m sorry Sally Carrol, but I’ve heard you say yourself that you’d never marry —  — “

“That’s quite different. I told you I wouldn’t want to tie my life to any of the boys that are round Tarleton now, but I never made any sweepin’ generalities.”

They walked along in silence.

“I probably spread it on a bit thick Sally Carrol. I’m sorry.”

She nodded but made no answer. Five minutes later as they stood in the hallway she suddenly threw her arms round him.

“Oh, Harry,” she cried, her eyes brimming with tears; “let’s get married next week. I’m afraid of having fusses like that. I’m afraid, Harry. It wouldn’t be that way if we were married.”

But Harry, being in the wrong, was still irritated.

“That’d be idiotic. We decided on March.”

The tears in Sally Carrol’s eyes faded; her expression hardened slightly.

“Very well — I suppose I shouldn’t have said that.”

Harry melted.

“Dear little nut!” he cried. “Come and kiss me and let’s forget.” That very night at the end of a vaudeville performance the orchestra played “Dixie” and Sally Carrol felt something stronger and more enduring than her tears and smiles of the day brim up inside her. She leaned forward gripping the arms of her chair until her face grew crimson.

“Sort of get you dear?” whispered Harry.

But she did not hear him. To the limited throb of the violins and the inspiring beat of the kettle-drums her own old ghosts were marching by and on into the darkness, and as fifes whistled and sighed in the low encore they seemed so nearly out of sight that she could have waved good-by.

“Away, Away,

Away down South in Dixie!

Away, away,

Away down South in Dixie!”

V

It was a particularly cold night. A sudden thaw had nearly cleared the streets the day before, but now they were traversed again with a powdery wraith of loose snow that travelled in wavy lines before the feet of the wind, and filled the lower air with a fine-particled mist. There was no sky — only a dark, ominous tent that draped in the tops of the streets and was in reality a vast approaching army of snowflakes — while over it all, chilling away the comfort from the brown-and-green glow of lighted windows and muffling the steady trot of the horse pulling their sleigh, interminably washed the north wind. It was a dismal town after all, she though, dismal.

Sometimes at night it had seemed to her as though no one lived here — they had all gone long ago — leaving lighted houses to be covered in time by tombing heaps of sleet. Oh, if there should be snow on her grave! To be beneath great piles of it all winter long, where even her headstone would be a light shadow against light shadows. Her grave — a grave that should be flower-strewn and washed with sun and rain.

She thought again of those isolated country houses that her train had passed, and of the life there the long winter through — the ceaseless glare through the windows, the crust forming on the soft drifts of snow, finally the slow cheerless melting and the harsh spring of which Roger Patton had told her. Her spring — to lose it forever — with its lilacs and the lazy sweetness it stirred in her heart. She was laying away that spring — afterward she would lay away that sweetness.

With a gradual insistence the storm broke. Sally Carrol felt a film of flakes melt quickly on her eyelashes, and Harry reached over a furry arm and drew down her complicated flannel cap. Then the small flakes came in skirmish-line, and the horse bent his neck patiently as a transparency of white appeared momentarily on his coat.

“Oh, he’s cold, Harry,” she said quickly.

“Who? The horse? Oh, no, he isn’t. He likes it!”

After another ten minutes they turned a corner and came in sight of their destination. On a tall hill outlined in vivid glaring green against the wintry sky stood the ice palace. It was three stories in the air, with battlements and embrasures and narrow icicled windows, and the innumerable electric lights inside made a gorgeous transparency of the great central hall. Sally Carrol clutched Harry’s hand under the fur robe.

“It’s beautiful!” he cried excitedly. “My golly, it’s beautiful, isn’t it! They haven’t had one here since eighty-five!”

Somehow the notion of there not having been one since eighty-five oppressed her. Ice was a ghost, and this mansion of it was surely peopled by those shades of the eighties, with pale faces and blurred snow-filled hair.

“Come on, dear,” said Harry.

She followed him out of the sleigh and waited while he hitched the horse. A party of four — Gordon, Myra, Roger Patton, and another girl — drew up beside them with a mighty jingle of bells. There were quite a crowd already, bundled in fur or sheepskin, shouting and calling to each other as they moved through the snow, which was now so thick that people could scarcely be distinguished a few yards away.

“It’s a hundred and seventy feet tall,” Harry was saying to a muffled figure beside him as they trudged toward the entrance; “covers six thousand square yards.”

She caught snatches of conversation: “One main hall” — “walls twenty to forty inches thick” — “and the ice cave has almost a mile of — “ — “this Canuck who built it —  — “

They found their way inside, and dazed by the magic of the great crystal walls Sally Carrol found herself repeating over and over two lines from “Kubla Khan”:

“It was a miracle of rare device,

A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!”

In the great glittering cavern with the dark shut out she took a seat on a wooded bench and the evening’s oppression lifted. Harry was right — it was beautiful; and her gaze travelled the smooth surface of the walls, the blocks for which had been selected for their purity and dearness to obtain this opalescent, translucent effect.

“Look! Here we go — oh, boy!” cried Harry.

A band in a far corner struck up “Hail, Hail, the Gang’s All Here!” which echoed over to them in wild muddled acoustics, and then the lights suddenly went out; silence seemed to flow down the icy sides and sweep over them. Sally Carrol could still see her white breath in the darkness, and a dim row of pale faces over on the other side.

The music eased to a sighing complaint, and from outside drifted in the full-throated remnant chant of the marching clubs. It grew louder like some pæan of a viking tribe traversing an ancient wild; it swelled — they were coming nearer; then a row of torches appeared, and another and another, and keeping time with their moccasined feet a long column of gray-mackinawed figures swept in, snow-shoes slung at their shoulders, torches soaring and flickering as their voice rose along the great walls.

The gray column ended and another followed, the light streaming luridly this time over red toboggan caps and flaming crimson mackinaws, and as they entered they took up the refrain; then came a long platoon of blue and white, of green, of white, of brown and yellow.

“Those white ones are the Wacouta Club,” whispered Harry eagerly. “Those are the men you’ve met round at dances.”

The volume of the voices grew; the great cavern was a phantasmagoria of torches waving in great banks of fire, of colors and the rhythm of soft-leather steps. The leading column turned and halted, platoon deploys in front of platoon until the whole procession made a solid flag of flame, and then from thousands of voices burst a mighty shout that filled the air like a crash of thunder, and sent the torches wavering. It was magnificent, it was tremendous! To Sally Carol it was the North offering sacrifice on some mighty altar to the gray pagan God of Snow. As the shout died the band struck up again and there came more singing, and then long reverberating cheers by each club. She sat very quiet listening while the staccato cries rent the stillness; and then she started, for there was a volley of explosion, and great clouds of smoke went up here and there through the cavern — the flash-light photographers at work — and the council was over. With the band at their head the clubs formed in column once more, took up their chant, and began to march out.

“Come on!” shouted Harry. “We want to see the labyrinths down-stairs before they turn the lights off!”

They all rose and started toward the chute — Harry and Sally Carrol in the lead, her little mitten buried in his big fur gantlet. At the bottom of the chute was a long empty room of ice, with the ceiling so low that they had to stoop — and their hands were parted. Before she realized what he intended Harry had darted down one of the half-dozen glittering passages that opened into the room and was only a vague receding blot against the green shimmer.

“Harry!” she called.

“Come on!” he cried back.

She looked round the empty chamber; the rest of the party had evidently decided to go home, were already outside somewhere in the blundering snow. She hesitated and then darted in after Harry.

“Harry!” she shouted.

She had reached a turning-point thirty feet down; she heard a faint muffled answer far to the left, and with a touch of panic fled toward it. She passed another turning, two more yawning alleys.

“Harry!”

No answer. She started to run straight forward, and then turned like lightning and sped back the way she had come, enveloped in a sudden icy terror.

She reached a turn — was it here? — took the left and came to what should have been the outlet into the long, low room, but it was only another glittering passage with darkness at the end. She called again, but the walls gave back a flat, lifeless echo with no reverberations. Retracing her steps she turned another corner, this time following a wide passage. It was like the green lane between the parted water of the Red Sea, like a damp vault connecting empty tombs.

She slipped a little now as she walked, for ice had formed on the bottom of her overshoes; she had to run her gloves along the half-slippery, half-sticky walls to keep her balance.

“Harry!”

Still no answer. The sound she made bounced mockingly down to the end of the passage.

Then on an instant the lights went out, and she was in complete darkness. She gave a small, frightened cry, and sank down into a cold little heap on the ice. She felt her left knee do something as she fell, but she scarcely noticed it as some deep terror far greater than any fear of being lost settled upon her. She was alone with this presence that came out of the North, the dreary loneliness that rose from ice-bound whalers in the Arctic seas, from smokeless, trackless wastes where were strewn the whitened bones of adventure. It was an icy breath of death; it was rolling down low across the land to clutch at her.

With a furious, despairing energy she rose again and started blindly down the darkness. She must get out. She might be lost in here for days, freeze to death and lie embedded in the ice like corpses she had read of, kept perfectly preserved until the melting of a glacier. Harry probably thought she had left with the others — he had gone by now; no one would know until next day. She reached pitifully for the wall. Forty inches thick, they had said — forty inches thick!

On both sides of her along the walls she felt things creeping, damp souls that haunted this palace, this town, this North.

“Oh, send somebody — send somebody!” she cried aloud.

Clark Darrow — he would understand; or Joe Ewing; she couldn’t be left here to wander forever — to be frozen, heart, body, and soul. This her — this Sally Carrol! Why, she was a happy thing. She was a happy little girl. She liked warmth and summer and Dixie. These things were foreign — foreign.

“You’re not crying,” something said aloud. “You’ll never cry any more. Your tears would just freeze; all tears freeze up here!”

She sprawled full length on the ice.

“Oh, God!” she faltered.

A long single file of minutes went by, and with a great weariness she felt her eyes dosing. Then some one seemed to sit down near her and take her face in warm, soft hands. She looked up gratefully.

“Why it’s Margery Lee,” she crooned softly to herself. “I knew you’d come.” It really was Margery Lee, and she was just as Sally Carrol had known she would be, with a young, white brow, and wide welcoming eyes, and a hoop-skirt of some soft material that was quite comforting to rest on.

“Margery Lee.”

It was getting darker now and darker — all those tombstones ought to be repainted sure enough, only that would spoil ‘em, of course. Still, you ought to be able to see ‘em.

Then after a succession of moments that went fast and then slow, but seemed to be ultimately resolving themselves into a multitude of blurred rays converging toward a pale-yellow sun, she heard a great cracking noise break her new-found stillness.

It was the sun, it was a light; a torch, and a torch beyond that, and another one, and voices; a face took flesh below the torch, heavy arms raised her and she felt something on her cheek — it felt wet. Some one had seized her and was rubbing her face with snow. How ridiculous — with snow!

“Sally Carrol! Sally Carrol!”

It was Dangerous Dan McGrew; and two other faces she didn’t know. “Child, child! We’ve been looking for you two hours! Harry’s half-crazy!”

Things came rushing back into place — the singing, the torches, the great shout of the marching clubs. She squirmed in Patton’s arms and gave a long low cry.

“Oh, I want to get out of here! I’m going back home. Take me home” —  — her voice rose to a scream that sent a chill to Harry’s heart as he came racing down the next passage — “to-morrow!” she cried with delirious, unstrained passion — “To-morrow! To-morrow! To-morrow!”

VI

The wealth of golden sunlight poured a quite enervating yet oddly comforting heat over the house where day long it faced the dusty stretch of road. Two birds were making a great to-do in a cool spot found among the branches of a tree next door, and down the street a colored woman was announcing herself melodiously as a purveyor of strawberries. It was April afternoon.

Sally Carrol Happer, resting her chin on her arm, and her arm on an old window-seat, gazed sleepily down over the spangled dust whence the heat waves were rising for the first time this spring. She was watching a very ancient Ford turn a perilous corner and rattle and groan to a jolting stop at the end of the walk. See made no sound and in a minute a strident familiar whistle rent the air. Sally Carrol smiled and blinked.

“Good mawnin’.”

A head appeared tortuously from under the car-top below.

“Tain’t mawnin’, Sally Carrol.”

“Sure enough!” she said in affected surprise. “I guess maybe not.”

“What you doin’?”

“Eatin’ a green peach. ‘Spect to die any minute.”

Clark twisted himself a last impossible notch to get a view of her face.

“Water’s warm as a kettla steam, Sally Carol. Wanta go swimmin’?”

“Hate to move,” sighed Sally Carol lazily, “but I reckon so.”

Head and Shoulders

In 1915 Horace Tarbox was thirteen years old. In that year he took the examinations for entrance to PrincetonUniversity and received the Grade A — excellent — in Cæsar, Cicero, Vergil, Xenophon, Homer, Algebra, Plane Geometry, Solid Geometry, and Chemistry.

Two years later while George M. Cohan was composing “Over There,” Horace was leading the sophomore class by several lengths and digging out theses on “The Syllogism as an Obsolete Scholastic Form,” and during the battle of Château-Thierry he was sitting at his desk deciding whether or not to wait until his seventeenth birthday before beginning his series of essays on “The Pragmatic Bias of the New Realists.”

After a while some newsboy told him that the war was over, and he was glad, because it meant that Peat Brothers, publishers, would get out their new edition of “Spinoza’s Improvement of the Understanding.” Wars were all very well in their way, made young men self-reliant or something but Horace felt that he could never forgive the President for allowing a brass band to play under his window the night of the false armistice, causing him to leave three important sentences out of his thesis on “German Idealism.”

The next year he went up to Yale to take his degree as Master of Arts.

He was seventeen then, tall and slender, with near-sighted gray eyes and an air of keeping himself utterly detached from the mere words he let drop.

“I never feel as though I’m talking to him,” expostulated Professor Dillinger to a sympathetic colleague. “He makes me feel as though I were talking to his representative. I always expect him to say: ‘Well, I’ll ask myself and find out.’“

And then, just as nonchalantly as though Horace Tarbox had been Mr. Beef the butcher or Mr. Hat the haberdasher, life reached in, seized him, handled him, stretched him, and unrolled him like a piece of Irish lace on a Saturday-afternoon bargain-counter.

To move in the literary fashion I should say that this was all because when way back in colonial days the hardy pioneers had come to a bald place in Connecticut and asked of each other, “Now, what shall we build here?” the hardiest one among ‘em had answered: “Let’s build a town where theatrical managers can try out musical comedies!” How afterward they founded YaleCollege there, to try the musical comedies on, is a story every one knows. At any rate one December, “Home James” opened at the Shubert, and all the students encored Marcia Meadow, who sang a song about the Blundering Blimp in the first act and did a shaky, shivery, celebrated dance in the last.

Marcia was nineteen. She didn’t have wings, but audiences agreed generally that she didn’t need them. She was a blonde by natural pigment, and she wore no paint on the streets at high noon. Outside of that she was no better than most women.

It was Charlie Moon who promised her five thousand Pall Malls if she would pay a call on Horace Tarbox, prodigy extraordinary. Charlie was a senior in Sheffield, and he and Horace were first cousins. They liked and pitied each other.

Horace had been particularly busy that night. The failure of the Frenchman Laurier to appreciate the significance of the new realists was preying on his mind. In fact, his only reaction to a low, clear-cut rap at his study was to make him speculate as to whether any rap would have actual existence without an ear there to hear it. He fancied he was verging more and more toward pragmatism. But at that moment, though he did not know it, he was verging with astounding rapidity toward something quite different.

The rap sounded — three seconds leaked by — the rap sounded.

“Come in,” muttered Horace automatically.

He heard the door open and then close, but, bent over his book in the big armchair before the fire, he did not look up.

“Leave it on the bed in the other room,” he said absently.

“Leave what on the bed in the other room?”

Marcia Meadow had to talk her songs, but her speaking voice was like byplay on a harp.

“The laundry.”

“I can’t.”

Horace stirred impatiently in his chair.

“Why can’t you?”

“Why, because I haven’t got it.”

“Hm!” he replied testily. “Suppose you go back and get it.”

Across the fire from Horace was another easychair. He was accustomed to change to it in the course of an evening by way of exercise and variety. One chair he called Berkeley, the other he called Hume. He suddenly heard a sound as of a rustling, diaphanous form sinking into Hume. He glanced up.

“Well,” said Marcia with the sweet smile she used in Act Two (“Oh, so the Duke liked my dancing!”) “Well, Omar Khayyam, here I am beside you singing in the wilderness.”

Horace stared at her dazedly. The momentary suspicion came to him that she existed there only as a phantom of his imagination. Women didn’t come into men’s rooms and sink into men’s Humes. Women brought laundry and took your seat in the street-car and married you later on when you were old enough to know fetters.

This woman had clearly materialized out of Hume. The very froth of her brown gauzy dress was art emanation from Hume’s leather arm there! If he looked long enough he would see Hume right through her and then he would be alone again in the room. He passed his fist across his eyes. He really must take up those trapeze exercises again.

“For Pete’s sake, don’t look so critical!” objected the emanation pleasantly. “I feel as if you were going to wish me away with that patent dome of yours. And then there wouldn’t be anything left of me except my shadow in your eyes.”

Horace coughed. Coughing was one of his two gestures. When he talked you forgot he had a body at all. It was like hearing a phonograph record by a singer who had been dead a long time.

“What do you want?” he asked.

“I want them letters,” whined Marcia melodramatically — “them letters of mine you bought from my grandsire in 1881.”

Horace considered.

“I haven’t got your letters,” he said evenly. “I am only seventeen years old. My father was not born until March 3, 1879. You evidently have me confused with some one else.”

“You’re only seventeen?” repeated March suspiciously.

“Only seventeen.”

“I knew a girl,” said Marcia reminiscently, “who went on the ten-twenty-thirty when she was sixteen. She was so stuck on herself that she could never say ‘sixteen’ without putting the ‘only’ before it. We got to calling her ‘Only Jessie.’ And she’s just where she was when she started — only worse. ‘Only’ is a bad habit, Omar — it sounds like an alibi.”

“My name is not Omar.”

“I know,” agreed Marcia, nodding — “your name’s Horace. I just call you Omar because you remind me of a smoked cigarette.”

“And I haven’t your letters. I doubt if I’ve ever met your grandfather. In fact, I think it very improbable that you yourself were alive in 1881.”

Marcia stared at him in wonder.

“Me — 1881? Why sure! I was second-line stuff when the Florodora Sextette was still in the convent. I was the original nurse to Mrs. Sol Smith’s Juliette. Why, Omar, I was a canteen singer during the War of 1812.”

Horace’s mind made a sudden successful leap, and he grinned.

“Did Charlie Moon put you up to this?”

Marcia regarded him inscrutably.

“Who’s Charlie Moon?”

“Small — wide nostrils — big ears.”

She grew several inches and sniffed.

“I’m not in the habit of noticing my friends’ nostrils.

“Then it was Charlie?”

Marcia bit her lip — and then yawned. “Oh, let’s change the subject, Omar. I’ll pull a snore in this chair in a minute.”

“Yes,” replied Horace gravely, “Hume has often been considered soporific —  — “

“Who’s your friend — and will he die?”

Then of a sudden Horace Tarbox rose slenderly and began to pace the room with his hands in his pockets. This was his other gesture.

“I don’t care for this,” he said as if he were talking to himself — “at all. Not that I mind your being here — I don’t. You’re quite a pretty little thing, but I don’t like Charlie Moon’s sending you up here. Am I a laboratory experiment on which the janitors as well as the chemists can make experiments? Is my intellectual development humorous in any way? Do I look like the pictures of the little Boston boy in the comic magazines? Has that callow ass, Moon, with his eternal tales about his week in Paris, any right to —  — “

“No,” interrupted Marcia emphatically. “And you’re a sweet boy. Come here and kiss me.”

Horace stopped quickly in front of her.

“Why do you want me to kiss you?” he asked intently, “Do you just go round kissing people?”

“Why, yes,” admitted Marcia, unruffled. “‘At’s all life is. Just going round kissing people.”

“Well,” replied Horace emphatically, “I must say your ideas are horribly garbled! In the first place life isn’t just that, and in the second place. I won’t kiss you. It might get to be a habit and I can’t get rid of habits. This year I’ve got in the habit of lolling in bed until seven-thirty —  — “

Marcia nodded understandingly.

“Do you ever have any fun?” she asked.

“What do you mean by fun?”

“See here,” said Marcia sternly, “I like you, Omar, but I wish you’d talk as if you had a line on what you were saying. You sound as if you were gargling a lot of words in your mouth and lost a bet every time you spilled a few. I asked you if you ever had any fun.”

Horace shook his head.

“Later, perhaps,” he answered. “You see I’m a plan. I’m an experiment. I don’t say that I don’t get tired of it sometimes — I do. Yet — oh, I can’t explain! But what you and Charlie Moon call fun wouldn’t be fun to me.”

“Please explain.”

Horace stared at her, started to speak and then, changing his mind, resumed his walk. After an unsuccessful attempt to determine whether or not he was looking at her Marcia smiled at him.

“Please explain.”

Horace turned.

“If I do, will you promise to tell Charlie Moon that I wasn’t in?”

“Uh-uh.”

“Very well, then. Here’s my history: I was a ‘why’ child. I wanted to see the wheels go round. My father was a young economics professor at Princeton. He brought me up on the system of answering every question I asked him to the best of his ability. My response to that gave him the idea of making an experiment in precocity. To aid in the massacre I had ear trouble — seven operations between the age of nine and twelve. Of course this kept me apart from other boys and made me ripe for forcing. Anyway, while my generation was laboring through Uncle Remus I was honestly enjoying Catullus in the original.

“I passed off my college examinations when I was thirteen because I couldn’t help it. My chief associates were professors, and I took a tremendous pride in knowing that I had a fine intelligence, for though I was unusually gifted I was not abnormal in other ways. When I was sixteen I got tired of being a freak; I decided that some one had made a bad mistake. Still as I’d gone that far I concluded to finish it up by taking my degree of Master of Arts. My chief interest in life is the study of modern philosophy. I am a realist of the School of Anton Laurier — with Bergsonian trimmings — and I’ll be eighteen years old in two months. That’s all.”

“Whew!” exclaimed Marcia. “That’s enough! You do a neat job with the parts of speech.”

“Satisfied?”

“No, you haven’t kissed me.”

“It’s not in my programme,” demurred Horace. “Understand that I don’t pretend to be above physical things. They have their place, but —  — “

“Oh, don’t be so darned reasonable!”

“I can’t help it.”

“I hate these slot-machine people.”

“I assure you I —  — “ began Horace.

“Oh shut up!”

“My own rationality —  — “

“I didn’t say anything about your nationality. You’re Amuricun, ar’n’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Well, that’s O.K. with me. I got a notion I want to see you do something that isn’t in your highbrow programme. I want to see if a what-ch-call-em with Brazilian trimmings — that thing you said you were — can be a little human.”

Horace shook his head again.

“I won’t kiss you.”

“My life is blighted,” muttered Marcia tragically. “I’m a beaten woman. I’ll go through life without ever having a kiss with Brazilian trimmings.” She sighed. “Anyways, Omar, will you come and see my show?”

“What show?”

“I’m a wicked actress from ‘Home James’!”

“Light opera?”

“Yes — at a stretch. One of the characters is a Brazilian rice-planter. That might interest you.”

“I saw ‘The Bohemian Girl’ once,” reflected Horace aloud. “I enjoyed it — to some extent —  — “

“Then you’ll come?”

“Well, I’m — I’m —  — “

“Oh, I know — you’ve got to run down to Brazil for the week-end.”

“Not at all. I’d be delighted to come —  — “

Marcia clapped her hands.

“Goodyforyou! I’ll mail you a ticket — Thursday night?”

“Why, I —  — “

“Good! Thursday night it is.”

She stood up and walking close to him laid both hands on his shoulders.

“I like you, Omar. I’m sorry I tried to kid you. I thought you’d be sort of frozen, but you’re a nice boy.”

He eyed her sardonically.

“I’m several thousand generations older than you are.”

“You carry your age well.”

They shook hands gravely.

“My name’s Marcia Meadow,” she said emphatically. “‘Member it — Marcia Meadow. And I won’t tell Charlie Moon you were in.”

An instant later as she was skimming down the last flight of stairs three at a time she heard a voice call over the upper banister: “Oh, say —  — “

She stopped and looked up — made out a vague form leaning over.

“Oh, say!” called the prodigy again. “Can you hear me?”

“Here’s your connection Omar.”

“I hope I haven’t given you the impression that I consider kissing intrinsically irrational.”

“Impression? Why, you didn’t even give me the kiss! Never fret — so long.”

Two doors near her opened curiously at the sound of a feminine voice. A tentative cough sounded from above. Gathering her skirts, Marcia dived wildly down the last flight, and was swallowed up in the murky Connecticut air outside.

Up-stairs Horace paced the floor of his study. From time to time he glanced toward Berkeley waiting there in suave dark-red reputability, an open book lying suggestively on his cushions. And then he found that his circuit of the floor was bringing him each time nearer to Hume. There was something about Hume that was strangely and inexpressibly different. The diaphanous form still seemed hovering near, and had Horace sat there he would have felt as if he were sitting on a lady’s lap. And though Horace couldn’t have named the quality of difference, there was such a quality — quite intangible to the speculative mind, but real, nevertheless. Hume was radiating something that in all the two hundred years of his influence he had never radiated before.

Hume was radiating attar of roses.

II

On Thursday night Horace Tarbox sat in an aisle seat in the fifth row and witnessed “Home James.” Oddly enough he found that he was enjoying himself. The cynical students near him were annoyed at his audible appreciation of time-honored jokes in the Hammerstein tradition. But Horace was waiting with anxiety for Marcia Meadow singing her song about a Jazz-bound Blundering Blimp. When she did appear, radiant under a floppity flower-faced hat, a warm glow settled over him, and when the song was over he did not join in the storm of applause. He felt somewhat numb.

In the intermission after the second act an usher materialized beside him, demanded to know if he were Mr. Tarbox, and then handed him a note written in a round adolescent band. Horace read it in some confusion, while the usher lingered with withering patience in the aisle.

“Dear Omar: After the show I always grow an awful hunger. If you want to satisfy it for me in the Taft Grill just communicate your answer to the big-timber guide that brought this and oblige.

Your friend,

Marcia Meadow.”

“Tell her,” — he coughed — “tell her that it will be quite all right. I’ll meet her in front of the theatre.”

The big-timber guide smiled arrogantly.

“I giss she meant for you to come roun’ t’ the stage door.”

“Where — where is it?”

“Ou’side. Tunayulef. Down ee alley.”

“What?”

“Ou’side. Turn to y’ left! Down ee alley!”

The arrogant person withdrew. A freshman behind Horace snickered.

Then half an hour later, sitting in the Taft Grill opposite the hair that was yellow by natural pigment, the prodigy was saying an odd thing.

“Do you have to do that dance in the last act?” he was asking earnestly — “I mean, would they dismiss you if you refused to do it?”

Marcia grinned.

“It’s fun to do it. I like to do it.”

And then Horace came out with a faux pas.

“I should think you’d detest it,” he remarked succinctly. “The people behind me were making remarks about your bosom.”

Marcia blushed fiery red.

“I can’t help that,” she said quickly. “The dance to me is only a sort of acrobatic stunt. Lord, it’s hard enough to do! I rub liniment into my shoulders for an hour every night.”

“Do you have — fun while you’re on the stage?”

“Uh-huh — sure! I got in the habit of having people look at me, Omar, and I like it.”

“Hm!” Horace sank into a brownish study.

“How’s the Brazilian trimmings?”

“Hm!” repeated Horace, and then after a pause: “Where does the play go from here?”

“New York.”

“For how long?”

“All depends. Winter — maybe.”

“Oh!”

“Coming up to lay eyes on me, Omar, or aren’t you int’rested? Not as nice here, is it, as it was up in your room? I wish we was there now.”

“I feel idiotic in this place,” confessed Horace, looking round him nervously.

“Too bad! We got along pretty well.”

At this he looked suddenly so melancholy that she changed her tone, and reaching over patted his hand.

“Ever take an actress out to supper before?”

“No,” said Horace miserably, “and I never will again. I don’t know why I came to-night. Here under all these lights and with all these people laughing and chattering I feel completely out of my sphere. I don’t know what to talk to you about.”

“We’ll talk about me. We talked about you last time.”

“Very well.”

“Well, my name really is Meadow, but my first name isn’t Marcia — it’s Veronica. I’m nineteen. Question — how did the girl make her leap to the footlights? Answer — she was born in Passaic, New Jersey, and up to a year ago she got the right to breathe by pushing Nabiscoes in Marcel’s tea-room in Trenton. She started going with a guy named Robbins, a singer in the Trent House cabaret, and he got her to try a song and dance with him one evening. In a month we were filling the supper-room every night. Then we went to New York with meet-my-friend letters thick as a pile of napkins.

“In two days we landed a job at Divinerries’, and I learned to shimmy from a kid at the Palais Royal. We stayed at Divinerries’ six months until one night Peter Boyce Wendell, the columnist, ate his milk-toast there. Next morning a poem about Marvellous Marcia came out in his newspaper, and within two days I had three vaudeville offers and a chance at the Midnight Frolic. I wrote Wendell a thank-you letter, and he printed it in his column — said that the style was like Carlyle’s, only more rugged and that I ought to quit dancing and do North American literature. This got me a coupla more vaudeville offers and a chance as an ingénue in a regular show. I took it — and here I am, Omar.”

When she finished they sat for a moment in silence she draping the last skeins of a Welsh rabbit on her fork and waiting for him to speak.

“Let’s get out of here,” he said suddenly.

Marcia’s eyes hardened.

“What’s the idea? Am I making you sick?”

“No, but I don’t like it here. I don’t like to be sitting here with you.”

Without another word Marcia signalled for the waiter.

“What’s the check?” she demanded briskly “My part — the rabbit and the ginger ale.”

Horace watched blankly as the waiter figured it.

“See here,” he began, “I intended to pay for yours too. You’re my guest.”

With a half-sigh Marcia rose from the table and walked from the room. Horace, his face a document in bewilderment, laid a bill down and followed her out, up the stairs and into the lobby. He overtook her in front of the elevator and they faced each other.

“See here,” he repeated “You’re my guest. Have I said something to offend you?”

After an instant of wonder Marcia’s eyes softened.

“You’re a rude fella!” she said slowly. “Don’t you know you’re rude?”

“I can’t help it,” said Horace with a directness she found quite disarming. “You know I like you.”

“You said you didn’t like being with me.”

“I didn’t like it.”

“Why not?” Fire blazed suddenly from the gray forests of his eyes.

“Because I didn’t. I’ve formed the habit of liking you. I’ve been thinking of nothing much else for two days.”

“Well, if you —  — “

“Wait a minute,” he interrupted. “I’ve got something to say. It’s this: in six weeks I’ll be eighteen years old. When I’m eighteen years old I’m coming up to New York to see you. Is there some place in New York where we can go and not have a lot of people in the room?”

“Sure!” smiled Marcia. “You can come up to my ‘partment. Sleep on the couch if you want to.”

“I can’t sleep on couches,” he said shortly. “But I want to talk to you.”

“Why, sure,” repeated Marcia, “in my ‘partment.”

In his excitement Horace put his hands in his pockets.

“All right — just so I can see you alone. I want to talk to you as we talked up in my room.”

“Honey boy,” cried Marcia, laughing, “is it that you want to kiss me?”

“Yes,” Horace almost shouted. “I’ll kiss you if you want me to.”

The elevator man was looking at them reproachfully. Marcia edged toward the grated door.

“I’ll drop you a post-card,” she said.

Horace’s eyes were quite wild.

“Send me a post-card! I’ll come up any time after January first. I’ll be eighteen then.”

And as she stepped into the elevator he coughed enigmatically, yet with a vague challenge, at the calling, and walked quickly away.

III

He was there again. She saw him when she took her first glance at the restless Manhattan audience — down in the front row with his head bent a bit forward and his gray eyes fixed on her. And she knew that to him they were alone together in a world where the high-rouged row of ballet faces and the massed whines of the violins were as imperceivable as powder on a marble Venus. An instinctive defiance rose within her.

“Silly boy!” she said to herself hurriedly, and she didn’t take her encore.

“What do they expect for a hundred a week — perpetual motion?” she grumbled to herself in the wings.

“What’s the trouble? Marcia?”

“Guy I don’t like down in front.”

During the last act as she waited for her specialty she had an odd attack of stage fright. She had never sent Horace the promised post-card. Last night she had pretended not to see him — had hurried from the theatre immediately after her dance to pass a sleepless night in her apartment, thinking — as she had so often in the last month — of his pale, rather intent face, his slim, boyish fore, the merciless, unworldly abstraction that made him charming to her.

And now that he had come she felt vaguely sorry — as though an unwonted responsibility was being forced on her.

“Infant prodigy!” she said aloud.

“What?” demanded the negro comedian standing beside her.

“Nothing — just talking about myself.”

On the stage she felt better. This was her dance — and she always felt that the way she did it wasn’t suggestive any more than to some men every pretty girl is suggestive. She made it a stunt.

“Uptown, downtown, jelly on a spoon,

After sundown shiver by the moon.”

He was not watching her now. She saw that clearly. He was looking very deliberately at a castle on the back drop, wearing that expression he had worn in the Taft Grill. A wave of exasperation swept over her — he was criticising her.

“That’s the vibration that thrills me,

Funny how affection fi-lls me

Uptown, downtown —  — “

Unconquerable revulsion seized her. She was suddenly and horribly conscious of her audience as she had never been since her first appearance. Was that a leer on a pallid face in the front row, a droop of disgust on one young girl’s mouth? These shoulders of hers — these shoulders shaking — were they hers? Were they real? Surely shoulders weren’t made for this!

“Then — you’ll see at a glance

I’ll need some funeral ushers with St. Vitus dance

At the end of the world I’ll —  — “

The bassoon and two cellos crashed into a final chord. She paused and poised a moment on her toes with every muscle tense, her young face looking out dully at the audience in what one young girl afterward called “such a curious, puzzled look,” and then without bowing rushed from the stage. Into the dressing-room she sped, kicked out of one dress and into another, and caught a taxi outside.

Her apartment was very warm — small, it was, with a row of professional pictures and sets of Kipling and O. Henry which she had bought once from a blue-eyed agent and read occasionally. And there were several chairs which matched, but were none of them comfortable, and a pink-shaded lamp with blackbirds painted on it and an atmosphere of other stifled pink throughout. There were nice things in it — nice things unrelentingly hostile to each other, offspring of a vicarious, impatient taste acting in stray moments. The worst was typified by a great picture framed in oak bark of Passaic as seen from the Erie Railroad — altogether a frantic, oddly extravagant, oddly penurious attempt to make a cheerful room. Marcia knew it was a failure.

Into this room came the prodigy and took her two hands awkwardly.

“I followed you this time,” he said.

“Oh!”

“I want you to marry me,” he said.

Her arms went out to him. She kissed his mouth with a sort of passionate wholesomeness.

“There!”

“I love you,” he said.

She kissed him again and then with a little sigh flung herself into an armchair and half lay there, shaken with absurd laughter.

“Why, you infant prodigy!” she cried.

“Very well, call me that if you want to. I once told you that I was ten thousand years older than you — I am.”

She laughed again.

“I don’t like to be disapproved of.”

“No one’s ever going to disapprove of you again.”

“Omar,” she asked, “why do you want to marry me?”

The prodigy rose and put his hands in his pockets.

“Because I love you, Marcia Meadow.”

And then she stopped calling him Omar.

“Dear boy,” she said, “you know I sort of love you. There’s something about you — I can’t tell what — that just puts my heart through the wringer every time I’m round you. But honey — “ She paused.

“But what?”

“But lots of things. But you’re only just eighteen, and I’m nearly twenty.”

“Nonsense!” he interrupted. “Put it this way — that I’m in my nineteenth year and you’re nineteen. That makes us pretty close — without counting that other ten thousand years I mentioned.”

Marcia laughed.

“But there are some more ‘buts.’ Your people —  —

“My people!” exclaimed the prodigy ferociously. “My people tried to make a monstrosity out of me.” His face grew quite crimson at the enormity of what he was going to say. “My people can go way back and sit down!”

“My heavens!” cried Marcia in alarm. “All that? On tacks, I suppose.”

“Tacks — yes,” he agreed wildly — “on anything. The more I think of how they allowed me to become a little dried-up mummy —  — “

“What makes you thank you’re that?” asked Marcia quietly — “me?”

“Yes. Every person I’ve met on the streets since I met you has made me jealous because they knew what love was before I did. I used to call it the ‘sex impulse.’ Heavens!”

“There’s more ‘buts,’“ said Marcia

“What are they?”

“How could we live?”

“I’ll make a living.”

“You’re in college.”

“Do you think I care anything about taking a Master of Arts degree?”

“You want to be Master of Me, hey?”

“Yes! What? I mean, no!”

Marcia laughed, and crossing swiftly over sat in his lap. He put his arm round her wildly and implanted the vestige of a kiss somewhere near her neck.

“There’s something white about you,” mused Marcia “but it doesn’t sound very logical.”

“Oh, don’t be so darned reasonable!”

“I can’t help it,” said Marcia.

“I hate these slot-machine people!”

“But we —  — “

“Oh, shut up!”

And as Marcia couldn’t talk through her ears she had to.

IV

Horace and Marcia were married early in February. The sensation in academic circles both at Yale and Princeton was tremendous. Horace Tarbox, who at fourteen had been played up in the Sunday magazines sections of metropolitan newspapers, was throwing over his career, his chance of being a world authority on American philosophy, by marrying a chorus girl — they made Marcia a chorus girl. But like all modern stories it was a four-and-a-half-day wonder.

They took a flat in Harlem. After two weeks’ search, during which his idea of the value of academic knowledge faded unmercifully, Horace took a position as clerk with a South American export company — some one had told him that exporting was the coming thing. Marcia was to stay in her show for a few months — anyway until he got on his feet. He was getting a hundred and twenty-five to start with, and though of course they told him it was only a question of months until he would be earning double that, Marcia refused even to consider giving up the hundred and fifty a week that she was getting at the time.

“We’ll call ourselves Head and Shoulders, dear,” she said softly, “and the shoulders’ll have to keep shaking a little longer until the old head gets started.”

“I hate it,” he objected gloomily.

“Well,” she replied emphatically, “Your salary wouldn’t keep us in a tenement. Don’t think I want to be public — I don’t. I want to be yours. But I’d be a half-wit to sit in one room and count the sunflowers on the wall-paper while I waited for you. When you pull down three hundred a month I’ll quit.”

And much as it hurt his pride, Horace had to admit that hers was the wiser course.

March mellowed into April. May read a gorgeous riot act to the parks and waters of Manhatten, and they were very happy. Horace, who had no habits whatsoever — he had never had time to form any — proved the most adaptable of husbands, and as Marcia entirely lacked opinions on the subjects that engrossed him there were very few jottings and bumping. Their minds moved in different spheres. Marcia acted as practical factotum, and Horace lived either in his old world of abstract ideas or in a sort of triumphantly earthy worship and adoration of his wife. She was a continual source of astonishment to him — the freshness and originality of her mind, her dynamic, clear-headed energy, and her unfailing good humor.

And Marcia’s co-workers in the nine-o’clock show, whither she had transferred her talents, were impressed with her tremendous pride in her husband’s mental powers. Horace they knew only as a very slim, tight-lipped, and immature-looking young man, who waited every night to take her home.

“Horace,” said Marcia one evening when she met him as usual at eleven, “you looked like a ghost standing there against the street lights. You losing weight?”

He shook his head vaguely.

“I don’t know. They raised me to a hundred and thirty-five dollars to-day, and —  — “

“I don’t care,” said Marcia severely. “You’re killing yourself working at night. You read those big books on economy —  — “

“Economics,” corrected Horace.

“Well, you read ‘em every night long after I’m asleep. And you’re getting all stooped over like you were before we were married.”

“But, Marcia, I’ve got to —  — “

“No, you haven’t dear. I guess I’m running this shop for the present, and I won’t let my fella ruin his health and eyes. You got to get some exercise.”

“I do. Every morning I —  — “

“Oh, I know! But those dumb-bells of yours wouldn’t give a consumptive two degrees of fever. I mean real exercise. You’ve got to join a gymnasium. ‘Member you told me you were such a trick gymnast once that they tried to get you out for the team in college and they couldn’t because you had a standing date with Herb Spencer?”

“I used to enjoy it,” mused Horace, “but it would take up too much time now.”

“All right,” said Marcia. “I’ll make a bargain with you. You join a gym and I’ll read one of those books from the brown row of ‘em.”

“‘Pepys’ Diary’? Why, that ought to be enjoyable. He’s very light.”

“Not for me — he isn’t. It’ll be like digesting plate glass. But you been telling me how much it’d broaden my lookout. Well, you go to a gym three nights a week and I’ll take one big dose of Sammy.”

Horace hesitated.

“Well —  — “

“Come on, now! You do some giant swings for me and I’ll chase some culture for you.”

So Horace finally consented, and all through a baking summer he spent three and sometimes four evenings a week experimenting on the trapeze in Skipper’s Gymnasium. And in August he admitted to Marcia that it made him capable of more mental work during the day.

“Mens sana in corpore sano,” he said.

“Don’t believe in it,” replied Marcia. “I tried one of those patent medicines once and they’re all bunk. You stick to gymnastics.”

One night in early September while he was going through one of his contortions on the rings in the nearly deserted room he was addressed by a meditative fat man whom he had noticed watching him for several nights.

“Say, lad, do that stunt you were doin’ last night.”

Horace grinned at him from his perch.

“I invented it,” he said. “I got the idea from the fourth proposition of Euclid.”

“What circus he with?”

“He’s dead.”

“Well, he must of broke his neck doin’ that stunt. I set here last night thinkin’ sure you was goin’ to break yours.”

“Like this!” said Horace, and swinging onto the trapeze he did his stunt.

“Don’t it kill your neck an’ shoulder muscles?”

“It did at first, but inside of a week I wrote the Quod erat demonstrandum on it.”

“Hm!”

Horace swung idly on the trapeze.

“Ever think of takin’ it up professionally?” asked the fat man.

“Not I.”

“Good money in it if you’re willin’ to do stunts like ‘at an’ can get away with it.”

“Here’s another,” chirped Horace eagerly, and the fat man’s mouth dropped suddenly agape as he watched this pink-jerseyed Prometheus again defy the gods and Isaac Newton.

The night following this encounter Horace got home from work to find a rather pale Marcia stretched out on the sofa waiting for him.

“I fainted twice to-day,” she began without preliminaries.

“What?”

“Yep. You see baby’s due in four months now. Doctor says I ought to have quit dancing two weeks ago.”

Horace sat down and thought it over.

“I’m glad of course,” he said pensively — “I mean glad that we’re going to have a baby. But this means a lot of expense.”

“I’ve got two hundred and fifty in the bank,” said Marcia hopefully, “and two weeks’ pay coming.”

Horace computed quickly.

“Inducing my salary, that’ll give us nearly fourteen hundred for the next six months.”

Marcia looked blue.

“That all? Course I can get a job singing somewhere this month. And I can go to work again in March.”

“Of course nothing!” said Horace gruffly. “You’ll stay right here. Let’s see now — there’ll be doctor’s bills and a nurse, besides the maid: We’ve got to have some more money.”

“Well,” said Marcia wearily, “I don’t know where it’s coming from. It’s up to the old head now. Shoulders is out of business.”

Horace rose and pulled on his coat.

“Where are you going?”

“I’ve got an idea,” he answered. “I’ll be right back.”

Ten minutes later as he headed down the street toward Skipper’s Gymnasium he felt a placid wonder, quite unmixed with humor, at what he was going to do. How he would have gaped at himself a year before! How every one would have gaped! But when you opened your door at the rap of life you let in many things.

The gymnasium was brightly lit, and when his eyes became accustomed to the glare he found the meditative fat man seated on a pile of canvas mats smoking a big cigar.

“Say,” began Horace directly, “were you in earnest last night when you said I could make money on my trapeze stunts?”

“Why, yes,” said the fat man in surprise.

“Well, I’ve been thinking it over, and I believe I’d like to try it. I could work at night and on Saturday afternoons — and regularly if the pay is high enough.”

The fat men looked at his watch.

“Well,” he said, “Charlie Paulson’s the man to see. He’ll book you inside of four days, once he sees you work out. He won’t be in now, but I’ll get hold of him for to-morrow night.”

The fat man was as good as his word. Charlie Paulson arrived next night and put in a wondrous hour watching the prodigy swap through the air in amazing parabolas, and on the night following he brought two age men with him who looked as though they had been born smoking black cigars and talking about money in low, passionate voices. Then on the succeeding Saturday Horace Tarbox’s torso made its first professional appearance in a gymnastic exhibition at the ColemanStreetGardens. But though the audience numbered nearly five thousand people, Horace felt no nervousness. From his childhood he had read papers to audiences — learned that trick of detaching himself.

“Marcia,” he said cheerfully later that same night, “I think we’re out of the woods. Paulson thinks he can get me an opening at the Hippodrome, and that means an all-winter engagement. The Hippodrome you know, is a big —  — “

“Yes, I believe I’ve heard of it,” interrupted Marcia, “but I want to know about this stunt you’re doing. It isn’t any spectacular suicide, is it?”

“It’s nothing,” said Horace quietly. “But if you can think of an nicer way of a man killing himself than taking a risk for you, why that’s the way I want to die.”

Marcia reached up and wound both arms tightly round his neck.

“Kiss me,” she whispered, “and call me ‘dear heart.’ I love to hear you say ‘dear heart.’ And bring me a book to read to-morrow. No more Sam Pepys, but something trick and trashy. I’ve been wild for something to do all day. I felt like writing letters, but I didn’t have anybody to write to.”

“Write to me,” said Horace. “I’ll read them.”

“I wish I could,” breathed Marcia. “If I knew words enough I could write you the longest love-letter in the world — and never get tired.”

But after two more months Marcia grew very tired indeed, and for a row of nights it was a very anxious, weary-looking young athlete who walked out before the Hippodrome crowd. Then there were two days when his place was taken by a young man who wore pale blue instead of white, and got very little applause. But after the two days Horace appeared again, and those who sat close to the stage remarked an expression of beatific happiness on that young acrobat’s face even when he was twisting breathlessly in the air an the middle of his amazing and original shoulder swing. After that performance he laughed at the elevator man and dashed up the stairs to the flat five steps at a time — and then tiptoed very carefully into a quiet room.

“Marcia,” he whispered.

“Hello!” She smiled up at him wanly. “Horace, there’s something I want you to do. Look in my top bureau drawer and you’ll find a big stack of paper. It’s a book — sort of — Horace. I wrote it down in these last three months while I’ve been laid up. I wish you’d take it to that Peter Boyce Wendell who put my letter in his paper. He could tell you whether it’d be a good book. I wrote it just the way I talk, just the way I wrote that letter to him. It’s just a story about a lot of things that happened to me. Will you take it to him, Horace?”

“Yes, darling.”

He leaned over the bed until his head was beside her on the pillow, and began stroking back her yellow hair.

“Dearest Marcia,” he said softly.

“No,” she murmured, “call me what I told you to call me.”

“Dear heart,” he whispered passionately — “dearest heart.”

“What’ll we call her?”

They rested a minute in happy, drowsy content, while Horace considered.

“We’ll call her Marcia Hume Tarbox,” he said at length.

“Why the Hume?”

“Because he’s the fellow who first introduced us.”

“That so?” she murmured, sleepily surprised. “I thought his name was Moon.”

Her eyes dosed, and after a moment the slow lengthening surge of the bedclothes over her breast showed that she was asleep.

Horace tiptoed over to the bureau and opening the top drawer found a heap of closely scrawled, lead-smeared pages. He looked at the first sheet:

SANDRA PEPYS, SYNCOPATED BY Marcia Tarbox

He smiled. So Samuel Pepys had made an impression on her after all. He turned a page and began to read. His smile deepened — he read on. Half an hour passed and he became aware that Marcia had waked and was watching him from the bed.

“Honey,” came in a whisper.

“What Marcia?”

“Do you like it?”

Horace coughed.

“I seem to be reading on. It’s bright.”

“Take it to Peter Boyce Wendell. Tell him you got the highest marks in Princeton once and that you ought to know when a book’s good. Tell him this one’s a world beater.”

“All right, Marcia,” Horace said gently.

Her eyes closed again and Horace crossing over kissed her forehead — stood there for a moment with a look of tender pity. Then he left the room.

All that night the sprawly writing on the pages, the constant mistakes in spelling and grammar, and the weird punctuation danced before his eyes. He woke several times in the night, each time full of a welling chaotic sympathy for this desire of Marcia’s soul to express itself in words. To him there was something infinitely pathetic about it, and for the first time in months he began to turn over in his mind his own half-forgotten dreams.

He had meant to write a series of books, to popularize the new realism as Schopenhauer had popularized pessimism and William James pragmatism.

But life hadn’t come that way. Life took hold of people and forced them into flying rings. He laughed to think of that rap at his door, the diaphanous shadow in Hume, Marcia’s threatened kiss.

“And it’s still me,” he said aloud in wonder as he lay awake in the darkness. “I’m the man who sat in Berkeley with temerity to wonder if that rap would have had actual existence had my ear not been there to hear it. I’m still that man. I could be electrocuted for the crimes he committed.

“Poor gauzy souls trying to express ourselves in something tangible. Marcia with her written book; I with my unwritten ones. Trying to choose our mediums and then taking what we get — and being glad.”

V

“Sandra Pepys, Syncopated,” with an introduction by Peter Boyce Wendell the columnist, appeared serially in Jordan’s Magazine, and came out in book form in March. From its first published instalment it attracted attention far and wide. A trite enough subject — a girl from a small New Jersey town coming to New York to go on the stage — treated simply, with a peculiar vividness of phrasing and a haunting undertone of sadness in the very inadequacy of its vocabulary, it made an irresistible appeal.

Peter Boyce Wendell, who happened at that time to be advocating the enrichment of the American language by the immediate adoption of expressive vernacular words, stood as its sponsor and thundered his indorsement over the placid bromides of the conventional reviewers.

Marcia received three hundred dollars an instalment for the serial publication, which came at an opportune time, for though Horace’s monthly salary at the Hippodrome was now more than Marcia’s had ever been, young Marcia was emitting shrill cries which they interpreted as a demand for country air. So early April found them installed in a bungalow in Westchester County, with a place for a lawn, a place for a garage, and a place for everything, including a sound-proof impregnable study, in which Marcia faithfully promised Mr. Jordan she would shut herself up when her daughter’s demands began to be abated, and compose immortally illiterate literature.

“It’s not half bad,” thought Horace one night as he was on his way from the station to his house. He was considering several prospects that had opened up, a four months’ vaudeville offer in five figures, a chance to go back to Princeton in charge of all gymnasium work. Odd! He had once intended to go back there in charge of all philosophic work, and now he had not even been stirred by the arrival in New York of Anton Laurier, his old idol.

The gravel crunched raucously under his heel. He saw the lights of his sitting-room gleaming and noticed a big car standing in the drive. Probably Mr. Jordan again, come to persuade Marcia to settle down’ to work.

She had heard the sound of his approach and her form was silhouetted against the lighted door as she came out to meet him. “There’s some Frenchman here,” she whispered nervously. “I can’t pronounce his name, but he sounds awful deep. You’ll have to jaw with him.”

“What Frenchman?”

“You can’t prove it by me. He drove up an hour ago with Mr. Jordan, and said he wanted to meet Sandra Pepys, and all that sort of thing.”

Two men rose from chairs as they went inside.

“Hello Tarbox,” said Jordan. “I’ve just been bringing together two celebrities. I’ve brought M’sieur Laurier out with me. M’sieur Laurier, let me present Mr. Tarbox, Mrs. Tarbox’s husband.”

“Not Anton Laurier!” exclaimed Horace.

“But, yes. I must come. I have to come. I have read the book of Madame, and I have been charmed” — he fumbled in his pocket — “ah I have read of you too. In this newspaper which I read to-day it has your name.”

He finally produced a clipping from a magazine.

“Read it!” he said eagerly. “It has about you too.”

Horace’s eye skipped down the page.

“A distinct contribution to American dialect literature,” it said. “No attempt at literary tone; the book derives its very quality from this fact, as did ‘Huckleberry Finn.’“

Horace’s eyes caught a passage lower down; he became suddenly aghast — read on hurriedly:

“Marcia Tarbox’s connection with the stage is not only as a spectator but as the wife of a performer. She was married last year to Horace Tarbox, who every evening delights the children at the Hippodrome with his wondrous flying performance. It is said that the young couple have dubbed themselves Head and Shoulders, referring doubtless to the fact that Mrs. Tarbox supplies the literary and mental qualities, while the supple and agile shoulder of her husband contribute their share to the family fortunes.

“Mrs. Tarbox seems to merit that much-abused title — ‘prodigy.’ Only twenty —  — “

Horace stopped reading, and with a very odd expression in his eyes gazed intently at Anton Laurier.

“I want to advise you — “ he began hoarsely.

“What?”

“About raps. Don’t answer them! Let them alone — have a padded door.”

The Cut-Glass Bowl

There was a rough stone age and a smooth stone age and a bronze age, and many years afterward a cut-glass age. In the cut-glass age, when young ladies had persuaded young men with long, curly mustaches to marry them, they sat down several months afterward and wrote thank-you notes for all sorts of cut-glass presents — punch-bowls, finger-bowls, dinner-glasses, wine-glasses, ice-cream dishes, bonbon dishes, decanters, and vases — for, though cut glass was nothing new in the nineties, it was then especially busy reflecting the dazzling light of fashion from the Back Bay to the fastnesses of the Middle West.

After the wedding the punch-bowls were arranged in the sideboard with the big bowl in the centre; the glasses were set up in the china-closet; the candlesticks were put at both ends of things — and then the struggle for existence began. The bonbon dish lost its little handle and became a pin-tray upstairs; a promenading cat knocked the little bowl off the sideboard, and the hired girl chipped the middle-sized one with the sugar-dish; then the wine-glasses succumbed to leg fractures, and even the dinner-glasses disappeared one by one like the ten little niggers, the last one ending up, scarred and maimed as a tooth-brush holder among other shabby genteels on the bathroom shelf. But by the time all this had happened the cut-glass age was over, anyway.

It was well past its first glory on the day the curious Mrs. Roger Fairboalt came to see the beautiful Mrs. Harold Piper.

“My dear,” said the curious Mrs. Roger Fairboalt, “I love your house. I think it’s quite artistic.”

“I’m so glad,” said the beautiful Mrs. Harold Piper, lights appearing in her young, dark eyes; “and you must come often. I’m almost always alone in the afternoon.”

Mrs. Fairboalt would have liked to remark that she didn’t believe this at all and couldn’t see how she’d be expected to — it was all over town that Mr. Freddy Gedney had been dropping in on Mrs. Piper five afternoons a week for the past six months. Mrs. Fairboalt was at that ripe age where she distrusted all beautiful women —  —

“I love the dining-room most,” she said, “all that marvellous china, and that huge cut-glass bowl.”

Mrs. Piper laughed, so prettily that Mrs. Fairboalt’s lingering reservations about the Freddy Gedney story quite vanished.

“Oh, that big bowl!” Mrs. Piper’s mouth forming the words was a vivid rose petal. “There’s a story about that bowl —  — “

“Oh —  — “

“You remember young Carleton Canby? Well, he was very attentive at one time, and the night I told him I was going to marry Harold, seven years ago in ninety-two, he drew himself way up and said: ‘Evylyn, I’m going to give a present that’s as hard as you are and as beautiful and as empty and as easy to see through.’ He frightened me a little — his eyes were so black. I thought he was going to deed me a haunted house or something that would explode when you opened it. That bowl came, and of course it’s beautiful. Its diameter or circumference or something is two and a half feet — or perhaps it’s three and a half. Anyway, the sideboard is really too small for it; it sticks way out.”

“My dear, wasn’t that odd! And he left town about then didn’t he?” Mrs. Fairboalt was scribbling italicized notes on her memory — “hard, beautiful, empty, and easy to see through.”

“Yes, he went West — or South — or somewhere,” answered Mrs. Piper, radiating that divine vagueness that helps to lift beauty out of time.

Mrs. Fairboalt drew on her gloves, approving the effect of largeness given by the open sweep from the spacious music-room through the library, disclosing a part of the dining-room beyond. It was really the nicest smaller house in town, and Mrs. Piper had talked of moving to a larger one on Devereaux Avenue. Harold Piper must be coining money.

As she turned into the sidewalk under the gathering autumn dusk she assumed that disapproving, faintly unpleasant expression that almost all successful women of forty wear on the street.

If I were Harold Piper, she thought, I’d spend a little less time on business and a little more time at home. Some friend should speak to him.

But if Mrs. Fairboalt had considered it a successful afternoon she would have named it a triumph had she waited two minutes longer. For while she was still a black receding figure a hundred yards down the street, a very good-looking distraught young man turned up the walk to the Piper house. Mrs. Piper answered the door-bell herself, and with a rather dismayed expression led him quickly into the library.

“I had to see you,” he began wildly; “your note played the devil with me. Did Harold frighten you into this?”

She shook her head.

“I’m through, Fred,” she said slowly, and her lips had never looked to him so much like tearings from a rose. “He came home last night sick with it. Jessie Piper’s sense of duty was to much for her, so she went down to his office and told him. He was hurt and — oh, I can’t help seeing it his way, Fred. He says we’ve been club gossip all summer and he didn’t know it, and now he understands snatches of conversation he’s caught and veiled hints people have dropped about me. He’s mighty angry, Fred, and he loves me and I love him — rather.”

Gedney nodded slowly and half closed his eyes.

“Yes,” he said “yes, my trouble’s like yours. I can see other people’s points of view too plainly.” His gray eyes met her dark ones frankly. “The blessed thing’s over. My God, Evylyn, I’ve been sitting down at the office all day looking at the outside of your letter, and looking at it and looking at it —  — “

“You’ve got to go, Fred,” she said steadily, and the slight emphasis of hurry in her voice was a new thrust for him. “I gave him my word of honor I wouldn’t see you. I know just how far I can go with Harold, and being here with you this evening is one of the things I can’t do.”

They were still standing, and as she spoke she made a little movement toward the door. Gedney looked at her miserably, trying, here at the end, to treasure up a last picture of her — and then suddenly both of them were stiffened into marble at the sound of steps on the walk outside. Instantly her arm reached out grasping the lapel of his coat — half urged, half swung him through the big door into the dark dining-room.

“I’ll make him go up-stairs,” she whispered close to his ear; “don’t move till you hear him on the stairs. Then go out the front way.”

Then he was alone listening as she greeted her husband in the hall.

Harold Piper was thirty-six, nine years older than his wife. He was handsome — with marginal notes: these being eyes that were too close together, and a certain woodenness when his face was in repose. His attitude toward this Gedney matter was typical of all his attitudes. He had told Evylyn that he considered the subject closed and would never reproach her nor allude to it in any form; and he told himself that this was rather a big way of looking at it — that she was not a little impressed. Yet, like all men who are preoccupied with their own broadness, he was exceptionally narrow.

He greeted Evylyn with emphasized cordiality this evening.

“You’ll have to hurry and dress, Harold,” she said eagerly; “we’re going to the Bronsons’.”

He nodded.

“It doesn’t take me long to dress, dear,” and, his words trailing off, he walked on into the library. Evylyn’s heart clattered loudly.

“Harold —  — “ she began, with a little catch in her voice, and followed him in. He was lighting a cigarette. “You’ll have to hurry, Harold,” she finished, standing in the doorway.

“Why?” he asked a trifle impatiently; “you’re not dressed yourself yet, Evie.”

He stretched out in a Morris chair and unfolded a newspaper. With a sinking sensation Evylyn saw that this meant at least ten minutes — and Gedney was standing breathless in the next room. Supposing Harold decided that before he went upstairs he wanted a drink from the decanter on the sideboard. Then it occurred to her to forestall this contingency by bringing him the decanter and a glass. She dreaded calling his attention to the dining-room in any way, but she couldn’t risk the other chance.

But at the same moment Harold rose and, throwing his paper down, came toward her.

“Evie, dear,” he said, bending and putting his arms about her, “I hope you’re not thinking about last night —  — “ She moved close to him, trembling. “I know,” he continued, “it was just an imprudent friendship on your part. We all make mistakes.”

Evylyn hardly heard him. She was wondering if by sheer clinging to him she could draw him out and up the stairs. She thought of playing sick, asking to be carried up — unfortunately she knew he would lay her on the couch and bring her whiskey.

Suddenly her nervous tension moved up a last impossible notch. She had heard a very faint but quite unmistakable creak from the floor of the dining room. Fred was trying to get out the back way.

Then her heart took a flying leap as a hollow ringing note like a gong echoed and re-echoed through the house. Gedney’s arm had struck the big cut-glass bowl.

“What’s that!” cried Harold. “Who’s there?”

She clung to him but he broke away, and the room seemed to crash about her ears. She heard the pantry-door swing open, a scuffle, the rattle of a tin pan, and in wild despair she rushed into the kitchen and pulled up the gas. Her husband’s arm slowly unwound from Gedney’s neck, and he stood there very still, first in amazement, then with pain dawning in his face.

“My golly!” he said in bewilderment, and then repeated: “My golly!”

He turned as if to jump again at Gedney, stopped, his muscles visibly relaxed, and he gave a bitter little laugh.

“You people — you people —  — “ Evylyn’s arms were around him and her eyes were pleading with him frantically, but he pushed her away and sank dazed into a kitchen chair, his face like porcelain. “You’ve been doing things to me, Evylyn. Why, you little devil! You little devil!”

She had never felt so sorry for him; she had never loved him so much.

“It wasn’t her fault,” said Gedney rather humbly. “I just came.” But Piper shook his head, and his expression when he stared up was as if some physical accident had jarred his mind into a temporary inability to function. His eyes, grown suddenly pitiful, struck a deep, unsounded chord in Evylyn — and simultaneously a furious anger surged in her. She felt her eyelids burning; she stamped her foot violently; her hands scurried nervously over the table as if searching for a weapon, and then she flung herself wildly at Gedney.

“Get out!” she screamed, dark eves blazing, little fists beating helplessly on his outstretched arm. “You did this! Get out of here — get out — get out! get out!”

II

Concerning Mrs. Harold Piper at thirty-five, opinion was divided — women said she was still handsome; men said she was pretty no longer. And this was probably because the qualities in her beauty that women had feared and men had followed had vanished. Her eyes were still as large and as dark and as sad, but the mystery had departed; their sadness was no longer eternal, only human, and she had developed a habit, when she was startled or annoyed, of twitching her brows together and blinking several times. Her mouth also had lost: the red had receded and the faint down-turning of its corners when she smiled, that had added to the sadness of the eyes and been vaguely mocking and beautiful, was quite gone. When she smiled now the corners of her lips turned up. Back in the days when she revelled in her own beauty Evylyn had enjoyed that smile of hers — she had accentuated it. When she stopped accentuating it, it faded out and the last of her mystery with it.

Evylyn had ceased accentuating her smile within a month after the Freddy Gedney affair. Externally things had gone an very much as they had before. But in those few minutes during which she had discovered how much she loved her husband, Evylyn had realized how indelibly she had hurt him. For a month she struggled against aching silences, wild reproaches and accusations — she pled with him, made quiet, pitiful little love to him, and he laughed at her bitterly — and then she, too, slipped gradually into silence and a shadowy, impenetrable barrier dropped between them. The surge of love that had risen in her she lavished on Donald, her little boy, realizing him almost wonderingly as a part of her life.

The next year a piling up of mutual interests and responsibilities and some stray flicker from the past brought husband and wife together again — but after a rather pathetic flood of passion Evylyn realized that her great opportunity was gone. There simply wasn’t anything left. She might have been youth and love for both — but that time of silence had slowly dried up the springs of affection and her own desire to drink again of them was dead.

She began for the first time to seek women friends, to prefer books she had read before, to sew a little where she could watch her two children to whom she was devoted. She worried about little things — if she saw crumbs on the dinner-table her mind drifted off the conversation: she was receding gradually into middle age.

Her thirty-fifth birthday had been an exceptionally busy one, for they were entertaining on short notice that night, as she stood in her bedroom window in the late afternoon she discovered that she was quite tired. Ten years before she would have lain down and slept, but now she had a feeling that things needed watching: maids were cleaning down-stairs, bric-à-brac was all over the floor, and there were sure to be grocery-men that had to be talked to imperatively — and then there was a letter to write Donald, who was fourteen and in his first year away at school.

She had nearly decided to lie down, nevertheless, when she heard a sudden familiar signal from little Julie down-stairs. She compressed her lips, her brows twitched together, and she blinked.

“Julie!” she called.

“Ah-h-h-ow!” prolonged Julie plaintively. Then the voice of Hilda, the second maid, floated up the stairs.

“She cut herself a little, Mis’ Piper.”

Evylyn flew to her sewing-basket, rummaged until she found a torn handkerchief, and hurried downstairs. In a moment Julie was crying in her arms as she searched for the cut, faint, disparaging evidences of which appeared on Julie’s dress.

“My thu-umb!” explained Julie. “Oh-h-h-h, t’urts.”

“It was the bowl here, the he one,” said Hilda apologetically. “It was waitin’ on the floor while I polished the sideboard, and Julie come along an’ went to foolin’ with it. She yust scratch herself.”

Evylyn frowned heavily at Hilda, and twisting Julie decisively in her lap, began tearing strips of the handkerchief.

“Now — let’s see it, dear.”

Julie held it up and Evelyn pounced.

“There!”

Julie surveyed her swathed thumb doubtfully. She crooked it; it waggled. A pleased, interested look appeared in her tear-stained face. She sniffled and waggled it again.

“You precious!” cried Evylyn and kissed her, but before she left the room she levelled another frown at Hilda. Careless! Servants all that way nowadays. If she could get a good Irishwoman — but you couldn’t any more — and these Swedes —  —

At five o’clock Harold arrived and, coming up to her room, threatened in a suspiciously jovial tone to kiss her thirty-five times for her birthday. Evylyn resisted.

“You’ve been drinking,” she said shortly, and then added qualitatively, “a little. You know I loathe the smell of it.”

“Evie,” he said after a pause, seating himself in a chair by the window, “I can tell you something now. I guess you’ve known things haven’t beep going quite right down-town.”

She was standing at the window combing her hair, but at these words she turned and looked at him.

“How do you mean? You’ve always said there was room for more than one wholesale hardware house in town.” Her voice expressed some alarm.

“There was,” said Harold significantly, “but this Clarence Ahearn is a smart man.”

“I was surprised when you said he was coming to dinner.”

“Evie,” he went on, with another slap at his knee, “after January first ‘The Clarence Ahearn Company’ becomes ‘The Ahearn, Piper Company’ — and ‘Piper Brothers’ as a company ceases to exist.”

Evylyn was startled. The sound of his name in second place was somehow hostile to her; still he appeared jubilant.

“I don’t understand, Harold.”

“Well, Evie, Ahearn has been fooling around with Marx. If those two had combined we’d have been the little fellow, struggling along, picking up smaller orders, hanging back on risks. It’s a question of capital, Evie, and ‘Ahearn and Marx’ would have had the business just like ‘Ahearn and Piper’ is going to now.” He paused and coughed and a little cloud of whiskey floated up to her nostrils. “Tell you the truth, Evie, I’ve suspected that Ahearn’s wife had something to do with it. Ambitious little lady, I’m told. Guess she knew the Marxes couldn’t help her much here.”

“Is she — common?” asked Evie.

“Never met her, I’m sure — but I don’t doubt it. Clarence Ahearn’s name’s been up at the Country Club five months — no action taken.” He waved his hand disparagingly. “Ahearn and I had lunch together to-day and just about clinched it, so I thought it’d be nice to have him and his wife up to-night — just have nine, mostly family. After all, it’s a big thing for me, and of course we’ll have to see something of them, Evie.”

“Yes,” said Evie thoughtfully, “I suppose we will.”

Evylyn was not disturbed over the social end of it — but the idea of “Piper Brothers” becoming “The Ahearn, Piper Company” startled her. It seemed like going down in the world.

Half an hour later, as she began to dress for dinner, she heard his voice from down-stairs.

“Oh, Evie, come down!”

She went out into the hall and called over the banister:

“What is it?”

“I want you to help me make some of that punch before dinner.”

Hurriedly rehooking her dress, she descended the stairs and found him grouping the essentials on the dining-room table. She went to the sideboard and, lifting one of the bowls, carried it over.

“Oh, no,” he protested, “let’s use the big one. There’ll be Ahearn and his wife and you and I and Milton, that’s five, and Tom and Jessie, that’s seven: and your sister and Joe Ambler, that’s nine. You don’t know how quick that stuff goes when you make it.”

“We’ll use this bowl,” she insisted. “It’ll hold plenty. You know how Tom is.”

Tom Lowrie, husband to Jessie, Harold’s first cousin, was rather inclined to finish anything in a liquid way that he began.

Harold shook his head.

“Don’t be foolish. That one holds only about three quarts and there’s nine of us, and the servants’ll want some — and it isn’t strong punch. It’s so much more cheerful to have a lot, Evie; we don’t have to drink all of it.”

“I say the small one.”

Again he shook his head obstinately.

“No; be reasonable.”

“I am reasonable,” she said shortly. “I don’t want any drunken men in the house.”

“Who said you did?”

“Then use the small bowl.”

“Now, Evie —  — “

He grasped the smaller bowl to lift it back. Instantly her hands were on it, holding it down. There was a momentary struggle, and then, with a little exasperated grunt, he raised his side, slipped it from her fingers, and carried it to the sideboard.

She looked at him and tried to make her expression contemptuous, but he only laughed. Acknowledging her defeat but disclaiming all future interest in the punch, she left the room.

III

At seven-thirty, her cheeks glowing and her high-piled hair gleaming with a suspicion of brilliantine, Evylyn descended the stairs. Mrs. Ahearn, a little woman concealing a slight nervousness under red hair and an extreme Empire gown, greeted her volubly. Evelyn disliked her on the spot, but the husband she rather approved of. He had keen blue eyes and a natural gift of pleasing people that might have made him, socially, had he not so obviously committed the blunder of marrying too early in his career.

“I’m glad to know Piper’s wife,” he said simply. “It looks as though your husband and I are going to see a lot of each other in the future.”

She bowed, smiled graciously, and turned to greet the others: Milton Piper, Harold’s quiet, unassertive younger brother; the two Lowries, Jessie and Tom; Irene, her own unmarried sister; and finally Joe Ambler, a confirmed bachelor and Irene’s perennial beau.

Harold led the way into dinner.

“We’re having a punch evening,” he announced jovially — Evylyn saw that he had already sampled his concoction — “so there won’t be any cocktails except the punch. It’s m’ wife’s greatest achievement, Mrs. Ahearn; she’ll give you the recipe if you want it; but owing to a slight” — he caught his wife’s eye and paused — “to a slight indisposition; I’m responsible for this batch. Here’s how!”

All through dinner there was punch, and Evylyn, noticing that Ahearn and Milton Piper and all the women were shaking their heads negatively at the maid, knew she had been right about the bowl; it was still half full. She resolved to caution Harold directly afterward, but when the women left the table Mrs. Ahearn cornered her, and she found herself talking cities and dressmakers with a polite show of interest.

“We’ve moved around a lot,” chattered Mrs. Ahearn, her red head nodding violently. “Oh, yes, we’ve never stayed so long in a town before — but I do hope we’re here for good. I like it here; don’t you?”

“Well, you see, I’ve always lived here, so, naturally —  — “

“Oh, that’s true,” said Mrs. Ahearn and laughed. Clarence always used to tell me he had to have a wife he could come home to and say: “Well, we’re going to Chicago to-morrow to live, so pack up.”

“I got so I never expected to live anywhere.” She laughed her little laugh again; Evylyn suspected that it was her society laugh.

“Your husband is a very able man, I imagine.”

“Oh, yes,” Mrs. Ahearn assured her eagerly. “He’s brainy, Clarence is. Ideas and enthusiasm, you know. Finds out what he wants and then goes and gets it.”

Evylyn nodded. She was wondering if the men were still drinking punch back in the dining-room. Mrs. Ahearn’s history kept unfolding jerkily, but Evylyn had ceased to listen. The first odor of massed cigars began to drift in. It wasn’t really a large house, she reflected; on an evening like this the library sometimes grew blue with smoke, and next day one had to leave the windows open for hours to air the heavy staleness out of the curtains. Perhaps this partnership might . . . she began to speculate on a new house . . .

Mrs. Ahearn’s voice drifted in on her:

“I really would like the recipe if you have it written down somewhere —  — “

Then there was a sound of chairs in the dining-room and the men strolled in. Evylyn saw at once that her worst fears were realized. Harold’s face was flushed and his words ran together at the ends of sentences, while Tom Lowrie lurched when he walked and narrowly missed Irene’s lap when he tried to sink onto the couch beside her. He sat there blinking dazedly at the company. Evylyn found herself blinking back at him, but she saw no humor in it. Joe Ambler was smiling contentedly and purring on his cigar. Only Ahearn and Milton Piper seemed unaffected.

“It’s a pretty fine town, Ahearn,” said Ambler, “you’ll find that.”

“I’ve found it so,” said Ahearn pleasantly.

“You find it more, Ahearn,” said Harold, nodding emphatically “‘f I’ve an’thin’ do ‘th it.”

He soared into a eulogy of the city, and Evylyn wondered uncomfortably if it bored every one as it bored her. Apparently not. They were all listening attentively. Evylyn broke in at the first gap.

“Where’ve you been living, Mr. Ahearn?” she asked interestedly. Then she remembered that Mrs. Ahearn had told her, but it didn’t matter. Harold mustn’t talk so much. He was such an ass when he’d been drinking. But he plopped directly back in.

“Tell you, Ahearn. Firs’ you wanna get a house up here on the hill. Get Stearne house or Ridgeway house. Wanna have it so people say: ‘There’s Ahearn house.’ Solid, you know, tha’s effec’ it gives.”

Evylyn flushed. This didn’t sound right at all. Still Ahearn didn’t seem to notice anything amiss, only nodded gravely.

“Have you been looking —  — “ But her words trailed off unheard as Harold’s voice boomed on.

“Get house — tha’s start. Then you get know people. Snobbish town first toward outsider, but not long — after know you. People like you” — he indicated Ahearn and his wife with a sweeping gesture — “all right. Cordial as an’thin’ once get by first barrer-bar-barrer — “ He swallowed, and then said “barrier,” repeated it masterfully.

Evylyn looked appealingly at her brother-in-law, but before he could intercede a thick mumble had come crowding out of Tom Lowrie, hindered by the dead cigar which he gripped firmly with his teeth.

“Huma uma ho huma ahdy um —  — “

“What?” demanded Harold earnestly.

Resignedly and with difficulty Tom removed the cigar — that is, he removed part of it, and then blew the remainder with a whut sound across the room, where it landed liquidly and limply in Mrs. Ahearn’s lap.

“Beg pardon,” he mumbled, and rose with the vague intention of going after it. Milton’s hand on his coat collapsed him in time, and Mrs. Ahearn not ungracefully flounced the tobacco from her skirt to the floor, never once looking at it.

“I was sayin’,” continued Tom thickly, “‘fore ‘at happened,” — he waved his hand apologetically toward Mrs. Ahearn — “I was sayin’ I heard all truth that Country Club matter.”

Milton leaned and whispered something to him.

“Lemme ‘lone,” he said petulantly; “know what I’m doin’. ‘Ats what they came for.”

Evylyn sat there in a panic, trying to make her mouth form words. She saw her sister’s sardonic expression and Mrs. Ahearn’s face turning a vivid red. Ahearn was looking down at his watch-chain, fingering it.

“I heard who’s been keepin’ y’ out, an’ he’s not a bit better’n you. I can fix whole damn thing up. Would’ve before, but I didn’t know you. Harol’ tol’ me you felt bad about the thing —  — “

Milton Piper rose suddenly and awkwardly to his feet. In a second every one was standing tensely and Milton was saying something very hurriedly about having to go early, and the Ahearns were listening with eager intentness. Then Mrs. Ahearn swallowed and turned with a forced smile toward Jessie. Evylyn saw Tom lurch forward and put his hand on Ahearns shoulder — and suddenly she was listening to a new, anxious voice at her elbow, and, turning, found Hilda, the second maid.

“Please, Mis’ Piper, I tank Yulie got her hand poisoned. It’s all swole up and her cheeks is hot and she’s moanin’ an’ groanin’ —  — “

“Julie is?” Evylyn asked sharply. The party suddenly receded. She turned quickly, sought with her eyes for Mrs. Ahearn, slipped toward her.

“If you’ll excuse me, Mrs. — “ She had momentarily forgotten the name, but she went right on: “My little girl’s been taken sick. I’ll be down when I can.” She turned and ran quickly up the stairs, retaining a confused picture of rays of cigar smoke and a loud discussion in the centre of the room that seemed to be developing into an argument.

Switching on the light in the nursery, she found Julie tossing feverishly and giving out odd little cries. She put her hand against the cheeks. They were burning. With an exclamation she followed the arm down under the cover until she found the hand. Hilda was right. The whole thumb was swollen to the wrist and in the centre was a little inflamed sore. Blood-poisoning! her mind cried in terror. The bandage had come off the cut and she’d gotten something in it. She’d cut it at three o’clock — it was now nearly eleven. Eight hours. Blood-poisoning couldn’t possibly develop so soon.

She rushed to the ‘phone.

Doctor Martin across the street was out. Doctor Foulke, their family physician, didn’t answer. She racked her brains and in desperation called her throat specialist, and bit her lip furiously while he looked up the numbers of two physicians. During that interminable moment she thought she heard loud voices down-stairs — but she seemed to be in another world now. After fifteen minutes she located a physician who sounded angry and sulky at being called out of bed. She ran back to the nursery and, looking at the hand, found it was somewhat more swollen.

“Oh, God!” she cried, and kneeling beside the bed began smoothing back Julie’s hair over and over. With a vague idea of getting some hot water, she rose and stared toward the door, but the lace of her dress caught in the bed-rail and she fell forward on her hands and knees. She struggled up and jerked frantically at the lace. The bed moved and Julie groaned. Then more quietly but with suddenly fumbling fingers she found the pleat in front, tore the whole pannier completely off, and rushed from the room.

Out in the hall she heard a single loud, insistent voice, but as she reached the head of the stairs it ceased and an outer door banged.

The music-room came into view. Only Harold and Milton were there, the former leaning against a chair, his face very pale, his collar open, and his mouth moving loosely.

“What’s the matter?”

Milton looked at her anxiously.

“There was a little trouble —  — “

Then Harold saw her and, straightening up with an effort, began to speak.

“Sult m’own cousin m’own house. God damn common nouveau rish. ‘Sult m’own cousin —  — “

“Tom had trouble with Ahearn and Harold interfered,” said Milton. “My Lord Milton,” cried Evylyn, “couldn’t you have done something?”

“I tried; I —  — “

“Julie’s sick,” she interrupted; “she’s poisoned herself. Get him to bed if you can.”

Harold looked up.

“Julie sick?”

Paying no attention, Evylyn brushed by through the dining-room, catching sight, with a burst of horror, of the big punch-bowl still on the table, the liquid from melted ice in its bottom. She heard steps on the front stairs — it was Milton helping Harold up — and then a mumble: “Why, Julie’s a’righ’.”

“Don’t let him go into the nursery!” she shouted.

The hours blurred into a nightmare. The doctor arrived just before midnight and within a half-hour had lanced the wound. He left at two after giving her the addresses of two nurses to call up and promising to return at half past six. It was blood-poisoning.

At four, leaving Hilda by the bedside, she went to her room, and slipping with a shudder out of her evening dress, kicked it into a corner. She put on a house dress and returned to the nursery while Hilda went to make coffee.

Not until noon could she bring herself to look into Harold’s room, but when she did it was to find him awake and staring very miserably at the ceiling. He turned blood-shot hollow eyes upon her. For a minute she hated him, couldn’t speak. A husky voice came from the bed.

“What time is it?”

“Noon.”

“I made a damn fool —  — “

“It doesn’t matter,” she said sharply. “Julie’s got blood-poisoning. They may” — she choked over the words — “they think she’ll have to lose her hand.”

“What?”

“She cut herself on that — that bowl.”

“Last night?”

“Oh, what does it matter?” see cried; “she’s got blood-poisoning. Can’t you hear?” He looked at her bewildered — sat half-way up in bed.

“I’ll get dressed,” he said.

Her anger subsided and a great wave of weariness and pity for him rolled over her. After all, it was his trouble, too.

“Yes,” she answered listlessly, “I suppose you’d better.”

IV

If Evylyn’s beauty had hesitated an her early thirties it came to an abrupt decision just afterward and completely left her. A tentative outlay of wrinkles on her face suddenly deepened and flesh collected rapidly on her legs and hips and arms. Her mannerism of drawing her brows together had become an expression — it was habitual when she was reading or speaking and even while she slept. She was forty-six.

As in most families whose fortunes have gone down rather than up, she and Harold had drifted into a colorless antagonism. In repose they looked at each other with the toleration they might have felt for broken old chairs; Evylyn worried a little when he was sick and did her best to be cheerful under the wearying depression of living with a disappointed man.

Family bridge was over for the evening and she sighed with relief. She had made more mistakes than usual this evening and she didn’t care. Irene shouldn’t have made that remark about the infantry being particularly dangerous. There had been no letter for three weeks now, and, while this was nothing out of the ordinary, it never failed to make her nervous; naturally she hadn’t known how many clubs were out.

Harold had gone up-stairs, so she stepped out on the porch for a breath of fresh air. There was a bright glamour of moonlight diffusing on the sidewalks and lawns, and with a little half yawn, half laugh, she remembered one long moonlight affair of her youth. It was astonishing to think that life had once been the sum of her current love-affairs. It was now the sum of her current problems.

There was the problem of Julie — Julie was thirteen, and lately she was growing more and more sensitive about her deformity and preferred to stay always in her room reading. A few years before she had been frightened at the idea of going to school, and Evylyn could not bring herself to send her, so she grew up in her mother’s shadow, a pitiful little figure with the artificial hand that she made no attempt to use but kept forlornly in her pocket. Lately she had been taking lessons in using it because Evylyn had feared she would cease to lift the arm altogether, but after the lessons, unless she made a move with it in listless obedience to her mother, the little hand would creep back to the pocket of her dress. For a while her dresses were made without pockets, but Julie had moped around the house so miserably at a loss all one month that Evylyn weakened and never tried the experiment again.

The problem of Donald had been different from the start. She had attempted vainly to keep him near her as she had tried to teach Julie to lean less on her — lately the problem of Donald had been snatched out of her hands; his division had been abroad for three months.

She yawned again — life was a thing for youth. What a happy youth she must have had! She remembered her pony, Bijou, and the trip to Europe with her mother when she was eighteen —  —

“Very, very complicated,” she said aloud and severely to the moon, and, stepping inside, was about to close the door when she heard a noise in the library and started.

It was Martha, the middle-aged servant: they kept only one now.

“Why, Martha!” she said in surprise.

Martha turned quickly.

“Oh, I thought you was up-stairs. I was jist —  — “

“Is anything the matter?”

Martha hesitated.

“No; I —  — “ She stood there fidgeting. “It was a letter, Mrs. Piper, that I put somewhere.

“A letter? Your own letter?” asked Evylyn.

“No, it was to you. ‘Twas this afternoon, Mrs. Piper, in the last mail. The postman give it to me and then the back door-bell rang. I had it in my hand, so I must have stuck it somewhere. I thought I’d just slip in now and find it.”

“What sort of a letter? From Mr. Donald?”

“No, it was an advertisement, maybe, or a business letter. It was a long narrow one, I remember.”

They began a search through the music-room, looking on trays and mantelpieces, and then through the library, feeling on the tops of rows of books. Martha paused in despair.

“I can’t think where. I went straight to the kitchen. The dining-room, maybe.” She started hopefully for the dining-room, but turned suddenly at the sound of a gasp behind her. Evylyn had sat down heavily in a Morris chair, her brows drawn very close together eyes blanking furiously.

“Are you sick?”

For a minute there was no answer. Evylyn sat there very still and Martha could see the very quick rise and fall of her bosom.

“Are you sick?” she repeated.

“No,” said Evylyn slowly, “but I know where the letter is. Go ‘way, Martha. I know.”

Wonderingly, Martha withdrew, and still Evylyn sat there, only the muscles around her eyes moving — contracting and relaxing and contracting again. She knew now where the letter was — she knew as well as if she had put it there herself. And she felt instinctively and unquestionably what the letter was. It was long and narrow like an advertisement, but up in the corner in large letters it said “War Department” and, in smaller letters below, “Official Business.” She knew it lay there in the big bowl with her name in ink on the outside and her soul’s death within.

Rising uncertainly, she walked toward the dining-room, feeling her way along the bookcases and through the doorway. After a moment she found the light and switched it on.

There was the bowl, reflecting the electric light in crimson squares edged with black and yellow squares edged with blue, ponderous and glittering, grotesquely and triumphantly ominous. She took a step forward and paused again; another step and she would see over the top and into the inside — another step and she would see an edge of white — another step — her hands fell on the rough, cold surface —

In a moment she was tearing it open, fumbling with an obstinate fold, holding it before her while the typewritten page glared out and struck at her. Then it fluttered like a bird to the floor. The house that had seemed whirring, buzzing a moment since, was suddenly very quiet; a breath of air crept in through the open front door carrying the noise of a passing motor; she heard faint sounds from upstairs and then a grinding racket in the pipe behind the bookcases-her husband turning of a water-tap —  —

And in that instant it was as if this were not, after all, Donald’s hour except in so far as he was a marker in the insidious contest that had gone on in sudden surges and long, listless interludes between Evylyn and this cold, malignant thing of beauty, a gift of enmity from a man whose face she had long since forgotten. With its massive, brooding passivity it lay there in the centre of her house as it had lain for years, throwing out the ice-like beams of a thousand eyes, perverse glitterings merging each into each, never aging, never changing.

Evylyn sat down on the edge of the table and stared at it fascinated. It seemed to be smiling now, a very cruel smile, as if to say:

“You see, this time I didn’t have to hurt you directly. I didn’t bother. You know it was I who took your son away. You know how cold I am and how hard and how beautiful, because once you were just as cold and hard and beautiful.”

The bowl seemed suddenly to turn itself over and then to distend and swell until it became a great canopy that glittered and trembled over the room, over the house, and, as the walls melted slowly into mist, Evylyn saw that it was still moving out, out and far away from her, shutting off far horizons and suns and moons and stars except as inky blots seen faintly through it. And under it walked all the people, and the light that came through to them was refracted and twisted until shadow seamed light and light seemed shadow — until the whole panoply of the world became changed and distorted under the twinkling heaven of the bowl.

Then there came a far-away, booming voice like a low, clear bell. It came from the centre of the bowl and down the great sides to the ground and then bounced toward her eagerly.

“You see, I am fate,” it shouted, “and stronger than your puny plans; and I am how-things-turn-out and I am different from your little dreams, and I am the flight of time and the end of beauty and unfulfilled desire; all the accidents and imperceptions and the little minutes that shape the crucial hours are mine. I am the exception that proves no rules, the limits of your control, the condiment in the dish of life.”

The booming sound stopped; the echoes rolled away over the wide land to the edge of the bowl that bounded the world and up the great sides and back to the centre where they hummed for a moment and died. Then the great walls began slowly to bear down upon her, growing smaller and smaller, coming closer and closer as if to crush her; and as she clinched her hands and waited for the swift bruise of the cold glass, the bowl gave a sudden wrench and turned over — and lay there on the side-board, shining and inscrutable, reflecting in a hundred prisms, myriad, many-colored glints and gleams and crossings and interlaces of light.

The cold wind blew in again through to front door, and with a desperate, frantic energy Evylyn stretched both her arms around the bowl. She must be quick — she must be strong. She tightened her arms until they ached, tauted the thin strips of muscle under her soft flesh, and with a mighty effort raised it and held it. She felt the wind blow cold on her back where her dress had come apart from the strain of her effort, and as she felt it she turned toward it and staggered under the great weight out through the library and on toward the front door. She must be quick — she must be strong. The blood in her arms throbbed dully and her knees kept giving way under her, but the feel of the cool glass was good.

Out the front door she tottered and over to the stone steps, and there, summoning every fibre of her soul and body for a last effort, swung herself half around — for a second, as she tried to loose her hold, her numb fingers clung to the rough surface, and in that second she slipped and, losing balance, toppled forward with a despairing cry, her arms still around the bowl . . . down . . .

Over the way lights went on; far down the block the crash was heard, and pedestrians rushed up wonderingly; up-stairs a tired man awoke from the edge of sleep and a little girl whimpered in a haunted doze. And all over the moonlit sidewalk around the still, black form, hundreds of prisms and cubes and splinters of glass reflected the light in little gleams of blue, and black edged with yellow, and yellow, and crimson edged with black.

Bernice Bobs Her Hair

After dark on Saturday night one could stand on the first tee of the golf-course and see the country-club windows as a yellow expanse over a very black and wavy ocean. The waves of this ocean, so to speak, were the heads of many curious caddies, a few of the more ingenious chauffeurs, the golf professional’s deaf sister — and there were usually several stray, diffident waves who might have rolled inside had they so desired. This was the gallery.

The balcony was inside. It consisted of the circle of wicker chairs that lined the wall of the combination clubroom and ballroom. At these Saturday-night dances it was largely feminine; a great babel of middle-aged ladies with sharp eyes and icy hearts behind lorgnettes and large bosoms. The main function of the balcony was critical, it occasionally showed grudging admiration, but never approval, for it is well known among ladies over thirty-five that when the younger set dance in the summer-time it is with the very worst intentions in the world, and if they are not bombarded with stony eyes stray couples will dance weird barbaric interludes in the corners, and the more popular, more dangerous, girls will sometimes be kissed in the parked limousines of unsuspecting dowagers.

But, after all, this critical circle is not close enough to the stage to see the actors’ faces and catch the subtler byplay. It can only frown and lean, ask questions and make satisfactory deductions from its set of postulates, such as the one which states that every young man with a large income leads the life of a hunted partridge. It never really appreciates the drama of the shifting, semi-cruel world of adolescence. No; boxes, orchestra-circle, principals, and chorus be represented by the medley of faces and voices that sway to the plaintive African rhythm of Dyer’s dance orchestra.

From sixteen-year-old Otis Ormonde, who has two more years at Hill School, to G. Reece Stoddard, over whose bureau at home hangs a Harvard law diploma; from little Madeleine Hogue, whose hair still feels strange and uncomfortable on top of her head, to Bessie MacRae, who has been the life of the party a little too long — more than ten years — the medley is not only the centre of the stage but contains the only people capable of getting an unobstructed view of it.

With a flourish and a bang the music stops. The couples exchange artificial, effortless smiles, facetiously repeat “la-de-da-da dum-dum,” and then the clatter of young feminine voices soars over the burst of clapping.

A few disappointed stags caught in midfloor as they had been about to cut in subsided listlessly back to the walls, because this was not like the riotous Christmas dances — these summer hops were considered just pleasantly warm and exciting, where even the younger marrieds rose and performed ancient waltzes and terrifying fox trots to the tolerant amusement of their younger brothers and sisters.

Warren McIntyre, who casually attended Yale, being one of the unfortunate stags, felt in his dinner-coat pocket for a cigarette and strolled out onto the wide, semidark veranda, where couples were scattered at tables, filling the lantern-hung night with vague words and hazy laughter. He nodded here and there at the less absorbed and as he passed each couple some half-forgotten fragment of a story played in his mind, for it was not a large city and every one was Who’s Who to every one else’s past. There, for example, were Jim Strain and Ethel Demorest, who had been privately engaged for three years. Every one knew that as soon as Jim managed to hold a job for more than two months she would marry him. Yet how bored they both looked, and how wearily Ethel regarded Jim sometimes, as if she wondered why she had trained the vines of her affection on such a wind-shaken poplar.

Warren was nineteen and rather pitying with those of his friends who hadn’t gone East to college. But, like most boys, he bragged tremendously about the girls of his city when he was away from it. There was Genevieve Ormonde, who regularly made the rounds of dances, house-parties, and football games at Princeton, Yale, Williams, and Cornell; there was black-eyed Roberta Dillon, who was quite as famous to her own generation as Hiram Johnson or Ty Cobb; and, of course, there was Marjorie Harvey, who besides having a fairylike face and a dazzling, bewildering tongue was already justly celebrated for having turned five cart-wheels in succession during the last pump-and-slipper dance at New Haven.

Warren, who had grown up across the street from Marjorie, had long been “crazy about her.” Sometimes she seemed to reciprocate his feeling with a faint gratitude, but she had tried him by her infallible test and informed him gravely that she did not love him. Her test was that when she was away from him she forgot him and had affairs with other boys. Warren found this discouraging, especially as Marjorie had been making little trips all summer, and for the first two or three days after each arrival home he saw great heaps of mail on the Harveys’ hall table addressed to her in various masculine handwritings. To make matters worse, all during the month of August she had been visited by her cousin Bernice from Eau Claire, and it seemed impossible to see her alone. It was always necessary to hunt round and find some one to take care of Bernice. As August waned this was becoming more and more difficult.

Much as Warren worshipped Marjorie he had to admit that Cousin Bernice was sorta dopeless. She was pretty, with dark hair and high color, but she was no fun on a party. Every Saturday night he danced a long arduous duty dance with her to please Marjorie, but he had never been anything but bored in her company.

“Warren” —  — a soft voice at his elbow broke in upon his thoughts, and he turned to see Marjorie, flushed and radiant as usual. She laid a hand on his shoulder and a glow settled almost imperceptibly over him.

“Warren,” she whispered “do something for me — dance with Bernice. She’s been stuck with little Otis Ormonde for almost an hour.”

Warren’s glow faded.

“Why — sure,” he answered half-heartedly.

“You don’t mind, do you? I’ll see that you don’t get stuck.”

“‘Sall right.”

Marjorie smiled — that smile that was thanks enough.

“You’re an angel, and I’m obliged loads.”

With a sigh the angel glanced round the veranda, but Bernice and Otis were not in sight. He wandered back inside, and there in front of the women’s dressing-room he found Otis in the centre of a group of young men who were convulsed with laughter. Otis was brandishing a piece of timber he had picked up, and discoursing volubly.

“She’s gone in to fix her hair,” he announced wildly. “I’m waiting to dance another hour with her.”

Their laughter was renewed.

“Why don’t some of you cut in?” cried Otis resentfully. “She likes more variety.”

“Why, Otis,” suggested a friend “you’ve just barely got used to her.”

“Why the two-by-four, Otis?” inquired Warren, smiling.

“The two-by-four? Oh, this? This is a club. When she comes out I’ll hit her on the head and knock her in again.”

Warren collapsed on a settee and howled with glee.

“Never mind, Otis,” he articulated finally. “I’m relieving you this time.”

Otis simulated a sudden fainting attack and handed the stick to Warren.

“If you need it, old man,” he said hoarsely.

No matter how beautiful or brilliant a girl may be, the reputation of not being frequently cut in on makes her position at a dance unfortunate. Perhaps boys prefer her company to that of the butterflies with whom they dance a dozen times an but, youth in this jazz-nourished generation is temperamentally restless, and the idea of fox-trotting more than one full fox trot with the same girl is distasteful, not to say odious. When it comes to several dances and the intermissions between she can be quite sure that a young man, once relieved, will never tread on her wayward toes again.

Warren danced the next full dance with Bernice, and finally, thankful for the intermission, he led her to a table on the veranda. There was a moment’s silence while she did unimpressive things with her fan.

“It’s hotter here than in Eau Claire,” she said.

Warren stifled a sigh and nodded. It might be for all he knew or cared. He wondered idly whether she was a poor conversationalist because she got no attention or got no attention because she was a poor conversationalist.

“You going to be here much longer?” he asked and then turned rather red. She might suspect his reasons for asking.

“Another week,” she answered, and stared at him as if to lunge at his next remark when it left his lips.

Warren fidgeted. Then with a sudden charitable impulse he decided to try part of his line on her. He turned and looked at her eyes.

“You’ve got an awfully kissable mouth,” he began quietly.

This was a remark that he sometimes made to girls at college proms when they were talking in just such half dark as this. Bernice distinctly jumped. She turned an ungraceful red and became clumsy with her fan. No one had ever made such a remark to her before.

“Fresh!” —  — the word had slipped out before she realized it, and she bit her lip. Too late she decided to be amused, and offered him a flustered smile.

Warren was annoyed. Though not accustomed to have that remark taken seriously, still it usually provoked a laugh or a paragraph of sentimental banter. And he hated to be called fresh, except in a joking way. His charitable impulse died and he switched the topic.

“Jim Strain and Ethel Demorest sitting out as usual,” he commented.

This was more in Bernice’s line, but a faint regret mingled with her relief as the subject changed. Men did not talk to her about kissable mouths, but she knew that they talked in some such way to other girls.

“Oh, yes,” she said, and laughed. “I hear they’ve been mooning around for years without a red penny. Isn’t it silly?”

Warren’s disgust increased. Jim Strain was a close friend of his brother’s, and anyway he considered it bad form to sneer at people for not having money. But Bernice had had no intention of sneering. She was merely nervous.

II

When Marjorie and Bernice reached home at half after midnight they said good night at the top of the stairs. Though cousins, they were not intimates. As a matter of fact Marjorie had no female intimates — she considered girls stupid. Bernice on the contrary all through this parent-arranged visit had rather longed to exchange those confidences flavored with giggles and tears that she considered an indispensable factor in all feminine intercourse. But in this respect she found Marjorie rather cold; felt somehow the same difficulty in talking to her that she had in talking to men. Marjorie never giggled, was never frightened, seldom embarrassed, and in fact had very few of the qualities which Bernice considered appropriately and blessedly feminine.

As Bernice busied herself with tooth-brush and paste this night she wondered for the hundredth time why she never had any attention when she was away from home. That her family were the wealthiest in Eau Claire; that her mother entertained tremendously, gave little diners for her daughter before all dances and bought her a car of her own to drive round in, never occurred to her as factors in her home-town social success. Like most girls she had been brought up on the warm milk prepared by Annie Fellows Johnston and on novels in which the female was beloved because of certain mysterious womanly qualities, always mentioned but never displayed.

Bernice felt a vague pain that she was not at present engaged in being popular. She did not know that had it not been for Marjorie’s campaigning she would have danced the entire evening with one man; but she knew that even in Eau Claire other girls with less position and less pulchritude were given a much bigger rush. She attributed this to something subtly unscrupulous in those girls. It had never worried her, and if it had her mother would have assured her that the other girls cheapened themselves and that men really respected girls like Bernice.

She turned out the light in her bathroom, and on an impulse decided to go in and chat for a moment with her aunt Josephine, whose light was still on. Her soft slippers bore her noiselessly down the carpeted hall, but hearing voices inside she stopped near the partly openers door. Then she caught her own name, and without any definite intention of eavesdropping lingered — and the thread of the conversation going on inside pierced her consciousness sharply as if it had been drawn through with a needle.

“She’s absolutely hopeless!” It was Marjorie’s voice. “Oh, I know what you’re going to say! So many people have told you how pretty and sweet she is, and how she can cook! What of it? She has a bum time. Men don’t like her.”

“What’s a little cheap popularity?”

Mrs. Harvey sounded annoyed.

“It’s everything when you’re eighteen,” said Marjorie emphatically. “I’ve done my best. I’ve been polite and I’ve made men dance with her, but they just won’t stand being bored. When I think of that gorgeous coloring wasted on such a ninny, and think what Martha Carey could do with it — oh!”

“There’s no courtesy these days.”

Mrs. Harvey’s voice implied that modern situations were too much for her. When she was a girl all young ladies who belonged to nice families had glorious times.

“Well,” said Marjorie, “no girl can permanently bolster up a lame-duck visitor, because these days it’s every girl for herself. I’ve even tried to drop hints about clothes and things, and she’s been furious — given me the funniest looks. She’s sensitive enough to know she’s not getting away with much, but I’ll bet she consoles herself by thinking that she’s very virtuous and that I’m too gay and fickle and will come to a bad end. All unpopular girls think that way. Sour grapes! Sarah Hopkins refers to Genevieve and Roberta and me as gardenia girls! I’ll bet she’d give ten years of her life and her European education to be a gardenia girl and have three or four men in love with her and be cut in on every few feet at dances.”

“It seems to me,” interrupted Mrs. Harvey rather wearily, “that you ought to be able to do something for Bernice. I know she’s not very vivacious.”

Marjorie groaned.

“Vivacious! Good grief! I’ve never heard her say anything to a boy except that it’s hot or the floor’s crowded or that she’s going to school in New York next year. Sometimes she asks them what kind of car they have and tells them the kind she has. Thrilling!”

There was a short silence and then Mrs. Harvey took up her refrain:

“All I know is that other girls not half so sweet and attractive get partners. Martha Carey, for instance, is stout and loud, and her mother is distinctly common. Roberta Dillon is so thin this year that she looks as though Arizona were the place for her. She’s dancing herself to death.”

“But, mother,” objected Marjorie impatiently, “Martha is cheerful and awfully witty and an awfully slick girl, and Roberta’s a marvellous dancer. She’s been popular for ages!”

Mrs. Harvey yawned.

“I think it’s that crazy Indian blood in Bernice,” continued Marjorie. “Maybe she’s a reversion to type. Indian women all just sat round and never said anything.”

“Go to bed, you silly child,” laughed Mrs. Harvey. “I wouldn’t have told you that if I’d thought you were going to remember it. And I think most of your ideas are perfectly idiotic,” she finished sleepily.

There was another silence, while Marjorie considered whether or not convincing her mother was worth the trouble. People over forty can seldom be permanently convinced of anything. At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide.

Having decided this, Marjorie said good night. When she came out into the hall it was quite empty.

III

While Marjorie was breakfasting late next day Bernice came into the room with a rather formal good morning, sat down opposite, stared intently over and slightly moistened her lips.

“What’s on your mind?” inquired Marjorie, rather puzzled.

Bernice paused before she threw her hand-grenade.

“I heard what you said about me to your mother last night.”

Marjorie was startled, but she showed only a faintly heightened color and her voice was quite even when she spoke.

“Where were you?”

“In the hall. I didn’t mean to listen — at first.”

After an involuntary look of contempt Marjorie dropped her eyes and became very interested in balancing a stray corn-flake on her finger.

“I guess I’d better go back to Eau Claire — if I’m such a nuisance.” Bernice’s lower lip was trembling violently and she continued on a wavering note: “I’ve tried to be nice, and — and I’ve been first neglected and then insulted. No one ever visited me and got such treatment.”

Marjorie was silent.

“But I’m in the way, I see. I’m a drag on you. Your friends don’t like me.” She paused, and then remembered another one of her grievances. “Of course I was furious last week when you tried to hint to me that that dress was unbecoming. Don’t you think I know how to dress myself?”

“No,” murmured less than half-aloud.

“What?”

“I didn’t hint anything,” said Marjorie succinctly. “I said, as I remember, that it was better to wear a becoming dress three times straight than to alternate it with two frights.”

“Do you think that was a very nice thing to say?”

“I wasn’t trying to be nice.” Then after a pause: “When do you want to go?”

Bernice drew in her breath sharply.

“Oh!” It was a little half-cry.

Marjorie looked up in surprise.

“Didn’t you say you were going?”

“Yes, but —  — “

“Oh, you were only bluffing!”

They stared at each other across the breakfast-table for a moment. Misty waves were passing before Bernice’s eyes, while Marjorie’s face wore that rather hard expression that she used when slightly intoxicated undergraduate’s were making love to her.

“So you were bluffing,” she repeated as if it were what she might have expected.

Bernice admitted it by bursting into tears. Marjorie’s eyes showed boredom.

“You’re my cousin,” sobbed Bernice. “I’m v-v-visiting you. I was to stay a month, and if I go home my mother will know and she’ll wah-wonder —  — “

Marjorie waited until the shower of broken words collapsed into little sniffles.

“I’ll give you my month’s allowance,” she said coldly, “and you can spend this last week anywhere you want. There’s a very nice hotel —  — “

Bernice’s sobs rose to a flute note, and rising of a sudden she fled from the room.

An hour later, while Marjorie was in the library absorbed in composing one of those non-committal marvelously elusive letters that only a young girl can write, Bernice reappeared, very red-eyed, and consciously calm. She cast no glance at Marjorie but took a book at random from the shelf and sat down as if to read. Marjorie seemed absorbed in her letter and continued writing. When the clock showed noon Bernice closed her book with a snap.

“I suppose I’d better get my railroad ticket.”

This was not the beginning of the speech she had rehearsed up-stairs, but as Marjorie was not getting her cues — wasn’t urging her to be reasonable; it’s an a mistake — it was the best opening she could muster.

“Just wait till I finish this letter,” said Marjorie without looking round. “I want to get it off in the next mail.”

After another minute, during which her pen scratched busily, she turned round and relaxed with an air of “at your service.” Again Bernice had to speak.

“Do you want me to go home?”

“Well,” said Marjorie, considering, “I suppose if you’re not having a good time you’d better go. No use being miserable.”

“Don’t you think common kindness —  — “

“Oh, please don’t quote ‘Little Women’!” cried Marjorie impatiently. “That’s out of style.”

“You think so?”

“Heavens, yes! What modern girl could live like those inane females?”

“They were the models for our mothers.”

Marjorie laughed.

“Yes, they were — not! Besides, our mothers were all very well in their way, but they know very little about their daughters’ problems.”

Bernice drew herself up.

“Please don’t talk about my mother.”

Marjorie laughed.

“I don’t think I mentioned her.”

Bernice felt that she was being led away from her subject.

“Do you think you’ve treated me very well?”

“I’ve done my best. You’re rather hard material to work with.”

The lids of Bernice’s eyes reddened.

“I think you’re hard and selfish, and you haven’t a feminine quality in you.”

“Oh, my Lord!” cried Marjorie in desperation “You little nut! Girls like you are responsible for all the tiresome colorless marriages; all those ghastly inefficiencies that pass as feminine qualities. What a blow it must be when a man with imagination marries the beautiful bundle of clothes that he’s been building ideals round, and finds that she’s just a weak, whining, cowardly mass of affectations!”

Bernice’s mouth had slipped half open.

“The womanly woman!” continued Marjorie. “Her whole early life is occupied in whining criticisms of girls like me who really do have a good time.”

Bernice’s jaw descended farther as Marjorie’s voice rose.

“There’s some excuse for an ugly girl whining. If I’d been irretrievably ugly I’d never have forgiven my parents for bringing me into the world. But you’re starting life without any handicap — “ Marjorie’s little fist clinched, “If you expect me to weep with you you’ll be disappointed. Go or stay, just as you like.” And picking up her letters she left the room.

Bernice claimed a headache and failed to appear at luncheon. They had a matinée date for the afternoon, but the headache persisting, Marjorie made explanation to a not very downcast boy. But when she returned late in the afternoon she found Bernice with a strangely set face waiting for her in her bedroom.

“I’ve decided,” began Bernice without preliminaries, “that maybe you’re right about things — possibly not. But if you’ll tell me why your friends aren’t — aren’t interested in me I’ll see if I can do what you want me to.”

Marjorie was at the mirror shaking down her hair.

“Do you mean it?”

“Yes.”

“Without reservations? Will you do exactly what I say?”

“Well, I —  — “

“Well nothing! Will you do exactly as I say?”

“If they’re sensible things.”

“They’re not! You’re no case for sensible things.”

“Are you going to make — to recommend —  — “

“Yes, everything. If I tell you to take boxing-lessons you’ll have to do it. Write home and tell your mother you’re going’ to stay another two weeks.

“If you’ll tell me —  — “

“All right — I’ll just give you a few examples now. First you have no ease of manner. Why? Because you’re never sure about your personal appearance. When a girl feels that she’s perfectly groomed and dressed she can forget that part of her. That’s charm. The more parts of yourself you can afford to forget the more charm you have.”

“Don’t I look all right?”

“No; for instance you never take care of your eyebrows. They’re black and lustrous, but by leaving them straggly they’re a blemish. They’d be beautiful if you’d take care of them in one-tenth the time you take doing nothing. You’re going to brush them so that they’ll grow straight.”

Bernice raised the brows in question.

“Do you mean to say that men notice eyebrows?”

“Yes — subconsciously. And when you go home you ought to have your teeth straightened a little. It’s almost imperceptible, still —  — “

“But I thought,” interrupted Bernice in bewilderment, “that you despised little dainty feminine things like that.”

“I hate dainty minds,” answered Marjorie. “But a girl has to be dainty in person. If she looks like a million dollars she can talk about Russia, ping-pong, or the League of Nations and get away with it.”

“What else?”

“Oh, I’m just beginning! There’s your dancing.”

“Don’t I dance all right?”

“No, you don’t — you lean on a man; yes, you do — ever so slightly. I noticed it when we were dancing together yesterday. And you dance standing up straight instead of bending over a little. Probably some old lady on the side-line once told you that you looked so dignified that way. But except with a very small girl it’s much harder on the man, and he’s the one that counts.”

“Go on.” Bernice’s brain was reeling.

“Well, you’ve got to learn to be nice to men who are sad birds. You look as if you’d been insulted whenever you’re thrown with any except the most popular boys. Why, Bernice, I’m cut in on every few feet — and who does most of it? Why, those very sad birds. No girl can afford to neglect them. They’re the big part of any crowd. Young boys too shy to talk are the very best conversational practice. Clumsy boys are the best dancing practice. If you can follow them and yet look graceful you can follow a baby tank across a barb-wire sky-scraper.”

Bernice sighed profoundly, but Marjorie was not through.

“If you go to a dance and really amuse, say, three sad birds that dance with you; if you talk so well to them that they forget they’re stuck with you, you’ve done something. They’ll come back next time, and gradually so many sad birds will dance with you that the attractive boys will see there’s no danger of being stuck — then they’ll dance with you.”

“Yes,” agreed Bernice faintly. “I think I begin to see.”

“And finally,” concluded Marjorie, “poise and charm will just come. You’ll wake up some morning knowing you’ve attained it and men will know it too.”

Bernice rose.

“It’s been awfully kind of you — but nobody’s ever talked to me like this before, and I feel sort of startled.”

Marjorie made no answer but gazed pensively at her own image in the mirror.

“You’re a peach to help me,” continued Bernice.

Still Marjorie did not answer, and Bernice thought she had seemed too grateful.

“I know you don’t like sentiment,” she said timidly.

Marjorie turned to her quickly.

“Oh, I wasn’t thinking about that. I was considering whether we hadn’t better bob your hair.”

Bernice collapsed backward upon the bed.

IV

On the following Wednesday evening there was a dinner-dance at the country club. When the guests strolled in Bernice found her place-card with a slight feeling of irritation. Though at her right sat G. Reece Stoddard, a most desirable and distinguished young bachelor, the all-important left held only Charley Paulson. Charley lacked height, beauty, and social shrewdness, and in her new enlightenment Bernice decided that his only qualification to be her partner was that he had never been stuck with her. But this feeling of irritation left with the last of the soup-plates, and Marjorie’s specific instruction came to her. Swallowing her pride she turned to Charley Paulson and plunged.

“Do you think I ought to bob my hair, Mr. Charley Paulson?”

Charley looked up in surprise.

“Why?”

“Because I’m considering it. It’s such a sure and easy way of attracting attention.”

Charley smiled pleasantly. He could not know this had been rehearsed. He replied that he didn’t know much about bobbed hair. But Bernice was there to tell him.

“I want to be a society vampire, you see,” she announced coolly, and went on to inform him that bobbed hair was the necessary prelude. She added that she wanted to ask his advice, because she had heard he was so critical about girls.

Charley, who knew as much about the psychology of women as he did of the mental states of Buddhist contemplatives, felt vaguely flattered.

“So I’ve decided,” she continued, her voice rising slightly, “that early next week I’m going down to the Sevier Hotel barber-shop, sit in the first chair, and get my hair bobbed.” She faltered noticing that the people near her had paused in their conversation and were listening; but after a confused second Marjorie’s coaching told, and she finished her paragraph to the vicinity at large. “Of course I’m charging admission, but if you’ll all come down and encourage me I’ll issue passes for the inside seats.”

There was a ripple of appreciative laughter, and under cover of it G. Reece Stoddard leaned over quickly and said close to her ear: “I’ll take a box right now.”

She met his eyes and smiled as if he had said something surprisingly brilliant.

“Do you believe in bobbed hair?” asked G. Reece in the same undertone.

“I think it’s unmoral,” affirmed Bernice gravely. “But, of course, you’ve either got to amuse people or feed ‘em or shock ‘em.” Marjorie had culled this from Oscar Wilde. It was greeted with a ripple of laughter from the men and a series of quick, intent looks from the girls. And then as though she had said nothing of wit or moment Bernice turned again to Charley and spoke confidentially in his ear.

“I want to ask you your opinion of several people. I imagine you’re a wonderful judge of character.”

Charley thrilled faintly — paid her a subtle compliment by overturning her water.

Two hours later, while Warren McIntyre was standing passively in the stag line abstractedly watching the dancers and wondering whither and with whom Marjorie had disappeared, an unrelated perception began to creep slowly upon him — a perception that Bernice, cousin to Marjorie, had been cut in on several times in the past five minutes. He closed his eyes, opened them and looked again. Several minutes back she had been dancing with a visiting boy, a matter easily accounted for; a visiting boy would know no better. But now she was dancing with some one else, and there was Charley Paulson headed for her with enthusiastic determination in his eye. Funny — Charley seldom danced with more than three girls an evening.

Warren was distinctly surprised when — the exchange having been effected — the man relieved proved to be none ether than G. Reece Stoddard himself. And G. Reece seemed not at all jubilant at being relieved. Next time Bernice danced near, Warren regarded her intently. Yes, she was pretty, distinctly pretty; and to-night her face seemed really vivacious. She had that look that no woman, however histrionically proficient, can successfully counterfeit — she looked as if she were having a good time. He liked the way she had her hair arranged, wondered if it was brilliantine that made it glisten so. And that dress was becoming — a dark red that set off her shadowy eyes and high coloring. He remembered that he had thought her pretty when she first came to town, before he had realized that she was dull. Too bad she was dull — dull girls unbearable — certainly pretty though.

His thoughts zigzagged back to Marjorie. This disappearance would be like other disappearances. When she reappeared he would demand where she had been — would be told emphatically that it was none of his business. What a pity she was so sure of him! She basked in the knowledge that no other girl in town interested him; she defied him to fall in love with Genevieve or Roberta.

Warren sighed. The way to Marjorie’s affections was a labyrinth indeed. He looked up. Bernice was again dancing with the visiting boy. Half unconsciously he took a step out from the stag line in her direction, and hesitated. Then he said to himself that it was charity. He walked toward her — collided suddenly with G. Reece Stoddard.

“Pardon me,” said Warren.

But G. Reece had not stopped to apologize. He had again cut in on Bernice.

That night at one o’clock Marjorie, with one hand on the electric-light switch in the hall, turned to take a last look at Bernice’s sparkling eyes.

“So it worked?”

“Oh, Marjorie, yes!” cried Bernice.

“I saw you were having a gay time.”

“I did! The only trouble was that about midnight I ran short of talk. I had to repeat myself — with different men of course. I hope they won’t compare notes.”

“Men don’t,” said Marjorie, yawning, “and it wouldn’t matter if they did — they’d think you were even trickier.”

She snapped out the light, and as they started up the stairs Bernice grasped the banister thankfully. For the first time in her life she had been danced tired.

“You see,” said Marjorie it the top of the stairs, “one man sees another man cut in and he thinks there must be something there. Well, we’ll fix up some new stuff to-morrow. Good night.”

“Good night.”

As Bernice took down her hair she passed the evening before her in review. She had followed instructions exactly. Even when Charley Paulson cut in for the eighth time she had simulated delight and had apparently been both interested and flattered. She had not talked about the weather or Eau Claire or automobiles or her school, but had confined her conversation to me, you, and us.

But a few minutes before she fell asleep a rebellious thought was churning drowsily in her brain — after all, it was she who had done it. Marjorie, to be sure, had given her her conversation, but then Marjorie got much of her conversation out of things she read. Bernice had bought the red dress, though she had never valued it highly before Marjorie dug it out of her trunk — and her own voice had said the words, her own lips had smiled, her own feet had danced. Marjorie nice girl — vain, though — nice evening — nice boys — like Warren — Warren — Warren — what’s his name — Warren —  —

She fell asleep.

V

To Bernice the next week was a revelation. With the feeling that people really enjoyed looking at her and listening to her came the foundation of self-confidence. Of course there were numerous mistakes at first. She did not know, for instance, that Draycott Deyo was studying for the ministry; she was unaware that he had cut in on her because he thought she was a quiet, reserved girl. Had she known these things she would not have treated him to the line which began “Hello, Shell Shock!” and continued with the bathtub story — “It takes a frightful lot of energy to fix my hair in the summer — there’s so much of it — so I always fix it first and powder my face and put on my hat; then I get into the bathtub, and dress afterward. Don’t you think that’s the best plan?”

Though Draycott Deyo was in the throes of difficulties concerning baptism by immersion and might possibly have seen a connection, it must be admitted that he did not. He considered feminine bathing an immoral subject, and gave her some of his ideas on the depravity of modern society.

But to offset that unfortunate occurrence Bernice had several signal successes to her credit. Little Otis Ormonde pleaded off from a trip East and elected instead to follow her with a puppylike devotion, to the amusement of his crowd and to the irritation of G. Reece Stoddard, several of whose afternoon calls Otis completely ruined by the disgusting tenderness of the glances he bent on Bernice. He even told her the story of the two-by-four and the dressing-room to show her how frightfully mistaken he and every one else had been in their first judgment of her. Bernice laughed off that incident with a slight sinking sensation.

Of all Bernice’s conversation perhaps the best known and most universally approved was the line about the bobbing of her hair.

“Oh, Bernice, when you goin’ to get the hair bobbed?”

“Day after to-morrow maybe,” she would reply, laughing. “Will you come and see me? Because I’m counting on you, you know.”

“Will we? You know! But you better hurry up.”

Bernice, whose tonsorial intentions were strictly dishonorable, would laugh again.

“Pretty soon now. You’d be surprised.”

But perhaps the most significant symbol of her success was the gray car of the hypercritical Warren McIntyre, parked daily in front of the Harvey house. At first the parlor-maid was distinctly startled when he asked for Bernice instead of Marjorie; after a week of it she told the cook that Miss Bernice had gotta holda Miss Marjorie’s best fella.

And Miss Bernice had. Perhaps it began with Warren’s desire to rouse jealousy in Marjorie; perhaps it was the familiar though unrecognized strain of Marjorie in Bernice’s conversation; perhaps it was both of these and something of sincere attraction besides. But somehow the collective mind of the younger set knew within a week that Marjorie’s most reliable beau had made an amazing face-about and was giving an indisputable rush to Marjorie’s guest. The question of the moment was how Marjorie would take it. Warren called Bernice on the ‘phone twice a day, sent her notes, and they were frequently seen together in his roadster, obviously engrossed in one of those tense, significant conversations as to whether or not he was sincere.

Marjorie on being twitted only laughed. She said she was mighty glad that Warren had at last found some one who appreciated him. So the younger set laughed, too, and guessed that Marjorie didn’t care and let it go at that.

One afternoon when there were only three days left of her visit Bernice was waiting in the hall for Warren, with whom she was going to a bridge party. She was in rather a blissful mood, and when Marjorie — also bound for the party — appeared beside her and began casually to adjust her hat in the mirror, Bernice was utterly unprepared for anything in the nature of a clash. Marjorie did her work very coldly and succinctly in three sentences.

“You may as well get Warren out of your head,” she said coldly.

“What?” Bernice was utterly astounded.

“You may as well stop making a fool of yourself over Warren McIntyre. He doesn’t care a snap of his fingers about you.”

For a tense moment they regarded each other — Marjorie scornful, aloof; Bernice astounded, half-angry, half-afraid. Then two cars drove up in front of the house and there was a riotous honking. Both of them gasped faintly, turned, and side by side hurried out.

All through the bridge party Bernice strove in vain to master a rising uneasiness. She had offended Marjorie, the sphinx of sphinxes. With the most wholesome and innocent intentions in the world she had stolen Marjorie’s property. She felt suddenly and horribly guilty. After the bridge game, when they sat in an informal circle and the conversation became general, the storm gradually broke. Little Otis Ormonde inadvertently precipitated it.

“When you going back to kindergarten, Otis?” some one had asked.

“Me? Day Bernice gets her hair bobbed.”

“Then your education’s over,” said Marjorie quickly. “That’s only a bluff of hers. I should think you’d have realized.”

“That a fact?” demanded Otis, giving Bernice a reproachful glance.

Bernice’s ears burned as she tried to think up an effectual come-back. In the face of this direct attack her imagination was paralyzed.

“There’s a lot of bluffs in the world,” continued Marjorie quite pleasantly. “I should think you’d be young enough to know that, Otis.”

“Well,” said Otis, “maybe so. But gee! With a line like Bernice’s —  — “

“Really?” yawned Marjorie. “What’s her latest bon mot?”

No one seemed to know. In fact, Bernice, having trifled with her muse’s beau, had said nothing memorable of late.

“Was that really all a line?” asked Roberta curiously.

Bernice hesitated. She felt that wit in some form was demanded of her, but under her cousin’s suddenly frigid eyes she was completely incapacitated.

“I don’t know,” she stalled.

“Splush!” said Marjorie. “Admit it!”

Bernice saw that Warren’s eyes had left a ukulele he had been tinkering with and were fixed on her questioningly.

“Oh, I don’t know!” she repeated steadily. Her cheeks were glowing.

“Splush!” remarked Marjorie again.

“Come through, Bernice,” urged Otis. “Tell her where to get off.” Bernice looked round again — she seemed unable to get away from Warren’s eyes.

“I like bobbed hair,” she said hurriedly, as if he had asked her a question, “and I intend to bob mine.”

“When?” demanded Marjorie.

“Any time.”

“No time like the present,” suggested Roberta.

Otis jumped to his feet.

“Good stuff!” he cried. “We’ll have a summer bobbing party. Sevier Hotel barber-shop, I think you said.”

In an instant all were on their feet. Bernice’s heart throbbed violently.

“What?” she gasped.

Out of the group came Marjorie’s voice, very clear and contemptuous.

“Don’t worry — she’ll back out!”

“Come on, Bernice!” cried Otis, starting toward the door.

Four eyes — Warren’s and Marjorie’s — stared at her, challenged her, defied her. For another second she wavered wildly.

“All right,” she said swiftly “I don’t care if I do.”

An eternity of minutes later, riding down-town through the late afternoon beside Warren, the others following in Roberta’s car close behind, Bernice had all the sensations of Marie Antoinette bound for the guillotine in a tumbrel. Vaguely she wondered why she did not cry out that it was all a mistake. It was all she could do to keep from clutching her hair with both bands to protect it from the suddenly hostile world. Yet she did neither. Even the thought of her mother was no deterrent now. This was the test supreme of her sportsmanship; her right to walk unchallenged in the starry heaven of popular girls.

Warren was moodily silent, and when they came to the hotel he drew up at the curb and nodded to Bernice to precede him out. Roberta’s car emptied a laughing crowd into the shop, which presented two bold plate-glass windows to the street.

Bernice stood on the curb and looked at the sign, Sevier Barber-Shop. It was a guillotine indeed, and the hangman was the first barber, who, attired in a white coat and smoking a cigarette, leaned nonchalantly against the first chair. He must have heard of her; he must have been waiting all week, smoking eternal cigarettes beside that portentous, too-often-mentioned first chair. Would they blind-fold her? No, but they would tie a white cloth round her neck lest any of her blood — nonsense — hair — should get on her clothes.

“All right, Bernice,” said Warren quickly.

With her chin in the air she crossed the sidewalk, pushed open the swinging screen-door, and giving not a glance to the uproarious, riotous row that occupied the waiting bench, went up to the fat barber.

“I want you to bob my hair.”

The first barber’s mouth slid somewhat open. His cigarette dropped to the floor.

“Huh?”

“My hair — bob it!”

Refusing further preliminaries, Bernice took her seat on high. A man in the chair next to her turned on his side and gave her a glance, half lather, half amazement. One barber started and spoiled little Willy Schuneman’s monthly haircut. Mr. O’Reilly in the last chair grunted and swore musically in ancient Gaelic as a razor bit into his cheek. Two bootblacks became wide-eyed and rushed for her feet. No, Bernice didn’t care for a shine.

Outside a passer-by stopped and stared; a couple joined him; half a dozen small boys’ nose sprang into life, flattened against the glass; and snatches of conversation borne on the summer breeze drifted in through the screen-door.

“Lookada long hair on a kid!”

“Where’d yuh get ‘at stuff? ‘At’s a bearded lady he just finished shavin’.”

But Bernice saw nothing, heard nothing. Her only living sense told her that this man in the white coat had removed one tortoise-shell comb and then another; that his fingers were fumbling clumsily with unfamiliar hairpins; that this hair, this wonderful hair of hers, was going — she would never again feel its long voluptuous pull as it hung in a dark-brown glory down her back. For a second she was near breaking down, and then the picture before her swam mechanically into her vision — Marjorie’s mouth curling in a faint ironic smile as if to say:

“Give up and get down! You tried to buck me and I called your bluff. You see you haven’t got a prayer.”

And some last energy rose up in Bernice, for she clinched her hands under the white cloth, and there was a curious narrowing of her eyes that Marjorie remarked on to some one long afterward.

Twenty minutes later the barber swung her round to face the mirror, and she flinched at the full extent of the damage that had been wrought. Her hair was not curls and now it lay in lank lifeless blocks on both sides of her suddenly pale face. It was ugly as sin — she had known it would be ugly as sin. Her face’s chief charm had been a Madonna-like simplicity. Now that was gone and she was — well frightfully mediocre — not stagy; only ridiculous, like a Greenwich Villager who had left her spectacles at home.

As she climbed down from the chair she tried to smile — failed miserably. She saw two of the girls exchange glances; noticed Marjorie’s mouth curved in attenuated mockery — and that Warren’s eyes were suddenly very cold.

“You see,” — her words fell into an awkward pause — “I’ve done it.”

“Yes, you’ve — done it,” admitted Warren.

“Do you like it?”

There was a half-hearted “Sure” from two or three voices, another awkward pause, and then Marjorie turned swiftly and with serpentlike intensity to Warren.

“Would you mind running me down to the cleaners?” she asked. “I’ve simply got to get a dress there before supper. Roberta’s driving right home and she can take the others.”

Warren stared abstractedly at some infinite speck out the window. Then for an instant his eyes rested coldly on Bernice before they turned to Marjorie.

“Be glad to,” he said slowly.

VI

Bernice did not fully realize the outrageous trap that had been set for her until she met her aunt’s amazed glance just before dinner.

“Why Bernice!”

“I’ve bobbed it, Aunt Josephine.”

“Why, child!”

“Do you like it?”

“Why Bernice!”

“I suppose I’ve shocked you.”

“No, but what’ll Mrs. Deyo think tomorrow night? Bernice, you should have waited until after the Deyo’s dance — you should have waited if you wanted to do that.”

“It was sudden, Aunt Josephine. Anyway, why does it matter to Mrs. Deyo particularly?”

“Why child,” cried Mrs. Harvey, “in her paper on ‘The Foibles of the Younger Generation’ that she read at the last meeting of the Thursday Club she devoted fifteen minutes to bobbed hair. It’s her pet abomination. And the dance is for you and Marjorie!”

“I’m sorry.”

“Oh, Bernice, what’ll your mother say? She’ll think I let you do it.”

“I’m sorry.”

Dinner was an agony. She had made a hasty attempt with a curling-iron, and burned her finger and much hair. She could see that her aunt was both worried and grieved, and her uncle kept saying, “Well, I’ll be darned!” over and over in a hurt and faintly hostile torte. And Marjorie sat very quietly, intrenched behind a faint smile, a faintly mocking smile.

Somehow she got through the evening. Three boy’s called; Marjorie disappeared with one of them, and Bernice made a listless unsuccessful attempt to entertain the two others — sighed thankfully as she climbed the stairs to her room at half past ten. What a day!

When she had undressed for the night the door opened and Marjorie came in.

“Bernice,” she said “I’m awfully sorry about the Deyo dance. I’ll give you my word of honor I’d forgotten all about it.”

“‘Sall right,” said Bernice shortly. Standing before the mirror she passed her comb slowly through her short hair.

“I’ll take you down-town to-morrow,” continued Marjorie, “and the hairdresser’ll fix it so you’ll look slick. I didn’t imagine you’d go through with it. I’m really mighty sorry.”

“Oh, ‘sall right!”

“Still it’s your last night, so I suppose it won’t matter much.”

Then Bernice winced as Marjorie tossed her own hair over her shoulders and began to twist it slowly into two long blond braids until in her cream-colored negligée she looked like a delicate painting of some Saxon princess. Fascinated, Bernice watched the braids grow. Heavy and luxurious they were moving under the supple fingers like restive snakes — and to Bernice remained this relic and the curling-iron and a to-morrow full of eyes. She could see G. Reece Stoddard, who liked her, assuming his Harvard manner and telling his dinner partner that Bernice shouldn’t have been allowed to go to the movies so much; she could see Draycott Deyo exchanging glances with his mother and then being conscientiously charitable to her. But then perhaps by to-morrow Mrs. Deyo would have heard the news; would send round an icy little note requesting that she fail to appear — and behind her back they would all laugh and know that Marjorie had made a fool of her; that her chance at beauty had been sacrificed to the jealous whim of a selfish girl. She sat down suddenly before the mirror, biting the inside of her cheek.

“I like it,” she said with an effort. “I think it’ll be becoming.”

Marjorie smiled.

“It looks all right. For heaven’s sake, don’t let it worry you!”

“I won’t.”

“Good night Bernice.”

But as the door closed something snapped within Bernice. She sprang dynamically to her feet, clinching her hands, then swiftly and noiseless crossed over to her bed and from underneath it dragged out her suitcase. Into it she tossed toilet articles and a change of clothing, Then she turned to her trunk and quickly dumped in two drawerfulls of lingerie and stammer dresses. She moved quietly, but deadly efficiency, and in three-quarters of an hour her trunk was locked and strapped and she was fully dressed in a becoming new travelling suit that Marjorie had helped her pick out.

Sitting down at her desk she wrote a short note to Mrs. Harvey, in which she briefly outlined her reasons for going. She sealed it, addressed it, and laid it on her pillow. She glanced at her watch. The train left at one, and she knew that if she walked down to the Marborough Hotel two blocks away she could easily get a taxicab.

Suddenly she drew in her breath sharply and an expression flashed into her eyes that a practiced character reader might have connected vaguely with the set look she had worn in the barber’s chair — somehow a development of it. It was quite a new look for Bernice — and it carried consequences.

She went stealthily to the bureau, picked up an article that lay there, and turning out all the lights stood quietly until her eyes became accustomed to the darkness. Softly she pushed open the door to Marjorie’s room. She heard the quiet, even breathing of an untroubled conscience asleep.

She was by the bedside now, very deliberate and calm. She acted swiftly. Bending over she found one of the braids of Marjorie’s hair, followed it up with her hand to the point nearest the head, and then holding it a little slack so that the sleeper would feel no pull, she reached down with the shears and severed it. With the pigtail in her hand she held her breath. Marjorie had muttered something in her sleep. Bernice deftly amputated the other braid, paused for an instant, and then flitted swiftly and silently back to her own room.

Down-stairs she opened the big front door, closed it carefully behind her, and feeling oddly happy and exuberant stepped off the porch into the moonlight, swinging her heavy grip like a shopping-bag. After a minute’s brisk walk she discovered that her left hand still held the two blond braids. She laughed unexpectedly — had to shut her mouth hard to keep from emitting an absolute peal. She was passing Warren’s house now, and on the impulse she set down her baggage, and swinging the braids like piece of rope flung them at the wooden porch, where they landed with a slight thud. She laughed again, no longer restraining herself.

“Huh,” she giggled wildly. “Scalp the selfish thing!”

Then picking up her staircase she set off at a half-run down the moonlit street.

Benediction

The Baltimore Station was hot and crowded, so Lois was forced to stand by the telegraph desk for interminable, sticky seconds while a clerk with big front teeth counted and recounted a large lady’s day message, to determine whether it contained the innocuous forty-nine words or the fatal fifty-one.

Lois, waiting, decided she wasn’t quite sure of the address, so she took the letter out of her bag and ran over it again.

“Darling,” it began — “I understand and I’m happier than life ever meant me to be. If I could give you the things you’ve always been in tune with — but I can’t Lois; we can’t marry and we can’t lose each other and let all this glorious love end in nothing.

“Until your letter came, dear, I’d been sitting here in the half dark and thinking where I could go and ever forget you; abroad, perhaps, to drift through Italy or Spain and dream away the pain of having lost you where the crumbling ruins of older, mellower civilizations would mirror only the desolation of my heart — and then your letter came.

“Sweetest, bravest girl, if you’ll wire me I’ll meet you in Wilmington — till then I’ll be here just waiting and hoping for every long dream of you to come true.

“Howard.”

She had read the letter so many times that she knew it word by word, yet it still startled her. In it she found many faint reflections of the man who wrote it — the mingled sweetness and sadness in his dark eyes, the furtive, restless excitement she felt sometimes when he talked to her, his dreamy sensuousness that lulled her mind to sleep. Lois was nineteen and very romantic and curious and courageous.

The large lady and the clerk having compromised on fifty words, Lois took a blank and wrote her telegram. And there were no overtones to the finality of her decision.

It’s just destiny — she thought — it’s just the way things work out in this damn world. If cowardice is all that’s been holding me back there won’t be any more holding back. So we’ll just let things take their course and never be sorry.

The clerk scanned her telegram:

“Arrived Baltimore today spend day with my brother meet me Wilmington three P.M. Wednesday Love

“Lois.”

“Fifty-four cents,” said the clerk admiringly.

And never be sorry — thought Lois — and never be sorry —  —

II

Trees filtering light onto dapple grass. Trees like tall, languid ladies with feather fans coquetting airily with the ugly roof of the monastery. Trees like butlers, bending courteously over placid walks and paths. Trees, trees over the hills on either side and scattering out in clumps and lines and woods all through eastern Maryland, delicate lace on the hems of many yellow fields, dark opaque backgrounds for flowered bushes or wild climbing garden.

Some of the trees were very gay and young, but the monastery trees were older than the monastery which, by true monastic standards, wasn’t very old at all. And, as a matter of fact, it wasn’t technically called a monastery, but only a seminary; nevertheless it shall be a monastery here despite its Victorian architecture or its Edward VII additions, or even its Woodrow Wilsonian, patented, last-a-century roofing.

Out behind was the farm where half a dozen lay brothers were sweating lustily as they moved with deadly efficiency around the vegetable-gardens. To the left, behind a row of elms, was an informal baseball diamond where three novices were being batted out by a fourth, amid great chasings and puffings and blowings. And in front as a great mellow bell boomed the half-hour a swarm of black, human leaves were blown over the checker-board of paths under the courteous trees.

Some of these black leaves were very old with cheeks furrowed like the first ripples of a splashed pool. Then there was a scattering of middle-aged leaves whose forms when viewed in profile in their revealing gowns were beginning to be faintly unsymmetrical. These carried thick volumes of Thomas Aquinas and Henry James and Cardinal Mercier and Immanuel Kant and many bulging note-books filled with lecture data.

But most numerous were the young leaves; blond boys of nineteen with very stern, conscientious expressions; men in the late twenties with a keen self-assurance from having taught out in the world for five years — several hundreds of them, from city and town and country in Maryland and Pennsylvania and Virginia and West Virginia and Delaware.

There were many Americans and some Irish and some tough Irish and a few French, and several Italians and Poles, and they walked informally arm in arm with each other in twos and threes or in long rows, almost universally distinguished by the straight mouth and the considerable chin — for this was the Society of Jesus, founded in Spain five hundred years before by a tough-minded soldier who trained men to hold a breach or a salon, preach a sermon or write a treaty, and do it and not argue . . .

Lois got out of a bus into the sunshine down by the outer gate. She was nineteen with yellow hair and eyes that people were tactful enough not to call green. When men of talent saw her in a street-car they often furtively produced little stub-pencils and backs of envelopes and tried to sum up that profile or the thing that the eyebrows did to her eyes. Later they looked at their results and usually tore them up with wondering sighs.

Though Lois was very jauntily attired in an expensively appropriate travelling affair, she did not linger to pat out the dust which covered her clothes, but started up the central walk with curious glances at either side. Her face was very eager and expectant, yet she hadn’t at all that glorified expression that girls wear when they arrive for a Senior Prom at Princeton or New Haven; still, as there were no senior proms here, perhaps it didn’t matter.

She was wondering what he would look like, whether she’d possibly know him from his picture. In the picture, which hung over her mother’s bureau at home, he seemed very young and hollow-cheeked and rather pitiful, with only a well-developed mouth and all ill-fitting probationer’s gown to show that he had already made a momentous decision about his life. Of course he had been only nineteen then and now he was thirty-six — didn’t look like that at all; in recent snap-shots he was much broader and his hair had grown a little thin — but the impression of her brother she had always retained was that of the big picture. And so she had always been a little sorry for him. What a life for a man! Seventeen years of preparation and he wasn’t even a priest yet — wouldn’t be for another year.

Lois had an idea that this was all going to be rather solemn if she let it be. But she was going to give her very best imitation of undiluted sunshine, the imitation she could give even when her head was splitting or when her mother had a nervous breakdown or when she was particularly romantic and curious and courageous. This brother of hers undoubtedly needed cheering up, and he was going to be cheered up, whether he liked it or not.

As she drew near the great, homely front door she saw a man break suddenly away from a group and, pulling up the skirts of his gown, run toward her. He was smiling, she noticed, and he looked very big and — and reliable. She stopped and waited, knew that her heart was beating unusually fast.

“Lois!” he cried, and in a second she was in his arms. She was suddenly trembling.

“Lois!” he cried again, “why, this is wonderful! I can’t tell you, Lois, how much I’ve looked forward to this. Why, Lois, you’re beautiful!”

Lois gasped.

His voice, though restrained, was vibrant with energy and that odd sort of enveloping personality she had thought that she only of the family possessed.

“I’m mighty glad, too — Kieth.”

She flushed, but not unhappily, at this first use of his name.

“Lois — Lois — Lois,” he repeated in wonder. “Child, we’ll go in here a minute, because I want you to meet the rector, and then we’ll walk around. I have a thousand things to talk to you about.”

His voice became graver. “How’s mother?”

She looked at him for a moment and then said something that she had not intended to say at all, the very sort of thing she had resolved to avoid.

“Oh, Kieth — she’s — she’s getting worse all the time, every way.”

He nodded slowly as if he understood.

“Nervous, well — you can tell me about that later. Now —  — “

She was in a small study with a large desk, saying something to a little, jovial, white-haired priest who retained her hand for some seconds.

“So this is Lois!”

He said it as if he had heard of her for years.

He entreated her to sit down.

Two other priests arrived enthusiastically and shook hands with her and addressed her as “Kieth’s little sister,” which she found she didn’t mind a bit.

How assured they seemed; she had expected a certain shyness, reserve at least. There were several jokes unintelligible to her, which seemed to delight every one, and the little Father Rector referred to the trio of them as “dim old monks,” which she appreciated, because of course they weren’t monks at all. She had a lightning impression that they were especially fond of Kieth — the Father Rector had called him “Kieth” and one of the others had kept a hand on his shoulder all through the conversation. Then she was shaking hands again and promising to come back a little later for some ice-cream, and smiling and smiling and being rather absurdly happy . . . she told herself that it was because Kieth was so delighted in showing her off.

Then she and Kieth were strolling along a path, arm in arm, and he was informing her what an absolute jewel the Father Rector was.

“Lois,” he broke off suddenly, “I want to tell you before we go any farther how much it means to me to have you come up here. I think it was — mighty sweet of you. I know what a gay time you’ve been having.”

Lois gasped. She was not prepared for this. At first when she had conceived the plan of taking the hot journey down to Baltimore staying the night with a friend and then coming out to see her brother, she had felt rather consciously virtuous, hoped he wouldn’t be priggish or resentful about her not having come before — but walking here with him under the trees seemed such a little thing, and surprisingly a happy thing.

“Why, Kieth,” she said quickly, “you know I couldn’t have waited a day longer. I saw you when I was five, but of course I didn’t remember, and how could I have gone on without practically ever having seen my only brother?”

“It was mighty sweet of you, Lois,” he repeated.

Lois blushed — he did have personality.

“I want you to tell me all about yourself,” he said after a pause. “Of course I have a general idea what you and mother did in Europe those fourteen years, and then we were all so worried, Lois, when you had pneumonia and couldn’t come down with mother — let’s see that was two years ago — and then, well, I’ve seen your name in the papers, but it’s all been so unsatisfactory. I haven’t known you, Lois.”

She found herself analyzing his personality as she analyzed the personality of every man she met. She wondered if the effect of — of intimacy that he gave was bred by his constant repetition of her name. He said it as if he loved the word, as if it had an inherent meaning to him.

“Then you were at school,” he continued.

“Yes, at Farmington. Mother wanted me to go to a convent — but I didn’t want to.”

She cast a side glance at him to see if he would resent this.

But he only nodded slowly.

“Had enough convents abroad, eh?”

“Yes — and Kieth, convents are different there anyway. Here even in the nicest ones there are so many common girls.”

He nodded again.

“Yes,” he agreed, “I suppose there are, and I know how you feel about it. It grated on me here, at first, Lois, though I wouldn’t say that to any one but you; we’re rather sensitive, you and I, to things like this.”

“You mean the men here?”

“Yes, some of them of course were fine, the sort of men I’d always been thrown with, but there were others; a man named Regan, for instance — I hated the fellow, and now he’s about the best friend I have. A wonderful character, Lois; you’ll meet him later. Sort of man you’d like to have with you in a fight.”

Lois was thinking that Kieth was the sort of man she’d like to have with her in a fight.

“How did you — how did you first happen to do it?” she asked, rather shyly, “to come here, I mean. Of course mother told me the story about the Pullman car.”

“Oh, that —  — “ He looked rather annoyed.

“Tell me that. I’d like to hear you tell it.”

“Oh, it’s nothing except what you probably know. It was evening and I’d been riding all day and thinking about — about a hundred things, Lois, and then suddenly I had a sense that some one was sitting across from me, felt that he’d been there for some time, and had a vague idea that he was another traveller. All at once he leaned over toward me and I heard a voice say: ‘I want you to be a priest, that’s what I want.’ Well I jumped up and cried out, ‘Oh, my God, not that!’ — made an idiot of myself before about twenty people; you see there wasn’t any one sitting there at all. A week after that I went to the JesuitCollege in Philadelphia and crawled up the last flight of stairs to the rector’s office on my hands and knees.”

There was another silence and Lois saw that her brother’s eyes wore a far-away look, that he was staring unseeingly out over the sunny fields. She was stirred by the modulations of his voice and the sudden silence that seemed to flow about him when he finished speaking.

She noticed now that his eyes were of the same fibre as hers, with the green left out, and that his mouth was much gentler, really, than in the picture — or was it that the face had grown up to it lately? He was getting a little bald just on top of his head. She wondered if that was from wearing a hat so much. It seemed awful for a man to grow bald and no one to care about it.

“Were you — pious when you were young, Kieth?” she asked. “You know what I mean. Were you religious? If you don’t mind these personal questions.”

“Yes,” he said with his eyes still far away — and she felt that his intense abstraction was as much a part of his personality as his attention. “Yes, I suppose I was, when I was — sober.”

Lois thrilled slightly.

“Did you drink?”

He nodded.

“I was on the way to making a bad hash of things.” He smiled and, turning his gray eyes on her, changed the subject.

“Child, tell me about mother. I know it’s been awfully hard for you there, lately. I know you’ve had to sacrifice a lot and put up with a great deal and I want you to know how fine of you I think it is. I feel, Lois, that you’re sort of taking the place of both of us there.”

Lois thought quickly how little she had sacrificed; how lately she had constantly avoided her nervous, half-invalid mother.

“Youth shouldn’t be sacrificed to age, Kieth,” she said steadily.

“I know,” he sighed, “and you oughtn’t to have the weight on your shoulders, child. I wish I were there to help you.”

She saw how quickly he had turned her remark and instantly she knew what this quality was that he gave off. He was sweet. Her thoughts went of on a side-track and then she broke the silence with an odd remark.

“Sweetness is hard,” she said suddenly.

“What?”

“Nothing,” she denied in confusion. “I didn’t mean to speak aloud. I was thinking of something — of a conversation with a man named Freddy Kebble.”

“Maury Kebble’s brother?”

“Yes,” she said rather surprised to think of him having known Maury Kebble. Still there was nothing strange about it. “Well, he and I were talking about sweetness a few weeks ago. Oh, I don’t know — I said that a man named Howard — that a man I knew was sweet, and he didn’t agree with me, and we began talking about what sweetness in a man was: He kept telling me I meant a sort of soppy softness, but I knew I didn’t — yet I didn’t know exactly how to put it. I see now. I meant just the opposite. I suppose real sweetness is a sort of hardness — and strength.”

Kieth nodded.

“I see what you mean. I’ve known old priests who had it.”

“I’m talking about young men,” she said rather defiantly.

They had reached the now deserted baseball diamond and, pointing her to a wooden bench, he sprawled full length on the grass.

“Are these young men happy here, Kieth?”

“Don’t they look happy, Lois?”

“I suppose so, but those young ones, those two we just passed — have they — are they —  — ?

“Are they signed up?” he laughed. “No, but they will be next month.”

“Permanently?”

“Yes — unless they break down mentally or physically. Of course in a discipline like ours a lot drop out.”

“But those boys. Are they giving up fine chances outside — like you did?”

He nodded.

“Some of them.”

“But Kieth, they don’t know what they’re doing. They haven’t had any experience of what they’re missing.”

“No, I suppose not.”

“It doesn’t seem fair. Life has just sort of scared them at first. Do they all come in so young?”

“No, some of them have knocked around, led pretty wild lives — Regan, for instance.”

“I should think that sort would be better,” she said meditatively, “men that had seen life.”

“No,” said Kieth earnestly, “I’m not sure that knocking about gives a man the sort of experience he can communicate to others. Some of the broadest men I’ve known have been absolutely rigid about themselves. And reformed libertines are a notoriously intolerant class. Don’t you thank so, Lois?”

She nodded, still meditative, and he continued:

“It seems to me that when one weak reason goes to another, it isn’t help they want; it’s a sort of companionship in guilt, Lois. After you were born, when mother began to get nervous she used to go and weep with a certain Mrs. Comstock. Lord, it used to make me shiver. She said it comforted her, poor old mother. No, I don’t think that to help others you’ve got to show yourself at all. Real help comes from a stronger person whom you respect. And their sympathy is all the bigger because it’s impersonal.”

“But people want human sympathy,” objected Lois. “They want to feel the other person’s been tempted.”

“Lois, in their hearts they want to feel that the other person’s been weak. That’s what they mean by human.

“Here in this old monkery, Lois,” he continued with a smile, “they try to get all that self-pity and pride in our own wills out of us right at the first. They put us to scrubbing floors — and other things. It’s like that idea of saving your life by losing it. You see we sort of feel that the less human a man is, in your sense of human, the better servant he can be to humanity. We carry it out to the end, too. When one of us dies his family can’t even have him then. He’s buried here under plain wooden cross with a thousand others.”

His tone changed suddenly and he looked at her with a great brightness in his gray eyes.

“But way back in a man’s heart there are some things he can’t get rid of — an one of them is that I’m awfully in love with my little sister.”

With a sudden impulse she knelt beside him in the grass and, Leaning over, kissed his forehead.

“You’re hard, Kieth,” she said, “and I love you for it — and you’re sweet.”

III

Back in the reception-room Lois met a half-dozen more of Kieth’s particular friends; there was a young man named Jarvis, rather pale and delicate-looking, who, she knew, must be a grandson of old Mrs. Jarvis at home, and she mentally compared this ascetic with a brace of his riotous uncles.

And there was Regan with a scarred face and piercing intent eyes that followed her about the room and often rested on Kieth with something very like worship. She knew then what Kieth had meant about “a good man to have with you in a fight.”

He’s the missionary type — she thought vaguely — China or something.

“I want Kieth’s sister to show us what the shimmy is,” demanded one young man with a broad grin.

Lois laughed.

“I’m afraid the Father Rector would send me shimmying out the gate. Besides, I’m not an expert.”

“I’m sure it wouldn’t be best for Jimmy’s soul anyway,” said Kieth solemnly. “He’s inclined to brood about things like shimmys. They were just starting to do the — maxixe, wasn’t it, Jimmy? — when he became a monk, and it haunted him his whole first year. You’d see him when he was peeling potatoes, putting his arm around the bucket and making irreligious motions with his feet.”

There was a general laugh in which Lois joined.

“An old lady who comes here to Mass sent Kieth this ice-cream,” whispered Jarvis under cover of the laugh, “because she’d heard you were coming. It’s pretty good, isn’t it?”

There were tears trembling in Lois’ eyes.

IV

Then half an hour later over in the chapel things suddenly went all wrong. It was several years since Lois had been at Benediction and at first she was thrilled by the gleaming monstrance with its central spot of white, the air rich and heavy with incense, and the sun shining through the stained-glass window of St. Francis Xavier overhead and falling in warm red tracery on the cassock of the man in front of her, but at the first notes of the “O salutaris hostia” a heavy weight seemed to descend upon her soul. Kieth was on her right and young Jarvis on her left, and she stole uneasy glance at both of them.

What’s the matter with me? she thought impatiently.

She looked again. Was there a certain coldness in both their profiles, that she had not noticed before — a pallor about the mouth and a curious set expression in their eyes? She shivered slightly: they were like dead men.

She felt her soul recede suddenly from Kieth’s. This was her brother — this, this unnatural person. She caught herself in the act of a little laugh.

“What is the matter with me?”

She passed her hand over her eyes and the weight increased. The incense sickened her and a stray, ragged note from one of the tenors in the choir grated on her ear like the shriek of a slate-pencil. She fidgeted, and raising her hand to her hair touched her forehead, found moisture on it.

“It’s hot in here, hot as the deuce.”

Again she repressed a faint laugh and, then in an instant the weight on her heart suddenly diffused into cold fear. . . . It was that candle on the altar. It was all wrong — wrong. Why didn’t somebody see it? There was something in it. There was something coming out of it, taking form and shape above it.

She tried to fight down her rising panic, told herself it was the wick. If the wick wasn’t straight, candles did something — but they didn’t do this! With incalculable rapidity a force was gathering within her, a tremendous, assimilative force, drawing from every sense, every corner of her brain, and as it surged up inside her she felt an enormous terrified repulsion. She drew her arms in close to her side away from Kieth and Jarvis.

Something in that candle . . . she was leaning forward — in another moment she felt she would go forward toward it — didn’t any one see it? . . . anyone?

“Ugh!”

She felt a space beside her and something told her that Jarvis had gasped and sat down very suddenly . . . then she was kneeling and as the flaming monstrance slowly left the altar in the hands of the priest, she heard a great rushing noise in her ears — the crash of the bells was like hammer-blows . . . and then in a moment that seemed eternal a great torrent rolled over her heart — there was a shouting there and a lashing as of waves . . .

. . . She was calling, felt herself calling for Kieth, her lips mouthing the words that would not come:

“Kieth! Oh, my God! Kieth!”

Suddenly she became aware of a new presence, something external, in front of her, consummated and expressed in warm red tracery. Then she knew. It was the window of St. Francis Xavier. Her mind gripped at it, clung to it finally, and she felt herself calling again endlessly, impotently — Kieth — Kieth!

Then out of a great stillness came a voice:

“Blessed be God.”

With a gradual rumble sounded the response rolling heavily through the chapel:

“Blessed be God.”

The words sang instantly in her heart; the incense lay mystically and sweetly peaceful upon the air, and the candle on the altar went out.

“Blessed be His Holy Name.”

“Blessed be His Holy Name.”

Everything blurred into a swinging mist. With a sound half-gasp, half-cry she rocked on her feet and reeled backward into Kieth’s suddenly outstretched arms.

V

“Lie still, child.”

She closed her eyes again. She was on the grass outside, pillowed on Kieth’s arm, and Regan was dabbing her head with a cold towel.

“I’m all right,” she said quietly.

“I know, but just lie still a minute longer. It was too hot in there. Jarvis felt it, too.”

She laughed as Regan again touched her gingerly with the towel.

“I’m all right,” she repeated.

But though a warm peace was falling her mind and heart she felt oddly broken and chastened, as if some one had held her stripped soul up and laughed.

VI

Half an hour later she walked leaning on Kieth’s arm down the long central path toward the gate.

“It’s been such a short afternoon,” he sighed, “and I’m so sorry you were sick, Lois.”

“Kieth, I’m feeling fine now, really; I wish you wouldn’t worry.”

“Poor old child. I didn’t realize that Benediction’d be a long service for you after your hot trip out here and all.”

She laughed cheerfully.

“I guess the truth is I’m not much used to Benediction. Mass is the limit of my religious exertions.”

She paused and then continued quickly:

“I don’t want to shock you, Kieth, but I can’t tell you how — how inconvenient being a Catholic is. It really doesn’t seem to apply any more. As far as morals go, some of the wildest boys I know are Catholics. And the brightest boys — I mean the ones who think and read a lot, don’t seem to believe in much of anything any more.”

“Tell me about it. The bus won’t be here for another half-hour.”

They sat down on a bench by the path.

“For instance, Gerald Carter, he’s published a novel. He absolutely roars when people mention immortality. And then Howa — well, another man I’ve known well, lately, who was Phi Beta Kappa at Harvard says that no intelligent person can believe in Supernatural Christianity. He says Christ was a great socialist, though. Am I shocking you?”

She broke off suddenly.

Kieth smiled.

“You can’t shock a monk. He’s a professional shock-absorber.”

“Well,” she continued, “that’s about all. It seems so — so narrow. Church schools, for instance. There’s more freedom about things that Catholic people can’t see — like birth control.”

Kieth winced, almost imperceptibly, but Lois saw it.

“Oh,” she said quickly, “everybody talks about everything now.”

“It’s probably better that way.”

“Oh, yes, much better. Well, that’s all, Kieth. I just wanted to tell you why I’m a little — luke-warm, at present.”

“I’m not shocked, Lois. I understand better than you think. We all go through those times. But I know it’ll come out all right, child. There’s that gift of faith that we have, you and I, that’ll carry us past the bad spots.”

He rose as he spoke and they started again down the path.

“I want you to pray for me sometimes, Lois. I think your prayers would be about what I need. Because we’ve come very close in these few hours, I think.”

Her eyes were suddenly shining.

“Oh we have, we have!” she cried. “I feel closer to you now than to any one in the world.”

He stopped suddenly and indicated the side of the path.

“We might — just a minute —  — “

It was a pietà, a life-size statue of the Blessed Virgin set within a semicircle of rocks.

Feeling a little self-conscious she dropped on her knees beside him and made an unsuccessful attempt at prayer.

She was only half through when he rose. He took her arm again.

“I wanted to thank Her for letting as have this day together,” he said simply.

Lois felt a sudden lump in her throat and she wanted to say something that would tell him how much it had meant to her, too. But she found no words.

“I’ll always remember this,” he continued, his voice trembling a little —  — “this summer day with you. It’s been just what I expected. You’re just what I expected, Lois.”

“I’m awfully glad, Keith.”

“You see, when you were little they kept sending me snap-shots of you, first as a baby and then as a child in socks playing on the beach with a pail and shovel, and then suddenly as a wistful little girl with wondering, pure eyes — and I used to build dreams about you. A man has to have something living to cling to. I think, Lois, it was your little white soul I tried to keep near me — even when life was at its loudest and every intellectual idea of God seemed the sheerest mockery, and desire and love and a million things came up to me and said: ‘Look here at me! See, I’m Life. You’re turning your back on it!’ All the way through that shadow, Lois, I could always see your baby soul flitting on ahead of me, very frail and clear and wonderful.”

Lois was crying softly. They had reached the gate and she rested her elbow on it and dabbed furiously at her eyes.

“And then later, child, when you were sick I knelt all one night and asked God to spare you for me — for I knew then that I wanted more; He had taught me to want more. I wanted to know you moved and breathed in the same world with me. I saw you growing up, that white innocence of yours changing to a flame and burning to give light to other weaker souls. And then I wanted some day to take your children on my knee and hear them call the crabbed old monk Uncle Kieth.”

He seemed to be laughing now as he talked.

“Oh, Lois, Lois, I was asking God for more then. I wanted the letters you’d write me and the place I’d have at your table. I wanted an awful lot, Lois, dear.”

“You’ve got me, Kieth,” she sobbed “you know it, say you know it. Oh, I’m acting like a baby but I didn’t think you’d be this way, and I — oh, Kieth — Kieth —  — “

He took her hand and patted it softly.

“Here’s the bus. You’ll come again won’t you?”

She put her hands on his cheeks, add drawing his head down, pressed her tear-wet face against his.

“Oh, Kieth, brother, some day I’ll tell you something.”

He helped her in, saw her take down her handkerchief and smile bravely at him, as the driver kicked his whip and the bus rolled off. Then a thick cloud of dust rose around it and she was gone.

For a few minutes he stood there on the road his hand on the gate-post, his lips half parted in a smile.

“Lois,” he said aloud in a sort of wonder, “Lois, Lois.”

Later, some probationers passing noticed him kneeling before the pietà, and coming back after a time found him still there. And he was there until twilight came down and the courteous trees grew garrulous overhead and the crickets took up their burden of song in the dusky grass.

VII

The first clerk in the telegraph booth in the Baltimore Station whistled through his buck teeth at the second clerk:

“S’matter?”

“See that girl — no, the pretty one with the big black dots on her veil. Too late — she’s gone. You missed somep’n.”

“What about her?”

“Nothing. ‘Cept she’s damn good-looking. Came in here yesterday and sent a wire to some guy to meet her somewhere. Then a minute ago she came in with a telegram all written out and was standin’ there goin’ to give it to me when she changed her mind or somep’n and all of a sudden tore it up.”

“Hm.”

The first clerk came around tile counter and picking up the two pieces of paper from the floor put them together idly. The second clerk read them over his shoulder and subconsciously counted the words as he read. There were just thirteen.

“This is in the way of a permanent goodbye. I should suggest Italy.

“Lois.”

“Tore it up, eh?” said the second clerk.

Dalyrimple Goes Wrong

In the millennium an educational genius will write a book to be given to every young man on the date of his disillusion. This work will have the flavor of Montaigne’s essays and Samuel Butler’s note-books — and a little of Tolstoi and Marcus Aurelius. It will be neither cheerful nor pleasant but will contain numerous passages of striking humor. Since first-class minds never believe anything very strongly until they’ve experienced it, its value will be purely relative . . . all people over thirty will refer to it as “depressing.”

This prelude belongs to the story of a young man who lived, as you and I do, before the book.

II

The generation which numbered Bryan Dalyrimple drifted out of adolescence to a mighty fan-fare of trumpets. Bryan played the star in an affair which included a Lewis gun and a nine-day romp behind the retreating German lines, so luck triumphant or sentiment rampant awarded him a row of medals and on his arrival in the States he was told that he was second in importance only to General Pershing and Sergeant York. This was a lot of fun. The governor of his State, a stray congressman, and a citizens’ committee gave him enormous smiles and “By God, Sirs” on the dock at Hoboken; there were newspaper reporters and photographers who said “would you mind” and “if you could just”; and back in his home town there were old ladies, the rims of whose eyes grew red as they talked to him, and girls who hadn’t remembered him so well since his father’s business went blah! in nineteen-twelve.

But when the shouting died he realized that for a month he had been the house guest of the mayor, that he had only fourteen dollars in the world and that “the name that will live forever in the annals and legends of this State” was already living there very quietly and obscurely.

One morning he lay late in bed and just outside his door he heard the up-stairs maid talking to the cook. The up-stairs maid said that Mrs. Hawkins, the mayor’s wife, had been trying for a week to hint Dalyrimple out of the house. He left at eleven o’clock in intolerable confusion, asking that his trunk be sent to Mrs. Beebe’s boarding-house.

Dalyrimple was twenty-three and he had never worked. His father had given him two years at the StateUniversity and passed away about the time of his son’s nine-day romp, leaving behind him some mid-Victorian furniture and a thin packet of folded paper that turned out to be grocery bills. Young Dalyrimple had very keen gray eyes, a mind that delighted the army psychological examiners, a trick of having read it — whatever it was — some time before, and a cool hand in a hot situation. But these things did not save him a final, unresigned sigh when he realized that he had to go to work — right away.

It was early afternoon when he walked into the office of Theron G. Macy, who owned the largest wholesale grocery house in town. Plump, prosperous, wearing a pleasant but quite unhumorous smile, Theron G. Macy greeted him warmly.

“Well — how do, Bryan? What’s on your mind?”

To Dalyrimple, straining with his admission, his own words, when they came, sounded like an Arab beggar’s whine for alms.

“Why — this question of a job.” (“This question of a job” seemed somehow more clothed than just “a job.”)

“A job?” An almost imperceptible breeze blew across Mr. Macy’s expression.

“You see, Mr. Macy,” continued Dalyrimple, “I feel I’m wasting time. I want to get started at something. I had several chances about a month ago but they all seem to have — gone —  — “

“Let’s see,” interrupted Mr. Macy. “What were they?”

“Well, just at the first the governor said something about a vacancy on his staff. I was sort of counting on that for a while, but I hear he’s given it to Allen Gregg, you know, son of G. P. Gregg. He sort of forgot what he said to me — just talking, I guess.”

“You ought to push those things.”

“Then there was that engineering expedition, but they decided they’d have to have a man who knew hydraulics, so they couldn’t use me unless I paid my own way.”

“You had just a year at the university?”

“Two. But I didn’t take any science or mathematics. Well, the day the battalion paraded, Mr. Peter Jordan said something about a vacancy in his store. I went around there to-day and I found he meant a sort of floor-walker — and then you said something one day” — he paused and waited for the older man to take him up, but noting only a minute wince continued — “about a position, so I thought I’d come and see you.”

“There was a position,” confessed Mr. Macy reluctantly, “but since then we’ve filled it.” He cleared his throat again. “You’ve waited quite a while.”

“Yes, I suppose I did. Everybody told me there was no hurry — and I’d had these various offers.”

Mr. Macy delivered a paragraph on present-day opportunities which Dalyrimple’s mind completely skipped.

“Have you had any business experience?”

“I worked on a ranch two summers as a rider.”

“Oh, well,” Mr. Macy disparaged this neatly, and then continued: “What do you think you’re worth?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, Bryan, I tell you, I’m willing to strain a point and give you a chance.”

Dalyrimple nodded.

“Your salary won’t be much. You’ll start by learning the stock. Then you’ll come in the office for a while. Then you’ll go on the road. When could you begin?”

“How about to-morrow?”

“All right. Report to Mr. Hanson in the stock-room. He’ll start you off.”

He continued to regard Dalyrimple steadily until the latter, realizing that the interview was over, rose awkwardly.

“Well, Mr. Macy, I’m certainly much obliged.”

“That’s all right. Glad to help you, Bryan.”

After an irresolute moment, Dalyrimple found himself in the hall. His forehead was covered with perspiration, and the room had not been hot.

“Why the devil did I thank the son of a gun?” he muttered.

III

Next morning Mr. Hanson informed him coldly of the necessity of punching the time-clock at seven every morning, and delivered him for instruction into the hands of a fellow worker, one Charley Moore.

Charley was twenty-six, with that faint musk of weakness hanging about him that is often mistaken for the scent of evil. It took no psychological examiner to decide that he had drifted into indulgence and laziness as casually as he had drifted into life, and was to drift out. He was pale and his clothes stank of smoke; he enjoyed burlesque shows, billiards, and Robert Service, and was always looking back upon his last intrigue or forward to his next one. In his youth his taste had run to loud ties, but now it seemed to have faded, like his vitality, and was expressed in pale-lilac four-in-hands and indeterminate gray collars. Charley was listlessly struggling that losing struggle against mental, moral, and physical anæmia that takes place ceaselessly on the lower fringe of the middle classes.

The first morning he stretched himself on a row of cereal cartons and carefully went over the limitations of the Theron G. Macy Company.

“It’s a piker organization. My Gosh! Lookit what they give me. I’m quittin’ in a coupla months. Hell! Me stay with this bunch!”

The Charley Moores are always going to change jobs next month. They do, once or twice in their careers, after which they sit around comparing their last job with the present one, to the infinite disparagement of the latter.

“What do you get?” asked Dalyrimple curiously.

“Me? I get sixty.” This rather defiantly.

“Did you start at sixty?”

“Me? No, I started at thirty-five. He told me he’d put me on the road after I learned the stock. That’s what he tells ‘em all.”

“How long’ve you been here?” asked Dalyrimple with a sinking sensation.

“Me? Four years. My last year, too, you bet your boots.”

Dalyrimple rather resented the presence of the store detective as he resented the time-clock, and he came into contact with him almost immediately through the rule against smoking. This rule was a thorn in his side. He was accustomed to his three or four cigarettes in a morning, and after three days without it he followed Charley Moore by a circuitous route up a flight of back stairs to a little balcony where they indulged in peace. But this was not for long. One day in his second week the detective met him in a nook of the stairs, on his descent, and told him sternly that next time he’d be reported to Mr. Macy. Dalyrimple felt like an errant schoolboy.

Unpleasant facts came to his knowledge. There were “cave-dwellers” in the basement who had worked there for ten or fifteen years at sixty dollars a month, rolling barrels and carrying boxes through damp, cement-walled corridors, lost in that echoing half-darkness between seven and five-thirty and, like himself, compelled several times a month to work until nine at night.

At the end of a month he stood in line and received forty dollars. He pawned a cigarette-case and a pair of field-glasses and managed to live — to eat, sleep, and smoke. It was, however, a narrow scrape; as the ways and means of economy were a closed book to him and the second month brought no increase, he voiced his alarm.

“If you’ve got a drag with old Macy, maybe he’ll raise you,” was Charley’s disheartening reply. “But he didn’t raise me till I’d been here nearly two years.”

“I’ve got to live,” said Dalyrimple simply. “I could get more pay as a laborer on the railroad but, Golly, I want to feel I’m where there’s a chance to get ahead.”

Charles shook his head sceptically and Mr. Macy’s answer next day was equally unsatisfactory.

Dalyrimple had gone to the office just before closing time.

“Mr. Macy, I’d like to speak to you.”

“Why — yes.” The unhumorous smile appeared. The voice was faintly resentful.

“I want to speak to you in regard to more salary.”

Mr. Macy nodded.

“Well,” he said doubtfully, “I don’t know exactly what you’re doing. I’ll speak to Mr. Hanson.”

He knew exactly what Dalyrimple was doing, and Dalyrimple knew he knew.

“I’m in the stock-room — and, sir, while I’m here I’d like to ask you how much longer I’ll have to stay there.”

“Why — I’m not sure exactly. Of course it takes some time to learn the stock.”

“You told me two months when I started.”

“Yes. Well, I’ll speak to Mr. Hanson.”

Dalyrimple paused irresolute.

“Thank you, sir.”

Two days later he again appeared in the office with the result of a count that had been asked for by Mr. Hesse, the bookkeeper. Mr. Hesse was engaged and Dalyrimple, waiting, began idly fingering in a ledger on the stenographer’s desk.

Half unconsciously he turned a page — he caught sight of his name — it was a salary list:

Dalyrimple

Demming

Donahoe

Everett

His eyes stopped —

Everett.........................$60

So Tom Everett, Macy’s weak-chinned nephew, had started at sixty — and in three weeks he had been out of the packing-room and into the office.

So that was it! He was to sit and see man after man pushed over him: sons, cousins, sons of friends, irrespective of their capabilities, while he was cast for a pawn, with “going on the road” dangled before his eyes — put off with the stock remark: “I’ll see; I’ll look into it.” At forty, perhaps, he would be a bookkeeper like old Hesse, tired, listless Hesse with a dull routine for his stint and a dull background of boarding-house conversation.

This was a moment when a genii should have pressed into his hand the book for disillusioned young men. But the book has not been written.

A great protest swelling into revolt surged up in him. Ideas half forgotten, chaoticly perceived and assimilated, filled his mind. Get on — that was the rule of life — and that was all. How he did it, didn’t matter — but to be Hesse or Charley Moore.

“I won’t!” he cried aloud.

The bookkeeper and the stenographers looked up in surprise.

“What?”

For a second Dalyrimple stared — then walked up to the desk.

“Here’s that data,” he said brusquely. “I can’t wait any longer.”

Mr. Hesse’s face expressed surprise.

It didn’t matter what he did — just so he got out of this rut. In a dream he stepped from the elevator into the stock-room, and walking to an unused aisle, sat down on a box, covering his face with his hands.

His brain was whirring with the frightful jar of discovering a platitude for himself.

“I’ve got to get out of this,” he said aloud and then repeated, “I’ve got to get out” — and he didn’t mean only out of Macy’s wholesale house.

When he left at five-thirty it was pouring rain, but he struck off in the opposite direction from his boarding-house, feeling, in the first cool moisture that oozed soggily through his old suit, an odd exultation and freshness. He wanted a world that was like walking through rain, even though he could not see far ahead of him, but fate had put him in the world of Mr. Macy’s fetid storerooms and corridors. At first merely the overwhelming need of change took him, then half-plans began to formulate in his imagination.

“I’ll go East — to a big city — meet people — bigger people — people who’ll help me. Interesting work somewhere. My God, there must be.”

With sickening truth it occurred to him that his facility for meeting people was limited. Of all places it was here in his own town that he should be known, was known — famous — before the water of oblivion had rolled over him.

You had to cut corners, that was all. Pull — relationship — wealthy marriages —  —

For several miles the continued reiteration of this preoccupied him and then he perceived that the rain had become thicker and more opaque in the heavy gray of twilight and that the houses were falling away. The district of full blocks, then of big houses, then of scattering little ones, passed and great sweeps of misty country opened out on both sides. It was hard walking here. The sidewalk had given place to a dirt road, streaked with furious brown rivulets that splashed and squashed around his shoes.

Cutting corners — the words began to fall apart, forming curious phrasings — little illuminated pieces of themselves. They resolved into sentences, each of which had a strangely familiar ring.

Cutting corners meant rejecting the old childhood principles that success came from faithfulness to duty, that evil was necessarily punished or virtue necessarily rewarded — that honest poverty was happier than corrupt riches.

It meant being hard.

This phrase appealed to him and he repeated it over and over. It had to do somehow with Mr. Macy and Charley Moore — the attitudes, the methods of each of them.

He stopped and felt his clothes. He was drenched to the skin. He looked about him and, selecting a place in the fence where a tree sheltered it, perched himself there.

In my credulous years — he thought — they told me that evil was a sort of dirty hue, just as definite as a soiled collar, but it seems to me that evil is only a manner of hard luck, or heredity-and-environment, or “being found out.” It hides in the vacillations of dubs like Charley Moore as certainly as it does in the intolerance of Macy, and if it ever gets much more tangible it becomes merely an arbitrary label to paste on the unpleasant things in other people’s lives.

In fact — he concluded — it isn’t worth worrying over what’s evil and what isn’t. Good and evil aren’t any standard to me — and they can be a devil of a bad hindrance when I want something. When I want something bad enough, common sense tells me to go and take it — and not get caught.

And then suddenly Dalyrimple knew what he wanted first. He wanted fifteen dollars to pay his overdue board bill.

With a furious energy he jumped from the fence, whipped off his coat, and from its black lining cut with his knife a piece about five inches square. He made two holes near its edge and then fixed it on his face, pulling his hat down to hold it in place. It flapped grotesquely and then dampened and clung clung to his forehead and cheeks.

Now . . . The twilight had merged to dripping dusk . . . black as pitch. He began to walk quickly back toward town, not waiting to remove the mask but watching the road with difficulty through the jagged eye-holes. He was not conscious of any nervousness . . . the only tension was caused by a desire to do the thing as soon as possible.

He reached the first sidewalk, continued on until he saw a hedge far from any lamp-post, and turned in behind it. Within a minute he heard several series of footsteps — he waited — it was a woman and he held his breath until she passed . . . and then a man, a laborer. The next passer, he felt, would be what he wanted . . . the laborer’s footfalls died far up the drenched street . . . other steps grew nears grew suddenly louder.

Dalyrimple braced himself.

“Put up your hands!”

The man stopped, uttered an absurd little grunt, and thrust pudgy arms skyward.

Dalyrimple went through the waistcoat.

“Now, you shrimp,” he said, setting his hand suggestively to his own hip pocket, “you run, and stamp — loud! If I hear your feet stop I’ll put a shot after you!”

Then he stood there in sudden uncontrollable laughter as audibly frightened footsteps scurried away into the night.

After a moment he thrust the roll of bills into his pocket, snatched off his mask, and running quickly across the street, darted down an alley.

IV

Yet, however Dalyrimple justified himself intellectually, he had many bad moments in the weeks immediately following his decision. The tremendous pressure of sentiment and inherited ambition kept raising riot with his attitude. He felt morally lonely.

The noon after his first venture he ate in a little lunch-room with Charley Moore and, watching him unspread the paper, waited for a remark about the hold-up of the day before. But either the hold-up was not mentioned or Charley wasn’t interested. He turned listlessly to the sporting sheet, read Doctor Crane’s crop of seasoned bromides, took in an editorial on ambition with his mouth slightly ajar, and then skipped to Mutt and Jeff.

Poor Charley — with his faint aura of evil and his mind that refused to focus, playing a lifeless solitaire with cast-off mischief.

Yet Charley belonged on the other side of the fence. In him could be stirred up all the flamings and denunciations of righteousness; he would weep at a stage heroine’s lost virtue, he could become lofty and contemptuous at the idea of dishonor.

On my side, thought Dalyrimple, there aren’t any resting-places; a man who’s a strong criminal is after the weak criminals as well, so it’s all guerilla warfare over here.

What will it all do to me? he thought with a persistent weariness. Will it take the color out of life with the honor? Will it scatter my courage and dull my mind? — despiritualize me completely — does it mean eventual barrenness, eventual remorse, failure?

With a great surge of anger, he would fling his mind upon the barrier — and stand there with the flashing bayonet of his pride. Other men who broke the laws of justice and charity lied to all the world. He at any rate would not lie to himself. He was more than Byronic now: not the spiritual rebel, Don Juan; not the philosophical rebel, Faust; but a new psychological rebel of his own century — defying the sentimental a priori forms of his own mind —  —

Happiness was what he wanted — a slowly rising scale of gratifications of the normal appetites — and he had a strong conviction that the materials, if not the inspiration of happiness, could be bought with money.

V

The night came that drew him out upon his second venture, and as he walked the dark street he felt in himself a great resemblance to a cat — a certain supple, swinging litheness. His muscles were rippling smoothly and sleekly under his spare, healthy flesh — he had an absurd desire to bound along the street, to run dodging among trees, to turn “cart-wheels” over soft grass.

It was not crisp, but in the air lay a faint suggestion of acerbity, inspirational rather than chilling.

“The moon is down — I have not heard the clock!”

He laughed in delight at the line which an early memory had endowed with a hushed awesome beauty.

He passed a man and then another a quarter of mile afterward.

He was on Philmore Street now and it was very dark. He blessed the city council for not having put in new lamp-posts as a recent budget had recommended. Here was the red-brick Sterner residence which marked the beginning of the avenue; here was the Jordon house, the Eisenhaurs’, the Dents’, the Markhams’, the Frasers’; the Hawkins’, where he had been a guest; the Willoughbys’, the Everett’s, colonial and ornate; the little cottage where lived the Watts old maids between the imposing fronts of the Macys’ and the Krupstadts’; the Craigs —

Ah . . . there! He paused, wavered violently — far up the street was a blot, a man walking, possibly a policeman. After an eternal second be found himself following the vague, ragged shadow of a lamp-post across a lawn, running bent very low. Then he was standing tense, without breath or need of it, in the shadow of his limestone prey.

Interminably he listened — a mile off a cat howled, a hundred yards away another took up the hymn in a demoniacal snarl, and he felt his heart dip and swoop, acting as shock-absorber for his mind. There were other sounds; the faintest fragment of song far away; strident, gossiping laughter from a back porch diagonally across the alley; and crickets, crickets singing in the patched, patterned, moonlit grass of the yard. Within the house there seemed to lie an ominous silence. He was glad he did not know who lived here.

His slight shiver hardened to steel; the steel softened and his nerves became pliable as leather; gripping his hands he gratefully found them supple, and taking out knife and pliers he went to work on the screen.

So sure was he that he was unobserved that, from the dining-room where in a minute he found himself, he leaned out and carefully pulled the screen up into position, balancing it so it would neither fall by chance nor be a serious obstacle to a sudden exit.

Then he put the open knife in his coat pocket, took out his pocket-flash, and tiptoed around the room.

There was nothing here he could use — the dining-room had never been included in his plans for the town was too small to permit disposing of silver.

As a matter of fact his plans were of the vaguest. He had found that with a mind like his, lucrative in intelligence, intuition, and lightning decision, it was best to have but the skeleton of a campaign. The machine-gun episode had taught him that. And he was afraid that a method preconceived would give him two points of view in a crisis — and two points of view meant wavering.

He stumbled slightly on a chair, held his breath, listened, went on, found the hall, found the stairs, started up; the seventh stair creaked at his step, the ninth, the fourteenth. He was counting them automatically. At the third creak he paused again for over a minute — and in that minute he felt more alone than he had ever felt before. Between the lines on patrol, even when alone, he had had behind him the moral support of half a billion people; now he was alone, pitted against that same moral pressure — a bandit. He had never felt this fear, yet he had never felt this exultation.

The stairs came to an end, a doorway approached; he went in and listened to regular breathing. His feet were economical of steps and his body swayed sometimes at stretching as he felt over the bureau, pocketing all articles which held promise — he could not have enumerated them ten seconds afterward. He felt on a chair for possible trousers, found soft garments, women’s lingerie. The corners of his mouth smiled mechanically.

Another room . . . the same breathing, enlivened by one ghastly snort that sent his heart again on its tour of his breast. Round object — watch; chain; roll of bills; stick-pins; two rings — he remembered that he had got rings from the other bureau. He started out winced as a faint glow flashed in front of him, facing him. God! — it was the glow of his own wrist-watch on his outstretched arm.

Down the stairs. He skipped two crumbing steps but found another. He was all right now, practically safe; as he neared the bottom he felt a slight boredom. He reached the dining-room — considered the silver — again decided against it.

Back in his room at the boarding-house he examined the additions to his personal property:

Sixty-five dollars in bills.

A platinum ring with three medium diamonds, worth, probably, about seven hundred dollars. Diamonds were going up.

A cheap gold-plated ring with the initials O. S. and the date inside — ‘03 — probably a class-ring from school. Worth a few dollars. Unsalable.

A red-cloth case containing a set of false teeth.

A silver watch.

A gold chain worth more than the watch.

An empty ring-box.

A little ivory Chinese god — probably a desk ornament.

A dollar and sixty-two cents in small change.

He put the money under his pillow and the other things in the toe of an infantry boot, stuffing a stocking in on top of them. Then for two hours his mind raced like a high-power engine here and there through his life, past and future, through fear and laughter. With a vague, inopportune wish that he were married, he fell into a deep sleep about half past five.

VI

Though the newspaper account of the burglary failed to mention the false teeth, they worried him considerably. The picture of a human waking in the cool dawn and groping for them in vain, of a soft, toothless breakfast, of a strange, hollow, lisping voice calling the police station, of weary, dispirited visits to the dentist, roused a great fatherly pity in him.

Trying to ascertain whether they belonged to a man or a woman, he took them carefully out of the case and held them up near his mouth. He moved his own jaws experimentally; he measured with his fingers; but he failed to decide: they might belong either to a large-mouthed woman or a small-mouthed man.

On a warm impulse he wrapped them in brown paper from the bottom of his army trunk, and printed false teeth on the package in clumsy pencil letters. Then, the next night, he walked down Philmore Street, and shied the package onto the lawn so that it would be near the door. Next day the paper announced that the police had a clew — they knew that the burglar was in town. However, they didn’t mention what the clew was.

VII

At the end of a month “Burglar Bill of the Silver District was the nurse-girl’s standby for frightening children. Five burglaries were attributed to him, but though Dalyrimple had only committed three, he considered that majority had it and appropriated the title to himself. He had once been seen — “a large bloated creature with the meanest face you ever laid eyes on.” Mrs. Henry Coleman, awaking at two o’clock at the beam of an electric torch flashed in her eye, could not have been expected to recognize Bryan Dalyrimple at whom she had waved flags last Fourth of July, and whom she had described as “not at all the daredevil type, do you think?”

When Dalyrimple kept his imagination at white heat he managed to glorify his own attitude, his emancipation from petty scruples and remorses — but let him once allow his thought to rove unarmored, great unexpected horrors and depressions would overtake him. Then for reassurance he had to go back to think out the whole thing over again. He found that it was on the whole better to give up considering himself as a rebel. It was more consoling to think of every one else as a fool.

His attitude toward Mr. Macy underwent a change. He no longer felt a dim animosity and inferiority in his presence. As his fourth month in the store ended he found himself regarding his employer in a manner that was almost fraternal. He had a vague but very assured conviction that Mr. Macy’s innermost soul would have abetted and approved. He no longer worried about his future. He had the intention of accumulating several thousand dollars and then clearing out — going east, back to France, down to South America. Half a dozen times in the last two months he had been about to stop work, but a fear of attracting attention to his being in funds prevented him. So he worked on, no longer in listlessness, but with contemptuous amusement.

VIII

Then with astounding suddenness something happened that changed his plans and put an end to his burglaries.

Mr. Macy sent for him one afternoon and with a great show of jovial mystery asked him if he had an engagement that night. If he hadn’t, would he please call on Mr. Alfred J. Fraser at eight o’clock. Dalyrimple’s wonder was mingled with uncertainty. He debated with himself whether it were not his cue to take the first train out of town. But an hour’s consideration decided him that his fears were unfounded and at eight o’clock he arrived at the big Fraser house in Philmore Avenue.

Mr. Fraser was commonly supposed to be the biggest political influence in the city. His brother was Senator Fraser, his son-in-law was Congressman Demming, and his influence, though not wielded in such a way as to make him an objectionable boss, was strong nevertheless.

He had a great, huge face, deep-set eyes, and a barn-door of an upper lip, the melange approaching a worthy climax in a long professional jaw.

During his conversation with Dalyrimple his expression kept starting toward a smile, reached a cheerful optimism, and then receded back to imperturbability.

“How do you do, sir?” he laid, holding out his hand. “Sit down. I suppose you’re wondering why I wanted you. Sit down.”

Dalyrimple sat down.

“Mr. Dalyrimple, how old are you?”

“I’m twenty-three.”

“You’re young. But that doesn’t mean you’re foolish. Mr. Dalyrimple, what I’ve got to say won’t take long. I’m going to make you a proposition. To begin at the beginning, I’ve been watching you ever since last Fourth of July when you made that speech in response to the loving-cup.”

Dalyrimple murmured disparagingly, but Fraser waved him to silence.

“It was a speech I’ve remembered. It was a brainy speech, straight from the shoulder, and it got to everybody in that crowd. I know. I’ve watched crowds for years.” He cleared his throat as if tempted to digress on his knowledge of crowds — then continued. “But, Mr. Dalyrimple, I’ve seen too many young men who promised brilliantly go to pieces, fail through want of steadiness, too many high-power ideas, and not enough willingness to work. So I waited. I wanted to see what you’d do. I wanted to see if you’d go to work, and if you’d stick to what you started.”

Dalyrimple felt a glow settle over him.

“So,” continued Fraser, “when Theron Macy told me you’d started down at his place, I kept watching you, and I followed your record through him. The first month I was afraid for awhile. He told me you were getting restless, too good for your job, hinting around for a raise —  — “

Dalyrimple started.

“ —  — But he said after that you evidently made up your mind to shut up and stick to it. That’s the stuff I like in a young man! That’s the stuff that wins out. And don’t think I don’t understand. I know how much harder it was for you after all that silly flattery a lot of old women had been giving you. I know what a fight it must have been —  — “

Dalyrimple’s face was burning brightly. It felt young and strangely ingenuous.

“Dalyrimple, you’ve got brains and you’ve got the stuff in you — and that’s what I want. I’m going to put you into the State Senate.”

“The what?”

“The State Senate. We want a young man who has got brains, but is solid and not a loafer. And when I say State Senate I don’t stop there. We’re up against it here, Dalyrimple. We’ve got to get some young men into politics — you know the old blood that’s been running on the party ticket year in and year out.”

Dalyrimple licked his lips.

“You’ll run me for the State Senate?”

“I’ll put you in the State Senate.”

Mr. Fraser’s expression had now reached the point nearest a smile and Dalyrimple in a happy frivolity felt himself urging it mentally on — but it stopped, locked, and slid from him. The barn-door and the jaw were separated by a line strait as a nail. Dalyrimple remembered with an effort that it was a mouth, and talked to it.

“But I’m through,” he said. “My notoriety’s dead. People are fed up with me.”

“Those things,” answered Mr. Fraser, “are mechanical. Linotype is a resuscitator of reputations. Wait till you see the herald, beginning next week — that is if you’re with us — that is,” and his voice hardened slightly, “if you haven’t got too many ideas yourself about how things ought to be run.”

“No,” said Dalyrimple, looking him frankly in the eye. “You’ll have to give me a lot of advice at first.”

“Very well. I’ll take care of your reputation then. Just keep yourself on the right side of the fence.”

Dalyrimple started at this repetition of a phrase he had thought of so much lately. There was a sudden ring at the door-bell.

“That’s Macy now,” observed Fraser, rising. “I’ll go let him in. The servants have gone to bed.”

He left Dalyrimple there in a dream. The world was opening up suddenly — The State Senate, the United States Senate — so life was this after all — cutting corners — common sense, that was the rule. No more foolish risks now unless necessity called — but it was being hard that counted — Never to let remorse or self-reproach lose him a night’s sleep — let his life be a sword of courage — there was no payment — all that was drivel — drivel.

He sprang to his feet with clinched hands in a sort of triumph.

“Well, Bryan,” said Mr. Macy stepping through the portières.

The two older men smiled their half-smiles at him.

“Well Bryan,” said Mr. Macy again.

Dalyrimple smiled also.

“How do, Mr. Macy?”

He wondered if some telepathy between them had made this new appreciation possible — some invisible realization. . . .

Mr. Macy held out his hand.

“I’m glad we’re to be associated in this scheme — I’ve been for you all along — especially lately. I’m glad we’re to be on the same side of the fence.”

“I want to thank you, sir,” said Dalyrimple simply. He felt a whimsical moisture gathering back of his eyes.

The Four Fists

At the present time no one I know has the slightest desire to hit Samuel Meredith; possibly this is because a man over fifty is liable to be rather severely cracked at the impact of a hostile fist, but, for my part, I am inclined to think that all his hitable qualities have quite vanished. But it is certain that at various times in his life hitable qualities were in his face, as surely as kissable qualities have ever lurked in a girl’s lips.

I’m sure every one has met a man like that, been casually introduced, even made a friend of him, yet felt he was the sort who aroused passionate dislike — expressed by some in the involuntary clinching of fists, and in others by mutterings about “takin’ a poke” and “landin’ a swift smash in ee eye.” In the juxtaposition of Samuel Meredith’s features this quality was so strong that it influenced his entire life.

What was it? Not the shape, certainly, for he was a pleasant-looking man from earliest youth: broad-bowed with gray eyes that were frank and friendly. Yet I’ve heard him tell a room full of reporters angling for a “success” story that he’d be ashamed to tell them the truth that they wouldn’t believe it, that it wasn’t one story but four, that the public would not want to read about a man who had been walloped into prominence.

It all started at PhillipsAndoverAcademy when he was fourteen. He had been brought up on a diet of caviar and bell-boys’ legs in half the capitals of Europe, and it was pure luck that his mother had nervous prostration and had to delegate his education to less tender, less biassed hands.

At Andover he was given a roommate named Gilly Hood. Gilly was thirteen, undersized, and rather the school pet. From the September day when Mr. Meredith’s valet stowed Samuel’s clothing in the best bureau and asked, on departing, “hif there was hanything helse, Master Samuel?” Gilly cried out that the faculty had played him false. He felt like an irate frog in whose bowl has been put goldfish.

“Good gosh!” he complained to his sympathetic contemporaries, “he’s a damn stuck-up Willie. He said, ‘Are the crowd here gentlemen?’ and I said, ‘No, they’re boys,’ and he said age didn’t matter, and I said, ‘Who said it did?’ Let him get fresh with me, the ole pieface!”

For three weeks Gilly endured in silence young Samuel’s comments on the clothes and habits of Gilly’s personal friends, endured French phrases in conversation, endured a hundred half-feminine meannesses that show what a nervous mother can do to a boy, if she keeps close enough to him — then a storm broke in the aquarium.

Samuel was out. A crowd had gathered to hear Gilly be wrathful about his roommate’s latest sins.

“He said, ‘Oh, I don’t like the windows open at night,’ he said, ‘except only a little bit,’“ complained Gilly.

“Don’t let him boss you.”

“Boss me? You bet he won’t. I open those windows, I guess, but the darn fool won’t take turns shuttin’ ‘em in the morning.”

“Make him, Gilly, why don’t you?”

“I’m going to.” Gilly nodded his head in fierce agreement. “Don’t you worry. He needn’t think I’m any ole butler.”

“Le’s see you make him.”

At this point the darn fool entered in person and included the crowd in one of his irritating smiles. Two boys said, “‘Lo, Mer’dith”; the others gave him a chilly glance and went on talking to Gilly. But Samuel seemed unsatisfied.

“Would you mind not sitting on my bed?” he suggested politely to two of Gilly’s particulars who were perched very much at ease.

“Huh?”

“My bed. Can’t you understand English?”

This was adding insult to injury. There were several comments on the bed’s sanitary condition and the evidence within it of animal life.

“S’matter with your old bed?” demanded Gilly truculently.

“The bed’s all right, but —  — “

Gilly interrupted this sentence by rising and walking up to Samuel. He paused several inches away and eyed him fiercely.

“You an’ your crazy ole bed,” he began. “You an’ your crazy —  — “

“Go to it, Gilly,” murmured some one.

“Show the darn fool — “

Samuel returned the gaze coolly.

“Well,” he said finally, “it’s my bed — “

He got no further, for Gilly hauled off and hit him succinctly in the nose.

“Yea! Gilly!”

“Show the big bully!”

“Just let him touch you — he’ll see!”

The group closed in on them and for the first time in his life Samuel realized the insuperable inconvenience of being passionately detested. He gazed around helplessly at the glowering, violently hostile faces. He towered a head taller than his roommate, so if he hit back he’d be called a bully and have half a dozen more fights on his hands within five minutes; yet if he didn’t he was a coward. For a moment he stood there facing Gilly’s blazing eyes, and then, with a sudden choking sound, he forced his way through the ring and rushed from the room.

The month following bracketed the thirty most miserable days of his life. Every waking moment he was under the lashing tongues of his contemporaries; his habits and mannerisms became butts for intolerable witticisms and, of course, the sensitiveness of adolescence was a further thorn. He considered that he was a natural pariah; that the unpopularity at school would follow him through life. When he went home for the Christmas holidays he was so despondent that his father sent him to a nerve specialist. When he returned to Andover he arranged to arrive late so that he could be alone in the bus during the drive from station to school.

Of course when he had learned to keep his mouth shut every one promptly forgot all about him. The next autumn, with his realization that consideration for others was the discreet attitude, he made good use of the clean start given him by the shortness of boyhood memory. By the beginning of his senior year Samuel Meredith was one of the best-liked boys of his class — and no one was any stronger for him than his first friend and constant companion, Gilly Hood.

II

Samuel became the sort of college student who in the early nineties drove tandems and coaches and tallyhos between Princeton and Yale and New York City to show that they appreciated the social importance of football games. He believed passionately in good form — his choosing of gloves, his tying of ties, his holding of reins were imitated by impressionable freshmen. Outside of his own set he was considered rather a snob, but as his set was the set, it never worried him. He played football in the autumn, drank high-balls in the winter, and rowed in the spring. Samuel despised all those who were merely sportsmen without being gentlemen or merely gentlemen without being sportsmen.

He lived in New York and often brought home several of his friends for the week-end. Those were the days of the horse-car and in case of a crush it was, of course, the proper thing for any one of Samuel’s set to rise and deliver his seat to a standing lady with a formal bow. One night in Samuel’s junior year he boarded a car with two of his intimates. There were three vacant seats. When Samuel sat down he noticed a heavy-eyed laboring man sitting next to him who smelt objectionably of garlic, sagged slightly against Samuel and, spreading a little as a tired man will, took up quite too much room.

The car had gone several blocks when it stopped for a quartet of young girls, and, of course, the three men of the world sprang to their feet and proffered their seats with due observance of form. Unfortunately, the laborer, being unacquainted with the code of neckties and tallyhos, failed to follow their example, and one young lady was left at an embarrassed stance. Fourteen eyes glared reproachfully at the barbarian; seven lips curled slightly; but the object of scorn stared stolidly into the foreground in sturdy unconsciousness of his despicable conduct. Samuel was the most violently affected. He was humiliated that any male should so conduct himself. He spoke aloud.

“There’s a lady standing,” he said sternly.

That should have been quite enough, but the object of scorn only looked up blankly. The standing girl tittered and exchanged nervous glances with her companions. But Samuel was aroused.

“There’s a lady standing,” he repeated, rather raspingly. The man seemed to comprehend.

“I pay my fare,” he said quietly.

Samuel turned red and his hands clinched, but the conductor was looking their way, so at a warning nod from his friends he subsided into sullen gloom.

They reached their destination and left the car, but so did the laborer, who followed them, swinging his little pail. Seeing his chance, Samuel no longer resisted his aristocratic inclination. He turned around and, launching a full-featured, dime-novel sneer, made a loud remark about the right of the lower animals to ride with human beings.

In a half-second the workman had dropped his pail and let fly at him. Unprepared, Samuel took the blow neatly on the jaw and sprawled full length into the cobblestone gutter.

“Don’t laugh at me!” cried his assailant. “I been workin’ all day. I’m tired as hell!”

As he spoke the sudden anger died out of his eyes and the mask of weariness dropped again over his face. He turned and picked up his pail. Samuel’s friends took a quick step in his direction.

“Wait!” Samuel had risen slowly and was motioning back. Some time, somewhere, he had been struck like that before. Then he remembered — Gilly Hood. In the silence, as he dusted himself off, the whole scene in the room at Andover was before his eyes — and he knew intuitively that he had been wrong again. This man’s strength, his rest, was the protection of his family. He had more use for his seat in the street-car than any young girl.

“It’s all right,” said Samuel gruffly. “Don’t touch ‘him. I’ve been a damn fool.”

Of course it took more than an hour, or a week, for Samuel to rearrange his ideas on the essential importance of good form. At first he simply admitted that his wrongness had made him powerless — as it had made him powerless against Gilly — but eventually his mistake about the workman influenced his entire attitude. Snobbishness is, after all, merely good breeding grown dictatorial; so Samuel’s code remained but the necessity of imposing it upon others had faded out in a certain gutter. Within that year his class had somehow stopped referring to him as a snob.

III

After a few years Samuel’s university decided that it had shone long enough in the reflected glory of his neckties, so they declaimed to him in Latin, charged him ten dollars for the paper which proved him irretrievably educated, and sent him into the turmoil with much self-confidence, a few friends, and the proper assortment of harmless bad habits.

His family had by that time started back to shirt-sleeves, through a sudden decline in the sugar-market, and it had already unbuttoned its vest, so to speak, when Samuel went to work. His mind was that exquisite tabula rasa that a university education sometimes leaves, but he had both energy and influence, so he used his former ability as a dodging half-back in twisting through Wall Street crowds as runner for a bank.

His diversion was — women. There were half a dozen: two or three débutantes, an actress (in a minor way), a grass-widow, and one sentimental little brunette who was married and lived in a little house in Jersey City.

They had met on a ferry-boat. Samuel was crossing from New York on business (he had been working several years by this time) and he helped her look for a package that she had dropped in the crush.

“Do you come over often?” he inquired casually.

“Just to shop,” she said shyly. She had great brown eyes and the pathetic kind of little mouth. “I’ve only been married three months, and we find it cheaper to live over here.”

“Does he — does your husband like your being alone like this?”

She laughed, a cheery young laugh.

“Oh, dear me, no. We were to meet for dinner but I must have misunderstood the place. He’ll be awfully worried.”

“Well,” said Samuel disapprovingly, “he ought to be. If you’ll allow me I’ll see you home.”

She accepted his offer thankfully, so they took the cable-car together. When they walked up the path to her little house they saw a light there; her husband had arrived before her.

“He’s frightfully jealous,” she announced, laughingly apologetic.

“Very well,” answered Samuel, rather stiffly. “I’d better leave you here.”

She thanked him and, waving a good night, he left her.

That would have been quite all if they hadn’t met on Fifth Avenue one morning a week later. She started and blushed and seemed so glad to see him that they chatted like old friends. She was going to her dressmaker’s, eat lunch alone at Taine’s, shop all afternoon, and meet her husband on the ferry at five. Samuel told her that her husband was a very lucky man. She blushed again and scurried off.

Samuel whistled all the way back to his office, but about twelve o’clock he began to see that pathetic, appealing little mouth everywhere — and those brown eyes. He fidgeted when he looked at the clock; he thought of the grill down-stairs where he lunched and the heavy male conversation thereof, and opposed to that picture appeared another; a little table at Taine’s with the brown eyes and the mouth a few feet away. A few minutes before twelve-thirty he dashed on his hat and rushed for the cable-car.

She was quite surprised to see him.

“Why — hello,” she said. Samuel could tell that she was just pleasantly frightened.

“I thought we might lunch together. It’s so dull eating with a lot of men.”

She hesitated.

“Why, I suppose there’s no harm in it. How could there be!”

It occurred to her that her husband should have taken lunch with her — but he was generally so hurried at noon. She told Samuel all about him: he was a little smaller than Samuel, but, oh, much better-looking. He was a book-keeper and not making a lot of money, but they were very happy and expected to be rich within three or four years.

Samuel’s grass-widow had been in a quarrelsome mood for three or four weeks, and through contrast, he took an accentuated pleasure in this meeting; so fresh was she, and earnest, and faintly adventurous. Her name was Marjorie.

They made another engagement; in fact, for a month they lunched together two or three times a week. When she was sure that her husband would work late Samuel took her over to New Jersey on the ferry, leaving her always on the tiny front porch, after she had gone in and lit the gas to use the security of his masculine presence outside. This grew to be a ceremony — and it annoyed him. Whenever the comfortable glow fell out through the front windows, that was his congé; yet he never suggested coming in and Marjorie didn’t invite him.

Then, when Samuel and Marjorie had reached a stage in which they sometimes touched each other’s arms gently, just to show that they were very good friends, Marjorie and her husband had one of those ultrasensitive, supercritical quarrels that couples never indulge in unless they care a great deal about each other. It started with a cold mutton-chop or a leak in the gas-jet — and one day Samuel found her in Taine’s, with dark shadows under her brown eyes and a terrifying pout.

By this time Samuel thought he was in love with Marjorie — so he played up the quarrel for all it was worth. He was her best friend and patted her hand — and leaned down close to her brown curls while she whispered in little sobs what her husband had said that morning; and he was a little more than her best friend when he took her over to the ferry in a hansom.

“Marjorie,” he said gently, when he left her, as usual, on the porch, “if at any time you want to call on me, remember that I am always waiting, always waiting.”

She nodded gravely and put both her hands in his. “I know,” she said. “I know you’re my friend, my best friend.”

Then she ran into the house and he watched there until the gas went on.

For the next week Samuel was in a nervous turmoil. Some persistently rational strain warned him that at bottom he and Marjorie had little in common, but in such cases there is usually so much mud in the water that one can seldom see to the bottom. Every dream and desire told him that he loved Marjorie, wanted her, had to have her.

The quarrel developed. Marjorie’s husband took to staying in New York until late at night, came home several times disagreeably overstimulated, and made her generally miserable. They must have had too much pride to talk it out — for Marjorie’s husband was, after all, pretty decent — so it drifted on from one misunderstanding to another. Marjorie kept coming more and more to Samuel; when a woman can accept masculine sympathy at is much more satisfactory to her than crying to another girl. But Marjorie didn’t realize how much she had begun to rely on him, how much he was part of her little cosmos.

One night, instead of turning away when Marjorie went in and lit the gas, Samuel went in, too, and they sat together on the sofa in the little parlor. He was very happy. He envied their home, and he felt that the man who neglected such a possession out of stubborn pride was a fool and unworthy of his wife. But when he kissed Marjorie for the first time she cried softly and told him to go. He sailed home on the wings of desperate excitement, quite resolved to fan this spark of romance, no matter how big the blaze or who was burned. At the time he considered that his thoughts were unselfishly of her; in a later perspective he knew that she had meant no more than the white screen in a motion picture: it was just Samuel — blind, desirous.

Next day at Taine’s, when they met for lunch, Samuel dropped all pretense and made frank love to her. He had no plans, no definite intentions, except to kiss her lips again, to hold her in his arms and feel that she was very little and pathetic and lovable. . . . He took her home, and this time they kissed until both their hearts beat high — words and phrases formed on his lips.

And then suddenly there were steps on the porch — a hand tried the outside door. Marjorie turned dead-white.

“Wait!” she whispered to Samuel, in a frightened voice, but in angry impatience at the interruption he walked to the front door and threw it open.

Every one has seen such scenes on the stage — seen them so often that when they actually happen people behave very much like actors. Samuel felt that he was playing a part and the lines came quite naturally: he announced that all had a right to lead their own lives and looked at Marjorie’s husband menacingly, as if daring him to doubt it. Marjorie’s husband spoke of the sanctity of the home, forgetting that it hadn’t seemed very holy to him lately; Samuel continued along the line of “the right to happiness”; Marjorie’s husband mentioned firearms and the divorce court. Then suddenly he stopped and scrutinized both of them — Marjorie in pitiful collapse on the sofa, Samuel haranguing the furniture in a consciously heroic pose.

“Go up-stairs, Marjorie,” he said, in a different tone.

“Stay where you are!” Samuel countered quickly.

Marjorie rose, wavered, and sat down, rose again and moved hesitatingly toward the stairs.

“Come outside,” said her husband to Samuel. “I want to talk to you.”

Samuel glanced at Marjorie, tried to get some message from her eyes; then he shut his lips and went out.

There was a bright moon and when Marjorie’s husband came down the steps Samuel could see plainly that he was suffering — but he felt no pity for him.

They stood and looked at each other, a few feet apart, and the husband cleared his throat as though it were a bit husky.

“That’s my wife,” he said quietly, and then a wild anger surged up inside him. “Damn you!” he cried — and hit Samuel in the face with all his strength.

In that second, as Samuel slumped to the ground, it flashed to him that he had been hit like that twice before, and simultaneously the incident altered like a dream — he felt suddenly awake. Mechanically he sprang to his feet and squared off. The other man was waiting, fists up, a yard away, but Samuel knew that though physically he had him by several inches and many pounds, he wouldn’t hit him. The situation had miraculously and entirely changed — a moment before Samuel had seemed to himself heroic; now he seemed the cad, the outsider, and Marjorie’s husband, silhouetted against the lights of the little house, the eternal heroic figure, the defender of his home.

There was a pause and then Samuel turned quickly away and went down the path for the last time.

IV

Of course, after the third blow Samuel put in several weeks at conscientious introspection. The blow years before at Andover had landed on his personal unpleasantness; the workman of his college days had jarred the snobbishness out of his system, and Marjorie’s husband had given a severe jolt to his greedy selfishness. It threw women out of his ken until a year later, when he met his future wife; for the only sort of woman worth while seemed to be the one who could be protected as Marjorie’s husband had protected her. Samuel could not imagine his grass-widow, Mrs. De Ferriac, causing any very righteous blows on her own account.

His early thirties found him well on his feet. He was associated with old Peter Carhart, who was in those days a national figure. Carhart’s physique was like a rough model for a statue of Hercules, and his record was just as solid — a pile made for the pure joy of it, without cheap extortion or shady scandal. He had been a great friend of Samuel’s father, but he watched the son for six years before taking him into his own office. Heaven knows how many things he controlled at that time — mines, railroads, banks, whole cities. Samuel was very close to him, knew his likes and dislikes, his prejudices, weaknesses and many strengths.

One day Carhart sent for Samuel and, closing the door of his inner office, offered him a chair and a cigar.

“Everything O. K., Samuel?” he asked.

“Why, yes.”

“I’ve been afraid you’re getting a bit stale.”

“Stale?” Samuel was puzzled.

“You’ve done no work outside the office for nearly ten years?”

“But I’ve had vacations, in the Adiron —  — “

Carhart waved this aside.

“I mean outside work. Seeing the things move that we’ve always pulled the strings of here.”

“No,” admitted Samuel; “I haven’t.”

“So,” he said abruptly “I’m going to give you an outside job that’ll take about a month.”

Samuel didn’t argue. He rather liked the idea and he made up his mind that, whatever it was, he would put it through just as Carhart wanted it. That was his employer’s greatest hobby, and the men around him were as dumb under direct orders as infantry subalterns.

“You’ll go to San Antonio and see Hamil,” continued Carhart. “He’s got a job on hand and he wants a man to take charge.”

Hamil was in charge of the Carhart interests in the Southwest, a man who had grown up in the shadow of his employer, and with whom, though they had never met, Samuel had had much official correspondence.

“When do I leave?”

“You’d better go to-morrow,” answered Carhart, glancing at the calendar. “That’s the 1st of May. I’ll expect your report here on the 1st of June.”

Next morning Samuel left for Chicago, and two days later he was facing Hamil across a table in the office of the Merchants’ Trust in San Antonio. It didn’t take long to get the gist of the thing. It was a big deal in oil which concerned the buying up of seventeen huge adjoining ranches. This buying up had to be done in one week, and it was a pure squeeze. Forces had been set in motion that put the seventeen owners between the devil and the deep sea, and Samuel’s part was simply to “handle” the matter from a little village near Pueblo. With tact and efficiency the right man could bring it off without any friction, for it was merely a question of sitting at the wheel and keeping a firm hold. Hamil, with an astuteness many times valuable to his chief, had arranged a situation that would give a much greater clear gain than any dealing in the open market. Samuel shook hands with Hamil, arranged to return in two weeks, and left for San Felipe, New Mexico.

It occurred to him, of course, that Carhart was trying him out. Hamil’s report on his handling of this might be a factor in something big for him, but even without that he would have done his best to put the thing through. Ten years in New York hadn’t made him sentimental and he was quite accustomed to finish everything he began — and a little bit more.

All went well at first. There was no enthusiasm, but each one of the seventeen ranchers concerned knew Samuel’s business, knew what he had behind him, and that they had as little chance of holding out as flies on a window-pane. Some of them were resigned — some of them cared like the devil, but they’d talked it over, argued it with lawyers and couldn’t see any possible loophole. Five of the ranches had oil, the other twelve were part of the chance, but quite as necessary to Hamil’s purpose, in any event.

Samuel soon saw that the real leader was an early settler named McIntyre, a man of perhaps fifty, gray-haired, clean-shaven, bronzed by forty New Mexico summers, and with those clear steady eye that Texas and New Mexico weather are apt to give. His ranch had not as yet shown oil, but it was in the pool, and if any man hated to lose his land McIntyre did. Every one had rather looked to him at first to avert the big calamity, and he had hunted all over the territory for the legal means with which to do it, but he had failed, and he knew it. He avoided Samuel assiduously, but Samuel was sure that when the day came for the signatures he would appear.

It came — a baking May day, with hot wave rising off the parched land as far as eyes could see, and as Samuel sat stewing in his little improvised office — a few chairs, a bench, and a wooden table — he was glad the thing was almost over. He wanted to get back East the worst way, and join his wife and children for a week at the seashore.

The meeting was set for four o’clock, and he was rather surprised at three-thirty when the door opened and McIntyre came in. Samuel could not help respecting the man’s attitude, and feeling a bit sorry for him. McIntyre seemed closely related to the prairies, and Samuel had the little flicker of envy that city people feel toward men who live in the open.

“Afternoon,” said McIntyre, standing in the open doorway, with his feet apart and his hands on his hips.

“Hello, Mr. McIntyre.” Samuel rose, but omitted the formality of offering his hand. He imagined the rancher cordially loathed him, and he hardly blamed him. McIntyre came in and sat down leisurely.

“You got us,” he said suddenly.

This didn’t seem to require any answer.

“When I heard Carhart was back of this,” he continued, “I gave up.”

“Mr. Carhart is —  — “ began Samuel, but McIntyre waved him silent.

“Don’t talk about the dirty sneak-thief!”

“Mr. McIntyre,” said Samuel briskly, “if this half-hour is to be devoted to that sort of talk —  — “

“Oh, dry up, young man,” McIntyre interrupted, “you can’t abuse a man who’d do a thing like this.”

Samuel made no answer.

“It’s simply a dirty filch. There just are skunks like him too big to handle.”

“You’re being paid liberally,” offered Samuel.

“Shut up!” roared McIntyre suddenly. “I want the privilege of talking.” He walked to the door and looked out across the land, the sunny, steaming pasturage that began almost at his feet and ended with the gray-green of the distant mountains. When he turned around his mouth was trembling.

“Do you fellows love Wall Street?” he said hoarsely, “or wherever you do your dirty scheming —  — “ He paused. “I suppose you do. No critter gets so low that he doesn’t sort of love the place he’s worked, where he’s sweated out the best he’s had in him.”

Samuel watched him awkwardly. McIntyre wiped his forehead with a huge blue handkerchief, and continued:

“I reckon this rotten old devil had to have another million. I reckon we’re just a few of the poor he’s blotted out to buy a couple more carriages or something.” He waved his hand toward the door. “I built a house out there when I was seventeen, with these two hands. I took a wife there at twenty-one, added two wings, and with four mangy steers I started out. Forty summers I’ve saw the sun come up over those mountains and drop down red as blood in the evening, before the heat drifted off and the stars came out. I been happy in that house. My boy was born there and he died there, late one spring, in the hottest part of an afternoon like this. Then the wife and I lived there alone like we’d lived before, and sort of tried to have a home, after all, not a real home but nigh it — cause the boy always seemed around close, somehow, and we expected a lot of nights to see him runnin’ up the path to supper.” His voice was shaking so he could hardly speak and he turned again to the door, his gray eyes contracted.

“That’s my land out there,” he said, stretching out his arm, “my land, by God — It’s all I got in the world — and ever wanted.” He dashed his sleeve across his face, and his tone changed as he turned slowly and faced Samuel. “But I suppose it’s got to go when they want it — it’s got to go.”

Samuel had to talk. He felt that in a minute more he would lose his head. So he began, as level-voiced as he could — in the sort of tone he saved for disagreeable duties.

“It’s business, Mr. McIntyre,” he said. “It’s inside the law. Perhaps we couldn’t have bought out two or three of you at any price, but most of you did have a price. Progress demands some things —  — “

Never had he felt so inadequate, and it was with the greatest relief that he heard hoof-beats a few hundred yards away.

But at his words the grief in McIntyre’s eyes had changed to fury.

“You and your dirty gang of crooks!” he cried. “Not one of you has got an honest love for anything on God’s earth! You’re a herd of money-swine!”

Samuel rose and McIntyre took a step toward him.

“You long-winded dude. You got our land — take that for Peter Carhart!”

He swung from the shoulder quick as lightning and down went Samuel in a heap. Dimly he heard steps in the doorway and knew that some one was holding McIntyre, but there was no need. The rancher had sunk down in his chair, and dropped his head in his hands.

Samuel’s brain was whirring. He realized that the fourth fist had hit him, and a great flood of emotion cried out that the law that had inexorably ruled his life was in motion again. In a half-daze he got up and strode from the room.

The next ten minutes were perhaps the hardest of his life. People talk of the courage of convictions, but in actual life a man’s duty to his family may make a rigid corpse seem a selfish indulgence of his own righteousness. Samuel thought mostly of his family, yet he never really wavered. That jolt had brought him to.

When he came back in the room there were a log of worried faces waiting for him, but he didn’t waste any time explaining.

“Gentlemen,” he said, “Mr. McIntyre has been kind enough to convince me that in this matter you are absolutely right and the Peter Carhart interests absolutely wrong. As far as I am concerned you can keep your ranches to the rest of your days.”

He pushed his way through an astounded gathering, and within a half-hour he had sent two telegrams that staggered the operator into complete unfitness for business; one was to Hamil in San Antonio; one was to Peter Carhart in New York.

Samuel didn’t sleep much that night. He knew that for the first time in his business career he had made a dismal, miserable failure. But some instinct in him, stronger than will, deeper than training, had forced him to do what would probably end his ambitions and his happiness. But it was done and it never occurred to him that he could have acted otherwise.

Next morning two telegrams were waiting for him. The first was from Hamil. It contained three words:

“You blamed idiot!”

The second was from New York:

“Deal off come to New York immediately Carhart.”

Within a week things had happened. Hamil quarrelled furiously and violently defended his scheme. He was summoned to New York and spent a bad half-hour on the carpet in Peter Carhart’s office. He broke with the Carhart interests in July, and in August Samuel Meredith, at thirty-five years old, was, to all intents, made Carhart’s partner. The fourth fist had done its work.

I suppose that there’s a caddish streak in every man that runs crosswise across his character and disposition and general outlook. With some men it’s secret and we never know it’s there until they strike us in the dark one night. But Samuel’s showed when it was in action, and the sight of it made people see red. He was rather lucky in that, because every time his little devil came up it met a reception that sent it scurrying down below in a sickly, feeble condition. It was the same devil, the same streak that made him order Gilly’s friends off the bed, that made him go inside Marjorie’s house.

If you could run your hand along Samuel Meredith’s jaw you’d feel a lump. He admits he’s never been sure which fist left it there, but he wouldn’t lose it for anything. He says there’s no cad like an old cad, and that sometimes just before making a decision, it’s a great help to stroke his chin. The reporters call it a nervous characteristic, but it’s not that. It’s so he can feel again the gorgeous clarity, the lightning sanity of those four fists.

TALES FROM THE JAZZ AGE

First published in 1922, this collection of eleven short stories is divided into three separate parts, according to subject matter.  The collection includes one of Fitzgerald’s best known works The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.  Many of the stories were published earlier in various magazines.

The 2008 film adaptation, which sparked new interest in Fitzgerald’s short stories

CONTENTS

MY LAST FLAPPERS

THE JELLY-BEAN.

THE CAMEL’S BACK

MAY DAY

PORCELAIN AND PINK

FANTASIES

THE DIAMOND AS BIG AS THE RITZ

THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON

TARQUIN OF CHEAPSIDE

“O RUSSET WITCH!”

UNCLASSIFIED MASTERPIECES

THE LEES OF HAPPINESS

MR. ICKY

JEMINA, THE MOUNTAIN GIRL

Fitzgerald in the Newman school football team

INTRODUCTIONS

MY LAST FLAPPERS

THE JELLY-BEAN

This is a Southern story, with the scene laid in the small Lily of Tarleton, Georgia. I have a profound affection for Tarleton, but somehow whenever I write a story about it I receive letters from all over the South denouncing me in no uncertain terms. “The Jelly-Bean,” published in “The Metropolitan,” drew its full share of these admonitory notes.

It was written under strange circumstances shortly after my first novel was published, and, moreover, it was the first story in which I had a collaborator. For, finding that I was unable to manage the crap-shooting episode, I turned it over to my wife, who, as a Southern girl, was presumably an expert on the technique and terminology of that great sectional pastime.

THE CAMEL’S BACK

I suppose that of all the stories I have ever written this one cost me the least travail and perhaps gave me the most amusement. As to the labor involved, it was written during one day in the city of New Orleans, with the express purpose of buying a platinum and diamond wrist watch which cost six hundred dollars. I began it at seven in the morning and finished it at two o’clock the same night. It was published in the “Saturday Evening Post” in 1920, and later included in the O. Henry Memorial Collection for the same year. I like it least of all the stories in this volume.

My amusement was derived from the fact that the camel part of the story is literally true; in fact, I have a standing engagement with the gentleman involved to attend the next fancy-dress party to which we are mutually invited, attired as the latter part of the camel — this as a sort of atonement for being his historian.

MAY DAY.

This somewhat unpleasant tale, published as a novelette in the “Smart Set” in July, 1920, relates a series of events which took place in the spring of the previous year. Each of the three events made a great impression upon me. In life they were unrelated, except by the general hysteria of that spring which inaugurated the Age of Jazz, but in my story I have tried, unsuccessfully I fear, to weave them into a pattern — a pattern which would give the effect of those months in New York as they appeared to at least one member of what was then the younger generation.

PORCELAIN AND PINK.

“And do you write for any other magazines?” inquired the young lady.

“Oh, yes,” I assured her. “I’ve had some stories and plays in the

‘Smart Set,’ for instance —  — “

The young lady shivered.

“The ‘Smart Set’!” she exclaimed. “How can you? Why, they publish stuff about girls in blue bathtubs, and silly things like that.”

And I had the magnificent joy of telling her that she was referring to

“Porcelain and Pink,” which had appeared there several months before.

FANTASIES

THE DIAMOND AS BIG AS THE RITZ.

These next stories are written in what, were I of imposing stature, I should call my “second manner.” “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz,” which appeared last summer in the “Smart Set,” was designed utterly for my own amusement. I was in that familiar mood characterized by a perfect craving for luxury, and the story began as an attempt to feed that craving on imaginary foods.

One well-known critic has been pleased to like this extravaganza better than anything I have written. Personally I prefer “The Offshore Pirate.” But, to tamper slightly with Lincoln: If you like this sort of thing, this, possibly, is the sort of thing you’ll like.

THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON.

This story was inspired by a remark of Mark Twain’s to the effect that it was a pity that the best part of life came at the beginning and the worst part at the end. By trying the experiment upon only one man in a perfectly normal world I have scarcely given his idea a fair trial. Several weeks after completing it, I discovered an almost identical plot in Samuel Butler’s “Note-books.”

The story was published in “Collier’s” last summer and provoked this startling letter from an anonymous admirer in Cincinnati:

“Sir —

I have read the story Benjamin Button in Colliers and I wish to say that as a short story writer you would make a good lunatic I have seen many peices of cheese in my life but of all the peices of cheese I have ever seen you are the biggest peice. I hate to waste a peice of stationary on you but I will.”

TARQUIN OF CHEAPSIDE.

Written almost six years ago, this story is a product of undergraduate days at Princeton. Considerably revised, it was published in the “Smart Set” in 1921. At the time of its conception I had but one idea — to be a poet — and the fact that I was interested in the ring of every phrase, that I dreaded the obvious in prose if not in plot, shows throughout. Probably the peculiar affection I feel for it depends more upon its age than upon any intrinsic merit.

“O RUSSET WITCH!”

When this was written I had just completed the first draft of my second novel, and a natural reaction made me revel in a story wherein none of the characters need be taken seriously. And I’m afraid that I was somewhat carried away by the feeling that there was no ordered scheme to which I must conform. After due consideration, however, I have decided to let it stand as it is, although the reader may find himself somewhat puzzled at the time element. I had best say that however the years may have dealt with Merlin Grainger, I myself was thinking always in the present. It was published in the “Metropolitan.”

UNCLASSIFIED MASTERPIECES

THE LEES OF HAPPINESS.

Of this story I can say that it came to me in an irresistible form, crying to be written. It will be accused perhaps of being a mere piece of sentimentality, but, as I saw it, it was a great deal more. If, therefore, it lacks the ring of sincerity, or even, of tragedy, the fault rests not with the theme but with my handling of it.

It appeared in the “Chicago Tribune,” and later obtained, I believe, the quadruple gold laurel leaf or some such encomium from one of the anthologists who at present swarm among us. The gentleman I refer to runs as a rule to stark melodramas with a volcano or the ghost of John Paul Jones in the role of Nemesis, melodramas carefully disguised by early paragraphs in Jamesian manner which hint dark and subtle complexities to follow. On this order:

“The case of Shaw McPhee, curiously enough, had no hearing on the almost incredible attitude of Martin Sulo. This is parenthetical and, to at least three observers, whose names for the present I must conceal, it seems improbable, etc., etc., etc.,” until the poor rat of fiction is at last forced out into the open and the melodrama begins.

MR. ICKY

This has the distinction of being the only magazine piece ever written in a New York hotel. The business was done in a bedroom in the Knickerbocker, and shortly afterward that memorable hostelry closed its doors forever.

When a fitting period of mourning had elapsed it was published in the

“Smart Set.”

JEMINA.

Written, like “Tarquin of Cheapside,” while I was at Princeton, this sketch was published years later in “Vanity Fair.” For its technique I must apologize to Mr. Stephen Leacock.

I have laughed over it a great deal, especially when I first wrote it, but I can laugh over it no longer. Still, as other people tell me it is amusing, I include it here. It seems to me worth preserving a few years — at least until the ennui of changing fashions suppresses me, my books, and it together.

With due apologies for this impossible Table of Contents, I tender these tales of the Jazz Age into the hands of those who read as they run and run as they read.

MY LAST FLAPPERS

THE JELLY-BEAN.

Jim Powell was a Jelly-bean. Much as I desire to make him an appealing character, I feel that it would be unscrupulous to deceive you on that point. He was a bred-in-the-bone, dyed-in-the-wool, ninety-nine three-quarters per cent Jelly-bean and he grew lazily all during Jelly-bean season, which is every season, down in the land of the Jelly-beans well below the Mason-Dixon line.

Now if you call a Memphis man a Jelly-bean he will quite possibly pull a long sinewy rope from his hip pocket and hang you to a convenient telegraph-pole. If you Call a New Orleans man a Jelly-bean he will probably grin and ask you who is taking your girl to the Mardi Gras ball. The particular Jelly-bean patch which produced the protagonist of this history lies somewhere between the two — a little city of forty thousand that has dozed sleepily for forty thousand years in southern Georgia occasionally stirring in its slumbers and muttering something about a war that took place sometime, somewhere, and that everyone else has forgotten long ago.

Jim was a Jelly-bean. I write that again because it has such a pleasant sound — rather like the beginning of a fairy story — as if Jim were nice. It somehow gives me a picture of him with a round, appetizing face and all sort of leaves and vegetables growing out of his cap. But Jim was long and thin and bent at the waist from stooping over pool-tables, and he was what might have been known in the indiscriminating North as a corner loafer. “Jelly-bean” is the name throughout the undissolved Confederacy for one who spends his life conjugating the verb to idle in the first person singular — I am idling, I have idled, I will idle.

Jim was born in a white house on a green corner, It had four weather-beaten pillars in front and a great amount of lattice-work in the rear that made a cheerful criss-cross background for a flowery sun-drenched lawn. Originally the dwellers in the white house had owned the ground next door and next door to that and next door to that, but this had been so long ago that even Jim’s father, scarcely remembered it. He had, in fact, thought it a matter of so little moment that when he was dying from a pistol wound got in a brawl he neglected even to tell little Jim, who was five years old and miserably frightened. The white house became a boarding-house run by a tight-lipped lady from Macon, whom Jim called Aunt Mamie and detested with all his soul.

He became fifteen, went to high school, wore his hair in black snarls, and was afraid of girls. He hated his home where four women and one old man prolonged an interminable chatter from summer to summer about what lots the Powell place had originally included and what sorts of flowers would be out next. Sometimes the parents of little girls in town, remembering Jim’s mother and fancying a resemblance in the dark eyes and hair, invited him to parties, but parties made him shy and he much preferred sitting on a disconnected axle in Tilly’s Garage, rolling the bones or exploring his mouth endlessly with a long straw. For pocket money, he picked up odd jobs, and it was due to this that he stopped going to parties. At his third party little Marjorie Haight had whispered indiscreetly and within hearing distance that he was a boy who brought the groceries sometimes. So instead of the two-step and polka, Jim had learned to throw, any number he desired on the dice and had listened to spicy tales of all the shootings that had occurred in the surrounding country during the past fifty years.

He became eighteen. The war broke out and he enlisted as a gob and polished brass in the Charleston Navy-yard for a year. Then, by way of variety, he went North and polished brass in the Brooklyn Navy-yard for a year.

When the war was over he came home, He was twenty-one, has trousers were too short and too tight. His buttoned shoes were long and narrow. His tie was an alarming conspiracy of purple and pink marvellously scrolled, and over it were two blue eyes faded like a piece of very good old cloth, long exposed to the sun.

In the twilight of one April evening when a soft gray had drifted down along the cottonfields and over the sultry town, he was a vague figure leaning against a board fence, whistling and gazing at the moon’s rim above the lights of Jackson Street. His mind was working persistently on a problem that had held his attention for an hour. The Jelly-bean had been invited to a party.

Back in the days when all the boys had detested all the girls, Clark Darrow and Jim had sat side by side in school. But, while Jim’s social aspirations had died in the oily air of the garage, Clark had alternately fallen in and out of love, gone to college, taken to drink, given it up, and, in short, become one of the best beaux of the town. Nevertheless Clark and Jim had retained a friendship that, though casual, was perfectly definite. That afternoon Clark’s ancient Ford had slowed up beside Jim, who was on the sidewalk and, out of a clear sky, Clark invited him to a party at the country club. The impulse that made him do this was no stranger than the impulse which made Jim accept. The latter was probably an unconscious ennui, a half-frightened sense of adventure. And now Jim was soberly thinking it over.

He began to sing, drumming his long foot idly on a stone block in the sidewalk till it wobbled up and down in time to the low throaty tune:

”One smile from Home in Jelly-bean town,

Lives Jeanne, the Jelly-bean Queen.

She loves her dice and treats ‘em nice;

No dice would treat her mean.”

He broke off and agitated the sidewalk to a bumpy gallop.

“Daggone!” he muttered, half aloud. They would all be there — the old crowd, the crowd to which, by right of the white house, sold long since, and the portrait of the officer in gray over the mantel, Jim should have belonged. But that crowd had grown up together into a tight little set as gradually as the girls’ dresses had lengthened inch by inch, as definitely as the boys’ trousers had dropped suddenly to their ankles. And to that society of first names and dead puppy loves Jim was an outsider — a running mate of poor whites. Most of the men knew him, condescendingly; he tipped his hat to three or four girls. That was all.

When the dusk had thickened into a blue setting for the moon, he walked through the hot, pleasantly pungent town to Jackson Street. The stores were closing and the last shoppers were drifting homeward, as if borne on the dreamy revolution of a slow merry-go-round. A street-fair farther down a brilliant alley of varicolored booths and contributed a blend of music to the night — an oriental dance on a calliope, a melancholy bugle in front of a freak show, a cheerful rendition of “Back Home in Tennessee” on a hand-organ.

The Jelly-bean stopped in a store and bought a collar. Then he sauntered along toward Soda Sam’s, where he found the usual three or four cars of a summer evening parked in front and the little darkies running back and forth with sundaes and lemonades.

“Hello, Jim.”

It was a voice at his elbow — Joe Ewing sitting in an automobile with

Marylyn Wade. Nancy Lamar and a strange man were in the back seat.

The Jelly-bean tipped his hat quickly.

“Hi Ben — “ then, after an almost imperceptible pause — “How y’ all?”

Passing, he ambled on toward the garage where he had a room up-stairs. His “How y’all” had been said to Nancy Lamar, to whom he had not spoken in fifteen years.

Nancy had a mouth like a remembered kiss and shadowy eyes and blue-black hair inherited from her mother who had been born in Budapest. Jim passed her often on the street, walking small-boy fashion with her hands in her pockets and he knew that with her inseparable Sally Carrol Hopper she had left a trail of broken hearts from Atlanta to New Orleans.

For a few fleeting moments Jim wished he could dance. Then he laughed and as he reached his door began to sing softly to himself:

”Her Jelly Roll can twist your soul,

Her eyes are big and brown,

She’s the Queen of the Queens of the Jelly-beans —

My Jeanne of Jelly-bean Town.”

II

At nine-thirty, Jim and Clark met in front of Soda Sam’s and started for the Country Club in Clark’s Ford. “Jim,” asked Clark casually, as they rattled through the jasmine-scented night, “how do you keep alive?”

The Jelly-bean paused, considered.

“Well,” he said finally, “I got a room over Tilly’s garage. I help him some with the cars in the afternoon an’ he gives it to me free. Sometimes I drive one of his taxies and pick up a little thataway. I get fed up doin’ that regular though.”

“That all?”

“Well, when there’s a lot of work I help him by the day — Saturdays usually — and then there’s one main source of revenue I don’t generally mention. Maybe you don’t recollect I’m about the champion crap-shooter of this town. They make me shoot from a cup now because once I get the feel of a pair of dice they just roll for me.”

Clark grinned appreciatively,

“I never could learn to set ‘em so’s they’d do what I wanted. Wish you’d shoot with Nancy Lamar some day and take all her money away from her. She will roll ‘em with the boys and she loses more than her daddy can afford to give her. I happen to know she sold a good ring last month to pay a debt.”

The Jelly-bean was noncommittal.

“The white house on Elm Street still belong to you?”

Jim shook his head.

“Sold. Got a pretty good price, seein’ it wasn’t in a good part of town no more. Lawyer told me to put it into Liberty bonds. But Aunt Mamie got so she didn’t have no sense, so it takes all the interest to keep her up at Great Farms Sanitarium.

“Hm.”

“I got an old uncle up-state an’ I reckin I kin go up there if ever I get sure enough pore. Nice farm, but not enough niggers around to work it. He’s asked me to come up and help him, but I don’t guess I’d take much to it. Too doggone lonesome — “ He broke off suddenly. “Clark, I want to tell you I’m much obliged to you for askin’ me out, but I’d be a lot happier if you’d just stop the car right here an’ let me walk back into town.”

“Shucks!” Clark grunted. “Do you good to step out. You don’t have to dance — just get out there on the floor and shake.”

“Hold on,” exclaimed. Jim uneasily, “Don’t you go leadin’ me up to any girls and leavin’ me there so I’ll have to dance with ‘em.”

Clark laughed.

“‘Cause,” continued Jim desperately, “without you swear you won’t do that I’m agoin’ to get out right here an’ my good legs goin’ carry me back to Jackson street.”

They agreed after some argument that Jim, unmolested by females, was to view the spectacle from a secluded settee in the corner where Clark would join him whenever he wasn’t dancing.

So ten o’clock found the Jelly-bean with his legs crossed and his arms conservatively folded, trying to look casually at home and politely uninterested in the dancers. At heart he was torn between overwhelming self-consciousness and an intense curiosity as to all that went on around him. He saw the girls emerge one by one from the dressing-room, stretching and pluming themselves like bright birds, smiling over their powdered shoulders at the chaperones, casting a quick glance around to take in the room and, simultaneously, the room’s reaction to their entrance — and then, again like birds, alighting and nestling in the sober arms of their waiting escorts. Sally Carrol Hopper, blonde and lazy-eyed, appeared clad in her favorite pink and blinking like an awakened rose. Marjorie Haight, Marylyn Wade, Harriet Cary, all the girls he had seen loitering down Jackson Street by noon, now, curled and brilliantined and delicately tinted for the overhead lights, were miraculously strange Dresden figures of pink and blue and red and gold, fresh from the shop and not yet fully dried.

He had been there half an hour, totally uncheered by Clark’s jovial visits which were each one accompanied by a “Hello, old boy, how you making out?” and a slap at his knee. A dozen males had spoken to him or stopped for a moment beside him, but he knew that they were each one surprised at finding him there and fancied that one or two were even slightly resentful. But at half past ten his embarrassment suddenly left him and a pull of breathless interest took him completely out of himself — Nancy Lamar had come out of the dressing-room.

She was dressed in yellow organdie, a costume of a hundred cool corners, with three tiers of ruffles and a big bow in back until she shed black and yellow around her in a sort of phosphorescent lustre. The Jelly-bean’s eyes opened wide and a lump arose in his throat. For she stood beside the door until her partner hurried up. Jim recognized him as the stranger who had been with her in Joe Ewing’s car that afternoon. He saw her set her arms akimbo and say something in a low voice, and laugh. The man laughed too and Jim experienced the quick pang of a weird new kind of pain. Some ray had passed between the pair, a shaft of beauty from that sun that had warmed him a moment since. The Jelly-bean felt suddenly like a weed in a shadow.

A minute later Clark approached him, bright-eyed and glowing.

“Hi, old man” he cried with some lack of originality. “How you making out?”

Jim replied that he was making out as well as could be expected.

“You come along with me,” commanded Clark. “I’ve got something that’ll put an edge on the evening.”

Jim followed him awkwardly across the floor and up the stairs to the locker-room where Clark produced a flask of nameless yellow liquid.

“Good old corn.”

Ginger ale arrived on a tray. Such potent nectar as “good old corn” needed some disguise beyond seltzer.

“Say, boy,” exclaimed Clark breathlessly, “doesn’t Nancy Lamar look beautiful?”

Jim nodded.

“Mighty beautiful,” he agreed.

“She’s all dolled up to a fare-you-well to-night,” continued Clark.

“Notice that fellow she’s with?”

“Big fella? White pants?”

“Yeah. Well, that’s Ogden Merritt from Savannah. Old man Merritt makes the Merritt safety razors. This fella’s crazy about her. Been chasing, after her all year.

“She’s a wild baby,” continued Clark, “but I like her. So does everybody. But she sure does do crazy stunts. She usually gets out alive, but she’s got scars all over her reputation from one thing or another she’s done.”

“That so?” Jim passed over his glass. “That’s good corn.”

“Not so bad. Oh, she’s a wild one. Shoot craps, say, boy! And she do like her high-balls. Promised I’d give her one later on.”

“She in love with this — Merritt?”

“Damned if I know. Seems like all the best girls around here marry fellas and go off somewhere.”

He poured himself one more drink and carefully corked the bottle.

“Listen, Jim, I got to go dance and I’d be much obliged if you just stick this corn right on your hip as long as you’re not dancing. If a man notices I’ve had a drink he’ll come up and ask me and before I know it it’s all gone and somebody else is having my good time.”

So Nancy Lamar was going to marry. This toast of a town was to become the private property of an individual in white trousers — and all because white trousers’ father had made a better razor than his neighbor. As they descended the stairs Jim found the idea inexplicably depressing. For the first time in his life he felt a vague and romantic yearning. A picture of her began to form in his imagination — Nancy walking boylike and debonnaire along the street, taking an orange as tithe from a worshipful fruit-dealer, charging a dope on a mythical account, at Soda Sam’s, assembling a convoy of beaux and then driving off in triumphal state for an afternoon of splashing and singing.

The Jelly-bean walked out on the porch to a deserted corner, dark between the moon on the lawn and the single lighted door of the ballroom. There he found a chair and, lighting a cigarette, drifted into the thoughtless reverie that was his usual mood. Yet now it was a reverie made sensuous by the night and by the hot smell of damp powder puffs, tucked in the fronts of low dresses and distilling a thousand rich scents, to float out through the open door. The music itself, blurred by a loud trombone, became hot and shadowy, a languorous overtone to the scraping of many shoes and slippers.

Suddenly the square of yellow light that fell through the door was obscured by a dark figure. A girl had come out of the dressing-room and was standing on the porch not more than ten feet away. Jim heard a low-breathed “doggone” and then she turned and saw him. It was Nancy Lamar.

Jim rose to his feet.

“Howdy?”

“Hello — “ she paused, hesitated and then approached. “Oh, it’s — Jim

Powell.”

He bowed slightly, tried to think of a casual remark.

“Do you suppose,” she began quickly, “I mean — do you know anything about gum?”

“What?” “I’ve got gum on my shoe. Some utter ass left his or her gum on the floor and of course I stepped in it.”

Jim blushed, inappropriately.

“Do you know how to get it off?” she demanded petulantly. “I’ve tried a knife. I’ve tried every damn thing in the dressing-room. I’ve tried soap and water — and even perfume and I’ve ruined my powder-puff trying to make it stick to that.”

Jim considered the question in some agitation.

“Why — I think maybe gasolene — “

The words had scarcely left his lips when she grasped his hand and pulled him at a run off the low veranda, over a flower bed and at a gallop toward a group of cars parked in the moonlight by the first hole of the golf course.

“Turn on the gasolene,” she commanded breathlessly.

“What?”

“For the gum of course. I’ve got to get it off. I can’t dance with gum on.”

Obediently Jim turned to the cars and began inspecting them with a view to obtaining the desired solvent. Had she demanded a cylinder he would have done his best to wrench one out.

“Here,” he said after a moment’s search. “‘Here’s one that’s easy. Got a handkerchief?”

“It’s up-stairs wet. I used it for the soap and water.”

Jim laboriously explored his pockets.

“Don’t believe I got one either.”

“Doggone it! Well, we can turn it on and let it run on the ground.”

He turned the spout; a dripping began.

“More!”

He turned it on fuller. The dripping became a flow and formed an oily pool that glistened brightly, reflecting a dozen tremulous moons on its quivering bosom.

“Ah,” she sighed contentedly, “let it all out. The only thing to do is to wade in it.”

In desperation he turned on the tap full and the pool suddenly widened sending tiny rivers and trickles in all directions.

“That’s fine. That’s something like.”

Raising her skirts she stepped gracefully in.

“I know this’ll take it off,” she murmured.

Jim smiled.

“There’s lots more cars.”

She stepped daintily out of the gasolene and began scraping her slippers, side and bottom, on the running-board of the automobile. The jelly-bean contained himself no longer. He bent double with explosive laughter and after a second she joined in.

“You’re here with Clark Darrow, aren’t you?” she asked as they walked back toward the veranda.

“Yes.”

“You know where he is now?”

“Out dancin’, I reckin.”

“The deuce. He promised me a highball.”

“Well,” said Jim, “I guess that’ll be all right. I got his bottle right here in my pocket.”

She smiled at him radiantly.

“I guess maybe you’ll need ginger ale though,” he added.

“Not me. Just the bottle.”

“Sure enough?”

She laughed scornfully.

“Try me. I can drink anything any man can. Let’s sit down.”

She perched herself on the side of a table and he dropped into one of the wicker chairs beside her. Taking out the cork she held the flask to her lips and took a long drink. He watched her fascinated.

“Like it?”

She shook her head breathlessly.

“No, but I like the way it makes me feel. I think most people are that way.”

Jim agreed.

“My daddy liked it too well. It got him.”

“American men,” said Nancy gravely, “don’t know how to drink.”

“What?” Jim was startled.

“In fact,” she went on carelessly, “they don’t know how to do anything very well. The one thing I regret in my life is that I wasn’t born in England.”

“In England?”

“Yes. It’s the one regret of my life that I wasn’t.”

“Do you like it over there?” “Yes. Immensely. I’ve never been there in person, but I’ve met a lot of Englishmen who were over here in the army, Oxford and Cambridge men — you know, that’s like Sewanee and University of Georgia are here — and of course I’ve read a lot of English novels.”

Jim was interested, amazed.

“D’ you ever hear of Lady Diana Manner?” she asked earnestly.

No, Jim had not.

“Well, she’s what I’d like to be. Dark, you know, like me, and wild as sin. She’s the girl who rode her horse up the steps of some cathedral or church or something and all the novelists made their heroines do it afterwards.”

Jim nodded politely. He was out of his depths.

“Pass the bottle,” suggested Nancy. “I’m going to take another little one. A little drink wouldn’t hurt a baby.

“You see,” she continued, again breathless after a draught. “People over there have style, Nobody has style here. I mean the boys here aren’t really worth dressing up for or doing sensational things for. Don’t you know?”

“I suppose so — I mean I suppose not,” murmured Jim.

“And I’d like to do ‘em an’ all. I’m really the only girl in town that has style.”

She stretched, out her arms and yawned pleasantly.

“Pretty evening.”

“Sure is,” agreed Jim.

“Like to have boat” she suggested dreamily. “Like to sail out on a silver lake, say the Thames, for instance. Have champagne and caviare sandwiches along. Have about eight people. And one of the men would jump overboard to amuse the party, and get drowned like a man did with Lady Diana Manners once.”

“Did he do it to please her?”

“Didn’t mean drown himself to please her. He just meant to jump overboard and make everybody laugh.”

“I reckin they just died laughin’ when he drowned.”

“Oh, I suppose they laughed a little,” she admitted. “I imagine she did, anyway. She’s pretty hard, I guess — like I am.”

“You hard?”

“Like nails.” She yawned again and added, “Give me a little more from that bottle.”

Jim hesitated but she held out her hand defiantly, “Don’t treat me like a girl;” she warned him. “I’m not like any girl you ever saw,” She considered. “Still, perhaps you’re right. You got — you got old head on young shoulders.”

She jumped to her feet and moved toward the door. The Jelly-bean rose also.

“Good-bye,” she said politely, “good-bye. Thanks, Jelly-bean.”

Then she stepped inside and left him wide-eyed upon the porch.

III

At twelve o’clock a procession of cloaks issued single file from the women’s dressing-room and, each one pairing with a coated beau like dancers meeting in a cotillion figure, drifted through the door with sleepy happy laughter — through the door into the dark where autos backed and snorted and parties called to one another and gathered around the water-cooler.

Jim, sitting in his corner, rose to look for Clark. They had met at eleven; then Clark had gone in to dance. So, seeking him, Jim wandered into the soft-drink stand that had once been a bar. The room was deserted except for a sleepy negro dozing behind the counter and two boys lazily fingering a pair of dice at one of the tables. Jim was about to leave when he saw Clark coming in. At the same moment Clark looked up.

“Hi, Jim” he commanded. “C’mon over and help us with this bottle. I guess there’s not much left, but there’s one all around.”

Nancy, the man from Savannah, Marylyn Wade, and Joe Ewing were lolling and laughing in the doorway. Nancy caught Jim’s eye and winked at him humorously.

They drifted over to a table and arranging themselves around it waited for the waiter to bring ginger ale. Jim, faintly ill at ease, turned his eyes on Nancy, who had drifted into a nickel crap game with the two boys at the next table.

“Bring them over here,” suggested Clark.

Joe looked around.

“We don’t want to draw a crowd. It’s against club rules.

“Nobody’s around,” insisted Clark, “except Mr. Taylor. He’s walking up and down, like a wild-man trying find out who let all the gasolene out of his car.”

There was a general laugh.

“I bet a million Nancy got something on her shoe again. You can’t park when she’s around.”

“O Nancy, Mr. Taylor’s looking for you!”

Nancy’s cheeks were glowing with excitement over the game. “I haven’t seen his silly little flivver in two weeks.”

Jim felt a sudden silence. He turned and saw an individual of uncertain age standing in the doorway.

Clark’s voice punctuated the embarrassment.

“Won’t you join us Mr. Taylor?”

“Thanks.”

Mr. Taylor spread his unwelcome presence over a chair. “Have to, I guess. I’m waiting till they dig me up some gasolene. Somebody got funny with my car.”

His eyes narrowed and he looked quickly from one to the other. Jim wondered what he had heard from the doorway — tried to remember what had been said.

“I’m right to-night,” Nancy sang out, “and my four bits is in the ring.”

“Faded!” snapped Taylor suddenly.

“Why, Mr. Taylor, I didn’t know you shot craps!” Nancy was overjoyed to find that he had seated himself and instantly covered her bet. They had openly disliked each other since the night she had definitely discouraged a series of rather pointed advances.

“All right, babies, do it for your mamma. Just one little seven.” Nancy was cooing to the dice. She rattled them with a brave underhand flourish, and rolled them out on the table.

“Ah-h! I suspected it. And now again with the dollar up.”

Five passes to her credit found Taylor a bad loser. She was making it personal, and after each success Jim watched triumph flutter across her face. She was doubling with each throw — such luck could scarcely last. “Better go easy,” he cautioned her timidly.

“Ah, but watch this one,” she whispered. It was eight on the dice and she called her number.

“Little Ada, this time we’re going South.”

Ada from Decatur rolled over the table. Nancy was flushed and half-hysterical, but her luck was holding.

She drove the pot up and up, refusing to drag. Taylor was drumming with his fingers on the table but he was in to stay.

Then Nancy tried for a ten and lost the dice. Taylor seized them avidly. He shot in silence, and in the hush of excitement the clatter of one pass after another on the table was the only sound.

Now Nancy had the dice again, but her luck had broken. An hour passed. Back and forth it went. Taylor had been at it again — and again and again. They were even at last — Nancy lost her ultimate five dollars.

“Will you take my check,” she said quickly, “for fifty, and we’ll shoot it all?” Her voice was a little unsteady and her hand shook as she reached to the money.

Clark exchanged an uncertain but alarmed glance with Joe Ewing. Taylor shot again. He had Nancy’s check.

“How ‘bout another?” she said wildly. “Jes’ any bank’ll do — money everywhere as a matter of fact.”

Jim understood — the “good old corn” he had given her — the “good old corn” she had taken since. He wished he dared interfere — a girl of that age and position would hardly have two bank accounts. When the clock struck two he contained himself no longer.

“May I — can’t you let me roll ‘em for you?” he suggested, his low, lazy voice a little strained.

Suddenly sleepy and listless, Nancy flung the dice down before him.

“All right — old boy! As Lady Diana Manners says, ‘Shoot ‘em,

Jelly-bean’ — My luck’s gone.”

“Mr. Taylor,” said Jim, carelessly, “we’ll shoot for one of those there checks against the cash.”

Half an hour later Nancy swayed forward and clapped him on the back.

“Stole my luck, you did.” She was nodding her head sagely.

Jim swept up the last check and putting it with the others tore them into confetti and scattered them on the floor. Someone started singing and Nancy kicking her chair backward rose to her feet.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” she announced, “Ladies — that’s you Marylyn. I want to tell the world that Mr. Jim Powell, who is a well-known Jelly-bean of this city, is an exception to the great rule — ‘lucky in dice — unlucky in love.’ He’s lucky in dice, and as matter of fact I — I love him. Ladies and gentlemen, Nancy Lamar, famous dark-haired beauty often featured in the Herald as one the most popular members of younger set as other girls are often featured in this particular case; Wish to announce — wish to announce, anyway, Gentlemen — “ She tipped suddenly. Clark caught her and restored her balance.

“My error,” she laughed, “she — stoops to — stoops to — anyways — We’ll drink to Jelly-bean … Mr. Jim Powell, King of the Jelly-beans.”

And a few minutes later as Jim waited hat in hand for Clark in the darkness of that same corner of the porch where she had come searching for gasolene, she appeared suddenly beside him.

“Jelly-bean,” she said, “are you here, Jelly-bean? I think — “ and her slight unsteadiness seemed part of an enchanted dream — “I think you deserve one of my sweetest kisses for that, Jelly-bean.”

For an instant her arms were around his neck — her lips were pressed to his.

“I’m a wild part of the world, Jelly-bean, but you did me a good turn.”

Then she was gone, down the porch, over the cricket-loud lawn. Jim saw

Merritt come out the front door and say something to her angrily — saw

her laugh and, turning away, walk with averted eyes to his car.

Marylyn and Joe followed, singing a drowsy song about a Jazz baby.

Clark came out and joined Jim on the steps. “All pretty lit, I guess,” he yawned. “Merritt’s in a mean mood. He’s certainly off Nancy.”

Over east along the golf course a faint rug of gray spread itself across the feet of the night. The party in the car began to chant a chorus as the engine warmed up.

“Good-night everybody,” called Clark.

“Good-night, Clark.”

“Good-night.”

There was a pause, and then a soft, happy voice added,

“Good-night, Jelly-bean.”

The car drove off to a burst of singing. A rooster on a farm across the way took up a solitary mournful crow, and behind them, a last negro waiter turned out the porch light, Jim and Clark strolled over toward the Ford, their shoes crunching raucously on the gravel drive.

“Oh boy!” sighed Clark softly, “how you can set those dice!”

It was still too dark for him to see the flush on Jim’s thin cheeks — or to know that it was a flush of unfamiliar shame.

IV

Over Tilly’s garage a bleak room echoed all day to the rumble and snorting down-stairs and the singing of the negro washers as they turned the hose on the cars outside. It was a cheerless square of a room, punctuated with a bed and a battered table on which lay half a dozen books — Joe Miller’s “Slow Train thru Arkansas,” “Lucille,” in an old edition very much annotated in an old-fashioned hand; “The Eyes of the World,” by Harold Bell Wright, and an ancient prayer-book of the Church of England with the name Alice Powell and the date 1831 written on the fly-leaf.

The East, gray when Jelly-bean entered the garage, became a rich and vivid blue as he turned on his solitary electric light. He snapped it out again, and going to the window rested his elbows on the sill and stared into the deepening morning. With the awakening of his emotions, his first perception was a sense of futility, a dull ache at the utter grayness of his life. A wall had sprung up suddenly around him hedging him in, a wall as definite and tangible as the white wall of his bare room. And with his perception of this wall all that had been the romance of his existence, the casualness, the light-hearted improvidence, the miraculous open-handedness of life faded out. The Jelly-bean strolling up Jackson Street humming a lazy song, known at every shop and street stand, cropful of easy greeting and local wit, sad sometimes for only the sake of sadness and the flight of time — that Jelly-bean was suddenly vanished. The very name was a reproach, a triviality. With a flood of insight he knew that Merritt must despise him, that even Nancy’s kiss in the dawn would have awakened not jealousy but only a contempt for Nancy’s so lowering herself. And on his part the Jelly-bean had used for her a dingy subterfuge learned from the garage. He had been her moral laundry; the stains were his.

As the gray became blue, brightened and filled the room, he crossed to his bed and threw himself down on it, gripping the edges fiercely.

“I love her,” he cried aloud, “God!”

As he said this something gave way within him like a lump melting in his throat. The air cleared and became radiant with dawn, and turning over on his face he began to sob dully into the pillow.

In the sunshine of three o’clock Clark Darrow chugging painfully along Jackson Street was hailed by the Jelly-bean, who stood on the curb with his fingers in his vest pockets.

“Hi!” called Clark, bringing his Ford to an astonishing stop alongside. “Just get up?”

The Jelly-bean shook his head.

“Never did go to bed. Felt sorta restless, so I took a long walk this morning out in the country. Just got into town this minute.”

“Should think you would feel restless. I been feeling thataway all day — “

“I’m thinkin’ of leavin’ town” continued the Jelly-bean, absorbed by his own thoughts. “Been thinkin’ of goin’ up on the farm, and takin’ a little that work off Uncle Dun. Reckin I been bummin’ too long.”

Clark was silent and the Jelly-bean continued:

“I reckin maybe after Aunt Mamie dies I could sink that money of mine in the farm and make somethin’ out of it. All my people originally came from that part up there. Had a big place.”

Clark looked at him curiously.

“That’s funny,” he said. “This — this sort of affected me the same way.”

The Jelly-bean hesitated.

“I don’t know,” he began slowly, “somethin’ about — about that girl last night talkin’ about a lady named Diana Manners — an English lady, sorta got me thinkin’!” He drew himself up and looked oddly at Clark, “I had a family once,” he said defiantly.

Clark nodded.

“I know.”

“And I’m the last of ‘em,” continued the Jelly-bean his voice rising slightly, “and I ain’t worth shucks. Name they call me by means jelly — weak and wobbly like. People who weren’t nothin’ when my folks was a lot turn up their noses when they pass me on the street.”

Again Clark was silent.

“So I’m through, I’m goin’ to-day. And when I come back to this town it’s going to be like a gentleman.”

Clark took out his handkerchief and wiped his damp brow.

“Reckon you’re not the only one it shook up,” he admitted gloomily. “All this thing of girls going round like they do is going to stop right quick. Too bad, too, but everybody’ll have to see it thataway.”

“Do you mean,” demanded Jim in surprise, “that all that’s leaked out?”

“Leaked out? How on earth could they keep it secret. It’ll be announced in the papers to-night. Doctor Lamar’s got to save his name somehow.”

Jim put his hands on the sides of the car and tightened his long fingers on the metal.

“Do you mean Taylor investigated those checks?”

It was Clark’s turn to be surprised.

“Haven’t you heard what happened?”

Jim’s startled eyes were answer enough.

“Why,” announced Clark dramatically, “those four got another bottle of corn, got tight and decided to shock the town — so Nancy and that fella Merritt were married in Rockville at seven o’clock this morning.”

A tiny indentation appeared in the metal under the Jelly-bean’s fingers.

“Married?”

“Sure enough. Nancy sobered up and rushed back into town, crying and frightened to death — claimed it’d all been a mistake. First Doctor Lamar went wild and was going to kill Merritt, but finally they got it patched up some way, and Nancy and Merritt went to Savannah on the two-thirty train.”

Jim closed his eyes and with an effort overcame a sudden sickness.

“It’s too bad,” said Clark philosophically. “I don’t mean the wedding — reckon that’s all right, though I don’t guess Nancy cared a darn about him. But it’s a crime for a nice girl like that to hurt her family that way.”

The Jelly-bean let go the car and turned away. Again something was going on inside him, some inexplicable but almost chemical change.

“Where you going?” asked Clark.

The Jelly-bean turned and looked dully back over his shoulder.

“Got to go,” he muttered. “Been up too long; feelin’ right sick.”

“Oh.”

* * * * *

The street was hot at three and hotter still at four, the April dust seeming to enmesh the sun and give it forth again as a world-old joke forever played on an eternity of afternoons. But at half past four a first layer of quiet fell and the shades lengthened under the awnings and heavy foliaged trees. In this heat nothing mattered. All life was weather, a waiting through the hot where events had no significance for the cool that was soft and caressing like a woman’s hand on a tired forehead. Down in Georgia there is a feeling — perhaps inarticulate — that this is the greatest wisdom of the South — so after a while the Jelly-bean turned into a poolhall on Jackson Street where he was sure to find a congenial crowd who would make all the old jokes — the ones he knew.

THE CAMEL’S BACK

The glazed eye of the tired reader resting for a second on the above title will presume it to be merely metaphorical. Stories about the cup and the lip and the bad penny and the new broom rarely have anything, to do with cups or lips or pennies or brooms. This story Is the exception. It has to do with a material, visible and large-as-life camel’s back.

Starting from the neck we shall work toward the tail. I want you to meet Mr. Perry Parkhurst, twenty-eight, lawyer, native of Toledo. Perry has nice teeth, a Harvard diploma, parts his hair in the middle. You have met him before — in Cleveland, Portland, St. Paul, Indianapolis, Kansas City, and so forth. Baker Brothers, New York, pause on their semi-annual trip through the West to clothe him; Montmorency & Co. dispatch a young man post-haste every three months to see that he has the correct number of little punctures on his shoes. He has a domestic roadster now, will have a French roadster if he lives long enough, and doubtless a Chinese tank if it comes into fashion. He looks like the advertisement of the young man rubbing his sunset-colored chest with liniment and goes East every other year to his class reunion.

I want you to meet his Love. Her name is Betty Medill, and she would take well in the movies. Her father gives her three hundred a month to dress on, and she has tawny eyes and hair and feather fans of five colors. I shall also introduce her father, Cyrus Medill. Though he is to all appearances flesh and blood, he is, strange to say, commonly known in Toledo as the Aluminum Man. But when he sits in his club window with two or three Iron Men, and the White Pine Man, and the Brass Man, they look very much as you and I do, only more so, if you know what I mean.

Now during the Christmas holidays of 1919 there took place in Toledo, counting only the people with the italicized the, forty-one dinner parties, sixteen dances, six luncheons, male and female, twelve teas, four stag dinners, two weddings, and thirteen bridge parties. It was the cumulative effect of all this that moved Perry Parkhurst on the twenty-ninth day of December to a decision.

This Medill girl would marry him and she wouldn’t marry him. She was having such a good time that she hated to take such a definite step. Meanwhile, their secret engagement had got so long that it seemed as if any day it might break off of its own weight. A little man named Warburton, who knew it all, persuaded Perry to superman her, to get a marriage license and go up to the Medill house and tell her she’d have to marry him at once or call it off forever. So he presented himself, his heart, his license, and his ultimatum, and within five minutes they were in the midst of a violent quarrel, a burst of sporadic open fighting such as occurs near the end of all long wars and engagements. It brought about one of those ghastly lapses in which two people who are in love pull up sharp, look at each other coolly and think it’s all been a mistake. Afterward they usually kiss wholesomely and assure the other person it was all their fault. Say it all was my fault! Say it was! I want to hear you say it!

But while reconciliation was trembling in the air, while each was, in a measure, stalling it off, so that they might the more voluptuously and sentimentally enjoy it when it came, they were permanently interrupted by a twenty-minute phone call for Betty from a garrulous aunt. At the end of eighteen minutes Perry Parkhurst, urged on by pride and suspicion and injured dignity, put on his long fur coat, picked up his light brown soft hat, and stalked out the door.

“It’s all over,” he muttered brokenly as he tried to jam his car into first. “It’s all over — if I have to choke you for an hour, damn you!”. The last to the car, which had been standing some time and was quite cold.

He drove downtown — that is, he got into a snow rut that led him downtown. He sat slouched down very low in his seat, much too dispirited to care where he went.

In front of the Clarendon Hotel he was hailed from the sidewalk by a bad man named Baily, who had big teeth and lived at the hotel and had never been in love.

“Perry,” said the bad man softly when the roadster drew up beside him at the curb, “I’ve got six quarts of the doggonedest still champagne you ever tasted. A third of it’s yours, Perry, if you’ll come up-stairs and help Martin Macy and me drink it.”

“Baily,” said Perry tensely, “I’ll drink your champagne. I’ll drink every drop of it, I don’t care if it kills me.”

“Shut up, you nut!” said the bad man gently. “They don’t put wood alcohol in champagne. This is the stuff that proves the world is more than six thousand years old. It’s so ancient that the cork is petrified. You have to pull it with a stone drill.”

“Take me up-stairs,” said Perry moodily. “If that cork sees my heart it’ll fall out from pure mortification.”

The room up-stairs was full of those innocent hotel pictures of little girls eating apples and sitting in swings and talking to dogs. The other decorations were neckties and a pink man reading a pink paper devoted to ladies in pink tights.

“When you have to go into the highways and byways —  — “ said the pink man, looking reproachfully at Baily and Perry.

“Hello, Martin Macy,” said Perry shortly, “where’s this stone-age champagne?”

“What’s the rush? This isn’t an operation, understand. This is a party.”

Perry sat down dully and looked disapprovingly at all the neckties.

Baily leisurely opened the door of a wardrobe and brought out six handsome bottles.

“Take off that darn fur coat!” said Martin Macy to Perry. “Or maybe you’d like to have us open all the windows.”

“Give me champagne,” said Perry.

“Going to the Townsends’ circus ball to-night?”

“Am not!”

“‘Vited?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Why not go?”

“Oh, I’m sick of parties,” exclaimed Perry. “I’m sick of ‘em. I’ve been to so many that I’m sick of ‘em.”

“Maybe you’re going to the Howard Tates’ party?”

“No, I tell you; I’m sick of ‘em.”

“Well,” said Macy consolingly, “the Tates’ is just for college kids anyways.”

“I tell you —  — “

“I thought you’d be going to one of ‘em anyways. I see by the papers you haven’t missed a one this Christmas.”

“Hm,” grunted Perry morosely.

He would never go to any more parties. Classical phrases played in his mind — that side of his life was closed, closed. Now when a man says “closed, closed” like that, you can be pretty sure that some woman has double-closed him, so to speak. Perry was also thinking that other classical thought, about how cowardly suicide is. A noble thought that one — warm and inspiring. Think of all the fine men we should lose if suicide were not so cowardly!

An hour later was six o’clock, and Perry had lost all resemblance to the young man in the liniment advertisement. He looked like a rough draft for a riotous cartoon. They were singing — an impromptu song of Baily’s improvisation:

”One Lump Perry, the parlor snake,

Famous through the city for the way he drinks his tea;

Plays with it, toys with it

Makes no noise with it,

Balanced on a napkin on his well-trained knee — “

“Trouble is,” said Perry, who had just banged his hair with Baily’s comb and was tying an orange tie round it to get the effect of Julius Caesar, “that you fellas can’t sing worth a damn. Soon’s I leave the air and start singing tenor you start singin’ tenor too.”

“‘M a natural tenor,” said Macy gravely. “Voice lacks cultivation, tha’s all. Gotta natural voice, m’aunt used say. Naturally good singer.”

“Singers, singers, all good singers,” remarked Baily, who was at the telephone. “No, not the cabaret; I want night egg. I mean some dog-gone clerk ‘at’s got food — food! I want —  — “

“Julius Caesar,” announced Perry, turning round from the mirror. “Man of iron will and stern ‘termination.”

“Shut up!” yelled Baily. “Say, iss Mr. Baily Sen’ up enormous supper.

Use y’own judgment. Right away.”

He connected the receiver and the hook with some difficulty, and then with his lips closed and an expression of solemn intensity in his eyes went to the lower drawer of his dresser and pulled it open.

“Lookit!” he commanded. In his hands he held a truncated garment of pink gingham.

“Pants,” he exclaimed gravely. “Lookit!”

This was a pink blouse, a red tie, and a Buster Brown collar.

“Lookit!” he repeated. “Costume for the Townsends’ circus ball. I’m li’l’ boy carries water for the elephants.”

Perry was impressed in spite of himself.

“I’m going to be Julius Caesar,” he announced after a moment of concentration.

“Thought you weren’t going!” said Macy.

“Me? Sure I’m goin’, Never miss a party. Good for the nerves — like celery.”

“Caesar!” scoffed Baily. “Can’t be Caesar! He is not about a circus.

Caesar’s Shakespeare. Go as a clown.”

Perry shook his head.

“Nope; Caesar,”

“Caesar?”

“Sure. Chariot.”

Light dawned on Baily.

“That’s right. Good idea.”

Perry looked round the room searchingly.

“You lend me a bathrobe and this tie,” he said finally. Baily considered.

“No good.”

“Sure, tha’s all I need. Caesar was a savage. They can’t kick if I come as Caesar, if he was a savage.”

“No,” said Baily, shaking his head slowly. “Get a costume over at a costumer’s. Over at Nolak’s.”

“Closed up.”

“Find out.”

After a puzzling five minutes at the phone a small, weary voice managed to convince Perry that it was Mr. Nolak speaking, and that they would remain open until eight because of the Townsends’ ball. Thus assured, Perry ate a great amount of filet mignon and drank his third of the last bottle of champagne. At eight-fifteen the man in the tall hat who stands in front of the Clarendon found him trying to start his roadster.

“Froze up,” said Perry wisely. “The cold froze it. The cold air.”

“Froze, eh?”

“Yes. Cold air froze it.”

“Can’t start it?”

“Nope. Let it stand here till summer. One those hot ole August days’ll thaw it out awright.”

“Goin’ let it stand?”

“Sure. Let ‘er stand. Take a hot thief to steal it. Gemme taxi.”

The man in the tall hat summoned a taxi.

“Where to, mister?”

“Go to Nolak’s — costume fella.”

II

Mrs. Nolak was short and ineffectual looking, and on the cessation of the world war had belonged for a while to one of the new nationalities. Owing to unsettled European conditions she had never since been quite sure what she was. The shop in which she and her husband performed their daily stint was dim and ghostly, and peopled with suits of armor and Chinese mandarins, and enormous papier-mâché birds suspended from the ceiling. In a vague background many rows of masks glared eyelessly at the visitor, and there were glass cases full of crowns and scepters, and jewels and enormous stomachers, and paints, and crape hair, and wigs of all colors.

When Perry ambled into the shop Mrs. Nolak was folding up the last troubles of a strenuous day, so she thought, in a drawer full of pink silk stockings.

“Something for you?” she queried pessimistically. “Want costume of

Julius Hur, the charioteer.”

Mrs. Nolak was sorry, but every stitch of charioteer had been rented long ago. Was it for the Townsends’ circus ball?

It was.

“Sorry,” she said, “but I don’t think there’s anything left that’s really circus.”

This was an obstacle.

“Hm,” said Perry. An idea struck him suddenly. “If you’ve got a piece of canvas I could go’s a tent.”

“Sorry, but we haven’t anything like that. A hardware store is where you’d have to go to. We have some very nice Confederate soldiers.”

“No. No soldiers.”

“And I have a very handsome king.”

He shook his head.

“Several of the gentlemen” she continued hopefully, “are wearing stovepipe hats and swallow-tail coats and going as ringmasters — but we’re all out of tall hats. I can let you have some crape hair for a mustache.”

“Want somep’n ‘stinctive.”

“Something — let’s see. Well, we have a lion’s head, and a goose, and a camel — “

“Camel?” The idea seized Perry’s imagination, gripped it fiercely.

“Yes, but It needs two people.”

“Camel, That’s the idea. Lemme see it.”

The camel was produced from his resting place on a top shelf. At first glance he appeared to consist entirely of a very gaunt, cadaverous head and a sizable hump, but on being spread out he was found to possess a dark brown, unwholesome-looking body made of thick, cottony cloth.

“You see it takes two people,” explained Mrs. Nolak, holding the camel in frank admiration. “If you have a friend he could be part of it. You see there’s sorta pants for two people. One pair is for the fella in front, and the other pair for the fella in back. The fella in front does the lookin’ out through these here eyes, an’ the fella in back he’s just gotta stoop over an’ folla the front fella round.”

“Put it on,” commanded Perry.

Obediently Mrs. Nolak put her tabby-cat face inside the camel’s head and turned it from side to side ferociously.

Perry was fascinated.

“What noise does a camel make?”

“What?” asked Mrs. Nolak as her face emerged, somewhat smudgy. “Oh, what noise? Why, he sorta brays.”

“Lemme see it in a mirror.”

Before a wide mirror Perry tried on the head and turned from side to side appraisingly. In the dim light the effect was distinctly pleasing. The camel’s face was a study in pessimism, decorated with numerous abrasions, and it must be admitted that his coat was in that state of general negligence peculiar to camels — in fact, he needed to be cleaned and pressed — but distinctive he certainly was. He was majestic. He would have attracted attention in any gathering, if only by his melancholy cast of feature and the look of hunger lurking round his shadowy eyes.

“You see you have to have two people,” said Mrs. Nolak again.

Perry tentatively gathered up the body and legs and wrapped them about him, tying the hind legs as a girdle round his waist. The effect on the whole was bad. It was even irreverent — like one of those mediaeval pictures of a monk changed into a beast by the ministrations of Satan. At the very best the ensemble resembled a humpbacked cow sitting on her haunches among blankets.

“Don’t look like anything at all,” objected Perry gloomily.

“No,” said Mrs. Nolak; “you see you got to have two people.”

A solution flashed upon Perry.

“You got a date to-night?”

“Oh, I couldn’t possibly —  — “

“Oh, come on,” said Perry encouragingly. “Sure you can! Here! Be good sport, and climb into these hind legs.”

With difficulty he located them, and extended their yawning depths ingratiatingly. But Mrs. Nolak seemed loath. She backed perversely away.

“Oh, no —  — “

“C’mon! You can be the front if you want to. Or we’ll flip a coin.”

“Make it worth your while.”

Mrs. Nolak set her lips firmly together.

“Now you just stop!” she said with no coyness implied. “None of the gentlemen ever acted up this way before. My husband —  — “

“You got a husband?” demanded Perry. “Where is he?”

“He’s home.”

“Wha’s telephone number?”

After considerable parley he obtained the telephone number pertaining to the Nolak penates and got into communication with that small, weary voice he had heard once before that day. But Mr. Nolak, though taken off his guard and somewhat confused by Perry’s brilliant flow of logic, stuck staunchly to his point. He refused firmly, but with dignity, to help out Mr. Parkhurst in the capacity of back part of a camel.

Having rung off, or rather having been rung off on, Perry sat down on a three-legged stool to think it over. He named over to himself those friends on whom he might call, and then his mind paused as Betty Medill’s name hazily and sorrowfully occurred to him. He had a sentimental thought. He would ask her. Their love affair was over, but she could not refuse this last request. Surely it was not much to ask — to help him keep up his end of social obligation for one short night. And if she insisted, she could be the front part of the camel and he would go as the back. His magnanimity pleased him. His mind even turned to rosy-colored dreams of a tender reconciliation inside the camel — there hidden away from all the world….

“Now you’d better decide right off.”

The bourgeois voice of Mrs. Nolak broke in upon his mellow fancies and roused him to action. He went to the phone and called up the Medill house. Miss Betty was out; had gone out to dinner.

Then, when all seemed lost, the camel’s back wandered curiously into the store. He was a dilapidated individual with a cold in his head and a general trend about him of downwardness. His cap was pulled down low on his head, and his chin was pulled down low on his chest, his coat hung down to his shoes, he looked run-down, down at the heels, and — Salvation Army to the contrary — down and out. He said that he was the taxicab-driver that the gentleman had hired at the Clarendon Hotel. He had been instructed to wait outside, but he had waited some time, and a suspicion had grown upon him that the gentleman had gone out the back way with purpose to defraud him — gentlemen sometimes did — so he had come in. He sank down onto the three-legged stool.

“Wanta go to a party?” demanded Perry sternly.

“I gotta work,” answered the taxi-driver lugubriously. “I gotta keep my job.”

“It’s a very good party.”

“‘S a very good job.”

“Come on!” urged Perry. “Be a good fella. See — it’s pretty!” He held the camel up and the taxi-driver looked at it cynically.

“Huh!”

Perry searched feverishly among the folds of the cloth.

“See!” he cried enthusiastically, holding up a selection of folds. “This is your part. You don’t even have to talk. All you have to do is to walk — and sit down occasionally. You do all the sitting down. Think of it. I’m on my feet all the time and you can sit down some of the time. The only time I can sit down is when we’re lying down, and you can sit down when — oh, any time. See?”

“What’s ‘at thing?” demanded the individual dubiously. “A shroud?”

“Not at all,” said Perry indignantly. “It’s a camel.”

“Huh?”

Then Perry mentioned a sum of money, and the conversation left the land of grunts and assumed a practical tinge. Perry and the taxi-driver tried on the camel in front of the mirror.

“You can’t see it,” explained Perry, peering anxiously out through the eyeholes, “but honestly, ole man, you look sim’ly great! Honestly!”

A grunt from the hump acknowledged this somewhat dubious compliment.

“Honestly, you look great!” repeated Perry enthusiastically. “Move round a little.”

The hind legs moved forward, giving the effect of a huge cat-camel hunching his back preparatory to a spring.

“No; move sideways.”

The camel’s hips went neatly out of joint; a hula dancer would have writhed in envy.

“Good, isn’t it?” demanded Perry, turning to Mrs. Nolak for approval.

“It looks lovely,” agreed Mrs. Nolak.

“We’ll take it,” said Perry.

The bundle was stowed under Perry’s arm and they left the shop.

“Go to the party!” he commanded as he took his seat in the back.

“What party?”

“Fanzy-dress party.”

“Where’bouts is it?”

This presented a new problem. Perry tried to remember, but the names of all those who had given parties during the holidays danced confusedly before his eyes. He could ask Mrs. Nolak, but on looking out the window he saw that the shop was dark. Mrs. Nolak had already faded out, a little black smudge far down the snowy street.

“Drive uptown,” directed Perry with fine confidence. “If you see a party, stop. Otherwise I’ll tell you when we get there.”

He fell into a hazy daydream and his thoughts wandered again to Betty — he imagined vaguely that they had had a disagreement because she refused to go to the party as the back part of the camel. He was just slipping off into a chilly doze when he was wakened by the taxi-driver opening the door and shaking him by the arm.

“Here we are, maybe.”

Perry looked out sleepily. A striped awning led from the curb up to a spreading gray stone house, from which issued the low drummy whine of expensive jazz. He recognized the Howard Tate house.

“Sure,” he said emphatically; “‘at’s it! Tate’s party to-night. Sure, everybody’s goin’.”

“Say,” said the individual anxiously after another look at the awning, “you sure these people ain’t gonna romp on me for comin’ here?”

Perry drew himself up with dignity.

“‘F anybody says anything to you, just tell ‘em you’re part of my costume.”

The visualization of himself as a thing rather than a person seemed to reassure the individual.

“All right,” he said reluctantly.

Perry stepped out under the shelter of the awning and began unrolling the camel.

“Let’s go,” he commanded.

Several minutes later a melancholy, hungry-looking camel, emitting clouds of smoke from his mouth and from the tip of his noble hump, might have been seen crossing the threshold of the Howard Tate residence, passing a startled footman without so much as a snort, and heading directly for the main stairs that led up to the ballroom. The beast walked with a peculiar gait which varied between an uncertain lockstep and a stampede — but can best be described by the word “halting.” The camel had a halting gait — and as he walked he alternately elongated and contracted like a gigantic concertina.

III

The Howard Tates are, as every one who lives in Toledo knows, the most formidable people in town. Mrs. Howard Tate was a Chicago Todd before she became a Toledo Tate, and the family generally affect that conscious simplicity which has begun to be the earmark of American aristocracy. The Tates have reached the stage where they talk about pigs and farms and look at you icy-eyed if you are not amused. They have begun to prefer retainers rather than friends as dinner guests, spend a lot of money in a quiet way, and, having lost all sense of competition, are in process of growing quite dull.

The dance this evening was for little Millicent Tate, and though all ages were represented, the dancers were mostly from school and college — the younger married crowd was at the Townsends’ circus ball up at the Tallyho Club. Mrs. Tate was standing just inside tie ballroom, following Millicent round with her eyes, and beaming whenever she caught her bye. Beside her were two middle-aged sycophants, who were saying what a perfectly exquisite child Millicent was. It was at this moment that Mrs. Tate was grasped firmly by the skirt and her youngest daughter, Emily, aged eleven, hurled herself with an “Oof!” into her mother’s arms.

“Why, Emily, what’s the trouble?”

“Mamma,” said Emily, wild-eyed but voluble, “there’s something out on the stairs.”

“What?”

“There’s a thing out on the stairs, mamma. I think it’s a big dog, mamma, but it doesn’t look like a dog.”

“What do you mean, Emily?”

The sycophants waved their heads sympathetically.

“Mamma, it looks like a — like a camel.”

Mrs. Tate laughed.

“You saw a mean old shadow, dear, that’s all.”

“No, I didn’t. No, it was some kind of thing, mamma — big. I was going down-stairs to see if there were any more people, and this dog or something, he was coming up-stairs. Kinda funny, mamma, like he was lame. And then he saw me and gave a sort of growl, and then he slipped at the top of the landing, and I ran.”

Mrs. Tate’s laugh faded.

“The child must have seen something,” she said.

The sycophants agreed that the child must have seen something — and suddenly all three women took an instinctive step away from the door as the sounds of muffled steps were audible just outside.

And then three startled gasps rang out as a dark brown form rounded the corner, and they saw what was apparently a huge beast looking down at them hungrily.

“Oof!” cried Mrs. Tate.

“O-o-oh!” cried the ladies in a chorus.

The camel suddenly humped his back, and the gasps turned to shrieks.

“Oh — look!”

“What is it?”

The dancing stopped, bat the dancers hurrying over got quite a different impression of the invader; in fact, the young people immediately suspected that it was a stunt, a hired entertainer come to amuse the party. The boys in long trousers looked at it rather disdainfully, and sauntered over with their hands in their pockets, feeling that their intelligence was being insulted. But the girls uttered little shouts of glee.

“It’s a camel!”

“Well, if he isn’t the funniest!”

The camel stood there uncertainly, swaying slightly from side to aide, and seeming to take in the room in a careful, appraising glance; then as if he had come to an abrupt decision, he turned and ambled swiftly out the door.

Mr. Howard Tate had just come out of the library on the lower floor, and was standing chatting with a young man in the hall. Suddenly they heard the noise of shouting up-stairs, and almost immediately a succession of bumping sounds, followed by the precipitous appearance at the foot of the stairway of a large brown beast that seemed to be going somewhere in a great hurry.

“Now what the devil!” said Mr. Tate, starting.

The beast picked itself up not without dignity and, affecting an air of extreme nonchalance, as if he had just remembered an important engagement, started at a mixed gait toward the front door. In fact, his front legs began casually to run.

“See here now,” said Mr. Tate sternly. “Here! Grab it, Butterfield!

Grab it!”

The young man enveloped the rear of the camel in a pair of compelling arms, and, realizing that further locomotion was impossible, the front end submitted to capture and stood resignedly in a state of some agitation. By this time a flood of young people was pouring down-stairs, and Mr. Tate, suspecting everything from an ingenious burglar to an escaped lunatic, gave crisp directions to the young man:

“Hold him! Lead him in here; we’ll soon see.”

The camel consented to be led into the library, and Mr. Tate, after locking the door, took a revolver from a table drawer and instructed the young man to take the thing’s head off. Then he gasped and returned the revolver to its hiding-place.

“Well, Perry Parkhurst!” he exclaimed in amazement.

“Got the wrong party, Mr. Tate,” said Perry sheepishly. “Hope I didn’t scare you.”

“Well — you gave us a thrill, Perry.” Realization dawned on him.

“You’re bound for the Townsends’ circus ball.”

“That’s the general idea.”

“Let me introduce Mr. Butterfield, Mr. Parkhurst.” Then turning to

Perry; “Butterfield is staying with us for a few days.”

“I got a little mixed up,” mumbled Perry. “I’m very sorry.”

“Perfectly all right; most natural mistake in the world. I’ve got a clown rig and I’m going down there myself after a while.” He turned to Butterfield. “Better change your mind and come down with us.”

The young man demurred. He was going to bed.

“Have a drink, Perry?” suggested Mr. Tate.

“Thanks, I will.”

“And, say,” continued Tate quickly, “I’d forgotten all about your — friend here.” He indicated the rear part of the camel. “I didn’t mean to seem discourteous. Is it any one I know? Bring him out.”

“It’s not a friend,” explained Perry hurriedly. “I just rented him.”

“Does he drink?”

“Do you?” demanded Perry, twisting himself tortuously round.

There was a faint sound of assent.

“Sure he does!” said Mr. Tate heartily. “A really efficient camel ought to be able to drink enough so it’d last him three days.”

“Tell you,” said Perry anxiously, “he isn’t exactly dressed up enough to come out. If you give me the bottle I can hand it back to him and he can take his inside.”

From under the cloth was audible the enthusiastic smacking sound inspired by this suggestion. When a butler had appeared with bottles, glasses, and siphon one of the bottles was handed back; thereafter the silent partner could be heard imbibing long potations at frequent intervals.

Thus passed a benign hour. At ten o’clock Mr. Tate decided that they’d better be starting. He donned his clown’s costume; Perry replaced the camel’s head, arid side by side they traversed on foot the single block between the Tate house and the Tallyho Club.

The circus ball was in full swing. A great tent fly had been put up inside the ballroom and round the walls had been built rows of booths representing the various attractions of a circus side show, but these were now vacated and over the floor swarmed a shouting, laughing medley of youth and color — downs, bearded ladies, acrobats, bareback riders, ringmasters, tattooed men, and charioteers. The Townsends had determined to assure their party of success, so a great quantity of liquor had been surreptitiously brought over from their house and was now flowing freely. A green ribbon ran along the wall completely round the ballroom, with pointing arrows alongside and signs which instructed the uninitiated to “Follow the green line!” The green line led down to the bar, where waited pure punch and wicked punch and plain dark-green bottles.

On the wall above the bar was another arrow, red and very wavy, and under it the slogan: “Now follow this!”

But even amid the luxury of costume and high spirits represented, there, the entrance of the camel created something of a stir, and Perry was immediately surrounded by a curious, laughing crowd attempting to penetrate the identity of this beast that stood by the wide doorway eying the dancers with his hungry, melancholy gaze.

And then Perry saw Betty standing in front of a booth, talking to a comic policeman. She was dressed in the costume of an Egyptian snake-charmer: her tawny hair was braided and drawn through brass rings, the effect crowned with a glittering Oriental tiara. Her fair face was stained to a warm olive glow and on her arms and the half moon of her back writhed painted serpents with single eyes of venomous green. Her feet were in sandals and her skirt was slit to the knees, so that when she walked one caught a glimpse of other slim serpents painted just above her bare ankles. Wound about her neck was a glittering cobra. Altogether a charming costume — one that caused the more nervous among the older women to shrink away from her when she passed, and the more troublesome ones to make great talk about “shouldn’t be allowed” and “perfectly disgraceful.”

But Perry, peering through the uncertain eyes of the camel, saw only her face, radiant, animated, and glowing with excitement, and her arms and shoulders, whose mobile, expressive gestures made her always the outstanding figure in any group. He was fascinated and his fascination exercised a sobering effect on him. With a growing clarity the events of the day came back — rage rose within him, and with a half-formed intention of taking her away from the crowd he started toward her — or rather he elongated slightly, for he had neglected to issue the preparatory command necessary to locomotion.

But at this point fickle Kismet, who for a day had played with him bitterly and sardonically, decided to reward him in full for the amusement he had afforded her. Kismet turned the tawny eyes of the snake-charmer to the camel. Kismet led her to lean toward the man beside her and say, “Who’s that? That camel?”

“Darned if I know.”

But a little man named Warburton, who knew it all, found it necessary to hazard an opinion:

“It came in with Mr. Tate. I think part of it’s probably Warren

Butterfield, the architect from New York, who’s visiting the Tates.”

Something stirred in Betty Medill — that age-old interest of the provincial girl in the visiting man.

“Oh,” she said casually after a slight pause.

At the end of the next dance Betty and her partner finished up within a few feet of the camel. With the informal audacity that was the key-note of the evening she reached out and gently rubbed the camel’s nose.

“Hello, old camel.”

The camel stirred uneasily.

“You ‘fraid of me?” said Betty, lifting her eyebrows in reproof. “Don’t be. You see I’m a snake-charmer, but I’m pretty good at camels too.”

The camel bowed very low and some one made the obvious remark about beauty and the beast.

Mrs. Townsend approached the group.

“Well, Mr. Butterfield,” she said helpfully, “I wouldn’t have recognised you.”

Perry bowed again and smiled gleefully behind his mask.

“And who is this with you?” she inquired.

“Oh,” said Perry, his voice muffled by the thick cloth and quite unrecognizable, “he isn’t a fellow, Mrs. Townsend. He’s just part of my costume.”

Mrs. Townsend laughed and moved away. Perry turned again to Betty,

“So,” he thought, “this is how much she cares! On the very day of our final rupture she starts a flirtation with another man — an absolute stranger.”

On an impulse he gave her a soft nudge with his shoulder and waved his head suggestively toward the hall, making it clear that he desired her to leave her partner and accompany him.

“By-by, Rus,” she called to her partner. “This old camel’s got me.

Where we going, Prince of Beasts?”

The noble animal made no rejoinder, but stalked gravely along in the direction of a secluded nook on the side stairs.

There she seated herself, and the camel, after some seconds of confusion which included gruff orders and sounds of a heated dispute going on in his interior, placed himself beside her — his hind legs stretching out uncomfortably across two steps.

“Well, old egg,” said Betty cheerfully, “how do you like our happy party?”

The old egg indicated that he liked it by rolling his head ecstatically and executing a gleeful kick with his hoofs.

“This is the first time that I ever had a tête-à-tête with a man’s valet ‘round” — she pointed to the hind legs — “or whatever that is.”

“Oh,” mumbled Perry, “he’s deaf and blind.”

“I should think you’d feel rather handicapped — you can’t very well toddle, even if you want to.”

The camel hang his head lugubriously.

“I wish you’d say something,” continued Betty sweetly. “Say you like me, camel. Say you think I’m beautiful. Say you’d like to belong to a pretty snake-charmer.”

The camel would.

“Will you dance with me, camel?”

The camel would try.

Betty devoted half an hour to the camel. She devoted at least half an hour to all visiting men. It was usually sufficient. When she approached a new man the current débutantes were accustomed to scatter right and left like a close column deploying before a machine-gun. And so to Perry Parkhurst was awarded the unique privilege of seeing his love as others saw her. He was flirted with violently!

IV

This paradise of frail foundation was broken into by the sounds of a general ingress to the ballroom; the cotillion was beginning. Betty and the camel joined the crowd, her brown hand resting lightly on his shoulder, defiantly symbolizing her complete adoption of him.

When they entered the couples were already seating themselves at tables round the walls, and Mrs. Townsend, resplendent as a super bareback rider with rather too rotund calves, was standing in the centre with the ringmaster in charge of arrangements. At a signal to the band every one rose and began to dance.

“Isn’t it just slick!” sighed Betty. “Do you think you can possibly dance?”

Perry nodded enthusiastically. He felt suddenly exuberant. After all, he was here incognito talking to his love — he could wink patronizingly at the world.

So Perry danced the cotillion. I say danced, but that is stretching the word far beyond the wildest dreams of the jazziest terpsichorean. He suffered his partner to put her hands on his helpless shoulders and pull him here and there over the floor while he hung his huge head docilely over her shoulder and made futile dummy motions with his feet. His hind legs danced in a manner all their own, chiefly by hopping first on one foot and then on the other. Never being sure whether dancing was going on or not, the hind legs played safe by going through a series of steps whenever the music started playing. So the spectacle was frequently presented of the front part of the camel standing at ease and the rear keeping up a constant energetic motion calculated to rouse a sympathetic perspiration in any soft-hearted observer.

He was frequently favored. He danced first with a tall lady covered with straw who announced jovially that she was a bale of hay and coyly begged him not to eat her.

“I’d like to; you’re so sweet,” said the camel gallantly.

Each time the ringmaster shouted his call of “Men up!” he lumbered ferociously for Betty with the cardboard wienerwurst or the photograph of the bearded lady or whatever the favor chanced to be. Sometimes he reached her first, but usually his rushes were unsuccessful and resulted in intense interior arguments.

“For Heaven’s sake,” Perry would snarl, fiercely between his clenched teeth, “get a little pep! I could have gotten her that time if you’d picked your feet up.”

“Well, gimme a little warnin’!”

“I did, darn you.”

“I can’t see a dog-gone thing in here.”

“All you have to do is follow me. It’s just like dragging a load of sand round to walk with you.”

“Maybe you wanta try back hare.”

“You shut up! If these people found you in this room they’d give you the worst beating you ever had. They’d take your taxi license away from you!”

Perry surprised himself by the ease with which he made this monstrous threat, but it seemed to have a soporific influence on his companion, for he gave out an “aw gwan” and subsided into abashed silence.

The ringmaster mounted to the top of the piano and waved his hand for silence.

“Prizes!” he cried. “Gather round!”

“Yea! Prizes!”

Self-consciously the circle swayed forward. The rather pretty girl who had mustered the nerve to come as a bearded lady trembled with excitement, thinking to be rewarded for an evening’s hideousness. The man who had spent the afternoon having tattoo marks painted on him skulked on the edge of the crowd, blushing furiously when any one told him he was sure to get it.

“Lady and gent performers of this circus,” announced the ringmaster jovially, “I am sure we will all agree that a good time has been had by all. We will now bestow honor where honor is due by bestowing the prizes. Mrs. Townsend has asked me to bestow the prices. Now, fellow performers, the first prize is for that lady who has displayed this evening the most striking, becoming” — at this point the bearded lady sighed resignedly — “and original costume.” Here the bale of hay pricked up her ears. “Now I am sure that the decision which has been agreed upon will be unanimous with all here present. The first prize goes to Miss Betty Medill, the charming Egyptian snake-charmer.” There was a burst of applause, chiefly masculine, and Miss Betty Medill, blushing beautifully through her olive paint, was passed up to receive her award. With a tender glance the ringmaster handed down to her a huge bouquet of orchids.

“And now,” he continued, looking round him, “the other prize is for that man who has the most amusing and original costume. This prize goes without dispute to a guest in our midst, a gentleman who is visiting here but whose stay we all hope will be long and merry — in short, to the noble camel who has entertained us all by his hungry look and his brilliant dancing throughout the evening.”

He ceased and there was a violent clapping, and yeaing, for it was a popular choice. The prize, a large box of cigars, was put aside for the camel, as he was anatomically unable to accept it in person.

“And now,” continued the ringmaster, “we will wind up the cotillion with the marriage of Mirth to Folly!

“Form for the grand wedding march, the beautiful snake-charmer and the noble camel in front!”

Betty skipped forward cheerily and wound an olive arm round the camel’s neck. Behind them formed the procession of little boys, little girls, country jakes, fat ladies, thin men, sword-swallowers, wild men of Borneo, and armless wonders, many of them well in their cups, all of them excited and happy and dazzled by the flow of light and color round them, and by the familiar faces, strangely unfamiliar under bizarre wigs and barbaric paint. The voluptuous chords of the wedding march done in blasphemous syncopation issued in a delirious blend from the trombones and saxophones — and the march began.

“Aren’t you glad, camel?” demanded Betty sweetly as they stepped off. “Aren’t you glad we’re going to be married and you’re going to belong to the nice snake-charmer ever afterward?”

The camel’s front legs pranced, expressing excessive joy.

“Minister! Minister! Where’s the minister?” cried voices out of the revel. “Who’s going to be the clergyman?”

The head of Jumbo, obese negro, waiter at the Tally-ho Club for many years, appeared rashly through a half-opened pantry door.

“Oh, Jumbo!”

“Get old Jumbo. He’s the fella!”

“Come on, Jumbo. How ‘bout marrying us a couple?”

“Yea!”

Jumbo was seized by four comedians, stripped of his apron, and escorted to a raised daïs at the head of the ball. There his collar was removed and replaced back side forward with ecclesiastical effect. The parade separated into two lines, leaving an aisle for the bride and groom.

“Lawdy, man,” roared Jumbo, “Ah got ole Bible ‘n’ ev’ythin’, sho nuff.”

He produced a battered Bible from an interior pocket.

“Yea! Jumbo’s got a Bible!”

“Razor, too, I’ll bet!”

Together the snake-charmer and the camel ascended the cheering aisle and stopped in front of Jumbo.

“Where’s yo license, camel?”

A man near by prodded Perry.

“Give him a piece of paper. Anything’ll do.”

Perry fumbled confusedly in his pocket, found a folded paper, and pushed it out through the camel’s mouth. Holding it upside down Jumbo pretended to scan it earnestly.

“Dis yeah’s a special camel’s license,” he said. “Get you ring ready, camel.”

Inside the camel Perry turned round and addressed his worse half.

“Gimme a ring, for Heaven’s sake!”

“I ain’t got none,” protested a weary voice.

“You have. I saw it.”

“I ain’t goin’ to take it offen my hand.”

“If you don’t I’ll kill you.”

There was a gasp and Perry felt a huge affair of rhinestone and brass inserted into his hand.

Again he was nudged from the outside.

“Speak up!”

“I do!” cried Perry quickly.

He heard Betty’s responses given in a debonair tone, and even in this burlesque the sound thrilled him.

Then he had pushed the rhinestone through a tear in the camel’s coat and was slipping it on her finger, muttering ancient and historic words after Jumbo. He didn’t want any one to know about this ever. His one idea was to slip away without having to disclose his identity, for Mr. Tate had so far kept his secret well. A dignified young man, Perry — and this might injure his infant law practice.

“Embrace the bride!”

“Unmask, camel, and kiss her!”

Instinctively his heart beat high as Betty turned to him laughingly and began to strike the card-board muzzle. He felt his self-control giving way, he longed to surround her with his arms and declare his identity and kiss those lips that smiled only a foot away — when suddenly the laughter and applause round them died off and a curious hush fell over the hall. Perry and Betty looked up in surprise. Jumbo had given vent to a huge “Hello!” in such a startled voice that all eyes were bent on him.

“Hello!” he said again. He had turned round the camel’s marriage license, which he had been holding upside down, produced spectacles, and was studying it agonizingly.

“Why,” he exclaimed, and in the pervading silence his words were heard plainly by every one in the room, “this yeah’s a sho-nuff marriage permit.”

“What?”

“Huh?”

“Say it again, Jumbo!”

“Sure you can read?”

Jumbo waved them to silence and Perry’s blood burned to fire in his veins as he realized the break he had made.

“Yassuh!” repeated Jumbo. “This yeah’s a sho-nuff license, and the pa’ties concerned one of ‘em is dis yeah young lady, Miz Betty Medill, and th’ other’s Mistah Perry Pa’khurst.”

There was a general gasp, and a low rumble broke out as all eyes fell on the camel. Betty shrank away from him quickly, her tawny eyes giving out sparks of fury.

“Is you Mistah Pa’khurst, you camel?”

Perry made no answer. The crowd pressed up closer and stared at him. He stood frozen rigid with embarrassment, his cardboard face still hungry and sardonic as he regarded the ominous Jumbo.

“Y’all bettah speak up!” said Jumbo slowly, “this yeah’s a mighty serious mattah. Outside mah duties at this club ah happens to be a sho-nuff minister in the Firs’ Cullud Baptis’ Church. It done look to me as though y’all is gone an’ got married.”

V

The scene that followed will go down forever in the annals of the Tallyho Club. Stout matrons fainted, one hundred per cent Americans swore, wild-eyed débutantes babbled in lightning groups instantly formed and instantly dissolved, and a great buzz of chatter, virulent yet oddly subdued, hummed through the chaotic ballroom. Feverish youths swore they would kill Perry or Jumbo or themselves or some one, and the Baptis’ preacheh was besieged by a tempestuous covey of clamorous amateur lawyers, asking questions, making threats, demanding precedents, ordering the bonds annulled, and especially trying to ferret out any hint of prearrangement in what had occurred.

In the corner Mrs. Townsend was crying softly on the shoulder of Mr. Howard Tate, who was trying vainly to comfort her; they were exchanging “all my fault’s” volubly and voluminously. Outside on a snow-covered walk Mr. Cyrus Medill, the Aluminum Man, was being paced slowly up and down between two brawny charioteers, giving vent now to a string of unrepeatables, now to wild pleadings that they’d just let him get at Jumbo. He was facetiously attired for the evening as a wild man of Borneo, and the most exacting stage-manager would have acknowledged any improvement in casting the part to be quite impossible.

Meanwhile the two principals held the real centre of the stage. Betty Medill — or was it Betty Parkhurst? — storming furiously, was surrounded by the plainer girls — the prettier ones were too busy talking about her to pay much attention to her — and over on the other side of the hall stood the camel, still intact except for his headpiece, which dangled pathetically on his chest. Perry was earnestly engaged in making protestations of his innocence to a ring of angry, puzzled men. Every few minutes, just as he had apparently proved his case, some one would mention the marriage certificate, and the inquisition would begin again.

A girl named Marion Cloud, considered the second best belle of Toledo, changed the gist of the situation by a remark she made to Betty.

“Well,” she said maliciously, “it’ll all blow over, dear. The courts will annul it without question.”

Betty’s angry tears dried miraculously in her eyes, her lips shut tight together, and she looked stonily at Marion. Then she rose and, scattering her sympathizers right and left, walked directly across the room to Perry, who stared at her in terror. Again silence crept down upon the room.

“Will you have the decency to grant me five minutes’ conversation — or wasn’t that included in your plans?”

He nodded, his mouth unable to form words.

Indicating coldly that he was to follow her she walked out into the hall with her chin uptilted and headed for the privacy of one of the little card-rooms.

Perry started after her, but was brought to a jerky halt by the failure of his hind legs to function.

“You stay here!” he commanded savagely.

“I can’t,” whined a voice from the hump, “unless you get out first and let me get out.”

Perry hesitated, but unable any longer to tolerate the eyes of the curious crowd he muttered a command and the camel moved carefully from the room on its four legs.

Betty was waiting for him.

“Well,” she began furiously, “you see what you’ve done! You and that crazy license! I told you you shouldn’t have gotten it!”

“My dear girl, I — “

“Don’t say ‘dear girl’ to me! Save that for your real wife if you ever get one after this disgraceful performance. And don’t try to pretend it wasn’t all arranged. You know you gave that colored waiter money! You know you did! Do you mean to say you didn’t try to marry me?”

“No — of course — “

“Yes, you’d better admit it! You tried it, and now what are you going to do? Do you know my father’s nearly crazy? It’ll serve you right if he tries to kill you. He’ll take his gun and put some cold steel in you. Even if this wed — this thing can be annulled it’ll hang over me all the rest of my life!”

Perry could not resist quoting softly: “‘Oh, camel, wouldn’t you like to belong to the pretty snake-charmer for all your — “

“Shut-up!” cried Betty.

There was a pause.

“Betty,” said Perry finally, “there’s only one thing to do that will really get us out clear. That’s for you to marry me.”

“Marry you!”

“Yes. Really it’s the only — “

“You shut up! I wouldn’t marry you if — if — “

“I know. If I were the last man on earth. But if you care anything about your reputation — “

“Reputation!” she cried. “You’re a nice one to think about my reputation now. Why didn’t you think about my reputation before you hired that horrible Jumbo to — to — “

Perry tossed up his hands hopelessly.

“Very well. I’ll do anything you want. Lord knows I renounce all claims!”

“But,” said a new voice, “I don’t.”

Perry and Betty started, and she put her hand to her heart.

“For Heaven’s sake, what was that?”

“It’s me,” said the camel’s back.

In a minute Perry had whipped off the camel’s skin, and a lax, limp object, his clothes hanging on him damply, his hand clenched tightly on an almost empty bottle, stood defiantly before them.

“Oh,” cried Betty, “you brought that object in here to frighten me!

You told me he was deaf — that awful person!”

The camel’s back sat down on a chair with a sigh of satisfaction.

“Don’t talk ‘at way about me, lady. I ain’t no person. I’m your husband.”

“Husband!”

The cry was wrung simultaneously from Betty and Perry.

“Why, sure. I’m as much your husband as that gink is. The smoke didn’t marry you to the camel’s front. He married you to the whole camel. Why, that’s my ring you got on your finger!”

With a little yelp she snatched the ring from her finger and flung it passionately at the floor.

“What’s all this?” demanded Perry dazedly.

“Jes’ that you better fix me an’ fix me right. If you don’t I’m a-gonna have the same claim you got to bein’ married to her!”

“That’s bigamy,” said Perry, turning gravely to Betty.

Then came the supreme moment of Perry’s evening, the ultimate chance on which he risked his fortunes. He rose and looked first at Betty, where she sat weakly, aghast at this new complication, and then at the individual who swayed from side to side on his chair, uncertainly, menacingly.

“Very well,” said Perry slowly to the individual, “you can have her. Betty, I’m going to prove to you that as far as I’m concerned our marriage was entirely accidental. I’m going to renounce utterly my rights to have you as my wife, and give you to — to the man whose ring you wear — your lawful husband.”

There was a pause and four horror-stricken eyes were turned on him,

“Good-by, Betty,” he said brokenly. “Don’t forget me in your new-found happiness. I’m going to leave for the Far West on the morning train. Think of me kindly, Betty.”

With a last glance at them he turned and his head rested on his chest as his hand touched the door-knob.

“Good-by,” he repeated. He turned the door-knob.

But at this sound the snakes and silk and tawny hair precipitated themselves violently toward him.

“Oh, Perry, don’t leave me! Perry, Perry, take me with you!”

Her tears flowed damply on his neck. Calmly he folded his arms about her.

“I don’t care,” she cried. “I love you and if you can wake up a minister at this hour and have it done over again I’ll go West with you.”

Over her shoulder the front part of the camel looked at the back part of the camel — and they exchanged a particularly subtle, esoteric sort of wink that only true camels can understand.

MAY DAY

There had been a war fought and won and the great city of the conquering people was crossed with triumphal arches and vivid with thrown flowers of white, red, and rose. All through the long spring days the returning soldiers marched up the chief highway behind the strump of drums and the joyous, resonant wind of the brasses, while merchants and clerks left their bickerings and figurings and, crowding to the windows, turned their white-bunched faces gravely upon the passing battalions.

Never had there been such splendor in the great city, for the victorious war had brought plenty in its train, and the merchants had flocked thither from the South and West with their households to taste of all the luscious feasts and witness the lavish entertainments prepared — and to buy for their women furs against the next winter and bags of golden mesh and varicolored slippers of silk and silver and rose satin and cloth of gold.

So gaily and noisily were the peace and prosperity impending hymned by the scribes and poets of the conquering people that more and more spenders had gathered from the provinces to drink the wine of excitement, and faster and faster did the merchants dispose of their trinkets and slippers until they sent up a mighty cry for more trinkets and more slippers in order that they might give in barter what was demanded of them. Some even of them flung up their hands helplessly, shouting:

“Alas! I have no more slippers! and alas! I have no more trinkets! May heaven help me for I know not what I shall do!”

But no one listened to their great outcry, for the throngs were far too busy — day by day, the foot-soldiers trod jauntily the highway and all exulted because the young men returning were pure and brave, sound of tooth and pink of cheek, and the young women of the land were virgins and comely both of face and of figure.

So during all this time there were many adventures that happened in the great city, and, of these, several — or perhaps one — are here set down.

I

At nine o’clock on the morning of the first of May, 1919, a young man spoke to the room clerk at the Biltmore Hotel, asking if Mr. Philip Dean were registered there, and if so, could he be connected with Mr. Dean’s rooms. The inquirer was dressed in a well-cut, shabby suit. He was small, slender, and darkly handsome; his eyes were framed above with unusually long eyelashes and below with the blue semicircle of ill health, this latter effect heightened by an unnatural glow which colored his face like a low, incessant fever.

Mr. Dean was staying there. The young man was directed to a telephone at the side.

After a second his connection was made; a sleepy voice hello’d from somewhere above.

“Mr. Dean?” — this very eagerly — “it’s Gordon, Phil. It’s Gordon Sterrett. I’m down-stairs. I heard you were in New York and I had a hunch you’d be here.”

The sleepy voice became gradually enthusiastic. Well, how was Gordy, old boy! Well, he certainly was surprised and tickled! Would Gordy come right up, for Pete’s sake!

A few minutes later Philip Dean, dressed in blue silk pajamas, opened his door and the two young men greeted each other with a half-embarrassed exuberance. They were both about twenty-four, Yale graduates of the year before the war; but there the resemblance stopped abruptly. Dean was blond, ruddy, and rugged under his thin pajamas. Everything about him radiated fitness and bodily comfort. He smiled frequently, showing large and prominent teeth.

“I was going to look you up,” he cried enthusiastically. “I’m taking a couple of weeks off. If you’ll sit down a sec I’ll be right with you. Going to take a shower.”

As he vanished into the bathroom his visitor’s dark eyes roved nervously around the room, resting for a moment on a great English travelling bag in the corner and on a family of thick silk shirts littered on the chairs amid impressive neckties and soft woollen socks.

Gordon rose and, picking up one of the shirts, gave it a minute examination. It was of very heavy silk, yellow, with a pale blue stripe — and there were nearly a dozen of them. He stared involuntarily at his own shirt-cuffs — they were ragged and linty at the edges and soiled to a faint gray. Dropping the silk shirt, he held his coat-sleeves down and worked the frayed shirt-cuffs up till they were out of sight. Then he went to the mirror and looked at himself with listless, unhappy interest. His tie, of former glory, was faded and thumb-creased — it served no longer to hide the jagged buttonholes of his collar. He thought, quite without amusement, that only three years before he had received a scattering vote in the senior elections at college for being the best-dressed man in his class.

Dean emerged from the bathroom polishing his body.

“Saw an old friend of yours last night,” he remarked. “Passed her in the lobby and couldn’t think of her name to save my neck. That girl you brought up to New Haven senior year.”

Gordon started.

“Edith Bradin? That whom you mean?”

“‘At’s the one. Damn good looking. She’s still sort of a pretty doll — you know what I mean: as if you touched her she’d smear.”

He surveyed his shining self complacently in the mirror, smiled faintly, exposing a section of teeth.

“She must be twenty-three anyway,” he continued.

“Twenty-two last month,” said Gordon absently.

“What? Oh, last month. Well, I imagine she’s down for the Gamma Psi dance. Did you know we’re having a Yale Gamma Psi dance to-night at Delmonico’s? You better come up, Gordy. Half of New Haven’ll probably be there. I can get you an invitation.”

Draping himself reluctantly in fresh underwear, Dean lit a cigarette and sat down by the open window, inspecting his calves and knees under the morning sunshine which poured into the room.

“Sit down, Gordy,” he suggested, “and tell me all about what you’ve been doing and what you’re doing now and everything.”

Gordon collapsed unexpectedly upon the bed; lay there inert and spiritless. His mouth, which habitually dropped a little open when his face was in repose, became suddenly helpless and pathetic.

“What’s the matter?” asked Dean quickly.

“Oh, God!”

“What’s the matter?”

“Every God damn thing in the world,” he said miserably, “I’ve absolutely gone to pieces, Phil. I’m all in.”

“Huh?”

“I’m all in.” His voice was shaking.

Dean scrutinized him more closely with appraising blue eyes.

“You certainly look all shot.”

“I am. I’ve made a hell of a mess of everything.” He paused. “I’d better start at the beginning — or will it bore you?”

“Not at all; go on.” There was, however, a hesitant note in Dean’s voice. This trip East had been planned for a holiday — to find Gordon Sterrett in trouble exasperated him a little.

“Go on,” he repeated, and then added half under his breath, “Get it over with.”

“Well,” began Gordon unsteadily, “I got back from France in February, went home to Harrisburg for a month, and then came down to New York to get a job. I got one — with an export company. They fired me yesterday.”

“Fired you?”

“I’m coming to that, Phil. I want to tell you frankly. You’re about the only man I can turn to in a matter like this. You won’t mind if I just tell you frankly, will you, Phil?”

Dean stiffened a bit more. The pats he was bestowing on his knees grew perfunctory. He felt vaguely that he was being unfairly saddled with responsibility; he was not even sure he wanted to be told. Though never surprised at finding Gordon Sterrett in mild difficulty, there was something in this present misery that repelled him and hardened him, even though it excited his curiosity.

“Go on.”

“It’s a girl.”

“Hm.” Dean resolved that nothing was going to spoil his trip. If

Gordon was going to be depressing, then he’d have to see less of

Gordon.

“Her name is Jewel Hudson,” went on the distressed voice from the bed. “She used to be ‘pure,’ I guess, up to about a year ago. Lived here in New York — poor family. Her people are dead now and she lives with an old aunt. You see it was just about the time I met her that everybody began to come back from France in droves — and all I did was to welcome the newly arrived and go on parties with ‘em. That’s the way it started, Phil, just from being glad to see everybody and having them glad to see me.”

“You ought to’ve had more sense.”

“I know,” Gordon paused, and then continued listlessly. “I’m on my own now, you know, and Phil, I can’t stand being poor. Then came this darn girl. She sort of fell in love with me for a while and, though I never intended to get so involved, I’d always seem to run into her somewhere. You can imagine the sort of work I was doing for those exporting people — of course, I always intended to draw; do illustrating for magazines; there’s a pile of money in it.”

“Why didn’t you? You’ve got to buckle down if you want to make good,” suggested Dean with cold formalism.

“I tried, a little, but my stuff’s crude. I’ve got talent, Phil; I can draw — but I just don’t know how. I ought to go to art school and I can’t afford it. Well, things came to a crisis about a week ago. Just as I was down to about my last dollar this girl began bothering me. She wants some money; claims she can make trouble for me if she doesn’t get it.”

“Can she?”

“I’m afraid she can. That’s one reason I lost my job — she kept calling up the office all the time, and that was sort of the last straw down there. She’s got a letter all written to send to my family. Oh, she’s got me, all right. I’ve got to have some money for her.”

There was an awkward pause. Gordon lay very still, his hands clenched by his side.

“I’m all in,” he continued, his voice trembling. “I’m half crazy, Phil. If I hadn’t known you were coming East, I think I’d have killed myself. I want you to lend me three hundred dollars.”

Dean’s hands, which had been patting his bare ankles, were suddenly quiet — and the curious uncertainty playing between the two became taut and strained.

After a second Gordon continued:

“I’ve bled the family until I’m ashamed to ask for another nickel.”

Still Dean made no answer.

“Jewel says she’s got to have two hundred dollars.”

“Tell her where she can go.”

“Yes, that sounds easy, but she’s got a couple of drunken letters I wrote her. Unfortunately she’s not at all the flabby sort of person you’d expect.”

Dean made an expression of distaste.

“I can’t stand that sort of woman. You ought to have kept away.”

“I know,” admitted Gordon wearily.

“You’ve got to look at things as they are. If you haven’t got money you’ve got to work and stay away from women.”

“That’s easy for you to say,” began Gordon, his eyes narrowing.

“You’ve got all the money in the world.”

“I most certainly have not. My family keep darn close tab on what I spend. Just because I have a little leeway I have to be extra careful not to abuse it.”

He raised the blind and let in a further flood of sunshine.

“I’m no prig, Lord knows,” he went on deliberately. “I like pleasure — and I like a lot of it on a vacation like this, but you’re — you’re in awful shape. I never heard you talk just this way before. You seem to be sort of bankrupt — morally as well as financially.”

“Don’t they usually go together?”

Dean shook his head impatiently.

“There’s a regular aura about you that I don’t understand. It’s a sort of evil.”

“It’s an air of worry and poverty and sleepless nights,” said Gordon, rather defiantly.

“I don’t know.”

“Oh, I admit I’m depressing. I depress myself. But, my God, Phil, a week’s rest and a new suit and some ready money and I’d be like — like I was. Phil, I can draw like a streak, and you know it. But half the time I haven’t had the money to buy decent drawing materials — and I can’t draw when I’m tired and discouraged and all in. With a little ready money I can take a few weeks off and get started.”

“How do I know you wouldn’t use it on some other woman?”

“Why rub it in?” said Gordon, quietly.

“I’m not rubbing it in. I hate to see you this way.”

“Will you lend me the money, Phil?”

“I can’t decide right off. That’s a lot of money and it’ll be darn inconvenient for me.”

“It’ll be hell for me if you can’t — I know I’m whining, and it’s all my own fault but — that doesn’t change it.”

“When could you pay it back?”

This was encouraging. Gordon considered. It was probably wisest to be frank.

“Of course, I could promise to send it back next month, but — I’d better say three months. Just as soon as I start to sell drawings.”

“How do I know you’ll sell any drawings?”

A new hardness in Dean’s voice sent a faint chill of doubt over

Gordon. Was it possible that he wouldn’t get the money?

“I supposed you had a little confidence in me.”

“I did have — but when I see you like this I begin to wonder.”

“Do you suppose if I wasn’t at the end of my rope I’d come to you like this? Do you think I’m enjoying it?” He broke off and bit his lip, feeling that he had better subdue the rising anger in his voice. After all, he was the suppliant.

“You seem to manage it pretty easily,” said Dean angrily. “You put me in the position where, if I don’t lend it to you, I’m a sucker — oh, yes, you do. And let me tell you it’s no easy thing for me to get hold of three hundred dollars. My income isn’t so big but that a slice like that won’t play the deuce with it.”

He left his chair and began to dress, choosing his clothes carefully. Gordon stretched out his arms and clenched the edges of the bed, fighting back a desire to cry out. His head was splitting and whirring, his mouth was dry and bitter and he could feel the fever in his blood resolving itself into innumerable regular counts like a slow dripping from a roof.

Dean tied his tie precisely, brushed his eyebrows, and removed a piece of tobacco from his teeth with solemnity. Next he filled his cigarette case, tossed the empty box thoughtfully into the waste basket, and settled the case in his vest pocket.

“Had breakfast?” he demanded.

“No; I don’t eat it any more.”

“Well, we’ll go out and have some. We’ll decide about that money later. I’m sick of the subject. I came East to have a good time.

“Let’s go over to the Yale Club,” he continued moodily, and then added with an implied reproof: “You’ve given up your job. You’ve got nothing else to do.”

“I’d have a lot to do if I had a little money,” said Gordon pointedly.

“Oh, for Heaven’s sake drop the subject for a while! No point in glooming on my whole trip. Here, here’s some money.”

He took a five-dollar bill from his wallet and tossed it over to Gordon, who folded it carefully and put it in his pocket. There was an added spot of color in his cheeks, an added glow that was not fever. For an instant before they turned to go out their eyes met and in that instant each found something that made him lower his own glance quickly. For in that instant they quite suddenly and definitely hated each other.

II

Fifth Avenueand Forty-fourth Street swarmed with the noon crowd. The wealthy, happy sun glittered in transient gold through the thick windows of the smart shops, lighting upon mesh bags and purses and strings of pearls in gray velvet cases; upon gaudy feather fans of many colors; upon the laces and silks of expensive dresses; upon the bad paintings and the fine period furniture in the elaborate show rooms of interior decorators.

Working-girls, in pairs and groups and swarms, loitered by these windows, choosing their future boudoirs from some resplendent display which included even a man’s silk pajamas laid domestically across the bed. They stood in front of the jewelry stores and picked out their engagement rings, and their wedding rings and their platinum wrist watches, and then drifted on to inspect the feather fans and opera cloaks; meanwhile digesting the sandwiches and sundaes they had eaten for lunch.

All through the crowd were men in uniform, sailors from the great fleet anchored in the Hudson, soldiers with divisional insignia from Massachusetts to California, wanting fearfully to be noticed, and finding the great city thoroughly fed up with soldiers unless they were nicely massed into pretty formations and uncomfortable under the weight of a pack and rifle. Through this medley Dean and Gordon wandered; the former interested, made alert by the display of humanity at its frothiest and gaudiest; the latter reminded of how often he had been one of the crowd, tired, casually fed, overworked, and dissipated. To Dean the struggle was significant, young, cheerful; to Gordon it was dismal, meaningless, endless.

In the Yale Club they met a group of their former classmates who greeted the visiting Dean vociferously. Sitting in a semicircle of lounges and great chairs, they had a highball all around.

Gordon found the conversation tiresome and interminable. They lunched together en masse, warmed with liquor as the afternoon began. They were all going to the Gamma Psi dance that night — it promised to be the best party since the war.

“Edith Bradin’s coming,” said some one to Gordon. “Didn’t she used to be an old flame of yours? Aren’t you both from Harrisburg?”

“Yes.” He tried to change the subject. “I see her brother occasionally. He’s sort of a socialistic nut. Runs a paper or something here in New York.”

“Not like his gay sister, eh?” continued his eager informant. “Well, she’s coming to-night — with a junior named Peter Himmel.”

Gordon was to meet Jewel Hudson at eight o’clock — he had promised to have some money for her. Several times he glanced nervously at his wrist watch. At four, to his relief, Dean rose and announced that he was going over to Rivers Brothers to buy some collars and ties. But as they left the Club another of the party joined them, to Gordon’s great dismay. Dean was in a jovial mood now, happy, expectant of the evening’s party, faintly hilarious. Over in Rivers’ he chose a dozen neckties, selecting each one after long consultations with the other man. Did he think narrow ties were coming back? And wasn’t it a shame that Rivers couldn’t get any more Welsh Margotson collars? There never was a collar like the “Covington.”

Gordon was in something of a panic. He wanted the money immediately. And he was now inspired also with a vague idea of attending the Gamma Psi dance. He wanted to see Edith — Edith whom he hadn’t met since one romantic night at the Harrisburg Country Club just before he went to France. The affair had died, drowned in the turmoil of the war and quite forgotten in the arabesque of these three months, but a picture of her, poignant, debonnaire, immersed in her own inconsequential chatter, recurred to him unexpectedly and brought a hundred memories with it. It was Edith’s face that he had cherished through college with a sort of detached yet affectionate admiration. He had loved to draw her — around his room had been a dozen sketches of her — playing golf, swimming — he could draw her pert, arresting profile with his eyes shut.

They left Rivers’ at five-thirty and parsed for a moment on the sidewalk.

“Well,” said Dean genially, “I’m all set now. Think I’ll go back to the hotel and get a shave, haircut, and massage.”

“Good enough,” said the other man, “I think I’ll join you.”

Gordon wondered if he was to be beaten after all. With difficulty he restrained himself from turning to the man and snarling out, “Go on away, damn you!” In despair he suspected that perhaps Dean had spoken to him, was keeping him along in order to avoid a dispute about the money.

They went into the Biltmore — a Biltmore alive with girls — mostly from the West and South, the stellar débutantes of many cities gathered for the dance of a famous fraternity of a famous university. But to Gordon they were faces in a dream. He gathered together his forces for a last appeal, was about to come out with he knew not what, when Dean suddenly excused himself to the other man and taking Gordon’s arm led him aside.

“Gordy,” he said quickly, “I’ve thought the whole thing over carefully and I’ve decided that I can’t lend you that money. I’d like to oblige you, but I don’t feel I ought to — it’d put a crimp in me for a month.”

Gordon, watching him dully, wondered why he had never before noticed how much those upper teeth projected.

“I’m — mighty sorry, Gordon,” continued Dean, “but that’s the way it is.”

He took out his wallet and deliberately counted out seventy-five dollars in bills.

“Here,” he said, holding them out, “here’s seventy-five; that makes eighty all together. That’s all the actual cash I have with me, besides what I’ll actually spend on the trip.”

Gordon raised his clenched hand automatically, opened it as though it were a tongs he was holding, and clenched it again on the money.

“I’ll see you at the dance,” continued Dean. “I’ve got to get along to the barber shop.”

“So-long,” said Gordon in a strained and husky voice.

“So-long.”

Dean, began to smile, but seemed to change his mind. He nodded briskly and disappeared.

But Gordon stood there, his handsome face awry with distress, the roll of bills clenched tightly in his hand. Then, blinded by sudden tears, he stumbled clumsily down the Biltmore steps.

III

About nine o’clock of the same night two human beings came out of a cheap restaurant in Sixth Avenue. They were ugly, ill-nourished, devoid of all except the very lowest form of intelligence, and without even that animal exuberance that in itself brings color into life; they were lately vermin-ridden, cold, and hungry in a dirty town of a strange land; they were poor, friendless; tossed as driftwood from their births, they would be tossed as driftwood to their deaths. They were dressed in the uniform of the United States Army, and on the shoulder of each was the insignia of a drafted division from New Jersey, landed three days before.

The taller of the two was named Carrol Key, a name hinting that in his veins, however thinly diluted by generations of degeneration, ran blood of some potentiality. But one could stare endlessly at the long, chinless face, the dull, watery eyes, and high cheek-bones, without finding suggestion of either ancestral worth or native resourcefulness.

His companion was swart and bandy-legged, with rat-eyes and a much-broken hooked nose. His defiant air was obviously a pretense, a weapon of protection borrowed from that world of snarl and snap, of physical bluff and physical menace, in which he had always lived. His name was Gus Rose.

Leaving the café they sauntered down Sixth Avenue, wielding toothpicks with great gusto and complete detachment.

“Where to?” asked Rose, in a tone which implied that he would not be surprised if Key suggested the South Sea Islands.

“What you say we see if we can getta holda some liquor?” Prohibition was not yet. The ginger in the suggestion was caused by the law forbidding the selling of liquor to soldiers.

Rose agreed enthusiastically.

“I got an idea,” continued Key, after a moment’s thought, “I got a brother somewhere.”

“In New York?”

“Yeah. He’s an old fella.” He meant that he was an elder brother.

“He’s a waiter in a hash joint.”

“Maybe he can get us some.”

“I’ll say he can!”

“B’lieve me, I’m goin’ to get this darn uniform off me to-morra. Never get me in it again, neither. I’m goin’ to get me some regular clothes.”

“Say, maybe I’m not.”

As their combined finances were something less than five dollars, this intention can be taken largely as a pleasant game of words, harmless and consoling. It seemed to please both of them, however, for they reinforced it with chuckling and mention of personages high in biblical circles, adding such further emphasis as “Oh, boy!” “You know!” and “I’ll say so!” repeated many times over.

The entire mental pabulum of these two men consisted of an offended nasal comment extended through the years upon the institution — army, business, or poorhouse — which kept them alive, and toward their immediate superior in that institution. Until that very morning the institution had been the “government” and the immediate superior had been the “Cap’n” — from these two they had glided out and were now in the vaguely uncomfortable state before they should adopt their next bondage. They were uncertain, resentful, and somewhat ill at ease. This they hid by pretending an elaborate relief at being out of the army, and by assuring each other that military discipline should never again rule their stubborn, liberty-loving wills. Yet, as a matter of fact, they would have felt more at home in a prison than in this new-found and unquestionable freedom.

Suddenly Key increased his gait. Rose, looking up and following his glance, discovered a crowd that was collecting fifty yards down the street. Key chuckled and began to run in the direction of the crowd; Rose thereupon also chuckled and his short bandy legs twinkled beside the long, awkward strides of his companion.

Reaching the outskirts of the crowd they immediately became an indistinguishable part of it. It was composed of ragged civilians somewhat the worse for liquor, and of soldiers representing many divisions and many stages of sobriety, all clustered around a gesticulating little Jew with long black whiskers, who was waving his arms and delivering an excited but succinct harangue. Key and Rose, having wedged themselves into the approximate parquet, scrutinized him with acute suspicion, as his words penetrated their common consciousness.

“ — What have you got outa the war?” he was crying fiercely. “Look arounja, look arounja! Are you rich? Have you got a lot of money offered you? — no; you’re lucky if you’re alive and got both your legs; you’re lucky if you came back an’ find your wife ain’t gone off with some other fella that had the money to buy himself out of the war! That’s when you’re lucky! Who got anything out of it except J. P. Morgan an’ John D. Rockerfeller?”

At this point the little Jew’s oration was interrupted by the hostile impact of a fist upon the point of his bearded chin and he toppled backward to a sprawl on the pavement.

“God damn Bolsheviki!” cried the big soldier-blacksmith, who had delivered the blow. There was a rumble of approval, the crowd closed in nearer.

The Jew staggered to his feet, and immediately went down again before a half-dozen reaching-in fists. This time he stayed down, breathing heavily, blood oozing from his lip where it was cut within and without.

There was a riot of voices, and in a minute Rose and Key found themselves flowing with the jumbled crowd down Sixth Avenue under the leadership of a thin civilian in a slouch hat and the brawny soldier who had summarily ended the oration. The crowd had marvellously swollen to formidable proportions and a stream of more non-committal citizens followed it along the sidewalks lending their moral support by intermittent huzzas.

“Where we goin’?” yelled Key to the man nearest him

His neighbor pointed up to the leader in the slouch hat.

“That guy knows where there’s a lot of ‘em! We’re goin’ to show ‘em!”

“We’re goin’ to show ‘em!” whispered Key delightedly to Rose, who repeated the phrase rapturously to a man on the other side.

Down Sixth Avenue swept the procession, joined here and there by soldiers and marines, and now and then by civilians, who came up with the inevitable cry that they were just out of the army themselves, as if presenting it as a card of admission to a newly formed Sporting and Amusement Club.

Then the procession swerved down a cross street and headed for Fifth

Avenue and the word filtered here and there that they were bound for a

Red meeting at Tolliver Hall.

“Where is it?”

The question went up the line and a moment later the answer floated hack. Tolliver Hall was down on Tenth Street. There was a bunch of other sojers who was goin’ to break it up and was down there now!

But Tenth Street had a faraway sound and at the word a general groan went up and a score of the procession dropped out. Among these were Rose and Key, who slowed down to a saunter and let the more enthusiastic sweep on by.

“I’d rather get some liquor,” said Key as they halted and made their way to the sidewalk amid cries of “Shell hole!” and “Quitters!”

“Does your brother work around here?” asked Rose, assuming the air of one passing from the superficial to the eternal.

“He oughta,” replied Key. “I ain’t seen him for a coupla years. I been out to Pennsylvania since. Maybe he don’t work at night anyhow. It’s right along here. He can get us some o’right if he ain’t gone.”

They found the place after a few minutes’ patrol of the street — a shoddy tablecloth restaurant between Fifth Avenue and Broadway. Here Key went inside to inquire for his brother George, while Rose waited on the sidewalk.

“He ain’t here no more,” said Key emerging. “He’s a waiter up to

Delmonico’s.”

Rose nodded wisely, as if he’d expected as much. One should not be surprised at a capable man changing jobs occasionally. He knew a waiter once — there ensued a long conversation as they waited as to whether waiters made more in actual wages than in tips — it was decided that it depended on the social tone of the joint wherein the waiter labored. After having given each other vivid pictures of millionaires dining at Delmonico’s and throwing away fifty-dollar bills after their first quart of champagne, both men thought privately of becoming waiters. In fact, Key’s narrow brow was secreting a resolution to ask his brother to get him a job.

“A waiter can drink up all the champagne those fellas leave in bottles,” suggested Rose with some relish, and then added as an afterthought, “Oh, boy!”

By the time they reached Delmonico’s it was half past ten, and they were surprised to see a stream of taxis driving up to the door one after the other and emitting marvelous, hatless young ladies, each one attended by a stiff young gentleman in evening clothes.

“It’s a party,” said Rose with some awe. “Maybe we better not go in.

He’ll be busy.”

“No, he won’t. He’ll be o’right.”

After some hesitation they entered what appeared to them to be the least elaborate door and, indecision falling upon them immediately, stationed themselves nervously in an inconspicuous corner of the small dining-room in which they found themselves. They took off their caps and held them in their hands. A cloud of gloom fell upon them and both started when a door at one end of the room crashed open, emitting a comet-like waiter who streaked across the floor and vanished through another door on the other side.

There had been three of these lightning passages before the seekers mustered the acumen to hail a waiter. He turned, looked at them suspiciously, and then approached with soft, catlike steps, as if prepared at any moment to turn and flee.

“Say,” began Key, “say, do you know my brother? He’s a waiter here.”

“His name is Key,” annotated Rose.

Yes, the waiter knew Key. He was up-stairs, he thought. There was a big dance going on in the main ballroom. He’d tell him.

Ten minutes later George Key appeared and greeted his brother with the utmost suspicion; his first and most natural thought being that he was going to be asked for money.

George was tall and weak chinned, but there his resemblance to his brother ceased. The waiter’s eyes were not dull, they were alert and twinkling, and his manner was suave, in-door, and faintly superior. They exchanged formalities. George was married and had three children. He seemed fairly interested, but not impressed by the news that Carrol had been abroad in the army. This disappointed Carrol.

“George,” said the younger brother, these amenities having been disposed of, “we want to get some booze, and they won’t sell us none. Can you get us some?”

George considered.

“Sure. Maybe I can. It may be half an hour, though.”

“All right,” agreed Carrol, “we’ll wait.”

At this Rose started to sit down in a convenient chair, but was hailed to his feet by the indignant George.

“Hey! Watch out, you! Can’t sit down here! This room’s all set for a twelve o’clock banquet.”

“I ain’t goin’ to hurt it,” said Rose resentfully. “I been through the delouser.”

“Never mind,” said George sternly, “if the head waiter seen me here talkin’ he’d romp all over me.”

“Oh.”

The mention of the head waiter was full explanation to the other two; they fingered their overseas caps nervously and waited for a suggestion.

“I tell you,” said George, after a pause, “I got a place you can wait; you just come here with me.”

They followed him out the far door, through a deserted pantry and up a pair of dark winding stairs, emerging finally into a small room chiefly furnished by piles of pails and stacks of scrubbing brushes, and illuminated by a single dim electric light. There he left them, after soliciting two dollars and agreeing to return in half an hour with a quart of whiskey.

“George is makin’ money, I bet,” said Key gloomily as he seated himself on an inverted pail. “I bet he’s making fifty dollars a week.”

Rose nodded his head and spat.

“I bet he is, too.”

“What’d he say the dance was of?”

“A lot of college fellas. YaleCollege.”

They, both nodded solemnly at each other.

“Wonder where that crowda sojers is now?”

“I don’t know. I know that’s too damn long to walk for me.”

“Me too. You don’t catch me walkin’ that far.”

Ten minutes later restlessness seized them.

“I’m goin’ to see what’s out here,” said Rose, stepping cautiously toward the other door.

It was a swinging door of green baize and he pushed it open a cautious inch.

“See anything?”

For answer Rose drew in his breath sharply.

“Doggone! Here’s some liquor I’ll say!”

“Liquor?”

Key joined Rose at the door, and looked eagerly.

“I’ll tell the world that’s liquor,” he said, after a moment of concentrated gazing.

It was a room about twice as large as the one they were in — and in it was prepared a radiant feast of spirits. There were long walls of alternating bottles set along two white covered tables; whiskey, gin, brandy, French and Italian vermouths, and orange juice, not to mention an array of syphons and two great empty punch bowls. The room was as yet uninhabited.

“It’s for this dance they’re just starting,” whispered Key; “hear the violins playin’? Say, boy, I wouldn’t mind havin’ a dance.”

They closed the door softly and exchanged a glance of mutual comprehension. There was no need of feeling each other out.

“I’d like to get my hands on a coupla those bottles,” said Rose emphatically.

“Me too.”

“Do you suppose we’d get seen?”

Key considered.

“Maybe we better wait till they start drinkin’ ‘em. They got ‘em all laid out now, and they know how many of them there are.”

They debated this point for several minutes. Rose was all for getting his hands on a bottle now and tucking it under his coat before anyone came into the room. Key, however, advocated caution. He was afraid he might get his brother in trouble. If they waited till some of the bottles were opened it’d be all right to take one, and everybody’d think it was one of the college fellas.

While they were still engaged in argument George Key hurried through the room and, barely grunting at them, disappeared by way of the green baize door. A minute later they heard several corks pop, and then the sound of cracking ice and splashing liquid. George was mixing the punch.

The soldiers exchanged delighted grins.

“Oh, boy!” whispered Rose.

George reappeared.

“Just keep low, boys,” he said quickly. “Ill have your stuff for you in five minutes.”

He disappeared through the door by which he had come.

As soon as his footsteps receded down the stairs, Rose, after a cautious look, darted into the room of delights and reappeared with a bottle in his hand.

“Here’s what I say,” he said, as they sat radiantly digesting their first drink. “We’ll wait till he comes up, and we’ll ask him if we can’t just stay here and drink what he brings us — see. We’ll tell him we haven’t got any place to drink it — see. Then we can sneak in there whenever there ain’t nobody in that there room and tuck a bottle under our coats. We’ll have enough to last us a coupla days — see?”

“Sure,” agreed Rose enthusiastically. “Oh, boy! And if we want to we can sell it to sojers any time we want to.”

They were silent for a moment thinking rosily of this idea. Then Key reached up and unhooked the collar of his O. D. coat.

“It’s hot in here, ain’t it?”

Rose agreed earnestly.

“Hot as hell.”

IV

She was still quite angry when she came out of the dressing-room and crossed the intervening parlor of politeness that opened onto the hall — angry not so much at the actual happening which was, after all, the merest commonplace of her social existence, but because it had occurred on this particular night. She had no quarrel with herself. She had acted with that correct mixture of dignity and reticent pity which she always employed. She had succinctly and deftly snubbed him.

It had happened when their taxi was leaving the Biltmore — hadn’t gone half a block. He had lifted his right arm awkwardly — she was on his right side — and attempted to settle it snugly around the crimson fur-trimmed opera cloak she wore. This in itself had been a mistake. It was inevitably more graceful for a young man attempting to embrace a young lady of whose acquiescence he was not certain, to first put his far arm around her. It avoided that awkward movement of raising the near arm.

His second faux pas was unconscious. She had spent the afternoon at the hairdresser’s; the idea of any calamity overtaking her hair was extremely repugnant — yet as Peter made his unfortunate attempt the point of his elbow had just faintly brushed it. That was his second faux pas. Two were quite enough.

He had begun to murmur. At the first murmur she had decided that he was nothing but a college boy — Edith was twenty-two, and anyhow, this dance, first of its kind since the war, was reminding her, with the accelerating rhythm of its associations, of something else — of another dance and another man, a man for whom her feelings had been little more than a sad-eyed, adolescent mooniness. Edith Bradin was falling in love with her recollection of Gordon Sterrett.

So she came out of the dressing-room at Delmonico’s and stood for a second in the doorway looking over the shoulders of a black dress in front of her at the groups of Yale men who flitted like dignified black moths around the head of the stairs. From the room she had left drifted out the heavy fragrance left by the passage to and fro of many scented young beauties — rich perfumes and the fragile memory-laden dust of fragrant powders. This odor drifting out acquired the tang of cigarette smoke in the hall, and then settled sensuously down the stairs and permeated the ballroom where the Gamma Psi dance was to be held. It was an odor she knew well, exciting, stimulating, restlessly sweet — the odor of a fashionable dance.

She thought of her own appearance. Her bare arms and shoulders were powdered to a creamy white. She knew they looked very soft and would gleam like milk against the black backs that were to silhouette them to-night. The hairdressing had been a success; her reddish mass of hair was piled and crushed and creased to an arrogant marvel of mobile curves. Her lips were finely made of deep carmine; the irises of her eyes were delicate, breakable blue, like china eyes. She was a complete, infinitely delicate, quite perfect thing of beauty, flowing in an even line from a complex coiffure to two small slim feet.

She thought of what she would say to-night at this revel, faintly prestiged already by the sounds of high and low laughter and slippered footsteps, and movements of couples up and down the stairs. She would talk the language she had talked for many years — her line — made up of the current expressions, bits of journalese and college slang strung together into an intrinsic whole, careless, faintly provocative, delicately sentimental. She stalled faintly as she heard a girl sitting on the stairs near her say: “You don’t know the half of it, dearie!”

And as she smiled her anger melted for a moment, and closing her eyes she drew in a deep breath of pleasure. She dropped her arms to her side until they were faintly touching the sleek sheath that covered and suggested her figure. She had never felt her own softness so much nor so enjoyed the whiteness of her own arms.

“I smell sweet,” she said to herself simply, and then came another thought “I’m made for love.”

She liked the sound of this and thought it again; then inevitable succession came her new-born riot of dreams about Gordon. The twist of her imagination which, two months before, had disclosed to her her unguessed desire to see him again, seemed now to have been leading up to this dance, this hour.

For all her sleek beauty, Edith was a grave, slow-thinking girl. There was a streak in her of that same desire to ponder, of that adolescent idealism that had turned her brother socialist and pacifist. Henry Bradin had left Cornell, where he had been an instructor in economies, and had come to New York to pour the latest cures for incurable evils into the columns of a radical weekly newspaper.

Edith, less fatuously, would have been content to cure Gordon Sterrett. There was a quality of weakness in Gordon that she wanted to take care of; there was a helplessness in him that she wanted to protect. And she wanted someone she had known a long while, someone who had loved her a long while. She was a little tired; she wanted to get married. Out of a pile of letters, half a dozen pictures and as many memories, and this weariness, she had decided that next time she saw Gordon their relations were going to be changed. She would say something that would change them. There was this evening. This was her evening. All evenings were her evenings.

Then her thoughts were interrupted by a solemn undergraduate with a hurt look and an air of strained formality who presented himself before her and bowed unusually low. It was the man she had come with, Peter Himmel. He was tall and humorous, with horned-rimmed glasses and an air of attractive whimsicality. She suddenly rather disliked him — probably because he had not succeeded in kissing her.

“Well,” she began, “are you still furious at me?”

“Not at all.”

She stepped forward and took his arm.

“I’m sorry,” she said softly. “I don’t know why I snapped out that way. I’m in a bum humor to-night for some strange reason. I’m sorry.”

“S’all right,” he mumbled, “don’t mention it.”

He felt disagreeably embarrassed. Was she rubbing in the fact of his late failure?

“It was a mistake,” she continued, on the same consciously gentle key.

“We’ll both forget it.” For this he hated her.

A few minutes later they drifted out on the floor while the dozen swaying, sighing members of the specially hired jazz orchestra informed the crowded ballroom that “if a saxophone and me are left alone why then two is com-pan-ee!”

A man with a mustache cut in.

“Hello,” he began reprovingly. “You don’t remember me.”

“I can’t just think of your name,” she said lightly — “and I know you so well.”

“I met you up at — “ His voice trailed disconsolately off as a man with very fair hair cut in. Edith murmured a conventional “Thanks, loads — cut in later,” to the inconnu.

The very fair man insisted on shaking hands enthusiastically. She placed him as one of the numerous Jims of her acquaintance — last name a mystery. She remembered even that he had a peculiar rhythm in dancing and found as they started that she was right.

“Going to be here long?” he breathed confidentially.

She leaned back and looked up at him.

“Couple of weeks.”

“Where are you?”

“Biltmore. Call me up some day.”

“I mean it,” he assured her. “I will. We’ll go to tea.”

“So do I — Do.”

A dark man cut in with intense formality.

“You don’t remember me, do you?” he said gravely.

“I should say I do. Your name’s Harlan.”

“No-ope. Barlow.”

“Well, I knew there were two syllables anyway. You’re the boy that played the ukulele so well up at Howard Marshall’s house party.

“I played — but not — “

A man with prominent teeth cut in. Edith inhaled a slight cloud of whiskey. She liked men to have had something to drink; they were so much more cheerful, and appreciative and complimentary — much easier to talk to.

“My name’s Dean, Philip Dean,” he said cheerfully. “You don’t remember me, I know, but you used to come up to New Haven with a fellow I roomed with senior year, Gordon Sterrett.”

Edith looked up quickly.

“Yes, I went up with him twice — to the Pump and Slipper and the Junior prom.”

“You’ve seen him, of course,” said Dean carelessly. “He’s here to-night. I saw him just a minute ago.”

Edith started. Yet she had felt quite sure he would be here.

“Why, no, I haven’t — “

A fat man with red hair cut in.

“Hello, Edith,” he began.

“Why — hello there — “

She slipped, stumbled lightly.

“I’m sorry, dear,” she murmured mechanically.

She had seen Gordon — Gordon very white and listless, leaning against the side of a doorway, smoking, and looking into the ballroom. Edith could see that his face was thin and wan — that the hand he raised to his lips with a cigarette, was trembling. They were dancing quite close to him now.

“ — They invite so darn many extra fellas that you — “ the short man was saying.

“Hello, Gordon,” called Edith over her partner’s shoulder. Her heart was pounding wildly.

His large dark eyes were fixed on her. He took a step in her direction. Her partner turned her away — she heard his voice bleating —  —

“ — but half the stags get lit and leave before long, so — “ Then a low tone at her side.

“May I, please?”

She was dancing suddenly with Gordon; one of his arms was around her; she felt it tighten spasmodically; felt his hand on her back with the fingers spread. Her hand holding the little lace handkerchief was crushed in his.

“Why Gordon,” she began breathlessly.

“Hello, Edith.”

She slipped again — was tossed forward by her recovery until her face touched the black cloth of his dinner coat. She loved him — she knew she loved him — then for a minute there was silence while a strange feeling of uneasiness crept over her. Something was wrong.

Of a sudden her heart wrenched, and turned over as she realized what it was. He was pitiful and wretched, a little drunk, and miserably tired.

“Oh — “ she cried involuntarily.

His eyes looked down at her. She saw suddenly that they were blood-streaked and rolling uncontrollably.

“Gordon,” she murmured, “we’ll sit down; I want to sit down.”

They were nearly in mid-floor, but she had seen two men start toward her from opposite sides of the room, so she halted, seized Gordon’s limp hand and led him bumping through the crowd, her mouth tight shut, her face a little pale under her rouge, her eyes trembling with tears.

She found a place high up on the soft-carpeted stairs, and he sat down heavily beside her.

“Well,” he began, staring at her unsteadily, “I certainly am glad to see you, Edith.”

She looked at him without answering. The effect of this on her was immeasurable. For years she had seen men in various stages of intoxication, from uncles all the way down to chauffeurs, and her feelings had varied from amusement to disgust, but here for the first time she was seized with a new feeling — an unutterable horror.

“Gordon,” she said accusingly and almost crying, “you look like the devil.”

He nodded, “I’ve had trouble, Edith.”

“Trouble?”

“All sorts of trouble. Don’t you say anything to the family, but I’m all gone to pieces. I’m a mess, Edith.”

His lower lip was sagging. He seemed scarcely to see her.

“Can’t you — can’t you,” she hesitated, “can’t you tell me about it,

Gordon? You know I’m always interested in you.”

She bit her lip — she had intended to say something stronger, but found at the end that she couldn’t bring it out.

Gordon shook his head dully. “I can’t tell you. You’re a good woman. I can’t tell a good woman the story.”

“Rot,” she said, defiantly. “I think it’s a perfect insult to call any one a good woman in that way. It’s a slam. You’ve been drinking, Gordon.”

“Thanks.” He inclined his head gravely. “Thanks for the information.”

“Why do you drink?”

“Because I’m so damn miserable.”

“Do you think drinking’s going to make it any better?”

“What you doing — trying to reform me?”

“No; I’m trying to help you, Gordon. Can’t you tell me about it?”

“I’m in an awful mess. Best thing you can do is to pretend not to know me.”

“Why, Gordon?”

“I’m sorry I cut in on you — its unfair to you. You’re pure woman — and all that sort of thing. Here, I’ll get some one else to dance with you.”

He rose clumsily to his feet, but she reached up and pulled him down beside her on the stairs.

“Here, Gordon. You’re ridiculous. You’re hurting me. You’re acting like a — like a crazy man — “

“I admit it. I’m a little crazy. Something’s wrong with me, Edith.

There’s something left me. It doesn’t matter.”

“It does, tell me.”

“Just that. I was always queer — little bit different from other boys. All right in college, but now it’s all wrong. Things have been snapping inside me for four months like little hooks on a dress, and it’s about to come off when a few more hooks go. I’m very gradually going loony.”

He turned his eyes full on her and began to laugh, and she shrank away from him.

“What is the matter?”

“Just me,” he repeated. “I’m going loony. This whole place is like a dream to me — this Delmonico’s — “

As he talked she saw he had changed utterly. He wasn’t at all light and gay and careless — a great lethargy and discouragement had come over him. Revulsion seized her, followed by a faint, surprising boredom. His voice seemed to come out of a great void.

“Edith,” he said, “I used to think I was clever, talented, an artist. Now I know I’m nothing. Can’t draw, Edith. Don’t know why I’m telling you this.”

She nodded absently.

“I can’t draw, I can’t do anything. I’m poor as a church mouse.” He laughed, bitterly and rather too loud. “I’ve become a damn beggar, a leech on my friends. I’m a failure. I’m poor as hell.”

Her distaste was growing. She barely nodded this time, waiting for her first possible cue to rise.

Suddenly Gordon’s eyes filled with tears.

“Edith,” he said, turning to her with what was evidently a strong effort at self-control, “I can’t tell you what it means to me to know there’s one person left who’s interested in me.”

He reached out and patted her hand, and involuntarily she drew it away.

“It’s mighty fine of you,” he repeated.

“Well,” she said slowly, looking him in the eye, “any one’s always glad to see an old friend — but I’m sorry to see you like this, Gordon.”

There was a pause while they looked at each other, and the momentary eagerness in his eyes wavered. She rose and stood looking at him, her face quite expressionless.

“Shall we dance?” she suggested, coolly.

— Love is fragile — she was thinking — but perhaps the pieces are saved, the things that hovered on lips, that might have been said. The new love words, the tendernesses learned, are treasured up for the next lover.

V

Peter Himmel, escort to the lovely Edith, was unaccustomed to being snubbed; having been snubbed, he was hurt and embarrassed, and ashamed of himself. For a matter of two months he had been on special delivery terms with Edith Bradin, and knowing that the one excuse and explanation of the special delivery letter is its value in sentimental correspondence, he had believed himself quite sure of his ground. He searched in vain for any reason why she should have taken this attitude in the matter of a simple kiss.

Therefore when he was cut in on by the man with the mustache he went out into the hall and, making up a sentence, said it over to himself several times. Considerably deleted, this was it:

“Well, if any girl ever led a man on and then jolted him, she did — and she has no kick coming if I go out and get beautifully boiled.”

So he walked through the supper room into a small room adjoining it, which he had located earlier in the evening. It was a room in which there were several large bowls of punch flanked by many bottles. He took a seat beside the table which held the bottles.

At the second highball, boredom, disgust, the monotony of time, the turbidity of events, sank into a vague background before which glittering cobwebs formed. Things became reconciled to themselves, things lay quietly on their shelves; the troubles of the day arranged themselves in trim formation and at his curt wish of dismissal, marched off and disappeared. And with the departure of worry came brilliant, permeating symbolism. Edith became a flighty, negligible girl, not to be worried over; rather to be laughed at. She fitted like a figure of his own dream into the surface world forming about him. He himself became in a measure symbolic, a type of the continent bacchanal, the brilliant dreamer at play.

Then the symbolic mood faded and as he sipped his third highball his imagination yielded to the warm glow and he lapsed into a state similar to floating on his back in pleasant water. It was at this point that he noticed that a green baize door near him was open about two inches, and that through the aperture a pair of eyes were watching him intently.

“Hm,” murmured Peter calmly.

The green door closed — and then opened again — a bare half inch this time.

“Peek-a-boo,” murmured Peter.

The door remained stationary and then he became aware of a series of tense intermittent whispers.

“One guy.”

“What’s he doin’?”

“He’s sittin’ lookin’.”

“He better beat it off. We gotta get another li’l’ bottle.”

Peter listened while the words filtered into his consciousness.

“Now this,” he thought, “is most remarkable.”

He was excited. He was jubilant. He felt that he had stumbled upon a mystery. Affecting an elaborate carelessness he arose and waited around the table — then, turning quickly, pulled open the green door, precipitating Private Rose into the room.

Peter bowed.

“How do you do?” he said.

Private Rose set one foot slightly in front of the other, poised for fight, flight, or compromise.

“How do you do?” repeated Peter politely.

“I’m o’right.”

“Can I offer you a drink?”

Private Rose looked at him searchingly, suspecting possible sarcasm.

“O’right,” he said finally.

Peter indicated a chair.

“Sit down.”

“I got a friend,” said Rose, “I got a friend in there.” He pointed to the green door.

“By all means let’s have him in.”

Peter crossed over, opened the door and welcomed in Private Key, very suspicious and uncertain and guilty. Chairs were found and the three took their seats around the punch bowl. Peter gave them each a highball and offered them a cigarette from his case. They accepted both with some diffidence.

“Now,” continued Peter easily, “may I ask why you gentlemen prefer to lounge away your leisure hours in a room which is chiefly furnished, as far as I can see, with scrubbing brushes. And when the human race has progressed to the stage where seventeen thousand chairs are manufactured on every day except Sunday — “ he paused. Rose and Key regarded him vacantly. “Will you tell me,” went on Peter, “why you choose to rest yourselves on articles, intended for the transportation of water from one place to another?”

At this point Rose contributed a grunt to the conversation.

“And lastly,” finished Peter, “will you tell me why, when you are in a building beautifully hung with enormous candelabra, you prefer to spend these evening hours under one anemic electric light?”

Rose looked at Key; Key looked at Rose. They laughed; they laughed uproariously; they found it was impossible to look at each other without laughing. But they were not laughing with this man — they were laughing at him. To them a man who talked after this fashion was either raving drunk or raving crazy.

“You are Yale men, I presume,” said Peter, finishing his highball and preparing another.

They laughed again.

“Na-ah.”

“So? I thought perhaps you might be members of that lowly section of the university known as the SheffieldScientificSchool.”

“Na-ah.”

“Hm. Well, that’s too bad. No doubt you are Harvard men, anxious to preserve your incognito in this — this paradise of violet blue, as the newspapers say.”

“Na-ah,” said Key scornfully, “we was just waitin’ for somebody.”

“Ah,” exclaimed Peter, rising and filling their glasses, “very interestin’. Had a date with a scrublady, eh?”

They both denied this indignantly.

“It’s all right,” Peter reassured them, “don’t apologize. A scrublady’s as good as any lady in the world.”

“Kipling says ‘Any lady and Judy O’Grady under the skin.’“

“Sure,” said Key, winking broadly at Rose.

“My case, for instance,” continued Peter, finishing his glass. “I got a girl up here that’s spoiled. Spoildest darn girl I ever saw. Refused to kiss me; no reason whatsoever. Led me on deliberately to think sure I want to kiss you and then plunk! Threw me over! What’s the younger generation comin’ to?”

“Say tha’s hard luck,” said Key — “that’s awful hard luck.”

“Oh, boy!” said Rose.

“Have another?” said Peter.

“We got in a sort of fight for a while,” said Key after a pause, “but it was too far away.”

“A fight? — tha’s stuff!” said Peter, seating himself unsteadily.

“Fight ‘em all! I was in the army.”

“This was with a Bolshevik fella.”

“Tha’s stuff!” exclaimed Peter, enthusiastic. “That’s what I say!

Kill the Bolshevik! Exterminate ‘em!”

“We’re Americuns,” said Rose, implying a sturdy, defiant patriotism.

“Sure,” said Peter. “Greatest race in the world! We’re all Americans!

Have another.”

They had another.

VI

At one o’clock a special orchestra, special even in a day of special orchestras, arrived at Delmonico’s, and its members, seating themselves arrogantly around the piano, took up the burden of providing music for the Gamma Psi Fraternity. They were headed by a famous flute-player, distinguished throughout New York for his feat of standing on his head and shimmying with his shoulders while he played the latest jazz on his flute. During his performance the lights were extinguished except for the spotlight on the flute-player and another roving beam that threw flickering shadows and changing kaleidoscopic colors over the massed dancers.

Edith had danced herself into that tired, dreamy state habitual only with débutantes, a state equivalent to the glow of a noble soul after several long highballs. Her mind floated vaguely on the bosom of her music; her partners changed with the unreality of phantoms under the colorful shifting dusk, and to her present coma it seemed as if days had passed since the dance began. She had talked on many fragmentary subjects with many men. She had been kissed once and made love to six times. Earlier in the evening different under-graduates had danced with her, but now, like all the more popular girls there, she had her own entourage — that is, half a dozen gallants had singled her out or were alternating her charms with those of some other chosen beauty; they cut in on her in regular, inevitable succession.

Several times she had seen Gordon — he had been sitting a long time on the stairway with his palm to his head, his dull eyes fixed at an infinite spark on the floor before him, very depressed, he looked, and quite drunk — but Edith each time had averted her glance hurriedly. All that seemed long ago; her mind was passive now, her senses were lulled to trance-like sleep; only her feet danced and her voice talked on in hazy sentimental banter.

But Edith was not nearly so tired as to be incapable of moral indignation when Peter Himmel cut in on her, sublimely and happily drunk. She gasped and looked up at him.

“Why, Peter!”

“I’m a li’l’ stewed, Edith.”

“Why, Peter, you’re a peach, you are! Don’t you think it’s a bum way of doing — when you’re with me?”

Then she smiled unwillingly, for he was looking at her with owlish sentimentality varied with a silly spasmodic smile.

“Darlin’ Edith,” he began earnestly, “you know I love you, don’t you?”

“You tell it well.”

“I love you — and I merely wanted you to kiss me,” he added sadly.

His embarrassment, his shame, were both gone. She was a mos’ beautiful girl in whole worl’. Mos’ beautiful eyes, like stars above. He wanted to ‘pologize — firs’, for presuming try to kiss her; second, for drinking — but he’d been so discouraged ‘cause he had thought she was mad at him —  —

The red-fat man cut in, and looking up at Edith smiled radiantly.

“Did you bring any one?” she asked.

No. The red-fat man was a stag.

“Well, would you mind — would it be an awful bother for you to — to take me home to-night?” (this extreme diffidence was a charming affectation on Edith’s part — she knew that the red-fat man would immediately dissolve into a paroxysm of delight).

“Bother? Why, good Lord, I’d be darn glad to! You know I’d be darn glad to.”

“Thanks loads! You’re awfully sweet.”

She glanced at her wrist-watch. It was half-past one. And, as she said “half-past one” to herself, it floated vaguely into her mind that her brother had told her at luncheon that he worked in the office of his newspaper until after one-thirty every evening.

Edith turned suddenly to her current partner.

“What street is Delmonico’s on, anyway?”

“Street? Oh, why Fifth Avenue, of course.”

“I mean, what cross street?”

“Why — let’s see — it’s on Forty-fourth Street.”

This verified what she had thought. Henry’s office must be across the street and just around the corner, and it occurred to her immediately that she might slip over for a moment and surprise him, float in on him, a shimmering marvel in her new crimson opera cloak and “cheer him up.” It was exactly the sort of thing Edith revelled in doing — an unconventional, jaunty thing. The idea reached out and gripped at her imagination — after an instant’s hesitation she had decided.

“My hair is just about to tumble entirely down,” she said pleasantly to her partner; “would you mind if I go and fix it?”

“Not at all.”

“You’re a peach.”

A few minutes later, wrapped in her crimson opera cloak, she flitted down a side-stairs, her cheeks glowing with excitement at her little adventure. She ran by a couple who stood at the door — a weak-chinned waiter and an over-rouged young lady, in hot dispute — and opening the outer door stepped into the warm May night.

VII

The over-rouged young lady followed her with a brief, bitter glance — then turned again to the weak-chinned waiter and took up her argument.

“You better go up and tell him I’m here,” she said defiantly, “or I’ll go up myself.”

“No, you don’t!” said George sternly.

The girl smiled sardonically.

“Oh, I don’t, don’t I? Well, let me tell you I know more college fellas and more of ‘em know me, and are glad to take me out on a party, than you ever saw in your whole life.”

“Maybe so — “

“Maybe so,” she interrupted. “Oh, it’s all right for any of ‘em like that one that just ran out — God knows where she went — it’s all right for them that are asked here to come or go as they like — but when I want to see a friend they have some cheap, ham-slinging, bring-me-a-doughnut waiter to stand here and keep me out.”

“See here,” said the elder Key indignantly, “I can’t lose my job.

Maybe this fella you’re talkin’ about doesn’t want to see you.”

“Oh, he wants to see me all right.”

“Anyways, how could I find him in all that crowd?”

“Oh, he’ll be there,” she asserted confidently. “You just ask anybody for Gordon Sterrett and they’ll point him out to you. They all know each other, those fellas.”

She produced a mesh bag, and taking out a dollar bill handed it to

George.

“Here,” she said, “here’s a bribe. You find him and give him my message. You tell him if he isn’t here in five minutes I’m coming up.”

George shook his head pessimistically, considered the question for a moment, wavered violently, and then withdrew.

In less than the allotted time Gordon came down-stairs. He was drunker than he had been earlier in the evening and in a different way. The liquor seemed to have hardened on him like a crust. He was heavy and lurching — almost incoherent when he talked.

“‘Lo, Jewel,” he said thickly. “Came right away, Jewel, I couldn’t get that money. Tried my best.”

“Money nothing!” she snapped. “You haven’t been near me for ten days.

What’s the matter?”

He shook his head slowly.

“Been very low, Jewel. Been sick.”

“Why didn’t you tell me if you were sick. I don’t care about the money that bad. I didn’t start bothering you about it at all until you began neglecting me.”

Again he shook his head.

“Haven’t been neglecting you. Not at all.”

“Haven’t! You haven’t been near me for three weeks, unless you been so drunk you didn’t know what you were doing.”

“Been sick. Jewel,” he repeated, turning his eyes upon her wearily.

“You’re well enough to come and play with your society friends here all right. You told me you’d meet me for dinner, and you said you’d have some money for me. You didn’t even bother to ring me up.”

“I couldn’t get any money.”

“Haven’t I just been saying that doesn’t matter? I wanted to see you, Gordon, but you seem to prefer your somebody else.”

He denied this bitterly.

“Then get your hat and come along,” she suggested. Gordon hesitated — and she came suddenly close to him and slipped her arms around his neck.

“Come on with me, Gordon,” she said in a half whisper. “We’ll go over to Devineries’ and have a drink, and then we can go up to my apartment.”

“I can’t, Jewel, —  — “

“You can,” she said intensely.

“I’m sick as a dog!”

“Well, then, you oughtn’t to stay here and dance.”

With a glance around him in which relief and despair were mingled, Gordon hesitated; then she suddenly pulled him to her and kissed him with soft, pulpy lips.

“All right,” he said heavily. “I’ll get my hat.”

VII

When Edith came out into the clear blue of the May night she found the Avenue deserted. The windows of the big shops were dark; over their doors were drawn great iron masks until they were only shadowy tombs of the late day’s splendor. Glancing down toward Forty-second Street she saw a commingled blur of lights from the all-night restaurants. Over on Sixth Avenue the elevated, a flare of fire, roared across the street between the glimmering parallels of light at the station and streaked along into the crisp dark. But at Forty-fourth Street it was very quiet.

Pulling her cloak close about her Edith darted across the Avenue. She started nervously as a solitary man passed her and said in a hoarse whisper — “Where bound, kiddo?” She was reminded of a night in her childhood when she had walked around the block in her pajamas and a dog had howled at her from a mystery-big back yard.

In a minute she had reached her destination, a two-story, comparatively old building on Forty-fourth, in the upper window of which she thankfully detected a wisp of light. It was bright enough outside for her to make out the sign beside the window — the New York Trumpet. She stepped inside a dark hall and after a second saw the stairs in the corner.

Then she was in a long, low room furnished with many desks and hung on all sides with file copies of newspapers. There were only two occupants. They were sitting at different ends of the room, each wearing a green eye-shade and writing by a solitary desk light.

For a moment she stood uncertainly in the doorway, and then both men turned around simultaneously and she recognized her brother.

“Why, Edith!” He rose quickly and approached her in surprise, removing his eye-shade. He was tall, lean, and dark, with black, piercing eyes under very thick glasses. They were far-away eyes that seemed always fixed just over the head of the person to whom he was talking.

He put his hands on her arms and kissed her cheek.

“What is it?” he repeated in some alarm.

“I was at a dance across at Delmonico’s, Henry,” she said excitedly, “and I couldn’t resist tearing over to see you.”

“I’m glad you did.” His alertness gave way quickly to a habitual vagueness. “You oughtn’t to be out alone at night though, ought you?”

The man at the other end of the room had been looking at them curiously, but at Henry’s beckoning gesture he approached. He was loosely fat with little twinkling eyes, and, having removed his collar and tie, he gave the impression of a Middle-Western farmer on a Sunday afternoon.

“This is my sister,” said Henry. “She dropped in to see me.”

“How do you do?” said the fat man, smiling. “My name’s Bartholomew,

Miss Bradin. I know your brother has forgotten it long ago.”

Edith laughed politely.

“Well,” he continued, “not exactly gorgeous quarters we have here, are they?”

Edith looked around the room.

“They seem very nice,” she replied. “Where do you keep the bombs?”

“The bombs?” repeated Bartholomew, laughing. “That’s pretty good — the bombs. Did you hear her, Henry? She wants to know where we keep the bombs. Say, that’s pretty good.”

Edith swung herself onto a vacant desk and sat dangling her feet over the edge. Her brother took a seat beside her.

“Well,” he asked, absent-mindedly, “how do you like New York this trip?”

“Not bad. I’ll be over at the Biltmore with the Hoyts until Sunday.

Can’t you come to luncheon to-morrow?”

He thought a moment.

“I’m especially busy,” he objected, “and I hate women in groups.”

“All right,” she agreed, unruffled. “Let’s you and me have luncheon together.”

“Very well.”

“I’ll call for you at twelve.”

Bartholomew was obviously anxious to return to his desk, but apparently considered that it would be rude to leave without some parting pleasantry.

“Well” — he began awkwardly.

They both turned to him.

“Well, we — we had an exciting time earlier in the evening.”

The two men exchanged glances.

“You should have come earlier,” continued Bartholomew, somewhat encouraged. “We had a regular vaudeville.”

“Did you really?”

“A serenade,” said Henry. “A lot of soldiers gathered down there in the street and began to yell at the sign.”

“Why?” she demanded.

“Just a crowd,” said Henry, abstractedly. “All crowds have to howl. They didn’t have anybody with much initiative in the lead, or they’d probably have forced their way in here and smashed things up.”

“Yes,” said Bartholomew, turning again to Edith, “you should have been here.”

He seemed to consider this a sufficient cue for withdrawal, for he turned abruptly and went back to his desk.

“Are the soldiers all set against the Socialists?” demanded Edith of her brother. “I mean do they attack you violently and all that?”

Henry replaced his eye-shade and yawned.

“The human race has come a long way,” he said casually, “but most of us are throw-backs; the soldiers don’t know what they want, or what they hate, or what they like. They’re used to acting in large bodies, and they seem to have to make demonstrations. So it happens to be against us. There’ve been riots all over the city to-night. It’s May Day, you see.”

“Was the disturbance here pretty serious?”

“Not a bit,” he said scornfully. “About twenty-five of them stopped in the street about nine o’clock, and began to bellow at the moon.”

“Oh” — She changed the subject. “You’re glad to see me, Henry?”

“Why, sure.”

“You don’t seem to be.”

“I am.”

“I suppose you think I’m a — a waster. Sort of the World’s Worst

Butterfly.”

Henry laughed.

“Not at all. Have a good time while you’re young. Why? Do I seem like the priggish and earnest youth?”

“No — “ she paused,” — but somehow I began thinking how absolutely different the party I’m on is from — from all your purposes. It seems sort of — of incongruous, doesn’t it? — me being at a party like that, and you over here working for a thing that’ll make that sort of party impossible ever any more, if your ideas work.”

“I don’t think of it that way. You’re young, and you’re acting just as you were brought up to act. Go ahead — have a good time?”

Her feet, which had been idly swinging, stopped and her voice dropped a note.

“I wish you’d — you’d come back to Harrisburg and have a good time. Do you feel sure that you’re on the right track —  — “

“You’re wearing beautiful stockings,” he interrupted. “What on earth are they?”

“They’re embroidered,” she replied, glancing down; “Aren’t they cunning?” She raised her skirts and uncovered slim, silk-sheathed calves. “Or do you disapprove of silk stockings?”

He seemed slightly exasperated, bent his dark eyes on her piercingly.

“Are you trying to make me out as criticizing you in any way, Edith?”

“Not at all —  — “

She paused. Bartholomew had uttered a grunt. She turned and saw that he had left his desk and was standing at the window.

“What is it?” demanded Henry.

“People,” said Bartholomew, and then after an instant: “Whole jam of them. They’re coming from Sixth Avenue.”

“People?”

The fat man pressed his nose to the pane.

“Soldiers, by God!” he said emphatically. “I had an idea they’d come back.”

Edith jumped to her feet, and running over joined Bartholomew at the window.

“There’s a lot of them!” she cried excitedly. “Come here, Henry!”

Henry readjusted his shade, but kept his seat.

“Hadn’t we better turn out the lights?” suggested Bartholomew.

“No. They’ll go away in a minute.”

“They’re not,” said Edith, peering from the window. “They’re not even thinking of going away. There’s more of them coming. Look — there’s a whole crowd turning the corner of Sixth Avenue.”

By the yellow glow and blue shadows of the street lamp she could see that the sidewalk was crowded with men. They were mostly in uniform, some sober, some enthusiastically drunk, and over the whole swept an incoherent clamor and shouting.

Henry rose, and going to the window exposed himself as a long silhouette against the office lights. Immediately the shouting became a steady yell, and a rattling fusillade of small missiles, corners of tobacco plugs, cigarette-boxes, and even pennies beat against the window. The sounds of the racket now began floating up the stairs as the folding doors revolved.

“They’re coming up!” cried Bartholomew.

Edith turned anxiously to Henry.

“They’re coming up, Henry.”

From down-stairs in the lower hall their cries were now quite audible.

“ — God Damn Socialists!”

“Pro-Germans! Boche-lovers!”

“Second floor, front! Come on!”

“We’ll get the sons — “

The next five minutes passed in a dream. Edith was conscious that the clamor burst suddenly upon the three of them like a cloud of rain, that there was a thunder of many feet on the stairs, that Henry had seized her arm and drawn her back toward the rear of the office. Then the door opened and an overflow of men were forced into the room — not the leaders, but simply those who happened to be in front.

“Hello, Bo!”

“Up late, ain’t you!”

“You an’ your girl. Damn you!”

She noticed that two very drunken soldiers had been forced to the front, where they wobbled fatuously — one of them was short and dark, the other was tall and weak of chin.

Henry stepped forward and raised his hand.

“Friends!” he said.

The clamor faded into a momentary stillness, punctuated with mutterings.

“Friends!” he repeated, his far-away eyes fixed over the heads of the crowd, “you’re injuring no one but yourselves by breaking in here to-night. Do we look like rich men? Do we look like Germans? I ask you in all fairness — “

“Pipe down!”

“I’ll say you do!”

“Say, who’s your lady friend, buddy?”

A man in civilian clothes, who had been pawing over a table, suddenly held up a newspaper.

“Here it is!” he shouted, “They wanted the Germans to win the war!”

A new overflow from the stairs was shouldered in and of a sudden the room was full of men all closing around the pale little group at the back. Edith saw that the tall soldier with the weak chin was still in front. The short dark one had disappeared.

She edged slightly backward, stood close to the open window, through which came a clear breath of cool night air.

Then the room was a riot. She realized that the soldiers were surging forward, glimpsed the fat man swinging a chair over his head — instantly the lights went out and she felt the push of warm bodies under rough cloth, and her ears were full of shouting and trampling and hard breathing.

A figure flashed by her out of nowhere, tottered, was edged sideways, and of a sudden disappeared helplessly out through the open window with a frightened, fragmentary cry that died staccato on the bosom of the clamor. By the faint light streaming from the building backing on the area Edith had a quick impression that it had been the tall soldier with tie weak chin.

Anger rose astonishingly in her. She swung her arms wildly, edged blindly toward the thickest of the scuffling. She heard grunts, curses, the muffled impact of fists.

“Henry!” she called frantically, “Henry!”

Then, it was minutes later, she felt suddenly that there were other figures in the room. She heard a voice, deep, bullying, authoritative; she saw yellow rays of light sweeping here and there in the fracas. The cries became more scattered. The scuffling increased and then stopped.

Suddenly the lights were on and the room was full of policemen, clubbing left and right. The deep voice boomed out:

“Here now! Here now! Here now!”

And then:

“Quiet down and get out! Here now!”

The room seemed to empty like a wash-bowl. A policeman fast-grappled in the corner released his hold on his soldier antagonist and started him with a shove toward the door. The deep voice continued. Edith perceived now that it came from a bull-necked police captain standing near the door.

“Here now! This is no way! One of your own sojers got shoved out of the back window an’ killed hisself!”

“Henry!” called Edith, “Henry!”

She beat wildly with her fists on the back of the man in front of her; she brushed between two others; fought, shrieked, and beat her way to a very pale figure sitting on the floor close to a desk.

“Henry,” she cried passionately, “what’s the matter? What’s the matter? Did they hurt you?”

His eyes were shut. He groaned and then looking up said disgustedly —

“They broke my leg. My God, the fools!”

“Here now!” called the police captain. “Here now! Here now!”

IX

“Childs’, Fifty-ninth Street,” at eight o’clock of any morning differs from its sisters by less than the width of their marble tables or the degree of polish on the frying-pans. You will see there a crowd of poor people with sleep in the corners of their eyes, trying to look straight before them at their food so as not to see the other poor people. But Childs’, Fifty-ninth, four hours earlier is quite unlike any Childs’ restaurant from Portland, Oregon, to Portland, Maine. Within its pale but sanitary walls one finds a noisy medley of chorus girls, college boys, debutantes, rakes, filles de joie — a not unrepresentative mixture of the gayest of Broadway, and even of Fifth Avenue.

In the early morning of May the second it was unusually full. Over the marble-topped tables were bent the excited faces of flappers whose fathers owned individual villages. They were eating buckwheat cakes and scrambled eggs with relish and gusto, an accomplishment that it would have been utterly impossible for them to repeat in the same place four hours later.

Almost the entire crowd were from the Gamma Psi dance at Delmonico’s except for several chorus girls from a midnight revue who sat at a side table and wished they’d taken off a little more make-up after the show. Here and there a drab, mouse-like figure, desperately out of place, watched the butterflies with a weary, puzzled curiosity. But the drab figure was the exception. This was the morning after May Day, and celebration was still in the air.

Gus Rose, sober but a little dazed, must be classed as one of the drab figures. How he had got himself from Forty-fourth Street to Fifty-ninth Street after the riot was only a hazy half-memory. He had seen the body of Carrol Key put in an ambulance and driven off, and then he had started up town with two or three soldiers. Somewhere between Forty-fourth Streetand Fifty-ninth Street the other soldiers had met some women and disappeared. Rose had wandered to Columbus Circle and chosen the gleaming lights of Childs’ to minister to his craving for coffee and doughnuts. He walked in and sat down.

All around him floated airy, inconsequential chatter and high-pitched laughter. At first he failed to understand, but after a puzzled five minutes he realized that this was the aftermath of some gay party. Here and there a restless, hilarious young man wandered fraternally and familiarly between the tables, shaking hands indiscriminately and pausing occasionally for a facetious chat, while excited waiters, bearing cakes and eggs aloft, swore at him silently, and bumped him out of the way. To Rose, seated at the most inconspicuous and least crowded table, the whole scene was a colorful circus of beauty and riotous pleasure.

He became gradually aware, after a few moments, that the couple seated diagonally across from him with their backs to the crowd, were not the least interesting pair in the room. The man was drunk. He wore a dinner coat with a dishevelled tie and shirt swollen by spillings of water and wine. His eyes, dim and blood-shot, roved unnaturally from side to side. His breath came short between his lips.

“He’s been on a spree!” thought Rose.

The woman was almost if not quite sober. She was pretty, with dark eyes and feverish high color, and she kept her active eyes fixed on her companion with the alertness of a hawk. From time to time she would lean and whisper intently to him, and he would answer by inclining his head heavily or by a particularly ghoulish and repellent wink.

Rose scrutinized them dumbly for some minutes until the woman gave him a quick, resentful look; then he shifted his gaze to two of the most conspicuously hilarious of the promenaders who were on a protracted circuit of the tables. To his surprise he recognized in one of them the young man by whom he had been so ludicrously entertained at Delmonico’s. This started him thinking of Key with a vague sentimentality, not unmixed with awe. Key was dead. He had fallen thirty-five feet and split his skull like a cracked cocoa-nut.

“He was a darn good guy,” thought Rose mournfully. “He was a darn good guy, o’right. That was awful hard luck about him.”

The two promenaders approached and started down between Rose’s table and the next, addressing friends and strangers alike with jovial familiarity. Suddenly Rose saw the fair-haired one with the prominent teeth stop, look unsteadily at the man and girl opposite, and then begin to move his head disapprovingly from side to side.

The man with the blood-shot eyes looked up.

“Gordy,” said the promenader with the prominent teeth, “Gordy.”

“Hello,” said the man with the stained shirt thickly.

Prominent teeth shook his finger pessimistically at the pair, giving the woman a glance of aloof condemnation.

“What’d I tell you Gordy?”

Gordon stirred in his seat.

“Go to hell!” he said.

Dean continued to stand there shaking his finger. The woman began to get angry.

“You go way!” she cried fiercely. “You’re drunk, that’s what you are!”

“So’s he,” suggested Dean, staying the motion of his finger and pointing it at Gordon.

Peter Himmel ambled up, owlish now and oratorically inclined.

“Here now,” he began as if called upon to deal with some petty dispute between children. “Wha’s all trouble?”

“You take your friend away,” said Jewel tartly. “He’s bothering us.”

“What’s at?”

“You heard me!” she said shrilly. “I said to take your drunken friend away.”

Her rising voice rang out above the clatter of the restaurant and a waiter came hurrying up.

“You gotta be more quiet!”

“That fella’s drunk,” she cried. “He’s insulting us.”

“Ah-ha, Gordy,” persisted the accused. “What’d I tell you.” He turned to the waiter. “Gordy an’ I friends. Been tryin’ help him, haven’t I, Gordy?”

Gordy looked up.

“Help me? Hell, no!”

Jewel rose suddenly, and seizing Gordon’s arm assisted him to his feet.

“Come on, Gordy!” she said, leaning toward him and speaking in a half whisper. “Let’s us get out of here. This fella’s got a mean drunk on.”

Gordon allowed himself to be urged to his feet and started toward the door. Jewel turned for a second and addressed the provoker of their flight.

“I know all about you!” she said fiercely. “Nice friend, you are, I’ll say. He told me about you.”

Then she seized Gordon’s arm, and together they made their way through the curious crowd, paid their check, and went out.

“You’ll have to sit down,” said the waiter to Peter after they had gone.

“What’s ‘at? Sit down?”

“Yes — or get out.”

Peter turned to Dean.

“Come on,” he suggested. “Let’s beat up this waiter.”

“All right.”

They advanced toward him, their faces grown stern. The waiter retreated.

Peter suddenly reached over to a plate on the table beside him and picking up a handful of hash tossed it into the air. It descended as a languid parabola in snowflake effect on the heads of those near by.

“Hey! Ease up!”

“Put him out!”

“Sit down, Peter!”

“Cut out that stuff!”

Peter laughed and bowed.

“Thank you for your kind applause, ladies and gents. If some one will lend me some more hash and a tall hat we will go on with the act.”

The bouncer bustled up.

“You’ve gotta get out!” he said to Peter.

“Hell, no!”

“He’s my friend!” put in Dean indignantly.

A crowd of waiters were gathering. “Put him out!”

“Better go, Peter.”

There was a short, struggle and the two were edged and pushed toward the door.

“I got a hat and a coat here!” cried Peter.

“Well, go get ‘em and be spry about it!”

The bouncer released his hold on Peter, who, adopting a ludicrous air of extreme cunning, rushed immediately around to the other table, where he burst into derisive laughter and thumbed his nose at the exasperated waiters.

“Think I just better wait a l’il longer,” he announced.

The chase began. Four waiters were sent around one way and four another. Dean caught hold of two of them by the coat, and another struggle took place before the pursuit of Peter could be resumed; he was finally pinioned after overturning a sugar-bowl and several cups of coffee. A fresh argument ensued at the cashier’s desk, where Peter attempted to buy another dish of hash to take with him and throw at policemen.

But the commotion upon his exit proper was dwarfed by another phenomenon which drew admiring glances and a prolonged involuntary “Oh-h-h!” from every person in the restaurant.

The great plate-glass front had turned to a deep blue, the color of a Maxfield Parrish moonlight — a blue that seemed to press close upon the pane as if to crowd its way into the restaurant. Dawn had come up in Columbus Circle, magical, breathless dawn, silhouetting the great statue of the immortal Christopher, and mingling in a curious and uncanny manner with the fading yellow electric light inside.

X

Mr. In and Mr. Out are not listed by the census-taker. You will search for them in vain through the social register or the births, marriages, and deaths, or the grocer’s credit list. Oblivion has swallowed them and the testimony that they ever existed at all is vague and shadowy, and inadmissible in a court of law. Yet I have it upon the best authority that for a brief space Mr. In and Mr. Out lived, breathed, answered to their names and radiated vivid personalities of their own.

During the brief span of their lives they walked in their native garments down the great highway of a great nation; were laughed at, sworn at, chased, and fled from. Then they passed and were heard of no more.

They were already taking form dimly, when a taxi cab with the top open breezed down Broadway in the faintest glimmer of May dawn. In this car sat the souls of Mr. In and Mr. Out discussing with amazement the blue light that had so precipitately colored the sky behind the statue of Christopher Columbus, discussing with bewilderment the old, gray faces of the early risers which skimmed palely along the street like blown bits of paper on a gray lake. They were agreed on all things, from the absurdity of the bouncer in Childs’ to the absurdity of the business of life. They were dizzy with the extreme maudlin happiness that the morning had awakened in their glowing souls. Indeed, so fresh and vigorous was their pleasure in living that they felt it should be expressed by loud cries.

“Ye-ow-ow!” hooted Peter, making a megaphone with his hands — and Dean joined in with a call that, though equally significant and symbolic, derived its resonance from its very inarticulateness.

“Yo-ho! Yea! Yoho! Yo-buba!”

Fifty-third Street was a bus with a dark, bobbed-hair beauty atop; Fifty-second was a street cleaner who dodged, escaped, and sent up a yell of, “Look where you’re aimin’!” in a pained and grieved voice. At Fiftieth Street a group of men on a very white sidewalk in front of a very white building turned to stare after them, and shouted:

“Some party, boys!”

At Forty-ninth Street Peter turned to Dean. “Beautiful morning,” he said gravely, squinting up his owlish eyes.

“Probably is.”

“Go get some breakfast, hey?”

Dean agreed — with additions.

“Breakfast and liquor.”

“Breakfast and liquor,” repeated Peter, and they looked at each other, nodding. “That’s logical.”

Then they both burst into loud laughter.

“Breakfast and liquor! Oh, gosh!”

“No such thing,” announced Peter.

“Don’t serve it? Ne’mind. We force ‘em serve it Bring pressure bear.”

“Bring logic bear.”

The taxi cut suddenly off Broadway, sailed along a cross street, and stopped in front of a heavy tomb-like building in Fifth Avenue.

“What’s idea?”

The taxi-driver informed them that this was Delmonico’s.

This was somewhat puzzling. They were forced to devote several minutes to intense concentration, for if such an order had been given there must have been a reason for it.

“Somep’m ‘bouta coat,” suggested the taxi-man.

That was it. Peter’s overcoat and hat. He had left them at Delmonico’s. Having decided this, they disembarked from the taxi and strolled toward the entrance arm in arm.

“Hey!” said the taxi-driver.

“Huh?”

“You better pay me.”

They shook their heads in shocked negation.

“Later, not now — we give orders, you wait.”

The taxi-driver objected; he wanted his money now. With the scornful condescension of men exercising tremendous self-control they paid him.

Inside Peter groped in vain through a dim, deserted check-room in search of his coat and derby.

“Gone, I guess. Somebody stole it.”

“Some Sheff student.”

“All probability.”

“Never mind,” said Dean, nobly. “I’ll leave mine here too — then we’ll both be dressed the same.”

He removed his overcoat and hat and was hanging them up when his roving glance was caught and held magnetically by two large squares of cardboard tacked to the two coat-room doors. The one on the left-hand door bore the word “In” in big black letters, and the one on the right-hand door flaunted the equally emphatic word “Out.”

“Look!” he exclaimed happily —

Peter’s eyes followed his pointing finger.

“What?”

“Look at the signs. Let’s take ‘em.”

“Good idea.”

“Probably pair very rare an’ valuable signs. Probably come in handy.”

Peter removed the left-hand sign from the door and endeavored to conceal it about his person. The sign being of considerable proportions, this was a matter of some difficulty. An idea flung itself at him, and with an air of dignified mystery he turned his back. After an instant he wheeled dramatically around, and stretching out his arms displayed himself to the admiring Dean. He had inserted the sign in his vest, completely covering his shirt front. In effect, the word “In” had been painted upon his shirt in large black letters.

“Yoho!” cheered Dean. “Mister In.”

He inserted his own sign in like manner.

“Mister Out!” he announced triumphantly. “Mr. In meet Mr. Out.”

They advanced and shook hands. Again laughter overcame them and they rocked in a shaken spasm of mirth.

“Yoho!”

“We probably get a flock of breakfast.”

“We’ll go — go to the Commodore.”

Arm in arm they sallied out the door, and turning east in Forty-fourth

Street set out for the Commodore.

As they came out a short dark soldier, very pale and tired, who had been wandering listlessly along the sidewalk, turned to look at them.

He started over as though to address them, but as they immediately bent on him glances of withering unrecognition, he waited until they had started unsteadily down the street, and then followed at about forty paces, chuckling to himself and saying, “Oh, boy!” over and over under his breath, in delighted, anticipatory tones.

Mr. In and Mr. Out were meanwhile exchanging pleasantries concerning their future plans.

“We want liquor; we want breakfast. Neither without the other. One and indivisible.”

“We want both ‘em!”

“Both ‘em!”

It was quite light now, and passers-by began to bend curious eyes on the pair. Obviously they were engaged in a discussion, which afforded each of them intense amusement, for occasionally a fit of laughter would seize upon them so violently that, still with their arms interlocked, they would bend nearly double.

Reaching the Commodore, they exchanged a few spicy epigrams with the sleepy-eyed doorman, navigated the revolving door with some difficulty, and then made their way through a thinly populated but startled lobby to the dining-room, where a puzzled waiter showed them an obscure table in a corner. They studied the bill of fare helplessly, telling over the items to each other in puzzled mumbles.

“Don’t see any liquor here,” said Peter reproachfully.

The waiter became audible but unintelligible.

“Repeat,” continued Peter, with patient tolerance, “that there seems to be unexplained and quite distasteful lack of liquor upon bill of fare.”

“Here!” said Dean confidently, “let me handle him.” He turned to the waiter — “Bring us — bring us — “ he scanned the bill of fare anxiously. “Bring us a quart of champagne and a — a — probably ham sandwich.”

The waiter looked doubtful.

“Bring it!” roared Mr. In and Mr. Out in chorus.

The waiter coughed and disappeared. There was a short wait during which they were subjected without their knowledge to a careful scrutiny by the head-waiter. Then the champagne arrived, and at the sight of it Mr. In and Mr. Out became jubilant.

“Imagine their objecting to us having, champagne for breakfast — jus’ imagine.”

They both concentrated upon the vision of such an awesome possibility, but the feat was too much for them. It was impossible for their joint imaginations to conjure up a world where any one might object any one else having champagne for breakfast. The waiter drew the cork with an enormous pop and their glasses immediately foamed with pale yellow froth.

“Here’s health, Mr. In.”

“Here’s same to you, Mr. Out.”

The waiter withdrew; the minutes passed; the champagne became low in the bottle.

“It’s — it’s mortifying,” said Dean suddenly.

“Wha’s mortifying?”

“The idea their objecting us having champagne breakfast.”

“Mortifying?” Peter considered. “Yes, tha’s word — mortifying.”

Again they collapsed into laughter, howled, swayed, rocked back and forth in their chairs, repeating the word “mortifying” over and over to each other — each repetition seeming to make it only more brilliantly absurd.

After a few more gorgeous minutes they decided on another quart. Their anxious waiter consulted his immediate superior, and this discreet person gave implicit instructions that no more champagne should be served. Their check was brought.

Five minutes later, arm in arm, they left the Commodore and made their way through a curious, staring crowd along Forty-second Street, and up Vanderbilt Avenue to the Biltmore. There, with sudden cunning, they rose to the occasion and traversed the lobby, walking fast and standing unnaturally erect.

Once in the dining-room they repeated their performance. They were torn between intermittent convulsive laughter and sudden spasmodic discussions of politics, college, and the sunny state of their dispositions. Their watches told them that it was now nine o’clock, and a dim idea was born in them that they were on a memorable party, something that they would remember always. They lingered over the second bottle. Either of them had only to mention the word “mortifying” to send them both into riotous gasps. The dining-room was whirring and shifting now; a curious lightness permeated and rarefied the heavy air.

They paid their check and walked out into the lobby.

It was at this moment that the exterior doors revolved for the thousandth time that morning, and admitted into the lobby a very pale young beauty with dark circles under her eyes, attired in a much-rumpled evening dress. She was accompanied by a plain stout man, obviously not an appropriate escort.

At the top of the stairs this couple encountered Mr. In and Mr. Out.

“Edith,” began Mr. In, stepping toward her hilariously and making a sweeping bow, “darling, good morning.”

The stout man glanced questioningly at Edith, as if merely asking her permission to throw this man summarily out of the way.

“‘Scuse familiarity,” added Peter, as an afterthought. “Edith, good-morning.”

He seized Dean’s elbow and impelled him into the foreground.

“Meet Mr. In, Edith, my bes’ frien’. Inseparable. Mr. In and Mr. Out.”

Mr. Out advanced and bowed; in fact, he advanced so far and bowed so low that he tipped slightly forward and only kept his balance by placing a hand lightly on Edith’s shoulder.

“I’m Mr. Out, Edith,” he mumbled pleasantly. “S’misterin Misterout.”

“‘Smisterinanout,” said Peter proudly.

But Edith stared straight by them, her eyes fixed on some infinite speck in the gallery above her. She nodded slightly to the stout man, who advanced bull-like and with a sturdy brisk gesture pushed Mr. In and Mr. Out to either side. Through this alley he and Edith walked.

But ten paces farther on Edith stopped again — stopped and pointed to a short, dark soldier who was eying the crowd in general, and the tableau of Mr. In and Mr. Out in particular, with a sort of puzzled, spell-bound awe.

“There,” cried Edith. “See there!”

Her voice rose, became somewhat shrill. Her pointing finger shook slightly.

“There’s the soldier who broke my brother’s leg.”

There were a dozen exclamations; a man in a cutaway coat left his place near the desk and advanced alertly; the stout person made a sort of lightning-like spring toward the short, dark soldier, and then the lobby closed around the little group and blotted them from the sight of Mr. In and Mr. Out.

But to Mr. In and Mr. Out this event was merely a particolored iridescent segment of a whirring, spinning world.

They heard loud voices; they saw the stout man spring; the picture suddenly blurred.

Then they were in an elevator bound skyward.

“What floor, please?” said the elevator man.

“Any floor,” said Mr. In.

“Top floor,” said Mr. Out.

“This is the top floor,” said the elevator man.

“Have another floor put on,” said Mr. Out.

“Higher,” said Mr. In.

“Heaven,” said Mr. Out.

XI

In a bedroom of a small hotel just off Sixth Avenue Gordon Sterrett awoke with a pain in the back of his head and a sick throbbing in all his veins. He looked at the dusky gray shadows in the corners of the room and at a raw place on a large leather chair in the corner where it had long been in use. He saw clothes, dishevelled, rumpled clothes on the floor and he smelt stale cigarette smoke and stale liquor. The windows were tight shut. Outside the bright sunlight had thrown a dust-filled beam across the sill — a beam broken by the head of the wide wooden bed in which he had slept. He lay very quiet — comatose, drugged, his eyes wide, his mind clicking wildly like an unoiled machine.

It must have been thirty seconds after he perceived the sunbeam with the dust on it and the rip on the large leather chair that he had the sense of life close beside him, and it was another thirty seconds after that before that he realized that he was irrevocably married to Jewel Hudson.

He went out half an hour later and bought a revolver at a sporting goods store. Then he took a took a taxi to the room where he had been living on East Twenty-seventh Street, and, leaning across the table that held his drawing materials, fired a cartridge into his head just behind the temple.

PORCELAIN AND PINK

A room in the down-stairs of a summer cottage. High around the wall runs an art frieze of a fisherman with a pile of nets at his feet and a ship on a crimson ocean, a fisherman with a pile of nets at his feet and a ship on a crimson ocean, a fisherman with a pile of nets at his feet and so on. In one place on the frieze there is an overlapping — here we have half a fisherman with half a pile of nets at his foot, crowded damply against half a ship on half a crimson ocean. The frieze is not in the plot, but frankly it fascinates me. I could continue indefinitely, but I am distracted by one of the two objects in the room — a blue porcelain bath-tub. It has character, this bath-tub. It is not one of the new racing bodies, but is small with a high tonneau and looks as if it were going to jump; discouraged, however, by the shortness of its legs, it has submitted to its environment and to its coat of sky-blue paint. But it grumpily refuses to allow any patron completely to stretch his legs — which brings us neatly to the second object in the room:

It is a girl — clearly an appendage to the bath-tub, only her head and throat — beautiful girls have throats instead of necks — and a suggestion of shoulder appearing above the side. For the first ten minutes of the play the audience is engrossed in wondering if she really is playing the game fairly and hasn’t any clothes on or whether it is being cheated and she is dressed.

The girl’s name is JULIE MARVIS. From the proud way she sits up in the bath-tub we deduce that she is not very tall and that she carries herself well. When she smiles, her upper tip rolls a little and reminds you of an Easter Bunny, She is within whispering distance of twenty years old.

One thing more — above and to the right of the bath-tub is a window. It is narrow and has a wide sill; it lets in much sunshine, but effectually prevents any one who looks in from seeing the bath-tub. You begin to suspect the plot?

We open, conventionally enough, with a song, but, as the startled gasp of the audience quite drowns out the first half, we will give only the last of it:

JULIE: (In an airy sophrano — enthusiastico)

When Caesar did the Chicago

He was a graceful child,

Those sacred chickens

Just raised the dickens

The Vestal Virgins went wild.

Whenever the Nervii got nervy

He gave them an awful razz

They shook is their shoes

With the Consular blues

The Imperial Roman Jazz

(During the wild applause that follows JULIE modestly moves her arms and makes waves on the surface of the water — at least we suppose she does. Then the door on the left opens and LOIS MARVIS enters, dressed but carrying garments and towels. LOIS is a year older than JULIE and is nearly her double in face and voice, but in her clothes and expression are the marks of the conservative. Yes, you’ve guessed it. Mistaken identity is the old rusty pivot upon which the plot turns.)

LOIS: (Starting) Oh, ‘scuse me. I didn’t know you were here.

JULIE: Oh, hello. I’m giving a little concert —

LOIS: (Interrupting) Why didn’t you lock the door?

JULIE: Didn’t I?

LOIS: Of course you didn’t. Do you think I just walked through it?

JULIE: I thought you picked the lock, dearest.

LOIS: You’re so careless.

JULIE: No. I’m happy as a garbage-man’s dog and I’m giving a little concert.

LOIS: (Severely) Grow up!

JULIE: (Waving a pink arm around the room) The walls reflect the sound, you see. That’s why there’s something very beautiful about singing in a bath-tub. It gives an effect of surpassing loveliness. Can I render you a selection?

LOIS: I wish you’d hurry out of the tub.

JULIE: (Shaking her head thoughtfully) Can’t be hurried. This is my kingdom at present, Godliness.

LOIS: Why the mellow name?

JULIE: Because you’re next to Cleanliness. Don’t throw anything please!

LOIS: How long will you be?

JULIE: (After some consideration) Not less than fifteen nor more than twenty-five minutes.

LOIS: As a favor to me will you make it ten?

JULIE: (Reminiscing) Oh, Godliness, do you remember a day in the chill of last January when one Julie, famous for her Easter-rabbit smile, was going out and there was scarcely any hot water and young Julie had just filled the tub for her own little self when the wicked sister came and did bathe herself therein, forcing the young Julie to perform her ablutions with cold cream — which is expensive and a darn lot of troubles?

LOIS: (Impatiently) Then you won’t hurry?

JULIE: Why should I?

LOIS: I’ve got a date.

JULIE: Here at the house?

LOIS: None of your business.

(JULIE shrugs the visible tips of her shoulders and stirs the water into ripples.)

JULIE: So be it.

LOIS: Oh, for Heaven’s sake, yes! I have a date here, at the house — in a way.

JULIE: In a way?

LOIS: He isn’t coming in. He’s calling for me and we’re walking.

JULIE: (Raising her eyebrows) Oh, the plot clears. It’s that literary Mr. Calkins. I thought you promised mother you wouldn’t invite him in.

LOIS: (Desperately) She’s so idiotic. She detests him because he’s just got a divorce. Of course she’s had more expedience than I have, but —

JULIE: (Wisely) Don’t let her kid you! Experience is the biggest gold brick in the world. All older people have it for sale.

LOIS: I like him. We talk literature.

JULIE: Oh, so that’s why I’ve noticed all these weighty, books around the house lately.

LOIS: He lends them to me.

JULIE: Well, you’ve got to play his game. When in Rome do as the

Romans would like to do. But I’m through with books. I’m all educated.

LOIS: You’re very inconsistent — last summer you read every day.

JULIE: If I were consistent I’d still be living on warm milk out of a bottle.

LOIS: Yes, and probably my bottle. But I like Mr. Calkins.

JULIE: I never met him.

LOIS: Well, will you hurry up?

JULIE: Yes. (After a pause) I wait till the water gets tepid and then I let in more hot.

LOIS: (Sarcastically) How interesting!

JULIE: ‘Member when we used to play “soapo”?

LOIS: Yes — and ten years old. I’m really quite surprised that you don’t play it still.

JULIE: I do. I’m going to in a minute.

LOIS: Silly game.

JULIE: (Warmly) No, it isn’t. It’s good for the nerves. I’ll bet you’ve forgotten how to play it.

LOIS: (Defiantly) No, I haven’t. You — you get the tub all full of soapsuds and then you get up on the edge and slide down.

JULIE: (Shaking her head scornfully) Huh! That’s only part of it. You’ve got to slide down without touching your hand or feet —

LOIS:(Impatiently) Oh, Lord! What do I care? I wish we’d either stop coming here in the summer or else get a house with two bath-tubs.

JULIE: You can buy yourself a little tin one, or use the hose —  —

LOIS: Oh, shut up!

JULIE: (Irrelevantly) Leave the towel.

LOIS: What?

JULIE: Leave the towel when you go.

LOIS: This towel?

JULIE: (Sweetly) Yes, I forgot my towel.

LOIS: (Looking around for the first time) Why, you idiot! You haven’t even a kimono.

JULIE: (Also looking around) Why, so I haven’t.

LOIS: (Suspicion growing on her) How did you get here?

JULIE: (Laughing) I guess I — I guess I whisked here. You know — a white form whisking down the stairs and —

LOIS: (Scandalized) Why, you little wretch. Haven’t you any pride or self-respect?

JULIE: Lots of both. I think that proves it. I looked very well. I really am rather cute in my natural state.

LOIS: Well, you —

JULIE: (Thinking aloud) I wish people didn’t wear any clothes.

I guess I ought to have been a pagan or a native or something.

LOIS: You’re a —

JULIE: I dreamt last night that one Sunday in church a small boy brought in a magnet that attracted cloth. He attracted the clothes right off of everybody; put them in an awful state; people were crying and shrieking and carrying on as if they’d just discovered their skins for the first time. Only I didn’t care. So I just laughed. I had to pass the collection plate because nobody else would.

LOIS: (Who has turned a deaf ear to this speech) Do you mean to tell me that if I hadn’t come you’d have run back to your room — un — unclothed?

JULIE: Au naturel is so much nicer.

LOIS: Suppose there had been some one in the living-room.

JULIE: There never has been yet.

LOIS: Yet! Good grief! How long —

JULIE: Besides, I usually have a towel.

LOIS: (Completely overcome) Golly! You ought to be spanked. I hope, you get caught. I hope there’s a dozen ministers in the living-room when you come out — and their wives, and their daughters.

JULIE: There wouldn’t be room for them in the living-room, answered

Clean Kate of the Laundry District.

LOIS: All right. You’ve made your own — bath-tub; you can lie in it.

(LOIS starts determinedly for the door.)

JULIE: (In alarm) Hey! Hey! I don’t care about the k’mono, but I want the towel. I can’t dry myself on a piece of soap and a wet wash-rag.

LOIS: (Obstinately). I won’t humor such a creature. You’ll have to dry yourself the best way you can. You can roll on the floor like the animals do that don’t wear any clothes.

JULIE: (Complacent again) All right. Get out!

LOIS: (Haughtily) Huh!

(JULIE turns on the cold water and with her finger directs a parabolic stream at LOIS. LOIS retires quickly, slamming the door after her. JULIE laughs and turns off the water)

JULIE: (Singing)

When the Arrow-collar man

Meets the D’jer-kiss girl

On the smokeless Sante Fé

Her Pebeco smile

Her Lucile style

De dum da-de-dum one day —

(She changes to a whistle and leans forward to turn on the taps, but is startled by three loud banging noises in the pipes. Silence for a moment — then she puts her mouth down near the spigot as if it were a telephone)

JULIE: Hello! (No answer) Are you a plumber? (No answer) Are you the water department? (One loud, hollow bang) What do you want? (No answer) I believe you’re a ghost. Are you? (No answer) Well, then, stop banging. (She reaches out and turns on the warm tap. No water flows. Again she puts her mouth down close to the spigot) If you’re the plumber that’s a mean trick. Turn it on for a fellow. (Two loud, hollow bangs) Don’t argue! I want water — water! Water!

(A young man’s head appears in the window — a head decorated with a slim mustache and sympathetic eyes. These last stare, and though they can see nothing but many fishermen with nets and much crimson ocean, they decide him to speak)

THE YOUNG MAN: Some one fainted?

JULIE: (Starting up, all ears immediately) Jumping cats!

THE YOUNG MAN: (Helpfully) Water’s no good for fits.

JULIE: Fits! Who said anything about fits!

THE YOUNG MAN: You said something about a cat jumping

JULIE: (Decidedly) I did not!

THE YOUNG MAN: Well, we can talk it over later, Are you ready to go out? Or do you still feel that if you go with me just now everybody will gossip?

JULIE: (Smiling) Gossip! Would they? It’d be more than gossip — it’d be a regular scandal.

THE YOUNG MAN: Here, you’re going it a little strong. Your family might be somewhat disgruntled — but to the pure all things are suggestive. No one else would even give it a thought, except a few old women. Come on.

JULIE: You don’t know what you ask.

THE YOUNG MAN: Do you imagine we’d have a crowd following us?

JULIE: A crowd? There’d be a special, all-steel, buffet train leaving

New York hourly.

THE YOUNG MAN: Say, are you house-cleaning?

JULIE: Why?

THE YOUNG MAN: I see all the pictures are off the walls.

JULIE: Why, we never have pictures in this room.

THE YOUNG MAN: Odd, I never heard of a room without pictures or tapestry or panelling or something.

JULIE: There’s not even any furniture in here.

THE YOUNG MAN: What a strange house!

JULIE: It depend on the angle you see it from.

THE YOUNG MAN: (Sentimentally) It’s so nice talking to you like this — when you’re merely a voice. I’m rather glad I can’t see you.

JULIE; (Gratefully) So am I.

THE YOUNG MAN: What color are you wearing?

JULIE: (After a critical survey of her shoulders) Why, I guess it’s a sort of pinkish white.

THE YOUNG MAN: Is it becoming to you?

JULIE: Very. It’s — it’s old. I’ve had it for a long while.

THE YOUNG MAN: I thought you hated old clothes.

JULIE: I do but this was a birthday present and I sort of have to wear it.

THE YOUNG MAN: Pinkish-white. Well I’ll bet it’s divine. Is it in style?

JULIE: Quite. It’s very simple, standard model.

THE YOUNG MAN: What a voice you have! How it echoes! Sometimes I shut my eyes and seem to see you in a far desert island calling for me. And I plunge toward you through the surf, hearing you call as you stand there, water stretching on both sides of you —

(The soap slips from the side of the tub and splashes in. The young man blinks)

YOUNG MAN: What was that? Did I dream it?

JULIE: Yes. You’re — you’re very poetic, aren’t you?

THE YOUNG MAN: (Dreamily) No. I do prose. I do verse only when

I am stirred.

JULIE: (Murmuring) Stirred by a spoon —

THE YOUNG MAN: I have always loved poetry. I can remember to this day the first poem I ever learned by heart. It was “Evangeline.”

JULIE: That’s a fib.

THE YOUNG MAN: Did I say “Evangeline”? I meant “The Skeleton in

Armor.”

JULIE: I’m a low-brow. But I can remember my first poem. It had one verse:

Parker and Davis

Sittin’ on a fence

Tryne to make a dollar

Outa fif-teen cents.

THE YOUNG MAN: (Eagerly) Are you growing fond of literature?

JULIE: If it’s not too ancient or complicated or depressing. Same way with people. I usually like ‘em not too ancient or complicated or depressing.

THE YOUNG MAN: Of course I’ve read enormously. You told me last night that you were very fond of Walter Scott.

JULIE: (Considering) Scott? Let’s see. Yes, I’ve read “Ivanhoe” and “The Last of the Mohicans.”

THE YOUNG MAN: That’s by Cooper.

JULIE: (Angrily) “Ivanhoe” is? You’re crazy! I guess I know. I read it. THE YOUNG MAN: “The Last of the Mohicans” is by Cooper.

JULIE: What do I care! I like O. Henry. I don’t see how he ever wrote those stories. Most of them he wrote in prison. “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” he made up in prison.

THE YOUNG MAN: (Biting his lip) Literature — literature! How much it has meant to me!

JULIE: Well, as Gaby Deslys said to Mr. Bergson, with my looks and your brains there’s nothing we couldn’t do.

THE YOUNG MAN: (Laughing) You certainly are hard to keep up with. One day you’re awfully pleasant and the next you’re in a mood. If I didn’t understand your temperament so well —

JULIE: (Impatiently) Oh, you’re one of these amateur character-readers, are you? Size people up in five minutes and then look wise whenever they’re mentioned. I hate that sort of thing.

THE YOUNG MAN: I don’t boast of sizing you up. You’re most mysterious,

I’ll admit.

JULIE: There’s only two mysterious people in history.

THE YOUNG MAN: Who are they?

JULIE: The Man with the Iron Mask and the fella who says “ug uh-glug uh-glug uh-glug” when the line is busy.

THE YOUNG MAN: You are mysterious, I love you. You’re beautiful, intelligent, and virtuous, and that’s the rarest known combination.

JULIE: You’re a historian. Tell me if there are any bath-tubs in history. I think they’ve been frightfully neglected.

THE YOUNG MAN: Bath-tubs! Let’s see. Well, Agamemnon was stabbed in his bath-tub. And Charlotte Corday stabbed Marat in his bath-tub.

JULIE: (Sighing) Way back there! Nothing new besides the sun, is there? Why only yesterday I picked up a musical-comedy score that mast have been at least twenty years old; and there on the cover it said “The Shimmies of Normandy,” but shimmie was spelt the old way, with a “C.”

THE YOUNG MAN: I loathe these modern dances. Oh, Lois, I wish I could see you. Come to the window.

(There is a loud bang in the water-pipe and suddenly the flow starts from the open taps. Julie turns them off quickly)

THE YOUNG MAN: (Puzzled) What on earth was that?

JULIE: (Ingeniously) I heard something, too.

THE YOUNG MAN: Sounded like running water.

JULIE: Didn’t it? Strange like it. As a matter of fact I was filling the gold-fish bowl.

THE YOUNG MAN: (Still puzzled) What was that banging noise?

JULIE: One of the fish snapping his golden jaws.

THE YOUNG MAN: (With sudden resolution) Lois, I love you. I am not a mundane man but I am a forger —

JULIE: (Interested at once) Oh, how fascinating.

THE YOUNG MAN: — a forger ahead. Lois, I want you.

JULIE: (Skeptically) Huh! What you really want is for the world to come to attention and stand there till you give “Rest!”

THE YOUNG MAN: Lois I — Lois I —

(He stops as Lois opens the door, comes in, and bangs it behind her. She looks peevishly at JULIE and then suddenly catches sight of the young man in the window)

LOIS: (In horror) Mr. Calkins!

THE YOUNG MAN: (Surprised) Why I thought you said you were wearing pinkish white!

(After one despairing stare LOIS shrieks, throws up her hands in surrender, and sinks to the floor.)

THE YOUNG MAN: (In great alarm) Good Lord! She’s fainted! I’ll be right in.

(JULIE’S eyes light on the towel which has slipped from LOIS’S inert hand.)

JULIE: In that case I’ll be right out.

(She puts her hands on the side of the tub to lift herself out and a murmur, half gasp, half sigh, ripples from the audience.

A Belasco midnight comes quickly down and blots out the stage.)

CURTAIN.

FANTASIES

THE DIAMOND AS BIG AS THE RITZ

1

John T. Unger came from a family that had been well known in Hades — a small town on the Mississippi River — for several generations. John’s father had held the amateur golf championship through many a heated contest; Mrs. Unger was known “from hot-box to hot-bed,” as the local phrase went, for her political addresses; and young John T. Unger, who had just turned sixteen, had danced all the latest dances from New York before he put on long trousers. And now, for a certain time, he was to be away from home. That respect for a New England education which is the bane of all provincial places, which drains them yearly of their most promising young men, had seized upon his parents. Nothing would suit them but that he should go to St. Midas’s School near Boston — Hades was too small to hold their darling and gifted son.

Now in Hades — as you know if you ever have been there — the names of the more fashionable preparatory schools and colleges mean very little. The inhabitants have been so long out of the world that, though they make a show of keeping up-to-date in dress and manners and literature, they depend to a great extent on hearsay, and a function that in Hades would be considered elaborate would doubtless be hailed by a Chicago beef-princess as “perhaps a little tacky.”

John T. Unger was on the eve of departure. Mrs. Unger, with maternal fatuity, packed his trunks full of linen suits and electric fans, and Mr. Unger presented his son with an asbestos pocket-book stuffed with money.

“Remember, you are always welcome here,” he said. “You can be sure, boy, that we’ll keep the home fires burning.”

“I know,” answered John huskily.

“Don’t forget who you are and where you come from,” continued his father proudly, “and you can do nothing to harm you. You are an Unger — from Hades.”

So the old man and the young shook hands, and John walked away with tears streaming from his eyes. Ten minutes later he had passed outside the city limits and he stopped to glance back for the last time. Over the gates the old-fashioned Victorian motto seemed strangely attractive to him. His father had tried time and time again to have it changed to something with a little more push and verve about it, such as “Hades — Your Opportunity,” or else a plain “Welcome” sign set over a hearty handshake pricked out in electric lights. The old motto was a little depressing, Mr. Unger had thought — but now ….

So John took his look and then set his face resolutely toward his destination. And, as he turned away, the lights of Hades against the sky seemed full of a warm and passionate beauty.

* * * * *

St. Midas’s School is half an hour from Boston in a Rolls-Pierce motor-car. The actual distance will never be known, for no one, except John T. Unger, had ever arrived there save in a Rolls-Pierce and probably no one ever will again. St. Midas’s is the most expensive and the most exclusive boys’ preparatory school in the world.

John’s first two years there passed pleasantly. The fathers of all the boys were money-kings, and John spent his summer visiting at fashionable resorts. While he was very fond of all the boys he visited, their fathers struck him as being much of a piece, and in his boyish way he often wondered at their exceeding sameness. When he told them where his home was they would ask jovially, “Pretty hot down there?” and John would muster a faint smile and answer, “It certainly is.” His response would have been heartier had they not all made this joke — at best varying it with, “Is it hot enough for you down there?” which he hated just as much.

In the middle of his second year at school, a quiet, handsome boy named Percy Washington had been put in John’s form. The new-comer was pleasant in his manner and exceedingly well dressed even for St. Midas’s, but for some reason he kept aloof from the other boys. The only person with whom he was intimate was John T. Unger, but even to John he was entirely uncommunicative concerning his home or his family. That he was wealthy went without saying, but beyond a few such deductions John knew little of his friend, so it promised rich confectionery for his curiosity when Percy invited him to spend the summer at his home “in the West.” He accepted, without hesitation.

It was only when they were in the train that Percy became, for the first time, rather communicative. One day while they were eating lunch in the dining-car and discussing the imperfect characters of several of the boys at school, Percy suddenly changed his tone and made an abrupt remark.

“My father,” he said, “is by far the richest man in the world.”

“Oh,” said John politely. He could think of no answer to make to this confidence. He considered “That’s very nice,” but it sounded hollow and was on the point of saying, “Really?” but refrained since it would seem to question Percy’s statement. And such an astounding statement could scarcely be questioned.

“By far the richest,” repeated Percy.

“I was reading in the World Almanac,” began John, “that there was one man in America with an income of over five million a years and four men with incomes of over three million a year, and — “

“Oh, they’re nothing.” Percy’s mouth was a half-moon of scorn. “Catch-penny capitalists, financial small-fry, petty merchants and money-lenders. My father could buy them out and not know he’d done it.”

“But how does he — “

“Why haven’t they put down his income-tax? Because he doesn’t pay any. At least he pays a little one — but he doesn’t pay any on his real income.”

“He must be very rich,” said John simply, “I’m glad. I like very rich people.

“The richer a fella is, the better I like him.” There was a look of passionate frankness upon his dark face. “I visited the Schnlitzer-Murphys last Easter. Vivian Schnlitzer-Murphy had rubies as big as hen’s eggs, and sapphires that were like globes with lights inside them — “

“I love jewels,” agreed Percy enthusiastically. “Of course I wouldn’t want any one at school to know about it, but I’ve got quite a collection myself. I used to collect them instead of stamps.”

“And diamonds,” continued John eagerly. “The Schnlitzer-Murphys had diamonds as big as walnuts — “

“That’s nothing.” Percy had leaned forward and dropped his voice to a low whisper. “That’s nothing at all. My father has a diamond bigger than the Ritz-Carlton Hotel.”

II

The Montana sunset lay between two mountains like a gigantic bruise from which dark arteries spread themselves over a poisoned sky. An immense distance under the sky crouched the village of Fish, minute, dismal, and forgotten. There were twelve men, so it was said, in the village of Fish, twelve sombre and inexplicable souls who sucked a lean milk from the almost literally bare rock upon which a mysterious populatory force had begotten them. They had become a race apart, these twelve men of Fish, like some species developed by an early whim of nature, which on second thought had abandoned them to struggle and extermination.

Out of the blue-black bruise in the distance crept a long line of moving lights upon the desolation of the land, and the twelve men of Fish gathered like ghosts at the shanty depot to watch the passing of the seven o’clock train, the Transcontinental Express from Chicago. Six times or so a year the Transcontinental Express, through some inconceivable jurisdiction, stopped at the village of Fish, and when this occurred a figure or so would disembark, mount into a buggy that always appeared from out of the dusk, and drive off toward the bruised sunset. The observation of this pointless and preposterous phenomenon had become a sort of cult among the men of Fish. To observe, that was all; there remained in them none of the vital quality of illusion which would make them wonder or speculate, else a religion might have grown up around these mysterious visitations. But the men of Fish were beyond all religion — the barest and most savage tenets of even Christianity could gain no foothold on that barren rock — so there was no altar, no priest, no sacrifice; only each night at seven the silent concourse by the shanty depot, a congregation who lifted up a prayer of dim, anaemic wonder.

On this June night, the Great Brakeman, whom, had they deified any one, they might well have chosen as their celestial protagonist, had ordained that the seven o’clock train should leave its human (or inhuman) deposit at Fish. At two minutes after seven Percy Washington and John T. Unger disembarked, hurried past the spellbound, the agape, the fearsome eyes of the twelve men of Fish, mounted into a buggy which had obviously appeared from nowhere, and drove away.

After half an hour, when the twilight had coagulated into dark, the silent negro who was driving the buggy hailed an opaque body somewhere ahead of them in the gloom. In response to his cry, it turned upon them a luminous disc which regarded them like a malignant eye out of the unfathomable night. As they came closer, John saw that it was the tail-light of an immense automobile, larger and more magnificent than any he had ever seen. Its body was of gleaming metal richer than nickel and lighter than silver, and the hubs of the wheels were studded with iridescent geometric figures of green and yellow — John did not dare to guess whether they were glass or jewel.

Two negroes, dressed in glittering livery such as one sees in pictures of royal processions in London, were standing at attention beside the car and, as the two young men dismounted from the buggy, they were greeted in some language which the guest could not understand, but which seemed to be an extreme form of the Southern negro’s dialect.

“Get in,” said Percy to his friend, as their trunks were tossed to the ebony roof of the limousine. “Sorry we had to bring you this far in that buggy, but of course it wouldn’t do for the people on the train or those God-forsaken fellas in Fish to see this automobile.”

“Gosh! What a car!” This ejaculation was provoked by its interior. John saw that the upholstery consisted of a thousand minute and exquisite tapestries of silk, woven with jewels and embroideries, and set upon a background of cloth of gold. The two armchair seats in which the boys luxuriated were covered with stuff that resembled duvetyn, but seemed woven in numberless colours of the ends of ostrich feathers.

“What a car!” cried John again, in amazement.

“This thing?” Percy laughed. “Why, it’s just an old junk we use for a station wagon.”

By this time they were gliding along through the darkness toward the break between the two mountains.

“We’ll be there in an hour and a half,” said Percy, looking at the clock. “I may as well tell you it’s not going to be like anything you ever saw before.”

If the car was any indication of what John would see, he was prepared to be astonished indeed. The simple piety prevalent in Hades has the earnest worship of and respect for riches as the first article of its creed — had John felt otherwise than radiantly humble before them, his parents would have turned away in horror at the blasphemy.

They had now reached and were entering the break between the two mountains and almost immediately the way became much rougher.

“If the moon shone down here, you’d see that we’re in a big gulch,” said Percy, trying to peer out of the window. He spoke a few words into the mouthpiece and immediately the footman turned on a searchlight and swept the hillsides with an immense beam.

“Rocky, you see. An ordinary car would be knocked to pieces in half an hour. In fact, it’d take a tank to navigate it unless you knew the way. You notice we’re going uphill now.”

They were obviously ascending, and within a few minutes the car was crossing a high rise, where they caught a glimpse of a pale moon newly risen in the distance. The car stopped suddenly and several figures took shape out of the dark beside it — these were negroes also. Again the two young men were saluted in the same dimly recognisable dialect; then the negroes set to work and four immense cables dangling from overhead were attached with hooks to the hubs of the great jewelled wheels. At a resounding “Hey-yah!” John felt the car being lifted slowly from the ground — up and up — clear of the tallest rocks on both sides — then higher, until he could see a wavy, moonlit valley stretched out before him in sharp contrast to the quagmire of rocks that they had just left. Only on one side was there still rock — and then suddenly there was no rock beside them or anywhere around.

It was apparent that they had surmounted some immense knife-blade of stone, projecting perpendicularly into the air. In a moment they were going down again, and finally with a soft bump they were landed upon the smooth earth.

“The worst is over,” said Percy, squinting out the window. “It’s only five miles from here, and our own road — tapestry brick — all the way. This belongs to us. This is where the United States ends, father says.”

“Are we in Canada?”

“We are not. We’re in the middle of the Montana Rockies. But you are now on the only five square miles of land in the country that’s never been surveyed.”

“Why hasn’t it? Did they forget it?”

“No,” said Percy, grinning, “they tried to do it three times. The first time my grandfather corrupted a whole department of the State survey; the second time he had the official maps of the United States tinkered with — that held them for fifteen years. The last time was harder. My father fixed it so that their compasses were in the strongest magnetic field ever artificially set up. He had a whole set of surveying instruments made with a slight defection that would allow for this territory not to appear, and he substituted them for the ones that were to be used. Then he had a river deflected and he had what looked like a village up on its banks — so that they’d see it, and think it was a town ten miles farther up the valley. There’s only one thing my father’s afraid of,” he concluded, “only one thing in the world that could be used to find us out.”

“What’s that?”

Percy sank his voice to a whisper.

“Aeroplanes,” he breathed. “We’ve got half a dozen anti-aircraft guns and we’ve arranged it so far — but there’ve been a few deaths and a great many prisoners. Not that we mind that, you know, father and I, but it upsets mother and the girls, and there’s always the chance that some time we won’t be able to arrange it.”

Shreds and tatters of chinchilla, courtesy clouds in the green moon’s heaven, were passing the green moon like precious Eastern stuffs paraded for the inspection of some Tartar Khan. It seemed to John that it was day, and that he was looking at some lads sailing above him in the air, showering down tracts and patent medicine circulars, with their messages of hope for despairing, rock-bound hamlets. It seemed to him that he could see them look down out of the clouds and stare — and stare at whatever there was to stare at in this place whither he was bound — What then? Were they induced to land by some insidious device to be immured far from patent medicines and from tracts until the judgment day — or, should they fail to fall into the trap, did a quick puff of smoke and the sharp round of a splitting shell bring them drooping to earth — and “upset” Percy’s mother and sisters. John shook his head and the wraith of a hollow laugh issued silently from his parted lips. What desperate transaction lay hidden here? What a moral expedient of a bizarre Croesus? What terrible and golden mystery?…

The chinchilla clouds had drifted past now and, outside the Montana night was bright as day the tapestry brick of the road was smooth to the tread of the great tyres as they rounded a still, moonlit lake; they passed into darkness for a moment, a pine grove, pungent and cool, then they came out into a broad avenue of lawn, and John’s exclamation of pleasure was simultaneous with Percy’s taciturn “We’re home.”

Full in the light of the stars, an exquisite château rose from the borders of the lake, climbed in marble radiance half the height of an adjoining mountain, then melted in grace, in perfect symmetry, in translucent feminine languor, into the massed darkness of a forest of pine. The many towers, the slender tracery of the sloping parapets, the chiselled wonder of a thousand yellow windows with their oblongs and hectagons and triangles of golden light, the shattered softness of the intersecting planes of star-shine and blue shade, all trembled on John’s spirit like a chord of music. On one of the towers, the tallest, the blackest at its base, an arrangement of exterior lights at the top made a sort of floating fairyland — and as John gazed up in warm enchantment the faint acciaccare sound of violins drifted down in a rococo harmony that was like nothing he had ever beard before. Then in a moment the car stepped before wide, high marble steps around which the night air was fragrant with a host of flowers. At the top of the steps two great doors swung silently open and amber light flooded out upon the darkness, silhouetting the figure of an exquisite lady with black, high-piled hair, who held out her arms toward them.

“Mother,” Percy was saying, “this is my friend, John Unger, from

Hades.”

Afterward John remembered that first night as a daze of many colours, of quick sensory impressions, of music soft as a voice in love, and of the beauty of things, lights and shadows, and motions and faces. There was a white-haired man who stood drinking a many-hued cordial from a crystal thimble set on a golden stem. There was a girl with a flowery face, dressed like Titania with braided sapphires in her hair. There was a room where the solid, soft gold of the walls yielded to the pressure of his hand, and a room that was like a platonic conception of the ultimate prison — ceiling, floor, and all, it was lined with an unbroken mass of diamonds, diamonds of every size and shape, until, lit with tail violet lamps in the corners, it dazzled the eyes with a whiteness that could be compared only with itself, beyond human wish, or dream.

Through a maze of these rooms the two boys wandered. Sometimes the floor under their feet would flame in brilliant patterns from lighting below, patterns of barbaric clashing colours, of pastel delicacy, of sheer whiteness, or of subtle and intricate mosaic, surely from some mosque on the Adriatic Sea. Sometimes beneath layers of thick crystal he would see blue or green water swirling, inhabited by vivid fish and growths of rainbow foliage. Then they would be treading on furs of every texture and colour or along corridors of palest ivory, unbroken as though carved complete from the gigantic tusks of dinosaurs extinct before the age of man ….

Then a hazily remembered transition, and they were at dinner — where each plate was of two almost imperceptible layers of solid diamond between which was curiously worked a filigree of emerald design, a shaving sliced from green air. Music, plangent and unobtrusive, drifted down through far corridors — his chair, feathered and curved insidiously to his back, seemed to engulf and overpower him as he drank his first glass of port. He tried drowsily to answer a question that had been asked him, but the honeyed luxury that clasped his body added to the illusion of sleep — jewels, fabrics, wines, and metals blurred before his eyes into a sweet mist ….

“Yes,” he replied with a polite effort, “it certainly is hot enough for me down there.”

He managed to add a ghostly laugh; then, without movement, without resistance, he seemed to float off and away, leaving an iced dessert that was pink as a dream …. He fell asleep.

When he awoke he knew that several hours had passed. He was in a great quiet room with ebony walls and a dull illumination that was too faint, too subtle, to be called a light. His young host was standing over him.

“You fell asleep at dinner,” Percy was saying. “I nearly did, too — it was such a treat to be comfortable again after this year of school. Servants undressed and bathed you while you were sleeping.”

“Is this a bed or a cloud?” sighed John. “Percy, Percy — before you go,

I want to apologise.”

“For what?”

“For doubting you when you said you had a diamond as big as the

Ritz-Carlton Hotel.”

Percy smiled.

“I thought you didn’t believe me. It’s that mountain, you know.”

“What mountain?”

“The mountain the chateau rests on. It’s not very big, for a mountain. But except about fifty feet of sod and gravel on top it’s solid diamond. One diamond, one cubic mile without a flaw. Aren’t you listening? Say —  — “

But John T. Unger had again fallen asleep.

III

Morning. As he awoke he perceived drowsily that the room had at the same moment become dense with sunlight. The ebony panels of one wall had slid aside on a sort of track, leaving his chamber half open to the day. A large negro in a white uniform stood beside his bed.

“Good-evening,” muttered John, summoning his brains from the wild places.

“Good-morning, sir. Are you ready for your bath, sir? Oh, don’t get up — I’ll put you in, if you’ll just unbutton your pyjamas — there. Thank you, sir.”

John lay quietly as his pyjamas were removed — he was amused and delighted; he expected to be lifted like a child by this black Gargantua who was tending him, but nothing of the sort happened; instead he felt the bed tilt up slowly on its side — he began to roll, startled at first, in the direction of the wall, but when he reached the wall its drapery gave way, and sliding two yards farther down a fleecy incline he plumped gently into water the same temperature as his body.

He looked about him. The runway or rollway on which he had arrived had folded gently back into place. He had been projected into another chamber and was sitting in a sunken bath with his head just above the level of the floor. All about him, lining the walls of the room and the sides and bottom of the bath itself, was a blue aquarium, and gazing through the crystal surface on which he sat, he could see fish swimming among amber lights and even gliding without curiosity past his outstretched toes, which were separated from them only by the thickness of the crystal. From overhead, sunlight came down through sea-green glass.

“I suppose, sir, that you’d like hot rosewater and soapsuds this morning, sir — and perhaps cold salt water to finish.”

The negro was standing beside him.

“Yes,” agreed John, smiling inanely, “as you please.” Any idea of ordering this bath according to his own meagre standards of living would have been priggish and not a little wicked.

The negro pressed a button and a warm rain began to fall, apparently from overhead, but really, so John discovered after a moment, from a fountain arrangement near by. The water turned to a pale rose colour and jets of liquid soap spurted into it from four miniature walrus heads at the corners of the bath. In a moment a dozen little paddle-wheels, fixed to the sides, had churned the mixture into a radiant rainbow of pink foam which enveloped him softly with its delicious lightness, and burst in shining, rosy bubbles here and there about him.

“Shall I turn on the moving-picture machine, sir?” suggested the negro deferentially. “There’s a good one-reel comedy in this machine to-day, or I can put in a serious piece in a moment, if you prefer it.

“No, thanks,” answered John, politely but firmly. He was enjoying his bath too much to desire any distraction. But distraction came. In a moment he was listening intently to the sound of flutes from just outside, flutes dripping a melody that was like a waterfall, cool and green as the room itself, accompanying a frothy piccolo, in play more fragile than the lace of suds that covered and charmed him.

After a cold salt-water bracer and a cold fresh finish, he stepped out and into a fleecy robe, and upon a couch covered with the same material he was rubbed with oil, alcohol, and spice. Later he sat in a voluptuous while he was shaved and his hair was trimmed.

“Mr. Percy is waiting in your sitting-room,” said the negro, when these operations were finished. “My name is Gygsum, Mr. Unger, sir. I am to see to Mr. Unger every morning.”

John walked out into the brisk sunshine of his living-room, where he found breakfast waiting for him and Percy, gorgeous in white kid knickerbockers, smoking in an easy chair.

IV

This is a story of the Washington family as Percy sketched it for John during breakfast.

The father of the present Mr. Washington had been a Virginian, a direct descendant of George Washington, and Lord Baltimore. At the close of the Civil War he was a twenty-five-year-old Colonel with a played-out plantation and about a thousand dollars in gold.

Fitz-Norman Culpepper Washington, for that was the young Colonel’s name, decided to present the Virginia estate to his younger brother and go West. He selected two dozen of the most faithful blacks, who, of course, worshipped him, and bought twenty-five tickets to the West, where he intended to take out land in their names and start a sheep and cattle ranch.

When he had been in Montana for less than a month and things were going very poorly indeed, he stumbled on his great discovery. He had lost his way when riding in the hills, and after a day without food he began to grow hungry. As he was without his rifle, he was forced to pursue a squirrel, and, in the course of the pursuit, he noticed that it was carrying something shiny in its mouth. Just before it vanished into its hole — for Providence did not intend that this squirrel should alleviate his hunger — it dropped its burden. Sitting down to consider the situation Fitz-Norman’s eye was caught by a gleam in the grass beside him. In ten seconds he had completely lost his appetite and gained one hundred thousand dollars. The squirrel, which had refused with annoying persistence to become food, had made him a present of a large and perfect diamond.

Late that night he found his way to camp and twelve hours later all the males among his darkies were back by the squirrel hole digging furiously at the side of the mountain. He told them he had discovered a rhinestone mine, and, as only one or two of them had ever seen even a small diamond before, they believed him, without question. When the magnitude of his discovery became apparent to him, he found himself in a quandary. The mountain was a diamond — it was literally nothing else but solid diamond. He filled four saddle bags full of glittering samples and started on horseback for St. Paul. There he managed to dispose of half a dozen small stones — when he tried a larger one a storekeeper fainted and Fitz-Norman was arrested as a public disturber. He escaped from jail and caught the train for New York, where he sold a few medium-sized diamonds and received in exchange about two hundred thousand dollars in gold. But he did not dare to produce any exceptional gems — in fact, he left New York just in time. Tremendous excitement had been created in jewellery circles, not so much by the size of his diamonds as by their appearance in the city from mysterious sources. Wild rumours became current that a diamond mine had been discovered in the Catskills, on the Jersey coast, on Long Island, beneath Washington Square. Excursion trains, packed with men carrying picks and shovels, began to leave New York hourly, bound for various neighbouring El Dorados. But by that time young Fitz-Norman was on his way back to Montana.

By the end of a fortnight he had estimated that the diamond in the mountain was approximately equal in quantity to all the rest of the diamonds known to exist in the world. There was no valuing it by any regular computation, however, for it was one solid diamond — and if it were offered for sale not only would the bottom fall out of the market, but also, if the value should vary with its size in the usual arithmetical progression, there would not be enough gold in the world to buy a tenth part of it. And what could any one do with a diamond that size?

It was an amazing predicament. He was, in one sense, the richest man that ever lived — and yet was he worth anything at all? If his secret should transpire there was no telling to what measures the Government might resort in order to prevent a panic, in gold as well as in jewels. They might take over the claim immediately and institute a monopoly.

There was no alternative — he must market his mountain in secret. He sent South for his younger brother and put him in charge of his coloured following, darkies who had never realised that slavery was abolished. To make sure of this, he read them a proclamation that he had composed, which announced that General Forrest had reorganised the shattered Southern armies and defeated the North in one pitched battle. The negroes believed him implicitly. They passed a vote declaring it a good thing and held revival services immediately.

Fitz-Norman himself set out for foreign parts with one hundred thousand dollars and two trunks filled with rough diamonds of all sizes. He sailed for Russia in a Chinese junk, and six months after his departure from Montana he was in St. Petersburg. He took obscure lodgings and called immediately upon the court jeweller, announcing that he had a diamond for the Czar. He remained in St. Petersburg for two weeks, in constant danger of being murdered, living from lodging to lodging, and afraid to visit his trunks more than three or four times during the whole fortnight.

On his promise to return in a year with larger and finer stones, he was allowed to leave for India. Before he left, however, the Court Treasurers had deposited to his credit, in American banks, the sum of fifteen million dollars — under four different aliases.

He returned to America in 1868, having been gone a little over two years. He had visited the capitals of twenty-two countries and talked with five emperors, eleven kings, three princes, a shah, a khan, and a sultan. At that time Fitz-Norman estimated his own wealth at one billion dollars. One fact worked consistently against the disclosure of his secret. No one of his larger diamonds remained in the public eye for a week before being invested with a history of enough fatalities, amours, revolutions, and wars to have occupied it from the days of the first Babylonian Empire.

From 1870 until his death in 1900, the history of Fitz-Norman Washington was a long epic in gold. There were side issues, of course — he evaded the surveys, he married a Virginia lady, by whom he had a single son, and he was compelled, due to a series of unfortunate complications, to murder his brother, whose unfortunate habit of drinking himself into an indiscreet stupor had several times endangered their safety. But very few other murders stained these happy years of progress and expansion.

Just before he died he changed his policy, and with all but a few million dollars of his outside wealth bought up rare minerals in bulk, which he deposited in the safety vaults of banks all over the world, marked as bric-a-brac. His son, Braddock Tarleton Washington, followed this policy on an even more tensive scale. The minerals were converted into the rarest of all elements — radium — so that the equivalent of a billion dollars in gold could be placed in a receptacle no bigger than a cigar box.

When Fitz-Norman had been dead three years his son, Braddock, decided that the business had gone far enough. The amount of wealth that he and his father had taken out of the mountain was beyond all exact computation. He kept a note-book in cipher in which he set down the approximate quantity of radium in each of the thousand banks he patronised, and recorded the alias under which it was held. Then he did a very simple thing — he sealed up the mine.

He sealed up the mine. What had been taken out of it would support all the Washingtons yet to be born in unparalleled luxury for generations. His one care must be the protection of his secret, lest in the possible panic attendant on its discovery he should be reduced with all the property-holders in the world to utter poverty.

This was the family among whom John T. Unger was staying. This was the story he heard in his silver-walled living-room the morning after his arrival.

V

After breakfast, John found his way out the great marble entrance, and looked curiously at the scene before him. The whole valley, from the diamond mountain to the steep granite cliff five miles away, still gave off a breath of golden haze which hovered idly above the fine sweep of lawns and lakes and gardens. Here and there clusters of elms made delicate groves of shade, contrasting strangely with the tough masses of pine forest that held the hills in a grip of dark-blue green. Even as John looked he saw three fawns in single file patter out from one clump about a half-mile away and disappear with awkward gaiety into the black-ribbed half-light of another. John would not have been surprised to see a goat-foot piping his way among the trees or to catch a glimpse of pink nymph-skin and flying yellow hair between the greenest of the green leaves.

In some such cool hope he descended the marble steps, disturbing faintly the sleep of two silky Russian wolfhounds at the bottom, and set off along a walk of white and blue brick that seemed to lead in no particular direction.

He was enjoying himself as much as he was able. It is youth’s felicity as well as its insufficiency that it can never live in the present, but must always be measuring up the day against its own radiantly imagined future — flowers and gold, girls and stars, they are only prefigurations and prophecies of that incomparable, unattainable young dream.

John rounded a soft corner where the massed rosebushes filled the air with heavy scent, and struck off across a park toward a patch of moss under some trees. He had never lain upon moss, and he wanted to see whether it was really soft enough to justify the use of its name as an adjective. Then he saw a girl coming toward him over the grass. She was the most beautiful person he had ever seen.

She was dressed in a white little gown that came just below her knees, and a wreath of mignonettes clasped with blue slices of sapphire bound up her hair. Her pink bare feet scattered the dew before them as she came. She was younger than John — not more than sixteen.

“Hallo,” she cried softly, “I’m Kismine.”

She was much more than that to John already. He advanced toward her, scarcely moving as he drew near lest he should tread on her bare toes.

“You haven’t met me,” said her soft voice. Her blue eyes added, “Oh, but you’ve missed a great deal!”… “You met my sister, Jasmine, last night. I was sick with lettuce poisoning,” went on her soft voice, and her eye continued, “and when I’m sick I’m sweet — and when I’m well.”

“You have made an enormous impression on me,” said John’s eyes, “and I’m not so slow myself” — “How do you do?” said his voice. “I hope you’re better this morning.” — “You darling,” added his eyes tremulously.

John observed that they had been walking along the path. On her suggestion they sat down together upon the moss, the softness of which he failed to determine.

He was critical about women. A single defect — a thick ankle, a hoarse voice, a glass eye — was enough to make him utterly indifferent. And here for the first time in his life he was beside a girl who seemed to him the incarnation of physical perfection.

“Are you from the East?” asked Kismine with charming interest.

“No,” answered John simply. “I’m from Hades.”

Either she had never heard of Hades, or she could think of no pleasant comment to make upon it, for she did not discuss it further.

“I’m going East to school this fall” she said. “D’you think I’ll like it? I’m going to New York to Miss Bulge’s. It’s very strict, but you see over the weekends I’m going to live at home with the family in our New York house, because father heard that the girls had to go walking two by two.”

“Your father wants you to be proud,” observed John.

“We are,” she answered, her eyes shining with dignity. “None of us has ever been punished. Father said we never should be. Once when my sister Jasmine was a little girl she pushed him downstairs and he just got up and limped away.

“Mother was — well, a little startled,” continued Kismine, “when she

heard that you were from — from where you are from, you know.

She said that when she was a young girl — but then, you see, she’s a

Spaniard and old-fashioned.”

“Do you spend much time out here?” asked John, to conceal the fact that he was somewhat hurt by this remark. It seemed an unkind allusion to his provincialism.

“Percy and Jasmine and I are here every summer, but next summer Jasmine is going to Newport. She’s coming out in London a year from this fall. She’ll be presented at court.”

“Do you know,” began John hesitantly, “you’re much more sophisticated than I thought you were when I first saw you?”

“Oh, no, I’m not,” she exclaimed hurriedly. “Oh, I wouldn’t think of being. I think that sophisticated young people are terribly common, don’t you? I’m not all, really. If you say I am, I’m going to cry.”

She was so distressed that her lip was trembling. John was impelled to protest:

“I didn’t mean that; I only said it to tease you.”

“Because I wouldn’t mind if I were,” she persisted, “but I’m not. I’m very innocent and girlish. I never smoke, or drink, or read anything except poetry. I know scarcely any mathematics or chemistry. I dress very simply — in fact, I scarcely dress at all. I think sophisticated is the last thing you can say about me. I believe that girls ought to enjoy their youths in a wholesome way.”

“I do, too,” said John, heartily,

Kismine was cheerful again. She smiled at him, and a still-born tear dripped from the comer of one blue eye.

“I like you,” she whispered intimately. “Are you going to spend all your time with Percy while you’re here, or will you be nice to me? Just think — I’m absolutely fresh ground. I’ve never had a boy in love with me in all my life. I’ve never been allowed even to see boys alone — except Percy. I came all the way out here into this grove hoping to run into you, where the family wouldn’t be around.”

Deeply flattered, John bowed from the hips as he had been taught at dancing school in Hades.

“We’d better go now,” said Kismine sweetly. “I have to be with mother at eleven. You haven’t asked me to kiss you once. I thought boys always did that nowadays.”

John drew himself up proudly.

“Some of them do,” he answered, “but not me. Girls don’t do that sort of thing — in Hades.”

Side by side they walked back toward the house.

6

John stood facing Mr. Braddock Washington in the full sunlight. The elder man was about forty, with a proud, vacuous face, intelligent eyes, and a robust figure. In the mornings he smelt of horses — the best horses. He carried a plain walking-stick of gray birch with a single large opal for a grip. He and Percy were showing John around.

“The slaves’ quarters are there.” His walking-stick indicated a cloister of marble on their left that ran in graceful Gothic along the side of the mountain. “In my youth I was distracted for a while from the business of life by a period of absurd idealism. During that time they lived in luxury. For instance, I equipped every one of their rooms with a tile bath.”

“I suppose,” ventured John, with an ingratiating laugh, “that they used the bathtubs to keep coal in. Mr. Schnlitzer-Murphy told me that once he — “

“The opinions of Mr. Schnlitzer-Murphy are of little importance, I should imagine,” interrupted Braddock Washington coldly. “My slaves did not keep coal in their bathtubs. They had orders to bathe every day, and they did. If they hadn’t I might have ordered a sulphuric acid shampoo. I discontinued the baths for quite another reason. Several of them caught cold and died. Water is not good for certain races — except as a beverage.”

John laughed, and then decided to nod his head in sober agreement.

Braddock Washington made him uncomfortable.

“All these negroes are descendants of the ones my father brought North with him. There are about two hundred and fifty now. You notice that they’ve lived so long apart from the world that their original dialect has become an almost indistinguishable patois. We bring a few of them up to speak English — my secretary and two or three of the house servants.

“This is the golf course,” he continued, as they strolled along the velvet winter grass. “It’s all a green, you see — no fairway, no rough, no hazards.”

He smiled pleasantly at John.

“Many men in the cage, father?” asked Percy suddenly.

Braddock Washington stumbled, and let forth an involuntary curse.

“One less than there should be,” he ejaculated darkly — and then added after a moment, “We’ve had difficulties.”

“Mother was telling me,” exclaimed Percy, “that Italian teacher — “

“A ghastly error,” said Braddock Washington angrily. “But of course there’s a good chance that we may have got him. Perhaps he fell somewhere in the woods or stumbled over a cliff. And then there’s always the probability that if he did get away his story wouldn’t be believed. Nevertheless, I’ve had two dozen men looking for him in different towns around here.”

“And no luck?”

“Some. Fourteen of them reported to my agent they’d each killed a man answering to that description, but of course it was probably only the reward they were after — “

He broke off. They had come to a large cavity in the earth about the circumference of a merry-go-round, and covered by a strong iron grating. Braddock Washington beckoned to John, and pointed his cane down through the grating. John stepped to the edge and gazed. Immediately his ears were assailed by a wild clamor from below.

“Come on down to Hell!”

“Hallo, kiddo, how’s the air up there?”

“Hey! Throw us a rope!”

“Got an old doughnut, Buddy, or a couple of second-hand sandwiches?”

“Say, fella, if you’ll push down that guy you’re with, we’ll show you a quick disappearance scene.”

“Paste him one for me, will you?”

It was too dark to see clearly into the pit below, but John could tell from the coarse optimism and rugged vitality of the remarks and voices that they proceeded from middle-class Americans of the more spirited type. Then Mr. Washington put out his cane and touched a button in the grass, and the scene below sprang into light.

“These are some adventurous mariners who had the misfortune to discover El Dorado,” he remarked.

Below them there had appeared a large hollow in the earth shaped like the interior of a bowl. The sides were steep and apparently of polished glass, and on its slightly concave surface stood about two dozen men clad in the half costume, half uniform, of aviators. Their upturned faces, lit with wrath, with malice, with despair, with cynical humour, were covered by long growths of beard, but with the exception of a few who had pined perceptibly away, they seemed to be a well-fed, healthy lot.

Braddock Washington drew a garden chair to the edge of the pit and sat down.

“Well, how are you, boys?” he inquired genially.

A chorus of execration, in which all joined except a few too dispirited to cry out, rose up into the sunny air, but Braddock Washington heard it with unruffled composure. When its last echo had died away he spoke again.

“Have you thought up a way out of your difficulty?”

From here and there among them a remark floated up.

“We decided to stay here for love!”

“Bring us up there and we’ll find us a way!”

Braddock Washington waited until they were again quiet. Then he said:

“I’ve told you the situation. I don’t want you here, I wish to heaven I’d never seen you. Your own curiosity got you here, and any time that you can think of a way out which protects me and my interests I’ll be glad to consider it. But so long as you confine your efforts to digging tunnels — yes, I know about the new one you’ve started — you won’t get very far. This isn’t as hard on you as you make it out, with all your howling for the loved ones at home. If you were the type who worried much about the loved ones at home, you’d never have taken up aviation.”

A tall man moved apart from the others, and held up his hand to call his captor’s attention to what he was about to say.

“Let me ask you a few questions!” he cried. “You pretend to be a fair-minded man.”

“How absurd. How could a man of my position be fair-minded toward you? You might as well speak of a Spaniard being fair-minded toward a piece of steak.”

At this harsh observation the faces of the two dozen fell, but the tall man continued:

“All right!” he cried. “We’ve argued this out before. You’re not a humanitarian and you’re not fair-minded, but you’re human — at least you say you are — and you ought to be able to put yourself in our place for long enough to think how — how — how — “

“How what?” demanded Washington, coldly.

“ — how unnecessary — “

“Not to me.”

“Well — how cruel — “

“We’ve covered that. Cruelty doesn’t exist where self-preservation is involved. You’ve been soldiers; you know that. Try another.”

“Well, then, how stupid.”

“There,” admitted Washington, “I grant you that. But try to think of an alternative. I’ve offered to have all or any of you painlessly executed if you wish. I’ve offered to have your wives, sweethearts, children, and mothers kidnapped and brought out here. I’ll enlarge your place down there and feed and clothe you the rest of your lives. If there was some method of producing permanent amnesia I’d have all of you operated on and released immediately, somewhere outside of my preserves. But that’s as far as my ideas go.”

“How about trusting us not to peach on you?” cried some one.

“You don’t proffer that suggestion seriously,” said Washington, with an expression of scorn. “I did take out one man to teach my daughter Italian. Last week he got away.”

A wild yell of jubilation went up suddenly from two dozen throats and a pandemonium of joy ensued. The prisoners clog-danced and cheered and yodled and wrestled with one another in a sudden uprush of animal spirits. They even ran up the glass sides of the bowl as far as they could, and slid back to the bottom upon the natural cushions of their bodies. The tall man started a song in which they all joined —

”Oh, we’ll hang the kaiser

On a sour apple-tree — “

Braddock Washington sat in inscrutable silence until the song was over.

“You see,” he remarked, when he could gain a modicum of attention. “I bear you no ill-will. I like to see you enjoying yourselves. That’s why I didn’t tell you the whole story at once. The man — what was his name? Critchtichiello? — was shot by some of my agents in fourteen different places.”

Not guessing that the places referred to were cities, the tumult of rejoicing subsided immediately.

“Nevertheless,” cried Washington with a touch of anger, “he tried to run away. Do you expect me to take chances with any of you after an experience like that?”

Again a series of ejaculations went up.

“Sure!”

“Would your daughter like to learn Chinese?”

“Hey, I can speak Italian! My mother was a wop.”

“Maybe she’d like t’learna speak N’Yawk!”

“If she’s the little one with the big blue eyes I can teach her a lot of things better than Italian.”

“I know some Irish songs — and I could hammer brass once’t.”

Mr. Washington reached forward suddenly with his cane and pushed the button in the grass so that the picture below went out instantly, and there remained only that great dark mouth covered dismally with the black teeth of the grating.

“Hey!” called a single voice from below, “you ain’t goin’ away without givin’ us your blessing?”

But Mr. Washington, followed by the two boys, was already strolling on toward the ninth hole of the golf course, as though the pit and its contents were no more than a hazard over which his facile iron had triumphed with ease.

7

July under the lee of the diamond mountain was a month of blanket nights and of warm, glowing days. John and Kismine were in love. He did not know that the little gold football (inscribed with the legend Pro deo et patria et St. Mida) which he had given her rested on a platinum chain next to her bosom. But it did. And she for her part was not aware that a large sapphire which had dropped one day from her simple coiffure was stowed away tenderly in John’s jewel box.

Late one afternoon when the ruby and ermine music room was quiet, they spent an hour there together. He held her hand and she gave him such a look that he whispered her name aloud. She bent toward him — then hesitated.

“Did you say ‘Kismine’?” she asked softly, “or — “

She had wanted to be sure. She thought she might have misunderstood.

Neither of them had ever kissed before, but in the course of an hour it seemed to make little difference.

The afternoon drifted away. That night, when a last breath of music drifted down from the highest tower, they each lay awake, happily dreaming over the separate minutes of the day. They had decided to be married as soon as possible.

8

Every day Mr. Washington and the two young men went hunting or fishing in the deep forests or played golf around the somnolent course — games which John diplomatically allowed his host to win — or swam in the mountain coolness of the lake. John found Mr. Washington a somewhat exacting personality — utterly uninterested in any ideas or opinions except his own. Mrs. Washington was aloof and reserved at all times. She was apparently indifferent to her two daughters, and entirely absorbed in her son Percy, with whom she held interminable conversations in rapid Spanish at dinner.

Jasmine, the elder daughter, resembled Kismine in appearance — except that she was somewhat bow-legged, and terminated in large hands and feet — but was utterly unlike her in temperament. Her favourite books had to do with poor girls who kept house for widowed fathers. John learned from Kismine that Jasmine had never recovered from the shock and disappointment caused her by the termination of the World War, just as she was about to start for Europe as a canteen expert. She had even pined away for a time, and Braddock Washington had taken steps to promote a new war in the Balkans — but she had seen a photograph of some wounded Serbian soldiers and lost interest in the whole proceedings. But Percy and Kismine seemed to have inherited the arrogant attitude in all its harsh magnificence from their father. A chaste and consistent selfishness ran like a pattern through their every idea.

John was enchanted by the wonders of the château and the valley. Braddock Washington, so Percy told him, had caused to be kidnapped a landscape gardener, an architect, a designer of state settings, and a French decadent poet left over from the last century. He had put his entire force of negroes at their disposal, guaranteed to supply them with any materials that the world could offer, and left them to work out some ideas of their own. But one by one they had shown their uselessness. The decadent poet had at once begun bewailing his separation, from the boulevards in spring — he made some vague remarks about spices, apes, and ivories, but said nothing that was of any practical value. The stage designer on his part wanted to make the whole valley a series of tricks and sensational effects — a state of things that the Washingtons would soon have grown tired of. And as for the architect and the landscape gardener, they thought only in terms of convention. They must make this like this and that like that.

But they had, at least, solved the problem of what was to be done with them — they all went mad early one morning after spending the night in a single room trying to agree upon the location of a fountain, and were now confined comfortably in an insane asylum at Westport, Connecticut.

“But,” inquired John curiously, “who did plan all your wonderful reception rooms and halls, and approaches and bathrooms — ?”

“Well,” answered Percy, “I blush to tell you, but it was a moving-picture fella. He was the only man we found who was used to playing with an unlimited amount of money, though he did tuck his napkin in his collar and couldn’t read or write.”

As August drew to a close John began to regret that he must soon go back to school. He and Kismine had decided to elope the following June.

“It would be nicer to be married here,” Kismine confessed, “but of course I could never get father’s permission to marry you at all. Next to that I’d rather elope. It’s terrible for wealthy people to be married in America at present — they always have to send out bulletins to the press saying that they’re going to be married in remnants, when what they mean is just a peck of old second-hand pearls and some used lace worn once by the Empress Eugenie.”

“I know,” agreed John fervently. “When I was visiting the Schnlitzer-Murphys, the eldest daughter, Gwendolyn, married a man whose father owns half of West Virginia. She wrote home saying what a tough struggle she was carrying on on his salary as a bank clerk — and then she ended up by saying that ‘Thank God, I have four good maids anyhow, and that helps a little.’“

“It’s absurd,” commented Kismine — “Think of the millions and millions of people in the world, labourers and all, who get along with only two maids.”

One afternoon late in August a chance remark of Kismine’s changed the face of the entire situation, and threw John into a state of terror.

They were in their favourite grove, and between kisses John was indulging in some romantic forebodings which he fancied added poignancy to their relations.

“Sometimes I think we’ll never marry,” he said sadly. “You’re too wealthy, too magnificent. No one as rich as you are can be like other girls. I should marry the daughter of some well-to-do wholesale hardware man from Omaha or Sioux City, and be content with her half-million.”

“I knew the daughter of a wholesale hardware man once,” remarked Kismine. “I don’t think you’d have been contented with her. She was a friend of my sister’s. She visited here.”

“Oh, then you’ve had other guests?” exclaimed John in surprise.

Kismine seemed to regret her words.

“Oh, yes,” she said hurriedly, “we’ve had a few.”

“But aren’t you — wasn’t your father afraid they’d talk outside?”

“Oh, to some extent, to some extent,” she answered, “Let’s talk about something pleasanter.”

But John’s curiosity was aroused.

“Something pleasanter!” he demanded. “What’s unpleasant about that?

Weren’t they nice girls?”

To his great surprise Kismine began to weep.

“Yes — th — that’s the — the whole t-trouble. I grew qu-quite attached to some of them. So did Jasmine, but she kept inv-viting them anyway. I couldn’t understand it.”

A dark suspicion was born in John’s heart.

“Do you mean that they told, and your father had them — removed?”

“Worse than that,” she muttered brokenly. “Father took no chances — and Jasmine kept writing them to come, and they had such a good time!”

She was overcome by a paroxysm of grief.

Stunned with the horror of this revelation, John sat there open-mouthed, feeling the nerves of his body twitter like so many sparrows perched upon his spinal column.

“Now, I’ve told you, and I shouldn’t have,” she said, calming suddenly and drying her dark blue eyes.

“Do you mean to say that your father had them murdered before they left?”

She nodded.

“In August usually — or early in September. It’s only natural for us to get all the pleasure out of them that we can first.”

“How abominable! How — why, I must be going crazy! Did you really admit that — “

“I did,” interrupted Kismine, shrugging her shoulders. “We can’t very well imprison them like those aviators, where they’d be a continual reproach to us every day. And it’s always been made easier for Jasmine and me, because father had it done sooner than we expected. In that way we avoided any farewell scene-”

“So you murdered them! Uh!” cried John.

“It was done very nicely. They were drugged while they were asleep — and their families were always told that they died of scarlet fever in Butte.”

“But — I fail to understand why you kept on inviting them!”

“I didn’t,” burst out Kismine. “I never invited one. Jasmine did. And they always had a very good time. She’d give them the nicest presents toward the last. I shall probably have visitors too — I’ll harden up to it. We can’t let such an inevitable thing as death stand in the way of enjoying life while we have it. Think of how lonesome it’d be out here if we never had any one. Why, father and mother have sacrificed some of their best friends just as we have.”

“And so,” cried John accusingly, “and so you were letting me make love to you and pretending to return it, and talking about marriage, all the time knowing perfectly well that I’d never get out of here alive — “

“No,” she protested passionately. “Not any more. I did at first. You were here. I couldn’t help that, and I thought your last days might as well be pleasant for both of us. But then I fell in love with you, and — and I’m honestly sorry you’re going to — going to be put away — though I’d rather you’d be put away than ever kiss another girl.”

“Oh, you would, would you?” cried John ferociously.

“Much rather. Besides, I’ve always heard that a girl can have more fun with a man whom she knows she can never marry. Oh, why did I tell you? I’ve probably spoiled your whole good time now, and we were really enjoying things when you didn’t know it. I knew it would make things sort of depressing for you.”

“Oh, you did, did you?” John’s voice trembled with anger. “I’ve heard about enough of this. If you haven’t any more pride and decency than to have an affair with a fellow that you know isn’t much better than a corpse, I don’t want to have any more to with you!”

“You’re not a corpse!” she protested in horror. “You’re not a corpse!

I won’t have you saying that I kissed a corpse!”

“I said nothing of the sort!”

“You did! You said I kissed a corpse!”

“I didn’t!”

Their voices had risen, but upon a sudden interruption they both subsided into immediate silence. Footsteps were coming along the path in their direction, and a moment later the rose bushes were parted displaying Braddock Washington, whose intelligent eyes set in his good-looking vacuous face were peering in at them.

“Who kissed a corpse?” he demanded in obvious disapproval.

“Nobody,” answered Kismine quickly. “We were just joking.”

“What are you two doing here, anyhow?” he demanded gruffly. “Kismine, you ought to be — to be reading or playing golf with your sister. Go read! Go play golf! Don’t let me find you here when I come back!”

Then he bowed at John and went up the path.

“See?” said Kismine crossly, when he was out of hearing. “You’ve spoiled it all. We can never meet any more. He won’t let me meet you. He’d have you poisoned if he thought we were in love.”

“We’re not, any more!” cried John fiercely, “so he can set his mind at rest upon that. Moreover, don’t fool yourself that I’m going to stay around here. Inside of six hours I’ll be over those mountains, if I have to gnaw a passage through them, and on my way East.” They had both got to their feet, and at this remark Kismine came close and put her arm through his.

“I’m going, too.”

“You must be crazy — “

“Of course I’m going,” she interrupted impatiently.

“You most certainly are not. You — “

“Very well,” she said quietly, “we’ll catch up with father and talk it over with him.”

Defeated, John mustered a sickly smile.

“Very well, dearest,” he agreed, with pale and unconvincing affection, “we’ll go together.”

His love for her returned and settled placidly on his heart. She was his — she would go with him to share his dangers. He put his arms about her and kissed her fervently. After all she loved him; she had saved him, in fact.

Discussing the matter, they walked slowly back toward the château. They decided that since Braddock Washington had seen them together they had best depart the next night. Nevertheless, John’s lips were unusually dry at dinner, and he nervously emptied a great spoonful of peacock soup into his left lung. He had to be carried into the turquoise and sable card-room and pounded on the back by one of the under-butlers, which Percy considered a great joke.

9

Long after midnight John’s body gave a nervous jerk, he sat suddenly upright, staring into the veils of somnolence that draped the room. Through the squares of blue darkness that were his open windows, he had heard a faint far-away sound that died upon a bed of wind before identifying itself on his memory, clouded with uneasy dreams. But the sharp noise that had succeeded it was nearer, was just outside the room — the click of a turned knob, a footstep, a whisper, he could not tell; a hard lump gathered in the pit of his stomach, and his whole body ached in the moment that he strained agonisingly to hear. Then one of the veils seemed to dissolve, and he saw a vague figure standing by the door, a figure only faintly limned and blocked in upon the darkness, mingled so with the folds of the drapery as to seem distorted, like a reflection seen in a dirty pane of glass.

With a sudden movement of fright or resolution John pressed the button by his bedside, and the next moment he was sitting in the green sunken bath of the adjoining room, waked into alertness by the shock of the cold water which half filled it.

He sprang out, and, his wet pyjamas scattering a heavy trickle of water behind him, ran for the aquamarine door which he knew led out on to the ivory landing of the second floor. The door opened noiselessly. A single crimson lamp burning in a great dome above lit the magnificent sweep of the carved stairways with a poignant beauty. For a moment John hesitated, appalled by the silent splendour massed about him, seeming to envelop in its gigantic folds and contours the solitary drenched little figure shivering upon the ivory landing. Then simultaneously two things happened. The door of his own sitting-room swung open, precipitating three naked negroes into the hall — and, as John swayed in wild terror toward the stairway, another door slid back in the wall on the other side of the corridor, and John saw Braddock Washington standing in the lighted lift, wearing a fur coat and a pair of riding boots which reached to his knees and displayed, above, the glow of his rose-colored pyjamas.

On the instant the three negroes — John had never seen any of them before, and it flashed through his mind that they must be the professional executioners paused in their movement toward John, and turned expectantly to the man in the lift, who burst out with an imperious command:

“Get in here! All three of you! Quick as hell!”

Then, within the instant, the three negroes darted into the cage, the oblong of light was blotted out as the lift door slid shut, and John was again alone in the hall. He slumped weakly down against an ivory stair.

It was apparent that something portentous had occurred, something which, for the moment at least, had postponed his own petty disaster. What was it? Had the negroes risen in revolt? Had the aviators forced aside the iron bars of the grating? Or had the men of Fish stumbled blindly through the hills and gazed with bleak, joyless eyes upon the gaudy valley? John did not know. He heard a faint whir of air as the lift whizzed up again, and then, a moment later, as it descended. It was probable that Percy was hurrying to his father’s assistance, and it occurred to John that this was his opportunity to join Kismine and plan an immediate escape. He waited until the lift had been silent for several minutes; shivering a little with the night cool that whipped in through his wet pyjamas, he returned to his room and dressed himself quickly. Then he mounted a long flight of stairs and turned down the corridor carpeted with Russian sable which led to Kismine’s suite.

The door of her sitting-room was open and the lamps were lighted. Kismine, in an angora kimono, stood near the window Of the room in a listening attitude, and as John entered noiselessly she turned toward him.

“Oh, it’s you!” she whispered, crossing the room to him. “Did you hear them?”

“I heard your father’s slaves in my — “

“No,” she interrupted excitedly. “Aeroplanes!”

“Aeroplanes? Perhaps that was the sound that woke me.”

“There’re at least a dozen. I saw one a few moments ago dead against the moon. The guard back by the cliff fired his rifle and that’s what roused father. We’re going to open on them right away.”

“Are they here on purpose?”

“Yes — it’s that Italian who got away — “

Simultaneously with her last word, a succession of sharp cracks tumbled in through the open window. Kismine uttered a little cry, took a penny with fumbling fingers from a box on her dresser, and ran to one of the electric lights. In an instant the entire chateau was in darkness — she had blown out the fuse.

“Come on!” she cried to him. “We’ll go up to the roof garden, and watch it from there!”

Drawing a cape about her, she took his hand, and they found their way out the door. It was only a step to the tower lift, and as she pressed the button that shot them upward he put his arms around her in the darkness and kissed her mouth. Romance had come to John Unger at last. A minute later they had stepped out upon the star-white platform. Above, under the misty moon, sliding in and out of the patches of cloud that eddied below it, floated a dozen dark-winged bodies in a constant circling course. From here and there in the valley flashes of fire leaped toward them, followed by sharp detonations. Kismine clapped her hands with pleasure, which, a moment later, turned to dismay as the aeroplanes, at some prearranged signal, began to release their bombs and the whole of the valley became a panorama of deep reverberate sound and lurid light.

Before long the aim of the attackers became concentrated upon the points where the anti-aircraft guns were situated, and one of them was almost immediately reduced to a giant cinder to lie smouldering in a park of rose bushes.

“Kismine,” begged John, “you’ll be glad when I tell you that this attack came on the eve of my murder. If I hadn’t heard that guard shoot off his gun back by the pass I should now be stone dead — “

“I can’t hear you!” cried Kismine, intent on the scene before her.

“You’ll have to talk louder!”

“I simply said,” shouted John, “that we’d better get out before they begin to shell the chateau!”

Suddenly the whole portico of the negro quarters cracked asunder, a geyser of flame shot up from under the colonnades, and great fragments of jagged marble were hurled as far as the borders of the lake.

“There go fifty thousand dollars’ worth of slaves,” cried Kismine, “at pre-war prices. So few Americans have any respect for property.”

John renewed his efforts to compel her to leave. The aim of the aeroplanes was becoming more precise minute by minute, and only two of the anti-aircraft guns were still retaliating. It was obvious that the garrison, encircled with fire, could not hold out much longer.

“Come on!” cried John, pulling Kismine’s arm, “we’ve got to go. Do you realise that those aviators will kill you without question if they find you?”

She consented reluctantly.

“We’ll have to wake Jasmine!” she said, as they hurried toward the lift. Then she added in a sort of childish delight: “We’ll be poor, won’t we? Like people in books. And I’ll be an orphan and utterly free. Free and poor! What fun!” She stopped and raised her lips to him in a delighted kiss.

“It’s impossible to be both together,” said John grimly. “People have found that out. And I should choose to be free as preferable of the two. As an extra caution you’d better dump the contents of your jewel box into your pockets.”

Ten minutes later the two girls met John in the dark corridor and they descended to the main floor of the chateau. Passing for the last time through the magnificence of the splendid halls, they stood for a moment out on the terrace, watching the burning negro quarters and the flaming embers of two planes which had fallen on the other side of the lake. A solitary gun was still keeping up a sturdy popping, and the attackers seemed timorous about descending lower, but sent their thunderous fireworks in a circle around it, until any chance shot might annihilate its Ethiopian crew.

John and the two sisters passed down the marble steps, turned sharply to the left, and began to ascend a narrow path that wound like a garter about the diamond mountain. Kismine knew a heavily wooded spot half-way up where they could lie concealed and yet be able to observe the wild night in the valley — finally to make an escape, when it should be necessary, along a secret path laid in a rocky gully.

10

It was three o’clock when they attained their destination. The obliging and phlegmatic Jasmine fell off to sleep immediately, leaning against the trunk of a large tree, while John and Kismine sat, his arm around her, and watched the desperate ebb and flow of the dying battle among the ruins of a vista that had been a garden spot that morning. Shortly after four o’clock the last remaining gun gave out a clanging sound, and went out of action in a swift tongue of red smoke. Though the moon was down, they saw that the flying bodies were circling closer to the earth. When the planes had made certain that the beleaguered possessed no further resources they would land and the dark and glittering reign of the Washingtons would be over.

With the cessation of the firing the valley grew quiet. The embers of the two aeroplanes glowed like the eyes of some monster crouching in the grass. The château stood dark and silent, beautiful without light as it had been beautiful in the sun, while the woody rattles of Nemesis filled the air above with a growing and receding complaint. Then John perceived that Kismine, like her sister, had fallen sound asleep.

It was long after four when he became aware of footsteps along the path they had lately followed, and he waited in breathless silence until the persons to whom they belonged had passed the vantage-point he occupied. There was a faint stir in the air now that was not of human origin, and the dew was cold; he knew that the dawn would break soon. John waited until the steps had gone a safe distance up the mountain and were inaudible. Then he followed. About half-way to the steep summit the trees fell away and a hard saddle of rock spread itself over the diamond beneath. Just before he reached this point he slowed down his pace warned by an animal sense that there was life just ahead of him. Coming to a high boulder, he lifted his head gradually above its edge. His curiosity was rewarded; this is what he saw:

Braddock Washington was standing there motionless, silhouetted against the gray sky without sound or sign of life. As the dawn came up out of the east, lending a gold green colour to the earth, it brought the solitary figure into insignificant contrast with the new day.

While John watched, his host remained for a few moments absorbed in some inscrutable contemplation; then he signalled to the two negroes who crouched at his feet to lift the burden which lay between them. As they struggled upright, the first yellow beam of the sun struck through the innumerable prisms of an immense and exquisitely chiselled diamond — and a white radiance was kindled that glowed upon the air like a fragment of the morning star. The bearers staggered beneath its weight for a moment — then their rippling muscles caught and hardened under the wet shine of the skins and the three figures were again motionless in their defiant impotency before the heavens.

After a while the white man lifted his head and slowly raised his arms in a gesture of attention, as one who would call a great crowd to hear — but there was no crowd, only the vast silence of the mountain and the sky, broken by faint bird voices down among the trees. The figure on the saddle of rock began to speak ponderously and with an inextinguishable pride.

“You — out there — !” he cried in a trembling voice.

“You — there —  — !” He paused, his arms still uplifted, his head held attentively as though he were expecting an answer. John strained his eyes to see whether there might be men coming down the mountain, but the mountain was bare of human life. There was only sky and a mocking flute of wind along the treetops. Could Washington be praying? For a moment John wondered. Then the illusion passed — there was something in the man’s whole attitude antithetical to prayer.

“Oh, you above there!”

The voice was become strong and confident. This was no forlorn supplication. If anything, there was in it a quality of monstrous condescension.

“You there — “ Words, too quickly uttered to be understood, flowing one into the other …. John listened breathlessly, catching a phrase here and there, while the voice broke off, resumed, broke off again — now strong and argumentative, now coloured with a slow, puzzled impatience, Then a conviction commenced to dawn on the single listener, and as realisation crept over him a spray of quick blood rushed through his arteries. Braddock Washington was offering a bribe to God!

That was it — there was no doubt. The diamond in the arms of his slaves was some advance sample, a promise of more to follow.

That, John perceived after a time, was the thread running through his sentences. Prometheus Enriched was calling to witness forgotten sacrifices, forgotten rituals, prayers obsolete before the birth of Christ. For a while his discourse took the farm of reminding God of this gift or that which Divinity had deigned to accept from men — great churches if he would rescue cities from the plague, gifts of myrrh and gold, of human lives and beautiful women and captive armies, of children and queens, of beasts of the forest and field, sheep and goats, harvests and cities, whole conquered lands that had been offered up in lust or blood for His appeasal, buying a meed’s worth of alleviation from the Divine wrath — and now he, Braddock Washington, Emperor of Diamonds, king and priest of the age of gold, arbiter of splendour and luxury, would offer up a treasure such as princes before him had never dreamed of, offer it up not in suppliance, but in pride.

He would give to God, he continued, getting down to specifications, the greatest diamond in the world. This diamond would be cut with many more thousand facets than there were leaves on a tree, and yet the whole diamond would be shaped with the perfection of a stone no bigger than a fly. Many men would work upon it for many years. It would be set in a great dome of beaten gold, wonderfully carved and equipped with gates of opal and crusted sapphire. In the middle would be hollowed out a chapel presided over by an altar of iridescent, decomposing, ever-changing radium which would burn out the eyes of any worshipper who lifted up his head from prayer — and on this altar there would be slain for the amusement of the Divine Benefactor any victim He should choose, even though it should be the greatest and most powerful man alive.

In return he asked only a simple thing, a thing that for God would be absurdly easy — only that matters should be as they were yesterday at this hour and that they should so remain. So very simple! Let but the heavens open, swallowing these men and their aeroplanes — and then close again. Let him have his slaves once more, restored to life and well.

There was no one else with whom he had ever needed: to treat or bargain.

He doubted only whether he had made his bribe big enough. God had His price, of course. God was made in man’s image, so it had been said: He must have His price. And the price would be rare — no cathedral whose building consumed many years, no pyramid constructed by ten thousand workmen, would be like this cathedral, this pyramid.

He paused here. That was his proposition. Everything would be up to specifications, and there was nothing vulgar in his assertion that it would be cheap at the price. He implied that Providence could take it or leave it.

As he approached the end his sentences became broken, became short and uncertain, and his body seemed tense, seemed strained to catch the slightest pressure or whisper of life in the spaces around him. His hair had turned gradually white as he talked, and now he lifted his head high to the heavens like a prophet of old — magnificently mad.

Then, as John stared in giddy fascination, it seemed to him that a curious phenomenon took place somewhere around him. It was as though the sky had darkened for an instant, as though there had been a sudden murmur in a gust of wind, a sound of far-away trumpets, a sighing like the rustle of a great silken robe — for a time the whole of nature round about partook of this darkness; the birds’ song ceased; the trees were still, and far over the mountain there was a mutter of dull, menacing thunder.

That was all. The wind died along the tall grasses of the valley. The dawn and the day resumed their place in a time, and the risen sun sent hot waves of yellow mist that made its path bright before it. The leaves laughed in the sun, and their laughter shook until each bough was like a girl’s school in fairyland. God had refused to accept the bribe.

For another moment John, watched the triumph of the day. Then, turning, he saw a flutter of brown down by the lake, then another flutter, then another, like the dance of golden angels alighting from the clouds. The aeroplanes had come to earth.

John slid off the boulder and ran down the side of the mountain to the clump of trees, where the two girls were awake and waiting for him. Kismine sprang to her feet, the jewels in her pockets jingling, a question on her parted lips, but instinct told John that there was no time for words. They must get off the mountain without losing a moment. He seized a hand of each, and in silence they threaded the tree-trunks, washed with light now and with the rising mist. Behind them from the valley came no sound at all, except the complaint of the peacocks far away and the pleasant of morning.

When they had gone about half a mile, they avoided the park land and entered a narrow path that led over the next rise of ground. At the highest point of this they paused and turned around. Their eyes rested upon the mountainside they had just left — oppressed by some dark sense of tragic impendency.

Clear against the sky a broken, white-haired man was slowly descending the steep slope, followed by two gigantic and emotionless negroes, who carried a burden between them which still flashed and glittered in the sun. Half-way down two other figures joined them — John could see that they were Mrs. Washington and her son, upon whose arm she leaned. The aviators had clambered from their machines to the sweeping lawn in front of the chateau, and with rifles in hand were starting up the diamond mountain in skirmishing formation.

But the little group of five which had formed farther up and was engrossing all the watchers’ attention had stopped upon a ledge of rock. The negroes stooped and pulled up what appeared to be a trap-door in the side of the mountain. Into this they all disappeared, the white-haired man first, then his wife and son, finally the two negroes, the glittering tips of whose jewelled head-dresses caught the sun for a moment before the trap-door descended and engulfed them all.

Kismine clutched John’s arm.

“Oh,” she cried wildly, “where are they going? What are they going to do?”

“It must be some underground way of escape — “

A little scream from the two girls interrupted his sentence.

“Don’t you see?” sobbed Kismine hysterically. “The mountain is wired!”

Even as she spoke John put up his hands to shield his sight. Before their eyes the whole surface of the mountain had changed suddenly to a dazzling burning yellow, which showed up through the jacket of turf as light shows through a human hand. For a moment the intolerable glow continued, and then like an extinguished filament it disappeared, revealing a black waste from which blue smoke arose slowly, carrying off with it what remained of vegetation and of human flesh. Of the aviators there was left neither blood nor bone — they were consumed as completely as the five souls who had gone inside.

Simultaneously, and with an immense concussion, the château literally threw itself into the air, bursting into flaming fragments as it rose, and then tumbling back upon itself in a smoking pile that lay projecting half into the water of the lake. There was no fire — what smoke there was drifted off mingling with the sunshine, and for a few minutes longer a powdery dust of marble drifted from the great featureless pile that had once been the house of jewels. There was no more sound and the three people were alone in the valley.

9

At sunset John and his two companions reached the huge cliff which had marked the boundaries of the Washington’s dominion, and looking back found the valley tranquil and lovely in the dusk. They sat down to finish the food which Jasmine had brought with her in a basket.

“There!” she said, as she spread the table-cloth and put the sandwiches in a neat pile upon it. “Don’t they look tempting? I always think that food tastes better outdoors.”

“With that remark,” remarked Kismine, “Jasmine enters the middle class.”

“Now,” said John eagerly, “turn out your pocket and let’s see what jewels you brought along. If you made a good selection we three ought to live comfortably all the rest of our lives.”

Obediently Kismine put her hand in her pocket and tossed two handfuls of glittering stones before him. “Not so bad,” cried John enthusiastically. “They aren’t very big, but-Hallo!” His expression changed as he held one of them up to the declining sun. “Why, these aren’t diamonds! There’s something the matter!

“By golly!” exclaimed Kismine, with a startled look. “What an idiot I am!”

“Why, these are rhinestones!” cried John.

“I know.” She broke into a laugh. “I opened the wrong drawer. They belonged on the dress of a girl who visited Jasmine. I got her to give them to me in exchange for diamonds. I’d never seen anything but precious stones before.”

“And this is what you brought?”

“I’m afraid so.” She fingered the brilliants wistfully. “I think I like these better. I’m a little tired of diamonds.”

“Very well,” said John gloomily. “We’ll have to live in Hades. And you will grow old telling incredulous women that you got the wrong drawer. Unfortunately, your father’s bank-books were consumed with him.”

“Well, what’s the matter with Hades?”

“If I come home with a wife at my age my father is just as liable as not to cut me off with a hot coal, as they say down there.”

Jasmine spoke up.

“I love washing,” she said quietly. “I have always washed my own handkerchiefs. I’ll take in laundry and support you both.”

“Do they have washwomen in Hades?” asked Kismine innocently.

“Of course,” answered John. “It’s just like anywhere else.”

“I thought — perhaps it was too hot to wear any clothes.”

John laughed.

“Just try it!” he suggested. “They’ll run you out before you’re half started.”

“Will father be there?” she asked.

John turned to her in astonishment.

“Your father is dead,” he replied sombrely. “Why should he go to Hades? You have it confused with another place that was abolished long ago.”

After supper they folded up the table-cloth and spread their blankets for the night.

“What a dream it was,” Kismine sighed, gazing up at the stars. “How strange it seems to be here with one dress and a penniless fiancée!

“Under the stars,” she repeated. “I never noticed the stars before. I always thought of them as great big diamonds that belonged to some one. Now they frighten me. They make me feel that it was all a dream, all my youth.”

“It was a dream,” said John quietly. “Everybody’s youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness.”

“How pleasant then to be insane!”

“So I’m told,” said John gloomily. “I don’t know any longer. At any rate, let us love for a while, for a year or so, you and me. That’s a form of divine drunkenness that we can all try. There are only diamonds in the whole world, diamonds and perhaps the shabby gift of disillusion. Well, I have that last and I will make the usual nothing of it.” He shivered. “Turn up your coat collar, little girl, the night’s full of chill and you’ll get pneumonia. His was a great sin who first invented consciousness. Let us lose it for a few hours.”

So wrapping himself in his blanket he fell off to sleep.

THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON

I

As long ago as 1860 it was the proper thing to be born at home. At present, so I am told, the high gods of medicine have decreed that the first cries of the young shall be uttered upon the anaesthetic air of a hospital, preferably a fashionable one. So young Mr. and Mrs. Roger Button were fifty years ahead of style when they decided, one day in the summer of 1860, that their first baby should be born in a hospital. Whether this anachronism had any bearing upon the astonishing history I am about to set down will never be known.

I shall tell you what occurred, and let you judge for yourself.

The Roger Buttons held an enviable position, both social and financial, in ante-bellum Baltimore. They were related to the This Family and the That Family, which, as every Southerner knew, entitled them to membership in that enormous peerage which largely populated the Confederacy. This was their first experience with the charming old custom of having babies — Mr. Button was naturally nervous. He hoped it would be a boy so that he could be sent to YaleCollege in Connecticut, at which institution Mr. Button himself had been known for four years by the somewhat obvious nickname of “Cuff.”

On the September morning consecrated to the enormous event he arose nervously at six o’clock dressed himself, adjusted an impeccable stock, and hurried forth through the streets of Baltimore to the hospital, to determine whether the darkness of the night had borne in new life upon its bosom.

When he was approximately a hundred yards from the Maryland PrivateHospital for Ladies and Gentlemen he saw Doctor Keene, the family physician, descending the front steps, rubbing his hands together with a washing movement — as all doctors are required to do by the unwritten ethics of their profession.

Mr. Roger Button, the president of Roger Button & Co., Wholesale

Hardware, began to run toward Doctor Keene with much less dignity than

was expected from a Southern gentleman of that picturesque period.

“Doctor Keene!” he called. “Oh, Doctor Keene!”

The doctor heard him, faced around, and stood waiting, a curious expression settling on his harsh, medicinal face as Mr. Button drew near.

“What happened?” demanded Mr. Button, as he came up in a gasping rush.

“What was it? How is she? A boy? Who is it? What — “

“Talk sense!” said Doctor Keene sharply, He appeared somewhat irritated.

“Is the child born?” begged Mr. Button.

Doctor Keene frowned. “Why, yes, I suppose so — after a fashion.” Again he threw a curious glance at Mr. Button.

“Is my wife all right?”

“Yes.”

“Is it a boy or a girl?”

“Here now!” cried Doctor Keene in a perfect passion of irritation,

“I’ll ask you to go and see for yourself. Outrageous!” He snapped the

last word out in almost one syllable, then he turned away muttering:

“Do you imagine a case like this will help my professional reputation?

One more would ruin me — ruin anybody.”

“What’s the matter?” demanded Mr. Button appalled. “Triplets?”

“No, not triplets!” answered the doctor cuttingly. “What’s more, you can go and see for yourself. And get another doctor. I brought you into the world, young man, and I’ve been physician to your family for forty years, but I’m through with you! I don’t want to see you or any of your relatives ever again! Good-bye!”

Then he turned sharply, and without another word climbed into his phaeton, which was waiting at the curbstone, and drove severely away.

Mr. Button stood there upon the sidewalk, stupefied and trembling from head to foot. What horrible mishap had occurred? He had suddenly lost all desire to go into the Maryland PrivateHospital for Ladies and Gentlemen — it was with the greatest difficulty that, a moment later, he forced himself to mount the steps and enter the front door.

A nurse was sitting behind a desk in the opaque gloom of the hall.

Swallowing his shame, Mr. Button approached her.

“Good-morning,” she remarked, looking up at him pleasantly.

“Good-morning. I — I am Mr. Button.”

At this a look of utter terror spread itself over girl’s face. She rose to her feet and seemed about to fly from the hall, restraining herself only with the most apparent difficulty.

“I want to see my child,” said Mr. Button.

The nurse gave a little scream. “Oh — of course!” she cried hysterically. “Upstairs. Right upstairs. Go — up!”

She pointed the direction, and Mr. Button, bathed in cool perspiration, turned falteringly, and began to mount to the second floor. In the upper hall he addressed another nurse who approached him, basin in hand. “I’m Mr. Button,” he managed to articulate. “I want to see my —  — “

Clank! The basin clattered to the floor and rolled in the direction of the stairs. Clank! Clank! It began a methodical descent as if sharing in the general terror which this gentleman provoked.

“I want to see my child!” Mr. Button almost shrieked. He was on the verge of collapse.

Clank! The basin reached the first floor. The nurse regained control of herself, and threw Mr. Button a look of hearty contempt.

“All right, Mr. Button,” she agreed in a hushed voice. “Very well! But if you knew what a state it’s put us all in this morning! It’s perfectly outrageous! The hospital will never have a ghost of a reputation after —  — “

“Hurry!” he cried hoarsely. “I can’t stand this!”

“Come this way, then, Mr. Button.”

He dragged himself after her. At the end of a long hall they reached a room from which proceeded a variety of howls — indeed, a room which, in later parlance, would have been known as the “crying-room.” They entered.

“Well,” gasped Mr. Button, “which is mine?”

“There!” said the nurse.

Mr. Button’s eyes followed her pointing finger, and this is what he saw. Wrapped in a voluminous white blanket, and partly crammed into one of the cribs, there sat an old man apparently about seventy years of age. His sparse hair was almost white, and from his chin dripped a long smoke-coloured beard, which waved absurdly back and forth, fanned by the breeze coming in at the window. He looked up at Mr. Button with dim, faded eyes in which lurked a puzzled question.

“Am I mad?” thundered Mr. Button, his terror resolving into rage. “Is this some ghastly hospital joke?

“It doesn’t seem like a joke to us,” replied the nurse severely. “And I don’t know whether you’re mad or not — but that is most certainly your child.”

The cool perspiration redoubled on Mr. Button’s forehead. He closed his eyes, and then, opening them, looked again. There was no mistake — he was gazing at a man of threescore and ten — a baby of threescore and ten, a baby whose feet hung over the sides of the crib in which it was reposing.

The old man looked placidly from one to the other for a moment, and then suddenly spoke in a cracked and ancient voice. “Are you my father?” he demanded.

Mr. Button and the nurse started violently.

“Because if you are,” went on the old man querulously, “I wish you’d get me out of this place — or, at least, get them to put a comfortable rocker in here.”

“Where in God’s name did you come from? Who are you?” burst out Mr.

Button frantically.

“I can’t tell you exactly who I am,” replied the querulous whine, “because I’ve only been born a few hours — but my last name is certainly Button.”

“You lie! You’re an impostor!”

The old man turned wearily to the nurse. “Nice way to welcome a new-born child,” he complained in a weak voice. “Tell him he’s wrong, why don’t you?”

“You’re wrong. Mr. Button,” said the nurse severely. “This is your child, and you’ll have to make the best of it. We’re going to ask you to take him home with you as soon as possible-some time to-day.”

“Home?” repeated Mr. Button incredulously.

“Yes, we can’t have him here. We really can’t, you know?”

“I’m right glad of it,” whined the old man. “This is a fine place to keep a youngster of quiet tastes. With all this yelling and howling, I haven’t been able to get a wink of sleep. I asked for something to eat” — here his voice rose to a shrill note of protest — “and they brought me a bottle of milk!”

Mr. Button, sank down upon a chair near his son and concealed his face in his hands. “My heavens!” he murmured, in an ecstasy of horror. “What will people say? What must I do?”

“You’ll have to take him home,” insisted the nurse — “immediately!”

A grotesque picture formed itself with dreadful clarity before the eyes of the tortured man — a picture of himself walking through the crowded streets of the city with this appalling apparition stalking by his side.

“I can’t. I can’t,” he moaned.

People would stop to speak to him, and what was he going to say? He would have to introduce this — this septuagenarian: “This is my son, born early this morning.” And then the old man would gather his blanket around him and they would plod on, past the bustling stores, the slave market — for a dark instant Mr. Button wished passionately that his son was black — past the luxurious houses of the residential district, past the home for the aged….

“Come! Pull yourself together,” commanded the nurse.

“See here,” the old man announced suddenly, “if you think I’m going to walk home in this blanket, you’re entirely mistaken.”

“Babies always have blankets.”

With a malicious crackle the old man held up a small white swaddling garment. “Look!” he quavered. “This is what they had ready for me.”

“Babies always wear those,” said the nurse primly.

“Well,” said the old man, “this baby’s not going to wear anything in about two minutes. This blanket itches. They might at least have given me a sheet.”

“Keep it on! Keep it on!” said Mr. Button hurriedly. He turned to the nurse. “What’ll I do?”

“Go down town and buy your son some clothes.”

Mr. Button’s son’s voice followed him down into the hall: “And a cane, father. I want to have a cane.”

Mr. Button banged the outer door savagely….

2

“Good-morning,” Mr. Button said nervously, to the clerk in the Chesapeake Dry Goods Company. “I want to buy some clothes for my child.”

“How old is your child, sir?”

“About six hours,” answered Mr. Button, without due consideration.

“Babies’ supply department in the rear.”

“Why, I don’t think — I’m not sure that’s what I want. It’s — he’s an unusually large-size child. Exceptionally — ah large.”

“They have the largest child’s sizes.”

“Where is the boys’ department?” inquired Mr. Button, shifting his ground desperately. He felt that the clerk must surely scent his shameful secret.

“Right here.”

“Well —  — “ He hesitated. The notion of dressing his son in men’s clothes was repugnant to him. If, say, he could only find a very large boy’s suit, he might cut off that long and awful beard, dye the white hair brown, and thus manage to conceal the worst, and to retain something of his own self-respect — not to mention his position in Baltimore society.

But a frantic inspection of the boys’ department revealed no suits to fit the new-born Button. He blamed the store, of course — in such cases it is the thing to blame the store.

“How old did you say that boy of yours was?” demanded the clerk curiously.

“He’s — sixteen.”

“Oh, I beg your pardon. I thought you said six hours. You’ll find the youths’ department in the next aisle.”

Mr. Button turned miserably away. Then he stopped, brightened, and pointed his finger toward a dressed dummy in the window display. “There!” he exclaimed. “I’ll take that suit, out there on the dummy.”

The clerk stared. “Why,” he protested, “that’s not a child’s suit. At least it is, but it’s for fancy dress. You could wear it yourself!”

“Wrap it up,” insisted his customer nervously. “That’s what I want.”

The astonished clerk obeyed.

Back at the hospital Mr. Button entered the nursery and almost threw the package at his son. “Here’s your clothes,” he snapped out.

The old man untied the package and viewed the contents with a quizzical eye.

“They look sort of funny to me,” he complained, “I don’t want to be made a monkey of — “

“You’ve made a monkey of me!” retorted Mr. Button fiercely. “Never you mind how funny you look. Put them on — or I’ll — or I’ll spank you.” He swallowed uneasily at the penultimate word, feeling nevertheless that it was the proper thing to say.

“All right, father” — this with a grotesque simulation of filial respect — “you’ve lived longer; you know best. Just as you say.”

As before, the sound of the word “father” caused Mr. Button to start violently.

“And hurry.”

“I’m hurrying, father.”

When his son was dressed Mr. Button regarded him with depression. The costume consisted of dotted socks, pink pants, and a belted blouse with a wide white collar. Over the latter waved the long whitish beard, drooping almost to the waist. The effect was not good.

“Wait!”

Mr. Button seized a hospital shears and with three quick snaps amputated a large section of the beard. But even with this improvement the ensemble fell far short of perfection. The remaining brush of scraggly hair, the watery eyes, the ancient teeth, seemed oddly out of tone with the gaiety of the costume. Mr. Button, however, was obdurate — he held out his hand. “Come along!” he said sternly.

His son took the hand trustingly. “What are you going to call me, dad?” he quavered as they walked from the nursery — “just ‘baby’ for a while? till you think of a better name?”

Mr. Button grunted. “I don’t know,” he answered harshly. “I think we’ll call you Methuselah.”

3

Even after the new addition to the Button family had had his hair cut short and then dyed to a sparse unnatural black, had had his face shaved so close that it glistened, and had been attired in small-boy clothes made to order by a flabbergasted tailor, it was impossible for Button to ignore the fact that his son was a poor excuse for a first family baby. Despite his aged stoop, Benjamin Button — for it was by this name they called him instead of by the appropriate but invidious Methuselah — was five feet eight inches tall. His clothes did not conceal this, nor did the clipping and dyeing of his eyebrows disguise the fact that the eyes under — were faded and watery and tired. In fact, the baby-nurse who had been engaged in advance left the house after one look, in a state of considerable indignation.

But Mr. Button persisted in his unwavering purpose. Benjamin was a baby, and a baby he should remain. At first he declared that if Benjamin didn’t like warm milk he could go without food altogether, but he was finally prevailed upon to allow his son bread and butter, and even oatmeal by way of a compromise. One day he brought home a rattle and, giving it to Benjamin, insisted in no uncertain terms that he should “play with it,” whereupon the old man took it with — a weary expression and could be heard jingling it obediently at intervals throughout the day.

There can be no doubt, though, that the rattle bored him, and that he found other and more soothing amusements when he was left alone. For instance, Mr. Button discovered one day that during the preceding week he had smoked more cigars than ever before — a phenomenon, which was explained a few days later when, entering the nursery unexpectedly, he found the room full of faint blue haze and Benjamin, with a guilty expression on his face, trying to conceal the butt of a dark Havana. This, of course, called for a severe spanking, but Mr. Button found that he could not bring himself to administer it. He merely warned his son that he would “stunt his growth.”

Nevertheless he persisted in his attitude. He brought home lead soldiers, he brought toy trains, he brought large pleasant animals made of cotton, and, to perfect the illusion which he was creating — for himself at least — he passionately demanded of the clerk in the toy-store whether “the paint would come oft the pink duck if the baby put it in his mouth.” But, despite all his father’s efforts, Benjamin refused to be interested. He would steal down the back stairs and return to the nursery with a volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica, over which he would pore through an afternoon, while his cotton cows and his Noah’s ark were left neglected on the floor. Against such a stubbornness Mr. Button’s efforts were of little avail.

The sensation created in Baltimore was, at first, prodigious. What the mishap would have cost the Buttons and their kinsfolk socially cannot be determined, for the outbreak of the Civil War drew the city’s attention to other things. A few people who were unfailingly polite racked their brains for compliments to give to the parents — and finally hit upon the ingenious device of declaring that the baby resembled his grandfather, a fact which, due to the standard state of decay common to all men of seventy, could not be denied. Mr. and Mrs. Roger Button were not pleased, and Benjamin’s grandfather was furiously insulted.

Benjamin, once he left the hospital, took life as he found it. Several small boys were brought to see him, and he spent a stiff-jointed afternoon trying to work up an interest in tops and marbles — he even managed, quite accidentally, to break a kitchen window with a stone from a sling shot, a feat which secretly delighted his father.

Thereafter Benjamin contrived to break something every day, but he did these things only because they were expected of him, and because he was by nature obliging.

When his grandfather’s initial antagonism wore off, Benjamin and that gentleman took enormous pleasure in one another’s company. They would sit for hours, these two, so far apart in age and experience, and, like old cronies, discuss with tireless monotony the slow events of the day. Benjamin felt more at ease in his grandfather’s presence than in his parents’ — they seemed always somewhat in awe of him and, despite the dictatorial authority they exercised over him, frequently addressed him as “Mr.”

He was as puzzled as any one else at the apparently advanced age of his mind and body at birth. He read up on it in the medical journal, but found that no such case had been previously recorded. At his father’s urging he made an honest attempt to play with other boys, and frequently he joined in the milder games — football shook him up too much, and he feared that in case of a fracture his ancient bones would refuse to knit.

When he was five he was sent to kindergarten, where he initiated into the art of pasting green paper on orange paper, of weaving coloured maps and manufacturing eternal cardboard necklaces. He was inclined to drowse off to sleep in the middle of these tasks, a habit which both irritated and frightened his young teacher. To his relief she complained to his parents, and he was removed from the school. The Roger Buttons told their friends that they felt he was too young.

By the time he was twelve years old his parents had grown used to him. Indeed, so strong is the force of custom that they no longer felt that he was different from any other child — except when some curious anomaly reminded them of the fact. But one day a few weeks after his twelfth birthday, while looking in the mirror, Benjamin made, or thought he made, an astonishing discovery. Did his eyes deceive him, or had his hair turned in the dozen years of his life from white to iron-gray under its concealing dye? Was the network of wrinkles on his face becoming less pronounced? Was his skin healthier and firmer, with even a touch of ruddy winter colour? He could not tell. He knew that he no longer stooped, and that his physical condition had improved since the early days of his life.

“Can it be —  — ?” he thought to himself, or, rather, scarcely dared to think.

He went to his father. “I am grown,” he announced determinedly. “I want to put on long trousers.”

His father hesitated. “Well,” he said finally, “I don’t know. Fourteen is the age for putting on long trousers — and you are only twelve.”

“But you’ll have to admit,” protested Benjamin, “that I’m big for my age.”

His father looked at him with illusory speculation. “Oh, I’m not so sure of that,” he said. “I was as big as you when I was twelve.”

This was not true-it was all part of Roger Button’s silent agreement with himself to believe in his son’s normality.

Finally a compromise was reached. Benjamin was to continue to dye his hair. He was to make a better attempt to play with boys of his own age. He was not to wear his spectacles or carry a cane in the street. In return for these concessions he was allowed his first suit of long trousers….

4

Of the life of Benjamin Button between his twelfth and twenty-first year I intend to say little. Suffice to record that they were years of normal ungrowth. When Benjamin was eighteen he was erect as a man of fifty; he had more hair and it was of a dark gray; his step was firm, his voice had lost its cracked quaver and descended to a healthy baritone. So his father sent him up to Connecticut to take examinations for entrance to YaleCollege. Benjamin passed his examination and became a member of the freshman class.

On the third day following his matriculation he received a notification from Mr. Hart, the college registrar, to call at his office and arrange his schedule. Benjamin, glancing in the mirror, decided that his hair needed a new application of its brown dye, but an anxious inspection of his bureau drawer disclosed that the dye bottle was not there. Then he remembered — he had emptied it the day before and thrown it away.

He was in a dilemma. He was due at the registrar’s in five minutes.

There seemed to be no help for it — he must go as he was. He did.

“Good-morning,” said the registrar politely. “You’ve come to inquire about your son.”

“Why, as a matter of fact, my name’s Button —  — “ began Benjamin, but

Mr. Hart cut him off.

“I’m very glad to meet you, Mr. Button. I’m expecting your son here any minute.”

“That’s me!” burst out Benjamin. “I’m a freshman.”

“What!”

“I’m a freshman.”

“Surely you’re joking.”

“Not at all.”

The registrar frowned and glanced at a card before him. “Why, I have

Mr. Benjamin Button’s age down here as eighteen.”

“That’s my age,” asserted Benjamin, flushing slightly.

The registrar eyed him wearily. “Now surely, Mr. Button, you don’t expect me to believe that.”

Benjamin smiled wearily. “I am eighteen,” he repeated.

The registrar pointed sternly to the door. “Get out,” he said. “Get out of college and get out of town. You are a dangerous lunatic.”

“I am eighteen.”

Mr. Hart opened the door. “The idea!” he shouted. “A man of your age trying to enter here as a freshman. Eighteen years old, are you? Well, I’ll give you eighteen minutes to get out of town.”

Benjamin Button walked with dignity from the room, and half a dozen undergraduates, who were waiting in the hall, followed him curiously with their eyes. When he had gone a little way he turned around, faced the infuriated registrar, who was still standing in the door-way, and repeated in a firm voice: “I am eighteen years old.”

To a chorus of titters which went up from the group of undergraduates,

Benjamin walked away.

But he was not fated to escape so easily. On his melancholy walk to the railroad station he found that he was being followed by a group, then by a swarm, and finally by a dense mass of undergraduates. The word had gone around that a lunatic had passed the entrance examinations for Yale and attempted to palm himself off as a youth of eighteen. A fever of excitement permeated the college. Men ran hatless out of classes, the football team abandoned its practice and joined the mob, professors’ wives with bonnets awry and bustles out of position, ran shouting after the procession, from which proceeded a continual succession of remarks aimed at the tender sensibilities of Benjamin Button.

“He must be the wandering Jew!”

“He ought to go to prep school at his age!”

“Look at the infant prodigy!”

“He thought this was the old men’s home.”

“Go up to Harvard!”

Benjamin increased his gait, and soon he was running. He would show them! He would go to Harvard, and then they would regret these ill-considered taunts!

Safely on board the train for Baltimore, he put his head from the window. “You’ll regret this!” he shouted.

“Ha-ha!” the undergraduates laughed. “Ha-ha-ha!” It was the biggest mistake that YaleCollege had ever made….

5

In 1880 Benjamin Button was twenty years old, and he signalised his birthday by going to work for his father in Roger Button & Co., Wholesale Hardware. It was in that same year that he began “going out socially” — that is, his father insisted on taking him to several fashionable dances. Roger Button was now fifty, and he and his son were more and more companionable — in fact, since Benjamin had ceased to dye his hair (which was still grayish) they appeared about the same age, and could have passed for brothers.

One night in August they got into the phaeton attired in their full-dress suits and drove out to a dance at the Shevlins’ country house, situated just outside of Baltimore. It was a gorgeous evening. A full moon drenched the road to the lustreless colour of platinum, and late-blooming harvest flowers breathed into the motionless air aromas that were like low, half-heard laughter. The open country, carpeted for rods around with bright wheat, was translucent as in the day. It was almost impossible not to be affected by the sheer beauty of the sky — almost.

“There’s a great future in the dry-goods business,” Roger Button was saying. He was not a spiritual man — his aesthetic sense was rudimentary.

“Old fellows like me can’t learn new tricks,” he observed profoundly. “It’s you youngsters with energy and vitality that have the great future before you.”

Far up the road the lights of the Shevlins’ country house drifted into view, and presently there was a sighing sound that crept persistently toward them — it might have been the fine plaint of violins or the rustle of the silver wheat under the moon.

They pulled up behind a handsome brougham whose passengers were disembarking at the door. A lady got out, then an elderly gentleman, then another young lady, beautiful as sin. Benjamin started; an almost chemical change seemed to dissolve and recompose the very elements of his body. A rigour passed over him, blood rose into his cheeks, his forehead, and there was a steady thumping in his ears. It was first love.

The girl was slender and frail, with hair that was ashen under the moon and honey-coloured under the sputtering gas-lamps of the porch. Over her shoulders was thrown a Spanish mantilla of softest yellow, butterflied in black; her feet were glittering buttons at the hem of her bustled dress.

Roger Button leaned over to his son. “That,” he said, “is young

Hildegarde Moncrief, the daughter of General Moncrief.”

Benjamin nodded coldly. “Pretty little thing,” he said indifferently. But when the negro boy had led the buggy away, he added: “Dad, you might introduce me to her.”

They approached a group, of which Miss Moncrief was the centre. Reared in the old tradition, she curtsied low before Benjamin. Yes, he might have a dance. He thanked her and walked away — staggered away.

The interval until the time for his turn should arrive dragged itself out interminably. He stood close to the wall, silent, inscrutable, watching with murderous eyes the young bloods of Baltimore as they eddied around Hildegarde Moncrief, passionate admiration in their faces. How obnoxious they seemed to Benjamin; how intolerably rosy! Their curling brown whiskers aroused in him a feeling equivalent to indigestion.

But when his own time came, and he drifted with her out upon the changing floor to the music of the latest waltz from Paris, his jealousies and anxieties melted from him like a mantle of snow. Blind with enchantment, he felt that life was just beginning.

“You and your brother got here just as we did, didn’t you?” asked Hildegarde, looking up at him with eyes that were like bright blue enamel.

Benjamin hesitated. If she took him for his father’s brother, would it be best to enlighten her? He remembered his experience at Yale, so he decided against it. It would be rude to contradict a lady; it would be criminal to mar this exquisite occasion with the grotesque story of his origin. Later, perhaps. So he nodded, smiled, listened, was happy.

“I like men of your age,” Hildegarde told him. “Young boys are so idiotic. They tell me how much champagne they drink at college, and how much money they lose playing cards. Men of your age know how to appreciate women.”

Benjamin felt himself on the verge of a proposal — with an effort he choked back the impulse. “You’re just the romantic age,” she continued — “fifty. Twenty-five is too worldly-wise; thirty is apt to be pale from overwork; forty is the age of long stories that take a whole cigar to tell; sixty is — oh, sixty is too near seventy; but fifty is the mellow age. I love fifty.”

Fifty seemed to Benjamin a glorious age. He longed passionately to be fifty.

“I’ve always said,” went on Hildegarde, “that I’d rather marry a man of fifty and be taken care of than many a man of thirty and take care of him.”

For Benjamin the rest of the evening was bathed in a honey-coloured mist. Hildegarde gave him two more dances, and they discovered that they were marvellously in accord on all the questions of the day. She was to go driving with him on the following Sunday, and then they would discuss all these questions further.

Going home in the phaeton just before the crack of dawn, when the first bees were humming and the fading moon glimmered in the cool dew, Benjamin knew vaguely that his father was discussing wholesale hardware.

“…. And what do you think should merit our biggest attention after hammers and nails?” the elder Button was saying.

“Love,” replied Benjamin absent-mindedly.

“Lugs?” exclaimed Roger Button, “Why, I’ve just covered the question of lugs.”

Benjamin regarded him with dazed eyes just as the eastern sky was suddenly cracked with light, and an oriole yawned piercingly in the quickening trees…

6

When, six months later, the engagement of Miss Hildegarde Moncrief to Mr. Benjamin Button was made known (I say “made known,” for General Moncrief declared he would rather fall upon his sword than announce it), the excitement in Baltimore society reached a feverish pitch. The almost forgotten story of Benjamin’s birth was remembered and sent out upon the winds of scandal in picaresque and incredible forms. It was said that Benjamin was really the father of Roger Button, that he was his brother who had been in prison for forty years, that he was John Wilkes Booth in disguise — and, finally, that he had two small conical horns sprouting from his head.

The Sunday supplements of the New York papers played up the case with fascinating sketches which showed the head of Benjamin Button attached to a fish, to a snake, and, finally, to a body of solid brass. He became known, journalistically, as the Mystery Man of Maryland. But the true story, as is usually the case, had a very small circulation.

However, every one agreed with General Moncrief that it was “criminal” for a lovely girl who could have married any beau in Baltimore to throw herself into the arms of a man who was assuredly fifty. In vain Mr. Roger Button published his son’s birth certificate in large type in the Baltimore Blaze. No one believed it. You had only to look at Benjamin and see.

On the part of the two people most concerned there was no wavering. So many of the stories about her fiancé were false that Hildegarde refused stubbornly to believe even the true one. In vain General Moncrief pointed out to her the high mortality among men of fifty — or, at least, among men who looked fifty; in vain he told her of the instability of the wholesale hardware business. Hildegarde had chosen to marry for mellowness, and marry she did….

7

In one particular, at least, the friends of Hildegarde Moncrief were mistaken. The wholesale hardware business prospered amazingly. In the fifteen years between Benjamin Button’s marriage in 1880 and his father’s retirement in 1895, the family fortune was doubled — and this was due largely to the younger member of the firm.

Needless to say, Baltimore eventually received the couple to its bosom. Even old General Moncrief became reconciled to his son-in-law when Benjamin gave him the money to bring out his History of the Civil War in twenty volumes, which had been refused by nine prominent publishers.

In Benjamin himself fifteen years had wrought many changes. It seemed to him that the blood flowed with new vigour through his veins. It began to be a pleasure to rise in the morning, to walk with an active step along the busy, sunny street, to work untiringly with his shipments of hammers and his cargoes of nails. It was in 1890 that he executed his famous business coup: he brought up the suggestion that all nails used in nailing up the boxes in which nails are shipped are the property of the shippee, a proposal which became a statute, was approved by Chief Justice Fossile, and saved Roger Button and Company, Wholesale Hardware, more than six hundred nails every year.

In addition, Benjamin discovered that he was becoming more and more attracted by the gay side of life. It was typical of his growing enthusiasm for pleasure that he was the first man in the city of Baltimore to own and run an automobile. Meeting him on the street, his contemporaries would stare enviously at the picture he made of health and vitality.

“He seems to grow younger every year,” they would remark. And if old Roger Button, now sixty-five years old, had failed at first to give a proper welcome to his son he atoned at last by bestowing on him what amounted to adulation.

And here we come to an unpleasant subject which it will be well to pass over as quickly as possible. There was only one thing that worried Benjamin Button; his wife had ceased to attract him.

At that time Hildegarde was a woman of thirty-five, with a son, Roscoe, fourteen years old. In the early days of their marriage Benjamin had worshipped her. But, as the years passed, her honey-coloured hair became an unexciting brown, the blue enamel of her eyes assumed the aspect of cheap crockery — moreover, and, most of all, she had become too settled in her ways, too placid, too content, too anaemic in her excitements, and too sober in her taste. As a bride it been she who had “dragged” Benjamin to dances and dinners — now conditions were reversed. She went out socially with him, but without enthusiasm, devoured already by that eternal inertia which comes to live with each of us one day and stays with us to the end.

Benjamin’s discontent waxed stronger. At the outbreak of the Spanish-American War in 1898 his home had for him so little charm that he decided to join the army. With his business influence he obtained a commission as captain, and proved so adaptable to the work that he was made a major, and finally a lieutenant-colonel just in time to participate in the celebrated charge up San Juan Hill. He was slightly wounded, and received a medal.

Benjamin had become so attached to the activity and excitement of array life that he regretted to give it up, but his business required attention, so he resigned his commission and came home. He was met at the station by a brass band and escorted to his house.

8

Hildegarde, waving a large silk flag, greeted him on the porch, and even as he kissed her he felt with a sinking of the heart that these three years had taken their toll. She was a woman of forty now, with a faint skirmish line of gray hairs in her head. The sight depressed him.

Up in his room he saw his reflection in the familiar mirror — he went closer and examined his own face with anxiety, comparing it after a moment with a photograph of himself in uniform taken just before the war.

“Good Lord!” he said aloud. The process was continuing. There was no doubt of it — he looked now like a man of thirty. Instead of being delighted, he was uneasy — he was growing younger. He had hitherto hoped that once he reached a bodily age equivalent to his age in years, the grotesque phenomenon which had marked his birth would cease to function. He shuddered. His destiny seemed to him awful, incredible.

When he came downstairs Hildegarde was waiting for him. She appeared annoyed, and he wondered if she had at last discovered that there was something amiss. It was with an effort to relieve the tension between them that he broached the matter at dinner in what he considered a delicate way.

“Well,” he remarked lightly, “everybody says I look younger than ever.”

Hildegarde regarded him with scorn. She sniffed. “Do you think it’s anything to boast about?”

“I’m not boasting,” he asserted uncomfortably. She sniffed again. “The idea,” she said, and after a moment: “I should think you’d have enough pride to stop it.”

“How can I?” he demanded.

“I’m not going to argue with you,” she retorted. “But there’s a right way of doing things and a wrong way. If you’ve made up your mind to be different from everybody else, I don’t suppose I can stop you, but I really don’t think it’s very considerate.”

“But, Hildegarde, I can’t help it.”

“You can too. You’re simply stubborn. You think you don’t want to be like any one else. You always have been that way, and you always will be. But just think how it would be if every one else looked at things as you do — what would the world be like?”

As this was an inane and unanswerable argument Benjamin made no reply, and from that time on a chasm began to widen between them. He wondered what possible fascination she had ever exercised over him.

To add to the breach, he found, as the new century gathered headway, that his thirst for gaiety grew stronger. Never a party of any kind in the city of Baltimore but he was there, dancing with the prettiest of the young married women, chatting with the most popular of the debutantes, and finding their company charming, while his wife, a dowager of evil omen, sat among the chaperons, now in haughty disapproval, and now following him with solemn, puzzled, and reproachful eyes.

“Look!” people would remark. “What a pity! A young fellow that age tied to a woman of forty-five. He must be twenty years younger than his wife.” They had forgotten — as people inevitably forget — that back in 1880 their mammas and papas had also remarked about this same ill-matched pair.

Benjamin’s growing unhappiness at home was compensated for by his many new interests. He took up golf and made a great success of it. He went in for dancing: in 1906 he was an expert at “The Boston,” and in 1908 he was considered proficient at the “Maxine,” while in 1909 his “Castle Walk” was the envy of every young man in town.

His social activities, of course, interfered to some extent with his business, but then he had worked hard at wholesale hardware for twenty-five years and felt that he could soon hand it on to his son, Roscoe, who had recently graduated from Harvard.

He and his son were, in fact, often mistaken for each other. This pleased Benjamin — he soon forgot the insidious fear which had come over him on his return from the Spanish-American War, and grew to take a naïve pleasure in his appearance. There was only one fly in the delicious ointment — he hated to appear in public with his wife. Hildegarde was almost fifty, and the sight of her made him feel absurd….

9

One September day in 1910 — a few years after Roger Button & Co., Wholesale Hardware, had been handed over to young Roscoe Button — a man, apparently about twenty years old, entered himself as a freshman at HarvardUniversity in Cambridge. He did not make the mistake of announcing that he would never see fifty again, nor did he mention the fact that his son had been graduated from the same institution ten years before.

He was admitted, and almost immediately attained a prominent position in the class, partly because he seemed a little older than the other freshmen, whose average age was about eighteen.

But his success was largely due to the fact that in the football game with Yale he played so brilliantly, with so much dash and with such a cold, remorseless anger that he scored seven touchdowns and fourteen field goals for Harvard, and caused one entire eleven of Yale men to be carried singly from the field, unconscious. He was the most celebrated man in college.

Strange to say, in his third or junior year he was scarcely able to “make” the team. The coaches said that he had lost weight, and it seemed to the more observant among them that he was not quite as tall as before. He made no touchdowns — indeed, he was retained on the team chiefly in hope that his enormous reputation would bring terror and disorganisation to the Yale team.

In his senior year he did not make the team at all. He had grown so slight and frail that one day he was taken by some sophomores for a freshman, an incident which humiliated him terribly. He became known as something of a prodigy — a senior who was surely no more than sixteen — and he was often shocked at the worldliness of some of his classmates. His studies seemed harder to him — he felt that they were too advanced. He had heard his classmates speak of St. Midas’s, the famous preparatory school, at which so many of them had prepared for college, and he determined after his graduation to enter himself at St. Midas’s, where the sheltered life among boys his own size would be more congenial to him.

Upon his graduation in 1914 he went home to Baltimore with his Harvard diploma in his pocket. Hildegarde was now residing in Italy, so Benjamin went to live with his son, Roscoe. But though he was welcomed in a general way there was obviously no heartiness in Roscoe’s feeling toward him — there was even perceptible a tendency on his son’s part to think that Benjamin, as he moped about the house in adolescent mooniness, was somewhat in the way. Roscoe was married now and prominent in Baltimore life, and he wanted no scandal to creep out in connection with his family.

Benjamin, no longer persona grata with the débutantes and younger college set, found himself left much done, except for the companionship of three or four fifteen-year-old boys in the neighbourhood. His idea of going to St. Midas’s school recurred to him.

“Say,” he said to Roscoe one day, “I’ve told you over and over that I want to go to prep, school.”

“Well, go, then,” replied Roscoe shortly. The matter was distasteful to him, and he wished to avoid a discussion.

“I can’t go alone,” said Benjamin helplessly. “You’ll have to enter me and take me up there.”

“I haven’t got time,” declared Roscoe abruptly. His eyes narrowed and he looked uneasily at his father. “As a matter of fact,” he added, “you’d better not go on with this business much longer. You better pull up short. You better — you better” — he paused and his face crimsoned as he sought for words — “you better turn right around and start back the other way. This has gone too far to be a joke. It isn’t funny any longer. You — you behave yourself!”

Benjamin looked at him, on the verge of tears.

“And another thing,” continued Roscoe, “when visitors are in the house I want you to call me ‘Uncle’ — not ‘Roscoe,’ but ‘Uncle,’ do you understand? It looks absurd for a boy of fifteen to call me by my first name. Perhaps you’d better call me ‘Uncle’ all the time, so you’ll get used to it.”

With a harsh look at his father, Roscoe turned away….

10

At the termination of this interview, Benjamin wandered dismally upstairs and stared at himself in the mirror. He had not shaved for three months, but he could find nothing on his face but a faint white down with which it seemed unnecessary to meddle. When he had first come home from Harvard, Roscoe had approached him with the proposition that he should wear eye-glasses and imitation whiskers glued to his cheeks, and it had seemed for a moment that the farce of his early years was to be repeated. But whiskers had itched and made him ashamed. He wept and Roscoe had reluctantly relented.

Benjamin opened a book of boys’ stories, The Boy Scouts in BiminiBay, and began to read. But he found himself thinking persistently about the war. America had joined the Allied cause during the preceding month, and Benjamin wanted to enlist, but, alas, sixteen was the minimum age, and he did not look that old. His true age, which was fifty-seven, would have disqualified him, anyway.

There was a knock at his door, and the butler appeared with a letter bearing a large official legend in the corner and addressed to Mr. Benjamin Button. Benjamin tore it open eagerly, and read the enclosure with delight. It informed him that many reserve officers who had served in the Spanish-American War were being called back into service with a higher rank, and it enclosed his commission as brigadier-general in the United States army with orders to report immediately.

Benjamin jumped to his feet fairly quivering with enthusiasm. This was what he had wanted. He seized his cap, and ten minutes later he had entered a large tailoring establishment on Charles Street, and asked in his uncertain treble to be measured for a uniform.

“Want to play soldier, sonny?” demanded a clerk casually.

Benjamin flushed. “Say! Never mind what I want!” he retorted angrily. “My name’s Button and I live on Mt. Vernon Place, so you know I’m good for it.”

“Well,” admitted the clerk hesitantly, “if you’re not, I guess your daddy is, all right.”

Benjamin was measured, and a week later his uniform was completed. He had difficulty in obtaining the proper general’s insignia because the dealer kept insisting to Benjamin that a nice V.W.C.A. badge would look just as well and be much more fun to play with.

Saying nothing to Roscoe, he left the house one night and proceeded by train to CampMosby, in South Carolina, where he was to command an infantry brigade. On a sultry April day he approached the entrance to the camp, paid off the taxicab which had brought him from the station, and turned to the sentry on guard.

“Get some one to handle my luggage!” he said briskly.

The sentry eyed him reproachfully. “Say,” he remarked, “where you goin’ with the general’s duds, sonny?”

Benjamin, veteran of the Spanish-American War, whirled upon him with fire in his eye, but with, alas, a changing treble voice.

“Come to attention!” he tried to thunder; he paused for breath — then suddenly he saw the sentry snap his heels together and bring his rifle to the present. Benjamin concealed a smile of gratification, but when he glanced around his smile faded. It was not he who had inspired obedience, but an imposing artillery colonel who was approaching on horseback.

“Colonel!” called Benjamin shrilly.

The colonel came up, drew rein, and looked coolly down at him with a twinkle in his eyes. “Whose little boy are you?” he demanded kindly.

“I’ll soon darn well show you whose little boy I am!” retorted

Benjamin in a ferocious voice. “Get down off that horse!”

The colonel roared with laughter.

“You want him, eh, general?”

“Here!” cried Benjamin desperately. “Read this.” And he thrust his commission toward the colonel.

The colonel read it, his eyes popping from their sockets.

“Where’d you get this?” he demanded, slipping the document into his own pocket.

“I got it from the Government, as you’ll soon find out!”

“You come along with me,” said the colonel with a peculiar look. “We’ll go up to headquarters and talk this over. Come along.”

The colonel turned and began walking his horse in the direction of headquarters. There was nothing for Benjamin to do but follow with as much dignity as possible — meanwhile promising himself a stern revenge.

But this revenge did not materialise. Two days later, however, his son Roscoe materialised from Baltimore, hot and cross from a hasty trip, and escorted the weeping general, sans uniform, back to his home.

II

In 1920 Roscoe Button’s first child was born. During the attendant festivities, however, no one thought it “the thing” to mention, that the little grubby boy, apparently about ten years of age who played around the house with lead soldiers and a miniature circus, was the new baby’s own grandfather.

No one disliked the little boy whose fresh, cheerful face was crossed with just a hint of sadness, but to Roscoe Button his presence was a source of torment. In the idiom of his generation Roscoe did not consider the matter “efficient.” It seemed to him that his father, in refusing to look sixty, had not behaved like a “red-blooded he-man” — this was Roscoe’s favourite expression — but in a curious and perverse manner. Indeed, to think about the matter for as much as a half an hour drove him to the edge of insanity. Roscoe believed that “live wires” should keep young, but carrying it out on such a scale was — was — was inefficient. And there Roscoe rested.

Five years later Roscoe’s little boy had grown old enough to play childish games with little Benjamin under the supervision of the same nurse. Roscoe took them both to kindergarten on the same day, and Benjamin found that playing with little strips of coloured paper, making mats and chains and curious and beautiful designs, was the most fascinating game in the world. Once he was bad and had to stand in the corner — then he cried — but for the most part there were gay hours in the cheerful room, with the sunlight coming in the windows and Miss Bailey’s kind hand resting for a moment now and then in his tousled hair.

Roscoe’s son moved up into the first grade after a year, but Benjamin stayed on in the kindergarten. He was very happy. Sometimes when other tots talked about what they would do when they grew up a shadow would cross his little face as if in a dim, childish way he realised that those were things in which he was never to share.

The days flowed on in monotonous content. He went back a third year to the kindergarten, but he was too little now to understand what the bright shining strips of paper were for. He cried because the other boys were bigger than he, and he was afraid of them. The teacher talked to him, but though he tried to understand he could not understand at all.

He was taken from the kindergarten. His nurse, Nana, in her starched gingham dress, became the centre of his tiny world. On bright days they walked in the park; Nana would point at a great gray monster and say “elephant,” and Benjamin would say it after her, and when he was being undressed for bed that night he would say it over and over aloud to her: “Elyphant, elyphant, elyphant.” Sometimes Nana let him jump on the bed, which was fun, because if you sat down exactly right it would bounce you up on your feet again, and if you said “Ah” for a long time while you jumped you got a very pleasing broken vocal effect.

He loved to take a big cane from the hat-rack and go around hitting chairs and tables with it and saying: “Fight, fight, fight.” When there were people there the old ladies would cluck at him, which interested him, and the young ladies would try to kiss him, which he submitted to with mild boredom. And when the long day was done at five o’clock he would go upstairs with Nana and be fed on oatmeal and nice soft mushy foods with a spoon.

There were no troublesome memories in his childish sleep; no token came to him of his brave days at college, of the glittering years when he flustered the hearts of many girls. There were only the white, safe walls of his crib and Nana and a man who came to see him sometimes, and a great big orange ball that Nana pointed at just before his twilight bed hour and called “sun.” When the sun went his eyes were sleepy — there were no dreams, no dreams to haunt him.

The past — the wild charge at the head of his men up San Juan Hill; the first years of his marriage when he worked late into the summer dusk down in the busy city for young Hildegarde whom he loved; the days before that when he sat smoking far into the night in the gloomy old Button house on Monroe Street with his grandfather-all these had faded like unsubstantial dreams from his mind as though they had never been. He did not remember.

He did not remember clearly whether the milk was warm or cool at his last feeding or how the days passed — there was only his crib and Nana’s familiar presence. And then he remembered nothing. When he was hungry he cried — that was all. Through the noons and nights he breathed and over him there were soft mumblings and murmurings that he scarcely heard, and faintly differentiated smells, and light and darkness.

Then it was all dark, and his white crib and the dim faces that moved above him, and the warm sweet aroma of the milk, faded out altogether from his mind.

TARQUIN OF CHEAPSIDE

Running footsteps — light, soft-soled shoes made of curious leathery cloth brought from Ceylon setting the pace; thick flowing boots, two pairs, dark blue and gilt, reflecting the moonlight in blunt gleams and splotches, following a stone’s throw behind.

Soft Shoes flashes through a patch of moonlight, then darts into a blind labyrinth of alleys and becomes only an intermittent scuffle ahead somewhere in the enfolding darkness. In go Flowing Boots, with short swords lurching and long plumes awry, finding a breath to curse God and the black lanes of London.

Soft Shoes leaps a shadowy gate and crackles through a hedgerow. Flowing Boots leap the gate and crackles through the hedgerow — and there, startlingly, is the watch ahead — two murderous pikemen of ferocious cast of mouth acquired in Holland and the Spanish marches.

But there is no cry for help. The pursued does not fall panting at the feet of the watch, clutching a purse; neither do the pursuers raise a hue and cry. Soft Shoes goes by in a rush of swift air. The watch curse and hesitate, glance after the fugitive, and then spread their pikes grimly across the road and wait for Flowing Boots. Darkness, like a great hand, cuts off the even flow the moon.

The hand moves off the moon whose pale caress finds again the eaves and lintels, and the watch, wounded and tumbled in the dust. Up the street one of Flowing Boots leaves a black trail of spots until he binds himself, clumsily as he runs, with fine lace caught from his throat.

It was no affair for the watch: Satan was at large tonight and Satan seemed to be he who appeared dimly in front, heel over gate, knee over fence. Moreover, the adversary was obviously travelling near home or at least in that section of London consecrated to his coarser whims, for the street narrowed like a road in a picture and the houses bent over further and further, cooping in natural ambushes suitable for murder and its histrionic sister, sudden death.

Down long and sinuous lanes twisted the hunted and the harriers, always in and out of the moon in a perpetual queen’s move over a checker-board of glints and patches. Ahead, the quarry, minus his leather jerkin now and half blinded by drips of sweat, had taken to scanning his ground desperately on both sides. As a result he suddenly slowed short, and retracing his steps a bit scooted up an alley so dark that it seemed that here sun and moon had been in eclipse since the last glacier slipped roaring over the earth. Two hundred yards down he stopped and crammed himself into a niche in the wall where he huddled and panted silently, a grotesque god without bulk or outline in the gloom.

Flowing Boots, two pairs, drew near, came up, went by, halted twenty yards beyond him, and spoke in deep-lunged, scanty whispers:

“I was attune to that scuffle; it stopped.”

“Within twenty paces.”

“He’s hid.”

“Stay together now and we’ll cut him up.”

The voice faded into a low crunch of a boot, nor did Soft Shoes wait to hear more — he sprang in three leaps across the alley, where he bounded up, flapped for a moment on the top of the wall like a huge bird, and disappeared, gulped down by the hungry night at a mouthful.

II

”He read at wine, he read in bed,

He read aloud, had he the breath,

His every thought was with the dead,

And so he read himself to death.”

Any visitor to the old James the First graveyard near Peat’s Hill may spell out this bit of doggerel, undoubtedly one of the worst recorded of an Elizabethan, on the tomb of Wessel Caster.

This death of his, says the antiquary, occurred when he was thirty-seven, but as this story is concerned with the night of a certain chase through darkness, we find him still alive, still reading. His eyes were somewhat dim, his stomach somewhat obvious-he was a mis-built man and indolent — oh, Heavens! But an era is an era, and in the reign of Elizabeth, by the grace of Luther, Queen of England, no man could help but catch the spirit of enthusiasm. Every loft in Cheapside published its Magnum Folium (or magazine) — of its new blank verse; the Cheapside Players would produce anything on sight as long as it “got away from those reactionary miracle plays,” and the English Bible had run through seven “very large” printings in, as many months.

So Wessel Caxter (who in his youth had gone to sea) was now a reader of all on which he could lay his hands — he read manuscripts In holy friendship; he dined rotten poets; he loitered about the shops where the Magna Folia were printed, and he listened tolerantly while the young playwrights wrangled and bickered among them-selves, and behind each other’s backs made bitter and malicious charges of plagiarism or anything else they could think of.

To-night he had a book, a piece of work which, though inordinately versed, contained, he thought, some rather excellent political satire. “The Faerie Queene” by Edmund Spenser lay before him under the tremulous candle-light. He had ploughed through a canto; he was beginning another:

THE LEGEND OF BRITOMARTIS OR OF CHASTITY

It falls me here to write of Chastity. The fayrest vertue, far above the rest….

A sudden rush of feet on the stairs, a rusty swing-open of the thin door, and a man thrust himself into the room, a man without a jerkin, panting, sobbing, on the verge of collapse.

“Wessel,” words choked him, “stick me away somewhere, love of Our

Lady!”

Caxter rose, carefully closing his book, and bolted the door in some concern.

“I’m pursued,” cried out Soft Shoes. “I vow there’s two short-witted blades trying to make me into mincemeat and near succeeding. They saw me hop the back wall!”

“It would need,” said Wessel, looking at him curiously, “several battalions armed with blunderbusses, and two or three Armadas, to keep you reasonably secure from the revenges of the world.”

Soft Shoes smiled with satisfaction. His sobbing gasps were giving way to quick, precise breathing; his hunted air had faded to a faintly perturbed irony.

“I feel little surprise,” continued Wessel.

“They were two such dreary apes.”

“Making a total of three.”

“Only two unless you stick me away. Man, man, come alive, they’ll be on the stairs in a spark’s age.”

Wessel took a dismantled pike-staff from the corner, and raising it to the high ceiling, dislodged a rough trap-door opening into a garret above.

“There’s no ladder.”

He moved a bench under the trap, upon which Soft Shoes mounted, crouched, hesitated, crouched again, and then leaped amazingly upward. He caught at the edge of the aperture and swung back and forth, for a moment, shifting his hold; finally doubled up and disappeared into the darkness above. There was a scurry, a migration of rats, as the trap-door was replaced;… silence.

Wessel returned to his reading-table, opened to the Legend of

Britomartis or of Chastity — and waited. Almost a minute later there

was a scramble on the stairs and an intolerable hammering at the door.

Wessel sighed and, picking up his candle, rose.

“Who’s there?”

“Open the door!”

“Who’s there?”

An aching blow frightened the frail wood, splintered it around the edge. Wessel opened it a scarce three inches, and held the candle high. His was to play the timorous, the super-respectable citizen, disgracefully disturbed.

“One small hour of the night for rest. Is that too much to ask from every brawler and — “

“Quiet, gossip! Have you seen a perspiring fellow?”

The shadows of two gallants fell in immense wavering outlines over the narrow stairs; by the light Wessel scrutinized them closely. Gentlemen, they were, hastily but richly dressed — one of them wounded severely in the hand, both radiating a sort of furious horror. Waving aside Wessel’s ready miscomprehension, they pushed by him into the room and with their swords went through the business of poking carefully into all suspected dark spots in the room, further extending their search to Wessel’s bedchamber.

“Is he hid here?” demanded the wounded man fiercely.

“Is who here?”

“Any man but you.”

“Only two others that I know of.”

For a second Wessel feared that he had been too damned funny, for the gallants made as though to prick him through.

“I heard a man on the stairs,” he said hastily, “full five minutes ago, it was. He most certainly failed to come up.”

He went on to explain his absorption in “The Faerie Queene” but, for the moment at least, his visitors, like the great saints, were anaesthetic to culture.

“What’s been done?” inquired Wessel.

“Violence!” said the man with the wounded hand. Wessel noticed that his eyes were quite wild. “My own sister. Oh, Christ in heaven, give us this man!”

Wessel winced.

“Who is the man?”

“God’s word! We know not even that. What’s that trap up there?” he added suddenly.

“It’s nailed down. It’s not been used for years.” He thought of the pole in the corner and quailed in his belly, but the utter despair of the two men dulled their astuteness.

“It would take a ladder for any one not a tumbler,” said the wounded man listlessly.

His companion broke into hysterical laughter.

“A tumbler. Oh, a tumbler. Oh — “

Wessel stared at them in wonder.

“That appeals to my most tragic humor,” cried the man, “that no one — oh, no one — could get up there but a tumbler.”

The gallant with the wounded hand snapped his good fingers impatiently.

“We must go next door — and then on — “

Helplessly they went as two walking under a dark and storm-swept sky.

Wessel closed and bolted the door and stood a moment by it, frowning in pity.

A low-breathed “Ha!” made him look up. Soft Shoes had already raised the trap and was looking down into the room, his rather elfish face squeezed into a grimace, half of distaste, half of sardonic amusement.

“They take off their heads with their helmets,” he remarked in a whisper, “but as for you and me, Wessel, we are two cunning men.”

“Now you be cursed,” cried Wessel vehemently. “I knew you for a dog, but when I hear even the half of a tale like this, I know you for such a dirty cur that I am minded to club your skull.”

Soft Shoes stared at him, blinking.

“At all events,” he replied finally, “I find dignity impossible in this position.”

With this he let his body through the trap, hung for an instant, and dropped the seven feet to the floor.

“There was a rat considered my ear with the air of a gourmet,” he continued, dusting his hands on his breeches. “I told him in the rat’s peculiar idiom that I was deadly poison, so he took himself off.”

“Let’s hear of this night’s lechery!” insisted Wessel angrily.

Soft Shoes touched his thumb to his nose and wiggled the fingers derisively at Wessel.

“Street gamin!” muttered Wessel.

“Have you any paper?” demanded Soft Shoes irrelevantly, and then rudely added, “or can you write?”

“Why should I give you paper?”

“You wanted to hear of the night’s entertainment. So you shall, an you give me pen, ink, a sheaf of paper, and a room to myself.”

Wessel hesitated.

“Get out!” he said finally.

“As you will. Yet you have missed a most intriguing story.”

Wessel wavered — he was soft as taffy, that man — gave in. Soft Shoes went into the adjoining room with the begrudged writing materials and precisely closed the door. Wessel grunted and returned to “The Faerie Queene”; so silence came once more upon the house.

III

Three o’clock went into four. The room paled, the dark outside was shot through with damp and chill, and Wessel, cupping his brain in his hands, bent low over his table, tracing through the pattern of knights and fairies and the harrowing distresses of many girls. There were dragons chortling along the narrow street outside; when the sleepy armorer’s boy began his work at half-past five the heavy clink and clank of plate and linked mail swelled to the echo of a marching cavalcade.

A fog shut down at the first flare of dawn, and the room was grayish yellow at six when Wessel tiptoed to his cupboard bedchamber and pulled open the door. His guest turned on him a face pale as parchment in which two distraught eyes burned like great red letters. He had drawn a chair close to Wessel’s prie-dieu which he was using as a desk; and on it was an amazing stack of closely written pages. With a long sigh Wessel withdrew and returned to his siren, calling himself fool for not claiming his bed here at dawn.

The dump of boots outside, the croaking of old beldames from attic to attic, the dull murmur of morning, unnerved him, and, dozing, he slumped in his chair, his brain, overladen with sound and color, working intolerably over the imagery that stacked it. In this restless dream of his he was one of a thousand groaning bodies crushed near the sun, a helpless bridge for the strong-eyed Apollo. The dream tore at him, scraped along his mind like a ragged knife. When a hot hand touched his shoulder, he awoke with what was nearly a scream to find the fog thick in the room and his guest, a gray ghost of misty stuff, beside him with a pile of paper in his hand.

“It should be a most intriguing tale, I believe, though it requires some going over. May I ask you to lock it away, and in God’s name let me sleep?”

He waited for no answer, but thrust the pile at Wessel, and literally poured himself like stuff from a suddenly inverted bottle upon a couch in the corner, slept, with his breathing regular, but his brow wrinkled in a curious and somewhat uncanny manner.

Wessel yawned sleepily and, glancing at the scrawled, uncertain first page, he began reading aloud very softly:

The Rape of Lucrece

”From the besieged Ardea all in post,

Borne by the trustless wings of false desire,

Lust-breathing Tarquin leaves the Roman host — “

“O RUSSET WITCH!”

Merlin Grainger was employed by the Moonlight Quill Bookshop, which you may have visited, just around the corner from the Ritz-Carlton on Forty-seventh Street. The Moonlight Quill is, or rather was, a very romantic little store, considered radical and admitted dark. It was spotted interiorly with red and orange posters of breathless exotic intent, and lit no less by the shiny reflecting bindings of special editions than by the great squat lamp of crimson satin that, lighted through all the day, swung overhead. It was truly a mellow bookshop. The words “Moonlight Quill” were worked over the door in a sort of serpentine embroidery. The windows seemed always full of something that had passed the literary censors with little to spare; volumes with covers of deep orange which offer their titles on little white paper squares. And over all there was the smell of the musk, which the clever, inscrutable Mr. Moonlight Quill ordered to be sprinkled about-the smell half of a curiosity shop in Dickens’ London and half of a coffee-house on the warm shores of the Bosphorus.

From nine until five-thirty Merlin Grainger asked bored old ladies in black and young men with dark circles under their eyes if they “cared for this fellow” or were interested in first editions. Did they buy novels with Arabs on the cover, or books which gave Shakespeare’s newest sonnets as dictated psychically to Miss Sutton of South Dakota? he sniffed. As a matter of fact, his own taste ran to these latter, but as an employee at the Moonlight Quill he assumed for the working day the attitude of a disillusioned connoisseur.

After he had crawled over the window display to pull down the front shade at five-thirty every afternoon, and said good-bye to the mysterious Mr. Moonlight Quill and the lady clerk, Miss McCracken, and the lady stenographer, Miss Masters, he went home to the girl, Caroline. He did not eat supper with Caroline. It is unbelievable that Caroline would have considered eating off his bureau with the collar buttons dangerously near the cottage cheese, and the ends of Merlin’s necktie just missing his glass of milk — he had never asked her to eat with him. He ate alone. He went into Braegdort’s delicatessen on Sixth Avenue and bought a box of crackers, a tube of anchovy paste, and some oranges, or else a little jar of sausages and some potato salad and a bottled soft drink, and with these in a brown package he went to his room at Fifty-something West Fifty-eighth Street and ate his supper and saw Caroline.

Caroline was a very young and gay person who lived with some older lady and was possibly nineteen. She was like a ghost in that she never existed until evening. She sprang into life when the lights went on in her apartment at about six, and she disappeared, at the latest, about midnight. Her apartment was a nice one, in a nice building with a white stone front, opposite the south side of Central Park. The back of her apartment faced the single window of the single room occupied by the single Mr. Grainger.

He called her Caroline because there was a picture that looked like her on the jacket of a book of that name down at the Moonlight Quill.

Now, Merlin Grainger was a thin young man of twenty-five, with dark hair and no mustache or beard or anything like that, but Caroline was dazzling and light, with a shimmering morass of russet waves to take the place of hair, and the sort of features that remind you of kisses — the sort of features you thought belonged to your first love, but know, when you come across an old picture, didn’t. She dressed in pink or blue usually, but of late she had sometimes put on a slender black gown that was evidently her especial pride, for whenever she wore it she would stand regarding a certain place on the wall, which Merlin thought most be a mirror. She sat usually in the profile chair near the window, but sometimes honored the chaise longue by the lamp, and often she leaned ‘way back and smoked a cigarette with posturings of her arms and hands that Merlin considered very graceful.

At another time she had come to the window and stood in it magnificently, and looked out because the moon had lost its way and was dripping the strangest and most transforming brilliance into the areaway between, turning the motif of ash-cans and clothes-lines into a vivid impressionism of silver casks and gigantic gossamer cobwebs. Merlin was sitting in plain sight, eating cottage cheese with sugar and milk on it; and so quickly did he reach out for the window cord that he tipped the cottage cheese into his lap with his free hand — and the milk was cold and the sugar made spots on his trousers, and he was sure that she had seen him after all.

Sometimes there were callers — men in dinner coats, who stood and bowed, hat in hand and coat on arm, as they talked to Caroline; then bowed some more and followed her out of the light, obviously bound for a play or for a dance. Other young men came and sat and smoked cigarettes, and seemed trying to tell Caroline something — she sitting either in the profile chair and watching them with eager intentness or else in the chaise longue by the lamp, looking very lovely and youthfully inscrutable indeed.

Merlin enjoyed these calls. Of some of the men he approved. Others won only his grudging toleration, one or two he loathed — especially the most frequent caller, a man with black hair and a black goatee and a pitch-dark soul, who seemed to Merlin vaguely familiar, but whom he was never quite able to recognize.

Now, Merlin’s whole life was not “bound up with this romance he had constructed”; it was not “the happiest hour of his day.” He never arrived in time to rescue Caroline from “clutches”; nor did he even marry her. A much stranger thing happened than any of these, and it is this strange thing that will presently be set down here. It began one October afternoon when she walked briskly into the mellow interior of the Moonlight Quill.

It was a dark afternoon, threatening rain and the end of the world, and done in that particularly gloomy gray in which only New York afternoons indulge. A breeze was crying down the streets, whisking along battered newspapers and pieces of things, and little lights were pricking out all the windows — it was so desolate that one was sorry for the tops of sky-scrapers lost up there in the dark green and gray heaven, and felt that now surely the farce was to close, and presently all the buildings would collapse like card houses, and pile up in a dusty, sardonic heap upon all the millions who presumed to wind in and out of them.

At least these were the sort of musings that lay heavily upon the soul of Merlin Grainger, as he stood by the window putting a dozen books back in a row after a cyclonic visit by a lady with ermine trimmings. He looked out of the window full of the most distressing thoughts — of the early novels of H. G. Wells, of the boot of Genesis, of how Thomas Edison had said that in thirty years there would be no dwelling-houses upon the island, but only a vast and turbulent bazaar; and then he set the last book right side up, turned — and Caroline walked coolly into the shop.

She was dressed in a jaunty but conventional walking costume — he remembered this when he thought about it later. Her skirt was plaid, pleated like a concertina; her jacket was a soft but brisk tan; her shoes and spats were brown and her hat, small and trim, completed her like the top of a very expensive and beautifully filled candy box.

Merlin, breathless and startled, advanced nervously toward her.

“Good-afternoon — “ he said, and then stopped — why, he did not know, except that it came to him that something very portentous in his life was about to occur, and that it would need no furbishing but silence, and the proper amount of expectant attention. And in that minute before the thing began to happen he had the sense of a breathless second hanging suspended in time: he saw through the glass partition that bounded off the little office the malevolent conical head of his employer, Mr. Moonlight Quill, bent over his correspondence. He saw Miss McCracken and Miss Masters as two patches of hair drooping over piles of paper; he saw the crimson lamp overhead, and noticed with a touch of pleasure how really pleasant and romantic it made the book-store seem.

Then the thing happened, or rather it began to happen. Caroline picked up a volume of poems lying loose upon a pile, fingered it absently with her slender white hand, and suddenly, with an easy gesture, tossed it upward toward the ceiling where it disappeared in the crimson lamp and lodged there, seen through the illuminated silk as a dark, bulging rectangle. This pleased her — she broke into young, contagious laughter, in which Merlin found himself presently joining.

“It stayed up!” she cried merrily. “It stayed up, didn’t it?” To both of them this seemed the height of brilliant absurdity. Their laughter mingled, filled the bookshop, and Merlin was glad to find that her voice was rich and full of sorcery.

“Try another,” he found himself suggesting — “try a red one.”

At this her laughter increased, and she had to rest her hands upon the stack to steady herself.

“Try another,” she managed to articulate between spasms of mirth. “Oh, golly, try another!”

“Try two.”

“Yes, try two. Oh, I’ll choke if I don’t stop laughing. Here it goes.”

Suiting her action to the word, she picked up a red book and sent it in a gentle hyperbola toward the ceiling, where it sank into the lamp beside the first. It was a few minutes before either of them could do more than rock back and forth in helpless glee; but then by mutual agreement they took up the sport anew, this time in unison. Merlin seized a large, specially bound French classic and whirled it upward. Applauding his own accuracy, he took a best-seller in one hand and a book on barnacles in the other, and waited breathlessly while she made her shot. Then the business waxed fast and furious — sometimes they alternated, and, watching, he found how supple she was in every movement; sometimes one of them made shot after shot, picking up the nearest book, sending it off, merely taking time to follow it with a glance before reaching for another. Within three minutes they had cleared a little place on the table, and the lamp of crimson satin was so bulging with books that it was near breaking.

“Silly game, basket-ball,” she cried scornfully as a book left her hand. “High-school girls play it in hideous bloomers.”

“Idiotic,” he agreed.

She paused in the act of tossing a book, and replaced it suddenly in its position on the table.

“I think we’ve got room to sit down now,” she said gravely.

They had; they had cleared an ample space for two. With a faint touch of nervousness Merlin glanced toward Mr. Moonlight Quill’s glass partition, but the three heads were still bent earnestly over their work, and it was evident that they had not seen what had gone on in the shop. So when Caroline put her hands on the table and hoisted herself up Merlin calmly imitated her, and they sat side by side looking very earnestly at each other.

“I had to see you,” she began, with a rather pathetic expression in her brown eyes.

“I know.”

“It was that last time,” she continued, her voice trembling a little, though she tried to keep it steady. “I was frightened. I don’t like you to eat off the dresser. I’m so afraid you’ll — you’ll swallow a collar button.”

“I did once — almost,” he confessed reluctantly, “but it’s not so easy, you know. I mean you can swallow the flat part easy enough or else the other part — that is, separately — but for a whole collar button you’d have to have a specially made throat.” He was astonishing himself by the debonnaire appropriateness of his remarks. Words seemed for the first time in his life to ran at him shrieking to be used, gathering themselves into carefully arranged squads and platoons, and being presented to him by punctilious adjutants of paragraphs.

“That’s what scared me,” she said. “I knew you had to have a specially made throat — and I knew, at least I felt sure, that you didn’t have one.”

He nodded frankly.

“I haven’t. It costs money to have one — more money unfortunately than

I possess.”

He felt no shame in saying this — rather a delight in making the admission — he knew that nothing he could say or do would be beyond her comprehension; least of all his poverty, and the practical impossibility of ever extricating himself from it.

Caroline looked down at her wrist watch, and with a little cry slid from the table to her feet.

“It’s after five,” she cried. “I didn’t realize. I have to be at the Ritz at five-thirty. Let’s hurry and get this done. I’ve got a bet on it.”

With one accord they set to work. Caroline began the matter by seizing a book on insects and sending it whizzing, and finally crashing through the glass partition that housed Mr. Moonlight Quill. The proprietor glanced up with a wild look, brushed a few pieces of glass from his desk, and went on with his letters. Miss McCracken gave no sign of having heard — only Miss Masters started and gave a little frightened scream before she bent to her task again.

But to Merlin and Caroline it didn’t matter. In a perfect orgy of energy they were hurling book after book in all directions until sometimes three or four were in the air at once, smashing against shelves, cracking the glass of pictures on the walls, falling in bruised and torn heaps upon the floor. It was fortunate that no customers happened to come in, for it is certain they would never have come in again — the noise was too tremendous, a noise of smashing and ripping and tearing, mixed now and then with the tinkling of glass, the quick breathing of the two throwers, and the intermittent outbursts of laughter to which both of them periodically surrendered.

At five-thirty Caroline tossed a last book at the lamp, and gave the final impetus to the load it carried. The weakened silk tore and dropped its cargo in one vast splattering of white and color to the already littered floor. Then with a sigh of relief she turned to Merlin and held out her hand.

“Good-by,” she said simply.

“Are you going?” He knew she was. His question was simply a lingering wile to detain her and extract for another moment that dazzling essence of light he drew from her presence, to continue his enormous satisfaction in her features, which were like kisses and, he thought, like the features of a girl he had known back in 1910. For a minute he pressed the softness of her hand — then she smiled and withdrew it and, before he could spring to open the door, she had done it herself and was gone out into the turbid and ominous twilight that brooded narrowly over Forty-seventh Street.

I would like to tell you how Merlin, having seen how beauty regards the wisdom of the years, walked into the little partition of Mr. Moonlight Quill and gave up his job then and there; thence issuing out into the street a much finer and nobler and increasingly ironic man. But the truth is much more commonplace. Merlin Grainger stood up and surveyed the wreck of the bookshop, the ruined volumes, the torn silk remnants of the once beautiful crimson lamp, the crystalline sprinkling of broken glass which lay in iridescent dust over the whole interior — and then he went to a corner where a broom was kept and began cleaning up and rearranging and, as far as he was able, restoring the shop to its former condition. He found that, though some few of the books were uninjured, most of them had suffered in varying extents. The backs were off some, the pages were torn from others, still others were just slightly cracked in the front, which, as all careless book returners know, makes a book unsalable, and therefore second-hand.

Nevertheless by six o’clock he had done much to repair the damage. He had returned the books to their original places, swept the floor, and put new lights in the sockets overhead. The red shade itself was ruined beyond redemption, and Merlin thought in some trepidation that the money to replace it might have to come out of his salary. At six, therefore, having done the best he could, he crawled over the front window display to pull down the blind. As he was treading delicately back, he saw Mr. Moonlight Quill rise from his desk, put on his overcoat and hat, and emerge into the shop. He nodded mysteriously at Merlin and went toward the door. With his hand on the knob he paused, turned around, and in a voice curiously compounded of ferocity and uncertainty, he said:

“If that girl comes in here again, you tell her to behave.”

With that he opened the door, drowning Merlin’s meek “Yessir” in its creak, and went out.

Merlin stood there for a moment, deciding wisely not to worry about what was for the present only a possible futurity, and then he went into the back of the shop and invited Miss Masters to have supper with him at Pulpat’s French Restaurant, where one could still obtain red wine at dinner, despite the Great Federal Government. Miss Masters accepted.

“Wine makes me feel all tingly,” she said.

Merlin laughed inwardly as he compared her to Caroline, or rather as he didn’t compare her. There was no comparison.

II

Mr. Moonlight Quill, mysterious, exotic, and oriental in temperament was, nevertheless, a man of decision. And it was with decision that he approached the problem of his wrecked shop. Unless he should make an outlay equal to the original cost of his entire stock — a step which for certain private reasons he did not wish to take — it would be impossible for him to continue in business with the Moonlight Quill as before. There was but one thing to do. He promptly turned his establishment from an up-to-the-minute book-store into a second-hand bookshop. The damaged books were marked down from twenty-five to fifty per cent, the name over the door whose serpentine embroidery had once shone so insolently bright, was allowed to grow dim and take on the indescribably vague color of old paint, and, having a strong penchant for ceremonial, the proprietor even went so far as to buy two skull-caps of shoddy red felt, one for himself and one for his clerk, Merlin Grainger. Moreover, he let his goatee grow until it resembled the tail-feathers of an ancient sparrow and substituted for a once dapper business suit a reverence-inspiring affair of shiny alpaca.

In fact, within a year after Caroline’s catastrophic visit to the bookshop the only thing in it that preserved any semblance of being up to date was Miss Masters. Miss McCracken had followed in the footsteps of Mr. Moonlight Quill and become an intolerable dowd.

For Merlin too, from a feeling compounded of loyalty and listlessness, had let his exterior take on the semblance of a deserted garden. He accepted the red felt skull-cap as a symbol of his decay. Always a young man known, as a “pusher,” he had been, since the day of his graduation from the manual training department of a New York High School, an inveterate brusher of clothes, hair, teeth, and even eyebrows, and had learned the value of laying all his clean socks toe upon toe and heel upon heel in a certain drawer of his bureau, which would be known as the sock drawer.

These things, he felt, had won him his place in the greatest splendor of the Moonlight Quill. It was due to them that he was not still making “chests useful for keeping things,” as he was taught with breathless practicality in High School, and selling them to whoever had use of such chests — possibly undertakers. Nevertheless when the progressive Moonlight Quill became the retrogressive Moonlight Quill he preferred to sink with it, and so took to letting his suits gather undisturbed the wispy burdens of the air and to throwing his socks indiscriminately into the shirt drawer, the underwear drawer, and even into no drawer at all. It was not uncommon in his new carelessness to let many of his clean clothes go directly back to the laundry without having ever been worn, a common eccentricity of impoverished bachelors. And this in the face of his favorite magazines, which at that time were fairly staggering with articles by successful authors against the frightful impudence of the condemned poor, such as the buying of wearable shirts and nice cuts of meat, and the fact that they preferred good investments in personal jewelry to respectable ones in four per cent saving-banks.

It was indeed a strange state of affairs and a sorry one for many worthy and God-fearing men. For the first time in the history of the Republic almost any negro north of Georgia could change a one-dollar bill. But as at that time the cent was rapidly approaching the purchasing power of the Chinese ubu and was only a thing you got back occasionally after paying for a soft drink, and could use merely in getting your correct weight, this was perhaps not so strange a phenomenon as it at first seems. It was too curious a state of things, however, for Merlin Grainger to take the step that he did take — the hazardous, almost involuntary step of proposing to Miss Masters. Stranger still that she accepted him.

It was at Pulpat’s on Saturday night and over a $1.75 bottle of water diluted with vin ordinaire that the proposal occurred.

“Wine makes me feel all tingly, doesn’t it you?” chattered Miss

Masters gaily.

“Yes,” answered Merlin absently; and then, after a long and pregnant pause: “Miss Masters — Olive — I want to say something to you if you’ll listen to me.”

The tingliness of Miss Masters (who knew what was coming) increased until it seemed that she would shortly be electrocuted by her own nervous reactions. But her “Yes, Merlin,” came without a sign or flicker of interior disturbance. Merlin swallowed a stray bit of air that he found in his mouth.

“I have no fortune,” he said with the manner of making an announcement. “I have no fortune at all.”

Their eyes met, locked, became wistful, and dreamy and beautiful.

“Olive,” he told her, “I love you.”

“I love you too, Merlin,” she answered simply. “Shall we have another bottle of wine?”

“Yes,” he cried, his heart beating at a great rate. “Do you mean — “

“To drink to our engagement,” she interrupted bravely. “May it be a short one!”

“No!” he almost shouted, bringing his fist fiercely down upon the table. “May it last forever!”

“What?”

“I mean — oh, I see what you mean. You’re right. May it be a short one.” He laughed and added, “My error.”

After the wine arrived they discussed the matter thoroughly.

“We’ll have to take a small apartment at first,” he said, “and I believe, yes, by golly, I know there’s a small one in the house where I live, a big room and a sort of a dressing-room-kitchenette and the use of a bath on the same floor.”

She clapped her hands happily, and he thought how pretty she was really, that is, the upper part of her face — from the bridge of the nose down she was somewhat out of true. She continued enthusiastically:

“And as soon as we can afford it we’ll take a real swell apartment, with an elevator and a telephone girl.”

“And after that a place in the country — and a car.”

“I can’t imagine nothing more fun. Can you?”

Merlin fell silent a moment. He was thinking that he would have to give up his room, the fourth floor rear. Yet it mattered very little now. During the past year and a half — in fact, from the very date of Caroline’s visit to the Moonlight Quill — he had never seen her. For a week after that visit her lights had failed to go on — darkness brooded out into the areaway, seemed to grope blindly in at his expectant, uncurtained window. Then the lights had appeared at last, and instead of Caroline and her callers they stowed a stodgy family — a little man with a bristly mustache and a full-bosomed woman who spent her evenings patting her hips and rearranging bric-à-brac. After two days of them Merlin had callously pulled down his shade.

No, Merlin could think of nothing more fun than rising in the world with Olive. There would be a cottage in a suburb, a cottage painted blue, just one class below the sort of cottages that are of white stucco with a green roof. In the grass around the cottage would be rusty trowels and a broken green bench and a baby-carriage with a wicker body that sagged to the left. And around the grass and the baby-carriage and the cottage itself, around his whole world there would be the arms of Olive, a little stouter, the arms of her neo-Olivian period, when, as she walked, her cheeks would tremble up and down ever so slightly from too much face-massaging. He could hear her voice now, two spoons’ length away:

“I knew you were going to say this to-night, Merlin. I could see — “

She could see. Ah — suddenly he wondered how much she could see. Could she see that the girl who had come in with a party of three men and sat down at the next table was Caroline? Ah, could she see that? Could she see that the men brought with them liquor far more potent than Pulpat’s red ink condensed threefold?…

Merlin stared breathlessly, half-hearing through an auditory ether Olive’s low, soft monologue, as like a persistent honey-bee she sucked sweetness from her memorable hour. Merlin was listening to the clinking of ice and the fine laughter of all four at some pleasantry — and that laughter of Caroline’s that he knew so well stirred him, lifted him, called his heart imperiously over to her table, whither it obediently went. He could see her quite plainly, and he fancied that in the last year and a half she had changed, if ever so slightly. Was it the light or were her cheeks a little thinner and her eyes less fresh, if more liquid, than of old? Yet the shadows were still purple in her russet hair; her mouth hinted yet of kisses, as did the profile that came sometimes between his eyes and a row of books, when it was twilight in the bookshop where the crimson lamp presided no more.

And she had been drinking. The threefold flush in her cheeks was compounded of youth and wine and fine cosmetic — that he could tell. She was making great amusement for the young man on her left and the portly person on her right, and even for the old fellow opposite her, for the latter from time to time uttered the shocked and mildly reproachful cackles of another generation. Merlin caught the words of a song she was intermittently singing —

“Just snap your fingers at care, Don’t cross the bridge ‘til you’re there — “

The portly person filled her glass with chill amber. A waiter after several trips about the table, and many helpless glances at Caroline, who was maintaining a cheerful, futile questionnaire as to the succulence of this dish or that, managed to obtain the semblance of an order and hurried away….

Olive was speaking to Merlin —

“When, then?” she asked, her voice faintly shaded with disappointment. He realized that he had just answered no to some question she had asked him.

“Oh, sometime.”

“Don’t you — care?”

A rather pathetic poignancy in her question brought his eyes back to her.

“As soon as possible, dear,” he replied with surprising tenderness.

“In two months — in June.”

“So soon?” Her delightful excitement quite took her breath away.

“Oh, yes, I think we’d better say June. No use waiting.”

Olive began to pretend that two months was really too short a time for her to make preparations. Wasn’t he a bad boy! Wasn’t he impatient, though! Well, she’d show him he mustn’t be too quick with her. Indeed he was so sudden she didn’t exactly know whether she ought to marry him at all.

“June,” he repeated sternly.

Olive sighed and smiled and drank her coffee, her little finger lifted high above the others in true refined fashion. A stray thought came to Merlin that he would like to buy five rings and throw at it.

“By gosh!” he exclaimed aloud. Soon he would be putting rings on one of her fingers.

His eyes swung sharply to the right. The party of four had become so riotous that the head-waiter had approached and spoken to them. Caroline was arguing with this head-waiter in a raised voice, a voice so clear and young that it seemed as though the whole restaurant would listen — the whole restaurant except Olive Masters, self-absorbed in her new secret.

“How do you do?” Caroline was saying. “Probably the handsomest head-waiter in captivity. Too much noise? Very unfortunate. Something’ll have to be done about it. Gerald” — she addressed the man on her right — “the head-waiter says there’s too much noise. Appeals to us to have it stopped. What’ll I say?”

“Sh!” remonstrated Gerald, with laughter. “Sh!” and Merlin heard him add in an undertone: “All the bourgeoisie will be aroused. This is where the floorwalkers learn French.”

Caroline sat up straight in sudden alertness.

“Where’s a floorwalker?” she cried. “Show me a floorwalker.” This seemed to amuse the party, for they all, including Caroline, burst into renewed laughter. The head-waiter, after a last conscientious but despairing admonition, became Gallic with his shoulders and retired into the background.

Pulpat’s, as every one knows, has the unvarying respectability of the table d’hôte. It is not a gay place in the conventional sense. One comes, drinks the red wine, talks perhaps a little more and a little louder than usual under the low, smoky ceilings, and then goes home. It closes up at nine-thirty, tight as a drum; the policeman is paid off and given an extra bottle of wine for the missis, the coat-room girl hands her tips to the collector, and then darkness crushes the little round tables out of sight and life. But excitement was prepared for Pulpat’s this evening — excitement of no mean variety. A girl with russet, purple-shadowed hair mounted to her table-top and began to dance thereon.

“Sacré nom de Dieu! Come down off there!” cried the head-waiter. “Stop that music!”

But the musicians were already playing so loud that they could pretend not to hear his order; having once been young, they played louder and gayer than ever, and Caroline danced with grace and vivacity, her pink, filmy dress swirling about her, her agile arms playing in supple, tenuous gestures along the smoky air.

A group of Frenchmen at a table near by broke into cries of applause, in which other parties joined — in a moment the room was full of clapping and shouting; half the diners were on their feet, crowding up, and on the outskirts the hastily summoned proprietor was giving indistinct vocal evidences of his desire to put an end to this thing as quickly as possible.

“… Merlin!” cried Olive, awake, aroused at last; “she’s such a wicked girl! Let’s get out — now!”

The fascinated Merlin protested feebly that the check was not paid.

“It’s all right. Lay five dollars on the table. I despise that girl. I can’t bear to look at her.” She was on her feet now, tagging at Merlin’s arm.

Helplessly, listlessly, and then with what amounted to downright unwillingness, Merlin rose, followed Olive dumbly as she picked her way through the delirious clamor, now approaching its height and threatening to become a wild and memorable riot. Submissively he took his coat and stumbled up half a dozen steps into the moist April air outside, his ears still ringing with the sound of light feet on the table and of laughter all about and over the little world of the cafe. In silence they walked along toward Fifth Avenue and a bus.

It was not until next day that she told him about the wedding — how she had moved the date forward: it was much better that they should be married on the first of May.

III

And married they were, in a somewhat stuffy manner, under the chandelier of the flat where Olive lived with her mother. After marriage came elation, and then, gradually, the growth of weariness. Responsibility descended upon Merlin, the responsibility of making his thirty dollars a week and her twenty suffice to keep them respectably fat and to hide with decent garments the evidence that they were.

It was decided after several weeks of disastrous and well-nigh humiliating experiments with restaurants that they would join the great army of the delicatessen-fed, so he took up his old way of life again, in that he stopped every evening at Braegdort’s delicatessen and bought potatoes in salad, ham in slices, and sometimes even stuffed tomatoes in bursts of extravagance.

Then he would trudge homeward, enter the dark hallway, and climb three rickety flights of stairs covered by an ancient carpet of long obliterated design. The hall had an ancient smell — of the vegetables of 1880, of the furniture polish in vogue when “Adam-and Eve” Bryan ran against William McKinley, of portieres an ounce heavier with dust, from worn-out shoes, and lint from dresses turned long since into patch-work quilts. This smell would pursue him up the stairs, revivified and made poignant at each landing by the aura of contemporary cooking, then, as he began the next flight, diminishing into the odor of the dead routine of dead generations.

Eventually would occur the door of his room, which slipped open with indecent willingness and closed with almost a sniff upon his “Hello, dear! Got a treat for you to-night.”

Olive, who always rode home on the bus to “get a morsel of air,” would be making the bed and hanging up things. At his call she would come up to him and give him a quick kiss with wide-open eyes, while he held her upright like a ladder, his hands on her two arms, as though she were a thing without equilibrium, and would, once he relinquished hold, fall stiffly backward to the floor. This is the kiss that comes in with the second year of marriage, succeeding the bridegroom kiss (which is rather stagey at best, say those who know about such things, and apt to be copied from passionate movies).

Then came supper, and after that they went out for a walk, up two blocks and through Central Park, or sometimes to a moving picture, which taught them patiently that they were the sort of people for whom life was ordered, and that something very grand and brave and beautiful would soon happen to them if they were docile and obedient to their rightful superiors and kept away from pleasure.

Such was their day for three years. Then change came into their lives: Olive had a baby, and as a result Merlin had a new influx of material resources. In the third week of Olive’s confinement, after an hour of nervous rehearsing, he went into the office of Mr. Moonlight Quill and demanded an enormous increase in salary.

“I’ve been here ten years,” he said; “since I was nineteen. I’ve always tried to do my best in the interests of the business.”

Mr. Moonlight Quill said that he would think it over. Next morning he announced, to Merlin’s great delight, that he was going to put into effect a project long premeditated — he was going to retire from active work in the bookshop, confining himself to periodic visits and leaving Merlin as manager with a salary of fifty dollars a week and a one-tenth interest in the business. When the old man finished, Merlin’s cheeks were glowing and his eyes full of tears. He seized his employer’s hand and shook it violently, saying over and over again:

“It’s very nice of you, sir. It’s very white of you. It’s very, very nice of you.”

So after ten years of faithful work in the store he had won out at last. Looking back, he saw his own progress toward this hill of elation no longer as a sometimes sordid and always gray decade of worry and failing enthusiasm and failing dreams, years when the moonlight had grown duller in the areaway and the youth had faded out of Olive’s face, but as a glorious and triumphant climb over obstacles which he had determinedly surmounted by unconquerable will-power. The optimistic self-delusion that had kept him from misery was seen now in the golden garments of stern resolution. Half a dozen times he had taken steps to leave the Moonlight Quill and soar upward, but through sheer faintheartedness he had stayed on. Strangely enough he now thought that those were times when he had exerted tremendous persistence and had “determined” to fight it out where he was.

At any rate, let us not for this moment begrudge Merlin his new and magnificent view of himself. He had arrived. At thirty he had reached a post of importance. He left the shop that evening fairly radiant, invested every penny in his pocket in the most tremendous feast that Braegdort’s delicatessen offered, and staggered homeward with the great news and four gigantic paper bags. The fact that Olive was too sick to eat, that he made himself faintly but unmistakably ill by a struggle with four stuffed tomatoes, and that most of the food deteriorated rapidly in an iceless ice-box: all next day did not mar the occasion. For the first time since the week of his marriage Merlin Grainger lived under a sky of unclouded tranquillity.

The baby boy was christened Arthur, and life became dignified, significant, and, at length, centered. Merlin and Olive resigned themselves to a somewhat secondary place in their own cosmos; but what they lost in personality they regained in a sort of primordial pride. The country house did not come, but a month in an Asbury Park boarding-house each summer filled the gap; and during Merlin’s two weeks’ holiday this excursion assumed the air of a really merry jaunt — especially when, with the baby asleep in a wide room opening technically on the sea, Merlin strolled with Olive along the thronged board-walk puffing at his cigar and trying to look like twenty thousand a year.

With some alarm at the slowing up of the days and the accelerating of the years, Merlin became thirty-one, thirty-two — then almost with a rush arrived at that age which, with all its washing and panning, can only muster a bare handful of the precious stuff of youth: he became thirty-five. And one day on Fifth Avenue he saw Caroline.

It was Sunday, a radiant, flowerful Easter morning and the avenue was a pageant of lilies and cutaways and happy April-colored bonnets. Twelve o’clock: the great churches were letting out their people — St. Simon’s, St. Hilda’s, the Church of the Epistles, opened their doors like wide mouths until the people pouring forth surely resembled happy laughter as they met and strolled and chattered, or else waved white bouquets at waiting chauffeurs.

In front of the Church of the Epistles stood its twelve vestrymen, carrying out the time-honored custom of giving away Easter eggs full of face-powder to the church-going debutantes of the year. Around them delightedly danced the two thousand miraculously groomed children of the very rich, correctly cute and curled, shining like sparkling little jewels upon their mothers’ fingers. Speaks the sentimentalist for the children of the poor? Ah, but the children of the rich, laundered, sweet-smelling, complexioned of the country, and, above all, with soft, in-door voices.

Little Arthur was five, child of the middle class. Undistinguished, unnoticed, with a nose that forever marred what Grecian yearnings his features might have had, he held tightly to his mother’s warm, sticky hand, and, with Merlin on his other side, moved, upon the home-coming throng. At Fifty-third Street, where there were two churches, the congestion was at its thickest, its richest. Their progress was of necessity retarded to such an extent that even little Arthur had not the slightest difficulty in keeping up. Then it was that Merlin perceived an open landaulet of deepest crimson, with handsome nickel trimmings, glide slowly up to the curb and come to a stop. In it sat Caroline.

She was dressed in black, a tight-fitting gown trimmed with lavender, flowered at the waist with a corsage of orchids. Merlin started and then gazed at her fearfully. For the first time in the eight years since his marriage he was encountering the girl again. But a girl no longer. Her figure was slim as ever — or perhaps not quite, for a certain boyish swagger, a sort of insolent adolescence, had gone the way of the first blooming of her cheeks. But she was beautiful; dignity was there now, and the charming lines of a fortuitous nine-and-twenty; and she sat in the car with such perfect appropriateness and self-possession that it made him breathless to watch her.

Suddenly she smiled — the smile of old, bright as that very Easter and its flowers, mellower than ever — yet somehow with not quite the radiance and infinite promise of that first smile back there in the bookshop nine years before. It was a steelier smile, disillusioned and sad.

But it was soft enough and smile enough to make a pair of young men in cutaway coats hurry over, to pull their high hats off their wetted, iridescent hair; to bring them, flustered and bowing, to the edge of her landaulet, where her lavender gloves gently touched their gray ones. And these two were presently joined by another, and then two more, until there was a rapidly swelling crowd around the landaulet. Merlin would hear a young man beside him say to his perhaps well-favored companion:

“If you’ll just pardon me a moment, there’s some one I have to speak to. Walk right ahead. I’ll catch up.”

Within three minutes every inch of the landaulet, front, back, and side, was occupied by a man — a man trying to construct a sentence clever enough to find its way to Caroline through the stream of conversation. Luckily for Merlin a portion of little Arthur’s clothing had chosen the opportunity to threaten a collapse, and Olive had hurriedly rushed him over against a building for some extemporaneous repair work, so Merlin was able to watch, unhindered, the salon in the street.

The crowd swelled. A row formed in back of the first, two more behind that. In the midst, an orchid rising from a black bouquet, sat Caroline enthroned in her obliterated car, nodding and crying salutations and smiling with such true happiness that, of a sudden, a new relay of gentlemen had left their wives and consorts and were striding toward her.

The crowd, now phalanx deep, began to be augmented by the merely curious; men of all ages who could not possibly have known Caroline jostled over and melted into the circle of ever-increasing diameter, until the lady in lavender was the centre of a vast impromptu auditorium.

All about her were faces — clean-shaven, bewhiskered, old, young, ageless, and now, here and there, a woman. The mass was rapidly spreading to the opposite curb, and, as St. Anthony’s around the corner let out its box-holders, it overflowed to the sidewalk and crushed up against the iron picket-fence of a millionaire across the street. The motors speeding along the avenue were compelled to stop, and in a jiffy were piled three, five, and six deep at the edge of the crowd; auto-busses, top-heavy turtles of traffic, plunged into the jam, their passengers crowding to the edges of the roofs in wild excitement and peering down into the centre of the mass, which presently could hardly be seen from the mass’s edge.

The crush had become terrific. No fashionable audience at a Yale-Princeton football game, no damp mob at a world’s series, could be compared with the panoply that talked, stared, laughed, and honked about the lady in black and lavender. It was stupendous; it was terrible. A quarter mile down the block a half-frantic policeman called his precinct; on the same corner a frightened civilian crashed in the glass of a fire-alarm and sent in a wild paean for all the fire-engines of the city; up in an apartment high in one of the tall buildings a hysterical old maid telephoned in turn for the prohibition enforcement agent; the special deputies on Bolshevism, and the maternity ward of Bellevue Hospital.

The noise increased. The first fire-engine arrived, filling the Sunday air with smoke, clanging and crying a brazen, metallic message down the high, resounding walls. In the notion that some terrible calamity had overtaken the city, two excited deacons ordered special services immediately and set tolling the great bells of St. Hilda’s and St. Anthony’s, presently joined by the jealous gongs of St. Simon’s and the Church of the Epistles. Even far off in the Hudson and the East River the sounds of the commotion were heard, and the ferry-boats and tugs and ocean liners set up sirens and whistles that sailed in melancholy cadence, now varied, now reiterated, across the whole diagonal width of the city from Riverside Drive to the gray water-fronts of the lower East Side….

In the centre of her landaulet sat the lady in black and lavender, chatting pleasantly first with one, then with another of that fortunate few in cutaways who had found their way to speaking distance in the first rush. After a while she glanced around her and beside her with a look of growing annoyance.

She yawned and asked the man nearest her if he couldn’t run in somewhere and get her a glass of water. The man apologized in some embarrassment. He could not have moved hand or foot. He could not have scratched his own ear….

As the first blast of the river sirens keened along the air, Olive fastened the last safety-pin in little Arthur’s rompers and looked up. Merlin saw her start, stiffen slowly like hardening stucco, and then give a little gasp of surprise and disapproval.

“That woman,” she cried suddenly. “Oh!”

She flashed a glance at Merlin that mingled reproach and pain, and without another word gathered up little Arthur with one hand, grasped her husband by the other, and darted amazingly in a winding, bumping canter through the crowd. Somehow people gave way before her; somehow she managed to-retain her grasp on her son and husband; somehow she managed to emerge two blocks up, battered and dishevelled, into an open space, and, without slowing up her pace, darted down a side-street. Then at last, when uproar had died away into a dim and distant clamor, did she come to a walk and set little Arthur upon his feet.

“And on Sunday, too! Hasn’t she disgraced herself enough?” This was her only comment. She said it to Arthur, as she seemed to address her remarks to Arthur throughout the remainder of the day. For some curious and esoteric reason she had never once looked at her husband during the entire retreat.

IV

The years between thirty-five and sixty-five revolve before the passive mind as one unexplained, confusing merry-go-round. True, they are a merry-go-round of ill-gaited and wind-broken horses, painted first in pastel colors, then in dull grays and browns, but perplexing and intolerably dizzy the thing is, as never were the merry-go-rounds of childhood or adolescence; as never, surely, were the certain-coursed, dynamic roller-coasters of youth. For most men and women these thirty years are taken up with a gradual withdrawal from life, a retreat first from a front with many shelters, those myriad amusements and curiosities of youth, to a line with less, when we peel down our ambitions to one ambition, our recreations to one recreation, our friends to a few to whom we are anaesthetic; ending up at last in a solitary, desolate strong point that is not strong, where the shells now whistle abominably, now are but half-heard as, by turns frightened and tired, we sit waiting for death.

At forty, then, Merlin was no different from himself at thirty-five; a larger paunch, a gray twinkling near his ears, a more certain lack of vivacity in his walk. His forty-five differed from his forty by a like margin, unless one mention a slight deafness in his left ear. But at fifty-five the process had become a chemical change of immense rapidity. Yearly he was more and more an “old man” to his family — senile almost, so far as his wife was concerned. He was by this time complete owner of the bookshop. The mysterious Mr. Moonlight Quill, dead some five years and not survived by his wife, had deeded the whole stock and store to him, and there he still spent his days, conversant now by name with almost all that man has recorded for three thousand years, a human catalogue, an authority upon tooling and binding, upon folios and first editions, an accurate inventory of a thousand authors whom he could never have understood and had certainly never read.

At sixty-five he distinctly doddered. He had assumed the melancholy habits of the aged so often portrayed by the second old man in standard Victorian comedies. He consumed vast warehouses of time searching for mislaid spectacles. He “nagged” his wife and was nagged in turn. He told the same jokes three or four times a year at the family table, and gave his son weird, impossible directions as to his conduct in life. Mentally and materially he was so entirely different from the Merlin Grainger of twenty-five that it seemed incongruous that he should bear the same name.

He worked still In the bookshop with the assistance of a youth, whom, of course, he considered very idle, indeed, and a new young woman, Miss Gaffney. Miss McCracken, ancient and unvenerable as himself, still kept the accounts. Young Arthur was gone into Wall Street to sell bonds, as all the young men seemed to be doing in that day. This, of course, was as it should be. Let old Merlin get what magic he could from his books — the place of young King Arthur was in the counting-house.

One afternoon at four when he had slipped noiselessly up to the front of the store on his soft-soled slippers, led by a newly formed habit, of which, to be fair, he was rather ashamed, of spying upon the young man clerk, he looked casually out of the front window, straining his faded eyesight to reach the street. A limousine, large, portentous, impressive, had drawn to the curb, and the chauffeur, after dismounting and holding some sort of conversation with persons in the interior of the car, turned about and advanced in a bewildered fashion toward the entrance of the Moonlight Quill. He opened the door, shuffled in, and, glancing uncertainly at the old man in the skull-cap, addressed him in a thick, murky voice, as though his words came through a fog.

“Do you — do you sell additions?”

Merlin nodded.

“The arithmetic books are in the back of the store.”

The chauffeur took off his cap and scratched a close-cropped, fuzzy head.

“Oh, naw. This I want’s a detecatif story.” He jerked a thumb back toward the limousine. “She seen it in the paper. Firs’ addition.”

Merlin’s interest quickened. Here was possibly a big sale.

“Oh, editions. Yes, we’ve advertised some firsts, but-detective stories, I-don’t-believe-What was the title?”

“I forget. About a crime.”

“About a crime. I have-well, I have ‘The Crimes of the Borgias’-full morocco, London 1769, beautifully — “

“Naw,” interrupted the chauffeur, “this was one fella did this crime. She seen you had it for sale in the paper.” He rejected several possible titles with the air of connoisseur.

“‘Silver Bones,’“ he announced suddenly out of a slight pause.

“What?” demanded Merlin, suspecting that the stiffness of his sinews were being commented on.

“Silver Bones. That was the guy that done the crime.”

“Silver Bones?”

“Silver Bones. Indian, maybe.”

Merlin, stroked his grizzly cheeks. “Gees, Mister,” went on the prospective purchaser, “if you wanna save me an awful bawln’ out jes’ try an’ think. The old lady goes wile if everything don’t run smooth.”

But Merlin’s musings on the subject of Silver Bones were as futile as his obliging search through the shelves, and five minutes later a very dejected charioteer wound his way back to his mistress. Through the glass Merlin could see the visible symbols of a tremendous uproar going on in the interior of the limousine. The chauffeur made wild, appealing gestures of his innocence, evidently to no avail, for when he turned around and climbed back into the driver’s seat his expression was not a little dejected.

Then the door of the limousine opened and gave forth a pale and slender young man of about twenty, dressed in the attenuation of fashion and carrying a wisp of a cane. He entered the shop, walked past Merlin, and proceeded to take out a cigarette and light it. Merlin approached him.

“Anything I can do for you, sir?”

“Old boy,” said the youth coolly, “there are seveereal things; You can first let me smoke my ciggy in here out of sight of that old lady in the limousine, who happens to be my grandmother. Her knowledge as to whether I smoke it or not before my majority happens to be a matter of five thousand dollars to me. The second thing is that you should look up your first edition of the ‘Crime of Sylvester Bonnard’ that you advertised in last Sunday’s Times. My grandmother there happens to want to take it off your hands.”

Detecatif story! Crime of somebody! Silver Bones! All was explained. With a faint deprecatory chuckle, as if to say that he would have enjoyed this had life put him in the habit of enjoying anything, Merlin doddered away to the back of his shop where his treasures were kept, to get this latest investment which he had picked up rather cheaply at the sale of a big collection.

When he returned with it the young man was drawing on his cigarette and blowing out quantities of smoke with immense satisfaction.

“My God!” he said, “She keeps me so close to her the entire day running idiotic errands that this happens to be my first puff in six hours. What’s the world coming to, I ask you, when a feeble old lady in the milk-toast era can dictate to a man as to his personal vices. I happen to be unwilling to be so dictated to. Let’s see the book.”

Merlin passed it to him tenderly and the young man, after opening it with a carelessness that gave a momentary jump to the book-dealer’s heart, ran through the pages with his thumb.

“No illustrations, eh?” he commented. “Well, old boy, what’s it worth? Speak up! We’re willing to give you a fair price, though why I don’t know.”

“One hundred dollars,” said Merlin with a frown.

The young man gave a startled whistle.

“Whew! Come on. You’re not dealing with somebody from the cornbelt. I happen to be a city-bred man and my grandmother happens to be a city-bred woman, though I’ll admit it’d take a special tax appropriation to keep her in repair. We’ll give you twenty-five dollars, and let me tell you that’s liberal. We’ve got books in our attic, up in our attic with my old play-things, that were written before the old boy that wrote this was born.”

Merlin stiffened, expressing a rigid and meticulous horror.

“Did your grandmother give you twenty-five dollars to buy this with?”

“She did not. She gave me fifty, but she expects change. I know that old lady.”

“You tell her,” said Merlin with dignity, “that she has missed a very great bargain.”

“Give you forty,” urged the young man. “Come on now — be reasonable and don’t try to hold us up —  — “

Merlin had wheeled around with the precious volume under his arm and was about to return it to its special drawer in his office when there was a sudden interruption. With unheard-of magnificence the front door burst rather than swung open, and admitted in the dark interior a regal apparition in black silk and fur which bore rapidly down upon him. The cigarette leaped from the fingers of the urban young man and he gave breath to an inadvertent “Damn!” — but it was upon Merlin that the entrance seemed to have the most remarkable and incongruous effect — so strong an effect that the greatest treasure of his shop slipped from his hand and joined the cigarette on the floor. Before him stood Caroline.

She was an old woman, an old woman remarkably preserved, unusually handsome, unusually erect, but still an old woman. Her hair was a soft, beautiful white, elaborately dressed and jewelled; her face, faintly rouged à la grande dame, showed webs of wrinkles at the edges of her eyes and two deeper lines in the form of stanchions connected her nose with the corners of her mouth. Her eyes were dim, ill natured, and querulous.

But it was Caroline without a doubt: Caroline’s features though in decay; Caroline’s figure, if brittle and stiff in movement; Caroline’s manner, unmistakably compounded of a delightful insolence and an enviable self assurance; and, most of all, Caroline’s voice, broken and shaky, yet with a ring in it that still could and did make chauffeurs want to drive laundry wagons and cause cigarettes to fall from the fingers of urban grandsons.

She stood and sniffed. Her eyes found the cigarette upon the floor.

“What’s that?” she cried. The words were not a question — they were an entire litany of suspicion, accusation, confirmation, and decision. She tarried over them scarcely an instant. “Stand up!” she said to her grandson, “stand up and blow that nicotine out of your lungs!”

The young man looked at her in trepidation.

“Blow!” she commanded.

He pursed his lips feebly and blew into the air.

“Blow!” she repeated, more peremptorily than before.

He blew again, helplessly, ridiculously.

“Do you realize,” she went on briskly, “that you’ve forfeited five thousand dollars in five minutes?”

Merlin momentarily expected the young man to fall pleading upon his knees, but such is the nobility of human nature that he remained standing — even blew again into the air, partly from nervousness, partly, no doubt, with some vague hope of reingratiating himself.

“Young ass!” cried Caroline. “Once more, just once more and you leave college and go to work.”

This threat had such an overwhelming effect upon the young man that he took on an even paler pallor than was natural to him. But Caroline was not through.

“Do you think I don’t know what you and your brothers, yes, and your asinine father too, think of me? Well, I do. You think I’m senile. You think I’m soft. I’m not!” She struck herself with her-fist as though to prove that she was a mass of muscle and sinew. “And I’ll have more brains left when you’ve got me laid out in the drawing-room some sunny day than you and the rest of them were born with.”

“But Grandmother —  — “

“Be quiet. You, a thin little stick of a boy, who if it weren’t for my money might have risen to be a journeyman barber out in the Bronx — Let me see your hands. Ugh! The hands of a barber — you presume to be smart with me, who once had three counts and a bona-fide duke, not to mention half a dozen papal titles pursue me from the city of Rome to the city of New York.” She paused, took breath. “Stand up! Blow’!”

The young man obediently blew. Simultaneously the door opened and an excited gentleman of middle age who wore a coat and hat trimmed with fur, and seemed, moreover, to be trimmed with the same sort of fur himself on upper lip and chin, rushed into the store and up to Caroline.

“Found you at last,” he cried. “Been looking for you all over town. Tried your house on the ‘phone and your secretary told me he thought you’d gone to a bookshop called the Moonlight — “

Caroline turned to him irritably.

“Do I employ you for your reminiscences?” she snapped. “Are you my tutor or my broker?”

“Your broker,” confessed the fur-trimmed man, taken somewhat aback. “I beg your pardon. I came about that phonograph stock. I can sell for a hundred and five.”

“Then do it.”

“Very well. I thought I’d better — “

“Go sell it. I’m talking to my grandson.”

“Very well. I — “

“Good-by.”

“Good-by, Madame.” The fur-trimmed man made a slight bow and hurried in some confusion from the shop.

“As for you,” said Caroline, turning to her grandson, “you stay just where you are and be quiet.”

She turned to Merlin and included his entire length in a not unfriendly survey. Then she smiled and he found himself smiling too. In an instant they had both broken into a cracked but none the less spontaneous chuckle. She seized his arm and hurried him to the other side of the store. There they stopped, faced each other, and gave vent to another long fit of senile glee.

“It’s the only way,” she gasped in a sort of triumphant malignity. “The only thing that keeps old folks like me happy is the sense that they can make other people step around. To be old and rich and have poor descendants is almost as much fun as to be young and beautiful and have ugly sisters.”

“Oh, yes,” chuckled Merlin. “I know. I envy you.”

She nodded, blinking.

“The last time I was in here, forty years ago,” she said, “you were a young man very anxious to kick up your heels.”

“I was,” he confessed.

“My visit must have meant a good deal to you.”

“You have all along,” he exclaimed. “I thought — I used to think at first that you were a real person — human, I mean.”

She laughed.

“Many men have thought me inhuman.”

“But now,” continued Merlin excitedly, “I understand. Understanding is allowed to us old people — after nothing much matters. I see now that on a certain night when you danced upon a table-top you were nothing but my romantic yearning for a beautiful and perverse woman.”

Her old eyes were far away, her voice no more than the echo of a forgotten dream.

“How I danced that night! I remember.”

“You were making an attempt at me. Olive’s arms were closing about me and you warned me to be free and keep my measure of youth and irresponsibility. But it seemed like an effect gotten up at the last moment. It came too late.”

“You are very old,” she said inscrutably. “I did not realize.”

“Also I have not forgotten what you did to me when I was thirty-five. You shook me with that traffic tie-up. It was a magnificent effort. The beauty and power you radiated! You became personified even to my wife, and she feared you. For weeks I wanted to slip out of the house at dark and forget the stuffiness of life with music and cocktails and a girl to make me young. But then — I no longer knew how.”

“And now you are so very old.”

With a sort of awe she moved back and away from him.

“Yes, leave me!” he cried. “You are old also; the spirit withers with the skin. Have you come here only to tell me something I had best forget: that to be old and poor is perhaps more wretched than to be old and rich; to remind me that my son hurls my gray failure in my face?”

“Give me my book,” she commanded harshly. “Be quick, old man!”

Merlin looked at her once more and then patiently obeyed. He picked up the book and handed it to her, shaking his head when she offered him a bill.

“Why go through the farce of paying me? Once you made me wreck these very premises.”

“I did,” she said in anger, “and I’m glad. Perhaps there had been enough done to ruin me.”

She gave him a glance, half disdain, half ill-concealed uneasiness, and with a brisk word to her urban grandson moved toward the door.

Then she was gone — out of his shop — out of his life. The door clicked. With a sigh he turned and walked brokenly back toward the glass partition that enclosed the yellowed accounts of many years as well as the mellowed, wrinkled Miss McCracken.

Merlin regarded her parched, cobwebbed face with an odd sort of pity. She, at any rate, had had less from life than he. No rebellious, romantic spirit popping out unbidden had, in its memorable moments, given her life a zest and a glory.

Then Miss McGracken looked up and spoke to him:

“Still a spunky old piece, isn’t she?”

Merlin started.

“Who?”

“Old Alicia Dare. Mrs. Thomas Allerdyce she is now, of course; has been, these thirty years.”

“What? I don’t understand you.” Merlin sat down suddenly in his swivel chair; his eyes were wide.

“Why, surely, Mr. Grainger, you can’t tell me that you’ve forgotten her, when for ten years she was the most notorious character in New York. Why, one time when she was the correspondent in the Throckmorton divorce case she attracted so much attention on Fifth Avenue that there was a traffic tie-up. Didn’t you read about it in the papers.”

“I never used to read the papers.” His ancient brain was whirring.

“Well, you can’t have forgotten the time she came in here and ruined the business. Let me tell you I came near asking Mr. Moonlight Quill for my salary, and clearing out.”

“Do you mean, that — that you saw her?”

“Saw her! How could I help it with the racket that went on. Heaven knows Mr. Moonlight Quill didn’t like it either but of course he didn’t say anything. He was daffy about her and she could twist him around her little finger. The second he opposed one of her whims she’d threaten to tell his wife on him. Served him right. The idea of that man falling for a pretty adventuress! Of course he was never rich enough for her even though the shop paid well in those days.”

“But when I saw her.” stammered Merlin, “that is, when I thought saw her, she lived with her mother.”

“Mother, trash!”. said Miss McCracken indignantly. “She had a woman there she called ‘Aunty’, who was no more related to her than I am. Oh, she was a bad one — but clever. Right after the Throckmorton divorce case she married Thomas Allerdyce, and made herself secure for life.”

“Who was she?” cried Merlin. “For God’s sake what was she — a witch?”

“Why, she was Alicia Dare, the dancer, of course. In those days you couldn’t pick up a paper without finding her picture.”

Merlin sat very quiet, his brain suddenly fatigued and stilled. He was an old man now indeed, so old that it was impossible for him to dream of ever having been young, so old that the glamour was gone out of the world, passing not into the faces of children and into the persistent comforts of warmth and life, but passing out of the range of sight and feeling. He was never to smile again or to sit in a long reverie when spring evenings wafted the cries of children in at his window until gradually they became the friends of his boyhood out there, urging him to come and play before the last dark came down. He was too old now even for memories.

That night he sat at supper with his wife and son, who had used him for their blind purposes. Olive said:

“Don’t sit there like a death’s-head. Say something.”

“Let him sit quiet,” growled Arthur. “If you encourage him he’ll tell us a story we’ve heard a hundred times before.”

Merlin went up-stairs very quietly at nine o’clock. When he was in his room and had closed the door tight he stood by it for a moment, his thin limbs trembling. He knew now that he had always been a fool.

“O Russet Witch!”

But it was too late. He had angered Providence by resisting too many temptations. There was nothing left but heaven, where he would meet only those who, like him, had wasted earth.

UNCLASSIFIED MASTERPIECES

THE LEES OF HAPPINESS

If you should look through the files of old magazines for the first years of the present century you would find, sandwiched in between the stories of Richard Harding Davis and Frank Norris and others long since dead, the work of one Jeffrey Curtain: a novel or two, and perhaps three or four dozen short stories. You could, if you were interested, follow them along until, say, 1908, when they suddenly disappeared.

When you had read them all you would have been quite sure that here were no masterpieces — here were passably amusing stories, a bit out of date now, but doubtless the sort that would then have whiled away a dreary half hour in a dental office. The man who did them was of good intelligence, talented, glib, probably young. In the samples of his work you found there would have been nothing to stir you to more than a faint interest in the whims of life — no deep interior laughs, no sense of futility or hint of tragedy.

After reading them you would yawn and put the number back in the files, and perhaps, if you were in some library reading-room, you would decide that by way of variety you would look at a newspaper of the period and see whether the Japs had taken Port Arthur. But if by any chance the newspaper you had chosen was the right one and had crackled open at the theatrical page, your eyes would have been arrested and held, and for at least a minute you would have forgotten Port Arthur as quickly as you forgot Château Thierry. For you would, by this fortunate chance, be looking at the portrait of an exquisite woman.

Those were tie days of “Florodora” and of sextets, of pinched-in waists and blown-out sleeves, of almost bustles and absolute ballet skirts, but here, without doubt, disguised as she might be by the unaccustomed stiffness and old fashion of her costume, was a butterfly of butterflies. Here was the gayety of the period — the soft wine of eyes, the songs that flurried hearts, the toasts and tie bouquets, the dances and the dinners. Here was a Venus of the hansom, cab, the Gibson girl in her glorious prime. Here was…

…here was you. Find by looking at the name beneath, one Roxanne Milbank, who had been chorus girl and understudy in “The Daisy Chain,” but who, by reason of an excellent performance when the star was indisposed, had gained a leading part.

You would look again — and wonder. Why you had never heard of her. Why did her name not linger in popular songs and vaudeville jokes and cigar bands, and the memory of that gay old uncle of yours along with Lillian Russell and Stella Mayhew and Anna Held? Roxanne Milbank-whither had she gone? What dark trap-door had opened suddenly and swallowed her up? Her name was certainly not in last Sunday’s supplement on the list of actresses married to English noblemen. No doubt she was dead — poor beautiful young lady — and quite forgotten.

I am hoping too much. I am having you stumble on Jeffrey Curtains’s stories and Roxanne Milbank’s picture. It would be incredible that you should find a newspaper item six months later, a single item two inches by four, which informed the public of the marriage, very quietly, of Miss Roxanne Milbank, who had been on tour with “The Daisy Chain,” to Mr. Jeffrey Curtain, the popular author. “Mrs. Curtain,” it added dispassionately, “will retire from the stage.”

It was a marriage of love. He was sufficiently spoiled to be charming; she was ingenuous enough to be irresistible. Like two floating logs they met in a head-on rush, caught, and sped along together. Yet had Jeffrey Curtain kept at scrivening for twoscore years he could not have put a quirk into one of his stories weirder than the quirk that came into his own life. Had Roxanne Milbank played three dozen parts and filled five thousand houses she could never have had a role with more happiness and more despair than were in the fate prepared for Roxanne Curtain.

For a year they lived in hotels, travelled to California, to Alaska, to Florida, to Mexico, loved and quarrelled gently, and gloried in the golden triflings of his wit with her beauty — they were young and gravely passionate; they demanded everything and then yielded everything again in ecstasies of unselfishness and pride. She loved the swift tones of his voice and his frantic, if unfounded jealousy. He loved her dark radiance, the white irises of her eyes, the warm, lustrous enthusiasm of her smile.

“Don’t you like her?” he would demand rather excitedly and shyly.

“Isn’t she wonderful? Did you ever see — “

“Yes,” they would answer, grinning. “She’s a wonder. You’re lucky.”

The year passed. They tired of hotels. They bought an old house and twenty acres near the town of Marlowe, half an hour from Chicago; bought a little car, and moved out riotously with a pioneering hallucination that would have confounded Balboa.

“Your room will be here!” they cried in turn.

— And then:

“And my room here!”

“And the nursery here when we have children.”

“And we’ll build a sleeping porch — oh, next year.”

They moved out in April. In July Jeffrey’s closest friend, Harry Cromwell same to spend a week — they met him at the end of the long lawn and hurried him proudly to the house.

Harry was married also. His wife had had a baby some six months before and was still recuperating at her mother’s in New York. Roxanne had gathered from Jeffrey that Harry’s wife was not as attractive as Harry — Jeffrey had met her once and considered her — “shallow.” But Harry had been married nearly two years and was apparently happy, so Jeffrey guessed that she was probably all right.

“I’m making biscuits,” chattered Roxanne gravely. “Can you wife make biscuits? The cook is showing me how. I think every woman should know how to make biscuits. It sounds so utterly disarming. A woman who can make biscuits can surely do no —  — “

“You’ll have to come out here and live,” said Jeffrey. “Get a place out in the country like us, for you and Kitty.”

“You don’t know Kitty. She hates the country. She’s got to have her theatres and vaudevilles.”

“Bring her out,” repeated Jeffrey. “We’ll have a colony. There’s an awfully nice crowd here already. Bring her out!”

They were at the porch steps now and Roxanne made a brisk gesture toward a dilapidated structure on the right.

“The garage,” she announced. “It will also be Jeffrey’s writing-room within the month. Meanwhile dinner is at seven. Meanwhile to that I will mix a cocktail.”

The two men ascended to the second floor — that is, they ascended half-way, for at the first landing Jeffrey dropped his guest’s suitcase and in a cross between a query and a cry exclaimed:

“For God’s sake, Harry, how do you like her?”

“We will go up-stairs,” answered his guest, “and we will shut the door.”

Half an hour later as they were sitting together in the library Roxanne reissued from the kitchen, bearing before her a pan of biscuits. Jeffrey and Harry rose.

“They’re beautiful, dear,” said the husband, intensely.

“Exquisite,” murmured Harry.

Roxanne beamed.

“Taste one. I couldn’t bear to touch them before you’d seen them all and I can’t bear to take them back until I find what they taste like.”

“Like manna, darling.”

Simultaneously the two men raised the biscuits to their lips, nibbled tentatively. Simultaneously they tried to change the subject. But Roxanne undeceived, set down the pan and seized a biscuit. After a second her comment rang out with lugubrious finality:

“Absolutely bum!”

“Really —  — “

“Why, I didn’t notice —  — “

Roxanne roared.

“Oh, I’m useless,” she cried laughing. “Turn me out, Jeffrey — I’m a parasite; I’m no goal —  — “

Jeffrey put his arm around her.

“Darling, I’ll eat your biscuits.”

“They’re beautiful, anyway,” insisted Roxanne.

“They’re-they’re decorative,” suggested Harry.

Jeffrey took him up wildly.

“That’s the word. They’re decorative; they’re masterpieces. We’ll use them.”

He rushed to the kitchen and returned with a hammer and a handful of nails.

“We’ll use them, by golly, Roxanne! We’ll make a frieze out of them.”

“Don’t!” wailed Roxanne. “Our beautiful house.”

“Never mind. We’re going to have the library repapered in October.

Don’t you remember?”

“Well —  — “

Bang! The first biscuit was impaled to the wall, where it quivered for a moment like a live thing.

Bang!…

When Roxanne returned, with a second round of cocktails the biscuits were in a perpendicular row, twelve of them, like a collection of primitive spear-heads.

“Roxanne,” exclaimed Jeffrey, “you’re an artist! Cook? — nonsense! You shall illustrate my books!”

During dinner the twilight faltered into dusk, and later it was a starry dark outside, filled and permeated with the frail gorgeousness of Roxanne’s white dress and her tremulous, low laugh.

— Such a little girl she is, thought Harry. Not as old as Kitty.

He compared the two. Kitty — nervous without being sensitive, temperamental without temperament, a woman who seemed to flit and never light — and Roxanne, who was as young as spring night, and summed up in her own adolescent laughter.

— A good match for Jeffrey, he thought again. Two very young people, the sort who’ll stay very young until they suddenly find themselves old.

Harry thought these things between his constant thoughts about Kitty, He was depressed about Kitty. It seemed to him that she was well enough to come back to Chicago and bring his little son. He was thinking vaguely of Kitty when he said good-night to his friend’s wife and his friend at the foot of the stairs.

“You’re our first real house guest,” called Roxanne after him. “Aren’t you thrilled and proud?”

When he was out of sight around the stair corner she turned to Jeffrey, who was standing beside her resting his hand on the end of the banister.

“Are you tired, my dearest?”

Jeffrey rubbed the centre of his forehead with his fingers.

“A little. How did you know?”

“Oh, how could I help knowing about you?”

“It’s a headache,” he said moodily. “Splitting. I’ll take some aspirin.”

She reached over and snapped out the light, and with his arm tight about her waist they walked up the stairs together.

II

Harry’s week passed. They drove about the dreaming lanes or idled in cheerful inanity upon lake or lawn. In the evening Roxanne, sitting inside, played to them while the ashes whitened on the glowing ends of their cigars. Then came a telegram from Kitty saying that she wanted Harry to come East and get her, so Roxanne and Jeffrey were left alone in that privacy of which they never seemed to tire.

“Alone” thrilled them again. They wandered about the house, each feeling intimately the presence of the other; they sat on the same side of the table like honeymooners; they were intensely absorbed, intensely happy.

The town of Marlowe, though a comparatively old settlement, had only recently acquired a “society.” Five or six years before, alarmed at the smoky swelling of Chicago, two or three young married couples, “bungalow people,” had moved out; their friends had followed. The Jeffrey Curtains found an already formed “set” prepared to welcome: them; a country club, ballroom, and golf links yawned for them, and there were bridge parties, and poker parties, and parties where they drank beer, and parties where they drank nothing at all.

It was at a poker party that they found themselves a week after Harry’s departure. There were two tables, and a good proportion of the young wives were smoking and shouting their bets, and being very daringly mannish for those days.

Roxanne had left the game early and taken to perambulation; she wandered into the pantry and found herself some grape juice — beer gave her a headache — and then passed from table to table, looking over shoulders at the hands, keeping an eye on Jeffrey and being pleasantly unexcited and content. Jeffrey, with intense concentration, was raising a pile of chips of all colors, and Roxanne knew by the deepened wrinkle between his eyes that he was interested. She liked to see him interested in small things.

She crossed over quietly and sat down on the arm of his chair.

She sat there five minutes, listening to the sharp intermittent comments of the men and the chatter of the women, which rose from the table like soft smoke — and yet scarcely hearing either. Then quite innocently she reached out her hand, intending to place it on Jeffrey’s shoulder — as it touched him he started of a sudden, gave a short grunt, and, sweeping back his arm furiously, caught her a glancing blow on her elbow.

There was a general gasp. Roxanne regained her balance, gave a little cry, and rose quickly to her feet. It had been the greatest shock of her life. This, from Jeffrey, the heart of kindness, of consideration — this instinctively brutal gesture.

The gasp became a silence. A dozen eyes were turned on Jeffrey, who looked up as though seeing Roxanne for the first time. An expression of bewilderment settled on his face.

“Why — Roxanne —  — “ he said haltingly.

Into a dozen minds entered a quick suspicion, a rumor of scandal. Could it be that behind the scenes with this couple, apparently so in love, lurked some curious antipathy? Why else this streak of fire, across such a cloudless heaven?

“Jeffrey!” — Roxanne’s voice was pleading — startled and horrified, she yet knew that it was a mistake. Not once did it occur to her to blame him or to resent it. Her word was a trembling supplication — “Tell me, Jeffrey,” it said, “tell Roxanne, your own Roxanne.”

“Why, Roxanne — “ began Jeffrey again. The bewildered look changed to pain. He was clearly as startled as she. “I didn’t intend that,” he went on; “you startled me. You — I felt as if some one were attacking me. I — how — why, how idiotic!”

“Jeffrey!” Again the word was a prayer, incense offered up to a high

God through this new and unfathomable darkness.

They were both on their feet, they were saying good-by, faltering, apologizing, explaining. There was no attempt to pass it off easily. That way lay sacrilege. Jeffrey had not been feeling well, they said. He had become nervous. Back of both their minds was the unexplained horror of that blow — the marvel that there had been for an instant something between them — his anger and her fear — and now to both a sorrow, momentary, no doubt, but to be bridged at once, at once, while there was yet time. Was that swift water lashing under their feet — the fierce glint of some uncharted chasm?

Out in their car under the harvest moon he talked brokenly. It was just — incomprehensible to him, he said. He had been thinking of the poker game — absorbed — and the touch on his shoulder had seemed like an attack. An attack! He clung to that word, flung it up as a shield. He had hated what touched him. With the impact of his hand it had gone, that — nervousness. That was all he knew.

Both their eyes filled with tears and they whispered love there under the broad night as the serene streets of Marlowe sped by. Later, when they went to bed, they were quite calm. Jeffrey was to take a week off all work — was simply to loll, and sleep, and go on long walks until this nervousness left him. When they had decided this safety settled down upon Roxanne. The pillows underhead became soft and friendly; the bed on which they lay seemed wide, and white, and sturdy beneath the radiance that streamed in at the window.

Five days later, in the first cool of late afternoon, Jeffrey picked up an oak chair and sent it crashing through his own front window. Then he lay down on the couch like a child, weeping piteously and begging to die. A blood clot the size of a marble had broken his brain.

III

There is a sort of waking nightmare that sets in sometimes when one has missed a sleep or two, a feeling that comes with extreme fatigue and a new sun, that the quality of the life around has changed. It is a fully articulate conviction that somehow the existence one is then leading is a branch shoot of life and is related to life only as a moving picture or a mirror — that the people, and streets, and houses are only projections from a very dim and chaotic past. It was in such a state that Roxanne found herself during the first months of Jeffrey’s illness. She slept only when she was utterly exhausted; she awoke under a cloud. The long, sober-voiced consultations, the faint aura of medicine in the halls, the sudden tiptoeing in a house that had echoed to many cheerful footsteps, and, most of ail, Jeffrey’s white face amid the pillows of the bed they had shared — these things subdued her and made her indelibly older. The doctors held out hope, but that was all. A long rest, they said, and quiet. So responsibility came to Roxanne. It was she who paid the bills, pored over his bank-book, corresponded with his publishers. She was in the kitchen constantly. She learned from the nurse how to prepare his meals and after the first month took complete charge of the sick-room. She had had to let the nurse go for reasons of economy. One of the two colored girls left at the same time. Roxanne was realizing that they had been living from short story to short story.

The most frequent visitor was Harry Cromwell. He had been shocked and depressed by the news, and though his wife was now living with him in Chicago he found time to come out several times a month. Roxanne found his sympathy welcome — there was some quality of suffering in the man, some inherent pitifulness that made her comfortable when he was near. Roxanne’s nature had suddenly deepened. She felt sometimes that with Jeffrey she was losing her children also, those children that now most of all she needed and should have had.

It was six months after Jeffrey’s collapse and when the nightmare had faded, leaving not the old world but a new one, grayer and colder, that she wait to see Harry’s wife. Finding herself in Chicago with an extra hour before train time, she decided out of courtesy to call.

As she stepped inside the door she had an immediate impression that the apartment was very like some place she had seen before — and almost instantly she remembered a round-the-corner bakery of her childhood, a bakery full of rows and rows of pink frosted cakes — a stuffy pink, pink as a food, pink triumphant, vulgar, and odious.

And this apartment was like that. It was pink. It smelled pink!

Mrs. Cromwell, attired in a wrapper of pink and black, opened the door. Her hair was yellow, heightened, Roxanne imagined by a dash of peroxide in the rinsing water every week. Her eyes were a thin waxen blue — she was pretty and too consciously graceful. Her cordiality was strident and intimate, hostility melted so quickly to hospitality that it seemed they were both merely in the face and voice — never touching nor touched by the deep core of egotism beneath.

But to Roxanne these things were secondary; her eyes were caught and held in uncanny fascination by the wrapper. It was vilely unclean. From its lowest hem up four inches it was sheerly dirty with the blue dust of the floor; for the next three inches it was gray — then it shaded off into its natural color, which, was — pink. It was dirty at the sleeves, too, and at the collar — and when the woman turned to lead the way into the parlor, Roxanne was sure that her neck was dirty.

A one-sided rattle of conversation began. Mrs. Cromwell became explicit about her likes and dislikes, her head, her stomach, her teeth, her apartment — avoiding with a sort of insolent meticulousness any inclusion of Roxanne with life, as if presuming that Roxanne, having been dealt a blow, wished life to be carefully skirted.

Roxanne smiled. That kimono! That neck!

After five minutes a little boy toddled into the parlor — a dirty little boy clad in dirty pink rompers. His face was smudgy — Roxanne wanted to take him into her lap and wipe his nose; other parts in the of his head needed attention, his tiny shoes were kicked out at the toes. Unspeakable!

“What a darling little boy!” exclaimed Roxanne, smiling radiantly.

“Come here to me.”

Mrs. Cromwell looked coldly at her son.

“He will get dirty. Look at that face!” She held her head on one side and regarded it critically.

“Isn’t he a darling?” repeated Roxanne.

“Look at his rompers,” frowned Mrs. Cromwell.

“He needs a change, don’t you, George?”

George stared at her curiously. To his mind the word rompers connotated a garment extraneously smeared, as this one.

“I tried to make him look respectable this morning,” complained Mrs. Cromwell as one whose patience had been sorely tried, “and I found he didn’t have any more rompers — so rather than have him go round without any I put him back in those — and his face — “

“How many pairs has he?” Roxanne’s voice was pleasantly curious, “How many feather fans have you?” she might have asked.

“Oh, — “ Mrs. Cromwell considered, wrinkling her pretty brow. “Five, I think. Plenty, I know.”

“You can get them for fifty cents a pair.”

Mrs. Cromwell’s eyes showed surprise — and the faintest superiority.

The price of rompers!

“Can you really? I had no idea. He ought to have plenty, but I haven’t had a minute all week to send the laundry out.” Then, dismissing the subject as irrelevant — “I must show you some things — “

They rose and Roxanne followed her past an open bathroom door whose garment-littered floor showed indeed that the laundry hadn’t been sent out for some time, into another room that was, so to speak, the quintessence of pinkness. This was Mrs. Cromwell’s room.

Here the Hostess opened a closet door and displayed before’ Roxanne’s eyes an amazing collection of lingerie.

There were dozens of filmy marvels of lace and silk, all clean, unruffled, seemingly not yet touched. On hangers beside them were three new evening dresses.

“I have some beautiful things,” said Mrs. Cromwell, “but not much of a chance to wear them. Harry doesn’t care about going out.” Spite crept into her voice. “He’s perfectly content to let me play nursemaid and housekeeper all day and loving wife in the evening.”

Roxanne smiled again.

“You’ve got some beautiful clothes here.”

“Yes, I have. Let me show you —  — “

“Beautiful,” repeated Roxanne, interrupting, “but I’ll have to run if

I’m going to catch my train.”

She felt that her hands were trembling. She wanted to put them on this woman and shake her — shake her. She wanted her locked up somewhere and set to scrubbing floors.

“Beautiful,” she repeated, “and I just came in for a moment.”

“Well, I’m sorry Harry isn’t here.”

They moved toward the door.

“ — and, oh,” said Roxanne with an effort — yet her voice was still gentle and her lips were smiling — “I think it’s Argile’s where you can get those rompers. Good-by.”

It was not until she had reached the station and bought her ticket to Marlowe that Roxanne realized it was the first five minutes in six months that her mind had been off Jeffrey.

IV

A week later Harry appeared at Marlowe, arrived unexpectedly at five o’clock, and coming up the walk sank into a porch chair in a state of exhaustion. Roxanne herself had had a busy day and was worn out. The doctors were coming at five-thirty, bringing a celebrated nerve specialist from New York. She was excited and thoroughly depressed, but Harry’s eyes made her sit down beside him.

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothing, Roxanne,” he denied. “I came to see how Jeff was doing.

Don’t you bother about me.”

“Harry,” insisted Roxanne, “there’s something the matter.”

“Nothing,” he repeated. “How’s Jeff?”

Anxiety darkened her face.

“He’s a little worse, Harry. Doctor Jewett has come on from New York. They thought he could tell me something definite. He’s going to try and find whether this paralysis has anything to do with the original blood clot.”

Harry rose.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” he said jerkily. “I didn’t know you expected a consultation. I wouldn’t have come. I thought I’d just rock on your porch for an hour — “

“Sit down,” she commanded.

Harry hesitated.

“Sit down, Harry, dear boy.” Her kindness flooded out now — enveloped him. “I know there’s something the matter. You’re white as a sheet. I’m going to get you a cool bottle of beer.”

All at once he collapsed into his chair and covered his face with his hands.

“I can’t make her happy,” he said slowly. “I’ve tried and I’ve tried. This morning we had some words about breakfast — I’d been getting my breakfast down town — and — well, just after I went to the office she left the house, went East to her mother’s with George and a suitcase full of lace underwear.”

“Harry!”

“And I don’t know — “

There was a crunch on the gravel, a car turning into the drive.

Roxanne uttered a little cry.

“It’s Doctor Jewett.”

“Oh, I’ll — “

“You’ll wait, won’t you?” she interrupted abstractedly. He saw that his problem had already died on the troubled surface of her mind.

There was an embarrassing minute of vague, elided introductions and then Harry followed the party inside and watched them disappear up the stairs. He went into the library and sat down on the big sofa.

For an hour he watched the sun creep up the patterned folds of the chintz curtains. In the deep quiet a trapped wasp buzzing on the inside of the window pane assumed the proportions of a clamor. From time to time another buzzing drifted down from up-stairs, resembling several more larger wasps caught on larger window-panes. He heard low footfalls, the clink of bottles, the clamor of pouring water.

What had he and Roxanne done that life should deal these crashing blows to them? Up-stairs there was taking place a living inquest on the soul of his friend; he was sitting here in a quiet room listening to the plaint of a wasp, just as when he was a boy he had been compelled by a strict aunt to sit hour-long on a chair and atone for some misbehavior. But who had put him here? What ferocious aunt had leaned out of the sky to make him atone for — what?

About Kitty he felt a great hopelessness. She was too expensive — that was the irremediable difficulty. Suddenly he hated her. He wanted to throw her down and kick at her — to tell her she was a cheat and a leech — that she was dirty. Moreover, she must give him his boy.

He rose and began pacing up and down the room. Simultaneously he heard some one begin walking along the hallway up-stairs in exact time with him. He found himself wondering if they would walk in time until the person reached the end of the hall.

Kitty had gone to her mother. God help her, what a mother to go to! He tried to imagine the meeting: the abused wife collapsing upon the mother’s breast. He could not. That Kitty was capable of any deep grief was unbelievable. He had gradually grown to think of her as something unapproachable and callous. She would get a divorce, of course, and eventually she would marry again. He began to consider this. Whom would she marry? He laughed bitterly, stopped; a picture flashed before him — of Kitty’s arms around some man whose face he could not see, of Kitty’s lips pressed close to other lips in what was surely: passion.

“God!” he cried aloud. “God! God! God!”

Then the pictures came thick and fast. The Kitty of this morning faded; the soiled kimono rolled up and disappeared; the pouts, and rages, and tears all were washed away. Again she was Kitty Carr — Kitty Carr with yellow hair and great baby eyes. Ah, she had loved him, she had loved him.

After a while he perceived that something was amiss with him, something that had nothing to do with Kitty or Jeff, something of a different genre. Amazingly it burst on him at last; he was hungry. Simple enough! He would go into the kitchen in a moment and ask the colored cook for a sandwich. After that he must go back to the city.

He paused at the wall, jerked at something round, and, fingering it absently, put it to his mouth and tasted it as a baby tastes a bright toy. His teeth closed on it — Ah!

She’d left that damn kimono, that dirty pink kimono. She might have had the decency to take it with her, he thought. It would hang in the house like the corpse of their sick alliance. He would try to throw it away, but he would never be able to bring himself to move it. It would be like Kitty, soft and pliable, withal impervious. You couldn’t move Kitty; you couldn’t reach Kitty. There was nothing there to reach. He understood that perfectly — he had understood it all along.

He reached to the wall for another biscuit and with an effort pulled it out, nail and all. He carefully removed the nail from the centre, wondering idly if he had eaten the nail with the first biscuit. Preposterous! He would have remembered — it was a huge nail. He felt his stomach. He must be very hungry. He considered — remembered — yesterday he had had no dinner. It was the girl’s day out and Kitty had lain in her room eating chocolate drops. She had said she felt “smothery” and couldn’t bear having him near her. He had given George a bath and put him to bed, and then lain down on the couch intending to rest a minute before getting his own dinner. There he had fallen asleep and awakened about eleven, to find that there was nothing in the ice-box except a spoonful of potato salad. This he had eaten, together with some chocolate drops that he found on Kitty’s bureau. This morning he had breakfasted hurriedly down town before going to the office. But at noon, beginning to worry about Kitty, he had decided to go home and take her out to lunch. After that there had been the note on his pillow. The pile of lingerie in the closet was gone — and she had left instructions for sending her trunk.

He had never been so hungry, he thought.

At five o’clock, when the visiting nurse tiptoed down-stairs, he was sitting on the sofa staring at the carpet.

“Mr. Cromwell?”

“Yes?”

“Oh, Mrs. Curtain won’t be able to see you at dinner. She’s not well She told me to tell you that the cook will fix you something and that there’s a spare bedroom.”

“She’s sick, you say?”

“She’s lying down in her room. The consultation is just over.”

“Did they — did they decide anything?”

“Yes,” said the nurse softly. “Doctor Jewett says there’s no hope. Mr. Curtain may live indefinitely, but he’ll never see again or move again or think. He’ll just breathe.”

“Just breathe?”

“Yes.”

For the first time the nurse noted that beside the writing-desk where she remembered that she had seen a line of a dozen curious round objects she had vaguely imagined to be some exotic form of decoration, there was now only one. Where the others had been, there was now a series of little nail-holes.

Harry followed her glance dazedly and then rose to his feet.

“I don’t believe I’ll stay. I believe there’s a train.”

She nodded. Harry picked up his hat.

“Good-by,” she said pleasantly.

“Good-by,” he answered, as though talking to himself and, evidently moved by some involuntary necessity, he paused on his way to the door and she saw him pluck the last object from the wall and drop it into his pocket.

Then he opened the screen door and, descending the porch steps, passed out of her sight.

V

After a while the coat of clean white paint on the Jeffrey Curtain house made a definite compromise with the suns of many Julys and showed its good faith by turning gray. It scaled — huge peelings of very brittle old paint leaned over backward like aged men practising grotesque gymnastics and finally dropped to a moldy death in the overgrown grass beneath. The paint on the front pillars became streaky; the white ball was knocked off the left-hand door-post; the green blinds darkened, then lost all pretense of color.

It began to be a house that was avoided by the tender-minded — some church bought a lot diagonally opposite for a graveyard, and this, combined with “the place where Mrs. Curtain stays with that living corpse,” was enough to throw a ghostly aura over that quarter of the road. Not that she was left alone. Men and women came to see her, met her down town, where she went to do her marketing, brought her home in their cars — and came in for a moment to talk and to rest, in the glamour that still played in her smile. But men who did not know her no longer followed her with admiring glances in the street; a diaphanous veil had come down over her beauty, destroying its vividness, yet bringing neither wrinkles nor fat.

She acquired a character in the village — a group of little stories were told of her: how when the country was frozen over one winter so that no wagons nor automobiles could travel, she taught herself to skate so that she could make quick time to the grocer and druggist, and not leave Jeffrey alone for long. It was said that every night since his paralysis she slept in a small bed beside his bed, holding his hand.

Jeffrey Curtain was spoken of as though he were already dead. As the years dropped by those who had known him died or moved away — there were but half a dozen of the old crowd who had drunk cocktails together, called each other’s wives by their first names, and thought that Jeff was about the wittiest and most talented fellow that Marlowe had ever known. How, to the casual visitor, he was merely the reason that Mrs. Curtain excused herself sometimes and hurried upstairs; he was a groan or a sharp cry borne to the silent parlor on the heavy air of a Sunday afternoon.

He could not move; he was stone blind, dumb and totally unconscious. All day he lay in his bed, except for a shift to his wheel-chair every morning while she straightened the room. His paralysis was creeping slowly toward his heart. At first-for the first year — Roxanne had received the faintest answering pressure sometimes when she held his hand — then it had gone, ceased one evening and never come back, and through two nights Roxanne lay wide-eyed, staring into the dark and wondering what had gone, what fraction of his soul had taken flight, what last grain of comprehension those shattered broken nerves still carried to the brain.

After that hope died. Had it not been for her unceasing care the last spark would have gone long before. Every morning she shaved and bathed him, shifted him with her own hands from bed to chair and back to bed. She was in his room constantly, bearing medicine, straightening a pillow, talking to him almost as one talks to a nearly human dog, without hope of response or appreciation, but with the dim persuasion of habit, a prayer when faith has gone.

Not a few people, one celebrated nerve specialist among them, gave her a plain impression that it was futile to exercise so much care, that if Jeffrey had been conscious he would have wished to die, that if his spirit were hovering in some wider air it would agree to no such sacrifice from her, it would fret only for the prison of its body to give it full release.

“But you see,” she replied, shaking her head gently, “when I married

Jeffrey it was — until I ceased to love him.”

“But,” was protested, in effect, “you can’t love that.”

“I can love what it once was. What else is there for me to do?”

The specialist shrugged his shoulders and went away to say that Mrs. Curtain was a remarkable woman and just about as sweet as an angel — but, he added, it was a terrible pity.

“There must be some man, or a dozen, just crazy to take care of her….”

Casually — there were. Here and there some one began in hope — and ended in reverence. There was no love in the woman except, strangely enough, for life, for the people in the world, from the tramp to whom she gave food she could ill afford to the butcher who sold her a cheap cut of steak across the meaty board. The other phase was sealed up somewhere in that expressionless mummy who lay with his face turned ever toward the light as mechanically as a compass needle and waited dumbly for the last wave to wash over his heart.

After eleven years he died in the middle of a May night, when the scent of the syringa hung upon the window-sill and a breeze wafted in the shrillings of the frogs and cicadas outside. Roxanne awoke at two, and realized with a start she was alone in the house at last.

VI

After that she sat on her weather-beaten porch through many afternoons, gazing down across the fields that undulated in a slow descent to the white and green town. She was wondering what she would do with her life. She was thirty-six — handsome, strong, and free. The years had eaten up Jeffrey’s insurance; she had reluctantly parted with the acres to right and left of her, and had even placed a small mortgage on the house.

With her husband’s death had come a great physical restlessness. She missed having to care for him in the morning, she missed her rush to town, and the brief and therefore accentuated neighborly meetings in the butcher’s and grocer’s; she missed the cooking for two, the preparation of delicate liquid food for him. One day, consumed with energy, she went out and spaded up the whole garden, a thing that had not been done for years.

And she was alone at night in the room that had seen the glory of her marriage and then the pain. To meet Jeff again she went back in spirit to that wonderful year, that intense, passionate absorption and companionship, rather than looked forward to a problematical meeting hereafter; she awoke often to lie and wish for that presence beside her — inanimate yet breathing — still Jeff.

One afternoon six months after his death she was sitting on the porch, in a black dress which took away the faintest suggestion of plumpness from her figure. It was Indian summer — golden brown all about her; a hush broken by the sighing of leaves; westward a four o’clock sun dripping streaks of red and yellow over a flaming sky. Most of the birds had gone — only a sparrow that had built itself a nest on the cornice of a pillar kept up an intermittent cheeping varied by occasional fluttering sallies overhead. Roxanne moved her chair to where she could watch him and her mind idled drowsily on the bosom of the afternoon.

Harry Cromwell was coming out from Chicago to dinner. Since his divorce over eight years before he had been a frequent visitor. They had kept up what amounted to a tradition between them: when he arrived they would go to look at Jeff; Harry would sit down on the edge of the bed and in a hearty voice ask:

“Well, Jeff, old man, how do you feel to-day?”

Roxanne, standing beside, would look intently at Jeff, dreaming that some shadowy recognition of this former friend had passed across that broken mind — but the head, pale, carven, would only move slowly in its sole gesture toward the light as if something behind the blind eyes were groping for another light long since gone out.

These visits stretched over eight years — at Easter, Christmas, Thanksgiving, and on many a Sunday Harry had arrived, paid his call on Jeff, and then talked for a long while with Roxanne on the porch. He was devoted to her. He made no pretense of hiding, no attempt to deepen, this relation. She was his best friend as the mass of flesh on the bed there had been his best friend. She was peace, she was rest; she was the past. Of his own tragedy she alone knew.

He had been at the funeral, but since then the company for which he worked had shifted him to the East and only a business trip had brought him to the vicinity of Chicago. Roxanne had written him to come when he could — after a night in the city he had caught a train out.

They shook hands and he helped her move two rockers together.

“How’s George?”

“He’s fine, Roxanne. Seems to like school.”

“Of course it was the only thing to do, to send him.”

“Of course — “

“You miss him horribly, Harry?”

“Yes — I do miss him. He’s a funny boy — “

He talked a lot about George. Roxanne was interested. Harry must bring him out on his next vacation. She had only seen him once in her life — a child in dirty rompers.

She left him with the newspaper while she prepared dinner — she had four chops to-night and some late vegetables from her own garden. She put it all on and then called him, and sitting down together they continued their talk about George.

“If I had a child — “ she would say.

Afterward, Harry having given her what slender advice he could about investments, they walked through the garden, pausing here and there to recognize what had once been a cement bench or where the tennis court had lain….

“Do you remember — “

Then they were off on a flood of reminiscences: the day they had taken all the snap-shots and Jeff had been photographed astride the calf; and the sketch Harry had made of Jeff and Roxanne, lying sprawled in the grass, their heads almost touching. There was to have been a covered lattice connecting the barn-studio with the house, so that Jeff could get there on wet days — the lattice had been started, but nothing remained except a broken triangular piece that still adhered to the house and resembled a battered chicken coop.

“And those mint juleps!”

“And Jeff’s note-book! Do you remember how we’d laugh, Harry, when we’d get it out of his pocket and read aloud a page of material. And how frantic he used to get?”

“Wild! He was such a kid about his writing.”

They were both silent a moment, and then Harry said:

“We were to have a place out here, too. Do you remember? We were to buy the adjoining twenty acres. And the parties we were going to have!”

Again there was a pause, broken this time by a low question from

Roxanne.

“Do you ever hear of her, Harry?”

“Why — yes,” he admitted placidly. “She’s in Seattle. She’s married again to a man named Horton, a sort of lumber king. He’s a great deal older than she is, I believe.”

“And she’s behaving?”

“Yes — that is, I’ve heard so. She has everything, you see. Nothing much to do except dress up for this fellow at dinner-time.”

“I see.”

Without effort he changed the subject.

“Are you going to keep the house?”

“I think so,” she said, nodding. “I’ve lived here so long, Harry, it’d seem terrible to move. I thought of trained nursing, but of course that’d mean leaving. I’ve about decided to be a boarding-house lady.”

“Live in one?”

“No. Keep one. Is there such an anomaly as a boarding-house lady? Anyway I’d have a negress and keep about eight people in the summer and two or three, if I can get them, in the winter. Of course I’ll have to have the house repainted and gone over inside.”

Harry considered.

“Roxanne, why — naturally you know best what you can do, but it does seem a shock, Roxanne. You came here as a bride.”

“Perhaps,” she said, “that’s why I don’t mind remaining here as a boarding-house lady.”

“I remember a certain batch of biscuits.”

“Oh, those biscuits,” she cried. “Still, from all I heard about the way you devoured them, they couldn’t have been so bad. I was so low that day, yet somehow I laughed when the nurse told me about those biscuits.”

“I noticed that the twelve nail-holes are still in the library wall where Jeff drove them.”

“Yes.”

It was getting very dark now, a crispness settled in the air; a little gust of wind sent down a last spray of leaves. Roxanne shivered slightly.

“We’d better go in.”

He looked at his watch.

“It’s late. I’ve got to be leaving. I go East tomorrow.”

“Must you?”

They lingered for a moment just below the stoop, watching a moon that seemed full of snow float out of the distance where the lake lay. Summer was gone and now Indian summer. The grass was cold and there was no mist and no dew. After he left she would go in and light the gas and close the shatters, and he would go down the path and on to the village. To these two life had come quickly and gone, leaving not bitterness, but pity; not disillusion, but only pain. There was already enough moonlight when they shook hands for each to see the gathered kindness in the other’s eyes.

MR. ICKY

THE QUINTESSENCE OF QUAINTNESS IN ONE ACT

The Scene is the Exterior of a Cottage in West Issacshire on a desperately Arcadian afternoon in August. MR. ICKY, quaintly dressed in the costume of an Elizabethan peasant, is pottering and doddering among the pots and dods. He is an old man, well past the prime of life, no longer young, From the fact that there is a burr in his speech and that he has absent-mindedly put on his coat wrongside out, we surmise that he is either above or below the ordinary superficialities of life.

Near him on the grass lies PETER, a little boy. PETER, of course, has his chin on his palm like the pictures of the young Sir Walter Raleigh. He has a complete set of features, including serious, sombre, even funereal, gray eyes — and radiates that alluring air of never having eaten food. This air can best be radiated during the afterglow of a beef dinner. Be is looking at MR. ICKY, fascinated.

Silence. . . . The song of birds.

PETER: Often at night I sit at my window and regard the stars. Sometimes I think they’re my stars…. (Gravely) I think I shall be a star some day….

ME. ICKY: (Whimsically) Yes, yes … yes….

PETER: I know them all: Venus, Mars, Neptune, Gloria Swanson.

MR. ICKY: I don’t take no stock in astronomy…. I’ve been thinking o’ Lunnon, laddie. And calling to mind my daughter, who has gone for to be a typewriter…. (He sighs.)

PETER: I liked Ulsa, Mr. Icky; she was so plump, so round, so buxom.

MR. ICKY: Not worth the paper she was padded with, laddie. (He stumbles over a pile of pots and dods.)

PETER: How is your asthma, Mr. Icky?

MR. ICKY: Worse, thank God!…(Gloomily.) I’m a hundred years old… I’m getting brittle.

PETER: I suppose life has been pretty tame since you gave up petty arson.

MR. ICKY: Yes… yes…. You see, Peter, laddie, when I was fifty I reformed once — in prison.

PETER: You went wrong again?

MR. ICKY: Worse than that. The week before my term expired they insisted on transferring to me the glands of a healthy young prisoner they were executing.

PETER: And it renovated you?

MR. ICKY: Renovated me! It put the Old Nick back into me! This young criminal was evidently a suburban burglar and a kleptomaniac. What was a little playful arson in comparison!

PETER: (Awed) How ghastly! Science is the bunk.

MR. ICKY: (Sighing) I got him pretty well subdued now. ‘Tisn’t every one who has to tire out two sets o’ glands in his lifetime. I wouldn’t take another set for all the animal spirits in an orphan asylum.

PETER: (Considering) I shouldn’t think you’d object to a nice quiet old clergyman’s set.

MR. ICKY: Clergymen haven’t got glands — they have souls.

(There is a low, sonorous honking off stage to indicate that a large motor-car has stopped in the immediate vicinity. Then a young man handsomely attired in a dress-suit and a patent-leather silk hat comes onto the stage. He is very mundane. His contrast to the spirituality of the other two is observable as far back as the first row of the balcony. This is RODNEY DIVINE.)

DIVINE: I am looking for Ulsa Icky.

(MR. ICKY rises and stands tremulously between two dods.)

MR. ICKY: My daughter is in Lunnon.

DIVINE: She has left London. She is coming here. I have followed her.

(He reaches into the little mother-of-pearl satchel that hangs at his side for cigarettes. He selects one and scratching a match touches it to the cigarette. The cigarette instantly lights.)

DIVINE: I shall wait.

(He waits. Several hours pass. There is no sound except an occasional cackle or hiss from the dods as they quarrel among themselves. Several songs can be introduced here or some card tricks by DIVINE or a tumbling act, as desired.)

DIVINE: It’s very quiet here.

MR. ICKY: Yes, very quiet….

(Suddenly a loudly dressed girl appears; she is very worldly. It is ULSA ICKY. On her is one of those shapeless faces peculiar to early Italian painting.)

ULSA: (In a coarse, worldly voice) Feyther! Here I am! Ulsa did what?

MR. ICKY: (Tremulously) Ulsa, little Ulsa. (They embrace each other’s torsos.)

MR. ICKY: (Hopefully) You’ve come back to help with the ploughing.

ULSA: (Sullenly) No, feyther; ploughing’s such a beyther. I’d reyther not.

(Though her accent is broad, the content of her speech is sweet and clean.)

DIVINE: (Conciliatingly) See here, Ulsa. Let’s come to an understanding.

(He advances toward her with the graceful, even stride that made him captain of the striding team at Cambridge.)

ULSA: You still say it would be Jack?

MR. ICKY: What does she mean?

DIVINE: (Kindly) My dear, of course, it would be Jack. It couldn’t be Frank.

MR. ICKY: Frank who?

ULSA: It would be Frank!

(Some risqué joke can be introduced here.)

MR. ICKY: (Whimsically) No good fighting…no good fighting…

DIVINE: (Reaching out to stroke her arm with the powerful movement that made him stroke of the crew at Oxford) You’d better marry me.

ULSA: (Scornfully) Why, they wouldn’t let me in through the servants’ entrance of your house.

DIVINE: (Angrily) They wouldn’t! Never fear — you shall come in through the mistress’ entrance.

ULSA: Sir!

DIVINE: (In confusion) I beg your pardon. You know what I mean?

MR. ICKY: (Aching with whimsey) You want to marry my little

Ulsa?…

DIVINE: I do.

MR. ICKY: Your record is clean.

DIVINE: Excellent. I have the best constitution in the world —

ULSA: And the worst by-laws.

DIVINE: At Eton I was a member at Pop; at Rugby I belonged to

Near-beer. As a younger son I was destined for the police force —

MR. ICKY: Skip that…. Have you money?…

DIVINE: Wads of it. I should expect Ulsa to go down town in sections every morning — in two Rolls Royces. I have also a kiddy-car and a converted tank. I have seats at the opera —

ULSA: (Sullenly) I can’t sleep except in a box. And I’ve heard that you were cashiered from your club.

MR. ICKY: A cashier? …

DIVINE: (Hanging his head) I was cashiered.

ULSA: What for?

DIVINE: (Almost inaudibly) I hid the polo bails one day for a joke.

MR. ICKY: Is your mind in good shape?

DIVINE: (Gloomily) Fair. After all what is brilliance? Merely the tact to sow when no one is looking and reap when every one is.

ME. ICKY; Be careful. … I will-not marry my daughter to an epigram….

DIVINE: (More gloomily) I assure you I’m a mere platitude. I often descend to the level of an innate idea.

ULSA: (Dully) None of what you’re saying matters. I can’t marry a man who thinks it would be Jack. Why Frank would —

DIVINE: (Interrupting) Nonsense!

ULSA: (Emphatically) You’re a fool!

MR. ICKY: Tut-tut! … One should not judge … Charity, my girl. What was it Nero said? — “With malice toward none, with charity toward all — “

PETER: That wasn’t Nero. That was John Drinkwater.

MR. ICKY: Come! Who is this Frank? Who is this Jack?

DIVINE: (Morosely) Gotch.

ULSA: Dempsey.

DIVINE: We were arguing that if they were deadly enemies and locked in a room together which one would come out alive. Now I claimed that Jack Dempsey would take one —

ULSA: (Angrily) Rot! He wouldn’t have a —

DIVINE: (Quickly) You win.

ULSA: Then I love you again.

MR. ICKY: So I’m going to lose my little daughter…

ULSA: You’ve still got a houseful of children,

(CHARLES, ULSA’S brother, coming out of the cottage. He is dressed as if to go to sea; a coil of rope is slung about his shoulder and an anchor is hanging from his neck.)

CHARLES: (Not seeing them) I’m going to sea! I’m going to sea!

(His voice is triumphant.)

MR. ICKY: (Sadly) You went to seed long ago.

CHARLES: I’ve been reading “Conrad.”

PETER: (Dreamily) “Conrad,” ah! “Two Years Before the Mast,” by

Henry James.

CHARLES: What?

PETER: Walter Pater’s version of “Robinson Crusoe.”

CHARLES: (To his feyther) I can’t stay here and rot with you. I want to live my life. I want to hunt eels.

MR. ICKY: I will be here… when you come back….

CHARLES: (Contemptuously) Why, the worms are licking their chops already when they hear your name.

(It will be noticed that some of the characters have not spoken for some time. It will improve the technique if they can be rendering a spirited saxophone number.)

MR. ICKY: (Mournfully) These vales, these hills, these

McCormick harvesters — they mean nothing to my children. I understand.

CHARLES: (More gently) Then you’ll think of me kindly, feyther.

To understand is to forgive.

MR. ICKY: No…no….We never forgive those we can understand….We can only forgive those who wound us for no reason at all….

CHARLES: (Impatiently) I’m so beastly sick of your human nature line. And, anyway, I hate the hours around here.

(Several dozen more of MR. ICKY’S children trip out of the house, trip over the grass, and trip over the pots and dods. They are muttering “We are going away,” and “We are leaving you.”)

MR. ICKY: (His heart breaking) They’re all deserting me. I’ve been too kind. Spare the rod and spoil the fun. Oh, for the glands of a Bismarck.

(There is a honking outside — probably DIVINE’S chauffeur growing impatient for his master.)

MR. ICKY: (In misery) They do not love the soil! They have been faithless to the Great Potato Tradition! (He picks up a handful of soil passionately and rubs it on his bald head. Hair sprouts.) Oh, Wordsworth, Wordsworth, how true you spoke!

”No motion has she now, no force;

She does not hear or feel;

Roll’d round on earth’s diurnal course

In some one’s Oldsmobile.”

(They all groan and shouting “Life” and “Jazz” move slowly toward the wings.)

CHARLES: Back to the soil, yes! I’ve been trying to turn my back to the soil for ten years!

ANOTHER CHILD: The farmers may be the backbone of the country, but who wants to be a backbone?

ANOTHER CHILD: I care not who hoes the lettuce of my country if I can eat the salad!

ALL: Life! Psychic Research! Jazz!

MR. ICKY: (Struggling with himself) I must be quaint. That’s all there is. It’s not life that counts, it’s the quaintness you bring to it….

ALL: We’re going to slide down the Riviera. We’ve got tickets for

Piccadilly Circus. Life! Jazz!

MR. ICKY: Wait. Let me read to you from the Bible. Let me open it at random. One always finds something that bears on the situation.

(He finds a Bible lying in one of the dods and opening it at random begins to read.)

“Ahab and Istemo and Anim, Goson and Olon and Gilo, eleven cities and their villages. Arab, and Ruma, and Esaau — “

CHARLES: (Cruelly) Buy ten more rings and try again.

MR. ICKY: (Trying again) “How beautiful art thou my love, how beautiful art thou! Thy eyes are dove’s eyes, besides what is hid within. Thy hair is as flocks of goats which come up from Mount Galaad — Hm! Rather a coarse passage….”

(His children laugh at him rudely, shouting “Jazz!” and “All life is primarily suggestive!”)

MR. ICKY: (Despondently) It won’t work to-day. (Hopefully) Maybe it’s damp. (He feels it) Yes, it’s damp…. There was water in the dod…. It won’t work.

ALL: It’s damp! It won’t work! Jazz!

ONE OF THE CHILDREN: Come, we must catch the six-thirty.

(Any other cue may be inserted here.)

MR. ICKY: Good-by….

( They all go out. MR. ICKY is left alone. He sighs and walking over to the cottage steps, lies down, and closes his eyes.)

Twilight has come down and the stage is flooded with such light as never was on land or sea. There is no sound except a sheep-herder’s wife in the distance playing an aria from Beethoven’s Tenth Symphony, on a mouth-organ. The great white and gray moths swoop down and light on the old man until he is completely covered by them. But he does not stir.

The curtain goes up and down several times to denote the lapse of several minutes. A good comedy effect can be obtained by having MR. ICKY cling to the curtain and go up and down with it. Fireflies or fairies on wires can also be introduced at this point.

Then PETER appears, a look of almost imbecile sweetness on his face. In his hand he clutches something and from time to time glances at it in a transport of ecstasy. After a struggle with himself he lays it on the old man’s body and then quietly withdraws.

The moths chatter among themselves and then scurry away in sudden fright. And as night deepens there still sparkles there, small, white and round, breathing a subtle perfume to the West Issacshire breeze, PETER’S gift of love — a moth-ball.

(The play can end at this point or can go on indefinitely.)

JEMINA, THE MOUNTAIN GIRL

This don’t pretend to be “Literature.” This is just a tale for red-blooded folks who want a story and not just a lot of “psychological” stuff or “analysis.” Boy, you’ll love it! Read it here, see it in the movies, play it on the phonograph, run it through the sewing-machine.

A WILD THING

It was night in the mountains of Kentucky. Wild hills rose on all sides. Swift mountain streams flowed rapidly up and down the mountains.

Jemima Tantrum was down at the stream, brewing whiskey at the family still.

She was a typical mountain girl.

Her feet were bare. Her hands, large and powerful, hung down below her knees. Her face showed the ravages of work. Although but sixteen, she had for over a dozen years been supporting her aged pappy and mappy by brewing mountain whiskey. From time to time she would pause in her task, and, filling a dipper full of the pure, invigorating liquid, would drain it off — then pursue her work with renewed vigor.

She would place the rye in the vat, thresh it out with her feet and, in twenty minutes, the completed product would be turned out.

A sudden cry made her pause in the act of draining a dipper and look up.

“Hello,” said a voice. It came from a man clad in hunting boots reaching to his neck, who had emerged.

“Can you tell me the way to the Tantrums’ cabin?”

“Are you uns from the settlements down thar?”

She pointed her hand down to the bottom of the hill, where Louisville lay. She had never been there; but once, before she was born, her great-grandfather, old Gore Tantrum, had gone into the settlements in the company of two marshals, and had never come back. So the Tantrums from generation to generation, had learned to dread civilization.

The man was amused. He laughed a light tinkling laugh, the laugh of a Philadelphian. Something in the ring of it thrilled her. She drank off another dipper of whiskey.

“Where is Mr. Tantrum, little girl?” he asked, not without kindness.

She raised her foot and pointed her big toe toward the woods. “Thar in the cabing behind those thar pines. Old Tantrum air my old man.”

The man from the settlements thanked her and strode off. He was fairly vibrant with youth and personality. As he walked along he whistled and sang and turned handsprings and flapjacks, breathing in the fresh, cool air of the mountains.

The air around the still was like wine.

Jemina Tantrum watched him entranced. No one like him had ever come into her life before.

She sat down on the grass and counted her toes. She counted eleven.

She had learned arithmetic in the mountain school.

A MOUNTAIN FEUD

Ten years before a lady from the settlements had opened a school on the mountain. Jemina had no money, but she had paid her way in whiskey, bringing a pailful to school every morning and leaving it on Miss Lafarge’s desk. Miss Lafarge had died of delirium tremens after a year’s teaching, and so Jemina’s education had stopped.

Across the still stream, still another still was standing; It was that of the Doldrums. The Doldrums and the Tantrums never exchanged calls.

They hated each other.

Fifty years before old Jem Doldrum and old Jem Tantrum had quarrelled in the Tantrum cabin over a game of slapjack. Jem Doldrum had thrown the king of hearts in Jem Tantrum’s face, and old Tantrum, enraged, had felled the old Doldrum with the nine of diamonds. Other Doldrums and Tantrums had joined in and the little cabin was soon filled with flying cards. Harstrum Doldrum, one of the younger Doldrums, lay stretched on the floor writhing in agony, the ace of hearts crammed down his throat. Jem Tantrum, standing in the doorway; ran through suit after suit, his face alight with fiendish hatred. Old Mappy Tantrum stood on the table wetting down the Doldrums with hot whiskey. Old Heck Doldrum, having finally run out of trumps, was backed out of the cabin, striking left and right with his tobacco pouch, and gathering around him the rest of his clan. Then they mounted their steers and galloped furiously home.

That night old man Doldrum and his sons, vowing vengeance, had returned, put a ticktock on the Tantrum window, stuck a pin in the doorbell, and beaten a retreat.

A week later the Tantrums had put Cod Liver Oil in the Doldrums’ still, and so, from year to year, the feud had continued, first one family being entirely wiped out, then the other.

THE BIRTH OF LOVE

Every day little Jemina worked the still on her side of the stream, and Boscoe Doldrum worked the still on his side.

Sometimes, with automatic inherited hatred, the feudists would throw whiskey at each other, and Jemina would come home smelling like a French table d’hôte.

But now Jemina was too thoughtful to look across the stream.

How wonderful the stranger had been and how oddly he was dressed! In her innocent way she had never believed that there were any civilized settlements at all, and she had put the belief in them down to the credulity of the mountain people.

She turned to go up to the cabin, and, as she turned something struck her in the neck. It was a sponge, thrown by Boscoe Doldrum — a sponge soaked in whiskey from his still on the other side of the stream.

“Hi, thar, Boscoe Doldrum,” she shouted in her deep bass voice.

“Yo! Jemina Tantrum. Gosh ding yo’!” he returned.

She continued her way to the cabin.

The stranger was talking to her father. Gold had been discovered on the Tantrum land, and the stranger, Edgar Edison, was trying to buy the land for a song. He was considering what song to offer.

She sat upon her hands and watched him.

He was wonderful. When he talked his lips moved.

She sat upon the stove and watched him.

Suddenly there came a blood-curdling scream. The Tantrums rushed to the windows.

It was the Doldrums.

They had hitched their steers to trees and concealed themselves behind the bushes and flowers, and soon a perfect rattle of stones and bricks beat against the windows, bending them inward.

“Father! father!” shrieked Jemina.

Her father took down his slingshot from his slingshot rack on the wall and ran his hand lovingly over the elastic band. He stepped to a loophole. Old Mappy Tantrum stepped to the coalhole.

A MOUNTAIN BATTLE

The stranger was aroused at last. Furious to get at the Doldrums, he tried to escape from the house by crawling up the chimney. Then he thought there might be a door under the bead, but Jemina told him there was not. He hunted for doors under the beds and sofas, but each time Jemina pulled him out and told him there were no doors there. Furious with anger, he beat upon the door and hollered at the Doldrums. They did not answer him, but kept up their fusillade of bricks and stones against the window. Old Pappy Tantrum knew that just as soon as they were able to affect an aperture they would pour in and the fight would be over.

Then old Heck Doldrum, foaming at the mouth and expectorating on the ground, left and right, led the attack.

The terrific slingshots of Pappy Tantrum had not been without their effect. A master shot had disabled one Doldrum, and another Doldrum, shot almost incessantly through the abdomen, fought feebly on.

Nearer and nearer they approached the house.

“We must fly,” shouted the stranger to Jemina. “I will sacrifice myself and bear you away.”

“No,” shouted Pappy Tantrum, his face begrimed. “You stay here and fit on. I will bar Jemina away. I will bar Mappy away. I will bar myself away.”

The man from the settlements, pale and trembling with anger, turned to Ham Tantrum, who stood at the door throwing loophole after loophole at the advancing Doldrums.

“Will you cover the retreat?”

But Ham said that he too had Tantrums to bear away, but that he would leave himself here to help the stranger cover the retreat, if he could think of a way of doing it.

Soon smoke began to filter through the floor and ceiling. Shem Doldrum had come up and touched a match to old Japhet Tantrum’s breath as he leaned from a loophole, and the alcoholic flames shot up on all sides.

The whiskey in the bathtub caught fire. The walls began to fall in.

Jemina and the man from the settlements looked at each other.

“Jemina,” he whispered.

“Stranger,” she answered,

“We will die together,” he said. “If we had lived I would have taken you to the city and married you. With your ability to hold liquor, your social success would have been assured.”

She caressed him idly for a moment, counting her toes softly to herself. The smoke grew thicker. Her left leg was on fire.

She was a human alcohol lamp.

Their lips met in one long kiss and then a wall fell on them and blotted them out.

“As One.”

When the Doldrums burst through the ring of flame, they found them dead where they had fallen, their arms about each other.

Old Jem Doldrum was moved.

He took off his hat.

He filled it with whiskey and drank it off.

“They air dead,” he said slowly, “they hankered after each other. The fit is over now. We must not part them.”

So they threw them together into the stream and the two splashes they made were as one.

ALL THE SAD YOUNG MEN

This third collection of short stories was published in 1926, following The Great Gatsby, and contains nine stories.

The first edition

CONTENTS

THE RICH BOY

WINTER DREAMS

THE BABY PARTY

ABSOLUTION

RAGS MARTIN-JONES AND THE PR-NCE OF W-LES

THE ADJUSTER

HOT AND COLD BLOOD

“THE SENSIBLE THING”

GRETCHEN’S FORTY WINKS

THE RICH BOY

Begin with an individual, and before you know it you find that you have created a type; begin with a type, and you find that you have created--nothing. That is because we are all queer fish, queerer behind our faces and voices than we want any one to know or than we know ourselves. When I hear a man proclaiming himself an “average, honest, open fellow,” I feel pretty sure that he has some definite and perhaps terrible abnormality which he has agreed to conceal--and his protestation of being average and honest and open is his way of reminding himself of his misprision.

There are no types, no plurals. There is a rich boy, and this is his and not his brothers’ story. All my life I have lived among his brothers but this one has been my friend. Besides, if I wrote about his brothers I should have to begin by attacking all the lies that the poor have told about the rich and the rich have told about themselves--such a wild structure they have erected that when we pick up a book about the rich, some instinct prepares us for unreality. Even the intelligent and impassioned reporters of life have made the country of the rich as unreal as fairy-land.

Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different. The only way I can describe young Anson Hunter is to approach him as if he were a foreigner and cling stubbornly to my point of view. If I accept his for a moment I am lost--I have nothing to show but a preposterous movie.

II

Anson was the eldest of six children who would some day divide a fortune of fifteen million dollars, and he reached the age of reason--is it seven?--at the beginning of the century when daring young women were already gliding along Fifth Avenue in electric “mobiles.” In those days he and his brother had an English governess who spoke the language very clearly and crisply and well, so that the two boys grew to speak as she did--their words and sentences were all crisp and clear and not run together as ours are. They didn’t talk exactly like English children but acquired an accent that is peculiar to fashionable people in the city of New York.

In the summer the six children were moved from the house on 71st Street to a big estate in northern Connecticut. It was not a fashionable locality--Anson’s father wanted to delay as long as possible his children’s knowledge of that side of life. He was a man somewhat superior to his class, which composed New York society, and to his period, which was the snobbish and formalized vulgarity of the Gilded Age, and he wanted his sons to learn habits of concentration and have sound constitutions and grow up into right-living and successful men. He and his wife kept an eye on them as well as they were able until the two older boys went away to school, but in huge establishments this is difficult--it was much simpler in the series of small and medium-sized houses in which my own youth was spent--I was never far out of the reach of my mother’s voice, of the sense of her presence, her approval or disapproval.

Anson’s first sense of his superiority came to him when he realized the half-grudging American deference that was paid to him in the Connecticut village. The parents of the boys he played with always inquired after his father and mother, and were vaguely excited when their own children were asked to the Hunters’ house. He accepted this as the natural state of things, and a sort of impatience with all groups of which he was not the center--in money, in position, in authority--remained with him for the rest of his life. He disdained to struggle with other boys for precedence--he expected it to be given him freely, and when it wasn’t he withdrew into his family. His family was sufficient, for in the East money is still a somewhat feudal thing, a clan-forming thing. In the snobbish West, money separates families to form “sets.”

At eighteen, when he went to New Haven, Anson was tall and thick-set, with a clear complexion and a healthy color from the ordered life he had led in school. His hair was yellow and grew in a funny way on his head, his nose was beaked--these two things kept him from being handsome--but he had a confident charm and a certain brusque style, and the upper-class men who passed him on the street knew without being told that he was a rich boy and had gone to one of the best schools. Nevertheless, his very superiority kept him from being a success in college--the independence was mistaken for egotism, and the refusal to accept Yale standards with the proper awe seemed to belittle all those who had. So, long before he graduated, he began to shift the center of his life to New York.

He was at home in New York--there was his own house with “the kind of servants you can’t get any more”--and his own family, of which, because of his good humor and a certain ability to make things go, he was rapidly becoming the center, and the débutante parties, and the correct manly world of the men’s clubs, and the occasional wild spree with the gallant girls whom New Haven only knew from the fifth row. His aspirations were conventional enough--they included even the irreproachable shadow he would some day marry, but they differed from the aspirations of the majority of young men in that there was no mist over them, none of that quality which is variously known as “idealism” or “illusion.” Anson accepted without reservation the world of high finance and high extravagance, of divorce and dissipation, of snobbery and of privilege. Most of our lives end as a compromise--it was as a compromise that his life began.

He and I first met in the late summer of 1917 when he was just out of Yale, and, like the rest of us, was swept up into the systematized hysteria of the war. In the blue-green uniform of the naval aviation he came down to Pensacola, where the hotel orchestras played “I’m sorry, dear,” and we young officers danced with the girls. Every one liked him, and though he ran with the drinkers and wasn’t an especially good pilot, even the instructors treated him with a certain respect. He was always having long talks with them in his confident, logical voice--talks which ended by his getting himself, or, more frequently, another officer, out of some impending trouble. He was convivial, bawdy, robustly avid for pleasure, and we were all surprised when he fell in love with a conservative and rather proper girl.

Her name was Paula Legendre, a dark, serious beauty from somewhere in California. Her family kept a winter residence just outside of town, and in spite of her primness she was enormously popular; there is a large class of men whose egotism can’t endure humor in a woman. But Anson wasn’t that sort, and I couldn’t understand the attraction of her “sincerity”--that was the thing to say about her--for his keen and somewhat sardonic mind.

Nevertheless, they fell in love--and on her terms. He no longer joined the twilight gathering at the De Sota bar, and whenever they were seen together they were engaged in a long, serious dialogue, which must have gone on several weeks. Long afterward he told me that it was not about anything in particular but was composed on both sides of immature and even meaningless statements--the emotional content that gradually came to fill it grew up not out of the words but out of its enormous seriousness. It was a sort of hypnosis. Often it was interrupted, giving way to that emasculated humor we call fun; when they were alone it was resumed again, solemn, low-keyed, and pitched so as to give each other a sense of unity in feeling and thought. They came to resent any interruptions of it, to be unresponsive to facetiousness about life, even to the mild cynicism of their contemporaries. They were only happy when the dialogue was going on, and its seriousness bathed them like the amber glow of an open fire. Toward the end there came an interruption they did not resent--it began to be interrupted by passion.

Oddly enough, Anson was as engrossed in the dialogue as she was and as profoundly affected by it, yet at the same time aware that on his side much was insincere, and on hers much was merely simple. At first, too, he despised her emotional simplicity as well, but with his love her nature deepened and blossomed, and he could despise it no longer. He felt that if he could enter into Paula’s warm safe life he would be happy. The long preparation of the dialogue removed any constraint--he taught her some of what he had learned from more adventurous women, and she responded with a rapt holy intensity. One evening after a dance they agreed to marry, and he wrote a long letter about her to his mother. The next day Paula told him that she was rich, that she had a personal fortune of nearly a million dollars.

III

It was exactly as if they could say “Neither of us has anything: we shall be poor together”--just as delightful that they should be rich instead. It gave them the same communion of adventure. Yet when Anson got leave in April, and Paula and her mother accompanied him North, she was impressed with the standing of his family in New York and with the scale on which they lived. Alone with Anson for the first time in the rooms where he had played as a boy, she was filled with a comfortable emotion, as though she were pre-eminently safe and taken care of. The pictures of Anson in a skull cap at his first school, of Anson on horseback with the sweetheart of a mysterious forgotten summer, of Anson in a gay group of ushers and bridesmaid at a wedding, made her jealous of his life apart from her in the past, and so completely did his authoritative person seem to sum up and typify these possessions of his that she was inspired with the idea of being married immediately and returning to Pensacola as his wife.

But an immediate marriage wasn’t discussed--even the engagement was to be secret until after the war. When she realized that only two days of his leave remained, her dissatisfaction crystallized in the intention of making him as unwilling to wait as she was. They were driving to the country for dinner and she determined to force the issue that night.

Now a cousin of Paula’s was staying with them at the Ritz, a severe, bitter girl who loved Paula but was somewhat jealous of her impressive engagement, and as Paula was late in dressing, the cousin, who wasn’t going to the party, received Anson in the parlor of the suite.

Anson had met friends at five o’clock and drunk freely and indiscreetly with them for an hour. He left the Yale Club at a proper time, and his mother’s chauffeur drove him to the Ritz, but his usual capacity was not in evidence, and the impact of the steam-heated sitting-room made him suddenly dizzy. He knew it, and he was both amused and sorry.

Paula’s cousin was twenty-five, but she was exceptionally naïve, and at first failed to realize what was up. She had never met Anson before, and she was surprised when he mumbled strange information and nearly fell off his chair, but until Paula appeared it didn’t occur to her that what she had taken for the odor of a dry-cleaned uniform was really whiskey. But Paula understood as soon as she appeared; her only thought was to get Anson away before her mother saw him, and at the look in her eyes the cousin understood too.

When Paula and Anson descended to the limousine they found two men inside, both asleep; they were the men with whom he had been drinking at the Yale Club, and they were also going to the party. He had entirely forgotten their presence in the car. On the way to Hempstead they awoke and sang. Some of the songs were rough, and though Paula tried to reconcile herself to the fact that Anson had few verbal inhibitions, her lips tightened with shame and distaste.

Back at the hotel the cousin, confused and agitated, considered the incident, and then walked into Mrs. Legendre’s bedroom, saying: “Isn’t he funny?”

“Who is funny?”

“Why--Mr. Hunter. He seemed so funny.”

Mrs. Legendre looked at her sharply.

“How is he funny?”

“Why, he said he was French. I didn’t know he was French.”

“That’s absurd. You must have misunderstood.” She smiled: “It was a joke.”

The cousin shook her head stubbornly.

“No. He said he was brought up in France. He said he couldn’t speak any English, and that’s why he couldn’t talk to me. And he couldn’t!”

Mrs. Legendre looked away with impatience just as the cousin added thoughtfully, “Perhaps it was because he was so drunk,” and walked out of the room.

This curious report was true. Anson, finding his voice thick and uncontrollable, had taken the unusual refuge of announcing that he spoke no English. Years afterward he used to tell that part of the story, and he invariably communicated the uproarious laughter which the memory aroused in him.

Five times in the next hour Mrs. Legendre tried to get Hempstead on the phone. When she succeeded, there was a ten-minute delay before she heard Paula’s voice on the wire.

“Cousin Jo told me Anson was intoxicated.”

“Oh, no. . . .”

“Oh, yes. Cousin Jo says he was intoxicated. He told her he was French, and fell off his chair and behaved as if he was very intoxicated. I don’t want you to come home with him.”

“Mother, he’s all right! Please don’t worry about--”

“But I do worry. I think it’s dreadful. I want you to promise me not to come home with him.”

“I’ll take care of it, mother. . . .”

“I don’t want you to come home with him.”

“All right, mother. Good-by.”

“Be sure now, Paula. Ask some one to bring you.”

Deliberately Paula took the receiver from her ear and hung it up. Her face was flushed with helpless annoyance. Anson was stretched asleep out in a bedroom up-stairs, while the dinner-party below was proceeding lamely toward conclusion.

The hour’s drive had sobered him somewhat--his arrival was merely hilarious--and Paula hoped that the evening was not spoiled, after all, but two imprudent cocktails before dinner completed the disaster. He talked boisterously and somewhat offensively to the party at large for fifteen minutes, and then slid silently under the table; like a man in an old print--but, unlike an old print, it was rather horrible without being at all quaint. None of the young girls present remarked upon the incident--it seemed to merit only silence. His uncle and two other men carried him up-stairs, and it was just after this that Paula was called to the phone.

An hour later Anson awoke in a fog of nervous agony, through which he perceived after a moment the figure of his uncle Robert standing by the door.

“. . . I said are you better?”

“What?”

“Do you feel better, old man?”

“Terrible,” said Anson.

“I’m going to try you on another bromo-seltzer. If you can hold it down, it’ll do you good to sleep.”

With an effort Anson slid his legs from the bed and stood up.

“I’m all right,” he said dully.

“Take it easy.”

“I thin’ if you gave me a glassbrandy I could go down-stairs.”

“Oh, no--”

“Yes, that’s the only thin’. I’m all right now. . . . I suppose I’m in Dutch dow’ there.”

“They know you’re a little under the weather,” said his uncle deprecatingly. “But don’t worry about it. Schuyler didn’t even get here. He passed away in the locker-room over at the Links.”

Indifferent to any opinion, except Paula’s, Anson was nevertheless determined to save the débris of the evening, but when after a cold bath he made his appearance most of the party had already left. Paula got up immediately to go home.

In the limousine the old serious dialogue began. She had known that he drank, she admitted, but she had never expected anything like this--it seemed to her that perhaps they were not suited to each other, after all. Their ideas about life were too different, and so forth. When she finished speaking, Anson spoke in turn, very soberly. Then Paula said she’d have to think it over; she wouldn’t decide to-night; she was not angry but she was terribly sorry. Nor would she let him come into the hotel with her, but just before she got out of the car she leaned and kissed him unhappily on the cheek.

The next afternoon Anson had a long talk with Mrs. Legendre while Paula sat listening in silence. It was agreed that Paula was to brood over the incident for a proper period and then, if mother and daughter thought it best, they would follow Anson to Pensacola. On his part he apologized with sincerity and dignity--that was all; with every card in her hand Mrs. Legendre was unable to establish any advantage over him. He made no promises, showed no humility, only delivered a few serious comments on life which brought him off with rather a moral superiority at the end. When they came South three weeks later, neither Anson in his satisfaction nor Paula in her relief at the reunion realized that the psychological moment had passed forever.

IV

He dominated and attracted her, and at the same time filled her with anxiety. Confused by his mixture of solidity and self-indulgence, of sentiment and cynicism--incongruities which her gentle mind was unable to resolve--Paula grew to think of him as two alternating personalities. When she saw him alone, or at a formal party, or with his casual inferiors, she felt a tremendous pride in his strong, attractive presence, the paternal, understanding stature of his mind. In other company she became uneasy when what had been a fine imperviousness to mere gentility showed its other face. The other face was gross, humorous, reckless of everything but pleasure. It startled her mind temporarily away from him, even led her into a short covert experiment with an old beau, but it was no use--after four months of Anson’s enveloping vitality there was an anæmic pallor in all other men.

In July he was ordered abroad, and their tenderness and desire reached a crescendo. Paula considered a last-minute marriage--decided against it only because there were always cocktails on his breath now, but the parting itself made her physically ill with grief. After his departure she wrote him long letters of regret for the days of love they had missed by waiting. In August Anson’s plane slipped down into the North Sea. He was pulled onto a destroyer after a night in the water and sent to hospital with pneumonia; the armistice was signed before he was finally sent home.

Then, with every opportunity given back to them, with no material obstacle to overcome, the secret weavings of their temperaments came between them, drying up their kisses and their tears, making their voices less loud to one another, muffling the intimate chatter of their hearts until the old communication was only possible by letters, from far away. One afternoon a society reporter waited for two hours in the Hunters’ house for a confirmation of their engagement. Anson denied it; nevertheless an early issue carried the report as a leading paragraph--they were “constantly seen together at Southampton, Hot Springs, and TuxedoPark.” But the serious dialogue had turned a corner into a long-sustained quarrel, and the affair was almost played out. Anson got drunk flagrantly and missed an engagement with her, whereupon Paula made certain behavioristic demands. His despair was helpless before his pride and his knowledge of himself: the engagement was definitely broken.

“Dearest,” said their letters now, “Dearest, Dearest, when I wake up in the middle of the night and realize that after all it was not to be, I feel that I want to die. I can’t go on living any more. Perhaps when we meet this summer we may talk things over and decide differently--we were so excited and sad that day, and I don’t feel that I can live all my life without you. You speak of other people. Don’t you know there are no other people for me, but only you. . . .”

But as Paula drifted here and there around the East she would sometimes mention her gaieties to make him wonder. Anson was too acute to wonder. When he saw a man’s name in her letters he felt more sure of her and a little disdainful--he was always superior to such things. But he still hoped that they would some day marry.

Meanwhile he plunged vigorously into all the movement and glitter of post-bellum New York, entering a brokerage house, joining half a dozen clubs, dancing late, and moving in three worlds--his own world, the world of young Yale graduates, and that section of the half-world which rests one end on Broadway. But there was always a thorough and infractible eight hours devoted to his work in Wall Street, where the combination of his influential family connection, his sharp intelligence, and his abundance of sheer physical energy brought him almost immediately forward. He had one of those invaluable minds with partitions in it; sometimes he appeared at his office refreshed by less than an hour’s sleep, but such occurrences were rare. So early as 1920 his income in salary and commissions exceeded twelve thousand dollars.

As the Yale tradition slipped into the past he became more and more of a popular figure among his classmates in New York, more popular than he had ever been in college. He lived in a great house, and had the means of introducing young men into other great houses. Moreover, his life already seemed secure, while theirs, for the most part, had arrived again at precarious beginnings. They commenced to turn to him for amusement and escape, and Anson responded readily, taking pleasure in helping people and arranging their affairs.

There were no men in Paula’s letters now, but a note of tenderness ran through them that had not been there before. From several sources he heard that she had “a heavy beau,” Lowell Thayer, a Bostonian of wealth and position, and though he was sure she still loved him, it made him uneasy to think that he might lose her, after all. Save for one unsatisfactory day she had not been in New York for almost five months, and as the rumors multiplied he became increasingly anxious to see her. In February he took his vacation and went down to Florida.

Palm Beach sprawled plump and opulent between the sparkling sapphire of Lake Worth, flawed here and there by house-boats at anchor, and the great turquoise bar of the Atlantic Ocean. The huge bulks of the Breakers and the Royal Poinciana rose as twin paunches from the bright level of the sand, and around them clustered the Dancing Glade, Bradley’s House of Chance, and a dozen modistes and milliners with goods at triple prices from New York. Upon the trellissed veranda of the Breakers two hundred women stepped right, stepped left, wheeled, and slid in that then celebrated calisthenic known as the double-shuffle, while in half-time to the music two thousand bracelets clicked up and down on two hundred arms.

At the Everglades Club after dark Paula and Lowell Thayer and Anson and a casual fourth played bridge with hot cards. It seemed to Anson that her kind, serious face was wan and tired--she had been around now for four, five, years. He had known her for three.

“Two spades.”

“Cigarette? . . . Oh, I beg your pardon. By me.”

“By.”

“I’ll double three spades.”

There were a dozen tables of bridge in the room, which was filling up with smoke. Anson’s eyes met Paula’s, held them persistently even when Thayer’s glance fell between them. . . .

“What was bid?” he asked abstractedly.

“Rose of Washington Square”

sang the young people in the corners:

“I’m withering there

In basement air--”

The smoke banked like fog, and the opening of a door filled the room with blown swirls of ectoplasm. Little Bright Eyes streaked past the tables seeking Mr. Conan Doyle among the Englishmen who were posing as Englishmen about the lobby.

“You could cut it with a knife.”

“. . . cut it with a knife.”

“. . . a knife.”

At the end of the rubber Paula suddenly got up and spoke to Anson in a tense, low voice. With scarcely a glance at Lowell Thayer, they walked out the door and descended a long flight of stone steps--in a moment they were walking hand in hand along the moonlit beach.

“Darling, darling. . . .” They embraced recklessly, passionately, in a shadow. . . . Then Paula drew back her face to let his lips say what she wanted to hear--she could feel the words forming as they kissed again. . . . Again she broke away, listening, but as he pulled her close once more she realized that he had said nothing--only “Darling! Darling!” in that deep, sad whisper that always made her cry. Humbly, obediently, her emotions yielded to him and the tears streamed down her face, but her heart kept on crying: “Ask me--oh, Anson, dearest, ask me!”

“Paula. . . . Paula!”

The words wrung her heart like hands, and Anson, feeling her tremble, knew that emotion was enough. He need say no more, commit their destinies to no practical enigma. Why should he, when he might hold her so, biding his own time, for another year--forever? He was considering them both, her more than himself. For a moment, when she said suddenly that she must go back to her hotel, he hesitated, thinking, first, “This is the moment, after all,” and then: “No, let it wait--she is mine. . . .”

He had forgotten that Paula too was worn away inside with the strain of three years. Her mood passed forever in the night.

He went back to New York next morning filled with a certain restless dissatisfaction. There was a pretty débutante he knew in his car, and for two days they took their meals together. At first he told her a little about Paula and invented an esoteric incompatibility that was keeping them apart. The girl was of a wild, impulsive nature, and she was flattered by Anson’s confidences. Like Kipling’s soldier, he might have possessed himself of most of her before he reached New York, but luckily he was sober and kept control. Late in April, without warning, he received a telegram from Bar Harbor in which Paula told him that she was engaged to Lowell Thayer, and that they would be married immediately in Boston. What he never really believed could happen had happened at last.

Anson filled himself with whiskey that morning, and going to the office, carried on his work without a break--rather with a fear of what would happen if he stopped. In the evening he went out as usual, saying nothing of what had occurred; he was cordial, humorous, unabstracted. But one thing he could not help--for three days, in any place, in any company, he would suddenly bend his head into his hands and cry like a child.

V

In 1922 when Anson went abroad with the junior partner to investigate some London loans, the journey intimated that he was to be taken into the firm. He was twenty-seven now, a little heavy without being definitely stout, and with a manner older than his years. Old people and young people liked him and trusted him, and mothers felt safe when their daughters were in his charge, for he had a way, when he came into a room, of putting himself on a footing with the oldest and most conservative people there. “You and I,” he seemed to say, “we’re solid. We understand.”

He had an instinctive and rather charitable knowledge of the weaknesses of men and women, and, like a priest, it made him the more concerned for the maintenance of outward forms. It was typical of him that every Sunday morning he taught in a fashionable Episcopal Sunday-school--even though a cold shower and a quick change into a cutaway coat were all that separated him from the wild night before. Once, by some mutual instinct, several children got up from the front row and moved to the last. He told this story frequently, and it was usually greeted with hilarious laughter.

After his father’s death he was the practical head of his family, and, in effect, guided the destinies of the younger children. Through a complication his authority did not extend to his father’s estate, which was administrated by his Uncle Robert, who was the horsey member of the family, a good-natured, hard-drinking member of that set which centers about Wheatley Hills.

Uncle Robert and his wife, Edna, had been great friends of Anson’s youth, and the former was disappointed when his nephew’s superiority failed to take a horsey form. He backed him for a city club which was the most difficult in America to enter--one could only join if one’s family had “helped to build up New York” (or, in other words, were rich before 1880)--and when Anson, after his election, neglected it for the Yale Club, Uncle Robert gave him a little talk on the subject. But when on top of that Anson declined to enter Robert Hunter’s own conservative and somewhat neglected brokerage house, his manner grew cooler. Like a primary teacher who has taught all he knew, he slipped out of Anson’s life.

There were so many friends in Anson’s life--scarcely one for whom he had not done some unusual kindness and scarcely one whom he did not occasionally embarrass by his bursts of rough conversation or his habit of getting drunk whenever and however he liked. It annoyed him when any one else blundered in that regard--about his own lapses he was always humorous. Odd things happened to him and he told them with infectious laughter.

I was working in New York that spring, and I used to lunch with him at the Yale Club, which my university was sharing until the completion of our own. I had read of Paula’s marriage, and one afternoon, when I asked him about her, something moved him to tell me the story. After that he frequently invited me to family dinners at his house and behaved as though there was a special relation between us, as though with his confidence a little of that consuming memory had passed into me.

I found that despite the trusting mothers, his attitude toward girls was not indiscriminately protective. It was up to the girl--if she showed an inclination toward looseness, she must take care of herself, even with him.

“Life,” he would explain sometimes, “has made a cynic of me.”

By life he meant Paula. Sometimes, especially when he was drinking, it became a little twisted in his mind, and he thought that she had callously thrown him over.

This “cynicism,” or rather his realization that naturally fast girls were not worth sparing, led to his affair with Dolly Karger. It wasn’t his only affair in those years, but it came nearest to touching him deeply, and it had a profound effect upon his attitude toward life.

Dolly was the daughter of a notorious “publicist” who had married into society. She herself grew up into the Junior League, came out at the Plaza, and went to the Assembly; and only a few old families like the Hunters could question whether or not she “belonged,” for her picture was often in the papers, and she had more enviable attention than many girls who undoubtedly did. She was dark-haired, with carmine lips and a high, lovely color, which she concealed under pinkish-gray powder all through the first year out, because high color was unfashionable--Victorian-pale was the thing to be. She wore black, severe suits and stood with her hands in her pockets leaning a little forward, with a humorous restraint on her face. She danced exquisitely--better than anything she liked to dance--better than anything except making love. Since she was ten she had always been in love, and, usually, with some boy who didn’t respond to her. Those who did--and there were many--bored her after a brief encounter, but for her failures she reserved the warmest spot in her heart. When she met them she would always try once more--sometimes she succeeded, more often she failed.

It never occurred to this gypsy of the unattainable that there was a certain resemblance in those who refused to love her--they shared a hard intuition that saw through to her weakness, not a weakness of emotion but a weakness of rudder. Anson perceived this when he first met her, less than a month after Paula’s marriage. He was drinking rather heavily, and he pretended for a week that he was falling in love with her. Then he dropped her abruptly and forgot--immediately he took up the commanding position in her heart.

Like so many girls of that day Dolly was slackly and indiscreetly wild. The unconventionality of a slightly older generation had been simply one facet of a post-war movement to discredit obsolete manners--Dolly’s was both older and shabbier, and she saw in Anson the two extremes which the emotionally shiftless woman seeks, an abandon to indulgence alternating with a protective strength. In his character she felt both the sybarite and the solid rock, and these two satisfied every need of her nature.

She felt that it was going to be difficult, but she mistook the reason--she thought that Anson and his family expected a more spectacular marriage, but she guessed immediately that her advantage lay in his tendency to drink.

They met at the large débutante dances, but as her infatuation increased they managed to be more and more together. Like most mothers, Mrs. Karger believed that Anson was exceptionally reliable, so she allowed Dolly to go with him to distant country clubs and suburban houses without inquiring closely into their activities or questioning her explanations when they came in late. At first these explanations might have been accurate, but Dolly’s worldly ideas of capturing Anson were soon engulfed in the rising sweep of her emotion. Kisses in the back of taxis and motor-cars were no longer enough; they did a curious thing:

They dropped out of their world for a while and made another world just beneath it where Anson’s tippling and Dolly’s irregular hours would be less noticed and commented on. It was composed, this world, of varying elements--several of Anson’s Yale friends and their wives, two or three young brokers and bond salesmen and a handful of unattached men, fresh from college, with money and a propensity to dissipation. What this world lacked in spaciousness and scale it made up for by allowing them a liberty that it scarcely permitted itself. Moreover, it centered around them and permitted Dolly the pleasure of a faint condescension--a pleasure which Anson, whose whole life was a condescension from the certitudes of his childhood, was unable to share.

He was not in love with her, and in the long feverish winter of their affair he frequently told her so. In the spring he was weary--he wanted to renew his life at some other source--moreover, he saw that either he must break with her now or accept the responsibility of a definite seduction. Her family’s encouraging attitude precipitated his decision--one evening when Mr. Karger knocked discreetly at the library door to announce that he had left a bottle of old brandy in the dining-room, Anson felt that life was hemming him in. That night he wrote her a short letter in which he told her that he was going on his vacation, and that in view of all the circumstances they had better meet no more.

It was June. His family had closed up the house and gone to the country, so he was living temporarily at the Yale Club. I had heard about his affair with Dolly as it developed--accounts salted with humor, for he despised unstable women, and granted them no place in the social edifice in which he believed--and when he told me that night that he was definitely breaking with her I was glad. I had seen Dolly here and there, and each time with a feeling of pity at the hopelessness of her struggle, and of shame at knowing so much about her that I had no right to know. She was what is known as “a pretty little thing,” but there was a certain recklessness which rather fascinated me. Her dedication to the goddess of waste would have been less obvious had she been less spirited--she would most certainly throw herself away, but I was glad when I heard that the sacrifice would not be consummated in my sight.

Anson was going to leave the letter of farewell at her house next morning. It was one of the few houses left open in the Fifth Avenue district, and he knew that the Kargers, acting upon erroneous information from Dolly, had foregone a trip abroad to give their daughter her chance. As he stepped out the door of the Yale Club into Madison Avenue the postman passed him, and he followed back inside. The first letter that caught his eye was in Dolly’s hand.

He knew what it would be--a lonely and tragic monologue, full of the reproaches he knew, the invoked memories, the “I wonder if’s”--all the immemorial intimacies that he had communicated to Paula Legendre in what seemed another age. Thumbing over some bills, he brought it on top again and opened it. To his surprise it was a short, somewhat formal note, which said that Dolly would be unable to go to the country with him for the weekend, because Perry Hull from Chicago had unexpectedly come to town. It added that Anson had brought this on himself: “--if I felt that you loved me as I love you I would go with you at any time, any place, but Perry is so nice, and he so much wants me to marry him--”

Anson smiled contemptuously--he had had experience with such decoy epistles. Moreover, he knew how Dolly had labored over this plan, probably sent for the faithful Perry and calculated the time of his arrival--even labored over the note so that it would make him jealous without driving him away. Like most compromises, it had neither force nor vitality but only a timorous despair.

Suddenly he was angry. He sat down in the lobby and read it again. Then he went to the phone, called Dolly and told her in his clear, compelling voice that he had received her note and would call for her at five o’clock as they had previously planned. Scarcely waiting for the pretended uncertainty of her “Perhaps I can see you for an hour,” he hung up the receiver and went down to his office. On the way he tore his own letter into bits and dropped it in the street.

He was not jealous--she meant nothing to him--but at her pathetic ruse everything stubborn and self-indulgent in him came to the surface. It was a presumption from a mental inferior and it could not be overlooked. If she wanted to know to whom she belonged she would see.

He was on the door-step at quarter past five. Dolly was dressed for the street, and he listened in silence to the paragraph of “I can only see you for an hour,” which she had begun on the phone.

“Put on your hat, Dolly,” he said, “we’ll take a walk.”

They strolled up Madison Avenue and over to Fifth while Anson’s shirt dampened upon his portly body in the deep heat. He talked little, scolding her, making no love to her, but before they had walked six blocks she was his again, apologizing for the note, offering not to see Perry at all as an atonement, offering anything. She thought that he had come because he was beginning to love her.

“I’m hot,” he said when they reached 71st Street. “This is a winter suit. If I stop by the house and change, would you mind waiting for me downstairs? I’ll only be a minute.”

She was happy; the intimacy of his being hot, of any physical fact about him, thrilled her. When they came to the iron-grated door and Anson took out his key she experienced a sort of delight.

Down-stairs it was dark, and after he ascended in the lift Dolly raised a curtain and looked out through opaque lace at the houses over the way. She heard the lift machinery stop, and with the notion of teasing him pressed the button that brought it down. Then on what was more than an impulse she got into it and sent it up to what she guessed was his floor.

“Anson,” she called, laughing a little.

“Just a minute,” he answered from his bedroom . . . then after a brief delay: “Now you can come in.”

He had changed and was buttoning his vest. “This is my room,” he said lightly. “How do you like it?”

She caught sight of Paula’s picture on the wall and stared at it in fascination, just as Paula had stared at the pictures of Anson’s childish sweethearts five years before. She knew something about Paula--sometimes she tortured herself with fragments of the story.

Suddenly she came close to Anson, raising her arms. They embraced. Outside the area window a soft artificial twilight already hovered, though the sun was still bright on a back roof across the way. In half an hour the room would be quite dark. The uncalculated opportunity overwhelmed them, made them both breathless, and they clung more closely. It was eminent, inevitable. Still holding one another, they raised their heads--their eyes fell together upon Paula’s picture, staring down at them from the wall.

Suddenly Anson dropped his arms, and sitting down at his desk tried the drawer with a bunch of keys.

“Like a drink?” he asked in a gruff voice.

“No, Anson.”

He poured himself half a tumbler of whiskey, swallowed it, and then opened the door into the hall.

“Come on,” he said.

Dolly hesitated.

“Anson--I’m going to the country with you tonight, after all. You understand that, don’t you?”

“Of course,” he answered brusquely.

In Dolly’s car they rode on to Long Island, closer in their emotions than they had ever been before. They knew what would happen--not with Paula’s face to remind them that something was lacking, but when they were alone in the still, hot Long Island night they did not care.

The estate in Port Washington where they were to spend the week-end belonged to a cousin of Anson’s who had married a Montana copper operator. An interminable drive began at the lodge and twisted under imported poplar saplings toward a huge, pink, Spanish house. Anson had often visited there before.

After dinner they danced at the Linx Club. About midnight Anson assured himself that his cousins would not leave before two--then he explained that Dolly was tired; he would take her home and return to the dance later. Trembling a little with excitement, they got into a borrowed car together and drove to Port Washington. As they reached the lodge he stopped and spoke to the night-watchman.

“When are you making a round, Carl?”

“Right away.”

“Then you’ll be here till everybody’s in?”

“Yes, sir.”

“All right. Listen: if any automobile, no matter whose it is, turns in at this gate, I want you to phone the house immediately.” He put a five-dollar bill into Carl’s hand. “Is that clear?”

“Yes, Mr. Anson.” Being of the Old World, he neither winked nor smiled. Yet Dolly sat with her face turned slightly away.

Anson had a key. Once inside he poured a drink for both of them--Dolly left hers untouched--then he ascertained definitely the location of the phone, and found that it was within easy hearing distance of their rooms, both of which were on the first floor.

Five minutes later he knocked at the door of Dolly’s room.

“Anson?” He went in, closing the door behind him. She was in bed, leaning up anxiously with elbows on the pillow; sitting beside her he took her in his arms.

“Anson, darling.”

He didn’t answer.

“Anson. . . . Anson! I love you. . . . Say you love me. Say it now--can’t you say it now? Even if you don’t mean it?”

He did not listen. Over her head he perceived that the picture of Paula was hanging here upon this wall.

He got up and went close to it. The frame gleamed faintly with thrice-reflected moonlight--within was a blurred shadow of a face that he saw he did not know. Almost sobbing, he turned around and stared with abomination at the little figure on the bed.

“This is all foolishness,” he said thickly. “I don’t know what I was thinking about. I don’t love you and you’d better wait for somebody that loves you. I don’t love you a bit, can’t you understand?”

His voice broke, and he went hurriedly out. Back in the salon he was pouring himself a drink with uneasy fingers, when the front door opened suddenly, and his cousin came in.

“Why, Anson, I hear Dolly’s sick,” she began solicitously. “I hear she’s sick. . . .”

“It was nothing,” he interrupted, raising his voice so that it would carry into Dolly’s room. “She was a little tired. She went to bed.”

For a long time afterward Anson believed that a protective God sometimes interfered in human affairs. But Dolly Karger, lying awake and staring at the ceiling, never again believed in anything at all.

VI

When Dolly married during the following autumn, Anson was in London on business. Like Paula’s marriage, it was sudden, but it affected him in a different way. At first he felt that it was funny, and had an inclination to laugh when he thought of it. Later it depressed him--it made him feel old.

There was something repetitive about it--why, Paula and Dolly had belonged to different generations. He had a foretaste of the sensation of a man of forty who hears that the daughter of an old flame has married. He wired congratulations and, as was not the case with Paula, they were sincere--he had never really hoped that Paula would be happy.

When he returned to New York, he was made a partner in the firm, and, as his responsibilities increased, he had less time on his hands. The refusal of a life-insurance company to issue him a policy made such an impression on him that he stopped drinking for a year, and claimed that he felt better physically, though I think he missed the convivial recounting of those Celliniesque adventures which, in his early twenties, had played such a part of his life. But he never abandoned the Yale Club. He was a figure there, a personality, and the tendency of his class, who were now seven years out of college, to drift away to more sober haunts was checked by his presence.

His day was never too full nor his mind too weary to give any sort of aid to any one who asked it. What had been done at first through pride and superiority had become a habit and a passion. And there was always something--a younger brother in trouble at New Haven, a quarrel to be patched up between a friend and his wife, a position to be found for this man, an investment for that. But his specialty was the solving of problems for young married people. Young married people fascinated him and their apartments were almost sacred to him--he knew the story of their love-affair, advised them where to live and how, and remembered their babies’ names. Toward young wives his attitude was circumspect: he never abused the trust which their husbands--strangely enough in view of his unconcealed irregularities--invariably reposed in him.

He came to take a vicarious pleasure in happy marriages, and to be inspired to an almost equally pleasant melancholy by those that went astray. Not a season passed that he did not witness the collapse of an affair that perhaps he himself had fathered. When Paula was divorced and almost immediately remarried to another Bostonian, he talked about her to me all one afternoon. He would never love any one as he had loved Paula, but he insisted that he no longer cared.

“I’ll never marry,” he came to say; “I’ve seen too much of it, and I know a happy marriage is a very rare thing. Besides, I’m too old.”

But he did believe in marriage. Like all men who spring from a happy and successful marriage, he believed in it passionately--nothing he had seen would change his belief, his cynicism dissolved upon it like air. But he did really believe he was too old. At twenty-eight he began to accept with equanimity the prospect of marrying without romantic love; he resolutely chose a New York girl of his own class, pretty, intelligent, congenial, above reproach--and set about falling in love with her. The things he had said to Paula with sincerity, to other girls with grace, he could no longer say at all without smiling, or with the force necessary to convince.

“When I’m forty,” he told his friends, “I’ll be ripe. I’ll fall for some chorus girl like the rest.”

Nevertheless, he persisted in his attempt. His mother wanted to see him married, and he could now well afford it--he had a seat on the Stock Exchange, and his earned income came to twenty-five thousand a year. The idea was agreeable: when his friends--he spent most of his time with the set he and Dolly had evolved--closed themselves in behind domestic doors at night, he no longer rejoiced in his freedom. He even wondered if he should have married Dolly. Not even Paula had loved him more, and he was learning the rarity, in a single life, of encountering true emotion.

Just as this mood began to creep over him a disquieting story reached his ear. His aunt Edna, a woman just this side of forty, was carrying on an open intrigue with a dissolute, hard-drinking young man named Cary Sloane. Every one knew of it except Anson’s Uncle Robert, who for fifteen years had talked long in clubs and taken his wife for granted.

Anson heard the story again and again with increasing annoyance. Something of his old feeling for his uncle came back to him, a feeling that was more than personal, a reversion toward that family solidarity on which he had based his pride. His intuition singled out the essential point of the affair, which was that his uncle shouldn’t be hurt. It was his first experiment in unsolicited meddling, but with his knowledge of Edna’s character he felt that he could handle the matter better than a district judge or his uncle.

His uncle was in Hot Springs. Anson traced down the sources of the scandal so that there should be no possibility of mistake and then he called Edna and asked her to lunch with him at the Plaza next day. Something in his tone must have frightened her, for she was reluctant, but he insisted, putting off the date until she had no excuse for refusing.

She met him at the appointed time in the Plaza lobby, a lovely, faded, gray-eyed blonde in a coat of Russian sable. Five great rings, cold with diamonds and emeralds, sparkled on her slender hands. It occurred to Anson that it was his father’s intelligence and not his uncle’s that had earned the fur and the stones, the rich brilliance that buoyed up her passing beauty.

Though Edna scented his hostility, she was unprepared for the directness of his approach.

“Edna, I’m astonished at the way you’ve been acting,” he said in a strong, frank voice. “At first I couldn’t believe it.”

“Believe what?” she demanded sharply.

“You needn’t pretend with me, Edna. I’m talking about Cary Sloane. Aside from any other consideration, I didn’t think you could treat Uncle Robert--”

“Now look here, Anson--” she began angrily, but his peremptory voice broke through hers:

“--and your children in such a way. You’ve been married eighteen years, and you’re old enough to know better.”

“You can’t talk to me like that! You--”

“Yes, I can. Uncle Robert has always been my best friend.” He was tremendously moved. He felt a real distress about his uncle, about his three young cousins.

Edna stood up, leaving her crab-flake cocktail untasted.

“This is the silliest thing--”

“Very well, if you won’t listen to me I’ll go to Uncle Robert and tell him the whole story--he’s bound to hear it sooner or later. And afterward I’ll go to old Moses Sloane.”

Edna faltered back into her chair.

“Don’t talk so loud,” she begged him. Her eyes blurred with tears. “You have no idea how your voice carries. You might have chosen a less public place to make all these crazy accusations.”

He didn’t answer.

“Oh, you never liked me, I know,” she went on. “You’re just taking advantage of some silly gossip to try and break up the only interesting friendship I’ve ever had. What did I ever do to make you hate me so?”

Still Anson waited. There would be the appeal to his chivalry, then to his pity, finally to his superior sophistication--when he had shouldered his way through all these there would be admissions, and he could come to grips with her. By being silent, by being impervious, by returning constantly to his main weapon, which was his own true emotion, he bullied her into frantic despair as the luncheon hour slipped away. At two o’clock she took out a mirror and a handkerchief, shined away the marks of her tears and powdered the slight hollows where they had lain. She had agreed to meet him at her own house at five.

When he arrived she was stretched on a chaise-longue which was covered with cretonne for the summer, and the tears he had called up at luncheon seemed still to be standing in her eyes. Then he was aware of Cary Sloane’s dark anxious presence upon the cold hearth.

“What’s this idea of yours?” broke out Sloane immediately. “I understand you invited Edna to lunch and then threatened her on the basis of some cheap scandal.”

Anson sat down.

“I have no reason to think it’s only scandal.”

“I hear you’re going to take it to Robert Hunter, and to my father.”

Anson nodded.

“Either you break it off--or I will,” he said.

“What God damned business is it of yours, Hunter?”

“Don’t lose your temper, Cary,” said Edna nervously. “It’s only a question of showing him how absurd--”

“For one thing, it’s my name that’s being handed around,” interrupted Anson. “That’s all that concerns you, Cary.”

“Edna isn’t a member of your family.”

“She most certainly is!” His anger mounted. “Why--she owes this house and the rings on her fingers to my father’s brains. When Uncle Robert married her she didn’t have a penny.”

They all looked at the rings as if they had a significant bearing on the situation. Edna made a gesture to take them from her hand.

“I guess they’re not the only rings in the world,” said Sloane.

“Oh, this is absurd,” cried Edna. “Anson, will you listen to me? I’ve found out how the silly story started. It was a maid I discharged who went right to the Chilicheffs--all these Russians pump things out of their servants and then put a false meaning on them.” She brought down her fist angrily on the table: “And after Tom lent them the limousine for a whole month when we were South last winter--”

“Do you see?” demanded Sloane eagerly. “This maid got hold of the wrong end of the thing. She knew that Edna and I were friends, and she carried it to the Chilicheffs. In Russia they assume that if a man and a woman--”

He enlarged the theme to a disquisition upon social relations in the Caucasus.

“If that’s the case it better be explained to Uncle Robert,” said Anson dryly, “so that when the rumors do reach him he’ll know they’re not true.”

Adopting the method he had followed with Edna at luncheon he let them explain it all away. He knew that they were guilty and that presently they would cross the line from explanation into justification and convict themselves more definitely than he could ever do. By seven they had taken the desperate step of telling him the truth--Robert Hunter’s neglect, Edna’s empty life, the casual dalliance that had flamed up into passion--but like so many true stories it had the misfortune of being old, and its enfeebled body beat helplessly against the armor of Anson’s will. The threat to go to Sloane’s father sealed their helplessness, for the latter, a retired cotton broker out of Alabama, was a notorious fundamentalist who controlled his son by a rigid allowance and the promise that at his next vagary the allowance would stop forever.

They dined at a small French restaurant, and the discussion continued--at one time Sloane resorted to physical threats, a little later they were both imploring him to give them time. But Anson was obdurate. He saw that Edna was breaking up, and that her spirit must not be refreshed by any renewal of their passion.

At two o’clock in a small night-club on 53d Street, Edna’s nerves suddenly collapsed, and she cried to go home. Sloane had been drinking heavily all evening, and he was faintly maudlin, leaning on the table and weeping a little with his face in his hands. Quickly Anson gave them his terms. Sloane was to leave town for six months, and he must be gone within forty-eight hours. When he returned there was to be no resumption of the affair, but at the end of a year Edna might, if she wished, tell Robert Hunter that she wanted a divorce and go about it in the usual way.

He paused, gaining confidence from their faces for his final word.

“Or there’s another thing you can do,” he said slowly, “if Edna wants to leave her children, there’s nothing I can do to prevent your running off together.”

“I want to go home!” cried Edna again. “Oh, haven’t you done enough to us for one day?”

Outside it was dark, save for a blurred glow from Sixth Avenue down the street. In that light those two who had been lovers looked for the last time into each other’s tragic faces, realizing that between them there was not enough youth and strength to avert their eternal parting. Sloane walked suddenly off down the street and Anson tapped a dozing taxi-driver on the arm.

It was almost four; there was a patient flow of cleaning water along the ghostly pavement of Fifth Avenue, and the shadows of two night women flitted over the dark façade of St. Thomas’s church. Then the desolate shrubbery of Central Park where Anson had often played as a child, and the mounting numbers, significant as names, of the marching streets. This was his city, he thought, where his name had flourished through five generations. No change could alter the permanence of its place here, for change itself was the essential substratum by which he and those of his name identified themselves with the spirit of New York. Resourcefulness and a powerful will--for his threats in weaker hands would have been less than nothing--had beaten the gathering dust from his uncle’s name, from the name of his family, from even this shivering figure that sat beside him in the car.

Cary Sloane’s body was found next morning on the lower shelf of a pillar of QueensboroBridge. In the darkness and in his excitement he had thought that it was the water flowing black beneath him, but in less than a second it made no possible difference--unless he had planned to think one last thought of Edna, and call out her name as he struggled feebly in the water.

VII

Anson never blamed himself for his part in this affair--the situation which brought it about had not been of his making. But the just suffer with the unjust, and he found that his oldest and somehow his most precious friendship was over. He never knew what distorted story Edna told, but he was welcome in his uncle’s house no longer.

Just before Christmas Mrs. Hunter retired to a select Episcopal heaven, and Anson became the responsible head of his family. An unmarried aunt who had lived with them for years ran the house, and attempted with helpless inefficiency to chaperone the younger girls. All the children were less self-reliant than Anson, more conventional both in their virtues and in their shortcomings. Mrs. Hunter’s death had postponed the début of one daughter and the wedding of another. Also it had taken something deeply material from all of them, for with her passing the quiet, expensive superiority of the Hunters came to an end.

For one thing, the estate, considerably diminished by two inheritance taxes and soon to be divided among six children, was not a notable fortune any more. Anson saw a tendency in his youngest sisters to speak rather respectfully of families that hadn’t “existed” twenty years ago. His own feeling of precedence was not echoed in them--sometimes they were conventionally snobbish, that was all. For another thing, this was the last summer they would spend on the Connecticut estate; the clamor against it was too loud: “Who wants to waste the best months of the year shut up in that dead old town?” Reluctantly he yielded--the house would go into the market in the fall, and next summer they would rent a smaller place in WestchesterCounty. It was a step down from the expensive simplicity of his father’s idea, and, while he sympathized with the revolt, it also annoyed him; during his mother’s lifetime he had gone up there at least every other week-end--even in the gayest summers.

Yet he himself was part of this change, and his strong instinct for life had turned him in his twenties from the hollow obsequies of that abortive leisure class. He did not see this clearly--he still felt that there was a norm, a standard of society. But there was no norm, it was doubtful if there had ever been a true norm in New York. The few who still paid and fought to enter a particular set succeeded only to find that as a society it scarcely functioned--or, what was more alarming, that the Bohemia from which they fled sat above them at table.

At twenty-nine Anson’s chief concern was his own growing loneliness. He was sure now that he would never marry. The number of weddings at which he had officiated as best man or usher was past all counting--there was a drawer at home that bulged with the official neckties of this or that wedding-party, neckties standing for romances that had not endured a year, for couples who had passed completely from his life. Scarf-pins, gold pencils, cuff-buttons, presents from a generation of grooms had passed through his jewel-box and been lost--and with every ceremony he was less and less able to imagine himself in the groom’s place. Under his hearty good-will toward all those marriages there was despair about his own.

And as he neared thirty he became not a little depressed at the inroads that marriage, especially lately, had made upon his friendships. Groups of people had a disconcerting tendency to dissolve and disappear. The men from his own college--and it was upon them he had expended the most time and affection--were the most elusive of all. Most of them were drawn deep into domesticity, two were dead, one lived abroad, one was in Hollywood writing continuities for pictures that Anson went faithfully to see.

Most of them, however, were permanent commuters with an intricate family life centering around some suburban country club, and it was from these that he felt his estrangement most keenly.

In the early days of their married life they had all needed him; he gave them advice about their slim finances, he exorcised their doubts about the advisability of bringing a baby into two rooms and a bath, especially he stood for the great world outside. But now their financial troubles were in the past and the fearfully expected child had evolved into an absorbing family. They were always glad to see old Anson, but they dressed up for him and tried to impress him with their present importance, and kept their troubles to themselves. They needed him no longer.

A few weeks before his thirtieth birthday the last of his early and intimate friends was married. Anson acted in his usual rôle of best man, gave his usual silver tea-service, and went down to the usual Homeric to say good-by. It was a hot Friday afternoon in May, and as he walked from the pier he realized that Saturday closing had begun and he was free until Monday morning.

“Go where?” he asked himself.

The Yale Club, of course; bridge until dinner, then four or five raw cocktails in somebody’s room and a pleasant confused evening. He regretted that this afternoon’s groom wouldn’t be along--they had always been able to cram so much into such nights: they knew how to attach women and how to get rid of them, how much consideration any girl deserved from their intelligent hedonism. A party was an adjusted thing--you took certain girls to certain places and spent just so much on their amusement; you drank a little, not much, more than you ought to drink, and at a certain time in the morning you stood up and said you were going home. You avoided college boys, sponges, future engagements, fights, sentiment, and indiscretions. That was the way it was done. All the rest was dissipation.

In the morning you were never violently sorry--you made no resolutions, but if you had overdone it and your heart was slightly out of order, you went on the wagon for a few days without saying anything about it, and waited until an accumulation of nervous boredom projected you into another party.

The lobby of the Yale Club was unpopulated. In the bar three very young alumni looked up at him, momentarily and without curiosity.

“Hello there, Oscar,” he said to the bartender. “Mr. Cahill been around this afternoon?”

“Mr. Cahill’s gone to New Haven.”

“Oh . . . that so?”

“Gone to the ball game. Lot of men gone up.”

Anson looked once again into the lobby, considered for a moment, and then walked out and over to Fifth Avenue. From the broad window of one of his clubs--one that he had scarcely visited in five years--a gray man with watery eyes stared down at him. Anson looked quickly away--that figure sitting in vacant resignation, in supercilious solitude, depressed him. He stopped and, retracing his steps, started over 47th Street toward Teak Warden’s apartment. Teak and his wife had once been his most familiar friends--it was a household where he and Dolly Karger had been used to go in the days of their affair. But Teak had taken to drink, and his wife had remarked publicly that Anson was a bad influence on him. The remark reached Anson in an exaggerated form--when it was finally cleared up, the delicate spell of intimacy was broken, never to be renewed.

“Is Mr. Warden at home?” he inquired.

“They’ve gone to the country.”

The fact unexpectedly cut at him. They were gone to the country and he hadn’t known. Two years before he would have known the date, the hour, come up at the last moment for a final drink, and planned his first visit to them. Now they had gone without a word.

Anson looked at his watch and considered a week-end with his family, but the only train was a local that would jolt through the aggressive heat for three hours. And to-morrow in the country, and Sunday--he was in no mood for porch-bridge with polite undergraduates, and dancing after dinner at a rural roadhouse, a diminutive of gaiety which his father had estimated too well.

“Oh, no,” he said to himself. . . . “No.”

He was a dignified, impressive young man, rather stout now, but otherwise unmarked by dissipation. He could have been cast for a pillar of something--at times you were sure it was not society, at others nothing else--for the law, for the church. He stood for a few minutes motionless on the sidewalk in front of a 47th Street apartment-house; for almost the first time in his life he had nothing whatever to do.

Then he began to walk briskly up Fifth Avenue, as if he had just been reminded of an important engagement there. The necessity of dissimulation is one of the few characteristics that we share with dogs, and I think of Anson on that day as some well-bred specimen who had been disappointed at a familiar back door. He was going to see Nick, once a fashionable bartender in demand at all private dances, and now employed in cooling non-alcoholic champagne among the labyrinthine cellars of the Plaza Hotel.

“Nick,” he said, “what’s happened to everything?”

“Dead,” Nick said.

“Make me a whiskey sour.” Anson handed a pint bottle over the counter. “Nick, the girls are different; I had a little girl in Brooklyn and she got married last week without letting me know.”

“That a fact? Ha-ha-ha,” responded Nick diplomatically. “Slipped it over on you.”

“Absolutely,” said Anson. “And I was out with her the night before.”

“Ha-ha-ha,” said Nick, “ha-ha-ha!”

“Do you remember the wedding, Nick, in Hot Springs where I had the waiters and the musicians singing ‘God save the King’?”

“Now where was that, Mr. Hunter?” Nick concentrated doubtfully. “Seems to me that was--”

“Next time they were back for more, and I began to wonder how much I’d paid them,” continued Anson.

“--seems to me that was at Mr. Trenholm’s wedding.”

“Don’t know him,” said Anson decisively. He was offended that a strange name should intrude upon his reminiscences; Nick perceived this.

“Naw--aw--” he admitted, “I ought to know that. It was one of your crowd--Brakins. . . . Baker--”

“Bicker Baker,” said Anson responsively. “They put me in a hearse after it was over and covered me up with flowers and drove me away.”

“Ha-ha-ha,” said Nick. “Ha-ha-ha.”

Nick’s simulation of the old family servant paled presently and Anson went up-stairs to the lobby. He looked around--his eyes met the glance of an unfamiliar clerk at the desk, then fell upon a flower from the morning’s marriage hesitating in the mouth of a brass cuspidor. He went out and walked slowly toward the blood-red sun over Columbus Circle. Suddenly he turned around and, retracing his steps to the Plaza, immured himself in a telephone-booth.

Later he said that he tried to get me three times that afternoon, that he tried every one who might be in New York--men and girls he had not seen for years, an artist’s model of his college days whose faded number was still in his address book--Central told him that even the exchange existed no longer. At length his quest roved into the country, and he held brief disappointing conversations with emphatic butlers and maids. So-and-so was out, riding, swimming, playing golf, sailed to Europe last week. Who shall I say phoned?

It was intolerable that he should pass the evening alone--the private reckonings which one plans for a moment of leisure lose every charm when the solitude is enforced. There were always women of a sort, but the ones he knew had temporarily vanished, and to pass a New York evening in the hired company of a stranger never occurred to him--he would have considered that that was something shameful and secret, the diversion of a travelling salesman in a strange town.

Anson paid the telephone bill--the girl tried unsuccessfully to joke with him about its size--and for the second time that afternoon started to leave the Plaza and go he knew not where. Near the revolving door the figure of a woman, obviously with child, stood sideways to the light--a sheer beige cape fluttered at her shoulders when the door turned and, each time, she looked impatiently toward it as if she were weary of waiting. At the first sight of her a strong nervous thrill of familiarity went over him, but not until he was within five feet of her did he realize that it was Paula.

“Why, Anson Hunter!”

His heart turned over.

“Why, Paula--”

“Why, this is wonderful. I can’t believe it, Anson!”

She took both his hands, and he saw in the freedom of the gesture that the memory of him had lost poignancy to her. But not to him--he felt that old mood that she evoked in him stealing over his brain, that gentleness with which he had always met her optimism as if afraid to mar its surface.

“We’re at Rye for the summer. Pete had to come East on business--you know of course I’m Mrs. Peter Hagerty now--so we brought the children and took a house. You’ve got to come out and see us.”

“Can I?” he asked directly. “When?”

“When you like. Here’s Pete.” The revolving door functioned, giving up a fine tall man of thirty with a tanned face and a trim mustache. His immaculate fitness made a sharp contrast with Anson’s increasing bulk, which was obvious under the faintly tight cut-away coat.

“You oughtn’t to be standing,” said Hagerty to his wife. “Let’s sit down here.” He indicated lobby chairs, but Paula hesitated.

“I’ve got to go right home,” she said. “Anson, why don’t you--why don’t you come out and have dinner with us to-night? We’re just getting settled, but if you can stand that--”

Hagerty confirmed the invitation cordially.

“Come out for the night.”

Their car waited in front of the hotel, and Paula with a tired gesture sank back against silk cushions in the corner.

“There’s so much I want to talk to you about,” she said, “it seems hopeless.”

“I want to hear about you.”

“Well”--she smiled at Hagerty--”that would take a long time too. I have three children--by my first marriage. The oldest is five, then four, then three.” She smiled again. “I didn’t waste much time having them, did I?”

“Boys?”

“A boy and two girls. Then--oh, a lot of things happened, and I got a divorce in Paris a year ago and married Pete. That’s all--except that I’m awfully happy.”

In Rye they drove up to a large house near the Beach Club, from which there issued presently three dark, slim children who broke from an English governess and approached them with an esoteric cry. Abstractedly and with difficulty Paula took each one into her arms, a caress which they accepted stiffly, as they had evidently been told not to bump into Mummy. Even against their fresh faces Paula’s skin showed scarcely any weariness--for all her physical languor she seemed younger than when he had last seen her at Palm Beach seven years ago.

At dinner she was preoccupied, and afterward, during the homage to the radio, she lay with closed eyes on the sofa, until Anson wondered if his presence at this time were not an intrusion. But at nine o’clock, when Hagerty rose and said pleasantly that he was going to leave them by themselves for a while, she began to talk slowly about herself and the past.

“My first baby,” she said--”the one we call Darling, the biggest little girl--I wanted to die when I knew I was going to have her, because Lowell was like a stranger to me. It didn’t seem as though she could be my own. I wrote you a letter and tore it up. Oh, you were so bad to me, Anson.”

It was the dialogue again, rising and falling. Anson felt a sudden quickening of memory.

“Weren’t you engaged once?” she asked--”a girl named Dolly something?”

“I wasn’t ever engaged. I tried to be engaged, but I never loved anybody but you, Paula.”

“Oh,” she said. Then after a moment: “This baby is the first one I ever really wanted. You see, I’m in love now--at last.”

He didn’t answer, shocked at the treachery of her remembrance. She must have seen that the “at last” bruised him, for she continued:

“I was infatuated with you, Anson--you could make me do anything you liked. But we wouldn’t have been happy. I’m not smart enough for you. I don’t like things to be complicated like you do.” She paused. “You’ll never settle down,” she said.

The phrase struck at him from behind--it was an accusation that of all accusations he had never merited.

“I could settle down if women were different,” he said. “If I didn’t understand so much about them, if women didn’t spoil you for other women, if they had only a little pride. If I could go to sleep for a while and wake up into a home that was really mine--why, that’s what I’m made for, Paula, that’s what women have seen in me and liked in me. It’s only that I can’t get through the preliminaries any more.”

Hagerty came in a little before eleven; after a whiskey Paula stood up and announced that she was going to bed. She went over and stood by her husband.

“Where did you go, dearest?” she demanded.

“I had a drink with Ed Saunders.”

“I was worried. I thought maybe you’d run away.”

She rested her head against his coat.

“He’s sweet, isn’t he, Anson?” she demanded.

“Absolutely,” said Anson, laughing.

She raised her face to her husband.

“Well, I’m ready,” she said. She turned to Anson: “Do you want to see our family gymnastic stunt?”

“Yes,” he said in an interested voice.

“All right. Here we go!”

Hagerty picked her up easily in his arms.

“This is called the family acrobatic stunt,” said Paula. “He carries me up-stairs. Isn’t it sweet of him?”

“Yes,” said Anson.

Hagerty bent his head slightly until his face touched Paula’s.

“And I love him,” she said. “I’ve just been telling you, haven’t I, Anson?”

“Yes,” he said.

“He’s the dearest thing that ever lived in this world; aren’t you, darling? . . . Well, good night. Here we go. Isn’t he strong?”

“Yes,” Anson said.

“You’ll find a pair of Pete’s pajamas laid out for you. Sweet dreams--see you at breakfast.”

“Yes,” Anson said.

VIII

The older members of the firm insisted that Anson should go abroad for the summer. He had scarcely had a vacation in seven years, they said. He was stale and needed a change. Anson resisted.

“If I go,” he declared, “I won’t come back any more.”

“That’s absurd, old man. You’ll be back in three months with all this depression gone. Fit as ever.”

“No.” He shook his head stubbornly. “If I stop, I won’t go back to work. If I stop, that means I’ve given up--I’m through.”

“We’ll take a chance on that. Stay six months if you like--we’re not afraid you’ll leave us. Why, you’d be miserable if you didn’t work.”

They arranged his passage for him. They liked Anson--every one liked Anson--and the change that had been coming over him cast a sort of pall over the office. The enthusiasm that had invariably signalled up business, the consideration toward his equals and his inferiors, the lift of his vital presence--within the past four months his intense nervousness had melted down these qualities into the fussy pessimism of a man of forty. On every transaction in which he was involved he acted as a drag and a strain.

“If I go I’ll never come back,” he said.

Three days before he sailed Paula Legendre Hagerty died in childbirth. I was with him a great deal then, for we were crossing together, but for the first time in our friendship he told me not a word of how he felt, nor did I see the slightest sign of emotion. His chief preoccupation was with the fact that he was thirty years old--he would turn the conversation to the point where he could remind you of it and then fall silent, as if he assumed that the statement would start a chain of thought sufficient to itself. Like his partners, I was amazed at the change in him, and I was glad when the Paris moved off into the wet space between the worlds, leaving his principality behind.

“How about a drink?” he suggested.

We walked into the bar with that defiant feeling that characterizes the day of departure and ordered four Martinis. After one cocktail a change came over him--he suddenly reached across and slapped my knee with the first joviality I had seen him exhibit for months.

“Did you see that girl in the red tam?” he demanded, “the one with the high color who had the two police dogs down to bid her good-by.”

“She’s pretty,” I agreed.

“I looked her up in the purser’s office and found out that she’s alone. I’m going down to see the steward in a few minutes. We’ll have dinner with her to-night.”

After a while he left me, and within an hour he was walking up and down the deck with her, talking to her in his strong, clear voice. Her red tam was a bright spot of color against the steel-green sea, and from time to time she looked up with a flashing bob of her head, and smiled with amusement and interest, and anticipation. At dinner we had champagne, and were very joyous--afterward Anson ran the pool with infectious gusto, and several people who had seen me with him asked me his name. He and the girl were talking and laughing together on a lounge in the bar when I went to bed.

I saw less of him on the trip than I had hoped. He wanted to arrange a foursome, but there was no one available, so I saw him only at meals. Sometimes, though, he would have a cocktail in the bar, and he told me about the girl in the red tam, and his adventures with her, making them all bizarre and amusing, as he had a way of doing, and I was glad that he was himself again, or at least the self that I knew, and with which I felt at home. I don’t think he was ever happy unless some one was in love with him, responding to him like filings to a magnet, helping him to explain himself, promising him something. What it was I do not know. Perhaps they promised that there would always be women in the world who would spend their brightest, freshest, rarest hours to nurse and protect that superiority he cherished in his heart.

THE END

WINTER DREAMS

Some of the caddies were poor as sin and lived in one-room houses with a neurasthenic cow in the front yard, but Dexter Green’s father owned the second best grocery-store in Black Bear--the best one was “The Hub,” patronized by the wealthy people from Sherry Island--and Dexter caddied only for pocket-money.

In the fall when the days became crisp and gray, and the long Minnesota winter shut down like the white lid of a box, Dexter’s skis moved over the snow that hid the fairways of the golf course. At these times the country gave him a feeling of profound melancholy--it offended him that the links should lie in enforced fallowness, haunted by ragged sparrows for the long season. It was dreary, too, that on the tees where the gay colors fluttered in summer there were now only the desolate sand-boxes knee-deep in crusted ice. When he crossed the hills the wind blew cold as misery, and if the sun was out he tramped with his eyes squinted up against the hard dimensionless glare.

In April the winter ceased abruptly. The snow ran down into BlackBearLake scarcely tarrying for the early golfers to brave the season with red and black balls. Without elation, without an interval of moist glory, the cold was gone.

Dexter knew that there was something dismal about this Northern spring, just as he knew there was something gorgeous about the fall. Fall made him clinch his hands and tremble and repeat idiotic sentences to himself, and make brisk abrupt gestures of command to imaginary audiences and armies. October filled him with hope which November raised to a sort of ecstatic triumph, and in this mood the fleeting brilliant impressions of the summer at SherryIsland were ready grist to his mill. He became a golf champion and defeated Mr. T. A. Hedrick in a marvellous match played a hundred times over the fairways of his imagination, a match each detail of which he changed about untiringly--sometimes he won with almost laughable ease, sometimes he came up magnificently from behind. Again, stepping from a Pierce-Arrow automobile, like Mr. Mortimer Jones, he strolled frigidly into the lounge of the Sherry Island Golf Club--or perhaps, surrounded by an admiring crowd, he gave an exhibition of fancy diving from the spring-board of the club raft. . . . Among those who watched him in open-mouthed wonder was Mr. Mortimer Jones.

And one day it came to pass that Mr. Jones--himself and not his ghost--came up to Dexter with tears in his eyes and said that Dexter was the ---- best caddy in the club, and wouldn’t he decide not to quit if Mr. Jones made it worth his while, because every other ---- caddy in the club lost one ball a hole for him--regularly--

“No, sir,” said Dexter decisively, “I don’t want to caddy any more.” Then, after a pause: “I’m too old.”

“You’re not more than fourteen. Why the devil did you decide just this morning that you wanted to quit? You promised that next week you’d go over to the State tournament with me.”

“I decided I was too old.”

Dexter handed in his “A Class” badge, collected what money was due him from the caddy master, and walked home to Black Bear Village.

“The best ---- caddy I ever saw,” shouted Mr. Mortimer Jones over a drink that afternoon. “Never lost a ball! Willing! Intelligent! Quiet! Honest! Grateful!”

The little girl who had done this was eleven--beautifully ugly as little girls are apt to be who are destined after a few years to be inexpressibly lovely and bring no end of misery to a great number of men. The spark, however, was perceptible. There was a general ungodliness in the way her lips twisted down at the corners when she smiled, and in the--Heaven help us!--in the almost passionate quality of her eyes. Vitality is born early in such women. It was utterly in evidence now, shining through her thin frame in a sort of glow.

She had come eagerly out on to the course at nine o’clock with a white linen nurse and five small new golf-clubs in a white canvas bag which the nurse was carrying. When Dexter first saw her she was standing by the caddy house, rather ill at ease and trying to conceal the fact by engaging her nurse in an obviously unnatural conversation graced by startling and irrelevant grimaces from herself.

“Well, it’s certainly a nice day, Hilda,” Dexter heard her say. She drew down the corners of her mouth, smiled, and glanced furtively around, her eyes in transit falling for an instant on Dexter.

Then to the nurse:

“Well, I guess there aren’t very many people out here this morning, are there?”

The smile again--radiant, blatantly artificial--convincing.

“I don’t know what we’re supposed to do now,” said the nurse, looking nowhere in particular.

“Oh, that’s all right. I’ll fix it up.”

Dexter stood perfectly still, his mouth slightly ajar. He knew that if he moved forward a step his stare would be in her line of vision--if he moved backward he would lose his full view of her face. For a moment he had not realized how young she was. Now he remembered having seen her several times the year before--in bloomers.

Suddenly, involuntarily, he laughed, a short abrupt laugh--then, startled by himself, he turned and began to walk quickly away.

“Boy!”

Dexter stopped.

“Boy--”

Beyond question he was addressed. Not only that, but he was treated to that absurd smile, that preposterous smile--the memory of which at least a dozen men were to carry into middle age.

“Boy, do you know where the golf teacher is?”

“He’s giving a lesson.”

“Well, do you know where the caddy-master is?”

“He isn’t here yet this morning.”

“Oh.” For a moment this baffled her. She stood alternately on her right and left foot.

“We’d like to get a caddy,” said the nurse. “Mrs. Mortimer Jones sent us out to play golf, and we don’t know how without we get a caddy.”

Here she was stopped by an ominous glance from Miss Jones, followed immediately by the smile.

“There aren’t any caddies here except me,” said Dexter to the nurse, “and I got to stay here in charge until the caddy-master gets here.”

“Oh.”

Miss Jones and her retinue now withdrew, and at a proper distance from Dexter became involved in a heated conversation, which was concluded by Miss Jones taking one of the clubs and hitting it on the ground with violence. For further emphasis she raised it again and was about to bring it down smartly upon the nurse’s bosom, when the nurse seized the club and twisted it from her hands.

“You damn little mean old thing!” cried Miss Jones wildly.

Another argument ensued. Realizing that the elements of the comedy were implied in the scene, Dexter several times began to laugh, but each time restrained the laugh before it reached audibility. He could not resist the monstrous conviction that the little girl was justified in beating the nurse.

The situation was resolved by the fortuitous appearance of the caddy-master, who was appealed to immediately by the nurse.

“Miss Jones is to have a little caddy, and this one says he can’t go.”

“Mr. McKenna said I was to wait here till you came,” said Dexter quickly.

“Well, he’s here now.” Miss Jones smiled cheerfully at the caddy-master. Then she dropped her bag and set off at a haughty mince toward the first tee.

“Well?” The caddy-master turned to Dexter. “What you standing there like a dummy for? Go pick up the young lady’s clubs.”

“I don’t think I’ll go out to-day,” said Dexter.

“You don’t--”

“I think I’ll quit.”

The enormity of his decision frightened him. He was a favorite caddy, and the thirty dollars a month he earned through the summer were not to be made elsewhere around the lake. But he had received a strong emotional shock, and his perturbation required a violent and immediate outlet.

It is not so simple as that, either. As so frequently would be the case in the future, Dexter was unconsciously dictated to by his winter dreams.

II

Now, of course, the quality and the seasonability of these winter dreams varied, but the stuff of them remained. They persuaded Dexter several years later to pass up a business course at the State university--his father, prospering now, would have paid his way--for the precarious advantage of attending an older and more famous university in the East, where he was bothered by his scanty funds. But do not get the impression, because his winter dreams happened to be concerned at first with musings on the rich, that there was anything merely snobbish in the boy. He wanted not association with glittering things and glittering people--he wanted the glittering things themselves. Often he reached out for the best without knowing why he wanted it--and sometimes he ran up against the mysterious denials and prohibitions in which life indulges. It is with one of those denials and not with his career as a whole that this story deals.

He made money. It was rather amazing. After college he went to the city from which BlackBearLake draws its wealthy patrons. When he was only twenty-three and had been there not quite two years, there were already people who liked to say: “Now there’s a boy--” All about him rich men’s sons were peddling bonds precariously, or investing patrimonies precariously, or plodding through the two dozen volumes of the “George Washington Commercial Course,” but Dexter borrowed a thousand dollars on his college degree and his confident mouth, and bought a partnership in a laundry.

It was a small laundry when he went into it but Dexter made a specialty of learning how the English washed fine woollen golf-stockings without shrinking them, and within a year he was catering to the trade that wore knickerbockers. Men were insisting that their Shetland hose and sweaters go to his laundry just as they had insisted on a caddy who could find golf-balls. A little later he was doing their wives’ lingerie as well--and running five branches in different parts of the city. Before he was twenty-seven he owned the largest string of laundries in his section of the country. It was then that he sold out and went to New York. But the part of his story that concerns us goes back to the days when he was making his first big success.

When he was twenty-three Mr. Hart--one of the gray-haired men who like to say “Now there’s a boy”--gave him a guest card to the Sherry Island Golf Club for a week-end. So he signed his name one day on the register, and that afternoon played golf in a foursome with Mr. Hart and Mr. Sandwood and Mr. T. A. Hedrick. He did not consider it necessary to remark that he had once carried Mr. Hart’s bag over this same links, and that he knew every trap and gully with his eyes shut--but he found himself glancing at the four caddies who trailed them, trying to catch a gleam or gesture that would remind him of himself, that would lessen the gap which lay between his present and his past.

It was a curious day, slashed abruptly with fleeting, familiar impressions. One minute he had the sense of being a trespasser--in the next he was impressed by the tremendous superiority he felt toward Mr. T. A. Hedrick, who was a bore and not even a good golfer any more.

Then, because of a ball Mr. Hart lost near the fifteenth green, an enormous thing happened. While they were searching the stiff grasses of the rough there was a clear call of “Fore!” from behind a hill in their rear. And as they all turned abruptly from their search a bright new ball sliced abruptly over the hill and caught Mr. T. A. Hedrick in the abdomen.

“By Gad!” cried Mr. T. A. Hedrick, “they ought to put some of these crazy women off the course. It’s getting to be outrageous.”

A head and a voice came up together over the hill:

“Do you mind if we go through?”

“You hit me in the stomach!” declared Mr. Hedrick wildly.

“Did I?” The girl approached the group of men. “I’m sorry. I yelled ‘Fore!’“

Her glance fell casually on each of the men--then scanned the fairway for her ball.

“Did I bounce into the rough?”

It was impossible to determine whether this question was ingenuous or malicious. In a moment, however, she left no doubt, for as her partner came up over the hill she called cheerfully:

“Here I am! I’d have gone on the green except that I hit something.”

As she took her stance for a short mashie shot, Dexter looked at her closely. She wore a blue gingham dress, rimmed at throat and shoulders with a white edging that accentuated her tan. The quality of exaggeration, of thinness, which had made her passionate eyes and down-turning mouth absurd at eleven, was gone now. She was arrestingly beautiful. The color in her cheeks was centered like the color in a picture--it was not a “high” color, but a son of fluctuating and feverish warmth, so shaded that it seemed at any moment it would recede and disappear. This color and the mobility of her mouth gave a continual impression of flux, of intense life, of passionate vitality--balanced only partially by the sad luxury of her eyes.

She swung her mashie impatiently and without interest, pitching the ball into a sand-pit on the other side of the green. With a quick, insincere smile and a careless “Thank you!” she went on after it.

“That Judy Jones!” remarked Mr. Hedrick on the next tee, as they waited--some moments--for her to play on ahead. “All she needs is to be turned up and spanked for six months and then to be married off to an old-fashioned cavalry captain.”

“My God, she’s good-looking!” said Mr. Sandwood, who was just over thirty.

“Good-looking!” cried Mr. Hedrick contemptuously, “she always looks as if she wanted to be kissed! Turning those big cow-eyes on every calf in town!”

It was doubtful if Mr. Hedrick intended a reference to the maternal instinct.

“She’d play pretty good golf if she’d try,” said Mr. Sandwood.

“She has no form,” said Mr. Hedrick solemnly.

“She has a nice figure,” said Mr. Sandwood.

“Better thank the Lord she doesn’t drive a swifter ball,” said Mr. Hart, winking at Dexter.

Later in the afternoon the sun went down with a riotous swirl of gold and varying blues and scarlets, and left the dry, rustling night of Western summer. Dexter watched from the veranda of the Golf Club, watched the even overlap of the waters in the little wind, silver molasses under the harvest-moon. Then the moon held a finger to her lips and the lake became a clear pool, pale and quiet. Dexter put on his bathing-suit and swam out to the farthest raft, where he stretched dripping on the wet canvas of the springboard.

There was a fish jumping and a star shining and the lights around the lake were gleaming. Over on a dark peninsula a piano was playing the songs of last summer and of summers before that--songs from “Chin-Chin” and “The Count of Luxemburg” and “The Chocolate Soldier”--and because the sound of a piano over a stretch of water had always seemed beautiful to Dexter he lay perfectly quiet and listened.

The tune the piano was playing at that moment had been gay and new five years before when Dexter was a sophomore at college. They had played it at a prom once when he could not afford the luxury of proms, and he had stood outside the gymnasium and listened. The sound of the tune precipitated in him a sort of ecstasy and it was with that ecstasy he viewed what happened to him now. It was a mood of intense appreciation, a sense that, for once, he was magnificently attune to life and that everything about him was radiating a brightness and a glamour he might never know again.

A low, pale oblong detached itself suddenly from the darkness of the Island, spitting forth the reverberate sound of a racing motor-boat. Two white streamers of cleft water rolled themselves out behind it and almost immediately the boat was beside him, drowning out the hot tinkle of the piano in the drone of its spray. Dexter raising himself on his arms was aware of a figure standing at the wheel, of two dark eyes regarding him over the lengthening space of water--then the boat had gone by and was sweeping in an immense and purposeless circle of spray round and round in the middle of the lake. With equal eccentricity one of the circles flattened out and headed back toward the raft.

“Who’s that?” she called, shutting off her motor. She was so near now that Dexter could see her bathing-suit, which consisted apparently of pink rompers.

The nose of the boat bumped the raft, and as the latter tilted rakishly he was precipitated toward her. With different degrees of interest they recognized each other.

“Aren’t you one of those men we played through this afternoon?” she demanded.

He was.

“Well, do you know how to drive a motor-boat? Because if you do I wish you’d drive this one so I can ride on the surf-board behind. My name is Judy Jones”--she favored him with an absurd smirk--rather, what tried to be a smirk, for, twist her mouth as she might, it was not grotesque, it was merely beautiful--”and I live in a house over there on the Island, and in that house there is a man waiting for me. When he drove up at the door I drove out of the dock because he says I’m his ideal.”

There was a fish jumping and a star shining and the lights around the lake were gleaming. Dexter sat beside Judy Jones and she explained how her boat was driven. Then she was in the water, swimming to the floating surfboard with a sinuous crawl. Watching her was without effort to the eye, watching a branch waving or a sea-gull flying. Her arms, burned to butternut, moved sinuously among the dull platinum ripples, elbow appearing first, casting the forearm back with a cadence of falling water, then reaching out and down, stabbing a path ahead.

They moved out into the lake; turning, Dexter saw that she was kneeling on the low rear of the now uptilted surf-board.

“Go faster,” she called, “fast as it’ll go.”

Obediently he jammed the lever forward and the white spray mounted at the bow. When he looked around again the girl was standing up on the rushing board, her arms spread wide, her eyes lifted toward the moon.

“It’s awful cold,” she shouted. “What’s your name?”

He told her.

“Well, why don’t you come to dinner to-morrow night?”

His heart turned over like the fly-wheel of the boat, and, for the second time, her casual whim gave a new direction to his life.

III

Next evening while he waited for her to come down-stairs, Dexter peopled the soft deep summer room and the sun-porch that opened from it with the men who had already loved Judy Jones. He knew the sort of men they were--the men who when he first went to college had entered from the great prep schools with graceful clothes and the deep tan of healthy summers. He had seen that, in one sense, he was better than these men. He was newer and stronger. Yet in acknowledging to himself that he wished his children to be like them he was admitting that he was but the rough, strong stuff from which they eternally sprang.

When the time had come for him to wear good clothes, he had known who were the best tailors in America, and the best tailors in America had made him the suit he wore this evening. He had acquired that particular reserve peculiar to his university, that set it off from other universities. He recognized the value to him of such a mannerism and he had adopted it; he knew that to be careless in dress and manner required more confidence than to be careful. But carelessness was for his children. His mother’s name had been Krimslich. She was a Bohemian of the peasant class and she had talked broken English to the end of her days. Her son must keep to the set patterns.

At a little after seven Judy Jones came down-stairs. She wore a blue silk afternoon dress, and he was disappointed at first that she had not put on something more elaborate. This feeling was accentuated when, after a brief greeting, she went to the door of a butler’s pantry and pushing it open called: “You can serve dinner, Martha.” He had rather expected that a butler would announce dinner, that there would be a cocktail. Then he put these thoughts behind him as they sat down side by side on a lounge and looked at each other.

“Father and mother won’t be here,” she said thoughtfully.

He remembered the last time he had seen her father, and he was glad the parents were not to be here to-night--they might wonder who he was. He had been born in Keeble, a Minnesota village fifty miles farther north, and he always gave Keeble as his home instead of Black Bear Village. Country towns were well enough to come from if they weren’t inconveniently in sight and used as footstools by fashionable lakes.

They talked of his university, which she had visited frequently during the past two years, and of the near-by city which supplied SherryIsland with its patrons, and whither Dexter would return next day to his prospering laundries.

During dinner she slipped into a moody depression which gave Dexter a feeling of uneasiness. Whatever petulance she uttered in her throaty voice worried him. Whatever she smiled at--at him, at a chicken liver, at nothing--it disturbed him that her smile could have no root in mirth, or even in amusement. When the scarlet corners of her lips curved down, it was less a smile than an invitation to a kiss.

Then, after dinner, she led him out on the dark sun-porch and deliberately changed the atmosphere.

“Do you mind if I weep a little?” she said.

“I’m afraid I’m boring you,” he responded quickly.

“You’re not. I like you. But I’ve just had a terrible afternoon. There was a man I cared about, and this afternoon he told me out of a clear sky that he was poor as a church-mouse. He’d never even hinted it before. Does this sound horribly mundane?”

“Perhaps he was afraid to tell you.”

“Suppose he was,” she answered. “He didn’t start right. You see, if I’d thought of him as poor--well, I’ve been mad about loads of poor men, and fully intended to marry them all. But in this case, I hadn’t thought of him that way, and my interest in him wasn’t strong enough to survive the shock. As if a girl calmly informed her fiancé that she was a widow. He might not object to widows, but--

“Let’s start right,” she interrupted herself suddenly. “Who are you, anyhow?”

For a moment Dexter hesitated. Then:

“I’m nobody,” he announced. “My career is largely a matter of futures.”

“Are you poor?”

“No,” he said frankly, “I’m probably making more money than any man my age in the Northwest. I know that’s an obnoxious remark, but you advised me to start right.”

There was a pause. Then she smiled and the corners of her mouth drooped and an almost imperceptible sway brought her closer to him, looking up into his eyes. A lump rose in Dexter’s throat, and he waited breathless for the experiment, facing the unpredictable compound that would form mysteriously from the elements of their lips. Then he saw--she communicated her excitement to him, lavishly, deeply, with kisses that were not a promise but a fulfillment. They aroused in him not hunger demanding renewal but surfeit that would demand more surfeit . . . kisses that were like charity, creating want by holding back nothing at all.

It did not take him many hours to decide that he had wanted Judy Jones ever since he was a proud, desirous little boy.

IV

It began like that--and continued, with varying shades of intensity, on such a note right up to the dénouement. Dexter surrendered a part of himself to the most direct and unprincipled personality with which he had ever come in contact. Whatever Judy wanted, she went after with the full pressure of her charm. There was no divergence of method, no jockeying for position or premeditation of effects--there was a very little mental side to any of her affairs. She simply made men conscious to the highest degree of her physical loveliness. Dexter had no desire to change her. Her deficiencies were knit up with a passionate energy that transcended and justified them.

When, as Judy’s head lay against his shoulder that first night, she whispered, “I don’t know what’s the matter with me. Last night I thought I was in love with a man and to-night I think I’m in love with you--”--it seemed to him a beautiful and romantic thing to say. It was the exquisite excitability that for the moment he controlled and owned. But a week later he was compelled to view this same quality in a different light. She took him in her roadster to a picnic supper, and after supper she disappeared, likewise in her roadster, with another man. Dexter became enormously upset and was scarcely able to be decently civil to the other people present. When she assured him that she had not kissed the other man, he knew she was lying--yet he was glad that she had taken the trouble to lie to him.

He was, as he found before the summer ended, one of a varying dozen who circulated about her. Each of them had at one time been favored above all others--about half of them still basked in the solace of occasional sentimental revivals. Whenever one showed signs of dropping out through long neglect, she granted him a brief honeyed hour, which encouraged him to tag along for a year or so longer. Judy made these forays upon the helpless and defeated without malice, indeed half unconscious that there was anything mischievous in what she did.

When a new man came to town every one dropped out--dates were automatically cancelled.

The helpless part of trying to do anything about it was that she did it all herself. She was not a girl who could be “won” in the kinetic sense--she was proof against cleverness, she was proof against charm; if any of these assailed her too strongly she would immediately resolve the affair to a physical basis, and under the magic of her physical splendor the strong as well as the brilliant played her game and not their own. She was entertained only by the gratification of her desires and by the direct exercise of her own charm. Perhaps from so much youthful love, so many youthful lovers, she had come, in self-defense, to nourish herself wholly from within.

Succeeding Dexter’s first exhilaration came restlessness and dissatisfaction. The helpless ecstasy of losing himself in her was opiate rather than tonic. It was fortunate for his work during the winter that those moments of ecstasy came infrequently. Early in their acquaintance it had seemed for a while that there was a deep and spontaneous mutual attraction--that first August, for example--three days of long evenings on her dusky veranda, of strange wan kisses through the late afternoon, in shadowy alcoves or behind the protecting trellises of the garden arbors, of mornings when she was fresh as a dream and almost shy at meeting him in the clarity of the rising day. There was all the ecstasy of an engagement about it, sharpened by his realization that there was no engagement. It was during those three days that, for the first time, he had asked her to marry him. She said “maybe some day,” she said “kiss me,” she said “I’d like to marry you,” she said “I love you”--she said--nothing.

The three days were interrupted by the arrival of a New York man who visited at her house for half September. To Dexter’s agony, rumor engaged them. The man was the son of the president of a great trust company. But at the end of a month it was reported that Judy was yawning. At a dance one night she sat all evening in a motor-boat with a local beau, while the New Yorker searched the club for her frantically. She told the local beau that she was bored with her visitor, and two days later he left. She was seen with him at the station, and it was reported that he looked very mournful indeed.

On this note the summer ended. Dexter was twenty-four, and he found himself increasingly in a position to do as he wished. He joined two clubs in the city and lived at one of them. Though he was by no means an integral part of the stag-lines at these clubs, he managed to be on hand at dances where Judy Jones was likely to appear. He could have gone out socially as much as he liked--he was an eligible young man, now, and popular with down-town fathers. His confessed devotion to Judy Jones had rather solidified his position. But he had no social aspirations and rather despised the dancing men who were always on tap for the Thursday or Saturday parties and who filled in at dinners with the younger married set. Already he was playing with the idea of going East to New York. He wanted to take Judy Jones with him. No disillusion as to the world in which she had grown up could cure his illusion as to her desirability.

Remember that--for only in the light of it can what he did for her be understood.

Eighteen months after he first met Judy Jones he became engaged to another girl. Her name was Irene Scheerer, and her father was one of the men who had always believed in Dexter. Irene was light-haired and sweet and honorable, and a little stout, and she had two suitors whom she pleasantly relinquished when Dexter formally asked her to marry him.

Summer, fall, winter, spring, another summer, another fall--so much he had given of his active life to the incorrigible lips of Judy Jones. She had treated him with interest, with encouragement, with malice, with indifference, with contempt. She had inflicted on him the innumerable little slights and indignities possible in such a case--as if in revenge for having ever cared for him at all. She had beckoned him and yawned at him and beckoned him again and he had responded often with bitterness and narrowed eyes. She had brought him ecstatic happiness and intolerable agony of spirit. She had caused him untold inconvenience and not a little trouble. She had insulted him, and she had ridden over him, and she had played his interest in her against his interest in his work--for fun. She had done everything to him except to criticise him--this she had not done--it seemed to him only because it might have sullied the utter indifference she manifested and sincerely felt toward him.

When autumn had come and gone again it occurred to him that he could not have Judy Jones. He had to beat this into his mind but he convinced himself at last. He lay awake at night for a while and argued it over. He told himself the trouble and the pain she had caused him, he enumerated her glaring deficiencies as a wife. Then he said to himself that he loved her, and after a while he fell asleep. For a week, lest he imagined her husky voice over the telephone or her eyes opposite him at lunch, he worked hard and late, and at night he went to his office and plotted out his years.

At the end of a week he went to a dance and cut in on her once. For almost the first time since they had met he did not ask her to sit out with him or tell her that she was lovely. It hurt him that she did not miss these things--that was all. He was not jealous when he saw that there was a new man to-night. He had been hardened against jealousy long before.

He stayed late at the dance. He sat for an hour with Irene Scheerer and talked about books and about music. He knew very little about either. But he was beginning to be master of his own time now, and he had a rather priggish notion that he--the young and already fabulously successful Dexter Green--should know more about such things.

That was in October, when he was twenty-five. In January, Dexter and Irene became engaged. It was to be announced in June, and they were to be married three months later.

The Minnesota winter prolonged itself interminably, and it was almost May when the winds came soft and the snow ran down into Black Bear Lake at last. For the first time in over a year Dexter was enjoying a certain tranquility of spirit. Judy Jones had been in Florida, and afterward in Hot Springs, and somewhere she had been engaged, and somewhere she had broken it off. At first, when Dexter had definitely given her up, it had made him sad that people still linked them together and asked for news of her, but when he began to be placed at dinner next to Irene Scheerer people didn’t ask him about her any more--they told him about her. He ceased to be an authority on her.

May at last. Dexter walked the streets at night when the darkness was damp as rain, wondering that so soon, with so little done, so much of ecstasy had gone from him. May one year back had been marked by Judy’s poignant, unforgivable, yet forgiven turbulence--it had been one of those rare times when he fancied she had grown to care for him. That old penny’s worth of happiness he had spent for this bushel of content. He knew that Irene would be no more than a curtain spread behind him, a hand moving among gleaming tea-cups, a voice calling to children . . . fire and loveliness were gone, the magic of nights and the wonder of the varying hours and seasons . . . slender lips, down-turning, dropping to his lips and bearing him up into a heaven of eyes. . . . The thing was deep in him. He was too strong and alive for it to die lightly.

In the middle of May when the weather balanced for a few days on the thin bridge that led to deep summer he turned in one night at Irene’s house. Their engagement was to be announced in a week now--no one would be surprised at it. And to-night they would sit together on the lounge at the University Club and look on for an hour at the dancers. It gave him a sense of solidity to go with her--she was so sturdily popular, so intensely “great.”

He mounted the steps of the brownstone house and stepped inside.

“Irene,” he called.

Mrs. Scheerer came out of the living-room to meet him.

“Dexter,” she said, “Irene’s gone up-stairs with a splitting headache. She wanted to go with you but I made her go to bed.”

“Nothing serious, I--”

“Oh, no. She’s going to play golf with you in the morning. You can spare her for just one night, can’t you, Dexter?”

Her smile was kind. She and Dexter liked each other. In the living-room he talked for a moment before he said good-night.

Returning to the University Club, where he had rooms, he stood in the doorway for a moment and watched the dancers. He leaned against the door-post, nodded at a man or two--yawned.

“Hello, darling.”

The familiar voice at his elbow startled him. Judy Jones had left a man and crossed the room to him--Judy Jones, a slender enamelled doll in cloth of gold: gold in a band at her head, gold in two slipper points at her dress’s hem. The fragile glow of her face seemed to blossom as she smiled at him. A breeze of warmth and light blew through the room. His hands in the pockets of his dinner-jacket tightened spasmodically. He was filled with a sudden excitement.

“When did you get back?” he asked casually.

“Come here and I’ll tell you about it.”

She turned and he followed her. She had been away--he could have wept at the wonder of her return. She had passed through enchanted streets, doing things that were like provocative music. All mysterious happenings, all fresh and quickening hopes, had gone away with her, come back with her now.

She turned in the doorway.

“Have you a car here? If you haven’t, I have.”

“I have a coupé.”

In then, with a rustle of golden cloth. He slammed the door. Into so many cars she had stepped--like this--like that--her back against the leather, so--her elbow resting on the door--waiting. She would have been soiled long since had there been anything to soil her--except herself--but this was her own self outpouring.

With an effort he forced himself to start the car and back into the street. This was nothing, he must remember. She had done this before, and he had put her behind him, as he would have crossed a bad account from his books.

He drove slowly down-town and, affecting abstraction, traversed the deserted streets of the business section, peopled here and there where a movie was giving out its crowd or where consumptive or pugilistic youth lounged in front of pool halls. The clink of glasses and the slap of hands on the bars issued from saloons, cloisters of glazed glass and dirty yellow light.

She was watching him closely and the silence was embarrassing, yet in this crisis he could find no casual word with which to profane the hour. At a convenient turning he began to zigzag back toward the University Club.

“Have you missed me?” she asked suddenly.

“Everybody missed you.”

He wondered if she knew of Irene Scheerer. She had been back only a day--her absence had been almost contemporaneous with his engagement.

“What a remark!” Judy laughed sadly--without sadness. She looked at him searchingly. He became absorbed in the dashboard.

“You’re handsomer than you used to be,” she said thoughtfully. “Dexter, you have the most rememberable eyes.”

He could have laughed at this, but he did not laugh. It was the sort of thing that was said to sophomores. Yet it stabbed at him.

“I’m awfully tired of everything, darling.” She called every one darling, endowing the endearment with careless, individual comraderie. “I wish you’d marry me.”

The directness of this confused him. He should have told her now that he was going to marry another girl, but he could not tell her. He could as easily have sworn that he had never loved her.

“I think we’d get along,” she continued, on the same note, “unless probably you’ve forgotten me and fallen in love with another girl.”

Her confidence was obviously enormous. She had said, in effect, that she found such a thing impossible to believe, that if it were true he had merely committed a childish indiscretion--and probably to show off. She would forgive him, because it was not a matter of any moment but rather something to be brushed aside lightly.

“Of course you could never love anybody but me,” she continued. “I like the way you love me. Oh, Dexter, have you forgotten last year?”

“No, I haven’t forgotten.”

“Neither have I!”

Was she sincerely moved--or was she carried along by the wave of her own acting?

“I wish we could be like that again,” she said, and he forced himself to answer:

“I don’t think we can.”

“I suppose not. . . . I hear you’re giving Irene Scheerer a violent rush.”

There was not the faintest emphasis on the name, yet Dexter was suddenly ashamed.

“Oh, take me home,” cried Judy suddenly; “I don’t want to go back to that idiotic dance--with those children.”

Then, as he turned up the street that led to the residence district, Judy began to cry quietly to herself. He had never seen her cry before.

The dark street lightened, the dwellings of the rich loomed up around them, he stopped his coupé in front of the great white bulk of the Mortimer Joneses house, somnolent, gorgeous, drenched with the splendor of the damp moonlight. Its solidity startled him. The strong walls, the steel of the girders, the breadth and beam and pomp of it were there only to bring out the contrast with the young beauty beside him. It was sturdy to accentuate her slightness--as if to show what a breeze could be generated by a butterfly’s wing.

He sat perfectly quiet, his nerves in wild clamor, afraid that if he moved he would find her irresistibly in his arms. Two tears had rolled down her wet face and trembled on her upper lip.

“I’m more beautiful than anybody else,” she said brokenly, “why can’t I be happy?” Her moist eyes tore at his stability--her mouth turned slowly downward with an exquisite sadness: “I’d like to marry you if you’ll have me, Dexter. I suppose you think I’m not worth having, but I’ll be so beautiful for you, Dexter.”

A million phrases of anger, pride, passion, hatred, tenderness fought on his lips. Then a perfect wave of emotion washed over him, carrying off with it a sediment of wisdom, of convention, of doubt, of honor. This was his girl who was speaking, his own, his beautiful, his pride.

“Won’t you come in?” He heard her draw in her breath sharply.

Waiting.

“All right,” his voice was trembling, “I’ll come in.”

V

It was strange that neither when it was over nor a long time afterward did he regret that night. Looking at it from the perspective of ten years, the fact that Judy’s flare for him endured just one month seemed of little importance. Nor did it matter that by his yielding he subjected himself to a deeper agony in the end and gave serious hurt to Irene Scheerer and to Irene’s parents, who had befriended him. There was nothing sufficiently pictorial about Irene’s grief to stamp itself on his mind.

Dexter was at bottom hard-minded. The attitude of the city on his action was of no importance to him, not because he was going to leave the city, but because any outside attitude on the situation seemed superficial. He was completely indifferent to popular opinion. Nor, when he had seen that it was no use, that he did not possess in himself the power to move fundamentally or to hold Judy Jones, did he bear any malice toward her. He loved her, and he would love her until the day he was too old for loving--but he could not have her. So he tasted the deep pain that is reserved only for the strong, just as he had tasted for a little while the deep happiness.

Even the ultimate falsity of the grounds upon which Judy terminated the engagement that she did not want to “take him away” from Irene--Judy, who had wanted nothing else--did not revolt him. He was beyond any revulsion or any amusement.

He went East in February with the intention of selling out his laundries and settling in New York--but the war came to America in March and changed his plans. He returned to the West, handed over the management of the business to his partner, and went into the first officers’ training-camp in late April. He was one of those young thousands who greeted the war with a certain amount of relief, welcoming the liberation from webs of tangled emotion.

VI

This story is not his biography, remember, although things creep into it which have nothing to do with those dreams he had when he was young. We are almost done with them and with him now. There is only one more incident to be related here, and it happens seven years farther on.

It took place in New York, where he had done well--so well that there were no barriers too high for him. He was thirty-two years old, and, except for one flying trip immediately after the war, he had not been West in seven years. A man named Devlin from Detroit came into his office to see him in a business way, and then and there this incident occurred, and closed out, so to speak, this particular side of his life.

“So you’re from the Middle West,” said the man Devlin with careless curiosity. “That’s funny--I thought men like you were probably born and raised on Wall Street. You know--wife of one of my best friends in Detroit came from your city. I was an usher at the wedding.”

Dexter waited with no apprehension of what was coming.

“Judy Simms,” said Devlin with no particular interest; “Judy Jones she was once.”

“Yes, I knew her.” A dull impatience spread over him. He had heard, of course, that she was married--perhaps deliberately he had heard no more.

“Awfully nice girl,” brooded Devlin meaninglessly, “I’m sort of sorry for her.”

“Why?” Something in Dexter was alert, receptive, at once.

“Oh, Lud Simms has gone to pieces in a way. I don’t mean he ill-uses her, but he drinks and runs around--”

“Doesn’t she run around?”

“No. Stays at home with her kids.”

“Oh.”

“She’s a little too old for him,” said Devlin.

“Too old!” cried Dexter. “Why, man, she’s only twenty-seven.”

He was possessed with a wild notion of rushing out into the streets and taking a train to Detroit. He rose to his feet spasmodically.

“I guess you’re busy,” Devlin apologized quickly. “I didn’t realize--”

“No, I’m not busy,” said Dexter, steadying his voice. “I’m not busy at all. Not busy at all. Did you say she was--twenty-seven? No, I said she was twenty-seven.”

“Yes, you did,” agreed Devlin dryly.

“Go on, then. Go on.”

“What do you mean?”

“About Judy Jones.”

Devlin looked at him helplessly.

“Well, that’s--I told you all there is to it. He treats her like the devil. Oh, they’re not going to get divorced or anything. When he’s particularly outrageous she forgives him. In fact, I’m inclined to think she loves him. She was a pretty girl when she first came to Detroit.”

A pretty girl! The phrase struck Dexter as ludicrous.

“Isn’t she--a pretty girl, any more?”

“Oh, she’s all right.”

“Look here,” said Dexter, sitting down suddenly, “I don’t understand. You say she was a ‘pretty girl’ and now you say she’s ‘all right.’ I don’t understand what you mean--Judy Jones wasn’t a pretty girl, at all. She was a great beauty. Why, I knew her, I knew her. She was--”

Devlin laughed pleasantly.

“I’m not trying to start a row,” he said. “I think Judy’s a nice girl and I like her. I can’t understand how a man like Lud Simms could fall madly in love with her, but he did.” Then he added: “Most of the women like her.”

Dexter looked closely at Devlin, thinking wildly that there must be a reason for this, some insensitivity in the man or some private malice.

“Lots of women fade just like that,” Devlin snapped his fingers. “You must have seen it happen. Perhaps I’ve forgotten how pretty she was at her wedding. I’ve seen her so much since then, you see. She has nice eyes.”

A sort of dulness settled down upon Dexter. For the first time in his life he felt like getting very drunk. He knew that he was laughing loudly at something Devlin had said, but he did not know what it was or why it was funny. When, in a few minutes, Devlin went he lay down on his lounge and looked out the window at the New York sky-line into which the sun was sinking in dull lovely shades of pink and gold.

He had thought that having nothing else to lose he was invulnerable at last--but he knew that he had just lost something more, as surely as if he had married Judy Jones and seen her fade away before his eyes.

The dream was gone. Something had been taken from him. In a sort of panic he pushed the palms of his hands into his eyes and tried to bring up a picture of the waters lapping on SherryIsland and the moonlit veranda, and gingham on the golf-links and the dry sun and the gold color of her neck’s soft down. And her mouth damp to his kisses and her eyes plaintive with melancholy and her freshness like new fine linen in the morning. Why, these things were no longer in the world! They had existed and they existed no longer.

For the first time in years the tears were streaming down his face. But they were for himself now. He did not care about mouth and eyes and moving hands. He wanted to care, and he could not care. For he had gone away and he could never go back any more. The gates were closed, the sun was gone down, and there was no beauty but the gray beauty of steel that withstands all time. Even the grief he could have borne was left behind in the country of illusion, of youth, of the richness of life, where his winter dreams had flourished.

“Long ago,” he said, “long ago, there was something in me, but now that thing is gone. Now that thing is gone, that thing is gone. I cannot cry. I cannot care. That thing will come back no more.”

THE BABY PARTY

When John Andros felt old he found solace in the thought of life continuing through his child. The dark trumpets of oblivion were less loud at the patter of his child’s feet or at the sound of his child’s voice babbling mad non sequiturs to him over the telephone. The latter incident occurred every afternoon at three when his wife called the office from the country, and he came to look forward to it as one of the vivid minutes of his day.

He was not physically old, but his life had been a series of struggles up a series of rugged hills, and here at thirty-eight having won his battles against ill-health and poverty he cherished less than the usual number of illusions. Even his feeling about his little girl was qualified. She had interrupted his rather intense love-affair with his wife, and she was the reason for their living in a suburban town, where they paid for country air with endless servant troubles and the weary merry-go-round of the commuting train.

It was little Ede as a definite piece of youth that chiefly interested him. He liked to take her on his lap and examine minutely her fragrant, downy scalp and her eyes with their irises of morning blue. Having paid this homage John was content that the nurse should take her away. After ten minutes the very vitality of the child irritated him; he was inclined to lose his temper when things were broken, and one Sunday afternoon when she had disrupted a bridge game by permanently hiding up the ace of spades, he had made a scene that had reduced his wife to tears.

This was absurd and John was ashamed of himself. It was inevitable that such things would happen, and it was impossible that little Ede should spend all her indoor hours in the nursery upstairs when she was becoming, as her mother said, more nearly a ‘real person’ every day.

She was two and a half, and this afternoon, for instance, she was going to a baby party. Grown-up Edith, her mother, had telephoned the information to the office, and little Ede had confirmed the business by shouting ‘I yam going to a pantry!’ into John’s unsuspecting left ear.

‘Drop in at the Markeys’ when you get home, won’t you, dear?’ resumed her mother. ‘It’ll be funny. Ede’s going to be all dressed up in her new pink dress--’

The conversation terminated abruptly with a squawk which indicated that the telephone had been pulled violently to the floor. John laughed and decided to get an early train out; the prospect of a baby party in someone else’s house amused him.

‘What a peach of a mess!’ he thought humorously. ‘A dozen mothers, and each one looking at nothing but her own child. All the babies breaking things and grabbing at the cake, and each mama going home thinking about the subtle superiority of her own child to every other child there.’

He was in a good humour today--all the things in his life were going better than they had ever gone before. When he got off the train at his station he shook his head at an importunate taxi man, and began to walk up the long hill towards his house through the crisp December twilight. It was only six o’clock but the moon was out, shining with proud brilliance on the thin sugary snow that lay over the lawns.

As he walked along drawing his lungs full of cold air his happiness increased, and the idea of a baby party appealed to him more and more. He began to wonder how Ede compared to other children of her own age, and if the pink dress she was to wear was something radical and mature. Increasing his gait he came in sight of his own house, where the lights of a defunct Christmas-tree still blossomed in the window, but he continued on past the walk. The party was at the Markeys’ next door.

As he mounted the brick step and rang the bell he became aware of voices inside, and he was glad he was not too late. Then he raised his head and listened--the voices were not children’s voices, but they were loud and pitched high with anger; there were at least three of them and one, which rose as he listened to a hysterical sob, he recognized immediately as his wife’s.

‘There’s been some trouble,’ he thought quickly.

Trying the door, he found it unlocked and pushed it open.

The baby party started at half past four, but Edith Andros, calculating shrewdly that the new dress would stand out more sensationally against vestments already rumpled, planned the arrival of herself and little Ede for five. When they appeared it was already a flourishing affair. Four baby girls and nine baby boys, each one curled and washed and dressed with all the care of a proud and jealous heart, were dancing to the music of a phonograph. Never more than two or three were dancing at once, but as all were continually in motion running to and from their mothers for encouragement, the general effect was the same.

As Edith and her daughter entered, the music was temporarily drowned out by a sustained chorus, consisting largely of the word cute and directed towards little Ede, who stood looking timidly about and fingering the edges of her pink dress. She was not kissed--this is the sanitary age--but she was passed along a row of mamas each one of whom said ‘cu-u-ute’ to her and held her pink little hand before passing her on to the next. After some encouragement and a few mild pushes she was absorbed into the dance, and became an active member of the party.

Edith stood near the door talking to Mrs Markey, and keeping an eye on the tiny figure in the pink dress. She did not care for Mrs Markey; she considered her both snippy and common, but John and Joe Markey were congenial and went in together on the commuting train every morning, so the two women kept up an elaborate pretence of warm amity. They were always reproaching each other for ‘not coming to see me’, and they were always planning the kind of parties that began with ‘You’ll have to come to dinner with us soon, and we’ll go to the theatre,’ but never matured further.

‘Little Ede looks perfectly darling,’ said Mrs Markey, smiling and moistening her lips in a way that Edith found particularly repulsive.’ So grown-up--I can’t believe it!’

Edith wondered if ‘little Ede’ referred to the fact that Billy Markey, though several months younger, weighed almost five pounds more. Accepting a cup of tea she took a seat with two other ladies on a divan and launched into the real business of the afternoon, which of course lay in relating the recent accomplishments and insouciances of her child.

An hour passed. Dancing palled and the babies took to sterner sport. They ran into the dining-room, rounded the big table, and essayed the kitchen door, from which they were rescued by an expeditionary force of mothers. Having been rounded up they immediately broke loose, and rushing back to the dining-room tried the familiar swinging door again. The word ‘overheated’ began to be used, and small white brows were dried with small white handkerchiefs. A general attempt to make the babies sit down began, but the babies squirmed off laps with peremptory cries of ‘Down! Down!’ and the rush into the fascinating dining-room began anew.

This phase of the party came to an end with the arrival of refreshments, a large cake with two candles, and saucers of vanilla ice-cream. Billy Markey, a stout laughing baby with red hair and legs somewhat bowed, blew out the candles, and placed an experimental thumb on the white frosting. The refreshments were distributed, and the children ate, greedily but without confusion--they had behaved remarkably well all afternoon. They were modern babies who ate and slept at regular hours, so their dispositions were good, and their faces healthy and pink--such a peaceful party would not have been possible thirty years ago.

After the refreshments a gradual exodus began. Edith glanced anxiously at her watch--it was almost six, and John had not arrived. She wanted him to see Ede with the other children--to see how dignified and polite and intelligent she was, and how the only ice-cream spot on her dress was some that had dropped from her chin when she was joggled from behind.

‘You’re a darling,’ she whispered to her child, drawing her suddenly against her knee. ‘Do you know you’re a darling? Do you know you’re a darling?’

Ede laughed. ‘Bow-wow,’ she said suddenly.

‘Bow-wow?’ Edith looked around. ‘There isn’t any bow-wow.’

‘Bow-wow,’ repeated Ede. ‘I want a bow-wow.’

Edith followed the small pointing finger.

‘That isn’t a bow-wow, dearest, that’s a teddy-bear.’

‘Bear?’

‘Yes, that’s a teddy-bear, and it belongs to Billy Markey. You don’t want Billy Markey’s teddy-bear, do you?’

Ede did want it.

She broke away from her mother and approached Billy Markey, who held the toy closely in his arms. Ede stood regarding him with inscrutable eyes, and Billy laughed.

Grown-up Edith looked at her watch again, this time impatiently.

The party had dwindled until, besides Ede and Billy, there were only two babies remaining--and one of the two remained only by virtue of having hidden himself under the dining-room table. It was selfish of John not to come. It showed so little pride in the child. Other fathers had come, half a dozen of them, to call for their wives, and they had stayed for a while and looked on.

There was a sudden wail. Ede had obtained Billy’s teddy-bear by pulling it forcibly from his arms, and on Billy’s attempt to recover it, she had pushed him casually to the floor.

‘Why, Ede!’ cried her mother, repressing an inclination to laugh.

Joe Markey, a handsome, broad-shouldered man of thirty-five, picked up his son and set him on his feet. ‘You’re a fine fellow,’ he said jovially. ‘Let a girl knock you over! You’re a fine fellow.’

‘Did he bump his head?’ Mrs Markey returned anxiously from bowing the next to last remaining mother out of the door.

‘No-o-o-o,’ exclaimed Markey. ‘He bumped something else, didn’t you, Billy? He bumped something else.’

Billy had so far forgotten the bump that he was already making an attempt to recover his property. He seized a leg of the bear which projected from Ede’s enveloping arms and tugged at it but without success.

‘No,’ said Ede emphatically.

Suddenly, encouraged by the success of her former half-accidental manoeuvre, Ede dropped the teddy-bear, placed her hands on Billy’s shoulders and pushed him backward off his feet.

This time he landed less harmlessly; his head hit the bare floor just off the rug with a dull hollow sound, whereupon he drew in his breath and delivered an agonized yell.

Immediately the room was in confusion. With an exclamation Markey hurried to his son, but his wife was first to reach the injured baby and catch him up into her arms.

‘Oh, Billy,’ she cried, ‘what a terrible bump! She ought to be spanked.’

Edith, who had rushed immediately to her daughter, heard this remark, and her lips came sharply together.

‘Why, Ede,’ she whispered perfunctorily, ‘you bad girl!’

Ede put back her little head suddenly and laughed. It was a loud laugh, a triumphant laugh with victory in it and challenge and contempt. Unfortunately it was also an infectious laugh. Before her mother realized the delicacy of the situation, she too had laughed, an audible, distinct laugh not unlike the baby’s, and partaking of the same overtones.

Then, as suddenly, she stopped.

Mrs Markey’s face had grown red with anger, and Markey, who had been feeling the back of the baby’s head with one finger, looked at her, frowning.

‘It’s swollen already,’ he said with a note of reproof in his voice. ‘I’ll get some witch-hazel.’

But Mrs Markey had lost her temper. ‘I don’t see anything funny about a child being hurt!’ she said in a trembling voice.

Little Ede meanwhile had been looking at her mother curiously. She noted that her own laugh had produced her mother’s and she wondered if the same cause would always produce the same effect. So she chose this moment to throw back her head and laugh again.

To her mother the additional mirth added the final touch of hysteria to the situation. Pressing her handkerchief to her mouth she giggled irrepressibly. It was more than nervousness--she felt that in a peculiar way she was laughing with her child--they were laughing together.

It was in a way a defiance--those two against the world.

While Markey rushed upstairs to the bathroom for ointment, his wife was walking up and down rocking the yelling boy in her arms.

‘Please go home!’ she broke out suddenly. ‘The child’s badly hurt, and if you haven’t the decency to be quiet, you’d better go home.’

‘Very well,’ said Edith, her own temper rising. ‘I’ve never seen anyone make such a mountain out of--’

‘Get out!’ cried Mrs Markey frantically. ‘There’s the door, get out--I never want to see you in our house again. You or your brat either!’

Edith had taken her daughter’s hand and was moving quickly towards the door, but at this remark she stopped and turned around, her face contracting with indignation.

‘Don’t you dare call her that!’

Mrs Markey did not answer but continued walking up and down, muttering to herself and to Billy in an inaudible voice.

Edith began to cry.

‘I will get out!’ she sobbed. ‘I’ve never heard anybody so rude and c-common in my life. I’m, glad your baby did get pushed down--he’s nothing but a f-fat little fool anyhow.’

Joe Markey reached the foot of the stairs just in time to hear this remark.

‘Why, Mrs Andros,’ he said sharply, ‘can’t you see the child’s hurt. You really ought to control yourself.’

‘Control m-myself!’ exclaimed Edith brokenly. ‘You better ask her to c-control herself. I’ve never heard anybody so c-common in my life.’

‘She’s insulting me!’ Mrs Markey was now livid with rage. ‘Did you hear what she said, Joe? I wish you’d put her out. If she won’t go, just take her by the shoulders and put her out!’

‘Don’t you dare touch me!’ cried Edith. ‘I’m going just as quick as I can find my c-coat!’

Blind with tears she took a step towards the hall. It was just at this moment that the door opened and John Andros walked anxiously in.

‘John!’ cried Edith, and fled to him wildly.

‘What’s the matter? Why, what’s the matter?’

‘They’re--they’re putting me out!’ she wailed, collapsing against him. ‘He’d just started to take me by the shoulders and put me out. I want my coat!’

‘That’s not true,’ objected Markey hurriedly. ‘Nobody’s going to put you out.’ He turned to John. ‘Nobody’s going to put her out,’ he repeated. ‘She’s--’

‘What do you mean “put her out”?’ demanded John abruptly. ‘What’s all this talk, anyhow?’

‘Oh, let’s go!’ cried Edith. ‘I want to go. They’re so common, John!’

‘Look here!’ Markey’s face darkened. ‘You’ve said that about enough. You’re acting sort of crazy.’

‘They called Ede a brat!’

For the second time that afternoon little Ede expressed emotion at an inopportune moment. Confused and frightened at the shouting voices, she began to cry, and her tears had the effect of conveying that she felt the insult in her heart.

‘What’s the idea of this?’ broke out John. ‘Do you insult your guests in your own house?’

‘It seems to me it’s your wife that’s done the insulting!’ answered Markey crisply. ‘In fact, your baby there started all the trouble.’

John gave a contemptuous snort. ‘Are you calling names at a little baby?’ he inquired. ‘That’s a fine manly business!’

‘Don’t talk to him, John,’ insisted Edith. ‘Find my coat!’

‘You must be in a bad way,’ went on John angrily, ‘if you have to take out your temper on a helpless little baby.’

‘I never heard anything so damn twisted in my life,’ shouted Markey. ‘If that wife of yours would shut her mouth for a minute--’

‘Wait a minute! You’re not talking to a woman and child now--’

There was an incidental interruption. Edith had been fumbling on a chair for her coat, and Mrs Markey had been watching her with hot, angry eyes. Suddenly she laid Billy down on the sofa, where he immediately stopped crying and pulled himself upright, and coming into the hall she quickly found Edith’s coat and handed it to her without a word. Then she went back to the sofa, picked up Billy, and rocking him in her arms looked again at Edith with hot, angry eyes. The interruption had taken less than half a minute.

‘Your wife comes in here and begins shouting around about how common we are!’ burst out Markey violently. ‘Well, if we’re so damn common, you’d better stay away! And what’s more, you’d better get out now!’

Again John gave a short, contemptuous laugh.

‘You’re not only common,’ he returned, ‘you’re evidently an awful bully--when there’s any helpless women and children around.’ He felt for the knob and swung the door open. ‘Come on, Edith.’

Taking up her daughter in her arms, his wife stepped outside and John, still looking contemptuously at Markey, started to follow.

‘Wait a minute!’ Markey took a step forward; he was trembling slightly, and two large veins on his temples were suddenly full of blood. ‘You don’t think you can get away with that, do you? With me?’

Without a word John walked out the door, leaving it open.

Edith, still weeping, had started for home. After following her with his eyes until she reached her own walk, John turned back towards the lighted doorway where Markey was slowly coming down the slippery steps. He took off his overcoat and hat, tossed them off the path onto the snow. Then, sliding a little on the iced walk, he took a step forward.

At the first blow, they both slipped and fell heavily to the sidewalk, half rising then, and again pulled each other to the ground. They found a better foothold in the thin snow to the side of the walk and rushed at each other, both swinging wildly and pressing out the snow into a pasty mud underfoot.

The street was deserted, and except for their short tired gasps and the padded sound as one or the other slipped down into the slushy mud, they fought in silence, clearly defined to each other by the full moonlight as well as by the amber glow that shone out of the open door. Several times they both slipped down together, and then for a while the conflict threshed about wildly on the lawn.

For ten, fifteen, twenty minutes they fought there senselessly in the moonlight. They had both taken off coats and vests at some silently agreed upon interval and now their shirts dripped from their backs in wet pulpy shreds. Both were torn and bleeding and so exhausted that they could stand only when by their position they mutually supported each other--the impact, the mere effort of a blow, would send them both to their hands and knees.

But it was not weariness that ended the business, and the very meaninglessness of the fight was a reason for not stopping. They stopped because once when they were straining at each other on the ground, they heard a man’s footsteps coming along the sidewalk. They had rolled somehow into the shadow, and when they heard these footsteps they stopped fighting, stopped moving, stopped breathing, lay huddled together like two boys playing Indian until the footsteps had passed. Then, staggering to their feet, they looked at each other like two drunken men.

‘I’ll be damned if I’m going on with this thing any more,’ cried Markey thickly.

‘I’m not going on any more, either,’ said John Andros. ‘I’ve had enough of this thing.’

Again they looked at each other, sulkily this time, as if each suspected the other of urging him to a renewal of the fight. Markey spat out a mouthful of blood from a cut lip; then he cursed softly, and picking up his coat and vest, shook off the snow from them in a surprised way, as if their comparative dampness was his only worry in the world.

‘Want to come in and wash up?’ he asked suddenly.

‘No, thanks,’ said John. ‘I ought to be going home--my wife’ll be worried.’

He too picked up his coat and vest and then his overcoat and hat. Soaking wet and dripping with perspiration, it seemed absurd that less than half an hour ago he had been wearing all these clothes.

‘Well--good night,’ he said hesitantly.

Suddenly they walked towards each other and shook hands. It was no perfunctory hand-shake: John Andros’s arm went around Markey’s shoulder, and he patted him softly on the back for a little while.

‘No harm done,’ he said brokenly.

‘No--you?’

‘No, no harm done.’

‘Well,’ said John Andros after a minute, ‘I guess I’ll say good night.’

Limping slightly and with his clothes over his arm, John Andros turned away. The moonlight was still bright as he left the dark patch of trampled ground and walked over the intervening lawn. Down at the station, half a mile away, he could hear the rumble of the seven o’clock train.

‘But you must have been crazy,’ cried Edith brokenly. ‘I thought you were going to fix it all up there and shake hands. That’s why I went away.’

‘Did you want us to fix it up?’

‘Of course not, I never want to see them again. But I thought of course that was what you were going to do.’ She was touching the bruises on his neck and back with iodine as he sat placidly in a hot bath. ‘I’m going to get the doctor,’ she said insistently. ‘You may be hurt internally.’

He shook his head. ‘Not a chance,’ he answered. ‘I don’t want this to get all over the town.’

‘I don’t understand yet how it all happened.’

‘Neither do I.’ He smiled grimly. ‘I guess these baby parties are pretty rough affairs.’

‘Well, one thing--’ suggested Edith hopefully, ‘I’m certainly glad we have beef steak in the house for tomorrow’s dinner.’

‘Why?’

‘For your eye, of course. Do you know I came within an ace of ordering veal? Wasn’t that the luckiest thing?’

Half an hour later, dressed except that his neck would accommodate no collar, John moved his limbs experimentally before the glass. ‘I believe I’ll get myself in better shape,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘I must be getting old.’

‘You mean so that next time you can beat him?’

‘I did beat him,’ he announced. ‘At least, I beat him as much as he beat me. And there isn’t going to be any next time. Don’t you go calling people common any more. If you get in any trouble, you just take your coat and go home. Understand?’

‘Yes, dear,’ she said meekly. ‘I was very foolish and now I understand.’

Out in the hall, he paused abruptly by the baby’s door.

‘Is she asleep?’

‘Sound asleep. But you can go in and peek at her--just to say good night.’

They tiptoed in and bent together over the bed. Little Ede, her cheeks flushed with health, her pink hands clasped tight together, was sleeping soundly in the cool, dark room. John reached over the railing of the bed and passed his hand lightly over the silken hair.

‘She’s asleep,’ he murmured in a puzzled way.

‘Naturally, after such an afternoon.’

‘Miz Andros,’ the coloured maid’s stage whisper floated in from the hall. ‘Mr and Miz Markey downstairs an’ want to see you. Mr Markey he’s all cut up in pieces, mam’n. His face look like a roast beef. An’ Miz Markey she ‘pear mighty mad.’

‘Why, what incomparable nerve!’ exclaimed Edith. ‘Just tell them we’re not home. I wouldn’t go down for anything in the world.’

‘You most certainly will.’ John’s voice was hard and set.

‘What?’

‘You’ll go down right now, and, what’s more, whatever that other woman does, you’ll apologize for what you said this afternoon. After that you don’t ever have to see her again.’

‘Why--John, I can’t.’

‘You’ve got to. And just remember that she probably hated to come over here twice as much as you hate to go downstairs.’

‘Aren’t you coming? Do I have to go alone?’

‘I’ll be down--in just a minute.’

John Andros waited until she had closed the door behind her; then he reached over into the bed, and picking up his daughter, blankets and all, sat down in the rocking-chair holding her tightly in his arms. She moved a little, and he held his breath, but she was sleeping soundly, and in a moment she was resting quietly in the hollow of his elbow. Slowly he bent his head until his cheek was against her bright hair. ‘Dear little girl,’ he whispered. ‘Dear little girl, dear little girl.’

John Andros knew at length what it was he had fought for so savagely that evening. He had it now, he possessed it forever, and for some time he sat there rocking very slowly to and fro in the darkness.

ABSOLUTION

There was once a priest with cold, watery eyes, who, in the still of the night, wept cold tears. He wept because the afternoons were warm and long, and he was unable to attain a complete mystical union with our Lord. Sometimes, near four o’clock, there was a rustle of Swede girls along the path by his window, and in their shrill laughter he found a terrible dissonance that made him pray aloud for the twilight to come. At twilight the laughter and the voices were quieter, but several times he had walked past Romberg’s Drug Store when it was dusk and the yellow lights shone inside and the nickel taps of the soda-fountain were gleaming, and he had found the scent of cheap toilet soap desperately sweet upon the air. He passed that way when he returned from hearing confessions on Saturday nights, and he grew careful to walk on the other side of the street so that the smell of the soap would float upward before it reached his nostrils as it drifted, rather like incense, toward the summer moon.

But there was no escape from the hot madness of four o’clock. From his window, as far as he could see, the Dakota wheat thronged the valley of the Red River. The wheat was terrible to look upon and the carpet pattern to which in agony he bent his eyes sent his thought brooding through grotesque labyrinths, open always to the unavoidable sun.

One afternoon when he had reached the point where the mind runs down like an old clock, his housekeeper brought into his study a beautiful, intense little boy of eleven named Rudolph Miller. The little boy sat down in a patch of sunshine, and the priest, at his walnut desk, pretended to be very busy. This was to conceal his relief that some one had come into his haunted room.

Presently he turned around and found himself staring into two enormous, staccato eyes, lit with gleaming points of cobalt light. For a moment their expression startled him--then he saw that his visitor was in a state of abject fear.

“Your mouth is trembling,” said Father Schwartz, in a haggard voice.

The little boy covered his quivering mouth with his hand.

“Are you in trouble?” asked Father Schwartz, sharply. “Take your hand away from your mouth and tell me what’s the matter.”

The boy--Father Schwartz recognized him now as the son of a parishioner, Mr. Miller, the freight-agent--moved his hand reluctantly off his mouth and became articulate in a despairing whisper.

“Father Schwartz--I’ve committed a terrible sin.”

“A sin against purity?”

“No, Father . . . worse.”

Father Schwartz’s body jerked sharply.

“Have you killed somebody?”

“No--but I’m afraid--” the voice rose to a shrill whimper.

“Do you want to go to confession?”

The little boy shook his head miserably. Father Schwartz cleared his throat so that he could make his voice soft and say some quiet, kind thing. In this moment he should forget his own agony, and try to act like God. He repeated to himself a devotional phrase, hoping that in return God would help him to act correctly.

“Tell me what you’ve done,” said his new soft voice.

The little boy looked at him through his tears, and was reassured by the impression of moral resiliency which the distraught priest had created. Abandoning as much of himself as he was able to this man, Rudolph Miller began to tell his story.

“On Saturday, three days ago, my father he said I had to go to confession, because I hadn’t been for a month, and the family they go every week, and I hadn’t been. So I just as leave go, I didn’t care. So I put it off till after supper because I was playing with a bunch of kids and father asked me if I went, and I said ‘no,’ and he took me by the neck and he said ‘You go now,’ so I said ‘All right,’ so I went over to church. And he yelled after me: ‘Don’t come back till you go.’ . . .”

II

“On Saturday, Three Days Ago.”

The plush curtain of the confessional rearranged its dismal creases, leaving exposed only the bottom of an old man’s old shoe. Behind the curtain an immortal soul was alone with God and the Reverend Adolphus Schwartz, priest of the parish. Sound began, a labored whispering, sibilant and discreet, broken at intervals by the voice of the priest in audible question.

Rudolph Miller knelt in the pew beside the confessional and waited, straining nervously to hear, and yet not to hear what was being said within. The fact that the priest was audible alarmed him. His own turn came next, and the three or four others who waited might listen unscrupulously while he admitted his violations of the Sixth and Ninth Commandments.

Rudolph had never committed adultery, nor even coveted his neighbor’s wife--but it was the confession of the associate sins that was particularly hard to contemplate. In comparison he relished the less shameful fallings away--they formed a grayish background which relieved the ebony mark of sexual offenses upon his soul.

He had been covering his ears with his hands, hoping that his refusal to hear would be noticed, and a like courtesy rendered to him in turn, when a sharp movement of the penitent in the confessional made him sink his face precipitately into the crook of his elbow. Fear assumed solid form, and pressed out a lodging between his heart and his lungs. He must try now with all his might to be sorry for his sins--not because he was afraid, but because he had offended God. He must convince God that he was sorry and to do so he must first convince himself. After a tense emotional struggle he achieved a tremulous self-pity, and decided that he was now ready. If, by allowing no other thought to enter his head, he could preserve this state of emotion unimpaired until he went into that large coffin set on end, he would have survived another crisis in his religious life.

For some time, however, a demoniac notion had partially possessed him. He could go home now, before his turn came, and tell his mother that he had arrived too late, and found the priest gone. This, unfortunately, involved the risk of being caught in a lie. As an alternative he could say that he had gone to confession, but this meant that he must avoid communion next day, for communion taken upon an uncleansed soul would turn to poison in his mouth, and he would crumple limp and damned from the altar-rail.

Again Father Schwartz’s voice became audible.

“And for your--”

The words blurred to a husky mumble, and Rudolph got excitedly to his feet. He felt that it was impossible for him to go to confession this afternoon. He hesitated tensely. Then from the confessional came a tap, a creak, and a sustained rustle. The slide had fallen and the plush curtain trembled. Temptation had come to him too late. . . .

“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. . . . I confess to Almighty God and to you, Father, that I have sinned. . . . Since my last confession it has been one month and three days. . . . I accuse myself of--taking the Name of the Lord in vain. . . .”

This was an easy sin. His curses had been but bravado--telling of them was little less than a brag.

“. . . of being mean to an old lady.”

The wan shadow moved a little on the latticed slat.

“How, my child?”

“Old lady Swenson,” Rudolph’s murmur soared jubilantly. “She got our baseball that we knocked in her window, and she wouldn’t give it back, so we yelled ‘Twenty-three, Skidoo,’ at her all afternoon. Then about five o’clock she had a fit, and they had to have the doctor.”

“Go on, my child.”

“Of--of not believing I was the son of my parents.”

“What?” The interrogation was distinctly startled.

“Of not believing that I was the son of my parents.”

“Why not?”

“Oh, just pride,” answered the penitent airily.

“You mean you thought you were too good to be the son of your parents?”

“Yes, Father.” On a less jubilant note.

“Go on.”

“Of being disobedient and calling my mother names. Of slandering people behind my back. Of smoking--”

Rudolph had now exhausted the minor offenses, and was approaching the sins it was agony to tell. He held his fingers against his face like bars as if to press out between them the shame in his heart.

“Of dirty words and immodest thoughts and desires,” he whispered very low.

“How often?”

“I don’t know.”

“Once a week? Twice a week?”

“Twice a week.”

“Did you yield to these desires?”

“No, Father.”

“Were you alone when you had them?”

“No, Father. I was with two boys and a girl.”

“Don’t you know, my child, that you should avoid the occasions of sin as well as the sin itself? Evil companionship leads to evil desires and evil desires to evil actions. Where were you when this happened?”

“In a barn in back of--”

“I don’t want to hear any names,” interrupted the priest sharply.

“Well, it was up in the loft of this barn and this girl and--a fella, they were saying things--saying immodest things, and I stayed.”

“You should have gone--you should have told the girl to go.”

He should have gone! He could not tell Father Schwartz how his pulse had bumped in his wrist, how a strange, romantic excitement had possessed him when those curious things had been said. Perhaps in the houses of delinquency among the dull and hard-eyed incorrigible girls can be found those for whom has burned the whitest fire.

“Have you anything else to tell me?”

“I don’t think so, Father.”

Rudolph felt a great relief. Perspiration had broken out under his tight-pressed fingers.

“Have you told any lies?”

The question startled him. Like all those who habitually and instinctively lie, he had an enormous respect and awe for the truth. Something almost exterior to himself dictated a quick, hurt answer.

“Oh, no, Father, I never tell lies.”

For a moment, like the commoner in the king’s chair, he tasted the pride of the situation. Then as the priest began to murmur conventional admonitions he realized that in heroically denying he had told lies, he had committed a terrible sin--he had told a lie in confession.

In automatic response to Father Schwartz’s “Make an act of contrition,” he began to repeat aloud meaninglessly:

“Oh, my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended Thee. . . .”

He must fix this now--it was a bad mistake--but as his teeth shut on the last words of his prayer there was a sharp sound, and the slat was closed.

A minute later when he emerged into the twilight the relief in coming from the muggy church into an open world of wheat and sky postponed the full realization of what he had done. Instead of worrying he took a deep breath of the crisp air and began to say over and over to himself the words “Blatchford Sarnemington, Blatchford Sarnemington!”

Blatchford Sarnemington was himself, and these words were in effect a lyric. When he became Blatchford Sarnemington a suave nobility flowed from him. Blatchford Sarnemington lived in great sweeping triumphs. When Rudolph half closed his eyes it meant that Blatchford had established dominance over him and, as he went by, there were envious mutters in the air: “Blatchford Sarnemington! There goes Blatchford Sarnemington.”

He was Blatchford now for a while as he strutted homeward along the staggering road, but when the road braced itself in macadam in order to become the main street of Ludwig, Rudolph’s exhilaration faded out and his mind cooled, and he felt the horror of his lie. God, of course, already knew of it--but Rudolph reserved a corner of his mind where he was safe from God, where he prepared the subterfuges with which he often tricked God. Hiding now in this corner he considered how he could best avoid the consequences of his misstatement.

At all costs he must avoid communion next day. The risk of angering God to such an extent was too great. He would have to drink water “by accident” in the morning, and thus, in accordance with a church law, render himself unfit to receive communion that day. In spite of its flimsiness this subterfuge was the most feasible that occurred to him. He accepted its risks and was concentrating on how best to put it into effect, as he turned the corner by Romberg’s Drug Store and came in sight of his father’s house.

III

Rudolph’s father, the local freight-agent, had floated with the second wave of German and Irish stock to the Minnesota-Dakota country. Theoretically, great opportunities lay ahead of a young man of energy in that day and place, but Carl Miller had been incapable of establishing either with his superiors or his subordinates the reputation for approximate immutability which is essential to success in a hierarchic industry. Somewhat gross, he was, nevertheless, insufficiently hard-headed and unable to take fundamental relationships for granted, and this inability made him suspicious, unrestful, and continually dismayed.

His two bonds with the colorful life were his faith in the Roman Catholic Church and his mystical worship of the Empire Builder, James J. Hill. Hill was the apotheosis of that quality in which Miller himself was deficient--the sense of things, the feel of things, the hint of rain in the wind on the cheek. Miller’s mind worked late on the old decisions of other men, and he had never in his life felt the balance of any single thing in his hands. His weary, sprightly, undersized body was growing old in Hill’s gigantic shadow. For twenty years he had lived alone with Hill’s name and God.

On Sunday morning Carl Miller awoke in the dustless quiet of six o’clock. Kneeling by the side of the bed he bent his yellow-gray hair and the full dapple bangs of his mustache into the pillow, and prayed for several minutes. Then he drew off his night-shirt--like the rest of his generation he had never been able to endure pajamas--and clothed his thin, white, hairless body in woollen underwear.

He shaved. Silence in the other bedroom where his wife lay nervously asleep. Silence from the screened-off corner of the hall where his son’s cot stood, and his son slept among his Alger books, his collection of cigar-bands, his mothy pennants--”Cornell,” “Hamlin,” and “Greetings from Pueblo, New Mexico”--and the other possessions of his private life. From outside Miller could hear the shrill birds and the whirring movement of the poultry, and, as an undertone, the low, swelling click-a-tick of the six-fifteen through-train for Montana and the green coast beyond. Then as the cold water dripped from the wash-rag in his hand he raised his head suddenly--he had heard a furtive sound from the kitchen below.

He dried his razor hastily, slipped his dangling suspenders to his shoulder, and listened. Some one was walking in the kitchen, and he knew by the light footfall that it was not his wife. With his mouth faintly ajar he ran quickly down the stairs and opened the kitchen door.

Standing by the sink, with one hand on the still dripping faucet and the other clutching a full glass of water, stood his son. The boy’s eyes, still heavy with sleep, met his father’s with a frightened, reproachful beauty. He was barefooted, and his pajamas were rolled up at the knees and sleeves.

For a moment they both remained motionless--Carl Miller’s brow went down and his son’s went up, as though they were striking a balance between the extremes of emotion which filled them. Then the bangs of the parent’s moustache descended portentously until they obscured his mouth, and he gave a short glance around to see if anything had been disturbed.

The kitchen was garnished with sunlight which beat on the pans and made the smooth boards of the floor and table yellow and clean as wheat. It was the center of the house where the fire burned and the tins fitted into tins like toys, and the steam whistled all day on a thin pastel note. Nothing was moved, nothing touched--except the faucet where beads of water still formed and dripped with a white flash into the sink below.

“What are you doing?”

“I got awful thirsty, so I thought I’d just come down and get--”

“I thought you were going to communion.”

A look of vehement astonishment spread over his son’s face.

“I forgot all about it.”

“Have you drunk any water?”

“No--”

As the word left his mouth Rudolph knew it was the wrong answer, but the faded indignant eyes facing him had signalled up the truth before the boy’s will could act. He realized, too, that he should never have come downstairs; some vague necessity for verisimilitude had made him want to leave a wet glass as evidence by the sink; the honesty of his imagination had betrayed him.

“Pour it out,” commanded his father, “that water!”

Rudolph despairingly inverted the tumbler.

“What’s the matter with you, anyways?” demanded Miller angrily.

“Nothing.”

“Did you go to confession yesterday?”

“Yes.”

“Then why were you going to drink water?”

“I don’t know--I forgot.”

“Maybe you care more about being a little bit thirsty than you do about your religion.”

“I forgot.” Rudolph could feel the tears straining in his eyes.

“That’s no answer.”

“Well, I did.”

“You better look out!” His father held to a high, persistent, inquisitory note: “If you’re so forgetful that you can’t remember your religion something better be done about it.”

Rudolph filled a sharp pause with:

“I can remember it all right.”

“First you begin to neglect your religion,” cried his father, fanning his own fierceness, “the next thing you’ll begin to lie and steal, and the next thing is the reform school!”

Not even this familiar threat could deepen the abyss that Rudolph saw before him. He must either tell all now, offering his body for what he knew would be a ferocious beating, or else tempt the thunderbolts by receiving the Body and Blood of Christ with sacrilege upon his soul. And of the two the former seemed more terrible--it was not so much the beating he dreaded as the savage ferocity, outlet of the ineffectual man, which would lie behind it.

“Put down that glass and go up-stairs and dress!” his father ordered, “and when we get to church, before you go to communion, you better kneel down and ask God to forgive you for your carelessness.”

Some accidental emphasis in the phrasing of this command acted like a catalytic agent on the confusion and terror of Rudolph’s mind. A wild, proud anger rose in him, and he dashed the tumbler passionately into the sink.

His father uttered a strained, husky sound, and sprang for him. Rudolph dodged to the side, tipped over a chair, and tried to get beyond the kitchen table. He cried out sharply when a hand grasped his pajama shoulder, then he felt the dull impact of a fist against the side of his head, and glancing blows on the upper part of his body. As he slipped here and there in his father’s grasp, dragged or lifted when he clung instinctively to an arm, aware of sharp smarts and strains, he made no sound except that he laughed hysterically several times. Then in less than a minute the blows abruptly ceased. After a lull during which Rudolph was tightly held, and during which they both trembled violently and uttered strange, truncated words, Carl Miller half dragged, half threatened his son up-stairs.

“Put on your clothes!”

Rudolph was now both hysterical and cold. His head hurt him, and there was a long, shallow scratch on his neck from his father’s finger-nail, and he sobbed and trembled as he dressed. He was aware of his mother standing at the doorway in a wrapper, her wrinkled face compressing and squeezing and opening out into new series of wrinkles which floated and eddied from neck to brow. Despising her nervous ineffectuality and avoiding her rudely when she tried to touch his neck with witch-hazel, he made a hasty, choking toilet. Then he followed his father out of the house and along the road toward the Catholic church.

IV

They walked without speaking except when Carl Miller acknowledged automatically the existence of passers-by. Rudolph’s uneven breathing alone ruffled the hot Sunday silence.

His father stopped decisively at the door of the church.

“I’ve decided you’d better go to confession again. Go in and tell Father Schwartz what you did and ask God’s pardon.”

“You lost your temper, too!” said Rudolph quickly.

Carl Miller took a step toward his son, who moved cautiously backward.

“All right, I’ll go.”

“Are you going to do what I say?” cried his father in a hoarse whisper.

“All right.”

Rudolph walked into the church, and for the second time in two days entered the confessional and knelt down. The slat went up almost at once.

“I accuse myself of missing my morning prayers.”

“Is that all?”

“That’s all.”

A maudlin exultation filled him. Not easily ever again would he be able to put an abstraction before the necessities of his ease and pride. An invisible line had been crossed, and he had become aware of his isolation--aware that it applied not only to those moments when he was Blatchford Sarnemington but that it applied to all his inner life. Hitherto such phenomena as “crazy” ambitions and petty shames and fears had been but private reservations, unacknowledged before the throne of his official soul. Now he realized unconsciously that his private reservations were himself--and all the rest a garnished front and a conventional flag. The pressure of his environment had driven him into the lonely secret road of adolescence.

He knelt in the pew beside his father. Mass began. Rudolph knelt up--when he was alone he slumped his posterior back against the seat--and tasted the consciousness of a sharp, subtle revenge. Beside him his father prayed that God would forgive Rudolph, and asked also that his own outbreak of temper would be pardoned. He glanced sidewise at his son, and was relieved to see that the strained, wild look had gone from his face and that he had ceased sobbing. The Grace of God, inherent in the Sacrament, would do the rest, and perhaps after Mass everything would be better. He was proud of Rudolph in his heart, and beginning to be truly as well as formally sorry for what he had done.

Usually, the passing of the collection box was a significant point for Rudolph in the services. If, as was often the case, he had no money to drop in he would be furiously ashamed and bow his head and pretend not to see the box, lest Jeanne Brady in the pew behind should take notice and suspect an acute family poverty. But to-day he glanced coldly into it as it skimmed under his eyes, noting with casual interest the large number of pennies it contained.

When the bell rang for communion, however, he quivered. There was no reason why God should not stop his heart. During the past twelve hours he had committed a series of mortal sins increasing in gravity, and he was now to crown them all with a blasphemous sacrilege.

“Domini, non sum dignus; ut interes sub tectum meum; sed tantum dic verbo, et sanabitur anima mea. . . .”

There was a rustle in the pews, and the communicants worked their ways into the aisle with downcast eyes and joined hands. Those of larger piety pressed together their finger-tips to form steeples. Among these latter was Carl Miller. Rudolph followed him toward the altar-rail and knelt down, automatically taking up the napkin under his chin. The bell rang sharply, and the priest turned from the altar with the white Host held above the chalice:

“Corpus Domini nostri Jesu Christi custodiat animam meam in vitam aeternam.”

A cold sweat broke out on Rudolph’s forehead as the communion began. Along the line Father Schwartz moved, and with gathering nausea Rudolph felt his heart-valves weakening at the will of God. It seemed to him that the church was darker and that a great quiet had fallen, broken only by the inarticulate mumble which announced the approach of the Creator of Heaven and Earth. He dropped his head down between his shoulders and waited for the blow.

Then he felt a sharp nudge in his side. His father was poking him to sit up, not to slump against the rail; the priest was only two places away.

“Corpus Domini nostri Jesu Christi custodiat animam meam in vitam aeternam.”

Rudolph opened his mouth. He felt the sticky wax taste of the wafer on his tongue. He remained motionless for what seemed an interminable period of time, his head still raised, the wafer undissolved in his mouth. Then again he started at the pressure of his father’s elbow, and saw that the people were falling away from the altar like leaves and turning with blind downcast eyes to their pews, alone with God.

Rudolph was alone with himself, drenched with perspiration and deep in mortal sin. As he walked back to his pew the sharp taps of his cloven hoofs were loud upon the floor, and he knew that it was a dark poison he carried in his heart.

V

“Sagitta Volante in Dei”

The beautiful little boy with eyes like blue stones, and lashes that sprayed open from them like flower-petals had finished telling his sin to Father Schwartz--and the square of sunshine in which he sat had moved forward half an hour into the room. Rudolph had become less frightened now; once eased of the story a reaction had set in. He knew that as long as he was in the room with this priest God would not stop his heart, so he sighed and sat quietly, waiting for the priest to speak.

Father Schwartz’s cold watery eyes were fixed upon the carpet pattern on which the sun had brought out the swastikas and the flat bloomless vines and the pale echoes of flowers. The hall-clock ticked insistently toward sunset, and from the ugly room and from the afternoon outside the window arose a stiff monotony, shattered now and then by the reverberate clapping of a far-away hammer on the dry air. The priest’s nerves were strung thin and the beads of his rosary were crawling and squirming like snakes upon the green felt of his table top. He could not remember now what it was he should say.

Of all the things in this lost Swede town he was most aware of this little boy’s eyes--the beautiful eyes, with lashes that left them reluctantly and curved back as though to meet them once more.

For a moment longer the silence persisted while Rudolph waited, and the priest struggled to remember something that was slipping farther and farther away from him, and the clock ticked in the broken house. Then Father Schwartz stared hard at the little boy and remarked in a peculiar voice:

“When a lot of people get together in the best places things go glimmering.”

Rudolph started and looked quickly at Father Schwartz’s face.

“I said--” began the priest, and paused, listening. “Do you hear the hammer and the clock ticking and the bees? Well, that’s no good. The thing is to have a lot of people in the center of the world, wherever that happens to be. Then”--his watery eyes widened knowingly--”things go glimmering.”

“Yes, Father,” agreed Rudolph, feeling a little frightened.

“What are you going to be when you grow up?”

“Well, I was going to be a baseball-player for a while,” answered Rudolph nervously, “but I don’t think that’s a very good ambition, so I think I’ll be an actor or a Navy officer.”

Again the priest stared at him.

“I see exactly what you mean,” he said, with a fierce air.

Rudolph had not meant anything in particular, and at the implication that he had, he became more uneasy.

“This man is crazy,” he thought, “and I’m scared of him. He wants me to help him out some way, and I don’t want to.”

“You look as if things went glimmering,” cried Father Schwartz wildly. “Did you ever go to a party?”

“Yes, Father.”

“And did you notice that everybody was properly dressed? That’s what I mean. Just as you went into the party there was a moment when everybody was properly dressed. Maybe two little girls were standing by the door and some boys were leaning over the banisters, and there were bowls around full of flowers.”

“I’ve been to a lot of parties,” said Rudolph, rather relieved that the conversation had taken this turn.

“Of course,” continued Father Schwartz triumphantly, “I knew you’d agree with me. But my theory is that when a whole lot of people get together in the best places things go glimmering all the time.”

Rudolph found himself thinking of Blatchford Sarnemington.

“Please listen to me!” commanded the priest impatiently. “Stop worrying about last Saturday. Apostasy implies an absolute damnation only on the supposition of a previous perfect faith. Does that fix it?”

Rudolph had not the faintest idea what Father Schwartz was talking about, but he nodded and the priest nodded back at him and returned to his mysterious preoccupation.

“Why,” he cried, “they have lights now as big as stars--do you realize that? I heard of one light they had in Paris or somewhere that was as big as a star. A lot of people had it--a lot of gay people. They have all sorts of things now that you never dreamed of.”

“Look here--” He came nearer to Rudolph, but the boy drew away, so Father Schwartz went back and sat down in his chair, his eyes dried out and hot. “Did you ever see an amusement park?”

“No, Father.”

“Well, go and see an amusement park.” The priest waved his hand vaguely. “It’s a thing like a fair, only much more glittering. Go to one at night and stand a little way off from it in a dark place--under dark trees. You’ll see a big wheel made of lights turning in the air, and a long slide shooting boats down into the water. A band playing somewhere, and a smell of peanuts--and everything will twinkle. But it won’t remind you of anything, you see. It will all just hang out there in the night like a colored balloon--like a big yellow lantern on a pole.”

Father Schwartz frowned as he suddenly thought of something.

“But don’t get up close,” he warned Rudolph, “because if you do you’ll only feel the heat and the sweat and the life.”

All this talking seemed particularly strange and awful to Rudolph, because this man was a priest. He sat there, half terrified, his beautiful eyes open wide and staring at Father Schwartz. But underneath his terror he felt that his own inner convictions were confirmed. There was something ineffably gorgeous somewhere that had nothing to do with God. He no longer thought that God was angry at him about the original lie, because He must have understood that Rudolph had done it to make things finer in the confessional, brightening up the dinginess of his admissions by saying a thing radiant and proud. At the moment when he had affirmed immaculate honor a silver pennon had flapped out into the breeze somewhere and there had been the crunch of leather and the shine of silver spurs and a troop of horsemen waiting for dawn on a low green hill. The sun had made stars of light on their breastplates like the picture at home of the German cuirassiers at Sedan.

But now the priest was muttering inarticulate and heart-broken words, and the boy became wildly afraid. Horror entered suddenly in at the open window, and the atmosphere of the room changed. Father Schwartz collapsed precipitously down on his knees, and let his body settle back against a chair.

“Oh, my God!” he cried out, in a strange voice, and wilted to the floor.

Then a human oppression rose from the priest’s worn clothes, and mingled with the faint smell of old food in the corners. Rudolph gave a sharp cry and ran in a panic from the house--while the collapsed man lay there quite still, filling his room, filling it with voices and faces until it was crowded with echolalia, and rang loud with a steady, shrill note of laughter.

Outside the window the blue sirocco trembled over the wheat, and girls with yellow hair walked sensuously along roads that bounded the fields, calling innocent, exciting things to the young men who were working in the lines between the grain. Legs were shaped under starchless gingham, and rims of the necks of dresses were warm and damp. For five hours now hot fertile life had burned in the afternoon. It would be night in three hours, and all along the land there would be these blonde Northern girls and the tall young men from the farms lying out beside the wheat, under the moon.

RAGS MARTIN-JONES AND THE PR-NCE OF W-LES

The Majestic came gliding into New York harbor on an April morning. She sniffed at the tugboats and turtle-gaited ferries, winked at a gaudy young yacht, and ordered a cattle-boat out of her way with a snarling whistle of steam. Then she parked at her private dock with all the fuss of a stout lady sitting down, and announced complacently that she had just come from Cherbourg and Southampton with a cargo of the very best people in the world.

The very best people in the world stood on the deck and waved idiotically to their poor relations who were waiting on the dock for gloves from Paris. Before long a great toboggan had connected the Majestic with the North American continent, and the ship began to disgorge these very best people in the world--who turned out to be Gloria Swanson, two buyers from Lord & Taylor, the financial minister from Graustark with a proposal for funding the debt, and an African king who had been trying to land somewhere all winter and was feeling violently seasick.

The photographers worked passionately as the stream of passengers flowed on to the dock. There was a burst of cheering at the appearance of a pair of stretchers laden with two Middle-Westerners who had drunk themselves delirious on the last night out.

The deck gradually emptied, but when the last bottle of Benedictine had reached shore the photographers still remained at their posts. And the officer in charge of debarkation still stood at the foot of the gangway, glancing first at his watch and then at the deck as if some important part of the cargo was still on board. At last from the watchers on the pier there arose a long-drawn “Ah-h-h!” as a final entourage began to stream down from deck B.

First came two French maids, carrying small, purple dogs, and followed by a squad of porters, blind and invisible under innumerable bunches and bouquets of fresh flowers. Another maid followed, leading a sad-eyed orphan child of a French flavor, and close upon its heels walked the second officer pulling along three neurasthenic wolfhounds, much to their reluctance and his own.

A pause. Then the captain, Sir Howard George Witchcraft, appeared at the rail, with something that might have been a pile of gorgeous silver-fox fur standing by his side.

Rags Martin-Jones, after five years in the capitals of Europe, was returning to her native land!

Rags Martin-Jones was not a dog. She was half a girl and half a flower, and as she shook hands with Captain Sir Howard George Witchcraft she smiled as if some one had told her the newest, freshest joke in the world. All the people who had not already left the pier felt that smile trembling on the April air and turned around to see.

She came slowly down the gangway. Her hat, an expensive, inscrutable experiment, was crushed under her arm, so that her scant boy’s hair, convict’s hair, tried unsuccessfully to toss and flop a little in the harbor wind. Her face was like seven o’clock on a wedding morning save where she had slipped a preposterous monocle into an eye of clear childish blue. At every few steps her long lashes would tilt out the monocle, and she would laugh, a bored, happy laugh, and replace the supercilious spectacle in the other eye.

Tap! Her one hundred and five pounds reached the pier and it seemed to sway and bend from the shock of her beauty. A few porters fainted. A large, sentimental shark which had followed the ship across made a despairing leap to see her once more, and then dove, broken-hearted, back into the deep sea. Rags Martin-Jones had come home.

There was no member of her family there to meet her, for the simple reason that she was the only member of her family left alive. In 1913 her parents had gone down on the Titanic together rather than be separated in this world, and so the Martin-Jones fortune of seventy-five millions had been inherited by a very little girl on her tenth birthday. It was what the consumer always refers to as a “shame.”

Rags Martin-Jones (everybody had forgotten her real name long ago) was now photographed from all sides. The monocle persistently fell out, and she kept laughing and yawning and replacing it, so no very clear picture of her was taken--except by the motion-picture camera. All the photographs, however, included a flustered, handsome young man, with an almost ferocious love-light burning in his eyes, who had met her on the dock. His name was John M. Chestnut, he had already written the story of his success for the American Magazine, and he had been hopelessly in love with Rags ever since the time when she, like the tides, had come under the influence of the summer moon.

When Rags became really aware of his presence they were walking down the pier, and she looked at him blankly as though she had never seen him before in this world.

“Rags,” he began, “Rags--”

“John M. Chestnut?” she inquired, inspecting him with great interest.

“Of course!” he exclaimed angrily. “Are you trying to pretend you don’t know me? That you didn’t write me to meet you here?”

She laughed. A chauffeur appeared at her elbow, and she twisted out of her coat, revealing a dress made in great splashy checks of sea-blue and gray. She shook herself like a wet bird.

“I’ve got a lot of junk to declare,” she remarked absently.

“So have I,” said Chestnut anxiously, “and the first thing I want to declare is that I’ve loved you, Rags, every minute since you’ve been away.”

She stopped him with a groan.

“Please! There were some young Americans on the boat. The subject has become a bore.”

“My God!” cried Chestnut, “do you mean to say that you class my love with what was said to you on a boat?”

His voice had risen, and several people in the vicinity turned to hear.

“Sh!” she warned him, “I’m not giving a circus. If you want me to even see you while I’m here, you’ll have to be less violent.”

But John M. Chestnut seemed unable to control his voice.

“Do you mean to say”--it trembled to a carrying pitch--”that you’ve forgotten what you said on this very pier five years ago last Thursday?”

Half the passengers from the ship were now watching the scene on the dock, and another little eddy drifted out of the customs-house to see.

“John”--her displeasure was increasing--”if you raise your voice again I’ll arrange it so you’ll have plenty of chance to cool off. I’m going to the Ritz. Come and see me there this afternoon.”

“But, Rags!” he protested hoarsely. “Listen to me. Five years ago--”

Then the watchers on the dock were treated to a curious sight. A beautiful lady in a checkered dress of sea-blue and gray took a brisk step forward so that her hands came into contact with an excited young man by her side. The young man retreating instinctively reached back with his foot, but, finding nothing, relapsed gently off the thirty-foot dock and plopped, after a not ungraceful revolution, into the Hudson River.

A shout of alarm went up, and there was a rush to the edge just as his head appeared above water. He was swimming easily, and, perceiving this, the young lady who had apparently been the cause of the accident leaned over the pier and made a megaphone of her hands.

“I’ll be in at half past four,” she cried.

And with a cheerful wave of her hand, which the engulfed gentleman was unable to return, she adjusted her monocle, threw one haughty glance at the gathered crowd, and walked leisurely from the scene.

II

The five dogs, the three maids, and the French orphan were installed in the largest suite at the Ritz, and Rags tumbled lazily into a steaming bath, fragrant with herbs, where she dozed for the greater part of an hour. At the end of that time she received business calls from a masseuse, a manicure, and finally a Parisian hair-dresser, who restored her hair-cut to criminal’s length. When John M. Chestnut arrived at four he found half a dozen lawyers and bankers, the administrators of the Martin-Jones trust fund, waiting in the hall. They had been there since half past one, and were now in a state of considerable agitation.

After one of the maids had subjected him to a severe scrutiny, possibly to be sure that he was thoroughly dry, John was conducted immediately into the presence of m’selle. M’selle was in her bedroom reclining on the chaise-longue among two dozen silk pillows that had accompanied her from the other side. John came into the room somewhat stiffly and greeted her with a formal bow.

“You look better,” she said, raising herself from her pillows and staring at him appraisingly. “It gave you a color.”

He thanked her coldly for the compliment.

“You ought to go in every morning.” And then she added irrelevantly: “I’m going back to Paris tomorrow.”

John Chestnut gasped.

“I wrote you that I didn’t intend to stay more than a week anyhow,” she added.

“But, Rags--”

“Why should I? There isn’t an amusing man in New York.”

“But listen, Rags, won’t you give me a chance? Won’t you stay for, say, ten days and get to know me a little?”

“Know you!” Her tone implied that he was already a far too open book. “I want a man who’s capable of a gallant gesture.”

“Do you mean you want me to express myself entirely in pantomime?”

Rags uttered a disgusted sigh.

“I mean you haven’t any imagination,” she explained patiently. “No Americans have any imagination. Paris is the only large city where a civilized woman can breathe.”

“Don’t you care for me at all any more?”

“I wouldn’t have crossed the Atlantic to see you if I didn’t. But as soon as I looked over the Americans on the boat, I knew I couldn’t marry one. I’d just hate you, John, and the only fun I’d have out of it would be the fun of breaking your heart.”

She began to twist herself down among the cushions until she almost disappeared from view.

“I’ve lost my monocle,” she explained.

After an unsuccessful search in the silken depths she discovered the illusive glass hanging down the back of her neck.

“I’d love to be in love,” she went on, replacing the monocle in her childish eye. “Last spring in Sorrento I almost eloped with an Indian rajah, but he was half a shade too dark, and I took an intense dislike to one of his other wives.”

“Don’t talk that rubbish!” cried John, sinking his face into his hands.

“Well, I didn’t marry him,” she protested. “But in one way he had a lot to offer. He was the third richest subject of the British Empire. That’s another thing--are you rich?”

“Not as rich as you.”

“There you are. What have you to offer me?”

“Love.”

“Love!” She disappeared again among the cushions. “Listen, John. Life to me is a series of glistening bazaars with a merchant in front of each one rubbing his hands together and saying ‘Patronize this place here. Best bazaar in the world.’ So I go in with my purse full of beauty and money and youth, all prepared to buy. ‘What have you got for sale?’ I ask him, and he rubs his hands together and says: ‘Well, Mademoiselle, to-day we have some perfectly be-oo-tiful love.’ Sometimes he hasn’t even got that in stock, but he sends out for it when he finds I have so much money to spend. Oh, he always gives me love before I go--and for nothing. That’s the one revenge I have.”

John Chestnut rose despairingly to his feet and took a step toward the window.

“Don’t throw yourself out,” Rags exclaimed quickly.

“All right.” He tossed his cigarette down into Madison Avenue.

“It isn’t just you,” she said in a softer voice. “Dull and uninspired as you are, I care for you more than I can say. But life’s so endless here. Nothing ever comes off.”

“Loads of things come off,” he insisted. “Why, to-day there was an intellectual murder in Hoboken and a suicide by proxy in Maine. A bill to sterilize agnostics is before Congress--”

“I have no interest in humor,” she objected, “but I have an almost archaic predilection for romance. Why, John, last month I sat at a dinner-table while two men flipped a coin for the kingdom of Schwartzberg-Rhineminster. In Paris I knew a man named Blutchdak who really started the war, and has a new one planned for year after next.”

“Well, just for a rest you come out with me tonight,” he said doggedly.

“Where to?” demanded Rags with scorn. “Do you think I still thrill at a night-club and a bottle of sugary mousseaux? I prefer my own gaudy dreams.”

“I’ll take you to the most highly-strung place in the city.”

“What’ll happen? You’ve got to tell me what’ll happen.”

John Chestnut suddenly drew a long breath and looked cautiously around as if he were afraid of being overheard.

“Well, to tell you the truth,” he said in a low, worried tone, “if everything was known, something pretty awful would be liable to happen to me.”

She sat upright and the pillows tumbled about her like leaves.

“Do you mean to imply that there’s anything shady in your life?” she cried, with laughter in her voice. “Do you expect me to believe that? No, John, you’ll have your fun by plugging ahead on the beaten path--just plugging ahead.”

Her mouth, a small insolent rose, dropped the words on him like thorns. John took his hat and coat from the chair and picked up his cane.

“For the last time--will you come along with me to-night and see what you will see?”

“See what? See who? Is there anything in this country worth seeing?”

“Well,” he said, in a matter-of-fact tone, “for one thing you’ll see the Prince of Wales.”

“What?” She left the chaise-longue at a bound. “Is he back in New York?”

“He will be to-night. Would you care to see him?”

“Would I? I’ve never seen him. I’ve missed him everywhere. I’d give a year of my life to see him for an hour.” Her voice trembled with excitement.

“He’s been in Canada. He’s down here incognito for the big prize-fight this afternoon. And I happen to know where he’s going to be to-night.”

Rags gave a sharp ecstatic cry:

“Dominic! Louise! Germaine!”

The three maids came running. The room filled suddenly with vibrations of wild, startled light.

“Dominic, the car!” cried Rags in French. “St. Raphael, my gold dress and the slippers with the real gold heels. The big pearls too--all the pearls, and the egg-diamond and the stockings with the sapphire clocks. Germaine--send for a beauty-parlor on the run. My bath again--ice cold and half full of almond cream. Dominic--Tiffany’s, like lightning, before they close. Find me a brooch, a pendant, a tiara, anything--it doesn’t matter--with the arms of the house of Windsor.”

She was fumbling at the buttons of her dress--and as John turned quickly to go, it was already sliding from her shoulders.

“Orchids!” she called after him, “orchids, for the love of heaven! Four dozen, so I can choose four.”

And then maids flew here and there about the room like frightened birds. “Perfume, St. Raphael, open the perfume trunk, and my rose-colored sables, and my diamond garters, and the sweet-oil for my hands! Here, take these things! This too--and this--ouch!--and this!”

With becoming modesty John Chestnut closed the outside door. The six trustees in various postures of fatigue, of ennui, of resignation, of despair, were still cluttering up the outer hall.

“Gentlemen,” announced John Chestnut, “I fear that Miss Martin-Jones is much too weary from her trip to talk to you this afternoon.”

III

“This place, for no particular reason, is called the Hole in the Sky.”

Rags looked around her. They were on a roof-garden wide open to the April night. Overhead the true stars winked cold, and there was a lunar sliver of ice in the dark west. But where they stood it was warm as June, and the couples dining or dancing on the opaque glass floor were unconcerned with the forbidding sky.

“What makes it so warm?” she whispered as they moved toward a table.

“It’s some new invention that keeps the warm air from rising. I don’t know the principle of the thing, but I know that they can keep it open like this even in the middle of winter--”

“Where’s the Prince of Wales?” she demanded tensely.

John looked around.

“He hasn’t arrived yet. He won’t be here for about half an hour.”

She sighed profoundly.

“It’s the first time I’ve been excited in four years.”

Four years--one year less than he had loved her. He wondered if when she was sixteen, a wild lovely child, sitting up all night in restaurants with officers who were to leave for Brest next day, losing the glamour of life too soon in the old, sad, poignant days of the war, she had ever been so lovely as under these amber lights and this dark sky. From her excited eyes to her tiny slipper heels, which were striped with layers of real silver and gold, she was like one of those amazing ships that are carved complete in a bottle. She was finished with that delicacy, with that care; as though the long lifetime of some worker in fragility had been used to make her so. John Chestnut wanted to take her up in his hands, turn her this way and that, examine the tip of a slipper or the tip of an ear or squint closely at the fairy stuff from which her lashes were made.

“Who’s that?” She pointed suddenly to a handsome Latin at a table over the way.

“That’s Roderigo Minerlino, the movie and face-cream star. Perhaps he’ll dance after a while.”

Rags became suddenly aware of the sound of violins and drums, but the music seemed to come from far away, seemed to float over the crisp night and on to the floor with the added remoteness of a dream.

“The orchestra’s on another roof,” explained John. “It’s a new idea--Look, the entertainment’s beginning.”

A negro girl, thin as a reed, emerged suddenly from a masked entrance into a circle of harsh barbaric light, startled the music to a wild minor, and commenced to sing a rhythmic, tragic song. The pipe of her body broke abruptly and she began a slow incessant step, without progress and without hope, like the failure of a savage insufficient dream. She had lost Papa Jack, she cried over and over with a hysterical monotony at once despairing and unreconciled. One by one the loud horns tried to force her from the steady beat of madness but she listened only to the mutter of the drums which were isolating her in some lost place in time, among many thousand forgotten years. After the failure of the piccolo, she made herself again into a thin brown line, wailed once with sharp and terrible intensity, then vanished into sudden darkness.

“If you lived in New York you wouldn’t need to be told who she is,” said John when the amber light flashed on. “The next fella is Sheik B. Smith, a comedian of the fatuous, garrulous sort--”

He broke off. Just as the lights went down for the second number Rags had given a long sigh, and leaned forward tensely in her chair. Her eyes were rigid like the eyes of a pointer dog, and John saw that they were fixed on a party that had come through a side entrance, and were arranging themselves around a table in the half-darkness.

The table was shielded with palms, and Rags at first made out only three dim forms. Then she distinguished a fourth who seemed to be placed well behind the other three--a pale oval of a face topped with a glimmer of dark-yellow hair.

“Hello!” ejaculated John. “There’s his majesty now.”

Her breath seemed to die murmurously in her throat. She was dimly aware that the comedian was now standing in a glow of white light on the dancing floor, that he had been talking for some moments, and that there was a constant ripple of laughter in the air. But her eyes remained motionless, enchanted. She saw one of the party bend and whisper to another, and after the low glitter of a match the bright button of a cigarette end gleamed in the background. How long it was before she moved she did not know. Then something seemed to happen to her eyes, something white, something terribly urgent, and she wrenched about sharply to find herself full in the center of a baby spot-light from above. She became aware that words were being said to her from somewhere, and that a quick trail of laughter was circling the roof, but the light blinded her, and instinctively she made a half-movement from her chair.

“Sit still!” John was whispering across the table. “He picks somebody out for this every night.”

Then she realized--it was the comedian, Sheik B. Smith. He was talking to her, arguing with her--about something that seemed incredibly funny to every one else, but came to her ears only as a blur of muddled sound. Instinctively she had composed her face at the first shock of the light and now she smiled. It was a gesture of rare self-possession. Into this smile she insinuated a vast impersonality, as if she were unconscious of the light, unconscious of his attempt to play upon her loveliness--but amused at an infinitely removed him, whose darts might have been thrown just as successfully at the moon. She was no longer a “lady”--a lady would have been harsh or pitiful or absurd; Rags stripped her attitude to a sheer consciousness of her own impervious beauty, sat there glittering until the comedian began to feel alone as he had never felt alone before. At a signal from him the spot-light was switched suddenly out. The moment was over.

The moment was over, the comedian left the floor, and the far-away music began. John leaned toward her.

“I’m sorry. There really wasn’t anything to do. You were wonderful.”

She dismissed the incident with a casual laugh--then she started, there were now only two men sitting at the table across the floor.

“He’s gone!” she exclaimed in quick distress.

“Don’t worry--he’ll be back. He’s got to be awfully careful, you see, so he’s probably waiting outside with one of his aides until it gets dark again.”

“Why has he got to be careful?”

“Because he’s not supposed to be in New York. He’s even under one of his second-string names.”

The lights dimmed again, and almost immediately a tall man appeared out of the darkness and approached their table.

“May I introduce myself?” he said rapidly to John in a supercilious British voice. “Lord Charles Este, of Baron Marchbanks’ party.” He glanced at John closely as if to be sure that he appreciated the significance of the name.

John nodded.

“That is between ourselves, you understand.”

“Of course.”

Rags groped on the table for her untouched champagne, and tipped the glassful down her throat.

“Baron Marchbanks requests that your companion will join his party during this number.”

Both men looked at Rags. There was a moment’s pause.

“Very well,” she said, and glanced back again interrogatively at John. Again he nodded. She rose and with her heart beating wildly threaded the tables, making the half-circuit of the room; then melted, a slim figure in shimmering gold, into the table set in half-darkness.

IV

The number drew to a close, and John Chestnut sat alone at his table, stirring auxiliary bubbles in his glass of champagne. Just before the lights went on, there was a soft rasp of gold cloth, and Rags, flushed and breathing quickly, sank into her chair. Her eyes were shining with tears.

John looked at her moodily.

“Well, what did he say?”

“He was very quiet.”

“Didn’t he say a word?”

Her hand trembled as she took up her glass of champagne.

“He just looked at me while it was dark. And he said a few conventional things. He was like his pictures, only he looks very bored and tired. He didn’t even ask my name.”

“Is he leaving New York to-night?”

“In half an hour. He and his aides have a car outside, and they expect to be over the border before dawn.”

“Did you find him--fascinating?”

She hesitated and then slowly nodded her head.

“That’s what everybody says,” admitted John glumly. “Do they expect you back there?”

“I don’t know.” She looked uncertainly across the floor but the celebrated personage had again withdrawn from his table to some retreat outside. As she turned back an utterly strange young man who had been standing for a moment in the main entrance came toward them hurriedly. He was a deathly pale person in a dishevelled and inappropriate business suit, and he had laid a trembling hand on John Chestnut’s shoulder.

“Monte!” exclaimed John, starting up so suddenly that he upset his champagne. “What is it? What’s the matter?”

“They’ve picked up the trail!” said the young man in a shaken whisper. He looked around. “I’ve got to speak to you alone.”

John Chestnut jumped to his feet, and Rags noticed that his face too had become white as the napkin in his hand. He excused himself and they retreated to an unoccupied table a few feet away. Rags watched them curiously for a moment, then she resumed her scrutiny of the table across the floor. Would she be asked to come back? The prince had simply risen and bowed and gone outside. Perhaps she should have waited until he returned, but though she was still tense with excitement she had, to some extent, become Rags Martin-Jones again. Her curiosity was satisfied--any new urge must come from him. She wondered if she had really felt an intrinsic charm--she wondered especially if he had in any marked way responded to her beauty.

The pale person called Monte disappeared and John returned to the table. Rags was startled to find that a tremendous change had come over him. He lurched into his chair like a drunken man.

“John! What’s the matter?”

Instead of answering, he reached for the champagne bottle, but his fingers were trembling so that the splattered wine made a wet yellow ring around his glass.

“Are you sick?”

“Rags,” he said unsteadily, “I’m all through.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m all through, I tell you.” He managed a sickly smile. “There’s been a warrant out for me for over an hour.”

“What have you done?” she demanded in a frightened voice. “What’s the warrant for?”

The lights went out for the next number, and he collapsed suddenly over the table.

“What is it?” she insisted, with rising apprehension. She leaned forward--his answer was barely audible.

“Murder?” She could feel her body grow cold as ice.

He nodded. She took hold of both arms and tried to shake him upright, as one shakes a coat into place. His eyes were rolling in his head.

“Is it true? Have they got proof?”

Again he nodded drunkenly.

“Then you’ve got to get out of the country now! Do you understand, John? You’ve got to get out now, before they come looking for you here!”

He loosed a wild glance of terror toward the entrance.

“Oh, God!” cried Rags, “why don’t you do something?” Her eyes strayed here and there in desperation, became suddenly fixed. She drew in her breath sharply, hesitated, and then whispered fiercely into his ear.

“If I arrange it, will you go to Canada tonight?”

“How?”

“I’ll arrange it--if you’ll pull yourself together a little. This is Rags talking to you, don’t you understand, John? I want you to sit here and not move until I come back!”

A minute later she had crossed the room under cover of the darkness.

“Baron Marchbanks,” she whispered softly, standing just behind his chair.

He motioned her to sit down.

“Have you room in your car for two more passengers to-night?”

One of the aides turned around abruptly.

“His lordship’s car is full,” he said shortly.

“It’s terribly urgent.” Her voice was trembling.

“Well,” said the prince hesitantly, “I don’t know.”

Lord Charles Este looked at the prince and shook his head.

“I don’t think it’s advisable. This is a ticklish business anyhow with contrary orders from home. You know we agreed there’d be no complications.”

The prince frowned.

“This isn’t a complication,” he objected.

Este turned frankly to Rags.

“Why is it urgent?”

Rags hesitated.

“Why”--she flushed suddenly--”it’s a runaway marriage.”

The prince laughed.

“Good!” he exclaimed. “That settles it. Este is just being official. Bring him over right away. We’re leaving shortly, what?”

Este looked at his watch.

“Right now!”

Rags rushed away. She wanted to move the whole party from the roof while the lights were still down.

“Hurry!” she cried in John’s ear. “We’re going over the border--with the Prince of Wales. You’ll be safe by morning.”

He looked up at her with dazed eyes. She hurriedly paid the check, and seizing his arm piloted him as inconspicuously as possible to the other table, where she introduced him with a word. The prince acknowledged his presence by shaking hands--the aides nodded, only faintly concealing their displeasure.

“We’d better start,” said Este, looking impatiently at his watch.

They were on their feet when suddenly an exclamation broke from all of them--two policemen and a red-haired man in plain clothes had come in at the main door.

“Out we go,” breathed Este, impelling the party toward the side entrance. “There’s going to be some kind of riot here.” He swore--two more blue-coats barred the exit there. They paused uncertainly. The plain-clothes man was beginning a careful inspection of the people at the tables.

Este looked sharply at Rags and then at John, who shrank back behind the palms.

“Is that one of your revenue fellas out there?” demanded Este.

“No,” whispered Rags. “There’s going to be trouble. Can’t we get out this entrance?”

The prince with rising impatience sat down again in his chair.

“Let me know when you chaps are ready to go.” He smiled at Rags. “Now just suppose we all get in trouble just for that jolly face of yours.”

Then suddenly the lights went up. The plain-clothes man whirled around quickly and sprang to the middle of the cabaret floor.

“Nobody try to leave this room!” he shouted. “Sit down, that party behind the palms! Is John M. Chestnut in this room?”

Rags gave a short involuntary cry.

“Here!” cried the detective to the policeman behind him. “Take a look at that funny bunch across over there. Hands up, you men!”

“My God!” whispered Este, “we’ve got to get out of here!” He turned to the prince. “This won’t do, Ted. You can’t be seen here. I’ll stall them off while you get down to the car.”

He took a step toward the side entrance.

“Hands up, there!” shouted the plain-clothes man. “And when I say hands up I mean it! Which one of you’s Chestnut?”

“You’re mad!” cried Este. “We’re British subjects. We’re not involved in this affair in any way!”

A woman screamed somewhere, and there was a general movement toward the elevator, a movement which stopped short before the muzzles of two automatic pistols. A girl next to Rags collapsed in a dead faint to the floor, and at the same moment the music on the other roof began to play.

“Stop that music!” bellowed the plain-clothes man. “And get some earrings on that whole bunch--quick!”

Two policemen advanced toward the party, and simultaneously Este and the other aides drew their revolvers, and, shielding the prince as they best could, began to edge toward the side. A shot rang out and then another, followed by a crash of silver and china as half a dozen diners overturned their tables and dropped quickly behind.

The panic became general. There were three shots in quick succession, and then a fusillade. Rags saw Este firing coolly at the eight amber lights above, and a thick fume of gray smoke began to fill the air. As a strange undertone to the shouting and screaming came the incessant clamor of the distant jazz band.

Then in a moment it was all over. A shrill whistle rang out over the roof, and through the smoke Rags saw John Chestnut advancing toward the plain-clothes man, his hands held out in a gesture of surrender. There was a last nervous cry, a chill clatter as some one inadvertently stepped into a pile of dishes, and then a heavy silence fell on the roof--even the band seemed to have died away.

“It’s all over!” John Chestnut’s voice rang out wildly on the night air. “The party’s over. Everybody who wants to can go home!”

Still there was silence--Rags knew it was the silence of awe--the strain of guilt had driven John Chestnut insane.

“It was a great performance,” he was shouting. “I want to thank you one and all. If you can find any tables still standing, champagne will be served as long as you care to stay.”

It seemed to Rags that the roof and the high stars suddenly began to swim round and round. She saw John take the detective’s hand and shake it heartily, and she watched the detective grin and pocket his gun. The music had recommenced, and the girl who had fainted was suddenly dancing with Lord Charles Este in the corner. John was running here and there patting people on the back, and laughing and shaking hands. Then he was coming toward her, fresh and innocent as a child.

“Wasn’t it wonderful?” he cried.

Rags felt a faintness stealing over her. She groped backward with her hand toward a chair.

“What was it?” she cried dazedly. “Am I dreaming?”

“Of course not! You’re wide awake. I made it up, Rags, don’t you see? I made up the whole thing for you. I had it invented! The only thing real about it was my name!”

She collapsed suddenly against his coat, clung to his lapels, and would have wilted to the floor if he had not caught her quickly in his arms.

“Some champagne--quick!” he called, and then he shouted at the Prince of Wales, who stood near by. “Order my car quick, you! Miss Martin-Jones has fainted from excitement.”

V

The skyscraper rose bulkily through thirty tiers of windows before it attenuated itself to a graceful sugar-loaf of shining white. Then it darted up again another hundred feet, thinned to a mere oblong tower in its last fragile aspiration toward the sky. At the highest of its high windows Rags Martin-Jones stood full in the stiff breeze, gazing down at the city.

“Mr. Chestnut wants to know if you’ll come right in to his private office.”

Obediently her slim feet moved along the carpet into a high, cool chamber overlooking the harbor and the wide sea.

John Chestnut sat at his desk, waiting, and Rags walked to him and put her arms around his shoulder.

“Are you sure you’re real?” she asked anxiously. “Are you absolutely sure?”

“You only wrote me a week before you came,” he protested modestly, “or I could have arranged a revolution.”

“Was the whole thing just mine?” she demanded. “Was it a perfectly useless, gorgeous thing, just for me?”

“Useless?” He considered. “Well, it started out to be. At the last minute I invited a big restaurant man to be there, and while you were at the other table I sold him the whole idea of the night-club.”

He looked at his watch.

“I’ve got one more thing to do--and then we’ve got just time to be married before lunch.” He picked up his telephone. “Jackson? . . . Send a triplicated cable to Paris, Berlin, and Budapest and have those two bogus dukes who tossed up for Schwartzberg-Rhineminster chased over the Polish border. If the Dutchy won’t act, lower the rate of exchange to point triple zero naught two. Also, that idiot Blutchdak is in the Balkans again, trying to start a new war. Put him on the first boat for New York or else throw him in a Greek jail.”

He rang off, turned to the startled cosmopolite with a laugh.

“The next stop is the City Hall. Then, if you like, we’ll run over to Paris.”

“John,” she asked him intently, “who was the Prince of Wales?”

He waited till they were in the elevator, dropping twenty floors at a swoop. Then he leaned forward and tapped the lift-boy on the shoulder.

“Not so fast, Cedric. This lady isn’t used to falls from high places.”

The elevator-boy turned around, smiled. His face was pale, oval, framed in yellow hair. Rags blushed like fire.

“Cedric’s from Wessex,” explained John. “The resemblance is, to say the least, amazing. Princes are not particularly discreet, and I suspect Cedric of being a Guelph in some left-handed way.”

Rags took the monocle from around her neck and threw the ribbon over Cedric’s head.

“Thank you,” she said simply, “for the second greatest thrill of my life.”

John Chestnut began rubbing his hands together in a commercial gesture.

“Patronize this place, lady,” he besought her. “Best bazaar in the city!”

“What have you got for sale?”

“Well, m’selle, to-day we have some perfectly bee-oo-tiful love.”

“Wrap it up, Mr. Merchant,” cried Rags Martin-Jones. “It looks like a bargain to me.”

THE ADJUSTER

At five o’clock the sombre egg-shaped room at the Ritz ripens to subtle melody — the light clat-clat of one lump, two lumps, into the cup, and the ding of the shining teapots and cream-pots as they kiss elegantly in transit upon a silver tray. There are those who cherish that amber hour above all other hours, for now the pale, pleasant toil of the lilies who inhabit the Ritz is over — the singing decorative part of the day remains.

Moving your eyes around the slightly raised horse-shoe balcony you might, one spring afternoon, have seen young Mrs. Alphonse Karr and young Mrs. Charles Hemple at a table for two. The one in the dress was Mrs. Hemple — when I say “the dress” I refer to that black immaculate affair with the big buttons and the red ghost of a cape at the shoulders, a gown suggesting with faint and fashionable irreverence the garb of a French cardinal, as it was meant to do when it was invented in the Rue de la Paix. Mrs. Karr and Mrs. Hemple were twenty-three years old, and their enemies said that they had done very well for themselves. Either might have had her limousine waiting at the hotel door, but both of them much preferred to walk home (up Park Avenue) through the April twilight.

Luella Hemple was tall, with the sort of flaxen hair that English country girls should have, but seldom do. Her skin was radiant, and there was no need of putting anything on it at all, but in deference to an antiquated fashion — this was the year 1920 — she had powdered out its high roses and drawn on it a new mouth and new eyebrows — which were no more successful than such meddling deserves. This, of course, is said from the vantage-point of 1925. In those days the effect she gave was exactly right.

“I’ve been married three years,” she was saying as she squashed out a cigarette in an exhausted lemon. “The baby will be two years old to-morrow. I must remember to get —  — “

She took a gold pencil from her case and wrote “Candles” and “Things you pull, with paper caps,” on an ivory date-pad. Then, raising her eyes, she looked at Mrs. Karr and hesitated.

“Shall I tell you something outrageous?”

“Try,” said Mrs. Karr cheerfully.

“Even my baby bores me. That sounds unnatural, Ede, but it’s true. He doesn’t begin to fill my life. I love him with all my heart, but when I have him to take care of for an afternoon, I get so nervous that I want to scream. After two hours I begin praying for the moment the nurse’ll walk in the door.”

When she had made this confession, Luella breathed quickly and looked closely at her friend. She didn’t really feel unnatural at all. This was the truth. There couldn’t be anything vicious in the truth.

“It may be because you don’t love Charles,” ventured Mrs. Karr, unmoved.

“But I do! I hope I haven’t given you that impression with all this talk.” She decided that Ede Karr was stupid. “It’s the very fact that I do love Charles that complicates matters. I cried myself to sleep last night because I know we’re drifting slowly but surely toward a divorce. It’s the baby that keeps us together.”

Ede Karr, who had been married five years, looked at her critically to see if this was a pose, but Luella’s lovely eyes were grave and sad.

“And what is the trouble?” Ede inquired.

“It’s plural,” said Luella, frowning. “First, there’s food. I’m a vile housekeeper, and I have no intention of turning into a good one. I hate to order groceries, and I hate to go into the kitchen and poke around to see if the ice-box is clean, and I hate to pretend to the servants that I’m interested in their work, when really I never want to hear about food until it comes on the table. You see, I never learned to cook, and consequently a kitchen is about as interesting to me as a — as a boiler-room. It’s simply a machine that I don’t understand. It’s easy to say, ‘Go to cooking school,’ the way people do in books — but, Ede, in real life does anybody ever change into a model Hausfrau — unless they have to?”

“Go on,” said Ede non-committally. ‘Tell me more.”“Well, as a result, the house is always in a riot. The servants leave every week. If they’re young and incompetent, I can’t train them, so we have to let them go. If they’re experienced, they hate a house where a woman doesn’t take an intense interest in the price of asparagus. So they leave — and half the time we eat at restaurants and hotels.”

“I don’t suppose Charles likes that.”

“Hates it. In fact, he hates about everything that I like. He’s lukewarm about the theatre, hates the opera, hates dancing, hates cocktail parties — sometimes I think he hates everything pleasant in the world. I sat home for a year or so. While Chuck was on the way, and while I was nursing him. I didn’t mind. But this year I told Charles frankly that I was still young enough to want some fun. And since then we’ve been going out whether he wants to or not.” She paused, brooding. “I’m so sorry for him I don’t know what to do, Ede — but if we sat home, I’d just be sorry for myself. And to tell you another true thing, I’d rather that he’d be unhappy than me.”

Luella was not so much stating a case as thinking aloud. She considered that she was being very fair. Before her marriage men had always told her that she was “a good sport,” and she had tried to carry this fairness into her married life. So she always saw Charley’s point of view as clearly as she saw her own.

If she had been a pioneer wife, she would probably have fought the fight side by side with her husband. But here in New York there wasn’t any fight. They weren’t struggling together to obtain a far-off peace and leisure — she had more of either than she could use. Luella, like several thousand other young wives in New York, honestly wanted something to do. If she had had a little more money and a little less love, she could have gone in for horses or for vagarious amour. Or if they had had a little less money, her surplus energy would have been absorbed by hope and even by effort. But the Charles Hemples were in between. They were of that enormous American class who wander over Europe every summer, sneering rather pathetically and wistfully at the customs and traditions and pastimes of other countries, because they have no customs or tradition or pastimes of their own. It is a class sprung yesterday from fathers and mothers who might just as well have lived two hundred years ago.

The tea-hour had turned abruptly into the before-dinner hour. Most of the tables had emptied until the room was dotted rather than crowded with shrill isolated voices and remote, surprising laughter — in one corner the waiters were already covering the tables with white for dinner.

“Charles and I are on each other’s nerves.” In the new silence Luella’s voice rang out with startling clearness, and she lowered it precipitately. “Little things. He keeps rubbing his face with his hand — all the time, at table, at the theatre — even when he’s in bed.

It drives me wild, and when things like that begin to irritate you, it’s nearly over.” She broke off and, reaching backward, drew up a light fur around her neck. “I hope I haven’t bored you, Ede. It’s on my mind, because to-night tells the story. I made an engagement for to-night — an interesting engagement, a supper after the theatre to meet some Russians, singers or dancers or something, and Charles says he won’t go. If he doesn’t — then I’m going alone. And that’s the end.”

She put her elbows on the table suddenly and, bending her eyes down into her smooth gloves, began to cry, stubbornly and quietly. There was no one near to see, but Ede Karr wished that she had taken her gloves off. She would have reached out consolingly and touched her bare hand. But the gloves were a symbol of the difficulty of sympathizing with a woman to whom life had given so much. Ede wanted to say that it would “come out all right,” that it wasn’t “so bad as it seemed,” but she said nothing. Her only reaction was impatience and distaste.

A waiter stepped near and laid a folded paper on the table, and Mrs. Karr reached for it.

“No, you mustn’t,” murmured Luella brokenly. “No, I invited you! I’ve got the money right here.”

II

The Hemples’ apartment — they owned it — was in one of those impersonal white palaces that are known by number instead of name. They had furnished it on their honeymoon, gone to England for the big pieces, to Florence for the bric-a-brac, and to Venice for the lace and sheer linen of the curtains and for the glass of many colors which littered the table when they entertained. Luella enjoyed choosing things on her honeymoon. It gave a purposeful air to the trip, and saved it from ever turning into the rather dismal wandering among big hotels and desolate ruins which European honeymoons are apt to be.

They returned, and life began. On the grand scale. Luella found herself a lady of substance. It amazed her sometimes that the specially created apartment and the specially created limousine were hers, just as indisputably as the mortgaged suburban bungalow out of The Ladies’ Home Journal and the last year’s car that fate might have given her instead. She was even more amazed when it all began to bore her. But it did…. The evening was at seven when she turned out of the April dusk, let herself into the hall, and saw her husband waiting in the living-room before an open fire. She came in without a sound, closed the door noiselessly behind her, and stood watching him for a moment through the pleasant effective vista of the small salon which intervened. Charles Hemple was in the middle thirties, with a young serious face and distinguished iron-gray hair which would be white in ten years more. That and his deep-set, dark-gray eyes were his most noticeable features — women always thought his hair was romantic; most of the time Luella thought so too.

At this moment she found herself hating him a little, for she saw that he had raised his hand to his face and was rubbing it nervously over his chin and mouth. It gave him an air of unflattering abstraction, and sometimes even obscured his words, so that she was continually saying “What?” She had spoken about it several times, and he had apologized in a surprised way. But obviously he didn’t realize how noticeable and how irritating it was, for he continued to do it. Things had now reached such a precarious state that Luella dreaded speaking of such matters any more — a certain sort of word might precipitate the imminent scene.

Luella tossed her gloves and purse abruptly on the table. Hearing the faint sound, her husband looked out toward the hall.

“Is that you, dear?”

“Yes, dear.”

She went into the living-room, and walked into his arms and kissed him tensely. Charles Hemple responded with unusual formality, and then turned her slowly around so that she faced across the room.

“I’ve brought some one home to dinner.”

She saw then that they were not alone, and her first feeling was of strong relief; the rigid expression on her face softened into a shy, charming smile as she held out her hand.

‘This is Doctor Moon — this is my wife.”A man a little older than her husband, with a round, pale, slightly lined face, came forward to meet her.

“Good evening, Mrs. Hemple,” he said. “I hope I’m not interfering with any arrangements of yours.”

“Oh, no,” Luella cried quickly. “I’m delighted that you’re coming to dinner. We’re quite alone.”

Simultaneously she thought of her engagement to-night, and wondered if this could be a clumsy trap of Charles’ to keep her at home. If it were, he had chosen his bait badly. This man — a tired placidity radiated from him, from his face, from his heavy, leisurely voice, even from the three year old shine of his clothes.

Nevertheless, she excused herself and went into the kitchen to see what was planned for dinner. As usual they were trying a new pair of servants, the luncheon had been ill-cooked and ill-served she would let them go to-morrow. She hoped Charles would talk to them — she hated to get rid of servants. Sometimes they wept, and sometimes they were insolent, but Charles had a way with him. And they were always afraid of a man.

The cooking on the stove, however, had a soothing savor. Luella gave instructions about “which china,” and unlocked a bottle of precious chianti from the buffet. Then she went in to kiss young Chuck good night.

“Has he been good?” she demanded as he crawled enthusiastically into her arms.

“Very good,” said the governess. “We went for a long walk over by Central Park.”

“Well, aren’t you a smart boy!” She kissed him ecstatically.

“And he put his foot into the fountain, so we had to come home in a taxi right away and change his little shoe and stocking.”

“That’s right. Here, wait a minute, Chuck!” Luella unclasped the great yellow beads from around her neck and handed them to him. “You mustn’t break mama’s beads.” She turned to the nurse. “Put them on my dresser, will you, after he’s asleep?”

She felt a certain compassion for her son as she went away — the small enclosed life he led, that all children led, except in big families. He was a dear little rose, except on the days when she took care of him. His face was the same shape as hers; she was thrilled sometimes, and formed new resolves about life when his heart beat against her own.

In her own pink and lovely bedroom, she confined her attentions to her face, which she washed and restored. Doctor Moon didn’t deserve a change of dress, and Luella found herself oddly tired, though she had done very little all day. She returned to the living-room, and they went in to dinner.

“Such a nice house, Mrs. Hemple,” said Doctor Moon impersonally; “and let me congratulate you on your fine little boy.”

“Thanks. Coming from a doctor, that’s a nice compliment.” She hesitated. “Do you specialize in children?” “I’m not a specialist at all,” he said. “I’m about the last of my kind — a general practitioner,”

“The last in New York, anyhow,” — remarked Charles. He had begun rubbing his face nervously, and Luella fixed her eyes on Doctor Moon so that she wouldn’t see. But at Charles’s next words she looked back at him sharply.

“In fact,” he said unexpectedly, “I’ve invited Doctor Moon here because I wanted you to have a talk with him to-night.”

Luella sat up straight in her chair.

“A talk with me?”

“Doctor Moon’s an old friend of mine, and I think he can tell you a few things, Luella, that you ought to know.”“Why — “She tried to laugh, but she was surprised and annoyed. “I don’t see, exactly, what you mean. There’s nothing the matter with me. I don’t believe I’ve ever felt better in my life.”

Doctor Moon looked at Charles, asking permission to speak. Charles nodded, and his hand went up automatically to his face.

“Your husband has told me a great deal about your unsatisfactory life together,” said Doctor Moon, still impersonally. “He wonders if I can be of any help in smoothing things out.”

Luella’s face was burning.

“I have no particular faith in psychoanalysis,” she said coldly, “and I scarcely consider myself a subject for it.”

“Neither have I,” answered Doctor Moon, apparently unconscious of the snub; “I have no particular faith in anything but myself. I told you I am not a specialist, nor, I may add, a faddist of any sort. I promise nothing.”

For a moment Luella considered leaving the room. But the effrontery of the suggestion aroused her curiosity too.

“I can’t imagine what Charles has told you,” she said, controlling herself with difficulty, “much less why. But I assure you that our affairs are a matter entirely between my husband and me. If you have no objections, Doctor Moon, I’d much prefer to discuss something — less personal.”

Doctor Moon nodded heavily and politely. He made no further attempt to open the subject, and dinner proceeded in what was little more than a defeated silence. Luella determined that, whatever happened, she would adhere to her plans for to-night. An hour ago her independence had demanded it, but now some gesture of defiance — had become necessary to her self-respect. She would stay in the living-room for a short moment after dinner; then, when the coffee came, she would excuse herself and dress to go out. But when they did leave the dining-room, it was Charles who, in a quick, unarguable way, vanished.

“I have a letter to write,” he said; “I’ll be back in a moment.” Before Luella could make a diplomatic objection, he went quickly down the corridor to his room, and she heard him shut his door.

Angry and confused, Luella poured the coffee and sank into a corner of the couch, looking intently at the fire.

“Don’t be afraid, Mrs. Hemple,” said Doctor Moon suddenly.”This was forced upon me. I do not act as a free agent — ““I’m not afraid of you,” she interrupted. But she knew that she was lying. She was a little afraid of him, if only for his dull insensitiveness to her distaste.

“Tell me about your trouble,” he said very naturally, as though she were not a free agent either. He wasn’t even looking at her, and except that they were alone in the room, he scarcely seemed to be addressing her at all.

The words that were in Luella’s mind, her will, on her lips, were : “I’ll do no such thing.” What she actually said amazed her. It came out of her spontaneously, with apparently no co-operation of her own.

“Didn’t you see him rubbing his face at dinner?” she said despairingly. “Are you blind? He’s become so irritating to me that I think I’ll go mad.”

“I see.” Doctor Moon’s round face nodded.

“Don’t you see I’ve had enough of home?” Her breasts seemed to struggle for air under her dress. “Don’t you see how bored I am with keeping house, with the baby — everything seems as if it’s going on forever and ever? I want excitement; and I don’t care what form it takes or what I pay for it, so long as it makes my heart beat.”

“I see.”

It infuriated Luella that he claimed to understand. Her feeling of defiance had reached such a pitch that she preferred that no one should understand. She was content to be justified by the impassioned sincerity of her desires.

“I’ve tried to be good, and I’m not going to try any more. If I’m one of those women who wreck their lives for nothing, then I’ll do it now. You can call me selfish, or silly, and be quite right; but in five minutes I’m going out of this house and begin to be alive.” “This time Doctor Moon didn’t answer, but he raised his head as if he were listening to something that was taking place a little distance away.

“You’re not going out,” he said after a moment; “I’m quite sure you’re not going out.”

Luella laughed.

“I am going out.”

He disregarded this.

“You see, Mrs. Hemple, your husband isn’t well. He’s been trying to live your kind of life, and the strain of it has been too much for him. When he rubs his mouth —  — “

Light steps came down the corridor, and the maid, with a frightened expression on her face, tiptoed into the room.

“Mrs. Hemple —  — “

Startled at the interruption, Luella turned quickly.

“Yes?”

“Can I speak to — ?” Her fear broke precipitately through her slight training.”Mr. Hemple, he’s sick! He came into the kitchen a while ago and began throwing all the food out of the ice-box, and now he’s in his room, crying and singing — “Suddenly Luella heard his voice.

III

Charles Hemple had had a nervous collapse. There were twenty years of almost uninterrupted toil upon his shoulders, and the recent pressure at home had been too much for him to bear. His attitude toward his wife was the weak point in what had otherwise been a strong-minded and well-organized career — he was aware of her intense selfishness, but it is one of the many flaws in the scheme of human relationships that selfishness in women has an irresistible appeal to many men. Luella’s selfishness existed side by side with a childish beauty, and, in consequence, Charles Hemple had begun to take the blame upon himself for situations which she had obviously brought about. It was an unhealthy attitude, and his mind had sickened, at length, with his attempts to put himself in the wrong. After the first shock and the momentary flush of pity that followed it, Luella looked at the situation with impatience. She was “a good sport” — she couldn’t take advantage of Charles when he was sick.

The question of her liberties had to be postponed until he was on his feet. Just when she had determined to be a wife no longer, Luella was compelled to be a nurse as well. She sat beside his bed while he talked about her in his delirium — about the days of their engagement, and how some friend had told him then that he was making a mistake, and about his happiness in the early months of their marriage, and his growing disquiet as the gap appeared. Evidently he had been more aware of it than she had thought — more than he ever said.

“Luella!” He would lurch up in bed. “Luella! Where are you?”

“I’m right here, Charles, beside you.” She tried to make her voice cheerful and warm.

“If you want to go, Luella, you’d belter go. I don’t seem to be enough for you any more.”

She denied this soothingly.

“I’ve thought it over, Luella, and I can’t ruin my health on account of you —  — “ Then quickly, and passionately: “Don’t go, Luella, for God’s sake, don’t go away and leave me! Promise me you won’t! — I’ll do anything you say if you won’t go.”

His humility annoyed her most; he was a reserved man, and she had never guessed at the extent of his devotion before.

“I’m only going for a minute. It’s Doctor Moon, your friend, Charles. He came to-day to see how you were, don’t you remember? And he wants to talk to me before he goes.”

“You’ll come back?” he persisted.

“In just a little while. There — lie quiet.”

She raised his head and plumped his pillow into freshness. A new trained nurse would arrive to-morrow.

In the living-room Doctor Moon was waiting — his suit more worn and shabby in the afternoon light. She disliked him inordinately, with an illogical conviction that he was in some way to blame for her misfortune, but he was so deeply interested that she couldn’t refuse to see him. She hadn’t asked him to consult with the specialists, though — a doctor who was so down at the heel. . . .

“Mrs. Hemple.” He came forward, holding out his hand, and Luella touched it, lightly and uneasily.

“You seem well,” he said.

“I am well, thank you.”

“I congratulate you on the way you’ve taken hold of things.” “But I haven’t taken hold of things at all,” she said coldly. “I do what I have to —  — “

“That’s just it.” Her impatience mounted rapidly. “I do what I have to, and nothing more,” she continued: “and with no particular good-will.”

Suddenly she opened up to him again, as she had the night of the Catastrophe — realizing that she was putting herself on a footing of intimacy with him, yet unable to restrain her words.

“The house isn’t going,” she broke out bitterly. “I had to discharge the servants, and now I’ve got a woman in by the day. And the baby has a cold, and I’ve found out that his nurse doesn’t know her business, and everything’s just as messy and terrible as it can be!”

“Would you mind telling me how you found out the nurse didn’t know her business?”

“You find out various unpleasant things when you’re forced to stay around the house.”

He nodded, his weary face turning here and there about the room.

“I feel somewhat encouraged,” he said slowly. “As I told you, I promise nothing; I only do the best I can.”

Luella looked up at him, startled.

“What do you mean?” she protested. “You’ve done nothing for me — nothing at all!”

“Nothing much — yet,” he said heavily. “It takes time, Mrs. Hemple.”

The words were said in a dry monotone that was somehow without offense, but Luella felt that he had gone too far. She got to her feet.

“I’ve met your type before,” she said coldly. “For some reason you seem to think that you have a standing here as ‘the old friend of the family.’ But I don’t make friends quickly, and I haven’t given you the privilege of being so” — she wanted to say “insolent,” but the word eluded her — “so personal with me.”

When the front door had closed behind him, Luella went into the kitchen to see if the woman understood about the three different dinners — one for Charles, one for the baby, and one for herself. It was hard to do with only a single servant when things were so complicated. She must try another employment agency — this one had begun to sound bored.

To her surprise, she found the cook with hat and coat on, reading a newspaper at the kitchen table.

“Why” — Luella tried to think of the name — “why, what’s the matter, Mrs. —  — “

“Mrs. Danski is my name.” “What’s the matter?” “I’m afraid I won’t be able to accommodate you,” said Mrs. Danski. “You see, I’m only a plain cook, and I’m not used to preparing invalid’s food.”

“But I’ve counted on you.”

“I’m very sorry.” She shook her head stubbornly. “I’ve got my own health to think of. I’m sure they didn’t tell me what kind of a job it was when I came. And when you asked me to clean out your husband’s room, I knew it was way beyond my powers.”

“I won’t ask you to clean anything,” said Luella desperately. “If you’ll just stay until to-morrow. I can’t possibly get anybody else to-night.”

Mrs. Danski smiled politely.

“I got my own children to think of, just like you.”

It was on Luella’s tongue to offer her more money, but suddenly her temper gave way.

“I’ve never heard of anything so selfish in my life!” she broke out. “To leave me at a time like this! You’re an old fool!”

“If you’d pay me for my time, I’d go,” said Mrs. Danski calmly.

“I won’t pay you a cent unless you’ll stay!”

She was immediately sorry she had said this, but she was too proud to withdraw the threat.

“You will so pay me!”

“You go out that door!”

“I’ll go when I get my money,” asserted Mrs. Danski indignantly. “I got my children to think of.”

Luella drew in her breath sharply, and took a step forward. Intimidated by her intensity, Mrs. Danski turned and flounced, muttering, out of the door.

Luella went to the phone and, calling up the agency, explained that the woman had left.

“Can you send me some one right away? My husband is sick and the baby’s sick —  — “

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Hemple; there’s no one in the office now. It’s after four o’clock.”

Luella argued for a while. Finally she obtained a promise that they would telephone to an emergency: woman they knew. That was the best they could do until to-morrow.

She called several other agencies, but the servant industry had apparently ceased to function for the day. After giving Charles his medicine, she tiptoed softly into the nursery.

“How’s baby?” she asked abstractedly.

“Ninety-nine one,” whispered the nurse, holding the thermometer to the light. “I just took it.”

“Is that much?” asked Luella, frowning.

“It’s just three-fifths of a degree. That isn’t so much for the afternoon. They often run up a little with a cold.”

Luella went over to the cot and laid her hand on her son’s flushed cheek, thinking, in the midst of her anxiety, how much he resembled the incredible cherub of the “Lux” advertisement in the bus.

She turned to the nurse.

“Do you know how to cook?”

“Why — I’m not a good cook.”

“Well, can you do the baby’s food to-night? That old fool has left, and I can’t get anyone, and I don’t know what to do.”

“Oh, yes, I can do the baby’s food.”

“That’s all right, then. I’ll try to fix something for Mr. Hemple. Please have your door open so you can hear the bell when the doctor comes. And let me know.”

So many doctors! There had scarcely been an hour all day when there wasn’t a doctor in the house. The specialist and their family physician every morning, then the baby doctor — and this afternoon there had been Doctor Moon, placid, persistent, unwelcome, in the parlor. Luella went into the kitchen. She could cook bacon and eggs for herself — she had often done that after the theatre. But the vegetables for Charles were a different matter — they must be left to boil or stew or something, and the stove had so many doors and ovens that she couldn’t decide which to use. She chose a blue pan that looked new, sliced carrots into it, and covered them with a little water. As she put it on the stove and tried to remember what to do next, the phone rang, It was the agency.

“Yes, this is Mrs. Hemple speaking.”

“Why, the woman we sent to you has returned here with the claim that you refused to pay her for her time.”

“I explained to you that she refused to stay,” said Luella hotly.

“She didn’t keep her agreement, and I didn’t fed I was under any obligation —  — “

“We have to see that our people are paid,” the agency informed her; “otherwise we wouldn’t be helping them at all, would we? I’m sorry, Mrs. Hemple, but we won’t be able to furnish you with any one else until this little matter is arranged.”

“Oh, I’ll pay, I’ll pay!” she cried.

“Of course we like to keep on good terms with our clients —  — “

“Yes — yes!”

“So if you’ll send her money around to-morrow? It’s seventy-five cents an hour.”

“But how about to-night?” she exclaimed. “I’ve got to have some one to-night.”

“Why — it’s pretty late now. I was just going home myself.”

“But I’m Mrs. Charles Hemple! Don’t you understand? I’m perfectly good for what I say I’ll do. I’m the wife of Charles Hemple, of 14 Broadway —  — “

Simultaneously she realized that Charles Hemple of 14 Broadway was a helpless invalid — he was neither a reference nor a refuge any more. In despair at the sudden callousness of the world, she hung up the receiver.

After another ten minutes of frantic muddling in the kitchen, she went to the baby’s nurse, whom she disliked, and confessed that she was unable to cook her husband’s dinner. The nurse announced that she had a splitting headache, and that with a sick child her hands were full already, but she consented, without enthusiasm, to show Luella what to do.

Swallowing her humiliation, Luella obeyed orders while the nurse experimented, grumbling, with the unfamiliar stove. Dinner was started after a fashion. Then it was time for the nurse to bathe Chuck, and Luella sat down alone at the kitchen table, and listened to the bubbling perfume that escaped from the pans.

“And women do this every day,” she thought. “Thousands of women. Cook and take care of sick people — and go out to work too.”

But she didn’t think of those women as being like her, except in the superficial aspect of having two feet and two hands. She said it as she might have said “South Sea Islanders wear nose-rings.” She was merely slumming to-day in her own home, and she wasn’t enjoying it. For her, it was merely a ridiculous exception.

Suddenly she became aware of slow approaching steps in the dining-room and then in the butler’s pantry. Half afraid that it was doctor Moon coming to pay another call, she looked up — and saw the nurse coming through the pantry door. It flashed through Luella’s mind that the nurse was going to be sick too. And she was right — the nurse had hardly reached the kitchen door when she lurched and clutched at the handle as a winged bird clings to a branch. Then she receded wordlessly to the floor. Simultaneously the door-bell rang; and Luella, getting to her feet, gasped with relief that the baby doctor had come.

“Fainted, that’s all,” he said, taking the girl’s head into his lap. The eyes fluttered. “Yep, she fainted, that’s all.”

“Everybody’s sick!” cried Luella with a sort of despairing humor. “Everybody’s sick but me, doctor.”

“This one’s not sick,” he said after a moment. “Her heart is normal already. She just fainted.”

When she had helped the doctor raise the quickening body to a chair, Luella hurried into the nursery and bent over the baby’s bed. She let down one of the iron sides quietly. The fever seemed to be gone now — the flush had faded away. She bent over to touch the small cheek.

Suddenly Luella began to scream.

IV

Even after her baby’s funeral, Luella still couldn’t believe that she had lost him. She came back to the apartment and walked around the nursery in a circle, saying his name. Then, frightened by grief, she sat down and stared at his white rocker with the red chicken painted on the side.

“What will become of me now?” she whispered to herself. “Something awful is going to happen to me when I realize that I’ll never see Chuck any more!”

She wasn’t sure yet. If she waited here till twi-light, the nurse might still bring him in from his walk. She remembered a tragic confusion in the midst of which some one had told her that Chuck was dead, but if that was so, then why was his room waiting, with his small brush and comb still on the bureau, and why was she here at all?

“Mrs. Hemple.”

She looked up. The weary, shabby figure of Doctor Moon stood in the door.

“You go away,” Luella said dully. “Your husband needs you.” “I don’t care.” Doctor Moon came a little way into the room. “I don’t think you understand, Mrs. Hemple. He’s been calling for you. You haven’t any one now except him.”

“I hate you,” she said suddenly.

“If you like. I promised nothing, you know. I do the best I can. You’ll be better when you realize that your baby is gone, that you’re not going to see him any more.”

Luella sprang to her feet.

“My baby isn’t dead!” she cried. “You lie! You always lie!” Her flashing eyes looked into his and caught something there, at once brutal and kind, that awed her and made her impotent and acquiescent. She lowered her own eyes in tired despair.

“All right,” she said wearily. “My baby is gone. What shall I do now?”

“Your husband is much better. All he needs is rest and kindness. But you must go to him and tell him what’s happened.”

“I suppose you think you made him better,” said Luella bitterly.

“Perhaps. He’s nearly well.”

Nearly well — then the last link that held her to her home was broken. This part of her life was over — she could cut it off here, with its grief and oppression, and be off now, free as the wind.

“I’ll go to him in a minute,” Luella said in a far-away voice. “Please leave me alone.”

Doctor Moon’s unwelcome shadow melted into the darkness of the hall.

“I can go away,” Luella whispered to herself. “Life has given me back freedom, in place of what it took away from me.”

But she mustn’t linger even a minute, or Life would bind her again and make her suffer once more. She called the apartment porter and asked that her trunk be brought up from the storeroom. Then she began taking things from the bureau and wardrobe, trying to approximate as nearly as possible the possessions that she had brought to her married life. She even found two old dresses that had formed part of her trousseau — out of style now, and a little tight in the hip — which she threw in with the rest. A new life. Charles was well again; and her baby, whom she had worshipped, and who had bored her a little, was dead.

When she had packed her trunk, she went into the kitchen automatically, to see about the preparations for dinner. She spoke to the cook about the special things for Charles and said that she herself was dining out. The sight of one of the small pans that had been used to cook Chuck’s food caught her attention for a moment — but she stared at it unmoved. She looked into the ice-box and saw it was clean and fresh inside. Then she went into Charles’s room. He was sitting up in bed, and the nurse was reading to him. His hair was almost white now, silvery white, and underneath it his eyes were huge and dark in his thin young face.

“The baby is sick?” he asked in his own natural voice.

She nodded.

He hesitated, closing his eyes for a moment. Then he asked:

“The baby is dead?”

“Yes.”

For a long time he didn’t speak. The nurse came over and put her hand on his forehead. Two large, strange tears welled from his eyes.

“I knew the baby was dead.”

After another long wait, the nurse spoke:

“The doctor said he could be taken out for a drive to-day while there was still sunshine. He needs a little change.”

“Yes.”

“I thought” — the nurse hesitated — “I thought perhaps it would do you both good, Mrs. Hemple, if you took him instead of me.”

Luella shook her head hastily.

“Oh, no,” she said. “I don’t feel able to, to-day.”

The nurse looked at her oddly. With a sudden feeling of pity for Charles, Luella bent down gently and kissed his cheek. Then, without a word, she went to her own room, put on her hat and coat, and with her suitcase started for the front door.

Immediately she saw that there was a shadow in the hall. If she could get past that shadow, she was free. If she could go to the right or left of it, or order it out of her way! But, stubbornly, it refused to move, and with a little cry she sank down into a hall chair.

“I thought you’d gone,” she wailed. “I told you to go away.”

“I’m going soon,” said Doctor Moon, “but I don’t want you to make an old mistake.”

“I’m not making a mistake — I’m leaving my mistakes behind.”

“You’re trying to leave yourself behind, but you can’t. The more you try to run away from yourself, the more you’ll have yourself with you.”

“But I’ve got to go away,” she insisted wildly. “Out of this house of death and failure!” “You haven’t failed yet. You’ve only begun.”

She stood up.

“Let me pass.”

“No.”

Abruptly she gave way, as she always did when he talked to her. She covered her face with her hands and burst into tears.

“Go back into that room and tell the nurse you’ll take your husband for a drive,” he suggested.

“I can’t.”

“Oh, yes.”

Once more Luella looked at him, and knew that she would obey. With the conviction that her spirit was broken at last, she took up her suitcase and walked back through the hall.

V

The nature of the curious influence that Doctor Moon exerted upon her, Louella could not guess. But as the days passed, she found herself doing many things that had been repugnant to her before. She stayed at home with Charles; and when he grew better, she went out with him sometimes to dinner, or the theatre, but only when he expressed a wish. She visited the kitchen every day, and kept an unwilling eye on the house, at first with a horror that it would go wrong again, then from habit. And she felt that it was all somehow mixed up with Doctor Moon — it was something he kept telling her about life, or almost telling her, and yet concealing from her, as though he were afraid to have her know.

With the resumption of their normal life, she found that Charles was less nervous. His habit of rubbing his face had left him, and if the world seemed less gay and happy to her than it had before, she experienced a certain peace, sometimes, that she had never known.

Then, one afternoon, Doctor Moon told her suddenly that he was going away.

“Do you mean for good?” she demanded with a touch of panic.

“For good.”

For a strange moment she wasn’t sure whether she was sorry.

“You don’t need me any more,” he said quietly. “You don’t realize it, but you’ve grown up.”

He came over and, sitting on the couch beside her, took her hand. Luella sat silent and tense — listening.

“We make an agreement with children that they can sit in the audience without helping to make the play,” he said, “but if they still sit in the audience after they’re grown, somebody’s got to work double time for them, so that they can enjoy the light and glitter of the world.”

“But I want the light and glitter,” she protested. “That’s all there is in life. There can’t be anything wrong in wanting to have things warm.”

“Things will still be warm.”

“How?” “Things will warm themselves from you.”

Luella looked at him, startled.

“It’s your turn to be the centre, to give others what was given to you for so long. You’ve got to give security to young people and peace to your husband, and a sort of charity to the old. You’ve got to let the people who work for you depend on you. You’ve got to cover up a few more troubles than you show, and be a little more patient than the average person, and do a little more instead of a little less than your share. The light and glitter of the world is in your hands.”

He broke off suddenly.

“Get up,” he said, “and go to that mirror and tell me what you see.”

Obediently Luella got up and went close to a purchase of her honeymoon, a Venetian pier-glass on the wall.

“I see new lines in my face here,” she said, raising her finger and placing it between her eyes, “and a few shadows at the sides that might be — that are little wrinkles.”

“Do you care?”

She turned quickly. “No,” she said.

“Do you realize that Chuck is gone? That you’ll never see him any more?”

“Yes.” She passed her hands slowly over her eyes. “But that all seems so vague and far away.”

“Vague and far away,” he repeated; and then: “And are you afraid of me now?”

“Not any longer,” she said, and she added frankly, “now that you’re going away.”

He moved toward the door. He seemed particularly weary to-night, as though he could hardly move about at all.

“The household here is in your keeping,” he said in a tired whisper. “If there is any light and warmth in it, it will be your light and warmth; if it is happy, it will be because you’ve made it so. Happy things may come to you in life, but you must never go seeking them any more. It is your turn to make the fire.”

“Won’t you sit down a moment longer?” Luella ventured.

“There isn’t time.” His voice was so low now that she could scarcely hear the words. “But remember that whatever suffering comes to you, I can always help you — if it is something that can be helped. I promise nothing.”

He opened the door. She must find out now what she most wanted to know, before it was too late.

“What have you done to me?” she cried. “Why have I no sorrow left for Chuck — for anything at all? Tell me, I almost see, yet I can’t see. Before you go — tell me who you are!”

“Who am I? — “

His worn suit paused in the doorway. His round, pale face seemed to dissolve into two faces, a dozen faces, a score, each one different yet the same — sad, happy, tragic, indifferent, resigned — until threescore Doctor Moons were ranged like an infinite series of reflections, like months stretching into the vista of the past.

“Who am I?” he repeated; “I am five years.”

The door closed.

At six o’clock Charles Hemple came home, and as usual Luella met him in the hall. Except that now his hair was dead white, his long illness of two years had left no mark upon him. Luella herself was more noticeably changed — she was a little stouter, and there were those lines around her eyes that had come when Chuck died one evening back in 1921. But she was still lovely, and there was a mature kindness about her face at twenty-eight, as if suffering had touched her only reluctantly and then hurried away.

“Ede and her husband are coming to dinner,” she said. “I’ve got theatre tickets, but if you’re tired, I don’t care whether we go or not.” “I’d like to go.”

She looked at him. “You wouldn’t.” “I really would.”

“We’ll see how you feel after dinner.”

He put his arm around her waist. Together they walked into the nursery where the two children were waiting up to say good night.

HOT AND COLD BLOOD

One day when the young Mathers had been married for about a year, Jaqueline walked inti the rooms of the hardware brekerage which her husband carried on with more than average success. At the open door of the inner office she stopped and said: “Oh, excuse me -” She had interrupted an apparently trivial yet somehow intriguing scene. A young man named Bronson whom she knew slightly was standing with her husband; the latter had risen from his desk. Bronson seized her husband’s hand and shook it earnestly — something more than earnestly. When they heard Jaqueline’s step in the doorway both men turned and Jaqueline saw that Bronson’s eyes were red.

A moment later he came out, passing her with a somewhat embarrassed “How do you do?” She walked into her husband’s office.

“What was Ed Bronson doing here?” she demanded curiously, and at once.

Jim Mather smiled at her, half shutting his gray eyes, and drew her quietly to a sitting position on his desk.

“He just dropped in for a minute,” he answered easily. “How’s everything at home?”

“All right.” She looked at him with curiosity. “What did he want?” she insisted.

“Oh, he just wanted to see me about something.”

“What?”

“Oh, just something. Business.”

“Why were his eyes red?”

“Were they?” He looked at her innocently, and then suddenly they both began to laugh. Jaqueline rose and walked around the desk and plumped down into his swivel chair.

“You might as well tell me,” she announced cheerfully, “because I’m going to stay right here till you do.”

“Well -” he hesitated, frowning. “He wanted me to do him a little favor.”

Then Jaqueline understood, or rather her mind leaped half accidentally to the truth.

“Oh.” Her voice tightened a little. “You’ve been lending him some money.”

“Only a little.”

“How much?”

“Only three hundred.” “Only three hundred.” The voice was of the texture of Bessemer cooled. “How much do we spend a month, Jim?”

“Why — why, about five or six hundred, I guess.” He shifted uneasily.

“Listen, Jack. Bronson’ll pay that back. He’s in a little trouble. He’s made a mistake about a girl out in Woodmere -”

“And he knows you’re famous for being an easy mark, so he comes to you,” interrupted Jaqueline.

“No.” He denied this formally.

“Don’t you suppose I could use that three hundred dollars?” she demanded. “How about that trip to New York we couldn’t afford last November?”

The lingering smile faded from Mather’s face. He went over and shut the door to the outer office.

“Listen, Jack,” he began, “you don’t understand this. Bronson’s one of the men I eat lunch with almost every day. We used to play together when we were kids, we went to school together. Don’t you see that I’m just the person he’d be right to come to in trouble? And that’s just why I couldn’t refuse.”

Jaqueline gave her shoulders a twist as if to shake off this reasoning.

“Well,” she answered decidedly, “all I know is that he’s no good. He’s always lit and if he doesn’t choose to work he has no business living off the work you do.”

They were sitting now on either side of the desk, each having adopted the attitude of one talking to a child. They began their sentences with “Listen!” and their faces wore expressions of rather tried patience.

“If you can’t understand, I can’t tell you,” Mather concluded, at the end of fifteen minutes, on what was, for him, an irritated key. “Such obligations do happen to exist sometimes among men and they have to be met. It’s more complicated than just refusing to lend money, especially in a business like mine where so much depends on the good-will of men down-town.”

Mather was putting on his coat as he said this. He was going home with her on the street-car to lunch. They were between automobiles — they had sold their old one and were going to get a new one in the spring. Now the street-car, on this particular day, was distinctly unfortunate. The argument in the office might have been forgotten under other circumstances, but what followed irritated the scratch until it became a serious temperamental infection.

They found a seat near the front of the car. It was late February an eager, unpunctilious sun was turning the scrawny street snow into dirty, cheerful rivulets that echoed in the gutters. Because of this the car was less full than usual — there was no one standing. The motorman had even opened his window and a yellow breeze was blowing the late breath of winter from the car.

It occurred pleasurably to Jaqueline that her husband sitting beside her was handsome and kind above other men. It was silly to try to change him. Perhaps Bronson might return the money after all, and anyhow three hundred dollars wasn’t a fortune. Of course he had no business doing it — but then -

Her musings were interrupted as an eddy of passengers pushed up the aisle, Jaqueline wished they’d put their hands over their mouths when they coughed, and she hoped that Jim would get a new machine pretty soon. You couldn’t tell what disease you’d run into in these trolleys.

She turned to Jim to discuss the subject — but Jim had stood up and was offering his seat to a woman who had been standing beside him in the aisle. The woman, without so much as a grunt, sat down. Jaqueline frowned.

The woman was. about fifty and enormous. When she first sat down she was content merely to fill the unoccupied part of the seat, but after a moment she began to expand and to spread her great rolls of fat over a larger and larger area until the process took on the aspect of violent trespassing. When the car rocked in Jaqueline’s direction the woman slid with it, but when it rocked back she managed by some exercise of ingenuity to dig in and hold the ground won.

Jaqueline caught her husband’s eye — he was swaying on a strap — and in an angry glance conveyed to him her entire disapproval of his action. He apologized mutely and became urgently engrossed in a row of car cards. The fat woman moved once more against Jaqueline — she was now practically overlapping her. Then she turned puffy, disagreeable eyes full on Mrs. James Mather, and coughed rousingly in her face.

With a smothered exclamation Jaqueline got to her feet, squeezed with brisk violence past the fleshy knees, and made her way, pink with rage, toward the rear of the car. There she seized a strap, and there she was presently joined by her husband in a state of considerable alarm.

They exchanged no word, but stood silently side by side for ten minutes while a row of men sitting in front of them crackled their newspapers and kept their eyes fixed virtuously upon the day’s cartoons.

When they left the car at last Jaqueline exploded.

“You big fool!” she cried wildly. “Did you see that horrible woman you gave your seat to? Why don’t you consider me occasionally instead of every fat selfish washwoman you meet?”

“How should I know -”

But Jaqueline was as angy at him as she had ever been — it was unusual for anyone to get angry at him.

“You didn’t see any of those men getting up for me, did you? No — wonder you were too tired to go out last Monday night. You’d probably given your seat to some — to some horrible, Polish washwoman that’s strong as an ox and likes to stand up!”

They were walking along the slushy street stepping wildly into great pools of water. Confused and distressed, Mather could utter neither apology nor defense.

Jaqueline broke off and then turned to him with a curious light in her eyes. The words in which she couched her summary of the situation were probably the most disagreeable that had ever been addressed to him in his life.

“The trouble with you, Jim, the reason you’re such an easy mark, is that you’ve got the ideas of a college freshman — you’re a professional nice fellow.”

II

The incident and the unpleasantness were forgotten. Mather’s vast good nature had smoothed over the roughness within an hour. References to it fell with a dying cadence throughout several days — then ceased and tumbled into the limbo of oblivion. I say “limbo,” for oblivion is, unfortunately, never quite oblivious. The subject was drowned out by the fact that Jaqueline with her customary spirit and coolness began the long, arduous, up-hill business of bearing a child. Her natural traits and prejudices became intensified and she was less inclined to let things pass. It was April now, and as yet they had not bought a car. Mather had discovered that he was saving practically nothing and that in another half-year he would have a family on his hands. It worried him. A wrinkle — small, tentative, undisturbing — appeared for the first time as a shadow around his honest, friendly eyes. He worked far into the spring twilight now, and frequently brought home with him the overflow from his office day. The new car would have to be postponed for a while.

April afternoon, and all the city shopping on Washington Street. Jaqueline walked slowly past the shops, brooding without fear or depression on the shape into which her life was now being arbitrarily forced. Dry summer dust was in the wind; the sun bounded cheerily from the plate-glass windows and made radiant gasoline rainbows where automobile drippings had formed pools on the street.

Jaqueline stopped. Not six feet from her a bright new sport roadster was parked at the curb. Beside it stood two men in conversation, and at the moment when she identified one of them as young Bronson she heard him say to the other in a casual tone: “What do you think of it? Just got it this morning.” -Jaqueline turned abruptly and walked with quick tapping steps to her husband’s office. With her usual curt nod to the stenographer she strode by her to the inner room. Mather looked up from his desk in surprise at her brusque entry.

“Jim,” she began breathlessly, “did Bronson ever pay you that three hundred?”

“Why — no” he answered hesitantly, “not yet. He was in here last week and he explained that he was a little bit hard up.” Her eyes gleamed with angry triumph.

“Oh, he did?” she snapped. “Well, he’s just bought a new sport roadster that must have cost anyhow twenty-five hundred dollars.” He shook his head, unbelieving.

“I saw it,” she insisted. “I heard him say he’d just bought it.” “He told me he was hard up,” repeated Mather helplessly. Jaqueline audibly gave up by heaving a profound noise, a sort of groanish sigh.

“He was using you! He knew you were easy and he was using you. Can’t you see? He wanted you to buy him the car and you did!” She laughed bitterly. “He’s probably roaring his sides out to think how easily he worked you.”

“Oh, no,” protested Mather with a shocked expression, you must have mistaken somebody for him -

“We walk — and he rides on our money,” she interrupted excitedly.

“Oh, it’s rich — it’s rich. If it wasn’t so maddening, it’d be absurd. Look here — !” Her voice grew sharper, more restrained — there was a touch of contempt in it now. “You spend half your time doing things for people who don’t give a damn about you or what becomes of you. You give up your seat on the street-car to hogs, and come home too dead tired to even move. You’re on all sorts of committees that take at least an hour a day out of your business and you don’t get a cent out of them. You’re — eternally — being used! — I won’t stand it! I thought I married a man — not a professional Samaritan who’s going to fetch and carry for the world!”

As she finished her invective Jaqueline reeled suddenly and sank into a chair — nervously exhausted.

“Just at this time,” she went on brokenly, “I need you. I need your strength and your health and your arms around me. And if you — if you just give it to every one, it’s spread so thin when it reaches me -”

He knelt by her side, moving her tired young head until it lay against his shoulder.

“I’m sorry, Jaqueline,” he said humbly, “I’ll be more careful. I didn’t realize what I was doing.”

“You’re the dearest person in the world,” murmured Jaqueline huskily, “but I want all of you and the best of you for me.” He smoothed her hair over and over. For a few minutes they rested there silently, having attained a sort of Nirvana of peace and understanding. Then Jaqueline reluctantly raised her head as they were interrupted by the voice of Miss Clancy in the doorway.

“Oh, I beg your pardon.”

“What is it?”

“A boy’s here with some boxes. It’s C. O. D.”

Mather rose and followed Miss Clancy into the outer office.

“It’s fifty dollars.”

He searched his wallet — he had omitted to go to the bank that morning.

“Just a minute,” he said abstractedly. His mind was on Jaqueline, Jaqueline who seemed forlorn in her trouble, waiting for him in the other room. He walked into the corridor, and opening the door of

“Clayton and Drake, Brokers” across the way, swung wide a low gate and went up to a man seated at a desk.

“Morning, Fred,” said Mather.

Drake, a little man of thirty with pince-nez and bald head, rose and shook hands.

“Morning, Jim. What can I do for you?”

“Why, a hoy’s in my office with some stuff C. O. D. and I haven’t a cent. Can you let me have fifty till this afternoon?”

Drake looked closely at Mather. Then, slowly and startlingly, he shook his head — not up and down but from side to side.

“Sorry, Jim,” he answered stiffly, “I’ve made a rule never to make a personal loan to anybody on any conditions. I’ve seen it break up too many friendships.”

Mather had come out of his abstraction now, and the monosyllable held an undisguised quality of shock. Then his natural tact acted automatically, springing to his aid and dictating his words though his brain was suddenly numb. His immediate instinct was to put Drake at ease in his refusal.

“Oh, I see.” He nodded his head as if in full agreement, as if he himself had often considered adopting just such a rule. “Oh, I see how you feel. Well — I just — I wouldn’t have you break a rule like that for anything. It’s probably a good thing.”

They talked for a minute longer. Drake justified his position easily; he had evidently rehearsed the part a great deal. He treated Mather to an exquisitely frank smile.

Mather went politely back to his office leaving Drake under the impression that the latter was the most tactful man in the city. Mather knew how to leave people with that impression. But when he entered his own office and saw his wife staring dismally out the window into the sunshine he clinched his hands, and his mouth moved in an unfamiliar shape.

“All right, Jack,” he said slowly, “I guess you’re right about most things, and I’m wrong as hell.”

III

During the next three months Mather thought back through many years. He had had an unusually happy life. Those frictions between man and man, between man and society, which harden most of us into a rough and cynical quarrelling trim, had been conspicuous by their infrequency in his life. It had never occurred to him before that he had paid a price for this immunity, but now he perceived how here and there, and constantly, he had taken the rough side of the road to avoid enmity or argument, or even question.

There was, for instance, much money that he had lent privately about thirteen hundred dollars in all, which he realized, in his new enlightenment, he would never see again. It had taken Jaqueline’s harder, feminine intelligence to know this. It was only now when he owed it to Jaqueline to have money in the bank that he missed these loans at all.

He realized too the truth of her assertions that he was continually doing favors — a little something here, a little something there; the sum total, in time and energy expended, was appalling. It had pleased him to do the favors. He reacted warmly to being thought well of, but he wondered now if he had not been merely indulging a selfish vanity of his own. In suspecting this, he was, as usual, not quite fair to himself. The truth was that Mather was essentially and enormously romantic.

He decided that these expenditures of himself made him tired at night, less efficient in his work, and less of a prop to Jaqueline, who, as the months passed, grew more heavy and bored, and sat through the long summer afternoons on the screened veranda waiting for his step at the end of the walk.

Lest that step falter, Mather gave up many things — among them the presidency of his college alumni association. He let slip other labors less prized. When he was put on a committee, men had a habit of electing him chairman and retiring into a dim background, where they were inconveniently hard to find. He was done with such things now. Also he avoided those who were prone to ask favors — fleeing a certain eager look that would be turned on him from some group at his club.

The change in him came slowly. He was not exceptionally unworldly — under other circumstances Drake’s refusal of money would not have surprised him. Had it come to him as a story he would scarcely have given it a thought. But it had broken in with harsh abruptness upon a situation existing in his own mind, and the shock had given it a powerful and literal significance.

It was mid-August now, and the last of a baking week. The curtains of his wide-open office windows had scarcely rippled all the day, but lay like sails becalmed in warm juxtaposition with the smothering screens. Mather was worried-Jaqueline had over-tired herself, and was paying for it by violent sick headaches, and business seemed to have come to an apathetic standstill. That morning he had been so irritable with Miss Clancy that she had looked at him in surprise. He had immediately apologized, wishing afterward that he hadn’t. He was working at high speed through this heat — why shouldn’t she?

She came to his door now, and he looked up faintly frowning.

“Mr. Edward Lacy.”

“All right,” he answered listlessly. Old man Lacy — he knew him slightly. A melancholy figure — a brilliant start back in the eighties, and now one of the city’s failures. He couldn’t imagine what Lacy wanted unless he were soliciting.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Mather.”

A little, solemn, gray-haired man stood on the threshold. Mather rose and greeted him politely.

“Are you busy, Mr. Mather?”

“Well, not so very” He stressed the qualifying word slightly.

Mr. Lacy sat down, obviously ill at ease. He kept his hat in his hands, and clung to it tightly as he began to speak.

“Mr. Mather, if you’ve got five minutes to spare, I’m going to tell you something that — that I find at present it’s necessary for me to tell you.”

Mather nodded. His instinct warned him that there was a favor to be asked, but he was tired, and with a sort of lassitude he let his chin sink into his hand, welcoming any distraction from his more immediate cares.

“You see,” went on Mr. Lacy — Mather noticed that the hands which fingered at the hat were trembling — “back in eighty-four your” father and I were very good friends. You’ve heard him speak of me no doubt.”Mather nodded.

“I was asked to be one of the pallbearers. Once we were — very close. It’s because of that that I come to you now. Never before in my life have I ever had to come to any one as I’ve come to you now, Mr. Mather — come to a stranger. But as you grow older your friends die or move away or some misunderstanding separates you. And your children die unless you’re fortunate enough to go first — and pretty soon you get to be alone, so that you don’t have any friends at all. You’re isolated.” He smiled faintly. His hands were trembling violently now.

“Once upon a time almost forty years ago your father came to me and asked me for a thousand dollars. I was a few years older than he was, and though I knew him only slightly, I had a high opinion of him. That was a lot of money in those days, and he had no security — he had nothing but a plan in his head — but I liked the way he had of looking out of his eyes — you’ll pardon me if I say you look not unlike him — so I gave it to him without security.”

Mr. Lacy paused. .

“Without security,” he repeated. “I could afford it then. I didn’t lose by it. He paid it back with interest at six per cent before the year was up.”

Mather was looking down at his blotter, tapping out a series of triangles with his pencil. He knew what was coming now, and his muscles physically tightened as he mustered his forces for the refusal he would have to make.

“I’m now an old man, Mr. Mather,” the cracked voice went on.

“I’ve made a failure — I am a failure — only we needn’t go into that now. I have a daughter, an unmarried daughter who lives with me. She does stenographic work and has been very kind to me. We live together, you know, on Selby Avenue — we have an apartment, quite a nice apartment.”

The old man sighed quaveringly. He was trying — and at the same time was afraid — to get to his request. It was insurance, it seemed. He had a ten-thousand-dollar policy, he had borrowed on it up to the limit, and he stood to lose the whole amount unless he could raise four hundred and fifty dollars. He and his daughter had about seventy-five dollars between them. They had no friends — he had explained that — and they had found it impossible to raise the money. . . .

Mather could stand the miserable story no longer. He could not spare the money, but he could at least relieve the old man of the blistered agony of asking for it.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Lacy,” he interrupted as gently as possible, “but I can’t lend you that money.”

“No?” The old man looked at him with faded, blinking eyes that were beyond all shock, almost, it seemed, beyond any human emotion except ceaseless care. The only change in his expression was that his mouth dropped slowly ajar. Mather fixed his eyes determinedly upon his blotter.

“We’re going to have a baby in a few months, and I’ve been saving for that. It wouldn’t be fair to my wife to take anything from her — or the child — right now.”

His voice sank to a sort of mumble. He found himself saying platitudinously that business was bad — saying it with revolting facility.

Mr. Lacy made no argument. He rose without visible signs of disappointment. Only his hands were still trembling and they worried Mather. The old man was apologetic — he was sorry to have bothered him at a time like this. Perhaps something would turn up. He had thought that if Mr. Mather did happen to have a good deal extra — why, he might be the person to go to because he was the son of an old friend.

As he left the office he had trouble opening the outer door. Miss Clancy helped him. He went shabbily and unhappily down the corridor with his faded eyes blinking and his mouth still faintly ajar.

Jim Mather stood by his desk, and put his hand over his face and shivered suddenly as if he were cold. But the five-o’clock air outside was hot as a tropic noon.

IV

The twilight was hotter still an hour later as he stood at the corner waiting for his car. The trolley-ride to his house was twenty-five minutes, and he bought a pink-jacketed newspaper to appetize his listless mind. Life had seemed less happy, less glamorous of late. Perhaps he had learned more of the world’s ways — perhaps its glamour was evaporating little by little with the hurried years.

Nothing like this afternoon, for instance, had ever happened to him before. He could not dismiss the old man from his mind. He pictured him plodding home in the weary heat — on foot, probably, to save carfare — opening the door of a hot little flat, and confessing to his daughter that the son of his friend had not been able to help him out. All evening they would plan helplessly until they said good night to each other — father and daughter, isolated by chance in this world — and went to lie awake with a pathetic loneliness in their two beds.

Mather’s street-car came along, and he found a scat near the front, next to an old lady who looked at him grudgingly as she moved over. At the-next block a crowd of girls from the department-store district flowed up the aisle, and Mather unfolded his paper. Of late he had not indulged in his habit of giving up his seat. Jaqueline was right — the average young girl was able to stand as well as he was. Giving up his seat was silly, a mere gesture. Nowadays not one woman in a dozen even bothered to thank him.

It was stifling hot in the car, and he wiped the heavy damp from his forehead. The aisle was thickly packed now, and a woman standing beside his seat was thrown momentarily against his shoulder as the car turned a corner. Mather took a long breath of the hot foul air, which persistently refused to circulate, and tried to centre his mind on a cartoon at the top of the sporting page.

“Move for’ard ina car, please!” The conductor’s voice pierced the opaque column of humanity with raucous irritation. “Plen’y of room for’ard!”

The crowd made a feeble attempt to shove forward, but the unfortunate fact that there was no space into which to move precluded any marked success. The car turned another corner, and again the woman next to Mather swayed against his shoulder. Ordinarily he would have given up his seat if only to avoid this reminder that she was there. It made him feel unpleasantly cold-blooded. And the car was horrible — horrible. They ought to put more of them on the line these sweltering days.

For the fifth time he looked at the pictures in the comic strip. There was a beggar in the second picture, and the wavering image of Mr. Lacy persistently inserted itself in the beggar’s place. God! Suppose the old man really did starve to death — suppose he threw himself into the river.

“Once,” thought Mather, “he helped my father. Perhaps, if it hadn’t, my own life would have been different than it has been. But Lacy could afford it then — and I can’t.”

To force out the picture of Mr. Lacy, Mather tried to think of Jaqueline. He said to himself over and over that he would have been sacrificing Jaqueline to a played-out man who had had his chance and failed. Jaqueline needed her chance now as never before.

Mather looked at his watch. He had been on the car ten minutes. Fifteen minutes still to ride, and the heat increasing with breathless intensity. The woman swayed against him once more, and looking out the window he saw that they were turning the last down-town corner.

It occurred to him that perhaps he ought, after all, to give the woman his seat — her last sway toward him had been a particularly tired sway. If he were sure she was an older woman — but the texture of her dress as it brushed his hand gave somehow the impression that she was a young girl. He did not dare look up to see. He was afraid of the appeal that might look out of her eyes if they were old — eyes or the sharp contempt if they were young.

For the next five minutes his mind worked in a vague suffocated way on what now seemed to him the enormous problem of whether or not to give her the seat. He felt dimly that doing so would partially atone for his refusal to Mr. Lacy that afternoon. It would be rather terrible to have done those two cold-blooded things in succession — and on such a day.

He tried the cartoon again, but in vain. He must concentrate on Jaqueline. He was dead tired now, and if he stood up he would be more tired. Jaqueline would be waiting for him, needing him. She — would be depressed and she would want him to hold her quietly in his arms for an hour after dinner. When he was tired this was rather a strain. And afterward when they went to bed she would ask him from time to time to get her medicine or a glass of ice-water. He hated to show any weariness in doing these things. She might notice and, needing something, refrain from asking for it.

The girl in the aisle swayed against him once more — this time it was more like a sag. She was tired, too. Well, it was weary to work. The ends of many proverbs that had to do with toil and the long day floated fragmentarily through his mind. Everybody in the world was tired — this woman, for instance, whose body was sagging so wearily, so strangely against his. But his home came first and his girl that he loved was waiting for him there. He must keep his strength for her, and he said to himself over and over that he would not give up his seat.

Then he heard a long sigh, followed by a sudden exclamation, and he realized that the girl was no longer leaning against him. The exclamation multiplied into a clatter of voices — then came a pause — then a renewed clatter that travelled down the car in calls and little staccato cries to the conductor. The bell clanged violently, and the hot car jolted to a sudden stop.

“Girl fainted up here!”

‘Too hot for her!”“Just keeled right over!”

“Get back there! Gangway, you!”

The crowd eddied apart. The passengers in front squeezed back and those on the rear platform temporarily disembarked. Curiosity and pity bubbled out of suddenly conversing groups. People tried to help, got in the way. Then the bell rang and voices rose stridently again.

“Get her out all right?”

“Say, did you see that?”“This damn’ company ought to — ““Did you see the man that carried her out? He was pale as a ghost, too.”

“Yes, but did you hear — ?” “What?”

“That fella. That pale fella that carried her out. He was sittin’ beside her — he says she’s his wife!”

The house was quiet. A breeze pressed back the dark vine leaves of the veranda, letting in thin yellow rods of moonlight on the wicker chairs. Jaqueline rested placidly on the long settee with her head in his arms. After a while she stirred lazily; her hand reaching up patted his cheek. “I think I’ll go to bed now. I’m so tired. Will you help me up?”

He lifted her and then laid her back among the pillows.

“I’ll be with you in a minute,” he said gently. “Can you wait for just a minute?”

He passed into the lighted living-room, and she heard him thumbing the pages of a telephone directory; then she listened as he called a number.

“Hello, is Mr. Lacy there? Why — yes, it is pretty important — if he hasn’t gone to sleep.”

A pause. Jaqueline could hear restless sparrows splattering through the leaves of the magnolia over the way. Then her husband at the telephone:

“Is this Mr. Lacy? Oh, this is Mather. Why — why, in regard to that matter we talked about this afternoon, I think I’ll be able to fix that up after all.” He raised his voice a little as though some one at the other end found it difficult to hear.”James Mather’s son, I said — About that little matter this afternoon — “

“THE SENSIBLE THING”

At the Great American Lunch Hour young George O’Kelly straightened his desk deliberately and with an assumed air of interest. No one in the office must know that he was in a hurry, for success is a matter of atmosphere, and it is not well to advertise the fact that your mind is separated from your work by a distance of seven hundred miles.

But once out of the building he set his teeth and began to run, glancing now and then at the gay noon of early spring which filled Times Square and loitered less than twenty feet over the heads of the crowd. The crowd all looked slightly upward and took deep March breaths, and the sun dazzled their eyes so that scarcely any one saw any one else but only their own reflection on the sky.

George O’Kelly, whose mind was over seven hundred miles away, thought that all outdoors was horrible. He rushed into the subway, and for ninety-five blocks bent a frenzied glance on a car-card which showed vividly how he had only one chance in five of keeping his teeth for ten years. At 137th Street he broke off his study of commercial art, left the subway, and began to run again, a tireless, anxious run that brought him this time to his home--one room in a high, horrible apartment-house in the middle of nowhere.

There it was on the bureau, the letter--in sacred ink, on blessed paper--all over the city, people, if they listened, could hear the beating of George O’Kelly’s heart. He read the commas, the blots, and the thumb-smudge on the margin--then he threw himself hopelessly upon his bed.

He was in a mess, one of those terrific messes which are ordinary incidents in the life of the poor, which follow poverty like birds of prey. The poor go under or go up or go wrong or even go on, somehow, in a way the poor have--but George O’Kelly was so new to poverty that had any one denied the uniqueness of his case he would have been astounded.

Less than two years ago he had been graduated with honors from The Massachusetts Institute of Technology and had taken a position with a firm of construction engineers in southern Tennessee. All his life he had thought in terms of tunnels and skyscrapers and great squat dams and tall, three-towered bridges, that were like dancers holding hands in a row, with heads as tall as cities and skirts of cable strand. It had seemed romantic to George O’Kelly to change the sweep of rivers and the shape of mountains so that life could flourish in the old bad lands of the world where it had never taken root before. He loved steel, and there was always steel near him in his dreams, liquid steel, steel in bars, and blocks and beams and formless plastic masses, waiting for him, as paint and canvas to his hand. Steel inexhaustible, to be made lovely and austere in his imaginative fire . . .

At present he was an insurance clerk at forty dollars a week with his dream slipping fast behind him. The dark little girl who had made this mess, this terrible and intolerable mess, was waiting to be sent for in a town in Tennessee.

In fifteen minutes the woman from whom he sublet his room knocked and asked him with maddening kindness if, since he was home, he would have some lunch. He shook his head, but the interruption aroused him, and getting up from the bed he wrote a telegram.

“Letter depressed me have you lost your nerve you are foolish and just upset to think of breaking off why not marry me immediately sure we can make it all right--”

He hesitated for a wild minute, and then added in a hand that could scarcely be recognized as his own: “In any case I will arrive to-morrow at six o’clock.”

When he finished he ran out of the apartment and down to the telegraph office near the subway stop. He possessed in this world not quite one hundred dollars, but the letter showed that she was “nervous” and this left him no choice. He knew what “nervous” meant--that she was emotionally depressed, that the prospect of marrying into a life of poverty and struggle was putting too much strain upon her love.

George O’Kelly reached the insurance company at his usual run, the run that had become almost second nature to him, that seemed best to express the tension under which he lived. He went straight to the manager’s office.

“I want to see you, Mr. Chambers,” he announced breathlessly.

“Well?” Two eyes, eyes like winter windows, glared at him with ruthless impersonality.

“I want to get four days’ vacation.”

“Why, you had a vacation just two weeks ago!” said Mr. Chambers in surprise.

“That’s true,” admitted the distraught young man, “but now I’ve got to have another.”

“Where’d you go last time? To your home?”

“No, I went to--a place in Tennessee.”

“Well, where do you want to go this time?”

“Well, this time I want to go to--a place in Tennessee.”

“You’re consistent, anyhow,” said the manager dryly. “But I didn’t realize you were employed here as a travelling salesman.”

“I’m not,” cried George desperately, “but I’ve got to go.”

“All right,” agreed Mr. Chambers, “but you don’t have to come back. So don’t!”

“I won’t.” And to his own astonishment as well as Mr. Chambers’ George’s face grew pink with pleasure. He felt happy, exultant--for the first time in six months he was absolutely free. Tears of gratitude stood in his eyes, and he seized Mr. Chambers warmly by the hand.

“I want to thank you,” he said with a rush of emotion. “I don’t want to come back. I think I’d have gone crazy if you’d said that I could come back. Only I couldn’t quit myself, you see, and I want to thank you for--for quitting for me.”

He waved his hand magnanimously, shouted aloud, “You owe me three days’ salary but you can keep it!” and rushed from the office. Mr. Chambers rang for his stenographer to ask if O’Kelly had seemed queer lately. He had fired many men in the course of his career, and they had taken it in many different ways, but none of them had thanked him--ever before.

II

Jonquil Cary was her name, and to George O’Kelly nothing had ever looked so fresh and pale as her face when she saw him and fled to him eagerly along the station platform. Her arms were raised to him, her mouth was half parted for his kiss, when she held him off suddenly and lightly and, with a touch of embarrassment, looked around. Two boys, somewhat younger than George, were standing in the background.

“This is Mr. Craddock and Mr. Holt,” she announced cheerfully. “You met them when you were here before.”

Disturbed by the transition of a kiss into an introduction and suspecting some hidden significance, George was more confused when he found that the automobile which was to carry them to Jonquil’s house belonged to one of the two young men. It seemed to put him at a disadvantage. On the way Jonquil chattered between the front and back seats, and when he tried to slip his arm around her under cover of the twilight she compelled him with a quick movement to take her hand instead.

“Is this street on the way to your house?” he whispered. “I don’t recognize it.”

“It’s the new boulevard. Jerry just got this car to-day, and he wants to show it to me before he takes us home.”

When, after twenty minutes, they were deposited at Jonquil’s house, George felt that the first happiness of the meeting, the joy he had recognized so surely in her eyes back in the station, had been dissipated by the intrusion of the ride. Something that he had looked forward to had been rather casually lost, and he was brooding on this as he said good night stiffly to the two young men. Then his ill-humor faded as Jonquil drew him into a familiar embrace under the dim light of the front hall and told him in a dozen ways, of which the best was without words, how she had missed him. Her emotion reassured him, promised his anxious heart that everything would be all right.

They sat together on the sofa, overcome by each other’s presence, beyond all except fragmentary endearments. At the supper hour Jonquil’s father and mother appeared and were glad to see George. They liked him, and had been interested in his engineering career when he had first come to Tennessee over a year before. They had been sorry when he had given it up and gone to New York to look for something more immediately profitable, but while they deplored the curtailment of his career they sympathized with him and were ready to recognize the engagement. During dinner they asked about his progress in New York.

“Everything’s going fine,” he told them with enthusiasm. “I’ve been promoted--better salary.”

He was miserable as he said this--but they were all so glad.

“They must like you,” said Mrs. Cary, “that’s certain--or they wouldn’t let you off twice in three weeks to come down here.”

“I told them they had to,” explained George hastily; “I told them if they didn’t I wouldn’t work for them any more.”

“But you ought to save your money,” Mrs. Cary reproached him gently. “Not spend it all on this expensive trip.”

Dinner was over--he and Jonquil were alone and she came back into his arms.

“So glad you’re here,” she sighed. “Wish you never were going away again, darling.”

“Do you miss me?”

“Oh, so much, so much.”

“Do you--do other men come to see you often? Like those two kids?”

The question surprised her. The dark velvet eyes stared at him.

“Why, of course they do. All the time. Why--I’ve told you in letters that they did, dearest.”

This was true--when he had first come to the city there had been already a dozen boys around her, responding to her picturesque fragility with adolescent worship, and a few of them perceiving that her beautiful eyes were also sane and kind.

“Do you expect me never to go anywhere”--Jonquil demanded, leaning back against the sofa-pillows until she seemed to look at him from many miles away--”and just fold my hands and sit still--forever?”

“What do you mean?” he blurted out in a panic. “Do you mean you think I’ll never have enough money to marry you?”

“Oh, don’t jump at conclusions so, George.”

“I’m not jumping at conclusions. That’s what you said.”

George decided suddenly that he was on dangerous grounds. He had not intended to let anything spoil this night. He tried to take her again in his arms, but she resisted unexpectedly, saying:

“It’s hot. I’m going to get the electric fan.”

When the fan was adjusted they sat down again, but he was in a super-sensitive mood and involuntarily he plunged into the specific world he had intended to avoid.

“When will you marry me?”

“Are you ready for me to marry you?”

All at once his nerves gave way, and he sprang to his feet.

“Let’s shut off that damned fan,” he cried, “it drives me wild. It’s like a clock ticking away all the time I’ll be with you. I came here to be happy and forget everything about New York and time--”

He sank down on the sofa as suddenly as he had risen. Jonquil turned off the fan, and drawing his head down into her lap began stroking his hair.

“Let’s sit like this,” she said softly, “just sit quiet like this, and I’ll put you to sleep. You’re all tired and nervous and your sweetheart’ll take care of you.”

“But I don’t want to sit like this,” he complained, jerking up suddenly, “I don’t want to sit like this at all. I want you to kiss me. That’s the only thing that makes me rest. And anyways I’m not nervous--it’s you that’s nervous. I’m not nervous at all.”

To prove that he wasn’t nervous he left the couch and plumped himself into a rocking-chair across the room.

“Just when I’m ready to marry you you write me the most nervous letters, as if you’re going to back out, and I have to come rushing down here--”

“You don’t have to come if you don’t want to.”

“But I do want to!” insisted George.

It seemed to him that he was being very cool and logical and that she was putting him deliberately in the wrong. With every word they were drawing farther and farther apart--and he was unable to stop himself or to keep worry and pain out of his voice.

But in a minute Jonquil began to cry sorrowfully and he came back to the sofa and put his arm around her. He was the comforter now, drawing her head close to his shoulder, murmuring old familiar things until she grew calmer and only trembled a little, spasmodically, in his arms. For over an hour they sat there, while the evening pianos thumped their last cadences into the street outside. George did not move, or think, or hope, lulled into numbness by the premonition of disaster. The clock would tick on, past eleven, past twelve, and then Mrs. Cary would call down gently over the banister--beyond that he saw only to-morrow and despair.

III

In the heat of the next day the breaking-point came. They had each guessed the truth about the other, but of the two she was the more ready to admit the situation.

“There’s no use going on,” she said miserably, “you know you hate the insurance business, and you’ll never do well in it.”

“That’s not it,” he insisted stubbornly; “I hate going on alone. If you’ll marry me and come with me and take a chance with me, I can make good at anything, but not while I’m worrying about you down here.”

She was silent a long time before she answered, not thinking--for she had seen the end--but only waiting, because she knew that every word would seem more cruel than the last. Finally she spoke:

“George, I love you with all my heart, and I don’t see how I can ever love any one else but you. If you’d been ready for me two months ago I’d have married you--now I can’t because it doesn’t seem to be the sensible thing.”

He made wild accusations--there was some one else--she was keeping something from him!

“No, there’s no one else.”

This was true. But reacting from the strain of this affair she had found relief in the company of young boys like Jerry Holt, who had the merit of meaning absolutely nothing in her life.

George didn’t take the situation well, at all. He seized her in his arms and tried literally to kiss her into marrying him at once. When this failed, he broke into a long monologue of self-pity, and ceased only when he saw that he was making himself despicable in her sight. He threatened to leave when he had no intention of leaving, and refused to go when she told him that, after all, it was best that he should.

For a while she was sorry, then for another while she was merely kind.

“You’d better go now,” she cried at last, so loud that Mrs. Cary came down-stairs in alarm.

“Is something the matter?”

“I’m going away, Mrs. Cary,” said George brokenly. Jonquil had left the room.

“Don’t feel so badly, George.” Mrs. Cary blinked at him in helpless sympathy--sorry and, in the same breath, glad that the little tragedy was almost done. “If I were you I’d go home to your mother for a week or so. Perhaps after all this is the sensible thing--”

“Please don’t talk,” he cried. “Please don’t say anything to me now!”

Jonquil came into the room again, her sorrow and her nervousness alike tucked under powder and rouge and hat.

“I’ve ordered a taxicab,” she said impersonally. “We can drive around until your train leaves.”

She walked out on the front porch. George put on his coat and hat and stood for a minute exhausted in the hall--he had eaten scarcely a bite since he had left New York. Mrs. Cary came over, drew his head down and kissed him on the cheek, and he felt very ridiculous and weak in his knowledge that the scene had been ridiculous and weak at the end. If he had only gone the night before--left her for the last time with a decent pride.

The taxi had come, and for an hour these two that had been lovers rode along the less-frequented streets. He held her hand and grew calmer in the sunshine, seeing too late that there had been nothing all along to do or say.

“I’ll come back,” he told her.

“I know you will,” she answered, trying to put a cheery faith into her voice. “And we’ll write each other--sometimes.”

“No,” he said, “we won’t write. I couldn’t stand that. Some day I’ll come back.”

“I’ll never forget you, George.”

They reached the station, and she went with him while he bought his ticket. . . .

“Why, George O’Kelly and Jonquil Cary!”

It was a man and a girl whom George had known when he had worked in town, and Jonquil seemed to greet their presence with relief. For an interminable five minutes they all stood there talking; then the train roared into the station, and with ill-concealed agony in his face George held out his arms toward Jonquil. She took an uncertain step toward him, faltered, and then pressed his hand quickly as if she were taking leave of a chance friend.

“Good-by, George,” she was saying, “I hope you have a pleasant trip.

“Good-by, George. Come back and see us all again.”

Dumb, almost blind with pain, he seized his suitcase, and in some dazed way got himself aboard the train.

Past clanging street-crossings, gathering speed through wide suburban spaces toward the sunset. Perhaps she too would see the sunset and pause for a moment, turning, remembering, before he faded with her sleep into the past. This night’s dusk would cover up forever the sun and the trees and the flowers and laughter of his young world.

IV

On a damp afternoon in September of the following year a young man with his face burned to a deep copper glow got off a train at a city in Tennessee. He looked around anxiously, and seemed relieved when he found that there was no one in the station to meet him. He taxied to the best hotel in the city where he registered with some satisfaction as George O’Kelly, Cuzco, Peru.

Up in his room he sat for a few minutes at the window looking down into the familiar street below. Then with his hand trembling faintly he took off the telephone receiver and called a number.

“Is Miss Jonquil in?”

“This is she.”

“Oh--” His voice after overcoming a faint tendency to waver went on with friendly formality.

“This is George O’Kelly. Did you get my letter?”

“Yes. I thought you’d be in to-day.”

Her voice, cool and unmoved, disturbed him, but not as he had expected. This was the voice of a stranger, unexcited, pleasantly glad to see him--that was all. He wanted to put down the telephone and catch his breath.

“I haven’t seen you for--a long time.” He succeeded in making this sound offhand. “Over a year.”

He knew how long it had been--to the day.

“It’ll be awfully nice to talk to you again.”

“I’ll be there in about an hour.”

He hung up. For four long seasons every minute of his leisure had been crowded with anticipation of this hour, and now this hour was here. He had thought of finding her married, engaged, in love--he had not thought she would be unstirred at his return.

There would never again in his life, he felt, be another ten months like these he had just gone through. He had made an admittedly remarkable showing for a young engineer--stumbled into two unusual opportunities, one in Peru, whence he had just returned, and another, consequent upon it, in New York, whither he was bound. In this short time he had risen from poverty into a position of unlimited opportunity.

He looked at himself in the dressing-table mirror. He was almost black with tan, but it was a romantic black, and in the last week, since he had had time to think about it, it had given him considerable pleasure. The hardiness of his frame, too, he appraised with a sort of fascination. He had lost part of an eyebrow somewhere, and he still wore an elastic bandage on his knee, but he was too young not to realize that on the steamer many women had looked at him with unusual tributary interest.

His clothes, of course, were frightful. They had been made for him by a Greek tailor in Lima--in two days. He was young enough, too, to have explained this sartorial deficiency to Jonquil in his otherwise laconic note. The only further detail it contained was a request that he should not be met at the station.

George O’Kelly, of Cuzco, Peru, waited an hour and a half in the hotel, until, to be exact, the sun had reached a midway position in the sky. Then, freshly shaven and talcum-powdered toward a somewhat more Caucasian hue, for vanity at the last minute had overcome romance, he engaged a taxicab and set out for the house he knew so well.

He was breathing hard--he noticed this but he told himself that it was excitement, not emotion. He was here; she was not married--that was enough. He was not even sure what he had to say to her. But this was the moment of his life that he felt he could least easily have dispensed with. There was no triumph, after all, without a girl concerned, and if he did not lay his spoils at her feet he could at least hold them for a passing moment before her eyes.

The house loomed up suddenly beside him, and his first thought was that it had assumed a strange unreality. There was nothing changed--only everything was changed. It was smaller and it seemed shabbier than before--there was no cloud of magic hovering over its roof and issuing from the windows of the upper floor. He rang the door-bell and an unfamiliar colored maid appeared. Miss Jonquil would be down in a moment. He wet his lips nervously and walked into the sitting-room--and the feeling of unreality increased. After all, he saw, this was only a room, and not the enchanted chamber where he had passed those poignant hours. He sat in a chair, amazed to find it a chair, realizing that his imagination had distorted and colored all these simple familiar things.

Then the door opened and Jonquil came into the room--and it was as though everything in it suddenly blurred before his eyes. He had not remembered how beautiful she was, and he felt his face grow pale and his voice diminish to a poor sigh in his throat.

She was dressed in pale green, and a gold ribbon bound back her dark, straight hair like a crown. The familiar velvet eyes caught his as she came through the door, and a spasm of fright went through him at her beauty’s power of inflicting pain.

He said “Hello,” and they each took a few steps forward and shook hands. Then they sat in chairs quite far apart and gazed at each other across the room.

“You’ve come back,” she said, and he answered just as tritely: “I wanted to stop in and see you as I came through.”

He tried to neutralize the tremor in his voice by looking anywhere but at her face. The obligation to speak was on him, but, unless he immediately began to boast, it seemed that there was nothing to say. There had never been anything casual in their previous relations--it didn’t seem possible that people in this position would talk about the weather.

“This is ridiculous,” he broke out in sudden embarrassment. “I don’t know exactly what to do. Does my being here bother you?”

“No.” The answer was both reticent and impersonally sad. It depressed him.

“Are you engaged?” he demanded.

“No.”

“Are you in love with some one?”

She shook her head.

“Oh.” He leaned back in his chair. Another subject seemed exhausted--the interview was not taking the course he had intended.

“Jonquil,” he began, this time on a softer key, “after all that’s happened between us, I wanted to come back and see you. Whatever I do in the future I’ll never love another girl as I’ve loved you.”

This was one of the speeches he had rehearsed. On the steamer it had seemed to have just the right note--a reference to the tenderness he would always feel for her combined with a non-committal attitude toward his present state of mind. Here with the past around him, beside him, growing minute by minute more heavy on the air, it seemed theatrical and stale.

She made no comment, sat without moving, her eyes fixed on him with an expression that might have meant everything or nothing.

“You don’t love me any more, do you?” he asked her in a level voice.

“No.”

When Mrs. Cary came in a minute later, and spoke to him about his success--there had been a half-column about him in the local paper--he was a mixture of emotions. He knew now that he still wanted this girl, and he knew that the past sometimes comes back--that was all. For the rest he must be strong and watchful and he would see.

“And now,” Mrs. Cary was saying, “I want you two to go and see the lady who has the chrysanthemums. She particularly told me she wanted to see you because she’d read about you in the paper.”

They went to see the lady with the chrysanthemums. They walked along the street, and he recognized with a sort of excitement just how her shorter footsteps always fell in between his own. The lady turned out to be nice, and the chrysanthemums were enormous and extraordinarily beautiful. The lady’s gardens were full of them, white and pink and yellow, so that to be among them was a trip back into the heart of summer. There were two gardens full, and a gate between them; when they strolled toward the second garden the lady went first through the gate.

And then a curious thing happened. George stepped aside to let Jonquil pass, but instead of going through she stood still and stared at him for a minute. It was not so much the look, which was not a smile, as it was the moment of silence. They saw each other’s eyes, and both took a short, faintly accelerated breath, and then they went on into the second garden. That was all.

The afternoon waned. They thanked the lady and walked home slowly, thoughtfully, side by side. Through dinner too they were silent. George told Mr. Cary something of what had happened in South America, and managed to let it be known that everything would be plain sailing for him in the future.

Then dinner was over, and he and Jonquil were alone in the room which had seen the beginning of their love affair and the end. It seemed to him long ago and inexpressibly sad. On that sofa he had felt agony and grief such as he would never feel again. He would never be so weak or so tired and miserable and poor. Yet he knew that that boy of fifteen months before had had something, a trust, a warmth that was gone forever. The sensible thing--they had done the sensible thing. He had traded his first youth for strength and carved success out of despair. But with his youth, life had carried away the freshness of his love.

“You won’t marry me, will you?” he said quietly.

Jonquil shook her dark head.

“I’m never going to marry,” she answered.

He nodded.

“I’m going on to Washington in the morning,” he said.

“Oh--”

“I have to go. I’ve got to be in New York by the first, and meanwhile I want to stop off in Washington.”

“Business!”

“No-o,” he said as if reluctantly. “There’s some one there I must see who was very kind to me when I was so--down and out.”

This was invented. There was no one in Washington for him to see--but he was watching Jonquil narrowly, and he was sure that she winced a little, that her eyes closed and then opened wide again.

“But before I go I want to tell you the things that happened to me since I saw you, and, as maybe we won’t meet again, I wonder if--if just this once you’d sit in my lap like you used to. I wouldn’t ask except since there’s no one else--yet--perhaps it doesn’t matter.”

She nodded, and in a moment was sitting in his lap as she had sat so often in that vanished spring. The feel of her head against his shoulder, of her familiar body, sent a shock of emotion over him. His arms holding her had a tendency to tighten around her, so he leaned back and began to talk thoughtfully into the air.

He told her of a despairing two weeks in New York which had terminated with an attractive if not very profitable job in a construction plant in Jersey City. When the Peru business had first presented itself it had not seemed an extraordinary opportunity. He was to be third assistant engineer on the expedition, but only ten of the American party, including eight rodmen and surveyors, had ever reached Cuzco. Ten days later the chief of the expedition was dead of yellow fever. That had been his chance, a chance for anybody but a fool, a marvellous chance--

“A chance for anybody but a fool?” she interrupted innocently.

“Even for a fool,” he continued. “It was wonderful. Well, I wired New York--”

“And so,” she interrupted again, “they wired that you ought to take a chance?”

“Ought to!” he exclaimed, still leaning back. “That I had to. There was no time to lose--”

“Not a minute?”

“Not a minute.”

“Not even time for--” she paused.

“For what?”

“Look.”

He bent his head forward suddenly, and she drew herself to him in the same moment, her lips half open like a flower.

“Yes,” he whispered into her lips. “There’s all the time in the world. . . .”

All the time in the world--his life and hers. But for an instant as he kissed her he knew that though he search through eternity he could never recapture those lost April hours. He might press her close now till the muscles knotted on his arms--she was something desirable and rare that he had fought for and made his own--but never again an intangible whisper in the dusk, or on the breeze of night. . . .

Well, let it pass, he thought; April is over, April is over. There are all kinds of love in the world, but never the same love twice.

GRETCHEN’S FORTY WINKS

I

The sidewalks were scratched with brittle leaves, and the bad little boy next door froze his tongue to the iron mail-box. Snow before night, sure. Autumn was over. This, of course, raised the coal question and the Christmas question; but Roger Halsey, standing on his own front porch, assured the dead suburban sky that he hadn’t time for worrying about the weather. Then he let himself hurriedly into the house, and shut the subject out into the cold twilight.

The hall was dark, but from above he heard the voices of his wife and the nursemaid and the baby in one of their interminable conversations, which consisted chiefly of ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Look out, Maxy!’ and ‘Oh, there he goes!’ punctuated by wild threats and vague bumpings and the recurrent sound of small, venturing feet.

Roger turned on the hall-light and walked into the living-room and turned on the red silk lamp. He put his bulging portfolio on the table, and sitting down rested his intense young face in his hand for a few minutes, shading his eyes carefully from the light. Then he lit a cigarette, squashed it out, and going to the foot of the stairs called for his wife.

‘Gretchen!’

‘Hello, dear.’ Her voice was full of laughter. ‘Come see baby.’

He swore softly.

‘I can’t see baby now,’ he said aloud. ‘How long ‘fore you’ll be down?’

There was a mysterious pause, and then a succession of ‘Don’ts’ and ‘Look outs, Maxy’ evidently meant to avert some threatened catastrophe.

‘How long ‘fore you’ll be down?’ repeated Roger, slightly irritated.

‘Oh, I’ll be right down.’

‘How soon?’ he shouted.

He had trouble every day at this hour in adapting his voice from the urgent key of the city to the proper casualness for a model home. But tonight he was deliberately impatient. It almost disappointed him when Gretchen came running down the stairs, three at a time, crying ‘What is it?’ in a rather surprised voice.

They kissed--lingered over it some moments. They had been married three years, and they were much more in love than that implies. It was seldom that they hated each other with that violent hate of which only young couples are capable, for Roger was still actively sensitive to her beauty.

‘Come in here,’ he said abruptly. ‘I want to talk to you.’

His wife, a bright-coloured, Titian-haired girl, vivid as a French rag doll, followed him into the living room.

‘Listen, Gretchen’--he sat down at the end of the sofa--’beginning with tonight I’m going to--What’s the matter?’

‘Nothing. I’m just looking for a cigarette. Go on.’

She tiptoed breathlessly back to the sofa and settled at the other end.

‘Gretchen--’ Again he broke off. Her hand, palm upward, was extended towards him. ‘Well, what is it?’ he asked wildly.

‘Matches.’

‘What?’

In his impatience it seemed incredible that she should ask for matches, but he fumbled automatically in his pocket.

‘Thank you,’ she whispered. ‘I didn’t mean to interrupt you. Go on.’

‘Gretch--’

Scratch! The match flared. They exchanged a tense look.

Her fawn’s eyes apologized mutely this time, and he laughed. After all, she had done no more than light a cigarette; but when he was in this mood her slightest positive action irritated him beyond measure.

‘When you’ve got time to listen,’ he said crossly, ‘you might be interested in discussing the poorhouse question with me.’

‘What poorhouse?’ Her eyes were wide, startled; she sat quiet as a mouse.

‘That was just to get your attention. But, beginning tonight, I start on what’ll probably be the most important six weeks of my life--the six weeks that’ll decide whether we’re going on forever in this rotten little house in this rotten little suburban town.’

Boredom replaced alarm in Gretchen’s black eyes. She was a Southern girl, and any question that had to do with getting ahead in the world always tended to give her a headache.

‘Six months ago I left the New York Lithographic Company,’ announced Roger, ‘and went in the advertising business for myself.’

‘I know,’ interrupted Gretchen resentfully; ‘and now instead of getting six hundred a month sure, we’re living on a risky five hundred.’

‘Gretchen,’ said Roger sharply, ‘if you’ll just believe in me as hard an you can for six weeks more we’ll be rich. I’ve got a chance now to get some of the biggest accounts in the country.’ He hesitated. ‘And for these six weeks we won’t go out at all, and we won’t have anyone here. I’m going to bring home work every night, and we’ll pull down all the blinds and if anyone rings the doorbell we won’t answer.’

He smiled airily as if it were a new game they were going to play. Then, as Gretchen was silent, his smile faded, and he looked at her uncertainly.

‘Well, what’s the matter?’ she broke out finally. ‘Do you expect me to jump up and sing? You do enough work as it is. If you try to do any more you’ll end up with a nervous breakdown. I read about a--’

‘Don’t worry about me,’ he interrupted; ‘I’m all right. But you’re going to be bored to death sitting here every evening.’

‘No, I won’t,’ she said without conviction--’except tonight.’

‘What about tonight?’

‘George Tompkins asked us to dinner.’

‘Did you accept?’

‘Of course I did,’ she said impatiently. ‘Why not? You’re always talking about what a terrible neighbourhood this is, and I thought maybe you’d like to go to a nicer one for a change.’

‘When I go to a nicer neighbourhood I want to go for good,’ he said grimly.

‘Well, can we go?’

‘I suppose we’ll have to if you’ve accepted.’

Somewhat to his annoyance the conversation abruptly ended. Gretchen jumped up and kissed him sketchily and rushed into the kitchen to light the hot water for a bath. With a sigh he carefully deposited his portfolio behind the bookcase--it contained only sketches and layouts for display advertising, but it seemed to him the first thing a burglar would look for. Then he went abstractedly upstairs, dropping into the baby’s room for a casual moist kiss, and began dressing for dinner.

They had no automobile, so George Tompkins called for them at 6.30. Tompkins was a successful interior decorator, a broad, rosy man with a handsome moustache and a strong odour of jasmine. He and Roger had once roomed side by side in a boarding-house in New York, but they had met only intermittently in the past five years.

‘We ought to see each other more,’ he told Roger tonight. ‘You ought to go out more often, old boy. Cocktail?’

‘No, thanks.’

‘No? Well, your fair wife will--won’t you, Gretchen?’

‘I love this house,’ she exclaimed, taking the glass and looking admiringly at ship models. Colonial whisky bottles, and other fashionable débris of 1925.

‘I like it,’ said Tompkins with satisfaction. ‘I did it to please myself, and I succeeded.’

Roger stared moodily around the stiff, plain room, wondering if they could have blundered into the kitchen by mistake.

‘You look like the devil, Roger,’ said his host. ‘Have a cocktail and cheer up.’

‘Have one,’ urged Gretchen.

‘What?’ Roger turned around absently. ‘Oh, no, thanks. I’ve got to work after I get home.’

‘Work!’ Tompkins smiled. ‘Listen, Roger, you’ll kill yourself with work. Why don’t you bring a little balance into your life--work a little, then play a little?’

‘That’s what I tell him,’ said Gretchen.

‘Do you know an average business man’s day?’ demanded Tompkins as they went in to dinner. ‘Coffee in the morning, eight hours’ work interrupted by a bolted luncheon, and then home again with dyspepsia and a bad temper to give the wife a pleasant evening.’

Roger laughed shortly.

‘You’ve been going to the movies too much,’ he said dryly.

‘What?’ Tompkins looked at him with some irritation. ‘Movies? I’ve hardly ever been to the movies in my life. I think the movies are atrocious. My opinions on life are drawn from my own observations. I believe in a balanced life.’

‘What’s that?’ demanded Roger.

‘Well’--he hesitated--’probably the best way to tell you would be to describe my own day. Would that seem horribly egotistic?’

‘Oh, no!’ Gretchen looked at him with interest. ‘I’d love to hear about it.’

‘Well, in the morning I get up and go through a series of exercises. I’ve got one room fitted up as a little gymnasium, and I punch the bag and do shadow-boxing and weight-pulling for an hour. Then after a cold bath--There’s a thing now! Do you take a daily cold bath?’

‘No,’ admitted Roger, ‘I take a hot bath in the evening three or four times a week.’

A horrified silence fell. Tompkins and Gretchen exchanged a glance as if something obscene had been said.

‘What’s the matter?’ broke out Roger, glancing from one to the other in some irritation. ‘You know I don’t take a bath every day--I haven’t got the time.’

Tompkins gave a prolonged sigh.

‘After my bath,’ he continued, drawing a merciful veil of silence over the matter, ‘I have breakfast and drive to my office in New York, where I work until four. Then I lay off, and if it’s summer I hurry out here for nine holes of golf, or if it’s winter I play squash for an hour at my club. Then a good snappy game of bridge until dinner. Dinner is liable to have something to do with business, but in a pleasant way. Perhaps I’ve just finished a house for some customer, and he wants me to be on hand for his first party to see that the lighting is soft enough and all that sort of thing. Or maybe I sit down with a good book of poetry and spend the evening alone. At any rate, I do something every night to get me out of myself.’

‘It must be wonderful,’ said Gretchen enthusiastically. ‘I wish we lived like that.’

Tompkins bent forward earnestly over the table.

‘You can,’ he said impressively. ‘There’s no reason why you shouldn’t. Look here, if Roger’ll play nine holes of golf every day it’ll do wonders for him. He won’t know himself. He’ll do his work better, never get that tired, nervous feeling--What’s the matter?’

He broke off. Roger had perceptibly yawned.

‘Roger,’ cried Gretchen sharply, ‘there’s no need to be so rude. If you did what George said, you’d be a lot better off.’ She turned indignantly to their host. ‘The latest is that he’s going to work at night for the next six weeks. He says he’s going to pull down the blinds and shut us up like hermits in a cave. He’s been doing it every Sunday for the last year; now he’s going to do it every night for six weeks.’

Tompkins shook his head sadly.

‘At the end of six weeks,’ he remarked, ‘he’ll be starting for the sanatorium. Let me tell you, every private hospital in New York is full of cases like yours. You just strain the human nervous system a little too far, and bang!--you’ve broken something. And in order to save sixty hours you’re laid up sixty weeks for repairs.’ He broke off, changed his tone, and turned to Gretchen with a smile. ‘Not to mention what happens to you. It seems to me it’s the wife rather than the husband who bears the brunt of these insane periods of overwork.’

‘I don’t mind,’ protested Gretchen loyally.

‘Yes, she does,’ said Roger grimly; ‘she minds like the devil. She’s a shortsighted little egg, and she thinks it’s going to be forever until I get started and she can have some new clothes. But it can’t be helped. The saddest thing about women is that, after all, their best trick is to sit down and fold their hands.’

‘Your ideas on women are about twenty years out of date,’ said Tompkins pityingly. ‘Women won’t sit down and wait any more.’

‘Then they’d better marry men of forty,’ insisted Roger stubbornly. ‘If a girl marries a young man for love she ought to be willing to make any sacrifice within reason, so long as her husband keeps going ahead.’

‘Let’s not talk about it,’ said Gretchen impatiently. ‘Please, Roger, let’s have a good time just this once.’

When Tompkins dropped them in front of their house at eleven Roger and Gretchen stood for a moment on the sidewalk looking at the winter moon. There was a fine, damp, dusty snow in the air, and Roger drew a long breath of it and put his arm around Gretchen exultantly.

‘I can make more money than he can,’ he said tensely. ‘And I’ll be doing it in just forty days.’

‘Forty days,’ she sighed. ‘It seems such a long time--when everybody else is always having fun. If I could only sleep for forty days.’

‘Why don’t you, honey? Just take forty winks, and when you wake up everything’ll be fine.’

She was silent for a moment.

‘Roger,’ she asked thoughtfully, ‘do you think George meant what he said about taking me horseback riding on Sunday?’

Roger frowned.

‘I don’t know. Probably not--I hope to Heaven he didn’t.’ He hesitated. ‘As a matter of fact, he made me sort of sore tonight--all that junk about his cold bath.’

With their arms about each other, they started up the walk to the house.

‘I’ll bet he doesn’t take a cold bath every morning,’ continued Roger ruminatively; ‘or three times a week, either.’ He fumbled in his pocket for the key and inserted it in the lock with savage precision. Then he turned around defiantly. ‘I’ll bet he hasn’t had a bath for a month.’

II

After a fortnight of intensive work, Roger Halsey’s days blurred into each other and passed by in blocks of twos and threes and fours. From eight until 5.30 he was in his office. Then a half-hour on the commuting train, where he scrawled notes on the backs of envelopes under the dull yellow light. By 7.30 his crayons, shears, and sheets of white cardboard were spread over the living-room table, and he laboured there with much grunting and sighing until midnight, while Gretchen lay on the sofa with a book, and the doorbell tinkled occasionally behind the drawn blinds. At twelve there was always an argument as to whether he would come to bed. He would agree to come after he had cleared up everything; but as he was invariably sidetracked by half a dozen new ideas, he usually found Gretchen sound asleep when he tiptoed upstairs.

Sometimes it was three o’clock before Roger squashed his last cigarette into the overloaded ash-tray, and he would undress in the dark, disembodied with fatigue, but with a sense of triumph that he had lasted out another day.

Christmas came and went and he scarcely noticed that it was gone. He remembered it afterwards as the day he completed the window-cards for Garrod’s shoes. This was one of the eight large accounts for which he was pointing in January--if he got half of them he was assured a quarter of a million dollars’ worth of business during the year.

But the world outside his business became a chaotic dream. He was aware that on two cool December Sundays George Tompkins had taken Gretchen horseback riding, and that another time she had gone out with him in his automobile to spend the afternoon skiing on the country-club hill. A picture of Tompkins, in an expensive frame, had appeared one morning on their bedroom wall. And one night he was shocked into a startled protest when Gretchen went to the theatre with Tompkins in town.

But his work was almost done. Daily now his layouts arrived from the printers until seven of them were piled and docketed in his office safe. He knew how good they were. Money alone couldn’t buy such work; more than he realized himself, it had been a labour of love.

December tumbled like a dead leaf from the calendar. There was an agonizing week when he had to give up coffee because it made his heart pound so. If he could hold on now for four days--three days--

On Thursday afternoon H. G. Garrod was to arrive in New York. On Wednesday evening Roger came home at seven to find Gretchen poring over the December bills with a strange expression in her eyes.

‘What’s the matter?’

She nodded at the bills. He ran through them, his brow wrinkling in a frown.

‘Gosh!’

‘I can’t help it,’ she burst out suddenly. ‘They’re terrible.’

‘Well, I didn’t marry you because you were a wonderful housekeeper. I’ll manage about the bills some way. Don’t worry your little head over it.’

She regarded him coldly.

‘You talk as if I were a child.’

‘I have to,’ he said with sudden irritation.

‘Well, at least I’m not a piece of bric-à-brac that you can just put somewhere and forget.’

He knelt down by her quickly, and took her arms in his hands.

‘Gretchen, listen!’ he said breathlessly. ‘For God’s sake, don’t go to pieces now! We’re both all stored up with malice and reproach, and if we had a quarrel it’d be terrible. I love you, Gretchen. Say you love me--quick!’

‘You know I love you.’

The quarrel was averted, but there was an unnatural tenseness all through dinner. It came to a climax afterwards when he began to spread his working materials on the table.

‘Oh, Roger,’ she protested, ‘I thought you didn’t have to work tonight.’

‘I didn’t think I’d have to, but something came up.’

‘I’ve invited George Tompkins over.’

‘Oh, gosh!’ he exclaimed. ‘Well, I’m sorry, honey, but you’ll have to phone him not to come.’

‘He’s left,’ she said. ‘He’s coming straight from town. He’ll be here any minute now.’

Roger groaned. It occurred to him to send them both to the movies, but somehow the suggestion stuck on his lips. He did not want her at the movies; he wanted her here, where he could look up and know she was by his side.

George Tompkins arrived breezily at eight o’clock. ‘Aha!’ he cried reprovingly, coming into the room. ‘Still at it.’

Roger agreed coolly that he was.

‘Better quit--better quit before you have to.’ He sat down with a long sigh of physical comfort and lit a cigarette. ‘Take it from a fellow who’s looked into the question scientifically. We can stand so much, and then--bang!’

‘If you’ll excuse me’--Roger made his voice as polite as possible--’I’m going upstairs and finish this work.’

‘Just as you like, Roger.’ George waved his hand carelessly. ‘It isn’t that I mind. I’m the friend of the family and I’d just as soon see the missus as the mister.’ He smiled playfully. ‘But if I were you, old boy, I’d put away my work and get a good night’s sleep.’

When Roger had spread out his materials on the bed upstairs he found that he could still hear the rumble and murmur of their voices through the thin floor. He began wondering what they found to talk about. As he plunged deeper into his work his mind had a tendency to revert sharply to his question, and several times he arose and paced nervously up and down the room.

The bed was ill adapted to his work. Several times the paper slipped from the board on which it rested, and the pencil punched through. Everything was wrong tonight. Letters and figures blurred before his eyes, and as an accompaniment to the beating of his temples came those persistent murmuring voices.

At ten he realized that he had done nothing for more than an hour, and with a sudden exclamation he gathered together his papers, replaced them in his portfolio, and went downstairs. They were sitting together on the sofa when he came in.

‘Oh, hello!’ cried Gretchen, rather unnecessarily, he thought. ‘We were just discussing you.’

‘Thank you,’ he answered ironically. ‘What particular part of my anatomy was under the scalpel?’

‘Your health,’ said Tompkins jovially.

‘My health’s all right,’ answered Roger shortly.

‘But you look at it so selfishly, old fella,’ cried Tompkins. ‘You only consider yourself in the matter. Don’t you think Gretchen has any rights? If you were working on a wonderful sonnet or a--a portrait of some madonna or something’--he glanced at Gretchen’s Titian hair--’why, then I’d say go ahead. But you’re not. It’s just some silly advertisement about how to sell Nobald’s hair tonic, and if all the hair tonic ever made was dumped into the ocean tomorrow the world wouldn’t be one bit the worse for it.’

‘Wait a minute,’ said Roger angrily: ‘that’s not quite fair. I’m not kidding myself about the importance of my work--it’s just as useless as the stuff you do. But to Gretchen and me it’s just about the most important thing in the world.’

‘Are you implying that my work is useless?’ demanded Tompkins incredulously.

‘No; not if it brings happiness to some poor sucker of a pants manufacturer who doesn’t know how to spend his money.’

Tompkins and Gretchen exchanged a glance.

‘Oh-h-h!’ exclaimed Tompkins ironically. ‘I didn’t realize that all these years I’ve just been wasting my time.’

‘You’re a loafer,’ said Roger rudely.

‘Me?’ cried Tompkins angrily. ‘You call me a loafer because I have a little balance in my life and find time to do interesting things? Because I play hard as well as work hard and don’t let myself get to be a dull, tiresome drudge?’

Both men were angry now, and their voices had risen, though on Tompkins’ face there still remained the semblance of a smile.

‘What I object to,’ said Roger steadily, ‘is that for the last six weeks you seem to have done all your playing around here.’

‘Roger!’ cried Gretchen. ‘What do you mean by talking like that?’

‘Just what I said.’

‘You’ve just lost your temper.’ Tompkins lit a cigarette with ostentatious coolness. ‘You’re so nervous from overwork you don’t know what you’re saying. You’re on the verge of a nervous break--’

‘You get out of here!’ cried Roger fiercely. ‘You get out of here right now--before I throw you out!’

Tompkins got angrily to his feet.

‘You--you throw me out?’ he cried incredulously.

They were actually moving towards each other when Gretchen stepped between them, and grabbing Tompkins’ arm urged him towards the door.

‘He’s acting like a fool, George, but you better get out,’ she cried, groping in the hall for his hat.

‘He insulted me!’ shouted Tompkins. ‘He threatened to throw me out!’

‘Never mind, George,’ pleaded Gretchen. ‘He doesn’t know what he’s saying. Please go! I’ll see you at ten o’clock tomorrow.’

She opened the door.

‘You won’t see him at ten o’clock tomorrow,’ said Roger steadily. ‘He’s not coming to this house any more.’

Tompkins turned to Gretchen.

‘It’s his house,’ he suggested. ‘Perhaps we’d better meet at mine.’

Then he was gone, and Gretchen had shut the door behind him. Her eyes were full of angry tears.

‘See what you’ve done!’ she sobbed. ‘The only friend I had, the only person in the world who liked me enough to treat me decently, is insulted by my husband in my own house.’

She threw herself on the sofa and began to cry passionately into the pillows.

‘He brought it on himself,’ said Roger stubbornly, ‘I’ve stood as much as my self-respect will allow. I don’t want you going out with him any more.’

‘I will go out with him!’ cried Gretchen wildly. ‘I’ll go out with him all I want! Do you think it’s any fun living here with you?’

‘Gretchen,’ he said coldly, ‘get up and put on your hat and coat and go out that door and never come back!’

Her mouth fell slightly ajar.

‘But I don’t want to get out,’ she said dazedly.

‘Well, then, behave yourself.’ And he added in a gentler voice: ‘I thought you were going to sleep for this forty days.’

‘Oh, yes,’ she cried bitterly, ‘easy enough to say! But I’m tired of sleeping.’ She got up, faced him defiantly. ‘And what’s more, I’m going riding with George Tompkins tomorrow.’

‘You won’t go out with him if I have to take you to New York and sit you down in my office until I get through.’

She looked at him with rage in her eyes.

‘I hate you,’ she said slowly. ‘And I’d like to take all the work you’ve done and tear it up and throw it in the fire. And just to give you something to worry about tomorrow, I probably won’t be here when you get back.’

She got up from the sofa, and very deliberately looked at her flushed, tear-stained face in the mirror. Then she ran upstairs and slammed herself into the bedroom.

Automatically Roger spread out his work on the living-room table. The bright colours of the designs, the vivid ladies--Gretchen had posed for one of them--holding orange ginger ale or glistening silk hosiery, dazzled his mind into a sort of coma. His restless crayon moved here and there over the pictures, shifting a block of letters half an inch to the right, trying a dozen blues for a cool blue, and eliminating the word that made a phrase anaemic and pale. Half an hour passed--he was deep in the work now; there was no sound in the room but the velvety scratch of the crayon over the glossy board.

After a long while he looked at his watch--it was after three. The wind had come up outside and was rushing by the house corners in loud, alarming swoops, like a heavy body falling through space. He stopped his work and listened. He was not tired now, but his head felt as if it was covered with bulging veins like those pictures that hang in doctors’ offices showing a body stripped of decent skin. He put his hands to his head and felt it all over. It seemed to him that on his temple the veins were knotty and brittle around an old scar.

Suddenly he began to be afraid. A hundred warnings he had heard swept into his mind. People did wreck themselves with overwork, and his body and brain were of the same vulnerable and perishable stuff. For the first time he found himself envying George Tompkins’ calm nerves and healthy routine. He arose and began pacing the room in a panic.

‘I’ve got to sleep,’ he whispered to himself tensely. ‘Otherwise I’m going crazy.’

He rubbed his hand over his eyes, and returned to the table to put up his work, but his fingers were shaking so that he could scarcely grasp the board. The sway of a bare branch against the window made him start and cry out. He sat down on the sofa and tried to think.

‘Stop! Stop! Stop!’ the clock said. ‘Stop! Stop! Stop!’

‘I can’t stop,’ he answered aloud. ‘I can’t afford to stop.’

Listen! Why, there was the wolf at the door now! He could hear its sharp claws scrape along the varnished woodwork. He jumped up, and running to the front door flung it open; then started back with a ghastly cry. An enormous wolf was standing on the porch, glaring at him with red, malignant eyes. As he watched it the hair bristled on its neck; it gave a low growl and disappeared in the darkness. Then Roger realized with a silent, mirthless laugh that it was the police dog from over the way.

Dragging his limbs wearily into the kitchen, he brought the alarm-clock into the living-room and set it for seven. Then he wrapped himself in his overcoat, lay down on the sofa and fell immediately into a heavy, dreamless sleep.

When he awoke the light was still shining feebly, but the room was the grey colour of a winter morning. He got up, and looking anxiously at his hands found to his relief that they no longer trembled. He felt much better. Then he began to remember in detail the events of the night before, and his brow drew up again in three shallow wrinkles. There was work ahead of him, twenty-four hours of work; and Gretchen, whether she wanted to or not, must sleep for one more day.

Roger’s mind glowed suddenly as if he had just thought of a new advertising idea. A few minutes later he was hurrying through the sharp morning air to Kingsley’s drug-store.

‘Is Mr Kingsley down yet?’

The druggist’s head appeared around the corner of the prescription-room.

‘I wonder if I can talk to you alone.’

At 7.30, back home again, Roger walked into his own kitchen. The general housework girl had just arrived and was taking off her hat.

‘Bebé’--he was not on familiar terms with her; this was her name--’I want you to cook Mrs Halsey’s breakfast right away. I’ll take it up myself.’

It struck Bebé that this was an unusual service for so busy a man to render his wife, but if she had seen his conduct when he had carried the tray from the kitchen she would have been even more surprised. For he set it down on the dining room table and put into the coffee half a teaspoonful of a white substance that was not powdered sugar. Then he mounted the stairs and opened the door of the bedroom.

Gretchen woke up with a start, glanced at the twin bed which had not been slept in, and bent on Roger a glance of astonishment, which changed to contempt when she saw the breakfast in his hand. She thought he was bringing it as a capitulation.

‘I don’t want any breakfast,’ she said coldly, and his heart sank, ‘except some coffee.’

‘No breakfast?’ Roger’s voice expressed disappointment

‘I said I’d take some coffee.’

Roger discreetly deposited the tray on a table beside the bed and returned quickly to the kitchen.

‘We’re going away until tomorrow afternoon,’ he told Bebé, ‘and I want to close up the house right now. So you just put on your hat and go home.’

He looked at his watch. It was ten minutes to eight, and he wanted to catch the 8.10 train. He waited five minutes and then tiptoed softly upstairs and into Gretchen’s room. She was sound asleep. The coffee cup was empty save for black dregs and a film of thin brown paste on the bottom. He looked at her rather anxiously, but her breathing was regular and clear.

From the closet he took a suitcase and very quickly began filling it with her shoes--street shoes, evening slippers, rubber-soled oxfords--he had not realized that she owned so many pairs. When he closed the suitcase it was bulging.

He hesitated a minute, took a pair of sewing scissors from a box, and following the telephone-wire until it went out of sight behind the dresser, severed it in one neat clip. He jumped as there was a soft knock at the door. It was the nursemaid. He had forgotten her existence.

‘Mrs Halsey and I are going up to the city till tomorrow,’ he said glibly. ‘Take Maxy to the beach and have lunch there. Stay all day.’

Back in the room, a wave of pity passed over him. Gretchen seemed suddenly lovely and helpless, sleeping there. It was somehow terrible to rob her young life of a day. He touched her hair with his fingers, and as she murmured something in her dream he leaned over and kissed her bright cheek. Then he picked up the suitcase full of shoes, locked the door, and ran briskly down the stairs.

III

By five o’clock that afternoon the last package of cards for Garrod’s shoes had been sent by messenger to H. G. Garrod at the Biltmore Hotel. He was to give a decision next morning. At 5.30 Roger’s stenographer tapped him on the shoulder.

‘Mr Golden, the superintendent of the building, to see you.’

Roger turned around dazedly.

‘Oh, how do?’

Mr Golden came directly to the point. If Mr Halsey intended to keep the office any longer, the little oversight about the rent had better be remedied right away.

‘Mr Golden,’ said Roger wearily, ‘everything’ll be all right tomorrow. If you worry me now maybe you’ll never get your money. After tomorrow nothing’ll matter.’

Mr Golden looked at the tenant uneasily. Young men sometimes did away with themselves when business went wrong. Then his eye fell unpleasantly on the initialled suitcase beside the desk.

‘Going on a trip?’ he asked pointedly.

‘What? Oh, no. That’s just some clothes.’

‘Clothes, eh? Well, Mr Halsey, just to prove that you mean what you say, suppose you let me keep that suitcase until tomorrow noon.’

‘Help yourself.’

Mr Golden picked it up with a deprecatory gesture.

‘Just a matter of form,’ he remarked.

‘I understand,’ said Roger, swinging around to his desk. ‘Good afternoon.’

Mr Golden seemed to feel that the conversation should close on a softer key.

‘And don’t work too hard, Mr Halsey. You don’t want to have a nervous break--’

‘No,’ shouted Roger, ‘I don’t. But I will if you don’t leave me alone.’

As the door closed behind Mr Golden, Roger’s stenographer turned sympathetically around.

‘You shouldn’t have let him get away with that,’ she said. ‘What’s in there? Clothes?’

‘No,’ answered Roger absently. ‘Just all my wife’s shoes.’

He slept in the office that night on a sofa beside his desk. At dawn he awoke with a nervous start, rushed out into the street for coffee, and returned in ten minutes in a panic--afraid that he might have missed Mr Garrod’s telephone call. It was then 6.30.

By eight o’clock his whole body seemed to be on fire. When his two artists arrived he was stretched on the couch in almost physical pain. The phone rang imperatively at 9.30, and he picked up the receiver with trembling hands.

‘Hello.’

‘Is this the Halsey agency?’

‘Yes, this is Mr Halsey speaking.’

‘This is Mr H. G. Garrod.’

Roger’s heart stopped beating.

‘I called up, young fellow, to say that this is wonderful work you’ve given us here. We want all of it and as much more as your office can do.’

‘Oh, God!’ cried Roger into the transmitter.

‘What?’ Mr H. G. Garrod was considerably startled. ‘Say, wait a minute there!’

But he was talking to nobody. The phone had clattered to the floor, and Roger, stretched full length on the couch, was sobbing as if his heart would break.

IV

Three hours later, his face somewhat pale, but his eyes calm as a child’s, Roger opened the door of his wife’s bedroom with the morning paper under his arm. At the sound of his footsteps she started awake.

‘What time is it?’ she demanded.

He looked at his watch.

‘Twelve o’clock.’

Suddenly she began to cry.

‘Roger,’ she said brokenly, ‘I’m sorry I was so bad last night.’

He nodded coolly.

‘Everything’s all right now,’ he answered. Then, after a pause: ‘I’ve got the account--the biggest one.’

She turned towards him quickly.

‘You have?’ Then, after a minute’s silence: ‘Can I get a new dress?’

‘Dress?’ He laughed shortly. ‘You can get a dozen. This account alone will bring us in forty thousand a year. It’s one of the biggest in the West.’

She looked at him, startled.

‘Forty thousand a year!’

‘Yes.’

‘Gosh’--and then faintly--’I didn’t know it’d really be anything like that.’ Again she thought a minute. ‘We can have a house like George Tompkins’.’

‘I don’t want an interior-decoration shop.’

‘Forty thousand a year!’ she repeated again, and then added softly: ‘Oh, Roger--’

‘Yes?’

‘I’m not going out with George Tompkins.’

‘I wouldn’t let you, even if you wanted to,’ he said shortly.

She made a show of indignation.

‘Why, I’ve had a date with him for this Thursday for weeks.’

‘It isn’t Thursday.’

‘It is.’

‘It’s Friday.’

‘Why, Roger, you must be crazy! Don’t you think I know what day it is?’

‘It isn’t Thursday,’ he said stubbornly. ‘Look!’ And he held out the morning paper.

‘Friday!’ she exclaimed. ‘Why, this is a mistake! This must be last week’s paper. Today’s Thursday.’

She closed her eyes and thought for a moment.

‘Yesterday was Wednesday,’ she said decisively. ‘The laundress came yesterday. I guess I know.’

‘Well,’ he said smugly, ‘look at the paper. There isn’t any question about it.’

With a bewildered look on her face she got out of bed and began searching for her clothes. Roger went into the bathroom to shave. A minute later he heard the springs creak again. Gretchen was getting back into bed.

‘What’s the matter?’ he inquired, putting his head around the corner of the bathroom.

‘I’m scared,’ she said in a trembling voice. ‘I think my nerves are giving way. I can’t find any of my shoes.’

‘Your shoes? Why, the closet’s full of them.’

‘I know, but I can’t see one.’ Her face was pale with fear. ‘Oh, Roger!’

Roger came to her bedside and put his arm around her.

‘Oh, Roger,’ she cried, ‘what’s the matter with me? First that newspaper, and now all my shoes. Take care of me, Roger.’

‘I’ll get the doctor,’ he said.

He walked remorselessly to the telephone and took up the receiver.

‘Phone seems to be out of order,’ he remarked after a minute; ‘I’ll send Bebé.’

The doctor arrived in ten minutes.

‘I think I’m on the verge of a collapse,’ Gretchen told him in a strained voice.

Doctor Gregory sat down on the edge of the bed and took her wrist in his hand.

‘It seems to be in the air this morning.’

‘I got up,’ said Gretchen in an awed voice, ‘and I found that I’d lost a whole day. I had an engagement to go riding with George Tompkins--’

‘What?’ exclaimed the doctor in surprise. Then he laughed.

‘George Tompkins won’t go riding with anyone for many days to come.’

‘Has he gone away?’ asked Gretchen curiously.

‘He’s going West.’

‘Why?’ demanded Roger. ‘Is he running away with somebody’s wife?’

‘No,’ said Doctor Gregory. ‘He’s had a nervous breakdown.’

‘What?’ they exclaimed in unison.

‘He just collapsed like an opera-hat in his cold shower.’

‘But he was always talking about his--his balanced life,’ gasped Gretchen. ‘He had it on his mind.’

‘I know,’ said the doctor. ‘He’s been babbling about it all morning. I think it’s driven him a little mad. He worked pretty hard at it, you know.’

‘At what?’ demanded Roger in bewilderment.

‘At keeping his life balanced.’ He turned to Gretchen. ‘Now all I’ll prescribe for this lady here is a good rest. If she’ll just stay around the house for a few days and take forty winks of sleep she’ll be as fit as ever. She’s been under some strain.’

‘Doctor,’ exclaimed Roger hoarsely, ‘don’t you think I’d better have a rest or something? I’ve been working pretty hard lately.’

‘You!’ Doctor Gregory laughed, slapped him violently on the back. ‘My boy, I never saw you looking better in your life.’

Roger turned away quickly to conceal his smile--winked forty times, or almost forty times, at the autographed picture of Mr George Tompkins, which hung slightly askew on the bedroom wall.

TAPS AT REVEILLE

Published in 1935, this book of 18 short stories is Fitzgerald’s fourth and final collection printed in his lifetime. The book was dedicated to his agent Harold Ober.

The first edition

CONTENTS

THE SCANDAL DETECTIVES

BASIL: THE FRESHEST BOY

HE THINKS HE’S WONDERFUL

THE CAPTURED SHADOW

THE PERFECT LIFE

FIRST BLOOD

A NICE QUIET PLACE

JOSEPHINE: A WOMAN WITH A PAST

CRAZY SUNDAY

TWO WRONGS

THE NIGHT AT CHANCELLORSVILLE

THE LAST OF THE BELLES

MAJESTY

FAMILY IN THE WIND

A SHORT TRIP HOME

ONE INTERNE

THE FIEND

BABYLON REVISITED

Harold Ober – Fitzgerald’s friend and agent

THE SCANDAL DETECTIVES

I

It was a hot afternoon in May and Mrs. Buckner thought that a pitcher of fruit lemonade might prevent the boys from filling up on ice cream at the drug store. She belonged to that generation, since retired, upon whom the great revolution in American family life was to be visited; but at that time she believed that her children’s relation to her was as much as hers had been to her parents, for this was more than twenty years ago.

Some generations are close to those that succeed them; between others the gap is infinite and unbridgeable. Mrs. Buckner--a woman of character, a member of Society in a large Middle-Western city--carrying a pitcher of fruit lemonade through her own spacious back yard, was progressing across a hundred years. Her own thoughts would have been comprehensible to her great-grandmother; what was happening in a room above the stable would have been entirely unintelligible to them both. In what had once served as the coachman’s sleeping apartment, her son and a friend were not behaving in a normal manner, but were, so to speak, experimenting in a void. They were making the first tentative combinations of the ideas and materials they found ready at their hand--ideas destined to become, in future years, first articulate, then startling and finally commonplace. At the moment when she called up to them they were sitting with disarming quiet upon the still unhatched eggs of the mid-twentieth century.

Riply Buckner descended the ladder and took the lemonade. Basil Duke Lee looked abstractedly down at the transaction and said, “Thank you very much, Mrs. Buckner.”

“Are you sure it isn’t too hot up there?”

“No, Mrs. Buckner. It’s fine.”

It was stifling; but they were scarcely conscious of the heat, and they drank two tall glasses each of the lemonade without knowing that they were thirsty. Concealed beneath a sawed-out trapdoor from which they presently took it was a composition book bound in imitation red leather which currently absorbed much of their attention. On its first page was inscribed, if you penetrated the secret of the lemon-juice ink: “The Book of Scandal, written by Riply Buckner, Jr., and Basil D. Lee, Scandal Detectives.”

In this book they had set down such deviations from rectitude on the part of their fellow citizens as had reached their ears. Some of these false steps were those of grizzled men, stories that had become traditions in the city and were embalmed in the composition book by virtue of indiscreet exhumations at family dinner tables. Others were the more exciting sins, confirmed or merely rumored, of boys and girls their own age. Some of the entries would have been read by adults with bewilderment, others might have inspired wrath, and there were three or four contemporary reports that would have prostrated the parents of the involved children with horror and despair.

One of the mildest items, a matter they had hesitated about setting down, though it had shocked them only last year, was: “Elwood Leaming has been to the Burlesque Show three or four times at the Star.”

Another, and perhaps their favorite, because of its uniqueness, set forth that “H. P. Cramner committed some theft in the East he could be imprisoned for and had to come here”--H. P. Cramner being now one of the oldest and “most substantial” citizens of the city.

The single defect in the book was that it could only be enjoyed with the aid of the imagination, for the invisible ink must keep its secrets until that day when, the pages being held close to the fire, the items would appear. Close inspection was necessary to determine which pages had been used--already a rather grave charge against a certain couple had been superimposed upon the dismal facts that Mrs. R. B. Cary had consumption and that her son, Walter Cary, had been expelled from PawlingSchool. The purpose of the work as a whole was not blackmail. It was treasured against the time when its protagonists should “do something” to Basil and Riply. Its possession gave them a sense of power. Basil, for instance, had never seen Mr. H. P. Cramner make a single threatening gesture in Basil’s direction but let him even hint that he was going to do something to Basil, and there preserved against him was the record of his past.

It is only fair to say that at this point the book passes entirely out of this story. Years later a janitor discovered it beneath the trapdoor, and finding it apparently blank, gave it to his little girl; so the misdeeds of Elwood Leaming and H. P. Cramner were definitely entombed at last beneath a fair copy of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.

The book was Basil’s idea. He was more the imaginative and in most ways the stronger of the two. He was a shining-eyed, brown-haired boy of fourteen, rather small as yet, and bright and lazy at school. His favorite character in fiction was Arsène Lupin, the gentleman burglar, a romantic phenomenon lately imported from Europe and much admired in the first bored decades of the century.

Riply Buckner, also in short pants, contributed to the partnership a breathless practicality. His mind waited upon Basil’s imagination like a hair trigger and no scheme was too fantastic for his immediate “Let’s do it!” Since the school’s third baseball team, on which they had been pitcher and catcher, decomposed after an unfortunate April season, they had spent their afternoons struggling to evolve a way of life which should measure up to the mysterious energies fermenting inside them. In the cache beneath the trapdoor were some “slouch” hats and bandanna handkerchiefs, some loaded dice, half of a pair of handcuffs, a rope ladder of a tenuous crochet persuasion for rear-window escapes into the alley, and a make-up box containing two old theatrical wigs and crêpe hair of various colors--all to be used when they decided what illegal enterprises to undertake.

Their lemonades finished, they lit Home Runs and held a desultory conversation which touched on crime, professional baseball, sex and the local stock company. This broke off at the sound of footsteps and familiar voices in the adjoining alley.

From the window, they investigated. The voices belonged to Margaret Torrence, Imogene Bissel and Connie Davies, who were cutting through the alley from Imogene’s back yard to Connie’s at the end of the block. The young ladies were thirteen, twelve and thirteen years old respectively, and they considered themselves alone, for in time to their march they were rendering a mildly daring parody in a sort of whispering giggle and coming out strongly on the finale: “Oh, my dar-ling Clemon-tine.”

Basil and Riply leaned together from the window, then remembering their undershirts sank down behind the sill.

“We heard you!” they cried together.

The girls stopped and laughed. Margaret Torrence chewed exaggeratedly to indicate gum, and gum with a purpose. Basil immediately understood.

“Whereabouts?” he demanded.

“Over at Imogene’s house.”

They had been at Mrs. Bissel’s cigarettes. The implied recklessness of their mood interested and excited the two boys and they prolonged the conversation. Connie Davies had been Riply’s girl during dancing-school term; Margaret Torrence had played a part in Basil’s recent past; Imogene Bissel was just back from a year in Europe. During the last month neither Basil nor Riply had thought about girls, and, thus refreshed, they become conscious that the centre of the world had shifted suddenly from the secret room to the little group outside.

“Come on up,” they suggested.

“Come on out. Come on down to the Whartons’ yard.”

“All right.”

Barely remembering to put away the Scandal Book and the box of disguises, the two boys hurried out, mounted their bicycles and rode up the alley.

The Whartons’ own children had long grown up, but their yard was still one of those predestined places where young people gather in the afternoon. It had many advantages. It was large, open to other yards on both sides, and it could be entered upon skates or bicycles from the street. It contained an old seesaw, a swing and a pair of flying rings; but it had been a rendezvous before these were put up, for it had a child’s quality--the thing that makes young people huddle inextricably on uncomfortable steps and desert the houses of their friends to herd on the obscure premises of “people nobody knows.” The Whartons’ yard had long been a happy compromise; there were deep shadows there all day long and ever something vague in bloom, and patient dogs around, and brown spots worn bare by countless circling wheels and dragging feet. In sordid poverty, below the bluff two hundred feet away, lived the “micks”--they had merely inherited the name, for they were now largely of Scandinavian descent--and when other amusements palled, a few cries were enough to bring a gang of them swarming up the hill, to be faced if numbers promised well, to be fled from into convenient houses if things went the other way.

It was five o’clock and there was a small crowd gathered there for that soft and romantic time before supper--a time surpassed only by the interim of summer dusk thereafter. Basil and Riply rode their bicycles around abstractedly, in and out of trees, resting now and then with a hand on someone’s shoulder, shading their eyes from the glow of the late sun that, like youth itself, is too strong to face directly, but must be kept down to an undertone until it dies away.

Basil rode over to Imogene Bissel and balanced idly on his wheel before her. Something in his face then must have attracted her, for she looked up at him, looked at him really, and slowly smiled. She was to be a beauty and belle of many proms in a few years. Now her large brown eyes and large beautifully shaped mouth and the high flush over her thin cheek bones made her face gnome-like and offended those who wanted a child to look like a child. For a moment Basil was granted an insight into the future, and the spell of her vitality crept over him suddenly. For the first time in his life he realized a girl completely as something opposite and complementary to him, and he was subject to a warm chill of mingled pleasure and pain. It was a definite experience and he was immediately conscious of it. The summer afternoon became lost in her suddenly--the soft air, the shadowy hedges and banks of flowers, the orange sunlight, the laughter and voices, the tinkle of a piano over the way--the odor left all these things and went into Imogene’s face as she sat there looking up at him with a smile.

For a moment it was too much for him. He let it go, incapable of exploiting it until he had digested it alone. He rode around fast in a circle on his bicycle, passing near Imogene without looking at her. When he came back after a while and asked if he could walk home with her, she had forgotten the moment, if it had ever existed for her, and was almost surprised. With Basil wheeling his bicycle beside her, they started down the street.

“Can you come out tonight?” he asked eagerly. “There’ll probably be a bunch in the Whartons’ yard.”

“I’ll ask mother.”

“I’ll telephone you. I don’t want to go unless you’ll be there.”

“Why?” She smiled at him again, encouraging him.

“Because I don’t want to.”

“But why don’t you want to?”

“Listen,” he said quickly, “what boys do you like better than me?”

“Nobody. I like you and Hubert Blair best.”

Basil felt no jealousy at the coupling of this name with his. There was nothing to do about Hubert Blair but accept him philosophically, as other boys did when dissecting the hearts of other girls.

“I like you better than anybody,” he said deliriously.

The weight of the pink dappled sky above him was not endurable. He was plunging along through air of ineffable loveliness while warm freshets sprang up in his blood and he turned them, and with them his whole life, like a stream toward this girl.

They reached the carriage door at the side of her house.

“Can’t you come in, Basil?”

“No.” He saw immediately that that was a mistake, but it was said now. The intangible present had eluded him. Still he lingered. “Do you want my school ring?”

“Yes, if you want to give it to me.”

“I’ll give it to you tonight.” His voice shook slightly as he added, “That is, I’ll trade.”

“What for?”

“Something.”

“What?” Her color spread; she knew.

“You know. Will you trade?”

Imogene looked around uneasily. In the honey-sweet silence that had gathered around the porch, Basil held his breath. “You’re awful,” she whispered. “Maybe. . . . Good-by.”

II

It was the best hour of the day now and Basil was terribly happy. This summer he and his mother and sister were going to the lakes and next fall he was starting away to school. Then he would go to Yale and be a great athlete, and after that--if his two dreams had fitted onto each other chronologically instead of existing independently side by side--he was due to become a gentleman burglar. Everything was fine. He had so many alluring things to think about that it was hard to fall asleep at night.

That he was now crazy about Imogene Bissel was not a distraction, but another good thing. It had as yet no poignancy, only a brilliant and dynamic excitement that was bearing him along toward the Whartons’ yard through the May twilight.

He wore his favorite clothes--white duck knickerbockers, pepper-and-salt Norfolk jacket, a Belmont collar and a gray knitted tie. With his black hair wet and shining, he made a handsome little figure as he turned in upon the familiar but now re-enchanted lawn and joined the voices in the gathering darkness. Three or four girls who lived in neighboring houses were present, and almost twice as many boys; and a slightly older group adorning the side veranda made a warm, remote nucleus against the lamps of the house and contributed occasional mysterious ripples of laughter to the already overburdened night.

Moving from shadowy group to group, Basil ascertained that Imogene was not yet here. Finding Margaret Torrence, he spoke to her aside, lightly.

“Have you still got that old ring of mine?”

Margaret had been his girl all year at dancing school, signified by the fact that he had taken her to the cotillion which closed the season. The affair had languished toward the end; none the less, his question was undiplomatic.

“I’ve got it somewhere,” Margaret replied carelessly. “Why? Do you want it back?”

“Sort of.”

“All right. I never did want it. It was you that made me take it, Basil. I’ll give it back to you tomorrow.”

“You couldn’t give it to me tonight, could you?” His heart leaped as he saw a small figure come in at the rear gate. “I sort of want to get it tonight.”

“Oh, all right, Basil.”

She ran across the street to her house and Basil followed. Mr. and Mrs. Torrence were on the porch, and while Margaret went upstairs for the ring he overcame his excitement and impatience and answered those questions as to the health of his parents which are so meaningless to the young. Then a sudden stiffening came over him, his voice faded off and his glazed eyes fixed upon a scene that was materializing over the way.

From the shadows far up the street, a swift, almost flying figure emerged and floated into the patch of lamplight in front of the Whartons’ house. The figure wove here and there in a series of geometric patterns, now off with a flash of sparks at the impact of skates and pavement, now gliding miraculously backward, describing a fantastic curve, with one foot lifted gracefully in the air, until the young people moved forward in groups out of the darkness and crowded to the pavement to watch. Basil gave a quiet little groan as he realized that of all possible nights, Hubert Blair had chosen this one to arrive.

“You say you’re going to the lakes this summer, Basil. Have you taken a cottage?”

Basil became aware after a moment that Mr. Torrence was making this remark for the third time.

“Oh, yes, sir,” he answered--”I mean, no. We’re staying at the club.”

“Won’t that be lovely?” said Mrs. Torrence.

Across the street, he saw Imogene standing under the lamp-post and in front of her Hubert Blair, his jaunty cap on the side of his head, maneuvering in a small circle. Basil winced as he heard his chuckling laugh. He did not perceive Margaret until she was beside him, pressing his ring into his hand like a bad penny. He muttered a strained hollow good-by to her parents, and weak with apprehension, followed her back across the street.

Hanging back in a shadow, he fixed his eyes not on Imogene but on Hubert Blair. There was undoubtedly something rare about Hubert. In the eyes of children less than fifteen, the shape of the nose is the distinguishing mark of beauty. Parents may call attention to lovely eyes, shining hair or gorgeous coloring, but the nose and its juxtaposition on the face is what the adolescent sees. Upon the lithe, stylish, athletic torso of Hubert Blair was set a conventional chubby face, and upon this face was chiseled the piquant, retroussé nose of a Harrison Fisher girl.

He was confident; he had personality, uninhibited by doubts or moods. He did not go to dancing school--his parents had moved to the city only a year ago--but already he was a legend. Though most of the boys disliked him, they did homage to his virtuosic athletic ability, and for the girls his every movement, his pleasantries, his very indifference, had a simply immeasurable fascination. Upon several previous occasions Basil had discovered this; now the discouraging comedy began to unfold once more.

Hubert took off his skates, rolled one down his arm and caught it by the strap before it reached the pavement; he snatched the ribbon from Imogene’s hair and made off with it, dodging from under her arms as she pursued him, laughing and fascinated, around the yard. He cocked one foot behind the other and pretended to lean an elbow against a tree, missed the tree on purpose and gracefully saved himself from falling. The boys watched him noncommittally at first. Then they, too, broke out into activity, doing stunts and tricks as fast as they could think of them until those on the porch craned their necks at the sudden surge of activity in the garden. But Hubert coolly turned his back on his own success. He took Imogene’s hat and began setting it in various quaint ways upon his head. Imogene and the other girls were filled with delight.

Unable any longer to endure the nauseous spectacle, Basil went up to the group and said, “Why, hello, Hube,” in as negligent a tone as he could command.

Hubert answered: “Why, hello, old--old Basil the Boozle,” and set the hat a different way on his head, until Basil himself couldn’t resist an unwilling chortle of laughter.

“Basil the Boozle! Hello, Basil the Boozle!” The cry circled the garden. Reproachfully he distinguished Riply’s voice among the others.

“Hube the Boob!” Basil countered quickly; but his ill humor detracted from the effect, though several boys repeated it appreciatively.

Gloom settled upon Basil, and through the heavy dusk the figure of Imogene began to take on a new, unattainable charm. He was a romantic boy and already he had endowed her heavily from his fancy. Now he hated her for her indifference, but he must perversely linger near in the vain hope of recovering the penny of ecstasy so wantonly expended this afternoon.

He tried to talk to Margaret with decoy animation, but Margaret was not responsive. Already a voice had gone up in the darkness calling in a child. Panic seized upon him; the blessed hour of summer evening was almost over. At a spreading of the group to let pedestrians through, he maneuvered Imogene unwillingly aside.

“I’ve got it,” he whispered. “Here it is. Can I take you home?”

She looked at him distractedly. Her hand closed automatically on the ring.

“What? Oh, I promised Hubert he could take me home.” At the sight of his face she pulled herself from her trance and forced a note of indignation. “I saw you going off with Margaret Torrence just as soon as I came into the yard.”

“I didn’t. I just went to get the ring.”

“Yes, you did! I saw you!”

Her eyes moved back to Hubert Blair. He had replaced his roller skates and was making little rhythmic jumps and twirls on his toes, like a witch doctor throwing a slow hypnosis over an African tribe. Basil’s voice, explaining and arguing, went on, but Imogene moved away. Helplessly he followed. There were other voices calling in the darkness now and unwilling responses on all sides.

“All right, mother!”

“I’ll be there in a second, mother.”

“Mother, can’t I please stay out five minutes more?”

“I’ve got to go,” Imogene cried. “It’s almost nine.”

Waving her hand and smiling absently at Basil, she started off down the street. Hubert pranced and stunted at her side, circled around her and made entrancing little figures ahead.

Only after a minute did Basil realize that another young lady was addressing him.

“What?” he demanded absently.

“Hubert Blair is the nicest boy in town and you’re the most conceited,” repeated Margaret Torrence with deep conviction.

He stared at her in pained surprise. Margaret wrinkled her nose at him and yielded up her person to the now-insistent demands coming from across the street. As Basil gazed stupidly after her and then watched the forms of Imogene and Hubert disappear around the corner, there was a low mutter of thunder along the sultry sky and a moment later a solitary drop plunged through the lamplit leaves overhead and splattered on the sidewalk at his feet. The day was to close in rain.

III

It came quickly and he was drenched and running before he reached his house eight blocks away. But the change of weather had swept over his heart and he leaped up every few steps, swallowing the rain and crying “Yo-o-o!” aloud, as if he himself were a part of the fresh, violent disturbance of the night. Imogene was gone, washed out like the day’s dust on the sidewalk. Her beauty would come back into his mind in brighter weather, but here in the storm he was alone with himself. A sense of extraordinary power welled up in him, until to leave the ground permanently with one of his wild leaps would not have surprised him. He was a lone wolf, secret and untamed; a night prowler, demoniac and free. Only when he reached his own house did his emotion begin to turn, speculatively and almost without passion, against Hubert Blair.

He changed his clothes, and putting on pajamas and dressing-gown descended to the kitchen, where he happened upon a new chocolate cake. He ate a fourth of it and most of a bottle of milk. His elation somewhat diminished, he called up Riply Buckner on the phone.

“I’ve got a scheme,” he said.

‘What about?”

“How to do something to H. B. with the S. D.”

Riply understood immediately what he meant. Hubert had been so indiscreet as to fascinate other girls besides Miss Bissel that evening.

“We’ll have to take in Bill Kampf,” Basil said.

“All right.”

“See you at recess tomorrow. . . . Good night!”

IV

Four days later, when Mr. and Mrs. George P. Blair were finishing dinner, Hubert was called to the telephone. Mrs. Blair took advantage of his absence to speak to her husband of what had been on her mind all day.

“George, those boys, or whatever they are, came again last night.”

He frowned.

“Did you see them?”

“Hilda did. She almost caught one of them. You see, I told her about the note they left last Tuesday, the one that said, ‘First warning, S. D.,’ so she was ready for them. They rang the back-door bell this time and she answered it straight from the dishes. If her hands hadn’t been soapy she could have caught one, because she grabbed him when he handed her a note, but her hands were soapy so he slipped away.”

“What did he look like?”

“She said he might have been a very little man, but she thought he was a boy in a false face. He dodged like a boy, she said, and she thought he had short pants on. The note was like the other. It said ‘Second warning, S. D.’“

“If you’ve got it, I’d like to see it after dinner.”

Hubert came back from the phone. “It was Imogene Bissel,” he said. “She wants me to come over to her house. A bunch are going over there tonight.”

“Hubert,” asked his father, “do you know any boy with the initials S. D.?”

“No, sir.”

“Have you thought?”

“Yeah, I thought. I knew a boy named Sam Davis, but I haven’t seen him for a year.”

“Who was he?”

“Oh, a sort of tough. He was at Number 44 School when I went there.”

“Did he have it in for you?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Who do you think could be doing this? Has anybody got it in for you that you know about?”

“I don’t know, papa; I don’t think so.”

“I don’t like the looks of this thing,” said Mr. Blair thoughtfully. “Of course it may be only some boys, but it may be--”

He was silent. Later, he studied the note. It was in red ink and there was a skull and crossbones in the corner, but being printed, it told him nothing at all.

Meanwhile Hubert kissed his mother, set his cap jauntily on the side of his head, and passing through the kitchen stepped out on the back stoop, intending to take the usual short cut along the alley. It was a bright moonlit night and he paused for a moment on the stoop to tie his shoe. If he had but known that the telephone call just received had been a decoy, that it had not come from Imogene Bissel’s house, had not indeed been a girl’s voice at all, and that shadowy and grotesque forms were skulking in the alley just outside the gate, he would not have sprung so gracefully and lithely down the steps with his hands in his pockets or whistled the first bar of the Grizzly Bear into the apparently friendly night.

His whistle aroused varying emotions in the alley. Basil had given his daring and successful falsetto imitation over the telephone a little too soon, and though the Scandal Detectives had hurried, their preparations were not quite in order. They had become separated. Basil, got up like a Southern planter of the old persuasion, was just outside the Blairs’ gate; Bill Kampf, with a long Balkan mustache attached by a wire to the lower cartilage of his nose, was approaching in the shadow of the fence; but Riply Buckner, in a full rabbinical beard, was impeded by a length of rope he was trying to coil and was still a hundred feet away. The rope was an essential part of their plan; for, after much cogitation, they had decided what they were going to do to Hubert Blair. They were going to tie him up, gag him and put him in his own garbage can.

The idea at first horrified them--it would ruin his suit, it was awfully dirty and he might smother. In fact the garbage can, symbol of all that was repulsive, won the day only because it made every other idea seem tame. They disposed of the objections--his suit could be cleaned, it was where he ought to be anyhow, and if they left the lid off he couldn’t smother. To be sure of this they had paid a visit of inspection to the Buckners’ garbage can and stared into it, fascinated, envisaging Hubert among the rinds and eggshells. Then two of them, at last, resolutely put that part out of their minds and concentrated upon the luring of him into the alley and the overwhelming of him there.

Hubert’s cheerful whistle caught them off guard and each of the three stood stock-still, unable to communicate with the others. It flashed through Basil’s mind that if he grabbed Hubert without Riply at hand to apply the gag as had been arranged, Hubert’s cries might alarm the gigantic cook in the kitchen who had almost taken him the night before. The thought threw him into a state of indecision. At that precise moment Hubert opened the gate and came out into the alley.

The two stood five feet apart, staring at each other, and all at once Basil made a startling discovery. He discovered he liked Hubert Blair--liked him well as any boy he knew. He had absolutely no wish to lay hands on Hubert Blair and stuff him into a garbage can, jaunty cap and all. He would have fought to prevent that contingency. As his mind, unstrung by his situation, gave pasture to this inconvenient thought, he turned and dashed out of the alley and up the street.

For a moment the apparition had startled Hubert, but when it turned and made off he was heartened and gave chase. Out-distanced, he decided after fifty yards to let well enough alone; and returning to the alley, started rather precipitously down toward the other end--and came face to face with another small and hairy stranger.

Bill Kampf, being more simply organized than Basil, had no scruples of any kind. It had been decided to put Hubert into a garbage can, and though he had nothing at all against Hubert, the idea had made a pattern on his brain which he intended to follow. He was a natural man--that is to say, a hunter--and once a creature took on the aspect of a quarry, he would pursue it without qualms until it stopped struggling.

But he had been witness to Basil’s inexplicable flight, and supposing that Hubert’s father had appeared and was now directly behind him, he, too, faced about and made off down the alley. Presently he met Riply Buckner, who, without waiting to inquire the cause of his flight, enthusiastically joined him. Again Hubert was surprised into pursuing a little way. Then, deciding once and for all to let well enough alone, he returned on a dead run to his house.

Meanwhile Basil had discovered that he was not pursued, and keeping in the shadows, made his way back to the alley. He was not frightened--he had simply been incapable of action. The alley was empty; neither Bill nor Riply was in sight. He saw Mr. Blair come to the back gate, open it, look up and down and go back into the house. He came closer. There was a great chatter in the kitchen--Hubert’s voice, loud and boastful, and Mrs. Blair’s, frightened, and the two Swedish domestics contributing bursts of hilarious laughter. Then through an open window he heard Mr. Blair’s voice at the telephone:

“I want to speak to the chief of police. . . . Chief, this is George P. Blair. . . . Chief, there’s a gang of toughs around here who--”

Basil was off like a flash, tearing at his Confederate whiskers as he ran.

V

Imogene Bissel, having just turned thirteen, was not accustomed to having callers at night. She was spending a bored and solitary evening inspecting the month’s bills which were scattered over her mother’s desk, when she heard Hubert Blair and his father admitted into the front hall.

“I just thought I’d bring him over myself,” Mr. Blair was saying to her mother. “There seems to be a gang of toughs hanging around our alley tonight.”

Mrs. Bissel had not called upon Mrs. Blair and she was considerably taken aback by this unexpected visit. She even entertained the uncharitable thought that this was a crude overture, undertaken by Mr. Blair on behalf of his wife.

“Really!” she exclaimed. “Imogene will be delighted to see Hubert, I’m sure. . . . Imogene!”

“These toughs were evidently lying in wait for Hubert,” continued Mr. Blair. “But he’s a pretty spunky boy and he managed to drive them away. However, I didn’t want him to come down here alone.”

“Of course not,” she agreed. But she was unable to imagine why Hubert should have come at all. He was a nice enough boy, but surely Imogene had seen enough of him the last three afternoons. In fact, Mrs. Bissel was annoyed, and there was a minimum of warmth in her voice when she asked Mr. Blair to come in.

They were still in the hall, and Mr. Blair was just beginning to perceive that all was not as it should be, when there was another ring at the bell. Upon the door being opened, Basil Lee, red-faced and breathless, stood on the threshold.

“How do you do, Mrs. Bissel? Hello, Imogene!” he cried in an unnecessarily hearty voice. “Where’s the party?”

The salutation might have sounded to a dispassionate observer somewhat harsh and unnatural, but it fell upon the ears of an already disconcerted group.

“There isn’t any party,” said Imogene wonderingly.

“What?” Basil’s mouth dropped open in exaggerated horror, his voice trembled slightly. “You mean to say you didn’t call me up and tell me to come over here to a party?”

“Why, of course not, Basil!”

Imogene was excited by Hubert’s unexpected arrival and it occurred to her that Basil had invented this excuse to spoil it. Alone of those present, she was close to the truth; but she underestimated the urgency of Basil’s motive, which was not jealousy but mortal fear.

“You called me up, didn’t you, Imogene?” demanded Hubert confidently.

“Why, no, Hubert! I didn’t call up anybody.”

Amid a chorus of bewildered protestations, there was another ring at the doorbell and the pregnant night yielded up Riply Buckner, Jr., and William S. Kampf. Like Basil, they were somewhat rumpled and breathless, and they no less rudely and peremptorily demanded the whereabouts of the party, insisting with curious vehemence that Imogene had just now invited them over the phone.

Hubert laughed, the others began to laugh and the tensity relaxed. Imogene, because she believed Hubert, now began to believe them all. Unable to restrain himself any longer in the presence of this unhoped-for audience, Hubert burst out with his amazing adventure.

“I guess there’s a gang laying for us all!” he exclaimed. “There were some guys laying for me in our alley when I went out. There was a big fellow with gray whiskers, but when he saw me he ran away. Then I went along the alley and there was a bunch more, sort of foreigners or something, and I started after’m and they ran. I tried to catchem, but I guess they were good and scared, because they ran too fast for me.”

So interested were Hubert and his father in the story that they failed to perceive that three of his listeners were growing purple in the face or to mark the uproarious laughter that greeted Mr. Bissel’s polite proposal that they have a party, after all.

“Tell about the warnings, Hubert,” prompted Mr. Blair. “You see, Hubert had received these warnings. Did you boys get any warnings?”

“I did,” said Basil suddenly. “I got a sort of warning on a piece of paper about a week ago.”

For a moment, as Mr. Blair’s worried eye fell upon Basil, a strong sense not precisely of suspicion but rather of obscure misgiving passed over him. Possibly that odd aspect of Basil’s eyebrows, where wisps of crêpe hair still lingered, connected itself in his subconscious mind with what was bizarre in the events of the evening. He shook his head somewhat puzzled. Then his thoughts glided back restfully to Hubert’s courage and presence of mind.

Hubert, meanwhile, having exhausted his facts, was making tentative leaps into the realms of imagination.

“I said, ‘So you’re the guy that’s been sending these warnings,’ and he swung his left at me, and I dodged and swung my right back at him. I guess I must have landed, because he gave a yell and ran. Gosh, he could run! You’d ought to of seen him, Bill--he could run as fast as you.”

“Was he big?” asked Basil, blowing his nose noisily.

“Sure! About as big as father.”

“Were the other ones big too?”

“Sure! They were pretty big. I didn’t wait to see, I just yelled, ‘You get out of here, you bunch of toughs, or I’ll show you!’ They started a sort of fight, but I swung my right at one of them and they didn’t wait for any more.”

“Hubert says he thinks they were Italians,” interrupted Mr. Blair. “Didn’t you, Hubert?”

“They were sort of funny-looking,” Hubert said. “One fellow looked like an Italian.”

Mrs. Bissel led the way to the dining room, where she had caused a cake and grape juice supper to be spread. Imogene took a chair by Hubert’s side.

“Now tell me all about it, Hubert,” she said, attentively folding her hands.

Hubert ran over the adventure once more. A knife now made its appearance in the belt of one conspirator; Hubert’s parleys with them lengthened and grew in volume and virulence. He had told them just what they might expect if they fooled with him. They had started to draw knives, but had thought better of it and taken to flight.

In the middle of this recital there was a curious snorting sound from across the table, but when Imogene looked over, Basil was spreading jelly on a piece of coffee cake and his eyes were brightly innocent. A minute later, however, the sound was repeated, and this time she intercepted a specifically malicious expression upon his face.

“I wonder what you’d have done, Basil,” she said cuttingly. “I’ll bet you’d be running yet!”

Basil put the piece of coffee cake in his mouth and immediately choked on it--an accident which Bill Kampf and Riply Buckner found hilariously amusing. Their amusement at various casual incidents at table seemed to increase as Hubert’s story continued. The alley now swarmed with malefactors, and as Hubert struggled on against overwhelming odds, Imogene found herself growing restless--without in the least realizing that the tale was boring her. On the contrary, each time Hubert recollected new incidents and began again, she looked spitefully over at Basil, and her dislike for him grew.

When they moved into the library, Imogene went to the piano, where she sat alone while the boys gathered around Hubert on the couch. To her chagrin, they seemed quite content to listen indefinitely. Odd little noises squeaked out of them from time to time, but whenever the narrative slackened they would beg for more.

“Go on, Hubert. Which one did you say could run as fast as Bill Kampf?”

She was glad when, after half an hour, they all got up to go.

“It’s a strange affair from beginning to end,” Mr. Blair was saying. “Idon’t like it. I’m going to have a detective look into the matter tomorrow. What did they want of Hubert? What were they going to do to him?”

No one offered a suggestion. Even Hubert was silent, contemplating his possible fate with certain respectful awe. During breaks in his narration the talk had turned to such collateral matters as murders and ghosts, and all the boys had talked themselves into a state of considerable panic. In fact each had come to believe, in varying degrees, that a band of kidnappers infested the vicinity.

“I don’t like it,” repeated Mr. Blair. “In fact I’m going to see all of you boys to your own homes.”

Basil greeted this offer with relief. The evening had been a mad success, but furies once aroused sometimes get out of hand. He did not feel like walking the streets alone tonight.

In the hall, Imogene, taking advantage of her mother’s somewhat fatigued farewell to Mr. Blair, beckoned Hubert back into the library. Instantly attuned to adversity, Basil listened. There was a whisper and a short scuffle, followed by an indiscreet but unmistakable sound. With the corners of his mouth falling, Basil went out the door. He had stacked the cards dexterously, but Life had played a trump from its sleeve at the last.

A moment later they all started off, clinging together in a group, turning corners with cautious glances behind and ahead. What Basil and Riply and Bill expected to see as they peered warily into the sinister mouths of alleys and around great dark trees and behind concealing fences they did not know--in all probability the same hairy and grotesque desperadoes who had lain in wait for Hubert Blair that night.

VI

A week later Basil and Riply heard that Hubert and his mother had gone to the seashore for the summer. Basil was sorry. He had wanted to learn from Hubert some of the graceful mannerisms that his contemporaries found so dazzling and that might come in so handy next fall when he went away to school. In tribute to Hubert’s passing, he practised leaning against a tree and missing it and rolling a skate down his arm, and he wore his cap in Hubert’s manner, set jauntily on the side of his head.

This was only for a while. He perceived eventually that though boys and girls would always listen to him while he talked, their mouths literally moving in response to his, they would never look at him as they had looked at Hubert. So he abandoned the loud chuckle that so annoyed his mother and set his cap straight upon his head once more.

But the change in him went deeper than that. He was no longer sure that he wanted to be a gentleman burglar, though he still read of their exploits with breathless admiration. Outside of Hubert’s gate, he had for a moment felt morally alone; and he realized that whatever combinations he might make of the materials of life would have to be safely within the law. And after another week he found that he no longer grieved over losing Imogene. Meeting her, he saw only the familiar little girl he had always known. The ecstatic moment of that afternoon had been a premature birth, an emotion left over from an already fleeting spring.

He did not know that he had frightened Mrs. Blair out of town and that because of him a special policeman walked a placid beat for many a night. All he knew was that the vague and restless yearnings of three long spring months were somehow satisfied. They reached combustion in that last week--flared up, exploded and burned out. His face was turned without regret toward the boundless possibilities of summer.

BASIL: THE FRESHEST BOY

I

It was a hidden Broadway restaurant in the dead of the night, and a brilliant and mysterious group of society people, diplomats and members of the underworld were there. A few minutes ago the sparkling wine had been flowing and a girl had been dancing gaily upon a table, but now the whole crowd were hushed and breathless. All eyes were fixed upon the masked but well-groomed man in the dress suit and opera hat who stood nonchalantly in the door.

‘Don’t move, please,’ he said, in a well-bred, cultivated voice that had, nevertheless, a ring of steel in it. ‘This thing in my hand might--go off.’

His glance roved from table to table--fell upon the malignant man higher up with his pale saturnine face, upon Heatherly, the suave secret agent from a foreign power, then rested a little longer, a little more softly perhaps, upon the table where the girl with dark hair and dark tragic eyes sat alone.

‘Now that my purpose is accomplished, it might interest you to know who I am.’ There was a gleam of expectation in every eye. The breast of the dark-eyed girl heaved faintly and a tiny burst of subtle French perfume rose into the air. ‘I am none other than that elusive gentleman, Basil Lee, better known as the Shadow.’

Taking off his well-fitting opera hat, he bowed ironically from the waist. Then, like a flash, he turned and was gone into the night.

‘You get up to New York only once a month,’ Lewis Crum was saying, ‘and then you have to take a master along.’

Slowly, Basil Lee’s glazed eyes turned from the barns and billboards of the Indiana countryside to the interior of the Broadway Limited. The hypnosis of the swift telegraph poles faded and Lewis Crum’s stolid face took shape against the white slipcover of the opposite bench.

‘I’d just duck the master when I got to New York,’ said Basil.

‘Yes, you would!’

‘I bet I would.’

‘You try it and you’ll see.’

‘What do you mean saying I’ll see, all the time, Lewis? What’ll I see?’

His very bright dark-blue eyes were at this moment fixed upon his companion with boredom and impatience. The two had nothing in common except their age, which was fifteen, and the lifelong friendship of their fathers--which is less than nothing. Also they were bound from the same Middle-Western city for Basil’s first and Lewis’s second year at the same Eastern school.

But, contrary to all the best traditions, Lewis the veteran was miserable and Basil the neophyte was happy. Lewis hated school. He had grown entirely dependent on the stimulus of a hearty vital mother, and as he felt her slipping farther and farther away from him, he plunged deeper into misery and homesickness. Basil, on the other hand, had lived with such intensity on so many stories of boarding-school life that, far from being homesick, he had a glad feeling of recognition and familiarity. Indeed, it was with some sense of doing the appropriate thing, having the traditional rough-house, that he had thrown Lewis’s comb off the train at Milwaukee last night for no reason at all.

To Lewis, Basil’s ignorant enthusiasm was distasteful--his instinctive attempt to dampen it had contributed to the mutual irritation.

‘I’ll tell you what you’ll see,’ he said ominously. ‘They’ll catch you smoking and put you on bounds.’

‘No, they won’t, because I won’t be smoking. I’ll be in training for football.’

‘Football! Yeah! Football!’

‘Honestly, Lewis, you don’t like anything, do you?’

‘I don’t like football. I don’t like to go out and get a crack in the eye.’ Lewis spoke aggressively, for his mother had canonized all his timidities as common sense. Basil’s answer, made with what he considered kindly intent, was the sort of remark that creates lifelong enmities.

‘You’d probably be a lot more popular in school if you played football,’--he suggested patronizingly.

Lewis did not consider himself unpopular. He did not think of it in that way at all. He was astounded.

‘You wait!’ he cried furiously. ‘They’ll take all that freshness out of you.’

‘Clam yourself,’ said Basil, coolly plucking at the creases of his first long trousers. ‘Just clam yourself.’

‘I guess everybody knows you were the freshest boy at the Country Day!’

‘Clam yourself,’ repeated Basil, but with less assurance. ‘Kindly clam yourself.’

‘I guess I know what they had in the school paper about you--’

Basil’s own coolness was no longer perceptible.

‘If you don’t clam yourself,’ he said darkly, ‘I’m going to throw your brushes off the train too.’

The enormity of this threat was effective. Lewis sank back in his seat, snorting and muttering, but undoubtedly calmer. His reference had been to one of the most shameful passages in his companion’s life. In a periodical issued by the boys of Basil’s late school there had appeared under the heading Personals:

If someone will please poison young Basil, or find some other means to stop his mouth, the school at large and myself will be much obliged.

The two boys sat there fuming wordlessly at each other. Then, resolutely, Basil tried to re-inter this unfortunate souvenir of the past. All that was behind him now. Perhaps he had been a little fresh, but he was making a new start. After a moment, the memory passed and with it the train and Lewis’s dismal presence--the breath of the East came sweeping over him again with a vast nostalgia. A voice called him out of the fabled world; a man stood beside him with a hand on his sweater-clad shoulder.

‘Lee!’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘It all depends on you now. Understand?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘All right,’ the coach said, ‘go in and win.’

Basil tore the sweater from his stripling form and dashed out on the field. There were two minutes to play and the score was 3 to 0 for the enemy, but at the sight of young Lee, kept out of the game all year by a malicious plan of Dan Haskins, the school bully, and Weasel Weems, his toady, a thrill of hope went over the St Regis stand.

‘33-12-16-22!’ barked Midget Brown, the diminutive little quarterback.

It was his signal--

‘Oh, gosh!’ Basil spoke aloud, forgetting the late unpleasantness. ‘I wish we’d get there before tomorrow.’

II

St RegisSchool, Eastchester,

November 18, 19--

Dear Mother:

There is not much to say today, but I thought I would write you about my allowance. All the boys have a bigger allowance than me, because there are a lot of little things I have to get, such as shoe laces, etc. School is still very nice and am having a fine time, but football is over and there is not much to do. I am going to New York this week to see a show. I do not know yet what it will be, but probably the Quacker Girl or little boy Blue as they are both very good. Dr Bacon is very nice and there’s a good phycission in the village. No more now as I have to study Algebra.

Your affectionate Son,

Basil D. Lee.

As he put the letter in its envelope, a wizened little boy came into the deserted study hall where he sat and stood staring at him.

‘Hello,’ said Basil, frowning.

‘I been looking for you,’ said the little boy, slowly and judicially. ‘I looked all over--up in your room and out in the gym, and they said you probably might of sneaked off in here.’

‘What do you want?’ Basil demanded.

‘Hold your horses, Bossy.’

Basil jumped to his feet. The little boy retreated a step.

‘Go on, hit me!’ he chirped nervously. ‘Go on, hit me, cause I’m just half your size--Bossy.’

Basil winced. ‘You call me that again and I’ll spank you.’

‘No, you won’t spank me. Brick Wales said if you ever touched any of us--’

‘But I never did touch any of you.’

‘Didn’t you chase a lot of us one day and didn’t Brick Wales--’

‘Oh, what do you want?’ Basil cried in desperation.

‘Doctor Bacon wants you. They sent me after you and somebody said maybe you sneaked in here.’

Basil dropped his letter in his pocket and walked out--the little boy and his invective following him through the door. He traversed a long corridor, muggy with that odour best described as the smell of stale caramels that is so peculiar to boys’ schools, ascended a stairs and knocked at an unexceptional but formidable door.

Doctor Bacon was at his desk. He was a handsome, redheaded Episcopal clergyman of fifty whose original real interest in boys was now tempered by the flustered cynicism which is the fate of all headmasters and settles on them like green mould. There were certain preliminaries before Basil was asked to sit down--gold-rimmed glasses had to be hoisted up from nowhere by a black cord and fixed on Basil to be sure that he was not an impostor; great masses of paper on the desk had to be shuffled through, not in search of anything but as a man nervously shuffles a pack of cards.

‘I had a letter from your mother this morning--ah--Basil.’ The use of his first name had come to startle Basil. No one else in school had yet called him anything but Bossy or Lee. ‘She feels that your marks have been poor. I believe you have been sent here at a certain amount of--ah--sacrifice and she expects--’

Basil’s spirit writhed with shame, not at his poor marks but that his financial inadequacy should be so bluntly stated. He knew that he was one of the poorest boys in a rich boys’ school.

Perhaps some dormant sensibility in Doctor Bacon became aware of his discomfort; he shuffled through the papers once more and began on a new note.

‘However, that was not what I sent for you about this afternoon. You applied last week for permission to go to New York on Saturday, to a matinée. Mr Davis tells me that for almost the first time since school opened you will be off bounds tomorrow.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘That is not a good record. However, I would allow you to go to New York if it could be arranged. Unfortunately, no masters are available this Saturday.’

Basil’s mouth dropped ajar. ‘Why, I--why, Doctor Bacon, I know two parties that are going. Couldn’t I go with one of them?’

Doctor Bacon ran through all his papers very quickly. ‘Unfortunately, one is composed of slightly older boys and the other group made arrangements some weeks ago.’

‘How about the party that’s going to the Quaker Girl with Mr Dunn?’

‘It’s that party I speak of. They feel that the arrangements are complete and they have purchased seats together.’

Suddenly Basil understood. At the look in his eye Doctor Bacon went on hurriedly.

‘There’s perhaps one thing I can do. Of course there must be several boys in the party so that the expenses of the master can be divided up among all. If you can find two other boys who would like to make up a party, and let me have their names by five o’clock, I’ll send Mr Rooney with you.’

‘Thank you,’ Basil said.

Doctor Bacon hesitated. Beneath the cynical incrustations of many years an instinct stirred to look into the unusual case of this boy and find out what made him the most detested boy in school. Among boys and masters there seemed to exist an extraordinary hostility towards him, and though Doctor Bacon had dealt with many sorts of schoolboy crimes, he had neither by himself nor with the aid of trusted sixth-formers been able to lay his hands on its underlying cause. It was probably no single thing, but a combination of things; it was most probably one of those intangible questions of personality. Yet he remembered that when he first saw Basil he had considered him unusually prepossessing.

He sighed. Sometimes these things worked themselves out. He wasn’t one to rush in clumsily. ‘Let us have a better report to send home next month, Basil.’

‘Yes, sir.’

Basil ran quickly downstairs to the recreation room. It was Wednesday and most of the boys had already gone into the village of Eastchester, whither Basil, who was still on bounds, was forbidden to follow. When he looked at those still scattered about the pool tables and piano, he saw that it was going to be difficult to get anyone to go with him at all. For Basil was quite conscious that he was the most unpopular boy at school.

It had begun almost immediately. One day, less than a fortnight after he came, a crowd of the smaller boys, perhaps urged on to it, gathered suddenly around him and began calling him Bossy. Within the next week he had two fights, and both times the crowd was vehemently and eloquently with the other boy. Soon after, when he was merely shoving indiscriminately, like everyone else, to get into the dining-room, Carver, the captain of the football team, turned about and, seizing him by the back of the neck, held him and dressed him down savagely. He joined a group innocently at the piano and was told, ‘Go on away. We don’t want you around.’

After a month he began to realize the full extent of his unpopularity. It shocked him. One day after a particularly bitter humiliation he went up to his room and cried. He tried to keep out of the way for a while, but it didn’t help. He was accused of sneaking off here and there, as if bent on a series of nefarious errands. Puzzled and wretched, he looked at his face in the glass, trying to discover there the secret of their dislike--in the expression of his eyes, his smile.

He saw now that in certain ways he had erred at the outset--he had boasted, he had been considered yellow at football, he had pointed out people’s mistakes to them, he had showed off his rather extraordinary fund of general information in class. But he had tried to do better and couldn’t understand his failure to atone. It must be too late. He was queered forever.

He had, indeed, become the scapegoat, the immediate villain, the sponge which absorbed all malice and irritability abroad--just as the most frightened person in a party seems to absorb all the others’ fear, seems to be afraid for them all. His situation was not helped by the fact, obvious to all, that the supreme self-confidence with which he had come to St Regis in September was thoroughly broken. Boys taunted him with impunity who would not have dared raise their voices to him several months before.

This trip to New York had come to mean everything to him--surcease from the misery of his daily life as well as a glimpse into the long-waited heaven of romance. Its postponement for week after week due to his sins--he was constantly caught reading after lights, for example, driven by his wretchedness into such vicarious escapes from reality--had deepened his longing until it was a burning hunger. It was unbearable that he should not go, and he told over the short list of those whom he might get to accompany him. The possibilities were Fat Gaspar, Treadway, and Bugs Brown. A quick journey to their rooms showed that they had all availed themselves of the Wednesday permission to go into Eastchester for the afternoon.

Basil did not hesitate. He had until five o’clock and his only chance was to go after them. It was not the first time he had broken bounds, though the last attempt had ended in disaster and an extension of his confinement. In his room, he put on a heavy sweater--an overcoat was a betrayal of intent--replaced his jacket over it and hid a cap in his back pocket. Then he went downstairs and with an elaborate careless whistle struck out across the lawn for the gymnasium. Once there, he stood for a while as if looking in the windows, first the one close to the walk, then one near the corner of the building. From here he moved quickly, but not too quickly, into a grove of lilacs. Then he dashed around the corner, down a long stretch of lawn that was blind from all windows and, parting the strands of a wire fence, crawled through and stood upon the grounds of a neighbouring estate. For the moment he was free. He put on his cap against the chilly November wind, and set out along the half-mile road to town.

Eastchester was a suburban farming community, with a small shoe factory. The institutions which pandered to the factory workers were the ones patronized by the boys--a movie house, a quick-lunch wagon on wheels known as the Dog and the Bostonian Candy Kitchen. Basil tried the Dog first and happened immediately upon a prospect.

This was Bugs Brown, a hysterical boy, subject to fits and strenuously avoided. Years later he became a brilliant lawyer, but at that time he was considered by the boys of St Regis to be a typical lunatic because of the peculiar series of sounds with which he assuaged his nervousness all day long.

He consorted with boys younger than himself, who were without the prejudices of their elders, and was in the company of several when Basil came in.

‘Who-ee!’ he cried. ‘Ee-ee-ee!’ He put his hand over his mouth and bounced it quickly, making a wah-wah-wah sound. ‘It’s Bossy Lee! It’s Bossy Lee! It’s Boss-Boss-Boss-Boss-Bossy Lee!’

‘Wait a minute, Bugs,’ said Basil anxiously, half afraid that Bugs would go finally crazy before he could persuade him to come to town. ‘Say, Bugs, listen. Don’t, Bugs--wait a minute. Can you come up to New York Saturday afternoon?’

‘Whe-ee-ee!’ cried Bugs to Basil’s distress.’ Wee-ee-ee!’

‘Honestly, Bugs, tell me, can you? We could go up together if you could go.’

‘I’ve got to see a doctor,’ said Bugs, suddenly calm. ‘He wants to see how crazy I am.’

‘Can’t you have him see about it some other day?’ said Basil without humour.

‘Whee-ee-ee!’ cried Bugs.

‘All right then,’ said Basil hastily. ‘Have you seen Fat Gaspar in town?’

Bugs was lost in shrill noise, but someone had seen Fat: Basil was directed to the Bostonian Candy Kitchen.

This was a gaudy paradise of cheap sugar. Its odour, heavy and sickly and calculated to bring out a sticky sweat upon an adult’s palms, hung suffocatingly over the whole vicinity and met one like a strong moral dissuasion at the door. Inside, beneath a pattern of flies, material as black point lace, a line of boys sat eating heavy dinners of banana splits, maple nut, and chocolate marshmallow nut sundaes. Basil found Fat Gaspar at a table on the side.

Fat Gaspar was at once Basil’s most unlikely and most ambitious quest. He was considered a nice fellow--in fact he was so pleasant that he had been courteous to Basil and had spoken to him politely all fall. Basil realized that he was like that to everyone, yet it was just possible that Fat liked him, as people used to in the past, and he was driven desperately to take a chance. But it was undoubtedly a presumption, and as he approached the table and saw the stiffened faces which the other two boys turned towards him, Basil’s hope diminished.

‘Say, Fat--’ he said, and hesitated. Then he burst forth suddenly. ‘I’m on bounds, but I ran off because I had to see you. Doctor Bacon told me I could go to New York Saturday if I could get two other boys to go. I asked Bugs Brown and he couldn’t go, and I thought I’d ask you.’

He broke off, furiously embarrassed, and waited. Suddenly the two boys with Fat burst into a shout of laughter.

‘Bugs wasn’t crazy enough!’

Fat Gaspar hesitated. He couldn’t go to New York Saturday and ordinarily he would have refused without offending. He had nothing against Basil; nor, indeed, against anybody; but boys have only a certain resistance to public opinion and he was influenced by the contemptuous laughter of the others.

‘I don’t want to go,’ he said indifferently. ‘Why do you want to ask me?’

Then, half in shame, he gave a deprecatory little laugh and bent over his ice cream.

‘I just thought I’d ask you,’ said Basil.

Turning quickly away, he went to the counter and in a hollow and unfamiliar voice ordered a strawberry sundae. He ate it mechanically, hearing occasional whispers and snickers from the table behind. Still in a daze, he started to walk out without paying his check, but the clerk called him back and he was conscious of more derisive laughter.

For a moment he hesitated whether to go back to the table and hit one of those boys in the face, but he saw nothing to be gained. They would say the truth--that he had done it because he couldn’t get anybody to go to New York. Clenching his fists with impotent rage, he walked from the store.

He came immediately upon his third prospect, Treadway. Treadway had entered St Regis late in the year and had been put in to room with Basil the week before. The fact that Treadway hadn’t witnessed his humiliations of the autumn encouraged Basil to behave naturally towards him, and their relations had been, if not intimate, at least tranquil.

‘Hey, Treadway,’ he called, still excited from the affair in the Bostonian, ‘can you come up to New York to a show Saturday afternoon?’

He stopped, realizing that Treadway was in the company of Brick Wales, a boy he had had a fight with and one of his bitterest enemies. Looking from one to the other, Basil saw a look of impatience in Treadway’s face and a faraway expression in Brick Wales’s, and he realized what must have been happening. Treadway, making his way into the life of the school, had just been enlightened as to the status of his room-mate. Like Fat Gaspar, rather than acknowledge himself eligible to such an intimate request, he preferred to cut their friendly relations short.

‘Not on your life,’ he said briefly. ‘So long.’ The two walked past him into the Candy Kitchen.

Had these slights, so much the bitterer for their lack of passion, been visited upon Basil in September, they would have been unbearable. But since then he had developed a shell of hardness which, while it did not add to his attractiveness, spared him certain delicacies of torture. In misery enough, and despair and self-pity, he went the other way along the street for a little distance until he could control the violent contortions of his face. Then, taking a roundabout route, he started back to school.

He reached the adjoining estate, intending to go back the way he had come. Half-way through a hedge, he heard footsteps approaching along the sidewalk and stood motionless, fearing the proximity of masters. Their voices grew nearer and louder; before he knew it he was listening with horrified fascination:

‘--so, after he tried Bugs Brown, the poor nut asked Fat Gaspar to go with him and Fat said, “What do you ask me for?” It serves him right if he couldn’t get anybody at all.’

It was the dismal but triumphant voice of Lewis Crum.

III

Up in his room, Basil found a package lying on his bed. He knew its contents and for a long time he had been eagerly expecting it, but such was his depression that he opened it listlessly. It was a series of eight colour reproductions of Harrison Fisher girls ‘on glossy paper, without printing or advertising matter and suitable for framing’.

The pictures were named Dora, Marguerite, Babette, Lucille, Gretchen, Rose, Katherine, and Mina. Two of them--Marguerite and Rose--Basil looked at, slowly tore up, and dropped in the waste-basket, as one who disposes of the inferior pups from a litter. The other six he pinned at intervals around the room. Then he lay down on his bed and regarded them.

Dora, Lucille, and Katherine were blonde; Gretchen was medium; Babette and Mina were dark. After a few minutes, he found that he was looking oftenest at Dora and Babette and, to a lesser extent, at Gretchen, though the latter’s Dutch cap seemed unromantic and precluded the element of mystery. Babette, a dark little violet-eyed beauty in a tight-fitting hat, attracted him most; his eyes came to rest on her at last.

‘Babette,’ he whispered to himself--’beautiful Babette.’

The sound of the word, so melancholy and suggestive, like ‘Vilia’ or ‘I’m happy at Maxim’s’ on the phonograph, softened him and, turning over on his face, he sobbed into the pillow. He took hold of the bed rails over his head and, sobbing and straining, began to talk to himself brokenly--how he hated them and whom he hated--he listed a dozen--and what he would do to them when he was great and powerful. In previous moments like these he had always rewarded Fat Gaspar for his kindness, but now he was like the rest. Basil set upon him, pummelling him unmercifully, or laughed sneeringly when he passed him blind and begging on the street.

He controlled himself as he heard Treadway come in, but did not move or speak. He listened as the other moved about the room, and after a while became conscious that there was an unusual opening of closets and bureau drawers. Basil turned over, his arm concealing his tear-stained face. Treadway had an armful of shirts in his hand.

‘What are you doing?’ Basil demanded.

His room-mate looked at him stonily. ‘I’m moving in with Wales,’ he said.

‘Oh!’

Treadway went on with his packing. He carried out a suitcase full, then another, took down some pennants and dragged his trunk into the hall. Basil watched him bundle his toilet things into a towel and take one last survey about the room’s new barrenness to see if there was anything forgotten.

‘Good-bye,’ he said to Basil, without a ripple of expression on his face.

‘Good-bye.’

Treadway went out. Basil turned over once more and choked into the pillow.

‘Oh, poor Babette!’ he cried huskily. ‘Poor little Babette! Poor little Babette!’ Babette, svelte and piquante, looked down at him coquettishly from the wall.

IV

Doctor Bacon, sensing Basil’s predicament and perhaps the extremity of his misery, arranged it that he should go into New York, after all. He went in the company of Mr Rooney, the football coach and history teacher. At twenty Mr Rooney had hesitated for some time between joining the police force and having his way paid through a small New England college; in fact he was a hard specimen and Doctor Bacon was planning to get rid of him at Christmas. Mr Rooney’s contempt for Basil was founded on the latter’s ambiguous and unreliable conduct on the football field during the past season--he had consented to take him to New York for reasons of his own.

Basil sat meekly beside him on the train, glancing past Mr Rooney’s bulky body at the Sound and the fallow fields of WestchesterCounty. Mr Rooney finished his newspaper, folded it up and sank into a moody silence. He had eaten a large breakfast and the exigencies of time had not allowed him to work it off with exercise. He remembered that Basil was a fresh boy, and it was time he did something fresh and could be called to account. This reproachless silence annoyed him.

‘Lee,’ he said suddenly, with a thinly assumed air of friendly interest, ‘why don’t you get wise to yourself?’

‘What, sir?’ Basil was startled from his excited trance of this morning.

‘I said why don’t you get wise to yourself?’ said Mr Rooney in a somewhat violent tone. ‘Do you want to be the butt of the school all your time here?’

‘No, I don’t.’ Basil was chilled. Couldn’t all this be left behind for just one day?

‘You oughtn’t to get so fresh all the time. A couple of times in history class I could just about have broken your neck.’ Basil could think of no appropriate answer. ‘Then out playing football,’ continued Mr Rooney, ‘--you didn’t have any nerve. You could play better than a lot of ‘em when you wanted, like that day against the Pomfret seconds, but you lost your nerve.’

‘I shouldn’t have tried for the second team,’ said Basil. ‘I was too light. I should have stayed on the third.’

‘You were yellow, that was all the trouble. You ought to get wise to yourself. In class, you’re always thinking of something else. If you don’t study, you’ll never get to college.’

‘I’m the youngest boy in the fifth form,’ Basil said rashly.

‘You think you’re pretty bright, don’t you?’ He eyed Basil ferociously. Then something seemed to occur to him that changed his attitude and they rode for a while in silence. When the train began to run through the thickly clustered communities near New York, he spoke again in a milder voice and with an air of having considered the matter for a long time:

‘Lee, I’m going to trust you.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘You go and get some lunch and then go on to your show. I’ve got some business of my own I got to attend to, and when I’ve finished I’ll try to get to the show. If I can’t, I’ll anyhow meet you outside.’ Basil’s heart leaped up. ‘Yes, sir.’

‘I don’t want you to open your mouth about this at school--I mean, about me doing some business of my own.’

‘No, sir.’

‘We’ll see if you can keep your mouth shut for once,’ he said, making it fun. Then he added, on a note of moral sternness, ‘And no drinks, you understand that?’

‘Oh, no, sir!’ The idea shocked Basil. He had never tasted a drink, nor even contemplated the possibility, save the intangible and nonalcoholic champagne of his café dreams.

On the advice of Mr Rooney he went for luncheon to the Manhattan Hotel, near the station, where he ordered a club sandwich, French fried potatoes, and a chocolate parfait. Out of the corner of his eye he watched the nonchalant, debonair, blasé New Yorkers at neighbouring tables, investing them with a romance by which these possible fellow citizens of his from the Middle West lost nothing. School had fallen from him like a burden; it was no more than an unheeded clamour, faint and far away. He even delayed opening the letter from the morning’s mail which he found in his pocket, because it was addressed to him at school.

He wanted another chocolate parfait, but being reluctant to bother the busy waiter any more, he opened the letter and spread it before him instead. It was from his mother:

Dear Basil:

This is written in great haste, as I didn’t want to frighten you by telegraphing. Grandfather is going abroad to take the waters and he wants you and me to come too. The idea is that you’ll go to school at Grenoble or Montreux for the rest of the year and learn the language and we’ll be close by. That is, if you want to. I know how you like St Regis and playing football and baseball, and of course there would be none of that; but on the other hand, it would be a nice change, even if it postponed your entering Yale by an extra year. So, as usual, I want you to do just as you like. We will be leaving home almost as soon as you get this and will come to the Waldorf in New York, where you can come in and see us for a few days, even if you decide to stay. Think it over, dear.

With love to my dearest boy,

Mother.

Basil got up from his chair with a dim idea of walking over to the Waldorf and having himself locked up safely until his mother came. Then, impelled to some gesture, he raised his voice and in one of his first basso notes called boomingly and without reticence for the waiter. No more St Regis! No more St Regis! He was almost strangling with happiness.

‘Oh, gosh!’ he cried to himself. ‘Oh, golly! Oh, gosh! Oh, gosh!’ No more Doctor Bacon and Mr Rooney and Brick Wales and Fat Gaspar. No more Bugs Brown and on bounds and being called Bossy. He need no longer hate them, for they were impotent shadows in the stationary world that he was sliding away from, sliding past, waving his hand. ‘Good-bye!’ he pitied them. ‘Good-bye!’

It required the din of Forty-second Street to sober his maudlin joy. With his hand on his purse to guard against the omnipresent pickpocket, he moved cautiously towards Broadway. What a day! He would tell Mr Rooney--Why, he needn’t ever go back! Or perhaps it would be better to go back and let them know what he was going to do, while they went on and on in the dismal, dreary round of school.

He found the theatre and entered the lobby with its powdery feminine atmosphere of a matinée. As he took out his ticket, his gaze was caught and held by a sculptured profile a few feet away. It was that of a well-built blond young man of about twenty with a strong chin and direct grey eyes. Basil’s brain spun wildly for a moment and then came to rest upon a name--more than a name--upon a legend, a sign in the sky. What a day! He had never seen the young man before, but from a thousand pictures he knew beyond the possibility of a doubt that it was Ted Fay, the Yale football captain, who had almost single-handed beaten Harvard and Princeton last fall. Basil felt a sort of exquisite pain. The profile turned away; the crowd revolved; the hero disappeared. But Basil would know all through the next hours that Ted Fay was here too.

In the rustling, whispering, sweet-smelling darkness of the theatre he read the programme. It was the show of all shows that he wanted to see, and until the curtain actually rose the programme itself had a curious sacredness--a prototype of the thing itself. But when the curtain rose it became waste paper to be dropped carelessly to the floor.

Act I. The Village Green of a Small Town near New York

It was too bright and blinding to comprehend all at once, and it went so fast that from the very first Basil felt he had missed things; he would make his mother take him again when she came--next week--tomorrow.

An hour passed. It was very sad at this point--a sort of gay sadness, but sad. The girl--the man. What kept them apart even now? Oh, those tragic errors, and misconceptions. So sad. Couldn’t they look into each other’s eyes and see?

In a blaze of light and sound, of resolution, anticipation and imminent trouble, the act was over.

He went out. He looked for Ted Fay and thought he saw him leaning rather moodily on the plush wall at the rear of the theatre, but he could not be sure. He bought cigarettes and lit one, but fancying at the first puff he heard a blare of music he rushed back inside.

Act 2. The Foyer of the Hotel Astor

Yes, she was, indeed, like a song--a Beautiful Rose of the Night. The waltz buoyed her up, brought her with it to a point of aching beauty and then let her slide back to life across its last bars as a leaf slants to earth across the air. The high life of New York! Who could blame her if she was carried away by the glitter of it all, vanishing into the bright morning of the amber window borders or into distant and entrancing music as the door opened and closed that led to the ballroom? The toast of the shining town.

Half an hour passed. Her true love brought her roses like herself and she threw them scornfully at his feet. She laughed and turned to the other, and danced--danced madly, wildly. Wait! That delicate treble among the thin horns, the low curving note from the great strings. There it was again, poignant and aching, sweeping like a great gust of emotion across the stage, catching her again like a leaf helpless in the wind:

‘Rose--Rose--Rose of the night

When the spring moon is bright you’ll be fair--’

A few minutes later, feeling oddly shaken and exalted, Basil drifted outside with the crowd. The first thing upon which his eyes fell was the almost forgotten and now curiously metamorphosed spectre of Mr Rooney.

Mr Rooney had, in fact, gone a little to pieces. He was, to begin with, wearing a different and much smaller hat than when he left Basil at noon. Secondly, his face had lost its somewhat gross aspect and turned a pure and even delicate white, and he was wearing his necktie and even portions of his shirt on the outside of his unaccountably wringing-wet overcoat. How, in the short space of four hours, Mr Rooney had got himself in such shape is explicable only by the pressure of confinement in a boys’ school upon a fiery outdoor spirit. Mr Rooney was born to toil under the clear light of heaven and, perhaps half-consciously, he was headed towards his inevitable destiny.

‘Lee,’ he said dimly, ‘you ought to get wise to y’self. I’m going to put you wise y’self.’

To avoid the ominous possibility of being put wise to himself in the lobby, Basil uneasily changed the subject.

‘Aren’t you coming to the show?’ he asked, flattering Mr Rooney by implying that he was in any condition to come to the show. ‘It’s a wonderful show.’

Mr Rooney took off his hat, displaying wringing-wet matted hair. A picture of reality momentarily struggled for development in the back of his brain.

‘We got to get back to school,’ he said in a sombre and unconvinced voice.

‘But there’s another act,’ protested Basil in horror. ‘I’ve got to stay for the last act.’

Swaying, Mr Rooney looked at Basil dimly realizing that he had put himself in the hollow of this boy’s hand.

‘All righ’,’ he admitted. ‘I’m going to get somethin’ to eat. I’ll wait for you next door.’

He turned abruptly, reeled a dozen steps, and curved dizzily into a bar adjoining the theatre. Considerably shaken, Basil went back inside.

Act 3. The Roof Garden of Mr Van Astor’s House.

Night

Half an hour passed. Everything was going to be all right, after all. The comedian was at his best now, with the glad appropriateness of laughter after tears, and there was a promise of felicity in the bright tropical sky. One lovely plaintive duet, and then abruptly the long moment of incomparable beauty was over.

Basil went into the lobby and stood in thought while the crowd passed out. His mother’s letter and the show had cleared his mind of bitterness and vindictiveness--he was his old self and he wanted to do the right thing. He wondered if it was the right thing to get Mr Rooney back to school. He walked towards the saloon, slowed up as he came to it and, gingerly opening the swinging door, took a quick peer inside. He saw only that Mr Rooney was not one of those drinking at the bar. He walked down the street a little way, came back and tried again. It was as if he thought the doors were teeth to bite him, for he had the old-fashioned Middle-Western boy’s horror of the saloon. The third time he was successful. Mr Rooney was sound asleep at a table in the back of the room.

Outside again Basil walked up and down, considering. He would give Mr Rooney half an hour. If, at the end of that time, he had not come out, he would go back to school. After all, Mr Rooney had laid for him ever since football season--Basil was simply washing his hands of the whole affair, as in a day or so he would wash his hands of school.

He had made several turns up and down, when glancing up an alley that ran beside the theatre his eye was caught by the sign, Stage Entrance. He could watch the actors come forth.

He waited. Women streamed by him, but those were the days before Glorification and he took these drab people for wardrobe women or something. Then suddenly a girl came out and with her a man, and Basil turned and ran a few steps up the street as if afraid they would recognize him--and ran back, breathing as if with a heart attack--for the girl, a radiant little beauty of nineteen, was Her and the young man by her side was Ted Fay.

Arm in arm, they walked past him, and irresistibly Basil followed. As they walked, she leaned towards Ted Fay in a way that gave them a fascinating air of intimacy. They crossed Broadway and turned into the Knickerbocker Hotel, and twenty feet behind them Basil followed, in time to see them go into a long room set for afternoon tea. They sat at a table for two, spoke vaguely to a waiter, and then, alone at last, bent eagerly towards each other. Basil saw that Ted Fay was holding her gloved hand.

The tea room was separated only by a hedge of potted firs from the main corridor. Basil went along this to a lounge which was almost up against their table and sat down.

Her voice was low and faltering, less certain than it had been in the play, and very sad: ‘Of course I do, Ted.’ For a long time, as their conversation continued, she repeated, ‘Of course I do,’ or ‘But I do, Ted.’ Ted Fay’s remarks were too low for Basil to hear.

‘--says next month, and he won’t be put off any more . . . I do in a way, Ted. It’s hard to explain, but he’s done everything for mother and me . . . There’s no use kidding myself. It was a foolproof part and any girl he gave it to was made right then and there . . . He’s been awfully thoughtful. He’s done everything for me.’

Basil’s ears were sharpened by the intensity of his emotion; now he could hear Ted Fay’s voice too:

‘And you say you love me.’

‘But don’t you see I promised to marry him more than a year ago.’

‘Tell him the truth--that you love me. Ask him to let you off.’

‘This isn’t musical comedy, Ted.’

‘That was a mean one,’ he said bitterly.

‘I’m sorry, dear, Ted darling, but you’re driving me crazy going on this way. You’re making it so hard for me.’

‘I’m going to leave New Haven, anyhow.’

‘No, you’re not. You’re going to stay and play baseball this spring. Why, you’re an ideal to all those boys! Why, if you--’

He laughed shortly. ‘You’re a fine one to talk about ideals.’

‘Why not? I’m living up to my responsibility to Beltzman; you’ve got to make up your mind just like I have--that we can’t have each other.’

‘Jerry! Think what you’re doing! All my life, whenever I hear that waltz--’

Basil got to his feet and hurried down the corridor, through the lobby and out of the hotel. He was in a state of wild emotional confusion. He did not understand all he had heard, but from his clandestine glimpse into the privacy of these two, with all the world that his short experience could conceive of at their feet, he had gathered that life for everybody was a struggle, sometimes magnificent from a distance, but always difficult and surprisingly simple and a little sad.

They would go on. Ted Fay would go back to Yale, put her picture in his bureau drawer and knock out home runs with the bases full this spring--at 8.30 the curtain would go up and She would miss something warm and young out of her life, something she had had this afternoon.

It was dark outside and Broadway was a blazing forest fire as Basil walked slowly along towards the point of brightest light. He looked up at the great intersecting planes of radiance with a vague sense of approval and possession. He would see it a lot now, lay his restless heart upon this greater restlessness of a nation--he would come whenever he could get off from school.

But that was all changed--he was going to Europe. Suddenly Basil realized that he wasn’t going to Europe. He could not forgo the moulding of his own destiny just to alleviate a few months of pain. The conquest of the successive worlds of school, college and New York--why, that was his true dream that he had carried from boyhood into adolescence, and because of the jeers of a few boys he had been about to abandon it and run ignominiously up a back alley! He shivered violently, like a dog coming out of the water, and simultaneously he was reminded of Mr Rooney.

A few minutes later he walked into the bar, past the quizzical eyes of the bartender and up to the table where Mr Rooney still sat asleep. Basil shook him gently, then firmly. Mr Rooney stirred and perceived Basil.

‘G’wise to yourself,’ he muttered drowsily. ‘G’wise to yourself an’ let me alone.’

‘I am wise to myself,’ said Basil. ‘Honest, I am wise to myself, Mr Rooney. You got to come with me into the washroom and get cleaned up, and then you can sleep on the train again, Mr Rooney. Come on, Mr Rooney, please--’

V

It was a long hard time. Basil got on bounds again in December and wasn’t free again until March. An indulgent mother had given him no habits of work and this was almost beyond the power of anything but life itself to remedy, but he made numberless new starts and failed and tried again.

He made friends with a new boy named Maplewood after Christmas, but they had a silly quarrel; and through the winter term, when a boys’ school is shut in with itself and only partly assuaged from its natural savagery by indoor sports, Basil was snubbed and slighted a good deal for his real and imaginary sins, and he was much alone. But on the other hand, there was Ted Fay, and Rose of the Night on the phonograph--’All my life whenever I hear that waltz’--and the remembered lights of New York, and the thought of what he was going to do in football next autumn and the glamorous image of Yale and the hope of spring in the air.

Fat Gaspar and a few others were nice to him now. Once when he and Fat walked home together by accident from down-town they had a long talk about actresses--a talk that Basil was wise enough not to presume upon afterwards. The smaller boys suddenly decided that they approved of him, and a master who had hitherto disliked him put his hand on his shoulder walking to a class one day. They would all forget eventually--maybe during the summer. There would be new fresh boys in September; he would have a clean start next year.

One afternoon in February, playing basketball, a great thing happened. He and Brick Wales were at forward on the second team and in the fury of the scrimmage the gymnasium echoed with sharp slapping contacts and shrill cries.

‘Here yar!’

‘Bill! Bill!’

Basil had dribbled the ball down the court and Brick Wales, free, was crying for it.

‘Here yar! Lee! Hey! Lee-y!’

Lee-y!

Basil flushed and made a poor pass. He had been called by a nickname. It was a poor makeshift, but it was something more than the stark bareness of his surname or a term of derision. Brick Wales went on playing, unconscious that he had done anything in particular or that he had contributed to the events by which another boy was saved from the army of the bitter, the selfish, the neurasthenic and the unhappy. It isn’t given to us to know those rare moments when people are wide open and the lightest touch can wither or heal. A moment too late and we can never reach them any more in this world. They will not be cured by our most efficacious drugs or slain with our sharpest swords.

Lee-y! it could scarcely be pronounced. But Basil took it to bed with him that night, and thinking of it, holding it to him happily to the last, fell easily to sleep.

HE THINKS HE’S WONDERFUL

I

After the college-board examinations in June, Basil Duke Lee and five other boys from St.RegisSchool boarded the train for the West. Two got out at Pittsburgh, one slanted south toward St. Louis and two stayed in Chicago; from then on Basil was alone. It was the first time in his life that he had ever felt the need of tranquillity, but now he took long breaths of it; for, though things had gone better toward the end, he had had an unhappy year at school.

He wore one of those extremely flat derbies in vogue during the twelfth year of the century, and a blue business suit become a little too short for his constantly lengthening body. Within he was by turns a disembodied spirit, almost unconscious of his person and moving in a mist of impressions and emotions, and a fiercely competitive individual trying desperately to control the rush of events that were the steps in his own evolution from child to man. He believed that everything was a matter of effort--the current principle of American education--and his fantastic ambition was continually leading him to expect too much. He wanted to be a great athlete, popular, brilliant and always happy. During this year at school, where he had been punished for his “freshness,” for fifteen years of thorough spoiling at home, he had grown uselessly introspective, and this interfered with that observation of others which is the beginning of wisdom. It was apparent that before he obtained much success in dealing with the world he would know that he’d been in a fight.

He spent the afternoon in Chicago, walking the streets and avoiding members of the underworld. He bought a detective story called “In the Dead of the Night,” and at five o’clock recovered his suitcase from the station check room and boarded the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul. Immediately he encountered a contemporary, also bound home from school.

Margaret Torrence was fourteen; a serious girl, considered beautiful by a sort of tradition, for she had been beautiful as a little girl. A year and a half before, after a breathless struggle, Basil had succeeded in kissing her on the forehead. They met now with extraordinary joy; for a moment each of them to the other represented home, the blue skies of the past, the summer afternoons ahead.

He sat with Margaret and her mother in the dining car that night. Margaret saw that he was no longer the ultraconfident boy of a year before; his brightness was subdued, and the air of consideration in his face--a mark of his recent discovery that others had wills as strong as his, and more power--appeared to Margaret as a charming sadness. The spell of peace after a struggle was still upon him. Margaret had always liked him--she was of the grave, conscientious type who sometimes loved him and whose love he could never return--and now she could scarcely wait to tell people how attractive he had grown.

After dinner they went back to the observation car and sat on the deserted rear platform while the train pulled them visibly westward between the dark wide farms. They talked of people they knew, of where they had gone for Easter vacation, of the plays they had seen in New York.

“Basil, we’re going to get an automobile,” she said, “and I’m going to learn to drive.”

“That’s fine.” He wondered if his grandfather would let him drive the electric sometimes this summer.

The light from inside the car fell on her young face, and he spoke impetuously, borne on by the rush of happiness that he was going home: “You know something? You know you’re the prettiest girl in the city?”

At the moment when the remark blurred with the thrilling night in Margaret’s heart, Mrs. Torrence appeared to fetch her to bed.

Basil sat alone on the platform for a while, scarcely realizing that she was gone, at peace with himself for another hour and content that everything should remain patternless and shapeless until tomorrow.

II

Fifteen is of all ages the most difficult to locate--to put one’s fingers on and say, “That’s the way I was.” The melancholy Jacques does not select it for mention, and all one can know is that somewhere between thirteen, boyhood’s majority, and seventeen, when one is a sort of counterfeit young man, there is a time when youth fluctuates hourly between one world and another--pushed ceaselessly forward into unprecedented experiences and vainly trying to struggle back to the days when nothing had to be paid for. Fortunately none of our contemporaries remember much more than we do of how we behaved in those days; nevertheless the curtain is about to be drawn aside for an inspection of Basil’s madness that summer.

To begin with, Margaret Torrence, in one of those moods of idealism which overcome the most matter-of-fact girls, gave it as her rapt opinion that Basil was wonderful. Having practised believing things all year at school, and having nothing much to believe at that moment, her friends accepted the fact. Basil suddenly became a legend. There were outbreaks of giggling when girls encountered him on the street, but he suspected nothing at all.

One night, when he had been home a week, he and Riply Buckner went on to an after-dinner gathering on Imogene Bissel’s veranda. As they came up the walk Margaret and two other girls suddenly clung together, whispered convulsively and pursued one another around the yard, uttering strange cries--an inexplicable business that ended only when Gladys Van Schellinger, tenderly and impressively accompanied by her mother’s maid, arrived in a limousine.

All of them were a little strange to one another. Those who had been East at school felt a certain superiority, which, however, was more than counterbalanced by the fact that romantic pairings and quarrels and jealousies and adventures, of which they were lamentably ignorant, had gone on while they had been away.

After the ice cream at nine they sat together on the warm stone steps in a quiet confusion that was halfway between childish teasing and adolescent coquetry. Last year the boys would have ridden their bicycles around the yard; now they had all begun to wait for something to happen.

They knew it was going to happen, the plainest girls, the shyest boys; they had begun to associate with others the romantic world of summer night that pressed deeply and sweetly on their senses. Their voices drifted in a sort of broken harmony in to Mrs. Bissel, who sat reading beside an open window.

“No, look out. You’ll break it. Bay-zil!”

“Rip-lee!”

“Sure I did!”

Laughter.

“--on MoonlightBay

We could hear their voices call--”

“Did you see--”

“Connie, don’t--don’t! You tickle. Look out!”

Laughter.

“Going to the lake tomorrow?”

“Going Friday.”

“Elwood’s home.”

“Is Elwood home?”

“--you have broken my heart--”

“Look out now!”

“Look out!”

Basil sat beside Riply on the balustrade, listening to Joe Gorman singing. It was one of the griefs of his life that he could not sing “so people could stand it,” and he conceived a sudden admiration for Joe Gorman, reading into his personality the thrilling clearness of those sounds that moved so confidently through the dark air.

They evoked for Basil a more dazzling night than this, and other more remote and enchanted girls. He was sorry when the voice died away, and there was a rearranging of seats and a businesslike quiet--the ancient game of Truth had begun.

“What’s your favorite color, Bill?”

“Green,” supplies a friend.

“Sh-h-h! Let him alone.”

Bill says, “Blue.”

“What’s your favorite girl’s name?”

“Mary,” says Bill.

“Mary Haupt! Bill’s got a crush on Mary Haupt!”

She was a cross-eyed girl, a familiar personification of repulsiveness.

“Who would you rather kiss than anybody?”

Across the pause a snicker stabbed the darkness.

“My mother.”

“No, but what girl?”

“Nobody.”

“That’s not fair. Forfeit! Come on, Margaret.”

“Tell the truth, Margaret.”

She told the truth and a moment later Basil looked down in surprise from his perch; he had just learned that he was her favorite boy.

“Oh, yes-s!” he exclaimed sceptically. “Oh, yes-s! How about Hubert Blair?”

He renewed a casual struggle with Riply Buckner and presently they both fell off the balustrade. The game became an inquisition into Gladys Van Schellinger’s carefully chaperoned heart.

“What’s your favorite sport?”

“Croquet.”

The admission was greeted by a mild titter.

“Favorite boy.”

“Thurston Kohler.”

A murmur of disappointment.

“Who’s he?”

“A boy in the East.”

This was manifestly an evasion.

“Who’s your favorite boy here?”

Gladys hesitated. “Basil,” she said at length.

The faces turned up to the balustrade this time were less teasing, less jocular. Basil depreciated the matter with “Oh, yes-s! Sure! Oh, yes-s!” But he had a pleasant feeling of recognition, a familiar delight.

Imogene Bissel, a dark little beauty and the most popular girl in their crowd, took Gladys’ place. The interlocutors were tired of gastronomic preferences--the first question went straight to the point.

“Imogene, have you ever kissed a boy?”

“No.” A cry of wild unbelief. “I have not!” she declared indignantly.

“Well, have you ever been kissed?”

Pink but tranquil, she nodded, adding, “I couldn’t help it.”

“Who by?”

“I won’t tell.”

“Oh-h-h! How about Hubert Blair?”

“What’s your favorite book, Imogene?”

“Beverly of Graustark.”

“Favorite girl?”

“Passion Johnson.”

“Who’s she?”

“Oh, just a girl at school.”

Mrs. Bissel had fortunately left the window.

“Who’s your favorite boy?”

Imogene answered steadily, “Basil Lee.”

This time an impressed silence fell. Basil was not surprised--we are never surprised at our own popularity--but he knew that these were not those ineffable girls, made up out of books and faces momentarily encountered, whose voices he had heard for a moment in Joe Gorman’s song. And when, presently, the first telephone rang inside, calling a daughter home, and the girls, chattering like birds, piled all together into Gladys Van Schellinger’s limousine, he lingered back in the shadow so as not to seem to be showing off. Then, perhaps because he nourished a vague idea that if he got to know Joe Gorman very well he would get to sing like him, he approached him and asked him to go to Lambert’s for a soda.

Joe Gorman was a tall boy with white eyebrows and a stolid face who had only recently become one of their “crowd.” He did not like Basil, who, he considered, had been “stuck up” with him last year, but he was acquisitive of useful knowledge and he was momentarily overwhelmed by Basil’s success with girls.

It was cheerful in Lambert’s, with great moths batting against the screen door and languid couples in white dresses and light suits spread about the little tables. Over their sodas, Joe proposed that Basil come home with him to spend the night; Basil’s permission was obtained over the telephone.

Passing from the gleaming store into the darkness, Basil was submerged in an unreality in which he seemed to see himself from the outside, and the pleasant events of the evening began to take on fresh importance.

Disarmed by Joe’s hospitality, he began to discuss the matter.

“That was a funny thing that happened tonight,” he said, with a disparaging little laugh.

“What was?”

“Why, all those girls saying I was their favorite boy.” The remark jarred on Joe. “It’s a funny thing,” went on Basil. “I was sort of unpopular at school for a while, because I was fresh, I guess. But the thing must be that some boys are popular with boys and some are popular with girls.”

He had put himself in Joe’s hands, but he was unconscious of it; even Joe was only aware of a certain desire to change the subject.

“When I get my car,” suggested Joe, up in his room, “we could take Imogene and Margaret and go for rides.”

“All right.”

“You could have Imogene and I’d take Margaret, or anybody I wanted. Of course I know they don’t like me as well as they do you.”

“Sure they do. It’s just because you haven’t been in our crowd very long yet.”

Joe was sensitive on that point and the remark did not please him. But Basil continued: “You ought to be more polite to the older people if you want to be popular. You didn’t say how do you do to Mrs. Bissel tonight.”

“I’m hungry,” said Joe quickly. “Let’s go down to the pantry and get something to eat.”

Clad only in their pajamas, they went downstairs. Principally to dissuade Basil from pursuing the subject, Joe began to sing in a low voice:

“Oh, you beautiful doll,

You great--big--”

But the evening, coming after the month of enforced humility at school, had been too much for Basil. He got a little awful. In the kitchen, under the impression that his advice had been asked, he broke out again:

“For instance, you oughtn’t to wear those white ties. Nobody does that that goes East to school.” Joe, a little red, turned around from the ice box and Basil felt a slight misgiving. But he pursued with: “For instance, you ought to get your family to send you East to school. It’d be a great thing for you. Especially if you want to go East to college, you ought to first go East to school. They take it out of you.”

Feeling that he had nothing special to be taken out of him, Joe found the implication distasteful. Nor did Basil appear to him at that moment to have been perfected by the process.

“Do you want cold chicken or cold ham?” They drew up chairs to the kitchen table. “Have some milk?”

“Thanks.”

Intoxicated by the three full meals he had had since supper, Basil warmed to his subject. He built up Joe’s life for him little by little, transformed him radiantly from what was little more than a Midwestern bumpkin to an Easterner bursting with savoir-faire and irresistible to girls. Going into the pantry to put away the milk, Joe paused by the open window for a breath of quiet air; Basil followed. “The thing is if a boy doesn’t get it taken out of him at school, he gets it taken out of him at college,” he was saying.

Moved by some desperate instinct, Joe opened the door and stepped out onto the back porch. Basil followed. The house abutted on the edge of the bluff occupied by the residential section, and the two boys stood silent for a moment, gazing at the scattered lights of the lower city. Before the mystery of the unknown human life coursing through the streets below, Basil felt the purport of his words grow thin and pale.

He wondered suddenly what he had said and why it had seemed important to him, and when Joe began to sing again softly, the quiet mood of the early evening, the side of him that was best, wisest and most enduring, stole over him once more. The flattery, the vanity, the fatuousness of the last hour moved off, and when he spoke it was almost in a whisper:

“Let’s walk around the block.”

The sidewalk was warm to their bare feet. It was only midnight, but the square was deserted save for their whitish figures, inconspicuous against the starry darkness. They snorted with glee at their daring. Once a shadow, with loud human shoes, crossed the street far ahead, but the sound served only to increase their own unsubstantiality. Slipping quickly through the clearings made by gas lamps among the trees, they rounded the block, hurrying when they neared the Gorman house as though they had been really lost in a midsummer night’s dream.

Up in Joe’s room, they lay awake in the darkness.

“I talked too much,” Basil thought. “I probably sounded pretty bossy and maybe I made him sort of mad. But probably when we walked around the block he forgot everything I said.”

Alas, Joe had forgotten nothing--except the advice by which Basil had intended him to profit.

“I never saw anybody as stuck up,” he said to himself wrathfully. “He thinks he’s wonderful. He thinks he’s so darn popular with girls.”

III

An element of vast importance had made its appearance with the summer; suddenly the great thing in Basil’s crowd was to own an automobile. Fun no longer seemed available save at great distances, at suburban lakes or remote country clubs. Walking downtown ceased to be a legitimate pastime. On the contrary, a single block from one youth’s house to another’s must be navigated in a car. Dependent groups formed around owners and they began to wield what was, to Basil at least, a disconcerting power.

On the morning of a dance at the lake he called up Riply Buckner.

“Hey, Rip, how you going out to Connie’s tonight?”

“With Elwood Leaming.”

“Has he got a lot of room?”

Riply seemed somewhat embarrassed. “Why, I don’t think he has. You see, he’s taking Margaret Torrence and I’m taking Imogene Bissel.”

“Oh!”

Basil frowned. He should have arranged all this a week ago. After a moment he called up Joe Gorman.

“Going to the Davies’ tonight, Joe?”

“Why, yes.”

“Have you got room in your car--I mean, could I go with you?”

“Why, yes, I suppose so.”

There was a perceptible lack of warmth in his voice.

“Sure you got plenty of room?”

“Sure. We’ll call for you quarter to eight.”

Basil began preparations at five. For the second time in his life he shaved, completing the operation by cutting a short straight line under his nose. It bled profusely, but on the advice of Hilda, the maid, he finally stanched the flow with little pieces of toilet paper. Quite a number of pieces were necessary; so, in order to facilitate breathing, he trimmed it down with a scissors, and with this somewhat awkward mustache of paper and gore clinging to his upper lip, wandered impatiently around the house.

At six he began working on it again, soaking off the tissue paper and dabbing at the persistently freshening crimson line. It dried at length, but when he rashly hailed his mother it opened once more and the tissue paper was called back into play.

At quarter to eight, dressed in blue coat and white flannels, he drew one last bar of powder across the blemish, dusted it carefully with his handkerchief and hurried out to Joe Gorman’s car. Joe was driving in person, and in front with him were Lewis Crum and Hubert Blair. Basil got in the big rear seat alone and they drove without stopping out of the city onto the Black Bear Road, keeping their backs to him and talking in low voices together. He thought at first that they were going to pick up other boys; now he was shocked, and for a moment he considered getting out of the car, but this would imply that he was hurt. His spirit, and with it his face, hardened a little and he sat without speaking or being spoken to for the rest of the ride.

After half an hour the Davies’ house, a huge rambling bungalow occupying a small peninsula in the lake, floated into sight. Lanterns outlined its shape and wavered in gleaming lines on the gold-and-rose colored water, and as they came near, the low notes of bass horns and drums were blown toward them from the lawn.

Inside Basil looked about for Imogene. There was a crowd around her seeking dances, but she saw Basil; his heart bounded at her quick intimate smile.

“You can have the fourth, Basil, and the eleventh and the second extra. . . . How did you hurt your lip?”

“Cut it shaving,” he said hurriedly. “How about supper?”

“Well, I have to have supper with Riply because he brought me.”

“No, you don’t,” Basil assured her.

“Yes, she does,” insisted Riply, standing close at hand. “Why don’t you get your own girl for supper?”

--but Basil had no girl, though he was as yet unaware of the fact.

After the fourth dance, Basil led Imogene down to the end of the pier, where they found seats in a motorboat.

“Now what?” she said.

He did not know. If he had really cared for her he would have known. When her hand rested on his knee for a moment he did not notice it. Instead, he talked. He told her how he had pitched on the second baseball team at school and had once beaten the first in a five-inning game. He told her that the thing was that some boys were popular with boys and some boys were popular with girls--he, for instance, was popular with girls. In short, he unloaded himself.

At length, feeling that he had perhaps dwelt disproportionately on himself, he told her suddenly that she was his favorite girl.

Imogene sat there, sighing a little in the moonlight. In another boat, lost in the darkness beyond the pier, sat a party of four. Joe Gorman was singing:

“My little love--

--in honey man,

He sure has won my--”

“I thought you might want to know,” said Basil to Imogene. “I thought maybe you thought I liked somebody else. The truth game didn’t get around to me the other night.”

“What?” asked Imogene vaguely. She had forgotten the other night, all nights except this, and she was thinking of the magic in Joe Gorman’s voice. She had the next dance with him; he was going to teach her the words of a new song. Basil was sort of peculiar, telling her all this stuff. He was good-looking and attractive and all that, but--she wanted the dance to be over. She wasn’t having any fun.

The music began inside--”Everybody’s Doing It,” played with many little nervous jerks on the violins.

“Oh, listen!” she cried, sitting up and snapping her fingers. “Do you know how to rag?”

“Listen, Imogene”--He half realized that something had slipped away--”let’s sit out this dance--you can tell Joe you forgot.”

She rose quickly. “Oh, no, I can’t!”

Unwillingly Basil followed her inside. It had not gone well--he had talked too much again. He waited moodily for the eleventh dance so that he could behave differently. He believed now that he was in love with Imogene. His self-deception created a tightness in his throat, a counterfeit of longing and desire.

Before the eleventh dance he was aware that some party was being organized from which he was purposely excluded. There were whisperings and arguings among some of the boys, and unnatural silences when he came near. He heard Joe Gorman say to Riply Buckner, “We’ll just be gone three days. If Gladys can’t go, why don’t you ask Connie? The chaperons’ll--” he changed his sentence as he saw Basil--”and we’ll all go to Smith’s for ice-cream soda.”

Later, Basil took Riply Buckner aside but failed to elicit any information: Riply had not forgotten Basil’s attempt to rob him of Imogene tonight.

“It wasn’t about anything,” he insisted. “We’re going to Smith’s, honest. . . . How’d you cut your lip?”

“Cut it shaving.”

When his dance with Imogene came she was even vaguer than before, exchanging mysterious communications with various girls as they moved around the room, locked in the convulsive grip of the Grizzly Bear. He led her out to the boat again, but it was occupied, and they walked up and down the pier while he tried to talk to her and she hummed:

“My little lov-in honey man--”

“Imogene, listen. What I wanted to ask you when we were on the boat before was about the night we played Truth. Did you really mean what you said?”

“Oh, what do you want to talk about that silly game for?”

It had reached her ears, not once but several times, that Basil thought he was wonderful--news that was flying about with as much volatility as the rumor of his graces two weeks before. Imogene liked to agree with everyone--and she had agreed with several impassioned boys that Basil was terrible. And it was difficult not to dislike him for her own disloyalty.

But Basil thought that only ill luck ended the intermission before he could accomplish his purpose; though what he had wanted he had not known.

Finally, during the intermission, Margaret Torrence, whom he had neglected, told him the truth.

“Are you going on the touring party up to the St. Croix River?” she asked. She knew he was not.

“What party?”

“Joe Gorman got it up. I’m going with Elwood Leaming.”

“No, I’m not going,” he said gruffly. “I couldn’t go.”

“Oh!”

“I don’t like Joe Gorman.”

“I guess he doesn’t like you much either.”

“Why? What did he say?”

“Oh, nothing.”

“But what? Tell me what he said.”

After a minute she told him, as if reluctantly: “Well, he and Hubert Blair said you thought--you thought you were wonderful.” Her heart misgave her.

But she remembered he had asked her for only one dance. “Joe said you told him that all the girls thought you were wonderful.”

“I never said anything like that,” said Basil indignantly, “never!”

He understood--Joe Gorman had done it all, taken advantage of Basil’s talking too much--an affliction which his real friends had always allowed for--in order to ruin him. The world was suddenly compact of villainy. He decided to go home.

In the coat room he was accosted by Bill Kampf: “Hello, Basil, how did you hurt your lip?”

“Cut it shaving.”

“Say, are you going to this party they’re getting up next week?”

“No.”

“Well, look, I’ve got a cousin from Chicago coming to stay with us and mother said I could have a boy out for the week-end. Her name is Minnie Bibble.”

“Minnie Bibble?” repeated Basil, vaguely revolted.

“I thought maybe you were going to that party, too, but Riply Buckner said to ask you and I thought--”

“I’ve got to stay home,” said Basil quickly.

“Oh, come on, Basil,” he pursued. “It’s only for two days, and she’s a nice girl. You’d like her.”

“I don’t know,” Basil considered. “I’ll tell you what I’ll do, Bill. I’ve got to get the street car home. I’ll come out for the week-end if you’ll take me over to Wildwood now in your car.”

“Sure I will.”

Basil walked out on the veranda and approached Connie Davies.

“Good-by,” he said. Try as he might, his voice was stiff and proud. “I had an awfully good time.”

“I’m sorry you’re leaving so early, Basil.” But she said to herself: “He’s too stuck up to have a good time. He thinks he’s wonderful.”

From the veranda he could hear Imogene’s laughter down at the end of the pier. Silently he went down the steps and along the walk to meet Bill Kampf, giving strollers a wide berth as though he felt the sight of him would diminish their pleasure.

It had been an awful night.

Ten minutes later Bill dropped him beside the waiting trolley. A few last picnickers sauntered aboard and the car bobbed and clanged through the night toward St. Paul.

Presently two young girls sitting opposite Basil began looking over at him and nudging each other, but he took no notice--he was thinking how sorry they would all be--Imogene and Margaret, Joe and Hubert and Riply.

“Look at him now!” they would say to themselves sorrowfully. “President of the United States at twenty-five! Oh, if we only hadn’t been so bad to him that night!”

He thought he was wonderful!

IV

Ermine Gilberte Labouisse Bibble was in exile. Her parents had brought her from New Orleans to Southampton in May, hoping that the active outdoor life proper to a girl of fifteen would take her thoughts from love. But North or South, a storm of sappling arrows flew about her. She was “engaged” before the first of June.

Let it not be gathered from the foregoing that the somewhat hard outlines of Miss Bibble at twenty had already begun to appear. She was of a radiant freshness; her head had reminded otherwise not illiterate young men of damp blue violets, pierced with blue windows that looked into a bright soul, with today’s new roses showing through.

She was in exile. She was going to Glacier National Park to forget. It was written that in passage she would come to Basil as a sort of initiation, turning his eyes out from himself and giving him a first dazzling glimpse into the world of love.

She saw him first as a quiet handsome boy with an air of consideration in his face, which was the mark of his recent re-discovery that others had wills as strong as his, and more power. It appeared to Minnie--as a few months back it had appeared to Margaret Torrence, like a charming sadness. At dinner he was polite to Mrs. Kampf in a courteous way that he had from his father, and he listened to Mr. Bibble’s discussion of the word “Creole” with such evident interest and appreciation that Mr. Bibble thought, “Now here’s a young boy with something to him.”

After dinner, Minnie, Basil and Bill rode into Black Bear village to the movies, and the slow diffusion of Minnie’s charm and personality presently became the charm and personality of the affair itself.

It was thus that all Minnie’s affairs for many years had a family likeness. She looked at Basil, a childish open look; then opened her eyes wider as if she had some sort of comic misgivings, and smiled--she smiled--

For all the candor of this smile, the effect--because of the special contours of Minnie’s face and independent of her mood--was sparkling invitation. Whenever it appeared Basil seemed to be suddenly inflated and borne upward, a little farther each time, only to be set down when the smile had reached a point where it must become a grin, and chose instead to melt away. It was like a drug. In a little while he wanted nothing except to watch it with a vast buoyant delight.

Then he wanted to see how close he could get to it.

There is a certain stage of an affair between young people when the presence of a third party is a stimulant. Before the second day had well begun, before Minnie and Basil had progressed beyond the point of great gross compliments about each other’s surpassing beauty and charm, both of them had begun to think about the time when they could get rid of their host, Bill Kampf.

In the late afternoon, when the first cool of the evening had come down and they were fresh and thin-feeling from swimming, they sat in a cushioned swing, piled high with pillows and shaded by the thick veranda vines; Basil put his arm around her and leaned toward her cheek and Minnie managed it that he touched her fresh lips instead. And he had always learned things quickly.

They sat there for an hour, while Bill’s voice reached them, now from the pier, now from the hall above, now from the pagoda at the end of the garden, and three saddled horses chafed their bits in the stable and all around them the bees worked faithfully among the flowers. Then Minnie reached up to reality, and they allowed themselves to be found--

“Why, we were looking for you too.”

And Basil, by simply waving his arms and wishing, floated miraculously upstairs to brush his hair for dinner.

“She certainly is a wonderful girl. Oh, gosh, she certainly is a wonderful girl!”

He mustn’t lose his head. At dinner and afterward he listened with unwavering deferential attention while Mr. Bibble talked of the boll weevil.

“But I’m boring you. You children want to go off by yourselves.”

“Not at all, Mr. Bibble. I was very interested--honestly.”

“Well, you all go on and amuse yourselves. I didn’t realize time was getting on. Nowadays it’s so seldom you meet a young man with good manners and good common sense in his head, that an old man like me is likely to go along forever.”

Bill walked down with Basil and Minnie to the end of the pier. “Hope we’ll have a good sailing tomorrow. Say, I’ve got to drive over to the village and get somebody for my crew. Do you want to come along?”

“I reckon I’ll sit here for a while and then go to bed,” said Minnie.

“All right. You want to come, Basil?”

“Why--why, sure, if you want me, Bill.”

“You’ll have to sit on a sail I’m taking over to be mended.”

“I don’t want to crowd you.”

“You won’t crowd me. I’ll go get the car.”

When he had gone they looked at each other in despair. But he did not come back for an hour--something happened about the sail or the car that took a long time. There was only the threat, making everything more poignant and breathless, that at any minute he would be coming.

By and by they got into the motorboat and sat close together murmuring: “This fall--” “When you come to New Orleans--” “When I go to Yale year after next--” “When I come North to school--” “When I get back from Glacier Park--” “Kiss me once more.” . . . “You’re terrible. Do you know you’re terrible? . . . You’re absolutely terrible--”

The water lapped against the posts; sometimes the boat bumped gently on the pier; Basil undid one rope and pushed, so that they swung off and way from the pier, and became a little island in the night. . .

. . . next morning, while he packed his bag, she opened the door of his room and stood beside him. Her face shone with excitement; her dress was starched and white.

“Basil, listen! I have to tell you: Father was talking after breakfast and he told Uncle George that he’d never met such a nice, quiet, level-headed boy as you, and Cousin Bill’s got to tutor this month, so father asked Uncle George if he thought your family would let you go to Glacier Park with us for two weeks so I’d have some company.” They took hands and danced excitedly around the room. “Don’t say anything about it, because I reckon he’ll have to write your mother and everything. Basil, isn’t it wonderful?”

So when Basil left at eleven, there was no misery in their parting. Mr. Bibble, going into the village for a paper, was going to escort Basil to his train, and till the motor-car moved away the eyes of the two young people shone and there was a secret in their waving hands.

Basil sank back in the seat, replete with happiness. He relaxed--to have made a success of the visit was so nice. He loved her--he loved even her father sitting beside him, her father who was privileged to be so close to her, to fuddle himself at that smile.

Mr. Bibble lit a cigar. “Nice weather,” he said. “Nice climate up to the end of October.”

“Wonderful,” agreed Basil. “I miss October now that I go East to school.”

“Getting ready for college?”

“Yes, sir; getting ready for Yale.” A new pleasurable thought occurred to him. He hesitated, but he knew that Mr. Bibble, who liked him, would share his joy. “I took my preliminaries this spring and I just heard from them--I passed six out of seven.”

“Good for you!”

Again Basil hesitated, then he continued: “I got A in ancient history and B in English history and English A. And I got C in algebra A and Latin A and B. I failed French A.”

“Good!” said Mr. Bibble.

“I should have passed them all,” went on Basil, “but I didn’t study hard at first. I was the youngest boy in my class and I had a sort of swelled head about it.”

It was well that Mr. Bibble should know he was taking no dullard to Glacier National Park. Mr. Bibble took a long puff of his cigar.

On second thought, Basil decided that his last remark didn’t have the right ring and he amended it a little.

“It wasn’t exactly a swelled head, but I never had to study very much, because in English I’d usually read most of the books before, and in history I’d read a lot too.” He broke off and tried again: “I mean, when you say swelled head you think of a boy just going around with his head swelled, sort of, saying, ‘Oh, look how much I know!’ Well, I wasn’t like that. I mean, I didn’t think I knew everything, but I was sort of--”

As he searched for the elusive word, Mr. Bibble said, “H’m!” and pointed with his cigar at a spot in the lake.

“There’s a boat,” he said.

“Yes,” agreed Basil. “I don’t know much about sailing. I never cared for it. Of course I’ve been out a lot, just tending boards and all that, but most of the time you have to sit with nothing to do. I like football.”

“H’m!” said Mr. Bibble. “When I was your age I was out in the Gulf in a catboat every day.”

“I guess it’s fun if you like it,” conceded Basil.

“Happiest days of my life.”

The station was in sight. It occurred to Basil that he should make one final friendly gesture.

“Your daughter certainly is an attractive girl, Mr. Bibble,” he said. “I usually get along with girls all right, but I don’t usually like them very much. But I think your daughter is the most attractive girl I ever met.” Then, as the car stopped, a faint misgiving overtook him and he was impelled to add with a disparaging little laugh. “Good-by. I hope I didn’t talk too much.”

“Not at all,” said Mr. Bibble. “Good luck to you. Goo’-by.”

A few minutes later, when Basil’s train had pulled out, Mr. Bibble stood at the newsstand buying a paper and already drying his forehead against the hot July day.

“Yes, sir! That was a lesson not to do anything in a hurry,” he was saying to himself vehemently. “Imagine listening to that fresh kid gabbling about himself all through Glacier Park! Thank the good Lord for that little ride!”

On his arrival home, Basil literally sat down and waited. Under no pretext would he leave the house save for short trips to the drug store for refreshments, whence he returned on a full run. The sound of the telephone or the door-bell galvanized him into the rigidity of the electric chair.

That afternoon he composed a wondrous geographical poem, which he mailed to Minnie:

Of all the fair flowers of Paris,

Of all the red roses of Rome,

Of all the deep tears of Vienna

The sadness wherever you roam,

I think of that night by the lakeside,

The beam of the moon and stars,

And the smell of an aching like perfume,

The tune of the Spanish guitars.

But Monday passed and most of Tuesday and no word came. Then, late in the afternoon of the second day, as he moved vaguely from room to room looking out of different windows into a barren lifeless street, Minnie called him on the phone.

“Yes?” His heart was beating wildly.

“Basil, we’re going this afternoon.”

“Going!” he repeated blankly.

“Oh, Basil, I’m so sorry. Father changed his mind about taking anybody West with us.”

“Oh!”

“I’m so sorry, Basil.”

“I probably couldn’t have gone.”

There was a moment’s silence. Feeling her presence over the wire, he could scarcely breathe, much less speak.

“Basil, can you hear me?”

“Yes.”

“We may come back this way. Anyhow, remember we’re going to meet this winter in New York.”

“Yes,” he said, and he added suddenly: “Perhaps we won’t ever meet again.”

“Of course we will. They’re calling me, Basil. I’ve got to go. Good-by.”

He sat down beside the telephone, wild with grief. The maid found him half an hour later bowed over the kitchen table. He knew what had happened as well as if Minnie had told him. He had made the same old error, undone the behavior of three days in half an hour. It would have been no consolation if it had occurred to him that it was just as well. Somewhere on the trip he would have let go and things might have been worse--though perhaps not so sad. His only thought now was that she was gone.

He lay on his bed, baffled, mistaken, miserable but not beaten. Time after time, the same vitality that had led his spirit to a scourging made him able to shake off the blood like water not to forget, but to carry his wounds with him to new disasters and new atonements--toward his unknown destiny.

Two days later his mother told him that on condition of his keeping the batteries on charge, and washing it once a week, his grandfather had consented to let him use the electric whenever it was idle in the afternoon. Two hours later he was out in it, gliding along Crest Avenue at the maximum speed permitted by the gears and trying to lean back as if it were a Stutz Bearcat. Imogene Bissel waved at him from in front of her house and he came to an uncertain stop.

“You’ve got a car!”

“It’s grandfather’s,” he said modestly. “I thought you were up on that party at the St. Croix.”

She shook her head. “Mother wouldn’t let me go--only a few girls went. There was a big accident over in Minneapolis and mother won’t even let me ride in a car unless there’s someone over eighteen driving.”

“Listen, Imogene, do you suppose your mother meant electrics?”

“Why, I never thought--I don’t know. I could go and see.”

“Tell your mother it won’t go over twelve miles an hour,” he called after her.

A minute later she ran joyfully down the walk. “I can go, Basil,” she cried. “Mother never heard of any wrecks in an electric. What’ll we do?”

“Anything,” he said in a reckless voice. “I didn’t mean that about this bus making only twelve miles an hour--it’ll make fifteen. Listen, let’s go down to Smith’s and have a claret lemonade.”

“Why, Basil Lee!”

THE CAPTURED SHADOW

Basil Duke Lee shut the front door behind him and turned on the dining-room light. His mother’s voice drifted sleepily downstairs:

“Basil, is that you?”

“No, mother, it’s a burglar.”

“It seems to me twelve o’clock is pretty late for a fifteen-year-old boy.”

“We went to Smith’s and had a soda.”

Whenever a new responsibility devolved upon Basil he was “a boy almost sixteen,” but when a privilege was in question, he was “a fifteen-year-old boy.”

There were footsteps above, and Mrs. Lee, in kimono, descended to the first landing.

“Did you and Riply enjoy the play?”

“Yes, very much.”

“What was it about?”

“Oh, it was just about this man. Just an ordinary play.”

“Didn’t it have a name?”

“‘Are You a Mason?’“

“Oh.” She hesitated, covetously watching his alert and eager face, holding him there. “Aren’t you coming to bed?”

“I’m going to get something to eat.”

“Something more?”

For a moment he didn’t answer. He stood in front of a glassed-in bookcase in the living room, examining its contents with an equally glazed eye.

“We’re going to get up a play,” he said suddenly. “I’m going to write it.”

“Well--that’ll be very nice. Please come to bed soon. You were up late last night, too, and you’ve got dark circles under your eyes.”

From the bookcase Basil presently extracted “Van Bibber and Others,” from which he read while he ate a large plate of straw softened with half a pint of cream. Back in the living room he sat for a few minutes at the piano, digesting, and meanwhile staring at the colored cover of a song from “The Midnight Sons.” It showed three men in evening clothes and opera hats sauntering jovially along Broadway against the blazing background of Times Square.

Basil would have denied incredulously the suggestion that that was currently his favorite work of art. But it was.

He went upstairs. From a drawer of his desk he took out a composition book and opened it.

BASIL DUKE LEE

ST.REGISSCHOOL

EASTCHESTER, CONN.

FIFTH FORM FRENCH

and on the next page, under Irregular Verbs:

Present

je connais

nous con

tu connais

il connait

He turned over another page.

MR. WASHINGTON SQUARE

A Musical Comedy by

BASIL DUKE LEE

Music by Victor Herbert

ACT I

[The porch of the Millionaires’ Club, near New York. Opening Chorus, LEILIA and DEBUTANTES:

We sing not soft, we sing not loud

For no one ever heard an opening chorus.

We are a very merry crowd

But no one ever heard an opening chorus.

We’re just a crowd of debutantes

As merry as can be

And nothing that there is could ever bore us

We’re the wittiest ones, the prettiest ones.

In all society

But no one ever heard an opening chorus.

LEILIA (stepping forward): Well, girls, has Mr. Washington Square been around here today?

Basil turned over a page. There was no answer to Leilia’s question. Instead in capitals was a brand-new heading:

HIC! HIC! HIC!

A Hilarious Farce in One Act

by

BASIL DUKE LEE

SCENE

[A fashionable apartment near Broadway, New York City. It is almost midnight. As the curtain goes up there is a knocking at the door and a few minutes later it opens to admit a handsome man in a full evening dress and a companion. He has evidently been imbibing, for his words are thick, his nose is red, and he can hardly stand up. He turns up the light and comes down center.

STUYVESANT: Hic! Hic! Hic!

O’HARA (his companion): Begorra, you been sayin’ nothing else all this evening.

Basil turned over a page and then another, reading hurriedly, but not without interest.

PROFESSOR PUMPKIN: Now, if you are an educated man, as you claim, perhaps you can tell me the Latin word for “this.”

STUYVESANT: Hic! Hic! Hic!

PROFESSOR PUMPKIN: Correct. Very good indeed. I--

At this point Hic! Hic! Hic! came to an end in midsentence. On the following page, in just as determined a hand as if the last two works had not faltered by the way, was the heavily underlined beginning of another:

THE CAPTURED SHADOW

A Melodramatic Farce in Three Acts

by

BASIL DUKE LEE

SCENE

[All three acts take place in the library of the VAN BAKERS’ house in New York. It is well furnished with a red lamp on one side and some crossed spears and helmets and so on and a divan and a general air of an oriental den.

When the curtain rises MISS SAUNDERS, LEILIA VAN BAKER and ESTELLA CARRAGE are sitting at a table. MISS SAUNDERS is an old maid about forty very kittenish. LEILIA is pretty with dark hair. ESTELLA has light hair. They are a striking combination.

“The Captured Shadow” filled the rest of the book and ran over into several loose sheets at the end. When it broke off Basil sat for a while in thought. This had been a season of “crook comedies” in New York, and the feel, the swing, the exact and vivid image of the two he had seen, were in the foreground of his mind. At the time they had been enormously suggestive, opening out into a world much larger and more brilliant than themselves that existed outside their windows and beyond their doors, and it was this suggested world rather than any conscious desire to imitate “Officer 666,” that had inspired the effort before him. Presently he printed Act II at the head of a new tablet and began to write.

An hour passed. Several times he had recourse to a collection of joke books and to an old Treasury of Wit and Humor which embalmed the faded Victorian cracks of Bishop Wilberforce and Sydney Smith. At the moment when, in his story, a door moved slowly open, he heard a heavy creak upon the stairs. He jumped to his feet, aghast and trembling, but nothing stirred; only a white moth bounced against the screen, a clock struck the half-hour far across the city, a bird whacked its wings in a tree outside.

Voyaging to the bathroom at half-past four, he saw with a shock that morning was already blue at the window. He had stayed up all night. He remembered that people who stayed up all night went crazy, and transfixed in the hall, he tried agonizingly to listen to himself, to feel whether or not he was going crazy. The things around him seemed preternaturally unreal, and rushing frantically back into his bedroom, he began tearing off his clothes, racing after the vanishing night. Undressed, he threw a final regretful glance at his pile of manuscript--he had the whole next scene in his head. As a compromise with incipient madness he got into bed and wrote for an hour more.

Late next morning he was startled awake by one of the ruthless Scandinavian sisters who, in theory, were the Lees’ servants. “Eleven o’clock!” she shouted. “Five after!”

“Let me alone,” Basil mumbled. “What do you come and wake me up for?”

“Somebody downstairs.” He opened his eyes. “You ate all the cream last night,” Hilda continued. “Your mother didn’t have any for her coffee.”

“All the cream!” he cried. “Why, I saw some more.”

“It was sour.”

“That’s terrible,” he exclaimed, sitting up. “Terrible!”

For a moment she enjoyed his dismay. Then she said, “Riply Buckner’s downstairs,” and went out, closing the door.

“Send him up!” he called after her. “Hilda, why don’t you ever listen for a minute? Did I get any mail?”

There was no answer. A moment later Riply came in.

“My gosh, are you still in bed?”

“I wrote on the play all night. I almost finished Act Two.” He pointed to his desk.

“That’s what I want to talk to you about,” said Riply. “Mother thinks we ought to get Miss Halliburton.”

“What for?”

“Just to sort of be there.”

Though Miss Halliburton was a pleasant person who combined the occupations of French teacher and bridge teacher, unofficial chaperon and children’s friend, Basil felt that her superintendence would give the project an unprofessional ring.

“She wouldn’t interfere,” went on Riply, obviously quoting his mother. “I’ll be the business manager and you’ll direct the play, just like we said, but it would be good to have her there for prompter and to keep order at rehearsals. The girls’ mothers’ll like it.”

“All right,” Basil agreed reluctantly. “Now look, let’s see who we’ll have in the cast. First, there’s the leading man--this gentleman burglar that’s called The Shadow. Only it turns out at the end that he’s really a young man about town doing it on a bet, and not really a burglar at all.”

“That’s you.”

“No, that’s you.”

“Come on! You’re the best actor,” protested Riply.

“No, I’m going to take a smaller part, so I can coach.”

“Well, haven’t I got to be business manager?”

Selecting the actresses, presumably all eager, proved to be a difficult matter. They settled finally on Imogene Bissel for leading lady; Margaret Torrence for her friend, and Connie Davies for “Miss Saunders, an old maid very kittenish.”

On Riply’s suggestion that several other girls wouldn’t be pleased at being left out, Basil introduced a maid and a cook, “who could just sort of look in from the kitchen.” He rejected firmly Riply’s further proposal that there should be two or three maids, “a sort of sewing woman,” and a trained nurse. In a house so clogged with femininity even the most umbrageous of gentleman burglars would have difficulty in moving about.

“I’ll tell you two people we won’t have,” Basil said meditatively--”that’s Joe Gorman and Hubert Blair.”

“I wouldn’t be in it if we had Hubert Blair,” asserted Riply.

“Neither would I.”

Hubert Blair’s almost miraculous successes with girls had caused Basil and Riply much jealous pain.

They began calling up the prospective cast and immediately the enterprise received its first blow. Imogene Bissel was going to Rochester, Minnesota, to have her appendix removed, and wouldn’t be back for three weeks.

They considered.

“How about Margaret Torrence?”

Basil shook his head. He had vision of Leilia Van Baker as someone rarer and more spirited than Margaret Torrence. Not that Leilia had much being, even to Basil--less than the Harrison Fisher girls pinned around his wall at school. But she was not Margaret Torrence. She was no one you could inevitably see by calling up half an hour before on the phone.

He discarded candidate after candidate. Finally a face began to flash before his eyes, as if in another connection, but so insistently that at length he spoke the name.

“Evelyn Beebe.”

“Who?”

Though Evelyn Beebe was only sixteen, her precocious charms had elevated her to an older crowd and to Basil she seemed of the very generation of his heroine, Leilia Van Baker. It was a little like asking Sarah Bernhardt for her services, but once her name had occurred to him, other possibilities seemed pale.

At noon they rang the Beebes’ door-bell, stricken by a paralysis of embarrassment when Evelyn opened the door herself and, with politeness that concealed a certain surprise, asked them in.

Suddenly, through the portière of the living room, Basil saw and recognized a young man in golf knickerbockers.

“I guess we better not come in,” he said quickly.

“We’ll come some other time,” Riply added.

Together they started precipitately for the door, but she barred their way.

“Don’t be silly,” she insisted. “It’s just Andy Lockheart.”

Just Andy Lockheart--winner of the Western Golf Championship at eighteen, captain of his freshman baseball team, handsome, successful at everything he tried, a living symbol of the splendid, glamorous world of Yale. For a year Basil had walked like him and tried unsuccessfully to play the piano by ear as Andy Lockheart was able to do.

Through sheer ineptitude at escaping, they were edged into the room. Their plan suddenly seemed presumptuous and absurd.

Perceiving their condition Evelyn tried to soothe them with pleasant banter.

“Well it’s about time you came to see me,” she told Basil. “Here I’ve been sitting at home every night waiting for you--ever since the Davies dance. Why haven’t you been here before?”

He stared at her blankly, unable even to smile, and muttered: “Yes, you have.”

“I have though. Sit down and tell me why you’ve been neglecting me! I suppose you’ve both been rushing the beautiful Imogene Bissel.”

“Why, I understand--” said Basil. “Why, I heard from somewhere that she’s gone up to have some kind of an appendicitis--that is--” He ran down to a pitch of inaudibility as Andy Lockheart at the piano began playing a succession of thoughtful chords, which resolved itself into the maxixe, an eccentric stepchild of the tango. Kicking back a rug and lifting her skirts a little, Evelyn fluently tapped out a circle with her heels around the floor.

They sat inanimate as cushions on the sofa watching her. She was almost beautiful, with rather large features and bright fresh color behind which her heart seemed to be trembling a little with laughter. Her voice and her lithe body were always mimicking, ceaselessly caricaturing every sound and movement near by, until even those who disliked her admitted that “Evelyn could always make you laugh.” She finished her dance now with a false stumble and an awed expression as she clutched at the piano, and Basil and Riply chuckled. Seeing their embarrassment lighten, she came and sat down beside them, and they laughed again when she said: “Excuse my lack of self-control.”

“Do you want to be the leading lady in a play we’re going to give?” demanded Basil with sudden desperation. “We’re going to have it at the Martindale School, for the benefit of the Baby Welfare.”

“Basil, this is so sudden.”

Andy Lockheart turned around from the piano.

“What’re you going to give--a minstrel show?”

“No, it’s a crook play named The Captured Shadow. Miss Halliburton is going to coach it.” He suddenly realized the convenience of that name to shelter himself behind.

“Why don’t you give something like ‘The Private Secretary’?” interrupted Andy. “There’s a good play for you. We gave it my last year at school.”

“Oh, no, it’s all settled,” said Basil quickly. “We’re going to put on this play that I wrote.”

“You wrote it yourself?” exclaimed Evelyn.

“Yes.”

“My-y gosh!” said Andy. He began to play again.

“Look, Evelyn,” said Basil. “It’s only for three weeks, and you’d be the leading lady.”

She laughed. “Oh, no. I couldn’t. Why don’t you get Imogene?”

“She’s sick, I tell you. Listen--”

“Or Margaret Torrence?”

“I don’t want anybody but you.”

The directness of this appeal touched her and momentarily she hesitated. But the hero of the Western Golf Championship turned around from the piano with a teasing smile and she shook her head.

“I can’t do it, Basil. I may have to go East with the family.”

Reluctantly Basil and Riply got up.

“Gosh, I wish you’d be in it, Evelyn.”

“I wish I could.”

Basil lingered, thinking fast, wanting her more than ever; indeed, without her, it scarcely seemed worth while to go on with the play. Suddenly a desperate expedient took shape on his lips:

“You certainly would be wonderful. You see, the leading man is going to be Hubert Blair.”

Breathlessly he watched her, saw her hesitate.

“Good-by,” he said.

She came with them to the door and then out on the veranda, frowning a little.

“How long did you say the rehearsals would take?” she asked thoughtfully.

II

On an August evening three days later Basil read the play to the cast on Miss Halliburton’s porch. He was nervous and at first there were interruptions of “Louder” and “Not so fast.” Just as his audience was beginning to be amused by the repartee of the two comic crooks--repartee that had seen service with Weber and Fields--he was interrupted by the late arrival of Hubert Blair.

Hubert was fifteen, a somewhat shallow boy save for two or three felicities which he possessed to an extraordinary degree. But one excellence suggests the presence of others, and young ladies never failed to respond to his most casual fancy, enduring his fickleness of heart and never convinced that his fundamental indifference might not be overcome. They were dazzled by his flashing self-confidence, by his cherubic ingenuousness, which concealed a shrewd talent for getting around people, and by his extraordinary physical grace. Long-legged, beautifully proportioned, he had that tumbler’s balance usually characteristic only of men “built near the ground.” He was in constant motion that was a delight to watch, and Evelyn Beebe was not the only older girl who had found in him a mysterious promise and watched him for a long time with something more than curiosity.

He stood in the doorway now with an expression of bogus reverence on his round pert face.

“Excuse me,” he said. “Is this the First Methodist Episcopal Church?” Everybody laughed--even Basil. “I didn’t know. I thought maybe I was in the right church, but in the wrong pew.”

They laughed again, somewhat discouraged. Basil waited until Hubert had seated himself beside Evelyn Beebe. Then he began to read once more, while the others, fascinated, watched Hubert’s efforts to balance a chair on its hind legs. This squeaky experiment continued as an undertone to the reading. Not until Basil’s desperate “Now, here’s where you come in, Hube,” did attention swing back to the play.

Basil read for more than an hour. When, at the end, he closed the composition book and looked up shyly, there was a burst of spontaneous applause. He had followed his models closely, and for all its grotesqueries, the result was actually interesting--it was a play. Afterward he lingered, talking to Miss Halliburton, and he walked home glowing with excitement and rehearsing a little by himself into the August night.

The first week of rehearsal was a matter of Basil climbing back and forth from auditorium to stage, crying, “No! Look here, Connie; you come in more like this.” Then things began to happen. Mrs. Van Schellinger came to rehearsal one day, and lingering afterward, announced that she couldn’t let Gladys be in “a play about criminals.” Her theory was that this element could be removed; for instance, the two comic crooks could be changed to “two funny farmers.”

Basil listened with horror. When she had gone he assured Miss Halliburton that he would change nothing. Luckily Gladys played the cook, an interpolated part that could be summarily struck out, but her absence was felt in another way. She was tranquil and tractable, “the most carefully brought-up girl in town,” and at her withdrawal rowdiness appeared during rehearsals. Those who had only such lines as “I’ll ask Mrs. Van Baker, sir,” in Act I and “No, ma’am,” in Act III showed a certain tendency to grow restless in between. So now it was:

“Please keep that dog quiet or else send him home!” or:

“Where’s that maid? Wake up, Margaret, for heaven’s sake!” or:

“What is there to laugh at that’s so darn funny?”

More and more the chief problem was the tactful management of Hubert Blair. Apart from his unwillingness to learn his lines, he was a satisfactory hero, but off the stage he became a nuisance. He gave an endless private performance for Evelyn Beebe, which took such forms as chasing her amorously around the hall or of flipping peanuts over his shoulder to land mysteriously on the stage. Called to order, he would mutter, “Aw, shut up yourself,” just loud enough for Basil to guess, but not to hear.

But Evelyn Beebe was all that Basil had expected. Once on the stage, she compelled a breathless attention, and Basil recognized this by adding to her part. He envied the half-sentimental fun that she and Hubert derived from their scenes together and he felt a vague, impersonal jealousy that almost every night after rehearsal they drove around together in Hubert’s car.

One afternoon when matters had progressed a fortnight, Hubert came in an hour late, loafed through the first act and then informed Miss Halliburton that he was going home.

“What for?” Basil demanded.

“I’ve got some things I got to do.”

“Are they important?”

“What business is that of yours?”

“Of course it’s my business,” said Basil heatedly, whereupon Miss Halliburton interfered.

“There’s no use of anybody getting angry. What Basil means, Hubert, is that if it’s just some small thing--why, we’re all giving up our pleasures to make this play a success.”

Hubert listened with obvious boredom.

“I’ve got to drive downtown and get father.”

He looked coolly at Basil, as if challenging him to deny the adequacy of this explanation.

“Then why did you come an hour late?” demanded Basil.

“Because I had to do something for mother.”

A group had gathered and he glanced around triumphantly. It was one of those sacred excuses, and only Basil saw that it was disingenuous.

“Oh, tripe!” he said.

“Maybe you think so--Bossy.”

Basil took a step toward him, his eyes blazing.

“What’d you say?”

“I said ‘Bossy.’ Isn’t that what they call you at school?”

It was true. It had followed him home. Even as he went white with rage a vast impotence surged over him at the realization that the past was always lurking near. The faces of school were around him, sneering and watching. Hubert laughed.

“Get out!” said Basil in a strained voice. “Go on! Get right out!”

Hubert laughed again, but as Basil took a step toward him he retreated.

“I don’t want to be in your play anyhow. I never did.”

“Then go on out of this hall.”

“Now, Basil!” Miss Halliburton hovered breathlessly beside them. Hubert laughed again and looked about for his cap.

“I wouldn’t be in your crazy old show,” he said. He turned slowly and jauntily, and sauntered out the door.

Riply Buckner read Hubert’s part that afternoon, but there was a cloud upon the rehearsal. Miss Beebe’s performance lacked its customary verve and the others clustered and whispered, falling silent when Basil came near. After the rehearsal, Miss Halliburton, Riply and Basil held a conference. Upon Basil flatly refusing to take the leading part, it was decided to enlist a certain Mayall De Bec, known slightly to Riply, who had made a name for himself in theatricals at the Central High School.

But next day a blow fell that was irreparable. Evelyn, flushed and uncomfortable, told Basil and Miss Halliburton that her family’s plans had changed--they were going East next week and she couldn’t be in the play after all. Basil understood. Only Hubert had held her this long.

“Good-by,” he said gloomily.

His manifest despair shamed her and she tried to justify herself.

“Really, I can’t help it. Oh, Basil, I’m so sorry!”

“Couldn’t you stay over a week with me after your family goes?” Miss Halliburton asked innocently.

“Not possibly. Father wants us all to go together. That’s the only reason. If it wasn’t for that I’d stay.”

“All right,” Basil said. “Good-by.”

“Basil, you’re not mad, are you?” A gust of repentance swept over her. “I’ll do anything to help. I’ll come to rehearsals this week until you get someone else, and then I’ll try to help her all I can. But father says we’ve got to go.”

In vain Riply tried to raise Basil’s morale after the rehearsal that afternoon, making suggestions which he waved contemptuously away. Margaret Torrence? Connie Davies? They could hardly play the parts they had. It seemed to Basil as if the undertaking was falling to pieces before his eyes.

It was still early when he got home. He sat dispiritedly by his bedroom window, watching the little Barnfield boy playing a lonesome game by himself in the yard next door.

His mother came in at five, and immediately sensed his depression.

“Teddy Barnfield has the mumps,” she said, in an effort to distract him. “That’s why he’s playing there all alone.”

“Has he?” he responded listlessly.

“It isn’t at all dangerous, but it’s very contagious. You had it when you were seven.”

“H’m.”

She hesitated.

“Are you worrying about your play? Has anything gone wrong?”

“No, mother. I just want to be alone.”

After a while he got up and started after a malted milk at the soda fountain around the corner. It was half in his mind to see Mr. Beebe and ask him if he couldn’t postpone his trip East. If he could only be sure that that was Evelyn’s real reason.

The sight of Evelyn’s nine-year-old brother coming along the street broke in on his thoughts.

“Hello, Ham. I hear you’re going away.”

Ham nodded.

“Going next week. To the seashore.”

Basil looked at him speculatively, as if, through his proximity to Evelyn, he held the key to the power of moving her.

“Where are you going now?” he asked.

“I’m going to play with Teddy Barnfield.”

“What!” Basil exclaimed. “Why, didn’t you know--” He stopped. A wild, criminal idea broke over him; his mother’s words floated through his mind: “It isn’t at all dangerous, but it’s very contagious.” If little Ham Beebe got the mumps, and Evelyn couldn’t go away--

He came to a decision quickly and coolly.

“Teddy’s playing in his back yard,” he said. “If you want to see him without going through his house, why don’t you go down this street and turn up the alley?”

“All right. Thanks,” said Ham trustingly.

Basil stood for a minute looking after him until he turned the corner into the alley, fully aware that it was the worst thing he had ever done in his life.

III

A week later Mrs. Lee had an early supper--all Basil’s favorite things: chipped beef, french-fried potatoes, sliced peaches and cream, and devil’s food.

Every few minutes Basil said, “Gosh! I wonder what time it is,” and went out in the hall to look at the clock. “Does that clock work right?” he demanded with sudden suspicion. It was the first time the matter had ever interested him.

“Perfectly all right. If you eat so fast you’ll have indigestion and then you won’t be able to act well.”

“What do you think of the program?” he asked for the third time. “Riply Buckner, Jr., presents Basil Duke Lee’s comedy, ‘The Captured Shadow.’“

“I think it’s very nice.”

“He doesn’t really present it.”

“It sounds very well though.”

“I wonder what time it is?” he inquired.

“You just said it was ten minutes after six.”

“Well, I guess I better be starting.”

“Eat your peaches, Basil. If you don’t eat you won’t be able to act.”

“I don’t have to act,” he said patiently. “All I am is a small part, and it wouldn’t matter--” It was too much trouble to explain.

“Please don’t smile at me when I come on, mother,” he requested. “Just act as if I was anybody else.”

“Can’t I even say how-do-you-do?”

“What?” Humor was lost on him. He said good-by. Trying very hard to digest not his food but his heart, which had somehow slipped down into his stomach, he started off for the Martindale School.

As its yellow windows loomed out of the night his excitement became insupportable; it bore no resemblance to the building he had been entering so casually for three weeks. His footsteps echoed symbolically and portentously in its deserted hall; upstairs there was only the janitor setting out the chairs in rows, and Basil wandered about the vacant stage until someone came in.

It was Mayall De Bec, the tall, clever, not very likeable youth they had imported from Lower Crest Avenue to be the leading man. Mayall, far from being nervous, tried to engage Basil in casual conversation. He wanted to know if Basil thought Evelyn Beebe would mind if he went to see her sometime when the show was over. Basil supposed not. Mayall said he had a friend whose father owned a brewery who owned a twelve-cylinder car.

Basil said, “Gee!”

At quarter to seven the participants arrived in groups--Riply Buckner with the six boys he had gathered to serve as ticket takers and ushers; Miss Halliburton, trying to seem very calm and reliable; Evelyn Beebe, who came in as if she were yielding herself up to something and whose glance at Basil seemed to say: “Well, it looks as if I’m really going through with it after all.”

Mayall De Bec was to make up the boys and Miss Halliburton the girls. Basil soon came to the conclusion that Miss Halliburton knew nothing about make-up, but he judged it diplomatic, in that lady’s overwrought condition, to say nothing, but to take each girl to Mayall for corrections when Miss Halliburton had done.

An exclamation from Bill Kampf, standing at a crack in the curtain, brought Basil to his side. A tall bald-headed man in spectacles had come in and was shown to a seat in the middle of the house, where he examined the program. He was the public. Behind those waiting eyes, suddenly so mysterious and incalculable, was the secret of the play’s failure or success. He finished the program, took off his glasses and looked around. Two old ladies and two little boys came in, followed immediately by a dozen more.

“Hey, Riply,” Basil called softly. “Tell them to put the children down in front.”

Riply, struggling into his policeman’s uniform, looked up, and the long black mustache on his upper lip quivered indignantly.

“I thought of that long ago.”

The hall, filling rapidly, was now alive with the buzz of conversation. The children in front were jumping up and down in their seats, and everyone was talking and calling back and forth save the several dozen cooks and housemaids who sat in stiff and quiet pairs about the room.

Then, suddenly, everything was ready. It was incredible. “Stop! Stop!” Basil wanted to say. “It can’t be ready. There must be something--there always has been something,” but the darkened auditorium and the piano and violin from Geyer’s Orchestra playing “Meet Me in the Shadows” belied his words. Miss Saunders, Leilia Van Baker and Leilia’s friend, Estella Carrage, were already seated on the stage, and Miss Halliburton stood in the wings with the prompt book. Suddenly the music ended and the chatter in front died away.

“Oh, gosh!” Basil thought. “Oh, my gosh!”

The curtain rose. A clear voice floated up from somewhere. Could it be from that unfamiliar group on the stage?

I will, Miss Saunders. I tell you I will!

But, Miss Leilia, I don’t consider the newspapers proper for young ladies nowadays.

I don’t care. I want to read about this wonderful gentleman burglar they call The Shadow.

It was actually going on. Almost before he realized it, a ripple of laughter passed over the audience as Evelyn gave her imitation of Miss Saunders behind her back.

“Get ready, Basil,” breathed Miss Halliburton.

Basil and Bill Kampf, the crooks, each took an elbow of Victor Van Baker, the dissolute son of the house, and made ready to aid him through the front door.

It was strangely natural to be out on the stage with all those eyes looking up encouragingly. His mother’s face floated past him, other faces that he recognized and remembered.

Bill Kampf stumbled on a line and Basil picked him up quickly and went on.

MISS SAUNDERS: So you are alderman from the Sixth Ward?

RABBIT SIMMONS: Yes, ma’am.

MISS SAUNDERS (shaking her head kittenishly): Just what is an alderman?

CHINAMAN RUDD: An alderman is halfway between a politician and a pirate.

This was one of Basil’s lines that he was particularly proud of--but there was not a sound from the audience, not a smile. A moment later Bill Kampf absent-mindedly wiped his forehead with his handkerchief and then stared at it, startled by the red stains of make-up on it--and the audience roared. The theater was like that.

MISS SAUNDERS: Then you believe in spirits, Mr. Rudd.

CHINAMAN RUDD: Yes, ma’am, I certainly do believe in spirits. Have you got any?

The first big scene came. On the darkened stage a window rose slowly and Mayall De Bec, “in a full evening dress,” climbed over the sill. He was tiptoeing cautiously from one side of the stage to the other, when Leilia Van Baker came in. For a moment she was frightened, but he assured her that he was a friend of her brother Victor. They talked. She told him naïvely yet feelingly of her admiration for The Shadow, of whose exploits she had read. She hoped, though, that The Shadow would not come here tonight, as the family jewels were all in that safe at the right.

The stranger was hungry. He had been late for his dinner and so had not been able to get any that night. Would he have some crackers and milk? That would be fine. Scarcely had she left the room when he was on his knees by the safe, fumbling at the catch, undeterred by the unpromising word “Cake” stencilled on the safe’s front. It swung open, but he heard footsteps outside and closed it just as Leilia came back with the crackers and milk.

They lingered, obviously attracted to each other. Miss Saunders came in, very kittenish, and was introduced. Again Evelyn mimicked her behind her back and the audience roared. Other members of the household appeared and were introduced to the stranger.

What’s this? A banging at the door, and Mulligan, a policeman, rushes in.

We have just received word from the Central Office that the notorious Shadow has been seen climbing in the window! No one can leave this house tonight!

The curtain fell. The first rows of the audience--the younger brothers and sisters of the cast--were extravagant in their enthusiasm. The actors took a bow.

A moment later Basil found himself alone with Evelyn Beebe on the stage. A weary doll in her make-up she was leaning against a table.

“Heigh-ho, Basil,” she said.

She had not quite forgiven him for holding her to her promise after her little brother’s mumps had postponed their trip East, and Basil had tactfully avoided her, but now they met in the genial glow of excitement and success.

“You were wonderful,” he said--”Wonderful!”

He lingered a moment. He could never please her, for she wanted someone like herself, someone who could reach her through her senses, like Hubert Blair. Her intuition told her that Basil was of a certain vague consequence; beyond that his incessant attempts to make people think and feel, bothered and wearied her. But suddenly, in the glow of the evening, they leaned forward and kissed peacefully, and from that moment, because they had no common ground even to quarrel on, they were friends for life.

When the curtain rose upon the second act Basil slipped down a flight of stairs and up to another to the back of the hall, where he stood watching in the darkness. He laughed silently when the audience laughed, enjoying it as if it were a play he had never seen before.

There was a second and a third act scene that were very similar. In each of them The Shadow, alone on the stage, was interrupted by Miss Saunders. Mayall De Bec, having had but ten days of rehearsal, was inclined to confuse the two, but Basil was totally unprepared for what happened. Upon Connie’s entrance Mayall spoke his third-act line and involuntarily Connie answered in kind.

Others coming on the stage were swept up in the nervousness and confusion, and suddenly they were playing the third act in the middle of the second. It happened so quickly that for a moment Basil had only a vague sense that something was wrong. Then he dashed down one stairs and up another and into the wings, crying:

“Let down the curtain! Let down the curtain!”

The boys who stood there aghast sprang to the rope. In a minute Basil, breathless, was facing the audience.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “there’s been changes in the cast and what just happened was a mistake. If you’ll excuse us we’d like to do that scene over.”

He stepped back in the wings to a flutter of laughter and applause.

“All right, Mayall!” he called excitedly. “On the stage alone. Your line is: ‘I just want to see that the jewels are all right,’ and Connie’s is: ‘Go ahead, don’t mind me.’ All right! Curtain up!”

In a moment things righted themselves. Someone brought water for Miss Halliburton, who was in a state of collapse, and as the act ended they all took a curtain call once more. Twenty minutes later it was over. The hero clasped Leilia Van Baker to his breast, confessing that he was The Shadow, “and a captured Shadow at that”; the curtain went up and down, up and down; Miss Halliburton was dragged unwillingly on the stage and the ushers came up the aisles laden with flowers. Then everything became informal and the actors mingled happily with the audience, laughing and important, congratulated from all sides. An old man whom Basil didn’t know came up to him and shook his hand, saying, “You’re a young man that’s going to be heard from some day,” and a reporter from the paper asked him if he was really only fifteen. It might all have been very bad and demoralizing for Basil, but it was already behind him. Even as the crowd melted away and the last few people spoke to him and went out, he felt a great vacancy come into his heart. It was over, it was done and gone--all that work, and interest and absorption. It was a hollowness like fear.

“Good night, Miss Halliburton. Good night, Evelyn.”

“Good night, Basil. Congratulations, Basil. Good night.”

“Where’s my coat? Good night, Basil.”

“Leave your costumes on the stage, please. They’ve got to go back tomorrow.”

He was almost the last to leave, mounting to the stage for a moment and looking around the deserted hall. His mother was waiting and they strolled home together through the first cool night of the year.

“Well, I thought it went very well indeed. Were you satisfied?” He didn’t answer for a moment. “Weren’t you satisfied with the way it went?”

“Yes.” He turned his head away.

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothing,” and then, “Nobody really cares, do they?”

“About what?”

“About anything.”

“Everybody cares about different things. I care about you, for instance.”

Instinctively he ducked away from a hand extended caressingly toward him: “Oh, don’t. I don’t mean like that.”

“You’re just overwrought, dear.”

“I am not overwrought. I just feel sort of sad.”

“You shouldn’t feel sad. Why, people told me after the play--”

“Oh, that’s all over. Don’t talk about that--don’t ever talk to me about that any more.”

“Then what are you sad about?”

“Oh, about a little boy.”

“What little boy?”

“Oh, little Ham--you wouldn’t understand.”

“When we get home I want you to take a real hot bath and quiet your nerves.”

“All right.”

But when he got home he fell immediately into deep sleep on the sofa. She hesitated. Then covering him with a blanket and a comforter, she pushed a pillow under his protesting head and went upstairs.

She knelt for a long time beside her bed.

“God, help him! help him,” she prayed, “because he needs help that I can’t give him any more.”

THE PERFECT LIFE

I

When he came into the dining room, a little tired, but with his clothes hanging cool and free on him after his shower, the whole school stood up and clapped and cheered until he slunk down into his seat. From one end of the table to the other, people leaned forward and smiled at him.

“Nice work, Lee. Not your fault we didn’t win.”

Basil knew that he had been good. Up to the last whistle he could feel his expended energy miraculously replacing itself after each surpassing effort. But he couldn’t realize his success all at once, and only little episodes lingered with him, such as when that shaggy Exeter tackle stood up big in the line and said, “Let’s get that quarter! He’s yellow.” Basil shouted back, “Yellow your gra’mother!” and the linesman grinned good-naturedly, knowing it wasn’t true. During that gorgeous hour bodies had no weight or force; Basil lay under piles of them, tossed himself in front of them without feeling the impact, impatient only to be on his feet dominating those two green acres once more. At the end of the first half he got loose for sixty yards and a touchdown, but the whistle had blown and it was not allowed. That was the high point of the game for St. Regis. Outweighed ten pounds to the man, they wilted down suddenly in the fourth quarter and Exeter put over two touchdowns, glad to win over a school whose membership was only one hundred and thirty-five.

When lunch was over and the school was trooping out of the dining hall, the Exeter coach came over to Basil and said:

“Lee, that was about the best game I’ve ever seen played by a prep-school back, and I’ve seen a lot of them.”

Doctor Bacon beckoned to him. He was standing with two old St. Regis boys, up from Princeton for the day.

“It was a very exciting game, Basil. We are all very proud of the team and--ah--especially of you.” And, as if this praise had been an indiscretion, he hastened to add: “And of all the others.”

He presented him to the two alumni. One of them, John Granby, Basil knew by reputation. He was said to be a “big man” at Princeton--serious, upright, handsome, with a kindly smile and large, earnest blue eyes. He had graduated from St. Regis before Basil entered.

“That was pretty work, Lee!” Basil made the proper deprecatory noises. “I wonder if you’ve got a moment this afternoon when we could have a little talk.”

“Why, yes, sir.” Basil was flattered. “Any time you say.”

“Suppose we take a walk about three o’clock. My train goes at five.”

“I’d like to very much.”

He walked on air to his room in the Sixth Form House. One short year ago he had been perhaps the most unpopular boy at St. Regis--”Bossy” Lee. Only occasionally did people forget and call him “Bossy” now, and then they corrected themselves immediately.

A youngster leaned out of the window of Mitchell House as he passed and cried, “Good work!” The negro gardener, trimming a hedge, chuckled and called, “You almost beatum by y’ own self.” Mr. Hicks the housemaster cried, “They ought to have given you that touchdown! That was a crime!” as Basil passed his door. It was a frosty gold October day, tinged with the blue smoke of Indian summer, weather that set him dreaming of future splendors, triumphant descents upon cities, romantic contacts with mysterious and scarcely mortal girls. In his room he floated off into an ambulatory dream in which he walked up and down repeating to himself tag ends of phrases: “by a prep-school back, and I’ve seen a lot of them.” . . . “Yellow your gra’mother!” . . . “You get off side again and I’ll kick your fat bottom for you!”

Suddenly he rolled on his bed with laughter. The threatened one had actually apologized between quarters--it was Pork Corrigan who only last year had chased him up two flights of stairs.

At three he met John Granby and they set off along the Grunwald Pike, following a long, low red wall that on fair mornings always suggested to Basil an adventurous quest like in “The Broad Highway.” John Granby talked awhile about Princeton, but when he realized that Yale was an abstract ideal deep in Basil’s heart, he gave up. After a moment a far-away expression, a smile that seemed a reflection of another and brighter world, spread over his handsome face.

“Lee, I love St.RegisSchool,” he said suddenly. “I spent the happiest years of my life here. I owe it a debt I can never repay.” Basil didn’t answer and Granby turned to him suddenly. “I wonder if you realize what you could do here.”

“What? Me?”

“I wonder if you know the effect on the whole school of that wonderful game you played this morning.”

“It wasn’t so good.”

“It’s like you to say that,” declared Granby emphatically, “but it isn’t the truth. However, I didn’t come out here to sing your praises. Only I wonder if you realize your power for good. I mean your power of influencing all these boys to lead clean, upright, decent lives.”

“I never thought about that,” said Basil, somewhat startled; “I never thought about--”

Granby slapped him smartly on the shoulder.

“Since this morning a responsibility has come to you that you can’t dodge. From this morning every boy in this school who goes around smoking cigarettes behind the gym and reeking with nicotine is a little bit your responsibility; every bit of cursing and swearing, or of learning to take the property of others by stealing milk and food supplies out of the pantry at night is a little bit your responsibility.”

He broke off. Basil looked straight ahead, frowning.

“Gee!” he said.

“I mean it,” continued Granby, his eyes shining. “You have the sort of opportunity very few boys have. I’m going to tell you a little story. Up at Princeton I knew two boys who were wrecking their lives with drink. I could have said, ‘It’s not my affair,’ and let them go to pieces their own way, but when I looked deep into my own heart I found I couldn’t. So I went to them frankly and put it up to them fairly and squarely, and those two boys haven’t--at least one of them hasn’t--touched a single drop of liquor from that day to this.”

“But I don’t think anybody in school drinks,” objected Basil. “At least there was a fellow named Bates that got fired last year--”

“It doesn’t matter,” John Granby interrupted. “Smoking leads to drinking and drinking leads to--other things.”

For an hour Granby talked and Basil listened; the red wall beside the road and the apple-heavy branches overhead seemed to become less vivid minute by minute as his thoughts turned inward. He was deeply affected by what he considered the fine unselfishness of this man who took the burdens of others upon his shoulders. Granby missed his train, but he said that didn’t matter if he had succeeded in planting a sense of responsibility in Basil’s mind.

Basil returned to his room awed, sobered and convinced. Up to this time he had always considered himself rather bad; in fact, the last hero character with which he had been able to identify himself was Hairbreadth Harry in the comic supplement, when he was ten. Though he often brooded, his brooding was dark and nameless and never concerned with moral questions. The real restraining influence on him was fear--the fear of being disqualified from achievement and power.

But this meeting with John Granby had come at a significant moment. After this morning’s triumph, life at school scarcely seemed to hold anything more--and here was something new. To be perfect, wonderful inside and out--as Granby had put it, to try to lead the perfect life. Granby had outlined the perfect life to him, not without a certain stress upon its material rewards such as honor and influence at college, and Basil’s imagination was already far in the future. When he was tapped last man for Skull and Bones at Yale and shook his head with a sad sweet smile, somewhat like John Granby’s, pointing to another man who wanted it more, a burst of sobbing would break from the assembled crowd. Then, out into the world, where, at the age of twenty-five, he would face the nation from the inaugural platform on the Capitol steps, and all around him his people would lift up their faces in admiration and love. . . .

As he thought he absent-mindedly consumed half a dozen soda crackers and a bottle of milk, left from a pantry raid the night before. Vaguely he realized that this was one of the things he was giving up, but he was very hungry. However, he reverently broke off the train of his reflections until he was through.

Outside his window the autumn dusk was split with shafts of lights from passing cars. In these cars were great football players and lovely débutantes, mysterious adventuresses and international spies--rich, gay, glamorous people moving toward brilliant encounters in New York, at fashionable dances and secret cafés, or on roof gardens under the autumn moon. He sighed; perhaps he could blend in these more romantic things later. To be of great wit and conversational powers, and simultaneously strong and serious and silent. To be generous and open and self-sacrificing, yet to be somewhat mysterious and sensitive and even a little bitter with melancholy. To be both light and dark. To harmonize this, to melt all this down into a single man--ah, there was something to be done. The very thought of such perfection crystallized his vitality into an ecstasy of ambition. For a moment longer his soul followed the speeding lights toward the metropolis; then resolutely he arose, put out his cigarette on the window sill, and turning on his reading lamp, began to note down a set of requirements for the perfect life.

II

One month later George Dorsey, engaged in the painful duty of leading his mother around the school grounds, reached the comparative seclusion of the tennis courts and suggested eagerly that she rest herself upon a bench.

Hitherto his conversation had confined itself to a few hoarse advices, such as “That’s the gym,” . . . “That’s Cuckoo Conklin that teaches French. Everybody hates him.” . . . “Please don’t call me ‘Brother’ in front of boys.” Now his face took on the preoccupied expression peculiar to adolescents in the presence of their parents. He relaxed. He waited to be asked things.

“Now, about Thanksgiving, George. Who is this boy you’re bringing home?”

“His name is Basil Lee.”

“Tell me something about him.”

“There isn’t anything to tell. He’s just a boy in the Sixth Form, about sixteen.”

“Is he a nice boy?”

“Yes. He lives in St. Paul, Minnesota. I asked him a long time ago.”

A certain reticence in her son’s voice interested Mrs. Dorsey.

“Do you mean you’re sorry you asked him? Don’t you like him any more?”

“Sure I like him.”

“Because there’s no use bringing anyone you don’t like. You could just explain that your mother has made other plans.”

“But I like him,” George insisted, and then he added hesitantly: “It’s just some funny way he’s got to be lately.”

“How?”

“Oh, just sort of queer.”

“But how, George? I don’t want you to bring anyone into the house that’s queer.”

“He isn’t exactly queer. He just gets people aside and talks to them. Then he sort of smiles at them.”

Mrs. Dorsey was mystified. “Smiles at them?”

“Yeah. He gets them off in a corner somewheres and talks to them as long as they can stand it, and then he smiles”--his own lips twisted into a peculiar grimace--”like that.”

“What does he talk about?”

“Oh, about swearing and smoking and writing home and a lot of stuff like that. Nobody pays any attention except one boy he’s got doing the same thing. He got stuck up or something because he was so good at football.”

“Well, if you don’t want him, don’t let’s have him.”

“Oh, no,” George cried in alarm. “I’ve got to have him. I asked him.”

Naturally, Basil was unaware of this conversation when, one morning, a week later, the Dorseys’ chauffeur relieved them of their bags in the Grand Central station. There was a slate-pink light over the city and people in the streets carried with them little balloons of frosted breath. About them the buildings broke up through many planes toward heaven, at their base the wintry color of an old man’s smile, on through diagonals of diluted gold, edged with purple where the cornices floated past the stationary sky.

In a long, low, English town car--the first of the kind that Basil had ever seen--sat a girl of about his own age. As they came up she received her brother’s kiss perfunctorily, nodded stiffly to Basil and murmured, “how-d’y’-do” without smiling. She said nothing further but seemed absorbed in meditations of her own. At first, perhaps because of her extreme reserve, Basil received no especial impression of her, but before they reached the Dorseys’ house he began to realize that she was one of the prettiest girls he had ever seen in his life.

It was a puzzling face. Her long eyelashes lay softly against her pale cheeks, almost touching them, as if to conceal the infinite boredom in her eyes, but when she smiled, her expression was illumined by a fiery and lovely friendliness, as if she were saying, “Go on; I’m listening. I’m fascinated. I’ve been waiting--oh, ages--for just this moment with you.” Then she remembered that she was shy or bored; the smile vanished, the gray eyes half closed again. Almost before it had begun, the moment was over, leaving a haunting and unsatisfied curiosity behind.

The Dorseys’ house was on Fifty-third Street. Basil was astonished first at the narrowness of its white stone front and then at the full use to which the space was put inside. The formal chambers ran the width of the house, artificial sunlight bloomed in the dining-room windows, a small elevator navigated the five stories in deferential silence. For Basil there was a new world in its compact luxury. It was thrilling and romantic that a foothold on this island was more precious than the whole rambling sweep of the James J. Hill house at home. In his excitement the feel of school dropped momentarily away from him. He was possessed by the same longing for a new experience, that his previous glimpses of New York had aroused. In the hard bright glitter of Fifth Avenue, in this lovely girl with no words to waste beyond a mechanical “How-d’y’-do,” in the perfectly organized house, he recognized nothing, and he knew that to recognize nothing in his surroundings was usually a guaranty of adventure.

But his mood of the last month was not to be thrown off so lightly. There was now an ideal that came first. A day mustn’t pass when he wasn’t, as John Granby put it, “straight with himself”--and that meant to help others. He could get in a good deal of work on George Dorsey in these five days; other opportunities might turn up, besides. Meanwhile, with the consciousness of making the best of both worlds, he unpacked his grip and got ready for luncheon.

He sat beside Mrs. Dorsey, who found him somewhat precipitately friendly in a Midwestern way, but polite, apparently not unbalanced. He told her he was going to be a minister and immediately he didn’t believe it himself; but he saw that it interested Mrs. Dorsey and let it stand.

The afternoon was already planned; they were going dancing--for those were the great days: Maurice was tangoing in “Over the River,” the Castles were doing a swift stiff-legged walk in the third act of “The Sunshine Girl”--a walk that gave the modern dance a social position and brought the nice girl into the café, thus beginning a profound revolution in American life. The great rich empire was feeling its oats and was out for some not too plebeian, yet not too artistic, fun.

By three o’clock seven young people were assembled, and they started in a limousine for Emil’s. There were two stylish, anæmic girls of sixteen--one bore an impressive financial name--and two freshmen from Harvard who exchanged private jokes and were attentive only to Jobena Dorsey. Basil expected that presently everyone would begin asking each other such familiar questions as “Where do you go to school?” and “Oh, do you know So-and-So?” and the party would become more free and easy, but nothing of the sort happened. The atmosphere was impersonal; he doubted if the other four guests knew his name. “In fact,” he thought, “it’s just as if everyone’s waiting for some one else to make a fool of himself.” Here again was something new and unrecognizable; he guessed that it was a typical part of New York.

They reached Emil’s. Only in certain Paris restaurants where the Argentines step untiringly through their native coils does anything survive of the dance craze as it existed just before the war. At that time it was not an accompaniment to drinking or love-making or hailing in the dawn--it was an end in itself. Sedentary stockbrokers, grandmothers of sixty, Confederate veterans, venerable statesmen and scientists, sufferers from locomotor ataxia, wanted not only to dance but to dance beautifully. Fantastic ambitions bloomed in hitherto sober breasts, violent exhibitionism cropped out in families modest for generations. Nonentities with long legs became famous overnight, and there were rendezvous where they could renew the dance, if they wished, next morning. Because of a neat glide or an awkward stumble careers were determined and engagements were made or broken, while the tall Englishman and the girl in the Dutch cap called the tune.

As they went into the cabaret sudden anxiety attacked Basil--modern dancing was one of the things upon which John Granby had been most severe.

He approached George Dorsey in the coat room.

“There’s an extra man, so do you suppose I’d be all right if I only danced when there’s a waltz? I’m no good at anything else.”

“Sure. It’s all right with me.” He looked curiously at Basil. “Gosh, have you sworn off everything?”

“No, not everything,” answered Basil uncomfortably.

The floor was already crowded. All ages and several classes of society shuffled around tensely to the nervous, disturbing beats of “Too Much Mustard.” Automatically the other three couples were up and away, leaving Basil at the table. He watched, trying to pretend to himself that he disapproved of it all but was too polite to show it. However, with so much to see, it was difficult to preserve that attitude, and he was gazing with fascination at Jobena’s active feet when a good-looking young man of about nineteen sat down beside him at the table.

“Excuse me,” he said with exaggerated deference. “This Miss Jobena Dorsey’s table?”

“Yes, it is.”

“I’m expected. Name’s De Vinci. Don’t ask me if I’m any relation to the painter.”

“My name’s Lee.”

“All right, Lee. What’ll you have? What are you having?” The waiter arrived with a tray, and De Vinci looked at its contents with disgust. “Tea--all tea. . . . Waiter, bring me a double Bronx. . . . How about you, Lee? Another double Bronx?”

“Oh, no, thanks,” said Basil quickly.

“One then, waiter.”

De Vinci sighed; he had the unmistakable lush look of a man who has been drinking hard for several days.

“Nice dog under that table over there. They oughtn’t to let people smoke if they’re going to bring dogs in here.”

“Why?”

“Hurts their eyes.”

Confusedly Basil deliberated this piece of logic.

“But don’t talk to me about dogs,” said De Vinci with a profound sigh; “I’m trying to keep from thinking of dogs.”

Basil obligingly changed the subject for him by asking him if he was in college.

“Two weeks.” For emphasis De Vinci held up two fingers. “I passed quickly through Yale. First man fired out of ‘15 Sheff.”

“That’s too bad,” said Basil earnestly. He took a deep breath and his lips twisted up in a kindly smile. “Your parents must have felt pretty badly about that.”

De Vinci stared at him as if over a pair of spectacles, but before he could answer, the dance ended and the others came back to the table.

“Hello there, Skiddy.”

“Well, well, Skiddy!”

They all knew him. One of the freshmen yielded him a place next to Jobena and they began to talk together in lowered voices.

“Skiddy De Vinci,” George whispered to Basil. “He and Jobena were engaged last summer, but I think she’s through.” He shook his head. “They used to go off in his mother’s electric up at Bar Harbor; it was disgusting.”

Basil glowed suddenly with excitement as if he had been snapped on like an electric torch. He looked at Jobena--her face, infinitely reserved, lightened momentarily, but this time her smile had gone sad; there was the deep friendliness but not the delight. He wondered if Skiddy De Vinci cared about her being through with him. Perhaps, if he reformed and stopped drinking and went back to Yale, she would change her mind.

The music began again. Basil stared uncomfortably into his cup of tea.

“This is a tango,” said George. “You can dance the tango, can’t you? It’s all right; it’s Spanish.”

Basil considered.

“Sure you can,” insisted George. “It’s Spanish, I tell you. There’s nothing to stop your dancing if it’s Spanish, is there?”

One of the freshmen looked at them curiously. Basil leaned over the table and asked Jobena to dance.

She made a last low-voiced remark to De Vinci before she rose; then, to atone for the slight rudeness, she smiled up at Basil. He was light-headed as they moved out on the floor.

Abruptly she made an outrageous remark and Basil started and nearly stumbled, doubtful that he had heard aright.

“I’ll bet you’ve kissed about a thousand girls in your time,” she said, “with that mouth.”

“What!”

“Not so?”

“Oh, no,” declared Basil. “Really, I--”

Her lids and lashes had drooped again indifferently; she was singing the band’s tune:

“Tango makes you warm inside;

You bend and sway and glide;

There’s nothing far and wide--”

What was the implication--that kissing people was all right; was even admirable? He remembered what John Granby had said: “Every time you kiss a nice girl you may have started her on the road to the devil.”

He thought of his own past--an afternoon on the Kampf’s porch with Minnie Bibble, a ride home from Black Bear Lake with Imogene Bissel in the back seat of the car, a miscellany of encounters running back to games of post office and to childish kisses that were consummated upon an unwilling nose or ear.

That was over; he was never going to kiss another girl until he found the one who would become his wife. It worried him that this girl whom he found lovely should take the matter so lightly. The strange thrill he had felt when George spoke of her “behaving disgustingly” with Skiddy De Vinci in his electric, was transformed into indignation--steadily rising indignation. It was criminal--a girl not yet seventeen.

Suddenly it occurred to him that this was perhaps his responsibility, his opportunity. If he could implant in her mind the futility of it all, the misery she was laying up for herself, his visit to New York would not have been in vain. He could go back to school happy, knowing he had brought to one girl the sort of peace she had never known before.

In fact, the more he thought of Jobena and Skiddy De Vinci in the electric, the madder it made him.

At five they left Emil’s to go to Castle House. There was a thin rain falling and the streets were gleaming. In the excitement of going out into the twilight Jobena slipped her arm quickly through Basil’s.

“There’s too many for the car. Let’s take the hansom.”

She gave the address to a septuagenarian in faded bottle green, and the slanting doors closed upon them, shutting them back away from the rain.

“I’m tired of them,” she whispered. “Such empty faces, except Skiddy’s, and in another hour he won’t be able to even talk straight. He’s beginning to get maudlin about his dog Eggshell that died last month, and that’s always a sign. Do you ever feel the fascination of somebody that’s doomed; who just goes on and on in the way he was born to go, never complaining, never hoping; just sort or resigned to it all?”

His fresh heart cried out against this.

“Nobody has to go to pieces,” he assured her. “They can just turn over a new leaf.”

“Not Skiddy.”

“Anybody,” he insisted. “You just make up your mind and resolve to live a better life, and you’d be surprised how easy it is and how much happier you are.”

She didn’t seem to hear him.

“Isn’t it nice, rolling along in this hansom with the damp blowing in, and you and I back here”--she turned to him and smiled--”together.”

“Yes,” said Basil abstractedly. “The thing is that everybody should try to make their life perfect. They can’t start young enough; in fact, they ought to start about eleven or twelve in order to make their life absolutely perfect.”

“That’s true,” she said. “In a way Skiddy’s life is perfect. He never worries, never regrets. You could put him back at the time of the--oh, the eighteenth century, or whenever it was they had the bucks and beaux--and he’d fit right in.”

“I didn’t mean that,” said Basil in alarm. “That isn’t at all what I mean by the perfect life.”

“You mean something more masterful,” she supplied. “I thought so, when I saw that chin of yours. I’ll bet you just take everything you want.”

Again she looked at him, swayed close to him.

“You don’t understand--” he began.

She put her hand on his arm. “Wait a minute; we’re almost there. Let’s not go in yet. It’s so nice with all the lights going on and it’ll be so hot and crowded in there. Tell him to drive out a few blocks more. I noticed you only danced a few times; I like that. I hate men that pop up at the first sound of music as if their life depended on it. Is it true you’re only sixteen?”

“Yes.”

“You seem older. There’s so much in your face.”

“You don’t understand--” Basil began again desperately.

She spoke through the trap to the cabby:

“Go up Broadway till we tell you to stop.” Sitting back in the cab, she repeated dreamily, “The perfect life. I’d like my life to be perfect. I’d like to suffer, if I could find something worth suffering for, and I’d like to never do anything low or small or mean, but just have big sins.”

“Oh, no!” said Basil, aghast. “That’s no way to feel; that’s morbid. Why, look, you oughtn’t to talk like that--a girl sixteen years old. You ought to--to talk things over with yourself--you ought to think more of the after life.” He stopped, half expecting to be interrupted, but Jobena was silent. “Why, up to a month ago I used to smoke as many as twelve or fifteen cigarettes a day, unless I was training for football. I used to curse and swear and only write home once in a while, so they had to telegraph sometimes to see if I was sick. I had no sense of responsibility. I never thought I could lead a perfect life until I tried.”

He paused, overcome by his emotion.

“Didn’t you?” said Jobena, in a small voice.

“Never. I was just like everybody else, only worse. I used to kiss girls and never think anything about it.”

“What--what changed you?”

“A man I met.” Suddenly he turned to her and, with an effort, caused to spread over his face a caricature of John Granby’s sad sweet smile. “Jobena, you--you have the makings of a fine girl in you. It grieved me a lot this afternoon to see you smoking nicotine and dancing modern suggestive dances that are simply savagery. And the way you talk about kissing. What if you meet some man that has kept himself pure and never gone around kissing anybody except his family, and you have to tell him that you went around behaving disgustingly?”

She leaned back suddenly and spoke crisply through the panel.

“You can go back now--the address we gave you.”

“You ought to cut it out.” Again Basil smiled at her, straining and struggling to lift her up out of herself to a higher plane. “Promise me you’ll try. It isn’t so hard. And then some day when some upright and straightforward man comes along and says, ‘Will you marry me?’ you’ll be able to say you never danced suggestive modern dances, except the Spanish tango and the Boston, and you never kissed anybody--that is, since you were sixteen, and maybe you wouldn’t have to say that you ever kissed anybody at all.”

“That wouldn’t be the truth,” she said in an odd voice. “Shouldn’t I tell him the truth?”

“You could tell him you didn’t know any better.”

“Oh.”

To Basil’s regret the cab drew up at Castle House. Jobena hurried in, and to make up for her absence, devoted herself exclusively to Skiddy and the Harvard freshmen for the remainder of the afternoon. But doubtless she was thinking hard--as he had done a month before. With a little more time he could have clinched his argument by showing the influence that one leading a perfect life could exert on others. He must find an opportunity tomorrow.

But next day he scarcely saw her. She was out for luncheon and she did not appear at her rendezvous with Basil and George after the matinée; they waited in vain in the Biltmore grill for an hour. There was company at dinner and Basil began to feel a certain annoyance when she disappeared immediately afterwards. Was it possible that his seriousness had frightened her? In that case it was all the more necessary to see her, reassure her, bind her with the invisible cords of high purpose to himself. Perhaps--perhaps she was the ideal girl that he would some day marry. At the gorgeous idea his whole being was flooded with ecstasy. He planned out the years of waiting, each one helping the other to lead the perfect life, neither of them ever kissing anybody else--he would insist on that, absolutely insist on it; she must promise not even to see Skiddy De Vinci--and then marriage and a life of service, perfection, fame and love.

The two boys went to the theatre again that night. When they came home a little after eleven, George went upstairs to say good night to his mother, leaving Basil to make reconnaissance in the ice box. The intervening pantry was dark and as he fumbled unfamiliarly for the light he was startled by hearing a voice in the kitchen pronounce his name:

“--Mr. Basil Duke Lee.”

“Seemed all right to me.” Basil recognized the drawling tone of Skiddy De Vinci. “Just a kid.”

“On the contrary, he’s a nasty little prig,” said Jobena decisively. “He gave me the old-fashioned moral lecture about nicotine and modern dancing and kissing, and about that upright, straightforward man that was going to come along some day--you know that upright straightforward man they’re always talking about. I suppose he meant himself, because he told me he led a perfect life. Oh, it was all so oily and horrible, it made me positively sick. Skiddy. For the first time in my life I was tempted to take a cocktail.”

“Oh, he’s just a kid,” said Skiddy moderately. “It’s a phase. He’ll get over it.”

Basil listened in horror; his face burning, his mouth ajar. He wanted above all things to get away, but his dismay rooted him to the floor.

“What I think of righteous men couldn’t be put on paper,” said Jobena after a moment. “I suppose I’m just naturally bad, Skiddy; at least, all my contacts with upright young men have affected me like this.”

“Then how about it, Jobena?”

There was a long silence.

“This has done something to me,” she said finally. “Yesterday I thought I was through with you, Skiddy, but ever since this happened I’ve had a vision of a thousand Mr. Basil Duke Lees, all grown up and asking me to share their perfect lives. I refuse to--definitely. If you like, I’ll marry you in Greenwich tomorrow.”

III

At one Basil’s light was still burning. Walking up and down his room, he made out case after case for himself, with Jobena in the role of villainness, but each case was wrecked upon the rock of his bitter humiliation. “A nasty little prig”--the words, uttered with conviction and scorn, had driven the high principles of John Granby from his head. He was a slave to his own admirations, and in the past twenty-four hours Jobena’s personality had become the strongest force in his life; deep in his heart he believed that what she had said was true.

He woke up on Thanksgiving morning with dark circles rimming his eyes. His bag, packed for immediate departure, brought back the debacle of the night before, and as he lay staring at the ceiling, relaxed by sleep, giant tears welled up into his eyes. An older man might have taken refuge behind the virtue of his intentions, but Basil knew no such refuge. For sixteen years he had gone his own way without direction, due to his natural combativeness and to the fact that no older man save John Granby had yet captured his imagination. Now John Granby had vanished in the night, and it seemed the natural thing to Basil that he should struggle back to rehabilitation unguided and alone.

One thing he knew--Jobena must not marry Skiddy De Vinci. That was a responsibility she could not foist upon him. If necessary, he would go to her father and tell what he knew.

Emerging from his room half an hour later, he met her in the hall. She was dressed in a smart blue street suit with a hobble skirt and a ruff of linen at her throat. Her eyes opened a little and she wished him a polite good morning.

“I’ve got to talk to you,” he said quickly.

“I’m terribly sorry.” To his intense discomfort she flashed her smile at him, just as if nothing had happened. “I’ve only a minute now.”

“It’s something very important. I know you don’t like me--”

“What nonsense!” She laughed cheerfully. “Of course I like you. How did you get such a silly idea in your head?”

Before he could answer, she waved her hand hastily and ran down the stairs.

George had gone to town and Basil spent the morning walking through large deliberate snowflakes in Central Park rehearsing what he should say to Mr. Dorsey.

“It’s nothing to me, but I cannot see your only daughter throw away her life on a dissipated man. If I had a daughter of my own who was about to throw away her life, I would want somebody to tell me, and so I have come to tell you. Of course, after this I cannot stay in your house, and so I bid you good-by.”

At quarter after twelve, waiting anxiously in the drawing-room, he heard Mr. Dorsey come in. He rushed downstairs, but Mr. Dorsey had already entered the lift and closed the door. Turning about, Basil raced against the machine to the third story and caught him in the hall.

“In regard to your daughter,” he began excitedly--”in regard to your daughter--”

“Well,” said Mr. Dorsey, “is something the matter with Jobena?”

“I want to talk to you about her.”

Mr. Dorsey laughed. “Are you going to ask her hand in marriage?”

“Oh, no.”

“Well, suppose we have a talk after dinner when we’re full of turkey and stuffing, and feeling happy.”

He clapped his hand on Basil’s shoulder and went on into his room.

It was a large family dinner party, and under cover of the conversation Basil kept an attentive eye on Jobena, trying to determine her desperate intention from her clothes and the expression of her face. She was adept at concealing her real emotions, as he had discovered this morning, but once or twice he saw her eyes wander to her watch and a look of abstraction come into them.

There was coffee afterward in the library, and, it seemed to Basil, interminable chatter. When Jobena arose suddenly and left the room, he moved just as quickly to Mr. Dorsey’s side.

“Well, young man, what can I do for you?”

“Why--” Basil hesitated.

“Now is the time to ask me--when I’m well fed and happy.”

“Why--” Again Basil stopped.

“Don’t be shy. It’s something about my Jobena.”

But a peculiar thing had happened to Basil. In sudden detachment he saw himself from the outside--saw himself sneaking to Mr. Dorsey, in a house in which he was a guest, to inform against a girl.

“Why--” he repeated blankly.

“The question is: Can you support her?” said Mr. Dorsey jovially. “And the second is: Can you control her?”

“I forgot what it was I wanted to say,” Basil blurted out.

He hurried from the library, his brain in a turmoil. Dashing upstairs, he knocked at the door of Jobena’s room. There was no answer and he opened the door and glanced inside. The room was empty, but a half-packed suitcase lay on the bed.

“Jobena,” he called anxiously. There was no answer. A maid passing along the hall told him Miss Jobena was having a marcel wave in her mother’s room.

He hurried downstairs and into his hat and coat, racking his brains for the address where they had dropped Skiddy De Vinci the other afternoon. Sure that he would recognize the building, he drove down Lexington Avenue in a taxi, tried three doors, and trembled with excitement as he found the name “Leonard Edward Davies De Vinci” on a card beside a bell. When he rang, a latch clicked on an inner door.

He had no plan. Failing argument, he had a vague melodramatic idea of knocking him down, tying him up and letting him lie there until it blew over. In view of the fact that Skiddy outweighed him by forty pounds, this was a large order.

Skiddy was packing--the overcoat he tossed hastily over his suitcase did not serve to hide this fact from Basil. There was an open bottle of whisky on his littered dresser, and beside it a half-full glass.

Concealing his surprise, he invited Basil to sit down.

“I had to come and see you”--Basil tried to make his voice calm--”about Jobena.”

“Jobena?” Skiddy frowned. “What about her? Did she send you here?”

“Oh, no.” Basil swallowed hard, stalling for time. “I thought--maybe you could advise me--you see, I don’t think she likes me, and I don’t know why.”

Skiddy’s face relaxed. “That’s nonsense. Of course she likes you. Have a drink?”

“No. At least not now.”

Skiddy finished his glass. After a slight hesitation he removed his overcoat from the suitcase.

“Excuse me if I go on packing, will you? I’m going out of town.”

“Certainly.”

“Better have a drink.”

“No, I’m on the water wagon--just now.”

“When you get worrying about nothing, the thing to do is to have a drink.”

The phone rang and he answered it, squeezing the receiver close to his ear:

“Yes. . . . I can’t talk now. . . . Yes. . . . At half-past five then. It’s now about four. . . . I’ll explain why when I see you. . . . Good-by.” He hung up. “My office,” he said with affected nonchalance . . . “Won’t you have a little drink?”

“No, thanks.”

“Never worry. Enjoy yourself.”

“It’s hard to be visiting in a house and know somebody doesn’t like you.”

“But she does like you. Told me so herself the other day.”

While Skiddy packed they discussed the question. He was a little hazy and extremely nervous, and a single question asked in the proper serious tone would send him rambling along indefinitely. As yet Basil had evolved no plan save to stay with Skiddy and wait for the best opportunity of coming into the open.

But staying with Skiddy was going to be difficult; he was becoming worried at Basil’s tenacity. Finally he closed his suitcase with one of those definite snaps, took down a large drink quickly and said:

“Well, guess I ought to get started.”

They went out together and Skiddy hailed a taxi.

“Which way are you going?” Basil asked.

“Uptown--I mean downtown.”

“I’ll ride with you,” volunteered Basil. “We might--we might have a drink in the--Biltmore.”

Skiddy hesitated. “I’ll drop you there,” he said.

When they reached the Biltmore, Basil made no move to get out.

“You’re coming in with me, aren’t you?” he asked in a surprised voice.

Frowning, Skiddy looked at his watch. “I haven’t got much time.”

Basil’s face fell; he sat back in the car.

“Well, there’s no use my going in alone, because I look sort of young and they wouldn’t give me anything unless I was with an older man.”

The appeal succeeded. Skiddy got out, saying, “I’ll have to hurry,” and they went into the bar.

“What’ll it be?”

“Something strong,” Basil said, lighting his first cigarette in a month.

“Two stingers,” ordered Skiddy.

“Let’s have something really strong.”

“Two double stingers then.”

Out of the corner of his eye Basil looked at the clock. It was twenty after five. Waiting until Skiddy was in the act of taking down his drink he signalled to the waiter to repeat the order.

“Oh, no!” cried Skiddy.

“You’ll have to have one on me.”

“You haven’t touched yours.”

Basil sipped his drink, hating it. He saw that with the new alcohol Skiddy had relaxed a little.

“Got to be going,” he said automatically. “Important engagement.”

Basil had an inspiration.

“I’m thinking of buying a dog,” he announced.

“Don’t talk about dogs,” said Skiddy mournfully. “I had an awful experience about a dog. I’ve just got over it.”

“Tell me about it.”

“I don’t even like to talk about it; it was awful.”

“I think a dog is the best friend a man has,” Basil said.

“Do you?” Skiddy slapped the table emphatically with his open hand. “So do I, Lee. So do I.”

“Nobody ever loves him like a dog,” went on Basil, staring off sentimentally into the distance.

The second round of double stingers arrived.

“Let me tell you about my dog that I lost,” said Skiddy. He looked at his watch. “I’m late, but a minute won’t make any difference, if you like dogs.”

“I like them better than anything in the world.” Basil raised his first glass, still half full. “Here’s to man’s best friend--a dog.”

They drank. There were tears in Skiddy’s eyes.

“Let me tell you. I raised this dog Eggshell from a pup. He was a beauty--an Airedale, sired by McTavish VI.”

“I bet he was a beauty.”

“He was! Let me tell you--”

As Skiddy warmed to his subject, Basil pushed his new drink toward Skiddy, whose hand presently closed upon the stem. Catching the bartender’s attention, he ordered two more. The clock stood at five minutes of six.

Skiddy rambled on. Ever afterward the sight of a dog story in a magazine caused Basil an attack of acute nausea. At half-past six Skiddy rose uncertainly.

“I’ve gotta go. Got important date. Be mad.”

“All right. We’ll stop by the bar and have one more.”

The bartender knew Skiddy and they talked for a few minutes, for time seemed of no account now. Skiddy had a drink with his old friend to wish him luck on a very important occasion. Then he had another.

At a quarter before eight o’clock Basil piloted Leonard Edward Davies De Vinci from the hotel bar, leaving his suitcase in care of the bartender.

“Important engagement,” Skiddy mumbled as they hailed a taxi.

“Very important,” Basil agreed. “I’m going to see that you get there.”

When the car rolled up, Skiddy tumbled in and Basil gave the address to the driver.

“Good-by and thanks!” Skiddy called fervently. “Ought to go in, maybe, and drink once more to best friend man ever had.”

“Oh, no,” said Basil, “it’s too important.”

“You’re right. It’s too important.”

The car rolled off and Basil followed it with his eye as it turned the corner. Skiddy was going out on Long Island to visit Eggshell’s grave.

IV

Basil had never had a drink before and, now with his jubilant relief, the three cocktails that he had been forced to down mounted swiftly to his head. On his way to the Dorseys’ house he threw back his head and roared with laughter. The self-respect he had lost last night rushed back to him; he felt himself tingling with the confidence of power.

As the maid opened the door for him he was aware subconsciously that there was someone in the lower hall. He waited till the maid disappeared; then stepping to the door of the coat room, he pulled it open. Beside her suitcase stood Jobena, wearing a look of mingled impatience and fright. Was he deceived by his ebullience or, when she saw him, did her face lighten with relief?

“Hello.” She took off her coat and hung it up as if that was her purpose there, and came out under the lights. Her face, pale and lovely, composed itself, as if she had sat down and folded her hands.

“George was looking for you,” she said indifferently.

“Was he? I’ve been with a friend.”

With an expression of surprise she sniffed the faint aroma of cocktails.

“But my friend went to visit his dog’s tomb, so I came home.”

She stiffened suddenly. “You’ve been with Skiddy?”

“He was telling me about his dog,” said Basil gravely. “A man’s best friend is his dog after all.”

She sat down and stared at him, wide-eyed.

“Has Skiddy passed out?”

“He went to see a dog.”

“Oh, the fool!” she cried.

“Were you expecting him? Is it possible that that’s your suitcase?”

“It’s none of your business.”

Basil took it out of the closet and deposited it in the elevator.

“You won’t need it tonight,” he said.

Her eyes shone with big despairing tears.

“You oughtn’t to drink,” she said brokenly. “Can’t you see what it’s made of him?”

“A man’s best friend is a stinger.”

“You’re just sixteen. I suppose all that you told me the other afternoon was a joke--I mean, about the perfect life.”

“All a joke,” he agreed.

“I thought you meant it. Doesn’t anybody ever mean anything?”

“I like you better than any girl I ever knew,” Basil said quietly. “I mean that.”

“I liked you, too, until you said that about my kissing people.”

He went and stood over her and took her hand.

“Let’s take the bag upstairs before the maid comes in.”

They stepped into the dark elevator and closed the door.

“There’s a light switch somewhere,” she said.

Still holding her hand, he drew her close and tightened his arm around her in the darkness. “Just for this once we don’t need the light.”

Going back on the train, George Dorsey came to a sudden resolution. His mouth tightened.

“I don’t want to say anything, Basil--” He hesitated. “But look--Did you have something to drink Thanksgiving Day?”

Basil frowned and nodded.

“Sometimes I’ve got to,” he said soberly. “I don’t know what it is. All my family died of liquor.”

“Gee!” exclaimed George.

“But I’m through. I promised Jobena I wouldn’t touch anything more till I’m twenty-one. She feels that if I go on with this constant dissipation it’ll ruin my life.”

George was silent for a moment.

“What were you and she talking about those last few days? Gosh, I thought you were supposed to be visiting me.”

“It’s--it’s sort of sacred,” Basil said placidly. . . . “Look here; if we don’t have anything fit to eat for dinner, let’s get Sam to leave the pantry window unlocked tonight.”

FIRST BLOOD

“I remember your coming to me in despair when Josephine was about three!” cried Mrs. Bray. “George was furious because he couldn’t decide what to go to work at, so he used to spank little Josephine.”

“I remember,” said Josephine’s mother.

“And so this is Josephine.”

This was, indeed, Josephine. She looked at Mrs. Bray and smiled, and Mrs. Bray’s eyes hardened imperceptibly. Josephine kept on smiling.

“How old are you, Josephine?”

“Just sixteen.”

“Oh-h. I would have said you were older.”

At the first opportunity Josephine asked Mrs. Perry, “Can I go to the movies with Lillian this afternoon?”

“No, dear; you have to study.” She turned to Mrs. Bray as if the matter were dismissed--but: “You darn fool,” muttered Josephine audibly.

Mrs. Bray said some words quickly to cover the situation, but, of course, Mrs. Perry could not let it pass unreproved.

“What did you call mother, Josephine?”

“I don’t see why I can’t go to the movies with Lillian.”

Her mother was content to let it go at this.

“Because you’ve got to study. You go somewhere every day, and your father wants it to stop.”

“How crazy!” said Josephine, and she added vehemently, “How utterly insane! Father’s got to be a maniac I think. Next thing he’ll start tearing his hair and think he’s Napoleon or something.”

“No,” interposed Mrs. Bray jovially as Mrs. Perry grew rosy. “Perhaps she’s right. Maybe George is crazy--I’m sure my husband’s crazy. It’s this war.”

But she was not really amused; she thought Josephine ought to be beaten with sticks.

They were talking about Anthony Harker, a contemporary of Josephine’s older sister.

“He’s divine,” Josephine interposed--not rudely, for, despite the foregoing, she was not rude; it was seldom even that she appeared to talk too much, though she lost her temper, and swore sometimes when people were unreasonable. “He’s perfectly--”

“He’s very popular. Personally, I don’t see very much to him. He seems rather superficial.”

“Oh, no, mother,” said Josephine. “He’s far from it. Everybody says he has a great deal of personality--which is more than you can say of most of these jakes. Any girl would be glad to get their hands on him. I’d marry him in a minute.”

She had never thought of this before; in fact, the phrase had been invented to express her feeling for Travis de Coppet. When, presently, tea was served, she excused herself and went to her room.

It was a new house, but the Perrys were far from being new people. They were Chicago Society, and almost very rich, and not uncultured as things went thereabouts in 1914. But Josephine was an unconscious pioneer of the generation that was destined to “get out of hand.”

In her room she dressed herself for going to Lillian’s house, thinking meanwhile of Travis de Coppet and of riding home from the Davidsons’ dance last night. Over his tuxedo, Travis had worn a loose blue cape inherited from an old-fashioned uncle. He was tall and thin, an exquisite dancer, and his eyes had often been described by female contemporaries as “very dark”--to an adult it appeared that he had two black eyes in the collisional sense, and that probably they were justifiably renewed every night; the area surrounding them was so purple, or brown, or crimson, that they were the first thing you noticed about his face, and, save for his white teeth, the last. Like Josephine, he was also something new. There were a lot of new things in Chicago then, but lest the interest of this narrative be divided, it should be remarked that Josephine was the newest thing of all.

Dressed, she went down the stairs and through a softly opening side door, out into the street. It was October and a harsh breeze blew her along under trees without leaves, past houses with cold corners, past caves of the wind that were the mouths of residential streets. From that time until April, Chicago is an indoor city, where entering by a door is like going into another world, for the cold of the lake is unfriendly and not like real northern cold--it serves only to accentuate the things that go on inside. There is no music outdoors, or love-making, and even in prosperous times the wealth that rolls by in limousines is less glamorous than embittering to those on the sidewalk. But in the houses there is a deep, warm quiet, or else an excited, singing noise, as if those within were inventing things like new dances. That is part of what people mean when they say they love Chicago.

Josephine was going to meet her friend Lillian Hammel, but their plan did not include attending the movies. In comparison to it, their mothers would have preferred the most objectionable, the most lurid movie. It was no less than to go for a long auto ride with Travis de Coppet and Howard Page, in the course of which they would kiss not once but a lot. The four of them had been planning this since the previous Saturday, when unkind circumstances had combined to prevent its fulfillment.

Travis and Howard were already there--not sitting down, but still in their overcoats, like symbols of action, hurrying the girls breathlessly into the future. Travis wore a fur collar on his overcoat and carried a gold-headed cane; he kissed Josephine’s hand facetiously yet seriously, and she said, “Hello, Travis!” with the warm affection of a politician greeting a prospective vote. But for a minute the two girls exchanged news aside.

“I saw him,” Lillian whispered, “just now.”

“Did you?”

Their eyes blazed and fused together.

“Isn’t he divine?” said Josephine.

They were referring to Mr. Anthony Harker, who was twenty-two, and unconscious of their existence, save that in the Perry house he occasionally recognized Josephine as Constance’s younger sister.

“He has the most beautiful nose,” cried Lillian, suddenly laughing. “It’s--” She drew it on the air with her finger and they both became hilarious. But Josephine’s face composed itself as Travis’ black eyes, conspicuous as if they had been freshly made the previous night, peered in from the hall.

“Well!” he said tensely.

The four young people went out, passed through fifty bitter feet of wind and entered Page’s car. They were all very confident and knew exactly what they wanted. Both girls were expressly disobeying their parents, but they had no more sense of guilt about it than a soldier escaping from an enemy prison camp. In the back seat, Josephine and Travis looked at each other; she waited as he burned darkly.

“Look,” he said to his hand; it was trembling. “Up till five this morning. Girls from the Follies.”

“Oh, Travis!” she cried automatically, but for the first time a communication such as this failed to thrill her. She took his hand, wondering what the matter was inside herself.

It was quite dark, and he bent over her suddenly, but as suddenly she turned her face away. Annoyed, he made cynical nods with his head and lay back in the corner of the car. He became engaged in cherishing his dark secret--the secret that always made her yearn toward him. She could see it come into his eyes and fill them, down to the cheek bones and up to the brows, but she could not concentrate on him. The romantic mystery of the world had moved into another man.

Travis waited ten minutes for her capitulation; then he tried again, and with this second approach she saw him plain for the first time. It was enough. Josephine’s imagination and her desires were easily exploited up to a certain point, but after that her very impulsiveness protected her. Now, suddenly, she found something real against Travis, and her voice was modulated with lowly sorrow.

“I heard what you did last night. I heard very well.”

“What’s the matter?”

“You told Ed Bement you were in for a big time because you were going to take me home in your car.”

“Who told you that?” he demanded, guilty but belittling.

“Ed Bement did, and he told me he almost hit you in the face when you said it. He could hardly keep restraining himself.”

Once more Travis retired to his corner of the seat. He accepted this as the reason for her coolness, as in a measure it was. In view of Doctor Jung’s theory that innumerable male voices argue in the subconscious of a woman, and even speak through her lips, then the absent Ed Bement was probably speaking through Josephine at that moment.

“I’ve decided not to kiss any more boys, because I won’t have anything left to give the man I really love.”

“Bull!” replied Travis.

“It’s true. There’s been too much talk around Chicago about me. A man certainly doesn’t respect a girl he can kiss whenever he wants to, and I want to be respected by the man I’m going to marry some day.”

Ed Bement would have been overwhelmed had he realized the extent of his dominance over her that afternoon.

Walking from the corner, where the youths discreetly left her, to her house, Josephine felt that agreeable lightness which comes with the end of a piece of work. She would be a good girl now forever, see less of boys, as her parents wished, try to be what Miss Benbower’s school denominated An Ideal Benbower Girl. Then next year, at Breerly, she could be an Ideal Breerly Girl. But the first stars were out over Lake Shore Drive, and all about her she could feel Chicago swinging around its circle at a hundred miles an hour, and Josephine knew that she only wanted to want such wants for her soul’s sake. Actually, she had no desire for achievement. Her grandfather had had that, her parents had had the consciousness of it, but Josephine accepted the proud world into which she was born. This was easy in Chicago, which, unlike New York, was a city state, where the old families formed a caste--intellect was represented by the university professors, and there were no ramifications, save that even the Perrys had to be nice to half a dozen families even richer and more important than themselves. Josephine loved to dance, but the field of feminine glory, the ballroom floor, was something you slipped away from with a man.

As Josephine came to the iron gate of her house, she saw her sister shivering on the top steps with a departing young man; then the front door closed and the man came down the walk. She knew who he was.

He was abstracted, but he recognized her for just a moment in passing.

“Oh, hello,” he said.

She turned all the way round so that he could see her face by the street lamp; she lifted her face full out of her fur collar and toward him, and then smiled.

“Hello,” she said modestly.

They passed. She drew in her head like a turtle.

“Well, now he knows what I look like, anyhow,” she told herself excitedly as she went on into the house.

II

Several days later Constance Perry spoke to her mother in a serious tone:

“Josephine is so conceited that I really think she’s a little crazy.”

“She’s very conceited,” admitted Mrs. Perry. “Father and I were talking and we decided that after the first of the year she should go East to school. But you don’t say a word about it until we know more definitely.”

“Heavens, mother, it’s none too soon! She and that terrible Travis de Coppet running around with his cloak, as if they were about a thousand years old. They came into the Blackstone last week and my spine crawled. They looked just like two maniacs--Travis slinking along, and Josephine twisting her mouth around as if she had St. Vitus dance. Honestly--”

“What did you begin to say about Anthony Harker?” interrupted Mrs. Perry.

“That she’s got a crush on him, and he’s about old enough to be her grandfather.”

“Not quite.”

“Mother, he’s twenty-two and she’s sixteen. Every time Jo and Lillian go by him, they giggle and stare--”

“Come here, Josephine,” said Mrs. Perry.

Josephine came into the room slowly and leaned her backbone against the edge of the opened door, teetering upon it calmly.

“What, mother?”

“Dear, you don’t want to be laughed at, do you?”

Josephine turned sulkily to her sister. “Who laughs at me? You do, I guess. You’re the only one that does.”

“You’re so conceited that you don’t see it. When you and Travis de Coppet came into the Blackstone that afternoon, my spine crawled. Everybody at our table and most of the other tables laughed--the ones that weren’t shocked.”

“I guess they were more shocked,” guessed Josephine complacently.

“You’ll have a fine reputation by the time you come out.”

“Oh, shut your mouth!” said Josephine.

There was a moment’s silence. Then Mrs. Perry whispered solemnly, “I’ll have to tell your father about this as soon as he comes home.”

“Go on, tell him.” Suddenly Josephine began to cry. “Oh, why can’t anybody ever leave me alone? I wish I was dead.”

Her mother stood with her arm around her, saying, “Josephine--now, Josephine”; but Josephine went on with deep, broken sobs that seemed to come from the bottom of her heart.

“Just a lot--of--of ugly and jealous girls who get mad when anybody looks at m-me, and make up all sorts of stories that are absolutely untrue, just because I can get anybody I want. I suppose that Constance is mad about it because I went in and sat for five minutes with Anthony Harker while he was waiting last night.”

“Yes, I was terribly jealous! I sat up and cried all night about it. Especially because he comes to talk to me about Marice Whaley. Why!--you got him so crazy about you in that five minutes that he couldn’t stop laughing all the way to the Warrens.”

Josephine drew in her breath in one last gasp, and stopped crying. “If you want to know, I’ve decided to give him up.”

“Ha-ha!” Constance exploded. “Listen to that, mother! She’s going to give him up--as if he ever looked at her or knew she was alive! Of all the conceited--”

But Mrs. Perry could stand no more. She put her arm around Josephine and hurried her to her room down the hall.

“All your sister meant was that she didn’t like to see you laughed at,” she explained.

“Well, I’ve given him up,” said Josephine gloomily.

She had given him up, renouncing a thousand kisses she had never had, a hundred long, thrilling dances in his arms, a hundred evenings not to be recaptured. She did not mention the letter she had written him last night--and had not sent, and now would never send.

“You musn’t think about such things at your age,” said Mrs. Perry. “You’re just a child.”

Josephine got up and went to the mirror.

“I promised Lillian to come over to her house. I’m late now.”

Back in her room, Mrs. Perry thought: “Two months to February.” She was a pretty woman who wanted to be loved by everyone around her; there was no power of governing in her. She tied up her mind like a neat package and put it in the post office, with Josephine inside it safely addressed to the Breerly School.

An hour later, in the tea room at the Blackstone Hotel, Anthony Harker and another young man lingered at table. Anthony was a happy fellow, lazy, rich enough, pleased with his current popularity. After a brief career in an Eastern university, he had gone to a famous college in Virginia and in its less exigent shadow completed his education; at least, he had absorbed certain courtesies and mannerisms that Chicago girls found charming.

“There’s that guy Travis de Coppet,” his companion had just remarked. “What’s he think he is, anyhow?”

Anthony looked remotely at the young people across the room, recognizing the little Perry girl and other young females whom he seemed to have encountered frequently in the street of late. Although obviously much at home, they seemed silly and loud; presently his eyes left them and searched the room for the party he was due to join for dancing, but he was still sitting there when the room--it had a twilight quality, in spite of the lights within and the full dark outside--woke up to confident and exciting music. A thickening parade drifted past him. The men in sack suits, as though they had just come from portentous affairs, and the women in hats that seemed about to take flight, gave a special impermanence to the scene. This implication that this gathering, a little more than uncalculated, a little less than clandestine, would shortly be broken into formal series, made him anxious to seize its last minutes, and he looked more and more intently into the crowd for the face of anyone he knew.

One face emerged suddenly around a man’s upper arm not five feet away, and for a moment Anthony was the object of the saddest and most tragic regard that had ever been directed upon him. It was a smile and not a smile--two big gray eyes with bright triangles of color underneath, and a mouth twisted into a universal sympathy that seemed to include both him and herself--yet withal, the expression not of a victim, but rather of the very demon of tender melancholy--and for the first time Anthony really saw Josephine.

His immediate instinct was to see with whom she was dancing. It was a young man he knew, and with this assurance he was on his feet giving a quick tug to his coat, and then out upon the floor.

“May I cut in, please?”

Josephine came close to him as they started, looked up into his eyes for an instant, and then down and away. She said nothing. Realizing that she could not possibly be more than sixteen, Anthony hoped that the party he was to join would not arrive in the middle of the dance.

When that was over, she raised eyes to him again; a sense of having been mistaken, of her being older than he had thought, possessed him. Just before he left her at her table, he was moved to say:

“Couldn’t I have another later?”

“Oh, sure.”

She united her eyes with his, every glint a spike--perhaps from the railroads on which their family fortunes were founded, and upon which they depended. Anthony was disconcerted as he went back to his table.

One hour later, they left the Blackstone together in her car.

This had simply happened--Josephine’s statement, at the end of their second dance, that she must leave, then her request, and his own extreme self-consciousness as he walked beside her across the empty floor. It was a favor to her sister to take her home--but he had that unmistakable feeling of expectation.

Nevertheless, once outside and shocked into reconsideration by the bitter cold, he tried again to allocate his responsibilities in the matter. This was hard going with Josephine’s insistent dark and ivory youth pressed up against him. As they got in the car he tried to dominate the situation with a masculine stare, but her eyes, shining as if with fever, melted down his bogus austerity in a whittled second.

Idly he patted her hand--then suddenly he was inside the radius of her perfume and kissing her breathlessly. . . .

“So that’s that,” she whispered after a moment. Startled, he wondered if he had forgotten something--something he had said to her before.

“What a cruel remark,” he said, “just when I was getting interested.”

“I only meant that any minute with you may be the last one,” she said miserably. “The family are going to send me away to school--they think I haven’t found that out yet.”

“Too bad.”

“--and today they got together--and tried to tell me that you didn’t know I was alive!”

After a long pause, Anthony contributed feebly. “I hope you didn’t let them convince you.”

She laughed shortly. “I just laughed and came down here.”

Her hand burrowed its way into his; when he pressed it, her eyes, bright now, not dark, rose until they were as high as his, and came toward him. A minute later he thought to himself: “This is a rotten trick I’m doing.”

He was sure he was doing it.

“You’re so sweet,” she said.

“You’re a dear child.”

“I hate jealousy worse than anything in the world,” Josephine broke forth, “and I have to suffer from it. And my own sister worse than all the rest.”

“Oh, no,” he protested.

“I couldn’t help it if I fell in love with you. I tried to help it. I used to go out of the house when I knew you were coming.”

The force of her lies came from her sincerity and from her simple and superb confidence that whomsoever she loved must love her in return. Josephine was never either ashamed or plaintive. She was in the world of being alone with a male, a world through which she had moved surely since she was eight years old. She did not plan; she merely let herself go, and the overwhelming life in her did the rest. It is only when youth is gone and experience has given us a sort of cheap courage that most of us realize how simple such things are.

“But you couldn’t be in love with me,” Anthony wanted to say, and couldn’t. He fought with a desire to kiss her again, even tenderly, and began to tell her that she was being unwise, but before he got really started at this handsome project, she was in his arms again, and whispering something that he had to accept, since it was wrapped up in a kiss. Then he was alone, driving away from her door.

What had he agreed to? All they had said rang and beat in his ear like an unexpected temperature--tomorrow at four o’clock on that corner.

“Good God!” he thought uneasily. “All that stuff about giving me up. She’s a crazy kid, she’ll get into trouble if somebody looking for trouble comes along. Big chance of my meeting her tomorrow!”

But neither at dinner nor the dance that he went to that night could Anthony get the episode out of his mind; he kept looking around the ballroom regretfully, as if he missed someone who should be there.

III

Two weeks later, waiting for Marice Whaley in a meager, indefinable down-stairs “sitting room,” Anthony reached in his pocket for some half-forgotten mail. Three letters he replaced; the other--after a moment of listening--he opened quickly and read with his back to the door. It was the third of a series--for one had followed each of his meetings with Josephine--and it was exactly like the others--the letter of a child. Whatever maturity of emotion could accumulate in her expression, when once she set pen to paper was snowed under by ineptitude. There was much about “your feeling for me” and “my feeling for you,” and sentences began, “Yes, I know I am sentimental,” or more gawkily, “I have always been sort of pash, and I can’t help that,” and inevitably much quoting of lines from current popular songs, as if they expressed the writer’s state of mind more fully than verbal struggles of her own.

The letter disturbed Anthony. As he reached the postscript, which coolly made a rendezvous for five o’clock this afternoon, he heard Marice coming down-stairs, and put it back in his pocket.

Marice hummed and moved about the room. Anthony smoked.

“I saw you Tuesday afternoon,” she said suddenly. “You seemed to be having a fine time.”

“Tuesday,” he repeated, as if thinking. “Oh, yeah. I ran into some kids and we went to a tea dance. It was amusing.”

“You were almost alone when I saw you.”

“What are you getting at?”

Marice hummed again. “Let’s go out. Let’s go to a matinée.”

On the way Anthony explained how he had happened to be with Connie’s little sister; the necessity of the explanation somehow angered him. When he had done, Marice said crisply:

“If you wanted to rob the cradle, why did you have to pick out that little devil? Her reputation’s so bad already that Mrs. McRae didn’t want to invite her to dancing class this year--she only did it on account of Constance.”

“Why is she so awful?” asked Anthony, disturbed.

“I’d rather not discuss it.”

His five-o’clock engagement was on his mind throughout the matinée. Though Marice’s remarks served only to make him dangerously sorry for Josephine, he was nevertheless determined that this meeting should be the last. It was embarrassing to have been remarked in her company, even though he had tried honestly to avoid it. The matter could very easily develop into a rather dangerous little mess, with no benefit either to Josephine or to himself. About Marice’s indignation he did not care; she had been his for the asking all autumn, but Anthony did not want to get married; did not want to get involved with anybody at all.

It was dark when he was free at 5:30, and turned his car toward the new PhilanthrophilogicalBuilding in the maze of reconstruction in Grant Park. The bleakness of place and time depressed him, gave a further painfulness to the affair. Getting out of his car, he walked past a young man in a waiting roadster--a young man whom he seemed to recognize--and found Josephine in the half darkness of the little chamber that the storm doors formed.

With an indefinable sound of greeting, she walked determinedly into his arms, putting up her face.

“I can only stay for a sec,” she protested, just as if he had begged her to come. “I’m supposed to go to a wedding with sister, but I had to see you.”

When Anthony spoke, his voice froze into a white mist, obvious in the darkness. He said things he had said to her before but this time firmly and finally. It was easier, because he could scarcely see her face and because somewhere in the middle she irritated him by starting to cry.

“I knew you were supposed to be fickle,” she whispered, “but I didn’t expect this. Anyhow, I’ve got enough pride not to bother you any further.” She hesitated. “But I wish we could meet just once more to try and arrive at a more different settlement.”

“No.”

“Some jealous girl has been talking to you about me.”

“No.” Then, in despair, he struck at her heart. “I’m not fickle. I’ve never loved you and I never told you I did.”

Guessing at the forlorn expression that would come into her face, Anthony turned away and took a purposeless step; when he wheeled nervously about, the storm door had just shut--she was gone.

“Josephine!” he shouted in helpless pity, but there was no answer. He waited, heart in his boots, until presently he heard a car drive away.

At home, Josephine thanked Ed Bement, whom she had used, with a tartlet of hope, went in by a side door and up to her room. The window was open and, as she dressed hurriedly for the wedding she stood close to it so that she would catch cold and die.

Seeing her face in the bathroom mirror, she broke down and sat on the edge of the tub, making a small choking sound like a struggle with a cough, and cleaning her finger nails. Later she could cry all night in bed when every one else was asleep, but now it was still afternoon.

The two sisters and their mother stood side by side at the wedding of Mary Jackson and Jackson Dillon. It was a sad and sentimental wedding--an end to the fine, glamorous youth of a girl who was universally admired and loved. Perhaps to no onlooker there were its details symbolical of the end of a period, yet from the vantage point of a decade, certain things that happened are already powdered with yesterday’s ridiculousness, and even tinted with the lavender of the day before. The bride raised her veil, smiling that grave sweet smile that made her “adored,” but with tears pouring down her cheeks, and faced dozens of friends hands outheld as if embracing all of them for the last time. Then she turned to a husband as serious and immaculate as herself, and looked at him as if to say, “That’s done. All this that I am is yours forever and ever.”

In her pew, Constance, who had been at school with Mary Jackson, was frankly weeping, from a heart that was a ringing vault. But the face of Josephine beside her was a more intricate study; it watched intently. Once or twice, though her eyes lost none of their level straight intensity, an isolated tear escaped, and, as if startled by the feel of it, the face hardened slightly and the mouth remained in defiant immobility, like a child well warned against making a disturbance. Only once did she move; hearing a voice behind her say: “That’s the little Perry girl. Isn’t she lovely looking?” she turned presently and gazed at a stained-glass window lest her unknown admirers miss the sight of the side face.

Josephine’s family went on to the reception, so she dined alone--or rather with her little brother and his nurse, which was the same thing.

She felt all empty. Tonight Anthony Harker, “so deeply lovable--so sweetly lovable--so deeply, sweetly lovable” was making love to someone new, kissing her ugly, jealous face; soon he would have disappeared forever, together with all the men of his generation, into a loveless matrimony, leaving only a world of Travis de Coppets and Ed Bements--people so easy as to scarcely be worth the effort of a smile.

Up in her room, she was excited again by the sight of herself in the bathroom mirror. Oh, what if she should die in her sleep tonight?

“Oh, what a shame,” she whispered.

She opened the window, and holding her only souvenir of Anthony, a big initialed linen handkerchief, crept desolately into bed. While the sheets were still cold, there was a knock at the door.

“Special-delivery letter,” said the maid.

Putting on the light, Josephine opened it, turned to the signature, then back again, her breast rising and falling quickly under her nightgown.

DARLING LITTLE JOSEPHINE: It’s no use, I can’t help it, I can’t lie about it. I’m desperately, terribly in love with you. When you went away this afternoon, it all rushed over me, and I knew I couldn’t give you up. I drove home, and I couldn’t eat or sit still, but only walk up and down thinking of your darling face and your darling tears, there in that vestibule. And now I sit writing this letter--

It was four pages long. Somewhere it disposed of their disparate ages as unimportant, and the last words were:

I know how miserable you must be, and I would give ten years of my life to be there to kiss your sweet lips good night.

When she had read it through, Josephine sat motionless for some minutes; grief was suddenly gone, and for a moment she was so overwhelmed that she supposed joy had come in its stead. On her face was a twinkling frown.

“Gosh!” she said to herself. She read over the letter once more.

Her first instinct was to call up Lillian, but she thought better of it. The image of the bride at the wedding popped out at her--the reproachless bride, unsullied, beloved and holy with a sweet glow. An adolescence of uprightness, a host of friends, then the appearance of the perfect lover, the Ideal. With an effort, she recalled her drifting mind to the present occasion. Certainly Mary Jackson would never have kept such a letter. Getting out of bed, Josephine tore it into little pieces and, with some difficulty, caused by an unexpected amount of smoke, burned it on a glass-topped table. No well-brought-up girl would have answered such a letter; the proper thing was to simply ignore it.

She wiped up the table top with the man’s linen handkerchief she held in her hand, threw it absently into a laundry basket and crept into bed. She suddenly was very sleepy.

IV

For what ensued, no one, not even Constance, blamed Josephine. If a man of twenty-two should so debase himself as to pay frantic court to a girl of sixteen against the wishes of her parents and herself, there was only one answer--he was a person who shouldn’t be received by decent people. When Travis de Coppet made a controversial remark on the affair at a dance, Ed Bement beat him into what was described as “a pulp,” down in the washroom, and Josephine’s reputation rose to normal and stayed there. Accounts of how Anthony had called time and time again at the house, each time denied admittance, how he had threatened Mr. Perry, how he had tried to bribe a maid to deliver letters, how he had attempted to waylay Josephine on her way back from school--these things pointed to the fact that he was a little mad. It was Anthony Harker’s own family who insisted that he should go West.

All this was a trying time for Josephine. She saw how close she had come to disaster, and by constant consideration and implicit obedience, tried to make up to her parents for the trouble she had unwittingly caused. At first she decided she didn’t want to go to any Christmas dances, but she was persuaded by her mother, who hoped she would be distracted by boys and girls home from school for the holidays. Mrs. Perry was taking her East to the BreerlySchool early in January, and in the buying of clothes and uniforms, mother and daughter were much together, and Mrs. Perry was delighted at Josephine’s new feeling of responsibility and maturity.

As a matter of fact, it was sincere, and only once did Josephine do anything that she could not have told the world. The day after New Year’s she put on her new travelling suit and her new fur coat and went out by her familiar egress, the side door, and walked down the block to the waiting car of Ed Bement. Downtown she left Ed waiting at a corner and entered a drug store opposite the old Union Station on LaSalle Street. A man with an unhappy mouth and desperate, baffled eyes was waiting for her there.

“Thank you for coming,” he said miserably.

She didn’t answer. Her face was grave and polite.

“Here’s what I want--just one thing,” he said quickly: “Why did you change? What did I do that made you change so suddenly? Was it something that happened, something I did? Was it what I said in the vestibule that night?”

Still looking at him, she tried to think, but she could only think how unattractive and rather terrible she found him now, and try not to let him see it. There would have been no use saying the simple truth--that she could not help what she had done, that great beauty has a need, almost an obligation, of trying itself, that her ample cup of emotion had spilled over on its own accord, and it was an accident that it had destroyed him and not her. The eyes of pity might follow Anthony Harker in his journey West, but most certainly the eyes of destiny followed Josephine as she crossed the street through the falling snow to Ed Bement’s car.

She sat quiet for a minute as they drove away, relieved and yet full of awe. Anthony Harker was twenty-two, handsome, popular and sought after--and how he had loved her--so much that he had to go away. She was as impressed as if they had been two other people.

Taking her silence for depression, Ed Bement said:

“Well, it did one thing anyhow--it stopped that other story they had around about you.”

She turned to him quickly. “What story?”

“Oh, just some crazy story.”

“What was it?” she demanded.

“Oh, nothing much,” he said hesitantly, “but there was a story around last August that you and Travis de Coppet were married.”

“Why, how perfectly terrible!” she exclaimed. “Why, I never heard of such a lie. It--” She stopped herself short of saying the truth--that though she and Travis had adventurously driven twenty miles to New Ulm, they had been unable to find a minister willing to marry them. It all seemed ages behind her, childish, forgotten.

“Oh, how perfectly terrible!” she repeated. “That’s the kind of story that gets started by jealous girls.”

“I know,” agreed Ed. “I’d just like to hear any boy try to repeat it to me. Nobody believed it anyhow.”

It was the work of ugly and jealous girls. Ed Bement, aware of her body next to him, and of her face shining like fire through the half darkness, knew that nobody so beautiful could ever do anything really wrong.

A NICE QUIET PLACE

I

All that week she couldn’t decide whether she was a lollipop or a roman candle--through her dreams, dreams that promised uninterrupted sleep through many vacation mornings, drove a series of long, incalculable murmuring in tune with the put-put-put of their cut-outs, “I love you--I love you,” over and over. She wrote in the evening:

Dear Ridge: When I think of not being able to come to the freshman dance with you this June, I could lie down and die, but mother is sort of narrow-minded in some ways, and she feels that sixteen is too young to go to a prom; and Lil Hammel’s mother feels the same way. When I think of you dancing around with some other girl and hear you handing her a line, like you do to everybody, I could lie down and scream. Oh, I know--because a girl here at school met you after I left Hot Springs at Easter. Anyhow, if you start rushing some other kid when you come out to Ed Bement’s house party this summer, I intend to cut her throat, or my own, or something desperate. And probably no one will even be sorry I’m dead. Ha-ha--

Summer, summer, summer--bland inland sun and friendly rain. Lake Forest, with its thousand enchanted verandas, the dancing on the outdoor platform at the club, and always the boys, centaurs, in new cars. Her mother came East to meet her, and as they walked together out of the Grand Central Station, the symphony of promise became so loud that Josephine’s face was puckered and distorted, as with the pressure of strong sunshine.

“We’ve got the best plans,” her mother said.

“Oh, what? What, mother?”

“A real change. I’ll tell you all about it when we get to the hotel.”

There was a sudden discord; a shadow fell upon Josephine’s heart.

“What do you mean? Aren’t we going to Lake Forest?”

“Some place much better”--her mother’s voice was alarmingly cheerful. “I’m saving it till we get to the hotel.”

Before Mrs. Perry had left Chicago, she and Josephine’s father had decided, from observations of their own and some revelations on the part of their elder daughter, Constance, that Josephine knew her way around Lake Forest all too well. The place had changed in the twenty years that it had been the summer rendezvous of fashionable Chicago; less circumscribed children of new families were resoundingly in evidence and, like most parents, Mrs. Perry thought of her daughter as one easily led into mischief by others. The more impartial eyes of other members of the colony had long regarded Josephine herself as the principal agent of corruption. But, preventive or penalty, the appalling thing to Josephine was that the Perrys were going to a “nice quiet place” this summer.

“Mother, I simply can’t go to Island Farms. I simply--”

“Father feels--”

“Why don’t you take me to a reform school if I’m so awful? Or to state’s penitentiary? I simply can’t go to a horrible old farm with a lot of country jakes and no fun and no friends except a lot of hicks.”

“But, dear, it’s not like that at all. They just call it Island Farms. In fact, your aunt’s place isn’t a farm; it’s really a nice little resort up in Michigan where lots of people spend the summer. Tennis and swimming and--and fishing.”

“Fishing?” repeated Josephine incredulously. “Do you call that something to do?” She shook her head in mute incomprehension. “I’ll just be forgotten, that’s all. When it’s my year to come out nobody will know who I am. They’ll just say, ‘Who in heck is this Josephine Perry? I never saw her around here.’ ‘Oh, she’s just some hick from a horrible old farm up in Michigan. Let’s not invite her.’ Just when everybody else is having a wonderful time--”

“Nobody’ll forget you in one summer, dear.”

“Yes, they will. Everybody’ll have new friends and know new dances, and I’ll be up there in the backwoods, full of hayseed, forgetting everything I know. If it’s so wonderful why isn’t Constance coming?”

Lying awake in their drawing-room on the Twentieth Century, Josephine brooded upon the terrible injustice of it all. She knew that her mother was going on her account, and mostly because of the gossip of a few ugly and jealous girls. These ugly and jealous girls, her relentless enemies, were not entirely creatures of Josephine’s imagination. There was something in the frank sensuousness of her beauty that plain women found absolutely intolerable; they stared at her in a frightened, guarded way.

It was only recently that gossip had begun to worry Josephine. Her own theory was that, though at thirteen or fourteen she had been “speedy”--a convenient word that lacked the vulgar implication of “fast”--she was now trying to do her best, and a difficult enough business it was, without the past being held against her; for the only thing she cared about in the world was being in love and being with the person she currently loved.

Toward midnight her mother spoke to her softly and found that she was asleep. Turning on the berth light, she looked for a moment at the flushed young face, smoothed now of all its disappointment by a faint, peculiar smile. She leaned over and kissed Josephine’s brow, behind which, doubtless, were passing in review those tender and eagerly awaited orgies of which she was to be deprived this summer.

II

Into Chicago, resonant with shrill June clamor; out to Lake Forest, where her friends moved already in an aura of new boys, new tunes, parties and house parties yet to be. One concession was granted her--she was to come back from Island Farms in time for Ed Bement’s house party--which is to say, for Ridgeway Saunders’ visit, the first of September.

Then northward, leaving all gayety behind, to the nice quiet place, implicit in its very station, which breathed no atmosphere of hectic arrivals or feverish partings: there was her aunt, her fifteen-year-old cousin, Dick, with the blank resentful stare of youth in spectacles, there were the dozen or so estates with tired people asleep inside them and the drab village three miles away. It was worse, even, than Josephine had imagined; to her the vicinity was literally unpopulated, for, as a representative of her generation, she stood alone. In despair, she buried herself in ceaseless correspondence with the outer world or, as a variant, played tennis with Dick and carried on a slow indifferent quarrel at his deliberately spiteful immaturity.

“Are you going to be this way always?” she demanded, breaking down at his stupidity one day. “Can’t you do anything about it? Does it hurt?”

“What way?” Dick shambled around the tennis net in the way that so offended her.

“Oh, such a pill! You ought to be sent away to some good school.”

“I am going to be.”

“Why, at your age most of the boys in Chicago have cars of their own.”

“Too many,” he responded.

“How do you mean?” Josephine flared up.

“I heard my aunt say there was too much of that there. That’s why they made you come up here. You’re too much for that sort of thing.”

Josephine flushed. “Couldn’t you help being such a pill, if you honestly tried?”

“I don’t know,” admitted Dick. “I don’t even think that maybe I am one.”

“Oh, yes, you are. I can assure you of that.”

It occurred to her, not very hopefully, that under proper supervision something might be made of him. Perhaps she could teach him to dance or have him learn to drive his mother’s car. She went to the extent of trying to smarten him up, to make him wash his hands bidiurnally and to soak his hair and cleave it down the middle. She suggested that he would be more beautiful without his spectacles, and he obediently bumped around without them for several afternoons. But when he developed a feverish headache one night and confessed to his mother why he had been “so utterly insane,” Josephine gave him up without a pang.

But she could have cared for almost anyone. She wanted to hear the mystical terminology of love, to feel the lift and pull inside herself that each one of a dozen affairs had given her. She had written, of course, to Ridgeway Saunders. He answered. She wrote again. He answered--but after two weeks. On the first of August, with one month gone and one to go, came a letter from Lillian Hammel, her best friend in Lake Forest.

Dearest Jo: You said to write you every single thing, and I will, but some of it will be sort of a fatal blow to you--about Ridgeway Saunders. Ed Bement visited him in Philadelphia, and he says he is so crazy about a girl there that he wants to leave Yale and get married. Her name is Evangeline Ticknor and she was fired from Foxcroft last year for smoking; quite a speed and said to be beautiful and something like you, from what I hear. Ed said that Ridgeway was so crazy about her that he wouldn’t even come out here in September unless Ed invited her, too; so Ed did. Probably a lot you care! You’ve probably had lots of crushes up there where you are, or aren’t there any attractive boys--

Josephine walked slowly up and down her room. Her parents had what they wanted now; the plot against her was complete. For the first time in her life she had been thrown over, and by the most attractive, the most desirable boy she had ever known, cut out by a girl “very much like herself.” Josephine wished passionately that she had been fired from school--then the family might have given up and let her alone.

She was not so much humiliated as full of angry despair, but for the sake of her pride, she had a letter to write immediately. Her eyes were bright with tears as she began:

Dearest Lil: I was not surprised when I heard that about R. S. I knew he was fickle and never gave him a second thought after school closed in June. As a matter of fact, you know how fickle I am myself, darling, and you can imagine that I haven’t had time to let it worry me. Everybody has a right to do what they want, sayI. Live and let live is my motto. I wish you could have been here this summer. More wonderful parties--

She paused, knowing that she should invent more circumstantial evidence of gayety. Pen in air, she gazed out into the deep, still mass of northern trees. Inventing was delicate work, and having dealt always in realities, her imagination was ill-adapted to the task. Nevertheless, after several minutes a vague, synthetic figure began to take shape in her mind. She dipped the pen and wrote: “One of the darlingest--” hesitated and turned again for inspiration to the window.

Suddenly she started and bent forward, the tears drying in her eyes. Striding down the road, not fifty feet from her window, was the handsomest, the most fascinating boy she had ever seen in her life.

III

He was about nineteen and tall, with a blond viking head; the fresh color in his slender, almost gaunt cheeks was baked warm and dry by the sun. She had a glimpse of his eyes--enough to know that they were “sad” and of an extraordinary glistening blue. His model legs were in riding breeches, above which he wore a soft sweater jacket of blue chamois, and as he walked he swung a crop acrimoniously at the overhanging leaves.

For a moment the vision endured; then the path turned into a clump of trees and he was gone, save for the small crunch of his boots on the pine needles.

Josephine did not move. The dark green trees that had seemed so lacking in promise were suddenly like a magic wall that had opened and revealed a short cut to possible delight; the trees gave forth a great trembling rustle. For another instant she waited; then she threw herself at the unfinished letter:

--he usually wears the best-looking riding clothes. He has the most beautiful eyes. On top he usually wears a blue chamois thing that is simply divine.

IV

When her mother came in, half an hour later, she found Josephine getting into her best afternoon dress with an expression that was at once animated and far away.

“I thought--” she said. “I don’t suppose you’d want to come with me and pay a few calls?”

“I’d adore to,” said Josephine unexpectedly.

Her mother hesitated. “I’m afraid it’s been a rather stupid month for you. I didn’t realize that there wouldn’t be anyone your age. But something nice has happened that I can’t tell you about yet, and perhaps I’ll soon have some news for you.”

Josephine did not appear to hear.

“Who shall we call on?” she demanded eagerly. “Let’s just call on everybody, even if it takes until ten o’clock tonight. Let’s start at the nearest house and just keep going until we’ve killed everybody off.”

“I don’t know whether we can do that.”

“Come on.” Josephine was putting on her hat. “Let’s get going, mother.”

Perhaps, Mrs. Perry thought, the summer was really making a difference in her daughter; perhaps it was developing in her a more gently social vein. At each house they visited she positively radiated animation, and displayed sincere disappointment when they found no one home. When her mother called it a day, the light in her eyes went out.

“We can try again tomorrow,” she said impatiently. “We’ll kill the rest of them off. We’ll go back to those houses where there was no one home.”

It was almost seven--a nostalgic hour, for it had been the loveliest of all at Lake Forest a year ago. Bathed and positively shining, one had intruded then for a last minute into the departing day, and, sitting alone on the veranda, turned over the romantic prospects of the night, while lighted windows sprang out on the blurring shapes of houses, and cars flew past with people late home from tea.

But tonight the murmurous Indian twilight of the lake country had a promise of its own, and strolling out into the lane that passed the house, Josephine broke suddenly into a certain walk, rather an externallized state of mind, that had been hitherto reserved for more sophisticated localities. It implied, through a skimming lift of the feet, through an impatience of the moving hips, through an abstracted smile, lastly through a glance that fell twenty feet ahead, that this girl was about to cross some material threshold where she was eagerly awaited; that, in fact, she had already crossed it in her imagination and left her surroundings behind. It was just at that moment she heard a strong clear whistle in front of her and the sound as of a stick swishing through leaves:

”Hello,

Fris-co,

Hello!

How do you do, my dear?

I only wish that you were here.”

Her heart beat a familiar tattoo; she realized that they would pass each other just where a last rift of sunset came down through the pines.

”Hello,

Fris-co,

Hel-lo!”

There he was, a fine shape against the foreground. His gallant face, drawn in a single dashing line, his chamois vest, so blue--she was near enough that she could have touched it. Then she realized with a shock that he had passed without noticing her proximity by a single flicker of his unhappy eyes.

“The conceited pill!” she thought indignantly. “Of all the conceited--”

She was silent during dinner; at the end she said to her aunt, with small preliminary:

“I passed the most conceited-looking young man today. I wonder who he could have been.”

“Maybe it was the nephew of old Dorrance,” offered Dick, “or the fellow staying at old Dorrance’s. Somebody said it was his nephew or some sort of relation.”

His mother said pointedly to Josephine: “We don’t see the Dorrances. Mr. Charles Dorrance considered that my husband was unjust to him about our boundary some years ago. Old Mr. Dorrance was a very stubborn man indeed.”

Josephine wondered if that was why he had failed to respond this afternoon. It was a silly reason.

But next day, at the same place, at the same hour, he literally jumped at her soft “Good evening”; he stared at her with unmistakable signs of dismay. Then his hand went up as if to remove a hat, found none, and he bowed instead and went on by.

But Josephine turned swiftly and walked at his side, smiling.

“You might be more sociable. You really shouldn’t be so exclusive, since we’re the only two people in this place. I do think it’s silly to let older people influence young people.”

He was walking so fast that she could scarcely keep up with him.

“Honestly, I’m a nice girl,” she persisted, still smiling. “Quite a few people rush me at dances and I once had a blind man in love with me.”

They were almost at her aunt’s gate, still walking furiously.

“Here’s where I live,” she said.

“Then I’ll say good-by.”

“What is the matter?” she demanded. “How can you be so rude?”

His lips formed the words, “I’m sorry.”

“I suppose you’ve got to hurry home so you can stare at yourself at the mirror.”

She knew this was untrue. He wore his good looks in almost an apologetic way. But it reached him, for he came to a precipitate halt, immediately moving off a little.

“Excuse my rudeness,” he exploded. “But I’m not used to girls.”

She was too winded to answer. But as her shaken composure gradually returned, she became aware of an odd weariness in his face.

“At least you might talk to me for a minute, if I don’t come any nearer.”

After a moment’s hesitation he hoisted himself tentatively onto a fence rail.

“If you’re so frightened of females, isn’t it time something was done about it?” she inquired.

“It’s too late.”

“Never,” she said positively. “Why, you’re missing half of life. Don’t you want to marry and have children and make some woman a fine wife--I mean, a fine husband?”

In answer he only shivered.

“I used to be terribly timid myself,” she lied kindly. “But I saw that I was missing half of life.”

“It isn’t a question of will power. It’s just that I’m a little crazy on the subject. A minute ago I had an instinct to throw a stone at you. I know it’s terrible, so if you’ll excuse me--”

He jumped down off the fence, but she cried quickly: “Wait! Let’s talk it all over.”

He lingered reluctantly.

“Why, in Chicago,” she said, “any man as good-looking as you could have any girl he wanted. Everyone would simply pursue him.”

The idea seemed to distress him still further; his face grew so sad that impulsively she moved nearer, but he swung one leg over the fence.

“All right. We’ll talk about something else,” she conceded. “Isn’t this the most dismal place you ever saw? I was supposed to be a speed in Lake Forest, so the family sentenced me to this, and I’ve had the most killing month, just sitting and twirling my thumbs. Then yesterday I looked out the window and saw you.”

“What do you mean you were a speed?” he inquired.

“Just sort of speedy--you know, sort of pash.”

He got up--this time with an air of finality.

“You really must excuse me. I know I’m an idiot on this woman question, but there’s nothing to do about it.”

“Will you meet me here tomorrow?”

“Heavens, no!”

Josephine was suddenly angry; she had humbled herself enough for one afternoon. With a cold nod, she started homeward down the lane.

“Wait!”

Now that there was thirty feet between them, his timidity had left him. She was tempted to go back, resisted the impulse with difficulty.

“I’ll be here tomorrow,” she said coolly.

Walking slowly home, she saw, by instinct rather than logic, that there was something here she failed to understand. In general, a lack of self-confidence was enough to disqualify any boy from her approval; it was the unforgivable sin, the white flag, the refusal of battle. Yet now that this young man was out of sight, she saw him as he had appeared the previous afternoon--unself-conscious, probably arrogant, utterly debonair. Again she wondered if the unpleasantness between the families could be responsible for his attitude.

In spite of their unsatisfactory conversation, she was happy. In the soft glow of the sunset it seemed certain that it would all come right tomorrow. Already the oppressive sense of being wasted had deserted her. The boy who had passed her window yesterday afternoon was capable of anything--love, drama, or even that desperate recklessness that she loved best of all.

Her mother was waiting on the veranda.

“I wanted to see you alone,” she said, “because I thought Aunt Gladys would be offended if you looked too delighted. We’re going back to Lake Forest tomorrow.”

“Mother!”

“Constance is announcing her engagement tomorrow and getting married in ten days. Malcolm Libby is in the State Department and he’s ordered abroad. Isn’t it wonderful? Your sister’s opening up the Lake Forest house today.”

“It’ll be marvellous.” After a moment Josephine repeated, with more conviction: “Perfectly marvellous.”

Lake Forest--she could feel the fast-beating excitement of it already. Yet there was something missing, as if the note of an essential trumpet had become separated from the band. For five weeks she had passionately hated Island Farms, but glancing around her in the gathering dusk, she felt rather sorry for it, a little ashamed of her desertion.

Throughout dinner the odd feeling persisted. She would be deep in exciting thoughts that began, “Won’t it be fun to--” then the imminent brilliance would fade and there would be a stillness inside her like the stillness of these Michigan nights. That was what was lacking in Lake Forest--a stillness for things to happen in, for people to walk into.

“We’ll be terribly busy,” her mother said. “Next week there’ll be bridesmaids in the house, and parties, and the wedding itself. We should have left tonight.”

Josephine went up to her room immediately and sat looking out into the darkness. Too bad; a wasted summer after all. If yesterday had happened sooner she might have gone away with some sense of having lived after all. Too late. “But there’ll be lots of boys,” she told herself--Ridgeway Saunders.

She could hear their confident lines, and somehow they rang silly on her ears. Suddenly she realized that what she was regretting was not the lost past but the lost future, not what had not been but what would never be. She stood up, breathing quickly.

A few minutes later she left the house by a side door and crossed the lawn to the gardener’s gate. She heard Dick call after her uncertainly, but she did not answer. It was dark and cool, and the feeling that the summer was rushing away from her. As if to overtake it, she walked faster, and in ten minutes turned in at the gate of the Dorrance house, set behind the jagged silhouettes of many trees. Someone on the veranda hailed her as she came near:

“Good evening. I can’t see who it is.”

“It’s the girl who was so fresh this afternoon.”

She heard him catch his breath suddenly.

“May I sit here on the steps for a moment? See? Quite safe and far away. I came to say good-by, because we’re going home tomorrow.”

“Are you really?” She could not tell whether his tone showed concern or relief. “It’ll be very quiet.”

“I want to explain about this afternoon, because I don’t want you to think I was just being fresh. Usually I like boys with more experience, but I just thought that since we were the only ones here, we might manage to have a good time, and there weren’t any days to waste.”

“I see.” After a moment he asked, “What will you do in Lake Forest? Be a--a speed?”

“I don’t much care what I do. I’ve wasted the whole six weeks.”

She heard him laugh.

“I gather from your tone that someone is going to have to pay for it,” he said.

“I hope so,” she answered rather grimly. She felt tears rise in her eyes. Everything was wrong. Everything seemed to be fixed against her.

“Please let me come up there on the settee,” she asked suddenly.

There was a creak as it stopped swinging.

“Please don’t. I hate to ask you, but really I’ll have to go if you do. Let’s talk about--Do you like horses?”

She got up swiftly, mounted the steps and walked toward the corner where he sat.

“No,” she said, “I think that what I’d like would be to be liked by you.”

In the light of the moon just lifting over the woods his face was positively haggard. He jumped to his feet; then his hands were on her arms and he was drawing her slowly toward him.

“You simply want to be kissed,” he was saying through scarcely opened lips. “I knew it the first time I saw that mouth of yours--that perfectly selfish, self-sufficient look that--”

Suddenly he dropped his arms and stepped away from her with a gesture of horror.

“Don’t stop!” she cried. “Do anything, tell me anything, even if it isn’t complimentary. I don’t care.”

But he had vaulted swiftly over the railing and, with his hands clasping the back of his head, was walking across the lawn. In a minute she overtook him and stood beseechingly in his path, her small bosom rising and falling.

“Why do you suppose I’m here?” he demanded suddenly. “Do you think I’m alone?”

“What--”

“My wife is with me.”

Josephine shivered.

“Oh--oh--then why doesn’t anybody know?”

“Because my wife is--my wife is colored.”

If it had not been so dark Josephine would have seen that for an instant he was laughing silently and uncontrollably.

“Oh,” she repeated.

“I didn’t know,” he continued.

In spite of a subconscious scepticism, an uncanny feeling stole over Josephine.

“What dealings could I have with a girl like you?”

She began to weep softly.

“Oh, I’m sorry. If I could only help you.”

“You can’t help me.” He turned gruffly away.

“You want me to go.”

He nodded.

“All right. I’ll go.”

Still sobbing, she half walked, half backed away from him, intimidated now, yet still hoping he would call to her. When she saw him for the last time from the gate, he was standing where she had left him, his fine thin face clear and handsome in the suddenly streaming light of an emergent moon.

She had gone a quarter of a mile down the road when she became conscious of running footsteps behind her. Before she could do more than start and turn anxiously, a figure sprang out at her. It was her cousin, Dick.

“Oh!” she cried. “You frightened me!”

“I followed you here. You had no business going out at night like this.”

“What a sneaky thing!” she said contemptuously.

They walked along side by side.

“I heard you with that fellow. You had a crush on him, didn’t you?”

“Will you be quiet! What does a horrible little pill like you know about anything?”

“I know a lot,” said Dick glumly. “I know there’s too much of that sort of thing at Lake Forest.”

She scorned to answer; they reached her aunt’s gate in silence.

“I tell you one thing,” he said uncertainly. “I’ll bet you wouldn’t want your mother to know about this.”

“You mean you’re going to my mother?”

“Just hold your horses. I was going to say I wouldn’t say anything about it--”

“I should hope not.”

“--on one condition.”

“Well?”

“The condition is--” He fidgeted uncomfortably. “You told me once that a lot of girls at Lake Forest had kissed boys and never thought anything about it.”

“Yes.” Suddenly she guessed what was coming, and an astonished laugh rose to her lips.

“Well, will you, then--kiss me?”

A vision of her mother arose--of a return to Lake Forest in chains. Deciding quickly, she bent toward him. Less than a minute later she was in her room, almost hysterical with tears and laughter. That, then, was the kiss with which destiny had seen fit to crown the summer.

V

Josephine’s sensational return to Lake Forest that August marked a revision of opinion about her; it can be compared to the moment when the robber bandit evolved through sheer power into the feudal seignior.

To the three months of nervous energy conserved since Easter beneath the uniform of her school were added six weeks of resentment--added, that is, as the match might be said to be added to the powder. For Josephine exploded with an audible, visible bang; for weeks thereafter pieces of her were gathered up from Lake Forest’s immaculate lawns.

It began quietly; it began with the long-awaited house party, on the first evening of which she was placed next to the unfaithful Ridgeway Saunders at dinner.

“I certainly felt pretty badly when you threw me over,” Josephine said indifferently--to rid him of any lingering idea that he had thrown her over. Once she had chilled him into wondering if, after all, he had come off best in the affair, she turned to the man on the other side. By the time the salad was served, Ridgeway was explaining himself to her. And his girl from the East, Miss Ticknor, was becoming increasingly aware of what an obnoxious person Josephine Perry was. She made the mistake of saying so to Ridgeway. Josephine made no such mistake; toward the end of dinner she merely asked him the innocent question as to who was his friend with the high button shoes.

By ten o’clock Josephine and Ridgeway were out in somebody’s car--far out where the colony becomes a prairie. As minute by minute she grew wearier of his softness, his anguish increased. She let him kiss her, just to be sure; and it was a desperate young man who returned to his host’s that night.

All next day his eyes followed her about miserably; Miss Ticknor was unexpectedly called East the following afternoon. This was pathetic, but certainly someone had to pay for Josephine’s summer. That score settled, she returned her attention to her sister’s wedding.

Immediately on her return she had demanded a trousseau in keeping with the splendor of a maid of honor, and under cover of the family rush had so managed to equip herself as to add a charming year to her age. Doubtless this contributed to the change of attitude toward her, for though her emotional maturity, cropping out of a schoolgirl dress, had seemed not quite proper, in more sophisticated clothes she was an incontestable little beauty; and as such she was accepted by at least the male half of the wedding party.

Constance was openly hostile. On the morning of the wedding itself, she unburdened herself to her mother.

“I do hope you’ll take her in hand after I’m gone, mother. It’s really unendurable the way she’s behaving. None of the bridesmaids have had a good time.”

“Let’s not worry,” Mrs. Perry urged. “After all, she’s had a very quiet summer.”

“I’m not worrying about her,” said Constance indignantly.

The wedding party were lunching at the club, and Josephine found herself next to a jovial usher who had arrived inebriated and remained in that condition ever since. However, it was early enough in the day for him to be coherent.

“The belle of Chicago, the golden girl of the golden West. Oh, why didn’t I come out here this summer?”

“I wasn’t here. I was up in a place called Island Farms.”

“Ah!” he exclaimed. “Ah-ha! That accounts for a lot of things--that accounts for the sudden pilgrimage of Sonny Dorrance.”

“Of who?”

“The famous Sonny Dorrance, the shame of Harvard, but the maiden’s prayer. Now don’t tell me you didn’t exchange a few warm glances with Sonny Dorrance.”

“But isn’t he,” she demanded faintly--”isn’t he supposed to be--married?”

He roared with laughter.

“Married--sure, married to a mulatto! You didn’t fall for that old line. He always pulls it when he’s reacting from some violent affair--that’s to protect himself while he recovers. You see, his whole life has been cursed by that fatal beauty.”

In a few minutes she had the story. Apart from everything else, Sonny Dorrance was fabulously rich--women had pursued him since he was fifteen--married women, débutantes, chorus girls. It was legendary.

There actually had been plots to entangle him into marriage, to entangle him into anything. There was the girl who tried to kill herself, there was the one who tried to kill him. Then, this spring, there was the annulled marriage business that had cost him an election to Porcellian at Harvard, and was rumored to have cost his father fifty thousand dollars.

“And now,” Josephine asked tensely, “you say he doesn’t like women?”

“Sonny? I tell you he’s the most susceptible man in America. This last thing shook him, and so he keeps off admirers by telling them anything. But by this time next month he’ll be involved again.”

As he talked, the dining room faded out like a scene in a moving picture, and Josephine was back at Island Farms, staring out the window, as a young man appeared between the pine trees.

“He was afraid of me,” she thought to herself, her heart tapping like a machine gun. “He thought I was like the others.”

Half an hour later she interrupted her mother in the midst of the wedding’s last and most violent confusion.

“Mother, I want to go back to Island Farms for the rest of the summer,” she said at once.

Mrs. Perry looked at her in a daze, and Josephine repeated her statement.

“Why, in less than a month you’ll be starting back to school.”

“I want to go anyhow.”

“I simply can’t understand you. In the first place, you haven’t been invited, and in the second place, I think a little gayety is good for you before you go back to school, and in the third place, I want you here with me.”

“Mother,” Josephine wailed, “don’t you understand? I want to go! You take me up there all summer when I don’t want to go, and just when I do want to, you make me stay in this ghastly place. Let me tell you this isn’t any place for a sixteen-year-old girl, if you knew everything.”

“What nonsense to be bothering me with just at this time!”

Josephine threw up her hands in despair; the tears were streaming down her cheeks.

“It’s ruining me here!” she cried. “Nobody thinks of anything but boys and dances from morning till night. They go out in their cars and kiss them from morning till night.”

“Well, I know my little girl doesn’t do anything like that.”

Josephine hesitated, taken a little aback.

“Well, I will,” she announced. “I’m weak. You told me I was. I always do what anybody tells me to do, and all these boys are just simply immoral, that’s all. The first thing you know I’ll be entirely ruined, and then you’ll be sorry you didn’t let me go to Island Farms. You’ll be sorry--”

She was working herself into hysteria. Her distracted mother took her by the shoulders and forced her down into a chair.

“I’ve never heard such silly talk. If you weren’t so old I’d spank you. If you keep this up you’ll be punished.”

Suddenly dry-eyed, Josephine got up and stalked out of the room. Punished! They had been punishing her all summer, and now they refused to punish her, refused to send her away. Oh, she was tired of trying. If she could think of something really awful to do, so that they would send her away forever--

Mr. Malcolm Libby, the prospective bridegroom, happened upon her fifteen minutes later, in an obscure corner of the garden. He was pacing restlessly about, steadying himself for the rehearsal at four o’clock and for the ceremony two hours later.

“Why, hello!” he cried. “Why, what’s the matter? You’ve been crying.”

He sat down on the bench, full of sympathy for Constance’s little sister.

“I’m not crying,” she sobbed. “I’m just angry.”

“About Constance going away? Don’t you think I’ll take good care of her?”

Leaning over, he patted her hand. If he had seen the look that flashed suddenly across her face it would have alarmed him, for it was curiously like the expression associated with a prominent character in Faust.

When she spoke, her voice was calm, almost cool, and yet tenderly sad:

“No, that wasn’t it. It was something else.”

“Tell me about it. Maybe I can help.”

“I was crying”--she hesitated delicately--”I was crying because Constance has all the luck.”

Half an hour later when, with the rehearsal twenty minutes late, the frantic bride-to-be came searching through the garden and happened upon them suddenly, Malcolm Libby’s arm was around Josephine, who seemed dissolved in uncontrollable grief, and on his face was a wildly harassed expression she had never seen there before. Constance gave a little gasping cry and sank down upon the pebbled path.

The next hour passed in an uproar. There was a doctor; there were shut doors; there was Mr. Malcolm Libby in an agonized condition, the sweat pouring off his brow, explaining to Mrs. Perry over and over that he could explain if he could only see Constance. There was Josephine, tight-lipped, in a room, being talked to coldly by various members of the family. There was the clamor of arriving guests; then frantic last minutes’ patching up of things, with Constance and Malcolm in each other’s arms and Josephine, unforgiven, being bundled into her dress.

Then a solemn silence fell and, moving to music, the maid of honor, her head demurely bowed, followed her sister up the two aisles of people that crowded the drawing-room. It was a lovely, sad wedding; the two sisters, light and dark, were a lovely contrast; there was as much interest in one as in the other. Josephine had become a great beauty and the prophets were busy; she stood for the radiant future, there at her sister’s side.

The crush was so great at the reception that not until it was over was Josephine missed. And long before nine o’clock, before Mrs. Perry had time to be uneasy, a note from the station had been handed in at the door:

My Dearest Mother: Ed Bement brought me here in his car, and I am catching the train to Island Farms at seven. I have wired the housekeeper to meet me, so don’t worry. I feel I have behaved terribly and am ashamed to face anyone, and I am punishing myself as I deserve by going back to the simple life. It is, after all, better for a girl of sixteen, I feel, and when you think it over you will agree. With dearest love.

Josephine.

After all, thought Mrs. Perry, perhaps it was just as well. Her husband was really angry, and she herself was exhausted and didn’t feel up to another problem at the moment. Perhaps a nice quiet place was best.

JOSEPHINE: A WOMAN WITH A PAST

I

Driving slowly through New Haven, two of the young girls became alert. Josephine and Lillian darted soft frank glances into strolling groups of three or four undergraduates, into larger groups on corners, which swung about as one man to stare at their receding heads. Believing that they recognized an acquaintance in a solitary loiterer, they waved wildly, whereupon the youth’s mouth fell open, and as they turned the next corner he made a dazed dilatory gesture with his hand. They laughed. ‘We’ll send him a post card when we get back to school tonight, to see if it really was him.’

Adele Craw, sitting on one of the little seats, kept on talking to Miss Chambers, the chaperon. Glancing sideways at her, Lillian winked at Josephine without batting an eye, but Josephine had gone into a reverie.

This was New Haven--city of her adolescent dreams, of glittering proms where she would move on air among men as intangible as the tunes they danced to. City sacred as Mecca, shining as Paris, hidden as Timbuktu. Twice a year the life-blood of Chicago, her home, flowed into it, and twice a year flowed back, bringing Christmas or bringing summer. Bingo, bingo, bingo, that’s the lingo; love of mine, I pine for one of your glances; the darling boy on the left there; underneath the stars I wait.

Seeing it for the first time, she found herself surprisingly unmoved--the men they passed seemed young and rather bored with the possibilities of the day, glad of anything to stare at; seemed undynamic and purposeless against the background of bare elms, lakes of dirty snow and buildings crowded together under the February sky. A wisp of hope, a well-turned-out derby-crowned man, hurrying with stick and suitcase towards the station, caught her attention, but his reciprocal glance was too startled, too ingenuous. Josephine wondered at the extent of her own disillusionment.

She was exactly seventeen and she was blasé. Already she had been a sensation and a scandal; she had driven mature men to a state of disequilibrium; she had, it was said, killed her grandfather, but as he was over eighty at the time perhaps he just died. Here and there in the Middle West were discouraged little spots which upon inspection turned out to be the youths who had once looked full into her green and wistful eyes. But her love affair of last summer had ruined her faith in the all-sufficiency of men. She had grown bored with the waning September days--and it seemed as though it had happened once too often. Christmas with its provocative shortness, its travelling glee clubs, had brought no one new. There remained to her only a persistent, a physical hope; hope in her stomach that there was someone whom she would love more than he loved her.

They stopped at a sporting-goods store and Adele Craw, a pretty girl with clear honourable eyes and piano legs, purchased the sporting equipment which was the reason for their trip--they were the spring hockey committee for the school. Adele was in addition the president of the senior class and the school’s ideal girl. She had lately seen a change for the better in Josephine Perry--rather as an honest citizen might guilelessly approve a speculator retired on his profits. On the other hand, Adele was simply incomprehensible to Josephine--admirable, without doubt, but a member of another species. Yet with the charming adaptability that she had hitherto reserved for men, Josephine was trying hard not to disillusion her, trying to be honestly interested in the small, neat, organized politics of the school.

Two men who had stood with their backs to them at another counter turned to leave the store, when they caught sight of Miss Chambers and Adele. Immediately they came forward. The one who spoke to Miss Chambers was thin and rigid of face. Josephine recognized him as Miss Brereton’s nephew, a student at New Haven, who had spent several week-ends with his aunt at the school. The other man Josephine had never seen before. He was tall and broad, with blond curly hair and an open expression in which strength of purpose and a nice consideration were pleasantly mingled. It was not the sort of face that generally appealed to Josephine. The eyes were obviously without a secret, with a sidewise gambol, without a desperate flicker to show that they had a life of their own apart from the mouth’s speech. The mouth itself was large and masculine; its smile was an act of kindness and control. It was rather with curiosity as to the sort of man who would be attentive to Adele Craw that Josephine continued to look at him, for his voice that obviously couldn’t lie greeted Adele as if this meeting was the pleasant surprise of his day.

In a moment Josephine and Lillian were called over and introduced.

‘This is Mr Waterbury’--that was Miss Brereton’s nephew--’and Mr Dudley Knowleton.’

Glancing at Adele, Josephine saw on her face an expression of tranquil pride, even of possession. Mr Knowleton spoke politely, but it was obvious that though he looked at the younger girls he did not quite see them. But since they were friends of Adele’s he made suitable remarks, eliciting the fact that they were both coming down to New Haven to their first prom the following week. Who were their hosts? Sophomores; he knew them slightly. Josephine thought that was unnecessarily superior. Why, they were the charter members of the Loving Brothers’ Association--Ridgeway Saunders and George Davey--and on the glee-club trip the girls they picked out to rush in each city considered themselves a sort of élite, second only to the girls they asked to New Haven.

‘And oh, I’ve got some bad news for you,’ Knowleton said to Adele. ‘You may be leading the prom. Jack Coe went to the infirmary with appendicitis, and against my better judgement I’m the provisional chairman.’ He looked apologetic. ‘Being one of those stone-age dancers, the two-step king, I don’t see how I ever got on the committee at all.’

When the car was on its way back to Miss Brereton’s school, Josephine and Lillian bombarded Adele with questions.

‘He’s an old friend from Cincinnati,’ she explained demurely. ‘He’s captain of the baseball team and he was last man for Skull and Bones.’

‘You’re going to the prom with him?’

‘Yes. You see, I’ve known him all my life.’

Was there a faint implication in this remark that only those who had known Adele all her life knew her at her true worth?

‘Are you engaged?’ Lillian demanded.

Adele laughed. ‘Mercy, I don’t think of such matters! It doesn’t seem to be time for that sort of thing yet, does it?’ (‘Yes,’ interpolated Josephine silently.)’ We’re just good friends. I think there can be a perfectly healthy friendship between a man and a girl without a lot of--’

‘Mush,’ supplied Lillian helpfully.

‘Well, yes, but I don’t like that word. I was going to say without a lot of sentimental romantic things that ought to come later.’

‘Bravo, Adele!’ said Miss Chambers somewhat perfunctorily.

But Josephine’s curiosity was unappeased.

‘Doesn’t he say he’s in love with you, and all that sort of thing?’

‘Mercy, no! Dud doesn’t believe in such stuff any more than I do. He’s got enough to do at New Haven, serving on the committees and the team.’

‘Oh!’ said Josephine.

She was oddly interested. That two people who were attracted to each other should never even say anything about it but be content to ‘not believe in such stuff’, was something new in her experience. She had known girls who had no beaux, others who seemed to have no emotions, and still others who lied about what they thought and did; but here was a girl who spoke of the attentions of the last man tapped for Skull and Bones as if they were two of the limestone gargoyles that Miss Chambers had pointed out on the just completed Harkness Hall. Yet Adele seemed happy--happier than Josephine, who had always believed that boys and girls were made for nothing but each other, and as soon as possible.

In the light of his popularity and achievements, Knowleton seemed more attractive. Josephine wondered if he would remember her and dance with her at the prom, or if that depended on how well he knew her escort, Ridgeway Saunders. She tried to remember whether she had smiled at him when he was looking at her. If she had really smiled he would remember her and dance with her. She was still trying to be sure of that over her two French irregular verbs and her ten stanzas of the Ancient Mariner that night; but she was still uncertain when she fell asleep.

II

Three gay young sophomores, the founders of the Loving Brothers’ Association, took a house together for Josephine, Lillian and a girl from Farmington and their three mothers. For the girls it was a first prom, and they arrived at New Haven with all the nervousness of the condemned; but a Sheffield fraternity tea in the afternoon yielded up such a plethora of boys from home, and boys who had visited there and friends of those boys, and new boys with unknown possibilities but obvious eagerness, that they were glowing with self-confidence as they poured into the glittering crowd that thronged the armoury at ten.

It was impressive; for the first time Josephine was at a function run by men upon men’s standards--an outward projection of the New Haven world from which women were excluded and which went on mysteriously behind the scenes. She perceived that their three escorts, who had once seemed the very embodiments of worldliness, were modest fry in this relentless microcosm of accomplishment and success. A man’s world! Looking around her at the glee-club concert, Josephine had felt a grudging admiration for the good fellowship, the good feeling. She envied Adele Craw, barely glimpsed in the dressing-room, for the position she automatically occupied by being Dudley Knowleton’s girl tonight. She envied her more stepping off under the draped bunting through a gateway of hydrangeas at the head of the grand march, very demure and faintly unpowdered in a plain white dress. She was temporarily the centre of all attention, and at the sight something that had long lain dormant in Josephine awakened--her sense of a problem, a scarcely defined possibility.

‘Josephine,’ Ridgeway Saunders began, ‘you can’t realize how happy I am now that it’s come true. I’ve looked forward to this so long, and dreamed about it--’

She smiled up at him automatically, but her mind was elsewhere, and as the dance progressed the idea continued to obsess her. She was rushed from the beginning; to the men from the tea were added a dozen new faces, a dozen confident or timid voices, until, like all the more popular girls, she had her own queue trailing her about the room. Yet all this had happened to her before, and there was something missing. One might have ten men to Adele’s two, but Josephine was abruptly aware that here a girl took on the importance of the man who had brought her.

She was discomforted by the unfairness of it. A girl earned her popularity by being beautiful and charming. The more beautiful and charming she was, the more she could afford to disregard public opinion. It seemed absurd that simply because Adele had managed to attach a baseball captain, who mightn’t know anything about girls at all, or be able to judge their attractions, she should be thus elevated in spite of her thick ankles, her rather too pinkish face.

Josephine was dancing with Ed Bement from Chicago. He was her earliest beau, a flame of pigtail days in dancing school when one wore white cotton stockings, lace drawers with a waist attached and ruffled dresses with the inevitable sash.

‘What’s the matter with me?’ she asked Ed, thinking aloud. ‘For months I’ve felt as if I were a hundred years old, and I’m just seventeen and that party was only seven years ago.’

‘You’ve been in love a lot since then,’ Ed said.

‘I haven’t,’ she protested indignantly. ‘I’ve had a lot of silly stories started about me, without any foundation, usually by girls who were jealous.’

‘Jealous of what?’

‘Don’t get fresh,’ she said tartly. ‘Dance me near Lillian.’

Dudley Knowleton had just cut in on Lillian. Josephine spoke to her friend; then waiting until their turns would bring them face to face over a space of seconds, she smiled at Knowleton. This time she made sure that smile intersected as well as met glance, that he passed beside the circumference of her fragrant charm. If this had been named like French perfume of a later day it might have been called ‘Please’. He bowed and smiled back; a minute later he cut in on her.

It was in an eddy in a corner of the room and she danced slower so that he adapted himself, and for a moment they went around in a slow circle.

‘You looked so sweet leading the march with Adele,’ she told him. ‘You seemed so serious and kind, as if the others were a lot of children. Adele looked sweet, too.’ And she added on an inspiration, ‘At school I’ve taken her for a model.’

‘You have!’ She saw him conceal his sharp surprise as he said, ‘I’ll have to tell her that.’

He was handsomer than she had thought, and behind his cordial good manners there was a sort of authority. Though he was correctly attentive to her, she saw his eyes search the room quickly to see if all went well; he spoke quietly, in passing, to the orchestra leader, who came down deferentially to the edge of his dais. Last man for Bones. Josephine knew what that meant--her father had been Bones. Ridgeway Saunders and the rest of the Loving Brothers’ Association would certainly not be Bones. She wondered, if there had been a Bones for girls, whether she would be tapped--or Adele Craw with her ankles, symbol of solidity.

Come on o-ver here.

Want to have you near;

Get a wel-come heart-y.

Come on join the part-y.

‘I wonder how many boys here have taken you for a model,’ she said. ‘If I were a boy you’d be exactly what I’d like to be. Except I’d be terribly bothered having girls falling in love with me all the time.’

‘They don’t,’ he said simply. ‘They never have.’

‘Oh yes--but they hide it because they’re so impressed with you, and they’re afraid of Adele.’

‘Adele wouldn’t object.’ And he added hastily, ‘--if it ever happened. Adele doesn’t believe in being serious about such things.’

‘Are you engaged to her?’

He stiffened a little. ‘I don’t believe in being engaged till the right time comes.’

‘Neither do I,’ agreed Josephine readily. ‘I’d rather have one good friend than a hundred people hanging around being mushy all the time.’

‘Is that what that crowd does that keeps following you around tonight?’

‘What crowd?’ she asked innocently.

‘The fifty per cent of the sophomore class that’s rushing you.’

‘A lot of parlour snakes,’ she said ungratefully.

Josephine was radiantly happy now as she turned beautifully through the newly enchanted hall in the arms of the chairman of the prom committee. Even this extra time with him she owed to the awe which he inspired in her entourage; but a man cut in eventually and there was a sharp fall in her elation. The man was impressed that Dudley Knowleton had danced with her; he was more respectful, and his modulated admiration bored her. In a little while, she hoped, Dudley Knowleton would cut back, but as midnight passed, dragging on another hour with it, she wondered if after all it had only been a courtesy to a girl from Adele’s school. Since then Adele had probably painted him a neat little landscape of Josephine’s past. When finally he approached her she grew tense and watchful, a state which made her exteriorly pliant and tender and quiet. But instead of dancing he drew her into the edge of a row of boxes.

‘Adele had an accident on the cloakroom steps. She turned her ankle a little and tore her stocking on a nail. She’d like to borrow a pair from you because you’re staying near here and we’re way out at the Lawn Club.’

‘Of course.’

‘I’ll run over with you--I have a car outside.’

‘But you’re busy; you mustn’t bother.’

‘Of course I’ll go with you.’

There was thaw in the air; a hint of thin and lucid spring hovered delicately around the elms and cornices of buildings whose bareness and coldness had so depressed her the week before. The night had a quality of asceticism, as if the essence of masculine struggle were seeping everywhere through the little city where men of three centuries had brought their energies and aspirations for winnowing. And Dudley Knowleton sitting beside her, dynamic and capable, was symbolic of it all. It seemed that she had never met a man before.

‘Come in, please,’ she said as he went up the steps of the house with her. ‘They’ve made it very comfortable.’

There was an open fire burning in the dark parlour. When she came downstairs with the stockings she went in and stood beside him, very still for a moment, watching it with him. Then she looked up, still silent, looked down, looked at him again.

‘Did you get the stockings?’ he asked, moving a little.

‘Yes,’ she said breathlessly. ‘Kiss me for being so quick.’

He laughed as if she said something witty and moved towards the door. She was smiling and her disappointment was deeply hidden as they got into the car.

‘It’s been wonderful meeting you,’ she told him. ‘I can’t tell you how many ideas I’ve gotten from what you said.’

‘But I haven’t any ideas.’

‘You have. All that about not getting engaged till the proper time comes. I haven’t had much opportunity to talk to a man like you. Otherwise my ideas would be different, I guess. I’ve just realized that I’ve been wrong about a lot of things. I used to want to be exciting. Now I want to help people.’

‘Yes,’ he agreed, ‘that’s very nice.’

He seemed about to say more when they arrived at the armoury. In their absence supper had begun; and crossing the great floor by his side, conscious of many eyes regarding them, Josephine wondered if people thought that they had been up to something.

‘We’re late,’ said Knowleton when Adele went off to put on the stockings. ‘The man you’re with has probably given you up long ago. You’d better let me get you something here.’

‘That would be too divine.’

Afterwards, back on the floor again, she moved in a sweet aura of abstraction. The followers of several departed belles merged with hers until now no girl on the floor was cut in on with such frequency. Even Miss Brereton’s nephew, Ernest Waterbury, danced with her in stiff approval. Danced? With a tentative change of pace she simply swung from man to man in a sort of hands-right-and-left around the floor. She felt a sudden need to relax, and as if in answer to her mood a new man was presented, a tall, sleek Southerner with a persuasive note:

‘You lovely creacha. I been strainin my eyes watchin your cameo face floatin round. You stand out above all these othuz like an Amehken Beauty Rose over a lot of field daisies.’

Dancing with him a second time, Josephine hearkened to his pleadings.

‘All right. Let’s go outside.’

‘It wasn’t outdaws I was considering,’ he explained as they left the floor. ‘I happen to have a mortgage on a nook right hee in the building.’

‘All right.’

Book Chaffee, of Alabama, led the way through the cloak-room, through a passage to an inconspicuous door.

‘This is the private apartment of my friend Sergeant Boone, instructa of the battery. He wanted to be particularly sure it’d be used as a nook tonight and not a readin room or anything like that.’

Opening the door he turned on a dim light; she came in and shut it behind her, and they faced each other.

‘Mighty sweet,’ he murmured. His tall face came down, his long arms wrapped around her tenderly, and very slowly so that their eyes met for quite a long time, he drew her up to him. Josephine kept thinking that she had never kissed a Southern boy before.

They started apart at the sudden sound of a key turning in the lock outside. Then there was a muffed snicker followed by retreating footsteps, and Book sprang for the door and wrenched at the handle just as Josephine noticed that this was not only Sergeant Boone’s parlour; it was his bedroom as well.

‘Who was it?’ she demanded. ‘Why did they lock us in?’

‘Some funny boy. I’d like to get my hands on him.’

‘Will he come back?’

Book sat down on the bed to think. ‘I couldn’t say. Don’t even know who it was. But if somebody on the committee came along it wouldn’t look too good, would it?’

Seeing her expression change, he came over and put his arm around her. ‘Don’t you worry, honey. We’ll fix it.’

She returned his kiss, briefly but without distraction. Then she broke away and went into the next apartment, which was hung with boots, uniform coats and various military equipment.

‘There’s a window up here,’ she said. It was high in the wall and had not been opened for a long time. Book mounted on a chair and forced it ajar.

‘About ten feet down,’ he reported, after a moment, ‘but there’s a big pile of snow just underneath. You might get a nasty fall and you’ll sure soak your shoes and stockin’s.’

‘We’ve got to get out,’ Josephine said sharply.

‘We’d better wait and give this funny man a chance--’

‘I won’t wait. I want to get out. Look--throw out all the blankets from the bed and I’ll jump on that: or you jump first and spread them over the pile of snow.’

After that it was merely exciting. Carefully Book Chaffee wiped the dust from the window to protect her dress; then they were struck silent by a footstep that approached--and passed the outer door. Book jumped, and she heard him kicking profanely as he waded out of the soft drift below. He spread the blankets. At the moment when Josephine swung her legs out the window, there was the sound of voices outside the door and the key turned again in the lock. She landed softly, reaching for his hand, and convulsed with laughter they ran and skidded down the half block towards the corner, and reaching the entrance to the armoury, they stood panting for a moment, breathing in the fresh night. Book was reluctant to go inside.

‘Why don’t you let me conduct you where you’re stayin? We can sit around and sort of recuperate.’

She hesitated, drawn towards him by the community of their late predicament; but something was calling her inside, as if the fulfilment of her elation awaited her there.

‘No,’ she decided.

As they went in she collided with a man in a great hurry, and looked up to recognize Dudley Knowleton.

‘So sorry,’ he said. ‘Oh hello--’

‘Won’t you dance me over to my box?’ she begged him impulsively. ‘I’ve torn my dress.’

As they started off he said abstractedly: ‘The fact is, a little mischief has come up and the buck has been passed to me. I was going along to see about it.’

Her heart raced wildly and she felt the need of being another sort of person immediately.

‘I can’t tell you how much it’s meant meeting you. It would be wonderful to have one friend I could be serious with without being all mushy and sentimental. Would you mind if I wrote you a letter--I mean, would Adele mind?’

‘Lord, no!’ His smile had become utterly unfathomable to her. As they reached the box she thought of one more thing:

‘Is it true that the baseball team is training at Hot Springs during Easter?’

‘Yes. You going there?’

‘Yes. Good night, Mr Knowleton.’

But she was destined to see him once more. It was outside the men’s coat room, where she waited among a crowd of other pale survivors and their paler mothers, whose wrinkles had doubled and tripled with the passing night. He was explaining something to Adele, and Josephine heard the phrase, ‘The door was locked, and the window open--’

Suddenly it occurred to Josephine that, meeting her coming in damp and breathless, he must have guessed at the truth--and Adele would doubtless confirm his suspicion. Once again the spectre of her old enemy, the plain and jealous girl, arose before her. Shutting her mouth tight together she turned away.

But they had seen her, and Adele called to her in her cheerful ringing voice:

‘Come say good night. You were so sweet about the stockings. Here’s a girl you won’t find doing shoddy, silly things, Dudley.’ Impulsively she leaned and kissed Josephine on the cheek. ‘You’ll see I’m right, Dudley--next year she’ll be the most respected girl in school.’

III

As things go in the interminable days of early March, what happened next happened quickly. The annual senior dance at Miss Brereton’s school came on a night soaked through with spring, and all the junior girls lay awake listening to the sighing tunes from the gymnasium. Between the numbers, when boys up from New Haven and Princeton wandered about the grounds, cloistered glances looked down from dark open windows upon the vague figures.

Not Josephine, though she lay awake like the others. Such vicarious diversions had no place in the sober patterns she was spinning now from day to day; yet she might as well have been in the forefront of those who called down to the men and threw notes and entered into conversations, for destiny had suddenly turned against her and was spinning a dark web of its own.

Lit-tle lady, don’t be depressed and blue,

After all, we’re both in the same can-noo--

Dudley Knowleton was over in the gymnasium fifty yards away, but proximity to a man did not thrill her as it would have done a year ago--not, at least, in the same way. Life, she saw now, was a serious matter, and in the modest darkness a line of a novel ceaselessly recurred to her: ‘He is a man fit to be the father of my children’. What were the seductive graces, the fast lines of a hundred parlour snakes compared to such realities. One couldn’t go on forever kissing comparative strangers behind half-closed doors.

Under her pillow now were two letters, answers to her letters. They spoke in a bold round hand of the beginning of baseball practice; they were glad Josephine felt as she did about things; and the writer certainly looked forward to seeing her at Easter. Of all the letters she had ever received they were the most difficult from which to squeeze a single drop of heart’s blood--one couldn’t even read the ‘Yours’ of the subscription as ‘Your’--but Josephine knew them by heart. They were precious because he had taken the time to write them; they were eloquent in the very postage stamp because he used so few.

She was restless in her bed--the music had begun again in the gymnasium:

Oh, my love, I’ve waited so long for you,

Oh, my love, I’m singing this song for you--

Oh-h-h--

From the next room there was light laughter, and then from below a male voice, and a long interchange of comic whispers. Josephine recognized Lillian’s laugh and the voices of two other girls. She could imagine them as they lay across the window in their nightgowns, their heads just showing from the open window. ‘Come right down,’ one boy kept saying. ‘Don’t be formal--come, just as you are.’

There was a sudden silence, then a quick crunching of footsteps on gravel, a suppressed snicker and a scurry, and the sharp, protesting groan of several beds in the next room and the banging of a door down the hall. Trouble for somebody, maybe. A few minutes later Josephine’s door half opened, she caught a glimpse of Miss Kwain against the dim corridor light, and then the door closed.

The next afternoon Josephine and four other girls, all of whom denied having breathed so much as a word into the night, were placed on probation. There was absolutely nothing to do about it. Miss Kwain had recognized their faces in the window and they were all from two rooms. It was an injustice, but it was nothing compared to what happened next. One week before Easter vacation the school motored off on a one-day trip to inspect a milk farm--all save the ones on probation. Miss Chambers, who sympathized with Josephine’s misfortune, enlisted her services in entertaining Mr Ernest Waterbury, who was spending a week-end with his aunt. This was only vaguely better than nothing, for Mr Waterbury was a very dull, very priggish young man. He was so dull and so priggish that the following morning Josephine was expelled from school.

It happened like this: they had strolled in the grounds, they had sat down at a garden table and had tea. Ernest Waterbury had expressed a desire to see something in the chapel, just a few minutes before his aunt’s car rolled up the drive. The chapel was reached by descending winding mock-medieval stairs; and, her shoes still wet from the garden, Josephine had slipped on the top step and fallen five feet directly into Mr Waterbury’s unwilling arms, where she lay helpless, convulsed with irresistible laughter. It was in this position that Miss Brereton and the visiting trustee had found them.

‘But I had nothing to do with it!’ declared the ungallant Mr Waterbury. Flustered and outraged, he was packed back to New Haven, and Miss Brereton, connecting this with last week’s sin, proceeded to lose her head. Josephine, humiliated and furious, lost hers, and Mr Perry, who happened to be in New York, arrived at the school the same night. At his passionate indignation, Miss Brereton collapsed and retracted, but the damage was done, and Josephine packed her trunk. Unexpectedly, monstrously, just as it had begun to mean something, her school life was over.

For the moment all her feelings were directed against Miss Brereton, and the only tears she shed at leaving were of anger and resentment. Riding with her father up to New York, she saw that while at first he had instinctively and whole-heartedly taken her part, he felt also a certain annoyance with her misfortune.

‘We’ll all survive,’ he said. ‘Unfortunately, even that old idiot Miss Brereton will survive. She ought to be running a reform school.’ He brooded for a moment. ‘Anyhow, your mother arrives tomorrow and you and she go down to Hot Springs as you planned.’

‘Hot Springs!’ Josephine cried, in a choked voice. ‘Oh, no!’

‘Why not?’ he demanded in surprise. ‘It seems the best thing to do. Give it a chance to blow over before you go back to Chicago.’

‘I’d rather go to Chicago,’ said Josephine breathlessly. ‘Daddy, I’d much rather go to Chicago.’

‘That’s absurd. Your mother’s started East and the arrangements are all made. At Hot Springs you can get out and ride and play golf and forget that old she-devil--’

‘Isn’t there another place in the East we could go? There’s people I know going to Hot Springs who’ll know all about this, people that I don’t want to meet--girls from school.’

‘Now, Jo, you keep your chin up--this is one of those times. Sorry I said that about letting it blow over in Chicago; if we hadn’t made other plans we’d go back and face every old shrew and gossip in town right away. When anybody slinks off in a corner they think you’ve been up to something bad. If anybody says anything to you, you tell them the truth--what I said to Miss Brereton. You tell them she said you could come back and I damn well wouldn’t let you go back.’

‘They won’t believe it.’

There would be, at all events, four days of respite at Hot Springs before the vacations of the schools. Josephine passed this time taking golf lessons from a professional so newly arrived from Scotland that he surely knew nothing of her misadventure; she even went riding with a young man one afternoon, feeling almost at home with him after his admission that he had flunked out of Princeton in February--a confidence, however, which she did not reciprocate in kind. But in the evenings, despite the young man’s importunity, she stayed with her mother, feeling nearer to her than she ever had before.

But one afternoon in the lobby Josephine saw by the desk two dozen good-looking young men waiting by a stack of hat cases and bags, and knew that what she dreaded was at hand. She ran upstairs and with an invented headache dined there that night, but after dinner she walked restlessly around their apartment. She was ashamed not only of her situation but of her reaction to it. She had never felt any pity for the unpopular girls who skulked in dressing-rooms because they could attract no partners on the floor, or for girls who were outsiders at Lake Forest, and now she was like them--hiding miserably out of life. Alarmed lest already the change was written in her face, she paused in front of the mirror, fascinated as ever by what she found there.

‘The darn fools!’ she said aloud. And as she said it her chin went up and the faint cloud about her eyes lifted. The phrases of the myriad love letters she had received passed before her eyes; behind her, after all, was the reassurance of a hundred lost and pleading faces, of innumerable tender and pleading voices. Her pride flooded back into her till she could see the warm blood rushing up into her cheeks.

There was a knock at the door--it was the Princeton boy.

‘How about slipping downstairs?’ he proposed. ‘There’s a dance. It’s full of E-lies, the whole Yale baseball team. I’ll pick up one of them and introduce you and you’ll have a big time. How about it?’

‘All right, but I don’t want to meet anybody. You’ll just have to dance with me all evening.’

‘You know that suits me.’

She hurried into a new spring evening dress of the frailest fairy blue. In the excitement of seeing herself in it, it seemed as if she had shed the old skin of winter and emerged a shining chrysalis with no stain; and going downstairs her feet fell softly just off the beat of the music from below. It was a tune from a play she had seen a week ago in New York, a tune with a future--ready for gaieties as yet unthought of, lovers not yet met. Dancing off, she was certain that life had innumerable beginnings. She had hardly gone ten steps when she was cut in upon by Dudley Knowleton.

‘Why, Josephine!’ He had never used her first name before--he stood holding her hand. ‘Why, I’m so glad to see you! I’ve been hoping and hoping you’d be here.’

She soared skyward on a rocket of surprise and delight. He was actually glad to see her--the expression on his face was obviously sincere. Could it be possible that he hadn’t heard?

‘Adele wrote me you might be here. She wasn’t sure.’

--Then he knew and didn’t care; he liked her anyhow.

‘I’m in sackcloth and ashes,’ she said.

‘Well, they’re very becoming to you.’

‘You know what happened--’ she ventured.

‘I do. I wasn’t going to say anything, but it’s generally agreed that Waterbury behaved like a fool--and it’s not going to be much help to him in the elections next month. Look--I want you to dance with some men who are just starving for a touch of beauty.’

Presently she was dancing with, it seemed to her, the entire team at once. Intermittently Dudley Knowleton cut back in, as well as the Princeton man, who was somewhat indignant at this unexpected competition. There were many girls from many schools in the room, but with an admirable team spirit the Yale men displayed a sharp prejudice in Josephine’s favour; already she was pointed out from the chairs along the wall.

But interiorly she was waiting for what was coming, for the moment when she would walk with Dudley Knowleton into the warm, Southern night. It came naturally, just at the end of a number, and they strolled along an avenue of early-blooming lilacs and turned a corner and another corner . . .

‘You were glad to see me, weren’t you?’ Josephine said.

‘Of course.’

‘I was afraid at first. I was sorriest about what happened at school because of you. I’d been trying so hard to be different--because of you.’

‘You mustn’t think of that school business any more. Everybody that matters knows you got a bad deal. Forget it and start over.’

‘Yes,’ she agreed tranquilly. She was happy. The breeze and the scent of lilacs--that was she, lovely and intangible; the rustic bench where they sat and the trees--that was he, rugged and strong beside her, protecting her.

‘I’d thought so much of meeting you here,’ she said after a minute. ‘You’d been so good for me, that I thought maybe in a different way I could be good for you--I mean I know ways of having a good time that you don’t know. For instance, we’ve certainly got to go horseback riding by moonlight some night. That’ll be fun.’

He didn’t answer.

‘I can really be very nice when I like somebody--that’s really not often,’ she interpolated hastily, ‘not seriously. But I mean when I do feel seriously that a boy and I are really friends I don’t believe in having a whole mob of other boys hanging around taking up time. I like to be with him all the time, all day and all evening, don’t you?’

He stirred a little on the bench; he leaned forward with his elbows on his knees, looking at his strong hands. Her gently modulated voice sank a note lower.

‘When I like anyone I don’t even like dancing. It’s sweeter to be alone.’

Silence for a moment.

‘Well, you know’--he hesitated, frowning--’as a matter of fact, I’m mixed up in a lot of engagements made some time ago with some people.’ He floundered about unhappily. ‘In fact, I won’t even be at the hotel after tomorrow. I’ll be at the house of some people down the valley--a sort of house party. As a matter of fact, Adele’s getting here tomorrow.’

Absorbed in her own thoughts, she hardly heard him at first, but at the name she caught her breath sharply.

‘We’re both to be at this house party while we’re here, and I imagine it’s more or less arranged what we’re going to do. Of course, in the daytime I’ll be here for baseball practice.’

‘I see.’ Her lips were quivering. ‘You won’t be--you’ll be with Adele.’

‘I think that--more or less--I will. She’ll--want to see you, of course.’

Another silence while he twisted his big fingers and she helplessly imitated the gesture.

‘You were just sorry for me,’ she said. ‘You like Adele--much better.’

‘Adele and I understand each other. She’s been more or less my ideal since we were children together.’

‘And I’m not your kind of girl?’ Josephine’s voice trembled with a sort of fright. ‘I suppose because I’ve kissed a lot of boys and got a reputation for speed and raised the deuce.’

‘It isn’t that.’

‘Yes, it is,’ she declared passionately. ‘I’m just paying for things.’ She stood up. ‘You’d better take me back inside so I can dance with the kind of boys that like me.’

She walked quickly down the path, tears of misery streaming from her eyes. He overtook her by the steps, but she only shook her head and said, ‘Excuse me for being so fresh. I’ll grow up--I got what was coming to me--it’s all right.’

A little later when she looked around the floor for him he had gone--and Josephine realized with a shock that for the first time in her life, she had tried for a man and failed. But, save in the very young, only love begets love, and from the moment Josephine had perceived that his interest in her was merely kindness she realized the wound was not in her heart but in her pride. She would forget him quickly, but she would never forget what she had learned from him. There were two kinds of men, those you played with and those you might marry. And as this passed through her mind, her restless eyes wandered casually over the group of stags, resting very lightly on Mr Gordon Tinsley, the current catch of Chicago, reputedly the richest young man in the Middle West. He had never paid any attention to young Josephine until tonight. Ten minutes ago he had asked her to go driving with him tomorrow.

But he did not attract her--and she decided to refuse. One mustn’t run through people, and, for the sake of a romantic half-hour, trade a possibility that might develop--quite seriously--later, at the proper time. She did not know that this was the first mature thought that she had ever had in her life, but it was.

The orchestra were packing their instruments and the Princeton man was still at her ear, still imploring her to walk out with him into the night. Josephine knew without cogitation which sort of man he was--and the moon was bright even on the windows. So with a certain sense of relaxation she took his arm and they strolled out to the pleasant bower she had so lately quitted, and their faces turned towards each other, like little moons under the great white ones which hovered high over the Blue Ridge; his arm dropped softly about her yielding shoulder.

‘Well?’ he whispered.

‘Well.’

CRAZY SUNDAY

It was Sunday--not a day, but rather a gap between two other days. Behind, for all of them, lay sets and sequences, the long waits under the crane that swung the microphone, the hundred miles a day by automobiles to and fro across a county, the struggles of rival ingenuities in the conference rooms, the ceaseless compromise, the clash and strain of many personalities fighting for their lives. And now Sunday, with individual life starting up again, with a glow kindling in eyes that had been glazed with monotony the afternoon before. Slowly as the hours waned they came awake like “Puppenfeen” in a toy shop: an intense colloquy in a corner, lovers disappearing to neck in a hall. And the feeling of “Hurry, it’s not too late, but for God’s sake hurry before the blessed forty hours of leisure are over.”

Joel Coles was writing continuity. He was twenty-eight and not yet broken by Hollywood. He had had what were considered nice assignments since his arrival six months before and he submitted his scenes and sequences with enthusiasm. He referred to himself modestly as a hack but really did not think of it that way. His mother had been a successful actress; Joel had spent his childhood between London and New York trying to separate the real from the unreal, or at least to keep one guess ahead. He was a handsome man with the pleasant cow-brown eyes that in 1913 had gazed out at Broadway audiences from his mother’s face.

When the invitation came it made him sure that he was getting somewhere. Ordinarily he did not go out on Sundays but stayed sober and took work home with him. Recently they had given him a Eugene O’Neill play destined for a very important lady indeed. Everything he had done so far had pleased Miles Calman, and Miles Calman was the only director on the lot who did not work under a supervisor and was responsible to the money men alone. Everything was clicking into place in Joel’s career. (“This is Mr. Calman’s secretary. Will you come to tea from four to six Sunday--he lives in Beverly Hills, number--.”)

Joel was flattered. It would be a party out of the top-drawer. It was a tribute to himself as a young man of promise. The Marion Davies’ crowd, the high-hats, the big currency numbers, perhaps even Dietrich and Garbo and the Marquise, people who were not seen everywhere, would probably be at Calman’s.

“I won’t take anything to drink,” he assured himself. Calman was audibly tired of rummies, and thought it was a pity the industry could not get along without them.

Joel agreed that writers drank too much--he did himself, but he wouldn’t this afternoon. He wished Miles would be within hearing when the cocktails were passed to hear his succinct, unobtrusive, “No, thank you.”

Miles Calman’s house was built for great emotional moments--there was an air of listening, as if the far silences of its vistas hid an audience, but this afternoon it was thronged, as though people had been bidden rather than asked. Joel noted with pride that only two other writers from the studio were in the crowd, an ennobled limey and, somewhat to his surprise, Nat Keogh, who had evoked Calman’s impatient comment on drunks.

Stella Calman (Stella Walker, of course) did not move on to her other guests after she spoke to Joel. She lingered--she looked at him with the sort of beautiful look that demands some sort of acknowledgment and Joe drew quickly on the dramatic adequacy inherited from his mother:

“Well, you look about sixteen! Where’s your kiddy car?”

She was visibly pleased; she lingered. He felt that he should say something more, something confident and easy--he had first met her when she was struggling for bits in New York. At the moment a tray slid up and Stella put a cocktail glass into his hand.

“Everybody’s afraid, aren’t they?” he said, looking at it absently. “Everybody watches for everybody else’s blunders, or tries to make sure they’re with people that’ll do them credit. Of course that’s not true in your house,” he covered himself hastily. “I just meant generally in Hollywood.”

Stella agreed. She presented several people to Joel as if he were very important. Reassuring himself that Miles was at the other side of the room, Joel drank the cocktail.

“So you have a baby?” he said. “That’s the time to look out. After a pretty woman has had her first child, she’s very vulnerable, because she wants to be reassured about her own charm. She’s got to have some new man’s unqualified devotion to prove to herself she hasn’t lost anything.”

“I never get anybody’s unqualified devotion,” Stella said rather resentfully.

“They’re afraid of your husband.”

“You think that’s it?” She wrinkled her brow over the idea; then the conversation was interrupted at the exact moment Joel would have chosen.

Her attentions had given him confidence. Not for him to join safe groups, to slink to refuge under the wings of such acquaintances as he saw about the room. He walked to the window and looked out toward the Pacific, colorless under its sluggish sunset. It was good here--the American Riviera and all that, if there were ever time to enjoy it. The handsome, well-dressed people in the room, the lovely girls, and the--well, the lovely girls. You couldn’t have everything.

He saw Stella’s fresh boyish face, with the tired eyelid that always drooped a little over one eye, moving about among her guests and he wanted to sit with her and talk a long time as if she were a girl instead of a name; he followed her to see if she paid anyone as much attention as she had paid him. He took another cocktail--not because he needed confidence but because she had given him so much of it. Then he sat down beside the director’s mother.

“Your son’s gotten to be a legend, Mrs. Calman--Oracle and a Man of Destiny and all that. Personally, I’m against him but I’m in a minority. What do you think of him? Are you impressed? Are you surprised how far he’s gone?”

“No, I’m not surprised,” she said calmly. “We always expected a lot from Miles.”

“Well now, that’s unusual,” remarked Joel. “I always think all mothers are like Napoleon’s mother. My mother didn’t want me to have anything to do with the entertainment business. She wanted me to go to West Point and be safe.”

“We always had every confidence in Miles.” . . .

He stood by the built-in bar of the dining room with the good-humored, heavy-drinking, highly paid Nat Keogh.

“--I made a hundred grand during the year and lost forty grand gambling, so now I’ve hired a manager.”

“You mean an agent,” suggested Joel.

“No, I’ve got that too. I mean a manager. I make over everything to my wife and then he and my wife get together and hand me out the money. I pay him five thousand a year to hand me out my money.”

“You mean your agent.”

“No, I mean my manager, and I’m not the only one--a lot of other irresponsible people have him.”

“Well, if you’re irresponsible why are you responsible enough to hire a manager?”

“I’m just irresponsible about gambling. Look here--”

A singer performed; Joel and Nat went forward with the others to listen.

II

The singing reached Joel vaguely; he felt happy and friendly toward all the people gathered there, people of bravery and industry, superior to a bourgeoisie that outdid them in ignorance and loose living, risen to a position of the highest prominence in a nation that for a decade had wanted only to be entertained. He liked them--he loved them. Great waves of good feeling flowed through him.

As the singer finished his number and there was a drift toward the hostess to say good-by, Joel had an idea. He would give them “Building It Up,” his own composition. It was his only parlor trick, it had amused several parties and it might please Stella Walker. Possessed by the hunch, his blood throbbing with the scarlet corpuscles of exhibitionism, he sought her.

“Of course,” she cried. “Please! Do you need anything?”

“Someone has to be the secretary that I’m supposed to be dictating to.”

“I’ll be her.”

As the word spread the guests in the hall, already putting on their coats to leave, drifted back and Joel faced the eyes of many strangers. He had a dim foreboding, realizing that the man who had just performed was a famous radio entertainer. Then someone said “Sh!” and he was alone with Stella, the center of a sinister Indian-like half-circle. Stella smiled up at him expectantly--he began.

His burlesque was based upon the cultural limitations of Mr. Dave Silverstein, an independent producer; Silverstein was presumed to be dictating a letter outlining a treatment of a story he had bought.

“--a story of divorce, the younger generators and the Foreign Legion,” he heard his voice saying, with the intonations of Mr. Silverstein. “But we got to build it up, see?”

A sharp pang of doubt struck through him. The faces surrounding him in the gently molded light were intent and curious, but there was no ghost of a smile anywhere; directly in front the Great Lover of the screen glared at him with an eye as keen as the eye of a potato. Only Stella Walker looked up at him with a radiant, never faltering smile.

“If we make him a Menjou type, then we get a sort of Michael Arlen only with a Honolulu atmosphere.”

Still not a ripple in front, but in the rear a rustling, a perceptible shift toward the left, toward the front door.

“--then she says she feels this sex appil for him and he burns out and says ‘Oh go on destroy yourself’--”

At some point he heard Nat Keogh snicker and here and there were a few encouraging faces, but as he finished he had the sickening realization that he had made a fool of himself in view of an important section of the picture world, upon whose favor depended his career.

For a moment he existed in the midst of a confused silence, broken by a general trek for the door. He felt the undercurrent of derision that rolled through the gossip; then--all this was in the space of ten seconds--the Great Lover, his eye hard and empty as the eye of a needle, shouted “Boo! Boo!” voicing in an overtone what he felt was the mood of the crowd. It was the resentment of the professional toward the amateur, of the community toward the stranger, the thumbs-down of the clan.

Only Stella Walker was still standing near and thanking him as if he had been an unparalleled success, as if it hadn’t occurred to her that anyone hadn’t liked it. As Nat Keogh helped him into his overcoat, a great wave of self-disgust swept over him and he clung desperately to his rule of never betraying an inferior emotion until he no longer felt it.

“I was a flop,” he said lightly, to Stella. “Never mind, it’s a good number when appreciated. Thanks for your coöperation.”

The smile did not leave her face--he bowed rather drunkenly and Nat drew him toward the door. . . .

The arrival of his breakfast awakened him into a broken and ruined world. Yesterday he was himself, a point of fire against an industry, today he felt that he was pitted under an enormous disadvantage, against those faces, against individual contempt and collective sneer. Worse than that, to Miles Calman he was become one of those rummies, stripped of dignity, whom Calman regretted he was compelled to use. To Stella Walker, on whom he had forced a martyrdom to preserve the courtesy of her house--her opinion he did not dare to guess. His gastric juices ceased to flow and he set his poached eggs back on the telephone table. He wrote:

DEAR MILES: You can imagine my profound self-disgust. I confess to a taint of exhibitionism, but at six o’clock in the afternoon, in broad daylight! Good God! My apologies to your wife.

Yours ever,

JOEL COLES.

Joel emerged from his office on the lot only to slink like a malefactor to the tobacco store. So suspicious was his manner that one of the studio police asked to see his admission card. He had decided to eat lunch outside when Nat Keogh, confident and cheerful, overtook him.

“What do you mean you’re in permanent retirement? What if that Three Piece Suit did boo you?

“Why, listen,” he continued, drawing Joel into the studio restaurant. “The night of one of his premiers at Grauman’s, Joe Squires kicked his tail while he was bowing to the crowd. The ham said Joe’d hear from him later but when Joe called him up at eight o’clock next day and said, ‘I thought I was going to hear from you,’ he hung up the phone.”

The preposterous story cheered Joel, and he found a gloomy consolation in staring at the group at the next table, the sad, lovely Siamese twins, the mean dwarfs, the proud giant from the circus picture. But looking beyond at the yellow-stained faces of pretty women, their eyes all melancholy and startling with mascara, their ball gowns garish in full day, he saw a group who had been at Calman’s and winced.

“Never again,” he exclaimed aloud, “absolutely my last social appearance in Hollywood!”

The following morning a telegram was waiting for him at his office:

You were one of the most agreeable people at our party. Expect you at my sister June’s buffet supper next Sunday.

STELLA WALKER CALMAN.

The blood rushed fast through his veins for a feverish minute. Incredulously he read the telegram over.

“Well, that’s the sweetest thing I ever heard of in my life!”

III

Crazy Sunday again. Joel slept until eleven, then he read a newspaper to catch up with the past week. He lunched in his room on trout, avocado salad and a pint of California wine. Dressing for the tea, he selected a pin-check suit, a blue shirt, a burnt orange tie. There were dark circles of fatigue under his eyes. In his second-hand car he drove to the Riviera apartments. As he was introducing himself to Stella’s sister, Miles and Stella arrived in riding clothes--they had been quarrelling fiercely most of the afternoon on all the dirt roads back of Beverly Hills.

Miles Calman, tall, nervous, with a desperate humor and the unhappiest eyes Joel ever saw, was an artist from the top of his curiously shaped head to his niggerish feet. Upon these last he stood firmly--he had never made a cheap picture though he had sometimes paid heavily for the luxury of making experimental flops. In spite of his excellent company, one could not be with him long without realizing that he was not a well man.

From the moment of their entrance Joel’s day bound itself up inextricably with theirs. As he joined the group around them Stella turned away from it with an impatient little tongue click--and Miles Calman said to the man who happened to be next to him:

“Go easy on Eva Goebel. There’s hell to pay about her at home.” Miles turned to Joel, “I’m sorry I missed you at the office yesterday. I spent the afternoon at the analyst’s.”

“You being psychoanalyzed?”

“I have been for months. First I went for claustrophobia, now I’m trying to get my whole life cleared up. They say it’ll take over a year.”

“There’s nothing the matter with your life,” Joel assured him.

“Oh, no? Well, Stella seems to think so. Ask anybody--they can all tell you about it,” he said bitterly.

A girl perched herself on the arm of Miles’ chair; Joel crossed to Stella, who stood disconsolately by the fire.

“Thank you for your telegram,” he said. “It was darn sweet. I can’t imagine anybody as good-looking as you are being so good-humored.”

She was a little lovelier than he had ever seen her and perhaps the unstinted admiration in his eyes prompted her to unload on him--it did not take long, for she was obviously at the emotional bursting point.

“--and Miles has been carrying on this thing for two years, and I never knew. Why, she was one of my best friends, always in the house. Finally when people began to come to me, Miles had to admit it.”

She sat down vehemently on the arm of Joel’s chair. Her riding breeches were the color of the chair and Joel saw that the mass of her hair was made up of some strands of red gold and some of pale gold, so that it could not be dyed, and that she had on no make-up. She was that good-looking--

Still quivering with the shock of her discovery, Stella found unbearable the spectacle of a new girl hovering over Miles; she led Joel into a bedroom, and seated at either end of a big bed they went on talking. People on their way to the washroom glanced in and made wisecracks, but Stella, emptying out her story, paid no attention. After a while Miles stuck his head in the door and said, “There’s no use trying to explain something to Joel in half an hour that I don’t understand myself and the psychoanalyst says will take a whole year to understand.”

She talked on as if Miles were not there. She loved Miles, she said--under considerable difficulties she had always been faithful to him.

“The psychoanalyst told Miles that he had a mother complex. In his first marriage he transferred his mother complex to his wife, you see--and then his sex turned to me. But when we married the thing repeated itself--he transferred his mother complex to me and all his libido turned toward this other woman.”

Joel knew that this probably wasn’t gibberish--yet it sounded like gibberish. He knew Eva Goebel; she was a motherly person, older and probably wiser than Stella, who was a golden child.

Miles now suggested impatiently that Joel come back with them since Stella had so much to say, so they drove out to the mansion in Beverly Hills. Under the high ceilings the situation seemed more dignified and tragic. It was an eerie bright night with the dark very clear outside of all the windows and Stella all rose-gold raging and crying around the room. Joel did not quite believe in picture actresses’ grief. They have other preoccupations--they are beautiful rose-gold figures blown full of life by writers and directors, and after hours they sit around and talk in whispers and giggle innuendoes, and the ends of many adventures flow through them.

Sometimes he pretended to listen and instead thought how well she was got up--sleek breeches with a matched set of legs in them, an Italian-colored sweater with a little high neck, and a short brown chamois coat. He couldn’t decide whether she was an imitation of an English lady or an English lady was an imitation of her. She hovered somewhere between the realest of realities and the most blatant of impersonations.

“Miles is so jealous of me that he questions everything I do,” she cried scornfully. “When I was in New York I wrote him that I’d been to the theater with Eddie Baker. Miles was so jealous he phoned me ten times in one day.”

“I was wild,” Miles snuffled sharply, a habit he had in times of stress. “The analyst couldn’t get any results for a week.”

Stella shook her head despairingly. “Did you expect me just to sit in the hotel for three weeks?”

“I don’t expect anything. I admit that I’m jealous. I try not to be. I worked on that with Dr. Bridgebane, but it didn’t do any good. I was jealous of Joel this afternoon when you sat on the arm of his chair.”

“You were?” She started up. “You were! Wasn’t there somebody on the arm of your chair? And did you speak to me for two hours?”

“You were telling your troubles to Joel in the bedroom.”

“When I think that that woman”--she seemed to believe that to omit Eva Goebel’s name would be to lessen her reality--”used to come here--”

“All right--all right,” said Miles wearily. “I’ve admitted everything and I feel as bad about it as you do.” Turning to Joel he began talking about pictures, while Stella moved restlessly along the far walls, her hands in her breeches pockets.

“They’ve treated Miles terribly,” she said, coming suddenly back into the conversation as if they’d never discussed her personal affairs. “Dear, tell him about old Beltzer trying to change your picture.”

As she stood hovering protectively over Miles, her eyes flashing with indignation in his behalf, Joel realized that he was in love with her. Stifled with excitement he got up to say good night.

With Monday the week resumed its workaday rhythm, in sharp contrast to the theoretical discussions, the gossip and scandal of Sunday; there was the endless detail of script revision--”Instead of a lousy dissolve, we can leave her voice on the sound track and cut to a medium shot of the taxi from Bell’s angle or we can simply pull the camera back to include the station, hold it a minute and then pan to the row of taxis”--by Monday afternoon Joel had again forgotten that people whose business was to provide entertainment were ever privileged to be entertained. In the evening he phoned Miles’ house. He asked for Miles but Stella came to the phone.

“Do things seem better?”

“Not particularly. What are you doing next Saturday evening?”

“Nothing.”

“The Perrys are giving a dinner and theater party and Miles won’t be here--he’s flying to South Bend to see the Notre Dame-California game. I thought you might go with me in his place.”

After a long moment Joel said, “Why--surely. If there’s a conference I can’t make dinner but I can get to the theater.”

“Then I’ll say we can come.”

Joel walked his office. In view of the strained relations of the Calmans, would Miles be pleased, or did she intend that Miles shouldn’t know of it? That would be out of the question--if Miles didn’t mention it Joel would. But it was an hour or more before he could get down to work again.

Wednesday there was a four-hour wrangle in a conference room crowded with planets and nebulae of cigarette smoke. Three men and a woman paced the carpet in turn, suggesting or condemning, speaking sharply or persuasively, confidently or despairingly. At the end Joel lingered to talk to Miles.

The man was tired--not with the exaltation of fatigue but life-tired, with his lids sagging and his beard prominent over the blue shadows near his mouth.

“I hear you’re flying to the Notre Dame game.”

Miles looked beyond him and shook his head.

“I’ve given up the idea.”

“Why?”

“On account of you.” Still he did not look at Joel.

“What the hell, Miles?”

“That’s why I’ve given it up.” He broke into a perfunctory laugh at himself. “I can’t tell what Stella might do just out of spite--she’s invited you to take her to the Perrys’, hasn’t she? I wouldn’t enjoy the game.”

The fine instinct that moved swiftly and confidently on the set, muddled so weakly and helplessly through his personal life.

“Look, Miles,” Joel said frowning. “I’ve never made any passes whatsoever at Stella. If you’re really seriously cancelling your trip on account of me, I won’t go to the Perrys’ with her. I won’t see her. You can trust me absolutely.”

Miles looked at him, carefully now.

“Maybe.” He shrugged his shoulders. “Anyhow there’d just be somebody else. I wouldn’t have any fun.”

“You don’t seem to have much confidence in Stella. She told me she’d always been true to you.”

“Maybe she has.” In the last few minutes several more muscles had sagged around Miles’ mouth, “But how can I ask anything of her after what’s happened? How can I expect her--” He broke off and his face grew harder as he said, “I’ll tell you one thing, right or wrong and no matter what I’ve done, if I ever had anything on her I’d divorce her. I can’t have my pride hurt--that would be the last straw.”

His tone annoyed Joel, but he said:

“Hasn’t she calmed down about the Eva Goebel thing?”

“No.” Miles snuffled pessimistically. “I can’t get over it either.”

“I thought it was finished.”

“I’m trying not to see Eva again, but you know it isn’t easy just to drop something like that--it isn’t some girl I kissed last night in a taxi! The psychoanalyst says--”

“I know,” Joel interrupted. “Stella told me.” This was depressing. “Well, as far as I’m concerned if you go to the game I won’t see Stella. And I’m sure Stella has nothing on her conscience about anybody.”

“Maybe not,” Miles repeated listlessly. “Anyhow I’ll stay and take her to the party. Say,” he said suddenly, “I wish you’d come too. I’ve got to have somebody sympathetic to talk to. That’s the trouble--I’ve influenced Stella in everything. Especially I’ve influenced her so that she likes all the men I like--it’s very difficult.”

“It must be,” Joel agreed.

IV

Joel could not get to the dinner. Self-conscious in his silk hat against the unemployment, he waited for the others in front of the Hollywood Theatre and watched the evening parade: obscure replicas of bright, particular picture stars, spavined men in polo coats, a stomping dervish with the beard and staff of an apostle, a pair of chic Filipinos in collegiate clothes, reminder that this corner of the Republic opened to the seven seas, a long fantastic carnival of young shouts which proved to be a fraternity initiation. The line split to pass two smart limousines that stopped at the curb.

There she was, in a dress like ice-water, made in a thousand pale-blue pieces, with icicles trickling at the throat. He started forward.

“So you like my dress?”

“Where’s Miles?”

“He flew to the game after all. He left yesterday morning--at least I think--” She broke off. “I just got a telegram from South Bend saying that he’s starting back. I forgot--you know all these people?”

The party of eight moved into the theater.

Miles had gone after all and Joel wondered if he should have come. But during the performance, with Stella a profile under the pure grain of light hair, he thought no more about Miles. Once he turned and looked at her and she looked back at him, smiling and meeting his eyes for as long as he wanted. Between the acts they smoked in the lobby and she whispered:

“They’re all going to the opening of Jack Johnson’s night club--I don’t want to go, do you?”

“Do we have to?”

“I suppose not.” She hesitated. “I’d like to talk to you. I suppose we could go to our house--if I were only sure--”

Again she hesitated and Joel asked:

“Sure of what?”

“Sure that--oh, I’m haywire I know, but how can I be sure Miles went to the game?”

“You mean you think he’s with Eva Goebel?”

“No, not so much that--but supposing he was here watching everything I do. You know Miles does odd things sometimes. Once he wanted a man with a long beard to drink tea with him and he sent down to the casting agency for one, and drank tea with him all afternoon.”

“That’s different. He sent you a wire from South Bend--that proves he’s at the game.”

After the play they said good night to the others at the curb and were answered by looks of amusement. They slid off along the golden garish thoroughfare through the crowd that had gathered around Stella.

“You see he could arrange the telegrams,” Stella said, “very easily.”

That was true. And with the idea that perhaps her uneasiness was justified, Joel grew angry: if Miles had trained a camera on them he felt no obligations toward Miles. Aloud he said:

“That’s nonsense.”

There were Christmas trees already in the shop windows and the full moon over the boulevard was only a prop, as scenic as the giant boudoir lamps of the corners. On into the dark foliage of Beverly Hills that flamed as eucalyptus by day, Joel saw only the flash of a white face under his own, the arc of her shoulder. She pulled away suddenly and looked up at him.

“Your eyes are like your mother’s,” she said. “I used to have a scrap book full of pictures of her.”

“Your eyes are like your own and not a bit like any other eyes,” he answered.

Something made Joel look out into the grounds as they went into the house, as if Miles were lurking in the shrubbery. A telegram waited on the hall table. She read aloud:

CHICAGO.

Home tomorrow night. Thinking of you. Love.

MILES.

“You see,” she said, throwing the slip back on the table, “he could easily have faked that.” She asked the butler for drinks and sandwiches and ran upstairs, while Joel walked into the empty reception rooms. Strolling about he wandered to the piano where he had stood in disgrace two Sundays before.

“Then we could put over,” he said aloud, “a story of divorce, the younger generators and the Foreign Legion.”

His thoughts jumped to another telegram.

“You were one of the most agreeable people at our party--”

An idea occurred to him. If Stella’s telegram had been purely a gesture of courtesy then it was likely that Miles had inspired it, for it was Miles who had invited him. Probably Miles had said:

“Send him a wire--he’s miserable--he thinks he’s queered himself.”

It fitted in with “I’ve influenced Stella in everything. Especially I’ve influenced her so that she likes all the men I like.” A woman would do a thing like that because she felt sympathetic--only a man would do it because he felt responsible.

When Stella came back into the room he took both her hands.

“I have a strange feeling that I’m a sort of pawn in a spite game you’re playing against Miles,” he said.

“Help yourself to a drink.”

“And the odd thing is that I’m in love with you anyhow.”

The telephone rang and she freed herself to answer it.

“Another wire from Miles,” she announced. “He dropped it, or it says he dropped it, from the airplane at Kansas City.”

“I suppose he asked to be remembered to me.”

“No, he just said he loved me. I believe he does. He’s so very weak.”

“Come sit beside me,” Joel urged her.

It was early. And it was still a few minutes short of midnight a half-hour later, when Joel walked to the cold hearth, and said tersely:

“Meaning that you haven’t any curiosity about me?”

“Not at all. You attract me a lot and you know it. The point is that I suppose I really do love Miles.”

“Obviously.”

“And tonight I feel uneasy about everything.”

He wasn’t angry--he was even faintly relieved that a possible entanglement was avoided. Still as he looked at her, the warmth and softness of her body thawing her cold blue costume, he knew she was one of the things he would always regret.

“I’ve got to go,” he said. “I’ll phone a taxi.”

“Nonsense--there’s a chauffeur on duty.”

He winced at her readiness to have him go, and seeing this she kissed him lightly and said, “You’re sweet, Joel.” Then suddenly three things happened: he took down his drink at a gulp, the phone rang loud through the house and a clock in the hall struck in trumpet notes.

Nine--ten--eleven--twelve--

V

It was Sunday again. Joel realized that he had come to the theater this evening with the work of the week still hanging about him like cerements. He had made love to Stella as he might attack some matter to be cleaned up hurriedly before the day’s end. But this was Sunday--the lovely, lazy perspective of the next twenty-four hours unrolled before him--every minute was something to be approached with lulling indirection, every moment held the germ of innumerable possibilities. Nothing was impossible--everything was just beginning. He poured himself another drink.

With a sharp moan, Stella slipped forward inertly by the telephone. Joel picked her up and laid her on the sofa. He squirted soda-water on a handkerchief and slapped it over her face. The telephone mouthpiece was still grinding and he put it to his ear.

“--the plane fell just this side of Kansas City. The body of Miles Calman has been identified and--”

He hung up the receiver.

“Lie still,” he said, stalling, as Stella opened her eyes.

“Oh, what’s happened?” she whispered. “Call them back. Oh, what’s happened?”

“I’ll call them right away. What’s your doctor’s name?”

“Did they say Miles was dead?”

“Lie quiet--is there a servant still up?”

“Hold me--I’m frightened.”

He put his arm around her.

“I want the name of your doctor,” he said sternly. “It may be a mistake but I want someone here.”

“It’s Doctor--Oh, God, is Miles dead?”

Joel ran upstairs and searched through strange medicine cabinets for spirits of ammonia. When he came down Stella cried:

“He isn’t dead--I know he isn’t. This is part of his scheme. He’s torturing me. I know he’s alive. I can feel he’s alive.”

“I want to get hold of some close friend of yours, Stella. You can’t stay here alone tonight.”

“Oh, no,” she cried. “I can’t see anybody. You stay. I haven’t got any friend.” She got up, tears streaming down her face. “Oh, Miles is my only friend. He’s not dead--he can’t be dead. I’m going there right away and see. Get a train. You’ll have to come with me.”

“You can’t. There’s nothing to do tonight. I want you to tell me the name of some woman I can call: Lois? Joan? Carmel? Isn’t there somebody?”

Stella stared at him blindly.

“Eva Goebel was my best friend,” she said.

Joel thought of Miles, his sad and desperate face in the office two days before. In the awful silence of his death all was clear about him. He was the only American-born director with both an interesting temperament and an artistic conscience. Meshed in an industry, he had paid with his ruined nerves for having no resilience, no healthy cynicism, no refuge--only a pitiful and precarious escape.

There was a sound at the outer door--it opened suddenly, and there were footsteps in the hall.

“Miles!” Stella screamed. “Is it you, Miles? Oh, it’s Miles.”

A telegraph boy appeared in the doorway.

“I couldn’t find the bell. I heard you talking inside.”

The telegram was a duplicate of the one that had been phoned. While Stella read it over and over, as though it were a black lie, Joel telephoned. It was still early and he had difficulty getting anyone; when finally he succeeded in finding some friends he made Stella take a stiff drink.

“You’ll stay here, Joel,” she whispered, as though she were half-asleep. “You won’t go away. Miles liked you--he said you--” She shivered violently, “Oh, my God, you don’t know how alone I feel.” Her eyes closed, “Put your arms around me. Miles had a suit like that.” She started bolt upright. “Think of what he must have felt. He was afraid of almost everything, anyhow.”

She shook her head dazedly. Suddenly she seized Joel’s face and held it close to hers.

“You won’t go. You like me--you love me, don’t you? Don’t call up anybody. Tomorrow’s time enough. You stay here with me tonight.”

He stared at her, at first incredulously, and then with shocked understanding. In her dark groping Stella was trying to keep Miles alive by sustaining a situation in which he had figured--as if Miles’ mind could not die so long as the possibilities that had worried him still existed. It was a distraught and tortured effort to stave off the realization that he was dead.

Resolutely Joel went to the phone and called a doctor.

“Don’t, oh, don’t call anybody!” Stella cried. “Come back here and put your arms around me.”

“Is Doctor Bales in?”

“Joel,” Stella cried. “I thought I could count on you. Miles liked you. He was jealous of you--Joel, come here.”

Ah then--if he betrayed Miles she would be keeping him alive--for if he were really dead how could he be betrayed?

“--has just had a very severe shock. Can you come at once, and get hold of a nurse?”

“Joel!”

Now the door-bell and the telephone began to ring intermittently, and automobiles were stopping in front of the door.

“But you’re not going,” Stella begged him. “You’re going to stay, aren’t you?”

“No,” he answered. “But I’ll be back, if you need me.”

Standing on the steps of the house which now hummed and palpitated with the life that flutters around death like protective leaves, he began to sob a little in his throat.

“Everything he touched he did something magical to,” he thought. “He even brought that little gamin alive and made her a sort of masterpiece.”

And then:

“What a hell of a hole he leaves in this damn wilderness--already!”

And then with a certain bitterness, “Oh, yes, I’ll be back--I’ll be back!”

TWO WRONGS

“Look at those shoes,” said Bill--”twenty-eight dollars.”

Mr. Brancusi looked. “Purty.”

“Made to order.”

“I knew you were a great swell. You didn’t get me up here to show me those shoes, did you?”

“I am not a great swell. Who said I was a great swell?” demanded Bill. “Just because I’ve got more education than most people in show business.”

“And then, you know, you’re a handsome young fellow,” said Brancusi dryly.

“Sure I am--compared to you anyhow. The girls think I must be an actor, till they find out. . . . Got a cigarette? What’s more, I look like a man--which is more than most of these pretty boys round Times Square do.”

“Good-looking. Gentleman. Good shoes. Shot with luck.”

“You’re wrong there,” objected Bill. “Brains. Three years--nine shows--four big hits--only one flop. Where do you see any luck in that?”

A little bored, Brancusi just gazed. What he would have seen--had he not made his eyes opaque and taken to thinking about something else--was a fresh-faced young Irishman exuding aggressiveness and self-confidence until the air of his office was thick with it. Presently, Brancusi knew, Bill would hear the sound of his own voice and be ashamed and retire into his other humor--the quietly superior, sensitive one, the patron of the arts, modelled on the intellectuals of the Theatre Guild. Bill McChesney had not quite decided between the two, such blends are seldom complete before thirty.

“Take Ames, take Hopkins, take Harris--take any of them,” Bill insisted. “What have they got on me? What’s the matter? Do you want a drink?”--seeing Brancusi’s glance wander toward the cabinet on the opposite wall.

“I never drink in the morning. I just wondered who was it keeps on knocking. You ought to make it stop it. I get a nervous fidgets, kind of half crazy, with that kind of thing.”

Bill went quickly to the door and threw it open.

“Nobody,” he said . . . “Hello! What do you want?”

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” a voice answered; “I’m terribly sorry. I got so excited and I didn’t realize I had this pencil in my hand.”

“What is it you want?”

“I want to see you, and the clerk said you were busy. I have a letter for you from Alan Rogers, the playwright--and I wanted to give it to you personally.”

“I’m busy,” said Bill. “See Mr. Cadorna.”

“I did, but he wasn’t very encouraging, and Mr. Rogers said--”

Brancusi, edging over restlessly, took a quick look at her. She was very young, with beautiful red hair, and more character in her face than her chatter would indicate; it did not occur to Mr. Brancusi that this was due to her origin in Delaney, South Carolina.

“What shall I do?” she inquired, quietly laying her future in Bill’s hands. “I had a letter to Mr. Rogers, and he just gave me this one to you.”

“Well, what do you want me to do--marry you?” exploded Bill.

“I’d like to get a part in one of your plays.”

“Then sit down and wait. I’m busy. . . . Where’s Miss Cohalan?” He rang a bell, looked once more, crossly, at the girl and closed the door of his office. But during the interruption his other mood had come over him, and he resumed his conversation with Brancusi in the key of one who was hand in glove with Reinhardt for the artistic future of the theater.

By 12:30 he had forgotten everything except that he was going to be the greatest producer in the world and that he had an engagement to tell Sol Lincoln about it at lunch. Emerging from his office, he looked expectantly at Miss Cohalan.

“Mr. Lincoln won’t be able to meet you,” she said. “He jus ‘is minute called.”

“Just this minute,” repeated Bill, shocked. “All right. Just cross him off that list for Thursday night.”

Miss Cohalan drew a line on a sheet of paper before her.

“Mr. McChesney, now you haven’t forgotten me, have you?”

He turned to the red-headed girl.

“No,” he said vaguely, and then to Miss Cohalan: “That’s all right; ask him for Thursday anyhow. To hell with him.”

He did not want to lunch alone. He did not like to do anything alone now, because contacts were too much fun when one had prominence and power.

“If you would just let me talk to you two minutes--” she began.

“Afraid I can’t now.” Suddenly he realized that she was the most beautiful person he had ever seen in his life.

He stared at her.

“Mr. Rogers told me--”

“Come and have a spot of lunch with me,” he said, and then, with an air of great hurry, he gave Miss Cohalan some quick and contradictory instructions and held open the door.

They stood on Forty-second Street and he breathed his pre-empted air--there is only enough air there for a few people at a time. It was November and the first exhilarating rush of the season was over, but he could look east and see the electric sign of one of his plays, and west and see another. Around the corner was the one he had put on with Brancusi--the last time he would produce anything except alone.

They went to the Bedford, where there was a to-do of waiters and captains as he came in.

“This is ver tractive restaurant,” she said, impressed and on company behavior.

“This is hams’ paradise.” He nodded to several people. “Hello, Jimmy--Bill. . . . Hello there, Jack. . . . That’s Jack Dempsey. . . . I don’t eat here much. I usually eat up at the Harvard Club.”

“Oh, did you go to Harvard? I used to know--”

“Yes.” He hesitated; there were two versions about Harvard, and he decided suddenly on the true one. “Yes, and they had me down for a hick there, but not any more. About a week ago I was out on Long Island at the Gouverneer Haights--very fashionable people--and a couple of Gold Coast boys that never knew I was alive up in Cambridge began pulling this ‘Hello, Bill, old boy’ on me.”

He hesitated and suddenly decided to leave the story there.

“What do you want--a job?” he demanded. He remembered suddenly that she had holes in her stockings. Holes in stockings always moved him, softened him.

“Yes, or else I’ve got to go home,” she said. “I want to be a dancer--you know, Russian ballet. But the lessons cost so much, so I’ve got to get a job. I thought it’d give me stage presence anyhow.”

“Hoofer, eh?”

“Oh, no, serious.”

“Well, Pavlova’s a hoofer, isn’t she?”

“Oh, no.” She was shocked at this profanity, but after a moment she continued: “I took with Miss Campbell--Georgia Berriman Campbell--back home--maybe you know her. She took from Ned Wayburn, and she’s really wonderful. She--”

“Yeah?” he said abstractedly. “Well, it’s a tough business--casting agencies bursting with people that can all do anything, till I give them a try. How old are you?”

“Eighteen.”

“I’m twenty-six. Came here four years ago without a cent.”

“My!”

“I could quit now and be comfortable the rest of my life.”

“My!”

“Going to take a year off next year--get married. . . . Ever hear of Irene Rikker?”

“I should say! She’s about my favorite of all.”

“We’re engaged.”

“My!”

When they went out into Times Square after a while he said carelessly, “What are you doing now?”

“Why, I’m trying to get a job.”

“I mean right this minute.”

“Why, nothing.”

“Do you want to come up to my apartment on Forty-sixth Street and have some coffee?”

Their eyes met, and Emmy Pinkard made up her mind she could take care of herself.

It was a great bright studio apartment with a ten-foot divan, and after she had coffee and he a highball, his arm dropped round her shoulder.

“Why should I kiss you?” she demanded. “I hardly know you, and besides, you’re engaged to somebody else.”

“Oh, that! She doesn’t care.”

“No, really!”

“You’re a good girl.”

“Well, I’m certainly not an idiot.”

“All right, go on being a good girl.”

She stood up, but lingered a minute, very fresh and cool, and not upset at all.

“I suppose this means you won’t give me a job?” she asked pleasantly.

He was already thinking about something else--about an interview and a rehearsal--but now he looked at her again and saw that she still had holes in her stockings. He telephoned:

“Joe, this is the Fresh Boy. . . . You didn’t think I knew you called me that, did you? . . . It’s all right. . . . Say, have you got those three girls for the party scene? Well, listen; save one for a Southern kid I’m sending around today.”

He looked at her jauntily, conscious of being such a good fellow.

“Well, I don’t know how to thank you. And Mr. Rogers,” she added audaciously. “Good-by, Mr. McChesney.”

He disdained to answer.

II

During rehearsal he used to come around a great deal and stand watching with a wise expression, as if he knew everything in people’s minds; but actually he was in a haze about his own good fortune and didn’t see much and didn’t for the moment care. He spent most of his week-ends on Long Island with the fashionable people who had “taken him up.” When Brancusi referred to him as the “big social butterfly,” he would answer, “Well, what about it? Didn’t I go to Harvard? You think they found me in a Grand Street apple cart, like you?” He was well liked among his new friends for his good looks and good nature, as well as his success.

His engagement to Irene Rikker was the most unsatisfactory thing in his life; they were tired of each other but unwilling to put an end to it. Just as, often, the two richest young people in a town are drawn together by the fact, so Bill McChesney and Irene Rikker, borne side by side on waves of triumph, could not spare each other’s nice appreciation of what was due such success. Nevertheless, they indulged in fiercer and more frequent quarrels, and the end was approaching. It was embodied in one Frank Llewellen, a big, fine-looking actor playing opposite Irene. Seeing the situation at once, Bill became bitterly humorous about it; from the second week of rehearsals there was tension in the air.

Meanwhile Emmy Pinkard, with enough money for crackers and milk, and a friend who took her out to dinner, was being happy. Her friend, Easton Hughes from Delaney, was studying at Columbia to be a dentist. He sometimes brought along other lonesome young men studying to be dentists, and at the price, if it can be called that, of a few casual kisses in taxicabs, Emmy dined when hungry. One afternoon she introduced Easton to Bill McChesney at the stage door, and afterward Bill made his facetious jealousy the basis of their relationship.

“I see that dental number has been slipping it over on me again. Well, don’t let him give you any laughing gas is my advice.”

Though their encounters were few, they always looked at each other. When Bill looked at her he stared for an instant as if he had not seen her before, and then remembered suddenly that she was to be teased. When she looked at him she saw many things--a bright day outside, with great crowds of people hurrying through the streets; a very good new limousine that waited at the curb for two people with very good new clothes, who got in and went somewhere that was just like New York, only away, and more fun there. Many times she had wished she had kissed him, but just as many times she was glad she hadn’t; since, as the weeks passed, he grew less romantic, tied up, like the rest of them, to the play’s laborious evolution.

They were opening in Atlantic City. A sudden moodiness apparent to everyone, came over Bill. He was short with the director and sarcastic with the actors. This, it was rumored, was because Irene Rikker had come down with Frank Llewellen on a different train. Sitting beside the author on the night of the dress rehearsal, he was an almost sinister figure in the twilight of the auditorium; but he said nothing until the end of the second act, when, with Llewellen and Irene Rikker on the stage alone, he suddenly called:

“We’ll go over that again--and cut out the mush!”

Llewellen came down to the footlights.

“What do you mean--cut out the mush?” he inquired. “Those are the lines, aren’t they?”

“You know what I mean--stick to business.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

Bill stood up. “I mean all that damn whispering.”

“There wasn’t any whispering. I simply asked--”

“That’ll do--take it over.”

Llewellen turned away furiously and was about to proceed, when Bill added audibly: “Even a ham has got to do his stuff.”

Llewellen whipped about. “I don’t have to stand that kind of talk, Mr. McChesney.”

“Why not? You’re a ham, aren’t you? When did you get ashamed of being a ham? I’m putting on this play and I want you to stick to your stuff.” Bill got up and walked down the aisle. “And when you don’t do it, I’m going to call you just like anybody else.”

“Well, you watch out for your tone of voice--”

“What’ll you do about it?”

Llewellen jumped down into the orchestra pit.

“I’m not taking anything from you!” he shouted.

Irene Rikker called to them from the stage, “For heaven’s sake, are you two crazy?” And then Llewellen swung at him, one short, mighty blow. Bill pitched back across a row of seats, fell through one, splintering it, and lay wedged there. There was a moment’s wild confusion, then people holding Llewellen, then the author, with a white face, pulling Bill up, and the stage manager crying: “Shall I kill him, chief? Shall I break his fat face?” and Llewellen panting and Irene Rikker frightened.

“Get back there!” Bill cried, holding a handkerchief to his face and teetering in the author’s supporting arms. “Everybody get back! Take that scene again, and no talk! Get back, Llewellen!”

Before they realized it they were all back on the stage, Irene pulling Llewellen’s arm and talking to him fast. Someone put on the auditorium lights full and then dimmed them again hurriedly. When Emmy came out presently for her scene, she saw in a quick glance that Bill was sitting with a whole mask of handkerchiefs over his bleeding face. She hated Llewellen and was afraid that presently they would break up and go back to New York. But Bill had saved the show from his own folly, since for Llewellen to take the further initiative of quitting would hurt his professional standing. The act ended and the next one began without an interval. When it was over, Bill was gone.

Next night, during the performance, he sat on a chair in the wings in view of everyone coming on or off. His face was swollen and bruised, but he neglected to seem conscious of the fact and there were no comments. Once he went around in front, and when he returned, word leaked out that two of the New York agencies were making big buys. He had a hit--they all had a hit.

At the sight of him to whom Emmy felt they all owed so much, a great wave of gratitude swept over her. She went up and thanked him.

“I’m a good picker, red-head,” he agreed grimly.

“Thank you for picking me.”

And suddenly Emmy was moved to a rash remark.

“You’ve hurt your face so badly!” she exclaimed. “Oh, I think it was so brave of you not to let everything go to pieces last night.”

He looked at her hard for a moment and then an ironic smile tried unsuccessfully to settle on his swollen face.

“Do you admire me, baby?”

“Yes.”

“Even when I fell in the seats, did you admire me?”

“You got control of everything so quick.”

“That’s loyalty for you. You found something to admire in that fool mess.”

And her happiness bubbled up into, “Anyhow, you behaved just wonderfully.” She looked so fresh and young that Bill, who had had a wretched day, wanted to rest his swollen cheek against her cheek.

He took both the bruise and the desire with him to New York next morning; the bruise faded, but the desire remained. And when they opened in the city, no sooner did he see other men begin to crowd around her beauty than she became this play for him, this success, the thing that he came to see when he came to the theater. After a good run it closed just as he was drinking too much and needed someone on the gray days of reaction. They were married suddenly in Connecticut, early in June.

III

Two men sat in the Savoy Grill in London, waiting for the Fourth of July. It was already late in May.

“Is he a nice guy?” asked Hubbel.

“Very nice,” answered Brancusi; “very nice, very handsome, very popular.” After a moment, he added: “I want to get him to come home.”

“That’s what I don’t get about him,” said Hubbel. “Show business over here is nothing compared to home. What does he want to stay here for?”

“He goes around with a lot of dukes and ladies.”

“Oh?”

“Last week when I met him he was with three ladies--Lady this, Lady that, Lady the other thing.”

“I thought he was married.”

“Married three years,” said Brancusi, “got a fine child, going to have another.”

He broke off as McChesney came in, his very American face staring about boldly over the collar of a box-shouldered topcoat.

“Hello, Mac; meet my friend Mr. Hubbel.”

“J’doo,” said Bill. He sat down, continuing to stare around the bar to see who was present. After a few minutes Hubbel left, and Bill asked:

“Who’s that bird?”

“He’s only been here a month. He ain’t got a title yet. You been here six months, remember.”

Bill grinned.

“You think I’m high-hat, don’t you? Well, I’m not kidding myself anyhow. I like it; it gets me. I’d like to be the Marquis of McChesney.”

“Maybe you can drink yourself into it,” suggested Brancusi.

“Shut your trap. Who said I was drinking? Is that what they say now? Look here; if you can tell me any American manager in the history of the theater who’s had the success that I’ve had in London in less than eight months, I’ll go back to America with you tomorrow. If you’ll just tell me--”

“It was with your old shows. You had two flops in New York.”

Bill stood up, his face hardening.

“Who do you think you are?” he demanded. “Did you come over here to talk to me like that?”

“Don’t get sore now, Bill. I just want you to come back. I’d say anything for that. Put over three seasons like you had in ‘22 and ‘23, and you’re fixed for life.”

“New York makes me sick,” said Bill moodily. “One minute you’re a king; then you have two flops, they go around saying you’re on the toboggan.”

Brancusi shook his head.

“That wasn’t why they said it. It was because you had that quarrel with Aronstael, your best friend.”

“Friend hell!”

“Your best friend in business anyhow. Then--”

“I don’t want to talk about it.” He looked at his watch. “Look here; Emmy’s feeling bad so I’m afraid I can’t have dinner with you tonight. Come around to the office before you sail.”

Five minutes later, standing by the cigar counter, Brancusi saw Bill enter the Savoy again and descend the steps that led to the tea room.

“Grown to be a great diplomat,” thought Brancusi; “he used to just say when he had a date. Going with these dukes and ladies is polishing him up even more.”

Perhaps he was a little hurt, though it was not typical of him to be hurt. At any rate he made a decision, then and there, that McChesney was on the down grade; it was quite typical of him that at that point he erased him from his mind forever.

There was no outward indication that Bill was on the down grade; a hit at the New Strand, a hit at the Prince of Wales, and the weekly grosses pouring in almost as well as they had two or three years before in New York. Certainly a man of action was justified in changing his base. And the man who, an hour later, turned into his Hyde Park house for dinner had all the vitality of the late twenties. Emmy, very tired and clumsy, lay on a couch in the upstairs sitting room. He held her for a moment in his arms.

“Almost over now,” he said. “You’re beautiful.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“It’s true. You’re always beautiful. I don’t know why. Perhaps because you’ve got character, and that’s always in your face, even when you’re like this.”

She was pleased; she ran her hand through his hair.

“Character is the greatest thing in the world,” he declared, “and you’ve got more than anybody I know.”

“Did you see Brancusi?”

“I did, the little louse! I decided not to bring him home to dinner.”

“What was the matter?”

“Oh, just snooty--talking about my row with Aronstael, as if it was my fault.”

She hesitated, closed her mouth tight, and then said quietly, “You got into that fight with Aronstael because you were drinking.”

He rose impatiently.

“Are you going to start--”

“No, Bill, but you’re drinking too much now. You know you are.”

Aware that she was right, he evaded the matter and they went in to dinner. On the glow of a bottle of claret he decided he would go on the wagon tomorrow till after the baby was born.

“I always stop when I want, don’t I? I always do what I say. You never saw me quit yet.”

“Never yet.”

They had coffee together, and afterward he got up.

“Come back early,” said Emmy.

“Oh, sure. . . . What’s the matter, baby?”

“I’m just crying. Don’t mind me. Oh, go on; don’t just stand there like a big idiot.”

“But I’m worried, naturally. I don’t like to see you cry.”

“Oh, I don’t know where you go in the evenings; I don’t know who you’re with. And that Lady Sybil Combrinck who kept phoning. It’s all right, I suppose, but I wake up in the night and I feel so alone, Bill. Because we’ve always been together, haven’t we, until recently?”

“But we’re together still. . . . What’s happened to you, Emmy?”

“I know--I’m just crazy. We’d never let each other down, would we? We never have--”

“Of course not.”

“Come back early, or when you can.”

He looked in for a minute at the Prince of Wales Theatre; then he went into the hotel next door and called a number.

“I’d like to speak to her Ladyship. Mr. McChesney calling.”

It was some time before Lady Sybil answered:

“This is rather a surprise. It’s been several weeks since I’ve been lucky enough to hear from you.”

Her voice was flip as a whip and cold as automatic refrigeration, in the mode grown familiar since British ladies took to piecing themselves together out of literature. It had fascinated Bill for a while, but just for a while. He had kept his head.

“I haven’t had a minute,” he explained easily. “You’re not sore, are you?”

“I should scarcely say ‘sore.’“

“I was afraid you might be; you didn’t send me an invitation to your party tonight. My idea was that after we talked it all over we agreed--”

“You talked a great deal,” she said; “possibly a little too much.”

Suddenly, to Bill’s astonishment, she hung up.

“Going British on me,” he thought. “A little skit entitled The Daughter of a Thousand Earls.”

The snub roused him, the indifference revived his waning interest. Usually women forgave his changes of heart because of his obvious devotion to Emmy, and he was remembered by various ladies with a not unpleasant sigh. But he had detected no such sigh upon the phone.

“I’d like to clear up this mess,” he thought. Had he been wearing evening clothes, he might have dropped in at the dance and talked it over with her, still he didn’t want to go home. Upon consideration it seemed important that the misunderstanding should be fixed up at once, and presently he began to entertain the idea of going as he was; Americans were excused unconventionalities of dress. In any case, it was not nearly time, and, in the company of several highballs, he considered the matter for an hour.

At midnight he walked up the steps of her Mayfair house. The coat-room attendants scrutinized his tweeds disapprovingly and a footman peered in vain for his name on the list of guests. Fortunately his friend Sir Humphrey Dunn arrived at the same time and convinced the footman it must be a mistake.

Inside, Bill immediately looked about for his hostess.

She was a very tall young woman, half American and all the more intensely English. In a sense, she had discovered Bill McChesney, vouched for his savage charms; his retirement was one of her most humiliating experiences since she had begun being bad.

She stood with her husband at the head of the receiving line--Bill had never seen them together before. He decided to choose a less formal moment for presenting himself.

As the receiving went on interminably, he became increasingly uncomfortable. He saw a few people he knew, but not many, and he was conscious that his clothes were attracting a certain attention; he was aware also that Lady Sybil saw him and could have relieved his embarrassment with a wave of her hand, but she made no sign. He was sorry he had come, but to withdraw now would be absurd, and going to a buffet table, he took a glass of champagne.

When he turned around she was alone at last, and he was about to approach her when the butler spoke to him:

“Pardon me, sir. Have you a card?”

“I’m a friend of Lady Sybil’s,” said Bill impatiently. He turned away, but the butler followed.

“I’m sorry, sir, but I’ll have to ask you to step aside with me and straighten this up.”

“There’s no need. I’m just about to speak to Lady Sybil now.”

“My orders are different, sir,” said the butler firmly.

Then, before Bill realized what was happening, his arms were pressed quietly to his sides and he was propelled into a little anteroom back of the buffet.

There he faced a man in a pince-nez in whom he recognized the Combrincks’ private secretary.

The secretary nodded to the butler, saying, “This is the man”; whereupon Bill was released.

“Mr. McChesney,” said the secretary, “you have seen fit to force your way here without a card, and His Lordship requests that you leave his house at once. Will you kindly give me the check for your coat?”

Then Bill understood, and the single word that he found applicable to Lady Sybil sprang to his lips; whereupon the secretary gave a sign to two footmen, and in a furious struggle Bill was carried through a pantry where busy bus boys stared at the scene, down a long hall, and pushed out a door into the night. The door closed; a moment later it was opened again to let his coat billow forth and his cane clatter down the steps.

As he stood there, overwhelmed, stricken aghast, a taxicab stopped beside him and the driver called:

“Feeling ill, gov’nor?”

“What?”

“I know where you can get a good pick-me-up, gov’nor. Never too late.” The door of the taxi opened on a nightmare. There was a cabaret that broke the closing hours; there was being with strangers he had picked up somewhere; then there were arguments, and trying to cash a check, and suddenly proclaiming over and over that he was William McChesney, the producer, and convincing no one of the fact, not even himself. It seemed important to see Lady Sybil right away and call her to account; but presently nothing was important at all. He was in a taxicab whose driver had just shaken him awake in front of his own home.

The telephone was ringing as he went in, but he walked stonily past the maid and only heard her voice when his foot was on the stair.

“Mr. McChesney, it’s the hospital calling again. Mrs. McChesney’s there and they’ve been phoning every hour.”

Still in a daze, he held the receiver up to his ear.

“We’re calling from the Midland Hospital, for your wife. She was delivered of a still-born child at nine this morning.”

“Wait a minute.” His voice was dry and cracking. “I don’t understand.”

After a while he understood that Emmy’s child was dead and she wanted him. His knees sagged groggily as he walked down the street, looking for a taxi.

The room was dark; Emmy looked up and saw him from a rumpled bed.

“It’s you!” she cried. “I thought you were dead! Where did you go?”

He threw himself down on his knees beside the bed, but she turned away.

“Oh, you smell awful,” she said. “It makes me sick.”

But she kept her hand in his hair, and he knelt there motionless for a long time.

“I’m done with you,” she muttered, “but it was awful when I thought you were dead. Everybody’s dead. I wish I was dead.”

A curtain parted with the wind, and as he rose to arrange it, she saw him in the full morning light, pale and terrible, with rumpled clothes and bruises on his face. This time she hated him instead of those who had hurt him. She could feel him slipping out of her heart, feel the space he left, and all at once he was gone, and she could even forgive him and be sorry for him. All this in a minute.

She had fallen down at the door of the hospital, trying to get out of the taxicab alone.

IV

When Emmy was well, physically and mentally, her incessant idea was to learn to dance; the old dream inculcated by Miss Georgia Berriman Campbell of South Carolina persisted as a bright avenue leading back to first youth and days of hope in New York. To her, dancing meant that elaborate blend of tortuous attitudes and formal pirouettes that evolved out of Italy several hundred years ago and reached its apogee in Russia at the beginning of this century. She wanted to use herself on something she could believe in, and it seemed to her that the dance was woman’s interpretation of music; instead of strong fingers, one had limbs with which to render Tschaikowsky and Stravinksi; and feet could be as eloquent in Chopiniana as voices in “The Ring.” At the bottom, it was something sandwiched in between the acrobats and the trained seals; at the top it was Pavlova and art.

Once they were settled in an apartment back in New York, she plunged into her work like a girl of sixteen--four hours a day at bar exercises, attitudes, sauts, arabesques and pirouettes. It became the realest part of her life, and her only worry was whether or not she was too old. At twenty-six she had ten years to make up, but she was a natural dancer with a fine body--and that lovely face.

Bill encouraged it; when she was ready he was going to build the first real American ballet around her. There were even times when he envied her her absorption; for affairs in his own line were more difficult since they had come home. For one thing, he had made many enemies in those early days of self-confidence; there were exaggerated stories of his drinking and of his being hard on actors and difficult to work with.

It was against him that he had always been unable to save money and must beg a backing for each play. Then, too, in a curious way, he was intelligent, as he was brave enough to prove in several uncommercial ventures, but he had no Theatre Guild behind him, and what money he lost was charged against him.

There were successes, too, but he worked harder for them, or it seemed so, for he had begun to pay a price for his irregular life. He always intended to take a rest or give up his incessant cigarettes, but there was so much competition now--new men coming up, with new reputations for infallibility--and besides, he wasn’t used to regularity. He liked to do his work in those great spurts, inspired by black coffee, that seem so inevitable in show business, but which took so much out of a man after thirty. He had come to lean, in a way, on Emmy’s fine health and vitality. They were always together, and if he felt a vague dissatisfaction that he had grown to need her more than she needed him, there was always the hope that things would break better for him next month, next season.

Coming home from ballet school one November evening, Emmy swung her little gray bag, pulled her hat far down over her still damp hair, and gave herself up to pleasant speculation. For a month she had been aware of people who had come to the studio especially to watch her--she was ready to dance. Once she had worked just as hard and for as long a time on something else--her relations with Bill--only to reach a climax of misery and despair, but here there was nothing to fail her except herself. Yet even now she felt a little rash in thinking: “Now it’s come. I’m going to be happy.”

She hurried, for something had come up today that she must talk over with Bill.

Finding him in the living room, she called him to come back while she dressed. She began to talk without looking around:

“Listen what happened!” Her voice was loud, to compete with the water running in the tub. “Paul Makova wants me to dance with him at the Metropolitan this season; only it’s not sure, so it’s a secret--even I’m not supposed to know.”

“That’s great.”

“The only thing is whether it wouldn’t be better for me to make a début abroad? Anyhow Donilof says I’m ready to appear. What do you think?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t sound very enthusiastic.”

“I’ve got something on my mind. I’ll tell you about it later. Go on.”

“That’s all, dear. If you still feel like going to Germany for a month, like you said, Donilof would arrange a début for me in Berlin, but I’d rather open here and dance with Paul Makova. Just imagine--” She broke off, feeling suddenly through the thick skin of her elation how abstracted he was. “Tell me what you’ve got on your mind.”

“I went to Doctor Kearns this afternoon.”

“What did he say?” Her mind was still singing with her own happiness. Bill’s intermittent attacks of hypochondria had long ceased to worry her.

“I told him about that blood this morning, and he said what he said last year--it was probably a little broken vein in my throat. But since I’d been coughing and was worried, perhaps it was safer to take an X-ray and clear the matter up. Well, we cleared it up all right. My left lung is practically gone.”

“Bill!”

“Luckily there are no spots on the other.”

She waited, horribly afraid.

“It’s come at a bad time for me,” he went on steadily, “but it’s got to be faced. He thinks I ought to go to the Adirondacks or to Denver for the winter, and his idea is Denver. That way it’ll probably clear up in five or six months.”

“Of course we’ll have to--” she stopped suddenly.

“I wouldn’t expect you to go--especially if you have this opportunity.”

“Of course I’ll go,” she said quickly. “Your health comes first. We’ve always gone everywhere together.”

“Oh, no.”

“Why, of course.” She made her voice strong and decisive. “We’ve always been together. I couldn’t stay here without you. When do you have to go?”

“As soon as possible. I went in to see Brancusi to find out if he wanted to take over the Richmond piece, but he didn’t seem enthusiastic.” His face hardened. “Of course there won’t be anything else for the present, but I’ll have enough, with what’s owing--”

“Oh, if I was only making some money!” Emmy cried. “You work so hard, and here I’ve been spending two hundred dollars a week for just my dancing lessons alone--more than I’ll be able to earn for years.”

“Of course in six months I’ll be as well as ever--he says.”

“Sure, dearest; we’ll get you well. We’ll start as soon as we can.”

She put an arm around him and kissed his cheek.

“I’m just an old parasite,” she said. “I should have known my darling wasn’t well.”

He reached automatically for a cigarette, and then stopped.

“I forgot--I’ve got to start cutting down smoking.” He rose to the occasion suddenly: “No, baby, I’ve decided to go alone. You’d go crazy with boredom out there, and I’d just be thinking I was keeping you away from your dancing.”

“Don’t think about that. The thing is to get you well.”

They discussed the matter hour after hour for the next week, each of them saying everything except the truth--that he wanted her to go with him and that she wanted passionately to stay in New York. She talked it over guardedly with Donilof, her ballet master, and found that he thought any postponement would be a terrible mistake. Seeing other girls in the ballet school making plans for the winter, she wanted to die rather than go, and Bill saw all the involuntary indications of her misery. For a while they talked of compromising on the Adirondacks, whither she would commute by aeroplane for the week-ends, but he was running a little fever now and he was definitely ordered West.

Bill settled it all one gloomy Sunday night, with that rough, generous justice that had first made her admire him, that made him rather tragic in his adversity, as he had always been bearable in his overweening success:

“It’s just up to me, baby. I got into this mess because I didn’t have any self-control--you seem to have all of that in this family--and now it’s only me that can get me out. You’ve worked hard at your stuff for three years and you deserve your chance--and if you came out there now you’d have it on me the rest of my life.” He grinned. “And I couldn’t stand that. Besides, it wouldn’t be good for the kid.”

Eventually she gave in, ashamed of herself, miserable--and glad. For the world of her work, where she existed without Bill, was bigger to her now than the world in which they existed together. There was more room to be glad in one than to be sorry in the other.

Two days later, with his ticket bought for that afternoon at five, they passed the last hours together, talking of everything hopeful. She protested still, and sincerely; had he weakened for a moment she would have gone. But the shock had done something to him, and he showed more character under it than he had for years. Perhaps it would be good for him to work it out alone.

“In the spring!” they said.

Then in the station with little Billy, and Bill saying: “I hate these graveside partings. You leave me here. I’ve got to make a phone call from the train before it goes.”

They had never spent more than a night apart in six years, save when Emmy was in the hospital; save for the time in England they had a good record of faithfulness and of tenderness toward each other, even though she had been alarmed and often unhappy at this insecure bravado from the first. After he went through the gate alone, Emmy was glad he had a phone call to make and tried to picture him making it.

She was a good woman; she had loved him with all her heart. When she went out into Thirty-third Street, it was just as dead as dead for a while, and the apartment he paid for would be empty of him, and she was here, about to do something that would make her happy.

She stopped after a few blocks, thinking: “Why, this is terrible--what I’m doing! I’m letting him down like the worst person I ever heard of. I’m leaving him flat and going off to dinner with Donilof and Paul Makova, whom I like for being beautiful and for having the same color eyes and hair. Bill’s on the train alone.”

She swung little Billy around suddenly as if to go back to the station. She could see him sitting in the train, with his face so pale and tired, and no Emmy.

“I can’t let him down,” she cried to herself as wave after wave of sentiment washed over her. But only sentiment--hadn’t he let her down--hadn’t he done what he wanted in London?

“Oh, poor Bill!”

She stood irresolute, realizing for one last honest moment how quickly she would forget this and find excuses for what she was doing. She had to think hard of London, and her conscience cleared. But with Bill all alone in the train it seemed terrible to think that way. Even now she could turn and go back to the station and tell him that she was coming, but still she waited, with life very strong in her, fighting for her. The sidewalk was narrow where she stood; presently a great wave of people, pouring out of the theater, came flooding along it, and she and little Billy were swept along with the crowd.

In the train, Bill telephoned up to the last minute, postponed going back to his stateroom, because he knew it was almost certain that he would not find her there. After the train started he went back and, of course, there was nothing but his bags in the rack and some magazines on the seat.

He knew then that he had lost her. He saw the set-up without any illusions--this Paul Makova, and months of proximity, and loneliness--afterward nothing would ever be the same. When he had thought about it all a long time, reading Variety and Zit’s in between, it began to seem, each time he came back to it, as if Emmy somehow were dead.

“She was a fine girl--one of the best. She had character.” He realized perfectly that he had brought all this on himself and that there was some law of compensation involved. He saw, too, that by going away he had again become as good as she was; it was all evened up at last.

He felt beyond everything, even beyond his grief, an almost comfortable sensation of being in the hands of something bigger than himself; and grown a little tired and unconfident--two qualities he could never for a moment tolerate--it did not seem so terrible if he were going West for a definite finish. He was sure that Emmy would come at the end, no matter what she was doing or how good an engagement she had.

THE NIGHT AT CHANCELLORSVILLE

I tell you I didn’t have any notion what I was getting into or I wouldn’t of gone down there. They can have their army--it seems to me they were all a bunch of yella-bellies. But my friend Nell said to me: “Nora, Philly, is as dead as Baltimore and we’ve got to eat this summer.” She just got a letter from a girl that said they were living fine down there in “Ole Virginia.” The soldiers were getting big pay-offs and figuring maybe they’d stay there all summer, at least till the Johnny Rebs gave up. They got their pay regular too, and a good clean-looking girl could ask--well, I forget now, because, after what happened to us, I guess you can’t expect me to remember anything.

I’ve always been used to decent treatment--somehow when I meet a man, no matter how fresh he is in the beginning, he comes to respect me in the end, and I’ve never had things done to me like some girls--getting left in a strange town or had my purse stolen.

Well, I started to tell you how I went down to the army in “Ole Virginia.” Never again! Wait’ll you hear.

I was used to traveling nice--once when I was a little girl my daddy took me on the cars to Baltimore--we lived in York, Pa. And we couldn’t have been more comfortable; we had pillows and the men came through with baskets of oranges and apples. You know, singing out: “Want to buy some oranges or apples--or beer?”

You know what they sell--but I never took any beer because--

Oh I know, I’ll go on--You only want to talk about the war, like all you men. But if this is your idea what a war is--

Well, they stuck us all in one car and a fresh fella took our tickets, and winked and said:

“Oh you’re going down to Hooker’s army.”

The lights were terrible in the car, smoky and full of bugs, so everything looked sort of yella. And say, that car was so old it was falling to pieces.

There must of been forty gay girls in it, a lot of them from Baltimore and Philly. Only there were three or four that weren’t gay--I mean they were more, oh, you know, rich people, and sat up front. Every once an awhile an officer would pop in from the next car and ask them if they wanted anything. I was in the seat behind with Nell and we heard him whisper: “You’re in terrible company, but we’ll be there in a few hours. And we’ll go right to headquarters, and I guarantee you some solid comfort.”

I never will forget that night. None of us had any food except some girls behind us had some sausages and bread, and they gave us what they had left. There was a spigot you turned but no water came out. After about two hours--stopping every two minutes it seemed to me--a couple of lieutenants, drunk as monkeys, came in from the next car and offered Nell and me some whiskey out of a bottle. Nell took some and I pretended to, and they set on the side of our seats. One of them started to make up to Nell, but just then the officer that had spoken to the women, pretty high up I guess, a major or a general, came back again and asked:

“You all right? Anything I can do?”

One of the ladies kind of whispered to him, and he turned to the one that was talking to Nell and made him go back in the other car. After that there was only one officer with us; he wasn’t really so drunk, just feeling sick.

“This certainly is a happy looking gang,” he said. “It’s good you can hardly see them in this light. They look as if their best friend just died.”

“What if they do,” Nell answered back quick. “How would you look yourself if you come all the way from Philly and then got in a buggy like this?”

“I come all the way from The Seven Days, sister,” he answered. “Maybe I’d be more pretty for you if I hadn’t lost an eye at Games’ Mill.”

Then we noticed he had lost an eye. He kept it sort of closed so we hadn’t remarked it before. Pretty soon he left and said he’d try and get us some water or coffee, that was what we wanted most.

The car kept rocking and it made us both feel funny. Some of the girls was sick and some was asleep on each other’s shoulders.

“Hey, where is this army?” Nell said. “Down in Mexico?”

I was kind of half asleep myself by that time and didn’t answer.

The next thing I knew I was woke up by a storm, the car was stopped again, and I said, “It’s raining.”

“Raining!” said Nell. “That’s cannons--they’re having a battle.”

“Oh!” I got awake. “Well, after this ride I don’t care who wins.”

It seemed to get louder all the time, but out the windows you couldn’t see anything on account of the mist.

In about half an hour another officer came in the car--he looked pretty messy as if he’d just crawled out of bed: his coat was still unbuttoned and he kept hitching up his trousers as if he didn’t have any suspenders on.

“All you ladies outside,” he said. “We need this car for wounded.”

“Hey!”

“We paid for our tickets, didn’t we?”

“We need all the cars for the wounded and the other cars are filled up.”

“Hey! We didn’t come down to fight in any battle!”

“It doesn’t matter what you came down for--you’re in a hell of a battle.”

I was scared, I can tell you. I thought maybe the Rebs would capture us and send us down to one of those prisons you hear about, where they starve you to death unless you sing Dixie all the time and kiss niggers.

“Hurry up!”

But another officer had come in who looked more nice.

“Stay where you are, ladies,” he said. And then he said to the officer, “What do you want to do? leave them standing on the siding! If Sedgewick’s Corps is broken, like they say, the Rebs may come up in this direction!”

Some of the girls began crying out loud.

“These are northern women after all,” he said.

“These are--”

“Shut up and go back to your command! I’m detailed to this transportation job--I’m taking these girls back to Washington with us.”

I thought they were going to hit each other, but they both walked off together. And we girls sat wondering what we were going to do.

What happened next I don’t remember exact. The cannons were sometimes very loud and then sometimes more far away, but there was firing of shots right near us--and a girl down the car had her window smashed like a hole in the center, sort of, all smashed you know, not like when you break a glass, more like ice in cold weather, just a hole and streaks around--you know. I heard a whole bunch of horses gallop by our windows, but I still couldn’t see anything.

That went on half an hour--galloping and more shots. We couldn’t tell how far away but they sounded like up by the engine.

Then it got quiet--and two men came into our car--we all knew right away they were Rebels, not officers, just plain Private ones, with muskets. One had on a old brown blouse sort of thing and one had on a blue thing--all spotted--I know I could never of let that man make love to me. It had spots--it was too short--anyway, it was out of style. Oh it was disgusting. I was surprised because I thought they always wore grey. They were disgusting looking and very dirty; one had a big pot of jam smeared all over his face and the other one had a big box of crackers.

“Hi ladies.”

“What you gals doin’ down here?”

“Kain’t you see, Steve, this is old Joe Hooker’s staff.”

“Reckin we ought to take em back to the General?”

They talked outlandish like that--I could hardly understand, they talked so funny.

One of the girls got historical she was so scared, and that made them kind of shy. They were just kids under those beards, and one of them tipped his hat or cap or whatever the old thing was.

“We’re not fixin’ to hurt you.”

At that moment there was a whole bunch more shooting down by the engine and the Rebs turned and ran.

We were glad, I can tell you.

Then, about fifteen minutes later, in came one of our officers. This was another new one.

“You better duck down!” he shouted to us. “They may fire on this train. We’re starting you off as soon as we unload two more ambulances.”

Half of us was on the floor already. The rich women sitting ahead of Nell and me had gone up into the car ahead where the wounded were--to see if they could do anything. Nell thought she’d look in too, but she came back holding her nose. She said it smelled awful in there.

It was lucky she didn’t go in, because two of the girls did from our car. People that is sick can never seem to get much consideration for other people who happen to be well. The nurses sent them right back--as if they was dirt under their feet.

After I don’t know how long the train began to move. A soldier come in and poured oil out of all our lights except one, and took it into the wounded car. So now we could hardly see at all.

If the trip down was slow the trip back was slower--The wounded began making so much noise, grunting and all, that we could hear it and couldn’t get a decent sleep.

We stopped everywhere.

When we got in Washington at last there was a lot of people in the station and they were all anxious about what had happened to the army, but I said You can search me. All I wanted was my little old room and my little old bed. I never been treated like that in my life.

One of the girls said she was going to write to President Lincoln about it.

And in the papers next day they never said anything about how our train got attacked, or about us girls at all! Can you beat it?

THE LAST OF THE BELLES

After Atlanta’s elaborate and theatrical rendition of Southern charm, we all underestimated Tarleton. It was a little hotter than anywhere we’d been--a dozen rookies collapsed the first day in that Georgia sun--and when you saw herds of cows drifting through the business streets, hi-yaed by colored drovers, a trance stole down over you out of the hot light; you wanted to move a hand or foot to be sure you were alive.

So I stayed out at camp and let Lieutenant Warren tell me about the girls. This was fifteen years ago, and I’ve forgotten how I felt, except that the days went along, one after another, better than they do now, and I was empty-hearted, because up North she whose legend I had loved for three years was getting married. I saw the clippings and newspaper photographs. It was “a romantic wartime wedding,” all very rich and sad. I felt vividly the dark radiance of the sky under which it took place, and as a young snob, was more envious than sorry.

A day came when I went into Tarleton for a haircut and ran into a nice fellow named Bill Knowles, who was in my time at Harvard. He’d been in the National Guard division that preceded us in camp; at the last moment he had transferred to aviation and been left behind.

“I’m glad I met you, Andy,” he said with undue seriousness. “I’ll hand you on all my information before I start for Texas. You see, there’re really only three girls here--”

I was interested; there was something mystical about there being three girls.

“--and here’s one of them now.”

We were in front of a drug store and he marched me in and introduced me to a lady I promptly detested.

“The other two are Ailie Calhoun and Sally Carrol Happer.”

I guessed from the way he pronounced her name, that he was interested in Ailie Calhoun. It was on his mind what she would be doing while he was gone; he wanted her to have a quiet, uninteresting time.

At my age I don’t even hesitate to confess that entirely unchivalrous images of Ailie Calhoun--that lovely name--rushed into my mind. At twenty-three there is no such thing as a preëmpted beauty; though, had Bill asked me, I would doubtless have sworn in all sincerity to care for her like a sister. He didn’t; he was just fretting out loud at having to go. Three days later he telephoned me that he was leaving next morning and he’d take me to her house that night.

We met at the hotel and walked uptown through the flowery, hot twilight. The four white pillars of the Calhoun house faced the street, and behind them the veranda was dark as a cave with hanging, weaving, climbing vines.

When we came up the walk a girl in a white dress tumbled out of the front door, crying, “I’m so sorry I’m late!” and seeing us, added: “Why, I thought I heard you come ten minutes--”

She broke off as a chair creaked and another man, an aviator from Camp Harry Lee, emerged from the obscurity of the veranda.

“Why, Canby!” she cried. “How are you?”

He and Bill Knowles waited with the tenseness of open litigants.

“Canby, I want to whisper to you, honey,” she said, after just a second. “You’ll excuse us, Bill.”

They went aside. Presently Lieutenant Canby, immensely displeased, said in a grim voice, “Then we’ll make it Thursday, but that means sure.” Scarcely nodding to us, he went down the walk, the spurs with which he presumably urged on his aeroplane gleaming in the lamplight.

“Come in--I don’t just know your name--”

There she was--the Southern type in all its purity. I would have recognized Ailie Calhoun if I’d never heard Ruth Draper or read Marse Chan. She had the adroitness sugar-coated with sweet, voluble simplicity, the suggested background of devoted fathers, brothers and admirers stretching back into the South’s heroic age, the unfailing coolness acquired in the endless struggle with the heat. There were notes in her voice that order slaves around, that withered up Yankee captains, and then soft, wheedling notes that mingled in unfamiliar loveliness with the night.

I could scarcely see her in the darkness, but when I rose to go--it was plain that I was not to linger--she stood in the orange light from the doorway. She was small and very blond; there was too much fever-colored rouge on her face, accentuated by a nose dabbed clownish white, but she shone through that like a star.

“After Bill goes I’ll be sitting here all alone night after night. Maybe you’ll take me to the country-club dances.” The pathetic prophecy brought a laugh from Bill. “Wait a minute,” Ailie murmured. “Your guns are all crooked.”

She straightened my collar pin, looking up at me for a second with something more than curiosity. It was a seeking look, as if she asked, “Could it be you?” Like Lieutenant Canby, I marched off unwillingly into the suddenly insufficient night.

Two weeks later I sat with her on the same veranda, or rather she half lay in my arms and yet scarcely touched me--how she managed that I don’t remember. I was trying unsuccessfully to kiss her, and had been trying for the best part of an hour. We had a sort of joke about my not being sincere. My theory was that if she’d let me kiss her I’d fall in love with her. Her argument was that I was obviously insincere.

In a lull between two of these struggles she told me about her brother who had died in his senior year at Yale. She showed me his picture--it was a handsome, earnest face with a Leyendecker forelock--and told me that when she met someone who measured up to him she’d marry. I found this family idealism discouraging; even my brash confidence couldn’t compete with the dead.

The evening and other evenings passed like that, and ended with my going back to camp with the remembered smell of magnolia flowers and a mood of vague dissatisfaction. I never kissed her. We went to the vaudeville and to the country club on Saturday nights, where she seldom took ten consecutive steps with one man, and she took me to barbecues and rowdy watermelon parties, and never thought it was worth while to change what I felt for her into love. I see now that it wouldn’t have been hard, but she was a wise nineteen and she must have seen that we were emotionally incompatible. So I became her confidant instead.

We talked about Bill Knowles. She was considering Bill; for, though she wouldn’t admit it, a winter at school in New York and a prom at Yale had turned her eyes North. She said she didn’t think she’d marry a Southern man. And by degrees I saw that she was consciously and voluntarily different from these other girls who sang nigger songs and shot craps in the country-club bar. That’s why Bill and I and others were drawn to her. We recognized her.

June and July, while the rumors reached us faintly, ineffectually, of battle and terror overseas, Ailie’s eyes roved here and there about the country-club floor, seeking for something among the tall young officers. She attached several, choosing them with unfailing perspicacity--save in the case of Lieutenant Canby, whom she claimed to despise, but, nevertheless, gave dates to “because he was so sincere”--and we apportioned her evenings among us all summer.

One day she broke all her dates--Bill Knowles had leave and was coming. We talked of the event with scientific impersonality--would he move her to a decision? Lieutenant Canby, on the contrary, wasn’t impersonal at all; made a nuisance of himself. He told her that if she married Knowles he was going to climb up six thousand feet in his aeroplane, shut off the motor and let go. He frightened her--I had to yield him my last date before Bill came.

On Saturday night she and Bill Knowles came to the country club. They were very handsome together and once more I felt envious and sad. As they danced out on the floor the three-piece orchestra was playing After You’ve Gone, in a poignant incomplete way that I can hear yet, as if each bar were trickling off a precious minute of that time. I knew then that I had grown to love Tarleton, and I glanced about half in panic to see if some face wouldn’t come in for me out of that warm, singing, outer darkness that yielded up couple after couple in organdie and olive drab. It was a time of youth and war, and there was never so much love around.

When I danced with Ailie she suddenly suggested that we go outside to a car. She wanted to know why didn’t people cut in on her tonight? Did they think she was already married?

“Are you going to be?”

“I don’t know, Andy. Sometimes, when he treats me as if I were sacred, it thrills me.” Her voice was hushed and far away. “And then--”

She laughed. Her body, so frail and tender, was touching mine, her face was turned up to me, and there, suddenly, with Bill Knowles ten yards off, I could have kissed her at last. Our lips just touched experimentally; then an aviation officer turned a corner of the veranda near us, peered into our darkness and hesitated.

“Ailie.”

“Yes.”

“You heard about this afternoon?”

“What?” She leaned forward, tenseness already in her voice.

“Horace Canby crashed. He was instantly killed.”

She got up slowly and stepped out of the car.

“You mean he was killed?” she said.

“Yes. They don’t know what the trouble was. His motor--”

“Oh-h-h!” Her rasping whisper came through the hands suddenly covering her face. We watched her helplessly as she put her head on the side of the car, gagging dry tears. After a minute I went for Bill, who was standing in the stag line, searching anxiously about for her, and told him she wanted to go home.

I sat on the steps outside. I had disliked Canby, but his terrible, pointless death was more real to me then than the day’s toll of thousands in France. In a few minutes Ailie and Bill came out. Ailie was whimpering a little, but when she saw me her eyes flexed and she came over swiftly.

“Andy”--she spoke in a quick, low voice--”of course you must never tell anybody what I told you about Canby yesterday. What he said, I mean.”

“Of course not.”

She looked at me a second longer as if to be quite sure. Finally she was sure. Then she sighed in such a quaint little way that I could hardly believe my ears, and her brow went up in what can only be described as mock despair.

“An-dy!”

I looked uncomfortably at the ground, aware that she was calling my attention to her involuntarily disastrous effect on men.

“Good night, Andy!” called Bill as they got into a taxi.

“Good night,” I said, and almost added: “You poor fool.”

II

Of course I should have made one of those fine moral decisions that people make in books, and despised her. On the contrary, I don’t doubt that she could still have had me by raising her hand.

A few days later she made it all right by saying wistfully, “I know you think it was terrible of me to think of myself at a time like that, but it was such a shocking coincidence.”

At twenty-three I was entirely unconvinced about anything, except that some people were strong and attractive and could do what they wanted, and others were caught and disgraced. I hoped I was of the former. I was sure Ailie was.

I had to revise other ideas about her. In the course of a long discussion with some girl about kissing--in those days people still talked about kissing more than they kissed--I mentioned the fact that Ailie had only kissed two or three men, and only when she thought she was in love. To my considerable disconcertion the girl figuratively just lay on the floor and howled.

“But it’s true,” I assured her, suddenly knowing it wasn’t. “She told me herself.”

“Ailie Calhoun! Oh, my heavens! Why, last year at the Tech spring house party--”

This was in September. We were going over-seas any week now, and to bring us up to full strength a last batch of officers from the fourth training camp arrived. The fourth camp wasn’t like the first three--the candidates were from the ranks; even from the drafted divisions. They had queer names without vowels in them, and save for a few young militiamen, you couldn’t take it for granted that they came out of any background at all. The addition to our company was Lieutenant Earl Schoen from New Bedford, Massachusetts; as fine a physical specimen as I have ever seen. He was six-foot-three, with black hair, high color and glossy dark-brown eyes. He wasn’t very smart and he was definitely illiterate, yet he was a good officer, high-tempered and commanding, and with that becoming touch of vanity that sits well on the military. I had an idea that New Bedford was a country town, and set down his bumptious qualities to that.

We were doubled up in living quarters and he came into my hut. Inside of a week there was a cabinet photograph of some Tarleton girl nailed brutally to the shack wall.

“She’s no jane or anything like that. She’s a society girl; goes with all the best people here.”

The following Sunday afternoon I met the lady at a semiprivate swimming pool in the country. When Ailie and I arrived, there was Schoen’s muscular body rippling out of a bathing suit at the far end of the pool.

“Hey, lieutenant!”

When I waved back at him he grinned and winked, jerking his head toward the girl at his side. Then, digging her in the ribs, he jerked his head at me. It was a form of introduction.

“Who’s that with Kitty Preston?” Ailie asked, and when I told her she said he looked like a street-car conductor, and pretended to look for her transfer.

A moment later he crawled powerfully and gracefully down the pool and pulled himself up at our side. I introduced him to Ailie.

“How do you like my girl, lieutenant?” he demanded. “I told you she was all right, didn’t I?” He jerked his head toward Ailie; this time to indicate that his girl and Ailie moved in the same circles. “How about us all having dinner together down at the hotel some night?”

I left them in a moment, amused as I saw Ailie visibly making up her mind that here, anyhow, was not the ideal. But Lieutenant Earl Schoen was not to be dismissed so lightly. He ran his eyes cheerfully and inoffensively over her cute, slight figure, and decided that she would do even better than the other. Then minutes later I saw them in the water together, Ailie swimming away with a grim little stroke she had, and Schoen wallowing riotously around her and ahead of her, sometimes pausing and staring at her, fascinated, as a boy might look at a nautical doll.

While the afternoon passed he remained at her side. Finally Ailie came over to me and whispered, with a laugh: “He’s following me around. He thinks I haven’t paid my carfare.”

She turned quickly. Miss Kitty Preston, her face curiously flustered, stood facing us.

“Ailie Calhoun, I didn’t think it of you to go out and delib’ately try to take a man away from another girl.”--An expression of distress at the impending scene flitted over Ailie’s face.--”I thought you considered yourself above anything like that.”

Miss Preston’s voice was low, but it held that tensity that can be felt farther than it can be heard, and I saw Ailie’s clear lovely eyes glance about in panic. Luckily, Earl himself was ambling cheerfully and innocently toward us.

“If you care for him you certainly oughtn’t to belittle yourself in front of him,” said Ailie in a flash, her head high.

It was her acquaintance with the traditional way of behaving against Kitty Preston’s naïve and fierce possessiveness, or if you prefer it, Ailie’s “breeding” against the other’s “commonness.” She turned away.

“Wait a minute, kid!” cried Earl Schoen. “How about your address? Maybe I’d like to give you a ring on the phone.”

She looked at him in a way that should have indicated to Kitty her entire lack of interest.

“I’m very busy at the Red Cross this month,” she said, her voice as cool as her slicked-back blond hair. “Good-by.”

On the way home she laughed. Her air of having been unwittingly involved in a contemptible business vanished.

“She’ll never hold that young man,” she said. “He wants somebody new.”

“Apparently he wants Ailie Calhoun.”

The idea amused her.

“He could give me his ticket punch to wear, like a fraternity pin. What fun! If mother ever saw anybody like that come in the house, she’d just lie down and die.”

And to give Ailie credit, it was fully a fortnight before he did come in her house, although he rushed her until she pretended to be annoyed at the next country-club dance.

“He’s the biggest tough, Andy,” she whispered to me. “But he’s so sincere.”

She used the word “tough” without the conviction it would have carried had he been a Southern boy. She only knew it with her mind; her ear couldn’t distinguish between one Yankee voice and another. And somehow Mrs. Calhoun didn’t expire at his appearance on the threshold. The supposedly ineradicable prejudices of Ailie’s parents were a convenient phenomenon that disappeared at her wish. It was her friends who were astonished. Ailie, always a little above Tarleton, whose beaux had been very carefully the “nicest” men of the camp--Ailie and Lieutenant Schoen! I grew tired of assuring people that she was merely distracting herself--and indeed every week or so there was someone new--an ensign from Pensacola, an old friend from New Orleans--but always, in between times, there was Earl Schoen.

Orders arrived for an advance party of officers and sergeants to proceed to the port of embarkation and take ship to France. My name was on the list. I had been on the range for a week and when I got back to camp, Earl Schoen buttonholed me immediately.

“We’re giving a little farewell party in the mess. Just you and I and Captain Craker and three girls.”

Earl and I were to call for the girls. We picked up Sally Carrol Happer and Nancy Lamar, and went on to Ailie’s house; to be met at the door by the butler with the announcement that she wasn’t home.

“Isn’t home?” Earl repeated blankly. “Where is she?”

“Didn’t leave no information about that; just said she wasn’t home.”

“But this is a darn funny thing!” he exclaimed. He walked around the familiar dusky veranda while the butler waited at the door. Something occurred to him. “Say,” he informed me--”say, I think she’s sore.”

I waited. He said sternly to the butler, “You tell her I’ve got to speak to her a minute.”

“How’m I goin’ tell her that when she ain’t home?”

Again Earl walked musingly around the porch. Then he nodded several times and said:

“She’s sore at something that happened downtown.”

In a few words he sketched out the matter to me.

“Look here; you wait in the car,” I said. “Maybe I can fix this.” And when he reluctantly retreated: “Oliver, you tell Miss Ailie I want to see her alone.”

After some argument he bore this message and in a moment returned with a reply:

“Miss Ailie say she don’t want to see that other gentleman about nothing never. She say come in if you like.”

She was in the library. I had expected to see a picture of cool, outraged dignity, but her face was distraught, tumultuous, despairing. Her eyes were red-rimmed, as though she had been crying slowly and painfully, for hours.

“Oh, hello, Andy,” she said brokenly. “I haven’t seen you for so long. Has he gone?”

“Now, Ailie--”

“Now, Ailie!” she cried. “Now, Ailie! He spoke to me, you see. He lifted his hat. He stood there ten feet from me with that horrible--that horrible woman--holding her arm and talking to her, and then when he saw me he raised his hat. Andy, I didn’t know what to do. I had to go in the drug store and ask for a glass of water, and I was so afraid he’d follow in after me that I asked Mr. Rich to let me go out the back way. I never want to see him or hear of him again.”

I talked. I said what one says in such cases. I said it for half an hour. I could not move her. Several times she answered by murmuring something about his not being “sincere,” and for the fourth time I wondered what the word meant to her. Certainly not constancy; it was, I half suspected, some special way she wanted to be regarded.

I got up to go. And then, unbelievably, the automobile horn sounded three times impatiently outside. It was stupefying. It said as plainly as if Earl were in the room, “All right; go to the devil then! I’m not going to wait here all night.”

Ailie looked at me aghast. And suddenly a peculiar look came into her face, spread, flickered, broke into a teary, hysterical smile.

“Isn’t he awful?” she cried in helpless despair. “Isn’t he terrible?”

“Hurry up,” I said quickly. “Get your cape. This is our last night.”

And I can still feel that last night vividly, the candlelight that flickered over the rough boards of the mess shack, over the frayed paper decorations left from the supply company’s party, the sad mandolin down a company street that kept picking My Indiana Home out of the universal nostalgia of the departing summer. The three girls lost in this mysterious men’s city felt something, too--a bewitched impermanence as though they were on a magic carpet that had lighted on the Southern countryside, and any moment the wind would lift it and waft it away. We toasted ourselves and the South. Then we left our napkins and empty glasses and a little of the past on the table, and hand in hand went out into the moonlight itself. Taps had been played; there was no sound but the far-away whinny of a horse, and a loud persistent snore at which we laughed, and the leathery snap of a sentry coming to port over by the guardhouse. Craker was on duty; we others got into a waiting car, motored into Tarleton and left Craker’s girl.

Then Ailie and Earl, Sally and I, two and two in the wide back seat, each couple turned from the other, absorbed and whispering, drove away into the wide, flat darkness.

We drove through pine woods heavy with lichen and Spanish moss, and between the fallow cotton fields along a road white as the rim of the world. We parked under the broken shadow of a mill where there was the sound of running water and restive squawky birds and over everything a brightness that tried to filter in anywhere--into the lost nigger cabins, the automobile, the fastnesses of the heart. The South sang to us--I wonder if they remember. I remember--the cool pale faces, the somnolent amorous eyes and the voices:

“Are you comfortable?”

“Yes; are you?”

“Are you sure you are?”

“Yes.”

Suddenly we knew it was late and there was nothing more. We turned home.

Our detachment started for Camp Mills next day, but I didn’t go to France after all. We passed a cold month on Long Island, marched aboard a transport with steel helmets slung at our sides and then marched off again. There wasn’t any more war. I had missed the war. When I came back to Tarleton I tried to get out of the Army, but I had a regular commission and it took most of the winter. But Earl Schoen was one of the first to be demobilized. He wanted to find a good job “while the picking was good.” Ailie was noncommittal, but there was an understanding between them that he’d be back.

By January the camps, which for two years had dominated the little city, were already fading. There was only the persistent incinerator smell to remind one of all that activity and bustle. What life remained centered bitterly about divisional headquarters building, with the disgruntled regular officers who had also missed the war.

And now the young men of Tarleton began drifting back from the ends of the earth--some with Canadian uniforms, some with crutches or empty sleeves. A returned battalion of the National Guard paraded through the streets with open ranks for their dead, and then stepped down out of romance forever and sold you things over the counters of local stores. Only a few uniforms mingled with the dinner coats at the country-club dance.

Just before Christmas, Bill Knowles arrived unexpectedly one day and left the next--either he gave Ailie an ultimatum or she had made up her mind at last. I saw her sometimes when she wasn’t busy with returned heroes from Savannah and Augusta, but I felt like an outmoded survival--and I was. She was waiting for Earl Schoen with such a vast uncertainty that she didn’t like to talk about it. Three days before I got my final discharge he came.

I first happened upon them walking down Market Street together, and I don’t think I’ve ever been so sorry for a couple in my life; though I suppose the same situation was repeating itself in every city where there had been camps. Exteriorly Earl had about everything wrong with him that could be imagined. His hat was green, with a radical feather; his suit was slashed and braided in a grotesque fashion that national advertising and the movies have put an end to. Evidently he had been to his old barber, for his hair bloused neatly on his pink, shaved neck. It wasn’t as though he had been shiny and poor, but the background of mill-town dance halls and outing clubs flamed out at you--or rather flamed out at Ailie. For she had never quite imagined the reality; in these clothes even the natural grace of that magnificent body had departed. At first he boasted of his fine job; it would get them along all right until he could “see some easy money.” But from the moment he came back into her world on its own terms he must have known it was hopeless. I don’t know what Ailie said or how much her grief weighed against her stupefaction. She acted quickly--three days after his arrival, Earl and I went North together on the train.

“Well, that’s the end of that,” he said moodily. “She’s a wonderful girl, but too much of a highbrow for me. I guess she’s got to marry some rich guy that’ll give her a great social position. I can’t see that stuck-up sort of thing.” And then, later: “She said to come back and see her in a year, but I’ll never go back. This aristocrat stuff is all right if you got the money for it, but--”

“But it wasn’t real,” he meant to finish. The provincial society in which he had moved with so much satisfaction for six months already appeared to him as affected, “dudish” and artificial.

“Say, did you see what I saw getting on the train?” he asked me after a while. “Two wonderful janes, all alone. What do you say we mosey into the next car and ask them to lunch? I’ll take the one in blue.” Halfway down the car he turned around suddenly. “Say, Andy,” he demanded, frowning; “one thing--how do you suppose she knew I used to command a street car? I never told her that.”

“Search me.”

III

This narrative arrives now at one of the big gaps that stared me in the face when I began. For six years, while I finished at Harvard Law and built commercial aeroplanes and backed a pavement block that went gritty under trucks, Ailie Calhoun was scarcely more than a name on a Christmas card; something that blew a little in my mind on warm nights when I remembered the magnolia flowers. Occasionally an acquaintance of Army days would ask me, “What became of that blond girl who was so popular?” but I didn’t know. I ran into Nancy Lamar at the Montmartre in New York one evening and learned that Ailie had become engaged to a man in Cincinnati, had gone North to visit his family and then broken it off. She was lovely as ever and there was always a heavy beau or two. But neither Bill Knowles nor Earl Schoen had ever come back.

And somewhere about that time I heard that Bill Knowles had married a girl he met on a boat. There you are--not much of a patch to mend six years with.

Oddly enough, a girl seen at twilight in a small Indiana station started me thinking about going South. The girl, in stiff pink organdie, threw her arms about a man who got off our train and hurried him to a waiting car, and I felt a sort of pang. It seemed to me that she was bearing him off into the lost midsummer world of my early twenties, where time had stood still and charming girls, dimly seen like the past itself, still loitered along the dusky streets. I suppose that poetry is a Northern man’s dream of the South. But it was months later that I sent off a wire to Ailie, and immediately followed it to Tarleton.

It was July. The Jefferson Hotel seemed strangely shabby and stuffy--a boosters’ club burst into intermittent song in the dining room that my memory had long dedicated to officers and girls. I recognized the taxi driver who took me up to Ailie’s house, but his “Sure, I do, lieutenant,” was unconvincing. I was only one of twenty thousand.

It was a curious three days. I suppose some of Ailie’s first young lustre must have gone the way of such mortal shining, but I can’t bear witness to it. She was still so physically appealing that you wanted to touch the personality that trembled on her lips. No--the change was more profound than that.

At once I saw she had a different line. The modulations of pride, the vocal hints that she knew the secrets of a brighter, finer ante-bellum day, were gone from her voice; there was no time for them now as it rambled on in the half-laughing, half-desperate banter of the newer South. And everything was swept into this banter in order to make it go on and leave no time for thinking--the present, the future, herself, me. We went to a rowdy party at the house of some young married people, and she was the nervous, glowing center of it. After all, she wasn’t eighteen, and she was as attractive in her rôle of reckless clown as she had ever been in her life.

“Have you heard anything from Earl Schoen?” I asked her the second night, on our way to the country-club dance.

“No.” She was serious for a moment. “I often think of him. He was the--” She hesitated.

“Go on.”

“I was going to say the man I loved most, but that wouldn’t be true. I never exactly loved him, or I’d have married him any old how, wouldn’t I?” She looked at me questioningly. “At least I wouldn’t have treated him like that.”

“It was impossible.”

“Of course,” she agreed uncertainly. Her mood changed; she became flippant: “How the Yankees did deceive us poor little Southern girls. Ah, me!”

When we reached the country club she melted like a chameleon into the--to me--unfamiliar crowd. There was a new generation upon the floor, with less dignity than the ones I had known, but none of them were more a part of its lazy, feverish essence than Ailie. Possibly she had perceived that in her initial longing to escape from Tarleton’s provincialism she had been walking alone, following a generation which was doomed to have no successors. Just where she lost the battle, waged behind the white pillars of her veranda, I don’t know. But she had guessed wrong, missed out somewhere. Her wild animation, which even now called enough men around her to rival the entourage of the youngest and freshest, was an admission of defeat.

I left her house, as I had so often left it that vanished June, in a mood of vague dissatisfaction. It was hours later, tossing about my bed in the hotel, that I realized what was the matter, what had always been the matter--I was deeply and incurably in love with her. In spite of every incompatibility, she was still, she would always be to me, the most attractive girl I had ever known. I told her so next afternoon. It was one of those hot days I knew so well, and Ailie sat beside me on a couch in the darkened library.

“Oh, no, I couldn’t marry you,” she said, almost frightened; “I don’t love you that way at all. . . . I never did. And you don’t love me. I didn’t mean to tell you now, but next month I’m going to marry another man. We’re not even announcing it, because I’ve done that twice before.” Suddenly it occurred to her that I might be hurt: “Andy, you just had a silly idea, didn’t you? You know I couldn’t ever marry a Northern man.”

“Who is he?” I demanded.

“A man from Savannah.”

“Are you in love with him?”

“Of course I am.” We both smiled. “Of course I am! What are you trying to make me say?”

There were no doubts, as there had been with other men. She couldn’t afford to let herself have doubts. I knew this because she had long ago stopped making any pretensions with me. This very naturalness, I realized, was because she didn’t consider me as a suitor. Beneath her mask of an instinctive thoroughbred she had always been on to herself, and she couldn’t believe that anyone not taken in to the point of uncritical worship could really love her. That was what she called being “sincere”; she felt most security with men like Canby and Earl Schoen, who were incapable of passing judgments on the ostensibly aristocratic heart.

“All right,” I said, as if she had asked my permission to marry. “Now, would you do something for me?”

“Anything.”

“Ride out to camp.”

“But there’s nothing left there, honey.”

“I don’t care.”

We walked downtown. The taxi driver in front of the hotel repeated her objection: “Nothing there now, cap.”

“Never mind. Go there anyhow.”

Twenty minutes later he stopped on a wide unfamiliar plain powdered with new cotton fields and marked with isolated clumps of pine.

“Like to drive over yonder where you see the smoke?” asked the driver. “That’s the new state prison.”

“No. Just drive along this road. I want to find where I used to live.”

An old race course, inconspicuous in the camp’s day of glory, had reared its dilapidated grandstand in the desolation. I tried in vain to orient myself.

“Go along this road past that clump of trees, and then turn right--no, turn left.”

He obeyed, with professional disgust.

“You won’t find a single thing, darling,” said Ailie. “The contractors took it all down.”

We rode slowly along the margin of the fields. It might have been here--

“All right. I want to get out,” I said suddenly.

I left Ailie sitting in the car, looking very beautiful with the warm breeze stirring her long, curly bob.

It might have been here. That would make the company streets down there and the mess shack, where we dined that night, just over the way.

The taxi driver regarded me indulgently while I stumbled here and there in the knee-deep underbrush, looking for my youth in a clapboard or a strip of roofing or a rusty tomato can. I tried to sight on a vaguely familiar clump of trees, but it was growing darker now and I couldn’t be quite sure they were the right trees.

“They’re going to fix up the old race course,” Ailie called from the car. “Tarleton’s getting quite doggy in its old age.”

No. Upon consideration they didn’t look like the right trees. All I could be sure of was this place that had once been so full of life and effort was gone, as if it had never existed, and that in another month Ailie would be gone, and the South would be empty for me forever.

MAJESTY

The extraordinary thing is not that people in a lifetime turn out worse or better than we had prophesied; particularly in America that is to be expected. The extraordinary thing is how people keep their levels, fulfill their promises, seem actually buoyed up by an inevitable destiny.

One of my conceits is that no one has ever disappointed me since I turned eighteen and could tell a real quality from a gift for sleight of hand, and even many of the merely showy people in my past seem to go on being blatantly and successfully showy to the end.

Emily Castleton was born in Harrisburg in a medium-sized house, moved to New York at sixteen to a big house, went to the Briarly School, moved to an enormous house, moved to a mansion at Tuxedo Park, moved abroad, where she did various fashionable things and was in all the papers. Back in her debutante year one of those French artists who are so dogmatic about American beauties, included her with eleven other public and semipublic celebrities as one of America’s perfect types. At the time numerous men agreed with him.

She was just faintly tall, with fine, rather large features, eyes with such an expanse of blue in them that you were really aware of it whenever you looked at her, and a good deal of thick blond hair--arresting and bright. Her mother and father did not know very much about the new world they had commandeered so Emily had to learn everything for herself, and she became involved in various situations and some of the first bloom wore off. However, there was bloom to spare. There were engagements and semi-engagements, short passionate attractions, and then a big affair at twenty-two that embittered her and sent her wandering the continents looking for happiness. She became “artistic” as most wealthy unmarried girls do at that age, because artistic people seem to have some secret, some inner refuge, some escape. But most of her friends were married now, and her life was a great disappointment to her father; so, at twenty-four, with marriage in her head if not in her heart, Emily came home.

This was a low point in her career and Emily was aware of it. She had not done well. She was one of the most popular, most beautiful girls of her generation with charm, money and a sort of fame, but her generation was moving into new fields. At the first note of condescension from a former schoolmate, now a young “matron,” she went to Newport and was won by William Brevoort Blair. Immediately she was again the incomparable Emily Castleton. The ghost of the French artist walked once more in the newspapers; the most-talked-of leisure-class event of October was her wedding day.

Splendor to mark society nuptials. . . . Harold Castleton sets out a series of five-thousand-dollar pavilions arranged like the interconnecting tents of a circus, in which the reception, the wedding supper and the ball will be held. . . . Nearly a thousand guests, many of them leaders in business, will mingle with those who dominate the social world. . . . The wedding gifts are estimated to be worth a quarter of a million dollars. . . .

An hour before the ceremony, which was to be solemnized at St. Bartholomew’s, Emily sat before a dressing-table and gazed at her face in the glass. She was a little tired of her face at that moment and the depressing thought suddenly assailed her that it would require more and more looking after in the next fifty years.

“I ought to be happy,” she said aloud, “but every thought that comes into my head is sad.”

Her cousin, Olive Mercy, sitting on the side of the bed, nodded. “All brides are sad.”

“It’s such a waste,” Emily said.

Olive frowned impatiently.

“Waste of what? Women are incomplete unless they’re married and have children.”

For a moment Emily didn’t answer. Then she said slowly, “Yes, but whose children?”

For the first time in her life, Olive, who worshipped Emily, almost hated her. Not a girl in the wedding party but would have been glad of Brevoort Blair--Olive among the others.

“You’re lucky,” she said. “You’re so lucky you don’t even know it. You ought to be paddled for talking like that.”

“I shall learn to love him,” announced Emily facetiously. “Love will come with marriage. Now, isn’t that a hell of a prospect?”

“Why so deliberately unromantic?”

“On the contrary, I’m the most romantic person I’ve ever met in my life. Do you know what I think when he puts his arms around me? I think that if I look up I’ll see Garland Kane’s eyes.”

“But why, then--”

“Getting into his plane the other day I could only remember Captain Marchbanks and the little two-seater we flew over the Channel in, just breaking our hearts for each other and never saying a word about it because of his wife. I don’t regret those men; I just regret the part of me that went into caring. There’s only the sweepings to hand to Brevoort in a pink waste-basket. There should have been something more; I thought even when I was most carried away that I was saving something for the one. But apparently I wasn’t.” She broke off and then added: “And yet I wonder.”

The situation was no less provoking to Olive for being comprehensible, and save for her position as a poor relation, she would have spoken her mind. Emily was well spoiled--eight years of men had assured her they were not good enough for her and she had accepted the fact as probably true.

“You’re nervous.” Olive tried to keep the annoyance out of her voice. “Why not lie down for an hour?”

“Yes,” answered Emily absently.

Olive went out and downstairs. In the lower hall she ran into Brevoort Blair, attired in a nuptial cutaway even to the white carnation, and in a state of considerable agitation.

“Oh, excuse me,” he blurted out. “I wanted to see Emily. It’s about the rings--which ring, you know. I’ve got four rings and she never decided and I can’t just hold them out in the church and have her take her pick.”

“I happen to know she wants the plain platinum band. If you want to see her anyhow--”

“Oh, thanks very much. I don’t want to disturb her.”

They were standing close together, and even at this moment when he was gone, definitely preëmpted, Olive couldn’t help thinking how alike she and Brevoort were. Hair, coloring, features--they might have been brother and sister--and they shared the same shy serious temperaments, the same simple straightforwardness. All this flashed through her mind in an instant, with the added thought that the blond, tempestuous Emily, with her vitality and amplitude of scale, was, after all, better for him in every way; and then, beyond this, a perfect wave of tenderness, of pure physical pity and yearning swept over her and it seemed that she must step forward only half a foot to find his arms wide to receive her.

She stepped backward instead, relinquishing him as though she still touched him with the tip of her fingers and then drew the tips away. Perhaps some vibration of her emotion fought its way into his consciousness, for he said suddenly:

“We’re going to be good friends, aren’t we? Please don’t think I’m taking Emily away. I know I can’t own her--nobody could--and I don’t want to.”

Silently, as he talked, she said good-by to him, the only man she had ever wanted in her life.

She loved the absorbed hesitancy with which he found his coat and hat and felt hopefully for the knob on the wrong side of the door.

When he had gone she went into the drawing-room, gorgeous and portentous; with its painted bacchanals and massive chandeliers and the eighteenth-century portraits that might have been Emily’s ancestors, but weren’t, and by that very fact belonged the more to her. There she rested, as always, in Emily’s shadow.

Through the door that led out to the small, priceless patch of grass on Sixtieth Street now inclosed by the pavilions, came her uncle, Mr. Harold Castleton. He had been sampling his own champagne.

“Olive so sweet and fair.” He cried emotionally, “Olive, baby, she’s done it. She was all right inside, like I knew all the time. The good ones come through, don’t they--the real thoroughbreds? I began to think that the Lord and me, between us, had given her too much, that she’d never be satisfied, but now she’s come down to earth just like a”--he searched unsuccessfully for a metaphor--”like a thoroughbred, and she’ll find it not such a bad place after all.” He came closer. “You’ve been crying, little Olive.”

“Not much.”

“It doesn’t matter,” he said magnanimously. “If I wasn’t so happy I’d cry too.”

Later, as she embarked with two other bridesmaids for the church, the solemn throbbing of a big wedding seemed to begin with the vibration of the car. At the door the organ took it up, and later it would palpitate in the cellos and base viols of the dance, to fade off finally with the sound of the car that bore bride and groom away.

The crowd was thick around the church, and ten feet out of it the air was heavy with perfume and faint clean humanity and the fabric smell of new clean clothes. Beyond the massed hats in the van of the church the two families sat in front rows on either side. The Blairs--they were assured a family resemblance by their expression of faint condescension, shared by their in-laws as well as by true Blairs--were represented by the Gardiner Blairs, senior and junior; Lady Mary Bowes Howard, née Blair; Mrs. Potter Blair; Mrs. Princess Potowki Parr Blair, née Inchbit; Miss Gloria Blair, Master Gardiner Blair III, and the kindred branches, rich and poor, of Smythe, Bickle, Diffendorfer and Hamn. Across the aisle the Castletons made a less impressive showing--Mr. Harold Castleton, Mr. and Mrs. Theodore Castleton and children, Harold Castleton Junior, and, from Harrisburg, Mr. Carl Mercy, and two little old aunts named O’Keefe hidden off in a corner. Somewhat to their surprise the two aunts had been bundled off in a limousine and dressed from head to foot by a fashionable couturière that morning.

In the vestry, where the bridesmaids fluttered about like birds in their big floppy hats, there was a last lip rouging and adjustment of pins before Emily should arrive. They represented several stages of Emily’s life--a schoolmate at Briarly, a last unmarried friend of débutante year, a travelling companion of Europe, and the girl she had visited in Newport when she met Brevoort Blair.

“They’ve got Wakeman,” this last one said, standing by the door listening to the music. “He played for my sister, but I shall never have Wakeman.”

“Why not?”

“Why, he’s playing the same thing over and over--’At Dawning.’ He’s played it half a dozen times.”

At this moment another door opened and the solicitous head of a young man appeared around it. “Almost ready?” he demanded of the nearest bridesmaid. “Brevoort’s having a quiet little fit. He just stands there wilting collar after collar--”

“Be calm,” answered the young lady. “The bride is always a few minutes late.”

“A few minutes!” protested the best man. “I don’t call it a few minutes. They’re beginning to rustle and wriggle like a circus crowd out there, and the organist has been playing the same tune for half an hour. I’m going to get him to fill in with a little jazz.”

“What time is it?” Olive demanded.

“Quarter of five--ten minutes of five.”

“Maybe there’s been a traffic tie-up.” Olive paused as Mr. Harold Castleton, followed by an anxious curate, shouldered his way in, demanding a phone.

And now there began a curious dribbling back from the front of the church, one by one, then two by two, until the vestry was crowded with relatives and confusion.

“What’s happened?”

“What on earth’s the matter?”

A chauffeur came in and reported excitedly. Harold Castleton swore and, his face blazing, fought his way roughly toward the door. There was an attempt to clear the vestry, and then, as if to balance the dribbling, a ripple of conversation commenced at the rear of the church and began to drift up toward the altar, growing louder and faster and more excited, mounting always, bringing people to their feet, rising to a sort of subdued roar. The announcement from the altar that the marriage had been postponed was scarcely heard, for by that time everyone knew that they were participating in a front-page scandal, that Brevoort Blair had been left waiting at the altar and Emily Castleton had run away.

II

There were a dozen reporters outside the Castleton house on Sixtieth Street when Olive arrived, but in her absorption she failed even to hear their questions; she wanted desperately to go and comfort a certain man whom she must not approach, and as a sort of substitute she sought her Uncle Harold. She entered through the interconnecting five-thousand-dollar pavilions, where caterers and servants still stood about in a respectful funereal half-light, waiting for something to happen, amid trays of caviar and turkey’s breast and pyramided wedding cake. Upstairs, Olive found her uncle sitting on a stool before Emily’s dressing-table. The articles of make-up spread before him, the repertoire of feminine preparation in evidence about, made his singularly inappropriate presence a symbol of the mad catastrophe.

“Oh, it’s you.” His voice was listless; he had aged in two hours. Olive put her arm about his bowed shoulder.

“I’m so terribly sorry, Uncle Harold.”

Suddenly a stream of profanity broke from him, died away, and a single large tear welled slowly from one eye.

“I want to get my massage man,” he said. “Tell McGregor to get him.” He drew a long broken sigh, like a child’s breath after crying, and Olive saw that his sleeves were covered with a dust of powder from the dressing-table, as if he had been leaning forward on it, weeping, in the reaction from his proud champagne.

“There was a telegram,” he muttered.

“It’s somewhere.”

And he added slowly,

“From now on you’re my daughter.”

“Oh, no, you mustn’t say that!”

Unrolling the telegram, she read:

I can’t make the grade I would feel like a fool either way but this will be over sooner so damn sorry for you

EMILY

When Olive had summoned the masseur and posted a servant outside her uncle’s door, she went to the library, where a confused secretary was trying to say nothing over an inquisitive and persistent telephone.

“I’m so upset, Miss Mercy,” he cried in a despairing treble. “I do declare I’m so upset I have a frightful headache. I’ve thought for half an hour I heard dance music from down below.”

Then it occurred to Olive that she, too, was becoming hysterical; in the breaks of the street traffic a melody was drifting up, distinct and clear:

“--Is she fair

Is she sweet

I don’t care--cause

I can’t compete--

Who’s the--”

She ran quickly downstairs and through the drawing-room, the tune growing louder in her ears. At the entrance of the first pavilion she stopped in stupefaction.

To the music of a small but undoubtedly professional orchestra a dozen young couples were moving about the canvas floor. At the bar in the corner stood additional young men, and half a dozen of the caterer’s assistants were busily shaking cocktails and opening champagne.

“Harold!” she called imperatively to one of the dancers. “Harold!”

A tall young man of eighteen handed his partner to another and came toward her.

“Hello, Olive. How did father take it?”

“Harold, what in the name of--”

“Emily’s crazy,” he said consolingly. “I always told you Emily was crazy. Crazy as a loon. Always was.”

“What’s the idea of this?”

“This?” He looked around innocently. “Oh, these are just some fellows that came down from Cambridge with me.”

“But--dancing!”

“Well, nobody’s dead, are they? I thought we might as well use up some of this--”

“Tell them to go home,” said Olive.

“Why? What on earth’s the harm? These fellows came all the way down from Cambridge--”

“It simply isn’t dignified.”

“But they don’t care, Olive. One fellow’s sister did the same thing--only she did it the day after instead of the day before. Lots of people do it nowadays.”

“Send the music home, Harold,” said Olive firmly, “or I’ll go to your father.”

Obviously he felt that no family could be disgraced by an episode on such a magnificent scale, but he reluctantly yielded. The abysmally depressed butler saw to the removal of the champagne, and the young people, somewhat insulted, moved nonchalantly out into the more tolerant night. Alone with the shadow--Emily’s shadow--that hung over the house, Olive sat down in the drawing-room to think. Simultaneously the butler appeared in the doorway.

“It’s Mr. Blair, Miss Olive.”

She jumped tensely to her feet.

“Who does he want to see?”

“He didn’t say. He just walked in.”

“Tell him I’m in here.”

He entered with an air of abstraction rather than depression, nodded to Olive and sat down on a piano stool. She wanted to say, “Come here. Lay your head here, poor man. Never mind.” But she wanted to cry, too, and so she said nothing.

“In three hours,” he remarked quietly, “we’ll be able to get the morning papers. There’s a shop on Fifty-ninth Street.”

“That’s foolish--” she began.

“I am not a superficial man”--he interrupted her--”nevertheless, my chief feeling now is for the morning papers. Later there will be a politely silent gauntlet of relatives, friends and business acquaintances. About the actual affair I surprise myself by not caring at all.”

“I shouldn’t care about any of it.”

“I’m rather grateful that she did it in time.”

“Why don’t you go away?” Olive leaned forward earnestly. “Go to Europe until it all blows over.”

“Blows over.” He laughed. “Things like this don’t ever blow over. A little snicker is going to follow me around the rest of my life.” He groaned. “Uncle Hamilton started right for Park Row to make the rounds of the newspaper offices. He’s a Virginian and he was unwise enough to use the old-fashioned word ‘horsewhip’ to one editor. I can hardly wait to see that paper.” He broke off. “How is Mr. Castleton?”

“He’ll appreciate your coming to inquire.”

“I didn’t come about that.” He hesitated. “I came to ask you a question. I want to know if you’ll marry me in Greenwich tomorrow morning.”

For a minute Olive fell precipitately through space; she made a strange little sound; her mouth dropped ajar.

“I know you like me,” he went on quickly. “In fact, I once imagined you loved me a little bit, if you’ll excuse the presumption. Anyhow, you’re very like a girl that once did love me, so maybe you would--” His face was pink with embarrassment, but he struggled grimly on; “anyhow, I like you enormously and whatever feeling I may have had for Emily has, I might say, flown.”

The clangor and alarm inside her was so loud that it seemed he must hear it.

“The favor you’ll be doing me will be very great,” he continued. “My heavens, I know it sounds a little crazy, but what could be crazier than the whole afternoon? You see, if you married me the papers would carry quite a different story; they’d think that Emily went off to get out of our way, and the joke would be on her after all.”

Tears of indignation came to Olive’s eyes.

“I suppose I ought to allow for your wounded egotism, but do you realize you’re making me an insulting proposition?”

His face fell.

“I’m sorry,” he said after a moment. “I guess I was an awful fool even to think of it, but a man hates to lose the whole dignity of his life for a girl’s whim. I see it would be impossible. I’m sorry.”

He got up and picked up his cane.

Now he was moving toward the door, and Olive’s heart came into her throat and a great, irresistible wave of self-preservation swept over her--swept over all her scruples and her pride. His steps sounded in the hall.

“Brevoort!” she called. She jumped to her feet and ran to the door. He turned. “Brevoort, what was the name of that paper--the one your uncle went to?”

“Why?”

“Because it’s not too late for them to change their story if I telephone now! I’ll say we were married tonight!”

III

There is a society in Paris which is merely a heterogeneous prolongation of American society. People moving in are connected by a hundred threads to the motherland, and their entertainments, eccentricities and ups and downs are an open book to friends and relatives at Southampton, Lake Forest or Back Bay. So during her previous European sojourn Emily’s whereabouts, as she followed the shifting Continental seasons, were publicly advertised; but from the day, one month after the unsolemnized wedding, when she sailed from New York, she dropped completely from sight. There was an occasional letter for her father, an occasional rumor that she was in Cairo, Constantinople or the less frequented Riviera--that was all.

Once, after a year, Mr. Castleton saw her in Paris, but, as he told Olive, the meeting only served to make him uncomfortable.

“There was something about her,” he said vaguely, “as if--well, as if she had a lot of things in the back of her mind I couldn’t reach. She was nice enough, but it was all automatic and formal.--She asked about you.”

Despite her solid background of a three-month-old baby and a beautiful apartment on Park Avenue, Olive felt her heart falter uncertainly.

“What did she say?”

“She was delighted about you and Brevoort.” And he added to himself, with a disappointment he could not conceal: “Even though you picked up the best match in New York when she threw it away.” . . .

. . . It was more than a year after this that his secretary’s voice on the telephone asked Olive if Mr. Castleton could see them that night. They found the old man walking his library in a state of agitation.

“Well, it’s come,” he declared vehemently. “People won’t stand still; nobody stands still. You go up or down in this world. Emily chose to go down. She seems to be somewhere near the bottom. Did you ever hear of a man described to me as a”--he referred to a letter in his hand--”dissipated ne’er-do-well named Petrocobesco? He calls himself Prince Gabriel Petrocobesco, apparently from--from nowhere. This letter is from Hallam, my European man, and it incloses a clipping from the Paris Matin. It seems that this gentleman was invited by the police to leave Paris, and among the small entourage who left with him was an American girl, Miss Castleton, ‘rumored to be the daughter of a millionaire.’ The party was escorted to the station by gendarmes.” He handed clipping and letter to Brevoort Blair with trembling fingers. “What do you make of it? Emily come to that!”

“It’s not so good,” said Brevoort, frowning.

“It’s the end. I thought her drafts were big recently, but I never suspected that she was supporting--”

“It may be a mistake,” Olive suggested. “Perhaps it’s another Miss Castleton.”

“It’s Emily all right. Hallam looked up the matter. It’s Emily, who was afraid ever to dive into the nice clean stream of life and ends up now by swimming around in the sewers.”

Shocked, Olive had a sudden sharp taste of fate in its ultimate diversity. She with a mansion building in Westbury Hills, and Emily was mixed up with a deported adventurer in disgraceful scandal.

“I’ve got no right to ask you this,” continued Mr. Castleton. “Certainly no right to ask Brevoort anything in connection with Emily. But I’m seventy-two and Fraser says if I put off the cure another fortnight he won’t be responsible, and then Emily will be alone for good. I want you to set your trip abroad forward by two months and go over and bring her back.”

“But do you think we’d have the necessary influence?” Brevoort asked. “I’ve no reason for thinking that she’d listen to me.”

“There’s no one else. If you can’t go I’ll have to.”

“Oh, no,” said Brevoort quickly. “We’ll do what we can, won’t we, Olive?”

“Of course.”

“Bring her back--it doesn’t matter how--but bring her back. Go before a court if necessary and swear she’s crazy.”

“Very well. We’ll do what we can.”

Just ten days after this interview the Brevoort Blairs called on Mr. Castleton’s agent in Paris to glean what details were available. They were plentiful but unsatisfactory. Hallam had seen Petrocobesco in various restaurants--a fat little fellow with an attractive leer and a quenchless thirst. He was of some obscure nationality and had been moved around Europe for several years, living heaven knew how--probably on Americans, though Hallam understood that of late even the most outlying circles of international society were closed to him. About Emily, Hallam knew very little. They had been reported last week in Berlin and yesterday in Budapest. It was probably that such an undesirable as Petrocobesco was required to register with the police everywhere, and this was the line he recommended the Blairs to follow.

Forty-eight hours later, accompanied by the American vice consul, they called upon the prefect of police in Budapest. The officer talked in rapid Hungarian to the vice consul, who presently announced the gist of his remarks--the Blairs were too late.

“Where have they gone?”

“He doesn’t know. He received orders to move them on and they left last night.”

Suddenly the prefect wrote something on a piece of paper and handed it, with a terse remark, to the vice consul.

“He says try there.”

Brevoort looked at the paper.

“Sturmdorp--where’s that?”

Another rapid conversation in Hungarian.

“Five hours from here on a local train that leaves Tuesdays and Fridays. This is Saturday.”

“We’ll get a car at the hotel,” said Brevoort.

They set out after dinner. It was a rough journey through the night across the still Hungarian plain. Olive awoke once from a worried doze to find Brevoort and the chauffeur changing a tire; then again as they stopped at a muddy little river, beyond which glowed the scattered lights of a town. Two soldiers in an unfamiliar uniform glanced into the car; they crossed a bridge and followed a narrow, warped main street to Sturmdorp’s single inn; the roosters were already crowing as they tumbled down on the mean beds.

Olive awoke with a sudden sure feeling that they had caught up with Emily; and with it came that old sense of helplessness in the face of Emily’s moods; for a moment the long past and Emily dominant in it, swept back over her, and it seemed almost a presumption to be here. But Brevoort’s singleness of purpose reassured her and confidence had returned when they went downstairs, to find a landlord who spoke fluent American, acquired in Chicago before the war.

“You are not in Hungary now,” he explained. “You have crossed the border into Czjeck-Hansa. But it is only a little country with two towns, this one and the capital. We don’t ask the visa from Americans.”

“That’s probably why they came here,” Olive thought.

“Perhaps you could give us some information about strangers?” asked Brevoort. “We’re looking for an American lady--” He described Emily, without mentioning her probable companion; as he proceeded a curious change came over the innkeeper’s face.

“Let me see your passports,” he said; then: “And why you want to see her?”

“This lady is her cousin.”

The innkeeper hesitated momentarily.

“I think perhaps I be able to find her for you,” he said.

He called the porter; there were rapid instructions in an unintelligible patois. Then:

“Follow this boy--he take you there.”

They were conducted through filthy streets to a tumble-down house on the edge of town. A man with a hunting rifle, lounging outside, straightened up and spoke sharply to the porter, but after an exchange of phrases they passed, mounted the stairs and knocked at a door. When it opened a head peered around the corner; the porter spoke again and they went in.

They were in a large dirty room which might have belonged to a poor boarding house in any quarter of the Western world--faded walls, split upholstery, a shapeless bed and an air, despite its bareness, of being overcrowded by the ghostly furniture, indicated by dust rings and worn spots, of the last decade. In the middle of the room stood a small stout man with hammock eyes and a peering nose over a sweet, spoiled little mouth, who stared intently at them as they opened the door, and then with a single disgusted “Chut!” turned impatiently away. There were several other people in the room, but Brevoort and Olive saw only Emily, who reclined in a chaise longue with half-closed eyes.

At the sight of them the eyes opened in mild astonishment; she made a move as though to jump up, but instead held out her hand, smiled and spoke their names in a clear polite voice, less as a greeting than as a sort of explanation to the others of their presence here. At their names a grudging amenity replaced the sullenness on the little man’s face.

The girls kissed.

“Tutu!” said Emily, as if calling him to attention--”Prince Petrocobesco, let me present my cousin Mrs. Blair, and Mr. Blair.”

“Plaisir,” said Petrocobesco. He and Emily exchanged a quick glance, whereupon he said, “Won’t you sit down?” and immediately seated himself in the only available chair, as if they were playing Going to Jerusalem.

“Plaisir,” he repeated. Olive sat down on the foot of Emily’s chaise longue and Brevoort took a stool from against the wall, meanwhile noting the other occupants of the room. There was a very fierce young man in a cape who stood, with arms folded and teeth gleaming, by the door, and two ragged, bearded men, one holding a revolver, the other with his head sunk dejectedly on his chest, who sat side by side in the corner.

“You come here long?” the prince asked.

“Just arrived this morning.”

For a moment Olive could not resist comparing the two, the tall fair-featured American and the unprepossessing South European, scarcely a likely candidate for Ellis Island. Then she looked at Emily--the same thick bright hair with sunshine in it, the eyes with the hint of vivid seas. Her face was faintly drawn, there were slight new lines around her mouth, but she was the Emily of old--dominant, shining, large of scale. It seemed shameful for all that beauty and personality to have arrived in a cheap boarding house at the world’s end.

The man in the cape answered a knock at the door and handed a note to Petrocobesco, who read it, cried “Chut!” and passed it to Emily.

“You see, there are no carriages,” he said tragically in French. “The carriages were destroyed--all except one, which is in a museum. Anyhow, I prefer a horse.”

“No,” said Emily.

“Yes, yes, yes!” he cried. “Whose business is it how I go?”

“Don’t let’s have a scene, Tutu.”

“Scene!” He fumed. “Scene!”

Emily turned to Olive: “You came by automobile?”

“Yes.”

“A big de luxe car? With a back that opens?”

“Yes.”

“There,” said Emily to the prince. “We can have the arms painted on the side of that.”

“Hold on,” said Brevoort. “This car belongs to a hotel in Budapest.”

Apparently Emily didn’t hear.

“Janierka could do it,” she continued thoughtfully.

At this point there was another interruption. The dejected man in the corner suddenly sprang to his feet and made as though to run to the door, whereupon the other man raised his revolver and brought the butt down on his head. The man faltered and would have collapsed had not his assailant hauled him back to the chair, where he sat comatose, a slow stream of blood trickling over his forehead.

“Dirty townsman! Filthy, dirty spy!” shouted Petrocobesco between clenched teeth.

“Now that’s just the kind of remark you’re not to make!” said Emily sharply.

“Then why we don’t hear?” he cried. “Are we going to sit here in this pigsty forever?”

Disregarding him, Emily turned to Olive and began to question her conventionally about New York. Was prohibition any more successful? What were the new plays? Olive tried to answer and simultaneously to catch Brevoort’s eye. The sooner their purpose was broached, the sooner they could get Emily away.

“Can we see you alone, Emily?” demanded Brevoort abruptly.

“Why, for the moment we haven’t got another room.”

Petrocobesco had engaged the man with the cape in agitated conversation, and taking advantage of this, Brevoort spoke hurriedly to Emily in a lowered voice:

“Emily, your father’s getting old; he needs you at home. He wants you to give up this crazy life and come back to America. He sent us because he couldn’t come himself and no one else knew you well enough--”

She laughed. “You mean, knew the enormities I was capable of.”

“No,” put in Olive quickly. “Cared for you as we do. I can’t tell you how awful it is to see you wandering over the face of the earth.”

“But we’re not wandering now,” explained Emily. “This is Tutu’s native country.”

“Where’s your pride, Emily?” said Olive impatiently. “Do you know that affair in Paris was in the papers? What do you suppose people think back home?”

“That affair in Paris was an outrage.” Emily’s blue eyes flashed around her. “Someone will pay for that affair in Paris.”

“It’ll be the same everywhere. Just sinking lower and lower, dragged in the mire, and one day deserted--”

“Stop, please!” Emily’s voice was cold as ice. “I don’t think you quite understand--”

Emily broke off as Petrocobesco came back, threw himself into his chair and buried his face in his hands.

“I can’t stand it,” he whispered. “Would you mind taking my pulse? I think it’s bad. Have you got the thermometer in your purse?”

She held his wrist in silence for a moment.

“It’s all right, Tutu.” Her voice was soft now, almost crooning. “Sit up. Be a man.”

“All right.”

He crossed his legs as if nothing had happened and turned abruptly to Breevort:

“How are financial conditions in New York?” he demanded.

But Brevoort was in no humor to prolong the absurd scene. The memory of a certain terrible hour three years before swept over him. He was no man to be made a fool of twice, and his jaw set as he rose to his feet.

“Emily, get your things together,” he said tersely. “We’re going home.”

Emily did not move; an expression of astonishment, melting to amusement, spread over her face. Olive put her arm around her shoulder.

“Come, dear. Let’s get out of this nightmare.” Then:

“We’re waiting,” Brevoort said.

Petrocobesco spoke suddenly to the man in the cape, who approached and seized Brevoort’s arm. Brevoort shook him off angrily, whereupon the man stepped back, his hand searching his belt.

“No!” cried Emily imperatively.

Once again there was an interruption. The door opened without a knock and two stout men in frock coats and silk hats rushed in and up to Petrocobesco. They grinned and patted him on the back chattering in a strange language, and presently he grinned and patted them on the back and they kissed all around; then, turning to Emily, Petrocobesco spoke to her in French.

“It’s all right,” he said excitedly. “They did not even argue the matter. I am to have the title of king.”

With a long sigh Emily sank back in her chair and her lips parted in a relaxed, tranquil smile.

“Very well, Tutu. We’ll get married.”

“Oh, heavens, how happy!” He clasped his hands and gazed up ecstatically at the faded ceiling. “How extremely happy!” He fell on his knees beside her and kissed her inside arm.

“What’s all this about kings?” Brevoort demanded. “Is this--is he a king?”

“He’s a king. Aren’t you, Tutu?” Emily’s hand gently stroked his oiled hair and Olive saw that her eyes were unusually bright.

“I am your husband,” cried Tutu weepily. “The most happy man alive.”

“His uncle was Prince of Czjeck-Hansa before the war,” explained Emily, her voice singing her content. “Since then there’s been a republic, but the peasant party wanted a change and Tutu was next in line. Only I wouldn’t marry him unless he insisted on being king instead of prince.”

Brevoort passed his hand over his wet forehead.

“Do you mean that this is actually a fact?”

Emily nodded. “The assembly voted it this morning. And if you’ll lend us this de luxe limousine of yours we’ll make our official entrance into the capital this afternoon.”

IV

Over two years later Mr. and Mrs. Brevoort Blair and their two children stood upon a balcony of the Carlton Hotel in London, a situation recommended by the management for watching royal processions pass. This one began with a fanfare of trumpets down by the Strand, and presently a scarlet line of horse guards came into sight.

“But, mummy,” the little boy demanded, “is Aunt Emily Queen of England?”

“No, dear; she’s queen of a little tiny country, but when she visits here she rides in the queen’s carriage.”

“Oh.”

“Thanks to the magnesium deposits,” said Brevoort dryly.

“Was she a princess before she got to be queen?” the little girl asked.

“No, dear; she was an American girl and then she got to be a queen.”

“Why?”

“Because nothing else was good enough for her,” said her father. “Just think, one time she could have married me. Which would you rather do, baby--marry me or be a queen?”

The little girl hesitated.

“Marry you,” she said politely, but without conviction.

“That’ll do, Brevoort,” said her mother. “Here they come.”

“I see them!” the little boy cried.

The cavalcade swept down the crowded street. There were more horse guards, a company of dragoons, outriders, then Olive found herself holding her breath and squeezing the balcony rail as, between a double line of beefeaters, a pair of great gilt-and-crimson coaches rolled past. In the first were the royal sovereigns, their uniforms gleaming with ribbons, crosses and stars, and in the second their two royal consorts, one old, the other young. There was about the scene the glamour shed always by the old empire of half the world, by her ships and ceremonies, her pomps and symbols; and the crowd felt it, and a slow murmur rolled along before the carriage, rising to a strong steady cheer. The two ladies bowed to left and right, and though few knew who the second queen was, she was cheered too. In a moment the gorgeous panoply had rolled below the balcony and on out of sight.

When Olive turned away from the window there were tears in her eyes.

“I wonder if she likes it, Brevoort. I wonder if she’s really happy with that terrible little man.”

“Well, she got what she wanted, didn’t she? And that’s something.”

Olive drew a long breath.

“Oh, she’s so wonderful,” she cried--”so wonderful! She could always move me like that, even when I was angriest at her.”

“It’s all so silly,” Brevoort said.

“I suppose so,” answered Olive’s lips. But her heart, winged with helpless adoration, was following her cousin through the palace gates half a mile away.

FAMILY IN THE WIND

The two men drove up the hill toward the blood-red sun. The cotton fields bordering the road were thin and withered, and no breeze stirred in the pines.

“When I am totally sober,” the doctor was saying — “I mean when I am totally sober — I don’t see the same world that you do. I’m like a friend of mine who had one good eye and got glasses made to correct his bad eye; the result was that he kept seeing elliptical suns and falling off tilted curbs, until he had to throw the glasses away. Granted that I am thoroughly anaesthetized the greater part of the day — well, I only undertake work that I know I can do when I am in that condition.”

“Yeah,” agreed his brother Gene uncomfortably. The doctor was a little tight at the moment and Gene could find no opening for what he had to say. Like so many Southerners of the humbler classes, he had a deep-seated courtesy, characteristic of all violent and passionate lands — he could not change the subject until there was a moment’s silence, and Forrest would not shut up.

“I’m very happy,” he continued, “or very miserable. I chuckle or I weep alcoholically and, as I continue to slow up, life accommodatingly goes faster, so that the less there is of myself inside, the more diverting becomes the moving picture without. I have cut myself off from the respect of my fellow man, but I am aware of a compensatory cirrhosis of the emotions. And because my sensitivity, my pity, no longer has direction, but fixes itself on whatever is at hand I have become an exceptionally good fellow — much more so than when I was a good doctor.”

As the road straightened after the next bend and Gene saw his house in the distance, he remembered his wife’s face as she had made him promise, and he could wait no longer: “Forrest, I got a thing — “

But at that moment the doctor brought his, car to a sudden stop in front of a small house just beyond a grove of pines. On the front steps a girl of eight was playing with a gray cat.

“This is the sweetest little kid I ever saw,” the doctor said to Gene and then to the child, in a grave voice: “Helen, do you need any pills for kitty?”

The little girl laughed.

“Well, I don’t know,” she said doubtfully. She was playing another game with the cat now and this came as rather an interruption.

“Because kitty telephoned me this morning,” the doctor continued, “and said her mother was neglecting her and couldn’t I get her a trained nurse from Montgomery.”

“She did not.” The little girl grabbed the cat close indignantly; the doctor took a nickel from his pocket and tossed it to the steps.

“I recommend a good dose of milk,” he said as he put the car into gear. “Good night, Helen.”

“Good night, doctor.”

As they drove off, Gene tried again: “Listen; stop,” he said. “Stop here a little way down… Here.”

The doctor stopped the car and the brothers faced each other. They were alike as to robustness of figure and a certain asceticism of feature and they were both in their middle forties; they were unlike in that the doctor’s glasses failed to conceal the veined, weeping eyes of a soak, and that he wore corrugated city wrinkles; Gene’s wrinkles bounded fields, followed the lines of rooftrees, of poles propping up sheds. His eyes were a fine, furry blue. But the sharpest contrast lay in the fact that Gene Janney was a country man while Dr.Forrest Janney was obviously a man of education.

“Well?” the doctor asked.

“You know Pinky’s at home,” Gene said, looking down the road.

“So I hear,” the doctor answered noncommittally.

“He got in a row in Birmingham and somebody shot him in the head.” Gene hesitated. “We got Doc Behrer because we thought you wouldn’t — maybe you wouldn’t — “

“I wouldn’t,” agreed Doctor Janney blandly.

“But look, Forrest; here’s the thing,” Gene insisted. “You know how it is — you often say Doc Behrer doesn’t know nothing. Shucks, I never thought he was much either. He says the bullet’s pressing on the — pressing on the brain, and he ain’t take it out without causin’ a hemmering, and he says he doesn’t know whether we could get him to Birmingham or Montgomery, or not, he’s so low. Doc wasn’t no help. What we want — “

“No,” said his brother, shaking his head. “No.”

“I just want you to look at him and tell us what to do,” Gene begged. “He’s unconscious, Forrest. He wouldn’t know you; you’d hardly know him. Thing is his mother’s about crazy.”

“She’s in the grip of a purely animal instinct.” The doctor took from his hip a flask containing half water and half Alabama corn, and drank. “You and I know that boy ought to been drowned the day he was born.”

Gene flinched. “He’s bad,” he admitted, “but I don’t know — You see him lying there — “

As the liquor spread over the doctor’s insides he felt an instinct to do something, not to violate his prejudices but simply to make some gesture, to assert his own moribund but still struggling will to power.

“All right, I’ll see him,” he said. “I’ll do nothing myself to help him, because he ought to be dead. And even his death wouldn’t make up for what he did to Mary Decker.”

Gene Janney pursed his lips. “Forrest, you sure about that?”

“Sure about it!” exclaimed the doctor. “Of course I’m sure. She died of starvation; she hadn’t had more than a couple cups of coffee in a week. And if you looked at her shoes, you could see she’d walked for miles.”

“Doc Behrer says — “

“What does he know? I performed the autopsy the day they found her on the Birmingham Highway. There was nothing the matter with her but starvation. That — that” — his voice shook with feeling — “that Pinky got tired of her and turned her out, and she was trying to get home. It suits me fine that he was invalided home himself a couple of weeks later.”

As he talked, the doctor had plunged the car savagely into gear and let the clutch out with a jump; in a moment they drew up be-fore Gene Janney’s home.

It was a square frame house with a brick foundation and a well-kept lawn blocked off from the farm, a house rather superior to the buildings that composed the town of Bending and the surrounding agricultural area, yet not essentially different in type or in its interior economy. The last of the plantation houses in this section of Alabama had long disappeared, the proud pillars yielding to poverty, rot and rain.

Gene’s wife, Rose, got up from her rocking chair on the porch.

“Hello, doc.” She greeted him a little nervously and without meeting his eyes. “You been a stranger here lately.”

The doctor met her eyes for several seconds. “How do you do, Rose,” he said. “Hi, Edith… Hi, Eugene” — this to the little boy and girl who stood beside their mother; and then: “Hi, Butch!” to the stocky youth of nineteen who came around the corner of the house hugging a round stone.

“Goin’ to have a sort of low wall along the front here — kind of neater,” Gene explained.

All of them had a lingering respect for the doctor. They felt reproachful toward him because they could no longer refer to him as their celebrated relative — “one of the bess surgeons up in Montgomery, yes, suh” — but there was his learning and the position he had once occupied in the larger world, before he had committed professional suicide by taking to cynicism and drink. He had come home to Bending and bought a half interest in the local drug store two years ago, keeping up his license, but practising only when sorely needed.

“Rose,” said Gene, “doc says he’ll take a look at Pinky.”

Pinky Janney, his lips curved mean and white under a new beard, lay in bed in a darkened room. When the doctor removed the bandage from his head, his breath blew into a low groan, but his paunchy body did not move. After a few minutes, the doctor replaced the bandage and, with Gene and Rose, returned to the porch.

“Behrer wouldn’t operate?” he asked.

“No.”

“Why didn’t they operate in Birmingham?”

“I don’t know.”

“H’m.” The doctor put on his hat. “That bullet ought to come out, and soon. It’s pressing against the carotid sheath. That’s the — anyhow, you can’t get him to Montgomery with that pulse.”

“What’ll we do?” Gene’s question carried a little tail of silence as he sucked his breath back.

“Get Behrer to think it over. Or else get somebody in Montgomery. There’s about a 25 per cent chance that the operation would save him; without the operation he hasn’t any chance at all.”

“Who’ll we get in Montgomery?” asked Gene.

“Any good surgeon would do it. Even Behrer could do it if he had any nerve.”

Suddenly Rose Janney came close to him, her eyes straining and burning with an animal maternalism. She seized his coat where it hung open.

“Doc, you do it! You can do it. You know you were as good a surgeon as any of em once. Please, doc, you go on do it.”

He stepped back a little so that her hands fell from his coat, and held out his own hands in front of him.

“See how they tremble?” he said with elaborate irony. “Look close and you’ll see. I wouldn’t dare operate.”

“You could do it all right,” said Gene hastily, “with a drink to stiffen you up.”

The doctor shook his head and said, looking at Rose: “No. You see, my decisions are not reliable, and if anything went wrong, it would seem to be my fault.” He was acting a little now — he chose his words carefully. “I hear that when I found that Mary Decker died of starvation, my opinion was questioned on the ground that I was a drunkard.”

“I didn’t say that,” lied Rose breathlessly.

“Certainly not. I just mention it to show how careful I’ve got to be.” He moved down the steps. “Well, my advice is to see Behrer again, or, failing that, get somebody from the city. Good night.”

But before he had reached the gate, Rose came tearing after him, her eyes white with fury.

“I did say you were a drunkard!” she cried. “When you said Mary Decker died of starvation, you made it out as if it was Pinky’s fault — you, swilling yourself full of corn all day! How can anybody tell whether you know what you’re doing or not? Why did you think so much about Mary Decker, anyhow — a girl half your age? Everybody saw how she used to come in your drug store and talk to you — “

Gene, who had followed, seized her arms. “Shut up now, Rose… Drive along, Forrest.”

Forrest drove along, stopping at the next bend to drink from his flask. Across the fallow cotton fields he could see the house where Mary Decker had lived, and had it been six months before, he might have detoured to ask her why she hadn’t come into the store that day for her free soda, or to delight her with a sample cosmetic left by a salesman that morning. He had not told Mary Decker how he felt about her; never intended to — she was seventeen, he was forty-five, and he no longer dealt in futures — but only after she ran away to Birmingham with Pinky Janney, did he realize how much his love for her had counted in his lonely life.

His thoughts went back to his brother’s house.

“Now, if I were a gentleman,” he thought, “I wouldn’t have done like that. And another person might have been sacrificed to that dirty dog, because if he died afterward Rose would say I killed him.”

Yet he felt pretty bad as he put his car away; not that he could have acted differently, but just that it was all so ugly.

He had been home scarcely ten minutes when a car creaked to rest outside and Butch Janney came in. His mouth was set tight and his eyes were narrowed as though to permit of no escape to the temper that possessed him until it should be unleashed upon its proper objective.

“Hi, Butch.”

“I want to tell you, Uncle Forrest, you can’t talk to my mother thataway. I’ll kill you, you talk to my mother like that!”

“Now shut up, Butch, and sit down,” said the doctor sharply.

She’s already bout sick on account of Pinky, and you come over and talk to her like that.”

“Your mother did all the insulting that was done, Butch. I just took it.”

“She doesn’t know what she’s saying and you ought to understand that.”

The doctor thought a minute. “Butch, what do you think of Pinky?.”

Butch hesitated uncomfortably. “Well, I can’t say I ever thought so much of him” — his tone changed defiantly — “but after all, he’s my own brother — “

“Wait a minute, Butch. What do you think of the way he treated Mary Decker?”

But Butch had shaken himself free, and now he let go the artillery of his rage:

“That ain’t the point; the point is anybody that doesn’t do right to my mother has me to answer to. It’s only fair when you got all the education — “

“I got my education myself, Butch.”

“I don’t care. We’re going to try again to get Doc Behrer to operate or get us some fellow from the city. But if we can’t, I’m coming and get you, and you’re going to take that bullet out if I have to hold a gun to you while you do it.” He nodded, panting a little; then he turned and went out and drove away.

“Something tells me,” said the doctor to himself, “that there’s no more peace for me in ChiltonCounty.” He called to his colored boy to put supper on the table. Then he rolled himself a cigarette and went out on the back stoop.

The weather had changed. The sky was now overcast and the grass stirred restlessly and there was a sudden flurry of drops without a sequel. A minute ago it had been warm, but now the moisture on his forehead was suddenly cool, and he wiped it away with his hand-kerchief. There was a buzzing in his ears and he swallowed and shook his head. For a moment he thought he must be sick; then suddenly the buzzing detached itself from him, grew into a swelling sound, louder and ever nearer, that might have been the roar of an approaching train.

II

Butch Janney was halfway home when he saw it — a huge, black approaching cloud whose lower edge bumped the ground. Even as he stared at it vaguely, it seemed to spread until it included the whole southern sky, and he saw pale electric fire in it and heard an in-creasing roar. He was in a strong wind now; blown debris, bits of broken branches, splinters, larger objects unidentifiable in the growing darkness, flew by him. Instinctively he got out of his car and, by now hardly able to stand against the wind, ran for a bank, or rather found himself thrown and pinned against a bank. Then for a minute, two minutes, he was in the black center of pandemonium.

First there was the sound, and he was part of the sound, so en-gulfed in it and possessed by it that he had no existence apart from it. It was not a collection of sounds, it was just Sound itself; a great screeching bow drawn across the chords of the universe. The sound and force were inseparable. The sound as well as the force held him to what he felt was the bank like a man crucified. Somewhere in this first moment his face, pinned sideways, saw his automobile make a little jump, spin halfway around and then go bobbing off over a field in a series of great helpless leaps. Then began the bombardment, the sound dividing its sustained cannon note into the cracks of a gigantic machine gun. He was only half-conscious as he felt himself become part of one of those cracks, felt himself lifted away from the bank to tear through space, through a blinding, lacerating mass of twigs and branches, and then, for an incalculable time, he knew nothing at all.

His body hurt him. He was lying between two branches in the top of a tree; the air was full of dust and rain, and he could hear nothing; it was a long time before he realized that the tree he was in had been blown down and that his involuntary perch among the pine needles was only five feet from the ground.

“Say, man!” he cried, aloud, outraged. “Say, man! Say, what a wind! Say, man!”

Made acute by pain and fear, he guessed that he had been standing on the tree’s root and had been catapulted by the terrific wrench as the big pine was torn from the earth. Feeling over himself, he found that his left ear was caked full of dirt, as if someone had wanted to take an impression of the inside. His clothes were in rags, his coat had torn on the back seam, and he could feel where, as some stray gust tried to undress him, it had cut into him under the arms.

Reaching the ground, he set off in the direction of his father’s house, but it was a new and unfamiliar landscape he traversed. The Thing — he did not know it was a tornado — had cut a path a quarter of a mile wide, and he was confused, as the dust slowly settled, by vistas had never seen before. It was unreal that Bending church tower should be visible from here; there had been groves of trees between.

But where was here? For he should be close to the Baldwin house; only as he tripped over great piles of boards, like a carelessly kept lumberyard, did Butch realize that there was no more Baldwin house, and then, looking around wildly, that there was no Necrawney house on the hill, no Peltzer house below it. There was not a light, not a sound, save the rain falling on the fallen trees.

He broke into a run. When he saw the bulk of his father’s house in the distance, he gave a “Hey!” of relief, but coming closer, he realized that something was missing. There were no outhouses and the built-on wing that held Pinky’s room had been sheared completely away.

“Mother!” he called. “Dad!” There was no answer; a dog bounded out of the yard and licked his hand…

… It was full dark twenty minutes later when Doc Janney stopped his car in front of his own drug store in Bending. The electric lights had gone out, but there were men with lanterns in the street, and in a minute a small crowd had collected around him. He unlocked the door hurriedly.

“Somebody break open the old WigginsHospital.” He pointed across the street. “I’ve got six badly injured in my car. I want some fellows to carry em in. Is Doc Behrer here?”

“Here he is,” offered eager voices out of the darkness as the doctor, case in hand, came through the crowd. The two men stood face to face by lantern light, forgetting that they disliked each other.

“God knows how many more there’s going to be,” said Doc Janney. “I’m getting dressing and disinfectant. There’ll be a lot of fractures — “ He raised his voice, “Somebody bring me a barrel!”

“I’ll get started over there,” said Doc Behrer. “There’s about half a dozen more crawled in.”

“What’s been done?” demanded Doc Janney of the men who followed him into the drug store. “Have they called Birmingham and Montgomery?”

“The telephone wires are down, but the telegraph got through.”

“Well, somebody get Doctor Cohen from Wettala, and tell any people who have automobiles to go up the Willard Pike and cut across toward Corsica and all through those roads there. There’s not a house left at the crossroads by the nigger store. I passed a lot of folks walking in, all of them hurt, but I didn’t have room or anybody else.” As he talked he was throwing bandages, disinfectant and drugs into a blanket. “I thought I had a lot more stuff than this in stock! And wait!” he called. “Somebody drive out and look down in that hollow where the Wooleys live. Drive right across the fields — the road’s blocked. . . . Now, you with the cap — Ed Jenks, ain’t it?”

“Yes, doc.”

“You see what I got here? You collect everything in the store that looks like this and bring it across the way, understand?”

“Yes, doc.”

As the doctor went out into the street, the victims were streaming into town — a woman on foot with a badly injured child, a buck-board full of groaning Negroes, frantic men gasping terrible stories. Everywhere confusion and hysteria mounted in the dimly illumined darkness. A mud-covered reporter from Birmingham drove up in a sidecar, the wheels crossing the fallen wires and brushwood that clogged the street, and there was the siren of a police car from Cooper, thirty miles away.

Already a crowd pressed around the doors of the hospital, closed these three months for lack of patients. The doctor squeezed past the melee of white faces and established himself in the nearest ward, grateful for the waiting row of old iron beds. Doctor Behrer was already at work across the hall.

“Get me half a dozen lanterns,” he ordered.

“Doctor Behrer wants iodine and adhesive.”

“All right, there it is… Here, you, Shinkey, stand by the door and keep everybody out except cases that can’t walk. Somebody run over and see if there ain’t some candles in the grocery store.”

The street outside was full of sound now — the cries of women, the contrary directions of volunteer gangs trying to clear the highway, the tense staccato of people rising to an emergency. A little before midnight arrived the first unit of the Red Cross. But the three doctors, presently joined by two others from near-by villages, had lost track of time long before that. The dead began to be brought in by ten o’clock; there were twenty, twenty-five, thirty, forty — the list grew. Having no more needs, these waited, as became simple husbandmen, in a garage behind, while the stream of injured — hundreds of them — flowed through the old hospital built to house only a dreads of them — flowed through the old hospital built to house only a score. The storm had dealt out fractures of the leg, collar bone, ribs and hip, lacerations of the back, elbows, ears, eyelids, nose; there were wounds from flying planks, and odd splinters in odd places, and a scalped man, who would recover to grow a new head of hair. Living or dead, Doc Janney knew every face, almost every name.

“Don’t you fret now. Billy’s all right. Hold still and let me tie this. People are drifting in every minute, but it’s so consarned dark they can’t find ‘em — All right, Mrs. Oakey. That’s nothing. Ev here’ll touch it with iodine… Now let’s see this man.”

Two o’clock. The old doctor from Wettala gave out, but now there were fresh men from Montgomery to take his place. Upon the air of the room, heavy with disinfectant, floated the ceaseless babble of human speech reaching the doctor dimly through the layer after layer of increasing fatigue:

“… Over and over — just rolled me over and over. Got hold of a bush and the bush came along too.”

“Jeff! Where’s Jeff?”

“… I bet that pig sailed a hundred yards — “

“ — just stopped the train in time. All the passengers got out and helped pull the poles — “

“Where’s Jeff?”

“He says, ‘Let’s get down cellar,’ and I says, ‘We ain’t got no cellar’ — “

“ — If there’s no more stretchers, find some light doors.”

“… Five seconds? Say, it was more like five minutes!”

At some time he heard that Gene and Rose had been seen with their two youngest children. He had passed their house on the way in and, seeing it standing, hurried on. The Janney family had been lucky; the doctor’s own house was outside the sweep of the storm.

Only as he saw the electric lights go on suddenly in the streets and glimpsed the crowd waiting for hot coffee in front of the Red Cross did the doctor realize how tired he was.

“You better go rest,” a young man was saying. “I’ll take this side of the room. I’ve got two nurses with me.”

“All right — all right. I’ll finish this row.”

The injured were being evacuated to the cities by train as fast as their wounds were dressed, and their places taken by others. He had only two beds to go — in the first one he found Pinky Janney.

He put his stethoscope to the heart. It was beating feebly. That he, so weak, so nearly gone, had survived this storm at all was remarkable. How he had got there, who had found him and carried him, was a mystery in itself. The doctor went over the body; there were small contusions and lacerations, two broken fingers, the dirt-filled cars that marked every case — nothing else. For a moment the doctor hesitated, but even when he closed his eyes, the image of Mary Decker seemed to have receded, eluding him. Something purely professional that had nothing to do with human sensibilities had been set in motion inside him, and he was powerless to head it off. He held out his hands before him; they were trembling slightly.

“Hell’s bells!” he muttered.

He went out of the room and around the corner of the hall, where he drew from his pocket the flask containing the last of the corn and water he had had in the afternoon. He emptied it. Returning to the ward, he disinfected two instruments and applied a local anaesthetic to a square section at the base of Pinky’s skull where the wound had healed over the bullet. He called a nurse to his side and then, scalpel in hand, knelt on one knee beside his nephew’s bed.

III

Two days later the doctor drove slowly around the mournful countryside. He had withdrawn from the emergency work after the first desperate night, feeling that his status as a pharmacist might embarrass his collaborators. But there was much to be done in bringing the damage to outlying sections under the aegis of the Red Cross, and he devoted himself to that.

The path of the demon was easy to follow. It had pursued an irregular course on its seven-league boots, cutting cross country, through woods, or even urbanely keeping to roads until they curved, when it went off on its own again. Sometimes the trail could be traced by cotton fields, apparently in full bloom, but this cotton came from the insides of hundreds of quilts and mattresses redistributed in the fields by the storm.

At a lumber pile that had lately been a Negro cabin, he stopped a moment to listen to a dialogue between two reporters and two shy pickaninnies. The old grandmother, her head bandaged, sat among the ruins, gnawing some vague meat and moving her rocker ceaselessly.

“But where is the river you were blown across?” one of the reporters demanded.

“There.”

“Where?”

The pickaninnies looked to their grandmother for aid.

“Right there behind you-all,” spoke up the old woman.

The newspapermen looked disgustedly at a muddy stream four yards wide.

“That’s no river.”

“That’s a MenadaRiver, we always calls it ever since I was a gull. Yes, suh, that’s a MenadaRiver. An’ them two boys was blowed right across it an set down on the othah side just as pretty, ‘thout any hurt at all. Chimney fell on me,” she concluded, feeling her head.

“Do you mean to say that’s all it was?” demanded the younger reporter indignantly. “That’s the river they were blown across! And one hundred and twenty million people have been led to believe — “

“That’s all right, boys,” interrupted Doc Janney. “That’s a right good river for these parts. And it’ll get bigger as those little fellahs get older.”

He tossed a quarter to the old woman and drove on.

Passing a country church, he stopped and counted the new brown mounds that marred the graveyard. He was nearing the centre of the holocaust now. There was the Howden house where three had been killed; there remained a gaunt chimney, a rubbish heap and a scarecrow surviving ironically in the kitchen garden. In the ruins of the house across the way a rooster strutted on top of a piano, reigning vociferously over an estate of trunks, boots, cans, books, calendars, rugs, chairs and window frames, a twisted radio and a legless sewing machine. Everywhere there was bedding — blankets, mattresses, bent springs, shredded padding — he had not realized how much of people’s lives was spent in bed. Here and there, cows and horses, often stained with disinfectant, were grazing again in the fields. At intervals there were Red Cross tents, and sitting by one of these, with the gray cat in her arms, the doctor came upon little Helen Kilrain. The usual lumber pile, like a child’s building game knocked down in a fit of temper, told the story.

“Hello, dear,” he greeted her, his heart sinking. “How did kitty like the tornado?”

“She didn’t.”

“What did she do?”

“She meowed.”

“Oh.”

“She wanted to get away, but I hanged on to her and she scratched me — see?”

He glanced at the Red Cross tent.

“Who’s taking care of you?”

“The lady from the Red Cross and Mrs. Wells,” she answered. “My father got hurt. He stood over me so it wouldn’t fall on me, and I stood over kitty. He’s in the hospital in Birmingham. When he comes back, I guess he’ll build our house again.”

The doctor winced. He knew that her father would build no more houses; he had died that morning. She was alone, and she did not know she was alone. Around her stretched the dark universe, impersonal, inconscient. Her lovely little face looked up at him confidently as he asked: “You got any kin anywhere, Helen?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’ve got kitty, anyhow, haven’t you?”

“It’s just a cat,” she admitted calmly, but anguished by her own betrayal of her love, she hugged it closer.

“Taking care of a cat must be pretty hard.”

“Oh no,” she said hurriedly. “It isn’t any trouble at all. It doesn’t eat hardly anything.”

He put his hand in his pocket, and then changed his mind suddenly.

“Dear, I’m coming back and see you later — later today. You take good care of kitty now, won’t you?”

“Oh, yes,” she answered lightly.

The doctor drove on. He stopped next at a house that had escaped damage. Walt Cupps, the owner, was cleaning a shotgun on his front porch.

“What’s that, Walt? Going to shoot up the next tornado?”

“Ain’t going to be a next tornado.”

“You can’t tell. Just take a look at that sky now. It’s getting mighty dark.”

Walt laughed and slapped his gun. “Not for a hundred years, anyhow. This here is for looters. There’s a lot of ‘em around, and not all black either. Wish when you go to town that you’d tell ‘em to scatter some militia out here.”

“I’ll tell em now. You come out all right?”

“I did, thank God. With six of us in the house. It took off one hen and probably it’s still carrying it around somewhere.”

The doctor drove on toward town, overcome by a feeling of uneasiness he could not define.

“It’s the weather,” he thought. “It’s the same kind of feel in the air there was last Saturday.”

For a month the doctor had felt an urge to go away permanently. Once this countryside had seemed to promise peace. When the impetus that had lifted him temporarily out of tired old stock was exhausted, he had come back here to rest, to watch the earth put forth, and live on simple, pleasant terms with his neighbors. Peace! He knew that the present family quarrel would never heal, nothing would ever be the same; it would all be bitter forever. And he had seen the placid countryside turned into a land of mourning. There was no peace here. Move on!

On the road he overtook Butch Janney walking to town.

“I was coming to see you,” said Butch, frowning. “You operated on Pinky after all, didn’t you?”

“Jump in… Yes, I did. How did you know?”

“Doc Behrer told us.” He shot a quick look at the doctor, who did not miss the quality of suspicion in it. “They don’t think he’ll last out the day.”

“I’m sorry for your mother.”

Butch laughed unpleasantly. “Yes, you are.”

“I said I’m sorry for your mother,” said the doctor sharply.

“I heard you.”

They drove for a moment in silence.

“Did you find your automobile?”

“Did I?” Butch laughed ruefully. “I found something — I don’t know whether you’d call it a car any more. And, you know, I could of had tornado insurance for twenty-five cents.” His voice trembled indignantly: “Twenty-five cents — but who would ever of thought of getting tornado insurance?”

It was growing darker; there was a thin crackle of thunder far to the southward.

“Well, all I hope,” said Butch with narrowed glance, “is that you hadn’t been drinking anything when you operated on Pinky.”

“You know, Butch,” the doctor said slowly, “that was a pretty dirty trick of mine to bring that tornado here.”

He had not expected the sarcasm to hit home, but he expected a retort — when suddenly he caught sight of Butch’s face. It was fish-white, the mouth was open, the eyes fixed and staring, and from the throat came a mewling sound. Limply he raised one hand before him, and then the doctor saw.

Less than a mile away, an enormous, top-shaped black cloud filled the sky and bore toward them, dipping and swirling, and in front of it sailed already a heavy, singing wind.

“It’s come back!” the doctor yelled.

Fifty yards ahead of them was the old iron bridge spanning Bilby Creek. He stepped hard on the accelerator and drove for it. The fields were full of running figures headed in the same direction. Reaching the bridge, he jumped out and yanked Butch’s arm.

“Get out, you fool! Get out!”

A nerveless mass stumbled from the car; in a moment they were in a group of half a dozen, huddled in the triangular space that the bridge made with the shore.

“Is it coming here?”

“No, it’s turning!”

“We had to leave grandpa!” “Oh, save me, save me! Jesus save me! Help me!”

“Jesus save my soul!”

There was a quick rush of wind outside, sending little tentacles under the bridge with a curious tension in them that made the doctor’s skin crawl. Then immediately there was a vacuum, with no more wind, but a sudden thresh of rain. The doctor crawled to the edge of the bridge and put his head up cautiously.

“It’s passed,” he said. “We only felt the edge; the center went way to the right of us.”

He could see it plainly; for a second he could even distinguish objects in it — shrubbery and small trees, planks and loose earth. Crawling farther out, he produced his watch and tried to time it, but the thick curtain of rain blotted it from sight.

Soaked to the skin, he crawled back underneath. Butch lay shivering in the farthest corner, and the doctor shook him.

“It went in the direction of your house!” the doctor cried “Pull yourself together! Who’s there?”

“No one,” Butch groaned. “They’re all down with Pinky.”

The rain had changed to hail now; first small pellets, then larger ones, and larger, until the sound of the fall upon the iron bridge was an ear-splitting tattoo.

The spared wretches under the bridge were slowly recovering and in the relief there were titters of hysterical laughter. After a certain point of strain, the nervous system makes its transitions without dignity or reason. Even the doctor felt the contagion.

“This is worse than a calamity,” he said dryly. “It’s getting to be a nuisance.”

IV

There were to be no more tornadoes in Alabama that spring. The second one — it was popularly thought to be the first one come back; for to the people of Chilton County it had become a personified force, definite as a pagan god — took a dozen houses, Gene Janney’s among them, and injured about thirty people. But this time — perhaps because everyone had developed some scheme of self-protection — there were no fatalities. It made its last dramatic bow by sailing down the main street of Bending, prostrating the telephone poles and crushing in the fronts of three shops, including Doc Janney’s drug store.

At the end of a week, houses were going up again, made of the old boards; and before the end of the long, lush Alabama summer the grass would be green again on all the graves. But it will be years before the people of the country cease to reckon events as happening “before the tornado” or “after the tornado,” — and for many families things will never be the same.

Doctor Janney decided that this was as good a time to leave as any. He sold the remains of his drug store, gutted alike by charity and catastrophe, and turned over his house to his brother until Gene could rebuild his own. He was going up to the city by train, for his car had been rammed against a tree and couldn’t be counted on for much more than the trip to the station.

Several times on the way in he stopped by the roadside to say good-by — once it was to Walter Cupps.

“So it hit you, after all,” he said, looking at the melancholy back house which alone marked the site.

“It’s pretty bad,” Walter answered. “But just think; they was six of us in or about the house and not one was injured. I’m content to give thanks to God for that.”

“You were lucky there, Walt,” the doctor agreed. “Do you happen to have heard whether the Red Cross took little Helen Kilrain to Montgomery or to Birmingham?”

“To Montgomery. Say, I was there when she came into town with that cat, tryin’ to get somebody to bandage up its paw. She must of walked miles through that rain and hail, but all that mattered to her was her kitty. Bad as I felt, I couldn’t help laughin’ at how spunky she was.”

The doctor was silent for a moment. “Do you happen to recollect if she has any people left?”

“I don’t, suh,” Walter replied, “but I think as not.”

At his brother’s place, the doctor made his last stop. They were all there, even the youngest, working among the ruins; already Butch had a shed erected to house the salvage of their goods. Save for this the most orderly thing surviving was the pattern of round white stone which was to have inclosed the garden.

The doctor took a hundred dollars in bills from his pocket and handed it to Gene.

“You can pay it back sometime, but don’t strain yourself,” he said. “It’s money I got from the store.” He cut off Gene’s thanks: “Pack up my books carefully when I send for ‘em.”

“You reckon to practice medicine up there, Forrest?”

“I’ll maybe try it.”

The brothers held on to each other’s hands for a moment; the two youngest children came up to say good-by. Rose stood in the back-ground in an old blue dress — she had no money to wear black for her eldest son.

“Good-by, Rose,” said the doctor.

“Good-by,” she responded, and then added in a dead voice, “Good luck to you, Forrest.”

For a moment he was tempted to say something conciliatory, but he saw it was no use. He was up against the maternal instinct, the same force that had sent little Helen through the storm with her injured cat.

At the station he bought a one-way ticket to Montgomery. The village was drab under the sky of a retarded spring, and as the train pulled out, it was odd to think that six months ago it had seemed to him as good a place as any other.

He was alone in the white section of the day coach; presently he felt for a bottle on his hip and drew it forth. “After all, a man of forty-five is entitled to more artificial courage when he starts over again.” He began thinking of Helen. “She hasn’t got any kin. I guess she’s my little girl now.”

He patted the bottle, then looked down at it as if in surprise.

“Well, we’ll have to put you aside for a while, old friend. Any cat that’s worth all that trouble and care is going to need a lot of grade-B milk.”

He settled down in his seat, looking out the window. In his memory of the terrible week the winds still sailed about him, came in as draughts through the corridor of the car — winds of the world — cyclones, hurricanes, tornadoes — gray and black, expected or unforeseen, some from the sky, some from the caves of hell.

But he would not let them touch Helen again — if he could help it.

He dozed momentarily, but a haunting dream woke him:”Daddy stood over me and I stood over kitty.”

“All right, Helen,” he said aloud, for he often talked to himself, “I guess the old brig can keep afloat a little longer — in any wind.”

A SHORT TRIP HOME

Author’s Note: In a moment of hasty misjudgment a whole paragraph of description was lifted out of this tale where it originated, and properly belongs, and applied to quite a different character in a novel of mine. I have ventured nonetheless to leave it here, even at the risk of seeming to serve warmed-over fare.

I was near her, for I had lingered behind in order to get the short walk with her from the living room to the front door. That was a lot, for she had flowered suddenly and I, being a man and only a year older, hadn’t flowered at all, had scarcely dared to come near her in the week we’d been home. Nor was I going to say anything in that walk of ten feet, or touch her; but I had a vague hope she’d do something, give a gay little performance of some sort, personal only in so far as we were alone together.

She had bewitchment suddenly in the twinkle of short hairs on her neck, in the sure, clear confidence that at about eighteen begins to deepen and sing in attractive American girls. The lamp light shopped in the yellow strands of her hair.

Already she was sliding into another world--the world of Joe Jelke and Jim Cathcart waiting for us now in the car. In another year she would pass beyond me forever.

As I waited, feeling the others outside in the snowy night, feeling the excitement of Christmas week and the excitement of Ellen here, blooming away, filling the room with “sex appeal”--a wretched phrase to express a quality that isn’t like that at all--a maid came in from the dining room, spoke to Ellen quietly and handed her a note. Ellen read it and her eyes faded down, as when the current grows weak on rural circuits, and smouldered off into space. Then she gave me an odd look--in which I probably didn’t show--and without a word, followed the maid into the dining room and beyond. I sat turning over the pages of a magazine for a quarter of an hour.

Joe Jelke came in, red-faced from the cold, his white silk muffler gleaming at the neck of his fur coat. He was a senior at New Haven, I was a sophomore. He was prominent, a member of Scroll and Keys, and, in my eyes, very distinguished and handsome.

“Isn’t Ellen coming?”

“I don’t know,” I answered discreetly. “She was all ready.”

“Ellen!” he called. “Ellen!”

He had left the front door open behind him and a great cloud of frosty air rolled in from outside. He went halfway up the stairs--he was a familiar in the house--and called again, till Mrs. Baker came to the banister and said that Ellen was below. Then the maid, a little excited, appeared in the dining-room door.

“Mr. Jelke,” she called in a low voice.

Joe’s face fell as he turned toward her, sensing bad news.

“Miss Ellen says for you to go on to the party. She’ll come later.”

“What’s the matter?”

“She can’t come now. She’ll come later.”

He hesitated, confused. It was the last big dance of vacation, and he was mad about Ellen. He had tried to give her a ring for Christmas, and failing that, got her to accept a gold mesh bag that must have cost two hundred dollars. He wasn’t the only one--there were three or four in the same wild condition, and all in the ten days she’d been home--but his chance came first, for he was rich and gracious and at that moment the “desirable” boy of St. Paul. To me it seemed impossible that she could prefer another, but the rumor was she’d described Joe as much too perfect. I suppose he lacked mystery for her, and when a man is up against that with a young girl who isn’t thinking of the practical side of marriage yet--well--.

“She’s in the kitchen,” Joe said angrily.

“No, she’s not.” The maid was defiant and a little scared.

“She is.”

“She went out the back way, Mr. Jelke.”

“I’m going to see.”

I followed him. The Swedish servants washing dishes looked up sideways at our approach and an interested crashing of pans marked our passage through. The storm door, unbolted, was flapping in the wind and as we walked out into the snowy yard we saw the tail light of a car turn the corner at the end of the back alley.

“I’m going after her,” Joe said slowly. “I don’t understand this at all.”

I was too awed by the calamity to argue. We hurried to his car and drove in a fruitless, despairing zigzag all over the residence section, peering into every machine on the streets. It was half an hour before the futility of the affair began to dawn upon him--St. Paul is a city of almost three hundred thousand people--and Jim Cathcart reminded him that we had another girl to stop for. Like a wounded animal he sank into a melancholy mass of fur in the corner, from which position he jerked upright every few minutes and waved himself backward and forward a little in protest and despair.

Jim’s girl was ready and impatient, but after what had happened her impatience didn’t seem important. She looked lovely though. That’s one thing about Christmas vacation--the excitement of growth and change and adventure in foreign parts transforming the people you’ve known all your life. Joe Jelke was polite to her in a daze--he indulged in one burst of short, loud, harsh laughter by way of conversation--and we drove to the hotel.

The chauffeur approached it on the wrong side--the side on which the line of cars was not putting forth guests--and because of that we came suddenly upon Ellen Baker just getting out of a small coupé. Even before we came to a stop, Joe Jelke had jumped excitedly from the car.

Ellen turned toward us, a faintly distracted look--perhaps of surprise, but certainly not of alarm--in her face; in fact, she didn’t seem very aware of us. Joe approached her with a stern, dignified, injured and, I thought, just exactly correct reproof in his expression. I followed.

Seated in the coupé--he had not dismounted to help Ellen out--was a hard thin-faced man of about thirty-five with an air of being scarred, and a slight sinister smile. His eyes were a sort of taunt to the whole human family--they were the eyes of an animal, sleepy and quiescent in the presence of another species. They were helpless yet brutal, unhopeful yet confident. It was as if they felt themselves powerless to originate activity, but infinitely capable of profiting by a single gesture of weakness in another.

Vaguely I placed him as one of the sort of men whom I had been conscious of from my earliest youth as “hanging around”--leaning with one elbow on the counters of tobacco stores, watching, through heaven knows what small chink of the mind, the people who hurried in and out. Intimate to garages, where he had vague business conducted in undertones, to barber shops and to the lobbies of theatres--in such places, anyhow, I placed the type, if type it was, that he reminded me of. Sometimes his face bobbed up in one of Tad’s more savage cartoons, and I had always from earliest boyhood thrown a nervous glance toward the dim borderland where he stood, and seen him watching me and despising me. Once, in a dream, he had taken a few steps toward me, jerking his head back and muttering: “Say, kid” in what was intended to be a reassuring voice, and I had broken for the door in terror. This was that sort of man.

Joe and Ellen faced each other silently; she seemed, as I have said, to be in a daze. It was cold, but she didn’t notice that her coat had blown open; Joe reached out and pulled it together, and automatically she clutched it with her hand.

Suddenly the man in the coupé, who had been watching them silently, laughed. It was a bare laugh, done with the breath--just a noisy jerk of the head--but it was an insult if I had ever heard one; definite and not to be passed over. I wasn’t surprised when Joe, who was quick tempered, turned to him angrily and said:

“What’s your trouble?”

The man waited a moment, his eyes shifting and yet staring, and always seeing. Then he laughed again in the same way. Ellen stirred uneasily.

“Who is this--this--” Joe’s voice trembled with annoyance.

“Look out now,” said the man slowly.

Joe turned to me.

“Eddie, take Ellen and Catherine in, will you?” he said quickly. . . . “Ellen, go with Eddie.”

“Look out now,” the man repeated.

Ellen made a little sound with her tongue and teeth, but she didn’t resist when I took her arm and moved her toward the side door of the hotel. It struck me as odd that she should be so helpless, even to the point of acquiescing by her silence in this imminent trouble.

“Let it go, Joe!” I called back over my shoulder. “Come inside!”

Ellen, pulling against my arm, hurried us on. As we were caught up into the swinging doors I had the impression that the man was getting out of his coupé.

Ten minutes later, as I waited for the girls outside the women’s dressing-room, Joe Jelke and Jim Cathcart stepped out of the elevator. Joe was very white, his eyes were heavy and glazed, there was a trickle of dark blood on his forehead and on his white muffler. Jim had both their hats in his hand.

“He hit Joe with brass knuckles,” Jim said in a low voice. “Joe was out cold for a minute or so. I wish you’d send a bell boy for some witch-hazel and court-plaster.”

It was late and the hall was deserted; brassy fragments of the dance below reached us as if heavy curtains were being blown aside and dropping back into place. When Ellen came out I took her directly downstairs. We avoided the receiving line and went into a dim room set with scraggly hotel palms where couples sometimes sat out during the dance; there I told her what had happened.

“It was Joe’s own fault,” she said, surprisingly. “I told him not to interfere.”

This wasn’t true. She had said nothing, only uttered one curious little click of impatience.

“You ran out the back door and disappeared for almost an hour,” I protested. “Then you turned up with a hard-looking customer who laughed in Joe’s face.”

“A hard-looking customer,” she repeated, as if tasting the sound of the words.

“Well, wasn’t he? Where on earth did you get hold of him, Ellen?”

“On the train,” she answered. Immediately she seemed to regret this admission. “You’d better stay out of things that aren’t your business, Eddie. You see what happened to Joe.”

Literally I gasped. To watch her, seated beside me, immaculately glowing, her body giving off wave after wave of freshness and delicacy--and to hear her talk like that.

“But that man’s a thug!” I cried. “No girl could be safe with him. He used brass knuckles on Joe--brass knuckles!”

“Is that pretty bad?”

She asked this as she might have asked such a question a few years ago. She looked at me at last and really wanted an answer; for a moment it was as if she were trying to recapture an attitude that had almost departed; then she hardened again. I say “hardened,” for I began to notice that when she was concerned with this man her eyelids fell a little, shutting other things--everything else--out of view.

That was a moment I might have said something, I suppose, but in spite of everything, I couldn’t light into her. I was too much under the spell of her beauty and its success. I even began to find excuses for her--perhaps that man wasn’t what he appeared to be; or perhaps--more romantically--she was involved with him against her will to shield some one else. At this point people began to drift into the room and come up to speak to us. We couldn’t talk any more, so we went in and bowed to the chaperones. Then I gave her up to the bright restless sea of the dance, where she moved in an eddy of her own among the pleasant islands of colored favors set out on tables and the south winds from the brasses moaning across the hall. After a while I saw Joe Jelke sitting in a corner with a strip of court-plaster on his forehead watching Ellen as if she herself had struck him down, but I didn’t go up to him. I felt queer myself--like I feel when I wake up after sleeping through an afternoon, strange and portentous, as if something had gone on in the interval that changed the values of everything and that I didn’t see.

The night slipped on through successive phases of cardboard horns, amateur tableaux and flashlights for the morning papers. Then was the grand march and supper, and about two o’clock some of the committee dressed up as revenue agents pinched the party, and a facetious newspaper was distributed, burlesquing the events of the evening. And all the time out of the corner of my eye I watched the shining orchid on Ellen’s shoulder as it moved like Stuart’s plume about the room. I watched it with a definite foreboding until the last sleepy groups had crowded into the elevators, and then, bundled to the eyes in great shapeless fur coats, drifted out into the clear dry Minnesota night.

II

There is a sloping mid-section of our city which lies between the residence quarter on the hill and the business district on the level of the river. It is a vague part of town, broken by its climb into triangles and odd shapes--there are names like Seven Corners--and I don’t believe a dozen people could draw an accurate map of it, though every one traversed it by trolley, auto or shoe leather twice a day. And though it was a busy section, it would be hard for me to name the business that comprised its activity. There were always long lines of trolley cars waiting to start somewhere; there was a big movie theatre and many small ones with posters of Hoot Gibson and Wonder Dogs and Wonder Horses outside; there were small stores with “Old King Brady” and “The Liberty Boys of ‘76” in the windows, and marbles, cigarettes and candy inside; and--one definite place at least--a fancy costumer whom we all visited at least once a year. Some time during boyhood I became aware that one side of a certain obscure street there were bawdy houses, and all through the district were pawnshops, cheap jewellers, small athletic clubs and gymnasiums and somewhat too blatantly run-down saloons.

The morning after the Cotillion Club party, I woke up late and lazy, with the happy feeling that for a day or two more there was no chapel, no classes--nothing to do but wait for another party tonight. It was crisp and bright--one of those days when you forget how cold it is until your cheek freezes--and the events of the evening before seemed dim and far away. After luncheon I started downtown on foot through a light, pleasant snow of small flakes that would probably fall all afternoon, and I was about half through that halfway section of town--so far as I know, there’s no inclusive name for it--when suddenly whatever idle thought was in my head blew away like a hat and I began thinking hard of Ellen Baker. I began worrying about her as I’d never worried about anything outside myself before. I began to loiter, with an instinct to go up on the hill again and find her and talk to her; then I remembered that she was at a tea, and I went on again, but still thinking of her, and harder than ever. Right then the affair opened up again.

It was snowing, I said, and it was four o’clock on a December afternoon, when there is a promise of darkness in the air and the street lamps are just going on. I passed a combination pool parlor and restaurant, with a stove loaded with hot-dogs in the window, and a few loungers hanging around the door. The lights were on inside--not bright lights but just a few pale yellow high up on the ceiling--and the glow they threw out into the frosty dusk wasn’t bright enough to tempt you to stare inside. As I went past, thinking hard of Ellen all this time, I took in the quartet of loafers out of the corner of my eye. I hadn’t gone half a dozen steps down the street when one of them called to me, not by name but in a way clearly intended for my ear. I thought it was a tribute to my raccoon coat and paid no attention, but a moment later whoever it was called to me again in a peremptory voice. I was annoyed and turned around. There, standing in the group not ten feet away and looking at me with the half-sneer on his face with which he’d looked at Joe Jelke, was the scarred, thin-faced man of the night before.

He had on a black fancy-cut coat, buttoned up to his neck as if he were cold. His hands were deep in his pockets and he wore a derby and high button shoes. I was startled, and for a moment I hesitated, but I was most of all angry, and knowing that I was quicker with my hands than Joe Jelke, I took a tentative step back toward him. The other men weren’t looking at me--I don’t think they saw me at all--but I knew that this one recognized me; there was nothing casual about his look, no mistake.

“Here I am. What are you going to do about it?” his eyes seemed to say.

I took another step toward him and he laughed soundlessly, but with active contempt, and drew back into the group. I followed. I was going to speak to him--I wasn’t sure what I was going to say--but when I came up he had either changed his mind and backed off, or else he wanted me to follow him inside, for he had slipped off and the three men watched my intent approach without curiosity. They were the same kind--sporty, but, unlike him, smooth rather than truculent; I didn’t find any personal malice in their collective glance.

“Did he go inside?” I asked.

They looked at one another in that cagy way; a wink passed between them, and after a perceptible pause, one said:

“Who go inside?”

“I don’t know his name.”

There was another wink. Annoyed and determined, I walked past them and into the pool room. There were a few people at a lunch counter along one side and a few more playing billiards, but he was not among them.

Again I hesitated. If his idea was to lead me into any blind part of the establishment--there were some half-open doors farther back--I wanted more support. I went up to the man at the desk.

“What became of the fellow who just walked in here?”

Was he on his guard immediately, or was that my imagination?

“What fellow?”

“Thin face--derby hat.”

“How long ago?”

“Oh--a minute.”

He shook his head again. “Didn’t see him,” he said.

I waited. The three men from outside had come in and were lined up beside me at the counter. I felt that all of them were looking at me in a peculiar way. Feeling helpless and increasingly uneasy, I turned suddenly and went out. A little way down the street I turned again and took a good look at the place, so I’d know it and could find it again. On the next corner I broke impulsively into a run, found a taxicab in front of the hotel and drove back up the hill.

Ellen wasn’t home. Mrs. Baker came downstairs and talked to me. She seemed entirely cheerful and proud of Ellen’s beauty, and ignorant of anything being amiss or of anything unusual having taken place the night before. She was glad that vacation was almost over--it was a strain and Ellen wasn’t very strong. Then she said something that relieved my mind enormously. She was glad that I had come in, for of course Ellen would want to see me, and the time was so short. She was going back at half-past eight tonight.

“Tonight!” I exclaimed. “I thought it was the day after tomorrow.”

“She’s going to visit the Brokaws in Chicago,” Mrs. Baker said. “They want her for some party. We just decided it today. She’s leaving with the Ingersoll girls tonight.”

I was so glad I could barely restrain myself from shaking her hand. Ellen was safe. It had been nothing all along but a moment of the most casual adventure. I felt like an idiot, but I realized how much I cared about Ellen and how little I could endure anything terrible happening to her.

“She’ll be in soon?”

“Any minute now. She just phoned from the University Club.”

I said I’d be over later--I lived almost next door and I wanted to be alone. Outside I remembered I didn’t have a key, so I started up the Bakers’ driveway to take the old cut we used in childhood through the intervening yard. It was still snowing, but the flakes were bigger now against the darkness, and trying to locate the buried walk I noticed that the Bakers’ back door was ajar.

I scarcely know why I turned and walked into that kitchen. There was a time when I would have known the Bakers’ servants by name. That wasn’t true now, but they knew me, and I was aware of a sudden suspension as I came in--not only a suspension of talk but of some mood or expectation that had filled them. They began to go to work too quickly; they made unnecessary movements and clamor--those three. The parlor maid looked at me in a frightened way and I suddenly guessed she was waiting to deliver another message. I beckoned her into the pantry.

“I know all about this,” I said. “It’s a very serious business. Shall I go to Mrs. Baker now, or will you shut and lock that back door?”

“Don’t tell Mrs. Baker, Mr. Stinson!”

“Then I don’t want Miss Ellen disturbed. If she is--and if she is I’ll know of it--” I delivered some outrageous threat about going to all the employment agencies and seeing she never got another job in the city. She was thoroughly intimidated when I went out; it wasn’t a minute before the back door was locked and bolted behind me.

Simultaneously I heard a big car drive up in front, chains crunching on the soft snow; it was bringing Ellen home, and I went in to say good-by.

Joe Jelke and two other boys were along, and none of the three could manage to take their eyes off her, even to say hello to me. She had one of those exquisite rose skins frequent in our part of the country, and beautiful until the little veins begin to break at about forty; now, flushed with the cold, it was a riot of lovely delicate pinks like many carnations. She and Joe had reached some sort of reconciliation, or at least he was too far gone in love to remember last night; but I saw that though she laughed a lot she wasn’t really paying any attention to him or any of them. She wanted them to go, so that there’d be a message from the kitchen, but I knew that the message wasn’t coming--that she was safe. There was talk of the Pump and Slipper dance at New Haven and of the Princeton Prom, and then, in various moods, we four left and separated quickly outside. I walked home with a certain depression of spirit and lay for an hour in a hot bath thinking that vacation was all over for me now that she was gone; feeling, even more deeply than I had yesterday, that she was out of my life.

And something eluded me, some one more thing to do, something that I had lost amid the events of the afternoon, promising myself to go back and pick it up, only to find that it had escaped me. I associated it vaguely with Mrs. Baker, and now I seemed to recall that it had poked up its head somewhere in the stream of conversation with her. In my relief about Ellen I had forgotten to ask her a question regarding something she had said.

The Brokaws--that was it--where Ellen was to visit. I knew Bill Brokaw well; he was in my class at Yale. Then I remembered and sat bolt upright in the tub--the Brokaws weren’t in Chicago this Christmas; they were at Palm Beach!

Dripping I sprang out of the tub, threw an insufficient union suit around my shoulders and sprang for the phone in my room. I got the connection quick, but Miss Ellen had already started for the train.

Luckily our car was in, and while I squirmed, still damp, into my clothes, the chauffeur brought it around to the door. The night was cold and dry, and we made good time to the station through the hard, crusty snow. I felt queer and insecure starting out this way, but somehow more confident as the station loomed up bright and new against the dark, cold air. For fifty years my family had owned the land on which it was built and that made my temerity seem all right somehow. There was always a possibility that I was rushing in where angels feared to tread, but that sense of having a solid foothold in the past made me willing to make a fool of myself. This business was all wrong--terribly wrong. Any idea I had entertained that it was harmless dropped away now; between Ellen and some vague overwhelming catastrophe there stood me, or else the police and a scandal. I’m no moralist--there was another element here, dark and frightening, and I didn’t want Ellen to go through it alone.

There are three competing trains from St. Paul to Chicago that all leave within a few minutes of half-past eight. Hers was the Burlington, and as I ran across the station I saw the grating being pulled over and the light above it go out. I knew, though, that she had a drawing-room with the Ingersoll girls, because her mother had mentioned buying the ticket, so she was, literally speaking, tucked in until tomorrow.

The C., M. & St. P. gate was down at the other end and I raced for it and made it. I had forgotten one thing, though, and that was enough to keep me awake and worried half the night. This train got into Chicago ten minutes after the other. Ellen had that much time to disappear into one of the largest cities in the world.

I gave the porter a wire to my family to send from Milwaukee, and at eight o’clock next morning I pushed violently by a whole line of passengers, clamoring over their bags parked in the vestibule, and shot out of the door with a sort of scramble over the porter’s back. For a moment the confusion of a great station, the voluminous sounds and echoes and cross-currents of bells and smoke struck me helpless. Then I dashed for the exit and toward the only chance I knew of finding her.

I had guessed right. She was standing at the telegraph counter, sending off heaven knows what black lie to her mother, and her expression when she saw me had a sort of terror mixed up with its surprise. There was cunning in it too. She was thinking quickly--she would have liked to walk away from me as if I weren’t there, and go about her own business, but she couldn’t. I was too matter-of-fact a thing in her life. So we stood silently watching each other and each thinking hard.

“The Brokaws are in Florida,” I said after a minute.

“It was nice of you to take such a long trip to tell me that.”

“Since you’ve found it out, don’t you think you’d better go on to school?”

“Please let me alone, Eddie,” she said.

“I’ll go as far as New York with you. I’ve decided to go back early myself.”

“You’d better let me alone.” Her lovely eyes narrowed and her face took on a look of dumb-animal-like resistance. She made a visible effort, the cunning flickered back into it, then both were gone, and in their stead was a cheerful reassuring smile that all but convinced me.

“Eddie, you silly child, don’t you think I’m old enough to take care of myself?” I didn’t answer. “I’m going to meet a man, you understand. I just want to see him today. I’ve got my ticket East on the five o’clock train. If you don’t believe it, here it is in my bag.”

“I believe you.”

“The man isn’t anybody that you know and--frankly, I think you’re being awfully fresh and impossible.”

“I know who the man is.”

Again she lost control of her face. That terrible expression came back into it and she spoke with almost a snarl:

“You’d better let me alone.”

I took the blank out of her hand and wrote out an explanatory telegram to her mother. Then I turned to Ellen and said a little roughly:

“We’ll take the five o’clock train East together. Meanwhile you’re going to spend the day with me.”

The mere sound of my own voice saying this so emphatically encouraged me, and I think it impressed her too; at any rate, she submitted--at least temporarily--and came along without protest while I bought my ticket.

When I start to piece together the fragments of that day a sort of confusion begins, as if my memory didn’t want to yield up any of it, or my consciousness let any of it pass through. There was a bright, fierce morning during which we rode about in a taxicab and went to a department store where Ellen said she wanted to buy something and then tried to slip away from me by a back way. I had the feeling, for an hour, that someone was following us along Lake Shore Drive in a taxicab, and I would try to catch them by turning quickly or looking suddenly into the chauffeur’s mirror; but I could find no one, and when I turned back I could see that Ellen’s face was contorted with mirthless, unnatural laughter.

All morning there was a raw, bleak wind off the lake, but when we went to the Blackstone for lunch a light snow came down past the windows and we talked almost naturally about our friends, and about casual things. Suddenly her tone changed; she grew serious and looked me in the eye, straight and sincere.

“Eddie, you’re the oldest friend I have,” she said, “and you oughtn’t to find it too hard to trust me. If I promise you faithfully on my word of honor to catch that five o’clock train, will you let me alone a few hours this afternoon?”

“Why?”

“Well”--she hesitated and hung her head a little--”I guess everybody has a right to say--good-by.”

“You want to say good-by to that--”

“Yes, yes,” she said hastily; “just a few hours, Eddie, and I promise faithfully that I’ll be on that train.”

“Well, I suppose no great harm could be done in two hours. If you really want to say good-by--”

I looked up suddenly, and surprised a look of such tense cunning in her face that I winced before it. Her lip was curled up and her eyes were slits again; there wasn’t the faintest touch of fairness and sincerity in her whole face.

We argued. The argument was vague on her part and somewhat hard and reticent on mine. I wasn’t going to be cajoled again into any weakness or be infected with any--and there was a contagion of evil in the air. She kept trying to imply, without any convincing evidence to bring forward, that everything was all right. Yet she was too full of the thing itself--whatever it was--to build up a real story, and she wanted to catch at any credulous and acquiescent train of thought that might start in my head, and work that for all it was worth. After every reassuring suggestion she threw out, she stared at me eagerly, as if she hoped I’d launch into a comfortable moral lecture with the customary sweet at the end--which in this case would be her liberty. But I was wearing her away a little. Two or three times it needed just a touch of pressure to bring her to the point of tears--which, of course, was what I wanted--but I couldn’t seem to manage it. Almost I had her--almost possessed her interior attention--then she would slip away.

I bullied her remorselessly into a taxi about four o’clock and started for the station. The wind was raw again, with a sting of snow in it, and the people in the streets, waiting for busses and street cars too small to take them all in, looked cold and disturbed and unhappy. I tried to think how lucky we were to be comfortably off and taken care of, but all the warm, respectable world I had been part of yesterday had dropped away from me. There was something we carried with us now that was the enemy and the opposite of all that; it was in the cabs beside us, the streets we passed through. With a touch of panic, I wondered if I wasn’t slipping almost imperceptibly into Ellen’s attitude of mind. The column of passengers waiting to go aboard the train were as remote from me as people from another world, but it was I that was drifting away and leaving them behind.

My lower was in the same car with her compartment. It was an old-fashioned car, its lights somewhat dim, its carpets and upholstery full of the dust of another generation. There were half a dozen other travellers, but they made no special impression on me, except that they shared the unreality that I was beginning to feel everywhere around me. We went into Ellen’s compartment, shut the door and sat down.

Suddenly I put my arms around her and drew her over to me, just as tenderly as I knew how--as if she were a little girl--as she was. She resisted a little, but after a moment she submitted and lay tense and rigid in my arms.

“Ellen,” I said helplessly, “you asked me to trust you. You have much more reason to trust me. Wouldn’t it help to get rid of all this, if you told me a little?”

“I can’t,” she said, very low--”I mean, there’s nothing to tell.”

“You met this man on the train coming home and you fell in love with him, isn’t that true?”

“I don’t know.”

“Tell me, Ellen. You fell in love with him?”

“I don’t know. Please let me alone.”

“Call it anything you want,” I went on, “he has some sort of hold over you. He’s trying to use you; he’s trying to get something from you. He’s not in love with you.”

“What does that matter?” she said in a weak voice.

“It does matter. Instead of trying to fight this--this thing--you’re trying to fight me. And I love you, Ellen. Do you hear? I’m telling you all of a sudden, but it isn’t new with me. I love you.”

She looked at me with a sneer on her gentle face; it was an expression I had seen on men who were tight and didn’t want to be taken home. But it was human. I was reaching her, faintly and from far away, but more than before.

“Ellen, I want you to answer me one question. Is he going to be on this train?”

She hesitated; then, an instant too late, she shook her head.

“Be careful, Ellen. Now I’m going to ask you one thing more, and I wish you’d try very hard to answer. Coming West, when did this man get on the train?”

“I don’t know,” she said with an effort.

Just at that moment I became aware, with the unquestionable knowledge reserved for facts, that he was just outside the door. She knew it, too; the blood left her face and that expression of low-animal perspicacity came creeping back. I lowered my face into my hands and tried to think.

We must have sat there, with scarcely a word, for well over an hour. I was conscious that the lights of Chicago, then of Englewood and of endless suburbs, were moving by, and then there were no more lights and we were out on the dark flatness of Illinois. The train seemed to draw in upon itself; it took on an air of being alone. The porter knocked at the door and asked if he could make up the berth, but I said no and he went away.

After a while I convinced myself that the struggle inevitably coming wasn’t beyond what remained of my sanity, my faith in the essential all-rightness of things and people. That this person’s purpose was what we call “criminal,” I took for granted, but there was no need of ascribing to him an intelligence that belonged to a higher plane of human, or inhuman, endeavor. It was still as a man that I considered him, and tried to get at his essence, his self-interest--what took the place in him of a comprehensible heart--but I suppose I more than half knew what I would find when I opened the door.

When I stood up Ellen didn’t seem to see me at all. She was hunched into the corner staring straight ahead with a sort of film over her eyes, as if she were in a state of suspended animation of body and mind. I lifted her and put two pillows under her head and threw my fur coat over her knees. Then I knelt beside her and kissed her two hands, opened the door and went out into the hall.

I closed the door behind me and stood with my back against it for a minute. The car was dark save for the corridor lights at each end. There was no sound except the groaning of the couplers, the even click-a-click of the rails and someone’s loud sleeping breath farther down the car. I became aware after a moment that the figure of a man was standing by the water cooler just outside the men’s smoking room, his derby hat on his head, his coat collar turned up around his neck as if he were cold, his hands in his coat pockets. When I saw him, he turned and went into the smoking room, and I followed. He was sitting in the far corner of the long leather bench; I took the single armchair beside the door.

As I went in I nodded to him and he acknowledged my presence with one of those terrible soundless laughs of his. But this time it was prolonged, it seemed to go on forever, and mostly to cut it short, I asked: “Where are you from?” in a voice I tried to make casual.

He stopped laughing and looked at me narrowly, wondering what my game was. When he decided to answer, his voice was muffled as though he were speaking through a silk scarf, and it seemed to come from a long way off.

“I’m from St. Paul, Jack.”

“Been making a trip home?”

He nodded. Then he took a long breath and spoke in a hard, menacing voice:

“You better get off at Fort Wayne, Jack.”

He was dead. He was dead as hell--he had been dead all along, but what force had flowed through him, like blood in his veins, out to St. Paul and back, was leaving him now. A new outline--the outline of him dead--was coming through the palpable figure that had knocked down Joe Jelke.

He spoke again, with a sort of jerking effort:

“You get off at Fort Wayne, Jack, or I’m going to wipe you out.” He moved his hand in his coat pocket and showed me the outline of a revolver.

I shook my head. “You can’t touch me,” I answered. “You see, I know.” His terrible eyes shifted over me quickly, trying to determine whether or not I did know. Then he gave a snarl and made as though he were going to jump to his feet.

“You climb off here or else I’m going to get you, Jack!” he cried hoarsely. The train was slowing up for Fort Wayne and his voice rang loud in the comparative quiet, but he didn’t move from his chair--he was too weak, I think--and we sat staring at each other while workmen passed up and down outside the window banging the brakes and wheels, and the engine gave out loud mournful pants up ahead. No one got into our car. After a while the porter closed the vestibule door and passed back along the corridor, and we slid out of the murky yellow station light and into the long darkness.

What I remember next must have extended over a space of five or six hours, though it comes back to me as something without any existence in time--something that might have taken five minutes or a year. There began a slow, calculated assault on me, wordless and terrible. I felt what I can only call a strangeness stealing over me--akin to the strangeness I had felt all afternoon, but deeper and more intensified. It was like nothing so much as the sensation of drifting away, and I gripped the arms of the chair convulsively, as if to hang onto a piece in the living world. Sometimes I felt myself going out with a rush. There would be almost a warm relief about it, a sense of not caring; then, with a violent wrench of the will, I’d pull myself back into the room.

Suddenly I realized that from a while back I had stopped hating him, stopped feeling violently alien to him, and with the realization, I went cold and sweat broke out all over my head. He was getting around my abhorrence, as he had got around Ellen coming West on the train; and it was just that strength he drew from preying on people that had brought him up to the point of concrete violence in St. Paul, and that, fading and flickering out, still kept him fighting now.

He must have seen that faltering in my heart, for he spoke at once, in a low, even, almost gentle voice: “You better go now.”

“Oh, I’m not going,” I forced myself to say.

“Suit yourself, Jack.”

He was my friend, he implied. He knew how it was with me and he wanted to help. He pitied me. I’d better go away before it was too late. The rhythm of his attack was soothing as a song: I’d better go away--and let him get at Ellen. With a little cry I sat bolt upright.

“What do you want of this girl?” I said, my voice shaking. “To make a sort of walking hell of her.”

His glance held a quality of dumb surprise, as if I were punishing an animal for a fault of which he was not conscious. For an instant I faltered; then I went on blindly:

“You’ve lost her; she’s put her trust in me.”

His countenance went suddenly black with evil, and he cried: “You’re a liar!” in a voice that was like cold hands.

“She trusts me,” I said. “You can’t touch her. She’s safe!”

He controlled himself. His face grew bland, and I felt that curious weakness and indifference begin again inside me. What was the use of all this? What was the use?

“You haven’t got much time left,” I forced myself to say, and then, in a flash of intuition, I jumped at the truth. “You died, or you were killed, not far from here!”--Then I saw what I had not seen before--that his forehead was drilled with a small round hole like a larger picture nail leaves when it’s pulled from a plaster wall. “And now you’re sinking. You’ve only got a few hours. The trip home is over!”

His face contorted, lost all semblance of humanity, living or dead. Simultaneously the room was full of cold air and with a noise that was something between a paroxysm of coughing and a burst of horrible laughter, he was on his feet, reeking of shame and blasphemy.

“Come and look!” he cried. “I’ll show you--”

He took a step toward me, then another and it was exactly as if a door stood open behind him, a door yawning out to an inconceivable abyss of darkness and corruption. There was a scream of mortal agony, from him or from somewhere behind, and abruptly the strength went out of him in a long husky sigh and he wilted to the floor. . . .

How long I sat there, dazed with terror and exhaustion, I don’t know. The next thing I remember is the sleepy porter shining shoes across the room from me, and outside the window the steel fires of Pittsburgh breaking the flat perspective also--something too faint for a man, too heavy for a shadow, of the night. There was something extended on the bench. Even as I perceived it it faded off and away.

Some minutes later I opened the door of Ellen’s compartment. She was asleep where I had left her. Her lovely cheeks were white and wan, but she lay naturally--her hands relaxed and her breathing regular and clear. What had possessed her had gone out of her, leaving her exhausted but her own dear self again.

I made her a little more comfortable, tucked a blanket around her, extinguished the light and went out.

III

When I came home for Easter vacation, almost my first act was to go down to the billiard parlor near Seven Corners. The man at the cash register quite naturally didn’t remember my hurried visit of three months before.

“I’m trying to locate a certain party who, I think, came here a lot some time ago.”

I described the man rather accurately, and when I had finished, the cashier called to a little jockeylike fellow who was sitting near with an air of having something very important to do that he couldn’t quite remember.

“Hey, Shorty, talk to this guy, will you? I think he’s looking for Joe Varland.”

The little man gave me a tribal look of suspicion. I went and sat near him.

“Joe Varland’s dead, fella,” he said grudgingly. “He died last winter.”

I described him again--his overcoat, his laugh, the habitual expression of his eyes.

“That’s Joe Varland you’re looking for all right, but he’s dead.”

“I want to find out something about him.”

“What you want to find out?”

“What did he do, for instance?”

“How should I know?”

“Look here! I’m not a policeman. I just want some kind of information about his habits. He’s dead now and it can’t hurt him. And it won’t go beyond me.”

“Well”--he hesitated, looking me over--”he was a great one for travelling. He got in a row in the station in Pittsburgh and a dick got him.”

I nodded. Broken pieces of the puzzle began to assemble in my head.

“Why was he a lot on trains?”

“How should I know, fella?”

“If you can use ten dollars, I’d like to know anything you may have heard on the subject.”

“Well,” said Shorty reluctantly, “all I know is they used to say he worked the trains.”

“Worked the trains?”

“He had some racket of his own he’d never loosen up about. He used to work the girls travelling alone on the trains. Nobody ever knew much about it--he was a pretty smooth guy--but sometimes he’d turn up here with a lot of dough and he let ‘em know it was the janes he got it off of.”

I thanked him and gave him the ten dollars and went out, very thoughtful, without mentioning that part of Joe Varland had made a last trip home.

Ellen wasn’t West for Easter, and even if she had been I wouldn’t have gone to her with the information, either--at least I’ve seen her almost every day this summer and we’ve managed to talk about everything else. Sometimes, though, she gets silent about nothing and wants to be very close to me, and I know what’s in her mind.

Of course she’s coming out this fall, and I have two more years at New Haven; still, things don’t look so impossible as they did a few months ago. She belongs to me in a way--even if I lose her she belongs to me. Who knows? Anyhow, I’ll always be there.

ONE INTERNE

I

Traditionally, the Coccidian Club show is given on the hottest night of spring, and that year was no exception. Two hundred doctors and students sweltered in the reception rooms of the old narrow house and another two hundred students pressed in at the doors, effectually sealing out any breezes from the Maryland night. The entertainment reached these latter clients only dimly, but refreshment was relayed back to them by a busy bucket brigade. Down cellar, the janitor made his annual guess that the sagging floors would hold up one more time.

Bill Tulliver was the coolest man in the hall. For no special reason he wore a light tunic and carried a crook during the only number in which he took part, the rendition of the witty, scurrilous and interminable song which described the failings and eccentricities of the medical faculty. He sat in comparative comfort on the platform and looked out over the hot sea of faces. The most important doctors were in front--Doctor Ruff, the ophthalmologist; Doctor Lane, the brain surgeon; Doctor Georgi, the stomach specialist; Doctor Barnett, the alchemist of internal medicine; and on the end of the row, with his saintlike face undisturbed by the rivulets of perspiration that poured down the long dome of his head, Doctor Norton, the diagnostician.

Like most young men who had sat under Norton, Bill Tulliver followed him with the intuition of the belly, but with a difference. He knelt to him selfishly as a sort of great giver of life. He wanted less to win his approval than to compel it. Engrossed in his own career, which would begin in earnest when he entered the hospital as an interne in July, his whole life was pointed toward the day when his own guess would be right and Doctor Norton’s would be wrong. In that moment he would emancipate himself--he need not base himself on the adding machine-calculating machine-probability machine-St. Francis of Assisi machine any longer.

Bill Tulliver had not arrived unprovoked at this pitch of egotism. He was the fifth in an unbroken series of Dr. William Tullivers who had practised with distinction in the city. His father died last winter; it was not unnatural that even from the womb of school this last scion of a medical tradition should clamor for “self-expression.”

The faculty song, immemorially popular, went on and on. There was a verse about the sanguinary Doctor Lane, about the new names Doctor Brune made up for the new diseases he invented, about the personal idiosyncrasies of Doctor Schwartze and the domestic embroilments of Doctor Gillespie. Doctor Norton, as one of the most popular men on the staff, got off easy. There were some new verses--several that Bill had written himself:

“Herpes Zigler, sad and tired,

Will flunk you out or kill ya,

If you forget Alfonso wired

For dope on hæmophilia.

Bumtiddy-bum-bum,

Tiddy-bum-bum.

Three thousand years ago,

Three thousand years ago.”

He watched Doctor Zigler and saw the wince that puckered up under the laugh. Bill wondered how soon there would be a verse about him, Bill Tulliver, and he tentatively composed one as the chorus thundered on.

After the show the older men departed, the floors were sloshed with beer and the traditional roughhouse usurped the evening. But Bill had fallen solemn and, donning his linen suit, he watched for ten minutes and then left the hot hall. There was a group on the front steps, breathing the sparse air, and another group singing around the lamp-post at the corner. Across the street arose the great bulk of the hospital about which his life revolved. Between the Michael’s Clinic and the Ward’s Dispensary arose a round full moon.

The girl--she was hurrying--reached the loiterers at the lamppost at the same moment as Bill. She wore a dark dress and a dark, flopping hat, but Bill got an impression that there was a gayety of cut, if not of color, about her clothes. The whole thing happened in less than a minute; the man turning about--Bill saw that he was not a member of the grand confraternity--and was simply hurling himself into her arms, like a child at its mother.

The girl staggered backward with a frightened cry; and everyone in the group acted at once.

“Are you sure you’re all right?”

“Oh, yes,” she gasped. “I think he just passed out and didn’t realize he was grabbing at a girl.”

“We’ll take him over to the emergency ward and see if he can swallow a stomach pump.”

Bill Tulliver found himself walking along beside the girl.

“Are you sure you’re all right?”

“Oh, yes.” She was still breathing hard; her bosom rose, putting out its eternal promises, as if the breath she had taken in were the last breather left in the world.

“Oh, catch it--oh, catch it and take it--oh, catch it,” she sighed. “I realized right away that they were students. I shouldn’t have gone by there tonight.”

Her hair, dark and drawn back to her ears, brushed her shoulders. She laughed uncontrollably.

“He was so helpless,” she said. “Lord knows I’ve seen men helpless--hundreds of them just helpless--but I’ll never forget the expression in his face when he decided to--to lean on me.”

Her dark eyes shone with mirth and Bill saw that she was really self-reliant. He stared at her, and the impression of her beauty grew until, uncommitted by a word, by even a formal introduction, he felt himself going out toward her, watching the turn of her lips and the shifting of her cheeks when she smiled . . .

All this was in the three or four minutes that he walked beside her; not till afterward did he realize how profound the impression had been.

As they passed the church-like bulk of the administration building, an open cabriolet slowed down beside them and a man of about thirty-five jumped out. The girl ran toward him.

“Howard!” she cried with excited gayety. “I was attacked. There were some students in front of the Coccidian Club building--”

The man swung sharply and menacingly toward Bill Tulliver.

“Is this one of them?” he demanded.

“No, no; he’s all right.”

Simultaneously Bill recognized him--it was Dr. Howard Durfee, brilliant among the younger surgeons, heartbreaker and swashbuckler of the staff.

“You haven’t been bothering Miss--”

She stopped him, but not before Bill had answered angrily:

“I don’t bother people.”

Unappeased, as if Bill were in some way responsible, Doctor Durfee got into his car; the girl got in beside him.

“So long,” she said. “And thanks.” Her eyes shone at Bill with friendly interest, and then, just before the car shot away, she did something else with them--narrowed them a little and then widened them, recognizing by this sign the uniqueness of their relationship. “I see you,” it seemed to say. “You registered. Everything’s possible.”

With the faint fanfare of a new motor, she vanished back into the spring night.

II

Bill was to enter the hospital in July with the first contingent of newly created doctors. He passed the intervening months at Martha’s Vineyard, swimming and fishing with Schoatze, his classmate, and returned tense with health and enthusiasm to begin his work.

The red square broiled under the Maryland sun. Bill went in through the administration building where a gigantic Christ gestured in marble pity over the entrance hall. It was by this same portal that Bill’s father had entered on his interneship thirty years before.

Suddenly Bill was in a condition of shock, his tranquility was rent asunder, he could not have given a rational account as to why he was where he was. A dark-haired girl with great, luminous eyes had started up from the very shadow of the statue, stared at him just long enough to effect this damage, and then with an explosive “Hello!” vanished into one of the offices.

He was still gazing after her, stricken, haywire, scattered and dissolved--when Doctor Norton hailed him:

“I believe I’m addressing William Tulliver the fifth--”

Bill was glad to be reminded who he was.

“--looking somewhat interested in Doctor Durfee’s girl,” continued Norton.

“Is she?” Bill asked sharply. Then: “Oh, howdedo, Doctor?”

Dr. Norton decided to exercise his wit, of which he had plenty. “In fact we know they spend their days together, and gossip adds the evenings.”

“Their days? I should think he’d be too busy.”

“He is. As a matter of fact, Miss Singleton induces the state of coma during which he performs his internal sculpture. She’s an anaesthetist.”

“I see. Then they are--thrown together all day.”

“If you regard that as a romantic situation.” Doctor Norton looked at him closely. “Are you settled yet? Can you do something for me right now?”

“Yes, indeed.”

“I know you don’t go on the ward till tomorrow, but I’d like you to go to East Michael and take a P. E. and a history.”

“Certainly.”

“Room 312. I’ve put your methodical friend Schoatze on the trail of another mystery next door.”

Bill hurried to his room on the top of Michael, jumped into a new white uniform, equipped himself with instruments. In his haste he forgot that this was the first time he had performed an inquisition unaided. Outside the door he smoothed himself into a calm, serious manner. He was almost a white apostle when we walked into the room; at least he tried to be.

A paunchy, sallow man of forty was smoking a cigarette in bed.

“Good morning,” Bill said heartily. “How are you this morning?”

“Rotten,” the man said. “That’s why I’m here.”

Bill set down his satchel and approached him like a young cat after its first sparrow.

“What seems to be the trouble?”

“Everything. My head aches, my bones ache, I can’t sleep, I don’t eat, I’ve got fever. My chauffeur ran over me, I mean ran over me, I mean ran me, if you know what I mean. I mean from Washington this morning. I can’t stand those Washington doctors; they don’t talk about anything but politics.”

Bill clapped a thermometer in his mouth and took his pulse. Then he made the routine examination of chest, stomach, throat and the rest. The reflexes were sluggish to the little rubber hammer. Bill sat down beside the bed.

“I’d trade hearts with you any day,” he promised.

“They all say I’ve got a good heart,” agreed the man. “What did you think of Hoover’s speech?”

“I thought you were tired of politics.”

‘That’s true, but I got thinking of Hoover while you went over me.”

“About Hoover?”

“About me. What did you find out?”

“We’ll want to make some tests. But you seem pretty sound really.”

“I’m not sound,” the patient snapped. “I’m not sound. I’m a sick man.”

Bill took out a P. E. form and a fountain pen.

“What’s your name?” he began.

“Paul B. Van Schaik.”

“Your nearest relative?”

There was nothing in the case history on which to form any opinion. Mr. Van Schaik had had several children’s diseases. Yesterday morning he was unable to get out of bed and his valet had taken his temperature and found fever.

Bill’s thermometer registered no fever.

“Now we’re going to make just a little prick in your thumb,” he said, preparing glass slides, and when this had been accomplished to the tune of a short, dismal howl from the patient, he added: “We want just a little specimen from your upper arm.”

“You want everything but my tears,” protested the patient.

“We have to investigate all the possibilities,” said Bill sternly, plunging the syringe into the soft upper arm, inspiring more explosive protests from Mr. Van Schaik.

Reflectively Bill replaced his instruments. He had obtained no clue as to what was the matter and he eyed the patient reproachfully.

On a chance, he looked for enlarged cervical glands, and asked him if his parents were alive, and took a last look at throat and teeth.

“Eyes normally prominent,” he wrote down, with a feeling of futility. “Pupils round and equal.”

“That’s all for the moment,” he said. “Try and get some rest.”

“Rest!” cried Mr. Van Schaik indignantly. “That’s just the trouble. I haven’t been able to sleep for three days. I feel worse every minute.”

As Bill went out into the hall, George Schoatze was just emerging from the room next door. His eyes were uncertain and there was sweat upon his brow.

“Finished?” Bill asked.

“Why, yes, in a way. Did Doctor Norton set you a job too?”

“Yeah. Kind of puzzling case in here--contradictory symptoms,” he lied.

“Same here,” said George, wiping his brow. “I’d rather have started out on something more clearly defined, like the ones Robinson gave us in class last year--you know, where there were two possibilities and one probability.”

“Unobliging lot of patients,” agreed Bill.

A student nurse approached him.

“You were just in 312,” she said in a low voice. “I better tell you. I unpacked for the patient, and there was one empty bottle of whisky and one half empty. He asked me to pour him a drink, but I didn’t like to do that without asking a doctor.”

“Quite right,” said Bill stiffly, but he wanted to kiss her hand in gratitude.

Dispatching the specimens to the laboratory, the two internes went in search of Doctor Norton, whom they found in his office.

“Through already? What luck, Tulliver?”

“He’s been on a bust and he’s got a hangover,” Bill blurted out. “I haven’t got the laboratory reports yet, but my opinion is that’s all.”

“I agree with you,” said Doctor Norton. “All right, Schoatze; how about the lady in 314?”

“Well, unless it’s too deep for me, there’s nothing the matter with her at all.”

“Right you are,” agreed Doctor Norton. “Nerves--and not even enough of them for the Ward clinic. What’ll we do with them?”

“Throw em out,” said Bill promptly.

“Let them stay,” corrected Doctor Norton. “They can afford it. They come to us for protection they don’t need, so let them pay for a couple of really sick people over in the free wards. We’re not crowded.”

Outside the office, Bill and George fastened eyes.

“Humbling us a little,” said Bill rather resentfully. “Let’s go up to the operating rooms; I want to convince myself all over again that this is a serious profession.” He swore. “I suppose for the next few months we’ll be feeling the bellies of four-flushers and taking the case histories of women who aren’t cases.”

“Never mind,” said George cautiously. “I was just as glad to start with something simple like--like--”

“Like what?”

“Why, like nothing.”

“You’re easily pleased,” Bill commented.

Ascertaining from a bulletin board that Dr. Howard Durfee was at work in No. 4, they took the elevator to the operating rooms. As they slipped on the gowns, caps, and then the masks, Bill realized how quickly he was breathing.

He saw HER before he saw anything else in the room, except the bright vermilion spot of the operation itself, breaking the universal whiteness of the scene. There was a sway of eyes toward the two internes as they came into the gallery, and Bill picked out her eyes, darker than ever in contrast with the snowy cap and mask, as she sat working the gas machine at the patient’s invisible head. The room was small. The platform on which they stood was raised about four feet, and by leaning out on a glass screen like a windshield, they brought their eyes to within two yards of the surgeon’s busy hands.

“It’s a neat appendix--not a cut in the muscle,” George whispered. “That guy can play lacrosse tomorrow.”

Doctor Durfee, busy with catgut, heard him.

“Not this patient,” he said. “Too many adhesions.”

His hands, trying the catgut, were sure and firm, the fine hands of a pianist, the tough hands of a pitcher combined. Bill thought how insecure, precariously involved, the patient would seem to a layman, and yet how safe he was with those sure hands in an atmosphere so made safe from time itself. Time had stopped at the door of the operating room, too profane to enter here.

Thea Singleton guarded the door of the patient’s consciousness, a hand on a pulse, another turning the wheels of the gas machine, as if they were the stops on a silent organ.

There were others in attendance--an assisting surgeon, a nurse who passed instruments, a nurse who made liaison between the table and the supplies--but Bill was absorbed in what subtle relationship there was between Howard Durfee and Thea Singleton; he felt a wild jealousy toward the mask with the brilliant, agile hands.

“I’m going,” he said to George.

He saw her that afternoon, and again it was in the shadow of the great stone Christ in the entrance hall. She was in street clothes, and she looked slick and fresh and tantalizingly excitable.

“Of course. You’re the man the night of the Coccidian show. And now you’re an interne. Wasn’t it you who came into Room 4 this morning?”

“Yes. How did it go?”

“Fine. It was Doctor Durfee.”

“Yes,” he said with emphasis. “I know it was Doctor Durfee.”

He met her by accident or contrivance half a dozen times in the next fortnight, before he judged he could ask her for a date.

“Why, I suppose so.” She seemed a little surprised. “Let’s see. How about next week--either Tuesday or Wednesday?”

“How about tonight?”

“Oh, not possibly.”

When he called Tuesday at the little apartment she shared with a woman musician from the Peabody Institute, he said:

“What would you like to do? See a picture?”

“No,” she answered emphatically. “If I knew you better I’d say let’s drive about a thousand miles into the country and go swimming in some quarry.” She looked at him quizzically. “You’re not one of those very impulsive internes, are you, that just sweep poor nurses off their feet?”

“On the contrary, I’m scared to death of you,” Bill admitted.

It was a hot night, but the white roads were cool. They found out a little about each other: She was the daughter of an Army officer and had grown up in the Philippines, and in the black-and-silver water of the abandoned quarry she surprised him with such diving as he had never seen a girl do. It was ghostly inside of the black shadow that ringed the glaring moonlight, and their voices echoed loud when they called to each other.

Afterward, with their heads wet and their bodies stung alive, they sat for awhile, unwilling to start back. Suddenly she smiled, and then looked at him without speaking, her lips just barely parted. There was the starlight set upon the brilliant darkness; and there were her pale cool cheeks, and Bill let himself be lost in love for her, as he had so wanted to do.

“We must go,” she said presently.

“Not yet.”

“Oh, yet--very yet--exceedingly yet.”

“Because,” he said after a moment, “you’re Doctor Durfee’s girl?”

“Yes,” she admitted after a moment, “I suppose I’m Doctor Durfee’s girl.”

“Why are you?” he cried.

“Are you in love with me?”

“I suppose I am. Are you in love with Durfee?”

She shook her head. “No, I’m not in love with anybody. I’m just--his girl.”

So the evening that had been at first ecstatic was finally unsatisfactory. This feeling deepened when he found that for his date he had to thank the fact that Durfee was out of town for a few days.

With August and the departure of more doctors on vacation, he found himself very busy. During four years he had dreamed of such work as he was doing, and now it was all disturbed by the ubiquity of “Durfee’s girl.” In vain he searched among the girls in the city, on those Sundays when he could go into the city, for some who would soften the hurt of his unreciprocated emotion. But the city seemed empty of girls, and in the hospital the little probationers in short cuffs had no appeal for him. The truth of his situation was that his initial idealism which had been centred in Doctor Norton had transferred itself to Thea. Instead of a God, it was now a Goddess who symbolized for him the glory and the devotion of his profession; and that she was caught up in an entanglement that bound her away from him, played havoc with his peace of mind.

Diagnosis had become a workaday matter--almost. He had made a few nice guesses and Doctor Norton had given him full credit.

“Nine times out of ten I’ll be right,” Norton said. “The rare thing is so rare that I’m out of the habit of looking for it. That’s where you young men come in; you’re cocked for the rare thing and that one time in ten you find it.”

“It’s a great feeling,” said Bill. “I got a big kick out of that actinomycosis business.”

“You look tired for your age,” said Doctor Norton suddenly. “At twenty-five you shouldn’t be existing entirely on nervous energy, Bill, and that’s what you’re doing. The people you grew up with say they never see you. Why not take a couple of hours a week away from the hospital, if only for the sake of your patients? You took so many chemistry tests of Mr. Doremus that we almost had to give him blood transfusions to build him up again.”

“I was right,” said Bill eagerly.

“But a little brutal. Everything would have developed in a day or two. Take it gently, like your friend Schoatze. You’re going to know a lot about internal medicine some day, but you’re trying to rush things.”

But Bill was a man driven; he tried more Sunday afternoons with current débutantes, but in the middle of a conversation he would find his mind drifting back to those great red building blocks of an Idea, where alone he could feel the pulse of life.

The news that a famous character in politics was leaving the Coast and coming to the hospital for the diagnosis of some obscure malady had the effect of giving him a sudden interest in politics. He looked up the record of the man and followed his journey east, which occupied half a column daily in the newspapers; party issues depended on his survival and eventual recovery.

Then one August afternoon there was an item in the society column which announced the engagement of Helen, débutante daughter of Mrs. Truby Ponsonby Day, to Dr. Howard Durfee. Bill’s reconciled world turned upside down. After an amount of very real suffering, he had accepted the fact that Thea was the mistress of a brilliant surgeon, but that Dr. Durfee should suddenly cut loose from her was simply incredible.

Immediately he went in search of her, found her issuing from the nurses’ ward in street clothes. Her lovely face, with the eyes that held for him all the mystery of people trying, all the splendor of a goal, all reward, all purpose, all satisfaction, was harried with annoyance; she had been stared at and pitied.

“If you like,” she answered, when he asked if he could run her home, and then: “Heaven help women! The amount of groaning over my body that took place this afternoon would have been plenty for a war.”

“I’m going to help you,” he said. “If that guy has let you down--”

“Oh, shut up! Up to a few weeks ago I could have married Howard Durfee by nodding my head--that’s just what I wouldn’t tell those women this afternoon. I think you’ve got discretion, and that’ll help you a lot when you’re a doctor.”

“I am a doctor,” he said somewhat stiffly.

“No, you’re just an interne.”

He was indignant and they drove in silence. Then, softening, she turned toward him and touched his arm.

“You happen to be a gentleman,” she said, “which is nice sometimes--though I prefer a touch of genius.”

“I’ve got that,” Bill said doggedly. “I’ve got everything, except you.”

“Come up to the apartment and I’ll tell you something that no one else in this city knows.”

It was a modest apartment but it told him that at some time she had lived in a more spacious world. It was all reduced, as if she had hung on to several cherished things, a Duncan Phyfe table, a brass by Brancusi, two oil portraits of the ‘50’s.

“I was engaged to John Gresham,” she said. “Do you know who he was?”

“Of course,” he said. “I took up the subscription for the bronze tablet to him.”

John Gresham had died by inches from radium poisoning, got by his own experiments.

“I was with him till the end,” Thea went on quickly, “and just before he died he wagged his last finger at me and said, ‘I forbid you to go to pieces. That doesn’t do any good.’ So, like a good little girl, I didn’t go to pieces, but I toughened up instead. Anyhow, that’s why I never could love Howard Durfee the way he wanted to be loved, in spite of his nice swagger and his fine hands.”

“I see.” Overwhelmed by the revelation, Bill tried to adjust himself to it. “I knew there was something far off about you, some sort of--oh, dedication to something I didn’t know about.”

“I’m pretty hard.” She got up impatiently. “Anyhow, I’ve lost a good friend today and I’m cross, so go before I show it. Kiss me good-by if you like.”

“It wouldn’t mean anything at this moment.”

“Yes, it would,” she insisted. “I like to be close to you. I like your clothes.”

Obediently he kissed her, but he felt far off from her and very rebuffed and young as he went out the door.

He awoke next morning with the sense of something important hanging over him; then he remembered. Senator Billings, relayed by crack trains, airplanes and ambulances, was due to arrive during the morning, and the ponderous body which had housed and expelled so much nonsense in thirty years was to be at the mercy of the rational at last.

“I’ll diagnose the old boy,” he thought grimly, “if I have to invent a new disease.”

He went about his routine work with a sense of fatigue that morning. Perhaps Doctor Norton would keep this plum to himself and Bill wouldn’t have a chance at him. But at eleven o’clock he met his senior in a corridor.

“The senator’s come,” he said. “I’ve formed a tentative opinion. You might go in and get his history. Go over him quickly and give him the usual laboratory work-up.”

“All right,” said Bill, but there was no eagerness in his voice. He seemed to have lost all his enthusiasm. With his instruments and a block of history paper, he repaired to the senator’s room.

“Good morning,” he began. “Feeling a little tired after your trip?”

The big barrel of a man rolled toward him.

“Exhausted,” he squeaked unexpectedly. “All in.”

Bill didn’t wonder; he felt rather that way himself, as if he had travelled thousands of miles in all sorts of conveyances until his insides, including his brains, were all shaken up together.

He took the case history.

“What’s your profession?”

“Legislator.”

“Do you use any alcohol?”

The senator raised himself on one arm and thundered, “See here, young man; I’m not going to be heckled! As long as the Eighteenth Amendment--” He subsided.

“Do you use any alcohol?” Bill asked again patiently.

“Why, yes.”

“How much?”

“A few drinks every day. I don’t count them. Say, if you look in my suitcase you’ll find an X-ray of my lungs, taken a few years ago.”

Bill found it and stared at it with a sudden feeling that everything was getting a little crazy.

“This is an X-ray of a woman’s stomach,” he said.

“Oh--well, it must have got mixed up,” said the senator. “It must be my wife’s.”

Bill went into the bathroom to wash his thermometer. When he came back he took the senator’s pulse, and was puzzled to find himself regarded in a curious way.

“What’s the idea?” the senator demanded. “Are you the patient or am I?” He jerked his hand angrily away from Bill. “Your hand’s like ice. And you’ve put the thermometer in your own mouth.”

Only then did Bill realize how sick he was. He pressed the nurse’s bell and staggered back to a chair with wave after wave of pain chasing across his abdomen.

III

He awoke with a sense that he had been in bed for many hours. There was fever bumping in his brain, a pervasive weakness in his body, and what had wakened him was a new series of pains in his stomach. Across the room in an armchair sat Dr. George Schoatze, and on his knee was the familiar case-history pad.

“What the hell,” Bill said weakly. “What the hell’s the matter with me? What happened?”

“You’re all right,” said George. “You just lie quiet.”

Bill tried to sit upright, but found he was too weak.

“Lie quiet!” he repeated incredulously. “What do you think I am--some dumb patient? I asked you what’s the matter with me?”

“That’s exactly what we’re trying to find out. Say, what is your exact age?”

“My age!” Bill cried. “A hundred and ten in the shade! My name’s Al Capone and I’m an old hophead. Stick that on your God damn paper and mail it to Santa Claus. I asked you what’s the matter with me.”

“And I say that’s what we’re trying to find out,” said George, staunch, but a little nervous. “Now, you take it easy.”

“Take it easy!” cried Bill. “When I’m burning up with fever and a half-wit interne sits there and asks me how many fillings I’ve got in my teeth! You take my temperature, and take it right away!”

“All right--all right,” said George conciliatingly. “I was just going to.”

He put the thermometer in Bill’s mouth and felt for the pulse, but Bill mumbled, “I’ll shake my ode pulse,” and pulled his hand away. After two minutes George deftly extracted the thermometer and walked with it to the window, an act of treachery that brought Bill’s legs out of bed.

“I want to read that thermometer!” he cried. “Now, you look here! I want to know what’s on that thermometer!”

George shook it down quickly and put it in its case.

“That isn’t the way we do things here,” he said.

“Oh, isn’t it? Well, then, I’ll go somewhere where they’ve got some sense.”

George prepared a syringe and two small plates of glass.

Bill groaned. “Do you think for a moment I’m going to let you do that? I taught you everything you know about blood chemistry. By God, I used to do your lessons for you, and you come here to make some clumsy stab into my arm!”

Perspiring fluently, as was his wont under strain, George rang for a nurse, with the hope that a female presence would have a calming effect on Bill. But it was not the right female.

“Another nitwit!” Bill cried as she came in. “Do you think I’m going to lie here and stand more of this nonsense? Why doesn’t somebody do something? Where’s Doctor Norton?”

“He’ll be here this afternoon.”

“This afternoon! I’ll probably be dead by this afternoon. Why isn’t he here this morning? Off on some social bat and I lie here surrounded by morons who’ve lost their heads and don’t know what to do about it. What are you writing there--that my ‘tongue protrudes in mid-line without tremor’? Give me my slippers and bathrobe. I’m going to report you two as specimens for the nerve clinic.”

They pressed him down in bed, whence he looked up at George with infinite reproach.

“You, that I explained a whole book of toxicology to, you’re presuming to diagnose me. Well, then, do it! What have I got? Why is my stomach burning up? Is it appendicitis? What’s the white count?”

“How can I find out the white count when--”

With a sigh of infinite despair at the stupidity of mankind, Bill relaxed, exhausted.

Doctor Norton arrived at two o’clock. His presence should have been reassuring, but by this time the patient was too far gone in nervous tension.

“Look here, Bill,” he said sternly. “What’s all this about not letting George look into your mouth?”

“Because he deliberately gagged me with that stick,” Bill cried. “When I get out of this I’m going to stick a plank down that ugly trap of his.”

“Now, that’ll do. Do you know little Miss Cary has been crying? She says she’s going to give up nursing. She says she’s never been so disillusioned in her life.”

“The same with me. Tell her I’m going to give it up too. After this, I’m going to kill people instead of curing them. Now when I need it nobody has even tried to cure me.”

An hour later Doctor Norton stood up.

“Well, Bill, we’re going to take you at your word and tell you what’s what. I’m laying my cards on the table when I say we don’t know what’s the matter with you. We’ve just got the X-rays from this morning, and it’s pretty certain it’s not the gall bladder. There’s a possibility of acute food poisoning or mesenteric thrombosis, or it may be something we haven’t thought of yet. Give us a chance, Bill.”

With an effort and with the help of a sedative, Bill got himself in comparative control; only to go to pieces again in the morning, when George Schoatze arrived to give him a hypodermoclysis.

“But I can’t stand it,” he raged. “I never could stand being pricked, and you have as much right with a needle as a year-old baby with a machine gun.”

“Doctor Norton has ordered that you get nothing by mouth.”

“Then give it intravenously.”

“This is best.”

“What I’ll do to you when I get well! I’ll inject stuff into you until you’re as big as a barrel! I will! I’ll hire somebody to hold you down!”

Forty-eight hours later, Doctor Norton and Doctor Schoatze had a conference in the former’s office.

“So there we are,” George was saying gloomily. “He just flatly refuses to submit to the operation.”

“H’m.” Doctor Norton considered. “That’ bad.”

“There’s certainly danger of a perforation.”

“And you say that his chief objection--”

“--that it was my diagnosis. He says I remembered the word ‘volvulus’ from some lecture and I’m trying to wish it on him.” George added uncomfortably: “He always was domineering, but I never saw anything like this. Today he claims it’s acute pancreatitis, but he doesn’t have any convincing reasons.”

“Does he know I agree with your opinion?”

“He doesn’t seem to believe in anybody,” said George uncomfortably. “He keeps fretting about his father; he keeps thinking he could help him if he was alive.”

“I wish that there was someone outside the hospital he had some faith in,” Norton said. An idea came to him: “I wonder--” He picked up the telephone and said to the operator: “I wish you’d locate Miss Singleton, Doctor Durfee’s anaesthetist. And when she’s free, ask her to come and see me.”

Bill opened his eyes wearily when Thea came into his room at eight that night.

“Oh, it’s you,” he murmured.

She sat on the side of his bed and put her hand on his arm.

“H’lo, Bill,” she said.

“H’lo.”

Suddenly he turned in bed and put both arms around her arm. Her free hand touched his hair.

“You’ve been bad,” she said.

“I can’t help it.”

She sat with him silently for half an hour; then she changed her position so that her arm was under his head. Stooping over him, she kissed him on the brow. He said:

“Being close to you is the first rest I’ve had in four days.”

After a while she said: “Three months ago Doctor Durfee did an operation for volvulus and it was entirely successful.”

“But it isn’t volvulus!” he cried. “Volvulus is when a loop of the intestine gets twisted on itself. It’s a crazy idea of Schoatze’s! He wants to make a trick diagnosis and get a lot of credit.”

“Doctor Norton agrees with him. You must give in, Bill. I’ll be right beside you, as close as I am now.”

Her soft voice was a sedative; he felt his resistance growing weaker; two long tears rolled from his eyes. “I feel so helpless,” he admitted. “How do I know whether George Schoatze has any sense?”

“That’s just childish,” she answered gently. “You’ll profit more by submitting to this than Doctor Schoatze will from his lucky guess.”

He clung to her suddenly. “Afterward, will you be my girl?”

She laughed. “The selfishness! The bargainer! You wouldn’t be very cheerful company if you went around with a twisted intestine.”

He was silent for a moment. “Yesterday I made my will,” he said. “I divided what I have between an old aunt and you.”

She put her face against his. “You’ll make me weep, and it really isn’t that serious at all.”

“All right then.” His white, pinched face relaxed. “Get it over with.”

Bill was wheeled upstairs an hour later. Once the matter was decided, all nervousness left him, and he remembered how the hands of Doctor Durfee had given him such a sense of surety last July, and remembered who would be at his head watching over him. He last thought as the gas began was sudden jealousy that Thea and Howard Durfee would be awake and near each other while he was asleep . . .

. . . When he awoke he was being wheeled down a corridor to his room. Doctor Norton and Doctor Schoatze, seeming very cheerful, were by his side.

“H’lo, hello,” cried Bill in a daze. “Say, what did they finally discover about Senator Billings?”

“It was only a common cold, Bill,” said Doctor Norton. “They’ve shipped him back west--by dirigible, helicopter and freight elevator.”

“Oh,” said Bill; and then, after a moment, “I feel terrible.”

“You’re not terrible,” Doctor Norton assured him. “You’ll be up on deck in a week. George here is certainly a swell guesser.”

“It was a beautiful operation,” said George modestly. “That loop would have perforated in another six hours.”

“Good anaesthesia job, too,” said Doctor Norton, winking at George. “Like a lullaby.”

Thea slipped in to see Bill next morning, when he was rested and the soreness was eased and he felt weak but himself again. She sat beside him on the bed.

“I made an awful fool of myself,” he confessed.

“A lot of doctors do when they get sick the first time. They go neurotic.”

“I guess everybody’s off me.”

“Not at all. You’ll be in for some kidding probably. Some bright young one wrote this for the Coccidian Club show.” She read from a scrap of paper:

“Interne Tulliver, chloroformed,

Had dreams above his station;

He woke up thinking he’d performed

His own li’l operation.”

“I guess I can stand it,” said Bill. “I can stand anything when you’re around; I’m so in love with you. But I suppose after this you’ll always see me as about high-school age.”

“If you’d had your first sickness at forty you’d have acted the same way.”

“I hear your friend Durfee did a brilliant job, as usual,” he said resentfully.

“Yes,” she agreed; after a minute she added: “He wants to break his engagement and marry me on my own terms.”

His heart stopped beating. “And what did you say?”

“I said No.”

Life resumed itself again.

“Come closer,” he whispered. “Where’s your hand? Will you, anyhow, go swimming with me every night all the rest of September?”

“Every other night.”

“Every night.”

“Well, every hot night,” she compromised.

Thea stood up.

He saw her eyes fix momentarily on some distant spot, linger there for a moment as if she were drawing support from it; then she leaned over him and kissed his hungry lips good-by, and faded back into her own mystery, into those woods where she hunted, with an old suffering and with a memory he could not share.

But what was valuable in it she had distilled; she knew how to pass it along so that it would not disappear. For the moment Bill had had more than his share, and reluctantly he relinquished her.

“This has been my biggest case so far,” he thought sleepily.

The verse to the Coccidian Club song passed through his mind, and the chorus echoed on, singing him into deep sleep:

Bumtiddy, bum-bum,

Tiddy-bum-bum.

Three thousand years ago,

Three thousand years ago.

THE FIEND

On June 3, 1895, on a country road near Stillwater, Minnesota, Mrs. Crenshaw Engels and her seven year old son, Mark, were waylaid and murdered by a fiend, under circumstances so atrocious that, fortunately, it is not necessary to set them down here.

Crenshaw Engels, the husband and father, was a photographer in Stillwater. He was a great reader and considered “a little unsafe,” for he had spoken his mind frankly about the railroad-agrarian struggles of the time--but no one denied that he was a devoted family man, and the catastrophe visited upon him hung over the little town for many weeks. There was a move to lynch the perpetrator of the horror, for Minnesota did not permit the capital punishment it deserved, but the instigators were foiled by the big stone penitentiary close at hand.

The cloud hung over Engel’s home so that folks went there only in moods of penitence, of fear or guilt, hoping that they would be visited in turn should their lives ever chance to trek under a black sky. The photography studio suffered also: the routine of being posed, the necessary silences and pauses in the process, permitted the clients too much time to regard the prematurely aged face of Crenshaw Engels, and high school students, newly married couples, mothers of new babies, were always glad to escape from the place into the open air. So Crenshaw’s business fell off and he went through a time of hardship--finally liquidating the lease, the apparatus and the good will, and wearing out the money obtained. He sold his house for a little more than its two mortgages, went to board and took a position clerking in Radamacher’s Department Store.

In the sight of his neighbors he had become a man ruined by adversity, a man manqué, a man emptied. But in the last opinion they were wrong--he was empty of all save one thing. His memory was long as a Jew’s, and though his heart was in the grave he was sane as when his wife and son had started on their last walk that summer morning. At the first trial he lost control and got at the Fiend, seizing him by the necktie--and then had been dragged off with the Fiend’s tie in such a knot that the man was nearly garotted.

At the second trial Crenshaw cried aloud once. Afterwards he went to all the members of the state legislature in the county and handed them a bill he had written himself for the introduction of capital punishment in the state--the bill to be retroactive on criminals condemned to life imprisonment. The bill fell through; it was on the day Crenshaw heard this that he got inside the penitentiary by a ruse and was only apprehended in time to be prevented from shooting the Fiend in his cell.

Crenshaw was given a suspended sentence and for some months it was assumed that the agony was fading gradually from his mind. In fact when he presented himself to the warden in another rôle a year after the crime, the official was sympathetic to his statement that he had had a change of heart and felt he could only emerge from the valley of shadow by forgiveness, that he wanted to help the Fiend, show him the True Path by means of good books and appeals to his buried better nature. So, after being carefully searched, Crenshaw was permitted to sit for half an hour in the corridor outside the Fiend’s cell.

But had the warden suspected the truth he would not have permitted the visit--for, far from forgiving, Crenshaw’s plan was to wreak upon the Fiend a mental revenge to replace the physical one of which he was subducted.

When he faced the Fiend, Crenshaw felt his scalp tingle. From behind the bars a roly-poly man, who somehow made his convict’s uniform resemble a business suit, a man with thick brown-rimmed glasses and the trim air of an insurance salesman, looked at him uncertainly. Feeling faint Crenshaw sat down in the chair that had been brought for him.

“The air around you stinks!” he cried suddenly. “This whole corridor, this whole prison.”

“I suppose it does,” admitted the Fiend, “I noticed it too.”

“You’ll have time to notice it,” Crenshaw muttered. “All your life you’ll pace up and down stinking in that little cell, with everything getting blacker and blacker. And after that there’ll be hell waiting for you. For all eternity you’ll be shut in a little space, but in hell it’ll be so small that you can’t stand up or stretch out.”

“Will it now?” asked the Fiend concerned.

“It will!” said Crenshaw. “You’ll be alone with your own vile thoughts in that little space, forever and ever and ever. You’ll itch with corruption so that you can never sleep, and you’ll always be thirsty, with water just out of reach.”

“Will I now?” repeated the Fiend, even more concerned. “I remember once--”

“All the time you’ll be full of horror,” Crenshaw interrupted. “You’ll be like a person just about to go crazy but can’t go crazy. All the time you’ll be thinking that it’s forever and ever.”

“That’s bad,” said the Fiend, shaking his head gloomily. “That’s real bad.”

“Now listen here to me,” went on Crenshaw. “I’ve brought you some books you’re going to read. It’s arranged that you get no books or papers except what I bring you.”

As a beginning Crenshaw had brought half a dozen books which his vagarious curiosity had collected over as many years. They comprised a German doctor’s thousand case histories of sexual abnormality--cases with no cures, no hopes, no prognoses, cases listed cold; a series of sermons by a New England Divine of the Great Revival which pictured the tortures of the damned in hell; a collection of horror stories; and a volume of erotic pieces from each of which the last two pages, containing the consummations, had been torn out; a volume of detective stories mutilated in the same manner. A tome of the Newgate calendar completed the batch. These Crenshaw handed through the bars--the Fiend took them and put them on his iron cot.

This was the first of Crenshaw’s long series of fortnightly visits. Always he brought with him something somber and menacing to say, something dark and terrible to read--save that once when the Fiend had had nothing to read for a long time he brought him four inspiringly titled books--that proved to have nothing but blank paper inside. Another time, pretending to concede a point, he promised to bring newspapers--he brought ten copies of the yellowed journal that had reported the crime and the arrest. Sometimes he obtained medical books that showed in color the red and blue and green ravages of leprosy and skin disease, the mounds of shattered cells, the verminous tissue and brown corrupted blood.

And there was no sewer of the publishing world from which he did not obtain records of all that was gross and vile in man.

Crenshaw could not keep this up indefinitely both because of the expense and because of the exhaustibility of such books. When five years had passed he leaned toward another form of torture. He built up false hopes in the Fiend with protests of his own change of heart and manoeuvres for a pardon, and then dashed the hopes to pieces. Or else he pretended to have a pistol with him, or an inflammatory substance that would make the cell a raging Inferno and consume the Fiend in two minutes--once he threw a dummy bottle into the cell and listened in delight to the screams as the Fiend ran back and forth waiting for the explosion. At other times he would pretend grimly that the legislature had passed a new law which provided that the Fiend would be executed in a few hours.

A decade passed. Crenshaw was gray at forty--he was white at fifty when the alternating routine of his fortnightly visits to the graves of his loved ones and to the penitentiary had become the only part of his life--the long days at Radamacher’s were only a weary dream. Sometimes he went and sat outside the Fiend’s cell, with no word said during the half hour he was allowed to be there. The Fiend too had grown white in twenty years. He was very respectable-looking with his horn-rimmed glasses and his white hair. He seemed to have a great respect for Crenshaw and even when the latter, in a renewal of diminishing vitality, promised him one day that on his very next visit he was going to bring a revolver and end the matter, he nodded gravely as if in agreement, said, “I suppose so. Yes, I suppose you’re perfectly right,” and did not mention the matter to the guards. On the occasion of the next visit he was waiting with his hands on the bars of the cell looking at Crenshaw both hopefully and desperately. At certain tensions and strains death takes on, indeed, the quality of a great adventure as any soldier can testify.

Years passed. Crenshaw was promoted to floor manager at Radamacher’s--there were new generations now that did not know of his tragedy and regarded him as an austere nonentity. He came into a little legacy and bought new stones for the graves of his wife and son. He knew he would soon be retired and while a third decade lapsed through the white winters, the short sweet smoky summers, it became more and more plain to him that the time had come to put an end to the Fiend; to avoid any mischance by which the other would survive him.

The moment he fixed upon came at the exact end of thirty years. Crenshaw had long owned the pistol with which it would be accomplished; he had fingered the shells lovingly and calculated the lodgement of each in the Fiend’s body, so that death would be sure but lingering--he studied the tales of abdominal wounds in the war news and delighted in the agony that made victims pray to be killed.

After that, what happened to him did not matter.

When the day came he had no trouble in smuggling the pistol into the penitentiary. But to his surprise he found the Fiend scrunched up upon his iron cot, instead of waiting for him avidly by the bars.

“I’m sick,” the Fiend said. “My stomach’s been burning me up all morning. They gave me a physic but now it’s worse and nobody comes.”

Crenshaw fancied momentarily that this was a premonition in the man’s bowels of a bullet that would shortly ride ragged through that spot.

“Come up to the bars,” he said mildly.

“I can’t move.”

“Yes, you can.”

“I’m doubled up. All doubled up.”

“Come doubled up then.”

With an effort the Fiend moved himself, only to fall on his side on the cement floor. He groaned and then lay quiet for a minute, after which, still bent in two, he began to drag himself a foot at a time toward the bars.

Suddenly Crenshaw set off at a run toward the end of the corridor.

“I want the prison doctor,” he demanded of the guard, “That man’s sick--sick, I tell you.”

“The doctor has--”

“Get him--get him now!”

The guard hesitated, but Crenshaw had become a tolerated, even privileged person around the prison, and in a moment the guard took down his phone and called the infirmary.

All that afternoon Crenshaw waited in the bare area inside the gates, walking up and down with his hands behind his back. From time to time he went to the front entrance and demanded of the guard:

“Any news?”

“Nothing yet. They’ll call me when there’s anything.”

Late in the afternoon the Warden appeared at the door, looked about and spotted Crenshaw. The latter, all alert, hastened over.

“He’s dead,” the Warden said. “His appendix burst. They did everything they could.”

“Dead,” Crenshaw repeated.

“I’m sorry to bring you this news. I know how--”

“It’s all right,” said Crenshaw, and licking his lips. “So he’s dead.”

The Warden lit a cigarette.

“While you’re here, Mr. Engels, I wonder if you can let me have that pass that was issued to you--I can turn it in to the office. That is--I suppose you won’t need it any more.”

Crenshaw took the blue card from his wallet and handed it over. The Warden shook hands with him.

“One thing more,” Crenshaw demanded as the Warden turned away. “Which is the--the window of the infirmary?”

“It’s on the interior court, you can’t see it from here.”

“Oh.”

When the Warden had gone Crenshaw still stood there a long time, the tears running out down his face. He could not collect his thoughts and he began by trying to remember what day it was; Saturday, the day, every other week, on which he came to see the Fiend.

He would not see the Fiend two weeks from now.

In a misery of solitude and despair he muttered aloud: “So he is dead. He has left me.” And then with a long sigh of mingled grief and fear, “So I have lost him--my only friend--now I am alone.”

He was still saying that to himself as he passed through the outer gate, and as his coat caught in the great swing of the outer door the guard opened up to release it, he heard a reiteration of the words:

“I’m alone. At last--at last I am alone.”

Once more he called on the Fiend, after many weeks.

“But he’s dead,” the Warden told him kindly.

“Oh, yes,” Crenshaw said. “I guess I must have forgotten.”

And he set off back home, his boots sinking deep into the white diamond surface of the flats.

BABYLON REVISITED

“And where’s Mr. Campbell?” Charlie asked.

“Gone to Switzerland. Mr. Campbell’s a pretty sick man, Mr. Wales.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. And George Hardt?” Charlie inquired.

“Back in America, gone to work.”

“And where is the Snow Bird?”

“He was in here last week. Anyway, his friend, Mr. Schaeffer, is in Paris.”

Two familiar names from the long list of a year and a half ago. Charlie scribbled an address in his notebook and tore out the page.

“If you see Mr. Schaeffer, give him this,” he said. “It’s my brother-in-law’s address. I haven’t settled on a hotel yet.”

He was not really disappointed to find Paris was so empty. But the stillness in the Ritz bar was strange and portentous. It was not an American bar any more--he felt polite in it, and not as if he owned it. It had gone back into France. He felt the stillness from the moment he got out of the taxi and saw the doorman, usually in a frenzy of activity at this hour, gossiping with a chasseur by the servants’ entrance.

Passing through the corridor, he heard only a single, bored voice in the once-clamorous women’s room. When he turned into the bar he travelled the twenty feet of green carpet with his eyes fixed straight ahead by old habit; and then, with his foot firmly on the rail, he turned and surveyed the room, encountering only a single pair of eyes that fluttered up from a newspaper in the corner. Charlie asked for the head barman, Paul, who in the latter days of the bull market had come to work in his own custom-built car--disembarking, however, with due nicety at the nearest corner. But Paul was at his country house today and Alix giving him information.

“No, no more,” Charlie said, “I’m going slow these days.”

Alix congratulated him: “You were going pretty strong a couple of years ago.”

“I’ll stick to it all right,” Charlie assured him. “I’ve stuck to it for over a year and a half now.”

“How do you find conditions in America?”

“I haven’t been to America for months. I’m in business in Prague, representing a couple of concerns there. They don’t know about me down there.”

Alix smiled.

“Remember the night of George Hardt’s bachelor dinner here?” said Charlie. “By the way, what’s become of Claude Fessenden?”

Alix lowered his voice confidentially: “He’s in Paris, but he doesn’t come here any more. Paul doesn’t allow it. He ran up a bill of thirty thousand francs, charging all his drinks and his lunches, and usually his dinner, for more than a year. And when Paul finally told him he had to pay, he gave him a bad check.”

Alix shook his head sadly.

“I don’t understand it, such a dandy fellow. Now he’s all bloated up--” He made a plump apple of his hands.

Charlie watched a group of strident queens installing themselves in a corner.

“Nothing affects them,” he thought. “Stocks rise and fall, people loaf or work, but they go on forever.” The place oppressed him. He called for the dice and shook with Alix for the drink.

“Here for long, Mr. Wales?”

“I’m here for four or five days to see my little girl.”

“Oh-h! You have a little girl?”

Outside, the fire-red, gas-blue, ghost-green signs shone smokily through the tranquil rain. It was late afternoon and the streets were in movement; the bistros gleamed. At the corner of the Boulevard des Capucines he took a taxi. The Place de la Concorde moved by in pink majesty; they crossed the logical Seine, and Charlie felt the sudden provincial quality of the Left Bank.

Charlie directed his taxi to the Avenue de l’Opera, which was out of his way. But he wanted to see the blue hour spread over the magnificent façade, and imagine that the cab horns, playing endlessly the first few bars of La Plus que Lent, were the trumpets of the Second Empire. They were closing the iron grill in front of Brentano’s Book-store, and people were already at dinner behind the trim little bourgeois hedge of Duval’s. He had never eaten at a really cheap restaurant in Paris. Five-course dinner, four francs fifty, eighteen cents, wine included. For some odd reason he wished that he had.

As they rolled on to the Left Bank and he felt its sudden provincialism, he thought, “I spoiled this city for myself. I didn’t realize it, but the days came along one after another, and then two years were gone, and everything was gone, and I was gone.”

He was thirty-five, and good to look at. The Irish mobility of his face was sobered by a deep wrinkle between his eyes. As he rang his brother-in-law’s bell in the Rue Palatine, the wrinkle deepened till it pulled down his brows; he felt a cramping sensation in his belly. From behind the maid who opened the door darted a lovely little girl of nine who shrieked “Daddy!” and flew up, struggling like a fish, into his arms. She pulled his head around by one ear and set her cheek against his.

“My old pie,” he said.

“Oh, daddy, daddy, daddy, daddy, dads, dads, dads!”

She drew him into the salon, where the family waited, a boy and girl his daughter’s age, his sister-in-law and her husband. He greeted Marion with his voice pitched carefully to avoid either feigned enthusiasm or dislike, but her response was more frankly tepid, though she minimized her expression of unalterable distrust by directing her regard toward his child. The two men clasped hands in a friendly way and Lincoln Peters rested his for a moment on Charlie’s shoulder.

The room was warm and comfortably American. The three children moved intimately about, playing through the yellow oblongs that led to other rooms; the cheer of six o’clock spoke in the eager smacks of the fire and the sounds of French activity in the kitchen. But Charlie did not relax; his heart sat up rigidly in his body and he drew confidence from his daughter, who from time to time came close to him, holding in her arms the doll he had brought.

“Really extremely well,” he declared in answer to Lincoln’s question. “There’s a lot of business there that isn’t moving at all, but we’re doing even better than ever. In fact, damn well. I’m bringing my sister over from America next month to keep house for me. My income last year was bigger than it was when I had money. You see, the Czechs--”

His boasting was for a specific purpose; but after a moment, seeing a faint restiveness in Lincoln’s eye, he changed the subject:

“Those are fine children of yours, well brought up, good manners.”

“We think Honoria’s a great little girl too.”

Marion Peters came back from the kitchen. She was a tall woman with worried eyes, who had once possessed a fresh American loveliness. Charlie had never been sensitive to it and was always surprised when people spoke of how pretty she had been. From the first there had been an instinctive antipathy between them.

“Well, how do you find Honoria?” she asked.

“Wonderful. I was astonished how much she’s grown in ten months. All the children are looking well.”

“We haven’t had a doctor for a year. How do you like being back in Paris?”

“It seems very funny to see so few Americans around.”

“I’m delighted,” Marion said vehemently. “Now at least you can go into a store without their assuming you’re a millionaire. We’ve suffered like everybody, but on the whole it’s a good deal pleasanter.”

“But it was nice while it lasted,” Charlie said. “We were a sort of royalty, almost infallible, with a sort of magic around us. In the bar this afternoon”--he stumbled, seeing his mistake--”there wasn’t a man I knew.”

She looked at him keenly. “I should think you’d have had enough of bars.”

“I only stayed a minute. I take one drink every afternoon, and no more.”

“Don’t you want a cocktail before dinner?” Lincoln asked.

“I take only one drink every afternoon, and I’ve had that.”

“I hope you keep to it,” said Marion.

Her dislike was evident in the coldness with which she spoke, but Charlie only smiled; he had larger plans. Her very aggressiveness gave him an advantage, and he knew enough to wait. He wanted them to initiate the discussion of what they knew had brought him to Paris.

At dinner he couldn’t decide whether Honoria was most like him or her mother. Fortunate if she didn’t combine the traits of both that had brought them to disaster. A great wave of protectiveness went over him. He thought he knew what to do for her. He believed in character; he wanted to jump back a whole generation and trust in character again as the eternally valuable element. Everything wore out.

He left soon after dinner, but not to go home. He was curious to see Paris by night with clearer and more judicious eyes than those of other days. He bought a strapontin for the Casino and watched Josephine Baker go through her chocolate arabesques.

After an hour he left and strolled toward Montmartre, up the Rue Pigalle into the Place Blanche. The rain had stopped and there were a few people in evening clothes disembarking from taxis in front of cabarets, and cocottes prowling singly or in pairs, and many Negroes. He passed a lighted door from which issued music, and stopped with the sense of familiarity; it was Bricktop’s, where he had parted with so many hours and so much money. A few doors farther on he found another ancient rendezvous and incautiously put his head inside. Immediately an eager orchestra burst into sound, a pair of professional dancers leaped to their feet and a maître d’hôtel swooped toward him, crying, “Crowd just arriving, sir!” But he withdrew quickly.

“You have to be damn drunk,” he thought.

Zelli’s was closed, the bleak and sinister cheap hotels surrounding it were dark; up in the Rue Blanche there was more light and a local, colloquial French crowd. The Poet’s Cave had disappeared, but the two great mouths of the Café of Heaven and the Café of Hell still yawned--even devoured, as he watched, the meager contents of a tourist bus--a German, a Japanese, and an American couple who glanced at him with frightened eyes.

So much for the effort and ingenuity of Montmartre. All the catering to vice and waste was on an utterly childish scale, and he suddenly realized the meaning of the word “dissipate”--to dissipate into thin air; to make nothing out of something. In the little hours of the night every move from place to place was an enormous human jump, an increase of paying for the privilege of slower and slower motion.

He remembered thousand-franc notes given to an orchestra for playing a single number, hundred-franc notes tossed to a doorman for calling a cab.

But it hadn’t been given for nothing.

It had been given, even the most wildly squandered sum, as an offering to destiny that he might not remember the things most worth remembering, the things that now he would always remember--his child taken from his control, his wife escaped to a grave in Vermont.

In the glare of a brasserie a woman spoke to him. He bought her some eggs and coffee, and then, eluding her encouraging stare, gave her a twenty-franc note and took a taxi to his hotel.

II

He woke upon a fine fall day--football weather. The depression of yesterday was gone and he liked the people on the streets. At noon he sat opposite Honoria at Le Grand Vatel, the only restaurant he could think of not reminiscent of champagne dinners and long luncheons that began at two and ended in a blurred and vague twilight.

“Now, how about vegetables? Oughtn’t you to have some vegetables?”

“Well, yes.”

“Here’s épinards and chou-fleur and carrots and haricots.”

“I’d like chou-fleur.”

“Wouldn’t you like to have two vegetables?”

“I usually only have one at lunch.”

The waiter was pretending to be inordinately fond of children. “Qu’elle est mignonne la petite? Elle parle exactement comme une Française.”

“How about dessert? Shall we wait and see?”

The waiter disappeared. Honoria looked at her father expectantly.

“What are we going to do?”

“First, we’re going to that toy store in the Rue Saint-Honoré and buy you anything you like. And then we’re going to the vaudeville at the Empire.”

She hesitated. “I like it about the vaudeville, but not the toy store.”

“Why not?”

“Well, you brought me this doll.” She had it with her. “And I’ve got lots of things. And we’re not rich any more, are we?”

“We never were. But today you are to have anything you want.”

“All right,” she agreed resignedly.

When there had been her mother and a French nurse he had been inclined to be strict; now he extended himself, reached out for a new tolerance; he must be both parents to her and not shut any of her out of communication.

“I want to get to know you,” he said gravely. “First let me introduce myself. My name is Charles J. Wales, of Prague.”

“Oh, daddy!” her voice cracked with laughter.

“And who are you, please?” he persisted, and she accepted a role immediately: “Honoria Wales, Rue Palatine, Paris.”

“Married or single?”

“No, not married. Single.”

He indicated the doll. “But I see you have a child, madame.”

Unwilling to disinherit it, she took it to her heart and thought quickly: “Yes, I’ve been married, but I’m not married now. My husband is dead.”

He went on quickly, “And the child’s name?”

“Simone. That’s after my best friend at school.”

“I’m very pleased that you’re doing so well at school.”

“I’m third this month,” she boasted. “Elsie”--that was her cousin--”is only about eighteenth, and Richard is about at the bottom.”

“You like Richard and Elsie, don’t you?”

“Oh, yes. I like Richard quite well and I like her all right.”

Cautiously and casually he asked: “And Aunt Marion and Uncle Lincoln--which do you like best?”

“Oh, Uncle Lincoln, I guess.”

He was increasingly aware of her presence. As they came in, a murmur of “. . . adorable” followed them, and now the people at the next table bent all their silences upon her, staring as if she were something no more conscious than a flower.

“Why don’t I live with you?” she asked suddenly. “Because mamma’s dead?”

“You must stay here and learn more French. It would have been hard for daddy to take care of you so well.”

“I don’t really need much taking care of any more. I do everything for myself.”

Going out of the restaurant, a man and a woman unexpectedly hailed him.

“Well, the old Wales!”

“Hello there, Lorraine. . . . Dunc.”

Sudden ghosts out of the past: Duncan Schaeffer, a friend from college. Lorraine Quarrles, a lovely, pale blonde of thirty; one of a crowd who had helped them make months into days in the lavish times of three years ago.

“My husband couldn’t come this year,” she said, in answer to his question. “We’re poor as hell. So he gave me two hundred a month and told me I could do my worst on that. . . . This your little girl?”

“What about coming back and sitting down?” Duncan asked.

“Can’t do it.” He was glad for an excuse. As always, he felt Lorraine’s passionate, provocative attraction, but his own rhythm was different now.

“Well, how about dinner?” she asked.

“I’m not free. Give me your address and let me call you.”

“Charlie, I believe you’re sober,” she said judicially. “I honestly believe he’s sober, Dunc. Pinch him and see if he’s sober.”

Charlie indicated Honoria with his head. They both laughed.

“What’s your address?” said Duncan sceptically.

He hesitated, unwilling to give the name of his hotel.

“I’m not settled yet. I’d better call you. We’re going to see the vaudeville at the Empire.”

“There! That’s what I want to do,” Lorraine said. “I want to see some clowns and acrobats and jugglers. That’s just what we’ll do, Dunc.”

“We’ve got to do an errand first,” said Charlie. “Perhaps we’ll see you there.”

“All right, you snob. . . . Good-by, beautiful little girl.”

“Good-by.”

Honoria bobbed politely.

Somehow, an unwelcome encounter. They liked him because he was functioning, because he was serious; they wanted to see him, because he was stronger than they were now, because they wanted to draw a certain sustenance from his strength.

At the Empire, Honoria proudly refused to sit upon her father’s folded coat. She was already an individual with a code of her own, and Charlie was more and more absorbed by the desire of putting a little of himself into her before she crystallized utterly. It was hopeless to try to know her in so short a time.

Between the acts they came upon Duncan and Lorraine in the lobby where the band was playing.

“Have a drink?”

“All right, but not up at the bar. We’ll take a table.”

“The perfect father.”

Listening abstractedly to Lorraine, Charlie watched Honoria’s eyes leave their table, and he followed them wistfully about the room, wondering what they saw. He met her glance and she smiled.

“I liked that lemonade,” she said.

What had she said? What had he expected? Going home in a taxi afterward, he pulled her over until her head rested against his chest.

“Darling, do you ever think about your mother?”

“Yes, sometimes,” she answered vaguely.

“I don’t want you to forget her. Have you got a picture of her?”

“Yes, I think so. Anyhow, Aunt Marion has. Why don’t you want me to forget her?”

“She loved you very much.”

“I loved her too.”

They were silent for a moment.

“Daddy, I want to come and live with you,” she said suddenly.

His heart leaped; he had wanted it to come like this.

“Aren’t you perfectly happy?”

“Yes, but I love you better than anybody. And you love me better than anybody, don’t you, now that mummy’s dead?”

“Of course I do. But you won’t always like me best, honey. You’ll grow up and meet somebody your own age and go marry him and forget you ever had a daddy.”

“Yes, that’s true,” she agreed tranquilly.

He didn’t go in. He was coming back at nine o’clock and he wanted to keep himself fresh and new for the thing he must say then.

“When you’re safe inside, just show yourself in that window.”

“All right. Good-by, dads, dads, dads, dads.”

He waited in the dark street until she appeared, all warm and glowing, in the window above and kissed her fingers out into the night.

III

They were waiting. Marion sat behind the coffee service in a dignified black dinner dress that just faintly suggested mourning. Lincoln was walking up and down with the animation of one who had already been talking. They were as anxious as he was to get into the question. He opened it almost immediately:

“I suppose you know what I want to see you about--why I really came to Paris.”

Marion played with the black stars on her necklace and frowned.

“I’m awfully anxious to have a home,” he continued. “And I’m awfully anxious to have Honoria in it. I appreciate your taking in Honoria for her mother’s sake, but things have changed now”--he hesitated and then continued more forcibly--”changed radically with me, and I want to ask you to reconsider the matter. It would be silly for me to deny that about three years ago I was acting badly--”

Marion looked up at him with hard eyes.

“--but all that’s over. As I told you, I haven’t had more than a drink a day for over a year, and I take that drink deliberately, so that the idea of alcohol won’t get too big in my imagination. You see the idea?”

“No,” said Marion succinctly.

“It’s a sort of stunt I set myself. It keeps the matter in proportion.”

“I get you,” said Lincoln. “You don’t want to admit it’s got any attraction for you.”

“Something like that. Sometimes I forget and don’t take it. But I try to take it. Anyhow, I couldn’t afford to drink in my position. The people I represent are more than satisfied with what I’ve done, and I’m bringing my sister over from Burlington to keep house for me, and I want awfully to have Honoria too. You know that even when her mother and I weren’t getting along well we never let anything that happened touch Honoria. I know she’s fond of me and I know I’m able to take care of her and--well, there you are. How do you feel about it?”

He knew that now he would have to take a beating. It would last an hour or two hours, and it would be difficult, but if he modulated his inevitable resentment to the chastened attitude of the reformed sinner, he might win his point in the end.

Keep your temper, he told himself. You don’t want to be justified. You want Honoria.

Lincoln spoke first: “We’ve been talking it over ever since we got your letter last month. We’re happy to have Honoria here. She’s a dear little thing, and we’re glad to be able to help her, but of course that isn’t the question--”

Marion interrupted suddenly. “How long are you going to stay sober, Charlie?” she asked.

“Permanently, I hope.”

“How can anybody count on that?”

“You know I never did drink heavily until I gave up business and came over here with nothing to do. Then Helen and I began to run around with--”

“Please leave Helen out of it. I can’t bear to hear you talk about her like that.”

He stared at her grimly; he had never been certain how fond of each other the sisters were in life.

“My drinking only lasted about a year and a half--from the time we came over until I--collapsed.”

“It was time enough.”

“It was time enough,” he agreed.

“My duty is entirely to Helen,” she said. “I try to think what she would have wanted me to do. Frankly, from the night you did that terrible thing you haven’t really existed for me. I can’t help that. She was my sister.”

“Yes.”

“When she was dying she asked me to look out for Honoria. If you hadn’t been in a sanitarium then, it might have helped matters.”

He had no answer.

“I’ll never in my life be able to forget the morning when Helen knocked at my door, soaked to the skin and shivering, and said you’d locked her out.”

Charlie gripped the sides of the chair. This was more difficult than he expected; he wanted to launch out into a long expostulation and explanation, but he only said: “The night I locked her out--” and she interrupted, “I don’t feel up to going over that again.”

After a moment’s silence Lincoln said: “We’re getting off the subject. You want Marion to set aside her legal guardianship and give you Honoria. I think the main point for her is whether she has confidence in you or not.”

“I don’t blame Marion,” Charlie said slowly, “but I think she can have entire confidence in me. I had a good record up to three years ago. Of course, it’s within human possibilities I might go wrong any time. But if we wait much longer I’ll lose Honoria’s childhood and my chance for a home.” He shook his head, “I’ll simply lose her, don’t you see?”

“Yes, I see,” said Lincoln.

“Why didn’t you think of all this before?” Marion asked.

“I suppose I did, from time to time, but Helen and I were getting along badly. When I consented to the guardianship, I was flat on my back in a sanitarium and the market had cleaned me out. I knew I’d acted badly, and I thought if it would bring any peace to Helen, I’d agree to anything. But now it’s different. I’m functioning, I’m behaving damn well, so far as--”

“Please don’t swear at me,” Marion said.

He looked at her, startled. With each remark the force of her dislike became more and more apparent. She had built up all her fear of life into one wall and faced it toward him. This trivial reproof was possibly the result of some trouble with the cook several hours before. Charlie became increasingly alarmed at leaving Honoria in this atmosphere of hostility against himself; sooner or later it would come out, in a word here, a shake of the head there, and some of that distrust would be irrevocably implanted in Honoria. But he pulled his temper down out of his face and shut it up inside him; he had won a point, for Lincoln realized the absurdity of Marion’s remark and asked her lightly since when she had objected to the word “damn.”

“Another thing,” Charlie said: “I’m able to give her certain advantages now. I’m going to take a French governess to Prague with me. I’ve got a lease on a new apartment--”

He stopped, realizing that he was blundering. They couldn’t be expected to accept with equanimity the fact that his income was again twice as large as their own.

“I suppose you can give her more luxuries than we can,” said Marion. “When you were throwing away money we were living along watching every ten francs. . . . I suppose you’ll start doing it again.”

“Oh, no,” he said. “I’ve learned. I worked hard for ten years, you know--until I got lucky in the market, like so many people. Terribly lucky. It didn’t seem any use working any more, so I quit. It won’t happen again.”

There was a long silence. All of them felt their nerves straining, and for the first time in a year Charlie wanted a drink. He was sure now that Lincoln Peters wanted him to have his child.

Marion shuddered suddenly; part of her saw that Charlie’s feet were planted on the earth now, and her own maternal feeling recognized the naturalness of his desire; but she had lived for a long time with a prejudice--a prejudice founded on a curious disbelief in her sister’s happiness, and which, in the shock of one terrible night, had turned to hatred for him. It had all happened at a point in her life where the discouragement of ill health and adverse circumstances made it necessary for her to believe in tangible villainy and a tangible villain.

“I can’t help what I think!” she cried out suddenly. “How much you were responsible for Helen’s death, I don’t know. It’s something you’ll have to square with your own conscience.”

An electric current of agony surged through him; for a moment he was almost on his feet, an unuttered sound echoing in his throat. He hung on to himself for a moment, another moment.

“Hold on there,” said Lincoln uncomfortably. “I never thought you were responsible for that.”

“Helen died of heart trouble,” Charlie said dully.

“Yes, heart trouble.” Marion spoke as if the phrase had another meaning for her.

Then, in the flatness that followed her outburst, she saw him plainly and she knew he had somehow arrived at control over the situation. Glancing at her husband, she found no help from him, and as abruptly as if it were a matter of no importance, she threw up the sponge.

“Do what you like!” she cried, springing up from her chair. “She’s your child. I’m not the person to stand in your way. I think if it were my child I’d rather see her--” She managed to check herself. “You two decide it. I can’t stand this. I’m sick. I’m going to bed.”

She hurried from the room; after a moment Lincoln said:

“This has been a hard day for her. You know how strongly she feels--” His voice was almost apologetic: “When a woman gets an idea in her head.”

“Of course.”

“It’s going to be all right. I think she sees now that you--can provide for the child, and so we can’t very well stand in your way or Honoria’s way.”

“Thank you, Lincoln.”

“I’d better go along and see how she is.”

“I’m going.”

He was still trembling when he reached the street, but a walk down the Rue Bonaparte to the quais set him up, and as he crossed the Seine, fresh and new by the quai lamps, he felt exultant. But back in his room he couldn’t sleep. The image of Helen haunted him. Helen whom he had loved so until they had senselessly begun to abuse each other’s love, tear it into shreds. On that terrible February night that Marion remembered so vividly, a slow quarrel had gone on for hours. There was a scene at the Florida, and then he attempted to take her home, and then she kissed young Webb at a table; after that there was what she had hysterically said. When he arrived home alone he turned the key in the lock in wild anger. How could he know she would arrive an hour later alone, that there would be a snowstorm in which she wandered about in slippers, too confused to find a taxi? Then the aftermath, her escaping pneumonia by a miracle, and all the attendant horror. They were “reconciled,” but that was the beginning of the end, and Marion, who had seen with her own eyes and who imagined it to be one of many scenes from her sister’s martyrdom, never forgot.

Going over it again brought Helen nearer, and in the white, soft light that steals upon half sleep near morning he found himself talking to her again. She said that he was perfectly right about Honoria and that she wanted Honoria to be with him. She said she was glad he was being good and doing better. She said a lot of other things--very friendly things--but she was in a swing in a white dress, and swinging faster and faster all the time, so that at the end he could not hear clearly all that she said.

IV

He woke up feeling happy. The door of the world was open again. He made plans, vistas, futures for Honoria and himself, but suddenly he grew sad, remembering all the plans he and Helen had made. She had not planned to die. The present was the thing--work to do and someone to love. But not to love too much, for he knew the injury that a father can do to a daughter or a mother to a son by attaching them too closely: afterward, out in the world, the child would seek in the marriage partner the same blind tenderness and, failing probably to find it, turn against love and life.

It was another bright, crisp day. He called Lincoln Peters at the bank where he worked and asked if he could count on taking Honoria when he left for Prague. Lincoln agreed that there was no reason for delay. One thing--the legal guardianship. Marion wanted to retain that a while longer. She was upset by the whole matter, and it would oil things if she felt that the situation was still in her control for another year. Charlie agreed, wanting only the tangible, visible child.

Then the question of a governess. Charlie sat in a gloomy agency and talked to a cross Béarnaise and to a buxom Breton peasant, neither of whom he could have endured. There were others whom he would see tomorrow.

He lunched with Lincoln Peters at Griffons, trying to keep down his exultation.

“There’s nothing quite like your own child,” Lincoln said. “But you understand how Marion feels too.”

“She’s forgotten how hard I worked for seven years there,” Charlie said. “She just remembers one night.”

“There’s another thing.” Lincoln hesitated. “While you and Helen were tearing around Europe throwing money away, we were just getting along. I didn’t touch any of the prosperity because I never got ahead enough to carry anything but my insurance. I think Marion felt there was some kind of injustice in it--you not even working toward the end, and getting richer and richer.”

“It went just as quick as it came,” said Charlie.

“Yes, a lot of it stayed in the hands of chasseurs and saxophone players and maîtres d’hôtel--well, the big party’s over now. I just said that to explain Marion’s feeling about those crazy years. If you drop in about six o’clock tonight before Marion’s too tired, we’ll settle the details on the spot.”

Back at his hotel, Charlie found a pneumatique that had been redirected from the Ritz bar where Charlie had left his address for the purpose of finding a certain man.

DEAR CHARLIE: You were so strange when we saw you the other day that I wondered if I did something to offend you. If so, I’m not conscious of it. In fact, I have thought about you too much for the last year, and it’s always been in the back of my mind that I might see you if I came over here. We did have such good times that crazy spring, like the night you and I stole the butcher’s tricycle, and the time we tried to call on the president and you had the old derby rim and the wire cane. Everybody seems so old lately, but I don’t feel old a bit. Couldn’t we get together some time today for old time’s sake? I’ve got a vile hang-over for the moment, but will be feeling better this afternoon and will look for you about five in the sweat-shop at the Ritz.

Always devotedly,

LORRAINE.

His first feeling was one of awe that he had actually, in his mature years, stolen a tricycle and pedalled Lorraine all over the Étoile between the small hours and dawn. In retrospect it was a nightmare. Locking out Helen didn’t fit in with any other act of his life, but the tricycle incident did--it was one of many. How many weeks or months of dissipation to arrive at that condition of utter irresponsibility?

He tried to picture how Lorraine had appeared to him then--very attractive; Helen was unhappy about it, though she said nothing. Yesterday, in the restaurant, Lorraine had seemed trite, blurred, worn away. He emphatically did not want to see her, and he was glad Alix had not given away his hotel address. It was a relief to think, instead, of Honoria, to think of Sundays spent with her and of saying good morning to her and of knowing she was there in his house at night, drawing her breath in the darkness.

At five he took a taxi and bought presents for all the Peters--a piquant cloth doll, a box of Roman soldiers, flowers for Marion, big linen handkerchiefs for Lincoln.

He saw, when he arrived in the apartment, that Marion had accepted the inevitable. She greeted him now as though he were a recalcitrant member of the family, rather than a menacing outsider. Honoria had been told she was going; Charlie was glad to see that her tact made her conceal her excessive happiness. Only on his lap did she whisper her delight and the question “When?” before she slipped away with the other children.

He and Marion were alone for a minute in the room, and on an impulse he spoke out boldly:

“Family quarrels are bitter things. They don’t go according to any rules. They’re not like aches or wounds; they’re more like splits in the skin that won’t heal because there’s not enough material. I wish you and I could be on better terms.”

“Some things are hard to forget,” she answered. “It’s a question of confidence.” There was no answer to this and presently she asked, “When do you propose to take her?”

“As soon as I can get a governess. I hoped the day after tomorrow.”

“That’s impossible. I’ve got to get her things in shape. Not before Saturday.”

He yielded. Coming back into the room, Lincoln offered him a drink.

“I’ll take my daily whisky,” he said.

It was warm here, it was a home, people together by a fire. The children felt very safe and important; the mother and father were serious, watchful. They had things to do for the children more important than his visit here. A spoonful of medicine was, after all, more important than the strained relations between Marion and himself. They were not dull people, but they were very much in the grip of life and circumstances. He wondered if he couldn’t do something to get Lincoln out of his rut at the bank.

A long peal at the door-bell; the bonne à tout faire passed through and went down the corridor. The door opened upon another long ring, and then voices, and the three in the salon looked up expectantly; Lincoln moved to bring the corridor within his range of vision, and Marion rose. Then the maid came back along the corridor, closely followed by the voices, which developed under the light into Duncan Schaeffer and Lorraine Quarrles.

They were gay, they were hilarious, they were roaring with laughter. For a moment Charlie was astounded; unable to understand how they ferreted out the Peters’ address.

“Ah-h-h!” Duncan wagged his finger roguishly at Charlie. “Ah-h-h!”

They both slid down another cascade of laughter. Anxious and at a loss, Charlie shook hands with them quickly and presented them to Lincoln and Marion. Marion nodded, scarcely speaking. She had drawn back a step toward the fire; her little girl stood beside her, and Marion put an arm about her shoulder.

With growing annoyance at the intrusion, Charlie waited for them to explain themselves. After some concentration Duncan said:

“We came to invite you out to dinner. Lorraine and I insist that all this shishi, cagy business ‘bout your address got to stop.”

Charlie came closer to them, as if to force them backward down the corridor.

“Sorry, but I can’t. Tell me where you’ll be and I’ll phone you in half an hour.”

This made no impression. Lorraine sat down suddenly on the side of a chair, and focussing her eyes on Richard, cried, “Oh, what a nice little boy! Come here, little boy.” Richard glanced at his mother, but did not move. With a perceptible shrug of her shoulders, Lorraine turned back to Charlie:

“Come and dine. Sure your cousins won’ mine. See you so sel’om. Or solemn.”

“I can’t,” said Charlie sharply. “You two have dinner and I’ll phone you.”

Her voice became suddenly unpleasant. “All right, we’ll go. But I remember once when you hammered on my door at four A.M. I was enough of a good sport to give you a drink. Come on, Dunc.”

Still in slow motion, with blurred, angry faces, with uncertain feet, they retired along the corridor.

“Good night,” Charlie said.

“Good night!” responded Lorraine emphatically.

When he went back into the salon Marion had not moved, only now her son was standing in the circle of her other arm. Lincoln was still swinging Honoria back and forth like a pendulum from side to side.

“What an outrage!” Charlie broke out. “What an absolute outrage!” Neither of them answered. Charlie dropped into an armchair, picked up his drink, set it down again and said:

“People I haven’t seen for two years having the colossal nerve--”

He broke off. Marion had made the sound “Oh!” in one swift, furious breath, turned her body from him with a jerk and left the room.

Lincoln set down Honoria carefully.

“You children go in and start your soup,” he said, and when they obeyed, he said to Charlie:

“Marion’s not well and she can’t stand shocks. That kind of people make her really physically sick.”

“I didn’t tell them to come here. They wormed your name out of somebody. They deliberately--”

“Well, it’s too bad. It doesn’t help matters. Excuse me a minute.”

Left alone, Charlie sat tense in his chair. In the next room he could hear the children eating, talking in monosyllables, already oblivious to the scene between their elders. He heard a murmur of conversation from a farther room and then the ticking bell of a telephone receiver picked up, and in a panic he moved to the other side of the room and out of earshot.

In a minute Lincoln came back. “Look here, Charlie. I think we’d better call off dinner for tonight. Marion’s in bad shape.”

“Is she angry with me?”

“Sort of,” he said, almost roughly. “She’s not strong and--”

“You mean she’s changed her mind about Honoria?”

“She’s pretty bitter right now. I don’t know. You phone me at the bank tomorrow.”

“I wish you’d explain to her I never dreamed these people would come here. I’m just as sore as you are.”

“I couldn’t explain anything to her now.”

Charlie got up. He took his coat and hat and started down the corridor. Then he opened the door of the dining room and said in a strange voice, “Good night, children.”

Honoria rose and ran around the table to hug him.

“Good night, sweetheart,” he said vaguely, and then trying to make his voice more tender, trying to conciliate something, “Good night, dear children.”

V

Charlie went directly to the Ritz bar with the furious idea of finding Lorraine and Duncan, but they were not there, and he realized that in any case there was nothing he could do. He had not touched his drink at the Peters’, and now he ordered a whisky-and-soda. Paul came over to say hello.

“It’s a great change,” he said sadly. “We do about half the business we did. So many fellows I hear about back in the States lost everything, maybe not in the first crash, but then in the second. Your friend George Hardt lost every cent, I hear. Are you back in the States?”

“No, I’m in business in Prague.”

“I heard that you lost a lot in the crash.”

“I did,” and he added grimly, “but I lost everything I wanted in the boom.”

“Selling short.”

“Something like that.”

Again the memory of those days swept over him like a nightmare--the people they had met travelling; then people who couldn’t add a row of figures or speak a coherent sentence. The little man Helen had consented to dance with at the ship’s party, who had insulted her ten feet from the table; the women and girls carried screaming with drink or drugs out of public places--

--The men who locked their wives out in the snow, because the snow of twenty-nine wasn’t real snow. If you didn’t want it to be snow, you just paid some money.

He went to the phone and called the Peters’ apartment; Lincoln answered.

“I called up because this thing is on my mind. Has Marion said anything definite?”

“Marion’s sick,” Lincoln answered shortly. “I know this thing isn’t altogether your fault, but I can’t have her go to pieces about it. I’m afraid we’ll have to let it slide for six months; I can’t take the chance of working her up to this state again.”

“I see.”

“I’m sorry, Charlie.”

He went back to his table. His whisky glass was empty, but he shook his head when Alix looked at it questioningly. There wasn’t much he could do now except send Honoria some things; he would send her a lot of things tomorrow. He thought rather angrily that this was just money--he had given so many people money. . . .

“No, no more,” he said to another waiter. “What do I owe you?”

He would come back some day; they couldn’t make him pay forever. But he wanted his child, and nothing was much good now, beside that fact. He wasn’t young any more, with a lot of nice thoughts and dreams to have by himself. He was absolutely sure Helen wouldn’t have wanted him to be so alone.

THE PAT HOBBY STORIES

The 17 short stories in this collection were first published by Arnold Gingrich of Esquire magazine between January 1940 and May 1941, and later collected in a volume in 1962.  The last installments in Esquire were published posthumously, as Fitzgerald passed away in 1940.

The tales concern Pat Hobby, a down-and-out screenwriter in Hollywood, who was once successful in the silent age of cinema, but now reduced to an alcoholic hack plaguing the studio lot.  Many of the stories are based on Fitzgerald’s own experiences in Hollywood as a screenwriter.

Scott and his wife Zelda, mid 1920s

CONTENTS

PAT HOBBY’S CHRISTMAS WISH

A MAN IN THE WAY

“BOIL SOME WATER--LOTS OF IT”

TEAMED WITH GENIUS

PAT HOBBY AND ORSON WELLES

PAT HOBBY’S SECRET

PAT HOBBY, PUTATIVE FATHER

THE HOMES OF THE STARS

PAT HOBBY DOES HIS BIT

PAT HOBBY’S PREVIEW

NO HARM TRYING

A PATRIOTIC SHORT

ON THE TRAIL OF PAT HOBBY

FUN IN AN ARTIST’S STUDIO

TWO OLD-TIMERS

MIGHTIER THAN THE SWORD

PAT HOBBY’S COLLEGE DAYS

PAT HOBBY’S CHRISTMAS WISH

Esquire (January 1940)

I

It was Christmas Eve in the studio. By eleven o’clock in the morning, Santa Claus had called on most of the huge population according to each one’s deserts.

Sumptuous gifts from producers to stars, and from agents to producers arrived at offices and studio bungalows: on every stage one heard of the roguish gifts of casts to directors or directors to casts; champagne had gone out from publicity office to the press. And tips of fifties, tens and fives from producers, directors and writers fell like manna upon the white collar class.

In this sort of transaction there were exceptions. Pat Hobby, for example, who knew the game from twenty years’ experience, had had the idea of getting rid of his secretary the day before. They were sending over a new one any minute--but she would scarcely expect a present the first day.

Waiting for her, he walked the corridor, glancing into open offices for signs of life. He stopped to chat with Joe Hopper from the scenario department.

‘Not like the old days,’ he mourned, ‘Then there was a bottle on every desk.’

‘There’re a few around.’

‘Not many.’ Pat sighed. ‘And afterwards we’d run a picture--made up out of cutting-room scraps.’

‘I’ve heard. All the suppressed stuff,’ said Hopper.

Pat nodded, his eyes glistening.

‘Oh, it was juicy. You darned near ripped your guts laughing--’

He broke off as the sight of a woman, pad in hand, entering his office down the hall recalled him to the sorry present.

‘Gooddorf has me working over the holiday,’ he complained bitterly.

‘I wouldn’t do it.’

‘I wouldn’t either except my four weeks are up next Friday, and if I bucked him he wouldn’t extend me.’

As he turned away Hopper knew that Pat was not being extended anyhow. He had been hired to script an old-fashioned horse-opera and the boys who were ‘writing behind him’--that is working over his stuff--said that all of it was old and some didn’t make sense.

‘I’m Miss Kagle,’ said Pat’s new secretary.

She was about thirty-six, handsome, faded, tired, efficient. She went to the typewriter, examined it, sat down and burst into sobs.

Pat started. Self-control, from below anyhow, was the rule around here. Wasn’t it bad enough to be working on Christmas Eve? Well--less bad than not working at all. He walked over and shut the door--someone might suspect him of insulting the girl.

‘Cheer up,’ he advised her. ‘This is Christmas.’

Her burst of emotion had died away. She sat upright now, choking and wiping her eyes.

‘Nothing’s as bad as it seems,’ he assured her unconvincingly. ‘What’s it, anyhow? They going to lay you off?’

She shook her head, did a sniffle to end sniffles, and opened her note book.

‘Who you been working for?’

She answered between suddenly gritted teeth.

‘Mr Harry Gooddorf.’

Pat widened his permanently bloodshot eyes. Now he remembered he had seen her in Harry’s outer office,

‘Since 1921. Eighteen years. And yesterday he sent me back to the department. He said I depressed him--I reminded him he was getting on.’ Her face was grim. ‘That isn’t the way he talked after hours eighteen years ago.’

‘Yeah, he was a skirt chaser then,’ said Pat.

‘I should have done something then when I had the chance.’

Pat felt righteous stirrings.

‘Breach of promise? That’s no angle!’

‘But I had something to clinch it. Something bigger than breach of promise. I still have too. But then, you see, I thought I was in love with him.’ She brooded for a moment. ‘Do you want to dictate something now?’

Pat remembered his job and opened a script.

‘It’s an insert,’ he began, ‘Scene 114A.’

Pat paced the office.

‘Ext. Long Shot of the Plains,’ he decreed. ‘Buck and Mexicans approaching the hyacenda.’

‘The what?’

‘The hyacenda--the ranch house.’ He looked at her reproachfully, ‘114 B. Two Shot: Buck and Pedro. Buck: “The dirty son-of-a-bitch. I’ll tear his guts out!”‘

Miss Kagle looked up, startled.

‘You want me to write that down?’

‘Sure.’

‘It won’t get by.’

‘I’m writing this. Of course, it won’t get by. But if I put “you rat” the scene won’t have any force.’

‘But won’t somebody have to change it to “you rat”?’

He glared at her--he didn’t want to change secretaries every day.

‘Harry Gooddorf can worry about that.’

‘Are you working for Mr Gooddorf?’ Miss Kagle asked in alarm.

‘Until he throws me out.’

‘I shouldn’t have said--’

‘Don’t worry,’ he assured her. ‘He’s no pal of mine anymore. Not at three-fifty a week, when I used to get two thousand . . . Where was I?’

He paced the floor again, repeating his last line aloud with relish. But now it seemed to apply not to a personage of the story but to Harry Gooddorf. Suddenly he stood still, lost in thought. ‘Say, what is it you got on him? You know where the body is buried?’

‘That’s too true to be funny.’

‘He knock somebody off?’

‘Mr Hobby, I’m sorry I ever opened my mouth.’

‘Just call me Pat. What’s your first name?’

‘Helen.’

‘Married?’

‘Not now.’

‘Well, listen Helen: What do you say we have dinner?’

II

On the afternoon of Christmas Day he was still trying to get the secret out of her. They had the studio almost to themselves--only a skeleton staff of technical men dotted the walks and the commissary. They had exchanged Christmas presents. Pat gave her a five dollar bill, Helen bought him a white linen handkerchief. Very well he could remember the day when many dozen such handkerchiefs had been his Christmas harvest.

The script was progressing at a snail’s pace but their friendship had considerably ripened. Her secret, he considered, was a very valuable asset, and he wondered how many careers had turned on just such an asset. Some, he felt sure, had been thus raised to affluence. Why, it was almost as good as being in the family, and he pictured an imaginary conversation with Harry Gooddorf.

‘Harry, it’s this way. I don’t think my experience is being made use of. It’s the young squirts who ought to do the writing--I ought to do more supervising.’

‘Or--?’

‘Or else,’ said Pat firmly.

He was in the midst of his day dream when Harry Gooddorf unexpectedly walked in.

‘Merry Christmas, Pat,’ he said jovially. His smile was less robust when he saw Helen, ‘Oh, hello Helen--didn’t know you and Pat had got together. I sent you a remembrance over to the script department.’

‘You shouldn’t have done that.’

Harry turned swiftly to Pat.

‘The boss is on my neck,’ he said. ‘I’ve got to have a finished script Thursday.’

‘Well, here I am,’ said Pat. ‘You’ll have it. Did I ever fail you?’

‘Usually,’ said Harry. ‘Usually.’

He seemed about to add more when a call boy entered with an envelope and handed it to Helen Kagle--whereupon Harry turned and hurried out.

‘He’d better get out!’ burst forth Miss Kagle, after opening the envelope. ‘Ten bucks--just ten bucks--from an executive--after eighteen years.’

It was Pat’s chance. Sitting on her desk he told her his plan.

‘It’s soft jobs for you and me,’ he said. ‘You the head of a script department, me an associate producer. We’re on the gravy train for life--no more writing--no more pounding the keys. We might even--we might even--if things go good we could get married.’

She hesitated a long time. When she put a fresh sheet in the typewriter Pat feared he had lost.

‘I can write it from memory,’ she said. ‘This was a letter he typed himself on February 3rd, 1921. He sealed it and gave it to me to mail--but there was a blonde he was interested in, and I wondered why he should be so secret about a letter.’

Helen had been typing as she talked, and now she handed Pat a note.

To Will Bronson

First National Studios

Personal

Dear Bill:

We killed Taylor. We should have cracked down on him sooner. So why not shut up.

Yours, Harry

‘Get it?’ Helen said. ‘On February 1st, 1921, somebody knocked off William Desmond Taylor, the director. And they’ve never found out who.’

III

For eighteen years she had kept the original note, envelope and all. She had sent only a copy to Bronson, tracing Harry Gooddorf’s signature.

‘Baby, we’re set!’ said Pat. ‘I always thought it was a girl got Taylor.’

He was so elated that he opened a drawer and brought forth a half-pint of whiskey. Then, with an afterthought, he demanded:

‘Is it in a safe place?’

‘You bet it is. He’d never guess where.’

‘Baby, we’ve got him!’

Cash, cars, girls, swimming pools swam in a glittering montage before Pat’s eye.

He folded the note, put it in his pocket, took another drink and reached for his hat.

‘You going to see him now?’ Helen demanded in some alarm. ‘Hey, wait till I get off the lot. I don’t want to get murdered.’

‘Don’t worry! Listen I’ll meet you in “the Muncherie” at Fifth and La Brea--in one hour.’

As he walked to Gooddorf’s office he decided to mention no facts or names within the walls of the studio. Back in the brief period when he had headed a scenario department Pat had conceived a plan to put a dictaphone in every writer’s office. Thus their loyalty to the studio executives could be checked several times a day.

The idea had been laughed at. But later, when he had been ‘reduced back to a writer’, he often wondered if his plan was secretly followed. Perhaps some indiscreet remark of his own was responsible for the doghouse where he had been interred for the past decade. So it was with the idea of concealed dictaphones in mind, dictaphones which could be turned on by the pressure of a toe, that he entered Harry Gooddorf’s office.

‘Harry--’ he chose his words carefully, ‘do you remember the night of February 1st, 1921?’

Somewhat flabbergasted, Gooddorf leaned back in his swivel chair.

‘What?’

‘Try and think. It’s something very important to you.’

Pat’s expression as he watched his friend was that of an anxious undertaker.

‘February 1st, 1921.’ Gooddorf mused. ‘No. How could I remember? You think I keep a diary? I don’t even know where I was then.’

‘You were right here in Hollywood.’

‘Probably. If you know, tell me.’

‘You’ll remember.’

‘Let’s see. I came out to the coast in sixteen. I was with Biograph till 1920. Was I making some comedies? That’s it. I was making a piece called Knuckleduster--on location.’

‘You weren’t always on location. You were in town February 1st.’

‘What is this?’ Gooddorf demanded. ‘The third degree?’

‘No--but I’ve got some information about your doings on that date.’

Gooddorf’s face reddened; for a moment it looked as if he were going to throw Pat out of the room--then suddenly he gasped, licked his lips and stared at his desk.

‘Oh,’ he said, and after a minute: ‘But I don’t see what business it is of yours.’

‘It’s the business of every decent man.’

‘Since when have you been decent?’

‘All my life,’ said Pat. ‘And, even if I haven’t, I never did anything like that.’

‘My foot!’ said Harry contemptuously. ‘You showing up here with a halo! Anyhow, what’s the evidence? You’d think you had a written confession. It’s all forgotten long ago.’

‘Not in the memory of decent men,’ said Pat. ‘And as for a written confession--I’ve got it.’

‘I doubt you. And I doubt if it would stand in any court. You’ve been taken in.’

‘I’ve seen it,’ said Pat with growing confidence. ‘And it’s enough to hang you.’

‘Well, by God, if there’s any publicity I’ll run you out of town.’

‘You’ll run me out of town.’

‘I don’t want any publicity.’

‘Then I think you’d better come along with me. Without talking to anybody.’

‘Where are we going?’

‘I know a bar where we can be alone.’

The Muncherie was in fact deserted, save for the bartender and Helen Kagle who sat at a table, jumpy with alarm. Seeing her, Gooddorf’s expression changed to one of infinite reproach.

‘This is a hell of a Christmas,’ he said, ‘with my family expecting me home an hour ago. I want to know the idea. You say you’ve got something in my writing.’

Pat took the paper from his pocket and read the date aloud. Then he looked up hastily:

‘This is just a copy, so don’t try and snatch it.’

He knew the technique of such scenes as this. When the vogue for Westerns had temporarily subsided he had sweated over many an orgy of crime.

‘To William Bronson, Dear Bill: We killed Taylor. We should have cracked down on him sooner. So why not shut up. Yours, Harry.’

Pat paused. ‘You wrote this on February 3rd, 1921.’

Silence. Gooddorf turned to Helen Kagle.

‘Did you do this? Did I dictate that to you?’

‘No,’ she admitted in an awed voice. ‘You wrote it yourself. I opened the letter.’

‘I see. Well, what do you want?’

‘Plenty,’ said Pat, and found himself pleased with the sound of the word.

‘What exactly?’

Pat launched into the description of a career suitable to a man of forty-nine. A glowing career. It expanded rapidly in beauty and power during the time it took him to drink three large whiskeys. But one demand he returned to again and again.

He wanted to be made a producer tomorrow.

‘Why tomorrow?’ demanded Gooddorf. ‘Can’t it wait?’

There were sudden tears in Pat’s eyes--real tears.

‘This is Christmas,’ he said. ‘It’s my Christmas wish. I’ve had a hell of a time. I’ve waited so long.’

Gooddorf got to his feet suddenly.

‘Nope,’ he said. ‘I won’t make you a producer. I couldn’t do it in fairness to the company. I’d rather stand trial.’

Pat’s mouth fell open.

‘What? You won’t?’

‘Not a chance. I’d rather swing.’

He turned away, his face set, and started toward the door.

‘All right!’ Pat called after him. ‘It’s your last chance.’

Suddenly he was amazed to see Helen Kagle spring up and run after Gooddorf--try to throw her arms around him.

‘Don’t worry!’ she cried. ‘I’ll tear it up, Harry! It was a joke Harry--’

Her voice trailed off rather abruptly. She had discovered that Gooddorf was shaking with laughter.

‘What’s the joke?’ she demanded, growing angry again. ‘Do you think I haven’t got it?’

‘Oh, you’ve got it all right,’ Gooddorf howled. ‘You’ve got it--but it isn’t what you think it is.’

He came back to the table, sat down and addressed Pat.

‘Do you know what I thought that date meant? I thought maybe it was the date Helen and I first fell for each other. That’s what I thought. And I thought she was going to raise Cain about it. I thought she was nuts. She’s been married twice since then, and so have I.’

‘That doesn’t explain the note,’ said Pat sternly but with a sinky feeling. ‘You admit you killed Taylor.’

Gooddorf nodded.

‘I still think a lot of us did,’ he said. ‘We were a wild crowd--Taylor and Bronson and me and half the boys in the big money. So a bunch of us got together in an agreement to go slow. The country was waiting for somebody to hang. We tried to get Taylor to watch his step but he wouldn’t. So instead of cracking down on him, we let him “go the pace”. And some rat shot him--who did it I don’t know.’

He stood up.

‘Like somebody should have cracked down on you, Pat. But you were an amusing guy in those days, and besides we were all too busy.’

Pat sniffled suddenly.

‘I’ve been cracked down on,’ he said. ‘Plenty.’

‘But too late,’ said Gooddorf, and added, ‘you’ve probably got a new Christmas wish by now, and I’ll grant it to you. I won’t say anything about this afternoon.’

When he had gone, Pat and Helen sat in silence. Presently Pat took out the note again and looked it over.

‘“So why not shut up?”‘ he read aloud. ‘He didn’t explain that.’

‘Why not shut up?’ Helen said.

A MAN IN THE WAY

Esquire (February 1940)

I

Pat Hobby could always get on the lot. He had worked there fifteen years on and off--chiefly off during the past five--and most of the studio police knew him. If tough customers on watch asked to see his studio card he could get in by phoning Lou, the bookie. For Lou also, the studio had been home for many years.

Pat was forty-nine. He was a writer but he had never written much, nor even read all the ‘originals’ he worked from, because it made his head bang to read much. But the good old silent days you got somebody’s plot and a smart secretary and gulped benzedrine ‘structure’ at her six or eight hours every week. The director took care of the gags. After talkies came he always teamed up with some man who wrote dialogue. Some young man who liked to work.

‘I’ve got a list of credits second to none,’ he told Jack Berners. ‘All I need is an idea and to work with somebody who isn’t all wet.’

He had buttonholed Jack outside the production office as Jack was going to lunch and they walked together in the direction of the commissary.

‘You bring me an idea,’ said Jack Berners. ‘Things are tight. We can’t put a man on salary unless he’s got an idea.’

‘How can you get ideas off salary?’ Pat demanded--then he added hastily: ‘Anyhow I got the germ of an idea that I could be telling you all about at lunch.’

Something might come to him at lunch. There was Baer’s notion about the boy scout. But Jack said cheerfully:

‘I’ve got a date for lunch, Pat. Write it out and send it around, eh?’

He felt cruel because he knew Pat couldn’t write anything out but he was having story trouble himself. The war had just broken out and every producer on the lot wanted to end their current stories with the hero going to war. And Jack Berners felt he had thought of that first for his production.

‘So write it out, eh?’

When Pat didn’t answer Jack looked at him--he saw a sort of whipped misery in Pat’s eye that reminded him of his own father. Pat had been in the money before Jack was out of college--with three cars and a chicken over every garage. Now his clothes looked as if he’d been standing at Hollywood and Vine for three years.

‘Scout around and talk to some of the writers on the lot,’ he said. ‘If you can get one of them interested in your idea, bring him up to see me.’

‘I hate to give an idea without money on the line,’ Pat brooded pessimistically, ‘These young squirts’ll lift the shirt off your back.’

They had reached the commissary door.

‘Good luck, Pat. Anyhow we’re not in Poland.’

--Good you’re not, said Pat under his breath. They’d slit your gizzard.

Now what to do? He went up and wandered along the cell block of writers. Almost everyone had gone to lunch and those who were in he didn’t know. Always there were more and more unfamiliar faces. And he had thirty credits; he had been in the business, publicity and script-writing, for twenty years.

The last door in the line belonged to a man he didn’t like. But he wanted a place to sit a minute so with a knock he pushed it open. The man wasn’t there--only a very pretty, frail-looking girl sat reading a book.

‘I think he’s left Hollywood,’ she said in answer to his question. ‘They gave me his office but they forgot to put up my name.’

‘You a writer?’ Pat asked in surprise.

‘I work at it.’

‘You ought to get ‘em to give you a test.’

‘No--I like writing.’

‘What’s that you’re reading.’

She showed him.

‘Let me give you a tip,’ he said. ‘That’s not the way to get the guts out of a book.’

‘Oh.’

‘I’ve been here for years--I’m Pat Hobby--and I know. Give the book to four of your friends to read it. Get them to tell you what stuck in their minds. Write it down and you’ve got a picture--see?’

The girl smiled.

‘Well, that’s very--very original advice, Mr Hobby.’

‘Pat Hobby,’ he said. ‘Can I wait here a minute? Man I came to see is at lunch.’

He sat down across from her and picked up a copy of a photo magazine.

‘Oh, just let me mark that,’ she said quickly.

He looked at the page which she checked. It showed paintings being boxed and carted away to safety from an art gallery in Europe.

‘How’ll you use it?’ he said.

‘Well, I thought it would be dramatic if there was an old man around while they were packing the pictures. A poor old man, trying to get a job helping them. But they can’t use him--he’s in the way--not even good cannon fodder. They want strong young people in the world. And it turns out he’s the man who painted the pictures many years ago.’

Pat considered.

‘It’s good but I don’t get it,’ he said.

‘Oh, it’s nothing, a short short maybe.’

‘Got any good picture ideas? I’m in with all the markets here.’

‘I’m under contract.’

‘Use another name.’

Her phone rang.

‘Yes, this is Pricilla Smith,’ the girl said.

After a minute she turned to Pat.

‘Will you excuse me? This is a private call.’

He got it and walked out, and along the corridor. Finding an office with no name on it he went in and fell asleep on the couch.

II

Late that afternoon he returned to Jack Berners’ waiting rooms. He had an idea about a man who meets a girl in an office and he thinks she’s a stenographer but she turns out to be a writer. He engages her as a stenographer, though, and they start for the South Seas. It was a beginning, it was something to tell Jack, he thought--and, picturing Pricilla Smith, he refurbished some old business he hadn’t seen used for years.

He became quite excited about it--felt quite young for a moment and walked up and down the waiting room mentally rehearsing the first sequence. ‘So here we have a situation like It Happened One Night--only new. I see Hedy Lamarr--’

Oh, he knew how to talk to these boys if he could get to them, with something to say.

‘Mr Berners still busy?’ he asked for the fifth time.

‘Oh, yes, Mr Hobby. Mr Bill Costello and Mr Bach are in there.’

He thought quickly. It was half-past five. In the old days he had just busted in sometimes and sold an idea, an idea good for a couple of grand because it was just the moment when they were very tired of what they were doing at present.

He walked innocently out and to another door in the hall. He knew it led through a bathroom right in to Jack Berners’ office. Drawing a quick breath he plunged . . .

‘. . . So that’s the notion,’ he concluded after five minutes. ‘It’s just a flash--nothing really worked out, but you could give me an office and a girl and I could have something on paper for you in three days.’

Berners, Costello and Bach did not even have to look at each other. Berners spoke for them all as he said firmly and gently:

‘That’s no idea, Pat. I can’t put you on salary for that.’

‘Why don’t you work it out further by yourself,’ suggested Bill Costello. ‘And then let’s see it. We’re looking for ideas--especially about the war.’

‘A man can think better on salary,’ said Pat.

There was silence. Costello and Bach had drunk with him, played poker with him, gone to the races with him. They’d honestly be glad to see him placed.

‘The war, eh,’ he said gloomily. ‘Everything is war now, no matter how many credits a man has. Do you know what it makes me think of? It makes me think of a well-known painter in the discard. It’s war time and he’s useless--just a man in the way.’ He warmed to his conception of himself, ‘--but all the time they’re carting away his own paintings as the most valuable thing worth saving. And they won’t even let me help. That’s what it reminds me of.’

There was again silence for a moment.

‘That isn’t a bad idea,’ said Bach thoughtfully. He turned to the others. ‘You know? In itself?’

Bill Costello nodded

‘Not bad at all. And I know where we could spot it. Right at the end of the fourth sequence. We just change old Ames to a painter.’

Presently they talked money.

‘I’ll give you two weeks on it,’ said Berners to Pat. ‘At two-fifty.’

‘Two-fifty!’ objected Pat. ‘Say there was one time you paid me ten times that!’

‘That was ten years ago,’ Jack reminded him. ‘Sorry. Best we can do now.’

‘You make me feel like that old painter--’

‘Don’t oversell it,’ said Jack, rising and smiling. ‘You’re on the payroll.’

Pat went out with a quick step and confidence in his eyes. Half a grand--that would take the pressure off for a month and you could often stretch two weeks into three--sometimes four. He left the studio proudly through the front entrance, stopping at the liquor store for a half-pint to take back to his room.

By seven o’clock things were even better. Santa Anita tomorrow, if he could get an advance. And tonight--something festive ought to be done tonight. With a sudden rush of pleasure he went down to the phone in the lower hall, called the studio and asked for Miss Pricilla Smith’s number. He hadn’t met anyone so pretty for years . . .

In her apartment Pricilla Smith spoke rather firmly into the phone.

‘I’m awfully sorry,’ she said, ‘but I couldn’t possibly . . . No--and I’m tied up all the rest of the week.’

As she hung up, Jack Berners spoke from the couch.

‘Who was it?’

‘Oh, some man who came in the office,’ she laughed, ‘and told me never to read the story I was working on.’

‘Shall I believe you?’

‘You certainly shall. I’ll even think of his name in a minute. But first I want to tell you about an idea I had this morning. I was looking at a photo in a magazine where they were packing up some works of art in the Tate Gallery in London. And I thought--’

“BOIL SOME WATER--LOTS OF IT”

Esquire (March 1940)

Pat Hobby sat in his office in the writers’ building and looked at his morning’s work, just come back from the script department. He was on a “polish job,” about the only kind he ever got nowadays. He was to repair a messy sequence in a hurry, but the word “hurry” neither frightened nor inspired him for Pat had been in Hollywood since he was thirty--now he was forty-nine. All the work he had done this morning (except a little changing around of lines so he could claim them as his own)--all he had actually invented was a single imperative sentence, spoken by a doctor.

“Boil some water--lots of it.”

It was a good line. It had sprung into his mind full grown as soon as he had read the script. In the old silent days Pat would have used it as a spoken title and ended his dialogue worries for a space, but he needed some spoken words for other people in the scene. Nothing came.

“Boil some water,” he repeated to himself. “Lots of it.”

The word boil brought a quick glad thought of the commissary. A reverent thought too--for an old-timer like Pat, what people you sat with at lunch was more important in getting along than what you dictated in your office. This was no art, as he often said--this was an industry.

“This is no art,” he remarked to Max Learn who was leisurely drinking at a corridor water cooler. “This is an industry.”

Max had flung him this timely bone of three weeks at three-fifty.

“Say look, Pat! Have you got anything down on paper yet?”

“Say I’ve got some stuff already that’ll make ‘em--” He named a familiar biological function with the somewhat startling assurance that it would take place in the theater.

Max tried to gauge his sincerity.

“Want to read it to me now?” he asked.

“Not yet. But it’s got the old guts if you know what I mean.”

Max was full of doubts.

“Well, go to it. And if you run into any medical snags check with the doctor over at the First Aid Station. It’s got to be right.”

The spirit of Pasteur shone firmly in Pat’s eyes.

“It will be.”

He felt good walking across the lot with Max--so good that he decided to glue himself to the producer and sit down with him at the Big Table. But Max foiled his intention by cooing “See you later” and slipping into the barber shop.

Once Pat had been a familiar figure at the Big Table; often in his golden prime he had dined in the private canteens of executives. Being of the older Hollywood he understood their jokes, their vanities, their social system with its swift fluctuations. But there were too many new faces at the Big Table now--faces that looked at him with the universal Hollywood suspicion. And at the little tables where the young writers sat they seemed to take work so seriously. As for just sitting down anywhere, even with secretaries or extras--Pat would rather catch a sandwich at the corner.

Detouring to the Red Cross Station he asked for the doctor. A girl, a nurse, answered from a wall mirror where she was hastily drawing her lips, “He’s out. What is it?”

“Oh. Then I’ll come back.”

She had finished, and now she turned--vivid and young and with a bright consoling smile.

“Miss Stacey will help you. I’m about to go to lunch.”

He was aware of an old, old feeling--left over from the time when he had had wives--a feeling that to invite this little beauty to lunch might cause trouble. But he remembered quickly that he didn’t have any wives now--they had both given up asking for alimony.

“I’m working on a medical,” he said. “I need some help.”

“A medical?”

“Writing it--idea about a doc. Listen--let me buy you lunch. I want to ask you some medical questions.”

The nurse hesitated.

“I don’t know. It’s my first day out here.”

“It’s all right,” he assured her, “studios are democratic; everybody is just ‘Joe’ or ‘Mary’--from the big shots right down to the prop boys.”

He proved it magnificently on their way to lunch by greeting a male star and getting his own name back in return. And in the commissary, where they were placed hard by the Big Table, his producer, Max Leam, looked up, did a little “takem” and winked.

The nurse--her name was Helen Earle--peered about eagerly.

“I don’t see anybody,” she said. “Except oh, there’s Ronald Colman. I didn’t know Ronald Colman looked like that.”

Pat pointed suddenly to the floor.

“And there’s Mickey Mouse!”

She jumped and Pat laughed at his joke--but Helen Earle was already staring starry-eyed at the costume extras who filled the hall with the colors of the First Empire. Pat was piqued to see her interest go out to these nonentities.

“The big shots are at this next table,” he said solemnly, wistfully, “directors and all except the biggest executives. They could have Ronald Colman pressing pants. I usually sit over there but they don’t want ladies. At lunch, that is, they don’t want ladies.”

“Oh,” said Helen Earle, polite but unimpressed. “It must be wonderful to be a writer too. It’s so very interesting.”

“It has its points,” he said . . . he had thought for years it was a dog’s life.

“What is it you want to ask me about a doctor?”

Here was toil again. Something in Pat’s mind snapped off when he thought of the story.

“Well, Max Leam--that man facing us--Max Leam and I have a script about a Doc. You know? Like a hospital picture?”

“I know.” And she added after a moment, “That’s the reason that I went in training.”

“And we’ve got to have it right because a hundred million people would check on it. So this doctor in the script he tells them to boil some water. He says, ‘Boil some water--lots of it.’ And we were wondering what the people would do then.”

“Why--they’d probably boil it,” Helen said, and then, somewhat confused by the question, “What people?”

“Well, somebody’s daughter and the man that lived there and an attorney and the man that was hurt.”

Helen tried to digest this before answering.

“--and some other guy I’m going to cut out,” he finished.

There was a pause. The waitress set down tuna fish sandwiches.

“Well, when a doctor gives orders they’re orders,” Helen decided.

“Hm.” Pat’s interest had wandered to an odd little scene at the Big Table while he inquired absently, “You married?”

“No.”

“Neither am I.”

Beside the Big Table stood an extra. A Russian Cossack with a fierce moustache. He stood resting his hand on the back of an empty chair between Director Paterson and Producer Leam.

“Is this taken?” he asked, with a thick Central European accent.

All along the Big Table faces stared suddenly at him. Until after the first look the supposition was that he must be some well-known actor. But he was not--he was dressed in one of the many-colored uniforms that dotted the room.

Someone at the table said: “That’s taken.” But the man drew out the chair and sat down.

“Got to eat somewhere,” he remarked with a grin.

A shiver went over the near-by tables. Pat Hobby stared with his mouth ajar. It was as if someone had crayoned Donald Duck into the Last Supper.

“Look at that,” he advised Helen. “What they’ll do to him! Boy!”

The flabbergasted silence at the Big Table was broken by Ned Harman, the Production Manager.

“This table is reserved,” he said.

The extra looked up from a menu.

“They told me sit anywhere.”

He beckoned a waitress--who hesitated, looking for an answer in the faces of her superiors.

“Extras don’t eat here,” said Max Leam, still politely. “This is a--”

“I got to eat,” said the Cossack doggedly. “I been standing around six hours while they shoot this stinking mess and now I got to eat.”

The silence had extended--from Pat’s angle all within range seemed to be poised in mid-air.

The extra shook his head wearily.

“I dunno who cooked it up--” he said--and Max Leam sat forward in his chair--”but it’s the lousiest tripe I ever seen shot in Hollywood.”

--At his table Pat was thinking why didn’t they do something? Knock him down, drag him away. If they were yellow themselves they could call the studio police.

“Who is that?” Helen Earle was following his eyes innocently, “Somebody I ought to know?”

He was listening attentively to Max Leam’s voice, raised in anger.

“Get up and get out of here, buddy, and get out quick!”

The extra frowned.

“Who’s telling me?” he demanded.

“You’ll see.” Max appealed to the table at large, “Where’s Cushman--where’s the Personnel man?”

“You try to move me,” said the extra, lifting the hilt of his scabbard above the level of the table, “and I’ll hang this on your ear. I know my rights.”

The dozen men at the table, representing a thousand dollars an hour in salaries, sat stunned. Far down by the door one of the studio police caught wind of what was happening and started to elbow through the crowded room. And Big Jack Wilson, another director, was on his feet in an instant coming around the table.

But they were too late--Pat Hobby could stand no more. He had jumped up, seizing a big heavy tray from the serving stand nearby. In two springs he reached the scene of action--lifting the tray he brought it down upon the extra’s head with all the strength of his forty-nine years. The extra, who had been in the act of rising to meet Wilson’s threatened assault, got the blow full on his face and temple and as he collapsed a dozen red streaks sprang into sight through the heavy grease paint. He crashed sideways between the chairs.

Pat stood over him panting--the tray in his hand.

“The dirty rat!” he cried. “Where does he think--”

The studio policeman pushed past; Wilson pushed past--two aghast men from another table rushed up to survey the situation.

“It was a gag!” one of them shouted. “That’s Walter Herrick, the writer. It’s his picture.”

“My God!”

“He was kidding Max Leam. It was a gag I tell you!”

“Pull him out . . . Get a doctor . . . Look out, there!”

Now Helen Earle hurried over; Walter Herrick was dragged out into a cleared space on the floor and there were yells of “Who did it?--Who beaned him?”

Pat let the tray lapse to a chair, its sound unnoticed in the confusion.

He saw Helen Earle working swiftly at the man’s head with a pile of clean napkins.

“Why did they have to do this to him?” someone shouted.

Pat caught Max Leam’s eye but Max happened to look away at the moment and a sense of injustice came over Pat. He alone in this crisis, real or imaginary, had acted. He alone had played the man, while those stuffed shirts let themselves be insulted and abused. And now he would have to take the rap--because Walter Herrick was powerful and popular, a three thousand a week man who wrote hit shows in New York. How could anyone have guessed that it was a gag?

There was a doctor now. Pat saw him say something to the manageress and her shrill voice sent the waitresses scattering like leaves toward the kitchen.

“Boil some water! Lots of it!”

The words fell wild and unreal on Pat’s burdened soul. But even though he now knew at first hand what came next, he did not think that he could go on from there.

TEAMED WITH GENIUS

Esquire (April 1940)

“I took a chance in sending for you,” said Jack Berners. “But there’s a job that you just may be able to help out with.”

Though Pat Hobby was not offended, either as man or writer, a formal protest was called for.

“I been in the industry fifteen years, Jack. I’ve got more screen credits than a dog has got fleas.”

“Maybe I chose the wrong word,” said Jack. “What I mean is, that was a long time ago. About money we’ll pay you just what Republic paid you last month--three-fifty a week. Now--did you ever hear of a writer named René Wilcox?”

The name was unfamiliar. Pat had scarcely opened a book in a decade.

“She’s pretty good,” he ventured.

“It’s a man, an English playwright. He’s only here in L. A. for his health. Well--we’ve had a Russian Ballet picture kicking around for a year--three bad scripts on it. So last week we signed up René Wilcox--he seemed just the person.”

Pat considered.

“You mean he’s--”

“I don’t know and I don’t care,” interrupted Berners sharply. “We think we can borrow Zorina, so we want to hurry things up--do a shooting script instead of just a treatment. Wilcox is inexperienced and that’s where you come in. You used to be a good man for structure.”

“Used to be!”

“All right, maybe you still are.” Jack beamed with momentary encouragement. “Find yourself an office and get together with René Wilcox.” As Pat started out he called him back and put a bill in his hand. “First of all, get a new hat. You used to be quite a boy around the secretaries in the old days. Don’t give up at forty-nine!”

Over in the Writers’ Building Pat glanced at the directory in the hall and knocked at the door of 216. No answer, but he went in to discover a blond, willowy youth of twenty-five staring moodily out the window.

“Hello, René!” Pat said. “I’m your partner.”

Wilcox’s regard questioned even his existence, but Pat continued heartily, “I hear we’re going to lick some stuff into shape. Ever collaborate before?”

“I have never written for the cinema before.”

While this increased Pat’s chance for a screen credit he badly needed, it meant that he might have to do some work. The very thought made him thirsty.

“This is different from playwriting,” he suggested, with suitable gravity.

“Yes--I read a book about it.”

Pat wanted to laugh. In 1928 he and another man had concocted such a sucker-trap, Secrets of Film Writing. It would have made money if pictures hadn’t started to talk.

“It all seems simple enough,” said Wilcox. Suddenly he took his hat from the rack. “I’ll be running along now.”

“Don’t you want to talk about the script?” demanded Pat. “What have you done so far?”

“I’ve not done anything,” said Wilcox deliberately. “That idiot, Berners, gave me some trash and told me to go on from there. But it’s too dismal.” His blue eyes narrowed. “I say, what’s a boom shot?”

“A boom shot? Why, that’s when the camera’s on a crane.”

Pat leaned over the desk and picked up a blue-jacketed “Treatment.” On the cover he read:

BALLET SHOES

A Treatment

by

Consuela Martin

An Original from an idea by Consuela Martin

Pat glanced at the beginning and then at the end.

“I’d like it better if we could get the war in somewhere,” he said frowning. “Have the dancer go as a Red Cross nurse and then she could get regenerated. See what I mean?”

There was no answer. Pat turned and saw the door softly closing.

What is this? he exclaimed. What kind of collaborating can a man do if he walks out? Wilcox had not even given the legitimate excuse--the races at Santa Anita!

The door opened again, a pretty girl’s face, rather frightened, showed itself momentarily, said “Oh,” and disappeared. Then it returned.

“Why it’s Mr. Hobby!” she exclaimed. “I was looking for Mr. Wilcox.”

He fumbled for her name but she supplied it.

“Katherine Hodge. I was your secretary when I worked here three years ago.”

Pat knew she had once worked with him, but for the moment could not remember whether there had been a deeper relation. It did not seem to him that it had been love--but looking at her now, that appeared rather too bad.

“Sit down,” said Pat. “You assigned to Wilcox?”

“I thought so--but he hasn’t given me any work yet.”

“I think he’s nuts,” Pat said gloomily. “He asked me what a boom shot was. Maybe he’s sick--that’s why he’s out here. He’ll probably start throwing up all over the office.”

“He’s well now,” Katherine ventured.

“He doesn’t look like it to me. Come on in my office. You can work for me this afternoon.”

Pat lay on his couch while Miss Katherine Hodge read the script of Ballet Shoes aloud to him. About midway in the second sequence he fell asleep with his new hat on his chest.

Except for the hat, that was the identical position in which he found René next day at eleven. And it was that way for three straight days--one was asleep or else the other--and sometimes both. On the fourth day they had several conferences in which Pat again put forward his idea about the war as a regenerating force for ballet dancers.

“Couldn’t we not talk about the war?” suggested René. “I have two brothers in the Guards.”

“You’re lucky to be here in Hollywood.”

“That’s as it may be.”

“Well, what’s your idea of the start of the picture?”

“I do not like the present beginning. It gives me an almost physical nausea.”

“So then, we got to have something in its place. That’s why I want to plant the war--”

“I’m late to luncheon,” said René Wilcox. “Good-bye, Mike.”

Pat grumbled to Katherine Hodge:

“He can call me anything he likes, but somebody’s got to write this picture. I’d go to Jack Berners and tell him--but I think we’d both be out on our ears.”

For two days more he camped in René’s office, trying to rouse him to action, but with no avail. Desperate on the following day--when the playwright did not even come to the studio--Pat took a benzedrine tablet and attacked the story alone. Pacing his office with the treatment in his hand he dictated to Katherine--interspersing the dictation with a short, biased history of his life in Hollywood. At the day’s end he had two pages of script.

The ensuing week was the toughest in his life--not even a moment to make a pass at Katherine Hodge. Gradually with many creaks, his battered hulk got in motion. Benzedrine and great drafts of coffee woke him in the morning, whiskey anesthetized him at night. Into his feet crept an old neuritis and as his nerves began to crackle he developed a hatred against René Wilcox, which served him as a sort of ersatz fuel. He was going to finish the script by himself and hand it to Berners with the statement that Wilcox had not contributed a single line.

But it was too much--Pat was too far gone. He blew up when he was half through and went on a twenty-four-hour bat--and next morning arrived back at the studio to find a message that Mr. Berners wanted to see the script at four. Pat was in a sick and confused state when his door opened and René Wilcox came in with a typescript in one hand, and a copy of Berners’ note in the other.

“It’s all right,” said Wilcox. “I’ve finished it.”

“What? Have you been working?”

“I always work at night.”

“What’ve you done? A treatment?”

“No, a shooting script. At first I was held back by personal worries, but once I got started it was very simple. You just get behind the camera and dream.”

Pat stood up aghast.

“But we were supposed to collaborate. Jack’ll be wild.”

“I’ve always worked alone,” said Wilcox gently. “I’ll explain to Berners this afternoon.”

Pat sat in a daze. If Wilcox’s script was good--but how could a first script be good? Wilcox should have fed it to him as he wrote; then they might have had something.

Fear started his mind working--he was struck by his first original idea since he had been on the job. He phoned to the script department for Katherine Hodge and when she came over told her what he wanted. Katherine hesitated.

“I just want to read it,” Pat said hastily. “If Wilcox is there you can’t take it, of course. But he just might be out.”

He waited nervously. In five minutes she was back with the script.

“It isn’t mimeographed or even bound,” she said.

He was at the typewriter, trembling as he picked out a letter with two fingers.

“Can I help?” she asked.

“Find me a plain envelope and a used stamp and some paste.”

Pat sealed the letter himself and then gave directions:

“Listen outside Wilcox’s office. If he’s in, push it under his door. If he’s out get a call boy to deliver it to him, wherever he is. Say it’s from the mail room. Then you better go off the lot for the afternoon. So he won’t catch on, see?”

As she went out Pat wished he had kept a copy of the note. He was proud of it--there was a ring of factual sincerity in it too often missing from his work.

“Dear Mr. Wilcox:

I am sorry to tell you your two brothers were killed in action today by a long range Tommy-gun. You are wanted at home in England right away.

John Smythe

The British Consulate, New York”

But Pat realized that this was no time for self-applause. He opened Wilcox’s script.

To his vast surprise it was technically proficient--the dissolves, fades, cuts, pans and trucking shots were correctly detailed. This simplified everything. Turning back to the first page he wrote at the top:

BALLET SHOES

First Revise

From Pat Hobby and René Wilcox--presently changing this to read: From René Wilcox and Pat Hobby.

Then, working frantically, he made several dozen small changes. He substituted the word “Scram!” for “Get out of my sight!”, he put “Behind the eight-ball” instead of “in trouble,” and replaced “you’ll be sorry” with the apt coinage “Or else!” Then he phoned the script department.

“This is Pat Hobby. I’ve been working on a script with René Wilcox, and Mr. Berners would like to have it mimeographed by half-past three.”

This would give him an hour’s start on his unconscious collaborator.

“Is it an emergency?”

“I’ll say.”

“We’ll have to split it up between several girls.”

Pat continued to improve the script till the call boy arrived. He wanted to put in his war idea but time was short--still, he finally told the call boy to sit down, while he wrote laboriously in pencil on the last page.

CLOSE SHOT: Boris and Rita

Rita: What does anything matter now! I have enlisted as a trained nurse in the war.

Boris: (moved) War purifies and regenerates!

(He puts his arms around her in a wild embrace as the music soars way up and we FADE OUT)

Limp and exhausted by his effort he needed a drink, so he left the lot and slipped cautiously into the bar across from the studio where he ordered gin and water.

With the glow, he thought warm thoughts. He had done almost what he had been hired to do--though his hand had accidentally fallen upon the dialogue rather than the structure. But how could Berners tell that the structure wasn’t Pat’s? Katherine Hodge would say nothing, for fear of implicating herself. They were all guilty but guiltiest of all was René Wilcox for refusing to play the game. Always, according to his lights, Pat had played the game.

He had another drink, bought breath tablets and for awhile amused himself at the nickel machine in the drugstore. Louie, the studio bookie, asked if he was interested in wagers on a bigger scale.

“Not today, Louie.”

“What are they paying you, Pat?”

“Thousand a week.”

“Not so bad.”

“Oh, a lot of us old-timers are coming back,” Pat prophesied. “In silent days was where you got real training--with directors shooting off the cuff and needing a gag in a split second. Now it’s a sis job. They got English teachers working in pictures! What do they know?”

“How about a little something on ‘Quaker Girl’?”

“No,” said Pat. “This afternoon I got an important angle to work on. I don’t want to worry about horses.”

At three-fifteen he returned to his office to find two copies of his script in bright new covers.

BALLET SHOES

from

René Wilcox and Pat Hobby

First Revise

It reassured him to see his name in type. As he waited in Jack Berners’ anteroom he almost wished he had reversed the names. With the right director this might be another It Happened One Night, and if he got his name on something like that it meant a three or four year gravy ride. But this time he’d save his money--go to Santa Anita only once a week--get himself a girl along the type of Katherine Hodge, who wouldn’t expect a mansion in Beverly Hills.

Berners’ secretary interrupted his reverie, telling him to go in. As he entered he saw with gratification that a copy of the new script lay on Berners’ desk.

“Did you ever--” asked Berners suddenly “--go to a psychoanalyst?”

“No,” admitted Pat. “But I suppose I could get up on it. Is it a new assignment?”

“Not exactly. It’s just that I think you’ve lost your grip. Even larceny requires a certain cunning. I’ve just talked to Wilcox on the phone.”

“Wilcox must be nuts,” said Pat, aggressively. “I didn’t steal anything from him. His name’s on it, isn’t it? Two weeks ago I laid out all his structure--every scene. I even wrote one whole scene--at the end about the war.”

“Oh yes, the war,” said Berners as if he was thinking of something else.

“But if you like Wilcox’s ending better--”

“Yes, I like his ending better. I never saw a man pick up this work so fast.” He paused. “Pat, you’ve told the truth just once since you came in this room--that you didn’t steal anything from Wilcox.”

“I certainly did not. I gave him stuff.”

But a certain dreariness, a grey malaise, crept over him as Berners continued:

“I told you we had three scripts. You used an old one we discarded a year ago. Wilcox was in when your secretary arrived, and he sent one of them to you. Clever, eh?”

Pat was speechless.

“You see, he and that girl like each other. Seems she typed a play for him this summer.”

“They like each other,” said Pat incredulously. “Why, he--”

“Hold it, Pat. You’ve had trouble enough today.”

“He’s responsible,” Pat cried. “He wouldn’t collaborate--and all the time--”

“--he was writing a swell script. And he can write his own ticket if we can persuade him to stay here and do another.”

Pat could stand no more. He stood up.

“Anyhow thank you, Jack,” he faltered. “Call my agent if anything turns up.” Then he bolted suddenly and surprisingly for the door.

Jack Berners signaled on the Dictograph for the President’s office.

“Get a chance to read it?” he asked in a tone of eagerness.

“It’s swell. Better than you said. Wilcox is with me now.”

“Have you signed him up?”

“I’m going to. Seems he wants to work with Hobby. Here, you talk to him.”

Wilcox’s rather high voice came over the wire.

“Must have Mike Hobby,” he said. “Grateful to him. Had a quarrel with a certain young lady just before he came, but today Hobby brought us together. Besides I want to write a play about him. So give him to me--you fellows don’t want him any more.”

Berners picked up his secretary’s phone.

“Go after Pat Hobby. He’s probably in the bar across the street. We’re putting him on salary again but we’ll be sorry.” He switched off, switched on again. “Oh! Take him his hat. He forgot his hat.”

PAT HOBBY AND ORSON WELLES

Esquire (May 1940)

I

‘Who’s this Welles?’ Pat asked of Louie, the studio bookie. ‘Every time I pick up a paper they got about this Welles.’

‘You know, he’s that beard,’ explained Louie.

‘Sure, I know he’s that beard, you couldn’t miss that. But what credits’s he got? What’s he done to draw one hundred and fifty grand a picture?’

What indeed? Had he, like Pat, been in Hollywood over twenty years? Did he have credits that would knock your eye out, extending up to--well, up to five years ago when Pat’s credits had begun to be few and far between?

‘Listen--they don’t last long,’ said Louie consolingly, ‘We’ve seen ‘em come and we’ve seen ‘em go. Hey, Pat?’

Yes--but meanwhile those who had toiled in the vineyard through the heat of the day were lucky to get a few weeks at three-fifty. Men who had once had wives and Filipinos and swimming pools.

‘Maybe it’s the beard,’ said Louie. ‘Maybe you and I should grow a beard. My father had a beard but it never got him off Grand Street.’

The gift of hope had remained with Pat through his misfortunes--and the valuable alloy of his hope was proximity. Above all things one must stick around, one must be there when the glazed, tired mind of the producer grappled with the question ‘Who?’ So presently Pat wandered out of the drug-store, and crossed the street to the lot that was home.

As he passed through the side entrance an unfamiliar studio policeman stood in his way.

‘Everybody in the front entrance now.’

‘I’m Hobby, the writer,’ Pat said.

The Cossack was unimpressed.

‘Got your card?’

‘I’m between pictures. But I’ve got an engagement with Jack Berners.’

‘Front gate.’

As he turned away Pat thought savagely: ‘Lousy Keystone Cop!’ In his mind he shot it out with him. Plunk! the stomach. Plunk! plunk! plunk!

At the main entrance, too, there was a new face.

‘Where’s Ike?’ Pat demanded.

‘Ike’s gone.’

‘Well, it’s all right, I’m Pat Hobby. Ike always passes me.’

‘That’s why he’s gone,’ said the guardian blandly. ‘Who’s your business with?’

Pat hesitated. He hated to disturb a producer.

‘Call Jack Berners’ office,’ he said. ‘Just speak to his secretary.’

After a minute the man turned from the phone.

‘What about?’ he said.

‘About a picture.’

He waited for an answer.

‘She wants to know what picture?’

‘To hell with it,’ said Pat disgustedly. ‘Look--call Louie Griebel. What’s all this about?’

‘Orders from Mr Kasper,’ said the clerk. ‘Last week a visitor from Chicago fell in the wind machine--Hello. Mr Louie Griebel?’

‘I’ll talk to him,’ said Pat, taking the phone.

‘I can’t do nothing, Pat,’ mourned Louie. ‘I had trouble getting my boy in this morning. Some twirp from Chicago fell in the wind machine.’

‘What’s that got to do with me?’ demanded Pat vehemently.

He walked, a little faster than his wont, along the studio wall to the point where it joined the back lot. There was a guard there but there were always people passing to and fro and he joined one of the groups. Once inside he would see Jack and have himself excepted from this absurd ban. Why, he had known this lot when the first shacks were rising on it, when this was considered the edge of the desert.

‘Sorry mister, you with this party?’

‘I’m in a hurry,’ said Pat. ‘I’ve lost my card.’

‘Yeah? Well, for all I know you may be a plain clothes man.’ He held open a copy of a photo magazine under Pat’s nose. ‘I wouldn’t let you in even if you told me you was this here Orson Welles.’

II

There is an old Chaplin picture about a crowded street car where the entrance of one man at the rear forces another out in front. A similar image came into Pat’s mind in the ensuing days whenever he thought of Orson Welles. Welles was in; Hobby was out. Never before had the studio been barred to Pat and though Welles was on another lot it seemed as if his large body, pushing in brashly from nowhere, had edged Pat out the gate.

‘Now where do you go?’ Pat thought. He had worked in the other studios but they were not his. At this studio he never felt unemployed--in recent times of stress he had eaten property food on its stages--half a cold lobster during a scene from The Divine Miss Carstairs; he had often slept on the sets and last winter made use of a Chesterfield overcoat from the costume department. Orson Welles had no business edging him out of this. Orson Welles belonged with the rest of the snobs back in New York.

On the third day he was frantic with gloom. He had sent note after note to Jack Berners and even asked Louie to intercede--now word came that Jack had left town. There were so few friends left. Desolate, he stood in front of the automobile gate with a crowd of staring children, feeling that he had reached the end at last.

A great limousine rolled out, in the back of which Pat recognized the great overstuffed Roman face of Harold Marcus. The car rolled toward the children and, as one of them ran in front of it, slowed down. The old man spoke into the tube and the car halted. He leaned out blinking.

‘Is there no policeman here?’ he asked of Pat.

‘No, Mr Marcus,’ said Pat quickly. ‘There should be. I’m Pat Hobby, the writer--could you give me a lift down the street?’

It was unprecedented--it was an act of desperation but Pat’s need was great.

Mr Marcus looked at him closely.

‘Oh yes, I remember you,’ he said. ‘Get in.’

He might possibly have meant get up in front with the chauffeur. Pat compromised by opening one of the little seats. Mr Marcus was one of the most powerful men in the whole picture world. He did not occupy himself with production any longer. He spent most of his time rocking from coast to coast on fast trains, merging and launching, launching and merging, like a much divorced woman.

‘Some day those children’ll get hurt.’

‘Yes, Mr Marcus,’ agreed Pat heartily, ‘Mr Marcus--’

‘They ought to have a policeman there.’

‘Yes. Mr Marcus. Mr Marcus--’

‘Hm-m-m!’ said Mr Marcus. ‘Where do you want to be dropped?’

Pat geared himself to work fast.

‘Mr Marcus, when I was your press agent--’

‘I know,’ said Mr Marcus. ‘You wanted a ten dollar a week raise.’

‘What a memory!’ cried Pat in gladness. ‘What a memory! But Mr Marcus, now I don’t want anything at all.’

‘This is a miracle.’

‘I’ve got modest wants, see, and I’ve saved enough to retire.’

He thrust his shoes slightly forward under a hanging blanket, The Chesterfield coat effectively concealed the rest.

‘That’s what I’d like,’ said Mr Marcus gloomily. ‘A farm--with chickens. Maybe a little nine-hole course. Not even a stock ticker.’

‘I want to retire, but different,’ said Pat earnestly. ‘Pictures have been my life. I want to watch them grow and grow--’

Mr Marcus groaned.

‘Till they explode,’ he said. ‘Look at Fox! I cried for him.’ He pointed to his eyes, ‘Tears!’

Pat nodded very sympathetically.

‘I want only one thing.’ From the long familiarity he went into the foreign locution. ‘I should go on the lot anytime. From nothing. Only to be there. Should bother nobody. Only help a little from nothing if any young person wants advice.’

‘See Berners,’ said Marcus.

‘He said see you.’

‘Then you did want something,’ Marcus smiled. ‘All right, all right by me. Where do you get off now?’

‘Could you write me a pass?’ Pat pleaded. ‘Just a word on your card?’

‘I’ll look into it,’ said Mr Marcus. ‘Just now I’ve got things on my mind. I’m going to a luncheon.’ He sighed profoundly. ‘They want I should meet this new Orson Welles that’s in Hollywood.’

Pat’s heart winced. There it was again--that name, sinister and remorseless, spreading like a dark cloud over all his skies.

‘Mr Marcus,’ he said so sincerely that his voice trembled, ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if Orson Welles is the biggest menace that’s come to Hollywood for years. He gets a hundred and fifty grand a picture and I wouldn’t be surprised if he was so radical that you had to have all new equipment and start all over again like you did with sound in 1928.’

‘Oh my God!’ groaned Mr Marcus.

‘And me,’ said Pat, ‘all I want is a pass and no money--to leave things as they are.’

Mr Marcus reached for his card case.

III

To those grouped together under the name ‘talent’, the atmosphere of a studio is not unfailingly bright--one fluctuates too quickly between high hope and grave apprehension. Those few who decide things are happy in their work and sure that they are worthy of their hire--the rest live in a mist of doubt as to when their vast inadequacy will be disclosed.

Pat’s psychology was, oddly, that of the masters and for the most part he was unworried even though he was off salary. But there was one large fly in the ointment--for the first time in his life he began to feel a loss of identity. Due to reasons that he did not quite understand, though it might have been traced to his conversation, a number of people began to address him as ‘Orson’.

Now to lose one’s identity is a careless thing in any case. But to lose it to an enemy, or at least to one who has become scapegoat for our misfortunes--that is a hardship. Pat was not Orson. Any resemblance must be faint and far-fetched and he was aware of the fact. The final effect was to make him, in that regard, something of an eccentric.

‘Pat,’ said Joe the barber, ‘Orson was in here today and asked me to trim his beard.’

‘I hope you set fire to it,’ said Pat.

‘I did,’ Joe winked at waiting customers over a hot towel. ‘He asked for a singe so I took it all off. Now his face is as bald as yours. In fact you look a bit alike.’

This was the morning the kidding was so ubiquitous that, to avoid it, Pat lingered in Mario’s bar across the street. He was not drinking--at the bar, that is, for he was down to his last thirty cents, but he refreshed himself frequently from a half-pint in his back pocket. He needed the stimulus for he had to make a touch presently and he knew that money was easier to borrow when one didn’t have an air of urgent need.

His quarry, Jeff Boldini, was in an unsympathetic state of mind. He too was an artist, albeit a successful one, and a certain great lady of the screen had just burned him up by criticizing a wig he had made for her. He told the story to Pat at length and the latter waited until it was all out before broaching his request.

‘No soap,’ said Jeff. ‘Hell, you never paid me back what you borrowed last month.’

‘But I got a job now,’ lied Pat. ‘This is just to tide me over. I start tomorrow.’

‘If they don’t give the job to Orson Welles,’ said Jeff humorously.

Pat’s eyes narrowed but he managed to utter a polite, borrower’s laugh.

‘Hold it,’ said Jeff. ‘You know I think you look like him?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Honest. Anyhow I could make you look like him. I could make you a beard that would be his double.’

‘I wouldn’t be his double for fifty grand.’

With his head on one side Jeff regarded Pat.

‘I could,’ he said. ‘Come on in to my chair and let me see.’

‘Like hell.’

‘Come on. I’d like to try it. You haven’t got anything to do. You don’t work till tomorrow.’

‘I don’t want a beard.’

‘It’ll come off.’

‘I don’t want it.’

‘It won’t cost you anything. In fact I’ll be paying you--I’ll loan you the ten smackers if you’ll let me make you a beard.’

Half an hour later Jeff looked at his completed work.

‘It’s perfect,’ he said. ‘Not only the beard but the eyes and everything.’

‘All right. Now take it off,’ said Pat moodily.

‘What’s the hurry? That’s a fine muff. That’s a work of art. We ought to put a camera on it. Too bad you’re working tomorrow--they’re using a dozen beards out on Sam Jones’ set and one of them went to jail in a homo raid. I bet with that muff you could get the job.’

It was weeks since Pat had heard the word job and he could not himself say how he managed to exist and eat. Jeff saw the light in his eye.

‘What say? Let me drive you out there just for fun,’ pleaded Jeff. ‘I’d like to see if Sam could tell it was a phony muff.’

‘I’m a writer, not a ham.’

‘Come on! Nobody would never know you back of that. And you’d draw another ten bucks.’

As they left the make-up department Jeff lingered behind a minute. On a strip of cardboard he crayoned the name Orson Welles in large block letters. And outside, without Pat’s notice, he stuck it in the windshield of his car.

He did not go directly to the back lot. Instead he drove not too swiftly up the main studio street. In front of the administration building he stopped on the pretext that the engine was missing, and almost in no time a small but definitely interested crowd began to gather. But Jeff’s plans did not include stopping anywhere long, so he hopped in and they started on a tour around the commissary.

‘Where are we going?’ demanded Pat.

He had already made one nervous attempt to tear the beard from him, but to his surprise it did not come away.

He complained of this to Jeff.

‘Sure,’ Jeff explained. ‘That’s made to last. You’ll have to soak it off.’

The car paused momentarily at the door of the commissary. Pat saw blank eyes staring at him and he stared back at them blankly from the rear seat.

‘You’d think I was the only beard on the lot,’ he said gloomily.

‘You can sympathize with Orson Welles.’

‘To hell with him.’

This colloquy would have puzzled those without, to whom he was nothing less than the real McCoy.

Jeff drove on slowly up the street. Ahead of them a little group of men were walking--one of them, turning, saw the car and drew the attention of the others to it. Whereupon the most elderly member of the party threw up his arms in what appeared to be a defensive gesture, and plunged to the sidewalk as the car went past.

‘My God, did you see that?’ exclaimed Jeff. ‘That was Mr Marcus.’

He came to a stop. An excited man ran up and put his head in the car window.

‘Mr Welles, our Mr Marcus has had a heart attack. Can we use your car to get him to the infirmary?’

Pat stared. Then very quickly he opened the door on the other side and dashed from the car. Not even the beard could impede his streamlined flight. The policeman at the gate, not recognizing the incarnation, tried to have words with him but Pat shook him off with the ease of a triple-threat back and never paused till he reached Mario’s bar.

Three extras with beards stood at the rail, and with relief Pat merged himself into their corporate whiskers. With a trembling hand he took the hard-earned ten dollar bill from his pocket.

‘Set ‘em up,’ he cried hoarsely. ‘Every muff has a drink on me.’

PAT HOBBY’S SECRET

Esquire (June 1940)

I

Distress in Hollywood is endemic and always acute. Scarcely an executive but is being gnawed at by some insoluble problem and in a democratic way he will let you in on it, with no charge. The problem, be it one of health or of production, is faced courageously and with groans at from one to five thousand a week. That’s how pictures are made.

‘But this one has got me down,’ said Mr Banizon, ‘--because how did the artillery shell get in the trunk of Claudette Colbert or Betty Field or whoever we decide to use? We got to explain it so the audience will believe it.’

He was in the office of Louie the studio bookie and his present audience also included Pat Hobby, venerable script-stooge of forty-nine. Mr Banizon did not expect a suggestion from either of them but he had been talking aloud to himself about the problem for a week now and was unable to stop.

‘Who’s your writer on it?’ asked Louie.

‘R. Parke Woll,’ said Banizon indignantly. ‘First I buy this opening from another writer, see. A grand notion but only a notion. Then I call in R. Parke Woll, the playwright, and we meet a couple of times and develop it. Then when we get the end in sight, his agent horns in and says he won’t let Woll talk any more unless I give him a contract--eight weeks at $3,000! And all I need him for is one more day!’

The sum brought a glitter into Pat’s old eyes. Ten years ago he had camped beatifically in range of such a salary--now he was lucky to get a few weeks at $250. His inflamed and burnt over talent had failed to produce a second growth.

‘The worse part of it is that Woll told me the ending,’ continued the producer.

‘Then what are you waiting for?’ demanded Pat. ‘You don’t need to pay him a cent.’

‘I forgot it!’ groaned Mr Banizon. ‘Two phones were ringing at once in my office--one from a working director. And while I was talking Woll had to run along. Now I can’t remember it and I can’t get him back.’

Perversely Pat Hobby’s sense of justice was with the producer, not the writer. Banizon had almost outsmarted Woll and then been cheated by a tough break. And now the playwright, with the insolence of an Eastern snob, was holding him up for twenty-four grand. What with the European market gone. What with the war.

‘Now he’s on a big bat,’ said Banizon. ‘I know because I got a man tailing him. It’s enough to drive you nuts--here I got the whole story except the pay-off. What good is it to me like that?’

‘If he’s drunk maybe he’d spill it,’ suggested Louie practically.

‘Not to me,’ said Mr Banizon. ‘I thought of it but he would recognize my face.’

Having reached the end of his current blind alley, Mr Banizon picked a horse in the third and one in the seventh and prepared to depart.

‘I got an idea,’ said Pat.

Mr Banizon looked suspiciously at the red old eyes.

‘I got no time to hear it now,’ he said.

‘I’m not selling anything,’ Pat reassured him. ‘I got a deal almost ready over at Paramount. But once I worked with this R. Parke Woll and maybe I could find what you want to know.’

He and Mr Banizon went out of the office together and walked slowly across the lot. An hour later, for an advance consideration of fifty dollars, Pat was employed to discover how a live artillery shell got into Claudette Colbert’s trunk or Betty Field’s trunk or whosoever’s trunk it should be.

II

The swath which R. Parke Woll was now cutting through the City of the Angels would have attracted no special notice in the twenties; in the fearful forties it rang out like laughter in church. He was easy to follow: his absence had been requested from two hotels but he had settled down into a routine where he carried his sleeping quarters in his elbow. A small but alert band of rats and weasels were furnishing him moral support in his journey--a journey which Pat caught up with at two a.m. in Conk’s Old Fashioned Bar.

Conk’s Bar was haughtier than its name, boasting cigarette girls and a doorman-bouncer named Smith who had once stayed a full hour with Tarzan White. Mr Smith was an embittered man who expressed himself by goosing the patrons on their way in and out and this was Pat’s introduction. When he recovered himself he discovered R. Parke Woll in a mixed company around a table, and sauntered up with an air of surprise.

‘Hello, good looking,’ he said to Woll. ‘Remember me--Pat Hobby?’

R. Parke Woll brought him with difficulty into focus, turning his head first on one side then on the other, letting it sink, snap up and then lash forward like a cobra taking a candid snapshot. Evidently it recorded for he said:

‘Pat Hobby! Sit down and wha’ll you have. Genlemen, this is Pat Hobby--best left-handed writer in Hollywood. Pat h’are you?’

Pat sat down, amid suspicious looks from a dozen predatory eyes. Was Pat an old friend sent to get the playwright home?

Pat saw this and waited until a half-hour later when he found himself alone with Woll in the washroom.

‘Listen Parke, Banizon is having you followed,’ he said. ‘I don’t know why he’s doing it. Louie at the studio tipped me off.’

‘You don’t know why?’ cried Parke. ‘Well, I know why. I got something he wants--that’s why!’

‘You owe him money?’

‘Owe him money. Why that--he owes me money! He owes me for three long, hard conferences--I outlined a whole damn picture for him.’ His vague finger tapped his forehead in several places. ‘What he wants is in here.’

An hour passed at the turbulent orgiastic table. Pat waited--and then inevitably in the slow, limited cycle of the lush, Woll’s mind returned to the subject.

‘The funny thing is I told him who put the shell in the trunk and why. And then the Master Mind forgot.’

Pat had an inspiration.

‘But his secretary remembered.’

‘She did?’ Woll was flabbergasted. ‘Secretary--don’t remember secretary.’

‘She came in,’ ventured Pat uneasily.

‘Well then by God he’s got to pay me or I’ll sue him.’

‘Banizon says he’s got a better idea.’

‘The hell he has. My idea was a pip. Listen--’

He spoke for two minutes.

‘You like it?’ he demanded. He looked at Pat for applause--then he must have seen something in Pat’s eye that he was not intended to see. ‘Why you little skunk,’ he cried. ‘You’ve talked to Banizon--he sent you here.’

Pat rose and tore like a rabbit for the door. He would have been out into the street before Woll could overtake him had it not been for the intervention of Mr Smith, the doorman.

‘Where you going?’ he demanded, catching Pat by his lapels.

‘Hold him!’ cried Woll, coming up. He aimed a blow at Pat which missed and landed full in Mr Smith’s mouth.

It has been mentioned that Mr Smith was an embittered as well as a powerful man. He dropped Pat, picked up R. Parke Woll by crotch and shoulder, held him high and then in one gigantic pound brought his body down against the floor. Three minutes later Woll was dead.

III

Except in great scandals like the Arbuckle case the industry protects its own--and the industry included Pat, however intermittently. He was let out of prison next morning without bail, wanted only as a material witness. If anything, the publicity was advantageous--for the first time in a year his name appeared in the trade journals. Moreover he was now the only living man who knew how the shell got into Claudette Colbert’s (or Betty Field’s) trunk.

‘When can you come up and see me?’ said Mr Banizon.

‘After the inquest tomorrow,’ said Pat enjoying himself. ‘I feel kind of shaken--it gave me an earache.’

That too indicated power. Only those who were ‘in’ could speak of their health and be listened to.

‘Woll really did tell you?’ questioned Banizon.

‘He told me,’ said Pat. ‘And it’s worth more than fifty smackers. I’m going to get me a new agent and bring him to your office.’

‘I tell you a better plan.’ said Banizon hastily, ‘I’ll get you on the payroll. Four weeks at your regular price.’

‘What’s my price?’ demanded Pat gloomily. ‘I’ve drawn everything from four thousand to zero.’ And he added ambiguously, ‘As Shakespeare says, “Every man has his price.”‘

The attendant rodents of R. Parke Woll had vanished with their small plunder into convenient rat holes, leaving as the defendant Mr Smith, and, as witnesses, Pat and two frightened cigarette girls. Mr Smith’s defence was that he had been attacked. At the inquest one cigarette girl agreed with him--one condemned him for unnecessary roughness. Pat Hobby’s turn was next, but before his name was called he started as a voice spoke to him from behind.

‘You talk against my husband and I’ll twist your tongue out by the roots.’

A huge dinosaur of a woman, fully six feet tall and broad in proportion, was leaning forward against his chair.

‘Pat Hobby, step forward please . . . now Mr Hobby tell us exactly what happened.’

The eyes of Mr Smith were fixed balefully on his and he felt the eyes of the bouncer’s mate reaching in for his tongue through the back of his head. He was full of natural hesitation.

‘I don’t know exactly,’ he said, and then with quick inspiration, ‘All I know is everything went white!’

‘What?’

‘That’s the way it was. I saw white. Just like some guys see red or black I saw white.’

There was some consultation among the authorities.

‘Well, what happened from when you came into the restaurant--up to the time you saw white?’

‘Well--’ said Pat fighting for time. ‘It was all kind of that way. I came and sat down and then it began to go black.’

‘You mean white.’

‘Black and white.’

There was a general titter.

‘Witness dismissed. Defendant remanded for trial.’

What was a little joking to endure when the stakes were so high--all that night a mountainous Amazon pursued him through his dreams and he needed a strong drink before appearing at Mr Banizon’s office next morning. He was accompanied by one of the few Hollywood agents who had not yet taken him on and shaken him off.

‘A flat sum of five hundred,’ offered Banizon. ‘Or four weeks at two-fifty to work on another picture.’

‘How bad do you want this?’ asked the agent. ‘My client seems to think it’s worth three thousand.’

‘Of my own money?’ cried Banizon. ‘And it isn’t even his idea. Now that Woll is dead it’s in the Public Remains.’

‘Not quite,’ said the agent. ‘I think like you do that ideas are sort of in the air. They belong to whoever’s got them at the time--like balloons.’

‘Well, how much?’ asked Mr Banizon fearfully. ‘How do I know he’s got the idea?’

The agent turned to Pat.

‘Shall we let him find out--for a thousand dollars?’

After a moment Pat nodded. Something was bothering him.

‘All right,’ said Banizon. ‘This strain is driving me nuts. One thousand.’

There was silence.

‘Spill it Pat,’ said the agent.

Still no word from Pat. They waited. When Pat spoke at last his voice seemed to come from afar.

‘Everything’s white,’ he gasped.

‘What?’

‘I can’t help it--everything has gone white. I can see it--white. I remember going into the joint but after that it all goes white.’

For a moment they thought he was holding out. Then the agent realized that Pat actually had drawn a psychological blank. The secret of R. Parke Woll was safe forever. Too late Pat realized that a thousand dollars was slipping away and tried desperately to recover.

‘I remember, I remember! It was put in by some Nazi dictator.’

‘Maybe the girl put it in the trunk herself,’ said Banizon ironically. ‘For her bracelet.’

For many years Mr Banizon would be somewhat gnawed by this insoluble problem. And as he glowered at Pat he wished that writers could be dispensed with altogether. If only ideas could be plucked from the inexpensive air!

PAT HOBBY, PUTATIVE FATHER

Esquire (July 1940)

I

Most writers look like writers whether they want to or not. It is hard to say why--for they model their exteriors whimsically on Wall Street brokers, cattle kings or English explorers--but they all turn out looking like writers, as definitely typed as ‘The Public’ or ‘The Profiteers’ in the cartoons.

Pat Hobby was the exception. He did not look like a writer. And only in one corner of the Republic could he have been identified as a member of the entertainment world. Even there the first guess would have been that he was an extra down on his luck, or a bit player who specialized in the sort of father who should never come home. But a writer he was: he had collaborated in over two dozen moving picture scripts, most of them, it must be admitted, prior to 1929.

A writer? He had a desk in the Writers’ Building at the studio; he had pencils, paper, a secretary, paper clips, a pad for office memoranda. And he sat in an overstuffed chair, his eyes not so very bloodshot taking in the morning’s Reporter.

‘I got to get to work,’ he told Miss Raudenbush at eleven. And again at twelve:

‘I got to get to work.’

At quarter to one, he began to feel hungry--up to this point every move, or rather every moment, was in the writer’s tradition. Even to the faint irritation that no one had annoyed him, no one had bothered him, no one had interfered with the long empty dream which constituted his average day.

He was about to accuse his secretary of staring at him when the welcome interruption came. A studio guide tapped at his door and brought him a note from his boss, Jack Berners:

Dear Pat:

Please take some time off and show these people around the lot.

Jack

‘My God!’ Pat exclaimed. ‘How can I be expected to get anything done and show people around the lot at the same time. Who are they?’ he demanded of the guide.

‘I don’t know. One of them seems to be kind of coloured. He looks like the extras they had at Paramount for Bengal Lancer. He can’t speak English. The other--’

Pat was putting on his coat to see for himself.

‘Will you be wanting me this afternoon?’ asked Miss Raudenbush.

He looked at her with infinite reproach and went out in front of the Writers’ Building.

The visitors were there. The sultry person was tall and of a fine carriage, dressed in excellent English clothes except for a turban. The other was a youth of fifteen, quite light of hue. He also wore a turban with beautifully cut jodhpurs and riding coat.

They bowed formally.

‘Hear you want to go on some sets,’ said Pat, ‘You friends of Jack Berners?’

‘Acquaintances,’ said the youth. ‘May I present you to my uncle: Sir Singrim Dak Raj.’

Probably, thought Pat, the company was cooking up a Bengal Lancers, and this man would play the heavy who owned the KhyberPass. Maybe they’d put Pat on it--at three-fifty a week. Why not? He knew how to write that stuff:

Beautiful Long Shot. The Gorge. Show Tribesman firing from behind rocks.

Medium Shot. Tribesman hit by bullet making nose dive over high rock. (use stunt man)

Medium Long Shot. The Valley. British troops wheeling out cannon.

‘You going to be long in Hollywood?’ he asked shrewdly.

‘My uncle doesn’t speak English,’ said the youth in a measured voice. ‘We are here only a few days. You see--I am your putative son.’

II

‘--And I would very much like to see Bonita Granville,’ continued the youth. ‘I find she has been borrowed by your studio.’

They had been walking toward the production office and it took Pat a minute to grasp what the young man had said.

‘You’re my what?’ he asked.

‘Your putative son,’ said the young man, in a sort of sing-song. ‘Legally I am the son and heir of the Rajah Dak Raj Indore. But I was born John Brown Hobby.’

‘Yes?’ said Pat. ‘Go on! What’s this?’

‘My mother was Delia Brown. You married her in 1926. And she divorced you in 1927 when I was a few months old. Later she took me to India, where she married my present legal father.’

‘Oh,’ said Pat. They had reached the production office. ‘You want to see Bonita Granville.’

‘Yes,’ said John Hobby Indore. ‘If it is convenient.’

Pat looked at the shooting schedule on the wall.

‘It may be,’ he said heavily. ‘We can go and see.’

As they started toward Stage 4, he exploded.

‘What do you mean, “my potato son”? I’m glad to see you and all that, but say, are you really the kid Delia had in 1926?’

‘Putatively,’ John Indore said. ‘At that time you and she were legally married.’

He turned to his uncle and spoke rapidly in Hindustani, whereupon the latter bent forward, looked with cold examination upon Pat and threw up his shoulders without comment. The whole business was making Pat vaguely uncomfortable.

When he pointed out the commissary, John wanted to stop there ‘to buy his uncle a hot dog’. It seemed that Sir Singrim had conceived a passion for them at the World’s Fair in New York, whence they had just come. They were taking ship for Madras tomorrow.

‘--whether or not,’ said John, sombrely. ‘I get to see Bonita Granville. I do not care if I meet her. I am too young for her. She is already an old woman by our standards. But I’d like to see her.’

It was one of those bad days for showing people around. Only one of the directors shooting today was an old timer, on whom Pat could count for a welcome--and at the door of that stage he received word that the star kept blowing up in his lines and had demanded that the set be cleared.

In desperation he took his charges out to the back lot and walked them past the false fronts of ships and cities and village streets, and medieval gates--a sight in which the boy showed a certain interest but which Sir Singrim found disappointing. Each time that Pat led them around behind to demonstrate that it was all phony Sir Singrim’s expression would change to disappointment and faint contempt.

‘What’s he say?’ Pat asked his offspring, after Sir Singrim had walked eagerly into a Fifth Avenue jewellery store, to find nothing but carpenter’s rubble inside.

‘He is the third richest man in India,’ said John. ‘He is disgusted. He says he will never enjoy an American picture again. He says he will buy one of our picture companies in India and make every set as solid as the Taj Mahal. He thinks perhaps the actresses just have a false front too, and that’s why you won’t let us see them.’

The first sentence had rung a sort of carillon in Pat’s head. If there was anything he liked it was a good piece of money--not this miserable, uncertain two-fifty a week which purchased his freedom.

‘I’ll tell you,’ he said with sudden decision. ‘We’ll try Stage 4, and peek at Bonita Granville.’

Stage 4 was double locked and barred, for the day--the director hated visitors, and it was a process stage besides. ‘Process’ was a generic name for trick photography in which every studio competed with other studios, and lived in terror of spies. More specifically it meant that a projecting machine threw a moving background upon a transparent screen. On the other side of the screen, a scene was played and recorded against this moving background. The projector on one side of the screen and the camera on the other were so synchronized that the result could show a star standing on his head before an indifferent crowd on 42nd Street--a real crowd and a real star--and the poor eye could only conclude that it was being deluded and never quite guess how.

Pat tried to explain this to John, but John was peering for Bonita Granville from behind the great mass of coiled ropes and pails where they hid. They had not got there by the front entrance, but by a little side door for technicians that Pat knew.

Wearied by the long jaunt over the back lot, Pat took a pint flask from his hip and offered it to Sir Singrim who declined. He did not offer it to John.

‘Stunt your growth,’ he said solemnly, taking a long pull.

‘I do not want any,’ said John with dignity.

He was suddenly alert. He had spotted an idol more glamorous than Siva not twenty feet away--her back, her profile, her voice. Then she moved off.

Watching his face, Pat was rather touched.

‘We can go nearer,’ he said. ‘We might get to that ballroom set. They’re not using it--they got covers on the furniture.’

On tip toe they started, Pat in the lead, then Sir Singrim, then John. As they moved softly forward Pat heard the word ‘Lights’ and stopped in his tracks. Then, as a blinding white glow struck at their eyes and the voice shouted ‘Quiet! We’re rolling!’ Pat began to run, followed quickly through the white silence by the others.

The silence did not endure.

‘Cut!’ screamed a voice, ‘What the living, blazing hell!’

From the director’s angle something had happened on the screen which, for the moment, was inexplicable. Three gigantic silhouettes, two with huge Indian turbans, had danced across what was intended to be a New England harbour--they had blundered into the line of the process shot. Prince John Indore had not only seen Bonita Granville--he had acted in the same picture. His silhouetted foot seemed to pass miraculously through her blonde young head.

III

They sat for some time in the guard-room before word could be gotten to Jack Berners, who was off the lot. So there was leisure for talk. This consisted of a longish harangue from Sir Singrim to John, which the latter--modifying its tone if not its words--translated to Pat.

‘My uncle says his brother wanted to do something for you. He thought perhaps if you were a great writer he might invite you to come to his kingdom and write his life.’

‘I never claimed to be--’

‘My uncle says you are an ignominious writer--in your own land you permitted him to be touched by those dogs of the policemen.’

‘Aw--bananas,’ muttered Pat uncomfortably.

‘He says my mother always wished you well. But now she is a high and sacred lady and should never see you again. He says we will go to our chambers in the Ambassador Hotel and meditate and pray and let you know what we decide.’

When they were released, and the two moguls were escorted apologetically to their car by a studio yes-man, it seemed to Pat that it had been pretty well decided already. He was angry. For the sake of getting his son a peek at Miss Granville, he had quite possibly lost his job--though he didn’t really think so. Or rather he was pretty sure that when his week was up he would have lost it anyhow. But though it was a pretty bad break he remembered most clearly from the afternoon that Sir Singrim was ‘the third richest man in India’, and after dinner at a bar on La Cienega he decided to go down to the Ambassador Hotel and find out the result of the prayer and meditation.

It was early dark of a September evening. The Ambassador was full of memories to Pat--the Coconut Grove in the great days, when directors found pretty girls in the afternoon and made stars of them by night. There was some activity in front of the door and Pat watched it idly. Such a quantity of baggage he had seldom seen, even in the train of Gloria Swanson or Joan Crawford. Then he started as he saw two or three men in turbans moving around among the baggage. So--they were running out on him.

Sir Singrim Dak Raj and his nephew Prince John, both pulling on gloves as if at a command, appeared at the door, as Pat stepped forward out of the darkness.

‘Taking a powder, eh?’ he said. ‘Say, when you get back there, tell them that one American could lick--’

‘I have left a note for you,’ said Prince John, turning from his Uncle’s side. ‘I say, you were nice this afternoon and it really was too bad.’

‘Yes, it was,’ agreed Pat.

‘But we are providing for you,’ John said. ‘After our prayers we decided that you will receive fifty sovereigns a month--two hundred and fifty dollars--for the rest of your natural life.’

‘What will I have to do for it?’ questioned Pat suspiciously.

‘It will only be withdrawn in case--’

John leaned and whispered in Pat’s ear, and relief crept into Pat’s eyes. The condition had nothing to do with drink and blondes, really nothing to do with him at all.

John began to get in the limousine.

‘Goodbye, putative father,’ he said, almost with affection.

Pat stood looking after him.

‘Goodbye son,’ he said. He stood watching the limousine go out of sight. Then he turned away--feeling like--like Stella Dallas. There were tears in his eyes.

Potato Father--whatever that meant. After some consideration he added to himself: it’s better than not being a father at all.

IV

He awoke late next afternoon with a happy hangover--the cause of which he could not determine until young John’s voice seemed to spring into his ears, repeating: ‘Fifty sovereigns a month, with just one condition--that it be withdrawn in case of war, when all revenues of our state will revert to the British Empire.’

With a cry Pat sprang to the door. No Los Angeles Times lay against it, no Examiner--only Toddy’s Daily Form Sheet. He searched the orange pages frantically. Below the form sheets, the past performances, the endless oracles for endless racetracks, his eye was caught by a one-inch item:

LONDON. SEPTEMBER 3RD. ON THIS MORNING’S DECLARATION BY CHAMBERLAIN, DOUGIE CABLES ‘ENGLAND TO WIN. FRANCE TO PLACE. RUSSIA TO SHOW’.

THE HOMES OF THE STARS

Esquire (August 1940)

Beneath a great striped umbrella at the side of a boulevard in a Hollywood heat wave, sat a man. His name was Gus Venske (no relation to the runner) and he wore magenta pants, cerise shoes and a sport article from Vine Street which resembled nothing so much as a cerulean blue pajama top.

Gus Venske was not a freak nor were his clothes at all extraordinary for his time and place. He had a profession--on a pole beside the umbrella was a placard:

VISIT THE HOMES OF THE STARS

Business was bad or Gus would not have hailed the unprosperous man who stood in the street beside a panting, steaming car, anxiously watching its efforts to cool.

‘Hey fella,’ said Gus, without much hope. ‘Wanna visit the homes of the stars?’

The red-rimmed eyes of the watcher turned from the automobile and looked superciliously upon Gus.

‘I’m in pictures,’ said the man, ‘I’m in ‘em myself.’

‘Actor?’

‘No. Writer.’

Pat Hobby turned back to his car, which was whistling like a peanut wagon. He had told the truth--or what was once the truth. Often in the old days his name had flashed on the screen for the few seconds allotted to authorship, but for the past five years his services had been less and less in demand.

Presently Gus Venske shut up shop for lunch by putting his folders and maps into a briefcase and walking off with it under his arm. As the sun grew hotter moment by moment, Pat Hobby took refuge under the faint protection of the umbrella and inspected a soiled folder which had been dropped by Mr Venske. If Pat had not been down to his last fourteen cents he would have telephoned a garage for aid--as it was, he could only wait.

After a while a limousine with a Missouri licence drew to rest beside him. Behind the chauffeur sat a little white moustached man and a large woman with a small dog. They conversed for a moment--then, in a rather shamefaced way, the woman leaned out and addressed Pat.

‘What stars’ homes can you visit?’ she asked.

It took a moment for this to sink in.

‘I mean can we go to Robert Taylor’s home and Clark Gable’s and Shirley Temple’s--’

‘I guess you can if you can get in,’ said Pat.

‘Because--’ continued the woman, ‘--if we could go to the very best homes, the most exclusive--we would be prepared to pay more than your regular price.’

Light dawned upon Pat. Here together were suckers and smackers. Here was that dearest of Hollywood dreams--the angle. If one got the right angle it meant meals at the Brown Derby, long nights with bottles and girls, a new tyre for his old car. And here was an angle fairly thrusting itself at him.

He rose and went to the side of the limousine.

‘Sure. Maybe I could fix it.’ As he spoke he felt a pang of doubt. ‘Would you be able to pay in advance?’

The couple exchanged a look.

‘Suppose we gave you five dollars now,’ the woman said, ‘and five dollars if we can visit Clark Gable’s home or somebody like that.’

Once upon a time such a thing would have been so easy. In his salad days when Pat had twelve or fifteen writing credits a year, he could have called up many people who would have said, ‘Sure, Pat, if it means anything to you.’ But now he could only think of a handful who really recognized him and spoke to him around the lots--Melvyn Douglas and Robert Young and Ronald Colman and Young Doug. Those he had known best had retired or passed away.

And he did not know except vaguely where the new stars lived, but he had noticed that on the folder were typewritten several dozen names and addresses with pencilled checks after each.

‘Of course you can’t be sure anybody’s at home,’ he said, ‘they might be working in the studios.’

‘We understand that.’ The lady glanced at Pat’s car, glanced away. ‘We’d better go in our motor.’

‘Sure.’

Pat got up in front with the chauffeur--trying to think fast. The actor who spoke to him most pleasantly was Ronald Colman--they had never exchanged more than conventional salutations but he might pretend that he was calling to interest Colman in a story.

Better still, Colman was probably not at home and Pat might wangle his clients an inside glimpse of the house. Then the process might be repeated at Robert Young’s house and Young Doug’s and Melvyn Douglas’. By that time the lady would have forgotten Gable and the afternoon would be over.

He looked at Ronald Colman’s address on the folder and gave the direction to the chauffeur.

‘We know a woman who had her picture taken with George Brent,’ said the lady as they started off, ‘Mrs Horace J. Ives, Jr.’

‘She’s our neighbour,’ said her husband. ‘She lives at 372 Rose Drive in Kansas City. And we live at 327.’

‘She had her picture taken with George Brent. We always wondered if she had to pay for it. Of course I don’t know that I’d want to go so far as that. I don’t know what they’d say back home.’

‘I don’t think we want to go as far as all that,’ agreed her husband.

‘Where are we going first?’ asked the lady, cosily.

‘Well, I had a couple calls to pay anyhow,’ said Pat. ‘I got to see Ronald Colman about something.’

‘Oh, he’s one of my favourites. Do you know him well?’

‘Oh yes,’ said Pat, ‘I’m not in this business regularly. I’m just doing it today for a friend. I’m a writer.’

Sure in the knowledge that not so much as a trio of picture writers were known to the public he named himself as the author of several recent successes.

‘That’s very interesting,’ said the man, ‘I knew a writer once--this Upton Sinclair or Sinclair Lewis. Not a bad fellow even if he was a socialist.’

‘Why aren’t you writing a picture now?’ asked the lady.

‘Well, you see we’re on strike,’ Pat invented. ‘We got a thing called the Screen Playwriters’ Guild and we’re on strike.’

‘Oh.’ His clients stared with suspicion at this emissary of Stalin in the front seat of their car.

‘What are you striking for?’ asked the man uneasily.

Pat’s political development was rudimentary. He hesitated.

‘Oh, better living conditions,’ he said finally, ‘free pencils and paper, I don’t know--it’s all in the Wagner Act.’ After a moment he added vaguely, ‘Recognize Finland.’

‘I didn’t know writers had unions,’ said the man. ‘Well, if you’re on strike who writes the movies?’

‘The producers,’ said Pat bitterly. ‘That’s why they’re so lousy.’

‘Well, that’s what I would call an odd state of things.’

They came in sight of Ronald Colman’s house and Pat swallowed uneasily. A shining new roadster sat out in front.

‘I better go in first,’ he said. ‘I mean we wouldn’t want to come in on any--on any family scene or anything.’

‘Does he have family scenes?’ asked the lady eagerly.

‘Oh, well, you know how people are,’ said Pat with charity. ‘I think I ought to see how things are first.’

The car stopped. Drawing a long breath Pat got out. At the same moment the door of the house opened and Ronald Colman hurried down the walk. Pat’s heart missed a beat as the actor glanced in his direction.

‘Hello Pat,’ he said. Evidently he had no notion that Pat was a caller for he jumped into his car and the sound of his motor drowned out Pat’s responses as he drove away.

‘Well, he called you “Pat”,’ said the woman impressed.

‘I guess he was in a hurry,’ said Pat. ‘But maybe we could see his house.’

He rehearsed a speech going up the walk. He had just spoken to his friend Mr Colman, and received permission to look around.

But the house was shut and locked and there was no answer to the bell. He would have to try Melvyn Douglas whose salutations, on second thought, were a little warmer than Ronald Colman’s. At any rate his clients’ faith in him was now firmly founded. The ‘Hello, Pat,’ rang confidently in their ears; by proxy they were already inside the charmed circle.

‘Now let’s try Clark Gable’s,’ said the lady. ‘I’d like to tell Carole Lombard about her hair.’

The lese majesty made Pat’s stomach wince. Once in a crowd he had met Clark Gable but he had no reason to believe that Mr Gable remembered.

‘Well, we could try Melvyn Douglas’ first and then Bob Young or else Young Doug. They’re all on the way. You see Gable and Lombard live away out in the St Joaquin valley.’

‘Oh,’ said the lady, disappointed, ‘I did want to run up and see their bedroom. Well then, our next choice would be Shirley Temple.’ She looked at her little dog. ‘I know that would be Boojie’s choice too.’

‘They’re kind of afraid of kidnappers,’ said Pat.

Ruffled, the man produced his business card and handed it to Pat.

DEERING R. ROBINSON

Vice President and Chairman

of the Board

Robdeer Food Products

‘Does that sound as if I want to kidnap Shirley Temple?’

‘They just have to be sure,’ said Pat apologetically. ‘After we go to Melvyn--’

‘No--let’s see Shirley Temple’s now,’ insisted the woman. ‘Really! I told you in the first place what I wanted.’

Pat hesitated.

‘First I’ll have to stop in some drugstore and phone about it.’

In a drugstore he exchanged some of the five dollars for a half pint of gin and took two long swallows behind a high counter, after which he considered the situation. He could, of course, duck Mr and Mrs Robinson immediately--after all he had produced Ronald Colman, with sound, for their five smackers. On the other hand they just might catch MissTemple on her way in or out--and for a pleasant day at Santa Anita tomorrow Pat needed five smackers more. In the glow of the gin his courage mounted, and returning to the limousine he gave the chauffeur the address.

But approaching the Temple house his spirit quailed as he saw that there was a tall iron fence and an electric gate. And didn’t guides have to have a licence?

‘Not here,’ he said quickly to the chauffeur. ‘I made a mistake. I think it’s the next one, or two or three doors further on.’

He decided on a large mansion set in an open lawn and stopping the chauffeur got out and walked up to the door. He was temporarily licked but at least he might bring back some story to soften them--say, that MissTemple had mumps. He could point out her sick-room from the walk.

There was no answer to his ring but he saw that the door was partly ajar. Cautiously he pushed it open. He was staring into a deserted living room on the baronial scale. He listened. There was no one about, no footsteps on the upper floor, no murmur from the kitchen. Pat took another pull at the gin. Then swiftly he hurried back to the limousine.

‘She’s at the studio,’ he said quickly. ‘But if we’re quiet we can look at their living-room.’

Eagerly the Robinsons and Boojie disembarked and followed him. The living-room might have been Shirley Temple’s, might have been one of many in Hollywood. Pat saw a doll in a corner and pointed at it, whereupon Mrs Robinson picked it up, looked at it reverently and showed it to Boojie who sniffed indifferently.

‘Could I meet Mrs Temple?’ she asked.

‘Oh, she’s out--nobody’s home,’ Pat said--unwisely.

‘Nobody. Oh--then Boojie would so like a wee little peep at her bedroom.’

Before he could answer she had run up the stairs. Mr Robinson followed and Pat waited uneasily in the hall, ready to depart at the sound either of an arrival outside or a commotion above.

He finished the bottle, disposed of it politely under a sofa cushion and then deciding that the visit upstairs was tempting fate too far, he went after his clients. On the stairs he heard Mrs Robinson.

‘But there’s only one child’s bedroom. I thought Shirley had brothers.’

A window on the winding staircase looked upon the street, and glancing out Pat saw a large car drive up to the curb. From it stepped a Hollywood celebrity who, though not one of those pursued by Mrs Robinson, was second to none in prestige and power. It was old Mr Marcus, the producer, for whom Pat Hobby had been press agent twenty years ago.

At this point Pat lost his head. In a flash he pictured an elaborate explanation as to what he was doing here. He would not be forgiven. His occasional weeks in the studio at two-fifty would now disappear altogether and another finis would be written to his almost entirely finished career. He left, impetuously and swiftly--down the stairs, through the kitchen and out the back gate, leaving the Robinsons to their destiny.

Vaguely he was sorry for them as he walked quickly along the next boulevard. He could see Mr Robinson producing his card as the head of Robdeer Food Products. He could see Mr Marcus’ scepticism, the arrival of the police, the frisking of Mr and Mrs Robinson.

Probably it would stop there--except that the Robinsons would be furious at him for his imposition. They would tell the police where they had picked him up.

Suddenly he went ricketing down the street, beads of gin breaking out profusely on his forehead. He had left his car beside Gus Venske’s umbrella. And now he remembered another recognizing clue and hoped that Ronald Colman didn’t know his last name.

PAT HOBBY DOES HIS BIT

Esquire (September 1940)

I

In order to borrow money gracefully one must choose the time and place. It is a difficult business, for example, when the borrower is cockeyed, or has measles, or a conspicuous shiner. One could continue indefinitely but the inauspicious occasions can be catalogued as one--it is exceedingly difficult to borrow money when one needs it.

Pat Hobby found it difficult in the case of an actor on a set during the shooting of a moving picture. It was about the stiffest chore he had ever undertaken but he was doing it to save his car. To a sordidly commercial glance the jalopy would not have seemed worth saving but, because of Hollywood’s great distances, it was an indispensable tool of the writer’s trade.

‘The finance company--’ explained Pat, but Gyp McCarthy interrupted.

‘I got some business in this next take. You want me to blow up on it?’

‘I only need twenty,’ persisted Pat. ‘I can’t get jobs if I have to hang around my bedroom.’

‘You’d save money that way--you don’t get jobs anymore.’

This was cruelly correct. But working or not Pat liked to pass his days in or near a studio. He had reached a dolorous and precarious forty-nine with nothing else to do.

‘I got a rewrite job promised for next week,’ he lied.

‘Oh, nuts to you,’ said Gyp. ‘You better get off the set before Hilliard sees you.’

Pat glanced nervously toward the group by the camera--then he played his trump card.

‘Once--’ he said,’--once I paid for you to have a baby.’

‘Sure you did!’ said Gyp wrathfully. ‘That was sixteen years ago. And where is it now--it’s in jail for running over an old lady without a licence.’

‘Well I paid for it,’ said Pat. ‘Two hundred smackers.’

‘That’s nothing to what it cost me. Would I be stunting at my age if I had dough to lend? Would I be working at all?’

From somewhere in the darkness an assistant director issued an order:

‘Ready to go!’

Pat spoke quickly.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘Five bucks.’

‘No.’

‘All right then,’ Pat’s red-rimmed eyes tightened. ‘I’m going to stand over there and put the hex on you while you say your line.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ said Gyp uneasily. ‘Listen, I’ll give you five. It’s in my coat over there. Here, I’ll get it.’

He dashed from the set and Pat heaved a sigh of relief. Maybe Louie, the studio bookie, would let him have ten more.

Again the assistant director’s voice:

‘Quiet! . . . We’ll take it now! . . . Lights!’

The glare stabbed into Pat’s eyes, blinding him. He took a step the wrong way--then back. Six other people were in the take--a gangster’s hide-out--and it seemed that each was in his way.

‘All right . . . Roll ‘em . . . We’re turning!’

In his panic Pat had stepped behind a flat which would effectually conceal him. While the actors played their scene he stood there trembling a little, his back hunched--quite unaware that it was a ‘trolley shot’, that the camera, moving forward on its track, was almost upon him.

‘You by the window--hey you, Gyp! hands up.’

Like a man in a dream Pat raised his hands--only then did he realize that he was looking directly into a great black lens--in an instant it also included the English leading woman, who ran past him and jumped out the window. After an interminable second Pat heard the order ‘Cut.’

Then he rushed blindly through a property door, around a corner, tripping over a cable, recovering himself and tearing for the entrance. He heard footsteps running behind him and increased his gait, but in the doorway itself he was overtaken and turned defensively.

It was the English actress.

‘Hurry up!’ she cried. ‘That finishes my work. I’m flying home to England.’

As she scrambled into her waiting limousine she threw back a last irrelevant remark. ‘I’m catching a New York plane in an hour.’

Who cares! Pat thought bitterly, as he scurried away.

He was unaware that her repatriation was to change the course of his life.

II

And he did not have the five--he feared that this particular five was forever out of range. Other means must be found to keep the wolf from the two doors of his coupe. Pat left the lot with despair in his heart, stopping only momentarily to get gas for the car and gin for himself, possibly the last of many drinks they had had together.

Next morning he awoke with an aggravated problem. For once he did not want to go to the studio. It was not merely Gyp McCarthy he feared--it was the whole corporate might of a moving picture company, nay of an industry. Actually to have interfered with the shooting of a movie was somehow a major delinquency, compared to which expensive fumblings on the part of producers or writers went comparatively unpunished.

On the other hand zero hour for the car was the day after tomorrow and Louie, the studio bookie, seemed positively the last resource and a poor one at that.

Nerving himself with an unpalatable snack from the bottom of the bottle, he went to the studio at ten with his coat collar turned up and his hat pulled low over his ears. He knew a sort of underground railway through the make-up department and the commissary kitchen which might get him to Louie’s suite unobserved.

Two studio policemen seized him as he rounded the corner by the barber shop.

‘Hey, I got a pass!’ he protested, ‘Good for a week--signed by Jack Berners.’

‘Mr Berners specially wants to see you.’

Here it was then--he would be barred from the lot.

‘We could sue you!’ cried Jack Berners. ‘But we couldn’t recover.’

‘What’s one take?’ demanded Pat. ‘You can use another.’

‘No we can’t--the camera jammed. And this morning Lily Keatts took a plane to England. She thought she was through.’

‘Cut the scene,’ suggested Pat--and then on inspiration, ‘I bet I could fix it for you.’

‘You fixed it, all right!’ Berners assured him. ‘If there was any way to fix it back I wouldn’t have sent for you.’

He paused, looked speculatively at Pat. His buzzer sounded and a secretary’s voice said ‘Mr Hilliard’.

‘Send him in.’

George Hilliard was a huge man and the glance he bent upon Pat was not kindly. But there was some other element besides anger in it and Pat squirmed doubtfully as the two men regarded him with almost impersonal curiosity--as if he were a candidate for a cannibal’s frying pan.

‘Well, goodbye,’ he suggested uneasily.

‘What do you think, George?’ demanded Berners.

‘Well--’ said Hilliard, hesitantly, ‘we could black out a couple of teeth.’

Pat rose hurriedly and took a step toward the door, but Hilliard seized him and faced him around.

‘Let’s hear you talk,’ he said.

‘You can’t beat me up,’ Pat clamoured. ‘You knock my teeth out and I’ll sue you.’

There was a pause.

‘What do you think?’ demanded Berners.

‘He can’t talk,’ said Hilliard.

‘You damn right I can talk!’ said Pat.

‘We can dub three or four lines,’ continued Hilliard, ‘and nobody’ll know the difference. Half the guys you get to play rats can’t talk. The point is this one’s got the physique and the camera will pull it out of his face too.’

Berners nodded.

‘All right, Pat--you’re an actor. You’ve got to play the part this McCarthy had. Only a couple of scenes but they’re important. You’ll have papers to sign with the Guild and Central Casting and you can report for work this afternoon.’

‘What is this!’ Pat demanded. ‘I’m no ham--’ Remembering that Hilliard had once been a leading man he recoiled from this attitude: ‘I’m a writer.’

‘The character you play is called “The Rat”,’ continued Berners. He explained why it was necessary for Pat to continue his impromptu appearance of yesterday. The scenes which included Miss Keatts had been shot first, so that she could fulfil an English engagement. But in the filling out of the skeleton it was necessary to show how the gangsters reached their hide-out, and what they did after Miss Keatts dove from the window. Having irrevocably appeared in the shot with Miss Keatts, Pat must appear in half a dozen other shots, to be taken in the next few days.

‘What kind of jack is it?’ Pat inquired.

‘We were paying McCarthy fifty a day--wait a minute Pat--but I thought I’d pay you your last writing price, two-fifty for the week.’

‘How about my reputation?’ objected Pat.

‘I won’t answer that one,’ said Berners. ‘But if Benchley can act and Don Stewart and Lewis and Wilder and Woollcott, I guess it won’t ruin you.’

Pat drew a long breath.

‘Can you let me have fifty on account,’ he asked, ‘because really I earned that yester--’

‘If you got what you earned yesterday you’d be in a hospital. And you’re not going on any bat. Here’s ten dollars and that’s all you see for a week.’

‘How about my car--’

‘To hell with your car.’

III

‘The Rat’ was the die-hard of the gang who were engaged in sabotage for an unidentified government of N-zis. His speeches were simplicity itself--Pat had written their like many times. ‘Don’t finish him till the Brain comes’; ‘Let’s get out of here’; ‘Fella, you’re going out feet first.’ Pat found it pleasant--mostly waiting around as in all picture work--and he hoped it might lead to other openings in this line. He was sorry that the job was so short.

His last scene was on location. He knew ‘The Rat’ was to touch off an explosion in which he himself was killed but Pat had watched such scenes and was certain he would be in no slightest danger. Out on the back lot he was mildly curious when they measured him around the waist and chest.

‘Making a dummy?’ he asked.

‘Not exactly,’ the prop man said. ‘This thing is all made but it was for Gyp McCarthy and I want to see if it’ll fit you.’

‘Does it?’

‘Just exactly.’

‘What is it?’

‘Well--it’s a sort of protector.’

A slight draught of uneasiness blew in Pat’s mind.

‘Protector for what? Against the explosion?’

‘Heck no! The explosion is phony--just a process shot. This is something else.’

‘What is it?’ persisted Pat. ‘If I got to be protected against something I got a right to know what it is.’

Near the false front of a warehouse a battery of cameras were getting into position. George Hilliard came suddenly out of a group and toward Pat and putting his arm on his shoulder steered him toward the actors’ dressing tent. Once inside he handed Pat a flask.

‘Have a drink, old man.’

Pat took a long pull.

‘There’s a bit of business, Pat,’ Hilliard said, ‘needs some new costuming. I’ll explain it while they dress you.’

Pat was divested of coat and vest, his trousers were loosened and in an instant a hinged iron doublet was fastened about his middle, extending from his armpits to his crotch very much like a plaster cast.

‘This is the very finest strongest iron, Pat,’ Hilliard assured him. ‘The very best in tensile strength and resistance. It was built in Pittsburgh.’

Pat suddenly resisted the attempts of two dressers to pull his trousers up over the thing and to slip on his coat and vest.

‘What’s it for?’ he demanded, arms flailing. ‘I want to know. You’re not going to shoot at me if that’s what--’

‘No shooting.’

‘Then what is it? I’m no stunt man--’

‘You signed a contract just like McCarthy’s to do anything within reason--and our lawyers have certified this.’

‘What is it?’ Pat’s mouth was dry.

‘It’s an automobile.’

‘You’re going to hit me with an automobile.’

‘Give me a chance to tell you,’ begged Hilliard. ‘Nobody’s going to hit you. The auto’s going to pass over you, that’s all. This case is so strong--’

‘Oh no!’ said Pat. ‘Oh no!’ He tore at the iron corselet. ‘Not on your--’

George Hilliard pinioned his arms firmly.

‘Pat, you almost wrecked this picture once--you’re not going to do it again. Be a man.’

‘That’s what I’m going to be. You’re not going to squash me out flat like that extra last month.’

He broke off. Behind Hilliard he saw a face he knew--a hateful and dreaded face--that of the collector for the North Hollywood Finance and Loan Company. Over in the parking lot stood his coupe, faithful pal and servant since 1934, companion of his misfortunes, his only certain home.

‘Either you fill your contract,’ said George Hilliard, ‘--or you’re out of pictures for keeps.’

The man from the finance company had taken a step forward. Pat turned to Hilliard.

‘Will you loan me--’ he faltered, ‘--will you advance me twenty-five dollars?’

‘Sure,’ said Hilliard.

Pat spoke fiercely to the credit man:

‘You hear that? You’ll get your money, but if this thing breaks, my death’ll be on your head.’

The next few minutes passed in a dream. He heard Hilliard’s last instructions as they walked from the tent. Pat was to be lying in a shallow ditch to touch off the dynamite--and then the hero would drive the car slowly across his middle. Pat listened dimly. A picture of himself, cracked like an egg by the factory wall, lay a-thwart his mind.

He picked up the torch and lay down in the ditch. Afar off he heard the call ‘Quiet’, then Hilliard’s voice and the noise of the car warming up.

‘Action!’ called someone. There was the sound of the car growing nearer--louder. And then Pat Hobby knew no more.

IV

When he awoke it was dark and quiet. For some moments he failed to recognize his whereabouts. Then he saw that stars were out in the California sky and that he was somewhere alone--no--he was held tight in someone’s arms. But the arms were of iron and he realized that he was still in the metallic casing. And then it all came back to him--up to the moment when he heard the approach of the car.

As far as he could determine he was unhurt--but why out here and alone?

He struggled to get up but found it was impossible and after a horrified moment he let out a cry for help. For five minutes he called out at intervals until finally a voice came from far away; and assistance arrived in the form of a studio policeman.

‘What is it fella? A drop too much?’

‘Hell no,’ cried Pat. ‘I was in the shooting this afternoon. It was a lousy trick to go off and leave me in this ditch.’

‘They must have forgot you in the excitement.’

‘Forgot me! I was the excitement. If you don’t believe me then feel what I got on!’

The cop helped him to his feet.

‘They was upset,’ he explained. ‘A star don’t break his leg every day.’

‘What’s that? Did something happen?’

‘Well, as I heard, he was supposed to drive the car at a bump and the car turned over and broke his leg. They had to stop shooting and they’re all kind of gloomy.’

‘And they leave me inside this--this stove. How do I get it off tonight? How’m I going to drive my car?’

But for all his rage Pat felt a certain fierce pride. He was Something in this set-up--someone to be reckoned with after years of neglect. He had managed to hold up the picture once more.

PAT HOBBY’S PREVIEW

Esquire (October 1940)

I

‘I haven’t got a job for you,’ said Berners. ‘We’ve got more writers now than we can use.’

‘I didn’t ask for a job,’ said Pat with dignity. ‘But I rate some tickets for the preview tonight--since I got a half credit.’

‘Oh yes, I want to talk to you about that,’ Berners frowned. ‘We may have to take your name off the screen credits.’

‘What?’ exclaimed Pat. ‘Why, it’s already on! I saw it in the Reporter. “By Ward Wainwright and Pat Hobby.”‘

‘But we may have to take it off when we release the picture. Wainwright’s back from the East and raising hell. He says that you claimed lines where all you did was change “No” to “No sir” and “crimson” to “red”, and stuff like that.’

‘I been in this business twenty years,’ said Pat. ‘I know my rights. That guy laid an egg. I was called in to revise a turkey!’

‘You were not,’ Berners assured him. ‘After Wainwright went to New York I called you in to fix one small character. If I hadn’t gone fishing you wouldn’t have got away with sticking your name on the script.’ Jack Berners broke off, touched by Pat’s dismal, red-streaked eyes. ‘Still, I was glad to see you get a credit after so long.’

‘I’ll join the Screen Writers Guild and fight it.’

‘You don’t stand a chance. Anyhow, Pat, your name’s on it tonight at least, and it’ll remind everybody you’re alive. And I’ll dig you up some tickets--but keep an eye out for Wainwright. It isn’t good for you to get socked if you’re over fifty.’

‘I’m in my forties,’ said Pat, who was forty-nine.

The Dictograph buzzed. Berners switched it on.

‘It’s Mr Wainwright.’

‘Tell him to wait.’ He turned to Pat: ‘That’s Wainwright. Better go out the side door.’

‘How about the tickets?’

‘Drop by this afternoon.’

To a rising young screen poet this might have been a crushing blow but Pat was made of sterner stuff. Sterner not upon himself, but on the harsh fate that had dogged him for nearly a decade. With all his experience, and with the help of every poisonous herb that blossoms between Washington Boulevard and Ventura, between Santa Monica and Vine--he continued to slip. Sometimes he grabbed momentarily at a bush, found a few weeks’ surcease upon the island of a ‘patch job’, but in general the slide continued at a pace that would have dizzied a lesser man.

Once safely out of Berners’ office, for instance, Pat looked ahead and not behind. He visioned a drink with Louie, the studio bookie, and then a call on some old friends on the lot. Occasionally, but less often every year, some of these calls developed into jobs before you could say ‘Santa Anita’. But after he had had his drink his eyes fell upon a lost girl.

She was obviously lost. She stood staring very prettily at the trucks full of extras that rolled toward the commissary. And then gazed about helpless--so helpless that a truck was almost upon her when Pat reached out and plucked her aside.

‘Oh, thanks,’ she said, ‘thanks, I came with a party for a tour of the studio and a policeman made me leave my camera in some office. Then I went to stage five where the guide said, but it was closed.’

She was a ‘Cute Little Blonde’. To Pat’s liverish eye, cute little blondes seemed as much alike as a string of paper dolls. Of course they had different names.

‘We’ll see about it,’ said Pat.

‘You’re very nice. I’m Eleanor Carter from Boise, Idaho.’

He told her his name and that he was a writer. She seemed first disappointed--then delighted.

‘A writer? . . . Oh, of course. I knew they had to have writers but I guess I never heard about one before.’

‘Writers get as much as three grand a week,’ he assured her firmly. ‘Writers are some of the biggest shots in Hollywood.’

‘You see, I never thought of it that way.’

‘Bernud Shaw was out here,’ he said, ‘--and Einstein, but they couldn’t make the grade.’

They walked to the Bulletin Board and Pat found that there was work scheduled on three stages--and one of the directors was a friend out of the past.

‘What did you write?’ Eleanor asked.

A great male Star loomed on the horizon and Eleanor was all eyes till he had passed. Anyhow the names of Pat’s pictures would have been unfamiliar to her.

‘Those were all silents,’ he said.

‘Oh. Well, what did you write last?’

‘Well, I worked on a thing at Universal--I don’t know what they called it finally--’ He saw that he was not impressing her at all. He thought quickly. What did they know in Boise, Idaho?’ I wrote Captains Courageous,’ he said boldly. ‘And Test Pilot and WutheringHeights and--and The Awful Truth and Mr Smith Goes to Washington.’

‘Oh!’ she exclaimed. ‘Those are all my favourite pictures. And Test Pilot is my boy friend’s favourite picture and Dark Victory is mine.’

‘I thought Dark Victory stank,’ he said modestly. ‘Highbrow stuff,’ and he added to balance the scales of truth, ‘I been here twenty years.’

They came to a stage and went in. Pat sent his name to the director and they were passed. They watched while Ronald Colman rehearsed a scene.

‘Did you write this?’ Eleanor whispered.

‘They asked me to,’ Pat said, ‘but I was busy.’

He felt young again, authoritative and active, with a hand in many schemes. Then he remembered something.

‘I’ve got a picture opening tonight.’

‘You have?’

He nodded.

‘I was going to take Claudette Colbert but she’s got a cold. Would you like to go?’

II

He was alarmed when she mentioned a family, relieved when she said it was only a resident aunt. It would be like old times walking with a cute little blonde past the staring crowds on the sidewalk. His car was Class of 1933 but he could say it was borrowed--one of his Jap servants had smashed his limousine. Then what? he didn’t quite know, but he could put on a good act for one night.

He bought her lunch in the commissary and was so stirred that he thought of borrowing somebody’s apartment for the day. There was the old line about ‘getting her a test’. But Eleanor was thinking only of getting to a hair-dresser to prepare for tonight, and he escorted her reluctantly to the gate. He had another drink with Louie and went to Jack Berners’ office for the tickets.

Berners’ secretary had them ready in an envelope.

‘We had trouble about these, Mr Hobby.’

‘Trouble? Why? Can’t a man go to his own preview? Is this something new?’

‘It’s not that, Mr Hobby,’ she said. ‘The picture’s been talked about so much, every seat is gone.’

Unreconciled, he complained, ‘And they just didn’t think of me.’

‘I’m sorry.’ She hesitated. ‘These are really Mr Wainwright’s tickets. He was so angry about something that he said he wouldn’t go--and threw them on my desk. I shouldn’t be telling you this.’

‘These are his seats?’

‘Yes, Mr Hobby.’

Pat sucked his tongue. This was in the nature of a triumph. Wainwright had lost his temper, which was the last thing you should ever do in pictures--you could only pretend to lose it--so perhaps his applecart wasn’t so steady. Perhaps Pat ought to join the Screen Writers Guild and present his case--if the Screen Writers Guild would take him in.

This problem was academic. He was calling for Eleanor at five o’clock and taking her ‘somewhere for a cocktail’. He bought a two-dollar shirt, changing into it in the shop, and a four-dollar Alpine hat--thus halving his bank account which, since the Bank Holiday of 1933, he carried cautiously in his pocket.

The modest bungalow in West Hollywood yielded up Eleanor without a struggle. On his advice she was not in evening dress but she was as trim and shining as any cute little blonde out of his past. Eager too--running over with enthusiasm and gratitude. He must think of someone whose apartment he could borrow for tomorrow.

‘You’d like a test?’ he asked as they entered the Brown Derby bar.

‘What girl wouldn’t?’

‘Some wouldn’t--for a million dollars.’ Pat had had setbacks in his love life. ‘Some of them would rather go on pounding the keys or just hanging around. You’d be surprised.’

‘I’d do almost anything for a test,’ Eleanor said.

Looking at her two hours later he wondered honestly to himself if it couldn’t be arranged. There was Harry Gooddorf--there was Jack Berners--but his credit was low on all sides. He could do something for her, he decided. He would try at least to get an agent interested--if all went well tomorrow.

‘What are you doing tomorrow?’ he asked.

‘Nothing,’ she answered promptly. ‘Hadn’t we better eat and get to the preview?’

‘Sure, sure.’

He made a further inroad on his bank account to pay for his six whiskeys--you certainly had the right to celebrate before your own preview--and took her into the restaurant for dinner. They ate little. Eleanor was too excited--Pat had taken his calories in another form.

It was a long time since he had seen a picture with his name on it. Pat Hobby. As a man of the people he always appeared in the credit titles as Pat Hobby. It would be nice to see it again and though he did not expect his old friends to stand up and sing Happy Birthday to You, he was sure there would be back-slapping and even a little turn of attention toward him as the crowd swayed out of the theatre. That would be nice.

‘I’m frightened,’ said Eleanor as they walked through the alley of packed fans.

‘They’re looking at you,’ he said confidently. ‘They look at that pretty pan and try to think if you’re an actress.’

A fan shoved an autograph album and pencil toward Eleanor but Pat moved her firmly along. It was late--the equivalent of’ ‘all aboard’ was being shouted around the entrance.

‘Show your tickets, please sir.’

Pat opened the envelope and handed them to the doorman. Then he said to Eleanor:

‘The seats are reserved--it doesn’t matter that we’re late.’

She pressed close to him, clinging--it was, as it turned out, the high point of her debut. Less than three steps inside the theatre a hand fell on Pat’s shoulder.

‘Hey Buddy, these aren’t tickets for here.’

Before they knew it they were back outside the door, glared at with suspicious eyes.

‘I’m Pat Hobby. I wrote this picture.’

For an instant credulity wandered to his side. Then the hard-boiled doorman sniffed at Pat and stepped in close.

‘Buddy you’re drunk. These are tickets to another show.’

Eleanor looked and felt uneasy but Pat was cool.

‘Go inside and ask Jack Berners,’ Pat said. ‘He’ll tell you.’

‘Now listen,’ said the husky guard, ‘these are tickets for a burlesque down in L.A.’ He was steadily edging Pat to the side. ‘You go to your show, you and your girl friend. And be happy.’

‘You don’t understand. I wrote this picture.’

‘Sure. In a pipe dream.’

‘Look at the programme. My name’s on it. I’m Pat Hobby.’

‘Can you prove it? Let’s see your auto licence.’

As Pat handed it over he whispered to Eleanor, ‘Don’t worry!’

‘This doesn’t say Pat Hobby,’ announced the doorman. ‘This says the car’s owned by the North Hollywood Finance and Loan Company. Is that you?’

For once in his life Pat could think of nothing to say--he cast one quick glance at Eleanor. Nothing in her face indicated that he was anything but what he thought he was--all alone.

III

Though the preview crowd had begun to drift away, with that vague American wonder as to why they had come at all, one little cluster found something arresting and poignant in the faces of Pat and Eleanor. They were obviously gate-crashers, outsiders like themselves, but the crowd resented the temerity of their effort to get in--a temerity which the crowd did not share. Little jeering jests were audible. Then, with Eleanor already edging away from the distasteful scene, there was a flurry by the door. A well-dressed six-footer strode out of the theatre and stood gazing till he saw Pat.

‘There you are!’ he shouted.

Pat recognized Ward Wainwright.

‘Go in and look at it!’ Wainwright roared. ‘Look at it. Here’s some ticket stubs! I think the prop boy directed it! Go and look!’ To the doorman he said: ‘It’s all right! He wrote it. I wouldn’t have my name on an inch of it.’

Trembling with frustration, Wainwright threw up his hands and strode off into the curious crowd.

Eleanor was terrified. But the same spirit that had inspired ‘I’d do anything to get in the movies’, kept her standing there--though she felt invisible fingers reaching forth to drag her back to Boise. She had been intending to run--hard and fast. The hard-boiled doorman and the tall stranger had crystallized her feelings that Pat was ‘rather simple’. She would never let those red-rimmed eyes come close to her--at least for any more than a doorstep kiss. She was saving herself for somebody--and it wasn’t Pat. Yet she felt that the lingering crowd was a tribute to her--such as she had never exacted before. Several times she threw a glance at the crowd--a glance that now changed from wavering fear into a sort of queenliness.

She felt exactly like a star.

Pat, too, was all confidence. This was his preview; all had been delivered into his hands: his name would stand alone on the screen when the picture was released. There had to be somebody’s name, didn’t there?--and Wainwright had withdrawn.

SCREENPLAY BY PAT HOBBY.

He seized Eleanor’s elbow in a firm grasp and steered her triumphantly towards the door:

‘Cheer up, baby. That’s the way it is. You see?’

NO HARM TRYING

Esquire (November 1940)

Pat hobby’s apartment lay athwart a delicatessen shop on Wilshire Boulevard. And there lay Pat himself, surrounded by his books--the Motion Picture Almanac of 1928 and Barton’s Track Guide, 1939--by his pictures, authentically signed photographs of Mabel Normand and Barbara LaMarr (who, being deceased, had no value in the pawn-shops)--and by his dogs in their cracked leather oxfords, perched on the arm of a slanting settee.

Pat was at “the end of his resources”--though this term is too ominous to describe a fairly usual condition in his life. He was an old-timer in pictures; he had once known sumptuous living, but for the past ten years jobs had been hard to hold--harder to hold than glasses.

“Think of it,” he often mourned. “Only a writer--at forty-nine.”

All this afternoon he had turned the pages of The Times and The Examiner for an idea. Though he did not intend to compose a motion picture from this idea, he needed it to get him inside a studio. If you had nothing to submit it was increasingly difficult to pass the gate. But though these two newspapers, together with Life, were the sources most commonly combed for “originals,” they yielded him nothing this afternoon. There were wars, a fire in TopangaCanyon, press releases from the studios, municipal corruptions, and always the redeeming deeds of “The Trojuns,” but Pat found nothing that competed in human interest with the betting page.

--If I could get out to Santa Anita, he thought--I could maybe get an idea about the nags.

This cheering idea was interrupted by his landlord, from the delicatessen store below.

“I told you I wouldn’t deliver any more messages,” said Nick, “and still I won’t. But Mr. Carl Le Vigne is telephoning in person from the studio and wants you should go over right away.”

The prospect of a job did something to Pat. It anesthetized the crumbled, struggling remnants of his manhood, and inoculated him instead with a bland, easygoing confidence. The set speeches and attitudes of success returned to him. His manner as he winked at a studio policeman, stopped to chat with Louie, the bookie, and presented himself to Mr. Le Vigne’s secretary, indicated that he had been engaged with momentous tasks in other parts of the globe. By saluting Le Vigne with a facetious “Hel-lo Captain!” he behaved almost as an equal, a trusted lieutenant who had never really been away.

“Pat, your wife’s in the hospital,” Le Vigne said. “It’ll probably be in the papers this afternoon.”

Pat started.

“My wife?” he said. “What wife?”

“Estelle. She tried to cut her wrists.”

“Estelle!” Pat exclaimed. “You mean Estelle? Say, I was only married to her three weeks!”

“She was the best girl you ever had,” said Le Vigne grimly.

“I haven’t even heard of her for ten years.”

“You’re hearing about her now. They called all the studios trying to locate you.”

“I had nothing to do with it.”

“I know--she’s only been here a week. She had a run of hard luck wherever it was she lived--New Orleans? Husband died, child died, no money . . .”

Pat breathed easier. They weren’t trying to hang anything on him.

“Anyhow she’ll live,” Le Vigne reassured him superfluously, “--and she was the best script girl on the lot once. We’d like to take care of her. We thought the way was give you a job. Not exactly a job, because I know you’re not up to it.” He glanced into Pat’s red-rimmed eyes. “More of a sinecure.”

Pat became uneasy. He didn’t recognize the word, but “sin” disturbed him and “cure” brought a whole flood of unpleasant memories.

“You’re on the payroll at two-fifty a week for three weeks,” said Le Vigne, “--but one-fifty of that goes to the hospital for your wife’s bill.”

“But we’re divorced!” Pat protested. “No Mexican stuff either. I’ve been married since, and so has--”

“Take it or leave it. You can have an office here, and if anything you can do comes up we’ll let you know.”

“I never worked for a hundred a week.”

“We’re not asking you to work. If you want you can stay home.”

Pat reversed his field.

“Oh, I’ll work,” he said quickly. “You dig me up a good story and I’ll show you whether I can work or not.”

Le Vigne wrote something on a slip of paper.

“All right. They’ll find you an office.”

Outside Pat looked at the memorandum.

“Mrs. John Devlin,” it read, “Good Samaritan Hospital.”

The very words irritated him.

“Good Samaritan!” he exclaimed. “Good gyp joint! One hundred and fifty bucks a week!”

Pat had been given many a charity job but this was the first one that made him feel ashamed. He did not mind not earning his salary, but not getting it was another matter. And he wondered if other people on the lot who were obviously doing nothing, were being fairly paid for it. There were, for example, a number of beautiful young ladies who walked aloof as stars, and whom Pat took for stock girls, until Eric, the callboy, told him they were imports from Vienna and Budapest, not yet cast for pictures. Did half their pay checks go to keep husbands they had only had for three weeks!

The loveliest of these was Lizzette Starheim, a violet-eyed little blonde with an ill-concealed air of disillusion. Pat saw her alone at tea almost every afternoon in the commissary--and made her acquaintance one day by simply sliding into a chair opposite.

“Hello, Lizzette,” he said. “I’m Pat Hobby, the writer.”

“Oh, hello!”

She flashed such a dazzling smile that for a moment he thought she must have heard of him.

“When they going to cast you?” he demanded.

“I don’t know.” Her accent was faint and poignant.

“Don’t let them give you the run-around. Not with a face like yours.” Her beauty roused a rusty eloquence. “Sometimes they just keep you under contract till your teeth fall out, because you look too much like their big star.”

“Oh no,” she said distressfully.

“Oh yes!” he assured her. “I’m telling you. Why don’t you go to another company and get borrowed? Have you thought of that idea?”

“I think it’s wonderful.”

He intended to go further into the subject but Miss Starheim looked at her watch and got up.

“I must go now, Mr.--”

“Hobby. Pat Hobby.”

Pat joined Dutch Waggoner, the director, who was shooting dice with a waitress at another table.

“Between pictures, Dutch?”

“Between pictures hell!” said Dutch. “I haven’t done a picture for six months and my contract’s got six months to run. I’m trying to break it. Who was the little blonde?”

Afterwards, back in his office, Pat discussed these encounters with Eric the callboy.

“All signed up and no place to go,” said Eric. “Look at this Jeff Manfred, now--an associate producer! Sits in his office and sends notes to the big shots--and I carry back word they’re in Palm Springs. It breaks my heart. Yesterday he put his head on his desk and boo-hoo’d.”

“What’s the answer?” asked Pat.

“Changa management,” suggested Eric, darkly. “Shake-up coming.”

“Who’s going to the top?” Pat asked, with scarcely concealed excitement.

“Nobody knows,” said Eric. “But wouldn’t I like to land uphill! Boy! I want a writer’s job. I got three ideas so new they’re wet behind the ears.”

“It’s no life at all,” Pat assured him with conviction. “I’d trade with you right now.”

In the hall next day he intercepted Jeff Manfred who walked with the unconvincing hurry of one without a destination.

“What’s the rush, Jeff?” Pat demanded, falling into step.

“Reading some scripts,” Jeff panted without conviction.

Pat drew him unwillingly into his office.

“Jeff, have you heard about the shake-up?”

“Listen now, Pat--” Jeff looked nervously at the walls. “What shake-up?” he demanded.

“I heard that this Harmon Shaver is going to be the new boss,” ventured Pat, “Wall Street control.”

“Harmon Shaver!” Jeff scoffed. “He doesn’t know anything about pictures--he’s just a money man. He wanders around like a lost soul.” Jeff sat back and considered. “Still--if you’re right, he’d be a man you could get to.” He turned mournful eyes on Pat. “I haven’t been able to see Le Vigne or Barnes or Bill Behrer for a month. Can’t get an assignment, can’t get an actor, can’t get a story.” He broke off. “I’ve thought of drumming up something on my own. Got any ideas?”

“Have I?” said Pat. “I got three ideas so new they’re wet behind the ears.”

“Who for?”

“Lizzette Starheim,” said Pat, “with Dutch Waggoner directing--see?”

“I’m with you all a hundred per cent,” said Harmon Shaver. “This is the most encouraging experience I’ve had in pictures.” He had a bright bond-salesman’s chuckle. “By God, it reminds me of a circus we got up when I was a boy.”

They had come to his office inconspicuously like conspirators--Jeff Manfred, Waggoner, Miss Starheim and Pat Hobby.

“You like the idea, Miss Starheim?” Shaver continued.

“I think it’s wonderful.”

“And you, Mr. Waggoner?”

“I’ve heard only the general line,” said Waggoner with director’s caution, “but it seems to have the old emotional socko.” He winked at Pat. “I didn’t know this old tramp had it in him.”

Pat glowed with pride. Jeff Manfred, though he was elated, was less sanguine.

“It’s important nobody talks,” he said nervously. “The Big Boys would find some way of killing it. In a week, when we’ve got the script done we’ll go to them.”

“I agree,” said Shaver. “They have run the studio so long that--well, I don’t trust my own secretaries--I sent them to the races this afternoon.”

Back in Pat’s office Eric, the callboy, was waiting. He did not know that he was the hinge upon which swung a great affair.

“You like the stuff, eh?” he asked eagerly.

“Pretty good,” said Pat with calculated indifference.

“You said you’d pay more for the next batch.”

“Have a heart!” Pat was aggrieved. “How many callboys get seventy-five a week?”

“How many callboys can write?”

Pat considered. Out of the two hundred a week Jeff Manfred was advancing from his own pocket, he had naturally awarded himself a commission of sixty per cent.

“I’ll make it a hundred,” he said. “Now check yourself off the lot and meet me in front of Benny’s bar.”

At the hospital, Estelle Hobby Devlin sat up in bed, overwhelmed by the unexpected visit.

“I’m glad you came, Pat,” she said, “you’ve been very kind. Did you get my note?”

“Forget it,” Pat said gruffly. He had never liked this wife. She had loved him too much--until she found suddenly that he was a poor lover. In her presence he felt inferior.

“I got a guy outside,” he said.

“What for?”

“I thought maybe you had nothing to do and you might want to pay me back for all this jack--”

He waved his hand around the bare hospital room.

“You were a swell script girl once. Do you think if I got a typewriter you could put some good stuff into continuity?”

“Why--yes. I suppose I could.”

“It’s a secret. We can’t trust anybody at the studio.”

“All right,” she said.

“I’ll send this kid in with the stuff. I got a conference.”

“All right--and--oh Pat--come and see me again.”

“Sure, I’ll come.”

But he knew he wouldn’t. He didn’t like sickrooms--he lived in one himself. From now on he was done with poverty and failure. He admired strength--he was taking Lizzette Starheim to a wrestling match that night.

In his private musings Harmon Shaver referred to the showdown as “the surprise party.” He was going to confront Le Vigne with a fait accompli and he gathered his coterie before phoning Le Vigne to come over to his office.

“What for?” demanded Le Vigne. “Couldn’t you tell me now--I’m busy as hell.”

This arrogance irritated Shaver--who was here to watch over the interests of Eastern stockholders.

“I don’t ask much,” he said sharply, “I let you fellows laugh at me behind my back and freeze me out of things. But now I’ve got something and I’d like you to come over.”

“All right--all right.”

Le Vigne’s eyebrows lifted as he saw the members of the new production unit but he said nothing--sprawled into an arm chair with his eyes on the floor and his fingers over his mouth.

Mr. Shaver came around the desk and poured forth words that had been fermenting in him for months. Simmered to its essentials, his protest was: “You would not let me play, but I’m going to play anyhow.” Then he nodded to Jeff Manfred--who opened the script and read aloud. This took an hour, and still Le Vigne sat motionless and silent.

“There you are,” said Shaver triumphantly. “Unless you’ve got any objection I think we ought to assign a budget to this proposition and get going. I’ll answer to my people.”

Le Vigne spoke at last.

“You like it, Miss Starheim?”

“I think it’s wonderful.”

“What language you going to play it in?”

To everyone’s surprise Miss Starheim got to her feet.

“I must go now,” she said with her faint poignant accent.

“Sit down and answer me,” said Le Vigne. “What language are you playing it in?”

Miss Starheim looked tearful.

“Wenn I gute teachers hätte konnte ich dann thees rôle gut spielen,” she faltered.

“But you like the script.”

She hesitated.

“I think it’s wonderful.”

Le Vigne turned to the others.

“Miss Starheim has been here eight months,” he said. “She’s had three teachers. Unless things have changed in the past two weeks she can say just three sentences. She can say, ‘How do you do’; she can say, ‘I think it’s wonderful’; and she can say, ‘I must go now.’ Miss Starheim has turned out to be a pinhead--I’m not insulting her because she doesn’t know what it means. Anyhow--there’s your Star.”

He turned to Dutch Waggoner, but Dutch was already on his feet.

“Now Carl--” he said defensively.

“You force me to it,” said Le Vigne. “I’ve trusted drunks up to a point, but I’ll be goddam if I’ll trust a hophead.”

He turned to Harmon Shaver.

“Dutch has been good for exactly one week apiece on his last four pictures. He’s all right now but as soon as the heat goes on he reaches for the little white powders. Now Dutch! Don’t say anything you’ll regret. We’re carrying you in hopes--but you won’t get on a stage till we’ve had a doctor’s certificate for a year.”

Again he turned to Harmon.

“There’s your director. Your supervisor, Jeff Manfred, is here for one reason only--because he’s Behrer’s wife’s cousin. There’s nothing against him but he belongs to silent days as much as--as much as--” His eyes fell upon a quavering broken man, “--as much as Pat Hobby.”

“What do you mean?” demanded Jeff.

“You trusted Hobby, didn’t you? That tells the whole story.” He turned back to Shaver. “Jeff’s a weeper and a wisher and a dreamer. Mr. Shaver, you have bought a lot of condemned building material.”

“Well, I’ve bought a good story,” said Shaver defiantly.

“Yes. That’s right. We’ll make that story.”

“Isn’t that something?” demanded Shaver. “With all this secrecy how was I to know about Mr. Waggoner and Miss Starheim? But I do know a good story.”

“Yes,” said Le Vigne absently. He got up. “Yes--it’s a good story. . . . Come along to my office, Pat.”

He was already at the door. Pat cast an agonized look at Mr. Shaver as if for support. Then, weakly, he followed.

“Sit down, Pat.”

“That Eric’s got talent, hasn’t he?” said Le Vigne. “He’ll go places. How’d you come to dig him up?”

Pat felt the straps of the electric chair being adjusted.

“Oh--I just dug him up. He--came in my office.”

“We’re putting him on salary,” said Le Vigne. “We ought to have some system to give these kids a chance.”

He took a call on his Dictograph, then swung back to Pat.

“But how did you ever get mixed up with this goddam Shaver. You, Pat--an old-timer like you.”

“Well, I thought--”

“Why doesn’t he go back East?” continued Le Vigne disgustedly. “Getting all you poops stirred up!”

Blood flowed back into Pat’s veins. He recognized his signal, his dog-call.

“Well, I got you a story, didn’t I?” he said, with almost a swagger. And he added, “How’d you know about it?”

“I went down to see Estelle in the hospital. She and this kid were working on it. I walked right in on them.”

“Oh,” said Pat.

“I knew the kid by sight. Now, Pat, tell me this--did Jeff Manfred think you wrote it--or was he in on the racket?”

“Oh God,” Pat mourned. “What do I have to answer that for?”

Le Vigne leaned forward intensely.

“Pat, you’re sitting over a trap door!” he said with savage eyes. “Do you see how the carpet’s cut? I just have to press this button and drop you down to hell! Will you talk?”

Pat was on his feet, staring wildly at the floor.

“Sure I will!” he cried. He believed it--he believed such things.

“All right,” said Le Vigne relaxing. “There’s whiskey in the sideboard there. Talk quick and I’ll give you another month at two-fifty. I kinda like having you around.”

A PATRIOTIC SHORT

Esquire (December 1940)

Pat Hobby, the writer and the man, had his great success in Hollywood during what Irving Cobb refers to as ‘the mosaic swimming-pool age--just before the era when they had to have a shinbone of St Sebastian for a clutch lever.’

Mr Cobb no doubt exaggerates, for when Pat had his pool in those fat days of silent pictures, it was entirely cement, unless you should count the cracks where the water stubbornly sought its own level through the mud.

‘But it was a pool,’ he assured himself one afternoon more than a decade later. Though he was now more than grateful for this small chore he had assigned him by producer Berners--one week at two-fifty--all the insolence of office could not take that memory away.

He had been called in to the studio to work upon an humble short. It was based on the career of General Fitzhugh Lee who fought for the Confederacy and later for the U.S.A. against Spain--so it would offend neither North nor South. And in the recent conference Pat had tried to co-operate.

‘I was thinking--’ he suggested to Jack Berners ‘--that it might be a good thing if we could give it a Jewish touch.’

‘What do you mean?’ demanded Jack Berners quickly.

‘Well I thought--the way things are and all, it would be a sort of good thing to show that there were a number of Jews in it too.’

‘In what?’

‘In the Civil War.’ Quickly he reviewed his meagre history. ‘They were, weren’t they?’

‘Naturally,’ said Berners, with some impatience, ‘I suppose everybody was except the Quakers.’

‘Well, my idea was that we could have this Fitzhugh Lee in love with a Jewish girl. He’s going to be shot at curfew so she grabs a church bell--’

Jack Berners leaned forward earnestly.

‘Say, Pat, you want this job, don’t you? Well, I told you the story. You got the first script. If you thought up this tripe to please me you’re losing your grip.’

Was that a way to treat a man who had once owned a pool which had been talked about by--

That was how he happened to be thinking about his long lost swimming pool as he entered the shorts department. He was remembering a certain day over a decade ago in all its details, how he had arrived at the studio in his car driven by a Filipino in uniform; the deferential bow of the guard at the gate which had admitted car and all to the lot, his ascent to that long lost office which had a room for the secretary and was really a director’s office . . .

His reverie was broken off by the voice of Ben Brown, head of the shorts department, who walked him into his own chambers.

‘Jack Berners just phoned me,’ he said. ‘We don’t want any new angles, Pat. We’ve got a good story. Fitzhugh Lee was a dashing cavalry commander. He was a nephew of Robert E. Lee and we want to show him at Appomattox, pretty bitter and all that. And then show how he became reconciled--we’ll have to be careful because Virginia is swarming with Lees--and how he finally accepts a U.S. commission from President McKinley--’

Pat’s mind darted back again into the past. The President--that was the magic word that had gone around that morning many years ago. The President of the United States was going to make a visit to the lot. Everyone had been agog about it--it seemed to mark a new era in pictures because a President of the United States had never visited a studio before. The executives of the company were all dressed up--from a window of his long lost Beverly Hills house Pat had seen Mr Maranda, whose mansion was next door to him, bustle down his walk in a cutaway coat at nine o’clock, and had known that something was up. He thought maybe it was clergy but when he reached the lot he had found it was the President of the United States himself who was coming . . .

‘Clean up the stuff about Spain,’ Ben Brown was saying. ‘The guy that wrote it was a Red and he’s got all the Spanish officers with ants in their pants. Fix up that.’

In the office assigned him Pat looked at the script of True to Two Flags. The first scene showed General Fitzhugh Lee at the head of his cavalry receiving word that Petersburg had been evacuated. In the script Lee took the blow in pantomime, but Pat was getting two-fifty a week--so, casually and without effort, he wrote in one of his favourite lines:

Lee (to his officers)

Well, what are you standing here gawking for? DO something! 6. Medium Shot Officers pepping up, slapping each other on back, etc.

Dissolve to:

To what? Pat’s mind dissolved once more into the glamorous past. On that happy day in the twenties his phone had rung at about noon. It had been Mr Maranda.

‘Pat, the President is lunching in the private dining room. Doug Fairbanks can’t come so there’s a place empty and anyhow we think there ought to be one writer there.’

His memory of the luncheon was palpitant with glamour. The Great Man had asked some questions about pictures and had told a joke and Pat had laughed and laughed with the others--all of them solid men together--rich, happy and successful.

Afterwards the President was to go on some sets and see some scenes taken and still later he was going to Mr Maranda’s house to meet some of the women stars at tea. Pat was not invited to that party but he went home early anyhow and from his veranda saw the cortège drive up, with Mr Maranda beside the President in the back seat. Ah he was proud of pictures then--of his position in them--of the President of the happy country where he was born . . .

Returning to reality Pat looked down at the script of True to Two Flags and wrote slowly and thoughtfully:

Insert: A calendar--with the years plainly marked and the sheets blowing off in a cold wind, to show Fitzhugh Lee growing older and older.

His labours had made him thirsty--not for water, but he knew better than to take anything else his first day on the job. He got up and went out into the hall and along the corridor to the water-cooler.

As he walked he slipped back into his reverie.

That had been a lovely California afternoon so Mr Maranda had taken his exalted guest and the coterie of stars into his garden, which adjoined Pat’s garden. Pat had gone out his back door and followed a low privet hedge keeping out of sight--and then accidentally come face to face with the Presidential party.

The President had smiled and nodded. Mr Maranda smiled and nodded.

‘You met Mr Hobby at lunch,’ Mr Maranda said to the President. ‘He’s one of our writers.’

‘Oh yes,’ said the President, ‘you write the pictures.’

‘Yes I do,’ said Pat.

The President glanced over into Pat’s property.

‘I suppose--’ he said, ‘--that you get lots of inspiration sitting by the side of that fine pool.’

‘Yes,’ said Pat, ‘yes, I do,’

. . . Pat filled his cup at the cooler. Down the hall there was a group approaching--Jack Berners, Ben Brown and several other executives and with them a girl to whom they were very attentive and deferential. He recognized her face--she was the girl of the year, the It girl, the Oomph girl, the Glamour Girl, the girl for whose services every studio was in violent competition.

Pat lingered over his drink. He had seen many phonies break in and break out again, but this girl was the real thing, someone to stir every pulse in the nation. He felt his own heart beat faster. Finally, as the procession drew near, he put down the cup, dabbed at his hair with his hand and took a step out into the corridor.

The girl looked at him--he looked at the girl. Then she took one arm of Jack Berners’ and one of Ben Brown’s and suddenly the party seemed to walk right through him--so that he had to take a step back against the wall.

An instant later Jack Berners turned around and said back to him, ‘Hello, Pat.’ And then some of the others threw half glances around but no one else spoke, so interested were they in the girl.

In his office, Pat looked at the scene where President McKinley offers a United States commission to Fitzhugh Lee. Suddenly he gritted his teeth and bore down on his pencil as he wrote:

Lee

Mr President, you can take your commission and go straight to hell.

Then he bent down over his desk, his shoulders shaking as he thought of that happy day when he had had a swimming pool.

ON THE TRAIL OF PAT HOBBY

Esquire (January 1941)

I

The day was dark from the outset, and a California fog crept everywhere. It had followed Pat in his headlong, hatless flight across the city. His destination, his refuge, was the studio, where he was not employed but which had been home to him for twenty years.

Was it his imagination or did the policeman at the gate give him and his pass an especially long look? It might be the lack of a hat--Hollywood was full of hatless men but Pat felt marked, especially as there had been no opportunity to part his thin grey hair.

In the Writers’ Building he went into the lavatory. Then he remembered: by some inspired ukase from above, all mirrors had been removed from the Writers’ Building a year ago.

Across the hall he saw Bee McIlvaine’s door ajar, and discerned her plump person.

‘Bee, can you loan me your compact box?’ he asked.

Bee looked at him suspiciously, then frowned and dug it from her purse.

‘You on the lot?’ she inquired.

‘Will be next week,’ he prophesied. He put the compact on her desk and bent over it with his comb. ‘Why won’t they put mirrors back in the johnnies? Do they think writers would look at themselves all day?’

‘Remember when they took out the couches?’ said Bee. ‘In nineteen thirty-two. And they put them back in thirty-four.’

‘I worked at home,’ said Pat feelingly.

Finished with her mirror he wondered if she were good for a loan--enough to buy a hat and something to eat. Bee must have seen the look in his eyes for she forestalled him.

‘The Finns got all my money,’ she said, ‘and I’m worried about my job. Either my picture starts tomorrow or it’s going to be shelved. We haven’t even got a title.’

She handed him a mimeographed bulletin from the scenario department and Pat glanced at the headline.

TO ALL DEPARTMENTS

TITLE WANTED--FIFTY DOLLARS REWARD

SUMMARY FOLLOWS

‘I could use fifty,’ Pat said. ‘What’s it about?’

‘It’s written there. It’s about a lot of stuff that goes on in tourist cabins.’

Pat started and looked at her wild-eyed. He had thought to be safe here behind the guarded gates but news travelled fast. This was a friendly or perhaps not so friendly warning. He must move on. He was a hunted man now, with nowhere to lay his hatless head.

‘I don’t know anything about that,’ he mumbled and walked hastily from the room.

II

Just inside the door of the commissary Pat looked around. There was no guardian except the girl at the cigarette stand but obtaining another person’s hat was subject to one complication: it was hard to judge the size by a cursory glance, while the sight of a man trying on several hats in a check room was unavoidably suspicious.

Personal taste also obtruded itself. Pat was beguiled by a green fedora with a sprightly feather but it was too readily identifiable. This was also true of a fine white Stetson for the open spaces. Finally he decided on a sturdy grey Homburg which looked as if it would give him good service. With trembling hands he put it on. It fitted. He walked out--in painful, interminable slow motion.

His confidence was partly restored in the next hour by the fact that no one he encountered made references to tourists’ cabins. It had been a lean three months for Pat. He had regarded his job as night clerk for the Selecto Tourists Cabins as a mere fill-in, never to be mentioned to his friends. But when the police squad came this morning they held up the raid long enough to assure Pat, or Don Smith as he called himself, that he would be wanted as a witness. The story of his escape lies in the realm of melodrama, how he went out a side door, bought a half pint of what he so desperately needed at the corner drug-store, hitchhiked his way across the great city, going limp at the sight of traffic cops and only breathing free when he saw the studio’s high-flown sign.

After a call on Louie, the studio bookie, whose great patron he once had been, he dropped in on Jack Berners. He had no idea to submit, but he caught Jack in a hurried moment flying off to a producers’ conference and was unexpectedly invited to step in and wait for his return.

The office was rich and comfortable. There were no letters worth reading on the desk, but there were a decanter and glasses in a cupboard and presently he lay down on a big soft couch and fell asleep.

He was awakened by Berners’ return, in high indignation.

‘Of all the damn nonsense! We get a hurry call--heads of all departments. One man is late and we wait for him. He comes in and gets a bawling out for wasting thousands of dollars worth of time. Then what do you suppose: Mr Marcus has lost his favourite hat!’

Pat failed to associate the fact with himself.

‘All the department heads stop production!’ continued Berners. ‘Two thousand people look for a grey Homburg hat!’ He sank despairingly into a chair, ‘I can’t talk to you today, Pat. By four o’clock, I’ve got to get a title to a picture about a tourist camp. Got an idea?’

‘No,’ said Pat. ‘No.’

‘Well, go up to Bee McIlvaine’s office and help her figure something out. There’s fifty dollars in it.’

In a daze Pat wandered to the door.

‘Hey,’ said Berners, ‘don’t forget your hat.’

III

Feeling the effects of his day outside the law, and of a tumbler full of Berners’ brandy, Pat sat in Bee McIlvaine’s office.

‘We’ve got to get a title,’ said Bee gloomily.

She handed Pat the mimeograph offering fifty dollars reward and put a pencil in his hand. Pat stared at the paper unseeingly.

‘How about it?’ she asked. ‘Who’s got a title?’

There was a long silence.

‘Test Pilot’s been used, hasn’t it?’ he said with a vague tone.

‘Wake up! This isn’t about aviation.’

‘Well, I was just thinking it was a good title.’

‘So’s The Birth of a Nation.’

‘But not for this picture,’ Pat muttered. ‘Birth of a Nation wouldn’t suit this picture.’

‘But not for this picture,’ Pat muttered. ‘Birth of a Nation wouldn’t suit this picture.’

‘Are you ribbing me?’ demanded Bee. ‘Or are you losing your mind? This is serious.’

‘Sure--I know.’ Feebly he scrawled words at the bottom of the page. ‘I’ve had a couple of drinks that’s all. My head’ll clear up in a minute. I’m trying to think what have been the most successful titles. The trouble is they’ve all been used, like It Happened One Night.’

Bee looked at him uneasily. He was having trouble keeping his eyes open and she did not want him to pass out in her office. After a minute she called Jack Berners.

‘Could you possibly come up? I’ve got some title ideas.’

Jack arrived with a sheaf of suggestions sent in from here and there in the studio, but digging through them yielded no ore.

‘How about it, Pat? Got anything?’

Pat braced himself to an effort.

‘I like It Happened One Morning,’ he said--then looked desperately at his scrawl on the mimeograph paper, ‘or else--Grand Motel.’

Berners smiled.

‘Grand Motel,’ he repeated. ‘By God! I think you’ve got something. Grand Motel.’

‘I said Grand Hotel,’ said Pat.

‘No, you didn’t. You said Grand Motel--and for my money it wins the fifty.’

‘I’ve got to go lie down,’ announced Pat. ‘I feel sick.’

‘There’s an empty office across the way. That’s a funny idea Pat, Grand Motel--or else Motel Clerk. How do you like that?’

As the fugitive quickened his step out the door Bee pressed the hat into his hands.

‘Good work, old timer,’ she said.

Pat seized Mr Marcus’ hat, and stood holding it there like a bowl of soup.

‘Feel--better--now,’ he mumbled after a moment. ‘Be back for the money.’

And carrying his burden he shambled toward the lavatory.

FUN IN AN ARTIST’S STUDIO

Esquire (February 1941)

I

This was back in 1938 when few people except the Germans knew that they had already won their war in Europe. People still cared about art and tried to make it out of everything from old clothes to orange peel and that was how the Princess Dignanni found Pat. She wanted to make art out of him.

‘No, not you, Mr DeTinc.’ she said, ‘I can’t paint you. You are a very standardized product, Mr DeTinc.’

Mr DeTinc, who was a power in pictures and had even been photographed with Mr Duchman, the Secret Sin specialist, stepped smoothly out of the way. He was not offended--in his whole life Mr DeTinc had never been offended--but especially not now, for the Princess did not want to paint Clark Gable or Spencer Rooney or Vivien Leigh either.

She saw Pat in the commissary and found he was a writer, and asked that he be invited to Mr DeTinc’s party. The Princess was a pretty woman born in Boston, Massachusetts and Pat was forty-nine with red-rimmed eyes and a soft purr of whiskey on his breath.

‘You write scenarios, Mr Hobby?’

‘I help,’ said Pat. ‘Takes more than one person to prepare a script.’

He was flattered by this attention and not a little suspicious. It was only because his supervisor was a nervous wreck that he happened to have a job at all. His supervisor had forgotten a week ago that he had hired Pat, and when Pat was spotted in the commissary and told he was wanted at Mr DeTinc’s house, the writer had passed a mauvais quart d’heure. It did not even look like the kind of party that Pat had known in his prosperous days. There was not so much as a drunk passed out in the downstairs toilet.

‘I imagine scenario writing is very well-paid,’ said the Princess.

Pat glanced around to see who was within hearing. Mr DeTinc had withdrawn his huge bulk somewhat, but one of his apparently independent eyes seemed fixed glittering on Pat.

‘Very well paid,’ said Pat--and he added in a lower voice, ‘--if you can get it.’

The Princess seemed to understand and lowered her voice too.

‘You mean writers have trouble getting work?’

He nodded.

‘Too many of ‘em get in these unions.’ He raised his voice a little for Mr DeTinc’s benefit. ‘They’re all Reds, most of these writers.’

The Princess nodded.

‘Will you turn your face a little to the light?’ she said politely. ‘There, that’s fine. You won’t mind coming to my studio tomorrow, will you? Just to pose for me an hour?’

He scrutinized her again.

‘Naked?’ he asked cautiously.

‘Oh, no,’ she averred. ‘Just the head.’

Mr DeTinc moved nearer and nodded.

‘You ought to go. Princess Dignanni is going to paint some of the biggest stars here. Going to paint Jack Benny and Baby Sandy and Hedy Lamarr--isn’t that a fact, Princess?’

The artist didn’t answer. She was a pretty good portrait painter and she knew just how good she was and just how much of it was her title. She was hesitating between her several manners--Picasso’s rose period with a flash of Boldini, or straight Reginald Marsh. But she knew what she was going to call it. She was going to call it Hollywood and Vine.

II

In spite of the reassurance that he would be clothed Pat approached the rendezvous with uneasiness. In his young and impressionable years he had looked through a peep-hole into a machine where two dozen postcards slapped before his eyes in sequence. The story unfolded was Fun in an Artist’s Studio. Even now with the strip tease a legalized municipal project, he was a little shocked at the remembrance, and when he presented himself next day at the Princess’s bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel it would not have surprised him if she had met him in a turkish towel. He was disappointed. She wore a smock and her black hair was brushed straight back like a boy’s.

Pat had stopped off for a couple of drinks on the way, but his first words: ‘How’ya Duchess?’ failed to set a jovial note for the occasion.

‘Well, Mr Hobby,’ she said coolly, ‘it’s nice of you to spare me an afternoon.’

‘We don’t work too hard in Hollywood,’ he assured her. ‘Everything is “Mañana”--in Spanish that means tomorrow.’

She led him forthwith into a rear apartment where an easel stood on a square of canvas by the window. There was a couch and they sat down.

‘I want to get used to you for a minute,’ she said. ‘Did you ever pose before?’

‘Do I look that way?’ He winked, and when she smiled he felt better and asked: ‘You haven’t got a drink around, have you?’

The Princess hesitated. She had wanted him to look as if he needed one. Compromising, she went to the ice box and fixed him a small highball. She returned to find that he had taken off his coat and tie and lay informally upon the couch.

‘That is better,’ the Princess said. ‘That shirt you’re wearing. I think they make them for Hollywood--like the special prints they make for Ceylon and Guatemala. Now drink this and we’ll get to work.’

‘Why don’t you have a drink too and make it friendly?’ Pat suggested.

‘I had one in the pantry,’ she lied.

‘Married woman?’ he asked.

‘I have been married. Now would you mind sitting on this stool?’

Reluctantly Pat got up, took down the highball, somewhat thwarted by the thin taste, and moved to the stool. ‘Now sit very still,’ she said.

He sat silent as she worked. It was three o’clock. They were running the third race at Santa Anita and he had ten bucks on the nose. That made sixty he owed Louie, the studio bookie, and Louie stood determinedly beside him at the pay window every Thursday. This dame had good legs under the easel--her red lips pleased him and the way her bare arms moved as she worked. Once upon a time he wouldn’t have looked at a woman over twenty-five, unless it was a secretary right in the office with him. But the kids you saw around now were snooty--always talking about calling the police.

‘Please sit still, Mr Hobby.’

‘What say we knock off,’ he suggested. ‘This work makes you thirsty.’

The Princess had been painting half an hour. Now she stopped and stared at him a moment.

‘Mr Hobby, you were loaned me by Mr DeTinc. Why don’t you act just as if you were working over at the studio? I’ll be through in another half-hour.’

‘What do I get out of it?’ he demanded, ‘I’m no poser--I’m a writer.’

‘Your studio salary has not stopped,’ she said, resuming her work. ‘What does it matter if Mr DeTinc wants you to do this?’

‘It’s different. You’re a dame. I’ve got my self-respect to think of.’

‘What do you expect me to do--flirt with you?’

‘No--that’s old stuff. But I thought we could sit around and have a drink.’

‘Perhaps later,’ she said, and then, ‘Is this harder work than the studio? Am I so difficult to look at?’

‘I don’t mind looking at you but why couldn’t we sit on the sofa?’

‘You don’t sit on the sofa at the studio.’

‘Sure you do. Listen, if you tried all the doors in the Writers’ Building you’d find a lot of them locked and don’t you forget it.’

She stepped back and squinted at him.

‘Locked? To be undisturbed?’ She put down her brush. ‘I’ll get you a drink.’

When she returned she stopped for a moment in the doorway--Pat had removed his shirt and stood rather sheepishly in the middle of the floor holding it toward her.

‘Here’s that shirt,’ he said. ‘You can have it. I know where I can get a lot more.’

For a moment longer she regarded him; then she took the shirt and put it on the sofa.

‘Sit down and let me finish,’ she said. As he hesitated she added, ‘Then we’ll have a drink together.’

‘When’ll that be?’

‘Fifteen minutes.’

She worked quickly--several times she was content with the lower face--several times she deliberated and started over. Something that she had seen in the commissary was missing.

‘Been an artist a long time?’ Pat asked.

‘Many years.’

‘Been around artists’ studios a lot?’

‘Quite a lot--I’ve had my own studios.’

‘I guess a lot goes on around those studios. Did you ever--’

He hesitated.

‘Ever what?’ she queried.

‘Did you ever paint a naked man?’

‘Don’t talk for one minute, please.’ She paused with brush uplifted, seemed to listen, then made a swift stroke and looked doubtfully at the result.

‘Do you know you’re difficult to paint?’ she said, laying down the brush.

‘I don’t like this posing around,’ he admitted. ‘Let’s call it a day.’ He stood up. ‘Why don’t you--why don’t you slip into something so you’ll be comfortable?’

The Princess smiled. She would tell her friends this story--it would sort of go with the picture, if the picture was any good, which she now doubted.

‘You ought to revise your methods,’ she said. ‘Do you have much success with this approach?’

Pat lit a cigarette and sat down.

‘If you were eighteen, see, I’d give you that line about being nuts about you.’

‘But why any line at all?’

‘Oh, come off it!’ he advised her. ‘You wanted to paint me, didn’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, when a dame wants to paint a guy--’ Pat reached down and undid his shoe strings, kicked his shoes onto the floor, put his stockinged feet on the couch. ‘--when a dame wants to see a guy about something or a guy wants to see a dame, there’s a payoff, see.’

The Princess sighed. ‘Well I seem to be trapped,’ she said. ‘But it makes it rather difficult when a dame just wants to paint a guy.’

‘When a dame wants to paint a guy--’ Pat half closed his eyes, nodded and flapped his hands expressively. As his thumbs went suddenly toward his suspenders, she spoke in a louder voice.

‘Officer!’

There was a sound behind Pat. He turned to see a young man in khaki with shining black gloves, standing in the door.

‘Officer, this man is an employee of Mr DeTinc’s. Mr DeTinc lent him to me for the afternoon.’

The policeman looked at the staring image of guilt upon the couch.

‘Get fresh?’ he inquired.

‘I don’t want to prefer charges--I called the desk to be on the safe side. He was to pose for me in the nude and now he refuses.’ She walked casually to her easel.’ Mr Hobby, why don’t you stop this mock-modesty--you’ll find a turkish towel in the bathroom.’

Pat reached stupidly for his shoes. Somehow it flashed into his mind that they were running the eighth race at Santa Anita--

‘Shake it up, you,’ said the cop. ‘You heard what the lady said.’

Pat stood up vaguely and fixed a long poignant look on the Princess.

‘You told me--’ he said hoarsely, ‘you wanted to paint--’

‘You told me I meant something else. Hurry please. And officer, there’s a drink in the pantry.’

. . . A few minutes later as Pat sat shivering in the centre of the room his memory went back to those peep-shows of his youth--though at the moment he could see little resemblance. He was grateful at least for the turkish towel, even now failing to realize that the Princess was not interested in his shattered frame but in his face.

It wore the exact expression that had wooed her in the commissary, the expression of Hollywood and Vine, the other self of Mr DeTinc--and she worked fast while there was still light enough to paint by.

TWO OLD-TIMERS

Esquire (March 1941)

Phil Macedon, once the Star of Stars, and Pat Hobby, script writer, had collided out on Sunset near the Beverly Hills Hotel. It was five in the morning and there was liquor in the air as they argued and Sergeant Gaspar took them around to the station house. Pat Hobby, a man of forty-nine, showed fight, apparently because Phil Macedon failed to acknowledge that they were old acquaintances.

He accidentally bumped Sergeant Gaspar who was so provoked that he put him in a little barred room while they waited for the Captain to arrive.

Chronologically Phil Macedon belonged between Eugene O’Brien and Robert Taylor. He was still a handsome man in his early fifties and he had saved enough from his great days for a hacienda in the San Fernando Valley; there he rested as full of honours, as rolicksome and with the same purposes in life as Man o’ War.

With Pat Hobby life had dealt otherwise. After twenty-one years in the industry, script and publicity, the accident found him driving a 1933 car which had lately become the property of the North Hollywood Finance and Loan Co. And once, back in 1928, he had reached a point of getting bids for a private swimming pool.

He glowered from his confinement, still resenting Macedon’s failure to acknowledge that they had ever met before.

‘I suppose you don’t remember Coleman,’ he said sarcastically. ‘Or Connie Talmadge or Bill Corker or Allan Dwan.’

Macedon lit a cigarette with the sort of timing in which the silent screen has never been surpassed, and offered one to Sergeant Gaspar.

‘Couldn’t I come in tomorrow?’ he asked. ‘I have a horse to exercise--’

‘I’m sorry, Mr Macedon,’ said the cop--sincerely for the actor was an old favourite of his. ‘The Captain is due here any minute. After that we won’t be holding you.’

‘It’s just a formality,’ said Pat, from his cell.

‘Yeah, it’s just a--’ Sergeant Gaspar glared at Pat. ‘It may not be any formality for you. Did you ever hear of the sobriety test?’

Macedon flicked his cigarette out the door and lit another.

‘Suppose I come back in a couple of hours,’ he suggested.

‘No,’ regretted Sergeant Gaspar. ‘And since I have to detain you, Mr Macedon, I want to take the opportunity to tell you what you meant to me once. It was that picture you made, The Final Push, it meant a lot to every man who was in the war.’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Macedon, smiling.

‘I used to try to tell my wife about the war--how it was, with the shells and the machine guns--I was in there seven months with the 26th New England--but she never understood. She’d point her finger at me and say “Boom! you’re dead,” and so I’d laugh and stop trying to make her understand.’

‘Hey, can I get out of here?’ demanded Pat.

‘You shut up!’ said Gaspar fiercely. ‘You probably wasn’t in the war.’

‘I was in the Motion Picture Home Guard,’ said Pat. ‘I had bad eyes.’

‘Listen to him,’ said Gaspar disgustedly. ‘That’s what all them slackers say. Well, the war was something. And after my wife saw that picture of yours I never had to explain to her. She knew. She always spoke different about it after that--never just pointed her finger at me and said “Boom!” I’ll never forget the part where you was in that shell hole. That was so real it made my hands sweat.’

‘Thanks,’ said Macedon graciously. He lit another cigarette, ‘You see, I was in the war myself and I knew how it was. I knew how it felt.’

‘Yes sir,’ said Gaspar appreciatively. ‘Well; I’m glad of the opportunity to tell you what you did for me. You--you explained the war to my wife.’

‘What are you talking about?’ demanded Pat Hobby suddenly. ‘That war picture Bill Corker did in 1925?’

‘There he goes again,’ said Gaspar. ‘Sure--The Birth of a Nation. Now you pipe down till the Captain comes.’

‘Phil Macedon knew me then all right,’ said Pat resentfully, ‘I even watched him work on it one day.’

‘I just don’t happen to remember you, old man,’ said Macedon politely, ‘I can’t help that.’

‘You remember the day Bill Corker shot that shell hole sequence don’t you? Your first day on the picture?’

There was a moment’s silence.

‘When will the Captain be here?’ Macedon asked.

‘Any minute now,’ Mr Macedon.’

‘Well, I remember,’ said Pat, ‘--because I was there when he had that shell hole dug. He was out there on the back lot at nine o’clock in the morning with a gang of hunkies to dig the hole and four cameras. He called you up from a field telephone and told you to go to the costumer and get into a soldier suit. Now you remember?’

‘I don’t load my mind with details, old man.’

‘You called up that they didn’t have one to fit you and Corker told you to shut up and get into one anyhow. When you got out to the back lot you were sore as hell because your suit didn’t fit.’

Macedon smiled charmingly.

‘You have a most remarkable memory. Are you sure you have the right picture--and the right actor?’ he asked.

‘Am I!’ said Pat grimly. ‘I can see you right now. Only you didn’t have much time to complain about the uniform because that wasn’t Corker’s plan. He always thought you were the toughest ham in Hollywood to get anything natural out of--and he had a scheme. He was going to get the heart of the picture shot by noon--before you even knew you were acting. He turned you around and shoved you down into that shell hole on your fanny, and yelled “Camera”.’

‘That’s a lie,’ said Phil Macedon. ‘I got down.’

‘Then why did you start yelling?’ demanded Pat. ‘I can still hear you: “Hey, what’s the idea! Is this some -- -- gag? You get me out of here or I’ll walk out on you!”

‘--and all the time you were trying to claw your way up the side of that pit, so damn mad you couldn’t see. You’d almost get up and then you’d slide back and lie there with your face working--till finally you began to bawl and all this time Bill had four cameras on you. After about twenty minutes you gave up and just lay there, heaving. Bill took a hundred feet of that and then he had a couple of prop men pull you out.’

The police Captain had arrived in the squad car. He stood in the doorway against the first grey of dawn.

‘What you got here, Sergeant? A drunk?’

Sergeant Gaspar walked over to the cell, unlocked it and beckoned Pat to come out. Pat blinked a moment--then his eyes fell on Phil Macedon and he shook his finger at him.

‘So you see I do know you,’ he said. ‘Bill Corker cut that piece of film and titled it so you were supposed to be a doughboy whose pal had just been killed. You wanted to climb out and get at the Germans in revenge, but the shells bursting all around and the concussions kept knocking you back in.’

‘What’s it about?’ demanded the Captain.

‘I want to prove I know this guy,’ said Pat. ‘Bill said the best moment in the picture was when Phil was yelling “I’ve already broken my first finger nail!” Bill titled it “Ten Huns will go to hell to shine your shoes!”‘

‘You’ve got here “collision with alcohol”,’ said the Captain looking at the blotter. ‘Let’s take these guys down to the hospital and give them the test.’

‘Look here now,’ said the actor, with his flashing smile, ‘my name’s Phil Macedon.’

The Captain was a political appointee and very young. He remembered the name and the face but he was not especially impressed because Hollywood was full of has-beens.

They all got into the squad car at the door.

After the test Macedon was held at the station house until friends could arrange bail. Pat Hobby was discharged but his car would not run, so Sergeant Gaspar offered to drive him home.

‘Where do you live?’ he asked as they started off.

‘I don’t live anywhere tonight,’ said Pat. ‘That’s why I was driving around. When a friend of mine wakes up I’ll touch him for a couple of bucks and go to a hotel.’

‘Well now,’ said Sergeant Gaspar, ‘I got a couple of bucks that ain’t working.’

The great mansions of Beverly Hills slid by and Pat waved his hand at them in salute.

‘In the good old days,’ he said, ‘I used to be able to drop into some of those houses day or night. And Sunday mornings--’

‘Is that all true you said in the station,’ Gaspar asked, ‘--about how they put him in the hole?’

‘Sure, it is,’ said Pat. ‘That guy needn’t have been so upstage. He’s just an old-timer like me.’

MIGHTIER THAN THE SWORD

Esquire (April 1941)

I

The swarthy man, with eyes that snapped back and forward on a rubber band from the rear of his head, answered to the alias of Dick Dale. The tall, spectacled man who was put together like a camel without a hump--and you missed the hump--answered to the name of E. Brunswick Hudson. The scene was a shoeshine stand, insignificant unit of the great studio. We perceive it through the red-rimmed eyes of Pat Hobby who sat in the chair beside Director Dale.

The stand was out of doors, opposite the commissary. The voice of E. Brunswick Hudson quivered with passion but it was pitched low so as not to reach passers-by.

‘I don’t know what a writer like me is doing out here anyhow,’ he said, with vibrations.

Pat Hobby, who was an old-timer, could have supplied the answer, but he had not the acquaintance of the other two.

‘It’s a funny business,’ said Dick Dale, and to the shoe-shine boy, ‘Use that saddle soap.’

‘Funny!’ thundered E., ‘It’s suspect! Here against my better judgement I write just what you tell me--and the office tells me to get out because we can’t seem to agree.’

‘That’s polite,’ explained Dick Dale. ‘What do you want me to do--knock you down?’

E. Brunswick Hudson removed his glasses.

‘Try it!’ he suggested. ‘I weigh a hundred and sixty-two and I haven’t got an ounce of flesh on me.’ He hesitated and redeemed himself from this extremity. ‘I mean fat on me.’

‘Oh, to hell with that!’ said Dick Dale contemptuously, ‘I can’t mix it up with you. I got to figure this picture. You go back East and write one of your books and forget it.’ Momentarily he looked at Pat Hobby, smiling as if he would understand, as if anyone would understand except E. Brunswick Hudson. ‘I can’t tell you all about pictures in three weeks.’

Hudson replaced his spectacles.

‘When I do write a book,’ he said, ‘I’ll make you the laughing stock of the nation.’

He withdrew, ineffectual, baffled, defeated. After a minute Pat spoke.

‘Those guys can never get the idea,’ he commented. ‘I’ve never seen one get the idea and I been in this business, publicity and script, for twenty years.’

‘You on the lot?’ Dale asked.

Pat hesitated.

‘Just finished a job,’ he said.

That was five months before.

‘What screen credits you got?’ Dale asked.

‘I got credits going all the way back to 1920.’

‘Come up to my office,’ Dick Dale said, ‘I got something I’d like to talk over--now that bastard is gone back to his New England farm. Why do they have to get a New England farm--with the whole West not settled?’

Pat gave his second-to-last dime to the bootblack and climbed down from the stand.

II

We are in the midst of technicalities.

‘The trouble is this composer Reginald de Koven didn’t have any colour,’ said Dick Dale. ‘He wasn’t deaf like Beethoven or a singing waiter or get put in jail or anything. All he did was write music and all we got for an angle is that song O Promise Me. We got to weave something around that--a dame promises him something and in the end he collects.’

‘I want time to think it over in my mind,’ said Pat. ‘If Jack Berners will put me on the picture--’

‘He’ll put you on,’ said Dick Dale. ‘From now on I’m picking my own writers. What do you get--fifteen hundred?’ He looked at Pat’s shoes, ‘Seven-fifty?’

Pat stared at him blankly for a moment; then out of thin air, produced his best piece of imaginative fiction in a decade.

‘I was mixed up with a producer’s wife,’ he said, ‘and they ganged up on me. I only get three-fifty now.’

In some ways it was the easiest job he had ever had. Director Dick Dale was a type that, fifty years ago, could be found in any American town. Generally he was the local photographer, usually he was the originator of small mechanical contrivances and a leader in bizarre local movements, almost always he contributed verse to the local press. All the most energetic embodiments of this ‘Sensation Type’ had migrated to Hollywood between 1910 and 1930, and there they had achieved a psychological fulfilment inconceivable in any other time or place. At last, and on a large scale, they were able to have their way. In the weeks that Pat Hobby and Mabel Hatman, Mr Dale’s script girl, sat beside him and worked on the script, not a movement, not a word went into it that was not Dick Dale’s coinage. Pat would venture a suggestion, something that was ‘Always good’.

‘Wait a minute! Wait a minute!’ Dick Dale was on his feet, his hands outspread. ‘I seem to see a dog.’ They would wait, tense and breathless, while he saw a dog.

‘Two dogs.’

A second dog took its place beside the first in their obedient visions.

‘We open on a dog on a leash--pull the camera back to show another dog--now they’re snapping at each other. We pull back further--the leashes are attached to tables--the tables tip over. See it?’

Or else, out of a clear sky.

‘I seem to see De Koven as a plasterer’s apprentice.’

‘Yes.’ This hopefully.

‘He goes to Santa Anita and plasters the walls, singing at his work. Take that down, Mabel.’ He continued on . . .

In a month they had the requisite hundred and twenty pages. Reginald de Koven, it seemed, though not an alcoholic, was too fond of ‘The Little Brown Jug’. The father of the girl he loved had died of drink, and after the wedding when she found him drinking from the Little Brown Jug, nothing would do but that she should go away, for twenty years. He became famous and she sang his songs as Maid Marian but he never knew it was the same girl.

The script, marked ‘Temporary Complete. From Pat Hobby’ went up to the head office. The schedule called for Dale to begin shooting in a week.

Twenty-four hours later he sat with his staff in his office, in an atmosphere of blue gloom. Pat Hobby was the least depressed. Four weeks at three-fifty, even allowing for the two hundred that had slipped away at Santa Anita, was a far cry from the twenty cents he had owned on the shoeshine stand.

‘That’s pictures, Dick,’ he said consolingly. ‘You’re up--you’re down--you’re in, you’re out. Any old-timer knows.’

‘Yes,’ said Dick Dale absently. ‘Mabel, phone that E. Brunswick Hudson. He’s on his New England farm--maybe milking bees.’

In a few minutes she reported.

‘He flew into Hollywood this morning, Mr Dale. I’ve located him at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel.’

Dick Dale pressed his ear to the phone. His voice was bland and friendly as he said:

‘Mr Hudson, there was one day here you had an idea I liked. You said you were going to write it up. It was about this De Koven stealing his music from a sheepherder up in Vermont. Remember?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, Berners wants to go into production right away, or else we can’t have the cast, so we’re on the spot, if you know what I mean. Do you happen to have that stuff?’

‘You remember when I brought it to you?’ Hudson asked. ‘You kept me waiting two hours--then you looked at it for two minutes. Your neck hurt you--I think it needed wringing. God, how it hurt you. That was the only nice thing about that morning.’

‘In picture business--’

‘I’m so glad you’re stuck. I wouldn’t tell you the story of The Three Bears for fifty grand.’

As the phones clicked Dick Dale turned to Pat.

‘Goddam writers!’ he said savagely. ‘What do we pay you for? Millions--and you write a lot of tripe I can’t photograph and get sore if we don’t read your lousy stuff! How can a man make pictures when they give me two bastards like you and Hudson. How? How do you think--you old whiskey bum!’

Pat rose--took a step toward the door. He didn’t know, he said.

‘Get out of here!’ cried Dick Dale. ‘You’re off the payroll. Get off the lot.’

Fate had not dealt Pat a farm in New England, but there was a café just across from the studio where bucolic dreams blossomed in bottles if you had the money. He did not like to leave the lot, which for many years had been home for him, so he came back at six and went up to his office. It was locked. He saw that they had already allotted it to another writer--the name on the door was E. Brunswick Hudson.

He spent an hour in the commissary, made another visit to the bar, and then some instinct led him to a stage where there was a bedroom set. He passed the night upon a couch occupied by Claudette Colbert in the fluffiest ruffles only that afternoon.

Morning was bleaker, but he had a little in his bottle and almost a hundred dollars in his pocket. The horses were running at Santa Anita and he might double it by night.

On his way out of the lot he hesitated beside the barber shop but he felt too nervous for a shave. Then he paused, for from the direction of the shoeshine stand he heard Dick Dale’s voice.

‘Miss Hatman found your other script, and it happens to be the property of the company.’

E. Brunswick Hudson stood at the foot of the stand.

‘I won’t have my name used,’ he said.

‘That’s good. I’ll put her name on it. Berners thinks it’s great, if the De Koven family will stand for it. Hell--the sheepbreeder never would have been able to market those tunes anyhow. Ever hear of any sheepherder drawing down jack from ASCAP?’

Hudson took off his spectacles.

‘I weigh a hundred and sixty-three--’

Pat moved in closer.

‘Join the army,’ said Dale contemptuously, ‘I got no time for mixing it up. I got to make a picture.’ His eyes fell on Pat. ‘Hello old-timer.’

‘Hello Dick,’ said Pat smiling. Then knowing the advantage of the psychological moment he took his chance.

‘When do we work?’ he said.

‘How much?’ Dick Dale asked the shoeshine boy--and to Pat, ‘It’s all done. I promised Mabel a screen credit for a long time. Look me up some day when you got an idea.’

He hailed someone by the barber shop and hurried off. Hudson and Hobby, men of letters who had never met, regarded each other. There were tears of anger in Hudson’s eyes.

‘Authors get a tough break out here,’ Pat said sympathetically. ‘They never ought to come.’

‘Who’d make up the stories--these feebs?’

‘Well anyhow, not authors,’ said Pat. ‘They don’t want authors. They want writers--like me.’

PAT HOBBY’S COLLEGE DAYS

Esquire (May 1941)

I

The afternoon was dark. The walls of TopangaCanyon rose sheer on either side. Get rid of it she must. The clank clank in the back seat frightened her. Evylyn did not like the business at all. It was not what she came out here to do. Then she thought of Mr Hobby. He believed in her, trusted her--and she was doing this for him.

But the mission was arduous. Evylyn Lascalles left the canyon and cruised along the inhospitable shores of Beverly Hills. Several times she turned up alleys, several times she parked beside vacant lots--but always some pedestrian or loiterer threw her into a mood of nervous anxiety. Once her heart almost stopped as she was eyed with appreciation--or was it suspicion--by a man who looked like a detective.

--He had no right to ask me this, she said to herself. Never again. I’ll tell him so. Never again.

Night was fast descending. Evylyn Lascalles had never seen it come down so fast. Back to the canyon then, to the wild, free life. She drove up a paint-box corridor which gave its last pastel shades to the day. And reached a certain security at a bend overlooking plateau land far below.

Here there could be no complication. As she threw each article over the cliff it would be as far removed from her as if she were in a different state of the Union.

Miss Lascalles was from Brooklyn. She had wanted very much to come to Hollywood and be a secretary in pictures--now she wished that she had never left her home.

On with the job though--she must part with her cargo--as soon as this next car passed the bend . . .

II

. . . Meanwhile her employer, Pat Hobby, stood in front of the barber shop talking to Louie, the studio bookie. Pat’s four weeks at two-fifty would be up tomorrow and he had begun to have that harassed and aghast feeling of those who live always on the edge of solvency.

‘Four lousy weeks on a bad script,’ he said. ‘That’s all I’ve had in six months.’

‘How do you live?’ asked Louie--without too much show of interest.

‘I don’t live. The days go by, the weeks go by. But who cares? Who cares--after twenty years.’

‘You had a good time in your day,’ Louie reminded him.

Pat looked after a dress extra in a shimmering lamé gown.

‘Sure,’ he admitted, ‘I had three wives. All anybody could want.’

‘You mean that was one of your wives?’ asked Louie.

Pat peered after the disappearing figure.

‘No-o. I didn’t say that was one. But I’ve had plenty of them feeding out of my pocket. Not now though--a man of forty-nine is not considered human.’

‘You’ve got a cute little secretary,’ said Louie. ‘Look Pat, I’ll give you a tip--’

‘Can’t use it,’ said Pat, ‘I got fifty cents.’

‘I don’t mean that kind of tip. Listen--Jack Berners wants to make a picture about U.W.C. because he’s got a kid there that plays basketball. He can’t get a story. Why don’t you go over and see the Athaletic Superintendent named Doolan at U.W.C.? That superintendent owes me three grand on the nags, and he could maybe give you an idea for a college picture. And then you bring it back and sell it to Berners. You’re on salary, ain’t you?’

‘Till tomorrow,’ said Pat gloomily.

‘Go and see Jim Kresge that hangs out in the Campus Sport Shop. He’ll introduce you to the Athaletic Superintendent. Look, Pat, I got to make a collection now. Just remember, Pat, that Doolan owes me three grand.’

III

It didn’t seem hopeful to Pat but it was better than nothing. Returning for his coat to his room in the Writers’ Building he was in time to pick up a plainting telephone.

‘This is Evylyn,’ said a fluttering voice. ‘I can’t get rid of it this afternoon. There’s cars on every road--’

‘I can’t talk about it here,’ said Pat quickly, ‘I got to go over to U.W.C. on a notion.’

‘I’ve tried,’ she wailed, ‘--and tried! And every time, some car comes along--’

‘Aw, please!’ He hung up--he had enough on his mind.

For years Pat had followed the deeds of ‘the Trojums’ of U.S.C. and the almost as fabulous doings of ‘the Roller Coasters’, who represented the Univ. of the WesternCoast. His interest was not so much physiological, tactical or intellectual as it was mathematical--but the Rollers had cost him plenty in their day--and thus it was with a sense of vague proprietorship that he stepped upon the half De Mille, half Aztec campus.

He located Kresge who conducted him to Superintendent Kit Doolan. Mr Doolan, a famous ex-tackle, was in excellent humour. With five coloured giants in this year’s line, none of them quite old enough for pensions, but all men of experience, his team was in a fair way to conquer his section.

‘Glad to be of help to your studio,’ he said. ‘Glad to help Mr Berners--or Louie. What can I do for you? You want to make a picture? . . . Well, we can always use publicity. Mr Hobby, I got a meeting of the Faculty Committee in just five minutes and perhaps you’d like to tell them your notion.’

‘I don’t know,’ said Pat doubtfully. ‘What I thought was maybe I could have a spiel with you. We could go somewhere and hoist one.’

‘Afraid not,’ said Doolan jovially. ‘If those smarties smelt liquor on me--Boy! Come on over to the meeting--somebody’s been getting away with watches and jewellery on the campus and we’re sure it’s a student.’

Mr Kresge, having played his role, got up to leave.

‘Like something good for the fifth tomorrow?’

‘Not me,’ said Mr Doolan.

‘You, Mr Hobby?’

‘Not me,’ said Pat.

IV

Ending their alliance with the underworld, Pat Hobby and Superintendent Doolan walked down the corridor of the AdministrationBuilding. Outside the Dean’s office Doolan said: ‘As soon as I can, I’ll bring you in and introduce you.’ As an accredited representative neither of Jack Berners’ nor of the studio, Pat waited with a certain malaise. He did not look forward to confronting a group of highbrows but he remembered that he bore an humble but warming piece of merchandise in his threadbare overcoat. The Dean’s assistant had left her desk to take notes at the conference so he repleated his calories with a long, gagging draught.

In a moment, there was a responsive glow and he settled down in his chair, his eye fixed on the door marked:

SAMUEL K. WISKETH

DEAN OF THE STUDENT BODY

It might be a somewhat formidable encounter.

. . . but why? There were stuffed shirts--everybody knew that. They had college degrees but they could be bought. If they’d play ball with the studio they’d get a lot of good publicity for U.W.C. And that meant bigger salaries for them, didn’t it, and more jack?

The door to the conference room opened and closed tentatively. No one came out but Pat sat up and readied himself. Representing the fourth biggest industry in America, or almost representing it, he must not let a bunch of highbrows stare him down. He was not without an inside view of higher education--in his early youth he had once been the ‘Buttons’ in the DKE House at the University of Pennsylvania. And with encouraging chauvinism he assured himself that Pennsylvania had it over this pioneer enterprise like a tent.

The door opened--a flustered young man with beads of sweat on his forehead came tearing out, tore through--and disappeared. Mr Doolan stood calmly in the doorway.

‘All right, Mr Hobby,’ he said.

Nothing to be scared of. Memories of old college days continued to flood over Pat as he walked in. And instantaneously, as the juice of confidence flowed through his system, he had his idea . . .

‘. . . it’s more of a realistic idea,’ he was saying five minutes later. ‘Understand?’

Dean Wiskith, a tall, pale man with an earphone, seemed to understand--if not exactly to approve. Pat hammered in his point again.

‘It’s up-to-the-minute,’ he said patiently, ‘what we call “a topical”. You admit that young squirt who went out of here was stealing watches, don’t you?’

The faculty committee, all except Doolan, exchanged glances, but no one interrupted.

‘There you are,’ went on Pat triumphantly. ‘You turn him in to the newspapers. But here’s the twist. In the Picture we make it turns out he steals the watches to support his young brother--and his young brother is the mainstay of the football team! He’s the climax runner. We probably try to borrow Tyrone Power but we use one of your players as a double.’

Pat paused, trying to think of everything.

‘--of course, we’ve got to release it in the southern states, so it’s got to be one of your players that’s white.’

There was an unquiet pause. Mr Doolan came to his rescue.

‘Not a bad idea,’ he suggested.

‘It’s an appalling idea,’ broke out Dean Wiskith. ‘It’s--’

Doolan’s face tightened slowly.

‘Wait a minute,’ he said. ‘Who’s telling who around here? You listen to him!’

The Dean’s assistant, who had recently vanished from the room at the call of a buzzer, had reappeared and was whispering in the Dean’s ear. The latter started.

‘Just a minute, Mr Doolan,’ he said. He turned to the other members of the committee.

‘The proctor has a disciplinary case outside and he can’t legally hold the offender. Can we settle it first? And then get back to this--’ He glared at Mr Doolan,’--to this preposterous idea?’

At his nod the assistant opened the door.

This proctor, thought Pat, ranging back to his days on the vineclad, leafy campus, looked like all proctors, an intimidated cop, a scarcely civilized beast of prey.

‘Gentlemen,’ the proctor said, with delicately modulated respect, ‘I’ve got something that can’t be explained away.’ He shook his head, puzzled, and then continued: ‘I know it’s all wrong--but I can’t seem to get to the point of it. I’d like to turn it over to you--I’ll just show you the evidence and the offender . . . Come in, you.’

As Evylyn Lascalles entered, followed shortly by a big clinking pillow cover which the proctor deposited beside her, Pat thought once more of the elm-covered campus of the University of Pennsylvania. He wished passionately that he were there. He wished it more than anything in the world. Next to that he wished that Doolan’s back, behind which he tried to hide by a shifting of his chair, were broader still.

‘There you are!’ she cried gratefully. ‘Oh, Mr Hobby--Thank God! I couldn’t get rid of them--and I couldn’t take them home--my mother would kill me. So I came here to find you--and this man packed into the back seat of my car.’

‘What’s in that sack?’ demanded Dean Wiskith. ‘Bombs? What?’

Seconds before the proctor had picked up the sack and bounced it on the floor, so that it gave out a clear unmistakable sound, Pat could have told them. There were dead soldiers--pints, half-pints, quarts--the evidence of four strained weeks at two-fifty--empty bottles collected from his office drawers. Since his contract was up tomorrow he had thought it best not to leave such witnesses behind.

Seeking for escape his mind reached back for the last time to those careless days of fetch and carry at the University of Pennsylvania.

‘I’ll take it,’ he said rising.

Slinging the sack over his shoulder, he faced the faculty committee and said surprisingly:

‘Think it over.’

V

‘We did,’ Mr Doolan told his wife that night. ‘But we never made head nor tail of it.’

‘It’s kind of spooky,’ said Mrs Doolan. ‘I hope I don’t dream tonight. The poor man with that sack! I keep thinking he’ll be down in purgatory--and they’ll make him carve a ship in every one of those bottles--before he can go to heaven.’

‘Don’t!’ said Doolan quickly. ‘You’ll have me dreaming. There were plenty bottles.

MISCELLANEOUS STORIES

These 78 short stories were printed in various periodicals and magazines, yet were never published in a story collection during the writer’s lifetime.

One of the many magazines Fitzgerald wrote stories for

CONTENTS

A FREEZE-OUT

A NEW LEAF

A NIGHT AT THE FAIR

AFTERNOON OF AN AUTHOR

AN ALCOHOLIC CASE

AT YOUR AGE

BASIL AND CLEOPATRA

THE BRIDAL PARTY

THE BOWL

DESIGN IN PLASTER

DICE, BRASSKNUCKLES & GUITAR

EMOTIONAL BANKRUPTCY

FINANCING FINNEGAN

FORGING AHEAD

THE HOTEL CHILD

“I DIDN’T GET OVER”

JACOB’S LADDER

THE LOST DECADE

LOVE IN THE NIGHT

MAGNETISM

MORE THAN JUST A HOUSE

NEWS OF PARIS--FIFTEEN YEARS AGO

ONE TRIP ABROAD

OUTSIDE THE CABINET-MAKER’S

THE ROUGH CROSSING

SIX OF ONE--

THE SWIMMERS

THREE HOURS BETWEEN PLANES

WHAT A HANDSOME PAIR!

THE ORDEAL

MYRA MEETS HIS FAMILY

THE I.O.U.

THE POPULAR GIRL

TWO FOR A CENT

THE PUSHER-IN-THE-FACE

ONE OF MY OLDEST FRIENDS

THE UNSPEAKABLE EGG

PRESUMPTION

YOUR WAY AND MINE

LIPSTICK: A COLLEGE COMEDY

THE LOVE BOAT

ON YOUR OWN

BETWEEN THREE AND FOUR

FLIGHT AND PURSUIT

A WOMAN WITH A PAST

TOO CUTE FOR WORDS,

STRANGE SANCTUARY

INSIDE THE HOUSE

LO, THE POOR PEACOCK!

ON SCHEDULE,

THE PASSIONATE ESKIMO

IMAGE ON THE HEART

A FULL LIFE

SHAGGY’S MORNING

THREE ACTS OF MUSIC

THE ANTS AT PRINCETON

IN THE HOLIDAYS

THE GUEST IN ROOM NINETEEN

THE LONG WAY OUT

THE WOMAN FROM “21”

ON AN OCEAN WAVE

DEARLY BELOVED

PAT AT THE FAIR REUNION AT THE FAIR

THE MYSTERY OF THE RAYMOND MORTGAGE

READE, SUBSTITUTE RIGHT HALF

A DEBT OF HONOR

THE ROOM WITH THE GREEN BLINDS

A LUCKLESS SANTA CLAUS

PAIN AND THE SCIENTIST

THE TRAIL OF THE DUKE

LITTLE MINNIE MCCLOSKEY

THE OLD FRONTIERSMAN

THE SPIRE AND THE GARGOYLE

THE DIARY OF A SOPHOMORE

THE PRINCE OF PESTS

SENTIMENT — AND THE USE OF ROUGE

THE PIERIAN SPRINGS AND THE LAST STRAW

CEDRIC THE STOKER

Fitzgerald enlisting for the Great War

A FREEZE-OUT

Saturday Evening Post (19 December 1931)

Here and there in a sunless corner skulked a little snow under a veil of coal specks, but the men taking down storm windows were laboring in shirt sleeves and the turf was becoming firm underfoot.

In the streets, dresses dyed after fruit, leaf and flower emerged from beneath the shed somber skins of animals; now only a few old men wore mousy caps pulled down over their ears. That was the day Forrest Winslow forgot the long fret of the past winter as one forgets inevitable afflictions, sickness, and war, and turned with blind confidence toward the summer, thinking he already recognized in it all the summers of the past--the golfing, sailing, swimming summers.

For eight years Forrest had gone East to school and then to college; now he worked for his father in a large Minnesota city. He was handsome, popular and rather spoiled in a conservative way, and so the past year had been a comedown. The discrimination that had picked Scroll and Key at New Haven was applied to sorting furs; the hand that had signed the Junior Prom expense checks had since rocked in a sling for two months with mild dermatitis venenata. After work, Forrest found no surcease in the girls with whom he had grown up. On the contrary, the news of a stranger within the tribe stimulated him and during the transit of a popular visitor he displayed a convulsive activity. So far, nothing had happened; but here was summer.

On the day spring broke through and summer broke through--it is much the same thing in Minnesota--Forrest stopped his coupé in front of a music store and took his pleasant vanity inside. As he said to the clerk, “I want some records,” a little bomb of excitement exploded in his larynx, causing an unfamiliar and almost painful vacuum in his upper diaphragm. The unexpected detonation was caused by the sight of a corn-colored girl who was being waited on across the counter.

She was a stalk of ripe corn, but bound not as cereals are but as a rare first edition, with all the binder’s art. She was lovely and expensive, and about nineteen, and he had never seen her before. She looked at him for just an unnecessary moment too long, with so much self-confidence that he felt his own rush out and away to join hers--”. . . from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.” Then her head swayed forward and she resumed her inspection of a catalogue.

Forrest looked at the list a friend had sent him from New York. Unfortunately, the first title was: “When Voo-do-o-do Meets Boop-boop-a-doop, There’ll Soon be a Hot-Cha-Cha.” Forrest read it with horror. He could scarcely believe a title could be so repulsive.

Meanwhile the girl was asking: “Isn’t there a record of Prokofiev’s ‘Fils Prodigue’?”

“I’ll see, madam.” The saleswoman turned to Forrest.

“‘When Voo--’“ Forrest began, and then repeated, “‘When Voo--’“

There was no use; he couldn’t say it in front of that nymph of the harvest across the table.

“Never mind that one,” he said quickly. “Give me ‘Huggable--’“

Again he broke off.

“‘Huggable, Kissable You’?” suggested the clerk helpfully, and her assurance that it was very nice suggested a humiliating community of taste.

“I want Stravinsky’s ‘Fire Bird,’“ said the other customer, “and this album of Chopin waltzes.”

Forrest ran his eye hastily down the rest of his list: “Digga Diggity,” “Ever So Goosy,” “Bunkey Doodle I Do.”

“Anybody would take me for a moron,” he thought. He crumpled up the list and fought for air--his own kind of air, the air of casual superiority.

“I’d like,” he said coldly, “Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight Sonata.’“

There was a record of it at home, but it didn’t matter. It gave him the right to glance at the girl again and again. Life became interesting; she was the loveliest concoction; it would be easy to trace her. With the “Moonlight Sonata” wrapped face to face with “Huggable, Kissable You,” Forrest quitted the shop.

There was a new book store down the street, and here also he entered, as if books and records could fill the vacuum that spring was making in his heart. As he looked among the lifeless words of many titles together, he was wondering how soon he could find her, and what then.

“I’d like a hard-boiled detective story,” he said.

A weary young man shook his head with patient reproof; simultaneously, a spring draft from the door blew in with it the familiar glow of cereal hair.

“We don’t carry detective stories or stuff like that,” said the young man in an unnecessarily loud voice. “I imagine you’ll find it at a department store.”

“I thought you carried books,” said Forrest feebly.

“Books, yes, but not that kind.” The young man turned to wait on his other customer.

As Forrest stalked out, passing within the radius of the girl’s perfume, he heard her ask:

“Have you got anything of Louis Arragon’s, either in French or in translation?”

“She’s just showing off,” he thought angrily. “They skip right from Peter Rabbit to Marcel Proust these days.”

Outside, parked just behind his own adequate coupé, he found an enormous silver-colored roadster of English make and custom design. Disturbed, even upset, he drove homeward through the moist, golden afternoon.

The Winslows lived in an old, wide-verandaed house on Crest Avenue--Forrest’s father and mother, his great-grandmother and his sister Eleanor. They were solid people as that phrase goes since the war. Old Mrs. Forrest was entirely solid; with convictions based on a way of life that had worked for eighty-four years. She was a character in the city; she remembered the Sioux war and she had been in Stillwater the day the James brothers shot up the main street.

Her own children were dead and she looked on these remoter descendants from a distance, oblivious of the forces that had formed them. She understood that the Civil War and the opening up of the West were forces, while the free-silver movement and the World War had reached her only as news. But she knew that her father, killed at Cold Harbor, and her husband, the merchant, were larger in scale than her son or her grandson. People who tried to explain contemporary phenomena to her seemed, to her, to be talking against the evidence of their own senses. Yet she was not atrophied; last summer she had traveled over half of Europe with only a maid.

Forrest’s father and mother were something else again. They had been in the susceptible middle thirties when the cocktail party and its concomitants arrived in 1921. They were divided people, leaning forward and backward. Issues that presented no difficulty to Mrs. Forrest caused them painful heat and agitation. Such an issue arose before they had been five minutes at table that night.

“Do you know the Rikkers are coming back?” said Mrs. Winslow. “They’ve taken the Warner house.” She was a woman with many uncertainties, which she concealed from herself by expressing her opinions very slowly and thoughtfully, to convince her own ears. “It’s a wonder Dan Warner would rent them his house. I suppose Cathy thinks everybody will fall all over themselves.”

“What Cathy?” asked old Mrs. Forrest.

“She was Cathy Chase. Her father was Reynold Chase. She and her husband are coming back here.”

“Oh, yes.”

“I scarcely knew her,” continued Mrs. Winslow, “but I know that when they were in Washington they were pointedly rude to everyone from Minnesota--went out of their way. Mary Cowan was spending a winter there, and she invited Cathy to lunch or tea at least half a dozen times. Cathy never appeared.”

“I could beat that record,” said Pierce Winslow. “Mary Cowan could invite me a hundred times and I wouldn’t go.”

“Anyhow,” pursued his wife slowly, “in view of all the scandal, it’s just asking for the cold shoulder to come out here.”

“They’re asking for it, all right,” said Winslow. He was a Southerner, well liked in the city, where he had lived for thirty years. “Walter Hannan came in my office this morning and wanted me to second Rikker for the Kennemore Club. I said: ‘Walter, I’d rather second Al Capone.’ What’s more, Rikker’ll get into the Kennemore Club over my dead body.”

“Walter had his nerve. What’s Chauncey Rikker to you? It’ll be hard to get anyone to second him.”

“Who are they?” Eleanor asked. “Somebody awful?”

She was eighteen and a débutante. Her current appearances at home were so rare and brief that she viewed such table topics with as much detachment as her great-grandmother.

“Cathy was a girl here; she was younger then I was, but I remember that she was always considered fast. Her husband, Chauncey Rikker, came from some little town upstate.”

“What did they do that was so awful?”

“Rikker went bankrupt and left town,” said her father. “There were a lot of ugly stories. Then he went to Washington and got mixed up in the alien-property scandal; and then he got in trouble in New York--he was in the bucket-shop business--but he skipped out to Europe. After a few years the chief Government witness died and he came back to America. They got him for a few months for contempt of court.” He expanded into eloquent irony: “And now, with true patriotism, he comes back to his beautiful Minnesota, a product of its lovely woods, its rolling wheat fields--”

Forrest called him impatiently: “Where do you get that, father? When did two Kentuckians ever win Nobel prizes in the same year? And how about an upstate boy named Lind--”

“Have the Rikkers any children?” Eleanor asked.

“I think Cathy has a daughter about your age, and a boy about sixteen.”

Forrest uttered a small, unnoticed exclamation. Was it possible? French books and Russian music--that girl this afternoon had lived abroad. And with the probability his resentment deepened--the daughter of a crook putting on all that dog! He sympathized passionately with his father’s refusal to second Rikker for the Kennemore Club.

“Are they rich?” old Mrs. Forrest suddenly demanded.

“They must be well off if they took Dan Warner’s house.”

“Then they’ll get in all right.”

“They won’t get into the Kennemore Club,” said Pierce Winslow. “I happen to come from a state with certain traditions.”

“I’ve seen the bottom rail get to be the top rail many times in this town,” said the old lady blandly.

“But this man’s a criminal, grandma,” explained Forrest. “Can’t you see the difference? It isn’t a social question. We used to argue at New Haven whether we’d shake hands with Al Capone if we met him--”

“Who is Al Capone?” asked Mrs. Forrest.

“He’s another criminal, in Chicago.”

“Does he want to join the Kennemore Club too?”

They laughed, but Forrest had decided that if Rikker came up for the Kennemore Club, his father’s would not be the only black ball in the box.

Abruptly it became full summer. After the last April storm someone came along the street one night, blew up the trees like balloons, scattered bulbs and shrubs like confetti, opened a cage full of robins and, after a quick look around, signaled up the curtain upon a new backdrop of summer sky.

Tossing back a strayed baseball to some kids in a vacant lot, Forrest’s fingers, on the stitched seams of the stained leather cover, sent a wave of ecstatic memories to his brain. One must hurry and get there--”there” was now the fairway of the golf course, but his feeling was the same. Only when he teed off at the eighteenth that afternoon did he realize that it wasn’t the same, that it would never be enough any more. The evening stretched large and empty before him, save for the set pieces of a dinner party and bed.

While he waited with his partner for a match to play off, Forrest glanced at the tenth tee, exactly opposite and two hundred yards away.

One of the two figures on the ladies’ tee was addressing her ball; as he watched, she swung up confidently and cracked a long drive down the fairway.

“Must be Mrs. Horrick,” said his friend. “No other woman can drive like that.”

At that moment the sun glittered on the girl’s hair and Forrest knew who it was; simultaneously, he remembered what he must do this afternoon. That night Chauncey Rikker’s name was to come up before the membership committee on which his father sat, and before going home, Forrest was going to pass the clubhouse and leave a certain black slip in a little box. He had carefully considered all that; he loved the city where his people had lived honorable lives for five generations. His grandfather had been a founder of this club in the 90’s when it went in for sailboat racing instead of golf, and when it took a fast horse three hours to trot out here from town. He agreed with his father that certain people were without the pale. Tightening his face, he drove his ball two hundred yards down the fairway, where it curved gently into the rough.

The eighteenth and tenth holes were parallel and faced in opposite directions. Between tees they were separated by a belt of trees forty feet wide. Though Forrest did not know it, Miss Rikker’s hostess, Helen Hannan, had dubbed into this same obscurity, and as he went in search of his ball he heard female voices twenty feet away.

“You’ll be a member after tonight,” he heard Helen Hannan say, “and then you can get some real competition from Stella Horrick.”

“Maybe I won’t be a member,” said a quick, clear voice. “Then you’ll have to come and play with me on the public links.”

“Alida, don’t be absurd.”

“Why? I played on the public links in Buffalo all last spring. For the moment there wasn’t anywhere else. It’s like playing on some courses in Scotland.”

“But I’d feel so silly. . . . Oh, gosh, let’s let the ball go.”

“There’s nobody behind us. As to feeling silly--if I cared about public opinion any more, I’d spend my time in my bedroom.” She laughed scornfully. “A tabloid published a picture of me going to see father in prison. And I’ve seen people change their tables away from us on steamers, and once I was cut by all the American girls in a French school. . . . Here’s your ball.”

“Thanks. . . . Oh, Alida, it seems terrible.”

“All the terrible part is over. I just said that so you wouldn’t be too sorry for us if people didn’t want us in this club. I wouldn’t care; I’ve got a life of my own and my own standard of what trouble is. It wouldn’t touch me at all.”

They passed out of the clearing and their voices disappeared into the open sky on the other side. Forrest abandoned the search for his lost ball and walked toward the caddie house.

“What a hell of a note,” he thought. “To take it out on a girl that had nothing to do with it”--which was what he was doing this minute as he went up toward the club. “No,” he said to himself abruptly, “I can’t do it. Whatever her father may have done, she happens to be a lady. Father can do what he feels he has to do, but I’m out.”

After lunch the next day, his father said rather diffidently: “I see you didn’t do anything about the Rikkers and the Kennemore Club.”

“No.”

“It’s just as well,” said his father. “As a matter of fact, they got by. The club has got rather mixed anyhow in the last five years--a good many queer people in it. And, after all, in a club you don’t have to know anybody you don’t want to. The other people on the committee felt the same way.”

“I see,” said Forrest dryly. “Then you didn’t argue against the Rikkers?”

“Well, no. The thing is I do a lot of business with Walter Hannan, and it happened yesterday I was obliged to ask him rather a difficult favor.”

“So you traded with him.” To both father and son, the word “traded” sounded like traitor.

“Not exactly. The matter wasn’t mentioned.”

“I understand,” Forrest said. But he did not understand, and some old childhood faith in his father died at that moment.

II

To snub anyone effectively one must have him within range. The admission of Chauncey Rikker to the Kennemore Club and, later, to the Downtown Club was followed by angry talk and threats of resignation that simulated the sound of conflict, but there was no indication of a will underneath. On the other hand, unpleasantness in crowds is easy, and Chauncey Rikker was a facile object for personal dislike; moreover, a recurrent echo of the bucket-shop scandal sounded from New York, and the matter was reviewed in the local newspapers, in case anyone had missed it. Only the liberal Hannan family stood by the Rikkers, and their attitude aroused considerable resentment, and their attempt to launch them with a series of small parties proved a failure. Had the Rikkers attempted to “bring Alida out,” it would have been for the inspection of a motley crowd indeed, but they didn’t.

When, occasionally during the summer, Forrest encountered Alida Rikker, they crossed eyes in the curious way of children who don’t know each other. For a while he was haunted by her curly yellow head, by the golden-brown defiance of her eyes; then he became interested in another girl. He wasn’t in love with Jane Drake, though he thought he might marry her. She was “the girl across the street”; he knew her qualities, good and bad, so that they didn’t matter. She had an essential reality underneath, like a relative. It would please their families. Once, after several highballs and some casual necking, he almost answered seriously when she provoked him with “But you don’t really care about me”; but he sat tight and next morning was relieved that he had. Perhaps in the dull days after Christmas--Meanwhile, at the Christmas dances among the Christmas girls he might find the ecstasy and misery, the infatuation that he wanted. By autumn he felt that his predestined girl was already packing her trunk in some Eastern or Southern city.

It was in his more restless mood that one November Sunday he went to a small tea. Even as he spoke to his hostess he felt Alida Rikker across the firelit room; her glowing beauty and her unexplored novelty pressed up against him, and there was a relief in being presented to her at last. He bowed and passed on, but there had been some sort of communication. Her look said that she knew the stand that his family had taken, that she didn’t mind, and was even sorry to see him in such a silly position, for she knew that he admired her. His look said: “Naturally, I’m sensitive to your beauty, but you see how it is; we’ve had to draw the line at the fact that your father is a dirty dog, and I can’t withdraw from my present position.”

Suddenly in a silence, she was talking, and his ears swayed away from his own conversation.

“. . . Helen had this odd pain for over a year and, of course, they suspected cancer. She went to have an X ray; she undressed behind a screen, and the doctor looked at her through the machine, and then he said, ‘But I told you to take off all your clothes,’ and Helen said, ‘I have.’ The doctor looked again, and said, ‘Listen, my dear, I brought you into the world, so there’s no use being modest with me. Take off everything.’ So Helen said, ‘I’ve got every stitch off; I swear.’ But the doctor said, ‘You have not. The X ray shows me a safety pin in your brassiere.’ Well, they finally found out that she’d been suspected of swallowing a safety pin when she was two years old.”

The story, floating in her clear, crisp voice upon the intimate air, disarmed Forrest. It had nothing to do with what had taken place in Washington or New York ten years before. Suddenly he wanted to go and sit near her, because she was the tongue of flame that made the firelight vivid. Leaving, he walked for an hour through feathery snow, wondering again why he couldn’t know her, why it was his business to represent a standard.

“Well, maybe I’ll have a lot of fun some day doing what I ought to do,” he thought ironically--”when I’m fifty.”

The first Christmas dance was the charity ball at the armory. It was a large, public affair; the rich sat in boxes. Everyone came who felt he belonged, and many out of curiosity, so the atmosphere was tense with a strange haughtiness and aloofness.

The Rikkers had a box. Forrest, coming in with Jane Drake, glanced at the man of evil reputation and at the beaten woman frozen with jewels who sat beside him. They were the city’s villains, gaped at by the people of reserved and timid lives. Oblivious of the staring eyes, Alida and Helen Hannan held court for several young men from out of town. Without question, Alida was incomparably the most beautiful girl in the room.

Several people told Forrest the news--the Rikkers were giving a big dance after New Year’s. There were written invitations, but these were being supplemented by oral ones. Rumor had it that one had merely to be presented to any Rikker in order to be bidden to the dance.

As Forrest passed through the hall, two friends stopped him and with a certain hilarity introduced him to a youth of seventeen, Mr. Teddy Rikker.

“We’re giving a dance,” said the young man immediately. “January third. Be very happy if you could come.”

Forrest was afraid he had an engagement.

“Well, come if you change your mind.”

“Horrible kid, but shrewd,” said one of his friends later. “We were feeding him people, and when we brought up a couple of saps, he looked at them and didn’t say a word. Some refuse and a few accept and most of them stall, but he goes right on; he’s got his father’s crust.”

Into the highways and byways. Why didn’t the girl stop it? He was sorry for her when he found Jane in a group of young women reveling in the story.

“I hear they asked Bodman, the undertaker, by mistake, and then took it back.”

“Mrs. Carleton pretended she was deaf.”

“There’s going to be a carload of champagne from Canada.”

“Of course, I won’t go, but I’d love to, just to see what happens. There’ll be a hundred men to every girl--and that’ll be meat for her.”

The accumulated malice repelled him, and he was angry at Jane for being part of it. Turning away, his eyes fell on Alida’s proud form swaying along a wall, watched the devotion of her partners with an unpleasant resentment. He did not know that he had been a little in love with her for many months. Just as two children can fall in love during a physical struggle over a ball, so their awareness of each other had grown to surprising proportions.

“She’s pretty,” said Jane. “She’s not exactly overdressed, but considering everything, she dresses too elaborately.”

“I suppose she ought to wear sackcloth and ashes or half mourning.”

“I was honored with a written invitation, but, of course, I’m not going.”

“Why not?”

Jane looked at him in surprise. “You’re not going.”

“That’s different. I would if I were you. You see, you don’t care what her father did.”

“Of course, I care.”

“No, you don’t. And all this small meanness just debases the whole thing. Why don’t they let her alone? She’s young and pretty and she’s done nothing wrong.”

Later in the week he saw Alida at the Hannans’ dance and noticed that many men danced with her. He saw her lips moving, heard her laughter, caught a word or so of what she said; irresistibly he found himself guiding partners around in her wake. He envied visitors to the city who didn’t know who she was.

The night of the Rikkers’ dance he went to a small dinner; before they sat down at table he realized that the others were all going on to the Rikkers’. They talked of it as a sort of comic adventure; insisted that he come too.

“Even if you weren’t invited, it’s all right,” they assured him. “We were told we could bring anyone. It’s just a free-for-all; it doesn’t put you under any obligations. Norma Nash is going and she didn’t invite Alida Rikker to her party. Besides, she’s really very nice. My brother’s quite crazy about her. Mother is worried sick, because he says he wants to marry her.”

Clasping his hand about a new highball, Forrest knew that if he drank it he would probably go. All his reasons for not going seemed old and tired, and, fatally, he had begun to seem absurd to himself. In vain he tried to remember the purpose he was serving, and found none. His father had weakened on the matter of the Kennemore Club. And now suddenly he found reasons for going--men could go where their women could not.

“All right,” he said.

The Rikkers’ dance was in the ballroom of the Minnekada Hotel. The Rikkers’ gold, ill-gotten, tainted, had taken the form of a forest of palms, vines and flowers. The two orchestras moaned in pergolas lit with fireflies, and many-colored spotlights swept the floor, touching a buffet where dark bottles gleamed. The receiving line was still in action when Forrest’s party came in, and Forrest grinned ironically at the prospect of taking Chauncey Rikker by the hand. But at the sight of Alida, her look that at last fell frankly on him, he forgot everything else.

“Your brother was kind enough to invite me,” he said.

“Oh, yes,” she was polite, but vague; not at all overwhelmed by his presence. As he waited to speak to her parents, he started, seeing his sister in a group of dancers. Then, one after another, he identified people he knew: it might have been any one of the Christmas dances; all the younger crowd were there. He discovered abruptly that he and Alida were alone; the receiving line had broken up. Alida glanced at him questioningly and with a certain amusement.

So he danced out on the floor with her, his head high, but slightly spinning. Of all things in the world, he had least expected to lead off the Chauncey Rikkers’ ball.

III

Next morning his first realization was that he had kissed her; his second was a feeling of profound shame for his conduct of the evening. Lord help him, he had been the life of the party; he had helped to run the cotillion. From the moment when he danced out on the floor, coolly meeting the surprised and interested glances of his friends, a mood of desperation had come over him. He rushed Alida Rikker, until a friend asked him what Jane was going to say. “What business is it of Jane’s?” he demanded impatiently. “We’re not engaged.” But he was impelled to approach his sister and ask her if he looked all right.

“Apparently,” Eleanor answered, “but when in doubt, don’t take any more.”

So he hadn’t. Exteriorly he remained correct, but his libido was in a state of wild extroversion. He sat with Alida Rikker and told her he had loved her for months.

“Every night I thought of you just before you went to sleep,” his voice trembled with insincerity, “I was afraid to meet you or speak to you. Sometimes I’d see you in the distance moving along like a golden chariot, and the world would be good to live in.”

After twenty minutes of this eloquence, Alida began to feel exceedingly attractive. She was tired and rather happy, and eventually she said:

“All right, you can kiss me if you want to, but it won’t mean anything. I’m just not in that mood.”

But Forrest had moods enough for both; he kissed her as if they stood together at the altar. A little later he had thanked Mrs. Rikker with deep emotion for the best time he had ever had in his life.

It was noon, and as he groped his way upright in bed, Eleanor came in in her dressing gown.

“How are you?” she asked.

“Awful.”

“How about what you told me coming back in the car? Do you actually want to marry Alida Rikker?”

“Not this morning.”

“That’s all right then. Now, look: the family are furious.”

“Why?” he asked with some redundancy.

“Both you and I being there. Father heard that you led the cotillion. My explanation was that my dinner party went, and so I had to go; but then you went too!”

Forrest dressed and went down to Sunday dinner. Over the table hovered an atmosphere of patient, puzzled, unworldly disappointment. Finally Forrest launched into it:

“Well, we went to Al Capone’s party and had a fine time.”

“So I’ve heard,” said Pierce Winslow dryly. Mrs. Winslow said nothing.

“Everybody was there--the Kayes, the Schwanes, the Martins and the Blacks. From now on, the Rikkers are pillars of society. Every house is open to them.”

“Not this house,” said his mother. “They won’t come into this house.” And after a moment: “Aren’t you going to eat anything, Forrest?”

“No, thanks. I mean, yes, I am eating.” He looked cautiously at his plate. “The girl is very nice. There isn’t a girl in town with better manners or more stuff. If things were like they were before the war, I’d say--”

He couldn’t think exactly what it was he would have said; all he knew was that he was now on an entirely different road from his parents’.

“This city was scarcely more than a village before the war,” said old Mrs. Forrest.

“Forrest means the World War, granny,” said Eleanor.

“Some things don’t change,” said Pierce Winslow. Both he and Forrest thought of the Kennemore Club matter and, feeling guilty, the older man lost his temper:

“When people start going to parties given by a convicted criminal, there’s something serious the matter with them.”

“We won’t discuss it any more at table,” said Mrs. Winslow hastily.

About four, Forrest called a number on the telephone in his room. He had known for some time that he was going to call a number.

“Is Miss Rikker at home? . . . Oh, hello. This is Forrest Winslow.”

“How are you?”

“Terrible. It was a good party.”

“Wasn’t it?”

“Too good. What are you doing?”

“Entertaining two awful hangovers.”

“Will you entertain me too?”

“I certainly will. Come on over.”

The two young men could only groan and play sentimental music on the phonograph, but presently they departed; the fire leaped up, day went out behind the windows, and Forrest had rum in his tea.

“So we met at last,” he said.

“The delay was all yours.”

“Damn prejudice,” he said. “This is a conservative city, and your father being in this trouble--”

“I can’t discuss my father with you.”

“Excuse me. I only wanted to say that I’ve felt like a fool lately for not knowing you. For cheating myself out of the pleasure of knowing you for a silly prejudice,” he blundered on. “So I decided to follow my own instincts.”

She stood up suddenly. “Good-by, Mr. Winslow.”

“What? Why?”

“Because it’s absurd for you to come here as if you were doing me a favor. And after accepting our hospitality, to remind me of my father’s troubles is simply bad manners.”

He was on his feet, terribly upset. “That isn’t what I meant. I said I had felt that way, and I despised myself for it. Please don’t be sore.”

“Then don’t be condescending.” She sat back in her chair. Her mother came in, stayed only a moment, and threw Forrest a glance of resentment and suspicion as she left. But her passage through had brought them together, and they talked frankly for a long time.

“I ought to be upstairs dressing.”

“I ought to have gone an hour ago, and I can’t.”

“Neither can I.”

With the admission they had traveled far. At the door he kissed her unreluctant lips and walked home, throwing futile buckets of reason on the wild fire.

Less than two weeks later it happened. In a car parked in a blizzard he poured out his worship, and she lay on his chest, sighing, “Oh, me too--me too.”

Already Forrest’s family knew where he went in the evenings; there was a frightened coolness, and one morning his mother said:

“Son, you don’t want to throw yourself away on some girl that isn’t up to you. I thought you were interested in Jane Drake.”

“Don’t bring that up. I’m not going to talk about it.”

But it was only a postponement. Meanwhile the days of this February were white and magical, the nights were starry and crystalline. The town lay under a cold glory; the smell of her furs was incense, her bright cheeks were flames upon a northern altar. An ecstatic pantheism for his land and its weather welled up in him. She had brought him finally back to it; he would live here always.

“I want you so much that nothing can stand in the way of that,” he said to Alida. “But I owe my parents a debt that I can’t explain to you. They did more than spend money on me; they tried to give me something more intangible--something that their parents had given them and that they thought was worth handing on. Evidently it didn’t take with me, but I’ve got to make this as easy as possible for them.” He saw by her face that he had hurt her. “Darling--”

“Oh, it frightens me when you talk like that,” she said. “Are you going to reproach me later? It would be awful. You’ll have to get it out of your head that you’re doing anything wrong. My standards are as high as yours, and I can’t start out with my father’s sins on my shoulders.” She thought for a moment. “You’ll never be able to reconcile it all like a children’s story. You’ve got to choose. Probably you’ll have to hurt either your family or hurt me.”

A fortnight later the storm broke at the Winslow house. Pierce Winslow came home in a quiet rage and had a session behind closed doors with his wife. Afterward she knocked at Forrest’s door.

“Your father had a very embarrassing experience today. Chauncey Rikker came up to him in the Downtown Club and began talking about you as if you were on terms of some understanding with his daughter. Your father walked away, but we’ve got to know. Are you serious about Miss Rikker?”

“I want to marry her,” he said.

“Oh, Forrest!”

She talked for a long time, recapitulating, as if it were a matter of centuries, the eighty years that his family had been identified with the city; when she passed from this to the story of his father’s health, Forrest interrupted:

“That’s all so irrelevant, mother. If there was anything against Alida personally, what you say would have some weight, but there isn’t.”

“She’s overdressed; she runs around with everybody--”

“She isn’t a bit different from Eleanor. She’s absolutely a lady in every sense. I feel like a fool even discussing her like this. You’re just afraid it’ll connect you in some way with the Rikkers.”

“I’m not afraid of that,” said his mother, annoyed. “Nothing would ever do that. But I’m afraid that it’ll separate you from everything worth while, everybody that loves you. It isn’t fair for you to upset our lives, let us in for disgraceful gossip--”

“I’m to give up the girl I love because you’re afraid of a little gossip.”

The controversy was resumed next day, with Pierce Winslow debating. His argument was that he was born in old Kentucky, that he had always felt uneasy at having begotten a son upon a pioneer Minnesota family, and that this was what he might have expected. Forrest felt that his parents’ attitude was trivial and disingenuous. Only when he was out of the house, acting against their wishes, did he feel any compunction. But always he felt that something precious was being frayed away--his youthful companionship with his father and his love and trust for his mother. Hour by hour he saw the past being irreparably spoiled, and save when he was with Alida, he was deeply unhappy.

One spring day when the situation had become unendurable, with half the family meals taken in silence, Forrest’s great-grandmother stopped him on the stair landing and put her hand on his arm.

“Has this girl really a good character?” she asked, her fine, clear, old eyes resting on his.

“Of course she has, gramma.”

“Then marry her.”

“Why do you say that?” Forrest asked curiously.

“It would stop all this nonsense and we could have some peace. And I’ve been thinking I’d like to be a great-great-grandmother before I die.”

Her frank selfishness appealed to him more than the righteousness of the others. That night he and Alida decided to be married the first of June, and telephoned the announcement to the papers.

Now the storm broke in earnest. Crest Avenue rang with gossip--how Mrs. Rikker had called on Mrs. Winslow, who was not at home. How Forrest had gone to live in the University Club. How Chauncey Rikker and Pierce Winslow had had words in the Downtown Club.

It was true that Forrest had gone to the University Club. On a May night, with summer sounds already gathered on the window screens, he packed his trunk and his suitcases in the room where he had lived as a boy. His throat contracted and he smeared his face with his dusty hand as he took a row of golf cups off the mantelpiece, and he choked to himself: “If they won’t take Alida, then they’re not my family any more.”

As he finished packing, his mother came in.

“You’re not really leaving.” Her voice was stricken.

“I’m moving to the University Club.”

“That’s so unnecessary. No one bothers you here. You do what you want.”

“I can’t bring Alida here.”

“Father--”

“Hell with father!” he said wildly.

She sat down on the bed beside him. “Stay here, Forrest. I promise not to argue with you any more. But stay here.”

“I can’t.”

“I can’t have you go!” she wailed. “It seems as if we’re driving you out, and we’re not!”

“You mean it looks as though you were driving me out.”

“I don’t mean that.”

“Yes, you do. And I want to say that I don’t think you and father really care a hang about Chauncey Rikker’s moral character.”

“That’s not true, Forrest. I hate people that behave badly and break the laws. My own father would never have let Chauncey Rikker--”

“I’m not talking about your father. But neither you nor my father care a bit what Chauncey Rikker did. I bet you don’t even know what it was.”

“Of course I know. He stole some money and went abroad, and when he came back they put him in prison.”

“They put him in prison for contempt of court.”

“Now you’re defending him, Forrest.”

“I’m not! I hate his guts; undoubtedly he’s a crook. But I tell you it was a shock to me to find that father didn’t have any principles. He and his friends sit around the Downtown Club and pan Chauncey Rikker, but when it comes to keeping him out of a club, they develop weak spines.”

“That was a small thing.”

“No, it wasn’t. None of the men of father’s age have any principles. I don’t know why. I’m willing to make an allowance for an honest conviction, but I’m not going to be booed by somebody that hasn’t got any principles and simply pretends to have.”

His mother sat helplessly, knowing that what he said was true. She and her husband and all their friends had no principles. They were good or bad according to their natures; often they struck attitudes remembered from the past, but they were never sure as her father or her grandfather had been sure. Confusedly she supposed it was something about religion. But how could you get principles just by wishing for them?

The maid announced the arrival of a taxi.

“Send up Olsen for my baggage,” said Forrest; then to his mother, “I’m not taking the coupé; I left the keys. I’m just taking my clothes. I suppose father will let me keep my job down town.”

“Forrest, don’t talk that way. Do you think your father would take your living away from you, no matter what you did?”

“Such things have happened.”

“You’re hard and difficult,” she wept. “Please stay here a little longer, and perhaps things will be better and father will get a little more reconciled. Oh, stay, stay! I’ll talk to father again. I’ll do my best to fix things.”

“Will you let me bring Alida here?”

“Not now. Don’t ask me that. I couldn’t bear--”

“All right,” he said grimly.

Olsen came in for the bags. Crying and holding on to his coat sleeve, his mother went with him to the front door.

“Won’t you say good-by to father?”

“Why? I’ll see him tomorrow in the office.”

“Forrest, I was thinking, why don’t you go to a hotel instead of the University Club?”

“Why, I thought I’d be more comfortable--” Suddenly he realized that his presence would be less conspicuous at a hotel. Shutting up his bitterness inside him, he kissed his mother roughly and went to the cab.

Unexpectedly, it stopped by the corner lamp-post at a hail from the sidewalk, and the May twilight yielded up Alida, miserable and pale.

“What is it?” he demanded.

“I had to come,” she said. “Stop the car. I’ve been thinking of you leaving your house on account of me, and how you loved your family--the way I’d like to love mine--and I thought how terrible it was to spoil all that. Listen, Forrest! Wait! I want you to go back. Yes, I do. We can wait. We haven’t any right to cause all this pain. We’re young. I’ll go away for a while, and then we’ll see.”

He pulled her toward him by her shoulders.

“You’ve got more principles than the whole bunch of them,” he said. “Oh, my girl, you love me and, gosh, it’s good that you do!”

IV

It was to be a house wedding, Forrest and Alida having vetoed the Rikkers’ idea that it was to be a sort of public revenge. Only a few intimate friends were invited.

During the week before the wedding, Forrest deduced from a series of irresolute and ambiguous telephone calls that his mother wanted to attend the ceremony, if possible. Sometimes he hoped passionately she would; at others it seemed unimportant.

The wedding was to be at seven. At five o’clock Pierce Winslow was walking up and down the two interconnecting sitting rooms of his house.

“This evening,” he murmured, “my only son is being married to the daughter of a swindler.”

He spoke aloud so that he could listen to the words, but they had been evoked so often in the past few months that their strength was gone and they died thinly upon the air.

He went to the foot of the stairs and called: “Charlotte!” No answer. He called again, and then went into the dining room, where the maid was setting the table.

“Is Mrs. Winslow out?”

“I haven’t seen her come in, Mr. Winslow.”

Back in the sitting room he resumed his walking; unconsciously he was walking like his father, the judge, dead thirty years ago; he was parading his dead father up and down the room.

“You can’t bring that woman into this house to meet your mother. Bad blood is bad blood.”

The house seemed unusually quiet. He went upstairs and looked into his wife’s room, but she was not there; old Mrs. Forrest was slightly indisposed; Eleanor, he knew, was at the wedding.

He felt genuinely sorry for himself as he went downstairs again. He knew his role--the usual evening routine carried out in complete obliviousness of the wedding--but he needed support, people begging him to relent, or else deferring to his wounded sensibilities. This isolation was different; it was almost the first isolation he had ever felt, and like all men who are fundamentally of the group, of the herd, he was incapable of taking a strong stand with the inevitable loneliness that it implied. He could only gravitate toward those who did.

“What have I done to deserve this?” he demanded of the standing ash tray. “What have I failed to do for my son that lay within my power?”

The maid came in. “Mrs. Winslow told Hilda she wouldn’t be here for dinner, and Hilda didn’t tell me.”

The shameful business was complete. His wife had weakened, leaving him absolutely alone. For a moment he expected to be furiously angry with her, but he wasn’t; he had used up his anger exhibiting it to others. Nor did it make him feel more obstinate, more determined; it merely made him feel silly.

“That’s it. I’ll be the goat. Forrest will always hold it against me, and Chauncey Rikker will be laughing up his sleeve.”

He walked up and down furiously.

“So I’m left holding the bag. They’ll say I’m an old grouch and drop me out of the picture entirely. They’ve licked me. I suppose I might as well be graceful about it.” He looked down in horror at the hat he held in his hand. “I can’t--I can’t bring myself to do it, but I must. After all, he’s my only son. I couldn’t bear that he should hate me. He’s determined to marry her, so I might as well put a good face on the matter.”

In sudden alarm he looked at his watch, but there was still time. After all, it was a large gesture he was making, sacrificing his principles in this manner. People would never know what it cost him.

An hour later, old Mrs. Forrest woke up from her doze and rang for her maid.

“Where’s Mrs. Winslow?”

“She’s not in for dinner. Everybody’s out.”

The old lady remembered.

“Oh, yes, they’ve gone over to get married. Give me my glasses and the telephone book. . . . Now, I wonder how you spell Capone.”

“Rikker, Mrs. Forrest.”

In a few minutes she had the number. “This is Mrs. Hugh Forrest,” she said firmly. “I want to speak to young Mrs. Forrest Winslow. . . . No, not to Miss Rikker; to Mrs. Forrest Winslow.” As there was as yet no such person, this was impossible. “Then I will call after the ceremony,” said the old lady.

When she called again, in an hour, the bride came to the phone.

“This is Forrest’s great-grandmother. I called up to wish you every happiness and to ask you to come and see me when you get back from your trip if I’m still alive.”

“You’re very sweet to call, Mrs. Forrest.”

“Take good care of Forrest, and don’t let him get to be a ninny like his father and mother. God bless you.”

“Thank you.”

“All right. Good-by, Miss Capo--Good-by, my dear.”

Having done her whole duty, Mrs. Forrest hung up the receiver.

A NEW LEAF

Saturday Evening Post (4 July 1931)

It was the first day warm enough to eat outdoors in the Bois de Boulogne, while chestnut blossoms slanted down across the tables and dropped impudently into the butter and the wine. Julia Ross ate a few with her bread and listened to the big goldfish rippling in the pool and the sparrows whirring about an abandoned table. You could see everybody again--the waiters with their professional faces, the watchful Frenchwomen all heels and eyes, Phil Hoffman opposite her with his heart balanced on his fork, and the extraordinarily handsome man just coming out on the terrace.

--the purple noon’s transparent might.

The breath of the moist air is light

Around each unexpanded bud--

Julia trembled discreetly; she controlled herself; she didn’t spring up and call, “Yi-yi-yi-yi! Isn’t this grand?” and push the maître d’hôtel into the lily pond. She sat there, a well-behaved woman of twenty-one, and discreetly trembled.

Phil was rising, napkin in hand. “Hi there, Dick!”

“Hi, Phil!”

It was the handsome man; Phil took a few steps forward and they talked apart from the table.

“--seen Carter and Kitty in Spain--”

“--poured on to the Bremen--”

“--so I was going to--”

The man went on, following the head waiter, and Phil sat down.

“Who is that?” she demanded.

“A friend of mine--Dick Ragland.”

“He’s without doubt the handsomest man I ever saw in my life.”

“Yes, he’s handsome,” he agreed without enthusiasm.

“Handsome! He’s an archangel, he’s a mountain lion, he’s something to eat. Just why didn’t you introduce him?”

“Because he’s got the worst reputation of any American in Paris.”

“Nonsense; he must be maligned. It’s all a dirty frame-up--a lot of jealous husbands whose wives got one look at him. Why, that man’s never done anything in his life except lead cavalry charges and save children from drowning.”

“The fact remains he’s not received anywhere--not for one reason but for a thousand.”

“What reasons?”

“Everything. Drink, women, jails, scandals, killed somebody with an automobile, lazy, worthless--”

“I don’t believe a word of it,” said Julia firmly. “I bet he’s tremendously attractive. And you spoke to him as if you thought so too.”

“Yes,” he said reluctantly, “like so many alcholics, he has a certain charm. If he’d only make his messes off by himself somewhere--except right in people’s laps. Just when somebody’s taken him up and is making a big fuss over him, he pours the soup down his hostess’ back, kisses the serving maid and passes out in the dog kennel. But he’s done it too often. He’s run through about everybody, until there’s no one left.”

“There’s me,” said Julia.

There was Julia, who was a little too good for anybody and sometimes regretted that she had been quite so well endowed. Anything added to beauty has to be paid for--that is to say, the qualities that pass as substitutes can be liabilities when added to beauty itself. Julia’s brilliant hazel glance was enough, without the questioning light of intelligence that flickered in it; her irrepressible sense of the ridiculous detracted from the gentle relief of her mouth, and the loveliness of her figure might have been more obvious if she had slouched and postured rather than sat and stood very straight, after the discipline of a strict father.

Equally perfect young men had several times appeared bearing gifts, but generally with the air of being already complete, of having no space for development. On the other hand, she found that men of larger scale had sharp corners and edges in youth, and she was a little too young herself to like that. There was, for instance, this scornful young egotist, Phil Hoffman, opposite her, who was obviously going to be a brilliant lawyer and who had practically followed her to Paris. She liked him as well as anyone she knew, but he had at present all the overbearance of the son of a chief of police.

“Tonight I’m going to London, and Wednesday I sail,” he said. “And you’ll be in Europe all summer, with somebody new chewing on your ear every few weeks.”

“When you’ve been called for a lot of remarks like that you’ll begin to edge into the picture,” Julia remarked. “Just to square yourself, I want you to introduce that man Ragland.”

“My last few hours!” he complained.

“But I’ve given you three whole days on the chance you’d work out a better approach. Be a little civilized and ask him to have some coffee.”

As Mr. Dick Ragland joined them, Julia drew a little breath of pleasure. He was a fine figure of a man, in coloring both tan and blond, with a peculiar luminosity to his face. His voice was quietly intense; it seemed always to tremble a little with a sort of gay despair; the way he looked at Julia made her feel attractive. For half an hour, as their sentences floated pleasantly among the scent of violets and snowdrops, forget-me-nots and pansies, her interest in him grew. She was even glad when Phil said:

“I’ve just thought about my English visa. I’ll have to leave you two incipient love birds together against my better judgment. Will you meet me at the Gare St. Lazare at five and see me off?”

He looked at Julia hoping she’d say, “I’ll go along with you now.” She knew very well she had no business being alone with this man, but he made her laugh, and she hadn’t laughed much lately, so she said: “I’ll stay a few minutes; it’s so nice and springy here.”

When Phil was gone, Dick Ragland suggested a fine champagne.

“I hear you have a terrible reputation?” she said impulsively.

“Awful. I’m not even invited out any more. Do you want me to slip on my false mustache?”

“It’s so odd,” she pursued. “Don’t you cut yourself off from all nourishment? Do you know that Phil felt he had to warn me about you before he introduced you? And I might very well have told him not to.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“I thought you seemed so attractive and it was such a pity.”

His face grew bland; Julia saw that the remark had been made so often that it no longer reached him.

“It’s none of my business,” she said quickly. She did not realize that his being a sort of outcast added to his attraction for her--not the dissipation itself, for never having seen it, it was merely an abstraction--but its result in making him so alone. Something atavistic in her went out to the stranger to the tribe, a being from a world with different habits from hers, who promised the unexpected--promised adventure.

“I’ll tell you something else,” he said suddenly. “I’m going permanently on the wagon on June fifth, my twenty-eighth birthday. I don’t have fun drinking any more. Evidently I’m not one of the few people who can use liquor.”

“You sure you can go on the wagon?”

“I always do what I say I’ll do. Also I’m going back to New York and go to work.”

“I’m really surprised how glad I am.” This was rash, but she let it stand.

“Have another fine?” Dick suggested. “Then you’ll be gladder still.”

“Will you go on this way right up to your birthday?”

“Probably. On my birthday I’ll be on the Olympic in mid-ocean.”

“I’ll be on that boat too!” she exclaimed.

“You can watch the quick change; I’ll do it for the ship’s concert.”

The tables were being cleared off. Julia knew she should go now, but she couldn’t bear to leave him sitting with that unhappy look under his smile. She felt, maternally, that she ought to say something to help him keep his resolution.

“Tell me why you drink so much. Probably some obscure reason you don’t know yourself.”

“Oh, I know pretty well how it began.”

He told her as another hour waned. He had gone to the war at seventeen and, when he came back, life as a Princeton freshman with a little black cap was somewhat tame. So he went up to Boston Tech and then abroad to the Beaux Arts; it was there that something happened to him.

“About the time I came into some money I found that with a few drinks I got expansive and somehow had the ability to please people, and the idea turned my head. Then I began to take a whole lot of drinks to keep going and have everybody think I was wonderful. Well, I got plastered a lot and quarreled with most of my friends, and then I met a wild bunch and for a while I was expansive with them. But I was inclined to get superior and suddenly think ‘What am I doing with this bunch?’ They didn’t like that much. And when a taxi that I was in killed a man, I was sued. It was just a graft, but it got in the papers, and after I was released the impression remained that I’d killed him. So all I’ve got to show for the last five years is a reputation that makes mothers rush their daughters away if I’m at the same hotel.”

An impatient waiter was hovering near and she looked at her watch.

“Gosh, we’re to see Phil off at five. We’ve been here all the afternoon.”

As they hurried to the Gare St. Lazare, he asked: “Will you let me see you again; or do you think you’d better not?”

She returned his long look. There was no sign of dissipation in his face, in his warm cheeks, in his erect carriage.

“I’m always fine at lunch,” he added, like an invalid.

“I’m not worried,” she laughed. “Take me to lunch day after tomorrow.”

They hurried up the steps of the Gare St. Lazare, only to see the last carriage of the Golden Arrow disappearing toward the Channel. Julia was remorseful, because Phil had come so far.

As a sort of atonement, she went to the apartment where she lived with her aunt and tried to write a letter to him, but Dick Ragland intruded himself into her thoughts. By morning the effect of his good looks had faded a little; she was inclined to write him a note that she couldn’t see him. Still, he had made her a simple appeal and she had brought it all on herself. She waited for him at half-past twelve on the appointed day.

Julia had said nothing to her aunt, who had company for luncheon and might mention his name--strange to go out with a man whose name you couldn’t mention. He was late and she waited in the hall, listening to the echolalia of chatter from the luncheon party in the dining room. At one she answered the bell.

There in the outer hall stood a man whom she thought she had never seen before. His face was dead white and erratically shaven, his soft hat was crushed bunlike on his head, his shirt collar was dirty, and all except the band of his tie was out of sight. But at the moment when she recognized the figure as Dick Ragland she perceived a change which dwarfed the others into nothing; it was in his expression. His whole face was one prolonged sneer--the lids held with difficulty from covering the fixed eyes, the drooping mouth drawn up over the upper teeth, the chin wabbling like a made-over chin in which the paraffin had run--it was a face that both expressed and inspired disgust.

“H’lo,” he muttered.

For a minute she drew back from him; then, at a sudden silence from the dining room that gave on the hall, inspired by the silence in the hall itself, she half pushed him over the threshold, stepped out herself and closed the door behind them.

“Oh-h-h!” she said in a single, shocked breath.

“Haven’t been home since yest’day. Got involve’ on a party at--”

With repugnance, she turned him around by his arm and stumbled with him down the apartment stairs, passing the concierge’s wife, who peered out at them curiously from her glass room. Then they came out into the bright sunshine of the Rue Guynemer.

Against the spring freshness of the Luxembourg Gardens opposite, he was even more grotesque. He frightened her; she looked desperately up and down the street for a taxi, but one turning the corner of the Rue de Vaugirard disregarded her signal.

“Where’ll we go lunch?” he asked.

“You’re in no shape to go to lunch. Don’t you realize? You’ve got to go home and sleep.”

“I’m all right. I get a drink I’ll be fine.”

A passing cab slowed up at her gesture.

“You go home and go to sleep. You’re not fit to go anywhere.”

As he focused his eyes on her, realizing her suddenly as something fresh, something new and lovely, something alien to the smoky and turbulent world where he had spent his recent hours, a faint current of reason flowed through him. She saw his mouth twist with vague awe, saw him make a vague attempt to stand up straight. The taxi yawned.

“Maybe you’re right. Very sorry.”

“What’s your address?”

He gave it and then tumbled into a corner, his face still struggling toward reality. Julia closed the door.

When the cab had driven off, she hurried across the street and into the Luxembourg Gardens as if someone were after her.

II

Quite by accident, she answered when he telephoned at seven that night. His voice was strained and shaking:

“I suppose there’s not much use apologizing for this morning. I didn’t know what I was doing, but that’s no excuse. But if you could let me see you for a while somewhere tomorrow--just for a minute--I’d like the chance of telling you in person how terribly sorry--”

“I’m busy tomorrow.”

“Well, Friday then, or any day.”

“I’m sorry, I’m very busy this week.”

“You mean you don’t ever want to see me again?”

“Mr. Ragland, I hardly see the use of going any further with this. Really, that thing this morning was a little too much. I’m very sorry. I hope you feel better. Good-by.”

She put him entirely out of her mind. She had not even associated his reputation with such a spectacle--a heavy drinker was someone who sat up late and drank champagne and maybe in the small hours rode home singing. This spectacle at high noon was something else again. Julia was through.

Meanwhile there were other men with whom she lunched at Ciro’s and danced in the Bois. There was a reproachful letter from Phil Hoffman in America. She liked Phil better for having been so right about this. A fortnight passed and she would have forgotten Dick Ragland, had she not heard his name mentioned with scorn in several conversations. Evidently he had done such things before.

Then, a week before she was due to sail, she ran into him in the booking department of the White Star Line. He was as handsome--she could hardly believe her eyes. He leaned with an elbow on the desk, his fine figure erect, his yellow gloves as stainless as his clear, shining eyes. His strong, gay personality had affected the clerk who served him with fascinated deference; the stenographers behind looked up for a minute and exchanged a glance. Then he saw Julia; she nodded, and with a quick, wincing change of expression he raised his hat.

They were together by the desk a long time and the silence was oppressive.

“Isn’t this a nuisance?” she said.

“Yes,” he said jerkily, and then: “You going by the Olympic?”

“Oh, yes.”

“I thought you might have changed.”

“Of course not,” she said coldly.

“I thought of changing; in fact, I was here to ask about it.”

“That’s absurd.”

“You don’t hate the sight of me? So it’ll make you seasick when we pass each other on the deck?”

She smiled. He seized his advantage:

“I’ve improved somewhat since we last met.”

“Don’t talk about that.”

“Well then, you have improved. You’ve got the loveliest costume on I ever saw.”

This was presumptuous, but she felt herself shimmering a little at the compliment.

“You wouldn’t consider a cup of coffee with me at the café next door, just to recover from this ordeal?”

How weak of her to talk to him like this, to let him make advances. It was like being under the fascination of a snake.

“I’m afraid I can’t.” Something terribly timid and vulnerable came into his face, twisting a little sinew in her heart. “Well, all right,” she shocked herself by saying.

Sitting at the sidewalk table in the sunlight, there was nothing to remind her of that awful day two weeks ago. Jekyll and Hyde. He was courteous, he was charming, he was amusing. He made her feel, oh, so attractive! He presumed on nothing.

“Have you stopped drinking?” she asked.

“Not till the fifth.”

“Oh!”

“Not until I said I’d stop. Then I’ll stop.”

When Julia rose to go, she shook her head at his suggestion of a further meeting.

“I’ll see you on the boat. After your twenty-eighth birthday.”

“All right; one more thing: It fits in with the high price of crime that I did something inexcusable to the one girl I’ve ever been in love with in my life.”

She saw him the first day on board, and then her heart sank into her shoes as she realized at last how much she wanted him. No matter what his past was, no matter what he had done. Which was not to say that she would ever let him know, but only that he moved her chemically more than anyone she had ever met, that all other men seemed pale beside him.

He was popular on the boat; she heard that he was giving a party on the night of his twenty-eighth birthday. Julia was not invited; when they met they spoke pleasantly, nothing more.

It was the day after the fifth that she found him stretched in his deck chair looking wan and white. There were wrinkles on his fine brow and around his eyes, and his hand, as he reached out for a cup of bouillon, was trembling. He was still there in the late afternoon, visibly suffering, visibly miserable. After three times around, Julia was irresistibly impelled to speak to him:

“Has the new era begun?”

He made a feeble effort to rise, but she motioned him not to and sat on the next chair.

“You look tired.”

“I’m just a little nervous. This is the first day in five years that I haven’t had a drink.”

“It’ll be better soon.”

“I know,” he said grimly.

“Don’t weaken.”

“I won’t.”

“Can’t I help you in any way? Would you like a bromide?”

“I can’t stand bromides,” he said almost crossly. “No, thanks, I mean.”

Julia stood up: “I know you feel better alone. Things will be brighter tomorrow.”

“Don’t go, if you can stand me.”

Julia sat down again.

“Sing me a song--can you sing?”

“What kind of a song?”

“Something sad--some sort of blues.”

She sang him Libby Holman’s “This is how the story ends,” in a low, soft voice.

“That’s good. Now sing another. Or sing that again.”

“All right. If you like, I’ll sing to you all afternoon.”

III

The second day in New York he called her on the phone. “I’ve missed you so,” he said. “Have you missed me?”

“I’m afraid I have,” she said reluctantly.

“Much?”

“I’ve missed you a lot. Are you better?”

“I’m all right now. I’m still just a little nervous, but I’m starting work tomorrow. When can I see you?”

“When you want.”

“This evening then. And look--say that again.”

“What?”

“That you’re afraid you have missed me.”

“I’m afraid that I have,” Julia said obediently.

“Missed me,” he added.

“I’m afraid I have missed you.”

“All right. It sounds like a song when you say it.”

“Good-by, Dick.”

“Good-by, Julia dear.”

She stayed in New York two months instead of the fortnight she had intended, because he would not let her go. Work took the place of drink in the daytime, but afterward he must see Julia.

Sometimes she was jealous of his work when he telephoned that he was too tired to go out after the theater. Lacking drink, night life was less than nothing to him--something quite spoiled and well lost. For Julia, who never drank, it was a stimulus in itself--the music and the parade of dresses and the handsome couple they made dancing together. At first they saw Phil Hoffman once in a while; Julia considered that he took the matter rather badly; then they didn’t see him any more.

A few unpleasant incidents occurred. An old schoolmate, Esther Cary, came to her to ask if she knew of Dick Ragland’s reputation. Instead of growing angry, Julia invited her to meet Dick and was delighted with the ease with which Esther’s convictions were changed. There were other, small, annoying episodes, but Dick’s misdemeanors had, fortunately, been confined to Paris and assumed here a far-away unreality. They loved each other deeply now--the memory of that morning slowly being effaced from Julia’s imagination--but she wanted to be sure.

“After six months, if everything goes along like this, we’ll announce our engagement. After another six months we’ll be married.”

“Such a long time,” he mourned.

“But there were five years before that,” Julia answered. “I trust you with my heart and with my mind, but something else says wait. Remember, I’m also deciding for my children.”

Those five years--oh, so lost and gone.

In August, Julia went to California for two months to see her family. She wanted to know how Dick would get along alone. They wrote every day; his letters were by turns cheerful, depressed, weary and hopeful. His work was going better. As things came back to him, his uncle had begun really to believe in him, but all the time he missed his Julia so. It was when an occasional note of despair began to appear that she cut her visit short by a week and came East to New York.

“Oh, thank God you’re here!” he cried as they linked arms and walked out of the Grand Central station. “It’s been so hard. Half a dozen times lately I’ve wanted to go on a bust and I had to think of you, and you were so far away.”

“Darling--darling, you’re so tired and pale. You’re working too hard.”

“No, only that life is so bleak alone. When I go to bed my mind churns on and on. Can’t we get married sooner?”

“I don’t know; we’ll see. You’ve got your Julia near you now, and nothing matters.”

After a week, Dick’s depression lifted. When he was sad, Julia made him her baby, holding his handsome head against her breast, but she liked it best when he was confident and could cheer her up, making her laugh and feel taken care of and secure. She had rented an apartment with another girl and she took courses in biology and domestic science in Columbia. When deep fall came, they went to football games and the new shows together, and walked through the first snow in Central Park, and several times a week spent long evenings together in front of her fire. But time was going by and they were both impatient. Just before Christmas, an unfamiliar visitor--Phil Hoffman--presented himself at her door. It was the first time in many months. New York, with its quality of many independent ladders set side by side, is unkind to even the meetings of close friends; so, in the case of strained relations, meetings are easy to avoid.

And they were strange to each other. Since his expressed skepticism of Dick, he was automatically her enemy; on another count, she saw that he had improved, some of the hard angles were worn off; he was now an assistant district attorney, moving around with increasing confidence through his profession.

“So you’re going to marry Dick?” he said. “When?”

“Soon now. When mother comes East.”

He shook his head emphatically. “Julia, don’t marry Dick. This isn’t jealousy--I know when I am licked--but it seems awful for a lovely girl like you to take a blind dive into a lake full of rocks. What makes you think that people change their courses? Sometimes they dry up or even flow into a parallel channel, but I’ve never known anybody to change.”

“Dick’s changed.”

“Maybe so. But isn’t that an enormous ‘maybe’? If he was unattractive and you liked him, I’d say go ahead with it. Maybe I’m all wrong, but it’s so darn obvious that what fascinates you is that handsome pan of his and those attractive manners.”

“You don’t know him,” Julia answered loyally. “He’s different with me. You don’t know how gentle he is, and responsive. Aren’t you being rather small and mean?”

“Hm.” Phil thought for a moment. “I want to see you again in a few days. Or perhaps I’ll speak to Dick.”

“You let Dick alone,” she cried. “He has enough to worry him without your nagging him. If you were his friend you’d try to help him instead of coming to me behind his back.”

“I’m your friend first.”

“Dick and I are one person now.”

But three days later Dick came to see her at an hour when he would usually have been at the office.

“I’m here under compulsion,” he said lightly, “under threat of exposure by Phil Hoffman.”

Her heart dropping like a plummet. “Has he given up?” she thought. “Is he drinking again?”

“It’s about a girl. You introduced me to her last summer and told me to be very nice to her--Esther Cary.”

Now her heart was beating slowly.

“After you went to California I was lonesome and I ran into her. She’d liked me that day, and for a while we saw quite a bit of each other. Then you came back and I broke it off. It was a little difficult; I hadn’t realized that she was so interested.”

“I see.” Her voice was starved and aghast.

“Try and understand. Those terribly lonely evenings. I think if it hadn’t been for Esther, I’d have fallen off the wagon. I never loved her--I never loved anybody but you--but I had to see somebody who liked me.”

He put his arm around her, but she felt cold all over and he drew away.

“Then any woman would have done,” Julia said slowly. “It didn’t matter who.”

“No!” he cried.

“I stayed away so long to let you stand on your own feet and get back your self-respect by yourself.”

“I only love you, Julia.”

“But any woman can help you. So you don’t really need me, do you?”

His face wore that vulnerable look that Julia had seen several times before; she sat on the arm of his chair and ran her hand over his cheek.

“Then what do you bring me?” she demanded. “I thought that there’d be the accumulated strength of having beaten your weakness. What do you bring me now?”

“Everything I have.”

She shook her head. “Nothing. Just your good looks--and the head waiter at dinner last night had that.”

They talked for two days and decided nothing. Sometimes she would pull him close and reach up to his lips that she loved so well, but her arms seemed to close around straw.

“I’ll go away and give you a chance to think it over,” he said despairingly. “I can’t see any way of living without you, but I suppose you can’t marry a man you don’t trust or believe in. My uncle wanted me to go to London on some business--”

The night he left, it was sad on the dim pier. All that kept her from breaking was that it was not an image of strength that was leaving her; she would be just as strong without him. Yet as the murky lights fell on the fine structure of his brow and chin, as she saw the faces turn toward him, the eyes that followed him, an awful emptiness seized her and she wanted to say: “Never mind, dear; we’ll try it together.”

But try what? It was human to risk the toss between failure and success, but to risk the desperate gamble between adequacy and disaster--

“Oh, Dick, be good and be strong and come back to me. Change, change, Dick--change!”

“Good-by, Julia--good-by.”

She last saw him on the deck, his profile cut sharp as a cameo against a match as he lit a cigarette.

IV

It was Phil Hoffman who was to be with her at the beginning and the end. It was he who broke the news as gently as it could be broken. He reached her apartment at half-past eight and carefully threw away the morning paper outside. Dick Ragland had disappeared at sea.

After her first wild burst of grief, he became purposely a little cruel.

“He knew himself. His will had given out; he didn’t want life any more. And, Julia, just to show you how little you can possibly blame yourself, I’ll tell you this: He’d hardly gone to his office for four months--since you went to California. He wasn’t fired because of his uncle; the business he went to London on was of no importance at all. After his first enthusiasm was gone he’d given up.”

She looked at him sharply. “He didn’t drink, did he? He wasn’t drinking?”

For a fraction of a second Phil hesitated. “No, he didn’t drink; he kept his promise--he held on to that.”

“That was it,” she said. “He kept his promise and he killed himself doing it.”

Phil waited uncomfortably.

“He did what he said he would and broke his heart doing it,” she went on chokingly. “Oh, isn’t life cruel sometimes--so cruel, never to let anybody off. He was so brave--he died doing what he said he’d do.”

Phil was glad he had thrown away the newspaper that hinted of Dick’s gay evening in the bar--one of many gay evenings that Phil had known of in the past few months. He was relieved that was over, because Dick’s weakness had threatened the happiness of the girl he loved; but he was terribly sorry for him--even understanding how it was necessary for him to turn his maladjustment to life toward one mischief or another--but he was wise enough to leave Julia with the dream that she had saved out of wreckage.

There was a bad moment a year later, just before their marriage, when she said:

“You’ll understand the feeling I have and always will have about Dick, won’t you, Phil? It wasn’t just his good looks. I believed in him--and I was right in a way. He broke rather than bent; he was a ruined man, but not a bad man. In my heart I knew when I first looked at him.”

Phil winced, but he said nothing. Perhaps there was more behind it than they knew. Better let it all alone in the depths of her heart and the depths of the sea.

A NIGHT AT THE FAIR

The Saturday Evening Post (July 21, 1928)

The two cities were separated only by a thin well-bridged river; their tails curling over the banks met and mingled, and at the juncture, under the jealous eye of each, lay, every fall, the State Fair. Because of this advantageous position, and because of the agricultural eminence of the state, the fair was one of the most magnificent in America. There were immense exhibits of grain, livestock and farming machinery; there were horse races and automobile races and, lately, aeroplanes that really left the ground; there was a tumultuous Midway with Coney Island thrillers to whirl you through space, and a whining, tinkling hoochie-coochie show. As a compromise between the serious and the trivial, a grand exhibition of fireworks, culminating in a representation of the Battle of Gettysburg, took place in the Grand Concourse every night.

At the late afternoon of a hot September day two boys of fifteen, somewhat replete with food and pop, and fatigued by eight hours of constant motion, issued from the Penny Arcade. The one with dark, handsome, eager eyes was, according to the cosmic inscription in his last year’s Ancient History, “Basil Duke Lee, Holly Avenue, St. Paul, Minnesota, United States, North America, Western Hemisphere, the World, the Universe.” Though slightly shorter than his companion, he appeared taller, for he projected, so to speak, from short trousers, while Riply Buckner, Jr., had graduated into long ones the week before. This event, so simple and natural, was having a disrupting influence on the intimate friendship between them that had endured for several years.

During that time Basil, the imaginative member of the firm, had been the dominating partner, and the displacement effected by two feet of blue serge filled him with puzzled dismay--in fact, Riply Buckner had become noticeably indifferent to the pleasure of Basil’s company in public. His own assumption of long trousers had seemed to promise a liberation from the restraints and inferiorities of boyhood, and the companionship of one who was, in token of his short pants, still a boy was an unwelcome reminder of how recent was his own metamorphosis. He scarcely admitted this to himself, but a certain shortness of temper with Basil, a certain tendency to belittle him with superior laughter, had been in evidence all afternoon. Basil felt the new difference keenly. In August a family conference had decided that even though he was going East to school, he was too small for long trousers. He had countered by growing an inch and a half in a fortnight, which added to his reputation for unreliability, but led him to hope that his mother might be persuaded, after all.

Coming out of the stuffy tent into the glow of sunset, the two boys hesitated, glancing up and down the crowded highway with expressions compounded of a certain ennui and a certain inarticulate yearning. They were unwilling to go home before it became necessary, yet they knew they had temporarily glutted their appetite for sights; they wanted a change in the tone, the motif, of the day. Near them was the parking space, as yet a modest yard; and as they lingered indecisively, their eyes were caught and held by a small car, red in color and slung at that proximity to the ground which indicated both speed of motion and speed of life. It was a Blatz Wildcat, and for the next five years it represented the ambition of several million American boys. Occupying it, in the posture of aloof exhaustion exacted by the sloping seat, was a blonde, gay, baby-faced girl.

The two boys stared. She bent upon them a single cool glance and then returned to her avocation of reclining in a Blatz Wildcat and looking haughtily at the sky. The two boys exchanged a glance, but made no move to go. They watched the girl--when they felt that their stares were noticeable they dropped their eyes and gazed at the car.

After several minutes a young man with a very pink face and pink hair, wearing a yellow suit and hat and drawing on yellow gloves, appeared and got into the car. There was a series of frightful explosions; then, with a measured tup-tup-tup from the open cut-out, insolent, percussive and thrilling as a drum, the car and the girl and the young man whom they had recognized as Speed Paxton slid smoothly away.

Basil and Riply turned and strolled back thoughtfully toward the Midway. They knew that Speed Paxton was dimly terrible--the wild and pampered son of a local brewer--but they envied him--to ride off into the sunset in such a chariot, into the very hush and mystery of night, beside him the mystery of that baby-faced girl. It was probably this envy that made them begin to shout when they perceived a tall youth of their own age issuing from a shooting gallery.

“Oh, El! Hey, El! Wait a minute!”

Elwood Leaming turned around and waited. He was the dissipated one among the nice boys of the town--he had drunk beer, he had learned from chauffeurs, he was already thin from too many cigarettes. As they greeted him eagerly, the hard, wise expression of a man of the world met them in his half-closed eyes.

“Hello, Rip. Put it there, Rip. Hello, Basil, old boy. Put it there.”

“What you doing, El?” Riply asked.

“Nothing. What are you doing?”

“Nothing.”

Elwood Leaming narrowed his eyes still further, seemed to give thought, and then made a decisive clicking sound with his teeth.

“Well, what do you say we pick something up?” he suggested. “I saw some pretty good stuff around here this afternoon.”

Riply and Basil drew tense, secret breaths. A year before they had been shocked because Elwood went to the burlesque shows at the Star--now here he was holding the door open to his own speedy life.

The responsibility of his new maturity impelled Riply to appear most eager. “All right with me,” he said heartily.

He looked at Basil.

“All right with me,” mumbled Basil.

Riply laughed, more from nervousness than from derision. “Maybe you better grow up first, Basil.” He looked at Elwood, seeking approval. “You better stick around till you get to be a man.”

“Oh, dry up!” retorted Basil. “How long have you had yours? Just a week!”

But he realized that there was a gap separating him from these two, and it was with a sense of tagging them that he walked along beside.

Glancing from right to left with the expression of a keen and experienced frontiersman, Elwood Leaming led the way. Several pairs of strolling girls met his mature glance and smiled encouragingly, but he found them unsatisfactory--too fat, too plain or too hard. All at once their eyes fell upon two who sauntered along a little ahead of them, and they increased their pace, Elwood with confidence, Riply with its nervous counterfeit and Basil suddenly in the grip of wild excitement.

They were abreast of them. Basil’s heart was in his throat. He looked away as he heard Elwood’s voice.

“Hello, girls! How are you this evening?”

Would they call for the police? Would his mother and Riply’s suddenly turn the corner?

“Hello, yourself, kiddo!”

“Where you going, girls?”

“Nowhere.”

“Well, let’s all go together.”

Then all of them were standing in a group and Basil was relieved to find that they were only girls his own age, after all. They were pretty, with clear skins and red lips and maturely piled up hair. One he immediately liked better than the other--her voice was quieter and she was shy. Basil was glad when Elwood walked on with the bolder one, leaving him and Riply to follow with the other, behind.

The first lights of the evening were springing into pale existence; the afternoon crowd had thinned a little, and the lanes, empty of people, were heavy with the rich various smells of pop corn and peanuts, molasses and dust and cooking Wienerwurst and a not-unpleasant overtone of animals and hay. The Ferris wheel, pricked out now in lights, revolved leisurely through the dusk; a few empty cars of the roller coaster rattled overhead. The heat had blown off and there was the crisp stimulating excitement of Northern autumn in the air.

They walked. Basil felt that there was some way of talking to this girl, but he could manage nothing in the key of Elwood Leaming’s intense and confidential manner to the girl ahead--as if he had inadvertently discovered a kinship of tastes and of hearts. So to save the progression from absolute silence--for Riply’s contribution amounted only to an occasional burst of silly laughter--Basil pretended an interest in the sights they passed and kept up a sort of comment thereon.

“There’s the six-legged calf. Have you seen it?”

“No, I haven’t.”

“There’s where the man rides the motorcycle around. Did you go there?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Look! They’re beginning to fill the balloon. I wonder what time they start the fireworks.”

“Have you been to the fireworks?”

“No, I’m going tomorrow night. Have you?”

“Yes, I been every night. My brother works there. He’s one of them that helps set them off.”

“Oh!”

He wondered if her brother cared that she had been picked up by strangers. He wondered even more if she felt as silly as he. It must be getting late, and he had promised to be home by half-past seven on pain of not being allowed out tomorrow night. He walked up beside Elwood.

“Hey, El,” he asked, “where we going?”

Elwood turned to him and winked. “We’re going around the Old Mill.”

“Oh!”

Basil dropped back again--became aware that in his temporary absence Riply and the girl had linked arms. A twinge of jealousy went through him and he inspected the girl again and with more appreciation, finding her prettier than he had thought. Her eyes, dark and intimate, seemed to have wakened at the growing brilliance of the illumination overhead; there was the promise of excitement in them now, like the promise of the cooling night.

He considered taking her other arm, but it was too late; she and Riply were laughing together at something--rather, at nothing. She had asked him what he laughed at all the time and he had laughed again for an answer. Then they both laughed hilariously and sporadically together.

Basil looked disgustedly at Riply. “I never heard such a silly laugh in my life,” he said indignantly.

“Didn’t you?” chuckled Riply Buckner. “Didn’t you, little boy?”

He bent double with laughter and the girl joined in. The words “little boy” had fallen on Basil like a jet of cold water. In his excitement he had forgotten something, as a cripple might forget his limp only to discover it when he began to run.

“You think you’re so big!” he exclaimed. “Where’d you get the pants? Where’d you get the pants?” He tried to work this up with gusto and was about to add: “They’re your father’s pants,” when he remembered that Riply’s father, like his own, was dead.

The couple ahead reached the entrance to the Old Mill and waited for them. It was an off hour, and half a dozen scows bumped in the wooden offing, swayed by the mild tide of the artificial river. Elwood and his girl got into the front seat and he promptly put his arm around her. Basil helped the other girl into the rear seat, but, dispirited, he offered no resistance when Riply wedged in and sat down between.

They floated off, immediately entering upon a long echoing darkness. Somewhere far ahead a group in another boat were singing, their voices now remote and romantic, now nearer and yet more mysterious, as the canal doubled back and the boats passed close to each other with an invisible veil between.

The three boys yelled and called, Basil attempting by his vociferousness and variety to outdo Riply in the girl’s eyes, but after a few moments there was no sound except his own voice and the continual bump-bump of the boat against the wooden sides, and he knew without looking that Riply had put his arm about the girl’s shoulder.

They slid into a red glow--a stage set of hell, with grinning demons and lurid paper fires--he made out that Elwood and his girl sat cheek to cheek--then again into the darkness, with the gently lapping water and the passing of the singing boat now near, now far away. For a while Basil pretended that he was interested in this other boat, calling to them, commenting on their proximity. Then he discovered that the scow could be rocked and took to this poor amusement until Elwood Leaming turned around indignantly and cried:

“Hey! What are you trying to do?”

They came out finally to the entrance and the two couples broke apart. Basil jumped miserably ashore.

“Give us some more tickets,” Riply cried. “We want to go around again.”

“Not me,” said Basil with elaborate indifference. “I have to go home.”

Riply began to laugh in derision and triumph. The girl laughed too.

“Well, so long, little boy,” Riply cried hilariously.

“Oh, shut up! So long, Elwood.”

“So long, Basil.”

The boat was already starting off; arms settled again about the girls’ shoulders.

“So long, little boy!”

“So long, you big cow!” Basil cried. “Where’d you get the pants? Where’d you get the pants?”

But the boat had already disappeared into the dark mouth of the tunnel, leaving the echo of Riply’s taunting laughter behind.

It is an ancient tradition that all boys are obsessed with the idea of being grown. This is because they occasionally give voice to their impatience with the restraints of youth, while those great stretches of time when they are more than content to be boys find expression in action and not in words. Sometimes Basil wanted to be just a little bit older, but no more. The question of long pants had not seemed vital to him--he wanted them, but as a costume they had no such romantic significance as, for example, a football suit or an officer’s uniform, or even the silk hat and opera cape in which gentlemen burglars were wont to prowl the streets of New York by night.

But when he awoke next morning they were the most important necessity in his life. Without them he was cut off from his contemporaries, laughed at by a boy whom he had hitherto led. The actual fact that last night some chickens had preferred Riply to himself was of no importance in itself, but he was fiercely competitive and he resented being required to fight with one hand tied behind his back. He felt that parallel situations would occur at school, and that was unbearable. He approached his mother at breakfast in a state of wild excitement.

“Why, Basil,” she protested in surprise, “I thought when we talked it over you didn’t especially care.”

“I’ve got to have them,” he declared. “I’d rather be dead than go away to school without them.”

“Well, there’s no need of being silly.”

“It’s true--I’d rather be dead. If I can’t have long trousers I don’t see any use in my going away to school.”

His emotion was such that the vision of his demise began actually to disturb his mother.

“Now stop that silly talk and come and eat your breakfast. You can go down and buy some at Barton Leigh’s this morning.”

Mollified, but still torn by the urgency of his desire, Basil strode up and down the room.

“A boy is simply helpless without them,” he declared vehemently. The phrase pleased him and he amplified it. “A boy is simply and utterly helpless without them. I’d rather be dead than go away to school--”

“Basil, stop talking like that. Somebody has been teasing you about it.”

“Nobody’s been teasing me,” he denied indignantly--”nobody at all.”

After breakfast, the maid called him to the phone.

“This is Riply,” said a tentative voice. Basil acknowledged the fact coldly. “You’re not sore about last night, are you?” Riply asked.

“Me? No. Who said I was sore?”

“Nobody. Well, listen, you know about us going to the fireworks together tonight.”

“Yes.” Basil’s voice was still cold.

“Well, one of those girls--the one Elwood had--has got a sister that’s even nicer than she is, and she can come out tonight and you could have her. And we thought we could meet about eight, because the fireworks don’t start till nine.”

“What do?”

“Well, we could go on the Old Mill again. We went around three times more last night.”

There was a moment’s silence. Basil looked to see if his mother’s door was closed.

“Did you kiss yours?” he demanded into the transmitter.

“Sure I did!” Over the wire came the ghost of a silly laugh. “Listen, El thinks he can get his auto. We could call for you at seven.”

“All right,” agreed Basil gruffly, and he added, “I’m going down and get some long pants this morning.”

“Are you?” Again Basil detected ghostly laughter. “Well, you be ready at seven tonight.”

Basil’s uncle met him at Barton Leigh’s clothing store at ten, and Basil felt a touch of guilt at having put his family to all this trouble and expense. On his uncle’s advice, he decided finally on two suits--a heavy chocolate brown for every day and a dark blue for formal wear. There were certain alterations to be made but it was agreed that one of the suits was to be delivered without fail that afternoon.

His momentary contriteness at having been so expensive made him save carfare by walking home from downtown. Passing along Crest Avenue, he paused speculatively to vault the high hydrant in front of the Van Schellinger house, wondering if one did such things in long trousers and if he would ever do it again. He was impelled to leap it two or three times as a sort of ceremonial farewell, and was so engaged when the Van Schellinger limousine turned into the drive and stopped at the front door.

“Oh, Basil,” a voice called.

A fresh delicate face, half buried under a mass of almost white curls, was turned toward him from the granite portico of the city’s second largest mansion.

“Hello, Gladys.”

“Come here a minute, Basil.”

He obeyed. Gladys Van Schellinger was a year younger than Basil--a tranquil, carefully nurtured girl who, so local tradition had it, was being brought up to marry in the East. She had a governess and always played with a certain few girls at her house or theirs, and was not allowed the casual freedom of children in a Midwestern city. She was never present at such rendezvous as the Whartons’ yard, where the others played games in the afternoons.

“Basil, I wanted to ask you something--are you going to the State Fair tonight?”

“Why, yes, I am.”

“Well, wouldn’t you like to come and sit in our box and watch the fireworks?”

Momentarily he considered the matter. He wanted to accept, but he was mysteriously impelled to refuse--to forgo a pleasure in order to pursue a quest that in cold logic did not interest him at all.

“I can’t. I’m awfully sorry.”

A shadow of discontent crossed Gladys’ face. “Oh? Well, come and see me sometime soon, Basil. In a few weeks I’m going East to school.”

He walked on up the street in a state of dissatisfaction. Gladys Van Schellinger had never been his girl, nor indeed anyone’s girl, but the fact that they were starting away to school at the same time gave him a feeling of kinship for her--as if they had been selected for the glamorous adventure of the East, chosen together for a high destiny that transcended the fact that she was rich and he was only comfortable. He was sorry that he could not sit with her in her box tonight.

By three o’clock, Basil, reading the Crimson Sweater up in his room, began giving attentive ear to every ring at the bell. He would go to the head of the stairs, lean over and call, “Hilda, was that a package for me?” And at four, dissatisfied with her indifference, her lack of feeling for important things, her slowness in going to and returning from the door, he moved downstairs and began attending to it himself. But nothing came. He phoned Barton Leigh’s and was told by a busy clerk: “You’ll get that suit. I’ll guarantee that you’ll get that suit.” But he did not believe in the clerk’s honor and he moved out on the porch and watched for Barton Leigh’s delivery wagon.

His mother came home at five. “There were probably more alterations than they thought,” she suggested helpfully. “You’ll probably get it tomorrow morning.”

“Tomorrow morning!” he exclaimed incredulously. “I’ve got to have that suit tonight.”

“Well, I wouldn’t be too disappointed if I were you, Basil. The stores all close at half-past five.”

Basil took one agitated look up and down Holly Avenue. Then he got his cap and started on a run for the street car at the corner. A moment later a cautious afterthought caused him to retrace his steps with equal rapidity.

“If they get here, keep them for me,” he instructed his mother--a man who thought of everything.

“All right,” she promised dryly, “I will.”

It was later than he thought. He had to wait for a trolley, and when he reached Barton Leigh’s he saw with horror that the doors were locked and the blinds drawn. He intercepted a last clerk coming out and explained vehemently that he had to have his suit tonight. The clerk knew nothing about the matter. . . . Was Basil Mr. Schwartze?

No, Basil was not Mr. Schwartze. After a vague argument wherein he tried to convince the clerk that whoever promised him the suit should be fired, Basil went dispiritedly home.

He would not go to the fair without his suit--he would not go at all. He would sit at home and luckier boys would go adventuring along its Great White Way. Mysterious girls, young and reckless, would glide with them through the enchanted darkness of the Old Mill, but because of the stupidity, selfishness and dishonesty of a clerk in a clothing store he would not be there. In a day or so the fair would be over--forever--those girls, of all living girls the most intangible, the most desirable, that sister, said to be nicest of all--would be lost out of his life. They would ride off in Blatz Wildcats into the moonlight without Basil having kissed them. No, all his life--though he would lose the clerk his position: “You see now what your act did to me”--he would look back with infinite regret upon that irretrievable hour. Like most of us, he was unable to perceive that he would have any desires in the future equivalent to those that possessed him now.

He reached home; the package had not arrived. He moped dismally about the house, consenting at half-past six to sit silently at dinner with his mother, his elbows on the table.

“Haven’t you any appetite, Basil?”

“No, thanks,” he said absently, under the impression he had been offered something.

“You’re not going away to school for two more weeks. Why should it matter--”

“Oh, that isn’t the reason I can’t eat. I had a sort of headache all afternoon.”

Toward the end of the meal his eye focused abstractedly on some slices of angel cake; with the air of a somnambulist, he ate three.

At seven he heard the sounds that should have ushered in a night of romantic excitement.

The Leaming car stopped outside, and a moment later Riply Buckner rang the bell. Basil rose gloomily.

“I’ll go,” he said to Hilda. And then to his mother, with vague impersonal reproach, “Excuse me a minute. I just want to tell them I can’t go to the fair tonight.”

“But of course you can go, Basil. Don’t be silly. Just because--”

He scarcely heard her. Opening the door, he faced Riply on the steps. Beyond was the Leaming limousine, an old high car, quivering in silhouette against the harvest moon.

Clop-clop-clop! Up the street came the Barton Leigh delivery wagon. Clop-clop! A man jumped out, dumped an iron anchor to the pavement, hurried along the street, turned away, turned back again, came toward them with a long square box in his hand.

“You’ll have to wait a minute,” Basil was calling wildly. “It can’t make any difference. I’ll dress in the library. Look here, if you’re a friend of mine, you’ll wait a minute.” He stepped out on the porch. “Hey, El, I’ve just got my--got to change my clothes. You can wait a minute, can’t you?”

The spark of a cigarette flushed in the darkness as El spoke to the chauffeur; the quivering car came to rest with a sigh and the skies filled suddenly with stars.

Once again the fair--but differing from the fair of the afternoon as a girl in the daytime differs from her radiant presentation of herself at night. The substance of the cardboard booths and plaster palaces was gone, the forms remained. Outlined in lights, these forms suggested things more mysterious and entrancing than themselves, and the people strolling along the network of little Broadways shared this quality, as their pale faces singly and in clusters broke the half darkness.

The boys hurried to their rendezvous, finding the girls in the deep shadow of the Temple of Wheat. Their forms had scarcely merged into a group when Basil became aware that something was wrong. In growing apprehension, he glanced from face to face and, as the introductions were made, he realized the appalling truth--the younger sister was, in point of fact, a fright, squat and dingy, with a bad complexion brooding behind a mask of cheap pink powder and a shapeless mouth that tried ceaselessly to torture itself into the mold of charm.

In a daze he heard Riply’s girl say, “I don’t know whether I ought to go with you. I had a sort of date with another fellow I met this afternoon.”

Fidgeting, she looked up and down the street, while Riply, in astonishment and dismay, tried to take her arm.

“Come on,” he urged. “Didn’t I have a date with you first?”

“But I didn’t know whether you’d come or not,” she said perversely.

Elwood and the two sisters added their entreaties.

“Maybe I could go on the Ferris wheel,” she said grudgingly, “but not the Old Mill. This fellow would be sore.”

Riply’s confidence reeled with the blow; his mouth fell ajar, his hand desperately pawed her arm. Basil stood glancing now with agonized politeness at his own girl, now at the others, with an expression of infinite reproach. Elwood alone was successful and content.

“Let’s go on the Ferris wheel,” he said impatiently. “We can’t stand here all night.”

At the ticket booth the recalcitrant Olive hesitated once more, frowning and glancing about as if she still hoped Riply’s rival would appear.

But when the swooping cars came to rest she let herself be persuaded in, and the three couples, with their troubles, were hoisted slowly into the air.

As the car rose, following the imagined curve of the sky, it occurred to Basil how much he would have enjoyed it in other company, or even alone, the fair twinkling beneath him with new variety, the velvet quality of the darkness that is on the edge of light and is barely permeated by its last attenuations. But he was unable to hurt anyone whom he thought of as an inferior. After a minute he turned to the girl beside him.

“Do you live in St. Paul or Minneapolis?” he inquired formally.

“St. Paul. I go to Number 7 School.” Suddenly she moved closer. “I bet you’re not so slow,” she encouraged him.

He put his arm around her shoulder and found it warm. Again they reached the top of the wheel and the sky stretched out overhead, again they lapsed down through gusts of music from remote calliopes. Keeping his eyes turned carefully away, Basil pressed her to him, and as they rose again into darkness, leaned and kissed her cheek.

The significance of the contact stirred him, but out of the corner of his eye he saw her face--he was thankful when a gong struck below and the machine settled slowly to rest.

The three couples were scarcely reunited outside when Olive uttered a yelp of excitement.

“There he is!” she cried. “That Bill Jones I met this afternoon--that I had the date with.”

A youth of their own age was approaching, stepping like a circus pony and twirling, with the deftness of a drum major, a small rattan cane. Under the cautious alias, the three boys recognized a friend and contemporary--none other than the fascinating Hubert Blair.

He came nearer. He greeted them all with a friendly chuckle. He took off his cap, spun it, dropped it, caught it, set it jauntily on the side of his head.

“You’re a nice one,” he said to Olive. “I waited here fifteen minutes this evening.”

He pretended to belabor her with the cane; she giggled with delight. Hubert Blair possessed the exact tone that all girls of fourteen, and a somewhat cruder type of grown women, find irresistible. He was a gymnastic virtuoso and his figure was in constant graceful motion; he had a jaunty piquant nose, a disarming laugh and a shrewd talent for flattery. When he took a piece of toffee from his pocket, placed it on his forehead, shook it off and caught it in his mouth, it was obvious to any disinterested observer that Riply was destined to see no more of Olive that night.

So fascinated were the group that they failed to see Basil’s eyes brighten with a ray of hope, his feet take four quick steps backward with all the guile of a gentleman burglar, his torso writhe through the parting of a tent wall into the deserted premises of the Harvester and Tractor Show. Once safe, Basil’s tensity relaxed, and as he considered Riply’s unconsciousness of the responsibilities presently to devolve upon him, he bent double with hilarious laughter in the darkness.

Ten minutes later, in a remote part of the fairgrounds, a youth made his way briskly and cautiously toward the fireworks exhibit, swinging as he walked a recently purchased rattan cane. Several girls eyed him with interest, but he passed them haughtily; he was weary of people for a brief moment--a moment which he had almost mislaid in the bustle of life--he was enjoying his long pants.

He bought a bleacher seat and followed the crowd around the race track, seeking his section. A few Union troops were moving cannon about in preparation for the Battle of Gettysburg, and, stopping to watch them, he was hailed by Gladys Van Schellinger from the box behind.

“Oh, Basil, don’t you want to come and sit with us?”

He turned about and was absorbed. Basil exchanged courtesies with Mr. and Mrs. Van Schellinger and he was affably introduced to several other people as “Alice Riley’s boy,” and a chair was placed for him beside Gladys in front.

“Oh, Basil,” she whispered, glowing at him, “isn’t this fun?”

Distinctly, it was. He felt a vast wave of virtue surge through him. How anyone could have preferred the society of those common girls was at this moment incomprehensible.

“Basil, won’t it be fun to go East? Maybe we’ll be on the same train.”

“I can hardly wait,” he agreed gravely. “I’ve got on long pants. I had to have them to go away to school.”

One of the ladies in the box leaned toward him. “I know your mother very well,” she said. “And I know another friend of yours. I’m Riply Buckner’s aunt.”

“Oh, yes!”

“Riply’s such a nice boy,” beamed Mrs. Van Schillinger.

And then, as if the mention of his name had evoked him, Riply Buckner came suddenly into sight. Along the now empty and brightly illuminated race track came a short but monstrous procession, a sort of Lilliputian burlesque of the wild gay life. At its head marched Hubert Blair and Olive, Hubert prancing and twirling his cane like a drum major to the accompaniment of her appreciative screams of laughter. Next followed Elwood Leaming and his young lady, leaning so close together that they walked with difficulty, apparently wrapped in each other’s arms. And bringing up the rear without glory were Riply Buckner and Basil’s late companion, rivaling Olive in exhibitionist sound.

Fascinated, Basil stared at Riply, the expression of whose face was curiously mixed. At moments he would join in the general tone of the parade with silly guffaw, at others a pained expression would flit across his face, as if he doubted that, after all, the evening was a success.

The procession was attracting considerable notice--so much that not even Riply was aware of the particular attention focused upon him from this box, though he passed by it four feet away. He was out of hearing when a curious rustling sigh passed over its inhabitants and a series of discreet whispers began.

“What funny girls,” Gladys said. “Was that first boy Hubert Blair?”

“Yes.” Basil was listening to a fragment of conversation behind:

“His mother will certainly hear of this in the morning.”

As long as Riply had been in sight, Basil had been in an agony of shame for him, but now a new wave of virtue, even stronger than the first, swept over him. His memory of the incident would have reached actual happiness, save for the fact that Riply’s mother might not let him go away to school. And a few minutes later, even that seemed endurable. Yet Basil was not a mean boy. The natural cruelty of his species toward the doomed was not yet disguised by hypocrisy--that was all.

In a burst of glory, to the alternate strains of Dixie and The Star-Spangled Banner, the Battle of Gettysburg ended. Outside by the waiting cars, Basil, on a sudden impulse, went up to Riply’s aunt.

“I think it would be sort of a--a mistake to tell Riply’s mother. He didn’t do any harm. He--”

Annoyed by the event of the evening, she turned on him cool, patronizing eyes.

“I shall do as I think best,” she said briefly.

He frowned. Then he turned and got into the Van Schellinger limousine.

Sitting beside Gladys in the little seats, he loved her suddenly. His hand swung gently against hers from time to time and he felt the warm bond that they were both going away to school tightened around them and pulling them together.

“Can’t you come and see me tomorrow?” she urged him. “Mother’s going to be away and she says I can have anybody I like.”

“All right.”

As the car slowed up for Basil’s house, she leaned toward him swiftly. “Basil--”

He waited. Her breath was warm on his cheek. He wanted her to hurry, or, when the engine stopped, her parents, dozing in back, might hear what she said. She seemed beautiful to him then; that vague unexciting quality about her was more than compensated for by her exquisite delicacy, the fine luxury of her life.

“Basil--Basil, when you come tomorrow, will you bring that Hubert Blair?”

The chauffeur opened the door and Mr. and Mrs. Van Schellinger woke up with a start. When the car had driven off, Basil stood looking after it thoughtfully until it turned the corner of the street.

AFTERNOON OF AN AUTHOR

Esquire (August 1936)

When he woke up he felt better than he had for many weeks, a fact that became plain to him negatively--he did not feel ill. He leaned for a moment against the door frame between his bedroom and bath till he could be sure he was not dizzy. Not a bit, not even when he stooped for a slipper under the bed.

It was a bright April morning, he had no idea what time because his clock was long unwound but as he went back through the apartment to the kitchen he saw that his daughter had breakfasted and departed and that the mail was in, so it was after nine.

“I think I’ll go out today,” he said to the maid.

“Do you good--it’s a lovely day.” She was from New Orleans, with the features and coloring of an Arab.

“I want two eggs like yesterday and toast, orange juice and tea.”

He lingered for a moment in his daughter’s end of the apartment and read his mail. It was an annoying mail with nothing cheerful in it--mostly bills and advertisements with the diurnal Oklahoma school boy and his gaping autograph album. Sam Goldwyn might do a ballet picture with Spessiwitza and might not--it would all have to wait till Mr. Goldwyn got back from Europe when he might have half a dozen new ideas. Paramount wanted a release on a poem that had appeared in one of the author’s books, as they didn’t know whether it was an original or quoted. Maybe they were going to get a title from it. Anyhow he had no more equity in that property--he had sold the silent rights many years ago and the sound rights last year.

“Never any luck with movies,” he said to himself. “Stick to your last, boy.”

He looked out the window during breakfast at the students changing classes on the college campus across the way.

“Twenty years ago I was changing classes,” he said to the maid. She laughed her débutante’s laugh.

“I’ll need a check,” she said, “if you’re going out.”

“Oh, I’m not going out yet. I’ve got two or three hours’ work. I meant late this afternoon.”

“Going for a drive?”

“I wouldn’t drive that old junk--I’d sell it for fifty dollars. I’m going on the top of a bus.”

After breakfast he lay down for fifteen minutes. Then he went into the study and began to work.

The problem was a magazine story that had become so thin in the middle that it was about to blow away. The plot was like climbing endless stairs, he had no element of surprise in reserve, and the characters who started so bravely day-before-yesterday couldn’t have qualified for a newspaper serial.

“Yes, I certainly need to get out,” he thought. “I’d like to drive down the Shenandoah Valley, or go to Norfolk on the boat.”

But both of these ideas were impractical--they took time and energy and he had not much of either--what there was must be conserved for work. He went through the manuscript underlining good phrases in red crayon and after tucking these into a file slowly tore up the rest of the story and dropped it in the waste-basket. Then he walked the room and smoked, occasionally talking to himself.

“Wee-l, let’s see--”

“Nau-ow, the next thing--would be--”

“Now let’s see, now--”

After awhile he sat down thinking:

“I’m just stale--I shouldn’t have touched a pencil for two days.”

He looked through the heading “Story Ideas” in his notebook until the maid came to tell him his secretary was on the phone--part time secretary since he had been ill.

“Not a thing,” he said. “I just tore up everything I’d written. It wasn’t worth a damn. I’m going out this afternoon.”

“Good for you. It’s a fine day.”

“Better come up tomorrow afternoon--there’s a lot of mail and bills.”

He shaved, and then as a precaution rested five minutes before he dressed. It was exciting to be going out--he hoped the elevator boys wouldn’t say they were glad to see him up and he decided to go down the back elevator where they did not know him. He put on his best suit with the coat and trousers that didn’t match. He had bought only two suits in six years but they were the very best suits--the coat alone of this one had cost a hundred and ten dollars. As he must have a destination--it wasn’t good to go places without a destination--he put a tube of shampoo ointment in his pocket for his barber to use, and also a small phial of luminol.

“The perfect neurotic,” he said, regarding himself in the mirror. “By-product of an idea, slag of a dream.”

II

He went into the kitchen and said good-by to the maid as if he were going to Little America. Once in the war he had commandeered an engine on sheer bluff and had it driven from New York to Washington to keep from being A.W.O.L. Now he stood carefully on the street corner waiting for the light to change, while young people hurried past him with a fine disregard for traffic. On the bus corner under the trees it was green and cool and he thought of Stonewall Jackson’s last words: “Let us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees.” Those Civil War leaders seemed to have realized very suddenly how tired they were--Lee shriveling into another man, Grant with his desperate memoir-writing at the end.

The bus was all he expected--only one other man on the roof and the green branches ticking against each window through whole blocks. They would probably have to trim those branches and it seemed a pity. There was so much to look at--he tried to define the color of one line of houses and could only think of an old opera cloak of his mother’s that was full of tints and yet was of no tint--a mere reflector of light. Somewhere church bells were playing “Venite Adoremus” and he wondered why, because Christmas was eight months off. He didn’t like bells but it had been very moving when they played “Maryland, My Maryland” at the governor’s funeral.

On the college football field men were working with rollers and a title occurred to him: “Turf-keeper” or else “The Grass Grows,” something about a man working on turf for years and bringing up his son to go to college and play football there. Then the son dying in youth and the man’s going to work in the cemetery and putting turf over his son instead of under his feet. It would be the kind of piece that is often placed in anthologies, but not his sort of thing--it was sheer swollen antithesis, as formalized as a popular magazine story and easier to write. Many people, however, would consider it excellent because it was melancholy, had digging in it and was simple to understand.

The bus went past a pale Athenian railroad station brought to life by the blue shirted redcaps out in front. The street narrowed as the business section began and there were suddenly brightly dressed girls, all very beautiful--he thought he had never seen such beautiful girls. There were men too but they all looked rather silly, like himself in the mirror, and there were old undecorative women, and presently, too, there were plain and unpleasant faces among the girls; but in general they were lovely, dressed in real colors all the way from six to thirty, no plans or struggles in their faces, only a state of sweet suspension, provocative and serene. He loved life terribly for a minute, not wanting to give it up at all. He thought perhaps he had made a mistake in coming out so soon.

He got off the bus, holding carefully to all the railings and walked a block to the hotel barbershop. He passed a sporting goods store and looked in the window unmoved except by a first baseman’s glove which was already dark in the pocket. Next to that was a haberdasher’s and here he stood for quite a while looking at the deep shade of shirts and the ones of checker and plaid. Ten years ago on the summer Riviera the author and some others had bought dark blue workmen’s shirts, and probably that had started that style. The checkered shirts were nice looking, bright as uniforms and he wished he were twenty and going to a beach club all dolled up like a Turner sunset or Guido Reni’s dawn.

The barbershop was large, shining and scented--it had been several months since the author had come downtown on such a mission and he found that his familiar barber was laid up with arthritis; however, he explained to another man how to use the ointment, refused a newspaper and sat, rather happy and sensually content at the strong fingers on his scalp, while a pleasant mingled memory of all the barbershops he had ever known flowed through his mind.

Once he had written a story about a barber. Back in 1929 the proprietor of his favorite shop in the city where he was then living had made a fortune of $300,000 on tips from a local industrialist and was about to retire. The author had no stake in the market, in fact, was about to sail for Europe for a few years with such accumulation as he had, and that autumn hearing how the barber had lost all his fortune he was prompted to write a story, thoroughly disguised in every way yet hinging on the fact of a barber rising in the world and then tumbling; he heard, nevertheless, that the story had been identified in the city and caused some hard feelings.

The shampoo ended. When he came out into the hall an orchestra had started to play in the cocktail room across the way and he stood for a moment in the door listening. So long since he had danced, perhaps two evenings in five years, yet a review of his last book had mentioned him as being fond of night clubs; the same review had also spoken of him as being indefatigable. Something in the sound of the word in his mind broke him momentarily and feeling tears of weakness behind his eyes he turned away. It was like in the beginning fifteen years ago when they said he had “fatal facility,” and he labored like a slave over every sentence so as not to be like that.

“I’m getting bitter again,” he said to himself. “That’s no good, no good--I’ve got to go home.”

The bus was a long time coming but he didn’t like taxis and he still hoped that something would occur to him on that upper-deck passing through the green leaves of the boulevard. When it came finally he had some trouble climbing the steps but it was worth it for the first thing he saw was a pair of high school kids, a boy and a girl, sitting without any self-consciousness on the high pedestal of the Lafayette statue, their attention fast upon each other. Their isolation moved him and he knew he would get something out of it professionally, if only in contrast to the growing seclusion of his life and the increasing necessity of picking over an already well-picked past. He needed reforestation and he was well aware of it, and he hoped the soil would stand one more growth. It had never been the very best soil for he had had an early weakness for showing off instead of listening and observing.

Here was the apartment house--he glanced up at his own windows on the top floor before he went in.

“The residence of the successful writer,” he said to himself. “I wonder what marvelous books he’s tearing off up there. It must be great to have a gift like that--just sit down with pencil and paper. Work when you want--go where you please.”

His child wasn’t home yet but the maid came out of the kitchen and said:

“Did you have a nice time?”

“Perfect,” he said. “I went roller skating and bowled and played around with Man Mountain Dean and finished up in a Turkish Bath. Any telegrams?”

“Not a thing.”

“Bring me a glass of milk, will you?”

He went through the dining room and turned into his study, struck blind for a moment with the glow of his two thousand books in the late sunshine. He was quite tired--he would lie down for ten minutes and then see if he could get started on an idea in the two hours before dinner.

AN ALCOHOLIC CASE

Esquire (February 1937)

CHAPTER I

‘Let--go--that--Oh-h-h! Please, now, will you? Don’t start drinking again! Come on--give me the bottle. I told you I’d stay awake givin’ it to you. Come on. If you do like that a-way--then what are you going to be like when you go home. Come on--leave it with me--I’ll leave half in the bottle. Pul-lease. You know what Dr Carter says--I’ll stay awake and give it to you, or else fix some of it in the bottle--come on--like I told you, I’m too tired to be fightin’ you all night. . . . All right, drink your fool self to death.’

‘Would you like some beer?’ he asked.

‘No, I don’t want any beer. Oh, to think that I have to look at you drunk again. My God!’

‘Then I’ll drink the Coca Cola.’

The girl sat down panting on the bed.

‘Don’t you believe in anything?’ she demanded.

‘Nothing you believe in--please--it’ll spill.’

She had no business there, she thought, no business trying to help him. Again they struggled, but after this time he sat with his head in his hands awhile, before he turned around once more.

‘Once more you try to get it I’ll throw it down,’ she said quickly. ‘I will--on the tiles in the bathroom.’

‘Then I’ll step on the broken glass--or you’ll step on it.’

‘Then let go--oh you promised--’

Suddenly she dropped it like a torpedo, sliding underneath her hand and slithering with a flash of red and black and the words: SIR GALAHAD, DISTILLED LOUISVILLE GIN. He took it by the neck and tossed it through the open door to the bathroom.

It was on the floor in pieces and everything was silent for a while and she read Gone With the Wind about things so lovely that had happened long ago. She began to worry that he would have to go into the bathroom and might cut his feet, and looked up from time to time to see if he would go in. She was very sleepy--the last time she looked up he was crying and he looked like an old Jewish man she had nursed once in California; he had had to go to the bathroom many times. On this case she was unhappy all the time but she thought:

‘I guess if I hadn’t liked him I wouldn’t have stayed on the case.’

With a sudden resurgence of conscience she got up and put a chair in front of the bathroom door. She had wanted to sleep because he had got her up early that morning to get a paper with the story of the Yale-Dartmouth game in it and she hadn’t been home all day. That afternoon a relative of his had come to see him and she had waited outside in the hall where there was a draught with no sweater to put over her uniform.

As well as she could she arranged him for sleeping, put a robe over his shoulders as he sat slumped over his writing table, and one on his knees. She sat down in the rocker but she was no longer sleepy; there was plenty to enter on the chart and treading lightly about she found a pencil and put it down:

Pulse 120

Respiration 25

Temp. 98--98.4--98.2

Remarks--

--She could make so many:

Tried to get bottle of gin. Threw it away and broke it.

She corrected it to read:

In the struggle it dropped and was broken. Patient was generally difficult.

She started to add as part of her report: I never want to go on an alcoholic case again, but that wasn’t in the picture. She knew she could wake herself at seven and clean up everything before his niece awakened. It was all part of the game. But when she sat down in the chair she looked at his face, white and exhausted, and counted his breathing again, wondering why it had all happened. He had been so nice today, drawn her a whole strip of his cartoon just for fun and given it to her. She was going to have it framed and hang it in her room. She felt again his thin wrists wrestling against her wrist and remembered the awful things he had said, and she thought too of what the doctor had said to him yesterday:

‘You’re too good a man to do this to yourself.’

She was tired and didn’t want to clean up the glass on the bathroom floor, because as soon as he breathed evenly she wanted to get him over to the bed. But she decided finally to clean up the glass first; on her knees, searching a last piece of it, she thought:

--This isn’t what I ought to be doing. And this isn’t what he ought to be doing.

Resentfully she stood up and regarded him. Through the thin delicate profile of his nose came a light snore, sighing, remote, inconsolable. The doctor had shaken his head in a certain way, and she knew that really it was a case that was beyond her. Besides, on her card at the agency was written, on the advice of her elders, ‘No Alcoholics’.

She had done her whole duty, but all she could think of was that when she was struggling about the room with him with that gin bottle there had been a pause when he asked her if she had hurt her elbow against a door and that she had answered: ‘You don’t know how people talk about you, no matter how you think of yourself--’ when she knew he had a long time ceased to care about such things.

The glass was all collected--as she got out a broom to make sure, she realized that the glass, in its fragments, was less than a window through which they had seen each other for a moment. He did not know about her sister, and Bill Markoe whom she had almost married, and she did not know what had brought him to this pitch, when there was a picture on his bureau of his young wife and his two sons and him, all trim and handsome as he must have been five years ago. It was so utterly senseless--as she put a bandage on her finger where she had cut it while picking up the glass she made up her mind she would never take an alcoholic case again.

CHAPTER II

It was early the next evening. Some Halloween jokester had split the side windows of the bus and she shifted back to the Negro section in the rear for fear the glass might fall out. She had her patient’s cheque but no way to cash it at this hour; there was a quarter and a penny in her purse.

Two nurses she knew were waiting in the hall of Mrs Hixson’s Agency.

‘What kind of case have you been on?’

‘Alcoholic,’ she said.

‘Oh, yes--Gretta Hawks told me about it--you were on with that cartoonist who lives at the Forest Park Inn.’

‘Yes, I was.’

‘I hear he’s pretty fresh.’

‘He’s never done anything to bother me,’ she lied. ‘You can’t treat them as if they were committed--’

‘Oh, don’t get bothered--I just heard that around town--oh, you know--they want you to play around with them--’

‘Oh, be quiet,’ she said, surprised at her own rising resentment.

In a moment Mrs Hixson came out and, asking the other two to wait, signalled her into the office.

‘I don’t like to put young girls on such cases,’ she began. ‘I got your call from the hotel.’

‘Oh, it wasn’t bad, Mrs Hixson. He didn’t know what he was doing and he didn’t hurt me in any way. I was thinking much more of my reputation with you. He was really nice all day yesterday. He drew me--’

‘I didn’t want to send you on that case.’ Mrs Hixson thumbed through the registration cards. ‘You take T.B. cases, don’t you? Yes, I see you do. Now here’s one--’

The phone rang in a continuous chime. The nurse listened as Mrs Hixson’s voice said precisely:

‘I will do what I can--that is simply up to the doctor . . . That is beyond my jurisdiction . . . Oh, hello, Hattie, no, I can’t now. Look, have you got any nurse that’s good with alcoholics? There’s somebody up at the Forest Park Inn who needs somebody. Call back will you?’

She put down the receiver. ‘Suppose you wait outside. What sort of man is this, anyhow? Did he act indecently?’

‘He held my hand away,’ she said, ‘so I couldn’t give him an injection.’

‘Oh, an invalid he-man,’ Mrs Hixson grumbled. ‘They belong in sanatoria. I’ve got a case coming along in two minutes that you can get a little rest on. It’s an old woman--’

The phone rang again. ‘Oh, hello, Hattie. . . . Well, how about that big Svensen girl? She ought to be able to take care of any alcoholic. . . . How about Josephine Markham? Doesn’t she live in your apartment house? . . . Get her to the phone.’ Then after a moment, ‘Joe, would you care to take the case of a well-known cartoonist, or artist, whatever they call themselves, at Forest Park Inn? . . . No, I don’t know, but Dr Carter is in charge and will be around about ten o’clock.’

There was a long pause; from time to time Mrs Hixson spoke:

‘I see . . . Of course, I understand your point of view. Yes, but this isn’t supposed to be dangerous--just a little difficult. I never like to send girls to a hotel because I know what riff-raff you’re liable to run into. . . . No, I’ll find somebody. Even at this hour. Never mind and thanks. Tell Hattie I hope that the hat matches the négligé. . . .’

Mrs Hixson hung up the receiver and made notations on the pad before her. She was a very efficient woman. She had been a nurse and had gone through the worst of it, had been a proud, idealistic, overworked probationer, suffered the abuse of smart internees and the insolence of her first patients, who thought that she was something to be taken into camp immediately for premature commitment to the service of old age. She swung around suddenly from the desk.

‘What kind of cases do you want? I told you I have a nice old woman--’

The nurse’s brown eyes were alight with a mixture of thoughts--the movie she had just seen about Pasteur and the book they had all read about Florence Nightingale when they were student nurses. And their pride, swinging across the streets in the cold weather at Philadelphia General, as proud of their new capes as débutantes in their furs going into balls at the hotels.

‘I--I think I would like to try the case again,’ she said amid a cacophony of telephone bells. ‘I’d just as soon go back if you can’t find anybody else.’

‘But one minute you say you’ll never go on an alcoholic case again and the next minute you say you want to go back to one.’

‘I think I overestimated how difficult it was. Really, I think I could help him.’

‘That’s up to you. But if he tried to grab your wrists.’

‘But he couldn’t,’ the nurse said. ‘Look at my wrists: I played basketball at Waynesboro High for two years. I’m quite able to take care of him.’

Mrs Hixson looked at her for a long minute. ‘Well, all right,’ she said. ‘But just remember that nothing they say when they’re drunk is what they mean when they’re sober--I’ve been all through that; arrange with one of the servants that you can call on him, because you never can tell--some alcoholics are pleasant and some of them are not, but all of them can be rotten.’

‘I’ll remember,’ the nurse said.

It was an oddly clear night when she went out, with slanting particles of thin sleet making white of a blue-black sky. The bus was the same that had taken her into town, but there seemed to be more windows broken now and the bus driver was irritated and talked about what terrible things he would do if he caught any kids. She knew he was just talking about the annoyance in general, just as she had been thinking about the annoyance of an alcoholic. When she came up to the suite and found him all helpless and distraught she would despise him and be sorry for him.

Getting off the bus, she went down the long steps to the hotel, feeling a little exalted by the chill in the air. She was going to take care of him because nobody else would, and because the best people of her profession had been interested in taking care of the cases that nobody else wanted.

She knocked at his study door, knowing just what she was going to say.

He answered it himself. He was in dinner clothes even to a derby hat--but minus his studs and tie.

‘Oh, hello,’ he said casually. ‘Glad you’re back. I woke up a while ago and decided I’d go out. Did you get a night nurse?’

‘I’m the night nurse too,’ she said. ‘I decided to stay on twenty-four-hour duty.’

He broke into a genial, indifferent smile.

‘I saw you were gone, but something told me you’d come back. Please find my studs. They ought to be either in a little tortoiseshell box or--’

He shook himself a little more into his clothes, and hoisted the cuffs up inside his coat sleeves.

‘I thought you had quit me,’ he said casually.

‘I thought I had, too.’

‘If you look on that table,’ he said, ‘you’ll find a whole strip of cartoons that I drew you.’

‘Who are you going to see?’ she asked.

‘It’s the President’s secretary,’ he said. ‘I had an awful time trying to get ready. I was about to give up when you came in. Will you order me some sherry?’

‘One glass,’ she agreed wearily.

From the bathroom he called presently:

‘Oh, Nurse, Nurse, Light of my Life, where is another stud?’

‘I’ll put it in.’

In the bathroom she saw the pallor and the fever on his face and smelled the mixed peppermint and gin on his breath.

‘You’ll come up soon?’ she asked. ‘Dr Carter’s coming at ten.’

‘What nonsense! You’re coming down with me.’

‘Me?’ she exclaimed. ‘In a sweater and skirt? Imagine!’

‘Then I won’t go.’

‘All right then, go to bed. That’s where you belong anyhow. Can’t you see these people tomorrow?’

‘No, of course not!’

She went behind him and reaching over his shoulder tied his tie--his shirt was already thumbed out of press where he had put in the studs, and she suggested:

‘Won’t you put on another one, if you’ve got to meet some people you like?’

‘All right, but I want to do it myself.’

‘Why can’t you let me help you?’ she demanded in exasperation. ‘Why can’t you let me help you with your clothes? What’s a nurse for--what good am I doing?’

He sat down suddenly on the toilet seat.

‘All right--go on.’

‘Now don’t grab my wrist,’ she said, and then, ‘Excuse me.’

‘Don’t worry. It didn’t hurt. You’ll see in a minute.’

She had the coat, vest, and stiff shirt off him but before she could pull his undershirt over his head he dragged at his cigarette, delaying her.

‘Now watch this,’ he said. ‘One--two--three.’

She pulled up the undershirt; simultaneously he thrust the crimson-grey point of the cigarette like a dagger against his heart. It crushed out against a copper plate on his left rib about the size of a silver dollar, and he said ‘Ouch!’ as a stray spark fluttered down against his stomach.

Now was the time to be hard-boiled, she thought. She knew there were three medals from the war in his jewel box, but she had risked many things herself: tuberculosis among them and one time something worse, though she had not known it and had never quite forgiven the doctor for not telling her.

‘You’ve had a hard time with that, I guess,’ she said lightly as she sponged him. ‘Won’t it ever heal?’

‘Never. That’s a copper plate.’

‘Well, it’s no excuse for what you’re doing to yourself.’

He bent his great brown eyes on her, shrewd--aloof, confused. He signalled to her, in one second, his Will to Die, and for all her training and experience she knew she could never do anything constructive with him. He stood up, steadying himself on the wash-basin and fixing his eyes on some place just ahead.

‘Now, if I’m going to stay here you’re not going to get at that liquor,’ she said.

Suddenly she knew he wasn’t looking for that. He was looking at the corner where he had thrown the bottle the night before. She stared at his handsome face, weak and defiant--afraid to turn even half-way because she knew that death was in that corner where he was looking. She knew death--she had heard it, smelt its unmistakable odour, but she had never seen it before it entered into anyone, and she knew this man saw it in the corner of his bathroom; that it was standing there looking at him while he spat from a feeble cough and rubbed the result into the braid of his trousers. It shone there crackling for a moment as evidence of the last gesture he ever made.

She tried to express it next day to Mrs Hixson:

‘It’s not like anything you can beat--no matter how hard you try. This one could have twisted my wrists until he strained them and that wouldn’t matter so much to me. It’s just that you can’t really help them and it’s so discouraging--it’s all for nothing.’

AT YOUR AGE

Saturday Evening Post (17 August 1929)

Tom Squires came into the drug store to buy a toothbrush, a can of talcum, a gargle, Castile soap, Epsom salts and a box of cigars. Having lived alone for many years, he was methodical, and while waiting to be served he held the list in his hand. It was Christmas week and Minneapolis was under two feet of exhilarating, constantly refreshed snow; with his cane Tom knocked two clean crusts of it from his overshoes. Then, looking up, he saw the blonde girl.

She was a rare blonde, even in that Promised Land of Scandinavians, where pretty blondes are not rare. There was warm color in her cheeks, lips and pink little hands that folded powders into papers; her hair, in long braids twisted about her head, was shining and alive. She seemed to Tom suddenly the cleanest person he knew of, and he caught his breath as he stepped forward and looked into her gray eyes.

“A can of talcum.”

“What kind?”

“Any kind. . . . That’s fine.”

She looked back at him apparently without self-consciousness, and, as the list melted away, his heart raced with it wildly.

“I am not old,” he wanted to say. “At fifty I’m younger than most men of forty. Don’t I interest you at all?”

But she only said “What kind of gargle?”

And he answered, “What can you recommend? . . . That’s fine.”

Almost painfully he took his eyes from her, went out and got into his coupé.

“If that young idiot only knew what an old imbecile like me could do for her,” he thought humorously--”what worlds I could open out to her!”

As he drove away into the winter twilight he followed this train of thought to a totally unprecedented conclusion. Perhaps the time of day was the responsible stimulant, for the shop windows glowing into the cold, the tinkling bells of a delivery sleigh, the white gloss left by shovels on the sidewalks, the enormous distance of the stars, brought back the feel of other nights thirty years ago. For an instant the girls he had known then slipped like phantoms out of their dull matronly selves of today and fluttered past him with frosty, seductive laughter, until a pleasant shiver crawled up his spine.

“Youth! Youth! Youth!” he apostrophized with conscious lack of originality, and, as a somewhat ruthless and domineering man of no morals whatsoever, he considered going back to the drug store to seek the blonde girl’s address. It was not his sort of thing, so the half-formed intention passed; the idea remained.

“Youth, by heaven--youth!” he repeated under his breath. “I want it near me, all around me, just once more before I’m too old to care.”

He was tall, lean and handsome, with the ruddy, bronzed face of a sportsman and a just faintly graying mustache. Once he had been among the city’s best beaus, organizer of cotillions and charity balls, popular with men and women, and with several generations of them. After the war he had suddenly felt poor, gone into business, and in ten years accumulated nearly a million dollars. Tom Squires was not introspective, but he perceived now that the wheel of his life had revolved again, bringing up forgotten, yet familiar, dreams and yearnings. Entering his house, he turned suddenly to a pile of disregarded invitations to see whether or not he had been bidden to a dance tonight.

Throughout his dinner, which he ate alone at the Downtown Club, his eyes were half closed and on his face was a faint smile. He was practicing so that he would be able to laugh at himself painlessly, if necessary.

“I don’t even know what they talk about,” he admitted. “They pet--prominent broker goes to petting party with débutante. What is a petting party? Do they serve refreshments? Will I have to learn to play a saxophone?”

These matters, lately as remote as China in a news reel, came alive to him. They were serious questions. At ten o’clock he walked up the steps of the College Club to a private dance with the same sense of entering a new world as when he had gone into a training camp back in ‘17. He spoke to a hostess of his generation and to her daughter, overwhelmingly of another, and sat down in a corner to acclimate himself.

He was not alone long. A silly young man named Leland Jaques, who lived across the street from Tom, remarked him kindly and came over to brighten his life. He was such an exceedingly fatuous young man that, for a moment, Tom was annoyed, but he perceived craftily that he might be of service.

“Hello, Mr. Squires. How are you, sir?”

“Fine, thanks, Leland. Quite a dance.”

As one man of the world with another, Mr. Jaques sat, or lay, down on the couch and lit--or so it seemed to Tom--three or four cigarettes at once.

“You should of been here last night, Mr. Squires. Oh, boy, that was a party and a half! The Caulkins. Hap-past five!”

“Who’s that girl who changes partners every minute?” Tom asked. . . . “No, the one in white passing the door.”

“That’s Annie Lorry.”

“Arthur Lorry’s daughter?”

“Yes.”

“She seems popular.”

“About the most popular girl in town--anyway, at a dance.”

“Not popular except at dances?”

“Oh, sure, but she hangs around with Randy Cambell all the time.”

“What Cambell?”

“D. B.”

There were new names in town in the last decade.

“It’s a boy-and-girl affair.” Pleased with this phrase, Jaques tried to repeat it: “One of those boy-and-girls affair--boys-and-girl affairs--” He gave it up and lit several more cigarettes, crushing out the first series on Tom’s lap.

“Does she drink?”

“Not especially. At least I never saw her passed out. . . . That’s Randy Cambell just cut in on her now.”

They were a nice couple. Her beauty sparkled bright against his strong, tall form, and they floated hoveringly, delicately, like two people in a nice, amusing dream. They came near and Tom admired the faint dust of powder over her freshness, the guarded sweetness of her smile, the fragility of her body calculated by Nature to a millimeter to suggest a bud, yet guarantee a flower. Her innocent, passionate eyes were brown, perhaps; but almost violet in the silver light.

“Is she out this year?”

“Who?”

“Miss Lorry.”

“Yes.”

Although the girl’s loveliness interested Tom, he was unable to picture himself as one of the attentive, grateful queue that pursued her around the room. Better meet her when the holidays were over and most of these young men were back in college “where they belonged.” Tom Squires was old enough to wait.

He waited a fortnight while the city sank into the endless northern midwinter, where gray skies were friendlier than metallic blue skies, and dusk, whose lights were a reassuring glimpse into the continuity of human cheer, was warmer than the afternoons of bloodless sunshine. The coat of snow lost its press and became soiled and shabby, and ruts froze in the street; some of the big houses on Crest Avenue began to close as their occupants went South. In those cold days Tom asked Annie and her parents to go as his guests to the last Bachelors’ Ball.

The Lorrys were an old family in Minneapolis, grown a little harassed and poor since the war. Mrs. Lorry, a contemporary of Tom’s, was not surprised that he should send mother and daughter orchids and dine them luxuriously in his apartment on fresh caviar, quail and champagne. Annie saw him only dimly--he lacked vividness, as the old do for the young--but she perceived his interest in her and performed for him the traditional ritual of young beauty--smiles, polite, wide-eyed attention, a profile held obligingly in this light or in that. At the ball he danced with her twice, and, though she was teased about it, she was flattered that such a man of the world--he had become that instead of a mere old man--had singled her out. She accepted his invitation to the symphony the following week, with the idea that it would be uncouth to refuse.

There were several “nice invitations” like that. Sitting beside him, she dozed in the warm shadow of Brahms and thought of Randy Cambell and other romantic nebulosities who might appear tomorrow. Feeling casually mellow one afternoon, she deliberately provoked Tom to kiss her on the way home, but she wanted to laugh when he took her hands and told her fervently he was falling in love.

“But how could you?” she protested. “Really, you musn’t say such crazy things. I won’t go out with you any more, and then you’ll be sorry.”

A few days later her mother spoke to her as Tom waited outside in his car:

“Who’s that, Annie?”

“Mr. Squires.”

“Shut the door a minute. You’re seeing him quite a bit.”

“Why not?”

“Well, dear, he’s fifty years old.”

“But, mother, there’s hardly anybody else in town.”

“But you musn’t get any silly ideas about him.”

“Don’t worry. Actually, he bores me to extinction most of the time.” She came to a sudden decision: “I’m not going to see him any more. I just couldn’t get out of going with him this afternoon.”

And that night, as she stood by her door in the circle of Randy Cambell’s arm, Tom and his single kiss had no existence for her.

“Oh, I do love you so,” Randy whispered. “Kiss me once more.”

Their cool cheeks and warm lips met in the crisp darkness, and, watching the icy moon over his shoulder, Annie knew that she was his surely and, pulling his face down, kissed him again, trembling with emotion.

“When’ll you marry me then?” he whispered.

“When can you--we afford it?”

“Couldn’t you announce our engagement? If you knew the misery of having you out with somebody else and then making love to you.”

“Oh, Randy, you ask so much.”

“It’s so awful to say good night. Can’t I come in for a minute?”

“Yes.”

Sitting close together in a trance before the flickering, lessening fire, they were oblivious that their common fate was being coolly weighed by a man of fifty who lay in a hot bath some blocks away.

II

Tom Squires had guessed from Annie’s extremely kind and detached manner of the afternoon that he had failed to interest her. He had promised himself that in such an eventuality he would drop the matter, but now he found himself in no such humor. He did not want to marry her; he simply wanted to see her and be with her a little; and up to the moment of her sweetly casual, half passionate, yet wholly unemotional kiss, giving her up would have been easy, for he was past the romantic age; but since that kiss the thought of her made his heart move up a few inches in his chest and beat there steady and fast.

“But this is the time to get out,” he said to himself. “My age; no possible right to force myself into her life.”

He rubbed himself dry, brushed his hair before the mirror, and, as he laid down the comb, said decisively: “That is that.” And after reading for an hour he turned out the lamp with a snap and repeated aloud: “That is that.”

In other words, that was not that at all, and the click of material things did not finish off Annie Lorry as a business decision might be settled by the tap of a pencil on the table.

“I’m going to carry this matter a little further,” he said to himself about half-past four; on that acknowledgment he turned over and found sleep.

In the morning she had receded somewhat, but by four o’clock in the afternoon she was all around him--the phone was for calling her, a woman’s footfalls passing his office were her footfalls, the snow outside the window was blowing, perhaps, against her rosy face.

“There is always the little plan I thought of last night,” he said to himself. “In ten years I’ll be sixty, and then no youth, no beauty for me ever any more.”

In a sort of panic he took a sheet of note paper and composed a carefully phrased letter to Annie’s mother, asking permission to pay court to her daughter. He took it himself into the hall, but before the letter slide he tore it up and dropped the pieces in a cuspidor.

“I couldn’t do such an underhand trick,” he told himself, “at my age.” But this self-congratulation was premature, for he rewrote the letter and mailed it before he left his office that night.

Next day the reply he had counted on arrived--he could have guessed its very words in advance. It was a curt and indignant refusal.

It ended:

I think it best that you and my daughter meet no more.

Very Sincerely Yours,         MABEL TOLLMAN LORRY.    ”And now,” Tom thought coolly, “we’ll see what the girl says to that.” He wrote a note to Annie. Her mother’s letter had surprised him, it said, but perhaps it was best that they should meet no more, in view of her mother’s attitude.

By return post came Annie’s defiant answer to her mother’s fiat: “This isn’t the Dark Ages. I’ll see you whenever I like.” She named a rendezvous for the following afternoon. Her mother’s short-sightedness brought about what he had failed to achieve directly; for where Annie had been on the point of dropping him, she was now determined to do nothing of the sort. And the secrecy engendered by disapproval at home simply contributed the missing excitement. As February hardened into deep, solemn, interminable winter, she met him frequently and on a new basis. Sometimes they drove over to St. Paul to see a picture or to have dinner; sometimes they parked far out on a boulevard in his coupé, while the bitter sleet glazed the windshield to opacity and furred his lamps with ermine. Often he brought along something special to drink--enough to make her gay, but, carefully, never more; for mingled with his other emotions about her was something paternally concerned.

Laying his cards on the table, he told her that it was her mother who had unwittingly pushed her toward him, but Annie only laughed at his duplicity.

She was having a better time with him than with anyone else she had ever known. In place of the selfish exigency of a younger man, he showed her a never-failing consideration. What if his eyes were tired, his cheeks a little leathery and veined, if his will was masculine and strong. Moreover, his experience was a window looking out upon a wider, richer world; and with Randy Cambell next day she would feel less taken care of, less valued, less rare.

It was Tom now who was vaguely discontented. He had what he wanted--her youth at his side--and he felt that anything further would be a mistake. His liberty was precious to him and he could offer her only a dozen years before he would be old, but she had become something precious to him and he perceived that drifting wasn’t fair. Then one day late in February the matter was decided out of hand.

They had ridden home from St. Paul and dropped into the College Club for tea, breaking together through the drifts that masked the walk and rimmed the door. It was a revolving door; a young man came around in it, and stepping into his space, they smelt onions and whisky. The door revolved again after them, and he was back within, facing them. It was Randy Cambell; his face was flushed, his eyes dull and hard.

“Hello, beautiful,” he said, approaching Annie.

“Don’t come so close,” she protested lightly. “You smell of onions.”

“You’re particular all of a sudden.”

“Always. I’m always particular.” Annie made a slight movement back toward Tom.

“Not always,” said Randy unpleasantly. Then, with increased emphasis and a fractional glance at Tom: “Not always.” With his remark he seemed to join the hostile world outside. “And I’ll just give you a tip,” he continued: “Your mother’s inside.”

The jealous ill-temper of another generation reached Tom only faintly, like the protest of a child, but at this impertinent warning he bristled with annoyance.

“Come on, Annie,” he said brusquely. “We’ll go in.”

With her glance uneasily averted from Randy, Annie followed Tom into the big room.

It was sparsely populated; three middle-aged women sat near the fire. Momentarily Annie drew back, then she walked toward them.

“Hello, mother . . . Mrs. Trumble . . . Aunt Caroline.”

The two latter responded; Mrs. Trumble even nodded faintly at Tom. But Annie’s mother got to her feet without a word, her eyes frozen, her mouth drawn. For a moment she stood staring at her daughter; then she turned abruptly and left the room.

Tom and Annie found a table across the room.

“Wasn’t she terrible?” said Annie, breathing aloud. He didn’t answer.

“For three days she hasn’t spoken to me.” Suddenly she broke out: “Oh, people can be so small! I was going to sing the leading part in the Junior League show, and yesterday Cousin Mary Betts, the president, came to me and said I couldn’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because a representative Junior League girl mustn’t defy her mother. As if I were a naughty child!”

Tom stared on at a row of cups on the mantelpiece--two or three of them bore his name. “Perhaps she was right,” he said suddenly. “When I begin to do harm to you it’s time to stop.”

“What do you mean?”

At her shocked voice his heart poured a warm liquid forth into his body, but he answered quietly: “You remember I told you I was going South? Well, I’m going tomorrow.”

There was an argument, but he had made up his mind. At the station next evening she wept and clung to him.

“Thank you for the happiest month I’ve had in years,” he said.

“But you’ll come back, Tom.”

“I’ll be two months in Mexico; then I’m going East for a few weeks.”

He tried to sound fortunate, but the frozen city he was leaving seemed to be in blossom. Her frozen breath was a flower on the air, and his heart sank as he realized that some young man was waiting outside to take her home in a car hung with blooms.

“Good-by, Annie. Good-by, sweet!”

Two days later he spent the morning in Houston with Hal Meigs, a classmate at Yale.

“You’re in luck for such an old fella,” said Meigs at luncheon, “because I’m going to introduce you to the cutest little traveling companion you ever saw, who’s going all the way to Mexico City.”

The lady in question was frankly pleased to learn at the station that she was not returning alone. She and Tom dined together on the train and later played rummy for an hour; but when, at ten o’clock, standing in the door of the stateroom, she turned back to him suddenly with a certain look, frank and unmistakable, and stood there holding that look for a long moment, Tom Squires was suddenly in the grip of an emotion that was not the one in question. He wanted desperately to see Annie, call her for a second on the phone, and then fall asleep, knowing she was young and pure as a star, and safe in bed.

“Good night,” he said, trying to keep any repulsion out of his voice.

“Oh! Good night.”

Arriving in El Paso next day, he drove over the border to Juarez. It was bright and hot, and after leaving his bags at the station he went into a bar for an iced drink; as he sipped it a girl’s voice addressed him thickly from the table behind:

“You’n American?”

He had noticed her slumped forward on her elbows as he came in; now, turning, he faced a young girl of about seventeen, obviously drunk, yet with gentility in her unsteady, sprawling voice. The American bartender leaned confidentially forward.

“I don’t know what to do about her,” he said. “She come in about three o’clock with two young fellows--one of them her sweetie. They had a fight and the men went off, and this one’s been here ever since.”

A spasm of distaste passed over Tom--the rules of his generation were outraged and defied. That an American girl should be drunk and deserted in a tough foreign town--that such things happened, might happen to Annie. He looked at his watch, hesitated.

“Has she got a bill?” he asked.

“She owes for five gins. But suppose her boy friends come back?”

“Tell them she’s at the Roosevelt Hotel in El Paso.”

Approaching, he put his hand on her shoulder. She looked up.

“You look like Santa Claus,” she said vaguely. “You couldn’t possibly be Santa Claus, could you?”

“I’m going to take you to El Paso.”

“Well,” she considered, “you look perfectly safe to me.”

She was so young--a drenched little rose. He could have wept for her wretched unconsciousness of the old facts, the old penalties of life. Jousting at nothing in an empty tilt yard with a shaking spear. The taxi moved too slowly through the suddenly poisonous night.

Having explained things to a reluctant night clerk, he went out and found a telegraph office.

“Have given up Mexican trip,” he wired. “Leaving here tonight. Please meet train in the St. Paul station at three o’clock and ride with me to Minneapolis, as I can’t spare you for another minute. All my love.”

He could at least keep an eye on her, advise her, see what she did with her life. That silly mother of hers!

On the train, as the baked tropical lands and green fields fell away and the North swept near again with patches of snow, then fields of it, fierce winds in the vestibule and bleak, hibernating farms, he paced the corridors with intolerable restlessness. When they drew into the St. Paul station he swung himself off like a young man and searched the platform eagerly, but his eyes failed to find her. He had counted on those few minutes between the cities; they had become a symbol of her fidelity to their friendship, and as the train started again he searched it desperately from smoker to observation car. But he could not find her, and now he knew that he was mad for her; at the thought that she had taken his advice and plunged into affairs with other men, he grew weak with fear.

Drawing into Minneapolis, his hands fumbled so that he must call the porter to fasten his baggage. Then there was an interminable wait in the corridor while the baggage was taken off and he was pressed up against a girl in a squirrel-trimmed coat.

“Tom!”

“Well, I’ll be--”

Her arms went up around his neck. “But, Tom,” she cried, “I’ve been right here in this car since St. Paul!”

His cane fell in the corridor, he drew her very tenderly close and their lips met like starved hearts.

III

The new intimacy of their definite engagement brought Tom a feeling of young happiness. He awoke on winter mornings with the sense of undeserved joy hovering in the room; meeting young men, he found himself matching the vigor of his mind and body against theirs. Suddenly his life had a purpose and a background; he felt rounded and complete. On gray March afternoons when she wandered familiarly in his apartment the warm sureties of his youth flooded back--ecstasy and poignancy, the mortal and the eternal posed in their immemorially tragic juxtaposition and, a little astounded, he found himself relishing the very terminology of young romance. But he was more thoughtful than a younger lover; and to Annie he seemed to “know everything,” to stand holding open the gates for her passage into the truly golden world.

“We’ll go to Europe first,” he said.

“Oh, we’ll go there a lot, won’t we? Let’s spend our winters in Italy and the spring in Paris.”

“But, little Annie, there’s business.”

“Well, we’ll stay away as much as we can anyhow. I hate Minneapolis.”

“Oh, no.” He was a little shocked. “Minneapolis is all right.”

“When you’re here it’s all right.”

Mrs. Lorry yielded at length to the inevitable. With ill grace she acknowledged the engagement, asking only that the marriage should not take place until fall.

“Such a long time,” Annie sighed.

“After all, I’m your mother. It’s so little to ask.”

It was a long winter, even in a land of long winters. March was full of billowy drifts, and when it seemed at last as though the cold must be defeated, there was a series of blizzards, desperate as last stands. The people waited; their first energy to resist was spent, and man, like weather, simply hung on. There was less to do now and the general restlessness was expressed by surliness in daily contacts. Then, early in April, with a long sigh the ice cracked, the snow ran into the ground and the green, eager spring broke up through.

One day, riding along a slushy road in a fresh, damp breeze with a little starved, smothered grass in it, Annie began to cry. Sometimes she cried for nothing, but this time Tom suddenly stopped the car and put his arm around her.

“Why do you cry like that? Are you unhappy?”

“Oh, no, no!” she protested.

“But you cried yesterday the same way. And you wouldn’t tell me why. You must always tell me.”

“Nothing, except the spring. It smells so good, and it always has so many sad thoughts and memories in it.”

“It’s our spring, my sweetheart,” he said. “Annie, don’t let’s wait. Let’s be married in June.”

“I promised mother, but if you like we can announce our engagement in June.”

The spring came fast now. The sidewalks were damp, then dry, and the children roller-skated on them and boys played baseball in the soft, vacant lots. Tom got up elaborate picnics of Annie’s contemporaries and encouraged her to play golf and tennis with them. Abruptly, with a final, triumphant lurch of Nature, it was full summer.

On a lovely May evening Tom came up the Lorrys’ walk and sat down beside Annie’s mother on the porch.

“It’s so pleasant,” he said, “I thought Annie and I would walk instead of driving this evening. I want to show her the funny old house I was born in.”

“On Chambers Street, wasn’t it? Annie’ll be home in a few minutes. She went riding with some young people after dinner.”

“Yes, on Chambers Street.”

He looked at his watch presently, hoping Annie would come while it was still light enough to see. Quarter of nine. He frowned. She had kept him waiting the night before, kept him waiting an hour yesterday afternoon.

“If I was twenty-one,” he said to himself, “I’d make scenes and we’d both be miserable.”

He and Mrs. Lorry talked; the warmth of the night precipitated the vague evening lassitude of the fifties and softened them both, and for the first time since his attentions to Annie began, there was no unfriendliness between them. By and by long silences fell, broken only by the scratch of a match or the creak of her swinging settee. When Mr. Lorry came home Tom threw away his second cigar in surprise and looked at his watch; it was after ten.

“Annie’s late,” Mrs. Lorry said.

“I hope there’s nothing wrong,” said Tom anxiously. “Who is she with?”

“There were four when they started out. Randy Cambell and another couple--I didn’t notice who. They were only going for a soda.”

“I hope there hasn’t been any trouble. Perhaps--Do you think I ought to go and see?”

“Ten isn’t late nowadays. You’ll find--” Remembering that Tom Squires was marrying Annie, not adopting her, she kept herself from adding: “You’ll get used to it.”

Her husband excused himself and went up to bed, and the conversation became more forced and desultory. When the church clock over the way struck eleven they both broke off and listened to the beats. Twenty minutes later just as Tom impatiently crushed out his last cigar, an automobile drifted down the street and came to rest in front of the door.

For a minute no one moved on the porch or in the auto. Then Annie, with a hat in her hand, got out and came quickly up the walk. Defying the tranquil night, the car snorted away.

“Oh, hello!” she cried. “I’m so sorry! What time is it? Am I terribly late?”

Tom didn’t answer. The street lamp threw wine color upon her face and expressed with a shadow the heightened flush of her cheek. Her dress was crushed, her hair was in brief, expressive disarray. But it was the strange little break in her voice that made him afraid to speak, made him turn his eyes aside.

“What happened?” Mrs. Lorry asked casually.

“Oh, a blow-out and something wrong with the engine--and we lost our way. Is it terribly late?”

And then, as she stood before them, her hat still in her hand, her breast rising and falling a little, her eyes wide and bright, Tom realized with a shock that he and her mother were people of the same age looking at a person of another. Try as he might, he could not separate himself from Mrs. Lorry. When she excused herself he suppressed a frantic tendency to say, “But why should you go now? After sitting here all evening?”

They were alone. Annie came up to him and pressed his hand. He had never been so conscious of her beauty; her damp hands were touched with dew.

“You were out with young Cambell,” he said.

“Yes. Oh, don’t be mad. I feel--I feel so upset tonight.”

“Upset?”

She sat down, whimpering a little.

“I couldn’t help it. Please don’t be mad. He wanted so for me to take a ride with him and it was such a wonderful night, so I went just for an hour. And we began talking and I didn’t realize the time. I felt so sorry for him.”

“How do you think I felt?” He scorned himself, but it was said now.

“Don’t, Tom. I told you I was terribly upset. I want to go to bed.”

“I understand. Good night, Annie.”

“Oh, please don’t act that way, Tom. Can’t you understand?”

But he could, and that was just the trouble. With the courteous bow of another generation, he walked down the steps and off into the obliterating moonlight. In a moment he was just a shadow passing the street lamps and then a faint footfall up the street.

IV

All through that summer he often walked abroad in the evenings. He liked to stand for a minute in front of the house where he was born, and then in front of another house where he had been a little boy. On his customary routes there were other sharp landmarks of the 90’s, converted habitats of gayeties that no longer existed--the shell of Jansen’s Livery Stables and the old Nushka Rink, where every winter his father had curled on the well-kept ice.

“And it’s a darn pity,” he would mutter. “A darn pity.”

He had a tendency, too, to walk past the lights of a certain drug store, because it seemed to him that it had contained the seed of another and nearer branch of the past. Once he went in, and inquiring casually about the blonde clerk, found that she had married and departed several months before. He obtained her name and on an impulse sent her a wedding present “from a dumb admirer,” for he felt he owed something to her for his happiness and pain. He had lost the battle against youth and spring, and with his grief paid the penalty for age’s unforgivable sin--refusing to die. But he could not have walked down wasted into the darkness without being used up a little; what he had wanted, after all, was only to break his strong old heart. Conflict itself has a value beyond victory and defeat, and those three months--he had them forever.

BASIL AND CLEOPATRA

Saturday Evening Post (27 April 1929)

Wherever she was, became a beautiful and enchanted place to Basil, but he did not think of it that way. He thought the fascination was inherent in the locality, and long afterward a commonplace street or the mere name of a city would exude a peculiar glow, a sustained sound, that struck his soul alert with delight. In her presence he was too absorbed to notice his surroundings; so that her absence never made them empty, but, rather, sent him seeking for her through haunted rooms and gardens that he had never really seen before.

This time, as usual, he saw only the expression of her face, the mouth that gave an attractive interpretation of any emotion she felt or pretended to feel--oh, invaluable mouth--and the rest of her, new as a peach and old as sixteen. He was almost unconscious that they stood in a railroad station and entirely unconscious that she had just glanced over his shoulder and fallen in love with another young man. Turning to walk with the rest to the car, she was already acting for the stranger; no less so because her voice was pitched for Basil and she clung to him, squeezing his arm.

Had Basil noticed this other young man that the train discharged he would merely have been sorry for him--as he had been sorry for the wretched people in the villages along the railroad and for his fellow travelers--they were not entering Yale in a fortnight nor were they about to spend three days in the same town with Miss Erminie Gilberte Labouisse Bibble. There was something dense, hopeless and a little contemptible about them all.

Basil had come to visit here because Erminie Bibble was visiting here.

On the sad eve of her departure from his native Western city a month before, she had said, with all the promise one could ask in her urgent voice:

“If you know a boy in Mobile, why don’t you make him invite you down when I’ll be there?”

He had followed this suggestion. And now with the soft, unfamiliar Southern city actually flowing around him, his excitement led him to believe that Fat Gaspar’s car floated off immediately they entered it. A voice from the curb came as a surprise:

“Hi, Bessie Belle. Hi, William. How you all?”

The newcomer was tall and lean and a year or so older than Basil. He wore a white linen suit and a panama hat, under which burned fierce, undefeated Southern eyes.

“Why, Littleboy Le Moyne!” exclaimed Miss Cheever. “When did you get home?”

“Jus’ now, Bessie Belle. Saw you lookin’ so fine and pretty, had to come and see closer.”

He was introduced to Minnie and Basil.

“Drop you somewhere, Littleboy?” asked Fat--on his native heath, William.

“Why--” Le Moyne hesitated. “You’re very kind, but the man ought to be here with the car.”

“Jump in.”

Le Moyne swung his bag on top of Basil’s and with courteous formality got in the back seat beside them. Basil caught Minnie’s eye and she smiled quickly back, as if to say, “This is too bad, but it’ll soon be over.”

“Do you happen to come from New Orleans, Miss Bibble?” asked Le Moyne.

“Sure do.”

“‘Cause I just came from there and they told me one of their mos’ celebrated heartbreakers was visiting up here, and meanwhile her suitors were shooting themselves all over the city. That’s the truth. I used to help pick ‘em up myself sometimes when they got littering the streets.”

“This must be Mobile Bay on the left,” Basil thought; “Down Mobile,” and the Dixie moonlight and darky stevedores singing. The houses on either side of the street were gently faded behind proud, protecting vines; there had been crinolines on these balconies, and guitars by night in these broken gardens.

It was so warm; the voices were so sure they had time to say everything--even Minnie’s voice, answering the banter of the youth with the odd nickname, seemed slower and lazier--he had scarcely ever thought of her as a Southern girl before. They stopped at a large gate where flickers of a yellow house showed through luscious trees. Le Moyne got out.

“I certainly hope you both enjoy your visit here. If you’ll permit me I’ll call around and see if there’s anything I can do to add to your pleasure.” He swooped his panama. “I bid you good day.”

As they started off, Bessie Belle turned around and smiled at Minnie.

“Didn’t I tell you?” she demanded.

“I guessed it in the station, before he came up to the car,” said Minnie. “Something told me that was him.”

“Did you think he was good-looking?”

“He was divine,” Minnie said.

“Of course he’s always gone with an older crowd.”

To Basil, this prolonged discussion seemed a little out of place. After all, the young man was simply a local Southerner who lived here; add to that, that he went with an older crowd, and it seemed that his existence was being unnecessarily insisted upon.

But now Minnie turned to him, said, “Basil,” wriggled invitingly and folded her hands in a humble, expectant way that invariably caused disturbances in his heart.

“I loved your letters,” she said.

“You might have answered them.”

“I haven’t had a minute, Basil. I visited in Chicago and then in Nashville. I haven’t even been home.” She lowered her voice. “Father and mother are getting a divorce, Basil. Isn’t that awful?”

He was startled; then, after a moment, he adjusted the idea to her and she became doubly poignant; because of its romantic connection with her, the thought of divorce would never shock him again.

“That’s why I didn’t write. But I’ve thought of you so much. You’re the best friend I have, Basil. You always understand.”

This was decidedly not the note upon which they had parted in St. Paul. A dreadful rumor that he hadn’t intended to mention rose to his lips.

“Who is this fellow Bailey you met at Lake Forest?” he inquired lightly.

“Buzz Bailey!” Her big eyes opened in surprise. “He’s very attractive and a divine dancer, but we’re just friends.” She frowned. “I bet Connie Davies has been telling tales in St. Paul. Honestly, I’m so sick of girls that, just out of jealousy or nothing better to do, sit around and criticize you if you have a good time.”

He was convinced now that something had occurred in Lake Forest, but he concealed the momentary pang from Minnie.

“Anyhow, you’re a fine one to talk.” She smiled suddenly. “I guess everybody knows how fickle you are, Mr. Basil Duke Lee.”

Generally such an implication is considered flattering, but the lightness, almost the indifference, with which she spoke increased his alarm--and then suddenly the bomb exploded.

“You needn’t worry about Buzz Bailey. At present I’m absolutely heart-whole and fancy free.”

Before he could even comprehend the enormity of what she had said, they stopped at Bessie Belle Cheever’s door and the two girls ran up the steps, calling back, “We’ll see you this afternoon.”

Mechanically Basil climbed into the front seat beside his host.

“Going out for freshman football, Basil?” William asked.

“What? Oh, sure. If I can get off my two conditions.” There was no if in his heart; it was the greatest ambition of his life.

“You’ll probably make the freshman team easy. That fellow Littleboy Le Moyne you just met is going to Princeton this fall. He played end at V. M. I.”

“Where’d he get that crazy name?”

“Why, his family always called him that and everybody picked it up.” After a moment he added, “He asked them to the country-club dance with him tonight.”

“When did he?” Basil demanded in surprise.

“Right then. That’s what they were talking about. I meant to ask them and I was just leading up to it gradually, but he stepped in before I could get a chance.” He sighed, blaming himself. “Well, anyhow, we’ll see them there.”

“Sure; it doesn’t matter,” said Basil. But was it Fat’s mistake? Couldn’t Minnie have said right out: “But Basil came all this way to see me and I ought to go with him on his first night here.”

What had happened? One month ago, in the dim, thunderous Union Station at St. Paul, they had gone behind a baggage truck and he had kissed her, and her eyes had said: “Again.” Up to the very end, when she disappeared in a swirl of vapor at the car window, she had been his--those weren’t things you thought; they were things you knew. He was bewildered. It wasn’t like Minnie, who, for all her glittering popularity, was invariably kind. He tried to think of something in his letters that might have offended her, and searched himself for new shortcomings. Perhaps she didn’t like him the way he was in the morning. The joyous mood in which he had arrived was vanishing into air.

She was her familiar self when they played tennis that afternoon; she admired his strokes and once, when they were close at the net, she suddenly patted his hand. But later, as they drank lemonade on the Cheevers’ wide, shady porch, he couldn’t seem to be alone with her even for a minute. Was it by accident that, coming back from the courts, she had sat in front with Fat? Last summer she had made opportunities to be alone with him--made them out of nothing. It was in a state that seemed to border on some terrible realization that he dressed for the country-club dance.

The club lay in a little valley, almost roofed over by willows, and down through their black silhouettes, in irregular blobs and patches, dripped the light of a huge harvest moon. As they parked the car, Basil’s tune of tunes, Chinatown, drifted from the windows and dissolved into its notes which thronged like elves through the glade. His heart quickened, suffocating him; the throbbing tropical darkness held a promise of such romance as he had dreamed of; but faced with it, he felt himself too small and impotent to seize the felicity he desired. When he danced with Minnie he was ashamed of inflicting his merely mortal presence on her in this fairyland whose unfamiliar figures reached towering proportions of magnificence and beauty. To make him king here, she would have to reach forth and draw him close to her with soft words; but she only said, “Isn’t it wonderful, Basil? Did you ever have a better time?”

Talking for a moment with Le Moyne in the stag line, Basil was hesitantly jealous and oddly shy. He resented the tall form that stooped down so fiercely over Minnie as they danced, but he found it impossible to dislike him or not to be amused by the line of sober-faced banter he kept up with passing girls. He and William Gasper were the youngest boys here, as Bessie Belle and Minnie were the youngest girls, and for the first time in his life he wanted passionately to be older, less impressionable, less impressed. Quivering at every scent, sight or tune, he wanted to be blasé and calm. Wretchedly he felt the whole world of beauty pour down upon him like moonlight, pressing on him, making his breath now sighing, now short, as he wallowed helplessly in a superabundance of youth for which a hundred adults present would have given years of life.

Next day, meeting her in a world that had shrunk back to reality, things were more natural, but something was gone and he could not bring himself to be amusing and gay. It would be like being brave after the battle. He should have been all that the night before. They went downtown in an unpaired foursome and called at a photographer’s for some pictures of Minnie. Basil liked one proof that no one else liked--somehow, it reminded him of her as she had been in St. Paul--so he ordered two--one for her to keep and one to send after him to Yale. All afternoon she was distracted and vaguely singing, but back at the Cheevers’ she sprang up the steps at the sound of the phone inside. Ten minutes later she appeared, sulky and lowering, and Basil heard a quick exchange between the two girls:

“He can’t get out of it.”

“--a pity.”

“--back Friday.”

It could only be Le Moyne who had gone away, and to Minnie it mattered. Presently, unable to endure her disappointment, he got up wretchedly and suggested to William that they go home. To his surprise, Minnie’s hand on his arm arrested him.

“Don’t go, Basil. It doesn’t seem as if I’ve seen you a minute since you’ve been here.”

He laughed unhappily.

“As if it mattered to you.”

“Basil, don’t be silly.” She bit her lip as if she were hurt. “Let’s go out to the swing.”

He was suddenly radiant with hope and happiness. Her tender smile, which seemed to come from the heart of freshness, soothed him and he drank down her lies in grateful gulps like cool water. The last sunshine touched her cheeks with the unearthly radiance he had seen there before, as she told him how she hadn’t wanted to accept Le Moyne’s invitation, and how surprised and hurt she had been when he hadn’t come near her last night.

“Then do one thing, Minnie,” he pleaded: “Won’t you let me kiss you just once?”

“But not here,” she exclaimed, “you silly!”

“Let’s go in the summerhouse, for just a minute.”

“Basil, I can’t. Bessie Belle and William are on the porch. Maybe some other time.”

He looked at her distraught, unable to believe or disbelieve in her, and she changed the subject quickly:

“I’m going to Miss Beecher’s school, Basil. It’s only a few hours from New Haven. You can come up and see me this fall. The only thing is, they say you have to sit in glass parlors. Isn’t that terrible?”

“Awful,” he agreed fervently.

William and Bessie Belle had left the veranda and were out in front, talking to some people in a car.

“Minnie, come into the summerhouse now--for just a minute. They’re so far away.”

Her face set unwillingly.

“I can’t, Basil. Don’t you see I can’t?”

“Why not? I’ve got to leave tomorrow.”

“Oh, no.”

“I have to. I only have four days to get ready for my exams. Minnie--”

He took her hand. It rested calmly enough in his, but when he tried to pull her to her feet she plucked it sharply away. The swing moved with the little struggle and Basil put out his foot and made it stop. It was terrible to swing when one was at a disadvantage.

She laid the recovered hand on his knee.

“I’ve stopped kissing people, Basil. Really. I’m too old; I’ll be seventeen next May.”

“I’ll bet you kissed Le Moyne,” he said bitterly.

“Well, you’re pretty fresh--”

Basil got out of the swing.

“I think I’ll go.”

Looking up, she judged him dispassionately, as she never had before--his sturdy graceful figure; the high, warm color through his tanned skin; his black, shining hair that she had once thought so romantic. She felt, too--as even those who disliked him felt--that there was something else in his face--a mark, a hint of destiny, a persistence that was more than will, that was rather a necessity of pressing its own pattern on the world, of having its way. That he would most probably succeed at Yale, that it would be nice to go there this year as his girl, meant nothing to her. She had never needed to be calculating. Hesitating, she alternatingly drew him toward her in her mind and let him go. There were so many men and they wanted her so much. If Le Moyne had been here at hand she wouldn’t have hesitated, for nothing must interfere with the mysterious opening glory of that affair; but he was gone for three days and she couldn’t decide quite yet to let Basil go.

“Stay over till Wednesday and I’ll--I’ll do what you want,” she said.

“But I can’t. I’ve got these exams to study for. I ought to have left this afternoon.”

“Study on the train.”

She wriggled, dropped her hands in her lap and smiled at him. Taking her hand suddenly, he pulled her to her feet and toward the summerhouse and the cool darkness behind its vines.

II

The following Friday Basil arrived in New Haven and set about crowding five days’ work into two. He had done no studying on the train; instead he sat in a trance and concentrated upon Minnie, wondering what was happening now that Le Moyne was there. She had kept her promise to him, but only literally--kissed him once in the playhouse, once, grudgingly, the second evening; but the day of his departure there had been a telegram from Le Moyne, and in front of Bessie Belle she had not even dared to kiss him good-by. As a sort of amend she had given him permission to call on the first day permitted by Miss Beecher’s school.

The opening of college found him rooming with Brick Wales and George Dorsey in a suite of two bedrooms and a study in Wright Hall. Until the result of his trigonometry examination was published he was ineligible to play football, but watching the freshmen practice on Yale field, he saw that the quarterback position lay between Cullum, last year’s Andover captain, and a man named Danziger from a New Bedford high school. There was a rumor that Cullum would be moved to halfback. The other quarterbacks did not appear formidable and Basil felt a great impatience to be out there with a team in his hands to move over the springy turf. He was sure he could at least get in some of the games.

Behind everything, as a light showing through, was the image of Minnie; he would see her in a week, three days, tomorrow. On the eve of the occasion he ran into Fat Gaspar, who was in Sheff, in the oval by Haughton Hall. In the first busy weeks they had scarcely met; now they walked along for a little way together.

“We all came North together,” Fat said. “You ought to have been along. We had some excitement. Minnie got in a jam with Littleboy Le Moyne.”

Basil’s blood ran cold.

“It was funny afterward, but she was pretty scared for a while,” continued Fat. “She had a compartment with Bessie Belle, but she and Littleboy wanted to be alone; so in the afternoon Bessie Belle came and played cards in ours. Well, after about two hours Bessie Belle and I went back, and there were Minnie and Littleboy standing in the vestibule arguing with the conductor; Minnie white as a sheet. Seems they locked the door and pulled down the blinds, and I guess there was a little petting going on. When he came along after the tickets and knocked on the door, they thought it was us kidding them, and wouldn’t let him in at first, and when they did, he was pretty upset. He asked Littleboy if that was his compartment, and whether he and Minnie were married that they locked the door, and Littleboy lost his temper trying to explain that there was nothing wrong. He said the conductor had insulted Minnie and he wanted him to fight. But that conductor could have made trouble, and believe me, I had an awful time smoothing it all over.”

With every detail imagined, with every refinement of jealousy beating in his mind, including even envy for their community of misfortune as they stood together in the vestibule, Basil went up to Miss Beecher’s next day. Radiant and glowing, more mysteriously desirable than ever, wearing her very sins like stars, she came down to him in her plain white uniform dress, and his heart turned over at the kindness of her eyes.

“You were wonderful to come up, Basil. I’m so excited having a beau so soon. Everybody’s jealous of me.”

The glass doors hinged like French windows, shutting them in on all sides. It was hot. Down through three more compartments he could see another couple--a girl and her brother, Minnie said--and from time to time they moved and gestured soundlessly, as unreal in these tiny human conservatories as the vase of paper flowers on the table. Basil walked up and down nervously.

“Minnie, I want to be a great man some day and I want to do everything for you. I understand you’re tired of me now. I don’t know how it happened, but somebody else came along--it doesn’t matter. There isn’t any hurry. But I just want you to--oh, remember me in some different way--try to think of me as you used to, not as if I was just another one you threw over. Maybe you’d better not see me for a while--I mean at the dance this fall. Wait till I’ve accomplished some big scene or deed, you know, and I can show it to you and say I did that all for you.”

It was very futile and young and sad. Once, carried away by the tragedy of it all, he was on the verge of tears, but he controlled himself to that extent. There was sweat on his forehead. He sat across the room from her, and Minnie sat on the couch, looking at the floor, and said several times: “Can’t we be friends, Basil? I always think of you as one of my best friends.”

Toward the end she rose patiently.

“Don’t you want to see the chapel?”

They walked upstairs and he glanced dismally into a small dark space, with her living, sweet-smelling presence half a yard from his shoulder. He was almost glad when the funereal business was over and he walked out of the school into the fresh autumn air.

Back in New Haven he found two pieces of mail on his desk. One was a notice from the registrar telling him that he had failed his trigonometry examination and would be ineligible for football. The second was a photograph of Minnie--the picture that he had liked and ordered two of in Mobile. At first the inscription puzzled him: “L. L. from E. G. L. B. Trains are bad for the heart.” Then suddenly he realized what had happened, and threw himself on his bed, shaken with wild laughter.

III

Three weeks later, having requested and passed a special examination in trigonometry, Basil began to look around him gloomily to see if there was anything left in life. Not since his miserable first year at school had he passed through such a period of misery; only now did he begin for the first time to be aware of Yale. The quality of romantic speculation reawoke, and, listlessly at first, then with growing determination, he set about merging himself into this spirit which had fed his dreams so long.

“I want to be chairman of the News or the Record,” thought his old self one October morning, “and I want to get my letter in football, and I want to be in Skull and Bones.”

Whenever the vision of Minnie and Le Moyne on the train occurred to him, he repeated this phrase like an incantation. Already he thought with shame of having stayed over in Mobile, and there began to be long strings of hours when he scarcely brooded about her at all.

He had missed half of the freshman football season, and it was with scant hope that he joined the squad on Yale field. Dressed in his black and white St. Regis jersey, amid the motley of forty schools, he looked enviously at the proud two dozen in Yale blue. At the end of four days he was reconciling himself to obscurity for the rest of the season when the voice of Carson, assistant coach, singled him suddenly out of a crowd of scrub backs.

“Who was throwing those passes just now?”

“I was, sir.”

“I haven’t seen you before, have I?”

“I just got eligible.”

“Know the signals?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, you take this team down the field--ends, Krutch and Bispam; tackles--”

A moment later he heard his own voice snapping out on the crisp air: “Thirty-two, sixty-five, sixty-seven, twenty-two--”

There was a ripple of laughter.

“Wait a minute! Where’d you learn to call signals like that?” said Carson.

“Why, we had a Harvard coach, sir.”

“Well, just drop the Haughton emphasis. You’ll get everybody too excited.”

After a few minutes they were called in and told to put on headgears.

“Where’s Waite?” Carson asked. “Test, eh? Well, you then--what’s your name?--in the black and white sweater?”

“Lee.”

“You call signals. And let’s see you get some life into this outfit. Some of you guards and tackles are big enough for the varsity. Keep them on their toes, you--what’s your name?”

“Lee.”

They lined up with possession of the ball on the freshmen’s twenty-yard line. They were allowed unlimited downs, but when, after a dozen plays, they were in approximately that same place, the ball was given to the first team.

“That’s that!” thought Basil. “That finishes me.”

But an hour later, as they got out of the bus, Carson spoke to him:

“Did you weigh this afternoon?”

“Yes. Hundred and fifty-eight.”

“Let me give you a tip--you’re still playing prep-school football. You’re still satisfied with stopping them. The idea here is that if you lay them down hard enough you wear them out. Can you kick?”

“No, sir.”

“Well, it’s too bad you didn’t get out sooner.”

A week later his name was read out as one of those to go to Andover. Two quarterbacks ranked ahead of him, Danziger and a little hard rubber ball of a man, named Appleton, and Basil watched the game from the sidelines, but when, the following Tuesday, Danziger splintered his arm in practice, Basil was ordered to report to training table.

On the eve of the game with the Princeton freshmen, the egress of the student body to Princeton for the Varsity encounter left the campus almost deserted. Deep autumn had set in, with a crackling wind from the west, and walking back to his room after final skull practice, Basil felt the old lust for glory sweep over him. Le Moyne was playing end on the Princeton freshman and it was probable that Minnie would be in the stands, but now, as he ran along the springy grass in front of Osborne, swaying to elude imaginary tacklers, the fact seemed of less importance than the game. Like most Americans, he was seldom able really to grasp the moment, to say: “This, for me, is the great equation by which everything else will be measured; this is the golden time,” but for once the present was sufficient. He was going to spend two hours in a country where life ran at the pace he demanded of it.

The day was fair and cool; an unimpassioned crowd, mostly townsmen, was scattered through the stands. The Princeton freshmen looked sturdy and solid in their diagonal stripes, and Basil picked out Le Moyne, noting coldly that he was exceptionally fast, and bigger than he had seemed in his clothes. On an impulse Basil turned and searched for Minnie in the crowd, but he could not find her. A minute later the whistle blew; sitting at the coach’s side, he concentrated all his faculties on the play.

The first half was played between the thirty-yard lines. The main principles of Yale’s offense seemed to Basil too simple; less effective than the fragments of the Haughton system he had learned at school, while the Princeton tactics, still evolved in Sam White’s long shadow, were built around a punter and the hope of a break. When the break came, it was Yale’s. At the start of the second half Princeton fumbled and Appleton sent over a drop kick from the thirty-yard line.

It was his last act of the day. He was hurt on the next kick-off and, to a burst of freshmen cheering, assisted from the game.

With his heart in a riot, Basil sprinted out on the field. He felt an overpowering strangeness, and it was someone else in his skin who called the first signals and sent an unsuccessful play through the line. As he forced his eyes to take in the field slowly, they met Le Moyne’s, and Le Moyne grinned at him. Basil called for a short pass over the line, throwing it himself for a gain of seven yards. He sent Cullum off tackle for three more and a first down. At the forty, with more latitude, his mind began to function smoothly and surely. His short passes worried the Princeton fullback, and, in consequence, the running gains through the line were averaging four yards instead of two.

At the Princeton forty he dropped back to kick formation and tried Le Moyne’s end, but Le Moyne went under the interfering halfback and caught Basil by a foot. Savagely Basil tugged himself free, but too late--the halfback bowled him over. Again Le Moyne’s face grinned at him, and Basil hated it. He called the same end and, with Cullum carrying the ball, they rolled over Le Moyne six yards, to Princeton’s thirty-two. He was slowing down, was he? Then run him ragged! System counseled a pass, but he heard himself calling the end again. He ran parallel to the line, saw his interference melt away and Le Moyne, his jaw set, coming for him. Instead of cutting in, Basil turned full about and tried to reverse his field. When he was trapped he had lost fifteen yards.

A few minutes later the ball changed hands and he ran back to the safety position thinking: “They’d yank me if they had anybody to put in my place.”

The Princeton team suddenly woke up. A long pass gained thirty yards. A fast new back dazzled his way through the line for another first down. Yale was on the defensive, but even before they had realized the fact, the disaster had happened. Basil was drawn on an apparently developed play; too late he saw the ball shoot out of scrimmage to a loose end; saw, as he was neatly blocked, that the Princeton substitutes were jumping around wildly, waving their blankets. They had scored.

He got up with his heart black, but his brain cool. Blunders could be atoned for--if they only wouldn’t take him out. The whistle blew for the quarter, and squatting on the turf with the exhausted team, he made himself believe that he hadn’t lost their confidence, kept his face intent and rigid, refusing no man’s eye. He had made his errors for today.

On the kick-off he ran the ball back to the thirty-five, and a steady rolling progress began. The short passes, a weak spot inside tackle, Le Moyne’s end. Le Moyne was tired now. His face was drawn and dogged as he smashed blindly into the interference; the ball carrier eluded him--Basil or another.

Thirty more to go--twenty--over Le Moyne again. Disentangling himself from the pile, Basil met the Southerner’s weary glance and insulted him in a crisp voice:

“You’ve quit, Littleboy. They better take you out.”

He started the next play at him and, as Le Moyne charged in furiously, tossed a pass over his head for the score. Yale 10, Princeton 7. Up and down the field again, with Basil fresher every minute and another score in sight, and suddenly the game was over.

Trudging off the field, Basil’s eye ranged over the stands, but he could not see her.

“I wonder if she knows I was pretty bad,” he thought, and then bitterly: “If I don’t, he’ll tell her.”

He could hear him telling her in that soft Southern voice--the voice that had wooed her so persuasively that afternoon on the train. As he emerged from the dressing room an hour later he ran into Le Moyne coming out of the visitors’ quarters next door. He looked at Basil with an expression at once uncertain and angry.

“Hello, Lee.” After a momentary hesitation he added: “Good work.”

“Hello, Le Moyne,” said Basil, clipping his words.

Le Moyne turned away, turned back again.

“What’s the matter?” he demanded. “Do you want to carry this any further?”

Basil didn’t answer. The bruised face and the bandaged hand assuaged his hatred a little, but he couldn’t bring himself to speak. The game was over, and now Le Moyne would meet Minnie somewhere, make the defeat negligible in the victory of the night.

“If it’s about Minnie, you’re wasting your time being sore,” Le Moyne exploded suddenly. “I asked her to the game, but she didn’t come.”

“Didn’t she?” Basil was startled.

“That was it, eh? I wasn’t sure. I thought you were just trying to get my goat in there.” His eyes narrowed. “The young lady kicked me about a month ago.”

“Kicked you?”

“Threw me over. Got a little weary of me. She runs through things quickly.”

Basil perceived that his face was miserable.

“Who is it now?” he asked in more civil tone.

“It seems to be a classmate of yours named Jubal--and a mighty sad bird, if you ask me. She met him in New York the day before her school opened, and I hear it’s pretty heavy. She’ll be at the Lawn Club Dance tonight.”

IV

Basil had dinner at the Taft with Jobena Dorsey and her brother George. The Varsity had won at Princeton and the college was jubilant and enthusiastic; as they came in, a table of freshmen by the door gave Basil a hand.

“You’re getting very important,” Jobena said.

A year ago Basil had thought for a few weeks that he was in love with Jobena; when they next met he knew immediately that he was not.

“And why was that?” he asked her now, as they danced. “Why did it all go so quick?”

“Do you really want to know?”

“Yes.”

“Because I let it go.”

“You let it go?” he repeated. “I like that!”

“I decided you were too young.”

“Didn’t I have anything to do with it?”

She shook her head.

“That’s what Bernard Shaw says,” Basil admitted thoughtfully. “But I thought it was just about older people. So you go after the men.”

“Well, I should say not!” Her body stiffened indignantly in his arms. “The men are usually there, and the girl blinks at them or something. It’s just instinct.”

“Can’t a man make a girl fall for him?”

“Some men can--the ones who really don’t care.”

He pondered this awful fact for a moment and stowed it away for future examination. On the way to the Lawn Club he brought forth more questions.

If a girl who had been “crazy about a boy” became suddenly infatuated with another, what ought the first boy to do?

“Let her go,” said Jobena.

“Supposing he wasn’t willing to do that. What ought he to do?”

“There isn’t anything to do.”

“Well, what’s the best thing?”

Laughing, Jobena laid her head on his shoulder.

“Poor Basil,” she said, “I’ll be Laura Jean Libbey and you tell me the whole story.”

He summarized the affair. “You see,” he concluded, “if she was just anybody I could get over it, no matter how much I loved her. But she isn’t--she’s the most popular, most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen. I mean she’s like Messalina and Cleopatra and Salome and all that.”

“Louder,” requested George from the front seat.

“She’s sort of an immortal woman,” continued Basil in a lower voice. “You know, like Madame du Barry and all that sort of thing. She’s not just--”

“Not just like me.”

“No. That is, you’re sort of like her--all the girls I’ve cared about are sort of the same. Oh, Jobena, you know what I mean.”

As the lights of the New Haven Lawn Club loomed up she became obligingly serious:

“There’s nothing to do. I can see that. She’s more sophisticated than you. She staged the whole thing from the beginning, even when you thought it was you. I don’t know why she got tired, but evidently she is, and she couldn’t create it again, even if she wanted to, and you couldn’t because you’re--”

“Go on. What?”

“You’re too much in love. All that’s left for you to do is to show her you don’t care. Any girl hates to lose an old beau; so she may even smile at you--but don’t go back. It’s all over.”

In the dressing room Basil stood thoughtfully brushing his hair. It was all over. Jobena’s words had taken away his last faint hope, and after the strain of the afternoon the realization brought tears to his eyes. Hurriedly filling the bowl, he washed his face. Someone came in and slapped him on the back.

“You played a nice game, Lee.”

“Thanks, but I was rotten.”

“You were great. That last quarter--”

He went into the dance. Immediately he saw her, and in the same breath he was dizzy and confused with excitement. A little dribble of stags pursued her wherever she went, and she looked up at each one of them with the bright-eyed, passionate smile he knew so well. Presently he located her escort and indignantly discovered it was a flip, blatant boy from Hill School he had already noticed and set down as impossible. What quality lurked behind those watery eyes that drew her? How could that raw temperament appreciate that she was one of the immortal sirens of the world?

Having examined Mr. Jubal desperately and in vain for the answers to these questions, he cut in and danced all of twenty feet with her, smiling with cynical melancholy when she said:

“I’m so proud to know you, Basil. Everybody says you were wonderful this afternoon.”

But the phrase was precious to him and he stood against the wall repeating it over to himself, separating it into its component parts and trying to suck out any lurking meaning. If enough people praised him it might influence her. “I’m proud to know you, Basil. Everybody says you were wonderful this afternoon.”

There was a commotion near the door and someone said, “By golly, they got in after all!”

“Who?” another asked.

“Some Princeton freshmen. Their football season’s over and three or four of them broke training at the Hofbrau.”

And now suddenly the curious specter of a young man burst out of the commotion, as a back breaks through a line, and neatly straight-arming a member of the dance committee, rushed unsteadily onto the floor. He wore no collar with his dinner coat, his shirt front had long expelled its studs, his hair and eyes were wild. For a moment he glanced around as if blinded by the lights; then his glance fell on Minnie Bibble and an unmistakable love light came into his face. Even before he reached her he began to call her name aloud in a strained, poignant Southern voice.

Basil sprang forward, but others were before him, and Littleboy Le Moyne, fighting hard, disappeared into the coatroom in a flurry of legs and arms, many of which were not his own. Standing in the doorway. Basil found his disgust tempered with a monstrous sympathy; for Le Moyne, each time his head emerged from under the faucet, spoke desperately of his rejected love.

But when Basil danced with Minnie again, he found her frightened and angry; so much so that she seemed to appeal to Basil for support, made him sit down.

“Wasn’t he a fool?” she cried feelingly. “That sort of thing gives a girl a terrible reputation. They ought to have put him in jail.”

“He didn’t know what he was doing. He played a hard game and he’s all in, that’s all.”

But her eyes filled with tears.

“Oh, Basil,” she pleaded, “am I just perfectly terrible? I never want to be mean to anybody; things just happen.”

He wanted to put his arm around her and tell her she was the most romantic person in the world, but he saw in her eyes that she scarcely perceived him; he was a lay figure--she might have been talking to another girl. He remembered what Jobena had said--there was nothing left except to escape with his pride.

“You’ve got more sense.” Her soft voice flowed around him like an enchanted river. “You know that when two people aren’t--aren’t crazy about each other any more, the thing is to be sensible.”

“Of course,” he said, and forced himself to add lightly: “When a thing’s over, it’s over.”

“Oh, Basil, you’re so satisfactory. You always understand.” And now suddenly, for the first time in months, she was actually thinking of him. He would be an invaluable person in any girl’s life, she thought, if that brain of his, which was so annoying sometimes, was really used “to sort of understand.”

He was watching Jobena dance, and Minnie followed his eyes.

“You brought a girl, didn’t you? She’s awfully pretty.”

“Not as pretty as you.”

“Basil.”

Resolutely he refused to look at her, guessing that she had wriggled slightly and folded her hands in her lap. And as he held on to himself an extraordinary thing happened--the world around, outside of her, brightened a little. Presently more freshmen would approach him to congratulate him on the game, and he would like it--the words and the tribute in their eyes. There was a good chance he would start against Harvard next week.

“Basil!”

His heart made a dizzy tour of his chest. Around the corner of his eyes he felt her eyes waiting. Was she really sorry? Should he seize the opportunity to turn to her and say: “Minnie, tell this crazy nut to go jump in the river, and come back to me.” He wavered, but a thought that had helped him this afternoon returned: He had made all his mistakes for this time. Deep inside of him the plea expired slowly.

Jubal the impossible came up with an air of possession, and Basil’s heart went bobbing off around the ballroom in a pink silk dress. Lost again in a fog of indecision, he walked out on the veranda. There was a flurry of premature snow in the air and the stars looked cold. Staring up at them he saw that they were his stars as always--symbols of ambition, struggle and glory. The wind blew through them, trumpeting that high white note for which he always listened, and the thin-blown clouds, stripped for battle, passed in review. The scene was of an unparalleled brightness and magnificence, and only the practiced eye of the commander saw that one star was no longer there.

THE BRIDAL PARTY

Saturday Evening Post (9 August 1930)

There was the usual insincere little note saying: “I wanted you to be the first to know.” It was a double shock to Michael, announcing, as it did, both the engagement and the imminent marriage; which, moreover, was to be held, not in New York, decently and far away, but here in Paris under his very nose, if that could be said to extend over the Protestant Episcopal Church of the Holy Trinity, Avenue George-Cinq. The date was two weeks off, early in June.

At first Michael was afraid and his stomach felt hollow. When he left the hotel that morning, the femme de chambre, who was in love with his fine, sharp profile and his pleasant buoyancy, scented the hard abstraction that had settled over him. He walked in a daze to his bank, he bought a detective story at Smith’s on the Rue de Rivoli, he sympathetically stared for a while at a faded panorama of the battlefields in a tourist-office window and cursed a Greek tout who followed him with a half-displayed packet of innocuous post cards warranted to be very dirty indeed.

But the fear stayed with him, and after a while he recognized it as the fear that now he would never be happy. He had met Caroline Dandy when she was seventeen, possessed her young heart all through her first season in New York, and then lost her, slowly, tragically, uselessly, because he had no money and could make no money; because, with all the energy and good will in the world, he could not find himself; because, loving him still, Caroline had lost faith and begun to see him as something pathetic, futile and shabby, outside the great, shining stream of life toward which she was inevitably drawn.

Since his only support was that she loved him, he leaned weakly on that; the support broke, but still he held on to it and was carried out to sea and washed up on the French coast with its broken pieces still in his hands. He carried them around with him in the form of photographs and packets of correspondence and a liking for a maudlin popular song called “Among My Souvenirs.” He kept clear of other girls, as if Caroline would somehow know it and reciprocate with a faithful heart. Her note informed him that he had lost her forever.

It was a fine morning. In front of the shops in the Rue de Castiglione, proprietors and patrons were on the sidewalk gazing upward, for the Graf Zeppelin, shining and glorious, symbol of escape and destruction--of escape, if necessary, through destruction--glided in the Paris sky. He heard a woman say in French that it would not her astonish if that commenced to let fall the bombs. Then he heard another voice, full of husky laughter, and the void in his stomach froze. Jerking about, he was face to face with Caroline Dandy and her fiancé.

“Why, Michael! Why, we were wondering where you were. I asked at the Guaranty Trust, and Morgan and Company, and finally sent a note to the National City--”

Why didn’t they back away? Why didn’t they back right up, walking backward down the Rue de Castiglione, across the Rue de Rivoli, through the Tuileries Gardens, still walking backward as fast as they could till they grew vague and faded out across the river?

“This is Hamilton Rutherford, my fiancé.”

“We’ve met before.”

“At Pat’s, wasn’t it?”

“And last spring in the Ritz Bar.”

“Michael, where have you been keeping yourself?”

“Around here.” This agony. Previews of Hamilton Rutherford flashed before his eyes--a quick series of pictures, sentences. He remembered hearing that he had bought a seat in 1920 for a hundred and twenty-five thousand of borrowed money, and just before the break sold it for more than half a million. Not handsome like Michael, but vitally attractive, confident, authoritative, just the right height over Caroline there--Michael had always been too short for Caroline when they danced.

Rutherford was saying: “No, I’d like it very much if you’d come to the bachelor dinner. I’m taking the Ritz Bar from nine o’clock on. Then right after the wedding there’ll be a reception and breakfast at the Hotel George-Cinq.”

“And, Michael, George Packman is giving a party day after tomorrow at Chez Victor, and I want you to be sure and come. And also to tea Friday at Jebby West’s; she’d want to have you if she knew where you were. What’s your hotel, so we can send you an invitation? You see, the reason we decided to have it over here is because mother has been sick in a nursing home here and the whole clan is in Paris. Then Hamilton’s mother’s being here too--”

The entire clan; they had always hated him, except her mother; always discouraged his courtship. What a little counter he was in this game of families and money! Under his hat his brow sweated with the humiliation of the fact that for all his misery he was worth just exactly so many invitations. Frantically he began to mumble something about going away.

Then it happened--Caroline saw deep into him, and Michael knew that she saw. She saw through to his profound woundedness, and something quivered inside her, died out along the curve of her mouth and in her eyes. He had moved her. All the unforgettable impulses of first love had surged up once more; their hearts had in some way touched across two feet of Paris sunlight. She took her fiancé’s arm suddenly, as if to steady herself with the feel of it.

They parted. Michael walked quickly for a minute; then he stopped, pretending to look in a window, and saw them farther up the street, walking fast into the Place Vendôme, people with much to do.

He had things to do also--he had to get his laundry.

“Nothing will ever be the same again,” he said to himself. “She will never be happy in her marriage and I will never be happy at all any more.”

The two vivid years of his love for Caroline moved back around him like years in Einstein’s physics. Intolerable memories arose--of rides in the Long Island moonlight; of a happy time at Lake Placid with her cheeks so cold there, but warm just underneath the surface; of a despairing afternoon in a little café on Forty-eighth Street in the last sad months when their marriage had come to seem impossible.

“Come in,” he said aloud.

The concierge with a telegram; brusque because Mr. Curly’s clothes were a little shabby. Mr. Curly gave few tips; Mr. Curly was obviously a petit client.

Michael read the telegram.

“An answer?” the concierge asked.

“No,” said Michael, and then, on an impulse: “Look.”

“Too bad--too bad,” said the concierge. “Your grandfather is dead.”

“Not too bad,” said Michael. “It means that I come into a quarter of a million dollars.”

Too late by a single month; after the first flush of the news his misery was deeper than ever. Lying awake in bed that night, he listened endlessly to the long caravan of a circus moving through the street from one Paris fair to another.

When the last van had rumbled out of hearing and the corners of the furniture were pastel blue with the dawn, he was still thinking of the look in Caroline’s eyes that morning--the look that seemed to say: “Oh, why couldn’t you have done something about it? Why couldn’t you have been stronger, made me marry you? Don’t you see how sad I am?”

Michael’s fists clenched.

“Well, I won’t give up till the last moment,” he whispered. “I’ve had all the bad luck so far, and maybe it’s turned at last. One takes what one can get, up to the limit of one’s strength, and if I can’t have her, at least she’ll go into this marriage with some of me in her heart.”

II

Accordingly he went to the party at Chez Victor two days later, upstairs and into the little salon off the bar where the party was to assemble for cocktails. He was early; the only other occupant was a tall lean man of fifty. They spoke.

“You waiting for George Packman’s party?”

“Yes. My name’s Michael Curly.”

“My name’s--”

Michael failed to catch the name. They ordered a drink, and Michael supposed that the bride and groom were having a gay time.

“Too much so,” the other agreed, frowning. “I don’t see how they stand it. We all crossed on the boat together; five days of that crazy life and then two weeks of Paris. You”--he hesitated, smiling faintly--”you’ll excuse me for saying that your generation drinks too much.”

“Not Caroline.”

“No, not Caroline. She seems to take only a cocktail and a glass of champagne, and then she’s had enough, thank God. But Hamilton drinks too much and all this crowd of young people drink too much. Do you live in Paris?”

“For the moment,” said Michael.

“I don’t like Paris. My wife--that is to say, my ex-wife, Hamilton’s mother--lives in Paris.”

“You’re Hamilton Rutherford’s father?”

“I have that honor. And I’m not denying that I’m proud of what he’s done; it was just a general comment.”

“Of course.”

Michael glanced up nervously as four people came in. He felt suddenly that his dinner coat was old and shiny; he had ordered a new one that morning. The people who had come in were rich and at home in their richness with one another--a dark, lovely girl with a hysterical little laugh whom he had met before; two confident men whose jokes referred invariably to last night’s scandal and tonight’s potentialities, as if they had important rôles in a play that extended indefinitely into the past and the future. When Caroline arrived, Michael had scarcely a moment of her, but it was enough to note that, like all the others, she was strained and tired. She was pale beneath her rouge; there were shadows under her eyes. With a mixture of relief and wounded vanity, he found himself placed far from her and at another table; he needed a moment to adjust himself to his surroundings. This was not like the immature set in which he and Caroline had moved; the men were more than thirty and had an air of sharing the best of this world’s good. Next to him was Jebby West, whom he knew; and, on the other side, a jovial man who immediately began to talk to Michael about a stunt for the bachelor dinner: They were going to hire a French girl to appear with an actual baby in her arms, crying: “Hamilton, you can’t desert me now!” The idea seemed stale and unamusing to Michael, but its originator shook with anticipatory laughter.

Farther up the table there was talk of the market--another drop today, the most appreciable since the crash; people were kidding Rutherford about it: “Too bad, old man. You better not get married, after all.”

Michael asked the man on his left, “Has he lost a lot?”

“Nobody knows. He’s heavily involved, but he’s one of the smartest young men in Wall Street. Anyhow, nobody ever tells you the truth.”

It was a champagne dinner from the start, and toward the end it reached a pleasant level of conviviality, but Michael saw that all these people were too weary to be exhilarated by any ordinary stimulant; for weeks they had drunk cocktails before meals like Americans, wines and brandies like Frenchmen, beer like Germans, whisky-and-soda like the English, and as they were no longer in the twenties, this preposterous mélange, that was like some gigantic cocktail in a nightmare, served only to make them temporarily less conscious of the mistakes of the night before. Which is to say that it was not really a gay party; what gayety existed was displayed in the few who drank nothing at all.

But Michael was not tired, and the champagne stimulated him and made his misery less acute. He had been away from New York for more than eight months and most of the dance music was unfamiliar to him, but at the first bars of the “Painted Doll,” to which he and Caroline had moved through so much happiness and despair the previous summer, he crossed to Caroline’s table and asked her to dance.

She was lovely in a dress of thin ethereal blue, and the proximity of her crackly yellow hair, of her cool and tender gray eyes, turned his body clumsy and rigid; he stumbled with their first step on the floor. For a moment it seemed that there was nothing to say; he wanted to tell her about his inheritance, but the idea seemed abrupt, unprepared for.

“Michael, it’s so nice to be dancing with you again.”

He smiled grimly.

“I’m so happy you came,” she continued. “I was afraid maybe you’d be silly and stay away. Now we can be just good friends and natural together. Michael, I want you and Hamilton to like each other.”

The engagement was making her stupid; he had never heard her make such a series of obvious remarks before.

“I could kill him without a qualm,” he said pleasantly, “but he looks like a good man. He’s fine. What I want to know is, what happens to people like me who aren’t able to forget?”

As he said this he could not prevent his mouth from dropping suddenly, and glancing up, Caroline saw, and her heart quivered violently, as it had the other morning.

“Do you mind so much, Michael?”

“Yes.”

For a second as he said this, in a voice that seemed to have come up from his shoes, they were not dancing; they were simply clinging together. Then she leaned away from him and twisted her mouth into a lovely smile.

“I didn’t know what to do at first, Michael. I told Hamilton about you--that I’d cared for you an awful lot--but it didn’t worry him, and he was right. Because I’m over you now--yes, I am. And you’ll wake up some sunny morning and be over me just like that.”

He shook his head stubbornly.

“Oh, yes. We weren’t for each other. I’m pretty flighty, and I need somebody like Hamilton to decide things. It was that more than the question of--of--”

“Of money.” Again he was on the point of telling her what had happened, but again something told him it was not the time.

“Then how do you account for what happened when we met the other day,” he demanded helplessly--”what happened just now? When we just pour toward each other like we used to--as if we were one person, as if the same blood was flowing through both of us?”

“Oh, don’t,” she begged him. “You mustn’t talk like that; everything’s decided now. I love Hamilton with all my heart. It’s just that I remember certain things in the past and I feel sorry for you--for us--for the way we were.”

Over her shoulder, Michael saw a man come toward them to cut in. In a panic he danced her away, but inevitably the man came on.

“I’ve got to see you alone, if only for a minute,” Michael said quickly. “When can I?”

“I’ll be at Jebby West’s tea tomorrow,” she whispered as a hand fell politely upon Michael’s shoulder.

But he did not talk to her at Jebby West’s tea. Rutherford stood next to her, and each brought the other into all conversations. They left early. The next morning the wedding cards arrived in the first mail.

Then Michael, grown desperate with pacing up and down his room, determined on a bold stroke; he wrote to Hamilton Rutherford, asking him for a rendezvous the following afternoon. In a short telephone communication Rutherford agreed, but for a day later than Michael had asked. And the wedding was only six days away.

They were to meet in the bar of the Hotel Jena. Michael knew what he would say: “See here, Rutherford, do you realize the responsibility you’re taking in going through with this marriage? Do you realize the harvest of trouble and regret you’re sowing in persuading a girl into something contrary to the instincts of her heart?” He would explain that the barrier between Caroline and himself had been an artificial one and was now removed, and demand that the matter be put up to Caroline frankly before it was too late.

Rutherford would be angry, conceivably there would be a scene, but Michael felt that he was fighting for his life now.

He found Rutherford in conversation with an older man, whom Michael had met at several of the wedding parties.

“I saw what happened to most of my friends,” Rutherford was saying, “and I decided it wasn’t going to happen to me. It isn’t so difficult; if you take a girl with common sense, and tell her what’s what, and do your stuff damn well, and play decently square with her, it’s a marriage. If you stand for any nonsense at the beginning, it’s one of these arrangements--within five years the man gets out, or else the girl gobbles him up and you have the usual mess.”

“Right!” agreed his companion enthusiastically. “Hamilton, boy, you’re right.”

Michael’s blood boiled slowly.

“Doesn’t it strike you,” he inquired coldly, “that your attitude went out of fashion about a hundred years ago?”

“No, it didn’t,” said Rutherford pleasantly, but impatiently. “I’m as modern as anybody. I’d get married in an aeroplane next Saturday if it’d please my girl.”

“I don’t mean that way of being modern. You can’t take a sensitive woman--”

“Sensitive? Women aren’t so darn sensitive. It’s fellows like you who are sensitive; it’s fellows like you they exploit--all your devotion and kindness and all that. They read a couple of books and see a few pictures because they haven’t got anything else to do, and then they say they’re finer in grain than you are, and to prove it they take the bit in their teeth and tear off for a fare-you-well--just about as sensitive as a fire horse.”

“Caroline happens to be sensitive,” said Michael in a clipped voice.

At this point the other man got up to go; when the dispute about the check had been settled and they were alone, Rutherford leaned back to Michael as if a question had been asked him.

“Caroline’s more than sensitive,” he said. “She’s got sense.”

His combative eyes, meeting Michael’s, flickered with a gray light. “This all sounds pretty crude to you, Mr. Curly, but it seems to me that the average man nowadays just asks to be made a monkey of by some woman who doesn’t even get any fun out of reducing him to that level. There are darn few men who possess their wives any more, but I am going to be one of them.”

To Michael it seemed time to bring the talk back to the actual situation: “Do you realize the responsibility you’re taking?”

“I certainly do,” interrupted Rutherford. “I’m not afraid of responsibility. I’ll make the decisions--fairly, I hope, but anyhow they’ll be final.”

“What if you didn’t start right?” said Michael impetuously. “What if your marriage isn’t founded on mutual love?”

“I think I see what you mean,” Rutherford said, still pleasant. “And since you’ve brought it up, let me say that if you and Caroline had married, it wouldn’t have lasted three years. Do you know what your affair was founded on? On sorrow. You got sorry for each other. Sorrow’s a lot of fun for most women and for some men, but it seems to me that a marriage ought to be based on hope.” He looked at his watch and stood up.

“I’ve got to meet Caroline. Remember, you’re coming to the bachelor dinner day after tomorrow.”

Michael felt the moment slipping away. “Then Caroline’s personal feelings don’t count with you?” he demanded fiercely.

“Caroline’s tired and upset. But she has what she wants, and that’s the main thing.”

“Are you referring to yourself?” demanded Michael incredulously.

“Yes.”

“May I ask how long she’s wanted you?”

“About two years.” Before Michael could answer, he was gone.

During the next two days Michael floated in an abyss of helplessness. The idea haunted him that he had left something undone that would sever this knot drawn tighter under his eyes. He phoned Caroline, but she insisted that it was physically impossible for her to see him until the day before the wedding, for which day she granted him a tentative rendezvous. Then he went to the bachelor dinner, partly in fear of an evening alone at his hotel, partly from a feeling that by his presence at that function he was somehow nearer to Caroline, keeping her in sight.

The Ritz Bar had been prepared for the occasion by French and American banners and by a great canvas covering one wall, against which the guests were invited to concentrate their proclivities in breaking glasses.

At the first cocktail, taken at the bar, there were many slight spillings from many trembling hands, but later, with the champagne, there was a rising tide of laughter and occasional bursts of song.

Michael was surprised to find what a difference his new dinner coat, his new silk hat, his new, proud linen made in his estimate of himself; he felt less resentment toward all these people for being so rich and assured. For the first time since he had left college he felt rich and assured himself; he felt that he was part of all this, and even entered into the scheme of Johnson, the practical joker, for the appearance of the woman betrayed, now waiting tranquilly in the room across the hall.

“We don’t want to go too heavy,” Johnson said, “because I imagine Ham’s had a pretty anxious day already. Did you see Fullman Oil’s sixteen points off this morning?”

“Will that matter to him?” Michael asked, trying to keep the interest out of his voice.

“Naturally. He’s in heavily; he’s always in everything heavily. So far he’s had luck; anyhow, up to a month ago.”

The glasses were filled and emptied faster now, and men were shouting at one another across the narrow table. Against the bar a group of ushers was being photographed, and the flash light surged through the room in a stifling cloud.

“Now’s the time,” Johnson said. “You’re to stand by the door, remember, and we’re both to try and keep her from coming in--just till we get everybody’s attention.”

He went on out into the corridor, and Michael waited obediently by the door. Several minutes passed. Then Johnson reappeared with a curious expression on his face.

“There’s something funny about this.”

“Isn’t the girl there?”

“She’s there all right, but there’s another woman there, too; and it’s nobody we engaged either. She wants to see Hamilton Rutherford, and she looks as if she had something on her mind.”

They went out into the hall. Planted firmly in a chair near the door sat an American girl a little the worse for liquor, but with a determined expression on her face. She looked up at them with a jerk of her head.

“Well, j’tell him?” she demanded. “The name is Marjorie Collins, and he’ll know it. I’ve come a long way, and I want to see him now and quick, or there’s going to be more trouble than you ever saw.” She rose unsteadily to her feet.

“You go in and tell Ham,” whispered Johnson to Michael. “Maybe he’d better get out. I’ll keep her here.”

Back at the table, Michael leaned close to Rutherford’s ear and, with a certain grimness, whispered:

“A girl outside named Marjorie Collins says she wants to see you. She looks as if she wanted to make trouble.”

Hamilton Rutherford blinked and his mouth fell ajar; then slowly the lips came together in a straight line and he said in a crisp voice:

“Please keep her there. And send the head barman to me right away.”

Michael spoke to the barman, and then, without returning to the table, asked quietly for his coat and hat. Out in the hall again, he passed Johnson and the girl without speaking and went out into the Rue Cambon. Calling a cab, he gave the address of Caroline’s hotel.

His place was beside her now. Not to bring bad news, but simply to be with her when her house of cards came falling around her head.

Rutherford had implied that he was soft--well, he was hard enough not to give up the girl he loved without taking advantage of every chance within the pale of honor. Should she turn away from Rutherford, she would find him there.

She was in; she was surprised when he called, but she was still dressed and would be down immediately. Presently she appeared in a dinner gown, holding two blue telegrams in her hand. They sat down in armchairs in the deserted lobby.

“But, Michael, is the dinner over?”

“I wanted to see you, so I came away.”

“I’m glad.” Her voice was friendly, but matter-of-fact. “Because I’d just phoned your hotel that I had fittings and rehearsals all day tomorrow. Now we can have our talk after all.”

“You’re tired,” he guessed. “Perhaps I shouldn’t have come.”

“No. I was waiting up for Hamilton. Telegrams that may be important. He said he might go on somewhere, and that may mean any hour, so I’m glad I have someone to talk to.”

Michael winced at the impersonality in the last phrase.

“Don’t you care when he gets home?”

“Naturally,” she said, laughing, “but I haven’t got much say about it, have I?”

“Why not?”

“I couldn’t start by telling him what he could and couldn’t do.”

“Why not?”

“He wouldn’t stand for it.”

“He seems to want merely a housekeeper,” said Michael ironically.

“Tell me about your plans, Michael,” she asked quickly.

“My plans? I can’t see any future after the day after tomorrow. The only real plan I ever had was to love you.”

Their eyes brushed past each other’s, and the look he knew so well was staring out at him from hers. Words flowed quickly from his heart:

“Let me tell you just once more how well I’ve loved you, never wavering for a moment, never thinking of another girl. And now when I think of all the years ahead without you, without any hope, I don’t want to live, Caroline darling. I used to dream about our home, our children, about holding you in my arms and touching your face and hands and hair that used to belong to me, and now I just can’t wake up.”

Caroline was crying softly. “Poor Michael--poor Michael.” Her hand reached out and her fingers brushed the lapel of his dinner coat. “I was so sorry for you the other night. You looked so thin, and as if you needed a new suit and somebody to take care of you.” She sniffled and looked more closely at his coat. “Why, you’ve got a new suit! And a new silk hat! Why, Michael, how swell!” She laughed, suddenly cheerful through her tears. “You must have come into money, Michael; I never saw you so well turned out.”

For a moment, at her reaction, he hated his new clothes.

“I have come into money,” he said. “My grandfather left me about a quarter of a million dollars.”

“Why, Michael,” she cried, “how perfectly swell! I can’t tell you how gladI am. I’ve always thought you were the sort of person who ought to have money.”

“Yes, just too late to make a difference.”

The revolving door from the street groaned around and Hamilton Rutherford came into the lobby. His face was flushed, his eyes were restless and impatient.

“Hello, darling; hello, Mr. Curly.” He bent and kissed Caroline. “I broke away for a minute to find out if I had any telegrams. I see you’ve got them there.” Taking them from her, he remarked to Curly, “That was an odd business there in the bar, wasn’t it? Especially as I understand some of you had a joke fixed up in the same line.” He opened one of the telegrams, closed it and turned to Caroline with the divided expression of a man carrying two things in his head at once.

“A girl I haven’t seen for two years turned up,” he said. “It seemed to be some clumsy form of blackmail, for I haven’t and never have had any sort of obligation toward her whatever.”

“What happened?”

“The head barman had a Sûreté Générale man there in ten minutes and it was settled in the hall. The French blackmail laws make ours look like a sweet wish, and I gather they threw a scare into her that she’ll remember. But it seems wiser to tell you.”

“Are you implying that I mentioned the matter?” said Michael stiffly.

“No,” Rutherford said slowly. “No, you were just going to be on hand. And since you’re here, I’ll tell you some news that will interest you even more.”

He handed Michael one telegram and opened the other.

“This is in code,” Michael said.

“So is this. But I’ve got to know all the words pretty well this last week. The two of them together mean that I’m due to start life all over.”

Michael saw Caroline’s face grow a shade paler, but she sat quiet as a mouse.

“It was a mistake and I stuck to it too long,” continued Rutherford. “So you see I don’t have all the luck, Mr. Curly. By the way, they tell me you’ve come into money.”

“Yes,” said Michael.

“There we are, then.” Rutherford turned to Caroline. “You understand, darling, that I’m not joking or exaggerating. I’ve lost almost every cent I had and I’m starting life over.”

Two pairs of eyes were regarding her--Rutherford’s noncommittal and unrequiring, Michael’s hungry, tragic, pleading. In a minute she had raised herself from the chair and with a little cry thrown herself into Hamilton Rutherford’s arms.

“Oh, darling,” she cried, “what does it matter! It’s better; I like it better, honestly I do! I want to start that way; I want to! Oh, please don’t worry or be sad even for a minute!”

“All right, baby,” said Rutherford. His hand stroked her hair gently for a moment; then he took his arm from around her.

“I promised to join the party for an hour,” he said. “So I’ll say good night, and I want you to go to bed soon and get a good sleep. Good night, Mr. Curly. I’m sorry to have let you in for all these financial matters.”

But Michael had already picked up his hat and cane. “I’ll go along with you,” he said.

III

It was such a fine morning. Michael’s cutaway hadn’t been delivered, so he felt rather uncomfortable passing before the cameras and moving-picture machines in front of the little church on the Avenue George-Cinq.

It was such a clean, new church that it seemed unforgivable not to be dressed properly, and Michael, white and shaky after a sleepless night, decided to stand in the rear. From there he looked at the back of Hamilton Rutherford, and the lacy, filmy back of Caroline, and the fat back of George Packman, which looked unsteady, as if it wanted to lean against the bride and groom.

The ceremony went on for a long time under the gay flags and pennons overhead, under the thick beams of June sunlight slanting down through the tall windows upon the well-dressed people.

As the procession, headed by the bride and groom, started down the aisle, Michael realized with alarm he was just where everyone would dispense with their parade stiffness, become informal and speak to him.

So it turned out. Rutherford and Caroline spoke first to him; Rutherford grim with the strain of being married, and Caroline lovelier than he had ever seen her, floating all softly down through the friends and relatives of her youth, down through the past and forward to the future by the sunlit door.

Michael managed to murmur, “Beautiful, simply beautiful,” and then other people passed and spoke to him--old Mrs. Dandy, straight from her sickbed and looking remarkably well, or carrying it off like the very fine old lady she was; and Rutherford’s father and mother, ten years divorced, but walking side by side and looking made for each other and proud. Then all Caroline’s sisters and their husbands and her little nephews in Eton suits, and then a long parade, all speaking to Michael because he was still standing paralyzed just at that point where the procession broke.

He wondered what would happen now. Cards had been issued for a reception at the George-Cinq; an expensive enough place, heaven knew. Would Rutherford try to go through with that on top of those disastrous telegrams? Evidently, for the procession outside was streaming up there through the June morning, three by three and four by four. On the corner the long dresses of girls, five abreast, fluttered many-colored in the wind. Girls had become gossamer again, perambulatory flora; such lovely fluttering dresses in the bright noon wind.

Michael needed a drink; he couldn’t face that reception line without a drink. Diving into a side doorway of the hotel, he asked for the bar, whither a chasseur led him through half a kilometer of new American-looking passages.

But--how did it happen?--the bar was full. There were ten--fifteen men and two--four girls, all from the wedding, all needing a drink. There were cocktails and champagne in the bar; Rutherford’s cocktails and champagne, as it turned out, for he had engaged the whole bar and the ballroom and the two great reception rooms and all the stairways leading up and down, and windows looking out over the whole square block of Paris. By and by Michael went and joined the long, slow drift of the receiving line. Through a flowery mist of “Such a lovely wedding,” “My dear, you were simply lovely,” “You’re a lucky man, Rutherford” he passed down the line. When Michael came to Caroline, she took a single step forward and kissed him on the lips, but he felt no contact in the kiss; it was unreal and he floated on away from it. Old Mrs. Dandy, who had always liked him, held his hand for a minute and thanked him for the flowers he had sent when he heard she was ill.

“I’m so sorry not to have written; you know, we old ladies are grateful for--” The flowers, the fact that she had not written, the wedding--Michael saw that they all had the same relative importance to her now; she had married off five other children and seen two of the marriages go to pieces, and this scene, so poignant, so confusing to Michael, appeared to her simply a familiar charade in which she had played her part before.

A buffet luncheon with champagne was already being served at small tables and there was an orchestra playing in the empty ballroom. Michael sat down with Jebby West; he was still a little embarrassed at not wearing a morning coat, but he perceived now that he was not alone in the omission and felt better. “Wasn’t Caroline divine?” Jebby West said. “So entirely self-possessed. I asked her this morning if she wasn’t a little nervous at stepping off like this. And she said, ‘Why should I be? I’ve been after him for two years, and now I’m just happy, that’s all.’“

“It must be true,” said Michael gloomily.

“What?”

“What you just said.”

He had been stabbed, but, rather to his distress, he did not feel the wound.

He asked Jebby to dance. Out on the floor, Rutherford’s father and mother were dancing together.

“It makes me a little sad, that,” she said. “Those two hadn’t met for years; both of them were married again and she divorced again. She went to the station to meet him when he came over for Caroline’s wedding, and invited him to stay at her house in the Avenue du Bois with a whole lot of other people, perfectly proper, but he was afraid his wife would hear about it and not like it, so he went to a hotel. Don’t you think that’s sort of sad?”

An hour or so later Michael realized suddenly that it was afternoon. In one corner of the ballroom an arrangement of screens like a moving-picture stage had been set up and photographers were taking official pictures of the bridal party. The bridal party, still as death and pale as wax under the bright lights, appeared, to the dancers circling the modulated semidarkness of the ballroom, like those jovial or sinister groups that one comes upon in The Old Mill at an amusement park.

After the bridal party had been photographed, there was a group of the ushers; then the bridesmaids, the families, the children. Later, Caroline, active and excited, having long since abandoned the repose implicit in her flowing dress and great bouquet, came and plucked Michael off the floor.

“Now we’ll have them take one of just old friends.” Her voice implied that this was best, most intimate of all. “Come here, Jebby, George--not you, Hamilton; this is just my friends--Sally--”

A little after that, what remained of formality disappeared and the hours flowed easily down the profuse stream of champagne. In the modern fashion, Hamilton Rutherford sat at the table with his arm about an old girl of his and assured his guests, which included not a few bewildered but enthusiastic Europeans, that the party was not nearly at an end; it was to reassemble at Zelli’s after midnight. Michael saw Mrs. Dandy, not quite over her illness, rise to go and become caught in polite group after group, and he spoke of it to one of her daughters, who thereupon forcibly abducted her mother and called her car. Michael felt very considerate and proud of himself after having done this, and drank much more champagne.

“It’s amazing,” George Packman was telling him enthusiastically. “This show will cost Ham about five thousand dollars, and I understand they’ll be just about his last. But did he countermand a bottle of champagne or a flower? Not he! He happens to have it--that young man. Do you know that T. G. Vance offered him a salary of fifty thousand dollars a year ten minutes before the wedding this morning? In another year he’ll be back with the millionaires.”

The conversation was interrupted by a plan to carry Rutherford out on communal shoulders--a plan which six of them put into effect, and then stood in the four-o’clock sunshine waving good-by to the bride and groom. But there must have been a mistake somewhere, for five minutes later Michael saw both bride and groom descending the stairway to the reception, each with a glass of champagne held defiantly on high.

“This is our way of doing things,” he thought. “Generous and fresh and free; a sort of Virginia-plantation hospitality, but at a different pace now, nervous as a ticker tape.”

Standing unself-consciously in the middle of the room to see which was the American ambassador, he realized with a start that he hadn’t really thought of Caroline for hours. He looked about him with a sort of alarm, and then he saw her across the room, very bright and young, and radiantly happy. He saw Rutherford near her, looking at her as if he could never look long enough, and as Michael watched them they seemed to recede as he had wished them to do that day in the Rue de Castiglione--recede and fade off into joys and griefs of their own, into the years that would take the toll of Rutherford’s fine pride and Caroline’s young, moving beauty; fade far away, so that now he could scarcely see them, as if they were shrouded in something as misty as her white, billowing dress.

Michael was cured. The ceremonial function, with its pomp and its revelry, had stood for a sort of initiation into a life where even his regret could not follow them. All the bitterness melted out of him suddenly and the world reconstituted itself out of the youth and happiness that was all around him, profligate as the spring sunshine. He was trying to remember which one of the bridesmaids he had made a date to dine with tonight as he walked forward to bid Hamilton and Caroline Rutherford good-by.

THE BOWL

Saturday Evening Post (21 January 1928)

There was a man in my class at Princeton who never went to football games. He spent his Saturday afternoons delving for minutiae about Greek athletics and the somewhat fixed battles between Christians and wild beasts under the Antonines. Lately--several years out of college--he has discovered football players and is making etchings of them in the manner of the late George Bellows. But he was once unresponsive to the very spectacle at his door, and I suspect the originality of his judgments on what is beautiful, what is remarkable and what is fun.

I reveled in football, as audience, amateur statistician and foiled participant--for I had played in prep school, and once there was a headline in the school newspaper: “Deering and Mullins Star Against Taft in Stiff Game Saturday.” When I came in to lunch after the battle the school stood up and clapped and the visiting coach shook hands with me and prophesied--incorrectly--that I was going to be heard from. The episode is laid away in the most pleasant lavender of my past. That year I grew very tall and thin, and when at Princeton the following fall I looked anxiously over the freshman candidates and saw the polite disregard with which they looked back at me, I realized that that particular dream was over. Keene said he might make me into a very fair pole vaulter--and he did--but it was a poor substitute; and my terrible disappointment that I wasn’t going to be a great football player was probably the foundation of my friendship with Dolly Harlan. I want to begin this story about Dolly with a little rehashing of the Yale game up at New Haven, sophomore year.

Dolly was started at halfback; this was his first big game. I roomed with him and I had scented something peculiar about his state of mind, so I didn’t let him out of the corner of my eye during the whole first half. With field glasses I could see the expression on his face; it was strained and incredulous, as it had been the day of his father’s death, and it remained so, long after any nervousness had had time to wear off. I thought he was sick and wondered why Keene didn’t see and take him out; it wasn’t until later that I learned what was the matter.

It was the Yale Bowl. The size of it or the enclosed shape of it or the height of the sides had begun to get on Dolly’s nerves when the team practiced there the day before. In that practice he dropped one or two punts, for almost the first time in his life, and he began thinking it was because of the Bowl.

There is a new disease called agoraphobia--afraid of crowds--and another called siderodromophobia--afraid of railroad traveling--and my friend Doctor Glock, the psychoanalyst, would probably account easily for Dolly’s state of mind. But here’s what Dolly told me afterward:

“Yale would punt and I’d look up. The minute I looked up, the sides of that damn pan would seem to go shooting up too. Then when the ball started to come down, the sides began leaning forward and bending over me until I could see all the people on the top seats screaming at me and shaking their fists. At the last minute I couldn’t see the ball at all, but only the Bowl; every time it was just luck that I was under it and every time I juggled it in my hands.”

To go back to the game. I was in the cheering section with a good seat on the forty-yard line--good, that is, except when a very vague graduate, who had lost his friends and his hat, stood up in front of me at intervals and faltered, “Stob Ted Coy!” under the impression that we were watching a game played a dozen years before. When he realized finally that he was funny he began performing for the gallery and aroused a chorus of whistles and boos until he was dragged unwillingly under the stand.

It was a good game--what is known in college publications as a historic game. A picture of the team that played it now hangs in every barber shop in Princeton, with Captain Gottlieb in the middle wearing a white sweater, to show that they won a championship. Yale had had a poor season, but they had the breaks in the first quarter, which ended 3 to 0 in their favor.

Between quarters I watched Dolly. He walked around panting and sucking a water bottle and still wearing that strained stunned expression. Afterward he told me he was saying over and over to himself: “I’ll speak to Roper. I’ll tell him between halves. I’ll tell him I can’t go through this any more.” Several times already he had felt an almost irresistible impulse to shrug his shoulders and trot off the field, for it was not only this unexpected complex about the Bowl; the truth was that Dolly fiercely and bitterly hated the game.

He hated the long, dull period of training, the element of personal conflict, the demand on his time, the monotony of the routine and the nervous apprehension of disaster just before the end. Sometimes he imagined that all the others detested it as much as he did, and fought down their aversion as he did and carried it around inside them like a cancer that they were afraid to recognize. Sometimes he imagined that a man here and there was about to tear off the mask and say, “Dolly, do you hate this lousy business as much as I do?”

His feeling had begun back at St. Regis’ School and he had come up to Princeton with the idea that he was through with football forever. But upper classmen from St. Regis kept stopping him on the campus and asking him how much he weighed, and he was nominated for vice president of our class on the strength of his athletic reputation--and it was autumn, with achievement in the air. He wandered down to freshman practice one afternoon, feeling oddly lost and dissatisfied, and smelled the turf and smelled the thrilling season. In half an hour he was lacing on a pair of borrowed shoes and two weeks later he was captain of the freshman team.

Once committed, he saw that he had made a mistake; he even considered leaving college. For, with his decision to play, Dolly assumed a moral responsibility, personal to him, besides. To lose or to let down, or to be let down, was simply intolerable to him. It offended his Scotch sense of waste. Why sweat blood for an hour with only defeat at the end?

Perhaps the worst of it was that he wasn’t really a star player. No team in the country could have spared using him, but he could do no spectacular thing superlatively well, neither run, pass nor kick. He was five-feet-eleven and weighed a little more than a hundred and sixty; he was a first-rate defensive man, sure in interference, a fair line plunger and a fair punter. He never fumbled and he was never inadequate; his presence, his constant cold sure aggression, had a strong effect on other men. Morally, he captained any team he played on and that was why Roper had spent so much time trying to get length in his kicks all season--he wanted him in the game.

In the second quarter Yale began to crack. It was a mediocre team composed of flashy material, but uncoordinated because of injuries and impending changes in the Yale coaching system. The quarterback, Josh Logan, had been a wonder at Exeter--I could testify to that--where games can be won by the sheer confidence and spirit of a single man. But college teams are too highly organized to respond so simply and boyishly, and they recover less easily from fumbles and errors of judgment behind the line.

So, with nothing to spare, with much grunting and straining, Princeton moved steadily down the field. On the Yale twenty-yard line things suddenly happened. A Princeton pass was intercepted; the Yale man, excited by his own opportunity, dropped the ball and it bobbed leisurely in the general direction of the Yale goal. Jack Devlin and Dolly Harlan of Princeton and somebody--I forget who--from Yale were all about the same distance from it. What Dolly did in that split second was all instinct; it presented no problem to him. He was a natural athlete and in a crisis his nervous system thought for him. He might have raced the two others for the ball; instead, he took out the Yale man with savage precision while Devlin scooped up the ball and ran ten yards for a touchdown.

This was when the sports writers still saw games through the eyes of Ralph Henry Barbour. The press box was right behind me, and as Princeton lined up to kick goal I heard the radio man ask:

“Who’s Number 22?”

“Harlan.”

“Harlan is going to kick goal. Devlin, who made the touchdown, comes from Lawrenceville School. He is twenty years old. The ball went true between the bars.”

Between the halves, as Dolly sat shaking with fatigue in the locker room, Little, the back-field coach, came and sat beside him.

“When the ends are right on you, don’t be afraid to make a fair catch,” Little said. “That big Havemeyer is liable to jar the ball right out of your hands.”

Now was the time to say it: “I wish you’d tell Bill--” But the words twisted themselves into a trivial question about the wind. His feeling would have to be explained, gone into, and there wasn’t time. His own self seemed less important in this room, redolent with the tired breath, the ultimate effort, the exhaustion of ten other men. He was shamed by a harsh sudden quarrel that broke out between an end and tackle; he resented the former players in the room--especially the graduate captain of two years before, who was a little tight and over-vehement about the referee’s favoritism. It seemed terrible to add one more jot to all this strain and annoyance. But he might have come out with it all the same if Little hadn’t kept saying in a low voice: “What a take-out, Dolly! What a beautiful take-out!” and if Little’s hand hadn’t rested there, patting his shoulder.

II

In the third quarter Joe Dougherty kicked an easy field goal from the twenty-yard line and we felt safe, until toward twilight a series of desperate forward passes brought Yale close to a score. But Josh Logan had exhausted his personality in sheer bravado and he was outguessed by the defense at the last. As the substitutes came running in, Princeton began a last march down the field. Then abruptly it was over and the crowd poured from the stands, and Gottlieb, grabbing the ball, leaped up in the air. For a while everything was confused and crazy and happy; I saw some freshmen try to carry Dolly, but they were shy and he got away.

We all felt a great personal elation. We hadn’t beaten Yale for three years and now everything was going to be all right. It meant a good winter at college, something pleasant and slick to think back upon in the damp cold days after Christmas, when a bleak futility settles over a university town. Down on the field, an improvised and uproarious team ran through plays with a derby, until the snake dance rolled over them and blotted them out. Outside the Bowl, I saw two abysmally gloomy and disgusted Yale men get into a waiting taxi and in a tone of final abnegation tell the driver “New York.” You couldn’t find Yale men; in the manner of the vanquished, they had absolutely melted away.

I begin Dolly’s story with my memories of this game because that evening the girl walked into it. She was a friend of Josephine Pickman’s and the four of us were going to drive up to the Midnight Frolic in New York. When I suggested to him that he’d be too tired he laughed dryly--he’d have gone anywhere that night to get the feel and rhythm of football out of his head. He walked into the hall of Josephine’s house at half-past six, looking as if he’d spent the day in the barber shop save for a small and fetching strip of court plaster over one eye. He was one of the handsomest men I ever knew, anyhow; he appeared tall and slender in street clothes, his hair was dark, his eyes big and sensitive and dark, his nose aquiline and, like all his features, somehow romantic. It didn’t occur to me then, but I suppose he was pretty vain--not conceited, but vain--for he always dressed in brown or soft light gray, with black ties, and people don’t match themselves so successfully by accident.

He was smiling a little to himself as he came in. He shook my hand buoyantly and said, “Why, what a surprise to meet you here, Mr. Deering,” in a kidding way. Then he saw the two girls through the long hall, one dark and shining, like himself, and one with gold hair that was foaming and frothing in the firelight, and said in the happiest voice I’ve ever heard, “Which one is mine?”

“Either you want, I guess.”

“Seriously, which is Pickman?”

“She’s light.”

“Then the other one belongs to me. Isn’t that the idea?”

“I think I’d better warn them about the state you’re in.”

Miss Thorne, small, flushed and lovely, stood beside the fire. Dolly went right up to her.

“You’re mine,” he said; “you belong to me.”

She looked at him coolly, making up her mind; suddenly she liked him and smiled. But Dolly wasn’t satisfied. He wanted to do something incredibly silly or startling to express his untold jubilation that he was free.

“I love you,” he said. He took her hand, his brown velvet eyes regarding her tenderly, unseeingly, convincingly. “I love you.”

For a moment the corners of her lips fell as if in dismay that she had met someone stronger, more confident, more challenging than herself. Then, as she drew herself together visibly, he dropped her hand and the little scene in which he had expended the tension of the afternoon was over.

It was a bright cold November night and the rush of air past the open car brought a vague excitement, a sense that we were hurrying at top speed toward a brilliant destiny. The roads were packed with cars that came to long inexplicable halts while police, blinded by the lights, walked up and down the line giving obscure commands. Before we had been gone an hour New York began to be a distant hazy glow against the sky.

Miss Thorne, Josephine told me, was from Washington, and had just come down from a visit in Boston.

“For the game?” I said.

“No; she didn’t go to the game.”

“That’s too bad. If you’d let me know I could have picked up a seat--”

“She wouldn’t have gone. Vienna never goes to games.”

I remembered now that she hadn’t even murmured the conventional congratulations to Dolly.

“She hates football. Her brother was killed in a prep-school game last year. I wouldn’t have brought her tonight, but when we got home from the game I saw she’d been sitting there holding a book open at the same page all afternoon. You see, he was this wonderful kid and her family saw it happen and naturally never got over it.”

“But does she mind being with Dolly?”

“Of course not. She just ignores football. If anyone mentions it she simply changes the subject.”

I was glad that it was Dolly and not, say, Jack Devlin who was sitting back there with her. And I felt rather sorry for Dolly. However strongly he felt about the game, he must have waited for some acknowledgment that his effort had existed.

He was probably giving her credit for a subtle consideration, yet, as the images of the afternoon flashed into his mind he might have welcomed a compliment to which he could respond “What nonsense!” Neglected entirely, the images would become insistent and obtrusive.

I turned around and was somewhat startled to find that Miss Thorne was in Dolly’s arms; I turned quickly back and decided to let them take care of themselves.

As we waited for a traffic light on upper Broadway, I saw a sporting extra headlined with the score of the game. The green sheet was more real than the afternoon itself--succinct, condensed and clear:

PRINCETON CONQUERS YALE 10-3

SEVENTY THOUSAND WATCH TIGER TRIM

BULLDOG

DEVLIN SCORES ON YALE FUMBLE

There it was--not like the afternoon, muddled, uncertain, patchy and scrappy to the end, but nicely mounted now in the setting of the past:

PRINCETON, 10; YALE, 3

Achievement was a curious thing, I thought. Dolly was largely responsible for that. I wondered if all things that screamed in the headlines were simply arbitrary accents. As if people should ask, “What does it look like?”

“It looks most like a cat.”

“Well, then, let’s call it a cat.”

My mind, brightened by the lights and the cheerful tumult, suddenly grasped the fact that all achievement was a placing of emphasis--a molding of the confusion of life into form.

Josephine stopped in front of the New Amsterdam Theater, where her chauffeur met us and took the car. We were early, but a small buzz of excitement went up from the undergraduates waiting in the lobby--”There’s Dolly Harlan”--and as we moved toward the elevator several acquaintances came up to shake his hand. Apparently oblivious to these ceremonies, Miss Thorne caught my eye and smiled. I looked at her with curiosity; Josephine had imparted the rather surprising information that she was just sixteen years old. I suppose my return smile was rather patronizing, but instantly I realized that the fact could not be imposed on. In spite of all the warmth and delicacy of her face, the figure that somehow reminded me of an exquisite, romanticized little ballerina, there was a quality in her that was as hard as steel. She had been brought up in Rome, Vienna and Madrid, with flashes of Washington; her father was one of those charming American diplomats who, with fine obstinacy, try to re-create the Old World in their children by making their education rather more royal than that of princes. Miss Thorne was sophisticated. In spite of all the abandon of American young people, sophistication is still a Continental monopoly.

We walked in upon a number in which a dozen chorus girls in orange and black were racing wooden horses against another dozen dressed in Yale blue. When the lights went on, Dolly was recognized and some Princeton students set up a clatter of approval with the little wooden hammers given out for applause; he moved his chair unostentatiously into a shadow.

Almost immediately a flushed and very miserable young man appeared beside our table. In better form he would have been extremely prepossessing; indeed, he flashed a charming and dazzling smile at Dolly, as if requesting his permission to speak to Miss Thorne.

Then he said, “I thought you weren’t coming to New York tonight.”

“Hello, Carl.” She looked up at him coolly.

“Hello, Vienna. That’s just it; ‘Hello Vienna--Hello Carl.’ But why? I thought you weren’t coming to New York tonight.”

Miss Thorne made no move to introduce the man, but we were conscious of his somewhat raised voice.

“I thought you promised me you weren’t coming.”

“I didn’t expect to, child. I just left Boston this morning.”

“And who did you meet in Boston--the fascinating Tunti?” he demanded.

“I didn’t meet anyone, child.”

“Oh, yes, you did! You met the fascinating Tunti and you discussed living on the Riviera.” She didn’t answer. “Why are you so dishonest, Vienna?” he went on. “Why did you tell me on the phone--”

“I am not going to be lectured,” she said, her tone changing suddenly. “I told you if you took another drink I was through with you. I’m a person of my word and I’d be enormously happy if you went away.”

“Vienna!” he cried in a sinking, trembling voice.

At this point I got up and danced with Josephine. When we came back there were people at the table--the men to whom we were to hand over Josephine and Miss Thorne, for I had allowed for Dolly being tired, and several others. One of them was Al Ratoni, the composer, who, it appeared, had been entertained at the embassy in Madrid. Dolly Harlan had drawn his chair aside and was watching the dancers. Just as the lights went down for a new number a man came up out of the darkness and leaning over Miss Thorne whispered in her ear. She started and made a motion to rise, but he put his hand on her shoulder and forced her down. They began to talk together in low excited voices.

The tables were packed close at the old Frolic. There was a man rejoining the party next to us and I couldn’t help hearing what he said:

“A young fellow just tried to kill himself down in the wash room. He shot himself through the shoulder, but they got the pistol away before--”

A minute later his voice again: “Carl Sanderson, they said.”

When the number was over I looked around. Vienna Thorne was staring very rigidly at Miss Lillian Lorraine, who was rising toward the ceiling as an enormous telephone doll. The man who had leaned over Vienna was gone and the others were obliviously unaware that anything had happened. I turned to Dolly and suggested that he and I had better go, and after a glance at Vienna in which reluctance, weariness and then resignation were mingled, he consented. On the way to the hotel I told Dolly what had happened.

“Just some souse,” he remarked after a moment’s fatigued consideration. “He probably tried to miss himself and get a little sympathy. I suppose those are the sort of things a really attractive girl is up against all the time.”

This wasn’t my attitude. I could see that mussed white shirt front with very young blood pumping over it, but I didn’t argue, and after a while Dolly said, “I suppose that sounds brutal, but it seems a little soft and weak, doesn’t it? Perhaps that’s just the way I feel tonight.”

When Dolly undressed I saw that he was a mass of bruises, but he assured me that none of them would keep him awake. Then I told him why Miss Thorne hadn’t mentioned the game and he woke up suddenly; the familiar glitter came back into his eyes.

“So that was it! I wondered. I thought maybe you’d told her not to say anything about it.”

Later, when the lights had been out half an hour, he suddenly said “I see” in a loud clear voice. I don’t know whether he was awake or asleep.

III

I’ve put down as well as I can everything I can remember about the first meeting between Dolly and Miss Vienna Thorne. Reading it over, it sounds casual and insignificant, but the evening lay in the shadow of the game and all that happened seemed like that. Vienna went back to Europe almost immediately and for fifteen months passed out of Dolly’s life.

It was a good year--it still rings true in my memory as a good year. Sophomore year is the most dramatic at Princeton, just as junior year is at Yale. It’s not only the elections to the upperclass clubs but also everyone’s destiny begins to work itself out. You can tell pretty well who’s going to come through, not only by their immediate success but by the way they survive failure. Life was very full for me. I made the board of the Princetonian, and our house burned down out in Dayton, and I had a silly half-hour fist fight in the gymnasium with a man who later became one of my closest friends, and in March Dolly and I joined the upperclass club we’d always wanted to be in. I fell in love, too, but it would be an irrelevancy to tell about that here.

April came and the first real Princeton weather, the lazy green-and-gold afternoons and the bright thrilling nights haunted with the hour of senior singing. I was happy, and Dolly would have been happy except for the approach of another football season. He was playing baseball, which excused him from spring practice, but the bands were beginning to play faintly in the distance. They rose to concert pitch during the summer, when he had to answer the question, “Are you going back early for football?” a dozen times a day. On the fifteenth of September he was down in the dust and heat of late-summer Princeton, crawling over the ground on all fours, trotting through the old routine and turning himself into just the sort of specimen that I’d have given ten years of my life to be.

From first to last, he hated it, and never let down for a minute. He went into the Yale game that fall weighing a hundred and fifty-three pounds, though that wasn’t the weight printed in the paper, and he and Joe McDonald were the only men who played all through that disastrous game. He could have been captain by lifting his finger--but that involves some stuff that I know confidentially and can’t tell. His only horror was that by some chance he’d have to accept it. Two seasons! He didn’t even talk about it now. He left the room or the club when the conversation veered around to football. He stopped announcing to me that he “wasn’t going through that business any more.” This time it took the Christmas holidays to drive that unhappy look from his eyes.

Then at the New Year Miss Vienna Thorne came home from Madrid and in February a man named Case brought her down to the Senior Prom.

IV

She was even prettier than she had been before, softer, externally at least, and a tremendous success. People passing her on the street jerked their heads quickly to look at her--a frightened look, as if they realized that they had almost missed something. She was temporarily tired of European men, she told me, letting me gather that there had been some sort of unfortunate love affair. She was coming out in Washington next fall.

Vienna and Dolly. She disappeared with him for two hours the night of the club dances, and Harold Case was in despair. When they walked in again at midnight I thought they were the handsomest pair I saw. They were both shining with that peculiar luminosity that dark people sometimes have. Harold Case took one look at them and went proudly home.

Vienna came back a week later, solely to see Dolly. Late that evening I had occasion to go up to the deserted club for a book and they called me from the rear terrace, which opens out to the ghostly stadium and to an unpeopled sweep of night. It was an hour of thaw, with spring voices in the warm wind, and wherever there was light enough you could see drops glistening and falling. You could feel the cold melting out of the stars and the bare trees and shrubbery toward Stony Brook turning lush in the darkness.

They were sitting together on a wicker bench, full of themselves and romantic and happy.

“We had to tell someone about it,” they said.

“Now can I go?”

“No, Jeff,” they insisted; “stay here and envy us. We’re in the stage where we want someone to envy us. Do you think we’re a good match?”

What could I say?

“Dolly’s going to finish at Princeton next year,” Vienna went on, “but we’re going to announce it after the season in Washington in the autumn.”

I was vaguely relieved to find that it was going to be a long engagement.

“I approve of you, Jeff,” Vienna said.

“I want Dolly to have more friends like you. You’re stimulating for him--you have ideas. I told Dolly he could probably find others like you if he looked around his class.”

Dolly and I both felt a little uncomfortable.

“She doesn’t want me to be a Babbitt,” he said lightly.

“Dolly’s perfect,” asserted Vienna. “He’s the most beautiful thing that ever lived, and you’ll find I’m very good for him, Jeff. Already I’ve helped him make up his mind about one important thing.” I guessed what was coming. “He’s going to speak a little piece if they bother him about playing football next autumn, aren’t you, child?”

“Oh, they won’t bother me,” said Dolly uncomfortably. “It isn’t like that--”

“Well, they’ll try to bully you into it, morally.”

“Oh, no,” he objected. “It isn’t like that. Don’t let’s talk about it now, Vienna. It’s such a swell night.”

Such a swell night! When I think of my own love passages at Princeton, I always summon up that night of Dolly’s, as if it had been I and not he who sat there with youth and hope and beauty in his arms.

Dolly’s mother took a place on Ram’s Point, Long Island, for the summer, and late in August I went East to visit him. Vienna had been there a week when I arrived, and my impressions were: first, that he was very much in love; and, second, that it was Vienna’s party. All sorts of curious people used to drop in to see Vienna. I wouldn’t mind them now--I’m more sophisticated--but then they seemed rather a blot on the summer. They were all slightly famous in one way or another, and it was up to you to find out how. There was a lot of talk, and especially there was much discussion of Vienna’s personality. Whenever I was alone with any of the other guests we discussed Vienna’s sparkling personality. They thought I was dull, and most of them thought Dolly was dull. He was better in his line than any of them were in theirs, but his was the only specialty that wasn’t mentioned. Still, I felt vaguely that I was being improved and I boasted about knowing most of those people in the ensuing year, and was annoyed when people failed to recognize their names.

The day before I left, Dolly turned his ankle playing tennis, and afterward he joked about it to me rather somberly.

“If I’d only broken it things would be so much easier. Just a quarter of an inch more bend and one of the bones would have snapped. By the way, look here.”

He tossed me a letter. It was a request that he report at Princeton for practice on September fifteenth and that meanwhile he begin getting himself in good condition.

“You’re not going to play this fall?”

He shook his head.

“No. I’m not a child any more. I’ve played for two years and I want this year free. If I went through it again it’d be a piece of moral cowardice.”

“I’m not arguing, but--would you have taken this stand if it hadn’t been for Vienna?”

“Of course I would. If I let myself be bullied into it I’d never be able to look myself in the face again.”

Two weeks later I got the following letter:

DEAR JEFF:

When you read this you’ll be somewhat surprised. I have, actually, this time, broken my ankle playing tennis. I can’t even walk with crutches at present; it’s on a chair in front of me swollen up and wrapped up as big as a house as I write. No one, not even Vienna, knows about our conversation on the same subject last summer and so let us both absolutely forget it. One thing, though--an ankle is a darn hard thing to break, though I never knew it before.

I feel happier than I have for years--no early-season practice, no sweat and suffer, a little discomfort and inconvenience, but free. I feel as if I’ve outwitted a whole lot of people, and it’s nobody’s business but that of your

Machiavellian (sic) friend,         DOLLY.    P.S. You might as well tear up this letter.

It didn’t sound like Dolly at all.

V

Once down at Princeton I asked Frank Kane--who sells sporting goods on Nassau Street and can tell you offhand the name of the scrub quarterback in 1901--what was the matter with Bob Tatnall’s team senior year.

“Injuries and tough luck,” he said. “They wouldn’t sweat after the hard games. Take Joe McDonald, for instance, All-American tackle the year before; he was slow and stale, and he knew it and didn’t care. It’s a wonder Bill got that outfit through the season at all.”

I sat in the stands with Dolly and watched them beat Lehigh 3-0 and tie Bucknell by a fluke. The next week we were trimmed 14-0 by Notre Dame. On the day of the Notre Dame game Dolly was in Washington with Vienna, but he was awfully curious about it when he came back next day. He had all the sporting pages of all the papers and he sat reading them and shaking his head. Then he stuffed them suddenly into the waste-paper basket.

“This college is football crazy,” he announced. “Do you know that English teams don’t even train for sports?”

I didn’t enjoy Dolly so much in those days. It was curious to see him with nothing to do. For the first time in his life he hung around--around the room, around the club, around casual groups--he who had always been going somewhere with dynamic indolence. His passage along a walk had once created groups--groups of classmates who wanted to walk with him, of underclassmen who followed with their eyes a moving shrine. He became democratic, he mixed around, and it was somehow not appropriate. He explained that he wanted to know more men in his class.

But people want their idols a little above them, and Dolly had been a sort of private and special idol. He began to hate to be alone, and that, of course, was most apparent to me. If I got up to go out and he didn’t happen to be writing a letter to Vienna, he’d ask “Where are you going?” in a rather alarmed way and make an excuse to limp along with me.

“Are you glad you did it, Dolly?” I asked him suddenly one day.

He looked at me with reproach behind the defiance in his eyes.

“Of course I’m glad.”

“I wish you were in that back field, all the same.”

“It wouldn’t matter a bit. This year’s game’s in the Bowl. I’d probably be dropping kicks for them.”

The week of the Navy game he suddenly began going to all the practices. He worried; that terrible sense of responsibility was at work. Once he had hated the mention of football; now he thought and talked of nothing else. The night before the Navy game I woke up several times to find the lights burning brightly in his room.

We lost 7 to 3 on Navy’s last-minute forward pass over Devlin’s head. After the first half Dolly left the stands and sat down with the players on the field. When he joined me afterward his face was smudgy and dirty as if he had been crying.

The game was in Baltimore that year. Dolly and I were going to spend the night in Washington with Vienna, who was giving a dance. We rode over there in an atmosphere of sullen gloom and it was all I could do to keep him from snapping out at two naval officers who were holding an exultant post mortem in the seat behind.

The dance was what Vienna called her second coming-out party. She was having only the people she liked this time, and these turned out to be chiefly importations from New York. The musicians, the playwrights, the vague supernumeraries of the arts, who had dropped in at Dolly’s house on Ram’s Point, were here in force. But Dolly, relieved of his obligations as host, made no clumsy attempt to talk their language that night. He stood moodily against the wall with some of that old air of superiority that had first made me want to know him. Afterward, on my way to bed, I passed Vienna’s sitting room and she called me to come in. She and Dolly, both a little white, were sitting across the room from each other and there was tensity in the air.

“Sit down, Jeff,” said Vienna wearily. “I want you to witness the collapse of a man into a schoolboy.” I sat down reluctantly. “Dolly’s changed his mind,” she said. “He prefers football to me.”

“That’s not it,” said Dolly stubbornly.

“I don’t see the point,” I objected. “Dolly can’t possibly play.”

“But he thinks he can. Jeff, just in case you imagine I’m being pig-headed about it, I want to tell you a story. Three years ago, when we first came back to the United States, father put my young brother in school. One afternoon we all went out to see him play football. Just after the game started he was hurt, but father said, ‘It’s all right. He’ll be up in a minute. It happens all the time.’ But, Jeff, he never got up. He lay there, and finally they carried him off the field and put a blanket over him. Just as we got to him he died.”

She looked from one to the other of us and began to sob convulsively. Dolly went over, frowning, and put his arm around her shoulder.

“Oh, Dolly,” she cried, “won’t you do this for me--just this one little thing for me?”

He shook his head miserably. “I tried, but I can’t,” he said.

“It’s my stuff, don’t you understand, Vienna? People have got to do their stuff.”

Vienna had risen and was powdering her tears at a mirror; now she flashed around angrily.

“Then I’ve been laboring under a misapprehension when I supposed you felt about it much as I did.”

“Let’s not go over all that. I’m tired of talking, Vienna; I’m tired of my own voice. It seems to me that no one I know does anything but talk any more.”

“Thanks. I suppose that’s meant for me.”

“It seems to me your friends talk a great deal. I’ve never heard so much jabber as I’ve listened to tonight. Is the idea of actually doing anything repulsive to you, Vienna?”

“It depends upon whether it’s worth doing.”

“Well, this is worth doing--to me.”

“I know your trouble, Dolly,” she said bitterly. “You’re weak and you want to be admired. This year you haven’t had a lot of little boys following you around as if you were Jack Dempsey, and it almost breaks your heart. You want to get out in front of them all and make a show of yourself and hear the applause.”

He laughed shortly. “If that’s your idea of how a football player feels--”

“Have you made up your mind to play?” she interrupted.

“If I’m any use to them--yes.”

“Then I think we’re both wasting our time.”

Her expression was ruthless, but Dolly refused to see that she was in earnest. When I got away he was still trying to make her “be rational,” and next day on the train he said that Vienna had been “a little nervous.” He was deeply in love with her, and he didn’t dare think of losing her; but he was still in the grip of the sudden emotion that had decided him to play, and his confusion and exhaustion of mind made him believe vainly that everything was going to be all right. But I had seen that look on Vienna’s face the night she talked with Mr. Carl Sanderson at the Frolic two years before.

Dolly didn’t get off the train at Princeton Junction, but continued on to New York. He went to two orthopedic specialists and one of them arranged a bandage braced with a whole little fence of whalebones that he was to wear day and night. The probabilities were that it would snap at the first brisk encounter, but he could run on it and stand on it when he kicked. He was out on University Field in uniform the following afternoon.

His appearance was a small sensation. I was sitting in the stands watching practice with Harold Case and young Daisy Cary. She was just beginning to be famous then, and I don’t know whether she or Dolly attracted the most attention. In those times it was still rather daring to bring down a moving-picture actress; if that same young lady went to Princeton today she would probably be met at the station with a band.

Dolly limped around and everyone said, “He’s limping!” He got under a punt and everyone said, “He did that pretty well!” The first team were laid off after the hard Navy game and everyone watched Dolly all afternoon. After practice I caught his eye and he came over and shook hands. Daisy asked him if he’d like to be in a football picture she was going to make. It was only conversation, but he looked at me with a dry smile.

When he came back to the room his ankle was swollen up as big as a stove pipe, and next day he and Keene fixed up an arrangement by which the bandage would be loosened and tightened to fit its varying size. We called it the balloon. The bone was nearly healed, but the little bruised sinews were stretched out of place again every day. He watched the Swarthmore game from the sidelines and the following Monday he was in scrimmage with the second team against the scrubs.

In the afternoons sometimes he wrote to Vienna. His theory was that they were still engaged, but he tried not to worry about it, and I think the very pain that kept him awake at night was good for that. When the season was over he would go and see.

We played Harvard and lost 7 to 3. Jack Devlin’s collar bone was broken and he was out for the season, which made it almost sure that Dolly would play. Amid the rumors and fears of mid-November the news aroused a spark of hope in an otherwise morbid undergraduate body--hope all out of proportion to Dolly’s condition. He came back to the room the Thursday before the game with his face drawn and tired.

“They’re going to start me,” he said, “and I’m going to be back for punts. If they only knew--”

“Couldn’t you tell Bill how you feel about that?”

He shook his head and I had a sudden suspicion that he was punishing himself for his “accident” last August. He lay silently on the couch while I packed his suitcase for the team train.

The actual day of the game was, as usual, like a dream--unreal with its crowds of friends and relatives and the inessential trappings of a gigantic show. The eleven little men who ran out on the field at last were like bewitched figures in another world, strange and infinitely romantic, blurred by a throbbing mist of people and sound. One aches with them intolerably, trembles with their excitement, but they have no traffic with us now, they are beyond help, consecrated and unreachable--vaguely holy.

The field is rich and green, the preliminaries are over and the teams trickle out into position. Head guards are put on; each man claps his hands and breaks into a lonely little dance. People are still talking around you, arranging themselves, but you have fallen silent and your eye wanders from man to man. There’s Jack Whitehead, a senior, at end; Joe McDonald, large and reassuring, at tackle; Toole, a sophomore, at guard; Red Hopman, center; someone you can’t identify at the other guard--Bunker probably--he turns and you see his number--Bunker; Bean Gile, looking unnaturally dignified and significant at the other tackle; Poore, another sophomore at end. Back of them is Wash Sampson at quarter--imagine how he feels! But he runs here and there on light feet, speaking to this man and that, trying to communicate his alertness and his confidence of success. Dolly Harlan stands motionless, his hands on his hips, watching the Yale kicker tee up the ball; near him is Captain Bob Tatnall--

There’s the whistle! The line of the Yale team sways ponderously forward from its balance and a split second afterward comes the sound of the ball. The field streams with running figures and the whole Bowl strains forward as if thrown by the current of an electric chair.

Suppose we fumbled right away.

Tatnall catches it, goes back ten yards, is surrounded and blotted out of sight. Spears goes through center for three. A short pass, Sampson to Tatnall, is completed, but for no gain. Harlan punts to Devereaux, who is downed in his tracks on the Yale forty-yard line.

Now we’ll see what they’ve got.

It developed immediately that they had a great deal. Using an effective crisscross and a short pass over center, they carried the ball fifty-four yards to the Princeton six-yard line, where they lost it on a fumble, recovered by Red Hopman. After a trade of punts, they began another push, this time to the fifteen-yard line, where, after four hair-raising forward passes, two of them batted down by Dolly, we got the ball on downs. But Yale was still fresh and strong, and with a third onslaught the weaker Princeton line began to give way. Just after the second quarter began Devereaux took the ball over for a touchdown and the half ended with Yale in possession of the ball on our ten-yard line. Score, Yale, 7; Princeton, 0.

We hadn’t a chance. The team was playing above itself, better than it had played all year, but it wasn’t enough. Save that it was the Yale game, when anything could happen, anything had happened, the atmosphere of gloom would have been deeper than it was, and in the cheering section you could cut it with a knife.

Early in the game Dolly Harlan had fumbled Devereaux’s high punt, but recovered without gain; toward the end of the half another kick slipped through his fingers, but he scooped it up, and slipping past the end, went back twelve yards. Between halves he told Roper he couldn’t seem to get under the ball, but they kept him there. His own kicks were carrying well and he was essential in the only back-field combination that could hope to score.

After the first play of the game he limped slightly, moving around as little as possible to conceal the fact. But I knew enough about football to see that he was in every play, starting at that rather slow pace of his and finishing with a quick side lunge that almost always took out his man. Not a single Yale forward pass was finished in his territory, but toward the end of the third quarter he dropped another kick--backed around in a confused little circle under it, lost it and recovered on the five-yard line just in time to avert a certain score. That made the third time, and I saw Ed Kimball throw off his blanket and begin to warm up on the sidelines.

Just at that point our luck began to change. From a kick formation, with Dolly set to punt from behind our goal, Howard Bement, who had gone in for Wash Sampson at quarter, took the ball through the center of the line, got by the secondary defense and ran twenty-six yards before he was pulled down. Captain Tasker, of Yale, had gone out with a twisted knee, and Princeton began to pile plays through his substitute, between Bean Gile and Hopman, with George Spears and sometimes Bob Tatnall carrying the ball. We went up to the Yale forty-yard line, lost the ball on a fumble and recovered it on another as the third quarter ended. A wild ripple of enthusiasm ran through the Princeton stands. For the first time we had the ball in their territory with first down and the possibility of tying the score. You could hear the tenseness growing all around you in the intermission; it was reflected in the excited movements of the cheer leaders and the uncontrollable patches of sound that leaped out of the crowd, catching up voices here and there and swelling to an undisciplined roar.

I saw Kimball dash out on the field and report to the referee and I thought Dolly was through at last, and was glad, but it was Bob Tatnall who came out, sobbing, and brought the Princeton side cheering to its feet.

With the first play pandemonium broke loose and continued to the end of the game. At intervals it would swoon away to a plaintive humming; then it would rise to the intensity of wind and rain and thunder, and beat across the twilight from one side of the Bowl to the other like the agony of lost souls swinging across a gap in space.

The teams lined up on Yale’s forty-one yard line and Spears immediately dashed off tackle for six yards. Again he carried the ball--he was a wild unpopular Southerner with inspired moments--going through the same hole for five more and a first down. Dolly made two on a cross buck and Spears was held at center. It was third down, with the ball on Yale’s twenty-nine-yard line and eight to go.

There was some confusion immediately behind me, some pushing and some voices; a man was sick or had fainted--I never discovered which. Then my view was blocked out for a minute by rising bodies and then everything went definitely crazy. Substitutes were jumping around down on the field, waving their blankets, the air was full of hats, cushions, coats and a deafening roar. Dolly Harlan, who had scarcely carried the ball a dozen times in his Princeton career, had picked a long pass from Kimball out of the air and, dragging a tackler, struggled five yards to the Yale goal.

VI

Some time later the game was over. There was a bad moment when Yale began another attack, but there was no scoring and Bob Tatnall’s eleven had redeemed a mediocre season by tying a better Yale team. For us there was the feel of victory about it, the exaltation if not the jubilance, and the Yale faces issuing from out the Bowl wore the look of defeat. It would be a good year, after all--a good fight at the last, a tradition for next year’s team. Our class--those of us who cared--would go out from Princeton without the taste of final defeat. The symbol stood--such as it was; the banners blew proudly in the wind. All that is childish? Find us something to fill the niche of victory.

I waited for Dolly outside the dressing rooms until almost everyone had come out; then, as he still lingered, I went in. Someone had given him a little brandy, and since he never drank much, it was swimming in his head.

“Have a chair, Jeff.” He smiled, broadly and happily. “Rubber! Tony! Get the distinguished guest a chair. He’s an intellectual and he wants to interview one of the bone-headed athletes. Tony, this is Mr. Deering. They’ve got everything in this funny Bowl but armchairs. I love this Bowl. I’m going to build here.”

He fell silent, thinking about all things happily. He was content. I persuaded him to dress--there were people waiting for us. Then he insisted on walking out upon the field, dark now, and feeling the crumbled turf with his shoe.

He picked up a divot from a cleat and let it drop, laughed, looked distracted for a minute, and turned away.

With Tad Davis, Daisy Cary and another girl, we drove to New York. He sat beside Daisy and was silly, charming and attractive. For the first time since I’d known him he talked about the game naturally, even with a touch of vanity.

“For two years I was pretty good and I was always mentioned at the bottom of the column as being among those who played. This year I dropped three punts and slowed up every play till Bob Tatnall kept yelling at me, ‘I don’t see why they won’t take you out!’ But a pass not even aimed at me fell in my arms and I’ll be in the headlines tomorrow.”

He laughed. Somebody touched his foot; he winced and turned white.

“How did you hurt it?” Daisy asked. “In football?”

“I hurt it last summer,” he said shortly.

“It must have been terrible to play on it.”

“It was.”

“I suppose you had to.”

“That’s the way sometimes.”

They understood each other. They were both workers; sick or well, there were things that Daisy also had to do. She spoke of how, with a vile cold, she had had to fall into an open-air lagoon out in Hollywood the winter before.

“Six times--with a fever of a hundred and two. But the production was costing ten thousand dollars a day.”

“Couldn’t they use a double?”

“They did whenever they could--I only fell in when it had to be done.”

She was eighteen and I compared her background of courage and independence and achievement, of politeness based upon the realities of cooperation, with that of most society girls I had known. There was no way in which she wasn’t inestimably their superior--if she had looked for a moment my way--but it was Dolly’s shining velvet eyes that signaled to her own.

“Can’t you go out with me tonight?” I heard her ask him.

He was sorry, but he had to refuse. Vienna was in New York; she was going to see him. I didn’t know, and Dolly didn’t know, whether there was to be a reconciliation or a good-by.

When she dropped Dolly and me at the Ritz there was real regret, that lingering form of it, in both their eyes.

“There’s a marvelous girl,” Dolly said. I agreed. “I’m going up to see Vienna. Will you get a room for us at the Madison?”

So I left him. What happened between him and Vienna I don’t know; he has never spoken about it to this day. But what happened later in the evening was brought to my attention by several surprised and even indignant witnesses to the event.

Dolly walked into the Ambassador Hotel about ten o’clock and went to the desk to ask for Miss Cary’s room. There was a crowd around the desk, among them some Yale or Princeton undergraduates from the game. Several of them had been celebrating and evidently one of them knew Daisy and had tried to get her room by phone. Dolly was abstracted and he must have made his way through them in a somewhat brusque way and asked to be connected with Miss Cary.

One young man stepped back, looked at him unpleasantly and said, “You seem to be in an awful hurry. Just who are you?”

There was one of those slight silent pauses and the people near the desk all turned to look. Something happened inside Dolly; he felt as if life had arranged his role to make possible this particular question--a question that now he had no choice but to answer. Still, there was silence. The small crowd waited.

“Why, I’m Dolly Harlan,” he said deliberately. “What do you think of that?”

It was quite outrageous. There was a pause and then a sudden little flurry and chorus: “Dolly Harlan! What? What did he say?”

The clerk had heard the name; he gave it as the phone was answered from Miss Cary’s room.

“Mr. Harlan’s to go right up, please.”

Dolly turned away, alone with his achievement, taking it for once to his breast. He found suddenly that he would not have it long so intimately; the memory would outlive the triumph and even the triumph would outlive the glow in his heart that was best of all. Tall and straight, an image of victory and pride, he moved across the lobby, oblivious alike to the fate ahead of him or the small chatter behind.

DESIGN IN PLASTER

Esquire (November, 1939)

“How long does the doctor think now?” Mary asked. With his good arm Martin threw back the top of the sheet, disclosing that the plaster armor had been cut away in front in the form of a square, so that his abdomen and the lower part of his diaphragm bulged a little from the aperture. His dislocated arm was still high over his head in an involuntary salute.

“This was a great advance,” he told her. “But it took the heat wave to make Ottinger put in this window. I can’t say much for the view but--have you seen the wire collection?”

“Yes, I’ve seen it,” his wife answered, trying to look amused.

It was laid out on the bureau like a set of surgeons’ tools--wires bent to every length and shape so that the nurse could reach any point inside the plaster cast when perspiration made the itching unbearable.

Martin was ashamed at repeating himself.

“I apologize,” he said. “After two months you get medical psychology. All this stuff is fascinating to me. In fact--” he added, and with only faint irony, “--it is in a way of becoming my life.”

Mary came over and sat beside the bed raising him, cast and all, into her slender arms. He was chief electrical engineer at the studio and his thirty-foot fall wasn’t costing a penny in doctor’s bills. But that--and the fact that the catastrophe had swung them together after a four months’ separation, was its only bright spot.

“I feel so close,” she whispered. “Even through this plaster.”

“Do you think that’s a nice way to talk?”

“Yes.”

“So do I.”

Presently she stood up and rearranged her bright hair in the mirror. He had seen her do it half a thousand times but suddenly there was a quality of remoteness about it that made him sad.

“What are you doing tonight?” he asked.

Mary turned, almost with surprise.

“It seems strange to have you ask me.”

“Why? You almost always tell me. You’re my contact with the world of glamour.”

“But you like to keep bargains. That was our arrangement when we began to live apart.”

“You’re being very technical.”

“No--but that was the arrangement. As a matter of fact I’m not doing anything. Bieman asked me to go to a preview, but he bores me. And that French crowd called up.”

“Which member of it?”

She came closer and looked at him.

“Why, I believe you’re jealous,” she said. “The wife of course. Or he did, to be exact, but he was calling for his wife--she’d be there. I’ve never seen you like this before.”

Martin was wise enough to wink as if it meant nothing and let it die away, but Mary said an unfortunate last word.

“I thought you liked me to go with them.”

“That’s it,” Martin tried to go slow, “--with ‘them,’ but now it’s ‘he.’“

“They’re all leaving Monday,” she said almost impatiently. “I’ll probably never see him again.”

Silence for a minute. Since his accident there were not an unlimited number of things to talk about, except when there was love between them. Or even pity--he was accepting even pity in the past fortnight. Especially their uncertain plans about the future were in need of being preceded by a mood of love.

“I’m going to get up for a minute,” he said suddenly. “No, don’t help me--don’t call the nurse. I’ve got it figured out.”

The cast extended half way to his knee on one side but with a snake-like motion he managed to get to the side of the bed--then rise with a gigantic heave. He tied on a dressing gown, still without assistance, and went to the window. Young people were splashing and calling in the outdoor pool of the hotel.

“I’ll go along,” said Mary. “Can I bring you anything tomorrow? Or tonight if you feel lonely?”

“Not tonight. You know I’m always cross at night--and I don’t like you making that long drive twice a day. Go along--be happy.”

“Shall I ring for the nurse?”

“I’ll ring presently.”

He didn’t though--he just stood. He knew that Mary was wearing out, that this resurgence of her love was wearing out. His accident was a very temporary dam of a stream that had begun to overflow months before.

When the pains began at six with their customary regularity the nurse gave him something with codein in it, shook him a cocktail and ordered dinner, one of those dinners it was a struggle to digest since he had been sealed up in his individual bomb-shelter. Then she was off duty four hours and he was alone. Alone with Mary and the Frenchman.

He didn’t know the Frenchman except by name but Mary had said once:

“Joris is rather like you--only naturally not formed--rather immature.”

Since she said that, the company of Mary and Joris had grown increasingly unattractive in the long hours between seven and eleven. He had talked with them, driven around with them, gone to pictures and parties with them--sometimes with the half comforting ghost of Joris’ wife along. He had been near as they made love and even that was endurable as long as he could seem to hear and see them. It was when they became hushed and secret that his stomach winced inside the plaster cast. That was when he had pictures of the Frenchman going toward Mary and Mary waiting. Because he was not sure just how Joris felt about her or about the whole situation.

“I told him I loved you,” Mary said--and he believed her, “I told him that I could never love anyone but you.”

Still he could not be sure how Mary felt as she waited in her apartment for Joris. He could not tell if, when she said good night at her door, she turned away relieved, or whether she walked around her living room a little and later, reading her book, dropped it in her lap and looked up at the ceiling. Or whether her phone rang once more for one more good night.

Martin hadn’t worried about any of these things in the first two months of their separation when he had been on his feet and well.

At half-past eight he took up the phone and called her; the line was busy and still busy at a quarter of nine. At nine it was out of order; at nine-fifteen it didn’t answer and at a little before nine-thirty it was busy again. Martin got up, slowly drew on his trousers and with the help of a bellboy put on a shirt and coat.

“Don’t you want me to come, Mr. Harris?” asked the bellboy.

“No thanks. Tell the taxi I’ll be right down.”

When the boy had gone he tripped on the slightly raised floor of the bathroom, swung about on one arm and cut his head against the wash bowl. It was not so much, but he did a clumsy repair job with the adhesive and, feeling ridiculous at his image in the mirror, sat down and called Mary’s number a last time--for no answer. Then he went out, not because he wanted to go to Mary’s but because he had to go somewhere toward the flame, and he didn’t know any other place to go.

At ten-thirty Mary, in her nightgown, was at the phone.

“Thanks for calling. But, Joris, if you want to know the truth I have a splitting headache. I’m turning in.”

“Mary, listen,” Joris insisted. “It happens Marianne has a headache too and has turned in. This is the last night I’ll have a chance to see you alone. Besides, you told me you’d never had a headache.”

Mary laughed.

“That’s true--but I am tired.”

“I would promise to stay one-half hour--word of honor. I am only just around the corner.”

“No,” she said and a faint touch of annoyance gave firmness to the word. “Tomorrow I’ll have either lunch or dinner if you like, but now I’m going to bed.”

She stopped. She had heard a sound, a weight crunching against the outer door of her apartment. Then three odd, short bell rings.

“There’s someone--call me in the morning,” she said. Hurriedly hanging up the phone she got into a dressing gown.

By the door of her apartment she asked cautiously.

“Who’s there?”

No answer--only a heavier sound--a human slipping to the floor.

“Who is it?”

She drew back and away from a frightening moan. There was a little shutter high in the door, like the peephole of a speakeasy, and feeling sure from the sound that whoever it was, wounded or drunk, was on the floor Mary reached up and peeped out. She could see only a hand covered with freshly ripening blood, and shut the trap hurriedly. After a shaken moment, she peered once more.

This time she recognized something--afterwards she could not have said what--a way the arm lay, a corner of the plaster cast--but it was enough to make her open the door quickly and duck down to Martin’s side.

“Get doctor,” he whispered. “Fell on the steps and broke.”

His eyes closed as she ran for the phone.

Doctor and ambulance came at the same time. What Martin had done was simple enough, a little triumph of misfortune. On the first flight of stairs that he had gone up for eight weeks, he had stumbled, tried to save himself with the arm that was no good for anything, then spun down catching and ripping on the stair rail. After that a five minute drag up to her door.

Mary wanted to exclaim, “Why? Why?” but there was no one to hear. He came awake as the stretcher was put under him to carry him to the hospital, repair the new breakage with a new cast, start it over again. Seeing Mary he called quickly. “Don’t you come. I don’t like anyone around when--when--Promise on your word of honor not to come?”

The orthopedist said he would phone her in an hour. And five minutes later it was with the confused thought that he was already calling that Mary answered the phone.

“I can’t talk, Joris,” she said. “There was an awful accident--”

“Can I help?”

“It’s gone now. It was my husband--”

Suddenly Mary knew she wanted to do anything but wait alone for word from the hospital.

“Come over then,” she said. “You can take me up there if I’m needed.”

She sat in place by the phone until he came--jumped to her feet with an exclamation at his ring.

“Why? Why?” she sobbed at last. “I offered to go see him at his hotel.”

“Not drunk?”

“No, no--he almost never takes a drink. Will you wait right outside my door while I dress and get ready?”

The news came half an hour later that Martin’s shoulder was set again, that he was sleeping under the ethylene gas and would sleep till morning. Joris Deglen was very gentle, swinging her feet up on the sofa, putting a pillow at her back and answering her incessant “Why?” with a different response every time--Martin had been delirious; he was lonely; then at a certain moment telling the truth he had long guessed at: Martin was jealous.

“That was it,” Mary said bitterly. “We were to be free--only I wasn’t free. Only free to sneak about behind his back.”

She was free now though, free as air. And later, when he said he wouldn’t go just yet, but would sit in the living room reading until she quieted down, Mary went into her room with her head clear as morning. After she undressed for the second time that night she stayed for a few minutes before the mirror arranging her hair and keeping her mind free of all thoughts about Martin except that he was sleeping and at the moment felt no pain.

Then she opened her bedroom door and called down the corridor into the living room:

“Do you want to come and tell me good night?”

DICE, BRASSKNUCKLES & GUITAR

International (May 1923)

Parts of New Jersey, as you know, are under water, and other parts are under continual surveillance by the authorities. But here and there lie patches of garden country dotted with old-fashioned frame mansions, which have wide shady porches and a red swing on the lawn. And perhaps, on the widest and shadiest of the porches there is even a hammock left over from the hammock days, stirring gently in a mid-Victorian wind.

When tourists come to such last-century landmarks they stop their cars and gaze for a while and then mutter: “Well, thank God this age is joined on to something” or else they say: “Well, of course, that house is mostly halls and has a thousand rats and one bathroom, but there’s an atmosphere about it--”

The tourist doesn’t stay long. He drives on to his Elizabethan villa of pressed cardboard or his early Norman meat-market or his medieval Italian pigeon-coop--because this is the twentieth century and Victorian houses are as unfashionable as the works of Mrs. Humphry Ward.

He can’t see the hammock from the road--but sometimes there’s a girl in the hammock. There was this afternoon. She was asleep in it and apparently unaware of the esthetic horrors which surrounded her, the stone statue of Diana, for instance, which grinned idiotically under the sunlight on the lawn.

There was something enormously yellow about the whole scene--there was this sunlight, for instance, that was yellow, and the hammock was of the particularly hideous yellow peculiar to hammocks, and the girl’s yellow hair was spread out upon the hammock in a sort of invidious comparison.

She slept with her lips closed and her hands clasped behind her head, as it is proper for young girls to sleep. Her breast rose and fell slightly with no more emphasis than the sway of the hammock’s fringe.

Her name, Amanthis, was as old-fashioned as the house she lived in. I regret to say that her mid-Victorian connections ceased abruptly at this point.

Now if this were a moving picture (as, of course, I hope it will some day be) I would take as many thousand feet of her as I was allowed--then I would move the camera up close and show the yellow down on the back of her neck where her hair stopped and the warm color of her cheeks and arms, because I like to think of her sleeping there, as you yourself might have slept, back in your young days. Then I would hire a man named Israel Glucose to write some idiotic line of transition, and switch thereby to another scene that was taking place at no particular spot far down the road.

In a moving automobile sat a southern gentleman accompanied by his body-servant. He was on his way, after a fashion, to New York but he was somewhat hampered by the fact that the upper and lower portions of his automobile were no longer in exact juxtaposition. In fact from time to time the two riders would dismount, shove the body on to the chassis, corner to corner, and then continue onward, vibrating slightly in involuntary unison with the motor.

Except that it had no door in back the car might have been built early in the mechanical age. It was covered with the mud of eight states and adorned in front by an enormous but defunct motometer and behind by a mangy pennant bearing the legend “Tarleton, Ga.” In the dim past someone had begun to paint the hood yellow but unfortunately had been called away when but half through the task.

As the gentleman and his body-servant were passing the house where Amanthis lay beautifully asleep in the hammock, something happened--the body fell off the car. My only apology for stating this so suddenly is that it happened very suddenly indeed. When the noise had died down and the dust had drifted away master and man arose and inspected the two halves.

“Look-a-there,” said the gentleman in disgust, “the doggone thing got all separated that time.”

“She bust in two,” agreed the body-servant.

“Hugo,” said the gentleman, after some consideration, “we got to get a hammer an’ nails an’ tack it on.”

They glanced up at the Victorian house. On all sides faintly irregular fields stretched away to a faintly irregular unpopulated horizon. There was no choice, so the black Hugo opened the gate and followed his master up a gravel walk, casting only the blasé glances of a confirmed traveler at the red swing and the stone statue of Diana which turned on them a storm-crazed stare.

At the exact moment when they reached the porch Amanthis awoke, sat up suddenly and looked them over.

The gentleman was young, perhaps twenty-four, and his name was Jim Powell. He was dressed in a tight and dusty readymade suit which was evidently expected to take flight at a moment’s notice, for it was secured to his body by a line of six preposterous buttons.

There were supernumerary buttons upon the coat-sleeves also and Amanthis could not resist a glance to determine whether or not more buttons ran up the side of his trouser leg. But the trouser bottoms were distinguished only by their shape, which was that of a bell. His vest was cut low, barely restraining an amazing necktie from fluttering in the wind.

He bowed formally, dusting his knees with a thatched straw hat. Simultaneously he smiled, half shutting his faded blue eyes and displaying white and beautifully symmetrical teeth.

“Good evenin’,” he said in abandoned Georgian. “My automobile has met with an accident out yonder by your gate. I wondered if it wouldn’t be too much to ask you if I could have the use of a hammer and some tacks--nails, for a little while.”

Amanthis laughed. For a moment she laughed uncontrollably. Mr. Jim Powell laughed, politely and appreciatively, with her. His body-servant, deep in the throes of colored adolescence, alone preserved a dignified gravity.

“I better introduce who I am, maybe,” said the visitor. “My name’s Powell. I’m a resident of Tarleton, Georgia. This here nigger’s my boy Hugo.”

“Your son!” The girl stared from one to the other in wild fascination.

“No, he’s my body-servant, I guess you’d call it. We call a nigger a boy down yonder.”

At this reference to the finer customs of his native soil the boy Hugo put his hands behind his back and looked darkly and superciliously down the lawn.

“Yas’m,” he muttered, “I’m a body-servant.”

“Where you going in your automobile,” demanded Amanthis.

“Goin’ north for the summer.”

“Where to?”

The tourist waved his hand with a careless gesture as if to indicate the Adirondacks, the Thousand Islands, Newport--but he said:

“We’re tryin’ New York.”

“Have you ever been there before?”

“Never have. But I been to Atlanta lots of times. An’ we passed through all kinds of cities this trip. Man!”

He whistled to express the enormous spectacularity of his recent travels.

“Listen,” said Amanthis intently, “you better have something to eat. Tell your--your body-servant to go ‘round in back and ask the cook to send us out some sandwiches and lemonade. Or maybe you don’t drink lemonade--very few people do any more.”

Mr. Powell by a circular motion of his finger sped Hugo on the designated mission. Then he seated himself gingerly in a rocking-chair and began revolving his thatched straw hat rapidly in his hands.

“You cer’nly are mighty kind,” he told her. “An’ if I wanted anything stronger than lemonade I got a bottle of good old corn out in the car. I brought it along because I thought maybe I wouldn’t be able to drink the whisky they got up here.”

“Listen,” she said, “my name’s Powell too. Amanthis Powell.”

“Say, is that right?” He laughed ecstatically. “Maybe we’re kin to each other. I come from mighty good people,” he went on. “Pore though. I got some money because my aunt she was using it to keep her in a sanitarium and she died.” He paused, presumably out of respect to his late aunt. Then he concluded with brisk nonchalance, “I ain’t touched the principal but I got a lot of the income all at once so I thought I’d come north for the summer.”

At this point Hugo reappeared on the veranda steps and became audible.

“White lady back there she asked me don’t I want eat some too. What I tell her?”

“You tell her yes mamm if she be so kind,” directed his master. And as Hugo retired he confided to Amanthis: “That boy’s got no sense at all. He don’t want to do nothing without I tell him he can. I brought him up,” he added, not without pride.

When the sandwiches arrived Mr. Powell stood up. He was unaccustomed to white servants and obviously expected an introduction.

“Are you a married lady?” he inquired of Amanthis, when the servant was gone.

“No,” she answered, and added from the security of eighteen, “I’m an old maid.”

Again he laughed politely.

“You mean you’re a society girl.”

She shook her head. Mr. Powell noted with embarrassed enthusiasm the particular yellowness of her yellow hair.

“Does this old place look like it?” she said cheerfully. “No, you perceive in me a daughter of the countryside. Color--one hundred percent spontaneous--in the daytime anyhow. Suitors--promising young barbers from the neighboring village with somebody’s late hair still clinging to their coat-sleeves.”

“Your daddy oughtn’t to let you go with a country barber,” said the tourist disapprovingly. He considered--”You ought to be a New York society girl.”

“No.” Amanthis shook her head sadly. “I’m too good-looking. To be a New York society girl you have to have a long nose and projecting teeth and dress like the actresses did three years ago.”

Jim began to tap his foot rhythmically on the porch and in a moment Amanthis discovered that she was unconsciously doing the same thing.

“Stop!” she commanded, “Don’t make me do that.”

He looked down at his foot.

“Excuse me,” he said humbly. “I don’t know--it’s just something I do.”

This intense discussion was now interrupted by Hugo who appeared on the steps bearing a hammer and a handful of nails.

Mr. Powell arose unwillingly and looked at his watch.

“We got to go, daggone it,” he said, frowning heavily. “See here. Wouldn’t you like to be a New York society girl and go to those dances an’ all, like you read about, where they throw gold pieces away?”

She looked at him with a curious expression.

“Don’t your folks know some society people?” he went on.

“All I’ve got’s my daddy--and, you see, he’s a judge.”

“That’s too bad,” he agreed.

She got herself by some means from the hammock and they went down toward the road, side by side.

“Well, I’ll keep my eyes open for you and let you know,” he persisted. “A pretty girl like you ought to go around in society. We may be kin to each other, you see, and us Powells ought to stick together.”

“What are you going to do in New York?”

They were now almost at the gate and the tourist pointed to the two depressing sectors of his automobile.

“I’m goin’ to drive a taxi. This one right here. Only it’s got so it busts in two all the time.”

“You’re going to drive that in New York?”

Jim looked at her uncertainly. Such a pretty girl should certainly control the habit of shaking all over upon no provocation at all.

“Yes mamm,” he said with dignity.

Amanthis watched while they placed the upper half of the car upon the lower half and nailed it severely into place. Then Mr. Powell took the wheel and his body-servant climbed in beside him.

“I’m cer’nly very much obliged to you indeed for your hospitality. Convey my respects to your father.”

“I will,” she assured him. “Come back and see me, if you don’t mind barbers in the room.”

He dismissed this unpleasant thought with a gesture.

“Your company would always be charming.” He put the car into gear as though to drown out the temerity of his parting speech. “You’re the prettiest girl I’ve seen up north--by far.”

Then with a groan and a rattle Mr. Powell of southern Georgia with his own car and his own body-servant and his own ambitions and his own private cloud of dust continued on north for the summer.

She thought she would never see him again. She lay in her hammock, slim and beautiful, opened her left eye slightly to see June come in and then closed it and retired contentedly back into her dreams.

But one day when the midsummer vines had climbed the precarious sides of the red swing in the lawn, Mr. Jim Powell of Tarleton, Georgia, came vibrating back into her life. They sat on the wide porch as before.

“I’ve got a great scheme,” he told her.

“Did you drive your taxi like you said?”

“Yes mamm, but the business was right bad. I waited around in front of all those hotels and theaters an’ nobody ever got in.”

“Nobody?”

“Well, one night there was some drunk fellas they got in, only just as I was gettin’ started my automobile came apart. And another night it was rainin’ and there wasn’t no other taxis and a lady got in because she said she had to go a long ways. But before we got there she made me stop and she got out. She seemed kinda mad and she went walkin’ off in the rain. Mighty proud lot of people they got up in New York.”

“And so you’re going home?” asked Amanthis sympathetically.

“No mamm. I got an idea.” His blue eyes grew narrow. “Has that barber been around here--with hair on his sleeves?”

“No. He’s--he’s gone away.”

“Well, then, first thing is I want to leave this car of mine here with you, if that’s all right. It ain’t the right color for a taxi. To pay for its keep I’d like to have you drive it just as much as you want. ‘Long as you got a hammer an’ nails with you there ain’t much bad that can happen--”

“I’ll take care of it,” interrupted Amanthis, “but where are you going?”

“Southampton. It’s about the most aristocratic watering trough--watering-place there is around here, so that’s where I’m going.”

She sat up in amazement.

“What are you going to do there?”

“Listen.” He leaned toward her confidentially. “Were you serious about wanting to be a New York society girl?”

“Deadly serious.”

“That’s all I wanted to know,” he said inscrutably. “You just wait here on this porch a couple of weeks and--and sleep. And if any barbers come to see you with hair on their sleeves you tell ‘em you’re too sleepy to see ‘em.”

“What then?”

“Then you’ll hear from me. Just tell your old daddy he can do all the judging he wants but you’re goin’ to do some dancin’. Mamm,” he continued decisively, “you talk about society! Before one month I’m goin’ to have you in more society than you ever saw.”

Further than this he would say nothing. His manner conveyed that she was going to be suspended over a perfect pool of gaiety and violently immersed, to an accompaniment of: “Is it gay enough for you, mamm? Shall I let in a little more excitement, mamm?”

“Well,” answered Amanthis, lazily considering, “there are few things for which I’d forego the luxury of sleeping through July and August--but if you’ll write me a letter I’ll--I’ll run up to Southampton.”

Jim snapped his fingers ecstatically.

“More society,” he assured her with all the confidence at his command, “than anybody ever saw.”

Three days later a young man wearing a straw hat that might have been cut from the thatched roof of an English cottage rang the doorbell of the enormous and astounding Madison Harlan house at Southampton. He asked the butler if there were any people in the house between the ages of sixteen and twenty. He was informed that Miss Genevieve Harlan and Mr. Ronald Harlan answered that description and thereupon he handed in a most peculiar card and requested in fetching Georgian that it be brought to their attention.

As a result he was closeted for almost an hour with Mr. Ronald Harlan (who was a student at the Hillkiss School) and Miss Genevieve Harlan (who was not uncelebrated at Southampton dances). When he left he bore a short note in Miss Harlan’s handwriting which he presented together with his peculiar card at the next large estate. It happened to be that of the Clifton Garneaus. Here, as if by magic, the same audience was granted him.

He went on--it was a hot day, and men who could not afford to do so were carrying their coats on the public highway, but Jim, a native of southernmost Georgia, was as fresh and cool at the last house as at the first. He visited ten houses that day. Anyone following him in his course might have taken him to be some curiously gifted book-agent with a much sought-after volume as his stock in trade.

There was something in his unexpected demand for the adolescent members of the family which made hardened butlers lose their critical acumen. As he left each house a close observer might have seen that fascinated eyes followed him to the door and excited voices whispered something which hinted at a future meeting.

The second day he visited twelve houses. Southampton has grown enormously--he might have kept on his round for a week and never seen the same butler twice--but it was only the palatial, the amazing houses which intrigued him.

On the third day he did a thing that many people have been told to do and few have done--he hired a hall. Perhaps the sixteen-to-twenty-year-old people in the enormous houses had told him to. The hall he hired had once been “Mr. Snorkey’s Private Gymnasium for Gentlemen.” It was situated over a garage on the south edge of Southampton and in the days of its prosperity had been, I regret to say, a place where gentlemen could, under Mr. Snorkey’s direction, work off the effects of the night before. It was now abandoned--Mr. Snorkey had given up and gone away and died.

We will now skip three weeks during which time we may assume that the project which had to do with hiring a hall and visiting the two dozen largest houses in Southampton got under way.

The day to which we will skip was the July day on which Mr. James Powell sent a wire to Miss Amanthis Powell saying that if she still aspired to the gaiety of the highest society she should set out for Southampton by the earliest possible train. He himself would meet her at the station.

Jim was no longer a man of leisure, so when she failed to arrive at the time her wire had promised he grew restless. He supposed she was coming on a later train, turned to go back to his--his project--and met her entering the station from the street side.

“Why, how did you--”

“Well,” said Amanthis, “I arrived this morning instead, and I didn’t want to bother you so I found a respectable, not to say dull, boarding-house on the Ocean Road.”

She was quite different from the indolent Amanthis of the porch hammock, he thought. She wore a suit of robins’ egg blue and a rakish young hat with a curling feather--she was attired not unlike those young ladies between sixteen and twenty who of late were absorbing his attention. Yes, she would do very well.

He bowed her profoundly into a taxicab and got in beside her.

“Isn’t it about time you told me your scheme?” she suggested.

“Well, it’s about these society girls up here.” He waved his hand airily. “I know ‘em all.”

“Where are they?”

“Right now they’re with Hugo. You remember--that’s my body-servant.”

“With Hugo!” Her eyes widened. “Why? What’s it all about?”

“Well, I got--I got sort of a school, I guess you’d call it.”

“A school?”

“It’s a sort of Academy. And I’m the head of it. I invented it.”

He flipped a card from his case as though he were shaking down a thermometer.

“Look.”

She took the card. In large lettering it bore the legend

JAMES POWELL; J.M.

“Dice, Brassknuckles and Guitar”

She stared in amazement.

“Dice, Brassknuckles and Guitar?” she repeated in awe.

“Yes mamm.”

“What does it mean? What--do you sell ‘em?”

“No mamm, I teach ‘em. It’s a profession.”

“Dice, Brassknuckles and Guitar? What’s the J. M.?”

“That stands for Jazz Master.”

“But what is it? What’s it about?”

“Well, you see, it’s like this. One night when I was in New York I got talkin’ to a young fella who was drunk. He was one of my fares. And he’d taken some society girl somewhere and lost her.”

“Lost her?”

“Yes mamm. He forgot her, I guess. And he was right worried. Well, I got to thinkin’ that these girls nowadays--these society girls--they lead a sort of dangerous life and my course of study offers a means of protection against these dangers.”

“You teach ‘em to use brassknuckles?”

“Yes mamm, if necessary. Look here, you take a girl and she goes into some café where she’s got no business to go. Well then, her escort he gets a little too much to drink an’ he goes to sleep an’ then some other fella comes up and says ‘Hello, sweet mamma’ or whatever one of those mashers says up here. What does she do? She can’t scream, on account of no real lady’ll scream nowadays--no--She just reaches down in her pocket and slips her fingers into a pair of Powell’s defensive brassknuckles, débutante’s size, executes what I call the Society Hook, and Wham! that big fella’s on his way to the cellar.”

“Well--what--what’s the guitar for?” whispered the awed Amanthis. “Do they have to knock somebody over with the guitar?”

“No, mamm!” exclaimed Jim in horror. “No mamm. In my course no lady would be taught to raise a guitar against anybody. I teach ‘em to play. Shucks! you ought to hear ‘em. Why, when I’ve given ‘em two lessons you’d think some of ‘em was colored.”

“And the dice?”

“Dice? I’m related to a dice. My grandfather was a dice. I teach ‘em how to make those dice perform. I protect pocketbook as well as person.”

“Did you--Have you got any pupils?”

“Mamm I got all the really nice, rich people in the place. What I told you ain’t all. I teach lots of things. I teach ‘em the jellyroll--and the Mississippi Sunrise. Why, there was one girl she came to me and said she wanted to learn to snap her fingers. I mean really snap ‘em--like they do. She said she never could snap her fingers since she was little. I gave her two lessons and now Wham! Her daddy says he’s goin’ to leave home.”

“When do you have it?” demanded the weak and shaken Amanthis.

“Three times a week. We’re goin’ there right now.”

“And where do I fit in?”

“Well, you’ll just be one of the pupils. I got it fixed up that you come from very high-tone people down in New Jersey. I didn’t tell ‘em your daddy was a judge--I told ‘em he was the man that had the patent on lump sugar.”

She gasped.

“So all you got to do,” he went on, “is to pretend you never saw no barber.”

They were now at the south end of the village and Amanthis saw a row of cars parked in front of a two-story building. The cars were all low, long, rakish and of a brilliant hue. They were the sort of car that is manufactured to solve the millionaire’s problem on his son’s eighteenth birthday.

Then Amanthis was ascending a narrow stairs to the second story. Here, painted on a door from which came the sounds of music and laughter were the words:

JAMES POWELL; J. M.

“Dice, Brassknuckles and Guitar”

Mon.--Wed.--Fri.

Hours 3-5 P.M.

“Now if you’ll just step this way--” said the Principal, pushing open the door.

Amanthis found herself in a long, bright room, populated with girls and men of about her own age. The scene presented itself to her at first as a sort of animated afternoon tea but after a moment she began to see, here and there, a motive and a pattern to the proceedings.

The students were scattered into groups, sitting, kneeling, standing, but all rapaciously intent on the subjects which engrossed them. From six young ladies gathered in a ring around some indistinguishable objects came a medley of cries and exclamations--plaintive, pleading, supplicating, exhorting, imploring and lamenting--their voices serving as tenor to an undertone of mysterious clatters.

Next to this group, four young men were surrounding an adolescent black, who proved to be none other than Mr. Powell’s late body-servant. The young men were roaring at Hugo apparently unrelated phrases, expressing a wide gamut of emotion. Now their voices rose to a sort of clamor, now they spoke softly and gently, with mellow implication. Every little while Hugo would answer them with words of approbation, correction or disapproval.

“What are they doing?” whispered Amanthis to Jim.

“That there’s a course in southern accent. Lot of young men up here want to learn southern accent--so we teach it--Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Eastern Shore, Ole Virginian. Some of ‘em even want straight nigger--for song purposes.”

They walked around among the groups. Some girls with metal knuckles were furiously insulting two punching bags on each of which was painted the leering, winking face of a “masher.” A mixed group, led by a banjo tom-tom, were rolling harmonic syllables from their guitars. There were couples dancing flat-footed in the corner to a phonograph record made by Rastus Muldoon’s Savannah Band; there were couples stalking a slow Chicago with a Memphis Sideswoop solemnly around the room.

“Are there any rules?” asked Amanthis.

Jim considered.

“Well,” he answered finally, “they can’t smoke unless they’re over sixteen, and the boys have got to shoot square dice and I don’t let ‘em bring liquor into the Academy.”

“I see.”

“And now, Miss Powell, if you’re ready I’ll ask you to take off your hat and go over and join Miss Genevieve Harlan at that punching bag in the corner.” He raised his voice. “Hugo,” he called, “there’s a new student here. Equip her with a pair of Powell’s Defensive Brassknuckles--débutante size.”

I regret to say that I never saw Jim Powell’s famous Jazz School in action nor followed his personally conducted tours into the mysteries of Dice, Brassknuckles and Guitar. So I can give you only such details as were later reported to me by one of his admiring pupils. During all the discussion of it afterwards no one ever denied that it was an enormous success, and no pupil ever regretted having received its degree--Bachelor of Jazz.

The parents innocently assumed that it was a sort of musical and dancing academy, but its real curriculum was transmitted from Santa Barbara to Biddeford Pool by that underground associated press which links up the so-called younger generation. Invitations to visit Southampton were at a premium--and Southampton generally is almost as dull for young people as Newport.

The Academy branched out with a small but well-groomed Jazz Orchestra.

“If I could keep it dark,” Jim confided to Amanthis, “I’d have up Rastus Muldoon’s Band from Savannah. That’s the band I’ve always wanted to lead.”

He was making money. His charges were not exorbitant--as a rule his pupils were not particularly flush--but he moved from his boarding-house to the Casino Hotel where he took a suite and had Hugo serve him his breakfast in bed.

The establishing of Amanthis as a member of Southampton’s younger set was easier than he had expected. Within a week she was known to everyone in the school by her first name. Miss Genevieve Harlan took such a fancy to her that she was invited to a sub-deb dance at the Harlan house--and evidently acquitted herself with tact, for thereafter she was invited to almost every such entertainment in Southampton.

Jim saw less of her than he would have liked. Not that her manner toward him changed--she walked with him often in the mornings, she was always willing to listen to his plans--but after she was taken up by the fashionable her evenings seemed to be monopolized. Several times Jim arrived at her boarding-house to find her out of breath, as if she had just come in at a run, presumably from some festivity in which he had no share.

So as the summer waned he found that one thing was lacking to complete the triumph of his enterprise. Despite the hospitality shown to Amanthis, the doors of Southampton were closed to him. Polite to, or rather, fascinated by him as his pupils were from three to five, after that hour they moved in another world.

His was the position of a golf professional who, though he may fraternize, and even command, on the links, loses his privileges with the sun-down. He may look in the club window but he cannot dance. And, likewise, it was not given to Jim to see his teachings put into effect. He could hear the gossip of the morning after--that was all.

But while the golf professional, being English, holds himself proudly below his patrons, Jim Powell, who “came from a right good family down there--pore though,” lay awake many nights in his hotel bed and heard the music drifting into his window from the Katzbys’ house or the Beach Club, and turned over restlessly and wondered what was the matter. In the early days of his success he had bought himself a dress-suit, thinking that he would soon have a chance to wear it--but it still lay untouched in the box in which it had come from the tailor’s.

Perhaps, he thought, there was some real gap which separated him from the rest. It worried him. One boy in particular, Martin Van Vleck, son of Van Vleck the ash-can King, made him conscious of the gap. Van Vleck was twenty-one, a tutoring-school product who still hoped to enter Yale. Several times Jim had heard him make remarks not intended for Jim’s ear--once in regard to the suit with multiple buttons, again in reference to Jim’s long, pointed shoes. Jim had passed these over.

He knew that Van Vleck was attending the school chiefly to monopolize the time of little Martha Katzby, who was just sixteen and too young to have attention of a boy of twenty-one--especially the attention of Van Vleck, who was so spiritually exhausted by his educational failures that he drew on the rather exhaustible innocence of sixteen.

It was late in September, two days before the Harlan dance which was to be the last and biggest of the season for this younger crowd. Jim, as usual, was not invited. He had hoped that he would be. The two young Harlans, Ronald and Genevieve, had been his first patrons when he arrived at Southampton--and it was Genevieve who had taken such a fancy to Amanthis. To have been at their dance--the most magnificent dance of all--would have crowned and justified the success of the waning summer.

His class, gathering for the afternoon, was loudly anticipating the next day’s revel with no more thought of him than if he had been the family butler. Hugo, standing beside Jim, chuckled suddenly and remarked:

“Look yonder that man Van Vleck. He paralyzed. He been havin’ powerful lotta corn this evenin’.”

Jim turned and stared at Van Vleck, who had linked arms with little Martha Katzby and was saying something to her in a low voice. Jim saw her try to draw away.

He put his whistle to his mouth and blew it.

“All right,” he cried, “Le’s go! Group one tossin’ the drumstick, high an’ zig-zag, group two, test your mouth organs for the Riverfront Shuffle. Promise ‘em sugar! Flatfoots this way! Orchestra--let’s have the Florida Drag-Out played as a dirge.”

There was an unaccustomed sharpness in his voice and the exercises began with a mutter of facetious protest.

With his smoldering grievance directing itself toward Van Vleck, Jim was walking here and there among the groups when Hugo tapped him suddenly on the arm. He looked around. Two participants had withdrawn from the mouth organ institute--one of them was Van Vleck and he was giving a drink out of his flask to fifteen-year-old Ronald Harlan.

Jim strode across the room. Van Vleck turned defiantly as he came up.

“All right,” said Jim, trembling with anger, “you know the rules. You get out!”

The music died slowly away and there was a sudden drifting over in the direction of the trouble. Somebody snickered. An atmosphere of anticipation formed instantly. Despite the fact that they all liked Jim their sympathies were divided--Van Vleck was one of them.

“Get out!” repeated Jim, more quietly.

“Are you talking to me?” inquired Van Vleck coldly.

“Yes.”

“Then you better say ‘sir.’“

“I wouldn’t say ‘sir’ to anybody that’d give a little boy whisky! You get out!”

“Look here!” said Van Vleck furiously. “You’ve butted in once too much. I’ve known Ronald since he was two years old. Ask him if he wants you to tell him what he can do!”

Ronald Harlan, his dignity offended, grew several years older and looked haughtily at Jim.

“Mind your own business!” he said defiantly, albeit a little guiltily.

“Hear that?” demanded Van Vleck. “My God, can’t you see you’re just a servant? Ronald here’d no more think of asking you to his party than he would his bootlegger.”

“Youbettergetout!” cried Jim incoherently.

Van Vleck did not move. Reaching out suddenly, Jim caught his wrist and jerking it behind his back forced his arm upward until Van Vleck bent forward in agony. Jim leaned and picked the flask from the floor with his free hand. Then he signed Hugo to open the hall-door, uttered an abrupt “You step!” and marched his helpless captive out into the hall where he literally threw him downstairs, head over heels bumping from wall to banister, and hurled his flask after him.

Then he reentered his academy, closed the door behind him and stood with his back against it.

“It--it happens to be a rule that nobody drinks while in this Academy.” He paused, looking from face to face, finding there sympathy, awe, disapproval, conflicting emotions. They stirred uneasily. He caught Amanthis’s eye, fancied he saw a faint nod of encouragement and, with almost an effort, went on:

“I just had to throw that fella out an’ you-all know it.” Then he concluded with a transparent affectation of dismissing an unimportant matter--”All right, let’s go! Orchestra--!”

But no one felt exactly like going on. The spontaneity of the proceedings had been violently disturbed. Someone made a run or two on the sliding guitar and several of the girls began whamming at the leer on the punching bags, but Ronald Harlan, followed by two other boys, got their hats and went silently out the door.

Jim and Hugo moved among the groups as usual until a certain measure of routine activity was restored but the enthusiasm was unrecapturable and Jim, shaken and discouraged, considered discontinuing school for the day. But he dared not. If they went home in this mood they might not come back. The whole thing depended on a mood. He must recreate it, he thought frantically--now, at once!

But try as he might, there was little response. He himself was not happy--he could communicate no gaiety to them. They watched his efforts listlessly and, he thought, a little contemptuously.

Then the tension snapped when the door burst suddenly open, precipitating a brace of middle-aged and excited women into the room. No person over twenty-one had ever entered the Academy before--but Van Vleck had gone direct to headquarters. The women were Mrs. Clifton Garneau and Mrs. Poindexter Katzby, two of the most fashionable and, at present, two of the most flurried women in Southampton. They were in search of their daughters as, in these days, so many women continually are.

The business was over in about three minutes.

“And as for you!” cried Mrs. Clifton Garneau in an awful voice, “your idea is to run a bar and--and opium den for children! You ghastly, horrible, unspeakable man! I can smell morphin fumes! Don’t tell me I can’t smell morphin fumes. I can smell morphin fumes!”

“And,” bellowed Mrs. Poindexter Katzby, “you have colored men around! You have colored girls hidden! I’m going to the police!”

Not content with herding their own daughters from the room, they insisted on the exodus of their friends’ daughters. Jim was not a little touched when several of them--including even little Martha Katzby, before she was snatched fiercely away by her mother--came up and shook hands with him. But they were all going, haughtily, regretfully or with shame-faced mutters of apology.

“Good-by,” he told them wistfully. “In the morning I’ll send you the money that’s due you.”

And, after all, they were not sorry to go. Outside, the sound of their starting motors, the triumphant put-put of their cut-outs cutting the warm September air, was a jubilant sound--a sound of youth and hopes high as the sun. Down to the ocean, to roll in the waves and forget--forget him and their discomfort at his humiliation.

They were gone--he was alone with Hugo in the room. He sat down suddenly with his face in his hands.

“Hugo,” he said huskily. “They don’t want us up here.”

“Don’t you care,” said a voice.

He looked up to see Amanthis standing beside him.

“You better go with them,” he told her. “You better not be seen here with me.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re in society now and I’m no better to those people than a servant. You’re in society--I fixed that up. You better go or they won’t invite you to any of their dances.”

“They won’t anyhow, Jim,” she said gently. “They didn’t invite me to the one tomorrow night.”

He looked up indignantly.

“They didn’t?”

She shook her head.

“I’ll make ‘em!” he said wildly. “I’ll tell ‘em they got to. I’ll--I’ll--”

She came close to him with shining eyes.

“Don’t you mind, Jim,” she soothed him. “Don’t you mind. They don’t matter. We’ll have a party of our own tomorrow--just you and I.”

“I come from right good folks,” he said, defiantly. “Pore though.”

She laid her hand softly on his shoulder.

“I understand. You’re better than all of them put together, Jim.”

He got up and went to the window and stared out mournfully into the late afternoon.

“I reckon I should have let you sleep in that hammock.”

She laughed.

“I’m awfully glad you didn’t.”

He turned and faced the room, and his face was dark.

“Sweep up and lock up, Hugo,” he said, his voice trembling. “The summer’s over and we’re going down home.”

Autumn had come early. Jim Powell woke next morning to find his room cool, and the phenomenon of frosted breath in September absorbed him for a moment to the exclusion of the day before. Then the lines of his face drooped with unhappiness as he remembered the humiliation which had washed the cheery glitter from the summer. There was nothing left for him except to go back where he was known, where under no provocation were such things said to white people as had been said to him here.

After breakfast a measure of his customary light-heartedness returned. He was a child of the South--brooding was alien to his nature. He could conjure up an injury only a certain number of times before it faded into the great vacancy of the past.

But when, from force of habit, he strolled over to his defunct establishment, already as obsolete as Snorkey’s late sanitarium, melancholy again dwelt in his heart. Hugo was there, a specter of despair, deep in the lugubrious blues amidst his master’s broken hopes.

Usually a few words from Jim were enough to raise him to an inarticulate ecstasy, but this morning there were no words to utter. For two months Hugo had lived on a pinnacle of which he had never dreamed. He had enjoyed his work simply and passionately, arriving before school hours and lingering long after Mr. Powell’s pupils had gone.

The day dragged toward a not-too-promising night. Amanthis did not appear and Jim wondered forlornly if she had not changed her mind about dining with him that night. Perhaps it would be better if she were not seen with them. But then, he reflected dismally, no one would see them anyhow--everybody was going to the big dance at the Harlans’ house.

When twilight threw unbearable shadows into the school hall he locked it up for the last time, took down the sign “James Powell; J. M., Dice, Brassknuckles and Guitar,” and went back to his hotel. Looking over his scrawled accounts he saw that there was another month’s rent to pay on his school and some bills for windows broken and new equipment that had hardly been used. Jim had lived in state, and he realized that financially he would have nothing to show for the summer after all.

When he had finished he took his new dress-suit out of its box and inspected it, running his hand over the satin of the lapels and lining. This, at least, he owned and perhaps in Tarleton somebody would ask him to a party where he could wear it.

“Shucks!” he said scoffingly. “It was just a no account old academy, anyhow. Some of those boys round the garage down home could of beat it all hollow.”

Whistling “Jeanne of Jelly-bean Town” to a not-dispirited rhythm Jim encased himself in his first dress-suit and walked downtown.

“Orchids,” he said to the clerk. He surveyed his purchase with some pride. He knew that no girl at the Harlan dance would wear anything lovelier than these exotic blossoms that leaned languorously backward against green ferns.

In a taxi-cab, carefully selected to look like a private car, he drove to Amanthis’s boarding-house. She came down wearing a rose-colored evening dress into which the orchids melted like colors into a sunset.

“I reckon we’ll go to the Casino Hotel,” he suggested, “unless you got some other place--”

At their table, looking out over the dark ocean, his mood became a contended sadness. The windows were shut against the cool but the orchestra played “Kalula” and “South Sea Moon” and for awhile, with her young loveliness opposite him, he felt himself to be a romantic participant in the life around him. They did not dance, and he was glad--it would have reminded him of that other brighter and more radiant dance to which they could not go.

After dinner they took a taxi and followed the sandy roads for an hour, glimpsing the now starry ocean through the casual trees.

“I want to thank you,” she said, “for all you’ve done for me, Jim.”

“That’s all right--we Powells ought to stick together.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to Tarleton tomorrow.”

“I’m sorry,” she said softly. “Are you going to drive down?”

“I got to. I got to get the car south because I couldn’t get what she was worth by sellin’ it. You don’t suppose anybody’s stole my car out of your barn?” he asked in sudden alarm.

She repressed a smile.

“No.”

“I’m sorry about this--about you,” he went on huskily, “and--and I would like to have gone to just one of their dances. You shouldn’t of stayed with me yesterday. Maybe it kept ‘em from asking you.”

“Jim,” she suggested eagerly, “let’s go and stand outside and listen to their old music. We don’t care.”

“They’ll be coming out,” he objected.

“No, it’s too cold. Besides there’s nothing they could do to you any more than they have done.”

She gave the chauffeur a direction and a few minutes later they stopped in front of the heavy Georgian beauty of the Madison Harlan house whence the windows cast their gaiety in bright patches on the lawn. There was laughter inside and the plaintive wind of fashionable horns, and now and again the slow, mysterious shuffle of dancing feet.

“Let’s go up close,” whispered Amanthis in an ecstatic trance, “I want to hear.”

They walked toward the house, keeping in the shadow of the great trees. Jim proceeded with awe--suddenly he stopped and seized Amanthis’s arm.

“Man!” he cried in an excited whisper. “Do you know what that is?”

“A night watchman?” Amanthis cast a startled look around.

“It’s Rastus Muldoon’s Band from Savannah! I heard ‘em once, and I know. It’s Rastus Muldoon’s Band!”

They moved closer till they could see first pompadours, then slicked male heads, and high coiffures and finally even bobbed hair pressed under black ties. They could distinguish chatter below the ceaseless laughter. Two figures appeared on the porch, gulped something quickly from flasks and returned inside. But the music had bewitched Jim Powell. His eyes were fixed and he moved his feet like a blind man.

Pressed in close behind some dark bushes they listened. The number ended. A breeze from the ocean blew over them and Jim shivered slightly. Then, in a wistful whisper:

“I’ve always wanted to lead that band. Just once.” His voice grew listless. “Come on. Let’s go. I reckon I don’t belong around here.”

He held out his arm to her but instead of taking it she stepped suddenly out of the bushes and into a bright patch of light.

“Come on, Jim,” she said startlingly. “Let’s go inside.”

“What--?”

She seized his arm and though he drew back in a sort of stupefied horror at her boldness she urged him persistently toward the great front door.

“Watch out!” he gasped. “Somebody’s coming out of that house and see us.”

“No, Jim,” she said firmly. “Nobody’s coming out of that house--but two people are going in.”

“Why?” he demanded wildly, standing in full glare of the porte-cochere lamps. “Why?”

“Why?” she mocked him. “Why, just because this dance happens to be given for me.”

He thought she was mad.

“Come home before they see us,” he begged her.

The great doors swung open and a gentleman stepped out on the porch. In horror Jim recognized Mr. Madison Harlan. He made a movement as though to break away and run. But the man walked down the steps holding out both hands to Amanthis.

“Hello at last,” he cried. “Where on earth have you two been? Cousin Amanthis--” He kissed her, and turned cordially to Jim. “And for you, Mr. Powell,” he went on, “to make up for being late you’ve got to promise that for just one number you’re going to lead that band.”

New Jersey was warm, all except the part that was under water, and that mattered only to the fishes. All the tourists who rode through the long green miles stopped their cars in front of a spreading old-fashioned country house and looked at the red swing on the lawn and the wide, shady porch, and sighed and drove on--swerving a little to avoid a jet-black body-servant in the road. The body-servant was applying a hammer and nails to a decayed flivver which flaunted from its rear the legend, “Tarleton, Ga.”

A girl with yellow hair and a warm color to her face was lying in the hammock looking as though she could fall asleep any moment. Near her sat a gentleman in an extraordinarily tight suit. They had come down together the day before from the fashionable resort at Southampton.

“When you first appeared,” she was explaining, “I never thought I’d see you again so I made that up about the barber and all. As a matter of fact, I’ve been around quite a bit--with or without brassknuckles. I’m coming out this autumn.”

“I reckon I had a lot to learn,” said Jim.

“And you see,” went on Amanthis, looking at him rather anxiously, “I’d been invited up to Southampton to visit my cousins--and when you said you were going, I wanted to see what you’d do. I always slept at the Harlans’ but I kept a room at the boarding-house so you wouldn’t know. The reason I didn’t get there on the right train was because I had to come early and warn a lot of people to pretend not to know me.”

Jim got up, nodding his head in comprehension.

“I reckon I and Hugo had better be movin’ along. We got to make Baltimore by night.”

“That’s a long way.”

“I want to sleep south tonight,” he said simply.

Together they walked down the path and past the idiotic statue of Diana on the lawn.

“You see,” added Amanthis gently, “you don’t have to be rich up here in order to--to go around, any more than you do in Georgia--” She broke off abruptly, “Won’t you come back next year and start another Academy?”

“No mamm, not me. That Mr. Harlan told me I could go on with the one I had but I told him no.”

“Haven’t you--didn’t you make money?”

“No mamm,” he answered. “I got enough of my own income to just get me home. I didn’t have my principal along. One time I was way ahead but I was livin’ high and there was my rent an’ apparatus and those musicians. Besides, there at the end I had to pay what they’d advanced me for their lessons.”

“You shouldn’t have done that!” cried Amanthis indignantly.

“They didn’t want me to, but I told ‘em they’d have to take it.”

He didn’t consider it necessary to mention that Mr. Harlan had tried to present him with a check.

They reached the automobile just as Hugo drove in his last nail. Jim opened a pocket of the door and took from it an unlabeled bottle containing a whitish-yellow liquid.

“I intended to get you a present,” he told her awkwardly, “but my money got away before I could, so I thought I’d send you something from Georgia. This here’s just a personal remembrance. It won’t do for you to drink but maybe after you come out into society you might want to show some of those young fellas what good old corn tastes like.”

She took the bottle.

“Thank you, Jim.”

“That’s all right.” He turned to Hugo. “I reckon we’ll go along now. Give the lady the hammer.”

“Oh, you can have the hammer,” said Amanthis tearfully. “Oh, won’t you promise to come back?”

“Someday--maybe.”

He looked for a moment at her yellow hair and her blue eyes misty with sleep and tears. Then he got into his car and as his foot found the clutch his whole manner underwent a change.

“I’ll say good-by mamm,” he announced with impressive dignity, “we’re goin’ south for the winter.”

The gesture of his straw hat indicated Palm Beach, St. Augustine, Miami. His body-servant spun the crank, gained his seat and became part of the intense vibration into which the automobile was thrown.

“South for the winter,” repeated Jim, and then he added softly, “You’re the prettiest girl I ever knew. You go back up there and lie down in that hammock, and sleep--sle-eep--”

It was almost a lullaby, as he said it. He bowed to her, magnificently, profoundly, including the whole North in the splendor of his obeisance--

Then they were gone down the road in quite a preposterous cloud of dust. Just before they reached the first bend Amanthis saw them come to a full stop, dismount and shove the top part of the car on to the bottom pan. They took their seats again without looking around. Then the bend--and they were out of sight, leaving only a faint brown mist to show that they had passed.

EMOTIONAL BANKRUPTCY

Saturday Evening Post (15 August 1931)

“There’s that nut with the spyglass again,” remarked Josephine. Lillian Hammel unhooked a lace sofa cushion from her waist and came to the window. “He’s standing back so we can’t see him. He’s looking at the room above.”

The peeper was working from a house on the other side of narrow Sixty-eighth Street, all unconscious that his activities were a matter of knowledge and, lately, of indifference to the pupils of Miss Truby’s finishing school. They had even identified him as the undistinguished but quite proper young man who issued from the house with a brief case at eight every morning, apparently oblivious of the school across the street.

“What a horrible person,” said Lillian.

“They’re all the same,” Josephine said. “I’ll bet almost every man we know would do the same thing, if he had a telescope and nothing to do in the afternoon. I’ll bet Louie Randall would, anyhow.”

“Josephine, is he actually following you to Princeton?” Lillian asked.

“Yes, dearie.”

“Doesn’t he think he’s got his nerve?”

“He’ll get away with it,” Josephine assured her.

“Won’t Paul be wild?”

“I can’t worry about that. I only know half a dozen boys at Princeton, and with Louie I know I’ll have at least one good dancer to depend on. Paul’s too short for me, and he’s a bum dancer anyhow.”

Not that Josephine was very tall; she was an exquisite size for seventeen and of a beauty that was flowering marvelously day by day into something richer and warmer. People gasped nowadays, whereas a year ago they would merely have stared, and scarcely glanced at her a year before that. She was manifestly to be the spectacular débutante of Chicago next year, in spite of the fact that she was an egotist who played not for popularity but for individual men. While Josephine always recovered, the men frequently didn’t--her mail from Chicago, from New Haven, from the Yale Battery on the border, averaged a dozen letters a day.

This was in the fall of 1916, with the thunder of far-off guns already growing louder on the air. When the two girls started for the Princeton prom two days later, they carried with them the Poems of Alan Seeger, supplemented by copies of Smart Set and Snappy Stories, bought surreptitiously at the station news stand. When compared to a seventeen-year-old girl of today, Lillian Hammel was an innocent; Josephine Perry, however, belonged to the ages.

They read nothing en route save a few love epigrams beginning: “A woman of thirty is--” The train was crowded and a sustained, excited chatter flowed along the aisles of the coaches. There were very young girls in a gallantly concealed state of terror; there were privately bored girls who would never see twenty-five again; there were unattractive girls, blandly unconscious of what was in store; and there were little, confident parties who felt as though they were going home.

“They say it’s not like Yale,” said Josephine. “They don’t do things so elaborately here. They don’t rush you from place to place, from one tea to another, like they do at New Haven.”

“Will you ever forget that divine time last spring?” exclaimed Lillian.

They both sighed.

“At least there’ll be Louie Randall,” said Josephine.

There would indeed be Louie Randall, whom Josephine had seen fit to invite herself, without the formality of telling her Princeton escort that he was coming. The escort, at that moment pacing up and down at the station platform with many other young men, was probably under the impression that it was his party. But he was wrong; it was Josephine’s party; even Lillian was coming with another Princeton man, named Martin Munn, whom Josephine had thoughtfully provided. “Please ask her,” she had written. “We’ll manage to see a lot of each other, if you do, because the man I’m coming with isn’t really very keen about me, so he won’t mind.”

But Paul Dempster cared a lot; so much so that when the train came puffing up from the Junction he gulped a full pint of air, which is a mild form of swooning. He had been devoted to Josephine for a year--long after her own interest had waned--he had long lost any power of judging her objectively; she was become simply a projection of his own dreams, a radiant, nebulous mass of light.

But Josephine saw Paul clearly enough as they stepped off the train. She gave herself up to him immediately, as if to get it over with, to clear the decks for more vital action.

“So thrilled--so thrilled! So darling to ask me!” Immemorial words, still doing service after fifteen years.

She took his arm snugly, settling it in hers with a series of little readjustments, as if she wanted it right because it was going to be there forever.

“I bet you’re not glad to see me at all,” she whispered. “I’ll bet you’ve forgotten me. I know you.”

Rudimentary stuff, but it sent Paul Dempster into a confused and happy trance. He had the adequate surface of nineteen, but, within, all was still in a ferment of adolescence.

He could only answer gruffly: “Big chance.” And then: “Martin had a chemistry lab. He’ll meet us at the club.”

Slowly the crowd of youth swirled up the steps and beneath Blair arch, floating in an autumn dream and scattering the yellow leaves with their feet. Slowly they moved between stretches of greensward under the elms and cloisters, with breath misty upon the crisp evening, following the hope that lay just ahead, the goal of happiness almost reached.

They sat before a big fire in the Witherspoon Club, the largest of those undergraduate mansions for which Princeton is famous. Martin Munn, Lillian’s escort, was a quiet, handsome boy whom Josephine had met several times, but whose sentimental nature she had not explored. Now, with the phonograph playing Down Among the Sheltering Palms, with the soft orange light of the great room glowing upon the scattered groups, who seemed to have brought in the atmosphere of infinite promise from outside, Josephine looked at him appraisingly. A familiar current of curiosity coursed through her; already her replies to Paul had grown abstracted. But still in the warm enchantment of the walk from the station, Paul did not notice. He was far from guessing that he had already been served his ration; of special attention he would get no more. He was now cast for another rôle.

At the exact moment when it was suggested that they dress for dinner the party became aware of an individual who had just entered the club and was standing by the entrance looking not exactly at home, for he blinked about unfamiliarly, but not in the least ill at ease. He was tall, with long, dancing legs, and his face was that of an old, experienced weasel to whom no henhouse was impregnable.

“Why, Louie Randall!” exclaimed Josephine in a tone of astonishment.

She talked to him for a moment as if unwillingly, and then introduced him all around, meanwhile whispering to Paul: “He’s a boy from New Haven. I never dreamed he’d follow me down here.”

Randall within a few minutes was somehow one of the party. He had a light and witty way about him; no dark suspicions had penetrated Paul’s mind.

“Oh, by the way,” said Louie Randall, “I wonder if I can find a place to change my clothes. I’ve got a suitcase outside.”

There was a pause. Josephine was apparently uninterested. The pause grew difficult, and Paul heard himself saying: “You can change in my room if you want to.”

“I don’t want to put you out.”

“Not at all.”

Josephine raised her eyebrows at Paul, disclaiming responsibility for the man’s presumption; a moment later, Randall said: “Do you live near here?”

“Pretty near.”

“Because I have a taxi and I could take you there if you’re going to change, and you could show me where it is. I don’t want to put you out.”

The repetition of this ambiguous statement suggested that otherwise Paul might find his belongings in the street. He rose unwillingly; he did not hear Josephine whisper to Martin Munn: “Please don’t you go yet.” But Lillian did, and without minding at all. Her love affairs never conflicted with Josephine’s, which is why they had been intimate friends so long. When Louie Randall and his involuntary host had departed, she excused herself and went to dress upstairs.

“I’d like to see all over the clubhouse,” suggested Josephine. She felt the old excitement mounting in her pulse, felt her cheeks begin to glow like an electric heater.

“These are the private dining rooms,” Martin explained as they walked around. . . . “The billiard room. . . . The squash courts. . . . This library is modeled on something in a Cercersion monastery in--in India or somewhere. . . . This”--he opened a door and peered in--”this is the president’s room, but I don’t know where the light is.”

Josephine walked in with a little laugh. “It’s very nice in here,” she said. “You can’t see anything at all. Oh, what have I run into? Come and save me!”

When they emerged a few minutes later, Martin smoothed back his hair hurriedly.

“You darling!” he said.

Josephine made a funny little clicking sound.

“What is it?” he demanded. “Why have you got such a funny look on your face?”

Josephine didn’t answer.

“Have I done something? Are you angry? You look as if you’d seen a ghost,” he said.

“You haven’t done anything,” she answered, and added, with an effort: “You were--sweet.” She shuddered. “Show me my room, will you?”

“How strange,” she was thinking. “He’s so attractive, but I didn’t enjoy kissing him at all. For the first time in my life--even when it was a man I didn’t especially care for--I had no feeling about him at all. I’ve often been bored afterward, but at the time it’s always meant something.”

The experience depressed her more than she could account for. This was only her second prom, but neither before nor after did she ever enjoy one so little. She had never been more enthusiastically rushed, but through it all she seemed to float in a detached dream. The men were not individuals tonight, but dummies; men from Princeton, men from New Haven, new men, old beaus--were all as unreal as sticks. She wondered if her face wore that bovine expression she had often noted on the faces of stupid and apathetic girls.

“It’s a mood,” she told herself. “I’m just tired.”

But next day, at a bright and active luncheon, she seemed to herself to have less vivacity than the dozen girls who boasted wanly that they hadn’t gone to bed at all. After the football game she walked with Paul Dempster to the station, trying contritely to give him the last end of the week-end, as she had given him the beginning.

“Then why won’t you go to the theater with us tonight?” he was pleading. “That was the understanding in my letter. We were to come to New York with you and all go to the theater.”

“Because,” she explained patiently, “Lillian and I have to be back to school by eight. That’s the only condition on which we were allowed to come.”

“Oh, hell,” he said. “I’ll bet you’re doing something tonight with that Randall.”

She denied this scornfully, but Paul was suddenly realizing that Randall had dined with them, Randall had slept upon his couch, and Randall, though at the game he had sat on the Yale side of the field, was somehow with them now.

His was the last face that Paul saw as the train pulled out for the Junction.

He had thanked Paul very graciously and asked him to stay with him if he was ever in New Haven.

Nevertheless, if the miserable Princetonian had witnessed a scene in the Pennsylvania Station an hour later, his pain would have been moderated, for now Louie Randall was arguing bitterly:

“But why not take a chance? The chaperon doesn’t know what time you have to be in.”

“We do.”

When finally he had accepted the inevitable and departed, Josephine sighed and turned to Lillian.

“Where are we going to meet Wallie and Joe? At the Ritz?”

“Yes, and we’d better hurry,” said Lillian. “The Follies begin at nine.”

II

It had been like that for almost a year--a game played with technical mastery, but with the fire and enthusiasm gone--and Josephine was still a month short of eighteen. One evening during Thanksgiving vacation, as they waited for dinner in the library of Christine Dicer’s house on Gramercy Park, Josephine said to Lillian:

“I keep thinking how excited I’d have been a year ago. A new place, a new dress, meeting new men.”

“You’ve been around too much, dearie; you’re blasé.”

Josephine bridled impatiently: “I hate that word, and it’s not true. I don’t care about anything in the world except men, and you know it. But they’re not like they used to be. . . . What are you laughing at?”

“When you were six years old they were different?”

“They were. They used to have more spirit when we played drop-the-handkerchief--even the little Ikeys that used to come in the back gate. The boys at dancing school were so exciting; they were all so sweet. I used to wonder what it would be like to kiss every one of them, and sometimes it was wonderful. And then came Travis and Tony Harker and Ridge Saunders and Ralph and John Bailey, and finally I began to realize that I was doing it all. They were nothing, most of them--not heroes or men of the world or anything I thought. They were just easy. That sounds conceited, but it’s true.”

She paused for a moment.

“Last night in bed I was thinking of the sort of man I really could love, but he’d be different from anybody I’ve ever met. He’d have to have certain things. He wouldn’t necessarily be very handsome, but pleasant looking; and with a good figure, and strong. Then he’d have to have some kind of position in the world, or else not care whether he had one or not; if you see what I mean. He’d have to be a leader, not just like everybody else. And dignified, but very pash, and with lots of experience, so I’d believe everything he said or thought was right. And every time I looked at him I’d have to get that thrill I sometimes get out of a new man; only with him I’d have to get it over and over every time I looked at him, all my life.”

“And you’d want him to be very much in love with you. That’s what I’d want first of all.”

“Of course,” said Josephine abstractedly, “but principally I’d want to be always sure of loving him. It’s much more fun to love someone than to be loved by someone.”

There were footsteps in the hall outside and a man walked into the room. He was an officer in the uniform of the French aviation--a glove-fitting tunic of horizon blue, and boots and belt that shone like mirrors in the lamplight. He was young, with gray eyes that seemed to be looking off into the distance, and a red-brown military mustache. Across his left breast was a line of colored ribbons, and there were gold-embroidered stripes on his arms and wings on his collar.

“Good evening,” he said courteously. “I was directed in here. I hope I’m not breaking into something.”

Josephine did not move; from head to foot she saw him, and as she watched he seemed to come nearer, filling her whole vision. She heard Lillian’s voice, and then the officer’s voice, saying:

“My name’s Dicer; I’m Christine’s cousin. Do you mind if I smoke a cigarette?”

He didn’t sit down. He moved about the room and turned over a magazine, not oblivious to their presence, but as if respecting their conversation. But when he saw that silence had fallen, he sat against a table near them with his arms folded and smiled at them.

“You’re in the French army,” Lillian ventured.

“Yes, I’ve just got back, and very glad to be here.”

He didn’t look glad, Josephine noticed. He looked as if he wanted to get out now, but had no place to go to.

For the first time in her life she felt no confidence. She had absolutely nothing to say. She hoped the emptiness that she had felt ever since her soul poured suddenly out toward his beautiful image didn’t show in her face. She made her lips into a smile, and kept thinking how once, long ago, Travis de Coppet had worn his uncle’s opera cloak to dancing school and suddenly seemed like a man out of the great world. So, now, the war overseas had gone on so long, touched us so little, save for confining us to our own shores, that it had a legendary quality about it, and the figure before her seemed to have stepped out of a gigantic red fairy tale.

She was glad when the other dinner guests came and the room filled with people, strangers she could talk to or laugh with or yawn at, according to their deserts. She despised the girls fluttering around Captain Dicer, but she admired him for not showing by a flicker of his eye that he either enjoyed it or hated it. Especially she disliked a tall, possessive blonde who once passed, her hand on his arm; he should have flicked away with a handkerchief the contamination of his immaculateness.

They went in to dinner; he was far away from her, and she was glad. All she could see of him was his blue cuff farther up the table when he reached for a glass, but she felt that they were alone together, none the less because he did not know.

The man next to her gave her the superfluous information that he was a hero:

“He’s Christine’s cousin, brought up in France, and joined at the beginning of the war. He was shot down behind the German lines and escaped by jumping off a train. There was a lot about it in the papers. I think he’s over here on some kind of propaganda work. . . . Great horseman too. Everybody likes him.”

After dinner she sat quietly while two men talked over her, sat persistently willing him to come to her. Ah, but she would be so nice, avoiding any curiosity or sentimentality about his experiences, avoiding any of the things that must have bored and embarrassed him since he had been home. She heard the voices around him:

“Captain Dicer. . . . Germans crucify all the Canadian soldiers they capture. . . . How much longer do you think the war . . . to be behind the enemy lines. . . . Were you frightened?” And then a heavy, male voice telling him about it, between puffs of a cigar: “The way I see it, Captain Dicer, neither side is getting anywhere. It strikes me they’re afraid of each other.”

It seemed a long time later that he came over to her, but at just the right moment, when there was a vacant seat beside her and he could slip into it.

“I wanted to talk to the prettiest girl for a while. I’ve wanted to all evening; it’s been pretty heavy going.”

Josephine wanted to lean against the shining leather of his belt, and more, she wanted to take his head in her lap. All her life had pointed toward this moment. She knew what he wanted, and gave it to him; not words, but a smile of warmth and delight--a smile that said, “I’m yours for the asking; I’m won.” It was not a smile that undervalued herself, because through its beauty it spoke for both of them, expressed all the potential joy that existed between them.

“Who are you?” he asked.

“I’m a girl.”

“I thought you were a flower. I wondered why they put you on a chair.”

“Vive la France,” answered Josephine demurely. She dropped her eyes to his chest. “Do you collect stamps, too, or only coins?”

He laughed. “It’s good to meet an American girl again. I hoped they’d at least put me across from you at table, so I could rest my eyes on you.”

“I could see your cuff.”

“I could see your arm. At least--yes, I thought it was your green bracelet.”

Later he suggested: “Why couldn’t you come out with me one of these evenings?”

“It’s not done. I’m still in school.”

“Well, some afternoon then. I’d like to go to a tea-dance place and hear some new tunes. The newest thing I know is Waiting for the Robert E. Lee.”

“My nurse used to sing me to sleep with it.”

“When could you?”

“I’m afraid you’ll have to make up a party. Your aunt, Mrs. Dicer, is very strict.”

“I keep forgetting,” he agreed. “How old are you?”

“Eighteen,” she said, anticipating by a month.

That was the point at which they were interrupted and the evening ended for her. The other young men in dinner coats looked like people in mourning beside the banner of his uniform. Some of them were persistent about Josephine, but she was in a reverie of horizon blue and she wanted to be alone.

“This is it at last,” something whispered inside her.

Later that night and next day, she still moved in a trance. Another day more and she would see him--forty-eight hours, forty, thirty. The very word “blasé” made her laugh; she had never known such excitement, such expectation. The blessed day itself was a haze of magic music and softly lit winter rooms, of automobiles where her knee trembled against the top lacing of his boot. She was proud of the eyes that followed them when they danced; she was proud of him even when he was dancing with another girl.

“He may think I’m too young,” she thought anxiously. “That’s why he won’t say anything. If he did, I’d leave school; I’d run away with him tonight.”

School opened next day and Josephine wrote home:

DEAR MOTHER: I wonder if I can’t spend part of the vacation in New York. Christine Dicer wants me to stay a week with her, which would still leave me a full ten days in Chicago. One reason is that the Metropolitan is putting on Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen and if I come home right away I can only see the Rheingold. Also there are two evening dresses that aren’t finished--

The answer came by return post:

. . . because, in the first place, your eighteenth birthday falls then, and your father would feel very badly, because it would be the first birthday you hadn’t passed with us; and, in the second place, I’ve never met the Dicers; and, thirdly, I’ve planned a little dance for you and I need your help; and, lastly, I can’t believe that the reasons you give are your real ones. During Christmas week the Chicago Grand Opera Company is giving--

Meanwhile Capt. Edward Dicer had sent flowers and several formal little notes that sounded to her like translations from the French. She was self-conscious, answering them; so she did it in slang. His French education and his years in the war while America was whirling toward the Jazz Age had made him, though he was only twenty-three, seem of a more formal, more courteous generation than her own. She wondered what he would think of such limp exotics as Travis de Coppet, or Book Chaffee, or Louie Randall. Two days before vacation he wrote asking when her train left for the West. That was something, and for seventy-two hours she lived on it, unable to turn her attention to the masses of Christmas invitations and unheeded letters that she had meant to answer before leaving. But on the day itself, Lillian brought her a marked copy of Town Tattle that, from its ragged appearance, had already been passed around the school.

It is rumored that a certain Tuxedo papa who was somewhat irrasticable about the marital choice of a previous offspring views with equanimity the fact that his remaining daughter is so often in company with a young man fresh from his exploits in the French army.

Captain Dicer did not come to the train. He sent no flowers. Lillian, who loved Josephine like part of herself, wept in their compartment. Josephine comforted her, saying: “But listen, darling; it’s all the same to me. I didn’t have a chance, being in school like we were. It’s all right.” But she was awake hours and hours after Lillian was asleep.

III

Eighteen--it was to have meant so many things: When I’m eighteen I can--Until a girl’s eighteen--You’ll see things differently when you’re eighteen.

That, at least, was true. Josephine saw her vacation invitations as so many overdue bills. Abstractedly she counted them as she always had before--twenty-eight dances, nineteen dinner and theater parties, fifteen tea dances and receptions, a dozen luncheons, a few miscellaneous bids, ranging from early breakfast for the Yale Glee Club to a bob party at Lake Forest--seventy-eight in all, and with the small dance she was giving herself, seventy-nine. Seventy-nine promises of gayety, seventy-nine offers to share fun with her. Patiently she sat down, choosing and weighing, referring doubtful cases to her mother.

“You seem a little white and tired,” her mother said.

“I’m wasting away. I’ve been jilted.”

“That won’t worry you very long. I know my Josephine. Tonight at the Junior League german you’ll meet the most marvelous men.”

“No, I won’t, mother. The only hope for me is to get married. I’ll learn to love him and have his children and scratch his back--”

“Josephine!”

“I know two girls who married for love who told me they were supposed to scratch their husbands’ backs and send out the laundry. But I’ll go through with it, and the sooner the better.”

“Every girl feels like that sometimes,” said her mother cheerfully. “Before I was married I had three or four beaus, and I honestly liked each one of them as well as the others. Each one had certain qualities I liked, and I worried about it so long that it didn’t seem worth while; I might as well have counted eenie, meenie, mynie, mo. Then one day when I was feeling lonely your father came to take me driving, and from that day I never had a single doubt. Love isn’t like it is in books.”

“But it is,” said Josephine gloomily. “At least for me it always has been.”

For the first time it seemed to her more peaceful to be with a crowd than to be alone with a man. The beginning of a line wearied her; how many lines had she listened to in three years? New men were pointed out as exciting, were introduced, and she took pleasure in freezing them to unhappiness with languid answers and wandering glances. Ancient admirers looked favorably upon the metamorphosis, grateful for a little overdue time at last. Josephine was glad when the holiday drew to a close. Returning from a luncheon one gray afternoon, the day after New Year’s, she thought that for once it was nice to think she had nothing to do until dinner. Kicking off her overshoes in the hall, she found herself staring at something on the table that at first seemed a projection of her own imagination. It was a card fresh from a case--MR. EDWARD DICER.

Instantly the world jerked into life, spun around dizzily and came to rest on a new world. The hall where he must have stood throbbed with life; she pictured his straight figure against the open door, and thought how he must have stood with his hat and cane in hand. Outside the house, Chicago, permeated with his presence, pulsed with the old delight. She heard the phone ring in the downstairs lounge and, still in her fur coat, ran for it.

“Hello!”

“Miss Josephine, please.”

“Oh, hello!”

“Oh. This is Edward Dicer.”

“I saw your card.”

“I must have just missed you.”

What did the words matter when every word was winged and breathless?

“I’m only here for the day. Unfortunately, I’m tied up for dinner tonight with the people I’m visiting.”

“Can you come over now?”

“If you like.”

“Come right away.”

She rushed upstairs to change her dress, singing for the first time in weeks. She sang:

“Where’s my shoes?

Where’s my new gray shoes, shoes, shoes?

I think I put them here,

But I guess--oh, where the deuce--”

Dressed, she was at the head of the stairs when the bell rang.

“Never mind,” she called to the maid; “I’ll answer.”

She opened upon Mr. and Mrs. Warren Dillon. They were old friends and she hadn’t seen them before, this Christmas.

“Josephine! We came to meet Constance here, but we hoped we’d have a glimpse of you; but you’re rushing around so.”

Aghast, she led the way into the library. “What time is sister meeting you?” she asked when she could.

“Oh, in half an hour, if she isn’t delayed.”

She tried to be especially polite, to atone in advance for what impoliteness might be necessary later. In five minutes the bell rang again; there was the romantic figure on the porch, cut sharp and clear against the bleak sky; and up the steps behind him came Travis de Coppet and Ed Bement.

“Stay!” she whispered quickly. “These people will all go.”

“I’ve two hours,” he said. “Of course, I’ll wait if you want me to.”

She wanted to throw her arms around him then, but she controlled herself, even her hands. She introduced everyone, she sent for tea. The men asked Edward Dicer questions about the war and he parried them politely but restlessly.

After half an hour he asked Josephine: “Have you the time? I must keep track of my train.”

They might have noticed the watch on his own wrist and taken the hint, but he fascinated them all, as though they had isolated a rare specimen and were determined to find out all about it. Even had they realized Josephine’s state of mind, it would have seemed to them that she was selfish to want something of such general interest for her own.

The arrival of Constance, her married sister, did not help matters; again Dicer was caught up into the phenomenon of human curiosity. As the clock in the hall struck six, he shot a desperate glance at Josephine. With a belated appreciation of the situation, the group broke itself up. Constance took the Dillons upstairs to the other sitting room, the two young men went home.

Silence, save for the voices fading off on the stairs, the automobile crunching away on the snow outside. Before a word was said, Josephine rang for the maid, and instructing her that she was not at home, closed the door into the hall. Then she went and sat down on the couch next to him and clasped her hands and waited.

“Thank God,” he said. “I thought if they stayed another minute--”

“Wasn’t it terrible?”

“I came out here because of you. The night you left New York I was ten minutes late getting to the train because I was detained at the French propaganda office. I’m not much good at letters. Since then I’ve thought of nothing but getting out here to see you.”

“I felt sad.” But not now; now she was thinking that in a moment she would be in his arms, feeling the buttons of his tunic press bruisingly against her, feeling his diagonal belt as something that bound them both and made her part of him. There were no doubts, no reservations, he was everything she wanted.

“I’m over here for six months more--perhaps a year. Then, if this damned war goes on, I’ll have to go back. I suppose I haven’t really got the right--”

“Wait--wait!” she cried. She wanted a moment longer to taste, to feel fully her happiness. “Wait,” she repeated, putting her hand on his. She felt every object in the room vividly; she saw the seconds passing, each one carrying a load of loveliness toward the future. “All right; now tell me.”

“Just that I love you,” he whispered. She was in his arms, her hair against his cheek. “We haven’t known each other long, and you’re only eighteen, but I’ve learned to be afraid of waiting.”

Now she leaned her head back until she was looking up at him, supported by his arm. Her neck curved gracefully, full and soft, and she leaned in toward his shoulder, as she knew how, so that her lips were every minute closer to him. “Now,” she thought. He gave a funny little sigh and pulled her face up to his.

After a minute she leaned away from him and twisted herself upright.

“Darling--darling--darling,” he said.

She looked at him, stared at him. Gently he pulled her over again and kissed her. This time, when she sat up, she rose and went across the room, where she opened a dish of almonds and dropped some in her mouth. Then she came back and sat beside him, looking straight ahead, then darting a sudden glance at him.

“What are you thinking, darling, darling Josephine?” She didn’t answer; he put both hands over hers. “What are you feeling, then?”

As he breathed, she could hear the faint sound of his leather belt moving on his shoulder; she could feel his strong, kind handsome eyes looking at her; she could feel his proud self feeding on glory as others feed on security; she heard the jingle of spurs ring in his strong, rich, compelling voice.

“I feel nothing at all,” she said.

“What do you mean?” He was startled.

“Oh, help me!” she cried. “Help me!”

“I don’t understand what you mean.”

“Kiss me again.”

He kissed her. This time he held on to her and looked down into her face.

“What do you mean?” he demanded. “You mean you don’t love me?”

“I don’t feel anything.”

“But you did love me.”

“I don’t know.”

He let her go. She went across the room and sat down.

“I don’t understand,” he said after a minute.

“I think you’re perfect,” she said, her lips quivering.

“But I’m not--thrilling to you?”

“Oh, yes, very thrilling. I was thrilled all afternoon.”

“Then what is it, darling?”

“I don’t know. When you kissed me I wanted to laugh.” It made her sick to say this, but a desperate, interior honesty drove her on. She saw his eyes change, saw him withdrawing a little from her. “Help me,” she repeated.

“Help you how? You’ll have to be more definite. I love you; I thought perhaps you loved me. That’s all. If I don’t please you--”

“But you do. You’re everything--you’re everything I’ve always wanted.” Her voice continued inside herself: “But I’ve had everything.”

“But you simply don’t love me.”

“I’ve got nothing to give you. I don’t feel anything at all.”

He got up abruptly. He felt her vast, tragic apathy pervading the room, and it set up an indifference in him now, too--a lot of things suddenly melted out of him.

“Good-by.”

“You won’t help me,” she murmured abstractedly.

“How in the devil can I help you?” he answered impatiently. “You feel indifferent to me. You can’t change that, but neither can I. Good-by.”

“Good-by.”

She was very tired and lay face downward on the couch with that awful, awful realization that all the old things are true. One cannot both spend and have. The love of her life had come by, and looking in her empty basket, she had found not a flower left for him--not one. After a while she wept.

“Oh, what have I done to myself?” she wailed. “What have I done? What have I done?”

FINANCING FINNEGAN

Esquire (January 1938)

Finnegan and I have the same literary agent to sell our writings for us--but though I’d often been in Mr. Cannon’s office just before and just after Finnegan’s visits, I had never met him. Likewise we had the same publisher and often when I arrived there Finnegan had just departed. I gathered from a thoughtful sighing way in which they spoke of him--

“Ah--Finnegan--”

“Oh yes, Finnegan was here.”

--that the distinguished author’s visit had been not uneventful. Certain remarks implied that he had taken something with him when he went--manuscripts, I supposed, one of those great successful novels of his. He had taken “it” off for a final revision, a last draft, of which he was rumored to make ten in order to achieve that facile flow, that ready wit, which distinguished his work. I discovered only gradually that most of Finnegan’s visits had to do with money.

“I’m sorry you’re leaving,” Mr. Cannon would tell me, “Finnegan will be here tomorrow.” Then after a thoughtful pause, “I’ll probably have to spend some time with him.”

I don’t know what note in his voice reminded me of a talk with a nervous bank president when Dillinger was reported in the vicinity. His eyes looked out into the distance and he spoke as to himself:

“Of course he may be bringing a manuscript. He has a novel he’s working on, you know. And a play too.”

He spoke as though he were talking about some interesting but remote events of the cinquecento; but his eyes became more hopeful as he added: “Or maybe a short story.”

“He’s very versatile, isn’t he?” I said.

“Oh yes,” Mr. Cannon perked up. “He can do anything--anything when he puts his mind to it. There’s never been such a talent.”

“I haven’t seen much of his work lately.”

“Oh, but he’s working hard. Some of the magazines have stories of his that they’re holding.”

“Holding for what?”

“Oh, for a more appropriate time--an upswing. They like to think they have something of Finnegan’s.”

His was indeed a name with ingots in it. His career had started brilliantly and if it had not kept up to its first exalted level, at least it started brilliantly all over again every few years. He was the perennial man of promise in American letters--what he could actually do with words was astounding, they glowed and coruscated--he wrote sentences, paragraphs, chapters that were masterpieces of fine weaving and spinning. It was only when I met some poor devil of a screen writer who had been trying to make a logical story out of one of his books that I realized he had his enemies.

“It’s all beautiful when you read it,” this man said disgustedly, “but when you write it down plain it’s like a week in the nut-house.”

From Mr. Cannon’s office I went over to my publishers on Fifth Avenue and there too I learned in no time that Finnegan was expected tomorrow.

Indeed he had thrown such a long shadow before him that the luncheon where I expected to discuss my own work was largely devoted to Finnegan. Again I had the feeling that my host, Mr. George Jaggers, was talking not to me but to himself.

“Finnegan’s a great writer,” he said.

“Undoubtedly.”

“And he’s really quite all right, you know.”

As I hadn’t questioned the fact I inquired whether there was any doubt about it.

“Oh no,” he said hurriedly. “It’s just that he’s had such a run of hard luck lately--”

I shook my head sympathetically. “I know. That diving into a half-empty pool was a tough break.”

“Oh, it wasn’t half-empty. It was full of water. Full to the brim. You ought to hear Finnegan on the subject--he makes a side-splitting story of it. It seems he was in a run-down condition and just diving from the side of the pool, you know--” Mr. Jaggers pointed his knife and fork at the table, “and he saw some young girls diving from the fifteen-foot board. He says he thought of his lost youth and went up to do the same and made a beautiful swan dive--but his shoulder broke while he was still in the air.” He looked at me rather anxiously. “Haven’t you heard of cases like that--a ball player throwing his arm out of joint?”

I couldn’t think of any orthopedic parallels at the moment.

“And then,” he continued dreamily, “Finnegan had to write on the ceiling.”

“On the ceiling?”

“Practically. He didn’t give up writing--he has plenty of guts, that fellow, though you may not believe it. He had some sort of arrangement built that was suspended from the ceiling and he lay on his back and wrote in the air.”

I had to grant that it was a courageous arrangement.

“Did it affect his work?” I inquired. “Did you have to read his stories backward--like Chinese?”

“They were rather confused for a while,” he admitted, “but he’s all right now. I got several letters from him that sounded more like the old Finnegan--full of life and hope and plans for the future--”

The faraway look came into his face and I turned the discussion to affairs closer to my heart. Only when we were back in his office did the subject recur--and I blush as I write this because it includes confessing something I seldom do--reading another man’s telegram. It happened because Mr. Jaggers was intercepted in the hall and when I went into his office and sat down it was stretched out open before me:

WITH FIFTY I COULD AT LEAST PAY TYPIST AND GET HAIRCUT AND PENCILS LIFE HAS BECOME IMPOSSIBLE AND I EXIST ON DREAM OF GOOD NEWS DESPERATELY FINNEGAN

I couldn’t believe my eyes--fifty dollars, and I happened to know that Finnegan’s price for short stories was somewhere around three thousand. George Jaggers found me still staring dazedly at the telegram. After he read it he stared at me with stricken eyes.

“I don’t see how I can conscientiously do it,” he said.

I started and glanced around to make sure I was in the prosperous publishing office in New York. Then I understood--I had misread the telegram. Finnegan was asking for fifty thousand as an advance--a demand that would have staggered any publisher no matter who the writer was.

“Only last week,” said Mr. Jaggers disconsolately, “I sent him a hundred dollars. It puts my department in the red every season, so I don’t dare tell my partners any more. I take it out of my own pocket--give up a suit and a pair of shoes.”

“You mean Finnegan’s broke?”

“Broke!” He looked at me and laughed soundlessly--in fact I didn’t exactly like the way that he laughed. My brother had a nervous--but that is afield from this story. After a minute he pulled himself together. “You won’t say anything about this, will you? The truth is Finnegan’s been in a slump, he’s had blow after blow in the past few years, but now he’s snapping out of it and I know we’ll get back every cent we’ve--” He tried to think of a word but “given him” slipped out. This time it was he who was eager to change the subject.

Don’t let me give the impression that Finnegan’s affairs absorbed me during a whole week in New York--it was inevitable, though, that being much in the offices of my agent and my publisher, I happened in on a lot. For instance, two days later, using the telephone in Mr. Cannon’s office, I was accidentally switched in on a conversation he was having with George Jaggers. It was only partly eavesdropping, you see, because I could only hear one end of the conversation and that isn’t as bad as hearing it all.

“But I got the impression he was in good health . . . he did say something about his heart a few months ago but I understood it got well . . . yes, and he talked about some operation he wanted to have--I think he said it was cancer. . . . Well, I felt like telling him I had a little operation up my sleeve too, that I’d have had by now if I could afford it. . . . No, I didn’t say it. He seemed in such good spirits that it would have been a shame to bring him down. He’s starting a story today, he read me some of it on the phone. . . .

“. . . I did give him twenty-five because he didn’t have a cent in his pocket . . . oh, yes--I’m sure he’ll be all right now. He sounds as if he means business.”

I understood it all now. The two men had entered into a silent conspiracy to cheer each other up about Finnegan. Their investment in him, in his future, had reached a sum so considerable that Finnegan belonged to them. They could not bear to hear a word against him--even from themselves.

II

I spoke my mind to Mr. Cannon. “If this Finnegan is a four-flusher you can’t go on indefinitely giving him money. If he’s through he’s through and there’s nothing to be done about it. It’s absurd that you should put off an operation when Finnegan’s out somewhere diving into half-empty swimming pools.”

“It was full,” said Mr. Cannon patiently--”full to the brim.”

“Well, full or empty the man sounds like a nuisance to me.”

“Look here,” said Cannon, “I’ve got a talk to Hollywood due on the wire. Meanwhile you might glance over that.” He threw a manuscript into my lap. “Maybe it’ll help you understand. He brought it in yesterday.”

It was a short story. I began it in a mood of disgust but before I’d read five minutes I was completely immersed in it, utterly charmed, utterly convinced and wishing to God I could write like that. When Cannon finished his phone call I kept him waiting while I finished it and when I did there were tears in these hard old professional eyes. Any magazine in the country would have run it first in any issue.

But then nobody had ever denied that Finnegan could write.

III

Months passed before I went again to New York, and then, so far as the offices of my agent and my publisher were concerned, I descended upon a quieter, more stable world. There was at last time to talk about my own conscientious if uninspired literary pursuits, to visit Mr. Cannon in the country and to kill summer evenings with George Jaggers where the vertical New York starlight falls like lingering lightning into restaurant gardens. Finnegan might have been at the North Pole--and as a matter of fact he was. He had quite a group with him, including three Bryn Mawr anthropologists, and it sounded as if he might collect a lot of material there. They were going to stay several months, and if the thing had somehow the ring of a promising little house party about it, that was probably due to my jealous, cynical disposition.

“We’re all just delighted,” said Cannon. “It’s a God-send for him. He was fed up and he needed just this--this--”

“Ice and snow,” I supplied.

“Yes, ice and snow. The last thing he said was characteristic of him. Whatever he writes is going to be pure white--it’s going to have a blinding glare about it.”

“I can imagine it will. But tell me--who’s financing it? Last time I was here I gathered the man was insolvent.”

“Oh, he was really very decent about that. He owed me some money and I believe he owed George Jaggers a little too--” He “believed,” the old hypocrite. He knew damn well--”so before he left he made most of his life insurance over to us. That’s in case he doesn’t come back--those trips are dangerous of course.”

“I should think so,” I said--”especially with three anthropologists.”

“So Jaggers and I are absolutely covered in case anything happens--it’s as simple as that.”

“Did the life-insurance company finance the trip?”

He fidgeted perceptibly.

“Oh, no. In fact when they learned the reason for the assignments they were a little upset. George Jaggers and I felt that when he had a specific plan like this with a specific book at the end of it, we were justified in backing him a little further.”

“I don’t see it,” I said flatly.

“You don’t?” The old harassed look came back into his eyes. “Well, I’ll admit we hesitated. In principle I know it’s wrong. I used to advance authors small sums from time to time, but lately I’ve made a rule against it--and kept it. It’s only been waived once in the last two years and that was for a woman who was having a bad struggle--Margaret Trahill, do you know her? She was an old girl of Finnegan’s, by the way.”

“Remember I don’t even know Finnegan.”

“That’s right. You must meet him when he comes back--if he does come back. You’d like him--he’s utterly charming.”

Again I departed from New York, to imaginative North Poles of my own, while the year rolled through summer and fall. When the first snap of November was in the air, I thought of the Finnegan expedition with a sort of shiver and any envy of the man departed. He was probably earning any loot, literary or anthropological, he might bring back. Then, when I hadn’t been back in New York three days, I read in the paper that he and some other members of his party had walked off into a snowstorm when the food supply gave out, and the Arctic had claimed another sacrifice.

I was sorry for him, but practical enough to be glad that Cannon and Jaggers were well protected. Of course, with Finnegan scarcely cold--if such a simile is not too harrowing--they did not talk about it but I gathered that the insurance companies had waived habeas corpus or whatever it is in their lingo, and it seemed quite sure that they would collect.

His son, a fine looking young fellow, came into George Jaggers’ office while I was there and from him I could guess at Finnegan’s charm--a shy frankness together with an impression of a very quiet brave battle going on inside of him that he couldn’t quite bring himself to talk about--but that showed as heat lightning in his work.

“The boy writes well too,” said George after he had gone. “He’s brought in some remarkable poems. He’s not ready to step into his father’s shoes, but there’s a definite promise.”

“Can I see one of his things?”

“Certainly--here’s one he left just as he went out.”

George took a paper from his desk, opened it and cleared his throat. Then he squinted and bent over a little in his chair.

“Dear Mr. Jaggers,” he began, “I didn’t like to ask you this in person--” Jaggers stopped, his eyes reading ahead rapidly.

“How much does he want?” I inquired.

He sighed.

“He gave me the impression that this was some of his work,” he said in a pained voice.

“But it is,” I consoled him. “Of course he isn’t quite ready to step into his father’s shoes.”

I was sorry afterwards to have said this, for after all Finnegan had paid his debts, and it was nice to be alive now that better times were back and books were no longer rated as unnecessary luxuries. Many authors I knew who had skimped along during the depression were now making long-deferred trips or paying off mortgages or turning out the more finished kind of work that can only be done with a certain leisure and security. I had just got a thousand dollars advance for a venture in Hollywood and was going to fly out with all the verve of the old days when there was chicken feed in every pot. Going in to say good-by to Cannon and collect the money, it was nice to find he too was profiting--wanted me to go along and see a motor boat he was buying.

But some last-minute stuff came up to delay him and I grew impatient and decided to skip it. Getting no response to a knock on the door of his sanctum, I opened it anyhow.

The inner office seemed in some confusion. Mr. Cannon was on several telephones at once and dictating something about an insurance company to a stenographer. One secretary was getting hurriedly into her hat and coat as upon an errand and another was counting bills from her purse.

“It’ll be only a minute,” said Cannon, “it’s just a little office riot--you never saw us like this.”

“Is it Finnegan’s insurance?” I couldn’t help asking. “Isn’t it any good?”

“His insurance--oh, perfectly all right, perfectly. This is just a matter of trying to raise a few hundred in a hurry. The banks are closed and we’re all contributing.”

“I’ve got that money you just gave me,” I said. “I don’t need all of it to get to the coast.” I peeled off a couple of hundred. “Will this be enough?”

“That’ll be fine--it just saves us. Never mind, Miss Carlsen. Mrs. Mapes, you needn’t go now.”

“I think I’ll be running along,” I said.

“Just wait two minutes,” he urged. “I’ve only got to take care of this wire. It’s really splendid news. Bucks you up.”

It was a cablegram from Oslo, Norway--before I began to read I was full of a premonition.

AM MIRACULOUSLY SAFE HERE BUT DETAINED BY AUTHORITIES PLEASE WIRE PASSAGE MONEY FOR FOUR PEOPLE AND TWO HUNDRED EXTRA I AM BRINGING BACK PLENTY GREETINGS FROM THE DEAD.

FINNEGAN    ”Yes, that’s splendid,” I agreed. “He’ll have a story to tell now.”

“Won’t he though,” said Cannon. “Miss Carlsen, will you wire the parents of those girls--and you’d better inform Mr. Jaggers.”

As we walked along the street a few minutes later, I saw that Mr. Cannon, as if stunned by the wonder of this news, had fallen into a brown study, and I did not disturb him, for after all I did not know Finnegan and could not whole-heartedly share his joy. His mood of silence continued until we arrived at the door of the motor boat show. Just under the sign he stopped and stared upward, as if aware for the first time where we were going.

“Oh, my,” he said, stepping back. “There’s no use going in here now. I thought we were going to get a drink.”

We did. Mr. Cannon was still a little vague, a little under the spell of the vast surprise--he fumbled so long for the money to pay his round that I insisted it was on me.

I think he was in a daze during that whole time because, though he is a man of the most punctilious accuracy, the two hundred I handed him in his office has never shown to my credit in the statements he has sent me. I imagine, though, that some day I will surely get it because some day Finnegan will click again and I know that people will clamor to read what he writes. Recently I’ve taken it upon myself to investigate some of the stories about him and I’ve found that they’re mostly as false as the half-empty pool. That pool was full to the brim.

So far there’s only been a short story about the polar expedition, a love story. Perhaps it wasn’t as big a subject as he expected. But the movies are interested in him--if they can get a good long look at him first and I have every reason to think that he will come through. He’d better.

FORGING AHEAD

Saturday Evening Post (March 30, 1929)

Basil Duke Lee and Riply Buckner, Jr., sat on the Lees’ front steps in the regretful gold of a late summer afternoon. Inside the house the telephone sang out with mysterious promise.

“I thought you were going home,” Basil said.

“I thought you were.”

“I am.”

“So am I.”

“Well, why don’t you go, then?”

“Why don’t you, then?”

“I am.”

They laughed, ending with yawning gurgles that were not laughed out but sucked in. As the telephone rang again, Basil got to his feet.

“I’ve got to study trig before dinner.”

“Are you honestly going to Yale this fall?” demanded Riply skeptically.

“Yes.”

“Everybody says you’re foolish to go at sixteen.”

“I’ll be seventeen in September. So long. I’ll call you up tonight.”

Basil heard his mother at the upstairs telephone and he was immediately aware of distress in her voice.

“Yes. . . . Isn’t that awful, Everett! . . . Yes. . . . Oh-h my!” After a minute he gathered that it was only the usual worry about business and went on into the kitchen for refreshments. Returning, he met his mother hurrying downstairs. She was blinking rapidly and her hat was on backward--characteristic testimony to her excitement.

“I’ve got to go over to your grandfather’s.”

“What’s the matter, mother?”

“Uncle Everett thinks we’ve lost a lot of money.”

“How much?” he asked, startled.

“Twenty-two thousand dollars apiece. But we’re not sure.”

She went out.

“Twenty-two thousand dollars!” he repeated in an awed whisper.

His ideas of money were vague and somewhat debonair, but he had noticed that at family dinners the immemorial discussion as to whether the Third Street block would be sold to the railroads had given place to anxious talk of Western Public Utilities. At half-past six his mother telephoned for him to have his dinner, and with growing uneasiness he sat alone at the table, undistracted by The Mississippi Bubble, open beside his plate. She came in at seven, distraught and miserable, and dropping down at the table, gave him his first exact information about finance--she and her father and her brother Everett had lost something more than eighty thousand dollars. She was in a panic and she looked wildly around the dining room as if money were slipping away even here, and she wanted to retrench at once.

“I’ve got to stop selling securities or we won’t have anything,” she declared. “This leaves us only three thousand a year--do you realize that, Basil? I don’t see how I can possibly afford to send you to Yale.”

His heart tumbled into his stomach; the future, always glowing like a comfortable beacon ahead of him, flared up in glory and went out. His mother shivered, and then emphatically shook her head.

“You’ll just have to make up your mind to go to the state university.”

“Gosh!” Basil said.

Sorry for his shocked, rigid face, she yet spoke somewhat sharply, as people will with a bitter refusal to convey.

“I feel terribly about it--your father wanted you to go to Yale. But everyone says that, with clothes and railroad fare, I can count on it costing two thousand a year. Your grandfather helped me to send you to St. Regis School, but he always thought you ought to finish at the state university.”

After she went distractedly upstairs with a cup of tea, Basil sat thinking in the dark parlor. For the present the loss meant only one thing to him--he wasn’t going to Yale after all. The sentence itself, divorced from its meaning, overwhelmed him, so many times had he announced casually, “I’m going to Yale,” but gradually he realized how many friendly and familiar dreams had been swept away. Yale was the faraway East, that he had loved with a vast nostalgia since he had first read books about great cities. Beyond the dreary railroad stations of Chicago and the night fires of Pittsburgh, back in the old states, something went on that made his heart beat fast with excitement. He was attuned to the vast, breathless bustle of New York, to the metropolitan days and nights that were tense as singing wires. Nothing needed to be imagined there, for it was all the very stuff of romance--life was as vivid and satisfactory as in books and dreams.

But first, as a sort of gateway to that deeper, richer life, there was Yale. The name evoked the memory of a heroic team backed up against its own impassable goal in the crisp November twilight, and later, of half a dozen immaculate noblemen with opera hats and canes standing at the Manhattan Hotel bar. And tangled up with its triumphs and rewards, its struggles and glories, the vision of the inevitable, incomparable girl.

Well, then, why not work his way through Yale? In a moment the idea had become a reality. He began walking rapidly up and down the room, declaring half aloud, “Of course, that’s the thing to do.” Rushing upstairs, he knocked at his mother’s door and announced in the inspired voice of a prophet: “Mother, I know what I’m going to do! I’m going to work my way through Yale.”

He sat down on her bed and she considered uncertainly. The men in her family had not been resourceful for several generations, and the idea startled her.

“It doesn’t seem to me you’re a boy who likes to work,” she said. “Besides, boys who work their way through college have scholarships and prizes, and you’ve never been much of a student.”

He was annoyed. He was ready for Yale a year ahead of his age and her reproach seemed unfair.

“What would you work at?” she said.

“Take care of furnaces,” said Basil promptly. “And shovel snow off sidewalks. I think they mostly do that--and tutor people. You could let me have as much money as it would take to go to the state university?”

“We’ll have to think it over.”

“Well, don’t you worry about anything,” he said emphatically, “because my earning my way through Yale will really make up for the money you’ve lost, almost.”

“Why don’t you start by finding something to do this summer?”

“I’ll get a job tomorrow. Maybe I can pile up enough so you won’t have to help me. Good night, Mother.”

Up in his room he paused only to thunder grimly to the mirror that he was going to work his way through Yale, and going to his bookcase, took down half a dozen dusty volumes of Horatio Alger, unopened for years. Then, much as a postwar young man might consult the George Washington Condensed Business Course, he sat at his desk and slowly began to turn the pages of Bound to Rise.

Two days later, after being insulted by the doorkeepers, office boys and telephone girls of the Press, the Evening News, the Socialist Gazette and a green scandal sheet called the Courier, and assured that no one wanted a reporter practically seventeen, after enduring every ignominy prepared for a young man in a free country trying to work his way through Yale, Basil Duke Lee, too “stuck-up” to apply to the parents of his friends, got a position with the railroad, through Eddie Parmelee, who lived across the way.

At 6.30 the following morning, carrying his lunch, and a new suit of overalls that had cost four dollars, he strode self-consciously into the Great Northern car shops. It was like entering a new school, except that no one showed any interest in him or asked him if he was going out for the team. He punched a time clock, which affected him strangely, and without even an admonition from the foreman to “go in and win,” was put to carrying boards for the top of a car.

Twelve o’clock arrived; nothing had happened. The sun was blazing hot and his hands and back were sore, but no real events had ruffled the dull surface of the morning. The president’s little daughter had not come by, dragged by a runaway horse; not even a superintendent had walked through the yard and singled him out with an approving eye. Undismayed, he toiled on--you couldn’t expect much the first morning.

He and Eddie Parmelee ate their lunches together. For several years Eddie had worked here in vacations; he was sending himself to the state university this fall. He shook his head doubtfully over the idea of Basil’s earning his way through Yale.

“Here’s what you ought to do,” he said: “You borrow two thousand dollars from your mother and buy twenty shares in Ware Plow and Tractor. Then go to a bank and borrow two thousand more with those shares for collateral, and with that two thousand buy twenty more shares. Then you sit on your back for a year, and after that you won’t have to think about earning your way through Yale.”

“I don’t think mother would give me two thousand dollars.”

“Well, anyhow, that’s what I’d do.”

If the morning had been uneventful, the afternoon was distinguished by an incident of some unpleasantness. Basil had risen a little, having been requested to mount to the top of a freight car and help nail the boards he had carried in the morning. He found that nailing nails into a board was more highly technical than nailing tacks into a wall, but he considered that he was progressing satisfactorily when an angry voice hailed him from below:

“Hey, you! Get up!”

He looked down. A foreman stood there, unpleasantly red in the face.

“Yes, you in the new suit. Get up!”

Basil looked about to see if someone was lying down, but the two sullen hunyaks seemed to be hard at work and it grew on him that he was indeed being addressed.

“I beg your pardon, sir,” he said.

“Get up on your knees or get out! What the h-- do you think this is?”

He had been sitting down as he nailed, and apparently the foreman thought that he was loafing. After another look at the foreman, he suppressed the explanation that he felt steadier sitting down and decided to just let it go. There were probably no railroad shops at Yale; yet, he remembered with a pang the ominous name, New York, New Haven and Hartford.

The third morning, just as he had become aware that his overalls were not where he had hung them in the shop, it was announced that all men of less than six months’ service were to be laid off. Basil received four dollars and lost his overalls. Learning that nails are driven from a kneeling position had cost him only carfare.

In a large old-fashioned house in the old section of the city lived Basil’s great-uncle, Benjamin Reilly, and there Basil presented himself that evening. It was a last resort--Benjamin Reilly and Basil’s grandfather were brothers and they had not spoken for twenty years.

He was received in the living room by the small, dumpy old man whose inscrutable face was hidden behind a white poodle beard. Behind him stood a woman of forty, his wife of six months, and her daughter, a girl of fifteen. Basil’s branch of the family had not been invited to the wedding, and he had never seen these two additions before.

“I thought I’d come down and see you, Uncle Ben,” he said with some embarrassment.

There was a certain amount of silence.

“Your mother well?” asked the old man.

“Oh, yes, thank you.”

Mr. Reilly waited. Mrs. Reilly spoke to her daughter, who threw a curious glance at Basil and reluctantly left the room. Her mother made the old man sit down.

Out of sheer embarrassment Basil came to the point. He wanted a summer job in the Reilly Wholesale Drug Company.

His uncle fidgeted for a minute and then replied that there were no positions open.

“Oh.”

“It might be different if you wanted a permanent place, but you say you want to go to Yale.” He said this with some irony of his own, and glanced at his wife.

“Why, yes,” said Basil. “That’s really why I want the job.”

“Your mother can’t afford to send you, eh?” The note of pleasure in his voice was unmistakable. “Spent all her money?”

“Oh, no,” answered Basil quickly. “She’s going to help me.”

To his surprise, aid came from an unpromising quarter. Mrs. Reilly suddenly bent and whispered in her husband’s ear, whereupon the old man nodded and said aloud:

“I’ll think about it, Basil. You go in there.”

And his wife repeated: “We’ll think about it. You go in the library with Rhoda while Mr. Reilly looks up and sees.”

The door of the library closed behind him and he was alone with Rhoda, a square-chinned, decided girl with fleshy white arms and a white dress that reminded Basil domestically of the lacy pants that blew among the laundry in the yard. Puzzled by his uncle’s change of front, he eyed her abstractedly for a moment.

“I guess you’re my cousin,” said Rhoda, closing her book, which he saw was The Little Colonel, Maid of Honor.

“Yes,” he admitted.

“I heard about you from somebody.” The implication was that her information was not flattering.

“From who?”

“A girl named Elaine Washmer.”

“Elaine Washmer!” His tone dismissed the name scornfully. “That girl!”

“She’s my best friend.” He made no reply. “She said you thought you were wonderful.”

Young people do not perceive at once that the giver of wounds is the enemy and the quoted tattle merely the arrow. His heart smoldered with wrath at Elaine Washmer.

“I don’t know many kids here,” said the girl, in a less aggressive key. “We’ve only been here six months. I never saw such a stuck-up bunch.”

“Oh, I don’t think so,” he protested. “Where did you live before?”

“Sioux City. All the kids have much more fun in Sioux City.”

Mrs. Reilly opened the door and called Basil back into the living room. The old man was again on his feet.

“Come down tomorrow morning and I’ll find you something,” he said.

“And why don’t you have dinner with us tomorrow night?” added Mrs. Reilly, with a cordiality wherein an adult might have detected disingenuous purpose.

“Why, thank you very much.”

His heart, buoyant with gratitude, had scarcely carried him out the door before Mrs. Reilly laughed shortly and called in her daughter.

“Now we’ll see if you don’t get around a little more,” she announced. “When was it you said they had those dances?”

“Thursdays at the College Club and Saturdays at the Lake Club,” said Rhoda promptly.

“Well, if this young man wants to hold the position your father has given him, you’ll go to them all the rest of the summer.”

Arbitrary groups formed by the hazards of money or geography may be sufficiently quarrelsome and dull, but for sheer unpleasantness the condition of young people who have been thrust together by a common unpopularity can be compared only with that of prisoners herded in a cell. In Basil’s eyes the guests at the little dinner the following night were a collection of cripples. Lewis and Hector Crum, dullard cousins who were tolerable only to each other; Sidney Rosen, rich but awful; ugly Mary Haupt, Elaine Washmer, and Betty Geer, who reminded Basil of a cruel parody they had once sung to the tune of Jungle Town:

Down below the hill

There lives a pill

That makes me ill,

And her name is Betty Geer.

We had better stop right here. . . .

She’s so fat,

She looks just like a cat,

And she’s the queen of pills.

Moreover, they resented Basil, who was presumed to be “stuck-up,” and walking home afterward, he felt dreary and vaguely exploited. Of course, he was grateful to Mrs. Reilly for her kindness, yet he couldn’t help wondering if a cleverer boy couldn’t have got out of taking Rhoda to the Lake Club next Saturday night. The proposal had caught him unaware; but when he was similarly trapped the following week, and the week after that, he began to realize the situation. It was a part of his job, and he accepted it grimly, unable, nevertheless, to understand how such a bad dancer and so unsociable a person should want to go where she was obviously a burden. “Why doesn’t she just sit at home and read a book,” he thought disgustedly, “or go away somewhere--or sew?”

It was one Saturday afternoon while he watched a tennis tournament and felt the unwelcome duty of the evening creep up on him, that he found himself suddenly fascinated by a girl’s face a few yards away. His heart leaped into his throat and the blood in his pulse beat with excitement; and then, when the crowd rose to go, he saw to his astonishment that he had been staring at a child ten years old. He looked away, oddly disappointed; after a moment he looked back again. The lovely, self-conscious face suggested a train of thought and sensation that he could not identify. As he passed on, forgoing a vague intention of discovering the child’s identity, there was beauty suddenly all around him in the afternoon; he could hear its unmistakable whisper, its never-inadequate, never-failing promise of happiness. “Tomorrow--one day soon now--this fall--maybe tonight.” Irresistibly compelled to express himself, he sat down and tried to write to a girl in New York. His words were stilted and the girl seemed cold and far away. The real image on his mind, the force that had propelled him into this state of yearning, was the face of the little girl seen that afternoon.

When he arrived with Rhoda Sinclair at the Lake Club that night, he immediately cast a quick look around to see what boys were present who were indebted to Rhoda or else within his own sphere of influence. This was just before cutting-in arrived, and ordinarily he was able to dispose of half a dozen dances in advance, but tonight an older crowd was in evidence and the situation was unpromising. However, as Rhoda emerged from the dressing room he saw Bill Kampf and thankfully bore down upon him.

“Hello, old boy,” he said, exuding personal good will. “How about dancing once with Rhoda tonight?”

“Can’t,” Bill answered briskly. “We’ve got people visiting us. Didn’t you know?”

“Well, why couldn’t we swap a dance anyhow?”

Bill looked at him in surprise.

“I thought you knew,” he exclaimed. “Erminie’s here. She’s been talking about you all afternoon.”

“Erminie Bibble!”

“Yes. And her father and mother and her kid sister. Got here this morning.”

Now, indeed, the emotion of two hours before bubbled up in Basil’s blood, but this time he knew why. It was the little sister of Erminie Gilbert Labouisse Bibble whose strangely familiar face had so attracted him. As his mind swung sharply back to a long afternoon on the Kampfs’ veranda at the lake, ages ago, a year ago, a real voice rang in his ear, “Basil!” and a sparkling little beauty of fifteen came up to him with a fine burst of hurry, taking his hand as though she was stepping into the circle of his arm.

“Basil, I’m so glad!” Her voice was husky with pleasure, though she was at the age when pleasure usually hides behind grins and mumbles. It was Basil who was awkward and embarrassed, despite the intention of his heart. He was a little relieved when Bill Kampf, more conscious of his lovely cousin than he had been a year ago, led her out on the floor.

“Who was that?” Rhoda demanded, as he returned in a daze. “I never saw her around.”

“Just a girl.” He scarcely knew what he was saying.

“Well, I know that. What’s her name?”

“Minnie Bibble, from New Orleans.”

“She certainly looks conceited. I never saw anybody so affected in my life.”

“Hush!” Basil protested involuntarily. “Let’s dance.”

It was a long hour before Basil was relieved by Hector Crum, and then several dances passed before he could get possession of Minnie, who was now the center of a moving whirl. But she made it up to him by pressing his hand and drawing him out to a veranda which overhung the dark lake.

“It’s about time,” she whispered. With a sort of instinct she found the darkest corner. “I might have known you’d have another crush.”

“I haven’t,” he insisted in horror. “That’s a sort of a cousin of mine.”

“I always knew you were fickle. But I didn’t think you’d forget me so soon.”

She had wriggled up until she was touching him. Her eyes, floating into his, said, What does it matter? We’re alone.

In a curious panic he jumped to his feet. He couldn’t possibly kiss her like this--right at once. It was all so different and older than a year ago. He was too excited to do more than walk up and down and say, “Gosh, I certainly am glad to see you,” supplementing this unoriginal statement with an artificial laugh.

Already mature in poise, she tried to soothe him: “Basil, come and sit down!”

“I’ll be all right,” he gasped, as if he had just fainted. “I’m a little fussed, that’s all.”

Again he contributed what, even to his pounding ears, sounded like a silly laugh.

“I’ll be here three weeks. Won’t it be fun?” And she added, with warm emphasis: “Do you remember on Bill’s veranda that afternoon?”

All he could find to answer was: “I work now in the afternoon.”

“You can come out in the evenings, Basil. It’s only half an hour in a car.”

“I haven’t got a car.”

“I mean you can get your family’s car.”

“It’s an electric.”

She waited patiently. He was still romantic to her--handsome, incalculable, a little sad.

“I saw your sister,” he blurted out. Beginning with that, he might bridge this perverse and intolerable reverence she inspired. “She certainly looks like you.”

“Does she?”

“It was wonderful,” he said. “Wonderful! Let me tell you--”

“Yes, do.” She folded her hands expectantly in her lap.

“Well, this afternoon--”

The music had stopped and started several times. Now, in an intermission, there was the sound of determined footsteps on the veranda, and Basil looked up to find Rhoda and Hector Crum.

“I got to go home, Basil,” squeaked Hector in his changing voice. “Here’s Rhoda.”

Take Rhoda out to the dock and push her in the lake. But only Basil’s mind said this; his body stood up politely.

“I didn’t know where you were, Basil,” said Rhoda in an aggrieved tone. “Why didn’t you come back?”

“I was just coming.” His voice trembled a little as he turned to Minnie. “Shall I find your partner for you?”

“Oh, don’t bother,” said Minnie. She was not angry, but she was somewhat astonished. She could not be expected to guess that the young man walking away from her so submissively was at the moment employed in working his way through Yale.

From the first, Basil’s grandfather, who had once been a regent at the state university, wanted him to give up the idea of Yale, and now his mother, picturing him hungry and ragged in a garret, adjoined her persuasions. The sum on which he could count from her was far below the necessary minimum, and although he stubbornly refused to consider defeat, he consented, “just in case anything happened,” to register at the university for the coming year.

In the administration building he ran into Eddie Parmelee, who introduced his companion, a small, enthusiastic Japanese.

“Well, well,” said Eddie. “So you’ve given up Yale!”

“I given up Yale,” put in Mr. Utsonomia, surprisingly. “Oh, yes, long time I given up Yale.” He broke into enthusiastic laughter. “Oh, sure. Oh, yes.”

“Mr. Utsonomia’s a Japanese,” explained Eddie, winking. “He’s a sub-freshman too.”

“Yes, I given up Harvard, Princeton too,” continued Mr. Utsonomia. “They give me choice back in my country. I choose here.”

“You did?” said Basil, almost indignantly.

“Sure, more strong here. More peasants come, with strength and odor of ground.”

Basil stared at him. “You like that?” he asked incredulously.

Utsonomia nodded. “Here I get to know real American peoples. Girls too. Yale got only boys.”

“But they haven’t got college spirit here,” explained Basil patiently.

Utsonomia looked blankly at Eddie.

“Rah-rah!” elucidated Eddie, waving his arms. “Rah-rah-rah! You know.”

“Besides, the girls here--” began Basil, and stopped.

“You know girls here?” grinned Utsonomia.

“No, I don’t know them,” said Basil firmly. “But I know they’re not like the girls that you’d meet down at the Yale proms. I don’t think they even have proms here. I don’t mean the girls aren’t all right, but they’re just not like the ones at Yale. They’re just coeds.”

“I hear you got a crush on Rhoda Sinclair,” said Eddie.

“Yes, I have!” said Basil ironically.

“They used to invite me to dinner sometimes last spring, but since you take her around to all the club dances--”

“Good-bye,” said Basil hastily. He exchanged a jerky bow for Mr. Utsonomia’s more formal dip, and departed.

From the moment of Minnie’s arrival the question of Rhoda had begun to assume enormous proportions. At first he had been merely indifferent to her person and a little ashamed of her lacy, oddly reminiscent clothes, but now, as he saw how relentlessly his services were commandeered, he began to hate her. When she complained of a headache, his imagination would eagerly convert it into a long, lingering illness from which she would recover only after college opened in the fall. But the eight dollars a week which he received from his great-uncle would pay his fare to New Haven, and he knew that if he failed to hold this position his mother would refuse to let him go.

Not suspecting the truth, Minnie Bibble found the fact that he only danced with her once or twice at each hop, and was then strangely moody and silent, somehow intriguing. Temporarily, at least, she was fascinated by his indifference, and even a little unhappy. But her precociously emotional temperament would not long stand neglect, and it was agony for Basil to watch several rivals beginning to emerge. There were moments when it seemed too big a price to pay even for Yale.

All his hopes centered upon one event. That was a farewell party in her honor for which the Kampfs had engaged the College Club and to which Rhoda was not invited. Given the mood and the moment, he might speed her departure knowing that he had stamped himself indelibly on her heart.

Three days before the party he came home from work at six to find the Kampfs’ car before his door and Minnie sitting alone on the front porch.

“Basil, I had to see you,” she said. “You’ve been so funny and distant to me.”

Intoxicated by her presence on his familiar porch, he found no words to answer.

“I’m meeting the family in town for dinner and I’ve got an hour. Can’t we go somewhere? I’ve been frightened to death your mother would come home and think it was fresh for me to call on you.” She spoke in a whisper, though there was no one close enough to hear. “I wish we didn’t have the old chauffeur. He listens.”

“Listens to what?” Basil asked, with a flash of jealousy.

“He just listens.”

“I’ll tell you,” he proposed: “We’ll have him drop us by grampa’s house and I’ll borrow the electric.”

The hot wind blew the brown curls around her forehead as they glided along Crest Avenue.

That he contributed the car made him feel more triumphantly astride the moment. There was a place he had saved for such a time as this--a little pigtail of a road left from the excavations of Prospect Park, where Crest Avenue ran obliviously above them and the late sun glinted on the Mississippi flats a mile away.

The end of summer was in the afternoon; it had turned a corner, and what was left must be used while there was yet time.

Suddenly she was whispering in his arms, “You’re first, Basil--nobody but you.”

“You just admitted you were a flirt.”

“I know, but that was years ago. I used to like to be called fast when I was thirteen or fourteen, because I didn’t care what people said; but about a year ago I began to see there was something better in life--honestly, Basil--and I’ve tried to act properly. But I’m afraid I’ll never be an angel.”

The river flowed in a thin scarlet gleam between the public baths and the massed tracks upon the other side. Booming, whistling, faraway railroad sounds reached them from down there; the voices of children playing tennis in Prospect Park sailed frailly overhead.

“I really haven’t got such a line as everybody thinks, Basil, for I mean a lot of what I say way down deep, and nobody believes me. You know how much alike we are, and in a boy it doesn’t matter, but a girl has to control her feelings, and that’s hard for me, because I’m emotional.”

“Haven’t you kissed anybody since you’ve been in St. Paul?”

“No.”

He saw she was lying, but it was a brave lie. They talked from their hearts--with the half truths and evasions peculiar to that organ, which has never been famed as an instrument of precision. They pieced together all the shreds of romance they knew and made garments for each other no less warm than their childish passion, no less wonderful than their sense of wonder.

He held her away suddenly, looked at her, made a strained sound of delight. There it was, in her face touched by sun--that promise--in the curve of her mouth, the tilted shadow of her nose on her cheek, the point of dull fire in her eyes--the promise that she could lead him into a world in which he would always be happy.

“Say I love you,” he whispered.

“I’m in love with you.”

“Oh, no; that’s not the same.”

She hesitated. “I’ve never said the other to anybody.”

“Please say it.”

She blushed the color of the sunset.

“At my party,” she whispered. “It’d be easier at night.”

When she dropped him in front of his house she spoke from the window of the car:

“This is my excuse for coming to see you. My uncle couldn’t get the club Thursday, so we’re having the party at the regular dance Saturday night.”

Basil walked thoughtfully into the house; Rhoda Sinclair was also giving a dinner at the College Club dance Saturday night.

It was put up to him frankly. Mrs. Reilly listened to his tentative excuses in silence and then said:

“Rhoda invited you first for Saturday night, and she already has one girl too many. Of course, if you choose to simply turn your back on your engagement and go to another party, I don’t know how Rhoda will feel, but I know how I should feel.”

And the next day his great-uncle, passing through the stock room, stopped and said: “What’s all this trouble about parties?”

Basil started to explain, but Mr. Reilly cut him short. “I don’t see the use of hurting a young girl’s feelings. You better think it over.”

Basil had thought it over; on Saturday afternoon he was still expected at both dinners and he had hit upon no solution at all.

Yale was only a month away now, but in four days Erminie Bibble would be gone, uncommitted, unsecured, grievously offended, lost forever. Not yet delivered from adolescence, Basil’s moments of foresight alternated with those when the future was measured by a day. The glory that was Yale faded beside the promise of that incomparable hour.

On the other side loomed up the gaunt specter of the university, with phantoms flitting in and out its portals that presently disclosed themselves as peasants and girls. At five o’clock, in a burst of contempt for his weakness, he went to the phone and left word with a maid at the Kampfs’ house that he was sick and couldn’t come tonight. Nor would he sit with the dull left-overs of his generation--too sick for one party, he was too sick for the other. The Reillys could have no complaint as to that.

Rhoda answered the phone and Basil tried to reduce his voice to a weak murmur:

“Rhoda, I’ve been taken sick. I’m in bed now,” he murmured feebly, and then added: “The phone’s right next to the bed, you see; so I thought I’d call you up myself.”

“You mean to say you can’t come?” Dismay and anger were in her voice.

“I’m sick in bed,” he repeated doggedly. “I’ve got chills and a pain and a cold.”

“Well, can’t you come anyhow?” she asked, with what to the invalid seemed a remarkable lack of consideration. “You’ve just got to. Otherwise there’ll be two extra girls.”

“I’ll send someone to take my place,” he said desperately. His glance, roving wildly out the window, fell on a house over the way. “I’ll send Eddie Parmelee.”

Rhoda considered. Then she asked with quick suspicion: “You’re not going to that other party?”

“Oh, no; I told them I was sick too.”

Again Rhoda considered. Eddie Parmelee was mad at her.

“I’ll fix it up,” Basil promised. “I know he’ll come. He hasn’t got anything to do tonight.”

A few minutes later he dashed across the street. Eddie himself, tying a bow on his collar, came to the door. With certain reservations, Basil hastily outlined the situation. Would Eddie go in his place?

“Can’t do it, old boy, even if I wanted to. Got a date with my real girl tonight.”

“Eddie, I’d make it worth your while,” he said recklessly. “I’d pay you for your time--say, five dollars.”

Eddie considered, there was hesitation in his eyes, but he shook his head.

“It isn’t worth it, Basil. You ought to see what I’m going out with tonight.”

“You could see her afterward. They only want you--I mean me--because they’ve got more girls than men for dinner--and listen, Eddie, I’ll make it ten dollars.”

Eddie clapped him on the shoulder.

“All right, old boy, I’ll do it for an old friend. Where’s the pay?”

More than a week’s salary melted into Eddie’s palm, but another sort of emptiness accompanied Basil back across the street--the emptiness of the coming night. In an hour or so the Kampfs’ limousine would draw up at the College Club and--time and time again his imagination halted miserably before that single picture, unable to endure any more.

In despair he wandered about the dark house. His mother had let the maid go out and was at his grandfather’s for dinner, and momentarily Basil considered finding some rake like Elwood Leaming and going down to Carling’s Restaurant to drink whiskey, wines and beer. Perhaps on her way back to the lake after the dance, Minnie, passing by, would see his face among the wildest of the revelers and understand.

“I’m going to Maxim’s,” he hummed to himself desperately; then he added impatiently: “Oh, to heck with Maxim’s!”

He sat in the parlor and watched a pale moon come up over the Lindsays’ fence at McKubben Street. Some young people came by, heading for the trolley that went to Como Park. He pitied their horrible dreariness--they were not going to dance with Minnie at the College Club tonight.

Eight-thirty--she was there now. Nine--they were dancing between courses to “Peg of My Heart” or doing the Castle Walk that Andy Lockheart brought home from Yale.

At ten o’clock he heard his mother come in, and almost immediately the phone rang. For a moment he listened without interest to her voice; then abruptly he sat up in his chair.

“Why, yes; how do you do, Mrs. Reilly. . . . Oh, I see. . . . Oh. . . . Are you sure it isn’t Basil you want to speak to? . . . Well, frankly, Mrs. Reilly, I don’t see that it’s my affair.”

Basil got up and took a step toward the door; his mother’s voice was growing thin and annoyed: “I wasn’t here at the time and I don’t know who he promised to send.”

Eddie Parmelee hadn’t gone after all--well, that was the end.

“. . . Of course not. It must be a mistake. I don’t think Basil would possibly do that; I don’t think he even knows any Japanese.”

Basil’s brain reeled. For a moment he was about to dash across the street after Eddie Parmelee. Then he heard a definitely angry note come into his mother’s voice:

“Very well, Mrs. Reilly. I’ll tell my son. But his going to Yale is scarcely a matter I care to discuss with you. In any case, he no longer needs anyone’s assistance.”

He had lost his position and his mother was trying to put a proud face on it. But her voice continued, soaring a little:

“Uncle Ben might be interested to know that this afternoon we sold the Third Street block to the Union Depot Company for four hundred thousand dollars.”

Mr. Utsonomia was enjoying himself. In the whole six months in America he had never felt so caught up in its inner life before. At first it had been a little hard to make plain to the lady just whose place it was he was taking, but Eddie Parmelee had assured him that such substitutions were an American custom, and he was spending the evening collecting as much data upon American customs as possible.

He did not dance, so he sat with the elderly lady until both the ladies went home, early and apparently a little agitated, shortly after dinner. But Mr. Utsonomia stayed on. He watched and he wandered. He was not lonesome; he had grown accustomed to being alone.

About eleven he sat on the veranda pretending to be blowing the smoke of a cigarette--which he hated--out over the city, but really listening to a conversation which was taking place just behind. It had been going on for half an hour, and it puzzled him, for apparently it was a proposal, and it was not refused. Yet, if his eyes did not deceive him, the contracting parties were of an age that Americans did not associate with such serious affairs. Another thing puzzled him even more: obviously, if one substituted for an absent guest, the absent guest should not be among those present, and he was almost sure that the young man who had just engaged himself for marriage was Mr. Basil Lee. It would be bad manners to intrude now, but he would urbanely ask him about a solution of this puzzle when the state university opened in the fall.

THE HOTEL CHILD

Saturday Evening Post (31 January 1931)

It is a place where one’s instinct is to give a reason for being there--”Oh, you see, I’m here because--” Failing that, you are faintly suspect, because this corner of Europe does not draw people; rather, it accepts them without too many inconvenient questions--live and let live. Routes cross here--people bound for private cliniques or tuberculosis resorts in the mountains, people who are no longer persona grata in Italy or France. And if that were all--

Yet on a gala night at the Hotel des Trois Mondes a new arrival would scarcely detect the current beneath the surface. Watching the dancing there would be a gallery of Englishwomen of a certain age, with neckbands, dyed hair and faces powdered pinkish gray; a gallery of American women of a certain age, with snowy-white transformations, black dresses and lips of cherry red. And most of them with their eyes swinging right or left from time to time to rest upon the ubiquitous Fifi. The entire hotel had been made aware that Fifi had reached the age of eighteen that night.

Fifi Schwartz. An exquisitely, radiantly beautiful Jewess whose fine, high forehead sloped gently up to where her hair, bordering it like an armorial shield, burst into lovelocks and waves and curlicues of soft dark red. Her eyes were bright, big, clear, wet and shining; the color of her cheeks and lips was real, breaking close to the surface from the strong young pump of her heart. Her body was so assertively adequate that one cynic had been heard to remark that she always looked as if she had nothing on underneath her dresses; but he was probably wrong, for Fifi had been as thoroughly equipped for beauty by man as by God. Such dresses--cerise for Chanel, mauve for Molyneux, pink for Patou; dozens of them, tight at the hips, swaying, furling, folding just an eighth of an inch off the dancing floor. Tonight she was a woman of thirty in dazzling black, with long white gloves dripping from her forearms. “Such ghastly taste,” the whispers said. “The stage, the shop window, the manikins’ parade. What can her mother be thinking? But, then, look at her mother.”

Her mother sat apart with a friend and thought about Fifi and Fifi’s brother, and about her other daughters, now married, whom she considered to have been even prettier than Fifi. Mrs. Schwartz was a plain woman; she had been a Jewess a long time, and it was a matter of effortless indifference to her what was said by the groups around the room. Another large class who did not care were the young men--dozens of them. They followed Fifi about all day in and out of motorboats, night clubs, inland lakes, automobiles, tea rooms and funiculars, and they said, “Hey, look, Fifi!” and showed off for her, or said, “Kiss me, Fifi,” or even, “Kiss me again, Fifi,” and abused her and tried to be engaged to her.

Most of them, however, were too young, since this little city, through some illogical reasoning, is supposed to have an admirable atmosphere as an educational center.

Fifi was not critical, nor was she aware of being criticized herself. Tonight the gallery in the great, crystal, horseshoe room made observations upon her birthday party, being somewhat querulous about Fifi’s entrance. The table had been set in the last of a string of dining rooms, each accessible from the central hall. But Fifi, her black dress shouting and halloing for notice, came in by way of the first dining room, followed by a whole platoon of young men of all possible nationalities and crosses, and at a sort of little run that swayed her lovely hips and tossed her lovely head, led them bumpily through the whole vista, while old men choked on fish bones, old women’s facial muscles sagged, and the protest rose to a roar in the procession’s wake.

They need not have resented her so much. It was a bad party, because Fifi thought she had to entertain everybody and be a dozen people, so she talked to the entire table and broke up every conversation that started, no matter how far away from her. So no one had a good time, and the people in the hotel needn’t have minded so much that she was young and terribly happy.

Afterward, in the salon, many of the supernumerary males floated off with a temporary air to other tables. Among these was young Count Stanislas Borowki, with his handsome, shining brown eyes of a stuffed deer, and his black hair already dashed with distinguished streaks like the keyboard of a piano. He went to the table of some people of position named Taylor and sat down with just a faint sigh, which made them smile.

“Was it ghastly?” he was asked.

The blond Miss Howard who was traveling with the Taylors was almost as pretty as Fifi and stitched up with more consideration. She had taken pains not to make Miss Schwartz’s acquaintance, although she shared several of the same young men. The Taylors were career people in the diplomatic service and were now on their way to London, after the League Conference at Geneva. They were presenting Miss Howard at court this season. They were very Europeanized Americans; in fact, they had reached a position where they could hardly be said to belong to any nation at all; certainly not to any great power, but perhaps to a sort of Balkanlike state composed of people like themselves. They considered that Fifi was as much of a gratuitous outrage as a new stripe in the flag.

The tall Englishwoman with the long cigarette holder and the half-paralyzed Pekingese presently got up, announcing to the Taylors that she had an engagement in the bar, and strolled away, carrying her paralyzed Pekingese and causing, as she passed, a chilled lull in the seething baby talk that raged around Fifi’s table.

About midnight, Mr. Weicker, the assistant manager, looked into the bar, where Fifi’s phonograph roared new German tangoes into the smoke and clatter. He had a small face that looked into things quickly, and lately he had taken a cursory glance into the bar every night. But he had not come to admire Fifi; he was engaged in an inquiry as to why matters were not going well at the Hotel des Trois Mondes this summer.

There was, of course, the continually sagging American Stock Exchange. With so many hotels begging to be filled, the clients had become finicky, exigent, quick to complain, and Mr. Weicker had had many fine decisions to make recently. One large family had departed because of a night-going phonograph belonging to Lady Capps-Karr. Also there was presumably a thief operating in the hotel; there had been complaints about pocketbooks, cigarette cases, watches and rings. Guests sometimes spoke to Mr. Weicker as if they would have liked to search his pockets. There were empty suites that need not have been empty this summer.

His glance fell dourly, in passing, upon Count Borowki, who was playing pool with Fifi. Count Borowki had not paid his bill for three weeks. He had told Mr. Weicker that he was expecting his mother, who would arrange everything. Then there was Fifi, who attracted an undesirable crowd--young students living on pensions who often charged drinks, but never paid for them. Lady Capps-Karr, on the contrary, was a grande cliente; one could count three bottles of whisky a day for herself and entourage, and her father in London was good for every drop of it. Mr. Weicker decided to issue an ultimatum about Borowki’s bill this very night, and withdrew. His visit had lasted about ten seconds.

Count Borowki put away his cue and came close to Fifi, whispering something. She seized his hand and pulled him to a dark corner near the phonograph.

“My American dream girl,” he said. “We must have you painted in Budapest the way you are tonight. You will hang with the portraits of my ancestors in my castle in Transylvania.”

One would suppose that a normal American girl, who had been to an average number of moving pictures, would have detected a vague ring of familiarity in Count Borowki’s persistent wooing. But the Hotel des Trois Mondes was full of people who were actually rich and noble, people who did fine embroidery or took cocaine in closed apartments and meanwhile laid claim to European thrones and half a dozen mediatized German principalities, and Fifi did not choose to doubt the one who paid court to her beauty. Tonight she was surprised at nothing: not even his precipitate proposal that they get married this very week.

“Mamma doesn’t want that I should get married for a year. I only said I’d be engaged to you.”

“But my mother wants me to marry. She is hard-boiling, as you Americans say; she brings pressure to bear that I marry Princess This and Countess That.”

Meanwhile Lady Capps-Karr was having a reunion across the room. A tall, stooped Englishman, dusty with travel, had just opened the door of the bar, and Lady Capps-Karr, with a caw of “Bopes!” had flung herself upon him: “Bopes, I say!”

“Capps, darling. Hi, there, Rafe--” this to her companion. “Fancy running into you, Capps.”

“Bopes! Bopes!”

Their exclamations and laughter filled the room, and the bartender whispered to an inquisitive American that the new arrival was the Marquis Kinkallow.

Bopes stretched himself out in several chairs and a sofa and called for the barman. He announced that he had driven from Paris without a stop and was leaving next morning to meet the only woman he had ever loved, in Milan. He did not look in a condition to meet anyone.

“Oh, Bopes, I’ve been so blind,” said Lady Capps-Karr pathetically. “Day after day after day. I flew here from Cannes, meaning to stay one day, and I ran into Rafe here and some other Americans I knew, and it’s been two weeks, and now all my tickets to Malta are void. Stay here and save me! Oh, Bopes! Bopes! Bopes!”

The Marquis Kinkallow glanced with tired eyes about the bar.

“Ah, who is that?” he demanded. “The lovely Jewess? And who is that item with her?”

“She’s an American,” said the daughter of a hundred earls. “The man is a scoundrel of some sort, but apparently he’s a cat of the stripe; he’s a great pal of Schenzi, in Vienna. I sat up till five the other night playing two-handed chemin de fer with him here in the bar and he owes me a mille Swiss.”

“Have to have a word with that wench,” said Bopes twenty minutes later. “You arrange it for me, Rafe, that’s a good chap.”

Ralph Berry had met Miss Schwartz, and, as the opportunity for the introduction now presented itself, he rose obligingly. The opportunity was that a chasseur had just requested Count Borowki’s presence in the office; he managed to beat two or three young men to her side.

“The Marquis Kinkallow is so anxious to meet you. Can’t you come and join us?”

Fifi looked across the room, her fine brow wrinkling a little. Something warned her that her evening was full enough already. Lady Capps-Karr had never spoken to her; Fifi believed she was jealous of her clothes.

“Can’t you bring him over here?”

A minute later Bopes sat down beside Fifi with a shadow of fine tolerance settling on his face. This was nothing he could help; in fact, he constantly struggled against it, but it was something that happened to his expression when he met Americans. “The whole thing is too much for me,” it seemed to say. “Compare my confidence with your uncertainty, my sophistication with your naïveté, and yet the whole world has slid into your power.” Of later years he found that his tone, unless carefully guarded, held a smoldering resentment.

Fifi eyed him brightly and told him about her glamorous future.

“Next I’m going to Paris,” she said, announcing the fall of Rome, “to, maybe, study at the Sorbonne. Then, maybe, I’ll get married; you can’t tell. I’m only eighteen. I had eighteen candles on my birthday cake tonight. I wish you could have been here. . . . I’ve had marvelous offers to go on the stage, but of course a girl on the stage gets talked about so.”

“What are you doing tonight?” asked Bopes.

“Oh, lots more boys are coming in later. Stay around and join the party.”

“I thought you and I might do something. I’m going to Milan tomorrow.”

Across the room, Lady Capps-Karr was tense with displeasure at the desertion.

“After all,” she protested, “a chep’s a chep, and a chum’s a chum, but there are certain things that one simply doesn’t do. I never saw Bopes in such frightful condition.”

She stared at the dialogue across the room.

“Come along to Milan with me,” the marquis was saying. “Come to Tibet or Hindustan. We’ll see them crown the King of Ethiopia. Anyhow, let’s go for a drive right now.”

“I got too many guests here. Besides, I don’t go out to ride with people the first time I meet them. I’m supposed to be engaged. To a Hungarian count. He’d be furious and would probably challenge you to a duel.”

Mrs. Schwartz, with an apologetic expression, came across the room to Fifi.

“John’s gone,” she announced. “He’s up there again.”

Fifi gave a yelp of annoyance. “He gave me his word of honor he would not go.”

“Anyhow, he went. I looked in his room and his hat’s gone. It was that champagne at dinner.” She turned to the marquis. “John is not a vicious boy, but vurry, vurry weak.”

“I suppose I’ll have to go after him,” said Fifi resignedly.

“I hate to spoil your good time tonight, but I don’t know what else. Maybe this gentleman would go with you. You see, Fifi is the only one that can handle him. His father is dead and it really takes a man to handle a boy.”

“Quite,” said Bopes.

“Can you take me?” Fifi asked. “It’s just up in town to a café.”

He agreed with alacrity. Out in the September night, with her fragrance seeping through an ermine cape, she explained further:

“Some Russian woman’s got hold of him; she claims to be a countess, but she’s only got one silver-fox fur, that she wears with everything. My brother’s just nineteen, so whenever he’s had a couple glasses champagne he says he’s going to marry her, and mother worries.”

Bopes’ arm dropped impatiently around her shoulder as they started up the hill to the town.

Fifteen minutes later the car stopped at a point several blocks beyond the café and Fifi stepped out. The marquis’ face was now decorated by a long, irregular finger-nail scratch that ran diagonally across his cheek, traversed his nose in a few sketchy lines and finished in a sort of grand terminal of tracks upon his lower jaw.

“I don’t like to have anybody get so foolish,” Fifi explained. “You needn’t wait. We can get a taxi.”

“Wait!” cried the marquis furiously. “For a common little person like you? They tell me you’re the laughingstock of the hotel, and I quite understand why.”

Fifi hurried along the street and into the café, pausing in the door until she saw her brother. He was a reproduction of Fifi without her high warmth; at the moment he was sitting at a table with a frail exile from the Caucasus and two Serbian consumptives. Fifi waited for her temper to rise to an executive pitch; then she crossed the dance floor, conspicuous as a thundercloud in her bright black dress.

“Mamma sent me after you, John. Get your coat.”

“Oh, what’s biting her?” he demanded, with a vague eye.

“Mamma says you should come along.”

He got up unwillingly. The two Serbians rose also; the countess never moved; her eyes, sunk deep in Mongol cheek bones, never left Fifi’s face; her head crouched in the silver-fox fur which Fifi knew represented her brother’s last month’s allowance. As John Schwartz stood there swaying unsteadily the orchestra launched into Ich bin von Kopf bis Fuss. Diving into the confusion of the table, Fifi emerged with her brother’s arm, marched him to the coat room and then out toward the taxi stand.

It was late, the evening was over, her birthday was over, and driving back to the hotel, with John slumped against her shoulder, Fifi felt a sudden depression. By virtue of her fine health she had never been a worrier, and certainly the Schwartz family had lived so long against similar backgrounds that Fifi felt no insufficiency in the Hotel des Trois Mondes as cloud and community--and yet the evening was suddenly all wrong. Didn’t evenings sometimes end on a high note and not fade out vaguely in bars? After ten o’clock every night she felt she was the only real being in a colony of ghosts, that she was surrounded by utterly intangible figures who retreated whenever she stretched out her hand.

The doorman assisted her brother to the elevator. Stepping in, Fifi saw, too late, that there were two other people inside. Before she could pull John out again, they had both brushed past her as if in fear of contamination. Fifi heard “Mercy!” from Mrs. Taylor and “How revolting!” from Miss Howard. The elevator mounted. Fifi held her breath until it stopped at her floor.

It was, perhaps, the impact of this last encounter that caused her to stand very still just inside the door of the dark apartment. Then she had the sense that someone else was there in the blackness ahead of her, and after her brother had stumbled forward and thrown himself on a sofa, she still waited.

“Mamma,” she called, but there was no answer; only a sound fainter than a rustle, like a shoe scraped along the floor.

A few minutes later, when her mother came upstairs, they called the valet de chambre and went through the rooms together, but there was no one. Then they stood side by side in the open door to their balcony and looked out on the lake with the bright cluster of Evian on the French shore and the white caps of snow on the mountains.

“I think we’ve been here long enough,” said Mrs. Schwartz suddenly. “I think I’ll take John back to the States this fall.”

Fifi was aghast. “But I thought John and I were going to the Sorbonne in Paris?”

“How can I trust him in Paris? And how could I leave you behind alone there?”

“But we’re used to living in Europe now. Why did I learn to talk French? Why, mamma, we don’t even know any people back home any more.”

“We can always meet people. We always have.”

“But you know it’s different; everybody is so bigoted there. A girl hasn’t the chance to meet the same sort of men, even if there were any. Everybody just watches everything you do.”

“So they do here,” said her mother. “That Mr. Weicker just stopped me in the hall; he saw you come in with John, and he talked to me about how you must keep out of the bar, you were so young. I told him you only took lemonade, but he said it didn’t matter; scenes like tonight made people leave the hotel.”

“Oh, how perfectly mean!”

“So I think we better go back home.”

The empty word rang desolately in Fifi’s ears. She put her arms around her mother’s waist, realizing that it was she and not her mother, with her mother’s clear grip on the past, who was completely lost in the universe. On the sofa her brother snored, having already entered the world of the weak, of the leaners together, and found its fetid and mercurial warmth sufficient. But Fifi kept looking at the alien sky, knowing that she could pierce it and find her own way through envy and corruption. For the first time she seriously considered marrying Borowki immediately.

“Do you want to go downstairs and say good night to the boys?” suggested her mother. “There’s lots of them still there asking where you are.”

But the Furies were after Fifi now--after her childish complacency and her innocence, even after her beauty--out to break it all down and drag it in any convenient mud. When she shook her head and walked sullenly into her bedroom, they had already taken something from her forever.

II

The following morning Mrs. Schwartz went to Mr. Weicker’s office to report the loss of two hundred dollars in American money. She had left the sum on her chiffonier upon retiring; when she awoke, it was gone. The door of the apartment had been bolted, but in the morning the bolt was found drawn, and yet neither of her children was awake. Fortunately, she had taken her jewels to bed with her in a chamois sack.

Mr. Weicker decided that the situation must be handled with care. There were not a few guests in the hotel who were in straitened circumstances and inclined to desperate remedies, but he must move slowly. In America one has money or hasn’t; in Europe the heir to a fortune may be unable to stand himself a haircut until the collapse of a fifth cousin, yet be a sure risk and not to be lightly offended. Opening the office copy of the Almanack de Gotha, Mr. Weicker found Stanislas Karl Joseph Borowki hooked firmly on to the end of a line older than the crown of St. Stephen. This morning, in riding clothes that were smart as a hussar’s uniform, he had gone riding with the utterly correct Miss Howard. On the other hand, there was no doubt as to who had been robbed, and Mr. Weicker’s indignation began to concentrate on Fifi and her family, who might have saved him this trouble by taking themselves off some time ago. It was even conceivable that the dissipated son, John, had nipped the money.

In all events, the Schwartzes were going home. For three years they had lived in hotels--in Paris, Florence, St. Raphael, Como, Vichy, La Baule, Lucerne, Baden-Baden and Biarritz. Everywhere there had been schools--always new schools--and both children spoke in perfect French and scrawny fragments of Italian. Fifi had grown from a large-featured child of fourteen to a beauty; John had grown into something rather dismal and lost. Both of them played bridge, and somewhere Fifi had picked up tap dancing. Mrs. Schwartz felt that it was all somehow unsatisfactory, but she did not know why. So, two days after Fifi’s party, she announced that they would pack their trunks, go to Paris for some new fall clothes and then go home.

That same afternoon Fifi came to the bar to get her phonograph, left there the night of her party. She sat up on a high stool and talked to the barman while she drank a ginger ale.

“Mother wants to take me back to America, but I’m not going.”

“What will you do?”

“Oh, I’ve got a little money of my own, and then I may get married.” She sipped her ginger ale moodily.

“I hear you had some money stolen,” he remarked. “How did it happen?”

“Well, Count Borowki thinks the man got into the apartment early and hid in between the two doors between us and the next apartment. Then, when we were asleep, he took the money and walked out.”

“Ha!”

Fifi sighed. “Well, you probably won’t see me in the bar any more.”

“We’ll miss you, Miss Schwartz.”

Mr. Weicker put his head in the door, withdrew it and then came in slowly.

“Hello,” said Fifi coldly.

“A-ha, young lady.” He waggled his finger at her with affected facetiousness. “Didn’t you know I spoke to your mother about your coming in to the bar? It’s merely for your own good.”

“I’m just having a ginger ale,” she said indignantly.

“But no one can tell what you’re having. It might be whisky or what not. It is the other guests who complain.”

She stared at him indignantly--the picture was so different from her own--of Fifi as the lively center of the hotel, of Fifi in clothes that ravished the eye, standing splendid and unattainable amid groups of adoring men. Suddenly Mr. Weicker’s obsequious, but hostile, face infuriated her.

“We’re getting out of this hotel!” she flared up. “I never saw such a narrow-minded bunch of people in my life; always criticizing everybody and making up terrible things about them, no matter what they do themselves. I think it would be a good thing if the hotel caught fire and burned down with all the nasty cats in it.”

Banging down her glass, she seized the phonograph case and stalked out of the bar.

In the lobby a porter sprang to help her, but she shook her head and hurried on through the salon, where she came upon Count Borowki.

“Oh, I’m so furious!” she cried. “I never saw so many old cats! I just told Mr. Weicker what I thought of them!”

“Did someone dare to speak rudely to you?”

“Oh, it doesn’t matter. We’re going away.”

“Going away!” He started. “When?”

“Right away. I don’t want to, but mamma says we’ve got to.”

“I must talk to you seriously about this,” he said. “I just called your room. I have brought you a little engagement present.”

Her spirits returned as she took the handsome gold-and-ivory cigarette case engraved with her initials.

“How lovely!”

“Now, listen; what you tell me makes it more important that I talk to you immediately. I have just received another letter from my mother. They have chosen a girl for me in Budapest--a lovely girl, rich and beautiful and of my own rank who would be very happy at the match, but I am in love with you. I would never have thought it possible, but I have lost my heart to an American.”

“Well, why not?” said Fifi, indignantly. “They call girls beautiful here if they have one good feature. And then, if they’ve got nice eyes or hair, they’re usually bow-legged or haven’t got nice teeth.”

“There is no flaw or fault in you.”

“Oh, yes,” said Fifi modestly. “I got a sort of big nose. Would you know I was Jewish?”

With a touch of impatience, Borowki came back to his argument: “So they are bringing pressure to bear for me to marry. Questions of inheritance depend on it.”

“Besides, my forehead is too high,” observed Fifi abstractedly. “It’s so high it’s got sort of wrinkles in it. I knew an awfully funny boy who used to call me ‘the highbrow.’“

“So the sensible thing,” pursued Borowki, “is for us to marry immediately. I tell you frankly there are other American girls not far from here who wouldn’t hesitate.”

“Mamma would be about crazy,” Fifi said.

“I’ve thought about that too,” he answered her eagerly. “Don’t tell her. If we drove over the border tonight we could be married tomorrow morning. Then we come back and you show your mother the little gilt coronets painted on your luggage. My own personal opinion is that she’ll be delighted. There you are, off her hands, with social position second to none in Europe. In my opinion, your mother has probably thought of it already, and may be saying to herself: ‘Why don’t those two young people just take matters into their own hands and save me all the fuss and expense of a wedding?’ I think she would like us for being so hard-boiled.”

He broke off impatiently as Lady Capps-Karr, emerging from the dining room with her Pekingese, surprised them by stopping at their table. Count Borowki was obliged to introduce them. As he had not known of the Marquis Kinkallow’s defection the other evening, nor that His Lordship had taken a wound to Milan the following morning, he had no suspicion of what was coming.

“I’ve noticed Miss Schwartz,” said the Englishwoman in a clear, concise voice. “And of course I’ve noticed Miss Schwartz’s clothes.”

“Won’t you sit down?” said Fifi.

“No, thank you.” She turned to Borowki. “Miss Schwartz’s clothes make us all appear somewhat drab. I always refuse to dress elaborately in hotels. It seems such rotten taste. Don’t you think so?”

“I think people always ought to look nice,” said Fifi, flushing.

“Naturally. I merely said that I consider it rotten taste to dress elaborately, save in the houses of one’s friends.”

She said “Good-by-e-e” to Borowki and moved on, emitting a mouthed cloud of smoke and a faint fragrance of whisky.

The insult had been as stinging as the crack of a whip, and as Fifi’s pride of her wardrobe was swept away from her, she heard all the comments that she had not heard, in one great resurgent whisper. Then they said that she wore her clothes here because she had nowhere else to wear them. That was why the Howard girl considered her vulgar and did not care to know her.

For an instant her anger flamed up against her mother for not telling her, but she saw that her mother did not know either.

“I think she’s so dowdy,” she forced herself to say aloud, but inside she was quivering. “What is she, anyhow? I mean, how high is her title? Very high?”

“She’s the widow of a baronet.”

“Is that high?” Fifi’s face was rigid. “Higher than a countess?”

“No. A countess is much higher--infinitely higher.” He moved his chair closer and began to talk intently.

Half an hour later Fifi got up with indecision on her face.

“At seven you’ll let me know definitely,” Borowki said, “and I’ll be ready with a car at ten.”

Fifi nodded. He escorted her across the room and saw her vanish into a dark hall mirror in the direction of the lift.

As he turned away, Lady Capps-Karr, sitting alone over her coffee, spoke to him:

“I want a word with you. Did you, by some slip of the tongue, suggest to Weicker that in case of difficulties I would guarantee your bills?”

Borowki flushed. “I may have said something like that, but--”

“Well, I told him the truth--that I never laid eyes on you until a fortnight ago.”

“I, naturally, turned to a person of equal rank--”

“Equal rank! What cheek! The only titles left are English titles. I must ask you not to make use of my name again.”

He bowed. “Such inconveniences will soon be for me a thing of the past.”

“Are you getting off with that vulgar little American?”

“I beg your pardon,” he said stiffly.

“Don’t be angry. I’ll stand you a whisky-and-soda. I’m getting in shape for Bopes Kinkallow, who’s just telephoned he’s tottering back here.”

Meanwhile, upstairs, Mrs. Schwartz was saying to Fifi: “Now that I know we’re going away I’m getting excited about it. It will be so nice seeing the Hirsts and Mrs. Bell and Amy and Marjorie and Gladys again, and the new baby. You’ll be happy, too; you’ve forgotten how they’re like. You and Gladys used to be great friends. And Marjorie--”

“Oh, mamma, don’t talk about it,” cried Fifi miserably. “I can’t go back.”

“We needn’t stay. If John was in a college like his father wanted, we could, maybe, go to California.”

But for Fifi all the romance of life was rolled up into the last three impressionable years in Europe. She remembered the tall guardsmen in Rome and the old Spaniard who had first made her conscious of her beauty at the Villa d’Este at Como, and the French naval aviator at St. Raphael who had dropped her a note from his plane into their garden, and the feeling that she had sometimes, when she danced with Borowki, that he was dressed in gleaming boots and a white-furred dolman.

She had seen many American moving pictures and she knew that the girls there always married the faithful boy from the old home town, and after that there was nothing.

“I won’t go,” she said aloud.

Her mother turned with a pile of clothes in her arms. “What talk is that from you, Fifi? You think I could leave you here alone?” As Fifi didn’t answer, she continued, with an air of finality: “That talk doesn’t sound nice from you. Now you stop fretting and saying such things, and get me this list of things uptown.”

But Fifi had decided. It was Borowki, then, and the chance of living fully and adventurously. He could go into the diplomatic service, and then one day when they encountered Lady Capps-Karr and Miss Howard at a legation ball, she could make audible the observation that for the moment seemed so necessary to her: “I hate people who always look as if they were going to or from a funeral.”

“So run along,” her mother continued. “And look in at that café and see if John is up there, and take him to tea.”

Fifi accepted the shopping list mechanically. Then she went into her room and wrote a little note to Borowki which she would leave with the concierge on the way out.

Coming out, she saw her mother struggling with a trunk, and felt terribly sorry for her. But there were Amy and Gladys in America, and Fifi hardened herself.

She walked out and down the stairs, remembering halfway that in her distraction she had omitted an official glance in the mirror; but there was a large mirror on the wall just outside the grand salon, and she stopped in front of that instead.

She was beautiful--she learned that once more, but now it made her sad. She wondered whether the dress she wore this afternoon was in bad taste, whether it would minister to the superiority of Miss Howard or Lady Capps-Karr. It seemed to her a lovely dress, soft and gentle in cut, but in color a hard, bright, metallic powder blue.

Then a sudden sound broke the stillness of the gloomy hall and Fifi stood suddenly breathless and motionless.

III

At eleven o’clock Mr. Weicker was tired, but the bar was in one of its periodical riots and he was waiting for it to quiet down. There was nothing to do in the stale office or the empty lobby; and the salon, where all day he held long conversations with lonely English and American women, was deserted; so he went out the front door and began to make the circuit of the hotel. Whether due to his circumambient course or to his frequent glances up at the twinkling bedroom lights and into the humble, grilled windows of the kitchen floor, the promenade gave him a sense of being in control of the hotel, of being adequately responsible, as though it were a ship and he was surveying it from a quarterdeck.

He went past a flood of noise and song from the bar, past a window where two bus boys sat on a bunk and played cards over a bottle of Spanish wine. There was a phonograph somewhere above, and a woman’s form blocked out a window; then there was the quiet wing, and turning the corner, he arrived back at his point of departure. And in front of the hotel, under the dim porte-cochère light, he saw Count Borowki.

Something made him stop and watch--something incongruous--Borowki, who couldn’t pay his bill, had a car and a chauffeur. He was giving the chauffeur some sort of detailed instructions, and then Mr. Weicker perceived that there was a bag in the front seat, and came forward into the light.

“You are leaving us, Count Borowki?”

Borowki started at the voice. “For the night only,” he answered. “I’m going to meet my mother.”

“I see.”

Borowki looked at him reproachfully. “My trunk and hat box are in my room, you’ll discover. Did you think I was running away from my bill?”

“Certainly not. I hope you will have a pleasant journey and find your mother well.”

But inside he took the precaution of dispatching a valet de chambre to see if the baggage was indeed there, and even to give it a thoughtful heft, lest its kernel were departed.

He dozed for perhaps an hour. When he woke up, the night concierge was pulling at his arm and there was a strong smell of smoke in the lobby. It was some moments before he could get it through his head that one wing of the hotel was on fire.

Setting the concierge at the alarms, he rushed down the hall to the bar, and through the smoke that poured from the door he caught sight of the burning billiard table and the flames licking along the floor and flaring up in alcoholic ecstasy every time a bottle on the shelves cracked with the heat. As he hastily retreated he met a line of half-dressed chasseurs and bus boys already struggling up from the lower depths with buckets of water. The concierge shouted that the fire department was on its way. He put two men at the telephones to awaken the guests, and as he ran back to form a bucket line at the danger point, he thought for the first time of Fifi.

Blind rage consumed him--with a precocious Indianlike cruelty she had carried out her threat. Ah, he would deal with that later; there was still law in the country. Meanwhile a clangor outdoors announced that the engines had arrived, and he made his way back through the lobby, filled now with men in pajamas carrying brief cases, and women in bedclothes carrying jewel boxes and small dogs; the number swelling every minute and the talk rising from a cadence heavy with sleep to the full staccato buzz of an afternoon soirée.

A chasseur called Mr. Weicker to the phone, but the manager shook him off impatiently.

“It’s the commissionaire of police,” the boy persisted. “He says you must speak to him.”

With an exclamation, Mr. Weicker hurried into the office. “‘Allo!”

“I’m calling from the station. Is this the manager?”

“Yes, but there’s a fire here.”

“Have you among your guests a man calling himself Count Borowki?”

“Why, yes--”

“We’re bringing him there for identification. He was picked up on the road on some information we received.”

“But--”

“We picked up a girl with him. We’re bringing them both down there immediately.”

“I tell you--”

The receiver clicked briskly in his ear and Mr. Weicker hurried back to the lobby, where the smoke was diminishing. The reassuring pumps had been at work for five minutes and the bar was a wet charred ruin. Mr. Weicker began passing here and there among the guests, tranquilizing and persuading; the phone operators began calling the rooms again, advising such guests as had not appeared that it was safe to go back to bed; and then, at the continued demands for an explanation, he thought again of Fifi, and this time of his own accord he hurried to the phone.

Mrs. Schwartz’s anxious voice answered; Fifi wasn’t there. That was what he wanted to know. He rang off brusquely. There was the story, and he could not have wished for anything more sordidly complete--an incendiary blaze and an attempted elopement with a man wanted by the police. It was time for paying, and all the money of America couldn’t make any difference. If the season was ruined, at least Fifi would have no more seasons at all. She would go to a girls’ institution where the prescribed uniform was rather plainer than any clothing she had ever worn.

As the last of the guests departed into the elevators, leaving only a few curious rummagers among the soaked débris, another procession came in by the front door. There was a man in civilian clothes and a little wall of policemen with two people behind. The commissionaire spoke and the screen of policemen parted.

“I want you to identify these two people. Has this man been staying here under the name of Borowki?”

Mr. Weicker looked. “He has.”

“He’s been wanted for a year in Italy, France and Spain. And this girl?”

She was half hidden behind Borowki, her head hanging, her face in shadow. Mr. Weicker craned toward her eagerly. He was looking at Miss Howard.

A wave of horror swept over Mr. Weicker. Again he craned his head forward, as if by the intensity of his astonishment he could convert her into Fifi, or look through her and find Fifi. But this would have been difficult, for Fifi was far away. She was in front of the café, assisting the stumbling and reluctant John Schwartz into a taxi. “I should say you can’t go back. Mother says you should come right home.”

IV

Count Borowki took his incarceration with a certain grace, as though, having lived so long by his own wits, there was a certain relief in having his days planned by an external agency. But he resented the lack of intercourse with the outer world, and was overjoyed when, on the fourth day of his imprisonment, he was led forth to find Lady Capps-Karr.

“After all,” she said, “a chep’s a chep and a chum’s a chum, whatever happens. Luckily, our consul here is a friend of my father’s, or they wouldn’t have let me see you. I even tried to get you out on bail, because I told them you went to Oxford for a year and spoke English perfectly, but the brutes wouldn’t listen.”

“I’m afraid there’s no use,” said Count Borowki gloomily. “When they’ve finished trying me I’ll have had a free journey all over Europe.”

“But that’s not the only outrageous thing,” she continued. “Those idiots have thrown Bopes and me out of the Trois Mondes, and the authorities are trying to get us to leave the city.”

“What for?”

“They’re trying to put the full blame of that tiresome fire on us.”

“Did you start it?”

“We did set some brandy on fire because we wanted to cook some potato chips in alcohol, and the bartender had gone to bed and left us there. But you’d think, from the way the swine talk, that we’d come there with the sole idea of burning everyone in their beds. The whole thing’s an outrage and Bopes is furious. He says he’ll never come here again. I went to the consulate and they agreed that the whole affair was perfectly disgraceful, and they’ve wired the Foreign Office.”

Borowki considered for a moment. “If I could be born over again,” he said slowly, “I think without any doubt I should choose to be born an Englishman.”

“I could choose to be anything but an American! By the way, the Taylors are not presenting Miss Howard at court because of the disgraceful way the newspapers played up the matter.”

“What puzzles me is what made Fifi suspicious,” said Borowki.

“Then it was Miss Schwartz who blabbed?”

“Yes. I thought I had convinced her to come with me, and I knew that if she didn’t, I had only to snap my fingers to the other girl. . . . That very afternoon Fifi visited the jeweler’s and discovered I’d paid for the cigarette case with a hundred-dollar American note I’d lifted from her mother’s chiffonier. She went straight to the police.”

“Without coming to you first! After all, a chep’s a chep--”

“But what I want to know is what made her suspicious enough to investigate, what turned her against me.”

Fifi, at that moment sitting on a high stool in a hotel bar in Paris and sipping a lemonade, was answering that very question to an interested bartender.

“I was standing in the hall looking in the mirror,” she said, “and I heard him talking to the English lady--the one who set the hotel on fire. And I heard him say, ‘After all, my one nightmare is that she’ll turn out to look like her mother.’“ Fifi’s voice blazed with indignation. “Well, you’ve seen my mother, haven’t you?”

“Yes, and a very fine woman she is.”

“After that I knew there was something the matter with him, and I wondered how much he’d paid for the cigarette case. So I went up to see. They showed me the bill he paid with.”

“And you will go to America now?” the barman asked.

Fifi finished her glass; the straw made a gurgling sound in the sugar at the bottom.

“We’ve got to go back and testify, and we’ll stay a few months anyhow.” She stood up. “Bye-bye; I’ve got a fitting.”

They had not got her--not yet. The Furies had withdrawn a little and stood in the background with a certain gnashing of teeth. But there was plenty of time.

Yet, as Fifi tottered out through the lobby, her face gentle with new hopes, as she went out looking for completion under the impression that she was going to the couturier, there was a certain doubt among the eldest and most experienced of the Furies if they would get her, after all.

“I DIDN’T GET OVER”

Esquire (October, 1936)

I was ‘sixteen in college and it was our twentieth reunion this year. We always called ourselves the “War Babies”--anyhow we were all in the damn thing and this time there was more talk about the war than at any previous reunion; perhaps because war’s in the air once more.

Three of us were being talkative on the subject in Pete’s back room the night after commencement, when a classmate came in and sat down with us. We knew he was a classmate because we remembered his face and name vaguely, and he marched with us in the alumni parade, but he’d left college as a junior and had not been back these twenty years.

“Hello there--ah--Hib,” I said after a moment’s hesitation. The others took the cue and we ordered a round of beer and went on with what we were talking about.

“I tell you it was kind of moving when we laid that wreath this afternoon.” He referred to a bronze plaque commemorating the ‘sixteeners who died in the war, “--to read the names of Abe Danzer and Pop McGowan and those fellows and to think they’ve been dead for twenty years and we’ve only been getting old.”

“To be that young again I’d take a chance on another war,” I said, and to the new arrival, “Did you get over, Hib?”

“I was in the army but I didn’t get over.”

The war and the beer and the hours flowed along. Each of us shot off our mouths about something amusing, or unique, or terrible--all except Hib. Only when a pause came he said almost apologetically:

“I would have gotten over except that I was supposed to have slapped a little boy.”

We looked at him inquiringly.

“Of course I didn’t,” he added. “But there was a row about it.” His voice died away but we encouraged him--we had talked a lot and he seemed to rate a hearing.

“Nothing much to tell. The little boy, downtown with his father, said some officer with a blue M. P. band slapped him in the crowd and he picked me! A month afterwards they found he was always accusing soldiers of slapping, so they let me go. What made me think of it was Abe Danzer’s name on that plaque this afternoon. They put me in Leavenworth for a couple of weeks while they investigated me, and he was in the next cell to mine.”

“Abe Danzer!”

He had been sort of a class hero and we all exclaimed aloud in the same breath. “Why he was recommended for the D. S. C!”

“I know it.”

“What on earth was Abe Danzer doing in Leavenworth?”

Again Hibbing became apologetic.

“Oddly enough I was the man who arrested him. But he didn’t blame me because it was all in line of duty, and when I turned up in the next cell a few months later he even laughed about it.”

We were all interested now.

“What did you have to arrest him for?”

“Well, I’d been put on Military Police in Kansas City and almost the first call I got was to take a detail of men with fixed bayonets to the big hotel there--I forget the name--and go to a certain room. When I tapped on the door I never saw so many shoulder stars and shoulder leaves in my life; there were at least a brace apiece of generals and colonels. And in the center stood Abe Danzer and a girl--a tart--both of them drunk as monkeys. But it took me a minute’s blinking before I realized what else was the matter: the girl had on Abe’s uniform overcoat and cap and Abe had on her dress and hat. They’d gone down in the lobby like that and run straight into the divisional commander.”

We three looked at him, first incredulous, then shocked, finally believing. We started to laugh but couldn’t quite laugh, only looked at Hibbing with silly half-smiles on our faces, imagining ourselves in Abe’s position.

“Did he recognize you?” I asked finally.

“Vaguely.”

“Then what happened?”

“It was short and sweet. We changed the clothes on them, put their heads in cold water, then I stood them between two files of bayonets and said, forward march.”

“And marched old Abe off to prison!” we exclaimed. “It must have been a crazy feeling.”

“It was. From the expression in that general’s face I thought they’d probably shoot him. When they put me in Leavenworth a couple of months later I was relieved to find he was still alive.”

“I can’t understand it,” Joe Boone said. “He never drank in college.”

“That all goes back to his D. S. C,” said Hibbing.

“You know about that too?”

“Oh yes, we were in the same division--we were from the same state.”

“I thought you didn’t get overseas.”

“I didn’t. Neither did Abe. But things seemed to happen to him. Of course nothing like what you fellows must have seen--”

“How did he get recommended for the D. S. C,” I interrupted, “--and what did it have to do with his taking to drink?”

“Well, those drownings used to get on his nerves and he used to dream about it--”

“What drownings? For God’s sake, man, you’re driving us crazy. It’s like that story about ‘what killed the dog.’“

“A lot of people thought he had nothing to do with the drownings. They blamed the trench mortar.”

We groaned--but there was nothing to do but let him tell it his own way.

“Just what trench mortar?” I asked patiently.

“Rather I mean a Stokes mortar. Remember those old stove-pipes, set at forty-five degrees? You dropped a shell down the mouth.”

We remembered.

“Well, the day this happened Abe was in command of what they called the ‘fourth battalion,’ marching it out fifteen miles to the rifle range. It wasn’t really a battalion--it was the machine gun company, supply company, medical detachment and Headquarters Company. The H. Q. Company had the trench mortars and the one-pounder and the signal corps, band and mounted orderlies--a whole menagerie in itself. Abe commanded that company but on this day most of the medical and supply officers had to go ahead with the advance, so as ranking first lieutenant he commanded the other companies besides. I tell you he must have been proud that day--twenty-one and commanding a battalion; he rode a horse at the head of it and probably pretended to himself that he was Stonewall Jackson. Say, all this must bore you--it happened on the safe side of the ocean.”

“Go on.”

“Well, we were in Georgia then, and they have a lot of those little muddy rivers with big old rafts they pull across on a slow cable. You could carry about a hundred men if you packed them in. When Abe’s ‘battalion’ got to this river about noon he saw that the third battalion just ahead wasn’t even half over, and he figured it would be a full hour at the rate that boat was going to and fro. So he marched the men a little down the shore to get some shade and was just about to let them have chow when an officer came riding up all covered with dust and said he was Captain Brown and where was the officer commanding Headquarters Company.

“‘That’s me, sir,’ said Abe.

“‘Well, I just got in to camp and I’m taking command,’ the officer said. And then, as if it was Abe’s fault, ‘I had to ride like hell to catch up with you. Where’s the company?’

“‘Right here, sir--and next is the supply, and next is the medical--I was just going to let them eat--’

“At the look in his eye Abe shut up. The captain wasn’t going to let them eat yet and probably for no more reason than to show off his authority. He wasn’t going to let them rest either--he wanted to see what his company looked like (he’d never seen a Headquarters Company except on paper). He thought for a long time and then he decided that he’d have the trench mortar platoon throw some shells across the river for practice. He gave Abe the evil eye again when Abe told him he only had live shells along; he accepted the suggestion of sending over a couple of signal men to wigwag if any farmers were being bumped off. The signal men crossed on the barge and when they had wigwagged all clear, ran for cover themselves because a Stokes mortar wasn’t the most accurate thing in the world. Then the fun began.

“The shells worked on a time fuse and the river was too wide so the first one only made a nice little geyser under water. But the second one just hit the shore with a crash and a couple of horses began to stampede on the ferry boat in midstream only fifty yards down. Abe thought this might hold his majesty the captain but he only said they’d have to get used to shell fire--and ordered another shot. He was like a spoiled kid with an annoying toy.

“Then it happened, as it did once in a while with those mortars no matter what you did--the shell stuck in the gun. About a dozen people yelled, ‘Scatter!’ all at once and I scattered as far as anybody and lay down flat, and what did that damn fool Abe do but go up and tilt the barrel and spill out the shell. He’d saved the mortar but there were just five seconds between him and eternity and how he got away before the explosion is a mystery to me.”

At this point I interrupted Hibbing.

“I thought you said there were some people killed.”

“Oh yes--oh but that was later. The third battalion had crossed by now so Captain Brown formed the companies and we marched off to the ferry boat and began embarking. The second lieutenant in charge of the embarking spoke to the captain:

“‘This old tub’s kind of tired--been over-worked all day. Don’t try to pack them in too tight.’

“But the captain wouldn’t listen. He sent them over like sardines and each time Abe stood on the rail and shouted:

“‘Unbuckle your belts and sling your packs light on your shoulders--’ (this without looking at the captain because he’d realized that the captain didn’t like orders except his own). But the embarking officer spoke up once more:

“‘That raft’s low in the water,’ he said. ‘I don’t like it. When you started shooting off that cannon the horses began jumping and the men ran around and unbalanced it.’

“‘Tell the captain,’ Abe said. ‘He knows everything.’

“The captain overheard this. ‘There’s just one more load,’ he said. ‘And I don’t want any more discussion about it.’

“It was a big load, even according to Captain Brown’s ideas. Abe got up on the side to make his announcement.

“‘They ought to know that by this time,’ Captain Brown snapped. ‘They’ve heard it often enough.’

“‘Not this bunch.’ Abe rattled it off anyhow and the men unloosened their belts, except a few at the far end who weren’t paying attention. Or maybe it was so jammed that they couldn’t hear.

“We began to sink when we were half way over, very slowly at first, just a little water around the shoes, but we officers didn’t say anything for fear of a panic. It had looked like a small river from the bank but here in the middle and at the rate we were going, it began to look like the widest river in the world.

“In two minutes the water was a yard high in the old soup plate and there wasn’t any use concealing things any longer. For once the captain was tongue-tied. Abe got up on the side again and said to stay calm, and not rock the boat and we’d get there, and made his speech one last time about slipping off the packs, and told the ones that could swim to jump off when it got to their hips. The men took it well but you could almost tell from their faces which ones could swim and which couldn’t.

“She went down with a big whush! just twenty yards from shore; her nose grounded in a mud bank five feet under water.

“I don’t remember much about the next fifteen minutes. I dove and swam out into the river a few yards for a view but it all looked like a mass of khaki and water with some sound over it that I remember as a sustained monotone but was composed, I suppose, of cussing, and a few yells of fright, and even a little kidding and laughter. I swam in and helped pull people to shore, but it was a slow business in our shoes . . .

“When there was nothing more in sight in the river (except one corner of the barge which had perversely decided to bob up) Captain Brown and Abe met. The captain was weak and shaking and his arrogance was gone.

“‘Oh God,’ he said. ‘What’ll I do?’

“Abe took control of things--he fell the men in and got squad reports to see if anyone was missing.

“There were three missing in the first squad alone and we didn’t wait for the rest--we called for twenty good swimmers to strip and start diving and as fast as they pulled in a body we started a medico working on it. We pulled out twenty-eight bodies and revived seven. And one of the divers didn’t come up--he was found floating down the river next day and they gave a medal and a pension to his widow.”

Hibbing paused and then added: “But I know that’s small potatoes to you fellows in the big time.”

“Sounds exciting enough to me,” said Joe Boone. “I had a good time in France but I spent most of it guarding prisoners at Brest.”

“But how about finishing this?” I demanded. “Why did this drive Abe hell-raising?”

“That was the captain,” said Hibbing slowly. “A couple of officers tried to get Abe a citation or something for the trench mortar thing. The captain didn’t like that, and he began going around saying that when Abe jumped up on the side of the barge to give the unsling order, he’d hung on to the ferry cable and pulled it out of whack. The captain found a couple of people who agreed with him but there were others who thought it was overloading and the commotion the horses made at the shell bursts. But Abe was never very happy in the army after that.”

There was an emphatic interruption in the person of Pete himself who said in no uncertain words:

“Mr. Tomlinson and Mr. Boone. Your wives say they’re calling for the last time. They say this has been one night too often, and if you don’t get back to the Inn in ten minutes they driving to Philadelphia.”

Tommy and Joe Boone arose reluctantly.

“I’m afraid I’ve monopolized the evening,” said Hibbing. “And after what you fellows must have seen.”

When they had gone I lingered.

“So Abe wasn’t killed in France.”

“No--you’ll notice all that tablet says is ‘died in service.’“

“What did he die of?”

Hibbing hesitated.

“He was shot by a guard trying to escape from Leavenworth. They’d given him ten years.”

“God! And what a great guy he was in college.”

“I suppose he was to his friends. But he was a good deal of a snob wasn’t he?”

“Maybe to some people.”

“He didn’t seem to even recognize a lot of his classmates when he met them in the army.”

“What do you mean?”

“Just what I say. I told you something that wasn’t true tonight. That captain’s name wasn’t Brown.”

Again I asked him what he meant.

“The captain’s name was Hibbing,” he said. “I was that captain, and when I rode up to join my company he acted as if he’d never seen me before. It kind of threw me off--because I used to love this place. Well--good night.”

JACOB’S LADDER

Saturday Evening Post (20 August 1927)

It was a particularly sordid and degraded murder trial, and Jacob Booth, writhing quietly on a spectators’ bench, felt that he had childishly gobbled something without being hungry, simply because it was there. The newspapers had humanized the case, made a cheap, neat problem play out of an affair of the jungle, so passes that actually admitted one to the court room were hard to get. Such a pass had been tendered him the evening before.

Jacob looked around at the doors, where a hundred people, inhaling and exhaling with difficulty, generated excitement by their eagerness, their breathless escape from their own private lives. The day was hot and there was sweat upon the crowd--obvious sweat in large dewy beads that would shake off on Jacob if he fought his way through to the doors. Someone behind him guessed that the jury wouldn’t be out half an hour.

With the inevitability of a compass needle, his head swung toward the prisoner’s table and he stared once more at the murderess’ huge blank face garnished with red button eyes. She was Mrs. Choynski, née Delehanty, and fate had ordained that she should one day seize a meat ax and divide her sailor lover. The puffy hands that had swung the weapon turned an ink bottle about endlessly; several times she glanced at the crowd with a nervous smile.

Jacob frowned and looked around quickly; he had found a pretty face and lost it again. The face had edged sideways into his consciousness when he was absorbed in a mental picture of Mrs. Choynski in action; now it was faded back into the anonymity of the crowd. It was the face of a dark saint with tender, luminous eyes and a skin pale and fair. Twice he searched the room, then he forgot and sat stiffly and uncomfortably, waiting.

The jury brought in a verdict of murder in the first degree; Mrs. Choynski squeaked, “Oh, my God!” The sentence was postponed until next day. With a slow rhythmic roll, the crowd pushed out into the August afternoon.

Jacob saw the face again, realizing why he hadn’t seen it before. It belonged to a young girl beside the prisoner’s table and it had been hidden by the full moon of Mrs. Choynski’s head. Now the clear, luminous eyes were bright with tears, and an impatient young man with a squashed nose was trying to attract the attention of the shoulder.

“Oh, get out!” said the girl, shaking the hand off impatiently. “Le’ me alone, will you? Le’ me alone. Geeze!”

The man sighed profoundly and stepped back. The girl embraced the dazed Mrs. Choynski and another lingerer remarked to Jacob that they were sisters. Then Mrs. Choynski was taken off the scene--her expression absurdly implied an important appointment--and the girl sat down at the desk and began to powder her face. Jacob waited; so did the young man with the squashed nose. The sergeant came up brusquely and Jacob gave him five dollars.

“Geeze!” cried the girl to the young man. “Can’t you le’ me alone?” She stood up. Her presence, the obscure vibrations of her impatience, filled the court room. “Every day itsa same!”

Jacob moved nearer. The other man spoke to her rapidly:

“Miss Delehanty, we’ve been more than liberal with you and your sister and I’m only asking you to carry out your share of the contract. Our paper goes to press at--”

Miss Delehanty turned despairingly to Jacob. “Can you beat it?” she demanded. “Now he wants a pitcher of my sister when she was a baby, and it’s got my mother in it too.”

“We’ll take your mother out.”

“I want my mother though. It’s the only one I got of her.”

“I’ll promise to give you the picture back tomorrow.”

“Oh, I’m sicka the whole thing.” Again she was speaking to Jacob, but without seeing him except as some element of the vague, omnipresent public. “It gives me a pain in the eye.” She made a clicking sound in her teeth that comprised the essence of all human scorn.

“I have a car outside, Miss Delehanty,” said Jacob suddenly. “Don’t you want me to run you home?”

“All right,” she answered indifferently.

The newspaper man assumed a previous acquaintance between them; he began to argue in a low voice as the three moved toward the door.

“Every day it’s like this,” said Miss Delehanty bitterly. “These newspaper guys!” Outside, Jacob signaled for his car and as it drove up, large, open and bright, and the chauffeur jumped out and opened the door, the reporter, on the verge of tears, saw the picture slipping away and launched into a peroration of pleading.

“Go jump in the river!” said Miss Delehanty, sitting in Jacob’s car. “Go--jump--in--the--river!”

The extraordinary force of her advice was such that Jacob regretted the limitations of her vocabulary. Not only did it evoke an image of the unhappy journalist hurling himself into the Hudson but it convinced Jacob that it was the only fitting and adequate way of disposing of the man. Leaving him to face his watery destiny, the car moved off down the street.

“You dealt with him pretty well,” Jacob said.

“Sure,” she admitted. “I get sore after a while and then I can deal with anybody no matter who. How old would you think I was?”

“How old are you?”

“Sixteen.”

She looked at him gravely, inviting him to wonder. Her face, the face of a saint, an intense little Madonna, was lifted fragilely out of the mortal dust of the afternoon. On the pure parting of her lips no breath hovered; he had never seen a texture pale and immaculate as her skin, lustrous and garish as her eyes. His own well-ordered person seemed for the first time in his life gross and well worn to him as he knelt suddenly at the heart of freshness.

“Where do you live?” he asked. The Bronx, perhaps Yonkers, Albany--Baffin’s Bay. They could curve over the top of the world, drive on forever.

Then she spoke, and as the toad words vibrated with life in her voice, the moment passed: “Eas’ Hun’erd thuyty-thuyd. Stayin’ with a girl friend there.”

They were waiting for a traffic light to change and she exchanged a haughty glance with a flushed man peering from a flanking taxi. The man took off his hat hilariously. “Somebody’s stenog,” he cried. “And oh, what a stenog!”

An arm and hand appeared in the taxi window and pulled him back into the darkness of the cab.

Miss Delehanty turned to Jacob, a frown, the shadow of a hair in breadth, appearing between her eyes. “A lot of ‘em know me,” she said. “We got a lot of publicity and pictures in the paper.”

“I’m sorry it turned out badly.”

She remembered the event of the afternoon, apparently for the first time in half an hour. “She had it comin’ to her, mister. She never had a chance. But they’ll never send no woman to the chair in New York State.”

“No; that’s sure.”

“She’ll get life.” Surely it was not she who had spoken. The tranquillity of her face made her words separate themselves from her as soon as they were uttered and take on a corporate existence of their own.

“Did you use to live with her?”

“Me? Say, read the papers! I didn’t even know she was my sister till they come and told me. I hadn’t seen her since I was a baby.” She pointed suddenly at one of the world’s largest department stores. “There’s where I work. Back to the old pick and shovel day after tomorrow.”

“It’s going to be a hot night,” said Jacob. “Why don’t we ride out into the country and have dinner?”

She looked at him. His eyes were polite and kind. “All right,” she said.

Jacob was thirty-three. Once he had possessed a tenor voice with destiny in it, but laryngitis had despoiled him of it in one feverish week ten years before. In despair that concealed not a little relief, he bought a plantation in Florida and spent five years turning it into a golf course. When the land boom came in 1924 he sold his real estate for eight hundred thousand dollars.

Like so many Americans, he valued things rather than cared about them. His apathy was neither fear of life nor was it an affectation; it was the racial violence grown tired. It was a humorous apathy. With no need for money, he had tried--tried hard--for a year and a half to marry one of the richest women in America. If he had loved her, or pretended to, he could have had her; but he had never been able to work himself up to more than the formal lie.

In person, he was short, trim and handsome. Except when he was overcome by a desperate attack of apathy, he was unusually charming; he went with a crowd of men who were sure that they were the best of New York and had by far the best time. During a desperate attack of apathy he was like a gruff white bird, ruffled and annoyed, and disliking mankind with all his heart.

He liked mankind that night under the summer moonshine of the Borghese Gardens. The moon was a radiant egg, smooth and bright as Jenny Delehanty’s face across the table; a salt wind blew in over the big estates collecting flower scents from their gardens and bearing them to the road-house lawn. The waiters hopped here and there like pixies through the hot night, their black backs disappearing into the gloom, their white shirt fronts gleaming startlingly out of an unfamiliar patch of darkness.

They drank a bottle of champagne and he told Jenny Delehanty a story. “You are the most beautiful thing I have ever seen,” he said, “but as it happens you are not my type and I have no designs on you at all. Nevertheless, you can’t go back to that store. Tomorrow I’m going to arrange a meeting between you and Billy Farrelly, who’s directing a picture on Long Island. Whether he’ll see how beautiful you are I don’t know, because I’ve never introduced anybody to him before.”

There was no shadow, no ripple of a change in her expression, but there was irony in her eyes. Things like that had been said to her before, but the movie director was never available next day. Or else she had been tactful enough not to remind men of what they had promised last night.

“Not only are you beautiful,” continued Jacob, “but you are somehow on the grand scale. Everything you do--yes, like reaching for that glass, or pretending to be self-conscious, or pretending to despair of me--gets across. If somebody’s smart enough to see it, you might be something of an actress.”

“I like Norma Shearer the best. Do you?”

Driving homeward through the soft night, she put up her face quietly to be kissed. Holding her in the hollow of his arm, Jacob rubbed his cheek against her cheek’s softness and then looked down at her for a long moment.

“Such a lovely child,” he said gravely.

She smiled back at him; her hands played conventionally with the lapels of his coat. “I had a wonderful time,” she whispered. “Geeze! I hope I never have to go to court again.”

“I hope you don’t.”

“Aren’t you going to kiss me good night?”

“This is Great Neck,” he said, “that we’re passing through. A lot of moving-picture stars live here.”

“You’re a card, handsome.”

“Why?”

She shook her head from side to side and smiled. “You’re a card.”

She saw then that he was a type with which she was not acquainted. He was surprised, not flattered, that she thought him droll. She saw that whatever his eventual purpose he wanted nothing of her now. Jenny Delehanty learned quickly; she let herself become grave and sweet and quiet as the night, and as they rolled over Queensboro Bridge into the city she was half asleep against his shoulder.

II

He called up Billy Farrelly next day. “I want to see you,” he said. “I found a girl I wish you’d take a look at.”

“My gosh!” said Farrelly. “You’re the third today.”

“Not the third of this kind.”

“All right. If she’s white, she can have the lead in a picture I’m starting Friday.”

“Joking aside, will you give her a test?”

“I’m not joking. She can have the lead, I tell you. I’m sick of these lousy actresses. I’m going out to the Coast next month. I’d rather be Constance Talmadge’s water boy than own most of these young--” His voice was bitter with Irish disgust. “Sure, bring her over, Jake. I’ll take a look at her.”

Four days later, when Mrs. Choynski, accompanied by two deputy sheriffs, had gone to Auburn to pass the remainder of her life, Jacob drove Jenny over the bridge to Astoria, Long Island.

“You’ve got to have a new name,” he said; “and remember you never had a sister.”

“I thought of that,” she answered. “I thought of a name too--Tootsie Defoe.”

“That’s rotten,” he laughed; “just rotten.”

“Well, you think of one if you’re so smart.”

“How about Jenny--Jenny--oh, anything--Jenny Prince?”

“All right, handsome.”

Jenny Prince walked up the steps of the motion-picture studio, and Billy Farrelly, in a bitter Irish humor, in contempt for himself and his profession, engaged her for one of the three leads in his picture.

“They’re all the same,” he said to Jacob. “Shucks! Pick ‘em up out of the gutter today and they want gold plates tomorrow. I’d rather be Constance Talmadge’s water boy than own a harem full of them.”

“Do you like this girl?”

“She’s all right. She’s got a good side face. But they’re all the same.”

Jacob bought Jenny Prince an evening dress for a hundred and eighty dollars and took her to the Lido that night. He was pleased with himself, and excited. They both laughed a lot and were happy.

“Can you believe you’re in the movies?” he demanded.

“They’ll probably kick me out tomorrow. It was too easy.”

“No, it wasn’t. It was very good--psychologically. Billy Farrelly was in just the one mood--”

“I liked him.”

“He’s fine,” agreed Jacob. But he was reminded that already another man was helping to open doors for her success. “He’s a wild Irishman, look out for him.”

“I know. You can tell when a guy wants to make you.”

“What?”

“I don’t mean he wanted to make me, handsome. But he’s got that look about him, if you know what I mean.” She distorted her lovely face with a wise smile. “He likes ‘em; you could tell that this afternoon.”

They drank a bottle of charged and very alcoholic grape juice.

Presently the head waiter came over to their table.

“This is Miss Jenny Prince,” said Jacob. “You’ll see a lot of her, Lorenzo, because she’s just signed a big contract with the pictures. Always treat her with the greatest possible respect.”

When Lorenzo had withdrawn, Jenny said, “You got the nicest eyes I ever seen.” It was her effort, the best she could do. Her face was serious and sad. “Honest,” she repeated herself, “the nicest eyes I ever seen. Any girl would be glad to have eyes like yours.”

He laughed, but he was touched. His hand covered her arm lightly. “Be good,” he said. “Work hard and I’ll be so proud of you--and we’ll have some good times together.”

“I always have a good time with you.” Her eyes were full on his, in his, held there like hands. Her voice was clear and dry. “Honest, I’m not kidding about your eyes. You always think I’m kidding. I want to thank you for all you’ve done for me.”

“I haven’t done anything, you lunatic. I saw your face and I was--I was beholden to it--everybody ought to be beholden to it.”

Entertainers appeared and her eyes wandered hungrily away from him.

She was so young--Jacob had never been so conscious of youth before. He had always considered himself on the young side until tonight.

Afterward, in the dark cave of the taxicab, fragrant with the perfume he had bought for her that day, Jenny came close to him, clung to him. He kissed her, without enjoying it. There was no shadow of passion in her eyes or on her mouth; there was a faint spray of champagne on her breath. She clung nearer, desperately. He took her hands and put them in her lap.

She leaned away from him resentfully.

“What’s the matter? Don’t you like me?”

“I shouldn’t have let you have so much champagne.”

“Why not? I’ve had a drink before. I was tight once.”

“Well, you ought to be ashamed of yourself. And if I hear of your taking any more drinks, you’ll hear from me.”

“You sure have got your nerve, haven’t you?”

“What do you do? Let all the corner soda jerkers maul you around whenever they want?”

“Oh, shut up!”

For a moment they rode in silence. Then her hand crept across to his. “I like you better than any guy I ever met, and I can’t help that, can I?”

“Dear little Jenny.” He put his arm around her again.

Hesitating tentatively, he kissed her and again he was chilled by the innocence of her kiss, the eyes that at the moment of contact looked beyond him out into the darkness of the night, the darkness of the world. She did not know yet that splendor was something in the heart; at the moment when she should realize that and melt into the passion of the universe he could take her without question or regret.

“I like you enormously,” he said; “better than almost anyone I know. I mean that about drinking though. You mustn’t drink.”

“I’ll do anything you want,” she said; and she repeated, looking at him directly, “Anything.”

The car drew up in front of her flat and he kissed her good night.

He rode away in a mood of exultation, living more deeply in her youth and future than he had lived in himself for years. Thus, leaning forward a little on his cane, rich, young and happy, he was borne along dark streets and light toward a future of his own which he could not foretell.

III

A month later, climbing into a taxicab with Farrelly one night, he gave the latter’s address to the driver. “So you’re in love with this baby,” said Farrelly pleasantly. “Very well, I’ll get out of your way.”

Jacob experienced a vast displeasure. “I’m not in love with her,” he said slowly. “Billy, I want you to leave her alone.”

“Sure! I’ll leave her alone,” agreed Farrelly readily. “I didn’t know you were interested--she told me she couldn’t make you.”

“The point is you’re not interested either,” said Jacob. “If I thought that you two really cared about each other, do you think I’d be fool enough to try to stand in the way? But you don’t give a darn about her, and she’s impressed and a little fascinated.”

“Sure,” agreed Farrelly, bored. “I wouldn’t touch her for anything.”

Jacob laughed. “Yes, you would. Just for something to do. That’s what I object to--anything--anything casual happening to her.”

“I see what you mean. I’ll let her alone.”

Jacob was forced to be content with that. He had no faith in Billy Farrelly, but he guessed that Farrelly liked him and wouldn’t offend him unless stronger feelings were involved. But the holding hands under the table tonight had annoyed him. Jenny lied about it when he reproached her; she offered to let him take her home immediately, offered not to speak to Farrelly again all evening. Then he had seemed silly and pointless to himself. It would have been easier, when Farrelly said “So you’re in love with this baby,” to have been able to answer simply, “I am.”

But he wasn’t. He valued her now more than he had ever thought possible. He watched in her the awakening of a sharply individual temperament. She liked quiet and simple things. She was developing the capacity to discriminate and shut the trivial and the unessential out of her life. He tried giving her books; then wisely he gave up that and brought her into contact with a variety of men. He made situations and then explained them to her, and he was pleased, as appreciation and politeness began to blossom before his eyes. He valued, too, her utter trust in him and the fact that she used him as a standard for judgments on other men.

Before the Farrelly picture was released, she was offered a two-year contract on the strength of her work in it--four hundred a week for six months and an increase on a sliding scale. But she would have to go to the Coast.

“Wouldn’t you rather have me wait?” she said, as they drove in from the country one afternoon. “Wouldn’t you rather have me stay here in New York--near you?”

“You’ve got to go where your work takes you. You ought to be able to look out for yourself. You’re seventeen.”

Seventeen--she was as old as he; she was ageless. Her dark eyes under a yellow straw hat were as full of destiny as though she had not just offered to toss destiny away.

“I wonder if you hadn’t come along, someone else would of,” she said--”to make me do things, I mean.”

“You’d have done them yourself. Get it out of your head that you’re dependent on me.”

“I am. Everything is, thanks to you.”

“It isn’t, though,” he said emphatically, but he brought no reasons; he liked her to think that.

“I don’t know what I’ll do without you. You’re my only friend”--and she added--”that I care about. You see? You understand what I mean?”

He laughed at her, enjoying the birth of her egotism implied in her right to be understood. She was lovelier that afternoon than he had ever seen her, delicate, resonant and, for him, undesirable. But sometimes he wondered if that sexlessness wasn’t for him alone, wasn’t a side that, perhaps purposely, she turned toward him. She was happiest of all with younger men, though she pretended to despise them. Billy Farrelly, obligingly and somewhat to her mild chagrin, had left her alone.

“When will you come out to Hollywood?”

“Soon,” he promised. “And you’ll be coming back to New York.”

She began to cry. “Oh, I’ll miss you so much! I’ll miss you so much!” Large tears of distress ran down her warm ivory cheeks. “Oh, geeze!” she cried softly. “You been good to me! Where’s your hand? Where’s your hand? You been the best friend anybody ever had. Where am I ever going to find a friend like you?”

She was acting now, but a lump arose in his throat and for a moment a wild idea ran back and forth in his mind, like a blind man, knocking over its solid furniture--to marry her. He had only to make the suggestion, he knew, and she would become close to him and know no one else, because he would understand her forever.

Next day, in the station, she was pleased with her flowers, her compartment, with the prospect of a longer trip than she had ever taken before. When she kissed him good-by her deep eyes came close to his again and she pressed against him as if in protest against the separation. Again she cried, but he knew that behind her tears lay the happiness of adventure in new fields. As he walked out of the station, New York was curiously empty. Through her eyes he had seen old colors once more; now they had faded back into the gray tapestry of the past. The next day he went to an office high in a building on Park Avenue and talked to a famous specialist he had not visited for a decade.

“I want you to examine the larynx again,” he said. “There’s not much hope, but something might have changed the situation.”

He swallowed a complicated system of mirrors. He breathed in and out, made high and low sounds, coughed at a word of command. The specialist fussed and touched. Then he sat back and took out his eyeglass. “There’s no change,” he said. “The cords are not diseased--they’re simply worn out. It isn’t anything that can be treated.”

“I thought so,” said Jacob, humbly, as if he had been guilty of an impertinence. “That’s practically what you told me before. I wasn’t sure how permanent it was.”

He had lost something when he came out of the building on Park Avenue--a half hope, the love child of a wish, that some day--

“New York desolate,” he wired her. “The night clubs all closed. Black wreaths on the Statue of Civic Virtue. Please work hard and be remarkably happy.”

“Dear Jacob,” she wired back, “miss you so. You are the nicest man that ever lived and I mean it, dear. Please don’t forget me. Love from Jenny.”

Winter came. The picture Jenny had made in the East was released, together with preliminary interviews and articles in the fan magazines. Jacob sat in his apartment, playing the Kreutzer Sonata over and over on his new phonograph, and read her meager and stilted but affectionate letters and the articles which said she was a discovery of Billy Farrelly’s. In February he became engaged to an old friend, now a widow.

They went to Florida and were suddenly snarling at each other in hotel corridors and over bridge games, so they decided not to go through with it after all. In the spring he took a stateroom on the Paris, but three days before sailing he disposed of it and went to California.

IV

Jenny met him at the station, kissed him and clung to his arm in the car all the way to the Ambassador Hotel. “Well, the man came,” she cried. “I never thought I’d get him to come. I never did.”

Her accent betrayed an effort at control. The emphatic “Geeze!” with all the wonder, horror, disgust or admiration she could put in it was gone, but there was no mild substitute, no “swell” or “grand.” If her mood required expletives outside her repertoire, she kept silent.

But at seventeen, months are years and Jacob perceived a change in her; in no sense was she a child any longer. There were fixed things in her mind--not distractions, for she was instinctively too polite for that, but simply things there. No longer was the studio a lark and a wonder and a divine accident; no longer “for a nickel I wouldn’t turn up tomorrow.” It was part of her life. Circumstances were stiffening into a career which went on independently of her casual hours.

“If this picture is as good as the other--I mean if I make a personal hit again, Hecksher’ll break the contract. Everybody that’s seen the rushes says it’s the first one I’ve had sex appeal in.”

“What are the rushes?”

“When they run off what they took the day before. They say it’s the first time I’ve had sex appeal.”

“I don’t notice it,” he teased her.

“You wouldn’t. But I have.”

“I know you have,” he said, and, moved by an ill-considered impulse, he took her hand.

She glanced quickly at him. He smiled--half a second too late. Then she smiled and her glowing warmth veiled his mistake.

“Jake,” she cried, “I could bawl, I’m so glad you’re here! I got you a room at the Ambassador. They were full, but they kicked out somebody because I said I had to have a room. I’ll send my car back for you in half an hour. It’s good you came on Sunday, because I got all day free.”

They had luncheon in the furnished apartment she had leased for the winter. It was 1920 Moorish, taken over complete from a favorite of yesterday. Someone had told her it was horrible, for she joked about it; but when he pursued the matter he found that she didn’t know why.

“I wish they had more nice men out here,” she said once during luncheon. “Of course there’s a lot of nice ones, but I mean--Oh, you know, like in New York--men that know even more than a girl does, like you.”

After luncheon he learned that they were going to tea. “Not today,” he objected. “I want to see you alone.”

“All right,” she agreed doubtfully. “I suppose I could telephone. I thought--It’s a lady that writes for a lot of newspapers and I’ve never been asked there before. Still, if you don’t want to--”

Her face had fallen a little and Jacob assured her that he couldn’t be more willing. Gradually he found that they were going not to one party but to three.

“In my position, it’s sort of the thing to do,” she explained. “Otherwise you don’t see anybody except the people on your own lot, and that’s narrow.” He smiled. “Well, anyhow,” she finished--”anyhow, you smart Aleck, that’s what everybody does on Sunday afternoon.”

At the first tea, Jacob noticed that there was an enormous preponderance of women over men, and of supernumeraries--lady journalists, cameramen’s daughters, cutters’ wives--over people of importance. A young Latin named Raffino appeared for a brief moment, spoke to Jenny and departed; several stars passed through, asking about children’s health with a domesticity that was somewhat overpowering. Another group of celebrities posed immobile, statue-like, in a corner. There was a somewhat inebriated and very much excited author apparently trying to make engagements with one girl after another. As the afternoon waned, more people were suddenly a little tight; the communal voice was higher in pitch and greater in volume as Jacob and Jenny went out the door.

At the second tea, young Raffino--he was an actor, one of innumerable hopeful Valentinos--appeared again for a minute, talked to Jenny a little longer, a little more attentively this time, and went out. Jacob gathered that this party was not considered to have quite the swagger of the other. There was a bigger crowd around the cocktail table. There was more sitting down.

Jenny, he saw, drank only lemonade. He was surprised and pleased at her distinction and good manners. She talked to one person, never to everyone within hearing; then she listened, without finding it necessary to shift her eyes about. Deliberate or not on her part, he noticed that at both teas she was sooner or later talking to the guest of most consequence. Her seriousness, her air of saying “This is my opportunity of learning something,” beckoned their egotism imperatively near.

When they left to drive to the last party, a buffet supper, it was dark and the electric legends of hopeful real-estate brokers were gleaming to some vague purpose on Beverly Hills. Outside Grauman’s Theater a crowd was already gathered in the thin, warm rain.

“Look! Look!” she cried. It was the picture she had finished a month before.

They slid out of the thin Rialto of Hollywood Boulevard and into the deep gloom of a side street; he put his arm about her and kissed her.

“Dear Jake.” She smiled up at him.

“Jenny, you’re so lovely; I didn’t know you were so lovely.”

She looked straight ahead, her face mild and quiet. A wave of annoyance passed over him and he pulled her toward him urgently, just as the car stopped at a lighted door.

They went into a bungalow crowded with people and smoke. The impetus of the formality which had begun the afternoon was long exhausted; everything had become at once vague and strident.

“This is Hollywood,” explained an alert talkative lady who had been in his vicinity all day. “No airs on Sunday afternoon.” She indicated the hostess. “Just a plain, simple, sweet girl.” She raised her voice: “Isn’t that so, darling--just a plain, simple, sweet girl?”

The hostess said, “Yeah. Who is?” And Jacob’s informant lowered her voice again: “But that little girl of yours is the wisest one of the lot.”

The totality of the cocktails Jacob had swallowed was affecting him pleasantly, but try as he might, the plot of the party--the key on which he could find ease and tranquillity--eluded him. There was something tense in the air--something competitive and insecure. Conversations with the men had a way of becoming empty and overjovial or else melting off into a sort of suspicion. The women were nicer. At eleven o’clock, in the pantry, he suddenly realized that he hadn’t seen Jenny for an hour. Returning to the living room, he saw her come in, evidently from outside, for she tossed a raincoat from her shoulders. She was with Raffino. When she came up, Jacob saw that she was out of breath and her eyes were very bright. Raffino smiled at Jacob pleasantly and negligently; a few moments later, as he turned to go, he bent and whispered in Jenny’s ear and she looked at him without smiling as she said good night.

“I got to be on the lot at eight o’clock,” she told Jacob presently. “I’ll look like an old umbrella unless I go home. Do you mind, dear?”

“Heavens, no!”

Their car drove over one of the interminable distances of the thin, stretched city.

“Jenny,” he said, “you’ve never looked like you were tonight. Put your head on my shoulder.”

“I’d like to. I’m tired.”

“I can’t tell you how radiant you’ve got to be.”

“I’m just the same.”

“No, you’re not.” His voice suddenly became a whisper, trembling with emotion. “Jenny, I’m in love with you.”

“Jacob, don’t be silly.”

“I’m in love with you. Isn’t it strange, Jenny? It happened just like that.”

“You’re not in love with me.”

“You mean the fact doesn’t interest you.” He was conscious of a faint twinge of fear.

She sat up out of the circle of his arm. “Of course it interests me; you know I care more about you than anything in the world.”

“More than about Mr. Raffino?”

“Oh--my--gosh!” she protested scornfully. “Raffino’s nothing but a baby.”

“I love you, Jenny.”

“No, you don’t.”

He tightened his arm. Was it his imagination or was there a small instinctive resistance in her body? But she came close to him and he kissed her.

“You know that’s crazy about Raffino.”

“I suppose I’m jealous.” Feeling insistent and unattractive, he released her. But the twinge of fear had become an ache. Though he knew that she was tired and that she felt strange at this new mood in him, he was unable to let the matter alone. “I didn’t realize how much a part of my life you were. I didn’t know what it was I missed--but I know now. I wanted you near.”

“Well, here I am.”

He took her words as an invitation, but this time she relaxed wearily in his arms. He held her thus for the rest of the way, her eyes closed, her short hair falling straight back, like a girl drowned.

“The car’ll take you to the hotel,” she said when they reached the apartment. “Remember, you’re having lunch with me at the studio tomorrow.”

Suddenly they were in a discussion that was almost an argument, as to whether it was too late for him to come in. Neither could yet appreciate the change that his declaration had made in the other. Abruptly they had become like different people, as Jacob tried desperately to turn back the clock to that night in New York six months before, and Jenny watched this mood, which was more than jealousy and less than love, snow under, one by one, the qualities of consideration and understanding which she knew in him and with which she felt at home.

“But I don’t love you like that,” she cried. “How can you come to me all at once and ask me to love you like that?”

“You love Raffino like that!”

“I swear I don’t! I never even kissed him--not really!”

“H’m!” He was a gruff white bird now. He could scarcely credit his own unpleasantness, but something illogical as love itself urged him on. “An actor!”

“Oh, Jake,” she cried, “please lemme go. I never felt so terrible and mixed up in my life.”

“I’ll go,” he said suddenly. “I don’t know what’s the matter, except that I’m so mad about you that I don’t know what I’m saying. I love you and you don’t love me. Once you did, or thought you did, but that’s evidently over.”

“But I do love you.” She thought for a moment; the red-and-green glow of a filling station on the corner lit up the struggle in her face. “If you love me that much, I’ll marry you tomorrow.”

“Marry me!” he exclaimed. She was so absorbed in what she had just said that she did not notice.

“I’ll marry you tomorrow,” she repeated. “I like you better than anybody in the world and I guess I’ll get to love you the way you want me to.” She uttered a single half-broken sob. “But--I didn’t know this was going to happen. Please let me alone tonight.”

Jacob didn’t sleep. There was music from the Ambassador grill till late and a fringe of working girls hung about the carriage entrance waiting for their favorites to come out. Then a long-protracted quarrel between a man and a woman began in the hall outside, moved into the next room and continued as a low two-toned mumble through the intervening door. He went to the window sometime toward three o’clock and stared out into the clear splendor of the California night. Her beauty rested outside on the grass, on the damp, gleaming roofs of the bungalows, all around him, borne up like music on the night. It was in the room, on the white pillow, it rustled ghostlike in the curtains. His desire recreated her until she lost all vestiges of the old Jenny, even of the girl who had met him at the train that morning. Silently, as the night hours went by, he molded her over into an image of love--an image that would endure as long as love itself, or even longer--not to perish till he could say, “I never really loved her.” Slowly he created it with this and that illusion from his youth, this and that sad old yearning, until she stood before him identical with her old self only by name.

Later, when he drifted off into a few hours’ sleep, the image he had made stood near him, lingering in the room, joined in mystic marriage to his heart.

V

“I won’t marry you unless you love me,” he said, driving back from the studio. She waited, her hands folded tranquilly in her lap. “Do you think I’d want you if you were unhappy and unresponsive, Jenny--knowing all the time you didn’t love me?”

“I do love you. But not that way.”

“What’s ‘that way’?”

She hesitated, her eyes were far off. “You don’t--thrill me, Jake. I don’t know--there have been some men that sort of thrilled me when they touched me, dancing or anything. I know it’s crazy, but--”

“Does Raffino thrill you?”

“Sort of, but not so much.”

“And I don’t at all?”

“I just feel comfortable and happy with you.”

He should have urged her that that was best, but he couldn’t say it, whether it was an old truth or an old lie.

“Anyhow, I told you I’ll marry you; perhaps you might thrill me later.”

He laughed, stopped suddenly. “If I didn’t thrill you, as you call it, why did you seem to care so much last summer?”

“I don’t know. I guess I was young. You never know how you once felt, do you?”

She had become elusive to him, with that elusiveness that gives a hidden significance to the least significant remarks. And with the clumsy tools of jealousy and desire, he was trying to create the spell that is ethereal and delicate as the dust on a moth’s wing.

“Listen, Jake,” she said suddenly. “That lawyer my sister had--that Scharnhorst--called up the studio this afternoon.”

“Your sister’s all right,” he said absently, and he added: “So a lot of men thrill you.”

“Well, if I’ve felt it with a lot of men, it couldn’t have anything to do with real love, could it?” she said hopefully.

“But your theory is that love couldn’t come without it.”

“I haven’t got any theories or anything. I just told you how I felt. You know more than me.”

“I don’t know anything at all.”

There was a man waiting in the lower hall of the apartment house. Jenny went up and spoke to him; then, turning back to Jake, said in a low voice: “It’s Scharnhorst. Would you mind waiting downstairs while he talks to me? He says it won’t take half an hour.”

He waited, smoking innumerable cigarettes. Ten minutes passed. Then the telephone operator beckoned him.

“Quick!” she said. “Miss Prince wants you on the telephone.”

Jenny’s voice was tense and frightened. “Don’t let Scharnhorst get out,” she said. “He’s on the stairs, maybe in the elevator. Make him come back here.”

Jacob put down the receiver just as the elevator clicked. He stood in front of the elevator door, barring the man inside. “Mr. Scharnhorst?”

“Yeah.” The face was keen and suspicious.

“Will you come up to Miss Prince’s apartment again? There’s something she forgot to say.”

“I can see her later.” He attempted to push past Jacob. Seizing him by the shoulders, Jacob shoved him back into the cage, slammed the door and pressed the button for the eighth floor.

“I’ll have you arrested for this!” Scharnhorst remarked. “Put into jail for assault!”

Jacob held him firmly by the arms. Upstairs, Jenny, with panic in her eyes, was holding open her door. After a slight struggle, the lawyer went inside.

“What is it?” demanded Jacob.

“Tell him, you,” she said. “Oh, Jake, he wants twenty thousand dollars!”

“What for?”

“To get my sister a new trial.”

“But she hasn’t a chance!” exclaimed Jacob. He turned to Scharnhorst. “You ought to know she hasn’t a chance.”

“There are some technicalities,” said the lawyer uneasily--”things that nobody but an attorney would understand. She’s very unhappy there, and her sister so rich and successful. Mrs. Choynski thought she ought to get another chance.”

“You’ve been up there working on her, heh?”

“She sent for me.”

“But the blackmail idea was your own. I suppose if Miss Prince doesn’t feel like supplying twenty thousand to retain your firm, it’ll come out that she’s the sister of the notorious murderess.”

Jenny nodded. “That’s what he said.”

“Just a minute!” Jacob walked to the phone. “Western Union, please. Western Union? Please take a telegram.” He gave the name and address of a man high in the political world of New York. “Here’s the message:

The convict Choynski threatening her sister, who is a picture actress, with exposure of relationship stop Can you arrange it with warden that she be cut off from visitors until I can get East and explain the situation stop Also wire me if two witnesses to an attempted blackmailing scene are enough to disbar a lawyer in New York if charges proceed from such a quarter as Read, Van Tyne, Biggs & Company, or my uncle the surrogate stop Answer Ambassador Hotel, Los Angeles.

Jacob C. K. Booth”

He waited until the clerk had repeated the message. “Now, Mr. Scharnhorst,” he said, “the pursuit of art should not be interrupted by such alarms and excursions. Miss Prince, as you see, is considerably upset. It will show in her work tomorrow and a million people will be just a little disappointed. So we won’t ask her for any decisions. In fact you and I will leave Los Angeles on the same train tonight.”

VI

The summer passed. Jacob went about his useless life, sustained by the knowledge that Jenny was coming East in the fall. By fall there would have been many Raffinos, he supposed, and she would find that the thrill of their hands and eyes--and lips--was much the same. They were the equivalent, in a different world, of the affairs at a college house party, the undergraduates of a casual summer. And if it was still true that her feeling for him was less than romantic, then he would take her anyway, letting romance come after marriage as--so he had always heard--it had come to many wives before.

Her letters fascinated and baffled him. Through the ineptitude of expression he caught gleams of emotion--an ever-present gratitude, a longing to talk to him, and a quick, almost frightened reaction toward him, from--he could only imagine--some other man. In August she went on location; there were only post cards from some lost desert in Arizona, then for a while nothing at all. He was glad of the break. He had thought over all the things that might have repelled her--of his portentousness, his jealousy, his manifest misery. This time it would be different. He would keep control of the situation. She would at least admire him again, see in him the incomparably dignified and well adjusted life.

Two nights before her arrival Jacob went to see her latest picture in a huge nightbound vault on Broadway. It was a college story. She walked into it with her hair knotted on the crown of her head--a familiar symbol for dowdiness--inspired the hero to a feat of athletic success and faded out of it, always subsidiary to him, in the shadow of the cheering stands. But there was something new in her performance; for the first time the arresting quality he had noticed in her voice a year before had begun to get over on the screen. Every move she made, every gesture, was poignant and important. Others in the audience saw it too. He fancied he could tell this by some change in the quality of their breathing, by a reflection of her clear, precise expression in their casual and indifferent faces. Reviewers, too, were aware of it, though most of them were incapable of any precise definition of a personality.

But his first real consciousness of her public existence came from the attitude of her fellow passengers disembarking from the train. Busy as they were with friends or baggage, they found time to stare at her, to call their friends’ attention, to repeat her name.

She was radiant. A communicative joy flowed from her and around her, as though her perfumer had managed to imprison ecstasy in a bottle. Once again there was a mystical transfusion, and blood began to course again through the hard veins of New York--there was the pleasure of Jacob’s chauffeur when she remembered him, the respectful frisking of the bell boys at the Plaza, the nervous collapse of the head waiter at the restaurant where they dined. As for Jacob, he had control of himself now. He was gentle, considerate and polite, as it was natural for him to be--but as, in this case, he had found it necessary to plan. His manner promised and outlined an ability to take care of her, a will to be leaned on.

After dinner, their corner of the restaurant cleared gradually of the theater crowd and the sense of being alone settled over them. Their faces became grave, their voices very quiet.

“It’s been five months since I saw you.” He looked down at his hands thoughtfully. “Nothing has changed with me, Jenny. I love you with all my heart. I love your face and your faults and your mind and everything about you. The one thing I want in this world is to make you happy.”

“I know,” she whispered. “Gosh, I know!”

“Whether there’s still only affection in your feeling toward me, I don’t know. If you’ll marry me, I think you’ll find that the other things will come, will be there before you know it--and what you called a thrill will seem a joke to you, because life isn’t for boys and girls, Jenny, but for men and women.”

“Jacob,” she whispered, “you don’t have to tell me. I know.”

He raised his eyes for the first time. “What do you mean--you know?”

“I get what you mean. Oh, this is terrible! Jacob, listen! I want to tell you. Listen, dear, don’t say anything. Don’t look at me. Listen, Jacob, I fell in love with a man.”

“What?” he asked blankly.

“I fell in love with somebody. That’s what I mean about understanding about a silly thrill.”

“You mean you’re in love with me?”

“No.”

The appalling monosyllable floated between them, danced and vibrated over the table: “No--no--no--no--no!”

“Oh, this is awful!” she cried. “I fell in love with a man I met on location this summer. I didn’t mean to--I tried not to, but first thing I knew there I was in love and all the wishing in the world couldn’t help it. I wrote you and asked you to come, but I didn’t send the letter, and there I was, crazy about this man and not daring to speak to him, and bawling myself to sleep every night.”

“An actor?” he heard himself saying in a dead voice. “Raffino?”

“Oh, no, no, no! Wait a minute, let me tell you. It went on for three weeks and I honestly wanted to kill myself, Jake. Life wasn’t worth while unless I could have him. And one night we got in a car by accident alone and he just caught me and made me tell him I loved him. He knew--he couldn’t help knowing.”

“It just--swept over you,” said Jacob steadily. “I see.”

“Oh, I knew you’d understand, Jake! You understand everything. You’re the best person in the world, Jake, and don’t I know it?”

“You’re going to marry him?”

Slowly she nodded her head. “I said I’d have to come East first and see you.” As her fear lessened, the extent of his grief became more apparent to her and her eyes filled with tears. “It only comes once, Jake, like that. That’s what kept in my mind all those weeks I didn’t hardly speak to him--if you lose it once, it’ll never come like that again and then what do you want to live for? He was directing the picture--he was the same about me.”

“I see.”

As once before, her eyes held his like hands. “Oh, Ja-a-ake!” In that sudden croon of compassion, all-comprehending and deep as a song, the first force of the shock passed off. Jacob’s teeth came together again and he struggled to conceal his misery. Mustering his features into an expression of irony, he called for the check. It seemed an hour later they were in a taxi going toward the Plaza Hotel.

She clung to him. “Oh, Jake, say it’s all right! Say you understand! Darling Jake, my best friend, my only friend, say you understand!”

“Of course I do, Jenny.” His hand patted her back automatically.

“Oh-h-h, Jake, you feel just awful, don’t you?”

“I’ll survive.”

“Oh-h-h, Jake!”

They reached the hotel. Before they got out Jenny glanced at her face in her vanity mirror and turned up the collar of her fur cape. In the lobby, Jacob ran into several people and said, “Oh, I’m so sorry,” in a strained, unconvincing voice. The elevator waited. Jenny, her face distraught and tearful, stepped in and held out her hand toward him with the fist clenched helplessly.

“Jake,” she said once more.

“Good night, Jenny.”

She turned her face to the wire wall of the cage. The gate clanged.

“Hold on!” he almost said. “Do you realize what you’re doing, starting that car like that?”

He turned and went out the door blindly. “I’ve lost her,” he whispered to himself, awed and frightened. “I’ve lost her!”

He walked over Fifty-ninth Street to Columbus Circle and then down Broadway. There were no cigarettes in his pocket--he had left them at the restaurant--so he went into a tobacco store. There was some confusion about the change and someone in the store laughed.

When he came out he stood for a moment puzzled. Then the heavy tide of realization swept over him and beyond him, leaving him stunned and exhausted. It swept back upon him and over him again. As one rereads a tragic story with the defiant hope that it will end differently, so he went back to the morning, to the beginning, to the previous year. But the tide came thundering back with the certainty that she was cut off from him forever in a high room at the Plaza Hotel.

He walked down Broadway. In great block letters over the porte-cochère of the Capitol Theater five words glittered out into the night: “Carl Barbour and Jenny Prince.”

The name startled him, as if a passer-by had spoken it. He stopped and stared. Other eyes rose to that sign, people hurried by him and turned in.

Jenny Prince.

Now that she no longer belonged to him, the name assumed a significance entirely its own.

It hung there, cool and impervious, in the night, a challenge, a defiance.

Jenny Prince.

“Come and rest upon my loveliness,” it said. “Fulfill your secret dreams in wedding me for an hour.”

Jenny Prince.

It was untrue--she was back at the Plaza Hotel, in love with somebody. But the name, with its bright insistence, rode high upon the night.

“I love my dear public. They are all so sweet to me.”

The wave appeared far off, sent up whitecaps, rolled toward him with the might of pain, washed over him. “Never any more. Never any more.” The wave beat upon him, drove him down, pounding with hammers of agony on his ears. Proud and impervious, the name on high challenged the night.

Jenny Prince.

She was there! All of her, the best of her--the effort, the power, the triumph, the beauty.

Jacob moved forward with a group and bought a ticket at the window.

Confused, he stared around the great lobby. Then he saw an entrance and walking in, found himself a place in the fast-throbbing darkness.

THE LOST DECADE

Esquire (December 1939)

All sorts of people came into the offices of the news-weekly and Orrison Brown had all sorts of relations with them. Outside of office hours he was “one of the editors”--during work time he was simply a curly-haired man who a year before had edited the Dartmouth Jack-O-Lantern and was now only too glad to take the undesirable assignments around the office, from straightening out illegible copy to playing call boy without the title.

He had seen this visitor go into the editor’s office--a pale, tall man of forty with blond statuesque hair and a manner that was neither shy nor timid, nor otherworldly like a monk, but something of all three. The name on his card, Louis Trimble, evoked some vague memory, but having nothing to start on, Orrison did not puzzle over it--until a buzzer sounded on his desk, and previous experience warned him that Mr. Trimble was to be his first course at lunch.

“Mr. Trimble--Mr. Brown,” said the Source of all luncheon money. “Orrison--Mr. Trimble’s been away a long time. Or he feels it’s a long time--almost twelve years. Some people would consider themselves lucky to’ve missed the last decade.”

“That’s so,” said Orrison.

“I can’t lunch today,” continued his chief. “Take him to Voisin or 21 or anywhere he’d like. Mr. Trimble feels there’re lots of things he hasn’t seen.”

Trimble demurred politely.

“Oh, I can get around.”

“I know it, old boy. Nobody knew this place like you did once--and if Brown tries to explain the horseless carriage just send him back here to me. And you’ll be back yourself by four, won’t you?”

Orrison got his hat.

“You’ve been away ten years?” he asked while they went down in the elevator.

“They’d begun the Empire State Building,” said Trimble. “What does that add up to?”

“About 1928. But as the chief said, you’ve been lucky to miss a lot.” As a feeler he added, “Probably had more interesting things to look at.”

“Can’t say I have.”

They reached the street and the way Trimble’s face tightened at the roar of traffic made Orrison take one more guess.

“You’ve been out of civilization?”

“In a sense.” The words were spoken in such a measured way that Orrison concluded this man wouldn’t talk unless he wanted to--and simultaneously wondered if he could have possibly spent the thirties in a prison or an insane asylum.

“This is the famous 21,” he said. “Do you think you’d rather eat somewhere else?”

Trimble paused, looking carefully at the brownstone house.

“I can remember when the name 21 got to be famous,” he said, “about the same year as Moriarity’s.” Then he continued almost apologetically, “I thought we might walk up Fifth Avenue about five minutes and eat wherever we happened to be. Some place with young people to look at.”

Orrison gave him a quick glance and once again thought of bars and gray walls and bars; he wondered if his duties included introducing Mr. Trimble to complaisant girls. But Mr. Trimble didn’t look as if that was in his mind--the dominant expression was of absolute and deep-seated curiosity and Orrison attempted to connect the name with Admiral Byrd’s hideout at the South Pole or flyers lost in Brazilian jungles. He was, or he had been, quite a fellow--that was obvious. But the only definite clue to his environment--and to Orrison the clue that led nowhere--was his countryman’s obedience to the traffic lights and his predilection for walking on the side next to the shops and not the street. Once he stopped and gazed into a haberdasher’s window.

“Crêpe ties,” he said. “I haven’t seen one since I left college.”

“Where’d you go?”

“Massachusetts Tech.”

“Great place.”

“I’m going to take a look at it next week. Let’s eat somewhere along here--” They were in the upper Fifties “--you choose.”

There was a good restaurant with a little awning just around the corner.

“What do you want to see most?” Orrison asked, as they sat down.

Trimble considered.

“Well--the back of people’s heads,” he suggested. “Their necks--how their heads are joined to their bodies. I’d like to hear what those two little girls are saying to their father. Not exactly what they’re saying but whether the words float or submerge, how their mouths shut when they’ve finished speaking. Just a matter of rhythm--Cole Porter came back to the States in 1928 because he felt that there were new rhythms around.”

Orrison was sure he had his clue now, and with nice delicacy did not pursue it by a millimeter--even suppressing a sudden desire to say there was a fine concert in Carnegie Hall tonight.

“The weight of spoons,” said Trimble, “so light. A little bowl with a stick attached. The cast in that waiter’s eye. I knew him once but he wouldn’t remember me.”

But as they left the restaurant the same waiter looked at Trimble rather puzzled as if he almost knew him. When they were outside Orrison laughed:

“After ten years people will forget.”

“Oh, I had dinner there last May--” He broke off in an abrupt manner.

It was all kind of nutsy, Orrison decided--and changed himself suddenly into a guide.

“From here you get a good candid focus on Rockefeller Center,” he pointed out with spirit “--and the Chrysler Building and the Armistead Building, the daddy of all the new ones.”

“The Armistead Building,” Trimble rubber-necked obediently. “Yes--I designed it.”

Orrison shook his head cheerfully--he was used to going out with all kinds of people. But that stuff about having been in the restaurant last May . . .

He paused by the brass entablature in the cornerstone of the building. “Erected 1928,” it said.

Trimble nodded.

“But I was taken drunk that year--every-which-way drunk. So I never saw it before now.”

“Oh.” Orrison hesitated. “Like to go in now?”

“I’ve been in it--lots of times. But I’ve never seen it. And now it isn’t what I want to see. I wouldn’t ever be able to see it now. I simply want to see how people walk and what their clothes and shoes and hats are made of. And their eyes and hands. Would you mind shaking hands with me?”

“Not at all, sir.”

“Thanks. Thanks. That’s very kind. I suppose it looks strange--but people will think we’re saying good-by. I’m going to walk up the avenue for awhile, so we will say good-by. Tell your office I’ll be in at four.”

Orrison looked after him when he started out, half expecting him to turn into a bar. But there was nothing about him that suggested or ever had suggested drink.

“Jesus,” he said to himself. “Drunk for ten years.”

He felt suddenly of the texture of his own coat and then he reached out and pressed his thumb against the granite of the building by his side.

LOVE IN THE NIGHT

Saturday Evening Post (14 March 1925)

The words thrilled Val. They had come into his mind sometime during the fresh gold April afternoon and he kept repeating them to himself over and over: “Love in the night; love in the night.” He tried them in three languages--Russian, French and English--and decided that they were best in English. In each language they meant a different sort of love and a different sort of night--the English night seemed the warmest and softest with a thinnest and most crystalline sprinkling of stars. The English love seemed the most fragile and romantic--a white dress and a dim face above it and eyes that were pools of light. And when I add that it was a French night he was thinking about, after all, I see I must go back and begin over.

Val was half Russian and half American. His mother was the daughter of that Morris Hasylton who helped finance the Chicago World’s Fair in 1892, and his father was--see the Almanach de Gotha, issue of 1910--Prince Paul Serge Boris Rostoff, son of Prince Vladimir Rostoff, grandson of a grand duke--’Jimber-jawed Serge’--and third-cousin-once-removed to the czar. It was all very impressive, you see, on that side--house in St. Petersburg, shooting lodge near Riga, and swollen villa, more like a palace, overlooking the Mediterranean. It was at this villa in Cannes that the Rostoffs passed the winter--and it wasn’t at all the thing to remind Princess Rostoff that this Riviera villa, from the marble fountain--after Bernini--to the gold cordial glasses--after dinner--was paid for with American gold.

The Russians, of course, were gay people on the Continent in the gala days before the war. Of the three races that used Southern France for a pleasure ground they were easily the most adept at the grand manner. The English were too practical, and the Americans, though they spent freely, had no tradition of romantic conduct. But the Russians--there was a people as gallant as the Latins, and rich besides! When the Rostoffs arrived at Cannes late in January the restaurateurs telegraphed north for the Prince’s favorite labels to paste on their champagne, and the jewelers put incredibly gorgeous articles aside to show to him--but not to the princess--and the Russian Church was swept and garnished for the season that the Prince might beg orthodox forgiveness for his sins. Even the Mediterranean turned obligingly to a deep wine color in the spring evenings, and fishing boats with robin-breasted sails loitered exquisitely offshore.

In a vague way young Val realized that this was all for the benefit of him and his family. It was a privileged paradise, this white little city on the water, in which he was free to do what he liked because he was rich and young and the blood of Peter the Great ran indigo in his veins. He was only seventeen in 1914, when this history begins, but he had already fought a duel with a young man four years his senior, and he had a small hairless scar to show for it on top of his handsome head.

But the question of love in the night was the thing nearest his heart. It was a vague pleasant dream he had, something that was going to happen to him some day that would be unique and incomparable. He could have told no more about it than that there was a lovely unknown girl concerned in it, and that it ought to take place beneath the Riviera moon.

The odd thing about all this was not that he had this excited and yet almost spiritual hope of romance, for all boys of any imagination have just such hopes, but that it actually came true. And when it happened, it happened so unexpectedly; it was such a jumble of impressions and emotions, of curious phrases that sprang to his lips, of sights and sounds and moments that were here, were lost, were past, that he scarcely understood it at all. Perhaps its very vagueness preserved it in his heart and made him forever unable to forget.

There was an atmosphere of love all about him that spring--his father’s loves, for instance, which were many and indiscreet, and which Val became aware of gradually from overhearing the gossip of servants, and definitely from coming on his American mother unexpectedly one afternoon, to find her storming hysterically at his father’s picture on the salon wall. In the picture his father wore a white uniform with a furred dolman and looked back impassively at his wife as if to say “Were you under the impression, my dear, that you were marrying into a family of clergymen?”

Val tiptoed away, surprised, confused--and excited. It didn’t shock him as it would have shocked an American boy of his age. He had known for years what life was among the Continental rich, and he condemned his father only for making his mother cry.

Love went on around him--reproachless love and illicit love alike. As he strolled along the seaside promenade at nine o’clock, when the stars were bright enough to compete with the bright lamps, he was aware of love on every side. From the open-air cafés, vivid with dresses just down from Paris, came a sweet pungent odor of flowers and chartreuse and fresh black coffee and cigarettes--and mingled with them all he caught another scent, the mysterious thrilling scent of love. Hands touched jewel-sparkling hands upon the white tables. Gay dresses and white shirt fronts swayed together, and matches were held, trembling a little, for slow-lighting cigarettes. On the other side of the boulevard lovers less fashionable, young Frenchmen who worked in the stores of Cannes, sauntered with their fiancées under the dim trees, but Val’s young eyes seldom turned that way. The luxury of music and bright colors and low voices--they were all part of his dream. They were the essential trappings of Love in the night.

But assume as he might the rather fierce expression that was expected from a young Russian gentleman who walked the streets alone, Val was beginning to be unhappy. April twilight had succeeded March twilight, the season was almost over, and he had found no use to make of the warm spring evenings. The girls of sixteen and seventeen whom he knew, were chaperoned with care between dusk and bedtime--this, remember, was before the war--and the others who might gladly have walked beside him were an affront to his romantic desire. So April passed by--one week, two weeks, three weeks--

He had played tennis until seven and loitered at the courts for another hour, so it was half-past eight when a tired cab horse accomplished the hill on which gleamed the façade of the Rostoff villa. The lights of his mother’s limousine were yellow in the drive, and the princess, buttoning her gloves, was just coming out the glowing door. Val tossed two francs to the cabman and went to kiss her on the cheek.

“Don’t touch me,” she said quickly. “You’ve been handling money.”

“But not in my mouth, mother,” he protested humorously.

The princess looked at him impatiently.

“I’m angry,” she said. “Why must you be so late tonight? We’re dining on a yacht and you were to have come along too.”

“What yacht?”

“Americans.” There was always a faint irony in her voice when she mentioned the land of her nativity. Her America was the Chicago of the nineties which she still thought of as the vast upstairs to a butcher shop. Even the irregularities of Prince Paul were not too high a price to have paid for her escape.

“Two yachts,” she continued; “in fact we don’t know which one. The note was very indefinite. Very careless indeed.”

Americans. Val’s mother had taught him to look down on Americans, but she hadn’t succeeded in making him dislike them. American men noticed you, even if you were seventeen. He liked Americans. Although he was thoroughly Russian he wasn’t immaculately so--the exact proportion, like that of a celebrated soap, was about ninety-nine and three-quarters per cent.

“I want to come,” he said, “I’ll hurry up, mother. I’ll--”

“We’re late now.” The princess turned as her husband appeared in the door. “Now Val says he wants to come.”

“He can’t,” said Prince Paul shortly. “He’s too outrageously late.”

Val nodded. Russian aristocrats, however indulgent about themselves, were always admirably Spartan with their children. There were no arguments.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

Prince Paul grunted. The footman, in red and silver livery, opened the limousine door. But the grunt decided the matter for Val, because Princess Rostoff at that day and hour had certain grievances against her husband which gave her command of the domestic situation.

“On second thought you’d better come, Val,” she announced coolly. “It’s too late now, but come after dinner. The yacht is either the Minnehaha or the Privateer.” She got into the limousine. “The one to come to will be the gayer one, I suppose--the Jacksons’ yacht--”

“Find got sense,” muttered the Prince cryptically, conveying that Val would find it if he had any sense. “Have my man take a look at you ‘fore you start. Wear tie of mine ‘stead of that outrageous string you affected in Vienna. Grow up. High time.”

As the limousine crawled crackling down the pebbled drive Val’s face was burning.

II

It was dark in Cannes harbor, rather it seemed dark after the brightness of the promenade that Val had just left behind. Three frail dock lights glittered dimly upon innumerable fishing boats heaped like shells along the beach. Farther out in the water there were other lights where a fleet of slender yachts rode the tide with slow dignity, and farther still a full ripe moon made the water bosom into a polished dancing floor. Occasionally there was a swish! creak! drip! as a rowboat moved about in the shallows, and its blurred shape threaded the labyrinth of hobbled fishing skiffs and launches. Val, descending the velvet slope of sand, stumbled over a sleeping boatman and caught the rank savor of garlic and plain wine. Taking the man by the shoulders he shook open his startled eyes.

“Do you know where the Minnehaha is anchored, and the Privateer?”

As they slid out into the bay he lay back in the stern and stared with vague discontent at the Riviera moon. That was the right moon, all right. Frequently, five nights out of seven, there was the right moon. And here was the soft air, aching with enchantment, and here was the music, many strains of music from many orchestras, drifting out from the shore. Eastward lay the dark Cape of Antibes, and then Nice, and beyond that Monte Carlo, where the night rang chinking full of gold. Some day he would enjoy all that, too, know its every pleasure and success--when he was too old and wise to care.

But tonight--tonight, that stream of silver that waved like a wide strand of curly hair toward the moon; those soft romantic lights of Cannes behind him, the irresistible ineffable love in this air--that was to be wasted forever.

“Which one?” asked the boatman suddenly.

“Which what?” demanded Val, sitting up.

“Which boat?”

He pointed. Val turned; above hovered the gray, sword-like prow of a yacht. During the sustained longing of his wish they had covered half a mile.

He read the brass letters over his head. It was the Privateer, but there were only dim lights on board, and no music and no voices, only a murmurous k-plash at intervals as the small waves leaped at the sides.

“The other one,” said Val; “the Minnehaha.”

“Don’t go yet.”

Val started. The voice, low and soft, had dropped down from the darkness overhead.

“What’s the hurry?” said the soft voice. “Thought maybe somebody was coming to see me, and have suffered terrible disappointment.”

The boatman lifted his oars and looked hesitatingly at Val. But Val was silent, so the man let the blades fall into the water and swept the boat out into the moonlight.

“Wait a minute!” cried Val sharply.

“Good-by,” said the voice. “Come again when you can stay longer.”

“But I am going to stay now,” he answered breathlessly.

He gave the necessary order and the rowboat swung back to the foot of the small companionway. Someone young, someone in a misty white dress, someone with a lovely low voice, had actually called to him out of the velvet dark. “If she has eyes!” Val murmured to himself. He liked the romantic sound of it and repeated it under his breath--”If she has eyes.”

“What are you?” She was directly above him now; she was looking down and he was looking up as he climbed the ladder, and as their eyes met they both began to laugh.

She was very young, slim, almost frail, with a dress that accentuated her youth by its blanched simplicity. Two wan dark spots on her cheeks marked where the color was by day.

“What are you?” she repeated, moving back and laughing again as his head appeared on the level of the deck. “I’m frightened now and I want to know.”

“I am a gentleman,” said Val, bowing.

“What sort of a gentleman? There are all sorts of gentlemen. There was a--there was a colored gentleman at the table next to ours in Paris, and so--” She broke off. “You’re not American, are you?”

“I’m Russian,” he said, as he might have announced himself to be an archangel. He thought quickly and then added, “And I am the most fortunate of Russians. All this day, all this spring I have dreamed of falling in love on such a night, and now I see that heaven has sent me to you.”

“Just one moment!” she said, with a little gasp. “I’m sure now that this visit is a mistake. I don’t go in for anything like that. Please!”

“I beg your pardon.” He looked at her in bewilderment, unaware that he had taken too much for granted. Then he drew himself up formally.

“I have made an error. If you will excuse me I will say good night.”

He turned away. His hand was on the rail.

“Don’t go,” she said, pushing a strand of indefinite hair out of her eyes. “On second thoughts you can talk any nonsense you like if you’ll only not go. I’m miserable and I don’t want to be left alone.”

Val hesitated; there was some element in this that he failed to understand. He had taken it for granted that a girl who called to a strange man at night, even from the deck of a yacht, was certainly in a mood for romance. And he wanted intensely to stay. Then he remembered that this was one of the two yachts he had been seeking.

“I imagine that the dinner’s on the other boat,” he said.

“The dinner? Oh, yes, it’s on the Minnehaha. Were you going there?”

“I was going there--a long time ago.”

“What’s your name?”

He was on the point of telling her when something made him ask a question instead.

“And you? Why are you not at the party?”

“Because I preferred to stay here. Mrs. Jackson said there would be some Russians there--I suppose that’s you.” She looked at him with interest. “You’re a very young man, aren’t you?”

“I am much older than I look,” said Val stiffly. “People always comment on it. It’s considered rather a remarkable thing.”

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-one,” he lied.

She laughed.

“What nonsense! You’re not more than nineteen.”

His annoyance was so perceptible that she hastened to reassure him. “Cheer up! I’m only seventeen myself. I might have gone to the party if I’d thought there’d be anyone under fifty there.”

He welcomed the change of subject.

“You preferred to sit and dream here beneath the moon.”

“I’ve been thinking of mistakes.” They sat down side by side in two canvas deck chairs. “It’s a most engrossing subject--the subject of mistakes. Women very seldom brood about mistakes--they’re much more willing to forget than men are. But when they do brood--”

“You have made a mistake?” inquired Val.

She nodded.

“Is it something that cannot be repaired?”

“I think so,” she answered. “I can’t be sure. That’s what I was considering when you came along.”

“Perhaps I can help in some way,” said Val. “Perhaps your mistake is not irreparable, after all.”

“You can’t,” she said unhappily. “So let’s not think about it. I’m very tired of my mistake and I’d much rather you’d tell me about all the gay, cheerful things that are going on in Cannes tonight.”

They glanced shoreward at the line of mysterious and alluring lights, the big toy banks with candles inside that were really the great fashionable hotels, the lighted clock in the old town, the blurred glow of the Café de Paris, the pricked-out points of villa windows rising on slow hills toward the dark sky.

“What is everyone doing there?” she whispered. “It looks as though something gorgeous was going on, but what it is I can’t quite tell.”

“Everyone there is making love,” said Val quietly.

“Is that it?” She looked for a long time, with a strange expression in her eyes. “Then I want to go home to America,” she said. “There is too much love here. I want to go home tomorrow.”

“You are afraid of being in love then?”

She shook her head.

“It isn’t that. It’s just because--there is no love here for me.”

“Or for me either,” added Val quietly. “It is sad that we two should be at such a lovely place on such a lovely night and have--nothing.”

He was leaning toward her intently, with a sort of inspired and chaste romance in his eyes--and she drew back.

“Tell me more about yourself,” she inquired quickly. “If you are Russian where did you learn to speak such excellent English?”

“My mother was American,” he admitted. “My grandfather was American also, so she had no choice in the matter.”

“Then you’re American too!”

“I am Russian,” said Val with dignity.

She looked at him closely, smiled and decided not to argue. “Well then,” she said diplomatically, “I suppose you must have a Russian name.”

But he had no intention now of telling her his name. A name, even the Rostoff name, would be a desecration of the night. They were their own low voices, their two white faces--and that was enough. He was sure, without any reason for being sure but with a sort of instinct that sang triumphantly through his mind, that in a little while, a minute or an hour, he was going to undergo an initiation into the life of romance. His name had no reality beside what was stirring in his heart.

“You are beautiful,” he said suddenly.

“How do you know?”

“Because for women moonlight is the hardest light of all.”

“Am I nice in the moonlight?”

“You are the loveliest thing that I have ever known.”

“Oh.” She thought this over. “Of course I had no business to let you come on board. I might have known what we’d talk about--in this moon. But I can’t sit here and look at the shore--forever. I’m too young for that. Don’t you think I’m too young for that?”

“Much too young,” he agreed solemnly.

Suddenly they both became aware of new music that was close at hand, music that seemed to come out of the water not a hundred yards away.

“Listen!” she cried. “It’s from the Minnehaha. They’ve finished dinner.”

For a moment they listened in silence.

“Thank you,” said Val suddenly.

“For what?”

He hardly knew he had spoken. He was thanking the deep low horns for singing in the breeze, the sea for its warm murmurous complaint against the bow, the milk of the stars for washing over them until he felt buoyed up in a substance more taut than air.

“So lovely,” she whispered.

“What are we going to do about it?”

“Do we have to do something about it? I thought we could just sit and enjoy--”

“You didn’t think that,” he interrupted quietly. “You know that we must do something about it. I am going to make love to you--and you are going to be glad.”

“I can’t,” she said very low. She wanted to laugh now, to make some light cool remark that would bring the situation back into the safe waters of a casual flirtation. But it was too late now. Val knew that the music had completed what the moon had begun.

“I will tell you the truth,” he said. “You are my first love. I am seventeen--the same age as you, no more.”

There was something utterly disarming about the fact that they were the same age. It made her helpless before the fate that had thrown them together. The deck chairs creaked and he was conscious of a faint illusive perfume as they swayed suddenly and childishly together.

III

Whether he kissed her once or several times he could not afterward remember, though it must have been an hour that they sat there close together and he held her hand. What surprised him most about making love was that it seemed to have no element of wild passion--regret, desire, despair--but a delirious promise of such happiness in the world, in living, as he had never known. First love--this was only first love! What must love itself in its fullness, its perfection be. He did not know that what he was experiencing then, that unreal, undesirous medley of ecstasy and peace, would be unrecapturable forever.

The music had ceased for some time when presently the murmurous silence was broken by the sound of a rowboat disturbing the quiet waves. She sprang suddenly to her feet and her eyes strained out over the bay.

“Listen!” she said quickly. “I want you to tell me your name.”

“No.”

“Please,” she begged him. “I’m going away tomorrow.”

He didn’t answer.

“I don’t want you to forget me,” she said. “My name is--”

“I won’t forget you. I will promise to remember you always. Whoever I may love I will always compare her to you, my first love. So long as I live you will always have that much freshness in my heart.”

“I want you to remember,” she murmured brokenly. “Oh, this has meant more to me than it has to you--much more.”

She was standing so close to him that he felt her warm young breath on his face. Once again they swayed together. He pressed her hands and wrists between his as it seemed right to do, and kissed her lips. It was the right kiss, he thought, the romantic kiss--not too little or too much. Yet there was a sort of promise in it of other kisses he might have had, and it was with a slight sinking of his heart that he heard the rowboat close to the yacht and realized that her family had returned. The evening was over.

“And this is only the beginning,” he told himself. “All my life will be like this night.”

She was saying something in a low quick voice and he was listening tensely.

“You must know one thing--I am married. Three months ago. That was the mistake that I was thinking about when the moon brought you out here. In a moment you will understand.”

She broke off as the boat swung against the companionway and a man’s voice floated up out of the darkness.

“Is that you, my dear?”

“Yes.”

“What is this other rowboat waiting?”

“One of Mrs. Jackson’s guests came here by mistake and I made him stay and amuse me for an hour.”

A moment later the thin white hair and weary face of a man of sixty appeared above the level of the deck. And then Val saw and realized too late how much he cared.

IV

When the Riviera season ended in May the Rostoffs and all the other Russians closed their villas and went north for the summer. The Russian Orthodox Church was locked up and so were the bins of rarer wine, and the fashionable spring moonlight was put away, so to speak, to wait for their return.

“We’ll be back next season,” they said as a matter of course.

But this was premature, for they were never coming back any more. Those few who straggled south again after five tragic years were glad to get work as chambermaids or valets de chambre in the great hotels where they had once dined. Many of them, of course, were killed in the war or in the revolution; many of them faded out as spongers and small cheats in the big capitals, and not a few ended their lives in a sort of stupefied despair.

When the Kerensky government collapsed in 1917, Val was a lieutenant on the eastern front, trying desperately to enforce authority in his company long after any vestige of it remained. He was still trying when Prince Paul Rostoff and his wife gave up their lives one rainy morning to atone for the blunders of the Romanoffs--and the enviable career of Morris Hasylton’s daughter ended in a city that bore even more resemblance to a butcher shop than had Chicago in 1892.

After that Val fought with Denikin’s army for a while until he realized that he was participating in a hollow farce and the glory of Imperial Russia was over. Then he went to France and was suddenly confronted with the astounding problem of keeping his body and soul together.

It was, of course, natural that he should think of going to America. Two vague aunts with whom his mother had quarreled many years ago still lived there in comparative affluence. But the idea was repugnant to the prejudices his mother had implanted in him, and besides he hadn’t sufficient money left to pay for his passage over. Until a possible counter-revolution should restore to him the Rostoff properties in Russia he must somehow keep alive in France.

So he went to the little city he knew best of all. He went to Cannes. His last two hundred francs bought him a third-class ticket and when he arrived he gave his dress suit to an obliging party who dealt in such things and received in return money for food and bed. He was sorry afterward that he had sold the dress suit, because it might have helped him to a position as a waiter. But he obtained work as a taxi driver instead and was quite as happy, or rather quite as miserable, at that.

Sometimes he carried Americans to look at villas for rent, and when the front glass of the automobile was up, curious fragments of conversation drifted out to him from within.

“--heard this fellow was a Russian prince.” . . . “Sh!” . . . “No, this one right here.” . . . “Be quiet, Esther!”--followed by subdued laughter.

When the car stopped, his passengers would edge around to have a look at him. At first he was desperately unhappy when girls did this; after a while he didn’t mind any more. Once a cheerfully intoxicated American asked him if it were true and invited him to lunch, and another time an elderly woman seized his hand as she got out of the taxi, shook it violently and then pressed a hundred-franc note into his hand.

“Well, Florence, now I can tell ‘em back home I shook hands with a Russian prince.”

The inebriated American who had invited him to lunch thought at first that Val was a son of the czar, and it had to be explained to him that a prince in Russia was simply the equivalent of a British courtesy lord. But he was puzzled that a man of Val’s personality didn’t go out and make some real money.

“This is Europe,” said Val gravely. “Here money is not made. It is inherited or else it is slowly saved over a period of many years and maybe in three generations a family moves up into a higher class.”

“Think of something people want--like we do.”

“That is because there is more money to want with in America. Everything that people want here has been thought of long ago.”

But after a year and with the help of a young Englishman he had played tennis with before the war, Val managed to get into the Cannes branch of an English bank. He forwarded mail and bought railroad tickets and arranged tours for impatient sight-seers. Sometimes a familiar face came to his window; if Val was recognized he shook hands; if not he kept silence. After two years he was no longer pointed out as a former prince, for the Russians were an old story now--the splendor of the Rostoffs and their friends was forgotten.

He mixed with people very little. In the evenings he walked for a while on the promenade, took a slow glass of beer in a café, and went early to bed. He was seldom invited anywhere because people thought that his sad, intent face was depressing--and he never accepted anyhow. He wore cheap French clothes now instead of the rich tweeds and flannels that had been ordered with his father’s from England. As for women, he knew none at all. Of the many things he had been certain about at seventeen, he had been most certain about this--that his life would be full of romance. Now after eight years he knew that it was not to be. Somehow he had never had time for love--the war, the revolution and now his poverty had conspired against his expectant heart. The springs of his emotion which had first poured forth one April night had dried up immediately and only a faint trickle remained.

His happy youth had ended almost before it began. He saw himself growing older and more shabby, and living always more and more in the memories of his gorgeous boyhood. Eventually he would become absurd, pulling out an old heirloom of a watch and showing it to amused young fellow clerks who would listen with winks to his tales of the Rostoff name.

He was thinking these gloomy thoughts one April evening in 1922 as he walked beside the sea and watched the never-changing magic of the awakening lights. It was no longer for his benefit, that magic, but it went on, and he was somehow glad. Tomorrow he was going away on his vacation, to a cheap hotel farther down the shore where he could bathe and rest and read; then he would come back and work some more. Every year for three years he had taken his vacation during the last two weeks in April, perhaps because it was then that he felt the most need for remembering. It was in April that what was destined to be the best part of his life had come to a culmination under a romantic moonlight. It was sacred to him--for what he had thought of as an initiation and a beginning had turned out to be the end.

He paused now in front of the Café des Étrangers and after a moment crossed the street on impulse and sauntered down to the shore. A dozen yachts, already turned to a beautiful silver color, rode at anchor in the bay. He had seen them that afternoon, and read the names painted on their bows--but only from habit. He had done it for three years now, and it was almost a natural function of his eye.

“Un beau soir,” remarked a French voice at his elbow. It was a boatman who had often seen Val here before. “Monsieur finds the sea beautiful?”

“Very beautiful.”

“I too. But a bad living except in the season. Next week, though, I earn something special. I am paid well for simply waiting here and doing nothing more from eight o’clock until midnight.”

“That’s very nice,” said Val politely.

“A widowed lady, very beautiful, from America, whose yacht always anchors in the harbor for the last two weeks in April. If the Privateer comes tomorrow it will make three years.”

V

All night Val didn’t sleep--not because there was any question in his mind as to what he should do, but because his long stupefied emotions were suddenly awake and alive. Of course he must not see her--not he, a poor failure with a name that was now only a shadow--but it would make him a little happier always to know that she remembered. It gave his own memory another dimension, raised it like those stereopticon glasses that bring out a picture from the flat paper. It made him sure that he had not deceived himself--he had been charming once upon a time to a lovely woman, and she did not forget.

An hour before train time next day he was at the railway station with his grip, so as to avoid any chance encounter in the street. He found himself a place in a third-class carriage of the waiting train.

Somehow as he sat there he felt differently about life--a sort of hope, faint and illusory, that he hadn’t felt twenty-four hours before. Perhaps there was some way in those next few years in which he could make it possible to meet her once again--if he worked hard, threw himself passionately into whatever was at hand. He knew of at least two Russians in Cannes who had started over again with nothing except good manners and ingenuity and were now doing surprisingly well. The blood of Morris Hasylton began to throb a little in Val’s temples and made him remember something he had never before cared to remember--that Morris Hasylton, who had built his daughter a palace in St. Petersburg, had also started from nothing at all.

Simultaneously another emotion possessed him, less strange, less dynamic but equally American--the emotion of curiosity. In case he did--well, in case life should ever make it possible for him to seek her out, he should at least know her name.

He jumped to his feet, fumbled excitedly at the carriage handle and jumped from the train. Tossing his valise into the check room he started at a run for the American consulate.

“A yacht came in this morning,” he said hurriedly to a clerk, “an American yacht--the Privateer. I want to know who owns it.”

“Just a minute,” said the clerk, looking at him oddly. “I’ll try to find out.”

After what seemed to Val an interminable time he returned.

“Why, just a minute,” he repeated hesitantly. “We’re--it seems we’re finding out.”

“Did the yacht come?”

“Oh, yes--it’s here all right. At least I think so. If you’ll just wait in that chair.”

After another ten minutes Val looked impatiently at his watch. If they didn’t hurry he’d probably miss his train. He made a nervous movement as if to get up from his chair.

“Please sit still,” said the clerk, glancing at him quickly from his desk. “I ask you. Just sit down in that chair.”

Val stared at him. How could it possibly matter to the clerk whether or not he waited?

“I’ll miss my train,” he said impatiently. “I’m sorry to have given you all this bother--”

“Please sit still! We’re glad to get it off our hands. You see, we’ve been waiting for your inquiry for--ah--three years.”

Val jumped to his feet and jammed his hat on his head.

“Why didn’t you tell me that?” he demanded angrily.

“Because we had to get word to our--our client. Please don’t go! It’s--ah, it’s too late.”

Val turned. Someone slim and radiant with dark frightened eyes was standing behind him, framed against the sunshine of the doorway.

“Why--”

Val’s lips parted, but no words came through. She took a step toward him.

“I--” She looked at him helplessly, her eyes filling with tears. “I just wanted to say hello,” she murmured. “I’ve come back for three years just because I wanted to say hello.”

Still Val was silent.

“You might answer,” she said impatiently. “You might answer when I’d--when I’d just about begun to think you’d been killed in the war.” She turned to the clerk. “Please introduce us!” she cried. “You see, I can’t say hello to him when we don’t even know each other’s names.”

It’s the thing to distrust these international marriages, of course. It’s an American tradition that they always turn out badly, and we are accustomed to such headlines as: “Would Trade Coronet for True American Love, Says Duchess,” and “Claims Count Mendicant Tortured Toledo Wife.” The other sort of headlines are never printed, for who would want to read: “Castle is Love Nest, Asserts Former Georgia Belle,” or “Duke and Packer’s Daughter Celebrate Golden Honeymoon.”

So far there have been no headlines at all about the young Rostoffs. Prince Val is much too absorbed in that string of moonlight-blue taxicabs which he manipulates with such unusual efficiency, to give out interviews. He and his wife only leave New York once a year--but there is still a boatman who rejoices when the Privateer steams into Cannes harbor on a mid-April night.

MAGNETISM

The Saturday Evening Post (3 March 1928)

I

The pleasant, ostentatious boulevard was lined at prosperous intervals with New England Colonial houses--without ship models in the hall. When the inhabitants moved out here the ship models had at last been given to the children. The next street was a complete exhibit of the Spanish-bungalow phase of West Coast architecture; while two streets over, the cylindrical windows and round towers of 1897--melancholy antiques which sheltered swamis, yogis, fortune tellers, dressmakers, dancing teachers, art academies and chiropractors--looked down now upon brisk buses and trolley cars. A little walk around the block could, if you were feeling old that day, be a discouraging affair.

On the green flanks of the modern boulevard children, with their knees marked by the red stains of the mercurochrome era, played with toys with a purpose--beams that taught engineering, soldiers that taught manliness, and dolls that taught motherhood. When the dolls were so banged up that they stopped looking like real babies and began to look like dolls, the children developed affection for them. Everything in the vicinity--even the March sunlight--was new, fresh, hopeful and thin, as you would expect in a city that had tripled its population in fifteen years.

Among the very few domestics in sight that morning was a handsome young maid sweeping the steps of the biggest house on the street. She was a large, simple Mexican girl with the large, simple ambitions of the time and the locality, and she was already conscious of being a luxury--she received one hundred dollars a month in return for her personal liberty. Sweeping, Dolores kept an eye on the stairs inside, for Mr Hannaford’s car was waiting and he would soon be coming down to breakfast. The problem came first this morning, however--the problem as to whether it was a duty or a favour when she helped the English nurse down the steps with the perambulator. The English nurse always said ‘Please’, and ‘Thanks very much’, but Dolores hated her and would have liked, without any special excitement, to beat her insensible. Like most Latins under the stimulus of American life, she had irresistible impulses towards violence.

The nurse escaped, however. Her blue cape faded haughtily into the distance just as Mr Hannaford, who had come quietly downstairs, stepped into the space of the front door.

‘Good morning.’ He smiled at Dolores; he was young and extraordinarily handsome. Dolores tripped on the broom and fell off the stoop. George Hannaford hurried down the steps, reached her as she was getting to her feet cursing volubly in Mexican, just touched her arm with a helpful gesture and said, ‘I hope you didn’t hurt yourself.’

‘Oh, no.’

‘I’m afraid it was my fault; I’m afraid I startled you, coming out like that.’

His voice had real regret in it; his brow was knit with solicitude.

‘Are you sure you’re all right?’

‘Aw, sure.’

‘Didn’t turn your ankle?’

‘Aw, no.’

‘I’m terribly sorry about it.’

‘Aw, it wasn’t your fault.’

He was still frowning as she went inside, and Dolores, who was not hurt and thought quickly, suddenly contemplated having a love affair with him. She looked at herself several times in the pantry mirror and stood close to him as she poured his coffee, but he read the paper and she saw that that was all for the morning.

Hannaford entered his car and drove to Jules Rennard’s house. Jules was a French Canadian by birth, and George Hannaford’s best friend; they were fond of each other and spent much time together. Both of them were simple and dignified in their tastes and in their way of thinking, instinctively gentle, and in a world of the volatile and the bizarre found in each other a certain quiet solidity.

He found Jules at breakfast.

‘I want to fish for barracuda,’ said George abruptly. ‘When will you be free? I want to take the boat and go down to Lower California.’

Jules had dark circles under his eyes. Yesterday he had closed out the greatest problem of his life by settling with his ex-wife for two hundred thousand dollars. He had married too young, and the former slavey from the Quebec slums had taken to drugs upon her failure to rise with him. Yesterday, in the presence of lawyers, her final gesture had been to smash his finger with the base of a telephone. He was tired of women for a while and welcomed the suggestion of a fishing trip.

‘How’s the baby?’ he asked.

‘The baby’s fine.’

‘And Kay?’

‘Kay’s not herself, but I don’t pay any attention. What did you do to your hand?’

‘I’ll tell you another time. What’s the matter with Kay, George?’

‘Jealous.’

‘Of who?’

‘Helen Avery. It’s nothing. She’s not herself, that’s all.’ He got up. ‘I’m late,’ he said. ‘Let me know as soon as you’re free. Any time after Monday will suit me.’

George left and drove out by an interminable boulevard which narrowed into a long, winding concrete road and rose into the hilly country behind. Somewhere in the vast emptiness a group of buildings appeared, a barnlike structure, a row of offices, a large but quick restaurant and half a dozen small bungalows. The chauffeur dropped Hannaford at the main entrance. He went in and passed through various enclosures, each marked off by swinging gates and inhabited by a stenographer.

‘Is anybody with Mr Schroeder?’ he asked, in front of a door lettered with that name.

‘No, Mr Hannaford.’

Simultaneously his eye fell on a young lady who was writing at a desk aside, and he lingered a moment.

‘Hello, Margaret,’ he said. ‘How are you, darling?’

A delicate, pale beauty looked up, frowning a little, still abstracted in her work. It was Miss Donovan, the script girl, a friend of many years.

‘Hello. Oh, George, I didn’t see you come in. Mr Douglas wants to work on the book sequence this afternoon.’

‘All right.’

‘These are the changes we decided on Thursday night.’ She smiled up at him and George wondered for the thousandth time why she had never gone into pictures.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘Will initials do?’

‘Your initials look like George Harris’s.’

‘Very well, darling.’

As he finished, Pete Schroeder opened his door and beckoned him. ‘George, come here!’ he said with an air of excitement. ‘I want you to listen to some one on the phone.’

Hannaford went in.

‘Pick up the phone and say “Hello”,’ directed Schroeder. ‘Don’t say who you are.’

‘Hello,’ said Hannaford obediently.

‘Who is this?’ asked a girl’s voice.

Hannaford put his hand over the mouthpiece. ‘What am I supposed to do?’

Schroeder snickered and Hannaford hesitated, smiling and suspicious.

‘Who do you want to speak to?’ he temporized into the phone.

‘To George Hannaford, I want to speak to. Is this him?’

‘Yes.’

‘Oh, George; it’s me.’

‘Who?’

‘Me--Gwen. I had an awful time finding you. They told me--’

‘Gwen who?’

‘Gwen--can’t you hear? From San Francisco--last Thursday night.’

‘I’m sorry,’ objected George. ‘Must be some mistake.’

‘Is this George Hannaford?’

‘Yes.’

The voice grew slightly tart: ‘Well, this is Gwen Becker you spent last Thursday evening with in San Francisco. There’s no use pretending you don’t know who I am, because you do.’

Schroeder took the apparatus from George and hung up the receiver.

‘Somebody has been doubling for me up in Frisco,’ said Hannaford.

‘So that’s where you were Thursday night!’

‘Those things aren’t funny to me--not since that crazy Zeller girl. You can never convince them they’ve been sold because the man always looks something like you. What’s new, Pete?’

‘Let’s go over to the stage and see.’

Together they walked out a back entrance, along a muddy walk, and opening a little door in the big blank wall of the studio building entered into its half darkness.

Here and there figures spotted the dim twilight, figures that turned up white faces to George Hannaford, like souls in purgatory watching the passage of a half-god through. Here and there were whispers and soft voices and, apparently from afar, the gentle tremolo of a small organ. Turning the corner made by some flats, they came upon the white crackling glow of a stage with two people motionless upon it.

An actor in evening clothes, his shirt front, collar and cuffs tinted a brilliant pink, made as though to get chairs for them, but they shook their heads and stood watching. For a long while nothing happened on the stage--no one moved. A row of lights went off with a savage hiss, went on again. The plaintive tap of a hammer begged admission to nowhere in the distance; a blue face appeared among the blinding lights above and called something unintelligible into the upper blackness. Then the silence was broken by a low clear voice from the stage:

‘If you want to know why I haven’t got stockings on, look in my dressing-room. I spoiled four pairs yesterday and two already this morning . . . This dress weighs six pounds.’

A man stepped out of the group of observers and regarded the girl’s brown legs; their lack of covering was scarcely distinguishable, but, in any event, her expression implied that she would do nothing about it. The lady was annoyed, and so intense was her personality that it had taken only a fractional flexing of her eyes to indicate the fact. She was a dark, pretty girl with a figure that would be full-blown sooner than she wished. She was just eighteen.

Had this been the week before, George Hannaford’s heart would have stood still. Their relationship had been in just that stage. He hadn’t said a word to Helen Avery that Kay could have objected to, but something had begun between them on the second day of this picture that Kay had felt in the air. Perhaps it had begun even earlier, for he had determined, when he saw Helen Avery’s first release, that she should play opposite him. Helen Avery’s voice and the dropping of her eyes when she finished speaking, like a sort of exercise in control, fascinated him. He had felt that they both tolerated something, that each knew half of some secret about people and life, and that if they rushed towards each other there would be a romantic communion of almost unbelievable intensity. It was this element of promise and possibility that had haunted him for a fortnight and was now dying away.

Hannaford was thirty, and he was a moving-picture actor only through a series of accidents. After a year in a small technical college he had taken a summer job with an electric company, and his first appearance in a studio was in the role of repairing a bank of Klieg lights. In an emergency he played a small part and made good, but for fully a year after that he thought of it as a purely transitory episode in his life. At first much of it had offended him--the almost hysterical egotism and excitability hidden under an extremely thin veil of elaborate good-fellowship. It was only recently, with the advent of such men as Jules Rennard into pictures, that he began to see the possibilities of a decent and secure private life, much as his would have been as a successful engineer. At last his success felt solid beneath his feet.

He met Kay Tomkins at the old Griffith Studios at Mamaroneck and their marriage was a fresh, personal affair, removed from most stage marriages. Afterwards they had possessed each other completely, had been pointed to: ‘Look, there’s one couple in pictures who manage to stay together.’ It would have taken something out of many people’s lives--people who enjoyed a vicarious security in the contemplation of their marriage--if they hadn’t stayed together, and their love was fortified by a certain effort to live up to that.

He held women off by a polite simplicity that underneath was hard and watchful; when he felt a certain current being turned on he became emotionally stupid. Kay expected and took much more from men, but she, too, had a careful thermometer against her heart. Until the other night, when she reproached him for being interested in Helen Avery, there had been an absolute minimum of jealousy between them.

George Hannaford was still absorbed in the thought of Helen Avery as he left the studio and walked towards his bungalow over the way. There was in his mind, first, a horror that anyone should come between him and Kay, and second, a regret that he no longer carried that possibility in the forefront of his mind. It had given him a tremendous pleasure, like the things that had happened to him during his first big success, before he was so ‘made’ that there was scarcely anything better ahead; it was something to take out and look at--a new and still mysterious joy. It hadn’t been love, for he was critical of Helen Avery as he had never been critical of Kay. But his feeling of last week had been sharply significant and memorable, and he was restless, now that it had passed.

Working that afternoon, they were seldom together, but he was conscious of her and he knew that she was conscious of him.

She stood a long time with her back to him at one point, and when she turned at length, their eyes swept past each other’s, brushing like bird wings. Simultaneously he saw they had gone far, in their way; it was well that he had drawn back. He was glad that someone came for her when the work was almost over.

Dressed, he returned to the office wing, stopping in for a moment to see Schroeder. No one answered his knock, and, turning the knob, he went in. Helen Avery was there alone.

Hannaford shut the door and they stared at each other. Her face was young, frightened. In a moment in which neither of them spoke, it was decided that they would have some of this out now. Almost thankfully he felt the warm sap of emotion flow out of his heart and course through his body.

‘Helen!’

She murmured ‘What?’ in an awed voice.

‘I feel terribly about this.’ His voice was shaking.

Suddenly she began to cry; painful, audible sobs shook her. ‘Have you got a handkerchief?’ she said.

He gave her a handkerchief. At that moment there were steps outside. George opened the door halfway just in time to keep Schroeder from entering on the spectacle of her tears.

‘Nobody’s in,’ he said facetiously. For a moment longer he kept his shoulder against the door. Then he let it open slowly.

Outside in his limousine, he wondered how soon Jules would be ready to go fishing.

II

From the age of twelve Kay Tompkins had worn men like rings on every finger. Her face was round, young, pretty and strong; a strength accentuated by the responsive play of brows and lashes around her clear, glossy, hazel eyes. She was the daughter of a senator from a Western state and she hunted unsuccessfully for glamour through a small Western city until she was seventeen, when she ran away from home and went on the stage. She was one of those people who are famous far beyond their actual achievement.

There was that excitement about her that seemed to reflect the excitement of the world. While she was playing small parts in Ziegfeld shows she attended proms at Yale, and during a temporary venture into pictures she met George Hannaford, already a star of the new ‘natural’ type then just coming into vogue. In him she found what she had been seeking.

She was at present in what is known as a dangerous state. For six months she had been helpless and dependent entirely upon George, and now that her son was the property of a strict and possessive English nurse, Kay, free again, suddenly felt the need of proving herself attractive. She wanted things to be as they had been before the baby was thought of. Also she felt that lately George had taken her too much for granted; she had a strong instinct that he was interested in Helen Avery.

When George Hannaford came home that night he had minimized to himself their quarrel of the previous evening and was honestly surprised at her perfunctory greeting.

‘What’s the matter, Kay?’ he asked after a minute. ‘Is this going to be another night like last night?’

‘Do you know we’re going out tonight?’ she said, avoiding an answer.

‘Where?’

‘To Katherine Davis’. I didn’t know whether you’d want to go--’

‘I’d like to go.’

‘I didn’t know whether you’d want to go. Arthur Busch said he’d stop for me.’

They dined in silence. Without any secret thoughts to dip into like a child into a jam jar, George felt restless, and at the same time was aware that the atmosphere was full of jealousy, suspicion and anger. Until recently they had preserved between them something precious that made their house one of the pleasantest in Hollywood to enter. Now suddenly it might be any house; he felt common and he felt unstable. He had come near to making something bright and precious into something cheap and unkind. With a sudden surge of emotion, he crossed the room and was about to put his arm around her when the doorbell rang. A moment later Dolores announced Mr Arthur Busch.

Busch was an ugly, popular little man, a continuity writer and lately a director. A few years ago they had been hero and heroine to him, and even now, when he was a person of some consequence in the picture world, he accepted with equanimity Kay’s use of him for such purposes as tonight’s. He had been in love with her for years, but, because his love seemed hopeless, it had never caused him much distress.

They went on to the party. It was a housewarming, with Hawaiian musicians in attendance, and the guests were largely of the old crowd. People who had been in the early Griffith pictures, even though they were scarcely thirty, were considered to be of the old crowd; they were different from those coming along now, and they were conscious of it. They had a dignity and straightforwardness about them from the fact that they had worked in pictures before pictures were bathed in a golden haze of success. They were still rather humble before their amazing triumph, and thus, unlike the new generation, who took it all for granted, they were constantly in touch with reality. Half a dozen or so of the women were especially aware of being unique. No one had come along to fill their places; here and there a pretty face had caught the public imagination for a year, but those of the old crowd were already legends, ageless and disembodied. With all this, they were still young enough to believe that they would go forever.

George and Kay were greeted affectionately: people moved over and made place for them. The Hawaiians performed and the Duncan sisters sang at the piano. From the moment George saw who was here he guessed that Helen Avery would be here, too, and the fact annoyed him. It was not appropriate that she should be part of this gathering through which he and Kay had moved familiarly and tranquilly for years.

He saw her first when someone opened the swinging door to the kitchen, and when, a little later, she came out and their eyes met, he knew absolutely that he didn’t love her. He went up to speak to her, and at her first words he saw something had happened to her, too, that had dissipated the mood of the afternoon. She had got a big part.

‘And I’m in a daze!’ she cried happily. ‘I didn’t think there was a chance and I’ve thought of nothing else since I read the book a year ago.’

‘It’s wonderful. I’m awfully glad.’

He had the feeling, though, that he should look at her with a certain regret; one couldn’t jump from such a scene as this afternoon to a plane of casual friendly interest. Suddenly she began to laugh.

‘Oh, we’re such actors, George--you and I.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You know what I mean.’

‘I don’t.’

‘Oh, yes, you do. You did this afternoon. It was a pity we didn’t have a camera.’

Short of declaring then and there that he loved her, there was absolutely nothing more to say. He grinned acquiescently. A group formed around them and absorbed them, and George, feeling that the evening had settled something, began to think about going home. An excited and sentimental elderly lady--someone’s mother--came up and began telling him how much she believed in him, and he was polite and charming to her, as only he could be, for half an hour. Then he went to Kay, who had been sitting with Arthur Busch all evening, and suggested that they go.

She looked up unwillingly. She had had several highballs and the fact was mildly apparent. She did not want to go, but she got up after a mild argument and George went upstairs for his coat. When he came down Katherine Davis told him that Kay had already gone out to the car.

The crowd had increased; to avoid a general good-night he went out through the sun-parlour door to the lawn; less than twenty feet away from him he saw the figures of Kay and Arthur Busch against a bright street lamp; they were standing close together and staring into each other’s eyes. He saw that they were holding hands.

After the first start of surprise George instinctively turned about, retraced his steps, hurried through the room he had just left, and came noisily out the front door. But Kay and Arthur Busch were still standing close together, and it was lingeringly and with abstracted eyes that they turned around finally and saw him. Then both of them seemed to make an effort; they drew apart as if it was a physical ordeal. George said good-bye to Arthur Busch with special cordiality, and in a moment he and Kay were driving homeward through the clear California night.

He said nothing, Kay said nothing. He was incredulous. He suspected that Kay had kissed a man here and there, but he had never seen it happen or given it any thought. This was different; there had been an element of tenderness in it and there was something veiled and remote in Kay’s eyes that he had never seen there before.

Without having spoken, they entered the house; Kay stopped by the library door and looked in.

‘There’s someone there,’ she said, and she added without interest: ‘I’m going upstairs. Good night.’

As she ran up the stairs the person in the library stepped out into the hall.

‘Mr Hannaford--’

He was a pale and hard young man; his face was vaguely familiar, but George didn’t remember where he had seen it before.

‘Mr Hannaford?’ said the young man. ‘I recognize you from your pictures.’ He looked at George, obviously a little awed.

‘What can I do for you?’

‘Well, will you come in here?’

‘What is it? I don’t know who you are.’

‘My name is Donovan. I’m Margaret Donovan’s brother.’ His face toughened a little.

‘Is anything the matter?’

Donovan made a motion towards the door. ‘Come in here.’ His voice was confident now, almost threatening.

George hesitated, then he walked into the library. Donovan followed and stood across the table from him, his legs apart, his hands in his pockets.

‘Hannaford,’ he said, in the tone of a man trying to whip himself up to anger, ‘Margaret wants fifty thousand dollars.’

‘What the devil are you talking about?’ exclaimed George incredulously.

‘Margaret wants fifty thousand dollars,’ repeated Donovan.

‘You’re Margaret Donovan’s brother?’

‘I am.’

‘I don’t believe it.’ But he saw the resemblance now. ‘Does Margaret know you’re here?’

‘She sent me here. She’ll hand over those two letters for fifty thousand, and no questions asked.’

‘What letters?’ George chuckled irresistibly. ‘This is some joke of Schroeder’s, isn’t it?’

‘This ain’t a joke, Hannaford. I mean the letters you signed your name to this afternoon.’

III

An hour later George went upstairs in a daze. The clumsiness of the affair was at once outrageous and astounding. That a friend of seven years should suddenly request his signature on papers that were not what they were purported to be made all his surroundings seem diaphanous and insecure. Even now the design engrossed him more than a defence against it, and he tried to re-create the steps by which Margaret had arrived at this act of recklessness or despair.

She had served as a script girl in various studios and for various directors for ten years; earning first twenty, now a hundred dollars a week. She was lovely-looking and she was intelligent; at any moment in those years she might have asked for a screen test, but some quality of initiative or ambition had been lacking. Not a few times had her opinion made or broken incipient careers. Still she waited at directors’ elbows, increasingly aware that the years were slipping away.

That she had picked George as a victim amazed him most of all. Once, during the year before his marriage, there had been a momentary warmth; he had taken her to a Mayfair ball, and he remembered that he had kissed her going home that night in the car. The flirtation trailed along hesitatingly for a week. Before it could develop into anything serious he had gone East and met Kay.

Young Donovan had shown him a carbon of the letters he had signed.

They were written on the typewriter that he kept in his bungalow at the studio, and they were carefully and convincingly worded. They purported to be love letters, asserting that he was Margaret Donovan’s lover, that he wanted to marry her, and that for that reason he was about to arrange a divorce. It was incredible. Someone must have seen him sign them that morning; someone must have heard her say: ‘Your initials are like Mr Harris’s.’

George was tired. He was training for a screen football game to be played next week, with the Southern California varsity as extras, and he was used to regular hours. In the middle of a confused and despairing sequence of thought about Margaret Donovan and Kay, he suddenly yawned. Mechanically he went upstairs, undressed and got into bed.

Just before dawn Kay came to him in the garden. There was a river that flowed past it now, and boats faintly lit with green and yellow lights moved slowly, remotely by. A gentle starlight fell like rain upon the dark, sleeping face of the world, upon the black mysterious bosoms of the trees, the tranquil gleaming water and the farther shore.

The grass was damp, and Kay came to him on hurried feet; her thin slippers were drenched with dew. She stood upon his shoes, nestling close to him, and held up her face as one shows a book open at a page.

‘Think how you love me,’ she whispered. ‘I don’t ask you to love me always like this, but I ask you to remember.’

‘You’ll always be like this to me.’

‘Oh no; but promise me you’ll remember.’ Her tears were falling. ‘I’ll be different, but somewhere lost inside me there’ll always be the person I am tonight.’

The scene dissolved slowly but George struggled into consciousness. He sat up in bed; it was morning. In the yard outside he heard the nurse instructing his son in the niceties of behaviour for two-month-old babies. From the yard next door a small boy shouted mysteriously: ‘Who let that barrier through on me?’

Still in his pyjamas, George went to the phone and called his lawyers. Then he rang for his man, and while he was being shaved a certain order evolved from the chaos of the night before. First, he must deal with Margaret Donovan; second, he must keep the matter from Kay, who in her present state might believe anything; and third, he must fix things up with Kay. The last seemed the most important of all.

As he finished dressing he heard the phone ring downstairs and, with an instinct of danger, picked up the receiver.

‘Hello . . . Oh, yes.’ Looking up, he saw that both his doors were closed. ‘Good morning, Helen . . . It’s all right, Dolores. I’m taking it up here.’ He waited till he heard the receiver click downstairs.

‘How are you this morning, Helen?’

‘George, I called up about last night. I can’t tell you how sorry I am.’

‘Sorry? Why are you sorry?’

‘For treating you like that. I don’t know what was in me, George. I didn’t sleep all night thinking how terrible I’d been.’

A new disorder established itself in George’s already littered mind.

‘Don’t be silly,’ he said. To his despair he heard his own voice run on: ‘For a minute I didn’t understand, Helen. Then I thought it was better so.’

‘Oh, George,’ came her voice after a moment, very low.

Another silence. He began to put in a cuff button.

‘I had to call up,’ she said after a moment. ‘I couldn’t leave things like that.’

The cuff button dropped to the floor; he stooped to pick it up, and then said ‘Helen!’ urgently into the mouthpiece to cover the fact that he had momentarily been away.

‘What, George?’

At this moment the hall door opened and Kay, radiating a faint distaste, came into the room. She hesitated.

‘Are you busy?’

‘It’s all right.’ He stared into the mouthpiece for a moment.

‘Well, good-bye,’ he muttered abruptly and hung up the receiver. He turned to Kay: ‘Good morning.’

‘I didn’t mean to disturb you,’ she said distantly.

‘You didn’t disturb me.’ He hesitated. ‘That was Helen Avery.’

‘It doesn’t concern me who it was. I came to ask you if we’re going to the Coconut Grove tonight.’

‘Sit down, Kay.’

‘I don’t want to talk.’

‘Sit down a minute,’ he said impatiently. She sat down. ‘How long are you going to keep this up?’ he demanded.

‘I’m not keeping up anything. We’re simply through, George, and you know it as well as I do.’

‘That’s absurd,’ he said. ‘Why, a week ago--’

‘It doesn’t matter. We’ve been getting nearer to this for months, and now it’s over.’

‘You mean you don’t love me?’ He was not particularly alarmed. They had been through scenes like this before.

‘I don’t know. I suppose I’ll always love you in a way.’ Suddenly she began to sob. ‘Oh, it’s all so sad. He’s cared for me so long.’

George stared at her. Face to face with what was apparently a real emotion, he had no words of any kind. She was not angry, not threatening or pretending, not thinking about him at all, but concerned entirely with her emotions towards another man.

‘What is it?’ he cried. ‘Are you trying to tell me you’re in love with this man?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said helplessly.

He took a step towards her, then went to the bed and lay down on it, staring in misery at the ceiling. After a while a maid knocked to say that Mr Busch and Mr Castle, George’s lawyer, were below. The fact carried no meaning to him. Kay went into her room and he got up and followed her.

‘Let’s send word we’re out,’ he said. ‘We can go away somewhere and talk this over.’

‘I don’t want to go away.’

She was already away, growing more mysterious and remote with every minute. The things on her dressing-table were the property of a stranger.

He began to speak in a dry, hurried voice. ‘If you’re still thinking about Helen Avery, it’s nonsense. I’ve never given a damn for anybody but you.’

They went downstairs and into the living-room. It was nearly noon--another bright emotionless California day. George saw that Arthur Busch’s ugly face in the sunshine was wan and white; he took a step towards George and then stopped, as if he were waiting for something--a challenge, a reproach, a blow.

In a flash the scene that would presently take place ran itself off in George’s mind. He saw himself moving through the scene, saw his part, an infinite choice of parts, but in every one of them Kay would be against him and with Arthur Busch. And suddenly he rejected them all.

‘I hope you’ll excuse me,’ he said quickly to Mr Castle. ‘I called you up because a script girl named Margaret Donovan wants fifty thousand dollars for some letters she claims I wrote her. Of course the whole thing is--’ He broke off. It didn’t matter. ‘I’ll come to see you tomorrow.’ He walked up to Kay and Arthur, so that only they could hear.

‘I don’t know about you two--what you want to do. But leave me out of it; you haven’t any right to inflict any of it on me, for after all it’s not my fault. I’m not going to be mixed up in your emotions.’

He turned and went out. His car was before the door and he said ‘Go to Santa Monica’ because it was the first name that popped into his head. The car drove off into the everlasting hazeless sunlight.

He rode for three hours, past Santa Monica and then along towards Long Beach by another road. As if it were something he saw out of the corner of his eye and with but a fragment of his attention, he imagined Kay and Arthur Busch progressing through the afternoon. Kay would cry a great deal and the situation would seem harsh and unexpected to them at first, but the tender closing of the day would draw them together. They would turn inevitably towards each other and he would slip more and more into the position of the enemy outside.

Kay had wanted him to get down in the dirt and dust of a scene and scramble for her. Not he; he hated scenes. Once he stooped to compete with Arthur Busch in pulling at Kay’s heart, he would never be the same to himself. He would always be a little like Arthur Busch; they would always have that in common, like a shameful secret. There was little of the theatre about George; the millions before whose eyes the moods and changes of his face had flickered during ten years had not been deceived about that. From the moment when, as a boy of twenty, his handsome eyes had gazed off into the imaginary distance of a Griffith Western, his audience had been really watching the progress of a straightforward, slow-thinking, romantic man through an accidentally glamorous life.

His fault was that he had felt safe too soon. He realized suddenly that the two Fairbankses, in sitting side by side at table, were not keeping up a pose. They were giving hostages to fate. This was perhaps the most bizarre community in the rich, wild, bored empire, and for a marriage to succeed here, you must expect nothing or you must be always together. For a moment his glance had wavered from Kay and he stumbled blindly into disaster.

As he was thinking this and wondering where he would go and what he should do, he passed an apartment house that jolted his memory. It was on the outskirts of town, a pink horror built to represent something, somewhere, so cheaply and sketchily that whatever it copied the architect must have long since forgotten. And suddenly George remembered that he had once called for Margaret Donovan here the night of a Mayfair dance.

‘Stop at this apartment!’ he called through the speaking-tube.

He went in. The negro elevator boy stared open-mouthed at him as they rose in the cage. Margaret Donovan herself opened the door.

When she saw him she shrank away with a little cry. As he entered and closed the door she retreated before him into the front room. George followed.

It was twilight outside and the apartment was dusky and sad. The last light fell softly on the standardized furniture and the great gallery of signed photographs of moving-picture people that covered one wall. Her face was white, and as she stared at him she began nervously wringing her hands.

‘What’s this nonsense, Margaret?’ George said, trying to keep any reproach out of his voice. ‘Do you need money that bad?’

She shook her head vaguely. Her eyes were still fixed on him with a sort ofterror; George looked at the floor.

‘I suppose this was your brother’s idea. At least I can’t believe you’d be sostupid.’ He looked up, trying to preserve the brusque masterly attitude of one talking to a naughty child, but at the sight of her face every emotion except pity left him. ‘I’m a little tired. Do you mind if I sit down?’

‘No.’

‘I’m a little confused today,’ said George after a minute. ‘People seem to have it in for me today.’

‘Why, I thought’--her voice became ironic in mid-sentence--’I thought everybody loved you, George.’

‘They don’t.’

‘Only me?’

‘Yes,’ he said abstractedly.

‘I wish it had been only me. But then, of course, you wouldn’t have been you.’

Suddenly he realized that she meant what she was saying.

‘That’s just nonsense.’

‘At least you’re here,’ Margaret went on. ‘I suppose I ought to be glad of that. And I am. I most decidedly am. I’ve often thought of you sitting in that chair, just at this time when it was almost dark. I used to make up little one-act plays about what would happen then. Would you like to hear one of them? I’ll have to begin by coming over and sitting on the floor at your feet.’

Annoyed and yet spellbound, George kept trying desperately to seize upon a word or mood that would turn the subject.

‘I’ve seen you sitting there so often that you don’t look a bit more real than your ghost. Except that your hat has squashed your beautiful hair down on one side and you’ve got dark circles or dirt under your eyes. You look white, too, George. Probably you were on a party last night.’

‘I was. And I found your brother waiting for me when I got home.’

‘He’s a good waiter, George. He’s just out of San Quentin prison, where he’s been waiting the last six years.’

‘Then it was his idea?’

‘We cooked it up together. I was going to China on my share.’

‘Why was I the victim?’

‘That seemed to make it realer. Once I thought you were going to fall in love with me five years ago.’

The bravado suddenly melted out of her voice and it was still light enough to see that her mouth was quivering.

‘I’ve loved you for years,’ she said--’since the first day you came West and walked into the old Realart Studio. You were so brave about people, George. Whoever it was, you walked right up to them and tore something aside as if it was in your way and began to know them. I tried to make love to you, just like the rest, but it was difficult. You drew people right up close to you and held them there, not able to move either way.’

‘This is all entirely imaginary,’ said George, frowning uncomfortably, ‘and I can’t control--’

‘No, I know. You can’t control charm. It’s simply got to be used. You’ve got to keep your hand in if you have it, and go through life attaching people to you that you don’t want. I don’t blame you. If you only hadn’t kissed me the night of the Mayfair dance. I suppose it was the champagne.’

George felt as if a band which had been playing for a long time in the distance had suddenly moved up and taken a station beneath his window. He had always been conscious that things like this were going on around him. Now that he thought of it, he had always been conscious that Margaret loved him, but the faint music of these emotions in his ear had seemed to bear no relation to actual life. They were phantoms that he had conjured up out of nothing; he had never imagined their actual incarnations. At his wish they should die inconsequently away.

‘You can’t imagine what it’s been like,’ Margaret continued after a minute. ‘Things you’ve just said and forgotten, I’ve put myself asleep night after night remembering--trying to squeeze something more out of them. After that night you took me to the Mayfair other men didn’t exist for me any more. And there were others, you know--lots of them. But I’d see you walking along somewhere about the lot, looking at the ground and smiling a little, as if something very amusing had just happened to you, the way you do. And I’d pass you and you’d look up and really smile: “Hello, darling!” “Hello, darling” and my heart would turn over. That would happen four times a day.’

George stood up and she, too, jumped up quickly.

‘Oh, I’ve bored you,’ she cried softly. ‘I might have known I’d bore you. You want to go home. Let’s see--is there anything else? Oh, yes; you might as well have those letters.’

Taking them out of a desk, she took them to a window and identified them by a rift of lamplight.

‘They’re really beautiful letters. They’d do you credit. I suppose it was pretty stupid, as you say, but it ought to teach you a lesson about--about signing things, or something.’ She tore the letters small and threw them in the wastebasket: ‘Now go on,’ she said.

‘Why must I go now?’

For the third time in twenty-four hours sad and uncontrollable tears confronted him.

‘Please go!’ she cried angrily--’or stay if you like. I’m yours for the asking. You know it. You can have any woman you want in the world by just raising your hand. Would I amuse you?’

‘Margaret--’

‘Oh, go on then.’ She sat down and turned her face away. ‘After all you’ll begin to look silly in a minute. You wouldn’t like that, would you? So get out.’

George stood there helpless, trying to put himself in her place and say something that wouldn’t be priggish, but nothing came.

He tried to force down his personal distress, his discomfort, his vague feeling of scorn, ignorant of the fact that she was watching him and understanding it all and loving the struggle in his face. Suddenly his own nerves gave way under the strain of the past twenty-four hours and he felt his eyes grow dim and his throat tighten. He shook his head helplessly. Then he turned away--still not knowing that she was watching him and loving him until she thought her heart would burst with it--and went out to the door.

IV

The car stopped before his house, dark save for small lights in the nursery and the lower hall. He heard the telephone ringing but when he answered it, inside, there was no one on the line. For a few minutes he wandered about in the darkness, moving from chair to chair and going to the window to stare out into the opposite emptiness of the night.

It was strange to be alone, to feel alone. In his overwrought condition the fact was not unpleasant. As the trouble of last night had made Helen Avery infinitely remote, so his talk with Margaret had acted as a catharsis to his own personal misery. It would swing back upon him presently, he knew, but for a moment his mind was too tired to remember, to imagine or to care.

Half an hour passed. He saw Dolores issue from the kitchen, take the paper from the front steps and carry it back to the kitchen for a preliminary inspection. With a vague idea of packing his grip, he went upstairs. He opened the door of Kay’s room and found her lying down.

For a moment he didn’t speak, but moved around the bathroom between. Then he went into her room and switched on the lights.

‘What’s the matter?’ he asked casually. ‘Aren’t you feeling well?’

‘I’ve been trying to get some sleep,’ she said. ‘George, do you think that girl’s gone crazy?’

‘What girl?’

‘Margaret Donovan. I’ve never heard of anything so terrible in my life.’

For a moment he thought that there had been some new development.

‘Fifty thousand dollars!’ she cried indignantly. ‘Why, I wouldn’t give it to her even if it were true. She ought to be sent to jail.’

‘Oh, it’s not so terrible as that,’ he said. ‘She has a brother who’s a pretty bad egg and it was his idea.’

‘She’s capable of anything,’ Kay said solemnly. ‘And you’re just a fool if you don’t see it. I’ve never liked her. She has dirty hair.’

‘Well, what of it?’ he demanded impatiently, and added: ‘Where’s Arthur Busch?’

‘He went home right after lunch. Or rather I sent him home.’

‘You decided you were not in love with him?’

She looked up almost in surprise. ‘In love with him? Oh, you mean this morning. I was just mad at you; you ought to have known that. I was a little sorry for him last night, but I guess it was the highballs.’

‘Well, what did you mean when you--’ He broke off. Wherever he turned he found a muddle, and he resolutely determined not to think.

‘My heavens!’ exclaimed Kay. ‘Fifty thousand dollars!’

‘Oh, drop it. She tore up the letters--she wrote them herself--and everything’s all right.’

‘George.’

‘Yes.’

‘Of course Douglas will fire her right away.’

‘Of course he won’t. He won’t know anything about it.’

‘You mean to say you’re not going to let her go? After this?’

He jumped up. ‘Do you suppose she thought that?’ he cried.

‘Thought what?’

‘That I’d have them let her go?’

‘You certainly ought to.’

He looked hastily through the phone book for her name.

‘Oxford--’ he called.

After an unusually long time the switchboard operator answered: ‘Bourbon Apartments.’

‘Miss Margaret Donovan, please.’

‘Why--’ The operator’s voice broke off. ‘If you’ll just wait a minute, please.’ He held the line; the minute passed, then another. Then the operator’s voice: ‘I couldn’t talk to you then. Miss Donovan has had an accident. She’s shot herself. When you called they were taking her through the lobby to St Catherine’s Hospital.’

‘Is she--is it serious?’ George demanded frantically.

‘They thought so at first, but now they think she’ll be all right. They’re going to probe for the bullet.’

‘Thank you.’

He got up and turned to Kay.

‘She’s tried to kill herself,’ he said in a strained voice. ‘I’ll have to go around to the hospital. I was pretty clumsy this afternoon and I think I’m partly responsible for this.’

‘George,’ said Kay suddenly.

‘What?’

‘Don’t you think it’s sort of unwise to get mixed up in this? People might say--’

‘I don’t give a damn what they say,’ he answered roughly.

He went to his room and automatically began to prepare for going out. Catching sight of his face in the mirror, he closed his eyes with a sudden exclamation of distaste, and abandoned the intention of brushing his hair.

‘George,’ Kay called from the next room, ‘I love you.’

‘I love you too.’

‘Jules Rennard called up. Something about barracuda fishing. Don’t you think it would be fun to get up a party? Men and girls both?’

‘Somehow the idea doesn’t appeal to me. The whole idea of barracuda fishing--’

The phone rang below and he started. Dolores was answering it.

It was a lady who had already called twice today.

‘Is Mr Hannaford in?’

‘No,’ said Dolores promptly. She stuck out her tongue and hung up the phone just as George Hannaford came downstairs. She helped him into his coat, standing as close as she could to him, opened the door and followed a little way out on the porch.

‘Meester Hannaford,’ she said suddenly, ‘that Miss Avery she call up five-six times today. I tell her you out and say nothing to missus.’

‘What?’ He stared at her, wondering how much she knew about his affairs.

‘She call up just now and I say you out.’

‘All right,’ he said absently.

‘Meester Hannaford.’

‘Yes, Dolores.’

‘I deedn’t hurt myself thees morning when I fell off the porch.’

‘That’s fine. Good night, Dolores.’

‘Good night, Meester Hannaford.’

George smiled at her, faintly, fleetingly, tearing a veil from between them, unconsciously promising her a possible admission to the thousand delights and wonders that only he knew and could command. Then he went to his waiting car and Dolores, sitting down on the stoop, rubbed her hands together in a gesture that might have expressed either ecstasy or strangulation, and watched the rising of the thin, pale California moon.

MORE THAN JUST A HOUSE

Saturday Evening Post (24 June 1933)

This was the sort of thing Lew was used to--and he’d been around a good deal already. You came into an entrance hall, sometimes narrow New England Colonial, sometimes cautiously spacious. Once in the hall, the host said: “Clare”--or Virginia, or Darling--”this is Mr. Lowrie.” The woman said, “How do you do, Mr. Lowrie,” and Lew answered, “How do you do, Mrs. Woman.” Then the man suggested, “How about a little cocktail?” And Lew lifted his brows apart and said, “Fine,” in a tone that implied: “What hospitality--consideration--attention!” Those delicious canapés. “M’m’m! Madame, what are they--broiled feathers? Enough to spoil a stronger appetite than mine.”

But Lew was on his way up, with six new suits of clothes, and he was getting into the swing of the thing. His name was up for a downtown club and he had his eye on a very modern bachelor apartment full of wrought-iron swinging gates--as if he were a baby inclined to topple downstairs--when he saved the life of the Gunther girl and his tastes underwent revision.

This was back in 1925, before the Spanish-American--No, before whatever it is that has happened since then. The Gunther girls had got off the train on the wrong side and were walking along arm in arm, with Amanda in the path of an approaching donkey engine. Amanda was rather tall, golden and proud, and the donkey engine was very squat and dark and determined. Lew had no time to speculate upon their respective chances in the approaching encounter; he lunged at Jean, who was nearest him, and as the two sisters clung together, startled, he pulled Amanda out of the iron pathway by such a hair’s breadth that a piston cylinder touched her coat.

And so Lew’s taste was changed in regard to architecture and interior decoration. At the Gunther house they served tea, hot or iced, sugar buns, gingerbread and hot rolls at half-past four. When he first went there he was embarrassed by his heroic status--for about five minutes. Then he learned that during the Civil War the grandmother had been saved by her own grandmother from a burning house in Montgomery County, that father had once saved ten men at sea and been recommended for the Carnegie medal, that when Jean was little a man had saved her from the surf at Cape May--that, in fact, all the Gunthers had gone on saving and being saved for the last fifty years and that their real debt to Lew was that now there would be no gap left in the tradition.

This was on the very wide, vine-curtained veranda [“The first thing I’d do would be tear off that monstrosity,” said a visiting architect] which almost completely bounded the big square box of the house, circa 1880. The sisters, three of them, appeared now and then during the time Lew drank tea and talked to the older people. He was only twenty-six himself and he wished Amanda would stay uncovered long enough for him to look at her, but only Bess, the sixteen-year-old sister, was really in sight; in front of the two others interposed a white-flannel screen of young men.

“It was the quickness,” said Mr. Gunther, pacing the long straw rug, “that second of coordination. Suppose you’d tried to warn them--never. Your subconscious mind saw that they were joined together--saw that if you pulled one, you pulled them both. One second, one thought, one motion. I remember in 1904--”

“Won’t Mr. Lowrie have another piece of gingerbread?” asked the grandmother.

“Father, why don’t you show Mr. Lowrie the apostles’ spoons?” Bess proposed.

“What?” Her father stopped pacing. “Is Mr. Lowrie interested in old spoons?”

Lew was thinking at the moment of Amanda twisting somewhere between the glare of the tennis courts and the shadow of the veranda, through all the warmth and graciousness of the afternoon.

“Spoons? Oh, I’ve got a spoon, thank you.”

“Apostles’ spoons,” Bess explained. “Father has one of the best collections in America. When he likes anybody enough he shows them the spoons. I thought, since you saved Amanda’s life--”

He saw little of Amanda that afternoon--talked to her for a moment by the steps while a young man standing near tossed up a tennis racket and caught it by the handle with an impatient bend of his knees at each catch. The sun shopped among the yellow strands of her hair, poured around the rosy tan of her cheeks and spun along the arms that she regarded abstractedly as she talked to him.

“It’s hard to thank a person for saving your life, Mr. Lowrie,” she said. “Maybe you shouldn’t have. Maybe it wasn’t worth saving.”

“Oh, yes, it was,” said Lew, in a spasm of embarrassment.

“Well, I’d like to think so.” She turned to the young man. “Was it, Allen?”

“It’s a good enough life,” Allen admitted, “if you go in for wooly blondes.”

She turned her slender smile full upon Lew for a moment, and then aimed it a little aside, like a pocket torch that might dazzle him. “I’ll always feel that you own me, Mr. Lowrie; my life is forfeit to you. You’ll always have the right to take me back and put me down in front of that engine again.”

Her proud mouth was a little overgracious about being saved, though Lew didn’t realize it; it seemed to Amanda that it might at least have been someone in her own crowd. The Gunthers were a haughty family--haughty beyond all logic, because Mr. Gunther had once been presented at the Court of St. James’s and remained slightly convalescent ever since. Even Bess was haughty, and it was Bess, eventually, who led Lew down to his car.

“It’s a nice place,” she agreed. “We’ve been going to modernize it, but we took a vote and decided to have the swimming pool repaired instead.”

Lew’s eyes lifted over her--she was like Amanda, except for the slightness of her and the childish disfigurement of a small wire across her teeth--up to the house with its decorative balconies outside the windows, its fickle gables, its gold-lettered, Swiss-chalet mottoes, the bulging projections of its many bays. Uncritically he regarded it; it seemed to him one of the finest houses he had ever known.

“Of course, we’re miles from town, but there’s always plenty of people. Father and mother go South after the Christmas holidays when we go back to school.”

It was more than just a house, Lew decided as he drove away. It was a place where a lot of different things could go on at once--a private life for the older people, a private romance for each girl. Promoting himself, he chose his own corner--a swinging seat behind one of the drifts of vines that cut the veranda into quarters. But this was in 1925, when the ten thousand a year that Lew had come to command did not permit an indiscriminate crossing of social frontiers. He was received by the Gunthers and held at arm’s length by them, and then gradually liked for the qualities that began to show through his awkwardness. A good-looking man on his way up can put directly into action the things he learns; Lew was never again quite so impressed by the suburban houses whose children lived upon rolling platforms in the street.

It was September before he was invited to the Gunthers’ on an intimate scale--and this largely because Amanda’s mother insisted upon it.

“He saved your life. I want him asked to this one little party.”

But Amanda had not forgiven him for saving her life.

“It’s just a dance for friends,” she complained. “Let him come to Jean’s debut in October--everybody’ll think he’s a business acquaintance of father’s. After all, you can be nice to somebody without falling into their arms.”

Mrs. Gunther translated this correctly as: “You can be awful to somebody without their knowing it”--and brusquely overrode her: “You can’t have advantages without responsibilities,” she said shortly.

Life had been opening up so fast for Lew that he had a black dinner coat instead of a purple one. Asked for dinner, he came early; and thinking to give him his share of attention when it was most convenient, Amanda walked with him into the tangled, out-of-hand garden. She wanted to be bored, but his gentle vitality disarmed her, made her look at him closely for almost the first time.

“I hear everywhere that you’re a young man with a future,” she said.

Lew admitted it. He boasted a little; he did not tell her that he had analyzed the spell which the Gunther house exerted upon him--his father had been gardener on a similar Maryland estate when he was a boy of five. His mother had helped him to remember that when he told her about the Gunthers. And now this garden was shot bright with sunset, with Amanda one of its own flowers in her flowered dress; he told her, in a rush of emotion, how beautiful she was, and Amanda, excited by the prospect of impending hours with another man, let herself encourage him. Lew had never been so happy as in the moment before she stood up from the seat and put her hand on his arm lightly.

“I do like you,” she said. “You’re very handsome. Do you know that?”

The harvest dance took place in an L-shaped space formed by the clearing of three rooms. Thirty young people were there, and a dozen of their elders, but there was no crowding, for the big windows were opened to the veranda and the guests danced against the wide, illimitable night. A country orchestra alternated with the phonograph, there was mildly calculated cider punch, and an air of safety beside the open bookshelves of the library and the oil portraits of the living room, as though this were one of an endless series of dances that had taken place here in the past and would take place again.

“Thought you never would cut in,” Bess said to Lew. “You’d be foolish not to. I’m the best dancer of us three, and I’m much the smartest one. Jean is the jazzy one, the most chic, but I think it’s passé to be jazzy and play the traps and neck every second boy. Amanda is the beauty, of course. But I’m going to be the Cinderella, Mr. Lowrie. They’ll be the two wicked sisters, and gradually you’ll find I’m the most attractive and get all hot and bothered about me.”

There was an interval of intervals before Lew could maneuver Amanda to his chosen segment of the porch. She was all radiant and shimmering. More than content to be with him, she tried to relax with the creak of the settee. Then instinct told her that something was about to happen.

Lew, remembering a remark of Jean’s--”He asked me to marry him, and he hadn’t even kissed me”--could yet think of no graceful way to assault Amanda; nevertheless he was determined to tell her tonight that he was in love with her.

“This’ll seem sudden,” he ventured, “but you might as well know. Please put me down on the list of those who’d like to have a chance.”

She was not surprised, but being deep in herself at the moment, she was rather startled. Giving up the idea of relaxing, she sat upright.

“Mr. Lowrie--can I call you by your first name?--can I tell you something? No, I won’t--yes, I will, because I like you now. I didn’t like you at first. How’s that for frankness?”

“Is that what you wanted to tell me?”

“No. Listen. You met Mr. Horton--the man from New York--the tall man with the rather old-looking hair?”

“Yes.” Lew felt a pang of premonition in his stomach.

“I’m engaged to him. You’re the first to know--except mother suspects. Whee! Now I told you because you saved my life, so you do sort of own me--I wouldn’t be here to be engaged, except for you.” Then she was honestly surprised at his expression. “Heavens, don’t look like that!” She regarded him, pained. “Don’t tell me you’ve been secretly in love with me all these months. Why didn’t I know? And now it’s too late.”

Lew tried a laugh.

“I hardly know you,” he confessed. “I haven’t had time to fall in love with you.”

“Maybe I work quick. Anyhow, if you did, you’ll have to forget it and be my friend.” Finding his hand, she squeezed it. “A big night for this little girl, Mr. Lew; the chance of a lifetime. I’ve been afraid for two days that his bureau drawer would stick or the hot water would give out and he’d leave for civilization.”

They were silent for a moment; then he asked:

“You very much in love with him?”

“Of course I am. I mean, I don’t know. You tell me. I’ve been in love with so many people; how can I answer that? Anyhow, I’ll get away from this old barn.”

“This house? You want to get away from here? Why, this is a lovely old house.”

She was astonished now, and then suddenly explosive:

“This old tomb! That’s the chief reason I’m marrying George Horton. Haven’t I stood it for twenty years? Haven’t I begged mother and father on my knees to move into town? This--shack--where everybody can hear what everybody else says three rooms off, and father won’t allow a radio, and not even a phone till last summer. I’m afraid even to ask a girl down from school--probably she’d go crazy listening to the shutters on a stormy night.”

“It’s a darn nice old house,” he said automatically.

“Nice and quaint,” she agreed. “Glad you like it. People who don’t have to live here generally do, but you ought to see us alone in it--if there’s a family quarrel you have to stay with it for hours. It all comes down to father wanting to live fifty miles from anywhere, so we’re condemned to rot. I’d rather live in a three-room apartment in town!” Shocked by her own vehemence, she broke off. “Anyhow,” she insisted, “it may seem nice to you, but it’s a nuisance to us.”

A man pulled the vines apart and peered at them, claimed her and pulled her to her feet; when she was gone, Lew went over the railing with a handhold and walked into the garden; he walked far enough away so that the lights and music from the house were blurred into one entity like a stage effect, like an approaching port viewed from a deck at night.

“I only saw her four times,” he said to himself. “Four times isn’t much. Eeney-meeney-miney-moe--what could I expect in four times? I shouldn’t feel anything at all.” But he was engulfed by fear. What had he just begun to know that now he might never know? What had happened in these moments in the garden this afternoon, what was the excitement that had blacked out in the instant of its birth? The scarcely emergent young image of Amanda--he did not want to carry it with him forever. Gradually he realized a truth behind his grief: He had come too late for her; unknown to him, she had been slipping away through the years. With the odds against him, he had managed to found himself on solid rock, and then, looking around for the girl, discovered that she had just gone. “Sorry, just gone out; just left; just gone.” Too late in every way--even for the house. Thinking over her tirade, Lew saw that he had come too late for the house; it was the house of a childhood from which the three girls were breaking away, the house of an older generation, sufficient unto them. To a younger generation it was pervaded with an aura of completion and fulfillment beyond their own power to add to. It was just old.

Nevertheless, he recalled the emptiness of many grander mansions built in more spectacular fashions--empty to him, at any rate, since he had first seen the Gunther place three months before. Something humanly valuable would vanish with the break-up of this family. The house itself, designed for reading long Victorian novels around an open fire of the evening, didn’t even belong to an architectural period worthy of restoration.

Lew circled an outer drive and stood quiet in the shadow of a rosebush as a pair of figures strolled down from the house; by their voices he recognized Jean and Allen Parks.

“Me, I’m going to New York,” Jean said, “whether they let me or not. . . . No, not now, you nut. I’m not in that mood.”

“Then what mood are you in?”

“Not in any mood. I’m only envious of Amanda because she’s hooked this M’sieur, and now she’ll go to Long Island and live in a house instead of a mouse trap. Oh, Jake, this business of being simple and swell--”

They passed out of hearing. It was between dances, and Lew saw the colors of frocks and the quick white of shirt fronts in the window-panes as the guests flowed onto the porch. He looked up at the second floor as a light went on there--he had a conception of the second floor as walled with crowded photographs; there must be bags full of old materials, and trunks with costumes and dress-making forms, and old dolls’ houses, and an overflow, everywhere along the vacant walls, of books for all generations--many childhoods side by side drifting into every corner.

Another couple came down the walk from the house, and feeling that inadvertently he had taken up too strategic a position, Lew moved away; but not before he had identified the pair as Amanda and her man from New York.

“What would you think if I told you I had another proposal tonight?”

“. . . be surprised at all.”

“A very worthy young man. Saved my life. . . . Why weren’t you there on that occasion, Bubbles? You’d have done it on a grand scale, I’m sure.”

Standing square in front of the house, Lew looked at it more searchingly. He felt a kinship with it--not precisely that, for the house’s usefulness was almost over and his was just beginning; rather, the sense of superior unity that the thoughtful young feel for the old, sense of the grandparent. More than only a house. He would like to be that much used up himself before being thrown out on the ash heap at the end. And then, because he wanted to do some courteous service to it while he could, if only to dance with the garrulous little sister, he pulled a brash pocket comb through his hair and went inside.

II

The man with the smiling scar approached Lew once more.

“This is probably,” he announced, “the biggest party ever given in New York.”

“I even heard you the first time you told me,” agreed Lew cheerfully.

“But, on the other hand,” qualified the man, “I thought the same thing at a party two years ago, in 1927. Probably they’ll go on getting bigger and bigger. You play polo, don’t you?”

“Only in the back yard,” Lewis assured him. “I said I’d like to play. I’m a serious business man.”

“Somebody told me you were the polo star.” The man was somewhat disappointed. “I’m a writer myself. A humani--a humanitarian. I’ve been trying to help out a girl over there in that room where the champagne is. She’s a lady. And yet, by golly, she’s the only one in the room that can’t take care of herself.”

“Never try to take care of anybody,” Lew advised him. “They hate you for it.”

But although the apartment, or rather the string of apartments and penthouses pressed into service for the affair, represented the best resources of the New York sky line, it was only limited metropolitan space at that, and moving among the swirls of dancers, thinned with dawn, Lew found himself finally in the chamber that the man had spoken of. For a moment he did not recognize the girl who had assumed the role of entertaining the glassy-eyed citizenry, chosen by natural selection to personify dissolution; then, as she issued a blanket invitation to a squad of Gaiety beauties to come south and recuperate on her Maryland estates, he recognized Jean Gunther.

She was the dark Gunther--dark and shining and driven. Lew, living in New York now, had seen none of the family since Amanda’s marriage four years ago. Driving her home a quarter of an hour later, he extracted what news he could; and then left her in the dawn at the door of her apartment, mussed and awry, yet still proud, and tottering with absurd formality as she thanked him and said good night.

He called next afternoon and took her to tea in Central Park.

“I am,” she informed him, “the child of the century. Other people claim to be the child of the century, but I’m actually the child of the century. And I’m having the time of my life at it.”

Thinking back to another period--of young men on the tennis courts and hot buns in the afternoon, and of wistaria and ivy climbing along the ornate railings of a veranda--Lew became as moral as it was possible to be in that well-remembered year of 1929.

“What are you getting out of it? Why don’t you invest in some reliable man--just a sort of background?”

“Men are good to invest money for you,” she dodged neatly. “Last year one darling spun out my allowance so it lasted ten months instead of three.”

“But how about marrying some candidate?”

“I haven’t got any love,” she said. “Actually, I know four--five--I know six millionaires I could maybe marry. This little girl from Carroll County. It’s just too many. Now, if somebody that had everything came along--”

She looked at Lew appraisingly. “You’ve improved, for example.”

“I should say I have,” admitted Lew, laughing. “I even go to first nights. But the most beautiful thing about me is I remember my old friends, and among them are the lovely Gunther girls of Carroll County.”

“You’re very nice,” she said. “Were you terribly in love with Amanda?”

“I thought so, anyhow.”

“I saw her last week. She’s super-Park Avenue and very busy having Park Avenue babies. She considers me rather disreputable and tells her friends about our magnificent plantation in the old South.”

“Do you ever go down to Maryland?”

“Do I though? I’m going Sunday night, and spend two months there saving enough money to come back on. When mother died”--she paused--”I suppose you knew mother died--I came into a little cash, and I’ve still got it, but it has to be stretched, see?”--she pulled her napkin cornerwise--”by tactful investing. I think the next step is a quiet summer on the farm.”

Lew took her to the theater the next night, oddly excited by the encounter. The wild flush of the times lay upon her; he was conscious of her physical pulse going at some abnormal rate, but most of the young women he knew were being hectic, save the ones caught up tight in domesticity.

He had no criticism to make--behind that lay the fact that he would not have dared to criticize her. Having climbed from a nether rung of the ladder, he had perforce based his standards on what he could see from where he was at the moment. Far be it from him to tell Jean Gunther how to order her life.

Getting off the train in Baltimore three weeks later, he stepped into the peculiar heat that usually preceded an electric storm. He passed up the regular taxis and hired a limousine for the long ride out to Carroll County, and as he drove through rich foliage, moribund in midsummer, between the white fences that lined the rolling road, many years fell away and he was again the young man, starved for a home, who had first seen the Gunther house four years ago. Since then he had occupied a twelve-room apartment in New York, rented a summer mansion on Long Island, but his spirit, warped by loneliness and grown gypsy with change, turned back persistently to this house.

Inevitably it was smaller than he had expected, a small, big house, roomy rather than spacious. There was a rather intangible neglect about it--the color of the house had never been anything but a brown-green relict of the sun; Lew had never known the stable to lean otherwise than as the Tower of Pisa, nor the garden to grow any other way than plebeian and wild.

Jean was on the porch--not, as she had prophesied, in the role of gingham queen or rural equestrienne, but very Rue-de-la-Paix against the dun cushions of the swinging settee. There was the stout, colored butler whom Lew remembered and who pretended, with racial guile, to remember Lew delightedly. He took the bag to Amanda’s old room, and Lew stared around it a little before he went downstairs. Jean and Bess were waiting over a cocktail on the porch.

It struck him that Bess had made a leaping change out of childhood into something that was not quite youth. About her beauty there was a detachment, almost an impatience, as though she had not asked for the gift and considered it rather a burden; to a young man, the gravity of her face might have seemed formidable.

“How is your father?” Lew asked.

“He won’t be down tonight,” Bess answered. “He’s not well. He’s over seventy, you know. People tire him. When we have guests, he has dinner upstairs.”

“It would be better if he ate upstairs all the time,” Jean remarked, pouring the cocktails.

“No, it wouldn’t,” Bess contradicted her. “The doctors said it wouldn’t. There’s no question about that.”

Jean turned in a rush to Lew. “For over a year Bess has hardly left this house. We could--”

“What junk!” her sister said impatiently. “I ride every morning.”

“--we could get a nurse who would do just as well.”

Dinner was formal, with candles on the table and the two young women in evening dresses. Lew saw that much was missing--the feeling that the house was bursting with activity, with expanding life--all this had gone. It was difficult for the diminished clan to do much more than inhabit the house. There was not a moving up into vacated places; there was simply an anachronistic staying on between a vanishing past and an incalculable future.

Midway through dinner, Lew lifted his head at a pause in the conversation, but what he had confused with a mutter of thunder was a long groan from the floor above, followed by a measured speech, whose words were interrupted by the quick clatter of Bess’ chair.

“You know what I ordered. Just so long as I am the head of--”

“It’s father.” Momentarily Jean looked at Lew as if she thought the situation was faintly humorous, but at his concerned face, she continued seriously, “You might as well know. It’s senile dementia. Not dangerous. Sometimes he’s absolutely himself. But it’s hard on Bess.”

Bess did not come down again; after dinner, Lew and Jean went into the garden, splattered with faint drops before the approaching rain. Through the vivid green twilight Lew followed her long dress, spotted with bright red roses--it was the first of that fashion he had ever seen; in the tense hush he had an illusion of intimacy with her, as though they shared the secrets of many years and, when she caught at his arm suddenly at a rumble of thunder, he drew her around slowly with his other arm and kissed her shaped, proud mouth.

“Well, at least you’ve kissed one Gunther girl,” Jean said lightly. “How was it? And don’t you think you’re taking advantage of us, being unprotected out here in the country?”

He looked at her to see if she were joking, and with a swift laugh she seized his arm again. It was raining in earnest, and they fled toward the house--to find Bess on her knees in the library, setting light to an open fire.

“Father’s all right,” she assured them. “I don’t like to give him the medicine till the last minute. He’s worrying about some man that lent him twenty dollars in 1892.” She lingered, conscious of being a third party, and yet impelled to play her mother’s role and impart an initial solidarity before she retired. The storm broke, shrieking in white at the windows, and Bess took the opportunity to fly to the windows upstairs, calling down after a moment:

“The telephone’s trying to ring. Do you think it’s safe to answer it?”

“Perfectly,” Jean called back, “or else they wouldn’t ring.” She came close to Lewis in the center of the room, away from the white, quivering windows.

“It’s strange having you here right now. I don’t mind saying I’m glad you’re here. But if you weren’t, I suppose we’d get along just as well.”

“Shall I help Bess close the windows?” Lew asked.

Simultaneously, Bess called downstairs:

“Nobody seemed to be on the phone, and I don’t like holding it.”

A ripping crash of thunder shook the house and Jean moved into Lew’s arm, breaking away as Bess came running down the stairs with a yelp of dismay.

“The lights are out up there,” she said. “I never used to mind storms when I was little. Father used to make us sit on the porch sometimes, remember?”

There was a dazzle of light around all the windows of the first floor, reflecting itself back and forth in mirrors, so that every room was pervaded with a white glare; there followed a sound as of a million matches struck at once, so loud and terrible that the thunder rolling down seemed secondary; then a splintering noise separated itself out, and Bess’ voice:

“That struck!”

Once again came the sickening lightning, and through a rolling pandemonium of sound they groped from window to window till Jean cried: “It’s William’s room! There’s a tree on it!”

In a moment, Lew had flung wide the kitchen door and saw, in the next glare, what had happened: The great tree, in falling, had divided the lean-to from the house proper.

“Is William there?” he demanded.

“Probably. He should be.”

Gathering up his courage, Lew dashed across the twenty feet of new marsh, and with a waffle iron smashed in the nearest window. Inundated with sheet rain and thunder, he yet realized that the storm had moved off from overhead, and his voice was strong as he called: “William! You all right?”

No answer.

“William!”

He paused and there came a quiet answer:

“Who dere?”

“You all right?”

“I wanna know who dere.”

“The tree fell on you. Are you hurt?”

There was a sudden peal of laughter from the shack as William emerged mentally from dark and atavistic suspicions of his own. Again and again the pealing laughter rang out.

“Hurt? Not me hurt. Nothin’ hurt me. I’m never better, as they say. Nothin’ hurt me.”

Irritated by his melting clothes, Lew said brusquely:

“Well, whether you know it or not, you’re penned up in there. You’ve got to try and get out this window. That tree’s too big to push off tonight.”

Half an hour later, in his room, Lew shed the wet pulp of his clothing by the light of a single candle. Lying naked on the bed, he regretted that he was in poor condition, unnecessarily fatigued with the exertion of pulling a fat man out a window. Then, over the dull rumble of the thunder he heard the phone again in the hall, and Bess’ voice, “I can’t hear a word. You’ll have to get a better connection,” and for thirty seconds he dozed, to wake with a jerk at the sound of his door opening.

“Who’s that?” he demanded, pulling the quilt up over himself.

The door opened slowly.

“Who’s that?”

There was a chuckle; a last pulse of lightning showed him three tense, blue-veined fingers, and then a man’s voice whispered: “I only wanted to know whether you were in for the night, dear. I worry--I worry.”

The door closed cautiously, and Lew realized that old Gunther was on some nocturnal round of his own. Aroused, he slipped into his sole change of clothes, listening to Bess for the third time at the phone.

“--in the morning,” she said. “Can’t it wait? We’ve got to get a connection ourselves.”

Downstairs he found Jean surprisingly spritely before the fire. She made a sign to him, and he went and stood above her, indifferent suddenly to her invitation to kiss her. Trying to decide how he felt, he brushed his hand lightly along her shoulder.

“Your father’s wandering around. He came in my room. Don’t you think you ought to--”

“Always does it,” Jean said. “Makes the nightly call to see if we’re in bed.”

Lew stared at her sharply; a suspicion that had been taking place in his subconscious assumed tangible form. A bland, beautiful expression stared back at him; but his ears lifted suddenly up the stairs to Bess still struggling with the phone.

“All right. I’ll try to take it that way. . . . P-ay-double ess-ee-dee--’p-a-s-s-e-d.’ All right; ay-double you-ay-wy. ‘Passed away?’“ Her voice, as she put the phrase together, shook with sudden panic. “What did you say--’Amanda Gunther passed away’?”

Jean looked at Lew with funny eyes.

“Why does Bess try to take that message now? Why not--”

“Shut up!” he ordered. “This is something serious.”

“I don’t see--”

Alarmed by the silence that seeped down the stairs, Lew ran up and found Bess sitting beside the telephone table holding the receiver in her lap, just breathing and staring, breathing and staring. He took the receiver and got the message:

“Amanda passed away quietly, giving life to a little boy.”

Lew tried to raise Bess from the chair, but she sank back, full of dry sobbing.

“Don’t tell father tonight.”

How did it matter if this was added to that old store of confused memories? It mattered to Bess, though.

“Go away,” she whispered. “Go tell Jean.”

Some premonition had reached Jean, and she was at the foot of the stairs while he descended.

“What’s the matter?”

He guided her gently back into the library.

“Amanda is dead,” he said, still holding her.

She gathered up her forces and began to wail, but he put his hand over her mouth.

“You’ve been drinking!” he said. “You’ve got to pull yourself together. You can’t put anything more on your sister.”

Jean pulled herself together visibly--first her proud mouth and then her whole body--but what might have seemed heroic under other conditions seemed to Lew only reptilian, a fine animal effort--all he had begun to feel about her went out in a few ticks of the clock.

In two hours the house was quiet under the simple ministrations of a retired cook whom Bess had sent for; Jean was put to sleep with a sedative by a physician from Ellicott City. It was only when Lew was in bed at last that he thought really of Amanda, and broke suddenly, and only for a moment. She was gone out of the world, his second--no, his third love--killed in single combat. He thought rather of the dripping garden outside, and nature so suddenly innocent in the clearing night. If he had not been so tired he would have dressed and walked through the long-stemmed, clinging ferns, and looked once more impersonally at the house and its inhabitants--the broken old, the youth breaking and growing old with it, the other youth escaping into dissipation. Walking through broken dreams, he came in his imagination to where the falling tree had divided William’s bedroom from the house, and paused there in the dark shadow, trying to piece together what he thought about the Gunthers.

“It’s degenerate business,” he decided--”all this hanging on to the past. I’ve been wrong. Some of us are going ahead, and these people and the roof over them are just push-overs for time. I’ll be glad to leave it for good and get back to something fresh and new and clean in Wall Street tomorrow.”

Only once was he wakened in the night, when he heard the old man quavering querulously about the twenty dollars that he had borrowed in ‘92. He heard Bess’ voice soothing him, and then, just before he went to sleep, the voice of the old Negress blotting out both voices.

III

Lew’s business took him frequently to Baltimore, but with the years it seemed to change back into the Baltimore that he had known before he met the Gunthers. He thought of them often, but after the night of Amanda’s death he never went there. By 1933, the role that the family had played in his life seemed so remote--except for the unforgettable fact that they had formed his ideas about how life was lived--that he could drive along the Frederick Road to where it dips into Carroll County before a feeling of recognition crept over him. Impelled by a formless motive, he stopped his car.

It was deep summer; a rabbit crossed the road ahead of him and a squirrel did acrobatics on an arched branch. The Gunther house was up the next crossroad and five minutes away--in half an hour he could satisfy his curiosity about the family; yet he hesitated. With painful consequences, he had once tried to repeat the past, and now, in normal times, he would have driven on with a feeling of leaving the past well behind him; but he had come to realize recently that life was not always a progress, nor a search for new horizons, nor a going away. The Gunthers were part of him; he would not be able to bring to new friends the exact things that he had brought to the Gunthers. If the memory of them became extinct, then something in himself became extinct also.

The squirrel’s flight on the branch, the wind nudging at the leaves, the cock splitting distant air, the creep of sunlight transpiring through the immobility, lulled him into an adolescent trance, and he sprawled back against the leather for a moment without problems. He loafed for ten minutes before the “k-dup, k-dup, k-dup” of a walking horse came around the next bend of the road. The horse bore a girl in Jodhpur breeches, and bending forward, Lew recognized Bess Gunther.

He scrambled from the car. The horse shied as Bess recognized Lew and pulled up. “Why, Mr. Lowrie! . . . Hey! Hoo-oo there, girl! . . . Where did you arrive from? Did you break down?”

It was a lovely face, and a sad face, but it seemed to Lew that some new quality made it younger--as if she had finally abandoned the cosmic sense of responsibility which had made her seem older than her age four years ago.

“I was thinking about you all,” he said. “Thinking of paying you a visit.” Detecting a doubtful shadow in her face, he jumped to a conclusion and laughed. “I don’t mean a visit; I mean a call. I’m solvent--sometimes you have to add that these days.”

She laughed too: “I was only thinking the house was full and where would we put you.”

“I’m bound for Baltimore anyhow. Why not get off your rocking horse and sit in my car a minute.”

She tied the mare to a tree and got in beside him.

He had not realized that flashing fairness could last so far into the twenties--only when she didn’t smile, he saw from three small thoughtful lines that she was always a grave girl--he had a quick recollection of Amanda on an August afternoon, and looking at Bess, he recognized all that he remembered of Amanda.

“How’s your father?”

“Father died last year. He was bedridden a year before he died.” Her voice was in the singsong of something often repeated. “It was just as well.”

“I’m sorry. How about Jean? Where is she?”

“Jean married a Chinaman--I mean she married a man who lives in China. I’ve never seen him.”

“Do you live alone, then?”

“No, there’s my aunt.” She hesitated. “Anyhow, I’m getting married next week.”

Inexplicably, he had the old sense of loss in his diaphragm.

“Congratulations! Who’s the unfortunate--”

“From Philadelphia. The whole party went over to the races this afternoon. I wanted to have a last ride with Juniper.”

“Will you live in Philadelphia?”

“Not sure. We’re thinking of building another house on the place, tear down the old one. Of course, we might remodel it.”

“Would that be worth doing?”

“Why not?” she said hastily. “We could use some of it, the architects think.”

“You’re fond of it, aren’t you?”

Bess considered.

“I wouldn’t say it was just my idea of modernity. But I’m a sort of a home girl.” She accentuated the words ironically. “I never went over very big in Baltimore, you know--the family failure. I never had the sort of thing Amanda and Jean had.”

“Maybe you didn’t want it.”

“I thought I did when I was young.”

The mare neighed peremptorily and Bess backed out of the car.

“So that’s the story, Lew Lowrie, of the last Gunther girl. You always did have a sort of yen for us, didn’t you?”

“Didn’t I! If I could possibly stay in Baltimore, I’d insist on coming to your wedding.”

At the lost expression on her face, he wondered to whom she was handing herself, a very precious self. He knew more about people now, and he felt the steel beneath the softness in her, the girders showing through the gentle curves of cheek and chin. She was an exquisite person, and he hoped that her husband would be a good man.

When she had ridden off into a green lane, he drove tentatively toward Baltimore. This was the end of a human experience and it released old images that regrouped themselves about him--if he had married one of the sisters; supposing--The past, slipping away under the wheels of his car, crunched awake his acuteness.

“Perhaps I was always an intruder in that family. . . . But why on earth was that girl riding in bedroom slippers?”

At the crossroads store he stopped to get cigarettes. A young clerk searched the case with country slowness.

“Big wedding up at the Gunther place,” Lew remarked.

“Hah? Miss Bess getting married?”

“Next week. The wedding party’s there now.”

“Well, I’ll be dog! Wonder what they’re going to sleep on, since Mark H. Bourne took the furniture away?”

“What’s that? What?”

“Month ago Mark H. Bourne took all the furniture and everything else while Miss Bess was out riding--they mortgaged on it just before Gunther died. They say around here she ain’t got a stitch except them riding clothes. Mark H. Bourne was good and sore. His claim was they sold off all the best pieces of furniture without his knowing it. . . . Now, that’s ten cents I owe you.”

“What do she and her aunt live on?”

“Never heard about an aunt--I only been here a year. She works the truck garden herself; all she buys from us is sugar, salt and coffee.”

Anything was possible these times, yet Lew wondered what incredibly fantastic pride had inspired her to tell that lie.

He turned his car around and drove back to the Gunther place. It was a desperately forlorn house he came to, and a jungled garden; one side of the veranda had slipped from the brick pillars and sloped to the ground; a shingle job, begun and abandoned, rotted paintless on the roof, a broken pane gaped from the library window.

Lew went in without knocking. A voice challenged him from the dining room and he walked toward it, his feet loud on the rugless floor, through rooms empty of stick and book, empty of all save casual dust. Bess Gunther, wearing the cheapest of house dresses, rose from the packing box on which she sat, with fright in her eyes; a tin spoon rattled on the box she was using as a table.

“Have you been kidding me?” he demanded. “Are you actually living like this?”

“It’s you.” She smiled in relief; then, with visible effort, she spurred herself into amenities:

“Take a box, Mr. Lowrie. Have a canned-goods box--they’re superior; the grain is better. And welcome to the open spaces. Have a cigar, a glass of champagne, have some rabbit stew and meet my fiancé.”

“Stop that.”

“All right,” she agreed.

“Why didn’t you go and live with some relatives?”

“Haven’t got any relatives. Jean’s in China.”

“What are you doing? What do you expect to happen?”

“I was waiting for you, I guess.”

“What do you mean?”

“You always seemed to turn up. I thought if you turned up, I’d make a play for you. But when it came to the point, I thought I’d better lie. I seem to lack the S.A. my sisters had.”

Lew pulled her up from the box and held her with his fingers by her waist.

“Not to me.”

In the hour since Lew had met her on the road the vitality seemed to have gone out of her; she looked up at him very tired.

“So you liked the Gunthers,” she whispered. “You liked us all.”

Lew tried to think, but his heart beat so quick that he could only sit her back on the box and pace along the empty walls.

“We’ll get married,” he said. “I don’t know whether I love you--I don’t even know you--I know the notion of your being in want or trouble makes me physically sick.” Suddenly he went down on both knees in front of her so that she would not seem so unbearably small and helpless. “Miss Bess Gunther, so it was you I was meant to love all the while.”

“Don’t be so anxious about it,” she laughed. “I’m not used to being loved. I wouldn’t know what to do; I never got the trick of it.” She looked down at him, shy and fatigued. “So here we are. I told you years ago that I had the makings of Cinderella.”

He took her hand; she drew it back instinctively and then replaced it in his. “Beg your pardon. Not even used to being touched. But I’m not afraid of you, if you stay quiet and don’t move suddenly.”

It was the same old story of reserve Lew could not fathom, motives reaching back into a past he did not share. With the three girls, facts seemed to reveal themselves precipitately, pushing up through the gay surface; they were always unsuspected things, currents and predilections alien to a man who had been able to shoot in a straight line always.

“I was the conservative sister,” Bess said. “I wasn’t any less pleasure loving but with three girls, somebody has to play the boy, and gradually that got to be my part. . . . Yes, touch me like that. Touch my cheek. I want to be touched; I want to be held. And I’m glad it’s you; but you’ve got to go slow; you’ve got to be careful. I’m afraid I’m the kind of person that’s forever. I’ll live with you and die for you, but I never knew what halfway meant. . . . Yes, that’s the wrist. Do you like it? I’ve had a lot of fun looking at myself in the last month, because there’s one long mirror upstairs that was too big to take out.”

Lew stood up. “All right, we’ll start like that. I’ll be so healthy that I’ll make you all healthy again.”

“Yes, like that,” she agreed.

“Suppose we begin by setting fire to this house.”

“Oh, no!” She took him seriously. “In the first place, it’s insured. In the second place--”

“All right, we’ll just get out. We’ll get married in Baltimore, or Ellicott City if you’d rather.”

“How about Juniper? I can’t go off and leave her.”

“We’ll leave her with the young man at the store.”

“The house isn’t mine. It’s all mortgaged away, but they let me live here--I guess it was remorse after they took even our old music, and our old scrapbooks. They didn’t have a chance of getting a tenant, anyhow.”

Minute by minute, Lew found out more about her, and liked what he found, but he saw that the love in her was all incrusted with the sacrificial years, and that he would have to be gardener to it for a while. The task seemed attractive.

“You lovely,” he told her. “You lovely! We’ll survive, you and I because you’re so nice and I’m so convinced about it.”

“And about Juniper--will she survive if we go away like this?”

“Juniper too.”

She frowned and then smiled--and this time really smiled--and said: “Seems to me, you’re falling in love.”

“Speak for yourself. My opinion is that this is going to be the best thing ever happened.”

“I’m going to help. I insist on--”

They went out together--Bess changed into her riding habit, but there wasn’t another article that she wanted to bring with her. Backing through the clogging weeds of the garden, Lew looked at the house over his shoulder. “Next week or so we’ll decide what to do about that.”

It was a bright sunset--the creep of rosy light that played across the blue fenders of the car and across their crazily happy faces moved across the house too--across the paralyzed door of the ice house, the rusting tin gutters, the loose-swinging shutter, the cracked cement of the front walk, the burned place of last year’s rubbish back of the tennis court. Whatever its further history, the whole human effort of collaboration was done now. The purpose of the house was achieved--finished and folded--it was an effort toward some commonweal, an effort difficult to estimate, so closely does it press against us still.

NEWS OF PARIS--FIFTEEN YEARS AGO

Furioso (Winter, 1947)

“We shouldn’t both be coming from the same direction,” Ruth said. “A lot of people know we’re at the same hotel.”

Henry Haven Dell smiled and then they both laughed. It was a bright morning in April and they had just turned off the Champs Elysées toward the English Church.

“I’ll walk on the other side of the street,” he said, “and then we’ll meet at the door.”

“No, we oughtn’t even to sit together. I’m a countess--laugh it off but anything I do will be in that damn ‘Boulevardier.’“

They stopped momentarily.

“But I hate to leave you,” he said. “You look so lovely.”

“I hate to leave you too,” she whispered. “I never knew how nice you were. But good-bye.”

Half way across the street, he stopped to a great screech of auto horns playing Debussy.

“We’re lunching,” he called back.

She nodded, but continued to walk looking straight ahead on her sidewalk. Henry Haven Dell continued his crossing and then walked quickly, from time to time throwing a happy glance at the figure across the way.

--I wonder if they have telephones in churches, he thought. After the ceremony he would see.

He stood in a rear row, catching Ruth’s eye from time to time, teasing her. It was a very fashionable wedding. As the bride and groom came down the aisle the bride caught his arm and took him with them down the street.

“Isn’t it fun,” the bride said. “And just think, Henry, I almost married you.”

Her husband laughed.

--at what, Henry thought. I could have had her if she’d really been the one.

Aloud he said:

“I have to telephone before the reception.”

“The hotel’s full of phones. Come and stand beside me. I want you to be the first to know.”

He got to the phone only after an hour.

“The Paris is delayed,” said the Compagnie Transatlantique. “We can’t give you an exact hour. Not before four.”

“Oh, no, Monsieur--not possibly.”

Good. In the lobby he joined a party of wedding guests and repaired to the Ritz on the man’s part of the bar. You couldn’t be with women incessantly.

“How long will you be in Paris, Henry?”

“That’s not a fair question. I can always tell you how long I’ll be in New York or London.”

He had two cocktails--each at a different table. A little before one when the confusion and din were at their height he went out into the Rue Cambon. There was not a taxi to be had--the doormen were chasing them all the way up to the Rue de Rivoli. One sailed into port with a doorman on the running board but a lovely little brunette in pale green was already waiting.

“Oh, look,” begged Henry. “You’re not by any chance going near the Bois?”

He was getting into the cab as he spoke. His morning coat was a sort of introduction. She nodded.

“I’m lunching there.”

“I’m Henry Dell,” he said, lifting his hat.

“Oh, it’s you--at last,” she said eagerly. “I’m Bessie Wing--born Leighton. I know all your cousins.”

“Isn’t this nice,” he exclaimed and she agreed.

“I’m breaking my engagement at luncheon,” she said. “And I’ll name you.”

“Really breaking your engagement?”

“At the Café Dauphine--from one to two.”

“I’ll be there--from time to time I’ll look at you.”

“What I want to know is--does he take me home afterward. I’m not Emily Posted.”

On impulse he said:

“No, I do. You may be faint or something. I’ll keep an eye on you.”

She shook her head.

“No--it wouldn’t be reverend this afternoon,” she said. “But I’ll be here weeks.”

“This afternoon,” he said. “You see, there’s a boat coming in.”

After a moment’s reluctance she answered:

“I do almost know you. Leave it this way. If you see me talk shaking a spoon back and forth I’ll meet you in front in five minutes.”

Ruth was waiting at table. Henry talked lazily to her for ten minutes, watching her face and the spring light upon the table. Then with a casual glance he located Bessie Wing across the room, deep in conversation with a man of twenty-six, his own age.

“We’ll have this afternoon--and then good-bye,” said Ruth.

“Not even this afternoon,” he answered solemnly, “I’m meeting the boat in an hour.”

“I’m sorry, Henry. Hasn’t it been fun?”

“Lots of fun. So much fun.” He felt sincerely sad.

“It’s just as well,” said Ruth with a little effort, “I have fittings that I’ve postponed. Remember me when you go to the Opera or out to St.-Germain.”

“I’ll do my best to forget you.”

A little later he saw the spoon waving.

“Let me go first,” he said. “I somehow couldn’t bear to sit here and see you walk off.”

“All right, I’ll sit here and think.”

Bessie was waiting under a pear tree in front--they crammed hastily into a taxi like escaping children.

“Was it bad?” he asked. “I watched you. There were tears in his eyes.”

She nodded.

“It was pretty bad.”

“Why did you break it?”

“Because my first marriage was a flop. There were so many men around that when I married I didn’t know who I loved any more. So there didn’t seem to be any point if you know what I mean. Why should it have been Hershell Wing?”

“How about this other man?”

“It would have been the same way only now it would be my fault because I know.”

They sat in the cool American drawing room of her apartment and had coffee.

“For anyone so beautiful--” he said, “there must be many times like those. When there isn’t a man--there’s just men.”

“There was a man once,” she said, “when I was sixteen. He looked like you. He didn’t love me.”

Henry went and sat beside her on the fauteuil.

“That happens too,” said Henry. “Perhaps the safest way is ‘Ships that pass in the night.’“

She held back a little.

“I don’t want to be old-fashioned but we don’t know each other.”

“Sure we do--remember--we met this morning.”

She laughed.

“Sedative for a broken engagement!”

“The specific one,” he said.

It was quiet in the room. The peacocks in the draperies stirred in the April wind.

Later they stood on her balcony arm in arm and looked over a sea of green leaves to the Arc de Triomphe.

“Where is the phone?” he asked suddenly. “Never mind--I know.”

He went inside, picked up the phone beside her bed.

“Compagnie Générale? . . . How about the boat train from the Paris?”

“Oh, she has not docked in Havre yet, monsieur. Call in several hours. The delay has been at Southampton.”

Returning to the balcony Henry said:

“All right--let’s do go to the Exposition.”

“I have to, you see,” she said. “This woman, Mary Tolliver I told you about--she’s the only person I can go to with what I did at luncheon. She’ll understand.”

“Would she understand about us too?”

“She’ll never know. She’s been an ideal of mine since I was sixteen.”

She was not much older than Bessie, Henry thought as they met her in the Crillon lobby--she was a golden brown woman, very trim and what the French call “soignée”--which means washed and something more. She had an American painter and an Austrian sculptor with her and Henry gathered that they were both a little in love with her, or else exploiting her for money--money evident in the Renault town car that took them to the exhibition of decorative arts that ringed the Seine.

They walked along through the show, passed the chromium rails, the shining economy of steel that was to change the furniture of an era. Henry, once art editor of the Harvard Lampoon, was not without a seeing eye but he let the painter and sculptor talk. When they sat down for an apéritif afterwards, Bessie sat very close to him--Mary Tolliver smiled and saw. She looked appraisingly at Henry.

“Have you two known each other long?” she asked.

“Years,” said Henry. “She is a sister to me. And now I must leave you all--after a charming afternoon.”

Bessie looked at him reproachfully, started to rise with him--controlled herself.

“I told you there was a boat,” he said gently.

“Ship,” she answered.

As he walked away he saw the painter move to the chair he had vacated by her side.

The Paris was still delayed at Southampton and Henry considered what to do. When you have been doing nothing in a pleasant way a long time it is difficult to fill in stray hours. More difficult than for one who works. In the country he might have exercised--here there were only faces over tables. And there must continue to be faces over tables.

--I am become a contemptible drone, he thought. I must give at least a thought to duty.

He taxied over to the left bank--to the Rue Nôtre-Dame des Champs--to call on a child he had endowed just after the war. A beautiful little orphan who begged in front of the Café du Dôme, Henry had sent her for three years to convent. He saw her once or twice each summer--not now for almost a year.

“Hélène is out,” said a new concierge whom Henry did not know. “How should I guess where she is? At the Café des Lilas? At Lipps?”

He was faintly shocked--then faintly reassured when he found her at Lipps, the beer place which was, at least, a step more respectable than the Dôme or the Rotonde. She left the two Americans with whom she was sitting and embraced him shyly.

“What are you preparing to do, Hélène?” he demanded kindly. “What profession do the nuns teach you?”

She shrugged her shoulders.

“I shall marry,” she said. “A rich American if I can. That young man I just left for example--he is on the staff of the New York Herald Tribune.”

“Reporters are not rich,” he reproved her, “and that one doesn’t look very promising.”

“Oh, he is drunk now,” said Hélène, “but at times he is all one would desire.”

Henry had been a romantic four years ago--right after the war. He had in no sense brought up this girl to marry or for anything else. Yet the thought was in his mind then, What if she could continue to be a great beauty. And now as he looked at her he felt a surge of jealousy toward the reporter.

ONE TRIP ABROAD

Saturday Evening Post (11 October 1930)

In the afternoon the air became black with locusts, and some of the women shrieked, sinking to the floor of the motorbus and covering their hair with traveling rugs. The locusts were coming north, eating everything in their path, which was not so much in that part of the world; they were flying silently and in straight lines, flakes of black snow. But none struck the windshield or tumbled into the car, and presently humorists began holding out their hands, trying to catch some. After ten minutes the cloud thinned out, passed, and the women emerged from the blankets, disheveled and feeling silly. And everyone talked together.

Everyone talked; it would have been absurd not to talk after having been through a swarm of locusts on the edge of the Sahara. The Smyrna-American talked to the British widow going down to Biskra to have one last fling with an as-yet-unencountered sheik. The member of the San Francisco Stock Exchange talked shyly to the author. “Aren’t you an author?” he said. The father and daughter from Wilmington talked to the cockney airman who was going to fly to Timbuctoo. Even the French chauffeur turned about and explained in a loud, clear voice: “Bumblebees,” which sent the trained nurse from New York into shriek after shriek of hysterical laughter.

Amongst the unsubtle rushing together of the travelers there was one interchange more carefully considered. Mr. and Mrs. Liddell Miles, turning as one person, smiled and spoke to the young American couple in the seat behind:

“Didn’t catch any in your hair?”

The young couple smiled back politely.

“No. We survived that plague.”

They were in their twenties, and there was still a pleasant touch of bride and groom upon them. A handsome couple; the man rather intense and sensitive, the girl arrestingly light of hue in eyes and hair, her face without shadows, its living freshness modulated by a lovely confident calm. Mr. and Mrs. Miles did not fail to notice their air of good breeding, of a specifically “swell” background, expressed both by their unsophistication and by their ingrained reticence that was not stiffness. If they held aloof, it was because they were sufficient to each other, while Mr. and Mrs. Miles’ aloofness toward the other passengers was a conscious mask, a social attitude, quite as public an affair in its essence as the ubiquitous advances of the Smyrna-American, who was snubbed by all.

The Mileses had, in fact, decided that the young couple were “possible” and, bored with themselves, were frankly approaching them.

“Have you been to Africa before? It’s been so utterly fascinating! Are you going on to Tunis?”

The Mileses, if somewhat worn away inside by fifteen years of a particular set in Paris, had undeniable style, even charm, and before the evening arrival at the little oasis town of Bou Saada they had all four become companionable. They uncovered mutual friends in New York and, meeting for a cocktail in the bar of the Hotel Transatlantique, decided to have dinner together.

As the young Kellys came downstairs later, Nicole was conscious of a certain regret that they had accepted, realizing that now they were probably committed to seeing a certain amount of their new acquaintances as far as Constantine, where their routes diverged.

In the eight months of their marriage she had been so very happy that it seemed like spoiling something. On the Italian liner that had brought them to Gibraltar they had not joined the groups that leaned desperately on one another in the bar; instead, they seriously studied French, and Nelson worked on business contingent on his recent inheritance of half a million dollars. Also he painted a picture of a smokestack. When one member of the gay crowd in the bar disappeared permanently into the Atlantic just this side of the Azores, the young Kellys were almost glad, for it justified their aloof attitude.

But there was another reason Nicole was sorry they had committed themselves. She spoke to Nelson about it: “I passed that couple in the hall just now.”

“Who--the Mileses?”

“No, that young couple--about our age--the ones that were on the other motorbus, that we thought looked so nice, in Bir Rabalou after lunch, in the camel market.”

“They did look nice.”

“Charming,” she said emphatically; “the girl and man, both. I’m almost sure I’ve met the girl somewhere before.”

The couple referred to were sitting across the room at dinner, and Nicole found her eyes drawn irresistibly toward them. They, too, now had companions, and again Nicole, who had not talked to a girl of her own age for two months, felt a faint regret. The Mileses, being formally sophisticated and frankly snobbish, were a different matter. They had been to an alarming number of places and seemed to know all the flashing phantoms of the newspapers.

They dined on the hotel veranda under a sky that was low and full of the presence of a strange and watchful God; around the corners of the hotel the night already stirred with the sounds of which they had so often read but that were even so hysterically unfamiliar--drums from Senegal, a native flute, the selfish, effeminate whine of a camel, the Arabs pattering past in shoes made of old automobile tires, the wail of Magian prayer.

At the desk in the hotel, a fellow passenger was arguing monotonously with the clerk about the rate of exchange, and the inappropriateness added to the detachment which had increased steadily as they went south.

Mrs. Miles was the first to break the lingering silence; with a sort of impatience she pulled them with her, in from the night and up to the table.

“We really should have dressed. Dinner’s more amusing if people dress, because they feel differently in formal clothes. The English know that.”

“Dress here?” her husband objected. “I’d feel like that man in the ragged dress suit we passed today, driving the flock of sheep.”

“I always feel like a tourist if I’m not dressed.”

“Well, we are, aren’t we?” asked Nelson.

“I don’t consider myself a tourist. A tourist is somebody who gets up early and goes to cathedrals and talks about scenery.”

Nicole and Nelson, having seen all the official sights from Fez to Algiers, and taken reels of moving pictures and felt improved, confessed themselves, but decided that their experiences on the trip would not interest Mrs. Miles.

“Every place is the same,” Mrs. Miles continued. “The only thing that matters is who’s there. New scenery is fine for half an hour, but after that you want your own kind to see. That’s why some places have a certain vogue, and then the vogue changes and the people move on somewhere else. The place itself really never matters.”

“But doesn’t somebody first decide that the place is nice?” objected Nelson. “The first ones go there because they like the place.”

“Where were you going this spring?” Mrs. Miles asked.

“We thought of San Remo, or maybe Sorrento. We’ve never been to Europe before.”

“My children, I know both Sorrento and San Remo, and you won’t stand either of them for a week. They’re full of the most awful English, reading the Daily Mail and waiting for letters and talking about the most incredibly dull things. You might as well go to Brighton or Bournemouth and buy a white poodle and a sunshade and walk on the pier. How long are you staying in Europe?”

“We don’t know; perhaps several years.” Nicole hesitated. “Nelson came into a little money, and we wanted a change. When I was young, my father had asthma and I had to live in the most depressing health resorts with him for years; and Nelson was in the fur business in Alaska and he loathed it; so when we were free we came abroad. Nelson’s going to paint and I’m going to study singing.” She looked triumphantly at her husband. “So far, it’s been absolutely gorgeous.”

Mrs. Miles decided, from the evidence of the younger woman’s clothes, that it was quite a bit of money, and their enthusiasm was infectious.

“You really must go to Biarritz,” she advised them. “Or else come to Monte Carlo.”

“They tell me there’s a great show here,” said Miles, ordering champagne. “The Ouled Naïls. The concierge says they’re some kind of tribe of girls who come down from the mountains and learn to be dancers, and what not, till they’ve collected enough gold to go back to their mountains and marry. Well, they give a performance tonight.”

Walking over to the Café of the Ouled Naïls afterward, Nicole regretted that she and Nelson were not strolling alone through the ever-lower, ever-softer, ever-brighter night. Nelson had reciprocated the bottle of champagne at dinner, and neither of them was accustomed to so much. As they drew near the sad flute she didn’t want to go inside, but rather to climb to the top of a low hill where a white mosque shone clear as a planet through the night. Life was better than any show; closing in toward Nelson, she pressed his hand.

The little cave of a café was filled with the passengers from the two busses. The girls--light-brown, flat-nosed Berbers with fine, deep-shaded eyes--were already doing each one her solo on the platform. They wore cotton dresses, faintly reminiscent of Southern mammies; under these their bodies writhed in a slow nautch, culminating in a stomach dance, with silver belts bobbing wildly and their strings of real gold coins tinkling on their necks and arms. The flute player was also a comedian; he danced, burlesquing the girls. The drummer, swathed in goatskins like a witch doctor, was a true black from the Sudan.

Through the smoke of cigarettes each girl went in turn through the finger movement, like piano playing in the air--outwardly facile, yet, after a few moments, so obviously exacting--and then through the very simply languid yet equally precise steps of the feet--these were but preparation to the wild sensuality of the culminated dance.

Afterward there was a lull. Though the performance seemed not quite over, most of the audience gradually got up to go, but there was a whispering in the air.

“What is it?” Nicole asked her husband.

“Why, I believe--it appears that for a consideration the Ouled Naïls dance in more or less--ah--Oriental style--in very little except jewelry.”

“Oh.”

“We’re all staying,” Mr. Miles assured her jovially. “After all, we’re here to see the real customs and manners of the country; a little prudishness shouldn’t stand in our way.”

Most of the men remained, and several of the women. Nicole stood up suddenly.

“I’ll wait outside,” she said.

“Why not stay, Nicole? After all, Mrs. Miles is staying.”

The flute player was making preliminary flourishes. Upon the raised dais two pale brown children of perhaps fourteen were taking off their cotton dresses. For an instant Nicole hesitated, torn between repulsion and the desire not to appear to be a prig. Then she saw another young American woman get up quickly and start for the door. Recognizing the attractive young wife from the other bus, her own decision came quickly and she followed.

Nelson hurried after her. “I’m going if you go,” he said, but with evident reluctance.

“Please don’t bother. I’ll wait with the guide outside.”

“Well--” The drum was starting. He compromised: “I’ll only stay a minute. I want to see what it’s like.”

Waiting in the fresh night, she found that the incident had hurt her--Nelson’s not coming with her at once, giving as an argument the fact that Mrs. Miles was staying. From being hurt, she grew angry and made signs to the guide that she wanted to return to the hotel.

Twenty minutes later, Nelson appeared, angry with the anxiety at finding her gone, as well as to hide his guilt at having left her. Incredulous with themselves, they were suddenly in a quarrel.

Much later, when there were no sounds at all in Bou Saada and the nomads in the market place were only motionless bundles rolled up in their burnouses, she was asleep upon his shoulder. Life is progressive, no matter what our intentions, but something was harmed, some precedent of possible nonagreement was set. It was a love match, though, and it could stand a great deal. She and Nelson had passed lonely youths, and now they wanted the taste and smell of the living world; for the present they were finding it in each other.

A month later they were in Sorrento, where Nicole took singing lessons and Nelson tried to paint something new into the Bay of Naples. It was the existence they had planned and often read about. But they found, as so many have found, that the charm of idyllic interludes depends upon one person’s “giving the party”--which is to say, furnishing the background, the experience, the patience, against which the other seems to enjoy again the spells of pastoral tranquillity recollected from childhood. Nicole and Nelson were at once too old and too young, and too American, to fall into immediate soft agreement with a strange land. Their vitality made them restless, for as yet his painting had no direction and her singing no immediate prospect of becoming serious. They said they were not “getting anywhere”--the evenings were long, so they began to drink a lot of vin de Capri at dinner.

The English owned the hotel. They were aged, come South for good weather and tranquillity; Nelson and Nicole resented the mild tenor of their days. Could people be content to talk eternally about the weather, promenade the same walks, face the same variant of macaroni at dinner month after month? They grew bored, and Americans bored are already in sight of excitement. Things came to head all in one night.

Over a flask of wine at dinner they decided to go to Paris, settle in an apartment and work seriously. Paris promised metropolitan diversion, friends of their own age, a general intensity that Italy lacked. Eager with new hopes, they strolled into the salon after dinner, when, for the tenth time, Nelson noticed an ancient and enormous mechanical piano and was moved to try it.

Across the salon sat the only English people with whom they had had any connection--Gen. Sir Evelyne Fragelle and Lady Fragelle. The connection had been brief and unpleasant--seeing them walking out of the hotel in peignoirs to swim, she had announced, over quite a few yards of floor space, that it was disgusting and shouldn’t be allowed.

But that was nothing compared with her response to the first terrific bursts of sound from the electric piano. As the dust of years trembled off the keyboard at the vibration, she shot galvanically forward with the sort of jerk associated with the electric chair. Somewhat stunned himself by the sudden din of Waiting for the Robert E. Lee, Nelson had scarcely sat down when she projected herself across the room, her train quivering behind her, and, without glancing at the Kellys, turned off the instrument.

It was one of those gestures that are either plainly justified, or else outrageous. For a moment Nelson hesitated uncertainly; then, remembering Lady Fragelle’s arrogant remark about his bathing suit, he returned to the instrument in her still-billowing wake and turned it on again.

The incident had become international. The eyes of the entire salon fell eagerly upon the protagonists, watching for the next move. Nicole hurried after Nelson, urging him to let the matter pass, but it was too late. From the outraged English table there arose, joint by joint, Gen. Sir Evelyne Fragelle, faced with perhaps his most crucial situation since the relief of Ladysmith.

“‘T’lee outrageous!--’t’lee outrageous!”

“I beg your pardon,” said Nelson.

“Here for fifteen years!” screamed Sir Evelyne to himself. “Never heard of anyone doing such a thing before!”

“I gathered that this was put here for the amusement of the guests.”

Scorning to answer, Sir Evelyne knelt, reached for the catch, pushed it the wrong way, whereupon the speed and volume of the instrument tripled until they stood in a wild pandemonium of sound; Sir Evelyne livid with military emotions, Nelson on the point of maniacal laughter.

In a moment the firm hand of the hotel manager settled the matter; the instrument gulped and stopped, trembling a little from its unaccustomed outburst, leaving behind it a great silence in which Sir Evelyne turned to the manager.

“Most outrageous affair ever heard of in my life. My wife turned it off once, and he”--this was his first acknowledgment of Nelson’s identity as distinct from the instrument--”he put it on again!”

“This is a public room in a hotel,” Nelson protested. “The instrument is apparently here to be used.”

“Don’t get in an argument,” Nicole whispered. “They’re old.”

But Nelson said, “If there’s any apology, it’s certainly due to me.”

Sir Evelyne’s eye was fixed menacingly upon the manager, waiting for him to do his duty. The latter thought of Sir Evelyne’s fifteen years of residence, and cringed.

“It is not the habitude to play the instrument in the evening. The clients are each one quiet on his or her table.”

“American cheek!” snapped Sir Evelyne.

“Very well,” Nelson said; “we’ll relieve the hotel of our presence tomorrow.”

As a reaction from this incident, as a sort of protest against Sir Evelyne Fragelle, they went not to Paris but to Monte Carlo after all. They were through with being alone.

II

A little more than two years after the Kellys’ first visit to Monte Carlo, Nicole woke up one morning into what, though it bore the same name, had become to her a different place altogether.

In spite of hurried months in Paris or Biarritz, it was now home to them. They had a villa, they had a large acquaintance among the spring and summer crowd--a crowd which, naturally, did not include people on charted trips or the shore parties from Mediterranean cruises; these latter had become for them “tourists.”

They loved the Riviera in full summer with many friends there and the nights open and full of music. Before the maid drew the curtains this morning to shut out the glare, Nicole saw from her window the yacht of T. F. Golding, placid among the swells of the Monacan Bay, as if constantly bound on a romantic voyage not dependent upon actual motion.

The yacht had taken the slow tempo of the coast; it had gone no farther than to Cannes and back all summer, though it might have toured the world. The Kellys were dining on board that night.

Nicole spoke excellent French; she had five new evening dresses and four others that would do; she had her husband; she had two men in love with her, and she felt sad for one of them. She had her pretty face. At 10:30 she was meeting a third man, who was just beginning to be in love with her “in a harmless way.” At one she was having a dozen charming people to luncheon. All that.

“I’m happy,” she brooded toward the bright blinds. “I’m young and good-looking, and my name is often in the paper as having been here and there, but really I don’t care about shi-shi. I think it’s all awfully silly, but if you do want to see people, you might as well see the chic, amusing ones; and if people call you a snob, it’s envy, and they know it and everybody knows it.”

She repeated the substance of this to Oscar Dane on the Mont Agel golf course two hours later, and he cursed her quietly.

“Not at all,” he said. “You’re just getting to be an old snob. Do you call that crowd of drunks you run with amusing people? Why, they’re not even very swell. They’re so hard that they’ve shifted down through Europe like nails in a sack of wheat, till they stick out of it a little into the Mediterranean Sea.”

Annoyed, Nicole fired a name at him, but he answered: “Class C. A good solid article for beginners.”

“The Colbys--anyway, her.”

“Third flight.”

“Marquis and Marquise de Kalb.”

“If she didn’t happen to take dope and he didn’t have other peculiarities.”

“Well, then, where are the amusing people?” she demanded impatiently.

“Off by themselves somewhere. They don’t hunt in herds, except occasionally.”

“How about you? You’d snap up an invitation from every person I named. I’ve heard stories about you wilder than any you can make up. There’s not a man that’s known you six months that would take your check for ten dollars. You’re a sponge and a parasite and everything--”

“Shut up for a minute,” he interrupted. “I don’t want to spoil this drive. . . . I just don’t like to see you kid yourself,” he continued. “What passes with you for international society is just about as hard to enter nowadays as the public rooms at the Casino; and if I can make my living by sponging off it, I’m still giving twenty times more than I get. We dead heats are about the only people in it with any stuff, and we stay with it because we have to.”

She laughed, liking him immensely, wondering how angry Nelson would be when he found that Oscar had walked off with his nail scissors and his copy of the New York Herald this morning.

“Anyhow,” she thought afterward, as she drove home toward luncheon, “we’re getting out of it all soon, and we’ll be serious and have a baby. After this last summer.”

Stopping for a moment at a florist’s, she saw a young woman coming out with an armful of flowers. The young woman glanced at her over the heap of color, and Nicole perceived that she was extremely smart, and then that her face was familiar. It was someone she had known once, but only slightly; the name had escaped her, so she did not nod, and forgot the incident until that afternoon.

They were twelve for luncheon: The Goldings’ party from the yacht, Liddell and Cardine Miles, Mr. Dane--seven different nationalities she counted; among them an exquisite young French-woman, Madame Delauney, whom Nicole referred to lightly as “Nelson’s girl.” Noel Delauney was perhaps her closest friend; when they made up foursomes for golf or for trips, she paired off with Nelson; but today, as Nicole introduced her to someone as “Nelson’s girl,” the bantering phrase filled Nicole with distaste.

She said aloud at luncheon: “Nelson and I are going to get away from it all.”

Everybody agreed that they, too, were going to get away from it all.

“It’s all right for the English,” someone said, “because they’re doing a sort of dance of death--you know, gayety in the doomed fort, with the Sepoys at the gate. You can see it by their faces when they dance--the intensity. They know it and they want it, and they don’t see any future. But you Americans, you’re having a rotten time. If you want to wear the green hat or the crushed hat, or whatever it is, you always have to get a little tipsy.”

“We’re going to get away from it all,” Nicole said firmly, but something within her argued: “What a pity--this lovely blue sea, this happy time.” What came afterward? Did one just accept a lessening of tension? It was somehow Nelson’s business to answer that. His growing discontent that he wasn’t getting anywhere ought to explode into a new life for both of them, or rather a new hope and content with life. That secret should be his masculine contribution.

“Well, children, good-by.”

“It was a great luncheon.”

“Don’t forget about getting away from it all.”

“See you when--”

The guests walked down the path toward their cars. Only Oscar, just faintly flushed on liqueurs, stood with Nicole on the veranda, talking on and on about the girl he had invited up to see his stamp collection. Momentarily tired of people, impatient to be alone, Nicole listened for a moment and then, taking a glass vase of flowers from the luncheon table, went through the French windows into the dark, shadowy villa, his voice following her as he talked on and on out there.

It was when she crossed the first salon, still hearing Oscar’s monologue on the veranda, that she began to hear another voice in the next room, cutting sharply across Oscar’s voice.

“Ah, but kiss me again,” it said, stopped; Nicole stopped, too, rigid in the silence, now broken only by the voice on the porch.

“Be careful.” Nicole recognized the faint French accent of Noel Delauney.

“I’m tired of being careful. Anyhow, they’re on the veranda.”

“No, better the usual place.”

“Darling, sweet darling.”

The voice of Oscar Dane on the veranda grew weary and stopped and, as if thereby released from her paralysis, Nicole took a step--forward or backward, she did not know which. At the sound of her heel on the floor, she heard the two people in the next room breaking swiftly apart.

Then she went in. Nelson was lighting a cigarette; Noel, with her back turned, was apparently hunting for hat or purse on a chair. With blind horror rather than anger, Nicole threw, or rather pushed away from her, the glass vase which she carried. If at anyone, it was at Nelson she threw it, but the force of her feeling had entered the inanimate thing; it flew past him, and Noel Delauney, just turning about, was struck full on the side of her head and face.

“Say, there!” Nelson cried. Noel sank slowly into the chair before which she stood, her hand slowly rising to cover the side of her face. The jar rolled unbroken on the thick carpet, scattering its flowers.

“You look out!” Nelson was at Noel’s side, trying to take the hand away to see what had happened.

“C’est liquide,” gasped Noel in a whisper. “Est-ce que c’est le sang?”

He forced her hand away, and cried breathlessly, “No, it’s just water!” and then, to Oscar, who had appeared in the doorway: “Get some cognac!” and to Nicole: “You fool, you must be crazy!”

Nicole, breathing hard, said nothing. When the brandy arrived, there was a continuing silence, like that of people watching an operation, while Nelson poured a glass down Noel’s throat. Nicole signaled to Oscar for a drink, and, as if afraid to break the silence without it, they all had a brandy. Then Noel and Nelson spoke at once:

“If you can find my hat--”

“This is the silliest--”

“--I shall go immediately.”

“--thing I ever saw; I--”

They all looked at Nicole, who said: “Have her car drive right up to the door.” Oscar departed quickly.

“Are you sure you don’t want to see a doctor?” asked Nelson anxiously.

“I want to go.”

A minute later, when the car had driven away, Nelson came in and poured himself another glass of brandy. A wave of subsiding tension flowed over him, showing in his face; Nicole saw it, and saw also his gathering will to make the best he could of it.

“I want to know just why you did that,” he demanded. “No, don’t go, Oscar.” He saw the story starting out into the world.

“What possible reason--”

“Oh, shut up!” snapped Nicole.

“If I kissed Noel, there’s nothing so terrible about it. It’s of absolutely no significance.”

She made a contemptuous sound. “I heard what you said to her.”

“You’re crazy.”

He said it as if she were crazy, and wild rage filled her.

“You liar! All this time pretending to be so square, and so particular what I did, and all the time behind my back you’ve been playing around with that little--”

She used a serious word, and as if maddened with the sound of it, she sprang toward his chair. In protection against this sudden attack, he flung up his arm quickly, and the knuckles of his open hand struck across the socket of her eye. Covering her face with her hand as Noel had done ten minutes previously, she fell sobbing to the floor.

“Hasn’t this gone far enough?” Oscar cried.

“Yes,” admitted Nelson, “I guess it has.”

“You go on out on the veranda and cool off.”

He got Nicole to a couch and sat beside her, holding her hand.

“Brace up--brace up, baby,” he said, over and over. “What are you--Jack Dempsey? You can’t go around hitting French women; they’ll sue you.”

“He told her he loved her,” she gasped hysterically. “She said she’d meet him at the same place. . . . Has he gone there now?”

“He’s out on the porch, walking up and down, sorry as the devil that he accidentally hit you, and sorry he ever saw Noel Delauney.”

“Oh, yes!”

“You might have heard wrong, and it doesn’t prove a thing, anyhow.”

After twenty minutes, Nelson came in suddenly and sank down on his knees by the side of his wife. Mr. Oscar Dane, reënforced in his idea that he gave much more than he got, backed discreetly and far from unwillingly to the door.

In another hour, Nelson and Nicole, arm in arm, emerged from their villa and walked slowly down to the Café de Paris. They walked instead of driving, as if trying to return to the simplicity they had once possessed, as if they were trying to unwind something that had become visibly tangled. Nicole accepted his explanations, not because they were credible, but because she wanted passionately to believe them. They were both very quiet and sorry.

The Café de Paris was pleasant at that hour, with sunset drooping through the yellow awnings and the red parasols as through stained glass. Glancing about, Nicole saw the young woman she had encountered that morning. She was with a man now, and Nelson placed them immediately as the young couple they had seen in Algeria, almost three years ago.

“They’ve changed,” he commented. “I suppose we have, too, but not so much. They’re harder-looking and he looks dissipated. Dissipation always shows in light eyes rather than in dark ones. The girl is tout ce qu’il y a de chic, as they say, but there’s a hard look in her face too.”

“I like her.”

“Do you want me to go and ask them if they are that same couple?”

“No! That’d be like lonesome tourists do. They have their own friends.”

At that moment people were joining them at their table.

“Nelson, how about tonight?” Nicole asked a little later. “Do you think we can appear at the Goldings’ after what’s happened?”

“We not only can but we’ve got to. If the story’s around and we’re not there, we’ll just be handing them a nice juicy subject of conversation. . . . Hello! What on earth--”

Something strident and violent had happened across the café; a woman screamed and the people at one table were all on their feet, surging back and forth like one person. Then the people at the other tables were standing and crowding forward; for just a moment the Kellys saw the face of the girl they had been watching, pale now, and distorted with anger. Panic-stricken, Nicole plucked at Nelson’s sleeve.

“I want to get out. I can’t stand any more today. Take me home. Is everybody going crazy?”

On the way home, Nelson glanced at Nicole’s face and perceived with a start that they were not going to dinner on the Goldings’ yacht after all. For Nicole had the beginnings of a well-defined and unmistakable black eye--an eye that by eleven o’clock would be beyond the aid of all the cosmetics in the principality. His heart sank and he decided to say nothing about it until they reached home.

III

There is some wise advice in the catechism about avoiding the occasions of sin, and when the Kellys went up to Paris a month later they made a conscientious list of the places they wouldn’t visit any more and the people they didn’t want to see again. The places included several famous bars, all the night clubs except one or two that were highly decorous, all the early-morning clubs of every description, and all summer resorts that made whoopee for its own sake--whoopee triumphant and unrestrained--the main attraction of the season.

The people they were through with included three-fourths of those with whom they had passed the last two years. They did this not in snobbishness, but for self-preservation, and not without a certain fear in their hearts that they were cutting themselves off from human contacts forever.

But the world is always curious, and people become valuable merely for their inaccessibility. They found that there were others in Paris who were only interested in those who had separated from the many. The first crowd they had known was largely American, salted with Europeans; the second was largely European, peppered with Americans. This latter crowd was “society,” and here and there it touched the ultimate milieu, made up of individuals of high position, of great fortune, very occasionally of genius, and always of power. Without being intimate with the great, they made new friends of a more conservative type. Moreover, Nelson began to paint again; he had a studio, and they visited the studios of Brancusi and Leger and Deschamps. It seemed that they were more part of something than before, and when certain gaudy rendezvous were mentioned, they felt a contempt for their first two years in Europe, speaking of their former acquaintances as “that crowd” and as “people who waste your time.”

So, although they kept their rules, they entertained frequently at home and they went out to the houses of others. They were young and handsome and intelligent; they came to know what did go and what did not go, and adapted themselves accordingly. Moreover, they were naturally generous and willing, within the limits of common sense, to pay.

When one went out one generally drank. This meant little to Nicole, who had a horror of losing her soigné air, losing a touch of bloom or a ray of admiration, but Nelson, thwarted somewhere, found himself quite as tempted to drink at these small dinners as in the more frankly rowdy world. He was not a drunk, he did nothing conspicuous or sodden, but he was no longer willing to go out socially without the stimulus of liquor. It was with the idea of bringing him to a serious and responsible attitude that Nicole decided after a year in Paris, that the time had come to have a baby.

This was coincidental with their meeting Count Chiki Sarolai. He was an attractive relic of the Austrian court, with no fortune or pretense to any, but with solid social and financial connections in France. His sister was married to the Marquis de la Clos d’Hirondelle, who, in addition to being of the ancient noblesse, was a successful banker in Paris. Count Chiki roved here and there, frankly sponging, rather like Oscar Dane, but in a different sphere.

His penchant was Americans; he hung on their words with a pathetic eagerness, as if they would sooner or later let slip their mysterious formula for making money. After a casual meeting, his interest gravitated to the Kellys. During Nicole’s months of waiting he was in the house continually, tirelessly interested in anything that concerned American crime, slang, finance or manners. He came in for a luncheon or dinner when he had no other place to go, and with tacit gratitude he persuaded his sister to call on Nicole, who was immensely flattered.

It was arranged that when Nicole went to the hospital he would stay at the appartement and keep Nelson company--an arrangement of which Nicole didn’t approve, since they were inclined to drink together. But the day on which it was decided, he arrived with news of one of his brother-in-law’s famous canal-boat parties on the Seine, to which the Kellys were to be invited and which, conveniently enough, was to occur three weeks after the arrival of the baby. So, when Nicole moved out to the American Hospital Count Chiki moved in.

The baby was a boy. For a while Nicole forgot all about people and their human status and their value. She even wondered at the fact that she had become such a snob, since everything seemed trivial compared with the new individual that, eight times a day, they carried to her breast.

After two weeks she and the baby went back to the apartment, but Chiki and his valet stayed on. It was understood, with that subtlety the Kellys had only recently begun to appreciate, that he was merely staying until after his brother-in-law’s party, but the apartment was crowded and Nicole wished him gone. But her old idea, that if one had to see people they might as well be the best, was carried out in being invited to the De la Clos d’Hirondelles’.

As she lay in her chaise longue the day before the event, Chiki explained the arrangements, in which he had evidently aided.

“Everyone who arrives must drink two cocktails in the American style before they can come aboard--as a ticket of admission.”

“But I thought that very fashionable French--Faubourg St. Germain and all that--didn’t drink cocktails.”

“Oh, but my family is very modern. We adopt many American customs.”

“Who’ll be there?”

“Everyone! Everyone in Paris.”

Great names swam before her eyes. Next day she could not resist dragging the affair into conversation with her doctor. But she was rather offended at the look of astonishment and incredulity that came into his eyes.

“Did I understand you aright?” he demanded. “Did I understand you to say that you were going to a ball tomorrow?”

“Why, yes,” she faltered. “Why not?”

“My dear lady, you are not going to stir out of the house for two more weeks; you are not going to dance or do anything strenuous for two more after that.”

“That’s ridiculous!” she cried. “It’s been three weeks already! Esther Sherman went to America after--”

“Never mind,” he interrupted. “Every case is different. There is a complication which makes it positively necessary for you to follow my orders.”

“But the idea is that I’ll just go for two hours, because of course I’ll have to come home to Sonny--”

“You’ll not go for two minutes.”

She knew, from the seriousness of his tone, that he was right, but, perversely, she did not mention the matter to Nelson. She said, instead, that she was tired, that possibly she might not go, and lay awake that night measuring her disappointment against her fear. She woke up for Sonny’s first feeding, thinking to herself: “But if I just take ten steps from a limousine to a chair and just sit half an hour--”

At the last minute the pale green evening dress from Callets, draped across a chair in her bedroom, decided her. She went.

Somewhere, during the shuffle and delay on the gangplank while the guests went aboard and were challenged and drank down their cocktails with attendant gayety, Nicole realized that she had made a mistake. There was, at any rate, no formal receiving line and, after greeting their hosts, Nelson found her a chair on deck, where presently her faintness disappeared.

Then she was glad she had come. The boat was hung with fragile lanterns, which blended with the pastels of the bridges and the reflected stars in the dark Seine, like a child’s dream out of the Arabian Nights. A crowd of hungry-eyed spectators were gathered on the banks. Champagne moved past in platoons like a drill of bottles, while the music, instead of being loud and obtrusive, drifted down from the upper deck like frosting dripping over a cake. She became aware presently that they were not the only Americans there--across the deck were the Liddell Mileses, whom she had not seen for several years.

Other people from that crowd were present, and she felt a faint disappointment. What if this was not the marquis’ best party? She remembered her mother’s second days at home. She asked Chiki, who was at her side, to point out celebrities, but when she inquired about several people whom she associated with that set, he replied vaguely that they were away, or coming later, or could not be there. It seemed to her that she saw across the room the girl who had made the scene in the Café de Paris at Monte Carlo, but she could not be sure, for with the faint almost imperceptible movement of the boat, she realized that she was growing faint again. She sent for Nelson to take her home.

“You can come right back, of course. You needn’t wait for me, because I’m going right to bed.”

He left her in the hands of the nurse, who helped her upstairs and aided her to undress quickly.

“I’m desperately tired,” Nicole said. “Will you put my pearls away?”

“Where?”

“In the jewel box on the dressing table.”

“I don’t see it,” said the nurse after a minute.

“Then it’s in a drawer.”

There was a thorough rummaging of the dressing table, without result.

“But of course it’s there.” Nicole attempted to rise, but fell back, exhausted. “Look for it, please, again. Everything is in it--all my mother’s things and my engagement things.”

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Kelly. There’s nothing in this room that answers to that description.”

“Wake up the maid.”

The maid knew nothing; then, after a persistent cross-examination, she did know something. Count Sarolai’s valet had gone out, carrying his suitcase, half an hour after madame left the house.

Writhing in sharp and sudden pain, with a hastily summoned doctor at her side, it seemed to Nicole hours before Nelson came home. When he arrived, his face was deathly pale and his eyes were wild. He came directly into her room.

“What do you think?” he said savagely. Then he saw the doctor. “Why, what’s the matter?”

“Oh, Nelson, I’m sick as a dog and my jewel box is gone, and Chiki’s valet has gone. I’ve told the police. . . . Perhaps Chiki would know where the man--”

“Chiki will never come in this house again,” he said slowly. “Do you know whose party that was? Have you got any idea whose party that was?” He burst into wild laughter. “It was our party--our party, do you understand? We gave it--we didn’t know it, but we did.”

“Maintenant, monsieur, il ne faut pas exciter madame--” the doctor began.

“I thought it was odd when the marquis went home early, but I didn’t suspect till the end. They were just guests--Chiki invited all the people. After it was over, the caterers and musicians began to come up and ask me where to send their bills. And that damn Chiki had the nerve to tell me he thought I knew all the time. He said that all he’d promised was that it would be his brother-in-law’s sort of party, and that his sister would be there. He said perhaps I was drunk, or perhaps I didn’t understand French--as if we’d ever talked anything but English to him.”

“Don’t pay!” she said. “I wouldn’t think of paying.”

“So I said, but they’re going to sue--the boat people and the others. They want twelve thousand dollars.”

She relaxed suddenly. “Oh, go away!” she cried. “I don’t care! I’ve lost my jewels and I’m sick, sick!”

IV

This is the story of a trip abroad, and the geographical element must not be slighted. Having visited North Africa, Italy, the Riviera, Paris and points in between, it was not surprising that eventually the Kellys should go to Switzerland. Switzerland is a country where very few things begin, but many things end.

Though there was an element of choice in their other ports of call, the Kellys went to Switzerland because they had to. They had been married a little more than four years when they arrived one spring day at the lake that is the center of Europe--a placid, smiling spot with pastoral hillsides, a backdrop of mountains and waters of postcard blue, waters that are a little sinister beneath the surface with all the misery that has dragged itself here from every corner of Europe. Weariness to recuperate and death to die. There are schools, too, and young people splashing at the sunny plages; there is Bonivard’s dungeon and Calvin’s city, and the ghosts of Byron and Shelley still sail the dim shores by night; but the Lake Geneva that Nelson and Nicole came to was the dreary one of sanatoriums and rest hotels.

For, as if by some profound sympathy that had continued to exist beneath the unlucky destiny that had pursued their affairs, health had failed them both at the same time; Nicole lay on the balcony of a hotel coming slowly back to life after two successive operations, while Nelson fought for life against jaundice in a hospital two miles away. Even after the reserve force of twenty-nine years had pulled him through, there were months ahead during which he must live quietly. Often they wondered why, of all those who sought pleasure over the face of Europe, this misfortune should have come to them.

“There’ve been too many people in our lives,” Nelson said. “We’ve never been able to resist people. We were so happy the first year when there weren’t any people.”

Nicole agreed. “If we could ever be alone--really alone--we could make up some kind of life for ourselves. We’ll try, won’t we, Nelson?”

But there were other days when they both wanted company desperately, concealing it from each other. Days when they eyed the obese, the wasted, the crippled and the broken of all nationalities who filled the hotel, seeking for one who might be amusing. It was a new life for them, turning on the daily visits of their two doctors, the arrival of the mail and newspapers from Paris, the little walk into the hillside village or occasionally the descent by funicular to the pale resort on the lake, with its Kursaal, its grass beach, its tennis clubs and sight-seeing busses. They read Tauchnitz editions and yellow-jacketed Edgar Wallaces; at a certain hour each day they watched the baby being given its bath; three nights a week there was a tired and patient orchestra in the lounge after dinner, that was all.

And sometimes there was a booming from the vine-covered hills on the other side of the lake, which meant that cannons were shooting at hail-bearing clouds, to save the vineyard from an approaching storm; it came swiftly, first falling from the heavens and then falling again in torrents from the mountains, washing loudly down the roads and stone ditches; it came with a dark, frightening sky and savage filaments of lightning and crashing, world-splitting thunder, while ragged and destroyed clouds fled along before the wind past the hotel. The mountains and the lake disappeared completely; the hotel crouched alone amid tumult and chaos and darkness.

It was during such a storm, when the mere opening of a door admitted a tornado of rain and wind into the hall, that the Kellys for the first time in months saw someone they knew. Sitting downstairs with other victims of frayed nerves, they became aware of two new arrivals--a man and woman whom they recognized as the couple, first seen in Algiers, who had crossed their path several times since. A single unexpressed thought flashed through Nelson and Nicole. It seemed like destiny that at last here in this desolate place they should know them, and watching, they saw other couples eying them in the same tentative way. Yet something held the Kellys back. Had they not just been complaining that there were too many people in their lives?

Later, when the storm had dozed off into a quiet rain, Nicole found herself near the girl on the glass veranda. Under cover of reading a book, she inspected the face closely. It was an inquisitive face, she saw at once, possibly calculating; the eyes, intelligent enough, but with no peace in them, swept over people in a single quick glance as though estimating their value. “Terrible egoist,” Nicole thought, with a certain distaste. For the rest, the cheeks were wan, and there were little pouches of ill health under the eyes; these combining with a certain flabbiness of arms and legs to give an impression of unwholesomeness. She was dressed expensively, but with a hint of slovenliness, as if she did not consider the people of the hotel important.

On the whole, Nicole decided she did not like her; she was glad that they had not spoken, but she was rather surprised that she had not noticed these things when the girl crossed her path before.

Telling Nelson her impression at dinner, he agreed with her.

“I ran into the man in the bar, and I noticed we both took nothing but mineral water, so I started to say something. But I got a good look at his face in the mirror and I decided not to. His face is so weak and self-indulgent that it’s almost mean--the kind of face that needs half a dozen drinks really to open the eyes and stiffen the mouth up to normal.”

After dinner the rain stopped and the night was fine outside. Eager for the air, the Kellys wandered down into the dark garden; on their way they passed the subjects of their late discussion, who withdrew abruptly down a side path.

“I don’t think they want to know us any more than we do them,” Nicole laughed.

They loitered among the wild rosebushes and the beds of damp-sweet, indistinguishable flowers. Below the hotel, where the terrace fell a thousand feet to the lake, stretched a necklace of lights that was Montreux and Vevey, and then, in a dim pendant, Lausanne; a blurred twinkling across the lake was Evian and France. From somewhere below--probably the Kursaal--came the sound of full-bodied dance music--American, they guessed, though now they heard American tunes months late, mere distant echoes of what was happening far away.

Over the Dent du Midi, over a black bank of clouds that was the rearguard of the receding storm, the moon lifted itself and the lake brightened; the music and the far-away lights were like hope, like the enchanted distance from which children see things. In their separate hearts Nelson and Nicole gazed backward to a time when life was all like this. Her arm went through his quietly and drew him close.

“We can have it all again,” she whispered. “Can’t we try, Nelson?”

She paused as two dark forms came into the shadows nearby and stood looking down at the lake below.

Nelson put his arm around Nicole and pulled her closer.

“It’s just that we don’t understand what’s the matter,” she said. “Why did we lose peace and love and health, one after the other? If we knew, if there was anybody to tell us, I believe we could try. I’d try so hard.”

The last clouds were lifting themselves over the Bernese Alps. Suddenly, with a final intensity, the west flared with pale white lightning. Nelson and Nicole turned, and simultaneously the other couple turned, while for an instant the night was as bright as day. Then darkness and a last low peal of thunder, and from Nicole a sharp, terrified cry. She flung herself against Nelson; even in the darkness she saw that his face was as white and strained as her own.

“Did you see?” she cried in a whisper. “Did you see them?”

“Yes!”

“They’re us! They’re us! Don’t you see?”

Trembling, they clung together. The clouds merged into the dark mass of mountains; looking around after a moment, Nelson and Nicole saw that they were alone together in the tranquil moonlight.

OUTSIDE THE CABINET-MAKER’S

The Century Magazine (December, 1928)

The automobile stopped at the corner of Sixteenth and some dingy-looking street. The lady got out. The man and the little girl stayed in the car.

“I’m going to tell him it can’t cost more than twenty dollars,” said the lady.

“All right. Have you the plans?”

“Oh, yes”--she reached for her bag in the back seat--”at least I have now.”

“Dites qu’il ne faut pas avoir les forts placards,” said the man. “Ni le bon bois.”

“All right.”

“I wish you wouldn’t talk French,” said the little girl.

“Et il faut avoir un bon ‘height.’ L’un des Murphys était comme ça.”

He held his hand five feet from the ground. The lady went through a door lettered “Cabinet-Maker” and disappeared up a small stairs.

The man and the little girl looked around unexpectantly. The neighborhood was red brick, vague, quiet. There were a few darkies doing something or other up the street and an occasional automobile went by. It was a fine November day.

“Listen,” said the man to the little girl, “I love you.”

“I love you too,” said the little girl, smiling politely.

“Listen,” the man continued. “Do you see that house over the way?”

The little girl looked. It was a flat in back of a shop. Curtains masked most of its interior, but there was a faint stir behind them. On one window a loose shutter banged from back to forth every few minutes. Neither the man nor the little girl had ever seen the place before.

“There’s a Fairy Princess behind those curtains,” said the man. “You can’t see her but she’s there, kept concealed by an Ogre. Do you know what an Ogre is?”

“Yes.”

“Well, this Princess is very beautiful with long golden hair.”

They both regarded the house. Part of a yellow dress appeared momentarily in the window.

“That’s her,” the man said. “The people who live there are guarding her for the Ogre. He’s keeping the King and Queen prisoner ten thousand miles below the earth. She can’t get out until the Prince finds the three--” He hesitated.

“And what, Daddy? The three what?”

“The three--Look! There she is again.”

“The three what?”

“The three--the three stones that will release the King and Queen.”

He yawned.

“And what then?”

“Then he can come and tap three times on each window and that will set her free.”

The lady’s head emerged from the upper story of the cabinetmaker’s.

“He’s busy,” she called down. “Gosh, what a nice day!”

“And what, Daddy?” asked the little girl. “Why does the Ogre want to keep her there?”

“Because he wasn’t invited to the christening. The Prince has already found one stone in President Coolidge’s collar-box. He’s looking for the second in Iceland. Every time he finds a stone the room where the Princess is kept turns blue. Gosh!”

“What, Daddy?”

“Just as you turned away I could see the room turn blue. That means he’s found the second stone.”

“Gosh!” said the little girl. “Look! It turned blue again, that means he’s found the third stone.”

Aroused by the competition the man looked around cautiously and his voice grew tense.

“Do you see what I see?” he demanded. “Coming up the street--there’s the Ogre himself, disguised--you know: transformed, like Mombi in ‘The Land of Oz.’“

“I know.”

They both watched. The small boy, extraordinarily small and taking very long steps, went to the door of the flat and knocked; no one answered but he didn’t seem to expect it or to be greatly disappointed. He took some chalk from his pocket and began drawing pictures under the door-bell.

“He’s making magic signs,” whispered the man. “He wants to be sure that the Princess doesn’t get out this door. He must know that the Prince has set the King and Queen free and will be along for her pretty soon.”

The small boy lingered for a moment; then he went to a window and called an unintelligible word. After a while a woman threw the window open and made an answer that the crisp wind blew away.

“She says she’s got the Princess locked up,” explained the man.

“Look at the Ogre,” said the little girl. “He’s making magic signs under the window too. And on the sidewalk. Why?”

“He wants to keep her from getting out, of course. That’s why he’s dancing. That’s a charm too--it’s a magic dance.”

The Ogre went away, taking very big steps. Two men crossed the street ahead and passed out of sight.

“Who are they, Daddy?”

“They’re two of the King’s soldiers. I think the army must be gathering over on Market Street to surround the house. Do you know what ‘surround’ means?”

“Yes. Are those men soldiers too?”

“Those too. And I believe that the old one just behind is the King himself. He’s keeping bent down low like that so that the Ogre’s people won’t recognize him.”

“Who is the lady?”

“She’s a Witch, a friend of the Ogre’s.”

The shutter blew closed with a bang and then slowly opened again.

“That’s done by the good and bad fairies,” the man explained. “They’re invisible, but the bad fairies want to close the shutter so nobody can see in and the good ones want to open it.”

“The good fairies are winning now.”

“Yes.” He looked at the little girl. “You’re my good fairy.”

“Yes. Look, Daddy! What is that man?”

“He’s in the King’s army too.” The clerk of Mr. Miller, the jeweler, went by with a somewhat unmartial aspect. “Hear the whistle? That means they’re gathering. And listen--there goes the drum.”

“There’s the Queen, Daddy. Look at there. Is that the Queen?”

“No, that’s a girl called Miss Television.” He yawned. He began to think of something pleasant that had happened yesterday. He went into a trance. Then he looked at the little girl and saw that she was quite happy. She was six and lovely to look at. He kissed her.

“That man carrying the cake of ice is also one of the King’s soldiers,” he said. “He’s going to put the ice on the Ogre’s head and freeze his brains so he can’t do any more harm.”

Her eyes followed the man down street. Other men passed. A darky in a yellow darky’s overcoat drove by with a cart marked The Del Upholstery Co. The shutter banged again and then slowly opened.

“See, Daddy, the good fairies are winning again.”

The man was old enough to know that he would look back to that time--the tranquil street and the pleasant weather and the mystery playing before the child’s eyes, mystery which he had created, but whose luster and texture he could never see or touch any more himself. Again he touched his daughter’s cheek instead and in payment fitted another small boy and limping man into the story.

“Oh, I love you,” he said.

“I know, Daddy,” she answered, abstractedly. She was staring at the house. For a moment he closed his eyes and tried to see with her but he couldn’t see--those ragged blinds were drawn against him forever. There were only the occasional darkies and the small boys and the weather that reminded him of more glamorous mornings in the past.

The lady came out of the cabinet-maker’s shop.

“How did it go?” he asked.

“Good. Il dit qu’il a fait les maisons de poupée pour les Du Ponts. Il va le faire.”

“Combien?”

“Vingt-cinq. I’m sorry I was so long.”

“Look, Daddy, there go a lot more soldiers!”

They drove off. When they had gone a few miles the man turned around and said, “We saw the most remarkable thing while you were there.” He summarized the episode. “It’s too bad we couldn’t wait and see the rescue.”

“But we did,” the child cried. “They had the rescue in the next street. And there’s the Ogre’s body in that yard there. The King and Queen and Prince were killed and now the Princess is queen.”

He had liked his King and Queen and felt that they had been too summarily disposed of.

“You had to have a heroine,” he said rather impatiently.

“She’ll marry somebody and make him Prince.”

They rode on abstractedly. The lady thought about the doll’s house, for she had been poor and had never had one as a child, the man thought how he had almost a million dollars and the little girl thought about the odd doings on the dingy street that they had left behind.

THE ROUGH CROSSING

The Saturday Evening Post (8 June 1929)

I

Once on the long, covered piers, you have come into a ghostly country that is no longer Here and not yet There. Especially at night. There is a hazy yellow vault full of shouting, echoing voices. There is the rumble of trucks and the clump of trunks, the strident chatter of a crane and the first salt smell of the sea. You hurry through, even though there’s time. The past, the continent, is behind you; the future is that glowing mouth in the side of the ship; this dim turbulent alley is too confusedly the present.

Up the gangplank, and the vision of the world adjusts itself, narrows. One is a citizen of a commonwealth smaller than Andorra. One is no longer so sure of anything. Curiously unmoved the men at the purser’s desk, cell-like the cabin, disdainful the eyes of voyagers and their friends, solemn the officer who stands on the deserted promenade deck thinking something of his own as he stares at the crowd below. A last odd idea that one didn’t really have to come, then the loud, mournful whistles, and the thing--certainly not the boat, but rather a human idea, a frame of mind--pushes forth into the big dark night.

Adrian Smith, one of the celebrities on board--not a very great celebrity, but important enough to be bathed in flashlight by a photographer who had been given his name, but wasn’t sure what his subject ‘did’--Adrian Smith and his blonde wife, Eva, went up to the promenade deck, passed the melancholy ship’s officer, and, finding a quiet aerie, put their elbows on the rail.

‘We’re going!’ he cried presently, and they both laughed in ecstasy. ‘We’ve escaped. They can’t get us now.’

‘Who?’

He waved his hand vaguely at the civic tiara.

‘All those people out there. They’ll come with their posses and their warrants and list of crimes we’ve committed, and ring the bell at our door on Park Avenue and ask for the Adrian Smiths, but what ho! the Adrian Smiths and their children and nurse are off for France.’

‘You make me think we really have committed crimes.’

‘They can’t have you,’ he said frowning. ‘That’s one thing they’re after me about--they know I haven’t got any right to a person like you, and they’re furious. That’s one reason I’m glad to get away.’

‘Darling,’ said Eva.

She was twenty-six--five years younger than he. She was something precious to everyone who knew her.

‘I like this boat better than the Majestic or the Aquitania,’she remarked, unfaithful to the ships that had served their honeymoon.

‘It’s much smaller.’

‘But it’s very slick and it has all those little shops along the corridors. And I think the staterooms are bigger.’

‘The people are very formal--did you notice?--as if they thought everyone else was a card sharp. And in about four days half of them will be calling the other half by their first names.’

Four of the people came by now--a quartet of young girls abreast, making a circuit of the deck. Their eight eyes swept momentarily towards Adrian and Eva, and then swept automatically back, save for one pair which lingered for an instant with a little start. They belonged to one of the girls in the middle, who was, indeed, the only passenger of the four. She was not more than eighteen--a dark little beauty with the fine crystal gloss over her that, in brunettes, takes the place of a blonde’s bright glow.

‘Now, who’s that?’ wondered Adrian. ‘I’ve seen her before.’

‘She’s pretty,’ said Eva.

‘Yes.’ He kept wondering, and Eva deferred momentarily to his distraction; then, smiling up at him, she drew him back into their privacy.

‘Tell me more,’ she said.

‘About what?’

‘About us--what a good time we’ll have, and how we’ll be much better and happier, and very close always.’

‘How could we be any closer?’ His arm pulled her to him.

‘But I mean never even quarrel any more about silly things. You know, I made up my mind when you gave me my birthday present last week’--her fingers caressed the fine seed pearls at her throat--’that I’d try never to say a mean thing to you again.’

‘You never have, my precious.’

Yet even as he strained her against his side she knew that the moment of utter isolation had passed almost before it had begun. His antennae were already out, feeling over this new world.

‘Most of the people look rather awful,’ he said--’little and swarthy and ugly. Americans didn’t use to look like that.’

‘They look dreary,’ she agreed. ‘Let’s not get to know anybody, but just stay together.’

A gong was beating now, and stewards were shouting down the decks, ‘Visitors ashore, please!’ and voices rose to a strident chorus. For a while the gangplanks were thronged; then they were empty, and the jostling crowd behind the barrier waved and called unintelligible things, and kept up a grin of good will. As the stevedores began to work at the ropes a flat-faced, somewhat befuddled young man arrived in a great hurry and was assisted up the gangplank by a porter and a taxi driver. The ship having swallowed him as impassively as though he were a missionary for Beirut, a low, portentous vibration began. The pier with its faces commenced to slide by, and for a moment the boat was just a piece accidentally split off from it; then the faces became remote, voiceless, and the pier was one among many yellow blurs along the water front. Now the harbour flowed swiftly toward the sea.

On a northern parallel of latitude a hurricane was forming and moving south by southeast preceded by a strong west wind. On its course it was destined to swamp the Peter I. Eudin of Amsterdam, with a crew of sixty-six, to break a boom on the largest boat in the world, and to bring grief and want to the wives of several hundred seamen. This liner, leaving New York Sunday evening, would enter the zone of the storm Tuesday, and of the hurricane late Wednesday night.

II

Tuesday afternoon Adrian and Eva paid their first visit to the smoking-room. This was not in accord with their intentions--they had ‘never wanted to see a cocktail again’ after leaving America--but they had forgotten the staccato loneliness of ships, and all activity centred about the bar. So they went in for just a minute.

It was full. There were those who had been there since luncheon, and those who would be there until dinner, not to mention a faithful few who had been there since nine this morning. It was a prosperous assembly, taking its recreation at bridge, solitaire, detective stories, alcohol, argument and love. Up to this point you could have matched it in the club or casino life of any country, but over it all played a repressed nervous energy, a barely disguised impatience that extended to old and young alike. The cruise had begun, and they had enjoyed the beginning, but the show was not varied enough to last six days, and already they wanted it to be over.

At a table near them Adrian saw the pretty girl who had stared at him on the deck the first night. Again he was fascinated by her loveliness; there was no mist upon the brilliant gloss that gleamed through the smoky confusion of the room. He and Eva had decided from the passenger list that she was probably ‘Miss Elizabeth D’Amido and maid’, and he had heard her called Betsy as he walked past a deck-tennis game. Among the young people with her was the flat-nosed youth who had been ‘poured on board’, the night of their departure; yesterday he had walked the deck morosely, but he was apparently reviving. Miss D’Amido whispered something to him, and he looked over at the Smiths with curious eyes. Adrian was new enough at being a celebrity to turn self-consciously away.

‘There’s a little roll. Do you feel it?’ Eva demanded.

‘Perhaps we’d better split a pint of champagne.’

While he gave the order a short colloquy was taking place at the other table; presently a young man rose and came over to them.

‘Isn’t this Mr Adrian Smith?’

‘Yes.’

‘We wondered if we couldn’t put you down for the deck-tennis tournament. We’re going to have a deck-tennis tournament.’

‘Why--’ Adrian hesitated.

‘My name’s Stacomb,’ burst out the young man. ‘We all know your--your plays or whatever it is, and all that--and we wondered if you wouldn’t like to come over to our table.’

Somewhat overwhelmed, Adrian laughed: Mr Stacomb, glib, soft, slouching, waited; evidently under the impression that he had delivered himself of a graceful compliment.

Adrian, understanding that, too, replied: ‘Thanks, but perhaps you’d better come over here.’

‘We’ve got a bigger table.’

‘But we’re older and more--more settled.’

The young man laughed kindly, as if to say, ‘That’s all right.’

‘Put me down,’ said Adrian. ‘How much do I owe you?’

‘One buck. Call me Stac.’

‘Why?’ asked Adrian, startled.

‘It’s shorter.’

When he had gone they smiled broadly.

‘Heavens,’ Eva gasped, ‘I believe they are coming over.’

They were. With a great draining of glasses, calling of waiters, shuffling of chairs, three boys and two girls moved to the Smiths’ table. If there was any diffidence, it was confined to the hosts; for the new additions gathered around them eagerly, eyeing Adrian with respect--too much respect--as if to say: ‘This was probably a mistake and won’t be amusing, but maybe we’ll get something out of it to help us in our after life, like at school.’

In a moment Miss D’Amido changed seats with one of the men and placed her radiant self at Adrian’s side, looking at him with manifest admiration.

‘I fell in love with you the minute I saw you,’ she said audibly and without self-consciousness; ‘so I’ll take all the blame for butting in. I’ve seen your play four times.’

Adrian called a waiter to take their orders.

‘You see,’ continued Miss D’Amido, ‘we’re going into a storm, and you might be prostrated the rest of the trip, so I couldn’t take any chances.’

He saw that there was no undertone or innuendo in what she said, nor the need of any. The words themselves were enough, and the deference with which she neglected the young men and bent her politeness on him was somehow very touching. A little glow went over him; he was having rather more than a pleasant time.

Eva was less entertained; but the flat-nosed young man, whose name was Butterworth, knew people that she did, and that seemed to make the affair less careless and casual. She did not like meeting new people unless they had ‘something to contribute’, and she was often bored by the great streams of them, of all types and conditions and classes, that passed through Adrian’s life. She herself ‘had everything’--which is to say that she was well endowed with talents and with charm--and the mere novelty of people did not seem a sufficient reason for eternally offering everything up to them.

Half an hour later when she rose to go and see the children, she was content that the episode was over. It was colder on deck, with a damp that was almost rain, and there was a perceptible motion. Opening the door of her state-room she was surprised to find the cabin steward sitting languidly on her bed, his head slumped upon the upright pillow. He looked at her listlessly as she came in, but made no move to get up.

‘When you’ve finished your nap you can fetch me a new pillow-case,’ she said briskly.

Still the man didn’t move. She perceived then that his face was green.

‘You can’t be seasick in here,’ she announced firmly. ‘You go and lie down in your own quarters.’

‘It’s me side,’ he said faintly. He tried to rise, gave out a little rasping sound of pain and sank back again. Eva rang for the stewardess.

A steady pitch, toss, roll had begun in earnest and she felt no sympathy for the steward, but only wanted to get him out as quick as possible. It was outrageous for a member of the crew to be seasick. When the stewardess came in Eva tried to explain this, but now her own head was whirring, and throwing herself on the bed, she covered her eyes.

‘It’s his fault,’ she groaned when the man was assisted from the room. ‘I was all right and it made me sick to look at him. I wish he’d die.’

In a few minutes Adrian came in.

‘Oh, but I’m sick!’ she cried.

‘Why, you poor baby.’ He leaned over and took her in his arms. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘I was all right upstairs, but there was a steward--Oh, I’m too sick to talk.’

‘You’d better have dinner in bed.’

‘Dinner! Oh, my heavens!’

He waited solicitously, but she wanted to hear his voice, to have it drown out the complaining sound of the beams.

‘Where’ve you been?’

‘Helping to sign up people for the tournament.’

‘Will they have it if it’s like this? Because if they do I’ll just lose for you.’

He didn’t answer; opening her eyes, she saw that he was frowning.

‘I didn’t know you were going in the doubles,’ he said.

‘Why, that’s the only fun.’

‘I told the D’Amido girl I’d play with her.’

‘Oh.’

‘I didn’t think. You know I’d much rather play with you.’

‘Why didn’t you, then?’ she asked coolly.

‘It never occurred to me.’

She remembered that on their honeymoon they had been in the finals and won a prize. Years passed. But Adrian never frowned in this regretful way unless he felt a little guilty. He stumbled about, getting his dinner clothes out of the trunk, and she shut her eyes.

When a particular violent lurch startled her awake again he was dressed and tying his tie. He looked healthy and fresh, and his eyes were bright.

‘Well, how about it?’ he inquired. ‘Can you make it, or no?’

‘No.’

‘Can I do anything for you before I go?’

‘Where are you going?’

‘Meeting those kids in the bar. Can I do anything for you?’

‘No.’

‘Darling, I hate to leave you like this.’

‘Don’t be silly. I just want to sleep.’

That solicitous frown--when she knew he was crazy to be out and away from the close cabin. She was glad when the door closed. The thing to do was to sleep, sleep.

Up--down--sideways. Hey there, not so far! Pull her round the corner there! Now roll her, right--left--Crea-eak! Wrench! Swoop!

Some hours later Eva was dimly conscious of Adrian bending over her. She wanted him to put his arms around her and draw her up out of this dizzy lethargy, but by the time she was fully awake the cabin was empty. He had looked in and gone. When she awoke next the cabin was dark and he was in bed.

The morning was fresh and cool, and the sea was just enough calmer to make Eva think she could get up. They breakfasted in the cabin and with Adrian’s help she accomplished an unsatisfactory makeshift toilet and they went up on the boat deck. The tennis tournament had already begun and was furnishing action for a dozen amateur movie cameras, but the majority of passengers were represented by lifeless bundles in deck chairs beside untasted trays.

Adrian and Miss D’Amido played their first match. She was deft and graceful; blatantly well. There was even more warmth behind her ivory skin than there had been the day before. The strolling first officer stopped and talked to her; half a dozen men whom she couldn’t have known three days ago called her Betsy. She was already the pretty girl of the voyage, the cynosure of starved ship’s eyes.

But after a while Eva preferred to watch the gulls in the wireless masts and the slow slide of the roll-top sky. Most of the passengers looked silly with their movie cameras that they had all rushed to get and now didn’t know what to use for, but the sailors painting the lifeboat stanchions were quiet and beaten and sympathetic, and probably wished, as she did, that the voyage was over.

Butterworth sat down on the deck beside her chair.

‘They’re operating on one of the stewards this morning. Must be terrible in this sea.’

‘Operating? What for?’ she asked listlessly.

‘Appendicitis. They have to operate now because we’re going into worse weather. That’s why they’re having the ship’s party tonight.’

‘Oh, the poor man!’ she cried, realizing it must be her steward.

Adrian was showing off now by being very courteous and thoughtful in the game.

‘Sorry. Did you hurt yourself? . . . No, it was my fault. . . You better put on your coat right away, pardner, or you’ll catch cold.’

The match was over and they had won. Flushed and hearty, he came up to Eva’s chair.

‘How do you feel?’

‘Terrible.’

‘Winners are buying a drink in the bar,’ he said apologetically.

‘I’m coming, too,’ Eva said, but an immediate dizziness made her sink back in her chair.

‘You’d better stay here. I’ll send you up something.’

She felt that his public manner had hardened towards her slightly.

‘You’ll come back?’

‘Oh, right away.’

She was alone on the boat deck, save for a solitary ship’s officer who slanted obliquely as he paced the bridge. When the cocktail arrived she forced herself to drink it, and felt better. Trying to distract her mind with pleasant things, she reached back to the sanguine talks that she and Adrian had had before sailing: There was the little villa in Brittany, the children learning French--that was all she could think of now--the little villa in Brittany, the children learning French--so she repeated the words over and over to herself until they became as meaningless as the wide white sky. The why of their being here had suddenly eluded her; she felt unmotivated, accidental, and she wanted Adrian to come back quick, all responsive and tender, to reassure her. It was in the hope that there was some secret of graceful living, some real compensation for the lost, careless confidence of twenty-one, that they were going to spend a year in France.

The day passed darkly, with fewer people around and a wet sky falling. Suddenly it was five o’clock, and they were all in the bar again, and Mr Butterworth was telling her about his past. She took a good deal of champagne, but she was seasick dimly through it, as if the illness was her soul trying to struggle up through some thickening incrustation of abnormal life.

‘You’re my idea of a Greek goddess, physically,’ Butterworth was saying.

It was pleasant to be Mr Butterworth’s idea of a Greek goddess physically, but where was Adrian? He and Miss D’Amido had gone out on a forward deck to feel the spray. Eva heard herself promising to get out her colours and paint the Eiffel Tower on Butterworth’s shirt front for the party tonight.

When Adrian and Betsy D’Amido, soaked with spray, opened the door with difficulty against the driving wind and came into the now-covered security of the promenade deck, they stopped and turned toward each other.

‘Well?’ she said. But he only stood with his back to the rail, looking at her, afraid to speak. She was silent, too, because she wanted him to be first; so for a moment nothing happened. Then she made a step towards him, and he took her in his arms and kissed her forehead.

‘You’re just sorry for me, that’s all.’ She began to cry a little. ‘You’re just being kind.’

‘I feel terribly about it.’ His voice was taut and trembling.

‘Then kiss me.’

The deck was empty. He bent over her swiftly.

‘No, really kiss me.’

He could not remember when anything had felt so young and fresh as her lips. The rain lay, like tears shed for him, upon the softly shining porcelain cheeks. She was all new and immaculate, and her eyes were wild.

‘I love you,’ she whispered. ‘I can’t help loving you, can I? When I first saw you--oh, not on the boat, but over a year ago--Grace Heally took me to a rehearsal and suddenly you jumped up in the second row and began telling them what to do. I wrote you a letter and tore it up.’

‘We’ve got to go.’

She was weeping as they walked along the deck. Once more, imprudently, she held up her face to him at the door of her cabin. His blood was beating through him in wild tumult as he walked on to the bar.

He was thankful that Eva scarcely seemed to notice him or to know that he had been gone. After a moment he pretended an interest in what she was doing.

‘What’s that?’

‘She’s painting the Eiffel Tower on my shirt front for tonight,’ explained Butterworth.

‘There,’ Eva laid away her brush and wiped her hands.

‘How’s that?’

‘A chef-d’oeuvre.’

Her eyes swept around the watching group, lingered casually upon Adrian.

‘You’re wet. Go and change.’

‘You come too.’

‘I want another champagne cocktail.’

‘You’ve had enough. It’s time to dress for the party.’

Unwilling she closed her paints and preceded him.

‘Stacomb’s got a table for nine,’ he remarked as they walked along the corridor.

‘The younger set,’ she said with unnecessary bitterness. ‘Oh, the younger set. And you just having the time of your life--with a child.’

They had a long discussion in the cabin, unpleasant on her part and evasive on his, which ended when the ship gave a sudden gigantic heave, and Eva, the edge worn off her champagne, felt ill again. There was nothing to do but to have a cocktail in the cabin, and after that they decided to go to the party--she believed him now, or she didn’t care.

Adrian was ready first--he never wore fancy dress.

‘I’ll go on up. Don’t be long.’

‘Wait for me, please; it’s rocking so.’

He sat down on a bed, concealing his impatience.

‘You don’t mind waiting, do you? I don’t want to parade up there all alone.’

She was taking a tuck in an oriental costume rented from the barber.

‘Ships make people feel crazy,’ she said. ‘I think they’re awful.’

‘Yes,’ he muttered absently.

‘When it gets very bad I pretend I’m in the top of a tree, rocking to and fro. But finally I get pretending everything, and finally I have to pretend I’m sane when I know I’m not.’

‘If you get thinking that way you will go crazy.’

‘Look, Adrian.’ She held up the string of pearls before clasping them on. ‘Aren’t they lovely?’

In Adrian’s impatience she seemed to move around the cabin like a figure in a slow-motion picture. After a moment he demanded:

‘Are you going to be long? It’s stifling in here.’

‘You go on!’ she fired up.

‘I don’t want--’

‘Go on, please! You just make me nervous trying to hurry me.’

With a show of reluctance he left her. After a moment’s hesitation he went down a flight to a deck below and knocked at a door.

‘Betsy.’

‘Just a minute.’

She came out in the corridor attired in a red pea-jacket and trousers borrowed from the elevator boy.

‘Do elevator boys have fleas?’ she demanded. ‘I’ve got everything in the world on under this as a precaution.’

‘I had to see you,’ he said quickly.

‘Careful,’ she whispered. ‘Mrs Worden, who’s supposed to be chaperoning me, is across the way. She’s sick.’

‘I’m sick for you.’

They kissed suddenly, clung close together in the narrow corridor, swaying to and fro with the motion of the ship.

‘Don’t go away,’ she murmured.

‘I’ve got to. I’ve--’

Her youth seemed to flow into him, bearing him up into a delicate romantic ecstasy that transcended passion. He couldn’t relinquish it; he had discovered something that he had thought was lost with his own youth forever. As he walked along the passage he knew that he had stopped thinking, no longer dared to think.

He met Eva going into the bar.

‘Where’ve you been?’ she asked with a strained smile.

‘To see about the table.’

She was lovely; her cool distinction conquered the trite costume and filled him with a resurgence of approval and pride. They sat down at a table.

The gale was rising hour by hour and the mere traversing of a passage had become a rough matter. In every stateroom trunks were lashed to the washstands, and the Vestris disaster was being reviewed in detail by nervous ladies, tossing, ill and wretched, upon their beds. In the smoking-room a stout gentleman had been hurled backward and suffered a badly cut head; and now the lighter chairs and tables were stacked and roped against the wall.

The crowd who had donned fancy dress and were dining together had swollen to about sixteen. The only remaining qualification for membership was the ability to reach the smoking-room. They ranged from a Groton-Harvard lawyer to an ungrammatical broker they had nicknamed Gyp the Blood, but distinctions had disappeared; for the moment they were samurai, chosen from several hundred for their triumphant resistance to the storm.

The gala dinner, overhung sardonically with lanterns and streamers, was interrupted by great communal slides across the room, precipitate retirements and spilled wine, while the ship roared and complained that under the panoply of a palace it was a ship after all. Upstairs afterward a dozen couples tried to dance, shuffling and galloping here and there in a crazy fandango, thrust around fantastically by a will alien to their own. In view of the condition of tortured hundreds below, there grew to be something indecent about it like a revel in a house of mourning, and presently there was an egress of the ever-dwindling survivors towards the bar.

As the evening passed, Eva’s feeling of unreality increased. Adrian had disappeared--presumably with Miss D’Amido--and her mind, distorted by illness and champagne, began to enlarge upon the fact; annoyance changed slowly to dark and brooding anger, grief to desperation. She had never tried to bind Adrian, never needed to--for they were serious people, with all sorts of mutual interests, and satisfied with each other--but this was a breach of the contract, this was cruel. How could he think that she didn’t know?

It seemed several hours later that he leaned over her chair in the bar where she was giving some woman an impassioned lecture upon babies, and said:

‘Eva, we’d better turn in.’

Her lip curled. ‘So that you can leave me there and then come back to your eighteen-year--’

‘Be quiet.’

‘I won’t come to bed.’

‘Very well. Good night.’

More time passed and the people at the table changed. The stewards wanted to close up the room, and thinking of Adrian--her Adrian--off somewhere saying tender things to someone fresh and lovely, Eva began to cry.

‘But he’s gone to bed,’ her last attendants assured her. ‘We saw him go.’

She shook her head. She knew better. Adrian was lost. The long seven-year dream was broken. Probably she was punished for something she had done; as this thought occurred to her the shrieking timbers overhead began to mutter that she had guessed at last. This was for the selfishness to her mother, who hadn’t wanted her to marry Adrian; for all the sins and omissions of her life. She stood up, saying she must go out and get some air.

The deck was dark and drenched with wind and rain. The ship pounded through valleys, fleeing from black mountains of water that roared towards it. Looking out at the night, Eva saw that there was no chance for them unless she could make atonement, propitiate the storm. It was Adrian’s love that was demanded of her. Deliberately she unclasped her pearl necklace, lifted it to her lips--for she knew that with it went the freshest, fairest part of her life--and flung it out into the gale.

III

When Adrian awoke it was lunchtime, but he knew that some heavier sound than the bugle had called him up from his deep sleep. Then he realized that the trunk had broken loose from its lashings and was being thrown back and forth between a wardrobe and Eva’s bed. With an exclamation he jumped up, but she was unharmed--still in costume and stretched out in deep sleep. When the steward had helped him secure the trunk, Eva opened a single eye.

‘How are you?’ he demanded, sitting on the side of her bed.

She closed the eye, opened it again.

‘We’re in a hurricane now,’ he told her. ‘The steward says it’s the worst he’s seen in twenty years.’

‘My head,’ she muttered. ‘Hold my head.’

‘How?’

‘In front. My eyes are going out. I think I’m dying.’

‘Nonsense. Do you want the doctor?’

She gave a funny little gasp that frightened him; he rang and sent the steward for the doctor.

The young doctor was pale and tired. There was a stubble of beard upon his face. He bowed curtly as he came in and, turning to Adrian, said with scant ceremony:

‘What’s the matter?’

‘My wife doesn’t feel well.’

‘Well, what is it you want--a bromide?’

A little annoyed by his shortness, Adrian said: ‘You’d better examine her and see what she needs.’

‘She needs a bromide,’ said the doctor. ‘I’ve given orders that she is not to have any more to drink on this ship.’

‘Why not?’ demanded Adrian in astonishment.

‘Don’t you know what happened last night?’

‘Why, no, I was asleep.’

‘Mrs Smith wandered around the boat for an hour, not knowing what she was doing. A sailor was sent to follow her, and then the medical stewardess tried to get her to bed, and your wife insulted her.’

‘Oh, my heavens!’ cried Eva faintly.

‘The nurse and I had both been up all night with Steward Carton, who died this morning.’ He picked up his case. ‘I’ll send down a bromide for Mrs Smith. Good-bye.’

For a few minutes there was silence in the cabin. Then Adrian put his arm around her quickly.

‘Never mind,’ he said. ‘We’ll straighten it out.’

‘I remember now.’ Her voice was an awed whisper. ‘My pearls. I threw them overboard.’

‘Threw them overboard!’

‘Then I began looking for you.’

‘But I was here in bed.’

‘I didn’t believe it; I thought you were with that girl.’

‘She collapsed during dinner. I was taking a nap down here.’

Frowning, he rang the bell and asked the steward for luncheon and a bottle of beer.

‘Sorry, but we can’t serve any beer to your cabin, sir.’

When he went out Adrian exploded: ‘This is an outrage. You were simply crazy from that storm and they can’t be so high-handed. I’ll see the captain.’

‘Isn’t that awful?’ Eva murmured. ‘The poor man died.’

She turned over and began to sob into her pillow. There was a knock at the door.

‘Can I come in?’

The assiduous Mr Butterworth, surprisingly healthy and immaculate, came into the crazily tipping cabin.

‘Well, how’s the mystic?’ he demanded of Eva. ‘Do you remember praying to the elements in the bar last night?’

‘I don’t want to remember anything about last night.’

They told him about the stewardess, and with the telling the situation lightened; they all laughed together.

‘I’m going to get you some beer to have with your luncheon,’ Butterworth said. ‘You ought to get up on deck.’

‘Don’t go,’ Eva said. ‘You look so cheerful and nice.’

‘Just for ten minutes.’

When he had gone, Adrian rang for two baths.

‘The thing is to put on our best clothes and walk proudly three times around the deck,’ he said.

‘Yes.’ After a moment she added abstractedly: ‘I like that young man. He was awfully nice to me last night when you’d disappeared.’

The bath steward appeared with the information that bathing was too dangerous today. They were in the midst of the wildest hurricane on the North Atlantic in ten years; there were two broken arms this morning from attempts to take baths. An elderly lady had been thrown down a staircase and was not expected to live. Furthermore, they had received the SOS signal from several boats this morning.

‘Will we go to help them?’

‘They’re all behind us, sir, so we have to leave them to the Mauretania. If we tried to turn in this sea the portholes would be smashed.’

This array of calamities minimized their own troubles. Having eaten a sort of luncheon and drunk the beer provided by Butterworth, they dressed and went on deck.

Despite the fact that it was only possible to progress step by step, holding on to rope or rail, more people were abroad than on the day before. Fear had driven them from their cabins, where the trunks bumped and the waves pounded the portholes, and they awaited momentarily the call to the boats. Indeed, as Adrian and Eva stood on the transverse deck above the second class, there was a bugle call, followed by a gathering of stewards and stewardesses on the deck below. But the boat was sound: it had outlasted one of its cargo--Steward James Carton was being buried at sea.

It was very British and sad. There were the rows of stiff, disciplined men and women standing in the driving rain, and there was a shape covered by the flag of the Empire that lived by the sea. The chief purser read the service, a hymn was sung, the body slid off into the hurricane. With Eva’s burst of wild weeping for this humble end, some last string snapped within her. Now she really didn’t care. She responded eagerly when Butterworth suggested that he get some champagne to their cabin. Her mood worried Adrian; she wasn’t used to so much drinking and he wondered what he ought to do. At his suggestion that they sleep instead, she merely laughed, and the bromide the doctor had sent stood untouched on the washstand. Pretending to listen to the insipidities of several Mr Stacombs, he watched her; to his surprise and discomfort she seemed on intimate and even sentimental terms with Butterworth and he wondered if this was a form of revenge for his attention to Betsy D’Amido.

The cabin was full of smoke, the voices went on incessantly, the suspension of activity, the waiting for the storm’s end, was getting on his nerves. They had been at sea only four days; it was like a year.

The two Mr Stacombs left finally, but Butterworth remained. Eva was urging him to go for another bottle of champagne.

‘We’ve had enough,’ objected Adrian. ‘We ought to go to bed.’

‘I won’t go to bed!’ she burst out. ‘You must be crazy! You play around all you want, and then, when I find somebody I--I like, you want to put me to bed.’

‘You’re hysterical.’

‘On the contrary, I’ve never been so sane.’

‘I think you’d better leave us, Butterworth,’ Adrian said. ‘Eva doesn’t know what she’s saying.’

‘He won’t go, I won’t let him go.’ She clasped Butterworth’s hand passionately. ‘He’s the only person that’s been half decent to me.’

‘You’d better go, Butterworth,’ repeated Adrian.

The young man looked at him uncertainly.

‘It seems to me you’re being unjust to your wife,’ he ventured.

‘My wife isn’t herself.’

‘That’s no reason for bullying her.’

Adrian lost his temper. ‘You get out of here!’ he cried.

The two men looked at each other for a moment in silence. Then Butterworth turned to Eva, said, ‘I’ll be back later,’ and left the cabin.

‘Eva, you’ve got to pull yourself together,’ said Adrian when the door closed.

She didn’t answer, looked at him from sullen, half-closed eyes.

‘I’ll order dinner here for us both and then we’ll try to get some sleep.’

‘I want to go up and send a wireless.’

‘Who to?’

‘Some Paris lawyer. I want a divorce.’

In spite of his annoyance, he laughed. ‘Don’t be silly.’

‘Then I want to see the children.’

‘Well, go and see them. I’ll order dinner.’

He waited for her in the cabin twenty minutes. Then impatiently he opened the door across the corridor; the nurse told him that Mrs Smith had not been there.

With a sudden prescience of disaster he ran upstairs, glanced in the bar, the salons, even knocked at Butterworth’s door. Then a quick round of the decks, feeling his way through the black spray and rain. A sailor stopped him at a network of ropes.

‘Orders are no one goes by, sir. A wave has gone over the wireless room.’

‘Have you seen a lady?’

‘There was a young lady here--’ He stopped and glanced around. ‘Hello, she’s gone.’

‘She went up the stairs!’ Adrian said anxiously. ‘Up to the wireless room!’

The sailor ran up to the boat deck; stumbling and slipping, Adrian followed. As he cleared the protected sides of the companionway, a tremendous body struck the boat a staggering blow and, as she keeled over to an angle of forty-five degrees, he was thrown in a helpless roll down the drenched deck, to bring up dizzy and bruised against a stanchion.

‘Eva!’ he called. His voice was soundless in the black storm. Against the faint light of the wireless-room window he saw the sailor making his way forward.

‘Eva!’

The wind blew him like a sail up against a lifeboat. Then there was another shuddering crash, and high over his head, over the very boat, he saw a gigantic, glittering white wave, and in the split second that it balanced there he became conscious of Eva, standing beside a ventilator twenty feet away. Pushing out from the stanchion, he lunged desperately toward her, just as the wave broke with a smashing roar. For a moment the rushing water was five feet deep, sweeping with enormous force towards the side, and then a human body was washed against him, and frantically he clutched it and was swept with it back towards the rail. He felt his body bump against it, but desperately he held on to his burden; then, as the ship rocked slowly back, the two of them, still joined by his fierce grip, were rolled out exhausted on the wet planks. For a moment he knew no more.

IV

Two days later, as the boat train moved tranquilly south toward Paris, Adrian tried to persuade his children to look out the window at the Norman countryside.

‘It’s beautiful,’ he assured them. ‘All the little farms like toys. Why, in heaven’s name, won’t you look?’

‘I like the boat better,’ said Estelle.

Her parents exchanged an infanticidal glance.

‘The boat is still rocking for me,’ Eva said with a shiver. ‘Is it for you?’

‘No. Somehow, it all seems a long way off. Even the passengers looked unfamiliar going through the customs.’

‘Most of them hadn’t appeared above ground before.’

He hesitated. ‘By the way, I cashed Butterworth’s cheque for him.’

‘You’re a fool. You’ll never see the money again.’

‘He must have needed it pretty badly or he would not have come to me.’

A pale and wan girl, passing along the corridor, recognized them and put her head through the doorway.

‘How do you feel?’

‘Awful.’

‘Me, too,’ agreed Miss D’Amido. ‘I’m vainly hoping my fiancé will recognize me at the Gare du Nord. Do you know two waves went over the wireless room?’

‘So we heard,’ Adrian answered dryly.

She passed gracefully along the corridor and out of their life.

‘The real truth is that none of it happened,’ said Adrian after a moment. ‘It was a nightmare--an incredibly awful nightmare.’

‘Then, where are my pearls?’

‘Darling, there are better pearls in Paris. I’ll take the responsibility for those pearls. My real belief is that you saved the boat.’

‘Adrian, let’s never get to know anyone else, but just stay together always--just we two.’

He tucked her arm under his and they sat close. ‘Who do you suppose those Adrian Smiths on the boat were?’ he demanded. ‘It certainly wasn’t me.’

‘Nor me.’

‘It was two other people,’ he said, nodding to himself. ‘There are so many Smiths in this world.’

SIX OF ONE--

Redbook (February 1932)

Barnes stood on the wide stairs looking down through a wide hall into the living-room of the country place and at the group of youths. His friend Schofield was addressing some benevolent remarks to them, and Barnes did not want to interrupt; as he stood there, immobile, he seemed to be drawn suddenly into rhythm with the group below; he perceived them as statuesque beings, set apart, chiseled out of the Minnesota twilight that was setting on the big room.

In the first place all five, the two young Schofields and their friends, were fine-looking boys, very American, dressed in a careless but not casual way over well-set-up bodies, and with responsive faces open to all four winds. Then he saw that they made a design, the faces profile upon profile, the heads blond and dark, turning toward Mr. Schofield, the erect yet vaguely lounging bodies, never tense but ever ready under the flannels and the soft angora wool sweaters, the hands placed on other shoulders, as if to bring each one into the solid freemasonry of the group. Then suddenly, as though a group of models posing for a sculptor were being dismissed, the composition broke and they all moved toward the door. They left Barnes with a sense of having seen something more than five young men between sixteen and eighteen going out to sail or play tennis or golf, but having gained a sharp impression of a whole style, a whole mode of youth, something different from his own less assured, less graceful generation, something unified by standards that he didn’t know. He wondered vaguely what the standards of 1920 were, and whether they were worth anything--had a sense of waste, of much effort for a purely esthetic achievement. Then Schofield saw him and called him down into the living-room.

“Aren’t they a fine bunch of boys?” Schofield demanded. “Tell me, did you ever see a finer bunch?”

“A fine lot,” agreed Barnes, with a certain lack of enthusiasm. He felt a sudden premonition that his generation in its years of effort had made possible a Periclean age, but had evolved no prospective Pericles. They had set the scene: was the cast adequate?

“It isn’t just because two of them happen to be mine,” went on Schofield. “It’s self-evident. You couldn’t match that crowd in any city in the country. First place, they’re such a husky lot. Those two little Kavenaughs aren’t going to be big men--more like their father; but the oldest one could make any college hockey-team in the country right now.”

“How old are they?” asked Barnes.

“Well, Howard Kavenaugh, the oldest, is nineteen--going to Yale next year. Then comes my Wister--he’s eighteen, also going to Yale next year. You liked Wister, didn’t you? I don’t know anybody who doesn’t. He’d make a great politician, that kid. Then there’s a boy named Larry Patt who wasn’t here today--he’s eighteen too, and he’s State golf champion. Fine voice too; he’s trying to get in Princeton.”

“Who’s the blond-haired one who looks like a Greek god?”

“That’s Beau Lebaume. He’s going to Yale, too, if the girls will let him leave town. Then there’s the other Kavenaugh, the stocky one--he’s going to be an even better athlete than his brother. And finally there’s my youngest, Charley; he’s sixteen,” Schofield sighed reluctantly. “But I guess you’ve heard all the boasting you can stand.”

“No, tell me more about them--I’m interested. Are they anything more than athletes?”

“Why, there’s not a dumb one in the lot, except maybe Beau Lebaume; but you can’t help liking him anyhow. And every one of them’s a natural leader. I remember a few years ago a tough gang tried to start something with them, calling them ‘candies’--well, that gang must be running yet. They sort of remind me of young knights. And what’s the matter with their being athletes? I seem to remember you stroking the boat at New London, and that didn’t keep you from consolidating railroad systems and--”

“I took up rowing because I had a sick stomach,” said Barnes. “By the way, are these boys all rich?”

“Well, the Kavenaughs are, of course; and my boys will have something.”

Barnes’ eyes twinkled.

“So I suppose since they won’t have to worry about money, they’re brought up to serve the State,” he suggested. “You spoke of one of your sons having a political talent and their all being like young knights, so I suppose they’ll go out for public life and the army and navy.”

“I don’t know about that,” Schofield’s voice sounded somewhat alarmed. “I think their fathers would be pretty disappointed if they didn’t go into business. That’s natural, isn’t it?”

“It’s natural, but it isn’t very romantic,” said Barnes good-humoredly.

“You’re trying to get my goat,” said Schofield. “Well, if you can match that--”

“They’re certainly an ornamental bunch,” admitted Barnes. “They’ve got what you call glamour. They certainly look like the cigarette ads in the magazine; but--”

“But you’re an old sour-belly,” interrupted Schofield. “I’ve explained that these boys are all well-rounded. My son Wister led his class at school this year, but I was a darn’ sight prouder that he got the medal for best all-around boy.”

The two men faced each other with the uncut cards of the future on the table before them. They had been in college together, and were friends of many years’ standing. Barnes was childless, and Schofield was inclined to attribute his lack of enthusiasm to that.

“I somehow can’t see them setting the world on fire, doing better than their fathers,” broke out Barnes suddenly. “The more charming they are, the harder it’s going to be for them. In the East people are beginning to realize what wealthy boys are up against. Match them? Maybe not now.” He leaned forward, his eyes lighting up. “But I could pick six boys from any high-school in Cleveland, give them an education, and I believe that ten years from this time your young fellows here would be utterly outclassed. There’s so little demanded of them, so little expected of them--what could be softer than just to have to go on being charming and athletic?”

“I know your idea,” objected Schofield scoffingly. “You’d go to a big municipal high-school and pick out the six most brilliant scholars--”

“I’ll tell you what I’ll do--” Barnes noticed that he had unconsciously substituted “I will” for “I would,” but he didn’t correct himself. “I’ll go to the little town in Ohio, where I was born--there probably aren’t fifty or sixty boys in the high-school there, and I wouldn’t be likely to find six geniuses out of that number.”

“And what?”

“I’ll give them a chance. If they fail, the chance is lost. That is a serious responsibility, and they’ve got to take it seriously. That’s what these boys haven’t got--they’re only asked to be serious about trivial things.” He thought for a moment. “I’m going to do it.”

“Do what?”

“I’m going to see.”

A fortnight later he was back in the small town in Ohio where he had been born, where, he felt, the driving emotions of his own youth still haunted the quiet streets. He interviewed the principal of the high-school, who made suggestions; then by the, for Barnes, difficult means of making an address and afterward attending a reception, he got in touch with teachers and pupils. He made a donation to the school, and under cover of this found opportunities of watching the boys at work and at play.

It was fun--he felt his youth again. There were some boys that he liked immediately, and he began a weeding-out process, inviting them in groups of five or six to his mother’s house, rather like a fraternity rushing freshman. When a boy interested him, he looked up his record and that of his family--and at the end of a fortnight he had chosen five boys.

In the order in which he chose them, there was first Otto Schlach, a farmer’s son who had already displayed extraordinary mechanical aptitude and a gift for mathematics. Schlach was highly recommended by his teachers, and he welcomed the opportunity offered him of entering the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

A drunken father left James Matsko as his only legacy to the town of Barnes’ youth. From the age of twelve, James had supported himself by keeping a newspaper-and-candy store with a three-foot frontage; and now at seventeen he was reputed to have saved five hundred dollars. Barnes found it difficult to persuade him to study money and banking at Columbia, for Matsko was already assured of his ability to make money. But Barnes had prestige as the town’s most successful son, and he convinced Matsko that otherwise he would lack frontage, like his own place of business.

Then there was Jack Stubbs, who had lost an arm hunting, but in spite of this handicap played on the high-school football team. He was not among the leaders in studies; he had developed no particular bent; but the fact that he had overcome that enormous handicap enough to play football--to tackle and to catch punts--convinced Barnes that no obstacles would stand in Jack Stubbs’ way.

The fourth selection was George Winfield, who was almost twenty. Because of the death of his father, he had left school at fourteen, helped to support his family for four years, and then, things being better, he had come back to finish high-school. Barnes felt, therefore, that Winfield would place a serious value on an education.

Next came a boy whom Barnes found personally antipathetic. Louis Ireland was at once the most brilliant scholar and most difficult boy at school. Untidy, insubordinate and eccentric, Louis drew scurrilous caricatures behind his Latin book, but when called upon inevitably produced a perfect recitation. There was a big talent nascent somewhere in him--it was impossible to leave him out.

The last choice was the most difficult. The remaining boys were mediocrities, or at any rate they had so far displayed no qualities that set them apart. For a time Barnes, thinking patriotically of his old university, considered the football captain, a virtuosic halfback who would have been welcome on any Eastern squad; but that would have destroyed the integrity of the idea.

He finally chose a younger boy, Gordon Vandervere, of a rather higher standing than the others. Vandervere was the handsomest and one of the most popular boys in school. He had been intended for college, but his father, a harassed minister, was glad to see the way made easy.

Barnes was content with himself; he felt godlike in being able to step in to mold these various destinies. He felt as if they were his own sons, and he telegraphed Schofield in Minneapolis:

HAVE CHOSEN HALF A DOZEN OF THE OTHER, AND AM BACKING THEM AGAINST THE WORLD.

And now, after all this biography, the story begins. . . .

The continuity of the frieze is broken. Young Charley Schofield had been expelled from Hotchkiss. It was a small but painful tragedy--he and four other boys, nice boys, popular boys, broke the honor system as to smoking. Charley’s father felt the matter deeply, varying between disappointment about Charley and anger at the school. Charley came home to Minneapolis in a desperate humor and went to the country day-school while it was decided what he was to do.

It was still undecided in midsummer. When school was over, he spent his time playing golf, or dancing at the Minnekada Club--he was a handsome boy of eighteen, older than his age, with charming manners, with no serious vices, but with a tendency to be easily influenced by his admirations. His principal admiration at the time was Gladys Irving, a young married woman scarcely two years older than himself. He rushed her at the club dances, and felt sentimentally about her, though Gladys on her part was in love with her husband and asked from Charley only the confirmation of her own youth and charm that a belle often needs after her first baby.

Sitting out with her one night on the veranda of the Lafayette Club, Charley felt a necessity to boast to her, to pretend to be more experienced, and so more potentially protective.

“I’ve seen a lot of life for my age,” he said. “I’ve done things I couldn’t even tell you about.”

Gladys didn’t answer.

“In fact last week--” he began, and thought better of it. “In any case I don’t think I’ll go to Yale next year--I’d have to go East right away, and tutor all summer. If I don’t go, there’s a job open in Father’s office; and after Wister goes back to college in the fall, I’ll have the roadster to myself.”

“I thought you were going to college,” Gladys said coldly.

“I was. But I’ve thought things over, and now I don’t know. I’ve usually gone with older boys, and I feel older than boys my age. I like older girls, for instance.” When Charley looked at her then suddenly, he seemed unusually attractive to her--it would be very pleasant to have him here, to cut in on her at dances all summer. But Gladys said:

“You’d be a fool to stay here.”

“Why?”

“You started something--you ought to go through with it. A few years running around town, and you won’t be good for anything.”

“You think so,” he said indulgently.

Gladys didn’t want to hurt him or to drive him away from her; yet she wanted to say something stronger.

“Do you think I’m thrilled when you tell me you’ve had a lot of dissipated experience? I don’t see how anybody could claim to be your friend and encourage you in that. If I were you, I’d at least pass your examinations for college. Then they can’t say you just lay down after you were expelled from school.”

“You think so?” Charley said, unruffled, and in his grave, precocious manner, as though he were talking to a child. But she had convinced him, because he was in love with her and the moon was around her. “Oh me, oh my, oh you,” was the last music they had danced to on the Wednesday before, and so it was one of those times.

Had Gladys let him brag to her, concealing her curiosity under a mask of companionship, if she had accepted his own estimate of himself as a man formed, no urging of his father’s would have mattered. As it was, Charley passed into college that fall, thanks to a girl’s tender reminiscences and her own memories of the sweetness of youth’s success in young fields.

And it was well for his father that he did. If he had not, the catastrophe of his older brother Wister that autumn would have broken Schofield’s heart. The morning after the Harvard game the New York papers carried a headline:

YALE BOYS AND FOLLIES GIRLS IN

MOTOR CRASH NEAR RYE

IRENE DALEY IN GREENWICH HOSPITAL THREATENS BEAUTY SUIT

MILLIONAIRE’S SON INVOLVED

The four boys came up before the dean a fortnight later. Wister Schofield, who had driven the car, was called first.

“It was not your car, Mr. Schofield,” the dean said. “It was Mr. Kavenaugh’s car, wasn’t it?”

“Yes sir.”

“How did you happen to be driving?”

“The girls wanted me to. They didn’t feel safe.”

“But you’d been drinking too, hadn’t you?”

“Yes, but not so much.”

“Tell me this,” asked the dean: “Haven’t you ever driven a car when you’d been drinking--perhaps drinking even more than you were that night?”

“Why--perhaps once or twice, but I never had any accidents. And this was so clearly unavoidable--”

“Possibly,” the dean agreed; “but we’ll have to look at it this way: Up to this time you had no accidents even when you deserved to have them. Now you’ve had one when you didn’t deserve it. I don’t want you to go out of here feeling that life or the University or I myself haven’t given you a square deal, Mr. Schofield. But the newspapers have given this a great deal of prominence, and I’m afraid that the University will have to dispense with your presence.”

Moving along the frieze to Howard Kavenaugh, the dean’s remarks to him were substantially the same.

“I am particularly sorry in your case, Mr. Kavenaugh. Your father has made substantial gifts to the University, and I took pleasure in watching you play hockey with your usual brilliance last winter.”

Howard Kavenaugh left the office with uncontrollable tears running down his cheeks.

Since Irene Daley’s suit for her ruined livelihood, her ruined beauty, was directed against the owner and the driver of the automobile, there were lighter sentences for the other two occupants of the car. Beau Lebaume came into the dean’s office with his arm in a sling and his handsome head swathed in bandages and was suspended for the remainder of the current year. He took it jauntily and said good-by to the dean with as cheerful a smile as could show through the bandages. The last case, however, was the most difficult. George Winfield, who had entered high-school late because work in the world had taught him the value of an education, came in looking at the floor.

“I can’t understand your participation in this affair,” said the dean. “I know your benefactor, Mr. Barnes, personally. He told me how you left school to go to work, and how you came back to it four years later to continue your education, and he felt that your attitude toward life was essentially serious. Up to this point you have a good record here at New Haven, but it struck me several months ago that you were running with a rather gay crowd, boys with a great deal of money to spend. You are old enough to realize that they couldn’t possibly give you as much in material ways as they took away from you in others. I’ve got to give you a year’s suspension. If you come back, I have every hope you’ll justify the confidence that Mr. Barnes reposed in you.”

“I won’t come back,” said Winfield. “I couldn’t face Mr. Barnes after this. I’m not going home.”

At the suit brought by Irene Daley, all four of them lied loyally for Wister Schofield. They said that before they hit the gasoline pump they had seen Miss Daley grab the wheel. But Miss Daley was in court, with her face, familiar to the tabloids, permanently scarred; and her counsel exhibited a letter canceling her recent moving-picture contract. The students’ case looked bad; so in the intermission, on their lawyer’s advice, they settled for forty thousand dollars. Wister Schofield and Howard Kavenaugh were snapped by a dozen photographers leaving the courtroom, and served up in flaming notoriety next day.

That night, Wister, the three Minneapolis boys, Howard and Beau Lebaume started for home. George Winfield said good-by to them in the Pennsylvania station; and having no home to go to, walked out into New York to start life over.

Of all Barnes’ protégés, Jack Stubbs with his one arm was the favorite. He was the first to achieve fame--when he played on the tennis team at Princeton, the rotogravure section carried pictures showing how he threw the ball from his racket in serving. When he was graduated, Barnes took him into his own office--he was often spoken of as an adopted son. Stubbs, together with Schlach, now a prominent consulting engineer, were the most satisfactory of his experiments, although James Matsko at twenty-seven had just been made a partner in a Wall Street brokerage house. Financially he was the most successful of the six, yet Barnes found himself somewhat repelled by his hard egoism. He wondered, too, if he, Barnes, had really played any part in Matsko’s career--did it after all matter whether Matsko was a figure in metropolitan finance or a big merchant in the Middle West, as he would have undoubtedly become without any assistance at all.

One morning in 1930 he handed Jack Stubbs a letter that led to a balancing up of the book of boys.

“What do you think of this?”

The letter was from Louis Ireland in Paris. About Louis they did not agree, and as Jack read, he prepared once more to intercede in his behalf.

MY DEAR SIR:

After your last communication, made through your bank here and enclosing a check which I hereby acknowledge, I do not feel that I am under any obligation to write you at all. But because the concrete fact of an object’s commercial worth may be able to move you, while you remain utterly insensitive to the value of an abstract idea--because of this I write to tell you that my exhibition was an unqualified success. To bring the matter even nearer to your intellectual level, I may tell you that I sold two pieces--a head of Lallette, the actress, and a bronze animal group--for a total of seven thousand francs ($280.00). Moreover I have commissions which will take me all summer--I enclose a piece about me cut from CAHIERS D’ART, which will show you that whatever your estimate of my abilities and my career, it is by no means unanimous.

This is not to say that I am ungrateful for your well-intentioned attempt to “educate” me. I suppose that Harvard was no worse than any other polite finishing school--the years that I wasted there gave me a sharp and well-documented attitude on American life and institutions. But your suggestions that I come to America and make standardized nymphs for profiteers’ fountains was a little too much--

Stubbs looked up with a smile.

“Well,” Barnes said, “what do you think? Is he crazy--or now that he has sold some statues, does it prove that I’m crazy?”

“Neither one,” laughed Stubbs. “What you objected to in Louis wasn’t his talent. But you never got over that year he tried to enter a monastery and then got arrested in the Sacco-Vanzetti demonstrations, and then ran away with the professor’s wife.”

“He was just forming himself,” said Barnes dryly, “just trying his little wings. God knows what he’s been up to abroad.”

“Well, perhaps he’s formed now,” Stubbs said lightly. He had always liked Louis Ireland--privately he resolved to write and see if he needed money.

“Anyhow, he’s graduated from me,” announced Barnes. “I can’t do any more to help him or hurt him. Suppose we call him a success, though that’s pretty doubtful--let’s see how we stand. I’m going to see Schofield out in Minneapolis next week, and I’d like to balance accounts. To my mind, the successes are you, Otto Schlach, James Matsko,--whatever you and I may think of him as a man,--and let’s assume that Louis Ireland is going to be a great sculptor. That’s four. Winfield’s disappeared. I’ve never had a line from him.”

“Perhaps he’s doing well somewhere.”

“If he were doing well, I think he’d let me know. We’ll have to count him as a failure so far as my experiment goes. Then there’s Gordon Vandervere.”

Both were silent for a moment.

“I can’t make it out about Gordon,” Barnes said. “He’s such a nice fellow, but since he left college, he doesn’t seem to come through. He was younger than the rest of you, and he had the advantage of two years at Andover before he went to college, and at Princeton he knocked them cold, as you say. But he seems to have worn his wings out--for four years now he’s done nothing at all; he can’t hold a job; he can’t get his mind on his work, and he doesn’t seem to care. I’m about through with Gordon.”

At this moment Gordon was announced over the phone.

“He asked for an appointment,” explained Barnes. “I suppose he wants to try something new.”

A personable young man with an easy and attractive manner strolled in to the office.

“Good afternoon, Uncle Ed. Hi there, Jack!” Gordon sat down. “I’m full of news.”

“About what?” asked Barnes.

“About myself.”

“I know. You’ve just been appointed to arrange a merger between J. P. Morgan and the Queensborough Bridge.”

“It’s a merger,” agreed Vandervere, “but those are not the parties to it. I’m engaged to be married.”

Barnes glowered.

“Her name,” continued Vandervere, “is Esther Crosby.”

“Let me congratulate you,” said Barnes ironically. “A relation of H. B. Crosby, I presume.”

“Exactly,” said Vandervere unruffled. “In fact, his only daughter.”

For a moment there was silence in the office. Then Barnes exploded.

“You’re going to marry H. B. Crosby’s daughter? Does he know that last month you retired by request from one of his banks?”

“I’m afraid he knows everything about me. He’s been looking me over for four years. You see, Uncle Ed,” he continued cheerfully, “Esther and I got engaged during my last year at Princeton--my roommate brought her down to a house-party, but she switched over to me. Well, quite naturally Mr. Crosby wouldn’t hear of it until I’d proved myself.”

“Proved yourself!” repeated Barnes. “Do you consider that you’ve proved yourself?”

“Well--yes.”

“How?”

“By waiting four years. You see, either Esther or I might have married anybody else in that time, but we didn’t. Instead we sort of wore him away. That’s really why I haven’t been able to get down to anything. Mr. Crosby is a strong personality, and it took a lot of time and energy wearing him away. Sometimes Esther and I didn’t see each other for months, so she couldn’t eat; so then thinking of that I couldn’t eat, so then I couldn’t work--”

“And you mean he’s really given his consent?”

“He gave it last night.”

“Is he going to let you loaf?”

“No. Esther and I are going into the diplomatic service. She feels that the family has passed through the banking phase.” He winked at Stubbs. “I’ll look up Louis Ireland when I get to Paris, and send Uncle Ed a report.”

Suddenly Barnes roared with laughter.

“Well, it’s all in the lottery-box,” he said. “When I picked out you six, I was a long way from guessing--” He turned to Stubbs and demanded: “Shall we put him under failure or under success?”

“A howling success,” said Stubbs. “Top of the list.”

A fortnight later Barnes was with his old friend Schofield in Minneapolis. He thought of the house with the six boys as he had last seen it--now it seemed to bear scars of them, like the traces that pictures leave on a wall that they have long protected from the mark of time. Since he did not know what had become of Schofield’s sons, he refrained from referring to their conversation of ten years before until he knew whether it was dangerous ground. He was glad of his reticence later in the evening when Schofield spoke of his elder son, Wister.

“Wister never seems to have found himself--and he was such a high-spirited kid! He was the leader of every group he went into; he could always make things go. When he was young, our houses in town and at the lake were always packed with young people. But after he left Yale, he lost interest in things--got sort of scornful about everything. I thought for a while that it was because he drank too much, but he married a nice girl and she took that in hand. Still, he hasn’t any ambition--he talked about country life, so I bought him a silver-fox farm, but that didn’t go; and I sent him to Florida during the boom, but that wasn’t any better. Now he has an interest in a dude-ranch in Montana; but since the depression--”

Barnes saw his opportunity and asked:

“What became of those friends of your sons’ that I met one day?”

“Let’s see--I wonder who you mean. There was Kavenaugh--you know, the flour people--he was here a lot. Let’s see--he eloped with an Eastern girl, and for a few years he and his wife were the leaders of the gay crowd here--they did a lot of drinking and not much else. It seems to me I heard the other day that Howard’s getting a divorce. Then there was the younger brother--he never could get into college. Finally he married a manicurist, and they live here rather quietly. We don’t hear much about them.”

They had had a glamour about them, Barnes remembered; they had been so sure of themselves, individually, as a group; so high-spirited, a frieze of Greek youths, graceful of body, ready for life.

“Then Larry Patt, you might have met him here. A great golfer. He couldn’t stay in college--there didn’t seem to be enough fresh air there for Larry.” And he added defensively: “But he capitalized what he could do--he opened a sporting-goods store and made a good thing of it, I understand. He has a string of three or four.”

“I seem to remember an exceptionally handsome one.”

“Oh--Beau Lebaume. He was in that mess at New Haven too. After that he went to pieces--drink and what-not. His father’s tried everything, and now he won’t have anything more to do with him.” Schofield’s face warmed suddenly; his eyes glowed. “But let me tell you, I’ve got a boy--my Charley! I wouldn’t trade him for the lot of them--he’s coming over presently, and you’ll see. He had a bad start, got into trouble at Hotchkiss--but did he quit? Never. He went back and made a fine record at New Haven, senior society and all that. Then he and some other boys took a trip around the world, and then he came back here and said: ‘All right, Father, I’m ready--when do I start?’ I don’t know what I’d do without Charley. He got married a few months back, a young widow he’d always been in love with; and his mother and I are still missing him, though they come over often--”

Barnes was glad about this, and suddenly he was reconciled at not having any sons in the flesh--one out of two made good, and sometimes better, and sometimes nothing; but just going along getting old by yourself when you’d counted on so much from sons--

“Charley runs the business,” continued Schofield. “That is, he and a young man named Winfield that Wister got me to take on five or six years ago. Wister felt responsible about him, felt he’d got him into this trouble at New Haven--and this boy had no family. He’s done well here.”

Another one of Barnes’ six accounted for! He felt a surge of triumph, but he saw he must keep it to himself; a little later when Schofield asked him if he’d carried out his intention of putting some boys through college, he avoided answering. After all, any given moment has its value; it can be questioned in the light of after-events, but the moment remains. The young princes in velvet gathered in lovely domesticity around the queen amid the hush of rich draperies may presently grow up to be Pedro the Cruel or Charles the Mad, but the moment of beauty was there. Back there ten years, Schofield had seen his sons and their friends as samurai, as something shining and glorious and young, perhaps as something he had missed from his own youth. There was later a price to be paid by those boys, all too fulfilled, with the whole balance of their life pulled forward into their youth so that everything afterward would inevitably be anticlimax; these boys brought up as princes with none of the responsibilities of princes! Barnes didn’t know how much their mothers might have had to do with it, what their mothers may have lacked.

But he was glad that his friend Schofield had one true son.

His own experiment--he didn’t regret it, but he wouldn’t have done it again. Probably it proved something, but he wasn’t quite sure what. Perhaps that life is constantly renewed, and glamour and beauty make way for it; and he was glad that he was able to feel that the republic could survive the mistakes of a whole generation, pushing the waste aside, sending ahead the vital and the strong. Only it was too bad and very American that there should be all that waste at the top; and he felt that he would not live long enough to see it end, to see great seriousness in the same skin with great opportunity--to see the race achieve itself at last.

THE SWIMMERS

Saturday Evening Post (19 October 1929)

In the Place Benoït, a suspended mass of gasoline exhaust cooked slowly by the June sun. It was a terrible thing, for, unlike pure heat, it held no promise of rural escape, but suggested only roads choked with the same foul asthma. In the offices of The Promissory Trust Company, Paris Branch, facing the square, an American man of thirty-five inhaled it, and it became the odor of the thing he must presently do. A black horror suddenly descended upon him, and he went up to the washroom, where he stood, trembling a little, just inside the door.

Through the washroom window his eyes fell upon a sign--1000 Chemises. The shirts in question filled the shop window, piled, cravated and stuffed, or else draped with shoddy grace on the show-case floor. 1000 Chemises--Count them! To the left he read Papeterie, Pâtisserie, Solde, Réclame, and Constance Talmadge in Déjeuner de Soleil; and his eye, escaping to the right, met yet more somber announcements: Vêtements Ecclésiastiques, Declaration de Décès, and Pompes Funèbres. Life and Death.

Henry Marston’s trembling became a shaking; it would be pleasant if this were the end and nothing more need be done, he thought, and with a certain hope he sat down on a stool. But it is seldom really the end, and after a while, as he became too exhausted to care, the shaking stopped and he was better. Going downstairs, looking as alert and self-possessed as any other officer of the bank, he spoke to two clients he knew, and set his face grimly toward noon.

“Well, Henry Clay Marston!” A handsome old man shook hands with him and took the chair beside his desk.

“Henry, I want to see you in regard to what we talked about the other night. How about lunch? In that green little place with all the trees.”

“Not lunch, Judge Waterbury; I’ve got an engagement.”

“I’ll talk now, then; because I’m leaving this afternoon. What do these plutocrats give you for looking important around here?”

Henry Marston knew what was coming.

“Ten thousand and certain expense money,” he answered.

“How would you like to come back to Richmond at about double that? You’ve been over here eight years and you don’t know the opportunities you’re missing. Why both my boys--”

Henry listened appreciatively, but this morning he couldn’t concentrate on the matter. He spoke vaguely about being able to live more comfortably in Paris and restrained himself from stating his frank opinion upon existence at home.

Judge Waterbury beckoned to a tall, pale man who stood at the mail desk.

“This is Mr. Wiese,” he said. “Mr. Wiese’s from downstate; he’s a halfway partner of mine.”

“Glad to meet you, suh.” Mr. Wiese’s voice was rather too deliberately Southern. “Understand the judge is makin’ you a proposition.”

“Yes,” Henry answered briefly. He recognized and detested the type--the prosperous sweater, presumably evolved from a cross between carpetbagger and poor white. When Wiese moved away, the judge said almost apologetically:

“He’s one of the richest men in the South, Henry.” Then, after a pause: “Come home, boy.”

“I’ll think it over, judge.” For a moment the gray and ruddy head seemed so kind; then it faded back into something one-dimensional, machine-finished, blandly and bleakly un-European. Henry Marston respected that open kindness--in the bank he touched it with daily appreciation, as a curator in a museum might touch a precious object removed in time and space; but there was no help in it for him; the questions which Henry Marston’s life propounded could be answered only in France. His seven generations of Virginia ancestors were definitely behind him every day at noon when he turned home.

Home was a fine high-ceiling apartment hewn from the palace of a Renaissance cardinal in the Rue Monsieur--the sort of thing Henry could not have afforded in America. Choupette, with something more than the rigid traditionalism of a French bourgeois taste, had made it beautiful, and moved through gracefully with their children. She was a frail Latin blonde with fine large features and vividly sad French eyes that had first fascinated Henry in a Grenoble pension in 1918. The two boys took their looks from Henry, voted the handsomest man at the University of Virginia a few years before the war.

Climbing the two broad flights of stairs, Henry stood panting a moment in the outside hall. It was quiet and cool here, and yet it was vaguely like the terrible thing that was going to happen. He heard a clock inside his apartment strike one, and inserted his key in the door.

The maid who had been in Choupette’s family for thirty years stood before him, her mouth open in the utterance of a truncated sigh.

“Bonjour, Louise.”

“Monsieur!” He threw his hat on a chair. “But, monsieur--but I thought monsieur said on the phone he was going to Tours for the children!”

“I changed my mind, Louise.”

He had taken a step forward, his last doubt melting away at the constricted terror in the woman’s face.

“Is madame home?”

Simultaneously he perceived a man’s hat and stick on the hall table and for the first time in his life he heard silence--a loud, singing silence, oppressive as heavy guns or thunder. Then, as the endless moment was broken by the maid’s terrified little cry, he pushed through the portières into the next room.

An hour later Doctor Derocco, de la Faculté de Médecine, rang the apartment bell. Choupette Marston, her face a little drawn and rigid, answered the door. For a moment they went through French forms; then:

“My husband has been feeling unwell for some weeks,” she said concisely. “Nevertheless, he did not complain in a way to make me uneasy. He has suddenly collapsed; he cannot articulate or move his limbs. All this, I must say, might have been precipitated by a certain indiscretion of mine--in all events, there was a violent scene, a discussion, and sometimes when he is agitated, my husband cannot comprehend well in French.”

“I will see him,” said the doctor; thinking: “Some things are comprehended instantly in all languages.”

During the next four weeks several people listened to strange speeches about one thousand chemises, and heard how all the population of Paris was becoming etherized by cheap gasoline--there was a consulting psychiatrist, not inclined to believe in any underlying mental trouble; there was a nurse from the American Hospital, and there was Choupette, frightened, defiant and, after her fashion, deeply sorry. A month later, when Henry awoke to his familiar room, lit with a dimmed lamp, he found her sitting beside his bed and reached out for her hand.

“I still love you,” he said--”that’s the odd thing.”

“Sleep, male cabbage.”

“At all costs,” he continued with a certain feeble irony, “you can count on me to adopt the Continental attitude.”

“Please! You tear at my heart.”

When he was sitting up in bed they were ostensibly close together again--closer than they had been for months.

“Now you’re going to have another holiday,” said Henry to the two boys, back from the country. “Papa has got to go to the seashore and get really well.”

“Will we swim?”

“And get drowned, my darlings?” Choupette cried. “But fancy, at your age. Not at all!”

So, at St. Jean de Luz they sat on the shore instead, and watched the English and Americans and a few hardy French pioneers of le sport voyage between raft and diving tower, motorboat and sand. There were passing ships, and bright islands to look at, and mountains reaching into cold zones, and red and yellow villas, called Fleur des Bois, Mon Nid, or Sans-Souci; and farther back, tired French villages of baked cement and gray stone.

Choupette sat at Henry’s side, holding a parasol to shelter her peach-bloom skin from the sun.

“Look!” she would say, at the sight of tanned American girls. “Is that lovely? Skin that will be leather at thirty--a sort of brown veil to hide all blemishes, so that everyone will look alike. And women of a hundred kilos in such bathing suits! Weren’t clothes intended to hide Nature’s mistakes?”

Henry Clay Marston was a Virginian of the kind who are prouder of being Virginians than of being Americans. That mighty word printed across a continent was less to him than the memory of his grandfather, who freed his slaves in ‘58, fought from Manassas to Appomattox, knew Huxley and Spencer as light reading, and believed in caste only when it expressed the best of race.

To Choupette all this was vague. Her more specific criticisms of his compatriots were directed against the women.

“How would you place them?” she exclaimed. “Great ladies, bourgeoises, adventuresses--they are all the same. Look! Where would I be if I tried to act like your friend, Madame de Richepin? My father was a professor in a provincial university, and I have certain things I wouldn’t do because they wouldn’t please my class, my family. Madame de Richepin has other things she wouldn’t do because of her class, her family.” Suddenly she pointed to an American girl going into the water: “But that young lady may be a stenographer and yet be compelled to warp herself, dressing and acting as if she had all the money in the world.”

“Perhaps she will have, some day.”

“That’s the story they are told; it happens to one, not to the ninety-nine. That’s why all their faces over thirty are discontented and unhappy.”

Though Henry was in general agreement, he could not help being amused at Choupette’s choice of target this afternoon. The girl--she was perhaps eighteen--was obviously acting like nothing but herself--she was what his father would have called a thoroughbred. A deep, thoughtful face that was pretty only because of the irrepressible determination of the perfect features to be recognized, a face that could have done without them and not yielded up its poise and distinction.

In her grace, at once exquisite and hardy, she was that perfect type of American girl that makes one wonder if the male is not being sacrificed to it, much as, in the last century, the lower strata in England were sacrificed to produce the governing class.

The two young men, coming out of the water as she went in, had large shoulders and empty faces. She had a smile for them that was no more than they deserved--that must do until she chose one to be the father of her children and gave herself up to destiny. Until then--Henry Marston was glad about her as her arms, like flying fish, clipped the water in a crawl, as her body spread in a swan dive or doubled in a jackknife from the springboard and her head appeared from the depth, jauntily flipping the damp hair away.

The two young men passed near.

“They push water,” Choupette said, “then they go elsewhere and push other water. They pass months in France and they couldn’t tell you the name of the President. They are parasites such as Europe has not known in a hundred years.”

But Henry had stood up abruptly, and now all the people on the beach were suddenly standing up. Something had happened out there in the fifty yards between the deserted raft and the shore. The bright head showed upon the surface; it did not flip water now, but called: “Au secours! Help!” in a feeble and frightened voice.

“Henry!” Choupette cried. “Stop! Henry!”

The beach was almost deserted at noon, but Henry and several others were sprinting toward the sea; the two young Americans heard, turned and sprinted after them. There was a frantic little time with half a dozen bobbing heads in the water. Choupette, still clinging to her parasol, but managing to wring her hands at the same time, ran up and down the beach crying: “Henry! Henry!”

Now there were more helping hands, and then two swelling groups around prostrate figures on the shore. The young fellow who pulled in the girl brought her around in a minute or so, but they had more trouble getting the water out of Henry, who had never learned to swim.

II

“This is the man who didn’t know whether he could swim, because he’d never tried.”

Henry got up from his sun chair, grinning. It was next morning, and the saved girl had just appeared on the beach with her brother. She smiled back at Henry, brightly casual, appreciative rather than grateful.

“At the very least, I owe it to you to teach you how,” she said.

“I’d like it. I decided that in the water yesterday, just before I went down the tenth time.”

“You can trust me. I’ll never again eat chocolate ice cream before going in.”

As she went on into the water, Choupette asked: “How long do you think we’ll stay here? After all, this life wearies one.”

“We’ll stay till I can swim. And the boys too.”

“Very well. I saw a nice bathing suit in two shades of blue for fifty francs that I will buy you this afternoon.”

Feeling a little paunchy and unhealthily white, Henry, holding his sons by the hand, took his body into the water. The breakers leaped at him, staggering him, while the boys yelled with ecstasy; the returning water curled threateningly around his feet as it hurried back to sea. Farther out, he stood waist deep with other intimidated souls, watching the people dive from the raft tower, hoping the girl would come to fulfill her promise, and somewhat embarrassed when she did.

“I’ll start with your eldest. You watch and then try it by yourself.”

He floundered in the water. It went into his nose and started a raw stinging; it blinded him; it lingered afterward in his ears, rattling back and forth like pebbles for hours. The sun discovered him, too, peeling long strips of parchment from his shoulders, blistering his back so that he lay in a feverish agony for several nights. After a week he swam, painfully, pantingly, and not very far. The girl taught him a sort of crawl, for he saw that the breast stroke was an obsolete device that lingered on with the inept and the old. Choupette caught him regarding his tanned face in the mirror with a sort of fascination, and the youngest boy contracted some sort of mild skin infection in the sand that retired him from competition. But one day Henry battled his way desperately to the float and drew himself up on it with his last breath.

“That being settled,” he told the girl, when he could speak, “I can leave St. Jean tomorrow.”

“I’m sorry.”

“What will you do now?”

“My brother and I are going to Antibes; there’s swimming there all through October. Then Florida.”

“And swim?” he asked with some amusement.

“Why, yes. We’ll swim.”

“Why do you swim?”

“To get clean,” she answered surprisingly.

“Clean from what?”

She frowned. “I don’t know why I said that. But it feels clean in the sea.”

“Americans are too particular about that,” he commented.

“How could anyone be?”

“I mean we’ve got too fastidious even to clean up our messes.”

“I don’t know.”

“But tell me why you--” He stopped himself in surprise. He had been about to ask her to explain a lot of other things--to say what was clean and unclean, what was worth knowing and what was only words--to open up a new gate to life. Looking for a last time into her eyes, full of cool secrets, he realized how much he was going to miss these mornings, without knowing whether it was the girl who interested him or what she represented of his ever-new, ever-changing country.

“All right,” he told Choupette that night. “We’ll leave tomorrow.”

“For Paris?”

“For America.”

“You mean I’m to go too? And the children?”

“Yes.”

“But that’s absurd,” she protested. “Last time it cost more than we spend in six months here. And then there were only three of us. Now that we’ve managed to get ahead at last--”

“That’s just it. I’m tired of getting ahead on your skimping and saving and going without dresses. I’ve got to make more money. American men are incomplete without money.”

“You mean we’ll stay?”

“It’s very possible.”

They looked at each other, and against her will, Choupette understood. For eight years, by a process of ceaseless adaptation, he had lived her life, substituting for the moral confusion of his own country, the tradition, the wisdom, the sophistication of France. After that matter in Paris, it had seemed the bigger part to understand and to forgive, to cling to the home as something apart from the vagaries of love. Only now, glowing with a good health that he had not experienced for years, did he discover his true reaction. It had released him. For all his sense of loss, he possessed again the masculine self he had handed over to the keeping of a wise little Provençal girl eight years ago.

She struggled on for a moment.

“You’ve got a good position and we really have plenty of money. You know we can live cheaper here.”

“The boys are growing up now, and I’m not sure I want to educate them in France.”

“But that’s all decided,” she wailed. “You admit yourself that education in America is superficial and full of silly fads. Do you want them to be like those two dummies on the beach?”

“Perhaps I was thinking more of myself, Choupette. Men just out of college who brought their letters of credit into the bank eight years ago, travel about with ten-thousand-dollar cars now. I didn’t use to care. I used to tell myself that I had a better place to escape to, just because we knew that lobster armoricaine was really lobster americaine. Perhaps I haven’t that feeling any more.”

She stiffened. “If that’s it--”

“It’s up to you. We’ll make a new start.”

Choupette thought for a moment. “Of course my sister can take over the apartment.”

“Of course.” He waxed enthusiastic. “And there are sure to be things that’ll tickle you--we’ll have a nice car, for instance, and one of those electric ice boxes, and all sorts of funny machines to take the place of servants. It won’t be bad. You’ll learn to play golf and talk about children all day. Then there are the movies.”

Choupette groaned.

“It’s going to be pretty awful at first,” he admitted, “but there are still a few good nigger cooks, and we’ll probably have two bathrooms.”

“I am unable to use more than one at a time.”

“You’ll learn.”

A month afterward, when the beautiful white island floated toward them in the Narrows, Henry’s throat grew constricted with the rest and he wanted to cry out to Choupette and all foreigners, “Now, you see!”

III

Almost three years later, Henry Marston walked out of his office in the Calumet Tobacco Company and along the hall to Judge Waterbury’s suite. His face was older, with a suspicion of grimness, and a slight irrepressible heaviness of body was not concealed by his white linen suit.

“Busy, judge?”

“Come in, Henry.”

“I’m going to the shore tomorrow to swim off this weight. I wanted to talk to you before I go.”

“Children going too?”

“Oh, sure.”

“Choupette’ll go abroad, I suppose.”

“Not this year. I think she’s coming with me, if she doesn’t stay here in Richmond.”

The judge thought: “There isn’t a doubt but what he knows everything.” He waited.

“I wanted to tell you, judge, that I’m resigning the end of September.”

The judge’s chair creaked backward as he brought his feet to the floor.

“You’re quitting, Henry?”

“Not exactly. Walter Ross wants to come home; let me take his place in France.”

“Boy, do you know what we pay Walter Ross?”

“Seven thousand.”

“And you’re getting twenty-five.”

“You’ve probably heard I’ve made something in the market,” said Henry deprecatingly.

“I’ve heard everything between a hundred thousand and half a million.”

“Somewhere in between.”

“Then why a seven-thousand-dollar job? Is Choupette homesick?”

“No, I think Choupette likes it over here. She’s adapted herself amazingly.”

“He knows,” the judge thought. “He wants to get away.”

After Henry had gone, he looked up at the portrait of his grandfather on the wall. In those days the matter would have been simpler. Dueling pistols in the old Wharton meadow at dawn. It would be to Henry’s advantage if things were like that today.

Henry’s chauffeur dropped him in front of a Georgian house in a new suburban section. Leaving his hat in the hall, he went directly out on the side veranda.

From the swaying canvas swing Choupette looked up with a polite smile. Save for a certain alertness of feature and a certain indefinable knack of putting things on, she might have passed for an American. Southernisms overlay her French accent with a quaint charm; there were still college boys who rushed her like a débutante at the Christmas dances.

Henry nodded at Mr. Charles Wiese, who occupied a wicker chair, with a gin fizz at his elbow.

“I want to talk to you,” he said, sitting down.

Wiese’s glance and Choupette’s crossed quickly before coming to rest on him.

“You’re free, Wiese,” Henry said. “Why don’t you and Choupette get married?”

Choupette sat up, her eyes flashing.

“Now wait.” Henry turned back to Wiese. “I’ve been letting this thing drift for about a year now, while I got my financial affairs in shape. But this last brilliant idea of yours makes me feel a little uncomfortable, a little sordid, and I don’t want to feel that way.”

“Just what do you mean?” Wiese inquired.

“On my last trip to New York you had me shadowed. I presume it was with the intention of getting divorce evidence against me. It wasn’t a success.”

“I don’t know where you got such an idea in your head, Marston; you--”

“Don’t lie!”

“Suh--” Wiese began, but Henry interrupted impatiently:

“Now don’t ‘Suh’ me, and don’t try to whip yourself up into a temper. You’re not talking to a scared picker full of hookworm. I don’t want a scene; my emotions aren’t sufficiently involved. I want to arrange a divorce.”

“Why do you bring it up like this?” Choupette cried, breaking into French. “Couldn’t we talk of it alone, if you think you have so much against me?”

“Wait a minute; this might as well be settled now,” Wiese said. “Choupette does want a divorce. Her life with you is unsatisfactory, and the only reason she has kept on is because she’s an idealist. You don’t seem to appreciate that fact, but it’s true; she couldn’t bring herself to break up her home.”

“Very touching.” Henry looked at Choupette with bitter amusement.

“But let’s come down to facts. I’d like to close up this matter before I go back to France.”

Again Wiese and Choupette exchanged a look.

“It ought to be simple,” Wiese said. “Choupette doesn’t want a cent of your money.”

“I know. What she wants is the children. The answer is, You can’t have the children.”

“How perfectly outrageous!” Choupette cried. “Do you imagine for a minute I’m going to give up my children?”

“What’s your idea, Marston?” demanded Wiese. “To take them back to France and make them expatriates like yourself?”

“Hardly that. They’re entered for St. Regis School and then for Yale. And I haven’t any idea of not letting them see their mother whenever she so desires--judging from the past two years, it won’t be often. But I intend to have their entire legal custody.”

“Why?” they demanded together.

“Because of the home.”

“What the devil do you mean?”

“I’d rather apprentice them to a trade than have them brought up in the sort of home yours and Choupette’s is going to be.”

There was a moment’s silence. Suddenly Choupette picked up her glass, dashed the contents at Henry and collapsed on the settee, passionately sobbing.

Henry dabbed his face with his handkerchief and stood up.

“I was afraid of that,” he said, “but I think I’ve made my position clear.”

He went up to his room and lay down on the bed. In a thousand wakeful hours during the past year he had fought over in his mind the problem of keeping his boys without taking those legal measures against Choupette that he could not bring himself to take. He knew that she wanted the children only because without them she would be suspect, even déclassée, to her family in France; but with that quality of detachment peculiar to old stock, Henry recognized this as a perfectly legitimate motive. Furthermore, no public scandal must touch the mother of his sons--it was this that had rendered his challenge so ineffectual this afternoon.

When difficulties became insurmountable, inevitable, Henry sought surcease in exercise. For three years, swimming had been a sort of refuge, and he turned to it as one man to music or another to drink. There was a point when he would resolutely stop thinking and go to the Virginia coast for a week to wash his mind in the water. Far out past the breakers he could survey the green-and-brown line of the Old Dominion with the pleasant impersonality of a porpoise. The burden of his wretched marriage fell away with the buoyant tumble of his body among the swells, and he would begin to move in a child’s dream of space. Sometimes remembered playmates of his youth swam with him; sometimes, with his two sons beside him, he seemed to be setting off along the bright pathway to the moon. Americans, he liked to say, should be born with fins, and perhaps they were--perhaps money was a form of fin. In England property begot a strong place sense, but Americans, restless and with shallow roots, needed fins and wings. There was even a recurrent idea in America about an education that would leave out history and the past, that should be a sort of equipment for aerial adventure, weighed down by none of the stowaways of inheritance or tradition.

Thinking of this in the water the next afternoon brought Henry’s mind to the children; he turned and at a slow trudgen started back toward shore. Out of condition, he rested, panting, at the raft, and glancing up, he saw familiar eyes. In a moment he was talking with the girl he had tried to rescue four years ago.

He was overjoyed. He had not realized how vividly he remembered her. She was a Virginian--he might have guessed it abroad--the laziness, the apparent casualness that masked an unfailing courtesy and attention; a good form devoid of forms was based on kindness and consideration. Hearing her name for the first time, he recognized it--an Eastern Shore name, “good” as his own.

Lying in the sun, they talked like old friends, not about races and manners and the things that Henry brooded over Choupette, but rather as if they naturally agreed about those things; they talked about what they liked themselves and about what was fun. She showed him a sitting-down, standing-up dive from the high springboard, and he emulated her inexpertly--that was fun. They talked about eating soft-shelled crabs, and she told him how, because of the curious acoustics of the water, one could lie here and be diverted by conversations on the hotel porch. They tried it and heard two ladies over their tea say:

“Now, at the Lido--”

“Now, at Asbury Park--”

“Oh, my dear, he just scratched and scratched all night; he just scratched and scratched--”

“My dear, at Deauville--”

“--scratched and scratched all night.”

After a while the sea got to be that very blue color of four o’clock, and the girl told him how, at nineteen, she had been divorced from a Spaniard who locked her in the hotel suite when he went out at night.

“It was one of those things,” she said lightly. “But speaking more cheerfully, how’s your beautiful wife? And the boys--did they learn to float? Why can’t you all dine with me tonight?”

“I’m afraid I won’t be able to,” he said, after a moment’s hesitation. He must do nothing, however trivial, to furnish Choupette weapons, and with a feeling of disgust, it occurred to him that he was possibly being watched this afternoon. Nevertheless, he was glad of his caution when she unexpectedly arrived at the hotel for dinner that night.

After the boys had gone to bed, they faced each other over coffee on the hotel veranda.

“Will you kindly explain why I’m not entitled to a half share in my own children?” Choupette began. “It is not like you to be vindictive, Henry.”

It was hard for Henry to explain. He told her again that she could have the children when she wanted them, but that he must exercise entire control over them because of certain old-fashioned convictions--watching her face grow harder, minute by minute, he saw there was no use, and broke off. She made a scornful sound.

“I wanted to give you a chance to be reasonable before Charles arrives.”

Henry sat up. “Is he coming here this evening?”

“Happily. And I think perhaps your selfishness is going to have a jolt, Henry. You’re not dealing with a woman now.”

When Wiese walked out on the porch an hour later, Henry saw that his pale lips were like chalk; there was a deep flush on his forehead and hard confidence in his eyes. He was cleared for action and he wasted no time. “We’ve got something to say to each other, suh, and since I’ve got a motorboat here, perhaps that’d be the quietest place to say it.”

Henry nodded coolly; five minutes later the three of them were headed out into Hampton Roads on the wide fairway of the moonlight. It was a tranquil evening, and half a mile from shore Wiese cut down the engine to a mild throbbing, so that they seemed to drift without will or direction through the bright water. His voice broke the stillness abruptly:

“Marston, I’m going to talk to you straight from the shoulder. I love Choupette and I’m not apologizing for it. These things have happened before in this world. I guess you understand that. The only difficulty is this matter of the custody of Choupette’s children. You seem determined to try and take them away from the mother that bore them and raised them”--Wiese’s words became more clearly articulated, as if they came from a wider mouth--”but you left one thing out of your calculations, and that’s me. Do you happen to realize that at this moment I’m one of the richest men in Virginia?”

“I’ve heard as much.”

“Well, money is power, Marston. I repeat, suh, money is power.”

“I’ve heard that too. In fact, you’re a bore, Wiese.” Even by the moon Henry could see the crimson deepen on his brow.

“You’ll hear it again, suh. Yesterday you took us by surprise and I was unprepared for your brutality to Choupette. But this morning I received a letter from Paris that puts the matter in a new light. It is a statement by a specialist in mental diseases, declaring you to be of unsound mind, and unfit to have the custody of children. The specialist is the one who attended you in your nervous breakdown four years ago.”

Henry laughed incredulously, and looked at Choupette, half expecting her to laugh, too, but she had turned her face away, breathing quickly through parted lips. Suddenly he realized that Wiese was telling the truth--that by some extraordinary bribe he had obtained such a document and fully intended to use it.

For a moment Henry reeled as if from a material blow. He listened to his own voice saying, “That’s the most ridiculous thing I ever heard,” and to Wiese’s answer: “They don’t always tell people when they have mental troubles.”

Suddenly Henry wanted to laugh, and the terrible instant when he had wondered if there could be some shred of truth in the allegation passed. He turned to Choupette, but again she avoided his eyes.

“How could you, Choupette?”

“I want my children,” she began, but Wiese broke in quickly:

“If you’d been halfway fair, Marston, we wouldn’t have resorted to this step.”

“Are you trying to pretend you arranged this scurvy trick since yesterday afternoon?”

“I believe in being prepared, but if you had been reasonable; in fact, if you will be reasonable, this opinion needn’t be used.” His voice became suddenly almost paternal, almost kind: “Be wise, Marston. On your side there’s an obstinate prejudice; on mine there are forty million dollars. Don’t fool yourself. Let me repeat, Marston, that money is power. You were abroad so long that perhaps you’re inclined to forget that fact. Money made this country, built its great and glorious cities, created its industries, covered it with an iron network of railroads. It’s money that harnesses the forces of Nature, creates the machine and makes it go when money says go, and stop when money says stop.”

As though interpreting this as a command, the engine gave forth a sudden hoarse sound and came to rest.

“What is it?” demanded Choupette.

“It’s nothing.” Wiese pressed the self-starter with his foot. “I repeat, Marston, that money--The battery is dry. One minute while I spin the wheel.”

He spun it for the best part of fifteen minutes while the boat meandered about in a placid little circle.

“Choupette, open that drawer behind you and see if there isn’t a rocket.”

A touch of panic had crept into her voice when she answered that there was no rocket. Wiese eyed the shore tentatively.

“There’s no use in yelling; we must be half a mile out. We’ll just have to wait here until someone comes along.”

“We won’t wait here,” Henry remarked.

“Why not?”

“We’re moving toward the bay. Can’t you tell? We’re moving out with the tide.”

“That’s impossible!” said Choupette sharply.

“Look at those two lights on shore--one passing the other now. Do you see?”

“Do something!” she wailed, and then, in a burst of French: “Ah, c’est épouvantable! N’est-ce pas qu’il y a quelque chose qu’on petit faire?”

The tide was running fast now, and the boat was drifting down the Roads with it toward the sea. The vague blots of two ships passed them, but at a distance, and there was no answer to their hail. Against the western sky a lighthouse blinked, but it was impossible to guess how near to it they would pass.

“It looks as if all our difficulties would be solved for us,” Henry said.

“What difficulties?” Choupette demanded. “Do you mean there’s nothing to be done? Can you sit there and just float away like this?”

“It may be easier on the children, after all.” He winced as Choupette began to sob bitterly, but he said nothing. A ghostly idea was taking shape in his mind.

“Look here, Marston. Can you swim?” demanded Wiese, frowning.

“Yes, but Choupette can’t.”

“I can’t either--I didn’t mean that. If you could swim in and get to a telephone, the coast-guard people would send for us.”

Henry surveyed the dark, receding shore.

“It’s too far,” he said.

“You can try!” said Choupette.

Henry shook his head.

“Too risky. Besides, there’s an outside chance that we’ll be picked up.”

The lighthouse passed them, far to the left and out of earshot. Another one, the last, loomed up half a mile away.

“We might drift to France like that man Gerbault,” Henry remarked. “But then, of course, we’d be expatriates--and Wiese wouldn’t like that, would you, Wiese?”

Wiese, fussing frantically with the engine, looked up.

“See what you can do with this,” he said.

“I don’t know anything about mechanics,” Henry answered. “Besides, this solution of our difficulties grows on me. Just suppose you were dirty dog enough to use that statement and got the children because of it--in that case I wouldn’t have much impetus to go on living. We’re all failures--I as head of my household, Choupette as a wife and a mother, and you, Wiese, as a human being. It’s just as well that we go out of life together.”

“This is no time for a speech, Marston.”

“Oh, yes, it’s a fine time. How about a little more house-organ oratory about money being power?”

Choupette sat rigid in the bow; Wiese stood over the engine, biting nervously at his lips.

“We’re not going to pass that lighthouse very close.” An idea suddenly occurred to him. “Couldn’t you swim to that, Marston?”

“Of course he could!” Choupette cried.

Henry looked at it tentatively.

“I might. But I won’t.”

“You’ve got to!”

Again he flinched at Choupette’s weeping; simultaneously he saw the time had come.

“Everything depends on one small point,” he said rapidly. “Wiese, have you got a fountain pen?”

“Yes. What for?”

“If you’ll write and sign about two hundred words at my dictation, I’ll swim to the lighthouse and get help. Otherwise, so help me God, we’ll drift out to sea! And you better decide in about one minute.”

“Oh, anything!” Choupette broke out frantically. “Do what he says, Charles; he means it. He always means what he says. Oh, please don’t wait!”

“I’ll do what you want”--Wiese’s voice was shaking--”only, for God’s sake, go on. What is it you want--an agreement about the children? I’ll give you my personal word of honor--”

“There’s no time for humor,” said Henry savagely. “Take this piece of paper and write.”

The two pages that Wiese wrote at Henry’s dictation relinquished all lien on the children thence and forever for himself and Choupette. When they had affixed trembling signatures Wiese cried:

“Now go, for God’s sake, before it’s too late!”

“Just one thing more: The certificate from the doctor.”

“I haven’t it here.”

“You lie.”

Wiese took it from his pocket.

“Write across the bottom that you paid so much for it, and sign your name to that.”

A minute later, stripped to his underwear, and with the papers in an oiled-silk tobacco pouch suspended from his neck, Henry dived from the side of the boat and struck out toward the light.

The waters leaped up at him for an instant, but after the first shock it was all warm and friendly, and the small murmur of the waves was an encouragement. It was the longest swim he had ever tried, and he was straight from the city, but the happiness in his heart buoyed him up. Safe now, and free. Each stroke was stronger for knowing that his two sons, sleeping back in the hotel, were safe from what he dreaded. Divorced from her own country, Choupette had picked the things out of American life that pandered best to her own self-indulgence. That, backed by a court decree, she should be permitted to hand on this preposterous moral farrago to his sons was unendurable. He would have lost them forever.

Turning on his back, he saw that already the motorboat was far away, the blinding light was nearer. He was very tired. If one let go--and, in the relaxation from strain, he felt an alarming impulse to let go--one died very quickly and painlessly, and all these problems of hate and bitterness disappeared. But he felt the fate of his sons in the oiled-silk pouch about his neck, and with a convulsive effort he turned over again and concentrated all his energies on his goal.

Twenty minutes later he stood shivering and dripping in the signal room while it was broadcast out to the coast patrol that a launch was drifting in the bay.

“There’s not much danger without a storm,” the keeper said. “By now they’ve probably struck a cross current from the river and drifted into Peyton Harbor.”

“Yes,” said Henry, who had come to this coast for three summers. “I knew that too.”

IV

In October, Henry left his sons in school and embarked on the Majestic for Europe. He had come home as to a generous mother and had been profusely given more than he asked--money, release from an intolerable situation, and the fresh strength to fight for his own. Watching the fading city, the fading shore, from the deck of the Majestic, he had a sense of overwhelming gratitude and of gladness that America was there, that under the ugly débris of industry the rich land still pushed up, incorrigibly lavish and fertile, and that in the heart of the leaderless people the old generosities and devotions fought on, breaking out sometimes in fanaticism and excess, but indomitable and undefeated. There was a lost generation in the saddle at the moment, but it seemed to him that the men coming on, the men of the war, were better; and all his old feeling that America was a bizarre accident, a sort of historical sport, had gone forever. The best of America was the best of the world.

Going down to the purser’s office, he waited until a fellow passenger was through at the window. When she turned, they both started, and he saw it was the girl.

“Oh, hello!” she cried. “I’m glad you’re going! I was just asking when the pool opened. The great thing about this ship is that you can always get a swim.”

“Why do you like to swim?” he demanded.

“You always ask me that.” She laughed.

“Perhaps you’d tell me if we had dinner together tonight.”

But when, in a moment, he left her he knew that she could never tell him--she or another. France was a land, England was a people, but America, having about it still that quality of the idea, was harder to utter--it was the graves at Shiloh and the tired, drawn, nervous faces of its great men, and the country boys dying in the Argonne for a phrase that was empty before their bodies withered. It was a willingness of the heart.

THREE HOURS BETWEEN PLANES

Esquire (July 1941)

It was a wild chance but Donald was in the mood, healthy and bored, with a sense of tiresome duty done. He was now rewarding himself. Maybe.

When the plane landed he stepped out into a mid-western summer night and headed for the isolated pueblo airport, conventionalized as an old red ‘railway depot’. He did not know whether she was alive, or living in this town, or what was her present name. With mounting excitement he looked through the phone book for her father who might be dead too, somewhere in these twenty years.

No. Judge Harmon Holmes--Hillside 3194.

A woman’s amused voice answered his inquiry for Miss Nancy Holmes.

‘Nancy is Mrs Walter Gifford now. Who is this?’

But Donald hung up without answering. He had found out what he wanted to know and had only three hours. He did not remember any Walter Gifford and there was another suspended moment while he scanned the phone book. She might have married out of town.

No. Walter Gifford--Hillside 1191. Blood flowed back into his fingertips.

‘Hello?’

‘Hello. Is Mrs Gifford there--this is an old friend of hers.’

‘This is Mrs Gifford.’

He remembered, or thought he remembered, the funny magic in the voice.

‘This is Donald Plant. I haven’t seen you since I was twelve years old.’

‘Oh-h-h!’ The note was utterly surprised, very polite, but he could distinguish in it neither joy nor certain recognition.

‘--Donald!’ added the voice. This time there was something more in it than struggling memory.

‘. . . when did you come back to town?’ Then cordially, ‘Where are you?’

‘I’m out at the airport--for just a few hours.’

‘Well, come up and see me.’

‘Sure you’re not just going to bed?’

‘Heavens, no!’ she exclaimed. ‘I was sitting here--having a highball by myself. Just tell your taxi man . . .’

On his way Donald analysed the conversation. His words ‘at the airport’ established that he had retained his position in the upper bourgeoisie. Nancy’s aloneness might indicate that she had matured into an unattractive woman without friends. Her husband might be either away or in bed. And--because she was always ten years old in his dreams--the highball shocked him. But he adjusted himself with a smile--she was very close to thirty.

At the end of a curved drive he saw a dark-haired little beauty standing against the lighted door, a glass in her hand. Startled by her final materialization, Donald got out of the cab, saying:

‘Mrs Gifford?’

She turned on the porch light and stared at him, wide-eyed and tentative. A smile broke through the puzzled expression.

‘Donald--it is you--we all change so. Oh, this is remarkable!’

As they walked inside, their voices jingled the words ‘all these years’, and Donald felt a sinking in his stomach. This derived in part from a vision of their last meeting--when she rode past him on a bicycle, cutting him dead--and in part from fear lest they have nothing to say. It was like a college reunion--but there the failure to find the past was disguised by the hurried boisterous occasion. Aghast, he realized that this might be a long and empty hour. He plunged in desperately.

‘You always were a lovely person. But I’m a little shocked to find you as beautiful as you are.’

It worked. The immediate recognition of their changed state, the bold compliment, made them interesting strangers instead of fumbling childhood friends.

‘Have a highball?’ she asked. ‘No? Please don’t think I’ve become a secret drinker, but this was a blue night. I expected my husband but he wired he’d be two days longer. He’s very nice, Donald, and very attractive. Rather your type and colouring.’ She hesitated, ‘--and I think he’s interested in someone in New York--and I don’t know.’

‘After seeing you it sounds impossible,’ he assured her. ‘I was married for six years, and there was a time I tortured myself that way. Then one day I just put jealousy out of my life forever. After my wife died I was very glad of that. It left a very rich memory--nothing marred or spoiled or hard to think over.’

She looked at him attentively, then sympathetically as he spoke.

‘I’m very sorry,’ she said. And after a proper moment,’ You’ve changed a lot. Turn your head. I remember father saying, “That boy has a brain.”‘

‘You probably argued against it.’

‘I was impressed. Up to then I thought everybody had a brain. That’s why it sticks in my mind.’

‘What else sticks in your mind?’ he asked smiling.

Suddenly Nancy got up and walked quickly a little away.

‘Ah, now,’ she reproached him. ‘That isn’t fair! I suppose I was a naughty girl.’

‘You were not,’ he said stoutly. ‘And I will have a drink now.’

As she poured it, her face still turned from him, he continued:

‘Do you think you were the only little girl who was ever kissed?’

‘Do you like the subject?’ she demanded. Her momentary irritation melted and she said: ‘What the hell! We did have fun. Like in the song.’

‘On the sleigh ride.’

‘Yes--and somebody’s picnic--Trudy James’s. And at Frontenac that--those summers.’

It was the sleigh ride he remembered most and kissing her cool cheeks in the straw in one corner while she laughed up at the cold white stars. The couple next to them had their backs turned and he kissed her little neck and her ears and never her lips.

‘And the Macks’ party where they played post office and I couldn’t go because I had the mumps,’ he said.

‘I don’t remember that.’

‘Oh, you were there. And you were kissed and I was crazy with jealousy like I never have been since.’

‘Funny I don’t remember. Maybe I wanted to forget.’

‘But why?’ he asked in amusement. ‘We were two perfectly innocent kids. Nancy, whenever I talked to my wife about the past, I told her you were the girl I loved almost as much as I loved her. But I think I really loved you just as much. When we moved out of town I carried you like a cannon ball in my insides.’

‘Were you that much--stirred up?’

‘My God, yes! I--’ He suddenly realized that they were standing just two feet from each other, that he was talking as if he loved her in the present, that she was looking up at him with her lips half-parted and a clouded look in her eyes.

‘Go on,’ she said, ‘I’m ashamed to say--I like it. I didn’t know you were so upset then. I thought it was me who was upset.’

‘You!’ he exclaimed. ‘Don’t you remember throwing me over at the drugstore.’ He laughed. ‘You stuck out your tongue at me.’

‘I don’t remember at all. It seemed to me you did the throwing over.’ Her hand fell lightly, almost consolingly on his arm. ‘I’ve got a photograph book upstairs I haven’t looked at for years. I’ll dig it out.’

Donald sat for five minutes with two thoughts--first the hopeless impossibility of reconciling what different people remembered about the same event--and secondly that in a frightening way Nancy moved him as a woman as she had moved him as a child. Half an hour had developed an emotion that he had not known since the death of his wife--that he had never hoped to know again.

Side by side on a couch they opened the book between them. Nancy looked at him, smiling and very happy.

‘Oh, this is such fun,’ she said. ‘Such fun that you’re so nice, that you remember me so--beautifully. Let me tell you--I wish I’d known it then! After you’d gone I hated you.’

‘What a pity,’ he said gently.

‘But not now,’ she reassured him, and then impulsively, ‘Kiss and make up--’

‘. . . that isn’t being a good wife,’ she said after a minute. ‘I really don’t think I’ve kissed two men since I was married.’

He was excited--but most of all confused. Had he kissed Nancy? or a memory? or this lovely trembly stranger who looked away from him quickly and turned a page of the book?

‘Wait!’ he said. ‘I don’t think I could see a picture for a few seconds.’

‘We won’t do it again. I don’t feel so very calm myself.’

Donald said one of those trivial things that cover so much ground.

‘Wouldn’t it be awful if we fell in love again?’

‘Stop it!’ She laughed, but very breathlessly. ‘It’s all over. It was a moment. A moment I’ll have to forget.’

‘Don’t tell your husband.’

‘Why not? Usually I tell him everything.’

‘It’ll hurt him. Don’t ever tell a man such things.’

‘All right I won’t.’

‘Kiss me once more,’ he said inconsistently, but Nancy had turned a page and was pointing eagerly at a picture.

‘Here’s you,’ she cried. ‘Right away!’

He looked. It was a little boy in shorts standing on a pier with a sailboat in the background.

‘I remember--’ she laughed triumphantly, ‘--the very day it was taken. Kitty took it and I stole it from her.’

For a moment Donald failed to recognize himself in the photo--then, bending closer--he failed utterly to recognize himself.

‘That’s not me,’ he said.

‘Oh yes. It was at Frontenac--the summer we--we used to go to the cave.’

‘What cave? I was only three days in Frontenac.’ Again he strained his eyes at the slightly yellowed picture. ‘And that isn’t me. That’s Donald Bowers. We did look rather alike.’

Now she was staring at him--leaning back, seeming to lift away from him.

‘But you’re Donald Bowers!’ she exclaimed; her voice rose a little. ‘No, you’re not. You’re Donald Plant.’

‘I told you on the phone.’

She was on her feet--her face faintly horrified.

‘Plant! Bowers! I must be crazy. Or it was that drink? I was mixed up a little when I first saw you. Look here! What have I told you?’

He tried for a monkish calm as he turned a page of the book.

‘Nothing at all,’ he said. Pictures that did not include him formed and re-formed before his eyes--Frontenac--a cave--Donald Bowers--’You threw me over!’

Nancy spoke from the other side of the room.

‘You’ll never tell this story,’ she said. ‘Stories have a way of getting around.’

‘There isn’t any story,’ he hesitated. But he thought: So she was a bad little girl.

And now suddenly he was filled with wild raging jealousy of little Donald Bowers--he who had banished jealousy from his life forever. In the five steps he took across the room he crushed out twenty years and the existence of Walter Gifford with his stride.

‘Kiss me again, Nancy,’ he said, sinking to one knee beside her chair, putting his hand upon her shoulder. But Nancy strained away.

‘You said you had to catch a plane.’

‘It’s nothing. I can miss it. It’s of no importance.’

‘Please go,’ she said in a cool voice. ‘And please try to imagine how I feel.’

‘But you act as if you don’t remember me,’ he cried, ‘--as if you don’t remember Donald Plant!’

‘I do. I remember you too . . . But it was all so long ago.’ Her voice grew hard again. ‘The taxi number is Crestwood 8484.’

On his way to the airport Donald shook his head from side to side. He was completely himself now but he could not digest the experience. Only as the plane roared up into the dark sky and its passengers became a different entity from the corporate world below did he draw a parallel from the fact of its flight. For five blinding minutes he had lived like a madman in two worlds at once. He had been a boy of twelve and a man of thirty-two, indissolubly and helplessly commingled.

Donald had lost a good deal, too, in those hours between the planes--but since the second half of life is a long process of getting rid of things, that part of the experience probably didn’t matter.

WHAT A HANDSOME PAIR!

Saturday Evening Post (27 August 1932)

At four o’clock on a November afternoon in 1902, Teddy Van Beck got out of a hansom cab in front of a brownstone house on Murray Hill. He was a tall, round-shouldered young man with a beaked nose and soft brown eyes in a sensitive face. In his veins quarreled the blood of colonial governors and celebrated robber barons; in him the synthesis had produced, for that time and place, something different and something new.

His cousin, Helen Van Beck, waited in the drawing-room. Her eyes were red from weeping, but she was young enough for it not to detract from her glossy beauty--a beauty that had reached the point where it seemed to contain in itself the secret of its own growth, as if it would go on increasing forever. She was nineteen and, contrary to the evidence, she was extremely happy.

Teddy put his arm around her and kissed her cheek, and found it changing into her ear as she turned her face away. He held her for a moment, his own enthusiasm chilling; then he said:

“You don’t seem very glad to see me.”

Helen had a premonition that this was going to be one of the memorable scenes of her life, and with unconscious cruelty she set about extracting from it its full dramatic value. She sat in a corner of the couch, facing an easy-chair.

“Sit there,” she commanded, in what was then admired as a “regal manner,” and then, as Teddy straddled the piano stool: “No, don’t sit there. I can’t talk to you if you’re going to revolve around.”

“Sit on my lap,” he suggested.

“No.”

Playing a one-handed flourish on the piano, he said, “I can listen better here.”

Helen gave up hopes of beginning on the sad and quiet note.

“This is a serious matter, Teddy. Don’t think I’ve decided it without a lot of consideration. I’ve got to ask you--to ask you to release me from our understanding.”

“What?” Teddy’s face paled with shock and dismay.

“I’ll have to tell you from the beginning. I’ve realized for a long time that we have nothing in common. You’re interested in your music, and I can’t even play chopsticks.” Her voice was weary as if with suffering; her small teeth tugged at her lower lip.

“What of it?” he demanded, relieved. “I’m musician enough for both. You wouldn’t have to understand banking to marry a banker, would you?”

“This is different,” Helen answered. “What would we do together? One important thing is that you don’t like riding; you told me you were afraid of horses.”

“Of course I’m afraid of horses,” he said, and added reminiscently: “They try to bite me.”

“It makes it so--”

“I’ve never met a horse--socially, that is--who didn’t try to bite me. They used to do it when I put the bridle on; then, when I gave up putting the bridle on, they began reaching their heads around trying to get at my calves.”

The eyes of her father, who had given her a Shetland at three, glistened, cold and hard, from her own.

“You don’t even like the people I like, let alone the horses,” she said.

“I can stand them. I’ve stood them all my life.”

“Well, it would be a silly way to start a marriage. I don’t see any grounds for mutual--mutual--”

“Riding?”

“Oh, not that.” Helen hesitated, and then said in an unconvinced tone, “Probably I’m not clever enough for you.”

“Don’t talk such stuff!” He demanded some truth: “Who’s the man?”

It took her a moment to collect herself. She had always resented Teddy’s tendency to treat women with less ceremony than was the custom of the day. Often he was an unfamiliar, almost frightening young man.

“There is someone,” she admitted. “It’s someone I’ve always known slightly, but about a month ago, when I went to Southampton, I was--thrown with him.”

“Thrown from a horse?”

“Please, Teddy,” she protested gravely. “I’d been getting more unhappy about you and me, and whenever I was with him everything seemed all right.” A note of exaltation that she would not conceal came into Helen’s voice. She rose and crossed the room, her straight, slim legs outlined by the shadows of her dress. “We rode and swam and played tennis together--did the things we both liked to do.”

He stared into the vacant space she had created for him. “Is that all that drew you to this fellow?”

“No, it was more than that. He was thrilling to me like nobody ever has been.” She laughed. “I think what really started me thinking about it was one day we came in from riding and everybody said aloud what a nice pair we made.”

“Did you kiss him?”

She hesitated. “Yes, once.”

He got up from the piano stool. “I feel as if I had a cannon ball in my stomach,” he exclaimed.

The butler announced Mr. Stuart Oldhorne.

“Is he the man?” Teddy demanded tensely.

She was suddenly upset and confused. “He should have come later. Would you rather go without meeting him?”

But Stuart Oldhorne, made confident by his new sense of proprietorship, had followed the butler.

The two men regarded each other with a curious impotence of expression; there can be no communication between men in that position, for their relation is indirect and consists in how much each of them has possessed or will possess of the woman in question, so that their emotions pass through her divided self as through a bad telephone connection.

Stuart Oldhorne sat beside Helen, his polite eyes never leaving Teddy. He had the same glowing physical power as she. He had been a star athlete at Yale and a Rough Rider in Cuba, and was the best young horseman on Long Island. Women loved him not only for his points but for a real sweetness of temper.

“You’ve lived so much in Europe that I don’t often see you,” he said to Teddy. Teddy didn’t answer and Stuart Oldhorne turned to Helen: “I’m early; I didn’t realize--”

“You came at the right time,” said Teddy rather harshly. “I stayed to play you my congratulations.”

To Helen’s alarm, he turned and ran his fingers over the keyboard. Then he began.

What he was playing, neither Helen nor Stuart knew, but Teddy always remembered. He put his mind in order with a short résumé of the history of music, beginning with some chords from The Messiah and ending with Debussy’s La Plus Que Lent, which had an evocative quality for him, because he had first heard it the day his brother died. Then, pausing for an instant, he began to play more thoughtfully, and the lovers on the sofa could feel that they were alone--that he had left them and had no more traffic with them--and Helen’s discomfort lessened. But the flight, the elusiveness of the music, piqued her, gave her a feeling of annoyance. If Teddy had played the current sentimental song from Erminie, and had played it with feeling, she would have understood and been moved, but he was plunging her suddenly into a world of mature emotions, whither her nature neither could nor wished to follow.

She shook herself slightly and said to Stuart: “Did you buy the horse?”

“Yes, and at a bargain. . . . Do you know I love you?”

“I’m glad,” she whispered.

The piano stopped suddenly. Teddy closed it and swung slowly around: “Did you like my congratulations?”

“Very much,” they said together.

“It was pretty good,” he admitted. “That last was only based on a little counterpoint. You see, the idea of it was that you make such a handsome pair.”

He laughed unnaturally; Helen followed him out into the hall.

“Good-by, Teddy,” she said. “We’re going to be good friends, aren’t we?”

“Aren’t we?” he repeated. He winked without smiling, and with a clicking, despairing sound of his mouth, went out quickly.

For a moment Helen tried vainly to apply a measure to the situation, wondering how she had come off with him, realizing reluctantly that she had never for an instant held the situation in her hands. She had a dim realization that Teddy was larger in scale; then the very largeness frightened her and, with relief and a warm tide of emotion, she hurried into the drawing-room and the shelter of her lover’s arms.

Their engagement ran through a halcyon summer. Stuart visited Helen’s family at Tuxedo, and Helen visited his family in Wheatley Hills. Before breakfast, their horses’ hoofs sedately scattered the dew in sentimental glades, or curtained them with dust as they raced on dirt roads. They bought a tandem bicycle and pedaled all over Long Island--which Mrs. Cassius Ruthven, a contemporary Cato, considered “rather fast” for a couple not yet married. They were seldom at rest, but when they were, they reminded people of His Move on a Gibson pillow.

Helen’s taste for sport was advanced for her generation. She rode nearly as well as Stuart and gave him a decent game in tennis. He taught her some polo, and they were golf crazy when it was still considered a comic game. They liked to feel fit and cool together. They thought of themselves as a team, and it was often remarked how well mated they were. A chorus of pleasant envy followed in the wake of their effortless glamour.

They talked.

“It seems a pity you’ve got to go to the office,” she would say. “I wish you did something we could do together, like taming lions.”

“I’ve always thought that in a pinch I could make a living breeding and racing horses,” said Stuart.

“I know you could, you darling.”

In August he brought a Thomas automobile and toured all the way to Chicago with three other men. It was an event of national interest and their pictures were in all the papers. Helen wanted to go, but it wouldn’t have been proper, so they compromised by driving down Fifth Avenue on a sunny September morning, one with the fine day and the fashionable crowd, but distinguished by their unity, which made them each as strong as two.

“What do you suppose?” Helen demanded. “Teddy sent me the oddest present--a cup rack.”

Stuart laughed. “Obviously, he means that all we’ll ever do is win cups.”

“I thought it was rather a slam,” Helen ruminated. “I saw that he was invited to everything, but he didn’t answer a single invitation. Would you mind very much stopping by his apartment now? I haven’t seen him for months and I don’t like to leave anything unpleasant in the past.”

He wouldn’t go in with her. “I’ll sit and answer questions about the auto from passers-by.”

The door was opened by a woman in a cleaning cap, and Helen heard the sound of Teddy’s piano from the room beyond. The woman seemed reluctant to admit her.

“He said don’t interrupt him, but I suppose if you’re his cousin--”

Teddy welcomed her, obviously startled and somewhat upset, but in a minute he was himself again.

“I won’t marry you,” he assured her. “You’ve had your chance.”

“All right,” she laughed.

“How are you?” He threw a pillow at her. “You’re beautiful! Are you happy with this--this centaur? Does he beat you with his riding crop?” He peered at her closely. “You look a little duller than when I knew you. I used to whip you up to a nervous excitement that bore a resemblance to intelligence.”

“I’m happy, Teddy. I hope you are.”

“Sure, I’m happy; I’m working. I’ve got MacDowell on the run and I’m going to have a shebang at Carnegie Hall next September.” His eyes became malicious. “What did you think of my girl?”

“Your girl?”

“The girl who opened the door for you.”

“Oh, I thought it was a maid.” She flushed and was silent.

He laughed. “Hey, Betty!” he called. “You were mistaken for the maid!”

“And that’s the fault of my cleaning on Sunday,” answered a voice from the next room.

Teddy lowered his voice. “Do you like her?” he demanded.

“Teddy!” She teetered on the arm of the sofa, wondering whether she should leave at once.

“What would you think if I married her?” he asked confidentially.

“Teddy!” She was outraged; it had needed but a glance to place the woman as common. “You’re joking. She’s older than you. . . . You wouldn’t be such a fool as to throw away your future that way.”

He didn’t answer.

“Is she musical?” Helen demanded. “Does she help you with your work?”

“She doesn’t know a note. Neither did you, but I’ve got enough music in me for twenty wives.”

Visualizing herself as one of them, Helen rose stiffly.

“All I can ask you is to think how your mother would have felt--and those who care for you. . . . Good-by, Teddy.”

He walked out the door with her and down the stairs.

“As a matter of fact, we’ve been married for two months,” he said casually. “She was a waitress in a place where I used to eat.”

Helen felt that she should be angry and aloof, but tears of hurt vanity were springing to her eyes.

“And do you love her?”

“I like her; she’s a good person and good for me. Love is something else. I loved you, Helen, and that’s all dead in me for the present. Maybe it’s coming out in my music. Some day I’ll probably love other women--or maybe there’ll never be anything but you. Good-by, Helen.”

The declaration touched her. “I hope you’ll be happy, Teddy. Bring your wife to the wedding.”

He bowed noncommittally. When she had gone, he returned thoughtfully to his apartment.

“That was the cousin that I was in love with,” he said.

“And was it?” Betty’s face, Irish and placid, brightened with interest. “She’s a pretty thing.”

“She wouldn’t have been as good for me as a nice peasant like you.”

“Always thinking of yourself, Teddy Van Beck.”

He laughed. “Sure I am, but you love me, anyhow?”

“That’s a big wur-red.”

“All right. I’ll remember that when you come begging around for a kiss. If my grandfather knew I married a bog trotter, he’d turn over in his grave. Now get out and let me finish my work.”

He sat at the piano, a pencil behind his ear. Already his face was resolved, composed, but his eyes grew more intense minute by minute, until there was a glaze in them, behind which they seemed to have joined his ears in counting and hearing. Presently there was no more indication in his face that anything had occurred to disturb the tranquillity of his Sunday morning.

II

Mrs. Cassius Ruthven and a friend, veils flung back across their hats, sat in their auto on the edge of the field.

“A young woman playing polo in breeches.” Mrs. Ruthven sighed. “Amy Van Beck’s daughter. I thought when Helen organized the Amazons she’d stop at divided skirts. But her husband apparently has no objections, for there he stands, egging her on. Of course, they always have liked the same things.”

“A pair of thoroughbreds, those two,” said the other woman complacently, meaning that she admitted them to be her equals. “You’d never look at them and think that anything had gone wrong.”

She was referring to Stuart’s mistake in the panic of 1907. His father had bequeathed him a precarious situation and Stuart had made an error of judgment. His honor was not questioned and his crowd stood by him loyally, but his usefulness in Wall Street was over and his small fortune was gone.

He stood in a group of men with whom he would presently play, noting things to tell Helen after the game--she wasn’t turning with the play soon enough and several times she was unnecessarily ridden off at important moments. Her ponies were sluggish--the penalty for playing with borrowed mounts--but she was, nevertheless, the best player on the field, and in the last minute she made a save that brought applause.

“Good girl! Good girl!”

Stuart had been delegated with the unpleasant duty of chasing the women from the field. They had started an hour late and now a team from New Jersey was waiting to play; he sensed trouble as he cut across to join Helen and walked beside her toward the stables. She was splendid, with her flushed cheeks, her shining, triumphant eyes, her short, excited breath. He temporized for a minute.

“That was good--that last,” he said.

“Thanks. It almost broke my arm. Wasn’t I pretty good all through?”

“You were the best out there.”

“I know it.”

He waited while she dismounted and handed the pony to a groom.

“Helen, I believe I’ve got a job.”

“What is it?”

“Don’t jump on the idea till you think it over. Gus Myers wants me to manage his racing stables. Eight thousand a year.”

Helen considered. “It’s a nice salary; and I bet you could make yourself up a nice string from his ponies.”

“The principal thing is that I need the money; I’d have as much as you and things would be easier.”

“You’d have as much as me,” Helen repeated. She almost regretted that he would need no more help from her. “But with Gus Myers, isn’t there a string attached? Wouldn’t he expect a boost up?”

“He probably would,” answered Stuart bluntly, “and if I can help him socially, I will. As a matter of fact, he wants me at a stag dinner tonight.”

“All right, then,” Helen said absently. Still hesitating to tell her her game was over, Stuart followed her glance toward the field, where a runabout had driven up and parked by the ropes.

“There’s your old friend, Teddy,” he remarked dryly--”or rather, your new friend, Teddy. He’s taking a sudden interest in polo. Perhaps he thinks the horses aren’t biting this summer.”

“You’re not in a very good humor,” protested Helen. “You know, if you say the word, I’ll never see him again. All I want in the world is for you and I to be together.”

“I know,” he admitted regretfully. “Selling horses and giving up clubs put a crimp in that. I know the women all fall for Teddy, now he’s getting famous, but if he tries to fool around with you I’ll break his piano over his head. . . . Oh, another thing,” he began, seeing the men already riding on the field. “About your last chukker--”

As best he could, he put the situation up to her. He was not prepared for the fury that swept over her.

“But it’s an outrage! I got up the game and it’s been posted on the bulletin board for three days.”

“You started an hour late.”

“And do you know why?” she demanded. “Because your friend Joe Morgan insisted that Celie ride sidesaddle. He tore her habit off her three times, and she only got here by climbing out the kitchen window.”

“I can’t do anything about it.”

“Why can’t you? Weren’t you once a governor of this club? How can women ever expect to be any good if they have to quit every time the men want the field? All the men want is for the women to come up to them in the evening and tell them what a beautiful game they played!”

Still raging and blaming Stuart, she crossed the field to Teddy’s car. He got out and greeted her with concentrated intensity:

“I’ve reached the point where I can neither sleep nor eat from thinking of you. What point is that?”

There was something thrilling about him that she had never been conscious of in the old days; perhaps the stories of his philanderings had made him more romantic to her.

“Well, don’t think of me as I am now,” she said. “My face is getting rougher every day and my muscles lean out of an evening dress like a female impersonator. People are beginning to refer to me as handsome instead of pretty. Besides, I’m in a vile humor. It seems to me women are always just edged out of everything.”

Stuart’s game was brutal that afternoon. In the first five minutes, he realized that Teddy’s runabout was no longer there, and his long slugs began to tally from all angles. Afterward, he bumped home across country at a gallop; his mood was not assuaged by a note handed him by the children’s nurse:

DEAR: Since your friends made it possible for us to play, I wasn’t going to sit there just dripping; so I had Teddy bring me home. And since you’ll be out to dinner, I’m going into New York with him to the theater. I’ll either be out on the theater train or spend the night at mother’s.

HELEN.    Stuart went upstairs and changed into his dinner coat. He had no defense against the unfamiliar claws of jealousy that began a slow dissection of his insides. Often Helen had gone to plays or dances with other men, but this was different. He felt toward Teddy the faint contempt of the physical man for the artist, but the last six months had bruised his pride. He perceived the possibility that Helen might be seriously interested in someone else.

He was in a bad humor at Gus Myers’ dinner--annoyed with his host for talking so freely about their business arrangement. When at last they rose from the table, he decided that it was no go and called Myers aside.

“Look here. I’m afraid this isn’t a good idea, after all.”

“Why not?” His host looked at him in alarm. “Are you going back on me? My dear fellow--”

“I think we’d better call it off.”

“And why, may I ask? Certainly I have the right to ask why.”

Stuart considered. “All right, I’ll tell you. When you made that little speech, you mentioned me as if you had somehow bought me, as if I was a sort of employee in your office. Now, in the sporting world that doesn’t go; things are more--more democratic. I grew up with all these men here tonight, and they didn’t like it any better than I did.”

“I see,” Mr. Myers reflected carefully--”I see.” Suddenly he clapped Stuart on the back. “That is exactly the sort of thing I like to be told; it helps me. From now on I won’t mention you as if you were in my--as if we had a business arrangement. Is that all right?”

After all, the salary was eight thousand dollars.

“Very well, then,” Stuart agreed. “But you’ll have to excuse me tonight. I’m catching a train to the city.”

“I’ll put an automobile at your disposal.”

At ten o’clock he rang the bell of Teddy’s apartment on Forty-eighth Street.

“I’m looking for Mr. Van Beck,” he said to the woman who answered the door. “I know he’s gone to the theater, but I wonder if you can tell me--” Suddenly he guessed who the woman was. “I’m Stuart Oldhorne,” he explained. “I married Mr. Van Beck’s cousin.”

“Oh, come in,” said Betty pleasantly. “I know all about who you are.”

She was just this side of forty, stoutish and plain of face, but full of a keen, brisk vitality. In the living room they sat down.

“You want to see Teddy?”

“He’s with my wife and I want to join them after the theater. I wonder if you know where they went?”

“Oh, so Teddy’s with your wife.” There was a faint, pleasant brogue in her voice. “Well, now, he didn’t say exactly where he’d be tonight.”

“Then you don’t know?”

“I don’t--not for the life of me,” she admitted cheerfully. “I’m sorry.”

He stood up, and Betty saw the thinly hidden anguish in his face. Suddenly she was really sorry.

“I did hear him say something about the theater,” she said ruminatively. “Now sit down and let me think what it was. He goes out so much and a play once a week is enough for me, so that one night mixes up with the others in my head. Didn’t your wife say where to meet them?”

“No. I only decided to come in after they’d started. She said she’d catch the theater train back to Long Island or go to her mother’s.”

“That’s it,” Betty said triumphantly, striking her hands together like cymbals. “That’s what he said when he called up--that he was putting a lady on the theater train for Long Island, and would be home himself right afterward. We’ve had a child sick and it’s driven things from my mind.”

“I’m very sorry I bothered you under those conditions.”

“It’s no bother. Sit down. It’s only just after ten.”

Feeling easier, Stuart relaxed a little and accepted a cigar.

“No, if I tried to keep up with Teddy, I’d have white hair by now,” Betty said. “Of course, I go to his concerts, but often I fall asleep--not that he ever knows it. So long as he doesn’t take too much to drink and knows where his home is, I don’t bother about where he wanders.” As Stuart’s face grew serious again, she changed her tone: “All and all, he’s a good husband to me and we have a happy life together, without interfering with each other. How would he do working next to the nursery and groaning at every sound? And how would I do going to Mrs. Ruthven’s with him, and all of them talking about high society and high art?”

A phrase of Helen’s came back to Stuart: “Always together--I like for us to do everything together.”

“You have children, haven’t you, Mr. Oldhorne?”

“Yes. My boy’s almost big enough to sit a horse.”

“Ah, yes; you’re both great for horses.”

“My wife says that as soon as their legs are long enough to reach stirrups, she’ll be interested in them again.” This didn’t sound right to Stuart and he modified it: “I mean she always has been interested in them, but she never let them monopolize her or come between us. We’ve always believed that marriage ought to be founded on companionship, on having the same interests. I mean, you’re musical and you help your husband.”

Betty laughed. “I wish Teddy could hear that. I can’t read a note or carry a tune.”

“No?” He was confused. “I’d somehow got the impression that you were musical.”

“You can’t see why else he’d have married me?”

“Not at all. On the contrary.”

After a few minutes, he said good night, somehow liking her. When he had gone, Betty’s expression changed slowly to one of exasperation; she went to the telephone and called her husband’s studio:

“There you are, Teddy. Now listen to me carefully. I know your cousin is with you and I want to talk with her. . . . Now, don’t lie. You put her on the phone. Her husband has been here, and if you don’t let me talk to her, it might be a serious matter.”

She could hear an unintelligible colloquy, and then Helen’s voice:

“Hello.”

“Good evening, Mrs. Oldhorne. Your husband came here, looking for you and Teddy. I told him I didn’t know which play you were at, so you’d better be thinking which one. And I told him Teddy was leaving you at the station in time for the theater train.”

“Oh, thank you very much. We--”

“Now, you meet your husband or there’s trouble for you, or I’m no judge of men. And--wait a minute. Tell Teddy, if he’s going to be up late, that Josie’s sleeping light, and he’s not to touch the piano when he gets home.”

Betty heard Teddy come in at eleven, and she came into the drawing-room smelling of camomile vapor. He greeted her absently; there was a look of suffering in his face and his eyes were bright and far away.

“You call yourself a great musician, Teddy Van Beck,” she said, “but it seems to me you’re much more interested in women.”

“Let me alone, Betty.”

“I do let you alone, but when the husbands start coming here, it’s another matter.”

“This was different, Betty. This goes way back into the past.”

“It sounds like the present to me.”

“Don’t make any mistake about Helen,” he said. “She’s a good woman.”

“Not through any fault of yours, I know.”

He sank his head wearily in his hands. “I’ve tried to forget her. I’ve avoided her for six years. And then, when I met her a month ago, it all rushed over me. Try and understand, Bet. You’re my best friend; you’re the only person that ever loved me.”

“When you’re good I love you,” she said.

“Don’t worry. It’s over. She loves her husband; she just came to New York with me because she’s got some spite against him. She follows me a certain distance just like she always has, and then--Anyhow, I’m not going to see her any more. Now go to bed, Bet. I want to play for a while.”

He was on his feet when she stopped him.

“You’re not to touch the piano tonight.”

“Oh, I forgot about Josie,” he said remorsefully. “Well, I’ll drink a bottle of beer and then I’ll come to bed.”

He came close and put his arm around her.

“Dear Bet, nothing could ever interfere with us.”

“You’re a bad boy, Teddy,” she said. “I wouldn’t ever be so bad to you.”

“How do you know, Bet? How do you know what you’d do?”

He smoothed down her plain brown hair, knowing for the thousandth time that she had none of the world’s dark magic for him, and that he couldn’t live without her for six consecutive hours. “Dear Bet,” he whispered. “Dear Bet.”

III

The Oldhornes were visiting. In the last four years, since Stuart had terminated his bondage to Gus Myers, they had become visiting people. The children visited Grandmother Van Beck during the winter and attended school in New York. Stuart and Helen visited friends in Asheville, Aiken and Palm Beach, and in the summer usually occupied a small cottage on someone’s Long Island estate. “My dear, it’s just standing there empty. I wouldn’t dream of accepting any rent. You’ll be doing us a favor by occupying it.”

Usually, they were; they gave out a great deal of themselves in that eternal willingness and enthusiasm which makes a successful guest--it became their profession. Moving through a world that was growing rich with the war in Europe, Stuart had somewhere lost his way. Twice playing brilliant golf in the national amateur, he accepted a job as professional at a club which his father had helped to found. He was restless and unhappy.

This week-end they were visiting a pupil of his. As a consequence of a mixed foursome, the Oldhornes went upstairs to dress for dinner surcharged with the unpleasant accumulation of many unsatisfactory months. In the afternoon, Stuart had played with their hostess and Helen with another man--a situation which Stuart always dreaded, because it forced him into competition with Helen. He had actually tried to miss that putt on the eighteenth--to just miss it. But the ball dropped in the cup. Helen went through the superficial motions of a good loser, but she devoted herself pointedly to her partner for the rest of the afternoon.

Their expressions still counterfeited amusement as they entered their room.

When the door closed, Helen’s pleasant expression faded and she walked toward the dressing table as though her own reflection was the only decent company with which to forgather. Stuart watched her, frowning.

“I know why you’re in a rotten humor,” he said; “though I don’t believe you know yourself.”

“I’m not in a rotten humor,” Helen responded in a clipped voice.

“You are; and I know the real reason--the one you don’t know. It’s because I holed that putt this afternoon.”

She turned slowly, incredulously, from the mirror.

“Oh, so I have a new fault! I’ve suddenly become, of all things, a poor sport!”

“It’s not like you to be a poor sport,” he admitted, “but otherwise why all this interest in other men, and why do you look at me as if I’m--well, slightly gamy?”

“I’m not aware of it.”

“I am.” He was aware, too, that there was always some man in their life now--some man of power and money who paid court to Helen and gave her the sense of solidity which he failed to provide. He had no cause to be jealous of any particular man, but the pressure of many was irritating. It annoyed him that on so slight a grievance, Helen should remind him by her actions that he no longer filled her entire life.

“If Anne can get any satisfaction out of winning, she’s welcome to it,” said Helen suddenly.

“Isn’t that rather petty? She isn’t in your class; she won’t qualify for the third flight in Boston.”

Feeling herself in the wrong, she changed her tone.

“Oh, that isn’t it,” she broke out. “I just keep wishing you and I could play together like we used to. And now you have to play with dubs, and get their wretched shots out of traps. Especially”--she hesitated--”especially when you’re so unnecessarily gallant.”

The faint contempt in her voice, the mock jealousy that covered a growing indifference was apparent to him. There had been a time when, if he danced with another woman, Helen’s stricken eyes followed him around the room.

“My gallantry is simply a matter of business,” he answered. “Lessons have brought in three hundred a month all summer. How could I go to see you play at Boston next week, except that I’m going to coach other women?”

“And you’re going to see me win,” announced Helen. “Do you know that?”

“Naturally, I want nothing more,” Stuart said automatically. But the unnecessary defiance in her voice repelled him, and he suddenly wondered if he really cared whether she won or not.

At the same moment, Helen’s mood changed and for a moment she saw the true situation--that she could play in amateur tournaments and Stuart could not, that the new cups in the rack were all hers now, that he had given up the fiercely competitive sportsmanship that had been the breath of life to him in order to provide necessary money.

“Oh, I’m so sorry for you, Stuart!” There were tears in her eyes. “It seems such a shame that you can’t do the things you love, and I can. Perhaps I oughtn’t to play this summer.”

“Nonsense,” he said. “You can’t sit home and twirl your thumbs.”

She caught at this: “You wouldn’t want me to. I can’t help being good at sports; you taught me nearly all I know. But I wish I could help you.”

“Just try to remember I’m your best friend. Sometimes you act as if we were rivals.”

She hesitated, annoyed by the truth of his words and unwilling to concede an inch; but a wave of memories rushed over her, and she thought how brave he was in his eked-out, pieced-together life; she came and threw her arms around him.

“Darling, darling, things are going to be better. You’ll see.”

Helen won the finals in the tournament at Boston the following week. Following around with the crowd, Stuart was very proud of her. He hoped that instead of feeding her egotism, the actual achievement would make things easier between them. He hated the conflict that had grown out of their wanting the same excellences, the same prizes from life.

Afterward he pursued her progress toward the clubhouse, amused and a little jealous of the pack that fawned around her. He reached the club among the last, and a steward accosted him. “Professionals are served in the lower grill, please,” the man said.

“That’s all right. My name’s Oldhorne.”

He started to walk by, but the man barred his way.

“Sorry, sir. I realize that Mrs. Oldhorne’s playing in the match, but my orders are to direct the professionals to the lower grill, and I understand you are a professional.”

“Why, look here--” Stuart began, wildly angry, and stopped. A group of people were listening. “All right; never mind,” he said gruffly, and turned away.

The memory of the experience rankled; it was the determining factor that drove him, some weeks later, to a momentous decision. For a long time he had been playing with the idea of joining the Canadian Air Force, for service in France. He knew that his absence would have little practical bearing on the lives of Helen and the children; happening on some friends who were also full of the restlessness of 1915, the matter was suddenly decided. But he had not counted on the effect upon Helen; her reaction was not so much one of grief or alarm, but as if she had been somehow outwitted.

“But you might have told me!” she wailed. “You leave me dangling; you simply take yourself away without any warning.”

Once again Helen saw him as the bright and intolerably blinding hero, and her soul winced before him as it had when they first met. He was a warrior; for him, peace was only the interval between wars, and peace was destroying him. Here was the game of games beckoning him--Without throwing over the whole logic of their lives, there was nothing she could say.

“This is my sort of thing,” he said confidently, younger with his excitement. “A few more years of this life and I’d go to pieces, take to drink. I’ve somehow lost your respect, and I’ve got to have that, even if I’m far away.”

She was proud of him again; she talked to everyone of his impending departure. Then, one September afternoon, she came home from the city, full of the old feeling of comradeship and bursting with news, to find him buried in an utter depression.

“Stuart,” she cried, “I’ve got the--” She broke off. “What’s the matter, darling? Is something the matter?”

He looked at her dully. “They turned me down,” he said.

“What?”

“My left eye.” He laughed bitterly. “Where that dub cracked me with the brassie. I’m nearly blind in it.”

“Isn’t there anything you can do?”

“Nothing.”

“Stuart!” She stared at him aghast. “Stuart, and I was going to tell you! I was saving it for a surprise. Elsa Prentice has organized a Red Cross unit to serve with the French, and I joined it because I thought it would be wonderful if we both went. We’ve been measured for uniforms and bought our outfits, and we’re sailing the end of next week.”

IV

Helen was a blurred figure among other blurred figures on a boat deck, dark against the threat of submarines. When the ship had slid out into the obscure future, Stuart walked eastward along Fifty-seventh Street. His grief at the severance of many ties was a weight he carried in his body, and he walked slowly, as if adjusting himself to it. To balance this there was a curious sensation of lightness in his mind. For the first time in twelve years he was alone, and the feeling came over him that he was alone for good; knowing Helen and knowing war, he could guess at the experiences she would go through, and he could not form any picture of a renewed life together afterward. He was discarded; she had proved the stronger at last. It seemed very strange and sad that his marriage should have such an ending.

He came to Carnegie Hall, dark after a concert, and his eye caught the name of Theodore Van Beck, large on the posted bills. As he stared at it, a green door opened in the side of the building and a group of people in evening dress came out. Stuart and Teddy were face to face before they recognized each other.

“Hello, there!” Teddy cried cordially. “Did Helen sail?”

“Just now.”

“I met her on the street yesterday and she told me. I wanted you both to come to my concert. Well, she’s quite a heroine, going off like that. . . . Have you met my wife?”

Stuart and Betty smiled at each other.

“We’ve met.”

“And I didn’t know it,” protested Teddy. “Women need watching when they get toward their dotage. . . . Look here, Stuart; we’re having a few people up to the apartment. No heavy music or anything. Just supper and a few débutantes to tell me I was divine. It will do you good to come. I imagine you’re missing Helen like the devil.”

“I don’t think I--”

“Come along. They’ll tell you you’re divine too.”

Realizing that the invitation was inspired by kindliness, Stuart accepted. It was the sort of gathering he had seldom attended, and he was surprised to meet so many people he knew. Teddy played the lion in a manner at once assertive and skeptical. Stuart listened as he enlarged to Mrs. Cassius Ruthven on one of his favorite themes:

“People tried to make marriages coöperative and they’ve ended by becoming competitive. Impossible situation. Smart men will get to fight shy of ornamental women. A man ought to marry somebody who’ll be grateful, like Betty here.”

“Now don’t talk so much, Theodore Van Beck,” Betty interrupted. “Since you’re such a fine musician, you’d do well to express yourself with music instead of rash words.”

“I don’t agree with your husband,” said Mrs. Ruthven. “English girls hunt with their men and play politics with them on absolutely equal terms, and it tends to draw them together.”

“It does not,” insisted Teddy. “That’s why English society is the most disorganized in the world. Betty and I are happy because we haven’t any qualities in common at all.”

His exuberance grated on Stuart, and the success that flowed from him swung his mind back to the failure of his own life. He could not know that his life was not destined to be a failure. He could not read the fine story that three years later would be carved proud above his soldier’s grave, or know that his restless body, which never spared itself in sport or danger, was destined to give him one last proud gallop at the end.

“They turned me down,” he was saying to Mrs. Ruthven. “I’ll have to stick to Squadron A, unless we get drawn in.”

“So Helen’s gone.” Mrs. Ruthven looked at him, reminiscing. “I’ll never forget your wedding. You were both so handsome, so ideally suited to each other. Everybody spoke of it.”

Stuart remembered; for the moment it seemed that he had little else that it was fun to remember.

“Yes,” he agreed, nodding his head thoughtfully, “I suppose we were a handsome pair.”

THE ORDEAL

I.

The hot four o’clock sun beat down familiarly upon the wide stretch of Maryland country, burning up the long valleys, powdering the winding road into fine dust and glaring on the ugly slated roof of the monastery. Into the gardens it poured hot, dry, lazy, bringing with it, perhaps, some quiet feeling of content, unromantic and cheerful. The walls, the trees, the sanded walks, seemed to radiate back into the fair cloudless sky the sweltering late summer heat and yet they laughed and baked happily. The hour brought some odd sensation of comfort to the farmer in a nearby field, drying his brow for a moment by his thirsty horse, and to the lay-brother opening boxes behind the monastery kitchen.

The man walked up and down on the bank above the creek. He had been walking for half an hour. The lay-brother looked at him quizzically as he passed and murmured an invocation. It was always hard, this hour before taking first vows. Eighteen years before one, the world just behind. The lay-brother had seen many in this same situation, some white and nervous, some grim and determined, some despairing. Then, when the bell tolled five, there were the vows and usually the novice felt better. It was this hour in the country when the world seemed gloriously apparent and the monastery vaguely impotent. The lay-brother shook his head in sympathy and passed on.

The man’s eyes were bent upon his prayer-book. He was very young, twenty at the most, and his dark hair in disorder gave him an even more boyish expression. A light flush lay on his calm face and his lips moved incessantly. He was not nervous. It seemed to him as if he had always known he was to become a priest. Two years before, he had felt the vague stirring, the transcendent sense of seeing heaven in everything, that warned him softly, kindly that the spring of his life was coming. He had given himself every opportunity to resist. He had gone a year to college, four months abroad, and both experiences only increased within him the knowledge of his destiny. There was little hesitation. He had at first feared self-committal with a thousand nameless terrors. He thought he loved the world. Panicky, he struggled, but surer and surer he felt that the last word had been said. He had his vocation — and then, because he was no coward, he decided to become a priest.

Through the long month of his probation he alternated between deep, almost delirious, joy and the same vague terror at his own love of life and his realization of all he sacrificed. As a favorite child he had been reared in pride and confidence in his ability, in faith in his destiny. Careers were open to him, pleasure, travel, the law, the diplomatic service. When, three months before, he had walked into the library at home and told his father that he was going to become a Jesuit priest, there was a family scene and letters on all sides from friends and relatives. They told him he was ruining a promising young life because of a sentimental notion of self sacrifice, a boyish dream. For a month he listened to the bitter melodrama of the commonplace, finding his only rest in prayer, knowing his salvation and trusting in it. After all, his worst battle had been with himself. He grieved at his father’s disappointment and his mother’s tears, but he knew that time would set them right.

And now in half an hour he would take the vows which pledged him forever to a life of service. Eighteen years of study — eighteen years where his every thought, every idea would be dictated to him, where his individuality, his physical ego would be effaced and he would come forth strong and firm to work and work and work. He felt strangely calm, happier in fact than he had been for days and months. Something in the fierce, pulsing heat of the sun likened itself to his own heart, strong in its decision, virile and doing its own share in the work, the greatest work. He was elated that he had been chosen, he from so many unquestionably singled out, unceasingly called for. And he had answered.

The words of the prayers seemed to run like a stream into his thoughts, lifting him up peacefully, serenely; and a smile lingered around his eyes. Everything seemed so easy; surely all life was a prayer. Up and down he walked. Then of a sudden something happened. Afterwards he could never describe it except by saying that some undercurrent had crept into his prayer, something unsought, alien. He read on for a moment and then it seemed to take the form of music. He raised his eyes with a start — far down the dusty road a group of negro hands were walking along singing, and the song was an old song that he knew:

“We hope ter meet you in heavan whar we’ll

Part no mo’,

Whar we’ll part no mo’.

Gawd a’moughty bless you twelwe

Me-et agin.”

Something flashed into his mind that had not been there before. He felt a sort of resentment toward those who had burst in upon him at this time, not because they were simple and primitive, but because they had vaguely disturbed him. That song was old in his life. His nurse had hummed it through the dreamy days of his childhood. Often in the hot summer afternoons he had played it softly on his banjo. It reminded him of so many things: months at the seashore on the hot beach with the gloomy ocean rolling around him, playing with sand castles with his cousin; summer evenings on the big lawn at home when he chased fireflys and the breeze carried the tune over the night to him from the negro-quarters. Later, with new words, it had served as a serenade — and now-well, he had done with that part of life, and yet he seemed to see a girl with kind eyes, old in a great sorrow, waiting, ever waiting. He seemed to hear voices calling, children’s voices. Then around him swirled the city, busy with the hum of men; and there was a family that would never be, beckoning him.

Other music ran now as undercurrent to his thoughts: wild, incoherent music, illusive and wailing, like the shriek of a hundred violins, yet clear and chord-like. Art, beauty, love and life passed in a panorama before him, exotic with the hot perfumes of world-passion. He saw struggles and wars, banners waving somewhere, voices giving hail to a king — and looking at him through it all were the sweet sad eyes of the girl who was now a woman.

Again the music changed; the air was low and sad. He seemed to front a howling crowd who accused him. The smoke rose again around the body of John Wycliffe, a monk knelt at a prie-dieu and laughed because the poor had not bread, Alexander VI pressed once more the poisoned ring into his brother’s hand, and the black robed figures of the inquisition scowled and whispered. Three great men said there was no God, a million voices seemed to cry, “Why! Why! must we believe?” Then as in a chrystal he seemed to hear Huxley, Nietzsche, Zola, Kant cry, “I will not” — He saw Voltaire and Shaw wild with cold passion. The voices pleaded “Why?” and the girl’s sad eyes gazed at him with infinite longing.

He was in a void above the world — the ensemble, everything called him now. He could not pray. Over and over again he said senselessly, meaninglessly, “God have mercy, God have mercy.” For a minute, an eternity, he trembled in the void and then — something snapped. They were still there, but the girl’s eyes were all wrong, the lines around her mouth were cold and chiselled and her passion seemed dead and earthy.

He prayed, and gradually the cloud grew clearer, the images appeared vague and shadowy. His heart seemed to stop for an instant and then — he was standing by the bank and a bell was tolling five. The reverend superior came down the steps and toward him.

“It is time to go in.” The man turned instantly.

“Yes, Father, I am coming.”

II.

The novices filed silently into the chapel and knelt in prayer. The blessed Sacrament in the gleaming monstrance was exposed among the flaming candles on the altar. The air was rich and heavy with incense. The man knelt with the others. A first chord of the magnificat, sung by the concealed choir above, startled him; he looked up. The late afternoon sun shone through the stained glass window of St. Francis Xavier on his left and fell in red tracery on the cassock of the man in front of him. Three ordained priests knelt on the altar. Above them a huge candle burned. He watched it abstractedly. To the right of him a novice was telling his beads with trembling fingers. The man looked at him. He was about twenty-six with fair hair and green-grey eyes that darted nervously around the chapel. They caught each other’s eye and the elder glanced quickly at the altar candle as if to draw attention to it. The man followed his eye and as he looked he felt his scalp creep and tingle. The same unsummoned instinct filled him that had frightened him half an hour ago on the bank. His breath came quicker. How hot the chapel was. It was too hot; and the candle was wrong — wrong — everything suddenly blurred. The man on his left caught him.

“Hold up,” he whispered, “they’ll postpone you. Are you better? Can you go through with it?”

He nodded vaguely and turned to the candle. Yes, there was no mistake. Something was there, something played in the tiny flame, curled in the minute wreath of smoke. Some evil presence was in the chapel, on the very altar of God. He felt a chill creeping over him, though he knew the room was warm. His soul seemed paralyzed, but he kept his eyes riveted on the candle. He knew that he must watch it. There was no one else to do it. He must not take his eyes from it. The line of novices rose and he mechanically reached his feet.

“Per omnia saecvla, saeculorum. Amen.”

Then he felt suddenly that something corporeal was missing — his last earthly support. He realized what it was. The man on his left had gone out overwrought and shaken. Then it began. Something before had attacked the roots of his faith; had matched his world-sense against his God-sense, had brought, he had thought, every power to bear against him; but this was different. Nothing was denied, nothing was offered. It could best be described by saying that a great weight seemed to press down upon his innermost soul, a weight that had no essence, mental or physical. A whole spiritual realm evil in its every expression engulfed him. He could not think, he could not pray. As in a dream he heard the voices of the men beside him singing, but they were far away, farther away from him than anything had ever been before. He existed on a plane where there was no prayer, no grace; where he realized only that the forces around him were of hell and where the single candle contained the essence of evil. He felt himself alone pitted against an infinity of temptation. He could bring no parallel to it in his own experience or any other. One fact he knew: one man had succumbed to this weight and he must not — must not. He must look at the candle and look and look until the power that filled it and forced him into this plane died forever for him. It was now or not at all.

He seemed to have no body and even what he had thought was his innermost self was dead. It was something deeper that was he, something that he had never felt before. Then the forces gathered for one final attack. The way that the other novice had taken was open to him. He drew his breath quickly and waited and then the shock came. The eternity and infinity of all good seemed crushed, washed away in an eternity and infinity of evil. He seemed carried helplessly along, tossed this way and that — as in a black limitless ocean where there is no light and the waves grow larger and larger and the sky darker and darker. The waves were dashing him toward a chasm, a maelstrom everlastingly evil, and blindly, unseeingly, desperately he looked at the candle, looked at the flame which seemed like the one black star in the sky of despair. Then suddenly he became aware of a new presence. It seemed to come from the left, seemed consummated and expressed in warm, red tracery somewhere. Then he knew. It was the stained window of St. Francis Xavier. He gripped at it spiritually, clung to it and with aching heart called silently for God.

“Tantum ergo Sacramentum

Veneremur cernui.”

The words of the hymn gathered strength like a triumphant paean of glory, the incense filled his brain, his very soul, a gate clanged somewhere and the candle on the altar went out.

“Ego vos absolvo a peccatis tuts in nomine patris, filii, spiritus sancti. Amen.”

The file of novices started toward the altar. The stained lights from the windows mingled with the candle glow and the eucharist in its golden halo seemed to the man very mystical and sweet. It was very calm. The subdeacon held the Book for him. He placed his right hand upon it.

“In the name of the Father and the Son and of the Holy Ghost — “

MYRA MEETS HIS FAMILY

Probably every boy who has attended an Eastern college in the last ten years has met Myra half a dozen times, for the Myras live on the Eastern colleges, as kittens live on warm milk. When Myra is young, seventeen or so, they call her a “wonderful kid”; in her prime — say, at nineteen — she is tendered the subtle compliment of being referred to by her name alone; and after that she is a “prom trotter” or “the famous coast-to-coast Myra.”

You can see her practically any winter afternoon if you stroll through the Biltmore lobby. She will be standing in a group of sophomores just in from Princeton or New Haven, trying to decide whether to dance away the mellow hours at the Club de Vingt or the Plaza Red Room. Afterward one of the sophomores will take her to the theater and ask her down to the February prom — and then dive for a taxi to catch the last train back to college.

Invariably she has a somnolent mother sharing a suite with her on one of the floors above.

When Myra is about twenty-four she thinks over all the nice boys she might have married at one time or other, sighs a little and does the best she can. But no remarks, please! She has given her youth to you; she has blown fragrantly through many ballrooms to the tender tribute of many eyes; she has roused strange surges of romance in a hundred pagan young breasts; and who shall say she hasn’t counted?

The particular Myra whom this story concerns will have to have a paragraph of history. I will get it over with as swiftly as possible.

When she was sixteen she lived in a big house in Cleveland and attended Derby School in Connecticut, and it was while she was still there that she started going to prep-school dances and college proms. She decided to spend the war at Smith College, but in January of her freshman year, falling violently in love with a young infantry officer, she failed all her midyear examinations and retired to Cleveland in disgrace. The young infantry officer arrived about a week later.

Just as she had about decided that she didn’t love him after all he was ordered abroad, and in a great revival of sentiment she rushed down to the port of embarkation with her mother to bid him good-by. She wrote him daily for two months, and then weekly for two months, and then once more. This last letter he never got, for a machine-gun bullet ripped through his head one rainy July morning. Perhaps this was just as well, for the letter informed him that it had all been a mistake, and that something told her they would never be happy together, and so on.

The “something” wore boots and silver wings and was tall and dark. Myra was quite sure that it was the real thing at last, but as an engine went through his chest at Kelly Field in mid-August she never had a chance to find out.

Instead she came East again, a little slimmer, with a becoming pallor and new shadows under her eyes, and throughout armistice year she left the ends of cigarettes all over New York on little china trays marked “Midnight Frolic” and “Coconut Grove” and “Palais Royal.” She was twenty-one now, and Cleveland people said that her mother ought to take her back home — that New York was spoiling her.

You will have to do your best with that. The story should have started long ago.

*****

It was an afternoon in September when she broke a theater date in order to have tea with young Mrs. Arthur Elkins, once her roommate at school.

“I wish,” began Myra as they sat down exquisitely, “that I’d been a senorita or a mademoiselle or something. Good grief! What is there to do over here once you’re out, except marry and retire!”

Lilah Elkins had seen this form of ennui before.

“Nothing,” she replied coolly; “do it.”

“I can’t seem to get interested, Lilah,” said Myra, bending forward earnestly. “I’ve played round so much that even while I’m kissing the man I just wonder how soon I’ll get tired of him. I never get carried away like I used to.”

“How old are you, Myra?”

“Twenty-one last spring.”

“Well,” said Lilah complacently, “take it from me, don’t get married unless you’re absolutely through playing round. It means giving up an awful lot, you know.”

“Through! I’m sick and tired of my whole pointless existence. Funny, Lilah, but I do feel ancient. Up at New Haven last spring men danced with me that seemed like little boys — and once I overheard a girl say in the dressing room, ‘There’s Myra Harper! She’s been coming up here for eight years.’ Of course she was about three years off, but it did give me the calendar blues.”

“You and I went to our first prom when we were sixteen — five years ago.”

“Heavens!” sighed Myra. “And now some men are afraid of me. Isn’t that odd? Some of the nicest boys. One man dropped me like a hotcake after coming down from Morristown for three straight weekends. Some kind friend told him I was husband hunting this year, and he was afraid of getting in too deep.”

“Well, you are husband hunting, aren’t you?”

“I suppose so — after a fashion.” Myra paused and looked about her rather cautiously. “Have you ever met Knowleton Whitney? You know what a wiz he is on looks, and his father’s worth a fortune, they say. Well, I noticed that the first time he met me he started when he heard my name and fought shy — and, Lilah darling, I’m not so ancient and homely as all that, am I?”

“You certainly are not!” laughed Lilah. “And here’s my advice: Pick out the best thing in sight — the man who has all the mental, physical, social and financial qualities you want, and then go after him hammer and tongs — the way we used to. After you’ve got him don’t say to yourself ‘Well, he can’t sing like Billy,’ or ‘I wish.he played better golf.’ You can’t have everything. Shut your eyes and turn off your sense of humor, and then after you’re married it’ll be very different and you’ll be mighty glad.”

“Yes,” said Myra absently; “I’ve had that advice before.”

“Drifting into romance is easy when you’re eighteen,” continued Lilah emphatically; “but after five years of it your capacity for it simply burns out.”

“I’ve had such nice times,” sighed Myra, “and such sweet men. To tell you the truth I have decided to go after someone.”

“Who?”

“Knowleton Whitney. Believe me, I may be a bit blase, but I can still get any man I want.”

“You really want him?”

“Yes — as much as I’ll ever want anyone. He’s smart as a whip, and shy — rather sweetly shy — and they say his family have the best-looking place in Westchester County.”

Lilah sipped the last of her tea and glanced at her wrist watch.

“I’ve got to tear, dear.”

They rose together and, sauntering out on Park Avenue, hailed taxicabs.

“I’m awfully glad, Myra; and I know you’ll be glad too.”

Myra skipped a little pool of water and, reaching her taxi, balanced on the running board like a ballet dancer.

“‘By, Lilah. See you soon.”

“Good-by, Myra. Good luck!”

And knowing Myra as she did, Lilah felt that her last remark was distinctly superfluous.

II

That was essentially the reason that one Friday night six weeks later Knowleton Whitney paid a taxi bill of seven dollars and ten cents and with a mixture of emotions paused beside Myra on the Biltmore steps.

The outer surface of his mind was deliriously happy, but just below that was a slowly hardening fright at what he had done. He, protected since his freshman year at Harvard from the snares of fascinating fortune hunters, dragged away from several sweet young things by the acquiescent nape of his neck, had taken advantage of his family’s absence in the West to become so enmeshed in the toils that it was hard to say which was toils and which was he.

The afternoon had been like a dream: November twilight along Fifth Avenue after the matinee, and he and Myra looking out at the swarming crowds from the romantic privacy of a hansom cab — quaint device — then tea at the Ritz and her white hand gleaming on the arm of a chair beside him; and suddenly quick broken words. After that had come the trip to the jeweler’s and a mad dinner in some little Italian restaurant where he had written “Do you?” on the back of the bill of fare and pushed it over for her to add the ever-miraculous “You know I do!” And now at the day’s end they paused on the Biltmore steps.

“Say it,” breathed Myra close to his ear.

He said it. Ah, Myra, how many ghosts must have flitted across your memory then!

“You’ve made me so happy, dear,” she said softly.

“No — you’ve made me happy. Don’t you know — Myra —  — “

“I know.”

“For good?”

“For good. I’ve got this, you see.” And she raised the diamond solitaire to her lips. She knew how to do things, did Myra.

“Good night.”

“Good night. Good night.”

Like a gossamer fairy in shimmering rose she ran up the wide stairs and her cheeks were glowing wildly as she rang the elevator bell.

At the end of a fortnight she got a telegraph from him saying that his family had returned from the West and expected her up in Westchester County for a week’s visit. Myra wired her train time, bought three new evening dresses and packed her trunk.

It was a cool November evening when she arrived, and stepping from the train in the late twilight she shivered slightly and looked eagerly round for Knowleton. The station platform swarmed for a moment with men returning from the city; there was a shouting-medley of wives and chauffeurs, and a great snorting of automobiles as they backed and turned and slid away. Then before she realized it the platform was quite deserted and not a single one of the luxurious cars remained. Knowleton must have expected her on another train.

With an almost inaudible “Damn!” she started toward the Elizabethan station to telephone, when suddenly she was accosted by a very dirty, dilapidated man who touched his ancient cap to her and addressed her in a cracked, querulous voice.

“You Miss Harper?”

“Yes,” she confessed, rather startled. Was this unmentionable person by any wild chance the chauffeur?

“The chauffeur’s sick,” he continued in a high whine. “I’m his son.

Myra gasped.

“You mean Mr. Whitney’s chauffeur?”

“Yes; he only keeps just one since the war. Great on economizin’ — regelar Hoover.” He stamped his feet nervously and smacked enormous gauntlets together. “Well, no use waitin’ here gabbin’ in the cold. Le’s have your grip.”

Too amazed for words and not a little dismayed, Myra followed her guide to the edge of the platform, where she looked in vain for a car. But she was not left to wonder long, for the person led her steps to a battered old flivver, wherein was deposited her grip.

“Big car’s broke,” he explained. “Have to use this or walk.”

He opened the front door for her and nodded.

“Step in.”

“I b’lieve I’ll sit in back if you don’t mind.”

“Surest thing you know,” he cackled, opening the back door. “I thought the trunk bumpin’ round back there might make you nervous.”

“What trunk?”

“Yourn.”

“Oh, didn’t Mr. Whitney — can’t you make two trips?”

He shook his head obstinately.

“Wouldn’t allow it. Not since the war. Up to rich people to set ‘n example; that’s what Mr. Whitney says. Le’s have your check, please.”

As he disappeared Myra tried in vain to conjure up a picture of the chauffeur if this was his son. After a mysterious argument with the station agent he returned, gasping violently, with the trunk on his back. He deposited it in the rear seat and climbed up front beside her.

It was quite dark when they swerved out of the road and up a long dusky driveway to the Whitney place, whence lighted windows flung great blots of cheerful, yellow light over the gravel and grass and trees. Even now she could see that it was very beautiful, that its blurred outline was Georgian Colonial and that great shadowy garden parks were flung out at both sides. The car plumped to a full stop before a square stone doorway and the chauffeur’s son climbed out after her and pushed open the outer door.

“Just go right in,” he cackled; and as she passed the threshold she heard him softly shut the door, closing out himself and the dark.

Myra looked round her. She was in a large somber hall paneled in old English oak and lit by dim shaded lights clinging like luminous yellow turtles at intervals along the wall. Ahead of her was a broad staircase and on both sides there were several doors, but there was no sight or sound of life, and an intense stillness seemed to rise ceaselessly from the deep crimson carpet.

She must have waited there a full minute before she began to have that unmistakable sense of someone looking at her. She forced herself to turn casually round.

A sallow little man, bald and clean shaven, trimly dressed in a frock coat and white spats, was standing a few yards away regarding her quizzically. He must have been fifty at the least, but even before he moved she had noticed a curious alertness about him — something in his pose which promised that it had been instantaneously assumed and would be instantaneously changed in a moment. His tiny hands and feet and the odd twist to his eyebrows gave him a faintly elfish expression, and she had one of those vague transient convictions that she had seen him before, many years ago.

For a minute they stared at each other in silence and then she flushed slightly and discovered a desire to swallow.

“I suppose you’re Mr. Whitney.” She smiled faintly and advanced a step toward him. “I’m Myra Harper.”

For an instant longer he remained silent and motionless, and it flashed across Myra that he might be deaf; then suddenly he jerked into spirited life exactly like a mechanical toy started by the pressure of a button.

“Why, of course — why, naturally. I know — ah!” he exclaimed excitedly in a high-pitched elfin voice. Then raising himself on his toes in a sort of attenuated ecstasy of enthusiasm and smiling a wizened smile, he minced toward her across the dark carpet.

She blushed appropriately.

“That’s awfully nice of —  — “

“Ah!” he went on. “You must be tired; a rickety, cindery, ghastly trip, I know. Tired and hungry and thirsty, no doubt, no doubt!” He looked round him indignantly. “The servants are frightfully inefficient in this house!”

Myra did not know what to say to this, so she made no answer. After an instant’s abstraction Mr. Whitney crossed over with his furious energy and pressed a button; then almost as if he were dancing he was by her side again, making thin, disparaging gestures with his hands.

“A little minute,” he assured her, “sixty seconds, scarcely more. Here!”

He rushed suddenly to the wall and with some effort lifted a great carved Louis Fourteenth chair and set it down carefully in the geometrical center of the carpet.

“Sit down — won’t you? Sit down! I’ll go get you something. Sixty seconds at the outside.”

She demurred faintly, but he kept on repeating “Sit down!” in such an aggrieved yet hopeful tone that Myra sat down. Instantly her host disappeared.

She sat there for five minutes and a feeling of oppression fell over her. Of all the receptions she had ever received this was decidedly the oddest — for though she had read somewhere that Ludlow Whitney was considered one of the most eccentric figures in the financial world, to find a sallow, elfin little man who, when he walked, danced was rather a blow to her sense of form. Had he gone to get Knowleton! She revolved her thumbs in interminable concentric circles.

Then she started nervously at a quick cough at her elbow. It was Mr. Whitney again. In one hand he held a glass of milk and in the other a blue kitchen bowl full of those hard cubical crackers used in soup.

“Hungry from your trip!” he exclaimed compassionately. “Poor girl, poor little girl, starving!” He brought out this last word with such emphasis that some of the milk plopped gently over the side of the glass.

Myra took the refreshments submissively. She was not hungry, but it had taken him ten minutes to get them so it seemed ungracious to refuse. She sipped gingerly at the milk and ate a cracker, wondering vaguely what to say. Mr. Whitney, however, solved the problem for her by disappearing again — this time by way of the wide stairs — four steps at a hop — the back of his bald head gleaming oddly for a moment in the half dark.

Minutes passed. Myra was torn between resentment and bewilderment that she should be sitting on a high comfortless chair in the middle of this big hall munching crackers. By what code was a visiting fiancee ever thus received!

Her heart gave a jump of relief as she heard a familiar whistle on the stairs. It was Knowleton at last, and when he came in sight he gasped with astonishment.

“Myra!”

She carefully placed the bowl and glass on the carpet and rose, smiling.

“Why,” he exclaimed, “they didn’t tell me you were here!”

“Your father — welcomed me.”

“Lordy! He must have gone upstairs and forgotten all about it. Did he insist on your eating this stuff? Why didn’t you just tell him you didn’t want any?”

“Why — I don’t know.”

“You musn’t mind father, dear. He’s forgetful and a little unconventional in some ways, but you’ll get used to him.”

He pressed a button and a butler appeared.

“Show Miss Harper to her room and have her bag carried up — and her trunk if it isn’t there already.” He turned to Myra. “Dear, I’m awfully sorry I didn’t know you were here. How long have you been waiting?”

“Oh, only a few minutes.”

It had been twenty at the least, but she saw no advantage in stressing it. Nevertheless it had given her an oddly uncomfortable feeling.

Half an hour later as she was hooking the last eye on her dinner dress there was a knock on the door.

“It’s Knowleton, Myra; if you’re about ready we’ll go in and see mother for a minute before dinner.”

She threw a final approving glance at her reflection in the mirror and turning out the light joined him in the hall. He led her down a central passage which crossed to the other wing of the house, and stopping before a closed door he pushed it open and ushered Myra into the weirdest room upon which her young eyes had ever rested.

It was a large luxurious boudoir, paneled, like the lower hall, in dark English oak and bathed by several lamps in a mellow orange glow that blurred its every outline into misty amber. In a great armchair piled high with cushions and draped with a curiously figured cloth of silk reclined a very sturdy old lady with bright white hair, heavy features, and an air about her of having been there for many years. She lay somnolently against the cushions, her eyes half closed, her great bust rising and falling under her black negligee.

But it was something else that made the room remarkable, and Myra’s eyes scarcely rested on the woman, so engrossed was she in another feature of her surroundings. On the carpet, on the chairs and sofas, on the great canopied bed and on the soft Angora rug in front of the fire sat and sprawled and slept a great array of white poodle dogs. There must have been almost two dozen of them, with curly hair twisting in front of their wistful eyes and wide yellow bows flaunting from their necks. As Myra and Knowleton entered a stir went over the dogs; they raised one-and-twenty cold black noses in the air and from one-and-twenty little throats went up a great clatter of staccato barks until the room was filled with such an uproar that Myra stepped back in alarm.

But at the din the somnolent fat lady’s eyes trembled open and in a low husky voice that was in itself oddly like a bark she snapped out “Hush that racket!” and the clatter instantly ceased. The two or three poodles round the fire turned their silky eyes on each other reproachfully, and lying down with little sighs faded out on the white Angora rug; the tousled ball on the lady’s lap dug his nose into the crook of an elbow and went back to sleep, and except for the patches of white wool scattered about the room Myra would have thought it all a dream.

“Mother,” said Knowleton after an instant’s pause, “this is Myra.”

From the lady’s lips flooded one low husky word: “Myra?”

“She’s visiting us, I told you.”

Mrs. Whitney raised a large arm and passed her hand across her forehead wearily.

“Child!” she said — and Myra started, for again the voice was like a low sort of growl — “you want to marry my son Knowleton?”

Myra felt that this was putting the tonneau before the radiator, but she nodded. “Yes, Mrs. Whitney.”

“How old are you?” This very suddenly.

“I’m twenty-one, Mrs. Whitney.”

“Ah — and you’re from Cleveland?” This was in what was surely a series of articulate barks.

“Yes, Mrs. Whitney.”

“Ah —  — “

Myra was not certain whether this last ejaculation was conversation or merely a groan, so she did not answer.

“You’ll excuse me if I don’t appear downstairs,” continued Mrs. Whitney; “but when we’re in the East I seldom leave this room and my dear little doggies.”

Myra nodded and a conventional health question was trembling on her lips when she caught Knowleton’s warning glance and checked it.

“Well,” said Mrs. Whitney with an air of finality, “you seem like a very nice girl. Come in again.”

“Good night, mother,” said Knowleton.” ‘Night!”barked Mrs. Whitney drowsily, and her eyes sealed gradually up as her head receded back again into the cushions.

Knowleton held open the door and Myra feeling a bit blank left the room. As they walked down the corridor she heard a burst of furious sound behind them; the noise of the closing door had again roused the poodle dogs.

When they went downstairs they found Mr. Whitney already seated at the dinner table.

“Utterly charming, completely delightful!” he exclaimed, beaming nervously. “One big family, and you the jewel of it, my dear.”

Myra smiled, Knowleton frowned and Mr. Whitney tittered.

“It’s been lonely here,” he continued; “desolate, with only us three. We expect you to bring sunlight and warmth, the peculiar radiance and efflorescence of youth. It will be quite delightful. Do you sing?”

“Why — I have. I mean, I do, some.”

He clapped his hands enthusiastically.

“Splendid! Magnificent! What do you sing? Opera? Ballads? Popular music?”

“Well, mostly popular music.”

“Good; personally I prefer popular music. By the way, there’s a dance to-night.”

“Father,” demanded Knowleton sulkily, “did you go and invite a crowd here?”

“I had Monroe call up a few people — just some of the neighbors,” he explained to Myra. “We’re all very friendly hereabouts; give informal things continually. Oh, it’s quite delightful.”

Myra caught Knowleton’s eye and gave him a sympathetic glance. It was obvious that he had wanted to be alone with her this first evening and was quite put out.

“I want them to meet Myra,” continued his father. “I want them to know this delightful jewel we’ve added to our little household.”

“Father,” said Knowleton suddenly, “eventually of course Myra and I will want to live here with you and mother, but for the first two or three years I think an apartment in New York would be more the thing for us.”

Crash! Mr. Whitney had raked across the tablecloth with his fingers and swept his silver to a jangling heap on the floor.

“Nonsense!” he cried furiously, pointing a tiny finger at his son. “Don’t talk that utter nonsense! You’ll live here, do you understand me? Here! What’s a home without children?”

“But, father —  — “

In his excitement Mr. Whitney rose and a faint unnatural color crept into his sallow face.

“Silence!” he shrieked. “If you expect one bit of help from me you can have it under my roof — nowhere else! Is that clear? As for you my exquisite young lady,” he continued, turning his wavering finger on Myra, “you’d better understand that the best thing you can do is to decide to settle down right here. This is my home, and I mean to keep it so.”

He stood then for a moment on his tiptoes, bending furiously indignant glances first on one, then on the other, and then suddenly he turned and skipped from the room.

“Well,” gasped Myra, turning to Knowleton in amazement “what do you know about that!”

III

Some hours later she crept into bed in a great state of restless discontent. One thing she knew — she was not going to live in this house. Knowleton would have to make his father see reason to the extent of giving them an apartment in the city. The sallow little man made her nervous, she was sure Mrs. Whitney’s dogs would haunt her dreams- and there was a general casualness in the chauffeur, the butler, the maids and even the guests she had met that night, that did not in the least coincide with her ideas on the conduct of a big estate.

She had lain there an hour perhaps when she was startled from a slow reverie by a sharp cry which seemed to proceed from the adjoining room. She sat up in bed and listened, and in a minute it was repeated. It sounded exactly like the plaint of a weary child stopped summarily by the placing of a hand over its mouth. In the dark silence her bewilderment shaded gradually off into uneasiness. She waited for the cry to recur, but straining her ears she heard only the intense crowded stillness of three o’clock. She wondered where Knowleton slept, remembered that his bedroom was over in the other wing just beyond his mother’s. She was alone over here — or was she?

With a little gasp she slid down into bed again and lay listening. Not since childhood had she been afraid of the dark, but the unforeseen presence of someone next door startled her and sent her imagination racing through a host of mystery stories that at one time or another had whiled away a long afternoon.

She heard the clock strike four and found she was very tired. A curtain drifted slowly down in front of her imagination, and changing her position she fell suddenly to sleep.

Next morning, walking with Knowleton under starry frosted bushes in one of the bare gardens, she grew quite light-hearted and wondered at her depression of the night before. Probably all families seemed odd when one visited them for the first time in such an intimate capacity. Yet her determination that she and Knowleton were going to live elsewhere than with the white dogs and the jumpy little man was not abated. And if the near-by Westchester County society was typified by the chilly crowd she had met at the dance —  —

“The family,” said Knowleton, “must seem rather unusual. I’ve been brought up in an odd atmosphere, I suppose, but mother is really quite normal outside of her penchant for poodles in great quantities, and father in spite of his eccentricities seems to hold a secure position in Wall Street.”

“Knowleton,” she demanded suddenly, “who lives in the room next door to me?”

Did he start and flush slightly — or was that her imagination?

“Because,” she went on deliberately, “I’m almost sure I heard someone crying in there during the night. It sounded like a child Knowleton.”

“There’s no one in there,” he said decidedly. “It was either your imagination or something you ate. Or possibly one of the maids was sick.”

Seeming to dismiss the matter without effort he changed the subject.

The day passed quickly. At lunch Mr. Whitney seemed to have forgotten his temper of the previous night; he was as nervously enthusiastic as ever; and watching him Myra again had that impression that she had seen him somewhere before. She and Knowleton paid another visit to Mrs. Whitney — and again the poodles stirred uneasily and set up a barking, to be summarily silenced by the harsh throaty voice. The conversation was short and of inquisitional flavor. It was terminated as before by the lady’s drowsy eyelids and a p’an of farewell from the dogs.

In the evening she found that Mr. Whitney had insisted on organizing an informal neighborhood vaudeville. A stage had been erected in the ballroom and Myra sat beside Knowleton in the front row and watched proceedings curiously. Two slim and haughty ladies sang, a man performed some ancient card tricks, a girl gave impersonations, and then to Myra’s astonishment Mr. Whitney appeared and did a rather effective buck-and-wing dance. There was something inexpressibly weird in the motion of the well-known financier flitting solemnly back and forth across the stag on his tiny feet. Yet he danced well, with an effortless grace and an unexpected suppleness, and he was rewarded with a storm of applause.

In the half dark the lady on her left suddenly spoke to her.

“Mr. Whitney is passing the word along that he wants to see you behind the scenes.”

Puzzled, Myra rose and ascended the side flight of stairs that led to the raised platform. Her host was waiting for her anxiously.

“Ah,” he chuckled, “splendid!”

He held out his hand, and wonderingly she took it. Before she realized his intention he had half led, half drawn her out on to the stage. The spotlight’s glare bathed them, and the ripple of conversation washing the audience ceased. The faces before her were pallid splotches on the gloom and she felt her ears burning as she waited for Mr. Whitney to speak.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he began, “most of you know Miss Myra Harper. You had the honor of meeting her last night. She is a delicious girl, I assure you. I am in a position to know. She intends to become the wife of my son.”

He paused and nodded and began clapping his hands. The audience immediately took up the clapping and Myra stood there in motionless horror, overcome by the most violent confusion of her life.

The piping voice went on: “Miss Harper is not only beautiful but talented. Last night she confided to me that she sang. I asked whether she preferred the opera, the ballad or the popular song, and she confessed that her taste ran to the latter. Miss Harper will now favor us with a popular song.”

And then Myra was standing alone on the stage, rigid with embarrassment. She fancied that on the faces in front of her she saw critical expectation, boredom, ironic disapproval. Surely this was the height of bad form — to drop a guest unprepared into such a situation.

In the first hush she considered a word or two explaining that Mr. Whitney had been under a misapprehension — then anger came to her assistance. She tossed her head and those in front saw her lips close together sharply.

Advancing to the platform’s edge she said succinctly to the orchestra leader: “Have you got ‘Wave That Wishbone’?”

“Lemme see. Yes, we got it.”

“All right. Let’s go!”

She hurriedly reviewed the words, which she had learned quite by accident at a dull house party the previous summer. It was perhaps not the song she would have chosen for her first public appearance, but it would have to do. She smiled radiantly, nodded at the orchestra leader and began the verse in a light clear alto.

As she sang a spirit of ironic humor slowly took possession of her — a desire to give them all a run for their money. And she did. She injected an East Side snarl into every word of slang; she ragged; she shimmied, she did a tickle-toe step she had learned once in an amateur musical comedy; and in a burst of inspiration finished up in an Al Jolson position, on her knees with her arms stretched out to her audience in syncopated appeal.

Then she rose, bowed and left the stage.

For an instant there was silence, the silence of a cold tomb; then perhaps half a dozen hands joined in a faint, perfunctory applause that in a second had died completely away.

“Heavens!” thought Myra. “Was it as bad as all that? Or did I shock ‘em?”

Mr. Whitney, however, seemed delighted. He was waiting for her in the wings and seizing her hand shook it enthusiastically.

“Quite wonderful!” he chuckled. “You are a delightful little actress — and you’ll be a valuable addition to our little plays. Would you like to give an encore?”

“No!” said Myra shortly, and turned away.

In a shadowy corner she waited until the crowd had filed out with an angry unwillingness to face them immediately after their rejection of her effort.

When the ballroom was quite empty she walked slowly up the stairs, and there she came upon Knowleton and Mr. Whitney alone in the dark hall, evidently engaged in a heated argument.

They ceased when she appeared and looked toward her eagerly.

“Myra,” said Mr. Whitney, “Knowleton wants to talk to you.”

“Father,” said Knowleton intensely, “I ask you —  — “

“Silence!” cried his father, his voice ascending testily. “You’ll do your duty — now.”

Knowleton cast one more appealing glance at him, but Mr. Whitney only shook his head excitedly and, turning, disappeared phantomlike up the stairs.

Knowleton stood silent a moment and finally with a look of dogged determination took her hand and led her toward a room that opened off the hall at the back. The yellow light fell through the door after them and she found herself in a dark wide chamber where she could just distinguish on the walls great square shapes which she took to be frames. Knowleton pressed a button, and immediately forty portraits sprang into life — old gallants from colonial days, ladies with floppity Gainsborough hats, fat women with ruffs and placid clasped hands.

She turned to Knowleton inquiringly, but he led her forward to a row of pictures on the side.

“Myra,” he said slowly and painfully, “there’s something I have to tell you. These” — he indicated the pictures with his hand — “are family portraits.”

There were seven of them, three men and three women, all of them of the period just before the Civil War. The one in the middle however, was hidden by crimson-velvet curtains.

“Ironic as it may seem,” continued Knowleton steadily, “that frame contains a picture of my great-grandmother.”

Reaching out, he pulled a little silken cord and the curtains parted, to expose a portrait of a lady dressed as a European but with the unmistakable features of a Chinese.

“My great-grandfather, you see, was an Australian tea importer. He met his future wife in Hong-Kong.”

Myra’s brain was whirling. She had a sudden vision of Mr. Whitney’s yellowish face, peculiar eyebrows and tiny hands and feet — she remembered ghastly tales she had heard of reversions to type — of Chinese babies — and then with a final surge of horror she thought of that sudden hushed cry in the night. She gasped, her knees seemed to crumple up and she sank slowly to the floor.

In a second Knowleton’s arms were round her.

“Dearest, dearest!” he cried. “I shouldn’t have told you! I shouldn’t have told you!”

As he said this Myra knew definitely and unmistakably that she could never marry him, and when she realized it she cast at him a wild pitiful look, and for the first time in her life fainted dead away.

IV

When she next recovered full consciousness she was in bed. She imagined a maid had undressed her, for on turning up the reading lamp she saw that her clothes had been neatly put away. For a minute she lay there, listening idly while the hall clock struck two, and then her overwrought nerves jumped in terror as she heard again that child’s cry from the room next door. The morning seemed suddenly infinitely far away. There was some shadowy secret near her — her feverish imagination pictured a Chinese child brought up there in the half dark.

In a quick panic she crept into a negligee and, throwing open the door, slipped down the corridor toward Knowleton’s room. It was very dark in the other wing, but when she pushed open his door she could see by the faint hall light that his bed was empty and had not been slept in. Her terror increased. What could take him out at this hour of the night? She started for Mrs. Whitney’s room, but at the thought of the dogs and her bare ankles she gave a little discouraged cry and passed by the door.

Then she suddenly heard the sound of Knowleton’s voice issuing from a faint crack of light far down the corridor, and with a glow of joy she fled toward it. When she was within a foot of the door she found she could see through the crack — and after one glance all thought of entering left her.

Before an open fire, his head bowed in an attitude of great dejection, stood Knowleton, and in the corner, feet perched on the table, sat Mr. Whitney in his shirt sleeves, very quiet and calm, and pulling contentedly on a huge black pipe. Seated on the table was a part of Mrs. Whitney — that is, Mrs. Whitney without any hair. Out of the familiar great bust projected Mrs. Whitney’s head, but she was bald; on her cheeks was the faint stubble of a beard, and in her mouth was a large black cigar, which she was puffing with obvious enjoyment.

“A thousand,” groaned Knowleton as if in answer to a question. “Say twenty-five hundred and you’ll be nearer the truth. I got a bill from the Graham Kennels to-day for those poodle dogs. They’re soaking me two hundred and saying that they’ve got to have ‘em back tomorrow.”

“Well.” said Mrs. Whitney in a low barytone voice, “send ‘em back. We’re through with ‘em.”

“That’s a mere item,” continued Knowleton glumly. “Including your salary, and Appleton’s here, and that fellow who did the chauffeur, and seventy supes for two nights, and an orchestra — that’s nearly twelve hundred, and then there’s the rent on the costumes and that darn Chinese portrait and the bribes to the servants. Lord! There’ll probably be bills for one thing or another coming in for the next month.”

“Well, then,” said Appleton, “for pity’s sake pull yourself together and carry it through to the end. Take my word for it, that girl will be out of the house by twelve noon.”

Knowleton sank into a chair and covered his face with his hands.

“Oh —  — “

“Brace up! It’s all over. I thought for a minute there in the hall that you were going to balk at that Chinese business.”

“It was the vaudeville that knocked the spots out of me,” groaned Knowleton. “It was about the meanest trick ever pulled on any girl, and she was so darned game about it!”

“She had to be,” said Mrs. Whitney cynically.

“Oh, Kelly, if you could have seen the girl look at me to-night just before she fainted in front of that picture. Lord, I believe she loves me! Oh, if you could have seen her!”

Outside Myra flushed crimson. She leaned closer to the door, biting her lip until she could taste the faintly bitter savor of blood.

“If there was anything I could do now,” continued Knowleton — “anything in the world that would smooth it over I believe I’d do it.”

Kelly crossed ponderously over, his bald shiny head ludicrous above his feminine negligee, and put his hand on Knowleton’s shoulder.

“See here, my boy — your trouble is just nerves. Look at it this way: You undertook somep’n to get yourself out of an awful mess. It’s a cinch the girl was after your money — now you’ve beat her at her own game an’ saved yourself an unhappy marriage and your family a lot of suffering. Ain’t that so, Appleton?”

“Absolutely!” said Appleton emphatically. “Go through with it.”

“Well” said Knowleton with a dismal attempt to be righteous, “if she really loved me she wouldn’t have let it all affect her this much. She’s not marrying my family.”

Appleton laughed.

“I thought we’d tried to make it pretty obvious that she is.”

“Oh, shut up!” cried Knowleton miserably.

Myra saw Appleton wink at Kelly.

“‘At’s right,” he said; “she’s shown she was after your money.” Well, now then, there’s no reason for not going through with it. See here. On one side you’ve proved she didn’t love you and you’re rid of her and free as air. She’ll creep away and never say a word about it — and your family never the wiser. On the other side twenty-five hundred thrown to the bow-wows, miserable marriage, girl sure to hate you as soon as she finds out, and your family all broken up and probably disownin’ you for marryin’ her. One big mess, I’ll tell the world.”

“You’re right,” admitted Knowleton gloomily. “You’re right, I suppose — but oh, the look in that girl’s face! She’s probably in there now lying awake, listening to the Chinese baby —  — “

Appleton rose and yawned.

“Well —  — “ he began.

But Myra waited to hear no more. Pulling her silk kimono close about her she sped like lightning down the soft corridor, to dive headlong and breathless into her room.

“My heavens!” she cried, clenching her hands in the darkness. “My heavens!”

V

Just before dawn Myra drowsed into a jumbled dream that seemed to act on through interminable hours. She awoke about seven and lay listlessly with one blue-veined arm hanging over the side of the bed. She who had danced in the dawn at many proms was very tired.

A clock outside her door struck the hour, and with her nervous start something seemed to collapse within her — she turned over and began to weep furiously into her pillow, her tangled hair spreading like a dark aura round her head. To her, Myra Harper, had been done this cheap vulgar trick by a man she had thought shy and kind.

Lacking the courage to come to her and tell her the truth he had gone into the highways and hired men to frighten her.

Between her fevered broken sobs she tried in vain to comprehend the workings of a mind which could have conceived this in all its subtlety. Her pride refused to let her think of it as a deliberate plan of Knowleton’s. It was probably an idea fostered by this little actor Appleton or by the fat Kelly with his horrible poodles. But it was all unspeakable — unthinkable. It gave her an intense sense of shame.

But when she emerged from her room at eight o’clock and disdaining breakfast, walked into the garden she was a very self-possessed young beauty, with dry cool eyes only faintly shadowed. The ground was firm and frosty with the promise of winter, and she found gray sky and dull air vaguely comforting and one with her mood. It was a day for thinking and she needed to think.

And then turning a corner suddenly she saw Knowleton seated on a stone bench, his head in his hands, in an attitude of profound dejection. He wore his clothes of the night before and-it was quite evident that he had not been to bed.

He did not hear her until she was quite close to him, and then as a dry twig snapped under her heel he looked up wearily. She saw that the night had played havoc with him — his face was deathly pale and his eyes were pink and puffed and tired. He jumped up with a look that was very like dread.

“Good morning,” said Myra quietly.

“Sit down,” he began nervously. “Sit down; I want to talk to you.l I’ve got to talk to you.”

Myra nodded and taking a seat beside him on the bench clasped her knees with her hands and half closed her eyes.

“Myra, for heaven’s sake have pity on me!”

She turned wondering eyes on him.

“What do you mean?”

He groaned.

“Myra, I’ve done a ghastly thing — to you, to me, to us. I haven’t a word to say in favor of myself — I’ve been just rotten. I think it was a sort of madness that came over me.”

“You’ll have to give me a clew to what you’re talking about.”

“Myra — Myra” — like all large bodies his confession seemed difficult to imbue with momentum — “Myra — Mr. Whitney is not my father.”

“You mean you were adopted?”

“No; I mean — Ludlow Whitney is my father, but this man you’ve met isn’t Ludlow Whitney.”

“I know,” said Myra coolly. “He’s Warren Appleton, the actor.”

Knowleton leaped to his feet.

“How on earth —  — “

“Oh,” lied Myra easily, “I recognized him the first night. I saw him five years ago in The Swiss Grapefruit.”

At this Knowleton seemed to collapse utterly. He sank down limply on to the bench.

“You knew?”

“Of course! How could I help it? It simply made me wonder what it was all about.”

With a great effort he tried to pull himself together.

“I’m going to tell you the whole story, Myra.”

“I’m all ears.”

“Well, it starts with my mother — my real one, not the woman with those idiotic dogs; she’s an invalid and I’m her only child. Her one idea in life has always been for me to make a fitting match, and her idea of a fitting match centers round social position in England. Her greatest disappointment was that I wasn’t a girl so I could marry a title, instead she wanted to drag me to England — marry me off to the sister of an earl or the daughter of a duke. Why, before she’d let me stay up here alone this fall she made me promise I wouldn’t go to see any girl more than twice. And then I met you.”

He paused for a second and continued earnestly: “You were the first girl in my life whom I ever thought of marrying. You intoxicated me, Myra. It was just as though you were making me love you by some invisible force.”

“I was,” murmured Myra.

“Well, that first intoxication lasted a week, and then one day a letter came from mother saying she was bringing home some wonderful English girl, Lady Helena Something-or-Other. And the same day a man told me that he’d heard I’d been caught by the most famous husband hunter in New York. Well, between these two things I went half crazy. I came into town to see you and call it off — got as far as the Biltmore entrance and didn’t dare. I started wandering down Fifth Avenue like a wild man, and then I met Kelly. I told him the whole story — and within an hour we’d hatched up this ghastly plan. It was his plan — all the details. His histrionic instinct got the better of him and he had me thinking it was the kindest way out.”

“Finish,” commanded Myra crisply.

“Well, it went splendidly, we thought. Everything — the station meeting, the dinner scene, the scream in the night, the vaudeville — though I thought that was a little too much — until — until —  — Oh, Myra, when you fainted under that picture and I held you there in my arms, helpless as a baby, I knew I loved you. I was sorry then, Myra.”

There was a long pause while she sat motionless, her hands still clasping her knees — then he burst out with a wild plea of passionate sincerity.

“Myra!” he cried. “If by any possible chance you can bring yourself to forgive and forget I’ll marry you when you say, let my family go to the devil, and love you all my life.”

For a long while she considered, and Knowleton rose and began pacing nervously up and down the aisle of bare bushes his hands in his pockets, his tired eyes pathetic now, and full of dull appeal. And then she came to a decision.

“You’re perfectly sure?” she asked calmly.

“Yes.”

“Very well, I’ll marry you to-day.”

With her words the atmosphere cleared and his troubles seemed to fall from him like a ragged cloak. An Indian summer sun drifted out from behind the gray clouds and the dry bushes rustled gently in the breeze.

“It was a bad mistake,” she continued, “but if you’re sure you love me now, that’s the main thing. We’ll go to town this morning get a license, and I’ll call up my cousin, who’s a minister in the First Presbyterian Church. We can go West to-night.”

“Myra!” he cried jubilantly. “You’re a marvel and I’m not fit to tie your shoe strings. I’m going to make up to you for this, darling girl.”

And taking her supple body in his arms he covered her face with kisses.

The next two hours passed in a whirl. Myra went to the telephone and called her cousin, and then rushed upstairs to pack. When she came down a shining roadster was waiting miraculously in the drive and by ten o’clock they were bowling happily toward the City.

They stopped for a few minutes at the City Hall and again at the jeweler’s, and then they were in the house of the Reverend Walter Gregory on Sixty-ninth Street, where a sanctimonious gentleman with twinkling eyes and a slight stutter received them cordially and urged them to a breakfast of bacon and eggs before the ceremony.

On the way to the station they stopped only long enough to wire Knowleton’s father, and then they were sitting in their compartment on the Broadway Limited.

“Darn!” exclaimed Myra. “I forgot my bag. Left it at Cousin Walter’s in the excitement.”

“Never mind. We can get a whole new outfit in Chicago.”

She glanced at her wrist watch.

“I’ve got time to telephone him to send it on.”

She rose.

“Don’t be long, dear.”

She leaned down and kissed his forehead.

“You know I couldn’t. Two minutes, honey.”

Outside Myra ran swiftly along the platform and up the steel stairs to the great waiting room, where a man met her — a twinkly-eyed man with a slight stutter.

“How d-did it go, M-myra?”

“Fine! Oh, Walter, you were splendid! I almost wish you’d join the ministry so you could officiate when I do get married.”

“Well — I r-rehearsed for half an hour after I g-got your telephone call.”

“Wish we’d had more time. I’d have had him lease an apartment and buy furniture.”

“H’m,” chuckled Walter. “Wonder how far he’ll go on his honeymoon.”

“Oh, he’ll think I’m on the train till he gets to Elizabeth.” She shook her little fist at the great contour of the marble dome. “Oh, he’s getting off too easy — far too easy!”

“I haven’t f — figured out what the f — fellow did to you, M — myra.”

“You never will, I hope.”

They had reached the side drive and he hailed her a taxicab.

“You’re an angel!” beamed Myra. “And I can’t thank you enough.”

“Well, any time I can be of use t — to you —  — By the way, what are you going to do with all the rings?”

Myra looked laughingly at her hand.

“That’s the question,” she said. “I may send them to Lady Helena Something-or-Other — and — well, I’ve always had a strong penchant for souvenirs. Tell the driver ‘Biltmore,’ Walter.”

THE I.O.U.

The above is not my real name — the fellow it belongs to gave his permission to sign it to this story. My real name I shall not divulge. I am a publisher. I accept long novels about young love written by old maids in South Dakota, detective stories concerning wealthy clubmen and female apaches with “wide dark eyes”, essays about the menace of this and that and the color of the moon in Tahiti by colledge professors and others unemployed. I accept no novels by authors under fifteen years old. All the columnists and communists (I can never get these two words straight) abuse me because they say I want money. I do — I want it terribly. My wife need it. My

[…the rest of manuscript is unavailable; 0ttached to the manuscript of this story is a short, typed synopsis by Harold Ober, which reads: “Cleverly written story. Almost a satire on publishing business. Told by a publisher. He brings out book by famous psychic research man, purporting to be communication with his nephew killed in War [WW1]. Publisher goes to Ohio to visit author. The nephew who has been in prison camp arrives at same time. Girl he was engaged to also there. Both are angry at author & publisher. Book is selling at great rate. Shows nephew dancing with angels in filmy garments. Publisher offers them money to keep quiet for a while — but native of town arrives. Recognizes nephew because he owes him $3.85 lost at poker. Publisher decides to publish only love stories and mysteries. HO.”]

About nine months after beginning his association with the Paul Revere Reynolds agency and his relationship as a client of Harold Ober, Fitzgerald sent a manuscript with a letter to Ober. In this letter of 2 June 1920, Fitzgerald indicated that this story was “a plot that Sell particularly wanted for Harps. Baz and which I promised him.” Someone in the Reynolds office identified the story as “The I. O. U.” There is no evidence that the story was actually offered to Harper’s Bazaar, and that magazine published no Fitzgerald stories during his lifetime. Ober obviously offered it other places, because on 17 July 1920, Fitzgerald wrote concerning the story again: “If ‘The I. O. U.’ comes back from the Post I wish you’d return it to me as I think I can change it so there’ll be no trouble selling it.” No correspondence survives indicating whether Fitzgerald resubmitted the story in a new version or with a new title. There is not even a record of what magazines Ober offered it to. However, the manuscript and a typescript survive, and a note attached to the typescript shows that at some time (probably after Fitzgerald’s death) Ober reworked or considered reworking the story in an attempt to make it salable.

Unfortunately Ober’s assessment of “The I. O. U.” is not one of his better judgments. He seems to have read more complexity and subtlety into the story than actually exists. While it could be considered a “clever” story, and perhaps could have been worked up into a salable story, “The I. O. U.” is truly one of Fitzgerald’s inconsequential efforts. The characters lack the charm of his flappers and the appeal of his young men in such stories as “Head and Shoulders,” “The Offshore Pirate,” or “Bernice Bobs Her Hair” — all published in The Saturday Evening Post in the same year. No, this time the magazine editors seem to have been more perceptive than Mr. Ober.

THE POPULAR GIRL

Along about half-past ten every Saturday night Yanci Bowman eluded her partner by some graceful subterfuge and from the dancing floor went to point of vantage overlooking the country-club bar. When she saw her father she would either beckon to him, if he chanced to be looking in her direction, or else she would dispatch a waiter to call attention to her impendent presence. If it were no later than half past ten — that is, if he had had no more than an hour of synthetic gin rickeys — he would get up from his chair and suffer himself to be persuaded into the ballroom.

“Ballroom,” for want of a better word. It was that room, filled by day with wicker furniture, which was always connotated in the phrase “Let’s go in and dance.” It was referred to as “inside” or “downstairs.” It was that nameless chamber wherein occur the principal transactions of all the country clubs in America.

Yanci knew that if she could keep her father there for an hour, talking, watching her dance, or even on rare occasions dancing himself, she could safely release him at the end of that time. In the period that would elapse before midnight ended the dance he could scarcely become sufficiently stimulated to annoy anyone.

All this entailed considerable exertion on Yanci’s part, and it was less for her father’s sake than for her own that she went through with it. Several rather unpleasant experiences were scattered through this past summer. One night when she had been detained by the impassioned and impossible-to-interrupt speech of a young man from Chicago her father had appeared swaying gently in the ballroom doorway; in his ruddy handsome face two faded blue eyes were squinted half shut as he tried to focus them on the dancers, and he was obviously preparing to offer himself to the first dowager who caught his eye. He was ludicrously injured when Yanci insisted upon an immediate withdrawal.

After that night Yanci went through her Fabian maneuver to the minute.

Yanci and her father were the handsomest two people in the Middle Western city where they lived. Tom Bowman’s complexion was hearty from twenty years spent in the service of good whisky and bad golf. He kept an office downtown, where he was thought to transact some vague real-estate business; but in point of fact his chief concern in life was the exhibition of a handsome profile and an easy well-bred manner at the country club, where he had spent the greater part of the ten years that had elapsed since his wife’s death.

Yanci was twenty, with a vague die-away manner which was partly the setting for her languid disposition and partly the effect of a visit she had paid to some Eastern relatives at an impressionable age. She was intelligent, in a flitting way, a romantic under the moon and unable to decide whether to marry for sentiment or for comfort, the latter of these two abstractions being well enough personified by one of the most ardent among her admirers. Meanwhile she kept house, not without efficiency, for her father, and tried in a placid unruffled tempo to regulate his constant tippling to the sober side of inebriety.

She admired her father. She admired him for his fine appearance and for his charming manner. He had never quite lost the air of having been a popular Bones man at Yale. This charm of his was a standard by which her susceptible temperament unconsciously judged the men she knew. Nevertheless, father and daughter were far from that sentimental family relationship which is a stock plant in fiction, but in life usually exists in the mind of only the older party to it. Yanci Bowman had decided to leave her home by marriage within the year. She was heartily bored.

Scott Kimblerly, who saw her for the first time this November evening at the country club, agreed with the lady whose house guest he was that Yanci was an exquisite little beauty. With a sort of conscious sensuality surprising in such a young man — Scott was only twenty-five — he avoided an introduction that he might watch her undisturbed for a fanciful hour, and sip the pleasure or the disillusion of her conversation at the drowsy end of the evening.

“She never got over the disappointment of not meeting the Prince of Wales when he was in this country,” remarked Mrs. Orrin Rogers, following his gaze. “She said so, anyhow; whether she was serious or not, I don’t know. I hear that she has her walls simply plastered with pictures of him.”

“Who?” asked Scott suddenly.

“Why, the Prince of Wales.”

“Who has plaster pictures of him?”

“Why, Yanci Bowman, the girl you said you thought was so pretty.”

“After a certain degree of prettiness, one pretty girl is as pretty as another,” said Scott argumentatively.

“Yes, I suppose so.”

Mrs. Rogers’ voice drifted off on an indefinite note. She had never in her life compassed a generality until it had fallen familiarly on her ear from constant repetition.

“Let’s talk her over,” Scott suggested.

With a mock reproachful smile Mrs. Rogers lent herself agreeably to slander. An encore was just beginning. The orchestra trickled a light overflow of music into the pleasant green-latticed room and the two score couples who for the evening comprised the local younger set moved placidly into time with its beat. Only a few apathetic stags gathered one by one in the doorways, and to a close observer it was apparent that the scene did not attain the gayety which was its aspiration. These girls and men had known each other from childhood; and though there were marriages incipient upon the floor tonight, they were marriages of environment, of resignation, or even of boredom.

Their trappings lacked the sparkle of the seventeen-year-old affairs that took place through the short and radiant holidays. On such occasions as this, thought Scott as his eyes still sought casually for Yanci, occurred the matings of the left-overs, the plainer, the duller, the poorer of the social world; matings actuated by the same urge toward perhaps a more glamorous destiny, yet, for all that, less beautiful and less young. Scott himself was feeling very old.

But there was one face in the crowd to which his generalization did not apply. When his eyes found Yanci Bowman among the dancers he felt much younger. She was the incarnation of all in which the dance failed — graceful youth, arrogant, languid freshness and beauty that was sad and perishable as a memory in a dream. Her partner, a young man with one of those fresh red complexions ribbed with white streaks, as though he had been slapped on a cold day, did not appear to be holding her interest, and her glance fell here and there upon a group, a face, a garment, with a far-away and oblivious melancholy.

“Dark-blue eyes,” said Scott to Mrs. Rogers. “I don’t know that they mean anything except that they’re beautiful, but that nose and upper lip and chin are certainly aristocratic — if there is any such thing,” he added apologetically.

“Oh, she’s very aristocratic,” agreed Mrs. Rogers. “Her grandfather was a senator or governor or something in one of the Southern states. Her father’s very aristocratic looking too. Oh, yes, they’re very aristocratic; they’re aristocratic people.”

“She looks lazy.”

Scott was watching the yellow gown drift and submerge among the dancers.

“She doesn’t like to move. It’s a wonder she dances so well. Is she engaged? Who is the man who keeps cutting in on her, the one who tucks his tie under his collar so rakishly and affects the remarkable slanting pockets?”

He was annoyed at the young man’s persistence, and his sarcasm lacked the ring of detachment.

“Oh, that’s” — Mrs. Rogers bent forward, the tip of her tongue just visible between her lips — “that’s the O’Rourke boy. He’s quite devoted, I believe.”

“I believe,” Scott said suddenly, “that I’ll get you to introduce me if she’s near when the music stops.”

They arose and stood looking for Yanci — Mrs. Rogers, small, stoutening, nervous, and Scott Kimberly, her husband’s cousin, dark and just below medium height. Scott was an orphan with half a million of his own, and he was in this city for no more reason than that he had missed a train. They looked for several minutes, and in vain. Yanci, in her yellow dress, no longer moved with slow loveliness among the dancers.

The clock stood at half past ten.

II

“Good evening,” her father was saying to her at that moment in syllables faintly slurred. “This seems to be getting to be a habit.”

They were standing near a side stairs, and over his shoulder through a glass door Yanci could see a party of half a dozen men sitting in familiar joviality about a round table.

“Don’t you want to come out and watch for a while?” she suggested, smiling and affecting a casualness she did not feel.

“Not tonight, thanks.”

Her father’s dignity was a bit too emphasized to be convincing.

“Just come out and take a look,” she urged him. “Everybody’s here, and I want to ask you what you think of somebody.”

This was not so good, but it was the best that occurred to her.

“I doubt very strongly if I’d find anything to interest me out there,” said Tom Bowman emphatically. “I observe that f’some insane reason I’m always taken out and aged on the wood for half an hour as though I was irresponsible.”

“I only ask you to stay a little while.”

“Very considerate, I’m sure. But tonight I happ’n to be interested in a discussion that’s taking place in here.”

“Come on, father.”

Yanci put her arm through his ingratiatingly; but he released it by the simple expedient of raising his own arm and letting hers drop.

“I’m afraid not.”

“I’ll tell you,” she suggested, concealing her annoyance at this unusually protracted argument, “you come in and look, just once, and then if it bores you you can go right back.”

He shook his head.

“No, thanks.”

Then without another word he turned suddenly and reentered the bar. Yanci went back to the ballroom. She glanced easily at the stag line as she passed, and making a quick selection murmured to a man near her, “Dance with me, will you, Carty? I’ve lost my partner.”

“Glad to,” answered Carty truthfully.

“Awfully sweet of you.”

“Sweet of me? Of you, you mean.”

She looked up at him absently. She was furiously annoyed at her father. Next morning at breakfast she would radiate a consuming chill, but for tonight she could only wait, hoping that if the worst happened he would at least remain in the bar until the dance was over.

Mrs. Rogers, who lived next door to the Bowmans, appeared suddenly at her elbow with a strange young man.

“Yanci,” Mrs. Rogers was saying with a social smile, “I want to introduce Mr. Kimberly. Mr. Kimberly’s spending the weekend with us, and I particularly wanted him to meet you.”

“How perfectly slick!” drawled Yanci with lazy formality.

Mr. Kimberly suggested to Miss Bowman that they dance, to which proposal Miss Bowman dispassionately acquiesced. They mingled their arms in the gesture prevalent and stepped into time with the beat of the drum. Simultaneously it seemed to Scott that the room and the couples who danced up and down upon it converted themselves into a background behind her. The commonplace lamps, the rhythm of the music playing some paraphrase of a paraphrase, the faces of many girls, pretty, undistinguished or absurd, assumed a certain solidity as though they had grouped themselves in a retinue for Yanci’s languid eyes and dancing feet.

“I’ve been watching you,” said Scott simply. “You look rather bored this evening.”

“Do I?” Her dark-blue eyes exposed a borderland of fragile iris as they opened in a delicate burlesque of interest. “How perfectly kill-ing!” she added.

Scott laughed. She had used the exaggerated phrase without smiling, indeed without any attempt to give it verisimilitude. He had heard the adjectives of the year — “hectic,” “marvelous,” and “slick” — delivered casually, but never before without the faintest meaning. In this lackadaisical young beauty it was inexpressibly charming.

The dance ended. Yanci and Scott strolled toward a lounge set against the wall, but before they could take possession there was a shriek of laughter and a brawny damsel dragging an embarrassed boy in her wake skidded by them and plumped down upon it.

“How rude!” observed Yanci.

“I suppose it’s her privilege.”

“A girl with ankles like that has no privileges.”

They seated themselves uncomfortably on two stiff chairs.

“Where do you come from?” she asked of Scott with polite uninterest.

“New York.”

This having transpired, Yanci deigned to fix her eyes on him for the best part of ten seconds.

“Who was the gentleman with the invisible tie,” Scott asked rudely, in order to make her look at him, “who was giving you such a rush? I found it impossible to keep my eyes off him. Is his personality as diverting as his haberdashery?”

“I don’t know,” she drawled; “I’ve only been engaged to him for a week.”

“My Lord!” exclaimed Scott, perspiring suddenly under his eyes.

“I beg your pardon. I didn’t —  — “

“I was only joking,” she interrupted with a sighing laugh. “I thought I’d see what you’d say to that.”

Then they both laughed, and Yanci continued, “I’m not engaged to anyone. I’m too horribly unpopular.” Still the same key, her languorous voice humorously contradicting the content of her remark. “No one’ll ever marry me.”

“How pathetic!”

“Really,” she murmured; “because I have to have compliments all the time, in order to live, and no one thinks I’m attractive any more, so no one ever gives them to me.”

Seldom had Scott been so amused.

“Why, you beautiful child,” he cried, “I’ll bet you never hear anything else from morning till night!”

“Oh yes I do,” she responded, obviously pleased. “I never get compliments unless I fish for them.”

“Everything’s the same,” she was thinking as she gazed around her in a peculiar mood of pessimism. Same boys sober and same boys tight; same old women sitting by the walls and one or two girls sitting with them who were dancing this time last year.

Yanci had reached the stage where these country-club dances seemed little more than a display of sheer idiocy. From being an enchanted carnival where jeweled and immaculate maidens rouged to the pinkest propriety displayed themselves to strange and fascinating men, the picture had faded to a medium-sized hall where was an almost indecent display of unclothed motives and obvious failures. So much for several years! And the dance had changed scarcely by a ruffle in the fashions or a new flip in a figure of speech.

Yanci was ready to be married.

Meanwhile the dozen remarks rushing to Scott Kimberly’s lips were interrupted by the apologetic appearance of Mrs. Rogers.

“Yanci,” the older woman was saying, “the chauffeur’s just telephoned to say that the car’s broken down. I wonder if you and your father have room for us going home. If it’s the slightest inconvenience don’t hesitate to tell —  — “

“I know he’ll be terribly glad to. He’s got loads of room, because I came out with someone else.”

She was wondering if her father would be presentable at twelve.

He could always drive at any rate — and, besides, people who asked for a lift could take what they got.

“That’ll be lovely. Thank you so much,” said Mrs. Rogers.

Then, as she had just passed the kittenish late thirties when women still think they are persona grata with the young and entered upon the early forties when their children convey to them tactfully that they no longer are, Mrs. Rogers obliterated herself from the scene. At that moment the music started and the unfortunate young man with white streaks in his red complexion appeared in front of Yanci.

Just before the end of the end of the next dance Scott Kimberly cut in on her again.

“I’ve come back,” he began, “to tell you how beautiful you are.”

“I’m not, really,” she answered. “And, besides, you tell everyone that.”

The music gathered gusto for its finale, and they sat down upon the comfortable lounge.

“I’ve told no one that for three years,” said Scott.

There was no reason why he should have made it three years, yet somehow it sounded convincing to both of them. Her curiosity was stirred. She began finding out about him. She put him to a lazy questionnaire which began with his relationship to the Rogerses and ended, he knew not by what steps, with a detailed description of his apartment in New York.

“I want to live in New York,” she told him; “on Park Avenue, in one of those beautiful white buildings that have twelve big rooms in each apartment and cost a fortune to rent.”

“That’s what I’d want, too, if I were married. Park Avenue — it’s one of the most beautiful streets in the world, I think, perhaps chiefly because it hasn’t any leprous park trying to give it an artificial suburbanity.”

“Whatever that is,” agreed Yanci. “Anyway, Father and I go to New York about three times a year. We always go to the Ritz.”

This was not precisely true. Once a year she generally pried her father from his placid and not unbeneficent existence that she might spend a week lolling by the Fifth Avenue shop windows, lunching or having tea with some former school friend from Farmover, and occasionally going to dinner and the theater with boys who came up from Yale or Princeton for the occasion. These had been pleasant adventures — not one but was filled to the brim with colorful hours — dancing at Montmartre, dining at the Ritz, with some movie star or supereminent society woman at the next table, or else dreaming of what she might buy at Hempel’s or Waxe’s or Thrumble’s if her father’s income had but one additional naught on the happy side of the decimal. She adored New York with a great impersonal affection — adored it as only a Middle Western or Southern girl can. In its gaudy bazaars she felt her soul transported with turbulent delight, for to her eyes it held nothing ugly, nothing sordid, nothing plain.

She had stayed once at the Ritz — once only. The Manhattan, where they usually registered, had been torn down. She knew that she could never induce her father to afford the Ritz again.

After a moment she borrowed a pencil and paper and scribbled a notification “To Mr. Bowman in the grill” that he was expected to drive Mrs. Rogers and her guest home, “by request” — this last underlined. She hoped that he would be able to do so with dignity. This note she sent by a waiter to her father. Before the next dance began it was returned to her with a scrawled O. K. and her father’s initials.

The remainder of the evening passed quickly. Scott Kimberly cut in on her as often as time permitted, giving her those comforting assurances of her enduring beauty which not without a whimsical pathos she craved. He laughed at her also, and she was not so sure that she liked that. In common with all vague people, she was unaware that she was vague. She did not entirely comprehend when Scott Kimberly told her that her personality would endure long after she was too old to care whether it endured or not.

She liked best to talk about New York, and each of their interrupted conversations gave her a picture or a memory of the metropolis on which she speculated as she looked over the shoulder of Jerry O’Rourke or Carty Braden or some other beau, to whom, as to all of them, she was comfortably anesthetic. At midnight she sent another note to her father, saying that Mrs. Rogers and Mrs. Rogers’ guest would meet him immediately on the porch by the main driveway. Then, hoping for the best, she walked out into the starry night and was assisted by Jerry O’Rourke into his roadster.

III

“Good night, Yanci.” With her late escort she was standing on the curbstone in front of the rented stucco house where she lived. Mr. O’Rourke was attempting to put significance into his lingering rendition of her name. For weeks he had been straining to boost their relations almost forcibly onto a sentimental plane; but Yanci, with her vague impassivity, which was a defense against almost anything, had brought to naught his efforts. Jerry O’Rourke was an old story. His family had money; but he — he worked in a brokerage house along with most of the rest of his young generation. He sold bonds — bonds were now the thing; real estate was once the thing — in the days of the boom; then automobiles were the thing. Bonds were the thing now. Young men sold them who had nothing else to go into.

“Don’t bother to come up, please.” Then as he put his car into gear, “Call me up soon!”

A minute later he turned the corner of the moonlit street and disappeared, his cut-out resounding voluminously through the night as it declared that the rest of two dozen weary inhabitants was of no concern to his gay meanderings.

Yanci sat down thoughtfully upon the porch steps. She had no key and must wait for her father’s arrival. Five minutes later a roadster turned into the street, and approaching with an exaggerated caution stopped in front of the Rogers’ large house next door. Relieved, Yanci arose and strolled slowly down the walk. The door of the car had swung open and Mrs. Rogers, assisted by Scott Kimberly, had alighted safely upon the sidewalk; but to Yanci’s surprise Scott Kimberly, after escorting Mrs. Rogers to her steps, returned to the car. Yanci was close enough to notice that he took the driver’s seat. As he drew up at the Bowman’s curbstone Yanci saw that her father was occupying the far corner, fighting with ludicrous dignity against a sleep that had come upon him. She groaned. The fatal last hour had done its work — Tom Bowman was once more hors de combat.

“Hello,” cried Yanci as she reached the curb.

“Yanci,” muttered her parent, simulating, unsuccessfully, a brisk welcome. His lips were curved in an ingratiating grin.

“Your father wasn’t feeling quite fit, so he let me drive home,” explained Scott cheerfully as he got himself out and came up to her.

“Nice little car. Had it long?”

Yanci laughed, but without humor.

“Is he paralyzed?”

“Is who paralyze’?” demanded the figure in the car with an offended sigh.

Scott was standing by the car.

“Can I help you out, sir?”

“I c’n get out. I c’n get out,” insisted Mr. Bowman. “Just step a li’l’ out my way. Someone must have given me some ‘stremely bad whisk’.”

“You mean a lot of people must have given you some,” retorted Yanci in cold unsympathy.

Mr. Bowman reached the curb with astonishing ease; but this was a deceitful success, for almost immediately he clutched at a handle of air perceptible only to himself, and was saved by Scott’s quickly proffered arm. Followed by the two men, Yanci walked toward the house in a furor of embarrassment. Would the young man think that such scenes went on every night? It was chiefly her own presence that made it humiliating for Yanci. Had her father been carried to bed by two butlers each evening she might even have been proud of the fact that he could afford such dissipation; but to have it thought that she assisted, that she was burdened with the worry and the care! And finally she was annoyed with Scott Kimberly for being there, and for his officiousness in helping to bring her father into the house.

Reaching the low porch of tapestry brick, Yanci searched in Tom Bowman’s vest for the key and unlocked the front door. A minute later the master of the house was deposited in an easy-chair.

“Thanks very much,” he said, recovering for a moment. “Sit down. Like a drink? Yanci, get some crackers and cheese, if there’s any, won’t you, dear?”

At the unconscious coolness of this Scott and Yanci laughed.

“It’s your bedtime, Father,” she said, her anger struggling with diplomacy.

“Give me my guitar,” he suggested, “and I’ll play you tune.”

Except on such occasions as this, he had not touched his guitar for twenty years. Yanci turned to Scott.

“He’ll be fine now. Thanks a lot. He’ll fall asleep in a minute and when I wake him he’ll go to bed like a lamb.”

“Well —  — “

They strolled together out the door.

“Sleepy?” he asked.

“No, not a bit.”

“Then perhaps you’d better let me stay here with you a few minutes until you see if he’s all right. Mrs. Rogers gave me a key so I can get in without disturbing her.”

“It’s quite all right,” protested Yanci. “I don’t mind a bit, and he won’t be any trouble. He must have taken a glass too much, and this whisky we have out here — you know! This has happened once before — last year,” she added.

Her words satisfied her; as an explanation it seemed to have a convincing ring.

“Can I sit down for a moment, anyway?” They sat side by side upon a wicker porch setee.

“I’m thinking of staying over a few days,” Scott said.

“How lovely!” Her voice had resumed its die-away note.

“Cousin Pete Rogers wasn’t well to-day, but tomorrow he’s going duck shooting, and he wants me to go with him.”

“Oh, how thrilling! I’ve always been mad to go, and Father’s always promised to take me, but he never has.”

“We’re going to be gone about three days, and then I thought I’d come back and stay over the next week-end —  — “ He broke off suddenly and bent forward in a listening attitude.

“Now what on earth is that?”

The sounds of music were proceeding brokenly from the room they had lately left — a ragged chord on a guitar and half a dozen feeble starts.

“It’s father!” cried Yanci.

And now a voice drifted out to them, drunken and murmurous, taking the long notes with attempted melancholy:

Sing a song of cities,

Ridin on a rail,

A niggah’s ne’er so happy

As when he’s out-a jail.

“How terrible!” exclaimed Yanci. “He’ll wake up everybody in the block.”

The chorus ended, the guitar jangled again, then gave out a last harsh sprang! and was still. A moment later these disturbances were followed by a low but quite definite snore. Mr. Bowman, having indulged his musical proclivity, had dropped off to sleep.

“Let’s go to ride,” suggested Yanci impatiently. “This is too hectic for me.”

Scott arose with alacrity and they walked down to the car.

“Where’ll we go?” she wondered.

“I don’t care.”

“We might go up half a block to Crest Avenue — that’s our show street — and then ride out to the river boulevard.”

IV

As they turned into Crest Avenue the new cathedral, immense and unfinished, in imitation of a cathedral left unfinished by accident in some little Flemish town, squatted just across the way like a plump white bulldog on its haunches. The ghosts of four moonlit apostles looked down at them wanly from wall niches still littered with the white, dusty trash of the builders. The cathedral inaugurated Crest Avenue. After it came the great brownstone mass built by R. R. Comerford, the flour king, followed by a half mile of pretentious stone houses put up in the gloomy 90’s. These were adorned with monstrous driveways and porte-cocheres which had once echoed to the hoofs of good horses and with huge circular windows that corseted the second stories.

The continuity of these mausoleums was broken by a small park, a triangle of grass where Nathan Hale stood ten feet tall with his hands bound behind his back by stone cord and stared over a great bluff at the slow Mississippi. Crest Avenue ran along the bluff, but neither faced it nor seemed aware of it, for all the houses fronted inward toward the street. Beyond the first half mile it became newer, essayed ventures in terraced lawns, in concoctions of stucco or in granite mansions which imitated through a variety of gradual refinements the marble contours of the Petit Trianon. The houses of this phase rushed by the roadster for a succession of minutes; then the way turned and the car was headed directly into the moonlight which swept toward it like the lamp of some gigantic motorcycle far up the avenue.

Past the low Corinthian lines of the Christian Science Temple, past a block of dark frame horrors, a deserted row of grim red brick — an unfortunate experiment of the late 90’s — then new houses again, bright-red brick now, with trimmings of white, black iron fences and hedges binding flowery lawns. These swept by, faded, passed, enjoying their moment of grandeur; then waiting there in the moonlight to be outmoded as had the frame, cupolaed mansions of lower town and the brownstone piles of older Crest Avenue in their turn.

The roofs lowered suddenly, the lots narrowed, the houses shrank up in size and shaded off into bungalows. These held the street for the last mile, to the bend in the river which terminated the prideful avenue at the statue of Chelsea Arbuthnot. Arbuthnot was the first governor — and almost the last of Anglo-Saxon blood.

All the way thus far Yanci had not spoken, absorbed still in the annoyance of the evening, yet soothed somehow by the fresh air of Northern November that rushed by them. She must take her fur coat out of storage next day, she thought.

“Where are we now?”

As they slowed down, Scott looked up curiously at the pompous stone figure, clear in the crisp moonlight, with one hand on a book and the forefinger of the other pointing, as though with reproachful symbolism, directly at some construction work going on in the street.

“This is the end of Crest Avenue,” said Yanci, turning to him. “This is our show street.”

“A museum of American architectural failures.”

“What?”

“Nothing,” he murmured.

“I should have explained it to you. I forgot. We can go along the river boulevard if you’d like — or are you tired?”

Scott assured her that he was not tired — not in the least.

Entering the boulevard, the cement road twisted under darkling trees.

“The Mississippi — how little it means to you now!” said Scott suddenly.

“What?” Yanci looked around. “Oh, the river.”

“I guess it was once pretty important to your ancestors up here.”

“My ancestors weren’t up here then,” said Yanci with some dignity. “My ancestors were from Maryland. My father came out here when he left Yale.”

“Oh!” Scott was politely impressed.

“My mother was from here. My father came out here from Baltimore because of his health.”

“Oh!”

“Of course we belong here now, I suppose” — this with faint condescension — “as much as anywhere else.”

“Of course.”

“Except that I want to live in the East and I can’t persuade Father to,” she finished.

It was after one o’clock and the boulevard was almost deserted. Occasionally two yellow disks would top a rise ahead of them and take shape as a late-returning automobile. Except for that, they were alone in a continual rushing dark. The moon had gone down.

“Next time the road goes near the river let’s stop and watch it,” he suggested.

Yanci smiled inwardly. This remark was obviously what one boy of her acquaintance had named an international petting cue, by which was meant a suggestion that aimed to create naturally a situation for a kiss. She considered the matter. As yet the man had made no particular impression on her. He was good-looking, apparently well-to-do and from New York. She had begun to like him during the dance, increasingly as the evening had drawn to a close; then the incident of her father’s appalling arrival had thrown cold water upon this tentative warmth; and now — it was November, and the night was cold. Still —  —

“All right,” she agreed suddenly.

The road divided; she swerved around and brought the car to a stop in an open place high above the river.

“Well?” she demanded in the deep quiet that followed the shutting off of the engine.

“Thanks.”

“Are you satisfied here?”

“Almost. Not quite.”

“Why not?”

“I’ll tell you in a minute,” he answered. “Why is your name Yanci?”

“It’s a family name.”

“It’s very pretty.” He repeated it several times caressingly. “Yanci — it has all the grace of Nancy, and yet it isn’t prim.”

“What’s your name?” she inquired.

“Scott.”

“Scott what?”

“Kimberly. Didn’t you know?”

“I wasn’t sure. Mrs. Rogers introduced you in such a mumble.”

There was a slight pause.

“Yanci,” he repeated; “beautiful Yanci, with her dark-blue eyes and her lazy soul. Do you know why I’m not quite satisfied, Yanci?”

“Why?”

Imperceptibly she had moved her face nearer until as she waited for an answer with her lips faintly apart he knew that in asking she had granted.

Without haste he bent his head forward and touched her lips.

He sighed, and both of them felt a sort of relief — relief from the embarrassment of playing up to what conventions of this sort of thing remained.

“Thanks,” he said as he had when she first stopped the car.

“Now are you satisfied?”

Her blue eyes regarded him unsmilingly in the darkness.

“After a fashion; of course, you can never say — definitely.”

Again he bent toward her, but she stooped and started the motor. It was late and Yanci was beginning to be tired. What purpose there was in the experiment was accomplished. He had had what he asked. If he liked it he would want more, and that put her one move ahead in the game which she felt she was beginning.

“I’m hungry,” she complained. “Let’s go down and eat.”

“Very well,” he acquiesced sadly. “Just when I was enjoying — the Mississippi.”

“Do you think I’m beautiful?” she inquired almost plaintively as they backed out.

“What an absurd question!”

“But I like to hear people say so.”

“I was just about to — when you started the engine.”

Downtown in a deserted all-night lunch room they ate bacon and eggs. She was pale as ivory now. The night had drawn the lazy vitality and languid color out of her face. She encouraged him to talk to her of New York until he was beginning every sentence with, “Well now, let’s see —  — “

The repast over, they drove home. Scott helped her put the car in the little garage, and just outside the front door she lent him her lips again for the faint brush of a kiss. Then she went in.

The long living room which ran the width of the small stucco house was reddened by a dying fire which had been high when Yanci left and now was faded to a steady undancing glow. She took a log from the fire box and threw it on the embers, then started as a voice came out of the half darkness at the other end of the room.

“Back so soon?”

It was her father’s voice, not yet quite sober, but alert and intelligent.

“Yes. Went riding,” she answered shortly, sitting down in a wicker chair before the fire. “Then went down and had something to eat.”

“Oh!”

Her father left his place and moved to a chair nearer the fire, where he stretched himself out with a sigh. Glancing at him from the corner of her eye, for she was going to show an appropriate coldness, Yanci was fascinated by his complete recovery of dignity in the space of two hours. His graying hair was scarcely rumpled; his handsome face was ruddy as ever. Only his eyes, crisscrossed with tiny red lines, were evidence of his late dissipation.

“Have a good time?”

“Why should you care?” she answered rudely.

“Why shouldn’t I?”

“You didn’t seem to care earlier in the evening. I asked you to take two people home for me, and you weren’t able to drive your own car.”

“The deuce I wasn’t!” he protested. “I could have driven in — in a race in an arana, areaena. That Mrs. Rogers insisted that her young admirer should drive, so what could I do?”

“That isn’t her young admirer,” retorted Yanci crisply. There was no drawl in her voice now. “She’s as old as you are. That’s her niece — I mean her nephew.”

“Excuse me!”

“I think you owe me an apology.” She found suddenly that she bore him no resentment. She was rather sorry for him, and it occurred to her that in asking him to take Mrs. Rogers home she had somehow imposed on his liberty. Nevertheless, discipline was necessary — there would be other Saturday nights. “Don’t you?” she concluded.

“I apologize, Yanci.”

“Very well, I accept your apology,” she answered stiffly.

“What’s more, I’ll make it up to you.”

Her blue eyes contracted. She hoped — she hardly dared to hope that he might take her to New York.

“Let’s see,” he said. “November, isn’t it? What date?”

“The twenty-third.”

“Well, I’ll tell you what I’ll do.” He knocked the tips of his fingers together tentatively. “I’ll give you a present. I’ve been meaning to let you have a trip all fall, but business has been bad.” She almost smiled — as though business was of any consequence in his life. “But then you need a trip. I’ll make you a present of it.”

He rose again, and crossing over to his desk sat down.

“I’ve got a little money in a New York bank that’s been lying there quite a while,” he said as he fumbled in a drawer for a check book. “I’ve been intending to close out the account. Let — me — see. There’s just —  — “ His pen scratched. “Where the devil’s the blotter? Uh!”

He came back to the fire and a pink oblong paper fluttered into her lap.

“Why, Father!”

It was a check for three hundred dollars.

“But can you afford this?” she demanded.

“It’s all right,” he reassured her, nodding. “That can be a Christmas present, too, and you’ll probably need a dress or a hat or something before you go.”

“Why,” she began uncertainly, “I hardly know whether I ought to take this much or not! I’ve got two hundred of my own downtown, you know. Are you sure —  — “

“Oh, yes!” He waved his hand with magnificent carelessness. “You need a holiday. You’ve been talking about New York, and I want you to go down there. Tell some of your friends at Yale and the other colleges and they’ll ask you to the prom or something. That’ll be nice. You’ll have a good time.”

He sat down abruptly in his chair and gave vent to a long sigh. Yanci folded up the check and tucked it into the low bosom of her dress.

“Well,” she drawled softly with a return to her usual manner, “you’re a perfect lamb to be so sweet about it, but I don’t want to be horribly extravagant.”

Her father did not answer. He gave another little sigh and relaxed sleepily into his chair.

“Of course I do want to go,” went on Yanci.

Still her father was silent. She wondered if he were asleep.

“Are you asleep?” she demanded, cheerfully now. She bent toward him; then she stood up and looked at him.

“Father,” she said uncertainly.

Her father remained motionless; the ruddy color had melted suddenly out of his face.

“Father!”

It occurred to her — and at the thought she grew cold, and a brassiere of iron clutched at her breast — that she was alone in the room. After a frantic instant she said to herself that her father was dead.

V

Yanci judged herself with inevitable gentleness — judged herself very much as a mother might judge a wild, spoiled child. She was not hard-minded, nor did she live by any ordered and considered philosophy of her own. To such a catastrophe as the death of her father her immediate reaction was a hysterical self-pity. The first three days were something of a nightmare; but sentimental civilization, being as infallible as Nature in healing the wounds of its more fortunate children, had inspired a certain Mrs. Oral, whom Yanci had always loathed, with a passionate interest in all such crises. To all intents and purposes Mrs. Oral buried Tom Bowman. The morning after his death Yanci had wired her maternal aunt in Chicago, but as yet that undemonstrative and well-to-do lady had sent no answer.

All day long, for four days, Yanci sat in her room upstairs, hearing steps come and go on the porch, and it merely increased her nervousness that the doorbell had been disconnected. This by order of Mrs. Oral! Doorbells were always disconnected! After the burial of the dead the strain relaxed. Yanci, dressed in her new black, regarded herself in the pier glass, and then wept because she seemed to herself very sad and beautiful. She went downstairs and tried to read a moving-picture magazine, hoping that she would not be alone in the house when the winter dark came down just after four.

This afternoon Mrs. Oral had said carpe diem to the maid, and Yanci was just starting for the kitchen to see whether she had yet gone when the reconnected bell rang suddenly through the house. Yanci started. She waited a minute, then went to the door. It was Scott Kimberly.

“I was just going to inquire for you,” he said.

“Oh! I’m much better, thank you,” she responded with the quiet dignity that seemed suited to her role.

They stood there in the hall awkwardly, each reconstructing the half-facetious, half-sentimental occasion on which they had last met. It seemed such an irreverent prelude to such a somber disaster. There was no common ground for them now, no gap that could be bridged by a slight reference to their mutual past, and there was no foundation on which he could adequately pretend to share her sorrow.

“Won’t you come in?” she said, biting her lip nervously. He followed her to the sitting room and sat beside her on the lounge. In another minute, simply because he was there and alive and friendly, she was crying on his shoulder.

“There, there!” he said, putting his arm behind her and patting her shoulder idiotically. “There, there, there!”

He was wise enough to attribute no ulterior significance to her action. She was overstrained with grief and loneliness and sentiment; almost any shoulder would have done as well. For all the biological thrill to either of them he might have been a hundred years old. In a minute she sat up.

“I beg your pardon,” she murmured brokenly. “But it’s — it’s so dismal in this house today.”

“I know just how you feel, Yanci.”

“Did I — did I — get — tears on your coat?”

In tribute to the tenseness of the incident they both laughed hysterically, and with the laughter she momentarily recovered her propriety.

“I don’t know why I should have chosen you to collapse on,” she wailed. “I really don’t just go ‘round doing it in-indiscriminately on anyone who comes in.”

“I consider it — a compliment,” he responded soberly, “and I can understand the state you’re in.” Then, after a pause, “Have you any plans?”

She shook her head.

“Va-vague ones,” she muttered between little gasps. “I tho-ought I’d go down and stay with my aunt in Chicago a while.”

“I should think that’d be the best — much the best thing.” Then, because he could think of nothing else to say, he added, “Yes, very much the best thing.”

“What are you doing — here in town?” she inquired, taking in her breath in minute gasps and dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief.

“Oh, I’m here with — with the Rogerses. I’ve been here.”

“Hunting?”

“No, I’ve just been here.”

He did not tell her that he had stayed over on her account. She might think it fresh.

“I see,” she said. She didn’t see.

“I want to know if there’s any possible thing I can do for you, Yanci. Perhaps go downtown for you, or do some errands — anything. Maybe you’d like to bundle up and get a bit of air. I could take you out to drive in your car some night, and no one would see you.”

He clipped his last word short as the inadvertency of this suggestion dawned on him. They stared at each other with horror in their eyes.

“Oh, no, thank you!” she cried. “I really don’t want to drive.”

To his relief the outer door opened and an elderly lady came in. It was Mrs. Oral. Scott rose immediately and moved backward toward the door.

“If you’re sure there isn’t anything I can do —  — “

Yanci introduced him to Mrs. Oral; then leaving the elder woman by the fire walked with him to the door. An idea had suddenly occurred to her.

“Wait a minute.”

She ran up the front stairs and returned immediately with a slip of pink paper in her hand.

“Here’s something I wish you’d do,” she said. “Take this to the First National Bank and have it cashed for me. You can leave the money here for me any time.”

Scott took out his wallet and opened it.

“Suppose I cash it for you now,” he suggested.

“Oh, there’s no hurry.”

“But I may as well.” He drew out three new one-hundred-dollar bills and gave them to her.

“That’s awfully sweet of you,” said Yanci.

“Not at all. May I come in and see you next time I come West?”

“I wish you would.”

“Then I will. I’m going East tonight.”

The door shut him out into the snowy dusk and Yanci returned to Mrs. Oral. Mrs. Oral had come to discuss plans.

“And now, my dear, just what do you plan to do? We ought to have some plan to go by, and I thought I’d find out if you had any definite plan in your mind.”

Yanci tried to think. She seemed to herself to be horribly alone in the world.

“I haven’t heard from my aunt. I wired her again this morning. She may be in Florida.”

“In that case you’d go there?”

“I suppose so.”

“Would you close this house?”

“I suppose so.”

Mrs. Oral glanced around with placid practicality. It occurred to her that if Yanci gave the house up she might like it for herself.

“And now,” she continued, “do you know where you stand financially?”

“All right, I guess,” answered Yanci indifferently; and then with a rush of sentiment, “There was enough for t-two; there ought to be enough for o-one.”

“I didn’t mean that,” said Mrs. Oral. “I mean, do you know the details?”

“No.”

“Well, I thought you didn’t know the details. And I thought you ought to know all the details — have a detailed account of what and where your money is. So I called up Mr. Haedge, who knew your father very well personally, to come up this afternoon and glance through his papers. He was going to stop in your father’s bank, too, by the way, and get all the details there. I don’t believe your father left any will.”

Details! Details! Details!

“Thank you,” said Yanci. “That’ll be — nice.”

Mrs. Oral gave three or four vigorous nods that were like heavy periods. Then she got up.

“And now if Hilma’s gone out I’ll make you some tea. Would you like some tea?”

“Sort of.”

“All right, I’ll make you some ni-nice tea.”

Tea! Tea! Tea!

Mr. Haedge, who came from one of the best Swedish families in town, arrived to see Yanci at five o’clock. He greeted her funereally; said that he had been several times to inquire for her; had organized the pallbearers and would now find out how she stood in no time. Did she have any idea whether or not there was a will? No? Well, there probably wasn’t one.

There was one. He found it almost at once in Mr. Bowman’s desk — but he worked there until eleven o’clock that night before he found much else. Next morning he arrived at eight, went down to the bank at ten, then to a certain brokerage firm, and came back to Yanci’s house at noon. He had known Tom Bowman for some years, but he was utterly astounded when he discovered the condition in which that handsome gallant had left his affairs.

He consulted Mrs. Oral, and that afternoon he informed a frightened Yanci in measured language that she was practically penniless. In the midst of the conversation a telegram from Chicago told her that her aunt had sailed the week previous for a trip through the Orient and was not expected back until late spring.

The beautiful Yanci, so profuse, so debonair, so careless with her gorgeous adjectives, had no adjectives for this calamity. She crept upstairs like a hurt child and sat before a mirror, brushing her luxurious hair to comfort herself. One hundred and fifty strokes she gave it, as it said in the treatment, and then a hundred and fifty more — she was too distraught to stop the nervous motion. She brushed it until her arm ached, then she changed arms and went on brushing.

The maid found her next morning, asleep, sprawled across the toilet things on the dresser in a room that was heavy and sweet with the scent of spilled perfume.

VI

To be precise, as Mr. Haedge was to a depressing degree, Tom Bowman left a bank balance that was more than ample — that is to say, more than ample to supply the post-mortem requirements of his own person. There was also twenty years’ worth of furniture, a temperamental roadster with asthmatic cylinders and two one-thousand-dollar bonds of a chain of jewelry stores which yielded 7.5 per cent interest. Unfortunately these were not known in the bond market.

When the car and the furniture had been sold and the stucco bungalow sublet, Yanci contemplated her resources with dismay. She had a bank balance of almost a thousand dollars. If she invested this she would increase her total income to about fifteen dollars a month. This, as Mrs. Oral cheerfully observed, would pay for the boarding-house room she had taken for Yanci as long as Yanci lived. Yanci was so encouraged by this news that she burst into tears.

So she acted as any beautiful girl would have acted in this emergency. With rare decision she told Mr. Haedge that she would leave her thousand dollars in a checking account, and then she walked out of his office and across the street to a beauty parlor to have her hair waved. This raised her morale astonishingly.

Indeed, she moved that very day out of the boarding house and into a small room at the best hotel in town. If she must sink into poverty, she would at least do so in the grand manner.

Sewed into the lining of her best mourning hat were the three new one-hundred-dollar bills, her father’s last present. What she expected of them, why she kept them in such a way, she did not know, unless perhaps because they had come to her under cheerful auspices and might through some gayety inherent in their crisp and virgin paper buy happier things than solitary meals and narrow hotel beds. They were hope and youth and luck and beauty; they began, somehow, to stand for all the things she had lost in that November night when Tom Bowman, having led her recklessly into space, had plunged off himself, leaving her to find the way back alone.

Yanci remained at the Hiawatha Hotel for three months, and she found that after the first visits of condolence her friends had happier things to do with their time than to spend it in her company. Jerry O’Rourke came to see her one day with a wild Celtic look in his eyes, and demanded that she marry him immediately. When she asked for time to consider he walked out in a rage. She heard later that he had been offered a position in Chicago and had left the same night.

She considered, frightened and uncertain. She had heard of people sinking out of place, out of life. Her father had once told her of a man in his class at college who had become a worker around saloons, polishing brass rails for the price of a can of beer; and she knew also that there were girls in this city with whose mothers her own mother had played as a little girl, but who were poor now and had grown common; who worked in stores and had married into the proletariat. But that such a fate should threaten her — how absurd! Why, she knew everyone! She had been invited everywhere; her great-grandfather had been governor of one of the Southern states!

She had written to her aunt in India and again in China, receiving no answer. She concluded that her aunt’s itinerary had changed, and this was confirmed when a post card arrived from Honolulu which showed no knowledge of Tom Bowman’s death, but announced that she was going with a party to the east coast of Africa. This was a last straw. The languorous and lackadaisical Yanci was on her own at last.

“Why not go to work for a while?” suggested Mr. Haedge with some irritation. “Lots of nice girls do nowadays, just for something to occupy themselves with. There’s Elsie Prendergast, who does society news on the Bulletin, and that Semple girl —  — “

“I can’t,” said Yanci shortly with a glitter of tears in her eyes. “I’m going East in February.”

“East? Oh, you’re going to visit someone?”

She nodded.

“Yes, I’m going to visit,” she lied, “so it’d hardly be worth while to go to work.” She could have wept, but she managed a haughty look. “I’d like to try reporting sometime, though, just for the fun of it.”

“Yes, it’s quite a lot of fun,” agreed Mr. Haedge with some irony. “Still, I suppose there’s no hurry about it. You must have plenty of that thousand dollars left.”

“Oh, plenty!”

There were a few hundred, she knew.

“Well, then I suppose a good rest, a change of scene would be the best thing for you.”

“Yes,” answered Yanci. Her lips were trembling and she rose, scarcely able to control herself. Mr. Haedge seemed so impersonally cold. “That’s why I’m going. A good rest is what I need.”

“I think you’re wise.”

What Mr. Haegde would have thought had he seen the dozen drafts she wrote that night of a certain letter is problematical. Here are two of the earlier ones. The bracketed words are proposed substitutions:

Dear Scott: Not having seen you since that day I was such a silly ass and wept on your coat, I thought I’d write and tell you that I’m coming East pretty soon and would like you to have lunch [dinner] with me or something. I have been living in a room [suite] at the Hiawatha Hotel, intending to meet my aunt, with whom I am going to live [stay], and who is coming back from China this month [spring]. Meanwhile I have a lot of invitations to visit, etc., in the East, and I thought I would do it now. So I’d like to see you —  —

This draft ended here and went into the wastebasket. After an hour’s work she produced the following:

My dear Mr. Kimberly: I have often [sometimes] wondered how you’ve been since I saw you. I am coming East next month before going to visit my aunt in Chicago, and you must come and see me. I have been going out very little, but my physician advises me that I need change, so I expect to shock the proprieties by some very gay visits in the East —  —

Finally in despondent abandon she wrote a simple note without explanation or subterfuge, tore it up and went to bed. Next morning she identified it in the wastebasket and decided it was the best one after all and sent him a fair copy. It ran:

Scott: Just a line to tell you I will be at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel from February seventh, probably for ten days. If you phone me some rainy afternoon I’ll invite you to tea.

Sincerely, Yanci Bowman.

VII

Yanci was going to the Ritz for no more reason than that she had once told Scott Kimberly that she always went there. When she reached New York — a cold New York, a strangely menacing New York, quite different from the gay city of theaters and hotel-corridor rendezvous that she had known — there was exactly two hundred dollars in her purse.

It had taken a large part of her bank account to live, and she had at last broken into her sacred three hundred dollars to substitute pretty and delicate quarter-mourning clothes for the heavy black she had laid away.

Walking into the hotel at the moment when its exquisitely dressed patrons were assembling for luncheon, it drained at her confidence to appear bored and at ease. Surely the clerks at the desk knew the contents of her pocketbook. She fancied even that the bell boys were snickering at the foreign labels she had steamed from an old trunk of her father’s and pasted on her suitcase. This last thought horrified her. Perhaps the very hotels and steamers so grandly named had long since been out of commission!

As she stood drumming her fingers on the desk she was wondering whether if she were refused admittance she could muster a casual smile and stroll out coolly enough to deceive two richly dressed women standing near. It had not taken long for the confidence of twenty years to evaporate. Three months without security had made an ineffaceable mark on Yanci’s soul.

“Twenty-four sixty-two,” said the clerk callously.

Her heart settled back into place as she followed the bell boy to the elevator, meanwhile casting a nonchalant glance at the two fashionable women as she passed them. Were their skirts long or short? — longer, she noticed.

She wondered how much the skirt of her new walking suit could be let out.

At luncheon her spirits soared. The head waiter bowed to her. The light rattle of conversation, the subdued hum of the music soothed her. She ordered supreme of melon, eggs Susette and an artichoke, and signed her room number to the check with scarcely a glance at it as it lay beside her plate. Up in her room, with the telephone directory open on the bed before her, she tried to locate her scattered metropolitan acquaintances. Yet even as the phone numbers, with their supercilious tags, Plaza, Circle, and Rhinelander, stared out at her, she could feel a cold wind blow at her unstable confidence. These girls, acquaintances of school, of a summer, of a house party, even of a week-end at a college prom — what claim or attraction could she, poor and friendless, exercise over them? They had their loves, their dates, their week’s gayety planned in advance. They would almost resent her inconvenient memory.

Nevertheless, she called four girls. One of them was out, one at Palm Beach, one in California. The only one to whom she talked said in a hearty voice that she was in bed with grippe, but would phone Yanci as soon as she felt well enough to go out. Then Yanci gave up the girls. She would have to create the illusion of a good time in some other manner. The illusion must be created — that was part of her plan.

She looked at her watch and found that it was three o’clock. Scott Kimberly should have phoned before this, or at least left some word. Still, he was probably busy — at a club, she thought vaguely, or else buying some neckties. He would probably call at four.

Yanci was well aware that she must work quickly. She had figured to a nicety that one hundred and fifty dollars carefully expended would carry her through two weeks, no more. The idea of failure, the fear that at the end of that time she would be friendless and penniless had not begun to bother her.

It was not the first time that for amusement, for a coveted invitation or for curiosity she had deliberately set out to capture a man; but it was the first time she had laid her plans with necessity and desperation pressing in on her.

One of her strongest cards had always been her background, the impression she gave that she was popular and desired and happy. This she must create now, and apparently out of nothing. Scott must somehow be brought to think that a fair portion of New York was at her feet.

At four she went over to Park Avenue, where the sun was out, walking and the February day was fresh and odorous of spring and the high apartments of her desire lined the street with radiant whiteness. Here she would live on a gay schedule of pleasure. In these smart not-to-be-entered-without-a-card women’s shops she would spend the morning hours acquiring and acquiring, ceaselessly and without thought of expense; in these restaurants she would lunch at noon in company with other fashionable women, orchid-adorned always, and perhaps bearing an absurdly dwarfed Pomeranian in her sleek arms.

In the summer — well, she would go to Tuxedo, perhaps to an immaculate house perched high on a fashionable eminence, where she would emerge to visit a world of teas and balls, of horse shows and polo. Between the halves of the polo game the players would cluster around her in their white suits and helmets, admiringly, and when she swept away, bound for some new delight, she would be followed by the eyes of many envious but intimidated women.

Every other summer they would, of course, go abroad. She began to plan a typical year, distributing a few months here and a few months there until she — and Scott Kimberly, by implication — would become the very auguries of the season, shifting with the slightest stirring of the social barometer from rusticity to urbanity, from palm to pine.

She had two weeks, no more, in which to attain to this position. In an ecstasy of determined emotion she lifted up her head toward the tallest of the tall white apartments.

“It will be too marvelous!” she said to herself.

For almost the first time in her life her words were not too exaggerated to express the wonder shining in her eyes.

VIII

About five o’clock she hurried back to the hotel, demanding feverishly at the desk if there had been a telephone message for her. To her profound disappointment there was nothing. A minute after she had entered her room the phone rang.

“This is Scott Kimberly.”

At the words a call to battle echoed in her heart.

“Oh, how do you do?”

Her tone implied that she had almost forgotten him. It was not frigid — it was merely casual.

As she answered the inevitable question as to the hour when she had arrived, a warm glow spread over her. Now that, from a personification of all the riches and pleasure she craved, he had materialized as merely a male voice over the telephone, her confidence became strengthened. Male voices were male voices. They could be managed; they could be made to intone syllables of which the minds behind them had no approval. Male voices could be made sad or tender or despairing at her will. She rejoiced. The soft clay was ready to her hand.

“Won’t you take dinner with me tonight?” Scott was suggesting.

“Why” — perhaps not, she thought; let him think of her tonight — “I don’t believe I’ll be able to,” she said. “I’ve got an engagement for dinner and the theater. I’m terribly sorry.”

Her voice did not sound sorry — it sounded polite. Then as though a happy thought had occurred to her as to a time and place where she could work him into her list of dates, “I’ll tell you: Why don’t you come around here this afternoon and have tea with me?”

He would be there immediately. He had been playing squash and as soon as he took a plunge he would arrive. Yanci hung up the phone and turned with a quiet efficiency to the mirror, too tense to smile.

She regarded her lustrous eyes and dusky hair in critical approval. Then she took a lavender tea gown from her trunk and began to dress.

She let him wait seven minutes in the lobby before she appeared; then she approached him with a friendly, lazy smile.

“How do you do?” she murmured. “It’s marvelous to see you again. How are you?” And, with a long sigh, “I’m frightfully tired. I’ve been on the go ever since I got here this morning; shopping and then tearing off to luncheon and a matinee. I’ve bought everything I saw. I don’t know how I’m going to pay for it all.”

She remembered vividly that when they had first met she had told him, without expecting to be believed, how unpopular she was. She could not risk such a remark now, even in jest. He must think that she had been on the go every minute of the day.

They took a table and were served with olive sandwiches and tea. He was so good-looking, she thought, and marvelously dressed. His gray eyes regarded her with interest from under immaculate ash-blond hair. She wondered how he passed his days, how he liked her costume, what he was thinking of at that moment.

“How long will you be here?” he asked.

“Well, two weeks, off and on. I’m going down to Princeton for the February prom and then up to a house party in Westchester County for a few days. Are you shocked at me for going out so soon? Father would have wanted me to, you know. He was very modern in all his ideas.”

She had debated this remark on the train. She was not going to a house party. She was not invited to the Princeton prom. Such things, nevertheless, were necessary to create the illusion. That was everything — the illusion.

“And then,” she continued, smiling, “two of my old beaus are in town, which makes it nice for me.”

She saw Scott blink and she knew that he appreciated the significance of this.

“What are your plans for this winter?” he demanded. “Are you going back West?”

“No. You see, my aunt returns from India this week. She’s going to open her Florida house, and we’ll stay there until the middle of March. Then we’ll come up to Hot Springs and we may go to Europe for the summer.”

This was all the sheerest fiction. Her first letter to her aunt, which had given the bare details of Tom Bowman’s death, had at last reached its destination. Her aunt had replied with a note of conventional sympathy and the announcement that she would be back in America within two years if she didn’t decide to live in Italy.

“But you’ll let me see something of you while you’re here,” urged Scott, after attending to this impressive program. “If you can’t take dinner with me tonight, how about Wednesday — that’s the day after tomorrow?”

“Wednesday? Let’s see.” Yanci’s brow was knit with imitation thought. “I think I have a date for Wednesday, but I don’t know for certain. How about phoning me tomorrow, and I’ll let you know? Because I want to go with you, only I think I’ve made an engagement.”

“Very well, I’ll phone you.”

“Do — about ten.”

“Try to be able to — then or any time.”

“I’ll tell you — if I can’t go to dinner with you Wednesday I can go to lunch surely.”

“All right,” he agreed. “And we’ll go to a matinee.”

They danced several times. Never by word or sign did Yanci betray more than the most cursory interest in him until just at the end, when she offered her hand to say good-by.

“Good-by, Scott.”

For just the fraction of a second — not long enough for him to be sure it had happened at all, but just enough so that he would be reminded, however faintly, of that night on the Mississippi boulevard — she looked into his eyes. Then she turned quickly and hurried away.

She took her dinner in a little tea room around the corner. It was an economical dinner which cost a dollar and a half. There was no date concerned in it at all, and no man — except an elderly person in spats who tried to speak to her as she came out the door.

IX

Sitting alone in one of the magnificent moving-picture theaters — a luxury which she thought she could afford — Yanci watched Mae Murray swirl through splendidly imagined vistas, and meanwhile considered the progress of the first day. In retrospect it was a distinct success. She had given the correct impression both as to her material prosperity and as to her attitude toward Scott himself. It seemed best to avoid evening dates. Let him have the evenings to himself, to think of her, to imagine her with other men, even to spend a few lonely hours in his apartment, considering how much more cheerful it might be if —  — Let time and absence work for her.

Engrossed for a while in the moving picture, she calculated the cost of the apartment in which its heroine endured her movie wrongs. She admired its slender Italian table, occupying only one side of the large dining room and flanked by a long bench which gave it an air of medieval luxury. She rejoiced in the beauty of Mae Murray’s clothes and furs, her gorgeous hats, her short-seeming French shoes. Then after a moment her mind returned to her own drama; she wondered if Scott were already engaged, and her heart dipped at the thought. Yet it was unlikely. He had been too quick to phone her on her arrival, too lavish with his time, too responsive that afternoon.

After the picture she returned to the Ritz, where she slept deeply and happily for almost the first time in three months. The atmosphere around her no longer seemed cold. Even the floor clerk had smiled kindly and admiringly when Yanci asked for her key.

Next morning at ten Scott phoned. Yanci, who had been up for hours, pretended to be drowsy from her dissipation of the night before.

No, she could not take dinner with him on Wednesday. She was terribly sorry; she had an engagement, as she had feared. But she could have luncheon and go to a matinee if he would get her back in time for tea.

She spent the day roving the streets. On top of a bus, though not on the front seat, where Scott might possibly spy her, she sailed out Riverside Drive and back along Fifth Avenue just at the winter twilight, and her feeling for New York and its gorgeous splendors deepened and redoubled. Here she must live and be rich, be nodded to by the traffic policemen at the corners as she sat in her limousine — with a small dog — and here she must stroll on Sunday to and from a stylish church, with Scott, handsome in his cutaway and tall hat, walking devotedly at her side.

At luncheon on Wednesday she described for Scott’s benefit a fanciful two days. She told of a motoring trip up the Hudson and gave him her opinion of two plays she had seen with — it was implied — adoring gentlemen beside her. She had read up very carefully on the plays in the morning paper and chosen two concerning which she could garner the most information.

“Oh,” he said in dismay, “you’ve seen Dulcy? I have two seats for it — but you won’t want to go again.”

“Oh, no, I don’t mind,” she protested truthfully. “You see, we went late, and anyway I adored it.”

But he wouldn’t hear of her sitting through it again — besides he had seen it himself. It was a play Yanci was mad to see, but she was compelled to watch him while he exchanged the tickets for others, and for the poor seats available at the last moment. The game seemed difficult at times.

“By the way,” he said afterwards as they drove back to the hotel in a taxi, “you’ll be going down to the Princeton prom tomorrow, won’t you?”

She started. She had not realized that it would be so soon or that he would know of it.

“Yes,” she answered coolly. “I’m going down tomorrow afternoon.”

“On the 2:20, I suppose,” Scott commented; and then, “Are you going to meet the boy who’s taking you down — at Princeton?”

For an instant she was off her guard.

“Yes, he’ll meet the train.”

“Then I’ll take you to the station,” proposed Scott. “There’ll be a crowd and you may have trouble getting a porter.”

She could think of nothing to say, no valid objection to make. She wished she had said that she was going by automobile, but she could conceive of no graceful and plausible way of amending her first admission.

“That’s mighty sweet of you.”

“You’ll be at the Ritz when you come back?”

“Oh, yes,” she answered. “I’m going to keep my rooms.”

Her bedroom was the smallest and least expensive in the hotel.

She concluded to let him put her on the train for Princeton; in fact, she saw no alternative. Next day as she packed her suitcase after luncheon the situation had taken such hold of her imagination that she filled it with the very things she would have chosen had she really been going to the prom. Her intention was to get out at the first stop and take the train back to New York.

Scott called for her at half past one and they took a taxi to the Pennsylvania Station. The train was crowded as he had expected, but he found her a seat and stowed her grip in the rack overhead.

“I’ll call you Friday to see how you’ve behaved,” he said.

“All right. I’ll be good.”

Their eyes met and in an instant, with an inexplicable, only half-conscious rush of emotion, they were in perfect communion. When Yanci came back, the glance seemed to say, ah, then —  —

A voice startled her ear:

“Why, Yanci!”

Yanci looked around. To her horror she recognized a girl named Ellen Harley, one of those to whom she had phoned upon her arrival.

“Well, Yanci Bowman! You’re the last person I ever expected to see. How are you?”

Yanci introduced Scott. Her heart was beating violently.

“Are you coming to the prom? How perfectly slick!” cried Ellen. “Can I sit here with you? I’ve been wanting to see you. Who are you going with?”

“No one you know.”

“Maybe I do.”

Her words, falling like sharp claws on Yanci’s sensitive soul, were interrupted by an unintelligible outburst from the conductor. Scott bowed to Ellen, cast at Yanci one level glance and then hurried off.

The train started. As Ellen arranged her grip and threw off her fur coat Yanci looked around her. The car was gay with girls whose excited chatter filled the damp, rubbery air like smoke. Here and there sat a chaperon, a mass of decaying rock in a field of flowers, predicting with a mute and somber fatality the end of all gayety and all youth. How many times had Yanci herself been one of such a crowd, careless and happy, dreaming of the men she would meet, of the battered hacks waiting at the station, the snow-covered campus, the big open fires in the clubhouses, and the imported orchestra beating out defiant melody against the approach of morning.

And now — she was an intruder, uninvited, undesired. As at the Ritz on the day of her arrival, she felt that at any instant her mask would be torn from her and she would be exposed as a pretender to the gaze of all the car.

“Tell me everything!” Ellen was saying. “Tell me what you’ve been doing. I didn’t see you at any of the football games last fall.”

This was by way of letting Yanci know that she had attended them herself.

The conductor was bellowing from the rear of the car, “Manhattan Transfer next stop!”

Yanci’s cheeks burned with shame. She wondered what she had best do — meditating a confession, deciding against it, answering Ellen’s chatter in frightened monosyllables — then, as with an ominous thunder of brakes the speed of the train began to slacken, she sprang on a despairing impulse to her feet.

“My heavens!” she cried. “I’ve forgotten my shoes! I’ve got to go back and get them.”

Ellen reacted to this with annoying efficiency.

“I’ll take your suitcase,” she said quickly, “and you can call for it. I’ll be at the Charter Club.”

“No!” Yanci almost shrieked. “It’s got my dress in it!”

Ignoring the lack of logic in her own remark, she swung the suitcase off the rack with what seemed to her a super-human effort and went reeling down the aisle, stared at curiously by the arrogant eyes of many girls. When she reached the platform just as the train came to a stop she felt weak and shaken. She stood on the hard cement which marks the quaint old village of Manhattan Transfer and tears were streaming down her cheeks as she watched the unfeeling cars speed off to Princeton with their burden of happy youth.

After half an hour’s wait Yanci got on a train and returned to New York. In thirty minutes she had lost the confidence that a week had gained for her. She came back to her little room and lay down quietly upon the bed.

X

By Friday Yanci’s spirits had partly recovered from their chill depression. Scott’s voice over the telephone in mid-morning was like a tonic, and she told him of the delights of Princeton with convincing enthusiasm, drawing vicariously upon a prom she had attended there two years before. He was anxious to see her, he said. Would she come to dinner and the theater that night? Yanci considered, greatly tempted. Dinner — she had been economizing on meals, and a gorgeous dinner in some extravagant show place followed by a musical comedy appealed to her starved fancy, indeed; but instinct told her that the time was not yet right. Let him wait. Let him dream a little more, a little longer.

“I’m too tired, Scott,” she said with an air of extreme frankness; “that’s the whole truth of the matter. I’ve been out every night since I’ve been here, and I’m really half dead. I’ll rest up on this house party over the week-end and then I’ll go to dinner with you any day you want me.”

There was a minute’s silence while she held the phone expectantly.

“Lot of resting up you’ll do on a house party,” he replied; “and, anyway, next week is so far off. I’m awfully anxious to see you, Yanci.”

“So am I, Scott.”

She allowed the faintest caress to linger on his name. When she had hung up she felt happy again. Despite her humiliation on the train her plan had been a success. The illusion was still intact; it was nearly complete. And in three meetings and half a dozen telephone calls she had managed to create a tenser atmosphere between them than if he had seen her constantly in the moods and avowals and beguilements of an out-and-out flirtation.

When Monday came she paid her first week’s hotel bill. The size of it did not alarm her — she was prepared for that — but the shock of seeing so much money go, of realizing that there remained only one hundred and twenty dollars of her father’s present, gave her a peculiar sinking sensation in the pit of her stomach. She decided to bring guile to bear immediately, to tantalize Scott by a carefully planned incident, and then at the end of the week to show him simply and definitely that she loved him.

As a decoy for Scott’s tantalization she located by telephone a certain Jimmy Long, a handsome boy with whom she had played as a little girl and who had recently come to New York to work. Jimmy Long was deftly maneuvered into asking her to go to a matinee with him on Wednesday afternoon. He was to meet her in the lobby at two.

On Wednesday she lunched with Scott. His eyes followed her every motion, and knowing this she felt a great rush of tenderness toward him. Desiring at first only what he represented, she had begun half unconsciously to desire him also. Nevertheless, she did not permit herself the slightest relaxation on that account. The time was too short and the odds too great. That she was beginning to love him only fortified her resolve.

“Where are you going this afternoon?” he demanded.

“To a matinee — with an annoying man.”

“Why is he annoying?”

“Because he wants me to marry him and I don’t believe I want to.”

There was just the faintest emphasis on the word “believe.” The implication was that she was not sure — that is, not quite.

“Don’t marry him.”

“I won’t — probably.”

“Yanci,” he said in a low voice, “do you remember a night on that boulevard —  — “

She changed the subject. It was noon and the room was full of sunlight. It was not quite the place, the time. When he spoke she must have every aspect of the situation in control. He must say only what she wanted said; nothing else would do.

“It’s five minutes to two,” she told him, looking at her wrist watch. “We’d better go. I’ve got to keep my date.”

“Do you want to go?”

“No,” she answered simply.

This seemed to satisfy him, and they walked out to the lobby. Then Yanci caught sight of a man waiting there, obviously ill at ease and dressed as no habitue of the Ritz ever was. The man was Jimmy Long, not long since a favored beau of his Western city. And now — his hat was green, actually! His coat, seasons old, was quite evidently the product of a well-known ready-made concern. His shoes, long and narrow, turned up at the toes. From head to foot everything that could possibly be wrong about him was wrong. He was embarrassed by instinct only, unconscious of his gaucherie, an obscene specter, a Nemesis, a horror.

“Hello, Yanci!” he cried, starting toward her with evident relief.

With a heroic effort Yanci turned to Scott, trying to hold his glance to herself. In the very act of turning she noticed the impeccability of Scott’s coat, his tie.

“Thanks for luncheon,” she said with a radiant smile. “See you tomorrow.”

Then she dived rather than ran for Jimmy Long, disposed of his outstretched hand and bundled him bumping through the revolving door with only a quick, “Let’s hurry!” to appease his somewhat sulky astonishment.

The incident worried her. She consoled herself by remembering that Scott had had only a momentary glance at the man, and that he had probably been looking at her anyhow. Nevertheless, she was horrified, and it is to be doubted whether Jimmy Long enjoyed her company enough to compensate for the cut-price, twentieth-row tickets he had obtained at Black’s Drug Store.

But if Jimmy as a decoy had proved a lamentable failure, an occurrence of Thursday offered her considerable satisfaction and paid tribute to her quickness of mind. She had invented an engagement for luncheon, and Scott was going to meet her at two o’clock to take her to the Hippodrome. She lunched alone somewhat imprudently in the Ritz dining room and sauntered out almost side by side with a good-looking young man who had been at the table next to her. She expected to meet Scott in the outer lobby, but as she reached the entrance to the restaurant she saw him standing not far away.

On a lightning impulse she turned to the good-looking man abreast of her, bowed sweetly and said in an audible, friendly voice, “Well, I’ll see you later.”

Then before he could even register astonishment she faced about quickly and joined Scott.

“Who was that?” he asked, frowning.

“Isn’t he darling-looking?”

“If you like that sort of looks.”

Scott’s tone implied that the gentleman referred to was effete and overdressed. Yanci laughed, impersonally admiring the skillfulness of her ruse.

It was in preparation for that all-important Saturday night that on Thursday she went into a shop on Forty-second Street to buy some long gloves. She made her purchase and handed the clerk a fifty-dollar bill so that her lightened pocketbook would feel heavier with the change she could put in. To her surprise the clerk tendered her the package and a twenty-five-cent piece.

“Is there anything else?”

“The rest of my change.”

“You’ve got it. You gave me five dollars. Four-seventy-five for the gloves leaves twenty-five cents.”

“I gave you fifty dollars.”

“You must be mistaken.”

Yanci searched her purse.

“I gave you fifty!” she repeated frantically.

“No, ma’am, I saw it myself.”

They glared at each other in hot irritation. A cash girl was called to testify, then the floor manager; a small crowd gathered.

“Why, I’m perfectly sure!” cried Yanci, two angry tears trembling in her eyes. “I’m positive!”

The floor manager was sorry, but the lady really must have left it at home. There was no fifty-dollar bill in the cash drawer. The bottom was creaking out of Yanci’s rickety world.

“If you’ll leave your address,” said the floor manager, “I’ll let you know if anything turns up.”

“Oh, you damn fools!” cried Yanci, losing control. “I’ll get the police!”

And weeping like a child she left the shop. Outside, helplessness overpowered her. How could she prove anything? It was after six and the store was closing even as she left it. Whichever employee had the fifty-dollar bill would be on her way home now before the police could arrive, and why should the New York police believe her, or even give her fair play?

In despair she returned to the Ritz where she searched through her trunk for the bill with hopeless and mechanical gestures. It was not there. She had known it would not be there. She gathered every penny together and found that she had fifty-one dollars and thirty cents. Telephoning the office, she asked that her bill be made out up to the following noon — she was too dispirited to think of leaving before then.

She waited in her room, not daring even to send for ice water. Then the phone rang and she heard the room clerk’s voice, cheerful and metallic.

“Miss Bowman?”

“Yes.”

“Your bill, including tonight, is ex-act-ly fifty-one twenty.”

“Fifty-one twenty?” Her voice was trembling.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Thank you very much.”

Breathless, she sat there beside the telephone, too frightened now to cry. She had ten cents left in the world!

XI

Friday. She had scarcely slept. There were dark rings under her eyes, and even a hot bath followed by a cold one failed to arouse her from a despairing lethargy. She had never fully realized what it would mean to be without money in New York; her determination and vitality seemed to have vanished at last with her fifty-dollar bill. There was no help for it now — she must attain her desire today or never.

She was to meet Scott at the Plaza for tea. She wondered — was it her imagination, or had his manner been consciously cool the afternoon before? For the first time in several days she had needed to make no effort to keep the conversation from growing sentimental. Suppose he had decided that it must come to nothing — that she was too extravagant, too frivolous. A hundred eventualities presented themselves to her during the morning — a dreary morning, broken only by her purchase of a ten-cent bun at a grocery store.

It was her first food in twenty hours, but she self-consciously pretended to the grocer to be having an amusing and facetious time in buying one bun. She even asked to see his grapes, but told him, after looking at them appraisingly — and hungrily — that she didn’t think she’d buy any. They didn’t look ripe to her, she said. The store was full of prosperous women who, with thumb and first finger joined and held high in front of them, were inspecting food. Yanci would have liked to ask one of them for a bunch of grapes. Instead she went up to her room in the hotel and ate her bun.

When four o’clock came she found that she was thinking more about the sandwiches she would have for tea than of what must occur there, and as she walked slowly up Fifth Avenue toward the Plaza she felt a sudden faintness which she took several deep breaths of air to overcome. She wondered vaguely where the bread line was. That was where people in her condition should go — but where was it? How did one find out? She imagined fantastically that it was in the phone book under B, or perhaps under N, for New York Bread Line.

She reached the Plaza. Scott’s figure, as he stood waiting for her in the crowded lobby, was a personification of solidity and hope.

“Let’s hurry!” she cried with a tortured smile. “I feel rather punk and I want some tea.”

She ate a club sandwich, some chocolate ice cream and six tea biscuits. She could have eaten much more, but she dared not. The eventuality of her hunger having been disposed of, she must turn at bay now and face this business of life, represented by the handsome young man who sat opposite watching her with some emotion whose import she could not determine just behind his level eyes.

But the words, the glance, subtle, pervasive and sweet, that she had planned, failed somehow to come.

“Oh, Scott,” she said in a low voice, “I’m so tired.”

“Tired of what?” he asked coolly.

“Of — everything.”

There was a silence.

“I’m afraid,” she said uncertainly — “I’m afraid I won’t be able to keep that date with you tomorrow.”

There was no pretense in her voice now. The emotion was apparent in the waver of each word, without intention or control.

“I’m going away.”

“Are you? Where?”

His tone showed strong interest, but she winced as she saw that that was all.

“My aunt’s come back. She wants me to join her in Florida right away.”

“Isn’t this rather unexpected?”

“Yes.”

“You’ll be coming back soon?” he said after a moment.

“I don’t think so. I think we’ll go to Europe from — from New Orleans.”

“Oh!”

Again there was a pause. It lengthened. In the shadow of a moment it would become awkward, she knew. She had lost — well? Yet, she would go on to the end.

“Will you miss me?”

“Yes.”

One word. She caught his eyes, wondered for a moment if she saw more there than that kindly interest; then she dropped her own again.

“I like it — here at the Plaza,” she heard herself saying.

They spoke of things like that. Afterwards she could never remember what they said. They spoke — even of the tea, of the thaw that was ended and the cold coming down outside. She was sick at heart and she seemed to herself very old. She rose at last.

“I’ve got to tear,” she said. “I’m going out to dinner.”

To the last she would keep on — the illusion, that was the important thing. To hold her proud lies inviolate — there was only a moment now. They walked toward the door.

“Put me in a taxi,” she said quietly. “I don’t feel equal to walking.”

He helped her in. They shook hands.

“Good-by, Scott,” she said.

“Good-by, Yanci,” he answered slowly.

“You’ve been awfully nice to me. I’ll always remember what a good time you helped to give me this two weeks.”

“The pleasure was mine. Shall I tell the driver the Ritz?”

“No. Just tell him to drive out Fifth. I’ll tap on the glass when I want him to stop.”

Out Fifth! He would think, perhaps, that she was dining on Fifth. What an appropriate finish that would be! She wondered if he were impressed. She could not see his face clearly, because the air was dark with the snow and her own eyes were blurred by tears.

“Good-by,” he said simply.

He seemed to realize that any pretense of sorrow on his part would be transparent. She knew that he did not want her.

The door slammed, the car started, skidding in the snowy street.

Yanci leaned back dismally in the corner. Try as she might, she could not see where she had failed or what it was that had changed his attitude toward her. For the first time in her life she had ostensibly offered herself to a man — and he had not wanted her. The precariousness of her position paled beside the tragedy of her defeat.

She let the car go on — the cold air was what she needed, of course. Ten minutes had slipped away drearily before she realized that she had not a penny with which to pay the driver.

“It doesn’t matter,” she thought. “They’ll just send me to jail, and that’s a place to sleep.”

She began thinking of the taxi driver.

“He’ll be mad when he finds out, poor man. Maybe he’s very poor, and he’ll have to pay the fare himself.” With a vague sentimentality, she began to cry.

“Poor taxi man,” she was saying half aloud. “Oh, people have such a hard time — such a hard time!”

She rapped on the window and when the car drew up at a curb she got out. She was at the end of Fifth Avenue and it was dark and cold.

“Send for the police!” she cried in a quick low voice. “I haven’t any money!”

The taxi man scowled down at her.

“Then what’d you get in for?”

She had not noticed that another car had stopped about twenty-five feet behind them. She heard running footsteps in the snow and then a voice at her elbow.

“It’s all right,” someone was saying to the taxi man. “I’ve got it right here.”

A bill was passed up. Yanci slumped sideways against Scott’s overcoat.

Scott knew — he knew because he had gone to Princeton to surprise her, because the stranger she had spoken to in the Ritz had been his best friend, because the check of her father’s for three hundred dollars had been returned to him marked “No funds.” Scott knew — he had known for days.

But he said nothing; only stood there holding her with one arm as her taxi driver drove away.

“Oh, it’s you,” said Yanci faintly. “Lucky you came along. I left my purse back at the Ritz, like an awful fool. I do such ridiculous things —  — “

Scott laughed with some enjoyment. There was a light snow falling, and lest she should slip in the damp he picked her up and carried her back toward his waiting taxi.

“Such ridiculous things,” she repeated.

“Go to the Ritz first,” he said to the driver. “I want to get a trunk.”

TWO FOR A CENT

When the rain was over, the sky became yellow in the west and the air was cool. Close to the street, which was of red dirt and lined with cheap bungalows dating from 1910, a little boy was riding a big bicycle along the sidewalk. His plan afforded a monotonous fascination. He rode each time for about a hundred yards, dismounted, turned the bicycle around so that it adjoined a stone step and getting on again, not without toil or heat, retraced his course. At one end this was bounded by a colored girl of fourteen holding an anemic baby, and at the other by a scarred, ill-nourished kitten, squatting dismally on the curb. These four were the only souls in sight.

The little boy had accomplished an indefinite number of trips oblivious alike to the melancholy advances of the kitten at one end and to the admiring vacuousness of the colored girl at the other when he swerved dangerously to avoid a man who had turned the corner into the street and recovered his balance only after a moment of exaggerated panic.

But if the incident was a matter of gravity to the boy, it attracted scarcely an instant’s notice from the newcomer, who turned suddenly from the sidewalk and stared with obvious and peculiar interest at the house before which he was standing. It was the oldest house in the street, built with clapboards and a shingled roof. It was a house — in the barest sense of the word: the sort of house that a child would draw on a blackboard. It was of a period, but of no design, and its exterior had obviously been made only as a decent cloak for what was within. It antedated the stucco bungalows by about thirty years and except for the bungalows, which were reproducing their species with prodigious avidity as though by some monstrous affiliation with the guinea-pig, it was the most common type of house in the country. For thirty years such dwellings had satisfied the canons of the middle class; they had satisfied its financial canons by being cheap, they had satisfied its aesthetic canons by being hideous. It was a house built by a race whose more energetic complement hoped either to move up or move on, and it was the more remarkable that its instability had survived so many summers and retained its pristine hideousness and discomfort so obviously unimpaired.

The man was about as old as the house, that is to say, about forty-five. But unlike the house, he was neither hideous nor cheap. His clothes were too good to have been made outside of a metropolis — moreover, they were so good that it was impossible to tell in which metropolis they were made. His name was Abercrombie and the most important event of his life had taken place in the house before which he was standing. He had been born there.

It was one of the last places in the world where he should have been born. He had thought so within a very few years after the event and he thought so now — an ugly home in a third-rate Southern town where his father had owned a partnership in a grocery store. Since then Abercrombie had played golf with the President of the United States and sat between two duchesses at dinner. He had been bored with the President, he had been bored and not a little embarrassed with the duchesses — nevertheless, the two incidents had pleased him and still sat softly upon his naive vanity. It delighted him that he had gone far.

He had looked fixedly at the house for several minutes before he perceived that no one lived there. Where the shutters were not closed it was because there were no shutters to be closed and in these vacancies, blind vacuous expanses of gray window looked unseeingly down at him. The grass had grown wantonly long in the yard and faint green mustaches were sprouting facetiously in the wide cracks of the walk. But it was evident that the property had been recently occupied for upon the porch lay half a dozen newspapers rolled into cylinders for quick delivery and as yet turned only to a faint resentful yellow.

They were not nearly so yellow as the sky when Abercrombie walked up on the porch and sat down upon an immemorial bench, for the sky was every shade of yellow, the color of tan, the color of gold, the color of peaches. Across the street and beyond a vacant lot rose a rampart of vivid red brick houses and it seemed to Abercrombie that the picture they rounded out was beautiful — the warm earthy brick and the sky fresh after the rain, changing and gray as a dream. All his life when he had wanted to rest his mind he had called up into it the image those two things had made for him when the air was clear just at this hour. So Abercrombie sat there thinking about his young days.

Ten minutes later another man turned the corner of the street, a different sort of man, both in the texture of his clothes and the texture of his soul. He was forty-six years old and he was a shabby drudge, married to a woman, who, as a girl, had known better days. This latter fact, in the republic, may be set down in the red italics of misery.

His name was Hemmick — Henry W. or George D. or John F. — the stock that produced him had had little imagination left to waste either upon his name or his design. He was a clerk in a factory which made ice for the long Southern Summer. He was responsible to the man who owned the patent for canning ice, who, in his turn was responsible only to God. Never in his life had Henry W. Hemmick discovered a new way to advertise canned ice nor had it transpired that by taking a diligent correspondence course in ice canning he had secretly been preparing himself for a partnership. Never had he rushed home to his wife, crying: “You can have that servant now, Nell, 1 have been made General Superintendent.” You will have to take him as you take Abercrombie, for what he is and will always be. This is a story of the dead years.

When the second man reached the house he turned in and began to mount the tipsy steps, noticed Abercrombie, the stranger, with a tired surprise, and nodded to him.

“Good evening,” he said.

Abercrombie voiced his agreement with the sentiment.

“Cool” — The newcomer covered his forefinger with his handkerchief and sent the swatched digit on a complete circuit of his collar band. “Have you rented this?” he asked.

“No, indeed, I’m just — resting. Sorry if I’ve intruded — I saw the house was vacant —  — “

“Oh, you’re not intruding!” said Hemmick hastily. “I don’t reckon anybody could intrude in this old barn. I got out two months ago. They’re not ever goin’ to rent it any more. I got a little girl about this high — “ he held his hand parallel to the ground and at an indeterminate distance” — and she’s mighty fond of an old doll that got left here when we moved. Began ???lerin’ for me to come over and look it up.”

“You used to live here?” inquired Abercrombie with interest.

“Lived here eighteen years. Came here’n I was married, raised four children in this house. Yes, sir. I know this old fellow.” He struck the door-post with the flat of his hand. “I know every leak in her roof and every loose board in her old floor.”

Abercrombie had been good to look at for so many years that he knew if he kept a certain attentive expression on his face his companion would continue to talk — indefinitely.

“You from up North?” inquired Hemmick politely, choosing with habituated precision the one spot where the anemic wooden railing would support his weight. “I thought so,” he resumed at Abercrombie’s nod. “Don’t take long to tell a Yankee.”

“I’m from New York.”

“So?” The man shook his head with inappropriate gravity. “Never have got up there, myself. Started to go a couple of times, before I was married, but never did get to go.”

He made a second excursion with his finger and handkerchief and then, as though having come suddenly to a cordial decision, he replaced the handkerchief in one of his bumpy pockets and extended the hand toward his companion.

“My name’s Hemmick.”

“Glad to know you.” Abercrombie took the hand without rising. “Abercrombie’s mine.”

“I’m mighty glad to know you, Mr. Abercrombie.”

Then for a moment they both hesitated, their two faces assumed oddly similar expressions, their eyebrows drew together, their eyes looked far away. Each was straining to force into activity some minute cell long sealed and forgotten in his brain. Each made a little noise in his throat, looked away, looked back, laughed. Abercrombie spoke first.

“We’ve met.”

“I know,” agreed Hemmick, “but whereabouts? That’s what’s got me. You from New York you say?”

“Yes, but I was born and raised in this town. Lived in this house till I left here when I was about seventeen. As a matter of fact, I remember you — you were a couple of years older.”

Again Hemmick considered.

“Well,” he said vaguely, “I sort of remember, too. I begin to remember — I got your name all right and I guess maybe it was your daddy had this house before I rented it. But all I can recollect about you is, that there was a boy named Abercrombie and he went away.”

In a few moments they were talking easily. It amused them both to have come from the same house — amused Abercrombie especially, for he was a vain man, rather absorbed, that evening, in his own early poverty. Though he was not given to immature impulses, he found it necessary somehow to make it clear in a few sentences that five years after he had gone away from the house and the town he had been able to send for his father and mother to join him in New York.

Hemmick listened with that exaggerated attention which men who have not prospered generally render to men who have. He would have continued to listen had Abercrombie become more expansive, for he was beginning faintly to associate him with an Abercrombie who had figured in the newspapers for several years at the head of shipping boards and financial committees. But Abercrombie, after a moment, made the conversation less personal.

“I didn’t realize you had so much heat here. I guess I’ve forgotten a lot in twenty-five years.”

“Why, this is a cool day,” boasted Hemmick, “this is cool. I was just sort of overheated from walking when I came up.”

“It’s too hot,” insisted Abercrombie with a restless movement; then he added abruptly, “I don’t like it here. It means nothing to me — nothing — I’ve wondered if it did, you know; that’s why I came down. And I’ve decided.

“You see,” he continued hesitantly, “up to recently the North was still full of professional Southerners, some real, some by sentiment, but all given to flowery monologues on the beauty of their old family plantations and all jumping up and howling when the band played ‘Dixie.’ You know what I mean” — he turned to Hemmick — “it got to be a sort of a national joke. Oh, I was in the game, too, I suppose. I used to stand up and perspire and cheer, and I’ve given young men positions for no particular reason except that they claimed to come from South Carolina or Virginia — “ again he broke off and became suddenly abrupt — “but I’m through, I’ve been here six hours and I’m through!”

“Too hot for you?” inquired Hemmick, with mild surprise.

“Yes! I’ve felt the heat and I’ve seen the men — those two or three dozen loafers standing in front of the stores on Jackson Street — in thatched straw hats” — then he added, with a touch of humor, “they’re what my son calls ‘slash-pocket, belted-back boys.’ Do you know the ones I mean?”

“Jelly-beans,” Hemmick nodded gravely, “we call ‘em Jelly-beans. No-account lot of boys all right. They got signs up in front of most of the stores asking ‘em not to stand there.”

“They ought to!” asserted Abercrombie, with a touch of irascibility. “That’s my picture of the South now, you know — a skinny, dark-haired young man with a gun on his hip and a stomach full of corn liquor or Dope Dola, leaning up against a drug store waiting for the next lynching.”

Hemmick objected, though with apology in his voice.

“You got to remember, Mr. Abercrombie, that we haven’t had the money down here since the war —  — “

Abercrombie waved this impatiently aside.

“Oh, I’ve heard all that,” he said, “and I’m tired of it. And I’ve heard the South lambasted till I’m tired of that, too. It’s not taking France and Ger?many fifty years to get on their feet, and their war made your war look like a little fracas up an alley. And it’s not your fault and it’s not anybody’s fault. It’s just that this is too damn hot to be a white man’s country and it always will be. I’d like to see ‘em pack two or three of these states full of darkies and drop ‘em out of the Union.”

Hemmick nodded, thoughtfully, though without thought. He had never thought; for over twenty years he had seldom ever held opinions, save the opinions of the local press or of some majority made articulate through passion. There was a certain luxury in thinking that he had never been able to afford. When cases were set before him he either accepted them outright if they were comprehensible to him or rejected them if they required a modicum of concentration. Yet he was not a stupid man. He was poor and busy and tired and there were no ideas at large in his community, even had he been capable of grasping them. The idea that he did not think would have been equally incomprehensible to him. He was a closed book, half full of badly printed, uncorrelated trash.

Just now, his reaction to Abercrombie’s assertion was exceedingly simple. Since the remarks proceeded from a man who was a Southerner by birth, who was successful — moreover, who was confident and decisive and persuasive and suave — he was inclined to accept them without suspicion or resentment. He took one of Abercrombie’s cigars and pulling on it, still with a stern imitation of profundity upon his tired face, watched the color glide out of the sky and the gray veils come down. The little boy and his bicycle, the baby, the nursemaid, the forlorn kitten, all had departed. In the stucco bungalows pianos gave out hot weary notes that inspired the crickets to competitive sound, and squeaky Graphophones filled in the intervals with patches of whining ragtime until the impression was created that each living room in the street opened directly out into the darkness.

“What I want to find out,” Abercrombie was saying with a frown, “is why I didn’t have sense enough to know that this was a worthless town. It was entirely an accident that I left here, an utterly blind chance, and as it happened, the very train that took me away was full of luck for me. The man I sat beside gave me my start in life.” His tone became resentful. “But I thought this was all right. I’d have stayed except that I’d gotten into a scrape down at the high school — I got expelled and my daddy told me he didn’t want me at home any more. Why didn’t I know the place wasn’t any good? Why didn’t I see?”

“Well, you’d probably never known anything better?” suggested Hemmick mildly.

“That wasn’t any excuse,” insisted Abercrombie. “If I’d been any good I’d have known. As a matter of fact — as — a — matter — of — fact,” he repeated slowly, “I think that at heart I was the sort of boy who’d have lived and died here happily and never known there was anything better.” He turned to Hemmick with a look almost of distress. “It worries me to think that my — that what’s happened to me can be ascribed to chance. But that’s the sort of boy I think I was. I didn’t start off with the Dick Whittington idea — I started off by accident.”

After this confession, he stared out into the twilight with a dejected expression that Hemmick could not understand. It was impossible for the latter to share any sense of the importance of such a distinction — in fact from a man of Abercrombie’s position it struck him as unnecessarily trivial. Still, he felt that some manifestation of acquiescence was only polite.

“Well,” he offered, “it’s just that some boys get the bee to get up and go North and some boys don’t. I happened to have the bee to go North. But I didn’t. That’s the difference between you and me.”

Abercrombie turned to him intently.

“You did?” he asked, with unexpected interest. “You wanted to get out?”

“At one time.” At Abercrombie’s eagerness Hemmick began to attach a new importance to the subject. “At one time,” he repeated, as though the singleness of the occasion was a thing he had often mused upon.

“How old were you?”

“Oh — ‘bout twenty.”

“What put it into your head?”

“Well, let me see — “ Hemmick considered. “ — I don’t know whether I remember sure enough but it seems to me that when I was down to the University — I was there two years — one of the professors told me that a smart boy ought to go North. He said business wasn’t going to amount to much down here for the next fifty years. And I guessed he was right. My father died about then, so I got a job as runner in the bank here, and I didn’t have much interest in anything except saving up enough money to go North. I was bound I’d go.”

“Why didn’t you? Why didn’t you?” insisted Abercrombie in an aggrieved tone.

“Well,” Hemmick hesitated. “Well, I right near did but — things didn’t work out and I didn’t get to go. It was a funny sort of business. It all started about the smallest thing you can think of. It all started about a penny.”

“A penny?”

“That’s what did it — one little penny. That’s why I didn’t go ‘way from here and all, like I intended.”

“Tell me about it, man!” exclaimed his companion. He looked at his watch impatiently. “I’d like to hear the story.”

Hemmick sat for a moment, distorting his mouth around the cigar.

“Well, to begin with,” he said, at length, “I’m going to ask you if you remember a thing that happened here about twenty-five years ago. A fellow named Hoyt, the cashier of the Cotton National Bank, disappeared one night with about thirty thousand dollars in cash. Say, man, they didn’t talk about anything else down here at the time. The whole town was shaken up about it, and I reckin you can imagine the disturbance it caused down at all the banks and especially at the Cotton National.”

“I remember.”

“Well, they caught him, and they got most of the money back, and by and by the excitement died down, except in the bank where the thing had happened. Down there it seemed as if they’d never get used to it. Mr. Deems, the First Vice-President, who’d always been pretty kind and decent, got to be a changed man. He was suspicious of the clerks, the tellers, the janitor, the watchman, most of the officers, and yes, by Golly, I guess he got so he kept an eye on the President himself.

“I don’t mean he was just watchful — he was downright hipped on the subject. He’d come up and ask you funny questions when you were going about your business. He’d walk into the teller’s cage on tip-toe and watch him without saying anything. If there was any mistake of any kind in the bookkeeping, he’d not only fire a clerk or so, but he’d raise such a riot that he made you want to push him into a vault and slam the door on him.

“He was just about running the bank then, and he’d affected the other officers, and — oh, you can imagine the havoc a thing like that could work on any sort of an organization. Everybody was so nervous that they made mistakes whether they were careful or not. Clerks were staying downtown until eleven at night trying to account for a lost nickel. It was a thin year, anyhow, and everything financial was pretty rickety, so one thing worked on another until the crowd of us were as near craziness as anybody can be and carry on the banking business at all.

“I was a runner — and all through the heat of one God-forsaken Summer I ran. I ran and I got mighty little money for it, and that was the time I hated that bank and this town, and all I wanted was to get out and go North. I was getting ten dollars a week, and I’d decided that when I’d saved fifty out of it I was going down to the depot and buy me a ticket to Cincinnati. I had an uncle in the banking business there, and he said he’d give me an opportunity with him. But he never offered to pay my way, and I guess he thought if I was worth having I’d manage to get up there by myself. Well, maybe I wasn’t worth having because, anyhow, I never did.

“One morning on the hottest day of the hottest July I ever knew — and you know what that means down here — I left the bank to call on a man named Harlan and collect some money that’d come due on a note. Harlan had the cash waiting for me all right, and when I counted it I found it amounted to three hundred dollars and eighty-six cents, the change being in brand-new coin that Harlan had drawn from another bank that morning. I put the three one-hundred-dollar bills in my wallet and the change in my watch pocket, signed a receipt and left. I was going straight back to the bank.

“Outside the heat was terrible. It was enough to make you dizzy, and I hadn’t been feeling right for a couple of days, so, while I waited in the shade for a street car, I was congratulating myself that in a month or so I’d be out of this and up where it was some cooler. And then as I stood there it occurred to me all of a sudden that outside of the money which I’d just collected, which, of course, I couldn’t touch, I didn’t have a cent in my pocket. I’d have to walk back to the bank, and it was about fifteen blocks away. You see, on the night before, I’d found that my change came to just a dollar, and I’d traded it for a bill at the corner store and added it to the roll in the bottom of my trunk. So there was no help for it — I took off my coat and I stuck my handkerchief into my collar and struck off through the suffocating heat for the bank.

“Fifteen blocks — you can imagine what that was like, and I was sick when I started. From away up by Juniper Street — you remember where that is; the new Mieger Hospital’s there now — all the way down to Jackson. After about six blocks I began to stop and rest whenever I found a patch of shade wide enough to hold me, and as I got pretty near I could just keep going by thinking of the big glass of iced tea my mother’d have waiting beside my plate at lunch. But after that I began getting too sick to even want the iced tea — I wanted to get rid of that money and then lie down and die.

“When I was still about two blocks away from the bank I put my hand into my watch pocket and pulled out that change; was sort of jingling it in my hand; making myself believe that I was so close that it was convenient to have it ready. I happened to glance into my hand, and all of a sudden I stopped up short and reached down quick into my watch pocket. The pocket was empty. There was a little hole in the bottom, and my hand held only a half dollar, a quarter, and a dime. I had lost one cent.

“Well, sir, I can’t tell you, I can’t express to you the feeling of discouragement that this gave me. One penny, mind you — but think: just the week before a runner had lost his job because he was a little bit shy twice. It was only carelessness; but there you were! They were all in a panic that they might get fired themselves, and the best thing to do was to fire some one else — first.

“So you can see that it was up to me to appear with that penny.

“Where I got the energy to care as much about it as I did is more than I can understand. I was sick and hot and weak as a kitten, but it never occurred to me that I could do anything except find or replace that penny, and immediately I began casting about for a way to do it. I looked into a couple of stores, hoping I’d see some one I knew, but while there were a few fellows loafing in front, just as you saw them today, there wasn’t one that I felt like going up to and saying: ‘Here! You got a penny?’ I thought of a couple of offices where I could have gotten it without much trouble, but they were some distance off, and besides being pretty dizzy, I hated to go out of my route when I was carrying bank money, because it looked kind of strange.

“So what should I do but commence walking back along the street toward the Union Depot where I last remembered having the penny. It was a brand-new penny, and I thought maybe I’d see it shining where it dropped. So I kept walking, looking pretty carefully at the sidewalk and thinking what I’d better do. I laughed a little, because I felt sort of silly for worrying about a penny, but I didn’t enjoy laughing, and it really didn’t seem silly to me at all.

“Well, by and by I got back to the Union Depot without having either seen the old penny or having thought what was the best way to get another. I hated to go all the way home, ‘cause we lived a long distance out; but what else was I to do? So I found a piece of shade close to the depot, and stood there considering, thinking first one thing and then another, and not getting anywhere at all. One little penny, just one — something almost any man in sight would have given me; something even the nigger baggage-smashers were jingling around in their pockets… I must have stood there about five minutes. I remember there was a line of about a dozen men in front of an army recruiting station they’d just opened, and a couple of them began to yell: ‘Join the Army!’ at me. That woke me up, and I moved on back toward the bank, getting worried now, getting mixed up and sicker and sicker and knowing a million ways to find a penny and not one that seemed convenient or right. I was exaggerating the importance of losing it, and I was exaggerating the difficulty of finding another, but you just have to believe that it seemed about as important to me just then as though it were a hundred dollars.

“Then I saw a couple of men talking in front of Moody’s soda place, and recognized one of them — Mr. Burling — who’d been a friend of my father’s. That was relief, I can tell you. Before I knew it I was chattering to him so quick that he couldn’t follow what I was getting at.

“‘Now,’ he said, ‘you know I’m a little deaf and can’t understand when you talk that fast! What is it you want, Henry? Tell me from the beginning.’

“‘Have you got any change with you?’ I asked him just as loud as I dared. ‘I just want — ‘ Then I stopped short; a man a few feet away had turned around and was looking at us. It was Mr. Deems, the First Vice-President of the Cotton National Bank.”

Hemmick paused, and it was still light enough for Abercrombie to see that he was shaking his head to and fro in a puzzled way. When he spoke his voice held a quality of pained surprise, a quality that it might have carried over twenty years.

“I never could understand what it was that came over me then. I must have been sort of crazy with the heat — that’s all I can decide. Instead of just saying, ‘Howdy’ to Mr. Deems, in a natural way, and telling Mr. Burling I wanted to borrow a nickel for tobacco, because I’d left my purse at home, I turned away quick as a flash and began walking up the street at a great rate, feeling like a criminal who had come near being caught.

“Before I’d gone a block I was sorry. I could almost hear the conversation that must’ve been taking place between those two men:

“‘What do you reckon’s the matter with that young man?’ Mr. Burling would say without meaning any harm. ‘Came up to me all excited and wanted to know if I had any money, and then he saw you and rushed away like he was crazy.’

“And I could almost see Mr. Deems’ big eyes get narrow with suspicion and watch him twist up his trousers and come strolling along after me. I was in a real panic now, and no mistake. Suddenly I saw a one-horse surrey going by, and recognized Bill Kennedy, a friend of mine, driving it. I yelled at him, but he didn’t hear me. Then I yelled again, but he didn’t pay any attention, so I started after him at a run, swaying from side to side, I guess, like I was drunk, and calling his name every few minutes. He looked around once, but he didn’t see me; he kept right on going and turned out of sight at the next comer. I stopped then because I was too weak to go any farther. I was just about to sit down on the curb and rest when I looked around, and the first thing I saw was Mr. Deems walking after me as fast as he could come. There wasn’t any of my imagination about it this time — the look in his eyes showed he wanted to know what was the matter with me!

“Well, that’s about all I remember clearly until about twenty minutes later, when I was at home trying to unlock my trunk with fingers that were trembling like a tuning fork. Before I could get it open, Mr. Deems and a policeman came in. I began talking all at once about not being a thief and trying to tell them what had happened, but I guess I was sort of hysterical, and the more I said the worse matters were. When I managed to get the story out it seemed sort of crazy, even to me — and it was true — it was true, true as I’ve told you — every word! — that one penny that I lost somewhere down by the station — “ Hemmick broke off and began laughing grotesquely — as though the excitement that had come over him as he finished his tale was a weakness of which he was ashamed. When he resumed it was with an affectation of nonchalance.

“I’m not going into the details of what happened because nothing much did — at least not on the scale you judge events by up North. It cost me my job, and I changed a good name for a bad one. Somebody tattled and somebody lied, and the impression got around that I’d lost a lot of the bank’s money and had been tryin’ to cover it up.

“I had an awful time getting a job after that. Finally I got a statement out of the bank that contradicted the wildest of the stories that had started, but the people who were still interested said it was just because the bank didn’t want any fuss or scandal — and the rest had forgotten: that is they’d forgotten what had happened, but they remembered that somehow I just wasn’t a young fellow to be trusted —  — “

Hemmick paused and laughed again, still without enjoyment, but bitterly, uncomprehendingly, and with a profound helplessness.

“So, you see, that’s why I didn’t go to Cincinnati,” he said slowly; “my mother was alive then, and this was a pretty bad blow to her. She had an idea — one of those old-fashioned Southern ideas that stick in people’s heads down here — that somehow I ought to stay here in town and prove myself honest. She had it on her mind, and she wouldn’t hear of my going. She said that the day I went’d be the day she’d die. So I sort of had to stay till I’d got back my — my reputation.”

“How long did that take?” asked Abercrombie quietly.

“About — ten years.”

“Oh —  — “

“Ten years,” repeated Hemmick, staring out into the gathering darkness. “This is a little town, you see: I say ten years because it was about ten years when the last reference to it came to my ears. But I was married long before that; had a kid. Cincinnati was out of my mind by that time.”

“Of course,” agreed Abercrombie.

They were both silent for a moment — then Hemmick added apologetically:

“That was sort of a long story, and I don’t know if it could have interested you much. But you asked me —  — “

“It did interest me,” answered Abercrombie politely. “It interested me tremendously. It interested me much more than I thought it would.”

It occurred to Hemmick that he himself had never realized what a curious, rounded tale it was. He saw dimly now that what had seemed to him only a fragment, a grotesque interlude, was really significant, complete. It was an interesting story; it was the story upon which turned the failure of his life. Abercrombie’s voice broke in upon his thoughts.

“You see, it’s so different from my story,” Abercrombie was saying. “It was an accident that you stayed — and it was an accident that I went away. You deserve more actual — actual credit, if there is such a thing in the world, for your intention of getting out and getting on. You see, I’d more or less gone wrong at seventeen. I was — well, what you call a Jelly-bean. All I wanted was to take it easy through life — and one day I just happened to see a sign up above my head that had on it: ‘Special rate to Atlanta, three dollars and forty-two cents.’ So I took out my change and counted it —  — “

Hemmick nodded. Still absorbed in his own story, he had forgotten the importance, the comparative magnificence of Abercrombie. Then suddenly he found himself listening sharply:

“I had just three dollars and forty-one cents in my pocket. But, you see, I was standing in line with a lot of other young fellows down by the Union Depot about to enlist in the army for three years. And I saw that extra penny on the walk not three feet away. I saw it because it was brand new and shining in the sun like gold.”

The Alabama night had settled over the street, and as the blue drew down upon the dust the outlines of the two men had become less distinct, so that it was not easy for any one who passed along the walk to tell that one of these men was of the few and the other of no importance. All the detail was gone — Abercrombie’s fine gold wrist watch, his collar, that he ordered by the , dozen from London, the dignity that sat upon him in his chair — all faded and were engulfed with Hemmick’s awkward suit and preposterous humped shoes into that pervasive depth of night that, like death, made nothing matter, nothing differentiate, nothing remain. And a little later on a passerby saw only the two glowing disks about the size of a penny that marked the rise and fall of their cigars.

THE PUSHER-IN-THE-FACE

The last prisoner was a man — his masculinity was not much in evidence, it is true; he would perhaps better be described as a “person,” but he undoubtedly came under that general heading and was so classified in the court record. He was a small, somewhat shriveled, somewhat wrinkled American who had been living along for probably thirty-five years.

His body looked as if it had been left by accident in his suit the last time it went to the tailor’s and pressed out with hot, heavy irons to its present sharpness. His face was merely a face. It was the kind of face that makes up crowds, gray in color with ears that shrank back against the head as if fearing the clamor of the city, and with the tired, tired eyes of one whose forebears have been underdogs for five thousand years.

Brought into the dock between two towering Celts in executive blue he seemed like the representative of a long extinct race, a very fagged out and shriveled elf who had been caught poaching on a buttercup in Central Park.

“What’s your name?”

“Stuart.”

“Stuart what?”

“Charles David Stuart.”

The clerk recorded it without comment in the book of little crimes and great mistakes.

“Age?”

“Thirty.”

“Occupation?”

“Night cashier.”

The clerk paused and looked at the judge. The judge yawned.

“Wha’s charge?” he asked.

“The charge is” — the clerk looked down at the notation in his hand — “the charge is that he pushed a lady in the face.”

“Pleads guilty?”

“Yes.”

The preliminaries were now disposed of. Charles David Stuart, looking very harmless and uneasy, was on trial for assault and battery.

The evidence disclosed, rather to the judge’s surprise, that the lady whose face had been pushed was not the defendant’s wife.

On the contrary the victim was an absolute stranger — the prisoner had never seen her before in his life. His reasons for the assault had been two: first, that she talked during a theatrical performance; and, second, that she kept joggling the back of his chair with her knees. When this had gone on for some time he had turned around and without any warning pushed her severely in the face.

“Call the plaintiff,” said the judge, sitting up a little in his chair. “Let’s hear what she has to say.”

The courtroom, sparsely crowded and unusually languid in the hot afternoon, had become suddenly alert. Several men in the back of the room moved into benches near the desk and a young reporter leaned over the clerk’s shoulder and copied the defendant’s name on the back of an envelope.

The plaintiff arose. She was a woman just this side of fifty with a determined, rather overbearing face under yellowish white hair. Her dress was a dignified black and she gave the impression of wearing glasses; indeed the young reporter, who believed in observation, had so described her in his mind before he realized that no such adornment sat upon her thin, beaked nose.

It developed that she was Mrs. George D. Robinson of 1219 Riverside Drive. She had always been fond of the theater and sometimes she went to the matinee. There had been two ladies with her yesterday, her cousin, who lived with her, and a Miss Ingles — both ladies were in court.

This is what had occurred:

As the curtain went up for the first act a woman sitting behind had asked her to remove her hat. Mrs. Robinson had been about to do so anyhow, and so she was a little annoyed at the request and had remarked as much to Miss Ingles and her cousin. At this point she had first noticed the defendant who was sitting directly in front, for he had turned around and looked at her quickly in a most insolent way. Then she had forgotten his existence until just before the end of the act when she made some remark to Miss Ingles — when suddenly he had stood up, turned around and pushed her in the face.

“Was it a hard blow?” asked the judge at this point.

“A hard blow!” said Mrs. Robinson indignantly, “I should say it was. I had hot and cold applications on my nose all night.”

“ — on her nose all night.”

This echo came from the witness bench where two faded ladies were leaning forward eagerly and nodding their heads in corroboration.

“Were the lights on?” asked the judge.

No, but everyone around had seen the incident and some people had taken hold of the man right then and there.

This concluded the case for the plaintiff. Her two companions gave similar evidence and in the minds of everyone in the courtroom the incident defined itself as one of unprovoked and inexcusable brutality.

The one element which did not fit in with this interpretation was the physiognomy of the prisoner himself. Of any one of a number of minor offenses he might have appeared guilty — pickpockets were notoriously mild-mannered, for example — but of this particular assault in a crowded theater he seemed physically incapable. He did not have the kind of voice or the kind of clothes or the kind of mustache that went with such an attack.

“Charles David Stuart,” said the judge, “you’ve heard the evidence against you?”

“Yes.”

“And you plead guilty?”

“Yes.”

“Have you anything to say before I sentence you?”

“No.” The prisoner shook his head hopelessly. His small hands were trembling.

“Not one word in extenuation of this unwarranted assault?”

The prisoner appeared to hesitate.

“Go on,” said the judge. “Speak up — it’s your last chance.”

“Well,” said Stuart with an effort, “she began talking about the plumber’s stomach.”

There was a stir in the courtroom. The judge leaned forward.

“What do you mean?”

“Why, at first she was only talking about her own stomach to — to those two ladies there” — he indicated the cousin and Miss Ingles — “and that wasn’t so bad. But when she began talking about the plumber’s stomach it got different.”

“How do you mean — different?”

Charles Stuart looked around helplessly.

“I can’t explain,” he said, his mustache wavering a little, “but when she began talking about the plumber’s stomach you — you had to listen.”

A snicker ran about the courtroom. Mrs. Robinson and her attendant ladies on the bench were visibly horrified. The guard took a step nearer as if at a nod from the judge he would whisk off this criminal to the dingiest dungeon in Manhattan.

But much to his surprise the judge settled himself comfortably in his chair.

“Tell us about it, Stuart,” he said not unkindly. “Tell us the whole story from the beginning.”

This request was a shock to the prisoner and for a moment he looked as though he would have preferred the order of condemnation. Then after one nervous look around the room he put his hands on the edge of the desk, like the paws of a fox-terrier just being trained to sit up, and began to speak in a quivering voice.

“Well, I’m a night cashier, your honor, in T. Cushmael’s restaurant on Third Avenue. I’m not married” — he smiled a little, as if he knew they had all guessed that — “and so on Wednesday and Saturday afternoons I usually go to the matinee. It helps to pass the time till dinner. There’s a drug store, maybe you know, where you can get tickets for a dollar sixty-five to some of the shows and I usually go there and pick out something. They got awful prices at the box office now.” He gave out a long silent whistle and looked feelingly at the judge. “Four or five dollars for one seat — “

The judge nodded his head.

“Well,” continued Charles Stuart, “when I pay even a dollar sixty-five I expect to see my money’s worth. About two weeks ago I went to one of these here mystery plays where they have one fella that did the crime and nobody knows who it was. Well, the fun at a thing like that is to guess who did it. And there was a lady behind me that’d been there before and she gave it all away to the fella with her. Gee” — his face fell and he shook his head from side to side — “I like to died right there. When I got home to my room I was so mad that they had to come and ask me to stop walking up and down. Dollar sixty-five of my money gone for nothing.

“Well, Wednesday came around again, and this show was one show I wanted to see. I’d been wanting to see it for months, and every time I went into the drug store I asked them if they had any tickets. But they never did.” He hesitated. “So Tuesday I took a chance and went over to the box office and got a seat. Two seventy-five it cost me.” He nodded impressively. “Two seventy-five. Like throwing money away. But I wanted to see that show.”

Mrs. Robinson in the front row rose suddenly to her feet.

“I don’t see what all this story has to do with it,” she broke out a little shrilly. “I’m sure I don’t care — “

The judge brought his gavel sharply down on the desk.

“Sit down, please,” he said.

“This is a court of law, not a matinee.”

Mrs. Robinson sat down, drawing herself up into a thin line and sniffing a little as if to say she’d see about this after a while. The judge pulled out his watch.

“Go on,” he said to Stuart. “Take all the time you want.”

“I got there first,” continued Stuart in a flustered voice. “There wasn’t anybody in there but me and the fella that was cleaning up. After awhile the audience came in, and it got dark and the play started, but just as I was all settled in my seat and ready to have a good time I heard an awful row directly behind me. Somebody had asked this lady” — he pointed directly to Mrs. Robinson — “to remove her hat like she should of done anyhow and she was sore about it. She kept telling the two ladies that was with her how she’d been at the theater before and knew enough to take off her hat. She kept that up for a long time, five minutes maybe, and then every once in a while she’d think of something new and say it in a loud voice. So finally I turned around and looked at her because I wanted to see what a lady looked like that could be so inconsiderate as that. Soon as I turned back she began on me. She said I was insolent and then she said ‘Tchk! Tchk! Tchk!’ a lot with her tongue and the two ladies that was with her said ‘Tchk! Tchk! Tchk!’ until you could hardly hear yourself think, much less listen to the play. You’d have thought I’d done something terrible.

“By and by, after they calmed down and I began to catch up with what was doing on the stage, I felt my seat sort of creak forward and then creak back again and I knew the lady had her feet on it and I was in for a good rock. Gosh!” he wiped his pale, narrow brow on which the sweat had gathered thinly, “it was awful. I hope to tell you I wished I’d never come at all. Once I got excited at a show and rocked a man’s chair without knowing it and I was glad when he asked me to stop. But I knew this lady wouldn’t be glad if I asked her. She’d of just rocked harder than ever.”

Some time before, the population of the courtroom had begun stealing glances at the middle-aged lady with yellowish-white hair. She was of a deep, life-like lobster color with rage.

“It got to be near the end of the act,” went on the little pale man, “and I was enjoying it as well as I could, seeing that sometimes she’d push me toward the stage and sometimes she’d let go, and the seat and me would fall back into place. Then all of a sudden she began to talk. She said she had an operation or something — I remember she said she told the doctor that she guessed she knew more about her own stomach than he did. The play was getting good just then — the people next to me had their handkerchiefs out and was weeping — and I was feeling sort of that way myself. And all of a sudden this lady began to tell her friends what she told the plumber about his indigestion. Gosh!” Again he shook his head from side to side; his pale eyes fell involuntarily on Mrs. Robinson — then looked quickly away. “You couldn’t help but hear some and I begun missing things and then missing more things and then everybody began laughing and I didn’t know what they were laughing at and, as soon as they’d leave off, her voice would begin again. Then there was a great big laugh that lasted for a long time and everybody bent over double and kept laughing and laughing, and I hadn’t heard a word. First thing I knew the curtain came down and then I don’t know what happened. I must of been a little crazy or something because I got up and closed my seat, and reached back and pushed the lady in the face.”

As he concluded there was a long sigh in the courtroom as though everyone had been holding in his breath waiting for the climax. Even the judge gasped a little and the three ladies on the witness bench burst into a shrill chatter and grew louder and louder and shriller and shriller until the judge’s gavel rang out again upon his desk.

“Charles Stuart,” said the judge in a slightly raised voice, “is this the only extenuation you can make for raising your hand against a woman of the plaintiff’s age?”

Charles Stuart’s head sank a little between his shoulders, seeming to withdraw as far as it was able into the poor shelter of his body.

“Yes, sir,” he said faintly.

Mrs. Robinson sprang to her feet.

“Yes, judge,” she cried shrilly, “and there’s more than that. He’s a liar too, a dirty little liar. He’s just proclaimed himself a dirty little — “

“Silence!” cried the judge in a terrible voice. “I’m running this court, and I’m capable of making my own decisions!” He paused. “I will now pronounce sentence upon Charles Stuart,” he referred to the register, “upon Charles David Stuart of 212 1/2 West 22nd St.”

The courtroom was silent. The reporter drew nearer — he hoped the sentence would be light — just a few days on the Island in lieu of a fine.

The judge leaned back in his chair and hid his thumbs somewhere under his black robe.

“Assault justified,” he said. “Case dismissed.”

The little man Charles Stuart came blinking out into the sunshine, pausing for a moment at the door of the court and looking furtively behind him as if he half expected that it was a judicial error. Then, sniffling once or twice, not because he had a cold but for those dim psychological reasons that make people sniff, he moved slowly south with an eye out for a subway station.

He stopped at a news-stand to buy a morning paper; then entering the subway was borne south to Eighteenth Street where he disembarked and walked east to Third Avenue. Here he was employed in an all-night restaurant built of glass and plaster white tile. Here he sat at a desk from curfew until dawn, taking in money and balancing the books of T. Cushmael, the proprietor. And here, through the interminable nights, his eyes, by turning a little to right or left, could rest upon the starched linen uniform of Miss Edna Schaeffer.

Miss Edna Schaeffer was twenty-three, with a sweet mild face and hair that was a living example of how henna should not be applied. She was unaware of this latter fact, because all the girls she knew used henna just this way, so perhaps the odd vermilion tint of her coiffure did not matter.

Charles Stuart had forgotten about the color of her hair long ago — if he had ever noticed its strangeness at all. He was much more interested in her eyes, and in her white hands which, as they moved deftly among piles of plates and cups, always looked as if they should be playing the piano. He had almost asked her to go to a matinee with him once, but when she had faced him her lips half-parted in a weary, cheerful smile, she had seemed so beautiful that he had lost courage and mumbled something else instead.

It was not to see Edna Schaeffer, however, that he had come to the restaurant so early in the afternoon. It was to consult with T. Cushmael, his employer, and discover if he had lost his job during his night in jail. T. Cushmael was standing in the front of the restaurant looking gloomily out the plate-glass window, and Charles Stuart approached him with ominous forebodings.

“Where’ve you been?” demanded T. Cushmael.

“Nowhere,” answered Charles Stuart discreetly.

“Well, you’re fired.”

Stuart winced.

“Right now?”

Cushmael waved his hands apathetically.

“Stay two or three days if you want to, till I find somebody. Then” — he made a gesture of expulsion — “outside for you.”

Charles Stuart assented with a weary little nod. He assented to everything. At nine o’clock, after a depressed interval during which he brooded upon the penalty of spending a night among the police, he reported for work.

“Hello, Mr. Stuart,” said Edna Schaeffer, sauntering curiously toward him as he took his place behind the desk. “What became of you last night? Get pinched?”

She laughed, cheerfully, huskily, charmingly he thought, at her joke.

“Yes,” he answered on a sudden impulse, “I was in the Thirty-fifth Street jail.”

“Yes, you were,” she scoffed.

“That’s the truth,” he insisted, “I was arrested.”

Her face grew serious at once.

“Go on. What did you do?”

He hesitated.

“I pushed somebody in the face.”

Suddenly she began to laugh, at first with amusement and then immoderately.

“It’s a fact,” mumbled Stuart, “I almost got sent to prison account of it.”

Setting her hand firmly over her mouth Edna turned away from him and retired to the refuge of the kitchen. A little later, when he was pretending to be busy at the accounts, he saw her retailing the story to the two other girls.

The night wore on. The little man in the grayish suit with the grayish face attracted no more attention from the customers than the whirring electric fan over his head. They gave him their money and his hand slid their change into a little hollow in the marble counter. But to Charles Stuart the hours of this night, this last night, began to assume a quality of romance. The slow routine of a hundred other nights unrolled with a new enchantment before his eyes. Midnight was always a sort of a dividing point — after that the intimate part of the evening began. Fewer people came in, and the ones that did seemed depressed and tired: a casual ragged man for coffee, the beggar from the street corner who ate a heavy meal of cakes and a beefsteak, a few nightbound street-women and a watchman with a red face who exchanged warning phrases with him about his health.

Midnight seemed to come early tonight and business was brisk until after one. When Edna began to fold napkins at a nearby table he was tempted to ask her if she too had not found the night unusually short. Vainly he wished that he might impress himself on her in some way, make some remark to her, some sign of his devotion that she would remember forever.

She finished folding the vast pile of napkins, loaded it onto the stand and bore it away, humming to herself. A few minutes later the door opened and two customers came in. He recognized them immediately, and as he did so a flush of jealousy went over him. One of them, a young man in a handsome brown suit, cut away rakishly from his abdomen, had been a frequent visitor for the last ten days. He came in always at about this hour, sat down at one of Edna’s tables, and drank two cups of coffee with lingering ease. On his last two visits he had been accompanied by his present companion, a swarthy Greek with sour eyes who ordered in a loud voice and gave vent to noisy sarcasm when anything was not to his taste.

It was chiefly the young man, though, who annoyed Charles Stuart. The young man’s eyes followed Edna wherever she went, and on his last two visits he had made unnecessary requests in order to bring her more often to his table.

“Good evening, girlie,” Stuart heard him say to-night. “How’s tricks?”

“O.K.,” answered Edna formally. “What’ll it be?”

“What have you?” smiled the young man. “Everything, eh? Well, what’d you recommend?”

Edna did not answer. Her eyes were staring straight over his head into some invisible distance.

He ordered finally at the urging of his companion. Edna withdrew and Stuart saw the young man turn and whisper to his friend, indicating Edna with his head.

Stuart shifted uncomfortably in his seat. He hated that young man and wished passionately that he would go away. It seemed as if his last night here, his last chance to watch Edna, and perhaps even in some blessed moment to talk to her a little, was marred by every moment this man stayed.

Half a dozen more people had drifted into the restaurant — two or three workmen, the newsdealer from over the way — and Edna was too busy for a few minutes to be bothered with attentions. Suddenly Charles Stuart became aware that the sour-eyed Greek had raised his hand and was beckoning him. Somewhat puzzled he left his desk and approached the table.

“Say, fella,” said the Greek, “what time does the boss come in?”

“Why — two o’clock. Just a few minutes now.”

“All right. That’s all. I just wanted to speak to him about something.”

Stuart realized that Edna was standing beside the table; both men turned toward her.

“Say, girlie,” said the young man, “I want to talk to you. Sit down.”

“I can’t.”

“Sure you can. The boss don’t mind.” He turned menacingly to Stuart. “She can sit down, can’t she?”

Stuart did not answer.

“I say she can sit down, can’t she?” said the young man more intently, and added, “Speak up, you little dummy.”

Still Stuart did not answer. Strange blood currents were flowing all over his body. He was frightened; anything said determinedly had a way of frightening him. But he could not move.

“Sh!” said the Greek to his companion.

But the younger man was angered.

“Say,” he broke out, “some time somebody’s going to take a paste at you when you don’t answer what they say. Go on back to your desk!”

Still Stuart did not move.

“Go on away!” repeated the young man in a dangerous voice. “Hurry up! Run!”

Then Stuart ran. He ran as hard as he was able. But instead of running away from the young man he ran toward him, stretching out his hands as he came near in a sort of straight arm that brought his two palms, with all the force of his hundred and thirty pounds, against his victim’s face. With a crash of china the young man went over backward in his chair and, his head striking the edge of the next table, lay motionless on the floor.

The restaurant was in a small uproar. There was a terrified scream from Edna, an indignant protest from the Greek, and the customers arose with exclamations from their tables. Just at this moment the door opened and Mr. Cushmael came in.

“Why you little fool!” cried Edna wrathfully. “What are you trying to do? Lose me my job?”

“What’s this?” demanded Mr. Cushmael, hurrying over. “What’s the idea?”

“Mr. Stuart pushed a customer in the face!” cried a waitress, taking Edna’s cue. “For no reason at all!”

The population of the restaurant had now gathered around the prostrate victim. He was doused thoroughly with water and a folded tablecloth was placed under his head.

“Oh, he did, did he?” shouted Mr. Cushmael in a terrible voice, seizing Stuart by the lapels of his coat.

“He’s raving crazy!” sobbed Edna. “He was in jail last night for pushing a lady in the face. He told me so himself!”

A large laborer reached over and grasped Stuart’s small trembling arm. Stuart gazed around dumbly. His mouth was quivering.

“Look what you done!” shouted Mr. Cushmael. “You like to kill a man.”

Stuart shivered violently. His mouth opened and he fought the air for a moment. Then he uttered a half-articulate sentence:

“Only meant to push him in the face.”

“Push him in the face?” ejaculated Cushmael in a frenzy. “So you got to be a pusher-in-the-face, eh? Well, we’ll push your face right into jail!”

“I — I couldn’t help it,” gasped Stuart. “Sometimes I can’t help it.” His voice rose unevenly. “I guess I’m a dangerous man and you better take me and lock me up!” He turned wildly to Cushmael, “I’d push you in the face if he’d let go my arm. Yes, I would! I’d push you — right-in-the-face!”

For a moment an astonished silence fell, broken by the voice of one of the waitresses who had been groping under the table.

“Some stuff dropped out of this fella’s back pocket when he tipped over,” she explained, getting to her feet. “It’s — why, it’s a revolver and — “

She had been about to say handkerchief, but as she looked at what she was holding her mouth fell open and she dropped the thing quickly on the table. It was a small black mask about the size of her hand.

Simultaneously the Greek, who had been shifting uneasily upon his feet ever since the accident, seemed to remember an important engagement that had slipped his mind. He dashed suddenly around the table and made for the front door, but it opened just at that moment to admit several customers who, at the cry of “Stop him!” obligingly spread out their arms. Barred in that direction, he jumped an overturned chair, vaulted over the delicatessen counter, and set out for the kitchen, collapsing precipitately in the firm grasp of the chef in the doorway.

“Hold him! Hold him!” screamed Mr. Cushmael, realizing the turn of the situation. “They’re after my cash drawer!”

Willing hands assisted the Greek over the counter, where he stood panting and gasping under two dozen excited eyes.

“After my money, hey?” shouted the proprietor, shaking his fist under the captive’s nose.

The stout man nodded, panting.

“We’d of got it too!” he gasped, “if it hadn’t been for that little pusher-in-the-face.’’

Two dozen eyes looked around eagerly. The little pusher-in-the-face had disappeared.

The beggar on the corner had just decided to tip the policeman and shut up shop for the night when he suddenly felt a small, somewhat excited hand fall on his shoulder.

“Help a poor man get a place to sleep — “ he was beginning automatically when he recognized the little cashier from the restaurant. “Hello, brother,” he added, leering up at him and changing his tone.

“You know what?” cried the little cashier in a strangely ominous tone. “I’m going to push you in the face!”

“What do you mean?” snarled the beggar. “Why, you Ga — “

He got no farther. The little man seemed to run at him suddenly, holding out his hands, and there was a sharp, smacking sound as the beggar came in contact with the sidewalk.

“You’re a fakir!” shouted Charles Stuart wildly. “I gave you a dollar when I first came here, before I found out you had ten times as much as I had. And you never gave it back!”

A stout, faintly intoxicated gentlemen who was strutting expansively along the other sidewalk had seen the incident and came running benevolently across the street.

“What does this mean!” he exclaimed in a hearty, shocked voice. “Why, poor fellow — “ He turned indignant eyes on Charles Stuart and knelt unsteadily to raise the beggar.

The beggar stopped cursing and assumed a piteous whine.

“I’m a poor man, Cap’n — “

“This is — this is horrible!” cried the Samaritan, with tears in his eyes. “It’s a disgrace! Police! Pol — !”

He got no farther. His hands, which he was raising for a megaphone, never reached his face — other hands reached his face, however, hands held stiffly out from a one-hundred-and-thirty-pound body! He sank down suddenly upon the beggar’s abdomen, forcing out a sharp curse which faded into a groan.

“This beggar’ll take you home in his car!” shouted the little man who stood over him. “He’s got it parked around the corner.”

Turning his face toward the hot strip of sky which lowered over the city the little man began to laugh, with amusement at first, then loudly and triumphantly until his high laughter ran out in the quiet street with a weird, elfish sound, echoing up the sides of the tall buildings, growing shriller and shriller until people blocks away heard its eerie cadence on the air and stopped to listen.

Still laughing the little man divested himself of his coat and then of his vest and hurriedly freed his neck of tie and collar. Then he spat upon his hands and with a wild, shrill, exultant cry began to run down the dark street.

He was going to clean up New York, and his first objective was the disagreeable policeman on the corner!

They caught him at two o’clock, and the crowd which had joined in the chase were flabbergasted when they found that the ruffian was only a weeping little man in his shirt sleeves. Someone at the station house was wise enough to give him an opiate instead of a padded cell, and in the morning he felt much better.

Mr. Cushmael, accompanied by an anxious young lady with crimson hair, called at the jail before noon.

“I’ll get you out,” cried Mr. Cushmael, shaking hands excitedly through the bars. “One policeman, he’ll explain it all to the other.”

“And there’s a surprise for you too,” added Edna softly, taking his other hand. “Mr. Cushmael’s got a big heart and he’s going to make you his day man now.”

“All right,” agreed Charles Stuart calmly. “But I can’t start till to-morrow.”

“Why not?”

“Because this afternoon I got to go to a matinee — with a friend.”

He relinquished his employer’s hand but kept Edna’s white fingers twined firmly in his.

“One more thing,” he went on in a strong, confident voice that was new to him, “if you want to get me off don’t have the case come up in the Thirty-fifth Street court.”

“Why not?”

“Because,” he answered with a touch of swagger in his voice, “that’s the judge I had when I was arrested last time.”

“Charles,” whispered Edna suddenly, “what would you do if I refused to go with you this afternoon?”

He bristled. Color came into his cheeks and he rose defiantly from his bench.

“Why, I’d — I’d — “

“Never mind,” she said, flushing slightly. “You’d do nothing of the kind.”

ONE OF MY OLDEST FRIENDS

All afternoon Marion had been happy. She wandered from room to room of their little apartment, strolling into the nursery to help the nurse-girl feed the children from dripping spoons, and then reading for a while on their new sofa, the most extravagant thing they had bought in their five years of marriage.

When she heard Michael’s step in the hall she turned her head and listened; she liked to hear him walk, carefully always as if there were children sleeping close by.

“Michael.”

“Oh — hello.” He came into the room, a tall, broad, thin man of thirty with a high forehead and kind black eyes.

“I’ve got some news for you,” he said immediately. “Charley Hart’s getting married.”

“No!”

He nodded.

“Who’s he marrying?”

“One of the little Lawrence girls from home.” He hesitated. “She’s arriving in New York to-morrow and I think we ought to do something for them while she’s here. Charley’s about my oldest friend.”

“Let’s have them up for dinner — “

“I’d like to do something more than that,” he interrupted. “Maybe a theater party. You see — “ Again he hesitated. “It’d be a nice courtesy to Charley.”

“All right,” agreed Marion, “but we musn’t spend much — and I don’t think we’re under any obligation.”

He looked at her in surprise.

“I mean,” went on Marion, “we — we hardly see Charley any more. We hardly ever see him at all.”

“Well, you know how it is in New York,” explained Michael apologetically. “He’s just as busy as I am. He has made a big name for himself and I suppose he’s pretty much in demand all the time.”

They always spoke of Charley Hart as their oldest friend. Five years before, when Michael and Marion were first married, the three of them had come to New York from the same Western city. For over a year they had seen Charley nearly every day and no domestic adventure, no uprush of their hopes and dreams, was too insignificant for his ear. His arrival in times of difficulty never failed to give a pleasant, humorous cast to the situation.

Of course Marion’s babies had made a difference, and it was several years now since they had called up Charley at midnight to say that the pipes had broken or the ceiling was falling in on their heads; but so gradually had they drifted apart that Michael still spoke of Charley rather proudly as if he saw him every day. For a while Charley dined with them once a month and all three found a great deal to say; but the meetings never broke up any more with, “I’ll give you a ring to-morrow.” Instead it was, “You’ll have to come to dinner more often,” or even, after three or four years, “We’ll see you soon.”

“Oh, I’m perfectly willing to give a little party,” said Marion now, looking speculatively about her. “Did you suggest a definite date?”

“Week from Saturday.” His dark eyes roamed the floor vaguely. “We can take up the rugs or something.”

“No.” She shook her head. “We’ll have a dinner, eight people, very formal and everything, and afterwards we’ll play cards.”

She was already speculating on whom to invite. Charley of course, being an artist, probably saw interesting people every day.

“We could have the Willoughbys,” she suggested doubtfully. “She’s on the stage or something — and he writes movies.”

“No — that’s not it,” objected Michael. “He probably meets that crowd at lunch and dinner every day until he’s sick of them. Besides, except for the Willoughbys, who else like that do we know? I’ve got a better idea. Let’s collect a few people who’ve drifted down here from home. They’ve all followed Charley’s career and they’d probably enjoy seeing him again. I’d like them to find out how natural and unspoiled he is after all.”

After some discussion they agreed on this plan and within an hour Marion had her first guest on the telephone:

“It’s to meet Charley Hart’s fiancee,” she explained. “Charley Hart, the artist. You see, he’s one of our oldest friends.”

As she began her preparations her enthusiasm grew. She rented a serving-maid to assure an impeccable service and persuaded the neighborhood florist to come in person and arrange the flowers. All the “people from home” had accepted eagerly and the number of guests had swollen to ten.

“What’ll we talk about, Michael?” she demanded nervously on the eve of the party. “Suppose everything goes wrong and everybody gets mad and goes home?”

He laughed.

“Nothing will. You see, these people all know each other — “

The phone on the table asserted itself and Michael picked up the receiver.

“Hello . . . why, hello, Charley.”

Marion sat up alertly in her chair.

“Is that so? Well, I’m very sorry. I’m very, very sorry… I hope it’s nothing serious.”

“Can’t he come?” broke out Marion.

“Sh!” Then into the phone, “Well, it certainly is too bad, Charley. No, it’s no trouble for us at all. We’re just sorry you’re ill.”

With a dismal gesture Michael replaced the receiver.

“The Lawrence girl had to go home last night and Charley’s sick in bed with grip.”

“Do you mean he can’t come?”

“He can’t come.”

Marion’s face contracted suddenly and her eyes filled with tears.

“He says he’s had the doctor all day,” explained Michael dejectedly. “He’s got fever and they didn’t even want him to go to the telephone.”

“I don’t care,” sobbed Marion. “I think it’s terrible. After we’ve invited all these people to meet him.”

“People can’t help being sick.”

“Yes they can,” she wailed illogically, “they can help it some way. And if the Lawrence girl was going to leave last night why didn’t he let us know then?”

“He said she left unexpectedly. Up to yesterday afternoon they both intended to come.”

“I don’t think he c-cares a bit. I’ll bet he’s glad he’s sick. If he’d cared he’d have brought her to see us long ago.”

She stood up suddenly.

“I’ll tell you one thing,” she assured him vehemently, “I’m just going to telephone everybody and call the whole thing off.”

“Why, Marion — “

But in spite of his half-hearted protests she picked up the phone book and began looking for the first number.

They bought theater tickets next day hoping to fill the hollowness which would invest the evening. Marion had wept when the unintercepted florist arrived at five with boxes of flowers and she felt that she must get out of the house to avoid the ghosts who would presently people it. In silence they ate an elaborate dinner composed of all the things that she had bought for the party.

“It’s only eight,” said Michael afterwards, “I think it’d be sort of nice if we dropped in on Charley for a minute, don’t you?”

“Why, no,” Marion answered, startled, “I wouldn’t think of it.”

“Why not? If he’s seriously sick I’d like to see how well he’s being taken care of.”

She saw that he had made up his mind, so she fought down her instinct against the idea and they taxied to a tall pile of studio apartments on Madison Avenue.

“You go on in,” urged Marion nervously, “I’d rather wait out here.”

“Please come in.”

“Why? He’ll be in bed and he doesn’t want any women around.”

“But he’d like to see you — it’d cheer him up. And he’d know that we understood about to-night. He sounded awfully depressed over the phone.”

He urged her from the cab.

“Let’s only stay a minute,” she whispered tensely as they went up in the elevator. “The show starts at half past eight.”

“Apartment on the right,” said the elevator man.

They rang the bell and waited. The door opened and they walked directly into Charley Hart’s great studio room.

It was crowded with people; from end to end ran a long lamp-lit dinner table strewn with ferns and young roses, from which a gay murmur of laughter and conversation arose into the faintly smoky air. Twenty women in evening dress sat on one side in a row chatting across the flowers at twenty men, with an elation born of the sparkling Burgundy which dripped from many bottles into thin chilled glass. Up on the high narrow balcony which encircled the room a string quartet was playing something by Stravinski in a key that was pitched just below the women’s voices and filled the air like an audible wine.

The door had been opened by one of the waiters, who stepped back deferentially from what he thought were two belated guests — and immediately a handsome man at the head of the table started to his feet, napkin in hand, and stood motionless, staring toward the newcomers. The conversation faded into half silence and all eyes followed Charley Hart’s to the couple at the door. Then, as if the spell was broken, conversation resumed, gathering momentum word by word — the moment was over.

“Let’s get out!” Marion’s low, terrified whisper came to Michael out of a void and for a minute he thought he was possessed by an illusion, that there was no one but Charley in the room after all. Then his eyes cleared and he saw that there were many people here — he had never seen so many! The music swelled suddenly into the tumult of a great brass band and a wind from the loud horns seemed to blow against them; without turning he and Marion each made one blind step backward into the hall, pulling the door to after them.

“Marion — I”

She had run toward the elevator, stood with one finger pressed hard against the bell which rang through the hall like a last high note from the music inside. The door of the apartment opened suddenly and Charley Hart came out into the hall.

“Michael!” he cried, “Michael and Marion, I want to explain! Come inside. I want to explain, I tell you.”

He talked excitedly — his face was flushed and his mouth formed a word or two that did not materialize into sound.

“Hurry up, Michael,” came Marion’s voice tensely from the elevator.

“Let me explain,” cried Charley frantically. “I want — “

Michael moved away from him — the elevator came and the gate clanged open.

“You act as if I’d committed some crime.” Charley was following Michael along the hall. “Can’t you understand that this is all an accidental situation?”

“It’s all right,” Michael muttered, “I understand.”

“No, you don’t.” Charley’s voice rose with exasperation. He was working up anger against them so as to justify his own intolerable position. “You’re going away mad and I asked you to come in and join the party. Why did you come up here if you won’t come in? Did you — ?”

Michael walked into the elevator.

“Down, please!” cried Marion. “Oh, I want to go down, pleasel”

The gates clanged shut.

They told the taxi-man to take them directly home — neither of them could have endured the theater. Driving uptown to their apartment, Michael buried his face in his hands and tried to realize that the friendship which had meant so much to him was over. He saw now that it had been over for some time, that not once during the past year had Charley sought their company and the shock of the discovery far outweighed the affront he had received.

When they reached home, Marion, who had not said a word in the taxi, led the way into the living-room and motioned for her husband to sit down.

“I’m going to tell you something that you ought to know,” she said. “If it hadn’t been for what happened to-night I’d probably never have told you — but now I think you ought to hear the whole story.” She hesitated. “In the first place, Charley Hart wasn’t a friend of yours at all.”

“What?” He looked up at her dully.

“He wasn’t your friend,” she repeated. “He hasn’t been for years. He was a friend of mine.”

“Why, Charley Hart was — “

“I know what you’re going to say — that Charley was a friend to both of us. But it isn’t true. I don’t know how he considered you at first but he stopped being your friend three or four years ago.”

“Why — “ Michael’s eyes glowed with astonishment. “If that’s true, why was he with us all the time?”

“On account of me,” said Marion steadily. “He was in love with me.”

“What?” Michael laughed incredulously. “You’re imagining things. I know how he used to pretend in a kidding way — “

“It wasn’t kidding,” she interrupted, “not underneath. It began that way — and it ended by his asking me to run away with him.”

Michael frowned.

“Go on,” he said quietly, “I suppose this is true or you wouldn’t be telling me about it — but it simply doesn’t seem real. Did he just suddenly begin to — to — “

He closed his mouth suddenly, unable to say the words.

“It began one night when we three were out dancing,” Marion hesitated. “And at first I thoroughly enjoyed it. He had a faculty for noticing things — noticing dresses and hats and the new ways I’d do my hair. He was good company. He could always make me feel important, somehow, and attractive. Don’t get the idea that I preferred his company to yours — I didn’t. I knew how completely selfish he was, and what a will-o’-the-wisp. But I encouraged him, I suppose — I thought it was fine. It was a new angle on Charley, and he was amusing at it just as he was at everything he did.”

“Yes — “ agreed Michael with an effort, “I suppose it was — hilariously amusing.”

“At first he liked you just the same. It didn’t occur to him that he was doing anything treacherous to you. He was just following a natural impulse — that was all. But after a few weeks he began to find you in the way. He wanted to take me to dinner without you along — and it couldn’t be done. Well, that sort of thing went on for over a year.”

“What happened then?”

“Nothing happened. That’s why he stopped coming to see us any more.”

Michael rose slowly to his feet.

“Do you mean — “

“Wait a minute. If you’ll think a little you’ll see it was bound to turn out that way. When he saw that I was trying to let him down easily so that he’d be simply one of our oldest friends again, he broke away. He didn’t want to be one of our oldest friends — that time was over.”

“I see.”

“Well — “ Marion stood up and began biting nervously at her lip, “that’s all. I thought this thing to-night would hurt you less if you understood the whole affair.”

“Yes,” Michael answered in a dull voice, “I suppose that’s true.”

Michael’s business took a prosperous turn, and when summer came they went to the country, renting a little old farmhouse where the children played all day on a tangled half acre of grass and trees. The subject of Charley was never mentioned between them and as the months passed he receded to a shadowy background in their minds. Sometimes, just before dropping off to sleep, Michael found himself thinking of the happy times the three of them had had together five years before — then the reality would intrude upon the illusion and he would be repelled from the subject with almost physical distaste.

One warm evening in July he lay dozing on the porch in the twilight. He had had a hard day at his office and it was welcome to rest here while the summer light faded from the land.

At the sound of an automobile he raised his head lazily. At the end of the path a local taxicab had stopped and a young man was getting out. With an exclamation Michael sat up. Even in the dusk he recognized those shoulders, that impatient walk —

“Well, I’m damned,” he said softly.

As Charley Hart came up the gravel path Michael noticed in a glance that he was unusually disheveled. His handsome face was drawn and tired, his clothes were out of press and he had the unmistakable look of needing a good night’s sleep.

He came up on the porch, saw Michael and smiled in a wan, embarrassed way.

“Hello, Michael.”

Neither of them made any move to shake hands but after a moment Charley collapsed abruptly into a chair.

“I’d like a glass of water,” he said huskily, “it’s hot as hell.”

Without a word Michael went into the house — returned with a glass of water which Charley drank in great noisy gulps.

“Thanks,” he said, gasping, “I thought I was going to pass away.”

He looked about him with eyes that only pretended to take in his surroundings.

“Nice little place you’ve got here,” he remarked; his eyes returned to Michael. “Do you want me to get out?”

“Why — no. Sit and rest if you want to. You look all in.”

“I am. Do you want to hear about it?”

“Not in the least.”

“Well, I’m going to tell you anyhow,” said Charley defiantly. “That’s what I came out here for. I’m in trouble, Michael, and I haven’t got anybody to go to except you.”

“Have you tried your friends?” asked Michael coolly.

“I’ve tried about everybody — everybody I’ve had time to go to. God!” He wiped his forehead with his hand. “I never realized how hard it was to raise a simple two thousand dollars.”

“Have you come to me for two thousand dollars?”

“Wait a minute, Michael. Wait till you hear. It just shows you what a mess a man can get into without meaning any harm. You see, I’m the treasurer of a society called the Independent Artists’ Benefit — a thing to help struggling students. There was a fund, thirty-five hundred dollars, and it’s been lying in my bank for over a year. Well, as you know, I live pretty high — make a lot and spend a lot — and about a month ago I began speculating a little through a friend of mine — “

“I don’t know why you’re telling me all this,” interrupted Michael impatiently, “I — “

“Wait a minute, won’t you — I’m almost through.” He looked at Michael with frightened eyes. “I used that money sometimes without even realizing that it wasn’t mine. I’ve always had plenty of my own, you see. Till this week,” he hesitated, “this week there was a meeting of this society and they asked me to turn over the money. Well, I went to a couple of men to try and borrow it and as soon as my back was turned one of them blabbed. There was a terrible blow-up last night. They told me unless I handed over the two thousand this morning they’d send me to jail — “ His voice rose and he looked around wildly. “There’s a warrant out for me now — and if I can’t get the money I’ll kill myself, Michael; I swear to God I will; I won’t go to prison. I’m an artist — not a business man. I — “

He made an effort to control his voice.

“Michael,” he whispered, “you’re my oldest friend. I haven’t got anyone in the world but you to turn to.”

“You’re a little late,” said Michael uncomfortably, “you didn’t think of me four years ago when you asked my wife to run away with you.”

A look of sincere surprise passed over Charley’s face.

“Are you mad at me about that?” he asked in a puzzled way. “I thought you were mad because I didn’t come to your party.”

Michael did not answer.

“I supposed she’d told you about that long ago,” went on Charley. “I couldn’t help it about Marion. I was lonesome and you two had each other. Every time I went to your house you’d tell me what a wonderful girl Marion was and finally I — I began to agree with you. How could I help falling in love with her, when for a year and a half she was the only decent girl I knew?” He looked defiantly at Michael. “Well, you’ve got her, haven’t you. I didn’t take her away. I never so much as kissed her — do you have to rub it in?”

“Look here,” said Michael sharply, “just why should I lend you this money?”

“Well — “ Charley hesitated, laughed uneasily, “I don’t know any exact reason. I just thought you would.”

“Why should I?”

“No reason at all, I suppose, from your way of looking at it.”

“That’s the trouble. If I gave it to you it would just be because I was slushy and soft. I’d be doing something that I don’t want to do.”

“All right,” Charley smiled unpleasantly, “that’s logical. Now that I think, there’s no reason why you should lend it to me. Well — “ he shoved his hands into his coat pocket and throwing his head back slightly seemed to shake the subject off like a cap, “I won’t go to prison — and maybe you’ll feel differently about it to-morrow.”

“Don’t count on that.”

“Oh, I don’t mean I’ll ask you again. I mean something — quite different.”

He nodded his head, turned quickly and walking down the gravel path was swallowed up in the darkness. Where the path met the road Michael heard his footsteps cease as if he were hesitating. Then they turned down the road toward the station a mile away.

Michael sank into his chair, burying his face in his hands. He heard Marion come out the door.

“I listened,” she whispered, “I couldn’t help it. I’m glad you didn’t lend him anything.”

She came close to him and would have sat down in his lap but an almost physical repulsion came over him and he got up quickly from his chair.

“I was afraid he’d work on your sentiment and make a fool of you,” went on Marion. She hesitated. “He hated you, you know. He used to wish you’d die. I told him that if he ever said so to me again I’d never see him any more.”

Michael looked up at her darkly.

“In fact, you were very noble.”

“Why, Michael — “

“You let him say things like that to you — and then when he comes here, down and out, without a friend in the world to turn to, you say you’re glad I sent him away.”

“It’s because I love you, dear — “

“No, it isn’t!” He interrupted savagely. “It’s because hate’s cheap in this world. Everybody’s got it for sale. My God! What do you suppose I think of myself now?”

“He’s not worth feeling that way about.”

“Please go away!” cried Michael passionately. “I want to be alone.”

Obediently she left him and he sat down again in the darkness of the porch, a sort of terror creeping over him. Several times he made a motion to get up but each time he frowned and remained motionless. Then after another long while he jumped suddenly to his feet, cold sweat starting from his forehead. The last hour, the months just passed, were washed away and he was swept years back in time. Why, they were after Charley Hart, his old friend. Charley Hart who had come to him because he had no other place to go. Michael began to run hastily about the porch in a daze, hunting for his hat and coat.

“Why Charley!” he cried aloud.

He found his coat finally and, struggling into it, ran wildly down the steps. It seemed to him that Charley had gone out only a few minutes before.

“Charley!” he called when he reached the road, “Charley, come back here. There’s been a mistake!”

He paused, listening. There was no answer. Panting a little he began to run doggedly along the road through the hot night.

It was only half past eight o’clock but the country was very quiet and the frogs were loud in the strip of wet marsh that ran along beside the road. The sky was salted thinly with stars and after a while there would be a moon, but the road ran among dark trees and Michael could scarcely see ten feet in front of him. After a while he slowed down to a walk, glancing at the phosphorous dial of his wrist watch — the New York train was not due for an hour. There was plenty of time.

In spite of this he broke into an uneasy run and covered the mile between his house and the station in fifteen minutes. It was a little station, crouched humbly beside the shining rails in the darkness. Beside it Michael saw the lights of a single taxi waiting for the next train.

The platform was deserted and Michael opened the door and peered into the dim waiting-room. It was empty.

“That’s funny,” he muttered.

Rousing a sleepy taxi driver, he asked if there had been anyone waiting for the train. The taxi driver considered — yes, there had been a young man waiting, about twenty minutes ago. He had walked up and down for a while, smoking a cigarette, and then gone away into the darkness.

“That’s funny,” repeated Michael. He made a megaphone of his hands and facing toward the wood across the track shouted aloud.

“Charley!”

There was no answer. He tried again. Then he turned back to the driver.

“Have you any idea what direction he went?”

The man pointed vaguely down the New York road which ran along beside the railroad track.

“Down there somewhere.”

With increasing uneasiness Michael thanked him and started swiftly along the road which was white now under the risen moon. He knew now as surely as he knew anything that Charley had gone off by himself to die. He remembered the expression on his face as he had turned away and the hand tucked down close in his coat pocket as if it clutched some menacing thing.

“Charley!” he called in a terrible voice.

The dark trees gave back no sound. He walked on past a dozen fields bright as silver under the moon, pausing every few minutes to shout and then waiting tensely for an answer.

It occurred to him that it was foolish to continue in this direction — Charley was probably back by the station in the woods somewhere. Perhaps it was all imagination, perhaps even now Charley was pacing the station platform waiting for the train from the city. But some impulse beyond logic made him continue. More than that — several times he had the sense that someone was in front of him, someone who just eluded him at every turning, out of sight and earshot, yet leaving always behind him a dim, tragic aura of having passed that way. Once he thought he heard steps among the leaves on the side of the road but it was only a piece of vagrant newspaper blown by the faint hot wind.

It was a stifling night — the moon seemed to be beating hot rays down upon the sweltering earth. Michael took off his coat and threw it over his arm as he walked. A little way ahead of him now was a stone bridge over the tracks and beyond that an interminable line of telephone poles which stretched in diminishing perspective toward an endless horizon. Well, he would walk to the bridge and then give up. He would have given up before except for this sense he had that someone was walking very lightly and swiftly just ahead.

Reaching the stone bridge he sat down on a rock, his heart beating in loud exhausted thumps under his dripping shirt. Well, it was hopeless — Charley was gone, perhaps out of range of his help forever. Far away beyond the station he heard the approaching siren of the nine-thirty train.

Michael found himself wondering suddenly why he was here. He despised himself for being here. On what weak chord in his nature had Charley played in those few minutes, forcing him into this senseless, frightened run through the night? They had discussed it all and Charley had been unable to give a reason why he should be helped.

He got to his feet with the idea of retracing his steps but before turning he stood for a minute in the moonlight looking down the road. Across the track stretched the line of telephone poles and, as his eyes followed them as far as he could see, he heard again, louder now and not far away, the siren of the New York train which rose and fell with musical sharpness on the still night. Suddenly his eyes, which had been traveling down the tracks, stopped and were focused suddenly upon one spot in the line of poles, perhaps a quarter of a mile away. It was a pole just like the others and yet it was different — there was something about it that was indescribably different.

And watching it as one might concentrate on some figure in the pattern of a carpet, something curious happened in his mind and instantly he saw everything in a completely different light. Something had come to him in a whisper of the breeze, something that changed the whole complexion of the situation. It was this: He remembered having read somewhere that at some point back in the dark ages a man named Gerbert had all by himself summed up the whole of European civilization. It became suddenly plain to Michael that he himself had just now been in a position like that. For one minute, one spot in time, all the mercy in the world had been vested in him.

He realized all this in the space of a second with a sense of shock and instantly he understood the reason why he should have helped Charley Hart. It was because it would be intolerable to exist in a world where there was no help — where any human being could be as alone as Charley had been alone this afternoon.

Why, that was it, of course — he had been trusted with that chance. Someone had come to him who had no other place to go — and he had failed.

All this time, this moment, he had been standing utterly motionless staring at the telephone pole down the track, the one that his eye had picked out as being different from the others. The moon was so bright now that near the top he could see a white bar set crosswise on the pole and as he looked the pole and the bar seemed to have become isolated as if the other poles had shrunk back and away.

Suddenly a mile down the track he heard the click and clamor of the electric train when it left the station, and as if the sound had startled him into life he gave a short cry and set off at a swaying run down the road, in the direction of the pole with the crossed bar.

The train whistled again. Click — click — click — it was nearer now, six hundred, five hundred yards away and as it came under the bridge he was running in the bright beam of its searchlight. There was no emotion in his mind but terror — he knew only that he must reach that pole before the train, and it was fifty yards away, struck out sharp as a star against the sky.

There was no path on the other side of the tracks under the poles but the train was so close now that he dared wait no longer or he would be unable to cross at all. He darted from the road, cleared the tracks in two strides and with the sound of the engine at his heels raced along the rough earth. Twenty feet, thirty feet — as the sound of the electric train swelled to a roar in his ears he reached the pole and threw himself bodily on a man who stood there close to the tracks, carrying him heavily to the ground with the impact of his body.

There was the thunder of steel in his ear, the heavy clump of the wheels on the rails, a swift roaring of air, and the nine-thirty train had gone past.

“Charley,” he gasped incoherently, “Charley.”

A white face looked up at him in a daze. Michael rolled over on his back and lay panting. The hot night was quiet now — there was no sound but the far-away murmur of the receding train.

“Oh, God!”

Michael opened his eyes to see that Charley was sitting up, his face in his hands.

“S’all right,” gasped Michael, “s’all right, Charley. You can have the money. I don’t know what I was thinking about. Why — why, you’re one of my oldest friends.”

Charley shook his head.

“I don’t understand,” he said brokenly. “Where did you come from — how did you get here?”

“I’ve been following you. I was just behind.”

“I’ve been here for half an hour.”

“Well, it’s good you chose this pole to — to wait under. I’ve been looking at it from down by the bridge. I picked it out on account of the crossbar.”

Charley had risen unsteadily to his feet and now he walked a few steps and looked up the pole in the full moonlight.

“What did you say?” he asked after a minute, in a puzzled voice. “Did you say this pole had a crossbar?”

“Why, yes. I was looking at it a long time. That’s how — “

Charley looked up again and hesitated curiously before he spoke.

“There isn’t any crossbar,” he said.

THE UNSPEAKABLE EGG

When Fifi visited her Long Island aunts the first time she was only ten years old, but after she went back to New York the man who worked around the place said that the sand dunes would never be the same again. She had spoiled them. When she left, everything on Montauk Point seemed sad and futile and broken and old. Even the gulls wheeled about less enthusiastically, as if they missed the brown, hardy little girl with big eyes who played barefoot in the sand.

The years bleached out Fifi’s tan and turned her a pale-pink color, but she still managed to spoil many places and plans for many hopeful men. So when at last it was announced in the best newspapers that she had concentrated on a gentleman named Van Tyne everyone was rather glad that all the sadness and longing that followed in her wake should become the responsibility of one self-sacrificing individual; not better for the individual, but for Fifi’s little world very much better indeed.

The engagement was not announced on the sporting page, nor even in the help-wanted column, because Fifi’s family belonged to the Society for the Preservation of Large Fortunes; and Mr. Van Tyne was descended from the man who accidentally founded that society, back before the Civil War. It appeared on the page of great names and was illustrated by a picture of a cross-eyed young lady holding the hand of a savage gentleman with four rows of teeth. That was how their pictures came out, anyhow, and the public was pleased to know that they were ugly monsters for all their money, and everyone was satisfied all around. The society editor set up a column telling how Mrs. Van Tyne started off in the Aquitania wearing a blue traveling dress of starched felt with a round square hat to match; and so far as human events can be prophesied, Fifi was as good as married; or, as not a few young men considered, as bad as married.

“An exceptionally brilliant match,” remarked Aunt Cal on the eve of the wedding, as she sat in her house on Montauk Point and clipped the notice for the cousins in Scotland, and then she added abstractedly, “All is forgiven.”

“Why, Cal!” cried Aunt Josephine. “What do you mean when you say all is forgiven? Fifi has never injured you in any way.”

“In the past nine years she has not seen fit to visit us here at Montauk Point, though we have invited her over and over again.”

“But I don’t blame her,” said Aunt Josephine, who was only thirty-one herself. “What would a young pretty girl do down here with all this sand?”

“We like the sand, Jo.”

“But we’re old maids, Cal, with no vices except cigarettes and double-dummy mah-jongg. Now Fifi, being young, naturally likes exciting, vicious things — late hours, dice playing, all the diversions we read about in these books.”

She waved her hand vaguely.

“I don’t blame her for not coming down here. If I were in her place —  — “

What unnatural ambitions lurked in Aunt Jo’s head were never disclosed, for the sentence remained unfinished. The front door of the house opened in an abrupt, startled way, and a young lady walked into the room in a dress marked “Paris, France.”

“Good evening, dear ladies,” she cried, smiling radiantly from one to the other. “I’ve come down here for an indefinite time in order to play in the sand.”

“Fifi!”

“Fifi!”

“Aunts!”

“But, my dear child,” cried Aunt Jo, “I thought this was the night of the bridal dinner.”

“It is,” admitted Fifi cheerfully. “But I didn’t go. I’m not going to the wedding either. I sent in my regrets today.”

It was all very vague; but it seemed, as far as her aunts could gather, that young Van Tyne was too perfect — whatever that meant. After much urging Fifi finally explained that he reminded her of an advertisement for a new car.

“A new car?” inquired Aunt Cal, wide eyed. “What new car?”

“Any new car.”

“Do you mean —  — “

Aunt Cal blushed.

“I don’t understand this new slang, but isn’t there some part of a car that’s called the — the clutch?”

“Oh, I like him physically,” remarked Fifi coolly. Her aunts started in unison. “But he was just —  — Oh, too perfect, too new; as if they’d fooled over him at the factory for a long time and put special curtains on him —  — “

Aunt Jo had visions of a black-leather sheik.

“ —  — and balloon tires and a permanent shave. He was too civilized for me, Aunt Cal.” She sighed. “I must be one of the rougher girls, after all.”

She was as immaculate and dainty sitting there as though she were the portrait of a young lady and about to be hung on the wall. But underneath her cheerfulness her aunts saw that she was in a state of hysterical excitement, and they persisted in suspecting that something more definite and shameful was the matter.

“But it isn’t,” insisted Fifi. “Our engagement was announced three months ago, and not a single chorus girl has sued George for breach of promise. Not one! He doesn’t use alcohol in any form except as hair tonic. Why, we’ve never even quarreled until today!”

“You’ve made a serious mistake,” said Aunt Cal.

Fifi nodded.

“I’m afraid I’ve broken the heart of the nicest man I ever met in my life, but it can’t be helped. Immaculate! Why, what’s the use of being immaculate when, no matter how hard you try, you can’t be half so immaculate as your husband? And tactful? George could introduce Mr. Trotzky to Mr. Rockefeller and there wouldn’t be a single blow. But after a certain point, I want to have all the tact in my family, and I told him so. I’ve never left a man practically at the church door before, so I’m going to stay here until everyone has had a chance to forget.”

And stay she did — rather to the surprise of her aunts, who expected that next morning she would rush wildly and remorsefully back to New York. She appeared at breakfast very calm and fresh and cool, and as though she had slept soundly all night, and spent the day reclining under a red parasol beside the sunny dunes, watching the Atlantic roll in from the east. Her aunts intercepted the evening paper and burnt it unseen in the open fire, under the impression that Fifi’s flight would be recorded in red headlines across the front page. They accepted the fact that Fifi was here, and except that Aunt Jo was inclined to go mah-jongg without a pair when she speculated on the too perfect man, their lives went along very much the same. But not quite the same.

“What’s the matter with that niece of yourn?” demanded the yardman gloomily of Aunt Josephine. “What’s a young pretty girl want to come and hide herself down here for?”

“My niece is resting,” declared Aunt Josephine stiffly.

“Them dunes ain’t good for wore-out people,” objected the yardman, soothing his head with his fingers. “There’s a monotoness about them. I seen her yesterday take her parasol and like to beat one down, she got so mad at it. Some day she’s going to notice how many of them there are, and all of a sudden go loony.” He sniffed. “And then what kind of a proposition we going to have on our hands?”

“That will do, Percy,” snapped Aunt Jo. “Go about your business. I want ten pounds of broken-up shells rolled into the front walk.”

“What’ll I do with that parasol?” he demanded. “I picked up the pieces.”

“It’s not my parasol,” said Aunt Jo tartly. “You can take the pieces and roll them into the front walk too.”

And so the June of Fifi’s abandoned honeymoon drifted away, and every morning her rubber shoes left wet footprints along a desolate shore at the end of nowhere. For a while she seemed to thrive on the isolation, and the sea wind blew her cheeks scarlet with health; but after a week had passed, her aunts saw that she was noticeably restless and less cheerful even than when she came.

“I’m afraid it’s getting on your nerves, my dear,” said Aunt Cal one particularly wild and windy afternoon. “We love to have you here, but we hate to see you looking so sad. Why don’t you ask your mother to take you to Europe for the summer?”

“Europe’s too dressed up,” objected Fifi wearily. “I like it here where everything’s rugged and harsh and rude, like the end of the world. If you don’t mind, I’d like to stay longer.”

She stayed longer, and seemed to grow more and more melancholy as the days slipped by to the raucous calls of the gulls and the flashing tumult of the waves along the shore. Then one afternoon she returned at twilight from the longest of her long walks with a strange derelict of a man. And after one look at him her aunts thought that the gardener’s prophecy had come true and that solitude had driven Fifi mad at last.

II

He was a very ragged wreck of a man as he stood in the doorway on that summer evening, blinking into Aunt Cal’s eyes; rather like a beachcomber who had wandered accidentally out of a movie of the South Seas. In his hands he carried a knotted stick of a brutal, treacherous shape. It was a murderous-looking stick, and the sight of it caused Aunt Cal to shrink back a little into the room.

Fifi shut the door behind them and turned to her aunts as if this were the most natural occasion in the world.

“This is Mr. Hopkins,” she announced, and then turned to her companion for corroboration. “Or is it Hopwood?”

“Hopkins,” said the man hoarsely. “Hopkins.”

Fifi nodded cheerfully.

“I’ve asked Mr. Hopkins to dinner,” she said.

There was some dignity which Aunt Cal and Aunt Josephine had acquired, living here beside the proud sea, that would not let them show surprise. The man was a guest now; that was enough. But in their hearts all was turmoil and confusion. They would have been no more surprised had Fifi brought in a many-headed monster out of the Atlantic.

“Won’t you — won’t you sit down, Mr. Hopkins?” said Aunt Cal nervously.

Mr. Hopkins looked at her blankly for a moment, and then made a loud clicking sound in the back of his mouth. He took a step toward a chair and sank down on its gilt frailty as though he meant to annihilate it immediately. Aunt Cal and Aunt Josephine collapsed rather weakly on the sofa.

“Mr. Hopkins and I struck up an acquaintance on the beach,” explained Fifi. “He’s been spending the summer down here for his health.”

Mr. Hopkins fixed his eyes glassily on the two aunts.

“I come down for my health,” he said.

Aunt Cal made some small sound; but recovering herself quickly, joined Aunt Jo in nodding eagerly at the visitor, as if they deeply sympathized.

“Yeah,” he repeated cheerfully.

“He thought the sea air would make him well and strong again,” said Fifi eagerly. “That’s why he came down here. Isn’t that it, Mr. Hopkins?”

“You said it, sister,” agreed Mr. Hopkins, nodding.

“So you see, Aunt Cal,” smiled Fifi, “you and Aunt Jo aren’t the only two people who believe in the medicinal quality of this location.”

“No,” agreed Aunt Cal faintly. “There are — there are three of us now.”

Dinner was announced.

“Would you — would you” — Aunt Cal braced herself and looked Mr. Hopkins in the eye — “would you like to wash your hands before dinner?”

“Don’t mention it.” Mr. Hopkins waved his fingers at her carelessly.

They went in to dinner, and after some furtive backing and bumping due to the two aunts trying to keep as far as possible from Mr. Hopkins, sat down at table.

“Mr. Hopkins lives in the woods,” said Fifi. “He has a little house all by himself, where he cooks his own meals and does his own washing week in and week out.”

“How fascinating!” said Aunt Jo, looking searchingly at their guest for some signs of the scholarly recluse. “Have you been living near here for some time?”

“Not so long,” he answered with a leer. “But I’m stuck on it, see? I’ll maybe stay here till I rot.”

“Are you — do you live far away?” Aunt Cal was wondering what price she could get for the house at a forced sale, and how she and her sister could ever bear to move.

“Just a mile down the line… This is a pretty gal you got here,’’ he added, indicating their niece with his spoon.

“Why — yes.” The two ladies glanced uneasily at Fifi.

“Some day I’m going to pick her up and run away with her,” he added pleasantly.

Aunt Cal, with a heroic effort, switched the subject away from their niece. They discussed Mr. Hopkins’ shack in the woods. Mr. Hopkins liked it well enough, he confessed, except for the presence of minute animal life, a small fault in an otherwise excellent habitat.

After dinner Fifi and Mr. Hopkins went out to the porch, while her aunts sat side by side on the sofa turning over the pages of magazines and from time to time glancing at each other with stricken eyes. That a savage had a few minutes since been sitting at their dinner table, that he was now alone with their niece on the dark veranda — no such terrible adventure had ever been allotted to their prim, quiet lives before.

Aunt Cal determined that at nine, whatever the consequences, she would call Fifi inside; but she was saved this necessity, for after half an hour the young lady strolled in calmly and announced that Mr. Hopkins had gone home. They looked at her, speechless.

“Fifi!” groaned Aunt Cal. “My poor child! Sorrow and loneliness have driven you insane!”

“We understand, my dear,” said Aunt Jo, touching her handkerchief to her eyes. “It’s our fault for letting you stay. A few weeks in one of those rest-cure places, or perhaps even a good cabaret, will —  — “

“What do you mean?” Fifi looked from one to the other in surprise. “Do you mean you object to my bringing Mr. Hopkins here?”

Aunt Cal flushed a dull red and her lips shut tight together.

“ ‘Object’ is not the word. You find some horrible, brutal roustabout along the beach —  — “

She broke off and gave a little cry. The door had swung open suddenly and a hairy face was peering into the room.

“I left my stick.”

Mr. Hopkins discovered the unpleasant weapon leaning in the corner and withdrew as unceremoniously as he had come, banging the door shut behind him. Fifi’s aunt sat motionless until his footsteps left the porch. Then Aunt Cal went swiftly to the door and pulled down the latch.

“I don’t suppose he’ll try to rob us tonight,” she said grimly, “because he must know we’ll be prepared. But I’ll warn Percy to go around the yard several times during the night.”

“Rob you!” cried Fifi incredulously.

“Don’t excite yourself, Fifi,” commanded Aunt Cal. “Just rest quietly in that chair while I call up your mother.”

“I don’t want you to call up my mother.”

“Sit calmly and close your eyes and try to — try to count sheep jumping over a fence.”

“Am I never to see another man unless he has a cutaway coat on?” exclaimed Fifi with flashing eyes. “Is this the Dark Ages, or the century of — of illumination? Mr. Hopkins is one of the most attractive eggs I’ve ever met in my life.”

“Mr. Hopkins is a savage!” said Aunt Cal succinctly.

“Mr. Hopkins is a very attractive egg.”

“A very attractive what?”

“A very attractive egg.”

“Mr. Hopkins is a — a — an unspeakable egg,” proclaimed Aunt Cal, adopting Fifi’s locution.

“Just because he’s natural,” cried Fifi impatiently. “All right, I don’t care; he’s good enough for me.”

The situation, it seemed, was even worse than they thought. This was no temporary aberration; evidently Fifi, in the reaction from her recent fiance, was interested in this outrageous man. She had met him several days ago, she confessed, and she intended to see him tomorrow. They had a date to go walking.

The worst of it was that after Fifi had gone scornfully to bed, Aunt

Cal called up her mother — and found that her mother was not at home; her mother had gone to White Sulphur Springs and wouldn’t be home for a week. It left the situation definitely in the hands of Aunt Cal and Aunt Jo, and the situation came to a head the next afternoon at tea time, when Percy rushed in upon them excitedly through the kitchen door.

“Miss Marsden,” he exclaimed in a shocked, offended voice, “I want to give up my position!”

“Why, Percy!”

“I can’t help it. I lived here on the Point for more’n forty-five years, and I never seen such a sight as I seen just now.”

“What’s the matter?” cried the two ladies, springing up in wild alarm.

“Go to the window and look for yourself. Miss Fifi is kissing a tramp in broad daylight, down on the beach!”

III

Five minutes later two maiden ladies were making their way across the sand toward a couple who stood close together on the shore, sharply outlined against the bright afternoon sky. As they came closer Fifi and Mr. Hopkins, absorbed in the contemplation of each other, perceived them and drew lingeringly apart. Aunt Cal began to speak when they were still thirty yards away.

“Go into the house, Fifi!” she cried.

Fifi looked at Mr. Hopkins, who touched her hand reassuringly and nodded. As if under the influence of a charm, Fifi turned away from him, and with her head lowered walked with slender grace toward the house.

“Now, my man,” said Aunt Cal, folding her arms, “what are your intentions?”

Mr. Hopkins returned her glare rudely. Then he gave a low hoarse laugh.

“What’s that to you?” he demanded.

“It’s everything to us. Miss Marsden is our niece, and your attentions are unwelcome — not to say obnoxious.”

Mr. Hopkins turned half away.

“Aw, go on and blab your mouth out!” he advised her.

Aunt Cal tried a new approach.

“What if I were to tell you that Miss Marsden were mentally deranged?”

“What’s that?”

“She’s — she’s a little crazy.”

He smiled contemptuously.

“What’s the idea? Crazy ‘cause she likes me?”

“That merely indicates it,” answered Aunt Cal bravely. “She’s had an unfortunate love affair and it’s affected her mind. Look here!” She opened the purse that swung at her waist. “If I give you fifty — a hundred dollars right now in cash, will you promise to move yourself ten miles up the beach?”

“Ah-h-h-h!” he exclaimed, so venomously that the two ladies swayed together.

“Two hundred!” cried Aunt Cal, with a catch in her voice.

He shook his finger at them.

“You can’t buy me!” he growled. “I’m as good as anybody. There’s chauffeurs and such that marry millionaires’ daughters every day in the week. This is Umerica, a free country, see?”

“You won’t give her up?” Aunt Cal swallowed hard on the words. “You won’t stop bothering her and go away?”

He bent over suddenly and scooped up a large double handful of sand, which he threw in a high parabola so that it scattered down upon the horrified ladies, enveloping them for a moment in a thick mist. Then laughing once again in his hoarse, boorish way, he turned and set off at a loping run along the sand.

In a daze the two women brushed the casual sand from their shoulders and walked stiffly toward the house.

“I’m younger than you are,” said Aunt Jo firmly when they reached the living room. “I want a chance now to see what I can do.”

She went to the telephone and called a New York number.

“Doctor Roswell Gallup’s office? Is Doctor Gallup there?” Aunt Cal sat down on the sofa and gazed tragically at the ceiling. “Doctor Gallup? This is Miss Josephine Marsden, of Montauk Point… Doctor Gallup, a very curious state of affairs has arisen concerning my niece. She has become entangled with a — a — an unspeakable egg.” She gasped as she said this, and went on to explain in a few words the uncanny nature of the situation.

“And I think that perhaps psychoanalysis might clear up what my sister and I have been unable to handle.”

Doctor Gallup was interested. It appeared to be exactly his sort of a case.

“There’s a train in half an hour that will get you here at nine o’clock,” said Aunt Jo. “We can give you dinner and accommodate you overnight.”

She hung up the receiver.

“There! Except for our change from bridge to mah-jongg, this will be the first really modern step we’ve ever taken in our lives.”

The hours passed slowly. At seven Fifi came down to dinner, as unperturbed as though nothing had happened; and her aunts played up bravely to her calmness, determined to say nothing until the doctor had actually arrived. After dinner Aunt Jo suggested mah-jongg, but Fifi declared that she would rather read, and settled on the sofa with a volume of the encyclopedia. Looking over her shoulder, Aunt Cal noted with alarm that she had turned to the article on the Australian bush.

It was very quiet in the room. Several times Fifi raised her head as if listening, and once she got up and went to the door and stared out for a long time into the night. Her aunts were both poised in their chairs to rush after her if she showed signs of bolting, but after a moment she closed the door with a sigh and returned to her chair. It was with relief that a little after nine they heard the sound of automobile wheels on the shell drive and knew that Doctor Gallup had arrived at last.

He was a short, stoutish man, with alert black eyes and an intense manner. He came in, glancing eagerly about him, and his eye brightened as it fell on Fifi like the eye of a hungry man when he sees prospective food. Fifi returned his gaze curiously, evidently unaware that his arrival had anything to do with herself.

“Is this the lady?” he cried, dismissing her aunts with a perfunctory handshake and approaching Fifi at a lively hop.

“This gentleman is Doctor Gallup, dear,” beamed Aunt Jo, expectant and reassured. “He’s an old friend of mine who’s going to help you.”

“Of course I am!” insisted Doctor Gallup, jumping around her cordially. “I’m going to fix her up just fine.”

“He understands everything about the human mind,” said Aunt Jo.

“Not everything,” admitted Doctor Gallup, smiling modestly. “But we often make the regular doctors wonder.” He turned roguishly to Fifi. “Yes, young lady, we often make the regular doctors wonder.”

Clapping his hands together decisively, he drew up a chair in front of Fifi.

“Come,” he cried, “let us see what can be the matter. We’ll start by having you tell me the whole story in your own way. Begin.”

“The story,” remarked Fifi, with a slight yawn, “happens to be none of your business.”

“None of my business!” he exclaimed incredulously. “Why, my girl, I’m trying to help you! Come now, tell old Doctor Gallup the whole story.”

“Let my aunts tell you,” said Fifi coldly. “They seem to know more about it than I do.”

Doctor Gallup frowned.

“They’ve already outlined the situation. Perhaps I’d better begin by asking you questions.”

“You’ll answer the doctor’s questions, won’t you, dear?” coaxed Aunt Jo. “Doctor Gallup is one of the most modern doctors in New York.”

“I’m an old-fashioned girl,” objected Fifi maliciously. “And I think it’s immoral to pry into people’s affairs. But go ahead and I’ll try to think up a comeback for everything you say.”

Doctor Gallup overlooked the unnecessary rudeness of this remark and mustered a professional smile.

“Now, Miss Marsden, I understand that about a month ago you came out here for a rest.”

Fifi shook her head.

“No, I came out to hide my face.”

“You were ashamed because you had broken your engagement?”

“Terribly. If you desert a man at the altar you brand him for the rest of his life.”

“Why?” he demanded sharply.

“Why not?”

“You’re not asking me. I’m asking you. . . . However, let that pass. Now, when you arrived here, how did you pass your time?”

“I walked mostly — walked along the beach.”

“It was on one of these walks that you met the — ah — person your aunt told me of over the telephone?”

Fifi pinkened slightly.

“Yes.”

“What was he doing when you first saw him?”

“He was looking down at me out of a tree.”

There was a general exclamation from her aunts, in which the word “monkey” figured.

“Did he attract you immediately?” demanded Doctor Gallup.

“Why, not especially. At first I only laughed.”

“I see. Now, as I understand, this man was very — ah — very originally clad.”

“Yes,” agreed Fifi.

“He was unshaven?”

“Yes.”

“Ah!” Doctor Gallup seemed to go through a sort of convolution like a medium coming out of a trance. “Miss Fifi,” he cried out triumphantly, “did you ever read The Sheik?”

“Never heard of it.”

“Did you ever read any book in which a girl was wooed by a so-called sheik or cave man?”

“Not that I remember.”

“What, then, was your favorite book when you were a girl?”

“Little Lord Fauntleroy.”

Doctor Gallup was considerably disappointed. He decided to approach the case from a new angle.

“Miss Fifi, won’t you admit that there’s nothing behind this but some fancy in your head?”

“On the contrary,” said Fifi startlingly, “there’s a great deal more behind it than any of you suspect. He’s changed my entire attitude on life.”

“What do you mean?”

She seemed on the point of making some declaration, but after a moment her lovely eyes narrowed obstinately and she remained silent.

“Miss Fifi” — Doctor Gallup raised his voice sharply — “the daughter of C. T. J. Calhoun, the biscuit man, ran away with a taxi driver. Do you know what she’s doing now?”

“No.”

“She’s working in a laundry on the East Side, trying to keep her child’s body and soul together.”

He looked at her keenly; there were signs of agitation in her face.

“Estelle Holliday ran away in 1920 with her father’s second man!” he cried. “Shall I tell you where I heard of her last? She stumbled into a charity hospital, bruised from head to foot, because her drunken husband had beaten her to within an inch of her life!”

Fifi was breathing hard. Her aunts leaned forward. Doctor Gallup sprang suddenly to his feet.

“But they were playing safe compared to you!” he shouted. “They didn’t woo an ex-convict with blood on his hands.”

And now Fifi was on her feet, too, her eyes flashing fire.

“Be careful!” she cried. “Don’t go too far!”

“I can’t go too far!” He reached in his pocket, plucked out a folded evening paper and slapped it down on the table.

“Read that, Miss Fifi!” he shouted. “It’ll tell you how four man-killers entered a bank in West Crampton three weeks ago. It’ll tell you how they shot down the cashier in cold blood, and how one of them, the most brutal, the most ferocious, the most inhuman, got away. And it will tell you that that human gorilla is now supposed to be hiding in the neighborhood of Montauk Point!”

There was a short stifled sound as Aunt Jo and Aunt Cal, who

had always done everything in complete unison, fainted away together. At the same moment there was loud, violent knocking, like the knocking of a heavy club, upon the barred front door.

IV

“Who’s there?” cried Doctor Gallup, starting. “Who’s there — or I’ll shoot!”

His eyes roved quickly about the room, looking for a possible weapon.

“Who are you?” shouted a voice from the porch. “You better open up or I’ll blow a hole through the door.”

“What’ll we do?” exclaimed Doctor Gallup, perspiring freely.

Fifi, who had been sprinkling water impartially upon her aunts, turned around with a scornful smile.

“It’s just Percy, the yardman,” she explained. “He probably thinks that you’re a burglar.”

She went to the door and lifted the latch. Percy, gun in hand, peered cautiously into the room.

“It’s all right, Percy. This is just an insane specialist from New York.”

“Everything’s a little insane tonight,” announced Percy in a frightened voice. “For the last hour I’ve been hearing the sound of oars.”

The eyes of Aunt Jo and Aunt Cal fluttered open simultaneously.

“There’s a fog all over the Point,” went on Percy dazedly, “and it’s got voices in it. I couldn’t see a foot before my face, but I could swear there was boats offshore, and I heard a dozen people talkin’ and callin’ to each other, just as if a lot of ghosts was havin’ a picnic supper on the beach.”

“What was that noise?” cried Aunt Jo, sitting upright.

“The door was locked,” explained Percy, “so I knocked on it with my gun.”

“No, I mean now!”

They listened. Through the open door came a low, groaning sound, issuing out of the dark mist which covered shore and sea alike.

“We’ll go right down and find out!” cried Doctor Gallup, who had recovered his shattered equilibrium; and, as the moaning sound drifted in again, like the last agony of some monster from the deep, he added, “I think you needed more than a psychoanalyst here tonight. Is there another gun in the house?”

Aunt Cal got up and took a small pearl-mounted revolver from the desk drawer.

“You can’t leave us in this house alone,” she declared emphatically. “Wherever you go we’re going tool”

Keeping close together, the four of them, for Fifi had suddenly disappeared, made their way outdoors and down the porch steps, where they hesitated a moment, peering into the impenetrable haze, more mysterious than darkness upon their eyes.

“It’s out there,” whispered Percy, facing the sea.

“Forward we go!” muttered Doctor Gallup tensely. “I’m inclined to think this is all a question of nerves.”

They moved slowly and silently along the sand, until suddenly Percy caught hold of the doctor’s arm.

“Listen!” he whispered sharply.

They all became motionless. Out of the neighboring darkness a dim, indistinguishable figure had materialized, walking with unnatural rigidity along the shore. Pressed against his body he carried some long, dark drape that hung almost to the sand. Immediately he disappeared into the mist, to be succeeded by another phantom walking at the same military gait, this one with something white and faintly terrible dangling from his arm. A moment later, not ten yards away from them, in the direction in which the figure had gone, a faint dull glow sprang into life, proceeding apparently from behind the largest of the dunes.

Huddled together, they advanced toward the dune, hesitated, and then, following Doctor Gallup’s example, dropped to their knees and began to crawl cautiously up its shoreward side. The glow became stronger as they reached the top, and at the same moment their heads popped up over the crest. This is what they saw:

In the light of four strong pocket flash lights, borne by four sailors in spotless white, a gentleman was shaving himself, standing clad only in athletic underwear upon the sand. Before his eyes an irreproachable valet held a silver mirror which gave back the soapy reflection of his face. To right and left stood two additional men-servants, one with a dinner coat and trousers hanging from his arm and the other bearing a white stiff shirt whose studs glistened in the glow of the electric lamps. There was not a sound except the dull scrape of the razor along its wielder’s face and the intermittent groaning sound that blew in out of the sea.

But it was not the bizarre nature of the ceremony, with its dim, weird surroundings under the unsteady light, that drew from the two women a short, involuntary sigh. It was the fact that the face in the mirror, the unshaven half of it, was terribly familiar, and in a moment they knew to whom that half face belonged — it was the countenance of their niece’s savage wooer who had lately prowled half naked along the beach.

Even as they looked he completed one side of his face, whereupon a valet stepped forward and with a scissors sheared off the exterior growth on the other, disclosing, in its entirety now, the symmetrical visage of a young, somewhat haggard but not unhandsome man. He lathered the bearded side, pulled the razor quickly over it and then applied a lotion to the whole surface, and inspected himself with considerable interest in the mirror. The sight seemed to please him, for he smiled. At a word one of the valets held forth the trousers in which he now incased his likely legs. Diving into his open shirt, he procured the collar, flipped a proper black bow with a practiced hand and slipped into the waiting dinner coat. After a transformation which had taken place before their very eyes, Aunt Cal and Aunt Jo found themselves gazing upon as immaculate and impeccable a young man as they had ever seen.

“Walters!” he said suddenly, in a clear, cultured voice.

One of the white-clad sailors stepped forward and saluted.

“You can take the boats back to the yacht. You ought to be able to find it all right by the foghorn.”

“Yes, sir.”

“When the fog lifts you’d better stand out to sea. Meanwhile, wireless New York to send down my car. It’s to call for me at the Marsden house on Montauk Point.”

As the sailor turned away, his torch flashed upward accidentally wavering upon the four amazed faces which were peering down at the curious scene.

“Look there, sir!” he exclaimed.

The four torches picked out the eavesdropping party at the top of the hill.

“Hands up, there!” cried Percy, pointing his rifle down into the glare of light.

“Miss Marsden!” called the young man eagerly. “I was just coming to call.”

“Don’t move!” shouted Percy; and then to the doctor, “Had I better fire?”

“Certainly not!” cried Doctor Gallup. “Young man, does your name happen to be what I think it is?”

The young man bowed politely.

“My name is George Van Tyne.”

A few minutes later the immaculate young man and two completely bewildered ladies were shaking hands. “I owe you more apologies than I can ever make,” he confessed, “for having sacrificed you to the strange whim of a young girl.”

“What whim?” demanded Aunt Cal.

“Why” — he hesitated — “you see, all my life I have devoted much attention to the so-called niceties of conduct; niceties of dress, of manners, of behavior —  — “

He broke off apologetically.

“Go on,” commanded Aunt Cal.

“And your niece has too. She always considered herself rather a model of — of civilized behavior” — he flushed — “until she met me.”

“I see,” Doctor Gallup nodded. “She couldn’t bear to marry anyone who was more of a — shall we say, a dandy? — than herself.”

“Exactly,” said George Van Tyne, with a perfect eighteenth-century bow. “It was necessary to show her what a — what an —  — “

“ —  — unspeakable egg,” supplied Aunt Josephine.

“ —  — what an unspeakable egg I could be. It was difficult, but not impossible. If you know what’s correct, you must necessarily know what’s incorrect; and my aim was to be as ferociously incorrect as possible. My one hope is that some day you’ll be able to forgive me for throwing the sand — I’m afraid that my impersonation ran away with me.”

A moment later they were all walking toward the house.

“But I still can’t believe that a gentleman could be so — so unspeakable,” gasped Aunt Jo. “And what will Fifi say?”

“Nothing,” answered Van Tyne cheerfully. “You see, Fifi knew about it all along. She even recognized me in the tree that first day. She begged me to — to desist until this afternoon; but I refused until she had kissed me tenderly, beard and all.”

Aunt Cal stopped suddenly.

“This is all very well, young man,” she said sternly; “but since you have so many sides to you, how do we know that in one of your off moments you aren’t the murderer who’s hiding out on the Point?”

“The murderer?” asked Van Tyne blankly. “What murderer?”

“Ah, I can explain that, Miss Marsden.” Doctor Gallup smiled apologetically. “As a matter of fact, there wasn’t any murderer.”

“No murderer?” Aunt Cal looked at him sharply.

“No, I invented the bank robbery and the escaped murderer and all. I was merely applying a form of strong medicine to your niece.”

Aunt Cal looked at him scornfully and turned to her sister. “All your modern ideas are not so successful as mah-jongg,” she remarked significantly.

The fog had blown back to sea, and as they came in sight of the house the lamps were glowing out into the darkness. On the porch waited an immaculate girl in a gleaming white dress, strung with beads which glistened in the new moonlight.

“The perfect man,” murmured Aunt Jo, flushing, “is, of course, he who will make any sacrifice.”

Van Tyne did not answer; he was engaged in removing some imperceptible flaw, less visible than a hair, from his elbow, and when he had finished he smiled. There was now not the faintest imperfection anywhere about him, except where the strong beating of his heart disturbed faintly the satin facing of his coat.

PRESUMPTION

Sitting by the window and staring out into the early autumn dusk, San Juan Chandler remembered only that Noel was coming tomorrow; but when, with a romantic sound that was half gasp, half sigh, he turned from the window, snapped on the light and looked at himself in the mirror, his expression became more materially complicated. He leaned closer. Delicacy balked at the abominable word “pimple”, but some such blemish had undoubtedly appeared on his cheek within the last hour, and now formed, with a pair from last week, a distressing constellation of three. Going into the bathroom adjoining his room — Juan had never possessed a bathroom to himself before — he opened a medicine closet, and, after peering about, carefully extracted a promising-looking jar of black ointment and covered each slight protuberance with a black gluey mound. Then, strangely dotted, he returned to the bedroom, put out the light and resumed his vigil over the shadowy garden.

He waited. That roof among the trees on the hill belonged to Noel Garneau’s house. She was coming back to it tomorrow; he would see her there… A loud clock on the staircase inside struck seven. Juan went to the glass and removed the ointment with a handkerchief. To his chagrin the spots were still there, even slightly irritated from the chemical sting of the remedy. That settled it — no more chocolate malted milks or eating between meals during his visit to Culpepper Bay. Taking the lid from the jar of talcum he had observed on the dressing table, he touched the laden puff to his cheek. Immediately his brows and lashes bloomed with snow and he coughed chokingly, observing that the triangle of humiliation was still observable upon his otherwise handsome face.

“Disgusting,” he muttered to himself. “I never saw anything so disgusting.” At twenty, such childish phenomena should be behind him.

Downstairs three gongs, melodious and metallic, hummed and sang. He listened for a moment, fascinated. Then he wiped the powder from his face, ran a comb through his yellow hair and went down to dinner.

Dinner at Cousin Cora’s he had found embarrassing. She was so stiff and formal about things like that, and so familiar about Juan’s private affairs. The first night of his visit he had tried politely to pull out her chair and bumped into the maid; the second night he remembered the experience — but so did the maid, and Cousin Cora seated herself unassisted. At home Juan was accustomed to behave as he liked; like all children of deferent and indulgent mothers, he lacked both confidence and good manners. Tonight there were guests. “This is San Juan Chandler, my cousin’s son — Mrs Holyoke — and Mr. Holyoke.”

The phrase “my cousin’s son” seemed to explain him away, seemed to account for his being in Miss Chandler’s house: “You understand — we must have our poor relations with us occasionally.” But a tone which implied that would be rude — and certainly Cousin Cora, with all her social position, couldn’t be rude.

Mr and Mrs Holyoke acknowledged the introduction politely and coolly and dinner was served. The conversation, dictated by Cousin Cora, bored Juan. It was about the garden and about her father, for whom she lived and who was dying slowly and unwillingly upstairs. Towards the salad Juan was wedged into the conversation by a question from Mr Holyoke and a quick look from his cousin.

“I’m just staying for a week,” he answered politely; “then I’ve got to go home because college opens pretty soon.”

“Where are you at college?”

Juan named his college, adding almost apologetically, “You see, my father went there.”

He wished that he could have answered that he was at Yale or Princeton, where he wanted to go. He was prominent at Henderson and belonged to a good fraternity, but it annoyed him when people occasionally failed to recognize his alma mater’s name.

“I suppose you’ve met all the young people here,” supposed Mrs Holyoke “ — my daughter?”

“Oh, yes” — her daughter was the dumpy, ugly girl with the thick spectacles — “oh, yes.” And he added, “I knew some people who lived here before I came.”

“The little Garneau girl,” explained Cousin Cora.

“Oh, yes. Noel Garneau,” agreed Mrs Holyoke. “Her mother’s a great beauty. How old is Noel now? She must be —  — “

“Seventeen,” supplied Juan; “but she’s old for her age.”

“Juan met her on a ranch last summer. They were on a ranch together. What is it that they call those ranches, Juan?”

“Dude ranches.”

“Dude ranches. Juan and another boy worked for their board.” Juan saw no reason why Cousin Cora should have supplied this information; she continued on an even more annoying note: “Noel’s mother sent her out there to keep her out of mischief, but Juan says the ranch was pretty gay itself.”

Mr Holyoke supplied a welcome change of subject.

“Your name is —  — “ he inquired, smiling and curious.

“San Juan Chandler. My father was wounded in the battle of San Juan Hill and so they called me after it — like Kenesaw Mountain Landis.”

He had explained this so many times that the sentences rolled off automatically — in school he had been called Santy, in college he was Don.

“You must come to dinner while you’re here,” said Mrs Holyoke vaguely.

The conversation slipped away from him as he realized freshly, strongly, that Noel would arrive tomorrow. And she was coming because he was here. She had cut short a visit in the Adirondacks on receipt of his letter. Would she like him now — in this place that was so different from Montana? There was a spaciousness, an air of money and pleasure about Culpepper for which San Juan Chandler — a shy, handsome, spoiled, brilliant, Penniless boy from a small Ohio city — was unprepared. At home, where father was a retired clergyman, Juan went with the nice people. He didn’t realize until this visit to a fashionable New England resort that where there are enough rich families to form a self-sufficient and exclusive group, such a group is invariably formed. On the dude ranch they had all dressed alike; here his ready-made Prince of Wales suit seemed exaggerated in style, his hat correct only in theory — an imitation hat — his very ties only projections of the ineffable Platonic ties which were worn here at Culpepper Bay. Yet all the differences were so small that he was unable quite to discern them.

But from the morning three days ago when he had stepped off the train into a group of young people who were waiting at the station for some friend of their own, he had been uneasy; and Cousin Cora’s introductions, which seemed to foist him horribly upon whomever he was introduced to, did not lessen his discomfort. He thought mechanically that she was being kind, and considered himself lucky that her invitation had coincided with his wild desire to see Noel Garneau again. He did not realize that in three days he had come to hate Cousin Cora’s cold and snobbish patronage.

Noel’s fresh, adventurous voice on the telephone next morning made his own voice quiver with nervous happiness. She would call for him at two and they would spend the afternoon together. All morning he lay in the garden, trying unsuccessfully to renew his summer tan in the mild lemon light of the September sun, sitting up quickly whenever he heard the sound of Cousin Cora’s garden shears at the end of a neighbouring border. He was back in his room, still meddling desperately with the white powder puff, when Noel’s roadster stopped outside and she came up the front walk. Noel’s eyes were dark blue, almost violet, and her lips, Juan had often thought, were like very small, very soft, red cushions — only cushions sounded all wrong, for they were really the most delicate lips in the world. When she talked they parted to the shape of “Oo!” and her eyes opened wide as though she was torn between tears and laughter at the poignancy of what she was saying. Already, at seventeen, she knew that men hung on her words in a way that frightened her. To Juan her most indifferent remarks assumed a highly ponderable significance and begot an intensity in him — a fact which Noel had several times found somewhat of a strain. He ran downstairs, down the gravel path towards her. “Noel, my dear,” he wanted so much to say, “you are the loveliest thing — the loveliest thing. My heart turns over when I see your beautiful face and smell that sweet fresh smell you have around you.” That would have been the precious, the irreplaceable truth. Instead he faltered, “Why, hello, Noel! How are you?… Well, I certainly am glad. Well, is this your car? What kind is it? Well, you certainly look fine.”

And he couldn’t look at her, because when he did his face seemed to him to be working idiotically — like someone else’s face. He got in, they drove off and he made a mighty effort to compose himself; but as her hand left the steering wheel to fall lightly on his, a perverse instinct made him jerk his hand away. Noel perceived the embarrassment and was puzzled and — sorry.

They went to the tennis tournament at the Culpepper Club. He was so little aware of anything except Noel that later he told Cousin Cora they hadn’t seen the tennis, and believed it himself.

Afterwards they loitered about the grounds, stopped by innumerable people who welcomed Noel home. Two men made him uneasy — one a small handsome youth of his own age with shining brown eyes that were bright as the glass eyes of a stuffed owl; the other a tall, languid dandy of twenty-five who was introduced to her, Juan rightly deduced, at his own request.

When they were in a group of girls he was more comfortable. He was able to talk, because being with Noel gave him confidence before these others, and his confidence before the others made him more confident with Noel. The situation improved.

There was one girl, a sharp, pretty blonde named Holly Morgan, with . whom he had spent some facetiously sentimental hours the day before, and in order to show Noel that he had been able to take care of himself before her return he made a point of talking aside to Holly Morgan. Holly was not responsive. Juan was Noel’s property, and though Holly liked him, she did not like him nearly well enough to annoy Noel.

“What time do you want me for dinner, Noel?” she asked.

“Eight o’clock,” said Noel. “Billy Harper’ll call for you.”

Juan felt a twinge of disappointment. He had thought that he and Noel were to be alone for dinner; that afterwards they would have a long talk on the dark veranda and he would kiss her lips as he had upon that never-to-be-forgotten Montana night, and give her his DKE pin to wear. Perhaps the others would leave early — he had told Holly Morgan of his love for Noel; she should have sense enough to know.

At twilight Noel dropped him at Miss Chandler’s gate, lingered for a moment with the engine cut off. The promise of the evening — the first lights in the houses along the bay, the sound of a remote piano, the little coolness in the wind — swung them both up suddenly into that paradise which Juan, drunk with ecstasy and terror, had been unable to evoke.

“Are you glad to see me?” she whispered.

“Am I glad?” The words trembled on his tongue. Miserably he struggled to bend his emotion into a phrase, a look, a gesture, but his mind chilled at the thought that nothing, nothing, nothing could express what he felt in his heart.

“You embarrass me,” he said wretchedly. “I don’t know what to say.” Noel waited, attuned to what she expected, sympathetic, but too young quite to see that behind the mask of egotism, of moody childishness, which the intensity of Juan’s devotion compelled him to wear, there was a tremendous emotion.

“Don’t be embarrassed,” Noel said. She was listening to the music now a tune they had danced to in the Adirondacks. The wings of a trance folded about her and the inscrutable someone who waited always in the middle distance loomed down over her with passionate words and dark romantic eyes. Almost mechanically, she started the engine and slipped the gear into first.

“At eight o’clock,” she said, almost abstractedly. “Good-bye, Juan.” The car moved off down the road. At the corner she turned and waved her hand and Juan waved back, happier than he had ever been in his life, his soul dissolved to a sweet gas that buoyed up his body like a balloon. Then the roadster was out of sight and, all unaware, he had lost her.

II

Cousin Cora’s chauffeur took him to Noel’s door. The other male guest, Billy Harper, was, he discovered, the young man with the bright brown eyes whom he had met that afternoon. Juan was afraid of him; he was on such familiar, facetious terms with the two girls — towards Noel his attitude seemed almost irreverent — that Juan was slighted during the conversation at dinner. They talked of the Adirondacks and they all seemed to know the group who had been there. Noel and Holly spoke of boys at Cambridge and New Haven and of how wonderful it was that they were going to school in New York this whiter. Juan meant to invite Noel to the autumn dance at his college, but he thought that he had better wait and do it in a letter, later on. He was glad when dinner was over.

The girls went upstairs. Juan and Billy Harper smoked.

“She certainly is attractive,” broke out Juan suddenly, his repression bursting into words.

“Who? Noel?”

“Yes.”

“She’s a nice girl,” agreed Harper gravely.

Juan fingered the DKE pin in his pocket.

“She’s wonderful,” he said. “I like Holly Morgan pretty well — I was handing her a sort of line yesterday afternoon — but Noel’s really the most attractive girl I ever knew.”

Harper looked at him curiously, but Juan, released from the enforced and artificial smile of dinner, continued enthusiastically: “Of course it’s silly to fool with two girls. I mean, you’ve got to be careful not to get in too deep.”

Billy Harper didn’t answer. Noel and Holly came downstairs. Holly suggested bridge, but Juan didn’t play bridge, so they sat talking by the fire. In some fashion Noel and Billy Harper became involved in a conversation about dates and friends, and Juan began boasting to Holly Morgan, who sat beside him on the sofa.

“You must come to a prom at college,” he said suddenly. “Why don’t you? It’s a small college, but we have the best bunch in our house and the proms are fun.”

“I’d love it.”

“You’d only have to meet the people in our house.”

“What’s that?”

“DKE.” He drew the pin from his pocket. “See?”

Holly examined it, laughed and handed it back.

“I wanted to go to Yale,” he went on, “but my family always go to the same place.”

“I love Yale,” said Holly.

“Yes,” he agreed vaguely, half hearing her, his mind moving between himself and Noel. “You must come up. I’ll write you about it.”

Time passed. Holly played the piano. Noel took a ukulele from the top of the piano, strummed it and hummed. Billy Harper turned the pages of the music. Juan listened, restless, unamused. Then they sauntered out into the dark garden, and finding himself beside Noel at last, Juan walked her quickly ahead until they were alone.

“Noel,” he whispered, “here’s my Deke pin. I want you to have it.”

She looked at him expressionlessly.

“I saw you offering it to Holly Morgan,” she said.

“Noel,” he cried in alarm, “I wasn’t offering it to her. I just showed it to her. Why, Noel, do you think —  — “

“You invited her to the prom.”

“I didn’t. I was just being nice to her.”

The others were close behind. She took the Deke pin quickly and put her finger to his lips in a facile gesture of caress.

He did not realize that she had not been really angry about the pin or the prom, and that his unfortunate egotism was forfeiting her interest.

At eleven o’clock Holly said she must go, and Billy Harper drove his car to the front door.

“I’m going to stay a few minutes if you don’t mind,” said Juan, standing in the door with Noel. “I can walk home.”

Holly and Billy Harper drove away. Noel and Juan strolled back into the drawing-room, where she avoided the couch and sat down in a chair.

“Let’s go out on the veranda,” suggested Juan uncertainly.

“Why?”

“Please, Noel.”

Unwillingly she obeyed. They sat side by side on a canvas settee and he put his arm around her.

“Kiss me,” he whispered. She had never seemed so desirable to him before.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t want to. I don’t kiss people any more.”

“But — me?” he demanded incredulously.

“I’ve kissed too many people. I’ll have nothing left if I keep on kissing people.”

“But you’ll kiss me, Noel?”

“Why?”

He could not even say, “Because I love you.” But he could say it, he knew that he could say it, when she was in his arms.

“If I kiss you once, will you go home?”

“Why, do you want me to go home?”

“I’m tired. I was travelling last night and I can never sleep on a train. Can you? I can never —  — “

Her tendency to leave the subject willingly made him frantic.

“Then kiss me once,” he insisted.

“You promise?”

“You kiss me first.”

“No, Juan, you promise first.”

“Don’t you want to kiss me?”

“Oh-h-h!” she groaned.

With gathering anxiety Juan promised and took her in his arms. For one moment at the touch of her lips, the feeling of her, of Noel, close to him, he forgot the evening, forgot himself — rather became the inspired, romantic self that she had known. But it was too late. Her hands were on his shoulders, pushing him away.

“You promised.”

“Noel —  — “

She got up. Confused and unsatisfied, he followed her to the door.

“Noel —  — “

“Good night, Juan.”

As they stood on the doorstep her eyes rose over the line of dark trees towards the ripe harvest moon. Some glowing thing would happen to her soon, she thought, her mind far away. Something that would dominate her, snatch her up out of life, helpless, ecstatic, exalted.

“Good night, Noel. Noel, please —  — “

“Good night, Juan. Remember we’re going swimming tomorrow. It’s wonderful to see you again. Good night.”

She dosed the door.

III

Towards morning he awoke from a broken sleep, wondering if she had not kissed him because of the three spots on his cheek. He turned on the light and looked at them. Two were almost invisible. He went into the bathroom, doused all three with the black ointment and crept back into bed.

Cousin Cora greeted him stiffly at breakfast next morning.

“You kept your great-uncle awake last night,” she said. “He heard you moving around in your room.”

“I only moved twice,” he said unhappily. “I’m terribly sorry.”

“He has to have his sleep, you know. We all have to be more considerate when there’s someone sick. Young people don’t always think of that. And he was so unusually well when you came.”

It was Sunday, and they were to go swimming at Holly Morgan’s house, where a crowd always collected on the bright easy beach. Noel called for him, but they arrived before any of his half-humble remarks about the night before had managed to attract her attention. He spoke to those he knew and was introduced to others, made ill at ease again by their cheerful familiarity with one another, by the correct informality of their clothes. He

was sure they noticed that he had worn only one suit during his visit to Culpepper Bay, varying it with white flannel trousers. Both pairs of trousers were out of press now, and after keeping his great-uncle awake he had not felt like bothering Cousin Cora about it at breakfast.

Again he tried to talk to Holly, with the vague idea of making Noel jealous, but Holly was busy and she eluded him. It was ten minutes before he extricated himself from a conversation with the obnoxious Miss Holyoke. At the moment he managed this he perceived to his horror that Noel was gone.

When he last saw her she had been engaged in a light but somehow intent conversation with the tall well-dressed stranger she had met yesterday. Now she wasn’t in sight. Miserable and horribly alone, he strolled up and down the beach, trying to look as if he were having a good time, seeming to watch the bathers, but keeping a sharp eye out for Noel. He felt that his self-conscious perambulations were attracting unbearable attention and sat down unhappily on a sand dune beside Billy Harper. But Billy Harper was neither cordial nor communicative, and after a minute hailed a man across the beach and went to talk to him.

Juan was desperate. When, suddenly, he spied Noel coming down from the house with the tall man, he stood up with a jerk, convinced that his features were working wildly.

She waved at him.

“A buckle came off my shoe,” she called. “I went to have it put on. I thought you’d gone in swimming.”

He stood perfectly still, not trusting his voice to answer. He understood that she was through with him; there was someone else. Immediately he wanted above all things to be away. As they came nearer, the tall man glanced at him negligently and resumed his vivacious, intimate conversation with Noel. A group suddenly closed around them.

Keeping the group in the corner of his eye, Juan began to move carefully and steadily towards the gate that led to the road. He started when the casual voice of a man behind him said, “Going?” and he answered, “Got to” with what purported to be a reluctant nod. Once behind the shelter of the parked cars, he began to run, slowed down as several chauffeurs looked at him curiously. It was a mile and a half to the Chandler house and the day was broiling, but he walked fast lest Noel, leaving the party — “With that man,” he thought bitterly — should overtake him trudging along the road. That would be more than he could bear.

There was the sound of a car behind him. Immediately Juan left the road and sought concealment behind a convenient hedge. It was no one from the party, but thereafter he kept an eye out for available cover, walking fast, or even running, over unpromising open spaces.

He was within sight of his cousin’s house when it happened. Hot and dishevelled, he had scarcely flattened himself against the back of a tree when Noel’s roadster, with the tall man at the wheel, flashed by down the road. Juan stepped out and looked after them. Then, blind with sweat and misery, he continued on towards home.

IV

At luncheon, Cousin Cora looked at him closely.

“What’s the trouble?” she inquired. “Did something go wrong at the beach this morning?”

“Why, no,” he exclaimed in simulated astonishment. “What made you think that?”

“You have such a funny look. I thought perhaps you’d had some trouble with the little Garneau girl.”

He hated her.

“No, not at all.”

“You don’t want to get any idea in your head about her,” said Cousin Cora.

“What do you mean?” He knew with a start what she meant.

“Any ideas about Noel Garneau. You’ve got your own way to make.” Juan’s face burned. He was unable to answer. “I say that in all kindness. You’re not in any position to think anything serious about Noel Garneau.”

Her implications cut deeper than her words. Oh, he had seen well enough that he was not essentially of Noel’s sort, that being nice in Akron wasn’t enough at Culpepper Bay. He had that realization that comes to all boys in his position that for every advantage — that was what his mother called this visit to Cousin Cora’s — he paid a harrowing price in self-esteem. But a world so hard as to admit such an intolerable state of affairs was beyond his comprehension. His mind rejected it all completely, as it had rejected the dictionary name for the three spots on his face. He wanted to let go, to vanish, to be home. He determined to go home tomorrow, but after this heart-rending conversation he decided to put off the announcement until tonight.

That afternoon he took a detective story from the library and retired upstairs to read on his bed. He finished the book by four o’clock and came down to change it for another. Cousin Cora was on the veranda arranging three tables for tea.

“I thought you were at the club,” she exclaimed in surprise. “I thought you’d gone up to the club.”

“I’m tired,” he said. “I thought I’d read.”

“Tired!” she exclaimed. “A boy your age! You ought to be out in the open air playing golf — that’s why you have that spot on your cheek” — Juan winced; his experiments with the black salve had irritated it to a sharp redness — “instead of lying around reading on a day like this.”

“I haven’t any clubs,” said Juan hurriedly.

“Mr Holyoke told you you could use his brother’s clubs. He spoke to the caddie master. Run on now. You’ll find lots of young people up there who want to play. I’ll begin to think you’re not having a good time.”

In agony Juan saw himself dubbing about the course alone — seeing Noel coming under his eye. He never wanted to see Noel again except out in Montana — some bright day, when she would come saying, “Juan, I never knew — never understood what your love was.”

Suddenly he remembered that Noel had gone into Boston for the afternoon. She would not be there. The horror of playing alone suddenly vanished.

The caddie master looked at him disapprovingly as he displayed his guest card, and Juan nervously bought a half-dozen balls at a dollar each in an effort to neutralize the imagined hostility. On the first tee he glanced around. It was after four and there was no one in sight except two old men practising drives from the top of a little hill. As he addressed his ball he heard someone come up on the tee behind him and he breathed easier at the sharp crack that sent his ball a hundred and fifty yards down the fairway.

“Playing alone?”

He looked around. A stout man of fifty, with a huge face, high forehead, long wide upper lip and great undershot jaw, was taking a driver from a bulging bag. “Why — yes.”

“Mind if I go round with you?”

“Not at all.”

Juan greeted the suggestion with a certain gloomy relief. They were evenly matched, the older man’s steady short shots keeping pace with Juan’s occasional brilliancy. Not until the seventh hole did the conversation rise above the fragmentary boasting and formalized praise which forms the small talk of golf.

“Haven’t seen you around before.”

“I’m just visiting here,” Juan explained, “staying with my cousin, Miss Chandler.”

“Oh yes — know Miss Chandler very well. Nice old snob.”

“What?” inquired Juan.

“Nice old snob, I said. No offence… Your honour, I think.” Not for several holes did Juan venture to comment on his partner’s remark.

“What do you mean when you say she’s a nice old snob?” he inquired with interest.

“Oh, it’s an old quarrel between Miss Chandler and me,” answered the older man brusquely. “She’s an old friend of my wife’s. When we were married and came out to Culpepper Bay for the summer, she tried to freeze us out. Said my wife had no business marrying me. I was an outsider.”

“What did you do?”

“We just let her alone. She came round, but naturally I never had much love for her. She even tried to put her oar in before we were married.” He laughed. “Cora Chandler of Boston — how she used to boss the girls around in those days! At twenty-five she had the sharpest tongue in Back Bay. They were old people there, you know — Emerson and Whittier to dinner and all that. My wife belonged to that crowd too. I was from the Middle West… Oh, too bad. I should have stopped talking. That makes me two up again.”

Suddenly Juan wanted to present his case to this man — not quite as it was, but adorned with a dignity and significance it did not so far possess. It began to round out in his mind as the sempiternal struggle of the poor young man against a snobbish, purse-proud world. This new aspect was comforting, and he put out of his mind the less pleasant realization that, superficially at least, money hadn’t entered into it. He knew in his heart that it was his unfortunate egotism that had repelled Noel, his embarrassment, his absurd attempt to make her jealous with Holly. Only indirectly was his poverty concerned; under different circumstances it might have given a touch of romance.

“I know exactly how you must have felt,” he broke out suddenly as they walked toward the tenth tee. “I haven’t any money and I’m in love with a girl who has — and it seems as if every busybody in the world is determined to keep us apart.”

For a moment Juan believed this. His companion looked at him sharply.

“Does the girl care about you?” he inquired.

“Yes.”

“Well, go after her, young man. All the money in this world hasn’t been made by a long shot.”

“I’m still in college,” said Juan, suddenly taken aback.

“Won’t she wait for you?”

“I don’t know. You see, the pressure’s pretty strong. Her family want her to many a rich man” — his mind visualized the tall well-dressed stranger of this morning and invention soared — “an easterner that’s visiting here, and I’m afraid they’ll all sweep her off her feet. If it’s not this man, it’s the next.”

His friend considered.

“You can’t have everything, you know,” he said presently. “I’m the last man to advise a young man to leave college, especially when I don’t know anything about him or his abilities; but if it’s going to break you up not to get her, you better think about getting to work.”

“I’ve been considering that,” said Juan frowning. The idea was ten seconds old in his mind.

“All girls are crazy now, anyhow,” broke out the older man. “They begin to think of men at fifteen, and by the time they’re seventeen they run off with the chauffeur next door.”

“That’s true,” agreed Juan absently. He was absorbed in the previous suggestion. “The trouble is that I don’t live in Boston. If I left college I’d want to be near her, because it might be a few months before I’d be able to support her. And I don’t know how I’d go about getting a position in Boston.”

“If you’re Cora Chandler’s cousin, that oughtn’t to be difficult. She knows everybody in town. And the girl’s family will probably help you out, once you’ve got her — some of them are fools enough for anything in these crazy days.”

“I wouldn’t like that.”

“Rich girls can’t live on air,” said the older man grimly.

They played for a while in silence. Suddenly, as they approached a green, Juan’s companion turned to him frowning.

“Look here, young man,” he said, “I don’t know whether you are really thinking of leaving college or whether I’ve just put the idea in your head. If I have, forget it. Go home and talk it over with your family. Do what they tell you to.”

“My father’s dead.”

“Well, then ask your mother. She’s got your best interest at heart.”

His attitude had noticeably stiffened, as if he were sorry he had become even faintly involved in Juan’s problem. He guessed that there was something solid in the boy, but he suspected his readiness to confide in strangers and his helplessness about getting a job. Something was lacking — not confidence, exactly — “It might be a few months before I was able to support her” — but something stronger, fiercer, more external. When they walked together into the caddie house he shook hands with him and was about to turn away, when impulse impelled him to add one word more.

“If you decide to try Boston come and see me,” he said. He pressed a card into Juan’s hand. “Good-bye. Good luck. Remember, a woman’s like a street car —  — “

He walked into the locker room. After paying his caddie, Juan glanced down at the card which he still held in his hand.

“Harold Garneau,” it read, “23-7 State Street.”

A moment later Juan was walking nervously and hurriedly from the grounds of the Culpepper Club, casting no glance behind.

V

One month later San Juan Chandler arrived in Boston and took an inexpensive room in a small downtown hotel. In his pocket was two hundred dollars in cash and an envelope full of liberty bonds aggregating fifteen hundred dollars more — the whole being a fund which had been started by his father when he was born, to give him his chance in life. Not without argument had he come into possession of this — not without tears had his decision to abandon his last year at college been approved by his mother. He had not told her everything; simply that he had an advantageous offer of a position in Boston; the rest she guessed and was tactfully silent. As a matter of fact, he had neither a position nor a plan, but he was twenty-one now, with the blemishes of youth departed for ever. One thing Juan knew — he was going to marry Noel Garneau. The sting and hurt and shame of that Sunday morning ran through his dreams, stronger than any doubts he might have felt, stronger even than the romantic boyish love for her that had blossomed one dry, still Montana night. That was still there, but locked apart; what had happened later overlay it, muffled it. It was necessary now to his pride, his self-respect, his very existence, that he have her, in order to wipe out his memory of the day on which he had grown three years.

He hadn’t seen her since. The following morning he had left Culpepper Bay and gone home.

Yes, he had a wonderful time. Yes, Cousin Cora had been very nice. Nor had he written, though a week later a surprised but somehow flippant and terrible note had come from her, saying how pleasant it was to have seen him again and how bad it was to leave without saying good-bye.

“Holly Morgan sends her best,” it concluded, with kind, simulated reproach. “Perhaps she ought to be writing instead of me. I always thought you were fickle, and now I know it.”

The poor effort which she had made to hide her indifference made him shiver. He did not add the letter to a certain cherished package tied with blue ribbon, but burned it up in an ash tray — a tragic gesture which almost set his mother’s house on fire.

So he began his life in Boston, and the story of his first year there is a fairy tale too immoral to be told. It is the story of one of those mad, illogical successes upon whose substantial foundations ninety-nine failures are later reared. Though he worked hard, he deserved no special credit for it — no credit, that is, commensurate with the reward he received. He ran into a man who had a scheme, a preposterous scheme, for the cold storage of sea food which he had been trying to finance for several years. Juan’s inexperience allowed him to be responsive and he invested twelve hundred dollars. In his first year this appalling indiscretion paid him 400 per cent. His partner attempted to buy him out, but they reached a compromise and Juan kept his shares.

The inner sense of his own destiny which had never deserted him whispered that he was going to be a rich man. But at the end of that year an event took place which made him think that it didn’t matter after all.

He had seen Noel Garneau twice — once entering a theatre and once riding through a Boston street in the back of her limousine, looking, he thought afterwards, bored and pale and tired. At the time he had thought nothing; an overwhelming emotion had seized his heart, held it helpless, suspended, as though it were in the grasp of material fingers. He had shrunk back hastily under the awning of a shop and waited trembling, horrified, ecstatic, until she went by. She did not know he was in Boston — he did not want her to know until he was ready. He followed her every move in the society columns of the papers. She was at school, at home for Christmas, at Hot Springs for Easter, coming out in the fall. Then she was a debutante, and every day he read of her at dinners and dances and assemblies and balls and charity functions and theatricals of the Junior

League. A dozen blurred newspaper unlikenesses of her filled a drawer of his desk. And still he waited. Let Noel have her fling.

When he had been sixteen months in Boston, and when Noel’s first season was dying away in the hum of the massed departure for Florida, Juan decided to wait no longer. So on a raw, damp February day, when children in rubber boots were building darns in the snow-filled gutters, a blond, handsome, well-dressed young man walked up the steps of the Garneau’s Boston house and handed his card to the maid. With his heart beating loud, he went into a drawing-room and sat down.

A sound of a dress on the stairs, light feet in the hall, an exclamation — Noel!

“Why, Juan,” she exclaimed, surprised, pleased, polite, “I didn’t know you were in Boston. It’s so good to see you. I thought you’d thrown me over for ever.”

In a moment he found voice — it was easier now than it had been. Whether or not she was aware of the change, he was a nobody no longer. There was something solid behind him that would prevent him ever again from behaving like a self-centred child.

He explained that he might settle in Boston, and allowed her to guess that he had done extremely well; and, though it cost him a twinge of pain, he spoke humourously of their last meeting, implying that he had left the swimming party on an impulse of anger at her. He could not confess that the impulse had been one of shame. She laughed. Suddenly he grew curiously happy.

Half an hour passed. The fire glowed in the hearth. The day darkened outside and the room moved into that shadowy twilight, that weather of indoors, which is like a breathless starshine. He had been standing; now he sat down beside her on the couch.

“Noel —  — “

Footsteps sounded lightly through the hall as the maid went through to the front door. Noel reached up quickly and turned up the electric lamp on the table behind her head.

“I didn’t realize how dark it was growing,” she said rather quickly, he thought. Then the maid stood in the doorway.

“Mr Templeton,” she announced.

“Oh, yes,” agreed Noel.

Mr Templeton, with a Harvard-Oxford drawl, mature, very much at home, looked at him with just a flicker of surprise, nodded, mumbled a bare politeness and took an easy position in front of the fire. He exchanged several remarks with Noel which indicated a certain familiarity with her movements. Then a short silence fell. Juan rose.

“I want to see you soon,” he said. “I’ll phone, shall I, and you tell me

when I can call?”

She walked with him to the door.

“So good to talk to you again,” she told him cordially. “Remember, I want to see a lot of you, Juan.”

When he left he was happier than he had been for two years. He ate dinner alone at a restaurant, almost singing to himself; and then, wild with elation, walked along the waterfront till midnight. He awoke thinking of her, wanting to tell people that what had been lost was found again. There had been more between them than the mere words said — Noel’s sitting with him in the half-darkness, her slight but perceptible nervousness as she came with him to the door.

Two days later he opened the Transcript to the society page and read down to the third item. There his eyes stopped, became like china eyes:

Mr and Mrs Harold Garneau announce the engagement of their daughter Noel to Mr Brooks Fish Templeton. Mr Templeton graduated from Harvard in the class of 1912 and is a partner in —  —

VI

At three o’clock that afternoon Juan rang the Garneaus’ doorbell and was shown into the hall. From somewhere upstairs he heard girls’ voices, and another murmur came from the drawing-room on the right, where he had talked to Noel only the week before.

“Can you show me into some room that isn’t being used?” he demanded tensely of the maid. “I’m an old friend — it’s very important — I’ve got to see Miss Noel alone.”

He waited in a small den at the back of the hall. Ten minutes passed — ten minutes more; he began to be afraid she wasn’t coming. At the end of half an hour the door bounced open and Noel came hurriedly in.

“Juan!” she cried happily. “This is wonderful! I might have known you’d be the first to come.” Her expression changed as she saw his face, and she hesitated. “But why were you shown in here?” she went on quickly. “You must come and meet everyone. I’m rushing around today like a chicken without a head.”

“Noel!” he said thickly.

“What?”

Her hand was on the door knob. She turned, startled.

“Noel, I haven’t come to congratulate you,” Juan said, his face white and , his voice harsh with his effort at self-control. “I’ve come to tell you you’re making an awful mistake.”

“Why — Juan!”

“And you know it,” he went on. “You know no one loves you as I love you, Noel. I want you to marry me.”

She laughed nervously.

“Why, Juan, that’s silly! I don’t understand your talking like this. I’m engaged to another man.”

“Noel, will you come here and sit down?”

“I can’t, Juan — there’re a dozen people outside. I’ve got to see them. It wouldn’t be polite. Another time, Juan. If you come another time I’d love to talk to you.”

“Now!” The word was stark, unyielding, almost savage. She hesitated.

“Ten minutes,” he said.

“I’ve really got to go, Juan.”

She sat down uncertainly, glancing at the door. Sitting beside her, Juan told her simply and directly everything that had happened to him since they had met, a year and a half before. He told her of his family, his Cousin Cora, of his inner humiliation at Culpepper Bay. Then he told her of his coming to Boston and of his success, and how at last, having something to bring her, he had come only to find he was too late. He kept back nothing. In his voice, as in his mind, there was no pretence now, no self-consciousness, but only a sincere and overmastering emotion. He had no defence for what he was doing, he said, save this — that he had somehow gained the right to present his case, to have her know how much his devotion had inspired him, to have her look once, if only in passing, upon the fact that for two years he had loved her faithfully and well.

When Juan finished, Noel was crying. It was terrible, she said, to tell her all this — just when she had decided about her life. It hadn’t been easy, yet it was done now, and she was really going to marry this other man. But she had never heard anything like this before — it upset her. She was — oh, so terribly sorry, but there was no use. If he had cared so much he might have let her know before.

But how could he let her know? He had had nothing to offer her except the fact that one summer night out West they had been overwhelmingly drawn together.

“And you love me now,” he said in a low voice. “You wouldn’t cry, Noel, if you didn’t love me. You wouldn’t care.”

“I’m — I’m sorry for you.”

“It’s more than that. You loved me the other day. You wanted me to sit beside you in the dark. Didn’t I feel it — didn’t I know? There’s something between us, Noel — a sort of pull. Something you always do to me and I to you — except that one sad time. Oh, Noel, don’t you know how it breaks my heart to see you sitting there two feet away from me, to want to put my arms around you and know you’ve made a senseless promise to another man?” There was a knock outside the door.

“Noel!”

She raised her head, putting a handkerchief quickly to her eyes.

“Yes?”

“It’s Brooks. May I come in?” Without waiting for an answer, Templeton opened the door and stood looking at them curiously. “Excuse me,” he said. He nodded brusquely at Juan. “Noel, there are lots of people here —  — “

“In a minute,” she said lifelessly.

“Aren’t you well?”

“Yes.”

He came into the room, frowning.

“What’s been upsetting you, dear?” He glanced quickly at Juan, who stood up, his eyes blurred with tears. A menacing note crept into Templeton’s voice. “I hope no one’s been upsetting you.”

For answer, Noel flopped down over a hill of pillows and sobbed aloud. “Noel” — Templeton sat beside her, and put his arm on her shoulder — “Noel.” He turned again to Juan, “I think it would be best if you left us alone, Mr —  — “ the name escaped his memory. “Noel’s a little tired.”

“I won’t go,” said Juan.

“Please wait outside then. We’ll see you later.”

“I won’t wait outside. I want to speak to Noel. It was you who interrupted.”

“And I have a perfect right to interrupt.” His face reddened angrily. “Just who the devil are you, anyhow?”

“My name is Chandler.”

“Well, Mr Chandler, you’re in the way here — is that plain? Your presence here is an intrusion and a presumption.”

“We look at it in different ways.”

They glared at each other angrily. After a moment Templeton raised Noel to a sitting posture.

“I’m going to take you upstairs, dear,” he said. “This has been a strain today. If you lie down till dinnertime —  — “

He helped her to her feet. Not looking at Juan, and still dabbing her face with her handkerchief, Noel suffered herself to be persuaded into the hall. Templeton turned in the doorway.

“The maid will give you your hat and coat, Mr Chandler.”

“I’ll wait right here,” said Juan.

VII

He was still there at half past six, when, following a quick knock, a large broad bulk which Juan recognized as Mr Harold Garneau came into the room.

“Good evening, sir,” said Mr Garneau, annoyed and peremptory. “Just what can I do for you?”

He came closer and a Sicker of recognition passed over his face.

“Oh!” he muttered.

“Good evening, sir,” said Juan.

“It’s you, is it?” Mr Garneau appeared to hesitate. “Brooks Templeton said that you were — that you insisted on seeing Noel” — he coughed — “that you refused to go home.”

“I want to see Noel, if you don’t mind.”

“What for?”

“That’s between Noel and me, Mr Garneau.”

“Mr Templeton and I are quite entitled to represent Noel in this case,” said Mr Garneau patiently. “She has just made the statement before her mother and me that she doesn’t want to see you again. Isn’t that plain enough?”

“I don’t believe it,” said Juan stubbornly. “I’m not in the habit of lying.”

“I beg your pardon. I meant —  — “

“I don’t want to discuss this unfortunate business with you,” broke out Garneau contemptuously. “I just want you to leave right now — and come back.”

“Why do you call it an unfortunate business?” inquired Juan coolly. “Good night, Mr Chandler.”

“You call it an unfortunate business because Noel’s broken her engagement”

“You are presumptuous, sir!” cried the older man. “Unbearably sumptuous.”

“Mr Garneau, you yourself were once kind enough to tell me —  — “

“I don’t give a damn what I told you!” cried Garneau. “You get out of here now!”

“Very well, I have no choice. I wish you to be good enough to tell Noel that I’ll be back tomorrow afternoon.”

Juan nodded, went into the hall and took his hat and coat from a chair. Upstairs, he heard running footsteps and a door opened and closed — not before he had caught the sound of impassioned voices and a short broken sob. He hesitated. Then he continued on along the hall towards the front door. Through a portiere of the dining-room he caught sight of a man-servant laying the service for dinner.

He rang the bell the next afternoon at the same hour. This time the butler, evidently instructed, answered the door.

Miss Noel was not at home. Could he leave a note? It was no use; Miss Noel was not in the city. Incredulous but anxious, Juan took a taxicab to

Harold Garneau’s office. “Mr Garneau can’t see you. If you like, he will speak to you for a moment on the phone.”

Juan nodded. The clerk touched a button on the waiting-room switchboard and handed an instrument to Juan.

“This is San Juan Chandler speaking. They told me at your residence that Noel had gone away. Is that true?”

“Yes.” The monosyllable was short and cold. “She’s gone away for a rest. Won’t be back for several months. Anything else?” “Did she leave any word for me?”

“No! She hates the sight of you.”

“What’s her address?”

“That doesn’t happen to be your affair. Good morning.”

Juan went back to his apartment and mused over the situation. Noel had been spirited out of town — that was the only expression he knew for it. And undoubtedly her engagement to Templeton was at least temporarily broken. He had toppled it over within an hour. He must see her again — that was the immediate necessity. But where? She was certainly with friends, and probably with relatives. That latter was the first clue to follow — he must find out the names of the relatives she had most frequently visited before.

He phoned Holly Morgan. She was in the south and not expected back Boston till May.

Then he called the society editor of the Boston Transcript. After a short wait, a polite, attentive, feminine voice conversed with him on the wire.

“This is Mr San Juan Chandler,” he said, trying to intimate by his voice that he was a distinguished leader of cotillions in the Back Bay. “I want to get some information, if you please, about the family of Mr Harold Garneau.”

“Why don’t you apply directly to Mr Garneau?” advised the society editor, not without suspicion.

“I’m not on speaking terms with Mr Garneau.”

A pause; then — “Well, really, we can’t be responsible for giving out information in such a peculiar way.”

“But there can’t be any secret about who Mr and Mrs Garneau’s relations are!” protested Juan in exasperation.

“But how can we be sure that you —  — “

He hung up the receiver. Two other papers gave no better results, a third was willing, but ignorant. It seemed absurd, almost like a conspiracy, that in a city where the Garneaus were so well known he could not obtain the desired names. It was as if everything had tightened up against his arrival on the scene. After a day of fruitless and embarrassing inquiries in stores, where his questions were looked upon with the suspicion that he might be compiling a sucker list, and of poring through back numbers of the Social Register, he saw that there was but one resource — that was Cousin Cora. Next morning he took the three-hour ride to Culpepper Bay.

It was the first time he had seen her for a year and a half, since the disastrous termination of his summer visit. She was offended — that he knew — especially since she had heard from his mother of the unexpected success. She greeted him coldly and reproachfully; but she told him what he wanted to know, because Juan asked his questions while she was still startled and surprised by his visit. He left Culpepper Bay with the information that Mrs Garneau had one sister, the famous Mrs Morton Poindexter, with whom Noel was on terms of great intimacy. Juan took the midnight train for New York.

Morton Poindexters’ telephone number was not in the New York book, and Information refused to divulge it; but Juan procured it reference to the Social Register. He called the house from his

“Miss Noel Garneau — is she in the city?” he inquired, according to hi plan. If the name was not immediately familiar, the servant would rent that he had the wrong number.

“Who wants to speak to her, please?”

That was a relief; his heart sank comfortably back into place.

“Oh — a friend.”

“No name?”

“No name.”

“I’ll see.”

The servant returned in a moment.

No, Miss Garneau was not there, was not in the city, was not expected.

The phone clicked off suddenly.

Late that afternoon a taxi dropped him in front of the Morton Poindexters’ house. It was the most elaborate house that he had ever seen, rising to five storeys on a corner of Fifth Avenue and adorned even with that ghost of a garden which, however minute, is the proudest gesture of money in New York.

He handed no card to the butler, but it occurred to him that he must be expected, for he was shown immediately into the drawing-room. When, after a short wait, Mrs Poindexter entered he experienced for the first time in five days a touch of uncertainty.

Mrs Poindexter was perhaps thirty-five, and of that immaculate fashion which the French describe as bien soignee. The inexpressible loveliness of her face was salted with another quality which for want of a better word might be called dignity. But it was more than dignity, for it wore no rigidity, but instead a softness so adaptable, so elastic, that it would withdraw from any attack which life might bring against it, only to spring back at the proper moment, taut, victorious and complete. San Juan saw that even though his guess was correct as to Noel’s being in the house, he was up against a force with which he had no contact before. This woman seemed to be not entirely of America, to possess resources which the American woman lacked or handled ineptly.

She received him with a graciousness which, though it was largely external, seemed to conceal no perturbation underneath. Indeed, her attitude appeared to be perfectly passive, just short of encouraging. It was with an effort that he resisted the inclination to lay his cards on the table. “Good evening.” She sat down on a stiff chair in the centre of the room and asked him to take an easy-chair near by. She sat looking at him silently until he spoke.

“Mrs Poindexter, I am very anxious to see Miss Garneau. I telephoned your house this morning and was told that she was not here.” Mrs Poindexter nodded. “However, I know she is here,” he continued evenly. “And I’m determined to see her. The idea that her father and mother can prevent me from seeing her, as though I had disgraced myself in some way — or that you, Mrs Poindexter, can prevent me from seeing her” — his voice rose a little —  — “is preposterous. This is not the year 1500 — nor even the year 1910.”

He paused. Mrs Poindexter waited for a moment to see if he had finished. Then she said, quietly and unequivocally, “I quite agree with you.”

Save for Noel, Juan thought he had never seen anyone so beautiful before.

“Mrs Poindexter,” he began again, in a more friendly tone, “I’m sorry to seem rude. I’ve been called presumptuous in this matter, and perhaps to some extent I am. Perhaps all poor boys who are in love with wealthy girls are presumptuous. But it happens that I am no longer a poor boy, and I have good reason to believe that Noel cares for me.”

“I see,” said Mrs Poindexter attentively. “But of course I knew nothing about all that.”

Juan hesitated, again disarmed by her complaisance. Then a surge of determination went over him.

“Will you let me see her?” he demanded. “Or will you insist on keeping up this farce a little longer?”

Mrs Poindexter looked at him as though considering.

“Why should I let you see her?”

“Simply because I ask you. Just as, when someone says ‘Excuse me’ you step aside for him in a doorway.”

Mrs Poindexter frowned.

“But Noel is concerned in this matter as much as you. And I’m not like person in a crowd. I’m more like a bodyguard, with instructions to let no one pass, even if they say ‘Excuse me’ in a most appealing voice.”

“You have instructions only from her father and mother,” said Juan, with rising impatience. “She’s the person concerned.”

“I’m glad you begin to admit that.”

“Of course I admit it,” he broke out. “I want you to admit it.”

“I do.”

“Then what’s the point of all this absurd discussion?” he demanded heatedly.

She stood up suddenly. “I bid you good evening, sir.”

Taken aback, Juan stood up too. “Why, what’s the matter?”

“I will not be spoken to like that,” said Mrs Poindexter, still in a low cool voice. “Either you can conduct yourself quietly or you can leave this house at once.”

Juan realized that he had taken the wrong tone. The words stung at him and for a moment he had nothing to say — as though he were a scolded boy at school. “This is beside the question,” he stammered finally. “I want to talk to Noel.”

“Noel doesn’t want to talk to you.” Suddenly Mrs Poindexter held out a sheet of note paper to him. He opened it. It said:

Aunt Jo: As to what we talked about this afternoon: If that intolerable bore calls, as he will probably do, and begins his presumptuous whining, please speak to him frankly. Tell him I never loved him, that I never at any time claimed to love him and that his persistence is revolting to me. Say that I am old enough to know my own mind and that my greatest wish is never to see him again in this world.

Juan stood there aghast. His universe was suddenly about him. Noel did not care, she had never cared. It was all a preposterous joke on him, played by those to whom the business of life had been such jokes from the beginning. He realized now that fundamentally they were all akin — Cousin Cora, Noel, her father, this cold, lovely woman here — affirming the prerogative of the rich to marry always within their caste, to erect artificial barriers and standards against those who could presume upon a summer’s philandering. The scales fell from his eyes and he saw his year and a half of struggle and effort not as progress towards a goal but only as a little race he had run by himself, outside, with no one to beat except himself — no one who cared.

Blindly he looked about for his hat, scarcely realizing it was in the hall. Blindly he stepped back when Mrs Poindexter’s hand moved towards him half a foot through the mist and Mrs Poindexter’s voice said softly, “I’m sorry.” Then he was in the hall, the note still clutched in the hand that struggled through the sleeve of his overcoat, the words which he felt he must somehow say choking through his lips.

“I didn’t understand. I regret very much that I’ve bothered you. It wasn’t dear to me how matters stood — between Noel and me —  — “

His hand was on the door knob.

“I’m sorry, too,” said Mrs Poindexter. “I didn’t realize from what Noel said that what I had to do would be so hard — Mr Templeton.”

“Chandler,” he corrected her dully. “My name’s Chandler.”

She stood dead still; suddenly her face went white.

“What?”

“My name — it’s Chandler.”

Like a flash she threw herself against the half-open door and it bumped shut. Then in a flash she was at the foot of the staircase.

“Noel!” she cried in a high, clear call. “Noel! Noel! Come down, Noel!” Her lovely voice floated up like a bell through the long high central hall. “Noel! Come down! It’s Mr Chandler! It’s Chandler!”

YOUR WAY AND MINE

One spring afternoon in the first year of the present century a young man was experimenting with a new typewriter in a brokerage office on lower Broadway. At his elbow lay an eight-line letter and he was endeavoring to make a copy on the machine but each attempt was marred by a monstrous capital rising unexpectedly in the middle of a word or by the disconcerting intrusion of some symbol such as $ or % into an alphabet whose membership was set at twenty-six many years ago. Whenever he detected a mistake he made a new beginning with a fresh sheet but after the fifteenth try he was aware of a ferocious instinct to cast the machine from the window.

The young man’s short blunt fingers were too big for the keys. He was big all over; indeed his bulky body seemed to be in the very process of growth for it had ripped his coat at the back seam, while his trousers clung to thigh and calf like skin tights. His hair was yellow and tousled — you could see the paths of his broad fingers in it — and his eyes were of a hard brilliant blue but the lids drooping a little over them reinforced an impression of lethargy that the clumsy body conveyed. His age was twenty-one.

“What do you think the eraser’s for, McComas?”

The young man looked around.

“What’s that?” he demanded brusquely.

“The eraser,” repeated the short alert human fox who had come in the outer door and paused behind him. “That there’s a good copy except for one word. Use your head or you’ll be sitting there until tomorrow.”

The human fox moved on into his private office. The young man sat for a moment, motionless, sluggish. Suddenly he grunted, picked up the eraser referred to and flung it savagely out of the window.

Twenty minutes later he opened the door of his employer’s office. In his hand was the letter, immaculately typed, and the addressed envelope.

“Here it is, sir,” he said, frowning a little from his late concentration.

The human fox took it, glanced at it and then looked at McComas with a peculiar smile.

“You didn’t use the eraser?”

“No, I didn’t, Mr. Woodley.”

“You’re one of those thorough young men, aren’t you?” said the fox sarcastically.

“What?”

“I said ‘thorough’ but since you weren’t listening I’ll change it to ‘pig-headed.’ Whose time did you waste just to avoid a little erasure that the best typists aren’t too proud to make? Did you waste your time or mine?”

“I wanted to make one good copy,” answered McComas steadily.

“You see, I never worked a typewriter before.”

“Answer my question,” snapped Mr. Woodley. “When you sat there making two dozen copies of that letter were you wasting your time or mine?”

“It was mostly my lunch time,” McComas replied, his big face flushing to an angry pink. “I’ve got to do things my own way or not at all.”

For answer Mr. Woodley picked up the letter and envelope, folded them, tore them once and again and dropped the pieces into the wastepaper basket with a toothy little smile.

“That’s my way,” he announced. “What do you think of that?”

Young McComas had taken a step forward as if to snatch the fragments from the fox’s hand.

“By golly,” he cried. “By golly. Why, for two cents I’d spank you!”

With an angry snarl Mr. Woodley sprang to his feet, fumbled in his pocket and threw a handful of change upon his desk.

Ten minutes later the outside man coming in to report perceived that neither young McComas nor his hat were in their usual places. But in the private office he found Mr. Woodley, his face crimson and foam bubbling between his teeth, shouting frantically into the telephone. The outside man noticed to his surprise that Mr. Woodley was in daring dishabille and that there were six suspender buttons scattered upon the office floor.

In 1902 Henry McComas weighed 196 pounds. In 1905 when he journeyed back to his home town, Elmira, to marry the love of his boyhood he tipped accurate beams at 210. His weight remained constant for two years but after the panic of 1907 it bounded to 220, about which comfortable figure it was apparently to hover for the rest of his life.

He looked mature beyond his years — under certain illuminations his yellow hair became a dignified white — and his bulk added to the impression of authority that he gave. During his first five years off the farm there was never a time when he wasn’t scheming to get into business for himself.

For a temperament like Henry McComas’, which insisted on running at a pace of its own, independence was an utter necessity. He must make his own rules, willy-nilly, even though he join the ranks of those many abject failures who have also tried. Just one week after he had achieved his emancipation from other people’s hierarchies he was moved to expound his point to Theodore Drinkwater, his partner — this because Drinkwater had wondered aloud if he intended never to come downtown before eleven.

“I doubt it,” said McComas.

“What’s the idea?” demanded Drinkwater indignantly. “What do you think the effect’s going to be on our office force?”

“Does Miss Johnston show any sign of being demoralized?”

“I mean after we get more people. It isn’t as if you were an old man, Mac, with your work behind you. You’re only twenty-eight, not a day older than I. What’ll you do at forty?”

“I’ll be downtown at eleven o’clock,” said McComas, “every working day of my life.”

Later in the week one of their first clients invited them to lunch at a celebrated business club; the club’s least member was a rajah of the swelling, expanding empire.

“Look around, Ted,” whispered McComas as they left the dining-room. “There’s a man looks like a prize-fighter, and there’s one who looks like a ham actor. That’s a plumber there behind you; there’s a coal heaver and a couple of cowboys — do you see? There’s a chronic invalid and a confidence man, a pawn-broker — that one on the right. By golly, where are all the big business men we came to see?”

The route back to their office took them by a small restaurant where the clerks of the district flocked to lunch.

“Take a look at them, Ted, and you’ll find the men who know the rules — and think and act and look like just what they are.”

“I suppose if they put on pink mustaches and came to work at five in the afternoon they’d get to be great men,” scoffed Drinkwater.

“Posing is exactly what I don’t mean. Just accept yourself. We’re brought up on fairy stories about the new leaf, but who goes on believing them except those who have to believe and have to hope or else go crazy. I think America will be a happier country when the individual begins to look his personal limitations in the face. Anything that’s in your character at twenty-one is usually there to stay.”

In any case what was in Henry McComas’ was there to stay. Henry McComas wouldn’t dine with a client in a bad restaurant for a proposition of three figures, wouldn’t hurry his luncheon for a proposition of four, wouldn’t go without it for a proposition of five. And in spite of these peculiarities the exporting firm in which he owned forty-nine per cent of the stock began to pepper South America with locomotives, dynamos, barb wire, hydraulic engines, cranes, mining machinery, and other appurtenances of civilization. In 1913 when Henry McComas was thirty-four he owned a house on Ninety-second Street and calculated that his income for the next year would come to thirty thousand dollars. And because of a sudden and unexpected demand from Europe which was not for pink lemonade, it came to twice that. The buying agent for the British Government arrived, followed by the buying agents for the French, Belgian, Russian and Serbian Governments, and a share of the commodities required were assembled under the stewardship of Drinkwater and McComas. There was a chance that they would be rich men. Then suddenly this eventually began to turn on the woman Henry McComas had married.

Stella McComas was the daughter of a small hay and grain dealer of upper New York. Her father was unlucky and always on the verge of failure, so she grew up in the shadow of worry. Later, while Henry McComas got his start in New York, she earned her living by teaching physical culture in the public schools of Utica. In consequence she brought to her marriage a belief in certain stringent rules for the care of the body and an exaggerated fear of adversity.

For the first years she was so impressed with her husband’s rapid rise and so absorbed in her babies that she accepted Henry as something infallible and protective, outside the scope of her provincial wisdom. But as her little girl grew into short dresses and hair ribbons, and her little boy into the custody of an English nurse she had more time to look closely at her husband. His leisurely ways, his corpulency, his sometimes maddening deliberateness, ceased to be the privileged idiosyncrasies of success, and became only facts.

For a while he paid no great attention to her little suggestions as to his diet, her occasional crankiness as to his hours, her invidious comparisons between his habits and the fancied habits of other men. Then one morning a peculiar lack of taste in his coffee precipitated the matter into the light.

“I can’t drink the stuff — it hasn’t had any taste for a week,” he complained. “And why is it brought in a cup from the kitchen? I like to put the cream and sugar in myself.”

Stella avoided an answer but later he reverted to the matter.

“About my coffee. You’ll remember — won’t you? — to tell Rose.”

Suddenly she smiled at him innocently.

“Don’t you feel better, Henry?” she asked eagerly.

“What?”

“Less tired, less worried?”

“Who said I was tired and worried? I never felt better in my life.”

“There you are.” She looked at him triumphantly. “You laugh at my theories but this time you’ll have to admit there’s something in them. You feel better because you haven’t had sugar in your coffee for over a week.”

He looked at her incredulously.

“What have I had?”

“Saccharine.”

He got up indignantly and threw his newspaper on the table.

“I might have known it,” he broke out. “All that bringing it out from the kitchen. What the devil is saccharine?”

“It’s a substitute, for people who have a tendency to run to fat.”

For a moment he hovered on the edge of anger, then he sat down shaking with laughter.

“It’s done you good,” she said reproachfully.

“Well, it won’t do me good any more,” he said grimly. “I’m thirty-four years old and I haven’t been sick a day in ten years. I’ve forgotten more about my constitution than you’ll ever know.”

“You don’t live a healthy life, Henry. It’s after forty that things begin to tell.”

“Saccharine!” he exclaimed, again breaking into laughter. “Saccharine! I thought perhaps it was something to keep me from drink. You know they have these — “

Suddenly she grew angry.

“Well why not? You ought to be ashamed to be so fat at your age. You wouldn’t be if you took a little exercise and didn’t lie around in bed all morning.”

Words utterly failed her,

“If I wanted to be a farmer,” said her husband quietly, “I wouldn’t have left home. This saccharine business is over today — do you see?”

Their financial situation rapidly improved. By the second year of the war they were keeping a limousine and chauffeur and began to talk vaguely of a nice summer house on Long Island Sound. Month by month a swelling stream of materials flowed through the ledgers of Drinkwater and McComas to be dumped on the insatiable bonfire across the ocean. Their staff of clerks tripled and the atmosphere of the office was so charged with energy and achievement that Stella herself often liked to wander in on some pretext during the afternoon.

One day early in 1916 she called to learn that Mr. McComas was out and was on the point of leaving when she ran into Ted Drinkwater coming out of the elevator.

“Why, Stella,” he exclaimed, “I was thinking about you only this morning.”

The Drinkwaters and the McComases were close if not particularly spontaneous friends. Nothing but their husbands’ intimate association would have thrown the two women together, yet they were “Henry, Ted, Mollie, and Stella” to each other and in ten years scarcely a month had passed without their partaking in a superficially cordial family dinner. The dinner being over, each couple indulged in an unsparing post-mortem over the other without, however, any sense of disloyalty. They were used to each other — so Stella was somewhat surprised by Ted Drinkwater’s personal eagerness at meeting her this afternoon.

“I want to see you,” he said in his intent direct way. “Have you got a minute, Stella? Could you come into my office?”

“Why, yes.”

As they walked between rows of typists toward the glassed privacy of THEODORE DRINKWATER, PRESIDENT, Stella could not help thinking that he made a more appropriate business figure than her husband. He was lean, terse, quick. His eye glanced keenly from right to left as if taking the exact measure of every clerk and stenographer in sight.

“Sit down, Stella.”

She waited, a feeling of vague apprehension stealing over her.

Drinkwater frowned.

“It’s about Henry,” he said.

“Is he sick?” she demanded quickly.

“No. Nothing like that.” He hesitated. “Stella, I’ve always thought you were a woman with a lot of common sense.”

She waited.

“This is a thing that’s been on my mind for over a year,” he continued. “He and I have battled it out so often that — that a certain coldness has grown up between us.”

“Yes?” Stella’s eyes blinked nervously.

“It’s about the business,” said Drinkwater abruptly. “A coldness with a business partner is a mighty unpleasant thing.”

“What’s the matter?”

“The old story, Stella. These are big years for us and he thinks business is going to wait while he carries on in the old country-store way. Down at eleven, hour and a half for lunch, won’t be nice to a man he doesn’t like for love or money. In the last six months he’s lost us about three sizable orders by things like that.”

Instinctively she sprang to her husband’s defense.

“But hasn’t he saved money too by going slow? On that thing about the copper, you wanted to sign right away and Henry — “

“Oh, that — “ He waved it aside a little hurriedly. “I’m the last man to deny that Henry has a wonderful instinct in certain ways — “

“But it was a great big thing,” she interrupted, “It would have practically ruined you if he hadn’t put his foot down. He said — “

She pulled herself up short.

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Drinkwater with an expression of annoyance, “perhaps not so bad as that. Anyway, we all make mistakes and that’s aside from the question. We have the opportunity right now of jumping into Class A. I mean it. Another two years of this kind of business and we can each put away our first million dollars. And, Stella, whatever happens, I am determined to put away mine. Even — “ He considered his words for a moment. “Even if it comes to breaking with Henry.”

“Oh!” Stella exclaimed. “I hope — “

“I hope not too. That’s why I wanted to talk to you. Can’t you do something, Stella? You’re about the only person he’ll listen to. He’s so darn pig-headed he can’t understand how he disorganizes the office. Get him up in the morning. No man ought to lie in bed till eleven.”

“He gets up at half past nine.”

“He’s down here at eleven. That’s what counts. Stir him up. Tell him you want more money. Orders are more money and there are lots of orders around for anyone who goes after them.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” she said anxiously. “But I don’t know — Henry’s difficult — very set in his ways.”

“You’ll think of something. You might — “ He smiled grimly. “You might give him a few more bills to pay. Sometimes I think an extravagant wife’s the best inspiration a man can have. We need more pep down here. I’ve got to be the pep for two. I mean it, Stella, I can’t carry this thing alone.”

Stella left the office with her mind in a panic. All the fears and uncertainties of her childhood had been brought suddenly to the surface. She saw Henry cast off by Ted Drinkwater and trying unsuccessfully to run a business of his own. With his easy-going ways! They would slide down hill, giving up the servants one by one, the car, the house. Before she reached home her imagination had envisaged poverty, her children at work — starvation. Hadn’t Ted Drinkwater just told her that he himself was the life of the concern — that he kept things moving? What would Henry do alone?

For a week she brooded over the matter, guarding her secret but looking with a mixture of annoyance and compassion at Henry over the dinner table. Then she mustered up her resolution. She went to a real estate agent and handed over her entire bank account of nine thousand dollars as the first payment on a house they had fearfully coveted on Long Island. . . . That night she told Henry.

“Why, Stella, you must have gone crazy,” he cried aghast. “You must have gone crazy. Why didn’t you ask me?”

He wanted to take her by the shoulders and shake her.

“I was afraid, Henry,” she answered truthfully.

He thrust his hands despairingly through his yellow hair.

“Just at this time, Stella. I’ve just taken out an insurance policy that’s more than I can really afford — we haven’t paid for the new car — we’ve had a new front put on this house — last week your sable coat. I was going to devote tonight to figuring just how close we were running on money.”

“But can’t you — can’t you take something out of the business until things get better?” she demanded in alarm.

“That’s just what I can’t do. It’s impossible. I can’t explain because you don’t understand the situation down there. You see Ted and I — can’t agree on certain things — “

Suddenly a new light dawned on her and she felt her body flinch. Supposing that by bringing about this situation she had put her husband into his partner’s hands. Yet wasn’t that what she wanted — wasn’t it necessary for the present that Henry should conform to Drinkwater’s methods?

“Sixty thousand dollars,” repeated Henry in a frightened voice that made her want to cry. “I don’t know where I am going to get enough to buy it on mortgage.” He sank into a chair. “I might go and see the people you dealt with tomorrow and make a compromise — let some of your nine thousand go.”

“I don’t think they would,” she said, her face set. “They were awfully anxious to sell — the owner’s going away.”

She had acted on impulse, she said, thinking that in their increasing prosperity the money would be available. He had been so generous about the new car — she supposed that now at last they could afford what they wanted.

It was typical of McComas that after the first moment of surprise he wasted no energy in reproaches. But two days later he came home from work with such a heavy and dispirited look on his face that she could not help but guess that he and Ted Drinkwater had had it out — and that what she wanted had come true. That night in shame and pity she cried herself to sleep.

A new routine was inaugurated in Henry McComas’ life. Each morning Stella woke him at eight and he lay for fifteen minutes in an unwilling trance, as if his body were surprised at this departure from the custom of a decade. He reached the office at nine-thirty as promptly as he had once reached it at eleven — on the first morning his appearance caused a flutter of astonishment among the older employees — and he limited his lunch time to a conscientious hour. No longer could he be found asleep on his office couch between two and three o’clock on summer afternoons — the couch itself vanished into that limbo which held his leisurely periods of digestion and his cherished surfeit of sleep. These were his concessions to Drinkwater in exchange for the withdrawal of sufficient money to cover his immediate needs.

Drinkwater of course could have bought him out, but for various reasons the senior partner did not consider this advisable. One of them, though he didn’t admit it to himself, was his absolute reliance on McComas in all matters of initiative and decision. Another reason was the tumultuous condition of the market, for as 1916 boomed on with the tragic battle of the Somme the allied agents sailed once more to the city of plenty for the wherewithal of another year. Coincidently Drinkwater and McComas moved into a suite that was like a floor in a country club and there they sat all day while anxious and gesticulating strangers explained what they must have, helplessly pledging their peoples to thirty years of economic depression. Drinkwater and McComas farmed out a dozen contracts a week and started the movement of countless tons toward Europe. Their names were known up and down the Street now — they had forgotten what it was to be kept waiting on a telephone.

But though profits increased and Stella, settled in the Long Island house, seemed for the first time in years perfectly satisfied, Henry McComas found himself growing irritable and nervous. What he missed most was the sleep for which his body hungered and which seemed to descend upon him at its richest just as he was shocked back into the living world each morning. And in spite of all material gains he was always aware that he was walking in his own paths no longer.

Their interests broadened and Drinkwater was frequently away on trips to the industrial towns of New England or the South. In consequence the detail of the office fell upon McComas — and he took it hard. A man capable of enormous concentration, he had previously harvested his power for hours of importance. Now he was inclined to fritter it away upon things that in perspective often proved to be inessentials. Sometimes he was engaged in office routine until six, then at home working until midnight when he tumbled, worn out but often still wide-eyed, into his beleaguered bed.

The firm’s policy was to slight their smaller accounts in Cuba and the West Indies and concentrate upon the tempting business of the war, and all through the summer they were hurrying to clear the scenes for the arrival of a new purchasing commission in September. When it arrived it unexpectedly found Drinkwater in Pennsylvania, temporarily out of reach. Time was short and the orders were to be placed in bulk. After much anxious parley over the telephone McComas persuaded four members of the commission to meet him for an hour at his own house that night.

Thanks to his own foresight everything was in order. If he hadn’t been able to be specific over the phone the coup toward which he had been working would have ended in failure. When it was brought off he was due for a rest and he knew it acutely. He’d had sharp fierce headaches in the past few weeks — he had never known a headache before.

The commissioners had been indefinite as to what time he could expect them that night. They were engaged for dinner and would be free somewhere between nine and eleven. McComas reached home at six, rested for a half hour in a steaming bath and then stretched himself gratefully on his bed. Tomorrow he would join Stella and the children in the country. His week-ends had been too infrequent in this long summer of living alone in the Ninety-second Street house with a deaf housekeeper. Ted Drinkwater would have nothing to say now, for this deal, the most ambitious of all, was his own. He had originated and engineered it — it seemed as if fate had arranged Drinkwater’s absence in order to give him the opportunity of concluding it himself.

He was hungry. He considered whether to take cold chicken and buttered toast at the hands of the housekeeper or to dress and go out to the little restaurant on the corner. Idly he reached his hand toward the bell, abandoned the attempt in the air, overcome by a pleasing languor which dispelled the headache that had bothered him all day.

That reminded him to take some aspirin and as he got up to go toward the bureau he was surprised at the weakened condition in which the hot bath had left him. After a step or two he turned about suddenly and plunged rather than fell back upon the bed. A faint feeling of worry passed over him and then an iron belt seemed to wind itself around his head and tighten, sending a spasm of pain through his body. He would ring for Mrs. Corcoran, who would call a doctor to fix him up. In a moment he would reach up his hand to the bell beside his bed. In a minute — he wondered at his indecision — then he cried out sharply as he realized the cause of it. His will had already given his brain the order and his brain had signaled it to his hand. It was his hand that would not obey.

He looked at his hand. Rather white, relaxed, motionless, it lay upon the counterpane. Again he gave it a command, felt his neck cords tighten with the effort. It did not move.

“It’s asleep,” he thought, but with rising alarm. “It’ll pass off in a minute.”

Then he tried to reach his other hand across his body to massage away the numbness but the other hand remained with a sort of crazy indifference on its own side of the bed. He tried to lift his foot — his knees. . . .

After a few seconds he gave a snort of nervous laughter. There was something ridiculous about not being able to move your own foot. It was like someone else’s foot, a foot in a dream. For a moment he had the fantastic notion that he must be asleep. But no — the unmistakable sense of reality was in the room.

“This is the end,” he thought, without fear, almost without emotion. “This thing, whatever it is, is creeping over me. In a minute I shall be dead.”

But the minute passed and another minute, and nothing happened, nothing moved except the hand of the little leather clock on his dresser which crept slowly over the point of seven minutes to seven. He turned his head quickly from side to side, shaking it as a runner kicks his legs to warm up. But there was no answering response from the rest of his body, only a slight rise and fall between belly and chest as he breathed out and in and a faint tremble of his helpless limbs from the faint tremble of the bed.

“Help!” he called out, “Mrs. Corcoran. Mrs. Cor-cor-an, help! Mrs. Corcor — “

There was no answer. She was in the kitchen probably. No way of calling her except by the bell, two feet over his head. Nothing to do but lie there until this passed off, or until he died, or until someone inquired for him at the front door.

The clock ticked past nine o’clock. In a house two blocks away the four members of the commission finished dinner, looked at their watches and issued forth into the September night with brief-cases in their hands. Outside a private detective nodded and took his place beside the chauffeur in the waiting limousine. One of the men gave an address on Ninety-second Street.

Ten minutes later Henry McComas heard the doorbell ring through the house. If Mrs. Corcoran was in the kitchen she would hear it too. On the contrary if she was in her room with the door shut she would hear nothing.

He waited, listening intently for the sound of footsteps. A minute passed. Two minutes. The doorbell rang again.

“Mrs. Corcoran!” he cried desperately.

Sweat began to roll from his forehead and down the folds of his neck. Again he shook his head desperately from side to side, and his will made a last mighty effort to kick his limbs into life. Not a movement, not a sound, except a third peal of the bell, impatient and sustained this time and singing like a trumpet of doom in his ear.

Suddenly he began to swear at the top of his voice calling in turn upon Mrs. Corcoran, upon the men in the street, asking them to break down the door, reassuring, imprecating, explaining. When he finished, the bell had stopped ringing; there was silence once more within the house.

A few minutes later the four men outside reentered their limousine and drove south and west toward the docks. They were to sleep on board ship that night. They worked late for there were papers to go ashore but long after the last of them was asleep Henry McComas lay awake and felt the sweat rolling from his neck and forehead. Perhaps all his body was sweating. He couldn’t tell.

For a year and a half Henry McComas lay silent in hushed and darkened rooms and fought his way back to life. Stella listened while a famous specialist explained that certain nervous systems were so constituted that only the individual could judge what was, or wasn’t, a strain. The specialist realized that a host of hypochondriacs imposed upon this fact to nurse and pamper themselves through life when in reality they were as hardy and phlegmatic as the policeman on the corner, but it was nevertheless a fact. Henry McComas’ large, lazy body had been the protection and insulation of a nervous intensity as fine and taut as a hair wire. With proper rest it functioned brilliantly for three or four hours a day — fatigued ever so slightly over the danger line it snapped like a straw.

Stella listened, her face wan and white. Then a few weeks later she went to Ted Drinkwater’s office and told him what the specialist had said. Drinkwater frowned uncomfortably — he remarked that specialists were paid to invent consoling nonsense. He was sorry but business must go on, and he thought it best for everyone, including Henry, that the partnership be dissolved. He didn’t blame Henry but he couldn’t forget that just because his partner didn’t see fit to keep in good condition they had missed the opportunity of a lifetime.

After a year Henry McComas found one day that he could move his arms down to the wrists; from that hour onward he grew rapidly well. In 1919 he went into business for himself with very little except his abilities and his good name and by the time this story ends, in 1926, his name alone was good for several million dollars.

What follows is another story. There are different people in it and it takes place when Henry McComas’ personal problems are more or less satisfactorily solved; yet it belongs to what has gone before. It concerns Henry McComas’ daughter.

Honoria was nineteen, with her father’s yellow hair (and, in the current fashion, not much more of it), her mother’s small pointed chin and eyes that she might have invented herself, deep-set yellow eyes with short stiff eyelashes that sprang from them like the emanations from a star in a picture. Her figure was slight and childish and when she smiled you were afraid that she might expose the loss of some baby teeth, but the teeth were there, a complete set, little and white. Many men had looked upon Honoria in flower. She expected to be married in the fall.

Whom to marry was another matter. There was a young man who traveled incessantly back and forth between London and Chicago playing in golf tournaments. If she married him she would at least be sure of seeing her husband every time he passed through New York. There was Max Van Camp who was unreliable, she thought, but good-looking in a brisk sketchy way. There was a dark man named Strangler who played polo and would probably beat her with a riding crop like the heroes of Ethel M. Dell. And there was Russel Codman, her father’s right-hand man, who had a future and whom she liked best of all.

He was not unlike her father in many ways — slow in thought, leisurely and inclined to stoutness — and perhaps these qualities had first brought him to Henry McComas’ favor. He had a genial manner and a hearty confident smile, and he had made up his mind about Honoria when he first saw her stroll into her father’s office one day three years before. But so far he hadn’t asked her to marry him, and though this annoyed Honoria she liked him for it too — he wanted to be secure and successful before he asked her to share his life. Max Van Camp, on the other hand, had asked her a dozen times. He was a quick-witted “alive” young man of the new school, continually bubbling over with schemes that never got beyond McComas’ waste-paper basket — one of those curious vagabonds of business who drift from position to position like strolling minstrels and yet manage to keep moving in an upward direction all their lives. He had appeared in McComas’ office the year before bearing an introductory letter from a friend.

He got the position. For a long while neither he nor his employer, nor anyone in the office, was quite sure what the position was. McComas at that time was interested in exporting, in real estate developments and, as a venture, in the possibilities of carrying the chain store idea into new fields.

Van Camp wrote advertising, investigated properties and accomplished such vague duties as might come under the phrase, “We’ll get Van Camp to do that.” He gave the effect always of putting much more clamor and energy into a thing than it required and there were those who, because he was somewhat flashy and often wasted himself like an unemployed dynamo, called him a bluff and pronounced that he was usually wrong.

“What’s the matter with you young fellows?” Henry McComas said to him one day. “You seem to think business is some sort of trick game, discovered about 1910, that nobody ever heard of before. You can’t even look at a proposition unless you put it into this new language of your own. What do you mean you want to ‘sell’ me this proposition? Do you want to suggest it — or are you asking money for it?”

“Just a figure of speech, Mr. McComas.”

“Well, don’t fool yourself that it’s anything else. Business sense is just common sense with your personal resources behind it — nothing more.”

“I’ve heard Mr. Codman say that,” agreed Max Van Camp meekly.

“He’s probably right. See here — “ he looked keenly at Van Camp; “how would you like a little competition with that same gentleman? I’ll put up a bonus of five hundred dollars on who comes in ahead.”

“I’d like nothing better, Mr. McComas.”

“All right. Now listen. We’ve got retail hardware stores in every city of over a thousand population in Ohio and Indiana. Some fellow named McTeague is horning in on the idea — he’s taken the towns of twenty thousand and now he’s got a chain as long as mine. I want to fight him in the towns of that size. Codman’s gone to Ohio. Suppose you take Indiana. Stay six weeks. Go to every town of over twenty thousand in the state and buy up the best hardware stores in sight.”

“Suppose I can only get the second-best?”

“Do what you can. There isn’t any time to waste because McTeague’s got a good start on us. Think you can leave tonight?”

He gave some further instructions while Van Camp fidgeted impatiently. His mind had grasped what was required of him and he wanted to get away. He wanted to ask Honoria McComas one more question, the same one, before it was time to go.

He received the same answer because Honoria knew she was going to marry Russel Codman, just as soon as he asked her to. Sometimes when she was alone with Codman she would shiver with excitement, feeling that now surely the time had come at last — in a moment the words would flow romantically from his lips. What the words would be she didn’t know, couldn’t imagine, but they would be thrilling and extraordinary, not like the spontaneous appeals of Max Van Camp which she knew by heart.

She waited excitedly for Russel Codman’s return from the West. This time, unless he spoke, she would speak herself. Perhaps he didn’t want her after all, perhaps there was someone else. In that case she would marry Max Van Camp and make him miserable by letting him see that he was getting only the remnants of a blighted life.

Then before she knew it the six weeks were up and Russel Codman came back to New York. He reported to her father that he was going to see her that night. In her excitement Honoria found excuses for being near the front door. The bell rang finally and a maid stepped past her and admitted a visitor into the hall.

“Max,” she cried.

He came toward her and she saw that his face was tired and white.

“Will you marry me?” he demanded without preliminaries.

She sighed.

“How many times, Max?”

“I’ve lost count,” he said cheerfully. “But I haven’t even begun. Do I understand that you refuse?”

“Yes, I’m sorry.”

“Waiting for Codman?”

She grew annoyed.

“That’s not your affair.”

“Where’s your father?”

She pointed, not deigning to reply.

Max entered the library where McComas rose to meet him.

“Well?” inquired the older man. “How did you make out?”

“How did Codman make out?” demanded Van Camp.

“Codman did well. He bought about eighteen stores — in several cases the very stores McTeague was after.”

“I knew he would,” said Van Camp.

“I hope you did the same.”

“No,” said Van Camp unhappily. “I failed.”

“What happened?” McComas slouched his big body reflectively back in his chair and waited.

“I saw it was no use,” said Van Camp after a moment. “I don’t know what sort of places Codman picked up in Ohio but if it was anything like Indiana they weren’t worth buying. These towns of twenty thousand haven’t got three good hardware stores. They’ve got one man who won’t sell out on account of the local wholesaler; then mere’s one man that McTeague’s got, and after that only little places on the corner. Anything else you’ll have to build up yourself. I saw right away that it wasn’t worth while.” He broke off. “How many places did Codman buy?”

“Eighteen or nineteen.”

“I bought three.”

McComas looked at him impatiently.

“How did you spend your time?” he asked. “Take you two weeks apiece to get them?”

“Took me two days,” said Van Camp gloomily. “Then I had an idea.”

“What was that?” McComas’ voice was ironical.

“Well — McTeague had all the good stores.”

“Yes.”

“So I thought the best thing was to buy McTeague’s company over his head.”

“What?”

“Buy his company over his head,” and Van Camp added with seeming irrelevance, “you see, I heard that he’d had a big quarrel with his uncle who owned fifteen per cent of the stock.”

“Yes,” McComas was leaning forward now — the sarcasm gone from his face.

“McTeague only owned twenty-five per cent and the storekeepers themselves owned forty. So if I could bring round the uncle we’d have a majority. First I convinced the uncle that his money would be safer with McTeague as a branch manager in our organization — “

“Wait a minute — wait a minute,” said McComas. “You go too fast for me. You say the uncle had fifteen per cent — how’d you get the other forty?”

“From the owners. I told them the uncle had lost faith in McTeague and I offered them better terms. I had all their proxies on condition that they would be voted in a majority only.”

“Yes,” said McComas eagerly. Then he hesitated. “But it didn’t work, you say. What was the matter with it? Not sound?”

“Oh, it was a sound scheme all right.”

“Sound schemes always work.”

“This one didn’t.”

“Why not?”

“The uncle died.”

McComas laughed. Then he stopped suddenly and considered.

“So you tried to buy McTeague’s company over his head?”

“Yes,” said Max with a shamed look. “And I failed.”

The door flew open suddenly and Honoria rushed into the room.

“Father,” she cried. At the sight of Max she stopped, hesitated, and then carried away by her excitement continued:

“Father — did you ever tell Russel how you proposed to Mother?”

“Why, let me see — yes, I think I did.”

Honoria groaned.

“Well, he tried to use it again on me.”

“What do you mean?”

“All these months I’ve been waiting — “ she was almost in tears, “waiting to hear what he’d say. And then — when it came — it sounded familiar — as if I’d heard it before.”

“It’s probably one of my proposals,” suggested Van Camp. “I’ve used so many.”

She turned on him quickly.

“Do you mean to say you’ve ever proposed to any other girl but me?”

“Honoria — would you mind?”

“Mind. Of course I wouldn’t mind. I’d never speak to you again as long as I lived.”

“You say Codman proposed to you in the words I used to your mother?” demanded McComas.

“Exactly,” she wailed. “He knew them by heart.”

“That’s the trouble with him,” said McComas thoughtfully. “He always was my man and not his own. You’d better marry Max, here.”

“Why — “ she looked from one to the other, “why — I never knew you liked Max, Father. You never showed it.”

“Well, that’s just the difference,” said her father, “between your way and mine.”

LIPSTICK: A COLLEGE COMEDY

School was over. The happy children, their books swinging carelessly at a strap’s end, tripped out into the Spring fields — Wait a minute, that’s the wrong story.

School was over. Without marking the page, the nineteen-year-old teacher closed McMaster’s History of the United States, stood up and said in an uncertain voice: “I suppose you know this will be my last day — “

“Good for you, kid!” a pupil cried in the front row.

“We’re all for you, Dolly. Go on out and knock ‘em dead!”

There was a spontaneous ovation. When it died away the teacher continued:

“I’m sorry you aren’t all coming with me — yet. Just remember when the days seem awfully long — that we’ve all got to go to school.”

Her friendly gaze moved down the rows where the women convicts sat — the sad, the shifty-eyed, the hard, the weak — each one dressed like herself in a belted smock of prison grey. For two years she had shared their lives — the same roof, the same food, the endless monotony. Now, in a few hours, she would be free and, as the word filled her mind like a song, their faces seemed to slip with all old unhappy things into the past.

“That’s all,” she said, stepping down from her desk. “School is over.”

School is over. In another educational institution not a hundred miles away a great bronze bell is ringing in a central tower. The campus is swarming suddenly with life. A stream of young men pours from each of twoscore arched doors, blurs to a crowd that eddies about for a moment in the green quadrangle, and then dividing once more into orderly streams files through other arched doorways and disappears. The young men are dressed in knickerbockers that are not too big, flannels not too wide, or in “business” suits that have no collegiate smack about them; if they wore sweaters, which they don’t, there would be no letter on them no matter how legitimately won for this is one of the oldest and most conservative of eastern universities, given over in large measure to the education of those who have had money for several generations, and its manners are simply the good manners of the world outside.

Whistling and in step a last group has moved out of sight across the campus. A lost rider has taken his bicycle from its place against the ivied wall and pedaled away, when two young men enter the quadrangle hurriedly and head for a doorway, conscious of being late. They are the two Manny brothers, one of whom, Ben, is the hero of this story.

Ben is tall, long-legged, fair (or so I see him) and, if not handsome, at least has reserve, consideration and dignity in his face. He is what used to be known as a “superior” person — that is he is sure of himself, he knows that his position in this world is based on solid rock of confidence and plenty and this has given him an air of “Who are you, anyhow?” toward those whose breeding he suspects — and even a certain arrogance. All this, mind you, is carefully hidden — otherwise he would be merely a snob. Only occasionally when he is excited does his politeness relax and this quality of “superiority” shows forth suddenly. In a way he is like his university — a symbol of its type. He is a man who is recognized, even deferred to, without being quite popular. He is twenty-two, a senior, the chairman of the dance committee and belongs to one of the best fraternities in college.

His brother Cupid is more human, more democratic, more popular and a great deal stouter. Not a roly-poly fat boy — he nevertheless reminds you of comfortable chairs, beer, hospitality, bawdy laughter.

On a classroom door the brothers are confronted by the following notice in pen and ink.

“Prof. Swope’s group in Science of Society will meet by the main gateway at         for an experimental trip to Hamlin Prison.”

They consult their watches, rush to the rendezvous. The party starts out in two cars.

At the other educational institution our late teacher, Miss Dolly Carrol, is preparing with the means at her disposal for her exit into the world. The means consist — some white powder in a piece of paper, a black spot drawing crayon, which must do service as an eye pencil, and a short stick of lip rouge which seems to have dried out in the balmy days of Lillian Russell, and yields no red. Look at her a moment. What mark have these two years left on her? No prison pallor, but in her eyes a sadness, a baffled hunger for life. Part of her youth has been lost here, and the sting and ignominy of it will stay with her for awhile.

Look around her cell and you will hear the drums that have beat in her ear on lonely nights. Pictures of debutantes, of society functions, bathing beauties, actresses, golf champions, film stars — people revelling through life, being happy.

Miss Mimi Haughton presented to society at dinner dance at the Plaza.

Flapper Army besieges Mayor for Mother’s Relief.

Contest winner gets lead in “Amorous Love.”

“Necking parties on wane” say Club Women.

These are life to her — the world outside…

The pathetic lipstick breaks, loses its pieces beneath the bed. She gropes for them, finds a morsel and presses it against her lips as if to extract its secret. She looks at herself hopefully — and then the futility of her little efforts to impress the world outside sweeps over her and tears that she bravely neglects to shed, glisten in her eyes.

Another scene. The group of young men from a plutocratic university who have chosen to study the science of society have entered the prison. Accompanied by a warden they make a tour of the cells.

Ben Manny lingers behind the others already overcome by a profound distaste. When the distorted face of a devilish hag, a face full of hate, malice, and condensed evil leers out at him from one cell, he starts, jumps away in horror.

In her cell Dolly, dressed simply in her old street clothes, makes a last round of the small monotonous walls.

“Mimi Haughton, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. A. P. Haughton of 39 East 68th Street.”…….

A newspaper clipping of a young, chic debutante, — piquant face, dress from the Rue de la Paix.

“You wait,” Dolly says, gazing defiantly at the picture.”I’ll catch up with you.”

A prisoner delivering mail stops at the cell door, congratulates Dolly on her release and gives her a letter and a package. They have an interesting flavor, as mail sometimes has. But before Dolly has time to do more than speculate upon them the students of sociology, Professor Swope in the lead, move curiously past her cell.

Professor Swope — a small man of thirty with a mother to support, impractical, inexperienced, fatuous — yet within his limits honorable, earnest, thorough, aglow with the latest ideas about reforming the criminal and uplifting the lost.

He sees Dolly.

All the young men see Dolly.

She is used to being looked at as a specimen. She stares back boldly. The group halts — the professor gathers the group about him and in a whisper asks them how they can regard this girl as anything but a victim of bad living conditions or bad early environment. One look at her would convince anyone of that.

Ben Manny, a little in the rear, wanders up. His eyes meet Dolly’s. He is not interested — he passes on, catches up with the group in time to hear the last of the professor’s words.. . .

But something has happened to Dolly. She is not able to look back defiantly and indifferently at this boy. She turns away from his eyes, busies herself about the cell — then stares after him, excited and discontented. Luckily she can’t hear what he’s saying: “Bunch of degenerates, Professor. Aren’t there enough deserving people to pity without wasting it on the dregs of humanity? We’re a nation of sentimentalists — a pretty face can do no wrong.”

The Professor listens, determined he will be broadminded. But the face of the girl in the cell he has just passed haunts him.

One young man nudges Cupid Manny.

“See the one back there, Cupid? She didn’t have a previous engagement. You could ask her down to the prom. You’d be sure of her anyhow.”

Professor Swope is annoyed at the facetious note.

“You might do worse,” he murmurs.

The group passes on. Putting Ben Manny’s supercilious face out of mind Dolly opens her letter.

My Dearest Niece:

Two years ago when the firm found out that someone had been selling their chemical formulas to a rival you took the shame and blame from your old uncle’s shoulders and saved his worthless life by going to prison in his place. I’ve prospered out here in New Mexico and I haven’t forgotten. You’re not going to be a typist any more.

Take what you find waiting for you outside the prison gates, and enjoy the youth and happiness you sacrificed $94

Your loving and grateful Uncle.

Years ago I stumbled on an old Indian Chemical secret called “The scent of love.” I have made it into a gift for you.

Confused Dolly drops the letter, and opens the package — it contains a large red lipstick in a case of curious design. Before she can examine it a guard comes to the door of her cell and cheerfully,

“Whether you want to or not — out you go.”

He picks up her grip.

The warden in his office is formally polite. He dumps out the little box that contains her few small possessions, among them a diploma from a business school — and adds the usual gifts of the state, some good advice and a five dollar bill. He likes Dolly. They shake hands.

Meanwhile Professor Swope has been seized by a curious longing to talk to the pretty prisoner. What was her offense — or hermisfortune? He steps away from his students and retraces his steps toward her cell. It is empty. A prisoner sweeping tells him that Dolly is free and directs him to the warden’s office —

She has just emerged and is trying the lipstick, curiously and eagerly, glad merely for the fact that it will make her lips red.

“I beg your pardon, here is my card. I saw your face and I couldn’t resist wanting to talk to you. They told me you were leaving today. If there’s anything I can do — “

What a kind world. What a funny little man. She smiled at him — he became confused.

“I’m all right,” she said. “Thanks.”

Why, she was beautiful he thought. To offer her charity was an insult. To think that his students had spoken trivially of such a girl.

The prom indeed — how many prom girls could look at a man with a gaze as fresh and lovely. Probably she would behave as well as anyone at a prom. What an experiment it would be to take her. That mouth — it was like a flower — why, it was worth a life time of study — of devotion.

“Professor!” Her voice brought him to himself — his lips were not two inches away from hers.

“I beg your pardon,” he faltered. Then words springing from some spontaneous source gushed from him, “Would you honor me by coming with me to the University dance next month?”

He was trembling, astonished at himself.

“Me?” Dolly laughed. Stuff of her dreams. “No thanks. But you’re very kind.” And then with a touch of suspicion, “Did you want to parade me around in my ball and chain?”

He looked so hurt that she smiled kindly and thanked him again.

“I really mean it. I — “ She stepped back hurriedly — again he was swaying toward her.

“You can help me with my bag,’’ she said and turned toward the great doorway. Picking up the cardboard grip he followed her. The turnkey shook hands with Dolly — the gate swung open. In a trance she passed through, stepped into the sunshine, heard a trim deferential voice at her ear.

“Miss Dolly Carrol?”

A liveried chauffeur stood attention beside her, holding a coat of Russian sable over his arm.

“This is your car, Miss Carrol — “ It was a lemon colored Rolls-Royce. Dolly looked incredulously from the car to the chauffeur.

“It’s a mistake,” she said.

“No mistake, Miss Carrol.”

Suddenly the full meaning of her uncle’s letter burst over her. “You are to be a typist no longer” — My God, it wasn’t just a prisoner’s hallucination, induced by months of loneliness and

“Your coat, Miss Carrol.”

Her arms slid into the silken sleeves. The chauffeur opened the limousine door. She took a faltering step, hesitated, but the professor’s face convinced her that it was real — he was as astonished — overwhelmed as she. Dolly got in.

From the prison emerged the group of students.

“My God,” ejaculated Cupid, “it’s that girl.” Ben nodded, cynically. “Evidently she hid the swag well.”

Dolly saw them, and her own chin went up.

“Goodbye professor,” she said graciously. “May we meet again.”

Her hand still clasped the diploma from a business school. With another haughty glance at the staring faces she folded it, tore it up and flung it to the breeze. Then she snuggled down into her sable coat.

“The Ritzmore, New York,” she said.

*****

This is the end of the first sequence.

II.

It’s better to be poor and popular on a side street than to be rich and lonesome in a fashionable hotel. Dolly is so lonesome that she pretends not to be — behold her in the lobby trying to look as if she hopes no one will speak to her. She drives “to the Stuyvesants at Southampton” and once out of the city she climbs into the front seat, shares a lunch box with the chauffeur, and drives back to the Ritzmore. On her return from one of these expeditions she finds the lobby swarming with college boys and young girls. She asks information from a clerk. He tells her that these are the outward and visible signs of prom week.

At the sight of these girls, the flowers of many cities from coast to coast, Dolly feels a pang. The prom stands for music, lights, fashion, youth — the things that apparently she had missed forever.

“I beg your pardon.” A man brushes against her and without looking at her passes with his companion, but not too quick for her to recognize Ben Manny, the haughty handsome boy whose face hadhaunted her since she left prison. And the girl with him is none other than the newspaper clipping come to life. The Mimi Haughton who one day last fall had been “presented to society at a dinner at the Plaza.”

Another familiar face —

A stout boy standing beneath the clock and looking anxiously at his watch. She remembers that he was one of the party of students that day.

“Mr. Manny!”

A page squirms through the crowd. Ben stops him, looks at the address on the telegram and directs him to his brother, under the clock.

“Bet you Cupid’s girl can’t come,” says Ben to Mimi Haughton.

Cupid opens the telegram with forebodings.

Mother ill in Albany. Can’t come. In tears. Grace.

It is a standard joke that Cupid’s girl whoever she may be never arrives. He grinds his teeth as he realizes that he is in for some heavy kidding. He is trudging gloomily out of the lobby when he comes face to face with Dolly.

“Hello,” she says.

Pretty girl. He wonders where he has known her and then suddenly remembers. Because he is sorry for her he stands for a moment chatting. Then he realized that dressed as she was in perfect taste, she isn’t a pitiable object at all.

Down the corridor he sees Ben and Mimi and Mimi’s mother going into the tea dance. The scent of perfume and powder is heavy on the air. The melody of “Meadowlark” floats out into the lobby. If that damn girl, would only — “I beg your pardon,” he says suddenly. His face has managed to slide up to within a foot of Dolly’s.

“Look here,” he says to Dolly, “come in and have some tea.”

“Me?”

“Sure.”

“Is it all right to invite me?”

“Of course.”

He is struck by an even more radical idea. This girl is a beauty and seems to be a pretty good counterfeit of a lady. No one knows who she is — why not take her to the prom and pretend she’s the one he originally invited.

They go into the tea room and join Ben’s party. Cupid has asked Dolly her name — now he introduces her in turn to Ben, Mimi and Mimi’s mother. During the introduction a parrot on a perch overhead — one of six in the room — glares down at Dolly and cries “Who’s this? Who’s this?” in a shrill voice.

Ben looks angrily from Dolly to his brother. This is really too much — when he gets Cupid alone he’ll give him a piece of his mind.

Mrs. Haughton’s politeness toward any girls who might compete with her daughter, Mimi, is effusive but artificial. Mimi is nineteen, a pretty, sharp-featured girl with a cynical worldly line of New York chatter. She is definitely “after” Ben Manny who represents everything she desires.

Cupid shows Ben the telegram which says that his girl, Grace, can’t come. The music starts. Ben dances with Mimi, Cupid with Dolly.

On the floor the attraction of the lipstick begins to act on Cupid. Why, this girl is wonderful — only with considerable difficulty does he restrain himself from kissing her on the floor. When they sit down he begins working around to the subject of the prom. Suddenly Ben perceives with horror what Cupid has in mind. Ben has nothing against Dolly personally but it is his honest conviction that it wouldn’t do at all.

“Miss Carrol,” says Cupid, “I wonder if you would care to — “

Ben interrupts him by asking for the sugar and gives Cupid a warning glance that Cupid pretends not to see.

“Miss Carrol,” he resumes, “This week-end — “

Again Ben’s voice, cold as ice, asking for the cream. And now Dolly understands what is happening. Her eyes meet Ben’s, first hurt and then defiant, and they stare at each other so tensely that Mimi and Mrs. Haughton sense the conflict. But they don’t guess the truth — that Ben has determined that Cupid will only bring this girl to the prom over his dead body.

“I was wondering, if you had nothing to do this week-end, if you would — “

A page boy winding among the tables cuts the suspense with —

“Mr. Manny! Mr. Manny!”

Cupid is wanted on the phone. He excuses himself and goes out to a booth — it is his girl on long distance. Mother is better. She can come. If Cupid could see the childhood sweetheart to whom he is talking over the phone he would have been less jubilant. Little Grace Jones has grown — she is no longer a sylph-like child of 75 pounds, but an oversized duofold model of 190, who can hardly get into the booth. But Cupid is happily unaware of this as he returns to the table and announces that his girl is coming after all. Ben tries to hide his look of relief and Dolly hers of disappointment. Neither succeeds.

“I’m honestly sorry,” Cupid whispers, “I was just about to ask you.”

But Dolly has jumped in turn to an audacious decision.

“To the prom?” she asks in a clear guileless voice. “Oh, that’s nice of you but I couldn’t have accepted. I’m going with another man.” She gets up. “Good bye. I’ll see you all there.”

And as she turns away, her chin uptilted, the parrot overhead makes a final comment.

“Some baby! Some baby!”

Thus ends the second sequence.

III.

Every train to the University town was jammed to the doors. Five hundred girls and half as many chaperones with trunks, bags, escorts and even an occasional personal maid were dumped in batches on the station platform whence they drove off in Fords, Packards, omnibuses, Victorias and seagoing hacks to the Club or hotel that would house them during their stay.

Dolly had wired Professor Swope she was coming and as the crowd poured from the train, she picked him out in his frock coat, waiting nervously for her on the platform.

“Well — I came,” she said. “Are you sorry?”

“Not at all.” And after one look at her he wasn’t.

The University is situated in a town of ten thousand people. Its grey Gothic architecture sprawls for miles over a green undulating campus — with here and there for variety, a hall that was old before the revolution began. On this same day the campus was alive with people — there were alumni in their reunion costumes, fathers and mothers, small brothers and sisters, prom girls, undergraduates in white bound for tennis or in tweeds bound for golf. Suddenly Dolly grew rigid as a long line of convicts walking in lock step and preceded by some pitiful little child convicts turned a corner into sight.

“How horrible,” she thought. “A prison even here!”

She breathed easier as she saw a sign the leader carried on a pole: “Reunion. Class of 1920.”

Her suitcase was enormous. It was all the professor could do to lift it off the ground. They had walked scarcely fifty yards, and the professor had already stopped several times to rest, when the Manny party in a big Marmon drove past, scattering insolent dust.

They passed through a Gothic arch and walked down the main street where undergraduates sat in chairs and benches tipped back against the storefronts and watched the girls go by. They stopped at the University Arms, an old inn where the professor had arranged for her to stay.

When she emerged and the week-end began.

They started for — a ball? No, an athletic contest? — wrong again. It was the professor’s idea that Dolly would appreciate a nice lecture on sociology that by good luck was scheduled for that day. As they walked along he rubbed his hands with pleasure — oblivious to the glances Dolly was attracting. A hundred eyes followed her — one young man paid her the compliment of falling over backward in his chair.

Evidently that was their destination — this pleasant colonial building with a jazzy band booming outside and couples strolling on the porch and a few young men loitering on the lawn outside. Her steps quicken, her cheeks brighten. How kind of the little professor to come out of his retirement and give her this good time!

But — what’s this, they’re going past — to another building, a recitation hall next door? That sign.

LECTURE ON CRIMINAL SOCIOLOGY

Phineas Hasslacher, Ph.D.

Professors and their wives are already going in. Dolly looks around in despair. The music is loud from the house beside.

“I know you’ll enjoy this,” says the professor, pointing at the sign and waiting for her exclamation of pleasure. At this moment her eyes fall on Cupid Manny.

He has just come out the Slide and Glide Club, hot and discouraged. He has been dancing with Grace for an hour and he needs a drink — safe behind a colonial pillar he tips a flask into his mouth. Then he sees Dolly. Gosh — why isn’t she his partner instead of this hippopotamus in ruffles. But he sees where she’s bound and guesses that she has her troubles too.

Why not invite them both in?

“Hey! wait a minute,” he calls. Dolly’s face brightens. He crosses the lawn and issues the invitation.

No. The professor shakes his head and looks significantly at Cupid. It’s impossible. But — that music. Dolly’s feet flirt eagerly with the sidewalk.

“Can’t we, professor?” she begs.

“Come on,” insists Cupid. “You’ll learn much more about crime in here.”

Takes the lecture sign and places it in front of the Club door.

“This way, professor.”

The professor is half pulled, half persuaded toward the door ofthe Slide and Glide Club. Meanwhile a new column of faculty couples arrive. They see the sign and cross the lawn toward it. The first couple has almost reached the Club house steps when Cupid sees what’s happening and returns the notice to its proper place. The column of ponderous and absent-minded pedagogues winds about like a snake following the sign — but this time to the right door.

There has been an interested observer to the scene — a gentleman of whom we will see more. He is <acronym title=“This character is variously named Jakes or Lakes in the typescript.”>Joe Jakes</acronym>, the proctor or campus cop — a stout, heavily moustached, plainclothes man responsible to the Dean for the students’ behavior. He doesn’t like the incident at all.

Meanwhile the professor still protesting has been persuaded into the Slide and Glide Club. It consists of a great stoneflagged central hall, looking out through high French windows on to a veranda and a row of tennis courts. On one side of the hall is a card room where chaperones are sitting down to bridge, on the other a great dim billiard room where couples stroll during the intermissions, knock the billiard balls about or occupy one of the large soft divans which line the walls.

In the central hall about twenty couples are dancing to the music of a Bohemian orchestra. Like all college dances in the East and South, this is a “Cut-in” affair — a stag may break in on whom he likes and dance with her until he himself is relieved. The unfortunate man who is dancing with Cupid’s girl, Grace Jones, has been “stuck” with her for some time. He has now resorted to the unusual experiment of holding a five dollar bill behind her back as a reward to anyone who will cut in.

Ben Manny, standing among the stags, sees Dolly and Professor Swope come in. Politely but coldly he shakes hands.

But he is alone in his indifference to her. No sooner has she danced off with Cupid than he is besieged with requests for an introduction. He has no choice but to comply and is thus put in the position of sponsoring a girl of whose presence his brother disapproves.

Dolly is more than popular — she is a riot. The professor follows her about looking for a dance, but some young fellow is always too nimble for him and cuts in ahead. Several times he taps the shoulder of the man she’s dancing with, only to find she’s already sailed off in someone else’s arms.

Ben Manny stands in the stag-line frowning. The annoying conviction creeps over him that by not dancing with Dolly he’s missing something. She passes close to him and their eyes meet; her mouth is but a yard away and irresistably he takes a step after her —

Too late. A man grabs his arm hurriedly.

“I’ve got to leave immediately, Ben. Would you mind taking care of Miss Jones?”

And Grace Jones is unceremoniously thrust into his arms. He is in for an arduous hour.

Herc Harkness, a tall, lean boy, a little stewed, innocently calls Mimi Haughton’s attention to the fact that Dolly’s partners all look as if they were going to kiss her. When men are close to her they seem to see her lips surrounded by a crowd of honey bees.

An intermission in the dance brings Mimi and Dolly close together. With feigned cordiality, Mimi takes out her powder puff and pretends to look for a lipstick.

“How annoying,” she exclaims. “I’ve lost it. May I borrow yours?”

But a look in her eyes warns Dolly. She answers innocently that she hasn’t got a lipstick with her. Mimi smiles to herself knowing that Dolly has it in her handbag and moves contemptuously.

Dolly and Cupid walk out into the billiard room and sit in a window open to the gathering June dusk. Two boys have just finished playing tennis on the court outside and are putting up their rackets. It is a lovely and romantic night. Cupid, a little tight now, groans to think that he must pass the evening with Grace. He produces his flask and offers it to Dolly, who refuses it. He drains it and in doing so leans back farther and farther until he loses his balance and topples head over heels out the open window. So surprisingly neat has been his exit that Dolly jumps up with astonishment at finding that she is suddenly alone.

At this moment Grace, discouraged at her luck on the dance floor, has maneuvered the unhappy Ben into the billiard room and is suggesting that they sit down on a couch and talk. Ben is desperate — he has been with her for half an hour. His eyes, roaming about looking for an excuse, fall on a slim figure walking through the dark billiard room toward the music. Ben doesn’t recognize her but he pretends to and exclaims to Grace.

“That girl is looking for me. We have this dance.”

He dashes across the room and in terror lest Grace pursue him, he seizes Dolly and dances her around between the tables with,explaining and apologizing. Only then does he realize who he has in his arms.

“I wondered if you were going to dance with me,” Dolly says, looking up at him.

He has no answer.

“You hate me. Don’t you? If you keep on hating me I’m going back to New York tonight.”

“Don’t be absurd,” he says quickly.

“But you think I have no business here.”

“No, I don’t,” he says embarrassed. “I suppose any girl as pretty as you can go anywhere, even — “ He pauses.

“Even if she’s just out of jail,” she finishes for him, and adds, “So you really think I’m pretty?”

He looks down at her in the half darkness. Outside the window a boy lights a gas street lamp and the glow falls on her face. Grace has gone out of the billiard room, intercepting, annexing Professor Swope just outside the door. Ben and Dolly are alone.

“You’re beautiful,” he whispers involuntarily.

“What — what feature do you think is the prettiest?”

He looks at her once more — then it is as though an invisible hand presses his head forward, until their lips meet and cling.

For a moment they dance on — then simultaneously they break apart, and, breathing hard, Dolly leans back against a billiard table. Neither of them has seen the shadow of Mimi, a shadow with clenched fists, flit past down the hall.

“I beg your pardon,” Ben gasps.

“Oh, don’t say that! Don’t say that!”

“I forgot everything. Your lips were so beautiful.”

In a turmoil of emotion Dolly accompanies him back to the dancing floor. She must have him now or it will break her heart.

This ends the Third Sequence.

IV.

Night. Two unsteady figures detach themselves from the shadow of the Slide and Glide Club and move off down the street. They are Cupid Manny and his friend Herc Harkness. Taking care of Grace has proved too heavy an assignment and Cupid, encouraged by a pint of Scotch, has backed out.

“I will now give my celebrated imitation of the Dean.”

The Dean one gathers is a person who walks with his feet turned out, with a fifty cent piece in his eye and with his head bobbing up and down as if it were on a wire. Also that he habitually reels from one side to the other.

“You stagoning,” says Herc reprovingly.

“What’s that?”

“Stagoning from one side to the other side. Watch me.”

They compete against each other, unaware that not far behind them a third party is apparently playing the same game. The third party, however, is fifty years old, doesn’t stagger and seems quite at home in his impersonation. In fact he is the Dean. Luckily he is nearsighted.

Suddenly Cupid and Here stop short. Under a lamp-post on the next corner stands the sinister figure Joe Jakes, the cop, and he is bending a curious gaze in their direction. They turn quickly and break into a run. So does Joe Jakes. They see the Dean — caught between two fires they duck into a long hedge-bordered walk, intending to hide until the danger is over.

“That was pretty close,” whispers Cupid.

“Sh!”

To their horror the Dean turns up the walk and comes toward them. They retreat. Before them is the open door of a house and over it the sign “Faculty Club” but this they do not see. They have no choice but to go in. Always fifty feet behind them, walking very deliberately, comes the Dean.

Upstairs they went. Came the Dean. Into a large reception room they hurried. Came the Dean. To their confused minds he seemed to be pursuing them with deadly persistence. They ran into a room separated from by drawn curtains. To their relief the Dean did not appear. Peeking through they saw him handing his hat, coat and gloves to an attendant, as if he were making a stay.

They took breath and looked around. A table was spread for twelve diners and on it a large card proclaimed the dinner of the Sociology Department. Slowly it dawned on them that they are in the very camp of the enemy.

“Look!” said Herc. “Beautiful food.”

A dish of glowing hors d’oeuvre adorned the center of the table and suddenly they realize that they are hungry. They nibble on a canape of anchovy, then a canape caviare.. . five minutes pass … a lone, slightly rumpled sardine sleeps upon the dish in solitary state.

“No need for these little forks now,” suggests Cupid. “Let’s take ‘em away.”

The forks are removed. That leaves three utensils on side of each plate and only two on the other. The discrepancy is remedied by the removal of the butter knives.

“Let’s take all the silver,” says Herc, “I got a low mark in sociology last year.”

“Fine.”

They gather up the remaining tableware and while Herc ties it up neatly into a napkin, Cupid draws aside the curtain to investigate the commotion now audible in the next room. It is full of people. He starts as he discovers Dolly and Professor Swope. The professor has his back toward the curtain. Signalling violently Cupid manages to catch Dolly’s eye. She stares back in astonishment. He beckons her, warning her to silence. After some maneuvering, she manages to slip through the curtain into the dining room where with considerable pride Cupid and Herc show her the napkin full of silver.

“But you’ll be caught and expelled,” she says in alarm. “You’d better put it all back where it was and go home to bed.”

It takes some time to get this through their befuddled minds and any minute the diners may come in from the next room; Dolly hurries to the window and looks out — under the lamp-post across the street stands the figure of Joe Jakes, the proctor.

Simultaneously there is a sound of movement from the next room. Dolly opens the door of a large linen closet, hustles the two boys protesting inside, and hurriedly turns the key. She picks up the napkin full of silver and starts for the table, just as the curtains quiver. She has only time to step aside and pretend to enter with the others.

It is on the tip of her tongue to tell the whole story to the professor and to hand him the bundle, but she realizes in time that he of all people would fail to understand. He would think — heavens! He would think that she had stolen the silver — that he had indeed been rash to bring along a girl just out of jail.

With dignity the party seats itself and Dolly, trembling a little, continues to hold the bulky bundle on her knee. In a moment all will be known and she must either give over Cupid and his friend to the authorities or leave the University in disgrace.

At this point a waiter picks up the hors d’oeuvre once so resplendent and finds that it consists of one sardine. He rushes to the steward. It is incredible. Amazed and horrified the steward orders him to say nothing, but to serve the soup.

The scarcity of silver now begins to be felt. The Dean summons the steward and points out that no doubt this little detail has been overlooked. The steward cannot believe his eyes. There is a rapid scurrying between the dining room and the kitchen, from which presently red-faced waiters appear looking as if they had gone through the third degree. Eventually the steward approaches the Dean.

“The silver has been stolen, sir.”

“Stolen?”

The word goes down the table. Dolly trembles violently — a spoon slips from the bundle and falls to the floor — fortunately without noise.

“That is unfortunate,” says the Dean. “Put out some more silver.”

“There is no more. It has all been rented to the prom committee for the dance tomorrow night.”

The Dean looks at him wrathfully.

“We’ve got to eat,” he roars. “Get us something — even if it’s only chopsticks. Unless somebody’s stolen the dinner.”

The kitchen is ransacked. Waiters presently appear with half pint spoons of tin or wood, toasting forks with two prongs, carving knives, pancake turners, cleavers, even an egg beater, and with horrified glances at one another the faculty begins to dine.

Let us draw a curtain over the obscene spectacle and return to Dolly. On her left fate has placed a certain professor pedagogue well along in years, but of amorous inclinations. He has been to many faculty dinners, but he has never drawn such a high number before. Under the very eyes of his wife he begins, with a suggestive wink, to work on Dolly.

His method is to pinch her leg under the table, and each time that she feels his hand on her knee she draws away. Unfortunately the movement invariably dislodges a piece of silver, which falls with a sharp tinkle to the floor. She holds her breath to see if anyone has heard and then kicks it deftly far under the table.

The professor, seeing her forced wooden smile and imagining that he is making an impression, continues his tactics. He even begins to edge his chair toward her until recalled to himself by a frigid glance from his wife.

In the closet Cupid and Herc, refreshed by a short sleep, awaken and try the door. It is locked. Philosophically they settle down to wait and meanwhile beguile the time with cigarettes, blowing the smoke out through the keyhole. The Dean sniffs suspiciously. Seeing a cloud of it arise, apparently from Professor Valentine, he says:

“It is not the custom to smoke until the end of dinner.”

A minute later another cloud of it drifts out of Professor Valentine’s lap and the Dean angrily orders him to put out his cigarette. Professor Valentine begins protesting his innocence and this effectually distracts his attention from Dolly, and she takes advantage of this to wipe some rouge from her lips. It is high time, for there is now a pleasant pile of silver on the floor.

The Dean rises to begin his speech.

“What,” he demands, “is the greatest influence on college life today?”

From the closet in harmony floats the fragment of a song:

“The Black Bottom — a new Twister — “

At Dolly’s nervous suggestion Professor Swope gets up and closes the window.

The party is to finish with the college cheer. It is the custom at dinners to give this with the napkin held in the right hand and waved to and fro. The Dean gives the signal and all arise.

Dolly is in a panic. She lays the bundle on the table and reaches for the nearest napkin, which happens to be that of Professor Swope. The professor’s hand gropes over the table, hunting for it-encounters the napkin containing the silver instead.

“Are you ready?” cries the Dean, raising his napkin.

“Ray! Ray! Ray!

“Rah! Rah! Rah! — “

The cheer gets no farther, for from Professor Swope’s waving napkin fly the knives, forks and spoons, bounding and scattering from end to end of the table like flowers from a cornucopia.

The Dean’s face grows purple, Professor Swope’s goes white. Everyone looks at the latter, horrified at his unprecedented temerity. Throwing down his napkin the Dean stalks from the room and, chattering excitedly, the others follow.

*****

This finishes the Fourth Sequence.

V.

Leaving the professor to clear himself as best he can Dolly lingers discreetly behind. When the room is empty she unlocks the door of the linen closet and with some impatience tells Cupid and Herc that they must go straight to their rooms before they cause further trouble.

They are pathetic in their helplessness. They start to walk out through the reception room — Dolly barely prevents them in time. A glance out the window shows Joe Jakes still on guard under the lamp-post across the street. Dolly sees that by themselves they are incapable of getting home without detection. But she thinks of her duty to the professor — hesitates —

“Come along,” she says finally, “I’ll take you part of the way.”

They go out through the kitchen and, eluding Joe Jakes, start across the campus. Outside the dormitory where Cupid rooms with his brother, she tries to turn back, but Cupid sits down stubbornly on a step and refuses to move.

“I want to be taken home.”

More to get rid of them than to oblige them she leads them upstairs and opens the door of the study shared by the two brothers.

It is a large room with cushioned seats under the leaded windows, arm chairs, work tables, many books and a piano. A bedroom leads out from either side. On the walls are some framed groups — football teams, committees, etc., but no girls’ photographs and no pennants. At present there are half a dozen people in the room — Mimi, her mother, Grace and Ben, who are cooking a Welsh Rarebit, and two other boys, one of whom is playing the piano. Almost as soon as Dolly enters a definite hostility comes into the air.

“Good evening,” says Ben, polite but puzzled.

“They were sleepy,” explains Dolly, indicating Cupid and Herc. “I thought they’d be better off at home.”

The culprits go unashamed to the piano and become musical. Mimi remarks loud enough for Dolly to hear.

“Some people can always find an excuse for attending parties they’re not invited to.”

Dolly turns to her in surprise and is met with an insolent stare. In her annoyance she lays her purse down on the table, where it immediately catches Mimi’s eye. Mimi knows that in that purse is the lipstick.

“I’m sorry to intrude,” flashes Dolly. “This was forced upon me. Good night.”

“Hey, wait a minute,” says Cupid. “I’m going to take you home.”

“You stay right where you are,” says Ben angrily. “You’re not going out of here this evening.”

“I’ve got to take Dolly home.”

“I’ll take her home,” snaps Ben impatiently. Cupid subsides.

Mimi, her eyes still on the purse, has crossed the room and as Dolly turns to Ben with a crisp “Please don’t bother,” she dexterously slides Dolly’s purse from the table into a fold of her gown. Then she saunters cooly away, unaware that Cupid and Herc, though muddled and uncomprehending, have seen her action.

Dolly turns and starts down the stairs and Ben, excusing himself to Mimi and her mother, follows.

About this time Professor Swope confused and distressed by his experience of the evening is coming out of the faculty club. He is in disgrace — the Dean has accepted his protestations of innocence, but still believes that he is in some way responsible. Worse, the professor has lost Dolly. He doesn’t know whether she has departed with disgust at him, or with guilt at having taken the silver herself. At any rate he must find her.

He starts down the street one way, then turns and goes down the other. To Joe Jakes, under his lamp-post, his excited actions appear suspicious. Joe wants to know what has become of the two drunks who disappeared with and it seems to him that this little man is acting very oddly indeed. He takes a menacing step in the professor’s direction.

Professor Swope’s nerves are jumpy and his first thought when he sees the familiar figure coming toward him is that the Dean is having him arrested for stealing the silver. He quickens his pace, so does Joe Jakes, he breaks into a run — Joe Jakes follows.

Over the campus goes the chase, in and out of the moonlight. A branch knocks off the professor’s derby and Joe picks it up without stopping.

Up in the Mannys’ room Cupid and Herc are witnesses to a peculiar accident. They see Mimi remove something from Dolly’s purse and then, looking about for a hiding place, drop the purse into the thin space behind the window seat. There is a look of triumph on her face.

Meanwhile Dolly and Ben are walking silently across the campus, Dolly a little in the lead. They come to a low wall and, to take a short cut, he helps her over it — immediately she is in his arms. With the second kiss he begins to admit the fascination she has for him. Nevertheless he is ashamed of himself and seeing this Dolly feels helpless and unhappy.

Nearing Dolly’s hotel they come to an all night restaurant, crowded with men and girls. The smell of hot dogs drifts out into the night and Dolly thinks of the dinner she was too frightened to eat. She tells Ben she’s hungry. He hesitates — his chin tightens. No, he won’t appear with her in any public placeHe tells her to wait for him — he will get something to eat and bring it outside.

Leaning rather sadly against the door of the restaurant watching the gay horseplay of the couples inside, Dolly is startled to see Professor Swope dash wildly by her and duck into the restaurant, closely followed by the campus cop, Joe Jakes. What has happened? Her instinct is to take to her heels, but she doesn’t.

Inside the restaurant Professor Swope, to conceal himself from his pursuer, squeezes in front of two boys taller than himself and, in a trembling voice, asks for a lemonade. Joe Jakes’ eyes roam aboutthe room seeking him and fall upon Ben Manny just leaving the restaurant with a bag of hot dogs and two bottles of ginger ale under his arm. Joe wonders if this can be his man — he is in a dinner coat, and he wears no hat. He seems a little taller than the other one, but Joe determines to follow and see.

Ben and Dolly go along the University Arms which is separated from the street by a tall iron grating. Once inside they hesitate — he wants nothing except to kiss her again, but the moon throws the shadow of the iron grating across her face, as if she were behind prison bars, and sadly now, he turns away.

The long, wide flight of steps leading up to the front door are white in the moonlight. Dolly invites him into the hotel, but he shakes his head and insists these steps are a better place for the picnic.

While he lays it out she fingers a paper that she always carries in the bosom of her dress. It is the letter from her uncle, which clears her from the guilt she expiated in prison. After a struggle she decides not to show it to him. If he really cares for her, nothing will matter.

Ben has no bottle opener for the Coca-Cola.

“I’ll run back to the quick lunch and get one,” he says. “Wait for me for a moment.”

He has hardly gone fifty feet when Joe Jakes seizes him by the arm.

“Got you, young fella,” he says. “What were you doing in the faculty club?”

“Me?” cries Ben in amazement. “I haven’t been near it all evening.”

“Then what did you run away from me for?”

“Me? I didn’t run away from you.”

“You can explain that to the Dean in the morning. Here’s your hat.”

Ben examines it.

“That isn’t my hat.”

“All right,” says Joe. “If you don’t want to take it what do I care. Go right to your room.”

“But Joe — “

“Never mind Joe-ing me. Go to your room. A man my age don’t like Marathons. You can state your case to the Dean in the morning.”

There is no choice but to obey. After all it was just as well. Better not to see her any more at all. As Ben trudges gloomily off across the Campus, Professor Swope is just emerging timorously from the quick lunch. He must find Dolly. With great caution he dodges up the street toward the hotel and slips inside the gate.

There she is on the moonlit steps and then he sees that, tired out with her long day, she is sound asleep. He comes up to her, and thinks how beautiful and innocent she looks — bends over as if to kiss her lips. But No — he is afraid to disturb her sleep. On the steps beside her he sees the lunch prepared for two and his heart melts. What a girl — all this time she has been waiting for him here with something to eat.

He sits down and tentatively nibbles a hot dog — he is very hungry. With the opener from his pocket knife he uncaps a bottle of Coca-Cola.

Outside the grating Joe Jakes watches Ben’s form disappear across the campus. He looks at the derby in his hand. Then with sudden disgust at his unsatisfactory night’s work, he flings it over the iron grating, where it lands at the professor’s feet.

Professor Swope looks up vaguely as if it had fallen from the stars. It is a magical night. After a hard day, the Gods are kind-nothing can surprise him. He sits there, drowsy and content, eating hot dogs and holding Dolly’s sleeping hand.

V

I.

After a restless night Dolly made her decision. She would go back to New York on the first train. The man she loved resented even her presence here and she was too proud to stay where she wasn’t wanted. It was a mistake ever to have come at all. How could she have thought that, stained and stamped as she was, she could compete with these girls who had been wrapped in cotton wool since birth? Perhaps back in the city her money would buy her friends who would grow to care for her, and some day she would forget.

Listlessly she began throwing things into her grip — they meant so little to her now — the gorgeous evening dress that had seemed like a princess’s robe a few short weeks ago was less to her than a shapeless prison gown now that the prince had failed to look her way. Her shoes — she kicked one impatiently against the wall, scraping a gash in its leather side. Then she was sorry and wept over the gash, knowing all the time that she was weeping over something else.

She couldn’t find the purse with lipstick in it. Where had she left it — and yet what did it matter now? Let it go — and youth and love too!

A knock at the door. Professor Swope, bowing and beaming, stood outside. He had a letter for her, forwarded from New York in his care. Dolly opened it — it was from the lawyers who handled her money.

Miss Dolly Carrol

Dear Madame

It is with great regret that we inform you that your uncle has met with reverses in the West and will be unable to continue your allowance. In fact we must ask you to return the sum of $982.00 advanced you last week above funds in hand.

Yours Very Respectfully,

Barly, Bacon and Barly.

The letter stunned her. She read it again and then stood with her eyes fixed on the space over the professor’s head. Her fingers drummed idly for a moment on the dresser until suddenly the keys of a typewriter seemed to materialize beneath them. She drew back frightened. Why — there would be no more gold dresses, or French shoes to kick about, or limousines, or fashionable hotels. Back to the old life in an office and an occasional trip to the theatre with the young clerk who worked next door.

Back she swung — now the gold dress was important again and the shoes — yes, and the prom and the girls who were going to dance tonight and be happy. Never again — she had had her chance and missed. The doors of the great world were closed to her.

The professor suddenly noticed that her grip was packed and that she was wearing a traveling suit.

“What’s the matter?” he demanded. “Are you going away?”

She hesitated. Her eyes filled with tears. Must she go? Couldn’t she have just this night, this last night? At any cost to her pride she must see him again and with the lipstick make him kiss her once more. Better that way than not at all. But — even the lipstick was gone. She had nothing.

Professor Swope came into the room and patted her awkwardly on the shoulder.

“What is it?” he inquired. “Can I be of any assistance?”

“I’m — I’m not going,” she faltered. “I thought I had an engagement in New York but this letter tells me I was wrong.”

*****

By ten o’clock that night a constant stream of bright fur and satin was flowing into the gymnasium. A student took tickets at the door and beside him stood Joe Jakes to see that no one entered with a flask showing on his hip or in a state of inebriation.

One  crossed the trophy  room  and  came  into the great gymnasium, gay now with bunting and streamers and flowers. The walls were lined with boxes, each designated by the name of a fraternity and used as parking places for chaperones — none of the young people came there except to borrow a pen or leave a loose buckle. Between dances they sat in the trophy room and its galleries or in autos outside or on the winding steps of an edifice called Honeymoon Tower.

Looked at from above the prom resolved itself into a central circle of closely packed stags around which hub revolved the varicolored wheel of dancers. Outside the wheel was a further ring of stags, flanked at each end by a celebrated orchestra from New York. The slow revolution of the wheel and the flashes of black darting out to dance with pink or blue or gold, kept the whole scene in constant, colorful motion.

The women’s dressing room presented a scene of equal, if less public animation. Five hundred girls pushed politely to a place in front of the long mirror, five hundred girls found some slight imperfections in the tint of a cheek or an eyebrow, five hundred girls remedied the defection with loving care.

But no girl was so particularly interested in this final moment as was Mimi Haughton. She had the lipstick and she was going to use it. Picture her in front of a mirror at one end of a long row of girls. Grace is at her side.

A glass shelf runs underneath the mirror from one end of the room to the other and this is what happens. Mimi and Grace take out their respective lipsticks, which are not unlike in size and appearance, and set them down on the glass shelf, their hands crossing as they do so. A moment later each of them, their eyes absorbed in the mirror, picks up the other’s lipstick. Grace, all unsuspecting, rubs the magic scent upon her lips — Mimi, all unsuspecting, rubs her lips with ordinary rouge.

But the tilting shelf has another trick to play. As Grace lays down the scented lipstick it falls on its fat side and begins to roll determinedly down the whole length of the shelf. A dozen girls grab at it absently, but it continues its course until brought to a stop in front of Dolly at the extreme end. She is so surprised and glad to get it back that she doesn’t inquire who has had it, but pops it into a bag that, this time, is affixed firmly to her arm.

This is destined to be the evening of Grace Jones’ life, the one that she’ll remember forever and tell about to her children and her grandchildren. For she is one of the belles of the ball. Man after man cuts in — even Cupid shows her marked attention until her round eyes almost pop out with happiness.

For Mimi it is another story. As Ben leads her out on the floor she takes his arm, leans close and looks up at him with languorous eyes. But her arm receives no answering pressure and his eyes seem unusually cold and far away, as if he had something on his mind.

They are standing near the foot of a winding staircase that rises out of a corner of the trophy room.

“Where does that go?” she asks.

“That’s called Wedding Stair,” he answers politely, but indifferently. “It leads up to Honeymoon Tower.”

“Is the view nice?” Again she tries the effect of the lipstick by leaning close to him, but he is unresponsive. She turns away to hide her disappointment and comes face to face with Dolly who has just emerged from the dressing room and overheard the conversation. Giving Dolly a glance of ill concealed malice Mimi walks with Ben into the ballroom.

Dolly hasn’t used the lipstick yet tonight. She scarcely knows why. What is the use if Ben won’t come near?

Strangely enough other boys seemed to like her just as well without it. They danced with her and she was, if anything, relieved that they no longer leaned toward her in just that eager way. But Ben didn’t come near and her heart grew numb and nothing seemed to matter at all.

She is sitting with Professor Swope in the Trophy Room between dances when her eyes are arrested by the sight of Ben lighting a cigarette and strolling moodily through the entrance to the Wedding Stair as if he were going up. The professor at the moment is asking Dolly to marry him. He tells her that at great personal sacrifice he has put her criminal past out of mind. In the middle of the unromantic declaration Dolly unceremoniously jumps to her feet and announces that she wants to go up to the tower. Professor Swope readily accedes.

The winding stair is well occupied. Near the bottom sit a couple, the girl fixing a flower into the man’s buttonhole. Around the next bend another couple are holding hands. Further up two are absorbed in an embrace, and further still a man is fitting an engagement ring on to a girl’s finger.

When the professor and Dolly have climbed this far, she stops and tells him that she doesn’t know whether she is worthy of him. She will have to ask herself. Will he wait here and let no one pass while she consults her conscience up on the tower?

He sits down and folds his hands prepared to wait. Dolly continues on up. Ben Manny is nearly at the top when he hears footsteps following him. He stops suspiciously — he wants to be alone and think. Somehow he isn’t happy that his engagement to Mimi will be announced tomorrow.

The footsteps have stopped so he goes on. Near the top he pauses again, hearing them distinctly. But again they stop and he walks out into the moonlight on top of the battlemented tower. Very quietly Dolly follows. Below is spread the college — a thousand lights in the windows of the Gothic halls, and, soaring against the dark horizon twoscore dreaming spires and towers. Ben is leaning against the battlement, staring off into the night.

“Here I am,” said Dolly faintly.

He turned around and came toward her slowly.

“I knew it was you,” he said. “I can’t escape you anywhere.”

They walked into each other’s arms and she turned up her face, but this time instead of kissing her he held her rigidly and looked at her in the moonlight.

“What was the matter?” he said almost harshly. “Why did they send you to prison?”

“For a crime,” she answered.

As he looked at her he was unable to believe it possible, if he hadn’t seen her in a prison cell.

Meanwhile Mimi has come up the stairs in search of Ben and encountered the professor. She is skeptical of his story that Dolly is up on top meditating all alone, and communicates her suspicion to him.

Incredulously the professor accompanies her to the top and stands with her for a moment, silently watching. They see Ben and Dolly come toward each other again, as if drawn by an irresistible force, hesitate, and then, with Ben’s face only an inch away from hers, break apart, without speaking, the professor draws Mimi down the stairs. He is distraught and wild.

“I knew it,” he says miserably. “That’s what comes of trusting a girl with a prison past. I found out in the nick of time.”

“A prison past?” repeats Mimi, her eyes narrowing. “A prison past?”

Innocently he repeats the whole story to Mimi, without seeing that he is putting a dangerous weapon into her hands.

As they descend the steps they encounter Joe Jakes coming up — he has been turning the couples out of the tower upon orders from the Dean who has decided that necking parties have gone far enough.

“Anyone else up there?” he demands of the professor.

The professor is too distraught to reply, even to hear, but Mimi answers for him. She shakes her head implying no, well aware that Ben and Dolly are on the tower.

When everyone is out Joe Jakes closes the door to the wedding stair and hangs a sign on it.

Any undergraduate found in this tower will be indefinitely suspended.

By Order of the Dean.

Mimi, when no one is looking, turns the key in the lock, effectually preventing Ben and Dolly from coming out.

At the moment Ben and Dolly are too wrapped up in themselves to care what is happening below. She knows the struggle that is going on in Ben, knows that he cares for her, yet she cannot make him kiss her when he holds her in his arms. She takes out the lipstick, brings it near her lips — then shakes her head. No — better give up and let it and tonight with all pleasant things than know that she had made him declare himself by a trick.

“Oh, Ben — “ she cried aloud, “Ben — “

He stood with his back to her, silent and motionless. Once more she raised the lipstick, hesitated, then she dashed it to the stone floor of the tower and blind with tears turned away toward the stair.

But now there was a strong arm about her, a face near to her and a voice she knew whispering what she had not hoped to hear.

“I love you. I love you.”

With a long sigh of happiness she melted into his dinner coat.

Downstairs other forces are in motion — a clucking of hens in one box with Mimi in the center feeding them the poison grain. She tells the story the professor has told her, keeping back only the identity of the girl. Disgraceful. A blackbird among all those swallows. The clucks soar to a crescendo — it is a case for the Dean.

And Mimi has another string to her bow — Ben and Dolly are in the forbidden tower. Once the agitation against Dolly’s presence is under way she seeks Joe Jakes outside the door.

“Please,” she asks innocently. “Can’t anyone go in the tower?”

“I’m sorry, Miss, nobody.”

“But,” she protests, “I saw a couple go up there not ten minutes ago.

Upon the tower the night is soft as a benediction. With Dolly in the circle of his arms, Ben is reading a paper she has taken from her bosom and handed to him. But almost before he has comprehended what it means to them, to their love, a bell sounds the strokes of midnight from another tower.

Twelve o’clock. The grand march which he, as chairman of the committee, must lead!

He seizes her hand and pulls her down the steps three at a time. To his astonishment the door is locked. He considers — he knows there has been some talk of closing the tower and concludes that this is the result.

Somewhat worried they climb once more to the top of the tower and hand in hand survey the prospects of escape. Downstairs, though they are unaware of it, Joe Jakes, breathing fire, is already at the stair door.

Forty feet below the tower is the pebble covered roof of the adjoining Gothic building, and by great luck a vine pruner’s ladder is resting against the ivied tower wall. Down they go to the roof — pick out a lighted window in the next quadrangle and silhouetted clearly against the moon, scurry toward it along the battlement. One can go a good three miles over the medieval chain of masonry that winds in and out over the campus, forming in turn halls, towers, and quadrangles, without once descending to earth, but this is not their object. They know now that there a determined figure is scrambling along behind them in full pursuit. With the aid of a slide down a slanting slate roof, they reach a window. It is the work of but a moment, to break a pane, step inside, toss fifty cents on the table to pay for damages and dash downstairs.

Back at the prom the scandal had just reached the Dean’s ears. The little committee of chaperones, buzzing with restrained indignation, “really thought that this was too much.” Not only should the girl be ejected but the man responsible for bringing her should be severely disciplined. The Dean agreed that he would take action. They had only to supply the name of the girl.

The box where this sub rosa dispute took place was the center of attention as rumor began to drift about. Purity demanded a sacrifice — someone was going to be decorated with the scarlet letter and publicly thrown out of the prom. Only Dolly and Ben who had just drifted breathlessly in and drifted out upon the floor were awareof what hung over Dolly’s head. They and Professor Swope who had discovered the allurements of Grace Jones and was quickly forgetting his sorrows of an hour before.

Mimi waited triumphant. In a minute it would be time — when the proctor brought them down from the tower she would say the word, and Ben would see the lady of his fancy disgraced before his eyes.

Someone else was watching too — one of the men who figures in this story, with in his coat pocket which he fingered with a twitchy hand.

By the time Ben and Dolly realize that something is up and join the fringe of the little group, the Dean is growing impatient.

“All right, Miss Haughton,” he says impatiently. “Let me have the name of this unfortunate young lady. We don’t want a public scene.”

Ben and Dolly hear and pause. Her face turns white; Ben’s arm tightens on her.

“I’m behind you whatever happens,” he says. “Remember that and keep your head.”

For another moment Mimi hesitates triumphantly — hesitates just a fraction too long, for she hears a familiar and insinuating voice low in her ear.

“Mimi, you’d better not say a word.”

She turns. It is Cupid. His hand slides a little from his pocket and she sees what he has in his hand.

“It’s better to have a jail term over, Mimi, than to have one staring you in the face.”

“Why — what do you mean?” she gasps.

“I mean that we saw you take this bag and we saw you throw it away. There happens to be a law against larceny in this state, and if you say one word about Miss Dolly Carrol, just as sure as you’re alive you’ll go to jail.”

His stout face is very grim and determined now — Dolly retreats a little bit before him. The Dean’s voice breaks in on them again.

“I’ll have to ask you to tell me the girl’s name.”

Mimi looks about, hate and rage in her eyes. Then she meets Cupid’s glance and her expression changes to one of fear.

“I’m — I’m sorry,” she falters, “I don’t know the name. I was mistaken. I must have been wrong.”

A minute later the group dissolved in laughter and contempt and not long after Mimi and her mother might have been seen making their way hurriedly toward the door. It was time for the grand march and as Ben had no partner now what more natural than that he should ask Dolly, or that the professor should be more content with Grace, or that Cupid should be happiest with nobody at all.

There they go!

I must add that the lipstick was found by a little colored girl delivering laundry, who in consequence grew up and had a perfectly enormous family.

Ben and Dolly were never known to care.

THE LOVE BOAT

The boat floated down the river through the summer night like a Fourth of July balloon footloose in the heavens. The decks were brightly lit and restless with dancers, but bow and stern were in darkness; so the boat had no more outline than an accidental cluster of stars. Between the black banks it floated, softly parting the mild dark tide from the sea and leaving in its wake small excited gusts of music — “Babes in the Woods” over and over, and “Moonlight Bay.” Past the scattered lights of Pokus Landing, where a poet in an attic window saw yellow hair gleam in the turn of a dance. Past Ulm, where the moon came up out of a boiler works, and West Esther, where it slid, unregretted, behind a cloud.

The radiance of the boat itself was enough for, among others, the three young Harvard graduates; they were weary and a little depressed and they gave themselves up promptly to its enchantment. Their own boat was casually drifting and a collision was highly possible, but no one made a movement to start the engine and get out of the way.

“It makes me very sad,” one of them said. “It is so beautiful that it makes me want to cry.”

“Go on and cry, Bill.”

“Will you cry too?”

“We’ll all cry.”

His loud, facetious “Boo-hoo!” echoed across the night, reached the steamer and brought a small lively crowd to the rail.

“Look! It’s a launch.”

“Some guys in a launch.”

Bill got to his feet. The two crafts were scarcely ten feet apart.

“Throw us a hempen rope,” he pleaded eloquently. “Come on — be impulsive. Please do.”

Once in a hundred years there would have been a rope at hand. It was there that night. With a thud the coil struck the wooden bottom and in an instant the motorboat was darting along behind the steamer, as if in the wake of a harpooned whale.

Fifty high-school couples left the dance and scrambled for a place around the suddenly interesting stern rail. Fifty girls gave forth immemorial small cries of excitement and sham fright. Fifty young men forgot the mild exhibitionism which had characterized their manner of the evening and looked grudgingly at the more effectual show-off of three others. Mae Purley, without the involuntary quiver of an eyelash, fitted the young man standing in the boat into her current dream, where he displaced Al Fitzpatrick with laughable ease. She put her hand on Al Fitzpatrick’s arm and squeezed it a little because she had stopped thinking about him entirely and felt that he must be aware of it. Al, who had been standing with his eyes squinted up, watching the towed boat, looked tenderly at Mae and tried to put his arm about her shoulder. But Mae Purley and Bill Frothington, handsome and full of all the passionate promise in the world, had locked eyes across the intervening space.

They made love. For a moment they made love as no one ever dares to do after. Their glance was closer than an embrace, more urgent than a call. There were no words for it. Had there been, and had Mae heard them, she would have fled to the darkest corner of the ladies’ washroom and hid her face in a paper towel.

“We want to come on board!” Bill called. “We’re life-preserver salesmen! How about pulling us around to the side?”

Mr. McVitty, the principal, arrived on the scene too late to interfere. The three young Harvard graduates — Ellsworth Ames soaking wet, unconsciously Byronic with his dark curls plastered damply to his forehead, Hamilton Abbot and Bill Frothington surer-footed and dry — climbed and were hoisted over the side. The motorboat bobbed on behind.

With a sort of instinctive reverence for the moment, Mae Purley hung back in the shadow, not through lack of confidence but through excess of it. She knew that he would come straight to her. That was never the trouble and never had been — the trouble was in keeping up her own interest after she had satisfied the deep but casual curiosity of her lips. But tonight was going to be different. She knew this when she saw that he was in no hurry; he was leaning against the rail making a couple of high-school seniors — who suddenly seemed very embryonic to themselves — feel at ease.

He looked at her once.

“It’s all right,” his eyes said, without a movement of his face, “I understand as well as you. I’ll be there in just a minute.”

Life burned high in them both; the steamer and its people were at a distance and in darkness. It was one of those times.

“I’m a Harvard man,” Mr. McVitty was saying, “class of 1907.” The three young men nodded with polite indifference. “I’m glad to know we won the race,” continued the principal, simulating a reborn enthusiasm which had never existed. “I haven’t been to New London in fifteen years.”

“Bill here rowed Number Two,” said Ames. “That’s a coaching launch we’ve got.”

“Oh. You were on the crew?”

“Crew’s over now,” said Bill impatiently. “Everything’s over.”

“Well, let me congratulate you.”

Shortly they froze him into silence. They were not his sort of Harvard man; they wouldn’t have known his name in four years there together. But they would have been much more gracious and polite about it had it not been this particular night. They hadn’t broken away from the hilarious mobs of classmates and relatives at New London to exchange discomfort with the master of a mill-town high school.

“Can we dance?” they demanded.

A few minutes later Bill and Mae Purley were walking down the deck side by side. Life had met over the body of Al Fitzpatrick, engulfing him. The two clear voices:

“Perhaps you’ll dance with me,” with the soft assurance of the moonlight itself, and: “I’d love to,” were nothing that could be argued about, not by twice what Al Fitzpatrick pretended to be. The most consoling thought in Al’s head was that they might be fought over.

What was it they said? Did you hear it? Can you remember? Later that night she remembered only his pale wavy hair and the long limbs that she followed around the dancing floor.

She was thin, a thin burning flame, colorless yet fresh. Her smile came first slowly, then with a rush, pouring out of her heart, shy and bold, as if all the life of that little body had gathered for a moment around her mouth and the rest of her was a wisp that the least wind would blow away. She was a changeling whose lips alone had escaped metamorphosis, whose lips were the only point of contact with reality.

“Then you live near?”

“Only about twenty-five miles from you,” Bill said. “Isn’t it funny?”

“Isn’t it funny?”

They looked at each other, a trifle awed in the face of such manifest destiny. They stood between two lifeboats on the top deck. Mae’s hand lay on his arm, playing with a loose ravel of his tweed coat. They had not kissed yet — that was coming in a minute. That was coming any time now, as soon as every cup of emotional moonlight had been drained of its possibilities and cast aside. She was seventeen.

“Are you glad I live near?”

She might have said “I’m delighted” or “Of course I am.” But she whispered, “Yes; are you?”

“Mae — with an e,” he said and laughed in a husky whisper. Already they had a joke together. “You look so darn beautiful.”

She accepted the compliment in silence, meeting his eyes. He pressed her to him by her merest elbow in a way that would have been impossible had she not been eager too. He never expected to see her after tonight.

“Mae.” His whisper was urgent. Mae’s eyes came nearer, grew larger, dissolved against his face, like eyes on a screen. Her frail body breathed imperceptibly in his arms.

A dance stopped. There was clapping for an encore. Then clapping for another encore with what had seemed only a poor bar of music in between. There was another dance, scarcely longer than a kiss. They were heavily endowed for love, these two, and both of them had played with it before.

Down below, Al Fitzpatrick’s awareness of time and space had reached a pitch that would have been invaluable to an investigator of the new mathematics. Bit by bit the boat presented itself to him as it really was, a wooden hulk garish with forty-watt bulbs, peopled by the commonplace young people of a commonplace town. The river was water, the moon was a flat meaningless symbol in the sky. He was in agony — which is to speak tritely. Rather, he was in deadly fear; his throat was dry, his mouth drooped into a hurt half moon as he tried to talk to some of the other boys — shy unhappy boys, who loitered around the stern.

Al was older than the rest — he was twenty-two, and out in the world for seven years. He worked in the Hammacker Mills and attended special high-school classes at night. Another year might see him assistant manager of the shops, and Mae Purley, with about as much eagerness as was to be expected in a girl who was having everything her own way, had half promised to marry him when she was eighteen. His wasn’t a temperament to go to pieces. When he had brooded up to the limit of his nature he felt a necessity for action. Miserably and desperately he climbed up to the top deck to make trouble.

Bill and Mae were standing close together by the lifeboat, quiet, absorbed and happy. They moved a little apart as he came near. “Is that you, Mae?” called Al in a hard voice. “Aren’t you going to come down and dance?”

“We were just coming.”

They walked toward him in a trance.

“What’s the idea?” Al said hoarsely. “You’ve been up here over two hours.”

At their indifference he felt pain swelling and spreading inside him, constricting his breath.

“Have you met Mr. Frothington?” She laughed shyly at the unfamiliar name.

“Yeah,” said Al rudely. “I don’t see the idea of his keeping you up here.”

“I’m sorry,” said Bill. “We didn’t realize.”

“Oh, you didn’t? Well, I did.” His jealousy cut through their absorption. They acknowledged it by an effort to hurry, to be impersonal, to defer to his wishes. Ungraciously he followed and the three of them came in a twinkling upon a scene that had suddenly materialized on the deck below.

Ellsworth Ames, smiling, but a little flushed, was leaning against the rail while Ham Abbot attempted to argue with a distraught young husky who kept trying to brush past him and get at Ames. Near them stood an indignant girl with another girl’s soothing arm around her waist.

“What is it?” demanded Bill quickly.

The distraught young man glared at him. “Just a couple of snobs that come here and try to spoil everybody else’s good time!” he cried wildly.

“He doesn’t like me,” said Ellsworth lightly. “I invited his girl to dance.”

“She didn’t want to dance with you!” shouted the other. “You think you’re so damn smart — ask her if she wanted to dance with you.”

The girl murmured indistinguishable words and disclaimed all responsibility by beginning to cry.

“You’re too fresh, that’s the trouble!” continued her defender. “I know what you said to her when you danced with her before. What do you think these girls are? They’re just as good as anybody, see?”

Al Fitzpatrick moved in closer.

“Let’s put ‘em all off the boat,” he suggested, stubborn and ashamed. “They haven’t got any business butting in here.”

A mild protest went up from the crowd, especially from the girls, and Abbot put his hand conciliatingly on the husky’s shoulder. But it was too late.

“You’ll put me off?” Ellsworth was saying coldly. “If you try to lay your hands on me I’ll rearrange your whole face.”

“Shut up, Ellie!” snapped Bill. “No use getting disagreeable. They don’t want us; we’d better go.” He stepped close to Mae, and whispered, “Good night. Don’t forget what I said. I’ll drive over and see you Sunday afternoon.”

As he pressed her hand quickly and turned away he saw the argumentative boy swing suddenly at Ames, who caught the blow with his left arm. In a moment they were slugging and panting, knee to knee in the small space left by the gathering crowd. Simultaneously Bill felt a hand pluck at his sleeve and he turned to face Al Fitzpatrick. Then the deck was in an uproar. Abbot’s attempt to separate Ames and his antagonist was misinterpreted; instantly he was involved in a battle of his own, cannonading against the other pairs, slipping on the smooth deck, bumping against noncombatants and scurrying girls who sent up shrill cries. He saw Al Fitzpatrick slap the deck suddenly with his whole body, not to rise again. He heard calls of “Get Mr. McVitty!” and then his own opponent was dropped by a blow he did not strike, and Bill’s voice said: “Come on to the boat!”

The next few minutes streaked by in wild confusion. Avoiding Bill, whose hammerlike arms had felled their two champions, the high-school boys tried to pull down Ham and Ellie, and the harassed group edged and revolved toward the stern rail.

“Hidden-ball stuff!” Bill panted. “Save it for Haughton. I’m G-Gardner, you’re Bradlee and Mahan — hip!”

Mr. McVitty’s alarmed face appeared above the combat, and his high voice, ineffectual at first, finally pierced the heat of battle.

“Aren’t you ashamed of yourselves! Bob — Cecil — George Roberg! Let go, I say!”

Abruptly the battle was over and the combatants, breathing hard, eyed one another impassively in the moonlight.

Ellie laughed and held out a pack of cigarettes. Bill untied the motor boat and walked forward with the painter to bring it alongside.

“They claim you insulted one of the girls,” said Mr. McVitty uncertainly. “Now that’s no way to behave after we took you aboard.”

“That’s nonsense,” snapped Ellie, between gasps. “I only told her I’d like to bite her neck.”

“Do you think that was a very gentlemanly thing to say?” demanded Mr. McVitty heatedly.

“Come on, Ellie!” Bill cried. “Good-by, everybody! Sorry there was such a row!”

They were already shadows of the past as they slipped one by one over the rail. The girls were turning cautiously back to their own men, and not one of them answered, and not one of them waved farewell.

“A bunch of meanies,” remarked Ellie ironically. “I wish all you ladies had one neck so I could bite it all at once. I’m a glutton for ladies’ necks.”

Feeble retorts went up here and there like muffled pistol shots.

“Good night, ladies,” Ham sang, as Bill shoved away from the side:

Good night, ladies,

Good night, ladies,

We’re going to leave you now-ow-ow.

The boat moved up the river through the summer night, while the launch, touched by its swell, rocked to and fro gently in the wide path of the moon.

II

On the following Sunday afternoon Bill Frothington drove over from Truro to the isolated rural slum known as Wheatly Village. He had stolen away from a house full of guests, assembled for his sister’s wedding, to pursue what his mother would have called an “unworthy affair.” But behind him lay an extremely successful career at Harvard and a youth somewhat more austere than the average, and this fall he would disappear for life into the banking house of Read, Hoppe and Company in Boston. He felt that the summer was his own. And had the purity of his intentions toward Mae Purley been questioned he would have defended himself with righteous anger. He had been thinking of her for five days. She attracted him violently, and he was following the attraction with eyes that did not ask to see.

Mae lived in the less offensive quarter of town on the third floor of its only apartment house, an unsuccessful relic of those more prosperous days of New England textile weaving that ended twenty years ago. Her father was a timekeeper who had fallen out of the white-collar class; Mae’s two older brothers were working at the loom, and Bill’s only impression as he entered the dingy flat was one of hopeless decay. The mountainous, soiled mother, at once suspicious and deferential, and the anaemic, beaten Anglo-Saxon asleep on the couch after his Sunday dinner were no more than shadows against the poor walls. But Mae was clean and fresh. No breath of squalor touched her. The pale pure youth of her cheeks, and her thin childish body shining through a new organdie dress, measured up full to the summer day.

“Where you going to take my little girl?” Mrs. Purley asked anxiously.

“I’m going to run away with her,” he said, laughing.

“Not with my little girl.”

“Oh, yes, I am. I don’t see why she hasn’t been run away with before.”

“Not my little girl.”

They held hands going downstairs, but not for an hour did the feeling of being intimate strangers pass. When the first promise of evening blew into the air at five o’clock and the light changed from white to yellow, their eyes met once in a certain way and Bill knew that it was time. They turned up a side road and down a wagon track, and in a moment the spell was around them again — the equal and opposite urge that drew them together. They talked about each other and then their voices grew quiet and they kissed, while chestnut blossoms slid in white diagonals through the air and fell across the car. After a long while an instinct told her that they had stayed long enough. He drove her home.

It went on like that for two months. He would come for her in the late afternoon and they would go for dinner to the shore. Afterward they would drive around until they found the center of the summer night and park there while the enchanted silence spread over them like leaves over the babes in the wood. Some day, naturally, they were going to marry. For the present it was impossible; he must go to work in the fall. Vaguely and with more than a touch of sadness both of them realized that this wasn’t true; that if Mae had been of another class an engagement would have been arranged at once. She knew that he lived in a great country house with a park and a caretaker’s lodge, that there were stables full of cars and horses, and that house parties and dances took place there all summer. Once they had driven past the gate and Mae’s heart was leaden in her breast as she saw that those wide acres would lie between them all her life.

On his part Bill knew that it was impossible to marry Mae Purley. He was an only son and he wore one of those New England names that are carried with one always. Eventually he broached the subject to his mother.

“It isn’t her poverty and ignorance,” his mother said, among other things. “It’s her lack of any standards — common women are common for life. You’d see her impressed by cheap and shallow people, by cheap and shallow things.”

“But, mother, this isn’t 1850. It isn’t as if she were marrying into the royal family.”

“If it were, it wouldn’t matter. But you have a name that for many generations has stood for leadership and self-control. People who have given up less and taken fewer responsibilities have had nothing to say aloud when men like your father and your Uncle George and your Great-grandfather Frothington held their heads high. Toss your pride away and see what you’ve left at thirty-five to take you through the rest of your life.”

“But you can only live once,” he protested — knowing, nevertheless, that what she said was, for him, right. His youth had been pointed to make him understand that exposition of superiority. He knew what it was to be the best, at home, at school, at Harvard. In his senior year he had known men to dodge behind a building and wait in order to walk with him across the Harvard Yard, not to be seen with him out of mere poor snobbishness, but to get something intangible, something he carried within him of the less obvious, less articulate experience of the race.

Several days later he went to see Mae and met her coming out of the flat. They sat on the stairs in the half darkness.

“Just think of these stairs,” he said huskily. “Think how many times you’ve kissed me on these stairs. At night when I’ve brought you home. On every landing. Last month when we walked up and down together five times before we could say good night.”

“I hate these stairs. I wish I never had to go up them any more.”

“Oh, Mae, what are we going to do?”

She didn’t answer for a moment. “I’ve been thinking a lot these last three days,” she said. “I don’t think it’s fair to myself to go on like this — or to Al.”

“To Al,” he said startled. “Have you been seeing Al?”

“We had a long talk last night.”

“All” he repeated incredulously.

“He wants to get married. He isn’t mad any more.”

Bill tried suddenly to face the situation he had been dodging for two months, but the situation, with practiced facility, slid around the corner. He moved up a step till he was beside Mae, and put his arm around her.

“Oh, let’s get married!” she cried desperately. “You can. If you want to, you can.”

“I do want to.”

“Then why can’t we?”

“We can, but not yet.”

“Oh, God, you’ve said that before.”

For a tragic week they quarreled and came together over the bodies of unresolved arguments and irreconcilable facts. They parted finally on a trivial question as to whether he had once kept her waiting half an hour.

Bill went to Europe on the first possible boat and enlisted in an ambulance unit. When America went into the war he transferred to the aviation and Mae’s pale face and burning lips faded off, faded out, against the wild dark background of the war.

III

In 1919 Bill fell romantically in love with a girl of his own set. He met her on the Lido and wooed her on golf courses and in fashionable speak-easies and in cars parked at night, loving her much more from the first than he had ever loved Mae. She was a better person, prettier and more intelligent and with a kindlier heart. She loved him; they had much the same tastes and more than ample money.

There was a child, after a while there were four children, then only three again. Bill grew a little stout after thirty, as athletes will. He was always going to take up something strenuous and get into real condition. He worked hard and drank a little too freely every weekend. Later he inherited the country house and lived there in the summer.

When he and Stella had been married eight years they felt safe for each other, safe from the catastrophes that had overtaken the majority of their friends. To Stella this brought relief; Bill, once he had accepted the idea of their safety, was conscious of a certain discontent, a sort of chemical restlessness. With a feeling of disloyalty to Stella, he shyly sounded his friends on the subject and found that in men of his age the symptoms were almost universal. Some blamed it on the war: “There’ll never be anything like the war.”

It was not variety of woman that he wanted. The mere idea appalled him. There were always women around. If he took a fancy to someone Stella invited her for a week-end, and men who liked Stella fraternally, or even somewhat sentimentally, were as often in the house. But the feeling persisted and grew stronger. Sometimes it would steal over him at dinner — a vast nostalgia — and the people at table would fade out and odd memories of his youth would come back to him. Sometimes a familiar taste or a smell would give him this sensation. Chiefly it had to do with the summer night.

One evening, walking down the lawn with Stella after dinner, the feeling seemed so close that he could almost grasp it. It was in the rustle of the pines, in the wind, in the gardener’s radio down behind the tennis court.

“Tomorrow,” Stella said; “there’ll be a full moon.”

She had stopped in a broad path of moonlight and was looking at him. Her hair was pale and lovely in the gentle light. She regarded him for a moment oddly, and he took a step forward as if to put his arms around her; then he stopped, unresponsive and dissatisfied. Stella’s expression changed slightly and they walked on.

“That’s too bad,” he said suddenly. “Because tomorrow I’ve got to go away.”

“Where?”

“To New York. Meeting of the trustees of school. Now that the kids are entered I feel I should.”

“You’ll be back Sunday?”

“Unless something comes up and I telephone.”

“Ad Haughton’s coming Sunday, and maybe the Ameses.”

“I’m glad you won’t be alone.”

Suddenly Bill had remembered the boat floating down the river and Mae Purley on the deck under the summer moon. The image became a symbol of his youth, his introduction to life. Not only did he remember the deep excitement of that night but felt it again, her face against his, the rush of air about them as they stood by the lifeboat and the feel of its canvas cover to his hand.

When his car dropped him at Wheatly Village next afternoon he experienced a sensation of fright. Eleven years — she might be dead; quite possibly she had moved away. Any moment he might pass her on the street, a tired, already faded woman pushing a baby carriage and leading an extra child.

“I’m looking for a Miss Mae Purley,” he said to a taxi driver. “It might be Fitzpatrick now.”

“Fitzpatrick up at the works?”

Inquiries within the station established the fact that Mae Purley was indeed Mrs. Fitzpatrick. They lived just outside of town.

Ten minutes later the taxi stopped before a white Colonial house.

“They made it over from a barn,” volunteered the taxi man. “There was a picture of it in one of them magazines.”

Bill saw that someone was regarding him from behind the screen door. It was Mae. The door opened slowly and she stood in the hall, unchanged, slender as of old. Instinctively he raised his arms and then, as he took another step forward, instinctively he lowered them.

“Mae.”

“Bill.”

She was there. For a moment he possessed her, her frailty, her thin smoldering beauty; then he had lost her again. He could no more have embraced her than he could have embraced a stranger.

On the sun porch they stared at each other. “You haven’t changed,” they said together.

It was gone from her. Words, casual, trivial, and insincere, poured from her mouth as if to fill the sudden vacancy in his heart:

“Imagine seeing you — know you anywhere — thought you’d forgotten me — talking about you only the other night.”

Suddenly he was without any inspiration. His mind became an utter blank, and try as he might, he could summon up no attitude to fill it.

“It’s a nice place you have here,” he said stupidly.

“We like it. You’d never guess it, but we made it out of an old barn.”

“The taxi driver told me.”

“ —  — stood here for a hundred years empty — got it for almost nothing — pictures of it before and after in Home and Country Side.”

Without warning his mind went blank again. What was the matter? Was he sick? He had even forgotten why he was here.

He knew only that he was smiling benevolently and that he must hang on to that smile, for if it passed he could never re-create it. What did it mean when one’s mind went blank? He must see a doctor tomorrow.

“ —  — since Al’s done so well. Of course Mr. Kohlsatt leans on him, so he don’t get away much. I get away to New York sometimes. Sometimes we both get away together.”

“Well, you certainly have a nice place here,” he said desperately. He must see a doctor in the morning. Doctor Flynn or Doctor Keyes or Doctor Given who was at Harvard with him. Or perhaps that specialist who was recommended to him by that woman at the Ameses’; or Doctor Gross or Doctor Studeford or Doctor de Martel —  —

“ —  — I never touch it, but Al always keeps something in the house. Al’s gone to Boston, but I think I can find the key.”

—  — or Doctor Ramsay or old Doctor Ogden, who had brought him into the world. He hadn’t realized that he knew so many doctors. He must make a list.

“ —  — you’re just exactly the same.”

Suddenly Bill put both hands on his stomach, gave a short coarse laugh and said “Not here.” His own act startled and surprised him, but it dissipated the blankness for a moment and he began to gather up the pieces of his afternoon. From her chatter he discovered her to be under the impression that in some vague and sentimental past she had thrown him over. Perhaps she was right. Who was she anyhow — this hard, commonplace article wearing Mae’s body for a mask of life? Defiance rose in him.

“Mae, I’ve been thinking about that boat,” he said desperately.

“What boat?”

“The steamboat on the Thames, Mae. I don’t think we should let ourselves get old. Get your hat, Mae. Let’s go for a boat ride tonight.”

“But I don’t see the point,” she protested. “Do you think just riding on a boat keeps people young? Maybe if it was salt water —  — “

“Don’t you remember that night on the boat?” he said, as if he were talking to a child. “That’s how we met. Two months later you threw me over and married Al Fitzpatrick.”

“But I didn’t marry Al then,” she said. “It wasn’t till two years later when he got a job as superintendent. There was a Harvard man I used to go around with that I almost married. He knew you. His name was Abbot — Ham Abbot.”

“Ham Abbot — you saw him again?”

“We went around for almost a year. I remember Al was wild. He said if I had any more Harvard men around he’d shoot them. But there wasn’t anything wrong with it. Ham was just cuckoo about me and I used to let him rave.”

Bill had read somewhere that every seven years a change is completed in the individual that makes him different from his self of seven years ago. He clung to the idea desperately. Dimly he saw this person pouring him an enormous glass of applejack, dimly he gulped it down and, through a description of the house, fought his way to the front door.

“Notice the original beams. The beams were what we liked best —  — “ She broke off suddenly. “I remember now about the boat.

You were in a launch and you got on board with Ham Abbot that night.”

The applejack was strong. Evidently it was fragrant also, for as they started off, the taxi driver volunteered to show him where the gentleman could get some more. He would give him a personal introduction in a place down by the wharf.

Bill sat at a dingy table behind swinging doors and, while the sun went down behind the Thames, disposed of four more applejacks. Then he remembered that he was keeping the taxi waiting. Outside a boy told him that the driver had gone home to supper and would be back in half an hour.

He sauntered over to a bale of goods and sat down, watching the mild activity of the docks. It was dusk presently. Stevedores appeared momentarily against the lighted hold of a barge and jerked quickly out of sight down an invisible incline. Next to the barge lay a steamer and people were going aboard; first a few people and then an increasing crowd. There was a breeze in the air and the moon came up rosy gold with a haze around.

Someone ran into him precipitately in the darkness, tripped, swore and staggered to his feet.

“I’m sorry,” said Bill cheerfully. “Hurt yourself?”

“Pardon me,” stuttered the young man. “Did I hurt you?”

“Not at all. Here, have a light.”

They touched cigarettes.

“Where’s the boat going?”

“Just down the river. It’s the high-school picnic tonight.”

“What?”

“The Wheatly High School picnic. The boat goes down to Groton, then it turns around and comes back.”

Bill thought quickly. “Who’s the principal of the high school?”

“Mr. McVitty.” The young man fidgeted impatiently. “So long, bud. I got to go aboard.”

“Me too,” whispered Bill to himself. “Me too.”

Still he sat there lazily for a moment, listening to the sounds clear and distinct now from the open deck: the high echolalia of the girls, the boys calling significant but obscure jokes to one another across the night. He was feeling fine. The air seemed to have distributed the applejack to all the rusty and unused corners of his body. He bought another pint, stowed it in his hip pocket and walked on board with all the satisfaction, the insouciance of a trans-atlantic traveler.

A girl standing in a group near the gangplank raised her eyes to him as he went past. She was slight and fair. Her mouth curved down and then broke upward as she smiled, half at him, half at the man beside her. Someone made a remark and the group laughed. Once again her glance slipped sideways and met his for an instant as he passed by.

Mr. McVitty was on the top deck with half a dozen other teachers, who moved aside at Bill’s breezy approach.

“Good evening, Mr. McVitty. You don’t remember me.”

“I’m afraid I don’t, sir.” The principal regarded him with tentative noncommittal eyes.

“Yet I took a trip with you on this same boat, exactly eleven years ago tonight.”

“This boat, sir, was only built last year.”

“Well, a boat like it,” said Bill. “I wouldn’t have known the difference myself.”

Mr. McVitty made no reply. After a moment Bill continued confidently, “We found that night that we were both sons of John Harvard.”

“Yes?”

“In fact on that very day I had been pulling an oar against what I might refer to as dear old Yale.”

Mr. McVitty’s eyes narrowed. He came closer to Bill and his nose wrinkled slightly.

“Old Eli,” said Bill; “in fact, Eli Yale.”

“I see,” said Mr. McVitty dryly. “And what can I do for you tonight?”

Someone came up with a question and in the enforced silence it occurred to Bill that he was present on the slightest of all pretexts — a previous and unacknowledged acquaintance. He was relieved when a dull rumble and a quiver of the deck indicated that they had left the shore.

Mr. McVitty, disengaged, turned toward him with a slight frown. “I seem to remember you now,” he said. “We took three of you aboard from a motor boat and we let you dance. Unfortunately the evening ended in a fight.”

Bill hesitated. In eleven years his relation to Mr. McVitty had somehow changed. He recalled Mr. McVitty as a more negligible, more easily dealt with person. There had been no such painful difficulties before.

“Perhaps you wonder how I happen to be here?” he suggested mildly.

“To be frank, I do, Mr —  — -”

“Frothington,” supplied Bill, and he added brazenly, “It’s rather a sentimental excursion for me. My greatest romance began on the evening you speak of. That was when I first met — my wife.”

Mr. McVitty’s attention was caught at last. “You married one of our girls?”

Bill nodded. “That’s why I wanted to take this trip tonight.”

“Your wife’s with you?”

“No.”

“I don’t understand —  — -” He broke off, and suggested gently,

“Or maybe I do. Your wife is dead?”

After a moment Bill nodded. Somewhat to his surprise two great tears rolled suddenly down his face.

Mr. McVitty put his hand on Bill’s shoulder. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I understand your feeling, Mr. Frothington, and I respect it. Please make yourself at home.”

After a nibble at his bottle Bill stood in the door of the salon watching the dance. It might have been eleven years ago. There were the high-school characters that he and Ham and Ellie had laughed at afterward — the fat boy who surely played center on the football team and the adolescent hero with the pompadour and the blatant good manners, president of his class. The pretty girl who had looked at him by the gangplank danced past him, and with a quick lift of his heart he placed her, too; her confidence and the wide but careful distribution of her favors — she was the popular girl, as Mae had been eleven years before.

Next time she went past he touched the shoulder of the boy she was dancing with. “May I have some of this?” he said.

“What?” her partner gasped.

“May I have some of this dance?”

The boy stared at him without relinquishing his hold.

“Oh, it’s all right, Red,” she said impatiently. “That’s the way they do now.”

Red stepped sulkily aside. Bill bent his arm as nearly as he could into the tortuous clasp that they were all using, and started.

“I saw you talking to Mr. McVitty,” said the girl, looking up into his face with a bright smile. “I don’t know you, but I guess it’s all right.”

“I saw you before that.”

“When?”

“Getting on the boat.”

“I don’t remember.”

“What’s your name?” he asked.

“May Schaffer. What’s the matter?”

“Do you spell it with an e?”

“No; why?”

A quartet of boys had edged toward them. One of its members suddenly shot out as if propelled from inside the group and bumped awkwardly against Bill.

“Can I have part of this dance?” asked the boy with a sort of giggle.

Without enthusiasm Bill let go. When the next dance began he cut in again. She was lovely. Her happiness in herself, in the evening would have transfigured a less pretty girl. He wanted to talk to her alone and was about to suggest that they go outside when there was a repetition of what had happened before — a young man was apparently shot by force from a group to Bill’s side.

“Can I have part of this dance?”

Bill joined Mr. McVitty by the rail. “Pleasant evening,” he remarked. “Don’t you dance?”

“I enjoy dancing,” said Mr. McVitty; and he added pointedly, “In my position it doesn’t seem quite the thing to dance with young girls.”

“That’s nonsense,” said Bill pleasantly. “Have a drink?”

Mr. McVitty walked suddenly away.

When he danced with May again he was cut in on almost immediately. People were cutting in all over the floor now — evidently he had started something. He cut back, and again he started to suggest that they go outside, but he saw that her attention was held by some horseplay going on across the room.

“I got a swell love nest up in the Bronx,” somebody was saying.

“Won’t you come outside?” said Bill. “There’s the most wonderful moon.”

“I’d rather dance.”

“We could dance out there.”

She leaned away from him and looked up with innocent scorn into his eyes.

“Where’d you get it?” she said.

“Get what?”

“All the happiness.”

Before he could answer, someone cut in. For a moment he imagined that the boy had said, “Part of this dance, daddy?” but his annoyance at May’s indifference drove the idea from his mind. Next time he went to the point at once.

“I live near here,” he said. “I’d be awfully pleased if I could call and drive you over for a week-end sometime.”

“What?” she asked vaguely. Again she was listening to a miniature farce being staged in the corner.

“My wife would like so much to have you,” went on Bill. Great dreams of what he could do for this girl for old times’ sake rose in his mind.

Her head swung toward him curiously. “Why, Mr. McVitty told somebody your wife was dead.”

“She isn’t,” said Bill.

Out of the corner of his eye he saw the inevitable catapult coming and danced quickly away from it.

A voice rang out: “Just look at old daddy step.”

“Ask him if I can have some of this dance.”

Afterward Bill only remembered the evening up to that point. A crowd swirled around him and someone kept demanding persistently who was a young boiler maker.

He decided, naturally enough, to teach them a lesson, as he had done before, and he told them so. Then there was a long discussion as to whether he could swim. After that the confusion deepened; there were blows and a short sharp struggle. He picked up the story himself in what must have been several minutes later, when his head emerged from the cool waters of the Thames River.

The river was white with the moon, which had changed from rosy gold to a wafer of shining cheese on high. It was some time before he could locate the direction of the shore, but he moved around unworried in the water. The boat was a mere speck now, far down the river, and he laughed to think how little it all mattered, how little anything mattered. Then, feeling sure that he had his wind and wondering if the taxi was still waiting at Wheatly Village, he struck out for the dark shore.

IV

He was worried as he drew near home next afternoon, possessed of a dark, unfounded fear. It was based, of course, on his own silly transgression. Stella would somehow hear of it. In his reaction from the debonair confidence of last night, it seemed inevitable that Stella would hear of it.

“Who’s here?” he asked the butler immediately.

“No one, sir. The Ameses came about an hour ago, but there was no word, so they went on. They said —  — -”

“Isn’t my wife here?”

“Mrs. Frothington left yesterday just after you.”

The whips of panic descended upon him.

“How long after me?”

“Almost immediately, sir. The telephone rang and she answered it, and almost immediately she had her bag packed and left the house.”

“Mr. Ad Haughton didn’t come?”

“I haven’t seen Mr. Haughton.”

It had happened. The spirit of adventure had seized Stella too. He knew that her life had been not without a certain pressure from sentimental men, but that she would ever go anywhere without telling him —  — -

He threw himself face downward on a couch. What had happened? He had never meant things to happen. Was that what she had meant when she had looked at him in that peculiar way the other night?

He went upstairs. Almost as soon as he entered the big bedroom he saw the note, written on blue stationery lest he miss it against the white pillow. In his misery an old counsel of his mother’s came back to him: “The more terrible things seem the more you’ve got to keep yourself in shape.”

Trembling, he divested himself of his clothes, turned on a bath and lathered his face. Then he poured himself a drink and shaved. It was like a dream, this change in his life. She was no longer his; even if she came back she was no longer his. Everything was different — this room, himself, everything that had existed yesterday. Suddenly he wanted it back. He got out of the bathtub and knelt down on the bath mat beside it and prayed. He prayed for Stella and himself and Ad Haughton; he prayed crazily for the restoration of his life — the life that he had just as crazily cut in two. When he came out of the bathroom with a towel around him, Ad Haughton was sitting on the bed.

“Hello, Bill. Where’s your wife?”

“Just a minute,” Bill answered. He went back into the bathroom and swallowed a draught of rubbing alcohol guaranteed to produce violent gastric disturbances. Then he stuck his head out the door casually.

“Mouthful of gargle,” he explained. “How are you, Ad? Open that envelope on the pillow and we’ll see where she is.”

“She’s gone to Europe with a dentist. Or rather her dentist is going to Europe, so she had to dash to New York —  — “

He hardly heard. His mind, released from worry, had drifted off again. There would be a full moon tonight, or almost a full moon. Something had happened under a full moon once. What it was he was unable for the moment to remember.

His long, lanky body, his little lost soul in the universe, sat there on the bathroom window seat.

“I’m probably the world’s worst guy,” he said, shaking his head at himself in the mirror — “probably the world’s worst guy. But I can’t help it. At my age you can’t fight against what you know you are.”

Trying his best to be better, he sat there faithfully for an hour. Then it was twilight and there were voices downstairs, and suddenly there it was, in the sky over his lawn, all the restless longing after fleeing youth in all the world — the bright uncapturable moon.

ON YOUR OWN

The third time he walked around the deck Evelyn stared at him. She stood leaning against the bulwark and when she heard his footsteps again she turned frankly and held his eyes for a moment until his turned away, as a woman can when she has the protection of other men’s company, Barlotto, playing ping-pong with Eddie O’Sullivan, noticed the encounter. “Aha!” he said, before the stroller was out of hearing, and when the rally was finished: “Then you’re still interested even if it’s not the German Prince.”

“How do you know it’s not the German Prince?” Evelyn demanded.

“Because the German Prince is the horse-faced man with white eyes. This one” — he took a passenger list from his pocket — “is either Mr George Ives, Mr Jubal Early Robbins and valet, or Mr Joseph Widdle with Mrs Widdle and six children.”

It was a medium-sized German boat, five days westbound from Cherbourg. The month was February and the sea was dingy grey and swept with rain. Canvas sheltered all the open portions of the promenade deck, even the ping-pong table was wet.

K’tap K’tap K’tap K’tap. Barlotto looked like Valentino — since he got fresh in the rumba number she had disliked playing opposite him. But Eddie O’Sullivan had been one of her best friends in the company.

Subconsciously she was waiting for the solitary promenader to round the deck again but he didn’t. She faced about and looked at the sea through the glass windows; instantly her throat closed and she held herself dose to the wooden rail to keep her shoulders from shaking. Her thoughts rang aloud in her ears: “My father is dead — when I was little we would walk to town on Sunday morning, I in my starched dress, and he would buy the Washington paper and a cigar and he was so proud of his pretty little girl. He was always so proud of me — he came to New York to see me when I opened with the Marx Brothers and he told everybody in the hotel he was my father, even the elevator boys. I’m glad he did, it was so much pleasure for him, perhaps the best time he ever had since he was young. He would like it if he knew I was coming all the way from London.”

“Game and set,” said Eddie.

She turned around. “We’ll go down and wake up the Barneys and have some bridge, eh?” suggested Barlotto.

Evelyn led the way, pirouetting once and again on the moist deck, then breaking into an “Off to Buffalo” against a sudden breath of wet wind. At the door she slipped and fell inward down the stair, saved herself by a perilous one-arm swing — and was brought up against the solitary promenader. Her mouth fell open comically — she balanced for a moment Then the man said, “I beg your pardon,” in an unmistakably southern voice. She met his eyes again as the three of them passed on. The man picked up Eddie O’Sullivan in the smoking room the next afternoon.

“Aren’t you the London cast of Chronic Affection?”

“We were until three days ago. We were going to run another two weeks but Miss Lovejoy was called to America so we closed.”

“The whole cast on board?” The man’s curiosity was inoffensive, it was a really friendly interest combined with a polite deference to the romance of the theatre. Eddie O’Sullivan liked him.

“Sure, sit down. No, there’s only Barlotto, the juvenile, and Miss Lovejoy and Charles Barney, the producer, and his wife. We left in twenty-four hours — the others are coming on the Homeric.”

“I certainly did enjoy seeing your show. I’ve been on a trip around the world and I turned up in London two weeks ago just ready for something American — and you had it.”

An hour later Evelyn poked her head around the corner of the smoking-room door and found them there.

“Why are you hiding out on us?” she demanded. “Who’s going to laugh at my stuff? That bunch of card sharps down there?”

Eddie introduced Mr George Ives. Evelyn saw a handsome, well-built man of thirty with a firm and restless face. At the corners of his eyes two pairs of fine wrinkles indicated an effort to meet the world on some other basis than its own. On his pan George Ives saw a rather small dark-haired girl of twenty-six, burning with a vitality that could only be described as “professional”. Which is to say it was not amateur — it could never use itself up upon any one person or group. At moments it possessed her so entirely, turning every shade of expression, every casual gesture, into a thing of such moment that she seemed to have no real self of her own. Her mouth was made of two small intersecting cherries pointing off into a bright smile; she had enormous, dark brown eyes. She was not beautiful but it took her only about ten seconds to persuade people that she was. Her body was lovely with little concealed muscles of iron. She was in black now and overdressed — she was always very chic and a little overdressed.

“I’ve been admiring you ever since you hurled yourself at me yesterday afternoon,” he said.

“I had to make you some way or other, didn’t I? What’s a girl going to with herself on a boat — fish?” They sat down.

“Have you been in England long?” George asked. “About five years — I go bigger over there.” In its serious moments her voice had the ghost of a British accent. “I’m not really very good at anything — I sing a little, dance a little, down a little, so the English think they’re getting a bargain. In New York they want specialists.”

It was apparent that she would have preferred an equivalent popularity in New York.

Barney, Mrs Barney and Barlotto came into the bar. “Aha!” Barlotto cried when George Ives was introduced. “She won’t believe he’s not the Prince.” He put his hand on George’s knee. “Miss Lovejoy was looking for the Prince the first day when she heard he was on board. We told her it was you.”

Evelyn was weary of Barlotto, weary of all of them, except Eddie O’Sullivan, though she was too tactful to have shown it when they were working together. She looked around. Save for two Russian priests playing chess their party was alone in the smoking-room — there were only thirty first-class passengers, with accommodations for two hundred. Again she wondered what sort of an America she was going back to. Suddenly the room depressed her — it was too big, too empty to fill and she felt the necessity of creating some responsive joy and gaiety around her.

“Let’s go down to my salon,” she suggested, pouring all her enthusiasm into her voice, making them a free and thrilling promise. “We’ll play the phonograph and send for the handsome doctor and the chief engineer and get them in a game of stud. I’ll be the decoy.”

As they went downstairs she knew she was doing this for the new man.

She wanted to play to him, show him what a good time she could give people. With the phonograph wailing “You’re driving me crazy” she began building up a legend. She was a “gun moll” and the whole trip had been a I frame to get Mr Ives into the hands of the mob. Her throaty mimicry flicked here and there from one to the other; two ship’s officers coming in were caught up in it and without knowing much English still understood the verve and magic of the impromptu performance. She was Anne Pennington, Helen Morgan, the effeminate waiter who came in for an order, she was everyone there in turn, and all in pace with the ceaseless music.

Later George Ives invited them all to dine with him in the upstairs restaurant that night. And as the party broke up and Evelyn’s eyes sought his approval he asked her to walk with him before dinner.

The deck was still damp, still canvassed in against the persistent of rain. The lights were a dim and murky yellow and blankets tumbled awry on empty deck chairs.

“You were a treat,” he said. “You’re like — Mickey Mouse.”

She took his arm and bent double over it with laughter.

“I like being Mickey Mouse. Look — there’s where I stood and stared you every time you walked around. Why didn’t you come around the fourth time?”

“I was embarrassed so I went up to the boat deck.”

As they turned at the bow there was a great opening of doors and a flooding out of people who rushed to the rail.

“They must have had a poor supper,” Evelyn said. “No — look!”

It was the Europa — a moving island of light. It grew larger minute by minute, swelled into a harmonious fairyland with music from its deck and searchlights playing on its own length. Through field-glasses they could discern figures lining the rail and Evelyn spun out the personal history of a man who was pressing his own pants in a cabin. Charmed they watched its sure matchless speed.

“Oh, Daddy, buy me that!” Evelyn cried, and then something suddenly broke inside her — the sight of beauty, the reaction to her late excitement choked her up and she thought vividly of her father. Without a word she went inside.

Two days later she stood with George Ives on the deck while the gaunt scaffolding of Coney Island slid by.

“What was Barlotto saying to you just now?” she demanded.

George laughed.

“He was saying just about what Barney said this afternoon, only he was more excited about it.”

She groaned.

“He said that you played with everybody — and that I was foolish if I thought this little boat flirtation meant anything — everybody had been through being in love with you and nothing ever came of it.”

“He wasn’t in love with me,” she protested. “He got fresh in a dance we had together and I called him for it.”

“Barney was wrought up too — said he felt like a father to you.”

“They make me tired,” she exclaimed. “Now they think they’re in love with me just because —  — “

“Because they see I am.”

“Because they think I’m interested in you. None of them were so eager until two days ago. So long as I make them laugh it’s all right but the minute I have any impulse of my own they all bustle up and think they’re being so protective. I suppose Eddie O’Sullivan will be next.”

“It was my fault telling them we found we lived only a few miles from each other in Maryland.”

“No, it’s just that I’m the only decent-looking girl on an eight-day boat, and the boys are beginning to squabble among themselves. Once they’re in New York they’ll forget I’m alive.”

Still later they were together when the city burst thunderously upon them in the early dusk — the high white range of lower New York swooping down like a strand of a bridge, rising again into uptown New York, hallowed with diadems of foamy light, suspended from the stars.

“I don’t know what’s the matter with me,” Evelyn sobbed. “I cry so much lately. Maybe I’ve been handling a parrot.”

The German band started to play on deck but the sweeping majesty of the city made the inarch trivial and tinkling; after a moment it died away.

“Oh, God! It’s so beautiful,” she whispered brokenly.

If he had not been going south with her the affair would probably have ended an hour later in the customs shed. And as they rode south to Washington next day he receded for the moment and her father came nearer. He was just a nice American who attracted her physically — a little necking behind a lifeboat in the darkness. At the iron grating in the Washington station where their ways divided she kissed him good-bye and for the time forgot him altogether as her train shambled down into the low-forested clayland of southern Maryland. Screening her eyes with her hands Evelyn looked out upon the dark infrequent villages and the scattered farm lights. Rocktown was a shrunken little station and there was her brother with a neighbour’s Ford — she was ashamed that her luggage was so good against the exploded upholstery. She saw a star she knew and heard Negro laughter from out of the night; the breeze was cool but in it there was some smell she recognized — she was home.

At the service next day in the Rocktown churchyard, the sense that she was on a stage, that she was being watched, froze Evelyn’s grief — then it was over and the country doctor lay among a hundred Lovejoys and Dorseys and Crawshaws. It was very friendly leaving him there with all his relations around him. Then as they turned from the graveside her eyes fell

on George Ives who stood a little apart with his hat in his hand. Outside the gate he spoke to her.

“You’ll excuse my coming. I had to see that you were all right.”

“Can’t you take me away somewhere now?” she asked impulsively. “I can’t stand much of this. I want to go to New York tonight.”

His face fell. “So soon?”

“I’ve got to be learning a lot of new dance routines and freshening up my stuff. You get sort of stale abroad.”

He called for her that afternoon, crisp and shining as his coupe. As they started off she noticed that the men in the gasoline stations seemed to know him with liking and respect. He fitted into the quickening spring landscape, into a legendary Maryland of graciousness and gallantry. He had not the range of a European; he gave her little of that constant reassurance as to her attractiveness — there were whole half-hours when he seemed scarcely aware of her at all.

They stopped once more at the churchyard — she brought a great armful of flowers to leave as a last offering on her father’s grave. Leaving him at the gate she went in.

The flowers scattered on the brown unsettled earth. She had no more ties here now and she did not know whether she would come back any more. She knelt down. All these dead, she knew them all, their weather-beaten faces with hard blue flashing eyes, their spare violent bodies, their souls made of new earth in the long forest-heavy darkness of the seventeenth century. Minute by minute the spell grew on her until it was hard to struggle back to the old world where she had dined with kings and princes, where her name in letters two feet high challenged the curiosity of the night A line of William McFee’s surged through her:

O staunch old heart that toiled so long for me

I waste my years sailing along the sea.

The words released her — she broke suddenly and sat back on her heels, crying.

How long she was staying she didn’t know; the flowers had grown invisible when a voice called her name from the churchyard and she got up and wiped her eyes.

“I’m coming.” And then, “Good-bye then Father, all my fathers.”

George helped her into the car and wrapped a robe around her. Then he took a long drink of country rye from his flask.

“Kiss me before we start,” he said suddenly.

She put up her face towards him.

“No, really kiss me.”

“Not now.”

“Don’t you like me?”

“I don’t feel like it, and my face is dirty.”

“As if that mattered.”

His persistence annoyed her.

“Let’s go on,” she said.

He put the car into gear.

“Sing me a song.”

“Not now, I don’t feel like it.”

He drove fast for half an hour — then he stopped under thick sheltering trees.

“Time for another drink. Don’t you think you better have one — it’s getting cold.”

“You know I don’t drink. You have one.”

“If you don’t mind.”

When he had swallowed he turned towards her again.

“I think you might kiss me now.”

Again she kissed him obediently but he was not satisfied.

“I mean really,” he repeated. “Don’t hold away like that. You know I’m in love with you and you say you like me.”

“Of course I do,” she said impatiently, “but there are times and times. This isn’t one of them. Let’s go on.”

“But I thought you liked me.”

“I won’t if you act this way.”

“You don’t like me then.”

“Oh don’t be absurd,” she broke out, “of course I like you, but I want to get to Washington.”

“We’ve got lots of time.” And then as she didn’t answer, “Kiss me once before we start.”

She grew angry. If she had liked him less she could have laughed him out of this mood. But there was no laughter in her — only an increasing distaste for the situation.

“Well,” he said with a sigh, “this car is very stubborn. It refuses to start until you kiss me.” He put his hand on hers but she drew hers away.

“Now look here.” Her temper mounted into her cheeks, her forehead. “If there was anything you could do to spoil everything it was just this. I thought people only acted like this in cartoons. It’s so utterly crude and” — she searched for a word — “and American. You only forgot to call me „baby”.”

“Oh.” After a minute he started the engine and then the car. The lights of Washington were a red blur against the sky.

“Evelyn,” he said presently. “I can’t think of anything more natural than wanting to kiss you, I —  — “

“Oh, it was so clumsy,” she interrupted. “Half a pint of corn whisky and then telling me you wouldn’t start the car unless I kissed you. I’m not used to that sort of thing. I’ve always had men treat me with the greatest delicacy. Men have been challenged to duels for staring at me in a casino — and then you, that I liked so much, try a thing like that. I can’t stand it —  — “ And again she repeated, bitterly “It’s so American.”

“Well, I haven’t any sense of guilt about it but I’m sorry I upset you.”

“Don’t you see?” she demanded. “If I’d wanted to kiss you I’d have managed managed to let you know.”

“I’m terribly sorry,” he repeated. They had dinner in the station buffet. He left her at the door of her pullman car.

“Good-bye,” she said, but coolly now, “Thank you for an awfully interesting trip. And call me up when you come to New York.”

“Isn’t this silly,” he protested. “You’re not even going to kiss me good-bye.”

She didn’t want to at all now and she hesitated before leaning forward lightly from the step. But this time he drew back.

“Never mind,” he said. “I understand how you feel. I’ll see you when I come to New York.”

He took off his hat, bowed politely and walked away. Feeling very alone and lost Evelyn went on into the car. That was for meeting people on boats, she thought, but she kept on feeling strangely alone.

II

She climbed a network of steel, concrete and glass, walked under a high echoing dome and came out into New York. She was part of it even before she reached her hotel. When she saw mail waiting for her and flowers around her suite, she was sure she wanted to live and work here with this great current of excitement flowing through her from dawn to dusk.

Within two days she was putting in several hours a morning Umbering up neglected muscles, an hour of new soft-shoe stuff with Joe Crusoe, and making a tour of the city to look at every entertainer who had something new.

Also she was weighing the prospects for her next engagement. In the background was the chance of going to London as a co-featured player in a Gershwin show then playing New York. Yet there was an air of repetition about it. New York excited her and she wanted to get something here. This was difficult — she had little following in America, show business was in a bad way — after a while her agent brought her several offers for shows that were going into rehearsal this fall. Meanwhile she was getting a little in debt and it was convenient that there were almost always men to take her to dinner and the theatre.

March blew past. Evelyn learned new steps and performed in half a dozen benefits; the season was waning. She dickered with the usual young impresarios who wanted to “build something around her”, but who seemed never to have the money, the theatre and the material at one and the same time. A week before she must decide about the English offer she heard from George Ives.

She heard directly, in the form of a telegram announcing his arrival, and indirectly in the form of a comment from her lawyer when she mentioned the fact. He whistled.

“Woman, have you snared George Ives? You don’t need any more jobs. A lot of girls have worn out their shoes chasing him.”

“Why, what’s his claim to fame?”

“He’s rich as Croesus — he’s the smartest young lawyer in the South, and they’re trying to run him now for governor of his state. In his spare time he’s one of the best polo players in America.” Evelyn whistled. “This is news,” she said.

She was startled. Her feelings about him suddenly changed — everything he had done began to assume significance. It impressed her that while she ad told him all about her public self he had hinted nothing of this. Now she remembered him talking aside with some ship reporters at the dock.

He came on a soft poignant day, gentle and spirited. She was engaged for lunch but he picked her up at the Ritz afterwards and they drove in Central Park. When she saw in a new revelation his pleasant eyes and his mouth that told how hard he was on himself, her heart swung towards him — she told him she was sorry about that night.

“I didn’t object to what you did but to the way you did it,” she said. “It’s all forgotten. Let’s be happy.”

“It all happened so suddenly,” he said. “It was disconcerting to look up suddenly on a boat and see the girl you’ve always wanted.”

“It was nice, wasn’t it?”

“I thought that anything so like a casual flower needn’t be respected. But that was all the more reason for treating it gently.”

“What nice words,” she teased him. “If you keep on I’m going to throw myself under the wheels of the cab.”

Oh, she liked him. They dined together and went to a play and in the taxi going back to her hotel she looked up at him and waited.

“Would you consider marrying me?”

“Yes, I’d consider marrying you.”

“Of course if you married me we’d live in New York.”

“Call me Mickey Mouse,” she said suddenly.

“Why?”

“I don’t know — it was fun when you called me Mickey Mouse.”

The taxi stopped at her hotel.

“Won’t you come in and talk for a while?” she asked. Her bodice was stretched tight across her heart. “Mother’s here in New York with me and I promised I’d go and see her for a while.”

“Oh.”

“Will you dine with us tomorrow night?”

“All right.”

She hurried in and up to her room and put on the phonograph.

“Oh, gosh, he’s going to respect me,” she thought. “He doesn’t know anything about me, he doesn’t know anything about women. He wants to make a goddess out of me and I want to be Mickey Mouse.” She went to the mirror swaying softly before it.

Lady play your mandolin Lady let that tune begin. At her agent’s next morning she ran into Eddie O’Sullivan.

“Are you married yet?” he demanded. “Or did you ever see him again?”

“Eddie, I don’t know what to do. I think I’m in love with him but we’re always out of step with each other.”

“Take him in hand.”

“That’s just what I don’t want to do. I want to be taken in hand myself.”

“Well, you’re twenty-six — you’re in love with him. Why don’t you marry him? It’s a bad season.”

“He’s so American,” she answered.

“You’ve lived abroad so long that you don’t know what you want.”

“It’s a man’s place to make me certain.” It was in a mood of revolt against what she felt was to be an inspection that she made a midnight rendezvous for afterwards to go to Chaplin’s film with two other men — “because I frightened him in Maryland and he’ll only leave me politely at my door”. She pulled all her dresses out of her wardrobe and defiantly chose a startling gown from Vionnet; when George called for her at seven she summoned him up to her suite and displayed it, half hoping he would protest. “Wouldn’t you rather I’d go as a convent girl?”

“Don’t change anything. I worship you.” But she didn’t want to be worshipped.

It was still light outside and she liked being next to him in the car. She felt fresh and young under the fresh young silk — she would be glad to ride with him for ever, if only she were sure they were going somewhere.

… The suite at the Plaza dosed around them; lamps were lighted in the salon.

“We’re really almost neighbours in Maryland,” said Mrs Ives. “Your name’s familiar in St Charles county and there’s a fine old house called Lovejoy Hall. Why don’t you buy it and restore it?”

“There’s no money in the family,” said Evelyn bluntly. “I’m the only hope, and actresses never save.”

When the other guest arrived Evelyn started. Of all shades of her past — Colonel Cary. She wanted to laugh, or else hide — for an instant she wondered if this had been calculated. But she saw in his surprise that it was impossible.

“Delighted to see you again,” he said simply.

As they sat down at table Mrs Ives remarked:

“Miss Lovejoy is from our part of Maryland.”

“I see,” Colonel Cary looked at Evelyn with the equivalent of a wink. His expression annoyed her and she flushed. Evidently he knew nothing about her success on the stage, remembered only an episode of six years ago. When champagne was served she let a waiter fill her glass lest Colonel Cary think that she was playing an unsophisticated role.

“I thought you were a teetotaller,” George observed.

“I am. This is about the third drink I ever had in my life.”

The wine seemed to clarify matters; it made her see the necessity of anticipating whatever the Colonel might afterwards tell the Ives. Her glass was filled again. A little later Colonel Cary gave an opportunity when he asked:

“What have you been doing all these years?”

“I’m on the stage.” She turned to Mrs Ives. “Colonel Cary and I met in my most difficult days.”

“Yes?”

The Colonel’s face reddened but Evelyn continued steadily.

“For two months I was what used to be called a „party girl”.”

“A party girl?” repeated Mrs Ives puzzled.

“It’s a New York phenomenon,” said George.

Evelyn smiled at the Colonel. “It used to amuse me.”

“Yes, very amusing,” he said.

“Another girl and I had just left school and decided to go on the stage. We waited around agencies and offices for months and there were literally days when we didn’t have enough to eat.”

“How terrible,” said Mrs Ives.

“Then somebody told us about „party girls”. Businessmen with clients from out of town sometimes wanted to give them a big time — singing a dancing and champagne, all that sort of thing, make them feel like regular fellows seeing New York. So they’d hire a room in a restaurant and invite a dozen party girls. All it required was to have a good evening dress and to sit next to some middle-aged man for two hours and laugh at his jokes and maybe kiss him good night. Sometimes you’d find a fifty-dollar bill in your napkin when you sat down at table. It sounds terrible, doesn’t it — but it was salvation to us in that awful three months.”

A silence had fallen, short as far as seconds go but so heavy that Evelyn felt it on her shoulders. She knew that the silence was coming from some deep place in Mrs Ives’s heart, that Mrs Ives was ashamed for her and felt that what she had done in the struggle for survival was unworthy of the dignity of woman. In those same seconds she sensed the Colonel chuckling maliciously behind his bland moustache, felt the wrinkles beside George’s eyes straining.

“It must be terribly hard to get started on the stage,” said Mrs Ives. “Tell me — have you acted mostly in England?”

“Yes.”

What had she said? Only the truth and the whole truth in spite of the old man leering there. She drank off her glass of champagne.

George spoke quickly, under the Colonel’s roar of conversation: “Isn’t that a lot of champagne if you’re not used to it?”

She saw him suddenly as a man dominated by his mother; her frank little reminiscence had shocked him. Things were different for a girl on her own and at least he should see that it was wiser than that Colonel Cary might launch dark implications thereafter. But she refused further champagne.

After dinner she sat with George at the piano.

“I suppose I shouldn’t have said that at dinner,” she whispered.

“Nonsense! Mother know everything’s changed nowadays.”

“She didn’t like it,” Evelyn insisted. “And as for that old boy that looks like a Peter Arno cartoon!”

Try as she might Evelyn couldn’t shake off the impression that some slight had been put upon her. She was accustomed only to having approval gad admiration around her.

“If you had to choose again would you choose the stage?” Mrs Ives asked.

“It’s a nice life,” Evelyn said emphatically. “If I had daughters with talent I’d choose it for them. I certainly wouldn’t want them to be society girls.”

“But we can’t all have talent,” said Colonel Cary.

“Of course most people have the craziest prejudices about the stage,” pursued Evelyn.

“Not so much nowadays,” said Mrs Ives. “So many nice girls go on the stage.”

“Girls of position,” added Colonel Cary.

“They don’t usually last very long,” said Evelyn. “Every time some debutante decides to dazzle the world there’s another flop due on Broadway. But the thing that makes me maddest is the way people condescend. I remember one season on the road — all the small-town social leaders inviting you to parties and then whispering and snickering in the corner. Snickering at Gladys Knowles!” Evelyn’s voice rang with indignation: “When Gladys goes to Europe she dines with the most prominent people in every country, the people who don’t know these backwoods social leaders exist —  — “

“Does she dine with their wives too?” asked Colonel Cary.

“With their wives too.” She glanced sharply at Mrs Ives. “Let me tell you that girls on the stage don’t feel a bit inferior, and the really fashionable people don’t think of patronizing them.”

The silence was there again heavier and deeper, but this time excited by her own words Evelyn was unconscious of it.

“Oh, it’s American women,” she said. “The less they have to offer the more they pick on the ones that have.”

She drew a deep breath, she felt that the room was stifling.

“I’m afraid I must go now,” she said.

“I’ll take you,” said George.

They were all standing. She shook hands. She liked George’s mother, who after all had made no attempt to patronize her.

“It’s been very nice,” said Mrs Ives.

“I hope we’ll meet soon. Good night.”

With George in a taxi she gave the address of a theatre on Broadway.

“I have a date,” she confessed.

“I see.”

“Nothing very important.” She glanced at him, and put her hand on his. Why didn’t he ask her to break the date? But he only said:

“He better go over Forty-fifth Street.”

Ah, well, maybe she’d better go back to England — and be Mickey Mouse, He didn’t know anything about women, anything about love, and to her that was the unforgivable sin. But why in a certain set of his face under the street lamps did he remind her of her father?

“Won’t you come to the picture?” she suggested.

“I’m feeling a little tired — I’m turning in.”

“Will you phone me tomorrow?”

“Certainly.”

She hesitated. Something was wrong and she hated to leave him. He helped her out of the taxi and paid it.

“Come with us?” she asked almost anxiously. “Listen, if you like —  — “

“I’m going to walk for a while!”

She caught sight of the men waiting for her and waved to them.

“George, is anything the matter?” she said.

“Of course not.”

He had never seemed so attractive, so desirable to her. As her friends came up, two actors, looking like very little fish beside him, he took off his hat and said:

“Good night, I hope you enjoy the picture.”

“George —  — “

— and a curious thing happened. Now for the first time she realized that her father was dead, that she was alone. She had thought of herself as being self-reliant, making more in some seasons than his practice brought him in five years. But he had always been behind her somewhere, his love had always been behind her — She had never been a waif, she had always had a place to go. And now she was alone, alone in the swirling indifferent crowd. Did she expect to love this man, who offered her so much, with the naive romantics of eighteen. He loved her — he loved her more than any one in the world loved her. She wasn’t ever going to be a great star, she knew that, and she had reached the time when a girl had to look out for herself. “Why, look,” she said, “I’ve got to go. Wait — or don’t wait.” Catching up her long gown she sped up Broadway. The crowd was enormous as theatre after theatre eddied out to the sidewalks. She sought for his silk hat as for a standard, but now there were many silk hats. She peered frantically into groups and crowds as she ran. An insolent voice called after her and again she shuddered with a sense of being unprotected. Reaching the corner she peered hopelessly into the tangled mass of the block ahead. But he had probably turned off Broadway so she darted left down the dimmer alley of Forty-eighth Street. Then she saw him, walking briskly, like a man leaving something behind — and overtook him at Sixth Avenue.

“George,” she cried.

He turned; his face looking at her was hard and miserable. “George, I didn’t want to go to that picture, I wanted you to make me not go. Why didn’t you ask me not to go?”

“I didn’t care whether you went or not.”

“Didn’t you?” she cried. “Don’t you care for me any more?”

“Do you want me to call you a cab?”

“No, I want to be with you.”

“I’m going home.”

“I’ll walk with you. What is it, George? What have I done?” They crossed Sixth Avenue and the street became darker. “What is it, George? Please tell me. If I did something wrong at your mother’s why didn’t you stop me?” He stopped suddenly. “You were our guest,” he said. “What did I do?”

“There’s no use going into it.” He signalled a passing taxi. “It’s quite obvious that we look at things differently. I was going to write you tomorrow but since you ask me it’s just as well to end it today.” “But why, George?” She wailed, “What did I do?” “You went out of your way to make a preposterous attack on an old gentlewoman who had given you nothing but courtesy and consideration.” “Oh, George, I didn’t, I didn’t… I’ll go to her and apologize. I’ll go tonight.”

“She wouldn’t understand. We simply look at things in different ways.”

“Oh — h-h.” She stood aghast.

He started to say something further, but after a glance at her he opened the taxi door.

“It’s only two blocks. You’ll excuse me if I don’t go with you.”

She had turned and was clinging to the iron railing of a stair.

“I’ll go in a minute,” she said. “Don’t wait.”

She wasn’t acting now. She wanted to be dead. She was crying for her father, she told herself — not for him but for her father.

His footsteps moved off, stopped, hesitated — came back.

“Evelyn.”

His voice was close beside her.

“Oh, poor baby,” it said. He turned her about gently in his arms and she clung to him.

“Oh yes,” she cried in wild relief. “Poor baby — just your poor baby.” She didn’t know whether this was love or not but she knew with all her heart and soul that she wanted to crawl into his pocket and be safe for ever.

BETWEEN THREE AND FOUR

This happened nowadays, with everyone somewhat discouraged. A lot of less fortunate spirits cracked when money troubles came to be added to all the nervous troubles accumulated in the prosperity — neurosis being a privilege of people with a lot of extra money. And some cracked merely because it was in the air, or because they were used to the great, golden figure of plenty standing behind them, as the idea of prudence and glory stands behind the French, and the idea of “the thing to do” used to stand behind the English. Almost everyone cracked a little.

Howard Butler had never believed in anything, including himself, except the system, and had not believed in that with the intensity of men who were its products or its prophets. He was a quiet, introverted man, not at all brave or resilient and, except in one regard, with no particular harm in him. He thought a lot without much apparatus for thinking, and in normal circumstances one would not expect him to fly very high or sink very low. Nevertheless, he had a vision, which is the matter of this story.

Howard Butler stood in his office on the ninth floor of a building in New York, deciding something. It was a branch and a showroom of B. B. Eddington’s Sons, office furniture and supplies, of which he was a branch manager — a perfect office ceremoniously equipped throughout, though now a little empty because of the decreased personnel due to hard times. Miss Wiess had just telephoned the name of an unwelcome caller, and he was deciding whether he hadn’t just as well see the person now; it was a question of sooner or later. Mrs. Summer was to be shown in.

Mrs. Summer did not need to be shown in, since she had worked there for eight years, up until six months ago. She was a handsome and vital lady in her late forties, with golden-grayish hair, a stylish-stout figure with a reminiscent touch of the Gibson Girl bend to it, and fine young eyes of bright blue. To Howard Butler she was still as vivid a figure as when, as Sarah Belknap, she had declined to marry him nearly thirty years ago — with the essential difference that he hated her.

She came into his private office with an alert way she had and, in a clear, compelling voice that always affected him, said, “Hello, Howard,” as if, without especially liking him, she didn’t object to him at all. This time there was just a touch of strain in her manner.

“Hello, Sarah.”

“Well,” she breathed, “it’s very strange to be back here. Tell me you’ve got a place for me.”

He pursed his lips and shook his head. “Things don’t pick up.”

“H’m.” She nodded and blinked several times.

“Cancellations, bad debts — we’ve closed two branches and there’ve been more pay cuts since you left. I’ve had to take one.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t expect the salary I used to get. I realize how things are. But, literally, I can’t find anything. I thought, perhaps, there might be an opening, say as office manager or head stenographer, with full responsibility. I’d be very glad of fifty dollars a week.”

“We’re not paying anything like that.”

“Or forty-five. Or even forty. I had a chance at twenty-five when I first left here and, like an idiot, I let it go. It seemed absurd after what I’d been getting; I couldn’t keep Jack at Princeton on that. Of course, he’s partly earning his way, but even in the colleges the competition is pretty fierce now — so many boys need money. Anyhow, last week I went back and tried to get the job at twenty-five, and they just laughed at me.” Mrs. Summer smiled grimly, but with full control over herself; yet she could only hold the smile a minute and she talked on to conceal its disappearance: “I’ve been eating at the soup kitchens to save what little I’ve got left. When I think that a woman of my capacity —  — That’s not conceit, Howard; you know I’ve got capacity. Mr.

Eddington always thought so. I never quite understood —  — “

“It’s tough, Sarah,” he said quickly. He looked at her shoes — they were still good shoes — on top anyhow. She had always been well turned out.

“If I had left earlier, if I’d been let out before the worst times came, I could have placed myself; but when I started hunting, everyone had got panicky.”

“We had to let Muller go too.”

“Oh, you did,” she said, with interest; the news restored her a measure of self-respect.

“A week ago.”

Six months before, the choice had been between Mr. Muller and Mrs. Summer, and Sarah Summer knew, and Howard Butler knew that she knew, that he had made a ticklish decision. He had satisfied an old personal grudge by keeping Muller, who was a young man, clearly less competent and less useful to the firm than Mrs. Summer, and who received the same salary.

Now they stared at each other; she trying to fix on him, to pin him down, to budge him; he trying to avoid her, and succeeding, but only by retreating into recently hollowed out cavities in his soul, but safe cavities, from which he could even regard her plight with a certain satisfaction. Yet he was afraid of what he had done; he was trying to be hard, but in her actual presence the sophistries he had evolved did not help him.

“Howard, you’ve got to give me a job,” she broke out. “Anything — thirty dollars, twenty-five dollars. I’m desperate. I haven’t thirty dollars left. I’ve got to get Jack through this year — his junior year. He wants to be a doctor. He thinks he can hold out till June on his own, but someone drove him down to New York on Washington’s Birthday, and he saw the way I was living. I tried to lie to him, but he guessed, and now he says he’s going to quit and get a job. Howard, I’d rather be dead than stand in his way. I’ve been thinking of nothing else for a week. I’d be better dead. After all, I’ve had my life — and a lot of happiness.”

For an instant Butler wavered. It could be done, but the phrase “a lot of happiness” hardened him, and he told himself how her presence in the office now would be a continual reproach.

Thirty years ago, on the porch of a gabled house in Rochester, he had sat in misery while John Summer and Sarah Belknap had told him moonily about their happiness. “I wanted you to be the first to know, Howard,” Sarah had said. Butler had blundered into it that evening, bringing flowers and a new offer of his heart; then he was suddenly made aware that things were changed, that he wasn’t very alive for either of them. Later, something she had said was quoted or misquoted to him — that if John Summer had not come along, she’d have been condemned to marry Howard Butler.

Years later he had walked into the office one morning to find her his subordinate. This time there was something menacing and repellent in his wooing, and she had put a stop to it immediately, definitely and finally. Then, for eight years, Butler had suffered her presence in the office, drying out in the sunshine of her vitality, growing bitter in the shadow of her indifference; aware that, despite her widowhood, her life was more complete than his.

“I can’t do it,” he said, as if regretfully. “Things are stripped to the bone here. There’s no one you could displace. Miss Wiess has been here twelve years.”

“I wonder if it would do any good to talk to Mr. Eddington.”

“He’s not in New York, and it wouldn’t do any good.”

She was beaten, but she went on evenly, “Is there any likelihood of a change, in the next month, say?”

Butler shrugged his shoulders. “How does anybody know when business will pick up? I’ll keep you in mind if anything turns up.” Then he added, in a surge of weakness: “Come back in a week or so, some afternoon between three and four.”

Mrs. Summer got up; she looked older than when she had come into the office.

“I’ll come back then.” She stood twisting her gloves, and her eyes seemed to stare out into more space than the office inclosed. “If you haven’t anything for me then, I’ll probably just — quit permanently.”

She walked quickly to the window, and he half rose from his chair.

“Nine floors is a nice height,” she remarked. “You could think things out one more time on the way down.”

“Oh, don’t talk that way. You’ll get a break any day now.”

“Business Woman Leaps Nine Floors to Death,” said Mrs. Summer, her eyes still fixed out the window. She sighed in a long, frightened breath, and turned toward the door. “Good-by, Howard. If you think things over, you’ll see I was right in not even trying to love you. I’ll be back some day next week, between three and four.”

He thought of offering her five dollars, but that would break down something inside him, so he let her go like that.

II

He saw her through the transparent place where the frosting was rubbed from the glass of his door. She was thinner than she had been last week, and obviously nervous, starting at anyone coming in or going out. Her foot was turned sideways under the chair and he saw where an oval hole was stopped with a piece of white cardboard.

When her name was telephoned, he said, “Wait,” letting himself be annoyed that she had come slightly before three; but the real cause of his anger lay in the fact that he wasn’t up to seeing her again. To postpone his realization of the decision made in his subconscious, he dictated several letters and held a telephone conversation with the head office. When he had finished, he found it was five minutes to four; he hadn’t meant to detain her an hour. He phoned Miss Wiess that he had no news for Mrs. Summer and couldn’t see her.

Through the glass he watched her take the news. It seemed to him that she swayed as she got up and stood blinking at Miss Wiess.

“I hope she’s gone for good,” Butler said to himself. “I can’t be responsible for everybody out of work in this city. I’d go crazy.”

Later he came downstairs into a belt of low, stifling city heat; twice on his way home he stopped at soda fountains for cold drinks. In his apartment he locked the door, as he so often did lately, as if he were raising a barrier against all the anxiety outside. He moved about, putting away some laundry, opening bills, brushing his coat and hanging it up — for he was very neat — and singing to himself:

I can’t give you anything but love, baby,

That’s the only thing I’ve plenty of, baby —  —

He was tired of the song, but he continually caught himself humming it. Or else he talked to himself, like many men who live alone.

“Now, that’s two colored shirts and two white ones. I’ll wear this one out first, because it’s almost done. Almost done… Seven, eight, and two in the wash — ten —  — “

Six o’clock. All the offices were out now; people hurrying out of elevators, swarming down the stairs. But the picture came to Butler tonight with a curious addition; he seemed to see someone climbing up the stairs, too, passing the throng, climbing very slowly and resting momentarily on the landings.

“Oh, what nonsense!” he thought impatiently. “She’d never do it. She was just trying to get my goat.”

But he kept on climbing up flights of stairs with her, the rhythm of the climbing as regular and persistent as the beat of fever. He grabbed his hat suddenly and went out to get dinner.

There was a storm coming; the sultry dust rose in swirls along the street. The people on the street seemed a long way removed from him in time and space. It seemed to him that they were all sad, all walking with their eyes fixed on the ground, save for a few who were walking and  talking  in  pairs.  These  latter seemed absurd,  with  their obliviousness of the fact that they were making a show of themselves with those who were walking as it was fitting — silent and alone.

But he was glad that the restaurant where he went was full. Sometimes, when he read the newspapers a lot, he felt that he was almost the only man left with enough money to get along with; and it frightened him, because he knew pretty well that he was not much of a man and they might find it out and take his position away from him. Since he was not all right with himself in his private life, he had fallen helplessly into the clutches of the neurosis that gripped the nation, trying to lose sight of his own insufficiencies in the universal depression.

“Don’t you like your dinner?” the waitress asked.

“Yes, sure.” He began to eat self-consciously.

“It’s the heat. I just seen by the papers another woman threw herself out of a ninth-story window this afternoon.”

Butler’s fork dropped to the floor.

“Imagine a woman doing that,” she went on, as she stooped for the fork. “If I ever wanted to do that, I’d go drown myself.”

“What did you say?”

“I say I’d go drown myself. I can’t swim anyhow. But I said if —  — “

“No, before that — about a woman.”

“About a woman that threw herself out of a ninth-story window. I’ll get the paper.”

He tried to stop her; he couldn’t look at the paper. With trembling fingers he laid a dollar on the table and hurried out of the restaurant.

It couldn’t possibly be her, because he had seen her at four, and it was now only twenty after seven. Three hours. A news stand drifted up to him, piled with late editions. Forming the sound of “agh” in his throat, he hurried past, hurried on, into exile.

He had better look. It couldn’t be Sarah.

But he knew it was Sarah. BUSINESS WOMAN, DISPIRITED, LEAPS NINE FLOORS TO DEATH. He passed another news stand and, turning into Fifth Avenue, walked north. The rain began in large drops that sent up whiffs of dust, and Butler, looking at the crawling sidewalk, suddenly stopped, unable to go forward or to retrace his steps.

“I’ll have to get a paper,” he muttered. “Otherwise I won’t sleep.”

He walked to Madison Avenue and found a news stand; his hand felt over the stacked papers and picked up one of each; he did not look at them, but folded them under his arm. He heard the rain falling on them in crisp pats, and then more softly, as if it was shredding them away. When he reached his door, he suddenly flung the soggy bundle down a basement entrance and hurried inside. Better wait till morning.

He undressed excitedly, as if he hadn’t a minute to lose. “It’s probably not her,” he kept repeating aloud. “And if it is, what did I have to do with it? I can’t be responsible for everybody out of work in this city.” With the help of this phrase and a hot double gin, he fell into a broken sleep.

He awoke at five, after a dream which left him shaken with its reality. In the dream he was talking to Sarah Belknap again. She lay in a hammock on a porch, young once more, and with a childish wistfulness. But she knew what was going to happen to her presently — she was going to be thrown from a high place and be broken and dead. Butler wanted to help her — tears were running out of his eyes and he was wringing his hands — but there was nothing he could do now; it was too late. She did not say that it was all his fault, but her eyes, grieving silently and helplessly about what was going to happen, reproached him for not having prevented it.

The sound that had awakened him was the plop of his morning paper against the door. The resurgent dream, heartbreaking and ominous, sank back into the depths from which it came, leaving him empty; and now his consciousness began to fill up with all the miserable things that made their home there. Torn between the lost world of pity and the world of meanness where he lived, Butler sprang out of bed, opened the door and took up the paper. His eyes, blurred with sleep, ran across the columns:

BUSINESS WOMAN, DISPIRITED.

LEAPS NINE FLOORS TO DEATH.

For a moment he thought it was an illusion. The print massed solidly below the headline; the headline itself disappeared. He rubbed his eyes with one fist; then he counted the columns over, and found that two columns were touching that should have flanked the story — but, no; there it was:

BUSINESS WOMAN, DISPIRITED.

LEAPS NINE FLOORS TO DEATH.

He heard the cleaning woman moving about in the hall, and going to the door, he flung it open.

“Mrs. Thomas!”

A pale Negress with corded glasses looked up at him from her pail.

“Look at this, Mrs. Thomas!” he cried. “My eyes are bad! I’m sick! I’ve got to know! Look!”

He held the paper before her; he felt his voice quivering like a muscle: “Now, you tell me. Does it say, ‘Business Woman Leaps to Death? Right there! Look, can’t you?”

The Negress glanced at him curiously, bent her head obediently to the page.

“Indeed it does, Mr. Butler.”

“Yes?” He passed his hand across his eyes. “Now, below that. Does it say, ‘Mrs. John Summer’? Does it say, ‘Mrs. John Summer’? Look carefully now.”

Again she glanced sharply at him before looking at the paper. “Indeed it does, Mr. Butler. ‘Mrs. John Summer.’ “After a minute she added, “Man, you’re sick.”

Butler closed his door, got back into bed and lay staring at the ceiling. After a while he began repeating his formulas aloud:

“I musn’t get to thinking that I had anything to do with it, because I didn’t. She’d been offered another job, but she thought she was too good for it. What would she have done for me if she’d been in my place?”

He considered telephoning the office that he was ill, but young George Eddington was expected back any day, and he did not dare. Miss Wiess had gone on her vacation yesterday, and there was a substitute to be broken in. The substitute had not known Mrs. Summer, so there would be no discussion of what had happened.

It was a day of continuing heat, wasted unprolific heat that cradled the groans of the derrick and the roar of the electric riveters in the building going up across the street. In the heat every sound was given its full discordant value, and by early afternoon Butler was sick and dizzy. He had made up his mind to go home, and was walking restlessly about his office when the thing began to happen. He heard the clock outside his office ticking loud in the hot silence, heard the little, buzzing noise it made, passing the hour; and at the same moment he heard the sigh of pneumatic hinges, as the corridor door swung open and someone came into the outer office. Then there wasn’t a sound.

For a moment he hoped that it was someone he would have to see; then he shivered and realized that he was afraid — though he did not know why — and walked toward his own door. Before reaching it, he stopped. The noise of the riveting machine started again, but it seemed farther away now. For an instant he had the impression that the clock in the next room had stopped, too, but there it was again, marking rather long seconds against the silence.

Suddenly he did not want to know who had come into the next room; yet he was irresistibly impelled to find out. In one corner of his door was the transparent spot through which almost the whole outer office was visible, but now Butler discovered a minute scrape in the painted letter B of his name. Through it he could see the floor, and the dark little hall giving on the corridor where chairs for visitors were placed. Clamping his teeth together, he put his eye to this crack.

Tucked beneath the chair and criss-crossing the chair legs were a pair of woman’s tan shoes. The sole of one shoe turned toward him, and he made out a gray oval in the center. Breathlessly he moved until his eye was at the other hole. There was something sitting in the chair — rather, slumped in it, as if it had been put down there and had immediately crumpled. A dangling hand and what he could see of the face were of a diaphanous pallor, and the whole attitude was one of awful stillness. With a little, choking noise, Butler sprang back from the door.

III

It was several minutes before he was able to move from the wall against which he had backed himself. It was as if there was a sort of bargain between himself and the thing outside that, by staying perfectly still, playing dead, he was safe. But there was not a sound, not a movement, in the outer office and, after a while, a surface rationality asserted itself. He told himself that this was all the result of strain; that the frightening part of it was not the actual phantom, but that his nerves should be in a state to conjure it up. But he drew little consolation from this; if the terror existed, it was immaterial whether it originated in another world or in the dark places of his own mind.

He began making a systematic effort to pull himself together. In the first place, the noises outside were continuing as before; his office, his own body, were tangible as ever, and people were passing in the street; Miss Rousseau would answer the pressure of a bell which was within reach of his hand. Secondly, there could, conceivably, be some natural explanation of the thing outside; he had not been able to see the whole face and he could not be absolutely sure that it was what he thought it was; any number of people had cardboard in their shoes these days. In the third place — and he astonished himself at the coolness with which he deliberated this — if the matter reached an intolerable point, one could always take one’s own life, thus automatically destroying whatever horror had come into it.

It was this last thought that caused him to go to the window and look down at the people passing below. He stood there for a minute, never quite turning his back on the door, and watched the people passing and the workmen on the steel scaffolding over the way. His heart tried to go out to them, and he struggled desperately to assert the common humanity he shared with them, the joys and griefs they had together, but it was impossible. Fundamentally, he despised them and — that is to say, he could make no connection with them, while his connection with the thing in the next room was manifest and profound.

Suddenly Butler wrenched himself around, walked to the door and put his eye to the aperture. The figure had moved, had slumped farther sideways, and the blood rushed up, tingling, into his head as he saw that the face, now turned sightlessly toward him, was the face of Sarah Summer.

He found himself sitting at his desk, bent over it in a fit of uncontrollable laughter.

How long he had sat there he did not know, when suddenly he heard a noise, and recognized it, after a moment, as the swishing sigh of the hinges on the outer door. Looking at his watch, he saw that it was four o’clock.

He rang for Miss Rousseau, and when she came, asked: “Is anyone waiting to see me?”

“No, Mr. Butler.”

“Was there someone earlier?”

“No, sir.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’ve been in the filing room, but the door was open; if anyone had come in I’d surely have heard them.”

“All right. Thanks.”

As she went out, he looked after her through the open door. The chair was now empty.

IV

He took a strong bromide that night and got himself some sleep, and his reasoning reassumed, with dawn, a certain supremacy. He went to the office, not because he felt up to it but because he knew he would never be able to go again. He was glad he had gone, when Mr. George Eddington came in late in the morning.

“Man, you look sick,” Eddington said.

“It’s only the heat.”

“Better see a doctor.”

“I will,” said Butler, “but it’s nothing.”

“What’s happened here the last two weeks?”

BUSINESS WOMAN, DISPIRITED.

LEAPS NINE FLOORS TO DEATH.

“Very little,” he said aloud. “We’ve moved out of the Two Hundredth Street warehouse.”

“Whose idea was that?”

“Your brother’s.”

“I’d rather you’d refer all such things to me for confirmation. We may have to move in again.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Where’s Miss Wiess?”

“Her mother’s sick; I gave her three days’ vacation.”

“And Mrs. Summer’s left…Oh, by the way, I want to speak to you about that later.”

Butler’s heart constricted suddenly. What did he mean? Had he seen the papers?

“I’m sorry Miss Wiess is gone,” said Eddington. “I wanted to go over all this last month’s business.”

“I’ll take the books home tonight,” Butler offered conciliatingly. “I can be ready to go over them with you tomorrow.”

“Please do.”

Eddington left shortly. Butler found something in his tone disquieting — the shortness of a man trying to prepare one for even harsher eventualities. There was so much to worry about now, Butler thought; it hardly seemed worth while worrying about so many things. He sat at his desk in a sort of despairing apathy, realizing at lunchtime that he had done nothing all morning.

At 1:30, on his way back to the office, a chill wave of terror washed suddenly over him. He walked blindly as the remorseless sun led him along a path of flat black and hostile gray. The clamor of a fire engine plunging through the quivering air had the ominous portent of things in a nightmare. He found that someone had closed his windows, and he flung them open to the sweltering machines across the street. Then, with an open ledger before him, he sat down to wait.

Half an hour passed. Butler heard Miss Rousseau’s muffled typewriter in the outer office, and her voice making a connection on the phone. He heard the clock move over two o’clock with a rasping sound; almost immediately he looked at his watch and found it was 2:30. He wiped his forehead, finding how cold sweat can be. Minutes passed. Then he started bolt upright as he heard the outer door open and close slowly, with a sigh.

Simultaneously he felt something change in the day outside — as if it had turned away from him, foreshortening and receding like a view from a train. He got up with difficulty, walked to the door and peered through the transparent place into the outer office.

She was there; her form cut the shadow of the corner; he knew the line of her body under her dress. She was waiting to see if he could give her a job, so that she could keep herself, and her son might not have to give up his ambitions.

“I’m afraid there’s nothing. Come back next week. Between three and four.”

“I’ll come back.”

With a struggle that seemed to draw his last reserve of strength up from his shoes, Butler got himself under control and picked up the phone. Now he would see — he would see.

“Miss Rousseau.”

“Yes, Mr. Butler.”

“If there’s anyone waiting to see me, please send them in.”

“There’s no one waiting to see you, Mr. Butler. There’s —  — “

Uttering a choked sound, he hung up the phone and walked to the door and flung it open.

It was no use; she was there, clearly discernible, distinct and vivid as in life. And as he looked, she rose slowly, her dark garments falling about her like cerements — arose and regarded him with a wan smile, as if, at last and too late, he was going to help her. He took a step backward.

Now she came toward him slowly, until he could see the lines in her face, the wisps of gray-gold hair under her hat.

With a broken cry, he sprang backward so that the door slammed. Simultaneously he knew, with a last fragment of himself, that there was something wrong in the very nature of the logic that had brought him to this point, but it was too late now. He ran across the office like a frightened cat, and with a sort of welcome apprehension of nothingness, stepped out into the dark air beyond his window. Even had he grasped the lest fact that he sought for — the fact that the cleaning woman who had read him the newspaper could neither read nor write — it was too late for it to affect him. He was already too much engrossed in death to connect it with anything or to think what bearing it might have on the situation.

V

Mrs. Summer did not go on into Butler’s office. She had not been waiting to see him, but was here in answer to a summons from Mr. Eddington, and she was intercepted by Eddington himself, who took her aside, talking;

“I’m sorry about all this.” He indicated Butler’s office. “We’re letting him go. We’ve only recently discovered that he fired you practically on his own whim. Why, the number of your ideas we’re using —  — We never considered letting you go. Things have been so mixed up.”

“I came to see you yesterday,” Mrs. Summer said. “I was all in and there was no one in the office at the moment. I must have fainted in the chair, because it was an hour later when I remembered anything, and then I was too tired to do anything except go home.”

“We’ll see about all this,” Eddington said grimly. “We’ll —  — It’s one of those things —  — “ He broke off. The office was suddenly full of confusion; there was a policeman and, behind him, many curious peering faces. “What’s the matter? … Hello, there seems to be something wrong here. What is it, officer?”

FLIGHT AND PURSUIT

In 1918, a few days before the Armistice, Caroline Martin, of Derby, in Virginia, eloped with a trivial young lieutenant from Ohio. They were married in a town over the Maryland border and she stayed there until George Corcoran got his discharge — then they went to his home in the North.

It was a desperate, reckless marriage. After she had left her aunt’s house with Corcoran, the man who had broken her heart realized that he had broken his own too; he telephoned, but Caroline had gone, and all that he could do that night was to lie awake and remember her waiting in the front yard, with the sweetness draining down into her out of the magnolia trees, out of the dark world, and remember himself arriving in his best uniform, with boots shining and with his heart full of selfishness that, from shame, turned into cruelty. Next day he learned that she had eloped with Corcoran and, as he had deserved, he had lost her.

In Sidney Lahaye’s overwhelming grief, the petty reasons for his act disgusted him — the alternative of a long trip around the world or of a bachelor apartment in New York with four Harvard friends; more positively the fear of being held, of being bound. The trip — they could have taken it together. The bachelor apartment — it had resolved into its bare, cold constituent parts in a single night. Being held? Why, that was all he wanted — to be close to that freshness, to be held in those young arms forever.

He had been an egoist, brought up selfishly by a selfish mother; this was his first suffering. But like his small, wiry, handsome person, he was all knit of one piece and his reactions were not trivial. What he did he carried with him always, and he knew he had done a contemptible and stupid thing. He carried his grief around, and eventually it was good for him. But inside of him, utterly unassimilable, indigestible, remained the memory of the girl.

Meanwhile, Caroline Corcoran, lately the belle of a Virginia town, was paying for the luxury of her desperation in a semi-slum of Dayton, Ohio.

II

She had been three years in Dayton and the situation had become intolerable. Brought up in a district where everyone was comparatively poor, where not two gowns out of fifty at country-club dances cost more than thirty dollars, lack of money had not been formidable in itself. This was very different. She came into a world not only of straining poverty but of a commonness and vulgarity that she had never touched before. It was in this regard that George Corcoran had deceived her. Somewhere he had acquired a faint patina of good breeding and he had said or done nothing to prepare her for his mother, into whose two-room flat he introduced her. Aghast, Caroline realized that she had stepped down several floors. These people had no position of any kind; George knew no one; she was literally alone in a strange city. Mrs. Corcoran disliked Caroline — disliked her good manners, her Southern ways, the added burden of her presence. For all her airs, she had brought them nothing save, eventually, a baby. Meanwhile George got a job and they moved to more spacious quarters, but mother came, too, for she owned her son, and Caroline’s months went by in unimaginable dreariness. At first she was too ashamed and too poor to go home, but at the end of a year her aunt sent her money for a visit and she spent a month in Derby with her little son, proudly reticent, but unable to keep some of the truth from leaking out to her friends. Her friends had done well, or less well, but none of them had fared quite so ill as she.

But after three years, when Caroline’s child became less dependent, and when the last of her affection for George had been frittered away, as his pleasant manners became debased with his own inadequacies, and when her bright, unused beauty still plagued her in the mirror, she knew that the break was coming. Not that she had specific hopes of happiness — for she accepted the idea that she had wrecked her life, and her capacity for dreaming had left her that November night three years before — but simply because conditions were intolerable. The break was heralded by a voice over the phone — a voice she remembered only as something that had done her terrible injury long ago.

“Hello,” said the voice — a strong voice with strain in it. “Mrs. George Corcoran?”

“Yes.”

“Who was Caroline Martin?”

“Who is this?”

“This is someone you haven’t seen for years. Sidney Lahaye.”

After a moment she answered in a different tone: “Yes?”

“I’ve wanted to see you for a long time,” the voice went on.

“I don’t see why,” said Caroline simply.

“I want to see you. I can’t talk over the phone.”

Mrs. Corcoran, who was in the room, asked “Who is it?” forming the words with her mouth. Caroline shook her head slightly.

“I don’t see why you want to see me,” she said, “and I don’t think I want to see you.” Her breath came quicker; the old wound opened up again, the injury that had changed her from a happy young girl in love into whatever vague entity in the scheme of things she was now.

“Please don’t ring off,” Sidney said. “I didn’t call you without thinking it over carefully. I heard things weren’t going well with you.”

“That’s not true.” Caroline was very conscious now of Mrs. Corcoran’s craning neck. “Things are going well. And I can’t see what possible right you have to intrude in my affairs.”

“Wait, Caroline! You don’t know what happened back in Derby after you left. I was frantic —  — “

“Oh, I don’t care —  — “ she cried. “Let me alone; do you hear?”

She hung up the receiver. She was outraged that this man, almost forgotten now save as an instrument of her disaster, should come back into her life!

“Who was it?” demanded Mrs. Corcoran.

“Just a man — a man I loathe.”

“Who?”

“Just an old friend.”

Mrs. Corcoran looked at her sharply. “It wasn’t that man, was it?” she asked.

“What man?”

“The one you told Georgie about three years ago, when you were first married — it hurt his feelings. The man you were in love with that threw you over.”

“Oh, no,” said Caroline. “That is my affair.”

She went to the bedroom that she shared with George. If Sidney should persist and come here, how terrible — to find her sordid in a mean street.

When George came in, Caroline heard the mumble of his mother’s conversation behind the closed door; she was not surprised when he asked at dinner:

“I hear that an old friend called you up.”

“Yes. Nobody you know.”

“Who was it?”

“It was an old acquaintance, but he won’t call again,” she said.

“I’ll bet he will,” guessed Mrs. Corcoran. “What was it you told him wasn’t true?”

“That’s my affair.”

Mrs. Corcoran glanced significantly at George, who said:

“It seems to me if a man calls up my wife and annoys her, I have a right to know about it.”

“You won’t, and that’s that.” She turned to his mother: “Why did you have to listen, anyhow?”

“I was there. You’re my son’s wife.”

“You make trouble,” said Caroline quietly; “you listen and watch me and make trouble. How about the woman who keeps calling up George — you do your best to hush that up.”

“That’s a lie!” George cried. “And you can’t talk to my mother like that! If you don’t think I’m sick of your putting on a lot of dog when I work all day and come home to find —  — “

As he went off into a weak, raging tirade, pouring out his own self-contempt upon her, Caroline’s thoughts escaped to the fifty-dollar bill, a present from her grandmother hidden under the paper in a bureau drawer. Life had taken much out of her in three years; she did not know whether she had the audacity to run away — it was nice, though, to know the money was there.

Next day, in the spring sunlight, things seemed better — and she and George had a reconciliation. She was desperately adaptable, desperately sweet-natured, and for an hour she had forgotten all the trouble and felt the old emotion of mingled passion and pity for him. Eventually his mother would go; eventually he would change and improve; and meanwhile there was her son with her own kind, wise smile, turning over the pages of a linen book on the sunny carpet. As her soul sank into a helpless, feminine apathy, compounded of the next hour’s duty, of a fear of further hurt or incalculable change, the phone rang sharply through the flat.

Again and again it rang, and she stood rigid with terror. Mrs. Corcoran was gone to market, but it was not the old woman she feared. She feared the black cone hanging from the metal arm, shrilling and shrilling across the sunny room. It stopped for a minute, replaced by her heartbeats; then began again. In a panic she rushed into her room, threw little Dexter’s best clothes and her only presentable dress and shoes into a suitcase and put the fifty-dollar bill in her purse. Then taking her son’s hand, she hurried out of the door, pursued down the apartment stairs by the persistent cry of the telephone. The windows were open, and as she hailed a taxi and directed it to the station, she could still hear it clamoring out into the sunny morning.

III

Two years later, looking a full two years younger, Caroline regarded herself in the mirror, in a dress that she had paid for. She was a stenographer, employed by an importing firm in New York; she and young Dexter lived on her salary and on the income of ten thousand dollars in bonds, a legacy from her aunt. If life had fallen short of what it had once promised, it was at least livable again, less than misery. Rising to a sense of her big initial lie, George had given her freedom and the custody of her child. He was in kindergarten now, and safe until 5:30, when she would call for him and take him to the small flat that was at least her own. She had nothing warm near her, but she had New York, with its diversion for all purses, its curious yielding up of friends for the lonely, its quick metropolitan rhythm of love and birth and death that supplied dreams to the unimaginative, pageantry and drama to the drab.

But though life was possible it was less than satisfactory. Her work was hard, she was physically fragile; she was much more tired at the day’s end than the girls with whom she worked. She must consider a precarious future when her capital should be depleted by her son’s education. Thinking of the Corcoran family, she had a horror of being dependent on her son; and she dreaded the day when she must push him from her. She found that her interest in men had gone. Her two experiences had done something to her; she saw them clearly and she saw them darkly, and that part of her life was sealed up, and it grew more and more faint, like a book she had read long ago. No more love.

Caroline saw this with detachment, and not without a certain, almost impersonal, regret. In spite of the fact that sentiment was the legacy of a pretty girl, it was just one thing that was not for her. She surprised herself by saying in front of some other girls that she disliked men, but she knew it was the truth. It was an ugly phrase, but now, moving in an approximately foursquare world, she detested the compromises and evasions of her marriage. “I hate men — I, Caroline, hate men. I want from them no more than courtesy and to be left alone. My life is incomplete, then, but so be it. For others it is complete, for me it is incomplete.”

The day that she looked at her evening dress in the mirror, she was in a country house on Long Island — the home of Evelyn Murdock, the most spectacularly married of all her old Virginia friends. They had met in the street, and Caroline was there for the week-end, moving unfamiliarly through a luxury she had never imagined, intoxicated at finding that in her new evening dress she was as young and attractive as these other women, whose lives had followed more glamorous paths. Like New York the rhythm of the week-end, with its birth, its planned gayeties and its announced end, followed the rhythm of life and was a substitute for it. The sentiment had gone from Caroline, but the patterns remained. The guests, dimly glimpsed on the veranda, were prospective admirers. The visit to the nursery was a promise of future children of her own; the descent to dinner was a promenade down a marriage aisle, and her gown was a wedding dress with an invisible train.

“The man you’re sitting next to,” Evelyn said, “is an old friend of yours. Sidney Lahaye — he was at Camp Rosecrans.”

After a confused moment she found that it wasn’t going to be difficult at all. In the moment she had met him — such a quick moment that she had no time to grow excited — she realized that he was gone for her. He was only a smallish, handsome man, with a flushed, dark skin, a smart little black mustache and very fine eyes. It was just as gone as gone. She tried to remember why he had once seemed the most desirable person in the world, but she could only remember that he had made love to her, that he had made her think of them as engaged, and then that he had acted badly and thrown her over — into George Corcoran’s arms. Years later he had telephoned like a traveling salesman remembering a dalliance in a casual city. Caroline was entirely unmoved and at her ease as they sat down at table.

But Sidney Lahaye was not relinquishing her so easily.

“So I called you up that night in Derby,” he said; “I called you for half an hour. Everything had changed for me in that ride out to camp.”

“You had a beautiful remorse.”

“It wasn’t remorse; it was self-interest. I realized I was terribly in love with you. I stayed awake all night —  — “

Caroline listened indifferently. It didn’t even explain things; nor did it tempt her to cry out on fate — it was just a fact.

He stayed near her, persistently. She knew no one else at the party; there was no niche in any special group for her. They talked on the veranda after dinner, and once she said coolly:

“Women are fragile that way. You do something to them at certain times and literally nothing can ever change what you’ve done.”

“You mean that you definitely hate me.”

She nodded. “As far as I feel actively about you at all.”

“I suppose so. It’s awful, isn’t it?”

“No. I even have to think before I can really remember how I stood waiting for you in the garden that night, holding all my dreams and hopes in my arms like a lot of flowers — they were that to me, anyhow. I thought I was pretty sweet. I’d saved myself up for that — all ready to hand it all to you. And then you came up to me and kicked me.” She laughed incredulously. “You behaved like an awful person. Even though I don’t care any more, you’ll always be an awful person to me. Even if you’d found me that night, I’m not at all sure that anything could have been done about it. Forgiveness is just a silly word in a matter like that.”

Feeling her own voice growing excited and annoyed, she drew her cape around her and said in an ordinary voice:

“It’s getting too cold to sit here.”

“One more thing before you go,” he said. “It wasn’t typical of me. It was so little typical that in the last five years I’ve never spent an unoccupied moment without remembering it. Not only I haven’t married, I’ve never even been faintly in love. I’ve measured up every girl I’ve met to you, Caroline — their faces, their voices, the tips of their elbows.”

“I’m sorry I had such a devastating effect on you. It must have been a nuisance.”

“I’ve kept track of you since I called you in Dayton; I knew that, sooner or later, we’d meet.”

“I’m going to say good night.”

But saying good night was easier than sleeping, and Caroline had only an hour’s haunted doze behind her when she awoke at seven. Packing her bag, she made up a polite, abject letter to Evelyn Murdock, explaining why she was unexpectedly leaving on Sunday morning. It was difficult and she disliked Sidney Lahaye a little bit more intensely for that.

IV

Months later Caroline came upon a streak of luck. A Mrs. O’Connor, whom she met through Evelyn Murdock, offered her a post as private secretary and traveling companion. The duties were light, the traveling included an immediate trip abroad, and Caroline, who was thin and run down from work, jumped at the chance. With astonishing generosity the offer included her boy.

From the beginning Caroline was puzzled as to what had attracted Helen O’Connor to her. Her employer was a woman of thirty, dissipated in a discreet way, extremely worldly and, save for her curious kindness to Caroline, extremely selfish. But the salary was good and Caroline shared in every luxury and was invariably treated as an equal.

The next three years were so different from anything in her past that they seemed years borrowed from the life of someone else. The Europe in which Helen O’Connor moved was not one of tourists but of seasons. Its most enduring impression was a phantasmagoria of the names of places and people — of Biarritz, of Mme de Colmar, of Deauville, of the Comte de Berme, of Cannes, of the Derehiemers, of Paris and the Chateau de Madrid. They lived the life of casinos and hotels so assiduously reported in the Paris American papers — Helen O’Connor drank and sat up late, and after a while Caroline drank and sat up late. To be slim and pale was fashionable during those years, and deep in Caroline was something that had become directionless and purposeless, that no longer cared. There was no love; she sat next to many men at table, appreciated compliments, courtesies and small gallantries, but the moment something more was hinted, she froze very definitely. Even when she was stimulated with excitement and wine, she felt the growing hardness of her sheath like a breastplate. But in other ways she was increasingly restless.

At first it had been Helen O’Connor who urged her to go out; now it became Caroline herself for whom no potion was too strong or any evening too late. There began to be mild lectures from Helen.

“This is absurd. After all, there’s such a thing as moderation.”

“I suppose so, if you really want to live.”

“But you want to live; you’ve got a lot to live for. If my skin was like yours, and my hair —  — Why don’t you look at some of the men that look at you?”

“Life isn’t good enough, that’s all,” said Caroline. “For a while I made the best of it, but I’m surer every day that it isn’t good enough. People get through by keeping busy; the lucky ones are those with interesting work. I’ve been a good mother, but I’d certainly be an idiot putting in a sixteen-hour day mothering Dexter into being a sissy.”

“Why don’t you marry Lahaye? He has money and position and everything you could want.”

There was a pause. “I’ve tried men. To hell with men.”

Afterward she wondered at Helen’s solicitude, having long realized that the other woman cared nothing for her. They had not even mutual tastes; often they were openly antipathetic and didn’t meet for days at a time. Caroline wondered why she was kept on, but she had grown more self-indulgent in these years and she was not inclined to quibble over the feathers that made soft her nest.

One night on Lake Maggiore things changed in a flash. The blurred world seen from a merry-go-round settled into place; the merry-go-round suddenly stopped.

They had gone to the hotel in Locarno because of Caroline. For months she had had a mild but persistent asthma and they had come there for rest before the gayeties of the fall season at Biarritz. They met friends, and with them Caroline wandered to the Kursaal to play mild boule at a maximum of two Swiss francs. Helen remained at the hotel.

Caroline was sitting in the bar. The orchestra was playing a Wiener Walzer, and suddenly she had the sensation that the chords were extending themselves, that each bar of three-four time was bending in the middle, dropping a little and thus drawing itself out, until the waltz itself, like a phonograph running down, became a torture. She put her fingers in her ears; then suddenly she coughed into her handkerchief.

She gasped.

The man with her asked: “What is it? Are you sick?”

She leaned back against the bar, her handkerchief with the trickle of blood clasped concealingly in her hand. It seemed to her half an hour before she answered, “No, I’m all right,” but evidently it was only a few seconds, for the man did not continue his solicitude.

“I must get out,” Caroline thought. “What is it?” Once or twice before she had noticed tiny flecks of blood, but never anything like this. She felt another cough coming and, cold with fear and weakness, wondered if she could get to the wash room.

After a long while the trickle stopped and someone wound the orchestra up to normal time. Without a word she walked slowly from the room, holding herself delicately as glass. The hotel was not a block away; she set out along the lamplit street. After a minute she wanted to cough again, so she stopped and held her breath and leaned against the wall. But this time it was no use; she raised her handkerchief to her mouth and lowered it after a minute, this time concealing it from her eyes. Then she walked on.

In the elevator another spell of weakness overcame her, but she managed to reach the door of her suite, where she collapsed on a little sofa in the antechamber. Had there been room in her heart for any emotion except terror, she would have been surprised at the sound of an excited dialogue in the salon, but at the moment the voices were art of a nightmare and only the shell of her ear registered what they said.

“I’ve been six months in Central Asia, or I’d have caught up with this before,” a man’s voice said, and Helen answered, “I’ve no sense of guilt whatsoever.”

“I don’t suppose you have. I’m just panning myself for having picked you out.”

“May I ask who told you this tale, Sidney?”

“Two people. A man in New York had seen you in Monte Carlo and said for a year you’d been doing nothing but buying drinks for a bunch of cadgers and spongers. He wondered who was backing you. Then I saw Evelyn Murdock in Paris, and she said Caroline was dissipating night after night; she was thin as a rail and her face looked like death. That’s what brought me down here.”

“Now listen, Sidney. I’m not going to be bullied about this. Our arrangement was that I was to take Caroline abroad and give her a good time, because you were in love with her or felt guilty about her, or something. You employed me for that and you backed me. Well, I’ve done just what you wanted. You said you wanted her to meet lots of men.”

“I said men.”

“I’ve rounded up what I could. In the first place, she’s absolutely indifferent, and when men find that out, they’re liable to go away.”

He sat down. “Can’t you understand that I wanted to do her good, not harm? She’s had a rotten time; she’s spent most of her youth paying for something that was my fault, so I wanted to make it up the best way I could. I wanted her to have two years of pleasure; I wanted her to learn not to be afraid of men and to have some of the gayety that I cheated her out of. With the result that you led her into two years of dissipation —  — “ He broke off: “What was that?” he demanded.

Caroline had coughed again, irrepressibly. Her eyes were closed and she was breathing in little gasps as they came into the hall. Her hand opened and her handkerchief dropped to the floor.

In a moment she was lying on her own bed and Sidney was talking rapidly into the phone. In her dazed state the passion in his voice shook her like a vibration, and she whispered “Please! Please!” in a thin voice. Helen loosened her dress and took off her slippers and stockings.

The doctor made a preliminary examination and then nodded formidably at Sidney. He said that by good fortune a famous Swiss specialist on tuberculosis was staying at the hotel; he would ask for an immediate consultation.

The specialist arrived in bedroom slippers. His examination was as thorough as possible with the instruments at hand. Then he talked to Sidney in the salon.

“So far as I can tell without an X ray, there is a sudden and widespread destruction of tissue on one side — sometimes happens when the patient is run down in other ways. If the X ray bears me out, I would recommend an immediate artificial pneumothorax. The only chance is to completely isolate the left lung.”

“When could it be done?”

The doctor considered. “The nearest center for this trouble is Montana Vermala, about three hours from here by automobile. If you start immediately and I telephone to a colleague there, the operation might be performed tomorrow morning.”

In the big, springy car Sidney held her across his lap, surrounding with his arms the mass of pillows. Caroline hardly knew who held her, nor did her mind grasp what she had overheard. Life jostled you around so — really very tiring. She was so sick, and probably going to die, and that didn’t matter, except that there was something she wanted to tell Dexter.

Sidney was conscious of a desperate joy in holding her, even though she hated him, even though he had brought her nothing but harm. She was his in these night hours, so fair and pale, dependent on his arms for protection from the jolts of the rough road, leaning on his strength at last, even though she was unaware of it; yielding him the responsibility he had once feared and ever since desired. He stood between her and disaster.

Past Dome d’Ossola, a dim, murkily lighted Italian town; past Brig, where a kindly Swiss official saw his burden and waved him by without demanding his passport; down the valley of the Rhone, where the growing stream was young and turbulent in the moonlight. Then Sierre, and the haven, the sanctuary in the mountains, two miles above, where the snow gleamed. The funicular waited: Caroline sighed a little as he lifted her from the car.

“It’s very good of you to take all this trouble,” she whispered formally.

V

For three weeks she lay perfectly still on her back. She breathed and she saw flowers in her room. Eternally her temperature was taken. She was delirious after the operation and in her dreams she was again a girl in Virginia, waiting in the yard for her lover. Dress stay crisp for him — button stay put — bloom magnolia — air stay still and sweet. But the lover was neither Sidney Lahaye nor an abstraction of many men — it was herself, her vanished youth lingering in that garden, unsatisfied and unfulfilled; in her dream she waited there under the spell of eternal hope for the lover that would never come, and who now no longer mattered.

The operation was a success. After three weeks she sat up, in a month her fever had decreased and she took short walks for an hour every day. When this began, the Swiss doctor who had performed the operation talked to her seriously.

“There’s something you ought to know about Montana Vermala; it applies to all such places. It’s a well-known characteristic of tuberculosis that it tends to hurt the morale. Some of these people you’ll see on the streets are back here for the third time, which is usually the last time. They’ve grown fond of the feverish stimulation of being sick; they come up here and live a life almost as gay as life in Paris — some of the champagne bills in this sanatorium are amazing. Of course, the air helps them, and we manage to exercise a certain salutary control over them, but that kind are never really cured, because in spite of their cheerfulness they don’t want the normal world of responsibility. Given the choice, something in them would prefer to die. On the other hand, we know a lot more than we did twenty years ago, and every month we send away people of character completely cured. You’ve got that chance because your case is fundamentally easy; your right lung is utterly untouched. You can choose; you can run with the crowd and perhaps linger along three years, or you can leave in one year as well as ever.”

Caroline’s observation confirmed his remarks about the environment. The village itself was like a mining town — hasty, flimsy buildings dominated by the sinister bulk of four or five sanatoriums; chastely cheerful when the sun glittered on the snow, gloomy when the cold seeped through the gloomy pines. In contrast were the flushed, pretty girls in Paris clothes whom she passed on the street, and the well-turned-out men. It was hard to believe they were fighting such a desperate battle, and as the doctor had said, many of them were not. There was an air of secret ribaldry — it was considered funny to send miniature coffins to new arrivals, and there was a continual undercurrent of scandal. Weight, weight, weight; everyone talked of weight — how many pounds one had put on last month or lost the week before.

She was conscious of death around her, too, but she felt her own strength returning day by day in the high, vibrant air, and she knew she was not going to die.

After a month came a stilted letter from Sidney. It said:

I stayed only until the immediate danger was past. I knew that, feeling as you do, you wouldn’t want my face to be the first thing you saw. So I’ve been down here in Sierre at the foot of the mountain, polishing up my Cambodge diary. If it’s any consolation for you to have someone who cares about you within call, I’d like nothing better than to stay on here. I hold myself utterly responsible for what happened to you, and many times I’ve wished I had died before I came into your life. Now there’s only the present — to get you well.

About your son — once a month I plan to run up to his school in Fontainebleau and see him for a few days — I’ve seen him once now and we like each other. This summer I’ll either arrange for him to go to a camp or take him through the Norwegian fjords with me, whichever plan seems advisable.

The letter depressed Caroline. She saw herself sinking into a bondage of gratitude to this man — as though she must thank an attacker for binding up her wounds. Her first act would be to earn the money to pay him back. It made her tired even to think of such things now, but it was always present in her subconscious, and when she forgot it she dreamed of it. She wrote:

Dear Sidney:

It’s absurd your staying there and I’d much rather you didn’t. In fact, it makes me uncomfortable. I am, of course, enormously grateful for all you’ve done for me and for Dexter. If it isn’t too much trouble, will you come up here before you go to Paris, as I have some things to send him?

Sincerely,

Caroline M. Corcoran.

He came a fortnight later, full of a health and vitality that she found as annoying as the look of sadness that was sometimes in his eyes. He adored her and she had no use for his adoration. But her strongest sensation was one of fear — fear that since he had made her suffer so much, he might be able to make her suffer again.

“I’m doing you no good, so I’m going away,” he said. “The doctors seem to think you’ll be well by September. I’ll come back and see for myself. After that I’ll never bother you again.”

If he expected to move her, he was disappointed.

“It may be some time before I can pay you back,” she said.

“I got you into this.”

“No, I got myself into it. … Good-by, and thank you for everything you’ve done.”

Her voice might have been thanking him for bringing a box of candy. She was relieved at his departure. She wanted only to rest and be alone.

The winter passed. Toward the end she skied a little, and then spring came sliding up the mountain in wedges and spear points of green. Summer was sad, for two friends she had made there died within a week and she followed their coffins to the foreigners’ graveyard in Sierre. She was safe now. Her affected lung had again expanded; it was scarred, but healed; she had no fever, her weight was normal and there was a bright mountain color in her cheeks.

October was set as the month of her departure, and as autumn approached, her desire to see Dexter again was overwhelming. One day a wire came from Sidney in Tibet stating that he was starting for Switzerland.

Several mornings later the floor nurse looked in to toss her a copy of the Paris Herald and she ran her eyes listlessly down the columns. Then she sat up suddenly in bed.

AMERICAN FEARED LOST IN BLACK SEA

Sidney Lahaye, Millionaire Aviator, and Pilot Missing Four Days.

Teheran, Persia, October 5 —  —

Caroline sprang out of bed, ran with the paper to the window, looked away from it, then looked at it again.

AMERICAN FEARED LOST IN BLACK SEA

Sidney Lahaye, Millionaire Aviator —  —

“The Black Sea,” she repeated, as if that was the important part of the affair — “in the Black Sea.”

She stood there in the middle of an enormous quiet. The pursuing feet that had thundered in her dream had stopped. There was a steady, singing silence.

“Oh-h-h!” she said.

AMERICAN FEARED LOST IN BLACK SEA

Sidney Lahaye, Millionaire Aviator, and Pilot Missing Four Days.

Teheran, Persia, October 5 —  —

Caroline began to talk to herself in an excited voice.

“I must get dressed,” she said; “I must get to the telegraph and see whether everything possible has been done. I must start for there.” She moved around the room, getting into her clothes. “Oh-h-h!” she whispered. “Oh-h-h!” With one shoe on, she fell face downward across the bed. “Oh, Sidney — Sidney!” she cried, and then again, in terrible protest: “Oh-h-h!” She rang for the nurse. “First, I must eat and get some strength; then I must find out about trains.”

She was so alive now that she could feel parts of herself uncurl, unroll. Her heart picked up steady and strong, as if to say, “I’ll stick by you,” and her nerves gave a sort of jerk as all the old fear melted out of her. Suddenly she was grown, her broken girlhood dropped away from her, and the startled nurse answering her ring was talking to someone she had never seen before.

“It’s all so simple. He loved me and I loved him. That’s all there is. I must get to the telephone. We must have a consul there somewhere.”

For a fraction of a second she tried to hate Dexter because he was not Sidney’s son, but she had no further reserve of hate. Living or dead, she was with her love now, held close in his arms. The moment that his footsteps stopped, that there was no more menace, he had overtaken her. Caroline saw that what she had been shielding was valueless — only the little girl in the garden, only the dead, burdensome past.

“Why, I can stand anything,” she said aloud — “anything — even losing him.”

The doctor, alarmed by the nurse, came hurrying in.

“Now, Mrs. Corcoran, you’re to be quiet. No matter what news you’ve had, you —  — Look here, this may have some bearing on it, good or bad.”

He handed her a telegram, but she could not open it, and she handed it back to him mutely. He tore the envelope and held the message before her:

PICKED UP BY COALER CITY OF CLYDE STOP ALL WELL —  —

The telegram blurred; the doctor too. A wave of panic swept over her as she felt the old armor clasp her metallically again. She waited a minute, another minute; the doctor sat down.

“Do you mind if I sit in your lap a minute?” she said. “I’m not contagious any more, am I?”

With her head against his shoulder, she drafted a telegram with his fountain pen on the back of the one she had just received. She wrote:

PLEASE DON’T TAKE ANOTHER AEROPLANE BACK HERE. WE’VE GOT EIGHT YEARS TO MAKE UP, SO WHAT DOES A DAY OR TWO MATTER? I LOVE YOU WITH ALL MY HEART AND SOUL.

A WOMAN WITH A PAST

Driving slowly through New Haven, two of the young girls became alert. Josephine and Lillian darted soft frank glances into strolling groups of three or four undergraduates, into larger groups on corners, which swung about as one man to stare at their receding heads. Believing that they recognized an acquaintance in a solitary loiterer, they waved wildly, whereupon the youth’s mouth fell open, and as they turned the next corner he made a dazed dilatory gesture with his hand. They laughed. “We’ll send him a post card when we get back to school tonight, to see if it really was him.”

Adele Craw, sitting on one of the little seats, kept on talking to Miss Chambers, the chaperon. Glancing sideways at her, Lillian winked at Josephine without batting an eye, but Josephine had gone into a reverie.

This was New Haven — city of her adolescent dreams, of glittering proms where she would move on air among men as intangible as the tunes they danced to. City sacred as Mecca, shining as Paris, hidden as Timbuktu. Twice a year the life-blood of Chicago, her home, flowed into it, and twice a year flowed back, bringing Christmas or bringing summer. Bingo, bingo, bingo, that’s the lingo; love of mine, I pine for one of your glances; the darling boy on the left there; underneath the stars I wait.

Seeing it for the first time, she found herself surprisingly unmoved — the men they passed seemed young and rather bored with the possibilities of the day, glad of anything to stare at; seemed undynamic and purposeless against the background of bare elms, lakes of dirty snow and buildings crowded together under the February sky. A wisp of hope, a well-turned-out derby-crowned man, hurrying with stick and suitcase towards the station, caught her attention, but his reciprocal glance was too startled, too ingenuous. Josephine wondered at the extent of her own disillusionment.

She was exactly seventeen and she was blase. Already she had been a sensation and a scandal; she had driven mature men to a state of disequilibrium; she had, it was said, killed her grandfather, but as he was over eighty at the time perhaps he just died. Here and there in the Middle West were discouraged little spots which upon inspection turned out to be the youths who had once looked full into her green and wistful eyes. But her love affair of last summer had ruined her faith in the all-sufficiency of men. She had grown bored with the waning September days — and it seemed as though it had happened once too often. Christmas with its provocative shortness, its travelling glee clubs, had brought no one new. There remained to her only a persistent, a physical hope; hope in her stomach that there was someone whom she would love more than he loved her.

They stopped at a sporting-goods store and Adele Craw, a pretty girl with clear honourable eyes and piano legs, purchased the sporting equipment which was the reason for their trip — they were the spring hockey committee for the school. Adele was in addition the president of the senior class and the school’s ideal girl. She had lately seen a change for the better in Josephine Perry — rather as an honest citizen might guilelessly approve a peculator retired on his profits. On the other hand, Adele was simply incomprehensible to Josephine — admirable, without doubt, but a member of another species. Yet with the charming adaptability that she had hitherto reserved for men, Josephine was trying hard not to disillusion her, trying to be honestly interested in the small, neat, organized politics of the school.

Two men who had stood with their backs to them at another counter turned to leave the store, when they caught sight of Miss Chambers and Adele. Immediately they came forward. The one who spoke to Miss Chambers was thin and rigid of face. Josephine recognized him as Miss Brereton’s nephew, a student at New Haven, who had spent several week-ends with his aunt at the school. The other man Josephine had never seen before. He was tall and broad, with blond curly hair and an open expression in which strength of purpose and a nice consideration were pleasantly mingled. It was not the sort of face that generally appealed to Josephine. The eyes were obviously without a secret, without a sidewise gambol, without a desperate flicker to show that they had a life of their own apart from the mouth’s speech. The mouth itself was large and masculine; its smile was an act of kindness and control. It was rather with curiosity as to the sort of man who would be attentive to Adele Craw that Josephine continued to look at him, for his voice that obviously couldn’t lie greeted Adele as if this meeting was the pleasant surprise of his day.

In a moment Josephine and Lillian were called over and introduced.

“This is Mr Waterbury” — that was Miss Brereton’s nephew — “and Mr Dudley Knowleton.”

Glancing at Adele, Josephine saw on her face an expression of tranquil pride, even of possession. Mr Knowleton spoke politely, but it was obvious that though he looked at the younger girls he did not quite see them. But since they were friends of Adele’s he made suitable remarks, eliciting the fact that they were both coming down to New Haven to their first prom the following week. Who were their hosts? Sophomores; he knew them slightly. Josephine thought that was unnecessarily superior. Why, they were the charter members of the Loving Brothers” Association — Ridgeway Saunders and George Davey — and on the glee-club trip the girls they picked out to rush in each city considered themselves a sort of elite, second only to the girls they asked to New Haven.

“And oh, I’ve got some bad news for you,” Knowleton said to Adele. “You may be leading the prom. Jack Coe went to the infirmary with appendicitis, and against my better judgment I’m the provisional chairman.” He looked apologetic. “Being one of those stoneage dancers, the two-step king, I don’t see how I ever got on the committee at all.”

When the car was on its way back to Miss Brereton’s school, Josephine and Lillian bombarded Adele with questions.

“He’s an old friend from Cincinnati,” she explained demurely. “He’s captain of the baseball team and he was last man for Skull and Bones.”

“You’re going to the prom with him?”

“Yes. You see, I’ve known him all my life.”

Was there a faint implication in this remark that only those who had known Adele all her life knew her at her true worth?

“Are you engaged?” Lillian demanded.

Adele laughed. “Mercy, I don’t think of such matters! It doesn’t seem to be time for that sort of thing yet, does it?” (‘Yes,” interpolated Josephine silently.) “We’re just good friends. I think there can be a perfectly healthy friendship between a man and a girl without a lot of — “

“Mush,” supplied Lillian helpfully.

“Well, yes, but I don’t like that word. I was going to say without a lot of sentimental romantic things that ought to come later.”

“Bravo, Adele!” said Miss Chambers somewhat perfunctorily.

But Josephine’s curiosity was unappeased.

“Doesn’t he say he’s in love with you, and all that sow of thing?”

“Mercy, no! Dud doesn’t believe in such stuff anymore than I do. He’s got enough to do at New Haven, serving on the committees and the team.”

“Oh!” said Josephine.

She was oddly interested. That two people who were attracted to each other should never even say anything about it but be content to “not believe in such stuff,” was something new in her experience. She had known girls who had no beaux, others who seemed to have no emotions, and still others who lied about what they thought and did; but here was a girl who spoke of the attentions of the last man tapped for Skull and Bones as if they were two of the limestone gargoyles that Miss Chambers had pointed out on the just completed Harkness Hall. Yet Adele seemed happy — happier than Josephine, who had always believed that boys and girls were made for nothing but each other, and as soon as possible.

In the light of his popularity and achievements, Knowleton seemed more attractive. Josephine wondered if he would remember her and dance with her at the prom, or if that depended on how well he knew her escort, Ridgeway Saunders. She tried to remember whether she had smiled at him when he was looking at her. If she had really smiled he would remember her and dance with her. She was still trying to be sure of that over her two French irregular verbs and her ten stanzas of the Ancient Mariner that night; but she was still uncertain when she fell asleep.

II

Three gay young sophomores, the founders of the Loving Brothers” Association, took a house together for Josephine, Lillian and a girl from Farmington and their three mothers. For the girls it was a first prom, and they arrived at New Haven with all the nervousness of the condemned; but a Sheffield fraternity tea in the afternoon yielded up such a plethora of boys from home, and boys who had visited there and friends of those boys, and new boys with unknown possibilities but obvious eagerness, that they were glowing with self-confidence as they poured into the glittering crowd that thronged the armoury at ten.

It was impressive; for the first time Josephine was at a function run by men upon men’s standards — an outward projection of the New Haven world from which women were excluded and which went on mysteriously behind the scenes. She perceived that their three escorts, who had once seemed the very embodiments of worldliness, were modest fry in this relentless microcosm of accomplishment and success. A man’s world! Looking around her at the glee-club concert, Josephine had felt a grudging admiration for the good fellowship, the good feeling. She envied Adele Craw, barely glimpsed in the dressing-room, for the position she automatically occupied by being Dudley Knowleton’s girl tonight. She envied her more stepping off under the draped bunting through a gateway of hydrangeas at the head of the grand march, very demure and faintly unpowdered in a plain white dress. She was temporarily the centre of all attention, and at the sight something that had long lain dormant in Josephine awakened — her sense of a problem, a scarcely defined possibility.

“Josephine,” Ridgeway Saunders began, “you can’t realize how happy I am now that it’s come true. I’ve looked forward to this so long, and dreamed about it — “

She smiled up at him automatically, but her mind was elsewhere, and as the dance progressed the idea continued to obsess her. She was rushed from the beginning; to the men from the tea were added a dozen new faces, a dozen confident or timid voices, until, like all the more popular girls, she had her own queue trailing her about the room. Yet all this had happened to her before, and there was something missing. One might have ten men to Adele’s two, but Josephine was abruptly aware that here a girl took on the importance of the man who had brought her.

She was discomforted by the unfairness of it. A girl earned her popularity by being beautiful and charming. The more beautiful and charming she was, the more she could afford to disregard public opinion. It seemed absurd that simply because Adele had managed to attach a baseball captain, who mightn’t know anything about girls at all, or be able to judge their attractions, she should be thus elevated in spite of her thick ankles, her rather too pinkish face.

Josephine was dancing with Ed Bement from Chicago. He was her earliest beau, a flame of pigtail days in dancing school when one wore white cotton stockings, lace drawers with a waist attached and ruffled dresses with the inevitable sash.

“What’s the matter with me?” she asked Ed, thinking aloud. “For months I’ve felt as if I were a hundred years old, and I’m just seventeen and that party was only seven years ago.”

“You’ve been in love a lot since then,” Ed said.

“I haven’t,” she protested indignantly. “I’ve had a lot of silly stories started about me, without any foundation, usually by girls who were jealous.”

“Jealous of what?”

“Don’t get fresh,” she said tartly. “Dance me near Lillian.”

Dudley Knowleton had just cut in on Lillian. Josephine spoke to her friend; then waiting until their turns would bring them face to face over a space of seconds, she smiled at Knowleton. This time she made sure that smile intersected as well as met glance, that he passed beside the circumference of her fragrant charm. If this had been named like French perfume of a later day it might have been called “Please.” He bowed and smiled back; a minute later he cut in on her.

It was in an eddy in a corner of the room and she danced slower so that he adapted himself, and for a moment they went around in a slow circle.

“You looked so sweet leading the march with Adele,’, she told him. “You seemed so serious and kind, as if the others were a lot of children. Adele looked sweet, too.” And she added on an inspiration, “At school I’ve taken her for a model.”

“You have!” She saw him conceal his sharp surprise as he said, “I’ll have to tell her that.”

He was handsomer than she had thought, and behind his cordial good manners there was a sort of authority. Though he was correctly attentive to her, she saw his eyes search the room quickly to see if all went well; he spoke quietly, in passing, to the orchestra leader, who came down deferentially to the edge of his dais. Last man for Bones. Josephine knew what that meant -- her father had been Bones. Ridgeway Saunders and the rest of the Loving Brothers” Association would certainly not be Bones. She wondered, if there had been a Bones for girls, whether she would be tapped — or Adele Craw with her ankles, symbol of solidity.

Come on o-ver here,

Want to have you near;

Come on join the part-y,

Get a wel-come heart-y.

“I wonder how many boys here have taken you for a model,” she said. “If I were a boy you’d be exactly what I’d like to be. Except I’d be terribly bothered having girls falling in love with me all the time.”

“They don’t,” he said simply. “They never have.”

“Oh, yes — but they hide it because they’re so impressed with you, and they’re afraid of Adele.”

“Adele wouldn’t object.” And he added hastily, “ — if it ever happened. Adele doesn’t believe in being serious about such things.”

“Are you engaged to her?”

He stiffened a little. “I don’t believe in being engaged till the right time comes.”

“Neither do I,” agreed Josephine readily. “I’d rather have one good friend than a hundred people hanging around being mushy all the time.”

“Is that what that crowd does that keeps following you around tonight?”

“What crowd?” she asked innocently.

The fifty per cent of the sophomore class that’s rushing you.”

“A lot of parlour snakes,” she said ungratefully.

Josephine was radiantly happy now as she turned beautifully through the newly enchanted ball in the arms of the chairman of the prom committee. Even this extra time with him she owed to the awe which he inspired in her entourage; but a man cut in eventually and there was a sharp fall in her elation. The man was impressed that Dudley Knowleton had danced with her; he was more respectful, and his modulated admiration bored her. In a little while, she hoped, Dudley Knowleton would cut back, but as midnight passed, dragging on another hour with it, she wondered if after all it had only been a courtesy to a girl from Adele’s school. Since then Adele had probably painted him a neat little landscape of Josephine’s past. When finally he approached her she grew tense and watchful, a state which made her exteriorly pliant and tender and quiet. But instead of dancing he drew her into the edge of a row of boxes.

“Adele had an accident on the cloakroom steps. She turned her ankle a little and tore her stocking on a nail. She’d like to borrow a pair from you because you’re staying near here and we’re way out at the Lawn Club.”

“Of course.”

“I’ll run over with you — I have a car outside.”

“But you’re busy, you mustn’t bother,”

“Of course I’ll go with you.”

There was thaw in the air; a hint of thin and lucid spring hovered delicately around the elms and cornices of buildings whose bareness and coldness had so depressed her the week before. The night had a quality of asceticism, as if the essence of masculine struggle were seeping everywhere through the little city where men of three centuries had brought their energies and aspirations for winnowing. And Dudley Knowleton sitting beside her, dynamic and capable, was symbolic of it all. It seemed that she had never met a man before.

“Come in, please,” she said as he went up the steps of the bouse with her. “They’ve made it very comfortable.”

There was an open fire burning in the dark parlour. When she came downstairs with the stockings she went in arid stood beside him, very still for a moment watching it with him. Then she looked up, still silent, looked down, looked at him again.

“Did you get the stockings?” he asked, moving a little.

“Yes,” she said breathlessly. “Kiss me for being so quick.”

He laughed as if she said something witty and moved towards the door. She was smiling and her disappointment was deeply hidden as they got into the car.

“It’s been wonderful meeting you,” she told him. “I can’t tell you how many ideas I’ve gotten from what you said.”

“But I haven’t any ideas.”

“You have. All that about not getting engaged till the proper time comes. I haven’t had much opportunity to talk to a man like you. Otherwise my ideas would be different, I guess. I’ve just realized that I’ve been wrong about a lot of things. I used to want to be exciting. Now I want to help people.”

“Yes,” he agreed, “that’s very nice.”

He seemed about to say more when they arrived at the armoury. In their absence supper had begun; and crossing the great floor by his side, conscious of many eyes regarding them, Josephine wondered if people thought that they had been up to something.

“We’re late,” said Knowleton when Adele went off to put on the stockings. “The man you’re with has probably given you up long ago. You’d better let me get you something here.”

“That would be too divine.”

Afterwards, back on the floor again, she moved in a sweet aura of abstraction. The followers of several departed belles merged with hers until now no girl on the floor was cut in on with such frequency. Even Miss Brereton’s nephew, Ernest Waterbury, danced with her in stiff approval. Danced? With a tentative change of pace she simply swung from man to man in a sort of hands-right-and-left around the floor. She felt a sudden need to relax, and as if in answer to her mood a new man was presented, a tall, sleek Southerner with a persuasive note:

“You lovely creacha. I been strainin my eyes watchin your cameo face floatin round. You stand out above all these othuz like an Amehken Beauty Rose over a lot of field daisies.”

Dancing with him a second time, Josephine hearkened to his pleadings.

“All right. Let’s go outside.”

“It wasn’t outdaws I was considering,” he explained as they left the floor. “I happen to have a mortgage on a nook right hee in the building.”

“All right.”

Book Chaffee, of Alabama, led the way through the cloakroom, through a passage to an inconspicuous door.

“This is the private apartment of my friend Sergeant Boone, instructa of the battery. He wanted to be particularly sure it’d be used as a nook tonight and not a readin room or anything like that.”

Opening the door he turned on a dim light; she came in and he shut it behind her, and they faced each other.

“Mighty sweet,” he murmured. His tall face came down, his long arms wrapped around her tenderly, and very slowly so that their eyes met for quite a long time, he drew her up to him. Josephine kept thinking that she had never kissed a Southern boy before.

They started apart at the sudden sound of a key turning in the lock outside. Then there was a muffled snicker followed by retreating footsteps, and Book sprang for the door and wrenched at the handle just as Josephine noticed that this was not only Sergeant Boone’s parlour; it was his bedroom as well.

“Who was it?” she demanded. “Why did they lock us in?”

“Some funny boy. I’d like to get my hands on him.”

“Will he come back?”

Book sat down on the bed to think. “I couldn’t say. Don’t even know who it was. But if somebody on the committee came along it wouldn’t look too good, would it?”

Seeing her expression change, he came over and put bis arm around her. “Don’t you worry, honey. We’ll fix it.”

She returned his kiss, briefly but without distraction. Then she broke away and went into the next apartment, which was hung with boots, uniform coats and various military equipment.

“There’s a window up here,” she said. It was high in the wall and had not been opened for a long time. Book mounted on a chair and forced it ajar.

“About ten feet down,” he reported, after a moment, “but there’s a big pile of snow just underneath. You might get a nasty fall and you’ll sure soak your shoes and stockin’s.”

“We’ve got to get out,” Josephine said sharply.

“We’d better wait and give this funny man a chance — “

“I won’t wait. I want to get out. Look — throw out all the blankets from the bed and I’ll jump on that: or you jump first and spread them over the pile of snow.”

After that it was merely exciting. Carefully Book Chaffee wiped the dust from the window to protect her dress; then they were struck silent by a footstep that approached — and passed the outer door. Book jumped, and she heard him kicking profanely as he waded out of the soft drift below. He spread the blankets. At the moment when Josephine swung her legs out the window, there was the sound of voices outside the door and the key turned again in the lock. She landed softly, reaching for his hand, and convulsed with laughter they ran and skidded down the half block towards the corner, and reaching the entrance to the armoury, they stood panting for a moment, breathing in the fresh night. Book was reluctant to go inside.

“Why don’t you let me conduct you where you’re stayin? We can sit around and sort of recuperate.”

She hesitated, drawn towards him by the community of their late predicament; but something was calling her inside, as if the fulfilment of her elation awaited her there.

“No,” she decided

As they went in she collided with a man in a great hurry, and looked up to recognize Dudley Knowleton.

“So sorry,” he said. “Oh hello — “

“Won’t you dance me over to my box?” she begged him impulsively. “I’ve torn my dress.”

As they started off he said abstractedly: “The fact is, a little mischief has come up and the buck has been passed to me. I was going along to see about it.”

Her heart raced wildly and she felt the need of being another sort of person immediately.

“I can’t tell you how much it’s meant meeting you. It would be wonderful to have one friend I could be serious with without being all mushy and sentimental. Would you mind if I wrote you a letter — I mean, would Adele mind?”

“Lord, no!” His smile had become utterly unfathomable to her. As they reached the box she thought of one more thing:

“Is it true that the baseball team is training at Hot Springs during Easter?”

“Yes. You going there?”

“Yes. Good night, Mr Knowleton.”

But she was destined to see him once more. It was outside the men’s coat room, where she waited among a crowd of other pale survivors and their paler mothers, whose wrinkles had doubled and tripled with the passing night. He was explaining something to Adele, and Josephine heard the phrase, “The door was locked, and the window open — “

Suddenly it occurred to Josephine that, meeting her coming in damp and breathless, he must have guessed at the truth — and Adele would doubtless confirm his suspicion. Once again the spectre of her old enemy, the plain and jealous girl, arose before her. Shutting her mouth tight together she turned away.

But they had seen her, and Adele called to her in her cheerful ringing voice:

“Come say good night. You were so sweet about the stockings. Here’s a girl you won’t find doing shoddy, silly things, Dudley.” Impulsively she leaned and kissed Josephine on the cheek. “You’ll see I’m right, Dudley — next year she’ll be the most respected girl in school.”

III

As things go in the interminable days of early March, what happened next happened quickly. The annual senior dance at Miss Brereton’s school came on a night soaked through with spring, and all the junior girls lay awake listening to the sighing tunes from the gymnasium. Between the numbers, when boys up from New Haven and Princeton wandered about the grounds, cloistered glances looked down from dark open windows upon the vague figures.

Not Josephine, though she lay awake like the others. Such vicarious diversions had no place in the sober patterns she was spinning now from day to day; yet she might as well have been in the forefront of those who called down to the men and threw notes and entered into conversations, for destiny had suddenly turned against her and was spinning a dark web of its own.

Lit-tle lady, don’t be depressed and blue,

After all, we’re both in the same can-noo —

Dudley Knowleton was over in the gymnasium fifty yards away, but proximity to a man did not thrill her as it would have done a year ago — not, at least, in the same way. Life, she saw now, was a serious matter, and in the modest darkness a line of a novel ceaselessly recurred to her: “He is a man fit to be the father of my children.” What were the seductive graces, the fast lines of a hundred parlour snakes compared to such realities. One couldn’t go on forever kissing comparative strangers behind half-closed doors.

Under her pillow now were two letters, answers to her letters. They spoke in a bold round hand of the beginning of baseball practice; they were glad Josephine felt as she did about things; and the writer certainly looked forward to seeing her at Easter. Of all the letters she had ever received they were the most difficult from which to squeeze a single drop of heart’s blood — one couldn’t even read the “Yours” of the subscription as “Your” — but Josephine knew them by heart. They were precious because he had taken the time to write them; they were eloquent in the very postage stamp because he used so few.

She was restless in her bed — the music had begun again in the gymnasium:

Oh, my love, I’ve waited so long for you,

Oh, my love, I’m singing this song for you —

Oh-h-h —

From the next room there was light laughter, and then from below a male voice, and a long interchange of comic whispers. Josephine recognized Lillian’s laugh and the voices of two other girls. She could imagine them as they lay across the window in their nightgowns, their heads just showing from the open window. “Come right down,” one boy kept saying. “Don’t be formal — come just as you are.”

There was a sudden silence, then a quick crunching of footsteps on gravel, a suppressed snicker and a scurry, and the sharp, protesting groan of several beds in the next room and the banging of a door down the hall. Trouble for somebody, maybe. A few minutes later Josephine’s door half opened, she caught a glimpse of Miss Kwain against the dim corridor light, and then the door closed…

The next afternoon Josephine and four other girls, all of whom denied having breathed so much as a word into the night, were placed on probation. There was absolutely nothing to do about it. Miss Kwain had recognized their faces in the window and they were all from two rooms. It was an injustice, but it was nothing compared to what happened next. One week before Easter vacation the school motored off on a one-day trip to inspect a milk farm — all save the ones on probation. Miss Chambers, who sympathized with Josephine’s misfortune, enlisted her services in entertaining Mr Ernest Waterbury, who was spending a week-end with his aunt. This was only vaguely better than nothing, for Mr Waterbury was a very dull, very priggish young man. He was so dull and so priggish that the following morning Josephine was expelled from school.

It happened like this: they had strolled in the grounds, they had sat down at a garden table and had tea. Ernest Waterbury had expressed a desire to see something in the chapel, just a few minutes before his aunt’s car rolled up the drive. The chapel was reached by descending winding mock-medieval stairs; and, her shoes still wet from the garden, Josephine had slipped on the top step and fallen five feet directly into Mr Waterbury’s unwilling arms, where she lay helpless, convulsed with irresistible laughter. It was in this position that Miss Brereton and the visiting trustee had found them.

“But I had nothing to do with it!” declared the ungallant Mr Waterbury. Flustered and outraged, he was packed back to New Haven, and Miss Brereton, connecting this with last week’s sin, proceeded to lose her head. Josephine, humiliated and furious, lost hers, and Mr Perry, who happened to be in New York, arrived at the school the same night. At his passionate indignation, Miss Brereton collapsed and retracted, but the damage was done, and Josephine packed her trunk. Unexpectedly, monstrously, just as it had begun to mean something, her school life was over.

For the moment all her feelings were directed against Miss Brereton, and the only tears she shed at leaving were of anger and resentment. Riding with her father Up to New York, she saw that while at first he had instinctively and whole-heartedly taken her part, he felt also a certain annoyance with her misfortune.

“We’ll all survive,” he said. “Unfortunately, even that old idiot Miss Brereton will survive. She ought to be running a reform school.” He brooded for a moment. “Anyhow, your mother arrives tomorrow and you and she go down to Hot Springs as you planned.”

“Hot Springs!” Josephine cried, in a choked voice. “Oh, no!”

“Why not?” he demanded in surprise. “It seems the best thing to do. Give it a chance to blow over before you go back to Chicago.”

“I’d rather go to Chicago,” said Josephine breathlessly. “Daddy, I’d much rather go to Chicago.”

“That’s absurd. Your mother’s started East and the arrangements are all made. At Hot Springs you can get out and ride and play golf and forget that old she-devil — “

“Isn’t there another place in the East we could go? There’s people I know going to Hot Springs who’ll know all about this, people that I don’t want to meet — girls from school.”

“Now, Jo, you keep your chin up — this is one of those times. Sorry I said that about letting it blow over in Chicago; if we hadn’t made other plans we’d go back and face every old shrew and gossip in town right away. When anybody slinks off in a corner they think you’ve been up to something bad. If anybody says anything to you, you tell them the truth — what I said to Miss Brereton. You tell them she said you could come back and I damn well wouldn’t let you go back.”

“They won’t believe it.”

There would be, at all events, four days of respite at Hot Springs before the vacations of the schools. Josephine passed this time taking golf lessons from a professional so newly arrived from Scotland that he surely knew nothing of her misadventure; she even went riding with a young man one afternoon, feeling almost at home with him after his admission that he had flunked out of Princeton in February — a confidence, however, which she did not reciprocate in kind. But in the evenings, despite the young man’s importunity, she stayed with her mother, feeling nearer to her than she ever had before.

But one afternoon in the lobby Josephine saw by the desk two dozen good-looking young men waiting by a stack of bat cases and bags, and knew that what she dreaded was at hand. She ran upstairs and with an invented headache dined there that night, but after dinner she walked restlessly around their apartment. She was ashamed not only of her situation but of her reaction to it. She had never felt any pity for the unpopular girls who skulked in dressing-rooms because they could attract no partners on the floor, or for girls who were outsiders at Lake Forest, and now she was like them — hiding miserably out of life. Alarmed lest already the change was written in her face, she paused in front of the mirror, fascinated as ever by what she found there.

“The darn fools!” she said aloud. And as she said it her chin went up and the faint cloud about her eyes lifted. The phrases of the myriad love letters she had received passed before her eyes; behind her, after all, was the reassurance of a hundred lost and pleading faces, of innumerable tender and pleading voices. Her pride flooded back into her till she could see the warm blood rushing up into her cheeks.

There was a knock at the door — it was the Princeton boy.

“How about slipping downstairs?” be proposed. “There’s a dance. It’s full of E-lies, the whole Yale baseball team. I’ll pick up one of them and introduce you and you’ll have a big time. How about it?”

“All right, but I don’t want to meet anybody. You’ll just have to dance with me all evening.”

“You know that suits me.”

She hurried into a new spring evening dress of the frailest fairy blue. In the excitement of seeing herself in it, it seemed as if she had shed the old skin of winter and emerged a shining chrysalis with no stain; and going downstairs her feet fell softly just off the beat of the musk from below. It was a tune from a play she had seen a week ago in New York, a tune with a future — ready for gaieties as yet unthought of, lovers not yet met. Dancing off, she was certain that life had innumerable beginnings. She had hardly gone ten steps when she was cut in upon by Dudley Knowleton.

“Why, Josephine!” He had never used her first name before — he stood holding her hand. “Why, I’m so glad to see you! I’ve been hoping and hoping you’d be here.”

She soared skyward on a rocket of surprise and delight. He was actually glad to see her — the expression on his face was obviously sincere. Could it be possible that he hadn’t heard?

“Adele wrote me you might be here. She wasn’t sure.”

— Then he knew and didn’t care; he liked her anyhow.

“I’m in sackcloth and ashes,” she said.

“Well, they’re very becoming to you.”

“You know what happened — “ she ventured.

“I do. I wasn’t going to say anything, but it’s generally agreed that Waterbury behaved like a fool — and it’s not going to be much help to him in the elections next month. Look — I want you to dance with some men who are just starving for a touch of beauty.”

Presently she was dancing with, it seemed to her, the entire team at once. Intermittently Dudley Knowleton cut back in, as well as the Princeton man, who was somewhat indignant at this unexpected competition. There were many girls from many schools in the room, but with an admirable team spirit the Yale men displayed a sharp prejudice in Josephine’s favour; already she was pointed out from the chairs along the wall.

But interiorly she was waiting for what was, coming, for the moment when she would walk with Dudley Knowleton into the warm, Southern night. It came naturally, just at the end of a number, and they strolled along an avenue of early-blooming lilacs and turned a corner and another corner…

“You were glad to see me, weren’t you?” Josephine said.

“Of course.”

“I was afraid at first. I was sorriest about what happened at school because of you. I’d been trying so hard to be different — because of you.”

“You mustn’t think of that school business any more. Everybody that matters knows you got a bad deal. Forget it and start over.”

“Yes,” she agreed tranquilly. She was happy. The breeze and the scent of lilacs — that was she, lovely and intangible; the rustic bench where they sat and the trees — that was he, rugged and strong beside her, protecting her.

“I’d thought so much of meeting you here,” she said after a minute. “You’d been so good for me, that I thought maybe in a different way I could be good for you — I mean I know ways of having a good time that you don’t know. For instance, we’ve certainly got to go horseback riding by moonlight some night. That’ll be fun.”

He didn’t answer.

“I can really be very nice when I like somebody — that’s really not often,” she interpolated hastily, “not seriously. But I mean when I do feel seriously that a boy and I are really friends I don’t believe in having a whole mob of other boys hanging around taking up time. I like to be with him all the time, all day and all evening, don’t you?”

He stirred a little on the bench; he leaned forward with his elbows on his knees, looking at his strong hands. Her gently modulated voice sank a note lower.

“When I like anyone I don’t even like dancing. It’s sweeter to be alone.”

Silence for a moment.

“Well, you know” — he hesitated, frowning — “as a matter of fact, I’m mixed up in a lot of engagements made some time ago with some people.” He floundered about unhappily. “In fact, I won’t even be at the hotel after tomorrow. I’ll be at the house of some people down the valley — a sort of house party. As a matter of fact, Adele’s getting here tomorrow.”

Absorbed in her own thoughts, she hardly heard him at first, but at the name she caught her breath sharply.

“We’re both to be at this house party while we’re here, and I imagine it’s more or less arranged what we’re going to do. Of course, in the daytime I’ll be here for baseball practice.”

“I see.” Her lips were quivering. “You won’t be — you’ll be with Adele.”

“I think that — more or less — I will. She’ll — want to see you, of course.”

Another silence while he twisted his big fingers and she helplessly imitated the gesture.

“You were just sorry for me,” she said. “You like Adele — much better.”

“Adele and I understand each other. She’s been more or less my ideal since we were children together.”

“And I’m not your kind of girl?” Josephine’s voice trembled with a sort of fright. “I suppose because I’ve kissed a lot of boys and got a reputation for speed and raised the deuce.”

“It isn’t that.”

“Yes, it is,” she declared passionately. “I’m just paying for things.” She stood up. “You’d better take me back inside so I can dance with the kind of boys that like me.”

She walked quickly down the path, tears of misery streaming from her eyes. He overtook her by the steps, but she only shook her head and said, “Excuse me for being so fresh. I’ll grow up — I got what was coming to me — it’s all right.”

A little later when she looked around the floor for him he had gone — and Josephine realized with a shock that for the first time in her life, she had tried for a man and failed. But, save in the very young, only love begets love, and from the moment Josephine had perceived that his interest in her was merely kindness she realized the wound was not in her heart but in her pride. She would forget him quickly, but she would never forget what she had learned from him. There were two kinds of men, those you played with and those you might marry. And as this passed through her mind, her restless eyes wandered casually, over the group of stags, resting very lightly on Mr Gordon Tinsley, the current catch of Chicago, reputedly the richest young man in the Middle West. He had never paid any attention to young Josephine until tonight. Ten minutes ago he had asked her to go driving with him tomorrow.

But he did not attract her — and she decided to refuse. One mustn’t run through people, and, for the sake of a romantic half-hour, trade a possibility that might develop — quite seriously — later, at the proper time. She did not know that this was the first mature thought that she had ever had in her life, but it was.

The orchestra were packing their instruments and the Princeton man was still at her ear, still imploring her to walk out with him into the night. Josephine knew without cogitation which sort of man he was — and the moon was bright even on the windows. So with a certain sense of relaxation she took his arm and they strolled out to the pleasant bower she had so lately quitted, and their faces turned towards each other, like little moons under the great white ones which hovered high over the Blue Ridge; his arm dropped softly about her yielding shoulder.

“Well?” he whispered.

“Well.”

TOO CUTE FOR WORDS,

Bryan didn’t know exactly why Mrs. Hannaman was there. He thought it was something about his being a widower who should be looked after in some way. He had come home early from his office to catch up on certain aspects of his daughter.

“She has such beautiful manners,” Mrs. Hannaman was saying. “Old-fashioned manners.”

“Thank you,” he said. “We brought up Gwen in the Continental style, and when we came back here, we tried to keep up the general idea.”

“You taught her languages, and all that?”

“Lord, no! I never learned anything but waiter’s French, but I’m strict with Gwen. I don’t let her go to the movies, for instance —  — “

Had Mrs. Hannaman’s memory betrayed her, or had she heard her little niece Clara say that she and Gwen sat through three straight performances of Top Hat, and would see it again if they could find it at one of the smaller theaters.

“We have a phonograph,” Bryan Bowers continued, “so Gwen can play music of her own choice, but I won’t give her a radio. Children ought to make their own music.”

He heard himself saying this, only half believing it, wishing Gwen would come home.

“She plays the piano?”

“Well, she did. She took piano lessons for years, but this year there was so much work at school that we just let it go. I mean we postponed it. She’s just thirteen, and she’s got plenty of time.”

“Of course,” agreed Mrs. Hannaman dryly.

When Mrs. Hannaman left, Bryan went back to work on the apartment. They were really settled at last. At least he was settled; it seemed rather likely that Gwen never would be settled. Glancing into his daughter’s room now, he uttered a short exclamation of despair. Everything was just as it had been for the past three weeks. He had told the maid that nothing must be touched except the bed, because Gwen should do her own straightening up. She had been to camp this past summer; if this was the system she had learned, that was time wasted. A pair of crushed jodhpur breeches lay in the corner where they had been stepped out of, a section of them rising resentfully above the rest, as if trying to straighten up of its own accord; a stack of letters from boys — a stack that had once worn a neat elastic band — was spread along the top of the bureau like a pack of cards ready for the draw; three knitted sweaters in various preliminary stages of creation and the beginnings of many tidying-ups lay like abandoned foundations about the room. The business was always to be completed on the following Sunday, but Sunday was always the day when the unforeseen came up: Gwen was invited to do something very healthy, or she had so much homework, or he had to take her out with him because he didn’t want to leave her alone. For a while it had been a fine idea to let her live in this mess until she was impelled to act from within, but as October crept into November the confusion increased. She was late for everything because nothing could be found. The maid complained it had become absolutely impossible to sweep the room, save with the cautious steps of Eliza on the ice.

He heard his daughter come in, and, with the problem in his mind, went to meet her in the living room.

They faced each other in a moment of happiness. They looked alike. He had been handsome once, but middle age had added flesh in the unappealing places. When he spoke of the past, Gwen was never able to imagine him in romantic situations. She was an arresting little beauty, black-eyed, with soft bay hair and with an extraordinarily infectious laugh — a rare laugh that had a peal in it, and yet managed not to get on people’s nerves.

She had thrown herself full length on a couch, scattering her books on the floor. When Bryan came in, she moved her feet so that they just projected over the side of the couch. He noted the gesture, and suggested:

“Pull down your skirt or else take it off altogether.”

“Daddy! Don’t be so vulgar!”

“That’s the only way I can get through to you sometimes.”

“Daddy, I got credit plus in geometry. Cute?”

“What’s credit plus?”

“Ninety-two.”

“Why don’t they just say ninety-two?”

“Daddy, did you get the tickets for the Harvard game?”

“I told you I’d take you.”

She nodded, and remarked as if absently:

“Dizzy’s father’s taking her to the Harvard game and the Navy game. And her uncle’s taking her to the Dartmouth game. Isn’t that cute?”

“What’s cute about it? Do you know what you said to Doctor Parker the other day, when he asked you if you liked Caesar? You said you thought Caesar was cute.” He walked around the room in helpless laughter. “A man conquers the whole known world, and a little schoolgirl comes along a thousand years afterwards and says he’s cute!”

“Two thousand years,” remarked Gwen, unruffled… “Daddy, Mr. Campbell’s driving them up to the Harvard game in their new car. Isn’t that cu — isn’t that fine?”

She was always like this in the first half hour home from school or a party — outer worlds where she lived with such intensity that she carried it into the slower tempo of life at home like weather on her shoes. This is what made her say:

“It’d take forever the way you drive, daddy.”

“I drive fast enough.”

“Once I drove ninety miles an hour —  — “

Startled, he stared at her, and Gwen should have been acute enough to minimize the statement immediately. But still in her worldly daze, she continued “ — on the way to Turtle Lake this summer.”

“Who with?”

“With a girl.”

“A girl your age driving a car!”

“No. The girl was nineteen — she’s a sister of a girl I was visiting. But I won’t tell you who. Probably you’d never let me go there again, daddy.”

She was very sorry that she had ever spoken.

“You might as well tell me. I know who you’ve visited this summer and I can find out who’s got a sister nineteen years old. I’m not going to have you mangled up against a telegraph post because some young —  — “

Momentarily Gwen was saved by the maid calling her father to the phone. As a sort of propitiation, she hung her overcoat in the closet, picked up her books and went on into her own room.

She examined it, as usual, with a vast surprise. She knew it was rather terrible, but she had some system of her own as to what to do about it — a system that never seemed to work out in actuality. She pounced with a cry upon the wastebasket — it was her record of “Cheek to Cheek,” broken, but preserved to remind her to get another. She cradled it to her arms, and as if this, in turn, reminded her of something else, she decided to telephone Dizzy Campbell. This required a  certain diplomacy. Bryan had become adamant on the matter of long phone conversations.

“This is about Latin,” she assured him.

“All right, but make it short, daughter.”

He read the paper in the living room, waiting for supper; for some time he had been aware of a prolonged murmur which confused itself in his mind with distant guns in Ethiopia and China. Only when he turned to the financial page and read the day’s quotation on American Tel. and Tel. did he spring to his feet.

“She’s on the phone again!” he exclaimed to himself; but even as the paper billowed to rest in front of him, Gwen appeared, all radiant and on the run.

“Oh, daddy, the best thing! You won’t have to take me to the game, after all! I mean you will to the game, but not up to the game. Dizzy’s aunt, Mrs. Charles Wrotten Ray, or something like that — somebody that’s all right, that they know about, that they can trust, and all that sort of thing —  — “

While she panted, he inquired politely:

“What about her? Has she made the Princeton team?”

“No. She lives up there and she has some nephews or uncles or something — it was all kind of complicated on the phone — that go to some kind of prep school that are about our age — about fifteen or sixteen —  — “

“I thought you were thirteen.”

“The boy is always older,” she assured him. “Anyhow, she —  — “

“Don’t ever say ‘she.’“

“Well, excuse me, daddy. Well, anyhow, this sort of person — you know, not ‘she,’ but this sort of Mrs. Wrotten Ray, or whatever her name is — she wants Dizzy —  — “

“Now, calm yourself, calm yourself.”

“I can’t, daddy; she’s waiting on the phone.”

“Who? Mrs. Wrotten Ray?”

“Oh, that isn’t her name, but it’s something like that. Anyhow, Mrs. Wrotten Ray wants Dizzy to bring Clara Hannaman and one other girl up to a little dance the night before the game. And Dizzy wants me to be the other girl, and can I go?”

“This is all a little sudden. I don’t like such things during a school term, and you know that.” He hated to refuse her, though, for, excepting an occasional indiscretion of speech, she was a trustworthy child; she made good grades in school and conscientiously wrestled with her ebullient temperament.

“Well, can I, daddy? Dizzy’s waiting; she has to know.”

“I suppose you can.”

“Oh, thanks. Mrs. Campbell’s going to call you up, but Dizzy couldn’t wait to tell me. Cute?”

She vanished, and in a moment the low murmur behind the door began again.

Something told Bryan that she’d be leading a simpler life at boarding school, but didn’t Helen Hannaman say something today about her old-fashioned manners? He couldn’t afford it this year anyhow, and, besides, she was such a bright little thing to have around the house.

But if he’d known that the movies were going to produce this Top Hat —  — She had broken the record of “Cheek to Cheek,” but there was still the one about sitting on his top hat and climbing up his shirt front —  —

Curiously, he opened the door to the dining room and discovered the phonograph going and his daughter in a crouching posture, arms outspread, head projecting from its proper neck, eyes half closed. When she saw him, she straightened up.

“I thought that this ‘Cheek by Jowl’ was broken,” he said.

“It is, but you can still play the inside a little. See, it’s over already. You certainly can’t object to that much of a record.”

“Let’s put it on again,” he suggested facetiously, “and we’ll dance.”

She looked at him with infinite compassion.

“Who do you imagine you are, daddy? Fred Astaire? What I want to know is if I can go to Princeton.”

“I said yes, didn’t I?”

“But you didn’t say it like when you mean it.”

“Yes, then — yes. Get enough rope and hang yourself.”

“Then I can go?”

“Yes, of course. Why not? Where do you think you’re going? To the prom or something? Of course, you can go.”

II

Having lunch on the train, the three girls were a little bit mad with excitement. Clara Hannaman and Dizzy Campbell were fourteen, a year older than Gwen, and Clara was already somewhat taller, but they were all dressed alike in suits that might have been worn by their mothers. Their jewelry consisted of thin rings and chains, legacies from grandmothers, supplemented by flamboyant Koh-i-noors from the five-and-ten; and it was true that their coats might once have responded to wheedling calls of “Pussy,” “Bunny,” or “Nanny.” But it was their attacks of hysteria that stamped them as of a certain age.

Clara had asked: “What kind of a joint is this we’re going to?” She was temporarily under the spell of Una Merkel and the hard-boiled school, and this question was enough to start a rat-tat-tat of laughter, to the extent that eating was suspended, napkins called into play. One word was usually enough to send them off; frequently it was a boy’s name that had some private meaning to them, and for a whole afternoon or evening this single word would serve as detonator. At other times a curious soberness fell upon all of them, a sort of quietude. They faced both ways — toward a world they were fast leaving and a world they had never met — and the contradiction was externalized in the uncanny mirth.

There was a sober moment now when they all looked at the girl across the way, who was the debutante of the year and bound for the fall prom. They looked with respect, even a certain awe, impressed with her ease and tranquility in the face of her ordeal. It made them feel very young and awkward, and they were both glad and sorry that they were too young for the prom. Last year that girl had been only the captain of the basketball team at school; now she was in the Great Game, and they had noted the men who came to see her off at the station with flowers and adjurations not to “fall for any babies up there… Be five years before they get a job.”

After luncheon, the three girls planned to study — they had conscientiously brought books along — but the excitement of the train was such that they never got any farther than the phrase “jeweled stomacher” from an English-history lesson — which thereafter became their phrase for the day. They reached Princeton in an uncanny, explosive quiet, because Dizzy claimed to have forgotten her jeweled stomacher on the train, but their wild chuckles changed to a well-bred reserve as they were greeted on the platform by Miss Ray, young and lovely and twenty.

Where were the boys? They peered for them through the early dusk, not expecting to be greeted like prom girls, but there might have been someone of their own age, the one for whom they had dressed and dreamed and waved their locks sidewise in these last twenty-four hours. When they reached the house, Miss Ray exploded the bomb; while they took off their coats, she said:

“You’re due for a disappointment. I tried to reach you by telegraphing and telephone, too, but you’d already left.”

Their eyes turned toward her, apprehensive, already stricken.

“Seems that grandmother’s not well, and mother felt she had to go up to Albany. So, before I was even awake, she called off the little dance, and she’d phoned everybody. I tried to fix it up, but it was too late.”

Now their faces were utterly expressionless.

“Mother was excited, that’s all,” continued Miss Ray. “Grandmother’ll live to be a hundred. I’ve been on the phone all afternoon trying to find some company for you girls for this evening, but the town’s a madhouse and nobody’s available — the boys for the little dance were coming from New York. Lord, if I’d only waked up before eleven o’clock!”

“We don’t mind,” Dizzy lied gently. “Really we don’t, Esther. We can amuse ourselves.”

“Oh, darling, I know how you feel!”

“Yes,” they said together, and Dizzy asked, “Where’s Shorty? Did he have to go to Albany too?”

“No, he’s here. But he’s only sixteen and —  — I hardly know how to explain it, but he’s the youngest man in his class in college, and very small, and this year he’s just impossibly shy. When the party was called off, he just refused to appear as the only boy; said he’d stay in his room and study chemistry, and there he is. And he won’t come out.”

Gwen formed a mental picture of him. Better that he remained in his hermitage; they could have more fun without him.

“Anyhow, you’ll have the game tomorrow.”

“Yes,” they said together.

That was that. Upstairs they took out their evening gowns, which, according to modern acceptance, were as long and as chic as any adult evening gowns, and laid them on their beds. They brought out their silk hosiery, their gold or silver sandal dancing shoes, and surveyed the glittering exhibit. At that age, their mothers would have worn ruffles, flounces and cotton stockings to brand them as adolescent. But this historical fact, dinned into them for many years, was small consolation now.

After they had dressed, things seemed better, even though they were only dressing for one another; when they went down to dinner, they gave such an impression of amiability and gaiety that they convinced even Esther Ray. It was difficult, though, when Miss Ray’s escort called to take her to the Harvard-Princeton concert, and she must have seen it in their eyes.

“I’ve got an idea,” she said. “I think we can get you into the concert, but you may have to stand up in back.”

That was something indeed. They brightened. They ran for coats; and Gwen caught sight of a very hurried young man in the upper hall with a plate in one hand and a cup in the other, but he disappeared into his room before she could see him plainly.

In any event, the concert turned out as precariously as most improvisations — it was jammed, and they were obliged to stand behind rows of taller people and to listen to tantalizing bursts of laughter and fragments of song — while from Clara’s superior three inches they gathered such information as they could as to what it looked like.

When it was over; they were washed out with the happy, excited crowd, driven back to the Rays’, and dumped almost brusquely on the doorstep.

“Good night. Thanks.”

“Thanks a lot.”

“It was fine!”

“Thanks. Good night.”

Upstairs they moved around in silence, casting stray glances at themselves in the mirror and rearranging, to no purpose now, some bit of awry finery. Dizzy had even taken off her necklace of seed pearls, when Gwen said suddenly:

“I want to go to the prom.”

“Who doesn’t?” Clara said. Suddenly she looked at Gwen sharply and asked: “What do you mean, Gwen?”

Gwen was drawing her lips in the mirror with Dizzy’s lipstick. She would have had one along herself, save it had melted going through Alabama on the way to the ranch last summer, and she had never since been able to get the top off it. Clara watched her until Gwen said:

“How would you make up if you were going to the prom?”

“Like this,” Clara suggested.

In a minute they were all at it.

“Not like that; that looks very ordinary.” And: “Remember, that’s Esther’s eye pencil. That’s too much, Dizzy.”

“Not with powder, it isn’t.”

Within half an hour they had somehow managed to age themselves by several years, and crying: “Bring on my jeweled stomacher,” they minced, paraded and danced around the room.

“I’ll tell you what,” Gwen said. “I just sort of want to go to the outside of the prom. I mean I don’t want to do anything bad, you know, but I want to see how they work it.”

“Esther might see us.”

“She won’t,” said Gwen sagely. “She’s probably having herself a time, and that girl on the train too — that Marion Lamb — you know, we used to know her in school. You take a lot of these debutantes,” she continued, “and when they get by themselves — pretty cute is what I would say, if you asked me.”

Dizzy looked like white-pine shavings; even her eyes were so light and virginal that what she said now came as a sort of shock to the other two:

“We’ll do it — we’ll go to the prom. We’ve got more what it takes than most of those girls.”

“Of course this isn’t like a city,” Clara suggested uncertainly. “It’s perfectly all right; it’s just the same as going out in your yard.”

This remark was calming to their consciences, but they were really less concerned with kidnapers or molesters of womanhood than with what Gwen’s plan was. Gwen had no plan. She had literally nothing on her mind except a certain disparity between the picture of herself wandering around a college campus at night with rouged lips, and a little scene that had taken place a week before, when she had argued with her father that she wanted to set up her doll’s house in her room instead of having it sent to storage.

The deciding factor was that they had been cheated by their elders. Though Bryan had never met Mrs. Ray, he somehow seemed to share in her disastrous excitability of the morning. This was the sort of thing that parents did as a class. The sort of thing for which they had joint responsibility. Before Gwen and Dizzy had agreed to the excursion in words, they bumped shoulders around the mirror, modifying their faces until the theatrical quality yielded to the more seemly pigmentation of an embassy ball. In the last burst of conservatism, for they might run inadvertently into Esther Ray, they cleansed the area around their eyes, leaving only the faintest patina of evening on lips and noses. The ten-cent crown jewels disappeared from ear and wrist and throat so quickly that when they went downstairs all taint of the side show had disappeared. Taste had triumphed.

Issuing into a clear brilliant November night, they walked along a high exuberant street beneath the dark trees of Liberty Place — though that meant nothing to them. A dog panicked them momentarily from behind a hedge, but they met no further obstacle until it was necessary to pass beneath a bright arc on Mercer Street.

“Where are we going?” Clara asked.

“Up to where we can hear it.”

She stopped. Figures had loomed up ahead, and they linked arms protectively, but it was only two colored women carrying a basket of laundry between them.

“Come on,” Gwen said.

“Come on to where?”

“To where we’re going.”

They reached a cathedral-like structure which Clara recognized as a corner of the campus, and by a sort of instinct they turned into an archway, threaded a deserted cloister and came out into a wider vista of terraces and Gothic buildings, and suddenly there was music in the air. After a few hundred yards, Dizzy pulled them up short.

“I see it,” she whispered. “It’s that big building down there with all the lights. That’s the gymnasium.”

“Let’s go closer,” said Gwen. “There isn’t anybody around. Let’s go till we see somebody, anyhow.”

Arms linked, they marched on in the shadow of the long halls. They were getting dangerously close to the zone of activity, could distinguish figures against the blur of the gymnasium entrance, and hear the applause in the intervals. Once more they stopped, afraid either to go on or to hold their ground, for there were voices and footsteps approaching out of the darkness.

“Over at the other side,” Clara suggested. “It’s dark there and we can get really close.”

They left the path and ran across the turf; stopped, breathless, in the haven of a group of parked cars. Here they huddled silently, feeling like spies behind the enemy lines. Within the great bulky walls, fifty feet away, a sonorous orchestra proclaimed a feeling that someone was fooling, announced that someone was its lucky star, and demanded if it wasn’t a lovely day to be caught in the rain. Inside those walls existed ineffable romance — an orchid-colored dream in which floated prototypes of their future selves, surrounded, engulfed, buoyed up by unnumbered boys. No one spoke; there was no more to say than the orchestra was saying to their young hearts, and when the music stopped, they did not speak; then suddenly they realized that they were not alone.

“We can eat later,” a man’s voice said.

“I don’t care about it at all, when I’m with you.”

The three young girls caught their breath in a gasp, clutched at one another’s arms. The voices came from a car not five feet from where they stood; it was turned away from the gymnasium, so that under cover of the music, their approach had gone unobserved.

“What’s one supper,” the girl continued, “when I think of all the suppers we’ll have together all through life?”

“Beginning next June, darling.”

“Beginning next June, darling, darling, darling.”

And once again a clutching went on among the listeners. For the girl’s voice was that of Marion Lamb, the debutante who had been on the train.

At this point, because it was a rather cool night and her evening cloak was thin, Dizzy sneezed — sneezed loudly and sneezed again.

III

“But how do we know you kids won’t tell?” the man was demanding: He turned to Marion: “Can’t you explain to them how important it is not to tell? Explain that it’ll absolutely wreck your debut at home.”

“But I don’t care, Harry. I’d be proud —  — “

“I care. It simply can’t get around now.”

“We won’t tell,” the young girls chorused ardently. And Gwen added: “We think it’s cute.”

“Do you realize you’re the only ones that know?” he asked sternly. “The only ones! And if it slipped out, I’d know who told, and —  — “

There were such sinister threats in his voice that instinctively the trio recoiled a step.

“That isn’t the way to talk to them,” said Marion. “I went to school with these girls and I know they won’t tell. Anyhow, they know it’s not serious — that I get engaged every few weeks or so.”

“Marion,” cried the young man, “I can’t stand hearing you talk like that!”

“Oh, Harry, I didn’t mean to hurt you!” she gasped, equally upset. “You know there’s never been anyone but you.”

He groaned.

“Well, how are we going to silence this gallery?” Distraught, he fumbled in his pocket for money.

“No, Harry. They’ll keep quiet.” But looking at those six eyes, she felt a vast misgiving. “Listen, what would you three like more than anything in the world?”

They laughed and looked at one another.

“To go to the prom, I guess,” said Gwen frankly. “But of course, we wouldn’t be allowed to. Our parents wouldn’t let us, even if we were invited — I mean —  — “

“I’ve got the idea,” said Harry. “I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I know a side entrance that leads up to the indoor track. How would you like to sit up there in the dark and look on awhile without anybody seeing you?”

“Whew!” said Dizzy.

“If I take you up there, will you give me your sacred words of honor that you’ll never breathe a word of what you heard tonight?”

“Will we!” they exclaimed together.

IV

Leaving them on the running track, the focusing eye must move down momentarily to the thick of the dance below. Or rather to its outskirts, where a person had just appeared who has hitherto played a small and sorry part in this history, and there he stood uncertainly, his view obscured by a throbbing Harvard-Princeton stag line. If, half an hour before, anyone had told Shorty Ray that eleven o’clock would find him in his present situation, he would not even have said, “Huh!” Some boys of inconsiderable height are compensated by an almost passionate temerity. Not Shorty; since adolescence, he never had been able to face girls with a minimum of dignity. The dance at home was part of a campaign to break him of his shyness, and it had seemed a stroke of luck to him that if his grandmother’s health were going to fail anyhow, it should have chosen this particular day.

As if in retribution for this irreverence, a telegram from Albany addressed to his sister had come to the house at the very moment when he had started to turn out his lights.

An older man would have torn open the telegram and read it, but anything sealed was sacred to him, and such telegrams spelled emergencies. There was nothing for it save to get it to Esther in the gymnasium as quickly as possible.

One thing he knew — he would not go upon the dance floor in search of her. After he had argued his way past the doorkeeper, he was simply standing there feeling helpless, when Dizzy spied him from above.

“There’s Tommy!” she exclaimed.

“Where?”

“The short boy by the door. Well, that’s pathetic, if you ask me! He wouldn’t even come out and look at us, and then he goes to the prom.”

“He doesn’t seem to be having much of a time,” said Clara.

“Let’s go down and cheer him up,” Gwen suggested.

“Not me,” said Dizzy. “For one thing, I wouldn’t want the Rays to know we were here.”

“I forgot about that.”

“Anyhow, he’s gone now.”

He was gone, but not, as they supposed, into the delirious carnival. Irresolute, he had finally conceived the idea of mounting to the running track and trying to locate Esther among the dancers. Even as Dizzy spoke, he was there at her elbow, to their mutual surprise.

“I thought you were in bed!” he exclaimed, as he recognized his cousin.

“I thought you were studying.”

“I was studying when a telegram came, and now I’ve got to find Esther.”

He was introduced with great formality; Gwen and Clara immediately adopting the convention that they had not known of his existence in the same town.

“Esther was in one of the boxes a while ago,” said Gwen. “No. 18.”

Grasping at this, Tommy turned to Dizzy.

“Then I wonder if you’d mind going over and giving her this telegram?”

“I would so mind,” said Dizzy. “Why don’t you give it to her yourself? We’re not supposed to be here.”

“Neither am I; they let me in. But I can’t just walk across there all by myself, and you can,” he said earnestly.

Gwen had been looking at him in a curiously intent way for some moments. He was not at all the person she had pictured — in fact, she decided that he was one of the handsomest boys she had ever seen in her life.

“I’ll take it to her,” she said suddenly.

“Will you?” For the first time he seemed to see Gwen — a girl who looked like the pictures in the magazines, and yet was smaller than himself. He thrust the telegram at her. “Thanks! Gosh, I certainly am —  — “

“I’m not going downstairs alone,” she interrupted. “You’ve got to take me part way.”

As they descended, he looked at her again out of the corner of his eye; at the big arch he paused.

“Now you take it the rest of the way,” he said.

“The best way would be to do it together.”

“Oh, no!” he exclaimed. “You didn’t say that. I’m not going to walk across the floor.”

“I didn’t mean walk. If we walked, everybody’d kind of look at us, but if we danced across to the box, nobody would notice it.”

“You said you’d take it!” he said indignantly.

“I will, but you’ve got to take me.” And she added innocently, “That makes it easy for us both.”

“I won’t do it,” he declared.

“Then you can take it yourself.”

“I never —  — “

Suddenly, before he realized it, she was in the circle of his arm, his hand was on what was apparently a forgotten seam in her dress just between shoulder blades, and they were moving across the floor.

Through the line of stags and out into the kaleidoscope. Gwen was at home; all hesitancy at the daring of her idea vanishing like the tension of a football player after the kick-off. By some inexorable right, this was her world. This was, perhaps, not the time set for entering it, but, maybe because her generation had ceased to move in the old Euclidian world, her age ceased to matter after a moment. She felt as old as any girl on the floor.

And now, miracle of miracles, the lights dimmed, and at the signal, the divine spark passed from one orchestra to another, and Gwen was dancing onward in a breathless trance to the melody of “Cheek to Cheek.”

*****

In the Laurel Club box, the ladies were growing weary. Chaperonage, they decided, was too lightly undertaken, too poorly compensated for. They were tired of the parade of animation, of lovely, confident faces, and one of them said as much to the middle-aged man who sat at her side. He, too, wore the look of speculating upon the texture of cool pillowcases and the beatitude of absolute quiet.

“I had to come,” she said, “but I still don’t understand why you came.”

“Perhaps because I saw in the morning paper that you’d be here, after all these years.”

“This is no place to say that to a woman of my age; the competition makes me feel very old. Look at that odd-looking couple — like a pair of midgets. I haven’t seen them before.”

He looked, but they seemed like just the sort of eccentrics to wander into any doze, so, after vaguely replying, “Aren’t they cute?” he glazed his eyes for a while, until she commented: “There they are again. Such little people. That girl — why, she can’t be more than fourteen, and she’s like a blase, world-weary woman of twenty. Can you imagine what her parents could have been thinking of, to let her come here tonight?”

He looked again; then, after a long pause, he said, rather wearily:

“Yes, I can imagine.”

“You think it’s all right then?” she demanded. “Why, it seems to me —  — “

“No, Helen, I just meant I can imagine what they would be thinking if they knew about it. Because the girl seems to be my daughter.”

V

It was not in Bryan’s nature to rush out and snatch Gwen from the floor. Should she pass near him again, he intended to bow to her very formally indeed and let the next step be hers. He was not angry with her — he supposed her hostess was behind the matter — but he was angry at a system which permitted a baby disguised as a young woman, a marriageable young woman, to dance at a semipublic ball.

At his undergraduate club the next day, he wended his way from group to group, stopping to chat momentarily here and there, but with his eye always out for Gwen, who was to meet him there. When the crowd was drifting out and down to the stadium, he called the Rays’ house, and found her still there.

“You better meet me at the game,” he said, glad he had given her the ticket. “I want to go down now and see the teams practice.”

“Daddy, I hate to say it but I’ve lost it.” Her voice was hushed and solemn. “I searched and searched, and then I remembered I stuck it in the mirror at home with some invitations, to see how it would look, and forgot to —  — “

The connection was broken, and a male voice demanded if there were rooms at the club tonight and if the steward had delivered a brown lunch basket to Thomas Pickering, ‘96. For ten minutes more he jangled the receiver; he wanted to tell her to buy a bad seat in the end stand and work her way around to him, but the phone service in Princeton shared the hysteria of the crowd.

People began going by the booth, looking at their watches and hurrying to get to the kick-off; in another five minutes there was no one going by the booth, and there was sweat upon Bryan’s brow. He had played freshman football in college; it meant to him what war or chess might have meant to his grandfather. Resentment possessed him suddenly.

“After all, she had her fun last night, and now I have a right to mine. Let her miss it. She doesn’t care, really.”

But on the way to the stadium he was torn between the human roar that went up at momentary intervals behind that massive wall and the picture of Gwen making a last desperate search for that precious counter that gleamed uselessly in a mirror at home.

He hardened himself.

“It’s that disorderliness. This will be a better lesson than any lecture.”

Nevertheless, at the very gate Bryan paused once more; he and Gwen were very close, and he could still go after her, but a huge swelling cry from the arena decided him; he went in with the last dribble of the crowd.

It was as he reached his seat that he saw that there was a hand signaling him, heard a voice hailing him.

“Oh, daddy, here we are! We thought maybe you’d —  — “

“Sit down,” he whispered, breathlessly slipping into his place. “People want to see. Did you find your ticket?”

“No, daddy. I had a terrible time — but this is Tommy Ray, daddy. He hasn’t got a seat here; he was just keeping your seat till you came. He can sit anywhere because he —  — “

“Be quiet, Baby! You can tell me later. What’s happened on the field? What’s on that Scoreboard?”

“What Scoreboard?”

From the aisle steps whither he had moved, Tommy supplied the information that it was nothing to nothing; Bryan bent his whole attention upon the game.

At the quarter, he relaxed and demanded:

“How did you manage to get in?”

“Well, you see, Tommy Ray” — she lowered her voice — “this boy beside me — he’s one of the ticket takers. And I knew he’d be somewhere, because he told me last night that was why he had to go home —  — “

She stopped herself.

“I understand,” Bryan said dryly. “I wondered what you found to talk about in that remarkable dancing position.”

“You were there?” she cried in dismay. “You —  — “

“Listen to that Harvard band,” he interrupted, “jazzing old marching songs — seems sort of irreverent. Of course, you’d probably like them to play ‘Cheek by Jowl.’“

“Daddy!”

But for a moment her eyes were far off on the gray horizon, listening, not to the band, but to that sweeter and somehow older tune.

“What did you think?” she asked, after a moment. “I mean when you saw me there?”

“What did I think? I thought you were just too cute for words.”

“You didn’t! I don’t care how you punish me, but please don’t ever say that horrible word again!”

STRANGE SANCTUARY

The little girl with dark blue eyes and last summer’s golden tan rang the doorbell of the Appletons’ house a second time, then turned to the Negress behind her.

“I know there’s somebody in, Hazeldawn, because I can hear them. Just leave the suitcase and you can go back to Mrs. Martin’s.”

“You sure, now, these people expect you?”

“Well, Mrs. Martin said she telephoned both places before she fixed things up; so if it wasn’t the Sidneys’, this must be where I’m expected Somebody has to take me in,” she added wryly. The little girl’s name was Dolly Haines and her age was thirteen.

The door was suddenly answered by a youth whom Dolly had never seen before. Startled by the strange face, Dolly turned back to Hazeldawn: “Don’t go yet. There may be some mistake.”

“The Appletons don’t seem to be around,” the boy said. “There was a maid awhile ago, but she doesn’t seem to be around either.” Seeing her hesitate, and experiencing a quick response to her beauty, he added, “But come in. Glad to have you. I been making myself at home for two hours.”

He was fifteen, tall without being gangling, ruddy-cheeked and full of laughter and loose in his clothes. Liking him immediately, sophistication flowed into Dolly. She said to the Negress:

“Thanks oodles, Hazeldawn, Tell the postman about the mail — and bring me my laundry when it’s ready.”

The boy carried her bag and Dolly followed. They sat on the sofa in the living room, at home within five minutes.

Clarke Cresswell turned on the radio. “I’m beginning to think I own this place,” he said. “Have you been here before?”

“This’ll be the third time — if they take me in. I’ve been visiting around like this since father got sick last April, and I’m tired of it.”

“Don’t I understand!” the boy agreed darkly. “My parents were drowned in China when I was two, and I was shipped home by registered mail. I’ve been a guest ever since. But I’m not visiting the Appletons,” Clarke went on; “I’m only here for dinner. They’ve got measles at my prep school, so I’m visiting my aunt, Miss Grace Terhune.”

The name made Dolly sit up. “Why, she’s the assistant headmistress of my school!”

“Don’t blame me.”

She wouldn’t have blamed him for anything.

“Let’s light a fire,” he suggested, and she agreed that a fire would be nice.

They sat before it and discussed what makes a girl popular and such matters until a maid called Dolly to the phone. It was Mrs. Appleton:

“I’m so sorry, Dolly. We’ve been delayed. We ran over a pig near Annapolis and we thought it was a man. It looked just like a man… Have Evelyn cook supper for you and Clarke right away.”

Dolly looked at herself in the hall mirror before she went back into the library. She had never been happy in just this way before, and she wanted to see what she’ looked like. Returning to the fireside, she said, “Go on.”

“What were we talking about?” Clarke asked.

*****

Next day there was an invitation to a Halloween party and a letter from her father:

You’re always regretting the lack of relatives. Well, now you’ve got one. Cousin Charlie Craig (uncle to you!) is on his way back home after ten years in Europe. His house is at 2008 St. Paul Street. Go call on him — he writes me that he’ll be delighted either to put you up or dress you down while I’m away. He’s peculiar, but I think you’ll like him.

The news was interesting, but it was overshadowed by the more vivid presence in the city of Clarke Cress-well. Or rather his specter, for Dolly didn’t see him again all that week. At last she inquired around school whether any of the girls had met him. Her eagerness was communicated to her friends. Overnight he became a sort of legend: “Has any one met Clarke Cresswell?”

When Saturday arrived, Dolly thumbed through the telephone book. In a moment the fact that an uncle was in town became the most important thing in the world. For Miss Grace Terhune, Clarke’s aunt, lived only two doors away from him.

She had been considering a shopping trip to the five-and-ten, but now it was plain that her duty was to call on her uncle.

St. Paul Street was in the old residential section. On summer days the passer-by could glance through the tall windows at family portraits that had hung undisturbed for a hundred years.

But today the blinds on 2008 were drawn and there was such a long silence after Dolly rang the bell that she nearly gave up. Then the door opened a little way and a birdlike young woman cooed, “What is it?”

“I’m Dolly Haines. I came to see my Uncle Charlie.”

The tiny woman scrutinized her, and Dolly thought she was very pretty with her doll’s hair and china-blue eyes. “Who sent you?” the woman asked.

“My father. He wanted me to call on Uncle Charlie because I’ve never met him and he thought I ought to.”

The woman hesitated. Then she said, “Well, I’ll see. You come in.”

Dolly stepped into the hall and the door closed behind her. Inside it was very dim. Rectangles of cheesecloth indicated paintings on the wall, and the same material protected clocks, busts, lamps, and books.

“I didn’t mean to call so soon,” said Dolly. “I know Uncle Charlie just got home.”

“How did you know?”

“Father told me.” Dolly was glad, in view of the woman’s inhospitable attitude, that she had brought her father’s letter. “This’ll tell who I am.”

The woman took the letter and held it to a bulb of dim orange in the hall. Then she said, “Wait a minute, little girl, right where you are,” and flew up the long stairs. Then a door opened and closed above.

As she waited, Dolly’s mind began to turn on the house two doors farther on.. Her reverie was interrupted by a man coming downstairs. He was tall and handsome, with a blond hairline mustache; he held out a friendly hand and said, “Hello there! Bit dark, what?”

“Are you my Uncle Charlie?”

*****

“What? No; name’s Redfern — Major Redfern. Sorry to say Charlie’s not up to much today. Touch of liver… Do you live around here?”

“I used to live with father. But he got arthritis and had to go to New Mexico.” Dolly rambled on for a moment, even though she had still to be asked to sit down.

Major Redfern interrupted her suddenly: “You’ll soon be a debutante, won’t you?”

“Me? Oh, not me — not for a long time. But I know a lot of debutantes who went to my school last year.”

“Did they, now? Who? I have letters of introduction to some debutantes, but I seem to have mislaid them.”

Dolly began naming debutantes she knew. Major Redfern interrupted:

“Duckney? That’ll be the daughter of L. P. Duckney, won’t it? The one who’s having a big party Monday night?”

“I suppose so. I sit behind her in church.”

He laid down the hat and stick he carried. “Forgot something upstairs,” he said.

“If Uncle Charlie is sick, tell him never mind,” Dolly called after him. “I can come another time.”

“No, no. Sit tight. He wants to see you.”

Presently the little woman flutterde down, Major Redfern after her. The woman was more friendly now; she introduced herself as Miss Willie Shugrue, adding, “Your uncle can’t see you today, but he sent his love.”

“My father’s been sick too, so I can sympathize.”

“I’m the trained nurse,” volunteered Miss Willie. “But I — “

Major Redfern interrupted abruptly: “I’ll do the talking.” Then, to Dolly, “Always welcome here in . Charlie’s house, I know. Maybe you’d like to pay us a little visit.”

“I couldn’t exactly leave these people I’m visiting right now,” Dolly said. “I’d be glad to come later, though.” Dolly felt that the call had run its course. “Good-by. Tell Uncle Charlie I hope he feels better tomorrow.”

“Well — I may see you in church tomorrow,” said the major. “What church do you go to, by the way?”

Dolly told him.

Once the door had closed, her uncle’s household was far behind her. Did she dare ask Mrs. Appleton, she wondered, to invite Clarke to luncheon? Could a guest ask such a favor? If not, she would probably never see Clarke again, and at that dismal thought a wave of revolt swept over her. After all, Mrs. Appleton had been her mother’s best friend. With her lips moving in rehearsal, she went slowly upstairs toward Mrs. Appleton’s room.

Then, just outside the closed door, she stopped — her name had suddenly twisted through the keyhole.

“Dolly is here because she had no other place to go.”

“But I don’t see why we have to be the ones, mother. Does her father expect her to visit all the rest of her life?”

“That doesn’t sound like you, Lila.”

“Well, I can’t help it. I’d countedon having these girls for a visit,and now Dolly’s got the guest room.Don’t tell me that charity begins at home!”

Dolly tiptoed to her room, packed her suitcase hurriedly, dashed off a note to Mrs. Appleton explaining that her Uncle Charlie wanted her to visit there for a week, and crept unobserved from the house.

*****

In the morning she walked to church with Major Redfern. She had passed a curious evening, with the major beating years of dust out of a bed and Miss Willie flitting about, not at all like the trained nurse who had taken care of her father last spring.

“Dashed unlucky about those letters of introduction,” said the major as they walked along. “Of course I came down to look after your Uncle Charlie, but I planned to have a bit of amusement, too. And now I can’t find the things. I say, be a good fellow and introduce me to the thingumbob girl if we run into her.”

Dolly was glad to be of service. As the crowd rolled into church she spotted Angela in the vestibule and introduced major. Angela, good-natured and full of her current importance, was more than charmed.

“How long will you be here, Major Redfern?”

“Couldn’t say. Been taking care of Dolly’s uncle and haven’t had a chance to see the city. Seems a bit dead to an outsider, you know.”

“You mustn’t be an outsider. We take a certain pride in our hospitality.”

During the service DolIy divided the congregation into quadrants and scanned each sector for the sight of a tall young form, but to no avail, so with regret she followed the major and Angela down the aisle.

“Of course you must come,” the young lady was saying. “There’s no time to send you a formal invitation, but I’ll just write ‘Monday evening’ on my calling card and give it to you right now.”

As they emerged into the sunshine it occurred to Dolly that in spite of being handsome the major had a sort of trigger face; if the nose pressed down only a little more it might touch his mouth and precipitate an explosion. He’s a fast worker, she thought. Like Clarke: Clarke was a fast worker, too. But where was he? Back at school? She must know — right off.

Her impatience must have been apparent, for as they walked away the major said, “Not polite to leave any one so quickly. Really ought to consider manners, what?”

“I’m sorry.”

“That’s America,” said the major tolerantly. “This little Duckney — she’s the type, now. Not a brain in her head. Just an easy clink, that’s all.”

“What’s a clink?” inquired Dolly.

“Eh?” He looked at her sharply. “Oh, that’s just an expression.”

Now they were approaching Miss Terhune’s house… But what was that upon the door — that rectangle of pink? She came close enough to read the one word: Measles.

The major must have seen the dismay in her face.” What’s trouble?”

“I just forgot — I got to get something at the drugstore.”

“Well, cheerio. By the way, I wouldn’t mention your Uncle Charlie there. He doesn’t want it known that he’s ill.”

*****

In the drugstore she telephoned Miss Terhune’s house and asked for Clarke Gresswell.

“I saw that sign on your house — “

“I hoped nobody would.”

“I’m staying with my uncle in the same row as you,” she ran on hurriedly. “So I just called up.”

“I’m not in bed; I loaf around and play the radio. Say, listen: have you got a funny skylight — like a box, sort of — on top of your house?”

“Have we? It’s right in the ceiling outside my door.”

“Well, after dinner, you come on out of your skylight and you’ll see me in mine. You won’t catch any measles.”

“My uncle wouldn’t like it,” she said perversely. “And anyhow I’ve got to make a Halloween costume. Good-by.”

Dolly walked home thoughtfully. As the door closed her into the gloomy front hall, the feeling of desertion came back. Meeting Miss Willie on her way upstairs, she said, “Is my uncle better? Couldn’t I see him today?”

“Not today. He’s not well enough.”

“He knows I’m here?”

“Yes; he wants you to make yourself at home.”

After dinner she set to work on her costume while the major smoked and Miss Willie looked on.

“Where’s your party going to be?” she asked Dolly.

“Just around the corner.”

“Some friends?”

“Of course,” said Dolly. “A girl I’ve known all my life.”

“Isn’t that jolly!” said the major, turning to Miss Willie. “Dolly and I will both be stepping out tomorrow night. Beastly shame you have to stay home with Uncle Charlie.”

Miss Willie didn’t answer.

“What’s the costume?”

“Sort of black thing with a mask, like a witch. We’re going all around the neighborhood and howl — that sort of thing.”

“Are these rich people?” asked Miss Willie.

“Stow it,” the major said abruptly.

Looking up at him, Dolly decided that she didn’t like him, after all. She didn’t like him any better than she did Miss Willie. Why did Uncle Charlie keep such people around?

“Do you like your school?” asked Miss Willie quickly.

“Very much. And I’ve got oodles of English history to study.”

Gathering her sawing, she went upstairs. As she passed Uncle Charlie’s room she hesitated for a moment, tempted to open the door quietly and at least look in upon the sick man. She was convinced that he was being neglected, for Miss Willie seemed a poor sort of nurse.

But she passed on up to her third-floor room. There was the pillbox skylight, reached by a cute little ladder, and she wondered if Clarke were really waiting for her two roofs away.

*****

On impulse, she brushed her hair before the mirror, climbed the ladder, pushed open a slanting strip of glass, and scrambled to the roof. In the clear autumn air her sense of oppression lifted. She shivered, not from cold, but as if shaking from her what she left below.

On her right was a fire escape leading to an alley, and northward were four old-fashioned skylights projecting from the flat continuous roof. The second would be Miss Terhune’s. Dolly’s shoes sounded flat on the cemented pebbles as she walked toward it. Framed vividly by the intersecting planes of the parallelepiped, a face stared out at her and shouted, “Can you hear me?”

“Heavens, yes!” She stopped with her back against a chimney.

“I wondered if you could,” Clarke said. “I’ve been yelling ever since I caught sight of you. And I’ve been sitting on this ladder for almost an hour. Where’ve you been?”

“I told you I wasn’t coming.”

“Oh, but that’s just like a girl. Honest, though, I did think you weren’t coming. I thought I’d come over and give you measles in revenge, and then we’d be quarantined together.”

“You look quite dumb in there,” Dolly said. “I don’t want to be quarantined with you, the way you look.”

“You look dumb out there. Which is funniest — you that can’t come in, or me that can’t come out?”

“The whole roof is kind of dumb, isn’t it?”

“Well, why do you live in such a funny old town?”

She was about to say “I don’t know” when the fact swept over her that she didn’t know. Standing here beside a chimney on a prairie of roofs seemed as logical a location as any she had been in for months.

What Clarke said next was as good as though he had guessed her thoughts: “I was looking at a cloud, and then you stepped out of it.”

It was almost too much. And Dolly couldn’t say, “Open the skylight and let me come down and have your measles with you.” All she could say was, “Good-by. Glad you’re looking so well.”

“Are you going?”

“I’ve got to get back.”

“Oh, bunk! Your uncle won’t mind. My aunt says she used to know him.”

For an instant Dolly felt the urge to tell Clarke everything. But he was so beautiful there in his glass prison. She would not let her troubles come even that near to touching him, if she could help it.

*****

Dolly worked late at lessons, and was rather upset, deep in the evening, when Miss Willie flew up with some drugstore sandwiches and the information that her Uncle Charlie sent his love.

“Has he had the doctor?”

“Of course.”

But somehow Dolly was far from reassured.

Next afternoon, after leaving her friends at school with staccato assurances that they would meet at the party, she pondered the advisability of wiring her father. On her way upstairs she heard Miss Willie’s voice in the major’s room:

“You had studs when we left.”

“I have studs now, if I can find them. Cheer up! I can always borrow Uncle Charlie’s.”

Miss Willie laughed. It was an unpleasant laugh, both shrill and shrunken, like a bird so used to being scared that she never knew whether to start a song or not. Dolly, heartened by her familiar day at school, was once again tempted to try Uncle Charlie’s door; but a sudden scuffle in the major’s room sent her flying upstairs in a panic.

“What must I do?” she asked herself. “I can’t tell anybody, because it’s my uncle’s house.”

On her way downstairs some time later, she heard the major and Miss Willie bickering in the lower hall, and drew back in the shadows. But from the sudden fading of their voices she knew that they had heard her footsteps, so she continued on down.

The major wore a full-dress suit. His stick like a slung gun, the white gleam of his gloves, the thin string of his monocle — all these made Dolly sure he would be a success at Angela Duckney’s that evening. And she resented it. She was sorry now that she had ever introduced him to the older girl.

“Ah, the future debutante,” remarked the major gallantly. “May I drop you anywhere?”

“Oh, no. I’m just going around the comer.”

*****

Throughout the supper and the finding of old friends under black satin dominoes, Dolly was haunted by the image of the Englishman. She had never before known what it was to hate, for her father had thrown a protective screen about the motherless girl.

The Halloweeners, about to start outdoors for the real fun of the evening, stood in a group of two dozen, black-masked, clown-white with flour. Suddenly Dolly wiped the flour from her hand on a bare spot under John Hamilton’s ear.

“Hey, quit!” he protested.” Or, if you must act your age, try it on the boyfriend.”

“What boy friend?” she asked John.

“Oh, you don’t know? Well, everybody else in your school seems to know his name. Clarke Somebody.”

“Clarke Cresswell? Why, how — Where is he?”

“Over there, lapping up ice cream.”

A tough voice broke out suddenly over the soft young raillery: “All out, now — one by one. Just a formality, boys and girls.”

“I think that man’s a detective!” John whispered into Dolly’s ear. “Something’s been stolen, I bet.”

She scarcely heard him. As they trooped toward the door she kept looking about for Clarke, hoping to spot him before the mask dropped over her face and obscured her vision. The edge of the mask was tipped at the door and the rough voice said, “O.K., little lady.”

*****

She was next to the last one out; the last was a girl clown-white with flour. On the front steps the host stood and whispered something to three men who kept their hands in their pockets. The party hesitated on the sidewalk.

“Go on, go on, children,” directed the host suddenly. “What’s happened doesn’t concern you.”

It was just at that moment that, from some person indistinguishable in the darkness, Dolly heard a trill of high birdish laughter.

Miss Willie! Which one of the masked faces was hers — and where, oh, where was Clarke? There! That tall one. She darted toward him and lifted her mask.

“Well!” he exclaimed. “Well, where were you when the crown jewels disappeared? I thought sure you had them.”

“I thought sure you had the measles.”

“So did the doctor; but that was his mistake. He just thought if everybody in my school had measles I must have them too.” In the light of a street lamp he bent to look at her. “You’re shaking! What’s the matter?”

A sob broke from Dolly. “I’m worried about Uncle Charlie. They won’t let me see him.”

“Who won’t?”

“The friends that are staying with him.” Even in her anxiety she forced herself to be no more specific.

“Anything I can do?”

They were tagging a little behind the others. Suddenly she said, “I think he’s alone now. I want to see him. Will you duck the crowd and go with me?”

Uncle Charlie’s front door was locked and Dolly had no key.

“I’ve got to see my uncle,” she said. “Can’t we climb up that fire escape in the alley? It goes right by his room.”

Clarke inspected, then reported back: “It’s ten feet off the ground. But we can go through my aunt’s house and over the roof.”

Miss Terhune’s. house was inky black, but when they came out on the roof cold autumn stars were showing.

“Now tell me what it’s all about,” Clarke demanded.

It was about her pride, but she could never tell him that. “Aren’t the stars nice?” she said. “China eyes.”

“Honestly, you’re the funniest girl I ever knew! Once I thought you and I had a lot in common, but — “

“How’ll we get down to Uncle Charlie’s room?” Dolly interrupted.

“The fire escape, of course. We can get down, even if we can’t get up.”

The night was chilly, but Dolly felt warm. They backed down the iron skeleton, Clarke ahead so that if she slipped she would fall into his arms. On the second landing they faced a dark window.

“It’s stuck,” whispered Clarke. “I’ll try from the top.”

That worked, and she scrambled in.

“Can I come in?” Clarke whispered from the fire escape.

“Yes — and turn on the lights!”

The bed sprang into life. It was a great dust-covered heap of blankets and pillows piled a yard high.

There wasn’t any Uncle Charlie, then, and never had been. Dolly knew it, plain as plain. “May I come back to your house?” she asked. “And stay all night at Miss Terhune’s?”

“You know you can.”

“Let’s go,” she said. “Now!”

“But what about your uncle?”

“I never want to hear of him again. And I don’t want you to tell Miss Terhune anything!”

“All right, if you don’t want me to. We’ll just tell her you got locked out.”

“Come on! Hurry!” Dolly had heard the sound of voices and footsteps in the lower hall.

*****

Major Redfern usually tipped the taxi driver, but tonight he only had a brusque “Thanks very much” and a stray thought as to whether the driver would be liable to remember where he had picked up his fare.

For the major had seen a ghost at the exact moment when he had presented Angela Duckney’s card at her ball. Even though seen obliquely and halfway across the room, the major had identified it immediately as that of one Hep J. Morrison, who was built on somewhat the same ruthless dimensions as himself. There was no room there for both of them, so the major withdrew precipitately, even neglecting to go down the receiving line.

But he felt sure, as he stood in front of the checkroom, that his business rival had not seen him.

“Yes, my hat. And a cape and a stick,” he agreed mildly.

Let there be no ambiguity at this point. The major was a bad man with high hopes, and the Baltimore venture had been among his hopes. But with Hep J. Morrison working the same town there were no more hopes.

Except, of course, the little girl! He considered the possibilities all the way home. Then, turning from the taxicab, he saw a small form on the stoop, shivering in a black domino and with a face so caked with flour that he hardly recognized it.

He opened the door, almost throwing Miss Willie inside. “Now what is it? Where’ve you been?”

“Look!” Out of her pocket she drew an emerald bracelet. Then from the top of her stocking she produced a platinum-and-diamond wrist watch. “Look at that!” she sang proudly.

“Where did you get this stuff?”

“At the party around the corner. I didn’t touch anything else — honest! There wasn’t another thing worth taking.”

“Once a klep, always a klep,” he said. “Look here. We’re leaving right away. Hep Morrison was at the ball, so we’ll have to try Atlanta. Where’s Dolly?”

“She’s still with the party. They have no idea who snitched the stuff.”

He unwound his white scarf, folded it, and put it in his side pocket. “Soon as we’re packed we’ll go find that kid and then clear out. Is there anything to drink?”

“There’s some gin up in ‘Uncle Charlie’s room.’”

With that the major and Miss Willie went upstairs.

*****

Dolly had left her bag behind in that awful house, and the fact haunted her at school next day. She was even more worried when, after her first class, she was summoned to Miss Terhune’s study.

“Sit down, Dolly.” The teacher leaned forward over her desk and said, “Tell me: Was there any trouble at your uncle’s last night? My nephew won’t tell me a thing.”

“All I want to do is get my bag, Miss Terhune. I left it there, you know. Then I’m going back to the Appletons’. But I certainly appreciate your taking me in last night.”

Miss Terhune shifted in her chair. “Dolly, a telegram has just come from your father. He is on his way to Baltimore. And until he arrives you’d better stay right with me. This afternoon I’ll have Clarke go with you to get your bag. And if your uncle is there, tell him I’d like to see him.”

The door of 2008 was open when they got there, and the front blinds were up. Dolly peered in cautiously. Then she turned to Clarke and said, “There’s three men inside. Will you go in with me?”

They were jostled suddenly by an expressman who had been trundling a small truck in the street. “Who you looking for?” he demanded.

“I happen to have left a small suitcase here,” said Dolly.

“Well, talk to the man that owns the place.”

The children hesitated, but were swept almost literally into the hall ahead of the expressman and his trunk. “Even before they were well inside, a man collared Clarke and marched him toward two other men within. The first was a quiet gray-haired man of fifty in the act of pulling a piece of cloth from a painting; the second was a grim-faced six-footer with a pad in his hand.

“That’s not the pair,” said the gray-haired man. “Why, these are just kids. What do you want here?”

“They might be working for the couple — “ began the tall detective.

But the gray-haired man was looking at Dolly, “Open that other window,” he said. She returned his gaze without fear, for he seemed like her own sort at last. And as the light came in he said, “You’re Morton Haines’ child.”

“Are you Uncle Charlie?” Dolly demanded.

The man with the notebook was also surveying Dolly closely. In a low voice he said,” Be careful, Mr. Craig.”

“It’s all right,” said Uncle Charlie. “This is my niece.”

Dolly made one of those lightning decisions that sometimes got her in trouble, sometimes stood her in good stead. She would never say anything about what had occurred — never anything at all.

Catching the negative headshake by which she signaled this decision to Clarke, the detective frowned.

But Charlie Craig continued, “It’s all right. I’d vouch for her anywhere, with her father’s eyes and nose.”

“Well, if you’re sure, sir.”

“Of course I’m sure. I know my kin.” He turned to Dolly. “You might introduce your friend.”

“This is Clarke Cresswell. He’s a nephew of Miss Grace Terhune.”

Mr. Craig turned to the detective. “That clinches it. I’ve known Miss Terhune since she was a foot high. You’re my guest here, young lady. I wrote your father I’d be glad to put you up. Where are your things?”

“I brought my suitcase over,” said Dolly, lying promptly.

He came close and took her hand. “I want to know you,” he said.

*****

“So that’s that,” the detective said to Mr. Craig. “The man is known as Dodo Gilbert, but he calls himself Lord Dana or George Whilomville or sometimes Major Redfern. And the woman named Birdie or Willie Lukas is an old hand at shoplifting.”

“I haven’t missed anything here so far. But I’m glad my niece didn’t come into this house three days ago!”

They heard the phone ring and Dolly answering it.

“Just a minute,” she said; “you want my uncle.” She raised her voice: “Somebody wants you, Uncle Charlie.” And then, “What? Oh, daddy! When did you get here?”

After she rang off, she gazed at the hall, glowing from newly opened windows. Clarke did not know what the new light in Dolly’s eyes was, but it meant she was home at last.

INSIDE THE HOUSE

When Bryan Bowers came home in the late afternoon, three boys were helping Gwen to decorate the tree. He was glad, for she had bought too big a tree to climb around herself, and he had not relished the prospect of crawling over the ceiling.

The boys stood up as he came in, and Gwen introduced them:

“Jim Bennett, daddy, and Satterly Brown you know, and Jason Crawford you know.”

He was glad she had said the names. So many boys had been there throughout the holidays that it had become somewhat confusing.

He sat down for a moment.

“Don’t let me interrupt. I’ll be leaving you shortly.”

It struck him that the three boys looked old, or certainly large, beside Gwen, though none was over sixteen. She was fourteen, almost beautiful, he thought — would be beautiful, if she had looked a little more like her mother. But she had such a pleasant profile and so much animation that she had become rather too popular at too early an age.

“Are you at school here in the city?” he asked the new young man.

“No, sir. I’m at S’n Regis; just home for the holidays.”

Jason Crawford, the boy with the wavy yellow pompadour and horn-rimmed glasses, said, with an easy laugh:

“He couldn’t take it here, Mr. Bowers.”

Bryan continued to address the new boy:

“Those little lights you’re working at are the biggest nuisance about a Christmas tree. One bulb always misses and then it takes forever to find which one it is.”

“That’s just what happened now.”

“You said it, Mr. Bowers,” said Jason.

Bryan looked up at his daughter, balanced on a stepladder.

“Aren’t you glad I told you to put these men to work?” he asked. “Think of old daddy having to do this.”

Gwen agreed from her precarious perch: “It would have been hard on you, daddy. But wait till I get this tinsel thing on.”

“You aren’t old, Mr. Bowers,” Jason offered.

“I feel old.”

Jason laughed, as if Bryan had said something witty.

Bryan addressed Satterly:

“How do things go with you, Satterly? Make the first hockey team?”

“No, sir. Never really expected to.”

“He gets in all the games,” Jason supplied.

Bryan got up.

“Gwen, why don’t you hang these boys on the tree?” he suggested. “Don’t you think a Christmas tree covered with boys would be original?”

“I think —  — “ began Jason, but Bryan continued:

“I’m sure none of them would be missed at home. You could call up their families and explain that they were only being used as ornaments till after the holidays.”

He was tired, and that was his best effort. With a general wave, he went toward his study.

Jason’s voice followed him:

“You’d get tired seeing us hanging around, Mr. Bowers. Better change your mind about letting Gwen have dates.”

Bryan turned around sharply. “What do you mean about ‘dates’?”

Gwen peeked over the top of the Christmas tree. “He just means about dates, daddy. Don’t you know what a date is?”

“Well now, will one of you tell me just exactly what a date is?”

All the boys seemed to begin to talk at once.

“Why, a date is —  — “

“Why, Mr. Bowers —  — “

“A date —  — “

He cut through their remarks:

“Is a ‘date’ anything like what we used to call an engagement?”

Again the cacophony commenced.

“ —  — No, a date is —  — “

“ —  — An engagement is —  — “

“ —  — It’s sort of more —  — “

Bryan looked up at the Christmas tree from which Gwen’s face stared out from the tinsel somewhat like the Cheshire cat in Alice in Wonderland.

“Heaven’s sakes, don’t fall out of the tree about it,” he said.

“Daddy, you don’t mean to say that you don’t know what a date is?”

“A date is something you can have at home,” said Bryan. He started to go to his study but Jason supplied: “Mr. Bowers, I can explain to you why Gwen won’t fall out of the tree —  — “

Bryan closed his door on the remark and stood near it.

“That young man is extremely fresh,” he thought.

Stretched out on his divan for half an hour, he let the worries of the day slip from his shoulders. At the end of that time there was a knock, and he sat up, saying:

“Come in… Oh, hello, Gwen.” He stretched and yawned.

“How’s your metabolism?”

“What’s metabolism? You asked me that one other afternoon.”

“I think it’s something everybody has. Like a liver.”

She had a question to ask him and did not pursue the subject further:

“Daddy, did you like them? Those boys?”

“Sure.”

“How do you like Jason?”

He pretended to be obtuse.

“Which one was he?”

“You know very well. Once you said he was fresh. But he wasn’t this afternoon, did you think?”

“The boy with all the yellow fuzz?”

“Daddy, you know very well which one he was.”

“I wasn’t sure. Because you told me if I didn’t let you go out alone at night, Jason wouldn’t come to see you again. So I thought this must be some boy who looked like him.”

She shook off his teasing.

“I do know this, daddy: That if I’m not allowed to have dates, nobody’s going to invite me to the dance.”

“What do you call this but a date? Three boys. If you think I’m going to let you race around town at night with some kid, you’re fooling yourself. He can come here any night except a school night.”

“It isn’t the same,” she said mournfully.

“Let’s not go over that. You told me that all the girls you knew had these dates, but when I asked you to name even one —  — “

“All right, daddy. The way you talk you’d think it was something awful we were going to do. We just want to go to the movies.”

“To see Peppy Velance again.”

She admitted that was their destination.

“I’ve heard nothing but Peppy Velance for two months. Dinner’s one long movie magazine. If that girl is your ideal, why don’t you be practical about it and learn to tap like her? If you just want to be a belle —  — “

“What’s a belle?”

“A belle?” Bryan was momentarily unable to understand that the term needed definition. “A belle? Why, it’s what your mother was. Very popular — that sort of thing.”

“Oh. You mean the nerts.”

“What?”

“Being the nerts — having everybody nerts about you.”

“What?” he repeated incredulously.

“Oh, now, don’t get angry, daddy. Call it a belle then.”

He laughed, but as she stood beside his couch, silent and a little resentful, a wave of contrition went over him as he remembered that she was motherless. Before he could speak, Gwen said in a tight little voice:

“I don’t think your friends are so interesting! What am I supposed to do — get excited about some lawyers and doctors?”

“We won’t discuss that. You have the day with your friends. When you’re home in the evening, you’ve got to be a little grown up. There’s a lawyer coming here tonight to dinner, and I’d like you to make a good impression on him.”

“Then I can’t go to the movies?”

“No.”

Silent and expressionless, save for the faint lift of her chin, Gwen stood a moment. Then she turned abruptly and left the room.

II

Mr. Edward Harrison was pleased to find his friend’s little girl so polite and so pleasant to look at. Bryan, wanting to atone for his harshness of the afternoon, introduced him as the author of “The Music Goes Round and Round.”

For a moment, Gwen looked at Mr. Harrison, startled. Then they laughed together.

During dinner, the lawyer tried to draw her out:

“Do you plan to marry? Or to take up a career?”

“I think that I’d like to be a debutante.” She looked at her father reproachfully, “And maybe have dates on the side. I haven’t got any talents for a career that I know about.”

Her father interrupted her:

“She has though. She ought to make a good biologist — or else she could be a chemist making funny artificial fingernails.” He changed his tone: “Gwen and I had a little run-in on the subject of careers this afternoon. She’s stage-struck, and I’d rather have her do something about it than just talk.”

Mr. Harrison turned to Gwen. “Why don’t you?” he asked. “I can give you some tips. I do a lot of theatrical business. Probably know some of your favorites.”

“Do you know Peppy Velance?”

“She’s a client of mine.”

Gwen was thrilled.

“Is she nice?”

“Yes. But I’m more interested in you. Why not go in for a career if your father thinks you have the necessary stuff?”

How could Gwen tell him it was because she was happy the way things were? How could she explain to him what she hardly knew herself — that her feeling for Peppy Velance only stood for loveliness — enchanted gardens, ballrooms through which to walk with enchanted lovers? Starlight and tunes.

The stage! The very word frightened her. That was work, like school. But somewhere there must exist a world of which Peppy Velance’s pictures were only an echo, and this world seemed to lie just ahead — proms and parties of people at gay resorts. She could not cry out to Mr. Harrison, “I don’t want a career, because I’m a romantic little snob. Because I want to be a belle, a belle, a belle” — the word ringing like a carillon inside her.

So she only said:

“Please tell me about Peppy Velance.”

“Peppy Velance? Let’s see.”

He thought for a moment. “She’s a kid from New Mexico. Her name’s really Schwartze. Sweet. About as much brains as the silver peacock on your buffet. Has to be coached before every scene, so she can talk English. And she’s having a wonderful time with her success. Is that satisfactory?”.

It was far from being satisfactory to Gwen. But she didn’t believe him.

He was an old man, about forty, like her father, and Peppy Velance had probably never looked at him romantically.

The important thing was that Jason would arrive presently, and maybe two other boys and a girl. They would have some sort of time — in spite of the fact that a sortie into the world of night was forbidden.

“One girl at school knows Clark Gable,” she said, switching the subject. “Do you know him, Mr. Harrison?”

“No,” Mr. Harrison said in such a funny way that both father and daughter looked at him. His face had turned gray.

“I wonder if I could ask for a cup of coffee.”

The host stepped on the bell.

“Do you want to lie down, Ed?”

“No, thanks. I brought a brief case of work to do on the train and the strain on the eyes always seems to affect the old pump.”

Being one of those who had made an unwelcome breakfast of chlorine gas eighteen years before, Bryan understood that Mr. Harrison could never be quite sure. As the other man drank his coffee, the world was still swimming and he felt the need of telling this pretty little girl something — before the tablecloth got darker.

“Were you offended at what I said about Peppy Velance? You were. I saw you wondering how an old man like me would dare even talk about her.”

“Honestly —  — “

He waved her silent with a feeling that his own time was short.

“I didn’t want to give you the idea that all actresses are as superficial as Peppy. It’s a fine career. Lots of intelligent women go into it now.”

What was it that he wanted to tell her? There was something in that eager little face that he longed to help.

He shook his head from side to side when Bryan asked him once more if he would like to lie down.

“Of course, it’s better to do things than to talk about them,” he said, catching his breath with an effort.

He choked on the coffee. “Nobody wants a lot of bad actresses. But it would be nice if all girls were to do something.”

As his weakness increased he felt that, perhaps, it was this pretty little girl’s face he was fighting. Then he fainted.

Afterwards he was on his feet with Bryan’s arm supporting him.

“No… Here on Gwen’s sofa … till I can get the doctor… Gently… There you are… Gwen, I want you to stay in the room a minute.”

She was thinking:

“Jason will be here any time now.” She wished her father would hurry at the phone. Growing up during her mother’s illness had inevitably made her callous about such things.

Their doctor lived almost across the street. When he arrived, she and her father retired to his study.

“What do you think, daddy? Will Mr. Harrison have to go to a hospital?”

“I don’t know whether they’ll want to move him.”

“What about Jason then?”

Abstracted, he only half heard her. “I hope it’s nothing serious about Mr. Harrison, but did you notice the color of his face?”

The doctor came into the study and held a quiet conversation with him, from which Gwen caught the words “trained nurse,” and “I’ll call the drugstore.”

As Bryan started into the other room, she said:

“Daddy, if Jason and I went out —  — “

She broke off as he turned.

“You and Jason aren’t going out. I told you that.”

“But if Mr. Harrison’s got to stay in the guest room right next door, where you can hear every word —  — “

She stopped again at the expression in her father’s face when what she was saying dawned on him.

“Call Jason right away and tell him not to come,” he said. He shook his head from side to side: “Good Lord! Whose little girl are you?”

III

Six days later Gwen came home, propelling herself as if she were about to dive into a ditch just ahead. She wore a sort of hat that evidently heaven had sent down upon her. It had lit as an ornament on her left temple, and when she raised her hand to her head, it slid — the impression being that it was held by an invisible elastic, which might snap at any moment and send it, with a zip, back into space.

“Where did you get it?” the cook asked enviously as she came in through the pantry entrance.

“Get what?”

“Where did you get it?” her father asked as she came into his study.

“This?” Gwen asked incredulously.

“It’s all right with me.”

The maid had followed her in, and he said, in answer to her question:

“We’ll have the same diet ordered for Mr. Harrison. Wait a minute — if Gwen’s hat floats out the window, take a shotgun out of the closet — and see if you can bring it down, like a duck.”

In her room, Gwen removed the article of discussion, putting it delicately on her dresser for present admiration. Then she went to pay her daily visit to Mr. Harrison.

He was so much better that he was on the point of getting up. When Gwen came in, he sent, the nurse for some water and lay back momentarily. To Gwen he looked more formidable as he got better. His hair, from lack of cutting, wasn’t like the smooth coiffures of her friends. She wished her father knew handsomer people.

“I’m about to get up and make my arrangements to go back to New York to work. Before I go, though, I want to tell you something.”

“All right, Mr. Harrison. I’m listening.”

“It’s seldom you find beauty and intelligence in the same person. When you do they have to spend the first part of their life terribly afraid of a flame that they will have to put out someday —  — “

“Yes, Mr. Harrison —  — “

“ —  — and sometimes they spend the rest of their life trying to wake up that same flame. Then it’s like a kid trying to make a bonfire out of two sticks, only this time one of the sticks is the beauty they have lost and the other stick is the intelligence they haven’t cultivated — and the two sticks won’t make a bonfire — and they just think that life has done them a dirty trick, when the truth is these two sticks would never set fire to each other. And now go call the nurse for me, Gwen.” As she left the room he called after her, “Don’t be too hard on your father.”

She turned around from the door — “What do you mean, don’t be hard on father?”

“He loved somebody who was beautiful, like you.”

“You mean mummy?”

“You do look like her. Nobody could ever actually be like her.” He broke off to write a check for the nurse, and as if he was impelled by something outside himself he added, “So did many other men.” He brought himself up sharply and asked the nurse, “Do I owe anything more to the night nurse?” Then once again to Gwen:

“I want to tell you about your father,” he said. “He never got over your mother’s death, never will. If he is hard on you, it is because he loves you.”

“He’s never hard on me,” she lied.

“Yes, he is. He is unjust sometimes, but your mother —  — “ He broke off and said to the nurse, “Where’s my tie?”

“Here it is, Mr. Harrison.”

After he had left the house in a flurry of telephoning, Gwen took her bath, weighted her fresh, damp hair with curlers, and drew herself a mouth with the last remnant from a set of varicolored lipsticks that had belonged to her mother. Encountering her father in the hall she looked at him closely in the light of what Mr. Harrison had said, but she only saw the father she had always known.

“Daddy, I want to ask you once more. Jason has invited me to go to the movies with him tonight. I thought you wouldn’t mind — if there were four of us. I’m not absolutely sure Dizzy can come, but I think so. Since Mr. Harrison’s been here I haven’t been able to have any company.”

“Don’t do anything about it until you’ve had your dinner,” Bryan said. “What’s the use of having an admirer if you can’t dangle him a little?”

“Dangle how, what do you mean?”

“Well, I just meant make him wait.”

“But, daddy, how could I make him wait when he’s the most important boy in town?”

“What is this all about?” he demanded. “Seems to be a question of whether this prep-school hero has his wicked way with you or whether I have mine. And anyhow, it’s just possible that something more amusing will turn up.”

Gwen seemed to have no luck that night — on the phone Dizzy said:

“I’m almost sure I can go, but I don’t know absolutely.”

“You call me back whatever happens.”

“You call me. Mother thinks I can go, but she doesn’t think she can do anything now, ‘cause there’s something under the sink and father hasn’t come home.”

“The sink!”

“We don’t know exactly what it is; it may be a water main or something. That’s why everybody’s afraid to go downstairs. I can’t tell you anything definite until father comes home.”

“Dizzy! I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“We’re so upset out here too. I’ll explain when I see you. Anyhow, mother’s telling me to put the phone down” — there was a momentary interruption — “so they can get to the plumber.”

Then the phone hung up with an impact that suggested that all the plumbers in the world were arriving in gross.

Immediately the phone rang again. It was Jason.

“Well, how about it, can we go to the movies?”

“I don’t know. I just finished talking to Dizzy. The water main’s busted and she has to have a plumber.”

“Can’t you go to the picture whether she can or not? I’ve got the car and our chauffeur.”

“No, I can’t go alone and Dizzy’s got this thing.”

The impression in Gwen’s voice was that plague was raging in the suburbs.

“What?”

“Never mind, never mind. I don’t understand it myself. If you want to know more about it call up Dizzy.”

“But Peppy Velance is in Night Train at the Eleanora Duse Theater — you know, the little place just about two blocks from where you live.”

There was a long pause. Then Gwen’s voice said: “A-l-1 right. I’ll go whether Dizzy can go or not.”

She met her father presently with a guilty feeling, but before she could speak he said:

“Put on your hat — and your rubbers; feels stormy outside; plans are changed and we’re dining out.”

“Daddy, I don’t want to go out. I’ve got homework to do.”

He was disappointed.

“I’d rather stay here,” Gwen continued. “I’m expecting company.”

At the false impression she was giving she felt something go out of her. With an attempt at self-justification she added, “Daddy, I get good marks at school, and just because I happen to like some boys —  — “

Bryan tied his muffler again and bent over to pull on his overshoes. “Good-by,” he said.

“What do you mean?” inquired Gwen uncertainly.

“I merely said good-by, darling.”

“But you kind of scared me, daddy, you talk as if you were going away forever.”

“I won’t be late. I just thought you might come along, because someone amusing might be there.”

“I don’t want to go, daddy.”

IV

But after her father had gone it was no fun sitting beside the phone waiting for Jason to call. When he did phone, she started downstairs to meet him — she was still in a bad humor — a fact that she displayed to one of the series of trained nurses that had been taking care of Mr. Harrison. This one had just come in and she wore blue glasses, and Gwen said with unfamiliar briskness:

“I don’t know where Mr. Harrison is; I think he was going to meet daddy at some party and I guess they will be back sometime.”

On her way down in the elevator she thought: “But I do know where daddy is.”

“Stop!” she said to the elevator man. “Take me upstairs again.”

He brought the car to rest.

But a great stubbornness seemed to have come over Gwen with her decision to be disobedient.

“No, go on down,” she said.

It haunted her though when she met Jason and they trudged their way through the gathering snowstorm to the car.

They had scarcely started off before there was a short struggle.

“No, I won’t kiss you,” Gwen said. “I did that once and the boy that kissed me told about it. Why should I? Nobody does that any more — at my age anyhow.”

“You’re fourteen.”

“Well, wait till I’m fifteen then. Maybe it’ll be the thing to do by that time.”

They sank back in opposite corners of the car. “Then I guess you won’t like this picture,” said Jason, “because I understand it’s pretty hot stuff. When Peppy Velance gets together with this man in the dive in Shanghai I understand —  — “

“Oh, skip it,” Gwen exploded.

She scarcely knew why she had liked him so much an hour before.

The snow had gathered heavily on the portico of the theater with the swirl of a Chesapeake Bay blizzard, and she was glad of the warmth within. Momentarily, as the newsreel unwound, she forgot her ill-humor, forgot her unblessed excursion into the night — forgot everything except that she had not told the nurse where her father could be found.

At the end of the newsreel she said to Jason:

“Isn’t there a drugstore where I could phone home, where we could go out to for just a minute?”

“But the feature’s going on in just a minute,” he objected, “and it’s snowing so hard.”

All through the shorts, though, it worried her, so much that in a scene where Mickey Mouse skated valiantly over the ice she seemed to see snow falling into the theater too. Suddenly she grabbed Jason’s arm and shook him as if to shake herself awake — though she didn’t feel asleep — because the snow was falling. It was falling in front of the screen in drips and then in larger pebblelike pieces and then in a scatter of what looked like snowballs. Other people must have noticed the same phenomenon at the same time, for the projecting machine went off with a click and left the house dark; the dim house lights went on and the four ushers on duty in the little picture house ran down the aisles with confused expressions to see what the trouble was.

Gwen heard a quick twitter of alarm behind her; a stout man who had stumbled over them coming in said in an authoritative voice, “Say, I think the ceiling is caving in.” And immediately several people rose around them.

“Hold on,” the man cried. “Don’t anybody lose their heads.”

It was one of those uncertain moments in a panic where tragedy might intervene by an accidental word, and as if realizing this a temporary hush came over the crowd. The ushers stopped in their tracks. The first man to see and direct the situation was the projector operator who came out from his booth and leaned over the balcony, crying down:

“The snow has broken through the roof. Everybody go out the side exits marked with the little red lights. No, I said the side exits — the little red lights.” Trouble was developing at the main entrance too, but he didn’t want them to know about it. “Don’t rush; you’re just risking your own lives. You men down there crack anybody that even looks as if they were going to run.”

After an uncertain desperate moment the crowd decided to act together.

They filed slowly out through the emergency exits, some of them half afraid even to look toward the screen now only a white blank almost imperceptible through the interior snowstorm that screened it in turn. They all behaved well, as American crowds do, and they were out in the adjoining street and alley before the roof gave way altogether.

Gwen went out calmly.

What she felt most strongly in the street with the others was that the durn snow might have waited a little longer because Peppy Velance’s picture was about to start.

V

The manager had been the last to leave and he was now telling the anxious crowd that everyone had left the theater before the roof fell in. It was only then that Gwen thought of Jason and realized that he was no longer with her —  —

That, in fact, from the moment of the near calamity he had not been beside her at all — but just might have been snowed under by the general collapse. Then — as she joined the throng of those who had lost each other and were finding each other again in the confusion — her eye fell upon him on the outskirts of the crowd and she started toward him.

She ran against policemen coming up and small boys rushing toward the accident and she was held up by the huge drift of snow that still gathered about the fallen portico.

When she was clear of the crowd, Jason was somehow out of sight. But she had a dollar in her pocket, and she hesitated between trying to get a taxi or walking the few blocks home. She decided on the latter.

The snow that had brought down the movie house continued. She had meant to be home surely before her father and had calculated on only one hour of time that she would never be able to account for to herself — but time she knew that sooner or later she would account for to her father.

As she walked along she thought that she had made the nurse wait, too, but now she was almost home and she could straighten that out. As she passed the second block she thought of Jason with contempt, and thought:

“If he couldn’t wait for me why should I wait for him?”

She reached the apartment prepared to face her father with the truth and what necessary result would evolve.

VI

There was a coat of snow on her shoulders as she came into the apartment.

Her father in the sitting room heard her key in the lock and came to the door before she opened it. “I have been worried,” he said. “You’ve never gone out before against my orders. What happened?”

“We went to see Peppy Velance at the small theater just over a couple of blocks from here and, daddy, the roof fell in.”

“What roof?”

“The roof of the theater.”

“What!”

“Yes, daddy, the roof fell in.”

“Was anybody killed?”

“No, they got us all out first. Jason didn’t bring me home, but I saw him afterward and I know that he’s all right, and the man said nobody was hurt.”

“I’m glad I didn’t think of all that.”

“It was the snow,” said Gwen. “I know you’re pretty sore, but it’s been so dull this whole week, with Mr. Harrison sick and this is the last Peppy Velance was going to be at the Eleanora Duse —  — “

“Peppy Velance was here. She left ten minutes ago. She was waiting to see you.”

“What?”

“You saw her tonight, even if you didn’t know it. She flew down from New York to see Mr. Harrison about some business, but you seemed to be in an awful hurry. Mr. Harrison didn’t expect her so soon. We brought her back here because I knew that you might like to meet her properly.”

“Daddy!”

“I suppose you didn’t recognize her because she had on blue glasses, but she took them off, and when she’s got them off she looks just as human as anyone else.”

Stricken, Gwen sat down and repeated, “Was she here, daddy?”

“Well, Mr. Harrison seems to think so and he ought to know.”

“Where is Peppy Velance now?”

“She and Mr. Harrison had plans to catch the midnight train to New York. He left you his regards. Say, you haven’t caught cold, have you?”

Gwen brushed at her eyes, “No, these are only snowflakes. Daddy, do you mean that she was honestly here all that time while I was out?”

“Yes, daughter, but don’t cry about it. She left you a little box of lipstick with her name on it and it’s on the table.”

“I never thought of her like that,” Gwen said slowly. “I thought there were always a lot of — you know — a lot of attractive men hanging around her. I guess why I didn’t recognize her was because there weren’t any men hanging around her. Go on, daddy; tell me — at least, was she attractive — like mummy was?”

“She wasn’t like mummy, but she was very nice — I hope you didn’t catch cold.”

“I don’t think so.” She sniffed experimentally, “No, I’m sure I didn’t. Isn’t it funny I went out and the blizzard came? I wish I’d stayed here where it was safe and warm —  — “ On her way to her room she ruminated aloud:

“I guess most important things happen inside the house, don’t they, daddy?”

“You go to bed.”

“All right, daddy.”

Her door closed gently. What went on behind it he would never know. He wrote her a short note saying:

“Peppy Velance and Mr. Harrison are coming to dinner tomorrow night.” He stood it up against the English-history book on the table. Then he moved it to rest against the little tin satchel that the maid would fill with sandwiches for school in the morning.

LO, THE POOR PEACOCK!

Miss McCrary put the leather cover over the typewriter. Since it was the last time, Jason came over and helped her into her coat, rather to her embarrassment.

“Mr. Davis, remember if anything comes up that I didn’t cover on the memorandum, just you telephone. The letters are off; the files are straight. They’ll call for the typewriter on Monday.”

“You’ve been very nice.”

“Oh, don’t mention it. It’s been a pleasure. I’m only sorry — “

Jason murmured the current shibboleth: “If times pick up — “

A moment after her departure her face reappeared in the doorway.

“Give my love to the little girl. And I hope Mrs. Davis is better.”

At once it was lonely in the office. Not because of Miss McCrary’s physical absence — her presence often intruded on him — but because she was gone for good. Putting on his coat Jason looked at the final memorandum — it contained nothing that need be done today — or in three days. It was nice to have a cleared desk, but he remembered days when business was so active, so pulsating that he telephoned instructions from railroad trains, radiographed from shipboard.

At home he found Jo and two other little girls playing Greta Garbo in the living room. Jo was so happy and ridiculous, so clownish with the childish smudge of rouge and mascara, that he decided to wait till after luncheon to introduce the tragedy.

Passing through the pantry he took a slant-eyed glance at the little girls still in masquerade, realizing that presently he would have to deflate one balloon of imagination. The child who was playing Mae West — to the extent of saying ‘Come up and see me sometime’ — admitted that she had never been permitted to see Mae West on the screen; she had been promised that privilege when she was fourteen.

Jason had been old enough for the war; he was thirty-eight. He wore a salt-and-pepper mustache; he was of middle height and well-made within the first ready-made suit he had ever owned.

Jo came close and demanded in quick French:

“Can I have these girls for lunch?”

“Pas aujourd’hui.”

“Bien.”

*****

But she had to be told now. He didn’t want to give her bad news in the evening, when she was tired.

After luncheon when the maid had withdrawn, he said:

“I want to talk, now, about a serious matter.”

At the seriousness of his tone her eyes left a lingering crumb.

“It’s about school,” he said.

“About school?”

He plunged into his thesis.

“There’ve been hospital bills and not much business. I’ve figured out a budget — You know what that is: It’s how much you’ve got, placed against how much you can spend. On clothes and food and education and so forth. Miss McCrary helped me figure it out before she left.”

“Has she left? Why?”

“Her mother’s been sick and she felt she ought to stay home and take care of her. And now, Jo, the thing that hits the budget hardest is school.”

Without quite comprehending what was coming, Jo’s face had begun to share the unhappiness of her father’s.

.  “It’s an expensive school with the extras and all — one of the most expensive day schools in the East.”

He struggled to his point, with the hurt that was coming to her germinating in his own throat.

“It doesn’t seem we can afford it any more this year.”

Still Jo did not quite understand, but there was a hush in the dining room.

“You mean I can’t go to school this term?” she asked, finally.

“Oh, you’ll go to school. But not Tunstall.”

“Then I don’t go to Tunstall Monday,” she said in a flat voice. “Where will I go?”

“You’ll take your second term at public school. They’re very good now. Mama never went to anything but a public school.”

“Daddy!” Her voice, comprehending at last, was shocked.

“We mustn’t make a mountain out of a mole-hill. After this year you can probably go back and finish at Tunstall — “

“But Daddy! Tunstall’s supposed to be the best. And you said this term you were satisfied with my marks — “

“That hasn’t anything to do with it. There are three of us, Jo, and we’ve got to consider all three. We’ve lost a great deal of money. There simply isn’t enough to send you.”

Two advance tears passed the frontier of her eyes, and navigated the cheeks.

Unable to endure her grief, he spoke on automatically:

“Which is best — spend too much and get into debt — or draw in our horns for a while?”

Still she wept silently. All the way to the hospital where they were paying their weekly visit she dripped involuntary tears.

Jason had undoubtedly spoiled her. For ten years the Davis household had lived lavishly in Paris; thence he had journeyed from Stockholm to Istamboul, placing American capital in many enterprises. It had been a magnificent enterprise — while it had lasted. They inhabited a fine house on the Avenue Kleber, or else a villa at Beaulieu. There was an English Nanny, and then a governess, who imbued Jo with a sense of her father’s surpassing power. She was brought up with the same expensive simplicity as the children she played with in the Champs Elysees. Like them, she accepted the idea that luxury of life was simply a matter of growing up to it — the right to precedence, huge motors, speed boats, boxes at opera or ballet; Jo had early got into the habit of secretly giving away most of the surplus of presents with which she was inundated.

Two years ago the change began. Her mother’s health failed, and her father ceased to be any longer a mystery man, just back from Italy with a family of Lenci dolls for her. But she was young and adjustable and fitted into the life at Tunstall school, not realizing how much she loved the old life. Jo tried honestly to love the new life too, because she loved things and people and she was prepared to like the still newer change. But it took a little while because of the fact that she loved, that she was built to love, to love deeply and forever.

When they reached the hospital Jason said:

“Don’t tell mother about school. She might notice that it’s hit you rather hard, and make her unhappy. When you get — sort of used to it we’ll tell her.”

“I won’t say anything.”

They followed a tiled passage they both knew to an open door.

“Can we come in?”

“Can you?”

Together husband and daughter embraced her, almost jealously, from either side of the bed. With a deep quiet, their arms and necks strained together.

Annie Lee’s eyes filled with tears.

“Sit down. Have chairs, you all. Miss Carson, we need another chair.”

They had scarcely noticed the nurse’s presence.

“Now tell me everything. Have some chocolates. Aunt Vi sent them. She can’t remember what I can and can’t eat.”

Her face, ivory cold in winter, stung to a gentle wild rose in spring, then in summer pale as the white key of a piano, seldom changed. Only the doctors and Jason knew how ill she was.

“All’s well,” he said. “We keep the house going.”

“How about you, Jo? How’s school? Did you pass your exams?”

“Of course, Mama.”

“Good marks, much better than last year,” Jason added.

“How about the play?” Annie Lee pursued innocently. “Are you still going to be Titania?”

“I don’t know, Mama.”

Jason switched the subject to ‘the farm,’ a remnant of a once extensive property of Annie Lee’s.

“I’d sell it if we could. I can’t see how your mother ever made it pay.”

“She did though. Right up to the day of her death.”

“It was the sausage. And there doesn’t seem to be a market for it any more.”

The nurse warned them that time was up. As if to save the precious minutes Annie Lee thrust out a white hand to each.

*****

As they got into the car, Jo asked:

“Daddy, what happened to our money?”

Well — better tell her than to have her brood about it.

“It’s complicated. The Europeans couldn’t pay interest on what we lent them. You know interest?”

“Of course. We had it in the Second Main.”

“My job was to judge whether a business showed promise, and if I thought so we loaned them money. When bad times came and they couldn’t pay, we wouldn’t loan any more. So my job was played out and we came home.”

He went on to say that the money he had invested in the venture — oh, many thousands, oh, never mind how much, Jo — and now all that money was ‘tied up.’

Under the aegis of the old shot tower they slowed by a garage to fill the tank.

“Why do you like to stop at this station, Daddy? Beside that ugly old chimney over there?”

“That’s not a chimney. Don’t you know what it is? During the Revolution they had to drop lead down to make the bullets to fire at the British. This is a Historical Monument.”

…They rounded the corner of the Confederate dead. Jo spoke again suddenly:

“Americans have a hard time, don’t they, Daddy? Always fights about nothing.”

“Oh well, we’re a fighting race. That’s what brought us here in the first place.”

“But it’s not happy — like in Europe.”

“They have their troubles. Anyhow you were just a child and all shielded.” And he added as they stopped in front of their house, “What of it?”

“Mummy has heart trouble, and you lost your money, and — “

“For heaven’s sake don’t get sorry for yourself!” he said gruffly. “That spoils people for good. We have a nice house, at least.” He felt a pang at knowing that they were going to have to give it up, but he did not want to put too much upon her in one day.

But in the hall Jo was still absorbed in her inner story.

“Daddy, we’re like the characters in Little Orphan Annie, only we haven’t got that dog that says Arp all the time. I never heard a dog say Arp did you? They always have dogs in the funny papers now that say ‘Arp’ or ‘Woof,’ and I never heard a dog say either.”

He was relieved at the turn the conversation had taken.

“I only like the Gumps. Except when I feel mean I like Dick Tracy and X-9.”

Jo sighed as she started to her room.

“Nothing seems so bad — when you only have to read about it,” she said ruefully.

II

Almost before Jo was adjusted to public school the news broke to her of their impending move. It was a far cry from the spacious house with the mutual, free-rolling lawns of the new suburbs, to the little apartment. Into which the big sofa and the big bed simply wouldn’t go and had to repose instead at storage, along with many other things. Jo derived a melancholy consolation from being allowed to act as interior decorator. With some difficulty her father restrained his hilarity.

“I think it’s beautiful, Baby.”

“Oh, I know you don’t. But Daddy, I thought I’d get tinfoil at the five-and-ten and make the whole room silver, like a room in the House Beautiful. But it rumpled. And now it won’t come off — no matter what I do makes it worse!”

During Washington’s Birthday vacation she repainted her furniture. The man from the Cleaning and Dyeing Company looked aghast at the rug he was expected to restore. And that evening at dancing school mothers warned their children away from the violent rashes on her arms — and were appalled — no understatement is possible — by the clearly leprous quality of the green or purple patches that glared like menacing eyes — dull and sinister eyes — from her hair. There had been nothing to do about it; hair is not washed in tears. The patches remained, remained indeed for weeks. After a fortnight they took on a not unattractive hue — attractive, that is to say, to anyone but Jo — of the roofs of many European villages washed down by an avalanche. And mingled. Thoroughly mingled.

The catastrophe discouraged Jo so much that she no longer wanted to go to the Beacon’s Barn dancing class.

Jason argued for it — it was not expensive.

“But there’s no use,” she said, “ — now I don’t go to Tunstall any more. They have secrets. I like a lot of people at school now.”

“You’d better,” her father said.

“Why do you say I’d better?”

In their new isolation these two talked and fought against each other like adults, almost the old sempiternal dispute of man and wife.

Jason hated that it should be that way, hated her to see him in moments of discouragement.

*****

“Let’s go out to the farm,” he said one Saturday at breakfast. “You’ve never been there.”

“Can we afford to run the car?”

“Jo, can’t you forget for a minute that I’m poor? I’ve explained; in the textile business there’re only three or four accounts that pay commissions. That’s like interest. You said you understood that.”

“Yes.”

“And the brokers who have them are naturally hanging on — they had them before I came here. As long as I have to sell second-class merchandise to — “

“Let’s forget it and like the ride.”

“It certainly can go fast, Daddy. Can we really afford to run it?”

“It’s cheaper running fast. I want to get there before they finish making the first batch of sausage.”

It was seventy miles between fields of frosty rubble, between the ever-dividing purple shoulders of the Appalachians, between villages he had never wanted to ask the names of, so much did he cherish the image of them in his heart…

But Jo’s heart was still in France. She was less regarding than thinking.

“Daddy — why couldn’t we just make a lot of money out of the farm? Like grandmother did. And just live on that. And get rich.”

“But there isn’t any farm any more, I tell you. There’s just a —  — just a large pig-sty!”

He retreated from his coarseness as he saw her face contract.

“It isn’t quite all that, Baby. Young Seneca does a little truck farming — “

“Who’s Young Seneca?”

“There was an Old Seneca and now there’s a Young Seneca — “

“When it was a big farm how big was it, Daddy?”

“As far as you can see.”

“Far as the mountains?”

“Not quite.”

“It was a big farm, wasn’t it?”

“It was good and big — even for these parts,” he answered, falling into the vernacular.

After a time Jo asked:

“How do they make the sausage, Daddy?”

“I kind of forget. I think — let’s see — I think the formula is sixteen pounds of lean meat and sixteen of fat meat. And then they grind it all together. Then they knead in the seasoning — nine tablespoons of salt, nine pepper, nine sage — “

“Why nine?”

“That’s what your grandmother did.”

—  — Jason had fed Jo’s insatiable curiosity with as much as he remembered of the process as they turned into the washed-out lane that led to the farm.

Young Seneca, plunged into work, hurried over to greet them.

“How goes?” Jason asked.

“Just startin’, Mr. Davis. We butchered last night. Then a couple of boys thought they had a right to sleep all day. Have I got to pay ‘em for that time? They just keep the dogs off.”

“The dogs?” Jo demanded.

He acknowledged her presence.

“That’s right, Missy. Dogs down here are up to anything. We say: ‘It’s a poor dog that can’t keep his own self.’“

Getting out of the car they walked toward the smokehouse.

“We pay those hands well,” Jason said. “They still get the chitlings and cracklings and hogs’ heads?”

“They gets the regular, Mr. Davis. Even them ditchers work right hard. You take now Aunt Rose that worked for your mother-and-law — she’s been kneadin’ that seasoning till her arms like to fall off.”

The Negress in question greeted them cheerfully.

“Day! Mr. Davis. Day! young lady.”

She left her job momentarily to inspect the child, wiping her hands of the sharp spices on a big old kitchen towel.

“And don’t you look like your mother did?”

Jo wandered into the smokehouse. She passed barrels of flour, salt, lard — of brown sugar, of cut sugar, of sugar granulated. Coming out she ran into a colored girl with a bucket of milk on her head.

“I’m sorry.”

Without losing a bit of her balance the young woman laughed hilariously.

“Don’t need to be sorry. There’s chits been threatnin’ to push me down three years, and none ov’em ever do it.”

…Jo emerged from the smokehouse to find her father in argument with Young Seneca, who broke off from time to time to call instructions to his helpers.

“That there’s a flour sifter you’re using, Aunt Jinnie. You ought to use a cornmeal sifter for getting out them sage stems.”

Jo’s interest was divided between the sausage grinding and her father’s conversation with Young Seneca.

“We’re not making a cheap sausage and listen to this.”

He took a letter from his pocket and read aloud: “‘We cannot undertake to distribute your product any longer because of the cancellations.’ Now I can’t believe that’s just hard times. This used to be the best-known stuff of its kind in the East. It’s fallen off in quality. So where’s your pride, man? They didn’t use to be able to keep up with the orders. Something’s missing.”

“Sure I don’t know what it is, Mr. Davis.”

When they started back a hickory fire flamed against the white sycamores and it was cold.

“Daddy, if the farm was mine I’d try to find out what’s the matter about the sausage.”

Every day Jo lost a little faith in her father. Father had been “wonderful” once, and she went on, because she had been correctly tuned to the idea that duty is everything. She had been early made to put her back and wrists into that great realization — work isn’t all enthusiasm, though that is an essential part of it — in the long stress and strain of life it is more often what one doesn’t want to do any longer.

III

At high school Jo was behind in some subjects but in language classes her only difficulty was to bring her accent down to the level of the rest; her weak spot was Ancient History, which she had never studied — her remark that Julius Caesar was King of Egypt, remembered vaguely from a quick reading of Anthony and Cleopatra, became a teacher’s legend in the school. She made only a few friends at school; she was at the age of existing largely in her imagination.

*****

On Jason’s part it was no help in the dull late winter to know that Jo was losing faith in him. Her right to security and to special privilege as well — this, that was as much a part of her as her sense of responsibility — made a friction between them. But something was gone — Jo’s respect for the all-wise, all-just, all-providing.

He tried to keep up his morale with exercise, and with ceaseless pursuit of better textile accounts. His thin stream of commission money scarcely sufficed to keep his head above water. With one of the big ones he would be on safe ground; for he was favorably known here. Well disposed wholesalers tried to slant in his direction, but they were prevented by a class of merchandise they did not care to carry.

*****

There came the black day when he cracked — the blue black, the purple black, the green black of those unused to it. In the morning the grocer’s wife came; she said loud in the living room that she and her husband did not care to carry the account any longer.

“Be quiet!” Jason warned her. “Wait till the little girl gets off to school.”

“Your little girl! What about mine. One hundred ten dollar — “

Jo’s feet sounded on the stairs.

“Morning Daddy. Oh! Morning Mrs. Deshhacker.”

“Good morning.”

Temporarily, Jo’s imperturbability disarmed Mrs. Deshhacker, but after she had gone into the dining room, she delivered her ultimatum more firmly. Jason could only say:

“I’ll try… Middle of next week… Anyhow a partial payment.”

There was the silver: Certain pieces were inviolate — the Supreme Court Bowl, the Lee spoons with the crest of his grandfather —

Jason had seen the sign many times. Mr. Cale would take any security — was most generous, most reliable.

“How do you do, sir?”

With the infallible good manners of the Marylander, even of the humbler denominations, he stood waiting. His venality scarcely showed through his mask.

Jason mumbled something with a shamed face. Mr. Cale was used to that and stopped him.

“You want to raise some money?”

“Yes — on some silver.”

“What kind?”

“Table silver. Some goblets that have been a long time — “ He broke off — the indignity was intolerable — “and a coffee set.”

“Well naturally you have to show me.”

“Of course. There may be other things — some furniture. A few pieces — I’ll redeem them in a month or so.”

“Oh, I’m sure you will.”

Big chance he will, he added from his own experience…

At the hospital Jason was stopped in the hall and made to sit down by the floor nurse. Doctor Keyster was finishing his rounds and wanted to talk to him before he went into his wife’s room.

“About what?”

“He didn’t say.”

“She’s worse?”

“I don’t know, Mr. Davis. He just wants to talk to you — “

She was cleaning thermometers as she talked.

*****

Half an hour later in a little reception room Dr. Keyster spoke his mind.

“She doesn’t respond. There’s nothing before her but years of rest, that’s all I can say — years of rest. We’ve all got fond of her here but there’d be no service to you in kidding you.”

“She’ll never get well?”

“Probably never.”

“You don’t think she’ll ever be well?” Jason asked again.

“There have been cases — “

……Then the spring was gone out of life, April, May and June. That was all gone.

…April when she came to him like a rill of sweetness. May when she was a hillside. June when they held each other so close that there was nothing more except the lashes flicking on their eyes…

Dr. Keyster said:

“You might as well make up your mind to it, Mr. Davis.”

Going home once more from one of the many pietas to his love, Jason’s taxi passed through an agitated meat market; a labor agitator was addressing the crowd; when he saw Jason in his taxi he shifted the burden of his discourse to him.

“Here is one! And here we are! We’ll turn them upside down and shake them till the dimes and quarters roll out!”

Jason wondered what would roll out of him. He had just enough to pay the taxi.

*****

Up in his bedroom he felt for the third time the balance of the thirty-eight revolver —  — life insurance all paid up.

“Help me to kill myself!” he prayed. “No fooling now. Put it in the mouth.”

—  — The phone rang sharp and he tossed the gun onto the empty twin bed.

A woman’s voice said: “Is this Mr. Davis? This is Principal McCutcheon’s secretary. Just one moment.”

Then came a man’s voice, level and direct.

“This is Mr. McCutcheon at the High School. It’s an unfortunate matter, Mr. Davis. We have to ask you to withdraw your daughter Josephine from school.”

Jason’s tense breath caught in his throat.

“I thought you’d rather know before she reached home. I tried your office. We’re compelled, much against our sensibilities, to expel three of the girls for conduct that can’t be condoned. When a pupil falls below the tone of the school the individual must be sacrificed to the good of the majority. I called a committee of teachers, Mr. Davis, and they saw eye-to-eye with me.”

“What was the nature of the offense?”

“That I don’t care to go into on the phone, Mr. Davis. I shall be glad to see you by appointment any afternoon except Thursday between two and four. I must add that we were more than surprised to find Josephine linked up to this matter. She’s held herself — well, I must say, a little aloof; she hasn’t ingratiated herself with her teachers, but — well, there we are.”

“I see,” Jason said dryly.

“Good afternoon, sir.”

Jason reached for the revolver and began taking the cartridges out of the magazine.

—  — I’ve got to stick around — a little longer, he thought.

*****

Jo arrived in half an hour, her usually mobile mouth tight and hard. There were dark strips of tears up and down her cheeks.

“Hello.”

“Hello, darling.” He had been waiting for her downstairs; he waited till she had taken off her coat and hat.

“What’s it all about anyhow?”

Furiously she turned to him.

“I won’t tell you! You can shake me, Daddy! You can beat me!”

“For God’s sake — what’s this all about? When did I ever beat you?”

“They wanted to this morning because I wouldn’t say what they wanted.”

Jo flung herself into a corner of the big couch and wept into it. He walked around the room, concerned and embarrassed.

“I don’t want to know, Jo. Whatever you do is all right with me. I trust you, Baby, all the way. I’m not even making any inquiries.”

She turned tired eyes up at him.

“You won’t? You promise, word of honor?”

“Yes.”

“I’ve got an idea, a real hunch. Unless — or say till I get the Gehrbohm account, I have lots of time in the afternoon. Suppose I be your private tutor for awhile. I was pretty good once in Latin and Algebra. For the languages we’ll get a reading list from the library.”

She sobbed again deep into the big cushions.

“Oh Baby! Stop that. We’re not defeatists, you and me. Take a bath and then we’ll get up some dinner.”

When she had gone into her room Jason tried to think of something outside himself. Then he remembered what Annie Lee had said in their short quarter hour this morning.

“I can’t understand about the farm — it was all so simple. There was the seasoning — nine tablespoons of salt, then nine of hickory ash, then the pepper and sage. And of course always the tenderloin — “

“Hickory ash?” Jason had exclaimed. “Tenderloin?”

Stirred by his surprise she lifted herself up in bed, so that he had to ease her gently down again. “Don’t tell me Young Seneca isn’t using tenderloin — isn’t putting in the tablespoons of hickory ash?”

—  — In the living room of the apartment Jason sat down and wrote Young Seneca.

When Jo came downstairs he said, “Take this over to the post office, will you? It’s about the farm.”

After examining the address Jo demanded:

“Father — do you mean seriously you’re going to teach me?”

“Am I? You bet! Teach you all I know.”

“All right.”

But in the grey dusk he was still bent over the ragged text-book.

“Caesar,” he said over the first text. “It’s addressed to the damn Swiss!”

He translated:

“In Switzerland they necked the Gods and the men — “

“What, Daddy?”

“Wait now: In Switzerland they necked the men and then they necked the Gods — This is difficult now — Latin didn’t seem like that in my day.”

Jason turned to Jo with exasperation. “Don’t they give you sentences to construe? Helvetii qui nec Deos nec homines verebantur — That means quiver I think — magnum dolorem. That means it all ends up very sad. Why did you ask me to translate it in the first place?”

“I didn’t ask you. I knew that part. It means the Helvetians who feared neither Gods nor men came to great grief because they were restrained on all sides by mountains.”

He read again: “Patiebantur quod ex omnibus partibus, and that means a rampart of ten feet,” he cried exultantly across the lamplight.

“Yah! You saw that in a footnote.”

“I did not,” he lied.

“Give me your word of honor?”

“Let’s talk about something else.”

“You fancy yourself as a teacher.”

That was the end of the first night’s Latin.

Thumbing over the book Jo found her place and read aloud slowly:

“If the government revenue from taxes increased from one billion dollars in 1927 to five hundred billion dollars in 1929, what was the increased percent?”

“Go on,” said Jason.

“Go on yourself, Daddy. You’re this wonderful mathematician. And try this one!”

“Let me read it myself:

‘If the sum of the reciprocals of two consecutive even numbers is zero. Then the sum of two other consecutive numbers is 11/60. What are the numbers?’“

Jason said, “There’s always for the X an unknown quantity. You have to have some system — haven’t you?”

“Swell system.”

“Got to start somewhere.” He bent over it again: “If the government revenue increased from five billions in 1927 to — “

He was temporarily at the end of his resources.

“Darling,” he said. “In a week I’ll know more about this — “

“Yes, Daddy.”

“Time for you to go to bed.”

There was a pregnant silence between them.

“I know.”

She came over to him and pecked briefly at an old baseball scar on his forehead.

VI

To keep the chronicle going one must skip through the days when Annie Lee’s farm came to life again — when Young Seneca realized that Mr. Davis actually wanted tenderloin put into the sausage — the day he recalled that an important appendage was nine tablespoons of hickory ash.

Orders for the buckets began to increase. From merely paying for itself, the farm began to dribble a trickle of profit.

VII

Some nights Jason used to go to her bedside and sit. Not tonight, though. He picked up in the living room the copy of Caesar’s Gaellic Wars.

The Swiss, who feared neither Gods nor men, suffered…

“Who am I to be afraid?” Jason thought. He who had led eight Ohio country boys to death in a stable in France and come out of it with only the loss of the tip of his left shoulder!

The Swiss who feared neither Gods nor men suffered —

He pulled the lamp closer.

The night wore on in a melange of verbs and participles. Toward eleven the phone rang.

“This is Mr. McCutcheon.”

“Oh, yes.”

“There’s a serious injustice been done your daughter.”

It seems that there had been some wild excursion into the boys’ locker-room — during which someone was posted as sentry outside. The sentry had run away but Jo was there trying to warn them at the moment when the monitors appeared.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Davis. There isn’t much we can do in these cases — except offer our sincere apology.”

“I know.”

The phone put on the voice of Mr. Halklite.

Here it was! The Pan-American Textile account.

“Hello, Mr. Davis! I’m in Philadelphia. We’ve had some correspondence — I’ll be down in your part of the world tomorrow and I thought I’d drop in. Sorry to call so late…”

Breakfast was waiting when, having made a journey to his office and back, Jason went to his bedroom — almost immediately Jo, who had heard him come in, knocked at the door and demanded in alarm:

“What’s the matter?”

“I’m just tired. I’ve been working all night. Say, if you have those girls to lumpshun — “ the words seemed extraordinarily hard and long — “then fix up the room afterwards. Very important. Business meeting.”

“I understand, Daddy.”

Holding to the bed-post he swayed precariously. “Whole future depends on this man. Make it nice for him.”

With no more warning he pitched forward across the bed.

VIII

Unexpectedly at eleven o’clock the colored girl admitted Mr. Halklite. On his tour of inspection Mr. Halklite had become, perforce, less and less kind, though he was kindly by nature. Keenness was his valuable business asset — exercising the quality had temporarily become dull — there was the necessity of weeding out the exhausted and the inefficient. Halklite could tell the dead from the living, and that was half of why he had just been elected a vice-president of Pan-American Textile. Only half, though. The other half was because he was kind.

A little girl came into the room.

“Good morning. Is your father in? I think he expected me.”

“Won’t you come in? Father’s got a cold — he’s lying down.”

In Jason’s bedroom Jo shook and shook the exhausted body without result. She went back into the living room.

“Daddy’ll be getting up presently,” she said. “He’s sorry he wasn’t dressed to meet you.”

“Oh, that’s all right. You’re Mr. Davis’ little girl?” Mr. Halklite said.

Jo crossed as if casually to the piano bench and turned back to him with sudden decision.

“Mr. Halklite, father’s had flu, and the doctor doesn’t want him to get up. He’s going to try to.”

“Oh, we can’t let him!”

“The doctor didn’t want him to. But Daddy’s like that. If he says he’ll do something, he does. Daddy needs a woman to take care of him. And I’m so busy at school — “

“Tell him not to get up,” Halklite repeated.

“I don’t even know whether he can.”

“Then tell him it doesn’t matter.”

She went to her father’s room and presently returned.

“He sent you best regards. He was sorry not to see you.”

Her heart was in agony. Keeping that agony out of her expression was the hardest thing she had ever had to do.

“I’m good and sorry,” Mr. Halklite said. “I wanted to talk to him.”

“How old is your father, young lady?”

“I don’t know. I guess he’s about thirty-eight.”

“Well a man can be young at thirty-eight,” he protested. “Isn’t your father still young?”

“Daddy’s young. But he’s serious.” She hesitated.

“Go on,” Halklite said. “Tell me about him. I’ll leave you to your lessons as soon as I finish my cigarette. But I think you ought to stay out of your father’s room while he’s ill.”

“Oh, I do.”

“You’re fond of your daddy?”

“Yes — everybody is.”

“Does he go around much?”

“Not much — Oh, he does though. He goes out to see Mama once a week. And he goes to walk half an hour when I go to bed. He starts out when I start to bed and then I call down to him when I hear him open the door coming in — pour dire bon soir.”

“You speak French?” She regretted that she had mentioned it, but she admitted, “I grew up in France.”

“So did your daddy, didn’t he?”

“Oh no, Daddy’s very American. He can’t even speak French much, really.”

Halklite stood up, made his decision suddenly, perhaps irrationally.

“You tell your father we want to put our account in his hands. Maybe that’ll cheer him up and help him get well. ‘Pan-Am-Tex.’ Can you remember that? He’ll understand.”

IX

It was April again and they walked in the zoo.

“It’s been a hard year, Jo.”

“I know that, Daddy. But look at the peacocks!”

“This is your education, Jo. It’s most of what you’ll ever know about life. You’ll understand later.”

“I know we’ve had bad times, Daddy. Everything’s better again, isn’t it? Look at the peacocks, mon pere. They don’t worry.”

“Well, if you insist, let’s sit on the bench and stare at them.”

Jo sat silent for a moment. Then she said:

“We were peacocks once, weren’t we?”

“What?”

“They probably have sorrows and troubles sometimes, when their tails don’t grow out.”

“I guess so. What school do you want to go to next year? You can have your choice.”

“That doesn’t seem to matter any more. Look at the peacock — Look! the one that’s trying to peck outside the cage. I love him — do you?”

Jason said, “After all, considering everything, it wasn’t such a bad year.”

“What?” Jo turned from the cage where she had gone to try, unsuccessfully, to feed the bird a shelled peanut.

“Daddy, let’s stop worrying. I thought we stopped months ago. Mother’s coming home next week. Maybe some day we’ll be three peacocks again.”

Jason came over to the wire.

“I suppose peacocks have their problems.”

“I suppose so. Look, Daddy! I’ve got this one eating the popcorn.”

ON SCHEDULE,

In September, René’s old house seemed pretty fine to him, with its red maples and silver birches and the provident squirrels toiling overtime on the lawn. It was on the outskirts of a university town, a rambling frame structure that had been a residence in the 80’s, the county poorhouse in the 1900’s, and now was a residence again. Few modern families would care to live there, amid the groans of moribund plumbing and without even the silvery “Hey!” of a telephone, but René, at first sight of its wide veranda, which opened out into a dilapidated park of five acres, loved it for reminding him of a lost spot of his childhood in Normandy. Watching the squirrels from his window reminded René that it was time to complete certain winter provisions of his own, and laying aside his work, he took a large sheet of paper ruled into oblongs and ran over it once again. Then he went into the hall and called up the front staircase:

“Noël.”

“Yes, daddy.”

“I wish to see you, cherie.”

“Well, you told me to put away the soldiers.”

“You can do that later. I want you to go over to the Slocums’ and get Miss Becky Snyder, and then I wish to speak to you both together.”

“Becky’s here, daddy; she’s in the bathtub.”

René started. “In the bath —  — “

The cracks and settlings of the house had created fabulous acoustics, and now another voice, not a child’s, drifted down to him:

“The water runs so slow over at the Slocums’, it takes all day to draw a bath. I didn’t think you’d mind, René.”

“Mind!” he exclaimed vaguely. As if the situation was not already delicate. “Mind!” If Becky took baths here, she might just as well be living here, so far as any casual visitor would conclude. He imagined himself trying to explain to Mrs. Dean-of-the-Faculty McIntosh the very complicated reasons why Becky Snyder was upstairs taking a bath.

At that, he might succeed — he would have blushed to attempt it in France.

His daughter, Noël, came downstairs. She was twelve, and very fair and exquisitely made, like his dead wife; and often in the past he had worried about that. Lately she had become as robust as any American child and his anxieties were concentrated upon her education, which, he had determined, was going to be as good as that of any French girl.

“Do you realize that your school starts tomorrow?”

“Yeah.”

“What is that?”

“Yes, daddy.”

“I am going to be busier than I have ever been in my life.”

“With all that water?”

“With all that water — think of all the baths Becky could take in it. And with the nice cute little power plant of my own the Foundation has built me. So, for you, Noël, I have prepared a schedule and my secretary has made three copies — one for you, one for me and one for Becky. We shall make a pocket in the back of your arithmetic in which to keep your copy. You must always keep it there, for if you lose it, then our whole day is thrown out of joint.”

Noël shifted restlessly in her chair.

“What I don’t understand,” she said, “is why I can’t take just like the other girls? Why I have to do a lot of goofy —  — “

“Do not use that word!”

“Well, why I can’t do like everybody else?”

“Then you don’t want to continue the piano.”

“Oh, yes, piano; but why do I have to take French out of school every day?”

René rose, pushing his fingers distractedly over his prematurely iron-gray hair — he was only thirty-four.

“What is the use of explaining things to you?” he cried. “Listen. You speak perfect French and you want to preserve it, don’t you? And you can’t study in your school what you already know more accurately than a sophomore in the college.”

“Then why —  — “

“Because no child retains a language unless she continues it till fourteen. Your brain —  — “ René tapped his own ferociously. “It cannot do it.”

Noël laughed, but her father was serious.

“It is an advantage!” he cried. “It will help you — it will help you to be an actress at the Comedie Francaise. Do you understand?”

“I don’t want to be an actress any more,” confessed Noël. “I’d rather electrolize water for the Foundation like you, and have a little doll’s power plant, and I can keep up my French talking to you in the evening. Becky could join in, because she wants to learn anyhow.”

Her father nodded his head sadly.

“Very well, then; all right.” He brushed the paper schedule aside; being careful, however, that it didn’t go into the wastebasket. “But you cannot grow up useless in this house. I will give you a practical education instead. We will stop the school and you can study sewing, cooking, domestic economy. You can learn to help about the house.” He sat down at his desk thoroughly disgusted, and made a gesture of waving her away, to be left alone with his disappointment.

Noël considered. Once this had been a rather alarming joke — when her marks were unsatisfactory, her father always promised to bring her up as a fine cook. But though she no longer believed him, his logic had the effect of sobering her. Her own case was simply that she hated running around to extra lessons in the middle of the morning; she wanted to be exactly like the other girls in school.

“All right, then,” she said. Both of them stood up as Becky, still damp and pink from her bath, came into the room.

Becky was nineteen, a startling little beauty, with her head set upon her figure as though it had been made separately and then placed there with the utmost precision. Her body was sturdy, athletic; her head was a bright, happy composition of curves and shadows and vivid color, with that final kinetic jolt, the element that is eventually sexual in effect, which made strangers stare at her. Who has not had the excitement of seeing an apparent beauty from afar; then, after a moment, seeing that same face grow mobile and watching the beauty disappear moment by moment, as if a lovely statue had begun to walk with the meager joints of a paper doll? Becky’s beauty was the opposite of that. The facial muscles pulled her expressions into lovely smiles and frowns, disdains, gratifications and encouragements; her beauty was articulated, and expressed vividly whatever it wanted to express.

Beyond that, she was an undeveloped girl, living for the moment on certain facets of René  du Cary’s mind. There was no relation between herself and Noël as yet except that of fellow pupils — though they suspected each other faintly as competitors for his affection.

“So now,” René pursued, “let us get this exact, darlings. Here we have one car, no telephone and three lives. To drive the car we have you” — this to Becky — “and me, and usually Aquilla’s brother. I will not even explain the schedule, but I assure you that it is perfect. I worked on it until one this morning.”

They sat obediently while he studied it with pride for a moment.

“Now here is a typical day: On Tuesday, Aquilla’s brother takes me to laboratory, dropping Noël at her school; when he returns to house, Becky takes car to tennis practice, calls for Noël and takes her to Mlle. Segur’s. Then she does shopping — and so forth.”

“Suppose I have no shopping?” suggested Becky.

“Then you do ‘and so forth.’ If there is no ‘and so forth,’ you drive car to laboratory and catch bus home — in that case, I bring Aquilla’s brother — I mean Noël” — he stared at the schedule, screwing up his eyes — “I bring Noël from Mademoiselle’s back to school and continue home. Then” — he hesitated — “and then —  — “

Noël rocked with amusement.

“It’s like that riddle,” she cried, “about the man who had to cross the river with the goose and the fox and the —  — “

“Wait one minute!” René’s voice was full of exasperated flats. “There is one half hour left out here, or else Aquilla’s brother will have to lunch before it is cooked.”

Becky, who had been listening with a helpful expression, became suddenly a woman of sagacity and force. The change, expressed in every line of her passionate face, startled René, and he listened to her with a mixture of awe, pride and disapproval.

“Why not let my tennis lessons go this fall?” she suggested. “After all, the most important things are your experiment and Noël’s education. Tennis will be over in a month or two. It just complicates everything.”

“Give up the tennis!” he said incredulously. “Idiotic child! Of course, you’ll continue. American women must be athletes. It is the custom of the country. All we need is complete cooperation.”

Tennis was Becky’s forte. She had been New Jersey scholastic champion at sixteen, thereby putting the small town of Bingham upon the map. René had followed the careers of his compatriots Lacoste and Lenglen, and he was very particular about Becky’s tennis. He knew that already there had been a trickle of talk in the community about himself and Becky — this young girl he had found somewhere or nowhere, and had recently deposited in the keeping of Mr. and Mrs. Slocum on the adjacent truck farm. Becky’s tennis had a certain abstract value that would matter later. It was a background for Becky — or rather it was something that would stand between Becky and her lack of any background whatsoever. It had to go into the schedule, no matter how difficult it made things.

René had loved his wife, an American, and after she faded off agonizingly in Switzerland, three years had dragged by before the tragic finality of the fact ceased to present itself at the end of sleep as a black period that ended the day before it began. Curiously crediting the legend that every seven years the human body completely renews itself, she had put a provision in her last sick will that if he married within seven years of her death, the moderate income she bequeathed him should accrue in trust for Noël. What he did after the seven years would be, Edith considered, an act of someone she had never known. The provision had not bothered him. It was rather a convenience to know that marriage was out of the question, and many a trap set for him had gone unsprung during his years as a widower in the college town. The income made it possible for him to stay in research, under the aegis of one of those scientific foundations that gravitated to the university, instead of seeking a livelihood as a pedagogue in a foreign land. In his own line he was a man with that lucky touch. Last year, in cleaning up the junk of someone else’s abandoned experiment, he had stumbled upon an entirely new technic in the activation of a catalyst for bringing about chemical reactions. He felt that after another year he would be able to provide for Noël far better than could his wife’s shrunken trust fund.

So, for a thousand days he wore his grief down, and eventually he found that his daughter was growing up and that work really was the best thing with which to fill a life. He settled down, and existence became as foreshortened as the rhythm of the college itself.

“My relations with my daughter,” he used to say, in those days, “are becoming what you call the Electra complex. If man was an adaptable animal, I should develop a lap and a very comfortable bosom and become a real mother to her, but I cannot. So, how can I put a stop to this father-and-daughter complex we are developing between us?”

The problem solved itself in its own terms. René was in love with youth, and one day he saw Becky Snyder’s beauty peering over the back of a cut-down flivver stalled on the Lincoln Highway. It was an old flivver, even for its old-flivverish function of bearing young love from nook to nook. Jokes climbed feebly upon its sides and a great “Bingham H.S. 1932” defaced — if one can call it that — the radiator. René du Cary, aloof as any university don spending an afternoon on his bicycle, would have passed it with a shrug of amusement, if he had not suddenly perceived the cause of the flivver’s motionless position in the road — a deeply intoxicated young man was draped across the wheel.

“Now, this is too bad,” he thought, when, with his bicycle in the back seat, he was conducting the car toward its destination. He kept imagining Noël in a like situation. Only when they had returned the young man and his movable couch to the bosom of his family, and he sat with Becky and her deaf aunt on the farmhouse stoop, did he realize how authentically, radiantly beautiful she was and want to touch her hair and her shining face and the nape of her neck — the place where he kissed Noël good night.

She walked with him to the gate.

“You must not permit that young man to call on you,” he said. “He’s not good for you.”

“Then what do I do?” She smiled. “Sit home?”

He raised his hands.

“Are there no more solid citizens in this village?”

Becky looked impatient, as if he ought to know there weren’t.

“I was engaged to a nice fellow that died last year,” she informed him, and then with pride: “He went to Hamilton. I was going to the spring dance with him. He got pneumonia.”

“I’m sorry,” said René.

“There’re no boys around here. There was a man said he’d get me a job on the stage in New York, but I know that game. My friend here — a girl, I mean — she goes to town to get picked up by students. It’s just hard luck for a girl to be born in a place like this. I mean, there’s no future. I met some men through playing tennis, but I never saw them again.”

He listened as the muddled concepts poured forth — the mingled phrases of debutante, waif and country girl. The whole thing confused him — the mixture of innocence, opportunism, ignorance. It made him feel very foreign and far off.

“I will collect some undergraduates,” he surprised himself by promising. “They should appreciate living beauty, if they appreciate nothing else.”

But that wasn’t the way it worked out. The half dozen seniors, the lady who came to pour tea on his porch, recognized, before half an hour had passed, that he was desperately in love with the girl, that he didn’t know it, that he was miserable when two of the young men made engagements with her. Next time she came, there were no young men.

“I love you and I want you to marry me,” he said.

“But I’m simply —  — I don’t know what to say. I never thought —  — “

“Don’t try to think. I will think for us both.”

“And you’ll teach me,” she said pathetically. “I’ll try so hard.”

“We can’t be married for seven more months because —  — My heavens, you are beautiful!”

It was June then, and they got to know each other in a few long afternoons in the swing on the porch. She felt very safe with him — a little too safe.

That was the first time when the provision in Edith’s will really bothered René. The seven specified years would not be over until December, and the interval would be difficult. To announce the engagement would be to submit Becky to a regents’ examination by the ladies of the university. Because he considered himself extravagantly lucky to have discovered such a prize, he hated the idea of leaving her to rusticate in Bingham. Other connoisseurs of beauty, other discerning foreigners, might find her stalled on the road with unworthy young men. Moreover, she needed an education in the social civilities and, much as the railroad kings of the pioneer West sent their waitress sweethearts to convents in order to prepare them for their high destinies, he considered sending Becky to France with a chaperon for the interval. But he could not afford it, and ended by installing her with the Slocums next door.

“This schedule,” he said to her, “is the most important thing in our lives; you must not lose your copy.”

“No, dearest.”

“Your future husband wants a lot; he wants a beautiful wife and a well-brought-up child, and his work to be very good, and to live in the country. There is limited money. But with method,” he said fiercely — “method for one, method for all — we can make it go.”

“Of course we can.”

After she had kissed him and clung to him and gone, he sat looking out at the squirrels still toiling in the twilight.

“How strange,” he thought. “For the moment my rôle is that of supérieure in a convent. I can show my two little girls about how good work is, and about politeness. All the rest one either has or hasn’t.

“The schedule is my protection; for now I will have no more time to think of details, and yet they must not be educated by the money changers of Hollywood. They should grow up; there is too much of keeping people children forever. The price is too high; the bill is always presented to someone in the end.”

His glance fell on the table. Upon it, carefully folded, lay a familiar-looking paper — the typewritten oblongs showed through. And on the chair where Becky had sat, its twin rested. The schedules, forgotten and abandoned, remained beside their maker.

“Mon Dieu!” he cried, his fingers rising to his young gray hair. “Quel commencement! Noël!”

II

With a sort of quivering heave like the attempt of a team to move a heavy load, René’s schedule got in motion. It was an uncertain motion — the third day Noël lost her schedule and went on a school botany tour, while Aquilla’s brother — a colored boy who had some time ago replaced a far-wandering houseman, but had never quite acquired a name of his own in the household — waited for her two hours in front of the school, so that Becky missed her tennis lesson and Mlle. Ségur, inconvenienced, complained to René. This was on a day that René had passed in despair trying to invent a process for keeping the platinum electrodes nicely blurred in a thousand glass cells. When he came home he blew up and Noël, at his request, had her supper in bed.

Each day plunged him deeper into his two experiments. One was his attempt to develop the catalyst upon which he had stumbled; the second was based on the new knowledge that there are two kinds of water. Should his plan of decomposing electrolytically one hundred thousand gallons of water yield him the chance of studying the two sorts spectrographically, the results might be invaluable. The experiment was backed by a commercial firm as well as by the Foundation, but it was already running into tens of thousands of dollars — there was the small power plant built for his use, the thousand platinum electrodes, each in its glass jar, as well as the time consumed in the difficult and tedious installation of the apparatus.

Necessarily, the domestic part of the day receded in importance. It was nice to know that his girls were safe and well occupied, that there would be two faces waiting for him eagerly at home. But for the moment he could not divert any more energy to his family. Becky had tennis and a reading list she had asked him for. She wanted to be a fine wife to René; she knew that he was trying to rear some structure of solidity in which they could all dwell together, and she guessed that it was the strain of the present situation that made him often seem to put undue emphasis on minor matters. When he began to substitute moments of severe strictness with Noël for the time he would have liked to devote to her, especially to her lessons — which were coming back marked “careless” — Becky protested. Whereupon René insisted that his intensity of feeling about Noël’s manners was an attempt to save her trouble, to conserve her real energies for real efforts and not let them be spent to restore the esteem of her fellows, lost in a moment of carelessness or vanity. “Either one learns politeness at home,” René said, “or the world teaches it with a whip — and many young people in America are ruined in that process. How do I care whether Noël ‘adores’ me or not, as they say? I am not bringing her up to be my wife.”

Still, and in spite of everything, the method was not working. His private life was beginning to interfere with it. If he had been able to spend another half an hour in the laboratory that day when he knew Becky was waiting discreetly a little way down the road, or even if he could have sent an overt message to her, saying that he was delayed thereby, then the tap would not have been left on and a quantity of new water would not have run into the water already separated according to its isotope, thus necessitating starting over. Work, love, his child — his demands did not seem to him exorbitant; he had had forethought and had made a schedule which anticipated all minor difficulties.

“Let us reconsider,” he said, assembling his girls again. “Let us consider that we have a method, embodied in this schedule. A method is better and bigger than a man.”

“Not always,” said Becky.

“How do you mean, not always, little one?”

“Cars really do act up like ours did the other day, René. We can’t stand before them and read them the schedule.”

“No, my darling,” he said excitedly. “It is to ourselves we read the schedule. We foresee — we have the motor examined, we have the tank filled.”

“Well, we’ll try to do better,” said Becky. “Won’t we, Noël? You and I — and the car.”

“You are joking, but I am serious.”

She came close to him.

“I’m not joking, darling. I love you with all my heart and I’m trying to do everything you say — even play tennis: though I’d rather run over and keep your house a little cleaner for you.”

“My house?” he stared around vaguely. “Why, my house is very clean. Aquilla’s sister comes in every other Friday.”

He had cause to remember this one Sunday afternoon a week later, when he had a visit from his chief assistant, Charles Hume, and his wife. They were old friends, and he perceived immediately the light of old friends bent on friendship in their eyes. And how was little Noël? They had had Noël in their house for a week the previous summer.

René called upstairs for Noël, but got no answer.

“She is in the fields somewhere.” He waved his hand vaguely. “All around, it is country.”

“All very well while the days are long,” said Dolores Hume. “But remember, there are such things as kidnapings.”

René shut his mind swiftly against a new anxiety.

“How are you, René?” Dolores asked. “Charles thinks you’ve been overdoing things.”

“Now, dear,” Charles protested, “I —  — “

“You be still. I’ve known René longer than you have. You two men fuss and fume over those jars all day and then René has his hands full with Noël all evening.”

Did René’s eyes deceive him, or did she look closely to see how he was taking this?

“Charles says this is an easy stage of things, so we wondered if we could help you by taking Noël while you went for a week’s rest.”

Annoyed, René answered abruptly: “I don’t need a rest and I can’t go away.” This sounded rude; René was fond of his assistant. “Not that Charles couldn’t carry on quite as well as I.”

“It’s really poor little Noël I’m thinking of as much as you. Any child needs personal attention.”

His wrath rising, René merely nodded blandly.

“If you won’t consider that,” Dolores pursued, “I wonder you don’t get a little colored girl to keep an eye on Noël in the afternoon. She could help with the cleaning. I’ve noticed that Frenchmen may be more orderly than American men, but not a bit cleaner.”

She drew her hand experimentally along the woodwork.

“Heavens!” she exclaimed, awed. Her hand was black, a particularly greasy, moldy, creepy black, with age-old furniture oil in it and far-drifted grime.

“What a catastrophe!” cried René. Only last week he had refused to let Becky clean the house. “I beg a thousand pardons. Let me get you —  — “

“It serves me right,” she admitted, “and don’t you do anything about it. I know this house like my pocket.”

When she had gone, Charles Hume said:

“I feel I ought to apologize to you for Dolores. She’s a strange woman, René, and she has no damn business butting into your affairs like this!”

He stopped. His wife was suddenly in the room again, and the men had an instant sense of something gone awry. Her face was shocked and hurt, stricken, as if she had been let down in some peculiarly personal way.

“You might not have let me go upstairs,” she said to René. “Your private affairs are your own, but if it was anybody but you, René, I’d think it was a rather bad joke.”

For a moment René was bewildered. Then he half understood, but before he could speak Dolores continued coldly:

“Of course I thought it was Noël in the tub, and I walked right in.”

René was all gestures now; he took a long, slow, audible breath; raising his hands slowly to his eyes, he shook his head in time to a quick “tck, tck, tck, tck.” Then, laying his cards on the table with a sudden downward movement of his arms, he tried to explain. The girl was the niece of a neighbor — he knew, even in the midst of his evasive words, that it was no use. Dolores was just a year or so older than that war generation which took most things for granted. He knew that previous to her marriage she had been a little in love with him, and he saw the story going out into the world of the college town. He knew this even when she pretended to believe him at the last, and when Charles gave him a look of understanding and a tacit promise with his eyes that he’d shut her up, as they went out the door.

“I feel so terrible,” mourned Becky.

“It was the one day the water at the Slocums’ wouldn’t run at all, and I was so hot and sticky I thought I’d just jump in for two seconds. That woman’s face when it came in the door! ‘Oh, it’s not Noël,’ she said, and what could I say? From the way she stared at me, she ought to have seen.”

*****

It was November and the campus was riotous once a week with violets and chrysanthemums, hot dogs and football badges, and all the countryside was a red-and-yellow tunnel of leaves around the flow of many cars. Usually René went to the games, but not this year. Instead he attended upon the activities of the precious water that was not water, that was a heavenlike, mysterious fluid that might cure mental diseases in the Phacochoerus, or perhaps only grow hair on eggs — or else he played valet to his catalyst, wound in five thousand dollars’ worth of platinum wire and gleaming dully at him every morning from its quartz prison.

He took Becky and Noël up there one day because it was unusually early. He was slightly disappointed because Noël was absorbed in an inspection of her schedule while he explained the experiments. The tense, sunny room seemed romantic to Becky, with its odor of esoteric gases, the faint perfumes of future knowledge, the low electric sizz in the glass cells.

“Daddy, can I look at your schedule one minute?” Noël asked. “There’s one dumb word that I never know what it means.”

He handed it toward her vaguely, for a change in the caliber and quality of the sound in the room made him aware that something was happening. He knelt down beside the quartz vessel with a fountain pen in his hand.

He had changed the conditions of his experiment yesterday, and now he noted quickly:

Flow of 500 c.c. per minute, temperature 255°C. Changed gas mixture to 2 vol. oxygen and 1.56 vol. nitrogen. Slight reaction, about 1 per cent. Changing to 2 vol. 0 and 1.76 vol. N. Temperature 283°C. platinum filament is now red-hot.

He worked quickly, noting the pressure gauge. Ten minutes passed; the filament glowed and faded, and René put down figure after figure. When he arose, with a rather far-away expression, he seemed almost surprised to see Becky and Noël still there.

“Well, now; that was luck,” he said.

“We’re going to be late to school,” Becky told him, and then added apologetically: “What happened, René?”

“It is too long to explain.”

“Of course you see, daddy,” said Noël reprovingly, “that we have to keep the schedule.”

“Of course, of course. Go along.” He kissed them each hungrily on the nape of the neck, watching them with pride and joy, yet putting them aside for a while as he walked around the laboratory with some of the unworldliness of an altar boy. The electrolysis also seemed to be going better. Both of his experiments, like a recalcitrant team, had suddenly decided to function, realizing the persistence they were up against.

He heard Charles Hume coming in, but he reserved his news about the catalyst while they concentrated upon the water. It was noon before he had occasion to turn to his notes — realized with a shock that he had no notes. The back of the schedule on which he had taken them was astonishingly, inexplicably blank; it was as if he had written in vanishing ink or under the spell of an illusion. Then he saw what had happened — he had made the notes on Noël’s schedule and she had taken it to school. When Aquilla’s brother arrived with a registered package, he dispatched him to the school with the schedule to make the exchange. The data he had observed seemed irreplaceable, the more so as — despite his hopeful “Look! Look! Come here, Charles, now, and look!” — the catalyst failed entirely to act up.

He wondered what was delaying Aquilla’s brother and felt a touch of anxiety as he and Charles walked up to Main Street for lunch. Afterward Charles left, to jack up a chemistry-supply firm in town.

“Don’t worry too hard,” he said. “Open the windows — the room’s full of nitrogen-chloride.”

“Don’t worry about that.”

“Well —  — “ Charles hesitated. “I didn’t agree with Dolores’ attitude the other day, but I think you’re trying to do too much.”

“Not at all,” René protested. “Only, I am anxious to get possession of my notes again. It might be months or never, before I would blunder on that same set of conditions again.”

He was hardly alone before a small voice on the telephone developed as Noël calling up from school:

“Daddy?”

“Yes, baby.”

“Can you understand French or English better on the phone?”

“What? I can understand anything.”

“Well, it’s about my schedule.”

“I am quite aware of that. You took away my schedule. How do you explain that?”

Noël’s voice was hesitant: “But I didn’t, daddy. You handed me your schedule with a whole lot of dumb things on the back.”

“They are not dumb things!” he exclaimed. “They are very valuable things. That is why I sent Aquilla’s brother to exchange the schedules. Has that been done?”

“I was gone to French when he came, so he went away — I guess on account of that day he was so dumb and waited. So I haven’t got any schedule and I don’t know whether Becky is coming for me after play hour or whether I’m to ride out with the Sheridans and walk home from there.”

“You haven’t got any schedule at all?” he demanded, his world breaking up around him.

“I don’t know what became of it. Maybe I left it in the car.”

“Maybe you left it in the car?”

“It wasn’t mine.”

He set down the receiver because he needed both hands now for the gesture he was under compulsion to make. He threw them up so high that it seemed as if they left his wrists and were caught again on their descent. Then he seized the phone again.

“ —  — because school closes at four o’clock, and if I wait for Becky and she doesn’t come, then I’ll have to be locked out.”

“Listen,” said René. “Can you hear? Do you want me to speak in English or French?”

“Either one, daddy.”

“Well, listen to me: Good-by.”

He hung up. Regretting for the first time the lack of a phone at home, he ran up to Main Street and found a taxi, which he urged, with his foot on an imaginary back-seat accelerator, in the direction of home.

The house was locked; the car was gone; the maid was gone; Becky was gone. Where she was gone he had no idea, and the Slocums could give him no information… The notes might be anywhere now, kicked carelessly into the street, crumpled and flung away.

“But Becky will recognize it as a schedule,” he consoled himself. “She would not be so formidable as to throw away our schedule.”

He was by no means sure that it was in the car. On a chance, he had the taxi drive him into the colored district with the idea that he might get some sort of orientation from Aquilla’s brother. René had never before searched for a colored man in the Negro residential quarter of an American city. He had no idea at first of what he was attempting, but after half an hour the problem assumed respectable dimensions.

“Do you know” — so he would call to dark and puzzled men on the sidewalks — “where I can find the house of Aquilla’s brother, or of Aquilla’s sister — either one?”

“I don’t even know who Aquilla is, boss.”

René tried to think whether it was a first or a last name, and gave up as he realized that he never had known. As time passed, he had more and more a sense that he was pursuing a phantom; it began to shame him to ask the whereabouts of such ghostly, blatantly immaterial lodgings as the house of Aquilla’s brother. When he had stated his mission a dozen times, sometimes varying it with hypocritical pleas as to the whereabouts of Aquilla’s sister, he began to feel a little crazy.

It was colder. There was a threat of first winter snow in the air, and at the thought of his notes being kicked out into it, buried beneath it, René abandoned his quest and told the taxi man to drive home, in the hope that Becky had returned. But the house was deserted and cold. With the taxi throbbing outside, he threw coal into the furnace and then drove back into the center of town. It seemed to him that if he stayed on Main Street he would sooner or later run into Becky and the car — there were not an unlimited number of places to pass an afternoon in a regimented community of seven thousand people. Becky had no friends here — it was the first time he had ever thought of that. Literally there was almost no place where she could be.

Aimless, feeling almost as intangible as Aquilla’s brother, he wandered along, glancing into every drug store and eating shop. Young people were always eating. He could not really inquire of anyone if they had seen her, for even Becky was only a shadow here, a person hidden and unknown, a someone to whom he had not yet given reality. Only two things were real — his schedule, for the lack of which he was utterly lost and helpless, and the notes written on its back.

It was colder, minute by minute; a blast of real winter, sweeping out of the walks beside College Hall, made him wonder suddenly if Becky was going to pick up Noël. What had Noël said about being locked out when the school was closed? Not in weather like this. With sudden concern and self-reproach, René took another taxi and drove to the school, but it was closed and dark inside.

“Then, perhaps, she is lost too,” he thought. “Quite possibly she tried to walk herself home by herself and was kidnaped, or got a big chill, or was run over.”

He considered quite seriously stopping at the police station, and only decided against it when he was unable to think what he could possibly report to them with any shred of dignity.

“ —  — that a man of science, has managed, in one afternoon, in this one little town, to lose everything.”

III

Meanwhile, Becky was thoroughly enjoying herself. When Aquilla’s brother returned with the car at noon, he handed over Noël’s schedule with no comment save that he had not been able to give it to Noël because he could not find her. He was finished with European culture for the day, and was already crossing the Mediterranean in his mind while Becky tried to pump further information out of him.

A girl she had met through tennis had wangled the use of one of the club squash courts for the early hours of the afternoon. The squash was good; Becky soaked and sweated in the strange, rather awesome atmosphere of masculinity, and afterward, feeling fine and cool, took out her own schedule to check up on her duties of the afternoon. The schedule said to call for Noël, and Becky set out with all her thoughts in proportion — the one about herself and tennis; the one about Noël, whom she had come to love and learn with the evenings when René was late at the laboratory; the one about René, in whom she recognized the curious secret of power. But when she arrived at the school and found Noël’s penciled note on the gatepost, an epidemic of revolt surged suddenly over her.

Dear Becky: Had daddy’s schedule and lost it and do not know if you are coming or not. Mrs. Hume told me I could wait at her house, so please pick me up there if you get this?

Noël

If there was one person Becky had no intention of encountering, it was Mrs. Dolores Hume. She knew this very fiercely and she didn’t see how she should be expected to go to Mrs. Hume’s house. She had by no means been drawn to the lady who had inspected her so hostilely in the bathtub — to put it mildly, she was not particular about ever seeing her again.

Her resentment turned against René. Looked at in any light, her position was that of a person of whom he was ashamed. One side of her understood the complications of his position, but in her fine glow of health after exercise, it seemed outrageous that anyone should have the opportunity to think of her in a belittling way. René’s theories were very well, but she would have been a hundred times happier had they announced the engagement long before, even though every curious cat in the community stared at her for a month or two. Becky felt as if she had been kept in the kitchen, and she was developing a sense of inferiority. This, in turn, made her think of the schedule as a sort of tyranny, and several times lately she had wondered how much of herself she was giving up in the complete subservience of every hour of every day to another’s judgment.

“He can call for Noël,” she decided. “I’ve done my best all through. If he’s so wise, he ought not to put me in such a situation.”

An hour later, René was still unable to think where he had put her at all. He had planned the days for her, but he had never really thought before about how she would fill them up. Returning to his laboratory in a state of profound gloom, he increased his pace as he came in sight of the building, cursed with a new anxiety. He had been absent more than three hours, with the barometer steadily falling and three windows open; he could not remember whether he or Charles was to have spoken to the janitor about continuing the heat over the week-end. His jars, the precious water in his jars —  — He ran up the icy stairs of the old building, afraid of what he was going to see.

One closed jar went with a cracking plop as he stood panting inside the door. One thousand of them glistened in tense rows through three long rooms, and he held his breath, waiting for them to go off together, almost hearing the crackling, despairing sound they would make. He saw that another one was broken, and then another in a far row. The room was like ice, with a blizzard seeping through eight corners of every window; there was ice formed on the faucet.

On tiptoe, lest even a faint movement precipitate the nine hundred and ninety-seven catastrophes, he retreated to the hall; then his heart beat again as he heard the dull, reassuring rumble of the janitor’s shovel in the cellar.

“Fire it up as far as you can!” he called down, and then descended another flight so as to be sure he was understood. “Make it as hot a blaze as possible, even if it is all” — he could not think of the word for kindling — “even if it is all small wood.”

He hurried back to the laboratory, entering again on tiptoe. As he entered, two jars beside a north window cracked, but his hand, brushing the radiator, felt just the beginning of a faint and tepid warmth. He took off his overcoat, and then his coat, and tucked them in across one window, dragged out an emergency electric heater, and then turned on every electric appliance in the room. From moment to moment, he stopped and listened ominously, but there were no more of the short, disastrous dying cries. By the time he had isolated the five broken jars and checked up on the amount of ice in the others, there was a definite pulse of heat coming off the radiators.

As he still fussed mechanically around the room, his hands shaking, he heard Noël’s voice in a lower hall, and she came upstairs with Dolores Hume, both of them bundled to the ears against the cold.

“Here you are, René,” Dolores said cheerfully. “We’ve phoned here three times and all over town. We wanted Noël to stay to dinner, but she keeps thinking you’d be worried. What is all this about a schedule? Are you all catching trains?”

“What is what?” he answered dazedly. “You realize, Dolores, what has happened here in this room?”

“It’s got very cold.”

“The water in our jars froze. We almost lost them all!”

He heard the furnace door close, and then the janitor coming upstairs.

Furious at what seemed the indifference of the world, he repeated:

“We nearly lost them all!”

“Well, as long as you didn’t —  — “ Dolores fixed her eyes upon a vague spot far down the late battlefield of gleaming jars. “Since we’re here, René, I want to say something to you — a thing that seems to me quite as important as your jars. There is something very beautiful about a widower being left alone with a little daughter to care for and to protect and to guide. It doesn’t seem to me that anything so beautiful should be lightly destroyed.”

For the second time that day, René started to throw his hands up in the air, but he had stretched his wrists a little the last time, and in his profound agitation he was not at all sure that he could catch them.

“There is no answer,” he groaned. “Listen, Dolores; you must come to my laboratory often. There is something very beautiful in a platinum electrode.”

“I am thinking only of Noël,” said Dolores serenely.

At this point, the janitor, effectually concealed beneath a thick mask of coal dust, came into the room. It was Noël who first divined the fact that the janitor was Becky Snyder.

IV

Under those thoroughly unmethodical circumstances, the engagement of René and Becky was announced to the world — the world as personified and represented by Dolores Hume. But for René even that event was overshadowed by his astonishment at learning that the first jar had burst at the moment Becky came into his laboratory; that she had remembered that water expanded as it froze and guessed at the danger; that she had been working for three-quarters of an hour to start the furnace before he had arrived; and, finally, that she had taken care of the furnace for two years back in Bingham — “because there was nothing much else to do.”

Dolores took it nicely, though she saw fit to remind Becky that she would be somewhat difficult to recognize if constantly observed under such extremely contrary conditions.

“I suppose it all has something to do with this schedule I hear so much about.”

“I started the fire with the schedule,” remarked Becky, and then amended herself when René jumped up with a suddenly agonized expression: “Not the one with the notes on it — that was behind the cushions of the car.”

“It’s too much for me,” Dolores admitted. “I suppose you’ll all end by sleeping here tonight — probably in the jars.”

Noël bent double with laughter.

“Why don’t we? Look on the schedule, daddy, and see if that’s the thing to do.”

THE PASSIONATE ESKIMO

Pan-e-troon crawled out of the igloo, pushing away the nose of an inquisitive dog, and uttered in Lapp the equivalent of” Scram!” to the rest of the pack. He looked to see if the line of fish was safely out of their reach and then proceeded a hundred yards over the white surface to his father’s hut.

The old man, his face the color of rawhide, looked at him imperturbably.

“Are you packed and ready?” he asked.

“All packed and ready.”

“Good. We leave early in the morning. Most of the others are on the point of departure.”

It was true. As far as the eye could reach, there were signs of dismantling and preparation, and the bustle and excitement that accompany it.

Pan-e-troon gazed for a moment with an expression of regret that confined itself, however, to his slitlike purple eyes. He was a small youth, but supple and well made — and the contours of his round nose and chin and cheeks gave him a perpetually cheerful expression. He gazed about him for a long time — he had come to like this locality.

“Old Wise One,” he said to his father,” I want to go into Chicago.”

His father started. “What?”

“For one last look.”

“But by yourself?” demanded his father anxiously.

“Yes, Old Wise One. I can find my way around. I speak a lot of American now and if I get lost I only have to say, ‘World’s Fair.’”

The old man grunted.

“I don’t like it. When we have a guide and are together, all right, but alone you’ll get hurt, get lost.”

“Old Wise One, I must go,” said Pan-e-troon. “Here is the last chance before we start for our home. Home is very fine, doubtless — “

“Of course it is!” said his father indignantly.

Pan-e-troon bowed slightly and finished his sentence: “ — and often in these hot months I have wished to be fishing through the ice, or hunting bear, or eating well cooked blubber. But — “

“But what?”

“I should like to carry back more memories of this great village. I should like to walk along the street not regarding what the guides tell us to regard but noticing for myself what I wish. I should like to go into a trading post and put down money and say, ‘ Here-give me that exchange for this’; and I should like to say to people, ‘ Which way, please? Much ‘blige.’”

He was a silent young man and this was probably the longest speech he had ever made in his life.

“You are a fool!” grunted his father. But he knew Pan-e-troon, and opening his purse he took out a new silver quarter.

“Spend it carefully,” he said.” Buy me some tobacco. And bring back what change there is.”

Pan-e-troon bowed again.

“I shall indeed, Old Wise One.”

*****

He hurried back to his igloo for a small cache of money of his own — a. quarter, two dimes, and two pennies. The fortune jingled together pleasantly in his hand, where indeed he must hold it, for he wore the costume of the Arctic Circle. This was not as oppressive as it sounds in Chicago of a late October afternoon, for it had been especially made of the lightest skins for the purpose of display at the Fair.

He hesitated between his fur cap and a new straw hat which an admirer had given him, finally deciding on the latter.

Then he slipped the money into the top of “a moccasin, and once more shouting” Scram!” at the dogs who were leaping at the line of fish, he walked out of the Eskimo village into the pleasance.

Immediately he had a following. Pan-e-troon was grown used to strange eyes, however, and they did not disturb him. He felt quite at ease, quite a part of the crowd, in his new straw hat, and he wished he had borrowed his father’s new spectacles for additional decoration.

Walking through the rapidly disappearing midway, past Spaniards, Dutchmen, Mexicans, Chinese villagers (between whom and the Eskimos there was some strange jealousy of exhibitionism), Pan-e-troon reached Michigan Boulevard. He was happy, he was excited. He stopped now and then to stare into shop windows, but they held such a surfeit of charms as to be confusing. So with lingering sighs he went on in the direction of atall building which he knew as one of the city’s great department stores. He had gone through it with the other Eskimos several months before as part of a bus tour of the city.

First, though, he would get the tobacco of the Old Wise One off his mind, and he turned into a shop with pipes in the window.

The perspiring man in charge gave him immediate attention. Several men lounging in the store stared at him.

Pan-e-troon beamed. He had never made a purchase in America by himself.

“I give you something,” he announced, “and you give me something.”

The salesman glanced at the others and then back at Pan-e-troon.

“That’s all right with me, brother. What do you want to give me?”

Pan-e-troon’s grin grew wider.

“You not understand. I give you something — “

One of the lounging men helped out with:

“He wants to give you his straw hat, George.”

“Well, I wish he’d make up his mind. I’ve got ‘bout ten degrees hotter since he come in here.”

Pan-e-troon shook his head regretfully but still smiled. Then he reached down into his moccasin and held out money.

“Here!” he said. triumphantly.” I give you this — you give me that.”

He pointed at the row of cans behind the man.

“Pipe tobacco?”

Pan-e-troon nodded.

“What kind?” The salesman named a few brands.

“One,” said Pan-e-troon.” I give you something, you give me something.”

*****

The salesman, unresourceful by nature, gave up. The man who had spoken came behind the counter to his assistance.

“Now, Robinson Crusoe, we got vely mely kinds, savvy?” He put several cans on the counter.” This is a dime; this is a quarter; this is imported, two dollars a pound. How much do you want to spend?”

Pan-e-troon looked at the array.

“One.”

“All right. How much you got?” Pan-e-troon showed his money.” I guess you want the cheapest kind. This is a good dime tobacco.”

“No more cheap, eh?” inquired Pan-e-troon.

“No more cheap.”

“Much ‘blige.”

“All right. Don’t set yourself on fire or melt down your house. Good-by.”

“Good-by. I give you something — “

“I understand, and I give you something. All clear — even a banker could understand it.”

Pan-e-troon proceeded along Michigan Boulevard toward the department store. He had made a purchase by himself — his heart glowed. Now he could get what he wanted. Reaching the store, he walked through the busy shuffle, looking at the counters and buying copies of Real Sleuths and Gangsters’ Secrets, his favorite magazines. His true desire was on an upper floor, but his eye was caught suddenly by an object on a counter. It was a lady — at least it was part of a lady — and she stood on a little pedestal with a short cape over her shoulders; her eyes were a bright blue and she had golden hair, Pan-e-troon beamed at her. Gently he touched her shoulder and then spoke to the saleswoman:

“I give you — “

Half hearing him, she looked at the tag on the cape and said:

“Two fifty-nine.”

“What say?”

“Two dollars and fifty-nine cents.”

He shook his head regretfully and passed on.

On the occasion of the bus tour the Eskimos had mounted by elevator and moving stairway; but he could find neither, so he walked up a flight and made the same thorough inspection of all the aisles. Luckily the department he sought was on the third floor — he recognized it immediately with a feeling of delight. It was the toy department.

“I want to buy airplane,” he said to a saleswoman.

She confronted the strange spectacle with a start.

“You mean these toy ones, don’t you? I remember now — you were all in here a few weeks ago.”

She wound an elastic motor on a model and sent the model flier soaring around the room. Pan-e-troon watched in rapture.

“How much I give?” he asked.

“These?. They are ninety-nine cents, marked down from a dollar fifty.”

Ruefully Pan-e-troon surveyed his money.

“No can,” he said. “ Not give for this?”

“No, not give for that.”

Though sorely disappointed, he met the debacle with a smile, as if it were the greatest joke in the world, and turned away. But something about him touched the woman.

*****

“Look here, you. If that’s all the money you got you’ll get the most out of it at the five-and-ten. They may have little models, smaller than this.”

“Five-and-ten?” he repeated blankly.

“There’s one just around the corner.” She called a bundle boy.” Earl, will you take this — this Eskimo around to the five-and-ten? He don’t get the idea.”

Earl eyed Pan-e-troon resentfully.

“Me be seen on the street with that!”

“Don’t be yourself all the time — I’ll fix it with Mr. Richards. Now, monseer, or whatever you call yourself, go along with this boy and he’ll fix you up.”

Presently he was deposited at the swarming entrance of the emporium. But he had hardly begun his wandering when his attention was caught by a counter piled high with locks of all kinds — padlocks, door locks, safety locks, tire locks — and he gave out a grunt of delight as he approached it.

Locks were his passion — in early boyhood he had come into possession of one from off a Russian steamer that had broken up on the ice. Toys were nonexistent, and he spent many an hour taking the lock apart and putting it together. Later a missionary gave him another, and another wreck yielded up a few more. This mechanical passion was entirely theoretical, due to the absence of doors on igloos; but the chests which his party had brought south were so thoroughly sealed that only Pan-e-troon, using twisted lengths of wire, was able to open them.

He bought a lock. He could have bought ‘three with his remaining money, but he knew very well which were cheaply made and which were not.

He did not visit the toy department — he was too anxious to return to the Fair and take apart his new acquisition. He was happy — he had an urge to be borne somewhere, to be wafted about. He would take a ride in a trolley.

He rode for an hour, proud and happy. He gave the conductor five cents and the conductor gave him a ride; then he gave the conductor another five cents and the conductor gave him more of a ride.

Then in a traffic tangle at a crossing Pan-e-troon found his eyes fixing themselves with increasing interest outside the window.

*****

In a glittering underslung open car sat a girl. She was probably, not merely in his imagination, the most beautiful creature he had ever seen in his life — a ripply blonde who, had it been necessary, could have posed for any of those exquisite creatures in the advertisements. Her eyes were a little worried; so was her mouth.

Beside her was a morose-looking young man; but Pan-e-troon scarcely looked at the young man.

“She is a chief’s daughter,” he said to himself.” Doubtless the daughter of one of the greatest chiefs of all — ruler of one of the great trading posts.”

Pan-e-troon sighed as the jam broke and the car started forward. Now he began ruminating instead of gazing. Home seemed very far away, very vast and white — but not as white as that girl’s forehead. It was becoming plain to him this afternoon that he was not looking forward to going back.

After half an hour when he had concluded that it was time to be getting off, he saw the same car again. It was stopped by the side of the road, and the young man was in the act of removing one of the great bulbous tires — the girl leaning over the side and watching. The trolley clanged past, but before the next corner Pan-e-troon was on his feet, shouting:

“I out! Here I go out!”

On the corner Pan-e-troon waited until the trolley was out of sight. Then he walked back casually in the direction of the automobile.

He walked so quietly on his moccasins that not until he was beside the motor did the girl perceive him. She gave a sudden little gasp and the young man looked up, broke off his work, and stared.

“What is it?” the girl whispered.” It’s almost an Eskimo.”

“Well, what’s he doing down here?”

“Look! He’s got on a straw hat.”

Pan-e-troon put his hands behind his back and beamed.

“I wonder if he knows anything about tires,” the young man said.” Maybe he could stuff the hole with blubber or something, what?”

“You’re not supposed to talk to me, Westgate. I keep my word.” She lowered her voice.” But evidently this polar number is going to stick around.”

The polar number was. When presently the wheel came off with a whirring wrench and went bouncing down the inclined street, Pan-e-troon tore after it, retrieved it, and brought it back to the car.

“Much ‘blige,” he said proudly.

“Don’t mention it,” said Edith Cary.” Where do you come from?”

“I from Lapland.”

“What are you doing so far from home?”

“Worl’sfair,” he explained.

“Then what are you doing way out here?” she pursued.

“See Chicago,” he explained.” Eskimo village go Lapland tomorrow.”

At this moment a coupe drew up beside Edith’s car. At the wheel sat a ruddy man of forty with a bristling mustache.

Edith frowned just faintly, and Pan-e-troon, unableto take his eyes from her, remarked upon the fact.

“Well, why the stop?” said the newcomer.

“We had a blowout.”

The newcomer looked from Edith to the young man suspiciously.

“Well, as long as you’re keeping your promise — as long as you’re not letting him work on you.”

“Humphrey, shut up!” said Edith impatiently.” By the way, since you’re one of the executives of the Fair, you’ll enjoy meeting Mr. — “ She turned to the observer. “What’s your name?”

“Name Pan-e-troon. That mean — “

“Mr. Pan-e-troon. He’s in your show, Humphrey, and he’s seeing the sights of our city.”

“My God, how did he get off the reservation? We have more trouble rounding up these exhibits — they wander around and get fleeced and then we’re to blame.”

“I’m not going to fleece him, Humphrey. He has such beautiful fleece.”

She felt a sympathy for the stranger in his wandering, but her sudden frown was not caused by that.

“Speaking of exhibits,” she said,” I thought you were going to hold the — you know what — until the family get back.”

“Well, that’s tomorrow, isn’t it? And the Fair’s over.”

“But I’ve no place to keep it — no combination for the safe. Since father lent it to the Fair, it seems to me it isn’t much to ask — “

“I’ll be staying at your house tonight — anyhow I wouldn’t talk about it.” Humphrey Deering glanced at Pan-e-troon.” You never can tell what disguises crooks will get up nowadays.”

“Oh, no.” Edith smiled at the Eskimo.” Mr. Troon’s all right — in fact, I’ve taken a fancy to him.”

The young man jacked the car down and put away the tools. Humphrey Deering’s eyes fell on him unfavorably.

“You follow me out,” he said.” But it seems to me that a man who once aspired to your hand would have more pride than to — “

“I had no place to go,” declared Westgate, unperturbed. “ I arrived here this morning without a dollar.”

“Anyhow, he’s a sort of cousin,” said Edith.

But Humphrey Deering pursued stubbornly:

“In view of what he did “ — he hesitated as Westgate flushed — “ you ought to be chaperoned.”

“Anything to please,” said Edith. She turned to Pan-e-troon.” Would you like to go to a big house in the country to spend the night?”

“Good Lord!” exclaimed Humphrey.

“I told you I’d taken a fancy to him.”

“Well, don’t put him in the doghouse — unless you want to start a distemper epidemic. He’s probably worn those skins all summer.”

*****

Pan-e-troon caught the gist of this and said indignantly:” These skins all clean. My father shoot; my aunt sew; I make clean.”

Humphrey started his motor impatiently. With little difficulty Edith persuaded Pan-e-troon into the rumble seat.

“If you’ve never been inside an American house you’ll have it to remember on those long, long nights up there.”

“Nights very long,” Pan-e-troon chuckled.” Six month.”

“Six months,” Edith repeated to Westgate.” Doesn’t that melt your heart?”

“No, never melt,” Pan-e-troon assured her.” Snow always.”

When they started off he was sure neither of their destination nor of his right to go; but the quiet speed lulled him into reckless content. After an hour of open country they turned in at a gate and curved up a long drive to a great mansion.

In the portentous hall warriors in tin glared down at Pan-e-troon through eyeless helmets, and he took off his hat politely.

“Mr. Troon has no baggage, Christopher. Fit him out and all that. Then take his things and brush them — you understand?”

“If you’ll follow me, Mr. Troon,” sniffed Christopher.

When Pan-e-troon was alone in his room, he lay on the bed with his feet in the air, stuffed the pillow over his mouth, and roared. What a day! This was an adventure beyond his wildest dreams. Downstairs he found his hostess and Westgate in the library. Edith was more than ever radiant in a dinner dress of wine-colored velvet, and she greeted him with no less courtesy than if he had been the accredited ambassador from the North Pole. , From the curios in the trophy room she sought out a sealskin drum, and he recognized on it the markings of a tribe neighbor to his own. Meanwhile she concluded what she was saying to Westgate:

“What we’ll do is this. You slip on a tail coat, and put the thing into one of the tails, and have Christopher sew up the tail — and the thing is safe for the night.”

“And sleep in the coat? That’d look just too natural to any burglar.”

*****

Christopher appeared to say that two men were outside with a package to be delivered personally to Miss Cary. In a moment Edith came back, her eyes shining.

“I’m going to take a real look at this thing!” she exclaimed as she broke the seals. “I’ve never had my hands on it before.”

From a box within a box she took an object wrapped in velvet — and uttered a little cry of delight. It was a circular setting of gold stuffed with alternate diamonds and rubies large as lumps of sugar. Going to the mirror, she put it on — and watched it settle down about her ears.

“Elizabeth the Second didn’t bob her hair.”

She showed it to Pan-e-troon.

“Very old — it belonged to a big lady chief a long time ago. It’s worth a lot of money.”

“Hund’ed dollar,” he agreed.

“Many, many, many hundred dollars. Last summer some robbers came to the World’s Fair and tried to steal it, but the police chased them away.”

An exasperated groan came from the doorway, where stood Humphrey Deering:

“What’s the idea, Edith? We keep a day and night guard on that exhibit for two seasons, and you wear it around as if it was a necklace from the five-and-ten!”

“I know five-and-ten,” said Pan-e-troon eagerly.” I been five-and-ten. I give them something — they give me something. Look, I show you — I go get.”

As he left the room Humphrey looked after him impatiently.

“How do you know who that fellow is?”

“Don’t be unpleasant, Humphrey. Somebody ought to wear this — it’s part of the responsibility of owning it. And as for Mr. Troon — well, I never heard of any rackets in the Arctic Circle.”

Pan-e-troon returned and, simmering with joy, presented Edith with the lock he had bought that afternoon.

“I give you this,” he bubbled,” you not give me anything. This free for you.”

“Oh, I couldn’t take it! Why, it’s a lock — isn’t it beautiful! I’ll be able to lock up all my things with it.”

“Yes!” he said excitedly. He pointed to the tiara of Elizabeth the Second, sloped awry upon her head.” Lock up and then no robbers can get. I show you.”

“Good God!” snorted Humphrey.

As they went in to dinner, a wind that had been soughing through the leaves swelled in gusto; the front door swung open with a bang and a sharp breath of impending winter swept into the hall.

“Autumn’s over,” Edith mourned.” Shut the door, will you, Westgate?”

She shivered slightly as she sat down at the table, and sent upstairs for a cape. When the butler had left the dining room she took off the tiara and handed it to West-gate.

“Take this now — it makes me uncomfortable. And after dinner do what I said.”

“What’s that?” demanded Humphrey.

“He’s going to keep it for me.”

“Why not me?”

“I guess she thinks it’s safer with some one in the family,” said Westgate dryly.

“See here — I’m much closer to being inthe family than you are.”

Pan-e-troon, applying himself to the legerdemain of many forks, did not speak but watched their faces in turn. Stimulated by the unusual situation in which he found himself, he was doing much thinking. Here was a most valuable headdress. Here was a young man who did not have a dollar when he reached Chicago. Secondly, here was Miss Cary’s fiance, and he knew from the magazines he read that the least likely suspect was only too often the one most capable of villainy. And chiefly, here was the city of Chicago swarming with gangsters and criminals — and in it, defenseless against their wiles, was the goddess, Miss Cary.

She was a goddess. He had lit his small savage flame at her altar, and the minutes fanned it until Edith could feel its white heat cut through the candlelight. She loved to be loved, and she liked it that this odd little package from another zone should respond to her. She would have gone further to make him enjoy himself, save for the general unpleasantness of her own situation. That Westgate should come back just when she had yielded every point, when everything had been settled in a way to please her family!

She was glad when the dinner was over-She walked out on the front terrace for a moment.

“Come out here, Mr. Troon. There’s a north wind and maybe you can feel your home in it.”

“North wind say many thing.”

“What does this one say?”

“Me, I don’t know big say. My uncle he know. He know where fish, where hunt, where bad danger. Always he tell from north wind.”

“Will you be glad to get home?”

He shook his head doubtfully and beamed as he always did when he spoke of adverse circumstances.

“Born poor race, poor people; work hard. always.”

It was growing colder. They went into the library for coffee.

Pan-e-troon picked up the drum again and began singing low in time to the strum of his fingers:

“Ben pay — en pay

Pane ina Kohna —

Ben pay — en pay

Pane ina Kohna —  — “

“What’s he groaning about?” said Humphrey.

“It’s some tribal song.”

Pan-e-troon explained:

“This song is north wind when it mean danger. This here part about danger.”

Westgate came downstairs in his tail coat, and took a chair very carefully indeed.

“I’m worth twenty thousand dollars as I sit,” he said. “Do I look it?”

“I sing song about danger,” announced Pan-e-troon.

“Sing it to yourself!” said Humphrey impatiently.

“No; go on — I like it,” said Edith. Pan-e-troon continued soulfully:

“Em sto — poh bay

Em sto — poh bay

Pane ina Kohna — “

“Pain in a corner is right!” exclaimed Humphrey. Pan-e-troon now launched into a gayer number as if to compete with the louder winds outside:

“Bik-bik-bik-bik

Ata-woona-woa

Bik-bik-bik-bik

Ooh — ooh — OOH!

“Magic song,” he interpolated. “Bik-bik-bik-bik — “

Humphrey threw up his arms desperately.

“This chink is driving me crazy! Can’t you make him sign off?”

He went to the radio and turned it on, dialing to a loud band. Pan-e-troon’s voice faded off.

“Don’t you see you’re boring us to death?” demanded Humphrey.

Pan-e-troon was aghast.

“Miz Cary no like?”

“No!”

Pan-e-troon laid down the drum and licked his lips.

“You no like because magic song,” he said.” Somebody bad here no like magic song. It tell about danger.”

“Just what do you mean?”

“Pan-e-troon have eyes to see. He see other eyes and they look at great fine headdress that cost many hund’ed dollar.”

All three stared at him. Edith said mischievously:

“So that’s it! I’m interested. Now that I think of it, Westgate could use the chaplet very nicely — and as for you, Humphrey, I haven’t yet understood why it had to be delivered before father arrived.”

Humphrey did not laugh.

“I explained that — “

“Never mind now. Tell us all, Pan-e-troon.”

Westgate began taking off his coat.

“Here — I’m not wearing this thing.”

“Nonsense, Westgate. Anyhow, it’s Humphrey that Pan-e-troon really suspects.”

“Why, the mangy yellow tramp!” cried Humphrey.” I ought to kick him out of this house.”

*****

The Eskimo’s eyes glinted on his.

“No kick Pan-e-troon,” he said. He turned to Edith. “Sorry you no like song. I go way now. You keep lock. All much ‘blige.”

“But I do like — “

Laughing politely, yet with an air this time of not laughing at all, he ducked his head and hurried from the room.

“We can’t let him go!” Edith cried.” You’re absurd, Humphrey — as if he meant anything.”

“Didn’t he, though! And I wouldn’t be a tit surprised if he has his eyes on that tiara himself.”

“Besides, it’s getting colder outside and he probably can’t find his way home.”

“He’ll find his way,” said Humphrey. “Those people are like Indians.”

But when after twenty minutes Pan-e-troon had failed to come downstairs, Edith stood up.

“I’m going to find him — he may be committing hara-kiri or something.”

“More probably he’s at your jewel box,” said Humphrey.

“I’ll go with you,” Westgate offered.

“Then I’ll go too.”

“See here,” said Westgate.” It seems to me it’s going too far to extract a promise from a man and then watch him besides. I told you I wouldn’t speak to Edith on personal matters unless you were within hearing distance.”

“And I’m going to see that you don’t. I don’t want you harrowing her with any ‘ explanations ‘ of your conduct last year.”

“I’ve already — “ Westgate broke off hopelessly. “What’s the use?”

They went up to the east wing, where the three men had been installed. Wind was sweeping through the upper corridors, and Edith shivered as Westgate closed a window at the end of the gallery. She knocked on the door of Pan-e-troon’s room, and at the touch it blew open with a bang.

His hat and his magazines were gone; the room was empty.

“I’ll bet he crawled out the window,” Humphrey said.” And I’m going to look in my room and see if he took my silver brushes with him.”

A moment later he called:

“No, here they are — “ Humphrey’s voice broke off as his own door slammed suddenly shut.

“Say, what is this?” he called a moment later. “Are you doing anything funny to that door, Westgate?”

“No, of course not.”

“Well, it won’t open. Is there a key out there?”

“No.”

The knob was manipulated from both sides without success.

“You’re locked in all right,” said Westgate, and added consolingly,” Anyhow, it’s nearly bedtime.”

“Like fun I’ll stay locked up here all night! I’ll — “

Westgate took off his coat and handed it to Edith.

“Now, when I say ‘Hep!’ you shove, Humphrey, and I’ll pull, and we’ll see what we can do. It may just be jammed. All ready? Hep!”

At the word Westgate’s body hit the door again, and Humphrey pulled at the knob — whereupon it came off neatly in the latter’s hand and he sat down violently.

“There’s a door between the two bedrooms,” suggested Edith. “We’ll try that.”

They went into Westgate’s room. There too the window was inexplicably open, and hardly had they crossed the threshold when the door blew shut behind them. Westgate jumped to the knob and then groaned:

“This one’s jammed too! This is getting phony.”

Humphrey’s voice reached them through the wall in a muffled roar:

“Whah you boo boom? Onagona — “

“We’re locked in too!”

The door between, the two bedrooms was to be as unamenable to persuasion as the others. Westgate looked out the window.

“Wouldn’t these rooms be sure to have gratings?”

“Father was afraid of kidnapers.” She raised her voice.” Humphrey, there’s a ventilator over the door. We can talk through that.”

They heard him moving furniture to stand on; a moment later his voice reached them clear and wild :

“If you think I’m going to stand for this! If you think I don’t know — “

“Humphrey, we’re just as helpless as you are.”

“Then who did it? Doors don’t lock themselves.”

“Looks like the Eskimo.”

“Ring your call bell, Humphrey,” said Edith.” I’ve tried this one, but it must be broken.”

.Westgate sat down and considered.

“Somebody wanted us to be locked in our rooms tonight,” said Westgate. “ That’s all I can make out.”

“What Iwant toknow is what you two are doing,” demanded Humphrey.

“Oh, we’re dancing nose to nose,” said Westgate disgustedly.” To a new tune called Pain in a Corner. Ever hear it?”

“I mean, what are you talking about? I hope you’re not trying to explain — “

“You can hear every word we say.”

“I don’t call this hearing.”

“You’re using your ears, aren’t you?”

“But I have to stand on top of a chair on top of a sofa — “

“I didn’t promise anything about a chair and sofa — “

“Sh — sh!” Edith whispered suddenly.” There’s some one outside the door, walking very quietly.”

“Hey, you!” cried Westgate. “Who’s that? We want to get out of here!”

*****

There was no answer, but the shuffle of footsteps continued. Then they both started as they saw the handle of the door turn very quietly, turn back into place.

“Who’s that?” Westgate cried. “Hands up or I fire!”

As he was unarmed and had no means of knowing whether or not his commands were obeyed, his threat was somewhat superfluous. The footsteps lisped off and died away.

“Well, if it was a burglar at least he can’t get the — “ Westgate broke off.” Say, where’s my coat? I gave it to you.”

“Your coat!” Edith uttered a little cry.” I dropped it in the hall.”

Westgate sat down and whistled.

“What’s that?” cried Humphrey.

“Tell him,” Westgate said, “that it’s the first bars of the Miserere.”…

An hour passed very quietly, save when from time to time a haggard voice came through the ventilator:

“You’re not whispering, are you?”

“No!”

“It isn’t fair that I should have to stand here.”

“Then why don’t you go to sleep? That’s what we’re trying to do.”

“While you make up some fool explanation for Edith? I know it’s something you don’t want me to hear, something just disgraceful — “

Another hour waned while Edith dozed on the bed and Westgate stretched on the settee. Then, as if a church clock striking in the village was a signal, a cry, followed by a crash, came from the other room. Westgate sprang to his feet.

“He’s down!” he exclaimed.” Poor old Humphrey. Now I can talk. Listen, Edith, and listen quick.”

“Yes,” she said in a frightened voice;” I’m listening.”

“It wasn’t me who was sued for breach of promise — itwas my father. I let people think it because he was senileand I wanted him to die with a good name. I’ve only just finished paying off his bills. Now if there’s anythingfancy about that explanation — “

“What is it?” cried Humphrey, who had painfully regained his perch.” Here I have a nasty fall and you take advantage of it — “ He broke off at a curious hushed sound. “What is it, Edith?” he cried, despairing.

“Oh, Humphrey, can’t a girl cry?”

“Anyhow, it’s another day,” said Westgate.

“Not until dawn.”

“All right, then.”

After that there was no sound at all from the room except the occasional squeaking of a wicker settee. Westgate and Edith were keeping their promise.

*****

At the crack of dawn they got the attention of a farmer outside and in half an hour they were free. But the coat was gone from the hall, and with it the tiara was gone — and Pan-e-troon.

“I still can’t believe it,” protested Edith.” But if he took it he’ll be easy to find.”

“I don’t know — it might have been a clever disguise.” Deering looked at Westgate. “ A clever inside job.”

They were making a cursory tour of the place in the early light, and now they started at a cry from the farmer, who had opened the door of the little icehouse.

Inside, where quarters of beef and mutton swung from hooks, Pan-e-troon was just raising himself sleepily from a pile of sawdust.

“Good morning,” he said, grinning. And then, as the men advanced toward him menacingly,” No be mad today. Pan-e-troon sorry. He no think you bad men now.”

“But we think you are!” thundered Humphrey. “Where’s the coronet?”

“I got it. That’s why I fix door so you locked up in room. I think you bad men maybe. ,But now no — I catch real bad man. Put him here for cool off. I only half good detect,” grinned Pan-e-troon.” I forget lock his door too. But when I make march round and round the big house I see him come out with black coat. Then we have big hit fight and I take headdress.”

“I see,” said Westgate. He turned to Edith.” Then Christopher did answer the call bell — but when he saw the coat in the hall he saw his opportunity.”

Pan-e-troon stretched.” I sure danger was there,” he said. “Now I go Lapland today.”

“Just once before you go we want you to render Pain in a Corner for the special benefit of Mr. Humphrey Deering,” Westgate said.

But Pan-e-troon was the son of many chiefs and he had too much dignity to be kidded.

“That fine song in my country. That mean danger.”

*****

Pan-e-troon’s visit to Chicago is handed down in the annals of his tribe, though the Eskimo version differs a little — the Cary estate, for instance, did not break off from the mainland and float out into Lake Michigan, with Westgate and Edith perched upon it. And as Pan-e-troon is entirely a gentleman his wife will never know that part of his devotion is reserved for a princess of the fabled trading posts in the far away.

IMAGE ON THE HEART

The train rolled into the little French town as if it were entering a dusty garden. As the floor of the railroad carriage trembled and shifted with the brakes, the stationary human figures outside the window became suddenly mobile as the train itself, and began running along beside it. The passengers seemed to blend right into the countryside as soon as the porters on the platform were running as fast as the train.

She was waiting for him — eight months was a long time and they were shy with each other for a moment. She had fair hair — delicate, shiny, essentially private hair — it was not arranged as blondes preferred at the moment but rather as if it were to be let down for someone alone sometime, somewhere. There was no direct challenge in it, and in her face there were the sort of small misproportions that kept her from being smooth and immediately pretty. But in her nineteen years she had managed to be a standard of beauty to two or three men — Tudy was lovely to those to whom she wanted to be lovely.

They got into one of those old-fashioned victorias that have a last refuge in the south of France; as the horse started off down the cobblestoned street, the man turned to the girl beside him and asked simply:

“Do you still want to marry me?”

“Yes, Tom.”

“Thank God.”

They interlaced hands and arms. Even though the cab was moving so slowly up a hill of the old town that pedestrians kept pace with them, it didn’t seem necessary to let go. Everything seemed all right in this mellow Provencal sunshine.

“It seemed forever till you’d come,” Tudy murmured. “Forever and forever. The University closes in another week — and that’s the end of my education.”

“You finish as a freshman.”

“Just a freshman. But I’d rather have had this than any finishing school — especially because you gave it to me.”

“I had to bring you up to my standard,” he said lightly. “Do you feel improved?”

“Do I! Maybe you think these French universities haven’t got standards. It’s — “ She broke off to say suddenly: “There’s you, Tom — don’t you see? That French officer coming out of the magasin de tabac across the street — he’s your double.”

Tom looked over toward the sleepy sidewalk, picked out the man, and agreed. “He does look like me, at least like I looked ten years ago. We’ll have to look him up if he lives here.”

“I know him, he’s been here a week on leave. He’s a naval aviator from Toulon. I wanted to meet him because he looked so much like you.”

Like Tom the man was darkly blond and handsome with a flickering in his face, a firelight over high cheekbones. Not having thought much of the matter for years, he stared curiously at the naval officer — who recognized Tudy and waved at her — and said meditatively:

“So that’s what Hook like.”

A minute later the carriage clattered into a green cove under a roof of poplars; beneath the soft roof slept the Hotel des Thermes, tranquil as when it had been a Roman Bath two thousand years before.

“Of course, you’ll stay on at your pension until Mother comes,” he said.

“I have to, Tom. I’m still a student. Isn’t that absurd — when you think that I’m a widow?”

The carriage had drawn up at the door. The concierge was bowing.

“Mother will be here in ten days — then the wedding — then we’re off for Sicily.”

She pressed his hand.

“In half an hour at the Pension Duval,” she said. “I’ll be in the front garden waiting.”

“As soon as I snatch a bath,” he said.

As the cab started off without him, Tudy squeezed back in the corner. She was trying not to think too much but irresistibly she kept saying to herself:

“I’m a lost soul maybe — I don’t feel at all like I ought to feel. Oh, if he’d only come a week ago.”

They had known each other for many years before this rendezvous in France. Or rather Tom had known her people, for he had thought of her as a little girl until one day at Rehoboth Beach a year before. Then word had gone around the hotel that there was a bride of a week whose husband had been tragically drowned that morning. Tom took charge of the immediate situation — it developed that she had no one to turn to and that she was left penniless. He fell in love with her and with her helplessness, and after a few months he persuaded her to let him lend her the money to go abroad and study for a year — and put something between herself and the past. There were no strings attached — indeed, nothing had been said — but he knew that she responded to him in so far as her grief permitted, and there was correspondence more and more intimate and in a few months he wrote asking her to marry him.

She wrote him a glowing answer — and thus it was that he was here. Thus it was that she sat opposite him in an outdoor restaurant on the Rue de Provence that night. The electric lights behind the leaves swayed into sight sometimes in a faint wind, making her head into a ball of white gold.

“Oh, you’ve been so good to me,” she said. “And I really have worked hard, and I’ve loved it here.”

“That’s why I want to be married here, because I’ve so often thought of you in this old town — my heart’s been here for eight months.”

“And I’ve pictured you stopping here when you were a boy, and loving it so much you wanted to send me here.”

“Did you really think of me — like your letters said?”

“Every day,” she answered quickly. “Every letter was true. Sometimes I couldn’t get home fast enough to write you.”

If only he had come a week ago!

Tom talked on:

“And you like the idea of Sicily? I have two months. If you have any other place — “

“No, Sicily’s all right — I mean Sicily’s wonderful.”

Four men, two of them naval officers, and a girl had come into the little cafe. One face among them emerged in the hundred little flashlights and dark patches of leaves — it was that of Lieutenant de Marine Riccard, the man Tudy had pointed out that afternoon. The party settled themselves at a table opposite, grouping and regrouping with laughter.

“Let’s go,” Tudy said suddenly. “We’ll ride up to the University.”

“But isn’t that my double? I’m curious to meet him.”

“Oh, he’s very — young. He’s just here on leave and he’s going back soon, I think — he probably wants to talk to his friends. Do let’s go.”

Obediently he signaled for the check, but it was too late. Riccard has risen from the table, with him two of the other men.

“ — ‘Sieu Croirier.”

“ — ‘Sieu Silve.”

“ — soir.”

“ — chantee.”

“Why, we do look alike,” Tom said to Riccard.

Riccard smiled politely.

“Excuse me? Oh, yes — I see — a little bit of a bit.” Then he conceded rather haughtily, “I am the English type, I had a Scotswoman for a grandmother.”

“You speak English well.”

“I have known English and American people.” Fragmentarily his eyes strayed towards Tudy. “You speak French well, I wish I could speak so good English. Tell me,” he said intently, “do you know any tricks?”

“Tricks?” Tom asked in surprise.

“Americans all know tricks and I am like an American that way. We have been doing tricks this evening before we came here. Do you know the trick with the fork where you hit it so — “he illustrated with graphic gesturing — “and it lands here in the glass?”

“I’ve seen it. I can’t do it.”

“Neither can I mostly, but sometimes though. Garcon, bring a fork. Also there are some tricks with matches — very interesting. They make you think, these tricks.”

Suddenly Tom remembered that though tricks were no hobby of his, he did happen to have with him something of the sort bought for a nephew and undelivered. It was in his trunk in the hotel, and it was plain that Riccard would consider it a prince among jests. Pleased by the thought, he watched the French people bring their ready concentration, their delight in simple things made complex, to bear upon the forks and matches and handkerchiefs that presently came into play. He liked watching them; he felt young with them; he laughed in tune to Tudy’s laughter — it was fine to be sitting beside her in the soft balm of a Provencal night watching French people make nonsense at the day’s end…

He was an astute man, but he was so wrapped up in his dream of Tudy that it was not until two nights later that he realized something was not as it should be. They had invited several of her friends from the University and Lieutenant Riccard to dine with them in the same little cafe. Tom did the trick that he had recovered from his trunk, a familiar old teaser that depended on two little rubber bulbs connected by a thin cord two yards long.

One of the bulbs was planted under the table cloth beneath Riccard’s plate, and by squeezing the other bulb from across the table, Tom was able to make the Frenchman’s plate rise and fall inexplicably, jiggle, bump, tilt, and conduct itself in a generally supernatural manner. It was not Tom’s notion of the cream of human wit, but Riccard had asked for it and so far as practical jokes go it was a decided success.

“I don’t know what can be the matter with my fork tonight,” Riccard said mournfully. “You Americans will think I am barbarian. There! I have done it again! Can it be that my hand is trembling?” He looked anxiously at his hands. “No — yet there it is — I am destined to spill things tonight. It is one of those matters in life that can never be explained — “

He started as the knife on his plate gave a little sympathetic clink.

“Mon Dieu!” Once again he attempted a logical treatment of the situation, but he was obviously disturbed and he kept a watchful eye on the plate. “It is because I haven’t flown in ten days,” he decided. “You see, I am used to currents of air, to adjustments very sudden, and when it does not come I imagine it — “

It was a warm night, but there was extra dew on his young forehead, and then Tudy’s voice, very clear and piercing, cut through the tranquil air.

“Stop it, Tom. Stop it!”

He looked at her with an amazement as great as Riccard’s. In fear of a contagious mirth he had been avoiding her eyes, but he saw suddenly that there was no mirth in her face at all — only an engrossed compassion.

His world tilted like the plate for a moment, righted itself; he explained to Riccard the mechanics of the joke, and then as a sort of atonement, presented him with the apparatus. Riccard, trying to get back at someone, tried immediately to put it into action, inveigling the proprietor of the restaurant to sit down on it, but for the time Tom only remembered the expression on Tudy’s face when she had cried out. What did it mean when she could be so sorry for another man? Perhaps it was a general tenderness, perhaps her maternal instinct was so strong that he would be glad later when she felt that way about their children. Oh, she was good, but there was something in him unreconciled to the poignancy, the spontaneity of that cry — and on the way home in the cab he asked her:

“Are you by any chance interested in this French boy? If you are, it’s all right with me. We’ve been apart for a long time and if you’ve changed — “

She took his face between her hands and looked into his eyes.

“How can you say that to me?”

“Well, I thought that maybe gratitude was influencing you — “

“Gratitude has nothing to do with it. You’re the best man I ever knew.”

“The point is, do I happen to be attractive to you?”

“Of course you are — other men seem unimportant when you’re around. That’s why I don’t like to see them. Oh, Tom, I wish your mother would hurry so we can get married and leave here — “

As he caught her into his arms, she gave a sob that went through him like a knife. But as the minutes passed and she half lay in his arms in the shadow of the cab’s awning, he loved her so much and felt so close to her that he couldn’t believe anything could really have gone wrong.

Tudy took her examinations. “Not that they matter, because of course I’m not going on. But that’s what you sent me for. I’m now ‘finished.’ Darling, do I look finished?”

He regarded her appraisingly.

“You’ve probably learned enough French to get you in trouble,” he said. “You’re a little sweeter, perhaps, but not much — there wasn’t very much room for improvement.”

“Oh, but French wasn’t all I learned. How about Siamese. I sat next to the cutest little Siamese all during one lecture course, and he tried so desperately to make up to me. I learned to say, ‘No, I will not climb out the window of the pension tonight’ in Siamese. Do you want to hear me say it?”

It was a bright morning — he had called for her at eight to walk to the University. Arm in arm they strolled.

“What are you going to do while I’m being examined?” she asked.

“I’m going to get the car — “

“Our car — I’m wild to see it.”

“It’s a funny little thing, but it’ll take us all over Italy — “

“Then what will you do the rest of the time, after you get the car?”

“Why, I’ll try it out and then I’ll probably stop in front of the cafe about noon and have a bock, and maybe run into Riccard or one of your French friends — “

“What do you talk about with Riccard?” she asked.

“Oh, we do tricks. We don’t talk — not exactly, at least it doesn’t seem like talk.”

She hesitated. “I don’t see why you like to talk to Riccard,” she said at last.

“He’s a very nice type, very impetuous and fiery — “

“I know,” she said suddenly. “He once told me he’d resign his commission if I’d fly to China with him and fight in the war.”

When she said this, they had come to a halt engulfed by a crowd of students pouring into the buildings. She joined them as if she had said nothing at all:

“Goodbye, darling. I’ll be on this corner at one o’clock.”

He walked thoughtfully down to the garage. She had told him a great deal. He wasn’t asking her to fly to China; he was asking her to go for a quiet honeymoon in Sicily. He promised her security, not adventure.

“Well, it’s absurd to be jealous of this man,” he thought. “I’m just getting a little old before my time.”

So in the week of waiting for his mother, he organized picnics and swimming parties and trips to Aries and Nimes, inviting Tudy’s friends from the University, and they danced and sang and were very gay in little restaurant gardens and bistros all over that part of Provence — and behaved in such a harmless, lazy, wasteful summer manner that Tom, who wanted only to be alone with Tudy, almost managed to convince himself that he was having a good time…

…until the night on the steps of Tudy’s pension when he broke the silence and told her he wasn’t.

“Perhaps you’d better think it over,” he said.

“Think what over, Tom?”

“Whether you love me enough to marry me.”

Alarmed she cried: “Why, Tom, of course I do.”

“I’m not so sure. I like to see you have a good time, but I’m not the sort of man who could ever play — well, call it ‘background.’ “

“But you’re not background. I’m trying to please you, Tom; I thought you wanted to see a lot of young people and be very

Provencal and dance the Carmagnol’ and all that.”

“But it seems to be Riccard who’s dancing it with you. You didn’t actually have to kiss him tonight.”

“You were there — you saw. There was nothing secret about it. It was in front of a lot of people.”

“I didn’t like it.”

“Oh, I’m sorry if it hurt you, Tom. It was all playing. Sometimes with a man it’s difficult to avoid those things. You feel like a fool if you do. It was just Provence, just the lovely night — and I’ll never see him again after three or four days.”

He shook his head slowly.

“No, I’ve changed ideas. I don’t think we’ll see him any more at all.”

“What?” Was it alarm or relief in her voice? “Oh, then all right, Tom — that’s all right. You know best.”

“Is that agreed then?”

“You’re absolutely right,” she repeated after a minute. “But I think we could see him once more, just before he goes.”

“I’ll see him tomorrow,” he said almost gruffly. “You’re not a child and neither is he. It isn’t as if you were a debutante tapering off some heartsick swain.”

“Then why can’t you and I go away until he leaves.”

“That’s running away — that’d be a fine way to start a marriage.”

“Well, do what you want,” she said, and he saw by the starlight that her face was strained. “You know that more than anything in the world I want to marry you, Tom.”

Next day on the Rue de Provence he encountered Riccard; by mutual instinct they turned to a table of the nearest cafe.

“I must talk to you,” said Riccard.

“I wanted to talk to you,” Tom said, but he waited.

Riccard tapped his breast pocket.

“I have a letter here from Tudy delivered by hand this morning.”

“Yes?”

“You must understand that I am fond of you too, Tom — that I am very sad about the whole thing.”

“Well, what?” Tom demanded impatiently. “If Tudy wrote that she was in love with you — “

Riccard tapped his pocket again.

“She did not say that. I could show you this letter — “

“I don’t want to see it.”

Their tempers were rising.

“You’re upsetting Tudy,” Tom said. “Your business is to keep out.”

Riccard’s answer was humble but his eyes were proud.

“I have no money,” he said.

And, of all things, Tom was sorry for him.

“A girl must make her choice,” he said kindly. “You’re in the way now.”

“I understand that, too. I shall perhaps shorten my leave. I shall borrow a friend’s plane and fly down, and if I crash so much the better.”

“That’s nonsense.”

They shook hands and Tom duplicated the other’s formal little bow, succinct as a salute. . . .

He picked up Tudy at her pension an hour later. She was lovely in an inky blue muslin dress above which her hair shone like a silver angel. As they drove away from the house he said:

“I feel like a brute. But you can’t have two men, can you — like a young girl at a dance?”

‘‘Oh, I know it — don’t talk about it, darling. He did it all. I haven’t done anything I couldn’t tell you about.”

Riccard had said much the same thing. What bothered Tom was the image on the heart.

They drove southward past cliffs that might have had Roman lookouts posted on them, or that might have concealed barbarians waiting to drop boulders upon the Roman legions if they defiled through some pass.

Tom kept thinking: “Between Riccard and me which is the Roman, and which is the barbarian?”

…Over the crest of a cliff a singing dot came into sight — a dark bee, a hawk — an airplane. They looked up idly, then they were suddenly thinking the same thing, wondering if it were Riccard on his way back to the naval base in Toulon.

“It probably is.” Her voice sounded dry and uninterested.

“It looks like an old-fashioned monoplane to me.”

“Oh, I guess he can fly anything. He was picked to make some flight to Brazil that they called off. It was in the papers before you came — “

She broke off because of a sudden change of the situation in the sky. After passing over them the plane had begun to circle back, and in a moment its flight resolved itself into a slowly graduated spiral which was undoubtedly intended to center over the road a quarter of a mile ahead of them.

“What’s he trying to do?” exclaimed Tom. “Drop flowers on us?”

She didn’t answer. During what must have been less than a minute of time, the car and plane approached the same spot. Tom stopped the car.

“If this is one of his tricks, let’s get out.”

“Oh, he wouldn’t — “

“But look!”

The plane had come out of its dive, straightened out and was headed straight for them. Tom caught at Tudy’s hand, trying to pull her from the car, but he had misjudged the time and the plane was already upon them, with a roaring din — then suddenly it was over them and away.

“The fool!” Tom cried.

“He’s a wonderful flier.” Her face was still and calm. “He might have killed himself.”

Tom got back in the car and sat looking at her for a moment. Then he turned the car around and started back the way they had come.

For a long time they drove in silence. Then she asked:

“What are you going to do — send me home to America?”

The simplicity of her question confused him; it was impossible to punish her for an episode that was no fault of her own, yet he had intended just that when he turned the car around.

“What do you want to do?” he asked, stalling.

Her face had that fatalistic helplessness that he had seen on it one day ten months before when he broke the news to her that her husband had left nothing. And the same wave of protective love that had swept over him then swept over him again now. In the same moment he realized that the tragedy of her marriage — which had come so quickly she scarcely knew what had happened — had not really matured her. And by protecting her from its consequences he had aided the retardation.

“You’re just a girl,” he said aloud. “I suppose it’s my fault.”

In that case his responsibility was not over, and deep in his heart he knew that in spite of her inopportune coquetry so obvious under her thin denials, he did not want it to be over. On the contrary he seized upon it as a reason for holding her to him.

“You’re making a little trip,” he said as they neared town. “But not to America. I want you to go up to Paris for three or four days and shop a little. Meanwhile I’ll go down to Marseilles and meet Mother.”

Tudy cheered up at the suggestion.

“I’ll get my graduation dress and my trousseau at the same time.”

“All right, but I want you to leave this afternoon. So pack your bags right away.”

An hour later they stood together in the station.

“I miss my exam tomorrow,” she said.

“But it’ll give you a chance to come down to earth.”

He hated the phrase even as it left his lips: To come down to earth — was that an appealing prospect to hold out to any woman?

“Goodbye, dearest, dearest Tom.”

As the train started off he ran beside it a moment, throwing into her window a packet of two bright handkerchiefs she had liked in a bazaar.

“Thanks — oh, thanks.”

It was a long platform — when he came out at its end into the sunlight he stopped. There was his heart in motion with the train; he could feel the rip when the shadow of the last car broke from under the station roof.

She wrote immediately from Paris.

Oh, I miss you so, Tom. And I miss Provence, too. (Then a lot of erasing.) I miss everything that I’ve grown so fond of this last year. But I don’t miss any person but you!

There are no Americans in the streets — maybe we belong at home now and always did. They have a life they never take us into. They plan their lives so differently. But our American lives are so strange that we can never figure things out ahead. Like the hurricanes in Florida and the tornadoes and floods. All of a sudden things happen to us and we hardly know what hit us.

But I guess we must like that sort of thing or our ancestors wouldn’t have come to America. Does this make sense? There is a man knocking on the door with a package. More later.

Later:

Darling, it is my wedding dress and I cried on it just a little in the corner where I can wash it out. And darling, it makes me think of my other wedding dress and of how kind you have been to me and how I love you.

It is blue — oh, the frailest blue. I’m getting afraid I won’t be able to get the tears out of the corner.

Later:

I did — and it is so lovely, hanging now in the closet with the door open. It’s now eight o’clock — you know l’heure bleu — when everything is really blue — and I’m going to walk up to the Opera along the Avenue de l’Opera and then back to the hotel.

Before I go to sleep I’ll think of you and thank you for the dress and the lovely year and the new life you’re giving me.

Your devoted, your loving,

TUDY.

P.S. I still think I should have stayed and gone with you to meet your mother in Marseilles. She —

Tom broke off and went back to the signature: “Your devoted, your loving.” Which was she? He read back over the letter pausing at any erasure, for an erasure often means an evasion, a second thought. And a love letter should come like a fresh stream from the heart, with no leaf on its current.

Then a second the next morning:

I’m so glad for your telegram — this will reach you just before you start down to Marseilles. Give your mother my dearest love and tell her how much I hate missing her and how I wish I could welcome her to Provence. (There were two lines crossed out and rewritten.) I will be starting back day after tomorrow. How funny it is to be buying things, when I never had any money like this to spend before — $225.00 — that’s what it was, after I’d figured the hotel bill and even thought of keeping enough cash in hand so I won’t arrive absolutely penniless.

I’ve bought two presents, I hope you won’t mind, one for your mother and one for somebody else and that’s you. And don’t think I’ve stinted myself and that I won’t be a pretty bride for you! In fact I haven’t waited until my wedding day to find out. I’ve dressed all up half a dozen times and stood in front of the mirror.

I’ll be glad when it’s over. Won’t you, darling? I mean I’ll be glad when it’s begun — won’t you, darling?

Meanwhile, on the morning after she left, Tom had run into Riccard in the street. He nodded to him coldly, still angry about the airplane stunt, but Riccard seemed so unconscious of any guilt, seemed to think of it merely as a trick as innocuous as the bulb under the plate, that Tom waived the matter and stood talking with him a while under the freckled poplar shadows.

“So you decided not to go,” he remarked.

“Oh, I shall go, but not until tomorrow after all. And how is Madame — I mean Tudy?”

“She’s gone up to Paris to do some shopping.”

He felt a malicious satisfaction in seeing Riccard’s face fall.

“Where does she stay there? I would like to send her a telegram of goodbye.”

No, you don’t, Tom thought. Aloud he lied:

“I’m not sure — the hotel where she was going to stay is full.”

“When does she come back?”

“She gets here day after tomorrow morning. I’m going to meet her with the car at Avignon.”

“I see.” Riccard hesitated for a moment. “I hope you will be very happy,” he said.

His face was sad and bright at once; he was a gallant and charming young man, and Tom was sorry for a moment that they had not met under other circumstances.

But next day, driving to Marseilles, a very different idea came to him. Suppose instead of going to the air base at Toulon today, Riccard should go to Paris. There were not an infinite number of good hotels and in a morning’s search he might find out which was Tudy’s. And in the inevitable emotion of a “last meeting,” who could tell what might happen.

The worry so possessed him that when he reached Marseilles he put in a telephone call for the Naval Aviation Depot at Toulon.

“I’m calling Lieutenant Riccard,” he said.

“I do not understand.”

“Lieutenant Riccard.”

“This is not Lieutenant Riccard, surely?”

“No. I want to speak to Lieutenant Riccard.”

“Ah.”

“Is he there?”

“Riccard — wait till I look in the orderly room book… Yes… he is here — or at least he was here.”

Tom’s heart turned over as he waited.

“He is here,” said the voice. “He is in the mess room. One minute.”

Tom put the receiver very gently on the hook. His first instinct was relief — Riccard could not make it now; then he felt ashamed of his suspicions. Strolling that morning around a seaport where so many graver things had happened, he thought again of Tudy in a key above jealousy. He knew, though, that love should be a simpler, kinder thing; but every man loves out of something in himself that cannot be changed, and if he loved possessively and jealously, he could not help it.

Before he met his mother at the steamer he wired Tudy in Paris, asking an answer with a last thought that she might not be there. Bringing his mother back to the hotel for lunch he asked the concierge:

“Have you a telegram for me?”

It was there. His hands trembled as he opened it.

WHERE ELSE SHOULD I BE STOP LEAVING AT SIX TONIGHT AND REACHING AVIGNON TOMORROW MORNING AT FIVE A.M.

TUDY.

Driving up through Provence with his mother in the afternoon he said:

“You’re very brave to try to go around the world by yourself at seventy-eight.”

“I suppose I am,” she said. “But your father and I wanted to see China and Japan — and that was not to be — so I sometimes think I’m going to see them for him, as if he were alive.”

“You loved each other, didn’t you?”

She looked at him as if his question was a young impertinence.

“Of course.” Then she said suddenly: “Tom, is something making you unhappy?”

“Certainly not. Look what we’re passing, Mother — you’re not looking.”

“It’s a river — the Rhone, isn’t it?”

“It’s the Rhone. And after I’ve settled you at the Hotel des Thermes I’ll be following this same river up to Avignon to meet my girl.”

But he had a curious fear as he passed through the great gate of Avignon at four o’clock next morning that she would not be there. There had been a warning in the thin song of his motor, in the closed ominous fronts of the dark villages, in the gray break of light in the sky. He drank a glass of beer in the station buffet where several Italian emigrant families were eating from their baskets. Then he went out on the station platform and beckoned to a porter.

“There will be a lady with some baggage to carry.”

Now the train was coming out of the blue dawn. Tom stood midway on the platform trying to pick out a face at a window or vestibule as it slid to rest, but there was no face. He walked along beside the sleepers, but there was only an impatient conductor taking off small baggage. Tom went up to look at the luggage thinking maybe it was hers, that it was new and he hadn’t recognized it — then suddenly the train was in motion. Once more he glanced up and down the platform.

“Tom!”

She was there.

“Tudy — it’s you.”

“Didn’t you expect me?”

She looked wan and tired in the faint light. His instinct was to pick her up and carry her out to the car.

“I didn’t know there was another wagon-lit,” he said excitedly. “Thank heaven there was.”

“Darling, I’m so glad to see you. All this is my trousseau, that I told you about. Be careful of them, porter — the strings won’t hold probably.”

“Put this luggage in the car,” he said to the porter. “We’re going to have coffee in the buffet.”

“Bien, Monsieur.”

In the buffet Tudy took smaller packages from her purse.

“This is for your mother. I spent a whole morning finding this for her and I wouldn’t show it to you for anything.”

She found another package.

“This for you, but I won’t open it now. Oh, I was going to be so economical, but I bought two presents for you. I haven’t ten francs left. It’s good you met me.”

“Darling, you’re talking so much you’re not eating.”

“I forgot.”

“Well, eat — and drink your coffee. I don’t mean hurry — it’s only half-past four in the morning.”

They drove back through a day that was already blooming; there were peasants in the fields who looked at them as they went by, crawling up on one knee to stare over the tips of the young vines.

“What do we do now?” she said. “Oh, yes, now we get married.”

“We certainly do — tomorrow morning. And when you get married in France, you know you’ve been married. I spent the whole first day you were away signing papers. Once I had to forge your signature, but I gave the man ten francs — “

“Oh, Tom — “ she interrupted softly. “Don’t talk for a minute. It’s so beautiful this morning, I want to look at it.”

“Of course, darling.” He looked at her. “Is something the matter?”

“Nothing. I’m just confused.” She smoothed her face with her hands as if she were parting it in the middle. “I’m almost sure I left something, but I can’t think what.”

“Weddings are always confusing,” he said consolingly. “I’m supposed to forget the ring or something by the best traditions. Now just think of that — the groom has to remember to forget the ring.”

She laughed and her mood seemed to change, but when Tom saw her at intervals in the packing and preparations of the day, he noticed that the air of confusion, of vagueness, remained about her. But next morning when he called at her pension at nine, she seemed so beautiful to him with her white-gold hair gleaming above her frail blue frock that he remembered only how much he loved her.

“But don’t crush my bouquet,” she said. “Are you sure you want me?”

“Perfectly sure.”

“Even if — even if I have been rather foolish?”

“Of course.”

“Even if — “

He kissed her lips gently.

“That’ll do,” he said. “I know you were a little in love with Riccard, but it’s all over and we won’t ever mention it again — is that agreed?”

Momentarily she seemed to hesitate. “Yes, Tom.”

So they were married. And it seemed very strange to be married in France. Afterward they gave a little breakfast for a few friends at the hotel and afterward Tudy, who had moved over from the pension the day before, went upstairs to change her clothes and do her last packing, while Tom went to his mother’s room and sat with her for a while. She was not starting off with them, but would rest here a day or two and then motor down to Marseilles to catch another boat.

“I worry about your being alone,” he said.

“I know my way about, son. You just think about Tudy — remember, you’ve given her her head for eight months and she may need a little firmness. You’re twelve years older than she is and you ought to be that much wiser — “ She broke off, “But every marriage works out in its own way.”

Leaving his mother’s room Tom went down to the office to pay his bill.

“Someone wishes to see Monsieur,” said the clerk.

It was a French railroad conductor carrying a package.

“Bonjour, Monsieur,” he said politely. “Is it you who has just been married to the young lady who traveled on the P. L. M. yesterday?”

“Yes.”

“I did not like to disturb Madame on such a morning, but she left this on the train. It is a cloak.”

“Oh, yes,” said Tom. “She just missed it this morning.”

“I had a little time off duty so I thought I’d bring it myself.”

“We’re very much obliged. Here’s a fifty — no, here’s a hundred francs.”

The conductor looked at the size of Tom’s tip and sighed.

“I cannot keep all this. This is too generous.”

“Nonsense! I’ve been married this morning.”

He pressed the money into the man’s hand.

“You are very kind, Monsieur. Au revoir, Monsieur. But wait — “ He fumbled in his pocket. “I was so full of emotion at your generosity that I almost forgot. This is another article I found — it may belong to Madame or to her brother who got off at Lyons. I have not been able to figure what it is. Au revoir again, Monsieur, and thank you. I appreciate an American gentleman — “

He waved goodbye as he went down the stairs.

Tom was holding in his hands two bulbs of an apparatus that were connected by a long tube. If you pressed one bulb the air went through the tube and inflated the other.

When he came into Tudy’s room she was staring out the window in the direction of the University.

“Just taking a last look at my finishing school,” she said. “Why, what’s the matter?”

He was thinking faster than he ever had in his life.

“Here’s your cloak,” he said. “The conductor brought it.”

“Oh, good! It was an old cloak but — “

“And here’s this — “ He showed her what he held in his hand. “It seems your brother left it on the train.”

The comers of her mouth fell and her eyes pulled her young forehead into a hundred unfamiliar lines. In one moment her face took on all the anguish in the world.

“All right,” she said, after a minute. “I knew I should have told you. I tried to tell you this morning. Riccard flew up to Paris in time to meet me in the station and ride south with me. I had no idea he was coming.”

“But no doubt you were pleasantly surprised,” he said dryly.

“No, I wasn’t, I was furious. I didn’t see how he knew I was coming south on that train. That’s all there was to it, Tom — he rode down as far as Lyons with me. I started to tell you but you were so happy this morning and I couldn’t bear to.”

Their eyes met, hers wavered away from his out into the great soft-shaking poplar trees.

“I know I can never make you believe it was all right,” she said dully. “I suppose we can get an annulment.”

The sunlight fell on the square corners of her bags, parked and ready to go.

“I was just getting on the train when I saw him,” she said. “There was nothing I could do. Oh, it’s so awful — and if he just hadn’t dropped that terrible trick you’d never have known.”

Tom walked up and down the room a minute.

“I know you’re through with me,” Tudy said. “Anyhow, you’d just reproach me all the rest of my life. So we’d better quit. We can call it off.”

…We can die, too, he was thinking. He had never wanted anything so much in his life as he wanted to believe her. But he had to decide now not upon what was the truth, for that he would never know for certain, but upon the question as to whether he could now and forever put the matter out of his mind, or whether it would haunt their marriage like a ghost. Suddenly he decided:

“No, we won’t quit — we’ll try it. And there’ll never be any word of reproach.”

Her face lighted up; she rose and came toward him and he held her close for a minute.

“We’ll go right now,” he said.

An hour later they drove away from the hotel, both of them momentarily cheered by the exhilaration of starting a journey, with the little car bulging with bags and new vistas opening up ahead. But in the afternoon as they curved down through Provence, they were silent for a while each with a separate thought. His thought was that he would never know — what her thought was must be left unfathomed — and perhaps unfathomable in that obscure pool in the bottom of every woman’s heart.

Toward evening as they reached the seaboard and turned east following a Riviera that twinkled with light, they came out of their separate selves and were cheerful together. When the stars were bright on the water he said:

“We’ll build our love up and not down.”

“I won’t have to build my love up,” she said loyally. “It’s up in the skies now.”

They came to the end of France at midnight and looked at each other with infinite hope as they crossed the bridge over into Italy, into the new sweet warm darkness.

A FULL LIFE

At twilight on September 3d, 1923, a girl jumped from the fifty-third-story window of a New York office building. She wore a patented inflatable suit of rubber composition which had just been put on the novelty market for purposes of having fun — the wearer by a mere jump or push could supposedly sail over fences or street intersections. It was fully blown up when she jumped. The building was a set-back and she landed on the projecting root of the fiftieth floor. She was bruised and badly shaken but not seriously hurt.

She recovered consciousness in the ambulance and gave the name Gwendolyn Davies but in the emergency room when the intern so addressed her she denied it, and insisted on leaving the hospital after necessary stitches had been taken. Several inquiries that were undoubtedly for this girl asked for a different name. The intern, Dr. Wilkinson, gathered that a little orgy after hours had been taking place in the office at the time.

A week later Dr. Wilkinson took out a library book that he had borrowed there some time before. It was a collection of mysterious cases re-written from contemporary newspaper accounts, and the third story, entitled The Vanished Girl, read as follows:

In 1915 Delphis, N.Y., was an old town of large, faded houses, built far back on shady lawns — not at all like the Long Island and New Jersey villages where even Sunday is only a restless lull between the crash of trains. During the war there was a murder there, and in 1922 bandits held up a garage. After that nothing happened for a long time till Gwendolyn Davies walked out of her father’s house one day and disappeared off the face of the earth.

She was the daughter of a poor doctor and the prettiest girl in town. She had a brave, bright face that made you look at her, yellow hair and a beggar’s lips that would not beg in vain. The last person who ever laid eyes on Gwen Davies was the station master who put her suitcase on the train. She told him lightly that she was leaving for her family’s own good — she didn’t want to “raise the roof,” but no scandal ever developed about her. When she reached New York she was to go directly to a recommended boarding house adjacent to the college. She didn’t appear there — she simply melted like a shadow into the warm September night.

“Height, five feet five inches, weight, one hundred and sixteen pounds. Features, regular and pleasing. Left eye slighty larger than the right. Wearing a blue traveling suit and a red, leather-trimmed hat. Bright personality. We ask everyone to keep an eye out for this girl whose parents are prostrated by her disappearance.”

She was one of many thousands of lost girls, but her beauty and the fact that her father was a reputable physician made it news. There was a “ring” said the tabloids; there was original sin, said the pulpit; and “mark my words,” said the citizens of Delphis, their words being wild suppositions about somebody knowing something more than he or she saw fit to tell. For awhile the town of Delphis was as sad as the village of Hamlin after the Pied Piper had come and gone — there were young men who forgot their partners entirely when the orchestra played “Babes in the Woods” or “Underneath the Stars,” and fanned they had loved Gwen and would never love another.

After a few years a New York judge walked away into the blue and the case of Gwen Davies was revived for a day in the newspapers, with a note that someone had lately seen her or her double in a New York surface car; after that the waters closed over her, apparently forever.

Dr. Wilkinson was sure it was the same girl — he thought for awhile of trying to trace her by going to a newspaper with the story but he was a retiring young man and the idea became shelved like the play he was always going to write and the summer he was going to spend on the Riviera.

But he never forgot — he was forever haunted by the picture of the girl floating slowly out over the city at dusk, buoyed up by delicious air, by a quintessence of golden hope, like a soaring and unstable stock issue. She was the girl for whom a part of him was always searching at cafes and parties and theatres, when his practical wife would ask:

“Why are you staring around, Harvey? Do you see anybody we know?”

He did not explain.

II

Five years later the following story appeared in the New York papers:

This afternoon at four o’clock the Comptesse de Frejus jumped from the deck of the liner Stacia one day out from New York. She was rescued after the ship had turned around and searched for two hours through a fortunately calm sea. The Comptesse is an American, the farmer Mrs. Cornelius B. Hasbrouk. who obtained her divorce in Reno last year and then married Rene. Compt de Frejus, in fans. She gave out no statement but said to an officer of the cutter which picked her up that her chief thought in the water was to beat off the huge birds who attempted to perch on her head and peck at her eyes. The passengers with whom she had been talking had no warning of her sudden act nor any explanation.

There were no pictures of the Comptesse de Frejus and when Dr. Wilkinson went to the newspaper files at the public library he found that there were no pictures of Mrs. Cornelius B. Hasbrouk either, save with her arm covering her face. But there were a great many columns about Mrs. Hasbrouk’s first marriage and one of them mentioned a scar on her forehead — a scar that corresponded to a suture he had performed himself.

The columns had been written two years before. Mrs. Hasbrouk’s first marriage had begun stormily. The groom, a junior at Harvard, was twenty and had just inherited a fortune of twenty million dollars from his father, the powder manufacturer. The bride was a voting lady of no background, not even the stage. The story ran that when Mr. Hasbrouk was located the next morning in a barber shop he had to be shown his picture in the paper before he realized that he was married.

The new Mrs. Hasbrouk was the cross of the cameramen but the reporters did rather well by her. She was described as lovely, modest, well-bred, and charming. There was a vague impression that she was either horn the South, North or West, though one paper announced her birthplace as New York City. She said rather cryptically that she had married the young munitions magnate because she had “always really belonged to him” but that she would give him up it he preferred. Pending an annulment the couple departed for a trip to the South Seas.

Dr. Wilkinson was rather relieved that this marriage had not lasted and that her subsequent union with a member of the French nobility had led her to jump into the Atlantic. He fell that he knew her, in some such manner as one might know a composer or a writer one had never seen — he knew her though she had written only on air and there was a mysterious compulsion that made him follow her career with admiration and curiosity. He made certain notes from these newspaper files and settled down to wait for her to become news again.

III

At two o’clock on a June afternoon in 1937 Dr. Wilkinson, now a stout baldish man of forty, parked his car by a circus which had pitched on the shores of Long Island. The performance was not to begin until three but there were certain preliminary attractions and it was one of these which had attracted him to the spot. A little aside from the main tent stretched a large white banner on which was lettered:

THE HUMAN SHELL

At two-thirty this afternoon

the Countess of Frejus will

be fired out of this cannon.

A crowd of intellectuals was already inspecting the enormous piece of ordinance but Dr. Wilkinson stationed himself beside the net which was to catch the living bullet at the end of its trajectory.

In a few minutes a little group approached the cannon and Dr. Wilkinson’s heart put-putted like a motor boat. There, not a hundred feet away, dressed in the costume of an aviatrix, stood the girl whose life he had followed in the headlines. For him this was the high point of a somewhat humdrum and defeated life — he felt a great excitement, almost a reverence, in the face of the moment.

There was a sudden deep booming sound and a great pull of smoke from the mouth of the cannon; on the instant the form of the Countess of Frejus, nee Gwendolyn Davies, arched gracefully into the air, described a perfect parabola and plumped gently into the net beside which he stood. In a moment she had clambered out and the doctor advanced toward her.

“Good afternoon,” he said and introduced himself as a doctor who had once attended her.

“So it was you,” she said politely. “I’m afraid 1 must have seemed ungracious in leaving the hospital so quickly.”

“But I understand.” he assured her. “In fact I have been greatly interested in your career.”

“You’re not a reporter too.”

“No indeed. My interest is personal. I do want to ask you a few questions.”

Her lovely face clouded.

“I hate questions,” she said.

“But I have wailed so long. Come. Countess — I simply want you to explain certain remarks you made here and there. For instance when you ran away from Delphis you said you ‘did not want to raise the roof,’ and when you got married you said you had ‘always really belonged to Mr. Hasbrouk.’ But you ne\er said anything about why you jumped out the window or off the boat. Couldn’t you give me a little clue for my own satisfaction?”

She looked at him closely.

“And if I won’t tell you?”

He had his trump in reserve.

“Then, Countess, I shall be forced to give information to the police of Delphis and collect the reward for information leading to your whereabouts. While I have conceived a great admiration for you, there are others who might judge otherwise. It would be a salutory story for prospective runaways to find you ending up as an artificial shell.”

She gave a little laugh.

“But I’m not an artificial shell,” she said. “The joke’s on you — I’m full of dynamite so I always thought I’d go off.”

Even as this explanation issued from her lips she exploded with a tremendous hang, which was heard as tar as New York City.

There were headlines in all the papers but Dr. Wilkinson was unfortunately killed by the concussion and did not see them. And so another glamor girl passes into history.

SHAGGY’S MORNING

I woke up after a lousy dream, and as soon as the old beezer came alive I went around the yard trying to pick up something interesting, but the wind was too strong.

There was an old biscuit in my dish and if there’s anything gloomier than one dead biscuit on a windy morning I don’t know about it.

The Brain came downstairs early like she usually does ever since she began staying away all day long. I gave her a rush, and I meant it, too. I’m not one of these diggities that think their boss is a god, even if he’s an old nigger that smells like everybody that gave him his clothes — but really anybody would have to hand it to the Brain.

Since I grew up and got the idea that they don’t go in much for any perfumes except their own, I never had any trouble with her — except the time I brought her that bone in the middle of the night and she hit me in the eye with it.

I was hoping it was about the right day to go out in the country and swim, but nothing doing — she got into her moving room at the usual time and shoved off, and I had to amuse myself. It wasn’t the first time I wished I had something regular to do.

My friend across the street was waiting for his chow, which he gets in the morning, so I had a workout with the little squirt next door. He came tearing over, cursing and threatening, because he knew I never hurt him.

“You big, clumsy tub of hair, I could run rings around you, and I’m out to prove it!”

“Yeah?” I said, kind of amused, because he talks as if he meant it, and we went through a routine with a lot of false starts, charges, leg and throat holds, rollaways, and escapes. It was all right, and after, while we were panting plenty, but I don’t get much of a workout with him, because he uses up so much time dodging and doing circles. I like a dog to go in and take it. Even a little fellow like him. Once he let a tooth slip and nipped me, and I gave him hell.

“Don’t take advantage, or I’ll tear your coat off.”

“Aw, don’t get sore.”

“Then don’t let that tooth slip again.”

While we were resting he said: “What are you doing this morning?”

“What’s on your mind? You won’t get me out after some cat again. Some dogs never grow up.”

“It’s no cat.”

“Then what is it? Meat — or girls?”

“I’ll take you there and you can see for yourself.”

“You’re generous all of a sudden. How big’s the dog that’s there now?”

While we waited for my friend we did some barking — or rather the squirt did most of it. These little tykes can yelp all day without getting hoarse. He made some circles around a bunch of kids heading for school, and I had a laugh when he got a kick in the ribs and gave out a real yelp. I only barked a little in the base to stretch my throat — I’m not one of the kind always shooting off their mouth.

After my friend came out we went with the squirt to see what he’d found. Just like I thought, it was nothing — a garbage can with a lid you could nose off. I got a whiff of some perfume, too, that bucked me up for a minute, but it was yesterday’s, so my friend and I roughed up the squirt for wasting our time and went off on our own.

We followed a tall lady for a while — no particular reason except she had a parcel with meat in it — we knew we wouldn’t get any, but you never can tell. Sometimes I just feel like shutting my nose and just following somebody pretending they’re yours, or that they’re taking you somewhere. After a couple of streets I picked up a new perfume.

“There’s some romance,” I said.

“Say you got a nose.” He tried for it, but didn’t get anything.

“I must be getting old. I can always remember shapes, but I get mixed up on perfume.”

“Shucks, it’s just the wind,” I said, to make him feel all right, but he has got a weak nose. Now me, I got a fine nose, but I’m weak on shapes. In a minute, though, he got it, and we left the lady and started back down the street at a trot.

Say we must have followed a mile, both of us getting more and more disgusted.

“What’s the use?” my friend said. “Either I’m crazy or we’re not following one scent, but about ten.”

“I get about twenty.”

“What say we quit?”

“Well, we’re pretty near now.”

We got up on a hill presently and looked down — and, say, I haven’t seen so many curs since the dog show.

“Sold,” I says, and we started home.

The Brain wasn’t there yet, but the Beard was. He got out that damn pole and tried to kid me again, holding it out and jabbering — a long time ago I figured out that his object is to see if I’m fool enough to jump over it. But Idon’t bite, just walk round it. Then he tried the trick they all do — held my paws and tried to balance me up on the end of my spine. I never could figure out the point of that one.

He started the music-box, that tune that makes my ear hum and starts me howling — so I lammed it out and down the street. A dog passed me carrying a newspaper looking all pleased with himself — but the one time I tried that racket I forgot what it was I was carrying and started to bury it, and when the Beard saw me, was he sore!

Pretty soon I saw my friend coming down the street. He was a fine big dog. He stopped and visited for a minute, with a child he knew, and then he saw me, and came running in my direction. What happened next I couldn’t see. It was noon, and there were lots of moving rooms at the cross street — the first thing I knew was that one of them had stopped and then another, and that several people had gotten out. I hurried over with some men.

It was my friend, lying on his side and bleeding out of his mouth; his eyes were open, but his breathing was wrong. Everybody was excited, and they pulled him up on the lawn: by and by his little boy and girl ran out of their house and came over and began to cry. I and another dog that knew him well went up to him, and I wanted to lick him, but when I came really close he snarled, “Scram!” and got half up on his haunches. He thought I was going to eat him just because he was down.

The little boy said, “Get away, you!” and it made me feel bad because I’ve never eaten a dog in my life, and would not unless I was very hungry. But of course, I went away so as not to worry him, and waited until they carried him away on a blanket. After that we sniffed at the blood in the street and one dog licked it.

In the front yard I howled. I don’t know why — then I went to look for the Brain. When I didn’t find her I began to figure that maybe something had happened to her, too, and she wouldn’t be back any more. I went up on the porch and waited, but she didn’t come, so I scratched on the screen and went in and howled a little at the Beard, who gave me a head scratch.

Presently I went to the door, and there was the Brain, getting out of her moving room — I made a rush for her anyhow, and put my nose in her hand and almost tripped her going upstairs. It was good to know she was home. She gave me dinner — the ground beef again and biscuit and milk and a good bone. I picked out the meat first; then I drank the milk and licked the biscuits, but didn’t eat them; then I polished my teeth on the bone and buried it shallow — I must have a hundred bones around here, and I don’t know why I save them. I never find them again unless accidentally, but I just can’t stand leaving them around.

Afterwards I started to go over and see my friend, but there was nobody around except the little girl sitting in the swing and crying.

THREE ACTS OF MUSIC

They could hardly hear it for awhile. It was a slow gleam of pale blue and creamy pink. Then there was a tall room where there were many young people and finally they began to feel it and hear it.

What were they — no. This is about music.

He went to the band-stand; the piano player let him lean over his shoulder to read:

“From No, No, Nanette by Vincent Youmans.”

“Thank you,” he said, “I’d like to drop something in the horn but when an interne has a dollar bill and two coins in the world he might get married instead.”

“Never mind, doctor. That’s about what I had when I got married last winter.”

When he came back to the table she said:

“Did you find out who wrote that thing?”

“No! When do we go from here?”

“When they stop playing ‘Tea for Two.’”

Later as she came out of the women’s dressing room, she asked the man: “Who played it?”

“My God, how do I know. The band played it.”

It dripped out the door now:

Tea … two

Two … tea

“We can never get married. I’m not even a nurse yet.”

“Well, let’s kill the idea — let’s spend the rest of our lives going around and listening to tunes. What did you say that writer’s name was?”

“What did you say? You went over and looked, din’t you?”

“Didn’t you,” he corrected her.

“You’re so swell all the time.”

“Well, at least I found out who wrote it.”

“Who?”

“Somebody named Vincent Youmans.”

She hummed it over:

And you …

… for me

And me…

… for you

Al — o-o-n-n…

Their arms went about each other for a moment in the corridor outside the red room.

“If you lost the dollar bill and the other nickel I’d still marry you,” she said.

This is now years later but there was still music. There was “All Alone” and “Remember” and “Always” and “Blue Skies” and “How About Me.” He was back from Vienna but it didn’t seem to matter so much as it had before.

“Wait in here a moment,” she said outside the operating room. “Turn on the radio if you want to.”

“You’ve got mighty important, haven’t you?”

He turned on:

Re-mem-ber the night

the night you said —

“Are you high-hatting me?” she inquired, “or did medicine begin and end in Vienna?”

“No it didn’t,” he said humbly. “I’m impressed — evidently you can supervise the resident or the surgeons — “

“I’ve got an operation of Doctor Menafee’s coming in and there’s a tonsillectomy that’s got to be postponed. I’m a working girl. I’m supervising the operating room.”

“But you’ll go out with me tonight — won’t you? We’ll get them to play ‘All Alone.’”

She paused, regarding him.

“Yes, I’ve been all alone for a lot of time now. I’m somebody — you don’t seem to realize it. Say who is this Berlin anyhow? He was a singer in a dive, wasn’t he? My brother ran a roadhouse and he gave me money to get started with. But I thought I was away from all that. Who is this Irving Berlin? I hear he’s just married a society girl — “

“He’s just married — “

She had to go: “Excuse me. I’ve got to fire an interne before this gets going.”

“I was an interne once. I understand.”

They were out at last. She was making three thousand a year now and he was still being of a conservative old Vermont family.

“This Irving Berlin now. Is he happy with this Mackay girl? Those songs don’t sound — “

“I guess he is. The point is how happy are you?”

“Oh, we discussed that so long ago. What do I matter? I matter in a big way — but when I was a little country girl your family decided —

“Not you,” she said at the alarm in his eyes. “I know you never did.”

“I knew something else about you. I knew three things — that you were a Yonkers’ girl — and didn’t pronounce the language like I did — “

“And that I wanted to marry you. Let’s forget it. Your friend Mr. Berlin can talk better than we can. Listen to him.”

“I’m listening.”

“No. But lisden, I mean.”

Not for just a year but —

“Why do you say my friend Mr. Berlin? I never saw the guy.”

“I thought maybe you’d met him in Vienna in all these years.”

“I never saw him.”

“He married the girl — didn’t he?”

“What are you crying about?”

“I’m not crying. I just said he married the girl — didn’t he? Isn’t that all right to say? When you’ve come so far — when — “

“You are crying,” he said.

“No, I’m not. Honest. It’s this work. It wears down your eyes. Let’s dance.”

— o — ver — head

They were playing.

Blue skies o —

— ver head

She looked up out of his arms suddenly.

“Do you suppose they’re happy?”

“Who?”

“Irving Berlin and the Mackay girl?”

“How should I know whether they’re happy? I tell you I never knew them — never saw them.”

A moment later she whispered:

“We all knew them.”

This story is about tunes. Perhaps the tunes swing the people or the people the tunes. Anyhow:

“We’ll never do it,” he remarked with some finality.

“Smoke gets in your eyes,” said the music.

“Why?”

“Because we’re too old. You wouldn’t want to anyhow — you’ve got that job at Duke’s hospital.”

“I just got it.”

“Well, you’ve just got it. And it’s going to pay you four thousand.”

“That’s probably half what you make.”

“You mean you want to try it anyhow?”

When your heart’s on fire

“No. I guess you’re right. It’s too late.”

“ — Too late for what?”

“Just too late — like you told me.”

“But I didn’t mean it.”

“You were right though… Be quiet:

Lovely

to look at

Romantic to know

“You’re all those things in the song,” he said passionately.

“What? Lovely to look at and all that? You should have told me that fifteen years ago. Now I’m superintendent of a woman’s hospital.” She added: “And I’m still a woman.” Then she added: “But I’m not the woman you knew any more. I’m another woman.”

— lovely to look at, the orchestra repeated.

“Yes, I was lovely to look at when I was nothing — when I couldn’t even talk plain — “

“I never knew — “

“Oh let’s not go over it. Listen to what they’re playing.”

“It’s called ‘Lovely to Look At.’”

“Who’s it by?”

“A man named Jerome Kern.”

“Did you meet him when you went back to Europe the second time? Is he a friend of yours?”

“I never saw him. What gives you the impression I met all these big shots? I’m a doctor. Not a musician.”

She wondered about her own bitterness.

“I suppose because all those years I met nobody,” she said finally. “Sure, I once saw Doctor Kelly at a distance. But here I am — because I got good at my job.”

“And here I am, because — “

“You’ll always be wonderful to me. What did you say this man’s name was?”

“Kern. And I didn’t say it was. I said it is.”

“That’s the way you used to talk to me. And now both of us are fat and — sort of middle-aged. We never had much. Did we?”

“It wasn’t my fault.”

“It wasn’t anybody’s fault. It was just meant to be like that. Let’s dance. That’s a good tune. What did you say was this man’s name?”

“Kern.”

They

asked me how I

knew-ew-ew —

“We’ve had all that anyhow, haven’t we?” she asked him. “All those people — that Youmans, that Berlin, that Kern. They must have been through hell to be able to write like that. And we sort of listened to them, didn’t we?”

“But my God, that’s so little — “ he began but her mood changed and she said:

“Let’s not say anything about it. It was all we had — everything we’ll ever know about life. What were their names — you knew their names.”

“Their names were — “

“Didn’t you ever know any of them in that fifteen years around Europe?”

“I never saw one of them.”

“Well, I never will.” She hesitated before the wide horizon of how she might have lived. How she might have married this man, borne him children, died for him — of how she had lived out of sordid poverty and education — into power — and spinsterhood. And she cared not a damn for her man any more because he had never gone off with her. But she wondered how these composers had lived. Youmans and Irving Berlin and Jerome Kern and she thought that if any of their wives turned up in this hospital she would try to make them happy.

THE ANTS AT PRINCETON

Sufficient time having elapsed it is now possible to tell the facts about a case concerning which little is known, but about which the wildest speculations have been made. As a Princeton man and a friend of certain University officials the present author is in a position to know the true story, from its beginning at a faculty meeting to its nigh tragic ending at an intercollegiate football game.

One detail will forever elude me — which member of the faculty first conceived the idea of admitting ants as students to the University. The reasons given, I remember, were that the insects by their highly complicated organising power, their discipline and above all, their industry, would set an example to the other students.

In any event the experiment was inaugurated one autumn under what seemed the best auspices. It was possible through the efforts of Professor of the bacteriological department, and through the generosity of Mr. of the Board of Trustees to find a number of ants suitable to the experiment. And so tactfully was it managed that many of the students were totally unaware of the presence of their new classmates, and, but for a certain incident which forms the basis of this story, might have remained so all through college.

Some of the ants, because of their diminutive stature, found difficulty in “keeping up” with their fellow students and these were reluctantly dropped at midyear examinations. The majority of them did well, however, and all progressed favorably through the year in spite of a growing inferiority complex among them. This complex was strongest in an especially large well developed ant, in whom the conviction gradually grew that it was his destiny to justify his people and their abilities before the rest of the student body.

As I say, his stature approached that of a man, and it was natural that his ambition should take the form of making for himself a berth on the varsity football team.

This was not so difficult, for during the previous year the team had been disorganized. It was between regimes, so to speak, and Fritz Crisler had been called East from the University of Minnesota to take the reins.

One of Mr. Crisler’s first acts in assuming control was to ask for full independence in moulding a newer and better team — and the first matter that came up in this connection naturally centered about the ant.

For the ant by this time was playing running guard on the second varsity and to older alumni it seemed almost a disgrace that a team which had in other days contained such legendary heroes as Hillebrand, Biffy Lee, Big Bill Edwards and the Poes should have an ant on it, no matter what his personal character or ability.

But Crisler was firm.

“At Minnesota,” he would say, “we have no racial discriminations on our teams — except of course against Scandinavians.”

So as spring practice turned to fall practice the older alumni became resigned to the situation. And meanwhile the ant was moved up to the first varsity in which he became an important cog because of his versatility, playing secondary defense on the offense and secondary offense on the defense.

By the beginning of the season the coaches were beginning to think of him as a potential All-American. He was big and rugged and the dazzling way in which he twisted through the line on all fours, as well as his confusing ability to carry the ball under any of his eight arms, seemed to inaugurate a new era in American football. The whole offense was gradually built about him.

Every old Princetonian will remember that season — how in turn Cornell, Pennsylvania, Dartmouth, Columbia and Yale, and the two “breathers” (as the easy games were called), the Lawrenceville Seconds and the New Jersey School for Drug Addicts fell before the onslaught of the Tiger — or rather of the ant, for it was to him that the sports writers gave full credit. When his head was torn off in the Yale game there was dismay on the campus and a sigh of relief went over the undergraduate body when it was once more fixed in place.

Only one obstacle lay in the way of a victorious season and a sure trip to the Rose Bowl. The last game that year was with Harvard and the captain of the Crimson, Cabot Saltonville, who also played running guard, declared that he would rather cancel the game than play against an ant.

“I do not think it necessary to give any reasons,” he declared to an eager press, “but I assure you on my word as an old Groton man it is not a question of fear.”

The battle raged in the newspapers and on the two campuses. The Princetonians naturally saw in it a disingenuous desire to get rid of their star player. The claim was made that a Maeterlinck had written about ants while only an Adams had written about Bostonians. The Cambridgians stood almost unanimously behind their captain and broke up a radical meeting which considered the matter an aspect of the class war.

In the end Princeton yielded. The ant would sit on the sidelines. Saltonville had won.

As the game progressed the result was as prophesied. Without their quintuple threat the Princeton team was as paralyzed. Steadily the score mounted 7-0, 14-0, 50-0, 65-0 — while the cheering from the Tiger stands gradually, took on the semblance of a groan.

Finally someone — legend ascribes it to a freshman — started a singsong slogan:

“We want ‘Aunty’.

We want ‘Aunty’.”

Those near-by took it up and finally the whole orange and black section were chanting it.

“We want Aunty!”

It was here that Captain Saltonville of Harvard made his great mistake. There were only ten minutes to play and in the overweening confidence engendered by the score he was moved to one of those gestures of chivalry inherited from a long line of New England ancestors.

He called time out and shouted to the Princeton sidelines.

“Send in that insect.”

They sent him in. He was in his civilian clothes for he had not expected to play, but before ten seconds had passed that seemed to make no difference, for once he was on the field a new spirit possessed the Princeton players. They swung into their old formations and with the ant leading the tandems rushed down the field. Crisler, as has been said, had built an offense around him that had carried them through an undefeated season. As “Aunty” bucked, tackled, spun, reversed, kicked and passed, hundreds of other smaller ants making their way cautiously through the grass swarmed over the Harvard players, and at each starting signal nipped them with such vehemence as to completely destroy their charge and spoil any vestige of an offense. (Some of them, by penetrating the players’ nether garments, gave rise to a famous phrase which would be indelicate to set down here.)

Captain Saltonville, his face black with ants so that he could scarcely see, cursed his generosity. But still he saw the score roll up 6-65, 25-65, 55-65, 64-65 — until Princeton was ahead at last. Then he decided on a desperate measure.

He would “get” Aunty. He would violate all the traditions of his family and play dirty.

The signal was given and in he rushed.

“Bim!” went his fist, under the scrimmage, “Bim! Bam! Bim!”

Something warned him even at the moment that he was being rash.

And presently the huge throng was treated to a strange sight. Out of the pile burst Captain Saltonville, running at full speed, and after him, with a ferocious light in his beady eyes came the ant. Past his own goal posts ran the Cambridgian, and then with a glance behind and a terrified cry, up he went over the barrier into the stands, up the aisle he climbed with the ant always behind him.

Terrified, the crowd watched knowing that eventually Captain Saltonville would reach the top of the stadium with no alternative to a fifty foot leap to the ground.

The stricken Massachuten reached the press box and paused, white with anguish. Nearer and nearer came the ant, impeded only a little by the efforts of Harvard men to head him off.

And then another anonymous figure walks into this story. It was a young resourceful sports writer.

“If you will give the proper statement to the press,” he said, “I think I can calm him down.”

“Anything!” cried Saltonville.

Carefully the reporter dictated and Saltonville repeated after him into the mike, his blood quivering with shame at the words.

“This anim — I mean my honorable opponent, is superior to me… in industry, character and courage…” He hurried on for his adversary was within hearing, “He is a gentleman and sportsman and I am proud to have encountered him even in defeat.”

The ant heard and stopped. Flattery is sweet and his fighting nature was mollified.

The pressman spoke for him.

“Do you mean that, Captain Saltonville?” he asked.

“Of course I do,” faltered the son of John Harvard, “That’s why I hurried up to the press box. I couldn’t keep back the truth any longer.”

*****

And that is the true story of the ants at Princeton. That they became a nuisance and had to be exterminated the following spring does not detract from the credit of their achievement.

The extermination order did not of course apply to “Aunty.” You can see him any day now, if you are curious, for he has specialized in the future of his own people and holds down with credit the Harkness Chair of Insectology at Yale and in his spare time coaches the team. And Captain Saltonville is still remembered as one of the fastest running guards the Crimson ever knew.

IN THE HOLIDAYS

The hospital was thinly populated, for many convalescents had taken risks to get home for the holidays and prospective patients were gritting their teeth until vacation was over. In the private ward one interne took on the duties of three, and six nurses the duties of a dozen. After New Year’s it would be different — just now the corridors were long and lonely.

Young Dr. Kamp came into the room of Mr. McKenna, who was not very ill, and snatched rest in the easy chair.

“How’s back feel?” he asked.

“Better, Doc. I thought I’d get up and dress tomorrow.”

“All right — if you haven’t any fever. The X-ray plates didn’t show a thing.”

“I’ve got to be out of here day after tomorrow.”

“When you get home you better see your own doctor, though I never have felt you were seriously ill — in spite of the pain. We’ve got a patient downstairs with a dizzy head that we can’t find a thing the matter with — there’s probably faulty elimination of some kind, but he came through every test sound as a dollar.”

“What’s his name?” McKenna asked.

“Griffin. So you see sometimes there just isn’t any diagnosis to be made. Say, were you in the war?”

“Me? No, I was too young.”

“Did you ever get shot?”

“No.”

“That’s funny — the X-ray showed a couple of things that looked like slugs in your buttocks.”

“Oh, that was a hunting accident,” said McKenna.

When the doctor left the nurse came in — she was the wrong one, not the beautiful little student nurse, dark and rosy, with eyes as soft as blue oil. Miss Hunter was plain and talked about the man she was marrying next month.

“That’s why I’m here on New Year’s Eve. We need the money and a girl gave me five dollars to take her place over the holidays. I can’t see him but I write him a whole book every night.”

“It certainly is some life in here,” said McKenna. “The food makes me sick.”

“Aren’t you ashamed — it’s better than we get. You ought to see that little student nurse go for the dessert you left today.”

He brightened momentarily.

“The pretty one?” Maybe this was an angle.

“Miss Collins.” She proffered him a vile liquid. “You can drink her health with this cocktail.”

“Oh, skip it. This doctor thinks I’m just bluffing — me and some other fellow that’s dizzy in the head. Name’s Griffin — do you take care of him?”

“He’s down on the first floor.”

“What does he look like?”

“Well, he wears glasses, about your age.”

“Is he handsome like me?”

“He’s very pale and he’s got a big bald place in his mustache. What’s the use of having a mustache if you have a bald place in it?”

He shifted in bed restlessly.

“I think I’d sleep better if I got up for awhile — just around the corridors. I could get a paper in the office and all that.”

“I’ll ask the doctor.”

Without waiting for permission McKenna got up and dressed. He was tying his tie when the nurse returned.

“All right,” Miss Hunter said, “but come back soon and wear your overcoat. The corridors are cold. And would you please drop this letter in the box for me?”

McKenna went out and downstairs and through many halls to the main office. He stopped at the registry desk and asked a question, afterwards writing down something on the back of an envelope.

Out in the damp, snowless night he inquired the way to a drugstore; he went directly to the phone booth and closeted himself for some minutes. Then he bought a movie magazine and a hip flask of port, and asked for a glass at the fountain.

All around the hospital the streets were quiet and the houses, largely occupied by medical people, were dark and deserted. Across the street the dark fortress of the hospital was blocked out against a pink blur in the downtown sky. There was a mailbox on the corner and after a moment he took out the nurse’s letter, tore it slowly into four pieces, and dropped it in the slot. Then he began thinking of the little student nurse, Miss Collins. He had a vague idea about Miss Collins. She had told him yesterday that she was sure to be flunked from her class in February. Why? Because she had stayed out too late with boy friends. Now, if that wasn’t a sort of come-on — especially when she added that she wasn’t going back to the old homestead and had no plans at all. Tomorrow McKenna was leaving town but in a couple of weeks he could ride down again and keep her out late in a big way, and if he liked her get her some clothes and set her up in Jersey City where he owned an apartment house. She was the double for a girl he once went with at Ohio State.

He looked at his watch — an hour and a half till midnight. Save for several occasions when he had been deterred for reasons contingent on his profession, all his New Year’s were opaque memories of whoopee. He never made resolves or thought of the past with nostalgia or regret — he was joyless and fearless, one of the stillborn who manage to use death as a mainspring. When he caused suffering it made his neck swell and glow and yet he had a feeling for it that was akin to sympathy. “Does it hurt, fella?” he had asked once. “Where does it hurt most? Cheer up — you’re almost out.”

McKenna had intended to leave the hospital before the thing came off, but the interne and nurse had only just spilled what he wanted to know into his lap and it was too late at night to leave without attracting attention. He crossed the street in order to re-enter the hospital by the door of the dispensary.

On the sidewalk a man and a woman, young and poorly dressed, stood hesitating.

“Say, mister,” the man said, “can you tell us something — if doctors look to see what’s wrong with you is it free? Somebody told me they sting you.”

McKenna paused in the doorway and regarded them — the woman watched him breathlessly.

“Sure they sting you,” McKenna said. “They charge you twenty bucks or they take it out on your hide.”

He went on in, past the screen door of the dispensary, past the entrance to the surgical unit where men made repairs that would not wait for the year to turn, past the children’s clinic where a single sharp cry of distress came through an open door, past the psychiatric wards, exuding a haunted darkness. A group of probationers in street clothes chattered by him, an orderly with a wheel chair, an old Negress leaning on a grizzled man, a young woman weeping between a doctor and a nurse. Through all that life, protesting but clinging, through all that hope of a better year, moved McKenna, the murderer, looking straight ahead lest they see death in his eyes.

In his room he rang for the nurse, had a quick drink and rang again. This time it was Miss Collins.

“It took you long enough,” he said. “Say, I don’t think I’ll go to bed yet. It’s so near twelve I think I’ll stay up and see the New Year in and all that stuff; maybe go out on the porch and hear the noise.”

“I suppose it’s all right.”

“You’ll stick with me, won’t you? Want a little port wine?”

Miss Collins wouldn’t dare do that but she’d be back presently. She was the prettiest twitch he had seen in a year.

After another glass of port he felt a growing excitement. He pictured “Mr. Griffin” on the floor below, feeling so hidden and secure, possibly asleep. He pictured Oaky and Flute Cuneo and Vandervere strapping on the arsenal; he wished he could be in on the finish but that was no play for a front man.

At a quarter of twelve Miss Collins came back and they went down the corridor to a glassed-in porch overlooking the city.

“I’m afraid this is my last New Year’s here,” she said.

“What do your care — you’ve got too much on the ball to go around washing mummies.”

At a minute before twelve a din started — first thin and far away, then rolling toward the hospital, a discord of whistles, bells, firecrackers and shots. Once, after a few minutes, McKenna thought he heard the pump sound of a silencer, once and again, but he could not be sure. From time to time Miss Collins darted in to the desk to see if there was a call for her, and each time he kept carefully in her sight.

After fifteen minutes the cacophony died away.

“My back hurts,” McKenna said. “I wish you’d help me off with my clothes and then rub me.”

“Certainly.”

On the way to his room he listened carefully for the sounds of commotion but there was nothing. Therefore, barring the unforeseen, all had gone off as planned — the State of New York’s intended witness was now with his fathers.

She bent over the bed, rubbing his back with alcohol.

“Sit down,” he ordered. “Just sit on the bed.”

He had almost finished the flask of port and he felt fine. There were worse ways to spend New Year’s — a job all mopped up, the good warming wine and a swell girl to rub his back.

“You certainly are something to look at.”

Two minutes later she tugged his hand from her rumpled belt.

“You’re crazy,” she exclaimed, panting.

“Oh, don’t get sore. I thought you kind of liked me.”

“Liked you! You! Why, your room smells like a dog’s room. I hate to touch you!”

Then was a small knock and the night superintendent called Miss Collins who went into the hall, hastily smoothing her apron. McKenna got out of bed, tiptoed to the door and listened — in a minute he heard Miss Collins’ voice:

“But I don’t know how to do it, Miss Gleason … You say the patient was shot…”

And then the other nurse:

“… then you simply tie the hands and feet together and…” McKenna got back into bed cautiously.

“Last rites for Mr. Griffin,” he thought. “That’s fine. It’ll take her mind off being sore.”

He had decided to leave next afternoon, when the winter dusk was closing down outside. The interne was uncertain and called the resident, just back from vacation. The latter came in after lunch when the orderly was helping McKenna pack.

“Don’t you want to see your doctor tomorrow?” he asked.

He was big and informal, more competent-looking than the interne.

“He’s just a doctor I got at the hotel. He doesn’t know anything about it.”

“Well, we’ve got one more test to hear from.”

“I haven’t got any fever,” said McKenna. “It must have been just a false alarm.”

The resident yawned.

“Excuse me,” he said — “they called me at two o’clock last night.”

“Somebody die?”

The resident nodded.

“Very suddenly. Somebody shot and killed a patient on the floor below.”

“Go on! You’re not safe anywhere now, are you?”

“Seems not.”

McKenna rang the bell at the head of the bed.

“I can’t find my hat, and none of those nurses have been in here all day — only the maid.” He turned to the orderly. “Go find a nurse and see if they know where my hat is.”

“And oh — “ the resident added, “tell them if they have that test ready to send it in.”

“What test?” McKenna asked.

“Just a routine business. Just a part of your body.”

“What part?”

“It ought to be here now. It’s hard to get these laboratory tests on a holiday.”

Miss Hunter’s face appeared in the doorway but she did not look toward McKenna.

“The message came,” she said. “It was just to tell you that the test was positive. And to give you this paper.”

The resident read it with interest.

“What is it?” demanded McKenna. “Say, I haven’t got — “

“You haven’t got anything,” said the resident, “ — not even a leg to stand on. In fact, I’d be sorry for you — if you hadn’t torn up that nurse’s letter.”

“What nurse’s letter?”

“The one the postman put together and brought in this morning.”

“I don’t know anything about it.”

“We do. You left your finger prints on it — and they seem to belong to a man named Joe Kinney who got three slugs in his bottom in New York last June.”

“You got nothing on me — what do you think you are, a tec?”

“That’s just what I am. And I know now that you work out of Jersey City and so did Griffin.”

“I was with Miss Collins when that happened.”

“What time?”

Catching his mistake McKenna hesitated.

“I was with her all evening — till one o’clock.”

“Miss Collins says she left you after five minutes because you got tough with her. Say, why did you have to pick a hospital? These girls have work to do — they can’t play with animals.”

“You got nothing at all on me — not even a gun.”

“Maybe you’ll wish you had one when I get done with you down at the station. Miss Hunter and I are engaged to be married and that letter was to me.”

By nightfall the hospital showed signs of increasing life — the doctors and nurses back early to go to work in the morning, and casualties of riot and diet, victims of colds, aches and infections saved since Christmas. Even the recently vacated beds of Messrs. Griffin and McKenna would be occupied by tomorrow. Both of them had better have celebrated the holidays outside.

THE GUEST IN ROOM NINETEEN

Mr. Cass knew he couldn’t go to sleep so he put his tie on again and went back to the lobby. The guests were all gone to bed but a little aura of activity seemed to linger about a half-finished picture puzzle, and the night watchman was putting a big log on the fire.

Mr. Cass limped slowly across the soft carpet, stopped behind him and grunted, “Heavy?”

The watchman, a wiry old mountaineer, looked around sharply.

“A hundred pound. It’s wet — it’ll be one o’clock before it’s burning good.”

Mr. Cass let himself into a chair. Last year he had been active, driving his own car — but he had suffered a stroke before coming South last month and now life was like waiting for an unwelcome train. He was very lonely.

The watchman built burning chunks about the wet log.

“Thought you was somebody else when you came in,” he said.

“Who did you think I was?”

“I thought you was the fella who’s always coming in late. First night I was on duty he came in at two without any noise and give me a start. Every night he comes in late.”

After a pause Mr. Cass asked:

“What’s his name?”

“I never did ask him his name.”

Another pause. The fire leapt into a premature, short-lived glow.

“How do you know he’s a guest here?”

“Oh, he’s a guest here.” But the watchman considered the matter for the first time. “I hear him go down the corridor and around the corner and then I hear his door shut.”

“He may be a burglar,” said Mr. Cass.

“Oh, he’s no burglar. He said he’d been coming here a long time.”

“Did he tell you he wasn’t a burglar?”

The watchman laughed.

“I never asked him that.”

The log slipped and the old man adjusted it; Mr. Cass envied his strength. It seemed to him that if he had strength he could run out of here, hurry along the roads of the world, the roads that led back, and not sit waiting.

Almost every evening he played bridge with the two clerks, and one night last week he simply passed away during a bridge hand, shrinking up through space, up through the ceilings like a wisp of smoke, looking back, looking down at his body hunched at the table, his white fist clutching the cards. He heard the bids and his own voice speaking — then the two clerks were helping him into his room and one of them sat with him till the doctor came… After awhile Mr. Cass had to go to the bathroom and he decided to go to the public one. It took him some time. When he came back to the lobby the watchman said:

“That fella came in late again. I found out he’s in number nineteen.”

“What’s his name?”

“I didn’t like to ask him that — I knew I could find out from his number.”

Mr. Cass sat down.

“I’m number eighteen,” he said. “I thought there were just some women next to me.”

The watchman went behind the desk to the mail rack. After a moment he reported.

“Funny thing — his box ain’t here. There’s number eighteen, that’s Mr. Cass — “

“That’s me.”

“ — and the next one is twenty, on the second floor. I must of understood him wrong.”

“I told you he was a burglar. What did he look like?”

“Well, now he wasn’t an old man and he wasn’t a young man. He seemed like he’d been sick and he had little holes all over his face.”

Despite its inadequacy the description somehow conjured up a picture for Mr. Cass. His partner, John Canisius, had never looked old or young and he had little holes in his face.

Suddenly Mr. Cass felt the same sensation stealing over him that he had felt the other night. Dimly he was aware that the watchman had gone to the door and dimly he heard his own voice saying: “Leave it open”; then the cold air swept in and his spirit left him and romped around the room with it. He saw John Canisius come in the open door and look at him and advance toward him, and then realized it was the watchman, pouring a paper cup of water into his mouth and spilling it on his collar.

“Thanks.”

“Feel all right now?”

“Did I faint?” he muttered.

“You fell over kind of funny. Reckon I better help you get back into your room.”

At the door of number eighteen Mr. Cass halted and pointed his cane at the room next door.

“What’s that number?”

“Seventeen. And that one without a number is the manager’s rooms. There ain’t any nineteen.”

“Do you think I’d better go in?”

“Sure thing.” The watchman lowered his voice. “If you’re thinking about that fella, I must of heard him wrong. I can’t go looking for him tonight.”

“He’s in here,” said Mr. Cass.

“No, he ain’t.”

“Yes, he is. He’s waiting for me.”

“Shucks, I’ll go in with you.”

He opened the door, turned on the light and took a quick look around.

“See — ain’t nobody here.”

Mr. Cass slept well and the next day was full Spring, so he decided to go out. It took him a long time to walk down the hill from the hotel and his progress across the double tracks took a good three minutes and attracted solicitous attention, but it was practically a country stroll compared to his negotiation of the highway which was accompanied by a great caterwauling of horns and screech of brakes. A welcoming committee waited him on the curb and helped him into the drug store where, exhausted by his adventure, he called a taxi to go home.

Because of this he fell asleep while undressing and waking at twelve felt dismal and oppressed. Finding it difficult to rise he rang, and the night watchman answered the bell.

“Glad to help you, Mr. Cass, if you’ll wait five minutes. It’s turned cold again and I want to get in a big log of wood.”

“Oh,” said Mr. Cass, and then, “Has the guest come in yet?”

“He just got in now.”

“Did you ask him if he’s a burglar?”

“He’s no burglar, Mr. Cass. He’s a nice fella. He’s going to help me with this big log. I’ll be right back.”

“Did he say what room — “ But the watchman was gone and Mr. Cass could only wait.

He waited five minutes, he waited ten. Then he gradually realized that the watchman was not coming back. It was plain that the watchman had been sent for.

Everyone tried to keep distressing things from Mr. Cass, and it was not until the following evening that he heard what had happened from some whispering at the desk.

The man had collapsed trying to lift a log too heavy for him. Mr. Cass said nothing because he knew that old people have to be careful what they say. Only he knew the watchman had not been alone.

After Easter the hotel’s short season faded out and it was not worth while to hire a new watchman, but Mr. Cass continued to have lonely nights and often he sat in the lobby after the other guests went to bed. One April night he dozed there for awhile, awakening to find that it was after two and he was not alone in the lobby.

The current of cooler air might have roused him, for a man he did not know had just come in the door.

The man was of no special age but even by the single light left burning Mr. Cass could see that he was a pale man, that there were little holes in his face like the ravages of some disease and he did not look like John Canisius, his partner.

“Good evening,” said the stranger.

“Hm,” said Mr. Cass, and then as the man turned down the corridor he spoke up in a strong voice:

“You’re out late.”

“Yes, quite late.”

“You a guest here?”

“Yes.”

Mr. Cass dragged himself to his feet and stood leaning on his cane.

“I suppose you live in room nineteen,” he said.

“As it happens, I do.”

“You needn’t lie to me,” said Mr. Cass, “I’m not an ignorant mountaineer. Are you a burglar — or did you come for some one?”

The man’s face seemed to grow even whiter.

“I don’t understand you,” he said.

“In any case I want you to get out of here,” said Mr. Cass. He was growing angry and it gave him a certain strength. “Otherwise I’m going to arouse the hotel.”

The stranger hesitated.

“There’s no need of doing that,” he said quietly. “That would be — “

Mr. Cass raised his cane menacingly, held it up a moment, then let it down slowly.

“Wait a minute,” he said, “I may want you to do something for me.”

“What is it?”

“It’s getting cold in here. I want you to help me bring in a log to put on the fire.”

The stranger was startled by the request.

“Are you strong enough?” he asked.

“Of course I’m strong enough,” Mr. Cass stood very upright, throwing back his shoulders.

“I can get it alone.”

“No, you can’t. You help me or I’ll arouse the house.”

They went out and down the back steps, Mr. Cass refusing the stranger’s arm.

He found, in fact, that he could walk much better than he thought and he left his cane by the stoop so that both hands were free for the log.

It was dark in the woodshed and the stranger lit a match. There was only one log, but it was over a hundred pounds, quite big enough to amply fill the small fireplace.

“Hadn’t I better do this?” said the stranger.

Mr. Cass did not answer, but bent and put his hands on the rough surface. The touch seemed to stimulate him, he felt no pain or strain in his back at all.

“Catch hold there,” he ordered.

“Are you sure — “

“Catch hold!”

Mr. Cass took a long breath of cool air into his lungs and shifted his hands on the log. His arms tightened, then his shoulders and the muscles on his back.

“Lift,” he grunted. And suddenly the log moved, came up with him as he straightened, and for a triumphant moment he stood there squarely, cradling it against him. Then out into space he went, very slowly, carrying the log which seemed lighter and lighter, seeming to melt away in his arms. He wanted to call back some word of mockery and derision to the stranger, but he was already too far away, out on the old roads that led back where he wished to be.

Everyone in the hotel was sorry to lose Mr. Cass, the manager especially, for he read the open letter on Mr. Cass’ desk saying that no further money could be remitted that year.

“What a shame. He’d been here so many years that we’d have been glad to carry him awhile until he made arrangements.”

Mr. Cass was the right sort of client — it was because of such guests that the manager had tried to keep his brother out of sight all winter.

The brother, a tough number, was considerably shaken by what had happened.

“That’s what I get for trying to be a help,” he said, “I should have known better. Both those old guys looked exactly like death itself to me.”

THE LONG WAY OUT

We were talking about some of the older castles in Touraine and we touched upon the iron cage in which Louis XI imprisoned Cardinal La Balue for six years, then upon oubliettes and such horrors. I had seen several of the latter, simply dry wells thirty or forty feet deep where a man was thrown to wait for nothing; since I have such a tendency to claustrophobia that a Pullman berth is a certain nightmare, they had made a lasting impression. So it was rather a relief when a doctor told this story — that is, it was a relief when he began it for it seemed to have nothing to do with the tortures long ago.

There was a young woman named Mrs. King who was very happy with her husband. They were well-to-do and deeply in love but at the birth of her second child she went into a long coma and emerged with a dear case of schizophrenia or “split personality.” Her delusion, which had something to do with the Declaration of Independence, had little bearing on the case and as she regained her health it began to disappear. At the end of ten months she was a convalescent patient scarcely marked by what had happened to her and very eager to go back into the world.

She was only twenty-one, rather girlish in an appealing way and a favorite with the staff of the sanitarium. When she became well enough so that she could take an experimental trip with her husband there was a general interest in the venture. One nurse had gone into Philadelphia with her to get a dress, another knew the story of her rather romantic courtship in Mexico and everyone had seen her two babies on visits to the hospital. The trip was to Virginia Beach for five days.

It was a joy to watch her make ready, dressing and packing meticulously and living in the gay trivialities of hair waves and such things. She was ready half an hour before the time of departure and she paid some visits on the floor in her powder-blue gown and her hat that looked like one minute after an April shower Her frail lovely face, with just that touch of startled sadness that often lingers after an illness, was alight with anticipation.

“We’ll just do nothing,” she said. “That’s my ambition. To get up when I want to for three straight mornings and stay up late three straight nights. To buy a bathing suit by myself and order a meal.”

When the time approached Mrs. King decided to wait downstairs instead of in her room and as she passed along the corridors with an orderly carrying her suitcase she waved to the other patients, sorry that they too were not going on a gorgeous holiday .The superintendent wished her well, two nurses found excuses to linger and share her infectious joy.

“What a beautiful tan you’ll get, Mrs. King.”

“Be sure and send a postcard.”

About the time she left her room her husband’s car was hit by a truck on his way from the city — he was hurt internally and was not expected to live more than a few hours. The information was received at the hospital in a glassed-in office adjoining the hall where Mrs. King waited. The operator, seeing Mrs. King and knowing that the glass was not sound proof, asked the head nurse to come immediately. The head nurse hurried aghast to a doctor and he decided what to do. So long as the husband was still alive it was best to tell her nothing, but of course she must know that he was not coming today.

Mrs. King was greatly disappointed.

“I suppose it’s silly to feel that way,” she said. “After all these months what’s one more day? He said he’d come tomorrow, didn’t he?”

The nurse was having a difficult time but she managed to pass it off until the patient was back in her room. Then they assigned a very experienced and phlegmatic nurse to keep Mrs. King away from other patients and from newspapers. By the next day the matter would be decided one way or another.

But her husband lingered on and they continued to prevaricate. A little before noon next day one of the nurses was passing along the corridor when she met Mrs. King, dressed as she had been the day before but this time carrying her own suitcase.

“I’m going to meet my husband,”she explained. “He couldn’t come yesterday but he’s coming today at the same time.”

The nurse walked along with her. Mrs. King had the freedom of the building and it was difficult to simply steer her back to her room and the nurse did not want to tell a story that would contradict what the authorities were telling her. When they reached the front hall she signaled to the operator who fortunately under-stood. Mrs. King gave herself a last inspection in the mirror and said:

“I’d like to have a dozen hats just like this to remind me to be this happy always.”

When the head nurse came in frowning a minute later she demanded:

“Don’t tell me George is delayed?”

“I’m afraid he is. There is nothing much to do but be patient.”

Mrs. King laughed ruefully. “I wanted him to see my costume when it was absolutely new.”

“Why, there isn’t a wrinkle in it.”

“I guess it’ll last till tomorrow. I oughtn’t to be blue about wait-ing one more day when I’m so utterly happy.”

“Certainly not.”

That night her husband died and at a conference of doctors next morning there was some discussion about what to do — it was a risk to tell her and a risk to keep it from her. It was decided finally to say that Mr. King had been called away and thus destroy her hope of an immediate meeting; when she was reconciled to this they could tell her the truth.

As the doctors came out of the conference one of them stopped and pointed. Down the corridor toward the outer hall walked Mrs. King carrying her suitcase.

Dr. Pirie, who had been in special charge of Mrs. King, caught his breath.

“This is awful,” he said. “I think perhaps I’d better tell her now. There’s no use saying he’s away when she usually hears from him twice a week, and if we say he’s sick she’ll want to go to him. Anybody else like the job?”

II

One of the doctors in the conference went on a fortnight’s vacation that afternoon. On the day of his return in the same corridor at the same hour, he stopped at the sight of a little procession coming toward him — an orderly carrying a suitcase, a nurse and Mrs. King dressed in the powder-blue-colored suit and wearing the spring hat.

“Good morning, Doctor,” she said. “I’m going to meet my husband and we’re going to Virginia Beach. I’m going to the hall because I don’t want to keep him waiting.”

He looked into her face, clear and happy as a child’s. The nurse signaled to him that it was as ordered so he merely bowed and spoke of the pleasant weather.

“It’s a beautiful day,” said Mrs. King, “but of course even if it was raining it would be a beautiful day for me.”

The doctor looked after her, puzzled and annoyed — why are they letting this go on, he thought. What possible good can it do?

Meeting Dr. Pirie he put the question to him.

“We tried to tell her,” Dr. Pirie said. “She laughed and said we were trying to see whether she’s still sick. You could use the word unthinkable in an exact sense here — his death is unthinkable to her.”

“But you can’t just go on like this.”

“Theoretically no,” said Dr. Pirie. “A few days ago when she packed up as usual the nurse tried to keep her from going. From out in the hall I could see her face, see her begin to go to pieces — for the first time, mind you. Her muscles were tense and her eyes glazed and her voice was thick and shrill when she very politely called the nurse a liar. It was touch and go there for a minute whether we had a tractable patient or a restraint case — and I stepped in and told the nurse to take her down to the reception room.”

He broke off as the procession that had just passed appeared again, headed back to the ward. Mrs. King stopped and spoke to Dr. Pirie.

“My husband’s been delayed,” she said. “Of course I’m disappointed but they tell me he’s coming tomorrow and after waiting to long one more day doesn’t seem to matter. Don’t you agree with me, Doctor?”

“I certainly do, Mrs. King.”

She took off her hat.

“I’ve got to put aside these clothes — I want them to be as fresh tomorrow as they are today.” She looked closely at the hat. “There’s a speck of dust on it, but I think I can get it off. Perhaps he won’t notice.”

“I’m sure he won’t.”

“Really I don’t mind waiting another day. It’ll be this time tomorrow before I know it, won’t it?”

When she had gone along the younger doctor said:

“There are still the two children.”

“I don’t think the children are going to matter. When she ‘went under,’ she tied up this trip with the idea of getting well. If we took it away she’d have to go to the bottom and start over.”

“Could she?”

“There’s no prognosis,” said Dr. Pirie. “I was simply explaining why she was allowed to go to the hall this morning.”

“But there’s tomorrow morning and the next morning.”

“There’s always the chance,” said Dr. Pirie, “that some day he will be there.”

The doctor ended his story here, rather abruptly. When we pressed him to tell what happened he protested that the rest was anticlimax — that all sympathy eventually wears out and that finally the staff of the sanitarium had simply accepted the fact.

“But does she still go to meet her husband?”

“Oh yes, it’s always the same — but the other patients, except new ones, hardly look up when she passes along the hall. The nurses manage to substitute a new hat every year or so but she still wears the same suit. She’s always a little disappointed but she makes the best of it, very sweetly too. It’s not an unhappy life as far as we know, and in some funny way it seems to set an example of tranquillity to the other patients. For God’s sake let’s talk about something else — let’s go back to oubliettes.”

THE WOMAN FROM “21”

Ah, what a day for Raymond Torrence! Once you knew that your roots were safely planted outside megalopolitanism what fun it was to come back — every five years. He and Elizabeth woke up to the frozen music of Fifth Avenue and Fifty-ninth Street, and first thing went down to his publishers on Fifth Avenue. Elizabeth, who was half Javanese and had never been in America before, liked it best of all there because her husband’s book was on multiple display in the window. She liked it in the store where she squeezed Ray’s hand tensely when people asked for it, and again when they bought it.

They lunched at the Stork Club with Hat Milbank, a pal of Ray’s at college and in the war. Of course no one there recognized Ray after these years but a man came in with the Book in his hands, crumpling up the jacket. Afterwards Hat asked them down to old Westbury to see the polo in which he still performed, but they went to the hotel and rested as they did in Java. Otherwise it would all be a little too much. Elizabeth wrote a letter to the children in Suva and told them “everyone in New York” was reading father’s book and admired the photograph which Janice had taken of a girl sick with yaws.

They went alone to a play by William Saroyan. After the curtain had been up five minutes the woman from “21” came in.

She was in the mid-thirties, dark and pretty. As she took her seat beside Ray Torrence she continued her conversation in a voice that was for outside and Elizabeth was a little sorry for her because obviously she did not know she was making herself a nuisance. They were a quartet — two in front. The girl’s escort was a tall and good-looking man. The woman leaning forward in her seat and talking to her friend in front, distracted Ray a little, but not overwhelmingly until she said in a conversational voice that must have reached the actors on the stage:

“Let’s all go back to ‘21’.”

Her escort replied in a whisper and there was quiet for a moment. Then the woman drew a long, long sigh, culminating in an exhausted groan in which could be distinguished the words, “Oh, my God.”

Her friend in front turned around so sweetly that Ray thought the woman next to him must be someone very prominent and powerful — an Astor or a Vanderbilt or a Roosevelt.

“See a little bit of it,” suggested her friend.

The woman from “21” flopped forward with a dynamic movement and began an audible but indecipherable conversation in which the number of the restaurant occurred again and again. When she shifted restlessly back into her chair with another groaning “My God!” this time directed toward the play, Raymond turned his head sideways and uttered a prayer to her aloud:

“Please.”

If Ray had muttered a four-letter word the effect could not have been more catalytic. The woman flashed about and regarded him — her eyes ablaze with the gastric hatred of many dying martinis and with something more. These were the unmistakable eyes of Mrs. Richbitch, that leftist creation as devoid of nuance as Mrs. Jiggs. As they burned with scalding arrogance — the very eyes of the Russian lady who let her coachman freeze outside while she wept at poverty in a play — at this moment Ray recognized a girl with whom he had played Run, Sheep, Run in Pittsburgh twenty years ago.

The woman did not after all excoriate him but this time her flop forward was so violent that it rocked the row ahead.

“Can you believe — can you imagine — “

Her voice raced along in a hoarse whisper. Presently she lunged sideways toward her escort and told him of the outrage. His eye caught Ray’s in a flickering embarrassed glance. On the other side of Ray, Elizabeth became disturbed and alarmed.

Ray did not remember the last five minutes of the act — beside him smoldered fury and he knew its name and the shape of its legs. Wanting nothing less than to kill, he hoped her man would speak to him or even look at him in a certain way during the entr’acte — but when it came the party stood up quickly, and the woman said: “We’ll go to ‘21’.”

On the crowded sidewalk between the acts Elizabeth talked softly to Ray. She did not seem to think it was of any great importance except for the effect on him. He agreed in theory — but when they went inside again the woman from “21” was already in her place, smoking and waving a cigarette.

“I could speak to the usher,” Ray muttered.

“Never mind,” said Elizabeth quickly. “In France you smoke in the music halls.”

“But you have some place to put the butt. She’s going to crush it out in my lap!”

In the sequel she spread the butt on the carpet and kept rubbing it in. Since a lady lush moves in mutually exclusive preoccupations just as a gent does, and the woman had passed beyond her preoccupation with Ray, things were tensely quiet.

When the lights went on after the second act, a voice called to Ray from the aisle. It was Hat Milbank.

“Hello, hello there, Ray! Hello, Mrs. Torrence. Do you want to go to ‘21’ after the theatre?”

His glance fell upon the people in between.

“Hello, Jidge,” he said to the woman’s escort; to the other three, who called him eagerly by name, he answered with an inclusive nod. Ray and Elizabeth crawled out over them. Ray told the story to Hat who seemed to ascribe as little importance to it as Elizabeth did, and wanted to know if he could come out to Fiji this spring.

But the effect upon Ray had been profound. It made him remember why he had left New York in the first place. This woman was what everything was for. She should have been humble, not awful, but she had become confused and thought she should be awful.

So Ray and Elizabeth would go back to Java, unmourned by anyone except Hat. Elizabeth would be a little disappointed at not seeing any more plays and not going to Palm Beach, and wouldn’t like having to pack so late at night. But in a silently communicable way she would understand. In a sense she would be glad. She even guessed that it was the children Ray was running to — to save them and shield them from all the walking dead.

When they went back to their seats for the third act the party from “21” were no longer there — nor did they come in later. It had clearly been another game of Run, Sheep, Run.

ON AN OCEAN WAVE

Gaston T. Scheer — the man, the company, the idea — five feet eight, carrying himself with dash and pride, walking the deck of the ocean liner like a conqueror. This was when it was something to be an American — Spring of 1929.

O’Kane, his confidential secretary, met him in the morning on the open front of the promenade deck.

“See her?” Scheer asked.

“Yes — sure. She’s all right.”

“Why shouldn’t she be all right?”

O’Kane hesitated.

“Some of her baggage is marked with her real initials — and the stewardess said —  — “

“Oh, hell!” said Scheer. “She should have had that fixed up in New York. It’s the same old story — girl’s not your wife, she’s always sensitive, always complaining about slights and injuries. Oh, hell.”

“She was all right.”

“Women are small potatoes,” said Scheer disgustedly. “Did you see that cable from Claud Hanson today that said he’d gladly die for me?”

“I saw it, Mr. Scheer.”

“I liked it.” Scheer said defiantly, “I think Claud meant it. I think he’d gladly die for me.”

Claud Hanson was Mr. Scheer’s other secretary. O’Kane let his natural cynicism run riot in silence.

“I think many people would, Mr. Scheer,” he said without vomiting. Gosh, it was probably true. Mr. Scheer did a lot for a lot of people — kept them alive, gave them work.

“I liked the sentiment,” said Scheer gazing gravely out to sea. “Anyhow Miss Denzer oughtn’t to grouse — it’s just four days and twelve hours. She doesn’t have to stay in her cabin, just so she doesn’t make herself conspicuous or talk to me — just in case.”

Just in case anyone had seen them together in New York.

“Anyhow — “ he concluded. “My wife’s never seen her or heard of her.”

Mr. O’Kane had concluded that he himself would possibly die for Mr. Scheer if Mr. Scheer kept on giving him market tips for ten years more. He would die at the end of the ten — you could cram a lot into ten years. By that time he himself might be able to bring two women abroad in the same load, in separate crates so to speak.

Alone, Gaston T. Scheer faced a strong west wind with a little spray in it. He was not afraid of the situation he had created — he had never been afraid since the day he had forced himself to lay out a foreman with a section of pitch chain.

It just felt a little strange when he walked with Minna and the children to think that Catherine Denzer might be watching them. So when he was on deck with Minna he kept his face impassive and aloof, appearing not to have a good time. This was false. He liked Minna — she said nice things.

In Europe this summer it would be easier. Minna and the children would be parked here and there, in Paris and on the Riviera, and he would make business trips with Catherine. It was a willful, daring arrangement but he was twice a man in every way. Life certainly owed him two women.

The day passed — once he saw Catherine Denzer, passing her in an empty corridor. She kept her bargain, all except for her lovely pale head which yearned toward him momentarily as they passed and made his throat warm, made him want to turn and go after her. But he kept himself in control — they would be in Cherbourg in fifty hours.

Another day passed — there was a brokerage office on board and he spent the time there, putting in a few orders, using the ship-to-shore telephone once, sending a few code wires.

That evening he left Minna talking to the college professor in the adjoining deck chair, and strolled restlessly around the ship, continually playing with the idea of going to Catherine Denzer, but only as a form of mental indulgence because it was twenty-four hours now to Paris and the situation was well in hand.

But he walked the halls of her deck, sometimes glancing casually down the little branch corridors to the staterooms. And so, entirely by accident, in one of these corridors he saw his wife Minna and the professor. They were in each other’s arms embracing, with all abandon. No mistake.

II

Cautiously Scheer backed away from the corridor. His first thought was very simple: it jumped over several steps — over fury, hot jealousy and amazement — it was that his entire plan for the summer was ruined. His next thought was that Minna must sweat blood for this and then he jumped a few more steps. He was what is known medically as a “schizoid” — in his business dealings, too, he left out intermediate steps, surprising competitors by arriving quickly at an extreme position without any discoverable logic. He had arrived at one of these extreme positions now and was not even surprised to find himself there.

An hour later there was a knock on the door of Mr. O’Kane’s cabin and Professor Dollard of the faculty of Weston Technical College came into the room. He was a thin quiet man of forty, wearing a loose tweed suit.

“Oh yes,” said O’Kane. “Come in. Sit down.”

“Thank you,” said Dollard. “What do you want to see me about?”

“Have a cigarette.”

“No thanks. I’m on my way to bed, but tell me, what’s it about?”

O’Kane coughed pointedly — whereupon Cates, the swimming-pool steward, came out of the private bathroom behind Dollard and went to the corridor door, locking it and standing in front of it. At the same time Gaston T. Scheer came out of the bathroom and Dollard stood up, blushing suddenly dark as he recognized him.

“Oh, hello — “ he said, “ — Mr. Scheer. What’s the idea of this?” He took off his glasses with the thought that Scheer was going to hit him.

“What are you a professor of, Professor?”

“Mathematics, Mr. Scheer — I told you that. What’s the idea of asking me down here?”

“You ought to stick to your job,” said Scheer. “You ought to stick there in the college and teach it and not mess around with decent people.”

“I’m not messing around with anybody.”

“You oughtn’t to fool around with people that could buy you out ten thousand times — and not know they spent a nickel.”

Dollard stood up.

“You’re out of your class,” said Scheer. “You’re a school teacher that’s promoted himself out of his class.”

Cates, the steward, stirred impatiently. He had left the two hundred pounds in cash in his locker and he wanted to have this over with and get back and hide it better.

“I don’t know yet what I’ve done,” Dollard said. But he knew all right. It was too bad. A long time ago he had decided to avoid rich people and here he was tangled up with the very worst type.

“You stepped out of your class,” said Scheer thickly, “but you’re not going to do it any more. You’re going to feed the fishes out there, see?”

Mr. O’Kane, who had bucked himself with whiskey, kept imagining that it was Claud Hanson who was about to die for Mr. Scheer — instead of Professor Dollard who had not offered himself for a sacrifice. There was still a moment when Dollard could have cried out for help but because he was guilty he could not bring himself to cry out. Then he was engrossed in a struggle to keep breathing, a struggle that he lost without a sigh.

III

Minna Scheer waited on the front of the promenade deck, walking in the chalked numbers of the shuffle-board game. She was excited and happy. Her feet as she placed them in the squares felt young and barefoot and desperate. She could play too — whatever it was they played. She had been a good girl so long, but now almost everybody she knew was raising the devil and it was a thrilling discovery to find that she could join in with such pleasure. The man was late but that made it all the more tense and unbearably lovely, and from time to time she raised her eyes in delight and looked off into the white hot wake of the steamer.

“On an Ocean Wave,” written in the summer of 1940, was the only Fitzgerald story published under a pseudonym. The disguise was his idea, and he originally proposed it to Arnold Gingrich in February 1940 for “Three Hours Between Planes”: “Why don’t you publish it under a pseudonym — say, John Darcy? I’m awfully tired of being Scott Fitzgerald anyhow, as there doesn’t seem to be so much money in it, and I’d like to find out if people read me just because I am Scott Fitzgerald or, what is more likely, don’t read me for the same reason. In other words it would fascinate me to have one of my stories stand on its own merits completely and see if there is a response.” It is likely that the real reason was Fitzgerald’s suspicion that the Pat Hobby stories had typed him. Moreover, he wanted to accelerate publication of the stories Esquire was holding until the Hobby series was completed. Although “On an Ocean Wave” was published posthumously, it had been scheduled before Fitzgerald died and appeared in the same issue as “Fun in an Artist’s Studio.”

“On an Ocean Wave” was not a new departure for Fitzgerald. The treatment of Scheer is uncharacteristically hard-boiled; but the style is recognizable, as in the final paragraph which might have been written for one of Fitzgerald’s Twenties stories. Published in Esquire, February 1941.

DEARLY BELOVED

O, my Beauty Boy — reading Plato so divine! O, dark, oh fair, colored golf champion of Chicago. Over the rails he goes at night, steward of the club car, and afterwards in the dim smoke by the one light and the smell of stale spittoons, writing west to the Rosecrucian Brotherhood. Seeking ever.

O Beauty Boy here is your girl, not one to soar like you, but a clean swift serpent who will travel as fast on land and look toward you in the sky.

Lilymary loved him, oft invited him and they were married in St. Jarvis’ church in North Englewood. For years they bettered themselves, running along the tread-mill of their reach, becoming only a little older and no better than before. He was loaned the Communist Manifesto by the wife of the advertising manager of a Chicago Daily but for preference give him Plato — the Phaedo and the Apologia, or else the Rosecrucian Brotherhood of Sacramento, California, which burned in his ears as the rails clicked past Alton, Springfield Burlington in the dark.

Bronze lovers, never never canst thou have thy bronze child — or so it seemed for years. Then the clock struck, the gong rang and Dr. Edwin Bruch of South Michigan Avenue agreed to handle the whole thing for $200. They looked so nice — so delicately nice, neither of them over hurting the other and graciously expert in the avoidance. Beauty Boy took fine care of her in her pregnancy — paid his sister to watch with her while he did double work on the road and served for caterers in the city; and one day the bronze baby was born.

O Beauty Boy, Lilymary said, here is your beauty boy. She lay in a four bed ward in the hospital with the wives of a prize fighter, an undertaker and a doctor. Beauty Boy’s face was so twisted with radiance; his teeth shining so in his smile and his eyes so kind that it seemed that nothing and nothing could ever.

Beauty Boy sad beside her bed when she slept and read Thoreau’s Walden for the third time. Then the nurse told him he must leave. He went on the road that night and in Alton going to mail her a letter for a passenger he slipped under the moving train and his leg was off above the knee.

Beauty Boy lay in the hospital and a year passed. Lilymary went back to work again cooking. Things were tough, there was even trouble about his workman’s compensation, but he found lines in his books that helped them along for awhile when all the human beings seemed away.

The little baby flourished but he was not beautiful like his parents; not as they had expected in those golden dreams. They had only spare-time love to give the child so the sister more and more and more took care of him. For they wanted to get back where they were, they wanted Beauty Boy’s leg to grow again so it would all be like it was before. So that he could find delight in his books again and Lilymary could find delight in hoping for a little baby.

Some years passed. They were so far back on the treadmill that they would never catch up. Beauty Boy was a night-watchman now but he had six operations on his stump and each new artificial limb gave him constant pain. Lilymary worked fairly steadily as a cook. Now they had become just ordinary people. Even the sister had long since forgotten that Beauty Boy was formerly colored golf champion of Chicago. Once in cleaning the closet she threw out all his books — the Apologia and the Phaedo of Plate, and the Thoreau and the Emerson and all the leaflets and correspondence with the Roosecrucian Brotherhood. He didn’t find out for a long time that they were gone. And then he just stared at the place where they had been and said “Say, man … say man.”

For things change and get so different that we can hardly recognize them and it seems that only our names remain the same. It seemed wrong for them still to call each other Beauty Boy and Lilymary long after the delight was over.

Some years later they both died in an influenza epidemic and went to heaven. They thought it was going to be all right then — indeed things began to happen in exactly the way that they had been told as children. Beauty Boy’s leg grew again and he became golf champion of all heaven, both white and black, and drove the ball powerfully from cloud to cloud through the blue fairway. Lilymary’s breasts became young and firm, she was respected among the other angels, and her pride n Beauty Boy became as it had been before.

In the evening they sat and tried to remember what it was they missed. It was not this Hobbs, for here everyone knew all those things by heart, and it was not the little boy for he had never really been on e of them. They couldn’t remember so after a puzzled time they would give up trying, and talk about how nice the other one was, of how fine a score Beauty Boy would make tomorrow.

So things go.

PAT AT THE FAIR REUNION AT THE FAIR

Once when Pat Hobby was a boy a maiden aunt took him to the circus. The only fly in the ointment was that she wouldn’t give him a dime to see the bearded lady in the side show — which was Pats’ heart’s desire.

And now forty years later a somewhat parallel situation obtained with Mr. Pat Hobby at the Golden Gate World’s Fair. The lady of his desire was not bearded — no, no such incarnation would have been approved among Mr. Rosis Aquabelles — but the part of the maiden aunt was almost literally played by George Poupolous, motion picture producer.

The heel of the girls shoe come off without warning and she grabbed at the rolling chair for support. The attendant svayed her arm and sat her down beside Pat Hobby, a visitor from Hollywood!

“Could you drop me at the Aquacade?” she groaned.

Pat looked nervously at the door through which Mr. Poupolous had disappeared a minute before. Over was a sign which read “The Birth of Twins in Technicolor. The Golden Gates most Scientific Exhibit.”

Pat had no way of estimating how long the birth of twins took. He thought of her. Popolous who stood handsomely between him and starvation — then he looked at the girl.

“Aquacade,” he said to her attendant.

“I work there,” said the girl.

Pat introduced himself.

“I’m a writer — from Hollywood.”

“I swim at the Aquacade.”

They eyed each other sparring for advantage. She was nineteen. Pat was a somewhat shop-worn thirty mul.

Moreover the recent words of Mr. Poupolous — “George” to his face but referred to otherwose in his absense — rang in Pat’s ear.

“I want you should stay with me. Always when a producer takes a writer on a trip the writer is to stay with him. Suppose I have an idea — like now, a picture about a World’s Fair? Who would it be to write down the idea and remember it?”

Pat spoke urgently to the attendant.

“Push hard,” he said to the attendant. “I got to be back in ten minutes.”

The girl was straw-haired and appealing.

“Did you see the birth of twins,” he asked, and when she looked at him scalthingly he hurriedly added, “I just wondered how long it takes.”

“I’m sure I don’t know. I spend all the time I can get off in the Art Exposition.”

He looked at her again.

“I’m here with a producer,” he said, “He’s always looking for talent.”

Perhaps the Aquabelle had heard this one before because she did not answer — in fact made no further remark untill he had deposited her at the steps of the water carnival. Then she relaxed.

“Come and see us,” she said.

He looked at the Aquabelle longingly and hopelessly. Mr. Poupolous had seen the Aquacade in New York.

“Home, James,” he said.

On the way back he found himself reminded of a bearded lady. Not that Mr. Rose’s employee wore any more than the most conventional and invisible down, but once forty years ago his maiden aunt had refused him ten cents to see a bearded lady. And the present situation had a familiar ring. There was nothing he could do about it — in his present decline two weeks at two fifty were not to be despised.

He reached the midway just as Mr. Poupolous emerged from his scientific studies.

“Where now?” said Pat with proper joviality.

“That was Panorananama,”said Mr. Popolous.

Pat looking longingly at Sally Rands nude ranch.

“Humpfrey Bogart and his wife are here today,” volunteered the man behind the rolling chair. “They had dinner at the Golden Gate Restaurant.”

Pat and Mr. Poupolous exchanged a glance — known as George to his face and “Pupe” behind his back — took the news calmly. He pointed onto the building in front of them and said to his companion, Mr. Pat Hobby.

“Art Expedition.”

Mr. Poupolous had never been good at signs.

The youth pushing the chair spoke again.

“You do want to go to the Art Exposition? Humpfrey Bogart and his —  — “

“Stop!” cried Mr. Poupolous. “There’s Bruce Ligorna.”

Pat’s scelerotic heart was thrilled. After long neglect — broken by an occasional week at two fifty — he was in the swim again. Everybody was here — that was indeed Legorna, the director sitting alone on the steps of the Fine Art Building.

“He looks sick,” said Mr. Poupolous as they approached. “Hi there, Bruce.”

“I’m sick,” said Bruce.

“What’s a matter?”

Ligorna waved his hand despondently toward the picture gallery.

“Hung pictures,” he said, “They make me faint. I shouldn’t have gone in alone — they had to carry me out.”

“Why didn’t you tell them who you were?” demanded Pat indignantly.

“I was unconscious.”

“You mean the pictures made you sick?” asked Mr. Poupolous.

“Always have,” said Bruce dismally, “I been psyked but they can’t find out why. I’m trying to get over it myself — but I should have had somebody with me.”

“Do moving pictures make you sick?” asked Pat.

“No — just hung pictures.”

Poupolous smiled suspiciously to think if he were drunk — but the fresh fine air of the Golden Gate was without a faint….

*****

From editor: That’s all that survived of the text — the end of the story is missing.

THE MYSTERY OF THE RAYMOND MORTGAGE

When I first saw John Syrel of the New York Daily News, he was standing before an open window of my house gazing out on the city. It was about six o’clock and the lights were just going on. All down 33rd Street was a long line of gayly illuminated buildings. He was not a tall man, but thanks to the erectness of his posture, and the suppleness of his movement, it would take no athlete to tell that he was of fine build. He was twenty-three years old when I first saw him, and was already a reporter on the News. He was not a handsome man; his face was clean-shaven, and his chin showed him to be of strong character. His eyes and hair were brown.

As I entered the room he turned around slowly and addressed me in a slow, drawling tone: “I think I have the honor of speaking to Mr. Egan, chief of police.” I assented, and he went on: “My name is John Syrel and my business, — to tell you frankly, is to learn all I can about that case of the Raymond mortgage.”

I started to speak but he silenced me with a wave of his hand. “Though I belong to the staff of the Daily News,” he continued, “I am not here as an agent of the paper,”

“I am not here,” I interrupted coldly, “to tell every newspaper reporter or adventurer about private affairs. James, show this man out.”

Syrel turned without a word and I heard his steps echo up the driveway.

However, this was not destined to be the last time I ever saw Syrel, as events will show.

The morning after I first saw John Syrel, I proceeded to the scene of the crime to which he had alluded. On the train I picked up a newspaper and read the following account of the crime and theft, which had followed it:

“EXTRA”

“Great Crime Committed in Suburbs of City”

“Mayor Proceeding to Scenes of Crime”

On the morning of July 1st, a crime and serious theft were committed on the outskirts of the city. Miss Raymond was killed and the body of a servant was found outside of the house. Mr. Raymond of Santuka Lake was awakened on Tuesday morning by a scream and two revolver shots which proceeded from his wife’s room. He tried to open the door but it would not open. He was almost certain the door was locked from the inside, when suddenly it swung open disclosing a room in frightful disorder. On the center of the floor was a revolver and on his wife’s bed was a blood stain in the shape of a hand. His wife was missing, but on a closer search he found his daughter under the bed, stone dead. The window was broken in two places. Miss Raymond had a bullet wound on her body and her head was fearfully cut. The body of a servant was found outside with a bullet hole through this head. Mrs. Raymond has not been found.

The room was upset. The bureau drawers were out as if the murderer had been looking for something. Chief of Police Egan is on the scene of the crime, etc., etc.

Just then the conductor called out “Santuka!” The train came to a stop, and getting out of the car I walked up to the house. On the porch I met Gregson, who was supposed to be the ablest detective in the force. He gave me a plan of the house which he said he would like to have me look at before we went in.

“The body of the servant,” he said, “is that of John Standish. He has been with family 12 years and was a perfectly honest man. He was only 32 years old.”

“The bullet which killed him was not found?” I asked.

“No,” he answered; and then, “Well, you had better come in and see for yourself. By the way, there was a fellow hanging around here, who was trying to see the body. When I refused to let him in, he went around to where the servant was shot and I saw him go down on his knees on the grass and begin to search. A few minutes later he stood up and leaned against a tree. Then he came up to the house and asked to see the body again. I said he could if he would go away afterwards. He assented, and when he got inside the room he went down on his knees and under the bed and hunted around. Then he went over to the window and examined the broken pane carefully. After that he declared himself satisfied and went down towards the hotel.”

After I had examined the room to my satisfaction, I found that I might as well try to see through a millstone as to try to fathom this mystery. As I finished my investigation I met Gregson in the laboratory.

“I suppose you heard about the mortgage,” said he, as we went down stairs. I answered in the negative, and he told me that a valuable mortgage had disappeared from the room in which Miss Raymond was killed. The night before Mr. Raymond had placed the mortgage in a drawer and it had disappeared.”

On my way to town that night I met Syrel again, and he bowed cordially to me. I began to feel ashamed of myself for sending him out of my house. As I went into the car the only vacant seat was next to him. I sat down and apologized for my rudeness of the day before. He took it lightly and, there being nothing to say, we sat in silence. At last I ventured a remark.

“What do you think of the case?”

“I don’t think anything of it as yet. I haven’t had time yet.”

Nothing daunted I began again. “Did you learn anything?”

Syrel dug his hand into his pocket and produced a bullet. I examined it.

“Where did you find it?” I asked.

“In the yard,” he answered briefly.

At this I again relapsed into my seat. When we reached the city, night was coming on. My first day’s investigation was not very successful.

My next day’s investigation was no more successful than the first. My friend Syrel was not at home. The maid came into Mr. Raymond’s room while I was there and gave notice that she was going to leave. “Mr. Raymond,” she said, “there was queer noises outside my window last night. I’d like to stay, sir, but it grates on my nerves.” Beyond this nothing happened, and I came home worn out. On the morning of the next day I was awakened by the maid who had a telegram in her hand. I opened it and found it was from Gregson. “Come at once,” it said “startling development.” I dressed hurriedly and took the first car to Santuka. When I reached the Santuka station, Gregson was waiting for me in a runabout. As soon as I got into the carriage Gregson told me what had happened.

“Someone was in the house last night. You know Mr. Raymond asked me to sleep there. Well, to continue, last night, about one, I began to be very thirsty. I went into the hall to get a drink from the faucet there, and as I was passing from my room (I sleep in Miss Raymond’s room) into the hall I heard somebody in Mrs. Raymond’s room. Wondering why Mr. Raymond was up at that time of night I went into the sitting room to investigate. I opened the door of Mrs. Raymond’s room. The body of Miss Raymond was lying on the sofa. A man was kneeling beside it. His face was away from me, but I could tell by his figure that he was not Mr. Raymond. As I looked he got up softly and I saw him open a bureau. He took something out and put it into his pocket. As he turned around he saw me, and I saw that he was a young man. With a cry of rage he sprang at me, and having no weapon I retreated. He snatched up a heavy Indian club and swung it over my head. I gave a cry which must have alarmed the house, for I know nothing more till I saw Mr. Raymond bending over me.”

“How did this man look,” I asked. “Would you know him if you saw him again?”

“I think not,” he answered, “I only saw his profile.”

“The only explanation I can give is this,” said I. “The murderer was in Miss Raymond’s room and when she came in he overpowered her and inflicted the gash. He then made for Mrs. Raymond’s room and carried her off after having first shot Miss Raymond, who attempted to rise. Outside the house he met Standish, who attempted to stop him and was shot.”

Gregson smiled. “That solution is impossible,” he said.

As we reached the house I saw John Syrel, who beckoned me aside. “If you come with me,” he said, “you will learn something that may be valuable to you.” I excused myself to Gregson and followed Syrel. As we reached the walk he began to talk.

“Let us suppose that the murderer or murderess escaped from the house. Where would they go? Naturally they wanted to get away. Where did they go? Now, there are two railroad stations near by, Santuka and Lidgeville. I have ascertained that they did not go by Santuka. So did Gregson. I supposed, therefore, that they went by Lidgeville. Gregson didn’t; that’s the difference. A straight line is the shortest distance between two points. I followed a straight line between here and Lidgeville. At first there was nothing. About two miles farther on I saw some footprints in a marshy hollow. They consisted of three footprints. I took an impression. Here it is. You see this one is a woman’s. I have compared it with one of Mrs. Raymond’s boots. They are identical. The others are mates. They belong to a man. I compared the bullet I found, where Standish was killed, with one of the remaining cartridges in the revolver that was found in Mrs. Raymond’s room. They were mates. Only one shot had been fired and as I had found one bullet, I concluded that either Mrs. or Miss Raymond had fired the shot. I preferred to think Mrs. Raymond fired it because she had fled. Summing these things up and also taking into consideration that Mrs. Raymond must have had some cause to try to kill Standish, I concluded that John Standish killed Miss Raymond through the window of her mother’s room, Friday night. I also conclude Mrs. Raymond after ascertaining that her daughter was dead, shot Standish through the window and killed him. Horrified at what she had done she hid behind the door when Mr. Raymond came in. Then she ran down the back stairs. Going outside she stumbled upon the revolver Standish had used and picking it up took it with her. Somewhere between here and Lidgeville she met the owner of these footprints, either by accident or design and walked with him to the station where they took the early train for Chicago. The station master did not see the man. He says that only a woman bought a ticket, so I concluded that the young man didn’t go. Now you must tell me what Gregson told you.”

“How did you know all this,” exclaimed I astonshed. And then I told him about the midnight visitor. He did not appear to be much astonished, and he said “I guess that the young man is our friend of the footprints. Now you had better go get a brace of revolvers and pack your suitcase if you wish to go with me to find this young man and Mrs. Raymond, whom I think is with him.

Greatly surprised at what I had heard I took the first train back to town. I bought a pair of fine Colt revolvers, a dark lantern, and two changes of clothing. We went over to Lidgeville and found that a young man had left on the six o’clock train for Ithaca. On reaching Ithaca we found that he had changed trains and was now half way to Princeton, New Jersey. It was five o’clock, but we took a fast train and expected to overtake him half way between Ithaca and Princeton. What was our chagrin when on reaching the slow train, to find he had gotten off at Indianous and was now probably safe. Thoroughly disappointed we took the train for Indianous. The ticket seller said that a young man in a light gray suit had taken a bus to the Raswell Hotel. We found the bus which the station master said he had taken, in the street. We went up to the driver and he admitted that he had started for the Raswell Hotel in his cab.

“But,” said the old fellow, “when I reached there, the fellow had clean disappeared, an’ I never got his fare.”

Syrel groaned; it was plain that we had lost the young man. We took the next train for New York and telegraphed to Mr. Raymond that we would be down Monday. Sunday night, however, I was called to the phone and recognized Syrel’s voice. He directed me to come at once to five hundred thirty-four Chestnut Street. I met him on the doorstep.

“What have you heard?” I asked.

“I have an agent in Indianous,” he replied, “in the shape of an Arab boy whom I employ for 10 cents a day. I told him to spot the woman and today I got a telegram from him (I left him money to send one), saying to come at once. So come on.”

We took the train for Indianous. “Smidy,” the young Arab, met us at the station.

“You see, sur, it’s dis way. You says, ‘Spot de guy wid dat hack,’ and I says I would. Dat night a young dude comes out of er house on Pine Street and give the cabman a $10 bill. An den he went back into the house and a minute after he comes out wid a woman, an’ den day went down here a little way an’ goes into a house farther down the street, I’ll show you de place.”

We followed Smidy down the street until we arrived at a corner house. The ground floor was occupied by a cigar store, but the second floor was evidently for rent. As we stood there a face appeared at the window and, seeing us, hastily retreated. Syrel pulled a picture from his pocket. “It’s she,” he exclaimed, and calling us to follow he dashed into a little side door. We heard voices upstairs, a shuffle of feet and a noise as if a door had been shut.

“Up the stairs,” shouted Syrel, and we followed him, taking two steps at a bound. As we reached the top landing we were met by a young man.

“What right have you to enter this house?” he demanded.

“The right of the law,” replied Syrel.

“I didn’t do it” broke out the young man. “It was this way. Agnes Raymond loved me — she did not love Standish — he shot her; and God did not let her murder go unrevenged. It was well Mrs. Raymond killed him, for his blood would have been on my hands. I went back to see Agnes before she was buried. A man came in. I knocked him down. I didn’t know until a moment ago that Mrs. Raymond had killed him.

“I forgot Mrs. Raymond” screamed Syrel, “where is she?”

“She is out of your power forever,” said the young man.

Syrel brushed past him and, with Smidy and I following, burst open the door of the room at the head of the stairs. We rushed in.

On the floor lay a woman, and as soon as I touched her heart I knew she was beyond the doctor’s skill.

“She has taken poison,” I said. Syre looked around, the young man had gone. And we stood there aghast in the presence of death.

READE, SUBSTITUTE RIGHT HALF

“Hold! Hold! Hold!” The slogan thundered up the field to where the battered, crimson warders trotted wearily into their places again. The blues’ attack this time came straight at center and was good for a gain of seven yards.

“Second down, three,” yelled the referee, and again the attack came straight at center. This time there was no withstanding the rush and the huge Hilton fullback crushed through the crimson line again and shaking off his many tacklers, staggered on toward the Warrentown goal.

The midget Warrentown quarter-back ran nimbly up the field and, dodging the interference, shot in straight at the fullback’s knees throwing him to the ground. The teams sprang back into line again, but Hearst, the crimson right tackle, lay still upon the ground. The right half was shifted to tackle and Berl, the captain, trotted over to the sidelines to ask the advice of the coaches.

“Who have we got for half, sir?” he inquired of the head coach.

“Suppose you try Reade,” answered the coach, and calling to one of the figures on the pile of straw, which served as a seat for the substitutes, he beckoned to him. Pulling off his sweater, a light haired stripling trotted over to the coach.

“Pretty light,” said Berl as he surveyed the form before him.

“I guess that’s all we have, though,” answered the coach. Reade was plainly nervous as he shifted his weight from one foot to the other and fidgeted with the end of his jersey.

“Oh, I guess he’ll do,” said Berl. “Come on kid,” and they trotted off on the field.

The teams quickly lined up and the Hilton quarter gave the signal “6-8-7G.” The play came between guard and tackle, but before the full-back could get started a lithe form shot out from the Warrentown line and brought him heavily to the ground.

“Good work, Reade,” said Berl, as Reade trotted back into his place, and blushing at the compliment he crouched low in the line and waited for the play. The center snapped the ball to quarter, who, turning, was about to give it to the half. The ball slipped from his grasp and he reached for it, but too late. Reade had slipped in between the end and tackle and dropped on the ball.

“Good one, Reade,” shouted Mridle, the Warrentown quarter, as he came racing up, crying signals as he ran. Signal “48-10G-37,”

It was Reade around left end, but the pass was bad and the quarter dropped the ball. Reade scooped it up on a run and raced around left end. In the delay which had been caused by the fumble Reade’s interference had been broken up and he must shift for himself; even as he rounded the end he was thrown with a thud by the blue full-back. He had gained but a yard. “Never mind, Reade,” said the quarter, “my fault.” The ball was snapped, but again the pass was bad and a Hilton line man fell on the ball.

Then began a steady march up the field toward the Warrentown goal. Time and time again Reade slipped through the Hilton line and nailed the runner before he could get started. But slowly Hilton pushed down the field toward the Warrentown goal. When the Blues were on the Crimson’s ten-yard line their quarter-back made his only error of judgment during the game. He gave the signal for a forward pass. The ball was shot to the full-back, who turned to throw it to the right half. As the pigskin left his hand, Reade leaped upward and caught the ball. He stumbled for a moment, but, soon getting his balance, started out for the Hilton goal with a long string of Crimson and Blue men spread out behind him. He had a start of about five yards on his nearest opponent, but this distance was decreased to three before he had passed his own forty-five-yard line. He turned his head and looked back. His pursuer was breathing heavily and Reade saw what was coming. He was going to try a diving tackle. As the man’s body shot out straight for him he stepped out of the way and the man fell harmlessly past him, missing him by a foot.

From there to the goal line it was easy running, and as Reade laid the pigskin on the ground and rolled happily over beside it he could just hear another slogan echo down the field: “One point — two points — three points — four points — five points. Reade! Reade! Reade!”

A DEBT OF HONOR

“Prayle!”

“Here.”

“Martin!”

“Absent.”

“Sanderson!”

“Here.”

“Carlton, for sentry duty!”

“Sick.”

“Any volunteers to take his place?”

“Me, me,” said Jack Sanderson, eagerly.

“All right,” said the captain and went on with the roll.

It was a very cold night. Jack never quite knew how it came about. He had been wounded in the hand the day before and his gray jacket was stained a bright red where he had been hit by a stray ball. And “number six” was such a long post. From way up by the general’s tent to way down by the lake. He could feel a faintness stealing over him. He was very tired and it was getting very dark — very dark.

They found him there, sound alseep, in the morning, worn out by the fatigue of the march and the fight which had followed it. There was nothing the matter with him save the wounds, which were slight, and military rules were very strict. To the last day of his life Jack always remembered the sorrow in his captain’s voice as he read aloud the dismal order.

Camp Bowling Green, C. S. A.

Jan. 15, 1863, U. S.

For falling asleep while in a position of trust at a sentry post, private John Sanderson is hereby condemned to be shot at sunrise on Jan, 16, 1863.

By order of

Robert E. Lee,

Lieutenant General Commanding.

Jack never forgot the dismal night and the march which followed it. They tied a hankerchief over his head and led him a little apart to a wall which bounded one side of the camp. Never had life seemed so sweet.

General Lee in his tent thought long and seriously upon the matter.

“He is so awfully young and of good family too; but camp discipline must be enforced. Still it was not much of an offense for such a punishment. The lad was over tired and wounded. By George, he shall go free if I risk my reputation. Sergeant, order private John Sanderson to be brought before me.”

“Very well, sir,” and saluting, the orderly left the tent.

Jack was brought in, supported by two soldiers, for a reaction had set in after his narrow escape from death.

“Sir,” said General Lee sternly, “on account of your extreme youth you will get off with a reprimand but see that it never happens again, for, if it should, I shall not be so lenient.”

“General,” answered Jack drawing himself up to his full height, “The Confederate States of America shall never have cause to regret that I was not shot.” And Jack was led away, still trembling, but happy in the knowledge of a new found life.

*****

Six weeks after with Lee’s army near Chancellorsville. The success of Fredricksburg had made possible this advance of the Confederate arms. The firing had just commenced when a courier rode up to General Jackson.

“Colonel Barrows says sir, that the enemy have possession of a small frame house on the outskirts of the woods and it overlooks our earthworks. Has he your permission to take it by assault?”

“My compliments to Colonel Barrows and say that I cannot spare more than twenty men but that he is welcome to charge with that number,” answered the General.

“Yes, sir,” and the orderly setting spurs to his horse rode away.

Five minutes later a column of men from the 3rd Virginia burst out from the woods and ran toward the house. A galling fire broke out from the Federal lines and many a brave man fell, among whom was their leader, a young lieutenant. Jack Sanderson sprang to the front and waving his gun encouraged the men onward. Half way between the Confederate lines and the house was a small mound, and behind this the men threw themselves to get a minute’s respite.

A minute later a figure sprang up and ran toward the house, and before the Union troops saw him he was half way across the bullet-swept clearing. Then the federal fire was directed at him. He staggered for a moment and placed his hand to his forehead. On he ran and reaching the house he quickly opened the door and went inside. A minute later a pillar of flame shot out of the windows of the house and almost immediately afterwards the Federal occupants were in full flight. A long cheer rolled along the Confederate lines and then the word was given to charge and they charged sweeping all before them. That night the searchers wended their way to the half burned house. There on the floor, beside the mattress he had set on fire, lay the body of him who had once been John Sanderson, private, third Virginia. He had paid his debt.

THE ROOM WITH THE GREEN BLINDS

I

It was ominous looking enough in broad daylight, with its dull, brown walls, and musty windows. The garden, if it might be called so, was simply a mass of overgrown weeds, and the walk was falling to pieces, the bricks crumbling from the touch of time. Inside it was no better. Rickety old three-legged chairs covered with a substance that had once been plush, were not exactly hospitable looking objects. And yet this house was part of the legacy my grandfather had left me. In his will had been this clause: “The house, as it now stands, and all that is inside it, shall go to my grandson, Robert Calvin Raymond, on his coming to the age of twenty-one years. I furthermore desire that he shall not open the room at the end of the corridor, on the second floor until Carmatle falls. He may fix up three rooms of the house as modern as he wishes, but let the others remain unchanged. He may keep but one servant.”

To a poor young man with no outlook in life, and no money, but a paltry eight hundred a year, this seemed a windfall when counted with the twenty-five thousand dollars that went with it. I resolved to fix up my new home, and so started South to Macon, Ga., near which my grandfather’s house was situated. All the evening on the Pullman I had thought about that clause, “He shall not open the room at the end of the corridor on the second floor until Carmatle falls.” Who was Carmatle? And what did it mean when it said, “When Carmatle falls?” In vain I supposed and guessed and thought; I could make no sense of it.

When I finally arrived at the house, I lighted one of a box of candles which I had brought with me and walked up the creaking stairs to the third floor and down a long, narrow corridor covered with cobwebs and bugs of all sorts till I finally came to a massive oaken door which barred my further progress. On the door I could just make out with the aid of the candle the initials J. W. B. in red paint. The door was barred on the outside by heavy iron bars, effectually barricaded against anybody entering or going out. Suddenly, without even a warning flicker my candle went out, and I found myself in complete darkness. Though I am not troubled with weak nerves, I confess I was somewhat startled by this, for there was not a breath of air stirring. I relit the candle and walked out of the corridor down to the room of the three-legged chairs. As it was now almost nine o’clock and as I was tired after my day of traveling, I soon fell off to sleep.

How long I slept I do not know. I awoke suddenly and sat bolt upright on the lounge. For far down the downstairs hall I heard approaching footsteps, and a second later saw the reflection of a candle on the wall outside my door. I made no noise but as the steps came closer I crept softly to my feet. Another sound and the intruder was directly outside and I had a look at him. The flickering flame of the candle shone on a strong, handsome face, fine brown eyes and a determined chin. A stained grey Confederate uniform covered a magnificent form and here and there a blood stain made him more weird as he stood looking straight ahead with a glazed stare. His clean shaven face seemed strangely familiar to me, and some instinct made me connect him with the closed door on the right wing.

I came to myself with a start and crouched to leap at him, but some noise I made must have alarmed him, for the candle was suddenly extinguished and I brought up against a chair, nursing a bruised shin. I spent the rest of the night trying to connect the clause in my uncle’s will with this midnight prowler.

When morning came, things began to look clearer, and I resolved to find out whether I had been dreaming or whether I had had a Confederate officer for a guest. I went into the hall and searched for any sign which might lead to a revelation of the mystery. Sure enough, just outside my door was a tallow stain. About ten yards further on was another, and I found myself following a trail of spots along the hall, and upstairs toward the left wing of the house. About twenty feet from the door of the forbidden room they stopped; neither was there any trace of anyone having gone further. I walked up to the door and tried it to make sure that no one could possibly go in or out. Then I descended and, sauntering out, went around to the east wing to see how it looked from the outside. The room had three windows, each of which was covered with a green blind, and with three iron bars. To make sure of this I went around to the barn, a tumbly old structure, and, by dint of much exertion, succeeded in extracting a ladder from a heap of debris behind it. I placed this against the house, and climbing up, tested each bar carefully. There was no deception. They were firmly set in the concrete sill.

Therefore, there could be but one explanation, the man concealed there must have a third way of getting out, some sort of secret passageway. With this thought in mind I searched the house from garret to cellar, but not a sign could I see of any secret entrance. Then I sat down to think it over.

In the first place there was somebody concealed in the room in the east wing. I had no doubt of that, who was in the habit of making midnight visits to the front hall. Who was Carmatle? It was an unusual name, and I felt if I could find its possessor I could unravel this affair.

Aha! now I had it. Carmatle, the governor of Georgia; why had I not thought of that before? I resolved that that afternoon I would start for Atlanta to see him.

II.

“Mr. Carmattyle, I believe?”

“At your service.”

“Governor, it’s rather a personal matter I have come to see you about and I may have made a mistake in identity. Do you know anything about ‘J. W. B.’ or did you ever know a man with those initials?”

The governor paled.

“Young man, tell me where you heard those initials and what brought you here?”

In as few words as possible I related to him my story, beginning with the will and ending with my theories regarding it.

When I had finished, the governor rose to his feet.

“I see it all; I see it all. Now with your permission I shall spend a night with you in your house in company with a friend of mine who is in the secret service. If I am right, concealed in that house is — well,” he broke off. “I had better not say now, for it may be only a remarkable coincidence. Meet me at the station in half an hour, and you had better bring a revolver.

Six o’clock found us at the manor and the governor and I with the detective he had brought along, a fellow by the name of Butler, proceeded at once to the room.

After half an hour’s labor we succeeded in finding no such thing as a passageway, secret or otherwise. Being tired I sat down to rest and in doing so my hand touched a ledge projecting from the wall. Instantly a portion of the wall swung open, disclosing an opening about three feet square. Instantly the governor, with the agility of a cat, was through it and his form disappeared from view. We grasped the situation and followed him. I found myself crawling along on hard stone in black darkness. Suddenly a shot resounded, and another. Then the passageway came to an end. We were in a room magnificently hung with oriental draperies, the walls covered with medieval armor and ancient swords, shields and battle axes. A red lamp on the table threw a lurid glare over all and cast a red glow on a body which lay at the foot of a Turkish divan. It was the Confederate officer, shot through the heart, for the life blood was fast staining his grey uniform red. The governor was standing near the body, a smoking revolver in his hand.

“Gentlemen,” said he, “let me present to you John Wilkes Booth, the slayer of Albraham Lincoln.”

III

“Mr. Carmatle, you will explain this I hope.”

“Certainly,” and drawing up a chair the governor began:

“My son and I served in Forest’s cavalry during the Civil War, and being on a scouting expedition did not hear of Lee’s surrender at Appomatox until about three months afterwards. As we were riding southward along the Cumberland pike we met a man riding down the road. Having struck up an acquaintance, as travelers do, we camped together, the next morning the man was gone, together with my son’s old horse and my son’s old uniform, leaving his new horse and new civilian suit instead. We did not know what to make of this, but never suspected who this man was. My son and I separated and I never saw him again. He was bound for his aunt’s in Western Maryland and one morning he was shot by some Union soldiers in a barn where he had tried to snatch a minute’s rest on the way. The story was given out to the public that it was Booth that was shot but I knew and the government knew that my innocent son had been shot by mistake and that John Wilkes Booth, the man who had taken his horse and clothes had escaped. For four years I hunted Booth, but until I heard you mention the initials J. W. B. I had heard no word of him. As it was, when I found him he shot first. I think that his visit to the hall in the Confederate uniform was simply to frighten you away. The fact that your grandfather was a Southern sympathizer probably had protected him all these years. So now, gentlemen, you have heard my story. It rests with you whether this gets no farther than us three here and the government, or whether I shall be proclaimed a murderer and brought to trial.”

“You are as innocent as Booth is guilty,” said I. “My lips shall be forever sealed.”

And we both pressed forward and took him by the hand.

A LUCKLESS SANTA CLAUS

Miss Harmon was responsible for the whole thing. If it had not been for her foolish whim, Talbot would not have made a fool of himself, and — but I am getting ahead of my story.

It was Christmas Eve. Salvation Army Santa Clauses with highly colored noses proclaimed it as they beat upon rickety paper chimneys with tin spoons. Package laden old bachelors forgot to worry about how many slippers and dressing gowns they would have to thank people for next day, and joined in the general air of excitement that pervaded busy Manhattan.

In the parlor of a house situated on a dimly lighted residence street somewhere east of Broadway, sat the lady who, as I have said before, started the whole business. She was holding a conversation half frivolous, half sentimental, with a faultlessly dressed young man who sat with her on the sofa. All of this was quite right and proper, however, for they were engaged to be married in June.

“Harry Talbot,” said Dorothy Harmon, as she rose and stood laughing at the merry young gentleman beside her, “if you aren’t the most ridiculous boy I ever met, I’ll eat that terrible box of candy you brought me last week!”

“Dorothy,” reproved the young man, “you should receive gifts in the spirit in which they are given. That box of candy cost me much of my hard earned money.”

“Your hard earned money, indeed!” scoffed Dorothy. “You know very well that you never earned a cent in your life. Golf and dancing — that is the sum total of your occupations. Why, you can’t even spend money, much less earn it!”

“My dear Dorothy, I succeeded in running up some very choice bills last month, as you will find if you consult my father.”

“That’s not spending your money. That’s wasting it. Why, I don’t think you could give away twenty-five dollars in the right way to save your life.”

“But why on earth,” remonstrated Harry, “should I want to give away twenty-five dollars?”

“Because,” explained Dorothy, “that would be real charity. It’s nothing to charge a desk to your father and have it sent to me, but to give money to people you don’t know is something.”

“Why, any old fellow can give away money,” protested Harry.

“Then,” exclaimed Dorothy, “we’ll see if you can. I don’t believe that you could give twenty-five dollars in the course of an evening if you tried.”

“Indeed, I could.”

“Then try it!” And Dorothy, dashing into the hall, took down his coat and hat and placed them in his reluctant hands. “It is now half-past eight. You be here by ten o’clock.”

“But, but,” gasped Harry.

Dorothy was edging him towards the door.

“How much money have you?” she demanded.

Harry gloomily put his hand in his pocket and counted out a handful of bills.

“Exactly twenty-five dollars and five cents.”

“Very well! Now listen! These are the conditions. You go out and give this money to anybody you care to whom you have never seen before. Don’t give more than two dollars to any one person. And be back here by ten o’clock with no more than five cents in your pocket.”

“But,” declared Harry, still backing towards the door, “I want my twenty-five dollars.”

“Harry,” said Dorothy sweetly, “I am surprised!” and with that, she slammed the door in his face.

“I insist,” muttered Harry, “that this is a most unusual proceeding.”

He walked down the steps and hesitated.

“Now,” he thought, “Where shall I go?”

He considered a moment and finally started off towards Broadway. He had gone about half a block when he saw a gentleman in a top hat approaching. Harry hesitated. Then he made up his mind, and, stepping towards the man, emitted what he intended for a pleasant laugh but what sounded more like a gurgle, and loudly vociferated, “Merry Christmas, friend!”

“The same to you,” answered he of the top hat, and would have passed on, but Harry was not to be denied.

“My good fellow” — He cleared his throat. “Would you like me to give you a little money?”

“What?” yelled the man.

“You might need some money, don’t you know, to — er — buy the children — a — a rag doll,” he finished brilliantly.

The next moment his hat went sailing into the gutter, and when he picked it up the man was far away.

“There’s five minutes wasted,” muttered Harry, as, full of wrath towards Dorothy, he strode along his way. He decided to try a different method with the next people he met. He would express himself more politely.

A couple approached him, — a young lady and her escort. Harry halted directly in their path and, taking off his hat, addressed them.

“As it is Christmas, you know, and everybody gives away — er — articles, why” —

“Give him a dollar, Billy, and let’s go on,” said the young lady.

Billy obediently thrust a dollar into Harry’s hand, and at that moment the girl gave a cry of surprise.

“Why, it’s Harry Talbot,” she exclaimed, “begging!”

But Harry heard no more. When he realized that he knew the girl he turned and sped like an arrow up the street, cursing has foolhardiness in taking up the affair at all.

He reached Broadway and started slowly down the gaily lighted thoroughfare, intending to give money to the street Arabs he met. All around him was the bustle of preparation. Everywhere swarmed people happy in the pleasant concert of their own generosity. Harry felt strangely out of place as he wandered aimlessly along. He was used to being catered to and bowed before, but here no one spoke to him, and one or two even had the audacity to smile at him and wish him a “Merry Christmas.” He nervously accosted a passing boy.

“I say, little boy, I’m going to give you some money.”

“No you ain’t,” said the boy sturdily. “I don’t want none of your money.”

Rather abashed, Harry continued down the street. He tried to present fifty cents to an inebriated man, but a policeman tapped him on the shoulder and told him to move on. He drew up beside a ragged individual and quietly whispered, “Do you wish some money?”

“I’m on,” said the tramp, “what’s the job?”

“Oh! there’s no job!” Harry reassured him.

“Tryin’ to kid me, hey?” growled the tramp resentfully. “Well, get somebody else.” And he slunk off into the crowd.

Next Harry tried to squeeze ten cents into the hand of a passing bellboy, but the youth pulled open his coat and displayed a sign “No Tipping.”

With the air of a thief, Harry approached an Italian bootblack, and cautiously deposited ten cents in his hand. At a safe distance he saw the boy wonderingly pocket the dime, and congratulated himself. He had but twenty-four dollars and ninety cents yet to give away! His last success gave him a plan. He stopped at a newsstand where, in full sight of the vender, he dropped a two-dollar bill and sped away in the crowd. After several minutes’ hard running he came to a walk amidst the curious glances of the bundle-laden passers-by, and was mentally patting himself on the back when he heard quick breathing behind him, and the very newsie he had just left thrust into his hand the two-dollar bill and was off like a flash.

The perspiration streamed from Harry’s forehead and he trudged along despondently. He got rid of twenty-five cents, however, by dropping it into a children’s aid slot. He tried to get fifty cents in, but it was a small slot. His first large sum was two dollars to a Salvation Army Santa Claus, and, after this, he kept a sharp lookout for them, but it was past their closing time, and he saw no more of them on his journey.

He was now crossing Union Square, and, after another half hour’s patient work, he found himself with only fifteen dollars left to give away. A wet snow was falling which turned to slush as it touched the pavements, and the light dancing pumps he wore were drenched, the water oozing out of his shoe with every step he took. He reached Cooper Square and turned into the Bowery. The number of people on the streets was fast thinning and all around him shops were closing up and their occupants going home. Some boys jeered at him, but, turning up his collar, he plodded on. In his ears rang the saying, mockingly yet kindly, “It is more blessed to give than to receive.”

He turned up Third Avenue and counted his remaining money. It amounted to three dollars and seventy cents. Ahead of him he perceived, through the thickening snow, two men standing under a lamp post. Here was his chance. He could divide his three dollars and seventy cents between them. He came up to them and tapped one on the shoulder. The man, a thin, ugly looking fellow, turned suspiciously.

“Won’t you have some money, you fellow?” he said imperiously, for he was angry at humanity in general and Dorothy in particular. The fellow turned savagely.

“Oh!” he sneered, “you’re one of these stiffs tryin’ the charity gag, and then gettin’ us pulled for beggin’. Come on, Jim, let’s show him what we are.”

And they showed him. They hit him, they mashed him, they got him down and jumped on him, they broke his hat, they tore his coat. And Harry, gasping, striking, panting, went down in the slush. He thought of the people who had that very night wished him a Merry Christmas. He was certainly having it.

*****

Miss Dorothy Harmon closed her book with a snap. It was past eleven and no Harry. What was keeping him? He had probably given up and gone home long ago. With this in mind, she reached up to turn out the light, when suddenly she heard a noise outside as if someone had fallen.

Dorothy rushed to the window and pulled up the blind. There, coming up the steps on his hands and knees was a wretched caricature of a man. He was hatless, coatless, collarless, tieless, and covered with snow. It was Harry. He opened the door and walked into the parlor, leaving a trail of wet snow behind him.

“Well?” he said defiantly.

“Harry,” she gasped, “can it be you?”

“Dorothy,” he said solemnly, “it is me.”

“What — what has happened?”

“Oh, nothing. I’ve just been giving away that twenty-five dollars.” And Harry sat down on the sofa.

“But Harry,” she faltered, “your eye is all swollen.”

“Oh, my eye? Let me see. Oh, that was on the twenty-second dollar. I had some difficulty with two gentlemen. However, we afterward struck up quite an acquaintance. I had some luck after that. I dropped two dollars in a blind beggar’s hat.”

“You have been all evening giving away that money?”

“My dear Dorothy, I have decidedly been all evening giving away that money.” He rose and brushed a lump of snow from his shoulder. “I really must be going now. I have two — er — friends outside waiting for me.” He walked towards the door.

“Two friends?”

“Why — a — they are the two gentlemen I had the difficulty with. They are coming home with me to spend Christmas. They are really nice fellows, though they might seem a trifle rough at first.”

Dorothy drew a quick breath. For a minute no one spoke. Then he took her in his arms.

“Dearest,” she whispered, “you did this all for me.”

A minute later he sprang down the steps, and arm in arm with his friends, walked off in the darkness.

“Good night, Dorothy,” he called back, “and a Merry Christmas!”

PAIN AND THE SCIENTIST

Walter Hamilton Bartney moved to Middleton because it was quiet and offered him an opportunity of studying law, which he should have done long ago. He chose a quiet house rather out in the suburbs of the village, for as he reasoned to himself, “Middleton is a suburb and remarkably quiet at that. Therefore a suburb of a suburb must be the very depth of solitude, and that is what I want.” So Bartney chose a small house in the suburbs and settled down. There was a vacant lot on his left, and on his right Skiggs, the famous Christian Scientist. It is because of Skiggs that this story was written.

Bartney, like the very agreeable young man he was, decided that it would be only neighborly to pay Skiggs a visit, not that he was very much interested in the personality of Mr. Skiggs, but because he had never seen a real Christian Scientist and he felt that his life would be empty without the sight of one.

However, he chose a most unlucky time for his visit. It was one night, dark as pitch that, feeling restless, he set off as the clock struck ten to investigate and become acquainted. He strode out of his lot and along the path that went by name of a road, feeling his way between bushes and rocks and keeping his eye on the solitary light that burned in Mr. Skiggs’ house.

“It would be blamed unlucky for me if he should take a notion to turn out that light,” he muttered through his clenched teeth. “I’d be lost. I’d just have to sit down and wait until morning.”

He approached the house, felt around cautiously, and, reaching for what he thought was a step, uttered an exclamation of pain, for a large stone had rolled down over his leg and pinned him to the earth. He grunted, swore, and tried to move the rock, but he was held powerless by the huge stone, and his efforts were unavailing.

“Hello!” he shouted. “Mr. Skiggs!”

There was no answer.

“Help, in there,” he cried again, “Help!”

A light was lit upstairs and a head, topped with a conical shaped night-cap, poked itself out of the window like an animated jack-in-the-box.

“Who’s there?” said the night-cap in a high-pitched querulous voice. “Who’s there? Speak, or I fire.”

“Don’t fire! It’s me — Bartney, your neighbor. I’ve had an accident, a nasty ankle wrench, and there’s a stone on top of me.”

“Bartney?” queried the night cap, nodding pensively. “Who’s Bartney?”

Bartney swore inwardly.

“I’m your neighbor. I live next door. This stone is very heavy. If you would come down here — “

“How do I know you’re Bartney, whoever he is?” demanded the night cap. “How do I know you won’t get me out there and blackjack me?”

“For heaven’s sake,” cried Bartney, “look and see. Turn a searchlight on me, and see if I’m not pinned down.”

“I have no searchlight,” came the voice from above.

“Then you’ll have to take a chance. I can’t stay here all night.”

“Then go away. I am not stopping you,” said the night cap with a decisive squeak in his voice.

“Mr. Skiggs,” said Bartney in desperation, “I am in mortal agony and — “

“You are not in mortal agony,” announced Mr. Skiggs.

“What? Do you still think I’m trying to entice you out here to murder you?”

“I repeat, you are not in mortal agony. I am convinced now that you really think you are hurt, but I assure you, you are not.”

“He’s crazy,” thought Bartney.

“I shall endeavor to prove to you that you are not, thus causing you more relief than I would if I lifted the stone. I am very moderate. I will treat you now at the rate of three dollars an hour.”

“An hour?” shouted Bartney fiercely. “You come down here and roll this stone off me, or I’ll skin you alive!”

“Even against your will,” went on Mr. Skiggs. “I feel called upon to treat you, for it is a duty to everyone to help the injured, or rather those who fancy themselves injured. Now, clear your mind of all sensation, and we will begin the treatment.”

“Come down here, you mean, low-browed fanatic!” yelled Bartney, forgetting his pain in a paroxysm of rage. “Come down here, and I’ll drive every bit of Christian Science out of your head.”

“To begin with,” began the shrill falsetto from the window, “there is no pain — absolutely none. Do you begin to have an inkling of that?”

“No,” shouted Bartney. “You, you — “ his voice was lost in a gurgle of impotent rage.

“Now, all is mind. Mind is everything. Matter is nothing — absolutely nothing. You are well. You fancy you are hurt, but you are not.”

“You lie,” shrieked Bartney.

Unheeding, Mr. Skiggs went on.

“Thus, if there is no pain, it can not act on your mind. A sensation is not physical. If you had no brain, there would be no pain, for what you call pain acts on the brain. You see?”

“Oh-h,” cried Bartney, “if you saw what a bottomless well of punishment you were digging for yourself, you’d cut out that monkey business.”

“Therefore, as so-called pain is a mental sensation, your ankle doesn’t hurt you. Your brain may imagine it does, but all sensation goes to the brain. You are very foolish when you complain of hurt — “

Bartney’s patience wore out. He drew in his breath, and let out a yell that echoed and re-echoed through the night air. He repeated it again and again, and at length he heard the sound of footsteps coming up the road.

“Hello!” came a voice.

Bartney breathed a prayer of thanksgiving.

“Come here! I’ve had an accident,” he called, and a minute later the night watchman’s brawny arms had rolled the stone off him, and he staggered to his feet.

“Good night,” called the Christian Scientist sweetly. “I hope I have made some impression on you.”

“You certainly have,” called back Bartney as he limped off, his hand on the watchman’s shoulder, “one I won’t forget.”

Two days later, as Bartney sat with his foot on a pillow he pulled an unfamiliar envelope out of his mail and opened it. It read:

WILLIAM BARTNEY.

To HEPEZIA SKIGGS, DR.

Treatment by Christian Science — $3.00. Payment by check or money order.

*****

The weeks wore on. Bartney was up and around. Out in his yard he started a flower garden and became a floral enthusiast. Every day he planted, and the next day he would weed what he had planted. But it gave him something to do, for law was tiresome at times.

One bright summer’s day, he left his house and strolled towards the garden, where the day before he had planted in despair some “store bought” pansies. He perceived to his surprise a long, thin, slippery-looking figure bending over, picking his new acquisitions. With quiet tread he approached, and, as the invader turned around, he said severely:

“What are you doing, sir?”

“I was plucking-er-a few posies — “

The long, thin, slippery looking figure got no further. Though the face had been strange to Bartney, the voice, a thin, querelous falsetto, was one he would never forget. He advanced slowly, eyeing the owner of that voice, as the wolf eyes his prey.

“Well, Mr. Skiggs, how is it I find you on my property?”

Mr. Skiggs appeared unaccountably shy and looked the other way.

“I repeat,” said Bartney, “that I find you here on my property — and in my power.”

“Yes, sir,” said Mr. Skiggs, squirming in alarm.

Bartney grabbed him by the collar, and shook him as a terrier does a rat.

“You conceited imp of Christian Science! You miserable hypocrite! What?” he demanded fiercely, as Skiggs emitted a cry of protest. “You yell. How dare you? Don’t you know there is no such thing as pain? Come on, now, give me some of that Christian Science. Say ‘mind is everything’. Say it!”

Mr. Skiggs, in the midst of his jerky course, said quaveringly, “Mind is everyth-thing.”

“Pain is nothing,” urged his tormenter grimly.

“P-Pain is nothing,” repeated Mr. Skiggs feelingly.

The shaking continued.

“Remember, Skiggs, this is all for the good of the cause. I hope you’re taking it to heart. Remember, such is life, therefore life is such. Do you see?”

He left off shaking, and proceeded to entice Skiggs around by a grip on his collar, the scientist meanwhile kicking and struggling violently.

“Now,” said Bartney, “I want you to assure me that you feel no pain. Go on, do it!”

“I f-feel — ouch,” he exclaimed as he passed over a large stone is his course, “n-no pain.”

“Now,” said Bartney, “I want two dollars for the hours’ Christian Science treatment I have given you. Out with it.”

Skiggs hesitated, but the look of Bartney’s eyes and a tightening of Bartney’s grip convinced him, and he unwillingly tendered a bill. Bartney tore it to pieces and distributed the fragments to the wind.

“Now, you may go.”

Skiggs, when his collar was released, took to his heels, and his flying footsteps crossed the boundary line in less time than you would imagine.

“Good-bye, Mr. Skiggs,” called Bartney pleasantly. “Any other time you want a treatment come over. The price is always the same. I see you know one thing I didn’t have to teach you. There’s no such thing as pain, when somebody else is the goat.”

THE TRAIL OF THE DUKE

It was a hot July night. Inside, through screen, window and door fled the bugs and gathered around the lights like so many humans at a carnival, buzzing, thugging, whirring. From out the night into the houses came the sweltering late summer heat, over-powering and enervating, bursting against the walls and enveloping all mankind like a huge smothering blanket. In the drug stores, the clerks, tired and grumbling handed out ice cream to hundreds of thirsty but misled civilians, while in the corners buzzed the electric fans in a whirring mockery of coolness. In the flats that line upper New York, pianos (sweating ebony perspiration) ground out rag-time tunes of last winter and here and there a wan woman sang the air in a hot soprano. In the tenements, shirt-sleeves gleamed like beacon lights in steady rows along the streets in tiers of from four to eight according to the number of stories of the house. In a word, it was a typical, hot New York summer night.

In his house on upper Fifth Avenue, young Dodson Garland lay on a divan in the billiard room and consumed oceans of mint juleps, as he grumbled at the polo that had kept him in town, the cigarettes, the butler, and occasionally breaking the Second Commandment. The butler ran back and forth with large consignments of juleps and soda and finally, on one of his dramatic entrances, Garland turned towards him and for the first time that evening perceived that the butler was a human being, not a living bottle-tray.

“Hello, Allen,” he said, rather surprised that he had made such a discovery. “Are you hot?”

Allen made an expressive gesture with his handkerchief, tried to smile but only succeeded in a feeble, smothery grin.

“Allen,” said Garland struck by an inspiration, “what shall I do tonight?” Allen again essayed the grin but, failing once more, sank into a hot, undignified silence.

“Get out of here,” exclaimed Garland petulantly, “and bring me another julep and a plate of ice.”

“Now,” thought the young man, “What shall I do? I can go to the theatre and melt. I can go to a roof-garden and be sung to by a would-be prima donna, or — or go calling.” “Go calling,” in Garland’s vocabulary meant but one thing: to see Mirabel. Mirabel Walmsley was his fiancee since some three months, and was in the city to receive some nobleman or other who was to visit her father. The lucky youth yawned, rolled over, yawned again and rose to a sitting position where he yawned a third time and then got to his feet.

“I’ll walk up and see Mirabel. I need a little exercise.” And with this final decision he went to his room where he dressed, sweated and dressed, for half an hour. At the end of that time, he emerged from his residence, immaculate, and strolled up Fifth Avenue to Broadway. The city was all outside. As he walked along the white way, he passed groups and groups clad in linen and lingerie, laughing, talking, smoking, smiling, all hot, all uncomfortable.

He reached Mirabel’s house and then suddenly stopped on the door step.

“Heavens,” he thought, “I forgot all about it. The Duke of Dunsinlane or Artrellane or some lane or other was to arrive today to see Mirabel’s papa. Isn’t that awful? And I haven’t seen Mirabel for three days.” He sighed, faltered, and finally walked up the steps and rang the bell. Hardly had he stepped inside the door, when the vision of his dreams came running into the hall in a state of great excitement and perturbation.

“Oh, Doddy!” she burst out, “I’m in an awful situation. “The Duke went out of the house an hour ago. None of the maids saw him go. He just wandered out. You must find him. He’s probably lost — lost and nobody knows him.” Mirabel wrung her hands in entrancing despair. “Oh, I shall die if he’s lost — and it so hot. He’ll have a sunstroke surely or a — moonstroke. Go and find him. We’ve telephoned the police, but it won’t do any good. Hurry up! Do! oh, Doddy, I’m so nervous.”

“Doddy” put his hands in his pockets, sighed, put his hat on his head and sighed again. Then he turned towards the door. Mirabel, her face anxious, followed him.

“Bring him right up here if you find him. Oh Doddy you’re a life-saver.” The life-saver sighed again and walked quickly through the portal. On the door-step he paused.

“Well, of all outrageous things! To hunt for a French Duke in New York. This is outrageous. Where shall I go? What will I do.” He paused at the door-step and then, following the crowd, strode toward Broadway. “Now let me see. I must have a plan of action. I can’t go up and ask everybody I meet if he’s the Duke of — — — , well of, well — I can’t remember his name. I don’t know what he looks like. He probably can’t talk English. Oh, curses on the nobility.”

He strode aimlessly, hot and muddled. He wished he had asked Mirabel the Duke’s name and personal appearance, but it was now too late. He would not convict himself of such a blunder. Reaching Broadway he suddenly bethought himself of a plan of action.

“I’ll try the restaurants.” He started down towards Sherry’s and had gone but half a block when he had an inspiration. The Duke’s picture was in some evening paper, and his name, too.

He bought a paper and sought for the picture with no result. He tried again and again. On his seventh paper he found it: “The Duke of Matterlane Visits American Millionaire.”

The Duke, a man with side whiskers and eye-glasses stared menacingly at him from the paper. Garland heaved a sigh of relief, took a long look at the likeness and stuck the paper into his pocket.

“Now to business,” he muttered, wiping his drenched brow, “Duke or die.”

Five minutes later he entered Sherry’s, where he sat down and ordered ginger ale. There was the usual summer night crowd, listless, flushed, and sunburned. There was the usual champagne and ice that seemed hotter than the room; but there was no Duke. He sighed, rose, and visited Delmonico’s, Martin’s, at each place consuming a glass of ginger ale.

“I’ll have to cut out the drinking,” he thought, “or I’ll be inebriated by the time I find his royal nuisance.”

On his weary trail, he visited more restaurants and more hotels, ever searching; sometimes thinking he saw an oasis and finding it only a mirage. He had consumed so much ginger ale that he felt a swaying sea-sickness as he walked; yet he plodded on, hotter and hotter, uncomfortable, and, as Alice in Wonderland would have said, uncomfortabler. His mind was grimly and tenaciously set on the Duke’s face. As he walked along, from hotel to cafe, from cafe to restaurant, the Duke’s whiskers remained glued firmly to the insides of his brains. It was half past eight by the City Hall clock when he started on his quest. It was now quarter past ten, hotter, sultrier and stuffier than ever. He had visited every important place of refreshment. He tried the drug stores. He went to four theatres and had the Duke paged, at a large bribe. His money was getting low, his spirits were lower still; but his temperature soared majestically and triumphantly aloft.

Finally, passing through an alley which had been recommended to him as a short cut, he saw before him a man lighting a cigarette. By the flickering match he noticed the whiskers. He stopped dead in his tracks, afraid that it might not be the Duke. The man lit another cigarette. Sure enough, the sideburns, eyeglasses and the whole face proved the question without a doubt.

Garland walked towards the man. The man looked back at him and started to walk in the opposite direction. Garland started to run; the man looked over his shoulder and started to run also. Garland slowed down. The man slowed down. They emerged upon Broadway in the same relative position and the man started north. Forty feet behind, in stolid determination, walked Garland without his hat. He had left it in the alley.

For eight blocks they continued, the man behind being the pacemaker. Then the Duke spoke quietly to a policeman and when Garland, lost in an obsession of pursuit, was grabbed by the arm by a blue-coated Gorgas, he saw ahead of him the Duke start to run. In a frenzy he struck at the policeman and stunned him. He ran on and in three blocks he had made up what he had lost. For five more blocks the Duke continued, glancing now and then over his shoulder. On the sixth block he stopped. Garland approached him with steady step. He of the side whiskers was standing under a lamp post. Garland came up and put his hand on his shoulder.

“Your Grace.”

“What’s dat?” said the Duke, with an unmistakable east-side accent. Garland was staggered.

“I’ll grace you,” continued the side burns aggressively. “I saw you was a swell and I’d a dropped you bad only I’m just out of jail myself. Now listen here. I’ll give you two seconds to get scarce. Go on, beat it.”

Garland beat it. Crestfallen and broken-hearted he walked away and set off for Mirabel’s. He would at least make a decent ending to a miserable quest. A half an hour later he rang the bell, his clothes hanging on him like a wet bathing suit.

Mirabel came to the door cool and fascinating.

“Oh Doddy,” she exclaimed. “Thank you so much. Dukey,” and she held up a small white poodle which she had in her arms, “came back ten minutes after you left. He had just followed the mail man.”

Garland sat down on the step.

“But the Duke of Matterlane?”

“Oh,” said Mirabel, “he comes tomorrow. You must come right over and meet him.”

“Im afraid I can’t,” said Garland, rising feebly, “previous engagement.” He paused, smiled faintly and set off across the sultry moon-lit pavement.

LITTLE MINNIE MCCLOSKEY

A story for girls

Editor’s Note — Not since Little Women have we had so moving a picture of girlhood hopes and dreams.

It was midnight in Miss Pickswinger’s Select Seminary for Young Ladies (country location, hot and cold water, wrestling, bull-baiting and other outdoor sports; washing, ironing, and Bulgarian extra). A group of girls had gathered in a cozy room. There was going to be a midnight feast. Oh, goody! There was but little light, for, fearing to turn on the acetylene, they had built a bonfire on the table, and one girl was appointed to feed the faint flames with false hair and legs which she wrenched quietly from the chairs and tables. A saddle of venison for their little supper was turning over and over on a spit in the cooking stove in the corner, and the potatoes were boiling noiselessly in the steam radiator. Perched like a little queen on the armchair sat Louise Sangfroid the hostess, on the mantle-piece lay Mary Murgatroid in red and white striped pajamas while balancing on the molding sat Minnie McCloskey in a nightshirt of yaeger flannel. Other girls sat around the room, two on a trunk which they had ingeniously improvised as a chair, one on an empty case of beer and three on a heap of broken glass and tin cans in the corner.

Girls will be girls! Ah, me! They would have their little frolic; a cask of Haig and Haig, stolen from Miss Pickswinger’s private stock, was behind the door and the mischievous girls had almost finished it.

Minnie McCloskey was the school drudge; she was working for her education. At three every morning she rose, made the beds, washed the dishes, branded the cattle, cut the grass, and did many other tasks. She was known affectionately to her companions as “Piggy” McCloskey (all the girls had nicknames. How they got them no one knew. Amy Gulps was called “Fatty,” perhaps because she was fat; Mary Munks was called “Red” conceivably because she had red hair. Phoebe Cohop was called “Boils” possibly because — (but enough, let us continue).

“Girls,” said Bridget Mulcahey, a petite little French girl, whose father had been shot at Soissons (for deserting), “let’s play a prank.”

A chorus of ohs! and ahs! and girlish giggles greeted this suggestion.

“What shall we do?” asked Gumpsa LePage.

“Something exciting,” said Bridget, “let’s hang Miss Pickswinger.” All assented enthusiastically except Minnie McCloskey.

“‘Fraid cat,” sneered the others, “‘fraid you’ll get punished.”

“No,” said Minnie, “but think of all she’s done for me.”

They struck her savagely with chairs, locked her in and rushed off. There was but one chance. Minnie quickly braided a rope out of rugs, lowered herself from the window, quickly weaved another rope out of grass, raised herself to Miss Pickswinger’s window. They were not there. There was yet time to outwit them. Suddenly she gasped in horror.

*****

A moment later the rollicking crowd of girls was confronted in front of Miss Pickswinger’s door by a slender figure. It was Minnie.

“You cannot pass,” she said sternly.

“Do you mean to say we cannot hang Miss Pickswinger if we wish?” cried Louise, indignantly.

Minnie shivered with emotion and sneezed with emotion. Then she spoke.

“There is no need. She has gotten one of her bedroom slippers in her mouth and choked to death.”

The girls rushed off shouting “Holiday” and striking each other, playfully on the head with stones, but Minnie, in the room above, threw herself down upon the heap of glass in the corner and sobbed as if her heart would break.

THE OLD FRONTIERSMAN

A story of the frontier

It was the middle of the forest. A figure might have been noticed crawling along, sniffing at the ground. It was Old Davy Underbush, the frontiersman and b’ar hunter. He was completely invisible and inaudible. The only way you could perceive him was by the sense of smell.

He was dressed as a frontiersman (cf. “what the men will wear,” theatre programs of 1776.) On his feet he wore moccasins made from the skin of the wood weasel. Around his legs were coonskin spats which ran into his trousers made of sheepskin; these extended to the waist. He wore a belt made of an old rattlesnake and a long bearskin coat. Around his head was wrapped a fishskin hat. At his hip hung horrible trophies of Indian warfare. One scalp of Object the Ojibway still wet with Oleaqua hung there beside the pompadour of Eardrum the Iroquois and the cowlick of Bootblack the Blackfoot. By his side walked “Tres Bien,” his trusty Eskimo cheese-hound.

He carried a muzzle loading shotgun, an old horse-pistol, and a set of razors. He was on the trail of Sen-Sen the Seneca and Omlette the Omega. They had come into the clearing and drunk all the fire-water from the fire-water factory. As they left they had, in the usual Indian manner, carved their initials on each tree they passed and it was by this that the astute old frontiersman had been sent out to track them.

It was now too dark to read the initials plainly and Davy often got them mixed up with those of other savages who had passed that way before. For three weeks the old b’ar hunter had followed them, living on the berries from the bushes and sometimes when no berries were to be found, snatching great handfuls of grass and dry leaves and devouring them.

As he crawled along he was thinking. If he did not find the redskins soon he would have to eat his moccasins. His scarred brow was knit with worry.

All around him were the noises of the forest; the long sad “Hoo” of the Huron, the plaintive sigh of the Sioux, and the light cackle of the Apache. Suddenly a new sound broke the stillness. It was the dry harsh cawing of the Seneca. Davy ran forward noiselessly. He was careful to make no sound. He ran with his feet completely off the ground toleave no clue for the watchful redmen. Sure enough the savages were in a little clearing in the forest playing on their primitive musical instruments. Sen-Sen the Seneca sat playing “The Last Rose of Summer” on an old comb wrapped in tissue paper and Omlette the Omega accompanied him on the snare Tom-Tom. The old frontiersman burst in on them waving his gun at them and threatening their scalps with one of his tempered razors.

The fight which ensued was furious.

The savages pulled his coat over his ears and hit him on the head with their bows and arrows. One would kneel behind Davy and the other would push the old frontiersman over him. Sen-Sen combed all the hair of his sheepskin trousers the wrong way and frantic with pain the old bar hunter fought on.

Finally Omlette the Omega withdrew to a distance and taking a station behind the old frontiersman let fly an arrow at him which passed through his sheepskin trousers and pierced his catskin underwear. The old b’ar hunter expired.

The savages fried him for dinner but found, to their disappointment that he was all dark meat owing to his lifelong exposure to the sun.

THE SPIRE AND THE GARGOYLE

I

The night mist fell. From beyond the moon it rolled, clustered about the spires and towers, and then settled below them so that the dreaming peaks seemed still in lofty aspiration toward the stars. Figures that dotted the daytime like ants now brushed along as ghosts in and out of the night. Even the buildings seemed infinitely more mysterious as they loomed suddenly out of the darkness, outlined each by a hundred faint squares of yellow light. Indefinitely from somewhere a bell boomed the quarter hour and one of the squares of light in an east campus recitation hall was blotted out for an instant as a figure emerged. It paused and resolved itself into a boy who stretched his arms wearily, and advancing threw himself down full length on the damp grass by the sun-dial. The cool bathed his eyes and helped to force away the tiresome picture of what he had just left, a picture that, in the two strenuous weeks of examinations now just over, had become indelibly impressed upon his memory — a room with the air fairly vibrating with nervous tension, silent with presence of twenty boys working desperately against time, searching every corner of tired brains for words and figures which seemed forever lost. The boy out on the grass opened his eyes and looked back at the three pale blurs which marked the windows of the examination room. Again he heard:

“There will be fifteen minutes more allowed for this examination.” There had followed silence broken by the snapping of verifying watches and the sharp frantic race of pencils. One by one the seats had been left vacant and the little preceptor with the tired look had piled the booklets higher. Then the boy had left the room to the music of three last scratching pencils.

In his case it all depended on this examination. If he passed it he would become a sophomore the following fall; if he failed, it meant that his college days faded out with the last splendors of June. Fifty cut recitations in his first wild term had made necessary the extra course of which he had just taken the examination. Winter muses, unacademic and cloistered by Forty-second Street and Broadway, had stolen hours from the dreary stretches of February and March. Later, time had crept insidiously through the lazy April afternoons and seemed so intangible in the long Spring twilights. So June found him unprepared. Evening after evening the senior singing, drifting over the campus and up to his window, drew his mind for an instant to the unconscious poetry of it and he, goading on his spoiled and over-indulged faculties, bent to the revengeful books again. Through the careless shell that covered his undergraduate consciousness had broken a deep and almost reverent liking for the gray walls and gothic peaks and all they symbolized in the store of the ages of antiquity.

In view of his window a tower sprang upward, grew into a spire, yearning higher till its uppermost end was half invisible against the morning skies. The transiency and relative unimportance of the campus figures except as holders of a sort of apostolic succession had first impressed themselves on him in contrast with this spire. In a lecture or in an article or in conversation, he had learned that Gothic architecture with its upward trend was peculiarly adapted to colleges, and the symbolism of this idea had become personal to him. Once he had associated the beauty of the campus night with the parades and singing crowds that streamed through it, but in the last month the more silent stretches of sward and the quiet halls with an occasional late-burning scholastic light held his imagination with a stronger grasp — and this tower in full view of his window became the symbol of his perception. There was something terribly pure in the slope of the chaste stone, something which led and directed and called. To him the spire became an ideal. He had suddenly begun trying desperately to stay in college.

“Well, it’s over,” he whispered aloud to himself, wetting his hands in the damp, and running them through his hair. “All over.”

He felt an enormous sense of relief. The last pledge had been duly indited in the last book, and his destiny lay no longer in his own hands, but in those of the little preceptor, whoever he was: the boy had never seen him before — and the face, — he looked like one of the gargoyles that nested in dozens of niches in some of the buildings. His glasses, his eyes, or his mouth gave a certain grotesque upward slant to his whole cast of feature, that branded him as of gargoyle origin, or at least gargoyle kinship. He was probably marking the papers. Perhaps, mused the boy, a bit of an interview, an arrangement for a rereading in case of the ever possible failure would be — to interrupt his thought the light went out in the examination room and a moment later three figures edged along the path beside him while a fourth struck off south towards the town. The boy jumped to his feet and, shaking himself like a wet spaniel, started after the preceptor. The man turned to him sharply as he murmured a good evening and started trudging along beside.

“Awful night,” said the boy.

The gargoyle only grunted.

“Gosh, that was a terrible examination.” This topic died as unfruitfully as that of the weather, so he decided to come directly to the point.

“Are you marking these papers, sir?”

The preceptor stopped and faced him. Perhaps he didn’t want to be reminded of the papers, perhaps he was in the habit of being exasperated by anything of this sort, but most probably he was tired and damp and wanted to get home.

“This isn’t doing you any good. I know what you’re going to say — that this is the crucial examination for you and that you’ld like me to go over your paper with you, and so on. I’ve heard the same thing a hundred times from a hundred students in the course of this last two weeks. My answer is ‘No, No,’ do you understand? I don’t care to know your identity and I won’t be followed home by a nagging boy.”

Simultaneously each turned and walked quickly away, and the boy suddenly realized with an instinct as certain as divination that he was not going to pass the examination.

“Damned gargoyle,” he muttered.

But he knew that the gargoyle had nothing to do with it.

II

Regularly every two weeks he had been drifting out Fifth Avenue. On crisp autumn afternoons the tops of the shining auto busses were particularly alluring. From the roofs of other passing busses a face barely seen, an interested glance, a flash of color assumed the proportion of an intrigue. He had left college five years before and the busses and the art gallery and a few books were his intellectual relaxation. Freshman year Carlyle’s “Heroes and Hero-Worship,” in the hands of an impassioned young instructor had interested him particularly. He had read practically nothing. He had neither the leisure to browse thoughtfully on much nor the education to cram thoughtfully on little, so his philosophy of life was molded of two elements: one the skeptical office philosophy of his associates, with a girl, a ten thousand dollar position, and a Utopian flat in some transfigured Bronx at the end of it; and the other, the three or four big ideas which he found in the plain speaking Scotchman, Carlyle. But he felt, and truly, that his whole range was pitifully small. He was not naturally bookish; his taste could be stimulated as in the case of “Heroes and Hero-Worship” but he was still and now always would be in the stage where every work and every author had to be introduced and sometimes interpreted to him. “Sartor Resartus” meant nothing to him nor ever could.

So Fifth Avenue and the top of the busses had really grown to stand for a lot. They meant relief from the painted, pagan crowds of Broadway, the crowded atmosphere of the blue serge suits and grated windows that he met down town and the dingy middle class cloud that hovered on his boarding house. Fifth Avenue had a certain respectability which he would have once despised; the people on the busses looked better fed, their mouths came together in better lines. Always a symbolist, and an idealist, whether his model had been a profligate but magnetic sophomore or a Carlylized Napoleon, he sought around him in his common life for something to cling to, to stand for what religions and families and philosophies of life had stood for. He had certain sense of fitness which convinced him that his old epicureanism, romantic as it might have been in the youth of his year at college, would have been exotic and rather disgusting in the city itself. It was much too easy; it lacked the penance of the five o’clock morning train back to college that had faced himself and his fellow student revelers, it lacked the penance of the long morning in classes, and the poverty of weeks. It had been something to have a reputation, even such a reputation as this crowd had had, but dissipation from the New York standpoint seemed a matter of spats and disgustingly rich Hebrews, and shoddy Bohemeanism had no attraction for him.

Yet he was happy this afternoon. Perhaps because the bus on which he rode was resplendent in its shining new coat of green paint, and the stick-of-candy glamor of it had gone into his disposition. He lit a cigarette and made himself rather comfortable until he arrived at his destination. There were only certain sections of the museum that he visited. Statuary never attracted him, and the Italian madonnas and Dutch gentlemen with inconsequent gloves and books in the foreground rather bored him. It was only here and there in an old picture tucked away in the corner that his eye caught the glare of light on snow in a simple landscape or the bright colors and multiple figures of a battle painting, and he was drawn into long and detailed fits of contemplation and frequent revisits.

On this particular afternoon he was wandering rather aimlessly from one room to another when he suddenly noticed a small man in overshoes, his face latticed with enormous spectacles, thumbing a catalogue in front of a Flemish group. He started, and with a sense of recollection walked by him several times. Suddenly he realized that here was that one time instrument of his fate, the gargoyle, the little preceptor who had flunked him in his crucial examination.

Oddly enough his first sensation was one of pleased reminiscence and a desire for conversation. Following that he had a curious feeling of shyness, untinged by any bitterness. He paused, staring heavily, and instantly the huge glasses glimmered suspiciously in his eyes.

“Pardon me sir, but do you remember me?” he asked eagerly.

The preceptor blinked feverishly.

“Ah — no.”

He mentioned the college and the blinks became more optimistic. He wisely decided to let the connection rest there. The preceptor couldn’t, couldn’t possibly remember all the men who had passed before his two “Mirrors of Shallot” so why bring up old, accusing facts — besides — he felt a great desire to chat.

“Yes — no doubt — your face is familiar, you’ll pardon my — my chilliness a moment since — a public place.” He looked around depreciatingly. “You see, I’ve left the university myself.”

“So you’ve gone up in the game?” He instantly regretted this remark for the little man answered rather quickly:

“I’m teaching in a high school in Brooklyn.” Rather embarassed, the younger man tried to change the subject by looking at the painting before them, but the gargoyle grimly continued:

“I have — a — rather a large family, and much as I regretted leaving the University, the salary was unfortunately very much of a factor.”

There was a pause during which both regarded the picture steadily. Then the gargoyle asked a question:

“How long since you’ve graduated?”

“Oh, I never graduated. I was there for only a short while.” He was sure now that the gargoyle had not the slightest conception of his identity; he might rather enjoy this, however, and he had a pleasant notion that the other was not averse to his company.

“Are you staying here much longer?” The gargoyle was not, and together they moved to a restaurant two blocks down where they indulged in milk, tea and jam and discussed the university. When six o’clock pushed itself into the crowded hours it was with real regret that they shook hands, and the little man, manipulating his short legs in mad expostulation, raced after a Brooklyn car. Yes, it had been distinctly exhilarating. They had talked of academic atmospheres, of hopes that lay in the ivied walls, of little things that could only have counted after the mystic hand of the separation had made them akin. The gargoyle had touched lightly upon his own story, of the work he was doing, of his own tepid, stuffy environment. It was his hope some day to get back, but now there were young appetites to satisfy (the other thought grotesquely of the young gargoyles) — if he could see his way clear in the next few years, — so it went, but through all his hopeful talk there was a kind of inevitability that he would teach in a Brooklyn high school till the last bell called him to his last class. Yes, he went back occasionally. He had a younger brother who was an instructor there.

So they had talked, knit together by the toast and the sense of exile. That night the shrivelled spinster on his left at table asked him what college he thought would be worthy of ushering her promising nephew into the outer world. He became voluble and discoursive. He spoke of ties that bind, of old associations, and remarked carelessly as he left her, that he was running back himself for a day the next week. But afterwards he lay awake and thought until the chairs and bedposts of his room became grey ghosts in the dawn.

III

The car was hot and stuffy with most of the smells of the state’s alien population. The red plush seats radiated dust in layers and stratas. The smoking car had been even more impossible with filthy floor and heavy air. So the man sat next to a partly open window in the coach and shivered against the cutting cloud of fog that streamed in over him. Lights sped by vaguely blurred and spreading, marking towns and farmhouses with the democratic indiscrimination of the mist. As the conductor heralded each station the man felt a certain thrill at the familiarity of the names. The times and conditions under which he had heard them revolved in a medley of memories of his one year. One station particularly near the university had a peculiar significance for him because of the different ways it had affected him while he had been in college. He had noted it at the time. September of his entrance year, it had been the point where he grew acutely nervous and figidity. Returning that November from a football defeat, it had stood for all that seemed gloomy in the gloomy college he was then going back to. In February it had meant the place to wake and pull one’s self together, and as he had passed it for the last time that June, he had wondered with a sudden sinking of his heart if it was to be the last time. Now as the train shook and trembled there for a moment, he stared out the window, and tried to get an impression. Oddly enough his first one came back to him; he felt rather nervous and uncertain.

He had discovered a few minutes ago that the little preceptor sat ahead of him three seats, but the younger man had not joined him or even addressed him. He wanted to draw to himself every impression he could from this ride.

They drew in. Grip in hand, he swung off the train, and from force of habit turned toward the broad steps that led to the campus. Then he stopped and dropping his suit case, looked before him. The night was typical of the place. It was very like the night on which he had taken his last examination, yet somehow less full and less poignant. Inevitability became a reality and assumed an atmosphere of compelling and wearing down. Where before the spirit of spires and towers had thrilled him and had made him dreamily content and acquiescent, it now overawed him. Where before he had realized only his own inconsequence, he now realized his own impotence and insufficiency. The towers in faint outlines and the battlemented walls of vague buildings fronted him. The engine from the train he had just left wheezed and clanged and backed; a hack drove off; a few pale self-effacing town boys strode away voicelessly, swallowed up in the night. And in front of him the college dreamed on — awake. He felt a nervous excitement that might have been the very throb of its slow heart.

A figure brushed violently into him, almost knocking him off his feet. He turned and his eyes pierced the trembling darkness of the arclight to find the little preceptor blinking apprehensively at him from his gargoyle’s eyes.

“Good evening.”

He was hesitatingly recognized.

“Ah — how do you do? How do you do? Foggy evening, hope I didn’t jar you.”

“Not at all. I was just admiring the serenity.” He paused and almost felt presumptuous.

“Are you — ah — pretending to be a student again?”

“I just ran out to see the place. Stay a night perhaps.” Somehow this sounded far-fetched to him. He wondered if it did to the other.

“Yes? — I’m doing the same thing. My brother is an instructor here now you know. He’s putting me up for a space.” For an instant the other longed fiercely that he too might be invited to be “put up for a space.”

“Are you walking up my way?”

“No — not quite yet.”

The gargoyle smiled awkwardly. “Well, good-night.” There was nothing more to say. Eyes staring, he watched the little figure walking off, propelled jerkily by his ridiculous legs.

Minutes passed. The train was silent. The several blurs on the station platform became impersonal and melted into the background. He was alone face to face with the spirit that should have dominated his life, the mother that he had renounced. It was a stream where he had once thrown a stone but the faint ripple had long since vanished. Here he had taken nothing, he had given nothing; nothing? — his eyes wandered slowly upward — up — up — until by straining them he could see where the spire began — and with his eyes went his soul. But the mist was upon both. He could not climb with the spire.

A belated freshman, his slicker rasping loudly, slushed along the soft path. A voice from somewhere called the inevitable formula toward an unknown window. A hundred little sounds of the current drifting on under the fog pressed in finally on his consciousness.

“Oh God!” he cried suddenly, and started at the sound of his own voice in the stillness. He had cried out from a complete overwhelming sense of failure. He realized how outside of it all he was. The gargoyle, poor tired little hack, was bound up in the fabric of the whole system much more than he was or ever could be. Hot tears of anger and helplessness rushed to his eyes. He felt no injustice, only a deep mute longing. The very words that would have purged his soul were waiting him in the depths of the unknown before him — waiting for him where he could never come to claim them. About him the rain dripped on. A minute longer he stood without moving, his head bent dejectedly, his hands clenched. Then he turned, and picking up his suit case walked over to the train. The engine gave a tentative pant, and the conductor, dozing in a corner, nodded sleepily at him from the end of the deserted car. Wearily he sank onto a red plush seat, and pressed his hot forehead against the damp window pane.

THE DIARY OF A SOPHOMORE

Sunday — March 18th.

Felt nervous all day — temperature 99 8/10. Jim and Heck and Joe came in after dinner. We are going to stick together. Everybody says “stick to your friends” — I’m sticking like a leech — they can’t shake me off. Hope I get a Seaweed bid.

Monday —

No mail — Jim, Heck and Joe not in rooms, college in anarchy — shall not leave room until I get a bid. Temperature 89.7.

Tuesday —

No mail — except a bill from Sinclair’s. Sophomores wanted me to join commons club — Told them I’d like to but I’d promised to stick with my friends. Got Jim, Heck and Joe bids to commons club. Why don’t they come to see me.

Wednesday —

Joe came over and said he and Heck were in the Pillbox section — Jim is going Star and Garter. I have a good chance for Pillbox — Turned down commons again.

Thursday —

We are all going Star and Garter. I’m glad I waited. We shook hands on it and Jim and Heck wept. Emotion is in the air. Temperature, 100.

Friday —

Peter Hype told me to hold off for Lung and Coatcheck. I told him I was going to stick with my friends. Hope he didn’t think I meant it.

Saturday —

Bid for Lung and Coatcheck. I hate to leave Joe and Heck. Shook hands with all the “Lungs.” Was introduced to several fellows in my class.

Sunday —

Awful excitement. Temperature 102.

Monday —

Signed up Seaweed. Jim was foolish to throw away his chances. It’s everyman’s business to look out for himself. Heck and Joe were a drag on me. They’ll be very happy in Star and Garter. Wrote Doris about it. Temperature, normal.

F.S.F.

THE PRINCE OF PESTS

A story of the war

It was night in July, 1914. A man and his board of directors sat around a table in a palace at Berlin. The man was tall, with a moustache and a short arm. Who was he? — oh, reader, can you guess? He wore a military uniform, green with grey facings; his pants were blue with red facings.

“Your Highness,” Von Boodlewaden was saying, “everything is ready.”

The Kaiser shook his head sadly and folded his arms, at least he tucked the short one in with the other. Then he took his short leg and crossed it over his long one, and having scratched his long ear come to business.

“Nietzsche,” he said, and waited for his words to have effect. Von Nicklebottom immediately sprang upon the table and led the customary cheer for Nietzsche — three locomotives with three sidels. of beer on the end.

“Nietzsche,” continued the Kaiser, “has said it. We will conquer by the sword.” As he said this he ran his hand lovingly along his sword, then trying its edge on a bit of celery which he munched tentatively.

“Your Highness,” cried Von Munchennoodle, “Belgium must be sacrificed.”

The Kaiser bit his lip until the blood ran slowly down to the table where it spread into little livid pools of red and yellow liquid. His councillors dipped their fingers in it and reverently crossed themselves. Deeply affected the Kaiser pledged them.

“And what of America?” asked Pistachio, Chancellor of the Domino Club.

“America?” said the Kaiser, rising to his full height. “Charles II had his Cromwell,. Caesar had his Brutus, and Wilson — “

There were cries of “plagiarism” and the Kaiser paused.

“‘Daniel Webster was a German,” he continued, rather abashed. Turning to the man on his center, Baron Badenuf, Chancellor of the Shakespearegoetheteutonic League, he commanded him.

“Look him up, Baddy.”

There was an hour while Badenuf looked up Webster, during whichan absolute silence was maintained, broken only by the Kaiser as he ran his sword rapidly up and down his neck, where he had caught prickly heat the summer before playing leap-frog on the beach at Ostend with Czar Nicholas. Badenuf finally returned.

“I find in the life of Webster,” he announced, “the relevant news that he once stopped at the Sauerkraut Inn while passing through Pennsylvania. This proves the case, for no one but a German would stop at a German Inn unless he has to, and Daniel didn’t.”

There were three wild cheers at this and according to the ancient German custom they prepared to pledge each other in the royal blood. The Kaiser tried his lip again but all the blood had gone out of it long ago. So he opened an artery in his leg with an olive fork.

They all gulped it down heartily while a German band played “Ach du lieber Augustine” and the Kaiser’s valet strapped his paralyzed arm to his sword so he could have his picture taken.

F.S.F.

SENTIMENT — AND THE USE OF ROUGE

I

This story has no moral value. It is about a man who had fought for two years and how he came back to England for two days, and then how he went away again. It is unfortunately one of those stories which must start at the beginning, and the beginning consists merely of a few details. There were two brothers (two sons of Lord Blachford) who sailed to Europe with the first hundred thousand. Lieutenant Richard Harrington Syneforth, the elder, was killed in some forgotten raid; the younger, Lieutenant Clay Harrington Syneforth is the hero of this story. He was now a Captain in the Seventeenth Sussex and the immoral thing in the story happens to him. The important part to remember is that when his father met him at Paddington station and drove him up town in his motor, he hadn’t been in England for two years — and this was in the early spring of nineteen-seventeen. Various circumstances had brought this about, wounds, advancement, meeting his family in Paris, and mostly being twenty-two and anxious to show his company an example of indefatigable energy. Besides, most of his friends were dead and he had rather a horror of seeing the gaps they’d leave in his England. And here is the story.

He sat at dinner and thought himself rather stupid and unnecessarily moody as his sister’s light chatter amused the table, Lord and Lady Blachford, himself and two unsullied aunts. In the first place he was rather doubtful about his sister’s new manner. She seemed, well, perhaps a bit loud and theatrical, and she was certainly pretty enough not to need so much paint. She couldn’t be more than eighteen, and paint — it seemed so useless. Of course he was used to it in Lois mother, would have been shocked had she appeared in her unrouged furrowedness, but on Clara it merely accentuated her youth. Altogether he had never seen such obvious paint, and, as they had always been a shockingly frank family, he told her so.

“You’ve got too much stuff on your face.” He tried to speak casually and his sister, nothing wroth, jumped up and ran to a mirror.

“No, I haven’t,” she said, calmly returning.

“I thought,” he continued rather annoyed, “that the criterion of how much paint to put on, was whether men were sure you’d used any or not.”

His sister and mother exchanged glances and both spoke at once.

“Not now, Clay, you know —  — “ began Clara.

“Really, Clay,” interrupted his mother, “you don’t know exactly what the standards are, so you can’t quite criticize. It happens to be a fad to paint a little more.”

Clayton was now rather angry.

“Will all the women at Mrs. Severance’s dance tonight be striped like this?”

Clara’s eyes flashed.

“Yes!”

“Then I don’t believe I care to go.”

Clara, about to flare up, caught her mother’s eye and was silent.

“Clay, I want you to go,” said Lady Blachford hastily. “People want to see you before they forget what you look like. And for tonight let’s not talk about war or paint.”

In the end Clay went. A navy subaltran called for his sister at ten and he followed in lonesome state at half-past. After half an hour he had had all he wanted. Frankly, the dance seemed all wrong. He remembered Mrs. Severance’s ante-bellum affairs — staid, correct occasions they were, with only a mere scattering from the faster set, just those people who couldn’t possibly be left out. Now it all was blent, some how, in one set. His sister had not exaggerated, practically every girl there was painted, overprinted; girls whom he remembered as curate-hunters, holders of long conversations with earnest young men on incence and the validity of orders, girls who had been terrifyingly masculine and had talked about dances as if they were the amusement of the feeble minded — all were there, trotting through the most extreme steps from over the water. He danced stiffly with many who had delighted his youth, and he found that he wasn’t enjoying himself at all. He found that he had come to picture England as a land of sorrow and acetisism and while there was little extravagance displayed tonight, he thought that the atmosphere had fallen to that of artificial gayety rather than risen to a stern calmness. Even under the carved, gilt ceiling of the Severances’ there was strangely an impression of dance-hall rather than dance, people arrived and departed most informally and, oddly enough, there was a dearth of older people rather than of younger. But there was something in the very faces of the girls, something which was half enthusiasm and half recklessness, that depressed him more than any concrete thing.

When he had decided this and had about made up his mind to go, Eleanor Marbrooke came in. He looked at her keenly. She had not lost, not a bit. He fancied that she had not quiet so much paint on as the others, and when he and she talked he felt a social refuge in her cool beauty. Even then he felt that the difference between she and the others was in degree rather than in kind. He stayed, of course, and one o’clock found them sitting apart, watching. There had been a drifting away and now there seemed to be nothing but officers and girls; the Severances themselves seemed out of place as they chattered volubly in a corner to a young couple who looked as if they would rather be left alone.

“Eleanor,” he demanded, “why is it that everyone looks so — well, so loose — so socially slovenly?”

“It’s terribly obvious, isn’t it?” she agreed, following his eyes around the room.

“And no one seems to care” he continued.

“No one does,” she responded, “but my dear man, we can’t sit here and criticize our hosts. What about me? How do I look?”

He regarded her critically.

“I’d say on the whole, that you’ve kept your looks.”

“Well, I like that,” she raised her brows at him in reproof. “You talk as if I were some shelved, old play — about, just over some domestic catastrophy.”

There was a pause; then he asked her directly.

“How about Dick?”

She grew serious at once.

“Poor Dick — I suppose we were engaged.”

“Suppose,” he said astonished, “why it was understood by everyone, both our families knew. I know I used to lie awake and envy my lucky brother.”

She laughed.

“Well, we certainly thought ourselves engaged. If war hadn’t come we’d be comfortably married now, but if he were still alive under these circumstances, I doubt if we’d be even engaged.”

“You weren’t in love with him?”

“Well, you see, perhaps that wouldn’t be the question, perhaps he wouldn’t marry me and perhaps I wouldn’t marry him.”

He jumped to his feet astounded and her warning hush just prevented him from exclaiming aloud. Before he could control his voice enough to speak she had whisked off with a staff officer. What could she mean? — except that in some moment of emotional excitement she had — but he couldn’t bear to think of Eleanor in that light. He must have misunderstood — he must talk more with her. No, surely — if it had been true she wouldn’t have said it so casually. He watched her — how close she danced. Her bright brown hair lay against the staff officer’s shoulder and her vivacious face was only two or three inches from his when she talked. All things considered Clay was becoming more angry every minute with things in general.

Next time he danced with her she seized his arm, and before he knew her intention, they had said goodbyes to the Severances’ and were speeding away in Eleanor’s limousine.

“It’s a nineteen-thirteen car — imagine having a four year old limousine before the war.”

“Terrific privation,” he said ironically. “Eleanor, I want to speak to you — “

“And I to you. That’s why I took you away. Where are you living?”

“At home.”

“Well then we’ll go to your old rooms in Grove Street. You’ve still got them, haven’t you?”

Before he could answer she had spoken to the chauffer and was leaning back in the corner smiling at him.

“Why Eleanor, we can’t do that — talk there — “

“Are the rooms cleaned?” she interrupted.

“About once a month I think, but — “

“That’s all that’s necessary. In fact it’ll be wonderfully proper, won’t be clothes lying around the room as there usually are at bachelor teas. At Colonel Hotesane’s farewell party, Gertrude Evarts and I saw — in the middle of the floor, well, my dear, a series of garments and — as we were the first to arrive we — “

“Eleanor,” said Clay firmly, “I don’t like this.”

“I know you don’t, and that’s why we’re going to your rooms to talk it over. Good heavens, do you think people worry these days about where conversations take place, unless they’re in wireless towers, or shoreways in coast towns?”

The machine had stopped and before he could bring further argument to bear she had stepped out and scurried up the steps, where she announced that she would wait until he came and opened the door. He had no alternative. He followed, and as they mounted the stairs inside he could hear her laughing softly at him in the darkness.

He threw open the door and groped for the electric light, and in the glow that followed both stood without moving. There on the table sat a picture of Dick, Dick almost as they had last seen him, worldly wise and sophisticated, in his civilian clothes. Eleanor was the first to move. She crossed swiftly over, the dust rising with the swish of her silk, and elbows on the table said softly:

“Poor old handsome, with your beautiful self all smashed.” She turned to Clay: “Dick didn’t have much of a soul, such a small soul. He never bothered about eternity and I doubt if he knows any — but he had a way with him, and oh, that magnificent body of his, red gold hair, brown eyes — “ her voice trailed off and she sank lazily onto the sofa in front of the hearth.

“Build a fire and then come and put your arm around me and we’ll talk.” Obediently he searched for wood while she sat and chatted. “I won’t pretend to busybody around and try to help — I’m far too tired. I’m sure I can give the impression of home much better by just sitting here and talking, can’t I?”

He looked up from where he knelt at her feet manipulating the kerosene can, and realized that his voice was husky as he spoke.

“Just talk about England — about the country a little and about Scotland and tell me things that have happened, amusing provincial things and things with women in them — Put yourself in,” he finished rather abruptly.

Eleanor smiled and kneeling down beside him lit the match and ran it along the edge of the paper that undermined the logs. She twisted her head to read it as it curled up in black at the corners, “August 14h, 1915. Zeppelin raid in — there it goes,” as it disappeared in little, licking flames. “My little sister — you remember Katherine; Kitty, the one with the yellow hair and the little lisp — she was killed by one of those things — she and a governess, that summer.”

“Little Kitty,” he said sadly, “a lot of children were killed I know, a lot, I didn’t know she was gone,” he was far away now and a set look had come into his eyes. She hastened to change the subject.

“Lots — but we’re not on death tonight. We’re going to pretend we’re happy. Do you see?” She patted his knee reprovingly, “we are happy. We are! Why you were almost whimsical awhile ago. I believe you’re a sentimentalist. Are you?”

He was still gazing absently at the fire but he looked up at this.

“Tonight, I am — almost — for the first time in my life. Are you, Eleanor?”

“No, I’m romantic. There’s a huge difference; a sentimental person thinks things will last, a romantic person hopes they wont.”

He was in a reverie again and she knew that he had hardly heard her.

“Excuse please,” she pleaded, slipping close to him. “Do be a nice boy and put your arm around me.” He put his arm gingerly about until she began to laugh quietly. When he hastily withdrew it, and bending forward, talked quickly at the fire.

“Will you tell me why in the name of this mad world we’re here tonight? Do you realize that this is — was a bachelor apartment before the bachelors all married the red widow over the channel — and you’ll be compromised?”

She seized the straps of his shoulder belt and tugged at him until his grey eyes looked into hers.

“Clay, Clay, don’t — you musn’t use small petty words like that at this time. Compromise! What’s that to words like Life and Love and Death and England. Compromise! Clay, I don’t believe anyone uses that word except servants.” She laughed. “Clay, you and our butler are the only men in England who use the word compromise. My maid and I have been warned within a week — How odd — Clay, look at me.”

He looked at her and saw what she intended, beauty heightened by enthusiasm. Her lips were half parted in a smile, her hair just so slightly disarranged.

“Damned witch,” he muttered. “You used to read Tolstoy, and believe him.”

“Did I?” her gaze wandered to the fire. “So I did, so I did.” Then her eyes came back to him and the present. “Really, Clay, we must stop gazing at the fire. It puts our minds on the past and tonight there’s got to be no past or future, no time, just tonight, you and I sitting here and I most tired for a military shoulder to rest my head upon.” But he was off on an old tack thinking of Dick and he spoke his thoughts aloud.

“You used to talk Tolstoy to Dick and I thought it was scandalous for such a good-looking girl to be intellectual.”

“I wasn’t, really,” she admitted. “It was to impress Dick.”

“I was shocked, too, when I read something of Tolstoy’s, I struck the something Sonata.”

“‘Kreutzer Sonata,’” she suggested.

“That’s it. I thought it was immoral for young girls to read Tolstoy and told Dick so. He used to nag me about that. I was nineteen.”

“Yes, we thought you quite the young prig. We considered ourselves advanced.”

“You’re only twenty, aren’t you?” asked Clay suddenly.

She nodded.

“Don’t you believe in Tolstoy any more?” he asked, almost fiercely.

She shook her head and then looked up at him almost wistfully.

“Won’t you let me lean against your shoulder just the smallest bit?”

He put his arm around her, never once taking his eyes from her face, and suddenly the whole strength of her appeal burst upon him. Clay was no saint, but he had always been rather decent about women. Perhaps that’s why he felt so helpless now. His emotions were not complex. He knew what was wrong, but he knew also that he wanted this woman, this wallet creature of silk and life who crept so close to him. There were reasons why he oughtn’t to have her, but he had suddenly seen how love was a big word like Life and Death, and she knew that he realized and was glad. Still they sat without moving for a long while and watched the fire.

II

At two-twenty next day Clay shook hands gravely with his father and stepped into the train for Dover. Eleanor, comfortable with a novel, was nestled into a corner of his compartment, and as he entered she smiled a welcome and closed the book.

“Well,” she began. “I felt like a minion of the almighty secret service as I slid by your inspiring and impecable father, swathed in yards and yards of veiling.”

“He wouldn’t have noticed you without your veil,” answered Clayton, sitting down. “He was really most emotional under all that brusqueness. Really, you know he’s quite a nice chap. Wish I knew him better.”

The train was in motion; the last uniforms had drifted in like brown, blown leaves, and now it seemed as if one tremendous wind was carrying them shoreward.

“How far are you going with me?” asked Clayton.

“Just to Rochester, an hour and a half. I absolutely had to see you before you left, which isn’t very Spartan of me. But really, you see, I feel that you don’t quite understand about last night, and look at me, as” she paused “well — as rather exceptional.”

“Wouldn’t I be rather an awful cad if I thought about it in those terms at all?”

“No,” she said cheerily, “I, for instance, am both a romantiscist and a psychologist. It does take the romance out of anything to analyze it, but I’m going to do it if only to clear myself in your eyes.”

“You don’t have to — “ he began.

“I know I don’t,” she interrupted, “but I’m going to, and when I’ve finished you’ll see where weakness and inevitability shade off. No, I don’t believe in Zola.”

“I don’t know him.”

“Well, my dear, Zola said that environment is environment, but he referred to families and races, and this is the story of a class.”

“What class?”

“Our class.”

“Please,” he said, “I’ve been wanting to hear.”

She settled herself against his shoulder, and gazing out at the vanishing country, began to talk very deliberately.

“It was said, before the war, that England was the only country in the world where women weren’t safe from men of their own class.”

“One particular fast set,” he broke in.

“A set, my dear man, who were fast but who kept every bit of their standing and position. You see even that was reaction. The idea of physical fitness came in with the end of the Victorians. Drinking died down in the Universities. Why you yourself once told me that the really bad men never drank, rather kept themselves fit for moral or intellectual crimes.”

“It was rather Victorian to drink much,” he agreed. “Chaps who drank were usually young fellows about to become curates, sowing the conventional wild oats by the most orthodox tippling.”

“Well,”she continued, “there had to be an outlet — and there was, and you know the form it took in what you called the fast set. Next enter Mr. Mars. You see as long as there was moral pressure exerted, the rotten side of society was localized. I won’t say it wasn’t spreading, but it was spreading slowly, some people even thought, rather normally, but when men began to go away and not come back, when marriage became a hurried thing and widows filled London, and all traditions seemed broken, why then things were different.”

“How did it start?”

“It started in cases where men were called away hurriedly and girls lost their nerve. Then the men didn’t come back — and there were the girls — “

He gasped.

“That was going on at the beginning? — I didn’t know at all.”

“Oh it was very quiet at first. Very little leaked out into daylight, but the thing spread in the dark. The next thing, you see, was to weave a sentimental mantle to throw over it. It was there and it had to be excused. Most girls either put on trousers and drove cars all day or painted their faces and danced with officers all night.”

“And what mighty principle had the honor of being a cloak for all that?” he asked sarcastically.

“Now here, you see, is the paradox. I can talk like this and pretend to analyze, and even sneer at the principle. Yet I’m as much under the spell as the most wishy-washy typist who spends a week end at Brighton with her young man before he sails with the conscripts.”

“I’m waiting to hear what the spell is.”

“It’s this — self sacrifice with a capitol S. Young men going to get killed for us. — We would have been their wives — we can’t be — therefore we’ll be as much as we can. And that’s the story.”

“Good God!”

“Young officer comes back,” she went on; “must amuse him, must amuse him; must give him the impression that people here are with him, that it’s a big home he’s coming to, that he’s appreciated. Now you know, of course, in the lower classes that sort of thing means children. Whether that will ever spread to us will depend on the duration of the war.”

“How about old ideas, and standards of woman and that sort of thing?” he asked, rather sheepishly.

“Sky-high, my dear — dead and gone. It might be said for utility that it’s better and safer for the race that officers stay with women of their own class. Think of the next generation in France.”

To Clay the whole compartment had suddenly become smothering. Bubbles of conventional ethics seemed to have burst and the long stagnant gas was reaching him. He was forced to seize his mind and make it cling to whatever shreds of the old still floated on the moral air. Eleanor’s voice came to him like the grey creed of a new materialistic world, the contrast was the more vivid because of the remains of erratic honor and sentimental religiosity that she flung out with the rest.

“So you see, my dear, utility, heroism and sentiment all combine and le voice. And we’re pulling into Rochester,” she turned to him pathetically. “I see that in trying to clear myself I’ve only indicted my whole sex,” and with tears in their eyes they kissed.

On the platform they talked for half a minute more. There was no emotion. She was trying to analyze again and her smooth brow was wrinkled in the effort. He was endeavoring to digest what she had said, but his brain was in a whirl.

“Do you remember,” he asked, “what you said last night about love being a big word like Life and Death?”

“A regular phrase; part of the technique of — of the game; a catch word.” The train moved off and as Clay swung himself on the last car she raised her voice so that he could hear her to the last — “Love is a big word, but I was flattering us. Real Love’s as big as Life and Death, but not that love — not that — “ Her voice failed and mingled with the sound of the rails, and to Clay she seemed to fade out like a grey ghost on the platform.

III

When the charge broke and the remnants lapped back like spent waves, Sergeant O’Flaherty, a bullet through the left side, dropped beside him, and as weary castaways fight half listlessly for shore, they crawled and pushed and edged themselves into a shell crater. Clay’s shoulder and back were bleeding profusely and he searched heavily and clumsily for his first aid package.

“That’ll be that the Seventeenth Sussex gets reorganized,” remarked O’Flaherty, sagely. “Two weeks in the rear and two weeks home.”

“Damn good regiment, it was, O’Flaherty,” said Clay. They would have seemed like two philosophic majors commenting from safe behind the lines had it not been that Clay was flat on his back, his face in a drawn ecstasy of pain, and that the Irishman was most evidently bleeding to death. The latter was twining an improvised tourniquet on his thigh, watching it with the careless casual interest a bashful suitor bestows upon his hat.

“I can’t get up no emotion over a regiment these nights,” he commented disgustedly. “This’ll be the fifth I was in that I seen smashed to hell. I joined these Sussex byes so I needn’t see more o’ me own go.”

“I think you know every one in Ireland, Sergeant.”

“All Ireland’s me friend, Captain, though I niver knew it ‘till I left. So I left the Irish, what was left of them. You see when an English bye dies he does some play actin’ before. Blood on an Englishman always calls rouge to me mind. It’s a game with him. The Irish take death damn serious.”

Clayton rolled painfully over and watched the night come softly down and blend with the drifting smoke. They were certainly between the devil and the deep sea and the slang of the next generation will use “no man’s land” for that. O’Flaherty was still talking.

“You see you has to do somethin’. You haven’t any God worth remarkin’ on. So you pass from life in the names of your holy principles, and hope to meet in Westminster.”

“We’re not mystics, O’Flaherty,” muttered Clay, “but we’ve got a firm grip on God and reality.”

“Mystics, my eye, beggin’ your pardon, lieutenant,” cried the Irishman, “a mystic ain’t no race, it’s a saint. You got the most airy way o’ thinkin’ in the wurruld an yit you talk about plain faith as if it was cloud gazin’. There was a lecture last week behind Vimy Y.M.C.A., an’ I stuck my head in the door; ‘Tan-gi-ble,’ the fellow was sayin’ ‘we must be Tan-gi-ble in our religion, we must be practicle’ an’ he starts off on Christian brotherhood an’ honorable death — so I stuck me head out again. An’ you got lots a good men dyin’ for that every day-tryin’ to be tan-gi-ble, dyin’ because their father’s a Duke or because he ain’t. But that ain’t what I got to think of. An’ right here let’s light a pipe before it gets dark enough for the damn burgomasters to see the match and practice on it.”

Pipes, as indispensible as the hard ration, were going in no time, and the sergeant continued as he blew a huge lung full of smoke towards the earth with incongruous supercaution.

“I fight because I like it, an’ God ain’t to blame for that, but when it’s death you’re talkin’ about I’ll tell you what I get an’ you don’t. Pere Dupont gets in front of the Frenchies an’ he says: ‘Allon, mes enfants!’ fine! an’ Father O’Brien, he says: ‘Go on in byes and bate the Luther out o’ them’ — great stuff! But can you see the reverent Updike — Updike just out o’ Oxford — yellin’ ‘mix it up, chappies,’ or ‘soak ‘em blokes?’ — NO, Captain, the best leader you ever get is a six foot rowin’ man that thinks God’s got a seat in the House o’ Commons. All sportin’ men have to have a bunch o’ cheerin’ when they die. Give an Englishman four inches in the sportin’ page this side of the whistle an’ he’ll die happy — but not O’Flaherty.”

But Clay’s thoughts were far away. Half delirious, his mind wandered to Eleanor. He had thought of nothing else for a week, ever since their parting at Rochester, and so many new sides of what he had learned were opening up. He had suddenly realized about Dick and Eleanor, they must have been married to all intents and purposes. Of course Clay had written to Eleanor from Paris, asking her to marry him on his return, and just yesterday he had gotten a very short, very kind, but definite refusal. And he couldn’t understand at all.

Then there was his sister — Eleanor’s words still rang in his ear. “They either put on trousers and act as chauffers all day or put on paint and dance with officers all night.” He felt perfectly sure that Clara was still well — virtuous. Virtuous — what a ridiculous word it seemed, and how odd to be using it about his sister. Clara had always been so painfully good. At fourteen she had been sent to Boston for a souvenir picture of Louisa M. Alcott to hang over her bed. His favorite amusement had been to replace it by some startling soubrette in tights, culled from the pages of the Pink Un. Well Clara, Eleanor, Dick, he himself, were all in the same boat, no matter what the actuality of their innocence or guilt. If he ever got back —

The Irishman, evidently sinking fast, was talking rapidly.

“Put your wishy-washy pretty clothes on everythin’ but it ain’t no disguise. If I get drunk it’s the flesh and the devil, if you get drunk it’s your wild oats. But you ain’t disguisin’ death, not to me you ain’t. It’s a damn serious affair. I may get killed for me flag, but I’m goin’ to die for meself. ‘I die for England’ he says. ‘Settle up with God, you’re through with England’ I says.”

He raised himself on his elbow and shook his fist toward the German trenches.

“It’s you an’ your damn Luther,” he shouted. “You been protestin’ and analyzin’ until you’re makin’ my body ache and burn like hell; you been evolvin’ like mister Darwin, an’ you stretched yourself so far that you’ve split. Everythin’s in-tan-gi-ble except your God. Honor an’ Fatherland an’ Westminster Abbey, they’re all in-tan-gi-ble except God an’ sure you got him tan-gi-ble. You got him on the flag an’ in the constitution. Next you’ll be writin’ your bibles with Christ sowin’ wild oats to make him human. You say he’s on your side. Onc’t, just onc’t, he had a favorite nation and they hung Him up by the hands and feet and his body hurt him and burn’t him,” his voice grew fainter. “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is wit’ thee — “ His voice trailed off, he shuddered and was dead.

The hours went on. Clayton lit another pipe, heedless of what German sharpshooters might see. A heavy March mist had come down and the damp was eating into him. His whole left side was paralyzed and he felt chill creep slowly over him. He spoke aloud.

“Damned old mist — damned lucky old Irishman — Damnation.” He felt a dim wonder that he was to know death but his thoughts turned as ever to England, and three faces came in sequence before him. Clara’s, Dick’s and Eleanor’s. It was all such a mess. He’d like to have gone back and finished that conversation. It had stopped at Rochester — he had stopped living in the station at Rochester. How queer to have stopped there — Rochester had no significance. Wasn’t there a play where a man was born in a station, or a handbag in a station, and he’d stopped living at — what did the Irishman say about cloaks, Eleanor said something about cloaks; too, he couldn’t see any cloaks, didn’t feel sentimental — only cold and dim and mixed up. He didn’t know about God — God was a good thing for curates — then there was the Y. M. C. A; God — and he always wore short sleeves, and bumpy Oxfords — but that wasn’t God — that was just the man who talked about God to soldiers. And then there was O’Flaherty’s God. He felt as if he knew him, but then he’d never called him God — he was fear and love, and it wasn’t dignified to fear God — or even to love him except in a calm respectable way. There were so many God’s it seemed — he had thought that Christianity was monotheistic, and it seemed pagan to have so many Gods.

Well, he’d find out the whole muddled business in about three minutes, and a lot of good it’d do anybody else left in the muddle.

Damned muddle — everything a muddle, everybody offside, and the referee gotten rid of — everybody trying to say that if the referee were there he’d have been on their side. He was going to go and find that old referee — find him — get hold of him, get a good hold — cling to him — cling to him — ask him —

THE PIERIAN SPRINGS AND THE LAST STRAW

My Uncle George assumed, during my childhood, almost legendary proportions. His name was never mentioned except in verbal italics. His published works lay in bright, interesting binding on the library table — forbidden to my whetted curiosity until I should reach the age of corruption. When one day I broke the orange lamp into a hundred shivers and glints of glass, it was in search of closer information concerning a late arrival among the books. I spent the afternoon in bed and for weeks could not play under the table because of maternal horror of severed arteries in hands and knees. But I had gotten my first idea of Uncle George — he was a tall, angular man with crooked arms. His opinion was founded upon the shape of the handwriting in which he had written “To you, my brother, with heartiest of futile hopes that you will enjoy and approve of this: George Rombert.” After this unintelligible beginning whatever interest I had in the matter waned, as would have all my ideas of the author, had he not been a constant family topic.

When I was eleven I unwillingly listened to the first comprehensible discussion of him. I was figeting on a chair in barbarous punishment when a letter arrived and I noticed my father growing stern and formidable as he read it. Instinctively I knew it concerned Uncle George — and I was right.

“What’s the matter Tom? — Some one sick?” asked my mother rather anxiously.

For answer father rose and handed her the letter and some newspaper clippings it had enclosed. When she had read it twice (for her naive curiosity could never resist a preliminary skim) she plunged —

“Why should she write to you and not to me?”

Father threw himself wearily on the sofa and arranged his long limbs decoratively.

“It’s getting tiresome, isn’t it? This is the third time he’s become — involved.” I started for I distinctively heard him add under his breath “Poor damn fool!”

“It’s much more than tiresome,” began my mother, “It’s disgusting; a great strong man with money and talent and every reason to behave and get married (she implied that these words were synonymous) playing around with serious women like a silly, conceited college boy. You’d think it was a harmless game!”

Here I put in my word. I thought that perhaps my being de trop in the conversation might lead to an early release.

“I’m here,” I volunteered.

“So I see,” said father in the tones he used to intimidate other young lawyers downtown; so I sat there and listened respectfully while they plumbed the iniquitous depths.

“It is a game to him,” said my father; “That’s all part of his theory.”

My mother sighed. “Mr. Sedgewick told me yesterday that his books had done inestimable harm to the spirit in which love is held in this country.”

“Mr. Sedgewick wrote him a letter,” remarked my father rather dryly, “and George sent him the book of Solomon by return post — “

“Don’t joke, Thomas,” said mother crowding her face with eyes, “George is treacherous, his mind is unhealthy — “

“And so would mine be, had you not snatched me passionately from his clutches — and your son here will be George the second, if he feeds on this sort of conversation at his age.” So the curtain fell upon my Uncle George for the first time.

Scrappy and rough-pieced information on this increasingly engrossing topic fitted gradually into my consciousness in the next five years like the parts of a picture puzzle. Here is the finished portrait from the angle of seventeen years — Uncle George was a Romeo and a mesogamist, a combination of Byron, Don Juan, and Bernard Shaw, with a touch of Havelock Ellis for good measure. He was about thirty, had been engaged seven times and drank ever so much more than was good for him. His attitude towards women was the piece-de-resistance of his character. To put it mildly he was not an idealist. He had written a series of novels, all of them bitter, each of them with some woman as the principal character. Some of the women were bad. None of them were quite good. He picked a rather wierd selection of Lauras to play muse to his whimsical Petrarch; for he could write, write well.

He was the type of author that gets dozens of letters a week from solicitors, aged men and enthusiastic young women who tell him that he is “prostituting his art” and “wasting golden literary opportunities.” As a matter of fact he wasn’t. It was very conceivable that he might have written better despite his unpleasant range of subject, but what he had written had a huge vogue that strangely enough, consisted not of the usual devotees of prostitute art, the eager shopgirls and sentimental salesmen to whom he was accused of pandering, but of the academic and literary circles of the country. His shrewd tenderness with nature (that is, everything but the white race), his well drawn men and the particularly cynical sting to his wit gave him many adherents. He was ranked in the most staid and severe of reviews as a coming man. Long psychopathic stories and dull germanized novels were predicted of him by optimistic critics. At one time he was the Thomas Hardy of America and he was several times heralded as the Balzac of his century. He was accused of having the great American novel in his coat pocket trying to peddle it from publisher to publisher. But somehow neither matter nor style had improved, people accused him of not “living.” His unmarried sister and he had an apartment where she sat greying year by year with one furtive hand on the bromo-seltzer and the other on the telephone receiver of frantic feminine telephone calls. For George Rombert grew violently involved at least once a year. He filled columns in the journals of society gossip. Oddly enough most of his affairs were with debutantes — a fact which was considered particularly annoying by sheltering mothers. It seemed as though he had the most serious way of talking the most outrageous nonsense and as he was most desirable from an economic point of view, many essayed the perilous quest.

Though we had lived in the East since I had been a baby, it was always understood that home meant the prosperous Western city that still supported the roots of our family tree. When I was twenty I went back for the first time and made my only acquaintance with United George.

I had dinner in the apartment with my aunt, a very brave, gentle old lady who told me, rather proudly, I thought, that I looked like George. I was shown his pictures from babyhood, in every attitude; George at Andover, on the Y. M. C. A. committee, strange anatomy; George at Williams in the center of the Literary Magazine Picture, George as head of his fraternity. Then she handed me a scrap-book containing accounts of his exploits and all criticism of his work.

“He cares nothing at all about all this,” she explained. I admired and questioned, and remember thinking as I left the apartment to seek Uncle George at his club, that between my family’s depressed opinion of him and my aunts elated one my idea of him was muddled to say the least. At the Iroquois Club I was directed to the grill, and there standing in the doorway, I picked one out of the crowd, who, I was immediately sure, was he. Here is the way he looked at the time. He was tall with magnificent iron grey hair and the pale soft skin of a boy, most remarkable in a man of his mode of life. Drooping green eyes and a sneering mouth complete my picture of his physical self. He was rather drunk, for he had been at the Club all afternoon and for dinner, but he was perfectly conscious of himself and the dulling of faculties was only perceivable in a very cautious walk and a crack in his voice that sank it occasionally to a hoarse whisper. He was talking to a table of men all in various stages of inebriation, and holding them by a most peculiar and magnetic series of gestures. Right here I want to remark that this influence was not dependent so much upon a vivid physical personality but on a series of perfectly artificial mental tricks, his gestures, the peculiar range of his speaking voice, the suddenness and terseness of his remarks.

I watched him intently while my hall boy whispered to him and he walked slowly and consciously over to me to shake hands gravely and escort me to a small table. For an hour we talked of family things, of healths and deaths and births. I could not take my eyes off him. The blood-shot streakedness of his green eyes made me think of wierd color combinations in a child’s paintbox. He had been looking bored for about ten minutes and my talk had been dwindling despondently down when suddenly he waved his hand as if to brush away a veil, and began to question me.

“Is that damn father of yours still defending me against your mother’s tongue?”

I started, but strangely, felt no resentment.

“Because,” he went on, “It’s the only thing he ever did for me all his life. He’s a terrible prig. I’d think it would drive you wild to have him in the house.”

“Father feels very kindly toward you, sir,” I said rather stiffly.

“Don’t,” he protested smiling. “Stick to veracity in your own family and don’t bother to lie to me. I’m a totally black figure in your mind, I’m well aware. Am I not?”

“Well — you’ve — you’ve had a twenty years’ history.”

“Twenty years — hell — “ said Uncle George. “Three years history and fifteen years aftermath.”

“But your books — and all.”

“Just aftermath, nothing but aftermath, my life stopped at twenty-one one night in October at sixteen minutes after ten. Do you want to hear about it? First I’ll show you the heifer and then I’ll take you upstairs and present you to the altar.”

“I, you — if you — “ I demurred feebly, for I was on fire to hear the story.

“Oh, — no trouble. I’ve done the story several times in books and life and around many a litered table. I have no delicacy any more — I lost that in the first smoke. This is the totally blackened heifer whom you’re talking to now.”

So he told me the story.

“You see it began Sophmore year — began most directly and most vividly in Christmas vacation of Sophmore year. Before that she’d always gone with a younger crowd — set, you young people call it now,” he paused and clutched with mental fingers for tangible figures to express himself. “Her dancing, I guess, and beauty and the most direct, unprincipled personality I’ve ever come in contact with. When she wanted a boy there was no preliminary scouting among other girls for information, no sending out of tentative approaches meant to be retailed to him. There was the most direct attack by every faculty and gift that she possessed. She had no divergence of method — she just made you conscious to the highest degree that she was a girl” — he turned his eyes on me suddenly and asked:

“Is that enough — do you want a description of her eyes and hair and what she said?”

“No,” I answered, “go on.”

“Well, I went back to college an idealist, I built up a system of psychology in which dark ladies with alto voices and infinite possibilities floated through my days and nights. Of course we had the most frantic correspondence — each wrote ridiculous letters and sent ridiculous telegrams, told all our acquaintances about our flaming affair and — well, you’ve been to college. All this is banal, I know. Here’s an odd thing. All the time I was idealizing her to the last possibility, I was perfectly conscious that she was about the faultiest girl I’d ever met. She was selfish, conceited and uncontrolled and since these were my own faults I was doubly aware of them. Yet I never wanted to change her. Each fault was knit up with a sort of passionate energy that transcended it. Her selfishness made her play the game harder, her lack of control put me rather in awe of her and her conceit was punctuated by such delicious moments of remorse and self-denunciation that it was almost — almost dear to me — Isn’t this getting ridiculous? She had the strongest effect on me. She made me want to do something for her, to get something to show her. Every honor in college took on the semblance of a presentable trophy.”

He beckoned to a waiter to my infinite misgiving, for though he seemed rather more sober than when I had arrived, he had been drinking steadily and I knew my own position would be embarrasing if he became altogether drunk.

“Then” — between sips — “we saw each other at sporadic intervals, quarreled, kissed and quarreled again. We were equals, neither was the leader. She was as interested in me as I was fascinated by her. We were both terrifically jealous but there was little occasion to show it. Each of us had small affairs on the side but merely as relaxations when the other was away. I didn’t realize it but my idealism was slowly waning — or increasing into love — and rather a gentle sort of love.” His face tightened. “This isn’t cup sentiment.” I nodded and he went on; “Well, we broke off in two hours and I was the weak one.”

“Senior year I went to her school dance in New York, and there was a man there from another college of whom I became very jealous and not without cause. She and I had a few words about it and half an hour later I walked out on the street in my coat and hat, leaving behind the melancholy statement that I was through for good. So far so good. If I’d gone back to college that night or if I’d gone and gotten drunk or done almost anything wild or resentful the break would never have occurred — she’d have written next day. Here’s what did happen. I walked along Fifth Avenue letting my imagination play on my sorrow, really luxuriating in it. She’d never looked better than she had that night, never; and I had never been so much in love. I worked myself up to the highest pitch of emotional imagination and moods grow real on me and then — Oh poor damn fool that I was — am — will always be — I went back. Went back! Couldn’t I have known or seen — I knew her and myself — I could have plotted out for anyone else or in a cool mood, for myself, just what I should have done, but my imagination made me go back, drove me. Half a thought in my brain would have sent me to Williamstown or the Manhattan bar. Another half thought sent me back to her school. When I crossed the threshold it was sixteen minutes after ten. At that minute I stopped living.”

“You can imagine the rest. She was angry at me for leaving, hadn’t had time to brood and when she saw me come in she resolved to punish me. I swallowed it hook and bait and temporarily lost confidence, temper, poise, every single jot of individuality or attractiveness I had. I wandered around that ballroom like a wild man trying to get a word with her and when I did I finished the job. I begged, pled, almost wept. She had no use for me from that hour. At two o’clock I walked out of that school a beaten man.”

“Why the rest — it’s a long nightmare — letters with all the nerve gone out of them, wild imploring letters; long silences hoping she’d care; rumors of her other affairs. At first I used to be sad when people still linked me up with her, asked me for news of her but finally when it got around that she’d thrown me over people didn’t ask me about her any more, they told me of her — crumbs to a dog. I wasn’t the authority any more on my own work, for that’s what she was — just what I’d read into her and brought out in her. That’s the story — “ He broke off suddenly and rose; tottering to his feet, his voice rose and rang through the deserted grill.

“I read history with a new viewpoint since I had known Cleopatra and Messaline and Montespan,” — he started toward the door.

“Where are you going?” I asked in alarm.

“We’re going upstairs to meet the lady. She’s a widow now for awhile so you must say Mrs. — see — Mrs.”

We went upstairs, I carefully behind with hands ready to be outstretched should he fall. I felt particularly unhappy. The hardest man in the world to handle is one who is too sober to be vacillating and too drunk to be persuaded; and I had, strange to say, an idea that my Uncle was eminently a person to be followed.

We entered a large room. I couldn’t describe it if my life depended on it. Uncle George nodded and beckoned to a woman at a bridge four across the room. She nodded and rising from the table walked slowly over. I started — naturally —

Here is my impression — a woman of thirty or a little under, dark, with intense physical magnetism and a most expressive mouth capable as I soon found out of the most remarkable change of expression by the slightest variance in facial geography. It was a mouth to be written to, but, though it could never have been called large, it could never have been crowded into a sonnet — I confess I have tried. Sonnet indeed! It contained the emotions of a drama and the history, I presume, of an epic. It was, as near as I can fathom, the eternal mouth. There were eyes also, brown, and a high warm coloring; but oh the mouth…

I felt like a character in a Victorian romance. The little living groups scattered around seemed to move in small spotlights around us who were acting out a comedy “down stage.” I was self-conscious about myself but purely physically so; I was merely a property; but I was very self-conscious for my Uncle. I dreaded the moment when he should lift his voice or overturn the table or kiss Mrs. Fulham bent dramatically back over his arm while the groups would start and stare. It was enormously unreal. I was introduced in a mumble and then forgotten.

“Tight again,” remarked Mrs. Fulham.

My Uncle made no answer.

“Well, I’m having a heavy bridge game and we’re ever so much behind. You can just have my dummy time. Aren’t you flattered?” She turned to me. “Your Uncle probably told you all about himself and me. He’s behaving so badly this year. He used to be such a pathetic, innocent little boy and such a devil with the debutantes.”

My Uncle broke in quickly with a rather grandiose air:

“That’s sufficient I think Myra, for you.”

“You’re going to blame me again?” she asked in feigned astonishment. “As if I — “

“Don’t — Don’t,” said my Uncle thickly. “Let one poor damn fool alone.”

Here I found myself suddenly appreciating a sudden contrast. My Uncle’s personality had dropped off him like a cloak. He was not the romantic figure of the grill, but a less sure, less attractive and somewhat contemptible individual. I had never seen personalities act like that before. Usually you either had one or you didn’t. I wonder if I mean personality or temperament or perhaps that brunette alto tenor mood that lies on the borderland… At any rate my Uncle’s mood was now that of a naughty boy to a stern aunt, almost that of a dog to his master.

“You know,” said Mrs. Fulham, “your Uncle is the only interesting thing in town. He’s such a perfect fool.”

Uncle George bowed his head and regarded the floor in a speculative manner. He smiled politely, if unhappily.

“That’s your idea.”

“He takes all his spite out on me.”

My Uncle nodded, Mrs. Fulham’s pardners called over to her that they had lost again and that the game was breaking up. She got rather angry.

“You know,” she said coldly to Uncle George, “you stand there like a trained spaniel letting me say anything I want to you — Do you know what a pitiful thing you are?”

My Uncle had gone a dark red. Mrs. Fulham turned again to me.

“I’ve been talking to him like this for ten years — like this or not at all. He’s my little lap dog. Here George, bring me my tea, write a book about me; you’re snippy, Georgie, but interesting.” Mrs. Fulham was rather carried away by the dramatic intensity of her own words and angered by George’s unmovable acceptance. So she lost her head.

“You know,” she said tensely, “my husband often wanted to horsewhip you but I’ve begged you off. He was very handy in the kennels and always said he could handle any kind of dog!”

Something had snapped. My Uncle rose, his eyes blazing. The shift of burden from her to her husband had lifted a weight from his shoulders. His eyes flashed but the words stored up for ten years came slow and measured.

“Your husband — Do you mean that crooked broker who kept you for five years. Horsewhip me! That was the prattle he may have used around the fireside to keep you under his dirty thumb. By God, I’ll horsewhip your next husband myself.” His voice had risen and the people were beginning to look up. A hush had fallen on the room and his words echoed from fireplace to fireplace.

“He’s the damn thief that robbed me of everything in this hellish world.”

He was shouting now. A few men drew near. Women shrank to the corners. Mrs. Fulham stood perfectly still. Her face had gone white but she was still sneering openly at him.

“What’s this?” he picked up her hand. She tried to snatch it away but he tightened his grip and twisting the wedding ring off her finger he threw it on the floor and stamped it into a beaten button of gold.

In a minute I had his arms held. She screamed and held up her broken finger. The crowd closed around us.

In five minutes Uncle George and I were speeding homeward in a taxi. Neither of us spoke; he sat staring straight before him, his green eyes glittering in the dark. I left next morning after breakfast.

*****

The story ought to end here. My Uncle George should remain with Mark Anthony and De Musset as a rather tragic semi-genius, ruined by a woman. Unfortunately the play continues into an inartistic sixth act where it topples over and descends like Uncle George himself in one of his more inebriated states, contrary to all the rules of dramatic literature. One month afterward Uncle George and Mrs. Fulham eloped in the most childish and romantic manner the night before her marriage to the Honorable Howard Bixby was to have taken place. Uncle George never drank again, nor did he ever write or in fact do anything except play a middling amount of golf and get comfortably bored with his wife.

Mother still doubts and predicts gruesome fates for his wife, Father is frankly astonished and not too pleased. In fact I rather believe he enjoyed having an author in the family, even if his books did look a bit decadent on the library table. From time to time I receive subscription lists and invitations from Uncle George. I keep them for use in my new book on Theories of Genius. You see I claim that if Dante had ever won — but a hypothetical sixth act is just as untechnical as a real one.

CEDRIC THE STOKER

The true story of the Battle of the Baltic

The grimy coal-hole of the battleship of the line was hot, and Cedric felt the loss of his parasol keenly. It was his duty to feed the huge furnace that sent the ship rolling over and over in the sea, heated the sailors’ bedrooms, and ran the washing machine. Cedric was hard at work. He would fill his hat with a heap of the black coals, carry them to the huge furnace, and throw them in. His hat was now soiled beyond recognition, and try as he might he could not keep his hands clean.

He was interrupted in his work by the jingle of the telephone bell. “Captain wishes to speak to you, Mr. Cedric,” said the girl at the exchange. Cedric rushed to the phone.

“How’s your mother,” asked the Captain.

“Very well, thank you, sir,” answered Cedric.

“Is it hot enough for you, down there?” said the Captain.

“Quite,” replied Cedric, courteously.

The Captain’s voice changed. He would change it every now and then. “Come to my office at once,” he said, “we are about to go into action and I wish your advice.”

Cedric rushed to the elevator, and getting off at the fourth floor, ran to the office. He found the Captain rubbing his face with cold cream to remove sunburn.

“Cedric,” said the Captain, sticking a lump of the greasy stuff into his mouth, and chewing it while he talked, “You are a bright child, rattle off the binomial theorem.”

Cedric repeated it forwards, backwards, and from the middle to both ends.

“Now name all the salts of phosphoric acid!”

Cedric named them all, and four or five extra.

“Now the Iliad!”

Here Cedric did his most difficult task. He repeated the Iliad backwards leaving out alternately every seventh and fourth word.

“You are efficient,” said the Captain smilingly. He took from his mouth the cold cream, which he had chewed into a hard porous lump, and dropped it back into the jar. “I shall trust you with all our lives.” He drew Cedric closer to him.

“Listen,” he whispered; “the enemy are attacking in force. They are far stronger than we. We outnumber them only five to one: nevertheless we shall fight with the utmost bravery. As commander of the fleet, I have ordered the crews of all my ships to struggle to the last shell and powder roll, and then to flee for their lives. This ship is not so fast as the others so I guess it had better begin fleeing now!”

“Sir — “ began Cedric, but he was interrupted by the stacatto noise of the huge forward turret pop-guns as the two fleets joined in battle. They could hear the sharp raps of the paddles as the bosuns spanked their crews to make them work faster. Their ears were deafened by the cursing of the pilots as the ships fouled one another. All the hideous sounds of battle rose and assailed them. Cedric rushed to the window and threw it open. He shrank back, aghast. Bearing down upon them, and only ten miles away, was the huge Hoboken, the biggest of all ferry-boats, captured by the enemy from the Erie Railroad in the fall of ‘92. So close she was that Cedric could read her route sign “Bronx West to Toid Avenoo.” The very words struck him numb. On she came, andon, throwing mountains of spray a mile in front of her and several miles to her rear.

“Is she coming fast, boy?” asked the Captain.

“Sir, she’s making every bit of a knot an hour,” answered Cedric, trembling.

The Captain seized him roughly by the shoulders. “We’ll fight to the end,” he said; “even though she is faster than we are. Quick! To the cellars, and stoke, stoke, STOKE!!”

Cedric unable to take his eyes from the terrible sight, ran backwards down the passageway, fell down the elevator shaft, and rushed to the furnace. Madly he carried coal back and forth, from the bin to the furnace door, and then back to the bin. Already the speed of the ship had increased. It tore through the water in twenty-foot jumps. But it was not enough. Cedric worked more madly, and still more madly. At last he had thrown the last lump of coal into the furnace. There was nothing more to be done. He rested his tired body against the glowing side of the furnace.

Again the telephone bell rang. Cedric answered it himself, not wishing to take the exchange girl away from her knitting. It was the Captain.

“We must have more speed,” he shouted: “We must have more speed. Throw on more coal — more coal!”

For a moment Cedric was wrapped in thought, his face twitching with horror. Then he realized his duty, and rushed forward

*****

**

Late that evening, when they were safe in port, the Captain smoking his after-dinner cigar, came down to the stoke-hole. He called for Cedric. There was not a sound. Again he called. Still there was silence. Suddenly the horror of the truth rushed upon him. He tore open the furnace door, and convulsed with sobs, drew forth a Brooks-Livingstone Collar, a half-melted piece of Spearmint gum, and a suit of Yerger asbestos underwear. For a moment he held them in his arms, and then fell howling upon the floor. The truth had turned out to be the truth.

Cedric had turned himself into calories.

F.S.F.

J.B.

The Short Stories

Fitzgerald, 1920

CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF SHORT STORIES

FLAPPERS AND PHILOSOPHERS

THE OFFSHORE PIRATE

THE ICE PALACE

HEAD AND SHOULDERS

THE CUT-GLASS BOWL

BERNICE BOBS HER HAIR

BENEDICTION

DALYRIMPLE GOES WRONG

THE FOUR FISTS

TALES FROM THE JAZZ AGE

MY LAST FLAPPERS

THE JELLY-BEAN.

THE CAMEL’S BACK

MAY DAY

PORCELAIN AND PINK

FANTASIES

THE DIAMOND AS BIG AS THE RITZ

THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON

TARQUIN OF CHEAPSIDE

“O RUSSET WITCH!”

UNCLASSIFIED MASTERPIECES

THE LEES OF HAPPINESS

MR. ICKY

JEMINA, THE MOUNTAIN GIRL

ALL THE SAD YOUNG MEN

THE RICH BOY

WINTER DREAMS

THE BABY PARTY

ABSOLUTION

RAGS MARTIN-JONES AND THE PR-NCE OF W-LES

THE ADJUSTER

HOT AND COLD BLOOD

“THE SENSIBLE THING”

GRETCHEN’S FORTY WINKS

TAPS AT REVEILLE

THE SCANDAL DETECTIVES

BASIL: THE FRESHEST BOY

HE THINKS HE’S WONDERFUL

THE CAPTURED SHADOW

THE PERFECT LIFE

FIRST BLOOD

A NICE QUIET PLACE

JOSEPHINE: A WOMAN WITH A PAST

CRAZY SUNDAY

TWO WRONGS

THE NIGHT AT CHANCELLORSVILLE

THE LAST OF THE BELLES

MAJESTY

FAMILY IN THE WIND

A SHORT TRIP HOME

ONE INTERNE

THE FIEND

BABYLON REVISITED

THE PAT HOBBY STORIES

PAT HOBBY’S CHRISTMAS WISH

A MAN IN THE WAY

“BOIL SOME WATER--LOTS OF IT”

TEAMED WITH GENIUS

PAT HOBBY AND ORSON WELLES

PAT HOBBY’S SECRET

PAT HOBBY, PUTATIVE FATHER

THE HOMES OF THE STARS

PAT HOBBY DOES HIS BIT

PAT HOBBY’S PREVIEW

NO HARM TRYING

A PATRIOTIC SHORT

ON THE TRAIL OF PAT HOBBY

FUN IN AN ARTIST’S STUDIO

TWO OLD-TIMERS

MIGHTIER THAN THE SWORD

PAT HOBBY’S COLLEGE DAYS

MISCELLANEOUS STORIES

A FREEZE-OUT

A NEW LEAF

A NIGHT AT THE FAIR

AFTERNOON OF AN AUTHOR

AN ALCOHOLIC CASE

AT YOUR AGE

BASIL AND CLEOPATRA

THE BRIDAL PARTY

THE BOWL

DESIGN IN PLASTER

DICE, BRASSKNUCKLES & GUITAR

EMOTIONAL BANKRUPTCY

FINANCING FINNEGAN

FORGING AHEAD

THE HOTEL CHILD

“I DIDN’T GET OVER”

JACOB’S LADDER

THE LOST DECADE

LOVE IN THE NIGHT

MAGNETISM

MORE THAN JUST A HOUSE

NEWS OF PARIS--FIFTEEN YEARS AGO

ONE TRIP ABROAD

OUTSIDE THE CABINET-MAKER’S

THE ROUGH CROSSING

SIX OF ONE--

THE SWIMMERS

THREE HOURS BETWEEN PLANES

WHAT A HANDSOME PAIR!

THE ORDEAL

MYRA MEETS HIS FAMILY

THE I.O.U.

THE POPULAR GIRL

TWO FOR A CENT

THE PUSHER-IN-THE-FACE

ONE OF MY OLDEST FRIENDS

THE UNSPEAKABLE EGG

PRESUMPTION

YOUR WAY AND MINE

LIPSTICK: A COLLEGE COMEDY

THE LOVE BOAT

ON YOUR OWN

BETWEEN THREE AND FOUR

FLIGHT AND PURSUIT

A WOMAN WITH A PAST

TOO CUTE FOR WORDS,

STRANGE SANCTUARY

INSIDE THE HOUSE

LO, THE POOR PEACOCK!

ON SCHEDULE,

THE PASSIONATE ESKIMO

IMAGE ON THE HEART

A FULL LIFE

SHAGGY’S MORNING

THREE ACTS OF MUSIC

THE ANTS AT PRINCETON

IN THE HOLIDAYS

THE GUEST IN ROOM NINETEEN

THE LONG WAY OUT

THE WOMAN FROM “21”

ON AN OCEAN WAVE

DEARLY BELOVED

PAT AT THE FAIR REUNION AT THE FAIR

THE MYSTERY OF THE RAYMOND MORTGAGE

READE, SUBSTITUTE RIGHT HALF

A DEBT OF HONOR

THE ROOM WITH THE GREEN BLINDS

A LUCKLESS SANTA CLAUS

PAIN AND THE SCIENTIST

THE TRAIL OF THE DUKE

LITTLE MINNIE MCCLOSKEY

THE OLD FRONTIERSMAN

THE SPIRE AND THE GARGOYLE

THE DIARY OF A SOPHOMORE

THE PRINCE OF PESTS

SENTIMENT — AND THE USE OF ROUGE

THE PIERIAN SPRINGS AND THE LAST STRAW

CEDRIC THE STOKER

ALPHABETICAL LIST OF SHORT STORIES

“BOIL SOME WATER--LOTS OF IT”

“I DIDN’T GET OVER”

“O RUSSET WITCH!”

“THE SENSIBLE THING”

A DEBT OF HONOR

A FREEZE-OUT

A FULL LIFE

A LUCKLESS SANTA CLAUS

A MAN IN THE WAY

A NEW LEAF

A NICE QUIET PLACE

A NIGHT AT THE FAIR

A PATRIOTIC SHORT

A SHORT TRIP HOME

A WOMAN WITH A PAST

ABSOLUTION

AFTERNOON OF AN AUTHOR

AN ALCOHOLIC CASE

AT YOUR AGE

BABYLON REVISITED

BASIL AND CLEOPATRA

BASIL: THE FRESHEST BOY

BENEDICTION

BERNICE BOBS HER HAIR

BETWEEN THREE AND FOUR

CEDRIC THE STOKER

CRAZY SUNDAY

DALYRIMPLE GOES WRONG

DEARLY BELOVED

DESIGN IN PLASTER

DICE, BRASSKNUCKLES & GUITAR

EMOTIONAL BANKRUPTCY

FAMILY IN THE WIND

FANTASIES

FINANCING FINNEGAN

FIRST BLOOD

FLIGHT AND PURSUIT

FORGING AHEAD

FUN IN AN ARTIST’S STUDIO

GRETCHEN’S FORTY WINKS

HE THINKS HE’S WONDERFUL

HEAD AND SHOULDERS

HOT AND COLD BLOOD

IMAGE ON THE HEART

IN THE HOLIDAYS

INSIDE THE HOUSE

JACOB’S LADDER

JEMINA, THE MOUNTAIN GIRL

JOSEPHINE: A WOMAN WITH A PAST

LIPSTICK: A COLLEGE COMEDY

LITTLE MINNIE MCCLOSKEY

LO, THE POOR PEACOCK!

LOVE IN THE NIGHT

MAGNETISM

MAJESTY

MAY DAY

MIGHTIER THAN THE SWORD

MORE THAN JUST A HOUSE

MR. ICKY

MY LAST FLAPPERS

MYRA MEETS HIS FAMILY

NEWS OF PARIS--FIFTEEN YEARS AGO

NO HARM TRYING

ON AN OCEAN WAVE

ON SCHEDULE,

ON THE TRAIL OF PAT HOBBY

ON YOUR OWN

ONE INTERNE

ONE OF MY OLDEST FRIENDS

ONE TRIP ABROAD

OUTSIDE THE CABINET-MAKER’S

PAIN AND THE SCIENTIST

PAT AT THE FAIR REUNION AT THE FAIR

PAT HOBBY AND ORSON WELLES

PAT HOBBY DOES HIS BIT

PAT HOBBY, PUTATIVE FATHER

PAT HOBBY’S CHRISTMAS WISH

PAT HOBBY’S COLLEGE DAYS

PAT HOBBY’S PREVIEW

PAT HOBBY’S SECRET

PORCELAIN AND PINK

PRESUMPTION

RAGS MARTIN-JONES AND THE PR-NCE OF W-LES

READE, SUBSTITUTE RIGHT HALF

SENTIMENT — AND THE USE OF ROUGE

SHAGGY’S MORNING

SIX OF ONE--

STRANGE SANCTUARY

TARQUIN OF CHEAPSIDE

TEAMED WITH GENIUS

THE ADJUSTER

THE ANTS AT PRINCETON

THE BABY PARTY

THE BOWL

THE BRIDAL PARTY

THE CAMEL’S BACK

THE CAPTURED SHADOW

THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON

THE CUT-GLASS BOWL

THE DIAMOND AS BIG AS THE RITZ

THE DIARY OF A SOPHOMORE

THE FIEND

THE FOUR FISTS

THE GUEST IN ROOM NINETEEN

THE HOMES OF THE STARS

THE HOTEL CHILD

THE I.O.U.

THE ICE PALACE

THE JELLY-BEAN.

THE LAST OF THE BELLES

THE LEES OF HAPPINESS

THE LONG WAY OUT

THE LOST DECADE

THE LOVE BOAT

THE MYSTERY OF THE RAYMOND MORTGAGE

THE NIGHT AT CHANCELLORSVILLE

THE OFFSHORE PIRATE

THE OLD FRONTIERSMAN

THE ORDEAL

THE PASSIONATE ESKIMO

THE PERFECT LIFE

THE PIERIAN SPRINGS AND THE LAST STRAW

THE POPULAR GIRL

THE PRINCE OF PESTS

THE PUSHER-IN-THE-FACE

THE RICH BOY

THE ROOM WITH THE GREEN BLINDS

THE ROUGH CROSSING

THE SCANDAL DETECTIVES

THE SPIRE AND THE GARGOYLE

THE SWIMMERS

THE TRAIL OF THE DUKE

THE UNSPEAKABLE EGG

THE WOMAN FROM “21”

THREE ACTS OF MUSIC

THREE HOURS BETWEEN PLANES

TOO CUTE FOR WORDS,

TWO FOR A CENT

TWO OLD-TIMERS

TWO WRONGS

UNCLASSIFIED MASTERPIECES

WHAT A HANDSOME PAIR!

WINTER DREAMS

YOUR WAY AND MINE

The Plays and Screenplays

THE GIRL FROM LAZY J

In 1911 when Fitzgerald was only fourteen, he joined The Elizabethan Dramatic Club of St. Paul, a group of about forty youngsters. The group was named after its founder Elizabeth Magoffin, who had just turned twenty. She preserved a number of manuscripts, including her transcriptions of her friend Scott’s first four attempts at writing for the theatre.  These are the first four plays in this section, which represent Fitzgerald’s earliest surviving works. The Girl from Lazy J is brief and flawed in many ways, but each succeeding play demonstrates the young playwright’s swift development.  The club produced one of his plays each summer from 1911 to 1914. A year after her death in 1951, Princeton University Library purchased the manuscripts, but they remained until 1978.

Fitzgerald in 1915, a year after joining the St. Paul theatre group

CONTENTS

CAST OF CHARACTERS

DESCRIPTION OF FURNISHINGS

THE GIRL FROM LAZY J

CAST OF CHARACTERS

MR. GEORGE KENDALL, owner of the “Diamond O” Ranch — Ed. Power

MRS. KENDALL, his wife — M. Armstrong

JACK DARCY, his nephew from Frisco... — S. Fitzgerald

LETICIA LARNED, a cowgirl — D. Greene

TONY GONZOLES, a Mexican cowpuncher.. — R. Washington

SCENE: Living room of a Ranch in Texas

TIME: 11:45 to 12:15 at night

DESCRIPTION OF FURNISHINGS

Interior of rancher’s shack. Lights dim.

Some candles. Rustic furniture and hangings — elk horns, Mexican baskets, blankets, etc. — Two chairs, a table, and a lounge.

Door at L. Cabinet at R. Window at C.

Properties of Characters:

Jack Darcy — Girl’s picture.

Leticia Larned — Mask; rope; revolver.

Mr. Kendall — Note; revolver.

Mrs. Kendall — Telegram.

Tony Gonzoles — Shotgun; rope; packet of letters.

THE GIRL FROM LAZY J

(Curtain rises, showing Jack in chair, whistling.)

JACK: Accepted, accepted, by jingo, by the prettiest girl this side of the Mississippi. (looks at -picture.) Look at her. She’s a daisy. But I wonder what Mother will say. And say, I can just see Father’s face when he hears of it. But why should they care? Lord knows she’s a fine girl and I’m willing to give up Yale for Leticia. Why, put her in a decent dress and she’d be the belle of the country. My, I’m tired, but I know I can’t sleep thinking of this. If Mother says no, I’ll be all broken up. (Noise outside.

Rises.) What’s that? A row I guess. Probably Uncle’s after one of the men. (Yawns, calls.) Tony, Tony! I wonder where that lazy greaser is.

(Enter Mr. Kendall, kicking Tony before him.)

KENDALL: YOU will try to whip those horses, hey, you measly Mexican scoundrel? Didn’t I tell you, Tony, that the next time you laid a hand to them I’d skin you? I ought by rights to put a bullet through your low down yellow hide. Now git, before I let daylight through you. Wait a minute. (To Jack.) Did you want him for anything?

JACK: (TO Tony.) Tell José he can turn in now. It’s almost twelve.

(Exit Tony.)

KENDALL: What do you think, Jack. I just went out to the stable and found him beating Dolly. I think I taught him a lesson. He won’t be licking my horses in a hurry again.

JACK: I don’t like the looks of that fellow and you’d better be careful with these Mexicans, Uncle. They’d as soon knife a man as they would a dog and Tony’s no exception to the general rule.

KENDALL: Huh! They’re only good for beating horses. They haven’t got enough grit to tackle a white man. But that fellow’s been acting queerly for some time with the horses and I think I’ll discharge him tomorrow. Jim and José can do the work, if you and I do a little extra.

JACK: Sure. By the way, I’ve seen him hanging around at the Lazy J. Maybe he’s got some business with Mrs. Larned.

KENDALL: Oh you young scamp! What have you been doing at the Lazy J? Stuck on Leticia, hey? And say, I’ve got a note here that I received this afternoon. I don’t know whether to take it as a joke or not.

JACK: Let’s see it. (Reads.) “Mr. Kendall, I warn you that on the night of August 12 I will relieve you of the five thousand dollars that you received last week in payment for the yearling steers.

Yours very sincerely — D. S. H.” Well of all things! I think I’ll keep this for a curiosity.

KENDALL: Well, what do you think I ought to do about it? Just let it go?

JACK: DO about it? There’s nothing to be done.

KENDALL: But look. It says on the night of the twelfth and this is the twelfth.

JACK: (Looks at paper.) So it does.

KENDALL: You don’t really think he’ll come?

JACK: Not exactly. But you want me to sit up and await developments.

KENDALL: Well I allow I’d sleep a bit easier if you did.

JACK: All right, Uncle. (Looks at watch.) Why it’s a quarter to twelve now. This may be only a joke but we might as well be on the safe side. Is the money in this cabinet?

KENDALL: Yes, and you’ll find some cigarettes on the shelf and there’s magazines so you can make yourself comfortable. And by the way, we might as well not say anything about it to Mrs. Kendall.

JACK: Very well. Good night.

KENDALL: Good night. And if you feel sleepy, don’t hesitate to take a nap. (Exit.)

(Enter Mrs. Kendall. Sees Jack.)

MRS. KENDALL: HOW soon are you going to bed, Jack?

JACK: Just a little while, Auntie.

MRS. KENDALL: (She begins to lock the windows.) Hello! Someone has been tampering with this catch. It won’t lock. Well I don’t suppose it makes any difference.

JACK: Auntie, I’ve got something to tell you.

MRS. KENDALL: What is it?

JACK: I’m engaged.

MRS. KENDALL: You’re engaged? Jack, you’re fooling.

JACK: No, that’s the truth.

MRS. KENDALL: Jack, what will your mother say?

JACK: Mother will like her, I know.

MRS. KENDALL: Tell me, who are you engaged to?

JACK: Her name is Leticia.

MRS. KENDALL: Leticia Larned?

JACK: The same.

MRS. KENDALL: Well Jack, you’ll be the death of me yet. But I can’t find it in my heart to be angry with you. Leticia is a fine girl.

JACK: She’s the best girl in the world and, Auntie, here’s her picture.

MRS. KENDALL: Well so long as you have to get married some time, I suppose I ought to be satisfied since you’ve picked out a nice girl. Still it does shock a body to learn it so suddenly. Well, good night. Come up when you’re ready and be sure and put out all the candles. (Exit.)

JACK: She took it better than I expected her to. Here’s hoping Mother will be as easily pacified. (Walks to window and looks out.) My, it’s a dreary night. Hello! Auntie was right. This catch has been tampered with. I half believe there’s something in this, and I’ve got a hunch that that rascal Tony’s at the bottom of it. First, the way he’s been acting today. He seems to think he’s got a grudge against us and is taking it out on the horses.

And he’s always hanging around the Lazy J. Then the note. And finally this lock. I wonder what the initials “D. S. H.” stand for.

I feel the solution lies in those three letters. (He sits in chair, yawns and goes to sleep. Enter Tony, sneaks around, ties him, and goes out after snuffing candle. Jack wakes up but finds himself tied and helpless. The window slowly opens and Leticia enters, masked. She looks around her but does not see Jack. The door opens and Tony enters and begins to work on the cabinet. She hides behind chair. She draws revolver and steps forward.)

LETICIA: Hands up.

(Tony turns around startled and throws up hands.)

Now Tony Gonzoles, alias Dead Shot Hoskins, what are you doing here at this time of night?

TONY: I may ask the same question to you, Miss —

LETICIA: Hush! Not a word from you. You probably know why I came here tonight. Where are the letters you stole from my mother five years ago? You blackmailer. Hand them to me now or, as I live, you’ll die. I’ll give you three. One — Two — Thank you. (Burns them.) And now as I have accomplished my purpose, I think I’ll lace you up a bit to keep you out of mischief. (Ties him and starts for door with revolver in holster.)

(Enter Mr. Kendall.)

KENDALL: By all that’s holy, it’s a woman! Well Miss D. S. H., or whatever your initials are, your game is up. I’ve got you with the goods. Let’s have that gun. You got two of ‘em tied up, eh? Well you are a plucky one.

LETICIA: (Noticing Jack. Aside.) It’s Jack. How shall I explain my presence here?

(Mr. Kendall unties Gonzoles, who starts for door. Unties Jack, who starts towards Gonzoles.)

JACK: SO you’re a blackmailer as well as a robber. Yes, I heard it all. Take that! (They fire. Gonzoles falls.) Uncle, put away your gun. I don’t know who that girl is, but whoever she is, she has saved my life tonight, for Tony, or rather Hoskins, would have stabbed me before he made his getaway. (Walks toward Leticia.) Well whoever you are, you’re going to shed that mask now.

(Enter Mrs. Kendall, with telegram.)

MRS. KENDALL: Here’s a telegram for you, Jack. (Sees Tony on floor.) Oh, what’s this!

JACK: (Opens telegram and reads.) “Mr. Jack Darcy, -- Ranch — I consent to your marriage. Go ahead. Mrs. Larned an old school friend of mine. Congratulations. Mother.” (Looks up; in astonishment, sees that masked girl, who has now unmasked, is Leticia.’)

(Starts back.) Leticia!

LETICIA: Jack!

KENDALL: God bless you, my children.

(Curtain.)

THE CAPTURED SHADOW

A Melodramatic-Comedy in Two Acts

Written for The Elizabethan Dramatic Club and Presented on Friday evening, August 23, 1912 at Oak Hall Under the direction of Elizabeth Magoffin.

Seven males Five females Time of presentation — One hour SYNOPSIS OF SCENES

Act I — Drawing room of Mr. Connage, New York City.

Act II — The same.

Time of action — about 10:30 P. M.

CONTENTS

CAST OF CHARACTERS

COSTUMES

ACT I

ACT II

CAST OF CHARACTERS

HUBERT CONNAGE — Lawrence Boardman

THORTON HART DUDLEY, alias “The Shadow” — F. Scott Fitzgerald

MISS SAUNDERS, housekeeper.... Dorothy Greene

MR. BEVERLY CONNAGE, father of Hubert — Paul Ballion

MRS. BEVERLY CONNAGE, mother of Hubert — Margaret Winchester

DOROTHY CONNAGE, sister of Hubert — Anne Winchester

HELEN MAYBURN, friend of Dorothy — Eleanor Alair

RABBIT SIMMONS (A CROOK) — Theodore Parkhouse

CHINYMAN RUDD (A CROOK) — James Porterfield

OFFICER MCGINNESS (A DETECTIVE) John L. Mitchell

OFFICER LEON DUREAL (A DETECTIVE) — George Squires

EMMA KATE, the maid — Julia Dorr

COSTUMES

Hubert Connage — tuxedo.

The Shadow — dress suit.

Miss Saunders — gray housekeeper’s dress, kerchief, and cap and apron.

Mr. Connage — smoking jacket.

Mrs. Connage — dressy house dress and jewels.

Dorothy Connage — evening dress.

Helen Mayburn — evening dress.

Rabbit Simmons — old clothes.

Chinyman Rudd — old clothes, and checked suit later.

Officer McGinness — policeman’s suit.

Officer Leon Dureal — policeman’s suit.

Emma Kate — black maid’s dress, cap, and apron.

ACT I

(Discovered: Emma Kate sitting asleep in the armchair.)

(Pause 10 seconds.)

(Voice outside heard singing “Silver T breads Among the Gold”)

(Enter Miss Saunders B. L. E.) (She puts on lights.)

(She crosses to the center of the stage, sees Emma Kate and folds her arms.)

MISS S.: Well!

(Pause 4 seconds.)

MISS S.: Well!

(Emma Kate stirs uneasily and rubs her eyes.)

EMMA K.: (Drowsily.) Oh yes — yes mum.

MISS S.: (Sternly.) What on earth have you been doing?

EMMA K.: (Sitting up.) Asleepin’, mum.

MISS S.: Sleeping, and in that chair. The best chair.

EMMA K.: Yes mum.

MISS S.: DO you realize that it is after ten o’clock?

EMMA K.: (Getting up.) Why Mrs. Connage toi’ me as how I was to wait here for young Mr. Hubert. He’s still out. An’ as he wasn’t come yet an’ the chair was settin’ there doin’ nothin’, I didn’t think it’ud be no harm if I slept a bit, mum.

MISS S.: (Shrugging her shoulders.) So Mr. Hubert is still out, is he?

EMMA K.: Yes’m, Miss Saunders.

MISS S.: By the way, please brush out the chair.

EMMA K.: Why I ain’t hurt the chair none.

MISS S.: (Angrily.) Please brush out the chair and no impudence.

EMMA K.: I wasn’t meaning to be impudent. (She starts to brush out the chair.)

MISS S.: YOU may as well go to bed. I’ll watch out for Mr. Hubert.

I intend giving him a piece of my mind. The idea of the young man coming home intoxicated every night. (Sits down at right.)

EMMA K.: (Turns towards her.) Oh mum, he’s adrinkin’ awful. I’ve had to sit up for him almost every night an’ I was awalkin’ by Mrs. Connage’s room today and I hears her say — (Checks herself.)

MISS S.: Aha! You were eavesdropping, were your That’s a nice trick. A nice trick, I must say.

EMMA K.: Honest to goodness, mum, I didn’t mean to hear her talkin’.

MISS S.: That’s a sly trick, Emma Kate, but I have detected you.

EMMA K.: Yes mum.

MISS S.: Well now. What did Mrs. Connage say?

EMMA K,: (Sur-prised.) Hmm?

MISS S.: What did she say?

EMMA K.: Why mum, a minute ago —

MISS S.: I have no personal interest in what Mrs. Connage was saying. I simply desire to know how much you have found out about the family secrets.

EMMA K.: I know most of the family secrets at that.

MISS S.: Eavesdroppers are certainly despicable creatures, heigh-ho — but I am waiting to hear what Mrs. Connage said.

EMMA K.: Between you and I, miss —

MISS S.: I and you, if you please.

EMMA K.: Cross your heart and hope to die if you tell?

MISS S.: How perfectly ridiculous. Of course I won’t go through any such childish proceedings. I wish to find out what Mrs. Connage said.

EMMA K.: Well 1 was apassin’ up the hall an’ Mrs. Connage was atellin’ to Mr. Connage ‘at young Mr. Hubert had been in jail three days when his dad — when Mr. Connage thought he was in Atlantic City.

MISS S.: Preserve us! This is news, real news. Hmmm. (Changing her tone suddenly.) How perfectly awful for you to listen to all that. And did you hear anything else?

EMMA K.: An’ Mr. Connage got awful mad. He swore some, too. Gee it was great! He kin swear better than the milkman. He said he’d turn Mr. Hubert out of the house and cut him off without a cent.

MISS S.: Dearie me! And what else did Mrs. Connage say?

(Dorothy outside.)

DOROTHY: Miss Saunders.

MISS S.: You may go now. (Emma Kate starts.) But don’t forget to brush out the chair. And no more of your mean sneaky eavesdropping tricks. (Emma Kate starts to cry.)

DOROTHY: (Outside.) Miss Saunders!

MISS S.: I am here, Miss Dorothy.

DOROTHY: (At doorway with newspaper.) Oh Miss Saunders, I’ve got the most fascinating newspaper article. (Sees Emma Kate.) Why, what’s the matter here?

MISS S.: I found this girl monopolizing the best chair.

EMMA K.: (Sniff, etc.)

DOROTHY: Oh poor Emma Kate. Were you tired?

EMMA K.: Tired? No mum. No I’m never tired.

DOROTHY: She didn’t hurt the chair, Miss S.

MISS S.: She sat in it. I asked her to retire.

EMMA K.: I’m goin’.

MISS S.: Have the kindness to hurry.

(Exit Emma K.)

DOROTHY: Miss Saunders, what’s a sorehead?

MISS S.: Vulgar slang. And where did you hear that?

DOROTHY: Why Brother Hubert said you were an awful sorehead.

(Miss Saunders displeased.)

MISS S.: (Sees newspaper.) Were you not forbidden to read newspapers?

DOROTHY: Oh yes, but I found the most romantic story.

MISS S.: Romantic bosh.

DOROTHY: It’s about a burglar.

MISS S.: Horrors!

DOROTHY: Not an ordinary burglar.

MISS S.: What kind?

DOROTHY: He is called the Shadow. For two weeks the police have been after him but they can’t catch him. He slips through their fingers. That’s why they call him the Shadow. Oh they say he’s so handsome.

MISS S.: Oh! (Sighs.)

DOROTHY: So accomplished!

MISS S.: Oh!! (Sighs.)

DOROTHY: And so wicked!

MISS S.: Oh!!! (Startled.)

DOROTHY: I like to imagine that he isn’t really a burglar at all but only pretending to be one. Because he always sends back everything he steals with his compliments.

MISS S.: He does?

DOROTHY: Yes. And real burglars don’t do that, do they?

MISS S.: Unfortunately they don’t. But I am perfectly aware that the person who stole my watch last year was a real burglar.

DOROTHY: Really?

MISS S.: He might send that back and leave off the compliments. I’ll give him the compliments if I catch him. That’s the second Ingersoll I’ve lost in the space of ten years.

DOROTHY: Yes, it’s terrible the way time flies. To change the subject, Helen Mayburn is coming over tonight to spend the night.

MISS S.: The poor girl that’s going to marry your brother?

DOROTHY: Why Miss Saunders!

MISS S.: I think she is making a fool of herself to do it. And I have a right to my opinion. And I will tell Hubert so.

DOROTHY: Poor Hubert.

MISS S.: Poor Hubert, indeed!

(Girl’s voice outside singing — “Everybody’s doin’ it”)

(Enter Helen Mayburn. She sees Dorothy and stops in the doorway.)

HELEN: Why hello, Dorothy. What’s the row about?

DOROTHY: Nothing at all.

MISS S.: Yes it is.

DOROTHY: (TO Miss Saunders.) Don’t you say a word.

MISS S.: Miss Mayburn, I feel it my duty to tell you that the man you are going to marry is a drunkard.

HELEN: Miss Saunders, he is not.

DOROTHY: Helen dear, don’t listen to her.

MISS S.: Indeed! Let me tell you young ladies that you must behave quietly tonight.

DOROTHY: Oh we will.

HELEN: Of course.

MISS S.: And remember, no raids on the pantry. Last time you two were together you tried to steal some cake which I would have given you if you had asked me politely.

HELEN: Oh, but it was so much more fun to steal it.

MISS S.: And James thought you were burglars.

HELEN AND DOROTHY: And we pushed him down stairs.

MISS S.: And he left the next morning. Well, we must have no more of that. Good evening, young ladies. (Exit at L. B. E.)

HELEN: What a most peculiar old lady.

DOROTHY: Very. She’ll probably try to get you off in a corner and say all the mean things she can about Hubert.

HELEN: Well! When we have our little chat, I’ll tell her what I think of her. Where is Hubert?

DOROTHY: Down town somewhere, I suppose. Come let us go upstairs.

HELEN: And Dorothy — we’ll practice the turkey trot before the big mirror in the hall. Come on.

(Exit the two.)

(Knocking outside.)

(Pause five seconds.)

(Knocking is repeated.)

HUBERT: (Outside.) Ah, what in ze name of Pat is the matter now? Open ze darn old door. Can’t a person enter his paternal residence wisout his key, ‘specially when he’s been so confounded “nfortunate as to lose the old key? It’s aggravating and antagonizing. Hello. Hello. (Crash outside.) There’s a nice trick. Leave it unlocked all the time. Pick me up, boys. I’m not broken but only dented. Pick up those two teeth near the door. They may come in handy in the morning.

(He appears tottering in the doorway.)

HUBERT: Good evening. Why there’s nobody home. (Enter behind hiyn Chinyman Rudd and Rabbit Simmons. ) Come in, gentlemen. Make yourself at home and sit down. (Falls against Ruddy pushing him into chair. Then pushes Rabbit into chair. Tries to sit down.) Pardon me, but could you give me a slight assistance?

(Rabbit pushes him into chair.) Much obliged. My legs are a little stiff from walking.

RUDD: Say, is this where you hang out?

HUBERT: This is my domicile abode.

RABBIT: Your paternal hemorrhage?

RUDD: Heritage. You ain’t got no edication.

RABBIT: Say, we’ve forgotten your name.

HUBERT: My name’s Hubert Connage. Dad is Mr. Connage.

Mother is Mrs. Connage. And my sister is Dorothy Connage. All the family, you see, have the same name. It’s surprising to me, to say the least. I’ve often wondered what a remarkable coincidence it was that we all had the same name. There’s Dad, one — he’s really two but we’ll count him one — and me, two. No, I’m one too. One, two, three, four.

RABBIT: Who the deuce are we for?

RUDD: Forty-seventh Street gang.

BOTH: Rah! Rah! Rah! (Both whistle.)

HUBERT: Hurray for you.

RUDD: Say, honest it’s awful nice of you to pick us up on the streets and bring us back with you to spend the night, but what will your governor say?

HUBERT: Probably say “how-de-do.”

RABBIT: I don’t care if he only says it. What’s worrying me is, — Has he got a dog?

HUBERT: No, there’s no dog. There’s a cat, tho’. Cutest little devil.

RABBIT: Divine, ain’t it, Ching?

RUDD: Unsophisticating.

RABBIT: Oh chickering.

RUDD: Say, this reminds me of Charley’s opium joint. All them there pictures and things.

RABBIT: (Sees statue of Venus de Milo.) Your mother swimmin’?

HUBERT: Mother? No. That’s a good one. That’s Venus de Milo.

RUDD: Pity you broke it. How did it bust?

RABBIT: Some one kicked it on the impulse of the moment.

HUBERT: I’m going to introduce you to Dad and tell him you’re my friends and are going to spend the night with me.

RABBIT: The likes of us ain’t for here. We both look like we been shot at an’ missed. We don’t move in the same circles.

HUBERT: I don’t know about circles but I have lately been moving in all sorts of curves.

RUDD: We’re — we’re — A couple of crooks.

HUBERT: That’s a good job. Are you married?

RABBIT: No, I got these scratches from a cat.

HUBERT: What are your names?

RUDD: On the island he’s 96 and I’m 108.

RABBIT: In social life he’s Chinyman Rudd and I’m Rabbit Simmons.

HUBERT: Rabbit, I had a rabbit once. Pretty little things, aren’t they? This rabbit was an awful crook. He stole more lettuce. So you’re burglars. What do you steal, bases?

RABBIT: We’ve been working for a fellow called the Shadow. He’s a kind of a gentleman burglar. He goes around in a dress suit and robs houses. We spy around for him, see when the family is going to be at home, find out about valuables and he pays us five hundred dollars a week apiece.

HUBERT: Who the dickens is the Shadow?

RUDD: His real name’s Thorton Hart. Nobody knows nothing about him. He acts just like a gentleman. He came about two weeks ago and he’s about as nervy as they make ‘em. They can’t catch him. He slips through the cops every time.

HUBERT: A shadow, hey? Well I’ll bet the old Shadow won’t have time for reflection if some good detectives get after him. Ever read Sherlock Holmes, Mr. Bunny?

RABBIT: Rabbit. No. Ever read Nick Carter?

HUBERT: Never. Say, I don’t want to see the poor old Shadow shackled. I hope the police don’t get him.

RUDD: He’s got on a job tonight. He says it’s a big one but he won’t tell us about it.

HUBERT: Success to him. Come, we’ll drink to him. (He fills up three glasses.) To the Shadow! May he never have the great misfortune to be a captured Shadow.

ALL: TO the Shadow! (All drink.)

HUBERT: Well, now I’ll procure you fellows some clothes. Why the way you’re dressed is a disgrace. I thought all crooks were rich. I’ll find you some good clothes. You make yourself at home and help yourself. (Exit.)

RABBIT: Well here’s our chance. Pile in a bagful of that silverware and beat it quick.

RUDD: AW say, nix.

RABBIT: Why not?

RUDD: When the guy meets us on the street, then brings us home and tells us he’s going to have us here to spend the night, we oughtn’t to rush off with his silver. H’ain’t you got no manners?

RABBIT: Just look. What couldn’t we do with this and this. Hold me back, please.

RUDD: I got enough to do holding myself.

BOTH: Ohh. (Sighing.)

(Enter Hubert with clothes.)

HUBERT: Now here’s some clothes. You go in there and put ‘em on. Try to look respectable and I’ll introduce you to Dad.

RUDD: What does your dad weigh?

RABBIT: HOW’S his punch?

HUBERT: Don’t know, but his whiskey’s darn good.

RUDD: Say, are these ours for keeps?

HUBERT: Sure.

RABBIT: Well I’ll leave my things here in exchange. They ain’t much to look at but they’re valuable as relics. It would grieve me if they were thrown away.

HUBERT: Don’t worry. I’ll put ‘em in a glass case.

RABBIT: Say, this is awful good of you even if you are tight.

HUBERT: Oh that’s all right, Mr. Hare.

RABBIT: Rabbit, Rabbit.

HUBERT: Rabies!

RABBIT: Rabbit.

HUBERT: Where?

RABBIT: Naw, Rabbit is my name.

HUBERT: Oh! I couldn’t imagine what you were talking about. Ha-Ha — (Laughs.)

RABBIT: Where do we change?

HUBERT: In there. Oh. (Something occurs to him.) (Laughs.) I’ve got the greatest scheme. Aldermen.

RUDD: Where?

HUBERT: YOU! (Still convulsed with laughter.)

RABBIT: He’s dippy.

RUDD: Poor guy.

HUBERT: NOW don’t you see? I’ll introduce you as aldermen from the Seventh Ward.

RUDD: (Doubtfully.) Hm!

RABBIT: Crooked politics.

RUDD: Say, do we look like aldermen?

HUBERT: Exactly, and it’ll be a capital joke on Dad.

RABBIT: NO alderman has got anything on me. Clarence, pass the sherry.

RUDD: The skenatcho sauce, please.

HUBERT: NOW remember, you’re aldermen from the S-s-t Ward.

RABBIT: The what?

HUBERT: The Whist Ward.

RUDD: Try and whistle it.

RABBIT: S-t.

HUBERT: Thixth. There it is. Thixth Ward.

RUDD: Not the Sixth. There’s an awful lot of roughnecks in the Sixth Ward.

RABBIT: Mercy me. How perfectly fumigating.

HUBERT: NOW you fellows come along and jump into these duds and then you can reform Tammany Hall.

(Exit Hubert and Rudd.)

(Rabbit sneaks over and fills a glass full of whiskey.)

(A head is -poked cautiously in the back door. The Shadow is seen. He sees Rabbit and starts. He sneaks up to the table, seizes a book and throws it at Rabbit’s feet. Rabbit jumps.)

RABBIT: The Shadow.

SHADOW: Well?

RABBIT: What are you doing here?

SHADOW: That’s just what I was going to ask you.

RABBIT: I am here with a special invitation.

SHADOW: I am here with no invitation at all. In fact I intend to rob this house.

RABBIT: SO this is the job you wouldn’t tell us about.

SHADOW: Exactly. Now what are you doing here?

RABBIT: I am thinking of going into politics.

SHADOW: Rabbit!

RABBIT: I’ve got a job as an alderman. Sixth Ward.

SHADOW: Alderman?

RABBIT: That’s straight goods. I’ve always been fond of politics and now, why I’ve got some prominent capitalists backing me and —

(Shrugs his shoulders.) The father of my chief backer owns this house and I’m spending the night with him.

SHADOW: IS he crazy?

RABBIT: NO.

SHADOW: Drunk?

RABBIT: HOW the deuce did you know?

SHADOW: Why (laughs) I thought he might be.

RABBIT: You’re tryin’ to kid me now. I’d really make a good alderman, tho’. I never was cut out for a crook. I was born for something better. Sometimes I get thinking that I ought to been a minister. Gosh! You ought to see me kiss a baby.

SHADOW: Don’t take advantage of a child, Rabbit. The poor things can’t defend themselves.

RABBIT: Hm?

SHADOW: I have no doubt you’re a pious youth and will make a simply great alderman and a model politician.

RABBIT: Well, how about you? You’re not so bad as you try to pretend to be. I don’t think you’re no crook at all. Why do you pack “p all the stuff you steal and send it back to the people you steal it from with “the compliments of the Shadow” on a little card? I seen you sendin’ back the stuff you steal. You act as if you were doing it for fun.

SHADOW: Maybe I am, Rabbit, maybe I am.

RABBIT: If you’re trying the crook business simply to find out what it’s like or to get fun out of it, why, you’d better cut it out. It doesn’t pay.

SHADOW: Enough of this. I intend to do a little work tonight and see what I can pick up around the place. I must get familiar with the house and introduce myself to the inhabitants. Let me see. “House owned by Mr. Connage, married. Two children, Hubert and Dorothy, twenty-two and eighteen respectively, and Miss Saunders, housekeeper.” Hubert must have been the one you say you are acquainted with.

RABBIT: Yes, we are on quite intimate terms.

SHADOW: I’ll look him up. In the meanwhile, of course, you’ll say nothing to any one about my being in the house.

RABBIT: Mum as a mouse.

SHADOW: And now for inspection. (Exit the Shadow.)

(Enter Rudd in a light check suit smoking black cigar.)

RABBIT: Well look at the duds.

RUDD: A little tasty class. They belong to the butler. Mr. Connage didn’t have any sporty enough for me.

(Voice outside.)

MRS. CONNAGE: Beverly, oh Beverly.

RABBIT: Beat it quick.

RUDD: Stand your ground. It’s the lady of the house.

RABBIT: Oh. Oh. (Shivering.)

MRS. C.: (Coming in.) Ah, callers. (To the crooks.) Good evening, gentlemen.

RUDD: Evenin’.

RABBIT: Howdy.

MRS. C.: Have you called to see Mr. Connage?

RUDD: Well not exactly.

MRS. C.: Or Miss Connage?

RUDD: Not minutely.

MRS. C.: Have you called to see me?

RABBIT: Not precisely.

RUDD: The truth is we’re aldermen from the Sixth Ward.

RABBIT: Personal friends of your son.

RUDD: What do they call you?

MRS. C.: I am Mrs. Connage. Well I’m afraid my son isn’t home yet.

RABBIT: Oh we just left him.

MRS. C.: IS he in the house?

RUDD: (Aside to Rabbit.) Lie to her. If she finds him drunk we’ll get kicked out.

MRS. C.: Where is he?

RABBIT: Why he’s pie-eyed.

(Rudd cautions him.)

RUDD: Sh-Sh.

MRS. C.: My son been having trouble with his eyes?

RUDD: He was half shot.

MRS. C.: (Screams.) Shot in the eye? Who shot him?

RABBIT: Well, when a guy gets half shot he usually does it himself.

RUDD: That’s so.

MRS. C.: He shot himself?

RUDD: He did.

RABBIT: J

RABBIT: (Aside.) A pretty mess.

MRS. C.: My heavens. This is terrible. Where is he?

RUDD: Why he’s here — I mean he’s — a —

RABBIT: Down town in a room of my boarding house.

(Mrs. Connage faints in the arms of Rabbit.)

RABBIT: Get some water quick.

RUDD: There ain’t none. Will whiskey do?

RABBIT: Anything.

(They give her whiskey. She revives.)

MRS. C.: I must go to him at once. Wait for me. I’ll get my wraps.

(Exit Mrs. Connage.)

RUDD: Well you did it.

RABBIT: You mean you did it.

RUDD: Whoever did it, between us, we’re in a pretty hole.

RABBIT: Well let’s clear out o’ here fore she comes down.

(They look out entrances.)

RUDD: Coast’s clear.

(They tiptoe out.)

(Enter Mr. Connage followed by Miss Saunders.)

MISS S.: But Mr. Connage.

MR. C.: No buts. My daughter informs me that you have been extracting bits of information from the servants and this alone would make me discharge you. But the idea of your throwing all my cigars out the window because you thought they were cartridges, that is too much!

MISS S.: But I did think they were cartridges. They smelt like it.

MR. C.: No matter. I asked you to leave in the morning and leave you shall. I am a man of my word.

MISS S.: But this is a serious step. Think. I have been with you so long and served you so well.

MR. C.: If you are here by tomorrow I will have you forcibly removed.

MISS S.: Such is my lot to be derided and misunderstood. Such is my fate.

MR. C.: Oh you still here?

MISS S.: Dear Mr. Connage —

MR. C.: Ohh!

(Violent ringings of the doorbell, shouts, hammering at door.)

EMMA K.: (Coming in at back.) Oh Mr. Connage, there are a lot of policemen at the gate all yelling that there’s a thief in the house. They’re breaking in.

MR. C.: A thief in my house?

MISS S.: Where, where?

EMMA K.: Oh what shall we do?

MISS S.: They’ve broken in.

EMMA K.: Here they come.

MR. C.: This is an outrage.

(Tramping in the hall. Enter a policeman.)

MCGINNESS: Stop. I’ll enter. Sir, there’s a burglar in the house. We saw him enter.

MR. C.: Impossible!

MCGINNESS: Nevertheless, it’s so.

EMMA K.: There is no burglar.

MISS S.: There may be.

MCGINNESS: If you are concealing him — Leon!

(Enter Leon Dureal.)

LEON: Oui, oui, monsieur.

MCGINNESS: Guard the stairs! Marshal the inmates. Search the house. We have reason to believe that the thief is none other than the famous Shadow himself.

MISS S.: The Shadow?

MR. C.: In my house?

MISS S.: Terrible!

EMMAK.: Awful!

VOICES OUTSIDE: Catch the thief. After him. Catch the Shadow. Nab the crook.

(Enter the girls.)

DOROTHY: What is the matter?

MR. C.: These men say there’s a burglar in the house.

LEON: Up ze stairs, men. I will lead and for ze honor of ze gen d’armes of France. Forward brave comrades.

MCGINNESS: Up the stairs.

MR. C.: One hundred dollars to the one that catches him.

MISS S.: One hundred dollars!

ALL: The Shadow! After him! Down with the thief! Capture the burglar! A cool hundred! Nab the reward! (Etc.)

(All talking at once, they rush out of the room. Enter the Shadow around the door at left.)

SHADOW: Well here’s a pretty fix, to say the least. Policemen all around the house. Policemen in it and all looking for me. They probably saw me coming in. How to get out is what’s worrying me.

(Enter Hubert from right.)

HUBERT: What’s all this row about? Why, what do you want here?

SHADOW: Are you Mr. Hubert Connage?

HUBERT: Yes, Mr. — Mr. — ?

SHADOW: Johnston. I called to see about the furnace.

HUBERT: Why our furnace is all right. You’ve got the wrong house. (Edges him toward door.)

SHADOW: The truth is, I called to see your father. Is he in?

HUBERT: He is.

SHADOW: But you will do just as well. Let me see. What day of the month is this?

HUBERT: The twenty-second, I think. I never keep track after twelve o’clock.

SHADOW: Well, to proceed to business. This is the twelfth.

HUBERT: NO, I said I never keep track after twenty-two — I mean twelve o’clock.

SHADOW: Well twenty-two years ago next April — May —

HUBERT: Hm!

SHADOW: Why, what’s the matter?

HUBERT: YOU been drinking too?

SHADOW: NO, certainly not. That’s the new fashioned way. Instead of saying “April and May,” you say “April-May.” Like, for instance, “April, maybe June, but always March.”

HUBERT: Yes. What?

SHADOW: YOU understand, I hope.

HUBERT: Clear as mud.

SHADOW: Listen. As I said, twenty years ago —

HUBERT: YOU said ten.

SHADOW: Did I? Split the difference and call it fifteen. Add six makes twenty-one; add seven and divide by two — I have fourteen, what have you?

HUBERT: GO on. I want to see how much a fellow sees and hears when he’s drunk or how much he thinks he hears. Do you think you can persuade me I’m talking to you? You can’t. I’m in bed sleeping as comfortable — (Turns but jails out of chair.) Why in the dickens didn’t you try and persuade me I wasn’t?

SHADOW: Because of Irving Berlin. Do you realize that he made thirty thousand on “Alexander’s Ragtime Band”?

HUBERT: Look here — this is gone far enough. I’ve made aldermen and been to sleep tonight but I’m awake now and I never listened to such a lot of nonsense as you’ve been talking. What in the devil are you doing in the house anyways?

VOICE OUTSIDE: After him. Catch the Shadow! Shackle the thief!

HUBERT: The Shadow, why here? What are you doing here? The Shadow. The Shadow. Are you the Shadow? Well, I’ll be —

SHADOW: Surprised.

HUBERT: I guess they’ve got you now, Mr. Shadow, or whatever they call you. When I yell, as I’m going to, it’s Sing Sing for you.

SHADOW: But you won’t yell.

HUBERT: I won’t?

SHADOW: YOU won’t.

HUBERT: And why not?

SHADOW: Because I say so.

HUBERT: We’ll see. Fa — !

SHADOW: Stop. Hand up!

HUBERT: (Puts hand up.)

SHADOW: Hand down. I have no gun.

HUBERT: I’m a fool. Fath — !

SHADOW: One more word and your fiancée, Miss — Miss — (looks at paper) Miss Helen Mayburn, will know where you were those three days last week. And it wasn’t Atlantic City.

HUBERT: Good heavens! What do you want?

SHADOW: I intend robbing this house if there is anything here that interests me.

HUBERT: What do you want of me?

SHADOW: Your absolute silence concerning me, nothing else.

HUBERT: Well you shall have it since you know so much. And how did you know I was in prison three days last week?

SHADOW: Simply enough. I was the policeman who arrested you. I saw you were drunk, saw you break in an old man’s derby, and I thought I’d give you a vacation.

HUBERT: YOU were that ugly cop with the long beard?

SHADOW: A rather doubtful compliment but I was he or he was I. Anyways, the problem now is this. They saw me enter this house. Some of them are in it. Some are out of it. I’ve got to get out.

HUBERT: Well 1 hope they catch you.

SHADOW: Remember, not a word from you.

HUBERT: They’ll catch you anyways.

SHADOW: They can’t.

HUBERT: Can’t?

SHADOW: Look here — when you were little did you ever chase a reflection?

HUBERT: Yes, but never caught it.

SHADOW: Of course not. Not only because you couldn’t catch it but because it was an impossibility. Did you ever hear of a captured shadow?

HUBERT: NO.

SHADOW: Of course not. There’s no such thing. It’s contrary to science. Now, I’m a shadow. So there you are.

HUBERT: You will be a captured Shadow before four hours.

SHADOW: Think as you please. I shall permit you to retire now. Good evening.

HUBERT: What?

SHADOW: YOU may go.

HUBERT: This is my house.

SHADOW: YOU may go.

HUBERT: Oh very well. (Exit.)

(Enter Miss S.)

MISS S.: Why, who are you?

SHADOW: Don’t be alarmed.

MISS S.: My nerves are in a turmoil. They say there is a thief in the house.

SHADOW: There is but I’ll get him. I am a detective, my dear lady.

MISS S.: So you’re a detective, are you?

SHADOW: I am.

MISS S.: A real detective?

SHADOW: What do I look like? Papier mâché?

MISS S.: And do you need assistance?

SHADOW: Assistance? Ah, I have just the thing. Sh!

MISS S.: Oh, if I could help you find this burglar, Mr. Connage might take me back in his employ.

SHADOW: Listen. I am hunting for the Shadow. I should like your assistance in a piece of work that requires careful handling. Now take heed. The real burglar is no other than Mr. Connage himself. He has been deceiving people for years but at last I’m onto him.

MISS S.: HOW perfectly awful. Still, I had long suspected.

SHADOW: NOW the next person who enters this room I want you to stop and hold here till I come. Have you a revolver?

MISS S.: I’ll get one. (Takes revolver from case on wall.)

SHADOW: NOW remember, no matter who the person is. Hold him or her up until I come, for I have reason to suspect that it will be Mr. Connage’s assistant. Remember, the police do not treat courageous work lightly. You will probably be rewarded and — How would you like a position on the women’s detective bureau?

MISS S.: Magnificent!

SHADOW: YOU will obtain it. Now crawl under this table. Don’t fire “nder any conditions and remember that “wait” and “hope.” are the passwords.

MISS S.: Wait and hope. I will remember.

(Exit Shadow. She crawls under table.)

(Enter Mrs. Connage in coat and shawl.)

MRS. C.: Gentlemen, I am ready to see my son. Why they’re gone.

Where on earth —

MISS S.: (Under table.) Halt. Not another step.

MRS. C.: What — what!

MISS S.: I have you covered.

MRS. C.: Oh who are you?

MISS S: One of the foremost members of the women’s secret service.

MRS. C.: It’s Miss Saunders.

MISS S: You have been found out.

MRS. C.: The woman is crazy!

MISS S: Put up your hands.

MRS. C.: She is in league with some robbers.

MISS S: The signs of guilt are written all over your face.

MRS. C.: Miss Saunders, release me at once. My son is lying half shot — in a boarding house and I must go to him.

MISS S: What language. Half shot indeed!

MRS. C.: Will you kindly explain this?

MISS S: No explanation is necessary. (Comes out from table.) I have you where I want you. My friend the detective will soon arrive.

MRS. C.: But —

MISS S: No explanations. I know all.

MRS. C.: All what?

MISS S.: All about your husband.

MRS. C.: (Aside.) Heavens! Can he have been up to something?

MISS S: He has indeed. And you know only too well. You are his accomplice.

MRS. C.: His accomplice? Me?

MISS S: You.

(Enter Mr. Connage from back.)

MRS. C.: Beverly!

MR. C.: Why, what’s all this about? A pistol!

MISS S: Put up your hands.

MR. C.: What?

MRS. C.: She says you’re a criminal.

MR. C.: What in the devil is the matter?

MRS. C.: And I’ve just received word that our son is shot.

MR. C.: Shot? I just saw him. (To Miss S.) Did you shoot him?

MISS S: Everything you say will be used against you.

MR. C.: This is preposterous.

MRS. C.: She must be in league with robbers.

MISS S.: You rascal, you!

MR. C.: (To his wife.) Have you been up to something?

(Voices outside.)

DUREAL: We have zem.

MCGINNESS: Bring them in here.

(Enter the -policemen, each holding either Rabbit or Rudd, followed by Emma Kate.)

MCGINNESS: We found them trying to sneak out of the back window. They have stolen these clothes.

DUREAL: We have did ze duty.

MCGINNESS: But what’s all this?

MR. C.: Arrest this woman. (Pointing to Miss Saunders.)

MISS S.: Arrest this man. (Pointing to Mr. Connage.)

MCGINNESS: But we have the crooks.

MISS S.: Pardon me but I have them.

MRS. C.: But this woman is evidently a thief herself.

DUREAL: Four crooks or five. Ah, this is a situation.

MCGINNESS: Who — Who — What shall I do?

DUREAL: These are the men.

MR. C. AND MRS. C.: This is the woman.

MISS S.: Apprehend this couple.

MCGINNESS: But which one shall I arrest?

DUREAL: Arrest all of zem.

(Enter Hubert followed by girls.)

DOROTHY: Papa! Mama!

MRS. C.: My son, restored!

HELEN: Miss Saunders!

HUBERT: Rabbit and Chinyman!

RABBIT: Well?

MCGINNESS: What shall I do? They each accuse somebody else.

HUBERT: These are my friends. Pll vouch for ‘em.

DOROTHY: This is my father and mother.

DUREAL: Ze case grows complicated.

RABBIT: Arrest the old lady with the shotgun.

HUBERT: You’re looking for the Shadow? There ain’t five Shadows.

(Enter the Shadow.)

SHADOW: NO, there are not. But the Shadow is here.

DUREAL: Shall I arrest this fellow too?

MISS S.: My friend the detective.

SHADOW: Pm Johnston from the central office.

MCGINNESS: Well, see if you can unravel this.

SHADOW: I think I can. The Shadow is in this room.

(All start.)

MCGINNESS: Where? Where?

SHADOW: Look! The crook will be known in two minutes. Listen!

Some one in this room is posing for some one else, but in reality is the Shadow.

ALL: The Shadow?

SHADOW: The most daring crook in New York. He is one who has for years been leading a double life. Officer. Arrest Hubert Connage, alias the Shadow.

ALL: Hubert Connage?

HUBERT: It’s a lie!!

MRS. C.: My son.

(Hubert starts up. They grab him. All are startled and talk.

Mrs. Connage faints and the Shadow lights a cigarette.)

(Curtain.)

ACT II

(Thirty minutes later. Scene the same. Mr. Connage is seated at left. McGinness is standing at right and Hubert is gagged and tied to chair between them. Dureal is standing to the right of McGinness.)

MR. C.: So now I hope you are convinced that my son is no burglar and no Shadow and that this is all a foolish mistake.

MCGINNESS: Well I guess it’s pretty certain that you ought to know your own son, but you’ll admit it looked mighty suspicious when that detective fellow stood out here and called him the Shadow.

DUREAL: Mais ou est-t-il. Le detective qui a lui dénoncé.

MCGINNESS: Yes, yes. Speak sensibly.

DUREAL: That detective. Where has he disappeared?

MCGINNESS: He said he was going to call up the police station.

MR. C.: But that was a half an hour ago.

MCGINNESS: Well he hasn’t come back.

MR. C.: Had you ever seen him before?

MCGINNESS: Never. He said he’d just joined the force.

MR. C.: I half believe he wasn’t a detective at all.

MCGINNESS: Well he couldn’t have gone far. There’s a guard of policemen around the house.

DUREAL: I knew, I knew continually, what ch’u call it, all ze time. I — ze brain, oui, moi.

MCGINNESS: Your mouth is overcrowded with talk. Now spill one word at a time and you’ll be understood.

DUREAL: I knew all the time.

MCGINNESS: And you didn’t tell us? Why you mean little thing.

He was a gent dee harm in France.

DUREAL: Oui j’étais un gen d’arme en Paris. I nevaire before fail. That we have not caught him is due to this pig.

MCGINNESS: Here, here, frogslegs — No names.

DUREAL: Frogslegs?

MR. C.: Gentlemen. It is not too late to catch this burglar or bogus detective. There is still a guard of policemen around the house, so he must be in the house.

HUBERT: (Gagged.) Mmmmm — mmm — mm — mmmm.

MR. C.: My son evidently wants to be released.

MCGINNESS: TO be sure. I forgot.

(Unties him.)

HUBERT: Mmm — Ah. Oh my mouth. (Tries to stretch it.) Of all the ivory-headed policemen. To let that fellow get away from almost under your nose.

DUREAL: What fellow?

HUBERT: That fake detective. Why he was the Shadow himself.

MCGINNESS, MR. C AND DUREAL: He was the Shadow?

HUBERT: Of course he was. If I hadn’t been a little intoxicated I wouldn’t have let him bluff me about keeping mum.

MCGINNESS: YOU knew who he was all the time?

HUBERT: Sure I did but he threatened to blab something he knew about me if I gave him away, but now he’s played me such a dirty trick and got my mouth so sore that I am going to catch that fellow if he tells about me all over town.

MR. C.: Mr. McGinness has stationed men all around the house, so he couldn’t have gotten away.

DUREAL: Well, after him.

MCGINNESS: Right-o.

MR. C.: Come, we will search the house.

(Exit McGinness, Dureal, Mr. Connage.)

(Enter Mrs. Connage.)

MRS. C.: Hubert, Hubert, my poor boy. So they released you. First some aldermen told me that you had been shot.

HUBERT: Aldermen? I don’t remember any alderman. Oh yes, I have a dim recollection of picking up two men on the street and bringing them home and why — yes — why I promised I’d make them aldermen or something of the sort.

MRS. C.: But my son, they said you had been shot in the eye and your eye looks all right. Where were you shot?

HUBERT: In the excitement.

(Enter Helen.)

HELEN: Oh excuse me. There has been so much excitement that I don’t know where I’m going.

HUBERT: Why Helen, just in time. Mother, Helen and I are — are — Oh why don’t you tell her?

HELEN: We’re — we’re — Why don’t you?

HUBERT: Engaged.

HELEN: TO be married.

MRS. C.: Engaged? Why, why, how startling! But Helen, you dear girl, I haven’t the heart to blame you. You must tell me all about it in the morning. Come, it is getting late.

HELEN: Here Hubert. Something I got for you down town today.

(Hands him -paper.) Sign it.

HUBERT: What is it?

HELEN: Why it’s a pledge.

(Exit Helen and Mrs. C.)

HUBERT: Well I’ll be darned. (Starts to throw it away, then examines it, then signs it and throws it on the table.)

(Enter Rudd and Rabbit.)

HUBERT: Ah, good morning Mr. — Mr. —

RABBIT: YOU ain’t forgotten us, have you?

HUBERT: Oh are you the fellows I brought home to spend the night with me?

RABBIT: We’re the ones. And say, you haven’t forgotten about aldermen?

HUBERT: Hey, did I say I’d make you aldermen? What a fool I was!

RABBIT: Oh I don’t know about that.

HUBERT: I tell you. I’ll consider the matter at least. You may spend the night as my guest.

RABBIT: But — But — But —

RUDD: YOU talk like a goat.

HUBERT: Where did you get that suit? It’s enough to wake any one up in the morning.

RUDD: Think so? You gave it to me.

HUBERT: You mean that I ever had a suit like that?

RUDD: You said I could take it out of the butler’s clothes press.

RABBIT: It looks cheap.

RUDD: Cheap? Why it’s all covered with big checks.

HUBERT: And here is a retaining fee and a happy rest to you both and — sh — sh — keep it dark about our political prospects.

(Exit Hubert.)

RABBIT: I’m going to insure my money so if I spend it I will have it anyways.

RUDD: Come, we’ll go to bed. Say, is the Shadow still in the house?

Wasn’t it slick when he told the cops that Hubert was the Shadow?

RABBIT: I guess they’re onto him now. Well let’s hope he gets out of the house safely. We know how it is.

(Exit both of them.)

(Enter the Shadow.)

SHADOW: Well I’m in for it. I’m as good as caught. The Shadow caught, captured. After baffling the New York police for two weeks, to be caught like an ordinary second story man. Still, they can’t do much to me. I can prove that I have sent back every bit of stuff that I stole. But to be captured and by such ivory heads as this McGinness. Still, I must not give up. I’m not caught yet, not by a long shot. There is still a chance. One chance in a hundred, but a chance all the same.

(Enter Dorothy.)

DOROTHY: Why it’s the detective. How do you do, sir. Sir, tell me.

Why did you accuse my brother? Will you release him?

SHADOW: Release him? Why, of course, if you wish.

DOROTHY: I didn’t know detectives were so obliging. But tell me. Is the Shadow in this house? And who is the Shadow?

SHADOW: I’m afraid it would be imprudent to tell you. You might put him on his guard.

DOROTHY: IS he as romantic looking as the newspapers say?

SHADOW: I should say not. He is an undersized, bullet-headed fellow. As ugly as I have ever seen, Miss Connage.

DOROTHY: Well then, why did you take my brother for him?

SHADOW: Why — oh yes — why yes — of course — Why that’s the question. Ha-ha. Well let me see. It’s a long story and my time for business is short. Listen. He is in this house and I must catch him.

DOROTHY: I wish you success, Mr. — Mr. —

SHADOW: Johnston.

DOROTHY: Mr. Johnston. But I am disappointed that the Shadow was not handsome for I had intended to fall in love with him.

SHADOW: YOU had? Poor fellow that he doesn’t know it. He would jump at the chance but you would have no use for a fellow like that.

DOROTHY: YOU never can tell. Good night, Mr. Johnston, and good luck.

(She goes out. He shakes his head sadly and then goes out.)

(Enter from opposite sides Rabbit and Miss Saunders.)

MISS S.: What a noble looking being!

RABBIT: Discovered.

MISS S.: Ah, ‘tis the politician. I thought I heard a noise in the library.

RABBIT: It must have been only the history repeating itself.

MISS S.: And how are you, dear sir?

RABBIT: I’m so thin from all this excitement that my shadow would puncture a bicycle tire.

MISS S.: Quite clever. You know I’m not as old as I look.

RABBIT: YOU couldn’t be and live.

MISS S.: He is eccentric. But will you not have a chocolate drop, sir? “Sweets to the sweet,” you know.

RABBIT: Have some of these. (Passes crackers.) Crackers to the cracked, you know.

MISS S.: Sir, I’ll have you know I’ll not be openly derided. Emma Kate. Show this man the door.

(Emma Kate comes in.)

EMMA K.: And no mum.

MISSS.: What?

EMMA K.: You was discharged this evenin’. I he’r Mr. Connage atellin’ you.

MISS S.: Entirely utterly crushed! I shall pray, and let me tell you my prayers will be heard, that this house will be swallowed by an earthquake — There! (Exit.)

RABBIT: And it’s good riddance to bad rubbish. Emma Kate, do you suppose that in the kitchen there is a little chicken and a bottle of beer ready to be eaten up?

EMMA K.: There might be.

RABBIT: Come along then.

(Exeunt the two.)

(Enter the Shadow followed by Dureal whom he does not see.)

SHADOW: Policemen at the front door, policemen at the back door, policemen at the side door and policemen at every window. How shall I get out? Let me see. Oh! the telephone.

DUREAL: Non, monsier. You are my prisoner.

SHADOW: Me your prisoner? You mean your guest.

DUREAL: I, Dureal, have captured you. Hands up.

SHADOW: Oh, is your name Dureal, the famous Dureal?

DUREAL: What, you know me? (He is pleased.)

SHADOW: Who has not heard of you — the cleverest gen d’arme in Paris, the handsomest and most efficient man on the New York police force.

DUREAL: Monsieur. But are you not the Shadow?

SHADOW: Yes I am, and you unaided have captured me. But it is no disgrace to be captured by you. It is rather an honor.

DUREAL: Monsuer.

SHADOW: Monsieur.

DUREAL: YOU are too polite.

SHADOW: One could never equal a Frenchman in politeness. But forgive me. You will sit down?

DUREAL: With pleasure.

SHADOW: But there is one thing I never could understand about the French police. Could you explain it? I hear they lock all the criminals in one large room. Now what’s to prevent them from breaking out?

DUREAL: But they don’t. They lock the prisoners in cells.

SHADOW: Surprising. Well now. How big are these cells? As big as these closets? (Opens closet door.)

DUREAL: Oh yes.

SHADOW: But now a man of your size couldn’t get in this closet.

DUREAL: Why certainly. Here. I will go in —

(Walks into closet. Shadow slams and locks door.)

SHADOW: And you’ll stay there too. Monsieur Monsieur. (Laughs.)

(Dureal stamps and pounds.)

SHADOW: And it’s always safer to work in the dark. (Extinguishes lights and lights candle on table.)

(Enter McGinness. He gives a cry of satisfaction and covers Shadow with a revolver. Shadow grabs up magazine and throws it so that it knocks revolver from policeman’s hand. He jumps over chair and grapples with policeman.)

MCGINNESS: Curse you, curse you.

SHADOW: Give up or I’ll break your arm.

(Enter Hubert followed by his father. He snatches up the candle and points revolver at Shadow.)

HUBERT: NOW we’ve got you, Mr. Shadow, or whatever you call yourself.

(Enter Dorothy, Helen, Miss S., Mrs. C., Emma K., and crooks.)

SHADOW: Yes, you’ve got me at last. I’m caught.

HUBERT: I thought there was no such thing as a captured Shadow.

DOROTHY: So you’re a burglar?

SHADOW: A burglar. Me — Yes.

MCGINNESS: Well it was no cinch, and for two weeks you’ve led us a hard chase.

SHADOW: I guess the game is up. But you know I’m not yet in the lockup. But I’d better make a clean sweep of it. My accomplice is in that closet.

MCGINNESS: Bosh and nonsense! It’s one of his tricks.

SHADOW: Will some one listen to me?

DOROTHY: I will listen to you.

SHADOW: Then listen. In that closet is locked some one who will be useful to you.

(Poundings.)

But he is desperate. So you must bind him directly. You take that shawl and throw it over his head. Here is the key. Ready. Unlock it.

(McGinness unlocks door. Dureal comes out. They throw shawl over head, not recognizing him. Shadow steps behind screen in the excitement. Dureal sputters and fumes.)

DUREAL: Fools. Fools. Where is he?

MCGINNESS: (Looking around.) Gone!

ALL: Where?

HUBERT: After him!

DUREAL: Oh me, oh my!

(Exit all. )

(Shadow comes quickly from behind screen and steps to telephone.)

(Enter Dorothy.)

DOROTHY: Well?

SHADOW: Well? (Takes up phone.)

DOROTHY: Put down that phone.

SHADOW: The phone? (Takes down receiver.)

DOROTHY: Yes, or —

SHADOW: Nonsense. Hello — Hello. Oh here they are.

DOROTHY: If you say one word over that phone, I’ll shoot.

SHADOW: YOU will? Very well. Central, give me the Forty-fourth Street police station. All right. Why don’t you fire?

DOROTHY: I — I can’t.

SHADOW: And why not?

DOROTHY: I don’t know.

SHADOW: Hello — Is this the Forty-fourth Street police station? Well this is Officer McGinness. I am at the Connages’ house on Fifty-second Street. Immediately withdraw the guard from around the house. We’ve caught the Shadow at last. Thank you.

Good evening. And please hurry. (Bangs down receiver.)

DOROTHY: If I wished I could summon the police or counteract that telephone message.

SHADOW: Why don’t you scream? I won’t stop you.

DOROTHY: Because I’m not going to. I am going to let you get out of here. Listen — tell me the truth. Who are you? You don’t seem like a burglar. And is it true that you send back everything you steal?

SHADOW: People seem to be onto me. Yes, I guess it is true.

DOROTHY: Are you a real thief then?

SHADOW: Why of course.

DOROTHY: I wished you weren’t.

SHADOW: YOU wish I wasn’t?

DOROTHY: I — I — would like to have known you better. But as it is, it is out of the question.

SHADOW: Yes, it’s out, out of the question. For I am only a burglar. Not fit to look at you.

DOROTHY: But why — Why are you a burglar?

SHADOW: Because I was born to it, I suppose.

DOROTHY: Born to it? You were not born to it. You are a gentleman.

SHADOW: Thank you, miss. Well, you are right in a way. By entering houses by stealth I’ve forfeited all claims to the name of gentleman, but I’ve never kept a thing I’ve taken and I’m glad you think I am. But as I am for the present a burglar, it is better we should not meet again. (At window.) I see the guard has been withdrawn. Good night, Miss Connage. Were I not a burglar, I might hope to know you better. But — (Ofens door.)

(Clock strikes twelve.)

DOROTHY: SO is it goodbye?

SHADOW: Listen — the clock has struck twelve. Up to twelve o’clock tonight I was forbidden by the terms to a bet to disclose who I was, but now I can tell you. My name is Thorton Hart Dudley. I made a bet of five thousand dollars with several New York men whom I met in Philadelphia that I could prove the New York police utterly incompetent, by committing daring robberies, and remain uncaught for two weeks. My two weeks is up now — I am a burglar no longer, and I have won my bet.

DOROTHY: Then you are not a thief?

SHADOW: Miss Connage, I am not in circumstances which put me in want of money. It was simply a question of daring with me.

The fancy struck me that I should like to be a burglar for a while, and when I had once entered into an agreement, I stuck it out, and — (Takes her hand. She draws it away.)

(Enter Mr. Connage.)

MR. C.: Here, here! What’s all this?

DOROTHY: Oh Father, this is my friend, Mr. — Mr. Dudley.

MR. C.: (Surprised.) Bless me, it’s the burglar!

SHADOW: NO sir — Never a burglar. Only a Shadow, and a Captured Shadow at that. (Glances at Dorothy.)

(Mr. Connage faints in chair.)

(Curtain.)

COWARD

Written for The Elizabethan Dramatic Club

A drama in two acts, given for the benefit of the Baby Welfare Association, and presented at the Saint Paul Y.W.C.A. Auditorium, Friday evening, August 29, 1913.

CONTENTS

CAST OF CHARACTERS

ACT I

ACT II

CAST OF CHARACTERS

JUDGE DOUGLAS — Robert Clark

MRS. DOUGLAS — Alice Lyon

LINDY DOUGLAS — Dorothy Greene

LIEUT. CHARLES DOUGLAS, C.S.A... — Scott Fitzgerald

LIEUT. PERCY ALTWATER, C.S.A... — Gustave Schurmeier

JIM HOLWORTHY — Lawrence Boardman

JEFFERSON — Theodore Parkhouse

CECILIA ASHTON — Eleanor Alair

VIRGINIA TAYLOR — Katherine Schulze

CAPT. ORMSBY, U.S.A — Wharton Smith

CLARA DOUGLAS — Letitia Magoffin

TOMMY DOUGLAS — Rudolf Patterson

MISS PRUIT — Elizabeth McDavitt

ANGELINA BANGS — Julia Dorr

PRIVATE WILLINGS — Scott Fitzgerald

PRIVATE BARKIS — Gustave Schurmeier

PRIVATE JOHNSON — Robert Clark

ACT I

Scene — Living room in the home of Judge Douglas somewhere in Virginia. Rich furnishings in colonial style of the period.

Time — 1861.

(Discovered at rise of curtain — Judge Douglas, seated in invalid chair. Mrs. Douglas near him. Judge Douglas seems to be disturbed about something. In his hand he shakes a bouquet of fresh flowers.)

JUDGE D.: I tell you I won’t have it! I can’t have it!

MRS. D.: I’m sure he’s a good boy.

JUDGE D.: Good? Good be hanged! I’d rather see him a human devil and off to the war, than hanging around here when every able-bodied man in the South is fighting. If I were able to walk I’d be there against the Yanks if I had only a broomstick. And the idea of that impudent young jackanapes paying attention to our daughter Lindy! — Bah!

MRS. D.: Well, I’m sure she doesn’t encourage him.

JUDGE D.: That’s not to her credit. If she did encourage him she’d be a lunatic.

MRS. D.: Arthur!

JUDGE D.: That’s what she’d be — A lunatic.

MRS. D.: But she hasn’t encouraged him.

JUDGE D.: Then why did he send her these? Why, tell me?

MRS. D.: I’m sure I don’t know.

JUDGE D.: Call in Jeff. I’ll show him!

MRS. D.: (Rings bell.)

(Enter Jeff.)

JUDGE D.: Throw these in the ash barrel, and any more from young Jim Hoi worthy as well. I’ll have no stay-at-homes making love to my daughter.

MRS. D.: I’m sure Lindy will see that a young man like that is not for her to become intimate with, but I see no harm in her seeing him.

JUDGE D.: But I do. Ned Holworthy himself said to me that he considered his son Jim a disgrace to his family. Why didn’t he enlist with my Charley and the rest?

JEFF: Dere’s somebody comin’. (Looking out window.)

MRS. D.: I suppose it’s the mail.

JEFF: No’m, it’s a female — two of ‘em. (Starts to leave.)

JUDGE D.: Where’s that Jeff? Where is her Ring the bell. Oh, there you are. I can’t talk to Lindy now. I’m liable to use violent language.

MRS. D.: Wheel Mr. Douglas to the side veranda and then leave him. He is testy today.

(Exit Jeff wheeling Judge Douglas in chair.)

(Enter Lindy, followed by Cecilia.)

LINDY: (In doorway.) Goodbye Ellen. Goodbye Miss Hazelton.

MRS. D.: That you, Lindy?

LINDY: Yes Mother.

MRS. D.: Oh, hello Cecilia.

CECILIA: Good morning, Mrs. Douglas. How’s everybody over here?

MRS. D.: All well. How’s your Mother, Cecilia?

CECILIA: She hasn’t been the same since John was shot.

MRS. D.: (Sighs.) Ah yes, I know. Charley’s well — praise be to heaven — but one son is not too much to give to the cause. Tommy would go if he were only old enough.

LINDY: Let’s not be doleful, Mother. I reckon I’ve got troubles enough. Look — (Holding out sewing.) Uniforms to make for Charley. How he can ever wear through a cloth this thick is a mystery to me, and yet they do — and always want more.

MRS. D.: Lindy, that’s no way to talk — You may be thankful you still have a brother to sew for.

LINDY: Well, I can’t help it — It is annoying! It’s sew, sew, sew —

I wish I were a man or at least as small as Tommy so that I could pretend I was.

CECILIA: Mrs. Douglas, what do you think? This morning I got all dressed for riding, boots and all, came down stairs and found that Kate, my new saddle horse, was gone.

MRS. D. and LINDY: Stolen?

CECILIA: NO, sent ahead to the Army. I guess I’ll be a pedestrian till Jeff Davis sits in Washington.

LINDY: Which will be a long while, I am afraid.

(Outside a fife is heard. Enter Tommy and Clara Douglas dressed as soldiers, Miss Pruit, their governess, following, carrying gun.)

TOMMY: Halt! Good morning, lady. You haven’t a pair of shoes for a poor old campaigner, have you? I haven’t eaten anything but salt pork since Bull Run.

CLARA: YOU ain’t going to eat shoes, are you?

TOMMY: Silence, Private Clara! If you speak again, I’ll make you the camp followers and advance Miss Pruit to the main army.

Miss PRUIT: Mrs. Douglas, do I have to stand for this? I’ve been the camp followers and the deserters and the Northerners all day. I wish I had remained in Boston as my folks advised, but I wouldn’t take the trip now for the Pilgrim Fathers themselves.

CECILIA: There aren’t going to be Pilgrim Fathers much longer, Miss Pruit.

MISS PRUIT: I want you to know, Miss Ashton, that my cousin’s aunt’s grandmother on my father’s side is related to Governor Bradford of New York.

CECILIA and LINDY: Oh excuse us, Miss Pruit!

TOMMY: Major Douglas, I think she’s a spy. If I mistake not, Boston is somewhere in Pennsylvania?

CLARA: You’re right.

TOMMY: TO the guard house. Charge! (They charge on Miss Pruity and all exit.)

LINDY: I guess they’ve all got the war spirit.

(Enter Angelina Bangs.)

ANGELINA: Good morning.

MRS. D.: Angelina. Come in.

ANGELINA: If I may. I am perusing a most attractive little book.

CECILIA: SO?

ANGELINA: Yes.

LINDY: What is it?

ANGELINA: The life of St. Cecilia. Your namesake, dear friend.

CECILIA: Here comes a sermon.

ANGELINA: Such a sweet book!

LINDY: And so dry!!

MRS. D.: Lindy, I’ve often wished that you were more like Angelina.

ANGELINA: I wish every one was.

CECILIA: Generous creature!

MRS. D.: Cecilia!!

ANGELINA: I have already forgiven her. You should learn, dear girl, not to be hasty.

MRS D.: There’s something for you to practice, Lindy.

LINDY: But I can’t be sanctimonious.

ANGELINA: But you can try. I, alas, have had hard struggles. I inherit all the low impulses of my father’s family, the Bangs. It is a continual struggle for the Angeline to overcome the Bangs. Alas, the Bangs often overcomes. This morning — I confess it with a tear of shame — I came very close to exclaiming “Rats!” in an ill-natured manner.

CECILIA: Oh do tell us. Did the Bangs win?

ANGELINA: NO, the Angelina conquered.

LINDY: I’m so glad.

ANGELINA: I must be going, Mrs. Douglas. Goodbye. Children, you have my prayers. (Exit.)

LINDY: What a sanctimonious creature!

CECILIA: I’d like to see the Bangs get out just once.

LINDY: It never will.

CECILIA: Oh Mrs. Douglas, will you show me that pattern for the coats?

MRS. D.: Certainly Celia; I’ve been meaning to. Come upstairs.

(Turns toward door leading to hall.)

(Enter Jeff. He sees that Lindy is not alone, so retreats in haste.)

MRS. D.: I wonder what he wanted?

LINDY: Probably wants to sample some of Daddy’s cigars.

(Exit Mrs. Douglas and Cecilia.)

(Enter Jeff, cautiously.)

JEFF: Ex-excuse me, Miss Lindy, bu-but dere’s a personal mattah I got to broach to you.

LINDY: All right Jeff, what is it?

JEFF: Dere’s a gemmen outside said he’d relieve ma present pecuniary emba’ssment if ah’d give yoh dis here note. He ain’t no friend o’ yoh father’s.

LINDY: Oh, it’s Mr. Jim Holworthy. (Reads note.) He wants to see me. Show him in.

JEFF: Yassum.

(Exit Jeff.)

(Enter Jeff, followed by Jim Holworthy.)

JEFF: I renounce Mistah James Holworthy.

JIM: Ah — ah — Morning, Miss Lindy.

LINDY: Good morning, Mr. Holworthy.

JIM: I — ah — just happened to be passing, so I thought I’d say “hello” with you.

LINDY: Hello.

JIM: Hello. I guess I’ll be going.

LINDY: Won’t you sit down? Take Mr. Holworthy’s hat, Jeff.

(Jeff starts to take hat.)

JIM: Hey there, what are you doing?

LINDY: It’s all right, Mr. Holworthy.

JIM: Sit down. Well, up — that is, begging your pardon. (Gets up and reaches for hat.)

LINDY: You may go, Jeff.

JEFF: Yassum.

LINDY: Jeff!

JEFF: Yassum, I’m agoin’. Mistah Holworthy ain’t forgot sumpin, is he?

JIM: Oh yes. Hmm — ah — (Fumbles in pockets.) Can you change ten cents, Miss Lindy?

LINDY: (Shakes her head.)

JIM: Well, here’s the money. It’s more than I intended. (Gives money to Jeff.)

JEFF: Ten cents Confederate!

LINDY: Jeff, go out at once!

(Exit Jeff.)

JIM: If there ain’t ten cents gone quick!

LINDY: That’s too bad, Mr. Holworthy.

JIM: Yes, it is. (Pause.) Are you feeling well?

LINDY: Pretty well, thank you. How are you?

JIM: I reckon I’m all right; how are you? — I mean — oh you’re all right — you just said so.

LINDY: Yes.

(Pause.)

JIM: How’s your mother?

LINDY: Fine.

JIM: Your father?

LINDY: Fine, thank you.

TIM: Your little sister?

LINDY: She’s all right.

JIM: And your brother?

LINDY: He’s right well.

Jim: Ain’t there a governess?

LINDY: Yes.

JIM: HOW’S she?

LINDY: Fine.

(Pause.)

JIM: HOW are all the niggers?

LINDY: All right, I reckon.

JIM: That’s good. You’re all right, ain’t you?

LINDY: Oh yes, thank you.

(Pause.)

JIM: Ah — ha! ha! (Laughs.)

LINDY: Are you ill?

JIM: Ill — Me? No, I ain’t sick.

LINDY: Then what are you laughing at?

JIM: Did you get those flowers I sent you?

LINDY: Flowers?

JIM: Yes, flowers.

LINDY: What flowers?

JIM: The ones I sent you.

LINDY: Why no. (Rings.) That’s powerful funny!

JIM: Didn’t you get them? I left them at the door.

(Enter Jeff.)

LINDY: Jeff, did I get some flowers this morning?

JEFF: Well, not exactly — You didn’t get ‘em, you received ‘em.

LINDY: Where are they?

JEFF: Why, yoh fathah — yoh fathah, he — he done planted ‘em.

LINDY: WThere? Where?

JEFF: (Waves both hands.) Oh, all ‘round.

LINDY: Where, Jeff?

JEFF: In de — in de ash can.

JIM: They ain’t going to grow in the ash can, Miss Lindy. No kind of flowers going to grow in the ash can.

LINDY: You may go, Jeff.

JIM: I reckon those flowers are ruined. I suspicion your father ain’t over crazy about me somehow.

LINDY: So?

JIM: Yes. No man that grows flowers is going to plant them in an ash can unless he doesn’t want them to grow, Miss Lindy.

LINDY: How astute you are.

JIM: Astute?

LINDY: Clever.

JIM: Oh yes, I am rather clever, but I don’t know — they don’t seem to care overmuch for me around here somehow.

LINDY: They don’t?

JIM: Father wanted me to go to war, but I didn’t care about it particularly. By the way, Miss Lindy, I’ve got a little matter I’d like to speak to you about.

LINDY: What’s that?

JIM: Do you want to get married?

LINDY: Eventually, I reckon. Why?

JIM: Oh, I just wondered.

LINDY: (Smiles.)

JIM: What do you think of me?

LINDY: What do I think of you?

JIM: Yes, for a husband.

LINDY: I reckon you’d make a good husband.

JIM: YOU do? — Say, that’s fine. Well Lindy —

LINDY: Miss Lindy!

JIM: Why, ain’t we engaged?

LINDY: (Laughing.) Oh horrors, no! I didn’t say a good husband for me. I said a good husband for somebody else.

JIM: (Crestfallen.) Then — then say you’ll be a sister to me.

LINDY: Why?

JIM: I was reading a story the other day, and the lady said she’d be a sister to the man she turned down.

LINDY: I’m afraid I can’t.

JIM: Well, could you be an aunt or a grandmother?

LINDY: Mr. Holworthy, my advice to you is right here:  Before you come around proposing to a girl, you had better go out with my brother and the rest and do some fighting. Then people would have some use for you. Do you know why my father doesn’t like you?

JIM: Mmm —

LINDY: He thinks you are a coward.

JIM: (Calmly.) Does he?

LINDY: You’re a fine one! You sit right there and let me call you a coward, with no remonstrance?

JIM: What do you want me to do? — Hit you?

LINDY: Why didn’t you enlist when the rest did?

JIM: I thought one man wouldn’t make any difference and I didn’t care particularly how the war came out anyway, and there were plenty to go without me.

LINDY: Every man counts, Mr. Holworthy, and I and everyone else would respect you more if you had joined the army.

JIM: DO you really think so, Miss Lindy?

LINDY: Yes I do.

JIM: (Starting to go.) Well, goodbye.

LINDY: Where are you going?

JIM: I’m going to enlist.

(Exit Jim.)

(Enter Virginia on run.)

VIRGINIA: Oh Lindy, news, news! Our army is retreating and will pass by here within half an hour by the Royd Turnpike.

LINDY: And Charley’s regiment?

VIRGINIA: Your brother’s regiment is with them.

LINDY: Oh, what news! Mother! Mother! (Calling.)

MRS. D.: (Outside.) Yes Lindy?

LINDY: Come down quick. Virginia, how do you know?

VIRGINIA: The advance guard is already in sight. My little brother Dick rode out to make sure, and he was right. It’s Early’s division of Lee’s army.

(Enter Mrs. Douglas and Cecilia.)

MRS. D.: What’s the matter, Lindy? Oh, howdy, Virginia.

VIRGINIA: The army! Oh the army! Celia, rejoice, rejoice! Charley is coming home. Isn’t it perfectly romantic!

MRS. D.: For an hour perhaps.

VIRGINIA: (Sits at pano and plays “Away Down South in Dixie.”)

(Enter Tommy and Clara Douglas and Governess.)

TOMMY: Oh Mother, may I go out and see the soldiers? May I?

May I? (Jumfing with excitement.)

CLARA: Yes Mother, may I?

MRS. D.: Very well, children.

CLARA AND TOMMY: THANKS’ MOTHER.

(Exit Tommy and Clara on run.)

(Hoofbeats heard outside.)

(Enter Charley, followed by Percy.)

CHARLEY: Well Mother, I’m back again, Sister too, and Celia.

(Embraces them all in turn.) Mother, this is my friend, Lieutenant Altwater. He’s an English sympathizer who came over and joined us.

MRS. D, CECILIA, VIRGINIA AND LINDY: We’re glad to meet you, Lieutenant Altwater. (Etc.)

PERCY: Delighted, I’m sure. You know, I haven’t seen a girl for six months. I declare I thought I’d die! You know, I love the girls, and alas they return the compliment.

VIRGINIA: (Thrilled.) Oh, are you a sharpshooter?

PERCY: Me? No, no, I’m in the Infantry, mounted at present.

CECILIA: Infant? Infant? A regiment of very young men?

PERCY: No, no, — Those on foot — Anyone on foot.

CECILIA: Oh girls, then we’re all infantries. (Laughs.)

VIRGINIA: HOW perfectly romantic!

MRS. D.: HOW do you like the army, Mr. Altwater.

PERCY: Very well, except for the servants. You know, they object to my keeping two valets. Isn’t it outrageous? I started out with a manicure lady but she eloped with my footman. Then my groom drank some of that bully Kentucky whiskey, and alas I don’t know where he is now!

VIRGINIA: How deliciously sentimental! Come, would you not like to see the place?

PERCY: I’d love to. (Extends arm to Virginia.) It reminds me of an old shooting lodge I’ve got up in Suffolk.

(Exit Percy and Virginia.)

CHARLEY: Well Mother, we’re rich. Our cavalry company fell in with a Yankee commissary train and here are twelve thousand dollars Union money. That’s shoes, guns, and what not for our whole division. Looks good to us. I’m acting commissary since old Wilkins was shot. Twelve thousand! That helps along.

LINDY: HOW long can you stay, Charley?

CHARLEY: Five minutes more. The division has passed now, and the Union advance is right behind us. But where is Father?

(Enter Judge Douglas, wheeled by Jeff.)

JUDGE D.: My son!

CHARLEY: Father! (They clasf hands.)

JUDGE Well, I’m mighty glad to see you. You don’t look any the worse for wear.

CHARLEY: I’ve been fine — A little scratch on my forehead — Nothing to speak of.

GIRLS and MRS. D.: Oh!

CHARLEY: Hardly drew blood, I assure you.

JUDGE D.: Charley, you are just in time to tell your sister what kind of a man Jim Holworthy is. He’s been sending her flowers.

CHARLEY: Jim Holworthy been sending Lindy flowers? Why Lindy, do you know that that man is a rank quitter? He’s a stay-at-home!

The day we organized our company he refused to join, and wouldn’t give any reason. He’s — he’s — why — if he does it again I’ll take him out and horsewhip him!

LINDY: There, there, Charley, your little sister is quite old enough to take care of herself. Mr. Holworthy has just enlisted at my bidding.

CHARLEY: I didn’t know he had the nerve.

JUDGE D.: Oh, so you’ve seen him lately, have you? I’ll cane him!

LINDY: There, Father, it’s all right.

JUDGE D.: But I tell you it isn’t all right! He can’t —

(Enter Percy.)

(Exit Judge Douglas and Jeff.)

PERCY: Charley old sport, we’d better be going. We’re behind the column now, and the Yankee outriders are not far behind.

CHARLEY: I reckon you’re right, Percy.

PERCY: You’ll excuse us, Mrs. Douglas. You know, General Lee really needs me. I fancy he’s wondering now where I am. I’m rather the power behind the throne, you know.

CHARLEY: Well, goodbye Celia; goodbye LindyJ goodbye Mother.

PERCY: Good afternoon Mrs. Douglas. Sorry I haven’t a card with me.

(Enter Judge Douglas and Jeff.)

JEFF: Mistah Charley, dere’s a squad of Yanks jumpin’ over the fence down by de cow pasture and comin’ up here right pert!

CHARLEY: All right, Jeff. You haven’t a few cigars, Father? We don’t get such luxuries.

JUDGE D.: Here — Help yourself.

CHARLEY: (Takes cigars.) Here, Percy.

PERCY: If I may. (Also takes cigars.)

MRS. D.: DO hurry, Charley; I’m so afraid.

CHARLEY: Goodbye everyone. Come on Percy.

(Exit Charley and Percy.)

(Sound of hoof beats. Voice outside.)

Hey, halt there! (Two shots fired.)

MRS. D.: Oh!

CECILIA: (At window.) They’re safe. Charley is waving his hat.

MRS. D.: Oh, thank God for that!

CECILIA: Some Yanks are coming across the yard.

JUDGE D.: Oh, if I wasn’t a cripple! Oh!!

(Door of ens — )

(Enter Caftain Ormsby with Privates.)

CAPT. O.: Good morning. (No answer.) You don’t seem sociable. Well, don’t answer then, but listen. A few officers will have to be quartered on you tonight. I’m sorry, lady — I thought I’d prepare you. It’s a disagreeable duty.

LINDY: We need no sympathy from Yanks.

MRS. D.: None at all.

CECILIA: I think I’ll be going home, Mrs. Douglas.

LINDY ) Goodbye, Celia.

CECILIA: Goodbye.

(Exit Cecilia.)

CAPT. O.: (Looking at Judge Douglas in chair.) What’s this? A Southerner and not at war?

JUDGE D.: Your remarks, sir, are entirely out of place. I’ll have you know, sir, that I — I —

LINDY: My father is paralyzed from his waist down.

CAPT. O.: I see. Well, you may expect the officers for dinner.

MRS. D.: If we must, we must. How many?

CAPT. O.: Four.

MRS. D.: The pantry is open — They can serve themselves. I will wait on no Yankees.

CAPT. O.: By the way, who were those two Rebs that rode away just as we came up?

JUDGE D.: That is our affair.

CAPT. O.: There’re a pesky lot of cavalrymen. They robbed a commissary train this morning, and cost Uncle Sam twelve thousand in greenbacks.

JUDGE D.: That doesn’t concern me in the slightest. Jeff, wheel me out. Come on, Mary.

(Exit Judge Douglas, Mrs. Douglas, and Jeff.)

CAPT. O.: I’ll put a guard in front of the house, Miss Douglas, to keep the soldiers from annexing food.

LINDY: As you please.

(Exit Captain Ormsby.)

LINDY: (Goes to table and picks up work. Under it she finds the money. She hides it under cover.)

JIM: (Outside.) I don’t know any countersign — I ain’t ever been behind a counter anyhow. I ain’t no clerk.

PRIVATE WILLINGS: (Outside.) I tell you you can’t pass.

(Enter Jim Holworthy, followed by Private Willings.)

LINDY: Well, Mr. Holworthy, did you did it? Did you en —

JIM: Hobble gobble gobble!

LINDY: Why, what’s the matter? I only wanted to know if you en —

JIM: Hobble gobble!

PRIVATE W.: What’s the matter? Is this some plot?

JIM: No. You see, she’s got a cold, and she wanted me to go to the drugstore and get her a mustard plaster.

LINDY: Why —

JIM: For her dog. You see, she’s fond of the dog, and it caught the cold.

LINDY: Mr. Holworthy, it’s no such thing — I just wanted to know if you — if you —

JIM: Aber-ca-daber!

PRIVATE W.: This is treason. I heard him say, “I could have had you.” You’re a spy.

JIM: No, I ain’t.

LINDY: This man isn’t a spy — He’s just afraid to go to war.

PRIVATE W.: Well, I’ll believe you, mum. But don’t let me see you snooping around here, Rube!

(Exit Private Willings.)

JIM: Did you hear what he called me? Come back here, you — I’ll show him. I’ll — I’ll — (Makes motion of stabbing.)

(Enter Private Willings.)

PRIVATE W.: Did you call?

JIM: Me? No, I didn’t call. Me? Oh, oh, I didn’t call.

PRIVATE W.: Excuse me, lady.

(Exit Private Willings.)

LINDY: Well, did you enlist?

JIM: Almost. I tossed a coin to see which army I’d join.

LINDY: Horrors! Who won?

JIM: Don’t be afraid, the South won me.

LINDY: And did you enlist?

JIM: Well, the recruiting officer had fled south with the Southern army, so I thought I’d try the Yanks, but they had a picture in a book on the table —

LINDY: A picture?

JIM: All blood. It was a battle. And — and then I realized that I’d better wait and join the other side, so I told the man to wait for me.

LINDY: Mr. Jim Holworthy, never speak to me again! I told my family I had influenced you to enlist, and — and — they believed me, and now you didn’t! I think you are contemptible —

JIM: Excuse me.

(Enter Judge Douglas wheeled by Jeff.)

JUDGE D.: What’s this? What’s this? Tell me, what’s this? On my honor it’s the worm!

JIM: Worm?

JUDGE D.: You impertinent young scamp, calling on my daughter.

I’ll — I’ll cane you! Jeff — my cane! Wheel me at him! (Jeff starts to wheel and Jim retreats.)

JIM: Oh Judge Douglas, be reasonable.

LINDY: Father, you’ll have a fit! Remember your liver is in poor condition.

JIM: Look out, Judge, there ain’t anything like a good liver.

JUDGE D.: What do you know about my liver? Lindy did you ever mention my liver to him?

LINDY: Never, Father — (Cautioning.) But your liver —

JUDGE D.: Bother my liver.

JIM: Well, don’t bother me.

(Enter Angelina.)

ANGELINA: A family disagreement? How perfectly shocking. Our family never squabble.

JUDGE D.: What’s this? Do you, young lady, mean to dictate to me in my own house? —

LINDY: GO slow, Father.

ANGELINA: Oh the Bangs in me is rising. Oh can I stop it? Can I?

(Struggle.) There. I have conquered it. Angeline stands victorious.

JUDGE D.: What’s this? Bangs, Angelina? Why the Bangs in you is the best part of you. Why Georgie Bangs ever married that patron saint mother of yours beats me. And you (turning to Jim), you’re a pair — I can’t control myself — I’ll burst! Wheel me out Jeff — No, don’t! Go ahead! Young sir — Stop! If I ever — Keep going! — see you again — Stop I say! I’ll — I’ll thrash you —

(Exit Judge Douglas, growling, wheeled by Jeff.)

ANGELINA: His words are blasphemous. I am shocked. I will return home and pray that he will never regret this moment. (Exit.)

JIM: (Sings.) “Throw out the life line.” He ain’t pleasant somehow. You know, he doesn’t love me.

LINDY: NO he doesn’t. (Whistle heard outside.) That’s my brother’s whistle that we used when we were children. He’s — he’s in the house! He’s coming back! Heavens!! And the Yankees everywhere. Oh Charley, Charley. (Whistles.) Where’s the sentry?

JIM: On the other end of the veranda.

(Enter Charley.)

LINDY: Charley, what brings you here? The Yankees are all around the house. There is a guard on the doorstep. Oh go, before it is too late.

CHARLEY: I came back for —

JIM: (Stepping up.) Howdy do, Charley.

(Charley snubs him.)

CHARLEY: So this is your resource when your friends are in the army? — this — this stay-at-home!

LINDY: We won’t quarrel now.

CHARLEY: I’m sorry, Lindy. But I must hurry. I mislaid that money. Where is it?

LINDY: Here it is. (Gets money from under cover.) Take it and go!

(Voice outside.)

CAPT. O.: Has no one gone in or out?

LINDY: (TO Charley, motioning him to door.) Quick! Go out here.

(Exit Charley.)

(Enter Captain Ormsby.)

CAPT. O.: Good morning, Miss Douglas; my duty is most unpleasant. There is a man concealed here. My sergeant saw a horseman ride through the gap and leave his horse in the woods. He was seen entering here.

LINDY: I’m afraid you are mistaken.

CAPT. O.: I sincerely hope so. Still, I am forced to assure myself of it.

LINDY: There is no one here.

CAPT. O.: You will kindly stand aside. It is hardly my pleasure to disobey a lady.

(Enter Charles Douglas, revolver in hand.)

CHARLEY: I will save you that trouble. Hands up, Captain.

CAPT. O.: (Raises hands.) I have men at this very doorstep. I have but to raise my voice.

CHARLEY: And you’ll be raising it with the angel chorus, or as you are a Yankee, contrarywise, if you say another word.

LINDY: Charley, what shall I do? (Pulling him to side.)

CHARLEY: (Aside to Lindy.) I’ll have to hide here. Get him out of here first. (To Yankee.) Yank, right about face. You walk from here right down to the gate without looking behind. A sign to your men and you go — (Still pointing pistol at him.)

CAPT. O.: Your chances are one in a million.

CHARLEY: NO remarks. March!

(Exit Captain Ormsby.)

LINDY: Quick — open this. (Pointing to chest.) Charley, quick — get in. Now slam that door, (to Jim)

(Voices heard outside, and tramping.)

CAPT. O.: Here they are.

(Enter Capt. Ormsby, Private Willings, and Private Barkis.)

Quick — Through the house! He can’t get away.

(Exit Privates.)

(Turning to Jim.) So you’re a pal of his, are you? In plain clothes — You’ll swing for this. He’s in uniform — lucky beggar.

JIM: NO, I ain’t.

CAPT. O.: And you, young lady, may have to eat prison fare for a while. This is high treason.

LINDY: YOU dare — you —

JIM: Let him alone, Miss Lindy. He’ll get mad.

(Enter Private Willings.)

PRIVATE W.: NO trace of him, sir. Three men are still searching. He must be here.

CAPT. O.: I’ll get that fresh Reb. Where is he? — Tell me!

LINDY: Do you think you can frighten me?

CAPT. O.: Here is a man we can. (Going towards Jim.) If you are wise you will say.

JIM: I — I — he —

LINDY: Jim!

CAPT. O.: Where is he?

JIM: I don’t know.

CAPT. O.: (To soldier.) Give this fellow a lash or two and then — Well, there are ropes in camp.

(Soldier grabs Jim.)

JIM: Don’t! I — I —

CAPT. O.: Hurry.

LINDY: Jim!

JIM: I — oh, I can’t!

CAPT. O.: Away with him.

JIM: Stop! I’ll tell. He’s — he’s in there. (Pointing to chest. Soldier springs to it and takes out Charley.)

CHARLEY: YOU damn coward!

CAPT. O.: (To Jim.) Here — Here’s a quarter. Southern manhood!

LINDY: (Crying.) Goodbye Charley. Oh, my brother.

CHARLEY: I’m only a prisoner of war, Lindy.

CAPT. O.: Right about face — March!

(Exit Captain Ormsby, Charles Douglas and Private Willings.)

JIM: Gee, they’re taking him away! They almost took me. Well, that’s over. What’s the matter? Why — why — you ain’t mad, are you, Miss Lindy? I — I — oh, I see, I shouldn’t have told, but I didn’t know. I didn’t — as God sees me, I didn’t! I was afraid. Speak to me, Miss Lindy. I just had to tell! Oh, don’t think I’m a — traitor. Don’t, Miss Lindy — Don’t! — oh don’t! (Stiffens “p.) I reckon I see now. I’m a — a what he called me, a coward!

(Pause.) Goodbye, I’m going now, south to the army. I see now, I’m — I’m — Goodbye, Miss Lindy — Goodbye.

(Lindy turns and leaves him without an answer.)

(Curtain.)

ACT II

(Scene same as Act I, and three years later.)

(Curtain rises showing Jeff setting table. He gets milk in a jug and fills two glasses half full. Then he gets water jug and fills up the rest of the glasses. Surveys his table. Places four crackers at plates. Then puts flowers in center. Something is lacking so he removes four flowers and places them at each plate. Surveys table again with satisfaction.)

(Enter Mrs. Douglas.)

MRS. D.: Good morning, Jeff.

JEFF: Mawnin’, Mrs. Douglas. (Hints at table with evident pride.)

MRS. D.: What’s this?

JEFF: De — de luncheon, Mrs. Douglas.

MRS. D.: YOU surely don’t expect us to eat flowers.

JEFF: No’m — No’m — You kin if you wants to, but I don’t advise you to. Dey’s not good to eat, ‘ceptin’ maybe cauliflower or bakin’ flour.

MRS. D.: And is there nothing else in the ice house?

JEFF: Oh, yassum — Yessam — Dey’s lots! Dey’s — ah — three or four pieces of bread and one of ‘em still pretty good. An — an — half a jug o’ milk, an — an — a egg an — a apple — All that!

MRS. D.: I reckon we’re mighty poor, Jeff.

JEFF: Don’t talk that way, Mrs. Douglas! Dat ain’t no way to talk. Times’ll mend — but dis here coat won’t.

MRS. D.: Yes, it is well to be hopeful, but I trust the horrible war is almost over. Since the Judge died we’ve been pretty poor, and Charley, though he has escaped so far, is still there.

JEFF: But you got a daughter.

MRS. D.: Poor Lindy! Having to give up all and become a school teacher. She practically supports us now, Jeff.

JEFF: Ah expect dey’ll be a heap o’ offers for her when de young men gits home from de wah.

MRS. D.: Jeff — You mustn’t talk that way.

JEFF: Yassum — Excuse me. (Goes to window.) Dere’s Miss Lindy now.

(Exit Jeff.)

(Enter Lindy and Cecilia.)

LINDY: Hello, Mother. (Removes shawl and hat.)

CECILIA: Good morning, Mrs. Douglas.

MRS. D.: Good morning, Celia.

CECILIA: I met Lindy on the way back from her schoolhouse, surrounded by a most adoring crowd of little nuisances. I rescued her, and here we are.

MRS. D.: Did you have a good day, Lindy?

LINDY: Fine, Mother. I think it will be all right now that that Tompkins boy has decided to behave. Mrs. Tompkins sent a note with him this morning authorizing me to punish him to the fullest extent of the law, and when I punish! — I tell you, Mother, I’m growing strong.

MRS D.: Oh, if Charley were only here to take the burden of supporting us off your shoulders.

CECILIA: I reckon he will soon. Our army is getting weaker and weaker. They’re going to make a stand at Appomattox, so Eddie Randolph wrote his mother.

LINDY: We haven’t seen Charley for two years.

MRS. D.: I miss him, oh, how I miss him!

LINDY: We can only wait for him. I’ll be back, Celia.

(Exit Lindy.)

CECILIA: YOU are not the only one who misses him.

MRS. D.: Celia, I thought so! So you are engaged?

CECILIA: He has asked me to marry him. He wrote me and said that his first duty was to you. He spoke also of Captain Holworthy. He was awarded a medal at the battle of Petersburg.

MRS. D.: Holworthy? Jim Holworthy?

CECILIA: Yes, I reckon he’s changed some. He wasn’t very popular when he left here, but somehow he joined the army, and he has proved himself.

MRS. D.: But does Charley like him after what happened that time three years ago in this very house, when he was captured through this Holworthy’s cowardice?

CECILIA: Charley bears no resentment. Holworthy has saved his life since then. I’m sure I’m willing to accept him as all right if he comes home.

MRS. D.: Perhaps you’re right.

CECILIA: And Mrs. Douglas, Charley wrote something else about him — a curious thing — The day Holworthy saved his life — it was in a skirmish — he was wounded slightly, and Charley, in “nbuttoning his collar to give him air, saw a locket spring open that he was wearing around his neck. Before he closed it he noticed the picture inside. Holworthy saw that Charley knew, and blushed, saying it was a hobby of his. But Charley knew that Captain Holworthy was carrying Lindy’s picture. I’ve often wondered if she has forgiven him.

LINDY: (From the doorway.) Yes, she has forgiven him.

(Enter Lindy.)

CECILIA: Lindy, I didn’t know —

LINDY: I was standing here. It makes no difference — I am interested in Captain Holworthy because I started his — his change.

He’s — he’s rather a protégé of mine.

(Enter Jeff.)

CECILIA: I must go now. Mother is waiting for me — waiting luncheon.

MRS. D.: Will you stay and dine? (Jeff coughs.) We have not much to offer, but (Jeff coughs) — Jeff, will you be quiet! — but we would be so glad to have you.

CECILIA: NO thank you, Mrs. Douglas. I think I’ll be moving along. Good morning.

MRS. D. AND LINDY: Good morning, Celia.

MRS. D.: Jeff, never do that again. Don’t you know we are always glad to have anyone share whatever we have?

JEFF: Yassum, but we ain’t got but one share. You can’t share a share.

MRS. D.: That’s true, but —

JEFF: Dey’s plenty o’ chairs — You don’t have to chair de shares —

I mean chair de chairs — No, I mean share de shares — Mrs.

Douglas, luncheon is ready.

LINDY: The children?

MRS. D.: At the Taylors for luncheon.

LINDY: Oh, I almost forgot — Teacher — “that’s me” — was presented with two oranges today. I’ll get them.

(Exit Lindy.)

JEFF: (Goes to window.) Lawd o’ massy! It’s Mistah Charley!

(Enter Captain Charles Douglas.)

CHARLEY: Jeff!

MRS. D.: My boy!

CHARLEY: Mother!

JEFF: Large as life and twice as natural!

CHARLEY: Home at last, Mother. Where’s Lindy?

(Enter Lindy with plate of oranges. She sees Charley and drops plate which Jeff catches.)

LINDY: Charley!

CHARLEY: Lindy! Home again. It seems great.

LINDY: And the war?

CHARLEY: Is over. Lee surrendered at Appomattox twelve hours ago. We did all we could — We were all gone — It was too much for us.

MRS. D.: My poor boy!

CHARLEY: I’m lucky to be alive and have a home to come back to, and a place for food. (Looks at table.)

MRS. D-: Sit down. You must be famished.

CHARLEY: Ah, milk! (Drinks and sputters.)

MRS. D.: Why, what’s the matter?

CHARLEY: Nothing. But I’ve learned something.

LINDY: What?

CHARLEY: There are some things worse than prison fare.

MRS. D.: (Drinks and sputters.)

LINDY: (Holds up glass.) Jeff, what’s the matter with this milk?

JEFF: (Examines it carefully.) Nothin’.

CHARLEY: Nothing?

MRS. D.: Nothing?

LINDY: Taste it!

JEFF: (Tastes it.) Oh, I recollect — I was enockomizing. Dey’s water — a little bit — in dis milk — Jes’ a bit.

CHARLEY: I should say there was. Mother, are we in need of economizing like this?

MRS. D.: Lindy teaches school.

CHARLEY: By all that is holy! I’ll get some work tonight. Mother, can you let me see exactly how we stand?

MRS. D.: Yes, I have the accounts in the parlor.

(Exit Mrs. Douglas, Captain Douglas and Jeff.)

(Enter Jim.)

JIM: Good morning, Miss Lindy.

LINDY: Mr. — Captain Holworthy! Good morning.

JIM: It’s — it’s four years since I saw you last.

LINDY: Four years.

JIM: I was different then — I reckon we all were.

LINDY: Yes, I reckon we all were.

JIM: I’ve always thought that you rather set me right somehow.

LINDY: YOU do me great honor, Captain Holworthy.

JIM: I haven’t forgotten it, either.

LINDY: YOU haven’t?

JIM: NO, I’ve — I’ve thought of it a lot more than you know. I realized long ago what I was.

LINDY: Well, you’ve come back different.

JIM: Yes, I reckon so. Do you remember the day when — when your brother was captured — what I said to you earlier in the day?

LINDY: Yes — yes, I think I do.

JIM: Well I — I can’t explain but — it’s you that I owe everything I’ve become — and that’s not much, for the last soldier of a lost cause doesn’t bring back much except an empty scabbard.

LINDY: And medals.

JIM: Medals.

LINDY: That little iron cross — Where did you get that?

JIM: Well, General Lee is the only one that can tell. HE — he gives them away instead of cigars; he was out of cigars the day I called.

LINDY: I see you’re more modest than you used to be.

JIM: It isn’t much of a virtue when you have nothing to be vain about. My vanity wants satisfaction in another way now.

LINDY: Yes?

JIM: Yes. I could be proud — very proud if — Miss Lindy, you know what I want to say. You’ve been with me always. You made me go south. You have made me what I am. Whenever I received promotion it was because you inspired me. And — and — will you keep inspiring me?

LINDY: YOU ask me to be your wife?

JIM: Yes.

LINDY: Ji — Captain Holworthy, the man I marry must have my whole respect. I have lived in a war time and have had death and bravery brought very near to me. Bravery and moral courage are to me necessary to respect and love. I — I — Do you remember that morning you told me you had a strain somewhere in your nature of cowardice?

JIM: I remember.

LINDY: Tell me then, if you have completely conquered that?

JIM: And if I have.

LINDY: If you have, I — I will marry you.

JIM: Miss Lindy — Lindy, I am telling you the truth, though God only knows it hurts me to do it — I haven’t conquered it. When it’s something impulsive or where I don’t have to reason, I’ve done many dangerous things, but when I think, I hesitate and give up. I got these trinkets for things like the first. This for a flag I took at Chickamauga, and this for saving Bragg from being shot at Shiloh; but I remember once when Lee asked for volunteers for secret service I didn’t step out with the rest. And when I was in Libby prison before I was exchanged, three fellows who were with me had a chance to escape. They offered me an equal chance — It was an even chance — death or escape, and I didn’t take it. I reckon it’s a yellow streak in me somewhere. I would like to try once more.

LINDY: I see. But your chance of trying is over now.

JIM: I reckon.

LINDY: Well, goodbye Jim.

JIM: Goodbye Miss Lindy. You are right — I shouldn’t have hoped for you. It was all a kind of a dream. (Starts to go.)

LINDY: You may have a chance yet to prove it.

JIM: NO, I reckon not.

(Exit Jim.)

(Enter Jeff.)

JEFF: On celebration o’ Mistah Charley’s return kin ah get out de best tableclof? He’s got a bit o’ money and he’s goin’ to buy a good dinner.

LINDY: Yes Jeff, anything.

(Exit Lindy.)

JEFF: NOW whah was dat? In — in de oie linen chest what hain’t been used fo’ yeahs. Lemme see. (Goes to chest and opens it.) Why I — I feels sumpin! (Pulls out roll of money.) Jumpin’ Jerusalem it’s money! Stacks of it! Northern money. Now dat’s one hundred and one hundred is — Gee, I ain’t no mathematician. Now lemme see — How did that money get thar? That chest ain’t been used since Mistah Charley was captured out o’ it three years ago. Why, don’t I recollect he had some army money wit him? But it won’t do to tell him it was dat — He’d send it away to General Lee. I’ll — I’ll — diplomatize — dat is, if I’m as good a liah as ah used to be. (Steps heard outside. Starts sweeping.)

(Enter Mrs. Douglas and Charley.)

JEFF: Mrs. Douglas, dere’s a mattah ah wants to broach to you.

MRS. D.: What is it, Jeff?

JEFF: (Hesitates and jumbles.) On de later desease — demise of youh inflected husband he sum-mumoned me to his bedside jes aftah he died, and thrust into mah hands a small sum o’ money which he said to give you after de triffic encountah which was den ragin’ triumphantly and spasmodically — de very words he used — was done. De circumstances is now justified. Behold!

(Produces money.)

CHARLEY: (Takes it.) Why, what’s this?

MRS. D.: Why, I didn’t know Arthur had any money when he died.

CHARLEY: Mother, it’s twelve thousand dollars good money!

MRS. D.: If Jeff is telling the truth —

CHARLEY: Jeff?

JEFF: Mrs. Douglas, ma mouf is as clean from lyin’ as is de grass from de snow — in de wintah time.

CHARLEY: It sounds true. Mother, we’re rich! It’s yours!

MRS. D.: It’s too good to be true.

CHARLEY: And I’m off.

MRS. D.: Where?

CHARLEY: TO see Cecilia.

(Exit Charley.’)

JEFF: (Aside.) No sah, dere ain’t nothin’ like a little judicious lyin’!

(Enter Lieutenant Percy Altwater.)

PERCY: Mrs. Douglas, good morning. I fancy you are surprised to see me.

MRS. D.: I remember you perfectly, Mr. Hotwater.

PERCY: Altwater, my dear lady — Altwater.

MRS. D.: Excuse me.

PERCY: Certainly. Do you know, I hesitate to tell you why I returned. Do you know, I fancy Cupid has been at work and brought me back, fair as a — a — What am I fair as?

MRS. D.: A dancing elephant.

PERCY: Yes, a dancing elephant — er — oh, that doesn’t sound just right, does it?

MRS. D.: Doesn’t it, Mr. Warmwater?

PERCY: Altwater — Altwater.

MRS. D.: Excuse me.

PERCY: And as I was saying, I made the acquaintance of a most fascinating young lady at your house, Miss Virginia the tailor — I suppose they meant dressmaker. But even if the poor girl is a dressmaker, I would wave aside caste and er — marry her.

MRS. D.: Very condescending of you, Mr. Breakwater.

PERCY: Altwater — Altwater. I think so myself.

MRS. D.: But she isn’t a dressmaker. That’s just her name.

PERCY: Miss Virginia Dressmaker — That’s a very odd name.

MRS. D.: NO no! — Miss Virginia Taylor.

PERCY: Oh!

(Enter Virginia.)

VIRGINIA: Good morning, Mrs. Douglas.

MRS D.: Here is a friend of yours, Virginia.

VIRGINIA: Mr. Sweetwater!

PERCY: Miss Dressmaker!

(Exit Mrs. Douglas.)

VIRGINIA: I am delighted to see you again.

PERCY: Did you get my letter?

VIRGINIA: Yes, and the coat-of-arms.

PERCY: Rather a pretty crest, isn’t it? I picked it up at a stationer’s in Richmond.

VIRGINIA: Horrors!

PERCY: I’m sorry. You’ll forgive me?

VIRGINIA: Yes. Who would not forgive the lost soldier of a last cause.

PERCY: Yes, but I’m not lost.

VIRGINIA: A slip of the tongue — I mean, the last soldier of a lost cause.

PERCY: Just so. It’s rather sad.

VIRGINIA: Sad? It’s all pathetic.

PERCY: Allopathic?

VIRGINIA: All pathetic.

PERCY: Miss Virginia, I’ve something to say to you.

VIRGINIA: It’s coming! — Isn’t it perfectly thirteenth century!

PERCY: Will you — will you —

VIRGINIA: Oh, I feel faint! Catch me! (Fakes a faint.) (Percy springs forward.) No, on the other side — It looks better. (He helps her sink into chair.) All right. Now go on.

PERCY: Will you marry me?

VIRGINIA: (Dreaming.) She looked tenderly into his dark brown eyes —

PERCY: But my eyes are not dark brown.

VIRGINIA: Sh! — And lisped — whispered tenderly —

PERCY: But this isn’t a novel, you know.

VIRGINIA: Now you’ve spoiled the whole thing. I want to look back upon my proposal as something romantic.

PERCY: But this is my proposal. Will you —

VIRGINIA: (Jumps up.) Wait! It must be on bended knees in the flower garden, with the roses —

PERCY: And the bugs —

VIRGINIA: With the green grass —

PERCY: My poor trousers!

VIRGINIA: Come, Alphonso —

PERCY: But my name isn’t Alphonso —

VIRGINIA: Never mind that — Come let us flit to the rose garden.

(She flits, and Percy very awkwardly “flits” after her.)

(Percy and Virginia cease flitting.)

(Enter Angelina.)

ANGELINA: Unchaperoned. This is perfectly awful. Unchaperoned!

PERCY: But we’re engaged.

ANGELINA: How terrible! Blush, young lady, blush with shame. How could you admit it? I wouldn’t admit it.

PERCY: YOU can’t admit it unless you’re engaged.

ANGELINA: Let me read you from this little work a short sermon on conduct of young ladies. “Young ladies should never under any conditions be alone with young men. The best authorities such as Miss Grayson, Miss Finch, Miss Spence and Miss Spindle agree in regard to this.” (Percy and Virginia have sneaked out.) “A young lady on meeting a young man in the street should on no account — “ (Sees that the others are gone.)

ANGELINA: Poor misguided people. I will pray for them. Yes I will pray for them. (Exit.)

(Enter Lindy and two soldiers — Privates Willings and Barkis —

from opposite doors.)

LINDY: What do you want here?

PRIVATE W.: Good morning, lady.

PRIVATE B.: Greetings, fair one.

LINDY: GO out of here!

PRIVATE W.: We just came back from Appomattox, lady, and passing this spacious house, we thought perhaps you had a few trinkets to donate to the Union cause, just to cement the peace.

(Removes cartridge belt and lays it on table.)

LINDY: We have nothing, nothing in the house.

PRIVATE W.: We’ll look and see, lady, if you have no objections.

(Exit Privates Willings and Barkis.)

LINDY: Jeff! Jeff! Oh, if Charley were only here.

(Enter Jeff.)

LINDY: Jeff, run out and find someone! — Any man! — Say that there are two Yankees here who are trying to pillage the house!

Quick!

(Exit Jeff.)

(Enter Private Barkis.)

PRIVATE B.: Lady, where’s the pantry? — I’m hungry. My pal prefers the valuables; I prefer the victuals. (Lindy -points toward pantry.) I bid thee adieu. (Bows low.)

(Exit Private Barkis.)

(Enter Private Willings.)

PRIVATE W.: Lady, there ain’t a valuable in the house — Not one!

Except I see you’ve got a mighty fine necklace round your neck.

LINDY: Oh, you thief — you — !

(Enter Jim Holworthy.)

JIM: What’s this?

LINDY: Jim, this man — (Jim and Private Willings both rush to cartridge belt on table. Jim reaches it first. Willings fires twice with the two guns he is carrying but they refuse to work on account of lack of ammunition which Jim now holds.)

JIM: I reckon I’ve got your stock of ammunition, Yank. You may go.

PRIVATE W.: Your lady friend here has a chain I want.

JIM: You may go, I say. (Advances toward him.)

PRIVATE W.: Keep back! I’ve got a friend in the kitchen.

JIM: I have many in the town. This lady has but to run out and —

PRIVATE W.: Can’t we settle it peaceably? You don’t want to get hurt by me and my friend, and we don’t want to get chased by the town. But I’ve taken a fancy to that necklace. Isn’t there any way we can decide?

JIM: Yes, there is a way — one way. (Thinks.) Are we at truce for a minute.

PRIVATE W.: Yes.

JIM: Load one of these pistols.

PRIVATE W.: One?

JIM: Yes. Now the lady will take them both, mix them up behind her back, then she’ll put one in each hand, and you choose one.

I’ll take the other. Then we fire. One will refuse to work.

PRIVATE W.: My God! Only one pistol loaded? But the lady —

JIM: You may trust the lady. May he not, Lindy?

LINDY: Yes. But I didn’t mean for you to do this, Jim!

JIM: It will end it one way or the other.

PRIVATE W.: Here they are. (Hands his two pistols to Lindy who mixes them as directed.)

JIM: All right, Yank — Choose.

PRIVATE W.: I — I — oh, I’m going — I can stand a battle, but you’ve got some nerve.

(Exit Private Willings.)

JIM: (Pause.) Well, I reckon I bluffed him. Glad to have been of service to you. Goodbye.

LINDY: You’re not going, Jim?

JIM: Yes.

LINDY: And you have nothing to say?

JIM: Nothing, I reckon. What’s the use?

LINDY: I think, Jim, you have had your chance.

JIM: Then you think you really will — ?

LINDY: Jim, come here — You are a worse coward than you were four years ago.

(They embrace.)

(Quick Curtain.)

ASSORTED SPIRITS

A two act farce written for The Elizabethan Dramatic Club by Francis Scott Fitzgerald Presented at the Y.W.C.A. Auditorium and the White Bear Yacht Club on Tuesday and Wednesday evenings, September 8 and 9, 1914

Under the Direction of Elizabeth Magoffin.

CONTENTS

CAST OF CHARACTERS

ACT I

ACT II

CAST OF CHARACTERS

WILLIAM CHAPMAN, gentleman spirit — Gustave Schurmeier

JOSEPH us HENDRIX, gentleman spirit — John L. Mitchell

PETER WETHERBY, who needs $10,000 — Scott Fitzgerald

DICKIE WETHERBY, a hypochondriac with hay fever — James Armstrong

MULLIGAN (Policeman) — McNeil Seymore

O’FLARITY (Policeman) —  — Robert Clark

CECILE WETHERBY, in love with Will — Eleanor Alair

CLARA KING, from Missouri.... — Katherine Schulze

SECOND STORY SALLE — Dorothy Greene

MADAME ZADA, a fortune teller... — Alice Lyon

MISS SPIGOT, doting aunt of Will... — Margaret Armstrong

HULDA, a maid, from Sweden.... — Betty Mudge

Act I — The Wetherby Home — 9:30 P. M.

Act II — Same — Next morning

Furnishings — up-to-date living room, two closets in evidence.

Costumes — Modern. Two devils’ suits. Two policeman uniforms.

ACT I

(Curtain rises showing Cecile and Miss Spigot in conversation.)

MISS S.: My dear Cecile, I have had such a busy day.

CEC.: YOU have?

MISS S.: Yes, you know my nephew William is coming home tomorrow.

CEC.: How perfectly delightful; I haven’t seen him for three years.

MISS S.: He has been very successful in the railroad business.

CEC.: So?

MISS S.: His business is contracting.

CEC.: HOW interesting. Contracting and expanding, I suppose.

MISS S.: (Indignantly.) He is not a contortionist, he is a railroad contractor.

CEC.: I see.

MISS S.: I suppose all the young girls in the vicinity will be angling for him.

CEC.: Yes, no doubt.

MISS S.: However, I have no one in mind; yet do you know I have always fancied that you and he would make a beautiful match.

CEC.: Miss Spigot!

MISS S.: My dear, my dear, you must control yourself. As an old friend of the family —

CEC.: (Interrupting.) Still, I want you to know that I am distinctly not angling for him.

(Dick looks in at door.)

MISS S.: Of course, of course. William is in town now.

CEC.: I am glad to hear it.

MISS S.: I haven’t seen him yet. He is going to a fancy dress ball tonight and he is dressing at his club. I expect him before midnight.

CEC.: (Yawns.) You must tell him to call.

MISS S.: Oh yes, he is the most —

DICK: (Outside.) Oh Hulda, you had better close all the windows, it is going to rain in a few minutes.

MISS S.: (Rising hurriedly.) Well, I must be going.

CEC.: SO sorry, come again some time.

(They both go out at left.)

(Dickie sticks his head around the corner and slowly comes into the room. Re-enter Cecile.)

DICK: IS she gone, Sis? (Feels pulse.)

CEC: (Sinks into chair.) Yes, thank Heaven.

PICK: I thought that would get her.

CEC.: What do you mean, isn’t it going to rain?

PICK: Not a cloud in the sky, but I was so nervous! And my hay fever starts tomorrow.

CEC.: I thought she would never stop, and the worst of it is she has her eyes on Dad. She was telling me about her nephew who is coming home tonight.

PICK: What, Will Chapman coming home tonight? That’s good.

CEC.: I haven’t seen him since he went away three years ago. He has been quite successful, I believe, a railroad contractor.

DICK: Well, I hope he hasn’t turned out like his aunt — the old bore. I like brilliant women.

CEC.: What is your idea of a brilliant woman?

DICK: Every widow between thirty-five and forty-five who has no children and doesn’t wear glasses.

CEC.: Miss Spigot shows unlimited nerve. She copied her house after ours and there she is at 225 Greenwood Place and we’re at 225 Greenbriar Street. It’s a wonder more people haven’t already gotten mixed up. We get her letters continually.

(Enter Mr. Wetherby.)

MR. W.: (Gruffly.) Well, I found a purchaser for the house.

DICK: Thank heavens, Father, then we can live less economically.

MR. W.: If you had gone to work we’d have done that long ago. The only thing you are fit for is signing patent medicine testimonials. You want a position where you can dress expensively, cultivate an English accent and babble about art. (Sits down in chair and picks up newspaper.)

DICK: (Enthusiastically.) Just the thing!

MR. W.: Well, I’ll set you up as an interior decorator. Why, you’ve got a suit for every day in the year.

DICK: Yes, this is it. (Pointing to suit he is wearing.) If I wasn’t so delicate. I’ve got a play now in mind. I’ll write it up next week if I feel well enough.

CEC.: Who is going to buy the house?

MR. W.: Hm, hm.

CEC.: Who is going to buy it, Dad?

MR. W.: Can’t I read the paper in peace?

CEC.: Who is going to buy it?

MR. W.: Buy what? Oh yes, why I got a letter today from Josephus Hendrix, a second cousin of mine. Haven’t seen him for years. He says he wants to buy it, but he makes a blamed queer stipulation.

CEC.: What’s the stipulation?

MR. W.: What’s what? Oh, he says the house is haunted.

CEC AND DICK: HAUNTED!

MR. W.: Yes. So Cousin Josephus and his ward, Miss Clara King, will come tomorrow morning to spend a few days. Then if the house proves all right he’ll buy it.

DICK: Miss Clara King — age, please.

MR. W.: HOW should I know?

DICK: What do you think?

MR. W.: HOW should I think?

DICK: Oh, like everyone else thinks.

MR. W.: Oh, she’s seventeen, I suppose.

DICK: Oh, a young kid. Light or dark?

MR. W.: I am sure I don’t know. Why the de —

CEC.: Tut, tut, papa, you must not use profane language.

MR. W.: I will use any language I want to.

(The telephone rings. Enter Hulda, who goes to the phone.)

HULDA: Hello — what’s that — I tank so — aw, this is me. (Sits down.) Oh, Mr. Wetherby, yes, he’s here — nothing is the matter with me, how are you? Oh, he bane fine. Yes I will get him.

MR. W.: Who are you talking to?

HULDA: There is a man wants to speak to you.

MR. W.: (Goes to the phone.) Hello — yes — yes — oh, that was that damned Swede girl. Yes, why Cousin Josephus, I didn’t expect you till tomorrow — yes — well — you will be up in fifteen minutes. Goodbye. (Rings off. To children.) Cousin Joseph has arrived unexpectedly. He and his ward are at the station now. See to their rooms — we have got to make a good impression.

CEC.: Very well, Father.

DICK: I can’t make beds with my weak back.

(Exit Dick and Cecile. Mr. W. sits down and picks up newspaper. Bell rings. Enter Hulda, running.)

MR. W.: (Testily.) What’s your name?

HULDA: Oh, I answer to “Hey” or any loud cry.

MR. W.: What are you always running through the house for?

Don’t you ever sit still?

HULDA: TO answer the bell.

MR. W.: Answer who?

HULDA: The bell —

MR. W.: What bell?

HULDA: The door bell —

MR. W.: Well answer it and don’t stand here talking.

(Exit Hulda, Mr. W. picks up paper, re-enter Hulda with card on plate.)

HULDA: Lady to see you sir.

MR. W.: A lady, what lady? Does she want me?

HULDA: Oh yes, she sayd you sant for her.

MR. W.: Oh yes, I remember.

HULDA: Who is she? I can’t read the card.

MR. W.: Never you mind who she is. Show her in. (Takes card, exit Hulda.)

MR. W.: (Reading from card.) Madame Zada, fortune teller, astrologer, mind reader — hm, humbug!

(Enter Hulda followed by Madame Zada, who advances toward Mr. W. Exit Hulda.)

MME.: Well, Brother Peter.

MR. W.: Sh — sh —

MME.: What’s the matter, are you ashamed of me?

MR. W.: Not exactly, but if my children should know that my sister and their aunt was a fortune teller —

MME.: Well, I must earn my living. Since my husband’s desertion I have tried everything. I went back to my old profession of manicuring but I have lost the knack and there is money in fortune telling.

MR. W.: Well, here is why I sent for you. I have a prospective buyer for my house but he says that he has heard it is haunted.

MME.: Well, where do I come in?

MR. W.: Hold your horses. I want to ask you first if you think there is anything in spirits.

MME.: Well, they are all very well in moderation.

MR. W.: What do you mean?

MME.: Of course I am not a drinking woman myself, but —

MR. W.: NO, no, I mean ghosts.

MME.: Ghosts?

MR. W.: DO you believe in them?

MME.: If there is money in it.

MR. W.: Well if there should be by any chance a ghost in this house do you think you could argue with it with your second sight — er — persuade it to shift its base of operations, discourage it, give it a cash bonus — anything to get rid of it. I can’t afford to have a ghost around here.

MME.: IS it violent?

MR. W.: HOW should I know, do you think I wrestle with it?

MME.: YOU want me to make sure if there is one?

MR. W.: Exactly. I want you to stay in the house tonight. I am sure the ghost would be open to an agreement of some kind.

MME.: NO doubt, no doubt, and what would I get?

MR. W.: Money, money, everybody wants it. I wish it was all in Hades.

MME.: Peter, I see you are still profane. Some day you will have an apparition or something and that will cure you.

MR. W.: Well, be sure I’ll fully recompense you. Is it a bargain?

MME.: Very well.

MR. W.: We will go to my study to arrange the details of the hunt.

(They go out — the bell rings. Hulda shows in Josephus and Clara. Cecile and Dickie enter from the opposite side.)

DICK: Ah, Mr. Hendrix and Miss King!

CEC.: Cousin Josephus!

CLARA: How do you do, Mr. Wetherby and Miss Wetherby, I suppose?

JO.: Ah, good evening, good evening! Tee hee, your father, eh, where is the sly old fox?

DICK: Let us show you to your rooms first, you must be tired.

This way, sir.

(They all go out left.)

(Enter William Chapman. He wears an overcoat and a slouch hat.)

WILL: (Calls.) Auntie, oh, Miss Spigot. (Takes of his coat and hat, disclosing a devil suit such as those worn at masquerades.) Well that was the slowest dance and I felt like a fool in this costume. (Sits down.) Oh, it’s good to be home. I wonder where Auntie is. (Enter Hulda.) Oh, just tell your mistress I am here. (Hulda screams and rushes out.) Well, I’ll be darned. Is the woman crazy? I wonder where I could get a drink of water. I think I’ll explore.

(Exit on left. Enter Hulda from right. She turns on the light.)

HULDA: Well, for the love of St. Olaf, I must have been dreaming. I bane thought I saw Old Nick himself. Oh, my heart’s beating like when Ole kissed me last night. What’s this? Mr. Wetherby’s hat and coat. I’ll take them to his room.

(Picks u-p Will’s hat and coat and goes out. Enter Will.)

WILL: Hello, someone turned the lights on. I wonder where my aunt is. This looks strange. Why, what’s this picture, and this, and where are all the old ones? (Walks around.) Why this doesn’t look familiar. I wonder if it could be the wrong house. No, the cabby told me this was 225 Greenbriar Street. Let’s see if I have the address right. (Takes card jrom pocket.) What — what — what — 225 Greenwood Place? Good Heavens, I am in the wrong house. (Looks around frantically.) Where is that coat? Oh Lord, it’s gone, and me in this costume. I say, I must find my coat.

(Exit on left. Enter Clara and Josephus on right.)

JO.: Well, Clara, how do you like the house?

CLARA: Oh, it’s so so. But I don’t see that it’s any better than the one we have now, unless you want more room.

JO.: (Not hearing.) Hey?

CLARA: I say unless you want room.

JO.: Wash room? Where, I don’t see it.

CLARA: NO I say, why do you want this house?

JO.: Ah yes, well I’ll tell you a secret. The Red Wing, Stillwater and Minneapolis Railroad Company are going to put a spur through here, and they will have to buy this property. I thought if I could get the house cheap it would be a good investment to snap it up quick.

CLARA: Why, I don’t think that is a bit nice.

JO.: Hey?

CLARA: I say that isn’t very nice.

JO.: Ah yes, yes, it is very nice. And that isn’t all. If I can prove that the house is haunted it will greatly decrease its value and I can insist on a very low price.

CLARA: What do you mean?

JO.: Simply this — I went to a costumer yesterday and bought a devil suit, red cloth with horns and all, you know. While I am here I shall prowl around in this suit and let some of the people see me. Then I’ll insist the house is haunted. He! He!

CLARA: Why, this is criminal, I won’t allow it.

JO.: You must remember you are my ward.

CLARA: Well, please do not cheat these people.

JO.: Tut, tut, child! —

(Enter Mr. Wetherby.)

MR. W.: Well, Cousin Josephus, how are you, stingy as ever?

JO.: Hey, Cousin Peter?

MR. W.: I say, are you stingy as ever?

JO.: I don’t quite hear you.

MR. W.: I see you don’t.

JO.: Hey? Oh yes, this is my ward, Miss Clara King.

MR. W.: How de do, Miss King.

CLARA: HOW do you do.

(Enter Dickie.)

MR. W.: (TO Jo.) And now you and I can go in the library and talk business, Cousin Josephus.

JO.: Surely, ah —

MR. W.: (Crossing to Dickie.) Amuse little Miss King, won’t you, Dickie?

DICK: (Dejectedly.) I suppose I’ll have to.

(Exit Wetherby and Josephus.)

DICK: (Crossing to Clara, patronizingly.) Hello, Clara.

CLARA: Hello — Dickie.

DICK: (Taken back.) How are — are you?

CLARA: I am quite well, thank you. How are you?

DICK: I’m never very well but I’m as well as one can expect; then one’s hay-fever comes on tomorrow. Ah, you live in St. Joseph, Missouri, don’t you?

CLARA: Yes.

DICK: HOW long have you lived in the United States?

CLARA: Sir!

DICK: I beg your pardon. It slipped out. (Aside.) How shall I amuse her? (To Clara.) I suppose you must have awfully good times there with your — ah, little playmates?

CLARA: (Carelessly.) Yes, we manage to scare up sufficient amusement. I suppose you have fun here playing baseball and football with the other boys?

DICK: Ah yes, I fancy I am a little beyond that now, but I — ER —

“sed to, before my health took a turn — and all that.

CLARA: Ah, you used to? Since you put on long trousers, I suppose?

DICK: (Changing the subject hurriedly.) Would you like some lemonade, er — Clara, Miss Clara?

CLARA: NO, thank you.

DICK: Some cake or candy?

CLARA: NO, but (confidentially) have you a cigaret?

DICK: (Startled.) Ha, er (looks around and draws chair closer).

Where did you say you lived?

CLARA: St. Joseph.

DICK: And they say Missouri is slow. I am sorry I have no cigarets with me and I don’t allow anyone to smoke my pipe. Shall I get you a cigar?

CLARA: NO, don’t bother. I had a cigaret at the depot and I have some in my room.

DICK: Whew!

CLARA: What did you say?

DICK: I said that is a pretty brooch you have on.

CLARA: It ought to be, I traded in three engagement rings for it. It got me in more trouble —

(Enter Wetherby and Josephus from right.)

(Enter Hulda from left.)

MR. W.: Well, then if the house proves unhaunted you give me ten thousand for it.

JO.: Yes, I have it right here and otherwise — (Shrugs his shoulders.) I’ll entrust it to your son for safekeeping —

MR. W.: Come, Dickie, and show Mr. Hendrix to his room.

(Wetherby and Hendrix go out. Clara goes to door.)

CLARA: Ta, ta, Dickie.

DICK: Good evening, Miss King. (Exit Clara.) A beautiful girl in the house and my hay-fever starts tomorrow.

(Dickie shakes his head and goes out.)

(Window slowly opens.)

(Enter Second Story Salle — whistles.)

(Enter Hulda.)

S. S.S.: Hello?

HULDA: I guess I left the window open all right?

S.S.S.: Yes. Well, what’s the dope?

HULDA: There’s a gentleman visiting here who has given ten thousand dollars to Mr. Dickie to keep for him.

S. S. S.: Ten thousand dollars?

HULDA: Yes.

S. S. S.: And who has it?

HULDA: Mr. Dickie.

S. S. S.: Where’s the young fellow’s room?

HULDA: Head of stairs on the left.

S. S. S.: I’ll remember.

HULDA: And for the love of Christina! be careful! The house is full — a — people!

S. S. S.: It’ll take more than a house full of people to catch Second Story Salle!

HULDA: And where do I come in?

S. S. S.: You do what I tell you, and keep your mouth tight. And I’ll come here tomorrow morning dressed as a book agent and give you your share.

HULDA: All right but be awful careful.

(Exit Hulda and S. S. S.)

(Enter Will.)

WILL: Whoever took that overcoat took it far away. What am I going to do? Oh —

(Enter Cecile.)

CEC.: Hello.

WILL: HOW do you do. Pardon me, madam, permit me to introduce myself.

CEC.: Don’t bother, I recognize you.

WILL: Oh, you do? Well, you have the advantage of me.

CEC.: My name is Ce-ce-cile Wether-b-by.

WILL: O yes, no wonder you know me.

CEC.: Sir!

WILL: YOU ought to, I used to play with you as a child.

CEC.: Sir, I admit I was a tomboy but I never entered into any communication with you.

WILL: But my dear young lady!

CEC.: I am not your dear young lady.

WILL: Perhaps I am not as fierce as I look.

CEC.: Were I not a lady I would tell you in plain language to go home.

WILL: YOU have told me, as far as I can see.

CEC.: I don’t see you going.

WILL: I want to explain first. I came here quite by accident. I was looking for Miss Spigot.

CEC.: Allow me to congratulate you, I expected as much.

WILL: YOU remember she is a relation of mine.

CEC.: I don’t doubt it.

WILL: And I was going to her house when here I am by accident in yours. I can’t get out for my overcoat has disappeared and I am too —

CEC.: (Interrupting.) Natural for safety.

WILL: And the worst of it is that you seem to have forgotten your old playmate Will Chapman.

CEC.: Will Chapman?

WILL: Surely.

CEC.: I had not heard of your demise. Believe me, I am very sorry.

WILL: Why, what do you mean? Oh heavens — what — what — you thought — oh Lord — this is too much! Come here and pinch me, I am real flesh and blood.

CEC.: Oh, I thought for a minute —

WILL: That I was — I know I shouldn’t have worn this costume. It looks like the de —

CEC.: Where did you get it?

WILL: I wore it to a masquerade ball.

CEC.: Oh, I see. But how did you get here?

WILL: I got here by accident and now I can’t get out, for someone took my overcoat.

CEC.: Well, listen. You must not be seen by anyone here. A man is here who wants to buy the house, but he won’t if he thinks the house is haunted. You must hide in this closet. (Goes to closet on lejt and throws open the door.) In about half an hour, when everyone is asleep, you come upstairs and I will leave an overcoat for you in the front hall.

WILL: Thank you, Cecile — I am —

CEC.: Now get in there and be quiet!

(He goes in closet, she shuts door, turns out lights and exits.)

(Enter Josephus with false mustache and goatee in his hand. He is dressed in a devil’s suit like Will’s. He turns up lights.)

JO.: (Looking anxiously behind him.) That’s funny, I’m all in a tremor. I could have sworn a minute ago that I saw my wife, my Amelia that I left so many years ago. I must have been dreaming. And now to frighten a few people. Te, he, he!

(Enter Clara.)

CLARA: Uncle Josephus!

JO.: What are you doing up at this hour?

CLARA: Listen, you must not do this. It is perfectly terrible. Some one might shoot you.

JO.: Nonsense, child, I can not afford to pay ten thousand dollars for the house.

CLARA: YOU are cheating Mr. Wetherby.

JO.: Tut, tut, cheating is a bad word.

CLARA: Listen, there is someone coming. Quick, you must hide Look, quick in here.

(She opens the other closet and puts him in. She goes out quickly at right. Enter Cecile, from left.)

CEC.: It’s rather mean, but I can’t take any chances. I must lock Will in until everyone is asleep. Let’s see, where did I put him? Oh yes, in this closet. (Goes to closet where Josephus is and locks door. There is pounding on the inside.) It’s too bad, Will, but I’ve got to do it.

(Exit Ceciley turning out lights.)

(Enter Second Story Salle at left.)

(Enter Dick at right.)

DICK: Good evening.

S. S. S.: Ah, good evening!

DICK: May I ask what you want here?

S. S. S.: Certainly — You may ask.

DICK: Well, what — er do you want?

S. S. S.: Didn’t you get my card?

DICK: No.

S.S.S.: That’s strange; I told the maid to take it to — Ah, you are Mr. Richard Wetherby, I presume?

DICK: Yes.

S. S. S.: Well, you’re the one I want to see.

DICK: Yes, yes, I see — but why?

S. S. S.: Well, you see it’s this way — I’ve heard of you —

DICK: NO doubt.

S. S. S.: As a playwright.

DICK: YOU have? Ah, won’t you have a seat?

S. S. S.: (Taking chair. )You have probably heard of me —

DICK: Yes, yes.

S. S. S.: My name is — Minnie Maddern Fiske.

DICK: Oh yes yes; have another seat — Have a cigar — I mean er —

S. S. S.: No doubt you catch my drift, or shall I snow again?

DICK: Ah yes, — that is — er —

S. S. S.: As a fellow professional, I took the liberty of dropping in at this unconventional hour —

DICK: Don’t mention it.

S. S. S.: To see about your er — play — “The Dappled Dawn.”

PICK: Ah yes, but it’s in a very primitive state; scarcely more than a title, to tell the truth.

S S S.: Never tell the truth; it is a confession of failure, a sign that your imagination is exhausted.

DICK: Yes of course. But about the play of mine —

S S. S.: I want it. (Takes ten thousand dollars from Dick’s pocket.)

— (Aside.) — And I have it!

DICK: Mrs. Fiske — May I call you Minnie? — You may have it.

S. S. S.: Tomorrow I would like to discuss it with you. We can fix a date for then, not for tonight; we artists have our trials, you know — temperament and —

DICK: Hay fever! Yes, yes.

S. S. S.: (Starting to faint — Hand grasping ten thousand dollars behind her.) Oh, I am going to faint! My head is swimming —

Water!

DICK: (As he exits.) Water for Mrs. Fiske!! (Exit r.)

(S. S. S. sees Will peep out of closet, screams, drops banknotes and jumps out of window.)

(Enter Hulda, she picks up money.)

HULDA: What’s this? The ten thousand dollars. Second Story Salle must have dropped it. (Exit.)

(Enter Dick r. with glass of water.)

DICK: Mrs. Fiske! Mrs. Fiske! Why, she’s gone! — But ah! —

Mrs. Fiske in “The Dappled Dawn,” by Richard Cartridgebelt Wetherby. Soon I’ll have a wad the size of — (feels pocket and finds ten thousand dollars gone). Good Lord, it’s gone. (Drops glass of water.) Someone’s taken that ten thousand dollars! What a mess I’m in. I mustn’t let anyone know. I’ll — I’ll search the house. (Exit in a rush.)

(Enter Mr. Wetherby and Mme. Zada, carrying candles.)

MR. W.: Sh! The people upstairs mustn’t hear us.

MME.: This sort of thing always makes me nervous. I have almost forgotten the formula for confronting spirits. Let’s see. (Produces book.) Question — whence do you come? Answer, from the land whence none return. Question — where do you go? Answer — to pace the night alone. Question — what do you wish from me? Answer —

JO.: (In closet.) Let me out of here.

MR. W.: What was that?

MME.: What, I didn’t hear anything.

MR. W.: I must have been mistaken.

MME.: Let me see, where was I? Question — why do you weep? Answer —

JO.: (In closet.) I am boiling to death.

MR. W.: I distinctly heard something then.

MME.: Yes, a hollow, muffled voice.

MR. W.: It’s the ghost!

MME.: Walk around the room and see.

MR. W.: Round the room, pshaw, what would I do walking around the room? Spose he cut me open on a new carpet. The idea! You must be crazy. Walk around yourself.

MME.: I have a sore foot. (Knocking is heard.)

MR. W.: Go, let him in.

MME.: YOU fool, it’s spirit knocking. (Three knocks.) Three knocks, that’s D. (Three more knocks.) Three more knocks — that’s D again. (Three more knocks.) Three D’s — let’s see, d — d — d — what can it mean?

MR. W.: Probably he stuttered when he was on earth.

MME.: Listen, I will go in your study and wait. You stay here and if anything happens call me.

MR. W.: Er, you think we had best separate? The ghost might overpower you.

MME.: Are you frightened?

MR. W.: No, no.

MME.: Well, stay here. (Exit Madame Z. )

MR. W.: (Sitting down.) Whew, this is tiresome business.

(Enter Clara, silently. She goes to Jose-phus’s closet silently and tries door.)

CLARA: Locked! What shall I do? He will have to stay there till morning.

(Exit Clara. Mr. W. has fallen asleep. The music starts playing “He’s a Devil.” The door of the left hand closet opens slowly and Will steals softly out. He tips over a chair.)

WILL: Dash it!

MR. W.: (Waking up.) What the devil!

WILL: (Coming forward.) How do you do, Mr. Wetherby?

MR. W.: Oh Lord, oh Heavens, I’ll never curse again! Never as I live, I swear it. Oh sir, go way and leave me.

WILL: YOU are a hospitable lot, I must say. When people come to see me I am more hospitable.

MR. W.: Yes, I know you are.

WILL: Come to my home in the future and see.

MR.W.: (Groaning.) Never, never.

(Mme. Z. has stolen softly in.)

MME.: Throw up your hands.

WILL: Why? (Puts up hands.)

MR. W.: A pistol does no good — you can’t hurt him with a bullet.

MME.: Why, he’s real flesh and blood. He’s no more devil than I am.

MR. W.: That doesn’t mean anything.

MME.: Pinch him and see.

MR. W.: I don’t want to pinch him. Pinch him yourself. Then you are not a devil?

WILL: No.

MR. W.: Then how dare you come in my house?

WILL: Don’t you allow anyone but devils in your house?

MME.: Here, hold this pistol pointed at him while I all up the police.

(Mr. W. takes pistol.)

WILL: The police!

MME.: (Picking up receiver.) Central, give me the police station, quick. Yes.

WILL: The police, oh Lord! (To Mr. W.) Sir, since you insist on thinking that I am not human I will prove to you that I am. I can pick up things like this snuffer (picks snuffer from candlestick) and use it —

(Snuffs out candle, plunging room into darkness. Mr. W. fires pistol. Mme. screams, they search for light. It flashes on, showing Hulda, Cecile and Clara in doorway.)

MR. W.: I’ve got him. (Wrestles with Dickie.)

ALL: What’s the matter?

MR. W.: There are spirits in here.

MME.: Spirits of ammonia — it was a man!

CECILE AND CLARA: (Aside.) How did he get out?

DICK: (Aside.)No, I fear it was a woman — (To others.) Let’s search for him.

(They search.)

HULDA: He bane not here.

MR. W.: Let’s search the whole downstairs.

(They all go out. The music starts flaying “He’s a Devil” and Will sticks his head out from under the table. S. S. S. sticks her head in the window.)

S. S. S.: Well, Mr. Satan, I’ll just take that ten thousand dollars.

(Curtain.)

ACT II

(Breakfast table laid as curtain rises. Doorbell rings. Hulda answers it. Enter Hulda followed by Miss Sfigot.)

MISS S.: So the family’s not up yet?

HULDA: NO ma’am, I thought they was going to stay up the whole night.

MISS S.: It doesn’t surprise me. What was the matter?

HULDA: Spirits.

MISS S.: Spirits?

HULDA: Yes, and lots of them.

MISS S.: Shocking! Shocking! And who were the er — inebriates?

HULDA: The which?

MISS S.: The victims.

HULDA: Well, there was Mr. Wetherby.

MISS S.: Was he very much ah —

HULDA: Terrible — he couldn’t sleep all night.

MISS S.: And who else?

HULDA: Well, there was a strange lady — she was very bad.

MISS S.: Oh, a strange lady? There are more skeletons in the family closet.

(Will sticks his head out of closet and quickly withdraws it.)

HULDA: Well you just take it from me — I was feeling very queer myself, ma’am.

MISS S.: You wicked girl!

HULDA:  I couldn’t help it.

MISS S.: They forced it on you, I suppose. What a den of perfidy!

HULDA: Yes’m, I’d just said goodbye to Ole — he’s my steady — on the back porch when I hears screamin’ and carryin’ on, and when I went in they all started looking for the spirits.

MISS S.: Where were they?

HULDA: Vanished.

MISS S.: I’ll wager you could account for some of them.

HULDA: It was two o’clock before they quieted down.

MISS S.: And while they were here with their spirits and carousals I was at home praying for my nephew.

HULDA: Your nevy?

MISS S.: Yes, he hasn’t come home yet. That’s why I came over — to see if Mr. Dick has heard from him. Poor boy! Something awful must have happened.

HULDA: Yes’m, he’s probably dead (looks carelessly at table) or else in a penitentiary.

MISS S.: No such thing.

HULDA: YOU never can tell — my Ole —

MISS S.: Bother your Ole!

HULDA: My Ole’s a fine fellow, I tell you.

(Enter Cecile.)

CEC.: Good morning, Miss Spigot.

MISS S.: I’m sure I wish you a very good morning.

CEC.: What’s wrong?

MISS S.: Nothing — nothing of consequence. Don’t bother, Miss Wetherby, you must be worn out.

CEC.: Oh, Hulda has told you of our little affair with the spirits?

(Laughs.)

MISS S.: She has, indeed, and pardon me if I say that I see no cause for laughing.

CEC.: Well, it was rather funny.

MISS S.: I came to see Mr. Dickie about something.

CEC.: He isn’t down yet.

MISS S.: I shall wait in the library. (Exit.)

(Enter Mr. W.)

MR. W.: Hm — hm —

CEC.: Good morning, Father.

MR. W.: Where’s the paper?

CEC.: It hasn’t been brought in yet.

MR. W.: Tell that Swede to get it. Tell her to hurry. Got anything fit to eat for breakfast?

(Exit Hulda.)

MR. W.: Well, it’s lucky Cousin Josephus slept through all that turmoil.

CEC.: He hasn’t come down yet.

MR. W.: Because I’ve got to have ten thousand before tomorrow morning to keep my business above water.

(Hulda enters and leaves paper for Mr. W.)

MR. W.: (Not seeing it.) Where’s that paper?

HULDA: Right there.

MR. W.: Where?

CEC.: There.

MR. W.: Well, don’t stand here staring like an idiot — get me my breakfast.

CEC.: Excuse me Father. (She goes silently to door of left hand wardrobe — tries it.) How did he get out? It’s still locked. I may as well unlock it. (She does so and then goes out. Hulda comes in and puts toast and coffee down by Mr. W. Exit.)

MR. W.: Isn’t she ever going to bring that breakfast? (Gets up and goes into kitchen. Will comes out of closet, gets toast and cofee and goes back. Enter Hulda and Mr. W.)

HULDA: I just brought you some.

MR. W.: YOU didn’t bring me any. If you did where is it?

HULDA: I bane tank it’s the spirits!

MR. W.: Spirits be damned! You didn’t bring it in!

HULDA: Well I’ll get another cup. (He sits down grumbling. She goes out, returns with another cup and exits.)

MR. W.: Where’s my toast? I don’t want coffee without toast.

(Goes out toward kitchen. Josephus comes out of closet, gets coffee and goes back again.)

MR. W.: (Coming in.) Well hurry up with it. Where’s my coffee?

(Searches in pockets.) What took that coffee? (Goes to door.)

Hulda, I want more coffee. Someone’s taken my coffee. (Takes “p paper, grumbling.)

(Enter Dickie.)

MR. W.: It’s about time you were down stairs — Well, why don’t you answer? Don’t sit there like an idiot. What’s the matter?

DICK: By hay-fever’s cob.

MR. W.: Your what?

DICK: By hay-fever. I couldn’t sleep a wick last dight.

MR. W.: Who expected you to sleep a week in one night?

DICK: Oh, I dot expect ady sypathy. I cad breathe through by dose.

MR. W.: Well, breathe through your ears.

DICK: Ad that’s dot the worst.

MR. W.: What’s the matter now?

DICK: You dow that ted thousad dollars that Mr. Hendricks idtrusted be with last dight?

MR. W.: Yes.

DICK: Well, it’s god!

MR. W.: Gone?

DICK: Vadished. I wed up idto by roob ad looked in the drawer where I’d left it, ad it was gone.

MR. W.: What a mess! That fellow last night must have taken it.

This is the limit! Have you telephoned the police?

DICK: Yes.

MR. W.: Well, the only thing for you to do is to marry Miss King.

I hear she’s an heiress. Otherwise there’s the deuce to pay.

DICK: I like the way you dispose of be. But I know she has her eyes od be, and she’s dot the first one.

MR. W.: Well, propose to her. That’s our only chance. You always were a bonehead. I’ve got to have that money by twelve o’clock to keep my business from going to smash.

DICK: IS it as bad as that?

MR. W.: It certainly is.

DICK: Well, id by dervous codition I’b dot respodsible. Argue it out with the policebad.

(Enter Clara King.)

CLARA: Good morning.

DICK: (Rising.) Good borning, Biss Kig.

MR. W.: (Getting up.) Women everywhere! Can’t women do without their breakfast once in a while? (Exit.)

DICK: HOW are you Biss Kig?

CLARA: Oh very well. You must be tired after all that excitement way past your bedtime. Of course I’m used to it — I never go to bed until two in St. Joseph.

DICK: YOU dow, Biss Kig — bay I call you Biss Clara? — you bade a barked ibpressiod od me last dight.

h CLARA: Did I?

DICK: Yes, id fact I cad remember — ah — that ady other girl ever bade that exact impressiod od be before.

(Enter Hulda.)

HULDA: Do you want coffee?

DICK: Yes. (To Clara.) Tell be, are you — ?

HULDA: Weak or strong?

DICK: She is deither.

CLARA: She’s speaking of coffee.

DICK: Strog. (Exit Hulda.) What was I sayig?

CLARA: HOW should I know?

DICK: I thought you bight have bed paying attedtion.

CLARA: Oh yes, it was something sentimental, I believe.

DICK: Listed, I remember, it’s this — ever since I saw you I’ve been head over heels in love. Last dight my pulse began climbing up to one hudred and ten. I said to byself — “You’re id love” and well — you know how it is. Between you ad by hay-fever I didn’t sleep a wick — oh, Clara, for you I would give —

HULDA: (Entering.) Your coffee, sir.

DICK: Damn my coffee!

CLARA: Decidedly. Damn it with your napkin; it’s running all over the table.

DICK: Here at your feet I cast my —

CLARA: Vanity.

DICK: Very well. If you persist in being facetious I can go you know.

Goodbye.

CLARA: Oh, goodbye. Are you going to play cops and robbers with your little companions?

DICK: Cops and robbers! Bah! (Exit.)

(Clara crosses to right hand wardrobe and of ens door. Enter Josef hus.)

JO.: Well.

CLARA: Are you satisfied? You caused enough trouble last night.

JO.: Trouble — after you locked me in!

CLARA: Don’t think you can fool me with those stories. You’ve got to get out of that costume.

JO.: The costumer didn’t tell me it would run. I’m covered with deep crimson from head to foot.

CLARA: Serves you right. Now listen — I’ll get you some clothes, I’ll leave them on this chair. When I sneeze you come out and get them.

JO: Very well, but hurry up! (He goes in closet. She exits.)

(Enter Cecile. The closet door opens, enter Will.)

WILL: Oh, Cecile!

CEC.: Oh Will! I’m sorry but I had to lock you in last night. How did you get out?

WILL: I didn’t know you locked me in.

CEC.: Why, yes.

WILL: I must have broken the lock. I had to come out — I was suffocating. I had a terrible time. I’d just gotten out of one muddle when some woman held me up and insisted on searching me for ten thousand dollars. At last I convinced her I didn’t have it and she went away — out the window — and I returned to the — ah — guest room.

CEC.: HOW odd. I wonder who it was? But I’m getting used to excitement. Nothing bothers me now.

WILL: Well, what shall I do?

CEC.: Wait — I’ll get you a coat. I’ll leave it on this chair. When I open the window you come out and get it.

WILL: Very well, when you open the window.

(Exit both.)

(Enter Hulda. She hums a Swedish song, then opens window.

Jo’s door begins to open.)

HULDA: Oh what a draft! (She sneezes. Will’s door begins to open.

She goes out. Will and Josephus come slowly to center and then see each other.)

BOTH: Well, what the devil!

WILL: What are you doing here?

JO.: What are you doing here?

WILL: It’s a long story.

JO.: So’s mine.

WILL: Well, I know how you feel. Does your color run?

JO.: Like a race horse. (Aside.) I wonder where those clothes are?

WILL: Where can that coat be? Sh! there’s someone coming.

JO.: I’m not going back to that closet.

WILL: Let’s try the table.

(They get under table. Hulda shows in Second Story Salle. Enter Mr. Wetherby.)

MR. W.: Who the deuce left this hat and coat in my room? It isn’t mine.

S. S. S.: Pardon me, sir, but I ‘ave a line of books h’I’d like to get you h’interested h’in.

MR. W.: Books? I don’t want books.

S. S. S.: I have “Innocent As A Flower” by Margureta Du Chene and “Delia the Double-died” by Madame Caruse. I also have a small encyclopedia and sets of Richard ‘arding Davis and Rudyard Kipling. If ee take that ee get the Oswego Medical Review for six months or else you can have “Fireside Hours.” for three months —

MR. W.: Oh get out, get out! Haven’t I got trouble enough. Hulda show her the door. (Exit Mr. W.)

S. S. S.: Well, there’s the deuce to pay. I ‘arvn’t got the money. Some chap dressed up like the devil frighted me so I dropped it and later when I searched him he denied that ‘e ‘ad hit.

HULDA: Sh! I got the money, up in my room. I picked it up where you dropped it. Wait here and I’ll get it for you. (Exit.)

S. S. S.: I carn’t wait here. I’ll step out into the ‘allway. Blarst the bloomin’ Swede. I ‘ope she’ll ‘urry. (Exit.)

(Enter Hulda with money.)

HULDA: Salle, oh Salle! (Snores.) What’s that? It’s somebody coming. Where shall I put this money? I’ll put it in here. (Slips money into coat pocket. Exit.)

(Enter Cecile with clothes. She goes to window and opens it. No result. She tries again. Enter Clara with clothes, opposite door.

She sees Cecile.)

CEC.: Oh, good morning.

CLARA: Good morning.

CEC.: What’s that?

CLARA: It’s one of my-guardian’s suits; I’m taking it to the cleaners.

What’s that?

CEC.: Oh, this is one of father’s suits-. I’m taking it to the pressers.

CLARA: Where I come from the cleaners and pressers are the same.

CEC.: HOW odd! It’s different here. The — ah — cleaners clean and the — ah — pressers press. Ah! ha. Yes.

CLARA: YOU surprise me.

CEC.: Can’t I take your suit with mine?

CLARA: Oh no, thank you.

(They go to different sides of stage and eye each other. Cecile starts for window.)

CEC: Where are you going?

CLARA: It’s hot in here. I’m going to open the window.

CEC: Oh don’t, don’t! For heaven’s sake don’t open the window.

CLARA: Why not?

CEC.: Because I have a cold. (Coughs.) I’m going to sneeze. K —

CLARA: Don’t sneeze, don’t, don’t. (Puts hand over her mouth.)

CEC.: Why not?

CLARA: The germs — the bubonic plague germs are spread like that.

CEC.: (Indignantly.) Do you mean to say I have the bubonic plague?

CLARA: NO, but one must be careful. Well, I think I shall be going.

Goodbye. (Exit.)

CEC.: Thank heavens! (Goes to closet and opens it.) Gone! gone!

(Exit hurriedly.)

(Enter Clara and Dickie.)

CLARA: Oh heavens, can I never be alone!

DICK: Clara, Clara, I’ve been hunting for you for ten minutes.

CLARA: Leave me, please.

DICK: I shall never leave you until you say you’ll bury me. Will you bury me?

CLARA: Yes, I’ll bury you with the greatest of pleasure, but get out. (Exit Dickie.) (looking in closet.) Why he’s gone. How odd! (Exit.)

(Will comes out from under table.)

WILL: He’s asleep, thank the Lord. Oh, my own coat and hat at last. Now to get out of here. (Exit.)

JO.: (Coming out from under table.) I must have fallen asleep.

I wonder where that other fellow is.

(Enter Dickie.)

DICK: Hello, who’s this? Why it’s a man! I say, you cad’t be seen id those clothes — we’ve got to sell this house.

JO.: But I say, let me —

DICK: Not a word. Mr. Hendrix mustn’t see you and I’b in a killing bood today.

JO.: But I am —

DICK: I don’t care who you are. Here, lie down there until I return. Remember, if you make a sound you’re dead.

JO.: Pardon me, if I make a sound I am alive.

DICK: Dead.

JO.: Alive.

DICK: Dead — so lie down — I’ll be back in a minute. (Exit.)

(Enter Mr. W. and Mme. Zada.)

MR. W.: Good heavens, Amelia, haven’t I got troubles enough?

MME.: I dropped in to see how your guests were this morning.

MR. W.: Guests — Lord, this morning they’ve taken to stealing things! There’s ten thousand missing. I’d like to lay my hands on that ghost — I’d throttle him — I’d — Oh — Oh —

(Josephus trembles under rug.)

MME.: Ten thousand dollars.

MR. W.: Oh Lord, here’s someone coming. You’ll have to hide somewhere. Here, get under there. (Puts her under table. Enter Dickie.)

DICK: Ah good borning.

MR. W.: I think I saw you before this morning.

DICK: Ah yes. — How do I get him away? Ah, I have it. (Produces pipe.) I hope you don’t mind my pipe.

MR. W.: NO, I rather like it. (Makes grimace. Jo starts to rise.

Dickie beats him back.)

(Enter Will and Policeman.)

1ST POL.: I found this fellow standing on the front steps. What’ll I do with him?

WILL: Oh, how do you do, Mr. Wetherby? Hello, Dickie.

DICK: Ah, how delighted to see you I’m sure.

MR. W.: Charmed.

DICK: Officer, this fellow is all right. — Keep down. —

WILL: Why, what’s the matter.

DICK: I was talking to my temper. I’m trying to keep my temper down. Keep down temper!

WILL: Why have you got all the policemen around the house?

That business last night?

BOTH: How did you hear about it?

WILL: Why — er — her — ha — er, it was in the paper.

BOTH: Oh Lord!

(Enter policeman with Second Story Salle. He is followed by Hulda, Miss Spigot, Clara and Cecile.)

2D POL.: I caught this woman trying to sneak out the back way. It looks a lot like the woman called Second Story Salle.

MR. W.: It’s the book agent!

DICK: YOU better hold her and search her.

2D POL.: She ‘asn’t got nothing suspicious on her but I’m taking no chances. She goes down to jail with me to be identified.

MR. W.: That’s right, officer; do your duty.

S. S. S.: If you want to know who the guilty party is look there.

(Points to Will.) Search him.

(They search Will and find bank notes.)

DICK: The ten thousand, thank heavens!

MISS S.: My nephew!

HULDA: I told you he’d land in penitentiary, like Ole.

WILL: Officer, this is ridiculous. I never saw this overcoat until five minutes ago — that is since last night.

S. S. S.: Don’t ye believe him.

WILL: Why, Mr. Wetherby can testify to my character.

MR. W.: I’m doing no testifying.

2D POL.: I guess you both better go down with me.

S. S. S.: The deuce you say! (Produces pistol.) Don’t move or I’ll put a bullet through you. I’ll need plenty of time so I guess you had all better sit down on the floor. Now where is that ten thousand dollars? Turn out your pockets! Ah, but my taxi bill is amounting up outside so I’ll not have time to search — Ta ta!

(Exit Second Story Salle in haste.) Ta-ta — (She goes out, policeman after her.) (They start after her and discover Jo.)

ALL: Who’s this — It’s another one — (etc.)

MR. W.: It must be the pal she spoke of.

JO.: Pardon me —

CEC.: Another devil!

JO.: No, I am —

CLARA: It’s guardian!

DICK: (Tears off mustache.)

MR. W.: Cousin Josephus!

ALL: Mr. Hendrix!

POLICEMAN: Shall I arrest him?

MR. W.: What are you doing in that costume?

JO.: I’m — I’m —

MR. W.: I see your plot. So it was you all the time?

ALL: For shame!

JO.: I’ll not be insulted — I’ll leave the house. Give me my money and I’ll go.

POLICEMAN: Why it’s gone!

DICK: Hasn’t anybody got it?

ALL: It was on the table. No!

JO.: Find me my money quick, all of you. I’ll sue the police department. Oh Lord! (Sinks into chair. All go out. Mme. Z. crawls out from under the table.)

MME.: Josephus! My Josephus!

JO.: A voice from the dead! Amelia, what are you doing here?

MME.: My husband, oh my husband!

JO.: What do you want?

MME.: You, I want you!

JO.: You can’t have me.

MME.: You loved me once!

JO.: Five years ago. When I married you I was a clerk and you a manicure girl. When I rose in life I had to leave you. Your station was too humble.

MME.: IS there not a touch of sentiment left in you? Have you forgotten the moonlight nights when we set on the terrace and I (sob) polished your finger nails?

JO.: Don’t weep on me; you’ll get me damp and I take cold easily.

MME.: Yes I remember when you proposed to me you had a cold. Oh, Josephus, won’t you take me back?

JO.: Oh I suppose I’ll have to.

MME.: Well, in that case here’s your ten thousand dollars.

JO.: Where did you get it?

MME.: I purloined it in the excitement. Come, we’ll face the world together. (Exit.)

(Enter Mr. W. and Will.)

WILL: Mr. W., as contracting engineer for the Red Wing, Hastings and Minneapolis Railroad I am authorized to offer you fifteen thousand dollars for your house.

MR. W.: Fifteen thousand? Thank heavens, that saves us! Yes, I’ll take it. Yes and thank you, Will, you’re not as bad as the rest of them.

(Enter Cecile.)

CEC.: Oh Father, I’ve been looking for you. Cousin Josephus says he has got his money. He’s walking off with a strange woman.

MR. W.: Thank the Lord! Thank the Lord! (Exit.)

CEC.: Oh I’m so tired I feel as if I could sleep for weeks.

WILL: SO am I. That night in that little hole. After this I’m going to be careful what I wear. Oh, Cecile!

CEC.: Yes.

WILL: Sleepy?

CEC.: Yes, are you?

WILL: Yes, but before I go to sleep I want to ask you something —

will you marry me?

CEC.: Yes, I suppose so. Do you love me?

WILL: Yes, I always have.

CEC.: So’ve I.

CEC.: — st — st — ! (They are both asleep.)

WILL: — st — st — ! )

(Curtain.)

SHADOW LAURELS

This one act play was written in 1915.

SHADOW LAURELS

(The scene is the interior of a wine shop in Paris. The walls are lined on all sides by kegs, piled like logs. The ceiling is low and covered with cobwebs. The midafternoon sun filters dejectedly through the one-barred window at the back. Doors are on both sides; one, heavy and powerful, opens outside; the other, on the left, leads to some inner chamber. A large table stands in the middle of the room backed by smaller ones set around the walls. A ship’s lamp hangs above the main table.

As the curtain rises there is knocking at the outside door — rather impatient knocking — and almost immediately Pitou, the wine dealer, enters from the other room and shuffles toward the door. He is an old man with unkempt beard and dirty corduroys.)

Pitou — Coming, coming — Hold tight! (The knocking stops. Pitou unlatches the door and it swings open. A man in a top hat and opera cloak enters. Jaques Chandelle is perhaps thirty-seven, tall and well groomed. His eyes are clear and penetrating, his chin, clean shaven, is sharp and decisive. His manner is that of a man accustomed only to success but ready and willing to work hard in any emergency. He speaks French with an odd accent as of one who knew the language well in early years but whose accent had grown toneless through long years away from France.)

Pitou — Good afternoon, Monsieur.

Chandelle — (looking about him curiously) Are you perhaps Monsieur Pitou?

Pitou — Yes, Monsieur.

Chandelle — Ah! I was told that one would always find you in at this hour. (He takes off his overcoat and lays it carefully on a chair) I was told also that you could help me.

Pitou — (puzzled) I could help you?

Chandelle — (Sitting down wearily on a wooden chair near the table) Yes, I’m a — a stranger in the city — now. I’m trying to trace someone — someone who has been dead many years. I’ve been informed that you’re the oldest inhabitant (he smiles faintly)

Pitou — (rather pleased) Perhaps — and yet there are older than I, ah yes, older than I. (He sits down across the table from Chandelle.)

Chandelle — And so I came for you. (He bends earnestly over the table toward Pitou.) Monsieur Pitou, I am trying to trace my father.

Pitou — Yes.

Chandelle — He died in this district about twenty years ago.

Pitou — Monsieur’s father was murdered?

Chandelle — Good God, no! What makes you think that?

Pitou — I thought perhaps in this district twenty years ago, an aristocrat —

Chandelle — My father was no aristocrat. As I remember, his last position was that of waiter in some forgotten cafe. (Pitou glances at Chandelle’s clothes and looks mystified. ) Here I’ll explain. I left France twenty-eight years ago to go to the states with my uncle. We went over in an immigrant ship, if you know what that is.

Pitou — Yes: I know.

Chandelle — My parents remained in France. The last I remember of my father was that he was a little man with a black beard, terribly lazy — the only good I ever remember his doing was to teach me to read and write. Where he picked up that accomplishment I don’t know. Five years after we reached America we ran across some newly landed French from this part of the city, who said that both my parents were dead. Soon after that my uncle died and I was far too busy to worry over parents whom I had half forgotten anyway. (He pauses.) Well to cut it short I prospered and —

Pitou — (deferentially) Monsieur is rich — ‘tis strange — ‘tis very strange.

Chandelle — Pitou, it probably appears strange to you that I should burst in on you now at this time of life, looking for traces of a father who went completely out of my life over twenty years ago.

Pitou — Oh — I understood you to say he was dead.

Chandelle — Yes he’s dead, but (hesitates) Pitou, I wonder if you can understand if I tell you why I am here.

Pitou — Yes, perhaps.

Chandelle — (very earnestly) Monsieur Pitou, in America the men I see now, the women I know all had fathers, fathers to be ashamed of, fathers to be proud of, fathers in gilt frames, and fathers in the family closet, Civil War fathers, and Ellis Island fathers. Some even had grandfathers.

Pitou — I had a grandfather. I remember.

Chandelle — (interrupting) I want to see people who knew him, who had talked with him. I want to find out his intelligence, his life, his record. (Impetuously) I want to sense him — I want to know him —

Pitou — (interrupting) What was his name?

Chandelle — Chandelle, Jean Chandelle.

Pitou — (quietly) I knew him.

Chandelle — You knew him?

Pitou — He came here often to drink — that was long ago when this place was the rendezvous of half the district.

Chandelle — (excitedly) Here? He used to come here? To this room? Good Lord, the very house he lived in was torn down ten years ago. In two days’ search you are the first soul I’ve found who knew him. Tell me of him — everything — be frank.

Pitou — Many come and go in forty years (shakes his head. ) There are many names and many faces — Jean Chandelle — ah, of course, Jean Chandelle. Yes, yes; the chief fact I can remember about your father was that he was a — a —

Chandelle — Yes.

Pitou — A terrible drunkard.

Chandelle — A drunkard — I expected as much. (He looks a trifle downcast, but makes a half-hearted attempt not to show it.)

Pitou — (Rambling on through a sea of reminiscence) I remember one Sunday night in July — hot night — baking — your father-let’s see — your father tried to knife Pierre Courru for drinking his mug of sherry.

Chandelle — Ah!

Pitou — And then — ah, yes, (excitedly standing up) I see it again. Your father is playing vingt-et-un and they say he is cheating so he breaks Clavine’s shin with a chair and throws a bottle at someone and Lafouquet sticks a knife into his lung. He never got over that. That was — was two years before he died.

Chandelle — So he cheated and was murdered. My God, I’ve crossed the ocean to discover that.

Pitou — No — no — I never believed he cheated. They were laying for him —

Chandelle — (burying his face in his hands) Is that all (he shrugs his shoulders; his voice is a trifle broken) I scarcely expected a — saint but — well: so he was a rotler.

Pitou — (Laying his hand on Chandelle’s shoulder) There Monsieur, I have talked too much. Those were rough days. Knives were drawn at anything. Your father — but hold — do you want to meet three friends of his, his best friends. They can tell you much more than I.

Chandelle — (gloomily) His friends?

Pitou — (reminiscent again) There were four of them. Three come here yet — will be here this afternoon — your father was the fourth and they would sit at this table and talk and drink. They talked nonsense — everyone said; the wine room poked fun at them — called them les “Academicians Ridicules. “ Night after night would they sit there. They would slouch in at eight and stagger out at twelve —

(The door swings open and three men enter. The first, La-marque, is a tall man, lean and with a thin straggly beard. The second, Destage, is short and fat, white bearded and bald. The third, Francois Meridien is slender, with black hair streaked with grey and a small moustache. His face is pitifully weak, his eyes small, his chin sloping. He is very nervous. They all glance with dumb curiosity at Chandelle. )

Pitou — (including all three with a sweep of his arm) Here they are, Monsieur, they can tell you more than I. (Turning to the others) Messieurs, this gentleman desires to know about —

Chandelle — (rising hastily and interrupting Pitou) About a friend of my father’s. Pitou tells me you knew him. I believe his name was — Chandelle.

(The three men start and Francois begins to laugh nervously.)

Lamarque — (after a pause) Chandelle?

Francois — Jean Chandelle? So he had another friend besides us?

Destage — You will pardon me, Monsieur: that name — no one but us had mentioned it for twenty-two years.

Lamarque — (trying to be dignified, but looking a trifle ridiculous) And with us it is mentioned with reverence and awe.

Destage — Lamarque exaggerates a little perhaps. (Very seriously) He was very dear to us. (Again Francois laughs nervously.)

Lamarque — But what is it that Monsieur wishes to know? (Chandelle motions them to sit down. They take places at the big table and Destage produces a pipe and begins to fill it.)

Francois — Why, we’re four again!

Lamarque — Idiot!

Chandelle — Here, Pitou! Wine for everyone. (Pitou nods and shuffles out) Now, Messieurs, tell me of Chandelle. Tell me of his personality.

(Lamarque looks blankly at Destage. )

Destage — Well, he was — was attractive —

Lamarque — Not to everyone.

Destage — But to us. Some thought him a sneak. (Chandelle winces) He was a wonderful talker — when he wished, he could amuse the whole wine room. But he preferred to talk to us. (Pitou enters with a bottle and glasses. He pours and leaves the bottle on the table. Then he goes out.)

Lamarque — He was educated. God knows how.

Francois — (draining his glass and pouring out more.) He knew everything, he could tell anything — he used to tell me poetry. Oh, what poetry! And I would listen and dream —

Destage — And he could make verses and sing them with his guitar.

Lamarque — And he would tell us about men and women of history — about Charlotte Corday and Fouquet and Moliere and St. Louis and Mamine, the strangler, and Charlemagne and Mme. Dubarry and Machiavelli and John Law and Francois Villon —

Destage — Villon! (enthusiastically) He loved Villon. He would talk for hours of him.

Francois — (Pouring more wine) And then he would get very drunk and say “Let us fight” and he would stand on the table and say that everyone in the wine shop was a pig and a son of pigs. La! He would grab a chair or a table and Sacre Vie Dieu! but those were hard nights for us.

Lamarque — Then he would take his hat and guitar and go into the streets to sing. He would sing about the moon.

Francois — And the roses and the ivory towers of Babylon and about the ancient ladies of the court and about “the silent chords that flow from the ocean to the moon. “

Destage — That’s why he made no money. He was bright and clever — when we worked, he worked feverishly hard, but he was always drunk, night and day.

Lamarque — Often he lived on liquor alone for weeks at a time.

Destage — He was much in jail toward the end.

Chandelle — (calling) Pitou! More wine!

Francois — (excitedly) And me! He used to like me best. He used to say that I was a child and he would train me. He died before he began. (Pitou enters with another bottle of wine; Francois siezes it eagerly and pours himself a glass.)

Destage — And then that cursed Lafouquet — stuck him with a knife.

Francois — But I fixed Lafouquet. He stood on the Seine bridge drunk and —

Lamarque — Shut up, you fool you —

Francois — I pushed him and he sank — down — down — and that night Chandelle came in a dream and thanked me.

Chandelle — (shuddering) How long — for how many years did you come here.

Destage — Six or seven. (Gloomily) Had to end — had to end.

Chandelle — And he’s forgotten. He left nothing. He’ll never be thought of again.

Destage — Remembered! Bah! Posterity is as much a charlatan as the most prejudiced tragic critic that ever boot-licked an actor. (He turns his glass nervously round and round) You don’t realize — I’m afraid — how we feel about Jean Chandelle, Francois and Lamarque and I — he was more than a genius to be admired —

Francois — (hoarsely) Don’t you see, he stood for us as well as for himself.

Lamarque — (rising excitedly and walking up and down.) There we were — four men — three of us poor dreamers — artistically educated, practically illiterate (he turns savagely to Chandelle and speaks almost menacingly) Do you realize that I can neither read nor write. Do you realize that back of Francois there, despite his fine phrases, there is a character weak as water, a mind as shallow as —

(Francois starts up angrily.)

Lemarque — Sit down (Francois sits down muttering.)

Francois — (after a pause) But, Monsieur, you must know — I leave the gift of — of — (helplessly) I can’t name it — appreciation, artistic, aesthetic sense — call it what you will. Weak — yes, why not? Here I am, with no chance, the world against me. I lie — I steal perhaps — I am drunk — I —

(Destage fills up Francois glass with wine.)

Destage — Here! Drink that and shut up! You are boring the gentleman. There is his weak side — poor infant.

(Chandelle who has listened to the last, keenly turns his chair toward Destage.)

Chandelle — But you say my father was more to you than a personal friend; in what way?

Lamarque — Can’t you see?

Francois — I — I — he helped — (Destage pours out more wine and gives it to him.)

Destage — You see he — how shall I say it? — he expressed us. If you can imagine a mind like mine, potently lyrical, sensitive without being cultivated. If you can imagine what a balm, what a medicine, what an all in all was summed up for me in my conversations with him. It was everything to me. I would struggle pathetically for a phrase to express a million yearnings and he would say it in a word.

Lamarque — Monsieur is bored? (Chandelle shakes his head and opening his case selects a cigarette and lights it)

Lamarque — Here, sir, are three rats, the product of a sewer-destined by nature to live and die in the filthy ruts where they were born. But these three rats in one thing are not of the sewer — they have eyes. Nothing to keep them from remaining in the sewer but their eyes, nothing to help them if they go out but their eyes — and now here comes the light. And it came and passed and left us rats again — vile rats — and one, when he lost the light, went blind.

Francois — (muttering to himself) —

Blind! Blind! Blind!

Then he ran alone, when the light had passed;

The sun had set and the night fell fast;

The rat lay down in the sewer at last,

Blind!

(A beam of the sunset has come to rest on the glass of wine that Francois holds in his hand. The wine glitters and sparkles. Francois looks at it, starts, and drops the glass. The wine runs over the table.)

Destage — (animatedly) Fifteen — twenty years ago he sat where you sat, small, heavy-bearded, black eyed — always sleepy looking.

Francois — (his eyes closed — his voice trailing off) Always sleepy, sleepy, slee —

Chandelle — (dreamily) He was a poet unsinging, crowned with wreaths of ashes. (His voice rings with just a shade of triumph.)

Francois — (talking in his sleep) Ah, well Chandelle, are you witty to-night, or melancholy or stupid or drunk.

Chandelle — Messieurs — it grows late. I must be off. Drink, all of you (enthusiastically) Drink until you cannot talk or walk or see. (He throws a bill on the table.)

Destage — Young Monsieur?

(Chandelle dons his coat and hat. Pitou enters with more wine. He fills the glasses.)

Lamarque — Drink with us, Monsieur.

Francois — (asleep) Toast, Chandelle, toast.

Chandelle — (taking a glass and raising it aloft). Toast (His face is a little red and his hand unsteady. He appears infinitely more gallic than when he entered the wine shop.)

Chandelle — I drink to one who might have been all, who was nothing — who might have sung; who only listened — who might have seen the sun; who but watched a dying ember — who drank of gall and wore a wreath of shadow laurels —

(The others have risen, even Francois who totters wildly forward.)

Francois — Jean, Jean, don’t go — don’t — till I, Francois — you can’t leave me — I’ll be all alone — alone — alone (his voice rises higher and higher) My God, man, can’t you see, you have no right to die — You are my soul. (He stands for a moment, then sprawls across the table. Far away in the twilight a violin sighs plaintively. The last beam of the sun rests on Francois’ head. Chandelle opens the door and goes out.)

Destage — The old days go by, and the old loves and the old spirit. “Ou sont les neiges d’antan? “ I guess. (Pauses unsteadily and then continues. ) I’ve gone far enough without him.

Lamarque — (dreamily) Far enough.

Destage — Your hand Jaques! (They clasp hands).

Francois — (wildly) Here — I, too — you won’t leave me (feebly) I want — just one more glass — one more —

(The light fades and disappears.)

(CURTAIN.)

PORCELAIN AND PINK

This one act play was written in early 1920.

PORCELAIN AND PINK

The room in the down-stairs of a summer cottage. High around the wall runs an art frieze of a fisherman with a pile of nets at his feet and a ship on a crimson ocean, a fisherman with a pile of nets at his feet and a ship on a crimson ocean, a fisherman with a pile of nets at his feet and so on. In one place on the frieze there is an overlapping — here we have half a fisherman with half a pile of nets at his foot, crowded damply against half a ship on half a crimson ocean. The frieze is not in the plot, but frankly it fascinates me. I could continue indefinitely, but I am distracted by one of the two objects in the room — a blue porcelain bath-tub. It has character, this bath-tub. It is not one of the new racing bodies, but is small with a high tonneau and looks as if it were going to jump; discouraged, however, by the shortness of its legs, it has submitted to its environment and to its coal of sky-blue point. But it grumpily refuses to allow any patron completely to stretch his legs — which brings us neatly to the second object in the room:

It is a girl — clearly an appendage to the bath-tub, only her head and throat — beautiful girls have throats instead of necks — and a suggestion of shoulder appearing above the side. For the first ten minutes of the play the audience is engrossed in wondering if she really is playing the game fairly and hasn’t any clothes on or whether it is being cheated and she is dressed.

The girl’s name is JULIE MARVIS. From the proud way she sits up in the bath-tub we deduce that she is not very tall and that she carries herself well. When she smiles, her upper lip rolls a little and reminds you of an Easier Bunny. She is within whispering distance of twenty years old.

One thing more — above and to the right of the bath-tub is a window. It is narrow and has a wide sill; if lets in much sunshine, but effectually prevents any one who looks in from seeing the bath-tub. You begin to suspect the plot?

We open, conventionally enough, with a song, but, as the startled gasp of the audience quite drowns out the first half, we will give only the last of it:

JULIE: (In an airy sophrano-enthusiastico)

When Caesar did the Chicago

He was a graceful child,

Those sacred chickens

Just raised the dickens

The Vestal Virgins went wild.

Whenever the Nervii got nervy

He gave them an awful razz

They shook in their shoes

With the Consular blues

The Imperial Roman Jazz

(During the wild applause that follows JULIE modestly moves her arms and makes waves on the surface of the water — at least we suppose she does. Then the door on the left opens and LOIS MARVIS enters, dressed but carrying garments and towels. LOIS is a year older than JULIE and is nearly her double in face and voice, but in her clothes and expression are the marks of the conservative. Yes, you’ve guessed it. Mistaken identity is the old, rusty pivot upon which the plot turns.)

LOIS: (Starting) Oh, ‘scuse me. I didn’t know you were here.

JULIE: Oh, hello. I’m giving a little concert —  —

LOIS: (Interrupting) Why didn’t you lock the door?

JULIE: Didn’t I?

LOIS: Of course you didn’t. Do you think I just walked through it?

JULIE: I thought you picked the lock, dearest.

LOIS: You are so careless.

JULIE: No. I’m happy as a garbage-man’s dog and I’m giving a little concert.

LOIS: (Severely) Grow up!

JULIE: (Waving a pink arm around the room) The walls reflect the sound, you see. That’s why there’s something very beautiful about singing in a bath-tub. It gives an effect of surpassing loveliness. Can I render you a selection?

LOIS: I wish you’d hurry out of the tub.

JULIE: (Shaking her head thoughtfully) Can’t be hurried. This is my kingdom at present, Godliness.

LOIS: Why the mellow name?

JULIE: Because you’re next to Cleanliness. Don’t throw anything please!

LOIS: How long will you be?

JULIE: (After some consideration) Not less than fifteen nor more than twenty-five minutes.

LOIS: As a favor to me will you make it ten?

JULIE: (Reminiscing) Oh, Godliness, do you remember a day in the chill of last January when one Julie, famous for her Easter-rabbit smile, was going out and there was scarcely any hot water and young Julie had just filed the tub for her own little self when the wicked sister came and did bathe herself therein, forcing the young Julie to perform her ablutions  with cold cream — which is expensive and a darn lot of trouble?

LOIS: (Impatiently) Then you won’t hurry?

JULIE: Why should I?

LOIS: I’ve got a date.

JULIE: Here at the house?

LOIS: None of your business.

(JULIE shrugs the visible tips of her shoulders and stirs the water into ripples.)

JULIE: So be It.

LOIS: Oh, for Heaven’s sake, yes! I have a date here at the house-in a way.

JULIE: In a way?

LOIS: He isn’t coming in. He’s calling for me and we’re walking.

JULIE: (Raising her eyebrows) Oh, the plot dears. It’s that literary Mr. Calkins. I thought you promised mother you wouldn’t invite him in.

LOIS: (Desperately) She’s so idiotic. She detests him because he’s just got a divorce. Of course she’s had more expedience than I have, but —  —

JULIE: (Wisely) Don’t let her kid you! Experience Is the biggest gold brick in the world. All older people have it for sale.

LOIS: I like him. We talk literature.

JULIE: Oh, so that’s why I’ve noticed all these weighty books around the house lately.

LOIS: He lends them to me.

JULIE: Well, you’ve got to play his game. When in Rome do as the Romans would like to do. Bat I’m through with books. I’m all educated.

LOIS: You’re very inconsistent — last summer you read every day.

JULIE: If I were consistent I’d still be living on warm milk out of a bottle.

LOIS: Yes, and probably my bottle. But I like Mr. Calkins.

JULIE: I never met him.

LOIS: Well, will you hurry up?

JULIE: Yes. (After a pause) I wait till the water gets tepid and then I let in more hot.

LOIS: (Sarcastically) How interesting!

JULIE: ‘Member when we used to play “soapo “?

LOIS: Yes — at ten years old. I’m really quite surprised that you don’t play it still.

JULIE: I do. I’m going to in a minute.

LOIS: Silly game.

JULIE: (Warmly) No, it isn’t. It’s good for the nerves. I’ll bet you’ve forgotten how to play at.

LOIS: (Defiantly) No, I haven’t. You — you get the tub all full of soapsuds and then you get up on the edge and slide down.

JULIE: (Shaking her head scornfully) Huh! That’s only part of it. You’ve got to slide down without touching your hands or feet —  —

LOIS: (Impatiently) Oh, Lord! What do I care? I wish we’d either stop coming here in the summer or else get a house with two bath-tubs.

JULIE: You can buy yourself a little tin one, or use the hose —  —

LOIS: Oh shut up!

JULIE: (Irrelevantly) Leave the towel.

LOIS: What?

JULIE: Leave the towel when you go.

LOIS: This towel?

JULIE : (Sweetly) Yes, I forgot my towel.

LOIS: (Looking around for the first time) Why, you idiot! You haven’t even a kimono.

JULIE: (Also looking around) Why, so I haven’t.

LOIS: (Suspicion growing on her) How did you get here?

JULIE: (Laughing) I guess I — I guess I whisked here. You know — a white form whisking down the stairs and —  —

LOIS: (Scandalized) Why, you little wretch. Haven’t you any pride or self-respect?

JULIE: Lots of both. I think that proves it. I looked very well. I really am rather cute in my natural state.

LOIS: Well, you —  —

JULIE: (Thinking aloud) I wish people didn’t wear any clothes. I guess I ought to have been a pagan or a native or something.

LOIS: You’re a —  —

JULIE: I dreamt last night that one Sunday in church a small boy brought in a magnet that attracted cloth. He attracted the clothes right off of everybody; put them in an awful state; people were crying and shrieking and carrying on as if they’d just discovered their skins for the first time. Only I didn’t care, So I just laughed. I had to pass the collection plate because nobody else would.

LOIS: (Who has turned a deaf ear to this speech) Do you mean to tell me that if I hadn’t come you’d have ran back to your room — un — unclothed?

JULIE: Au naturel is so much nicer.

LOIS: Suppose there had been some one in the living-room.

JULIE: There never has been yet.

LOIS Yet! Good grief! How long —  —

JULIE: Besides, I usually have a towel.

LOIS: (Completely overcome) Golly! You ought to be spanked, I hope you get caught. I hope there’s a dozen ministers in the living-room when you come out — and their wives and their daughters.

JULIE: There wouldn’t be room for them in the living-room, answered Clean Kate of the Laundry District.

LOIS: All right. You’ve made your own — bath-tub; you can lie in it.

(LOIS starts determinedly for the door.)

JULIE: (In alarm) Hey! Hey! I don’t care about the k’mono, but I want the towel. I can’t dry mysell on a piece of soap and a wet wash-rag.

LOIS: (Obstinately) I won’t humor such a creature. You’ll have to dry yourself the best way you can. You can roll on the floor like the animals do that don’t wear any clothes.

JULIE: (Complacent again) All right. Get out!

LOIS: (Haughtily) Huh!

(JULIE turns on the cold water and with her finger directs a parabolic stream at LOIS. LOIS retires quickly, slamming the door after her. JULIE laughs and turns off the water)

JULIE: (Singing)

When the Arrow-collar man

Meets the D’jer-kiss girl

On the smokeless Santa Fe

Her Pebeco smile

Her Lucile style

De dum da-de-dum one day —  —

(She changes to a whistle and leans forward to turn on the taps, but is startled by three loud banging noises in the pipes. Silence for a moment — then she puts her mouth down near the spigot as if it were a telephone)

JULIE:  Hello! (No answer)  Are you a plumber? (No answer) Are you the water department? (One loud, hollow bang)   What do you want? (No answer) I believe you’re a ghost.  Are you? (No answer) Well, then, stop banging. (She reaches out and turns on the warm tap. No water flows.  Again she puts her mouth down close to the spigot). If you’re the plumber that’s a mean trick. Turn it on for a fellow. (Two loud, hallow bangs) Don’t argue! I want water — water! Water!

(A young man’s head appears in the window — a head decorated with a slim mustache and sympatetic eyes. These last stare, and though they can see nothing but many fishermen with nets and much crimson ocean, they decide him to speak)

THE YOUNG MAN: Some one fainted?

JULIE: (Starting up, all ears immediately) Jumping cats!

THE YOUNG MAN: (Helpfully) Water’s no good for fits.

JULIE : Fits! Who said anything about fits!

THE YOUNG MAN: You said something about a cat jamping.

JULIE: (Decidedly) I did not!

THE YOUNG MAN: Well, we can talk it over later. Are you ready to go out? Or do you still feel that if you go with me just now everybody will gossip?

JULIE: (Smiling) Gossip! Would they? It’d be more than gossip — it’d be a regular scandal.

THE YOUNG MAN: Here, you’re going it a little strong. Your family might be somewhat disgruntled — but to the pure all things are suggestive. No one else would even give it a thought, except a few old women. Gome on.

JULIE: You don’t know what you ask.

THE YOUNG MAN: Do you imagine we’d have a crowd following us?

JULIE: A crowd? There’d be a special, all-steel buffet train leaving New York hourly.

THE YOUNG MAN: Say, are you house-cleaning?

JULIE: Why?

THE YOUNG MAN: I see all the pictures are off the walls.

JULIE: Why, we never have pictures in this room.

THE YOUNG MAN: Odd. I never heard of a room without pictures or tapestry or panelling or something.

JULIE: There’s not event any furniture in here.

THE YOUNG MAN: What a strange house!

JULIE: It depends on the angle you see it from.

THE YOUNG MAN: (Sentimentally) It’s so nice talking to you like this — when you’re merely a voice. I’m rather glad I can’t see you.

JULIE: (Gratefully) So am I.

THE YOUNG MAN: What color are you wearing?

JULIE: (After a critical survey of her shoulders) Why, I guess it’s a sort of pinkish white.

THE YOUNG MAN: Is it becoming to you?

JULIE: Very. It’s — it’s old. I’ve had it for a long while.

THE YOUNG MAN: I thought you hated old clothes.

JULIE: I do — but this was a birthday present and I sort of have to wear it.

THE YOUNG MAN: Pinkish white. Well, I’ll bet it’s divine. Is it in style?

JULIE: Quite. It’s very simple, standard model.

THE YOUNG MAN: What a voice you have! How it echos! Sometimes I shut my eyes and seem to see you in a far desert island calling for me. And I plunge toward you through the surf, hearing you call as you stand there, water stretching on both sides of you —  —

(The soap slips from the side of the tub and splashes in. The young man blinks)

THE YOUNG MAN: What was that? Did I dream it?

JULIE: Yes. You’re — you’re very poetic, aren’t you?

THE YOUNG MAN: (Dreamily) No. I do prose. I do verse only when I am stirred

JULIE: (Murmuring) Stirred by a spoon —  —

THE YOUNG MAN: I have always loved poetry. I can remember to this day the first poem I ever learned by heart. It was “Evangeline.”

JULIE: That’s a fib.

THE YOUNG MAN: Did I say  “Evangeline”? I meant “The Skeleton in Armor.”

JULIE: I’m a low-brow. But I can remember my first poem. It had one verse:

Parker and Davis

Sittin’ on a fence

Tryne to make a dollar

Outa fif-teen cents.

THE YOUNG MAN: (Eagerly) Are you growing fond of literature?

JULIE: If it’s not too ancient or complicated or depressing. Same way with people. I usually like ‘em if they’re not too ancient or complicated or depressing.

THE YOUNG MAN: Of course I’ve read enormously. You told me last night that you were very fond of Walter Scott.

JULIE: (Considering) Scott? Let’s see. Yes, I’ve read “Ivanhoe” and “The Last of the Mohicans.”

THE YOUNG MAN: That’s by Cooper.

JULIE: (Angrily)”Ivanhoe” is? You’re crazy! I guess I know. I read it.

THE YOUNG MAN: “The Last of the Mohicans” is by Cooper.

JULIE: What do I care! I like O. Henry. I don’t see how he ever wrote those stories. Most of them he wrote in prison. “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” he made up in prison.

THE YOUNG MAN: (Biting his lip) Literature — literature! How much it has meant to me!

JULIE: Well, as Gaby Deslys said to Mr. Bergson, with my looks and your brains there’s nothing we couldn’t do.

THE YOUNG MAN: (Laughing) You certainly are hard to keep up with. One day you’re awfully pleasant and the next you’re in a mood. If I didn’t understand your temperament so well —  —

JULiE: (Impatiently) Oh, you’re one of these amateur character — readers, are you? Size people up in five minutes and then look wise whenever they’re mentioned. I hate that sort of thing.

THE YOUNG MAN: I don’t boast of sizing you up. You’re most mysterious, I’ll admit.

JULIE: There’s only two mysterious people in history.

THE YOUNG MAN: Who are they?

JULIE: The Man with the Iron Mask and the fella who says “ug uh-glug uh-glug uh-glug” when the line is busy.

THE YOUNG MAN: You are mysterious. I love you. You’re beautiful, intelligent, and virtuous, and that’s the rarest known combination.

JULIE: You’re a historian. Tell me if there are any bath-tubs in history. I think they’ve been frightfully neglected.

THE YOUNG MAN: Bath-tubs! Let’s see. Well, Agamemnon was stabbed in his bath-tub. And Charlotte Corday stabbed Marat in his bath-tub.

JULIE: (Sighing) Way back there! Nothing new besides the sun, is there? Why only yesterday I picked up a musical-comedy score that mast have been at least twenty years old; and there on the cover it said “The Shimmies of Normandy,” but shimmie was spelt the old way, with a “C.”

THE YOUNG MAN: I loathe these modern dances. Oh, Lois, I wish I could see you. Come to the window.

(There is a loud bang in the water-pipe and suddenly the flow starts from the open taps. JULIE turns them off quickly).

THE YOUNG MAN: (Puzzled) What on earth was that?

JULIE: (Ingeniously) I heard something, too.

THE YOUNG MAN: Sounded like running water.

JULIE: Didn’t it? Strange like it. As a matter of fact I was filling the gold-fish bowl.

THE YOUNG MAN: (Still puzzled) What was that banging noise?

JULIE: One of the fish snapping his golden jaws.

THE YOUNG MAN: (With sudden resolution) Lois, I love you. I am not a mundane man but I am a forger —  —

JULIE: (Interested at once) Oh, how fascinating.

THE YOUNG MAN: — a forger ahead. Lois, I want you.

JULIE: (Skeptically) Huh! What you really want is for the world to come to attention and stand there till you give “Rest!”

THE YOUNG MAN: Lois I — Lois I —  —

(He stops as LOIS opens the door, comes in, and bangs it behind her. She looks peevishly at JULIE and then suddenly catches sight of the young man in the window)

LOIS: (In horror) Mr. Calkins!

THE YOUNG MAN: (Surprised) Why I thought you said you were wearing pinkish white!

(After one despairing stare LOIS shrieks, throws up her hands in surrender, and sinks to the floor.)

THE YOUNG MAN: (In great alarm) Good Lord! She’s fainted! I’ll be right in.

(JULIE’S eyes light on the towel which has slipped from LOIS’s inert hand.)

JULIE: In that case I’ll be right out.

(She puts her hands on the side of the tub to lift herself out and a murmur, half gasp, half sigh, ripples from the audience.

A Belasco midnight comes quickly down and blots out the stage.)

CURTAIN.

MR. ICKY

This one act play was written in 1920.

MR ICKY

The Scene is the Exterior of a Cottage in West Issacshire on a desperately Arcadian afternoon in August. MR. ICKY, quaintly dressed in the costume of an Elizabethan peasant, is pottering and doddering among the pots and dods. He is an old man, well past the prime of life, no longer young. From the fact that there is a burr in his speech and that he has absent-mindedly put on his coat wrongside out, we surmise that he is either above or below the ordinary superficialities of life.

Near him on the grass lies PETER, a little boy. PETER, of course, has his chin on his palm like the pictures of the young Sir Walter Raleigh. He has a complete set of features, including serious, sombre, even funereal, gray eyes — and radiates that alluring air of never having eaten food. This air can best be radiated during the afterglow of a beef dinner. He is looking at MR. ICKY, fascinated.

Silence… The song of birds.

PETER: Often at night I sit at my window and regard the stars. Sometimes I think they’re my stars…(Gravely) I think I shall be a star some day…

MR. ICKY: (Whimsically) Yes, yes… yes…

PETER: I know them all: Venus, Mars, Neptune, Gloria Swanson.

MR. ICKY: I don’t take no stock in astronomy… I’ve been thinking o’ Lunnon, laddie. And calling to mind my daughter, who has gone for to be a typewriter… (He sighs.)

PETER: I liked Ulsa, Mr. Icky; she was so plump, so round, so buxom,

MR. ICKY: Not worth the paper she was padded with, laddie. (He stumbles over a pile of pots and dods.)

PETER: How is your asthma, Mr. Icky?

MR. ICKY: Worse, thank God!… (Gloomily.) I’m a hundred years old… I’m getting brittle.

PETER: I suppose life has been pretty tame since you gave up petty arson.

MR. ICKY: Yes… yes… You see, Peter, laddie, when I was fifty I reformed once — in prison.

PETER: You went wrong again?

MR. ICKY: Worse than that. The week before my term expired they insisted on transferring to me the glands of a healthy young prisoner they were executing.

PETER: And it renovated you?

MR. ICKY: Renovated me! It put the Old Nick back into me! This young criminal was evidently a suburban burglar and a kleptomaniac. What was a little playful arson in comparison!

PETER: (Awed) How ghastly! Science is the bunk.

MR. ICKY: (Sighing) I got him pretty well subdued now. ‘Tisn’t every one who has to tire out two sets o’ glands in his lifetime. I wouldn’t take another set for all the animal spirits in an orphan asylum.

PETER: (Considering) I shouldn’t think you’d object to a nice quiet old clergyman’s set.

MR. ICKY: Clergymen haven’t got glands — they have souls.

(There is a low, sonorous honking off stage to indicate that a large motor-car has stopped in the immediate vicinity. Then a young wan handsomely attired in a dress-suit and a patent-leather silk hat comes onto the stage. He is very mundane. His contrast to the spirituality of the other two is observable as far back as the first row of the balcony. This is RODNEY DIVINE.)

DIVINE : I am looking for Ulsa Icky.

(MR. ICKY rises and stands tremulously between two dods.)

MR. ICKY: My daughter is in Lunnon.

DIVINE: She has left London. She is coming here. I have followed her.

(He reaches into the little mother-of-pearl satchel that hangs at his side for cigarettes. He selects one and scratching a match touches it to the cigarette. The cigarette instantly lights.)

DIVINE: I shall wait.

(He waits. Several hours pass. There is no sound except an occasional cackle or hiss from the dods as they quarrel among themselves. Several songs can be introduced here or some card tricks by DIVINE or a tumbling act, as desired.)

DIVINE: It’s very quiet here.

MR. ICKY: Yes, very quiet…

(Suddenly a loudly dressed girl appears; she is very worldly. It is ULSA ICKY. On her is one of those shapeless faces peculiar to early Italian painting.)

ULSA: (In a coarse, worldly voice) Feyther! Here I am! Ulsa did what?

MR. ICKY: (Tremulously) Ulsa, little Ulsa.

(They embrace each other’s torsos.)

MR. ICEY: (Hopefully) You’ve come back to help with the ploughing.

ULSA: (Sullenly) No, feyther; ploughing’s such a beyther. I’d reyther not.

(Though her accent is broad, the content of her speech is sweet and clean.)

DIVINE: (Conciliatingly) See here, Ulsa. Let’s come to an understanding.

(He advances toward her with the graceful, even stride that made him captain of the striding team at Cambridge.)

ULSA: You still say it would be Jack?

MR. ICKY: What does she mean?

DIVINE: (Kindly) My dear, of course, it would be Jack. It couldn’t be Frank.

MR. ICKY: Frank who?

ULSA: It would be Frank!

(Some risque joke can be introduced here.)

MR. ICKY: (Whimsically) No good fighting… no good fighting…

DIVINE: (Reaching out to stroke her arm with the powerfull movement that made him stroke of the crew at Oxford) You’d better marry me.

ULSA: (Scornfully) Why, they wouldn’t let me in through the servants’ entrance of your house,

DIVINE:(Angrily) They wouldn’t! Never fear — you shall come in through the mistress’ entrance.

ULSA: Sir!

DIVOTE: (In confusion) I beg your pardon. You know what I mean?

MR. ICKY: (Aching with whimsey) You want to marry my little Ulsa?…

DITOSE: I do.

MR. ICKY: Your record is clean.

DIVINE: Excellent. I have the best constitution in the world —  —

ULSA: And the worst by-laws.

DIVINE: At Eton I was a member at Pop; at Rugby I belonged to Near-beer. As a younger son I was destined for the police force —  —

MR. ICKY: Skip that… Have you money?…

DIVINE: Wads of it. I should expect Ulsa to go down town in sections every morning — in two Rolls-Royces. I have also a kiddy-car and a converted tank. I have seats at the opera —  —

ULSA: (Sullenly) I can’t sleep except in a box. And I’ve heard that you were cashiered from your club.

MR. ICKY: A cashier?…

DIVINE: (Hanging his head) I was cashiered.

ULSA: What for?

DIVINE: (Almost inaudibly) I hid the polo balls one day for a joke.

MR. ICKY: Is your mind in good shape?

DIVINE: (Gloomily) Fair. After all what is brilliance? Merely the tact to sow when no one is looking and reap when everyone is.

MR. ICKY: Be careful… I will not marry my daughter to an epigram…

DIVINE: (More gloomily) I assure you — I’m a mere platitude. I often descend to the level of an innate idea.

ULSA: (Dully) None of what you’re saying mattets. I can’t marry a man who thinks it would be Jack. Why Frank would —  —

DIVINE: (Interrupting) Nonsense!

ULSA: (Emphatically) You’re a fool!

MR. ICKY: Tut-tut!… One should not judge… Charity, my girl. What was it Nero said? — “With malice toward none, with charity toward all —  — “

PETER: That wasn’t Nero. That was John Drinkwater.

MR. ICKY: Come! Who is this Frank? Who is this Jack?

DIVINE: (Morosely) Gotch.

ULSA: Dempsey.

DIVINE: We were arguing that if they were deadly enemies and locked in a room together which one would come out alive. Now I claimed that Jack Dempsey would take one —  —

ULSA: (Angrily) Rot! He wouldn’t have a —  —

DIVINE: (Quickly) You win.

ULSA: Then I love you again.

MR. ICKY: So I’m going to lose my little daughter…

ULSA: You’ve still got a houseful of children.

(CHARLES, ULSA’S brother, coming out of the cottage. He is dressed as if to go to sea; a coil of rope is slung about his shoulder and an anchor is hanging from his neck.)

CHARLES: (Not seeing them) I’m going to sea! I’m going to sea!

(His voice is triumphant.)

MR. ICKY : (Sadly) You went to seed long ago.

CHARLES: I’ve been reading “Coftrad.”

PETER: (Dreamily) “Conrad,” ah! “Two Years Before the Mast,” by Henry James.

CHARLES: What?

PETER: Walter Pater’s version of “Robinson Crusoe.”

CHARLES: (To his feyther) I can’t stay here and rot with you. I want to live my life. I want to hunt eels.

MR. ICKY: I will be here … when you come back …

CHARLES: (Contemptuously) Why, the worms are licking their chops already when they hear your name.

(It will be noticed that some of the characters have not spoken for some time. It will improve the technique if they can be rendering a spirited saxophone number.)

MR. ICKY: (Mournfully) These vales, these hills thesee McCormick harvesters — they mean nothing to my children. I understand.

CHARLES: (More gently) Then you’ll think of me kindly, feyther. To understand is to forgive.

MR. ICKY: No … no … We never forgive those we can understand … We can only forgive those who wound us for no reason at all…

CHARLES: (Impatiently) I’m so beastly sick of your human nature line. And, anyway, I hate the hours around here.

(Several dozen more of MR. ICKY’S children trip out of the house, trip over the grass, and trip over the pots and dods. They are muttering “We are going away,” and “We are leaving you.”)

MR. ICKY: (His heart breaking) They’re all deserting me. I’ve been too kind. Spare the rod and spoil the fun. Oh, for the glands of a Bismarck.

(There is a honking outside — probably DIVINE’S chauffeur growing impatient for his master.)

MR. ICKY: (In misery) They do not love the soil! Tbey have been faithless to the Great Potato Tradition! (He picks up a handful of soil passionately and rubs it on his bald head. Hair sprouts.) Oh, Wordsworth, Wordsworth, how true you spoke!

No motion has she now, no force;

She does not hear or feel;

Roll’d round on earth’s diurnal course

In some one’s Oldsmobile.”

(They all groan and shouting “Life” and “Jazz” move slowly toward the wings.)

CHARLES: Back to the soil, yes! I’ve been trying to turn my back to the soil for ten years!

ANOTHER CHILD: The farmers may be the backbone of the country, but who wants to be a backbone?

ANOTHER CHILD : I care not who hoes the lettuce of my country if I can eat the salad!

ALL: Life! Psychic Research! Jazz!

MR. ICKY: (Struggling with himself) I must be quaint. That’s ail there is. It’s not life that counts, it’s the quaintness you bring to it…

ALL: We’re going to slide down the Riviera. We’ve got tickets for Piccadilly Circus. Life! Jazz!

MR. ICKY: Wait. Let me read to you from the Bible. Let me open it at random. One always finds something that bears on the situation.

(He finds a Bible lying in one of the dods and opening it at random begins to read.)

(“Anab and Istemo and Anim, Goson and Olon and Gilo, eleven cities and their villages. Arab, and Ruma, and Esaan —  — “

CHARLES: (Cruelly) Buy ten more rings and try again.

MR. ICKY: (Trying again) “How beautiful art thou my love, how beautiful art thou! Thy eyes are dove’s eyes, besides what is hid within. Thy hair is as flocks of goats which come up from Mount Galaad — “ Hm! Rather a coarse passage …

(His children laugh at him rudely, shouting “Jazz!”, and “All life is primarily suggestive!”)

MR. ICKY: (Despondently) It won’t work to-day. (Hopefully) Maybe it’s damp. (He feels it) Yes, it’s damp… There was water in the dod…  It won’t work.

ALL: It’s damp! It won’t work! Jazz!

ONE OF THE CHILDEEN: Come, we must catch the six-thirty.

(Any other cue may be inserted here)

MK. ICKY: Good-by…

(They all go out. MR. ICKY is left alone. He sighs and walking over to the cottage steps, lies down, and closes his eyes.

Twilight has come down and the stage is flooded with such light as never was on land or sea. There is no sound except a sheep-herder’s wife in the distance playing an aria from Beethoven’s Tenth Symphony, on a mouth-organ. The great white and gray moths swoop down and light on the old man until he is completely covered by them. But he does not stir.

The curtain goes up and down several times to denote the lapse of several minutes. A good comedy effect can be obtained by having MR. ICKY cling to the curtain and go up and down with it. Fireflies or fairies on wires can also be introduced at this point.

Then PETER appears, a look of almost imbecile sweetness on his face. In his hand he clutches something and from time to time glances at it in a transport of ecstasy. After a struggle with himself he lays it on the old man’s body and then  quietly withdraws.

The moths chatter among themselves and then scurry away in sudden fright. And as night deepens there still sparkles there, small, white and round, breathing a subtle perfume to the West Issacshire breeze, PETER’S gift of love — a moth-ball.

(The play can end at this point or can go on indefinitely.)

THE VEGETABLE,

OR

FROM PRESIDENT TO POSTMAN

The Vegetable the title of a short story that Fitzgerald developed into a play.  The main character Jerry Frost is a low-level clerk, trapped in an unhappy marriage.   The play portrays his endeavours for something more in his life, and yet he consistently falls short. After the publication of The Beautiful and the Damned, Fitzgerald hoped this play would secure financial wealth for him and his wife Zelda. Nevertheless, it was a failure, resulting with Fitzgerald becoming depressed and turning to alcohol.

The first edition

CONTENTS

Act I

Act II

Act III

Act I

This is the “living” room of Jerry Frost’s house. It is evening. The room (and, by implication, the house) is small and stuffy — it’s an awful bother to raise these old-fashioned windows; some of them stick, and besides it’s extravagant to let in much cold air, here in the middle of March. I can’t say much for the furniture, either. Some of it’s instalment stuff, imitation leather with the grain painted on as an after-effect, and some of it’s dingily, depressingly old. That bookcase held “Ben Hur” when it was a best-seller, and it’s now trying to digest “A Library of the World’s Best Literature” and the “Wit and Humor of the United States in Six Volumes.” That couch would be dangerous to sit upon without a map showing the location of all craters, hillocks, and thistle-patches. And three dead but shamefully unburied clocks stare eyelessly before them from their perches around the walls.

Those walls — God! The history of American photography hangs  upon  them. Photographs  of children  with puffed dresses and depressing leers, taken in the Fauntleroy nineties, of babies with toothless mouths and idiotic eyes, of young men with the hair cuts of ‘85 and ‘90 and ‘02, and with neckties that loop, twist, snag, or flare in conformity to some esoteric, antiquated standard of middle-class dandyism. And the girls! You’d have to laugh at the girls! Imitation Gibson girls, mostly; you can trace their histories around the room, as each of them withered and staled. Here’s one in the look-at-her-little-toes-aren’t-they-darling period, and here she is later when she was a little bother of ten. Look!  This is the way she was when she was after a husband. She might be worse. There’s a certain young charm or something, but in the next picture you can see what five years of general housework have done to her. You wouldn’t turn your eyes half a degree to watch her in the street. And that was taken six years ago — now she’s thirty and already an old woman.

You’ve guessed it. That last one, allowing for the photographer’s kind erasure of a few lines, is Mrs. Jerry Frost. If you listen for a minute, you’ll hear her, too.

But wait. Against my will, I’ll have to tell you a few sordid details about the room. There’s got to be a door in Plain sight that leads directly outdoors, and then there are two other doors, one to the dining-room and one to the second floor — you can see the beginning of the stairs. Then there’s a window somewhere that’s used in the last act. I hate to mention these things, but they’re part of the plot.

Now you see when the curtain went up, Jerry Frost had left the little Victrola playing and wandered off to the cellar or somewhere, and Mrs. Jerry (you can call her Charlotte) hears it from where she is up-stairs. Listen!

“Some little bug is going to find you, so-o-ome day!”

That’s her. She hasn’t got much of a voice, has she? And she will sing one key higher than the Victrola. And now the darn Victrola’s running down and giving off a ghastly minor discord like the death agony of a human being.

Charlotte. [She’s up-stairs, remember.] Jerry, wind up the graphophone.

There’s no answer.

Jer-ry!

Still no answer.

Jerry, wind up the graphophone. It isn’t good for it.

Yet again no answer.

All  right — [smugly] — if you want to ruin it, I don’t care.

The phonograph whines, groans, gags, and dies, and almost simultaneously with its last feeble gesture a man comes into the room, saying: “What?” He receives no answer. It is Jerry Frost, in whose home we are.

Jerry Frost is thirty-five. He is a clerk for the rail-road at $3,000 a year. He possesses no eyebrows, but nevertheless he constantly tries to knit them. His lips are faintly pursed at all times, as though about to emit an enormous opinion upon some matter of great importance.

On the wall there is a photograph of him at twenty-seven — just before he married. Those were the days of his high yellow pompadour. That is gone now, faded like the rest of him into a docile pattern without grace or humor.

After his mysterious and unanswered “What?” Jerry stares at the carpet, surely not in (Esthetic approval, and becomes engrossed in his lack of thoughts. Suddenly he gives a twitch and tries to reach with his hand some delicious sector of his back. He can almost reach it, but not quite — poor man! — so he goes to the mantelpiece and rubs his back gently, pleasingly, against it, meanwhile keeping his glance focussed darkly upon the carpet.

He is finished. He is at physical ease again. He leans over the table — did I say there was a table? — and turns the pages of a magazine, yawning meanwhile and tentatively beginning a slow clog step with his feet. Presently this distracts him from the magazine, and he looks apathetically at his feet. Then suddenly he sits in a chair and begins to sing, unmusically, and with faint interest, a piece which is possibly his own composition. The tune varies considerably, but the words have an indisputable consistency, as they are composed wholly of the phrase: “Everybody is there, everybody is there!”

He is a motion-picture of tremendous, unconscious boredom.

Suddenly he gives out a harsh, bark-like sound and raises his hand swiftly, as though he were addressing an audience. This fails to amuse him; the arm falters, strays lower —  —

Jerry. Char-lit! Have you got the Saturday Evening Post?

There is no reply.

Char-lit!

Still no reply.

Char-lit!

Charlotte[with syrupy recrimination]. You didn’t bother to answer me, so I don’t think I should bother to answer you.

Jerry [indignant, incredulous]. Answer you what?

Charlotte. You know what I mean.

Jerry. I mos’ certainly do not.

Charlotte. I asked you to wind up the graphophone.

Jerry [glancing at it indignantly]. The phonograph?

Charlotte. Yes, the graphophone!

Jerry. It’s the first time I knew it. [He is utterly disgusted. He starts to speak several times, but each time he hesitates. Disgust settles upon his face, in a heavy pall. Then he remembers his original question.] Have you got the Saturday Evening Post?

Charlotte. Yes, I told you!

Jerry. You did not tell me!

Charlotte. I can’t help it if you’re deaf!

Jerry. Deaf? Who’s deaf? [After a pause.] No more deaf than you are. [After another pause.] Not half as much.

Charlotte. Don’t talk so loud — you’ll wake the people next door.

Jerry [incredulously]. The people next door!

Charlotte. You heard me!

Jerry is beaten, and taking it very badly. He is beginning to brood when the telephone rings. He answers it.

Jerry. Hello!… [With recognition and rising interest.] Oh, hello… . Did you get the stuff… Just one gallon is all I want…  No, I can’t use more than one gallon…  [He looks around thoughtfully.] Yes, I suppose so, but I’d rather have you mix it before you bring it… . Well, about nine o’clock, then. [He rings off, gleeful now, smiling. Then sudden worry, and the hairless eyebrows knit together. He takes a note-book out of his pocket, lays it open before him, and picks up the receiver.] Midway 9191…  Yes…  Hello, is this Mr. — Mr. S-n-o-o-k-s’s residence?… Hello, is this Mr. S-n-o-o-k-s’s residence?…  [Very distinctly.]  Mr. Snukes or Snooks… . Mr. S-n-, the boo — the fella that gets stuff, hooch… h-o-o-c-h…  No, Snukes or Snooks is the man I want…  Oh. Why, a fella down-town gave me your husband’s name and he called me up — at least, I called him up first, and then he called me up just now — see?… You see? Hello — is this — am I talking to the wife of the — of the — of the fella that gets stuff for you?   The b-o-o-t-l-e-g-g-e-r? Oh, you know, the bootlegger. [He breathes hard after this word. Do you suppose Central will tell on him?]…  Oh. Well, you see, I wanted to tell him when he comes to-night to come to the back door…  No, Hooch is not my name. My name is Frost. 2127 Osceola Avenue… Oh, he’s left already? Oh, all right. Thanks… . Well, good-by… Well, good-by… good-by. [He rings off. Again his hairless brows are knit with worry.] Char-lit!

Charlotte[abstractedly]. Yes?

Jerry. Charlit, if you want to read a good story, read the one about the fella who gets shipwrecked on the BuzzardIslands and meets the Chinese girl, only she isn’t a Chinese girl at all.

Charlotte[she’s still upstairs, remember]. What?

Jerry. There’s one story in there — are you reading the Saturday Evening Post?

Charlotte. I would be if you didn’t interrupt me every minute.

Jerry. I’m not. I just wanted to tell you there’s one story in there about a Chinese girl who gets wrecked on the Buzzard Islands that isn’t a Chinese —  —

Charlotte. Oh, let up, for heaven’s sakes! Don’t nag me.

Clin-n-ng! That’s the door-bell.

There’s the door-bell.

Jerry [with fine sarcasm]. Oh, really? Why, I thought it was a cow-bell.

Charlotte[witheringly]. Ha-ha!

Well, he’s gone to the door. He opens it, mumbles something, closes it. Now he’s back.

Jerry. It wasn’t anybody.

Charlotte. It must have been.

Jerry. What?

Charlotte. It couldn’t have rung itself.

Jerry [in disgust]. Oh, gosh, you think that’s funny. [After a pause.] It was a man who wanted 2145. I told him this was 2127, so he went away.

Charlotte is now audibly descending a crickety flight of stairs, and here she is! She’s thirty, and old for her age, just like I told you, shapeless, slack-cheeked, but still defiant. She would fiercely resent the statement that her attractions have declined ninety per cent since her marriage, and in the same breath she would assume that there was a responsibility and shoulder it on her husband. She talks in a pessimistic whine and, with a sort of dowdy egotism, considers herself generally in the right. Frankly, I don’t like her, though she can’t help being what she is.

Charlotte. I thought you were going to the Republican Convention down at the Auditorium.

Jerry. Well, I am. [But he remembers the b-o-o — .] No, I can’t.

Charlotte. Well, then, for heaven’s sakes don’t spend the evening sitting here and nagging me. I’m nervous enough as it is.

They both sit. She produces a basket of sewing, selects a man’s nightshirt and begins, apparently, to rip it to pieces. Meanwhile Jerry, who has picked up a magazine, regards her out of the corner of his eye. During the first rip he starts to speak, and again during the second rip, but each time he restrains himself with a perceptible effort.

Jerry. What are you tearing that up for?

Charlotte[sarcastically]. Just for fun.

Jerry. Why don’t you tear up one of your own?

Charlotte[exasperated]. Oh, I know what I’m do-ing. For heaven’s sakes, don’t n-a-a-ag me!

Jerry [feebly]. Well, I just asked you. [A long pause.] Well, I got analyzed to-day.

Charlotte. What?

Jerry. I got analyzed.

Charlotte. What’s that?

Jerry. I got analyzed by an expert analyzer. Everybody down at the Railroad Company got analyzed. [Rather importantly.] They got a chart about me that long. [He expresses two feet with his hands.] Say — [He rises suddenly and goes up close to her.] What color my eyes?

Charlotte. Don’t ask me. Sort of brown, I guess.

Jerry. Brown? That’s what I told ‘em. But they got me down for blue.

Charlotte. What was it all about? Did they pay you anything for it?

Jerry. Pay me anything? Of course not. It was for my benefit. It’ll do me a lot of good. I was analyzed, can’t you understand? They found out a lot of stuff about me.

Charlotte[dropping her work in horror]. Do you think you’ll lose your job?

Jerry [in disgust]. A lot you know about business methods. Don’t you ever read “Efficiency” or the “Systematic Weekly”? It’s a sort of examination.

Charlotte. Oh, I know. When they feel all the bumps on your head.

Jerry. No, not like that at all. They ask you questions, see? Charlotte. Well, you needn’t be so cross about it

He hasn’t been cross.

I hope you had the spunk to tell them you thought you deserved a better position than you’ve got.

Jerry. They didn’t ask me things like that. It was up-stairs in one of the private offices. First the character analyzer looked at me sort of hard and said “Sit down!”

Charlotte. Did you sit down?

Jerry. Sure; the thing is to do what they tell you. Well, then the character analyzer asked me my name and whether I was married.

Charlotte[suspiciously]. What did you tell her?

Jerry. Oh, it was a man. I told him yes, of course. What do you think I am?

Charlotte. Well, did he ask you anything else about me?

Jerry. No. He asked me what it was my ambition to be, and I said I didn’t have any ambition left, and then I said, “Do you mean when I was a kid?” And he said, “All right, what did you want to do then?” And I said “Postman,” and he said, “What sort of a job would you like to get now?” and I said, “Well, what have you got to offer?”

Charlotte. Did he offer you a  job?

Jerry. No, he was just kidding, I guess. Well, then, he asked me if I’d ever done any studying at home to fit me for a higher position, and I said, “Sure,” and he said, “What?” and I couldn’t think of anything off-hand, so I told him I took music lessons. He said no, he meant about railroads, and I said they worked me so hard that when I got home at night I never want to hear about railroads again.

Charlotte. Was that all?

Jerry. Oh, there were some more questions. He asked me if I’d ever been in jail.

Charlotte. What did you tell him?

Jerry. I told him “no,” of course.

Charlotte. He probably didn’t believe you.

Jerry. Well, he asked me a few more things, and then he let me go. I think I got away with it all right. At least he didn’t give me any black marks on my chart — just a lot of little circles.

Charlotte. Oh, you got away with it “all right.” That’s all you care. You got away with it. Satisfied with nothing. Why didn’t you talk right up to him: “See here, I don’t see why I shouldn’t get more money.” That’s what you’d have ought to said. He’d of respected you more in the end.

Jerry [gloomily]. I did have ambitions once.

Charlotte. Ambition to do what? To be a postman. That was a fine ambition for a fella twenty-two years old. And you’d have been one if I’d let you. The only other ambition you ever had was to marry me. And that didn’t last long.

Jerry. I know it didn’t. It lasted one month too long, though.

A mutual glare here — let’s not look.

And I’ve had other ambitions since then — don’t you worry.

Charlotte[scornfully]. What?

Jerry. Oh, that’s all right.

Charlotte. What, though? I’d like to know what. To win five dollars playing dice in a cigar store?

Jerry. Never you mind. Don’t you worry. Don’t you fret. It’s all right, see?

Charlotte. You’re afraid to tell me.

Jerry. No, I’m not. Don’t you worry.

Charlotte. Yes, you are.

Jerry. All right then. If you want to know, I had an ambition to be President of the United States.

Charlotte[laughing]. Ho — ho — ho — ho!

Jerry is pretending to be interested only in sucking Ms teeth — but you can see that he is both sorry he made his admission and increasingly aware that his wife is being unpleasant.

Charlotte. But you decided to give that up, eh?

Jerry. Sure. I gave up everything when I got married.

Charlotte. Even gave up being a postman, eh? That’s right. Blame it all on me! Why, if it hadn’t been for me you wouldn’t even be what you are — a fifty-dollar-a-week clerk.

Jerry. That’s right. I’m only a fifty-dollar-a-week clerk. But you’re only a thirty-dollar-a-week wife.

Charlotte. Oh, I am, am I?

Jerry. I made a big mistake when I married you.

Charlotte. Stop talking like that! I wish you were dead-dead and buried — cremated! Then I could have some fun.

Jerry. Where — in the poorhouse?

Charlotte. That’s where I’d be, I know.

Charlotte is not really very angry. She is merely smug and self-satisfied, you see, and is only mildly annoyed at this unexpected resistance to her browbeating. She knows that Jerry will always stay and slave for her. She has begun this row as a sort of vaudeville to assuage her nightly boredom.

Charlotte. Why didn’t you think of these things before we got married?

Jerry. I did, a couple of times, but you had me all signed up then.

The sound of uncertain steps creaking down the second floor. Into the room at a wavering gait comes Jerry’s father, Horatio — “Dada.”

Dada was born in 1834, and will never see eighty-eight again — in fact, his gathering blindness prevented him from seeing it very clearly in the first place. Originally he was probably Jerry’s superior in initiative, but he did not prosper, and during the past twenty years his mind has been steadily failing. A Civil War pension has kept him quasi-independent, and he looks down as from a great dim height upon Jerry (whom he thinks of as an adolescent) and Charlotte (whom he rather dislikes). Never given to reading in his youth, he has lately become absorbed in the Old Testament and in all Old Testament literature, over which he burrows every day in the Public Library.

In person he is a small, shrivelled man with a great amount of hair on his face, which gives him an unmistakable resemblance to a French poodle. The fact that he is almost blind and even more nearly deaf contributes to his aloof, judicial pose, and to the prevailing impression that something grave and thoughtful and important is going on back of those faded, vacant eyes. This conception is entirely erroneous. Half the time his mind is a vacuum, in which confused clots of information and misinformation drift and stir — the rest of the time he broods upon the minute details of his daily existence. He is too old, even, for the petty spites which represent to the aged the single gesture of vitality they can make against the ever-increasing pressure of life and youth.

When he enters the room he looks neither to left nor right, but with his head shaking faintly and his mouth moving in a shorter vibration, makes directly for the bookcase.

Jerry. Hello, Dada.

Dada does not hear.

Jerry [louder]. Looking for the Bible, Dada?

Dada. [He has reached the bookcase, and he turns around stiffly.] I’m not deaf, sir.

Jerry. [Let’s draw the old man out.] Who do you think will be nominated for President, Dada?

Dada [trying to pretend he has just missed one word]. The —  —

jerry [louder]. Who do you think’ll be nominated for President, to-night?

Dada. I should say that Lincoln was our greatest President. [He turns back to the bookcase with an air of having settled a trivial question for all time.]

Jerry. I mean to-night. They’re getting a new one. Don’t you read the papers?

Dada [who has heard only a faint murmur]. Hm.

Charlotte. You know he never reads anything but the Bible. Why do you nag him?

Jerry. He reads the encyclopaedia at the Public Library. [With a rush of public spirit.] If he’d just read the newspapers he’d know what was going on and have something to talk about. He just sits around and never says anything.

Charlotte. At least he doesn’t gabble his head off all day. He’s got sense enough not to do that anyway, haven’t you, Dada?

Dada does not answer.

Jerry. Lookit here, Charlit. I don’t call it gabbling if I meet a man in the street and he says, “Well, I see, somebody was nominated for President,” and I say, “Yes, I see saw — see so.” Suppose I said, “Yes, Lincoln was our greatest President.” He’d say, “Why, if that fella isn’t a piece of cheese I never saw a piece of cheese.”

Dada [turning about plaintively]. Some one has taken my Bible.

Jerry. No, there it is on the second shelf, Dada.

Dada. [He doesn’t hear.] I don’t like people moving it around.

Charlotte. Nobody moved it.

Dada. My old mother used to say to me, “Horatio — “ [He brings this word out with an impressive roundness, but as his eye, at that moment, catches sight of the Bible, he loses track of his thought. He pounces upon the Holy Book and drags it out, pulling with it two or three other books, which crash to the floor. The sound of their fall is very faint on his ears — and under the delusion that his error is unnoticed, he slyly kicks the books under the bookcase. Jerry and Charlotte exchange a glance. With his Bible under his arm Dada starts stealthily toward the staircase. He sees something bright shining on the first step, and, not without difficulty, stoops to pick it up. His efforts are unsuccessful.] Hello, here’s a nail that looks just like a ten-cent piece. [He starts upstairs.]

Jerry. He thought he found a ten-cent piece.

Charlotte[significantly]. Nobody has yet in this house.

In the ensuing silence Dada can be heard ascending the stairs. About half-way up there is a noise as if he had slipped down a notch. Then a moment of utter silence.

Jerry. You all right, Dada?

No answer. Dada is heard to resume his climb. He was just resting. [He goes over and starts picking up the books. Cli-n-ng! There’s the front door-bell again. It occurs to him that it’s the b-o-o.] I’ll answer it.

Charlotte [who has risen]. I’ll answer it. It’s my own sister Doris, I know. You answered the last one.

Jerry. That was a mistake. It’s my turn this time by rights.

Answering the door-bell is evidently a pleasant diversion over which they have squabbled before.

Charlotte. I’ll answer it.

Jerry. You needn’t bother.

Cli-n-ng! An impatient ring that.

Charlotte and Jerry [together]. Now, listen here —

They both start for the door. Jerry turns, only trying to argue with her some more, and what does the woman do but slap his face! Then, quick as a flash, she is by him and has opened the door.

What do you think of that? Jerry stands there with an expressionless face. In comes Charlotte’s sister Doris.

Well, now, I’ll tell you about Doris. She’s nineteen, I guess, and pretty. She’s nice and slender and dressed in an astonishingly close burlesque of the current fashions. She’s a member of that portion of the middle-class whose girls are just a little bit too proud to work and just a little bit too needy not to. In this city of perhaps a quarter of a million people she knows a few girls who know a few girls who are “social leaders,” and through this connection considers herself a member of the local aristocracy. In her mind, morals, and manners she is a fairly capable imitation of the current moving-picture girl, with overtones of some of the year’s debutantes whom she sees down-town. Doris knows each debutante’s first name and reputation, and she follows the various affairs of the season as they appear in the society column.

She walks — walks, not runs — haughtily into the room, her head inclined faintly forward, her hips motionless. She speaks always in a bored voice, raising her eyebrows at the important words of each sentence.

Doris. Hello, people.

Jerry [a little stiffly — he’s mad.] Why, hello, Doris.

Doris sits down with a faint glance at her chair, as though suspecting its chastity.

Doris. Well, I’m engaged again.

She says this as though realizing that she is the one contact this couple have with the wider and outer world. She assumes with almost audible condescension that their only objective interest is the fascinating spectacle of her career. And so there is nothing personal in her confidences; is as though she were reporting dispassionately an affair of great national, or, rather, passional importance. And, indeed, Jerry and Charlotte respond magnificently to her initial remark by saying “Honestly?” in incredulous unison and staring at her with almost bated breath.

Doris[laconically]. Last night.

Charlotte[reproachfully]. Oh, Doris! [flattering her, you see, by accusing her of being utterly incorrigible.]

Doris. I simply couldn’t help it. I couldn’t stand him any longer, and this new fella I’m engaged to now simply had to know — because he was keeping some girl waiting. I just couldn’t stand it. The strain was awful.

Charlotte. Why couldn’t you stand it? What was the trouble?

Doris[coolly]. He drank.

Charlotte, of course, shakes her head in sympathy.

He’d drink anything. Anything he could get his hands on. He used to drink all these mixtures and then come round to see me.

A close observer might notice that at this statement Jerry, thinking of his nefarious bargain with the b-o-o, perceptibly winces.

Charlotte. Oh, that’s too bad. He was such a clean-cut fella.

Doris. Yes, Charlotte, he was clean-cut, but that was all. I couldn’t stand it, honestly I couldn’t. I never saw such a man, Charlotte. He took the platinum sardine. When they go up in your room and steal your six-dollar-an-ounce perfume, a girl’s got to let a man go.

Charlotte. I should say she has. What did he say when you broke it off?

Doris. He couldn’t say anything. He was too pie-eyed. I tied his ring on a string, hung it around his neck and pushed him out the door.

Jerry. Who’s the new one?

Doris. Well, to tell you the truth, I don’t know much about him, but I’ll tell you what I do know from what information I could gather from mutual friends, and so forth. He’s not quite so clean-cut as the first one, but he’s got lots of other good qualities. He comes from the State of Idaho, from a town named Fish.

Jerry. Fish? F-i-s-h?

Doris. I think so. It was named after his uncle…  a Mr. Fish.

Jerry [wittily]. They’re a lot of Fish out there.

Doris[not comprehending]. Well, these Fishes are very nice. They’ve been mayor a couple of times and all that sort of thing, if you know what I mean. His father’s in business up there now.

Jerry. What business?

Doris. He’s in the funereal-parlor business.

Jerry [indelicately]. Oh, undertaker.

Doris. [She’s sensitive to the word.] Well, not exactly, but something like that. A funereal parlor is a sort of — oh, a sort of a good undertaking place, if you know what I mean. [And now confidentially.] As a matter of fact, that’s the part of the thing I don’t like. You see, we may have to live out in Fish, right over his father’s place of business.

Jerry. Why, that’s all right. Think how handy it’ll be if —  —

Charlotte. Keep still, Jerry!

Jerry. Is he in the same business as his father?

Doris. No. At least not now. He was for a while, but the business wasn’t very good and now he says he’s through with it. His father’s bought him an interest in one of the stores.

Jerry. A Fish store, eh?

The two women look at him harshly.

Charlotte[wriggling her shoulders with enjoyment]. Tell us more about him.

Doris. Well, he’s wonderful looking. And he dresses, well, not loud, you know, but just well. And when anybody speaks to him he goes sort of — [To express what Mr. Fish does when any one speaks to him, Doris turns her profile sharply to the audience, her chin up, her eyes half-closed in an expression of melancholy scorn.]

Charlotte. I know — like Rudolph Valentine.

Doris[witheringly — do you blame her?]. Valentino.

Jerry. What does it mean when he does that?

Doris. I don’t know, just sort of — sort of passion.

Jerry. Passion!

Doris. Emotion sort of. He’s very emotional. That’s one reason I didn’t like the last fella I was engaged to. He wasn’t very emotional. He was sort of an old cow most of the time. I’ve got to have somebody emotional. You remember that place in the Sheik where the fella says: “Must I play valet as well as lover?” That’s the sort of thing I like.

Charlotte[darting a look at Jerry]. I know just what you mean.

Doris. He’s not really as tall as I’d like him to be, but he’s got a wonderful build and a good complexion. I can’t stand anybody without a good complexion — can you? He calls me adorable egg.

Jerry. What does he mean by that?

Doris[airily]. Oh, “egg” is just a name people use nowadays. It’s considered sort of the thing.

Jerry [awed]. Egg?

Charlotte. When do you expect to get married?

Doris. You never can tell!

A pause, during which they all sigh as if pondering. Then Doris,’with a tremendous effort at justice, switches the conversation away from herself.

Doris[patronizingly, condescendingly]. How’s everything going with you two? [To Jerry.] Does your father still read the Bible?

Jerry. Well, a lot of the time he just thinks.

Doris. He hasn’t had anything to do for the last twenty years but just think, has he?

Jerry [impressed]. Just think of the things he’s probably thought out.

Doris[blasphemously]. That old dumb-bell?

Charlotte and Jerry are a little shocked.

How’s everything else been going around here?

Jerry. I got analyzed to-day at —  —

Charlotte[interrupting]. The same as ever.

Jerry. I got anal —  —

Charlotte[to Jerry]. I wish you’d be polite enough not to interrupt me.

Jerry [pathetically]. I thought you were through.

Charlotte. Well, you’ve driven what I had to say right out of my head. [To Doris.] What do you think he said to-night? He said if he hadn’t married me he’d be President of the United States.

At this Jerry drops his newspaper precipitately, walks in anger to the door, and goes out without speaking.

You see? Just a display of temper. But it doesn’t worry me. [She sighs — the shrew.] I’m used to it.

Doris tactfully makes no reply. After a momentary silence she changes the subject.

Doris. Well, I find I just made an awful mistake.

Charlotte[eagerly]. Not keeping both those men for a while? That’s what I think.

Doris. No. I mean — do you remember those three dresses I had lengthened?

Charlotte[breathlessly]. Yes.

Doris[tragically].  I’ll never be able to wear them.

Charlotte. Why?

Doris. There’s a picture of Mae Murray in the new Motion Picture Magazine… my dear, half her calf!

Charlotte. Really?

At this point the door leading to the dining-room opens and Jerry comes in. Looking neither to left nor to right, he marches to his lately vacated place, snatches up half his newspaper, and goes out without speaking. The two women bestow on him a careless glance and continue their discussion.

Doris. It was just my luck. I wish I’d hemmed them like I thought of doing, instead of cutting them off. That’s the way it always is. As soon as I get my hair bobbed, Marilyn Miller begins to let hers grow. And look at mine — [She removes her hat.] I can’t do a thing with it. [She replaces her hat.] Been to the Bijou Theatre?

Charlotte. No, what’s there?

Again Jerry comes in, almost unbearably self-conscious now. The poor man has taken the wrong part of the paper. Silently, with a strained look, he makes the exchange under the intense supervision of four eyes, and starts back to his haven in the dining-room. Then he jumps as Doris speaks to him.

Doris. Say!

Jerry [morosely dignified]. What?

Doris[with real interest]. What makes you think you could be President?

Jerry [to Charlotte]. That’s right. Make a fool of me in front of all your relations! [In his excitement he bangs down his paper upon a chair.]

Charlotte. I haven’t said one word — not one single solitary word — have I, Doris?

Jerry goes out hastily — without his paper!

Did I say one word, Doris? I’ll leave it to you. Did I say one single word to bring down all that uproar on my head? To have him swear at me?

Jerry, crimson in the face, comes in, snatches up his forgotten paper, and rushes wildly out again.

He’s been nagging at me all evening. He said I kept him from doing everything he wanted to. And you know very well, Doris, he’d have been a postman if it hadn’t been for me. He said he wished I was dead.

It seems to me it was Charlotte who wished Jerry was dead!

He said he could get a better wife than me for thirty dollars a week.

Doris[fascinated]. Did he really? Where did he say he could get her?

Charlotte. That’s the sort of man he is.

Doris. He’d never be rich if you gave him the money. He hasn’t got any push. I think a man’s got to have push, don’t you? I mean sort of uh! [She gives a little grunt to express indomitable energy, and makes a sharp gesture with her hand.] I saw in the paper about a fella that didn’t have any legs or arms forty years old that was a millionaire.

Charlotte. Maybe if Jerry didn’t have any legs or arms he’d do better. How did this fella make it?

Doris. I forget. Some scheme. He just thought of a scheme. That’s the thing, you know — to think of some scheme. Some kind of cold cream or hair — say, I wish somebody’d invent some kind of henna that nobody could tell. Maybe Jerry could.

Charlotte. He hasn’t brains enough.

Doris. Say, I saw a wonderful dog to-day.

Charlotte. What kind of a dog?

Doris. It was out walking with Mrs. Richard Barton Hammond on Crest Avenue. It was pink.

Charlotte. Pink! I never saw a pink dog.

Doris. Neither did I before. Gosh, it was cunning… Well, I got to go. My fiance is coming over at quarter to nine and we’re going down to the theatre.

Charlotte. Why don’t you bring him over some time?

Doris. All right. I’ll bring him over after the movies if you’ll be up.

They walk together to the door. Doris goes out and Charlotte has scarcely shut the door behind her when the bell rings again. Charlotte opens the door and then retreats half-way across the room, with an alarmed expression on her face. A man has come in, with a great gunny-sack slung over his shoulder. It is none other than Mr. Snooks or Snukes, the bootlegger.

I wish I could introduce you to the original from whom I have taken Mr. Snooks. He is as villainous-looking a man as could be found in a year’s search. He has a weak chin, a broken nose, a squint eye, and a three days’ growth of beard. If you can imagine a race-track sport who has fallen in a pool of mud you can get an idea of his attire. His face and hands are incrusted with dirt. He lacks one prominent tooth, lacks it with a vulgar and somehow awful conspicuousness. His most ingratiating smile is a criminal leer, his eyes shift here and there upon the carpet, as he speaks in a villainous whine.

Charlotte[uneasily]. What do you want?

Mr. Snooks leers and winks broadly, whereat Charlotte bumps back against the bookcase.

Snooks [hoarsely]. Tell your husband Sandy Claus is here.

Charlotte[calling nervously].  Jerry, here’s somebody wants to see you. He says he’s — he’s Santa Claus.

In comes Jerry. He sees the situation, but the appearance of the b-o-o evidently shocks him, and a wave of uneasiness passes over him. Nevertheless, he covers up these feelings with a magnificent nonchalance.

Jerry. Oh, yes. Howdedo? How are you? Glad to see you.

Snooks [wiggling the bag, which gives out a loud, glassy clank]. Hear it talking to you, eh?

Charlotte looks from one to the other of them darkly.

Jerry. It’s all right, Charlit. I’ll tend to it. You go up-stairs. You go up-stairs and read that — there’s a story in the Saturday Evening Post about a Chinese girl on the Buzzard Islands that —  —

Charlotte. I know. Who isn’t a Chinese girl. Never mind that. I’ll stay right here.

Jerry turns from her with the air of one who has done his best — but now — well, she must take the consequences.

Jerry [to Snooks]. Is this Mr. Snukes? Or Snooks?

Snooks. Snooks. Funny name, ain’t it? I made it up. I got it off a can of tomatoes. I’m an Irish-Pole by rights. [Meanwhile he has been emptying the sack of its contents and setting them on the table. First come two one-gallon jars, one full, the other empty. Then a square, unopened one-gallon can. Finally three small bottles and a medicine dropper.]

Charlotte[in dawning horror]. What’s that? A still?

Snooks [with a wink at Jerry].  No, lady, this here’s a wine-press.

Jerry. [He’s attempting to conciliate her.] No, no, Charlit. Listen. This gentleman here is going to make me some gin — very, very cheap.

Charlotte. Some gin!

Jerry. Yes, for cocktails.

Charlotte. For whose cocktails?

Jerry. For you and me.

Charlotte. Do you think I’d take one of the poison things?

Jerry [to Snooks]. They’re not poison, are they?

Snooks. Poison! Say, lady, I’d be croaked off long ago if they was. I’d be up wid de angels! This ain’t wood alcohol. This is grain alcohol. [He holds up the gallon can, on which is the following label]:

WOOD ALCOHOL!

POISON!

Charlotte[indignantly]. Why, it says wood alcohol right on the can!

Snooks. Yes, but it ain’t. I just use a wood-alcohol can, so in case I get caught. You’re allowed to sell wood alcohol, see?

Jerry [explaining to Charlotte]. Just in case he gets caught — see?

Charlotte. I think the whole performance is perfectly terrible.

Jerry. No, it isn’t. Mr. Snooks has sold this to some of the swellest families in the city — haven’t you, Mr. Snooks?

Snooks. Sure. You know old man Alec Martin?

Jerry [glancing at Charlotte, who is stony-eyed]. Sure. Everybody knows who they are.

Snooks. I sole ‘em a gallon. And John B. Standish? I sole him five gallons and he said it was the best stuff he ever tasted.

Jerry [to Charlotte]. See — ? The swellest people in town.

Snooks. I’d a got here sooner, only I got double crossed to-day.

Jerry. How?

Snooks. A fella down-town sold me out to the rev’nue officers. I got stuck for two thousand dollars and four cases Haig and Haig.

Jerry. Gee, that’s too bad!

Snooks. Aw, you never know who’s straight in this game. They’ll double cross you in a minute.

Jerry. Who sold you out?

Snooks. A fella. What do you suppose he got for it?

Jerry. What?

Snooks. Ten dollars. What do you know about a fella that’d sell a guy out for ten dollars? I just went right up to him and said: “Why, you Ga —  — “

Jerry [nervously]. Say, don’t tell us!

Snooks. Well, I told him where he got off at, anyways. And then I plastered him one. An’ the rev’nue officers jus’ stood there and laughed. My brother ‘n I are goin’ ‘round an’ beat him up again tomorra.

Jerry [righteously]. He certainly deserved it.

A pause.

Snooks [after a moment’s brooding]. Well, I’ll fix this up for you now.

Charlotte[stiffly]. How much is it?

Snooks. This? Sixteen a gallon.

Jerry [eagerly]. See, that makes two gallons of the stuff, Charlotte, and that’s eight quarts, and eight quarts if the stuff makes sixteen quarts of cocktails. That’s enough to last us — oh, three years anyhow. Just think how nice it’ll be if anybody comes in. Just say: “Like a little cocktail?” “Sure.” “All right.” [He makes a noise to express orange squeezing.] Oranges! [A noise to express the cracking of ice.] Ice! [A noise to express the sound of a shaker.] Shaker! [He pours the imaginary compound into three imaginary glasses. Then he drinks off one of the imaginary glasses and pats his stomach.]

Charlotte[contemptuously]. Well, I think you’re a little crazy, if you ask me.

Snooks [taking off his hat and coat]. You got a big bowl?

Charlotte. No. Why didn’t you bring your own bowl?

Jerry [uncertainly]. There’s a nice big bowl in the kitchen.

Charlotte. All right. Go on and spoil all the kitchen things.

Jerry. I’ll wash it afterward.

Charlotte. Wash it? [She laughs contemptuously, implying that washing will do it no good then. Jerry, nevertheless, goes for the bowl. He feels pretty guilty by this time, but he’s going through with it now, even though he may never hear the last of it.]

Snooks [hollering after him]. Get a corkscrew, too. [He holds up the tin can to Charlotte.] Grain alcohol. [Charlotte’s lips curl in answer. He holds up a small bottle.] Spirits of Jupiter. One drop of this will smell up a whole house for a week. [He holds up a second bottle.] Oila  Aniseed. Give  it  a flavor. Take  the arsenic out. [He holds up a third bottle.] Oila Coreander.

Charlotte[sardonically]. Wouldn’t you like me to look in the medicine-chest and see if there’s something there you could use? Maybe you need some iodine. Or some of Dada’s ankle-strengthener.

Jerry comes in, laden.

Jerry. Here’s the bowl and the corkscrew.

Charlotte. You forgot the salt and pepper.

Amid great pounding the bootlegger breaks the corkscrew on the tin can. His exertions send him into a fit of coughing.

You’ll have to stop coughing. You’ll wake the people next door.

Snooks. You got a hairpin, lady?

Charlotte. No.

Snooks. Or a scissors?

Charlotte. No.

Snooks. Say, what kind of a house is this?

[He finally manages to open the can.]

Snooks. [With some pride.] Grain alcohol. Costs me $6.00 a gallon. [To Charlotte.] Smell it.

She retreats from it hastily.

Charlotte. I can smell something horrible.

Snooks. That’s the spirits of Jupiter. I haven’t opened it yet. It rots a cork in ten days. [He fills the bowl with water from one jar.]

Jerry [anxiously]. Hadn’t you better measure it?

Snooks. I got my eye trained.

Charlotte. What’s that — arsenic?

Snooks. Distilled water, lady. If you use regular water it gets cloudy. You want it clear. [He pours in alcohol from the can.] Got a spoon?… Well, never mind. [He rolls up his sleeve and undoubtedly intends to plunge his whole arm into the mixture.]

Jerry [hastily]. Here! Wait a minute. No use —  — no use getting your hand wet. I’ll get you a spoon. [He goes after it.]

Charlotte[sarcastically]. Get one of the best silver ones.

Snooks. Naw. Any kind’ll do.

Jerry returns with one of the best silver spoons, which he hands to Mr. Snooks.

Charlotte. I might have known you would — you fool!

Mr. Snooks stirs the mixture — the spoon turns rust-colored — Charlotte gives a little cry.

Snooks. It won’t hurt it, lady. Just leave it out in the sun for an hour. Now the spirits of Jupiter. [He fills the medicine dropper from a small bottle and lets a slow, interminable procession of drops fall into the bowl. Jerry watches intently and with gathering anxiety. At about the fourteenth drop he starts every time one falls. Finally Mr. Snooks ceases.]

Jerry. How many did you count?

Snooks. Sixteen.

Jerry. I counted eighteen.

Snooks. Well, a drop or so won’t make no difference. Now you got a funnel?

Jerry. I’ll get one. [He goes for it.]

Snooks. Good stuff, lady. This is as good as what you used to buy for the real thing.

Charlotte does not deign to answer.

You needn’t worry about that spoon. If that spoon had a been the real thing it w’na done like that. You can try out all your stuff that way. A lot of stuff is sold for silver nowadays that ain’t at all.

Jerry returns with the funnel, and Mr, Snooks pours the contents of the bowl into the two glass jars.

Snooks [holding up one jar admiringly]. The real thing.

Charlotte. It’s cloudy.

Snooks [reproachfully]. Cloudy?  You call that cloudy? That isn’t cloudy. Why, it’s just as clear —  —

He holds it up and pretends to look through it. This is unquestionably a mere gesture, for the mixture is heavily opaque and not to be pierced by the human eye.

Charlotte[disregarding him and turning scornfully to Jerry]. I wouldn’t drink it if it was the last liquor in the world.

Snooks. Lady, if this was the last liquor in the world it wouldn’t be for sale.

Jerry [doubtfully]. It does look a little — cloudy.

Snooks. No-o-o — ! Why you can see right through it. [Be fills a glass and drinks it off.] Why, it just needs to be filtered. That’s just nervous matter.

Charlotte and Jerry [together]. Nervous matter?

Jerry. When did we put that in?

Snooks. We didn’t put it in. It’s just a deposit. Sure, that’s just nervous matter. Any chemis’ will tell you.

Charlotte[sardonically]. Ha-ha! “Nervous matter.” There’s no such thing.

Snooks. Sure! That’s just nervous matter. [He fills the glass and hands it to her.] Try it!

Charlotte. Ugh!

As he comes near she leans away from him in horror. Snooks offers the glass to Jerry.

If you drink any of that stuff they’ll have to analyze you all over again.

But Jerry drinks it.

Charlotte. I can’t stand this. When your — when he’s gone I’ll thank you to open the windows. [She goes out and upstairs.]

Snooks [with a cynical laugh]. Your old lady’s a little sore on you, eh?

Jerry [bravely]. No. She doesn’t care what I do.

Snooks. You ought to give her a bat in the eye now and then. That’d fix her.

Jerry [shocked]. Oh, no; you oughtn’t to talk that way.

Snooks. Well, if you like ‘em to step around… Sixteen bucks, please.

Jerry searches his pockets.

Jerry [counting]. — thirteen — fourteen — let’s see. I can borrow the ice-man’s money if I can find where — Just wait a minute, Mr. Snooks.

He goes out to the pantry. Almost immediately there are steps upon the stairs, and in a moment Dada, resplendent in a flowing white nightshirt, trembles into Mr. Snooks’s vision. For a moment Mr. Snooks is startled.

Dada [blinking]. I thought I smelled something burning.

Snooks. I ain’t smelled nothin’, pop.

Dada. How do you do, sir. You’ll excuse my costume. I was awake and it occurred to me that the house was on fire. I am Mr. Frost’s father.

Snooks. I’m his bootlegger.

Dada. The —  — ?

Snooks. His bootlegger.

Dada [enthusiastically]. You’re my son’s employer?

They shake hands.

Dada. Excuse my costume. I was awake, and I thought I smelled something burning.

Snooks [decisively]. You’re kiddin’ yourself.

Dada. Perhaps I was wrong. My sense of smell is not as exact as it was. My son Jerry is a fine boy. He’s my only son by my second wife, Mr. — ? The —  — ? [He is evidently under the impression that Snooks has supplied the name and that he has missed it] I’m glad to meet his employer. I always say I’m a descendant of Jack Frost. We used to have a joke when I was young. We used to say that the first Frosts came to this state in the beginning of winter. Ha-ha-ha! [He is convinced that he is giving Jerry a boost with his employer]

Snooks [bored]. Ain’t it past your bedtime, pop?

Dada. Do you see? “Frosts” and “frosts.” We used to laugh at that joke a great deal.

Snooks. Anybody would.

Dada. “Frosts,” you see. We’re not rich, but I always say that it’s easier for a camel to get through a needle’s eye than for a rich man to get to heaven.

Snooks. That’s the way I always felt.

Dada. Well, I think I’ll turn in. My sense of smell deceived me. No harm done. [He laughs.] Good night, Mr. —  — ?

Snooks [humorously]. Good night, pop. Sleep tight. Don’t let the bedbugs bite.

Dada [starting away]. I hope you’ll excuse my costume. [He goes up-stairs. Jerry returns from the pantry just in time to hear his voice]

Jerry. Who was that? Dada?

Snooks. He thought he was on fire.

Jerry [unaware of the nightshirt]. That’s my father. He’s a great authority on — oh, on the Bible and a whole lot of other things. He’s been doing nothing for twenty years but thinking out a lot of things — here’s the money. [Jerry gives him sixteen bucks]

Snooks. Thanks. Well, I guess you’re all fixed. Drink a couple of these and then you’ll know what to say to your wife when she gets fresh.

Charlotte[from up-stairs]. Shut the door! I can smell that way up here!

Jerry hastily shuts the door leading up-stairs.

Snooks. Like any whiskey?

Jerry. I don’t believe so.

Snooks. Or some cream de menthy?

Jerry. No, I don’t believe so.

Snooks. How about some French vermuth?

Jerry. I don’t think I’ll take anything else now.

Snooks. Just try a drink of this.

Jerry. I did.

Snooks. Try another.

Jerry tries another.

Jerry. Not bad. Strong.

Snooks. Sure it’s strong. Knock you over. Hard to get now. They gyp you every time. The country’s goin’ to the dogs. Most of these bootleggers, you can’t trust ‘em two feet away. It’s awful. They don’t seem to have no conscience.

Jerry [warming]. Have you ever been analyzed, Mr. Snooks?

Snooks. Me? No, I never been arrested by the regular police.

Jerry. I mean when they ask you questions.

Snooks. Sure, I know. Thumb-prints — all that stuff.

Jerry takes another drink.

Jerry. You ought to want to rise in the world.

Snook. How do you know I oughta.

Jerry. Why — why, everybody ought to. It says so.

Snooks. What says so.

Jerry [with a burst of inspiration]. The Bible. It’s one of the commandments.

Snooks. I never could get through that book.

Jerry. Won’t you sit down?

Snooks. No, I got to hustle along in a minute.

Jerry. Say, do you mind if I ask you a personal question?

Snooks. Not at all. Shoot!

Jerry. Did you ever — did you ever have any ambition to be President?

Snooks. Sure. Once.

Jerry [ponderously]. You did, eh?

Snooks. Once. I guess bootleggin’s just as good, though. More money in it.

Jerry [weightily]. Yes, that’s true.

Snooks. Well, I got to hustle along now. I got to take my old woman to church.

Jerry. Oh. Yes.

Snooks. Well, so long. You got my address in case you’go dry.

They both smile genially at this pleasantry.

Jerry [opening the door]. All right. I’ll remember.

Snooks goes out. Jerry hesitates — then he opens the door to the up-stairs.

Jerry. Oh, Char-lit!

Charlotte[crossly]. Please keep that door shut. That smell comes right up here. It’ll start my hay-fever.

Jerry [genially]. Well, I just wanted to ask you if you’ll take one little cocktail with me.

Charlotte. No! How many times do I have to tell you?

Jerry [crestfallen]. Well, you don’t need to be so disagreeable about it.

He receives no answer. He would like to talk some more, but he shuts the door and returns to the table. Picking up one of the jars, he regards its opaqueness with a quizzical eye. But it is his and quite evidently it seems to him good. He looks curiously at the three little bottles, smells one of them curiously and hastily replaces the cork. He hesitates. Then he repairs to the dining-room, singing: “Everybody is there!” — and returns immediately with an orange, a knife, and another glass. He cuts the orange, squeezes half of it into a glass, wipes his hands on the fringe of the tablecloth, and adds some of his liquor. He drinks it slowly — he waits. He prepares another potation with the other half of the orange.

No! He does not choke, make horrible faces, nor feel his throat as it goes down. Nor does he stagger. His elation is evinced only by the vague confusion with which he mislays knife, oranges, and glasses.

Impelled by the gregarious instinct of mankind, he again repairs to the door that leads up-stairs, and opens it.

Jerry [calling]. Say, Char-lit! The convention must be over. I wonder who was nominated.

Charlotte. I asked you to shut that door.

But the impulse to express himself, to fuse his new elation into the common good, is irresistible. He goes to the telephone and picks up the receiver.

Jerry. Hello… Hello, hello. Say! I wonder’f you could tell me who was nominated for President… All right, give me Information… Information, I wonder if you could tell me who was nominated for President… Why not?…  Well, that’s information, isn’t it?…  It doesn’t matter what kind of information it is. It’s information, isn’t it? Isn’t it? It’s information, isn’t it?… Say, what’s your hurry? [He bobs the receiver up and down.] Hello, give me Long Distance again…  Hello, is this Information?… This is misinformation, eh? Ha-ha! Did you hear that? Misinformation… I asked for Information…  Well, you’ll do, Long Distance…  Long Distance — how far away are you? A long distance! Ha-ha!… Hello… Hello!

She has evidently rung off. Jerry does likewise.

Jerry [sarcastically]. Wonderful telephone service! [He goes quickly back to the ‘phone and picks up the receiver] Rottenest telephone service I ever saw! [He slams up and returns to his drink.]

There is a call outside, “Yoo-hoo!” and immediately afterward Doris opens the front door and comes in, followed by Joseph Fish, a red-headed, insipid young man of about twenty-four. Fish is dressed in a ready-made suit with a high belt at the back, and his pockets slant at a rakish angle. He is the product of a small-town high-school and a one-year business course at a state university.

Doris has him firmly by the arm. She leads him up to Jerry, who sets down his glass and blinks at them.

Doris. Gosh! This room smells like a brewery. [She notices the jars and the other debris of Jerry’s domestic orgy.] What on earth have you been doing? Brewing whiskey?

Jerry [attempting a dignified nonchalance]. Making cocktails.

Doris[with a long whistle]. What does Charlotte say?

Jerry [with dignity]. Charlit is up-stairs.

Doris. Well, I want you to meet my fiance, Mr. Fish. Mr. Fish, this is my brother-in-law, Mr. Frost.

Jerry. Pleased to meet you, Mr. Fish.

Fish. How de do. [He laughs politely.]

Jerry [horribly]. Is this the undertaker?

Doris[tartly]. You must be tight.

Jerry [to Fish]. Have a little drink?

Doris. He doesn’t use it.

Fish. Thanks. I don’t use it. [Again he laughs politely.]

Jerry [with a very roguish expression]. Do you know Ida?

Fish. Ida who?

Jerry. Idaho. [He laughs uproariously at his own wit] That’s a joke I heard to-day. I thought I’d tell it to you because you’re from Idaho.

Fish [resentfully]. Gosh, that’s a rotten joke.

Jerry [high-hatting  him]. Well, Idaho’s a rotten joke. I wouldn’t come from that State.

Doris[icily]. Maybe they’d feel the same way about you. I’m going up and see Charlotte. I wish you’d entertain Mr. Fish politely for a minute.

Doris goes upstairs. The two men sit down. Fish is somewhat embarrassed.

Jerry [with a wink]. Now she’s gone, better have a little drink.

Fish. No, thanks. I don’t use it any more. I used to use it a good deal out in Idaho, and then I quit.

A faint, almost imperceptible noise, as of a crowd far away, begins outside. Neither of the men seems to notice it, however.

Jerry. Get good liquor up there?

Fish. Well, around the shop we used to drink embalming fluid, but it got so it didn’t agree with me.

Jerry [focussing his eyes upon Fish, with some difficulty]. I shouldn’t think it would.

Fish. It’s all right for some fellas, but it doesn’t agree with me at all.

Jerry [suddenly]. How old are you?

Fish. Me? Twenty-five.

Jerry. Did you ever — did you ever have any ambition to be President?

Fish. President?

Jerry. Yes.

Fish. Of a company?

Jerry. No. Of the United States.

Fish [scornfully]. No-o-o-o!

Jerry [almost pleadingly]. Never did, eh?

Fish. Never.

Jerry. Tha’s funny. Did you ever want to be a postman?

Fish [scornfully]. No-o-o-o!… The thing to be is to be a senator.

Jerry. Is that so?

Fish. Sure. I’m goin’ to be one. Say! There’s where you get the real graft.

Jerry’s eyes close sleepily and then start open.

Jerry [attentively]. Do you hear a noise?

Fish [after listening for a moment]. I don’t hear a sound.

Jerry [puzzled]. That’s funny. I hear a noise.

Fish [scornfully]. I guess you’re seeing things.

Another pause.

Jerry. And you say you never wanted to be President?

Fish. Na-ah!

The noise outside has now increased, come nearer, swollen to the dimensions of a roar. Presently it is almost under the windows. Fish apparently does not hear it, but Jerry knits his hairless brows and rises to his feet. He goes to the window and throws it open. A mighty cheer goes up and there is the beating of a bass drum.

Jerry. Good gosh!

Cli-in-ng! Cli-in-ng! Cli-in-ng! The door-bell! Then the door swings open, and a dozen men rush into the room. In the lead is Mr. Jones, a politician.

Mr. Jones [approaching Jerry]. Is this Mr. Jeremiah Frost?

Jerry [with signs of fright]. Yes.

Mr. Jones. I’m Mr. Jones, the well-known politician. I am delegated to inform you that on the first ballot you, were unanimously given the Republican nomination for President.

Wild cheers from inside and out, and renewed beating of the bass drum. Jerry shakes Mr. Jones’s hand, but Fish, sitting in silence, takes no heed of the proceeding — apparently does not see or hear what is going on.

Jerry [to Mr. Jones].  My golly! I thought you were a revenue officer.

Amid a still louder burst of cheering Jerry is elevated to the shoulders of the crowd, and borne enthusiastically out the door as

The Curtain Falls

Act II

Any one who felt that the First Act was perhaps a little vulgar, will be glad to learn that we’re now on the lawn of the White House. Indeed, a corner of the ExecutiveMansion projects magnificently into sight, and steps lead up to the imposing swinging doors of a “Family Entrance.” From the window of the President’s office a flag flutters, and the awning displays this legend:

The White House

Jerry Frost, Pres.

And if you look hard enough at the office window you can see the President himself sitting at his desk inside.

The lawn, bounded by a white brick wall, is no less attractive. Not only are there white vines and flowers, a beautiful white tree, and a white table and chairs, but, also, a large sign over the gate, which bears the President’s name pricked out in electric bulbs.

Two white kittens are strolling along the wall, enjoying the ten-o’clock sunshine. A blond parrot swings in a cage over the table, and one of the chairs is at present occupied by a white fox-terrier puppy about the size of your hand.

That’s right. “Isn’t it darling!” We’ll let you watch it for a moment before we move into the Whirl of Public Affairs.

Look! Here comes somebody out. It’s Mr. Jones, the well-known politician, now secretary to President Frost. He has a while broom in his hands, and, after delighting the puppy with an absolutely white bone, he begins to sweep off the White House steps. At this point the gate swings open and Charlotte Frost comes in. As befits the First Lady of the Land, she is elaborately dressed — in the height of many fashions. She’s evidently been shopping — her arms are full of packages — but she has nevertheless seen fit to array herself in a gorgeous evening dress, with an interminable train. From her wide picture hat a plume dangles almost to the ground.

Mr. Jones politely relieves her of her bundles.

Charlotte[abruptly]. Good morning, Mr. Jones. Has everything gone to pieces?

Mr. Jones looks her over in some surprise.

Jones [apologetically].  Well, perhaps the petticoat —  —

Charlotte[a little stiffly]. I didn’t mention myself, I don’t think, Mr. Jones. I meant all my husband’s public affairs.

Jones. He’s been in his office all morning, Mrs. Frost. There are a lot of people waiting to see him.

Charlotte. [She’s relieved.] I heard them calling an extra, and I thought maybe everything had gone to pieces.

Jones. No, Mrs. Frost, the President hasn’t made any bad mistake for some time now. Of course, a lot of people objected when he appointed his father Secretary of the Treasury; his father’s being so old —  —

Charlotte. Well, I’ve had to stand for his family all my life — so I guess the country can. [Confidentially.]

Jones [a little embarrassed]. I see you’ve been shopping.

Charlotte. I’ve been buying some things for my sister’s wedding reception this afternoon.

The window of President Frost’s office opens abruptly. A white cigar emerges — followed by Jerry’s hairless eyebrows — passionately knit.

Jerry. All right. Go on and yell — and then when I make some awful mistake and the country goes to pieces, blame it on me!

Charlotte[very patiently]. Nagging me again. Picking on me. Pick — pick — pick! All day!

Jerry. Gosh, you can be disagreeable, Charlit!

Charlotte. Pick — pick — pick! Jerry [confused]. Pick?

Charlotte[sharply]. Pick!

Jerry jams down his window.

Meanwhile from the window above has emerged a hand holding a mirror. The hand is presently followed by a head with the hair slicked back damply. Doris, sister-in-law to the President, is seeking more light for her afternoon toilet.

Doris[disapprovingly]. I can hear you two washing your clothes in public all over the lawn. Charlotte. He keeps nagging at me.

Doris begins to apply a white lotion to her face. She daubs it at a freckle on her nose, and gazes passionately at the resultant white splotch.

Doris[abstractedly]. I should think you’d get so you could stand him in public, anyways.

Charlotte. He makes me madder in public than anywhere else.

She gathers her bundles and goes angrily into the White House. Doris glances down at Mr. Jones, and, deciding hastily that she is too publicly placid, withdraws her person from sight.

Jones picks up his broom and is about to go inside when a uniformed chauffeur opens the gate and announces:

“The Honorable Joseph Fish, Senator from Idaho.”

And now here’s Joseph Fish, in an enormous frock-coat and a tall silk hat, radiating an air of appalling prosperity.

Fish. Good morning, Mr. Jones. Is my fiancee around?

Jones. I believe she’s in her boudoir, Senator Fish. How is everything down at the capital?

Fish [gloomily]. Awful! I’m in a terrible position, Mr. Jones — and this was to have been my wedding reception day. Listen to this. [He takes a telegram from his pocket.] “Senator Joseph Fish, Washington, D.C. Present the State of Idaho’s compliments to President Frost and tell him that the people of Idaho demand his immediate resignation.”

Jones. This is terrible!

Fish. It’s because he made his father Secretary of the Treasury.

Jones. This will be depressing news to the President.

Fish. But think of me! This was to have been my wedding reception day. What will Doris say when she hears about this. I’ve got to ask her own brother-in-law to — to move out of his home?

Jones. Have a cocktail.

He takes a shaker and glasses from behind a porch pillar and pours out two drinks.

Jones. I saw this coming. But I’ll tell you now, Senator Fish, the President won’t resign.

Fish. Then it’ll be my duty to have him impeached.

Jones. Shall I call the President now?

Fish. Let’s wait until eleven o’clock. Give me one more hour of happiness. [He raises his eyes pathetically to the upper window.] Doris — oh Doris!

Doris, now fully dressed and under the influence of cosmetics, comes out onto the lawn. Mr. Jones, picking up the broom and the puppy, goes into the White House.

Fish [jealously]. Where were you all day yesterday?

Doris[languidly]. An old beau of mine came to see me and kept hanging around.

Fish [in wild alarm]. Good God! What’d he say?

Doris. He said I was stuck up because my brother-in-law was President, and I said: “Well, what if I am? I’d hate to say what your brother-in-law is.”

Fish [fascinated]. What is he?

Doris. He owns a garbage disposal service.

Fish [even more fascinated]. Is that right? Can you notice it on his brother-in-law?

Doris. Something awful. I wouldn’t of let him come in the house. Imagine if somebody came in to see you and said: “Sniff. Sniff. Who’s been sitting on these chairs?” And you said: “Oh, just my brother-in-law, the garbage disposal man.”

Fish. Doris — Doris, an awful thing has occurred —  —

Doris[looking out the gate]. Here comes Dada. Say, he must be going on to between eighty and ninety years old, if not older.

Fish [gloomily]. Why did your brother-in-law have to go and make him Secretary of the Treasury? He might as well have gone to an old men’s home and said: “See here, I want to get eight old dumb-bells for my cabinet.”

Doris. Oh, Jerry does everything all wrong. You see, he thought his father had read a lot of books — the Bible and the Encyclopaedia and the Dictionary and all.

In totters Dada. Prosperity has spruced him up, but not to any alarming extent. The hair on his face is not under cultivation. His small, watery eyes gleam dully in their ragged ovals. His mouth laps faintly at all times, like a lake with tides mildly agitated by the moon.

Fish. Good morning, Mr. Frost.

Dada [dimly]. Hm.

He is under the impression that he has made an adequate response.

Doris[tolerantly]. Dada, kindly meet my fiance — Senator Fish from Idaho.

Dada [expansively]. Young man, how do you do? I feel very well. You wouldn’t think I was eighty-eight years old, would you?

Fish [politely]. I should say not.

Doris. You’d think he was two hundred.

Dada [who missed this]. Yeah. [A long pause.] We used to have a joke when I was young — we used to say the first Frosts came to this country in the beginning of winter.

Doris. Funny as a crutch.

Dada [to Fish]. Do you ever read the Scriptures?

Fish. Sometimes.

Dada. I’m the Secretary of the Treasury, you know. My son made me the Secretary of the Treasury. He’s the President. He was my only boy by my second wife.

Doris. The old dumb-bell!

Dada. I was born in 1834, under the presidency of Andrew Jackson. I was twenty-seven years old when the war broke out.

Doris[sarcastically]. Do you mean the Revolutionary War?

Dada [witheringly]. The Revolutionary War was in 1776.

Doris. Tell me something I don’t know.

Dada. When you grow older you’ll find there are a lot of things you don’t know. [To Fish.] Do you know my son Jerry?

Doris[utterly disgusted]. Oh, gosh!

Fish. I met your son before he was elected President and I’ve seen him a lot of times since then, on account of being Senator from Idaho and all, and on account of Doris. You see, we’re going to have our wedding reception this afternoon —  —

In the middle of this speech Dada’s mind has begun to wander. He utters a vague “Hm!” and moves off, paying no further attention, and passing through the swinging doors into the White House.

Fish [impressed in spite of himself by Dada’s great age]. He’s probably had a lot of experience, that old bird. He was alive before you were born.

Doris. So were a lot of other old nuts. Come on — let’s go hire the music for our wedding reception.

Fish [remembering something with a start]. Doris — Doris, would you have a wedding reception with me if you knew — if you knew the disagreeable duty —  —

Doris. Knew what?

Fish. Nothing. I’m going to be happy, anyways [he looks at his watch] — for almost an hour.

They go out through the garden gate.

And now President Jerry Frost himself is seen to leave his window and in a minute he emerges from the ExecutiveMansion. He wears a loose-fitting white flannel frock coat, and a tall white stovepipe hat. His heavy gold watch-chain would anchor a small yacht, and he carries a white stick, ringed with a gold band.

After rubbing his back sensuously against a porch pillar, he walks with caution across the lawn and his hand is on the gate-latch when he is hailed from the porch by Mr. Jones.

Jones. Mr. President, where are you going?

Jerry [uneasily]. I thought I’d go down and get a cigar.

Jones [cynically]. It doesn’t look well for you to play dice for cigars, sir.

Jerry sits down wearily and puts his hat on the table.

Jones. I’m sorry to say there’s trouble in the air, Mr. President. It’s what we might refer to as the Idaho matter.

Jerry. The Idaho matter?

Jones. Senator Fish has received orders from Idaho to demand your resignation at eleven o’clock this morning.

Jerry. I never liked that bunch of people they got out there in Idaho.

Jones. Well, I just thought I’d tell you — so you could think about it.

Jerry [hopefully]. Maybe I’ll get some idea how to fix it up. I’m a very resourceful man. I always think of something.

Jones. Mr. President, would you — would you mind telling me how you got your start?

Jerry [carelessly]. Oh, I got analyzed one day, and they just found I was sort of a good man and would just be wasting my time as a railroad clerk.

Jones. So you forged ahead?

Jerry. Sure. I just made up my mind to be President, and then I went ahead and did it. I’ve always been a very ambitious sort of — sort of domineerer.

Jones sighs and takes several letters from his pocket.

Jones. The morning mail.

Jerry [looking at the first letter]. This one’s an ad, I’ll bet. [He opens it.] “Expert mechanics, chauffeurs, plumbers earn big money. We fit you in twelve lessons.” [He looks up.] I wonder if there’s anything personal in that. If there is it’s a low sort of joke.

Jones [soothingly]. Oh, I don’t think there is.

Jerry [offended]. Anybody that’d play a joke like that on a person that has all the responsibility of being President, and then to have somebody play a low, mean joke on him like that!

Jones. I’ll write them a disagreeable letter.

Jerry. All right. But make it sort of careless, as if it didn’t matter to me.

Jones. I can begin the letter “Damn Sirs” instead of “Dear Sirs.”

Jerry. Sure, that’s the idea. And put something like that in the ending, too.

Jones. “Yours insincerely,” or something like that… Now there’s a few people waiting in here to see you, sir. [He takes out a list.] First, there’s somebody that’s been ordered to be hung.

Jerry. What about him?

Jones. I think he wants to arrange it some way so he won’t be hung. Then there’s a man that’s got a scheme for changing everybody in the United States green.

Jerry [puzzled]. Green?

Jones. That’s what he says.

Jerry. Why green?

Jones. He didn’t say. I told him not to wait. And there’s the Ambassador from Abyssinia. He says that one of our sailors on leave in Abyssinia threw the king’s cousin down a flight of thirty-nine steps.

Jerry [after a pause]. What do you think I ought to do about that?

Jones. Well, I think you ought to — well, send flowers or something, to sort of recognize that the thing had happened.

Jerry [somewhat awed]. Is the king’s cousin sore? Jones. Well, naturally he —  —

Jerry. I don’t mean sore that way. I mean did he — did he take it hard? Did he think there was any ill feeling from the United States Government in the sailor’s — action?

Jones. Why, I suppose you might say yes.

Jerry. Well, you tell him that the sailor had no instructions to do any such thing. Demand the sailor’s resignation.

Jones. And Major-General Pushing has been waiting to see you for some time. Shall I tell him to come out here?

Jerry. All right.

Jones goes into the White House and returns, announcing: “Major-General Pushing, U.S.A.”

Out marches General Pushing. He is accompanied at three paces by a fifer and drummer, who play a spirited march. When the General reaches the President’s table the trio halt, the fife and drum cease playing, and the General salutes.

The General is a small fat man with a fierce gray mustache. His chest and back are fairly obliterated with medals, and he is wearing one of those great shakos peculiar to drum-majors.

Jerry. Good morning, General Pushing. Did they keep you waiting?

General Pushing [fiercely]. That’s all right. We’ve been marking time — it’s good for some of the muscles.

Jerry. How’s the army?

General Pushing. Very well, Mr. President. Several of the privates have complained of headaches. [He clears his throat portentously.] I’ve called on you to say I’m afraid we’ve got to have war. I held a conference last night with two others of our best generals. We discussed the matter thoroughly, and then we took a vote. Three to nothing in favor of war.

Jerry [alarmed]. Look at here, General Pushing, I’ve got a lot of things on my hands now, and the last thing I want to have is a war.

General Pushing. I knew things weren’t going very well with you, Mr. President. In fact, I’ve always thought that what this country needs is a military man at the head of it. The people are restless and excited. The best thing to keep their minds occupied is a good war. It will leave the country weak and shaken — but docile, Mr. President, docile. Besides — we voted on it, and there you are.

Jerry. Who is it against?

General Pushing. That we have not decided. We’re going to take up the details to-night. It depends on — just how much money there is in the Treasury. Would you mind calling up your — father — [the General gives this word an ironic accentuation] — and finding out?

Jerry takes up the white telephone from the table. Jones meanwhile has produced the shaker and glasses. He pours a cocktail for every one — even for the fifer and drummer.

Jerry [at the ‘phone]. Connect me with the Treasury Department, please… Is this the Treasury?… This is President Frost… Oh, I’m very well, thanks. No, it’s better. Much better. The dentist says he doesn’t think I’ll have to have it out now…  Say, what I called you up about is to find how much money there is in the Treasury… Oh, I see… Oh, I see. Thanks. [He hangs up the receiver.]

Jerry [worried]. General Pushing, things seem to be a little confused over at the Treasury. Dada — the Secretary of the Treasury isn’t there right now — and they say nobody else knows much about it.

General Pushing [disapprovingly]. Hm! I could put you on a nice war pretty cheap. I could manage a battle or so for almost nothing. [With rising impatience.] But a good President ought to be able to tell just how much we could afford.

Jerry [chastened]. I’ll find out from Dada.

General Pushing [meaningly]. Being President is a sacred trust, you know, Mr. Frost.

Jerry. Well, I know it’s a sacred trust, don’t I?

General Pushing [sternly]. Are you proud of it?

Jerry [utterly crestfallen]. Of course, I’m proud of it. Don’t I look proud? I’m proud as a pecan. [Resentfully.] What do you know about it, anyways? You’re nothing but a common soldier — I mean a common general.

General Pushing [pityingly]. I came here to help you, Mr. Frost. [With warning emphasis.] Perhaps you are aware that the sovereign State of Idaho is about to ask your resignation.

Jerry [now thoroughly resentful]. Look at here, suppose you be the President for a while, if you know so much about it.

General Pushing [complacently]. I’ve often thought that what this country needs is a military man at the head of it.

Jerry. All right, then, you just take off that hat and coat!

Jerry takes off his own coat. Jones rushes forward in alarm.

Jones. If there’s going to be a fight hadn’t we all better go into the billiard-room?

Jerry [insistently to General Pushing]. Take off that hat and coat!

General Pushing [aghast]. But, Mr. President —  —

Jerry. Listen here — if I’m the President you do what I say.

General Pushing obediently removes his sword and takes off his hat and coat. He assumes a crouching posture and, putting up his fists, begins to dance menacingly around Jerry.

But, instead of squaring off, Jerry gets quickly into the General’s hat and coat and buckles on the sword.

Jerry. All right, since you know so much about being President, you put on my hat and coat and try it for a while.

The General, greatly taken aback, looks from Jerry to Jerry’s coat, with startled eyes. Jerry swaggers up and down the lawn, brandishing the sword. Then his eyes fall with distaste upon the General’s shirtsleeves.

Jerry. Well, what are you moping around for?

General Pushing [plaintively]. Come on, Mr. President, be reasonable. Give me that coat and hat. Nobody appreciates a good joke any more than I do, but —  —

Jerry [emphatically]. No, I won’t give them to you. I’m a general, and I’m going to war. You can stay around here. [Sarcastically, to Mr. Jones.] He’ll straighten everything out, Mr. Jones.

General Pushing [pleadingly]. Mr. President, I’ve waited for this war for forty years. You wouldn’t take away my coat and hat like that, just as we’ve got it almost ready.

Jerry [pointing to the shirtsleeves]. That’s a nice costume to be hanging around the White House in.

General Pushing [brokenly]. I can’t help it, can I? Who took my coat and hat, anyhow?

Jerry. if you don’t like it you can get out.

General Pushing [sarcastically]. Yes. Nice lot of talk it’d cause if I went back to the War Department looking like this. “Where’s your hat and coat, General?” “Oh, I just thought I’d come down in my suspenders this morning.”

Jerry. You can have my coat — and my troubles.

Charlotte comes suddenly out of the White House, and they turn startled eyes upon her, like two guilty schoolboys.

Charlotte[staring]. What’s the matter? Has everything gone to pieces?

General Pushing [on the verge of tears]. He took my coat and hat.

Charlotte[pointing to the General]. Who is that man?

General Pushing [in a dismal whine]. I’m Major-General Pushing, I am.

Charlotte. I don’t believe it.

Jerry [uneasily]. Yes, he is, Charlit. I was just kidding him.

Charlotte[understanding immediately]. Oh, you’ve been nagging people again.

Jerry [beginning to unbutton the coat]. The General was nagging me, Charlit. I’ve just been teaching him a lesson — haven’t I, General?

He struggles out of the General’s coat and into his own. The General, grunting his relief and disgust, re-attires himself in the military garment.

Jerry [losing confidence under Charlotte’s stare]. Honest, everything’s getting on my nerves. First it’s some correspondence school getting funny, and then he [indicating the General] comes around, and then all the people out in Idaho —  —

Charlotte[with brows high]. Well, if you want to know what I think, I think everything’s going to pieces.

Jerry. No, it isn’t, Charlit. I’m going to fix everything. I’ve got a firm grip on everything. Haven’t I, Mr. Jones? I’m just nervous, that’s all.

General Pushing [now completely buttoned up, physically and mentally]. In my opinion, sir, you’re a very dangerous man. I have served under eight Presidents, but I have never before lost my coat and hat. I bid you good morning, Mr. President. You’ll hear from me later.

At his salute the fife and drum commence to play. The trio execute about face, and the escort, at three paces, follows the General out the gate.

Jerry stares uneasily after them.

Jerry. Everybody’s always saying that I’m going to hear from ‘em later. They want to kick me out of this job — that’s what they want. They think I don’t know.

Jones. The people elected you, Mr. President. And the people want you — all except the ones out in Idaho.

Charlotte[anxiously]. Couldn’t you be on the safe side and have yourself reduced to Vice-President, or something?

A Newsboy [outside]. Extra! Extra! Idaho says: “Resign or be Impeached.”

Jerry. Was that newsboy yelling something about me?

Charlotte[witheringly]. He never so much as mentioned you.

In response to Mr. Jones’s whistle a full-grown newsboy comes in at the gate. He hands Jerry a paper and is given a bill.

Jerry [carelessly]. Keep the change. It’s all right. I’ve got a big salary.

The Newsboy [pointing to Jerry’s frock coat]. I almost had one of them dress suits once.

Jerry [not without satisfaction]. I got six of them.

The Newsboy. I hadda get one so I could take a high degree in the Ku Klux. But I didn’t get one.

Jerry [absorbed in the paper]. I got six of ‘em.

The Newsboy. I ain’t got none. Well, much obliged. So long.

The newsboy goes out.

Jones [reading over Jerry’s shoulder]. It says: “Idaho flays, Treasury choice.”

Charlotte[wide-eyed]. Does that mean they’re going to flay Dada?

Jones [looking at his watch]. Senator Fish will be here at any moment now.

Charlotte. Well, all I know is that I’d show some spunk and not let them kick me out, even if I was the worst President they ever had…

Jerry. Listen, Charlit, you needn’t remind me of it every minute.

Charlotte. I didn’t remind you of it. I just mentioned it in an ordinary tone of voice.

She goes into the White House. Senator Joseph Fish comes in hesitantly through the gate.

Jerry [to Jones]. Here comes the State of Idaho.

Fish [timorously]. Good morning, Mr. President. How are you?

Jerry. Oh, I’m all right.

Fish [hurriedly producing the telegram and mumbling his words]. Got a little matter here, disagreeable duty. Want to get through as quickly as possible. “Senator Joseph Fish, Washington, D. C. Present the State of Idaho’s compliments to President Frost, and tell him that the people of Idaho demand his immediate resignation.” [He folds up the telegram and puts it in his pocket.] Well, Mr. President, I guess I got to be going. [He moves toward the gate and then hesitates.] This was to have been my wedding-reception day. Of course, Doris will never marry me now. It’s a very depressing thing to me, President Frost. [With his hand on the gate latch.] I suppose you want me to tell ‘em you won’t resign, don’t you?

Jones. We won’t resign.

Fish. Well, then it’s only right to tell you that Judge Fossile of the Supreme Court will bring a motion of impeachment at three o’clock this afternoon.

He turns melancholy eyes on Doris’s window. He kisses his hand toward it in a tragic gesture of farewell. Then he goes out.

Jerry looks at Mr. Jones as though demanding encouragement.

Jerry. They don’t know the man they’re up against, do they, Mr. Jones?

Jones. They certainly do not.

Jerry [lying desperately and not even convincing himself]. I’ve got resources they don’t know about.

Jones. If you’ll pardon a suggestion, I think the best move you could make, Mr. President, would be to demand your father’s resignation immediately.

Jerry [incredulously]. Put Dada out? Why, he used to work in a bank when he was young, and he knows all about the different amounts of money.

A pause.

Jerry [uncertainly]. Do you think I’m the worst President they ever had?

Jones [considering]. Well, no, there was that one they impeached.

Jerry [consoling himself]. And then there was that other  fellow — I  forget  his name. He  was  terrible. [Another disconsolate pause.] I suppose I might as well go down and get a cigar.

Jones. There’s just one more man out here to see you and he says he came to do you a favor. His name is — the Honorable Snooks, or Snukes, Ambassador from Irish Poland.

Jerry. What country’s that?

Jones. Irish Poland’s one of the new European countries. They took a sort of job lot of territories that nobody could use and made a country out of them. It’s got three or four acres of Russia and a couple of mines in Austria and a few lots in Bulgaria and Turkey.

Jerry. Show them all out here.

Jones. There’s only one. [He goes into the White House, returning immediately.]

Jones. The Honorable Snooks, or Snukes, Ambassador to the United States from Irish Poland.

The Honorable Snooks comes out through the swinging doors. His resemblance to Mr. Snooks, the bootlegger, is, to say the least, astounding. But his clothes — they are the clothes of the Corps Diplomatique. Red stockings enclose his calves, fading at the knee into black satin breeches. His coat, I regret to say, is faintly reminiscent of the Order of Mystic Shriners, but a broad red ribbon slanting diagonally across his diaphragm gives the upper part of his body a svelte, cosmopolitan air. At his side is slung an unusually long and cumbersome sword.

He comes in slowly, I might even say cynically, and after a brief nod at Jerry, surveys his surroundings with an appraising eye.

Jones goes to the table and begins writing.

Snooks. Got a nice house, ain’t you?

Jerry [still depressed from recent reverses]. Yeah.

Snooks. Wite, hey?

Jerry [as if he had just noticed it]. Yeah, white.

Snooks [after a pause]. Get dirty quick.

Jerry [adopting an equally laconic manner]. Have it washed.

Snooks. How’s your old woman?

Jerry [uneasily]. She’s all right. Have a cigar?

Snooks [taking the proffered cigar]. Thanks.

Jerry. That’s all right. I got a lot of them.

Snooks. That’s some cigar.

Jerry. I got a lot of them. I don’t smoke that kind myself, but I got a lot of them.

Snooks. That’s swell.

Jerry [becoming boastful]. See that tree? [The white tree.] Look, that’s a special tree. You never saw a tree like that before. Nobody’s got one but me. That tree was given to me by some natives.

Snooks. That’s swell.

Jerry. See this cane? The band around it’s solid gold.

Snooks. Is that right? I thought maybe it was to keep the squirrels from crawling up. [Abruptly.] Need any liquor? I get a lot, you know, on account of bein’ an ambassador. Gin, vermuth, bitters, absinthe?

Jerry. No, I don’t… See that sign? I bet you never saw one like that before.   I had it invented.

Snooks [bored]. Class. [Switching the subject.] I hear you made your old man Secretary of the Treasury.

Jerry. My father used to work in a —  —

Snooks. You’d ought to made him official Sandy Claus…  How you gettin’ away with your job?

Jerry [lying]. Oh, fine — fine! You ought to see the military review they had for me last week. Thousands and thousands of soldiers, and everybody cheered when they saw me. [Heartily.] It was sort of inspiring.

Snooks. I seen you plantin’ trees in the movies.

Jerry [excitedly]. Sure. I do that almost every day. That’s nothing to some of the things I have to do. But the thing is, I’m not a bit stuck up about any of it. See that gate?

Snooks. Yeah.

Jerry [now completely and childishly happy]. I had it made that way so that anybody passing by along the street can look in. Cheer them up, see? Sometimes I come out here and sit around just so if anybody passes by — well, there I am.

Snooks [sarcastically]. You ought to have yourself covered with radium so they can see you in the dark. [He changes his tone now and comes down to business.] Say, you’re lucky I found you in this morning. Got the time with you?

Jerry pulls out his watch. Snooks takes it as though to inspect it more closely.

Look here now, Mr. President. I got a swell scheme for you.

Jerry [trying to look keen]. Let’s hear it.

Snooks. You needn’t got to think now, just ‘cause I’m a hunerd per cent Irish Pole, that I ain’t goin’ to do the other guy a favor once in a while. An’ I got somep’m smooth for you. [He puts Jerry’s watch in his own pocket — the nerve of the man!]

Jerry. What is it?

Snooks [confidentially]. Islands.

Jerry. What islands?

Snooks. The BuzzardIslands.

Jerry looks blank.

Ain’t you neva hearda the BuzzardIslands?

Jerry [apologetically]. I never was any good at geography. I used to be pretty good in penmanship.

Snooks [in horror]. You ain’t neva hearda the BuzzardIslands?

Jerry. It’s sort of a disagreeable name.

Snooks. The BuzzardIslands. Property  of  the country of Irish Poland. Garden spots. Flowery paradises ina middle of the Atlantic. Rainbow Islandsa milk an’ honey, palms an’ pines, smellin’ with good-smellin’ woods and high-priced spices. Fulla animals with million buck skins and with birds that’s got feathers that the hat dives on Fifth Avenue would go nuts about. The folks in ee islands — swell-lookin’, husky, square, rich, one hunerd per cent Buzzardites.

Jerry [startled]. You mean Buzzards?

Snooks. One hunerd per cent Buzzardites, crazy about their island, butter, milk, live stock, wives, and industries.

Jerry [fascinated]. Sounds sort of pretty, don’t it?

Snooks. Pretty? Say, it’s smooth! Now here’s my proposition, an’ take it from me, it’s the real stuff. [Impressively.] The country of Irish Poland wants to sell you the Buzzard Islands — cheap.

Jerry [impressed]. You’re willing to sell ‘em, eh?

Snooks. Listen. I’ll be fair with you. [I regret to say that at this point he leans close to Jerry, removes the latter’s stick pin and places it in his own tie.] I’ve handed you the swellest proposition ever laid before a President since Andrew Jackson bought the population of Ireland from Great Britain.

Jerry. Yeah?

Snooks [intently]. Take it from me, Pres, and snap it up — dead cheap.

Jerry.  You’re sure it’s a good —  —

Snooks [indignantly]. Say, do you think an ambassador would tell you something that ain’t true?

Jerry [“man to man”]. That’s right, Mr. Snooks. I beg your pardon for that remark.

Snooks [touching his handkerchief to his eyes]. You hurt me, Pres, you hurt me, but I forgive you.

They shake hands warmly.

And now Jerry has an idea — a gorgeous idea. Why didn’t he think of it before? His voice literally trembles as he lays his plan before Snooks.

Jerry. Honorable Snooks, listen. I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll — I’ll take those Islands and pay — oh, say a round million dollars for them, on one condition.

Snooks [quickly]. Done. Name your condition.

Jerry [breathlessly]. That you’ll let me throw in one of the States on the trade.

Snooks. What State?

Jerry. The State of Idaho.

Snooks. How much do you want for it?

Jerry [hastily]. Oh, I’ll just throw that in free.

Snooks indicates Mr. Jones with his thumb.

Snooks. Get him to take it down.

Jones takes pen in hand. During the ensuing conversation he writes busily.

Jerry [anxiously]. The State of Idaho is just a gift, see? But you got to take it.

Suddenly the Honorable Snooks realizes how the land lies. He looks narrowly at Jerry, marvelling at an opportunity so ready to his hand.

Jerry [to Jones]. Here, get this down. We agree to buy the BuzzardIslands from the nation of Irish Poland for one million —  —

Snooks [interrupting]. Two million.

Jerry. Two million dollars, on condition that Irish Poland will also incorporate into their nation the State of Idaho, with all its people. Be sure and get that, Jones. With all its people.

Jones. I have it. The State of Idaho and four hundred and thirty-one thousand, eight hundred and sixty-six people. Including colored?

Jerry. Yes, including colored.

Snooks [craftily]. Just a minute, Pres. This here State of Idaho is mostly mountains, ain’t it?

Jerry [anxiously]. I don’t know. Is it, Mr. Jones?

Jones. It has quite a few mountains.

Snooks [hesitating]. Well, now, I don’t know if we better do it after all —  —

Jerry [quickly]. Three millions.

Snooks. I’ll tell you, I’d like to pull it off for you, Pres, but you see a State like that has gotta have upkeep. You take one of them mountains, for instance. You can’t just let a mountain alone like you would a — a ocean. You got to — to groom it. You got to — to chop it down. You got to explore it. Now take that alone — you got to explore it.

Jerry [swallowing]. Four millions.

Snooks. That’s more like it. Now these BuzzardIslands don’t require no attention. You just have to let ‘em alone. But you take the up-keep on a thing like the State of Idaho.

Jerry [wiping his brow]. Five millions.

Snooks. Sold! You get the BuzzardIslands and we get five million bucks and the State of Idaho.

Jerry. Got that down, Jones?

Snooks. On second thoughts —  —

Jerry [in a panic]. No, no, you can’t get out of it. It’s all down in black and white.

Snooks [resignedly]. Awright. I must say, Mr. President, you turned out to be a real man. When I first met you I wouldn’t have thought it, but I been pleasantly surprised.

He slaps Jerry heartily on the back. Jerry is so tickled at the solution of the Idaho problem that he feverishly seizes Snooks’s hand.

Snooks. And even if Irish Poland gets stung on the deal, we’ll put it through. Say, you and me ain’t politicians, fella, we’re statesmen, real statesmen. You ain’t got a cigarette about you, have you?

Jerry hands him his cigarette case. Snooks, after taking one, returns the case to his own pocket.

Jerry [enthusiastically]. Send me a post-card, Ambassador Snooks. The White House, City, will reach me.

Snooks. Post-card! Say, lay off. You and me are pals. I’d do anything for a pal. Come on down to the corner and I’ll buy you a cigar.

Jerry [to Mr. Jones]. I guess I can go out now for a while.

Jones. Oh, yes.

Jerry. Hang on to that treaty. And, say, when the Secretary of the Treasury wakes up tell him I’ve got to have five million dollars right away.

Jones. If you’ll just come into the office for a moment you can put your signatures on it right away.

Jerry and the Honorable Snooks go into the White House arm in arm, followed by Mr. Jones. Presently Jerry can be seen in the window of the President’s office.

A moment later the doors swing open again, this time for the tottering egress of Dada.

Dada, not without difficulty, arranges himself a place in the sun. He is preparing for his morning siesta, and, indeed, has almost managed to spread a handkerchief over his face when in through the gate comes Doris. Her eye falls on him and a stern purpose is born. Dada, seeing her approach, groans in anticipation.

Doris. Dada, I want to speak to you.

Dada blinks up at her, wearily.

Dada, I want to tell you something for your own good and for Jerry’s good. You want Jerry to keep his position, don’t you?

Dada. Jerry’s a fine boy. He was born to my second wife in eighteen hundred and —  —

Doris[interrupting impatiently]. Yes, I know he was. But I mean now.

Dada. No, I’ll never have any more children. Children are hard to raise properly.

This is aimed at her.

Doris. Look at here, Dada. What I think is the best thing to do is to resign your position.

Dada. The —  — ?

Doris. You’re too old, you see, if you know what I mean. You’re sort of — oh, not crazy, but just sort of feeble-minded.

Dada [who has caught one word]. Yes, I’m a little feeble. [He dozes off.]

Doris[absorbed in her thesis]. I don’t mean you’re crazy. Don’t get mad. I don’t mean you go around thinking you’re like Napoleon or a poached egg or anything like that, but you’re sort of feeble-minded. Don’t you understand, yourself? Sort of simple.

Dada [waking up suddenly]. How’s that?

Doris[infuriated]. That’s just the sort of thing I was talking about! Going to sleep like that when a person’s trying to tell you something for your own son’s good. That’s just exactly what I mean!

Dada [puzzled but resentful]. I don’t like you. You’re a very forward young girl. Your parents brought you up very unsuccessfully indeed.

Doris[smugly]. All right. You’re just making me think so more than ever. Go right ahead. Don’t mind me. Go right ahead. Then when you begin to really rave I’ll send for the lunatic-asylum wagon.

Dada [with an air of cold formality]. I’ll ask you to excuse me. [He wants to get to sleep]

Doris. First thing you know you’ll take all the money in the Treasury and hide it and forget where you put it.

Dada [succinctly]. There isn’t any money in the Treasury.

Doris[after a stunned pause]. Just what do you mean by that statement?

Dada [drowsily]. There isn’t any money in the Treasury. There was seven thousand dollars left yesterday, but I worked from morning till night and now there isn’t one red penny in there.

Doris. You must be crazy.

Dada. [He can scarcely keep awake] Hm.

Doris. Look at here! What do you mean — have you been spending that money — that doesn’t belong to you, you know — on some fast woman?

Dada [as usual, he doesn’t quite hear]. Yes, it’s all gone. I went down yesterday morning and I said to myself: “Horatio, you got only seven thousand dollars left, and you got to work from morning till night and get rid of it.” And I did.

Doris[furious, but impressed at the magnitude of the crime]. How much was there altogether?

Dada. Altogether? I haven’t the figures with me.

Doris. Why, you old dumb-bell, you. Imagine an old man your age that hasn’t had anything to do for twenty years but just sit around and think, going crazy about a woman at your age! [With scornful pity.] Don’t you know she just made a fool of you?

Dada [shaking his finger at her]. You must not talk like that. Be courteous and —  —

Doris. Yes, and pretty soon some woman comes along and you get “courteous” with her to the extent of all the money in the Treasury.

Dada. Yes, that’s one thing that stood me in good stead. My mother used to say to me: “Horatio —  — “

Doris[paying no attention to him]. What was her name?

Dada. Her name was Roxanna.

Doris. Where did she get hold of you?

Dada. My mother?

Doris. Your paramour.

Dada. She used to say to me: “Horatio —  — “

Doris. She probably used to say a lot more than that! Oh, I know how they handle old men like you. I’ve seen a lot of that. Slush is what appeals to old men like you.

Dada. No — I said courtesy.

Doris. You mean slush. What did she call you? — her old toodledums? And all that sort of thing? How perfectly disgusting!

Out comes Jerry now, just in time to catch Dada’s next remark, and to realize that there’s persecution in the air.

Dada [to Doris]. It’s been a hot day and I’ll ask you to excuse me. I never liked you, you know.

Jerry. Say, Doris, why can’t you leave Dada alone? He’s got more important things to think about than your new dresses and your silk stockings.

Doris. Got something more important than silk stockings, has he? Ask him!

Jerry. Dada’s got a lot more to him than anybody ever gives him credit for, haven’t you, Dada?

Doris[excitedly]. Yeah, yeah. All right. Wait till you hear what he’s done now. Wait till you hear. [To Dada.] Tell him what you did at your age. Some woman came up to him and said “Horatio — “ [She gives an awe-inspiring imitation of a passionate woman.] and he said: “Here —  — “

Jerry [interrupting]. What woman did?

Doris. Her name was Roxanna. Ask him where all the money in the Treasury is. At his age.

Jerry [in growing alarm]. Look at here, Doris —  —

Doris. The — old — dumb-bell! I take back what I said about your not being really crazy. [To Jerry.] Look out, he’ll begin to rave. [She pretends to be alarmed.] Yes, Dada, you’re a poached egg. It’s all right. I’ll send for the lunatic-asylum wagon.

Dada. I’ve been working in the dark. I thought it best.

Doris. You needn’t tell us all the disgusting details. Please respect my engagement. You must have bought her about everything in the world. No wonder I can’t get any good shoes in Washington. Jerry should have got you analyzed.

Jerry now begins to realize that something appalling has indeed happened. He sits down weakly.

Dada. I was working in the dark.

Doris. Well, Jerry should of had you analyzed in the dark.

Jerry [suddenly]. Char-lit!

Charlotte[at the upper window]. Stop screaming at me!

Jerry. Charlit, come on out here!

Doris. Dada’s done something awful. At his age!

Jerry. Hurry up out, Charlit!

Charlotte. You wouldn’t want me to come out in my chemise, would you?

Doris. It wouldn’t matter. We’ll be kicked out, anyways.

Charlotte. Has Dada been drinking?

Doris. Worse than that. Some woman’s got ahold of him.

Charlotte. Don’t let him go till I come down. I can handle him.

Mr. Jones comes out.

Dada [impressively]. I think the world is coming to an end at three o’clock.

Doris[wildly]. We’ve got a maniac here. Go get some rope.

Mr. Jones [in horror]. Are you going to hang him?

Out rushes Charlotte.

Dada. The United States was the wealthiest country in all the world. It’s easier for a camel to pass through a needle’s eye than for a wealthy man to enter heaven.

They all listen in expectant horror.

So all the money in the Treasury I have had destroyed by fire, or dumped into the deep sea. We are all saved.

Jerry. Do you mean to say that you haven’t even got five million dollars?

Dada. I finished it all up yesterday. It was not easy. It took a lot of resourcefulness, but I did it.

Jerry [in horror]. But I’ve got to have five million dollars this afternoon or I can’t get rid of Idaho, and I’ll be impeached!

Dada [complacently]. We’re all saved.

Jerry [wildly]. You mean we’re all lost!

He sinks disconsolately into a chair and buries his face in his hands. Charlotte, who knew everything would go to pieces, stands over him with an “I told you so” air. Doris shakes her finger at Dada who shakes his finger vigorously back at her. Mr. Jones, with great presence of mind, produces the cocktail shaker and passes around the consoling glasses to the violently agitated household.

*****

*****

*****

At two-thirty the horizontal sunlight is bright upon the White House lawn. Through the office window the President can be seen, bent over his desk in an attitude of great dejection. And here comes the Honorable Snooks through the gate, looking as if he’d been sent for. Mr. Jones hurries forth from the White House to greet him.

Snooks. Did you send for me, fella?

Jones [excitedly]. I should say we did, Honorable Snooks. Sit down and I’ll get the President.

As Mr. Jones goes in search of the President, Dada comes in through the gate at a triumphant tottering strut. He includes the Honorable Snooks in the splendor of his elation.

Dada [jubilantly]. Hooray! Hooray! I worked in the dark, but I won out!

Snooks [with profound disgust]. Well, if it ain’t Sandy Claus!

Dada. This is a great day for me, Mr. — You see the world is coming to an end.

Snooks. Well, Sandy Claus, everybody’s got a right to enjoy themselves their own way.

Dada. That’s in strict confidence, you understand.

Snooks. I wouldn’t spoil the surprise for nothin’.

Out rushes Jerry.

Jerry [in great excitement]. Honorable Snooks — Honorable Snooks —  —

Dada [suddenly]. Hooray! In at the finish.

He tries to slap the Honorable Snooks on the back, but the Honorable Snooks steps out of the way, and Dada loses his balance. Snooks and Jerry pick him up.

Jerry [suspiciously]. Dada, have you been drinking?

Dada. Just a little bit. Just enough to fortify me. I never touched a drop before to-day.

Snooks. You’re a naughty boy.

Dada. Yes, I think I’ll go in and rest up for the big event.

He wanders happily into the White House.

Jerry [in a hushed voice]. Honorable Snooks, Dada  has done something awful.

Snooks [pointing after Dada]. Him?

Jerry. He took all the money in the Treasury and destroyed it.

Snooks. What type of talk is that? You tryin’ to kid me?

Jerry. You see, he’s a very religious man, Honorable Snooks —  —

Snooks. You mean you ain’t got five million for me. [Jerry shakes his head.] Good night! This is a swell country. A bunch of Indian givers!

Jerry. There’s no use cursing at me, Honorable Snooks. I’m a broken man myself.

Snooks. Say, can the sob stuff an’ call up the Treasury. Get ‘em to strike off a couple billion dollars more. You’re the President, ain’t you?

Cheering up a little, Jerry goes to the telephone. Jerry. Give me the Treasury Department… Say, this is President Frost speaking. I just wanted to ask you if you couldn’t strike off a little currency, see? About — about five million dollars, see? And if you didn’t know whose picture to put on ‘em you could put my picture on ‘em, see? I got a good picture I just had taken…  You can’t strike any off?… Well, I just asked you…  Well, I just thought I’d ask you…  Well, no harm done — I just asked you — it didn’t hurt to ask, did it? [He rings off despondently.] It didn’t hurt ‘em to ask.

Snooks. Nothin’ doin’, eh?

In comes Mr. Jones.

Jones. It’s all over, Mr. President. I’ve just received word that Chief Justice Fossile of the Supreme Court, accompanied by the Senate Committee on Inefficiency, is on his way to the White House.

Jerry sits down, completely overcome. Jones retires.

Snooks. They goin’ to throw you out on your ear, eh?

Jerry [brooding]. It’s that low, mean bunch of people out in Idaho.

Snooks, who has been ruminating on the situation, comes to a decision.

Snooks. Look at here, Mr. President, I’m goin’ to help you out. I’ll pass up that five million bucks and we’ll make a straight swap of the BuzzardIslands for the State of Idaho.

Jerry [in amazement]. You’ll give me the BuzzardIslands for the State of Idaho?

Snooks nods. Jerry wrings his hand in great emotion. At this point Charlotte comes out of the White House. At the sight of the Honorable Snooks a somewhat disapproving expression passes over her face.

Jerry [excitedly]. Charlit — Charlit. This gentleman has saved me.

Charlotte[suspiciously]. Who is he?

Jerry. His name is The Honorable Snooks, Charlit.

Snooks [under Charlotte’s stern eye]. Well, I guess I got to be goin’.

Charlotte. Won’t you stay for my husband’s impeachment? We’re having a few people in.

Out comes Doris, accompanied by Dada. Dada is in such a state of exultation that much to Doris’s annoyance he is attempting a gavotte with her.

Doris[repulsing him]. Say, haven’t I got enough troubles having to throw over my fiance, without having you try to do your indecent old dances with me?

Dada sits down and regards the heavens with a long telescope.

Jerry has now recovered his confidence and is marching up and down waving his arms and rehearsing speeches under his breath. Snooks taps Dada’s head and winks lewdly at Charlotte and Doris.

Doris. Honestly, everybody seems to be going a little crazy around here. Is Jerry going to be fired or isn’t he?

Charlotte. He says he isn’t, but I don’t believe him for a minute.

Jones comes out, followed by an excitable Italian gentleman with long, musical hair.

Jones. This gentleman said he had an appointment with Miss Doris.

Jerry. Who are you?

The Gentleman. I am Stutz-Mozart’s Orang-Outang Band. I am ordered to come here with my band at three o’clock to play high-class jazz at young lady’s wedding reception.

Doris. I remember now. I did order him. It’s supposed to be the best jazz band in the country.

Jerry [to Stutz-Mozart]. Don’t you know there’s going to be a big political crisis here at three o’clock?

Doris. We can’t use you now, Mr. Stutz-Mozart. Anyways, I had to throw over my fiance on account of political reasons.

Stutz-Mozart [indignantly]. But I have my orangoutang band outside.

Charlotte[her eyes staring]. Real orang-outangs?

Doris. Of course not. They just call it that because they look kind of like orang-outangs. And they play kind of like orang-outangs, sort of. I mean the way orang-outangs would play if they knew how to play at all.

Jerry [to Stutz-Mozart]. Well, you’ll have to get  them away from here. I can’t have a lot of senators and judges coming in and finding me with a bunch of men that look like orang-outangs.

Stutz-Mozart. But I have been hired to play.

Jerry. Yes, but what do you think people would say? They’d say: Yes, here’s a fine sort of President we’ve got. All his friends look sort of like orangoutangs.

Stutz-Mozart. You waste my time. You pay me or else we play.

Jerry. Look at here. If you’re one of these radical agitators my advice to you is to go right back where you came from.

Stutz-Mozart. I came from Hoboken.

He goes threateningly out the gate.

Jones [announcing from the steps]. Chief Justice Fossile of the Supreme Court, accompanied by a committee from the Senate!

Charlotte[to Jerry]. Speak right up to them. Show them you’re not just a vegetable.

Here they come! Chief Justice Fossile, in a portentous white wig, is walking ponderously at the head of the procession. Five of the six Senators who follow him are large, grave gentlemen whose cutaway coats press in their swollen stomachs. Beside them Senator Fish seems frail and ineffectual.

The delegation comes to a halt before Jerry, who regards it defiantly, but with some uneasiness.

Judge Fossile. To the President of the United States — greetings.

Jerry [nervously]. Greetings yourself.

Mr. Jones has provided chairs, and the Senators seat themselves in a row, with Judge Fossile in front. Fish looks miserably at Doris. The Honorable Snooks lurks in the shadow of the Special Tree.

Judge Fossile. Mr. President, on the motion of the gentleman from Idaho — [He points to Fish, who tries unsuccessfully to shrink out of sight.] we have come to analyze you, with a view to impeachment.

Jerry [sarcastically]. Oh, is that so? [He looks for encouragment at Charlotte. Charlotte grunts.]

Judge Fossile. I believe that is the case, Senator Fish?

Fish [nervously]. Yes, but personally I like him.

Charlotte. Oh, you do, do you? [She nudges Jerry.] Speak right up to them like that.

Jerry. Oh, you do, do you?

Judge Fossile. Remove that woman!

No one pays any attention to his request.

Judge Fossile. Now, Mr. President, do you absolutely refuse to resign on the request of the Senator from Idaho?

Jerry. You’re darn right I refuse!

Judge Fossile. Well, then, I —  —

At this point Mr. Stutz-Mozart’s Orang-Outang Band outside of the wall launches into a jovial jazz rendition of “Way Down upon the SuwaneeRiver.” Suspecting it to be the national anthem, the Senators glance at each other uneasily, and then, removing their silk hats, get to their feet, one by one. Even Judge Fossile stands at respectful attention until the number dies away.

Jerry. Ha-ha! That wasn’t “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

The Senators look confused.

Doris[tragically]. This was to have been my wedding reception day.

Senator Fish begins to weep softly to himself.

Judge Fossile [angrily to Jerry]. This is preposterous, sir! You’re a dangerous man! You’re a menace to the nation!We will proceed no further. Have you anything to say before we vote on the motion made by the State of Idaho?

Charlotte. Yes, he has. He’s got a whole mouthful!

Doris. This is the feature moment of my life. Cecil B. Demille would shoot it with ten cameras. Judge Fossile. Remove these women.

The women are not removed.

Jerry [nervously]. Gentlemen, before you take this step into your hands I want to put my best foot forward. Let us consider a few aspects. For instance, for the first aspect let us take, for example, the War of the Revolution. There was ancient Rome, for example. Let us not only live so that our children who live after us, but also that our ancestors who preceded us and fought to make this country what it is!

General applause.

And now, gentlemen, a boy to-day is a man to-morrow — or, rather, in a few years. Consider the winning of the West — Daniel Boone and Kit Carson, and in our own time Buffalo Bill and — and Jesse James!

Prolonged applause.

Finally, in closing, I want to tell you about a vision of mine that I seem to see. I seem to see Columbia — Columbia — ah — blindfolded — ah — covered with scales — driving the ship of state over the battle-fields of the republic into the heart of the golden West and the cotton-fields of the sunny South.

Great applause. Mr. Jones, with his customary thoughtfulness, serves a round of cocktails.

Judge Fossile [sternly]. Gentlemen, you must not let yourselves be moved by this man’s impassioned rhetoric. The State of Idaho has moved his impeachment. We shall put it to a vote —  —

Jerry [interrupting]. Listen here, Judge Fossile, a state has got to be part of a country in order to impeach anybody, don’t they?

Judge Fossile. Yes.

Jerry. Well, the State of Idaho doesn’t belong to the United States any more.

A general sensation. Senator Fish stands up and sits down.

Judge Fossile. Then who does it belong to?

Snooks [pushing his way to the front]. It belongs to the nation of Irish Poland.

An even greater sensation.

Jerry. The State of Idaho is nothing but a bunch of mountains. I’ve traded it to the nation of Irish Poland for the BuzzardIslands.

Mr. Jones hands the treaty to Judge Fossile.

Fish [on his feet]. Judge Fossile, the people of Idaho —  —

Snooks. Treason! Treason! Set down, fella! You’re a subject of the nation of Irish Poland.

Jerry [pointing to Fish]. Those foreigners think they can run this country.

The other Senators shrink away from Fish.

Judge Fossile [to Fish]. If you want to speak as a citizen of the United States, you’ll have to take out naturalization papers.

Snooks. I won’t let him. I’m goin’ to take him with me. He’s part of our property.

He seizes the indignant Fish firmly by the arm and pins a large “Sold” badge to the lapel of his coat.

Doris[heartily]. Well, I’m certainly glad I didn’t marry a foreigner.

Just at this point, when Jerry seems to have triumphed all around, there is the noise of a fife and drum outside, and General Pushing marches in, followed by his musical escort. The General is in a state of great excitement.

General Pushing. Mr. President, I am here on the nation’s business!

The Senators. Hurrah!

General Pushing. War must be declared!

The Senators. Hurrah!

Jerry. Who is the enemy?

General Pushing. The enemy is the nation of Irish Poland!

All eyes are now turned upon Snooks, who looks considerably alarmed.

General Pushing [raising his voice]. On to the BuzzardIslands!

The Senators. Hurrah! Hurrah! Down with Irish Poland!

Judge Fossile. Now, Mr. President, all treaties are off!

General Pushing [looking scornfully at Jerry]. He tried to trade the State of Idaho for some islands full of Buzzards. Bah!

The Senators. Bah!

Snooks [indignantly]. What’s ee idea? Is this a frame-up to beat the nation of Irish Poland outa their rights? We want the State of Idaho. You want the BuzzardIslands, don’t you?

General Pushing. We can take them by force. We’re at war. [To the Senators.] We’ve ordered all stuffed Buzzards to be removed from the natural history museums. [Cheers.] And domestic Buzzards are now fair game, both in and out of season. [More cheers.] Buzzard domination would be unthinkable.

Judge Fossile [pointing to Jerry]. And now, Senators. How many of you vote for the impeachment of this enemy of the commonwealth?

The five Senators stand up.

Judge Fossile [to Jerry]. The verdict of a just nation. Is there any one here to say why this verdict should not stand?

Dada, who all this time has been absorbed in the contemplation of the heavens, suddenly throws down his telescope with a crash.

Dada [in a tragic voice]. It’s too late!

All. Too late?

Dada. Too late for the world to end this afternoon. I must have missed the date by two thousand years. [Wringing his hands.] I shall destroy myself!

Dada tries to destroy himself. He produces a pistol, aims at himself, and fires. He flounders down — but he has missed.

Doris[standing over him and shaking her finger]. You miss everything! I’m going to send for the lunatic-asylum wagon — if it’ll come!

Dada [shaking his finger back at her]. Your parents brought you up very unsuccessfully —  —

Judge Fossile. Silence! I will pronounce sentence of impeachment on this enemy of mankind. Look upon him!

They all look dourly at Jerry.

Now, gentlemen, the astronomers tell us that in the far heavens, near the southern cross, there is a vast space called the hole in the sky, where the most powerful telescope can discover no comet nor planet nor star nor sun.

They all look very cold and depressed. Jerry shivers. Fish picks up Dada’s abandoned telescope and begins an eager examination of the firmament.

In that dreary, cold, dark region of space the Great Author of Celestial Mechanism has left the chaos which was in the beginning. If the earth beneath my feet were capable of expressing its emotions it would, with the energy of nature’s elemental forces, heave, throw, and project this enemy of mankind into that vast region, there forever to exist in a solitude as eternal as — as eternity.

When he finishes a funereal silence falls.

Jerry [his voice shaken with grief]. Well, Judge, all I’ve got to say is that no matter what you’d done I wouldn’t want to do all those things to you.

Judge Fossile [thunderously]. Have you anything more to say?

Jerry [rising through his defeat to a sort of eloquent defiance]. Yes. I want to tell you all something. I don’t want to be President. [A murmur of surprise.] I never asked to be President. Why — why, I don’t even know how in hell I ever got to be President!

General Pushing [in horror]. Do you mean to say that there’s one American citizen who does not desire the sacred duty of being President? Sir, may I ask, then, just what you do want?

Jerry [wildly]. Yes! I want to be left alone.

Outside the wall Mr. Stutz-Mozart’s Orang-Outang Band strikes up “The Bee’s Knees.” The Senators arise respectfully and remove their hats, and General Pushing, drawing his sword, stands at the salute.

Four husky baggage smashers stagger out of the White House with the trunks of the Frost family, and hurry with them through the gate. Half a dozen assorted suitcases are flung after the trunks.

The music continues to play, the Senators continue to stand. The Frost family gaze at their departing luggage, each under the spell of a different emotion.

Charlotte is the first to pick up her grip. As she turns to the Senators, the music sinks to pianissimo, so her words are distinctly audible.

Charlotte. If it’s any satisfaction to yon, I’m going to be a different wife to him from now on. From now on I’m going to make his life perfectly miserable.

Charlotte goes out to a great burst of jazz. Dada, with some difficulty, locates his battered carpet-bag.

Dada. I find I missed the date by two thousand years. Eventually I will destroy myself.

Dada is gone now, hurried out between two porters and Doris is next. With dignity she selects her small but arrogant hand-bag.

Doris. All I want to say is if Cecil B. Demille ever saw the White House he’d say: “All right, that may do for the gardener’s cottage. Now I’ll start building a real house.”

As she leaves she tries desperately to walk out of step with the music and avoid the suggestion of march-ing. The attempt is not altogether successful.

President Jerry Frost now picks up his bag.

Jerry [defiantly]. Well, anyways I showed you you couldn’t put anything over on me. [Glancing around, his eye falls on the “Special Tree.” He goes over and pulls it up by the roots.] This was given to me by some natives. That sign’s mine, too. I had it invented. [He pauses.] I guess you think I wasn’t much good as a President, don’t you? Well, just try electing me again.

General Pushing [sternly]. We won’t! As a President you’d make a good postman.

At this sally there is a chorus of laughter.

Then Charlotte’s voice again. Does it come from outside the gate, or, mysteriously enough, from somewhere above?

Charlotte [very distinctly]. Shut the door! I can smell that stuff up here!

A bewildered look comes into Jerry’s eyes. He says “What?” in a loud voice.

Then with the tree in one hand and his grip in the other, he is hurried, between two porters, briskly toward the gate, while the Orang-Outang Band crashes into louder and louder jazz and

The Curtain Falls

Act III

Now we’re back at the Frosts’ house, and it’s a week after the events narrated in Act I. It is about nine o’clock in the morning, and through the open windows the sun is shining in great, brave squares upon the carpet. The jars, the glasses, the phials of a certain memorable night have been removed, but there is an air about the house quite inconsistent with the happy day outside an air of catastrophe, a profound gloom that seems to have settled even upon the “Library of Wit and Humor” in the dingy bookcase.

There is brooding going on upon the premises.

A quick tat-tat-tat from outdoors — the clatter of someone running up the porch steps. The door opens and Doris comes in, Doris in a yellowish skirt with a knit jersey to match, Doris chewing, faintly and delicately, what can surely be no more than a sheer wisp of gum.

Doris[calling]. Char-lotte.

A Voice [broken and dismal, from upstairs]. Is that you, Doris?

Doris. Yeah. Can I come up?

The Voice. [It’s Charlotte’s. You’d scarcely have recognized it.] I’ll come down.

Doris. Heard anything from Jerry?

Charlotte. Not a word.

Doris regards herself silently, but with interest, in a small mirror on the wall. In comes Charlotte — and oh, how changed from herself of last week. Her nose and eyes are red from weeping. She’s chastened and depressed.

Doris[with cheerful pessimism]. Haven’t heard a word, eh?

Charlotte[lugubriously].  No. Not one.

Doris[impressed in spite of herself]. Son of a gun! And he sneaked away a week ago to-night.

Charlotte. It was that awful liquor, I know. He sat up all night and in the morning he was gone.

Doris. It’s the funniest thing I ever heard of, his sneaking off this way… Say, Charlotte, I’ve been meaning to say something to you for a couple of days, but I didn’t want to get you depressed.

Charlotte. How could I possibly be any more depressed than I am?

Doris. Well, I just wanted to ask you if you’d tried the morgue yet. [Charlotte gives a little scream.] Wait a minute. Get control of yourself. I simply think you ought to try it. If he’s anywhere you ought to locate him.

Charlotte[wildly]. Oh, he’s not dead! He’s not dead!

Doris. I didn’t say he was, did I? I didn’t say he was. But when a fella wanders out tight after drinking some of this stuff, you can’t tell where you’ll find him. Let me tell you, Charlotte, I’ve had more experience with this sort of thing than you have.

Charlotte. The detective is coming to report this morning.

Doris. Has he been combing the dives? You ought to have him comb the dives, Charlotte. I saw a picture last week that ought to be a lesson to any woman that loses her husband in a funny way like this. The woman in this picture lost her husband and she just combed the dives and — there he was.

Charlotte[suspiciously]. What was he doing?

Doris. Some vampire was sitting on his lap in a cafe. [Charlotte moans.] But it does show that if you do have the dives combed, you can find ‘em. That’s what this woman did…  There’s where most men go when they wander out like that.

Charlotte. Oh, no, Jerry wouldn’t go to the dives, or the — the morgue, either. He’s never drank or done anything like that till that night. He’s always been so mild and patient.

This is a new note from Charlotte.

Doris[after a thoughtful pause]. Maybe he’s gone to Hollywood to go in the movies. They say a lot of lost men turn up there.

Charlotte[brokenly]. I don’t know what to do. Maybe I’m re-responsible. He said that night he might have been P-President if it hadn’t been for me. He’d just been analyzed, and they found he was per-perfect.

Doris. Well, with no reflections on the dead or anything like that, Charlotte, he wasn’t so wonderful as you make out. You can take it from me, he never would have been anything more than a postman if you hadn’t made him be a railroad clerk… . I’d have the dives combed.

Charlotte[eulogistically]. He was a good husband.

Doris. You’ll get over it.

Charlotte. What?

Doris. Cheer up. In a year or so you’ll never know you ever had a husband.

Charlotte[bursting into tears at this]. But I want him back.

Doris[reminiscently]. Do you know the song? Do you know the song? [She sings:]

“A good man is hard to find

You always get the other kind

And when you think that he is your friend

You look around and find him scratching

‘Round some other hen —  — “

She has forgotten her ethical connection and begins to enjoy the song for itself, when Charlotte interrupts.

Charlotte[in torture]. Oh, don’t! Don’t!

Doris. Oh, excuse me. I didn’t think you’d take it personally…  It’s just about colored people.

Charlotte. Oh, do you suppose he’s with some colored women?

Doris[scornfully]. No-o-o! What you need is to get your mind off it for a while. Just say to yourself if he’s in a dive, he’s in a dive, and if he’s in Hollywood, he’s in Hollywood, and if he’s in the morgue —  —

Charlotte[frantically]. If you say that word again. I’ll go crazy!

Doris. — well, in that place, then, just say: “I can’t do anything about it, so I’m going to forget it.” That’s what you want to say to yourself.

Charlotte. It’s easy enough to say, but I can’t get my mind —  —

Doris. Yes, you can. [Magnanimously.] I’ll tell you about what I’ve been doing. I’ve had sort of a scrap with Joseph.

Charlotte. Joseph who?

Doris. Joseph Fish. He’s that fella I brought around here, only you didn’t meet him. I told you about him. The one I got engaged to about ten days ago. His parents were in the mortuary business.

Charlotte. Oh.

Doris. Well, I been trying to make him stop chewing gum. I offered to give it up if he would. I think it’s sort of common when two people that go together are always whacking away at a piece of gum, don’t you?

There’s a ring at the door-bell.

Charlotte. That’s the detective.

Doris[prudently]. Have you got that liquor hidden?

Charlotte. I threw that horrible stuff away. Go let him in.

Charlotte goes to the door and ushers in the detective. The detective wears an expression of profound sagacity upon his countenance.

Have you found him?

The Detective [impressively]. Mrs. Frost, I think so.

Charlotte. Alive?

The Detective. Alive.

Charlotte. Where is he?

The Detective. Wait. Be calm. I’ve had several clews, and I’ve been following them up one at a time. And I’ve located a man, who answers to the first name of Jerry, that I think is your husband.

Charlotte. Where did you find him?

The Detective. He was picked up trying to jimmy his way into a house on Crest Avenue.

Charlotte. Good heavens!

The Detective. Yep — and his name is Jerry. He had it tattooed on his arm.

Charlotte. Good God!

The Detective. But there’s one thing that’s different from your description. What color is your husband’s hair?

Charlotte. Brown.

The Detective. Brown?  Are you sure?

Charlotte. Am I sure? Of course I’m sure.

The Detective [to Doris]. Do you collaborate that?

Doris. When he left here it was brown.

The Detective. Well, this fella’s hair was red.

Charlotte. Oh, it’s not Jerry then — it’s not Jerry.

Doris [to Charlotte]. Well, now, how do you know? Maybe — [She turns to the detective.] You see, this fella had been drinking some of this funny liquor you get around here sometimes and it may just have turned his hair red.

Charlotte[to the detective]. Oh, do you think so?

The Detective. I never heard of a case like that. I knew a fella whose hair was turned white by it.

Doris. I knew one, too. What was the name of the fella you knew?

Charlotte. Did this man claim to be my husband?

The Detective. No, madam, he didn’t. He said he had two wives out in Montana, but none that he knew of in these parts. But of course he may have been bluffing.

Doris. It doesn’t sound like Jerry to me.

The Detective. But you can identify him by that tattoo mark.

Charlotte[hastily]. Oh, he never had one.

The Detective. Are you sure?

Charlotte. Oh, yes.

The Detective [his face falling]. Well, then, he’s not our man, because this fella’s tattoo marks are three years old. Well, that’s a disappointment. That’s a great disappointment for me. I’ve wasted some time over this man. I’d been hoping he’d — ah — do.

Charlotte[hastily]. Oh, no, he wouldn’t do at all. I’ll have to have the right man or I won’t pay you.

The Detective. Well, now then, I’ve been following up another clew. Did your husband ever have aphasia?

Charlotte. Oh, no, he’s always been very healthy. He had some skin trouble about —  —

Doris. He doesn’t mean that, Charlotte. Aphasia’s where a man runs off and commits murder and falls in love with a young girl under another name.

Charlotte. Oh, no, he’s never done anything like this ever before.

The Detective. Suppose you tell me exactly what did happen.

Charlotte. Well, I told you he’d been drinking something that had spirits of nitrogen in it.

The Detective. Spirits of nitrogen!

Charlotte. That’s what the man said. It was sympathetic gin that this man had persuaded Jerry into buying.

The Detective. Yes.

Charlotte. And he’d been talking all evening about all the things he could have done if I hadn’t stood in his way. He had some examination he’d just taken.

Doris[explaining]. A psychical examination.

The Detective [wisely]. I see.

Charlotte. And my sister came over with the man she’s going to marry, and she came up to see me, and when she came down Jerry was asleep in his chair. Well, I didn’t go down. I wish I had now. And my sister here and her fellow went away. Then I went to bed, and it seems to me I could hear Jerry talking to himself in his sleep all night. I woke up about twelve, and he was saying something loud, and I told him to shut the door, because I could smell that awful sympathetic gin way up-stairs.

The Detective. Yes.

Charlotte. And that’s all. When I came down next morning at seven, he was gone.

The Detective [rising]. Well, Mrs. Frost, if your man can be located, I’m going to locate him.

Doris. Have you thought of combing the dives?

The Detective. What?

Doris. Have you combed the dives? It seems to me that I’d make the rounds of all the dives, and I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if you’d see this man with somebody sitting on his knee.

The Detective [to Charlotte]. Does he run to that?

Charlotte[hurriedly]. Oh, no. Oh, no.

Doris [to Charlotte]. How do you know?

A brisk knock at the door. Doris opens it eagerly, admitting a small, fat, gray-haired man in a state of great indignation.

The Detective [to Charlotte]. Is this the pursued?

The Man [sternly]. You are speaking to Mr. Pushing. I employ or did employ the man who lives in this house.

Charlotte[wildly]. Oh, where is he?

Mr. Pushing. That’s what I came here to find out. He hasn’t been at work for a week. I’m going to let him go.

Doris. You ought to be ashamed of yourself. He may be dead.

Mr. Pushing. Dead or alive, he’s fired. I had him analyzed. He didn’t have any ambition, and my analyzer gave him nothing but a row of goose-eggs. Bah!

Charlotte. I don’t care. He’s mine.

Doris[correcting her]. “Was” mine.

The Detective. Maybe you could tell me something about his habits in business hours.

Mr. Pushing. If you’ll come along with me I’ll show you his analyzed record. We’re having it framed. [Contemptuously.] Good morning.

He goes out. The Detective, after a nod at Charlotte and Doris, follows him.

Doris. Well, I should think you’d be encouraged.

Charlotte. Why?

Doris. Well, that detective found a fella that’s something like him. The same first name, anyway. That shows they’re getting warm.

Charlotte. Somehow it doesn’t encourage me.

Uncertain steps on the stairs. Dada appears wearing a battered hat and carrying a book under his arm.

Doris. Hello, Dada. Where you going?

Dada [hearing vague words]. Hm.

Charlotte. He’s going down to the library.

Dada [in  spirited  disagreement]. No. You  were wrong that time. I’m not going to the park. I’m going to the library.

Doris[sternly]. Where do you think your son is?

Dada. The —  — ?

Doris[louder]. Where do you think Jerry is, by this time?

Dada [to Charlotte]. Didn’t you tell me he was away?

Charlotte nods drearily.

Dada [placidly]. Hasn’t come back yet?

Doris. No. We’re having the dives combed.

Dada. Well, don’t worry. I remember I ran away from home once. It was in 1846. I wanted to go to Philadelphia and see the Zoo. I tried to get home, but they took me and locked me up.

Doris [to Charlotte]. Inthe monkey house, I bet.

Dada. [He missed this, thank God!] Yes, that’s the only time I ever ran away.

Doris. But this is a more serious thing, Dada.

Dada. Boys will be boys…  Well, it looks like a nice day.

Charlotte[to Doris]. He doesn’t care. He doesn’t even understand what it’s all about. When the detective searched his bedroom he thought it was the plumber.

Doris. He understands. Sure you do, don’t you, Dada? You understand what it’s all about, don’t you, Dada?

Dada [aggravatingly]. The —  — ?

Charlotte. Oh, let him go. He makes me nervous.

Doris. Maybe he could think out some place where Jerry’s gone. He’s supposed to think so much.

Dada. Well, good afternoon. I think I’ll go down to the library. [Dada goes out by the front door.]

Doris. Listen, Charlotte. I was going to tell you about Joseph — to get your mind off yourself, don’t you remember?

Charlotte. Yes.

Doris. I’ve gotten sort of tired of him. Honestly, I ought to get myself psychoanalyzed.

Charlotte. Why don’t you throw him over then? You ought to know how by this time.

Doris. Of course, having been unlucky in your own marriageable experience, you aren’t in a position to judge what I should do.

Charlotte. Do you love him?

Doris. Well, not — not especially.

Charlotte. Then throw him over.

Doris. I would — except for one thing. You see, it’d be sort of hard.

Charlotte. No, it wouldn’t.

Doris. Yes, it would. It wouldn’t be any cinch.

Charlotte. Why?

Doris. Well, you see I’ve been married to him for three days.

Charlotte[astounded]. What!

Doris. That isn’t very long, but you see in marriage every day counts.

Charlotte. Well, then, you can’t throw him over.

Doris. It’s next to impossible, I guess.

Charlotte. Was it a secret marriage?

Doris. Yes, there was nobody there but I and Joseph and the fella that did it. And I’m still living at home. You see, this girl that Joe was keeping waiting to see whether he was going to marry me or not, got impatient, and said she couldn’t be kept waiting any longer. It made her sort of nervous. She couldn’t eat her meals.

Charlotte. So you got married. And now you’re tired of him.

Doris. No, not exactly that, but it just sort of makes me uncomfortable, Charlotte, to know that you can’t throw over the man you’ve got without causing a lot of talk. Suppose he took to drink or something. You know everybody can’t get rid of their husbands as easy as you did.

Charlotte. One husband was always enough for me.

Doris. One may be all right for you, Charlotte, because you’re a monographist, but supposing Rodolph Valentino, or the Prince of Wales, or John D. Rockefeller was to walk in here and say: “Doris, I’ve worshipped you from a distance on account of the picture that you sent to the fame and fortune contest of the movie magazine, that got left out by accident or lost or something. Will you marry me?” What would you say, Charlotte?

Charlotte. I’d say no. I’d say, give me back Jerry.

Doris. Would you let having a husband stand in the way of your life’s happiness? I tell you I wouldn’t. I’d say to Joe: “You run up to the store and buy a bag of peanuts and come back in about twenty years.” I would, Charlotte. If I could marry Douglas Fairbanks I’d get rid of Joseph in some peaceful way if I could — but if I couldn’t I’d give him some glass cough-drops without a minute’s hesitation.

Charlotte[horrified]. Doris!

Doris. And I told Joseph so, too. This marriage business is all right for narrow-minded people, but I like to be where I can throw over a fella when it gets to be necessary.

Charlotte. If you had Jerry you wouldn’t feel that way.

Doris. Why, can’t you see, Charlotte, that’s the way Jerry must have felt?

Charlotte, overcome, rises to go.

And, Charlotte, I don’t want to depress you, but if he is — if it turns out that he is in the mor — in that place — I know where you can get some simply stunning mourning for —  —

Charlotte begins to weep.

Why, what’s the matter? I just thought it’d cheer you up to know you could get it cheap. You’ll have to watch your money, you know.

Charlotte hurries from the room.

Doris. I wonder what’s the matter with her.

Joseph Fish [outside]. Oh, Doris!

Doris goes to the window.

Doris. How did you know I was here?

Fish [outside]. They told me at your house. Can I come in?

Doris. Yes, but don’t holler around so. Haven’t you got any respect for the missing?

Fish comes in.

Fish. Doris, I’m awfully sorry about —  —

Doris. Oh, Joseph, haven’t you got any sense? Sitting there last night everything was perfect, and just when I was feeling sentimental you began talking about embalming — in the twilight. And I was just about to take out my removable bridge… .

Fish. I’m sorry…  Have they found your sister’s husband yet?

Doris. No.

Fish. Has he gone away permanently? Or for good?

Doris. We don’t know. We’re having the dives combed. Listen, has any one in your family ever had aphasia?

Fish. What’s that?

Doris. Where you go off and fall in love with girls and don’t know what you’re doing.

Fish. I think my uncle had that.

Doris. Sort of dazed?

Fish. Well, sort of. When there was any women around he got sort of dazed.

Doris[thoughtfully]. I wonder if you could inherit a thing from your uncle. [She removes her gum secretly.] What are you chewing, Joe?

Fish. Oh, just an old piece of something I found in my mouth.

Doris. It’s gum. I thought I asked you not to chew gum. It doesn’t look clean-cut for a man to be chewing gum. You haven’t got any sense of what’s nice, Joseph. See here, suppose I was at a reception and went up to Mrs. Astor or Mrs. Vanderbilt or somebody, like this: [She replaces her own gum in her mouth — she needs it for her imitation.] How do you do, Mrs. Vanderbilt? [Chew, chew] What do you think she’d say? Do you think she’d stand it? Not for a minute.

Fish. Well, when I start going with Mrs. Vanderbilt will be plenty of time to stop.

From outside is heard the sound of a metallic whistle, a melodious call in C major.

What’s that?

Doris. Don’t ask me.

Fish. It’s pretty. It must be some kind of bird.

The whistle is repeated. It is nearer.

There it is again.

Doris goes to the window.

Doris. It’s only the postman.

Fish. I never heard a postman with a whistle like that.

Doris. He must be a new one on this beat. That’s too bad. The old one used to give me my mail wherever I met him, even if he was four or five blocks from my house.

The sound again — just outside the door now.

I’ll let him in.

She goes to the door and opens it. The figure of the new postman is outlined in the doorway against the morning sky. It is Jerry Frost.

But for a particular reason neither Doris nor Joseph Fish recognize him. He is utterly changed. In the gray uniform his once flabby figure appears firm, erect — even defiant.  His chin is up — the office stoop has gone. When he speaks his voice is full of confidence, with perhaps a touch of scorn at the conglomerate weaknesses of humanity.

Jerry. Good morning. Would you like some mail?

Doris[taken somewhat aback]. Why, sure. I guess so.

Jerry. It’s a nice morning out. You two ought to be out walking.

Fish [blankly]. Huh?

Jerry. Is this number 2127? If it is, I’ve got a good-looking lot of mail for you.

Doris[with growing interest]. What do you mean, a good looking lot of mail?

Jerry. What do I mean? Why, I mean it’s got variety, of course. [Rummaging in his bag.] I got eight letters for you.

Doris. Say, you’re new on this beat, aren’t you?

Jerry. Yes, I’m new but I’m good. [He produces a handful of letters.] I’m the best one they ever had.

Fish. How do you know? Did they tell you?

Jerry. No, I just feel it. I know my job. I can give any other mailman stamps and post-cards and beat him with bundles. I’m just naturally good. I don’t know why.

Doris. I never heard of a mailman being good.

Jerry. They’re mostly all good. Some professions anybody can get into them, like business or politics for instance, but you take postmen — they’re like angels, they sort of pick ‘em out. [Witheringly.] They not only pick ‘em out — they select’em.

Fish [fascinated]. And you’re the best one.

Jerry [modestly]. Yes, I’m the best one they ever had. [He looks over the letters.] Now here’s what I call a clever ad. Delivered a lot of these this morning.  Children like ‘em, you know. They’re from the carpet company.

Fish. Let’s see it.   [He takes the ad eagerly.]

Jerry. Isn’t that a nice little thing? And I got two bills for you here. I’ll hide those, though. Still, maybe you want to clear up all your accounts. Some people like to get bills. The old lady next door wanted to get hers. I gave her three and you’d think they were checks. Anyways, these two don’t look very big, from the outside, anyhow. But of course you can’t tell from the outside.

Doris. Let me see them.

Fish. Let me see them too.

They squabble mildly over the bills.

Jerry. The thing is for everybody in the house to write what they guess is the amount of the bill on the outside of the envelope, and then when you open the envelope the one who guessed the closest has to pay the bill.

Fish. Or he could get a prize.

Jerry. Something like that. [He winks at Doris.] And here’s a couple of post-cards. They’re sort of pretty ones. This one’s — the Union Station at Buffalo.

Fish. Let me see it.

Jerry. And this one says Xmas greetings. It’s four months late. [To Doris.] I guess these are for you.

Doris. No, they’re for my sister.

Jerry. Well, I haven’t read what’s written on the back. I never do. I hope it’s good news.

Doris[inspecting the backs]. No, they’re from an aunt or something. Anything else?

Jerry. Yes, here’s one more. I think it’s one of the neatest letters I’ve had this morning. Now, isn’t that a cute letter? I call that a cute letter. [He weighs it in his hand and smells it.] Smell it.

Doris. It does smell good. It’s a perfume ad.

Fish. Say, that sure does smell good.

Jerry. Well, I’ve done pretty well by you this morning. Maybe you got a letter for me.

Doris. No, there’s none to-day.

Jerry. Funny thing: I came near leaving that pink letter with a little girl down the street who looked as if she needed one pretty bad. I thought that maybe it was really meant for her, and just had the wrong name and address on by mistake. It would of tickled her. I get tempted to leave mail where it really ought to go instead of where it’s addressed to. Mail ought to go to people who appreciate it. It’s hard on a postman, especially when he’s the best one they ever had.

Doris. I guess it must be.

Fish. Yeah, it must be tough.

They are both obviously fascinated.

Doris. Well, there’s somebody in this house who needs the right letter something awful. If you get one that looks as if it might do for her you could leave it by here.

Jerry. Is that so? Well, that’s too bad. I’ll certainly keep that in mind. The next one I think’ll do, I’ll leave it by here.

Doris. Thanks.

Jerry, I’ve got one of these special delivery love-letters for a girl around the corner, and I want to hurry up and give it to her, so as to see her grin when she gets it. It’s for Miss Doris —  —

Doris[interrupting]. That’s me. Give it to me now.

Jerry. Sure. Say, this is lucky. [He starts to hand it to her.] Say, listen — why are you like a stenographer?

Doris. Me?

Jerry. Yes.

Doris. I don’t know. Why?

Jerry. Because I say to you, “Take a letter.”

Fish [wildly amused]. Ha-ha! Ha-ha-ha!

Jerry [with some satisfaction]. That’s a good one, isn’t it? I made that one up this morning.

Fish. Ha-ha! Ho-ho!

Doris. Joseph, I asked you to have some respect for the missing. [To Jerry.] You see there’s a fella missing here and it’s his wife that needs the letter.

Fish [jealously]. Who’s your letter from?

Doris[reading it]. It’s from my last fiance. It says he didn’t mean to drink the perfume, but the label was off the bottle and he thought it was bay rum.

Fish. My God! Will you forgive him?

Jerry. Don’t worry, my boy. Bay rum or perfume, he killed her love with the first swallow. [He goes toward the door.] Good-by. I’ll try to find that letter for the lady here that needs it so bad.

Doris. Good-by — and thanks.

Fish. Let me open the door.

He opens the door. Jerry goes out. Doris and Fish stare at each other.

Doris. Isn’t he wonderful?

Fish. He’s a peach of a fella, but —  —

Doris. I know what you’re going to say; that you’ve seen him somewhere before.

Fish. I’m trying to think where. Maybe he’s been in the movies.

Doris. I think it’s that he looks like some fella I was engaged to once.

Fish. He’s some mailman.

Doris. The nicest one I ever saw. Isn’t he for you?

Fish. By far. Say, Charlie Chaplin’s down at the Bijou.

Doris. I don’t like him. I think he’s vulgar. Let’s go and see if there’s anything artistic.

Fish makes an indistinguishable frightened noise.

Doris. What’s the matter?

Fish. I’ve swallowed my gum.

Doris. It ought to teach you a moral.

They go out. Charlotte comes  in drearily. She glances first eagerly, then listlessly at the letters and throws them aside.

Clin-ng! The door-bell. She starts violently, runs to open it. It is that astounding product of our constitution, Mr. Snooks.

Charlotte[in horror]. Oh, what do you want?

Snooks [affably].  Good morning, lady. Is your husband around?

Charlotte. No. What have you done with him, you beast!

Snooks [surprised]. Say, what’s biting you, lady?

Charlotte. My husband was all right until you came here with that poison 1 What have you done with him? Where is he? What did you give him to drink? Tell me, or I’ll scream for the police! Tell me! Tell me!

Snooks. Lady, I ain’t seen your husband.

Charlotte. You lie! You know my husband has run away.

Snooks [interested]. Say now, has he? I had a hunch he would, sooner or later.

Charlotte. You made him. You told him to, that night, after I went out of the room! You suggested it to him. He’d never have thought of it.

Snooks. Lady, you got me wrong.

Charlotte. Then where is he? If I’m wrong, find him.

Snooks. [after a short consideration]. Have you tried the morgue?

Charlotte. Oh-h-h! Don’t say that word!

Snooks. Oh, he ain’t in the morgue. Probably some Jane’s got hold of him. She’ll send him home when she gets all his dough.

Charlotte. He isn’t a brute like you. He’s been kidnapped.

Snooks. Maybe he’s joined the Marine Corpse… Howsoever, if he ain’t here I guess I’ll be movin’ on.

Charlotte. What do you want of him now? Do you want to sell him some more wood alcohol?

Snooks. Lady, I don’t handle no wood alcohol. But I found a way of getting the grain alcohol out of iodine an’ practically eliminatin’ the poison. Just leaves a faint brownish tinge.

Charlotte. Go away.

Snooks. All right. I’ll beat it.

So he beats it.

Charlotte’s getting desperate from stick encounters. With gathering nervousness she wanders about the room, almost collapsing when she comes upon one of Jerry’s coats hanging behind a door. Scarcely aware of what she’s doing, she puts on the coat and buttons it close, as if imagining that Jerry is holding her to him in the brief and half-forgotten season of their honeymoon.

Outside a storm is come up. It has grown dark suddenly, and a faint drum of thunder lengthens into a cataract of doom. A louder rolling now and a great snake of lightning in the sky. Charlotte, lonesome and frightened, hurriedly closes the windows. Then, in sudden panic, she runs to the ‘phone.

Charlotte. Summit 3253… Hello, this is me. This is Charlotte… . Is Doris there? Do you know where she is?…  Well, if she comes in tell her to run over. Everything’s getting dark and I’m frightened… Yes, maybe somebody’ll come in, but nobody goes out in a storm like this. Even the policeman on the corner has gotten under a tree… Well, I’ll be all right. I’m just lonesome, I guess, and scared… Good-by.

She rings off and stands silently by the table. The storm reaches its height. Simultaneously with a terrific burst of thunder that sets the windows rattling the front door blows open suddenly, letting in a heavy gust of rain.

Charlotte is on the verge of hysterics.

Then there is a whistle outside — the bright, mellow whistle of the postman. She springs up, clasping her hands together. Jerry comes in, covered with a rain cape dripping water. The hood of the cape Partially conceals his face.

Jerry [cheerfully]. Well, it certainly is a rotten day.

Charlotte[starting at the voice]. It’s awful.

Jerry. But I heard there was a lady here that was expecting a letter, and I had one that I thought’d do, so no rain or anything could keep me from delivering it.

Charlotte [greedily]. A letter for me? Let me have it.

He hands it to her and she tears it open.

It’s from Jerry!

She reads it quickly.

Jerry. Is it what you wanted?

Charlotte[aloud, but to herself]. It doesn’t say where he is. It just says that he’s well and comfortable. And that he’s doing what he wants to do and what he’s got to do. And he says that doing his work makes him happy. {With suspicion.] I wonder if he’s in some dive… . If I wrote him a letter do you think you could find him with it, Mr. Postman?

Jerry. Yes, I can find him.

Charlotte. I want to tell him that if he’ll come home I won’t nag him any more, that I won’t try to change him, and that I won’t fuss at him for being poor.

Jerry. I’ll tell him that.

Charlotte[again talking to herself]. I was trying to nag him into something, I guess. Before we were married I always thought there must be some sort of mysterious brave things he did when he wasn’t with me. I thought that maybe sometimes he’d sneak away to hunt bears. But when he’d sneak away it was just to roll dice for cigars down at the corner. It wasn’t forests — it was just — toothpicks.

Jerry. Suppose that he was nothing but a postman now — like me.

Charlotte. I’ll be proud of him if he’s a postman, because I know he always wanted to be one. He’d be the best postman in the world and there’s something kind of exciting about being the best. It wasn’t so much that I wanted him to be rich, I guess, but I wanted him to do something he wouldn’t always be beat at. I was sort of glad he got drunk that night. It was about the first exciting thing he ever did.

Jerry. You never would of told him that.

Charlotte[stiffening]. I should say I wouldn’t of.

Jerry rises.

Jerry. I’ll try to get him here at six o’clock.

Charlotte. I’ll be waiting. [Quickly.] Tell him to stop by a store and get some rubbers.

Jerry. I’ll tell him. Good-by.

Charlotte. Good-by.

Jerry goes out into the rain, Charlotte sits down and bows her head upon the table.

Again there are steps on the porch. This time it is Dada, who comes in, closing a dripping umbrella.

Dada [as one who has passed through a great crisis]. I borrowed an umbrella from a man at the library.

Charlotte[in a muffled voice]. Jerry’s coming back.

Dada. Is he? A man at the library was kind enough to lend me his umbrella. [He goes over to the bookcase and begins an unsuccessful search for the Scriptures. Plaintively]. Some one has hidden my Bible.

Charlotte. In the second shelf.

He finds it. As he pulls it from its place, several other books come with it and tumble to the floor. After a glance at Charlotte, he kicks them under the bookcase. Then, with, his Bible under his arm, he starts for the stairs, but is attracted by something bright on the first stair, and attempts, unsuccessfully, to pick it up.

Dada. Hello, here’s a nail that looks like a ten-cent piece.

He goes upstairs. When he is half-way up, there isa sound as if he had slipped back a notch, then silence.

Charlotte[raising her head]. Are you all right, Dada?

No answer. Dada is heard to resume his climb.

Oh, if I could only sleep till six o’clock!

The storm has blown away, and the sun is out and streaming in the window, washing the ragged carpet with light. From the street there comes once again, faint now and far away, the mellow note of the postman’s whistle.

Charlotte[lifting her arms rapturously]. The best postman in the world!

CURTAIN

“SEND ME IN, COACH”

This short play was published in Esquire magazine, November 1936.

“SEND ME IN, COACH”

The scene is a recreation cottage of a summer camp, crossed paddles over the fireplace, shelf of cups, large plain table and several plain chairs and a blackboard. On the board is being written a word in large sprawling letters by a small, undersized boy in a bathing suit. The word is “Wedoodle.”

As the curtain rises a rather stout, overgrown boy of thirteen, also in a bathing suit, comes into the room and says “Hey,” causing the other boy to seize the eraser hastily and obliterate his mysterious polysyllable.

CASSIUS: (the stout boy) What does “Wedoodle” mean?

BUGS: (visibly embarrassed) Wedoodle? That’s just a camp my sister goes to.

CASSIUS: Must be a swell camp. Where’s the Old Man?

BUGS: I was just writing Wedoodle because there was some chalk here and I’m supposed to write her a letter because I got a letter this morning which said if I don’t write her a letter I wouldn’t get my quarter’s allowance.

CASSIUS: The Old Man not showed up?

BUGS: I don’t know. Say, I know my part — do you know yours?

CASSIUS: I know some of it but I’ll bet we don’t have any play.

BUGS: Why?

CASSIUS: Because Bill’s father was just tried in court and the guys in my tent say that Bill will probably be fired from camp.

Bugs: What do you mean?

CASSIUS: I got half of it; somebody else got the other half. (He finds a piece of newspaper from his pocket and reads.) “The acquittal of Cyrus K. Watchman” — that’s Bill’s father’s name — “had had — had had — had had, had had — “

BUGS: What did he have?

CASSIUS (a stupid boy, slow on the uptake) Well, he had this thing, see?

BUGS: Well, if his father had this thing happen to him he’ll get fired because the Old Man isn’t in any good humor now and I guess if any of us did anything that wasn’t all right he’d fire us right away. I tell you I’m glad I made up my tent right this morning.

Henry Grady comes in.

HENRY: Where’s the Old Man?

CASSIUS: He hasn’t showed up. I came in here and I found Bugs writing Skedaddle on the board. It’s some camp his sister goes to. Some name, hey?

BUGS: (Indignantly) It wasn’t Skedaddle; it was Wedoodle.

CASSIUS: What’s the difference? Skedaddle, Wedoodle, Skedaddle, Wedoodle — BUGS: Skedaddle doesn’t make any sense. CASSIUS: I suppose Wedoodle makes a lot of sense.

BUGS: Sure it does. It’s the name of a camp. What’s the sense of the name of our camp, Rahewawa?

CASSIUS: But shucks, Rahewawa is a regular camp.

BUGS: So’s Skedaddle — I mean Wedoodle.

Bill Watchman comes in. He is a cheerful boy, full of energy and apparently quite unaware that his family has been featured in the public prints.

BILL: All right, fellows, let’s get together. I met the Old Man on the way over and he said to go ahead. Does everybody know their parts?

BUGS: I only got two lines. The best one is when I say (quoting), “Mr. Jenkins says the team’s ready to go to bat down there, Doctor.”

BILL: Well, he wants us to run through it once before he gets over here.

The face of a handsome young man of twenty appears momentarily at the door.

RICKEY: (the young man) You guys ought to bo able to go on under your own steam; you ought to be old enough so you don’t have to be watched over. How about rehearsing this thing, so we can give your play decent?

The boys are instantly on their feet.

BOYS: All right, Mr. Rickey. When he goes the excitement subsides gradually,

HENRY: When my father brought mo up here he said, “I don’t know about the head man but if they are all like that counselor I know you’re going to be happy up here.”

CASSIUS: He certainly is a swell guy. Boy! BUGS: (at the blackboard) Guess the Old Man’s wife thinks so.

Bugs draws a large heart on the board and erases it just as Cassius produces from his pocket a much mangled part or rather two parts for it has been torn in half and he can read it only by a process of heavy concentration.

HENRY: Let’s begin.

They move the table so that Cassius is sitting behind it in a judicial attitude.

HENRY: (feeling his pockets) Shucks, I forgot my part.

BILL: You ought to know it by this time.

BUGS: I don’t really have to have any part because I only got two lines. One of them is, “Mr. Jenkins says the team’s ready — “

HENRY: Shut up. Bugs. Come on, let’s get going, Cassius.

He stands tentatively at one corner of the table, dashes to another corner and then goes back to the first corner.

CASSIUS: Well, I’m ready.

HENRY: Well go on then; you got the first line.

CASSIUS: (reading from his notes) “So then, Play-fair, you are your own worst enemy.”

HENRY : No, that comes later. It’s the upper half of the sheet.

CASSIUS: Oh yeah, I started to write home on this the other night. (coughs) “So, coach, you think we cannot win without Play-fair?”

HENRY: “It all depends on him, Doctor McDougall. He is our best pitcher and speed ball delivery artist and say, brother, is he good at the bat. If we are to beat St. Berries we need his services badly.” BUGS: Now do I — BILL: Shut up, Bugs. Go on, Cassius. CASSIUS: (fumbling with his notes) “So then, Playfair, you are your own — “ No, I see what you mean you want to start from the beginning. “So, coach, you think we cannot win without Playfair.” Oh you know all that stuff anyhow.

HENRY: What’s my cue? Oh yes. “Doctor McDougall, I happened to stop by the school post office and while asking for my mail they gave me this for you.”

Cassius goes through business of adjusting glasses and opening a letter. He bends over as if reading the letter.

CASSIUS: (reading) “So, Playfair you are your own worst enemy — “ Say, I can’t read without some kind of letter. I keep reading my part all the time.

BILL: Here’s a letter. Pretend that’s it. Say, I’m very glad we can go on without any supervision and do the thing because we feel we ought to. Don’t you feel that way? He hands a letter to Cassius.

The Old Man, an ex-athlete of sixty or thereabouts, comes in with young Rickey, a bland, suave, blond young man who looks like all the coast guards in the world. Rickey is impatient and full of nervous energy. He makes a sort of energetic spring, signifying nothing, and gooses Bill and Henry toward the door.

The OLD MAN: I think we’re not going to have a rehearsal today, boys, I think we’re going to postpone this rehearsal until a lot later.

BILL: Aren’t we going to rehearse the play today?

RICKEY: Hold your horses. (He turns to the Old Man.) Want to go in my bedroom?

The OLD MAN: No. Now, boys, I’m sorry to have to interrupt your rehearsal. What was that little play you were doing?

HENRY: We just as soon not do it because all of us are drawn for the swimming trials, two of us for the canoe and two —

The OLD MAN: Oh I want you all to do this play later. It’ll bring a lot of credit on the camp and next Monday is parents’ day. Do you all know your parts?

BUGS: (from the doorway) I know my part complete. I was just thinking if I have just my two lines to say, I needn’t come to rehearsal and could go to first swimming instead.

The OLD MAN: Now we have to have all four boys here because it’s supposed to be a play for four boys. You’ll just have to learn to be patient, Trevellion. Now you can go to swimming and I want Bill to wait just outside the door.

The boys go out and the two men are now alone in the room.

The OLD MAN: I suppose you think you are indispensable to us, don’t you?

RICKEY : Well, Doe, I got marks all over my face from playing heads up football and I’ll ? play anywhere, in the line or out of it. My father he’s got sense and I go back and sleep in the same bed with him in the fall and he says some of these men go in there and get two thousand, five thousand, ten thousand, and I go up to the State with you and what do I get?

The OLD MAN: You get your board and tuition.

RICKEY: Yes, but what I mean to say is what do you get? You taught me a lot, I know that, but I could throw a pass like a baseball forty-five yards before I ever saw you. Gimme a ball now and I’ll show you.

The OLD MAN: (patiently) When I go up to college this fall it’s understood that you go with me. I thought that had all been agreed upon.

RICKEY: Sure I’ll go with you. Eleven other boys that learned the game in normal school. (He spits contemptuously.) I know what everyone got. I know what Lawson’s got, I know what Catheart’s got. They come out clean and take the sorority girls out in the night-time. Sure they do. They go in with one shoulder out and the eyes closed. Needn’t tell me how you played football at Michigan — do you think I like going around with my nose broken Sunday, Monday and Tuesday?

The OLD MAN: Shut up now, shut up now.

RICKEY: Oh shut up and have all these kids admire me.

The OLD MAN: I know football is different than it was in my day. 1 didn’t know what fear was.

RICKEY: I don’t know what fear is. I know where a play’s going. My business is to bump into a play so where I go there isn’t going to be any more play.

The OLD MAN: That’s why you’re a great football player. I thought we’d agreed on everything.

RICKEY: Agreed, hell.

The OLD MAN: Don’t talk so loud. You know what I wanted to ask you. Stay away from my wife; she’s only a baby and don’t know what she’s doing.

RICKEY: Then why did you marry her? Go on, anything you say, I’m willing to leave. I can go up to Temple maybe.

The OLD MAN: (earnestly) Well, let’s give these kids some example of decency. (at the door) Hi, boys, we’re going on with the play. Start right in where you left off.

The boys come in.

CASSIUS: I can still use your letter, can’t I, Bill?

BILL: Sure.

CASSIUS: Well let’s go on.

The boys go directly to work. The Old Man nods at Rickey — a gesture that Rickey returns with a somewhat insolent wink. They go out.

CASSIUS: “Dear Dr. McDougall, we have hoard that your star athlete, Dick Playfair, was a star in professional baseball this summer and therefore cannot compote against our team in the game this afternoon. Sincerely yours, Hiram Jones, President, St. Berries College.”

HENRY: (in a great flurry of acting.) “What horrible news, Doctor! This means we haven’t a chance. Wo might as well give them the ball game now. But what proof have they?”

CASSIUS: “He gives plenty of proof here.” (He fumbles for a moment) “Playfair, you are your own worst enemy — “ Now wait a minute it goes over to the other side. “He has positive proof.”

HENRY: “I would not care so much for the loss of eleven men but this man. When ho begged me to send him into the game it would become different. Playfair would take the pigskin and before anyone had known it would run the full length of the field. I have coached many teams in my time — “

CASSIUS: “Go away; leave me to my thoughts. Send Playfair to me.” Now this is the place I was supposed to walk up and down. “The integrity of my school means more to me than the athletic success of my teams upon the playing field.” (He studies his manuscript.) “Now, stay a moment.” You know you’re supposed to stick around now.

HENRY: I know perfectly well what I’m supposed to do. You’re supposed to walk up and down. Why don’t you walk up and down?

CASSIUS: How about giving me a chance? Anyway it says Bugs here.

BUGS: (turning from the blackboard) I haven’t got anything to do till Jenkins goes out.

CASSIUS: Well, anyway it says something that looks like Bugs. (resuming his perusal of the manuscript) “Well let us go on with what material we have and atone by sheer something for anything we may have lost or something.” (He sighs and puts down paper.) “I am afraid we must lose a game for once.”

The Old Man, puts his head in at the doorway.

The OLD MAN: All right, boys — I’m glad you are going ahead on your own. I want to get the canoes off and I’ll be with you in no time.

The head disappears.

HENRY: Gosh, let’s quit this. Let’s wait till Cassius learns his part.

BUGS: Why not go on till we get to my line.

BILL: Give me back that letter from my father. I haven’t really read it and you’re getting it all mixed up with your part.

CASSIUS: (handing over the letter and at the same time bringing out the clipping) I thought you might want to see this, Bill. It’s got a lot about your father. (He reads:) “Mr. Watchman seemed depressed during the trial even though it was increasingly apparent that he would be acquitted. He was like a man who had lost all interest.”

Bugs at the blackboard has just written the first two syllables of Wedoodle. Bill, looks once more at the letter, evidently confused.

BILL: I guess my father’s going away — for a long trip, maybe to Europe probably. Gee, this is the nutsiest letter.

HENRY: Well, what’ll we do, rehearse some more?

BILL: (absently) Sure, we might as well. (He walks to the side of the stage, the letter still in his hand, reading half aloud.) “Good bye and good bye and good bye. Home day when you are grown you will forgive all this.”

CASSIUS: What are you talking to yourself about?

BILL: Nothing. (He tucks the letter into his pocket and says:) Well come on, let’s rehearse.

Cassius resumes his place at the table.

CASSIUS. I’m willing.

HENRY: “Well, the game must go on. I will tell the boys to get their bats and balls ready.”

CASSIUS: “Do, and send young Playfair to me. He and I must have a word or two about this.”

Henry walks from the scene, replaced immediately by Bugs, all eager and ready to go.

BUGS: “Mr. Jenkins says the team’s ready to go to bat down there, Doctor.”

CASSIUS: (confused) I haven’t got that or I haven’t got any answer —

BILL: Oh yes, that’s me. (He draws himself up.) I come in now. “Good morning, Dr. McDougall.”

CASSIUS: “Sit down, sir. I hear bad news of you.”

BILL: “I was afraid so, Doctor.”

CASSIUS: “Why did you do this, playing professional ball when you were still a student at CrescentRange? Was it for sordid money?”

BILL: (shaking his head) “No, sir. I’d rather lose my arm than play for money — but I can’t tell.”

CASSIUS: (standing up quickly) “Then I think you had better leave the school.” (The other characters move out of the room with an expression of alarm, then come back when they realize that this is part of the play.) “You are no longer a fit companion for my other pupils. Contamination once abroad smells like a verminal plague.” (He eyes his manuscript.) Say that can’t be right. “Contamination once abroad spreads like a veritable plague. Do you think you can have your baggage ready for the school bus this afternoon to take you into Troy?”

BILL: “Yes, sir.”

BUGS: That’s near Wedoodle.

CASSIUS: There isn’t a single line in my whole part that has anything about Wedoodle in it.

BUGS: I just thought so because the town my sister’s camp’s in is somewhere near Troy.

BILL: Since our parents have spent money to send us here I think we should take advantage of every single advantage that we have while we are here. Now this is a play that’s supposed to teach us how to be fine actors in the future or if we don’t want to be fine actors — well to be fine actors in any case.

HENRY: Shall we go on?

CASSIUS: “You have been a good student here, Playfair, and I regret to take this step. The other boys looked up at you.”

HENRY: Like we look up at Mr. Rickey.

CASSIUS: (studying the manuscript) It doesn’t say anything about Mr. Rickey here.

HENRY : You’re as crazy as Bugs.

CASSIUS: Aw go jump in the lake.

HENRY: Just what I’d like to do.

BILL: No, fellows we got to stay here till the Old Man comes back.

CASSIUS: Well I can’t walk up and down when I have this paper in my hand can I? (Nevertheless he rises and walks up and down.) All I can remember is a line I read in Bill’s letter, “Good bye and good bye and good bye.” But I couldn’t put that in the play, could I?

BILL: The next line is something about “Playfair, you are your own worst enemy.”

CASSIUS: “Playfair, you are your own worst enemy.” (He sighs a great breath of relief.)

BILL: “Doctor McDougall, you don’t understand it all.”

BUGS: Now wait a minute. Here’s where I come in. (Bugs makes a quick circle of the mom and intrudes upon the scene.) “Mr. Cassius says the team’s ready — “ I mean, “Mr. Jenkins says the team’s ready to go to bat down there, Dr. McDougall.”

BILL: “All right, I will tell you, I must tell you. There was a mountain settlement near my residence and they were trying to raise money for a schoolhouse. They needed a fast shortstop. I wanted to play for CrescentRange but I yielded because I wanted the school children to learn to read and write. I guess I was guilty.”

BUGS: You’re supposed to get up here now, Cassius.

CASSIUS: Don’t tell me now. I know all this part of my part. “Well, well, we must reconsider. Well, well, we must reconsider.”

BUGS: I never knew what I was supposed to do here, just stand or get out.

HENRY: Write on the blackboard.

CASSIUS: “Well, well, we must reconsider. Well, well, we must reconsider.” I tell you it’s the walking up and down that tells on you. Oh yes, I’ve got it. “Playfair, you are your own worst enemy — Playfair, we must reconsider.”

Bugs at the board has begun to write Wedoodle. The Old Man comes in.

The OLD MAN: Boys, we’re not going to have any more rehearsal this morning. Go along. I want to see Bill Watchman alone for a minute.

BILL: We did pretty well, almost up to the end.

Bugs makes a last dash at his blackboard and joins the others on the way out.

The OLD MAN: Bill, I have a telegram here that will make a great difference in your life and I want you to be a brave boy when you hear the news in it.

BILL: Is it about my father saying good bye? I had a letter and he said “Good bye, good bye, good bye.”

The OLD MAN: Yes, he said good bye because he’s gone away on a long long journey. Bill, you are old enough for me to tell you things that other people might tell you later in a cruder form. Your father is dead.

BILL: I knew my father was dead.

The OLD MAN: How did you know, Bill?

BILL: I just knew he was dead. I never ought to of left home this summer.

The OLD MAN: Bill, your father took his own life.

BILL: I don’t understand what you mean took his own life.

The OLD MAN: He killed himself.

BILL: Do I have to go home now, or, I mean wherever I’m going?

The OLD MAN: I don’t know yet. Of course you’ll stay here

till we see what arrangements are going to be made.

BILL: I don’t want to go home. I want to stay hero forever. I think Mr. Rickey is the most wonderful man in the world. I’d like to be able to dive like him. I know I can never bo as great as to be able to do a two and a half or even a one and a half like Mr. Rickey. And I want to be like you too. If I could ever bo like Mr. Rickey just once.

The OLD MAN: Mr. Rickey is a very fine athlete.

BILL: It’s like in the play. Sir, can’t wo just go on with it?

The OLD MAN: You mean now?

BILL: (passionately) Yes, now. I don’t want to think about my father. Can’t we just rehearse now as if nothing had happened and not tell anybody what happened? I won’t cry. I knew my father was dead last night.

The OLD MAN: (thoughtfully) Well of course if you think you want to do that — (He goes to the door and calls.) Hey, you down there, send those boys back for the festival play, Henry and BURS and Cassius. (He goes and puts his arm around Bill’s shoulder.) You like it here, don’t you, Bill? And we have been glad having you these four summers. Sometimes you’ve been your own worst enemy.

BILL: You won’t tell any of the rest of them will you?

The OLD MAN: They’ll realize how you feel. No one will say anything to you.

(Henry, Cassius and Bugs come in.)

The OLD MAN: We’ve decided to go on with the rehearsal. Now let’s start from the beginning. All ready?

Cassius takes his place behind the desk.

CASSIUS: “So, coach, you think we cannot win without Play-fair?”

HENRY: “It all depends on him, Dr. McDougall. He is our best pitcher and speed ball delivery artist and say, brother, is he good at the bat. If we are to beat St. Berries we need his services badly.”

BUGS: “Out!”

They all look toward him guestioningly.

HENRY: What’s that?

BUGS: Well, that’s the other line I’ve got that I’m supposed to yell from the window when Playfair makes a triple play.

The OLD MAN: He hasn’t made it yet.

BUGS: But I don’t know where he’s supposed to make it so I thought I’d just say it once in a while.

The OLD MAN: No, Trevellion, that’s not the way we work here. We wait till the man is out before we think he’s out. Henry, go to the window.

HENRY: Yes, sir.

The OLD MAN: Is Mr. Rickey out in the canoes?

HENRY: Yes, sir, I’m almost sure it’s Mr. Rickey.

The OLD MAN: (sighs) All right. Now let’s go on with the play. Now, Cassius, I don’t think you’re getting the full effect with the part. Let’s begin from the beginning.

CASSIUS: All right, sir. “So, Playfair, you are your own worst enemy.”

Bugs has gone to the board and in very small letters is tentatively sketching in Wedoodle. Bill has gone to the side of the stage and straddled a chair leaning his head forward on his arms, his shoulders shaking a little.

The OLD MAN: No, Now it ought to be more like this.

He pushes Cassius out of the way and sits down at the table as the curtain falls.

THREE COMRADES

Three Comrades is a 1938 film directed by Frank Borzage and produced by Joseph L. Mankiewicz for MGM studios. Fitzgerald wrote the screenplay with Edward E. Paramore Jr., adapting it from the novel Three Comrades by Erich Maria Remarque. It tells the story of the friendship of three young German soldiers following World War I.

The original film poster

Cast

Robert Taylor as Erich Lohkamp

Margaret Sullavan as Patricia Hollmann

Franchot Tone as Otto Koster

Robert Young as Gottfried Lenz

Guy Kibbee as Alfons

Lionel Atwill as Franz Breuer

Henry Hull as Dr. Heinrich Becker

Charley Grapewin as Local Doctor

Monty Woolley as Dr. Jaffe

THREE COMRADES

1 FADE IN:

A GERMAN FLAG —

— surmounted by a MAGNIFICENT BRONZE IMPERIAL EAGLE, waving against a white sky.

CUT TO:

2 A FRENCH SEVENTY-FIVE GUN —

— in action. It fires.

CUT TO:

3 THE FLAGPOLE —

— newly split, the eagle gone, the shredded flag fluttering on the remnant of the pole.

DISSOLVE TO:

4 A CORNER OF A MILITARY WAREHOUSE —

— where a pile of rifles mounts rapidly higher as other rifles are laid upon it.

CUT TO:

5 A PILE OF GERMAN HELMETS —

— added to as other helmets are thrown upon it.

DISSOLVE TO:

6 TITLE:

“DURING THE NINETEEN-TWENTIES WHILE THE WORLD WAS PROSPEROUS THE GERMANS WERE A BEATEN AND IMPOVERISHED PEOPLE.”

DISSOLVE TO:

7 EXT. OF A FOOD DEPOT; THE BEGINNING OF AN ENDLESS QUEUE OF PEOPLE —

— the poor, the middle-class, returned soldiers, children, tramps, all waiting with baskets or reticules in a quarter-mile bread-line. It turns a corner and winds around a block as the CAMERA TRUCKS along beside it.

At the very end are a rather haughty aristocratic woman and a lovely, thin, wan-faced little girl of about thirteen who looks on the verge of starvation. A Red Cross Doctor struck by the distinguished aspect of the unhappy pair, stops for a moment beside them.

Doctor: That little girl needs white bread and potatoes.

A demobilized officer and two soldiers overhear the conversation as they pass along the sidewalk and pause.

The Woman (with a short, scornful laugh): What, bread! — Is there such a thing? And potatoes — this child wouldn’t recognize a potato if she saw one.

The Doctor (very sadly): Ach! Later in life these growing children will suffer for all this.

CUT TO:

8 THE THREE SOLDIERS —

— saddened. The officer, most matured of the three, wears a head bandage. His name is Otto Koster. The second, impetuous, fiery and smouldering, decorated with the Iron Cross of both classes, is Gottfried Lenz. The youngest, still lighthearted and carefree after a short experience at the front, is Bobby Lohkamp. We only establish the three as a group and immediately —

DISSOLVE TO:

9 A GRAPH —

— to show the passage of ten years. A line drawn from the upper left to the lower right of the graph, is marked “National Wealth of Germany.” A moving pen draws another line which crosses the first line and moves always upward. This line is marked “Cost of Living.” As this insert is primarily for a time lapse, the dates on the graph should be very large. When the pen stops under 1928 — : DISSOLVE TO:

10 A SIGN READING: “GASOLINE, 1 M. 40 Pfg.”

We hear a full-bellied laugh of derision. The CAMERA PANS DOWN to show an automobile in front of a suburban filling station. It is a paintless touring car with split fenders that do not match, and windshield patched with adhesive tape.

In it sit the Three Comrades, wearing mechanics’ jumpers. They are a little older. Koster wears eyeglasses and shows a large scar on his forehead.Bobby Lohkamp is the sprucer of the three, even to sporting a flower behind his ear. The man laughing is the filling station attendant, holding a water-can. The Comrades look at him with an expression which says, “Funny, are we? Oh yeah?”

The Attendant (convulsed): That ain’t one car. That’s made out of ten cars. You ought to have ten licenses. Should I give you a push?

Pityingly the Comrades exchange a glance. Then Otto Koster steps on it, Bobby Lohkamp flicks the flower at the attendant, and they leave the filling station in such a burst of speed that the man jumps back and stares in astonishment.

CUT TO:

11 A SUBURBAN ROAD. AFTERNOON

The Comrades, bowling along leisurely, are passed by a reckless motor-cyclist, veering from one side of the road to the other. He holds his place annoyingly in front of the Comrades’ car, which will shortly be introduced as “Heinrich” (Note: I have put “Heinrich” instead of “Karl” because the latter is so like “car” that it would be a source of confusion.); and the Comrades don’t like it. We come to:

12 A CROSSROAD ON A RISE OF GROUND.

Neither city nor country; a few scattered houses and signboards.

The car, “Heinrich,” approaches. It begins to pass the cyclist, but slows up at the crossroad warning. But the motorcyclist curves narrowly around in front of a Ford coming out of the side road, and goes on his way.

CUT TO:

13 A CLOSE UP OF THE COMRADES IN THEIR CAR.

Koster: Look at that half-wit!

Lenz: That’s done it!

CUT TO:

14 THE FORD FROM THE SIDE ROAD —

— skids and overturns smashingly in the road.

CUT TO:

15 KOSTER —

— slams on his brakes and barely avoids crashing into the overturned car. Instantly the three Comrades jump out and run to the wreck. Koster has a slight limp.

CUT TO:

16 THE DRIVER OF THE FORD —

— Puppi, a baker about fifty, soft, stout, sharp-looking, unattractive, is pinned between the wheel and the seat. The motor is still running at high speed, but as Lenz turns it off, the man’s groans are audible. Koster, an exceptionally strong man, bends back the wheel while the other two pull Puppi out.

Lenz: Easy now.

Bobby Lohkamp (gritting his teeth): His ribs are crushed — I can feel.

Koster (panting): There’s a hospital up the road.

They place the man in “Heinrich”.

Koster (to Bobby): You stay here and keep an eye on it. (he indicates the wreck) May mean a repair job for us.

Koster drives off, with Lenz beside him, holding the half-unconscious baker in his arms.

DISSOLVE TO:

17 INT. THE RECEPTION ROOM OF A SMALLHOSPITAL.

The injured man is on an examination table. The Doctor looks up and speaks to Koster and Lenz.

The Doctor: Might have been worse. Couple of ribs broken. He’d better stay here.

Puppi (feebly): What about my car? (to Lenz and Koster) Will you see about the car? (struggles for breath) Telephone a garage.

Lenz (hinting): We run a repair shop ourselves.

Koster: We’ll tow it in if you want us to take care of it for you.

Puppi: All right — all right. Do what’s necessary. My name’s Manfred Puppi.

Koster (taking out a card): My name’s Otto Koster. (puts the card in Puppi’s pocket)

Lenz (consolingly): It was the motorcycle’s fault, and we’ve got his number.

DISSOLVE TO:

18 THE ROAD. KOSTER AND LENZ —

— driving rapidly back to the damaged car.

Koster: This is a God-send. First job in a week. I don’t mind saying I’ve been uneasy.

Lenz: So have I — you lose your nerve on one meal a day.

Koster: And it’s a big job too — radiator smashed, wheel crushed — (he breaks off) What’s the excitement?

Lenz, staring ahead, sees:

19 THE SUBURBAN CROSSROADS

People have gathered around the wrecked car. Bobby, his arms folded, stands defiantly in front of it. Facing him are four men in mechanics’ clothes, tough eggs with mean fighting faces. A wrecking truck, marked “Vogt Brothers” is drawn up behind them.

The Biggest Vogt Brother (to Bobby): Get going, or we’ll push your face in!

Bobby: I told you this was our job.

CUT TO:

20 “Heinrich” —

— coming to rest beside the group.

Koster (to Lenz): Looks like a tough bunch. They’re going to need persuasion. Where’s a wrench?

He takes off his glasses and groping for a wrench, puts it in his rear pocket.

Lenz (indignant): The dirty robbers! (he closes his hand on a bunch of keys) Too bad I’ve got on my best shoes.

Koster (getting out): Watch it — we’re three against four.

CUT TO:

21 KOSTER AND LENZ —

— approaching the wreck.

Biggest Vogt (to Bobby): Don’t talk tripe or you’ll need repairs yourself.

Koster and Lenz range themselves beside Bobby.

Koster: We’ve got permission from the owner to do the job.

Another Vogt Brother (producing a tire wrench from behind his back): How would you like another scar on your fat face?

Koster: That took a machine gun.

Biggest Vogt (still sure of himself): Three of you, eh?

Lenz: No, four.

Another Brother (looking around): Go on — he’s kidding.

Lenz (dryly): You can’t see him — his name is Justice.

Biggest Vogt (to his brother): Give us that trolley.

One brother takes hold of the cable that swings from his derrick and walks forward. Bobby stands in his way — Vogt tries to shove by, and in a minute, the fight is on. It is a great fight — three canny veterans against four young toughs. We get flashes of:

22 KOSTER —

— fighting coolly on two fronts, starting to use his wrench and deciding not to.

23 BOBBY —

— down, apparently being choked to death, then free, and up again.

24 LENZ —

— attacked with a tire wrench, knocking the man out with his improvised brass knuckles.

25 ONE OF THE BYSTANDERS —

— a goofy, goggle-eyed peasant, jumping up and down and clapping in ecstacy whenever the battle turns in favor of the Comrades, almost weeping when it goes against them.

26 THE FIGHT —

— has moved forward from the wrecked car toward the Vogt brothers’ truck, which is parked on an incline. One Vogt is out cold. When Koster is momentarily free, he glances at Lenz who is fighting near the rear of the truck and has his opponent at a disadvantage.

Koster (crooks his finger and shouts to Lenz): The crane!

Lenz, struggling with his opponent, sees that the hook of the derrick hangs free on its cable. He suddenly understands and, reaching for the hook, attaches it to the man’s belt.

27 SIMULTANEOUSLY: KOSTER —

— has unset the emergency brake of the wrecking truck and given it a shove. The truck starts to roll and the Vogt brother gives a yell as he is pulled off with it, bumping along the ground.

28 THE OTHER BROTHERS —

— see, and yelling imprecations, start after their truck. As it passes out of the picture down the hill with one of them climbing aboard —

CUT TO:

29 THE THREE COMRADES —

— laughing in victory while the goofy peasant jumps up and down, clapping his hands with delight.

Koster: Now we’ll take the prize to port.

DISSOLVE TO:

30 EXT. KOSTER&CO. AUTO REPAIR SHOP

The shop is set in a factory district of tall chimneys and tenements. In front of it is the sign, and a gas pump is in front of an old, creaking gate. As Koster drives “Heinrich” in, pulling the wrecked Ford, we follow to:

31 THE REPAIR SHOP

A COURTYARD —

— in a canyon between big buildings. Part of it is a covered shed sheltering a couple of dismantled jallopies and a once-expensive Cadillac which preserves a certain gaudy style and is polished to a fare-you-well. It bears a sign, “For Sale.” In a corner is a one-story room which serves as an office. Under a tin roof extending from it are chairs and a rough table. Nearby, a sink with mechanics’ soap. As the caravan halts, we see:

32 MATILDA —

— the charwoman, swaying rather drunkenly in the door of the office, then precipitately retiring.

Jupp, a boy of fifteen, freckled and spinakereared, coming forward eagerly as he wipes his hands on a piece of waste.

Jupp (before they can get out): A customer! — A customer! A guy came to look at the Cadillac! (he points toward it) He’ll be back. (he stares at the Ford) Whew!

Koster (getting out of “Heinrich”): We picked it up on the road. It means pay for you, Jupp. Jupp looks at their dishevelled clothes, then at the car and at Bobby, who has a bruised cheek bone.

Jupp: Were you in the wreck?

Bobby: We were in a war. And we need a drink. (as he starts toward the sink) Fine business on my birthday.

Lenz (calling after him): Your birthday? How old?

Bobby (turning): Thirty.

Lenz: How do you feel?

Bobby (washing his hands at the sink): I feel like sixty and sixteen at once. I feel low as that creeper. (he kicks at a roller, used to get under cars)

Lenz (calling): What do you mean, low? If you’re sixteen and sixty both, you’re living two lives at once. (pause) It’s a miracle. (Bobby disappears into the office):

Koster: Let him alone, Gottfried. Birthdays are no fun. That’s when you look at yourself in the mirror and find you’re only the same old heel after all. Let’s get busy. (to Jupp) What’s this about a customer?

Jupp: He said he’d be right back.

Lenz: Great snakes! If we can sell it, we can even pay the rent. Never mind the wreck. One more polish and we can ask another hundred.

Koster: Thick oil in the engine.

Lenz: More grease in the gears.

Koster: Deflate the tires for rough roads.

Lenz: Oil the bonnet. Hot water in the radiator.

They look toward the Cadillac with growing excitement as they talk.

Koster: Come on, Gottfried!

He and Lenz spring for the work shed.

CUT TO:

33 THE DINGY BUT SUNLIT OFFICE

A desk, surmounted by silver framed photograph of the Comrades in uniform; some chairs; street clothes on hooks and hangers; an open cupboard and a small table on which rests an empty bottle. We hear a woman’s voice, singing “The Song of the Bold Hussar,” which dies hollowly away as the SCENE WIDENS to include Bobby coming in the door and Matilda, the charwoman, with her hand stretched toward the bottle. Seeing him, she stops, teetering like a drunken hippopotamus, and drops a broom from her other hand. She wears a dirty white headcloth, hitched-up skirt, apron and thick slippers.

Bobby (amused and annoyed): Why, Frau Stoes! Last night that bottle was full. I must have forgotten to lock it up.

Matilda (blinking and staring): Holy Saints! I wasn’t expecting you.

Bobby: Evidently not. Was it good?

Matilda (involuntarily): It sure was. (recovering her dignity and wiping her mouth): This is very embarrassing. I simply can’t understand it —

Bobby: I can. You’re tight as a tick.

Matilda (at last thinking what to say): I only smelled it at first, Herr Lohkamp. Then I took a nip for my sciatica. Then the Devil got hold of me. (she draws herself up): Anyhow, you ought not to lead an old woman into temptation, leaving bottles about.

Bobby: It isn’t the first time. (he takes another bottle from the cupboard and looks at it) You drank Herr Koster’s best — and left the stuff we give to customers.

Matilda (grinning): I know what’s good. But you won’t tell, will you, Herr Lohkamp? — and me a poor widow?

Bobby: Not this time.

Jupp bursts into the office.

Jupp: Herr Lohkamp! The customer — the customer!

He is closely followed by Lenz and Koster.

Lenz (to Bobby): We’ve got to sell that Cadillac.

(his eyes, shining with an idea, rove around the office)

CUT TO:

34 THE GATE —

— through which Blumenthal has just entered, looking about with the canny eye of a successful middle-aged business man. He has a dead-pan but not without humor.

35 THE OFFICE

Koster brushing his hair. Bobby looking out the window into the court.

Bobby: Look at that expression. Suspicious already.

Lenz (out of sight): Remember the prices. Ask seven thousand. If he’s a low cur, take forty-five hundred; if he’s a maniac, forty-four hundred. But at that price, a curse goes with it. Go down fighting with your fist on his wallet.

Koster: Right.

(he goes out)

Lenz (still out of sight): I’m going to put on an act.

Bobby follows Koster out.

CUT TO:

36 KOSTER —

— coming out of the office into the courtyard and meeting Blumenthal.

Koster (cordially): My name’s Koster.

Blumenthal (offering his hand): Blumenthal.

Koster: You’ve come about the Cadillac? (Blumenthal nods) She’s over here.

Blumenthal (dryly): So I see.

Koster gives him an appraising glance. They have walked across the courtyard. Bobby has started the engine of the car.

Koster (taking a long breath): Good motor, good tires, good paint, dandy running condition. And for a big body, that hood is remarkably light. (he turns off the engine and raises the hood) See, you can work it with one hand. (but he and Bobby struggle with four hands to close it. Then Koster bangs the doors and rattles the handles) Nothing worn. Tight as a glove. Try them. (he takes his hand away. The handle comes with it. He hastily replaces it. Bobby turns on the engine again. Blumenthal nods in a bored way) Windows stay put at any height. Unbreakable glass — and that’s something — (he points at the battered Ford) — Why only today on the road —

Blumenthal (uninterested): All cars have unbreakable glass.

Koster (a little nervously): Horn — (Bobby sounds it) — pockets, seats, switchboard, lighter — Have a cigarette?

Blumenthal: I don’t smoke.

CUT TO:

37 THE GATE

— which Lenz is banging shut as if he had just come in. He has removed his unionalls and is amazingly spruced up — coat, tie, hat, cane and pigskin gloves. He compares the office number with a newspaper in his hand and walks up to Koster.

Lenz: Is there a Cadillac for sale here? (Koster nods, speechless) Can I see it?

Bobby (playing up): Here it is. But perhaps you won’t mind waiting a minute. Have a seat in the office.

Lenz listens to the engine which is still humming. His face is critical, then appreciative. He nods and goes toward the office.

Blumenthal (practically): What’s the car cost?

Koster: Seven thousand marks — (more sternly) Seven thousand marks net.

Blumenthal (snorting): Too much.

Koster: If you drove it, you’d feel differently. How about a trial run?

Blumenthal: Trial runs don’t prove anything. After you buy it you find out what’s the matter. (Bobby and Koster look dismayed) No, I’ll call you up. Good morning.

To their distress he suddenly turns away and strides very quickly out of the courtyard.

Koster (starting after him too late): Now, Mr. Blumenthal —

Mr. Blumenthal passes through the gate.

CUT TO:

38 THE OFFICE DOOR

Lenz coming out. He is hatless and coatless and is getting back into his work suit. The cane still dangles from his arm.

Lenz (proud of himself): Well? How did I do? I saw you were up against it, and I thought I’d lend a hand.

Koster (glum at missing the sale): I recognized my new suit.

Bobby: Where did you get the hot gloves?

Lenz: The Tax Collector left them. The cane too —

(he brandishes it; then breaks off suddenly and stares toward the gate)

Bobby (oblivious to this): You ought to go into vaudeville.

He sees the look in Lenz’s eye and turns; Blumenthal has come back in and is striding briskly across the court.

Koster (nervously): Oh — hello, Mr. Blumenthal.

Blumenthal (glancing at Lenz with amusement): I see — you make your customers work for you. All joking aside, what do you want for that bus?

Bobby (sternly): Seven thousand marks.

Koster (less sternly): Six thousand marks.

Blumenthal: I’ll give you five thousand.

The Comrades groan.

Koster (pleadingly): Five thousand eight hundred.

Blumenthal: Five thousand five hundred — and you’re tickled to death. I could easily knock you down another thousand. (a pause — the Comrades look at each other. They agree in silence) It’s a go! I want it in three days — license, new plates and all.

Koster (really pleased): Sold! And we’ll throw in these cut-glass ash trays.

(he takes one from a shelf and holds it up)

DISSOLVE TO:

39 A GLASS OF FOAMING BEER —

— held aloft by Koster. The Comrades and Jupp, with Matilda in the background, are gathered around the outdoor table.

Koster: — So I am proud to say that on the occasion of his thirtieth birthday, Bobby Lohkamp becomes a full-fledged member of the firm of Koster and Company.

(cheers)

Lenz (indicating bottles on the table): This stuff is as old as he is — and too good for this lousy hole. I move we go and have supper in the country — finish up a big day in the great outdoors. If we each take two bottles and put them in Heinrich, the road-spook —

General approval, as we

DISSOLVE TO:

40 “HEINRICH,” THE AUTOMOBILE —

— rolling leisurely along a country road at twilight. The Comrades are in street clothes. Koster is driving; Lenz is looking at a newspaper and singing with Bobby.

Lenz and Bobby (in chorus): Hail to thee

— O’er the sea,

— Fatherland.[“Ubers Meer Gruss Ich Dich Heimatland,” a popular German song of the period.]

Koster (interrupting): You’re in the fatherland. That song is for when you’re away.

(a pause.)

Lenz (brooding): We are away. Is this the fatherland — torn with poverty and despair, without future, without hope?

Koster (soberly): We didn’t talk like that in 1918 when things were worse.

Lenz: We still believed. And now, we’ve stopped believing. (pause) There’s only work to make you forget that there’s nothing to work for. (pause) Work and an occasional bottle.

Koster: What do you think of that gloomy talk, young Bobby? (Bobby, absorbed, doesn’t answer) Answer your superior officer!

Bobby (recollecting himself): Excuse me. I must have a touch of Spring Fever.

CUT TO:

41 A HUGE BUICK TOWN CAR —

— drawing up and overtaking them. As it comes abreast, a hand appears momentarily in the window and discards a half-smoked cigarette, which lands with a shower of sparks in “Heinrich.”

CUT TO:

42 INTERIOR OF “HEINRICH”

The cigarette falls in Bobby’s lap; he starts and gropes for it.

Koster (muttering fiercely): So you think you can pass our old Heinrich, do you?

Lenz: Little he knows that Heinrich has the great heart of a racer. Take him, Otto.

“Heinrich” has fallen a little behind the Buick — now he steps on it and draws abreast again. We see:

43 FOUR LIGHTS IN A ROW —

— the two crazy, patched eyes of “Heinrich,” and the big bright eyes of the Buick as they appear at a distance in the twilight and RACE TOWARD THE CAMERA.

Three times we see this, each time at a faster pace. Once, two other cars approach from the two sides of a crossroad, their lights stopping abruptly and making a great blurr, through which plunge the two racers.

CUT TO:

44 GLIMPSE OF THE COMRADES

Lenz’s newspaper blown against his face.

CUT TO:

45 THE BUICK DRIVER’S FACE —

— set and annoyed as he pats the arm of an invisible feminine companion at his side.

CUT TO:

46 “HEINRICH’S” LIGHTS —

— enlarging, drawing ahead and racing directly toward us in victory.

DISSOLVE TO:

47 EXTERIOR A WAYSIDE INN —

— idyllic and vine-covered, built from an old water mill. A stream still turns the wheel with a gentle, splashing sound. Within the restaurant a mechanical piano is playing “Goodbye My Dearest Guards Officer.”

“Heinrich” snorts up, and the Comrades get out.

Koster (sniffing): Liver and onions.

Lenz (gently laying his hand on the steaming radiator): I think it’s the gear-box.

Koster: Don’t forget the drinks.

As they take out the bottles, the Buick they passed pulls up and stops, and the man at the wheel steps out.

Erich Breuer is about forty, a parvenu and a profiteer. He has modeled himself on the aristocrat, but the veneer is thin and the butcher boy is often in evidence, especially when he is angry or at a disadvantage. He wears a camel’s hair coat, a monocle and yellow gloves which he pulls off as he looks angrily at the car that defeated him.

Lenz and Bobby wear superior expressions.

Koster (in a low, warning voice): Great Snakes! We don’t want two fights today.

Breuer (addressing them): What kind of a junk is that?

Lenz (coolly, after a moment’s pause): Did you say something?

Breuer (testily): I asked what make it was.

Lenz (insolently): Well, the grandpa was a sewing machine, the grandma was an old radio, and the pappa was a machine gun — (he breaks off) From the other side of the Buick there has appeared a lovely girl. Patricia Hollmann is in her middle twenties, stylish and beautiful — and something more. She seems to carry light and music with her — one should almost hear the music of the “Doll Dance” whenever she comes into the scene — and she moves through the chaos of the time with charm and brightness, even when there are only sad things to say.

Seeing her, the Comrades suddenly change their attitude. She smiles and they smile back at her.

Breuer (not knowing what to say): My name’s Breuer.

Lenz (introducing): Lenz — Koster — Lohkamp. Why don’t you show Mr. Breuer the car, Otto?

Koster (very politely): With pleasure.

Breuer (more pleasantly): I’d like to see it. You wiped me off the map.

Otto Koster and Breuer move toward “Heinrich.” Lenz and Bobby, struck by Pat’s beauty, are a little shy.

Bobby: It’s a lovely night.

Pat (quite at ease): Gorgeous.

Bobby (embarrassed): Unusually mild.

Lenz (very gravely): Terribly mild.

This doesn’t sound quite right to him. He goes to join Koster and Breuer beside the car, leaving Bobby and Pat alone. They take a few steps so that the mill wheel, dripping water, revolves directly behind them. Pat is very slim, very lovely in the uncertain light from the inn; she is an English type, blonde, with silky brown hair, face narrow and pale, cheeks rather wan, long thin hands and big, bright, passionate eyes.

Bobby (admiringly): We didn’t know there was anyone so — you know — in the car. Or we’d have let you win.

Pat (her voice is slow, deep, exciting, slightly hoarse): But why should you?

Bobby: It wasn’t fair. We can do ninety-five.

Pat (whistles and puts her hands in her pockets): Ninety-five!

Bobby: You couldn’t know that, could you? I think Herr Breuer is annoyed.

Pat (shrugs her shoulders): One ought to be able to lose sometimes.

Bobby (after a short pause): Is that your husband you’re with?

Pat: No. He’s a friend. Are you three brothers?

Bobby (surprised): No. Do we look alike?

Pat: Not exactly — (looking at him) — yet you have the same look — a very proud look.

Bobby (laughs): We run a repair shop.

Herr Breuer comes back enthusiastically into the scene, followed by Lenz and Koster.

Breuer: I don’t mind losing now. Mr. Koster has been a speedway racer — won the Grand Prize at Hamburg this year. I’m proud that it was so close. (he laughs — cars are his hobby) Mr. Koster and his friends are supping with us. (he claps Koster on the shoulder) Hey, old man.

DISSOLVE TO:

48 THE INTERIOR OF THE WAYSIDE INN —

— rustic and cozy with a blazing fire. The turning mill is visible through the window, and the rushing stream is audible in the room. The party has finished supper and is drinking wine. There are no other guests. Breuer, a little drunk and very talkative, sits beside Koster.

Breuer: Koster, when you take a curve at high speed, do you use the brake or change gears?

Koster: I just turn the wheel.

Breuer laughs as if that were an excellent joke.

Breuer: I drove a cab in the war — a staff car — in Berlin. It was better than the front. (he laughs again. Koster nods tolerantly)

Lenz and Bobby sit on either side of Pat. Bobby stares shyly, admiringly at Pat. Lenz is doing the “Floating Sugar Trick.” (Details appended at end of script)

Lenz: Now — sink! (the floating cube of sugar sinks to the bottom of the cup)

Pat (friendly, not supercilious): Extraordinary!

Lenz: Thank you, Madame. (he looks at her) You know, this is a great event for us.

Pat (surprised): To come here?

Lenz: To meet you. (he looks around) Time has ceased to flow on for a minute — as if we’d stopped in a lovely pool. (he smiles) You see, our lives are not very exciting.

Pat: You seem cheery enough. (looks at Bobby’s bruise) And pugnacious.

Lenz: Oh, we’re that. We go armed. But when we meet someone like you we take off the armor.

Pat: You mean you’re — political?

Lenz: Well — I have my sympathies — but Koster and young Bobby here keep out of it. (more intensely) No — I was speaking of the struggle for existence in this country of ours.

Bobby (afraid this is too grave for such a shining lady): I like the way you dress.

The tension of Lenz’s seriousness relaxes.

Pat: My only good costume. I feel very English in it — My mother was English. That’s why I’m Patricia.

Bobby: Patricia.

Lenz: Pat. That’s a fine name — easy to say. My name’s Gottfried. His name is Bobby. (Bobby is a little awed by the familiarity) He only tasted the war — he didn’t get boiled very hard — he can still be saved.

Bobby (flustered): What do you mean saved?

Lenz (staring straight ahead): Saved for life — (the radio begins to play “Falling in Love Again.” Lenz remembers something) By Heavens, it’s his birthday! Where’s the rum? (he reaches for it and fills the glasses)

Pat (to Bobby): How old?

Bobby (ruefully): Thirty.

Pat (with an appraising provocative look): That’s a very fine age — thirty.

DISSOLVE TO:

49 EXTERIOR OF THE INN

Under an arbor, Bobby and Pat are walking toward the cars, followed by Koster, Breuer and Lenz. Bobby and Pat are silent — the other three are singing the “Song of the Argonnerwald.” Bobby is carrying Pat’s cloak. She looks up at the stars as she puts it on — her lips are slightly open in a smile. They reach the cars.

Bobby (attentive): Do you think Herr Breuer is fit to drive?

Pat: I think so.

Bobby (anxiously): If you’re not quite sure, one of us could go with you.

Pat: It’s all right. He drives better when he’s had a little.

Bobby: But not so surely. (prolonging the moment) Let’s hope he’ll do all right. Can I phone you in the morning and see if you got home? We’re responsible — with that birthday rum.

(the others come up. Breuer gets into the car)

Pat: All right, if you like. Western two seven nine six.

She gets into the Buick. The Comrades bow and wave as the Buick roars away. Bobby notes the phone number on a match packet.

Lenz: I wonder what she finds in that auto catalogue? Wonderful girl, oh?

Bobby (pretending indifference): Who am I to say?

Lenz (teasingly): What do you live for, Bobby?

Bobby (abstracted): I’ve been asking myself that for a long time.

Lenz (with meaning): Maybe I could tell you.

(he gets into “Heinrich”)

Unobserved, Bobby leans over and pats “Heinrich.”

Bobby (with feeling): Thank you, Heinrich!

FADE OUT

50 FADE IN:

COURTYARD OF THE REPAIR SHOP —

— on a sunny morning. The radio in the office is playing “Tea for Two.” The wrecked Ford is in process of reconstruction. Bobby takes his overalls from the plum tree in the yard, disclosing to his amazement that it has blossomed beautifully during the night. Matilda, broom in hand, stands beside him.

Bobby: Well, look at the old plum tree!

Matilda: Every Spring it’s a fresh miracle. And the smell — just like rum — (sniffs) Fine old rum.

Jupp comes up to the tree and picks some blossoms.

Jupp (to Bobby): Good morning.

Bobby (idly): What’s the idea?

Jupp: For the ladies. I give them a spray with each gallon of gas. Helps business. (he retires)

Lenz’s head appears from beneath the Ford. He lies on a creeper.

Lenz: Say, Bob, it’s occurred to me that something ought to be done about that girl of Herr Breuer’s.

Bobby (starting): What do you mean?

Lenz: Just that. What are you glaring at me about?

Bobby: I’m not glaring.

(he puts on his overalls)

Lenz (crawling out, covered with grime): You are glaring. What was her name? Pat what?

Bobby (after a pause): How should I know?

Lenz (on his feet): You wrote down her address — I saw you.

Bobby (quickly): On a match packet — and I threw away the packet.

Lenz (seizing him by the hair): Threw it away? After Otto and I spent an hour with Breuer so you could make a hit. Threw it away? Holy Cats! (considers) Maybe Otto knows it.

Bobby: No he doesn’t.

Lenz (wrathfully): Of all the blase infants! You twerp, you! Don’t you know that was a wonderful girl? (ecstatically) Let me tell you, she was manna from heaven. You didn’t have the brains to appreciate her. Did you see those eyes? — of course not — you were looking at yourself in a glass of brandy.

Bobby (picks up a hand pump): Oh, pipe down.

Lenz (tenderly): And her hands — long and slender like Romaine salad — or endives —

Matilda (sweeping in the b.g.): I declare, you make my mouth water.

Lenz: Otto and I understand such things. At last we find a perfect girl — not only beautiful, but with atmosphere — (glaring at Bobby) Do you know what atmosphere is, you low-lifer?

Bobby (working the hand pump): Sure. The stuff that comes out of here.

Lenz (pityingly): Atmosphere is radiance, glamour, warmth, mystery. It is what gives beauty a soul and makes it alive.

He is gesturing passionately. Suddenly he stops, his arms fall to his side.

CUT TO:

51 WHAT HE SEES:

PUPPI, THE INJURED BAKER, AND A TOUGH, DUMPY WOMAN —

— who have come into the courtyard. Puppi wears his arm in a sling. Matilda looks disapprovingly at the woman.

Puppi: Good morning. (he looks at Bobby and Lenz and somehow his haughty manner fails in mid-speech) Isn’t my car ready?

Lenz (brought down to earth): Your what? Your car — not quite. That was a terrible beating you gave it. Another three days.

(he turns indifferently to the Ford)

A horn sounds and Koster, in the Cadillac, drives out of the work shop and stops momentarily beside the group.

Koster (to Puppi): How-de-do.

Puppi: Say, I wish you could hurry up my car.

The Woman (looking admiringly at the Cadillac): Is this it?

Koster: No. This one is sold. I’m going to deliver it now. But your Ford will look like new when we’re done with it.

Puppi (indicating the wreck to the woman): That one’s mine.

Woman (sniffishly): O that. I thought you had a real car.

Lenz is back under the car and Bobby has become absorbed in something he conceals in his hand. Taking advantage of this, Puppi breaks a big sprig from the plum tree, gives it to the woman and grasps her arm to leave. Only Matilda sees and sweeps them out with a haughty flourish of the broom.

CUT TO:

52 WHAT BOBBY IS LOOKING AT:

INSERT:

A BATTERED MATCH PACKET —

— on which is written “Western 2796”. The lines seem to wriggle like snakes or tongues of fire, as if it has been burning his pocket.

53 BOBBY —

— starts at the illusion, then glances carefully at Lenz, and we FOLLOW HIM to the interior of the office. He hesitates, picks up the phone, turns off the radio — just as Lenz begins a terrific banging in the courtyard.

Bobby (lingeringly into the phone): Atmosphere… I beg your pardon. Western two seven nine six.

Bobby waits for the connection with a beatific smile. The banging dies away as we —

CUT TO:

54 A SWITCHBOARD —

— with a white winged angel sitting at it.

Angel (sweetly): One moment, please — I’ll connect you with heaven.

CUT TO:

55 THE PEARLY GATES

St. Peter, the caretaker, sitting beside another switchboard.

St. Peter (cackling): I think she’s in.

CUT TO:

56 BOBBY’S FACE —

— still ecstatic, changing to human embarrassment as Pat’s voice says:

Pat: Hello.

Bobby: Oh, hello. (with an artificial laugh) This is that man.

Pat (calmly): What man?

Bobby (helplessly): That man you met the other night.

Pat (gentle, husky): I’ve met lots of men — on lots of other nights.

Bobby (frowning): Well — I don’t know exactly how to describe myself.

Pat (mischievous): Must you?

Bobby: I’m one of the men who beat you.

Pat (pretending alarm): Really? You must have the wrong woman.

Bobby: In our car, I mean.

Pat (remembering): Oh-h-h. Of course — (with more enthusiasm) — you’re the one who was so upset about the state of the nation.

Bobby: No — I was —

Pat: Then you must be the one who sang with Herr Breuer.

Bobby (very apologetic): No. I —

Pat (as if thinking): Was there another — ? (she laughs and stops teasing) Of course I remember you.

Bobby (hurriedly): I wondered if you got home all right. Did you?

Pat: Let’s see, did I? Why yes, here I am.

Bobby: That’s fine. Well — (in wild embarrassment) — goodbye.

Pat: Did you call up to say that?

Bobby: No, we — we just weren’t very busy.

Pat (gently ironic): Oh, a compliment. Oddly enough I won’t be busy next Tuesday evening.

Bobby (now utterly confused): That is funny. (a forced laugh) Well, goodbye.

Pat: Till Tuesday evening.

Bobby (automatically): Till Tuesday evening. What?

The phone is dead. He wriggles the receiver, and we —

CUT TO:

57 A SATYR, WHO HAS REPLACED THE ANGEL AT THE SWITCHBOARD —

— pulling out the plug with a sardonic expression.

CUT TO:

58 BOBBY —

— frowns, then reconsidering, smiles with satisfaction, and puts the match packet carefully away, as the scene —

DISSOLVES TO:

59 ALFONS’ BAR AND RESTAURANT —

— a neighborhood place, plain but with a certain distinction. Some day rich people will “discover” it. Alfons, the proprietor, is not introduced at present, but is in sight behind the bar.

The Comrades are drinking. Bobby wears his best clothes, not very good ones, and is drinking for confidence. Lenz has a strip of adhesive tape on his face.

Lenz (heatedly): The country’s mad. Little kids in soldier suits strutting around shrieking that they represent the Fatherland.

Koster: You let it come too near, you, Gottfried. Don’t do that. (pause) There’s nothing to hold on to right now. Things are rushing along like a stream of water. (to Bobby) What’s more important is why Bobby’s disguised like a gigolo.

Lenz (feeling Bobby’s new tie): A big date, eh? Who is it?

Koster: Why shouldn’t he have a date? Go to it, Bob, you’re just ripe for love.

Lenz: He has the necessary simplicity.

Koster (defending Bobby): Keep it. It’s a gift of God that if you lose, you never get back.

Lenz (cynically): Don’t let it get you down, Baby — you can’t help being born simple; just don’t die simple.

Koster: He’s envious, Bobby. He’s really the last of the romantics, but he’s afraid of the front line. (enthusiastically) Walk into it, Bobby. Remember — Parsifal was stupid — or he wouldn’t have won the Holy Grail.

Bobby: Go on — ride me.

Lenz (remorseful): We’re not riding you. In bad times, simplicity is priceless. (lightly) A mature mind, mine for instance — (he winks) — sees too many obstacles and gets uncertain before it starts. Knowledge may make you free but it certainly doesn’t make you happy.

Koster (raising his glass): Here’s to simplicity and all that goes with it, love and faith in the future, the dream of happiness, paradise regained. (he drinks) Bobby, we’ll be with you in spirit.

The radio is playing “Falling in Love Again” as we

DISSOLVE TO:

60 THE HALL OF AN APARTMENT HOUSE

(The following scene is an attempt to suggest the feeling of a rather shy young man calling on a girl.): Bobby walks with leaden, slow-motion steps into the elevator. To his alarm, it instantly whisks upward with a roar — almost as its gates close they open again to eject him. He casts a reproachful look at the elevator boy. Must he continue? Unseen hands seem to push him from behind, so that he leans backward in protest against the shoving. But the door opens even as he presses the bell and, following a maid, he is shoved like lightning along a hall. The hands seem to leave him, and he stands, limp, inside.

61 PAT’S APARTMENT

— small but furnished with remnants of magnificence. Portraits of generals and courtiers, a soft carpet, cozy little armchairs in faded satin, rolling tea table with tiny sandwiches, cakes and cocktail shaker. A small radio plays a tinkling minuet. Pat is standing to receive him.

Pat (very natural and gracious): How do you do, Mr. Bobby.

Bobby: Well, am I the right man?

Pat (laughing): That remains to be seen. Have a cocktail?

Bobby: Thanks. (as she pours, he looks around) This room is like something in a play.

Pat (offering a tray): Canape?

Bobby (takes one): Thanks. If I drop anything, remember I’m used to eating off of newspapers at the repair shop. I thought you told me you were poor.

Pat: I am. I’m living beyond my means.

They drink.

Bobby: That was good. Felt warm.

Pat (gravely): Then it’s a good time to tell you the truth — I’ve got to leave you by nine o’clock.

Bobby (disappointed) By nine?

Pat: Unfortunately. I only found out about it a few minutes ago, and I didn’t know your address. It’s a sort of business affair. I’m trying to get a job. (he looks at her cynically) So shall we go right away?

She takes his arm and they go down the hall.

DISSOLVE TO:

62 THE STREET OUTSIDE PAT’S APARTMENT — TWILIGHT

A decayed, once-fashionable quarter. They turn down the street.

Pat (breathing deeply): I’m always so glad coming out that door. There was a time I thought I would never leave that apartment again.

Bobby: How was that?

Pat (evasively): I had to stay in bed. There wasn’t so much to eat right after the war, you know. I grew too fast and ate too little.

Bobby: How long were you in bed?

Pat: A year, but it seems a lifetime.

They come to a tea room at the corner of the street.

Bobby (stopping): How about this place?

Pat: It looks a little — stodgy, doesn’t it?

Bobby realizes she is used to the best and feels rather miserable.

Bobby: This was probably a mistake.

Pat: What do you mean?

Bobby: I mean I ought to take you —

Pat: Take me where you go.

Bobby: Oh, no! I go to Alfons’ bar — but it’s rough. No place for a girl like you.

Pat: It’s just exactly the place for a girl like me. (looking doubtful, he signals a taxi) I’m really very easily pleased — very superficial and frivolous.

(a taxi stops and they get in.)

CUT TO:

63 INT. OF TAXI

Pat: When I got out of bed, I decided to live as I liked, even if only for a little while.

Bobby: Why not?

Pat: Everyone said I was a fool — that I ought to save my money and go to work. I wanted to be very gay and very irresponsible — and I was.

Bobby (fascinated): I think it was a brave decision.

Pat (remembering): Ach! I was frightened enough some times — as if I was in the wrong seat at the theatre. But it’s all over now.

Bobby: When do you go to work?

Pat: In a week. Then I’ll be too tired to go out in the evening.

(their eyes meet. It is a challenge, but quiet, almost careless. Bobby responds.)

Bobby: That doesn’t leave us much time.

CUT TO:

64 EXTERIOR ALFONS’ CAFE

They get out of the taxi.

Bobby (to newsboy at the door): Mr. Koster and Mr. Lenz have left, haven’t they?

Newsboy: Oh yes.

Bobby: Good. (to Pat) All right — come on in.

Pat: What’s the matter?

Bobby: Two especially tough men I didn’t want you to see, that’s all.

(they go in)

CUT TO:

65 INTERIOR ALFONS’ CAFE

They go through the crowded restaurant where several people salute Bobby. Four tarts at a table start to do likewise but refrain when they see Pat. They exchange winks. Bobby and Pat sit down in an alcove. Alfons, a huge gorilla of a man with sleeves rolled high on hairy arms, approaches them.

Bobby: A double whiskey, Alfons, and something to eat.

Pat (smiling): I’ll have a cocktail.

Alfons (he likes Pat): We have Bavarian sausage and sauerkraut, milady.

Bobby (to Pat): All right?

(Pat nods)

Bobby (to Alfons): Fine.

(Alfons goes)

Pat (looking around): I love this place. Do you come here often?

Bobby: It’s our headquarters. The only trouble is the (lowers his voice) — choir singing.

Alfons reappears and puts down the drinks.

Alfons (to Pat): Do you like choir singing?

Bobby: We love choir singing.

Bobby downs his drink as Alfons puts a record on the phonograph and a male choir wheezes out “Silence in the Forest.”

Bobby: Another double.

Alfons, helped by a waiter, serves two steaming plates of sausages.

Alfons (to Pat): You look as if you loved good singing.

Pat (playing up): Only choirs.

Alfons (interested): Now that’s funny. I do too.

66 EXTERIOR OF ALFONS’ CAFE

Lenz and Koster.

Lenz (to newsboy): Seen Mr. Lohkamp tonight?

Newsboy: Yes, sir. He’s inside.

Lenz: Oh he is — is he?

Newsboy: He asked if you were inside and when I said no, he went in.

Koster and Lenz exchange a surprised glance and go in.

CUT TO:

67 INTERIOR OF ALFONS’ CAFE — BOBBY AND PAT

Bobby (with feeling): I never realized before what a fine place this is.

Pat: It is cozy.

Bobby (lowering his voice): We’re in a sort of dugout — shells are screaming overhead but they can’t touch us.

Pat (falling into the play): Are you sure?

Bobby: Yes — (he looks at her gravely) I don’t know exactly why, but for some reason you and I are safe.

Pat: For the present.

Bobby: That’s all you can ever ask in a war.

Pat (curious): Are we in a war?

Bobby: My friends and I have found life to be a war.

Pat (thoughtfully): You are very fond of each other, aren’t you?

The voices of Lenz and Koster from out of sight:

Lenz & Koster (o.s.): Why, you two-faced liar, you hypocrite, you low heel! You snake in the grass, you fresh punk, you baby-faced double-crosser!

PAN TO LENZ AND KOSTER, drawing up chairs.

Pat (laughing): Why, hello. Do sit down.

Lenz (icily): We wondered if you got home safely last week, but our friend — : (ironic emphasis on the word): — lost the address.

Bobby: I only had the phone number.

Roster (ignoring him): You got home safely?

Pat (laughs): Herr Breuer knocked over a lamppost but it didn’t matter. There are lots more.

Koster: Waiter, some — . What are you drinking? Let’s have the same. You see, Pat, we three share everything.

Pat: I hope that includes me — (she looks at her watch) — but only till nine o’clock. I don’t want to keep Herr Breuer waiting.

Bobby (suddenly blue): Oh, waiter — another double whiskey. (he looks at his plate and says ruefully) Some delicacies come in very thin slices.

DISSOLVE TO:

68 EXTERIOR PAT’S DOOR

The elevator waits — the boy looks at Pat and Bobby from the cage.

Bobby (rather stiffly): I can’t help hoping you won’t combine business — with pleasure.

Momentarily surprised, Pat stares at him. Then getting his meaning, she suddenly laughs.

Pat: You baby. Good heavens, what a baby you are!

Bobby (blunderingly): Well, if you — anyway — you think I’m a halfwit.

Pat (gently): No, I don’t. (she looks at the elevator boy and points for him to go down) The gentleman can walk.

The elevator boy nods. As he goes down, Pat suddenly comes into Bobby’s arms — a kiss, complete but only one, and she is gone.

DISSOLVE TO:

69 EXTERIOR BOBBY’S BOARDING HOUSE

— a three-story house that has seen better days. Bobby enters.

70 BOBBY ON A FLIGHT OF DREARY, UNCARPETED STAIRS

Near the top he suddenly starts back as if at an apparition.

CUT TO:

71 THE STAIR LANDING

Hasse, a poor accountant, a drooping, beaten little man, has run out of his room onto the landing. He is followed by a stream of feminine abuse.

Woman’s Voice: — and stay out, you little rat. Us move to a cheaper room! Never! Not on your life! What could be worse than this one? Ach! What a husband!

The door bangs.

Hasse (explaining desolately to Bobby): I want to move only because I’m afraid — I’m afraid. Two more men were fired from the office today — I’ll be next, see if I’m not.

Bobby (a little tight): Cheer up, Herr Hasse.

Hasse: I work overtime every night and always these reproaches.

Bobby: You ought to beat her — or else take her to the movies. Take her to a loving movie. Let her dream.

Hasse (bitterly): You’re lucky to be alone.

Bobby (seriously): Do you think it’s fun to be alone? That’s no good either — take it from me.

The sound of a glass breaking within the room. Bobby has an impulse and goes back downstairs.

CUT TO:

72 CORRIDOR BELOW

Several doors are opened suspiciously. From one peeks the head of Frau Zalewska, the landlady.

Frau Zalewska: Good evening, Mr. Lohkamp.

The heads of other boarders peer out as Bobby goes along the lower corridor toward the phone. He takes up the receiver.

Bobby: Western two seven nine six.

The heads regard him. When he looks at one, it disappears, but another pops out across from it, so that his own head jerks from side to side spotting them. There are some coats hanging beside the phone. He makes a sort of tent of them and puts the phone inside.

Bobby: Hello.

Pat’s Voice: Oh, hello.

Bobby: Having the business interview?

Pat’s Voice: It’s all over. I’m on my way to bed — a bit feverish.

Bobby: I’m sorry. (he pushes aside the coats and takes a breath of cool air) You never heard the name Robert before, did you?

Pat’s Voice (sleepily): Yes.

Bobby: Let’s hear you pronounce it. Say “Robert is terrific”.

Pat’s Voice (laughing): Robert is a baby. And I like him that way.

Bobby: Now try “Bob”. “Bob is a — “

Pat’s Voice (softly, slowly): Bob drinks too much. Now, I’ve got to hang up — I’ve taken a sleeping pill.

Bobby: Goodnight — sleep well.

CUT TO:

73 INTERIOR PAT’S APARTMENT

Pat, full dressed and wide awake, hangs up the phone and stretches out on the couch, smoking. Herr Breuer is lounging familiarly in a chair.

Herr Breuer (irritated): He has his nerve.

Pat: He’s just a boy.

(Breuer looks at her narrowly)

Breuer: Your taste seems to be deteriorating.

Pat (pointedly): When one has left one’s own world, people are much the same.

(Breuer takes this hard)

Breuer: You haven’t answered about the phonograph shop.

Pat: I’d like it. (smiling to herself) I could sell records of choirs.

Breuer (puzzled): What do you mean?

Pat: I was just thinking of something. (her expression changes) But I won’t take that ridiculous salary. I’ll take a commission, that’s all.

Breuer (earnestly): Pat, I want to help you. It’d be a year before a shop would pay you enough to live on.

Pat (carelessly): Then let it go. I’m sorry. I’ve thought it over, and I don’t want anything that way. Pour me some more champagne.

DISSOLVE TO:

74 THE COURTYARD OF THE REPAIR SHOP NEXT MORNING

Seated in the repaired Ford are Puppi, the baker, and his girlfriend. Puppi is counting out money to Koster who stands in overalls beside the car.

Koster: You’ll find it’s better than ever.

Puppi’s Woman (sullenly): That’s not saying much. (she nudges Puppi) Ask him about that other car.

Puppi (unwillingly): My fiancee thinks she likes that other car you had — that Cadillac.

Koster: I told you, it’s sold and delivered.

Puppi’s Woman (very disappointed): That was really a refined car.

Koster (calculating the strength of her desire): Maybe the man who bought it will sell it. We could call him up. (raising his voice) Hey, Bobby! (he looks around) He was here a minute ago.

THE CAMERA MOVES TO SHOW BOBBY, unseen by the others, asleep in the back seat of the Ford. He has a hangover and his hands press a piece of dirty waste against one side of his head, an oil can against the other.

Puppi (wanting to drop the subject of the Cadillac): Never mind. I’m sure it would be too expensive.

He starts the engine, violently awakening Bobby who, in a nightmare, jumps up and raises the oil can as if to bean Puppi. He recovers himself.

Koster: Bobby, you’re a persuasive fellow.

Bobby (yelling — still dazed): What?

Koster: Do you think we could buy back that Cadillac? (he winks) The lady has taken a fancy to it.

Puppi: No she hasn’t, really.

Bobby (perking up): Let me try to get back the Cadillac. (to the woman) It certainly would become you better than this.

The woman, beaming, throws her arms around Puppi’s neck.

The Woman: Oh, sweetheart.

Koster (thoughtfully): He might sell for seven thousand marks —

Puppi (starts his car rolling slowly): Ach, that would be suicide!

Bobby (running along beside): We’d take this off your hands.

Puppi: Never.

Bobby (sprinting): A car fit for a queen — I’ll find out.

As the car passes through the gate, Bobby is stopped sharply by the fence, but his excitement remains.

DISSOLVE TO:

75 INTERIOR OF THE OFFICE

Bobby is hanging up the phone. Koster listening.

Bobby (excitedly to Koster): He’ll sell — for six thousand marks. Five hundred more profit for us.

Koster (jubilant): We’ve got the landlord stopped this month. Rags to riches in a week.

Bobby starts to dance — then groans and sinks down in a chair with his hand on his head. Koster pours himself a drink and offers the bottle to Bobby.

Bobby (shaking his head): I’m fed up with this damned boozing.

Koster: Just as well.

Bobby (after a pause): Say, Otto, you’ve been all over the world — South America and everything — (he indicates a picture of a beautiful dancing Senorita on the phone table) — tell me this. Does a man in love always behave like a sucker?

Koster: Always. (pause) The whole thing is a racket — mother nature’s favorite racket. (points out the window) It’s like that plum tree — making itself more beautiful than it ever will be again. Love is a swindle — it couldn’t be put over on the square.

Bobby: Do people in love always make fools of themselves?

Koster: A man can’t make a fool of himself in a woman’s eyes by anything he does for her sake. Do anything you like — turn cartwheels for her, dress up like Santa Claus, write her a poem in Chinese, pass out on her doorstep — only one thing to avoid —

Lent (his voice only): Don’t — ever — make — sense.

They jump, and the CAMERA MOVES to show Lenz looking in a window.

Bobby (to Lenz): Did you ever take a girl out and get drunk?

Lenz: Often. (looks knowingly at Bobby) Did you act very cute last night? Well, don’t apologize. Send flowers. Only flowers. They cover up everything. (with his usual touch of cynicism) Even graves.

DISSOLVE TO:

76 A STREET — BOBBY

standing beside “Heinrich”, looking covetously over a wall at a lilac tree — then stealthily helping himself.

DISSOLVE TO:

77 THE LILAC BRANCH

held in Pat’s arm as they roll along the streets of the city. Evening. The lights shining.

Pat (dreamily): Wonderful air. It smells of spring.

Bobby: We can go out into the country. (Pat shivers) Are you cold? (she turns up her collar and tucks her hands in her coat pockets) Your dress is too light.

Pat (shakes her head): I don’t like heavy things. It’ll be nice when it’s really warm this Summer. (he spreads a robe over her lap) Cold makes you miserable.

Bobby (solicitously): Would it make you warm to drive?

Pat: I don’t know how.

Bobby (surprised): You can’t drive?

Pat (shakes her head): And once we had three cars.

Bobby (looking straight ahead): Herr Breuer might have taught you.

Pat: He likes girls to be helpless.

Bobby (critical): He would.

Pat (dreaming): If I had a car, I’d drive about the streets every evening — half awake, half dreaming. Then one wouldn’t need anyone else.

Bobby (thoughtful): You do need someone — in the evening.

Pat: Yes. It’s odd — when it turns dark you need someone.

Bobby (moved): Let me teach you to drive.

DISSOLVE TO:

78 THE COUNTRYSIDE —

— white with moonlight. The engine off. The shrilling of frogs.

Bobby (practical): — Now, we’ll start from the beginning again. First the ignition — a sort of spark —

Pat (with meaning): Everything starts with a spark.

(she starts the car running)

Bobby (indicating the directions): Remember — first speed — second speed — third speed. She goes into first speed. The car moves.

Pat (frightened): Heavens! It’s actually going!

Bobby: First speed is the strongest.

Pat: And the safest?

Bobby: Not always. Now, second speed. (a screech as he leans forward; his arm has gone around her) No, always the clutch.

Pat (laughing as his arm presses her): Always the clutch — for all speed.

Bobby: Now third — the fastest.

The car slows up.

Pat (appalled): What have I done?

Bobby: It’s in neutral.

Pat: How uninteresting. (with meaning) I don’t like neutral.

Bobby (getting it): Neither do I. (he leans toward her but at that moment, before the car quite stops, she gets it in third and they go forward. He cautions her) Not too fast.

Pat: What happens if you’re caught?

Bobby: No license. You’d go to jail.

Pat (laughing): The woman pays. Even in a car.

Bobby (sentimental): But even in a car — there’s always some place where it’s light and warm.

CUT TO:

79 CLOSE SHOT. THE LITTLE AREA AROUND THE DASHBOARD.

Their hands just touching.

DISSOLVE TO:

80 THEIR HANDS OVER A TABLE —

— in Alfons’ Cafe, later in the night. Another gay night, with music and a friendly crowd at the tables. Alfons behind the bar and superintending supper.

Bobby (romancing): — then I batted around the world on freighters — especially South America.

Pat: I’ve always wanted to go to South America.

Bobby (thinking hard): Well, there’s Rio de Janiero — and Buenos Aires.

Pat (expectantly): Yes?

Bobby (inventing): You roll down to Rio. It’s wonderful. Then — then you roll down to Buenos Aires. They have monkeys — no, they have coffee. Monkeys and coffee.

Pat (mock serious): All rolling around, I suppose. Did you stay there long?

Bobby: Oh yes — years. Mostly in Rio de Jan —

Pat (interrupting): I know — and Buenos Aires. I mean, did you go up the Amazon?

Bobby: There weren’t any Amazons. There was mostly coffee —

Pat: And monkeys.

Bobby (fascinated with himself): Yes. Monkeys and coffee. A big harbor and the cities white and high above it, and crocodiles and jaguars and orchids growing in the darkness — (he stops, suddenly ashamed of his romantics. The radio is playing) That’s a new American tune… it’s called “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love, Baby.”

Pat: It’s sort of sad. Tell me more about South America.

Bobby: Well —

(he takes out Koster’s picture of the Senorita which he has purloined from the frame in the garage, and hands it across the table; then suddenly he looks up to see Koster and Lenz standing beside them.)

Koster: I’d like to hear about South America, too.

Lenz: At last we know where he is every evening. Hello, Pat.

Koster: Has Bobby told you how he took us with him to South America?

Bobby (very flustered): No, I —

Koster (seeing the picture): Great Snakes! A live Senorita! What do you think of her, Gottfried?

Lenz (examining it): Not bad — her chassis is sprung. Is this the one who sued you for breach of promise, Bobby?

Bobby: Now look here —

Koster: No, that’s the one he married. Does she know you’re out tonight, Bobby?

Pat, amused, looks fondly at Bobby. Alfons comes up.

Alfons: A round of cocktails on the house — The Three Comrades — always together.

Pat: I’m afraid I’m — extra.

Koster: No, you’re not. We welcome you. One and all, we approve of you.

Alfons: And what will you have in honor of this? Some pork chops?

Pat: Divine.

Alfons: Waiter, the chops! (to the group) A wonderful pig — took two firsts.

The waiter sets down a tray of drinks and shows a dish of raw chops.

Koster (gloating): Very promising.

Alfons (raising his glass): Pros’t! To the new recruit — now an old soldier.

Smiling, Pat drinks with the Three Comrades.

DISSOLVE TO:

81 INTERIOR ALFONS’ CAFE

— several hours later. Alfons is closing up. Pat and the Three Comrades are moving toward the door. False dawn has come up outside, making a blue oblong of the door; through which we see a procession of horse-drawn wagons and dog carts passing. The drivers are chanting a folk song:

“In Einem Kuhlen Grunde”

Bobby, Lenz and Pat: Goodnight, Alfons.

Koster: Good morning, rather. Those are the carts coming into market.

Lenz: Come on — we’ll go to the market and buy all the flowers inthe world.

They run for the nearest wagon, one simply overflowing with piles of cut flowers. Koster and Lenz swing themselves up front with a good-natured peasant.

Koster: Ten marks for a ride in your caravan.

Bobby and Pat get in the rear of the wagon and lie back luxuriantly against the flowers. The tail-board is just high enough to hide them. Lenz, in front, throws a handful of flowers, which arches over the high heap and falls on them.

Bobby: You don’t really love me, do you?

Pat (shaking her head): No. Do you love me?

Bobby: No. Lucky, isn’t it?

Pat: Very.

Bobby: Then nothing can hurt us.

Pat: Nothing.

Bobby: (puts his arm around her with a passion that belies his words): But you’d better not get lost in here, because I’d never be able to pick you out from the other flowers.

His arm around her — she lies closely to him.

Pat: I’m not this kind of flower. I’m afraid the hothouse variety. (she picks up a blossom and addresses it rather sadly) I’d love to be like you, my dear.

Bobby (holding her close to him; passionately): Oh you are — you are!

They lean far back into the flowers as the song rises to a climax and stops. Then silence, broken only by the sound of the horse’s hoofs through the half-darkness.

FADE OUT ON “ACT ONE”

(About the first third of the story)

82 FADE IN ON:

AN EXECUTIVE’S OFFICE —

— modern but not lavish. A map of the city is spread on the desk, and Herr Breuer is marking off with a crayon a district as big as several wards. Beside him stands a tough, brutal looking young man in semi-military garb.

Breuer: — From now on, then, I will be the unofficial mayor of this district. Is that clear?

The Lieutenant: Yes, mein Herr.

Breuer: Anything of importance must be brought immediately to my attention.

The Lieutenant: I understand, mein Herr. From now on the district will be run from this office — by and for our organization.

Breuer: And for Germany.

The Lieutenant (carelessly): Oh yes, and for Germany.

A secretary appears in the doorway.

The Secretary: I have Fraulein Hollmann on the phone, Herr Breuer.

The Lieutenant salutes and departs. Breuer picks up his phone.

Breuer: Hello, Pat. You’ve been hard to find this week… No, you can explain later…

(he stops smiling) Can I see you tonight?… Then I shall be at the opera myself. Afterwards you and your friend will be my guests for supper.

(he hangs up, frowning)

CUT TO:

83 BREUER’S FACE

— above a white tie he is adjusting in the mirror. A butler is snapping a buckle on his smooth vest.

CUT TO:

84 A LARGE SAFETY PIN —

— on a very gaping vest. This is upon Bobby who is in his room, being valeted by Koster and Lenz. There are open suitcases of clothes on the floor.

Lenz: No — we need that safety pin to keep his tie down at the back.

Koster: I know a way to do that with string.

(he finished pinning the vest and begins on the string)

Bobby: Won’t it show?

Lenz: Not as long as you don’t take your coat off. That’s a point I forgot to tell you. Always keep your coat on in the opera — no matter how you hate the tenor.

(he helps Bobby into his own dress coat, but it is too big)

Koster: Give us the coat.

Lenz: Awful! Try mine. (Lenz’s coat is tight but passable) Like a glove.

Bobby: It’s tight under my arms. Can’t reach my pockets.

Koster: That’ll save you a lot of money.

Lenz: It’s fine. In that crowd, you won’t show.

Bobby (nervously): I wish you were coming.

Lenz: There’s just enough clothes for one complete swell. Money?

(he hands some banknotes to Bobby)

Bobby: I’ve got enough. (he pushes the money away) We may not have a good month so soon again.

Koster (fiercely): I am your superior officer. Anyhow, we’re going to race Heinrich next week and make a fortune. (he thrusts the money into Bobby’s pocket and speaks seriously) It’s quite right what you’re doing, Bobby.

Bobby (pretended indifference): I can’t figure her out exactly — how she stands with — Herr Breuer.

Koster: Does it worry you?

Bobby (lying): Not a bit.

Koster: It shouldn’t. And I envy you.

Bobby: Why?

Koster: Because nothing else is worth a dime. (picking up an opera hat) And this tops you off. (he tries it) The thing won’t open. Got a tire wrench?

Lenz: Bang it on something.

Koster tries that — on the electric light, which explodes. But not the hat.

Koster: Never mind, Bobby. Carry it for the effect. It’ll open when it sees the other little hats.

(Bobby takes a last look and turns toward the door)

Lenz: And don’t forget to —

Koster: Let him alone. You’ve given him enough advice to last a year.

Bobby winks at them and as a hand organ outside strikes up an old army song, “The Three Lilies,” he goes out at a waiter’s trot, carrying the opera hat like a tray on his fingers.

Lenz: Do you think it’s wise?

Koster: Yes. It makes me happy that one of us at least has found —

(he hesitates)

Lenz: Found what?

Koster: A window — to look back into the past, into what might have been.

Lenz: You need a drink. Bobby among the rich. I don’t quite like it.

Koster: Pat’s not rich.

Lenz: She is in her heart. I couldn’t go to the opera while there are shootings in the street every night. That’s the sound in my ears.

Koster: Then for God’s sake, let Bobby have his moment of happiness.

DISSOLVE TO:

85 INTERIOR.

A NEW, SNAPPY-TAXI CAB

— SHOOTING FROM the driver’s seat at Pat, occupying the backseat alone. She wears a magnificent evening dress of silver brocade and sits pictorially with her arms stretched out to either side of the cab. Bobby is on the little seat with his knee visible and the unopened hat upon it.

Pat: Silly. Come back here.

Bobby: Of course I won’t. I might rumple you. You look like a silver torch in this light.

Pat: That’s what clothes are for.

Bobby: You need a richer man to match it.

Pat: The rich men I know are pretty awful, Bobby.

Bobby: If you say that often enough, I may got interested.

The hat on his knee suddenly opens with a “Pop!” As Pat laughs, we —

CUT TO:

86 TWO HANDS IN THE DARKNESS —

— lying along the arm of a theatre seat. SHOOTING FROM BEHIND, through the interval between the seats, we see them touch and then rise together, back to back. The fingers intertwine and lock.

The curtain of the stage in front of them comes down to end an act of Tales From Hoffman. The music dies away, but the lights have not yet come on. Behind a voice whispers:

The Usher (off scene): Let me see your ticket stubs, please.

Wonderingly, Bobby fumbles for them as the usher repeats the request to the pair at the end of the aisle — a plain German grocer and his fat wife.

Usher: Thank you. I’m sorry, but these seats were sold by mistake. They are reserved for special customers.

The Grocer: What’s that now?

Usher: The management requires these seats. You will get your money back at the door.

THE CAMERA PANS to a party of four waiting impatiently in the aisle.

CUT TO:

87 ROW OF SEATS

Bobby (angrily): I won’t move from here.

The Grocer: (amid general turning of heads and murmurs of protest): This is an outrage!

The lights go on, showing that one of the party in the aisle is Breuer — very arrogant and unconcerned. The other man is a baldheaded oldster. With them are two richly dressed women.

Breuer (to the usher): Hurry them, please. (suddenly he sees Pat and Bobby. Surprised, he changes his tone) Not those two there — they are friends of ours. These.

(he indicates two in front)

The Usher (to the two in front): Let me see your stubs, please.

CUT TO:

88 THE GERMAN GROCER AND HIS WIFE —

— going angrily up the aisle. Following them is another couple, an insignificant man and woman, humiliated and weepy.

The Grocer: Politics — that’s it. New bullies in power.

CUT TO:

89 BREUER’S PARTY —

— seating themselves. Breuer leans across Bobby, who is frowning disgustedly, and speaks to Pat.

Breuer: I’m sorry you were accidently disturbed. We’ll meet after the performance.

DISSOLVE TO:

90 THE EXTERIOR OF THE THEATRE —

— after the performance. There is a marked contrast between the wealthy opera patrons and the poverty-stricken crowd. Breuer’s party is walking haughtily to the curb. Pat turns back to speak to Bobby, who has fallen a little behind.

Pat (with sympathy): You’re sad, darling.

Bobby: It was such fun — till he came.

Pat: He’s just an old friend.

Bobby: That makes it worse.

Pat (gently): Don’t be silly.

Breuer (turning around): I’m taking you to a new night club — that will especially interest Pat.

Unwillingly, Bobby gives in as we —

DISSOLVE TO:

91 A NEON SIGN: “TRIANON”

PAN DOWN TO a doorway in what looks like an elaborate private house. Breuer’s party is getting out of the limousine.

They stop as Breuer points with his cane to a coat of arms above the doorway. Pat gives a little cry.

Pat: It’s our old house. (shocked) A night club!

Breuer: And a great success, I’m told.

Pat recovers from her moment of shock and laughs.

Pat: I suppose I should be proud of that.

CUT TO:

92 THE INTERIOR OF AN INTIMATE NIGHT-CLUB —

— Cossack music — rhumbas and tangos rather than jazz — and a distinguished-looking clientele.

The party sits down — Pat next to Breuer, Bobby between the two other women, thirtyish, rich, and bejeweled, not quite “out of the top drawer.” The waiter takes the order.

Breuer (looking at the menu): Champagne first? This Pol Roget, 1922?

(he looks around inquiringly)

Bobby: Some mineral water for me.

Pat (clapping her hands): Bravo, Bobby.

At her evident interest in Bobby, Breuer’s face tightens a little.

Breuer (in a chilly voice): And Appolonaris for — one.

Pat (looks around and shivers slightly): This was the reception room. How often I’ve leaned over those stairs and watched the dancing down below. (ironically) And now at last I can dance here myself.

Breuer: Will you?

They dance off, Bobby’s eyes following. Frau Schmidt, the woman at Bobby’s side looks him over lasciviously, wetting her lips.

Frau Schmidt: Are you an old friend of Erich Breuer’s?

Bobby: Scarcely.

Frau Schmidt: He’s become a man of influence. You saw how quickly he got seats in the theatre.

Bobby (ironically): Yes.

The waiter draws a champagne cork.

Frau Schmidt: He’s very fond of Fraulein Hollman. And it’s a lucky thing for her. (acidly) These fallen aristocrats. (but rather impressed) To think she used to live here!

93 OUT ON THE FLOOR —

— Pat’s cheek touches Breuer’s. His arm tightens around the silver dress. He talks in a low, confident voice — sometimes she looks up at him and laughs.

94 BOBBY —

— suddenly holds his glass out to the waiter pouring champagne.

Bobby: Include me.

95 FROM THE DANCE FLOOR — PAT —

— looks at Bobby. She smiles encouragingly. For answer —

96 BOBBY —

— raises the champagne glass to her gravely.

97 PAT —

— opens her eyes as if saying, “Ahhh!” She and Breuer stop dancing and come back to the table.

Pat says her old house makes her dizzy. We’ll drink and move on.

As they sit down —

DISSOLVE TO:

98 ANOTHER NIGHT CLUB —

— brighter and noisier. Breuer’s party is gathered about a tank of live, swimming trout. A waiter brandishes a fish net.

Breuer: That fat one.

The net goes in, the fish is captured.

Breuer (to Pat): There’s one the exact color of your dress.

Pat: Oh, which one?

Bobby: I hope he gets away.

Breuer: He won’t. Catch him, there.

(the fish manages to escape. The waiter goes after another)

Breuer (testily): No. I want that one.

Pat (suddenly comparing the fish to herself): I don’t. Oh, let it go — let it go!

Bobby (as it escapes again): Poor little silver trout!

Breuer meets Bobby’s eye; aware of the symbolism of the episode, Breuer laughs contemptuously.

DISSOLVE TO:

99 THE TABLE — LATER

The trout eaten. Breuer and Pat talking.

Breuer (lightly): There’s no reason why the Trianon Cabaret shouldn’t become a house again, if you chose.

Bobby overhears this and stands up, facing away and taking a step toward the bar.

Frau Schmidt (a little drunk): Where are you going, handsome?

Bobby: For a drink.

She grabs at his coat-tail — this causes the back of his tie to jerk over his collar, revealing a length of string.

Frau Schmidt: Why, the man’s all tied up in knots.

Bobby (politely savage): I think I’d better go home — and get some more string.

Pat (alarmed): I must go too — it’s late.

Breuer: That’s absurd. It’s only one. We haven’t started yet.

Bobby (quietly): Can’t you see she’s tired?

Breuer (dryly): You haven’t known Pat as long as I have. She doesn’t leave parties early. (raises his eyebrows) Why, my friend, you seem to be having trouble with your shirt.

Bobby looks at him angrily and seems about to blow up.

Breuer (to Pat): This dance?

Pat: I have it with Bobby.

Bobby: Please excuse me. I’m not dancing.

(he bows frigidly, and Pat flinches)

DISSOLVE TO:

100 THE INTERIOR OF THE LIMOUSINE —

— on the way home. Pat half asleep between Breuer and Bobby. Bobby is sullen and silent.

Breuer: Where can I drop you?

Bobby: At the next corner.

Breuer: I’ll gladly drive you home.

Bobby (looking out the window): Drop me here at Alfons’ Bar, if you please.

Breuer: Can you get in at this hour?

Bobby (ironically): Thanks for your interest. I can get in. (Breuer calls into the speaking tube. Bobby touches Pat’s hand) I won’t wake her. Goodnight, and thank you.

(but as he shuts the door, she stirs)

Pat (half asleep): Bobby — Bobby —

CUT TO:

101 INT. ALFONS’ BAR — BOBBY —

— sitting down with Lenz and Koster. They are surprised.

Koster: Hello — I thought you’d see the sun rise.

Bobby: I won’t. Perhaps two other people will.

Koster: That man Breuer?

Bobby: About the worst twerp I ever met. Kicking people out of the theater to get himself a seat.

Koster: Alfons! Give Bobby a triple brandy, whiskey, gin and rum.

Lenz (disappointed): She’s a rich man’s girl.

Bobby: Let’s forget it. Tell me about the race at the speedway. What’s the prize?

Koster: Five hundred marks cash. (frowning) Look here — don’t quarrel with that girl — she’s a thoroughbred.

Lenz (bitterly): She’s a rich man’s girl. What can Bobby do? If he was an American like we read about, he could go out and get rich over-night. But here —

Koster: Forget it. Very few things will stand inspection at three o’clock in the morning.

Suddenly, Bobby raises his hand angrily and smashes his glass.

Bobby (ashamed): Sorry — I forgot where I was for a moment.

DISSOLVE TO:

102 A DESERTED STREET

Dawn is coming, dull smudges behind the housetops. Bobby lurches along quite tight, his face pale and miserable. Reaching his house, he leans for a minute against the wall — then starts up the steps and searches for his key. In the dusk he hears a sound. Then he peers and sees a pale, indistinct form, crouching on the steps. It is Pat, still in her gleaming silver dress.

Bobby: Pat! Pat — what are you doing here?

Pat (stirring): I believe I’ve been asleep.

Bobby: How did you get here?

Pat: I walked, darling.

Bobby: I mean why are you here at all?

Pat: I’ve been asking myself that for an hour. (she stands up with a little fit of coughing) Oh God, it’s cold.

Bobby (sobering): Pat, you’re a marvelous girl, and I’m a damned idiot. But you’re shivering. Come inside here.

With his arm around her, they go in.

DISSOLVE TO:

103 BOBBY AND PAT —

— entering his room, Pat exhausted from the climb. He puts her on the bed and piles clothes on top of her.

Bobby: Oh, how dumb I am! I should have called you from Alfons’.

Pat (sniffing): Rum — cognac — whiskey — the League of Nations. Darling!

Bobby: I’m sorry.

Pat: Do you sleep on this bed?

Bobby: Yes — Oh, if I’d only known you were here. You’re still shivering. (he piles more clothes on) You’re the first lovely thing that’s ever been in this miserable room.

Pat (sleepily): You’re pretty lovely yourself.

He draws up a low stool and sits down beside the bed, leaning against it. Her eyes close.

Pat: You’re a drunkard and a darling, and you didn’t mean that the other night.

Bobby: Mean what?

Pat: About not loving me.

Bobby (suppressing a desire to put his arms around her): No, I didn’t mean it.

She closes her eyes; the birds are twittering outside the window. Bobby leans his elbow on the bed with his arm alongside hers. He yawns — his top hat opens with a dull thud.

DISSOLVE TO:

104 BREUER’S OFFICE — MORNING

A few days later. Breuer at his desk, his lieutenant facing him.

Breuer: Did you make that little investigation?

Lieutenant: I did — the three of them own a sort of repair shop — a poor little place. They pick up old jobs. You couldn’t call it a nest of revolutionaries, but one of them is — distinctly dangerous.

Breuer (eagerly): Which one? Robert Lohkamp?

Lieutenant: No. His name is Lenz. The other two don’t seem to mix in politics.

Breuer (disappointed): All right. Put this Lenz’s name on our list. Where is this garage or shop?

Lieutenant (points it out on the map): There — this corner.

Breuer (with meaning): How very odd! We were thinking of establishing a club house or an armory in that vicinity. It might be just the spot, that corner. I’d like those men moved on.

Lieutenant: Where to?

Breuer: Where — I don’t care. (with sudden passion) Out of Germany if necessary.

DISSOLVE TO:

105 A RACE TRACK

An enthusiastic crowd of racing fans.

SHOOTING FROM THE GRANDSTAND ACROSS THE TRACK, we see eight cars pass in a flurry of dust, then CAMERA TRUCKS across track up to —

106 A LINE OF “PITS” ALONG THE BARRIER

Each bears a sign — “Deusenburg,” “Renault,” “Isotta-Fraschini,” “Daimler,” etc. We approach the one marked “Heinrich,” and find Pat, Bobby, and Lenz all very excited, sitting on the barrier. There are cans of oil piled within, and a spare set of tires. Lenz is in mechanics’ overalls and holding a bottle of wine.

Lenz (tensely): Otto’s gaining — no he isn’t. Come on, Heinrich! Good old Heinrich. Last lap!

A Gigantic Mechanic (in the next pit): What is that white junk? A trailer?

Lenz (truculently): Who wants to know?

(the mechanic swells visibly)

Pat (warning him): Don’t, Gottfried. Hospitals are expensive.

Lenz and the mechanic are interrupted by a yell of surprise from the crowd.

CUT TO:

107 THE BACKSTRETCH

“HEINRICH” is creeping up on the others.

CUT TO:

108 THE PITS

Lenz: He’s stepping on it!

Bobby: Come on, Heinrich!

109 THE HOME STRETCH

The cars tearing for the finish. “Heinrich” and another are neck and neck — “Heinrich” sweeps by — to win.

CUT TO:

110 THE PITS

Lenz (to the big mechanic): Yah! Yah!

Cheering from the crowd. But as the exhaust and dust blow into the pits, Pat has a violent fit of coughing.

Bobby (supporting her): Are you all right?

Pat (choking): Nothing — dust in my throat.

Lenz (excitedly hands her the bottle): Try this!

(he rushes over to where Koster is stepping out of “Heinrich”, surrounded by a crowd)

Pat: I haven’t learned to drink from a bottle. (coughing) Isn’t it fine we won, darling.

DISSOLVE TO:

111 THE COURTYARD OF THE REPAIR SHOP. LATE AFTERNOON.

The Comrades and Pat at the outdoor table by the plum tree, singing, “Wann die Soldaten Durch die Stadt Marschieren.”

On the table sits the silver cup. “Heinrich” himself, with a wreath on his hood, stands in the background.

Jupp comes up to Lenz.

Jupp: There’s a customer — only he doesn’t seem like a customer.

Lenz: What? And we haven’t anything to sell just now. (he gets up) Where is he?

(he follows Jupp)

Koster: Bobby, would you mind going along too?

Bobby (puzzled): No — but why?

Koster: Lenz might need you. Only for a minute, Bobby.

(Bobby goes — suspiciously)

Pat (touching the cup): Was this worth risking your life for?

Koster (earnestly): I’m going to do something more dangerous than that. Meddle in other people’s business. How long have you known Bobby?

Pat: About six weeks.

Koster: Why don’t you get married? (Pat starts) You love him, don’t you? (she doesn’t answer) He hasn’t had much out of life. (still she doesn’t answer) Think of all you could give him that he’s never had.

Pat: It isn’t that. it’s — oh, it’s this wretched body of mine.

Koster: It’s an excellent body.

Pat: No — it’s merely patched up. After the war, we didn’t have enough to eat. I’m no good here.

(she puts her hand on her chest)

Koster: I guessed that.

Pat: I’m all right — when I take care of myself.

Koster: Let Bobby take care of you.

Pat: I wouldn’t let anyone do that.

Koster: You little idiot — that’s what he needs — something worthwhile to live for. That’s what all this idle drinking is about. The world has somehow slipped away from Lenz and me — we don’t want it to happen to Bobby.

Pat (shaking her head): It doesn’t make sense. Perhaps another kind of woman —

Koster: The kind he couldn’t love?

Lenz and Bobby come back to the table.

Lenz (worried): There seems to be some trouble about our license.

Koster: What is it?

Lenz: A fresh little squirt says we’ll have to get it renewed. Or rather he said we could try to get it renewed.

Koster (scoffing): What nonsense. We’ve been here two years. There’ll be no difficulty.

Bobby: He said —

Koster: Sit down. You can go to the license bureau tomorrow. (Lenz and Bobby sit down. Bobby next to Pat) This evening is too important to spoil. Pat tells me she loves us all. Am I right, Pat?

Pat: You took the words out of my mouth.

Koster: But I want to resign in favor of Bobby.

Lenz: How about me? Bobby has that South American wife.

Bobby: Shut up, you grease spot.

Koster (pointing to the car): Heinrich is all for it. He’s rich now, and he offers to stake them to a week on the coast.

Pat suddenly buries her head in Bobby’s chest.

Pat: Darling, let me hide my blushes. You don’t want a wife, do you?

Bobby (a little annoyed with Koster): Will you let go my apron strings. Don’t you think I can speak for myself?

Pat: Of course you can, darling — (she raises her head) — and let’s hear you.

Bobby: Ladies and gentlemen — (he pauses, embarrassed, holding Pat in his arms) — who is this woman?

Pat: Darling — (she looks up at him) — it’s just me.

Bobby: Oh.

Pat (looking into his eyes and imitating his tone.): Oh. (he draws her closer. She speaks a little louder and very lovingly) Oh! (then a little muffled as he holds her very closely) Ohh.

Koster and Lenz look at each other and raise their eyebrows reprovingly.

Koster and Lenz (as one would say “Aha”): O-oh!

DISSOLVE TO:

112 THE CORRIDOR OF A MUNICIPAL BUILDING

A row of offices with information desks at intervals. Lenz, frowning, goes along the corridor, and stops at one, speaking to a clerk.

Lenz: My name is Lenz. Who is responsible for renewing business licenses?

Clerk: The License Bureau.

Lenz: There seems to be something funny about it. Our fees are paid, but I can’t get the chief clerk’s signature, and it’s been three days.

Clerk: Not countersigned, perhaps.

Lenz: What’s that?

Clerk: Something new. (lowers his voice) Everything now has to be O.K ‘d by — (he breaks off suddenly) The Civil Service is down to the left.

Lenz: I didn’t ask you —

At the sound of footsteps, he catches the clerk’s warning eye. Breuer’s Lieutenant passes them, going down the corridor.

Lenz: Oh, politics, eh? Something higher than the law. I wish I knew some of those boys.

His glance falls across the corridor to the door from which the man has issued. THE CAMERA MOVES ALONG WITH HIS EYES to a glass door, on which is lettered: “ERICH BREUER Private Dept. of Appropriations”

Lenz’s Voice (excitedly): By heaven! I’ve met that gentleman.

Clerk: If you know Herr Breuer, it should be easy to arrange. He is not exactly in the administration, but — (he pauses significantly) Lenz has started for the office. He reconsiders and dashes for the pay telephone booth in the corridor.

Lenz: Western two seven nine six.

CUT TO:

113 CORRIDOR. BREUER’S LIEUTENANT

— coming back carrying papers. He pauses at the desk.

Lieutenant: That man who was here — had he just been to the License Bureau?

Clerk: Yes. He’s —

Lieutenant (interrupting): Was his name Lenz?

Clerk Yes.

(he points to the phone booth)

The lieutenant nods, smiles and goes on into Breuer’s office.

CUT TO:

114 LENZ AT PHONE

Lenz: — but what luck! I remembered that he’s a friend of yours. A word from you ought to fix it for us.

CUT TO:

115 PAT AT THE PHONE IN HER ROOM

She has on her hat and is dressed to go out. She frowns a little.

Pat: I’ll see him this morning. Goodbye, Gottfried.

She hangs up, puts her face in a bowl of flowers with a card, “Bobby,” beside it, picks up her bag and goes out.

DISSOLVE TO:

116 BREUER’S OFFICE.

Breuer behind his desk. Pat sitting upon it, smoking a cigarette.

Pat: — So you be a good fellow. Just tell all the little boys to let my friends alone.

Breuer (frowning): It’s not so simple as all that.

Pat (surprised): What? You’ve told me often that you were on the inside.

Breuer: Who are these friends of yours?

Pat: You’ve met them.

Breuer (contemptuously): Garage mechanics. This Bobby Lohkamp is no friend for you. And that Lenz — he’s a mischief-maker, a firebrand.

Pat: Gottfried is?

Breuer (savagely): Yes. He’s headed for trouble. But the man I’m interested in, or rather you’re interested in is Herr Bobby. (his thin veneer of manners cracks) And so I should go to a lot of trouble to help him.

Pat (coolly): Certainly not, Erich. (she gets up) I forgot a lot of things about you for a minute. And thought of you only as a friend. Awfully silly of me.

Breuer: Look here — are you crazy about this fellow?

Pat: Crazy? That’s a big word.

Breuer: Have you taken up with him?

Pat: Taken up what? Chess?

(she moves toward the door)

Breuer: You know I’d marry you tomorrow.

Pat: Not if I was married already.

Breuer: My God! Are you?

Pat: If those men were hounded out of their shop I think I’d be married that day.

Breuer (wiping his forehead in relief): But not yet?

Pat: Not — yet.

(she opens the door and goes out)

Breuer (starting after her): Pat!

Angrily ringing a bell, he picks up a small bust of Napoleon from his desk and flings it from him. It just misses the head of his lieutenant coming in.

Lieutenant: You rang, Herr Breuer?

Breuer: I want a close watch kept on these people — a special investigation — day and night — Miss Patricia Hollmann, Otto Koster, Bobby Lohkamp —

DISSOLVE TO:

117 AN AUCTIONEER’S YARD

— full of old junk, furniture, books, etc. In the foreground, under the “AUCTION” sign, a battered old taxi. Its owner, a Jew of about forty, thin and miserable, stands beside the auctioneer. In front of the bidders Pat and Koster sit on old chairs. Bobby and Lenz stand behind them.

Koster (addressing Pat and indicating the taxi): That — if we get it — is going to carry you away on your honeymoon. That’s its first job.

Pat: But we’re not getting married.

Lenz: I still don’t see why they want me along. (he looks at Bobby)

Bobby: Don’t look at me — I’m merely the fiancee.

THE CAMERA PANS SIDEWAYS to include a Secretive Little Man with his eyes on our friends. He is Breuer’s investigator. Hold it to show that he is straining to hear what they say.

A Voice (from the crowd): Three hundred marks for the taxi.

CUT BACK TO:

118 THE BIDDERS

Koster: Four hundred.

Auctioneer: Come, come. The taxi has its pride.

A bidder: Five hundred.

Koster: Seven-fifty.

Lenz (warning him): Hey, Otto — that’s our capital.

Koster: It’s a great investment. And look at the poor devil who owns it! It would bring a thousand in better times.

Auctioneer: Seven-fifty — seven-fifty. Sold! This magnificent property to this gentleman.

Koster and the others move forward. The spy melts away into the crowd.

Koster (introducing Pat to the taxi): Your magic carpet.

Pat: Close up the repair shop, Otto, and we’ll all go to the beach.

Koster: Impossible. One of us must stay. (CAMERA PANS to include taxi-driver, tears running from his eyes, as he gives his darling a last polish with a piece of waste) Never mind, old fellow. We’ll take good care of it.

Taxi Man: It’s a fine car. Three years and never a breakdown. But I’ve been ill — (he straightens his shoulders) I should not complain but thank God for my blessings. (almost with exaltation) Here is one country where a Jew is not homeless — where the Fatherland belongs to him as well as to the others. For that I am proud and happy.

HOLD THE CAMERA on him for a moment to impress the false prophecy of these words then —

FADE OUT.

119 FADE IN ON:

THE OLD TAXI

— chugging along a country road. Bobby at the wheel. Pat beside him; Lenz asleep in the back seat on their piled suitcases.

Bobby (eyes on the road): What does the meter read?

Pat (leaning forward): Nine hundred and eighty marks.

Bobby: I hope you have the money, lady, or I’ll have run you straight to the police station.

Pat: Sir, I can’t give you anything but love.

Bobby: It won’t buy gasoline.

Pat (wickedly): Oh yes it will. They tell me it’ll buy trips to the shore — look!

(she points forward eagerly)

SHOOTING FROM THE CAR, we see the road come to a hill-top, dip — and suddenly we are looking down at a wide panorama of beach and sea.

Bobby and Pat (turning excitedly): Gottfried! Gottfried! The sea — the sea!

Lenz (awakening with a start): See what?

DISSOLVE TO:

120 THE BEACH — LATE AFTERNOON

A circular bay, with a distant shore-line. On a hillock, about fifty yards back from the water, stands the Blue-White Inn, a simple little chalet. The beach is quiet; two little tents are pitched near the hull of a wrecked freighter, rotting on the sand.

121 CLOSEUP OF A TRAIL OF FOOTPRINTS

Two pairs parallel in the sand. The sound of a man whistling, and we PULL BACK to show Lenz in an old-fashioned, knee-length, short-sleeved bathing suit, such as were still worn in Germany in 1928. He follows the footprints toward the sea, where they disappear around the corner of the freighter.

Still whistling, he changes his course and walks toward a little bathing tent where two children are playing.

CUT TO:

122 OTHER SIDE OF THE BOAT, LOOKING SHOREWARD

Disclosed are Pat and Bobby leaning against the hull. Pat, wearing a chic bathing suit, is rubbing oil on Bobby’s shoulders. A handful of wild anemones are scattered in her lap. Bobby, like Lenz, wears a patched old-fashioned costume.

Bobby: Do you think that was Gottfried whistling?

Pat: I don’t think. I don’t think about anything — except about us and the sun and the holiday and the sea.

(she tickles his nose with an anemone)

Bobby: Take away your rose, woman.

Pat: It isn’t a rose.

Bobby: Violet, then.

Pat: Isn’t a violet.

Bobby: Then a lily — it better be — those are the only names I know.

Pat: Not really?

Bobby: I’ve always got by with those three. More oil.

Pat: No more. You just like the rubbing.

Bobby: Lazy mudfish. That’s what you were fifty thousand years ago.

Pat: I still am a lazy mudfish. Not a very good play-fellow.

Bobby (fervidly): But an extraordinary sweetheart.

Pat (sighing): Not that either — just a sort of — fragment.

Bobby: A lovely fragment. I’d get very weary if you were perfect. But a lovely fragment — darling. I’ll love you forever.

CUT TO:

123 THE LITTLE BATHING TENT

Lenz sitting in the sand, talking to a boy of thirteen and a girl of ten; they have taken an immediate fancy to him.

Lenz: The last time I was at the beach was during the war.

The Girl: Did they fight on the beach?

The Boy: No, you silly.

Lenz: That beach was west of here — in Belgium. We were so glad to be there — we threw off our uniforms and ran into the sea like mad.

The Girl: With your guns?

Lenz (laughing): No, we left them behind. But not far behind, because we’d hear the surf roar, and then every once in a while we’d hear something louder — (he looks off into the distance) — that was the big cannon at the front.

CUT TO:

124 THE BEACH, LOOKING SHOREWARD —

Pat and Bobby, arm in arm, coming down to the sea.

Pat: It looks very cold.

Bobby: It always does. (declaiming as he walks in) But we’ll never be cold — (unseen by Bobby, Pat scoops up a handful of water) — as long as we’re together — Ouch! Hey!

As the water hits him, he jumps as if a hot wire had touched him.

DISSOLVE TO:

125 LONG SHOT OF THE INN. TWILIGHT —

The faint sound of a motor which grows louder as we —

CUT TO:

126 A PLAQUE:

“GASTHAUS BLAU-WEISS”

DISSOLVE TO:

127 “BLUE-WHITE INN”

MEDIUM SHOT OF THE INN, showing a big Buick stopping in front. Out of it steps Breuer. He pauses to glance at the darkening beach, and then mounts the steps.

CUT TO:

128 THE RECEPTION HALL —

— a clean, middle-class seaside inn, really a boarding house. Victorian furniture, a porter’s desk. Fraulein Muller, the proprietress, a very old gentlewoman, greets him. He clicks his heels and bows in his most important manner.

Fraulein Muller: Good morning.

Breuer: My name is Breuer — have you a room for the night?

She opens a register on the desk.

Fraulein Muller: Our season doesn’t start till next week. We only have a few people.

Breuer (signing and scanning the register): I was expecting to meet some friends. Fraulein Hollmann —

Fraulein Muller: Three people came today, but they were in such a hurry to go swimming they haven’t registered. There was a single man and a young couple.

Breuer (aghast): What!

Fraulein Muller: I took them for a newly married couple and put their bags in the same room.

Breuer (furious): Impossible. Where are they now?

Fraulein Muller (pointing): Out on the terrace.

DISSOLVE TO:

129 THE TERRACE OF THE INN — TWILIGHT —

— Pat, Bobby and Lenz have finished dinner. Empty coffee cups and glasses. Below the terrace, two strolling musicians with accordion and guitar, are singing “Freut euch des Lebens.”

Breuer comes out of the inn.

Pat (surprised and displeased): Well, hello, Erich. (Breuer kisses her hand coolly) You know Mr. Lenz and Mr. Lohkamp.

They rise and bow. Bobby not very cordially.

Breuer: I’ve had the pleasure. May I?

(he sits down)

Pat: What are you doing here?

Breuer: I frequently come to the country by myself. It’s a surprise to find you here.

Lenz: Have you had dinner?

Breuer: On the road, thank you.

Bobby (dryly, suspecting something): Drive here in your Buick?

Breuer: Yes — did you come here in your — your —

Lenz: We didn’t bring Heinrich. It wasn’t fair to the rest of the traffic.

Breuer (not knowing his next step): This is a fortunate accident.

Lenz: It was an accident that we first met.

Breuer: Oh yes, the race — (looking at Bobby) — and you won.

Bobby: Yes.

Breuer (carelessly): It was a short distance. (with meaning) Over a longer course I would be quite likely to win.

Bobby (challengingly): We can try it sometime.

Fraulein Muller brings a lamp, sets it on the table and retires.

Breuer: You’re staying in the hotel?

Lenz: We’re up there somewhere. The end room.

Breuer (with a startled laugh): Not all of you! (as the music roars to a finale) That awful music! Go away, you monkeys!

(he throws some change over the balcony and the music stops)

Lenz (riding him): Maybe there were two rooms — I didn’t notice. What’s the difference — on the beach all day — just a place to dress and sleep.

Breuer (with a double take): Yes — what? (then trying to smile as he asks Pat lightly) You haven’t gone and got married have you?

Lenz: (with the implication that Pat and Bobby didn’t worry about a small point like that): No-o-o

(a pause)

Pat (suddenly): Would you wretches mind it terribly if I went to bed? Remember, we’ve been up since six.

Breuer (disappointed): Oh, I wanted to speak to you — (stops himself) — the next time I saw you —

Pat (interrupting him by getting up): That’ll be tomorrow. Goodnight, gentlemen.

(she goes into the inn)

Breuer: Just a minute, Pat. (to the men) You’ll excuse me?

CUT TO:

130 THE STAIRS — INSIDE — QUITE DARK —

Pat reaches the first landing. Breuer runs after her.

Breuer: Pat, I must see you alone. I’ve got something to say —

Pat: It’ll have to keep till morning, Erich. (almost pleading) When I say I’m tired, I mean it.

She turns away.

CUT TO:

131 THE TERRACE —

Bobby frowning.

Bobby: So bad news has come.

Lenz (teasing): Give him a chance — he likes Pat as well as you do.

Bobby (impatiently): I’m going to bed.

Lenz: I’ll keep an eye on the sea. (As Bobby goes in, Lenz goes to the terrace and calls over to the musicians) Hey, boys! Don’t go away.

CUT TO:

132 BOBBY —

— hurrying up the stairs. He goes to Pat’s door and knocks.

CUT TO:

133 BREUER’S DOOR —

— which is down the corridor and in half darkness, slowly opening. The strolling musicians have begun to play again outside — a soft, seductive tune.

CUT TO:

134 PAT’S DOOR —

— opening. She takes a step out and is in Bobby’s arms. We do not hear what they say but it is a long, passionate goodnight. Presently they break apart and he goes to his room.

CUT TO:

135 INT. BREUER’S BEDROOM. BREUER —

— closing his door and walking across to the window, frowning.

DISSOLVE TO:

136 INT. BREUER’S ROOM — NEXT MORNING

Breuer is taking off his pajama top when his glance falls out the window on the beach.

CUT TO:

137 WHAT HE SEES:

THE ABANDONED FREIGHTER — PAT — sunning herself on a slanting deck. Bobby and Lenz are playing with a medicine ball on the sand. A little farther along are the two children.

CUT TO:

138 BREUER’S ROOM

Breuer reaches for his bathing trunks.

DISSOLVE TO:

139 THE BEACH — BREUER —

In silk bathrobe and beach shoes, approaching the hull cautiously so as not to be seen by Bobby and Lenz. He climbs up the low side of the freighter.

CUT TO:

140 PAT —

Looking up expectantly; changes to a guarded expression as she sees who it is.

Breuer: Is this a private yacht or can I come aboard?

Pat: If you’re going where we go. To very pleasant seas.

Breuer: Well — the company is good — at present. Pat, I want you to marry me. I’m really bowled over when I see you with these tramps.

Pat: They’ve had tough lives to live but they’re not tramps.

Breuer (shrugging his shoulders): I was in the war, too. That’s the excuse for everything.

Pat: I won’t even try to explain them, Erich.

Breuer (tartly): No. Don’t. (persuasively) I want you to come back with me today. I want you to marry me tonight. I want to give you everything you once had —

Pat (interrupting): Please, please — I’m so happy now, Erich! For the first time in my life. I don’t believe it’s going to last very long — (very slowly and intensely) — but while it does, I hate and fear anything that threatens it.

Bobby’s face appears on the high side of the deck.

Bobby: Swim, Pat? (he nods to Breuer and pulls himself up on the boat, carrying an inflated innertube) We have a life preserver.

Breuer (supercilious): Doubtless from the garage.

Bobby (glances at Breuer then back at Pat): Swim?

Pat (getting up): Come on.

She starts up the deck toward the high side of the boat. Breuer signs to Bobby to remain behind. Bobby lingers impatiently.

Breuer: I want to talk to you a moment. I understand you’ve had trouble renewing your license.

Bobby: You know that?

Breuer: A lot of things come to my attention.

Bobby: What has anybody got against us?

Breuer (shrugging his shoulders): Who knows? Perhaps something political —

We have seen Pat disappear over the high side of the deck. Now we

CUT TO:

141 PAT —

Swinging by her hands from the edge of the deck. Only a yard away is a broken stanchion and if she could reach it, she could descend with ease, but her feet can’t quite make it. A sea gull swirls near her.

CUT TO:

142 UP ON THE DECK

Breuer: I thought that, whatever the trouble is, I could perhaps make those in charge drop the matter.

Bobby: What are you driving at?

Breuer: I want you to let Pat alone.

Bobby: Oh, so that’s it!

CUT TO:

143 PAT —

Struggling and panting. She has given up trying to reach the stanchion and is merely trying to get back up, for the drop is fifteen feet. She cries, “Bobby!” but feebly.

CUT TO:

144 THE BEACH BESIDE THE CHILDREN’S TENT

Lenz looks up, sees her dangling, and starts for her.

CUT TO:

145 THE DECK

Breuer: You claim to be Pat’s friend. Well, look at yourself frankly. What have you got to offer Pat? Do you expect her to sew buttons on overalls? (Bobby has no answer — simply looks at Breuer in a dazed way, his thumb through a hole in his bathing suit) As if that would be enough for Pat. (he shakes his head) You’re living in a dream, man.

CUT TO:

146 PAT —

Making a last violent struggle, an exhausting struggle. She gives a little cry, falls, lands on her hands and knees in the sand. Then she gets up slowly and begins to walk, gasping.

CUT TO:

147 LONG SHOT — LENZ —

Racing toward her in alarm.

CUT TO:

148 PAT —

Staggering, coughing, covering her mouth first with her hand, then with both arms, then falling to her knees, to her face amid the sea weed and wreckage.

Lenz (almost beside her): Pat! Pat!

CUT TO:

149 THE DECK

Bobby and Breuer hear.

Breuer: Something’s the matter.

He starts up the deck, Bobby following, still in a daze.

CUT TO:

150 UNDER THE SHADOW OF THE BOAT — MED. SHOT

Lenz is putting a towel under Pat’s head. A dark stain is on the towel — Pat is on her back now, but her face is tilted away from the camera. The little boy has just run up.

Lenz (to the boy): Go to the inn — get a doctor!

The boy starts off.

CUT TO:

151 THE EDGE OF THE DECK — SHOOTING UP FROM BEACH

Bobby and Breuer, looking down. Bobby, in wild alarm, swings himself over and drops.

CUT TO:

152 BEACH

Lent (shouting at Bobby): Water — bring water! It’s a hemorrhage!

Bobby, aghast, gets his balance, looks around, finds a tin can and runs for the water.

CUT TO:

153 THE PORCH OF THE BOARDING HOUSE

The small boy, panting, meets Fraulein Muller on the porch.

The boy: Get the Doctor. The lady’s bleeding — awful.

CUT TO:

154 BOBBY AND LENZ

— kneeling beside Pat — her face invisible, one fist clenched. Bobby pouring the cold water on her throat.

Bobby: Pat! Pat! Oh, God, we can’t let her just lie here.

Lenz: You never move a bleeding soldier. (to Breuer who stands by, wearing an expression of horror, slowly changing to distaste) Go get some ice.

(Breuer starts off)

155 SHOOTING OVER PAT’S BODY TO BOBBY

— lying beside her, face to face.

Bobby: Oh, God, make it stop! Oh God, Pat.

The little girl, on her knees, edges a little closer, staring wide-eyed.

DISSOLVE TO:

156 THE SAME SCENE TEN MINUTES LATER — MED. SHOT

(Note: I suggest an absolute avoidance of close shots of Pat. As we can’t show the actual horror of the hemorrhage, it is best suggested from the distance of a bystander who cranes his neck to see.): Lenz has borrowed the children’s beach tent and is setting it up half over Pat to keep out the sun. Bobby still lies beside Pat, his hand holding her head. The Doctor, an old man, is closing his case. Fraulein Muller and a servant are setting down pails of ice. The children and Breuer stand near, and a dozen curious neighbors have gathered in the background. The Doctor gets up and walks aside to Lenz.

CUT TO:

157 TWO SHOT — DOCTOR AND LENZ

The Doctor: The sun may have brought it on — and getting off the wreck finished it.

Lenz: What now?

The Doctor: She keeps calling for Dr. Jaffé — that’s Professor Felix Jaffé — I know him by reputation. If he could be brought here immediately —

Lenz: He will be! I’ll phone to the city.

He starts toward the inn. Turning back to Pat, the Doctor encounters Breuer. The latter’s expression is even more full of distaste.

Breuer (nervously): I never dreamed she was so ill. Will she die?

The Doctor (brusquely): I can’t say.

CUT TO:

158 MEDIUM SHOT — WHERE PAT LIES

Fraulein Muller, with a towel of cracked ice, gently moving Bobby away to set it in place.

Bobby comes up to Breuer and the Doctor, his face wild with grief.

Bobby: Will it start again?

The Doctor: There may be other paroxysms.

Bobby: Isn’t there something we can do?

The Doctor: Your friend is trying to get Dr. Jaffé.

Breuer (his interest in Pat has waned): I’ll help with any bills, of course. Unfortunately I have to get back to the city this afternoon. (with revolting pleasantness) Forget what I was saying to you — I know you’ll be good to Pat. (he nods, turns to the Doctor) Spare no trouble, Doctor. No —

(he catches Bobby’s contemptuous eye, bows to the doctor and goes away.)

CUT TO:

159 OFFICE OF THE INN

Lenz at the phone.

Lenz (tensely): — It’s a hemorrhage, Otto. Get this now — find Dr. — Felix — Jaffé. He’s looked after her and knows the case. Tell him to phone here. Somebody will be waiting. For God’s sake, hurry. Otto!

CUT TO:

160 THE OFFICE OF THE REPAIR SHOP

Otto hanging up the phone. Jupp standing by.

Koster: Miss Hollmann’s ill. Get out Heinrich right away. Great Snakes!

Jupp rushes out. Koster struggles into his coat and rushes out as we hear the roar of “Heinrich’s” engine.

DISSOLVE TO:

161 THE HALL OF THE HOSPITAL —

Koster waiting. A nursing sister comes to him.

Sister: Dr. Jaffé is operating. Do you want to see another Doctor?

Koster: When will he be through?

Sister (hesitantly): Well, he’s resting at the moment — but he’s about to start a pneumo-thorax —

Koster (interrupting): Sister — he loves this patient — I know he does — and she’s dying. I know he’d see me if he understood that.

Sister: Well —

Koster: Where is he?

He takes her arm and hurries her off — she pulls him back just before he marches her into a clothes closet.

Sister (laughing): It’s this way.

As they go out.

CUT TO:

162 OUTSIDE THE DOOR OF AN OPERATING ROOM —

The Doctor, stretched on a folding chair, eyes closed. Two internes and a nurse nearby. Dr. Jaffé is a saturnine, bitter-looking old man with the air of hating the world and everyone in it.

Koster and the nurse come in.

Koster (approaching him eagerly): Do you know Patricia Hollmann?

Jaffé (starting — awake): Never heard of her.

Koster (aghast): Patricia Hollmann.

Jaffé: You mean that wretched little devil — that skinny little eye-rolling butterfly —

Koster (sternly and slowly): Patricia Hollmann.

Jaffé: I know her. Don’t look at me like that, young man. Where is she — in jail?

Koster: She’s had a hemorrhage. They can’t stop it.

Jaffé (springing up angrily): And I’m supposed to break off operating to — (he is flinging off his cap and gown) I won’t do it! I warned her to take care of herself. She was six months in a sanitarium last year. I told her she’d — where is she?

Koster: She’s at — (he hesitates, lies) Not far from here. A little way out of the city.

CUT TO:

163 THE BEACH — LATE AFTERNOON —

Things have quieted down. Present are Pat, the local Doctor, Bobby, Lenz, Fraulein Muller and a trained nurse.

The Doctor (to Lenz after taking her pulse): When will Dr. Jaffé be here?

Lenz: I don’t know — two hours, perhaps.

The Doctor: Impossible. A hundred and fifty miles over mountain roads. (he frowns) The wind’s getting colder — it’s dangerous to leave her here any longer. We’ll have to take a chance and move her.

Bobby shrinks as the Doctor signals to two men who stand by with a stretcher.

CUT TO:

164 “HEINRICH” with KOSTER AND JAFFÉ —

— speeding through the city traffic on two wheels — down a one-way street.

DISSOLVE TO:

165 “HEINRICH” —

— tearing into the country.

Jaffé (above the engine’s roar): Very much longer?

Koster: Not very much.

Jaffé: How many miles?

Koster (casually): One hundred and fifty.

Jaffé (a double-take): Oh… What?

Koster: But only a few hours.

Jaffé: Stop it! We’ll take a train. Why didn’t you tell me, you fool?

Koster: You might not have come.

Jaffé: You kidnapper! You know that’s a penitentiary offense. You wretched body snatcher… Step on it! (they skid retchingly around a corner) Is she your girl?

Koster: I wish she was.

Jaffé: A reckless, idiotic, self-centered child.

CUT TO:

166 BEDROOM IN THE BLUE-WHITE INN

Pat on the bed, gasping and choking. Bobby, the nurse, and the doctor beside her.

Bobby: Dr. Jaffé’s coming, Pat. Any time now. Racing along the road — nearer — nearer —

Pat: I knew it wouldn’t last — it was too lovely — I’m sorry to be all this trouble.

Bobby: You should have told me.

Pat (with difficulty): We shouldn’t — ever — have met.

(she begins to cough)

The Doctor (to Bobby): She must not be excited.

THE SCENE DISSOLVES TO:

167 A MOUNTAIN ROAD

“Heinrich” tearing along a winding course.

Jaffé: Where did you get this car?

Koster: I built it out of some other cars.

Jaffé: Will you build one for me?

As they dash into a cloud of wind and rain, Jaffé lets go of his hat for an instant. The raging wind blows it off, to bound along the road. Without slowing up, Koster takes off his leather racing helmet and gives it to Jaffé, who looks at it as if it were going to bite him, as we —

DISSOLVE TO:

168 THE PORCH OF THE INN

Bobby standing tensely on the porch beside Fraulein Muller. Suddenly his face changes.

Bobby: I hear it — I hear it!

Fraulein Muller: I don’t hear it.

A purring is now audible.

Bobby: It’s like an angel’s wings.

He rushes into the house and into —

169 PAT’S BEDROOM

Bobby: Doctor, they’re coming! I can hear them!

The Doctor (looking at his watch): It’s impossible.

Bobby: There’s only one car with that engine. (he runs out): 170 THE PORCH OF THE INN.

Bobby reaches the porch just as “Heinrich” swings around the corner and comes to rest. As Koster and Jaffé step out, the country doctor comes out on the porch of the inn.

The Doctor: Professor Jaffé? (Jaffé nods) Thank God you’re here. We have so few cases like this down here.

Jaffé: Where is she?

The Doctor leads the Professor into the cottage.

Bobby (to Koster with feeling): Good work.

Koster: Now stop worrying. Got a cigarette? (Bobby gives him one) How did it happen?

Bobby: Too much exercise — I should have known. If anything happens now —

Koster: Death’s no stranger to us, old man. He tried to meet us at the front, didn’t he? — but he never quite managed it. Now Jaffé’s helping too. It’s going to be all right.

The nurse comes out on the steps.

Nurse (to Bobby): Dr. Jaffé sent word to you that she’s going to be all right.

She goes in. They look up at a lighted window of the Inn where the shadows of the Doctors move on the blind. Koster claps Bobby on the shoulder.

FADE OUT.

FADE IN:

171 PAT’S BEDROOM. SUNNY AND CHEERFUL.

An old music-box is tinkling “Wann die Soldaten,” and Pat is sitting up, dressed, in an easy chair. She is thin and pale, but her face lights up when Bobby comes in. He lays a bunch of anemones in her lap.

Bobby: Roses, violets and lilies. How are you — very strong?

Pat (proudly): This is the fourth day I’ve been up.

Bobby (sitting down): Well, there’s been some trouble.

Pat: What?

Bobby: Nothing serious — Fraulein Muller stubbed her toe. (bending toward Pat) Darling, you look —

Pat (laughing): Only that?

Bobby: On that new bed?

Pat: What new bed?

Bobby (tantalizing her): One of the guest beds she had to get so quickly. Darling, you look —

Pat (curious) Guest bed? Why?

Bobby (carelessly): Oh, for Lenz and Koster.

Pat (sitting up): Have they come back?

Bobby: They insisted on being here today. Pat, dear —

Pat: (more and more curious): Why?

Bobby: To see it happen, of course. You look —

Pat (wild with curiosity): What happen?

Bobby: Our wedding.

The music box becomes gayer as Lenz and Koster walk in, smiling.

Pat: What is this? Gottfried! Otto! (Lenz and Koster each kiss one of Pat’s hands) In the first place, if Bobby and I got married, Herr Breuer would do you an injury.

Koster: No he won’t, the twerp. Our license was renewed yesterday. Breuer has withdrawn all opposition.

Pat: In the second place — I’m in no condition —

Lenz: No condition to be left alone. That’s what we thought.

(the music-box stops)

Pat: In the third place, Dr. Jaffé said — that I might have to go away — (she falters) — to the mountains — this Fall.

Bobby (with passion): All the more reason to marry me now — (their eyes meet with meaning) — while it’s still summer.

Pat covers her eyes with her hand — then looks up smiling mistily. There are tears in Lenz’s eyes as he winds the music-box noisily.

Koster: I’ll get them. (at the door) All right, Fraulein.

The music-box tinkles out a delicate waltz as if for the wedding of a marionette, as the Burgermeister, Fraulein Muller, two servants and the little boy and girl from the beach come into the room.

FADE OUT.

172 FADE IN ON:

A SMALL YARD OR AREA-WAY —

— in back of a rundown brick house. Afternoon. An old-fashioned cellar door opens, and four men, one of them Lenz, come out cautiously into the yard and proceed toward a gate. As they open the gate, two shots ring out — one of them splinters the gatepost, another knocks off Lenz’s hat. The men run — we follow Lenz over a high board fence, and then —

DISSOLVE TO:

173 BOBBY’S ROOM IN HIS BOARDING HOUSE

Koster and Jupp are engaged in putting into place some of the things from Pat’s apartment. Matilda, from the garage, is cleaning. As the following scene takes place, they set down a couch, put attractive drapes on tables and bureaus and a fine coverlet on the bed, set up a white lounging chair, hang curtains that are already on rods, transforming — within a short time — a notably bare room into a pleasant and cheerful one.

Koster (setting down his edge of the couch and looking at his watch): I wonder what’s keeping Lenz. The newlyweds will be rolling in any minute.

Matilda: Such a difference the lady’s furniture makes.

Koster (looking around) Yes. It’ll be nice here.

Lenz’s Voice (from the doorway): For a while, anyhow. (THE CAMERA PANS TO HIM) For a little while this room will be a little center of warmth and light — (he comes forward into the room) — in a world of hopelessness and despair.

Koster: What’s the matter with your hat?

Lenz removes it and regards the bullet hole.

Lenz: A peephole from here to eternity. (he sails it out the door) I oughtn’t to bring ill omens here. (he takes a bottle from his pocket) Cognac from Alfons.

Koster: Who shot at you?

Lenz: Oh, I’m fair game. What’s known as a dangerous man.

Jupp (at the window): By Golly, they’re here!

As he rushes toward the door —

CUT TO:

174 THE OLD TAXI —

— drawing up at the door. Bobby helps out Pat who has been reclining against a mass of pillows. Jupp rushes up, bows, smiles and begins taking out bags.

Bobby: Hello, Jupp. Now, darling, I’m going to carry you upstairs.

CUT TO:

175 BOBBY’S ROOM

Koster tying on an apron and putting the bottle on a tray. Lenz starting “Ubers Meer Gruess Ich Dich Heimatland” on the phonograph.

The door opens, and into the transformed room walks Bobby, carrying Pat in his arms. Koster starts forward clowning — but he can’t, and suddenly they are all silent and very moved.

Pat (bravely and with vitality): Hello — Comrades.

Koster (with feeling): Welcome home.

FADE OUT.

176 FADE IN:

A TAXI STAND

Bobby, in the old taxi, pulls up at the end of the row, gets out, lights a cigarette. A big driver gets out of the taxi in front and approaches Bobby.

Taxi Man: Hey, fella, you better get out of here.

Bobby (innocently): Why?

Taxi Man (truculent): You ain’t got no cap. We got too many guys already.

Some other taxi men come up.

Bobby (pleasantly): Friend, I haven’t taken in five marks all day. That’s why I came here. I’ll buy some drinks for an entrance fee.

Taxi Man (angrily): We don’t want no outsiders. Get going!

Another Driver: Ah, let him alone, Gustav.

Gustav (furious): I’ll count three. One —

(Bobby sizes him up)

Bobby (stalling): Wouldn’t a whiskey taste good?

Gustav (unbuttoning his coat): — two —

Bobby (losing his temper): Oh, shut your fat face!

Bobby slams him, connects; Gustav goes down and out.

The Other Driver (with admiration): It won’t hurt him. He’s always asking for it.

They put the man in the cab, and we

DISSOLVE TO:

177 THE INTERIOR OF A CAFE.

BOBBY AND THREE DRIVERS AT TABLE

Bobby: I’ve been driving in the factory district.

The Friendly Driver: This is a good stand. More money than anywhere else in this rotten city. I’m an actor. Pete here is an architect.

Bobby (smiling): I’m in distinguished company. Is there much work at night?

Architect: Sure — lots of drunks. A taxi-driver’s best friend is a drunk.

Gustav comes in, glowering.

Friendly Driver (to Bobby): It’s all right. Keep quiet.

Gustav approaches menacingly; suddenly sits down. Bobby pushes a glass toward him.

Bobby (smiling): Your drink.

Gustav gulps it, calls the waiter.

Gustav (gruffly): Same again all round. (to Bobby) Lucky punch.

Bobby: Cracked my thumb.

Gustav: Good.

The waiter appears.

Waiter: Two taxis at the hotel.

Two of the men get up and move out. The phone rings again.

Gustav (raising his glass to Bobby): Good luck, Maxey Schmelling.

Bobby (drinks — puts down his glass suddenly): Excuse me — I forgot something.

(he goes into the phone booth)

CUT TO:

178 DR. JAFFÉ’S EXAMINATION ROOM

Pat sitting up on the table buttoning her waist — Dr. Jaffé writing in a notebook as the phone rings.

Jaffé: I saw you four weeks ago.

Pat: That’s right.

Jaffé picks up the phone.

Jaffé (after a moment): Yes, Pat’s here now.

CUT TO:

179 BOBBY IN THE CAFE BOOTH

He hangs up, waves at Gustav and rushes out.

DISSOLVE TO:

180 JAFFÉ’S OFFICE

Jaffé and Bobby, standing in the foreground. Pat talking to the secretary by the far door and out of earshot.

Dr. Jaffé (gravely): There has been no change. She must go to a sanitarium in October. A year ago, she seemed so much better. Now —

(he gestures pessimistically)

Bobby (slowly): The world is full of healthy people who ought to be chloroformed. And this happens to her.

Jaffé: There’s no answer to that one. (he puts his hand on Bobby’s arm) I ask your pardon for being able to do — nothing.

(they turn toward the door)

Pat (grateful): Goodbye, Dr. Jaffé.

Jaffé (affectionate): Goodbye, my dear.

Pat and Bobby leave the office. CAMERA TRUCKS in front of them down the corridor toward the elevator.

Bobby (unnaturally earnest): You’re getting better.

Pat (quickly): Don’t. I don’t want to know anything — until Autumn. The elevator clangs open.

Elevator Boy (raucously): Down!

DISSOLVE TO:

181 CLOSE SHOT — A CHESTNUT BRANCH

It flutters in a sudden gust of wind — its leaves falling.

CUT TO:

182 A NEWSPAPER —

— blowing along a pavement. ANGLE WIDENS TO SHOW:

183 A SHOPPING STREET —

— on a cold Fall day. Show-windows with fur coats on exaggerated mincing dummies of rich women. Bobby and Pat strolling.

Bobby: If I were rich, I’d buy you a fur coat for Autumn.

Pat (smiling): Which one?

Bobby (pointing): That one.

Pat: You’ve got good taste. That’s Canadian Mink.

Bobby (lightly): Would you like it? I’ll give it to you tomorrow.

Pat (without covetousness): Do you know what it costs, darling?

Bobby: Money’s no object. I’ll sell my yacht.

Pat (alarmed): Our friends would talk.

Bobby: Not another word — you’ll have it tomorrow.

184 AT THE NEXT WINDOW — A HABERDASHER —

— exaggerated, comic dummy of a man in dress clothes. In the back of the window is a mechanical display — toy man and woman in evening dress on a circular track. They go in one door of a toy opera house and out the other.

Pat: You’ve got to have those tails to go with my coat.

Bobby (pulling her back to the first window): But you’re not dressed yourself yet. Two or three ball gowns.

Pat (pulling him to the man’s window): Shirts, cane, topper —

Bobby (enthusiastically): Where’s a jewelers? Where do they sell ship’s tickets?

Pat: Egypt — South America.

Bobby (suddenly sobered): There never was any South America.

Pat: I knew it. But darling — (they are walking arm in arm in the crowded street) — it’s all right here in our hearts. We can go to the most exciting place — home.

(they come to the taxi parked against the curb. He opens the door and bows. Pat gets in the back seat)

Bobby: Where to, please?

Pat looks at him, shaking her head fondly from side to side. He nods understandingly, gets in and drives off.

DISSOLVE TO:

185 THEIR ROOM

Rain outside. Pat broiling a chop on a gas burner. Bobby on the couch.

Pat (looking out the window): Winter’s coming outside.

Bobby (his voice a little frightened): No, not yet. You just think that because it’s raining.

Pat (as if to herself): It’s raining. It’s been raining too long. At night sometimes when I wake, I imagine we’re quite buried under all the rain.

Thunder outside. The lights lower — brighten again.

Bobby (with feeling): It seems to me we’re lucky. When I think of life as it was before — I thank God. I never thought I would be so lucky.

Pat: It’s lovely when you say that. Then I believe it, too. You must say it oftener.

Bobby: Don’t I say it often enough?

Pat: No.

Bobby (melting): From now on, I’ll tell you every time I feel it. Even though it makes me feel absurd.

A gust of rain against the window. A sudden knock at the door. Bobby answers it to find Frau Zalewska, the landlady.

Zalewska: The phone, Herr Lohkamp.

DISSOLVE TO:

186 DOWNSTAIRS. BOBBY AT THE PHONE.

Bobby: (repeating in amazement a question that has been asked him): “How did she stand the trip?” — What trip?

CUT TO:

186A DR. JAFFÉ’S OFFICE. LATE AFTERNOON

Jaffé: The trip to the sanitarium.

Bobby’s Voice (over phone): Why, she’s upstairs. I didn’t know —

Dr. Jaffé (impatiently): I told her a week ago she must leave. I told her this change of temperature could simply blow her away.

Bobby: She didn’t tell me.

Dr. Jaffé: If you want to keep that girl of yours alive you take her off tomorrow — and I mean tomorrow.: Bobby: We’ll go tomorrow.

(he hangs up in consternation)

DISSOLVE TO:

187 THEIR ROOM UPSTAIRS

Pat with her face in her hands. Bobby annoyed and tender.

188 FLASH OF CHOP —

— smoking in the pan.

189 THEIR ROOM

Bobby: You should have told me, darling.

Pat: Oh, I couldn’t. We’ve been so happy and it was such a little time. It didn’t seem that a week or two could make any difference.

Bobby: We’ll have other weeks later. (she looks at him sad-eyed — Bobby resists her firmly) We’ll get Frau Zalewska to help pack — (to cheer her) — and listen, Pat, we’ll find Lenz and Koster and have a farewell dinner at Alfons’. We’ll celebrate.

Pat: (half between tears and laughter): I stole a week anyhow. They can’t take that back. I stole a precious, lovely week — (sing-song) Pat stole a wee-eak. (crowing) Now you can put her in prison, but you can’t get the week. She’s got the loot buried deep in her heart.

DISSOLVE TO:

190 ALFONS’ CAFE

A nine o’clock crowd. At a heaping table are Pat, Koster and Bobby — a chair waits for Lenz who has not arrived. Alfons, unusually magnificent in collar, tie and coat, hovers over them.

Pat: It seems awful not to wait for Gottfried but it does look so good.

Koster (to Alfons, rather concerned): Do you know where he is?

Alfons (glancing around cautiously): I have an idea — there’s a political meeting.

Koster (to Pat): Anyhow I’ll bring him to the train — if he hasn’t got a couple of black eyes.

Pat (with feverish gaiety): Alfons, I’m all a dither about how grand you look.

Alfons: In honor of a very fine lady.

Pat: But how can you throw people out dressed like that?

Alfons: Oh, can’t I? I’m ready in two seconds. (like lightning he whips off his coat — the shirt front, tie and collar are in one piece and come off with a click. He is ready for action) You see? — if they get tough, I do this — and this —

He picks a little man off a seat at the bar and goes through the action of tossing him out the door. Then setting the little man back on his stool, he replaces his ceremonial front.

Pat: Alfons —

(she pulls his face down to hers and rubs her cheek against him)

Alfons (retiring to the phonograph in embarrassment): It is not done to kiss the maitre d’hotel.

Koster: In front of her husband, too. (he shakes his head) I was afraid it wouldn’t last.

Alfons starts the “Pilgrims’ Chorus” from Tannhauser.

DISSOLVE TO:

191 THE SAME SCENE. AN HOUR LATER —

— the food eaten. Pat at the bar having cognac with Alfons. Koster and Bobby at the table.

Bobby: We’ll have to go home — our train goes at noon.

Koster (low voice): I’m worried about Lenz. Somebody said there’s street fighting down in the Schmedgrasse Quarter. And he’s always in front of everything.

Bobby: You think we’d better go after him?

Koster: I think we ought to. I hate to drag you out tonight.

Bobby: That’s all right.

Koster: You take Pat home and I’ll be waiting for you in the street with Heinrich. No use frightening her.

Bobby: I won’t tell her.

DISSOLVE TO:

192 THE BEDROOM IN THE BOARDING HOUSE

Pat’s trunk and suitcases are in evidence. She is undressed, getting into bed.

Pat: I hope there won’t be a bad dream.

Bobby (tenderly): Let me come into your dreams.

Pat: You’d be very welcome there.

Bobby (hesitantly): Pat, I’ve got a little taxi job — I’ll have to go out for a while. A little more money for our trip.

(he bends over her): Pat: I hate it when you drive all night.

Bobby (cheerfully): But I remember you once said you didn’t like people watching you when you’re asleep.

Pat: I didn’t. But now I get frightened that I won’t come back.

Bobby: But one always does. I won’t let you go away while you sleep. I’m an old wakeful soldier.

(he extinguishes all but the reading lamp and goes out the door)

DISSOLVE TO:

193 THE MISTY STREET OUTSIDE

In the distance a roll of drums, distant shots, the scream of an ambulance. Bobby gets into “Heinrich” beside Koster and they roar away.

DISSOLVE TO:

194 ANOTHER STREET —

— crowded with truck-loads of police with straps, helmets, guns, gleaming in the lamplight. Young men in half uniforms are gathered in the doorways.

“Heinrich” drives through — stops. Bobby and Koster get out and walk to where a speaker is declaiming on an outdoor platform. In the general commotion we can only hear the speaker’s voice as it rises to a climax.

Speaker: This cannot go on! This must be changed! (etc. etc.): the audience roars applause. Bobby and Koster jump up on a doorstep and scan the faces of the audience — lower middle-class and proletariat.

Koster: He isn’t here — come on. There’s another meeting down the street.

DISSOLVE TO:

195 EXT. THE FACADE OF A BIG GRIMY APARTMENT HOUSE

Small stores in front. Two trucks of police waiting. A small crowd listens to a yogi in a turban, preaching beneath a sign which reads:

“ASTROLOGY — PALMISTRY — FORTUNE TELLING YOUR HOROSCOPE — 1 MARK”

CUT TO:

196 TWO SHOT OF BOBBY AND KOSTER

Bobby: What these people want isn’t politics. They want a bogus religion.

Koster: Sure. They want to believe in something again — it doesn’t matter what it is. Great Snakes! Look out!

CUT TO:

197 FULL SHOT OF THE STREET —

— along which comes a line of Sturmtruppen — simultaneously a bunch of young men and boys spring from the shadows and plunge a great plank into the door of the apartment house. A fight begins at the door. Some of those within resisting, some pouring out. Chair legs, beer glasses, etc., as weapons.

IN A MEDIUM SHOT, Lenz appears suddenly, grapples with a policeman. Koster grabs the policeman and in a minute, as the police whistles sound, the Comrades are safely out of the melee. They hide —

198 IN A DOORWAY —

— with a crying child, then they step forth and we truck in front of them as they walk down the street, side by side.

Koster (to Lenz): I should think you’d have had enough. After four years of war —

CUT TO:

199 ACROSS THE STREET, FOUR YOUNG MEN —

— stop and regard the Comrades. One of them, wearing new yellow puttees, darts across the street toward them.

Yellow Leggings: There he is!

He fires two shots, turns and tears away, his companions with him, as we —

CUT TO:

200 GOTTFRIED LENZ —

— shot through the heart, falls dead on the sidewalk.

201 KOSTER AND BOBBY —

— kneel beside Lenz, rip open his coat and shirt. Seeing the wound they stiffen.

Koster (getting up): Stay here — I’ll get the car.

(he runs off)

Bobby (shaking Lenz): Gottfried! Can you hear me?

Lenz’s eyes are half shut, his face grey. Bobby listens for breathing, for heartbeats. Nothing.

Koster backs “Heinrich” up with a rush beside the body. The street is silent, but there is a far-away burst of machine-gun firing as they pick up the body, lay it in the back seat of the car and cover it with an overcoat. Koster and Bobby get up in front and drive off hurriedly.

Lenz’s hand, with one finger outstretched, protrudes over the side of the car.

DISSOLVE TO:

202 EXT. FIRST AID STATION. NIGHT.

Bobby and Koster carrying Lenz’s body inside.

CUT TO:

203 INT. FIRST AID STATION

A doctor in shirt sleeves showing them where to lay the body.

Doctor: Over here. (he pulls down a light close to the examination table) What is it?

Koster: Revolver shot.

The doctor uses a swab, feels Lenz’s pulse, listens to his heart, straightens up.

Doctor: I can’t do anything.

Koster: But the shot’s over on the side. Maybe it’s not so bad.

Doctor: There’re two shots. (they all bend over the body) He died right away. (the doctor takes a probing instrument from the cabinet) You can leave him here.

(he works over the body)

Koster (as if starting from sleep): We’re taking him with us.

Doctor: Not allowed. I’ve got to notify the police. We’ll have to try to find who did it. Here’s one bullet.

(he hands it to Koster who looks at it stupidly a moment)

Koster (slowly getting an idea): I’ll drive to the police station.

Doctor: I’ll telephone.

Koster (stubbornly): No. I’ll go after them.

FOLLOW Koster out the door.

CUT TO:

204 EXT. THE STEPS OF THE FIRST AID STATION

Koster hesitates a minute — then his jaw sets and he goes toward “Heinrich.”

CUT TO:

205 INT. FIRST AID STATION — DOCTOR AND BOBBY

Doctor: Can’t you tell me how it happened?

Bobby (cautiously): I don’t know. Must have been a mistake for some one else.

Doctor (looking again at Lenz): Was he in the war? (Bobby nods) I thought so from the scars. He was wounded several times.

Bobby: Yes — four times.

Doctor: A rotten trick. (rather guardedly, guessing this is something political) And probably by some skunk who was in his cradle then.

CUT TO:

206 “HEINRICH” —

— pulling up at THE SCENE OF THE MURDER. As Koster gets out, a shabby old woman is passing — by the lamplight she sees the bloodstain on the pavement, starts and walks around it. Koster looks up and down the street — then at the bullet in his hand.

DISSOLVE TO:

207 CLOSEUP OF KOSTER’S FACE IN “HEINRICH”

— driving along a street, looking from left to right, stonily.

CUT TO:

208 INT. FIRST AID STATION

A policeman sitting at a table questioning Bobby. Another stands by.

First Policeman (moistening pencil stub): Your friend’s height?

Bobby About — (his voice falters) Five feet ten.

Second Policeman: Can’t you tell us roughly what the fellow who shot him looked like? Did he belong to any political party — wear any badge or uniform?

Bobby: I didn’t see a badge, but I noticed he had on —

Koster’s Voice (o. s.): We couldn’t see anything. (he comes in from the street) It was too dark and it happened very quickly. There were the shots and then we only thought — (his eyes fall on Lenz’s body) — of our Comrade.

First Policeman: Do you yourself belong to any political party?

Koster: No.

First Policeman (suddenly looking hard at Bobby): But you saw the man.

Bobby (on his guard now): No. I saw nothing either.

Officer: Extraordinary. (he sighs cynically) Then there’s not much chance of finding him.

(he bends over his statement)

Koster (indicating Lenz’s body): Can we take him with us?

The policemen hesitate.

First Policeman (to Doctor): Cause of death established all right?

Doctor (nodding): I’ve written the certificate.

First Policeman (to Koster): It’s not legal — (he sees the expression of suffering in the faces of the two men) — but if you want to, you can take him home. You understand that there may be a further examination tomorrow.

Koster: Yes.

Doctor (gruffly kind): You can take the stretcher. Bring it back some time tomorrow.

Koster: Thanks.

In silence Koster and Bobby put the body on the stretcher. One of the policemen scratches his head with his pencil — the other yawns sleepily. FOLLOW THE STRETCHER out to the street.

209 EXT. FIRST AID STATION

Koster and Bobby put the stretcher in the back of “Heinrich” and cover the body with a coat. From the door, the Doctor watches.

210 TRAVELING SHOT — KOSTER AND BOBBY

— very grim as they start off through the thin bitter snow.

Koster: We’ll drive along the street just once more.

(Bobby takes a hammer out of a side pocket and lays it beside him): I have the feeling we’re going to meet them any minute.

They stop at a cafe on a corner. SHOOTING below its swinging door we see several pairs of legs but none in uniform. Koster opens the door cautiously, peers inside, shakes his head.

DISSOLVE TO:

211 ANOTHER STREET — BOBBY AND KOSTER IN “HEINRICH”

Koster (his eyes narrowing): Look!

CUT TO WHAT HE SEES:

212 GROUP SHOT OF FOUR PEOPLE UP THE STREET

— seen dimly through the snow.

CUT TO:

213 MEDIUM SHOT FROM BEHIND THE GROUP —

— including the four silhouettes against “Heinrich’s” approaching headlights.

The headlights go out as the car coasts up and stops with a roar of brakes a few feet away.

CUT TO:

214 KOSTER AND BOBBY —

— getting grimly out of “Heinrich” and approaching — to discover four harmless old people (comedy types) a little drunk. Koster and Bobby stop short.

The Old People (ad lib): I thought he was after me purse! A girl’s not safe in her own alley these days! The people you meet in the streets lately! Such wicked faces — scared me half silly!

Without answering, Koster and Bobby get into “Heinrich” and back away.

DISSOLVE TO:

215 “HEINRICH” —

— stopping at a sidewalk. By the light of a dim lamp one sees crossed flags over a doorway — a cardboard sign reads: “CLUB ROOM”.

Bobby and Koster get out.

Koster: Stay by the car. I’ll call if I need you.

He rings a bell, knocks at the door. It opens and he walks determinedly inside.

CUT TO:

216 BOBBY —

— lifting the overcoat from Lenz’s face so that the snow falls on it. He watches tenderly.

CUT TO:

217 INT. CLUB BUILDING —

— a dark hall. Koster holding a sort of porter or non-com by the shoulders.

Porter (intimidated): I haven’t heard any talk about anything.

Koster: You’re lying… A man with yellow leggings. (he points to a door at left) What’s in there?

Porter: A club room.

Koster (pointing to the other side): What’s in there?

Porter: A pistol range. But there’s been nobody here for an hour.

CUT TO:

218 EXT. CLUB BUILDINGS

Bobby standing beside “Heinrich.” Lenz’s stiffened finger seems to point toward the door of the building as Koster comes out, shaking his head. Bobby covers Lenz’s face again. They drive on.

DISSOLVE TO:

219 KOSTER AND BOBBY IN “HEINRICH”

It’s just before dawn and they are drenched to the skin. The car comes to a discouraged stop on a narrow street just before it goes into a highway.

Koster: It’s no use. They probably got off the streets. (he gets out, goes around and stares at Lenz, adjusting the coat a little as if he were still alive. He speaks as if to Lenz) We’ve looked everywhere. We won’t rest till it’s all right.

Bobby (impatient to act): Suppose we go to the police. They could at least help us find him.

Koster (fiercely): We’ll settle this ourselves. Do you think I’d let the police take care of it? (passionately) If they found him, I’d swear it was the wrong man so I could get him afterwards. (a clock somewhere begins to strike five in a weird minor. Koster’s voice becomes puzzled and bewildered) He wasn’t the sort of man you can spare, you know.

There is a crack of thunder and —

THE SCENE DISSOLVES TO:

220 A TRUCKING SHOT. THE SMOKEY REAR AREA OF A BATTLEFIELD IN 1918.

Along a battered communication trench trudge the Three Comrades. Lenz is in the center, giving a helping arm to Koster, who wears a bloody bandage on a head-wound — and to Bobby, who has swallowed a mouthful of gas. Bobby gasps and holds his hand to his chest.

Lenz (in a hearty, cajoling voice): Only a little way now. (to Bobby) Come on, son — you’ll have a week in bed with pretty nurses chewing on your ear. Won’t he, Lieutenant?

Bobby laughs and chokes. Koster stumbles.

Koster: I can’t see for this cursed bandage.

Lenz: Nothing to see, Lieutenant — not a lady in sight. Does the Lieutenant think he’s at the Kroll Garden? (he sniffs) No gas anyhow — Bobby swallowed it all. Keep moving — I want to get back and blow up the boys that got you.

With a burst of sound that might be gunfire or thunder —

THE SCENE DISSOLVES TO:

221 THE STREET. JUST BEFORE DAWN.

Bobby and Koster looking at each other across Lenz’s body. The stiff finger points toward the highway, along which passes a procession of market carts — but now they are wintry looking and snow-covered. Two of the drivers are singing a melancholy soldier’s song, “Argonnerwald.”

Koster: It’s morning. (then remembering) You and Pat are leaving at noon.

Bobby: Not now. I can’t go with —

Koster (sternly): You’re taking Pat to the mountains this morning. When you get back we can settle this.

Bobby (passionately): You swear you’ll wait for me?

Koster (nods): I’ll wait. This is something we have together.

They stand on either side of Lenz’s body as the last market cart clops by and a pale wintry light breaks in the East.

DISSOLVE TO:

222 A RAILROAD TRAIN —

— leaving a grimy city station in the rain.

DISSOLVE TO:

223 A THIRD-CLASS COMPARTMENT. EVENING.

GROUP SHOT favoring Bobby and Pat who stand watching at the corridor door. Some passengers, notably Rita, a Spanish girl, are playing guitar, mandolin and accordion, and others are singing. Several, but not all of them, are thin and pale. Bobby’s eyes are far away, expressionless — Pat is smiling.

Pat (to the performers): Bravo, Rita. Hello, Boris.

Rita: Buenas Noches, Pat. (Good Night, Pat)

Boris (a Russian): How do you do, Fraulein Hollmann?

Bobby (in a whisper to Pat): You know these people?

Pat: Yes, from two years ago; they’re going to the same sanitarium. All the birds migrate about this time of year.

Bobby (considering): Then it can’t be so bad.

As the music starts again they turn from the compartment and look out the corridor window, elbows on the rail.

Bobby: In the Spring you’ll be well enough to come back — all brown with the sun?

Pat (without belief): Yes.

(a strained pause)

Bobby (making conversation): Did you pack your silver dress? (Pat nods) It’s a beautiful dress — a dangerous dress. I hope it won’t make you unfaithful to me.

Pat (laughs sadly): I love you too much.

Bobby (producing a little flask with a cup on it): We deserve a drink. Pat, you’ve held up beautifully.

Pat: Not inside.

Bobby: That’s why we’ll have a drink. (she drinks the cognac) Good?

(Pat nods, leans against his shoulder)

Pat: Oh, darling, what is the good?

Bobby: Keep your chin up — I’ve been so proud of you all day. (holds her close) It’s just the day you leave. Then things get all right again.

Pat: I haven’t been brave. You didn’t notice. That’s all.

Bobby: That’s just it. As long as you don’t give in, you’re bigger than what happens to you. Lenz taught me that.

Pat: Why did he miss the train? (she doesn’t know the truth but anything is enough to accentuate her sadness) Oh, Bobby, I’m afraid — afraid of the last great fear. You don’t know what fear is.

Bobby: I certainly do.

Voice (off-scene): Tickets, please.

The conductor (a fat comedian) is having difficulty squeezing along the corridor. Bobby hands him the ticket.

Conductor: I’ve seen the lady’s ticket already.

Bobby: Yes — in the sleeper.

Conductor: She must go up there. It’s too crowded back here.

Voice (from the compartment — referring to the conductor’s girth): It is now.

(laughter within)

Bobby (to the conductor): She came to visit me.

Conductor (puffing, wedged in the doorway): Can’t go anywhere without a ticket.

A Voice (within the compartment): That must be your trouble.

Bobby takes Pat’s hand and starts down the jerky corridor.

DISSOLVE TO:

224 THE SLEEPER

They enter a compartment with lower and upper both made up. Pat looks at a little slip stuck on the door.

Pat (disappointed): The upper is reserved from Frankfort.

Bobby shuts the door. She lies down in the berth.

Bobby (sitting beside her): It’s a good half hour to Frankfort.

Pat (doubtfully): Well, there’s that League for Fallen Girls.

Bobby: They don’t have branches on trains.

Pat: Are you sure?

Bobby: Very sure.

(he bends toward her)

DISSOLVE TO:

225 THE SAME COMPARTMENT — MORNING

Pat and Helga Guttman, a plain, pleasant-faced girl, sit side by side. They have been chatting while outside the window snowy mountains glide by.

Helga: You were asleep when I came in.

Bobby opens the door and enters.

Bobby: Good morning.

Pat (very bright): Bobby! (indicating Helga) Another old friend — Helga Guttman. She’s going back too.

Bobby (bows): Fraulein. (to Pat) How did you sleep?

Pat: Fine. I’m all right now, Bobby. It’s good to be going back — to be able to go back. There’s tomorrow and next week and next month — why think any farther ahead than that?

As she talks —

DISSOLVE TO:

226 A RAILROAD STATION IN THE MOUNTAINS

Sun, bright snow, a blue sky — happy, laughing people on the platform and the air of a winter resort. Two men in plus fours bear Helga away to a sleigh. Bobby is surprised by the contrast to what he expected.

Helga (waving): So-long, Pat. See you at dinner.

Pat waves back. A porter approaches Bobby.

Porter: What hotel, please?

Bobby: Waldfrieden Sanitarium.

Porter: Waldfrieden Hotel? Will you go by mountain railroad or sleigh?

Bobby: Mountain railroad, eh, Pat?

DISSOLVE TO:

227 A MOUNTAIN RAILROAD OR FUNICULAR

Pat, Bobby and others, including a nurse and a stretcher-patient, are seated in the car which begins to rise slowly up the mountain.

At the top, looking small as a pin-point, is the sanitarium — at the bottom, gradually receding, is the station and the little village.

Bobby: What works it?

Pat: Another car takes on water at the top and pulls this one up. See it?

CUT TO:

228 LONG SHOT — THE OTHER CAR

— beginning its descent of the mountain.

CUT TO:

229 THE ASCENDING CAR

Bobby: Great idea. I wonder who thought of it. Is that the hotel?

CUT TO:

230 LONG SHOT OF THE SANITARIUM AT THE TOP

CUT TO:

231 THE ASCENDING CAR

Pat (looking up and nodding): Hospitals look very beautiful — when you need them.

Bobby (looking down): We’re between two worlds. That’s our train puffing away — it’s hard to believe that I’ve got to go back to that world this afternoon.

Pat (alarmed): Not right away — you’ll stay a week.

Bobby (lightly): Oh no. They’ll put you to bed for a while.

Pat (pleading): Two or three days anyhow. (excitedly) Maybe they’ll let me stay up.

Bobby (as to a beloved child): You’ve got fever now.

(he lays his hand on her cheek)

Pat: Your hand is so cool — leave it there. So cool…

A bare branch moves slowly through the car, clicking against the seats. Pat reaches for it but it is gone.

Bobby (looking straight ahead): Pat, I’ve got to tell you something now. Gottfried — left us — the other night.

Pat: Left us? (pause) You mean he’s dead? (as she realizes) Oh, my God!

Bobby: He was shot — instantly killed.

They stare at each other for a moment. Then slowly her face turns up toward the nearing sanitarium and the white sky behind it.

Pat (in a whisper) Gottfried!

DISSOLVE TO:

232 THE SAME CAR

— descending now, with its seat reversed and the sanitarium receding against a dark sky. Bobby is the only passenger and his face is set and grim. The sound of half-roguish, half martial music begins again as we —

DISSOLVE TO:

233 A LARGE OPEN-AIR CAFE IN THE CITY

Koster and Bobby at a table in a middle-class crowd.

234 IN THE STREET

— a platoon is marching past the open-air cafe — half a dozen officers and non-coms with brutal bullying faces, and their followers — thin-shouldered, spectacled clerks; blank-faced country types; thin, pool-room youths and pimply boys in their early teens. The sinister aspect of the personnel is accentuated by the contrast between the tough, remorseless leaders and the sheep-like troops.

THE CAMERA IS HELD ON THEM five or ten seconds to suggest rather than dwell on this.

CUT TO:

235 CLOSEUP — Koster

Koster: God help us if that represents the future.

CUT TO:

236 REVERSE ANGLE — BOBBY

His eyes narrow as he looks across the cafe and gets up quickly. From several angles we show him obstructed by tables or by people coming and going.

This is INTERCUT with LONG SHOTS of another table — a man, seen from behind only, rises and fades into the crowd. Reaching that table to find his quarry fled, Bobby stares about wildly; in a moment, Koster joins him. The music has faded into the distance.

Bobby: It was him — I’d know those leggings anywhere — but he’s gone.

Koster: There’s no use — we’ve got to get his name first. We’ll try it Alfons’ way.

DISSOLVE TO:

237 EXT. POLITICAL CLUBHOUSE

The same that Koster entered on the night of the shooting.

DISSOLVE TO:

238 AN INDOOR PISTOL RANGE

Four young men in semi-uniform are shooting at a line of new board targets. They are: (1) a short, fat, muscular man; (2) a heavy, dark brutish man; (3) a mean-faced “killer” type; (4) a big, fussy moron whose spectacles give him a false air of intellect.

As the fourth man shoots, one of the targets turns sideways with the impact. TRUCK UP TO a grey-haired man in civilian clothes standing near the targets. His expression is covertly interested.

Grey-haired Man: Wait a minute — the target turned.

A flick of his eye shows that he is doing something secretive as he goes to straighten the board.

CUT TO:

239 THE FOUR PISTOL-MEN

Talking and laughing together.

CUT TO:

240 CLOSEUP OF A HAND

Scrawling an initial — “B”, “H”, “T”, and “L” — on each bullet hole.

DISSOLVE TO:

241 THE SAME HAND

Holding four twisted lead bullets in it, each with a tag tied to it. PULL BACK THE CAMERA to show the man with Alfons, Bobby and Koster at a table in Alfons’ Cafe. Koster has another spent bullet in his palm.

Koster: This is the bullet that killed him.

Grey-haired Man: An expert can tell which one of these matches your bullet. Then you’ve got your man.

DISSOLVE TO:

242 EXT. THE POLITICAL CLUB — JUST AFTER SUNSET

The martial-roguish music begins again as the four men who were at pistol practice come out and start down the street.

CUT TO:

243 “HEINRICH”

Half a block behind them and on the other side of the street, getting in motion

CUT TO:

244 THE FOUR MEN

Turning a corner, reaching a cafe. The first man drops out.

The Others: Goodbye, Karl.

CUT TO:

245 “HEINRICH”

Coasting slowly along. Bobby and Koster are discernable in the front seat.

CUT TO:

246 THE THREE REMAINING MEN

Marching jauntily. They pass a couple of street women who make way for them admiringly.

The Women (ad lib): Where to, big boys? Plug ‘em where it hurts!

One of the men makes an obscene crack in a low voice — the others laugh boisterously. We are now speculating as to which of the three is the murderer.

CUT TO:

247 CLOSE SHOT OF “HEINRICH”

Bobby and Koster watching intently.

Bobby (warningly): No closer! Slow up! Slow up!

CUT TO:

248 LONG SHOT OF STREET AHEAD

The three men have stopped. They chat and look idly up and down — not noticing “Heinrich.” The second man waves and goes into a house. The music has now ceased.

249 TWO SHOT OF THE LAST COUPLE

— CAMERA TRUCKING AHEAD OF THEM. The choice is now between the “Killer Type” and “Spectacles.” The Killer feels his hip pocket. The other man cleans his ear sketchily with his little finger and looks at it. They do not talk.

CUT TO:

250 “HEINRICH” —

— moving along with only a faint ticking sound through the gathering dusk.

CUT TO:

251 A CORNER

The two men stop. They shake hands and part. We TRUCK AHEAD of the “Killer” type down the street, see him begin to whistle. But it is not he, for we —

CUT TO:

252 THE OTHER STREET

The face of “Spectacles” as he walks along, wearing a faint frown like a premonition. “Heinrich” is just behind him. From a window a radio gives a sudden squawk and the man turns his head as it begins to play “Crazy Rhythm.”

CUT TO:

253 CLOSEUP OF BOBBY AND KOSTER IN “HEINRICH.”

Bobby (grimly to himself): All right, Mister.

Koster: All right, let’s go. Let him fire first.

CUT TO:

254 CLOSEUP OF KOSTER’S FOOT

— going down on the accelerator.

CUT TO:

255 “SPECTACLES”

— walking. He reaches the open end of an alley just as —

256 “HEINRICH” —

— rushes up beside the curb.

257 “SPECTACLES”

— starts as Bobby and Koster get out. Then he turns and flees up the alley reaching for his gun.

258 KOSTER AND BOBBY —

Start down the dusky alley, each hugging a wall.

CUT TO:

259 A TRASH BARREL AT THE DEAD END OF THE ALLEY —

From behind which come two crackling flashes.

CUT TO:

260 KOSTER AND BOBBY —

Untouched, continuing on. Two more shots ring out. Then Koster raises his pistol slowly and fires.

CUT TO:

261 THE MURDERER —

Crouched behind a barrel, dropping his pistol and clutching his shoulder. He tries to pick up the revolver with his other hand, but — Koster and Bobby bear down on him.

Koster (fiercely): You killed Gottfried Lenz. Death and hate — that’s what you and your kind are peddling through the nation — that’s all you know, so here it is —

The murderer leaps to his feet to dodge around the trash barrel. Roster’s shots catch him in the heart and stomach, and, clutching himself, he dives head first into the trash barrel.

CUT TO:

262 THE STREET

A policeman approaching hurriedly.

263 THE ALLEY

Windows going up in the gathering darkness.

Voices (ad lib): What’s that? Who’s there?

CUT TO:

264 THE POLICEMAN —

At the mouth of the alley.

CUT TO:

265 THE MURDERER’S BODY

Half in the trash barrel, legs hanging out. The sound of a loud whistle.

FADE OUT:

FADE IN:

266 A CITY STREET ON A BLEAK WINTRY AFTERNOON

Bobby’s taxi rolling along.

DISSOLVE TO:

267-268 ANOTHER WINTRY STREET WITH THE TAXI — THEN ANOTHER.

DISSOLVE TO:

269 A TAXI STAND —

Bobby swings his arms against the cold, holds his hand up to a prospective customer who doesn’t respond — gives up and drives off.

DISSOLVE TO:

270 THE COURT OF THE REPAIR SHOP —

— blear and desolate. No cars except “Heinrich” in the work shop. The taxi rides in, passing the gasoline pump, snow-covered as if it hadn’t been used all day.

Bobby gets out at the office door and reads the meter.

CUT TO:

271 CLOSEUP OF THE METER —

— showing one-mark-fifty for the day.

CUT TO:

272 INT. THE OFFICE —

Koster, adding figures at the table, looks up as Bobby comes in the door, but seeing his gloomy face, asks no questions except —

Koster: Cold out?

Bobby (discarding muffler and old leather jacket): Plenty. But nobody rides.

Koster (cheerful): The Christmas rush ought to start about tomorrow.

Bobby: Maybe I’ll get Santa Claus for a fare.

Koster pushes a letter over to Bobby.

273 INSERT: PART OF A LETTER:

“…found it advisable to put all our repair work in the hands of several large jobbers, and so are giving up our policy of shopping it around.

Very truly yours,

WIES AUTO-ACCIDENT INSURANCE

Per K.S.R.”

274 INT. OFFICE OF REPAIR SHOP —

Bobby (in a hushed voice): Will we have to go out of business?

Koster (rising and opening a wall locker): Oh no. After Christmas there’ll be jobs. Right now everybody’s trying to make the old bus last through the holidays. (a knock at the door. Koster, who has just taken out a bottle, puts it back hastily) Come in. (Matilda comes in. She is wrapped in shawls, wears a Queen Mary hat and carries a net bag) Oh — Matilda!

(he takes out the bottle)

Matilda: Good evening, gentlemen.

Koster inverts the bottle over a glass.

Bobby (to Matilda): Got another job?

Matilda: I have several jobs now, thank you, Herr Lohkamp.

(but her eyes are fixed on the more important matter of the bottle — which won’t pour)

Koster (rather dismally): Well, that’s that. And it’s our last drop.

Matilda (taking off her bonnet): My new gentleman orders his rum by the case. (she opens her net bag) He drinks far too much. (she produces a bottle, takes out the cork and sets it on the table) But the very best.

Bobby (with feeling): Matilda — I love you.

(he fills three glasses)

Matilda (haughty in her turn): No customers’ rum, that.

(they are really grateful)

Bobby and Koster (raising their glasses): Pros’t, Matilda.

(they drink)

They look hungrily at the bottle again but Matilda corks it and puts it back in the handbag.

Matilda: It isn’t proper to leave bottles about. (she looks around the room) This room! I declare, I’ll sweep it out for you.

She puts on an apron and goes to fetch a broom — during the beginning of the next scene she is in and about, always in the background. Bobby and Koster sit facing each other, smoking.

Bobby (dreamily): A customer will ring up in half a minute — with a big job. You’ll see — half a minute.

Koster takes out his watch. Silence, save for Matilda moving about.

Bobby: Half a minute.

Koster: Twenty seconds to go… fifteen seconds —

Bobby: All right, you’ll see.

Koster: Four seconds — three seconds — two seconds — one second —

(the phone rings loud and startling. They both spring up, looking at each other in awe. Bobby answers)

Bobby: What?… Oh, hello — yes, yes — a job — yes. (Koster gives a dance kick with excitement and turns to stare at Bobby) …Yes, it sounds fine. What’s the price?

Koster (in a stage whisper): For the love of heaven, what is it?

Bobby: Shh! (to the phone) Oh, that’s the price.

Koster (wildly): Double it — double it!

Bobby (to Koster): He says I only have to name the price. (to the phone) Would you consider doubling your offer?

(Koster comes toward him in agony, his hands outstretched)

Koster: Great Snakes! Will you tell me what it is?

Bobby waves him silent but he gives a wild yell and collapses on his back on the desk, his feet in the air.

Bobby: Now just repeat that — my partner is not very well.

CUT TO:

275 ALFONS’ CAFE —

Alfons on the phone, smiling.

Alfons: You play piano for two hours for these cattlesellers and I’ll give you five marks — ten marks — what you want, Bobby.

CUT TO:

276 THE OFFICE —

Bobby hangs up the phone.

Bobby: I’m playing piano for Alfons tonight. Ten marks.

Koster (letting out his breath and sitting up): Oh — h — h — h!

Bobby: If they can stand it. I can. You see, Otto, there is a Santa Claus —

(he breaks off at Koster’s expression and follows his glance to the window. A pale face is pressed against the window pane)

Koster: Who’s that?

MOVE THE CAMERA UP to show it is the Jewish Driver who formerly owned the taxi-cab. He is poorer and thinner than before.

Koster: Oh, hello — come in.

The face disappears. Bobby opens the door for him.

Koster (cheerful): Come to buy back your taxi?

Driver (laughs): I wish I could. I see you’ve still got it. How’s it running?

Koster: Fine. What are you doing now — driving?

Driver (thoughtfully): No, I’m not driving. I’m doing little jobs here and there. I haven’t been able to get a regular job.

Koster: Tough times.

Driver (laughs deprecatingly): There seems to be a little — prejudice around lately. But I must have struck the wrong people.

Koster: There’re always some.

Driver (nodding): Yes. Always some. You don’t need any work done, do you?

Koster: We’re looking for work ourselves. (the cupboard is still open. Koster sees a sweater hanging there) Your clothes aren’t very warm. Here — try this on.

Driver (grateful): Thanks. (he admires it) Not depriving you?

Koster (slowly): No. It belonged to a friend of ours. He’d like you to have it.

Driver: I’d be glad to tune up the Ford for nothing.

Bobby: It’s tuned to the last pitch.

The sweater has started them thinking of Lenz and, sensing their mood, the driver backs out, wearing it knotted around his neck.

Driver: I’m certainly obliged for the sweater.

Koster: Put it on.

Driver: No, I’ll take it home. (Bobby follows him out the door. The Driver pauses affectionately beside the taxi) Well-made car. (Bobby nods. Driver moves off, pauses, reminded of something by the falling snow) I thought I had a job today — but the man wouldn’t give it to me — (very quietly; understated) — because it was Christmas.

HOLD THE CAMERA ON his face a moment. Then he wanders away through the snow.

DISSOLVE TO:

277 STREET OUTSIDE ALFONS’ CAFE —

FLASH OF THE SEMI-UNIFORMED MEN marching thru the snow to the same mocking music. Far away an ambulance screams in the night.

DISSOLVE TO:

278 INT. ALFONS’ CAFE —

Alfons is looking at the above scene through the window. He turns away with a frown. The cafe is crowded. A twelve-foot silver fir tree stands beside the bar, hung with colored balls, candles and tinsels. Two cafe women are putting on the finishing touches. In the rear, waiters set a big table — silver dishes over spirit lamps hold two suckling pigs with apples in their mouths and little fir sprigs ablaze upon their backs.

Bobby at the piano, is playing American jazz — “Among My Souvenirs,” “Muddy Water,” “Blue Room,” “So Blue,” etc. — and Koster is at a table surrounded by rough well-to-do cattlemen in cowhide boots. The patrons are moving to the table to sit down.

Now Bobby stops playing, pauses and then leading a quartet beside the piano, begins “O du Frohliche, O du Selige.” Between the second and third verses a waiter comes up to Bobby.

Waiter: A phone call, Bobby. (Bobby nods, not really realizing what the man has said. After the number is finished the man comes back) It’s a long distance call for you.

Bobby (jumping up): Why didn’t you tell me?

He dashes for the phone booth and another man sits down at the piano and plays, “I Can’t Give You Anything but Love Baby,” which continues quietly through the ensuing scene.

CUT TO:

279 THE PHONE BOOTH —

Bobby: Hello. Waldfrieden — yes —

CUT TO:

280 QUICK TRAVELING SHOT OF A LINE OF TELEPHONE POLES IN WINTER —

The line goes up a snowy mountain.

CUT TO:

281 PAT’S ROOM IN THE SANITARIUM —

— bare, white, cheerful. She lies on her bed, half dressed for a party, the silver dress beside her. She is thinner and paler than when we last saw her.

Pat: I tried to call you, dearest — I tried the boarding house and the shop —

Bobby (astonished): My God, are you really there?

Pat: Yes. I’m lying on my bed in my room.

CUT TO:

282 THE PHONE BOOTH

Bobby (groans): Ach, this wretched money! If I had any I’d be in an aeroplane in five minutes.

Pat (sadly): Oh, darling —

Pause — the wire hums.

Bobby: Are you still there, Pat?

CUT TO:

283 PAT’S BEDROOM

Pat: Yes, Bobby, but you mustn’t say things like that. You make my nose tingle.

CUT TO:

284 BOBBY IN THE PHONE BOOTH —

— settling himself in the cramped space — head against the wall.

Bobby: Tell me everything you do up there.

CUT TO:

285 PAT’S ROOM

Pat: Well, there’re some dances this week.

Bobby: I’ll bet you wear the silver dress.

Pat: Yes, Bobby — your silver dress.

Bobby: Who do you go to the dances with?

Pat: No one tonight. It’s here in the sanitarium. (pause) This is the last one for me because I have a little operation next week —

CUT TO:

286 THE PHONE BOOTH

Bobby (terribly upset): What is it? Why didn’t I know? Is it that one where they cut the rib?

Pat: How did you know?

Bobby: Pat — I want to talk to the Doctor — right away. Don’t cut me off — bob the receiver —

DISSOLVE TO:

287 OFFICE OF THE SANITARIUM

Dr. Plauten at telephone.

Dr. Plauten: She had a slight hemorrhage last week and she’s run a fever ever since.

CUT TO:

288 THE PHONE BOOTH

Bobby: Is the operation dangerous?

Dr. Plauten: Not if she stays very still afterwards. It’s a thoracoplasty — the only danger is a spontaneous collapse of the lung if she should move —

Bobby (interrupting): I’m coming up. It may take me two days — don’t do anything till I get there. (he hangs up and hurries from the booth, running into Koster) She’s worse. They’re operating. I’ve got to go up there. My heavens, Otto, how can I raise some money?

(Alfons joins them)

Alfons: They want more music, Bobby. I told them to be more generous with the piano player.

Bobby (distraught): Yes, I’ll play.

Alfons (noticing his agitation): Rest if you want, Bobby. You’ve played an hour.

Bobby: I don’t want to rest.

He throws himself down at the piano and plays “Kitten on the Keys” or something very staccato.

289 KOSTER —

— looking after Bobby and then silently going to the phone booth and closing the door.

CUT TO:

290 THE TABLE

Men are eating. Christmas stockings being passed by the waiters, containing fruit, nuts, horns, etc.

A Street Woman: And here’s the special one for Mr. Bobby. Because lots of times he plays for us for nothing.

She takes it to the piano and hangs it from a song album so that it dangles in front of Bobby whose unseeing eyes stare at it while he plays.

CUT TO:

291 KOSTER IN THE PHONE BOOTH

Koster: Dr. Jaffé, you told me several times that you’d like to buy my racing car. Well, it’s for sale now.

CUT TO:

292 HALL OF DR. JAFFÉ’S HOUSE

The Doctor stands at the phone with a table napkin in his hand. SHOOTING PAST HIM, we see his family at dinner in the next room.

Jaffé (incredulous): You mean that preposterous, ugly, rattling hybrid, that monstrosity, that four-legged road horror, that abominable juggernaught?

Koster’s Voice (discouraged): Yes. I only thought —

Jaffé (heartily): Of course I’ll buy it. I’ll drive it the rest of my life and then present it to the Transportation Museum.

Koster (relieved): I’ll give it to you in four days. But I need a little advance right now.

Jaffé: Come and get it.

CUT TO:

293 BOBBY —

— playing jazz. Between numbers, the Street Woman is at his ear.

Woman (coyly): Look at your present.

Bobby (not understanding): Present?

(Koster comes to the other side of the piano)

Koster (to Bobby): I’ve got the money.

Bobby (springing up): Oh, thank God!

Woman (pointing): In the stocking.

Bobby (getting control of himself): Oh — excuse me. (he opens the stocking, pulls out pink socks, a flask of rum, a green tie, half a dozen handkerchiefs) This is — this is — impossible. (he is very touched. They laugh and clap) I don’t know when I last got a Christmas present. I don’t even remember — (there are tears in his eyes — really the relief from strain) — it must have been before the war. But I have nothing at all for you.

Alfons (his arm about him): Play for us. That’s your present.

Bobby turns to the piano and plays “Silent Night” very movingly. The voices join in with beautiful choral harmony as we —

DISSOLVE TO:

294 — 303 A MONTAGE SHOWING:

“HEINRICH” ON ITS WAY TO THE MOUNTAINS. THIS SHOULD INCLUDE: WINTER ROADS; STREETS OF COUNTRY TOWNS DOMINATED BY ANCIENT CASTLES; PINE FORESTS AND MOUNTAIN LAKES; NIGHT SCENES — FIXING A FLAT BY MOONLIGHT; SNOW FALLING; FINALLY MOUNTAINS ON ALL SIDES.

CUT TO:

304 TRUCKING SHOT OF KOSTER AND BOBBY IN “HEINRICH.” A SPARKLING MORNING.

Koster (staring ahead triumphantly): We’d never have made it without chains.

CUT TO WHAT HE SEES:

305 A LONG SHOT OF THE INN —

— half a mile away.

CUT TO:

306 LONG SHOT OF A MOUNTAIN ROAD —

— “Heinrich” climbing. A horse-drawn sleigh is parked in the road ahead. “Heinrich” comes to a stop.

CUT TO:

307 CLOSEUP OF PAT ALONE IN THE SLEIGH —

— wrapped in robes and smiling.

CUT TO:

308 MEDIUM SHOT. THE SLEIGH.

Bobby and Koster running up to Pat and embracing her, robes and all, from both sides.

Koster: Great Snakes!

Bobby: We thought you’d be in bed.

Pat: I got your wire. I’ve been waiting in the road for an hour.

Bobby (to Koster with intensity): Otto, I love Heinrich. I’m grateful to him. I didn’t think I’d ever desert him — (quickly) — but I’m getting in here.

He dives in under the robes and comes up from below, holding Pat in his arms.

Pal: Are you staying? Tell me right away.

Bobby: Yes, I’m staying — until we go back together.

As the sleigh turns Pat puts her hand into his chest under the shirt. She kisses him and tears roll down her cheeks.

DISSOLVE TO:

309 EXT. OF THE SANITARIUM

Large chalet style with modernistic touches. People going and coming with skiis, sleds, etc. Bobby helps Pat out of the sleigh as Koster parks “Heinrich.”

Bobby (to Pat): I can’t get over everyone looking so gay.

Pat: Do you think it’s unnatural?

Bobby: No, but I keep being surprised. How’s your friend, Helga?

Pat (stops and faces him): Helga’s gone away.

Bobby: Gone away?

Pat (sadly): Yes.

Bobby understands.

Koster joins them, smiling, and they walk into the sanitarium together.

310 INT. SANITARIUM LOBBY —

— spacious and like a hotel save for the nurse at the receiving desk. Lounging chairs and sofas — card tables in use, a radio playing jazz, and a few people drinking what appear to be cocktails in the background. (Some of the types are normal, some thin and feverish but none very sick or emaciated — except when so specified in the script.): As Pat, Bobby and Koster come in, they run into the brisk young Doctor to whom Bobby talked on the phone.

Pat: Dr. Plauten — my husband.

Dr. Plauten (offering his hand): Oh. I’m happy to see you again, Herr Lohkamp. Your wife is a great favorite with us here.

Pat: And Herr Koster.

Bobby: Is she behaving?

Dr. Plauten (lightly): In a way. She is the leader of the younger set. Rather wild you know — cocktails, dancing —

Bobby (worried): Cocktails!

Dr. Plauten: By the dozen.

Pat (ruefully): But they’re made of raspberry syrup.

Dr. Plauten (broodingly): Cigarettes —

Pat: Without nicotine.

Dr. Plauten: Coffee —

Pat: Without caffeine.

Dr. Plauten: Dancing —

Pat (looking at Bobby): Without you.

Bobby (shyly): Is it all right for her to dance?

Dr. Plauten: It depends on the fever chart. Would you care to come into my office? I can tell you everything there.

They walk off the scene. Pat’s eyes follow Bobby lovingly. Without looking at Koster her arm seeks his.

Pat: Does he love me?

Koster (taking her hand): He loves you, Pat.

Pat (still looking off): Yes, he loves me — terribly. It will be very lonely for him.

Koster: That’s silly talk. (they begin to walk in the direction of the bar) What’s this about an operation?

CUT TO:

311 THE DOCTOR’S OFFICE. BOBBY AND DR. PLAUTEN.

Dr. Plauten: We take out a piece of the rib here — that’s all. She lies still for a few weeks — then she is up again and out — with perhaps a new chance for life — a furlough that may last a long time.

Bobby (terribly depressed): Then she’s sinking.

Dr. Plauten: The fever chart hasn’t encouraged us. If she’d stayed in the city things would be worse.

Bobby: But you only mean that it goes slower. (shaking his head) You haven’t any hope.

Dr. Plauten: A Doctor always has hope. It belongs to his job. But — both lungs are affected. (Bobby shakes his head in silent discouragement) Miracles do happen. Sometimes it stops, heals up — even desperate cases. (Bobby nods gloomily) We have many patients about the same age. A legacy from the war — undernourishment in the growing years.

As he talks there is a very faint sound of drums in the room. Bobby springs to his feet.

Bobby (wildly): Always that war!

CUT TO:

312 THE “BAR” IN THE LOBBY —

— where what sounded like drums has evolved into “Valencia” on the radio. Koster and Pat are sitting with drinks. Pat reaches around her own cocktail, takes up Koster’s and smells it.

Pat: Yours is real — mine is what they call a “Special.”

Koster (absorbed in his thoughts): It’s all been absolutely right, Pat. Even if things are as bad as you say, I’m glad you and Bobby have had this happiness together.

Pat: You’re very fond of Bobby.

Koster (nods; speaks slowly): Yes. It wasn’t on the cards for me to marry and have children. (he drinks) — and I’ve imagined sometimes he was my son — growing and developing. (sets down his glass) But it was a pretty bleak world to grow up in till you came.

Pat (wistfully): You think I’m what the doctor ordered for him?

Koster (nods): You’ve given him everything he could have dreamed of.

Pat: It wasn’t hard to give him everything. (nervously) But now what do I do? I love him — so I want to know how to act — to leave it all clean and bright just as if I’d never been. (Pat should not lean too heavily on these lines) She smiles suddenly, and CAMERA PANS TO BOBBY, coming out of the Doctor’s office. He sees Pat and Koster, bows to Dr. Plauten and goes toward them. They meet him near the desk.

Pat: Come and see my room.

Bobby: Otto and I have to get a place to live. (he turns to the motherly woman at the desk) Can you put us up?

Nurse: Out in the lodge. Visitors can’t stay in the hospital.

Bobby: I’ll bet I can. (the nurse hands him a key which he doesn’t take) There’s certainly a room next to my wife’s.

Nurse: It’s absolutely against regulations.

Bobby (to Koster and Pat): You two go along. (As they do, he turns back to the nurse) You have a bee-ootiful face.

(smiling gravely and looking into her eyes)

DISSOLVE TO:

313 PAT’S ROOM

She and Koster stand in the open window. Bobby comes in.

Pat: Success?

Bobby (dissimulating): Absolutely against regulations.

(Pat’s face falls)

Koster: We’ll think of something.

Pat (sitting on the bed): Tell me about home. Every day we can tell each other a little of what happened while we were apart. Then we can feel we’ve been together always.

Koster (feeling they want to be alone): There’s a rear spring in Heinrich that needs attention.

Pat: Good old Heinrich. What would we do without him? But certainly you’re not thinking about going back yet?

Koster (considering): The little operation is day after tomorrow?

Pat (frowns — smiles): That’s another day. The important thing is the dance tonight. If I haven’t a temperature — I can go.

Koster: Then don’t disturb her temperature, Bobby.

(he goes out)

Pat (arms around Bobby): Oh, darling, darling!

Bobby: Ought you to go to the dance?

Pat: No. But I’m going anyhow. (she looks at his serious face) Bobby, all the time you weren’t here I did everything they told me. I was nothing but one long prescription. And it hasn’t helped. I’ve only got worse. So the time that I still have — this time with you — let me do as I wish.

(her face is flushed and tender)

Bobby: I only thought we should ask the Doctor first.

Pat: We’re asking nobody anything. Nobody. (with an idea) I know where you can borrow evening clothes.

(she pulls him out through the French windows onto a little balcony)

CUT TO:

314 MED. SHOT EXT. OF SANITARIUM — BOBBY AND PAT ON HER BALCONY

— including another balcony below them and to the left on which a handsome young Italian, Tony, lies in a deck chair, wrapped in blankets.

Pat: Tony.

(Tony looks up, his face lighting)

Tony: Buon giorno, Pat.

Pat: You once told me you had two dinner coats. Can I wrap up my husband in one tonight?

CUT TO:

315 CLOSEUP PAT AND BOBBY

Pat (whispering): I suppose you’ve brought your own string?

(Bobby does a “double takem”)

CUT TO:

316 MED. SHOT TO INCLUDE TONY ON HIS BALCONY

Tony: Tutto quello che ho e tuo.

Pat (to Bobby): He says anything he has is yours — isn’t he cute? Also you’re being introduced — Signor Collazo, my husband.

(the two men smile and wave at each other)

CUT TO:

317 CLOSEUP OF TONY’S FACE

— full of adoration for Pat.

CUT TO:

318 CLOSEUP OF PAT AND BOBBY

— looking out from their balcony.

CUT TO WHAT THEY SEE:

319 THE VALLEY

— rather like Gstaad or Davos in Switzerland, with sanitariums on the snowy peaks. Across from them one road winds upward and disappears like a violet ribbon between the hills.

CUT TO:

320 THE BALCONY

Pat (shading her eyes): Is that the road home?

Bobby: Yes.

Pat: How far is it?

Bobby: About five hundred miles. In May you’ll be starting back along that road. Otto and I will come and get you.

Pat: In May. My God, in May!

FADE OUT.

FADE IN:

321 LOBBY OF THE SANITARIUM. EVENING

Radio music. Men and girls in evening dress and heavy coats passing out through the doors into the night. General high spirits.

Pat coming downstairs in the silver dress under a warm coat. Bobby and Koster in dinner coats, are waiting for her, overcoats over their arms.

Bobby (struck by her beauty): Pat, you look —

(he shakes his head, unable to express himself. Pat nods understandingly)

Pat: You’re rather like a Grand Duke yourself. And Otto — well, that’s service.

Koster: Ought to be — it’s the head waiter’s.

They walk through the lobby, stopping to speak briefly to Tony and a party, and Rita the Spanish girl who is between two admirers — Boris the Russian, more emaciated than on the train, and Herr Heffrich, a Dutchman, who looks fat and well. They pass Dr. Plauten who frowns as he sees Pat — he starts to speak to her, hesitates, decides not to.

CUT TO:

322 EXT. THE STEPS ABOVE THE WAITING SLEIGHS

The group pauses to look at the night scene below. Pat’s face suddenly wears an abstracted look.

Bobby (noticing an unusual mood): What is it? What are you listening for?

Pat (in a trance): I don’t know — I feel as if I were getting ready for something.

Koster (reassuringly): You are — for the ball.

DISSOLVE TO:

323 A LONG SHOT OF THE KURSAL IN THE VALLEY BELOW

Lights blazing, music drifting up faintly, sleighbells jingling.

DISSOLVE TO:

324 THE PARTY IN A SLEIGH —

— swinging along a white road between other sleighs — passing a sleigh with an exchange of gay cries.

DISSOLVE TO:

325 FULL SHOT — THE BALL ROOM AT THE KURSAL, OR CASINO

The orchestra is playing the “Blue Danube” and the guests are doing the old-fashioned “Wiener Waltz.”

Pat has just finished dancing with Tony who bows and retires as Bobby takes over.

Bobby (with exaggerated carelessness as they start off): That’s a chap you might fall in love with. Don’t you agree?

Pat (innocently): Not exactly. But I don’t know how I’d have done without him all the time you were gone.

Bobby: Haven’t you ever been tempted here?

Pat: Not very much.

Bobby (torturing himself): Hasn’t it been hard to be faithful in that silver dress?

Pat (lightly): On the contrary. It has memories, this dress.

Bobby (ruefully): Yes, I know its effect. But whatever you’ve done, I don’t want to know about it. It’s all past and forgotten.

Pat: (undisturbed — whatever she’s done, she has no sense of guilt): But I’ve done nothing. (tenderly) I love you too much.

DISSOLVE TO:

326 A CORNER OF THE KURSAL — LATER —

— with lights playing on the dancers. The orchestra is playing “My Blue Heaven” in “sweet” time. Bobby and Pat are dancing a little apart from the others.

CUT TO:

327 CLOSEUP OF PAT’S LIPS —

— saying something we cannot hear.

CUT TO:

328 REVERSE CLOSEUP OF BOBBY —

— showing his reaction to what she says. Implication of passion in both her whisper and his response but no words in this scene.

DISSOLVE TO:

329 THE GUESTS AT SUPPER AT LITTLE TABLES

MOVE CAMERA UP TO CORNER OF THE ROOM where Rita sits in the center, playing a guitar — something sad, Slavic and disturbing. At her feet sits Boris the Russian; behind the sofa stands Herr Heffrich the Dutchman. Both look at her adoringly.

At a table right next to this group sit Pat, Bobby and Koster. A girl in front coughs convulsively as the music dies away.

CUT TO:

330 THE GIRL —

— looking quickly into her handkerchief and flinching.

CUT TO:

331 GROUP SHOT FAVORING RITA, BORIS AND THE DUTCHMAN — INCLUDING PAT AND BOBBY

Boris sits up beside Rita on the sofa.

Boris (eagerly): I can dance the next dance with you, Rita. I gained a pound this week.

Rita (sniffing): Only one pound? Heffrich has gained four. (to the Dutchman) Haven’t you, dear?

Heffrich (swelling with pride): Not only that — my average afternoon temperature was only one hundred point-one. (Rita eyes him fondly as he turns to Boris) And you’re hovering around a hundred and two point-five every day.

Boris (heatedly): That’s a lie! He shakes the thermometer down. Everyone knows. (people begin to listen) And I’ve seen your X-ray chart. (he makes a gesture of revulsion) When you’re out of the way, it’ll be my turn.

Over the back of the sofa they lunge at each other and in a moment the brawl is raging.

CUT TO:

332 PAT’S TABLE

Bobby (smiling): Is that what you call love by degrees?

Pat (laughing): Love by the pound. You don’t know whether to laugh or cry. (looks at Bobby and whispers) Be gay, darling. Be gay tonight for my sake. Who knows when I’ll be able to go to a ball again.

A fanfare of drums as we

DISSOLVE TO:

333 THE STAIRS OF THE SANITARIUM — MIDNIGHT

Pat and Bobby walking up together. He has one arm around her and carries her coat. Koster watches them from the foot of the stairs.

334 CLOSE UP OF PAT

As she half turns to say goodnight to Koster.

Pat: It was a lovely dance. Goodnight, Otto.

Bobby and Pat continue to the landing and come to Pat’s door.

Bobby (rather shortly): Now you go straight to bed. It’s after midnight.

As Pat steps inside her room he stays in the hall and starts to close her door.

Pat (in dismay): Aren’t you even going to kiss —

(he shuts the door on her)

CUT TO:

335 PAT’S ROOM

Pat inside the door, rebellious at this treatment.

CUT TO:

336 THE HALL

Bobby hurrying to the next room, unlocking the door with a knowing look.

CUT TO:

337 PAT BEFORE THE MIRROR

— looking at a tear in her dress.

Pat (to herself in a whisper): It doesn’t matter. I’ll never wear it again.

She looks as if she were listening to something far off. Then she starts, and we see in the mirror that the door between the two rooms is opening and Bobby comes in.

Pat: Oh, Bobby! — where did you come from?

Bobby: My room — next door.

Pat (going toward him joyously): Darling! Old times are here again.

DISSOLVE TO:

338 PAT’S ROOM SEVERAL HOURS LATER.

Pat and Bobby asleep in bed.

CUT TO:

339 CLOSEUP PAT’S FACE —

— showing that she’s breathing with difficulty.

CUT TO:

340 TWO SHOT — PAT AND BOBBY

Bobby wakes, immediately concerned. Pat sits up in bed, coughing.

Pat (in a rasping voice): If I can only get through this hour — just this hour, Bobby — then I’ll have one day more — it’s now that they die.

Bobby: The operation’s going to make a new woman of you.

Pat: That’s Tony’s radio there in the corner. Will you turn it on? (Bobby goes to the radio) Sometimes you can get an American station at this hour — it makes these times pass quicker.

Bobby dials in. After a moment a voice comes on in Spanish.

Voice: Rio de Janeiro broadcasting — a programme of —

Pat (smiling wanly): Oh, Bobby, do you remember — rolling down to Rio? — monkeys and coffee?

Music starts on the radio: it is “My Blue Heaven.” It continues through the following scene.

Pat: You ought not to have slept in this room. Not any more.

Bobby (unperturbed): All right — then. You can sleep in mine.

Pat (dully): And you oughtn’t to kiss me.

Bobby (his arm around her): I will kiss you.

Pat (leaning away gently): No, you mustn’t get sick. You have to live a long time. I want you to keep well and have children and a real wife.

Bobby: I don’t want children or a wife, except you. You are my child and my wife.

Pat (dreaming): I would like to have had a child of yours, Bobby. It must be nice to leave a little of yourself behind. And sometimes when the child would look at you, you’d remember me. And for a moment I’d be there.

Bobby: We’ll have a child when you’re well — a girl, and we’ll call her Pat.

Pat (drinks from a glass of water): Maybe it’s better not. You’ve got to forget me. And if you do think of me, you must only think what good times we had — nothing more. (she sighs) It’s over — why — we’ll never understand. (shakes her head; speaks almost impersonally) I can’t understand it — why two people should love as we do and yet one die.

Bobby (speaking with difficulty): One or the other must die first. But we’re a long way from that.

Pat: People should die when they’re alone, or when they hate — not when they love.

Bobby (miserable): We could make a better world, couldn’t we, dearest?

Pat (nodding): We wouldn’t allow things like that. But what we’ve had couldn’t have been better. Only too short.

DISSOLVE TO:

341 — 350 AN OPERATING ROOM

WE SEE A MONTAGE MADE UP OF THE FOLLOWING FLASHES:

A DOCTOR’S TROUSERS AND NURSE’S SKIRT UNDER AN OPERATING TABLE — AN INSTRUMENT TABLE WITH RUBBER GLOVED HANDS PICKING UP INSTRUMENTS — A NURSE’S HAND AND MASK AS SHE OPERATES AN ANESTHETIC MACHINE — UNDER THE OPERATING TABLE AS BEFORE, THIS TIME A CLOSEUP OF THE DOCTOR’S FEET, HEEL LIFTING SLOWLY OFF THE GROUND AS IN A GOLFER’S SWING TO INDICATE THAT HE IS NOW AT THE CULMINATION OF HIS EFFORT.

A CORRIDOR OUTSIDE — TWO PAIRS OF LEGS (BOBBY’S AND KOSTER’S) WALKING UP AND DOWN TOGETHER — A CIGARETTE DROPS, A FOOT CRUSHES IT, A HAND PICKS UP THE BUTTS. THE FEET WALKING ONE WAY. THE FEET WALKING THE OTHER WAY.

THE OPERATING ROOM, Nurses’ and Doctor’s feet walking away from the table, instruments being thrown into a steam boiler.

CUT TO:

THE TABLE — being wheeled back through the building into an elevator, out again.

DISSOLVE TO:

351 INT. BOBBY’S ROOM

Bobby pacing. Koster coming in the door from the hall.

Koster: Perfectly normal. Never was any danger and there won’t be, if she stays perfectly quiet.

Bobby: Can’t I even see her?

Koster: Certainly. I’ve even got permission to say goodbye before I start.

DISSOLVE TO:

352 PAT’S ROOM —

— darkened. The door to Bobby’s room is open and Bobby and Koster are standing beside Pat who lies in bed.

Koster (to Pat): Don’t you try to say goodbye — you save your strength for this husband of yours. Half an hour ago he was a lot sicker than you. (Pat presses his hand and smiles from one to the other) Goodbye for a little while — Comrade.

FOLLOW Bobby and Koster into the other room. They close the door behind them.

CUT TO:

353 A CURTAIN

— blowing in at the window with a sudden draft.

CUT TO:

354 THE CONNECTING DOOR

— which they had thought shut, blowing slowly open.

CUT TO:

355 PAT’S EYES

— fixed on that door.

CUT TO:

356 INT. BOBBY’S ROOM

Bobby (firmly): Otto, where are you getting the money for this?

Koster: Somewhere out of the future — it’s nice not knowing exactly. (he hands Bobby a roll of bills) Why not draw on the future? We draw on the past. Why there are stars still shining that blew up ten thousand years ago —

Bobby (interrupting): Where are you getting this money?

Koster: Why —

Bobby: Tell me!

Koster (hesitating, then very simply): From Heinrich — it’s Dr. Jaffé’s Heinrich now. You see, he admired him so much…

CUT TO:

357 PAT’S ROOM

Pat’s eyes wide and staring. Pat’s head shaking from side to side in dismay.

CUT TO:

358 BOBBY’S ROOM

Bobby utterly sunk.

Bobby: That’s worse than the money lenders.

Koster: I shouldn’t have told you, you baby.

Bobby: This may be a matter of months, years.

CUT TO:

359 PAT’S ROOM

A nurse opening the door, looking at her, closing it. Pat’s hand slowly comes out from under the covers.

CUT TO:

360 THE UPPER HALL

Bobby and Koster walking toward the head of the stairs.

CUT TO:

361 PAT’S ROOM

Pat’s hand slowly taking off the bed clothes.

CUT TO:

362 THE LOBBY DOWNSTAIRS

A scattering of patients. Koster and Bobby pass through, meet Tony who shakes hands with Koster. Radio playing nervous music. “Heinrich” is visible through the front door.

CUT TO:

363 PAT ON THE SIDE OF HER BED

— slowly pulling herself erect, standing still a moment and then stretching out her closed fists quickly toward the ceiling and reaching toward death — the only thing that can save her love, her high honor.

CUT TO:

364 EXT. THE INN

“Heinrich” racing from the door with the cut-out open.

CUT TO:

365 PANNING SHOT — BOBBY

— rushing through the lobby again, brushing past several patients and running upstairs, two steps at a time.

CUT TO:

366 PAT’S ROOM

Pat collapsed in a heap beside the bed, dying. Bobby coming in the door — seeing — going to her —

Bobby: Pat — oh, Pat. (he raises her, supports her. Pat’s head wobbles on her shoulders) Help — somebody!

Pat (very low): It’s all right — it’s hard to die — but I’m quite full of love — like a bee is full of honey when it comes back to the hive in the evening.

On these words, before her eyes close in death, we —

FADE OUT.

367 FADE IN:

A SNOW-COVERED CEMETERY ON A HILL IN THE CITY — EVENING

Bobby and Koster, their eyes straight before them, are walking down a broad path. There is a faint glow in the sky and far away the unmistakable tp! tp! tp! tp! of a machine gun.

Koster: There’s fighting in the city.

As they continue on, they are suddenly four instead of two — the shadowy figures of Pat and Lenz, grave and tender, walk beside them toward whatever lies ahead.

FADE OUT.

THE END

INFIDELITY

Fitzgerald wrote this unfinished screenplay in 1938, but the censor Joseph Breen was unhappy with the content when he read a draft, and the project was dropped.  It was felt the handling of adultery would give out an immoral message, which was particularly frowned upon at that time.  Therefore, the film was never made and the script was left incomplete.

INFIDELITY.

The Waldorf Roof after the theatre on a gala night: A well-dressed crowd, two bands, a floor show.

Camera picks up two men in tailcoats at a table near the door. One of them is trim and elderly. The other has wild, rumpled hair. They have dropped in for a quick drink and their top hats sit on the table before them. Both hold opera glasses to their eyes, through which they rather unsteadily observe the crowd.

Camera shoots between them at the crowd.

GREY HAIR: Table beside the bass drum.

RUMPLED HAIR (moving his opera glasses): I’ve got it.

GREY HAIR: What do you say?

RUMPLED HAIR: Let me concentrate.

A blurred dose shot of a table across the room seen through a frame shaped like this [sign] OO to suggest open glasses. The blur dears to show two young people leaning ecstatically over: the table toward each other.

The observers’table.

RUMPLED HAIR: I say, engaged.

GREY HAIR: Sure. Now the couple on their right.

Camera, acting as opera glasses, pans to a dull couple of thirty, utterly bored, staring for amusement anywhere bur at each other. Accidently, their eyes meet with a glazed expression and, as if startled, hastily seek other focuses.

GREY HAIR’S VOICE: Married.

RUMPLED HAIR’S VOICE: That’s too easy.

Camera, as opera-glasses, pans gain to the right, picking up a devoted couple of thirty-five, happy; at ease with each other, interested in what’s outside because they are seeing it together.

RUMPLED HAIR’S VOICE: Married?

GREY HAIR’S VOICE: Yes. (Pause.) Lucky devils.

Camera, as opera glasses, pans left, picking up another couple. The girl is talking earnestly, passionately to the man. The man is listening, his mouth moving uneasily. Once his eyes wander quickly from side to side, then back to her. Her eyes have swayed slightly with his.

GREY HAIR’S VOICE: Cheating.

The observers’table: Both men lower their opera-glasses, laughing.

RUMPLED HAIR: That’s obvious.

He drinks as Grey Hair raises his opera glasses again.

RUMPLED HAIR (calling off): Waiter — the check.

GREY HAIR: Wait a minute. Close-up of Grey Hair’s face: His face tightens with interest as he looks through the glasses.

GREY HAIR: Take a look at this couple. The camera shoots between them at the crowd.

RUMPLED HAIR (raising opera glasses as a waiter’s hand lets check fall on table): Where are they?

GREY HAIR: Near the mike... where the waiter is. Seen their faces somewhere... Camera, as opera glasses, picks, up Nicolas and Althea

Gilbert at a table beside the floor show; they are a handsome,

attractive, vital, well-dressed pair. Camera holds on them during following business during which their lips move appropriately but we hear nothing. They have just been served a light supper by a waiter who now retires. Nicolas makes a polite reference to the floor show which she answers with a courteous smile, such as one gives to a stranger. The smile fades rather quickly, however, and their eyes meet for a moment, gravely — but not as if they were strangers’eyes, for with a stranger, some conversation would have to go with such a look.Now Althea says something and he reacts politely and deferentially, again as to a stranger, but once again their eyes meet and hold, silent and inscrutable in the way no strangers’eyes would. They are certainly accustomed to each other; with equal certainty there is a barrier between them.

GREY HAIR’S VOICE: What do you make of them?

RUMPLED HAIR’S VOICE: Brother and sister.

GREY HAIR’S VOICE Too polite. (Pause)

RUMPLED HAIR’S VOICE: Married — but love somebody else.

At this point the couple’s eyes meet for the second time.

GREY HAIR’S VOICE: I don’t know about that either.

RUMPLED HAIR’S VOICE: I give up. Come on. Who started this game anyhow?

A sort of wipe dissolve, as if the glasses were being laid down, disclosing: Full shot of the room from the observers’table. As Grey Hair and Rumpled Hair rise to pay their bill, the camera forgets them and moves swiftly forward through the tables with the music swelling up. It takes position for a two-shot of Nicolas and Althea Gilbert and during the rest of the scene, as a distinct innovation in treatment, it remains entirely stationary. The shot is wide enough so that we can see the entertainment on the other side of their table — enough of it to almost hold our interest by itself. In the floor show, between and beyond them, we see a soprano finishing a torch number.

SOPRANO (singing): There’s love outside the window.

There’s love beyond the door,

There’s love around the corner,

But I don’t go there anymore.

Nicolas and Althea clap perfunctorily. Their eyes meet but this time they avoid the glance just slightly.

NICOLAS (attentive): More sherry?

ALTHEA: No, thanks.

Some gay people pass them going out, brush against the table, excuse themselves. Nicolas looks quickly to see if Althea has been annoyed, then inclines his head slightly. The two eat in silence. With a not too emphasized gesture, Althea turns her wedding ring with her thumb. Headwaiter comes into scene.

WAITER: Everything all right, Mr. Gilbert?

NICOLAS: Very nice.

ALTHEA (almost in the same breath): Very nice. Waiter retires

NICOLAS (polite): Salt.

ALTHEA (handing it): Oh, I’m sorry.

NICOLAS (using it): Thanks.

A ventriloquist number how begins on the floor — they give it mild attention.They are well-bred; their expressions are in full control. The air of constraint will transpire from what they do and say — there should be no attempt to “act”.

THE VENTRILOQUIST (to his dummy): Well, Jimmy, since you took the fatal leap, I haven’t seen so much of you.

DUMMY: My wife complains of that, too. A peal of laughter from a nearby table. The Gilberts’expressions are pleasant but they do not smile. Their attitude continues through several other jokes on marriage. The ventriloquist moves our of our vision; his voice continues, faint and indistinguishable.

NICOLAS: Want some coffee?

ALTHEA: No thanks, but you have some.

NICOLAS: Not for me.

Laughter at the ventriloquist comes from the tables. Nicolas turns his head slightly but isn’t much interested. He raises his hand to the waiter who, comes into the scene.

NICOLAS: Check, please. (To Althea:) Or perhaps you want to see.

ALTHEA (wakening from an abstracted mood and covering up with a polite smile): What? No — no. I’ve had enough.

Nicolas nods at the waiter who figures the check. Nicolas pays, and for the first time Althea looks around at the other tables, ending by looking directly into the camera which thereupon moves up to a dose shot of her. Her face is passive, mask-like, but we are sure she is a woman who has not found in life what she desires.

The lobby of the Waldorf: The Gilberts step out of the elevator; his attitude is protective. The other passengers cast covert glances at this notably handsome, well-dressed couple. Camera follows them out the door.

The street in front of the hotel: Nicolas stops beside a newspaper vending machine for an early morning edition. After a step, Althea stops too. In deference to her, he hurries forth the paper, stuffs it in his pocket, and they walk on together. The doorman recognizes them. DOORMAN: Yes, Mr. Gilbert — your car’s here. (Signals down [unknown] and blows whistle.) Limousine draws up, chauffeur jumps out, the Gilberts get in and they drive off.

Interior of limousine; night: Althea is staring straight ahead; Nicolas takes out his paper, turns on the little light and reads. Althea’s glance is caught by an item on an inner page — an advertisement for fine laces. Nicolas adjusts the paper politely so she can see it — before he turns the page, he paid a side-glance to see if she’s finished.

ALTHEA: I’m through. (She turns eyes front again.) Hold on Nicolas and Althea riding in silence long enough to indicate that their silence is habitual. No individual shots — the camera should emphasize their physical nervousness, yet sort of intimacy. They seem to be so perfectly mated, they would be in each other’s arms, deliriously happy. A rich but not palatial house in the East Sixties; night: Nicolas starts to unlock the door when Starks, the butler, opens it.

As camera follows them in:

NICOLAS (to butler): You didn’t have to sit, Starks.

BUTTER: There were some phones, sir. Camera follows them into a luxurious drawing room, in the best taste, family portaits, etc., not just Park Avenue interior decoration. These are people of tradition.

BUTLER: Your brother phoned from the airport in Chicago, sir. He’s arriving by plane tomorrow morning.

NICOLAS: Ah, good, good, (He half turns to Althea as if to share his joy, but recollects himself immediately, enthusiasm fading.)

ALTHEA (shedding her fur coat): That’s nice.

BUTLER: (reading from a list): And Mr. E.R.P. Chetton, and Senator Wade from Washington, and Mr. Morris Cauley.

NICOLAS (lightly): Give me the list — I’ll dream on it.

BUTLER (to Althea from another list): And from the hospital (Althea is instantly alert), the superintendent — Mrs. Gostal, or —

ALTHEA (supplying it): Mrs. Gosnell.

BUTLER: She phoned that she has the other trustees for ten o’clock.

ALTHEA: Oh, thanks.

BUTLER: And there was Mrs. Payson calling from Southampton, and Mrs. Cromwell (she takes the list from his hand), and some gentleman who will call again. (To Nicolas:) A something to eat, sir? (Picks up Nicolas hat, stick, rtc.)

NICOLAS: Thanks, we’ve eaten. Althea starts out into the hall.

ALTHEA (looking at list as she walks): Starks, tell the new parmaid she can stay. Get her some new uniforms.

Nicolas stands out of her way. As she slowly passes the place, her fur coat catches in the projecting spike of an late andiron. She stops; detaches it in a gesture and goes on. Nicolas quietly picks up the andiron and quickly bends offending part until it breaks off. Althea, unseeing, passes to the door. Close shot of Starks looking startled at the piece of andiron which Nicolas now drops on the floor. Nicolas’face has not tangled with the effort.

The hall: Althea mounts the stairs slowly. Nicolas follows her steps behind.

Starks’s face is seen looking up at them, faintly frowning. Two open bedroom doors.

ALTHEA (formally — a little hurried): Good-night. I enjoyed the play.

NICOLAS: Good-night, Althea. She goes into her room. Nicolas looks after her for a split second. Then camera follows him into his room. Moving about, he takes off his coat, his vest and slips off suspenders. Then he looks at the list the butler has given him, crumples it, flips it absently into basket, frowns and stoops to look for it. The basket has other papers in it, and patiently he smooths out one or two. His hanging suspender, dangling on his arm, upsets the basket. He stands up and looks at it listlessly. The scene is not comic — it is to indicate and accentuate his alone-ness, his helplessness, that boyish clumsiness which makes women feel maternal.

Althea’s bedroom: Luxurious. She is taking off her necklace. Through the door, the maid is seen drawing a bath. On her dressing table is a big open jar of cold cream. She lets her dress slip off, stands on tiptoes and stretches. Then she picks up a squash racket from a chair and, in front of the mirror, makes a couple of tentative strokes, practicing form; that brings her hair tumbling down. Nicolas’room: In his pajamas, Nicolas presses a window-opening device, then he gets into bed and lies staring at the ceiling a moment before he turns off the light. Althea’s room: The maid waits. Althea is coming from the bath, ravishing in a silk nightgown, looking like love — but no lover. Camera should hold on these shots if tense mood of mystery has been successfully established.

THE MAID: Is there nothing Madame wants?

ALTHEA (turning): Nothing — absolutely nothing.

The maid leaves. Althea aims out the sidelights and gets into bed. She opens a book, reads a few lines, then lowers it and stares at the ceiling.

The camera moves up to the page of the book, open on her breast, and we read:

INVICTUS. “Out of the night that covers me,

Black as the pit from pole to pole,

I thank whatever Gods may be

For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance

I have not winced nor cried aloud — “

The shadow of her hand crosses the page. The light goes The Gilberts’breakfast alcove cm a May morning: A New York street outside the window. Althea, dressed in pajamas, looking very fresh and beautiful, is pulling up her chair at the breakfast table as the butler sets down two glasses of orange juice and two newspapers.

Nicolas comes in, dressed for business.

ALTHEA: Good morning.

NICOLAS (politely as he sits down): Morning. Sleep well?

ALTHEA: Yes, thanks. (To butler as he brings over covered dish from the serving table and shows it to her:) Is this made of the new ham?

BUTLER: Yes, Madame.

ALTHEA: It ought to taste of hickory smoke and molasses. (More to herself:) When I was a girl in Virginia, we had smokehouses full of it every autumn.

The butler serves her husband who drinks his orange juice, looks at the headlines and puts the paper in his pocket. Two lovebirds in a cage behind Althea cheep at her, and she gets up and goes to them. The birds perch on her finger, and she chirps back at them.

ALTHEA: You’ll get your breakfast after a while.

She turns and looks at Nicolas. He has just forked a piece of his sausage cake. Suddenly he realizes he is being looked at and is grateful for her interest, eyes brightening.

ALTHEA: Well — ?

NICOLAS: Well?

ALTHEA (smiling): Nicer?

NICOLAS: What, nicer?

ALTHEA: The ham.

The look in his eyes makes her turn away to return the birds to their cage, and speak in a cooler voice.

ALTHEA: It’s sent up from the South. Nicolas’little eagerness fades.

NICOLAS: Oh, yes — it’s fine. Delicious. Everything is.

ALTHEA: Thanks.

The drawing room: A little later. We truck in front of them as they walk from the breakfast alcove through the drawing room, to the front hall. Her side-glance is on the room as they pass — she stops momentarily to adjust some flowers that dangle awkwardly from a vase, then catches up with her husband.

The hall: The butler is handing Nicolas his hat and holding a light coat for him.

NICOLAS (realizing something): I don’t need this — it’s spring.

BUTLER: Yes, sir.

NICOLAS: And it’s Saturday. (To Althea:) You going to the country?

ALTHEA: To the Bancrofts’.

NICOLAS (with a faint sadness): No.

ALTHEA: You’ll have so many things to talk over with your brother — I’ll be back tomorrow night.

NICOLAS (to butler): If my brother phones here,call the office immediately.

BUTLER; Yes, sir.

NICOLAS (to Althea): Have a good time.

ALTHEA: Thank you, Nick.

He goes out.

Drawing room: Althea walks back toward the breakfast alcove. Over the shot, comes the sound of a telephone bell.

Street: Truck Nicolas to the limousine. Inside, he takes out his newspaper. Then, involuntarily, as though propelled by a strange longing, an inner loneliness, he looks back toward the house.

Breakfast alcove: Althea, glancing out the window, sees him looking from the limousine. She waves her handkerchief in a friendly fashion — but only friendly, like everything else. Sound of telephone bell continues.

The limousine: Nicolas’reaction: His eyes almost glisten with emotion.

The breakfast alcove: Althea turns from window, unmoved. The phone in breakfast alcove is still ringing. The butler hastens to answer it.

BUTLER (at phone): Who is this, please? (To Althea:) A gentleman from foreign pans.

ALTHEA (surprised): A gentleman from foreign parts? (Suddenly an expression of pleased recognition comes into her face as she crosses to the phone.)

The International Life Company; anteroom of the gigantic offices: Camera picks up Nicolas coming in from outside and trucks him through deferential clerks, typists at desks, and people waiting to see him, following him into his luxurious private office with the skyline outside the windows. He is definitely in a mood, throws his hat on his desk and wanders to the window, his eyes far away.

Miss Crane, his secretary, a neutral, not glamorous type, comes in and hangs up his hat.

SECRETARY: Morning, Mr. Gilbert. (She sits down with pad and pencil.)

NICOLAS (abstracted): Good morning. (He looks at her.) Not yet.

SECRETARY (surprised at his tone): What?

NICOLAS (as if in a dream): I mean, not yet. There’s something else.

SECRETARY (puzzled): Something I can do?

NICOLAS (seeing her for the first time): Not you. No, not you. (More collected.) I’ll send for you later.

Confused, she turns, her handkerchief dropping from her lap. Nicolas takes a step and picks it up, holds it gingerly, his mind going back to his wife’s gesture of that morning.

SECRETARY: You don’t approve of my handkerchief?

NICOLAS: Oh, yes. It’s very nice. (Hands it to her.)

SECRETARY (smells it): The perfume’s some you gave me last Christmas.

NICOLAS: Hmm.

An office boy opens the door.

BOY: Mr. Harrison Gilbert. Immediately a burly, successful-looking man, a few years older than Nicolas, brushes by him and advances toward his brother.

HARRISON: Nick!

NICOLAS: Harry! They do a boyhood grip — first slapping, then clasping hands on the third count. Miss Crane and the office boy go out.

HARRISON (smiling — referring to the grip that Nicolas fumbled): You missed it — first rime in twenty years. What’s the matter?

NICOLAS (smiling): I’m just surprised. I thought you weren’t ever coming East again.

By the door: The office boy opens it, piles two expensive, shining leather grips and a bag of golf clubs inside. As the door closes -

Two-shot of the brothers.

HARRISON: I wanted to see you... to see you close.

NICOLAS (a little embarrassed): Well, that’s nice —

His brother turns him to the window and examines him.

HARRISON: I meet people sometimes — who’ve seen you — and they say things — things that worry me.

NICOLAS (scoffing): What’s this?

HARRISON: They say you look like thirty — you think like forty — you always did — but you act like fifty.

NICOLAS (backing away): I deny it all.

HARRISON: And when a man acts like fifty, he feels like fifty. And, Nick, you’re thirty-three.

NICOLAS: Am I? That’s right.

HARRISON: How’s Althea?

NICOLAS: Never better. Very busy — interested in this children’s ward she started at the orthopedic. She’s gone to the country for the night, but you’ll see her tomorrow. Pause. Harrison sits on desk.

HARRISON: Nick, what’s the matter between you two?

NICOLAS: Oh, we’re fine. Do you expect two people to go on staring at each other like a couple of love-sick calves all their lives? Do people expect marriage to be one long honeymoon? Marriage has its phases — its acts — like anything else. This is another act, that’s all.

HARRISON (interrupting): Nick, what’s the matter between you and Althea? What happened two years ago? (Pause.)

NICOLAS: A door closed, that’s all.

HARRISON: Why? Why, Nick, up to two years ago —

At this point, with the voices continuing as an overtone, the scene dissolves to a montage composed of the following elements:

(a) Althea in a wide hat in a rope swing — Nicolas pushing and running completely under it, so that first her smiling face and then his come up to the camera.

(b) Nicolas in a room, holding a stepladder. Althea is driving a nail — She loses her balance, clutches the air wildly and falls into his arms, laughing.

(c) Nicolas and Althea, dressed as clown and harlequin, driving down a country road at dawn, his arm about her.

(d) Nicolas and Althea donkey riding in Mexico — her donkey stampedes, sending him tearing after in wild alarm.

(e) Nicolas and Althea snowballing each other in front of a big house. Nicolas ducks and a snowball knocks off the hat of a staid passerby.

(f) Nicolas at phone, his face fond and tender. Althea at phone, the same.

(g) Two hands over teacups, clasping.

(h) Nicolas and Althea entering a bedroom, arms about each other, closing a door behind them. Over this shot comes the following conversation:

HARRISON (continuing): ...You were the happiest pair I ever knew. The only thing that bothered me was that you were too happy.

NICOLAS: It couldn’t last.

HARRISON: But it didn’t have to break into bits. There was enough to last you your lifetime. People used to stare at you, envying you, wondering where you’d found it — found what everyone in the world is looking for. Pause.

NICOLAS: Don’t you think I remember. On the day she sailed for Europe, two years ago — if anyone had told me it could end -

His voice fades off as the montage ends. Medium shot: The gangway of an ocean liner. A standing sign reads, “Conte di Savoia — Sailing at Midnight.” Shooting from the pier, the camera goes swiftly up the gangway,passing stewards with luggage.

Dining salon of the ship: Quite a few people supping or drinking at tables. In the foreground a well-dressed group is saying good-bye.

Ad lib: Write me from Paris? Your summer clothes are in the country. Etc.

STEWARD’S VOICE (calling over scene): Fifteen minutes more.

Camera trucks forward swiftly through tables, taking up a medium-close position as in the shot on Waldotf Roof. Nicolas and Althea sit opposite each other but now all has changed. The emotions are love and excitement, sadness and animation, and every emotion is shared and exchanged.

ALTHEA (leaning over table): I don’t believe I’m going away. I never have believed it and never will. If you were leaving me, I could understand it — but that I’m going away, free and in my right mind — (She shakes her head somberly from side to fide)

NICOLAS: You’re not going away. Listen, did you readin papers about the dog they froze up in a cake of ice —

ALTHEA: Poor dog.

NICOLAS: Wait a minute —

ALTHEA (near tears anyhow): I’m afraid I’m going to weep over that dog.

NICOLAS: Wait! They thawed him out after a month, and he came to life again. That’s how it’ll be with us.

ALTHEA: But what’ll I think about in my cake of ice?

NICOLAS: Oh, you’ll look out and see the Italian scenery and watch your mother get well and write me letters.

ALTHEA (desolately): Here are some letters. (She hands him a package — six letters, each addressed to Nicolas Gilbert, Esq.) This for the time I’m on the boat. You’re to open one every day.

NICOLAS: Oh, that’s fine.

ALTHEA: They’re not so good. They’re all about the waves and fascinating stranger I meet on the boat deck in the storm. (Pause.) You ought to see a lot of Kitty Tredwick while I’m away, or Mary Hoffman or that horrible woman with the pink hair you admire so.

NICOLAS (taking out notebook and consulting it): I’m seeing her tonight. The others’ll have to wait a few days.

ALTHEA: And please wear the knee bandage another month. And listen (leans over table) I don’t want you to write me. Send me a few cables if you like.

NICOLAS (vaguely hurt): Not write?

ALTHEA: No. I can’t explain. This is a dream, being away from you, and a cable is part of the dream, all vague arid impossible. But a letter would be like seeing you a long way off — where I couldn’t reach out and touch you.

Nicolas is shaking his head from side to side — tears are winking in his eyes.

NICOLAS: You are the craziest girl.

STEWARD’S VOICE (off scene): Five minutes more.

NICOLAS: I want to see your state-room.

As they go up -

A beautiful, big, light cabin on a high deck filled with flowers, Nicolas and Althea coming in: She stands with her arms folded, looking at the floor.

NICOLAS: Comfortable?

ALTHEA: Yes.

NICOLAS: Everything you want? (Crosses to washstand)

ALTHEA: Yes.

NICOLAS (at washstand): Hot water — cold water — (Neither flows.) I guess they don’t go till the boat starts. Even ice water.

ALTHEA: You can freeze me right now.

He comes behind her and puts his arms around her.

NICOLAS: No, not yet.

ALTHEA (unsmiling): Yes.

NICOLAS (letting her go and speaking with dead seriousness): This is pretty awful, isn’t

it?

ALTHEA: This is the awfullest thing that ever happened. I can’t stand it.

She grabs his hand and begins to jump up and down. He jumps with her and, unsmiling, like two children, they jump in a circle, shouting:

ALTHEA AND NICOLAS: We — can’t — stand — it. We — can’t — stand — it —

Door opens and stewardess puts her head in.

STEWARDESS: Is anything wrong? They stop jumping and look at her.

NICOLAS AND ALTHEA (together): Ye-e-s-s-s. Everything.

NICOLAS (feeling fives from a bill roll): You take care of this lady as if she was a piece of glass. She is. A tin gong beats in the hall.

STEWARDESS: All ashore that’s going ashore. (She exits.) Althea, wide-eyed, points suddenly to the window. Shot of the porthole and outside it.

Apparently the ship is in motion, passing the lighted port-holes of another ship. Nicolas throws up his hat in joy.

NICOLAS: Yea — we’re moving! I’m a stowaway. I’ll ride as far as Quarantine.

ALTHEA: You can’t ride to Quarantine! It’s contagious there. Althea rushes toward the porthole.

Medium shot as from the porthole: Another ship, backing into dock, is passing dose to the Conte di Savoia. It is the old Optical illusion of one’s own train moving when it is really the train beside it, moving in another direction. Two-shot of Nicolas and Althea beside the porthole.

Nicolas laughing; Althea looking relieved.

ALTHEA: Shall I be glad or sorry?

NICOLAS: It gave me an idea. I’ll ride to Quarantine with you and come back on the tug.

ALTHEA (catching his arm and starting him out the door): You will not. I won’t have you catch some foreign disease.

NICOLAS (resisting): Quarantine is only where they halt the immigrants’ships.

ALTHEA: Then why do they call it Quarantine?

NOTE: Althea has no “screwball” affectations but is clinging to any talk that distracts her.

As they go out of the cabin -

The embarkation desk crowded with good-byes. Nicolas and Althea come out and make their way to the rail beside the gangplank.

ALTHEA: They wouldn’t call it Quarantine if —

NICOLAS: I tell you it doesn’t mean disease.

Althea waves at someone on the dock. His eyes follow.

ALTHEA; There’s Charles.

Medium shot of crowd on dock. Close-up of uniformed chauffeur waving his cap. Two-shot of the deck: Nicolas and Althea waving back.

ALTHEA: Charles wouldn’t say that about Quarantine. (She chokes back her tears, turns suddenly to Nicolas, takes hold of his upper arms and says in a quiet voice:) You’re my man — you know it, don’t you? (He looks at her unsmiling.) You know I’d die for you this second or any second, and I haven’t any life in the world apart from you. You know it, don’t you?

He smiles just slightly and nods. There is a great din from the gongs and now the crowd pushes over and through them, scrambling for the dock. Nicolas and Althea arc borne apart by the rush. Close-up of Althea, raising her voice a little to reach him.

ALTHEA: You know it, don’t you? You’re aware of it, aren’t you, Mister?

Close-up of Nicolas borne, resisting, with the crowd, trying to stop by the gangway rope. A man bumps against him

MAN: Beg pardon.

NICOLAS: I beg your pardon. (He looks back at Althea.) Close-up of Althea: She cups her hands. ALTHEA: Know it? Close-up of Nicolas pushed farther down gangway. Agonized, he makes a hugging gesture with his arms. Close-up of Althea with tears on her cheeks. Medium shot of Nicolas at bottom of gangway walking backward.

Close shot of Nicolas: He trips — his chauffeur catches him. Nicolas hardly notices that he has tripped. He and the chauffeur fight their way to the dock railing.

Medium shot of the boat from the dock: Passengers waving.

Two-shot of Nicolas and chauffeur.

NICOLAS: Which is she? Where is she?

CHAUFFEUR: There — on the boat, sir.

NICOLAS: Where? Where?

CHAUFFEUR (pointing stupidly): She’s one of those people.

NICOLAS (passionately): No, she’s not — she’s something entirely different! Close-up of Althea on the deck, her face in a set smile, automatically waving a handkerchief.

Close-up of Nicolas seeing her, his face lighting up. Whistles and horns are blowing. Medium shot of the ship — moving. Close-up of Althea, her handkerchief blowing from her hand. The camera follows it as it flutters down the side of the ship.

Close-up of Nicolas seeing the handkerchief, his eyes following it down. He starts from scene. Medium shot of the ship pulling away, Close-up of handkerchief landing on dock, still fluttering along under dock lights in the breeze from the boat.

Camera trucks after Nicolas as he runs out dock where the crowd is thinner. He stops, waves toward the boat and goes on. His face is serious as he pursues the handkerchief. He almost has it when with a last little jump it disappears over the side of the dock. He looks after it, then he looks after the boat.

Long shot of boat in the distance.

Nicolas raises his hand to wave but realizes the boat is too far away. It is difficult for him to realize Althea has actually gone.

Apartment house on Park Avenue.

Nicolas gets out of has car and walks in.

Magnificent duplex apartment: Starks admits Nicolas.

NOTE: In this retrospective, even Starks clothes are a different type than in the contemporary part of the picture.

NICOLAS: Hello, Starks.

Camera trucks Nicolas through, the dining room, with Starks following.

STARKS: Did Madame get off all right?

NICOLAS: Don’t let’s — mention Madame for a i Phone rings.

STARKS: A Mrs. Holland has called several times.

NICOLAS (now at the buffet in dining room): Didn’t her Mrs. Gilbert was sailing?

STARKS: She asked for you, sir.

NICOLAS (mixing a drink): Asked for me? I don’t speak to her. (Drinks.) She may be beautiful to some. (Drinks.) She always reminds me of a monkey. (Finish.) I’m going to bed.

Nicolas’bedroom: He is in pajamas, sitting on the the bed, taking off his slippers. A cigarette burns on table. Phone rings; absentmindedly, he picks it up.

NICOLAS: Hello — hello. (At the response, his face starts to bang up, wishing he’d let it ring. With artificial enthusiasm:) Oh, hello. What brings you here... yes, I know you live here (curses to himself) but I thought you were away — in India or somewhere (he lowers the phone from his mouth while he picks up the cigarette from the night table. He speaks impatiently to

himself:), or in the zoo.

WOMAN’S VOICE (on phone): I read in the paper that Althea sailed today.

NICOLAS: Yes, she did.

VOICE: So I sprang to the phone, thinking, “Now that he’s unprotected, I can try again.”

Nicolas nods grimly at the phone. Then an idea strikes him.

NICOLAS (confidentially): As a matter of fact, you can come right over. I don’t think Althea’s coming back at all.

VOICE (startled): What?

NICOLAS: Fact — she’s leaving me. Listen — come in by the window, will you?

VOICE (startled): The window?

NICOLAS (very confidentially): Climb up the side of the building. There’s a big parade of baby pandas coming in the door. That’s what Althea couldn’t understand — that’s why she left me — (A click at the other end. Nick looks at the phone, smiles and bangs up).

Insert — envelope: Nicolas Gilbert, Esq. To be opened the first day.

Insert — another envelope: Nicolas Gilbert, Esq. To be opened the second day.

And so on, with flashes of two more envelopes.

An office. Morning. It is very smart and important but not the same office that Nicolas occupies now. Nicolas — the cheery, spirited Nicolas of two years ago — comes in, just arriving for his morning’s work. A woman, apparently his secretary, is seated at a typewriter with her back to him and does not rise as he comes in. He gives her a faintly surprised glance, forgets her, sits down and opens the top drawer of his desk. Two envelopes, addressed to him in Althea’s writing, remain. He puts one back in the drawer and looks at the other.

Insert — envelope: Nicolas Gilbert, Esq. To be opened the fifth day.

Nicolas opens it and spreads it out before him. Woman at typewriter steals a side-glance at him. Iris Jones is about thirty, well preserved, healthy and with a certain charm. Any man would look at her twice, but she is cast as one who has not the special hallmarks by which privileged classes identify each other. She runs her words together in a way Althea would not, and though Althea uses a racier vernacular, her slang seems always within quotes. It is important that she be cast as a small-town girl. She turns back to the desk.

Nicolas continues to read the letter. He is absorbed and intent.

The door of the office opens very quietly, disclosing the same Miss Crane we have met before the retrospective, but, of corse, in a noticeably different costume. She looks at Iris and smiles like a conspirator.

Iris, seeing her, smiles back mischievously, hand at her lips. Miss Crane, smiling, withdraws quietly. Nicolas finishes the letter and puts it in a locked drawer which we see contains the open sheets of other letters in Althea’s writing. He snaps out of his dream and stands up. NICOLAS: Well. Miss Crane, suppose we forge onward and upward.

Close shot of Iris, her back still turned.

Iris: Yes, Mr. Gilbert.

NICOLAS (pacing): The position of a Vice-President — (The fact of a strange voice suddenly penetrates bis consciousness and he stands still.) What’s that?

Iris: I only said, “Yes, Mr. Gilbert.”

Nicolas walks swiftly toward her — as he nears, she swings around, facing him, gravely smiling.

NICOLAS: Iris Jones! (He takes hold of her arms.) Iris!

Iris: I fooled you. I was pretending to be pour secretary again. They look at each other. She is smiling but her eyes are a little frightened. Nicolas conceals a lot going on in his mind by retaining his mood of astonishment.

NICOLAS (letting go of her arms and straightening up): Iris! Well, sit down.

IRIS: I am sitting down. But I can stand up. (She does so. Smiles at him, trying to be just an old friend, but adoring him.)

NICOLAS: I can’t believe it. Come here. (To conceal his momentary confusion be walks back toward his own desk and sits down. She follows and stands beside him.) Iris! (He shakes his head.) Sit down. (She looks about — there’s no chair. She half sits on desk.) Here, let me get you a chair. (He rises and goes over to chair where she’s been sitting, brings it over and points at it.) Here, sit down. (He sits down it himself.)

NOTE: Gag ends here — don’t plug it.

NICOLAS: I haven’t seen you for five years.

Iris: Almost six years.

NICOLAS: Iris! Iris (pretty upset herself): You were the first man who ever called me Iris. I used to be Irene, but the day before I got the job as your secretary, I found Iris in a book called The Green Hat.

NICOLAS: Are you still Iris?

Iris: Yes — and still Iris Jones. Though perhaps it won’t be long now.

NICOLAS: You’re getting married?

Iris: I think so. I came to New York to see it once more and sort of make up my mind. I live upstate.

NICOLAS: Where?

Iris: Oh, upstate. You know — at the top of the map. In a little town.

NICOLAS: Hiding out, eh? You think I’m going to pursue you there?

Iris: No, I know all about you. (Pause.)

NICOLAS (thoughtfully): I didn’t forgive my father for — spiriting you away. One morning you just weren’t here — that’s all. And I got your note. It was months before I realized that father had done it.

Iris: You’ve forgiven him now, haven’t you?

NICOLAS: Yes. (Seeing her face fall ever so slightly.) Not altogether. We had happy times, you and I.

A luncheon table in a crowded downtown restaurant a few hours latter. Nicolas and Iris have just finished lunch.

IRIS: I’m glad your marriage is happy, and I’m glad I’m glad.

NICOLAS: That’s like you.

Waiter comes into the scene. Nicolas pays the check during the next speech.

IRIS: I wasn’t always glad. I hated her at first — her picture in the paper in the fur coat she was always used to — and you gave me my first one. But then I got to like her face — very brave — and loyal — and I knew she’d never let you down — she’d take care of you as long as you live.

NICOLAS: Do women really fret about men — or do they just pretend to?

IRIS (considering — granting it to her sex): They fret a lot.

NICOLAS: If Althea had married someone else, I’d want her to come to a bad end.

IRIS: Do you want me to come to a bad end?

NICOLAS (affectionately): Not you.

IRIS (matter of factly): Because you never cared very deeply.

NICOLAS: Bunk — I hate that talk about “the only girl I ever loved.” I loved you once, Iris — for a year I thought you were the only person in the world. Why do I have to lose that? Why do I have to deny it or belittle it? It was there — it was me.

Two-shot, with the camera favoring

Iris, her eyes shining with gratitude.

NICOLAS (getting up): And now, I love Althea — probably loving you taught me what love was about.

Small hotel: Night. Nicolas in dinner coat and black soft hat, helping Iris out of taxi.

IRIS: Thanks, it was wonderful. It was like old times — almost. (Pause.)

NICOLAS (with a friendly smile): Now wouldn’t it be silly if it was like old times — completely? Wouldn’t it? It would spoil everything.

IRIS (naturally): Good heavens — I realize that. I wouldn’t even like you if you made love to me.

NICOLAS: When do we meet?

IRIS (rather startled): Well, I was going home tomorrow.

NICOLAS (scoffing): You’ve only been here three days. And I’m lonesome. Who could be better company? I think even Althea would approve. (Lightly.) I’m phoning her tomorrow, and if it didn’t cost five dollars a minute, I’d even tell her about it!

A telephone switchboard: An operator is working.

OPERATOR: Mr. Nicolas Gilbert is calling Mrs. Nicolas Gilbert at the Lombardi Hotel, Florence, Italy.

Another switchboard.

OPERATOR (Italian type): Signora Gilbert — un momento, aspetti, prego... Signora Gilbert?

A luxurious hotel sitting room: Althea is at the phone in summer clothes and hat.

ALTHEA (ecstatically): Oh, darling! Oh, darling, she’s much better... She’s up and around... We’re starting home two weeks from today.

New York: Nicolas’office (of two years ago).

NICOLAS (standing at the point): I’ve played golf — I’ve played squash — I’ve laid awake thinking of you night after night.

ALTHEA (standing at the phone): Oh, this is awful — worse than a letter. I want to get on the boat right away. Did you look at the country place?

NICOLAS’VOICE (over wire): What country place?

ALTHEA: The one I mentioned in the last letter.

NICOLAS’VOICE: I didn’t get it.

ALTHEA: The last letter I gave you at the boat.

Nicolas, in his office: He starts. His hand moves to the drawer where the last letter still reposes, unopened. He slips it in his pocket.

NICOLAS: Oh, yes — ye-es. Listen, Althea, please come home.

ALTHEA: Oh, darling, if wires can sing, these wires ought to be in opera now.

NICOLAS’VOICE: We’re talking on the air.

ALTHEA: You mean walking on air.

NICOLAS’VOICE (misunderstanding): No! Talking on air.

ALTHEA: Walking and talking. It’s grand!

Telephone switchboard: Operator, with a smile, is handing earphone to another.

OPERATOR: Disse senti questi Americane pazzi come parlano.

Althea’s sitting room: Full shot. She hangs up and turns from the phone. Her convalescent mother, an aristocratic woman of fifty, quiet and not domineering, is coming in. from the bedroom, followed by an English nurse. The latter is a sort of feminine Arthur Treacher. Both are dressed to go out.

ALTHEA: Oh, Mummy, it was wonderful! I actually heard his voice.

MRS. CHILTON (dryly): Whose voice did you expect?

ALTHEA (jubilantly): Off for the races?

ENGLISH NURSE: The races — I thought we were going to tea in the country.

ALTHEA (beating her breast): I meant the races in here. (In time to her hands.) Pt-a-clop, pt-a-clop, pt-a-clop , pt-a-clop. Nicolas wins! Althea second — hurray!

MRS. CHlLTON: This two-year-old ought to be back in her stable.

ALTHEA: You know I won’t leave you till you’re stronger. Excuse me for being so happy — that he’s well and alive. (She turns to the open window and speaks more gravely.) I’ll be with you in a minute — I want to think of everything he said while I can still remember. (Her eyes art far away as she looks out)

ENGLISH NURSE: The country around Florence is beautiful this —

She subsides as Mrs. Chilton’s hand covers her hand warningly. The nurse looks at Althea, only half understanding.

Close shot of Althea at window: Her expression is a gentle, kindly smile, with a trace of sadness in her eyes — a longing deep in her, passive, not dynamic.

NURSE’S VOICE (over shot after pause, rather resentfully): The country is beautiful — Lady Whaley once told me — Oh, I beg your pardon.

Althea turns around.

ALTHEA: All right — let’s go.

MRS. CHILTON (to Althea): Hm! I haven’t seen you like this since that awful summer you were fifteen.

Long shot of a hilltop restaurant just outside of Florence: A simple, picturesque local caf6, popular with visitors. (The hilly nature of the location is necessary to the story)

In front of the restaurant: The hills fall away rather steeply from a terrace on one side. There is music coming from in-side. A limousine drives up: Althea and the nurse help Mrs. Chilton out.

Interior of restaurant: Beside the door there is a cashier’s desk with postcards and souvenirs for sale. In one corner, three peasant musicians play guitars throughout the scene. At tables covered with colored napkins, two dozen customers are scattered — tourists having tea or drinks, and natives playing cards or dominoes.

Our party enters. A waiter approaches them, and the camera trucks with them to a table.

Group shot of their table: The nurse is taking off Mrs. Chilton’s wrap.

MRS. CHILTON (to Althea): Did you see who I saw?

ALTHEA: No, who?

MRS. CHILTON: I think it’s Alex Aldrich.

ALTHEA (looking over her mother’s shoulder, then cautiously drawing her head out of sight): Heavens! I think it is.

A table, twenty feet away: Alex Aldrich, an American in his late twenties, is looking at a map spread out on his table. He is the type played by Ralph Bellamy in The Awful Truth — handsome, attractive, worthy, thoroughly admirable, but somehow too heavy in manner to grip the sympathy of an audience if playing opposite a man of charm.

Group shot of Althea’s table: A waiter is coming into shot.

WAITER (to Althea): Tea, Signora?

MRS. CHILTON: Tea.

ALTHEA: Tea — with lemon and biscuits. The nurse nods to waiter. He withdraws.

MRS. CHILTON (to Althea): Does he see us?

ALTHEA: No, thank heavens. (To nurse:) Change places with me.

As they change places, the shot widens to include mocha table, five feet away. Three men sit there: one is a pudgy, “overgrown” man of thirty, an unattractive, overbearing type. He is the illbred son of a rich oil man, an undeserving heir who asserts his claims by making himself a general public nuisance — probably wanted in America for manslaughter by automobile.

He notices Althea as she changes, and winks at the two neutral parasites who accompany him.

The camera pans the room, leaving Althea’s table and taking in both Big Boy’s table and the three musicians next to it. As the camera pans, Big Boy throws a handful of big Italian copper coins practically in the faces of the musicians. They pretend to smile but obviously are infuriated. Group shot of Althea’s table.

ALTHEA (to nurse); He wouldn’t come to my wedding.

NURSE (innocently): Perhaps he didn’t know about it.

ALTHEA (smiling): Oh, he knew about it — that was the whole trouble,.

MRS. CHILTON: He meant a great deal to Althea once.

ALTHEA: And suddenly Nick came along, and he meant nothing.

The waiter puts tea on the table and exits.

MRS. CHILTON (with irony): I’m glad Althea includes me in her world. She’s very good to people in her world, but those outside don’t exist.

ALTHEA (undisturbed): Love begins at home, doesn’t it?

MRS. CHILTON (not unkindly): Well, it needn’t end there. I think we should speak to Alex.

ALTHEA: Mother, if Nick were here, I wouldn’t mind a bit — I’d even be mean enough to show off for Alex, show him how happy I am. But after just talking to Nick on the phone — I just couldn’t.

MRS. CHILTON: Sugar please... Alex meant so much to you.

ALTHEA: One can’t go back. All I’d have to tell him is that he means nothing at all.

Big Boy steps suddenly into the scene. The ensuing conversation is all quiet, attracting no attention.

BIG BOY (ingratiatingly): Hello, Americans. (The three women glance at him, expressionless.) How would you like to be back in old New York, eh? Back in God’s country. (The nurse gestures him away, exactly as if he were a dirty child) Thought you’d like to have a drink to the Fourth of July. It’s two months off.

ALTHEA: Thanks, we’ll wait. (Turns to her mother)

Big Boy stands uncertainly — he has had a drink but is not drunk.

BIG BOY: You understand, and we’re all Americans.

ALTHEA: We’re waiting for some gentlemen who wouldn’t understand at all.

NURSE (indignantly to Mrs. Chilton): I should call a bobby — a carbonierri.

BIG BOY: If one of those boys tried to put his hands on me —

He leans, putting his hands on the table, one of them beside Althea’s cup. At the moment, she

has the little pot of boiling water in her hand and now she pours a few drops on his knuckles. Angrily’the music changes quickly to a gay, taunting tune as Big Boy straightens up. He starts to speak, turns and goes off scene.

NURSE: Very good. Just what Lady X would have done.

MRS. CHILTON (a law-abiding generation): Althea!

Waiter comes into the scene.

ALTHEA (distastefully): Another pot of boiling water.

Group shot at the desk by the door: Later. Althea, Mrs. Chilton, and the nurse are examining lace and souvenirs. Nurse carries coats.

Close shot of Alex Aldrich at his table, annotating his map from a book open before him. He closes book and looks up toward the side wall. He starts.

A mirror on the side wall showing Althea’s profile as she examines some lace.

Alex’s table: He reacts strongly, looks around to locate her, folds map hastily.

By the desk: Althea looks out the door to the terrace and, struck by the view drops the lace and walks out on the terrace.

Alex, standing by his table: He locates Mrs. Chilton and starts across the room toward her.

Big Boy’s table: Shooting toward the door by which Althea has gone out. Big Boy gets up. Camera follows him across restaurant toward door. He collides with Alex.

Two-shot of Alex and Big Boy.

ALEX: Pardon me.

Big Boy says nothing — goes off scene Camera holds on Alex following him up to Mrs. Chilton.

Group shot near desk: Alex is greeting Mrs. Chilton.

ALEX: Well, Mrs. Chilton — !

MRS. CHILTON: Well, Alex! What a surprise!

Two-shot of Althea and Big Boy on terrace.

BIG BOY: I didn’t mind. You can’t be too hot for me.

ALTHEA (after an annoyed pause): I suppose you’re just irresistible to some girls.

BIG BOY: You look as if you like all kind of men.

ALTHEA: No — I only like one kind. And you’re not it.

BIG BOY: Go on — you like all kinds — with a mouth like that.

At the desk.

ALEX (to Mrs. Chilton): I’ve been in Persia and I’m bound for Paris. This is great! I’ll get Althea and we’ll all drive back together.

As he starts out the door -

The terrace: Close shot of Althea and Alex, standing side by side, looking down with concern at something on the stone flags. Pull camera back to show Big Boy sitting down, nursing a cut in his forehead.

NOTE: Think avoidance of sock and merely showing result is more startling for a change.

ALEX: I’m sorry I hurt you.

BIG BOY: Big hero, eh? Alex picks up his book, puts Althea’s arm through his and they start along the terrace out of shot. Camera stays on Big Boy who gets up, picks up a loose stone from the rock wall and starts after them. Camera pans him up to Althea and Alex. Althea turns, cries aloud and Alex turns, swinging. His fist catches Big Boy and knocks him against the low terrace wall. Big Boy disappears over the wall.

Slope below wall: Big Boy lands six feet down, rolls over and over.

Terrace: Alex is pulling Althea away from the wall.

ALEX (panting): He was a sweet specimen! (He kicks the rock at his feel.) Look at that!

ALTHEA (evenly): Let’s go.

Alex shies the slate over the wall and again picks up his book. They start along terrace.

Cafe: Althea, Mrs. Chilton and the nurse are taking their places in the limousine. Alex stands at the side.

MRS. CHILTON (indignant): I think we ought to report that man to the police.

ALTHEA (leaning forward): Alex —

ALEX (about to get in front): Yes?

ALTHEA: Suppose he was badly hurt and lay down there all night?

NURSE: Serve him right.

ALTHEA: No — I don’t like it. Go tell the waiter he — fell over the wall. (Alex looks at her, unwillingly.)

ALEX: He had it coming.

ALTHEA: Please. (Alex leaves the car.)

MRS. CHILTON (patting Althea’s hand): That’s my girl.

ALTHEA (surprised): Thanks.

Steps of the inn: Alex is speaking to a waiter.

The limousine.

MRS. CHILTON: You see, Alex came in very handy.

ALTHEA (smiling): Maybe he planned it.

Alex comes into the scene and gets into front seat.

ALEX (to chauffeur): All right.

Traveling shot: Alex is turned around in his seat.

ALEX (rather seriously): How long are you planning to stay in Florence?

ALTHEA (leaning forward): Another week. Then we’re going home.

ALEX: I was thinking — if that man’s hurt there might be a little mess.

MRS. CHILTON: For us?

ALEX: This isn’t like America. They sometimes lock up witnesses for weeks.

ALTHEA (without smiling): Are you proposing that we flee?

Alex has taken copy of The New York Herald from his pocket. He turns a page.

ALEX: The Roma sails tomorrow from Genoa.

ALTHEA (scoffing): I wouldn’t think of it. Mother isn’t ready to go.

NURSE: Mrs. Chilton is quite able to travel. She could stand it better than any police proceedings.

ALEX (still frowning): As you like.

NURSE: When I was taking care of Lady —

MRS. CHILTON (interrupting): Gracious! One would think that I attacked the man!

Long shot. A European train racing through the night.

The Wagon Restaurant (dining car) on train: Alex and Althea are at dinner.

Flash of Chianti on table.

ALTHEA: I don’t mind sailing a week early. (With feeling:) It’ll be grand to get home — but it’s the first time I ever ran away from anything in my life.

ALEX: Once you ran away from me.

ALTHEA: I didn’t — we wore out.

ALEX: Your feeling about me wore out.

ALTHEA (lowering eyes): Alex, I don’t like the past much. (He reacts and she sees she’s hurt him.) I’m sorry.

ALEX: I can understand that. But a part of me lives in the past, you see. I have no bitterness — you might have married me. It was luck. It’s an accident who you marry — even whom you fall in love with. An important accident — but an accident — or at least a sort of photographic finish.

ALTHEA: I don’t think so. I think I’d have found Nick — or I’d have spent the rest of my life vaguely looking for him.

ALEX: You think so? Think there’s just one man for every woman? (He shakes his head and draws a circle on the tablecloth with his fork handle.) Your heart is like this.

ALTHEA (pretending alarm): Gracious!

ALEX: Well, like this. (He connects the circle to a heart and takes out a big handful of coins.) These are the men she’s known. (Dropping coins of different sorts inside the heart:) Here’s the boy in dancing school; here’s the policeman she thought was so beautiful; here’s her first love; here’s her husband, her — (He lets an American fifty-cent piece drop.)

ALTHEA: I stop there. (She points to the fifty-cent piece.)

ALEX (smiling and dropping more coins): These are just for illustration. Now a girl never gets rid of any of them. All their voices are always arguing in her mind — a great psychologist said that. But a man can love one woman exclusively. His heart’s like this. (Beside the heart he piles other coins, one on top of another in a stack.) First, here’s his mother. Here’s his nurse. Here’s the pretty little girl across the street. Here’s the one he took to a college dance. Each one tops the other, see — obscures her completely — until he gets the one he loves  — (looks at Althea) — or loses her. Then the others after that don’t count. (He lets the last coins scatter loosely about the table.)

ALTHEA (defiantly touching the fifty-cent piece in the heart): 1 don’t believe it, Alex.

ALEX: It’s true — there’s a little part of you, no matter how small, how buried, that belongs to me.

Althea sweeps all the other coins out of the heart with her other hand.

Wharf in Genoa beside the Conte Biancamano: People embarking.

Group shot of Althea handing a coin to a newsboy. Alex is standing beside her. Mrs. Chilton and the nurse, in background, are watching porter pile baggage.

Alex and Althea look eagerly at the paper.

ALEX (pointing): There it is.

Insert of Italian paper (in Italian — don’t dissolve to English):

“AMERICANS IN FRACAS.

Florence, May 28th, 1931.

Two Americans engaged in a fracas in a restaurant this afternoon, and one of them, Signor S. Johnson, suffered a broken arm. His opponent in the trouble was not identified...”

Wharf.

ALEX: He only broke his arm. Good! We can go on our ways with nothing on our consciences. I was the only real victim.

The horn of the boat blows loudly and four sad little boys, two with guitars, rush into the scene and surround them.

AD LIB (in Italian): A parting song — We know American songs — A farewell for good luck — Happy marriage —

ALEX (to boys): We’re not married.

BOY (in Italian): A lover then.

ALEX: No — no.

BOY (shrugging his shoulders): Male fortuna.

The hoys play a few chords of Santa Lucia and then suddenly launch into The Music Goes ‘Round and Around.

ALTHEA (taking Alex’s arm; excitedly): Alex, that’s home — that’s home.

The First Act may be said to end her

A nightclub in New York, gay but not fashionable. Perhaps the Pennsy Wama Roof with only a few men in formal clothes.

Two-shot of Nicolas and Iris dancing. His expression is entertained, if not absorbed — hers is frank adoration.

The music stops and the camera follows them to a table close at hand beside the floor.

Two-shot of Nicolas and Iris at table.

IRIS (continuing a conversation): Oh, I used to cut pictures of you out of the paper Last summer you gave a party for a real queen in your house at Westbury.

NICOLAS: She was a very silly queen.

IRIS (nodding approvingly): But it suited you. You always said you’d be rich some day, and every time you made a step up I was glad. I wondered if you did all the things you wanted to do — have you got a room with stars on the ceiling?

NICOLAS (smiling): I think we did have once.

IRIS: Once they had your drawing room in Town and Country and Althea’s — Mrs. Gilbert’s — bedroom. I’ve been ah through it in my imagination — many times.

NICOLAS (impetuously): Come up and I see the apartment. What could be more harmless?

IRIS (quite honestly): Oh no — it would spoil me. If I get married, my sitting room, my bedroom have got to seem the best in the world.

NICOLAS (grown a little careless): You’re very welcome — the guest room is yours.

IRIS (dreaming of splendor): The guest room!

NICOLAS (loyally): You’re just the kind of guest I’d like to have. And Althea would, too, if she knew you. Come for the weekend.

IRIS (entranced): That would be-extraordinary.

NICOLAS (delighted at her facet): It’s a deal. Shall we dance?

Interior of a limousine: Afternoon. Rain outside. Nicolas is alone in the seat.

A VOICE: Mr. Gilbert.

NICOLAS (picking up earphone): Yes, Charles.

Shot showing chauffeur through the glass.

CHARLES’S VOICE: Your raincoat’s in the compartment.

NICOLAS: Oh, thanks.

Leaning forward, he opens the compartment, bringing to light also Althea’s rubbers and little umbrella. He reacts strongly to this — not very pleasantly — feeling that this is her domain, their world together and now someone else is coming into it.

The limousine stops in front of a big apartment. Nicolas gets out and the camera follows him in.

Apartment: Nicolas is coming into the drawing room, taking off his gloves. Starks meets him and hands him the evening paper.

STARKS: Good afternoon, sir. (he starts to turn away.)

NICOLAS (embarrassed): Starks, I want to speak to you a minute.

STARKS: Yes, sir.

NICOLAS: Starks, you can — you can go off this weekend. I’m going away.

STARKS: Oh, thank you, sir. We’ve had such an easy time since Madame left. We’ll be right here if you need us. (He starts off scene.)

NICOLAS (a little embarrassed): No, I mean you go off duty. Go away to Atlantic City for a change. You and your wife and the maid too. Get a change. Get a rest.

STARKS: Oh, no thank you, sir. My wife and I have plans right here in New York. Perhaps the maid wants to go. I’ll —

NICOLAS (interrupting): Starks!

STARKS (surprised): Yes, sir.

NICOLAS (stubbornly, defiantly, yet scarcely able to meet Starks’s eye): I told you what I wanted.

STARKS (amazed — drawing a long breath): Yes, sir.

NICOLAS: It’s perfectly all right.

STARKS: Oh, I don’t doubt it, sir.

Starks goes. Nicolas stares at the floor.

The same room: An agency butler — not impeccable like Starks — is going through to answer the doorbell. Camera follows him to the door where he admits Nicolas and Iris.

NICOLAS: Good morning. Did Miss Jones’s bags arrive?

BUTLER: Yes, sir, right after I did.

NICOLAS: In the guest room?

BUTLER: Yes, sir — is there anything else, Mr. Gilman — Gilbert?

Iris, who has been staring about wide-eyed, catches this and reacts in a close-up. First her eyes narrow with fright as she realizes this is a strange servant, then she looks from the butler to Nicolas.

IRIS: Oh.

Two-shot, favoring Nicolas. He looks imperturbable. He doesn’t want to discuss this.

Close-up of Iris: The first sense of guilt changes to a slight lift of the brows and shoulders — complete acceptance of the situation.

NICOLAS’VOICE (over this shot): Nothing else.

Group shot of the butler retiring. Iris is taking Nicolas’arm, confident again, determined to enjoy.

IRIS: This is how you live. (She stares again and speaks half seriously as Nicolas takes her coat.) What do you talk about, the furniture?

NICOLAS: Yeah — and the wallpaper and how stifled we are by it all.

IRIS (not smiling): Seriously — what do you talk about — art and music?

NICOLAS (joking): Constantly. Even in our sleep. (Looks at her): Are you serious?

IRIS: Perfectly.

NICOLAS (apologetic): Well, we talk about everything — politics, our friends, Althea has a weakness for string quartets  — and I collect pictures of dogs down at the country house.

IRIS: Are there any string quartets tonight?

NICOLAS (taken aback): Now? I suppose so — at Carnegie Hall.

He picks up the paper — glances at her quizzically — sits down and opens the paper.

Group shot of a block of seats at Carnegie Hall, favoring Nicolas and Iris, the latter in a new dazzling dress.

We hear the last notes of a concerto, the lights come up, there is clapping and a buzz of conversation.

NICOLAS: What do you say we trade the last number for a highball?

Iris nods, reaching back for her cape.

The Gilberts’apartment: The hall. Nicolas and Iris are coming in. He flips his silk hat on a table.

Medium shot of the drawing room: The camera picks them up coming in. Nicolas is just faintly flushed and rumpled. Iris, throwing aside her cape, goes to a pier glass and mounts a stool before it.

Nicolas and Iris flop down a few feet apart on a big overstaffed sofa.

NICOLAS: Cigarette?

IRIS: Thanks. (Her hands shake.)

NICOLAS: Sleepy?

IRIS: Not exactly. I don’t want to go to sleep. I don’t want it to be tomorrow.

NICOLAS: You never liked tomorrow. When I used to talk about getting married, you’d always stop me.

IRIS: I knew we never would.

NICOLAS: This reminds me of another night too. (Iris nods.) You know the one I’m thinking of.

IRIS: Don’t let’s talk about it.

NICOLAS: Have you got unpleasant memories of it?

IRIS: Oh no, no. You know I haven’t.

NICOLAS: It was in June — hurdy-gurdies in the street.

IRIS (pointing to an imaginary chair in front of her): You sat there (pointing to the couch) and I sat here. Only my furniture wasn’t much like this.

NICOLAS: I sat there because I was frightened.

IRIS: I wasn’t — I was never so sure in my life.

NICOLAS: I didn’t sit there long. 1 came over -

IRIS: No, you got up and first you turned off the electric fan.

NICOLAS: Yes. (A pause — a gust of music from somewhere far off.) Listen -

IRIS: What?

NICOLAS: I thought I heard something — hurdy-gurdies.

IRIS: They don’t have them anymore. (Pause.)

NICOLAS: Iris.

IRIS: What?

NICOLAS: I’m frightened now. (Pause.)

IRIS: I guess now I’m frightened too.

They turn toward each other.

IRIS: Old friends, Nick.

NICOLAS: Old friends. Both very frightened.

The music again — but this time it is a hurdy-gurdy, playing far away in the street but easily distinguishable in the silence.

IRIS (wonderingly): They do have them.

Their eyes meet — this time hopelessly melting, melting irresistibly toward each other.

The dining room of the apartment: Morning. Quiet except for a raucous whistle from the pantry. A Persian cat dozes on a chair in a beam of sunshine.

Iris, in street clothes, enters and makes a short tour of the room, examining the silver on the buffet.

Close-up of Iris bending forward, looking.

Close-up of a big tankard on which is engraved, “Althea from Dick and Marion.”

Medium shot of Iris seeing the cat.

IRIS: Hello, pussy, pussy.

The cat looks at her, makes up its mind and dashes quickly for the kitchen as if a

dog were after it. At the pantry door it almost upsets the agency butler, carrying a breakfast tray. He curses silently and sets the tray on the table. ‘

IRIS: Good morning.

BUTLER (a German, both sanctimonius and impertinent): Good morning. (He turns on the radio, picks up the tray, and hesitates by the head of the table.) Where are you going to sit?

NICOLAS’VOICE: Right there.

Camera pans to Nicolas coming into the room, his face mask-like, his eyes just faintly bothered. Camera pans him up to the table. As he starts to sit down, the radio, now warmed up, plunges into a loud jazz tune — the same tune they danced to at the Biltmore, but now raucous and jangling.

NICOLAS: And turn that off!

Butler turns to the radio, lowers the volume and turns back to the table.

NICOLAS (quietly): I said off.

BUTLER (mumbling as he obeys): Kind of cheerful.

Two-shot of Nicolas and Iris at table. Nicolas is conscious of the disrespect but can only disregard it. The butler serves them plates of ham and eggs.

NICOLAS (to Iris): Hungry?

IRIS: Not very. I’m thinking of my plans. My train goes at one.

Nicolas looks sideways at the butler: the butler turns and goes to the pantry.

Two-shot of Nicolas and Iris.

NICOLAS: You’re really going home?

IRIS: Oh yes — really this time.

Nicolas’hand falls affectionately on hers. The gesture is not quite natural now, though, and both their hands move away. There is a little constraint between them.

IRIS: You’ve given me a wonderful lime.

NICOLAS: I’m glad. (He does not seem quite glad, in spite of his effort.)

IRIS: I’ve always wanted to go behind the scenes — and see how it was. Now I have.

NICOLAS (eating): Mm-hm.

IRIS (thoughtfully): Nicolas — I want to remember this — but I want to think you’ll forget — just as if it never happened.

NICOLAS: Nonsense.

IRIS: Yes — I want you to remember four years ago, but not this time. Pretend you dreamed it.

NICOLAS: Eat some breakfast.

IRIS: Yes. (She turns to her plate.)

Close-up of Iris: Her eyes look down, then look up again, then stare.

Two-shot of Iris and Nicolas. Nicolas looks up and sees Iris’expression. As he starts to turn and see what she is staring at, the camera drops them and pans very slowly around room, including the side-board, passing it and reaching the door.

Althea, motionless, stands in the door-way, regarding them. We are seeing her in a medium shot from their angle and we hold on it a moment.

Two-shot of Nicolas and Iris from Althea’s angle: Their faces are shocked and staring.

Medium shot of Althea from their angle: She turns very slowly and disappears from the doorway.

Two-shot of Nicolas and Iris: Nicolas gets up, his lips saying, “My God,” soundlessly.

The door to the pantry: The butler is standing wide-eyed, looking into the din-ins room.

Full shot of the drawing room: Althea walks rapidly through, toward front hall and door.

The hall of the apartment: Two porters have just brought in her baggage and set it down. She walks directly past them and out the door into the hall.

The drawing room: Nicolas has just entered from the dining room, looking left and right.

NICOLAS: Althea — Althea!

The outside hall: Althea is standing with her hand on elevator bell. The elevator stops. It is empty — she walks in and the door closes.

The dining room of the apartment: Iris is standing beside the table, her napkin crushed in her hand, her face stricken and aghast. The agency butler has already begun to take off the dishes with a wise expression on his face.

BUTLER (touching her plate): Through?

Iris does not see him. Her head shakes helplessly from side to side.

Park Avenue: Morning. The camera trucks in front of Althea as she walks, looking straight ahead.

Cross street: Althea walking.

Another street: Althea walking.

A corner: A first close shot of Althea as she hesitates, not knowing where to go. Her eyes are dazed and staring as she hails a taxi. It drives up.

Plaza Hotel: Althea is getting out of the taxi.

Desk of the hotel: Althea and clerk.

ALTHEA: My mother, Mrs. Chilton, has her same rooms?

CLERK (smiles): Oh yes, Mrs. Gilbert. She’s all settled.

The lobby: The camera pans Althea to the elevator. Its door opens and passengers go in. Althea hesitates.

BOY: Going up?

Althea shakes her head and turns away. Camera trucks with her to door and picks her up coming out.

Outside hotel: Althea hesitates; her face is set, expressionless. Suddenly her hands go to her face, come down just as quickly. She starts off scene. Camera trucks before her along Fifty-ninth Street. She passes a sign, “Antoine: Coiffeur des Dames.” The camera picks up Althea approaching along the street. Her eyes fall on the sign and, still expressionless, she turns in, the camera turning with her and following her inside.

Antoine’s: By the desk. Althea is taking off her hat. The woman at the desk greets her respectfully.

CLERK: Well, Mrs. Gilbert. It’s good to see you.

ALTHEA (concentrating with difficulty): I want to get — a wave — and a shampoo.

The woman has come around the desk. She looks Althea over.

CLERK: Let’s see — you have Emile.

She puts her hand toward Althea’s hair.

CLERK (surprized). Why you — why it looks as if you’d just had a wave.

Althea starts. Her face is reflected in a pier glass as she passes her hand over her hair.

ALTHEA’S VOICE: Why, yes — I had a wave on the boat.

Her reflection disappears from the glass.

CLERK’S VOICE: Would you like anything else, Mrs. Gilbert?

The clerk stares at the door.

Interior of a taxi: Nicolas and Iris, both in control of themselves now but utterly miserable.

NICOLAS: You’ll make it all right.

IRIS: I’m not worried about the train — (Her voice breaks.} Oh, Nicolas, what have I done to you? (She sobs aloud.)

NICOLAS: Please, Iris, you were always a brave girl. You weren’t to blame and everything will straighten itself out somehow.

Interior of Grand Central: Nicolas and Iris are standing beside a chair car. A porter is handing Iris back a stub. She opens her purse to put it in and something flutters out unnoticed.

PORTER: All aboard! You dropped something.

Iris and Nicolas embrace.

IRIS: Oh, darling, I’m so sorry.

She disappears into the vestibule of the car which begins to move immediately. The porter, swinging from the handrail, points to Nicolas’feet. After a moment, Nicolas stoops and picks it up.

Insert: The program of a nightclub.

Interior of the Gilberts’drawing room: Dusk. A big window opening on the city. Nicolas is sitting near the window in the darkness but he is not immediately visible. When the doorbell rings, we see his leg move off a chair. Then his figure blocks out the window and he stands motionless as we hear a key in the lock.

The hall: As the door opens, Althea, very weary, is momentarily visible against the lights of the outer hall. She comes in, dosing the door behind her.

NICOLAS’VOICE: Althea!

ALTHEA: Yes.

Shooting into the drawing room, we see her figure approach his — then she melts into the darkness on one side and he on the other.

NICOLAS: I’ll turn on the lights.

ALTHEA: Never mind... I like the dark better.

Shooting from the window — a little light falls on each of them — enough to see his utter misery — her fatigue and despair.

NICOLAS: I want you to know that this meant nothing to me. (Pause.) Nothing at all.

ALTHEA: Was she in my room?

NICOLAS: No, never. (Pause.) She was someone I knew a long time ago, many years ago.

ALTHEA: I don’t want to talk about it.

NICOLAS: We always said we’d never go to bed angry.

Shooting toward the window with Nicolas and Althea invisible.

ALTHEA: If you talk about it, I’ll go to a hotel. (Pause.)

NICOLAS: Did you bring your mother back with you?

ALTHEA: Yes.

NICOLAS: I didn’t expect you for a week  — I suppose you meant to surprise me.

ALTHEA: Yes. (Pause.)

NICOLAS: Do you want to go out for supper?

ALTHEA: No, I’m going to bed in a minute.

His shadow crosses the light suddenly. His head is against the window as he kneel at her feet.

NICOLAS: Althea.

Shooting at them from window, they faces dimly visible.

ALTHEA (with quiet scorn): You fool.

NICOLAS: Althea.

ALTHEA: I tied myself to a fool — a fool who threw us away.

A silent montage, showing the following flashes — each one a reminiscence of our first sequence which showed the state of affairs between Althea and Nicolas:

(a) Nicolas and Althea at table on a club veranda or racing pavilion. An unheard question from him — a polite lifting of the eyebrows from her.

(b) Nicolas and Althea in an open car — Nicolas driving, the road throwing them together, Althea coolly but not too obviously moving away.

(c) Nicolas and Althea in a hotel corridor outside two doors. With them a bell-boy with bags. Both pointing out which bags for which room.

Then, faster flashes:

(d) Like (a) but in a hotel dining room.

(e) Like (b) but in a taxi.

(f) An empty corridor — two doors across from each other being closed.

Over this montage comes:

NICOLAS’VOICE: She doesn’t happen to believe in divorce. She offered me a divorce.

HARRISON’S VOICE: I should think that would be much the best thing..

NICOLAS’VOICE (wearily): I suppose so — after two years.

Nicolas’present office. A two-shot of the two men talking. Nicolas’hair is mussed, Harrison is half through a cigar. Shot favors Nicolas.

NICOLAS: Still — still, you can’t tell — (he does not smile nor change expression but a beam of light from the window falls on his face) this morning she seemed very friendly. Came to the door with me, waved her handkerchief...

The Gilberts’breakfast room: Althea’s at phone; Starks picks up her handkerchief from the floor and puts it on the table beside her. He removes a tray and goes off the scene.

ALTHEA (at phone): Naturally I’m excited, Alex — I didn’t know you were in this country — or are you? Would you like to drive down to the country for the weekend? (Pause.) No, our place isn’t open this year — these are some friends. (Pause.) Be ready at two then. I’ve got to visit my hospital on the way.

Close shot of Alex Aldrich at a telephone.

ALEX: All right, Althea. Good-bye.

He hangs up and turns as camera pull-back to show the sitting room of a large hotel suite. Mrs. Chilton sits in a wheel-chair close by.

ALEX (to Mrs. Chillton: Contact established.

MRS. CHILTON: Good.

ALEX: I’d like to know a little more.

MRS. CHILTON: I don’t know anything more. I don’t know how young couples live nowadays, I don’t know what Nicolas did and she has never enlightened me. I only know that it’s all terribly wrong — bare and cheerless and wrong. I’d rather see her run away with a Chinaman than live this life.

ALEX (laughing): Am I to be the Chinaman?

MRS. CHILTON: You? 1 don’t know what you’re to be.

ALEX: You sent for me.

MRS. CHILTON: I promised I would. (Pause.) Perhaps I thought you could make her smile again — not with just her lips — in her heart.

During this speech the English nurse has entered in background with a small medicine glass which she hands to Mrs. Chilton. Mrs. Chilton waves it away.

ENGLISH NURSE: Please.

MRS. CHILTON (to nurse): You think you have established a certain dominance over me.

ENGLISH NURSE: Please.

Mrs. Chilton drinks the medicine. Alex rises.

ALEX: I needn’t tell you my motives are entirely selfish, Mrs. Chilton.

MRS. CHILTON (making a wry face at the medicine): All right.

The nurse goes off-scene with glass.

ALEX: I’m glad you’re in good health.

MRS. CHILTON: Go on — meet Althea — run away with her if she’ll run — beat her, make love to her, wake her up.

ALEX: It sounds like quite an order.

He nods, lakes up his hat, and the camera pans him toward the door.

Close shot of Mrs. Chilton: As the door closes, the nurse comes back into the scene.

NURSE: Now — you’ve done what you wanted. You can relax.

MRS. CHILTON: Spanking is probably the thing for Althea — sometimes children should be spanked for being right.

NURSE: You mean for being wrong.

MRS. CHILTON: 1 said for being right.

A gasoline station where the motor parkway comes out on Long Island: Rural background with establishing signs such as SOUTH LONG ISLAND DEVELOPMENT COMPANY. A beautiful, big roadster conies to an abrupt stop; Althea is at the wheel, Alex beside her. An attendant comes into shot.

ALTHEA: Fill it up, please.

Close two-shot of Alex and Althea.

ALTHEA: There’s nothing mysterious about my attitude — I’m simply through. And I’m the kind of person that when I’m through, I’m through.

ALEX: Do you mean also that you’re through with love?

ALTHEA: I wouldn’t be surprised.

ALEX: That would be a pity.

ALTHEA: Alex, about two years ago, I froze up in a cake of ice — I didn’t know then I was never coming out of it.

Insert sign: HOSPITAL ZONE. NO HORNS.

The roadster is going in the gateway of a hospital. It is a modern, suburban hospital — two-story brick, definitely located in the country. The roadster stops at the front steps. Alex and Althea get out.

ALTHEA (pausing, turning around): We gave them this land — our place is next door.

A montage shows:

(a) Alex and Althea walking along a corridor, accompanied by a deferential doctor in civilian clothes.

(b) Alex and Althea in a baby ward pausing beside several beds.

(c) Alex and Althea in a ward for older children. We note her very alive interest and also that she is a favorite with the hospital attendants and with several children she knows.

A playroom for convalescent children: A radio is playing soft music. Alex and Althea stand watching. Her smile seems softer suddenly in this scene — for the first time since we saw her on the dock in Genoa.

A nurse in white comes into the shot and up to Althea.

NURSE: Dr. Janzen will be in his office whenever you want to see him, Mrs. Gilbert. Something came up that prevents his joining you.

Althea nods, the smile still on her face, and turns toward the door.

The superintendent’s office: Dr. Janzen, an elderly physician, sits behind his desk, flanked by the superintendent of nurses, a white-haired woman. He is holding a little trial. Before him, with a gauze mask still hanging from him as if he had just finished operating, stands Dr. Paul Borden, assistant resident in surgery, an extremely attractive young man. His face at the moment wears a mocking, devil-may-care expression — he has been caught out and there’s nothing much he can do about it.

This group shot includes also a young probation nurse collapsed in an easy chair beside the head nurse. Her sniffling sob is the first sound we hear in the scene. Then Dr. Janzen pushes his chair back.

DR. JANZEN: Dr. Borden, we have no criticism of you professionally. You are, you can be, a surgeon of the highest order, but the hospital is not the place tor the exercise of — let us say, personal charm. I have warned you before. I am sorry to say that your residence in surgery is terminated.

Silence. The probationer sobs. The camera favors Dr. Borden, and we see disappointment, resentment and then a mocking insolence come into his face as he tries to think what to say. We get the impression that he is a gentleman but also that he is a wild man who is going to do nothing about the harm he has caused.

DR. BORDEN: Very well. I suppose there is no one I can appeal to.

DR. JANZEN: I am the final authority in this matter.

Corridor outside: Alex and Althea.

Nurse knocking at door.

Full shot of superintendent’s room; a door opens at the far end.

Group shot of the nurse, Althea and Alex entering.

Group by the desk: Dr. Borden snaps off his gauze mask, twirls it on his finger and turns away. Simultaneously Dr. Janzen gets up, looking off scene at Althea.

Full shot of the room: Althea and Alex are coming toward the desk from one door. Dr. Borden goes away from desk toward another door. Scene should be shot so that Althea approaches the desk without seeing his face, which has turned in the other direction as he goes out.

Close shot of Dr. Borden, half stopping, looking back at Althea.

Group shot. Althea, coming up to the doctor at the desk, does not see Borden.

ALTHEA: Afternoon, Dr. Janzen.

Close shot of Dr. Borden eyeing her appraisingly, approvingly. Obviously his interest in women transcends his interest in surgery. We like him forever for his refusal to let the dismissal get him down.

Dr. JANZEN’S VOICE (over shot): Good afternoon. Mrs. Gilbert.

Full shot of the room: Althea is shaking hands at desk, Dr. Borden turns and continues on out. Head nurse leads probationer out.

ALTHEA: This is Mr. Aldrich, Dr. Janzen.

Group shot around desk.

DR. JANZEN: How do you do — Mr. Aldrich. (He flinches and looks off scene at sound of door shutting.)

ALTHEA: Excitement?

DR. JANZEN: We have just made another unfortunate discovery that human frailty intrudes itself even into hospitals. (Bad line.) He motions her to a chair.

Squash court of the racket club. New York music.

Full shot of Nicolas and Harrison Gilbert finishing a game.

Close shot of Nicolas making a last successful stroke.

NICOLAS: I’d still rather beat you than anybody I know.

The locker room: Nicolas and Harrison are dressing.

NICOLAS: What kind of a party do you want — or if you don’t want a party — what?

HARRISON (not looking at Nicolas): Couldn’t we pick up Althea?

NICOLAS (casually but a little tensely): Althea is way down in the country on a weekend. And if I suddenly showed up there, nobody would be any more surprised than Althea. (Pause, then speaking in a softer voice:) After all, give me credit for a little pride. I don’t follow her around like a poodle dog.

HARRISON: Excuse me.

NICOLAS: Well then what’ll we do? The town is yours — what’s your taste — are you a rich big cattleman come to town? Or we can look up some of our old friends in Westchester — Chuck Havemyer or the Graces -

HARRISON: If you must know, I like the rich big cattleman.

NICOLAS: Well, everyone to his taste. A few months ago, I took a piece of a show for a bad debt; I’ve never asked any favors yet.

Inner office of Cudy Gray, theatrical manager: Comfortable Broadway atmosphere. A secretary has just ushered in Nicolas and his brother.

SECRETARY: Mr. Gray will be with you in two minutes, Mr. Gilbert.

She goes out. The two men sit down in armchairs.

HARRISON: You sure we want the whole company?

NICOLAS: You’re not used to our city ways, stranger.

HARRISON: We’ll have to hire a ballroom.

NICOLAS: I’ve got an even better idea, Harry. (He leans forward.) Two years ago there was a poor girl that wanted to see how the rich lived, so I threw my apartment open to her in a magnificent gesture.

HARRISON (ironically): Yes.

NICOLAS: Now I have an idle house on Long Island, inhabited only by bats, mice — and ghosts. In your honor I shall throw it open to the public tonight — the more attractive pan of the public, that is.

The door: A clamor of voices and it

flings open, projecting three attractive chorus girls into the room.

Full shot of room: Seeing the two strange men, the girls stop, their expressions change, their chatter stops.

FIRST GIRL: Oh, excuse us! (They turn and scamper out.)

NICOLAS (a little strained): You see — telepathy told them there was a party in the air — but what a party — they still don’t know that a fleet of Rolls-Royces is going to carry them out to Long Island, that a dozen caterers -

HARRISON: Hold on now. You’re going pretty far for a country hoy like me. How would Althea like this?

NICOLAS: I just hadn’t even thought of Althea — for two years I’ve done nothing but think of Althea — and talking it out of my system this morning seems to have done something to me.

HARRISON: You give a blowout like this and she’ll hear about it.

NICOLAS: I don’t doubt it! But I doubt she cares a snap what I do. (He stands up.) I think I’ll call the caretaker right now. (He picks up the phone on the desk.)

Interior of a gatekeeper’s lodge on Long Island: The caretaker in character-type, but not comic) is on the phone. His wife is beside him.

CARETAKER: Yes, certainly, Mr. Gilbert  — of course this is rather sudden notice —

He listens, hangs up, turns to his wife.

CARETAKER: He hung up.

Sound of an auto horn off scene. The caretaker and his wife look toward the windows.

Exterior of the caretaker’s lodge: The gate and entrance of a big estate. Althea’s car, with Althea and Alex, is coming to rest.

Medium shot including the car: The caretaker and his wife are coming out of the cottage. This arrival, following upon the telephone call, disconcerts them both.

Two-shot of Althea and Alex in car.

ALTHEA (ironically): This is the castle we built — up there in the trees somewhere.

ALEX: Can we drive up?

ALTHEA: I don’t think we want to.

Camera pulls back to show caretaker and wile coming up to car.

ALTHEA: Hello, Mrs. Barnes. Hello, Peter.

CARETAKER: How do you do.

WIFE: It’s nice to see you, Mrs. Gilbert.

ALTHEA: Mr. Aldrich — he’s thinking of renting the place.

ALEX: Don’t you believe it?

ALTHEA: You ought to settle down sometime.

ALEX: With whom?

ALTHEA: I’ll marry you sooner or later — I can’t go on being the thwarted woman forever.

During this passage the caretaker and his wife have exchanged an uneasy glance.

ALTHEA: Just stopping for a moment — what’s the news?

CARETAKER: Everything as usual. We keep hoping that —

ALTHEA (interrupting): Dogs in the kennels? Geese in the pond?

WIFE (impulsively): We wish you’d come down, Mrs. Gilbert, if only for a weekend sometime.

A look from her husband stops her; they obviously know of the rift and aren’t talking out of turn.

PETER: You wouldn’t like to look around

now? Your own garden is beautiful, Mrs. Gilbert, the beds you planted that spring —

Close-up of Althea pushing the car roughly into gear, her face hardening.

ALTHEA: I’ll come out sometime. We’re expected over in Wheatly Hills. (She begins to back out.)

The forecourt of another palatial country house: The roadster is coming to rest, A footman comes down the steps, bows and goes to the luggage compartment. Althea and Alex get out.

The gravel court: The camera picks up three riders, two men and a woman, and pans them up to Alex and Althea. The riders dismount — they are chic, fashionable people of middle age.

MRS. WATERS (the horsewoman): Darling! (She and Althea embrace.)

One of the men kisses Althea’s face in friendly fashion and Mrs. Waters shakes hands silently with Alex, retaining his hand.

Ad lib (Mrs. Waters, joking): So nice of me to ask you.

ALTHEA: And Mr. Aldrich — so good of us to come — Mr. Truby and Mr. — ?

MRS. WATERS: Lamb. I think. (She drops Alex’s hand.)

MR. LAMB (stuttering): Lam? Yes — Lamb — Lamb.

TRUBY (shaking hands with Alex): Lamb.

ALEX (acknowledging): Lamb.

ALTHEA: We’re here to be alone, darling. Mister Aldrich is my oldest love — I mean my first love.

They all reappraise Alex out of the corner of their eyes.

ALEX: Mrs. Waters, I’d like to be kept in sight every minute. (With sudden recognition.) Your name wasn’t Marion Ford?

MRS. WATERS: Yes — I remember you at Aiken in 1932.(To Althea:) You say you want him alone?

ALTHEA: Marion, that was my statement.

MRS. WATERS: Well, if you need any help, Mr. — (Turns to Lamb.)

LAMB: Lamb.

MRS. WATERS: Mr. Lamb is a patent lawyer.

LAMB: A-a-d-divorce lawyer.

MRS. WATERS: I mean a divorce lawyer  — it’s the same thing, isn’t it? (To Althea.) Darling — we’ll leave you absolutely alone.

The grounds of Mrs. Waters’estate: Twilight, just before dinner. Full shot of an open glade twenty feet across, bounded at both ends by trees. Alex Aldrich, in dinner coat, comes into scene, walks across the glade and disappears. Althea, in filmy evening dress, comes into sight, following him. She also goes off scene.

Sundial with bench: Alex comes into the scene and sits down on a sundial with a bench. Althea appears — whereupon he rises and with an air of mock ennui, starts off scene.

ALTHEA: Why are you avoiding me?

ALEX (stops): I find you repulsive.

ALTHEA: Well, this will be a lesson to me.

She sits down on the bench; Alex sits beside her. He puts his arm around her and draws her close.

ALTHEA: Shall I risk my dinner makeup? (They kiss.)

ALEX (sentimental): It’s been a long time.

ALTHEA: Yes — seven years — too long.

ALEX (sentimentally): Much too long.

ALTHEA: I didn’t mean that way. I meant too long to — kiss me again. (He starts.) No, don’t.

ALEX: I’ve waited seven years — I can wait a little longer.

ALTHEA (taking compact from bag): Rouge on your face. (She hands him a little mirror.) I wonder what kind of life we’d have.

ALEX: I have no idea — I can promise you nothing beside my deathless devotion

ALTHEA: Would I fall in love with you?

ALEX (after a pause): Possibly you’ve had your big love.

ALTHEA: Possibly.

ALEX: So possibly you don’t bring me every possibility. The ghost of another man —

ALTHEA (low and passionate): The one thing in the world I know is that I’ll never go back to that, never want it again, never want a repetition of it. 1 had thai love and it was no good and I’ve killed it so dead. (She gets up.)

Backstage at a New York musical show: Full shot of girls coming off after a number.

Group shot of Harrison (evening clothes) taking to it naturally, not the Broadway Johnny, not handling the girls, but talking to two or three with easy familiarity.

Group shot of Nicolas and Gray, the producer, a little to the side, talking to the male and female leads, attractive, really sympathetic types. Nicolas, perched on a stage prop, is a little aloof and detached. This isn’t quite his sort of thing but he is enjoying it like a children’s party. His manner to Alice Duff, the actress, is deferential and polite.

ALICE DUFF (looking off): Half those girls have broken dates to go.

NICOLAS: I wanted them to bring their dates.

ALICE: You’re very generous.

GRAY: I’ll tell them that.

NICOLAS: I want to use my house before I sell it. There won’t be such houses much longer.

ALICE: I never understood what you’d do with a big house unless you had a thousand children.

NICOLAS: Nothing but vanity. Or else sometimes you think you’re so much in love that your love could fill the biggest palace conceivable.

MALE LEAD: Sometimes you haven’t gut enough to fill one room.

As they laugh he gets his cue and goes off scene.

Mrs. Waters’house: A big staircase rises from a central hall. Two rooms open from it at either side, showing people at bridge. There is radio music throughout the scene.

Alex and Althea are mounting the wide steps side by side, but separated laterally by five feet. We see them take several slow steps in unison when Mr. Lamb comes into the scene and runs up the steps until he is between them.

LAMB: I s-say — is there really any p-possibility of your needing a —

ALEX: A what?

LAMB: A d-d-divorce lawyer.

ALTHEA: You can leave your name.

LAMB: Lamb. Gordon H. — L-l -

ALTHEA and ALEX (together): Lamb.

LAMB: I can fix things up overnight.

ALEX: We’ll let you know.

LAMB: I arranged the Perkins divorce and the Oberton divorce and -

ALTHEA: We’ll let you know.

LAMB: French divorces and M-Mexican divorces and even a Russian divorce. I can refer you to Mrs. Carpenter, now Mrs. Kohlsatt, or, no, now Mrs. Bannister. Her mother, formerly Mrs. Bronson, is now Mrs. Cain and she married Harry Crandall. I arranged his divorce from —

At this point at the top of the stairs, Althea stops walking — the others also stop. The camera favors her.

ALTHEA (strain in her voice, a sudden flash of tears in her eyes): They all seem to have hated each other, didn’t they?

Hold on her a moment. Then Alex and Althea start to walk on, leaving Mr. Lamb staring.

Full shot of a pleasant small sitting room: For a moment it is empty, then two doors, one at either side, open and Alex and Althea peer into the room. Both are dressed as in previous scene.

ALTHEA: Good grief! She’s given us a suite.

ALEX: So it appears.

ALTHEA: A little obvious — oh, it’s all a little obvious, Alex, you and me. 1 can’t go to sleep — I’m going out to ride — ride to China.

ALEX: That sounds fine. The roadster tears along in the moonlight, Althea at the wheel.

Interior of a luxurious limousine: Nicolas, Alice Duff and Gray — the latter holds Alice’s hand.

ALICE: The natives must think there’s a circus parade going through.

NICOLAS: We’re almost there. A road: Full moonlight, woods in the background. Althea brings the car to a stop

ALEX: Where are we?

ALTHEA (carelessly): Where we were this afternoon. This is our land. The hospital’s a mile farther on. The hospital — that’s all I’ve got to show for our marriage.

ALEX: That’s your difficulty, Althea — you’ve got to forget your marriage.

ALTHEA: I have.

ALEX: In a way. But — it’s just like coming here now — all roads seem to lead back to it. Well, then why can’t you go back farther still. Once you and I were happy. This isn’t the first moonlight we’ve sat in. He has put his arm around her and he draws near her. She submits to his kiss, at first with a show of enthusiasm, then with her arm going limp on his shoulder. He leans back.

Close shot of Althea’s face.

ALTHEA: What’s the use, Alex? It must be like kissing a monument. I’m awfully fond of you but something is dead. Blame it on me, Alex.

ALEX (desperately): Nothing is dead. You just won’t let yourself go. You’re letting yourself dry up. Your mother said- (He stops himself.)

ALTHEA (quickly): My mother — have you been talking to her?

ALEX: Yes, she sent for me. She loves you. She thinks what everyone else thinks, that, you’re a fool, a stubborn little fool. If your marriage is finished, why don’t you get out of it, start over? Why do you want to drag the past along with you everywhere, like an ugly old dress you can’t bear to throw away.

ALTHEA: Stop nagging at me — go away — leave me alone.

ALEX: I will go away. (He gets out of the car — she scarcely notices.) This is the end as far as I’m concerned. I’m going right out of your life as soon as I can get a taxi to town. Which way is the hospital? He walks off in the darkness. Close-up of Althea: She is sitting without moving, and looks up as she hears his voice.

ALEX’S VOICE: Please ask them to send my things to the Plaza.

ALTHEA: I’m not going back but I’ll tell them.

ALEX (on side of car): If you’re going to town, I’ll go with you.

Suddenly Althea starts the motor, throws the car into gear, wrenches the wheel and apparently drives the ear right straight into the woods. Then silence and trees have apparently swallowed her up. Close shot of the car coming to a stop: Althea jumps out, runs around the front and by the headlights, making sure these are tracks and ruts she is following. Then back into the car which starts off again with a lurch.

Close shot of Althea at the wheel, branches and leaves slapping against her face. The car stops and lights come to rest on a sign, on its side.

Insert sign: PRIVATE ROAD, NICOLAS GILBERT

Angle shot of the car starting, running against the sign and over it, bumping, bumping on and into a tree.

Close shot of the ear: Althea gets out of it and, utterly distraught, walks around into the headlights, raising her hands to her face as she walks.

ALTHEA: Oh, my God! Help me! What shall I do? What can I do? (She starts as she hears a voice off scene.)

VOICE: If an ordinary mortal can be of any assistance —

Althea feels no fright — she is utterly absorbed in her own emotions, the climax of her two-year struggle — as Dr. Paul Borden, in chamois vest and white trousers, walks into the scene. With sudden weakness she gives a little sob and collapses into his arms. He holds her for a moment, not recognizing her.

ALTHEA: I’m sorry.

BORDEN: That’s all right.

ALTHEA: I’m frightened.

BORDEN: Don’t be afraid of me.

ALTHEA: Not of you — just frightened — hold me for a moment.

BORDEN: I’ve got a shack right here — can you walk?

ALTHEA: Sure — if you hold me. It’s been a long time since I’ve had a man’s arm supporting me.

A small cottage set in a clearing: Inside are lights and the sound of soft music.

About thirty feet from the door Borden and Althea sit down on a fallen tree.

BORDEN: Feel better? (His arm is still around her.) What’s the matter — drink a little too much and miss the road?

ALTHEA (still dazed): That’s it, stranger. I’m drunk, drunk as an owl and I like it. (She snuggles in his arms.) I like it here.

BORDEN: You’re not a bit drunk. (Suddenly — half to himself.) And I know where I’ve seen you.

ALTHEA: You’ve never seen me — and I am drunk. I’ll prove it. Would anybody kiss an absolute stranger if they weren’t drunk? Who are you anyhow?

BORDEN: At present, I’m one of the unemployed.

ALTHEA: So am I — I used to be a wife. Now — I’m a great concern to everybody.

BORDEN: You’re a pretty devil.

ALTHEA: Yes, I’m a pretty devil. I’ve heard that before. Don’t let me go.

BORDEN: I certainly won’t — unless I’m asked.

ALTHEA: You’re entirely a creature of my imagination — and you’re very good-looking. And you don’t remind me of anything that’s past. (He nods understandingly.) If you haven’t got any girl of your own, you might even kiss me. (Borden starts to.) Wait a minute — a little while ago, I was a monument, but you get tired of being a monument.

BORDEN : Yes.

ALTHEA: Now I’m not a monument — to anything. (He bends toward her.)

Boom shot: The grounds immediately around a palatial country house which blazes with light. Dance music.

Camera swings to the side lawn passing over a few people in evening clothes, lingers on a long buffet-bar with two or three caterer’s assistants dispensing champagne and light refreshment.

The camera swings on over an increasing number of people to an open, lighted pagoda, occupied by a big swing orchestra in full performance.

Continuing camera looks down at a wide, flat space on the lawn on which half a dozen caterer’s assistants are about to unroll a great canvas for dancing.

Thirty or forty people are cheering them on.

Ad lib: Let her roll!

On with the dance!

Let’s go!

Can I help!

As the canvas finally and swiftly unrolls there is a general cheer.

Immediately one man runs out of the crowd and performs an amazing Hide, and as if this is a signal, the canvas is invaded immediately by eager dancers.

Camera, now on the ground, takes a medium shot of the four permanent lanterns which illuminate the canvas at its four corners.

Camera moves to a closer shot and pans around the dancers and shows a bright, attractive crowd, some of the girls overdressed and blondined but no suggestion of an orgy.

Group shot of Harrison Gilbert, Cudy Gray, Alice Duff and a few others.

HARRISON (very faintly high): I told them to play Chicago!

GRAY (winking at Alice): Where are you from, Mr. Gilbert?

HARRISON (incredulous): What? The camera picks up a waiter passing in front of them and follows him over the lawn toward the house.

The side porch of the house: The same waiter is entering wide double doors. Camera trucks with him into huge dining room with pictures covered with cloth. Waiters are making ready to serve a hot supper.

Camera drops waiter and trucks into magnificent front entrance hall. Great mirrors are covered with cloth, so is the top of a great table and some enormous Louis XIV chairs.

Close shot of a live mouse looking toward camera. Something startles him and he scampers to his hole a few feet away.

Medium shot of the bottom part of the banisters: One of the little Una Merkels slides into shot and reaches the floor, then another and another.

Flash of the little Una Merkels running upstairs again.

The upper hall, head of the staircase: The camera trucks before the three ponies down a wide corridor. Their eyes are wide and fascinated and as they walk they sing to the music outside and keep in step with linked arms.

One of them pauses and looks cautiously through a half-open door — the other two look over her shoulder.

Full shot of a lighted billiard room: Shooting over two covered tables including ball racks and scoring markers, to the door which keeps opening and shows the three ponies.

Close group shot of the three.

FIRST PONY: Oh, it’s a pool hall. I thought they must do something to keep this place up.

Full shot of a bedroom, large and luxurious like everything else in this house. Soft lighting, everything covered with cloth or canvas.

Nicolas Gilbert is standing in the middle of the floor.

Close shot of Nicolas.

The broadcast we almost heard last September

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Folks, here’s Poke McFiddle bringing you the big battle in Central Europe. Take it away, Poke.

Good morning, folks — it’s just dawn over here but every body’s up — yes, sir, everybody’s on hand — a cast of twenty million — the greatest ever assembled. Before I begin I want to tell you who’s in this corner. Folks, I’m five miles behind the lines in a dug-out with some of the finest men I ever met. I’ll just introduce you before the boys get going — here’s a delegation of cabinet ministers and half a dozen generals and presidents and a couple of stuffed Kings all just as eager to see the sport as you are, gentlemen — just as near to it as a periscope will let them get.

Set your clocks by that bomb, folks, it’s zero hour minus one minute — and now boy! are they laying down a hot barrage! Here, I’m going to turn’ you over to the heavy artillery for a minute. BOOM! That was a big one — sounded like the Fourth, eh? Ha-ha-ha.

While the boys are waiting to go over, everyone of them happy as jack rabbits, I’m going to let you hear this military band swinging the lads into battle. Take it, Tony. BOOM! I’m sorry, folks. That band doesn’t exist any more. You see, the enemy are putting down a barrage, too. Incidentally, just before the boys go over, I’m going to turn the mike over to our commercial man who’s got some Big News for you. I’ll be back in a flash with a crash…

Hello, America. This program, the first battle ever broadcast, comes to you through the courtesy of the Jitka Arms Works, who are supplying the ammunition for both sides. You can’t fight battles with duds — you need a Cool Clean Burst. I want to remind you of our little prize contest: you simply buy a package of our cartridges at your sporting store, tear off the top and write your guess at the number of casualties for the day. Whoever is nearest —

Sorry to interrupt, folks, we’ll hear more from Jitka later — about that Clean Cool Burst. But just now the boys are going over — and are they hitting that front line! This is War! They’re piling in, and watching them through this periscope is a sight to see. They’re down — they’re up, they’re up — they’re down for good. But that’s only one wave, folks, and they’replenty more. Incidentally, the noise isn’t static, it’s machine-gun fire coming to you courtesy of —

Let me tell you, the men in this dugout are wild! They’d give anything to be in there, but they’re too old and they’re needed back here to run things. Or else, how could we be bringing you this fine broadcast, courtesy of A. B. C. and the Jitka Arms Company…

…Folks, the show seems to be over for the day and now we’re going to take you out on the battlefield where all the Red Cross people are doing a fine job picking up some of the boys. Take it, Ned…

Hello, America. I’m going to let one boy speak for twenty thousand of them. Here he is, a fine boy — or he was this morn-ing — and glad and proud he had the chance to do it. Speak up, son, you’re talking to half a billion people.

“Hello. Mother — goodbye, Mother.”

Thanks, son. Oh-oh! That was too much for him. Take it away, Poke.

Folks, we’re having a little champagne dinner back here outside the dugout — and do we need it! But it seems to be getting suddenly misty in this neighborhood, very misty. And it’s beginning to smell funny. I don’t like it — it’s GAS, folks — GAS! And I can’t find my mask! Hey, my job is giving it out, not taking it…

…The time is eight o’clock. All you truckers on your toes! Prince Paul Obaloney of Dance Hall Society will give us a lesson in the Slinky-winky Blues.

Editorial: This sketch was written in 193S. To our knowledge it has never before been published or broadcast.

The Poetry

LIST OF POETRY

CLAY FEET

FIRST LOVE

FOR A LONG ILLNESS

MARCHING STREETS (1919 version)

MARCHING STREETS (1945 version)

LAMP IN THE WINDOW

OH MISSELDINE’S

PRINCETON — THE LAST DAY

THE STAYING UP ALL NIGHT

THOUSAND-AND-FIRST SHIP

OUR APRIL LETTER

ONE SOUTHERN GIRL .

TO BOATH

THE POPE AT CONFESSION

RAIN BEFORE DAWN

CLAY FEET

Clear in the morning I can see them sometimes:

Men, gods and ghosts, slim girls and graces —

Then the light grows, noon burns, and soon there come times

When I see but the pale and ravaged places

Their glory long ago adorned. — And seeing

My whole soul falters as an invalid

Too often cheered. Did something in their being

Of worth go from them when my ideal did?

Men, gods and ghosts, cast down by that young damning,

You have no answer; I but heard you say,

“Why, we are weak. We failed a bit in shamming.”

— So I am free! Will freedom always weigh

So much around my heart? For your defection,

Break! You who had me in your keeping, break! Fall

From that great height to this great imperfection!

Yet I must weep. — Yet can I hate you all?

FIRST LOVE

All my ways she wove of light,

Wove them all alive,

Made them warm and beauty bright…

So the trembling ambient air

Clothes the golden waters where

The pearl fishers dive.

When she wept and begged a kiss

Very close I’d hold her,

And I know so well in this

Fine fierce joy of memory

She was very young like me

Though half an aeon older.

Once she kissed me very long,

Tiptoed out the door,

Left me, took her light along,

Faded as a music fades…

Then I saw the changing shades,

Color-blind no more.

FOOTBALL

Now they’re ready, now they’re waiting,

Now he’s going to place the ball.

There, you hear the referee’s whistle,

As of old the baton’s fall.

See him crouching. Yes, he’s got it;

Now he’s off around the end.

Will the interference save him?

Will the charging line now bend?

Good he’free; no, see that halfback

Gaining up behind him slow.

Crash! they’re down; he threw him nicely, —

Classy tackle, hard and low.

Watch that line, now crouching waiting,

In their jerseys white and black;

Now they’re off and charging, making

Passage for the plunging back.

Buck your fiercest, run your fastest,

Let the straight arm do the rest.

Oh, they got him; never mind, though,

He could only do his best.

What is this? A new formation.

Look! their end acts like an ass.

See, he’s beckoning for assistance,

Maybe it’s a forward pass.

Yes, the ball is shot to fullback,

He, as calmly as you please,

Gets it, throws it to the end; he

Pulls the pigskin down with ease.

Now they’ve got him. No, they haven’t.

See him straight-arm all those fools.

Look, he’s clear. Oh, gee! don’t stumble.

Faster, faster, for the school.

There’s the goal, now right before you,

Ten yards, five yards, bless your name!

Oh! you Newman, 1911,

You know how to play the game.

FOR A LONG ILLNESS

Where did we store the summer of our love?

Come here and help me find it.

Search as I may there is no trove,

Only a dusty last year’s calendar.

Without your breath in my ear,

Your light in my eye to blind it,

I cannot see in the dark.

Oh, tender

Was your touch in spring, your barefoot voice —

In August we should find graver music and rejoice.

A long Provence of time we saw

For the end — to march together

Through the white dust.

The wines are raw —

Still that we will drink

In the groves by the old walls in the old weather.

Two who were hurt in the first dawn

Of battle; first to be whole again (let’s think)

If the wars grow faint, sweep over…

Come, we will rest in the shade of the Invalides, the lawn

Where there is luck only in three-leaf clover.

FRAGMENT

Every time I blow my nose I think of you

And the mellow noise it makes

Says I’ll be true —

With beers and wines

With Gertrude Steins,

With all of that

I’m through —

‘Cause every time I blow my no-o-ose

I — think — of — you.

MARCHING STREETS (1919 version)

Death slays the moon and the long dark deepens,

Hastens to the city, to the drear stone-heaps,

Films all eyes and whispers on the corners,

Whispers to the corners that the last soul sleeps.

Gay grow the streets now torched by yellow lamplight,

March all directions with a long sure tread.

East, west they wander through the blinded city,

Rattle on the windows like the wan-faced dead.

Ears full of throbbing, a babe awakens startled,

Sends a tiny whimper to the still gaunt room.

Arms of the mother tighten round it gently,

Deaf to the patter in the far-flung gloom.

Old streets hoary with dear, dead foot-steps

Loud with the tumbrils of a gold old age

Young streets sand-white still unheeled and soulless,

Virgin with the pallor of the fresh-cut page.

Black streets and alleys, evil girl and tearless,

Creeping leaden footed each in thin, torn coat,

Wine-stained and miry, mire choked and winding,

Wind like choking fingers on a white, full throat.

White lanes and pink lanes, strung with purpled roses,

Dance along the distance weaving o’er the hills,

Beckoning the dull streets with stray smiles wanton,

Strung with purpled roses that the stray dawn chills.

Here now they meet tiptoe on the corner,

Kiss behind the silence of the curtained dark;

Then half unwilling run between the houses,

Tracing through the pattern that the dim lamps mark.

Steps break steps and murmur into running,

Death upon the corner spills the edge of dawn

Dull the torches waver and the streets stand breathless;

Silent fades the marching and the night-noon’s gone.

MARCHING STREETS (1945 version)

Death shrouds the moon and the long dark deepens,

Hastens to the city, to the great stone heaps,

Blinds all eyes and lingers on the corners,

Whispers on the corners that the last soul sleeps.

Gay grow the streets now, torched by yellow lamp-light,

March all directions with a staid, slow tread;

East West they wander through the sodden city,

Rattle on the windows like the wan-faced dead.

Ears full of throbbing, a babe awakens startled,

Lends a tiny whimper to the still, dark doom;

Arms of the mother tighten round it gently,

Deaf to the marching in the far-flung gloom.

Old streets hoary with dead men’s footsteps,

Scarred with the coach-wheels of a gold old age;

Young streets, sand-white, fresh-cemented, soulless,

Virgin with the pallor of the fresh-cut page.

Black mews and alleys, stealthy-eyed and tearless,

Shoes patched and coats torn, torn and dirty old;

Mire-stained and winding, poor streets and weary,

Trudge along with curses, harsh as icy cold.

White lanes and pink lanes, strung with purple roses,

Dancing from a meadow, weaving from a hill,

Beckoning the boy streets with stray smiles wanton,

Strung with purple roses that the dawn must chill.

Soon will they meet, tiptoe on the corners,

Kiss behind the foliage of the leaf-filled dark.

Avenues and highroads, bridlepaths and parkways,

All must trace the pattern that the street-lamps mark.

Steps stop sharp! A clamor and a running!

Light upon the corner spills the milk of dawn.

Now the lamps are fading and a blue-winged silence

Settles like a swallow on a dew-drenched lawn.

OH, SISTER, CAN YOU SPARE YOUR HEART

I may be a What-ho, a No-can-do

Even a banker, but I can love you

As well as a better man

a letter-man of fame

As well as any Mr. Whosis you can name

The little break in my voice

— or Rolls-Royce

take your choice

I may lose

You must choose

So choose

A hundred thousand in gold

and you’re sold

to the old

and I’m broke

when our days a

are gold

I’m begging

begging

Oh, Sister, can you spare your heart?

Those wealthy goats

In racoon coats

can wolf you away from me

But draw your latch

For an honest patch

the skin of necessity

(we’ll make it a tent, dear)

The funny patch in my pants

take a chance

ask your aunts

What’s a loss

You must toss

So toss!

A gap inside that’s for good.

You’ll be good

As you should

Touch wood!

I’m begging

begging

Oh, Sister, can you spare your heart?

LAMP IN THE WINDOW

Do you remember, before keys turned in the locks,

When life was a close-up, and not an occasional letter,

That I hated to swim naked from the rocks

While you liked absolutely nothing better?

Do you remember many hotel bureaus that had

Only three drawers? But the only bother

Was that each of us got holy, then got mad

Trying to give the third one to the other.

East, west, the little car turned, often wrong

Up an erroneous Alp, an unmapped Savoy river.

We blamed each other, wild were our words and strong,

And, in an hour, laughed and called it liver.

And, though the end was desolate and unkind:

To turn the calendar at June and find December

On the next leaf; still, stupid-got with grief, I find

These are the only quarrels that I can remember.

OH MISSELDINE’S

Oh Misseldine’s, dear Misseldine’s,

A dive we’ll ne’er forget,

The taste of its banana splits

Is on our tonsils yet.

Its chocolate fudge makes livers budge,

It’s really too divine,

And as we reel, we’ll give one squeal

For dear old Misseldine’s.

PRINCETON — THE LAST DAY

The last light wanes and drifts across the land,

The low, long land, the sunny land of spires.

The ghosts of evening tune again their lyres

And wander singing, in a plaintive band

Down the long corridors of trees. Pale fires

Echo the night from tower top to tower.

Oh sleep that dreams and dream that never tires,

Press from the petals of the lotus-flower

Something of this to keep, the essence of an hour!

No more to wait the twilight of the moon

In this sequestrated vale of star and spire;

For one, eternal morning of desire

Passes to time and earthy afternoon.

Here, Heracletus, did you build of fire

And changing stuffs your prophecy far hurled

Down the dead years; this midnight I aspire

To see, mirrored among the embers, curled

In flame, the splendor and the sadness of the world.

THE STAYING UP ALL NIGHT

The warm fire.

The comfortable chairs.

The merry companions.

The stroke of twelve.

The wild suggestion.

The good sports.

The man who hasn’t slept for weeks.

The people who have done it before.

The long anecdotes.

The best looking girl yawns.

The forced raillery.

The stroke of one.

The best looking girl goes to bed.

The stroke of two.

The empty pantry.

The lack of firewood.

The second best looking girl goes to bed.

The weather-beaten ones who don’t.

The stroke of four.

The dozing off.

The amateur “life of the party.”

The burglar scare.

The scornful cat.

The trying to impress the milkman.

The scorn of the milkman.

The lunatic feeling.

The chilly sun.

The stroke of six.

The walk in the garden.

The sneezing.

The early risers.

The volley of wit at you.

The feeble come back.

The tasteless breakfast.

The miserable day.

8 P.M. — Between the sheets.

THOUSAND-AND-FIRST SHIP

In the fall of sixteen

In the cool of the afternoon

I saw Helena

Under a white moon —

I heard Helena

In a haunted doze

Say: “I know a gay place

Nobody knows.”

Her voice promised

She’d live with me there,

She’d bring everything -

I needn’t care:

Patches to mend my clothes

When they were torn,

Sunshine from Maryland,

Where I was born.

My kind of weather,

As wild as wild,

And a funny book

I wanted as a child;

Sugar and, you know,

Reason and Rhyme,

And water like water

I had one time.

There’d be an orchestra

Bingo! Bango!

Playing for us

To dance the tango,

And people would clap

When we arose,

At her sweet face

And my new clothes.

But more than all this

Was the promise she made

That nothing, nothing,

Ever would fade —

Nothing would fade

Winter or fall,

Nothing would fade,

Practically nothing at all.

Helena went off

And married another,

She may be dead

Or some man’s mother.

I have no grief left

But I’d like to know

If she took him

Where she promised we’d go.

OUR APRIL LETTER

This is April again. Roller skates rain slowly down the street.

Your voice far away on the phone.

Once I would have jumped like a clown through a hoop — but.

“Then the area of infection has increased? … Oh … What can I expect after all — I’ve had worse shocks, anyhow, I know and that’s something.” (Like hell it is, but it’s what you say to an X-ray doctor.)

Then the past whispering faint now on another phone:

“Is there any change?”

“Little or no change.”

“I see.”

The roller skates rain down the streets,

The black cars shine between the leaves,

Your voice far away:

“I am going with my daughter to the country. My husband left today… No he knows nothing.”

“Good.”

I have asked a lot of my emotions — one hundred and twenty stories. The price was high, right up with Kipling, because there was one little drop of something — not blood, not a tear, not my seed, but me more intimately than these, in every story, it was the extra I had. Now it has gone and I am just like you now.

Once the phial was full — here is the bottle it came in.

Hold on, there’s a drop left there … No, it was just the way the light fell.

But your voice on the telephone. If I hadn’t abused words so, what you said might have meant something. But one hundred and twenty stories…

April evening spreads over everything, the purple blur left by a child who has used the whole paint-box.

SAD CATASTROPHE

We don’t want visitors, we said:

They come and sit for hours and hours;

They come when we have gone to bed;

They are imprisoned here by showers;

They come when they are low and bored -

Drink from the bottle of your heart.

Once it is emptied, the gay horde,

Shouting the Rubaiyat, depart.

I balked: I was at work, I cried;

Appeared unshaven or not at all;

Was out of gin; the cook had died

Of small-pox — and more tales as tall.

On boor and friend I turned the same

Dull eye, the same impatient tone —

The ones with beauty, sense and fame

Perceived we wished to be alone.

But dull folk, dreary ones and rude -

Long talker, lonely soul and quack —

Who hereto hadn’t dare intrude,

Found us alone, swarmed to attack,

Thought silence was attention; rage

An echo of their own home’s war —

Glad we had ceased to ‘be upstage.’

— But the nice people came no more.

ONE SOUTHERN GIRL

.

Lolling down on the edge of time

Where the flower months fade as the days move over,

Days that are long like lazy rhyme,

Nights that are pale with the moon and the clover,

Summer there is a dream of summer

Rich with dusks for a lover’s food —

Who is the harlequin, who is the mummer,

You or time or the multitude?

Still does your hair’s gold light the ground

And dazzle the blind till their old ghosts rise?

Then, all you care to find being found,

Are you yet kind to their hungry eyes?

Part of a song, a remembered glory —

Say there’s one rose that lives and might

Whisper the fragments of our story:

Kisses, a lazy street — and night

TO BOATH

There was a flutter from the wings of God + you lay dead.

Your books were in your desk I guess + some unfinished chaos in your head

Was dumped to nothing by the great janitress of destinies

THE POPE AT CONFESSION

The gorgeous Vatican was steeped in night,

The organs trembled on my heart no more,

But with a blend of colors on my sight

I loitered through a somber corridor;

When suddenly I heard behind a screen

The faintest whisper as from one in prayer;

I glanced about, then passed, for I had seen

A hushed, dim-lighted room — and two were there.

A ragged friar, half in dream’s embrace,

Leaned sideways, soul intent, as if to seize

The last grey ice of sin that ached to melt

And faltered from the lips of him who knelt,

A little bent old man upon his knees

With pain and sorrow in his holy face.

RAIN BEFORE DAWN

The dull, faint patter in the drooping hours

Drifts in upon my sleep and fills my hair

With damp; the burden of the heavy air

In strewn upon me where my tired soul cowers,

Shrinking like some lone queen in empty towers

Dying. Blind with unrest I grow aware:

The pounding broad wings drifts down the stair

And sates me like the heavy scent of flowers.

I lie upon heart. My eyes like hands

Grip at the soggy pillow. Now the dawn

Tears from her wetted breast the spattered blouse

Of night; lead-eyed and moist she straggles o’er the lawn.

Between the curtains brooding stares and stands

Like some drenched swimmer — Death’s within the house

The Non-Fiction

LIST OF ESSAYS AND ARTICLES

THE CLAIMS OF THE LIT

CONTEMPORARY WRITERS AND THEIR WORK

WHO’S WHO — AND WHY

“WHAT I WAS ADVISED TO DO — AND DIDN’T”

SOME STORIES THEY LIKE TO TELL AGAIN

10 BEST BOOKS I HAVE READ

THE PAMPERED MEN

HOW TO LIVE ON $36,000 A YEAR

HOW TO LIVE ON PRACTICALLY NOTHING A YEAR

HOW TO WASTE MATERIAL

PRINCETON

TEN YEARS IN THE ADVERTISING BUSINESS

ECHOES OF THE JAZZ AGE

MY LOST CITY

ONE HUNDRED FALSE STARTS

RING

SLEEPING AND WAKING,

MY TEN FAVORITE PLAYS

THE CRACK-UP

PASTING IT TOGETHER

HANDLE WITH CARE

AUTHOR’S HOUSE

AFTERNOON OF AN AUTHOR

EARLY SUCCESS

PREFACE

MY GENERATION

THE CLAIMS OF THE LIT

This letter was published in The Princeton Alumni Weekly in 1917.

The Editor of

The Alumni Weekly,

Dear Sir,

I read with interest the letter of Mr. Edmund B. Wilson, Jr., ‘16, in The Alumni Weekly for Feb. 25, and I most heartily concur in his plea that the claims of the Nassau Literary Magazine to endowment should be prior to those of the Philadelphian Society. A scant fourth of every class, the more immature, impressionable, and timid fourth, are swept up yearly by the drag-net of the Philadelphian Society. By senior year most of them realize that the point of view therein camouflaged under the name of “social service” has little connection with modern life and modern thought — except with the present kill-joy spirit sweeping the Chautauquas — and the swarm of earnest youths diminishes to a mere scattering of mild and innocuous uplifters. But I believe that during the first three years inestimable harm is done to the impressionable fourth. Nothing could be less stimulating to that quickening of interest and intellectual curiosity which is the aim of all education than the depressing conviction of sin distilled by those prosperous apostles who go the rounds of the colleges frightening amiable freshmen. That a man such as the famous “bad example” should be permitted to sit smugly upon a Princeton lecture platform to be pointed at by the raucous lecturer as a reformed rake, and hence as an ideal, is a custom too ridiculous to be disgraceful but also too absurd to be endowed.

It seems inevitable that this herd of blue-nosed professional uplifters, at present at large in America appealing to the intellect of farmers’ wives and pious drug-clerks, shall have a breeding place in Princeton, but that men to whom such ideas are distasteful and revolting should have to contribute to keep it alive and bawling when the Lit. goes unendowed is really too much.

It is an unnecessary truckling to the mediocre religious fanaticism of a dull and earnest minority. Princeton lives by its statesmen and artists and scientists — even by its football teams — but not by its percentage of puritans in every graduating class.

F. Scott Fitzgerald ‘17.

CONTEMPORARY WRITERS AND THEIR WORK

The idea of “The Ice Palace” (Saturday Evening Post, May 22), grew out of a conversation with a girl out in St. Paul, Minnesota, my home. We were riding home from a moving picture show late one November night.

“Here comes winter,” she said, as a scattering of confetti-like snow blew along the street.

I thought immediately of the winters I had known there, their bleakness and dreariness and seemingly infinite length, and then we began talking about life in Sweden.

“I wonder,” I said casually, “if the Swedes aren’t melancholy on account of the cold — if this climate doesn’t make people rather hard and chill — “ and then I stopped, for I had scented a story.

I played with the idea for two weeks without writing a line. I felt I could work out a tale about some person or group of persons of Anglo-Saxon birth living for generations in a very cold climate. I already had one atmosphere detail — the first wisps of snow weaving like advance-guard ghosts up the street.

At the end of two weeks I was in Montgomery, Alabama, and while out walking with a girl I wandered into a graveyard. She told me I could never understand how she felt about the Confederate graves, and I told her I understood so well that I could put it on paper. Next day on my way back to St. Paul it came to me that it was all one story — the contrast between Alabama and Minnesota. When I reached home I had

(1) The idea of this contrast.

(2) The natural sequence of the girl visiting in the north.

(3) The idea that some phase of the cold should prey on her mind.

(4) That this phase should be an ice palace — I had the idea of using an ice palace in a story since several months before when my mother told me about one they had in St. Paul in the eighties.

(5) A detail about snow in the vestibule of a railway train.

When I reached St. Paul I intrigued my family into telling me all they remembered about the ice palace. At the public library I found a rough sketch of it that had appeared in a newspaper of the period. Then I went carefully through my notebook for any incident or character that might do — I always do this when I am ready to start a story — but I don’t believe that in this case I found anything except a conversation I had once had with a girl as to whether people were feline or canine.

Then I began. I did an atmospheric sketch of the girl’s life in Alabama. This was part one. I did the graveyard scene and also used it to begin the love interest and hint at her dislike of cold. This was part two. Then I began part three which was to be her arrival in the northern city, but in the middle I grew bored with it and skipped to the beginning of the ice palace scene, a part I was wild to do. I did the scene where the couple were approaching the palace in a sleigh, and of a sudden I began to get the picture of an ice labyrinth so I left the description of the palace and turned at once to the girl lost in the labyrinth. Parts one and two had taken two days. The ice palace and labyrinth part (part five) and the last scene (part six) which brought back the Alabama motif were finished the third day. So there I had my beginning and end which are the easiest and most enjoyable for me to write, and the climax, which is the most exciting and stimulating to work out. It took me three days to do parts three and four, the least satisfactory parts of the story, and while doing them I was bored and uncertain, constantly re-writing, adding and cutting and revising-and in the end didn’t care particularly for them.

That’s the whole story. It unintentionally illustrates my theory that, except in a certain sort of naturalistic realism, what you enjoy writing is liable to be much better reading than what you labor over.

WHO’S WHO — AND WHY

This autobiographical essay was written for The Saturday Evening Post in 1920.

The history of my life is the history of the struggle between an overwhelming urge to write and a combination of circumstances bent on keeping me from it.

When I lived in St. Paul and was about twelve I wrote all through every class in school in the back of my geography book and first year Latin and on the margins of themes and declensions and mathematics problems. Two years later a family congress decided that the only way to force me to study was to send me to boarding school. This was a mistake. It took my mind off my writing. I decided to play football, to smoke, to go to college, to do all sorts of irrelevant things that had nothing to do with the real business of life, which, of course, was the proper mixture of description and dialogue in the short story.

But in school I went off on a new tack. I saw a musical comedy called The Quaker Girl, and from that day forth my desk bulged with Gilbert & Sullivan librettos and dozens of notebooks containing the germs of dozens of musical comedies.

Near the end of my last year at school I came across a new musical-comedy score lying on top of the piano. It was a show called His Honor the Sultan, and the title furnished the information that it had been presented by the Triangle Club of Princeton University.

That was enough for me. From then on the university question was settled. I was bound for Princeton.

I spent my entire Freshman year writing an operetta for the Triangle Club. To do this I failed in algebra, trigonometry, coordinate geometry and hygiene. But the Triangle Club accepted my show, and by tutoring all through a stuffy August I managed to come back a Sophomore and act in it as a chorus girl. A little after this came a hiatus. My health broke down and I left college one December to spend the rest of the year recuperating in the West. Almost my final memory before I left was of writing a last lyric on that year’s Triangle production while in bed in the infirmary with a high fever.

The next year, 1916 — 17, found me back in college, but by this time I had decided that poetry was the only thing worth while, so with my head ringing with the meters of Swinburne and the matters of Rupert Brooke I spent the spring doing sonnets, ballads and rondels into the small hours. I had read somewhere that every great poet had written great poetry before he was twenty-one. I had only a year and, besides, war was impending. I must publish a book of startling verse before I was engulfed.

By autumn I was in an infantry officers’ training camp at FortLeavenworth, with poetry in the discard and a brand-new ambition — I was writing an immortal novel. Every evening, concealing my pad behind Small Problems for Infantry, I wrote paragraph after paragraph on a somewhat edited history of me and my imagination. The outline of twenty-two chapters, four of them in verse, was made, two chapters were completed; and then I was detected and the game was up. I could write no more during study period.

This was a distinct complication. I had only three months to live — in those days all infantry officers thought they had only three months to live — and I had left no mark on the world. But such consuming ambition was not to be thwarted by a mere war. Every Saturday at one o’clock when the week’s work was over I hurried to the Officers’ Club, and there, in a corner of a roomful of smoke, conversation and rattling newspapers, I wrote a one-hundred-and-twenty-thousand-word novel on the consecutive week-ends of three months. There was no revising; there was no time for it. As I finished each chapter I sent it to a typist in Princeton.

Meanwhile I lived in its smeary pencil pages. The drills, marches and Small Problems for Infantry were a shadowy dream. My whole heart was concentrated upon my book.

I went to my regiment happy. I had written a novel. The war could now go on. I forgot paragraphs and pentameters, similes and syllogisms. I got to be a first lieutenant, got my orders overseas — and then the publishers wrote me that though The Romantic Egotist was the most original manuscript they had received for years they couldn’t publish it. It was crude and reached no conclusion.

It was six months after this that I arrived in New York and presented my card to the office boys of seven city editors asking to be taken on as a. reporter. I had just turned twenty-two, the war was over, and I was going to trail murderers by day and do short stories by night. But the newspapers didn’t need me. They sent their office boys out to tell me they didn’t need me. They decided definitely and irrevocably by the sound of my name on a calling card that I was absolutely unfitted to be a reporter.

Instead I became an advertising man at ninety dollars a month, writing the slogans that while away the weary hours in rural trolley cars. After hours I wrote stories — from March to June. There were nineteen altogether; the quickest written in an hour and a half, the slowest in three days. No one bought them, no one sent personal letters. I had one hundred and twenty-two rejection slips pinned in a frieze about my room. I wrote movies. I wrote song lyrics. I wrote complicated advertising schemes. I wrote poems. I wrote sketches. I wrote jokes. Near the end of June I sold one story for thirty dollars.

On the Fourth of July, utterly disgusted with myself and all the editors, I went home to St. Paul and informed family and friends that I had given up my position and had come home to write a novel. They nodded politely, changed the subject and spoke of me very gently. But this time I knew what I was doing. I had a novel to write at last, and all through two hot months I wrote and revised and compiled and boiled down. On September fifteen This Side of Paradise was accepted by special delivery.

In the next two months I wrote eight stories and sold nine. The ninth was accepted by the same magazine that had rejected it four months before. Then, in November, I sold my first story to the editors of The Saturday Evening Post. By February I had sold them half a dozen. Then my novel came out. Then I got married. Now I spend my time wondering how it all happened.

In the words of the immortal Julius Caesar: “That’s all there is; there isn’t any more.”

“WHAT I WAS ADVISED TO DO — AND DIDN’T”

Published in Philadelphia Public Ledger, 22 April 1922.

“Good morning, Mr. Fitzgerald,” said the man with horn-rimmed spectacles, “I was asked to come down to the copy department and speak to you about writing. I understand that you received $30 for a story. Now I have had five stories in the Saturday Evening Post during the last ten years and I know the game from A to Z. There’s nothing in it. It’s all right for picking up a little spare cash, but as for making a living at it, it won’t do. You’re dreaming. It would take ten years before you’d even begin to get a start. In the meanwhile, you’d starve. Take my advice, give up writing and stay at your job.”

I didn’t!

IMAGINATION — AND A FEW MOTHERS

Back in the days of tenement uplift, the homes of tired stevedores and banana peddlers were frequently invaded by pompous dowagers who kept their limousines purring at the curb. “Giuseppi,” say the pompous dowagers, “what you need to brighten up your home is a game of of charades every evening.”

“Charade?” inquires the bewildered Giuseppi.

“Family charades,” beam the dowagers. “For instance, suppose some night your wife and the girls take the name ‘Viscountess Salisbury,’ or the words ‘initiative and referendum,’ and act them out — and you and the boys can guess what words they’re acting. So much more real fun than the saloon.”

Having sown the good seed, the dowagers reenter their limousines and drive to the next Giuseppi on their list, a list made out by the Society for Encouraging Parlor Games in Poor Families.

Thus went the attempt from on high to bring imagination into the home, an attempt about as successful as the current effort to clothe the native Hawaiians in dollar-eighty-five cheesecloth Mother Hubbards manufactured in Paterson, New Jersey.

The average home is a horribly dull place. This is a platitude; it’s so far taken for granted that it’s the basis of much of our national humor. The desire of the man for the club and the wife for the movie — as Shelley did not put it — has recently been supplemented by the cry of the child for the moonlight ride.

The statistics compiled last year by the state of Arkansas show that of every one hundred wives thirty-seven admit that they married chiefly to get away from home. The figures are appalling. That nineteen of the thirty-seven wished themselves home again as soon as they were married does not mitigate the frightful situation.

It is easy to say that the home fails chiefly in imagination. Rut an imagination under good control is about as rare a commodity as radium, and does not consist of playing charades or giving an imitation of Charlie Chaplin or putting papier-mache shades on the 1891 gas jets; imagination is an attitude toward living. It is a putting into the terrific, lifelong, age-old fight against domestic dullness all the energy that goes into worry and self-justification and nagging, which are the pet devices of all of us for whiling away the heavy hours.

The word energy at once brings up the picture of a big, bustling woman, breathing hard through closed lips, rushing from child to child and trying to organize a dear little Christmas play in the parlor. But that isn’t at all the kind of imagination I mean.

There are several kinds. For example, I once knew the mother of a family, a Mrs. Judkins, who had a marvelous imagination. If things had been a little different, Mrs. Judkins might have sold her imagination to the movies or the magazines, or invented a new kind of hook-and-eye. Or she might have put it into that intricate and delicate business of running a successful home. Did Mrs. Judkins use her imagination for these things? She did not! She had none left to use.

Her imagination had a leak in it, and its stuff was dissipated hourly into thin air — in this fashion: At six a.m. Mrs. Judkins awakes. She lies in bed. She begins her daily worry. Did, or did not, her daughter Anita look tired last night when she came in from that dance? Yes; she did. She had dark circles. Dark circles — a bogy of her childhood. Mrs. Judkins remembers how her own mother always worried about dark circles. Without doubt Anita is going into a nervous decline. How ghastly! Think of that Mrs. — what was her name? — who had the nervous decline at — at — what was that place? Think of it! Appalling! Well, I’ll — I’ll ask her to go to a doctor; but what if she won’t go? Maybe I can get her to stay home from dances for — for a month.

Out of her bed springs Mrs. Judkins in a state of nervous worry. She is impelled by a notion of doing some vague, nervous thing to avoid some vague, nervous catastrophe.She is already fatigued, because she shouldhave gone back to sleep for an hour; but sleep is now out of the question. Her wonderful imagination has conjured up Anita’s lapse into a bed of pain, her last words — something about “going back to the angels” — and her pitiful extinction.

Anita, who is seventeen and a healthy, hardy flapper, has merely plunged healthily ami hardily into having a good lime. For two nights in succession she has been out late at dances. The second night she was tired and developed dark circles. Today she will sleep until twelve o’clock, if Mrs. Judkins doesn’t wake her to ask her how she feels, and will get up looking like a magazine cover.

But it is only eight o’clock now, and we must return to Mrs. Judkins. She has tiptoed in to look at the doomed Anita, and on her way has glanced into the room where sleeps Clifford Judkins, third, age twelve. Her imagination is now running at fever heat. It is started for the day and will pulsate at the rate of sixty vivid images a minute until she falls into a weary coma at one o’clock tonight.

So she endows Clifford with dark circles also.

Poor Clifford! She decides not to wake him for school. He’s not strong enough. She’ll write a note to his teacher and explain. He looked tired yesterday when he came in from playing baseball. Baseball! Another ghastly thought! Why, suppose —

But I will not depress you by taking you through all the early hours of Mrs. Judkins’ morning; because she is depressing. A human being in a nervous, worried state is one of the most depressing things in the world. Mrs. Judkins is exhausted already so far as having the faintest cheerful effect on anyone else is concerned. In fact, after breakfast Mr. Judkins leaves the house with the impression that things are going pretty badly at home and that life’s a pretty dismal proposition.

But before he left he did a very unfortunate thing. Something in the newspaper made him exclaim that if they passed that Gunch-Bobly tariff law his business was going to the dogs. It was merely a conventional grumble. Complaining about the Gunch-Bobly tariff law is his pet hobby, but--

He has put a whole bag of grist — does grist come in bags? — into the mill of Mrs. Judkins’ imagination. By the time he reaches the street car Mrs. Judkins has got him into bankruptcy. By the time he is downtown he has — though he doesn’t know it — been spending a year in prison, with a woman and two starving children calling for him outside the gates. When he enters his office he is unconsciously entering the poorhouse, there to weep out a miserable old age.

Not According to Model

But enough; a few more hours of Mrs. Judkins’ day would exhaust me and you, as it exhausts everybody with whom she comes into contact.

There are many Mrs. Judkinses, and I could go on forever. But I will spare you, for I want to talk about one woman who together with several others I know fought the good fight against the dullness and boredom of the home and, by an unusual device, won a triumphant and deserved victory

I’m going to tell you about a charming woman who, as I have said, used her imagination in an unusual way. Hers was the happiest home I ever knew.

Did she work for a while in her husband’s office and learn how his business was run, so that she could talk to him about it in the evenings? Reader, she did not. Did she buy a football guide and master the rules- so that she could discuss the game understandingly with her sons? No; she didn’t. Nor did she organize a family orchestra in which Clarence played the drum, Maisee the harp and Vivian the oboe. She knew nothing about football, nor did she ever intend to. Her remarks on her husband’s business were delightfully vague. He was a manufacturer of stationery, and I think that in some confused way she imagined that he ran the Post Office Department.

No; she was not one of those appalling women who know more about the business of everybody in the house than anyone knows about his own. She never bored her boys by instructing them in football, though she occasionally delighted them by her ludicrous misapprehensions of how it was played. And she never dragged the paper industry onto the domestic hearth. She couldn’t even solve her own daughter’s algebra problems; she admitted it and didn’t try. In fact, she was not at all the model mother, as mapped out by Miss Emily Hope Demster, of the WayondotteValleyNormal School, in her paper on Keeping Ahead of Your Children.

She used her imagination in a finer and more far-seeing way. She knew that a home violently dominated by a strong-minded woman has a way of turning the girls into dependent shadows and the boys into downright ninnies. She realized that the inevitable growth of a healthy child is a drifting away from the home.

She Kept Young for Herself

So Mrs. Paxton protected herself by enjoying life quite selfishly in her own way. She did not keep young with her children or for her children — two hollow and disastrous phrases — she kept young for herself. When her children were tiresome she did not scold them; she told them that they bored her.

One of her sons was remarkably handsome and scholastically an utter dunce. I believe she liked him a little the best of the three; but when he was dull she laughed at him and told him so. She called him” the dumb one” without blame or malice, but always with humor. She could do this, because she thought of her children as persons, not as miraculous pieces of personal property.

A man doesn’t have to be very smart to do well in this world. In fact, Harry Paxton, though he never could get into college, has done very well since. And the fact that he is ‘‘dumb” is to this day a standing joke between him and his mother.

Mrs. Paxton’s children were always treated as though they were grown. As they grew older, their private lives were more and more respected and let alone. They chose their schools; they chose their activities; and so long as their friends did not bore Mrs. Pax-ton or at least were not personally inflicted on her, they chose their own friends. She herself had always been a musician; but as the children showed no predilections in that direction, no music lessons were ever suggested to them. As children, they scarcely existed to her — except in time of sickness; but as persons she got from them a sort of amazed enjoyment. One of her boys was brilliant; she was enormously impressed, exactly as though he had been someone she had read about in the paper. Once she remarked to a shocked and horrified group of mammas that her own daughter. Prudence, would be pretty if she didn’t dress so abominably.

Meanwhile she was protecting herself by having a good time, independently of her children. She did as she had always done. Until her children were old enough to share in her amusements, she let them alone in theirs. So far as their amusements were intrinsically interesting they interested her,but she seldom spoiled their frame of “pom-pom-pull-away” by playing it with them. She knew that children are happier by themselves, and if she played with them it was only because the wanted the exercise.

It was a sincerely happy home. The children were not compelled or even urged to love one another; and in consequence they grew up with a strong and rather sentimental mutual liking.

Mrs. Paxton’s home was a success, because she had a good time in it herself. The children never considered that it was run entirely for their benefit. It was a place where they could do what they liked; but it was distinctly not a place where they could do what they liked to somebody else. It neither restricted them nor did it prostrate itself abjectly before them. It was a place where their lather and mother seemed unforgetably happy over mysteries of their own. Even now they pause and wonder what were those amazing and incomprehensible jokes they could not understand. They were welcome to participate in the conversation, if they could, but it was never tempered into one-syllable platitudes for their minds.

Later, when Prudence came to her mother for worldly advice, Mrs. Paxton gave it — gave it as she would have given it to a friend.

So with her son at college. He never felt that there was someone standing behind him with all-forgiving arms. He was on his own. If he failed he would not be blamed, lectured or wept over; but he was not going to be bolstered through with the help of private tutors. Why not? Simply because tutoring would have meant that his mother would have to give up a new dress which she wanted and didn’t intend to give up — a straightforward, just and nsentimental reason.

Making Eminent Men

The home was never dull, because it was never compulsory; one could take it or leave it. It was a place where father and mother were happy. It was never insufficient; it had never promised to be a sort of dowdy, downy bed where everyone could indulge his bad habits, be careless in dress and appearance, nag and snarl in short, a breeding place for petty vices, weaknesses and insufficiencies. In return for giving up the conventional privileges of the mother, of dominating the children and endowing them with convenient, it erroneous, ideas, Mrs. Paxton claimed the right that she should not be dominated, discomforted or “used” by the children.

It is very easy to call her an “unnatural” mother; but being a “natural, old-fashioned mother” is just about the easiest groove for a woman to slide into. It takes much more imagination to be Mrs. Paxton’s kind. Motherhood, as a blind, unreasoning habit, is something we have inherited from our ancestors of the cave. This abandonment to the maternal instinct was universal, so we made it sacred — “ Hands Off!” But just as we develop, century by century, we tight against the natural, whether it’s the natural (and “sacred”?) instinct to kill what we hate or the temptation to abandon oneself to one’s children.

It is a commonplace to say that eminent men come, as a rule, from large families; but this is not due to any inherent virtue of the large family in itself; it is because in a large family the children’s minds are much more liable to be left alone; each child is not ineradically stamped with the particular beliefs, errors, convictions, aversions and bogies that haunted the mother in the year 1889 or 1901 or 1922 as the case might be. In large families no one child can be in so much direct contact with its parents.

Returning to Mrs. Paxton, I want to set down here what happened to her. The three children grew up and left her as children have a way of doing. She missed them, but it did not end her active life, as her active life had always gone along quite independently of them. She never became the miserable mother of the movies, broken by the separation, thankful for one homecoming a year, existing for and ravenously devouring the four letters a month she receives from her scattered daughters and sons. It is some day proved to all women that they do not own their children. They were never meant to.

And Mrs. Paxton had been wise enough never to pretend she owned her children. She had had enough imagination to see that they were primarily persons; and, except in the aforementioned times of sickness, it was as persons that she first thought of them.

“The Home is Oversufflcient”

So her life went on as it had gone on be-fore. As she grew older her amusements changed, but she grew old slowly. The strange part of it is that the children think of her as a person, not as a” mother” who has to be written to once a fortnight and who will excuse their most intolerable shortcomings.

“What? You’ve never met my mother?” they say. “Oh, she’s a most amazing, most interesting person. She’s perfectly charming. You ought to meet her.”

They remember their home as the place where their own interests were unhindered, and where, if they were bores, they were snubbed as bores should be snubbed.

“No,” cries the sentimentalist; “give me my old wrinkled mother who never thought of anything but me, who gave me the clothes off her back and grew old doing things for my pleasure. Why, I’m the only thing she was ever interested in.”

And that’s the fate of the mother we exalt at present — on screen and in sob story. Flatter her, “respect” her — and leave her alone. She never had the imagination to consider her children as persons when they were young, so they are unable to think of her as a person when she is old.

They send her a shawl for Christmas. When she visits them twice a year they take her to the Hippodrome; “Mother wouldn’t like these new-fashioned shows.” She is not a person; she is “poor” mother. Old at fifty, she eats in her room when there’s young company at dinner. She has given her children so much in selfish, unreasoning love that when they go from her she has nothing left except the honorary title “mother “on which to feed her ill-nourished soul.

We have learned at last on the advice of our doctors to leave babies alone. No longer do we tease and talk to and “draw out” the baby all day, and wonder why it is fretful and cross and nervous at the day’s end. A mother’s love for a child is no longer measured by the number of times it cries for her every night. Perhaps some day we’ll leave our children alone, too, and spend our time on ourselves. The home is not so much insufficient as it is oversufficient. It is cloying; it tries too hard. A woman happy with her husband is worth a dozen child worshipers, in her influence on the child. And all the energy spent in “molding” the child is not as effective as the imagination to see the child as a “person,” because sooner or later a person is what that child is going to be.

SOME STORIES THEY LIKE TO TELL AGAIN

“The following story, which from interior evidence I judge to be at least twenty-five years old, has amused be more than any I’ve heard in years:

“The scene is a banquet in Victorian England. Wine is flowing freely. Dinner is at last over and the chief speaker arises unsteadily to begin his oration with a toast.

“The chief speaker (holding a wavering glass on high): ‘Gen’lemen — the queal!’

“I can hear the editors of THE HERALD protest that I have a curious sense of humor. None the less it’s my favorite story.”

10 BEST BOOKS I HAVE READ

This list was printed in the Jersey City Evening Journal, 24 April 192.

Samuel Butler’s Note Books. The mind and heart of my favorite Victorian.

The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche (H. L. Mencken). A keen, hard intelligence interpreting the Great Modern Philosopher.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (James Joyce). Because James Joyce is to be the most profound literary influence in the next fifty years.

Zuleika Dobson (Max Beerbohm). For the sheer delight of its exquisite snobbery.

The Mysterious Stranger (Mark Twain). Mark Twain in his most sincere mood. A book and a startling revelation.

Nostromo (Joseph Conrad). The great novel of the past fifty years, as Ulysses is the great novel of the future.

Vanity Fair (Thackeray). No explanation required.

The Oxford Book of English Verse. This seems to me a better collection than Palgrave’s.

Thais (Anatole France). The great book of the man who is Wells and Shaw together.

Seventeen (Booth Tarkington). The funniest book I’ve ever read. —

THE PAMPERED MEN

Talking the other day with a Prominent Business Man who had just visited an eastern moving-picture studio, he remarked that never in his life had he seen so much waste and inefficiency in a single day.

“Why, look here — “ he began, and with such a pretty flow of words, told us how it could all be systematized, that we forgot for a moment that this was an old, old story. When Prominent Business Men go through moving picture studios they always come out feeling very superior and contemptuous — because they imagine that turning strips of celluloid into visible stories is as simple a matter as turning western cattle into eastern roast beef.

The real fallacy of the Business Man’s attitude lies, of course, in Vera Lafollette’s eyes. When Vera has a cold — and Vera will take cold, even when she’s under a two-hundred-thousand-dollar contract — her eyes grow red and dim just like yours and mine, and the lids swell. You can hardly blame her, when she’s in this condition, for refusing to go before the camera. She imagines that, if she does, every inch of red-eyed film will lose her one admirer, one silver dollar, one rung on the ladder she’s been climbing for years.

“Fire her!” says the Business Man with a bold air. “Why, last week when my superintendent disobeyed an order — “

But his superintendent was not the mainspring of a picture in which was tied up two hundred thousand dollars. In short, the moving picture is not a good profession for the efficiency bully. It is more often confronted with the human, the personal, the incalculable element than any other industry in the world.

But in one respect, there is much truth in the Business Man’s criticism of the movie. He wants to see centralization and authority, and he sees none. Is the responsibility with the producer? No — for he seems to be dependent on the director, who, in his turn, is apparently at the mercy of his story and his star. If in movie circles, you mention a successful picture, Torable David, for example, you will hear the credit for its success claimed for the producer, the director, the star, the author, the continuity writer and Lord knows how many technical artisans who have aided in the triumph. Mention a failure and you will hear the blame heaped on each one of these in turn — and finally on the public itself, for not being “intelligent” enough to like what they get.

Well, I am going to venture three opinions on the subject — three opinions that I think more and more people are coming to hold.

First — that the moving picture is a director’s business, and there never was a good picture or a bad picture for which the director was not entirely responsible.

Second — that with half a dozen exceptions, our directors are an utterly incompetent crew. Most of them entered the industry early and by accident, and the industry has outgrown them long ago.

Third — any director worth the price of his puttees should average four commercial successes out of five attempts in every year.

Let me first discuss his responsibility. In most of the big companies the director can select his own stories — the scenario departments are only too glad when a director says, “I want to do this picture and I know I can.” The director who undertakes pictures he doesn’t believe in is merely a hack — some ex-barnstormer who directed an illustrated song back in 1909 and is now hanging around Hollywood with nothing left except a megaphone.

The director chooses his cast, excepting the star, and he has control over the expenditure of the allotted money and over the writing and interpretation of the continuity. This is as it should be. Yet I have heard directors whining because they couldn’t find a story they wanted, and the whine had the true ring of incompetence. An author who whines for a plot at least has the excuse that his imagination has given out — the director has no excuse at all. The libraries are full of many million volumes ready to his hand.

In addition, directors sometimes complain of “incompetent actors.” This is merely pathetic, for it is the director’s business to make actors. On the spoken stage the director may justly cry that once rehearsals are over the acting is out of his power. But the movie director labors under no such disadvantage. He can make an actor go through a scene twenty times and then choose the best “take” for the assembled film. And in a fragmentary affair like a movie where the last scenes may be taken first, the director must do the thinking for the actor. If he is unable to, he does not belong on the platform of authority. After seeing what Chaplin did with that ex-cigarette-villain, Adolphe Menjou, and what Von Stroheim accomplished with the utterly inexperienced Mary Philbin, I believe that the alibi of incompetent acting will fall upon deaf ears.

Now directing, as the hack director understands it, is to be privy to all the outworn tricks of the trade. The hack director knows how to “visualize” every emotion — that is, he knows the rubber-stamp formula, he knows how every emotion has been visualized before. If, in a picture, the hero departs from the heroine and the heroine wants him back, the hack director knows that she must take a step after him, hold out her hands toward him and then let them drop to her side. He knows that when someone dies in the street, this is always “visualized” by having a kneeling bystander take off his hat. If someone dies in a house, a sheet is invariably drawn over his face.

Very well, let us see how Chaplin, greatest of all directors, conveyed this latter event in The Woman of Paris. He realized that the old convention was outworn, that it no longer had the power of calling the emotions to attention, so he invented a new way. The audience does not see the dying man at all; it sees the backs of the surrounding crowd and suddenly a waiter pushes his way out of that crowd, shaking his head. At once the whole horrible violence of the suicide is plain to us. We even understand the human vanity of the waiter in wanting to be first to convey the news.

We may forget that incident because the picture is full of spanking new effects but, when it is over, every bit of it, despite the shoddy mounting and the sentimentalized story, seems vastly important. Chaplin has a fine imaginative mind and he threw himself hard into his picture — it is the lazy man, the “wise old-timer,” in other words, the hack, who takes the timeworn easy way.

All I am saying comes down to this —

The chief business of a director is to invent new business to express the old emotions.

An “original” picture is not a story of a lunatic wanting the north star. It is the story of a little girl wanting a piece of candy — but our attention must be called with sharp novelty to the fact that she wants it. The valuable director is not he who makes a dull “artistic” transcription of Conrad’s Victory — give me the fellow who can blow the breath of life into a soggy gum-drop like Pollyanna.

Perhaps such men will appear. We have Griffith — just when he seems to be exhausted, he has a way of sitting up suddenly in his grave. We have Cruze, who can be forgiven The Covered Wagon if only for the amazing dream scene in Hollywood. We have Von Stroheim, who has a touch of real civilization in his make-up and, greatest of all, Chaplin, who almost invented the movies as a vehicle for personal expression. There are half a dozen others I could name — Sennett, Lubitsch, Ingram, Cecil De Mille, Dwan — who in the last five years have made two or three big successes interspersed with countless reels of drooling mediocrity, but I have my doubts about them; we must demand more than that.

As for the rest of the directors — let a thick, impenetrable curtain fall. Occasionally, a picture made by some jitney Griffith is successful because of the intelligence of self-directing stars — but beware of such accidents. The man’s next effort is likely to show the true barrenness and vulgarity of his mind.

One more remark — I doubt if successful directors will ever be found among established authors — though they may, perhaps, among playwrights and not-too-seasoned continuity men. Author-directors have a way of condescending to their audiences. Bad as Rupert Hughes’ books are, they are seldom as silly and meretricious as his pictures. I suspect that his mind is on Minnie Mc-Glook, the girl-fan of North Dakota, and not on his work —

which is —

to believe in his story, to keep his whole story in his head for ten weeks and, above all, to invent new business to express old emotions. All we ask from any of them is a little imagination and a little true feeling for the joys and the hopes and the everlasting struggles of mankind.

HOW TO LIVE ON $36,000 A YEAR

This long essay was written for the Saturday Evening Post in 1924.

“You ought to start saving money,” The Young Man With a Future assured me just the other day. “You think it’s smart to live up to your income. Some day you’ll land in the poorhouse. “

I was bored, but I knew he was going to tell me anyhow, so I asked him what I’d better do.

“It’s very simple, “ he answered impatiently; “only you establish a trust fund where you can’t get your money if you try. “

I had heard this before. It is System Number 999. I tried System Number 1 at the very beginning of my literary career four years ago. A month before I was married I went to a broker and asked his advice about investing some money.

“It’s only a thousand, “ I admitted, “but I feel I ought to begin to save right now. “

He considered.

“You don’t want Liberty Bonds, “ he said. “They’re too easy to turn into cash. You want a good, sound, conservative investment, but also you want it where you can’t get at it every five minutes. “

He finally selected a bond for me that paid 7 per cent and wasn’t listed on the market I turned over my thousand dollars, and my career of amassing capital began that day.

On that day, also, it ended.

The Heirloom No One Would Buy

My wife and I were married in New York in the spring of 1920, when prices were higher than they had been within the memory of man. In the light of after events it seems fitting that our career should have started at that precise point in time. I had just received a large check from the movies and I felt a little patronizing toward the millionaires riding down Fifth Avenue in their limousines — because my income had a way of doubling every month. This was actually the case. It had done so for several months — I had made only thirty-five dollars the previous August, while here in April I was making three thousand — and it seemed as if it was going to do so forever. At the end of the year it must reach half a million. Of course with such a state of affairs, economy seemed a waste of time. So we went to live at the most expensive hotel in New York, intending to wait there until enough money accumulated for a trip abroad.

To make a long story short, after we had been married for three months I found one day to my horror that I didn’t have a dollar in the world, and the weekly hotel bill for two hundred dollars would be due next day.

I remember the mixed feelings with which I issued from the bank on hearing the news.

“What’s the matter?” demanded my wife anxiously, as I joined her on the sidewalk. “You look depressed. “

“I’m not depressed, “ I answered cheerfully; “I’m just surprised. We haven’t got any money. “

“Haven’t got any money, “ she repeated calmly, and we began to walk up the Avenue in a sort of trance. “Well, let’s go to the movies, “ she suggested jovially.

It all seemed so tranquil that I was not a bit cast down. The cashier had not even scowled at me. I had walked in and said to him, “How much money have I got?” And he had looked in a big book and answered, “None. “

That was all. There were no harsh words, no blows. And I knew that there was nothing to worry about. I was now a successful author, and when successful authors ran out of money all they had to do was to sign checks. I wasn’t poor — they couldn’t fool me. Poverty meant being depressed and living in a small remote room and eating at a rotisserie on the corner, while I — why, it was impossible that I should be poor! I was living at the best hotel in New York!

My first step was to try to sell my only possession — my $1000 bond. It was the first of many times I made the attempt; in all financial crises I dig it out and with it go hopefully to the bank, supposing that, as it never fails to pay the proper interest, it has at last assumed a tangible value. But as I have never been able to sell it, it has gradually acquired the sacredness of a family heirloom. It is always referred to by my wife as “your bond, “ and it was once turned in at the Subway offices after I left it by accident on a car seat!

This particular crisis passed next morning when the discovery that publishers sometimes advance royalties sent me hurriedly to mine. So the only lesson I learned from it was that my money usually turns up somewhere in time of need, and that at the worst you can always borrow — a lesson that would make Benjamin Franklin turn over in his grave.

For the first three years of our marriage our income averaged a little more than $20, 000 a year. We indulged in such luxuries as a baby and a trip to Europe, and always money seemed to come easier and easier with less and less effort, until we felt that with just a little more margin to come and go on, we could begin to save.

Plans

We left the Middle West and moved East to a town about fifteen miles from New York, where we rented a house for $300 a month. We hired a nurse for $90 a month; a man and his wife — they acted as butler, chauffeur, yard man, cook, parlor maid and chamber maid — for $160 a month; and a laundress, who came twice a week, for $36 a month. This year of 1923, we told each other, was to be our saving year. We were going to earn $24, 000, and live on $18, 000, thus giving us a surplus of $6, 600 with which to buy safety and security for our old age. We were going to do better at last.

Now as everyone knows, when you want to do better you first buy a book and print your name in the front of it in capital letters. So my wife bought a book, and every bill that came to the house was carefully entered in it, so that we could watch living expenses and cut them away to almost nothing — or at least to $1, 500 a month.

We had, however, reckoned without our town. It is one of those little towns springing up on all sides of New York which are built especially for those who have made money suddenly but have never had money before.

My wife and I are, of course, members of this newly rich class. That is to say, five years ago we had no money at all, and what we now do away with would have seemed like inestimable riches to us then. I have at times suspected that we are the only newly rich people in America, that in fact we are the very couple at whom all the articles about the newly rich were aimed.

Now when you say “newly rich” you picture a middle-aged and corpulent man who has a tendency to remove his collar at formal dinners and is in perpetual hot water with his ambitious wife and her titled friends. As a member of the newly rich class, I assure you that this picture is entirely libelous. I myself, for example, am a mild, slightly used young man of twenty-seven, and what corpulence I may have developed is for the present a strictly confidential matter between my tailor and me. We once dined with a bona fide nobleman, but we were both far too frightened to take off our collars or even to demand corned beef and cabbage. Nevertheless we live in a town prepared for keeping money in circulation.

When we came here, a year ago, there were, all together, seven merchants engaged in the purveyance of food — three grocers, three butchers and a fisherman. But when the word went around in food-purveying circles that the town was filling up with the recently enriched as fast as houses could be built for them, the rush of butchers, grocers, fishmen and delicatessen men became enormous. Trainloads of them arrived daily with signs and scales in hand to stake out a claim and sprinkle sawdust upon it. It was like the gold rush of ‘49, or a big bonanza of the 70’s. Older and larger cities were denuded of their stores. Inside of a year eighteen food dealers had set up shop in our main street and might be seen any day waiting in their doorways with alluring and deceitful smiles.

Having long been somewhat overcharged by the seven previous food purveyors we all naturally rushed to the new men, who made it known by large numerical signs in their windows that they intended practically to give food away. But once we were snared, the prices began to rise alarmingly, until all of us scurried like frightened mice from one new man to another, seeking only justice, and seeking it in vain.

Great Expectations

What had happened, of course, was that there were too many food purveyors for the population. It was absolutely impossible for eighteen of them to subsist on the town and at the same time charge moderate prices. So each was waiting for some of the others to give up and move away; meanwhile the only way the rest of them could carry their loans from the bank was by selling things at two or three times the prices in the city fifteen miles away. And that is how our town became the most expensive one in the world.

Now in magazine articles people always get together and found community stores, but none of us would consider such a step. It would absolutely ruin us with our neighbors, who would suspect that we actually cared about our money. When I suggested one day to a local lady of wealth — whose husband, by the way, is reputed to have made his money by vending illicit liquids — that I start a community store known as “F. Scott Fitzgerald — Fresh Meats, “ she was horrified. So the idea was abandoned.

But in spite of the groceries, we began the year in high hopes. My first play was to be presented in the autumn, and even if living in the East forced our expenses a little over $1, 500 a month, the play would easily make up for the difference. We knew what colossal sums were earned on play royalties, and just to be sure, we asked several playwrights what was the maximum that could be earned on a year’s run. I never allowed myself to be rash. I took a sum half-way between the maximum and the minimum, and put that down as what we could fairly count on its earning. I think my figures came to about $100, 000.

It was a pleasant year; we always had this delightful event of the play to look forward to. When the play succeeded we could buy a house, and saving money would be so easy that we could do it blindfolded with both hands tied behind our backs.

As if in happy anticipation we had a small windfall in March from an unexpected source — a moving picture — and for almost the first time in our lives we had enough surplus to buy some bonds. Of course we had “my” bond, and every six months I clipped the little coupon and cashed it, but we were so used to it that we never counted it as money. It was simply a warning never to tie up cash where we couldn’t get at it in time of need.

No, the thing to buy was Liberty Bonds, and we bought four of them. It was a very exciting business. I descended to a shining and impressive room downstairs, and under the chaperonage of a guard deposited my $4, 000 in Liberty Bonds, together with “my” bond, in a little tin box to which I alone had the key.

Less Cash Than Company

I left the bank, feeling decidedly solid. I had at last accumulated a capital. I hadn’t exactly accumulated it, but there it was anyhow, and if I had died next day it would have yielded my wife $212 a year for life — or for just as long as she cared to live on that amount.

“That, “ I said to myself with some satisfaction, “is what is called providing for the wife and children. Now all I have to do is to deposit the $100, 000 from my play and then we’re through with worry forever. “

I found that from this time on I had less tendency to worry about current expenses. What if we did spend a few hundred too much now and then ? What if our grocery bills did vary mysteriously from $85 to $165 a month, according as to how closely we watched the kitchen? Didn’t I have bonds in the bank? Trying to keep under $1, 500 a month the way things were going was merely niggardly. We were going to save on a scale that would make such petty economies seem like counting pennies.

The coupons on “my” bond are always sent to an office on lower Broadway. Where Liberty Bond coupons are sent I never had a chance to find out, as I didn’t have the pleasure of clipping any. Two of them I was unfortunately compelled to dispose of just one month after I first locked them up. I had begun a new novel, you see, and it occurred to me it would be much better business in the end to keep at the novel and live on the Liberty Bonds while I was writing it. Unfortunately the novel progressed slowly, while the Liberty Bonds went at an alarming rate of speed. The novel was interrupted whenever there was any sound above a whisper in the house, while the Liberty Bonds were never interrupted at all.

And the summer drifted too. It was an exquisite summer and it became a habit with many world — weary New Yorkers to pass their week-ends at the Fitzgerald house in the country. Along near the end of a balmy and insidious August I realized with a shock that only three chapters of my novel were done — and in the little tin safety-deposit vault, only “my” bond remained. There it lay — paying storage on itself and a few dollars more. But never mind; in a little while the box would be bursting with savings. I’d have to hire a twin box next door.

But the play was going into rehearsal in two months. To tide over the interval there were two courses open to me — I could sit down and write some short stories or I could continue to work on the novel and borrow the money to live on. Lulled into a sense of security by our sanguine anticipations I decided on the latter course, and my publishers lent me enough to pay our bills until the opening night.

So I went back to my novel, and the months and money melted away; but one morning in October I sat in the cold interior of a New York theater and heard the cast read through the first act of my play. It was magnificent; my estimate had been too low. I could almost hear the people scrambling for seats, hear the ghostly voices of the movie magnates as they bid against one another for the picture rights. The novel was now laid aside; my days were spent at the theater and my nights in revising and improving the two or three little weak spots in what was to be the success of the year.

The time approached and life became a breathless affair. The November bills came in, were glanced at, and punched onto a bill file on the bookcase. More important questions were in the air. A disgusted letter arrived from an editor telling me I had written only two short stories during the entire year. But what did that matter? The main thing was that our second comedian got the wrong intonation in his first act exit line.

The play opened in Atlantic City in November. It was a colossal frost. People left their seats and walked out, people rustled their programs and talked audibly in bored impatient whispers. After the second act I wanted to stop the show and say it was all a mistake but the actors struggled heroically on.

There was a fruitless week of patching and revising, and then we gave up and came home. To my profound astonishment the year, the great year, was almost over. I was $5, 000 in debt, and my one idea was to get in touch with a reliable poorhouse where we could hire a room and bath for nothing a week. But one satisfaction nobody could take from us. We had spent $36, 000, and purchased for one year the right to be members of the newly rich class. What more can money buy?

Taking Account of Stock

The first move, of course, was to get out “my” bond, take it to the bank and offer it for sale. A very nice old man at a shining table was firm as to its value as security, but he promised that if I became overdrawn he would call me up on the phone and give me a chance to make good. No, he never went to lunch with depositors. He considered writers a shiftless class, he said, and assured me that the whole bank was absolutely burglarproof from cellar to roof.

Too discouraged even to put the bond back in the now yawning deposit box, I tucked it gloomily into my pocket and went home. There was no help for it — I must go to work. I had exhausted my resources and there was nothing else to do. In the train I listed all our possessions on which, if it came to that, we could possibly raise money. Here is the list:

- 1 Oil stove, damaged.

- 9 Electric lamps, all varieties.

- 2 Bookcases with books to match.

- 1 Cigarette humidor, made by a convict.

- 2 Framed crayon portraits of my wife and me.

- 1 Medium-priced automobile, 1921 model.

- 1 Bond, par value $1, 000; actual value unknown.

“Let’s cut down expenses right away, “ began my wife when I reached home. “There’s a new grocery in town where you pay cash and everything costs only half what it does anywhere else. I can take the car every morning and — “

“Cash!” I began to laugh at this. “Cash!”

The one thing it was impossible for us to do now was to pay cash. It was too late to pay cash. We had no cash to pay. We should rather have gone down on our knees and thanked the butcher and grocer for letting us charge. An enormous economic fact became clear to me at that moment — the rarity of cash, the latitude of choice that cash allows.

“Well, “ she remarked thoughtfully, “that’s too bad. But at least we don’t need three servants. We’ll get a Japanese to do general housework, and I’ll be nurse for a while until you get us put of danger. “

“Let them go?” I demanded incredulously. “But we can’t let them go! We’d have to pay them an extra two weeks each. Why, to get them out of the house would cost us $125 — in cash! Besides, it’s nice to have the butler; if we have an awful smash we can send him up to New York to hold us a place in the bread line.”

“Well, then, how can we economize?”

“We can’t. We’re too poor to economize. Economy is a luxury. We could have economized last summer — but now our only salvation is in extravagance.”

“How about a smaller house?”

“Impossible! Moving is the most expensive thing in the world; and besides, I couldn’t work during the confusion. No, “ I went on, “I’ll just have to get out of this mess the only way I know how, by making more money. Then when we’ve got something in the bank we can decide what we’d better do. “

Over our garage is a large bare room whither I now retired with pencil, paper and the oil stove, emerging the next afternoon at five o’clock with a 7, 000-word story. That was something; it would pay the rent and last month’s overdue bills. It took twelve hours a day for five weeks to rise from abject poverty back into the middle class, but within that time we had paid our debts, and the cause for immediate worry was over.

But I was far from satisfied with the whole affair. A young man can work at excessive speed with no ill effects, but youth is unfortunately not a permanent condition of life.

I wanted to find out where the $36, 000 had gone. Thirty-six thousand is not very wealthy — not yacht-and-Palm-Beach wealthy — but it sounds to me as though it should buy a roomy house full of furniture, a trip to Europe once a year, and a bond or two besides. But our $36, 000 had bought nothing at all.

So I dug up my miscellaneous account books, and my wife dug up her complete household record for the year 1923, and we made out the monthly average. Here it is:

HOUSEHOLD EXPENSES

Apportioned per month

Income tax

$

198.00

Food

$

202.00

Rent

$

300.00

Coal, wood, ice, gas, light, phone and water

$

114.50

Servants

$

295.00

Golf clubs

$

105.50

Clothes — three people

$

158.00

Doctor and dentist

$

42.50

Drugs and cigarettes

$

32.50

Automobile

$

25.00

Books

$

14.50

All other household expenses

$

112.50

Total

$

1,600.00

“Well, that’s not bad, “ we thought when we had got thus far. “Some of the items are pretty high, especially food and servants. But there’s about everything accounted for, and it’s only a little more than half our income. “

Then we worked out the average monthly expenditures that could be included under pleasure.

Hotel bills — this meant spending the night or charging meals in New York

$

51.00

Trips — only two, but apportioned per month

$

43.00

Theater tickets

$

55.00

Barber and hairdresser

$

25.00

Charity and loans

$

15.00

Taxis

$

15.00

Gambling — this dark heading covers bridge, craps and football bets

$

33.00

Restaurant parties

$

70.00

Entertaining

$

70.00

Miscellaneous

$

23.00

Total

$

400.00

Some of these items were pretty high. They will seem higher to a Westerner than to a New Yorker. Fifty-five dollars for theater tickets means between three and five shows a month, depending on the type of show and how long it’s been running. Football games are also included in this, as well as ringside seats to the Dempsey-Firpo fight. As for the amount marked “restaurant parties” — $70 would perhaps take three couples to a popular after-theater cabaret — but it would be a close shave.

We added the items marked “pleasure” to the items marked “household expenses, “ and obtained a monthly total.

“Fine, “ I said. “Just $3, 000. Now at least we’ll know where to cut down, because we know where it goes.”

She frowned; then a puzzled, awed expression passed over her face.

“What’s the matter?” I demanded. “Isn’t it all right? Are some of the items wrong?”

“It isn’t the items, “ she said staggeringly; “it’s the total. This only adds up to $2, 000 a month. “

I was incredulous, but she nodded.

“But listen, “ I protested; “my bank statements show that we’ve spent $3, 000 a month. You don’t mean to say that every month we lose $1, 000 dollars?”

“This only adds up to $2, 000, “ she protested, “so we must have. “

“Give me the pencil. “

For an hour I worked over the accounts in silence, but to no avail.

“Why, this is impossible!” I insisted. “People don’t lose $12, 000 in a year. It’s just — it’s just missing. “

There was a ring at the doorbell and I walked over to answer it, still dazed by these figures. It was the Banklands, our neighbors from over the way.

“Good heavens!” I announced. “We’ve just lost $12, 000!”

Bankland stepped back alertly.

“Burglars?” he inquired.

“Ghosts, “ answered my wife.

Mrs. Bankland looked nervously around.

“Really?”

We explained the situation, the mysterious third of our income that had vanished into thin air.

“Well, what we do, “ said Mrs. Bankland, “is, we have a budget. “

“We have a budget, “ agreed Bankland, “and we stick absolutely to it. If the skies fall we don’t go over any item of that budget. That’s the only way to live sensibly and save money. “

“That’s what we ought to do, “ I agreed.

Mrs. Bankland nodded enthusiastically.

“It’s a wonderful scheme, “ she went on. “We make a certain deposit every month, and all I save on it I can have for myself to do anything I want with. “

I could see that my own wife was visibly excited.

“That’s what I want to do, “ she broke out suddenly. “Have a budget. Everybody does it that has any sense. “

“I pity anyone that doesn’t use that system, “ said Bankland solemnly. “Think of the inducement to economy — the extra money my wife’ll have for clothes. “

“How much have you saved so far?” my wife inquired eagerly of Mrs. Bankland.

“So far?” repeated Mrs. Bankland. “Oh, I haven’t had a chance so far. You see we only began the system yesterday. “

“Yesterday!” we cried.

“Just yesterday,” agreed Bankland darkly. “But I wish to heaven I’d started it a year ago. I’ve been working over our accounts all week, and do you know, Fitzgerald, every month there’s $2, 000 I can’t account for to save my soul. “

Headed Toward Easy Street

Our financial troubles are now over. We have permanently left the newly rich class and installed the budget system. It is simple and sensible, and I can explain it to you in a few words. You consider your income as an enormous pie all cut up into slices, each slice representing one class of expenses. Somebody has worked it all out; so you know just what proportion of your income you can spend on each slice. There is even a slice for founding universities, if you go in for that.

For instance, the amount you spend on the theater should be half your drug-store bill. This will enable us to see one play every five and a half months, or two and a half plays a year. We have already picked out the first one, but if it isn’t running five and a half months from now we shall be that much ahead. Our allowance for newspapers should be only a quarter of what we spend on self-improvement, so we are considering whether to get the Sunday paper once a month or to subscribe for an almanac.

According to the budget we will be allowed only three-quarters of a servant, so we are on the lookout for a one-legged cook who can come six days a week. And apparently the author of the budget book lives in a town where you can still go to the movies for a nickel and get a shave for a dime. But we are going to give up the expenditure called “Foreign missions, etc., “ and apply it to the life of crime instead. Altogether, outside of the fact that there is no slice allowed for “missing” it seems to be a very complete book, and according to the testimonials in the back, if we make $36, 000 again this year, the chances are that we’ll save at least $35, 000.

“But we can’t get any of that first $36, 000 back, “ I complained around the house. “If we just had something to show for it I wouldn’t feel so absurd. “

My wife thought a long while.

“The only thing you can do, “ she said finally, “is to write a magazine article and call it How to Live on $36, 000 a Year.”

“What a silly suggestion!” I replied coldly.

HOW TO LIVE ON PRACTICALLY NOTHING A YEAR

This essay was printed in the Saturday Evening Post in 1924.

“All right,” I said hopefully, “what did it come to for the month?” “Two thousand three hundred and twenty dollars and eighty-two cents. “ It was the fifth of five long months during which we had tried by every device we knew of to bring the figure of our expenditures safely below the figure of our income. We had succeeded in buying less clothes, less food and fewer luxuries; in fact we had succeeded in everything except in saving money.

“Let’s give up, “ said my wife gloomily. “Look, here’s another bill I haven’t even opened. “

“It isn’t a bill; it’s got a French stamp.”

It was a letter. I read it aloud, and when I finished we looked at each other in a wild, expectant way.

“I don’t see why everybody doesn’t come over here, “ it said. “I am now writing from a little inn in France where I just had a meal fit for a king, washed down with champagne, for the absurd sum of sixty-one cents. It costs about one-tenth as much to live over here. From where I sit I can see the smoky peaks of the Alps rising behind a town that was old before Alexander the Great was born…”

By the time we had read the letter for the third time we were in our car bound for New York. As we rushed into the steamship office half an hour later, overturning a rolltop desk and bumping an office boy up against the wall, the agent looked up with mild surprise.

Off to the Riviera to Economize

“Don’t utter a word, “ he said. “You’re the twelfth this morning and I understand. You’ve just got a letter from a friend in Europe telling you how cheap everything is and you want to sail right away. How many?”

“One child, “ we told him breathlessly.

“Good!” he exclaimed, spreading out a deck of cards on his flat table. “The suits read that you are going on a long, unexpected journey, that you have illness ahead of you and that you will soon meet a number of dark men and women who mean you no good. “

As we threw him heavily from the window his voice floated up to us from somewhere between the sixteenth story and the street:

“You sail one week from tomorrow. “

Now when a family goes abroad to economize, they don’t go to the Wembley exhibition or the Olympic games; in fact they don’t go to London and Paris at all, but hasten to the Riviera, which is the southern coast of France and which is reputed to be the cheapest as well as the most beautiful locality in the world. Moreover we were going to the Riviera out of season, which is something like going to Palm Beach for July.

When the Riviera season finishes in late spring, all the wealthy British and American move up to Deauville and Trouville, and all the gambling houses and fashionable milliners and jewelers and second-story men close up their establishments and follow their quarry north. Immediately prices fall. The native Rivierans, who have been living on rice and fish all winter, come out of their caves and buy a bottle of red wine and splash about for a bit in their own blue sea.

For two reformed spendthrifts, the Riviera in summer had exactly the right sound. So we put our house in the hands of six real-estate agents and steamed off to France amid the deafening applause of a crowd of friends on the pier — both of whom waved wildly until we were out of sight.

We felt that we had escaped from extravagance and clamor and from all the wild extremes among which we had dwelt for five hectic years, from the tradesman who laid for us and the nurse who bullied us and the couple who kept our house for us and knew us all too well. We were going to the Old World to find a new rhythm for our lives, with a true conviction that we had left our old selves behind forever — and with a capital of just over seven thousand dollars.

The sun coming through high French windows woke us one week later. Outside we could hear the high, clear honk of strange auto horns and we remembered that we were in Paris.

The baby was already sitting up in her cot, ringing the bells which summoned the different fonctionnaires of the hotel as though she had determined to start the day immediately. It was indeed her day, for we were in Paris for no other reason than to get her a nurse.

“Entrez!” we shouted together as there was a knock at the door.

The Governess We Did Not Engage

A handsome waiter opened it and stepped inside, whereupon our child ceased her harmonizing upon the bells and regarded him with marked disfavor.

“Iss a mademoiselle who waited out in the street, “ he remarked.

“Speak French, “ I said sternly. “We’re all French here. “

He spoke French for some time.

“All right, “ I interrupted after a moment. “Now say that again very slowly in English; I didn’t quite understand. “

“His name’s Entrez, “ remarked the baby helpfully.

“Be that as it may, “ I flared up, “his French strikes me as very bad. “

We discovered finally that an English-governess was outside to answer our advertisement in the paper.

“Tell her to come in. “

After an interval, a tall, languid person in a Rue de la Paix hat strolled into the room and we tried to look as dignified as is possible when sitting up in bed.

“You’re Americans ?” she said, seating herself with scornful care.

“Yes. “

“I understand you want a nurse. Is this the child?”

“Yes, ma’am. “

Here is some high-born lady of the English court, we thought, in temporarily reduced circumstances.

“I’ve had a great deal of experience, “ she said, advancing upon our child and attempting unsuccessfully to take her hand. “I’m practically a trained nurse; I’m a lady born and I never complain. “

“Complain of what?” demanded my wife.

The applicant waved her hand vaguely.

“Oh, the food, for example. “

“Look here, “ I asked suspiciously, “before we go any farther, let me ask what salary you’ve been getting. “

“For you, “ she hesitated, “one hundred dollars a month. “

“Oh, you wouldn’t have to do the cooking too, “ we assured her; “it’s just to take care of one child. “

She arose and adjusted her feather boa with fine scorn.

“You’d better get a French nurse, “ she said, “if you’re that kind of people. She won’t open the windows at night and your baby will never learn the French word for ‘tub, ‘ but you’ll only have to pay her ten dollars a month. “

“Good-by, “ we said together.

“I’ll come for fifty. “

“Good-by, “ we repeated.

“For forty — and I’ll do the baby’s washing. “

“We wouldn’t take you for your board. “

The hotel trembled slightly as she closed the door.

“Where’s the lady gone?” asked our child.

“She’s hunting Americans, “ we said. “She looked in the hotel register and thought she saw Chicago written after our names. “

We are always witty like that with the baby. She considers us the most amusing couple she has ever known.

The Hot, Sweet South of France

After breakfast I went to the Paris branch of our American bank to get money; but I had no sooner entered it than I wished myself at the hotel, or at least that I had gone in by the back way, for I had evidently been recognized and an enormous crowd began to gather outside. The crowd grew, and I considered going to the window and making them a speech; but I thought that might only increase the disturbance, so I looked around intending to ask someone’s advice. I recognized no one, however, except one of the bank officials and a Mr. and Mrs. Douglas Fairbanks from America, who were buying francs at a counter in the rear. So I decided not to show myself; and by the time I had cashed my check the crowd had given up and melted away.

I think now that we did well to get away from Paris in nine days, which, after all, was only a week more than we had intended. Every morning a new boatload of Americans poured into the boulevards, and every afternoon our room at the hotel was filled with familiar faces until — except that there was no faint taste of wood alcohol in the refreshments — we might have been in New York. But at last, with six thousand five hundred dollars remaining, and with an English nurse whom we engaged for twenty-six dollars a month, we boarded the train for the Riviera, the hot, sweet South of France.

When your eyes first fall upon the Mediterranean you know at once why it was here that man first stood erect and stretched out his arms toward the sun. It is a blue sea; or rather it is too blue for that hackneyed phrase which has described every muddy pool from pole to pole. It is the fairy blue of Maxfield Parrish’s pictures; blue like blue books, blue oil, blue eyes, and in the shadow of the mountains a green belt of land runs along the coast for a hundred miles and makes a playground for the world. The Riviera! The names of its resorts, Cannes, Nice, Monte Carlo, call up the memory of a hundred kings and princes who have lost their thrones and come here to die, of mysterious rajahs and beys flinging blue diamonds to English dancing girls, of Russian millionaires tossing away fortunes at roulette in the lost caviar days before the war.

From Charles Dickens to Catherine de’ Medici, from Prince Edward of Wales in the height of his popularity, to Oscar Wilde in the depth of Jus disgrace, the whole world has come here to forget or to rejoice, to hide its face or have its fling, to build white palaces out of the spoils of oppression or to write the books which sometimes batter those palaces down. Under striped awnings beside the sea grand dukes and gamblers and diplomats and noble courtesans and Balkan czars smoked their slow cigarettes while 1913 drifted into 1914 without a quiver of the calendar, and the fury gathered in the north that was to sweep three-fourths of them away.

Floundering in Flawless French

We reached Hyeres, the town of our destination, in the blazing noon, aware immediately of the tropic’s breath as it oozed out of the massed pines. A cabby with a large egg-shaped carbuncle in the center of his forehead struggled with a uniformed hotel porter for the possession of our grips.

“Je suis a stranger here, “ I said in flawless French. “Je veux aller to le best hotel dans le town. “

The porter pointed to an imposing autobus in the station drive.

“Which is the best?” I asked.

For answer, he picked up our heaviest grip, balanced it a moment in his hand, hit the cabby a crashing blow on the forehead — I immediately understood the gradual growth of the carbuncle — and then pressed us firmly toward the car. I tossed several nickels — or rather francs — upon the prostrate carbuncular man.

“Isn’t it hot, “ remarked the nurse.

“I like it very much indeed, “ I responded, mopping my forehead and attempting a cool smile. I felt that the moral responsibility was with me. I had picked out Hyeres for no more reason than that a friend had once spent a winter there. Besides, we hadn’t come here to keep cool; we had come here to economize, to live on practically nothing a year.

“Nevertheless, it’s hot,” said my wife, and a moment later the child shouted, “Coat off!” in no uncertain voice.

“He must think we want to see the town, “ I said when, after driving for a mile along a palm-lined road, we stopped in an ancient Mexican-looking square. “Hold on!”

This last was in alarm, for he was hurriedly disembarking our baggage in front of a dilapidated quick-lunch emporium.

“Is this a joke?” I demanded. “Did I tell you to go to the best hotel in town?”

“Here it is, “ he said.

“No, it isn’t. This is the worst hotel I ever saw. “

“I am the proprietor, “ he said.

“I’m sorry, but we’ve got a baby here” — the nurse obligingly held up the baby — “and we want a more modern hotel, with a bath.”

“We have a bath.”

“I mean a private bath.”

“We will not use while you are here. All the big hotels have shut up themselves for during the summer. “

“I don’t believe him for a minute, “ said my wife.

I looked around helplessly. Two scanty, hungry women had come out of the door and were looking voraciously at our baggage. Suddenly I heard the sound of slow hoofs, and glancing up I beheld the carbuncular man driving disconsolately up the dusty street.

“What’s le best hotel dans le town?” I shouted at him.

“Non, non, non, non!” he cried, waving his reins excitedly. “Jardin Hotel open!”

As the proprietor dropped my grip and started toward the cabby at a run, I turned to the hungry women accusingly.

“What do you mean by having a bus like this?” I demanded.

I felt very American and superior; I intimated that if the morals of the French people were in this decadent state I regretted that we had ever entered the war.

“Daddy’s hot too, “ remarked the baby irrelevantly.

“I am not hot!”

“Daddy had better stop talking and find us a hotel, “ remarked the English nurse, “before we all melt away. “

It was the work of but an hour to pay off the proprietor, to add damages for his wounded feelings and to install ourselves in the Hotel du Jardin, on the edge of town.

“Hyeres, “ says my guidebook, “is the very oldest and warmest of the Riviera winter resorts and is now frequented almost exclusively by the English. “

But when we arrived there late in May, even the English, except the very oldest and warmest, had moved away. At dinner, only a superannuated dozen, a slowly decaying dozen, a solemn and dispirited dozen remained. But we were to be there merely while we searched for a villa, and it had the advantage of being amazingly cheap for a first class hotel. The rate for four of us, including meals, was one hundred and fifty francs — less than eight dollars a day.

The real-estate agent, an energetic young gentleman with his pants buttoned snugly around his chest, called on us next morning.

“Dozens of villas, “ he said enthusiastically. “We will take the horse and buggy and go see. “

It was a simmering morning, but the streets already swarmed with the faces of Southern France — dark faces, for there is an Arab streak along the Riviera, left from turbulent, forgotten centuries. Once the Moors harried the coast for gain, and later, as they swept up through Spain in mad glory, they threw out frontier towns along the shores as outposts for their conquest of the world. They were not the first people, or the last, that have tried to overrun France. All that remains now for proud Moslem hopes is an occasional Moorish tower and the tragic glint of black Eastern eyes.

“Now this villa rents for thirty dollars a month, “ said the real-estate agent as we stopped at a small house on the edge of town.

“What’s the matter with it?” asked my wife suspiciously.

“Nothing at all. It is superb. It has six rooms and a well. “

“A well?”

“A fine well. “

“Do you mean it has no bathroom?”

“Not what you would call an actual bathroom. “

“Drive on, “ we said.

It was obvious by noon that there were no villas to be let in Hyeres. Those we saw were all too hot, too small, too duty or too triste, an expressive word which implies that the mad marquis still walk through the halls in his shroud.

“Yes, we have no villas today, “ remarked the agent, smiling.

“That’s a very old played-out joke, “ I said, “and I am too hot to laugh. “

Extracting Information

Our clothes were hanging on us like wet towels, but when I had established our identity by a scar on my left hand we were admitted to the hotel. I decided to ask one of the lingering Englishmen if there was perhaps another quiet town near by.

Now, asking something of an American or a Frenchman is a definite thing: the only difference is that you can understand the American’s reply. But getting an answer from an Englishman is about as complicated as borrowing a match from the Secretary of State. The first one I approached dropped his paper, looked at me in horror and bolted precipitately from the room. This disconcerted me for a moment but luckily my eyes fell on a man whom I had seen being wheeled in to dinner.

“Good morning, “ I said. “Could you tell me — “ He jerked spasmodically, but to my relief, he was unable to leave his seat. “I wonder if you know a town where I could get a villa for the summer. “

“Don’t know any at all, “ he said coldly. “And I wouldn’t tell you if I did. “

He didn’t exactly pronounce the last sentence, but I could read the words as they issued from his eyes.

“I suppose you’re a newcomer too, “ I suggested.

“I’ve been here every winter for sixteen years. “

Pretending to detect an invitation in this, I drew up my chair.

“Then you must know some town, “ I assured him.

“Cannes, Nice, Monte Carlo. “

“But they’re too expensive. I want a quiet place to do a lot of work. “

“Cannes, Nice, Monte Carlo. All quiet in summer. Don’t know any others. Wouldn’t tell you if I did. Good day. “

Upstairs, the nurse was counting the mosquito bites on the baby, all received during the night, and my wife was adding them up in a big book.

“Cannes, Nice, Monte Carlo, “ I said.

“I’m glad we’re going to leave this broiling town, “ remarked the nurse.

“I think we’d better try Cannes. “

“I think so too, “ said my wife eagerly. “I hear it’s very gay — I mean, it’s no economy to stay where you can’t work, and I don’t believe we can get a villa here after all. “

“Let’s go on the big boat, “ said the baby suddenly.

“Silence! We’ve come to the Riviera and we’re here to stay. “

The Villa of Our Dreams

So we decided to leave the nurse and baby in Hyeres and run up to Cannes, which is a more fashionable town in a more northerly situation along the shore. Now when you run up to somewhere you have to have an automobile, so we bought the only new one in town next day. It had the power of six horses — the age of the horses was not stated — and it was so small that we loomed out of it like giants; so small that you could run it under the veranda for the night. It had no lock, no speedometer, no gauge, and its cost, including the parcel-post charge, was seven hundred and fifty dollars. We started for Cannes in it, and except for the warm exhaust when other cars drove over us, we found the trip comparatively cool.

All the celebrities of Europe have spent a season in Cannes; even the Man with the Iron Mask whiled away twelve years on an island off its shore. Its gorgeous villas are built of stone so soft that it is sawed instead of hewed. We looked at four of them next morning. They were small, neat and clean; you could have matched them in any suburb of Los Angeles. They rented at sixty-five dollars a month.

“I like them, “ said my wife firmly. “Let’s rent one. They look awfully easy to run. “

“We didn’t come abroad to find a house that was easy to run, “ I objected. “How could I write looking out on a” — I glanced out the window and my eyes met a splendid view of the sea — “where I’d hear every whisper in the house. “

So we moved on to the fourth villa, the wonderful fourth villa the memory of which still causes me to lie awake and hope that some bright day will find me there. It rose in white marble out of a great hill, like a chateau, like a castle of old. The very taxicab that took us there had romance in its front seat.

“Did you notice our driver?” said the agent, leaning toward me. “He used to be a Russian millionaire. “

We peered through the glass at him — a thin dispirited man who ordered the gears about with a lordly air.

“The town is full of them, “ said the agent. “They’re glad to get jobs as chauffeurs, butlers or waiters. The women work as femmes de chambre in the hotels. “

“Why don’t they open tea rooms like Americans do?”

“Many of them aren’t fit for anything. We’re awfully sorry for them, but — “ He leaned forward and tapped on the glass. “Would you mind driving a little faster? We haven’t got all day. “

“Look, “ he said when we reached the chateau on the hill. “There’s the Grand Duke Michael’s villa next door. “

“You mean he’s the butler there?”

“Oh, no; he’s got money. He’s gone north for the summer. “

When we had entered through scrolled brass gates that creaked massively as gates should for a king, and when the blinds had been drawn, we were in a high central hall hung with ancestral portraits of knights in armor and courtiers in satin and brocade. It was like a movie set. Flights of marble stairs rose in solid dignity to form a grand gallery into which light dropped through blue figured glass upon a mosaic floor. It was modern, too, with huge clean beds and a model kitchen and three bathrooms and a solemn, silent study overlooking the sea.

“It belonged to a Russian general, “ said the agent; “killed in Silesia during the war. “

“How much is it?”

“For the summer, one hundred and ten dollars a month. “

“Done!” I said. “Fix up the lease right away. My wife will go to Hyeres immediately to get the — “

“Just a minute, “ she said, frowning. “How many servants will it take to run this house?”

“Why, I should say, “ — the agent glanced at us sharply and hesitated — “about five. “

“I should say about eight. “ She turned to me. “Let’s go to Newport and rent the Vanderbilt house instead. “

“Remember, “ said the agent, “you’ve got the Grand Duke Michael on your left. “

“Will he come to see us?” I inquired.

“He would, of course, “ explained the agent, “only, you see, he’s gone away. “

We held debate upon the mosaic floor. My theory was that I couldn’t work in the little houses and that this would be a real investment because of its romantic inspiration. My wife’s theory was that eight servants eat a lot of food and that it simply wouldn’t do. We apologized to the agent, shook hands respectfully with the millionaire taxi driver and gave him five francs, and in a state of great dejection returned to Hyeres.

“Here’s the hotel bill, “ said my wife as we went despondently in to dinner.

“Thank heaven, its only fifty-five dollars. “

I opened it. To my amazement, tax after tax had been added beneath the bill — government tax, city tax, a ten per cent tax to retip the servants.

I looked gloomily at a nameless piece of meat soaked in a lifeless gravy which reclined on my plate.

“I think it’s goat’s meat, “ said the nurse, following my eyes. She turned to my wife. “Did you ever taste goat’s meat. Mrs. Fitzgerald?”

But Mrs. Fitzgerald had never tasted goat’s meat and Mrs. Fitzgerald had fled.

Hunting His Majesty

As I wandered dismally about the hotel next day, hoping that our house on Long Island hadn’t been rented so that we could go home for the summer, I noticed that the halls were even more deserted than usual. There seemed to be more old copies of the Illustrated London News about, and more empty chairs. At dinner we had the goat again. As I looked around the empty dining room I suddenly realized that the last Englishman had taken his cane and his conscience and fled to London. The management was keeping open a two-hundred-room hotel for us alone!

Hyeres grew warmer and we rested there in a helpless daze. We knew now why Catherine de’ Medici had chosen it for her favorite resort. A month of it in the summer and she must have returned to Paris with a dozen St. Bartholomew’s sizzling in her head. In vain we took trips to Nice, to Antibes, to St. Maximin — we were worried now; a fourth of our seven thousand had slipped away. Then one morning just five weeks after we had left New York we got off the train at a little town that we had never considered before. It was a red little town built close to the sea, with gay red-roofed houses and an air of repressed carnival about it; carnival that would venture forth into the streets before night. We knew that we would love to live in it and we asked a citizen the whereabouts of the real-estate agency.

“Ah, for that you had far better ask the king. “ he exclaimed.

A principality! A second Monaco! We had not known there were two of them along the French shore.

“And a bank that will cash a letter of credit?”

“For that, too, you must ask the king. “

He pointed the way toward the palace down a long shady street, and my wife hurriedly produced a mirror and began powdering her face.

“But our dusty clothes, “ I said modestly. “Do you think the king will — “

He considered.

“I’m not sure about clothes, “ he answered. “But I think — yes, I think the king will attend to that for you too. “

I hadn’t meant that, but we thanked him and with much inward trepidation proceeded toward the imperial domain. After half an hour, when royal turrets had failed to rise against the sky, I stopped another man.

“Can you tell us the way to the imperial palace?”

“The what?”

“We want to get an interview with his majesty — his majesty the king. “

The word “king” caught his attention. His mouth opened understandingly and he pointed to a sign over our heads:

“W. F. King, “ I read, “Anglo-American Bank, Real-Estate Agency, Railroad Tickets, Insurance, Tours and Excursions, Circulating Library. “

Where Things are So Cheap

The potentate turned out to be a brisk, efficient Englishman of middle age who had gradually acquired the little town to himself over a period of twenty years.

“We are Americans come to Europe to economize, “ I told him. “We’ve combed the Riviera from Nice to Hyeres and haven’t been able to find a villa. Meanwhile our money is leaking gradually away. “

He leaned back and pressed a button and almost immediately a lean, gaunt woman appeared in the door.

“This is Marthe, “ he said, “your cook. “

We could hardly believe our ears.

“Do you mean you have a villa for us?”

“I have already selected one, “ he said. “My agents saw you getting off the train. “

He pressed another button and a second woman stood respectfully beside the first.

“This is Jeanne, your femme de chambre. She does the mending, too, and waits on the table. You pay her thirteen dollars a month and you pay Marthe sixteen dollars. Marthe does the marketing, however, and expects to make a little on the side for herself. “

“But the villa?”

“The lease is being made out now. The price is seventy-nine dollars a month and your check is good with me. We move you in tomorrow. “

Within an hour we had seen our home, a clean cool villa set in a large garden on a hill above town. It was what we had been looking for all along. There was a summerhouse and a sand pile and two bathrooms and roses for breakfast and a gardener who called me milord. When we had paid the rent, only thirty-five hundred dollars, half our original capital, remained. But we felt that at last we could begin to live on practically nothing a year.

In the late afternoon of September 1, 1924, a distinguished-looking young man, accompanied by a young lady might have been seen lounging on a sandy beach in France. Both of them were burned to a deep chocolate brown, so that at first they seemed to be of Egyptian origin; but closer inspection showed that their faces had an Aryan cast and that their voices, when they spoke, had a faintly nasal, North American ring. Near them played a small black child with cotton-white hair who from time to time beat a tin spoon upon a pail and shouted, “Regardez-moi!” in no uncertain voice.

Out of the casino near by drifted weird rococo music — a song dealing with the non-possession of a specific yellow fruit in a certain otherwise well — stocked store. Waiters, both Senegalese and European, rushed around among the bathers with many-colored drinks, pausing now and then to chase away the children of the poor, who were dressing and undressing with neither modesty nor self-consciousness, upon the sand.

“Hasn’t it been a good summer!” said the young man lazily. “We’ve become absolutely French. “

“And the French are such an aesthetic people, “ said the young lady, listening for a moment to the banana music. “They know how to live. Think of all the nice things they have to eat!”

“Delicious things! Heavenly things!” exclaimed the young man, spreading some American deviled ham on some biscuits marked Springfield, Illinois. “But then they’ve studied the food question for two thousand years. “

“And things are so cheap here!” cried the young lady enthusiastically. “Think of perfume! Perfume that would cost fifteen dollars in New York, you can get here for five. “

The young man struck a Swedish match and lit an American cigarette.

“The trouble with most Americans in France, “ he remarked sonorously, “is that they won’t lead a real French life. They hang around the big hotels and exchange opinions fresh from the States. “

“I know, “ she agreed. “That’s exactly what it said in the New York Times this morning. “

The American music ended and the English nurse arose, implying that it was time the child went home to supper. With a sigh, the young man arose, too, and shook himself violently, scattering a great quantity of sand.

“We’ve got to stop on the way and get some Arizon-oil gasoline, “ he said. “That last stuff was awful. “

“The check, suh, “ said a Senegalese waiter with an accent from well below the Mason-Dixon Line. “That’ll be ten francs fo’ two glasses of beer. “

The young man handed him the equivalent of seventy cents in the gold-colored hat checks of France. Beer was perhaps a little higher than in America, but then he had had the privilege of hearing the historic banana song on a real, or almost real, jazz band. And waiting for him at home was a regular French supper-baked beans from the quaint old Norman town of Akron, Ohio, an omelet fragrant with la Chicago bacon and a cup of English tea.

But perhaps you have already recognized in these two cultured Europeans the same barbaric Americans who had left America just five months before; and perhaps you wonder that the change could have come about so quickly. The secret is that they had entered fully into the life of the Old World. Instead of patronizing tourist hotels they had made excursions to quaint little out-of-the-way restaurants, with the real French atmosphere, where supper for two rarely came to more than ten or fifteen dollars. Not for them the glittering capitals — Paris, Brussels, Rome. They were content with short trips to beautiful historic old towns, such as Monte Carlo, where they once left their automobile with a kindly garage man who paid their hotel bill and bought them tickets home.

The High Cost of Economizing

Yes, our summer had been a complete success. And we had lived on practically nothing — that is, on practically nothing except our original seven thousand dollars. It was all gone.

The trouble is that we had come to the Riviera out of season — that is, out of one season, but in the middle of another. For in summer the people who are trying to economize come South, and the shrewd French know that this class is the very easiest game of all, as people who are trying to get something for nothing are very liable to be.

Exactly where the money went we don’t know — we never do. There were the servants, for example. I was very fond of Marthe and Jeanne — and afterwards of their sisters Eugenie and Serpolette, who came in to help — but on my own initiative it would never have occurred to me to insure them all. Yet that was the law. If Jeanne suffocated in her mosquito netting, if Marthe tripped over a bone and broke her thumb, I was responsible. I wouldn’t have minded so much except that the little on the side that Marthe made in doing our marketing amounted, as I figure, to about forty-five per cent.

Our weekly bills at the grocer’s and the butcher’s averaged sixty-five dollars, or higher than they had ever been in an expensive Long Island town. Whatever the meat actually cost, it was almost invariably inedible; while as for the milk, every drop of it had to be boiled, because the cows were tubercular in France. For fresh vegetables we had tomatoes and a little asparagus; that was all — the only garlic that can be put over on us must be administered in sleep. I wondered often how the Riviera middle class — the bank clerk, say, who supports a family on from forty to seventy dollars a month — manages to keep alive.

“It’s even worse in winter, “ a little French girl told us on the beach. “The English and Americans drive the prices up until we can’t buy and we don’t know what to do. My sister had to go to Marseilles and find work, and she’s only fourteen. Next winter I’ll go too.”

No Money and No Regrets

There simply isn’t enough to go around; and the Americans who, because of their own high standard of material comfort, want the best obtainable, naturally have to pay. And in addition, the sharp French tradesmen are always ready to take advantage of a careless American eye.

“I don’t like this bill, “ I said to the food-and-ice deliverer. “I arranged to pay you five francs and not eight francs a day. “

He became unintelligible for a moment to gain time.

“My wife added it up, “ he said.

Those valuable Riviera wives! Always they are adding up their husbands’ accounts, and the dear ladies simply don’t know one figure from another. Such a talent in the wife of a railroad president would be an asset worth many million dollars.

It is twilight as I write this, and out of my window darkening banks of trees, set one clump behind another in many greens, slope down to the evening sea. The flaming sun has collapsed behind the peaks of the Esterels and the moon already hovers over the Roman aqueducts of Frejus, five miles away. In half an hour Rene and Bobbe, officers of aviation, are coming to dinner in their white ducks; and Rene, who is only twenty-three and has never recovered from having missed the war, will tell us romantically how he wants to smoke opium in Peking and how he writes a few things “for myself alone. “ Afterwards, in the garden, their white uniforms will grow dimmer as the more liquid dark comes down, until they, like the heavy roses and the nightingales in the pines, will seem to take an essential and indivisible part in the beauty of this proud gay land.

And though we have saved nothing, we have danced the carmagnole; and, except for the day when my wife took the mosquito lotion for a mouth wash, and the time when I tried to smoke a French cigarette, and, as Ring Lardner would say, swooned, we haven’t yet been sorry that we came.

The dark-brown child is knocking at the door to bid me good night.

“Going on the big boat, daddy?” she says in broken English.

“No. “

“Why?”

“Because we’re going to try it for another year, and besides — think of perfume!”

We are always like that with the baby. She considers us the wittiest couple she has ever known.

HOW TO WASTE MATERIAL

This review was printed in The Bookman in 1926.

Ever since living’s preoccupation with the necessity for an American background, for some square miles of cleared territory on which colorful variants might presently arise, the question of material has hampered the American writer. For one Dreiser who made a single minded and irreproachable choice there have been a dozen like Henry James who have stupid-got with worry over the matter, and yet another dozen who, blinded by the fading tail of Walt Whitman’s comet, have botched their books by the insincere compulsion to write “significantly” about America.

Insincere because it is not a compulsion found in themselves — it is “literary” in the most belittling sense. During the past seven years we have had at least half a dozen treatments of the American farmer, ranging from New England to Nebraska; at least a dozen canny books about youth, some of them with surveys of the American universities for background; more than a dozen novels reflecting various aspects of New York, Chicago, Washington, Detroit, Indianapolis, Wilmington, and Richmond; innumerable novels dealing with. American politics, business, society, science, racial problems, art, literature, and moving pictures, and with Americans abroad at peace or in war; finally several novels of change and growth, tracing the swift decades for their own sweet lavender or protesting vaguely and ineffectually against the industrialization of our beautiful old American life. We have had an Arnold Bennett for every five towns — surely by this time the foundations have been laid! Are we competent only to toil forever upon a never completed first floor whose specifications change from year to year?

In any case we are running through our material like spendthrifts — just as we have done before. In the Nineties there began a feverish search for any period of American history that hadn’t been “used, “ and once found it was immediately debauched into a pretty and romantic story. These past seven years have seen the same sort of literary gold rush; and for all our boasted sincerity and sophistication, the material is being turned out raw and undigested in much the same way. One author goes to a midland farm for three months to obtain the material for an epic of the American husbandmen! Another sets off on a like errand to the Blue Ridge Mountains, a third departs with a Corona for the West Indies — one is justified in the belief that what they get hold of will weigh no more than the journalistic loot brought back by Richard Harding Davis and John Fox, Jr., twenty years ago.

Worse, the result will be doctored up to give it a literary flavor. The farm story will be sprayed with a faint dilution of ideas and sensory impressions from Thomas Hardy; the novel of the Jewish tenement block will be festooned with wreaths from “Ulysses” and the later Gertrude Stein; the document of dreamy youth will be prevented from fluttering entirely away by means of great and half great names — Marx, Spencer, Wells, Edward Fitzgerald — dropped like paper weights here and there upon the pages. Finally the novel of business will be cudgeled into being satire by the questionable but constantly reiterated implication that the author and his readers don’t partake of the American commercial instinct and aren’t a little jealous.

And most of it — the literary beginnings of what was to have been a golden age — is as dead as if it had never been written. Scarcely one of those who put so much effort and enthusiasm, even intelligence, into it, got hold of any material at all.

To a limited extent this was the fault of two men — one of whom, H. L. Mencken, has yet done more for American letters than any man alive. What Mencken felt the absence of, what he wanted, and justly, back in 1920, got away from him, got twisted in his hand. Not because the “literary revolution” went beyond him but because his idea had always been ethical rather than aesthetic. In the history of culture no pure aesthetic idea has ever served as an offensive weapon. Mencken’s invective, sharp as Swift’s, made its point by the use of the most forceful prose style now written in English. Immediately, instead of committing himself to an infinite series of pronouncements upon the American novel, he should have modulated his tone to the more urbane, more critical one of his early essay on Dreiser.

But perhaps it was already too late. Already he had begotten a family of hammer and tongs men — insensitive, suspicious of glamour, preoccupied exclusively with the external, the contemptible, the “national” and the drab, whose style was a debasement of his least effective manner and who, like glib children, played continually with his themes in his maternal shadow. These were the men who manufactured enthusiasm when each new mass of raw data was dumped on the literary platform — mistaking incoherence for vitality, chaos for vitality. It was the “new poetry movement” over again, only that this time its victims were worth the saving. Every week some new novel gave its author membership in “that little band who are producing a worthy American literature. “ As one of the charter members of that little band I am proud to state that it has now swollen to seventy or eighty members.

And through a curious misconception of his, work, Sherwood Anderson must take part of the blame for this enthusiastic march up a blind alley in the dark. To this day reviewers solemnly speak of him as an inarticulate, fumbling man, bursting with ideas — when, on the contrary, he is the possessor of a brilliant and almost inimitable prose style, and of scarcely any ideas at all. Just as the prose of Joyce in the hands of, say, Waldo Frank becomes insignificant and idiotic, so the Anderson admirers set up Hergesheimer as an anti-Christ and then proceed to imitate Anderson’s lapses from that difficult simplicity they are unable to understand. And here again critics support them by discovering merits in the very disorganization that is to bring their books to a timely and unregretted doom.

Now the business is over. “Wolf” has been cried too often. The public, weary of being fooled, has gone back to its Englishmen, its memoirs and its prophets. Some of the late brilliant boys are on lecture tours (a circular informs me that most of them are to speak upon “the literary revolution!”), some are writing pot boilers, a few have definitely abandoned the literary life — they were never sufficiently aware that material, however closely observed, is as elusive as the moment in which it has its existence unless it is purified by an incorruptible style and by the catharsis of a passionate emotion.

Of all the work by the young men who have sprung up since 1920 one book survives — “The Enormous Room” by E. E. Cummings. It is scarcely a novel; it doesn’t deal with the American scene; it was swamped in the mediocre downpour, isolated — forgotten. But it lives on, because those few who cause books to live have not been able to endure the thought of its mortality. Two other books, both about the war, complete the possible salvage from the work of the younger generation — “Through the Wheat” and “Three Soldiers, “ but the former despite its fine last chapters doesn’t stand up as well as “Les Croix de Bois” and “The Red Badge of Courage, “ while the latter is marred by its pervasive flavor of contemporary indignation. But as an augury that someone has profited by this dismal record of high hope and stale failure comes the first work of Ernest Hemingway.

II

“In Our Time” consists of fourteen stories, short and long, with fifteen vivid miniatures interpolated between them. When I try to think of any contemporary American short stories as good as “Big Two-Hearted River, “ the last one in the book, only Gertrude Stein’s “Melanctha, “ Anderson’s “The Egg, “ and Lardner’s “Golden Honeymoon” come to mind. It is the account of a boy on a fishing trip — he hikes, pitches his tent, cooks dinner, sleeps, and next morning casts for trout. Nothing more — but I read it with the most breathless unwilling interest I have experienced since Conrad first bent my reluctant eyes upon the sea.

The hero, Nick, runs through nearly all the stories, until the book takes on almost an autobiographical tint — in fact “My Old Man, “ one of the two in which this element seems entirely absent, is the least successful of all. Some of the stories show influences but they are invariably absorbed and transmuted, while in “My Old Man” there is an echo of Anderson’s way of thinking in those sentimental “horse stories, “ which inaugurated his respectability and also his decline four years ago.

But with “The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife, “ “The End of Something, “ “The Three Day Blow, “ “Mr. and Mrs. Elliot, “ and “Soldier’s Home” you are immediately aware of something temperamentally new. In the first of these a man is backed down by a half breed Indian after committing himself to a fight. The quality of humiliation in the story is so intense that it immediately calls up every such incident in the reader’s past. Without the aid of a comment or a pointing finger one knows exactly the sharp emotion of young Nick who watches the scene.

The next two stories describe an experience at the last edge of adolescence. You are constantly aware of the continual snapping of ties that is going on around Nick. In the half stewed, immature conversation before the fire you watch the awakening of that vast unrest that descends upon the emotional type at about eighteen. Again there is not a single recourse to exposition. As in “Big Two-Hearted River, “ a picture — sharp, nostalgic, tense — develops before your eyes. When the picture is complete a light seems to snap out, the story is over. There is no tail, no sudden change of pace at the end to throw into relief what has gone before.

Nick leaves home penniless; you have a glimpse of him lying wounded in the street of a battered Italian town, and later of a love affair with a nurse on a hospital roof in Milan. Then in one of the best of the stories he is home again. The last glimpse of him is when

his mother asks him, with all the bitter world in his heart, to kneel down beside her in the dining room in Puritan prayer.

Anyone who first looks through the short interpolated sketches will hardly fail to read the stories themselves. “The Garden at Mons” and “The Barricade” are profound essays upon the English officer, written on a postage stamp. “The King of Greece’s Tea Party, “ “The Shooting of the Cabinet Ministers, “ and “The Cigar-store Robbery” particularly fascinated me, as they did when Edmund Wilson first showed them to me in an earlier pamphlet, over two years ago.

Disregard the rather ill considered blurbs upon the cover. It is sufficient that here is no raw food served up by the railroad restaurants of California and Wisconsin. In the best of these dishes there is not a bit to spare. And many of us who have grown weary of admonitions to “watch this man or that” have felt a sort of renewal of excitement at these stories wherein Ernest Hemingway turns a corner into the street.

PRINCETON

This essay was originally written for a series on American colleges printed in College Humor in 1927.

In preparatory school and up to the middle of sophomore year in college, it worried me that I wasn’t going and hadn’t gone to Yale. Was I missing a great American secret? There was a gloss upon Yale that Princeton lacked; Princeton’s flannels hadn’t been pressed for a week, its hair always blew a little in the wind. Nothing was ever carried through at Princeton with the same perfection as the Yale Junior Prom or the elections to their senior societies. From the ragged squabble of club elections with its scars of snobbishness and adolescent heartbreak, to the enigma that faced you at the end of senior year as to what Princeton was and what, bunk and cant aside, it really stood for, it never presented itself with Yale’s hard, neat, fascinating brightness. Only when you tried to tear part of your past out of your heart, as I once did, were you aware of its power of arousing a deep and imperishable love.

Princeton men take Princeton for granted and resent any attempt at analysis. As early as 1899 Jesse Lynch Williams was anathematized for reporting that Princeton wine helped to make the nineties golden. If the Princetonian had wanted to assert in sturdy chorus that his college was the true flower of American democracy, was deliberately and passionately America’s norm in ideals of conduct and success, he would have gone to Yale. His brother and many of the men from his school went there. Contrariwise he chooses Princeton because at seventeen the furies that whip on American youth have become too coercive for his taste. He wants something quieter, mellower and less exigent. He sees himself being caught up into a wild competition that will lead him headlong into New Haven and dump him pell-mell out into the world. The series of badges which reward the winner of each sprint are no doubt desirable, but he seeks the taste of pleasant pastures and a moment to breathe deep and ruminate before he goes into the clamorous struggle of American life. He finds at Princeton other men like himself and thus is begotten Princeton’s scoffing and mildly ironic attitude toward Yale.

Harvard has never existed as a conception at Princeton. Harvard men were “Bostonians with affected accents, “ or they were “That Isaacs fellow who got the high school scholarship out home. “ Lee Hugginson & Company hired their athletes for them but no matter how much one did for Harvard one couldn’t belong to “Fly” or “Porcellian” without going to Groton or St. Mark’s. Such ideas were satisfying if inaccurate, for Cambridge, in more senses than one, was many miles away. Harvard was a series of sporadic relationships, sometimes pleasant, sometimes hostile — that was all.

Princeton is in the flat midlands of Mew Jersey, rising, a green Phoenix, out of the ugliest country in the world. Sordid Trenton sweats and festers a few miles south; northward are Elizabeth and the Erie Railroad and the suburban slums of New York; westward the dreary upper purlieus of the Delaware River. But around Princeton, shielding her, is a ring of silence-certified milk dairies, great estates with peacocks and deer parks, pleasant farms and woodlands which we paced off and mapped down in the spring of 1917 in preparation for the war. The busy East has already dropped away when the branch train rattles familiarly from the junction. Two tall spires and then suddenly all around you spreads out the loveliest riot of Gothic architecture in America, battlement linked on to battlement, hall to hall, arch-broken, vine-covered-luxuriant and lovely over two square miles of green grass. Here is no monotony, no feeling that it was all built yesterday at the whim of last week’s millionaire; Nassau Hall was already thirty years old when Hessian bullets pierced its sides.

Alfred Noyes has compared Princeton to Oxford. To me the two are sharply different. Princeton is thinner and fresher, at once less profound and more elusive. For all its past, Nassau Hall stands there hollow and barren, not like a mother who has borne sons and wears the scars of her travail but like a patient old nurse, skeptical and affectionate with these foster children who, as Americans, can belong to no place under the sun.

In my romantic days I tried to conjure up the Princeton of Aaron Burr, Philip Freneau, James Madison and Light Horse Harry Lee, to tie on, so to speak, to the eighteenth century, to the history of man. But the chain parted at the Civil War, always the broken link in the continuity of American life. Colonial Princeton was, after all, a small denominational college. The Princeton I knew and belonged to grew from President McCosh’s great shadow in the seventies, grew with the great post bellum fortunes of New York and Philadelphia to include coaching parties and keg parties and the later American conscience and Booth Tarkington’s Triangle Club and Wilson’s cloistered plans for an educational utopia. Bound up with it somewhere was the rise of American football.

For at Princeton, as at Yale, football became, back in the nineties, a sort of symbol. Symbol of what? Of the eternal violence of American life? Of the eternal immaturity of the race? The failure of a culture within the walls? Who knows? It became something at first satisfactory, then essential and beautiful. It became, long before the insatiable millions took it, with Gertrude Ederle and Mrs. Snyder, to its heart, the most intense and dramatic spectacle since the Olympic games. The death of Johnny Poe with the Black Watch in Flanders starts the cymbals crashing for me, plucks the strings of nervous violins as no adventure of the mind that Princeton ever-offered. A year ago in the Champs Elysees I passed a slender dark-haired young man with an indolent characteristic walk. Something stopped inside me; I turned and looked after him. It was the romantic Buzz Law whom I had last seen one cold fall twilight in 1915, kicking from behind his goal line with a bloody bandage round his head.

After the beauty of its towers and the drama of its arenas, the widely known feature of Princeton is its “clientele.”

A large proportion of such gilded youth as will absorb an education drifts to Princeton. Goulds, Rockefellers, Harrimans, Morgans, pricks, Firestones, Perkinses, Pynes, McCormicks, Wanamakers, Cudahys and Du Ponts light there for a season, well or less well regarded. The names of Pell, Biddle, Van Rensselaer, Stuyvesant, Schuyler and Cooke titillate second generation mammas and papas with a social row to hoe in Philadelphia or New York. An average class is composed of three dozen boys from such Midas academies as St. Paul’s, St. Mark’s, St. George’s, Pomfret and Groton, a hundred and fifty more from Lawrenceville, Hotchkiss, Exeter, Andover and Hill, and perhaps another two hundred from less widely known preparatory schools. The remaining twenty per cent enter from the high schools and these last furnish a large proportion of the eventual leaders. For them the business of getting to Princeton has been more arduous, financially as well as scholastically. They are trained and eager for the fray.

In my time, a decade ago, the mid-winter examinations in freshman year meant a great winnowing. The duller athletes, the rich boys of thicker skulls than their forbears, fell in droves by the wayside. Often they had attained the gates at twenty or twenty-one and with the aid of a tutoring school only to find the first test too hard. They were usually a pleasant fifty or sixty, those first flunk-outs. They left many regrets behind.

Nowadays only a few boys of that caliber ever enter. Under the new system of admissions they are spotted by their early scholastic writhings and balkings and informed that Princeton has space only for those whose brains are of normal weight. This is because a few years ago the necessity arose of limiting the enrollment. The war prosperity made college possible for many boys and by 1921 the number of candidates, who each year satisfied the minimum scholastic requirements for Princeton, was far beyond the university’s capacity.

So, in addition to the college board examinations, the candidate must present his scholastic record, the good word of his schools, of two Princeton alumni, and must take a psychological test for general intelligence. The six hundred or so who with these credentials make the most favorable impression on the admissions committee are admitted. A man who is deficient in one scholastic subject may succeed in some cases over a man who has passed them all. A boy with a really excellent record, in, say science and mathematics, and a poor one in English, is admitted in preference to a boy with a fair general average and no special aptitude. The plan has raised the standard of scholarships and kept out such men as A, who in my time turned up in four different classes as a sort of perennial insult to the intelligence.

Whether the proverbially narrow judgments of head masters upon adolescents will serve to keep out the Goldsmiths, the Byrons, the Whitmans and the O’Neills it is too early to tell.

I can’t help hoping that a few disreputable characters will slip in to salt the salt of the earth. Priggishness sits ill on Princeton. It was typified in my day by the Polity Club. This was a group that once a fortnight sat gravely at the feet of Mr. Schwab or Judge Gary or some other pard-like spirit imported for the occasion. Had these inspired plutocrats disclosed trade secrets or even remained on the key of brisk business cynicism the occasion might have retained dignity, but the Polity Club were treated to the warmed over straw soup of the house organ and the production picnic, with a few hot sops thrown in about “future leaders of men. “ Looking through a copy of the latest year book I do not find the Polity Club at all. Perhaps it now serves worthier purposes.

President Hibben is a mixture of “normalcy” and discernment, of staunch allegiance to the status quo and of a fine tolerance amounting almost to intellectual curiosity. I have heard him in a speech mask with rhetoric statements of incredible shallowness; yet I have never known him to take a mean, narrow or short-sighted stand within Princeton’s walls. He fell heir to the throne in 1912 during the reaction to the Wilson idealism, and I believe that, learning vicariously, he has pushed out his horizon amazingly since then. His situation was not unlike Harding’s ten years later, but, surrounding himself with such men as Gauss, Heermance and Alexander Smith, he has abjured the merely passive and conducted a progressive and often brilliant administration.

Under him functions a fine philosophy department, an excellent department of classics, fathered by the venerable Dean West, a scientific faculty starred by such names as Oswald Veblen and Conklin; and a surprisingly pallid English department, top-heavy, undistinguished and with an uncanny knack of making literature distasteful to young men. Dr. Spaeth, one of several exceptions, coached the crew in the afternoon and in the morning aroused interest and even enthusiasm for the romantic poets, an interest later killed in the preceptorial rooms where mildly poetic gentlemen resented any warmth of discussion and called the prominent men of the class by their first names.

The Nassau Literary Magazine is the oldest college publication in America. In its files you can find the original Craig Kennedy story, as well as prose or poetry by Woodrow Wilson, John Grier Hibben, Henry van Dyke, David Graham Phillips, Stephen French Whitman, Booth Tarkington, Struthers Burt, Jesse Lynch Williams — almost every Princeton writer save Eugene O’Neill. To Princeton’s misfortune, O’Neill’s career terminated by request three years too soon. The Princetonian, the daily, is a conventional enough affair, though its editorial policy occasionally embodies coherent ideas, notably under James Bruce, Forrestal and John Martin, now of Time. The Tiger, the comic, is generally speaking, inferior to the Lampoon, the Record and the Widow. When it was late to press, John Biggs and I used to write whole issues in the interval between darkness and dawn.

The Triangle Club (acting, singing and dancing) is Princeton’s most characteristic organization. Founded by Booth Tarkington with the production of his libretto, The Honorable Julius Caesar, it blooms in a dozen cities every Christmastide. On the whole it represents a remarkable effort and under the wing of Donald Clive Stuart, it has become, unlike the Mask and Wig Club of Pennsylvania, entirely an intramural affair. Its best years have been due to the residence of such talented improvisers as Tarkington, Roy Dursrine, Walker Ellis, Ken Clark, or Erdman Harris. In my day it had a rowdy side but now the inebriated comedians and the all-night rehearsals are no more. It furnishes a stamping ground for the multiplying virtuosos of jazz, and the competition for places in the cast and chorus testifies to its popularity and power.

Princeton’s sacred tradition is the honor system, a method of pledging that to the amazement of outsiders actually works, with consequent elimination of suspicion and supervision. It is handed over as something humanly precious to the freshmen within a week of their entrance. Personally I have never seen or heard of a Princeton man cheating in an examination, though I am told a few such cases have been mercilessly and summarily dealt with. I can think of a dozen times when a page of notes glanced at in a wash room would have made the difference between failure and success for me, but I can’t recall any moral struggles in the matter. It simply doesn’t occur to you, any more than it would occur to you to rifle your roommate’s pocketbook. Perhaps the thing that struck deepest in the last autumn’s unfortunate Lampoon was the mention of the honor system with an insinuation and a sneer.

No freshmen allowed on Prospect Street; these are the eighteen upper class clubs. I first heard of them in an article by, I think, Owen Johnson, in the Saturday Evening Post nearly twenty years ago. Pictures of Ivy, Cottage, Tiger Inn, and Cap and Gown smiled from the page not like the tombs of robber barons on the Rhine but like friendly and distinguished havens where juniors and seniors might eat three semiprivate meals a day. Later I remember Prospect Street as the red torchlight of the freshman parade flickered over the imposing facades of the houses and the white shirt fronts of the upper classmen, and gleamed in the champagne goblets raised to toast the already prominent members of my class.

There are no fraternities at Princeton; toward the end of each year the eighteen clubs take in an average of about twenty-five sophomores each, seventy-five per cent of the class. The remaining twenty-five per cent continue to eat in the university dining halls and this situation has been the cause of revolutions, protests, petitions, and innumerable editorials in the Alumni Weekly. But the clubs represent an alumni investment of two million dollars — the clubs remain.

The Ivy Club was founded in 1879 and four years out of every five it is the most coveted club in Princeton. Its prestige is such that, broadly speaking, it can invite twenty boys out of every class and get fifteen of them. Not infrequently it has its debacles. Cottage, Tiger Inn or Cap and Gown — these three with Ivy have long been known as the “big” clubs — will take ten or fifteen of the boys that Ivy wants and Ivy will be left with a skeleton section of a dozen and considerable bitterness toward its successful rival. The University Cottage Club, feared and hated politically, has made several such raids. Architecturally the most sumptuous of the clubs, Cottage was founded in 1887. It has a large Southern following, particularly in St. Louis and Baltimore. Unlike these two, Tiger Inn cultivates a bluff simplicity. Its membership is largely athletic and while it pretends to disdain social qualifications it has a sharp exclusiveness of its own. The fourth big club, Cap and Gown, began as an organization of earnest and somewhat religious young men, but during the last ten years social and political successes have overshadowed its original purpose. As late as 1916 its president could still sway a wavering crowd of sophomores with the happy slogan of “Join Cap and Gown and Meet God.”

Of the others Colonial, an old club with a history of ups and downs, Charter, a comparative newcomer, and Quadrangle, the only club with a distinctly intellectual flavor, are the most influential. One club vanished in the confusion of the war. Two have been founded since, both of them in a little old building which has seen the birth of many. The special characteristics of the clubs vary so that it is hazardous to describe them. One whose members in my day were indefatigable patrons of the Nassau Inn Bar, is now, I am told, a sort of restaurant for the Philadelphian Society.

The Philadelphian Society is Princeton’s Y. M. C. A., and in more sagacious moments it is content to function as such. Occasionally, though, it becomes inspired with a Messianic urge to evangelize the university. In my day for example, it imported for the purpose a noted rabble rouser, one Dr. X, who brought along in all seriousness a reformed Bad Example. Such students as out of piety or curiosity could be assembled were herded into Alexander Hall and there ensued one of the most grotesque orgies ever held in the shadow of a great educational institution. When Dr. X’s sermon had risen to an inspirational chant, several dozen boys rose, staunch as colored gentlemen, and went forward to be saved. Among them was a popular free thinker and wine bibber whose sincerity we later probed but never determined. The climax of the occasion was the Bad Example’s account of his past excesses, culminating in his descent into an actual stone gutter, his conversion and his rise to the position of Bad Example for Dr. X’s traveling circus.

By this time the tenderer spirits in the audience had become uncomfortable, the tougher ones riotous; a few left the hall. The unctuousness of the proceedings was too much even for those more timorous days, and later there were protests on the grounds of sheer good taste. Last year “Buchmanism, “ a milder form of the same melodrama, came in for some outspoken and impatient criticism in the university press.

There is so much of Princeton that I have omitted to touch. Perhaps to be specific for a moment will be a method of being most general. Vivid lights played on the whole colorful picture during the winter and early spring of 1917, just before the war.

Never had the forces which compose the university been so strong and so in evidence. Four score sophomores had democratically refused to join clubs, under the leadership of David Bruce (a son of Senator Bruce), Richard Cleveland (a son of President Cleveland), and Henry Hyacinth Strater of Louisville, Kentucky. Not content with this, the latter, the first man in his class to make the Princetonian and an ardent devotee of Tolstoy and Edward Carpenter, came out as a pacifist. He was brilliant and deeply popular; he was much patronized, somewhat disapproved of but never in the slightest degree persecuted. He made a few converts who joined the Quakers and remained pacifists to the end.

The Nassau Literary Magazine under John Peale Bishop made a sudden successful bid for popular attention. Jack Newlin, later killed in France, drew Beardsley-like pictures for frontispieces; I wrote stories about current prom girls, stories that were later incorporated into a novel; John Biggs imagined the war with sufficient virtuosity to deceive veterans; and John Bishop made a last metrical effort to link up the current crusade with the revolution — while we all, waiting to go to training camps, found time heartily to despise the bombast and rhetoric of the day. We published a satirical number, a parody on the Cosmopolitan Magazine, which infuriated the less nimble-witted members of the English department. We — this time the board of the Tiger — issued an irreverent number which burlesqued the faculty, the anticlub movement and then the clubs themselves, by their real names. Everything around us seemed to be breaking up. These were the great days; battle was on the horizon; nothing was ever going to be the same again and nothing mattered. And for the next two years nothing did matter. Five per cent of my class, twenty-one boys, were killed in the war.

That spring I remember late nights at the Nassau Inn with Bill Coan, the proctor, waiting outside to hale selected specimens before the dean next morning. I remember the long afternoons of military drill on the soccer fields, side by side perhaps with an instructor of the morning. We used to snicker at Professor Wardlaw Miles’ attempts to reconcile the snap of the drill manual with his own precise and pedantic English. There were no snickers two years later when he returned from France with a leg missing and his breast bright with decorations. A thousand boys cheered him to his home. I remember the last June night when, with two-thirds of us in uniform, our class sang its final song on the steps of Nassau Hall and some of us wept because we knew we’d never be quite so young any more as we had been here. And I seem to remember a host of more intimate things that are now as blurred and dim as our cigarette smoke or the ivy on Nassau Hall that last night.

Princeton is itself. WilliamsCollege is not “what Princeton used to be. “ Williams is for guided boys whose female relatives waul them protected from reality. Princeton is of the world; it is somehow on the “grand scale”; and for sixty years it has been approximately the same. There is less singing and more dancing. The keg parties arc over but the slags line up for a hundred yards to cut in on young Lois Moran. There is no Elizabethan Club as at Yale to make a taste for poetry respectable, sometimes too respectable; exceptional talent must create its own public at Princeton, as it must in life. In spite, of all persuasions the varsity man conservatively wears his P on the inside of his sweater, but so far no Attorney General Palmers or Judge Thayers have bobbed up among the alumni. President Hibben sometimes disagrees aloud with Secretary Mellon and only ninety-two members of the senior class proclaimed themselves dry last year.

Looking back over a decade one sees the ideal of a university become a myth, a vision, a meadow lark among the smoke stacks. Yet perhaps it is there at Princeton, only more elusive than under the skies of the Prussian Rhiheland or Oxfordshire; or perhaps some men come upon it suddenly and possess it, while others wander forever outside. Even these seek in vain through middle age for any corner of the republic that preserves so much of what is fair, gracious, charming and honorable in American life.

TEN YEARS IN THE ADVERTISING BUSINESS

“Well, Mr. Fitzgerald, what can I do for you today?” It was in a high office with a view of that gold building.

“I want a raise, Mr. Cakebook,” I said.

“Why?”

“I’m about to get married. You’re only paying me Ninety-Five Dollars a month and, of course, with a family to support I’ve got to think of money.”

Into his grey eyes came a faraway look.

“Ninety-Five Dollars is a pretty good salary. By the way, let me see that laundry slogan as it stands now.”

“Here it is,” I said, with eager pride. “Listen: ‘We keep you clean in Muskateen.’ How’s that? Good, isn’t it. ‘We keep — ‘“

“Wait a minute,” he interrupted. “Look here, Mr. Fitzgerald. You’re too temperamental. Your ideas are too fancy, too imaginative. You ought to keep your feet on the ground. Now let me see that layout.”

He worked over it for a moment, his large brain bulging a little from time to time, his lips moving as to melody.

“Now listen to this,” he said, “I’ve got something good: ‘Muskateen Laundry — we clean and press.’ Listen Miss Schwartz, take that down right away. ‘Muskateen Laundry — we clean and press.’ “

Obsequiously I congratulated him — when he began to beam I returned to my thesis.

“Well, how about money?”

. . . ”I don’t know,” he mused. “Of course we try to be fair. How much do you want?”

I thought for a moment.

“Suppose you name an amount.”

“I’ll tell you, Mr. Fitzgerald,” he said, “we don’t like to argue about money with anybody. You let us use your picture and your name as one of the judges in this contest and we’ll call it a thousand dollars.”

“But it’ll take a couple of hours,” I objected, “and, of course, with a family to support I’ve got to think of money.”

“I realize that. We’ll call it fifteen hundred.”

“And it’s understood that I’m in no sense to endorse this product.”

“Perfectly. You merely pick the prettiest girl.”

We stood up and I looked out the window at that gold building.

“Did I understand you to say you’re about to get married?” he asked.

“Oh, no, I’ve been married ten years. That was back before those little dots.”

“It must have been some other couple.”

“It was,” I assured him. “Only the names were the same. The tissues change every decade. Good-by, Mr. Cakebook.”

“Good-by Mr. Fitzgerald.”

ECHOES OF THE JAZZ AGE

It is too soon to write about the Jazz Age with perspective, and without being suspected of premature arteriosclerosis. Many people still succumb to violent retching when they happen upon any of its characteristic words — words which have since yielded in vividness to the coinages of the underworld. It is as dead as were the Yellow Nineties in 1902. Yet the present writer already looks back to it with nostalgia. It bore him up, flattered him and gave him more money than he had dreamed of, simply for telling people that he felt as they did, that something had to be done with all the nervous energy stored up and unexpended in the War.

The ten-year period that, as if reluctant to die outmoded in its bed, leaped to a spectacular death in October, 1929, began about the time of the May Day riots in 1919. When the police rode down the demobilized country boys gaping at the orators in Madison Square, it was the sort of measure bound to alienate the more intelligent young men from the prevailing order. We didn’t remember anything about the Bill of Rights until Mencken began plugging it, but we did know that such tyranny belonged in the jittery little countries of South Europe. If goose-livered business men had this effect on the government, then maybe we had gone to war for J. P. Morgan’s loans after all. But, because we were tired of Great Causes, there was no more than a short outbreak of moral indignation, typified by Dos Passos’ Three Soldiers. Presently we began to have slices of the national cake and our idealism only flared up when the newspapers made melodrama out of such stories as Harding and the Ohio Gang or Sacco and Vanzetti. The events of 1919 left us cynical rather than revolutionary, in spite of the fact that now we are all rummaging around in our trunks wondering where in hell we left the liberty cap — “I know I had it” — and the moujik blouse. It was characteristic of the Jazz Age that it had no interest in politics at all.

It was an age of miracles, it was an age of art, it was an age of excess, and it was an age of satire. A Stuffed Shirt, squirming to blackmail in a lifelike way, sat upon the throne of the United States; a stylish young man hurried over to represent to us the throne of England. A world of girls yearned for the young Englishman; the old American groaned in his sleep as he waited to be poisoned by his wife, upon the advice of the female Rasputin who then made the ultimate decision in our national affairs. But such matters apart, we had things our way at last. With Americans ordering suits by the gross in London, the Bond Street tailors perforce agreed to moderate their cut to the American long-waisted figure and loose-fitting taste, something subtle passed to America, the style of man. During the Renaissance, Francis the First looked to Florence to trim his leg. Seventeenth-century England aped the court of France, and fifty years ago the German Guards officer bought his civilian clothes in London. Gentlemen’s clothes — symbol of “the power that man must hold and that passes from race to race.”

We were the most powerful nation. Who could tell us any longer what was fashionable and what was fun? Isolated during the European War, we had begun combing the unknown South and West for folkways and pastimes, and there were more ready to hand.

The first social revelation created a sensation out of all proportion to its novelty. As far back as 1915 the unchaperoned young people of the smaller cities had discovered the mobile privacy of that automobile given to young Bill at sixteen to make him “self-reliant.” At first petting was a desperate adventure even under such favorable conditions, but presently confidences were exchanged and the old commandment broke down. As early as 1917 there were references to such sweet and casual dalliance in any number of the Yale Record or the Princeton Tiger.

But petting in its more audacious manifestations was confined to the wealthier classes — among other young people the old standard prevailed until after the War, and a kiss meant that a proposal was expected, as young officers in strange cities sometimes discovered to their dismay. Only in 1920 did the veil finally fall — the Jazz Age was in flower.

Scarcely had the staider citizens of the republic caught their breaths when the wildest of all generations, the generation which had been adolescent during the confusion of the War, brusquely shouldered my contemporaries out of the way and danced into the limelight. This was the generation whose girls dramatized themselves as flappers, the generation that corrupted its elders and eventually overreached itself less through lack of morals than through lack of taste. May one offer in exhibit the year igaz! That was the peak of the younger generation, for though the Jazz Age continued, it became less and less an affair of youth.

The sequel was like a children’s party taken over by the elders, leaving the children puzzled and rather neglected and rather taken aback. By 1923 their elders, tired of watching the carnival with ill-concealed envy, had discovered that young liquor will take the place of young blood, and with a whoop the orgy began. The younger generation was starred no longer.

A whole race going hedonistic, deciding on pleasure. The precocious intimacies of the younger generation would have come about with or without prohibition — they were implicit in the attempt to adapt English customs to American conditions. (Our South, for example, is tropical and early maturing — it has never been part of the wisdom of France and Spain to let young girls go unchaperoned at sixteen and seventeen.) But the general decision to be amused that began with the cocktail parties of 1921 had more complicated origins.

The word jazz in its progress toward respectability has meant first sex, then dancing, then music. It is associated with a state of nervous stimulation, not unlike that of big cities behind the lines of a war. To many English the War still goes on because all the forces that menace them are still active — Wherefore eat, drink and be merry, for to-morrow we die. But different causes had now brought about a corresponding state in America — though there were entire classes (people over fifty, for example) who spent a whole decade denying its existence even when its puckish face peered into the family circle. Never did they dream that they had contributed to it. The honest citizens of every class, who believed in a strict public morality and were powerful enough to enforce the necessary legislation, did not know that they would necessarily be served by criminals and quacks, and do not really believe it to-day. Rich righteousness had always been able to buy honest and intelligent servants to free the slaves or the Cubans, so when this attempt collapsed our elders stood firm with all the stubbornness of people involved in a weak case, preserving their righteousness and losing their children. Silver-haired women and men with fine old faces, people who never did a consciously dishonest thing in their lives, still assure each other in the apartment hotels of New York and Boston and Washington that “there’s a whole generation growing up that will never know the taste of liquor.” Meanwhile their grand daughters pass the well-thumbed copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover around the boarding-school and, if they get about at all, know the taste of gin or corn at sixteen. But the generation who reached maturity between 1875 and 1895 continue to believe what they want to believe.

Even the intervening generations were incredulous. In 1920 Heywood Broun announced that all this hubbub was nonsense, that young men didn’t kiss but told anyhow. But very shortly people over twenty-five came in for an intensive education. Let me trace some of the revelations vouch¬safed them by reference to a dozen works written for various types of mentality during the decade. We begin with the suggestion that Don Juan leads an interesting life (Jurgen, (1919); then we learn that there’s a lot of sex around if we only knew it (Winesburg, Ohio, 1920) that adolescents lead very amorous lives (This Side of Paradise, 1920), that there are a lot of neglected Anglo-Saxon words (Ulysses, 1921), that older people don’t always resist sudden temptations (Cytherea, 1922), that girls are sometimes seduced without being ruined (Flaming Youth, 1922), that even rape often turns out well (The Sheik, 1922), that glamorous English ladies are often promiscuous (The Green Hat, 1924), that in fact they devote most of their time to it (The Vortex, 1926), that it’s a damn good thing too (Lady Chatterley’s Lover, 1928), and finally that there are abnormal variations (The Well of Loneliness, 1928, and Sodom and Gomorrah, 1929).

In my opinion the erotic clement in these works, even The Sheik written for children in the key of Peter Rabbit, did not one particle of harm. Everything they described, and much more, was familiar in our contemporary life. The majority of the theses were honest and elucidating — their effect was to restore some dignity to the male as opposed to the he-man in American life. (“And what is a ‘He-man’?” demanded Gertrude Stein one day. “Isn’t it a large enough order to fill out to the dimensions of all that ‘a man’ has meant in the past? A ‘He-man’!”) The married woman can now discover whether she is being cheated, or whether sex is just something to be endured, and her compensation should be to establish a tyranny of the spirit, as her mother may have hinted. Perhaps many women found that love was meant to be fun. Anyhow the objectors lost their tawdry little case, which is one reason why our literature is now the most living in the world. Contrary to popular opinion, the movies of the Jazz Age had no effect upon ils morals. The social attitude of the producers was timid, behind the times and banal — for example, no picture mirrored even faintly the younger generation until 1923, when magazines had already been started to celebrate it and it had long ceased to be news. There were a few feeble splutters and then Clara Bow in Flaming Youth; promptly the Hollywood hacks ran the theme into its cinematographic grave. Throughout the Jazz Age the movies got no farther than Mrs. Jiggs, keeping up with its most blatant superficialities. This was no doubt due to the censorship as well as to innate conditions in the industry. In any case, the Jazz Age now raced along under its own power, served by great filling stations full of money.

The people over thirty, the people all the way up to fifty, had joined the dance. We graybeards (to tread down F.P.A.) remember the uproar when in 1912 grandmothers of forty tossed away their crutches and took lessons in the Tango and the Castle-Walk. A dozen years later a woman might pack the Green Hat with her other affairs as she set off for Europe or New York, but Savonarola was too busy flogging dead horses in Augean stables of his own creation to notice. Society, even in small cities, now dined in separate chambers, and the sober table learned about the gay table only from hearsay. There were very few people left at the sober table. One of its former glories, the less sought-after girls who had become resigned to sublimating a probable celibacy, came across Freud and Jung in seeking their intellectual recompense and came tearing back into the fray.

By 1926 the universal preoccupation with sex had become a nuisance. (I remember a perfectly mated, contented young mother asking my wife’s advice about “having an affair right away,” though she had no one especially in mind, “because don’t you think it’s sort of undignified when you get much over thirty?”) For a while bootleg Negro records with their phallic euphemisms made everything suggestive, and simultaneously came a wave of erotic plays — young girls from finishing-schools packed the galleries to hear about the romance of being a Lesbian and George Jean Nathan protested. Then one young producer lost his head entirely, drank a beauty’s alcoholic bath-water and went to the penitentiary. Somehow his pathetic attempt at romance belongs to the Jazz Age, while his contemporary in prison, Ruth Snyder, had to be hoisted into it by the tabloids - she was, as The Daily News hinted deliciously to gourmets, about “to cook, and sizzle, AND FRY!” in the electric chair.

The gay elements of society had divided into two main streams, one flowing towards Palm Beach and Deauville, and the other, much smaller, towards the summer Riviera. One could get away with more on the summer Riviera, and whatever happened seemed to have something to do with art. From 1926 to 1929, the great years of the Cap d’Antibes, this corner of France was dominated by a group quite distinct from that American society which is dominated by Europeans. Pretty much of anything went at Antibes - by 1929, at the most gorgeous paradise for swimmers on the Mediterranean no one swam any more, save for a short hang-over dip at noon. There was a picturesque graduation of steep rocks over the sea and somebody’s valet and an occasional English girl used to dive from them, but the Americans were content to discuss each other in the bar. This was indicative of something that was taking place in the homeland — Americans were getting soft. There were signs everywhere: we still won the Olympic games but with champions whose names had few vowels in them - teams composed, like the fighting Irish combination of Notre Dame, of fresh overseas blood. Once the French became really interested, the Davis Cup gravitated automatically to their intensity in competition. The vacant lots of the Middle-Western cities were built up now - except for a short period in school, we were not turning out to be an athletic people like the British, after all. The hare and the tortoise. Of course if we wanted to we could be in a minute; we still had all those reserves of ancestral vitality, but one day in 1926 we looked down and found we had flabby arms and a fat pot and couldn’t say boop-boop-a-doop to a Sicilian. Shades of Van Bibber! - no Utopian ideal, God knows. Even golf, once considered an effeminate game, had seemed very strenuous of late - an emasculated form appeared and proved just right.

By 1927 a widespread neurosis began to be evident, faintly signalled, like a nervous beating of the feet, by the popularity of crossword puzzles. I remember a fellow expatriate opening a letter from a mutual friend of ours, urging him to come home and be revitalized by the hardy, bracing qualities of the native soil. It was a strong letter and it affected us both deeply, until we noticed that it was headed from a nerve sanatorium in Pennsylvania.

By this time contemporaries of mine had begun to disappear into the dark maw of violence. A classmate killed his wife and himself on Long Island, another tumbled ‘accidently’ from a skyscraper in Philadelphia, another purposely from a skyscraper in New York. One was killed in a speak-easy in Chicago; another was beaten to death in a speak-easy in New York and crawled home to the Princeton Club to die; still another had his skull crushed by a maniac’s axe in an insane asylum where he was confined. These are not catastrophes that I went out of my way to look for - these were my friends; moreover, these things happened not during the depression but during the boom.

In the spring of ‘27, something bright and alien flashed across the sky. A young Minnesotan who seemed to have had nothing to do with his generation did a heroic thing, arid for a moment people set down their glasses in country clubs and speak-easies and thought of their old best dreams. Maybe there was a way out by flying, maybe our restless blood could find frontiers in the illimitable air. But by that time we were all pretty well committed; and the Jazz Age continued; we would all have one more.

Nevertheless, Americans were wandering ever more widely - friends seemed eternally bound for Russia, Persia, Abyssinia, and Central Africa. And by 1928 Paris had grown suffocating. With each new shipment of Americans spewed up by the boom the quality fell off, until towards the end there was something sinister about the crazy boatloads. They were no longer the simple pa and ma and son and daughter, infinitely superior in their qualities of kindness and curiosity to the corresponding class in Europe, but fantastic neanderthals who believed something, something vague, that you remembered from a very cheap novel. I remember an Italian on a steamer who promenaded the deck in an American Reserve Officer’s uniform picking quarrels in broken English with Americans who criticized their own institutions in the bar. I remember a fat Jewess, inlaid with diamonds, who sat behind us at the Russian ballet and said as the curtain rose, ‘Thad’s luffly, dey ought to baint a bicture of it.’ This was low comedy, but it was evident that money and power were falling into the hands of people in comparison with whom the leader of a village Soviet would be a gold-mine of judgement and culture. There were citizens travelling in luxury in 1928 and 1929, who, in the distortion of their new condition, had the human value of Pekingese, bivalves, cretins, goats. I remember the Judge from some New York district who had taken his daughter to see the Bayeux Tapestries and made a scene in the papers advocating their segregation because one scene was immoral. But in those days life was like the race in Alice in Wonderland, there was a prize for every one.

The Jazz Age had had a wild youth and a heady middle age. There was the phase of the necking parties, the Leopold-Loeb murder (I remember the time my wife was arrested on QueensboroughBridge on the suspicion of being the ‘Bob-haired Bandit’) and the John Held Clothes. In the second phase such phenomena as sex and murder became more mature, if much more conventional. Middle age must be served and pyjamas came to the beach to save fat thighs and flabby calves from competition with the one-piece bathing-suit. Finally skirts came down and everything was concealed. Everybody was at scratch now. Let’s go -

But it was not to be. Somebody had blundered and the most expensive orgy in history was over.

It ended two years ago , because the utter confidence which was its essential prop received an enormous jolt, and it didn’t take long for the flimsy structure to settle earthward. And after two years the Jazz Age seems as far away as the days before the War. It was borrowed time anyhow — the whole upper tenth of a nation living with the insouciance of grand dukes and the casualness of chorus girls. But moralizing is easy now and it was pleasant to be in one’s twenties in such a certain and unworried time. Even when you were broke you didn’t worry about money, because it was in such profusion around you. Towards the end one had a struggle to pay one’s share; it was almost a favour to accept hospitality that required any travelling. Charm, notoriety, mere good manners weighed more than money as a social asset. This was rather splendid, but things were getting thinner and thinner as the eternal necessary human values tried to spread over all that expansion. Writers were geniuses on the strength of one respectable book or play; just as during the War officers of four months’ experience commanded hundreds of men, so there were now many little fish lording it over great big bowls. In the theatrical world extravagant productions were carried by a few second-rate stars, and so on up the scale into politics, where it was difficult to interest good men in positions of the highest importance and responsibility, importance and responsibility far exceeding that of business executives but which paid only five or six thousand a year.

Now once more the belt is tight and we summon the proper expression of horror as we look back at our wasted youth. Sometimes, though, there is a ghostly rumble among the drums, an asthmatic whisper in the trombones that swings me back into the early twenties when we drank wood alcohol and every day in every way grew better and better, and there was a first abortive shortening of the skirts, and girls all looked alike in sweater dresses, and people you didn’t want to know said ‘Yes, we have no bananas’, and it seemed only a question of a few years before the older people would step aside and let the world be run by those who saw things as they were — and it all seems rosy and romantic to us who were young then, because we will never feel quite so intensely about our surroundings any more.

MY LOST CITY

There was first the ferry boat moving softly from the Jersey shore at dawn — the moment crystallized into my first symbol of New York. Five years later when I was fifteen I went into the city from school to see Ina Claire in The Quaker Girl and Gertrude Bryan in Little Boy Blue. Confused by my hopeless and melancholy love for them both, I was unable to choose between them — so they blurred into one lovely entity, the girl. She was my second symbol of New York. The ferry boat stood for triumph, the girl for romance. In time I was to achieve some of both, but there was a third symbol that I have lost somewhere, and lost for ever.

I found it on a dark April afternoon after five more years.

‘Oh, Bunny,’ I yelled. ‘Bunny!’

He did not hear me — my taxi lost him, picked him up again half a block down the street. There were black spots of rain on the sidewalk and I saw him walking briskly through the crowd wearing a tan raincoat over his inevitable brown get-up; I noted with a shock that he was carrying a light cane.

‘Bunny!’ I called again, and stopped. I was still an undergraduate at Princeton while he had become a New Yorker. This was his afternoon walk, this hurry along with his stick through the gathering rain, and as I was not to meet him for an hour it seemed an intrusion to happen upon him engrossed in his private life. But the taxi kept pace with him and as I continued to watch I was impressed: he was no longer the shy little scholar of Holder Court - he walked with confidence, wrapped in his thoughts and looking straight ahead, and it was obvious that his new background was entirely sufficient to him. I knew that he had an apartment where he lived with three other men, released now from all undergraduate taboos, but there was something else that was nourishing him and I got my first impression of that new thing - the Metropolitan spirit.

Up to this time I had seen only the New York that offered itself for inspection - I was Dick Whittington up from the country gaping at the trained bears, or a youth of the Midi dazzled by the boulevards of Paris. I had come only to stare at the show, though the designers of the Wool-worthBuilding and the Chariot Race Sign, the producers of musical comedies and problem plays, could ask for no more appreciative spectator, for I took the style and glitter of New York even above its own valuation. But I had never accepted any of the practically anonymous invitations to debutante balls that turned up in an undergraduate’s mail, perhaps because I felt that no actuality could live up to my conception of New York’s splendour. Moreover, she to whom I fatuously referred as ‘my girl’ was a Middle Westerner, a fact which kept the warm centre of the world out there, so I thought of New York as essentially cynical and heartless — save for one night when she made luminous the Ritz Roof on a brief passage through.

Lately, however, I had definitely lost her and I wanted a man’s world, and this sight of Bunny made me see New York as just that. A week before, Monsignor Fay had taken me to the Lafayette where there was spread before us a brilliant flag of food, called an hors d’oeuvre, and with it we drank claret that was as brave as Bunny’s confident cane -but after all it was a restaurant, and afterwards we would drive back over a bridge into the hinterland. The New York of undergraduate dissipation, of Bustanoby’s, Shan-ley’s, Jack’s, had become a horror, and though I returned to it, alas, through many an alcoholic mist, I felt each time a betrayal of a persistent idealism. My participance was prurient rather than licentious and scarcely one pleasant memory of it remains from those days; as Ernest Hemingway once remarked, the sole purpose of the cabaret is for unattached men to find complaisant women. All the rest is a wasting of time in bad air.

But that night, in Bunny’s apartment, life was mellow and safe, a finer distillation of all that I had come to love at Princeton. The gentle playing of an oboe mingled with city noises from the street outside, which penetrated into the room with difficulty through great barricades of books; only the crisp tearing open of invitations by one man was a discordant note. I had found a third symbol of New York and I began wondering about the rent of such apartments and casting about for the appropriate friends to share one with me.

Fat chance - for the next two years I had as much control over my own destiny as a convict over the cut of his clothes. When I got back to New York in 1919 I was so entangled in life that a period of mellow monasticism in Washington Square was not to be dreamed of. The thing was to make enough money in the advertising business to rent a stuffy apartment for two in the Bronx. The girl concerned had never seen New York but she was wise enough to be rather reluctant. And in a haze of anxiety and unhappiness I passed the four most impressionable months of my life.

New York had all the irridescence of the beginning of the world. The returning troops marched up Fifth Avenue and girls were instinctively drawn east and north towards them - this was the greatest nation and there was gala in the air. As I hovered ghost-like in the Plaza Red Room of a Saturday afternoon, or went to lush and liquid garden parties in the East Sixties or tippled with Princetonians in the Biltmore Bar, I was haunted always by my other life - my drab room in the Bronx, my square foot of the subway, my fixation upon the day’s letter from Alabama - would it come and what would it say? - my shabby suits, my poverty, and love. While my friends were launching decently into life I had muscled my inadequate bark into midstream. The gilded youth circling around young Constance Bennett in the Club de Vingt, the classmates in the Yale-Princeton Club whooping up our first after-die-war reunion, the atmosphere of the millionaires’ houses that I sometimes frequented — these things were empty for me, though I recognized them as impressive scenery and regretted that I was committed to other romance. The most hilarious luncheon table or the most moony cabaret — it was all the same; from them I returned eagerly to my home on Claremont Avenue - home because there might be a letter waiting outside the door. One by one my great dreams of New York became tainted. The remembered charm of Bunny’s apartment faded with the rest when I interviewed a blowsy landlady in Greenwich Village. She told me I could bring girls to the room, and the idea filled me with dismay — why should I want to bring girls to my room? — I had a girl. I wandered through the town of 127th Street, resenting its vibrant life; or else I bought cheap theatre seats at Gray’s drugstore and tried to lose myself for a few hours in my old passion for Broadway. I was a failure -mediocre at advertising work and unable to get started as a writer. Hating the city, I got roaring, weeping drunk on my last penny and went home....

. . . Incalculable city. What ensued was only one of a thousand success stories of those gaudy days, but it plays a part in my own movie of New York. When I returned six months later the offices of editors and publishers were open to me, impresarios begged plays, the movies panted for screen material. To my bewilderment, I was adopted, not as a Middle Westerner, not even as a detached observer, but as the archetype of what New York wanted. This statement requires some account of the metropolis in 1920.

There was already the tall white city of today, already the feverish activity of the boom, but there was a general inarticulateness. As much as anyone the columnist F.P.A. guessed the pulse of the individual crowd, but shyly, as one watching from a window. Society and the native arts had not mingled - Ellen Mackay was not yet married to Irving Berlin. Many of Peter Arno’s people would have been meaningless to the citizen of 1920, and save for F.P.A.’s column there was no forum for metropolitan urbanity.

Then, for just a moment, the ‘younger generation’ idea became a fusion of many elements in New York life. People of fifty might pretend there was still a four hundred, or Maxwell Bodenheim might pretend there was a Bohemia worth its paint and pencils - but the blending of the bright, gay, vigorous elements began then, and for the first time there appeared a society a little livelier than the solid mahogany dinner parties of Emily Price Post. If this society produced the cocktail party, it also evolved Park Avenue wit, and for the first time an educated European could envisage a trip to New York as something more amusing than a gold-trek into a formalized Australian Bush.

For just a moment, before it was demonstrated that I was unable to play the role, I, who knew less of New York than any reporter of six months’ standing and less of its society than any hall-room boy in a Ritz stag line, was pushed into the position not only of spokesman for the time but of the typical product of that same moment. I, or rather it was ‘we’ now, did not know exactly what New York expected of us and found it rather confusing. Within a few months after our embarkation on the Metropolitan venture we scarcely knew any more who we were and we hadn’t a notion what we were. A dive into a civic fountain, a casual brush with the law, was enough to get us into the gossip columns, and we were quoted on a variety of subjects we knew nothing about. Actually our ‘contacts’ included half a dozen unmarried college friends and a few new literary acquaintances - I remember a lonesome Christmas when we had not one friend in the city, nor one house we could go to. Finding no nucleus to which we could cling, we became a small nucleus ourselves and gradually we fitted our disruptive personalities into the contemporary scene of New York. Or rather New York forgot us and let us stay.

This is not an account of the city’s changes but of the changes in this writer’s feeling for the city. From the confusion of the year 1920 I remember riding on top of a taxicab along deserted Fifth Avenue on a hot Sunday night, and a luncheon in the cool Japanese gardens at the Ritz with the wistful Kay Laurel and George Jean Nathan, and writing all night again and again, and paying too much for minute apartments, and buying magnificent but broken-down cars. The first speak-easies had arrived, the toddle was passe, the Montmartre was the smart place to dance and Lillian Tashman’s fair hair weaved around the floor among the enliquored college boys. The plays were Declassee and Sacred and Profane Love, and at the Midnight Frolic you danced elbow to elbow with Marion Davies and perhaps picked out the vivacious Mary Hay in the pony chorus. We thought we were apart from all that; perhaps everyone thinks they are apart from their milieu. We felt like small children in a great bright unexplored barn. Summoned out to Griffith’s studio on Long Island, we trembled in the presence of the familiar face of the Birth of a Nation; later I realized that behind much of the entertainment that the city poured forth into the nation there were only a lot of rather lost and lonely people. The world of the picture actors was like our own in that it was in New York and not of it. It had little sense of itself and no centre: when I first met Dorothy Gish I had the feeling that we were both standing on the North Pole and it was snowing. Since then they have found a home but it was not destined to be New York.

When bored we took our city with a Huysmans-like perversity. An afternoon alone in our ‘apartment’ eating olive sandwiches and drinking a quart of Bushmill’s whisky presented by Zoe Atkins, then out into the freshly bewitched city, through strange doors into strange apartments with intermittent swings along in taxis through the soft nights. At last we were one with New York, pulling it after us through every portal. Even now I go into many flats with the sense that I have been there before or in the one above or below - was it the night I tried to disrobe in the Scandals, or the night when (as I read with astonishment in the paper next morning) ‘Fitzgerald Knocks Officer This Side of Paradise’? Successful scrapping not being among my accomplishments, I tried in vain to reconstruct the sequence of events which led up to this denouement in Webster Hall. And lastly from that period I remember riding in a taxi one afternoon between very tall buildings under a mauve and rosy sky; I began to bawl because I had everything I wanted and knew I would never be so happy again.

It was typical of our precarious position in New York that when our child was to be born we played safe and went home to St Paul — it seemed inappropriate to bring a baby into all that glamour and loneliness. But in a year we were back and we began doing the same things over again and not liking them so much. We had run through a lot, though we had retained an almost theatrical innocence by preferring the role of the observed to that of the observer. But innocence is no end in itself and as our minds unwillingly matured we began to see New York whole and try to save some of it for the selves we would inevitably become.

It was too late - or too soon. For us the city was inevitably linked up with Bacchic diversions, mild or fantastic. We could organize ourselves only on our return to Long Island and not always there. We had no incentive to meet the city half way. My first symbol was now a memory, for I knew that triumph is in oneself; my second one had grown commonplace - two of the actresses whom I had worshipped from afar in 1913 had dined in our house. But it filled me with a certain fear that even the third symbol had grown dim — the tranquillity of Bunny’s apartment was not to be found in the ever-quickening city. Bunny himself was married, and about to become a father, other friends had gone to Europe, and the bachelors had become cadets of houses larger and more social than ours. By this time we ‘knew everybody’ - which is to say most of those whom Ralph Barton would draw as in the orchestra on an opening night.

But we were no longer important. The flapper, upon whose activities the popularity of my first books was based, had become passe by 1923 - anyhow in the East. I decided to crash Broadway with a play, but Broadway sent its scouts to Atlantic City and quashed the idea in advance, so I felt that, for the moment, the city and I had little to offer each other. I would take the Long Island atmosphere that I had familiarly breathed and materialize it beneath unfamiliar skies.

It was three years before we saw New York again. As the ship glided up the river, the city burst thunderously upon us in the early dusk — the white glacier of lower New York swooping down like a strand of a bridge to rise into uptown New York, a miracle of foamy light suspended by the stars. A band started to play on deck, but the majesty of the city made the march trivial and tinkling. From that moment I knew that New York, however often I might leave it, was home.

The tempo of the city had changed sharply. The uncertainties of 1920 were drowned in a steady golden roar and many of our friends had grown wealthy. But the restlessness of New York in 1927 approached hysteria. The parties were bigger - those of Conde Nast, for example, rivalled in their way the fabled balls of the nineties; the pace was faster - the catering to dissipation set an example to Paris; the shows were broader, the buildings were higher, the morals were looser and the liquor was cheaper; but all these benefits did not really minister to much delight. Young people wore out early - they were hard and languid at twenty-one, and save for Peter Arno none of them contributed anything new; perhaps Peter Arno and his collaborators said everything there was to say about the boom days in New York that couldn’t be said by a jazz band. Many people who were not alcoholics were lit up four days out of seven, and frayed nerves were strewn everywhere; groups were held together by a generic nervousness and the hangover became a part of the day as well allowed-for as the Spanish siesta. Most of my friends drank too much — the more they were in tune to the times the more they drank. And so effort per se had no dignity against the mere bounty of those days in New York, a depreciatory word was found for it: a successful programme became a racket — I was in the literary racket.

We settled a few hours from New York and I found that every time I came to the city I was caught into a complication of events that deposited me a few days later in a somewhat exhausted state on the train for Delaware. Whole sections of the city had grown rather poisonous, but invariably I found a moment of utter peace in riding south through Central Park at dark towards where the facade of 59th Street thrusts its lights through the trees. There again was my lost city, wrapped cool in its mystery and promise. But that detachment never lasted long - as the toiler must live in the city’s belly, so I was compelled to live in its disordered mind.

Instead there were the speak-easies — the moving from luxurious bars, which advertised in the campus publications of Yale and Princeton, to the beer gardens where the snarl-ing face of the underworld peered through the German good nature of the entertainment, then on to strange and even more sinister localities where one was eyed by granite-faced boys and there was nothing left of joviality but only a brutishness that corrupted the new day into which one presently went out. Back in 1920 I shocked a rising young business man by suggesting a cocktail before lunch. In 1929 there was liquor in half the downtown offices, and a speakeasy in half the large buildings.

One was increasingly conscious of the speak-easy and of Park Avenue. In the past decade Greenwich Village, Washington Square, Murray Hill, the chateaux of Fifth Avenue had somehow disappeared, or become unexpressive of anything. The city was bloated, gutted, stupid with cake and circuses, and a new expression ‘Oh yeah?’ summed up all the enthusiasm evoked by the announcement of the last super-skyscrapers. My barber retired on a half million bet in the market and I was conscious that the head waiters who bowed me, or failed to bow me, to my table were far, far wealthier than I. This was no fun — once again I had enough of New York and it was good to be safe on shipboard where the ceaseless revelry remained in the bar in transport to the fleecing rooms of France.

‘What news from New York?’

‘Stocks go up. A baby murdered a gangster.’

‘Nothing more?’

‘Nothing. Radios blare in the street.’

I once thought that there were no second acts in American lives, but there was certainly to be a second act to New York’s boom days. We were somewhere in North Africa when we heard a dull distant crash which echoed to the farthest wastes of the desert.

‘What was that?’

‘Did you hear it?’

‘It was nothing.’

‘Do you think we ought to go home and see?’

‘No - it was nothing.’

In the dark autumn of two years later we saw New York again. We passed through curiously polite customs agents, and then with bowed head and hat in hand I walked reverently through the echoing tomb. Among the ruins a few childish wraiths still played to keep up the pretence that they were alive, betraying by their feverish voices and hectic cheeks the thinness of the masquerade. Cocktail parties, a last hollow survival from the days of carnival, echoed to the plaints of the wounded: ‘Shoot me, for the love of God, someone shoot me!’, and the groans and wails of the dying: ‘Did you see that United States Steel is down three more points?’ My barber was back at work in his shop; again the head waiters bowed people to their tables, if there were people to be bowed. From the ruins, lonely and inexplicable as the sphinx, rose the Empire State Building and, just as it had been a tradition of mine to climb to the Plaza Roof to take leave of the beautiful city, extending as far as eyes could reach, so now I went to the roof of the last and most magnificent of towers. Then I understood — everything was explained: I had discovered the crowning error of the city, its Pandora’s box. Full of vaunting pride the New Yorker had climbed here and seen with dismay what he had never suspected, that the city was not the endless succession of canyons that he had supposed but that it had limits - from the tallest structure he saw for the first time that it faded out into the country on all sides, into an expanse of green and blue that alone was limitless. And with the awful realization that New York was a city after all and not a universe, the whole shining edifice that he had reared in his imagination came crashing to the ground. That was the rash gift of Alfred W. Smith to the citizens of New York.

Thus I take leave of my lost city. Seen from the ferry boat in the early morning, it no longer whispers of fantastic success and eternal youth. The whoopee mamas who prance before its empty parquets do not suggest to me the ineffable beauty of my dream girls of 1914. And Bunny, swinging along confidently with his cane towards his cloister in a carnival, has gone over to Communism and frets about the wrongs of southern mill workers and western farmers whose voices, fifteen years ago, would not have penetrated his study walls.

All is lost save memory, yet sometimes I imagine myself reading, with curious interest, a Daily News of the issue of 1945:

MAN OF FIFTY RUNS AMUCK IN NEW YORK

Fitzgerald Feathered Many Love Nests Cutie Avers Bumped Off By Outraged Gunman

So perhaps I am destined to return some day and find in the city new experiences that so far I have only read about. For the moment I can only cry out that I have lost my splendid mirage. Come back, come back, O glittering and white!

ONE HUNDRED FALSE STARTS

This essay was printed in the Saturday Evening Post in 1933.

“Crack!” goes the pistol and off starts this entry. Sometimes he has caught it just right; more often he has jumped the gun. On these occasions, if he is lucky, he runs only a dozen yards, looks around and jogs sheepishly back to the starting place. But too frequently he makes the entire circuit of the track under the impression that he is leading the field, and reaches the finish to find he has no following. The race must be run all over again.

A little more training, take a long walk, cut out that nightcap, no meat at dinner, and stop worrying about politics —

So runs an interview with one of the champion false starters of the writing profession — myself. Opening a leather-bound waiste-basket which I fatuously refer to as my “notebook, “ I pick out at random a small, triangular piece of wrapping paper with a canceled stamp on one side. On the other side is written:

Boopsie Dee was cute.

Nothing more. No cue as to what was intended to follow that preposterous statement. Boopsie Dee, indeed, confronting me with this single dogmatic fact about herself. Never will I know what happened to her, where and when she picked up her revolting name, and whether her cuteness got her into much trouble.

I pick out another scrap:

Article: Unattractive Things Girls Do, to pair with counter article by woman: Unattractive Things Men Do.

No. 1. Remove glass eye at dinner table.

That’s all there is on that scrap. Evidently, an idea that had dissolved into hilarity before it had fairly got under way. I try to revive it seriously. What unattractive things do girls do — I mean universally nowadays — or what unattractive things do a great majority of them do, or a strong minority? I have a few feeble ideas, but no, the notion is dead. I can only think of an article I read somewhere about a woman who divorced her husband because of the way he stalked a chop, and wondering at the time why she didn’t try him out on a chop before she married him. No, that all belongs to a gilded age when people could afford to have nervous breakdowns because of the squeak in daddy’s shoes.

Lines to an Old Favorite

There are hundreds of these hunches. Not all of them have to do with literature. Some are hunches about importing a troupe of Ouled Nail dancers from Africa, about bringing the Grand-Guignol from Paris to New York, about resuscitating football at Princeton — I have two scoring plays that will make a coach’s reputation in one season — and there is a faded note to “explain to D. W. Griffith why costume plays are sure to come back. “ Also my plan for a film version of H. G. Wells’ History of the World.

These little flurries caused me no travail — they were opium eater’s illusions, vanishing with the smoke of the pipe, or you know what I mean. The pleasure of thinking about them was the exact equivalent of having accomplished them. It is the six-page, ten-page, thirty-page globs of paper that grieve me professionally, like unsuccessful oil shafts; they represent my false starts.

There is, for example, one false start which I have made at least a dozen times. It is — or rather has tried to take shape as — a short story. At one time or another, I have written as many words on it as would make a presentable novel, yet the present version is only about twenty-five hundred words long and hasn’t been touched for two years. Its present name — it has gone under various aliases — is The Barnaby Family.

From childhood I have had a daydream — what a word for one whose entire life is spent noting them down — about starting at scratch on a desert island and building a comparatively high state of civilization out of the materials at hand. I always felt that Robinson Crusoe cheated when he rescued the tools from the wreck, and this applies equally to the Swiss Family Robinson, the Two Little Savages, and the balloon castaways of The Mysterious Island. In my story, not only would no convenient grain of wheat, repeating rifle, 4000 H. P. Diesel engine or technocratic butler be washed ashore but even my characters would he helpless city dwellers with no more wood lore than a cuckoo out of a clock.

The creation of such characters was easy, and it was easy washing them ashore:

For three long hours they were prostrated on the beach. Then Donald sat up.

“Well, here we are, “ he said with sleepy vagueness.

“Where?” his wife demanded eagerly.

“It couldn’t be America and it couldn’t be the Philippines, “ he said, “because we started from one and haven’t got to the other. “

“I’m thirsty, “ said the child.

Donald’s eyes went quickly to the shore.

“Where’s the raft?” He looked rather accusingly at Vivian. “Where’s the raft?”

“It was gone when I woke up. “

“It would be, “ he exclaimed bitterly. “Somebody might have thought of bringing the jug of water ashore. If I don’t do it, nothing is done in this house — I mean this family. “

All right, go on from there. Anybody — you back there in the tenth row — step up! Don’t be afraid. Just go on with the story. If you get stuck, you can look up tropical fauna and flora in the encyclopedia or call up a neighbor who has been shipwrecked.

Anyhow, that’s the exact point where my story — and I still think it’s a great plot — begins to creak and groan with unreality. I turn around after a while with a sense of uneasiness — how could anybody believe that rubbish about monkeys throwing coconuts? — trot back to the starting place, and I resume my crouch for days and days.

A Murder That Didn’t Jell

During such days I sometimes examine a clot of pages which is headed Ideas for Possible Stories. Among others, I find the following:

Bath water in Princeton or Florida.

Plot — suicide, indulgence, hate, liver and circumstance.

Snubbing or having somebody.

Dancer who found she could fly.

Oddly enough, all these are intelligible, if not enlightening, suggestions to me. But they are all old — old. I am as apt to be stimulated by them as by my signature or the beat of my feet pacing the floor. There is one that for years has puzzled me, that is as great a mystery as Boopsie Dee.

Story:

THE WINTER WAS COLD

CHARACTERS

Victoria Cuomo

Mark de Vinci

Jason Tenweather

Ambulance surgeon

Stark, a watchman

What was this about? Who were these people? I have no doubt that one of them was to be murdered or else be a murderer. But all else about the plot I have forgotten long ago.

I turn over a little. Here is something over which I linger longer; a false start that wasn’t bad, that might have been run out.

Words

When you consider the more expensive article and finally decide on the cheaper one, the salesman is usually thoughtful enough to make it alt right for you. “You’ll probably get the most wear out of this, “ he says consolingly, or even, “That’s the one I’d choose myself. “

The Trimbles were like that. They were specialists in the neat promotion of the next best into the best.

“It’ll do to wear around the house, “ they used to say; or, “We want to wait until we can get a really nice one. “

It was at this point that I decided I couldn’t write about the Trimbles. They were very nice and I would have enjoyed somebody else’s story of how they made out, but I couldn’t get under the surface of their lives — what kept them content to make the best of things instead of changing things. So I gave them up.

There is the question of dog stories. I like dogs and would like to write at least one dog story in the style of Mr. Terhune, but see what happens when I take pen in hand:

DOG

THE STORY OF A LITTLE DOG

Only a newsboy with a wizened face, selling his papers on the corner. A big dog fancier, standing on the curb, laughed contemptuously and twitched up the collar of his Airedale coat. Another rich dog man gave a little bark of scorn from a passing taxicab.

But the newsboy was interested in the animal that had crept close to his feet. He was only a cur; his fuzzy coat was inherited from his mother, who had been a fashionable poodle, while in stature he resembled his father, a Great Dane. And somewhere there was a canary concerned, for a spray of yellow feathers projected from his backbone —

You see, I couldn’t go on like that. Think of dog owners writing in to the editors from all over the country, protesting that I was no man for that job.

I am thirty-six years old. For eighteen years, save for a short space during the war, writing has been my chief interest in life, and I am in every sense a professional.

Yet even now when, at the recurrent cry of “Baby needs shoes, “ I sit down facing my sharpened pencils and block of legal-sized paper, I have a feeling of utter helplessness. I may write my story in three days or, as is more frequently the case, it may be six weeks before I have assembled anything worthy to be sent out. I can open a volume from a criminal-law library and find a thousand plots. I can go into highway and byway, parlor and kitchen, and listen to personal revelations that, at the hands of other writers, might endure forever. But all that is nothing — not even enough for a false start.

Twice-Told Tales

Mostly, we authors must repeat ourselves — that’s the truth. We have two or three great and moving experiences in our lives — experiences so great and moving that it doesn’t seem at the time that anyone else has been so caught up and pounded and dazzled and astonished and beaten and broken and rescued and illuminated and rewarded and humbled in just that way ever before.

Then we learn our trade, well or less well, and we tell our two or three stories — each time in a new disguise — maybe ten times, maybe a hundred, as long as people will listen.

If this were otherwise, one would have to confess to having no individuality at all. And each time I honestly believe that, because I have found a new background and a novel twist, I have really got away from the two or three fundamental tales I have to tell. But it is rather like Ed Wynn’s famous anecdote about the painter of boats who was begged to paint some ancestors for a client. The bargain was arranged, but with the painter’s final warning that the ancestors would all turn out to look like boats.

When I face the fact that all my stories are going to have a certain family resemblance, I am taking a step toward avoiding false starts. If a friend says he’s got a story for me and launches into a tale of being robbed by Brazilian pirates in a swaying straw hut on

the edge of a smoking volcano in the Andes, with his fiancee bound and gagged on the roof, I can well believe there were various human emotions involved; but having successfully avoided pirates, volcanoes and fiancees who get themselves bound and gagged on roofs, I can’t feel them. Whether it’s something that happened twenty years ago or only yesterday, I must start out with an emotion — one that’s close to me and that I can understand.

It’s an Ill Wind

Last summer I was hauled to the hospital with high fever and a tentative diagnosis of typhoid. My affairs were in no better shape than yours arc, reader. There was a story I should have written to pay my current debts, and I was haunted by the fact that I hadn’t made a will. If I had really had typhoid I wouldn’t have worried about such things, nor made that scene at the hospital when the nurses tried to plump me into an ice bath. I didn’t have either the typhoid or the bath, but I continued to rail against my luck that just at this crucial moment I should have to waste two weeks in bed, answering the baby talk of nurses and getting nothing done at all. But three days after I was discharged I had finished a story about a hospital.

The material was soaking in and I didn’t know it. I was profoundly moved by fear, apprehension, worry, impatience; every sense was acute, and that is the best way of accumulating material for a story. Unfortunately, it does not always come so easily. I say to myself — looking at the awful blank block of paper — “Now, here’s this man Swankins that I’ve known and liked for ten years. I am privy to all his private affairs, and some of them are wows. I’ve threatened to write about him, and he says to go ahead and do my worst. “

But can I? I’ve been in as many jams as Swankins, but I didn’t look at them the same way, nor would it ever have occurred to me to extricate myself from the Chinese police or from the clutches of that woman in the way Swankins chose. I could write some fine paragraphs about Swankins, but build a story around him that would have an ounce of feeling in it — impossible.

Or into my distraught imagination wanders a girl named Elsie about whom I was almost suicidal for a month, in 1916.

“How about me?” Elsie says. “Surely you swore to a lot of emotion back there in the past. Have you forgotten?”

“No, Elsie, I haven’t forgotten. “

“Well, then, write a story about me. You haven’t seen me for twelve years, so you don’t know how fat I am now and how boring I often seem to my husband. “

“No, Elsie, I — “

“Oh, come on. Surely I must be worth a story. Why, you used to hang around saying good-bye with your face so miserable and comic that I thought I’d go crazy myself before I got rid of you. And now you’re afraid even to start a story about me. Your feeling must have been pretty thin if you can’t revive it for a few hours. “

“No, Elsie; you don’t understand. I have written about you a dozen times. That funny little rabbit curl to your lip, I used it in a story six years ago. The way your face all changed just when you were going to laugh — I gave that characteristic to one of the first girls I ever wrote about. The way I stayed around trying to say good night, knowing that you’d rush to the phone as soon as the front door closed behind me — all that was in a book that I wrote once upon a time. “

“I see. Just because I didn’t respond to you, you broke me into bits and used me up piecemeal. “

“I’m afraid so, Elsie. You see, you never so much as kissed me, except that once with a kind of a shove at the same time, so there really isn’t any story. “

Plots without emotions, emotions without plots. So it goes sometimes. Let me suppose, however, that I have got under way; two days’ work, two thousand words are finished and being typed for a first revision. And suddenly doubts overtake me.

A Jury of One

What if I’m just horsing around? What’s going on in this regatta anyhow ? Who could care what happens to the girl, when the sawdust is obviously leaking out of her moment by moment? How did I get the plot all tangled up ? I am alone in the privacy of my faded blue room with my sick cat, the bare February branches waving at the window, an ironic paper weight that says Business is Good, a New England conscience — developed in Minnesota — and my greatest problem:

“Shall I run it out? Or shall I turn back?”

Shall I say:

“I know I had something to prove, and it may develop farther along in the story?”

Or:

“This is just bullheadedness. Better throw it away and start over. “

The latter is one of the most difficult decisions that an author must make. To make it philosophically, before he has exhausted himself in a hundred-hour effort to resuscitate a corpse or disentangle innumerable wet snarls, is a test of whether or not he is really a professional. There are often occasions when such a decision is doubly difficult. In the last stages of a novel, for instance, where there is no question of junking the whole, but when an entire favorite character has to be hauled out by the heels, screeching, and dragging half a dozen good scenes with him.

It is here that these confessions tie up with a general problem as well as with those peculiar to a writer. The decision as to when to quit, as to when one is merely floundering around and causing other people trouble, has to be made frequently in a lifetime. In youth we are taught the rather simple rule never to quit, because we are presumably following programs made by people wiser than ourselves. My own conclusion is that when one has embarked on a course that grows increasingly doubtful and feels the vital forces beginning to be used up, it is best to ask advice, if decent advice is within range. Columbus didn’t and Lindbergh couldn’t. So my statement at first seems heretical toward the idea that it is pleasantest to live with — the idea of heroism. But I make a sharp division between one’s professional life, when, after the period of apprenticeship, not more than 10 per cent of advice is worth a hoot, and one’s private and worldly life, when often almost anyone’s judgment is better than one’s own.

Once, not so long ago, when my work was hampered by so many — false starts that I thought the game was up at last, and when my personal life was even more thoroughly obfuscated, I asked an old Alabama Negro:

“Uncle Bob, when things get so bad that there isn’t any way out, what do you do then?”

Homely Advice, But Sound

The heat from the kitchen stove stirred his white sideburns as he warmed himself. If I cynically expected a platitudinous answer, a reflection of something remembered from Uncle Remus, I was disappointed.

“Mr. Fitzgerald, “ he said, “when things get that — away I wuks.”

It was good advice. Work is almost everything. But it would be nice to be able to distinguish useful work from mere labor expended. Perhaps that is part of work itself — to find the difference. Perhaps my frequent, solitary sprints around the track are profitable. Shall I tell you about another one? Very well. You see, I had this hunch — But in counting the pages, I find that my time is up and I must put my book of mistakes away. On the fire? No! I put it weakly back in the drawer. These old mistakes are now only toys — and expensive ones at that — give them a toy’s cupboard and then hurry back into the serious business of my profession. Joseph Conrad defined it more clearly, more vividly than any man of our time:

“My task is by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel — it is, before all, to make you see. “

It’s not very difficult to run back and start over again — especially in private. What you aim at is to get in a good race or two when the crowd is in the stand.

RING

For a year and a half the writer of this appreciation was Ring Lardner’s most familiar companion; after that, geography made separations and our contacts were rare. When my wife and I last saw him in 1931, he looked already like a man on his deathbed - it was terribly sad to see that six feet three inches of kindness stretched out ineffectual in the hospital room. His fingers trembled with a match, the tight skin on his handsome skull was marked as a mask of misery and nervous pain.

He gave a very different impression when we first saw him in 1921 — he seemed to have an abundance of quiet vitality that would enable him to outlast anyone, to take himself for long spurts of work or play that would ruin any ordinary constitution. He had recently convulsed the country with the famous kitten-and-coat saga (it had to do with a world’s series bet and with the impending conversion of some kittens into fur), and the evidence of the betting, a beautiful sable, was worn by his wife at the time. In those days he was interested in people, sports, bridge, music, the stage, the newspapers, the magazines, the books. But though I did not know it, the change in him had already begun — the impenetrable despair that dogged him for a dozen years to his death.

He had practically given up sleeping, save on short vacations deliberately consecrated to simple pleasures, most frequently golf with his friends, Grantland Rice or John Wheeler. Many a night we talked over a case of Canadian ale until bright dawn, when Ring would rise and yawn: ‘Well, I guess the children have left for school by this time - I might as well go home.’

The woes of many people haunted him - for example, the doctor’s death sentence pronounced upon Tad, the cartoonist (who, in fact, nearly outlived Ring) — it was as if he believed he could and ought to do something about such things. And as he struggled to fulfil his contracts, one of which, a comic strip based on the character of ‘the busher’, was a terror, indeed, it was obvious that he felt his work to be directionless, merely ‘copy’. So he was inclined to turn his cosmic sense of responsibility into the channel of solving other people’s problems — finding someone an introduction to a theatrical manager, placing a friend in a job, manoeuvring a man into a good club. The effort made was often out of proportion to the situation; the truth back of it was that Ring was getting off - he was a faithful and conscientious workman to the end, but he had stopped finding any fun in his work ten years before he died.

About that time (1922) a publisher undertook to reissue his old books and collect his recent stories and this gave him a sense of existing in the literary world as well as with the public, and he got some satisfaction from the reiterated statements of Mencken and F.P.A. as to his true stature as a writer. But I don’t think he cared then - it is hard to understand, but I don’t think he really gave a damn about anything except his personal relations with a few people. A case in point was his attitude to those imitators who lifted everything except the shirt off his back - only Hemingway has been so thoroughly frisked — it worried the imitators more than it worried Ring. His attitude was that if they got stuck in the process he’d help them over any tough place.

Throughout this period of huge earnings and an increasingly solid reputation on top and beneath, there were two ambitions more important to Ring than the work by which he will be remembered; he wanted to be a musician - sometimes he dramatized himself ironically as a thwarted composer - and he wanted to write shows. His dealings with managers would make a whole story: they were always commissioning him to do work which they promptly forgot they had ordered, and accepting librettos that they never produced. (Ring left a short ironic record of Ziegfeld.) Only with the aid of the practical George Kaufman did he achieve his ambition, and by then he was too far gone in illness to get a proper satisfaction from it.

The point of these paragraphs is that, whatever Ring’s achievement was, it fell short of the achievement he was capable of, and this because of a cynical attitude towards his work. How far back did that attitude go? - back to his youth in a Michigan village? Certainly back to his days with the Cubs. During those years, when most men of promise achieve an adult education, if only in the school of war, Ring moved in the company of a few dozen illiterates playing a boy’s game. A boy’s game, with no more possibilities in it than a boy could master, a game bounded by walls which kept out novelty or danger, change or adventure. This material, the observation of it under such circumstances, was the text of Ring’s schooling during the most formative period of the mind. A writer can spin on about his adventures after thirty, after forty, after fifty, but the criteria by which these adventures are weighed and valued are irrevocably settled at the age of twenty-five. However deeply Ring might cut into it, his cake had exactly the diameter of Frank Chance’s diamond.

Here was his artistic problem, and it promised future trouble. So long as he wrote within that enclosure the result was magnificent: within it he heard and recorded the voice of a continent. But when, inevitably, he outgrew his interest in it, what was Ring left with?

He was left with his fine linguistic technique - and he was left rather helpless in those few acres. He had been formed by the very world on which his hilarious irony had released itself. He had fought his way through to knowing what people’s motives are and what means they are likely to resort to in order to attain their goals. But now he had a new problem - what to do about it. He went on seeing, and the sights travelled back to the optic nerve, but no longer to be thrown off in fiction, because they were no longer sights that could be weighed and valued by the old criteria. It was never that he was completely sold on athletic virtuosity as the be-all and end-all of problems; the trouble was that he could find nothing finer. Imagine life conceived as a business of beautiful muscular organization - an arising, an effort, a good break, a sweat, a bath, a meal, a love, a sleep — imagine it achieved; then imagine trying to apply that standard to the horribly complicated mess of living, where nothing, even the greatest conceptions and workings and achievements, is else but messy, spotty, tortuous - and then one can imagine the confusion that Ring faced on coming out of the ball park.

He kept on recording but he no longer projected, and this accumulation, which he has taken with him to the grave, crippled his spirit in the latter years. It was not the fear of Niles, Michigan, that hampered him - it was the habit of silence, formed in the presence of the ‘ivory’ with which he lived and worked. Remember it was not humble ivory -Ring has demonstrated that - it was arrogant, imperative, often megalomaniacal ivory. He got the habit of silence, then the habit of repression that finally took the form of his odd little crusade in the New Yorker against pornographic songs. He had agreed with himself to speak only a small portion of his mind.

The present writer once suggested to him that he organize some cadre within which he could adequately display his talents, suggesting that it should be something deeply personal, and something on which Ring could take his time, but he dismissed the idea lightly; he was a disillusioned idealist but he had served his Fates well, and no other ones could be casually created for him — ‘This is something that can be printed,’ he reasoned; ‘this, however, belongs with that bunch of stuff that can never be written.’

He covered himself in such cases with protests of his inability to bring off anything big, but this was specious, for he was a proud man and had no reason to rate his abilities cheaply. He refused to ‘tell all’ because in a crucial period of his life he had formed the habit of not doing it — and this he had elevated gradually into a standard of taste. It never satisfied him by a damn sight.

So one is haunted not only by a sense of personal loss but by a conviction that Ring got less percentage of himself on paper than any other American of the first flight. There is ‘You Know Me, Al’, and there are about a dozen wonderful short stories (my God, he hadn’t even saved them — the material of How to Write Short Stories was obtained by photographing old issues in the public library!), and there is some of the most uproarious and inspired nonsense since Lewis Carroll. Most of the rest is mediocre stuff, with flashes, and I would do Ring a disservice to suggest it should be set upon an altar and worshipped, as have been the most casual relics of Mark Twain. Those three volumes should seem enough — to everyone who didn’t know Ring. But I venture that no one who knew him but will agree that the personality of the man overlapped it. Proud, shy, solemn, shrewd, polite, brave, kind, merciful, honourable — with the affection these qualities aroused he created in addition a certain awe in people. His intentions, his will, once in motion, were formidable factors in dealing with him — he always did every single thing he said he would do. Frequently he was the melancholy Jaques, and sad company indeed, but under any conditions a noble dignity flowed from him, so that time in his presence always seemed well spent.

On my desk, at the moment, I have the letters Ring wrote to us; here is a letter one thousand words long, here is one of two thousand words — theatrical gossip, literary shop talk, flashes of wit but not much wit, for he was feeling thin and saving the best of that for his work, anecdotes of his activities. I reprint the most typical one I can find:

‘The Dutch Treat show was a week ago Friday night. Grant Rice and I had reserved a table, and a table holds ten people and no more. Well, I had invited, as one guest, Jerry Kern, but he telephoned at the last moment that he couldn’t come. I then consulted with Grant Rice, who said he had no substitute in mind, but that it was a shame to waste our extra ticket when tickets were at a premium. So I called up Jones, and Jones said yes, and would it be all right for him to bring along a former Senator who was a pal of his and had been good to him in Washington. I said I was sorry, but our table was filled and, besides, we didn’t have an extra ticket. “Maybe I could dig up another ticket somewhere,” said Jones. “I don’t believe so,” I said, “but anyway the point is that we haven’t room at our table.” “Well,” said Jones, “I could have the Senator eat somewhere else and join us in time for the show.” “Yes,” I said, “but we have no ticket for him.” “Well, I’ll think up something,” he said. Well, what he thought up was to bring himself and the Senator and I had a hell of a time getting an extra ticket and shoving the Senator in at another table where he wasn’t wanted, and later in the evening, the Senator thanked Jones and said he was the greatest fella in the world and all I got was goodnight.

‘Well, I must close and nibble on a carrot. R.W.L.’

Even in a telegram Ring could compress a lot of himself. Here is one: WHEN ARE YOU COMING BACK AND WHY PLEASE ANSWER RING LARDNER.

This is not the moment to recollect Ring’s convivial aspects, especially as he had, long before his death, ceased to find amusement in dissipation, or indeed in the whole range of what is called entertainment — save for his perennial interest in songs. By grace of the radio and of the many musicians who, drawn by his enormous magnetism, made pilgrimages to his bedside, he had a consolation in the last days, and he made the most of it, hilariously rewriting Cole Porter’s lyrics in the New Yorker. But it would be an evasion for the present writer not to say that when he was Ring’s neighbour a decade ago, they tucked a lot under their belts in many weathers, and spent many words on many men and things. At no time did I feel that I had known him enough, or that anyone knew him — it was. not the feeling that there was more stuff in him and that it should come out, it was -rather a qualitative difference, it was rather as though, due to some inadequacy in one’s self, one had not penetrated to something unsolved, new and unsaid. That is why one wishes that Ring had written down a large proportion of what was in his mind and heart. It would have saved him longer for us, and that in itself would be something. But I would like to know what it was, and now I will go on wishing - what did Ring want, how did he want things to be, how did he think things were?

A great and good American is dead. Let us not obscure him by the flowers, but walk up and look at that fine medallion, all abraded by sorrows that perhaps we are not equipped to understand. Ring made no enemies, because he was kind, and to many millions he gave release and delight.

SLEEPING AND WAKING,

December, 1934

When some years ago I read a piece by Ernest Hemingway called Now I Lay Me, I thought there was nothing further to be said about insomnia. I see now that that was because I had never had much; it appears that every man’s insomnia is as different from his neighbor’s as are their daytime hopes and aspirations.

Now if insomnia is going to be one of your naturals, it begins to appear in the late thirties. Those seven precious hours of sleep suddenly break in two. There is, if one is lucky, the “first sweet sleep of night” and the last deep sleep of morning, but between the two appears a sinister, ever widening interval. This is the time of which it is written in the Psalms: Scuto circumdabit te veritas eius: non timebis a timore nocturno, a sagitta volante in die, a negotio perambulante in tenebris.

With a man I knew the trouble commenced with a mouse; in my case I like to trace it to a single mosquito.

My friend was in course of opening up his country house unassisted, and after a fatiguing day discovered that the only practical bed was a child’s affair — long enough but scarcely wider than a crib. Into this he flopped and was presently deeply engrossed in rest but with one arm irrepressibly extending over the side of the crib. Hours later he was awakened by what seemed to be a pin-prick in his finger. He shifted his arm sleepily and dozed off again — to be again awakened by the same feeling.

This time he flipped on the bed-light — and there attached to the bleeding end of his finger was a small and avid mouse. My friend, to use his own words, “uttered an exclamation,” but probably he gave a wild scream.

The mouse let go. It had been about the business of devouring the man as thoroughly as if his sleep were permanent. From then on it threatened to be not even temporary. The victim sat shivering, and very, very tired. He considered how he would have a cage made to fit over the bed and sleep under it the rest of his life. But it was too late to have the cage made that night and finally he dozed, to wake in intermittent horrors from dreams of being a Pied Piper whose rats turned about and pursued him.

He has never since been able to sleep without a dog or cat in the room.

My own experience with night pests was at a time of utter exhaustion — too much work undertaken, interlocking circumstances that made the work twice as arduous, illness within and around — the old story of troubles never coming singly. And ah, how I had planned that sleep that was to crown the end of the struggle — how I had looked forward to the relaxation into a bed soft as a cloud and permanent as a grave. An invitation to dine a deux with Greta Garbo would have left me indifferent.

But had there been such an invitation I would have done well to accept it, for instead I dined alone, or rather was dined upon by one solitary mosquito.

It is astonishing how much worse one mosquito can be than a swarm. A swarm can be prepared against, but one mosquito takes on a personality — a hatefulness, a sinister quality of the struggle to the death. This personality appeared all by himself in September on the twentieth floor of a New York hotel, as out of place as an armadillo. He was the result of New Jersey’s decreased appropriation for swamp drainage, which had sent him and other younger sons into neighboring states for food.

The night was warm — but after the first encounter, the vague slappings of the air, the futile searches, the punishment of my own ears a split second too late, I followed the ancient formula and drew the sheet over my head.

And so there continued the old story, the bitings through the sheet, the sniping of exposed sections of hand holding the sheet in place, the pulling up of the blanket with ensuing suffocation — followed by the psychological change of attitude, increasing wakefulness, wild impotent anger — finally a second hunt.

This inaugurated the maniacal phase — the crawl under the bed with the standing lamp for torch, the tour of the room with final detection of the insect’s retreat on the ceiling and attack with knotted towels, the wounding of oneself — my God!

— After that there was a short convalescence that my opponent seemed aware of, for he perched insolently beside my head — but I missed again.

At last, after another half hour that whipped the nerves into a frantic state of alertness came the Pyrrhic victory, and the small mangled spot of blood, my blood, on the headboard of the bed.

As I said, I think of that night, two years ago, as the beginning of my sleeplessness — because it gave me the sense of how sleep can be spoiled by one infinitesimal incalculable element. It made me, in the now archaic phraseology, “sleep-conscious.” I worried whether or not it was going to be allowed me. I was drinking, intermittently but generously, and on the nights when I took no liquor the problem of whether or not sleep was specified began to haunt me long before bedtime.

A typical night (and I wish I could say such nights were all in the past) comes after a particularly sedentary work-and-cigarette day. It ends, say without any relaxing interval, at the time for going to bed. All is prepared, the books, the glass of water, the extra pajamas lest I awake in rivulets of sweat, the luminol pills in the little round tube, the note book and pencil in case of a night thought worth recording. (Few have been — they generally seem thin in the morning, which does not diminish their force and urgency at night.)

I turn in, perhaps with a night-cap — I am doing some comparatively scholarly reading for a coincident work so I choose a lighter volume on the subject and read till drowsy on a last cigarette. At the yawning point I snap the book on a marker, the cigarette at the hearth, the button on the lamp. I turn first on the left side, for that, so I’ve heard, slows the heart, and then — coma.

So far so good. From midnight until two-thirty peace in the room. Then suddenly I am awake, harassed by one of the ills or functions of the body, a too vivid dream, a change in the weather for warm or cold.

The adjustment is made quickly, with the vain hope that the continuity of sleep can be preserved, but no — so with a sigh I flip on the light, take a minute pill of luminol and reopen my book. The real night, the darkest hour, has begun. I am too tired to read unless I get myself a drink and hence feel bad next day — so I get up and walk. I walk from my bedroom through the hall to my study, and then back again, and if it’s summer out to my back porch. There is a mist over Baltimore; I cannot count a single steeple. Once more to the study, where my eye is caught by a pile of unfinished business: letters, proofs, notes, etc. I start toward it, but No! this would be fatal. Now the luminol is having some slight effect, so I try bed again, this time half circling the pillow on edge about my neck.

“Once upon a time” (I tell myself) “they needed a quarterback at Princeton, and they had nobody and were in despair. The head coach noticed me kicking and passing on the side of the field, and he cried: ‘Who is that man — why haven’t we noticed him before?’ The under coach answered, ‘He hasn’t been out,’ and the response was: ‘Bring him to me.’”

“…we go to the day of the Yale game. I weigh only one hundred and thirty-five, so they save me until the third quarter, with the score — “

— But it’s no use — I have used that dream of a defeated dream to induce sleep for almost twenty years, but it has worn thin at last. I can no longer count on it — though even now on easier nights it has a certain lull…

The war dream then: the Japanese are everywhere victorious — my division is cut to rags and stands on the defensive in a part of Minnesota where I know every bit of the ground. The headquarters staff and the regimental battalion commanders who were in conference with them at the time have been killed by one shell. The command devolved upon Captain Fitzgerald. With superb presence…

— but enough; this also is worn thin with years of usage. The character who bears my name has become blurred. In the dead of the night I am only one of the dark millions riding forward in black buses toward the unknown.

Back again now to the rear porch, and conditioned by intense fatigue of mind and perverse alertness of the nervous system — like a broken-stringed bow upon a throbbing fiddle — I see the real horror develop over the roof-tops, and in the strident horns of night-owl taxis and the shrill monody of revelers’ arrival over the way. Horror and waste -

— Waste and horror — what I might have been and done that is lost, spent, gone, dissipated, unrecapturable. I could have acted thus, refrained from this, been bold where I was timid, cautious where I was rash.

I need not have hurt her like that.

Nor said this to him.

Nor broken myself trying to break what was unbreakable.

The horror has come now like a storm — what if this night prefigured the night after death — what if all thereafter was an eternal quivering on the edge of an abyss, with everything base and vicious in oneself urging one forward and the baseness and viciousness of the world just ahead. No choice, no road, no hope — only the endless repetition of the sordid and the semi-tragic. Or to stand forever, perhaps, on the threshold of life unable to pass it and return to it. I am a ghost now as the clock strikes four.

On the side of the bed I put my head in my hands. Then silence, silence — and suddenly — or so it seems in retrospect — suddenly I am asleep.

Sleep — real sleep, the dear, the cherished one, the lullaby. So deep and warm the bed and the pillow enfolding me, letting me sink into peace, nothingness — my dreams now, after the catharsis of the dark hours, are of young and lovely people doing young, lovely things, the girls I knew once, with big brown eyes, real yellow hair.

In the jail of ‘16 in the cool of the afternoon

I met Caroline under a white moon

There was an orchestra — Bingo-Bango

Playing for us to dance the tango

And the people all clapped as we arose

For her sweet face and my new clothes -

Life was like that, after all; my spirit soars in the moment of its oblivion; then down, down deep into the pillow…

“… Yes, Essie, yes. — Oh, My God, all right, I’ll take the call myself.”

Irresistible, iridescent — here is Aurora — here is another day.

MY TEN FAVORITE PLAYS

This article was printed in the New York Sun, 10 September 1934.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, who achieved a startling success with “This Side of Paradise,” who added to his prestige with “The Great Gatsby” (which Owen Davis dramatized) and whose latest (and some readers say best) novel is “Tender Is the Night,” writes from Park avenue, town of Baltimore, listing the following as his outstanding impressions in the theater:

1 — Charles Chaplin in “The Pilgrim.”

2 — Performance of an obscure stock company actor in Gillette’s “Secret Service,” about 1906.

3 — My own performance in a magicians’ show at the age of nine.

4 — Greta Garbo in her first big role.

5 — E. H. Sothern as Lord Dundreary in “Our American Cousin.”

6 — George M. Cohan in “The Little Millionaire.”

7 — Ina Claire in “The Quaker Girl.”

8 — The Theatre Guild actress who played the stage role in “Grand Hotel” that Joan Crawford played in the movies. I’ve seen her twice and I think she’s one of the greatest actresses in the world.

9 — Ernest Truax’s face when he was carrying through bravely in a flop of my own that opened cold in Atlantic City.

10 — David W. Griffith’s face as I imagine it during the filming of “A Birth of a Nation” when he was “forging in the smithy of his soul” all the future possibilities of the camera.

THE CRACK-UP

The Crack-Up was the leading work in a collection of essays published shortly after Fitzgerald’s death in 1940. It also contained the essays Pasting It Together and Handle with Care, which are also provided in this section of the eBook.  All three essays were originally printed in Esquire magazine.

The first edition cover

THE CRACK UP

February 1936

Of course all life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the dramatic side of the work — the big sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside - the ones you remember and blame things on and, in moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don’t show their effect all at once. There is another sort of blow that comes from within — that you don’t feel until it’s too late to do anything about it, until you realize with finality that in some regard you will never be as good a man again. The first sort of breakage seems to happen quick - the second kind happens almost without your knowing it but is realized suddenly indeed.

Before I go on with this short history, let me make a general observation - the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise. This philosophy fitted on to my early adult life, when I saw the improbable, the implausible, often the ‘impossible’, come true. Life was something you dominated if you were any good. Life yielded easily to intelligence and effort, or to what proportion could be mustered of both. It seemed a romantic business to be a successful literary man — you were not ever going to be as famous as a movie star but what note you had was probably longer-lived - you were never going to have the power of a man of strong political or religious convictions but you were certainly more independent. Of course within the practice of your trade you were forever unsatisfied - but I, for one, would not have chosen any other.

As the twenties passed, with my own twenties marching a little ahead of them, my two juvenile regrets — at not being big enough (or good enough) to play football in college, and at not getting overseas during the war — resolved themselves into childish waking dreams of imaginary heroism that were good enough to go to sleep on in restless nights. The big problems of life seemed to solve themselves, and if the business of fixing them was difficult, it made one too tired to think of more general problems.

Life, ten years ago, was largely a personal matter. I must hold in balance the sense of the futility of effort and the sense of the necessity to struggle; the conviction of the inevitability of failure and still the determination to ‘succeed’ — and, more than these, the contradiction between the dead hand of the past and the high intentions of the future. If I could do this through the common ills — domestic, professional and personal — then the ego would continue as an arrow shot from nothingness to nothingness with such force that only gravity would bring it to earth at last.

For seventeen years, with a year of deliberate loafing and resting out in the centre - things went on like that, with a new chore only a nice prospect for the next day. I was living hard, too, but: ‘Up to forty-nine it’ll be all right,’ I said. ‘I can count on that. For a man who’s lived as I have, that’s all you could ask.’

— And then, ten years this side of forty-nine, I suddenly realized that I had prematurely cracked.

II

Now a man can crack in many ways — can crack in the head - in which case the power of decision is taken from you by others! or in the body, when one can but submit to the white hospital world; or in the nerves. William Seabrook in an unsympathetic book tells, with some pride and a movie ending, of how he became a public charge. What led to his alcoholism or was bound up with it, was a collapse of his nervous system. Though the present writer was not so entangled - having at the time not tasted so much as a glass of beer for six months — it was his nervous reflexes that were giving way - too much anger and too many tears.

Moreover, to go back to my thesis that life has a varying offensive, the realization of having cracked was not simultaneous with a blow, but with a reprieve.

Not long before, I had sat in the office of a great doctor and listened to a grave sentence. With what, in retrospect, seems some equanimity, I had gone on about my affairs in ‘ the city where I was then living, not caring much, not thinking how much had been left undone, or what would become of this and that responsibility, like people do in books; I was well insured and anyhow I had been only a mediocre caretaker of most of the things left in my hands, even of my talent.

But I had a strong sudden instinct that I must be alone, I didn’t want to see any people at all. I had seen so many people all my life — I was an average mixer, but more than average in a tendency to identify myself, my ideas, my destiny, with those of all classes that I came in contact with. I was always saving or being saved - in a single morning I would go through the emotions ascribable to Wellington at Waterloo. I lived in a world of inscrutable hostiles and inalienable friends and supporters.

But now I wanted to be absolutely alone and so arranged a certain insulation from ordinary cares.

It was not an unhappy time. I went away and there were fewer people. I found I was good-and-tired. I could lie around and was glad to, sleeping or dozing sometimes twenty hours a day and in the intervals trying resolutely not to think — instead I made lists — made lists and tore them up, hundreds of lists: of cavalry leaders and football players and cities, and popular tunes and pitchers, and happy times, and hobbies and houses lived in and how many suits since I left the army and how many pairs of shoes (I didn’t count the suit I bought in Sorrento that shrunk, nor the pumps and dress shirt and collar that I carried around for years and never wore, because the pumps got damp and grainy and the shirt and collar got yellow and starch-rotted). And lists of women I’d liked, and of the times I had let myself be snubbed by people who had not been my betters in character or ability.

— And men suddenly, surprisingly, I got better.

— And cracked like an old plate as soon as I heard the news.

That is the real end of this story. What was to be done about it will have to rest in what used to be called the ‘womb of time’. Suffice it to say that after about an hour of solitary pillow-hugging, I began to realize that for two years my life had been a drawing on resources that I did not possess, but I had been mortgaging myself physically and spiritually up to the hilt. What was the small gift of life given back in comparison to that? - when there had once been a pride of direction and a confidence in enduring independence.

I realized that in those two years, in order to preserve something - an inner hush maybe, maybe not - I had weaned myself from all the things I used to love - that every act of life from the morning tooth-brush to the friend at dinner had become an effort. I saw that for a long time I had not liked people and things, but only followed the rickety old pretence of liking. I saw that even my love for those closest to me was become only an attempt to love, that my casual relations — with an editor, a tobacco seller, the child of a friend, were only what I remembered I should do, from other days. All in the same month I became bitter about such things as the sound of the radio, the advertisements in the magazines, the screech of tracks, the dead silence of the country - contemptuous at human softness, immediately (if secretively) quarrelsome towards hardness — hating the night when I couldn’t sleep and hating the day because it went towards night. I slept on the heart side now because I knew that the sooner I could tire that out, even a little, the sooner would come that blessed hour of nightmare which, like a catharsis, would enable me to better meet the new day.

There were certain spots, certain faces I could look at. Like most Middle Westerners, I have never had any but the vaguest race prejudices — I always had a secret yen for the lovely Scandinavian blondes who sat on porches in St Paul but hadn’t emerged enough economically to be part of what was then society. They were too nice to be ‘chickens’ and too quickly off the farmlands to seize a place in the sun, but I remembered going round blocks to catch a single glimpse of shining hair - the bright shock of a girl I’d never know. This is urban, unpopular talk. It strays afield from the fact that in these latter days I couldn’t stand the sight of Celts, English, Politicians, Strangers, Virginians, Negroes (light or dark), Hunting People, or retail clerks, and middlemen in general, all writers (I avoided writers very carefully because they can perpetuate trouble as no one else can) - and all the classes as classes and most of them as members of their class. ...

Trying to cling to something, I liked doctors and girl children up to the age of about thirteen and well-brought-up boy children from about eight years old on. I could have peace and happiness with these few categories of people. I forgot to add that I liked old men — men over seventy, sometimes over sixty if their faces looked seasoned. I liked Katharine Hepburn’s face on the screen, no matter what was said about her pretentiousness, and Miriam Hopkins’ face, and old friends if I only saw them once a year and could remember their ghosts.

All rather inhuman and undernourished, isn’t it? Well, that, children, is the true sign of cracking up.

It is not a pretty picture. Inevitably it was carted here and there within its frame and exposed to various critics. One of them can only be described as a person whose life makes other people’s lives seem like death — even this time when she was cast in the usually unappealing role of Job’s comforter. In spite of the fact that this story is over, let me append our conversation as a sort of postscript:

‘Instead of being so sorry for yourself, listen — ‘ she said. (She always says ‘Listen’, because she thinks while she talks - really thinks.) So she said: ‘Listen. Suppose this wasn’t a crack in you - suppose it was a crack in the Grand Canyon.’

‘The crack’s in me,’ I said heroically.

‘Listen! The world only exists in your eyes — your conception of it. You can make it as big or as small as you want to. And you’re trying to be a little puny individual. By God, if I ever cracked, I’d try to make the world crack with me. Listen I The world only exists through your apprehension of it, and so it’s much better to say that it’s not you that’s cracked - it’s the Grand Canyon.’

‘Baby et up all her Spinoza?’

‘I don’t know anything about Spinoza. I know — ‘ She spoke, then, of old woes of her own, that seemed, in the telling, to have been more dolorous than mine, and how she had met them, over-ridden them, beaten them.

I felt a certain reaction to what she said, but I am a slow-thinking man, and it occurred to me simultaneously that of all natural forces, vitality is the incommunicable one. In days when juice came into one as an article without duty, one tried to distribute it - but always without success; to further mix metaphors, vitality never ‘takes’. You have it or you haven’t it, like health or brown eyes or honour or a baritone voice. I might have asked some of it from her, neatly wrapped and ready for home cooking and digestion, but I could never have got it - not if I’d waited around for a thousand hours with the tin cup of self-pity. I could walk from her door, holding myself very carefully like cracked crockery, and go away into the world of bitterness, where I was making a home with such materials as are found there — and quote to myself after I left her door:

‘Ye are the salt of the earth. But if the salt hath lost its savour, wherewith shall it be salted?’

PASTING IT TOGETHER

April 1936

I have spoken in these pages of how an exceptionally optimistic young man experienced a crack-up of all values, a crack-up that he scarcely knew of until long after it occurred. I told of the succeeding period of desolation and of the necessity of going on, but without benefit of Henley’s familiar heroics, ‘my head is bloody but unbowed.’ For a checkup of my spiritual liabilities indicated that I had no particular head to be bowed or unbowed. Once I had a heart but that was about all I was sure of.

This was at least a starting place out of the morass in which I floundered: ‘I felt - therefore I was.’ At one time or another there had been many people who had leaned on me, come to me in difficulties or written me from afar, believed implicitly in my advice and my attitude towards life. The dullest platitude monger or the most unscrupulous Rasputin who can influence the destinies of many people must have some individuality, so the question became one of finding why and where I had changed, where was the leak through which, unknown to myself, my enthusiasm and my vitality had been steadily and prematurely trickling away.

One harassed and despairing night I packed a brief-case and went off a thousand miles to think it over. I took a dollar room in a drab little town where I knew no one and sunk all the money I had with me in a stock of potted meat, crackers, and apples. But don’t let me suggest that the change from a rather overstuffed world to a comparative asceticism was any Research Magnificent - I only wanted absolute quiet to think out why I had developed a sad attitude towards sadness, a melancholy attitude towards melancholy, and a tragic attitude towards tragedy - why I had become identified with the objects of my horror or compassion.

Does this seem a fine distinction? It isn’t: identification such as this spells the death of accomplishment. It is something like this that keeps insane people from working. Lenin did not willingly endure the sufferings of his proletariat, nor Washington of his troops, nor Dickens of his London poor. And when Tolstoy tried some such merging of himself with the objects of his attention, it was a fake and a failure. I mention these because they are the men best known to us all.

It was dangerous mist. When Wordsworth decided that ‘there had passed away a glory from the earth’, he felt no compulsion to pass away with it, and the Fiery Particle Keats never ceased his struggle against t.b. nor in his last moments relinquished his hope of being among the English poets.

My self-immolation was something sodden-dark. It was very distinctly not modern - yet I saw it in others, saw it in a dozen men of honour and industry since the war. (I heard you, but that’s too easy - there were Marxians among these men.) I had stood by while one famous contemporary of mine played with the idea of the Big Out for half a year; I had watched when another, equally eminent, spent months in an asylum unable to endure any contact with his fellow men. And of those who had given up and passed on I could list a score.

This led me to the idea that the ones who had survived had made some sort of clean break. This is a big word and is no parallel to a jail-break when one is probably headed for a new jail or will be forced back to the old one. The famous ‘Escape’ or ‘run away from it all’ is an excursion in a trap even if the trap includes the south seas, which are only for those who want to paint them or sail them. A clean break is something you cannot come back from; that is irretrievable because it makes the past cease to exist. So, since I could no longer fulfil the obligations that life had set for me or that I had set for myself, why not slay the empty shell who had been posturing at it for four years? I must continue to be a writer because that was my only way of life, but I would cease any attempts to be a person - to be kind, just, or generous. There were plenty of counterfeit coins around that would pass instead of these and I knew where I could get them at a nickel on the dollar. In thirty-nine years an observant eye has learned to detect where the milk is watered and the sugar is sanded, the rhinestone passed for diamond and the stucco for stone. There was to be no more giving of myself - all giving was to be outlawed henceforth under a new name, and that name was Waste.

The decision made me rather exuberant, like anything that is both real and new. As a sort of beginning there was a whole shaft of letters to be tipped into the waste basket when I went home, letters that wanted something for nothing - to read this man’s manuscript, market this man’s poem, speak free on the radio, indite notes of introduction, give this interview, help with the plot of this play, with this domestic situation, perform this act of thoughtfulness or charity.

The conjuror’s hat was empty. To draw things out of it had long been a sort of sleight of hand, and now, to change the metaphor, I was off the dispensing end of the relief roll forever.

The heady villainous feeling continued.

I felt like the beady-eyed men I used to see on the commuting train from Great Neck fifteen years back - men who didn’t care whether the world tumbled into chaos tomorrow if it spared their houses. I was one with them now, one with the smooth articles who said:

‘I’m sorry but business is business.’ Or:

‘You ought to have thought of that before you got into this trouble.’ Or:

‘I’m not the person to see about that.’

And a smile - ah, I would get me a smile. I’m still working on that smile. It is to combine the best qualities of an hotel manager, an experienced old social weasel, a headmaster on visitors’ day, a coloured elevator man, a pansy pulling a profile, a producer getting stuff at half its market value, a trained nurse coming on a new job, a body-vender in her first rotogravure, a hopeful extra swept near the camera, a ballet dancer with an infected toe, and of course the great beam of loving kindness common to all those from Washington to Beverly Hills who must exist by virtue of the contorted pan.

The voice too - I am working with a teacher on the voice. When I have perfected it the larynx will show no ring of conviction except the conviction of the person I am talking to. Since it will be largely called upon for the elicitation of the word ‘Yes’, my teacher (a lawyer) and I are concentrating on that, but in extra hours. I am learning to bring into it that polite acerbity that makes people feel that far from being welcome they are not even tolerated and are under continual and scathing analysis at every moment. These times will of course not coincide with the smile. This will be reserved exclusively for those from whom I have nothing to gain, old worn-out people or young struggling people. They won’t mind - what the hell, they get it most of the time anyhow.

But enough. It is not a matter of levity. If you are young and you should write asking to see me and learn how to be a sombre literary man writing pieces upon the state of emotional exhaustion that often overtakes writers in their prime - if you should be so young and so fatuous as to do this, I would not do so much as acknowledge your letter, unless you were related to someone very rich and important indeed. And if you were dying of starvation outside my window, I would go out quickly and give you the smile and the voice (if no longer the hand) and stick around till somebody raised a nickel to phone for the ambulance, that is if I thought there would be any copy in it for me.

I have now at last become a writer only. The man I had persistently tried to be became such a burden that I have ‘cut him loose’ with as little compunction as a Negro lady cuts loose a rival on Saturday night. Let the good people function as such - let the overworked doctors die in harness, with one week’s ‘vacation’ a year that they can devote to straightening out their family affairs, and let the underworked doctors scramble for cases at one dollar a throw; let the soldiers be killed and enter immediately into the Valhalla of their profession. That is their contract with the gods. A writer need have no such ideals unless he makes them for himself, and this one has quit. The old dream of being an entire man in the Goethe-Byron-Shaw tradition, with an opulent American touch, a sort of combination of J. P. Morgan, Topham Beauclerk and St Francis of Assisi, has been relegated to the junk heap of the shoulder pads worn for one day on the Princeton freshman football field and the overseas cap never worn overseas.

So what? This is what I think now: that the natural state of the sentient adult is a qualified unhappiness. I think also that in an adult the desire to be finer in grain than you are, ‘a constant striving’ (as those people say who gain their bread by saying it) only adds to this unhappiness in the end - that end that comes to our youth and hope. My own happiness in the past often approached such an ecstasy that I could not share it even with the person dearest to me but had to walk it away in quiet streets and lanes with only fragments of it to distil into little lines in books - and I think that my happiness, or talent for self-delusion or what you will, was an exception. It was not the natural thing but the unnatural - unnatural as the Boom; and my recent experience parallels the wave of despair that swept the nation when the Boom was over.

I shall manage to live with the new dispensation, though it has taken some months to be certain of the fact. And just as the laughing stoicism which has enabled the American Negro to endure the intolerable conditions of his existence has cost him his sense of the truth - so in my case there is a price to pay. I do not any longer like the postman, nor the grocer, nor the editor, nor the cousin’s husband, and he in turn will come to dislike me, so that life will never be very pleasant again, and the sign Cave Canem is hung permanently just above my door. I will try to be a correct animal though, and if you throw me a bone with enough meat on it I may even lick your hand.

HANDLE WITH CARE

March 1936

In a previous article this writer told about his realization that what he had before him was not the dish that he had ordered for his forties. In fact - since he and the dish were one, he described himself as a cracked plate, the kind that one wonders whether it is worth preserving. Your editor thought that the article suggested too many aspects without regarding them closely, and probably many readers felt the same way - and there are always those to whom all self-revelation is contemptible, unless it ends with a noble thanks to the gods for the Unconquerable Soul.

But I had been thanking the gods too long, and thanking them for nothing. I wanted to put a lament into my record, without even the background of the Euganean Hills to give it colour. There weren’t any Euganean hills that I could see.

Sometimes, though, the cracked plate has to be retained in the pantry, has to be kept in service as a household necessity. It can never again be warmed on the stove nor shuffled with the other plates in the dishpan; it will not be brought out for company, but it will do to hold crackers late at night or to go into the ice box under left-overs. ...

Hence this sequel - a cracked plate’s further history.

Now the standard cure for one who is sunk is to consider those in actual destitution or physical suffering - this is an all-weather beatitude for gloom in general and fairly salutary day-time advice for everyone. But at three o’clock in the morning, a forgotten package has the same tragic importance as a death sentence, and the cure doesn’t work -and in a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day. At that hour the tendency is to refuse to face things as long as possible by retiring into an infantile dream - but one is continually startled out of this by various contacts with the world. One meets these occasions as quickly and carelessly as possible and retires once more back into the dream, hoping that things will adjust themselves by some great material or spiritual bonanza. But as the withdrawal persists there is less and less chance of the bonanza - one is not waiting for the fade-out of a single sorrow, but rather being an unwilling witness of an execution, the disintegration of one’s own personality...

Unless madness or drugs or drink come into it, this phase comes to a dead-end, eventually, and is succeeded by a vacuous quiet. In this you can try to estimate what has been sheared away and what is left. Only when this quiet came to me, did I realize that I had gone through two parallel experiences.

The first time was twenty years ago, when I left Princeton in junior year with a complaint diagnosed as malaria. It transpired, through an X-ray taken a dozen years later, that it had been tuberculosis - a mild case, and after a few months of rest I went back to college. But I had lost certain offices, the chief one was the presidency of the Triangle Club, a musical comedy idea, and also I dropped back a class. To me college would never be the same. There were to be no badges of pride, no medals, after all. It seemed on one March afternoon that I had lost every single thing I wanted - and that night was the first time that I hunted down the spectre of womanhood that, for a little while, makes everything else seem unimportant.

Years later I realized that my failure as a big shot in college was all right - instead of serving on committees, I took a beating on English poetry; when I got the idea of what it was all about, 1 set about learning how to write. On Shaw’s principle that ‘If you don’t get what you like, you better like what you get’, it was a lucky break - at the moment it was a harsh and bitter business to know that my career as a leader of men was over.

Since that day I have not been able to fire a bad servant, and I am astonished and impressed by people who can. Some old desire for personal dominance was broken and gone. Life around me was a solemn dream, and I lived on the letters I wrote to a girl in another city. A man does not recover from such jolts - he becomes a different person and, eventually, the new person finds new things to care about.

The other episode parallel to my current situation took place after the war, when I had again over-extended my flank. It was one of those tragic loves doomed for lack of money, and one day the girl closed it out on the basis of common sense. During a long summer of despair I wrote a novel instead of letters, so it came out all right, but it came out at all right for a different person. The man with the jingle of money in his pocket who married the girl a year later would always cherish an abiding distrust, an animosity, towards the leisure class - not the conviction of a revolutionist but the smouldering hatred of a peasant. In the years since then I have never been able to stop wondering where my friends’ money came from, nor to stop thinking that at one time a sort of droit de seigneur might have been exercised to give one of them my girl.

For sixteen years I lived pretty much as this latter person, distrusting the rich, yet working for money with which to share their mobility and the grace that some of them brought into their lives. During this rime I had plenty of the usual horses shot from under me - I remember some of their names - Punctured Pride, Thwarted Expectation, Faithless, Show-off, Hard Hit, Never Again. And after a while I wasn’t twenty-five, then not even thirty-five, and nothing was quite as good. But in all these years I don’t remember a moment of discouragement. I saw honest men through moods of suicidal gloom - some of them gave up and died; others adjusted themselves and went on to a larger success than mine; but my morale never sank below the level of self-disgust when I had put on some unsightly personal show. Trouble has no necessary connexion with discouragement - discouragement has a germ of its own, as different from trouble as arthritis is different from a stiff joint.

When a new sky cut off the sun last spring, I didn’t at first relate it to what had happened fifteen or twenty years ago. Only gradually did a certain family resemblance come through - an over-extension of the flank, a burning of the candle at both ends; a call upon physical resources that I did not command, like a man over-drawing at his bank. In its impact this blow was more violent than the other two but it was the same in kind - a feeling that I was standing at twilight on a deserted range, with an empty rifle in my hands and the targets down. No problem set - simply a silence with only the sound of my own breathing.

In this silence there was a vast irresponsibility towards every obligation, a deflation of all my values. A passionate belief in order, a disregard of motives or consequences in favour of guess work and prophecy, a feeling that craft and industry would have a place in any world - one by one, these and other convictions were swept away. I saw that the novel, which at my maturity was the strongest and supplest medium for conveying thought and emotion from one human being to another, was becoming subordinated to a mechanical and communal art that, whether in the hands of Hollywood merchants or Russian idealists, was capable of reflecting only the tritest thought, the most obvious emotion. It was an art in which words were subordinate to images, where personality was worn down to the inevitable low gear of collaboration. As long past as 1930,1 had a hunch that the talkies would make even the best selling novelist as archaic as silent pictures. People still read, if only Professor Canby’s book of the month - curious children nosed at the slime of Mr Tiffany Thayer in the drug-store libraries - but there was a rankling indignity, that to me had become almost an obsession, in seeing the power of the written word subordinate to another power, a more glittering, a grosser power....

I set that down as an example of what haunted me during the long night - this was something I could neither accept nor struggle against, something which tended to make my efforts obsolescent, as the chain stores have crippled the small merchant, an exterior force, unbeatable -

(I have the sense of lecturing now, looking at a watch on the desk before me and seeing how many more minutes -)

Well, when I had reached this period of silence, I was forced into a measure that no one ever adopts voluntarily: I was impelled to think. God, was it difficult! The moving about of great secret trunks. In the first exhausted halt, I wondered whether I had ever thought. After a long time I came to these conclusions, just as I write them here:

(1) That I had done very little thinking, save within the problems of my craft. For twenty years a certain man had been my intellectual conscience. That was Edmund Wilson.

(2) That another man represented my sense of the ‘good life’, though I saw him once in a decade, and since then he might have been hung. He is in the fur business in the Northwest and wouldn’t like his name set down here. But in difficult situations I had tried to think what he would have thought, how he would have acted.

(3) That a third contemporary had been an artistic conscience to me - I had not imitated his infectious style, because my own style, such as it is, was formed before he published anything, but there was an awful pull towards him when I was on a spot.

(4) That a fourth man had come to dictate my relations with other people when these relations were successful: how to do, what to say. How to make people at least momentarily happy (in opposition to Mrs Post’s theories of how to make everyone thoroughly uncomfortable with a sort of systematized vulgarity). This always confused me and made me want to go out and get drunk, but this man had seen the game, analysed it and beaten it, and his word was good enough for me.

(5) That my political conscience had scarcely existed for ten years save as an element of irony in my stuff. When I became again concerned with the system I should function under, it was a man much younger than myself who brought it to me, with a mixture of passion and fresh air.

So there was not an ‘I’ any more - not a basis on which I could organize my self-respect - save my limitless capacity for toil that it seemed I possessed no more. It was strange to have no self - to be like a little boy left alone in a big house, who knew that now he could do anything he wanted to do, but found that there was nothing that he wanted to do -

(The watch is past the hour and I have barely reached my thesis. I have some doubts as to whether this is of general interest, but if anyone wants more, there is plenty left, and your editor will tell me. If you’ve had enough, say so - but not too loud, because I have the feeling that someone, I’m not sure who, is sound asleep - someone who could have helped me to keep my shop open. It wasn’t Lenin, and it wasn’t God.)

AUTHOR’S HOUSE

This artcile appeared in Esquire in July, 1936.

I have seen numerous photographs and read many accounts of the houses of Joan Crawford, Virginia Bruce and Claudette Colbert, usually with the hostess done up from behind with a bib explaining how on God’s earth to make a Hollywood soufflee or open a can of soup without removing the appendix in the same motion. But it has been a long time since I have seen a picture of an author’s house and it occurs to me to supply the deficiency.

Of course I must begin with an apology for writing about authors at all. In the days of the old Smart Set Mencken and Nathan had a rejection slip which notified the aspirant that they would not consider stories about painters, musicians and authors — perhaps because these classes are supposed to express themselves fully in their own work and are not a subject for portraiture. And having made the timorous bow I proceed with the portrait.

Rather than leave a somber effect at the end we begin at the bottom, in a dark damp unmodernized cellar. As your host’s pale yellow flashlight moves slowly around through the spiderwebs, past old boxes and barrels and empty bottles and parts of old machines you feel a little uneasy.

“Not a bad cellar — as cellars go, “ the author says. “You can’t see it very well and I can’t either — it’s mostly forgotten. “

“What do you mean ?”

“It’s everything I’ve forgotten — all the complicated dark mixture of my youth and infancy that made me a fiction writer instead of a fireman or a soldier.”

“You see fiction is a trick of the mind and heart composed of as many separate emotions as a magician uses in executing a pass or a palm. When you’ve learned it you forget it and leave it down here. “

“When did you learn it?”

“Oh every time I begin I have to learn it all over again in a way. But the intangibles are down here. Why I chose this God awful metier of sedentary days and sleepless nights and endless dissatisfaction. Why I would choose it again. All that’s down here and I’m just as glad I can’t look at it too closely. See that dark corner?”

“Yes. “

“Well, three months before I was born my mother lost her other two children and I think that came first of all though I don’t know how it worked exactly. I think I started then to be a writer. “

Your eyes fall on another corner and you give a start of alarm.

“What’s that?” you demand.

“That?” The author tries to change the subject, moving around so as to obscure your view of the too recent mound of dirt in the corner that has made you think of certain things in police reports.

But you insist.

“That is where it is buried, “ he says.

“What’s buried?”

“That’s where I buried my love after — “ he hesitates.

“After you killed her?”

“After I killed it. “

“I don’t understand what you mean. “

The author does not look at the pile of earth.

“That is where I buried my first childish love of myself, my belief that I would never die like other people, and that I wasn’t the son of my parents but a son of a king, a king who ruled the whole world. “

He breaks off.

“But let’s get out of here. We’ll go upstairs. “

In the living room the author’s eye is immediately caught by a scene outside the window. The visitor looks — he sees some children playing football on the lawn next door.

“There is another reason why I became an author. “

“How’s that?”

“Well, I used to play football in a school and there was a coach who didn’t like me for a damn. Well, our school was going to play a game up on the Hudson, and I had been substituting for our climax runner who had been hurt the week before. I had a good day substituting for him so now that he was well and had taken his old place I was moved into what might be called the position of blocking back. I wasn’t adapted to it, perhaps because there was less glory and less stimulation. It was cold, too, and I don’t stand cold, so instead of doing my job I got thinking how grey the skies were. When the coach took me out of the game he said briefly:

“ ‘We simply can’t depend on you. ‘

“I could only answer, ‘Yes, sir. ‘

“That was as far as I could explain to him literally what happened — and it’s taken me years to figure it out for my own benefit. I had been playing listlessly. We had the other team licked by a couple of touchdowns, and it suddenly occurred to me that I might as well let the opposing end — who hadn’t so far made a single tackle — catch a forward pass, but at the last moment I came to life and realized that I couldn’t let him catch the pass, but that at least I wouldn’t intercept it, so I just knocked it down.

“That was the point where I was taken out of the game. I remember the desolate ride in the bus back to the train and the desolate ride back to school with everybody thinking I had been yellow on the occasion, when actually I was just distracted and sorry for that opposing end. That’s the truth. I’ve been afraid plenty of times but that wasn’t one of the times. The point is it inspired me to write a poem for the school paper which made me as big a hit with my father as if I had become a football hero. So when I went home that Christmas vacation it was in my mind that if you weren’t able to function in action you might at least be able to tell about it, because you felt the same intensity — it was a back door way out of facing reality. “

They go into a dining room now. The author walks through it in haste and a certain aversion.

“Don’t you enjoy food?” the visitor asks.

“Food — yes! But not the miserable mixture of fruit juices and milk and whole-wheat bread I live on now. “

“Are you dyspeptic?”

“Dyspeptic! I’m simply ruined. “

“How so?”

“Well, in the middle west in those days children started life with fried food and waffles and that led into endless malted milks and bacon buns in college and then a little later I jumped to meals at Foyot’s and the Castelli dei Caesari and the Escargot and every spice merchant in France and Italy. And under the name of alcohol — Clarets and Burgundys, Chateau Yqnems and Champagnes, Pilsener and Dago Red, prohibition Scotch and Alabama white mule. It was very good while it lasted but I didn’t see what pap lay at the end. “ He shivered, “Let’s forget it — it isn’t dinner time. Now this — “ he says opening a door, “is my study. “

A secretary is typing there or rather in a little alcove adjoining. As they come in she hands the author some letters. His eye falls on the envelope of the first one, his face takes on an expectant smile and he says to the visitor:

“This is the sequel to something that was rather funny. Let me tell you the first part before I open this. Well, about two weeks ago I got a letter under cover from The Saturday Evening Post, addressed not to me but to

Thomas Kracklin,

Saturday Evening post

Philadelphia

pennsylvania Pa

On the envelope were several notations evidently by the Post’s mail department.

Not known here

Try a story series in 1930 files

Think this is character in story by X in 1927 files

“This last person had guessed it, for Thomas Kracklin was indeed a character in some stories of mine. Here’s what the letter said:

Mr. Kracklin I wonder if you are any kin to mine because my name was Kracklin an I had a brother an he did not see us much any more we was worried about him an I thought when I read your story that you was that Kracklin an I thought if I wrote you I would find out yours truly Mrs. Kracklin Lee.

“The address was a small town in Michigan. The letter amused me and was so different from any that I had received for a long time that I made up an answer to it. It went something like this:

My dear Mrs. Kracklin Lee:

I am indeed your long lost brother. I am now in the Baltimore Penitentiary awaiting execution by hanging. If I get out I will be glad to come to visit you. I think you would find me all right except I cannot be irritated as I sometimes kill people if the coffee is cold. But I think I won’t be much trouble except for that but I will be pretty poor when I get out of the penitentiary and will be glad if you can take care of me — unless they string me up next Thursday. Write me care of my lawyer.

“Here I gave my name and then signed the letter ‘Sincerely, Thomas Kracklin. ‘ This is undoubtedly the answer. “

The author opened the envelope — there were two letters inside. The first was addressed to him by his real name.

Dear Sir I hope my brother has not been hung an I thank you for sending his letter I am a poor woman an have no potatoes this day an can just buy the stamp but I hope my brother has not been hung an if not I would like to see him an will you give him this letter yours truly Mrs. Kracklin Lee.

This was the second letter:

Dear Brother I have not got much but if you get off you can come back here an I could not promise to suply you with much but maybe we could get along cannot really promise anythin but I hope you will get off an wish you the very best always your sister Mrs. Kracklin Lee.

When he had finished reading the author said:

“Now isn’t it fun to be so damn smart! Miss Palmer, please write a letter saying her brother’s been reprieved and gone to China and put five dollars in the envelope. “

“But it’s too late, “ he continued as he and his visitor went upstairs. “You can pay a little money but what can you do for meddling with a human heart? A writer’s temperament is continually making him do things he can never repair.

“This is my bedroom. I write a good deal lying down and when there are too many children around, but in summer it’s hot up here in the daytime and my hand sticks to the paper. “

The visitor moved a fold of cloth to perch himself on the side of a chair but the author warned him quickly:

“Don’t touch that! It’s just the way somebody left it. “

“Oh I beg your pardon. “

“Oh it’s all right — it was a long long time ago. Sit here for a moment and rest yourself and then we’ll go on up. “

“Up?”

“Up to the attic. This is a big house you see — on the old-fashioned side. “

The attic was the attic of Victorian fiction. It was pleasant, with beams of late light slanting in on piles and piles of magazines and pamphlets and children’s school books and college year books and “little” magazines from Paris and ballet programs and the old Dial and Mercury and L’lllustration unbound and the St. Nicholas and the journal of the Maryland Historical Society, and piles of maps and guide books from the Golden Gate to Bou Saada. There were files bulging with letters, one marked “letters from my grandfather to my grandmother” and several dozen scrap books and clipping books and photograph books and albums and “baby books” and great envelopes full of unfiled items....

“This is the loot, “ the author said grimly. “This is what one has instead of a bank balance. “

“Are you satisfied?”

“No. But it’s nice here sometimes in the late afternoon. This is a sort of a library in its way, you see — the library of a life. And nothing is as depressing as a library if you stay long in it. Unless of course you stay there all the time because then you adjust yourself and become a little crazy. Part of you gets dead. Come on let’s go up. “

“Where?”

“Up to the cupola — the turret, the watch-tower, whatever you want to call it. I’ll lead the way. “

It is small up there and full of baked silent heat until the author opens two of the glass sides that surround it and the twilight wind blows through. As far as your eye can see there is a river winding between green lawns and trees and purple buildings and red slums blended in by a merciful dusk. Even as they stand there the wind increases until it is a gale whistling around the tower and blowing birds past them.

“I lived up here once, “ the author said after a moment.

“Here? For a long time?”

“No. For just a little while when I was young. “

“It must have been rather cramped. “

“I didn’t notice it. “

“Would you like to try it again?”

“No. And I couldn’t if I wanted to. “

He shivered slightly and closed the windows. As they went downstairs the visitor said, half apologetically:

“It’s really just like all houses, isn’t it?”

The author nodded.

“I didn’t think it was when I built it, but in the end I suppose it’s just like other houses after all. “

AFTERNOON OF AN AUTHOR

When he woke up he felt better than he had for many weeks, a fact that became plain to him negatively — he did not feel ill. He leaned for a moment against the door frame between his bedroom and bath till he could be sure he was not dizzy. Not a bit, not even when he stooped for a slipper under the bed.

It was a bright April morning, he had no idea what time because his clock was long unwound but as he went back through the apartment to the kitchen he saw that his daughter had breakfasted and departed and that the mail was in, so it was after nine.

“I think I’ll go out today,” he said to the maid.

“Do you good — it’s a lovely day.” She was from New Orleans, with the features and coloring of an Arab.

“I want two eggs like yesterday and toast, orange juice and tea.”

He lingered for a moment in his daughter’s end of the apartment and read his mail. It was an annoying mail with nothing cheerful in it — mostly bills and advertisements with the diurnal Oklahoma school boy and his gaping autograph album. Sam Goldwyn might do a ballet picture with Spessiwitza and might not — it would all have to wait till Mr. Goldwyn got back from Europe when he might have half a dozen new ideas. Paramount wanted a release on a poem that had appeared in one of the author’s books, as they didn’t know whether it was an original or quoted. Maybe they were going to get a title from it. Anyhow he had no more equity in that property — he had sold the silent rights many years ago and the sound rights last year.

“Never any luck with movies,” he said to himself. “Stick to your last, boy .”

He looked out the window during breakfast at the students changing classes on the college campus across the way.

“Twenty years ago I was changing classes,” he said to the maid. She laughed her debutante’s laugh.

“I’ll need a check,” she said, “if you’re going out.”

“Oh, I’m not going out yet. I’ve got two or three hours’ work. I meant late this afternoon.”

“Going for a drive?”

“I wouldn’t drive that old junk — I’d sell it for fifty dollars. I’m going on the top of a bus.”

After breakfast he lay down for fifteen minutes. Then he went into the study and began to work.

The problem was a magazine story that had become so thin in the middle that it was about to blow away. The plot was like climbing endless stairs, he had no element of surprise in reserve, and the characters who started so bravely day-before-yesterday couldn’t have qualified for a newspaper serial.

“Yes, I certainly need to get out,” he thought. “I’d like to drive down the Shenandoah Valley, or go to Norfolk on the boat.”

But both of these ideas were impractical — they took time and energy and he had not much of either — what there was must be conserved for work. He went through the manuscript underlining good phrases in red crayon and after tucking these into a file slowly tore up the rest of the story and dropped it in the waste-basket. Then he walked the room and smoked, occasionally talking to himself.

“Wee-l, let’s see — “

“Nau-ow, the next thing — would be — “

“Now let’s see, now — “

After awhile he sat down thinking:

“I’m just stale — I shouldn’t have touched a pencil for two days.

He looked through the heading “Story Ideas” in his notebook until the maid came to tell him his secretary was on the phone - part time secretary since he had been ill.

“Not a thing,” he said. “I just tore up everything I’d written. It wasn’t worth a damn. I’m going out this afternoon.”

“Good for you. It’s a fine day.”

“Better come up tomorrow afternoon — there’s a lot of mail and bills.”

He shaved, and then as a precaution rested five minutes before he dressed. It was exciting to be going out — he hoped the elevator boys wouldn’t say they were glad to see him up and he decided to go down the back elevator where they did not know him. He put on his best suit with the coat and trousers that didn’t match. He had bought only two suits in six years but they were the very best suits — the coat alone of this one had cost a hundred and ten dollars. As he must have a destination — it wasn’t good to go places without a destination — he put a tube of shampoo ointment in his pocket for his barber to use, and also a small phial of luminol.

“The perfect neurotic,” he said, regarding himself in the mirror. “By-product of an idea, slag of a dream.”

II

He went into the kitchen and said good-by to the maid as if he were going to Little America. Once in the war he had commandeered an engine on sheer bluff and had it driven from New York to Washington to keep from being A.W.O.L. Now he stood carefully on the street corner waiting for the light to change, while young people hurried past him with a fine disregard for traffic. On the bus corner under the trees it was green and cool and he thought of Stonewall Jackson’s last words: “Let us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees.” Those Civil War leaders seemed to have realized very suddenly how tired they were — Lee shrivelling into another man, Grant with his desperate memoir-writing at the end.

The bus was all he expected — only one other man on the roof and the green branches ticking against each window through whole blocks. They would probably have to trim those branches and it seemed a pity. There was so much to look at — he tried to define the color of one line of houses and could only think of an old opera cloak of his mother’s that was full of tints and yet was of no tint — a mere reflector of light. Somewhere church bells were playing Venite Adoremus and he wondered why, because Christmas was eight months off. He didn’t like bells but it had been very moving when they played Maryland, My Maryland at the governor’s funeral.

On the college football field men were working with rollers and a title occurred to him: “Turf-keeper” or else “The Grass Grows,” something about a man working on turf for years and bringing up his son to go to college and play football there. Then the son dying in youth and the man’s going to work in the cemetery and putting turf over his son instead of under his feet. It would be the kind of piece that is often placed in anthologies, but not his sort of thing — it was sheer swollen antithesis, as formalized as a popular magazine story and easier to write. Many people, however, would consider it excellent because it was melancholy, had digging in it and was simple to understand.

The bus went past a pale Athenian railroad station brought to life by the blue shirted redcaps out in front. The street narrowed as the business section began and there were suddenly brightly dressed girls, all very beautiful — he thought he had never seen such beautiful girls. There were men too but they all looked rather silly, like himself in the mirror, and there were old undecorative women, and presently, too, there were plain and unpleasant faces among the girls; but in general they were lovely, dressed in real colors all the way from six to thirty, no plans or struggles in their faces, only a state of sweet suspension, provocative and serene. He loved life terribly for a minute, not wanting to give it up at all. He thought perhaps he had made a mistake in coming out so soon.

He got off the bus, holding carefully to all the railings and walked a block to the hotel barbershop. He passed a sporting goods store and looked in the window unmoved except by a first baseman’s glove which was already dark in the pocket. Next to that was a haberdasher’s and here he stood for quite a while looking at the deep shade of shirts and the ones of checker and plaid. Ten years ago on the summer Riviera the author and some others had bought dark blue workmen’s shirts, and probably that had started that style. The checkered shirts were nice looking, bright as uniforms and he wished he were twenty and going to a beach club all dolled up like a Turner sunset or Guido Reni’s Dawn.

The barbershop was large, shining and scented — it had been several months since the author had come downtown on such a mission and he found that his familiar barber was laid up with arthritis; however, he explained to another man how to use the ointment, refused a newspaper and sat, rather happy and sensually content at the strong fingers on his scalp, while a pleasant mingled memory of all the barbershops he had ever known flowed through his mind.

Once he had written a story about a barber. Back in 1929 the proprietor of his favorite shop in the city where he was then living had made a fortune of $300,000 on tips from a local industrialist and was about to retire. The author had no stake in the market, in fact, was about to sail for Europe for a few years with such accumulation as he had, and that autumn hearing how the barber had lost all his fortune he was prompted to write a story, thoroughly disguised in every way yet hinging on the fact of a barber rising in the world and then tumbling; he heard, nevertheless, that the story had been identified in the city and caused some hard feelings.

The shampoo ended. \Vhen he came out into the hall an orchestra had started to play in the cocktail room across the way and he stood for a moment in the door listening. So long since he had danced, perhaps two evenings in five years, yet a review of his last book had mentioned him as being fond of night clubs; the same review had also spoken of him as being indefatigable. Something in the sound of the word in his mind broke him momentarily and feeling tears of weakness behind his eyes he turned away. It was like in the beginning fifteen years ago when they said he had “fatal facility,” and he labored like a slave over every sentence so as not to be like that.

“I’m getting bitter again,” he said to himself. “That’s no good, no good — I’ve got to go home.”

The bus was a long time coming but he didn’t like taxis and he still hoped that something would occur to him on that upper-deck passing through the green leaves of the boulevard. When it came finally he had some trouble climbing the steps but it was worth it for the first thing he saw was a pair of high school kids, a boy and a girl, sitting without any self-consciousness on the high pedestal of the Lafayette statue, their attention fast upon each other. Their isolation moved him and he knew he would get something out of it professionally, if only in contrast to the growing seclusion of his life and the increasing necessity of picking over an already well-picked past. He needed reforestation and he was well aware of it, and he hoped the soil would stand one more growth. It had never been the very best soil for he had had an early weakness for showing off instead of listening and observing.

Here was the apartment house — he glanced up at his own windows on the top floor before he went in.

“The residence of the successful writer,” he said to himself. “I wonder what marvellous books he’s tearing off up there. It must be great to have a gift like that — just sit down with pencil and paper. Work when you want — go where you please.”

His child wasn’t home yet but the maid came out of the kitchen and said:

“Did you have a nice time?”

“Perfect,” he said. “I went roller-skating and bowled and played around with Man Mountain Dean and finished up in a Turkish Bath. Any telegrams?”

“Not a thing.”

“Bring me a glass of milk, will you?”

He went through the dining room and turned into his study, struck blind for a moment with the glow of his two thousand books in the late sunshine. He was quite tired — he would lie down for ten minutes and then see if he could get started on an idea in the two hours before dinner.

EARLY SUCCESS

Seventeen years ago this month I quit work or, if you prefer, I retired from business. I was through — let the Street Railway Advertising Company carry along under its own power. I retired, not on my profit, but on my liabilities, which included debts, despair, and a broken engagement, and crept home to St Paul to ‘finish a novel’.

That novel, begun in a training camp late in the war, was my ace in the hole. I had put it aside when I got a job in New York, but I was as constantly aware of it as of the shoe with cardboard in the sole, during all one desolate spring. It was like the fox and goose and the bag of beans. If I stopped working to finish the novel, I lost the girl.

So I struggled on in a business I detested and all the confidence I had garnered at Princeton and in a haughty career as an army’s worst aide-de-camp melted gradually away. Lost and forgotten, I walked quickly from certain places -from the pawnshop where one left the field-glasses, from prosperous friends whom one met when wearing the suit from before the war - from restaurants after tipping with the last nickel, from busy cheerful offices that were saving the jobs for their own boys from the war.

Even having a first story accepted had not proved very exciting. Dutch Mount and I sat across from each other in a car-card slogan advertising office, and the same mail brought each of us an acceptance from the same magazine — the old Smart Set.

‘My cheque was thirty - how much was yours?’

‘Thirty-five.’

The real blight, however, was that my story had been written in college two years before, and a dozen new ones hadn’t even drawn a personal letter. The implication was that I was on the down-grade at twenty-two. I spent the thirty dollars on a magenta feather fan for a girl in Alabama.

My friends who were not in love, or who had waiting arrangements with ‘sensible’ girls, braced themselves patiently for a long pull. Not I — I was in love with a whirlwind and I must spin a net big enough to catch it out of my head, a head full of trickling nickels and sliding dimes, the incessant music box of the poor. It couldn’t be done like that, so when the girl threw me over I went home and finished my novel. And then, suddenly, everything changed, and this article is about that first wild wind of success and the delicious mist it brings with it. It is a short and precious time - for when the mist rises in a few weeks, or a few months, one finds that the very best is over.

It began to happen in the autumn of 1919 when I was an empty bucket, so mentally blunted with the summer’s writing that I’d taken a job repairing car roofs at the Northern Pacific shops. Then the postman rang, and that day I quit work and ran along the street, stopping automobiles to tell friends and acquaintances about it — my novel This Side of Paradise was accepted for publication. That week the postman rang and rang, and I paid off my terrible small debts, bought a suit, and woke up every morning with a world of ineffable toploftiness and promise.

While I waited for the novel to appear, the metamorphosis of amateur into professional began to take place — a sort of stitching together of your whole life into a pattern of work, so that the end of one job is automatically the beginning of another. I had been an amateur before; in October, when I strolled with a girl among the stones of a southern graveyard, I was a professional and my enchantment with certain things that she felt and said was already paced by an anxiety to set them down in a story - it was called The Ice Palace and it was published later. Similarly, during Christmas week in St Paul, there was a night when I had stayed home from two dances to work on a story. Three friends called up during the evening to tell me I had missed some rare doings: a well-known man-about-town had disguised himself as a camel and, with a taxi-driver as the rear half, managed to attend the wrong party. Aghast with myself for not being there, I spent the next day trying to collect the fragments of the story.

‘Well, all I can say is it was funny when it happened.’ ‘No, I don’t know where he got the taxi-man.’ ‘You’d have to know him well to understand how funny it was.’

In despair I said:

‘Well, I can’t seem to find out exactly what happened but I’m going to write about it as if it was ten times funnier than anything you’ve said.’ So I wrote it, in twenty-two consecutive hours, and wrote it ‘funny’, simply because I was so emphatically told it was funny. The Camel’s Back was published and still crops up in the humorous anthologies.

With the end of the winter set in another pleasant pumped-dry period, and, while I took a little time off, a fresh picture of life in America began to form before my eyes. The uncertainties of 1919 were over - there seemed

little doubt about what was going to happen - America was going on the greatest, gaudiest spree in history and there was going to be plenty to tell about it. The whole golden boom was in the air - its splendid generosities, its outrageous corruptions and the tortuous death struggle of the old America in prohibition. All the stories that came into my head had a touch of disaster in them — the lovely young creatures in my novels went to ruin, the diamond mountains of my short stories blew up, my millionaires were as beautiful and damned as Thomas Hardy’s peasants. In life these things hadn’t happened yet, but I was pretty sure living wasn’t the reckless, careless business -these people thought — this generation just younger than me.

For my point of vantage was the dividing line between the two generations, and there I sat — somewhat self-consciously. When my first big mail came in — hundreds and hundreds of letters on a story about a girl who bobbed her hair - it seemed rather absurd that they should come to me about it. On the other hand, for a shy man it was nice to be somebody except oneself again: to be ‘the Author’ as one had been ‘the Lieutenant’. Of course one wasn’t really an author any more than one had been an army officer, but nobody seemed to guess behind the false face.

All in three days I got married and the presses were pounding out This Side of Paradise like they pound out extras in the movies.

With its publication I had reached a stage of manic-depressive insanity. Rage and bliss alternated hour by hour. A lot of people thought it was a fake, and perhaps it was, and a lot of others thought it was a lie, which it was not. In a daze I gave out an interview - I told what a great writer I was and how I’d achieved the heights. Heywood Broun, who was on my trail, simply quoted it with the comment that I seemed to be a very self-satisfied young man, and for some days I was notably poor company. I invited him to lunch and in a kindly way told him that it was too bad he had let his life slide away without accomplishing anything. He had just turned thirty and it was about then that I wrote a line which certain people will not let me forget: ‘She was a faded but still lovely woman of twenty-seven.’

In a daze I told the Scribner Company that I didn’t expect my novel to sell more than twenty thousand copies and when the laughter died away I was told that a sale of five thousand was excellent for a first novel. I think it was a week after publication that it passed the twenty thousand mark, but I took myself so seriously that I didn’t even think it was funny.

These weeks in the clouds ended abruptly a week later when Princeton turned on the book — not undergraduate Princeton but the black mass of faculty and alumni. There was a kind but reproachful letter from President Hibben, and a room full of classmates who suddenly turned on me with condemnation. We had been part of a rather gay party staged conspicuously in Harvey Firestone’s car of robin’s egg blue, and in the course of it I got an accidental black eye trying to stop a fight. This was magnified into an orgy, and in spite of a delegation of undergraduates who went to the board of Governors, I was suspended from my club for a couple of mondis. The Alumni Weekly got after my book and only Dean Gauss had a good word to say for me. The unctuousness and hypocrisy of the proceedings was exasperating and for seven years I didn’t go to Princeton. Then a magazine asked me for an article about it, and when I started to write it, I found I really loved the place and that the experience of one week was a small item in the total budget. But on that day in 1920 most of the joy went out of my success.

But one was now a professional - and the new world couldn’t possibly be presented without bumping the old out of the way. One gradually developed a protective hardness against both praise and blame. Too often people liked your things for the wrong reasons or people liked them whose dislike would be a compliment. No decent career was ever founded on a public and one learned to go ahead without precedents and without fear. Counting the bag, I found that in 1919 I had made $800 by writing, that in 1920 I had made $18,000, stories, picture rights, and book. My story price had gone from $30 to $1,000. That’s a small price to what was paid later in the Boom, but what it sounded like to me couldn’t be exaggerated.

The dream had been early realized and the realization carried with it a certain bonus and a certain burden. Premature success gives one an almost mystical conception of destiny as opposed to will-power - at its worst the Napoleonic delusion. The man who arrives young believes that he exercises his will because his star is shining. The man who only asserts himself at thirty has a balanced idea of what will-power and fate have each contributed, the one who gets there at forty is liable to put the emphasis on will alone. This comes out when the storms strike your craft.

The compensation of a very early success is a conviction that life is a romantic matter. In the best sense one stays young. When the primary objects of love and money could be taken for granted and a shaky eminence had lost its fascination, I had fair years to waste, years that I can’t honestly regret, in seeking the eternal Carnival by the Sea. Once in the middle twenties I was driving along the High Corniche Road through the twilight with the whole French Riviera twinkling on the sea below. As far ahead as I could see was Monte Carlo, and though it was out of season and there were no Grand Dukes left to gamble and E. Phillips Oppenheim was a fat industrious man in my hotel, who lived in a bath-robe - the very name was so incorrigibly enchanting that I could only stop the car and like the Chinese whisper: ‘Ah me!Ah me!’ It was not Monte Carlo I was looking at. It was back into the mind of the young man with cardboard soles who had walked the streets of New York. I was him again - for an instant I had the good fortune to share his dreams, I who had no more dreams of my own. And there are still times when I creep up on him, surprise him on an autumn morning in New York or a spring night in Carolina when it is so quiet that you can hear a dog barking in the next county. But never again as during that all too short period when he and I were one person, when the fulfilled future and the wistful past were mingled in a single gorgeous moment - when life was literally a dream.

PREFACE

This is the preface to the book Colonial and Historic Homes of Maryland by Don Swann, published in 1939.

FOREWORD

The undersigned can only consider himself a native of the Marylandfree State through ancestry and adoption. But the impression of the fames and the domains, the vistas and the glories of Maryland followed many a young man West after the Civil War and my father was of that number. Much of my early childhood in Minnesota was spent in asking him such questions as:

“ — and how long did it take Early’s column to pass Glenmary that day?” (That was a farm in MontgomeryCounty.)

and:

“ — what would have happened if Jeb Stewart’s cavalry had joined Lee instead of raiding all the way to Rockville?”

and:

“ — tell me again about how you used to ride through the woods with a spy up behind you on the horse.”

or:

“Why wouldn’t they let Francis Scott Key off the British frigate?”

And since so many legends of my family went west with father, memories of names that go back before Braddock’s disaster such as Caleb Godwin of Hockley-in-ye-Hole, or Philip Key of Tudor Hall, or Pleasance Ridgeley — so there must be hundreds and hundreds of families in such an old state whose ancestral memories are richer and fuller than mine.

But time obliterates people and memories and only the more fortunate landmarks survive. In the case of this fine book, it is upon the home above all that Don Swann has concentrated his talents and his painstaking research — the four walls (or sixteen as it may be) of Baronial Maryland, or the artistic result of the toil and sweat that some forever anonymous craftsman put into a balcony or a parquet. And outside this general range, the etcher has also paused here and there to jot down some detail of plainer houses that helps to make this a permanent record of the history of the Free State.

His work, naturally, will speak for itself, and, to allow it to do so, I cut short this prelude with the expression of high hopes for this venture by one of the State’s adopted sons.

Francis Scott Fitzgerald.

MY GENERATION

In 1918 the present writer stole an engine, together with its trustful engineer, and drove two hundred miles in it to keep from being A.W.O.L. He can still be tried for the offense, so the details must remain undisclosed. It is set down here only to bear witness to the fact that in those days we were red-blooded — Children! Don’t bring those parachutes into the house! All right, we’ll drop that approach altogether.

We who are now between forty and forty-five were born mostly at home in gaslight or in the country by oil lamps. Mewling and burping unscientifically in our nurses’ arms we were unaware of being the Great Inheritors — unaware that, as we took over the remnants of the crumbled Spanish Empire, the robe of primacy was being wrapped around our little shoulders. About ten million of us were born with the Empire, and in our first Buster Brown collars we were treated to a new kind of circuit parade, a Wild West Show on water — the Fleet was being sent on a trip to show the world. At the turn of the previous century — in 1800 — it had likewise been bracing to be an American, but that was from ignorance, for beyond our own shore we were a small potato indeed. This time, though, there was no doubt of it — when even our nursery books showed the last sinking turrets of Cervera’s fleet we were incorrigibly a great nation.

We were the great believers. Edmund Wilson has remarked that the force of the disillusion in A Farewell to Arms derives from Hemingway’s original hope and belief. Without that he could not have written of the war: “…finally only the names of places had dignity. . . . Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.” Hemingway felt that way in 1918. In 1899 when he was born there was faith and hope such as few modern nations have known.

It is important just when a generation first sees the light — and by a generation I mean that reaction against the fathers which seems to occur about three times in a century. It is distinguished by a set of ideas, inherited in moderated form from the madmen and the outlaws of the generation before; if it is a real generation it has its own leaders and spokesmen, and it draws into its orbit those born just before it and just after, whose ideas are less clear-cut and defiant. A strongly individual generation sprouts most readily from a time of stress and emergency — tensity, communicated from parent to child, seems to leave a pattern on the heart. The generation which reached maturity around 1800 was born spiritually at Valley Forge. Its milk was the illiterate letters, the verbal messages, the casualty reports written during the desperate seven-year retreat from Massachusetts to the Carolinas — and the return back to the Virginia town; its toys were the flintlock in the corner, the epaulettes of a Hessian grenadier; its first legend the print of Washington on the schoolroom wall. It grew up to be the hard-boiled generation of Andrew Jackson and Daniel Webster, Fulton and Eli Whitney, Lewis and Clark. Its few authors, Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper, struggled to give America a past, a breathing record of those who had known its forests and fields and towns, a special service for its dead.

They were tougher and rougher than their fathers; they were adrift in a land more remote from the mainstream and all their doubt clothed them in desperation. They revived the duel, long moribund in England. They had a mess on their hands — Washington had died with more apprehension for the republic than he had felt at the lowest ebb of the revolution, and the forces of the time gave life a restless stamp. In retrospect the men seem all of one piece. When the last of them, old General Winfield Scott, watched a new tragedy begin at Bull Run there could have been few men alive to whom he could speak the language of his broken heart.

In haste let me add that my generation is very much alive. One of us recently married Hedy Lamarr!

II

We were born to power and intense nationalism. We did not have to stand up in a movie house and recite a child’s pledge to the flag to be aware of it. We were told, individually and as a unit, that we were a race that could potentially lick ten others of any genus. This is not a nostalgic article for it has a point to make — but we began life in post-Fauntleroy suits (often a sailor’s uniform as a taunt to Spain). Jingo was the lingo — we saw plays named Paul Revere and Secret Service and raced toy boats called the Columbia and the Reliance after the cup defenders. We carved our own swords whistling, Way Down in ColonTown, where we would presently engage in battle with lesser breeds. We sang Tease Me, Coax Me, Kiss Me Good Night, Dear Love, and // You Talk in Your Sleep Don’t Mention My Name (which, due to the malice of some false friends, was Fitzboomski all through the Russo-Japanese war). We made “buckboards” out of velocipede wheels and didn’t get a page in Life about it, and we printed our own photographs in fading brown and blue. The mechanical age was coming fast but many of the things we played with we made ourselves.

That America passed away somewhere between 1910 and 1920; and the fact gives my generation its uniqueness — we are at once prewar and postwar. We were well-grown in the tense Spring of 1917, but for the most part not married and settled. The peace found us almost intact — less than five percent of my college class were killed in the war, and the colleges had a high average compared to the country as a whole. Men of our age in Europe simply do not exist. I have looked for them often, but they are twenty-five years dead.

So we inherited two worlds — the one of hope to which we had been bred; the one of disillusion which we had discovered early for ourselves. And that first world was growing as remote as another country, however close in time. My father wrote the old-fashioned “s” in his youthful letters and as a boy during the Civil War was an integral part of the Confederate spy system between Washington and Richmond. In moments of supreme exasperation he said, “Confound it!” I live without madness in a world of scientific miracles where curses or Promethean cries are bolder — and more ineffectual. I do not “accept” that world, as for instance my daughter does. But I function in it with familiarity, and to a growing extent my generation is beginning to run it.

III

What are these men who, about the time of their majority, found themselves singing, “We’re in the army now.” Their first discovery of 1919 was that nobody cared. Cut out the war talk — every so often life was doomed to be a cockeyed and disorderly business. Forget quickly.

All right then. Hank McGraw, who had been a major in France, came back to Princeton and captained a winning football team — I never saw him play without wondering what he thought about it all. Tommy Hitchcock, who had escaped from Germany by jumping from a train, went up to Harvard — perhaps to find out why. The best musician I ever knew was so confused that he walked out to put shirts on girls in the Society Islands! Men of fifty had the gall to tell us that when their cellars were exhausted they would drink no more — but they had fixed it so we could start with rotgut right now. Most of us took a drink by that time but honestly it wasn’t our invention — though both moonshine and heavy necking, which had spread up from the Deep South and out of Chicago as early as 1915, were put upon our bill.

The truth was that we found the youth younger than ourselves, the sheiks and the flappers, rather disturbing. We had settled down to work. George Gershwin was picking out tunes between other peoples’ auditions in Tin Pan Alley and Ernest Hemingway was reporting the massacres in Smyrna. Ben Hecht and Charlie Mac-Arthur were watching the Chicago underworld in bud. Dempsey, scarred in reverse by the war, was becoming the brave of his day, while Tunney bided his time. Donald Peattie was coming into his inheritance of the woods and what he found there. George Antheil’s music and Paul Nelson’s suspended house were a little way off, but Vincent Youmans already had charmed his audience with “0 me, O my, O you.” Merian Cooper would fly a little longer as a soldier of fortune before settling down to make Chang and Grass. Denny Holden wasn’t through with war either — in his plane last summer perished a gallant and lively jack-of-many-trades whose life was a hundred stories.

The late Tom Wolfe left the Norfolk shipyards and went to college for more education. His end was so tragic that I am glad I knew him in carefree and fortunate times. He had that flair for the extravagant and fantastic which has been an American characteristic from Irving and Poe to Dashiell Hammett. He was six feet eight inches tall and I was with him one night on Lake Geneva when he found to his amazement that not only could he reach the street wires over his head but that when he pulled them he caused a blackout of Montreux. To the inquiring mind this is something of a discovery, not a thing that happens every day. I had a hard time getting Tom away from there quickly. Windows opened, voices called, there were running footsteps, and still Tom played at his blackout with the casualness of a conductor ringing up fares. We drove over the French border that night.

Wolfe was a grievous loss. With Hemingway, Dos Passos, Wilder and Faulkner he was one of a group of talents for fiction such as rarely appear in a single hatching. Each of these authors created a world quite his own and lived in it convincingly. Decimated Europe had nothing to set beside the work of these young men.

The poets of my time set a more precarious course, or so I believe, for the novel had become elastic enough to say almost anything. But some of the critics, Wilson, Mumford, Seldes among others, have had powerful influence upon the taste and interests of the past two decades. The playwrights, Sherwood and Behrman, Barry and Stallings, Hecht and MacArthur, have been so successful that they are now their own angels — contemplating a production, they call for the private sucker list, and find their own names at the top. And that art which stockholders, producers and public have kept in its perennial infancy owes a great debt to those two directors, Frank Capra and King Vidor, who have fought themselves free of producer’s control.

All in all it was a husky generation. Match me Tommy Hitchcock or Bill Tilden for sheer power of survival as champions. Outside of a few Eastern cities there was a vacant lot in every block and I played humbly on the same teams with future Minnesota linemen, a national golf medalist, Dudley Mudge, and a national amateur champion, Harrison Johnston.

Later, pursued from hideout to hideout by the truant officers, I came in early contact with a few incipient men of letters. I was at prep school in New Jersey with Pulitzer Prizeman Herbert Agar and novelists Cyril Hume and Edward Hope Coffey. Hope and I were destined to follow a similar pattern — to write librettos at Princeton, “drool” for the college comic and, later, college novels. But I remember him best when he was center and I was quarterback on the second team at school. We were both fifteen — and awful. There were a couple of one-hundred-eighty-pound tackles (one of them now headmaster for his sins) who liked to practice taking me out, and Hope gave me no protection — no protection at all — and I would have paid well for protection. We were the laziest and lowest-ranking boys in school.

In college I was luckier. I knew the future presidents of many banks and oil companies, the Governor of Tennessee, and among the intellectuals encountered John Peale Bishop, warbird ElliottSprings, Judge John Biggs and Hamilton Fish Armstrong. Of course I had no idea who they were, and neither did they, or I could have started an autographed tablecloth. Things were stirring: Richard Cleveland, Henry Strater and David Bruce led a revolt against the “social system.” Spence and Pumpelly and Charlie Taft did the same at Yale.

Next on my list I find Al Capone, born in 1899 — but he saw the light in Naples. Anyhow, it’s a good place to stop.

IV

Those I have mentioned are only a platoon in an army of five million. Are they representative of my generation — of those who have one foot planted before the war and one after it? They are at any rate the articulate and my claim is that they have not been “sheltered” — when any moppet assures me that we “lived in an ! Ivory Tower,” my blood boils and I weep into my paraldehyde. The Jungle and The Octopus were on our shelves before John Steinbeck ate the grape of wrath. In 1920 the present writer recommended the immediate machine-gunning of all men in a position to marry. The revolution wasn’t just around the corner — it was under my hat. But it is a fact that the capacity of this generation to believe has run very thin. The war, the peace, the boom, the Depression, the shadow of the new war scarcely correspond to the idea of manifest destiny. Many men of my age are inclined to paraphrase Sir Edward Grey of 1914 — “The lamps are going out all over the world; we shall not see them lit again in our time.”

It should be said that Steinbeck and Dr. Hutchins, Peter Arno and the late Irving Thalberg, Caldwell and O’Hara, Saroyan and Odets, Colonel Lindbergh and District Attorney Dewey were all too young to play on our team. Their experiences, achievements, and certainties are not of our world. We are closer in time to the hulk in a veteran’s hospital — for these younger men did not dance the Grizzly Bear and the Bunny Hug when one was risking ostracism, or march a thousand miles to Beautiful Katie. But they swim, one and all, in our orbit; as the painter Picasso says: “You do something first and then somebody comes along and does it pretty.” Easy with that space gun! You oughtn’t to point things! By and large I grant them a grace we do not have, and for all we know the Messiah may be among them. But we are something else again.

Well — many are dead, and some I have quarreled with and don’t see anymore. But I have never cared for any men as much as for these who felt the first springs when I did, and saw death ahead, and were reprieved — and who now walk the long stormy summer. It is a generation staunch by inheritance, sophisticated by fact — and rather deeply wise. More than that what I feel about them is summed up in a line of Willa Gather’s: “We possess together the precious, the incommunicable past.”

The Letters

Scott with Zelda, c. 1920

LIST OF CORRESPONDENTS

CONTENTS

To Zelda Fitzgerald

To Ernest Hemingway

To Frances Scott Fitzgerald

To Maxwell Perkins

To John Peale Bishop

To Mrs Bayard Turnbull

To Christian Gauss

To Harold Ober

To Mrs Richard Taylor

To Edmund Wilson

To Gerald and Sara Murphy

Other Letters

To Zelda Fitzgerald

5521 Amestoy Avenue

Encino, California

May 6, 1939

Dearest Zelda:

Excuse this being typewritten, but I am supposed to lie in bed for a week or so and look at the ceiling. I objected somewhat to that regime as being drastic, so I am allowed two hours of work every day.

You were a peach throughout the whole trip and there isn’t a minute of it when I don’t think of you with all the old tenderness and with a consideration that I never understood that you had before. Because I can never remember anything else but consideration from you, so perhaps that sounds a little too much like a doctor or someone who knew you only when you were ill.

You are the finest, loveliest, tenderest, most beautiful person I have ever known, but even that is an understatement because the length that you went to there at the end would have tried anybody beyond endurance. Everything that I said and that we talked about during that time stands - I had a wire from daughter in regard to the little Vassar girl, telling me her name, and saying that the whole affair was washed out, but I don’t feel at home with the business yet.

There was a sweet letter waiting here from you for me when I came.

With dearest love,

Scott

5521 Amestoy Avenue

Encino, California

June 8, 1939

Dearest Zelda:

I have two letters from you, one the airmail in regard to Scottie’s operation and the other evidently posted before you had received mine. While she is in Baltimore I am having a re-check by my old friend, Dr Louis Hamman. I gather that she has had several ‘attacks.’ On the other hand, I want to be absolutely sure that the operation is imperative. I tell you this because though she will come to Asheville in any case - I think you’d better not make absolute arrangements until I get the report Dr Hamman. She reaches Baltimore today the 8th (unless she stays over a day with Harold Ober or someone else in New York) and I should get the report from Dr Hamman about the 15th or 16th - that is a few days before she is due to arrive in Asheville I will airmail you immediately and then you can clinch whatever arrangements you find advisable.

Remember, I will take care of the business of notifying her, breaking the news by airmail as soon as I hear how long she expects to remain in Baltimore. I am glad, just as you are, that since this seems to be necessary, you will be able to be at her side.

I am awfully sorry about the news concerning your mother. This seems to be a big year for illness in our family. I shall certainly plan for you to go down to see her around your birthday time as soon as the matter of Scottie’s visit - with or without operation - is disposed of. Perhaps if by chance Dr Hamman doesn’t think the operation advisable we can think up some combination scheme.

In the meantime I see from your last letter you were still worried about my health. Only last night I saw the doctor who tells me that I am already 60% better (I quote him exactly) than I was a month ago - and during that time I have blocked out a novel, completed and sold a story to Colliers magazine and over half-finished what will be a two-parter for The Saturday Evening Post - so you see I cannot possibly be very sick. What is the matter with me is quite definite and quite in control - the cause was overwork at the studios, and the cause being removed the illness should decrease at a faster rate than that at which it was contracted.

I am sitting outdoors as I dictate this and the atmosphere has just a breath of the back country plains in it, dry and hot, though the surrounding landscaped gardens are green and cool, very different from Asheville mountains, but I never had your gift for seeing nature plainly and putting her into vivid phrasing so I am afraid I can’t explain to you exactly what kind of country it is until you come here and see. Now Hollywood seems far away though it is just over the mountains and you seem very near always.

Devotedly,

5521 Amestov Avenue

Encino,California

August, 1939

Dearest:

I know you’re going to miss Scottie and I hope August passes quickly for you. it seems strange that it’s here - this last month has been too much of a hell for me to help much, but now I can see light at the end of the passage. It was like 1935-1936 when no one but Mrs Owens and I knew how bad things were and all my products were dirges and elegies. Sickness and no money are a wretched combination. But, as I told you, there has not at least been an accumulation of debt and there are other blessings. I see that only the rich now can do the things you and I once did in Europe - it is a tourist-class world - my salary out here during those frantic 20 months turned out to be an illusion once Ober and the governments of the U.S. and Canada were paid and the doctors began.

Keep well. I’m going to try to. I’m glad your mother’s illness was a false alarm.

Have arranged for Scottie to have a piano nearby, the not in this cottage. She seems to have had a happy time with you. I have written two long and two short stories and wait daily for Swanson to find me a studio job that won’t be too much of a strain - no more 14-hour days at any price. By the time you get this I hope I’ll be paying the small (not formidable) array of bills that have accumulated. Here is another check to be used most sparingly. - not on presents but necessities of Scottie’s departure, etc. Her tickets and traveling money will reach there Tuesday morning if all goes well. Her rail fare, round trip, is only $78.50 round trip, with $5.00 extra fare both ways.

Dearest love.

Scott

Of course you can count on going South in September. We could even meet you there.

And the editorial comment about your paintings was a real thrill to me. We must do something about that soon.

5121 Amestoy Avenue

Encino,

California August 4, 1939

Dearest:

Scottie arrives tomorrow and I hope she’ll enjoy the weeks out here. She doesn’t like heat much and of course this is subtropical but there is a pool nearby belonging to the landlord and as I wrote you there are boys from the East, at least for the present.

Perhaps I was unwise in telling her so succinctly that she had no home except Vassar. On the other hand, she doesn’t see the matter in relation to the past. When I tried to make a home for her she didn’t want it, and I have a sick-man’s feeling that she will arrive in a manner to break up such tranquillity as I have managed to establish after this illness. Perhaps she has changed - but this is the first time in many years that you yourself have expressed pleasure in her filial behavior. I, too, have had that, though in short doses, ever since the spring of 1934. Perhaps the very shortness of the doses has been the fault and I hope this visit will be a remedy.

In theory I tend to disagree with you about doing her harm to know where she stands. Scottie at her best is as she is now with a sense of responsibility and determination. She is at her absolute worst when she lies on her back and waves her feet in the air - so incapable of gratitude of things arranged for (the golf at Virginia Beach, for instance, or the moving picture stuff here, has been accepted as her natural right as a princess). I was sorry for the women of fifty who applied for that secretarial job in Baltimore in 1932 - who had never before in their lives found that a home can be precarious. But I am not particularly sorry for a youngster who is thrown on his own at 14 or so and has to make his way through school and college, the old sink or swim spirit - I suppose, au fond, the difference of attitude between the North and the old South.

Anyhow, we shall think of you and talk of you a lot and look forward to seeing you and wish you were with us. I will have done something by the time you get this about your expense money there. — Dearest love.

5521 Amestoy Avenue

Encino,

California August 18, 1939

Dearest Zelda:

Got your letter from Saluda. Will absolutely try to arrange the Montgomery trip early in September. Your letter made me sad, and I wish I could say ‘Yes, go where you want right away’ - but it doesn’t take into consideration the situation here. I will be much better able to grapple with the problem and with Dr Carroll two weeks from now. A severe illness like mine is liable to be followed by a period of shaky morale and at the moment I am concerned primarily with keeping us all alive and comfortable. I’m working on a picture at Universal and the exact position is that if I can establish their confidence in the next week that I am of value on this job it will relieve financial pressure through the fall and winter.

Scottie is very pleasant and, within the limits of her age, very cooperative to date - on the other hard, she’s one more responsibility, as she learns to drive and brings me her work and this summer there is no Helen Hayes to take her on a glamor tour of Hollywood. All of which boils down to the fact that my physical energy is at an absolute minimum without being definitely sick and I’ve got to conserve this for my work. I am as annoyed at the unreliability of the human body as you are at the vagaries of the nervous system. Please believe always that I am trying to do my best for us all. I have many times wished that my work was of a mechanical sort that could be done or delegated irrespective of morale, for I don’t want or expect happiness for myself - only pence enough to keep us all going. Put your happiness I want exceedingly, just as I wart Scottie’s safety.

I am writing Dr Carroll a long letter in a week’s time of which I will send you a carbon. I have already written Dr Suitt about the swimming.

With dearest love,

Scott

5521 Amestoy Avenue

Encino,

California October 6, 1939

Dearest Zelda:

Living in the flotsam of the international situation as we all are, work has been difficult. I am almost penniless - I’ve done stories for Esquire because I’ve had no time for anything else with $100.00 bank balances. You will remember it took me an average of six weeks to get the mood of a Saturday Evening Post story.

But everything may be all right tomorrow. As I wrote you - or did I? - friends sent Scottie back to college. That seemed more important than any pleasure for you or me. There is still two hundred dollars owing on her tuition - and I think I will probably manage to find it somewhere.

After her, you are my next consideration; I was properly moved by your mother’s attempt to send for you - but not enough to go overboard. For you to go on your first excursion without a nurse, without money, without even enough to pay your fare back, when Dr Carroll is backing you, and when Scottie and I are almost equally as helpless in the press of circumstances as you - well, it is the ruse of a clever old lady whom I respect and admire and who loves you dearly but not wisely —

I ask only this of you - leave me in peace with my hemorrhages and my hopes, and what eventually will fight through as the right to save you, the permission to give you a chance.

Your life has been a disappointment, as mine has been too. But we haven’t gone through this sweat for nothing. Scottie has got to survive and this is the most important year of her life.

With dearest love always,

Scott

5521 Amestoy Avenue

Encino,

California January 31, 1940

Dearest Zelda:

The article arrived and from a first brief glance I shall say that it is going to be rather difficult to sell. However, I will read it thoroughly tonight and report. Even a very intellectual magazine like the Forum or the Atlantic Monthly prefers their essays to contain some certain number of anecdotes or some dialogue or some cohesive and objective events. Of course, you might claim that vour whole article was conversation and in a sense it is, but it is one person’s conversation and thus does not contain much conflict. However, I think it is damn good considering that your pen has been rusty for so long. Shall I suggest you some ideas which yoa might handle with more chance of realizing on them? Tell me.

Dear, I know no one in Asheville except a couple of secretaries and nurses and the clerks at the hotel. I was ill at the time I was there and confined to mv room most of the time so I have no idea how you would make business contacts. This seems to be a great year for art and I wish you would drop a line to Cary Ross or someone about your new paintings and see if there is some interest. That would be a more practical way of getting things in motion than taking up something you’re unfamiliar with.

All is the same here. I think I have a job for next week. I know I’ve finished a pretty good story - the first one adequate to the Post in several years. It was a hard thing to get back to. My God, what a fund of hope and belief I must have had in the old days! As I say, I will write you more about the story tomorrow.

Dearest love.

Scott

552 1 Amestoy Avenue

Encino,

California February 6, 1940

Dearest Zelda:

I understand your attitude completely and sympathize with it to a great extent. But the mood which considers any work beneath their talents doesn’t especially appeal to me in other people, though I acknowledge being sometimes guilty of it myself. At the moment I am hoping for a job at Republic Studios, the lowest of the low, which would among other things help to pay your hospital bill. So the fact that anything you do can be applied on your bill instead of on our jaunt to the Isles of Greece doesn’t seem so tough.

However, I am disappointed, with you, that the future Ruskins and Elie Faures and other anatomists of art will have to look at your windows instead of the mail hall. But something tells me that by the time this letter comes you will have changed your point of view. It is those people that have kept your talent alive when you willed it to sink into the dark abyss. Granted it’s a delicate thing - mine is so scarred and buffeted that I am amazed that at times it still runs clear. (God, what a mess of similes.) But the awful thing would have been some material catastrophe that would have made it unable to run at all.

Dearest love.

Scott

5521 Amestoy Avenue

Encino,

CaliforniaMarch 19, 1940

Dearest:

It seems to me best not to hurry things.

(a) — I’d like you to leave with the blessings of Dr Carroll (you’ve consumed more of his working hours than one human deserves of another - you’d agree if you’d see his correspondence with me.) Next to Forel he has been your eventual best friend - better even than Meyert (though this is unfair to Meyer who never claimed to be a clinician but only a diagnostician).

But to hell with all that, and with illness.

(b) — Also, you’d best wait because I will certainly have more money three weeks from now than at present, and (c) — If things develop fast Scottie can skip down and see you for a day during her vacation - otherwise you won’t see her before summer. This is an if!

I don’t think you fully realize the extent of what Scottie has done at Vassar. You wrote rather casually of two years being enough but it isn’t. Her promise is unusual. Not only did she rise to the occasion and get in young but she has raised herself from a poor scholar to a very passable one; sold a professional story at eighteen; and moreover in very highbrow, at present very politically minded Vassar she has introduced with some struggle a new note. She has written and produced a musical comedy and founded a club called the Omgim to perpetuate the idea - almost the same thing that Tarkington did in 1893 when he founded the Triangle at Princeton. She did this against tough opposition - girls who wouldn’t let her on the board of the daily paper because, though she could write, she wasn’t ‘politically conscious.’

We have every reason at this point to cheer for our baby. I would do anything rather than deny her the last two years of college which she has now earned. There is more than talent there - a real genius for organization.

Nothing has developed here. I write these ‘Pat Hobby’ stories - and wait. I have a new idea now - a comedy series which will get me back into the big magazines - but my God I am a forgotten man. Gatsbv had to be taken out of the Modern Library because it didn’t sell, which was a blow.

With dearest love always,

Scott

5521 Amestoy Avenue

Encino, California April 11, 1940

Dearest Zelda:

I got your wire today asking for $5.00 and simultaneously one came from Dr Carroll saying you were coming out. I don’t know what the rail fare to Montgomery is, but I am sending you herewith $60.00, which I hope will take care of your ticket, baggage, etc. You are leaving bills behind you, I know, which I will try to take care of as soon as I can. I have sent Jean West $25.00 on account. Moreover I have sent a check to your mother for your expenses when you get to Montgomery.

Now as to the general arrangement: I am starting to work on this ‘speculation’ job. That is, they are giving me very little money but if the picture is resold when finished the deal will be somewhat better. I hesitated about accepting it but there have been absolutely no offers in many months and I did it on the advice of my new agent. It is a job that should be fun and suitable to my still uneven state of health. (Since yesterday I seem to be running a fever again.) In any case we can’t go on living indefinitely on those Esquire articles. So you will be a poor girl for awhile and there is nothing much to do about it. I can manage to send you $30.000 a week of which you should pay your mother about $15.00 for board, laundry, light, etc. The rest will be in checks of alternately $10.00 and $20.00 - that is, one week the whole sum will amount to $35.00, one week $25.00, etc. This is a sort of way of saving for you so that in alternate weeks you will have a larger lump sum in case you need clothes or something.

You will be cramped by this at first - more so than in the hospital, but it is everything that I can send without putting Scottie to work which I absolutely refuse to do. I don’t think you can promise a person an education and then snatch it away from them. If she quit Vassar I should feel like quitting all work and going to the free VeteransHospital where I probably belong.

The main thing is not to run up bills or wire me for extra funds. There simply aren’t any and as you can imagine I am deeply in debt to the government and everyone else. As soon as anything turns up I will naturally increase your allowance so that you will have more mobility, clothes, etc.

I am moving in town to be near my work. For the present, will you please address me care of my new agent, Phil Berg, 9484 Wilshire Boulevard, Beverly Hills, California? If you forget, ‘General Delivery, Encino’ will be forwarded to me also. As soon as I have a new permanent address I will write to you. I do hope this goes well. I wish you were going to brighter surroundings but this is certainly not the time to come to me and I can think of nowhere else for you to go in this dark and bloody world. I suppose a place is what you make it but I have grown to hate California and would give my life for three years in France. So bon voyage and stay well.

Dearest love.

Scott

5521 Amestoy Avenue

Encino, California May 4, 1940

Dearest Zelda:

I sympathize with your desire to do something. Why can’t you hire a cool room somewhere for a studio? All you’d need is an easel, a chair and a couch and I think you have an easel somewhere. I think with Marjorie’s help you could get it for almost nothing and perhaps after next week I can help more (I go according to the fever - if it stays around 99 I feel rash, if it runs up over a degree at a daily average I get alarmed and think we mustn’t get stony broke like last fall). My ambition is to pay the government who’ve laid off me so far. I don’t know what they’d annex except my scrapbook.

Will return the clipping Monday - she’s a smooth enough kid* (for which I take most of the credit except for the mouth, legs and personal charm, and barring the wit which comes from us both) - anyhow she’s the best kind a good deal of figuring out could do. She’s not as honest as either you or me but maybe she didn’t have as much to conceal.

I hope you’re happy. I wish you read books (you know those things that look like blocks but come apart on one side) - I mean loads of books and not just early Hebrew metaphysics. If you did I d advise you to try some short stories. You never could plot for shocks but you might try something along the line of Gogol’s The Cloak’ or Chekhov’s ‘The Darling.’ They are both in the Modern Library’s Best Russian Short Stories which the local Carnegie may have in stock.

Don’t waste your poor little income on wires to me - unless the money doesn’t come.

Yours at about 99.7,

Scott

P.S. Love to all. Excuse the bitter tone. I’ve overworked on the goddamn movie and am in bed for the day.

5521 Amestoy Avenue

Encino,California

May 11, 1940

Dearest Zelda:

Sorry I wrote you such a cross letter last week and I miss getting an answer from you. Things are better. The awful cough I had died down, the temperature fell and I’ve worked hard this week with apparently no ill effect except that I’m looking forward tomorrow to a peaceful Sunday spent in bed with Churchill’s Life of Marlborough. Funny that he should be Prime Minister at last. Do vou remember luncheon at his mother’s house in 1920 and Jack Churchill who was so hard to talk to at first and turned out to be so pleasant? And Lady Churchill’s call on the Countess of Bvnq whose butler was just like the butler in Alice in Wonderland? I thank God they’ve gotten rid of that old rapscallion, Chamberlain. It’s all terribly sad and as you can imagine I think of it night and day.

Also I think I’ve written a really brilliant continuity. It had better be for it seems to be a last life line that Hollywood has thrown me. It is a strong life line - to write as I please upon a piece of my own and if I can make a reputation out here (one of those brilliant Hollywood reputations which endure all of two months sometimes) now will be the crucial time.

Have a cynical letter from Scottie about the Princeton prom. Thank God I didn’t let her start to go at sixteen or she would be an old jade by now. Tell me something of your life there - how you like your old friends, your mother’s health, etc., and what you think you might do this summer during the hottest part. I should have said in my letter that if you want to read those stories upon which I think you might make a new approach to writing some of your own, order Best Russian Stories, Modern Library edition, from Scribners and they will charge it to me.

Next week I’ll be able to send you what I think is a permanent address for me for the summer - a small apartment in the heart of the city. Next fall if the cough is still active I may have to move again to some dry inland atmosphere.

Love to all of you and especially yourself.

Dearest love.

Scott

5521Amestoy Avenue

Encino,

California May 18, 1940

Dearest Zelda:

It’s hard to explain about the Saturday Evening Post matter. It isn’t that I haven’t tried, but the trouble with them goes back to the time of Lorimer’s retirement in 1935.I wrote them three stories that year and sent them about three others which they didn’t like. The last story they bought they published last in the issue and my friend, Adelaide Neil on the staff, implied to me that they didn’t want to pay that big price for stories unless they could use them in the beginning of the issue. Well, that was the time of my two- year sickness, T.B., the shoulder, etc., and you were at a most crucial point and I was foolishly trying to take care of Scottie and for one reason or another I lost the knack of writing the particular kind of stories they wanted.

As you should know from your own attempts, high-priced commercial writing for the magazines is a very definite trick. The rather special things that I brought to it, the intelligence and the good writing and even the radicalism all appealed to old Lorimer who had been a writer himself and liked style. The man who runs the magazine now is an up-and-coming young Republican who gives not a damn about literature and who pub. lishes almost nothing except escape stories about the brave fron tiersmen, etc., or fishing, or football captains - nothing that would even faintly shock or disturb the reactionary bourgeois. Well I simply can’t do it and, as I say, I’ve tried not once but twenty times.

As soon as I feel I am writing to a cheap specification my pen freezes and my talent vanishes over the hill, and I honestly don’t blame them for not taking the things that I’ve offered to them from time to time in the past three or four years. An explanation of their new attitude is that you no longer have a chance of selling a story with an unhappy ending (in the old days many of mine did have unhappy endings - if you remember). In fact the standard of writing from the best movies, like Rebecca, is, believe it or not, much higher at present than that in the commercial magazines such as Colliers and the Post.

Thank you for your letter. California is a monotonous climate and already I am tired of the flat, scentless tone of the summer. It is fun to be working on something I like and maybe in another month I will get the promised bonus on it and be able to pay last year’s income tax and raise our standard of living a little.

Love to you all and dearest love to you.

Scott

P.S. I am sending you the copy of the article you sent me about Scottie. You said something about giving it to Mrs McKinney.

1401 North Laurel Avenue

Hollywood,

California June 7, 1940

Dearest Zelda:

The Harvard Summer School idea seemed better for Scottie than her going to Virginia. You remember your old idea that people ought to be born on the shores of the North Sea and only in later life drift south toward the Mediterranean in softness? Now all the Montague Normans, Lady Willerts, Guinnesses, Vallam- brosas etc., who loafed with us in the South of France through many summers seem to have dug themselves into an awful pit. I want Scottie to be hardy and keen and able to fight her own battles and Virginia didn’t seem to be the right note - however charming.

I’ll be sending you a semi-permanent address any day now.

Dearest love.

Scott

1403 North Laurel Avenue

Hollywood,

California

June 14, 1940

Dearest Zelda:

At the moment everything is rather tentative. Scottie is coming South about the 20th and after that wants to go to summer school at Harvard. If I can possibly afford it I want her to go. She wants an education and has recently shown that she has a right to it. You will find her very mature and well-informed. My feeling is that we are in for a ten-year war and that perhaps one more year at Vassar is all she will have - which is one reason why the summer school appeals to me. If I can manage that for a month, then perhaps I can manage the seashore for you in August - by which time you will have had a good deal of Montgomery weather. A lot depends on whether my producer is going to continue immediately with ‘Babylon Revisited’ - or whether any other picture job turns up. Things are naturally shot to hell here with everybody running around in circles yet continuing to turn out two-million-dollar tripe like All This and Heaven Too.

Twenty years ago This Side of Paradise was a best seller and we Were settled in Westport. Ten years ago Paris was having almost its last great American season but we had quit the gay parade and you were gone to Switzerland. Five years ago I had my first bad stroke of illness and went to Asheville. Cards began falling badly for us much too early. The world has certainly caught up in the last four weeks. I hope the atmosphere in Montgomery is tranquil and not too full of war talk.

Love to all of you.

Scott

1403 North Laurel Avenue

Hollywood,

California July 6, 1940

Dearest Zelda:

I enjoyed reading the interview given out by our learned Scottie. I’m glad to know she spends her time thinking about strikes, relief and starvation while feeling no slightest jealousy of the girls with silver foxes who choose to recline on country club porches. It shows that we have hatched a worthy egg and I do not doubt that someday, like George Washington, she will ‘raise that standard to which all good men can repair.’

Seriously, I never heard such a bunch of hokum in my life as she sold that newspaper reporter but I’m glad she has one quality which I have found almost as valuable as positive original’ty, viz.: she can make the most of what she has read and heard - make a few paragraphs from Marx, John Stuart Mill, and The New Republic go further than most people can do with years of economic study. That is one way to grow learned, first pretend to be - then have to live up to it.

She has just shown her keenness in another way by taking me for $100.00 more advance money for the summer school than I had expected to pay, leaving me with a cash balance of $11.00 at date. Don’t bawl her out for this. Leave it to me because it most certainly will come out of her allowance and it was honestly nothing but carelessness in getting the exact data from the summer school. However, it affects you to this extent - that I’m going to ask you that if these checks reach you Monday not to cash them until Tuesday. It will be perfectly safe to cash them Tuesday because I’m getting a payment on the story at which I am back at work. The majority of the payment ($900.00) goes to Uncle Sam. $300.00 goes against a loan already made against it and the rest will be distributed for our needs during the next three weeks - so please if you have any extra funds save them for any emergency. We have done our share of lending and giving over many years and we must all watch our money.

Tell me what you do. Cousin Ceci writes that my Aunt Elise died last April at the age of ninety. I was fond of that old woman and I hadn’t yet assimilated her passing.

With dearest love always,

Scott

1403 North Laurel Avenue

Hollywood,

California July 12, 1940

Dearest Zelda:

You never tell me if you are painting or not, or what you are writing if anything. I spent a silly day yesterday with Shirley Temple and her family. They want to do the picture and they don’t want to do the picture, but that’s really the producer’s worry and not mine. She’s a lovely little girl, beautifully brought up, and she hasn’t quite reached the difficult age yet - figuring the difficult age at twelve. She reminds me so much of Scottie in the last days at La Paix, just before she entered Bryn Mawr. You weren’t there the day of the Maryland Hunt Cup Race in the spring of ‘34 when Scottie got the skirt and coat from my mother which suddenly jumped her into adolescence. You may remember that she wore the little suit till she was about sixteen.

It’s hot as hell here today and I haven’t been able to work. I too have had only one letter from Scottie, but she seems to like Boston.

With dearest love,

Scott

1403 North Laurel Avenue

Hollywood,

California July 20, 1940

Dearest Zelda:

Thanks for your letter about what you are doing. I do wish you were sketching a little if only to keep your hand in. You’ve never done any drawing at all in Alabama and it’s so very different in flora and general atmosphere than North Carolina that I think it would be worthwhile to record your moods while down there. When times are a little calmer I think you ought to have a really inclusive exhibition of your pictures. Perhaps if the war is over next year it would be a good summer’s job for Scottie to arrange it - I mean fill the place that Cary Ross did six years ago. She would meet all sorts of interesting people doing it and I had an idea of suggesting it as her work for this August, but the war pushes art into the background. At least people don’t buy anything.

I am sending you Gertrude Stein’s new book which Max Perkins sent me. I am mentioned in it on some page - anyhow I’ve underlined it. On the back of the wrapping paper I’ve addressed it and stamped it to Scottie. She might like to look it over too. It’s a melancholy book now that France has fallen, but fascinating for all that.

Ten days more to go on the Temple picture.

With dearest love,

Scott

Please write me a few lines about your mother’s health. Is she well in general? Is she active? I mean does she still go downtown, etc., or does she only go around in automobiles? And tell me why you didn’t go to Carolina this year. Was it lack of funds or is the trip a little too much for her?

1403 North Laurel Avenue

Hollywood,

California August 24,1940

Dearest Zelda:

By the time you get this Scottie will have leisurely started South - with two or three stops. I’ve missed seeing her this summer but we’ve exchanged long letters of a quite intimate character in regard to life and literature. She is an awfully good girl in the broad fundamentals. Please see to one thing - that she doesn’t get into any automobiles with drunken drivers.

I think I have a pretty good job coming up next week - a possibility of ten weeks’ work and a fairly nice price at 20th Century- Fox. I have my fingers crossed but with the good Shirley Temple script behind me I think my stock out here is better than at any time during the last year.

With dearest love,

Scott

1403 North Laurel Avenue

Hollywood,

CaliforniaSeptember 5,1940

Dearest Zelda:

Here’s ten dollars extra as I thought that due to Scottie’s visit it might come in handy. Also I’m sending you Craven’s Art Masterpieces, a book of extraordinary reproductions that is a little art gallery in itself.

Don’t be deceived by this sudden munificence - as yet I haven’t received a cent from my new job, but in a wild burst of elation of getting it, I hocked the car again for J 150.00.

With dearest love, always,

Scott

1403 North Laurel Avenue

Hollywood,

CaliforniaSeptember 14, 1940

Dearest Zelda:

Am sending you a small check next week which you should really spend on something which you need - a winter coat, for instance - or, if you are equipped, to put it away for a trip when it gets colder. I can’t quite see you doing this, however. Do you have extra bills, dentist’s, doctors’, etc., and, if so, they should be sent to me as I don’t expect you to pay them out of the thirty dollars.

And I certainly don’t want your mother to be in for any extras. Is she?

This is the third week of my job and I’m holding up very well but so many jobs have started well and come to nothing that I keep my fingers crossed until the thing is in production. Paramount doesn’t want to star Shirley Temple alone on the other picture and the producer can’t find any big star who will play with her so we are temporarily held up.

As I wrote you, Scottie is now definitely committed to an education and I feel so strongly about it that if she wanted to go to work I would let her really do it by cutting off all allowance. What on earth is the use of having gone to so much time and trouble about a thing and then giving it up two years short of fulfilment. It is the last two years in college that count. I got nothing out of my first two years - in the last I got my passionate love for poetry and historical perspective and ideas in general (however superficially); it carried me full swing into my career. Her generation is liable to get only too big a share of raw life at first hand.

Write me what you do?

With dearest love,

Scott

P.S. Scottie may quite possibly marry within a year and then she is fairly permanently off my hands. I’ve spent so much time doing work that I didn’t particularly want to do that what does one more year matter? They’ve let a certain writer here direct his own pictures and he has made such a go of it that there may be a different feeling about that soon. If I had that chance, I would attain my real goal in coming here in the first place.

1403 North Laurel Avenue

Hollywood,

CaliforniaSeptember 21,1940

Dearest Zelda:

So glad you like the art book. I would like to hear of your painting again and I meant it when I said next summer if the war is settled down you ought to have another exhibition.

Scottie went to Baltimore as she planned and I finally got a scrap of a note from her but I imagine most of her penmanship was devoted to young men. I think she’s going back with the intention, at least, of working hard and costing little.

I don’t know how this job is going. It may last two months - it may end in another week. Things depend on such hairlines here - one must not only do a thing well but do it as a compromise, sometimes between the utterly opposed ideas of two differing executives. The diplomatic part in business is my weak spot.

However, the Shirley Temple script is looking up again and is my great hope for attaining some real status out here as a movie man and not a novelist.

With dearest love,

Scott

1403 North Laurel Avenue

Hollywood,

CaliforniaSeptember 28, 1940

Dearest Zelda:

Autumn comes - I am forty-four - nothing changes. I have not heard from Scottie since she got to Vassar and from that I deduce she is extremely happy, needs nothing, is rich - obviously prosperous, busy and self-sufficient. So what more could I want? A letter might mean the opposite of any of these things.

I’m afraid Shirley Temple will be grown before Mrs Temple decides to meet the producer’s terms of this picture. It wouldn’t even be interesting if she’s thirteen.

Tomorrow I’m going out into society for the first time in some months - a tea at Dottie Parker’s (Mrs Alan Campbell), given for Don Stewart’s ex-wife, the Countess Tolstoy. Don’t know whether Don will be there or not. Ernest’s book is the’Book-of-the-Month.’ Do you remember how superior he used to be about mere sales? He and Pauline are getting divorced after ten years and he is marrying a girl named Martha Gellhorn. I know no news of anyone else except that Scottie seems to have made a hit in Norfolk.

Dearest love.

Scott

1403 North Laurel Avenue

Hollywood,

California October 5, 1940

Dearest Zelda:

Enjoyed your letter - especially the consoling line about the Japanese being a nice clean people. A lot of the past came into that party. Fay Wray, whose husband, John Monk Saunders, committed suicide two months ago; Deems Taylor, whom I hadn’t seen twice since the days at Swope’s;  Frank Tuttle of the old Film Guild. There was a younger generation there too and I felt very passé and decided to get a new suit.

With dearest love,

Scott

1403 North Laurel Avenue

Hollywood,

California October 11, 1940

Dearest Zelda; Another heat wave is here and reminds me of last year at the same time. The heat is terribly dry and not at all like Montgomery and is so unexpected. The people feel deeply offended, as if they were being bombed.

A letter from Gerald yesterday. He has no news except a general flavor of the past. To him, now, of course, the Riviera was the best time of all. Sara is interested in vegetables and gardens and all growing and living things.

I expect to be back on my novel any day and this time to finish, a two months’ job. The months go so fast that even Tender Is the Night is six years’ away. I think the nine years that intervened between The Great Gatsby and Tender hurt my reputation almost beyond repair because a whole generation grew up in the meanwhile to whom I was only a writer of Post stories. I don’t suppose anyone will be much interested in what I have to say this time and it may be the last novel I’ll ever write, but it must be done now because, after fifty, one is different. One can’t remember emotionally, I think, except about childhood but I have a few more things left to say.

My health is better. It was a long business and at any time some extra waste of energy has to be paid for at a double price. Weeks of fever and coughing - but the constitution is an amazing thing and nothing quite kills it until the heart has run its entire race. I’d like to get East around Christmas-time this year. I don’t know what the next three months will bring further, but if I get a credit on either of these last two efforts things will never again seem so black as they did a year ago when I felt that Hollywood had me down in its books as a ruined man - a label which I had done nothing to deserve.

With dearest love,

Scott

1403 North Laurel Avenue

Hollywood,

CaliforniaOctober 19,1940

Dearest Zelda:

I’m trying desperately to finish my novel by the middle of December and it’s a little like working on Tender Is the Night at the end - I think of nothing else. Still haven’t heard from the Shirley Temple story but it would be a great relaxation of pressure if she decides to do it, though an announcement in the paper says that she is going to be teamed with Judy Garland in Little Eva, which reminds me that I saw the two — Sisters both grown enormously fat in the Brown Derby. Do you remember them on the boat with Viscount Bryce and their dogs?

My room is covered with charts like it used to be for Tender Is the Night, telling the different movements of the characters and their histories. However, this one is to be short, as I originally planned it two yean ago, and more on the order of Gatsby.

Dearest love.

1403 North Laurel Avenue

Hollywood,

CaliforniaOctober 23, 1940

Dearest Zelda:

Advising you about money at long distance would be silly but you feel we’re both concerned in the Carroll matter. Still and all I would much rather you’d leave it to me and keep your money, I sent them a small payment last week. The thing is I have budgeted what I saved in the weeks at 20th

Century-Fox to last until December 15th so I can go on with the novel with the hope of having a full draft by then. Naturally I will not realize anything at once except on the very slim chance of a serial) and though I will try to make something immediately out of pictures or Esquire it may be a pretty slim Christmas. So my advice is to put the hundred and fifty away against that time.

I am deep in the novel, living in it, and it makes me happy. It is a constructed novel like Gatsby, with passages of poetic prose when it fits the action, but no ruminations or side-shows like Tender. Everything must contribute to the dramatic movement.

It’s odd that my old talent for the short story vanished. It was partly that times changed, editors changed, but part of it was tied up somehow with you and me - the happy ending. Of course every third story had some other ending, but essentially I got my public with stories of young love. I must have had a powerful imagination to project it so far and so often into the past.

Two thousand words today and all good.

With dearest love.

Scott

1403 North Laurel Avenue

Hollywood,

CaliforniaOctober 26, 1940

Dearest Zelda:

Ernest sent me his book and I’m in the middle of it. It is not as good as the Farewell to Arms. It doesn’t seem to have the tensity or the freshness nor has it the inspired poetic moments. But I imagine it would please the average type of reader, the mind who used to enjoy Sinclair Lewis, more than anything he has written. It is full of a lot of rounded adventures on the Huckleberry Finn order and of course it is highly intelligent and literate like everything he does. I suppose life takes a good deal out of you and you never can quite repeat. But the point is, he is making a fortune out of it - has sold it to the movies for over a hundred thousand dollars and as it’s the Book-of-the-Month selection he will make $50,000 from it in that form. Rather a long cry from his poor rooms over the saw mill in Paris.

No news except that I’m working hard, if that is news, and that Scottie’s story appears in The New Yorker this week.

With dearest love,

Scott

1403 North Laurel Avenue

Hollywood,

California November 2, 1940

Dearest Zelda:

Listening to the Harvard and Princeton game on the radio reminds me of the past that I lived a quarter of a century ago and Scottie is living now. I hear nothing from her though I imagine she is at Cambridge today.

The novel is hard as pulling teeth but that is because it is in its early character-planting phase. I feel people so less intently than I did once that this is harder. It means welding together hundreds of stray impressions and incidents to form the fabric of entire personalities. But later it should go faster. I hope all is well with you.

With dearest love,

Scott

1403 North Laurel Avenue

Hollywood,

California November 9, 1940

Dearest Zelda:

Got into rather a fret about Scottie last week, which however came out all right. She went to the infirmary with grippe and then in spite of my telegrams to everyone there, including the dean, Scottie and the infirmary itself, darkness seemed to close about her. I could get no information. Her weekly letter was missing. As I say, it turned out all right. She had been discharged and was probably out of town but I wrote her a strong letter that she must keep me informed of her general movements - not that I have any control over them or want any because she is after all of age and capable of looking after herself but one resents the breaking of a habit and I was used to hearing about her once a week.

I’m still absorbed in the novel which is growing under my hand - not as deft a hand as I’d like - but growing.

With dearest love always,

Scott

1403 North Laurel Avenue

Hollywood,

California November 16, 1940

Dearest Zelda:

I’m still listening to Yale-Princeton, which will convince you I spend all my time on the radio. Have had to lay off Coca-Cola, hence work with an attack of avitaminosis, whatever that is - it’s like a weight pressing on your shoulders and upper arms. Oh for the health of fifteen years ago!

I’d love to see anything you write so don’t hesitate to send it. I got the doctor’s bill which has been paid today. I liked Scottie’s little sketch, didn’t you?

With dearest love,

Scott

1403 North Laurel Avenue

Hollywood,

California November 23,1940

Dearest Zelda:

Enclosed is Scottie’s little story - she had just read Gertrude Stein’s Melanctha on my recommendation and the influence is what you might call perceptible.

The odd thing is that it appeared in eastern copies of The New Yorker and not in the western, and I had some bad moments looking through the magazine she had designated and wondering if my eyesight had departed.

The editor of Colliers wants me to write for them (he’s here in town), but I tell him I’m finishing my novel for myself and all I can promise him is a look at it. It will, at any rate, be nothing like anything else as I’m digging it out of myself like uranium - one ounce to the cubic ton of rejected ideas. It is a novel à la Flaubert without ‘ideas’ but only people moved singly and in mass through what I hope are authentic moods.

The resemblance is rather to Gatsby than to anything else I’ve written. I’m so glad you’re well and reasonably happy.

With dearest love,

Scott

P.S. Please send Scottie’s story back in your next letter - as it seems utterly impossible to get duplicates and I shall probably want to show it to authors and editors with paternal pride.

1403 North Laurel Avenue

Hollywood,

California December 6, 1940

Dearest Zelda:

No news except that the novel progresses and I am angry that this little illness has slowed me up. I’ve had trouble with my heart before but never anything organic. This is not a major attack but seems to have come on gradually and luckily a cardiogram showed it up in time. I may have to move from the third to the first floor apartment but I’m quite able to work, etc., if I do not overtire myself.

Scottie tells me she is arriving South Xmas Day. I envy you being together and I’ll be thinking of you. Everything is my novel now - it has become of absorbing interest. I hope I’ll be able to finish it by February.

With dearest love,

1403 North Laurel Avenue

Hollywood,

California December 13, 1940

Dearest Zelda:

Here’s why it would be foolish to sell the watch. I think I wrote you that over a year ago when things were very bad indeed I did consider pawning it as I desperately needed $200.00, for a couple of months. The price offered, to my astonishment, was $20.00, and of course I didn’t even consider it. It cost, I believe, $600.00. The reason for the shrinkage is a purely arbitrary change of taste in jewelry. It is actually artificial and created by the jewelers themselves. It is like the Buick we sold in 1927 - for $200.00 - to come back to America in ‘31 and buy a car of the same year and much more used for $400.00. If you have no use for the watch I think it would be a beautiful present for Scottie. She has absolutely nothing of any value and I’m sure would prize it highly. Moreover she never loses anything. If you preferred you could loan it to her as I think she’d get real pleasure out of sporting it.

The novel is about three-quarters through and I think I can go on till January 12 without doing any stories or going back to the studio. I couldn’t go back to the studio anyhow in my present condition as I have to spend most of the time in bed where I write on a wooden desk that I had made a year and a half ago. The cardiogram shows that my heart is repairing itself but it will be a gradual process that will take some months. It is odd that the heart is one of the organs that does repair itself.

I had a letter from Katharine Tighe the other day, a voice out of the past. Also one from Harry Mitchell who was my buddy at the Barron G. Collier Advertising Agency. And one from Max Perkins who is keen to see the novel and finally one from Bunny Wilson who is married now to a girl named Mary McCarthy who was an editor of The New Republic. They have a baby a year old and live in New Canaan.

I will write you again early next week in time for Christmas.

Dearest love.

P.S. I enclose the letter from Max, in fact two letters only I can’t find the one that just came. They will keep you au courant with the publishing world and some of our friends.

1403 North Laurel Avenue

Hollywood,

CaliforniaDecember 19, 1940

Dearest Zelda:

This has to be a small present this year but I figure Scottie’s present as a gift to you both and charge it off to you accordingly.

I am very anxious for Scottie to finish this year of college at least, so please do not stress to her that it is done at any inconvenience. The thing for which I am most grateful to my mother and father are my four years at Princeton, and I would be ashamed not to hand it on to another generation so there is no question of Scottie quitting. Do tell her this.

I hope you all have a fine time at Christmas. Much love to your mother and Marjorie and Minor and Nonny and Livy Hart and whoever you see.

Dearest love.

Scott

To Ernest Hemingway

14 rue de Tilsitt

Paris, France

Postmarked November 30,1925

Dear Ernest:

I was quite ashamed of the other morning. Not only in disturbing Hadley, but in foisting that — alias — upon you. However it is only fair to say that the deplorable man who entered your apartment Saturday morning was not me but a man named Johnston who has often been mistaken for me.

Zelda, evidences to the contrary, was not suffering from lack of care but from a nervous hysteria which is only relieved by a doctor bearing morphine. We both went to Belleau Wood next day to recuperate.

For some reason I told you a silly lie - or rather an exaggeration - silly because the truth itself was enough to make me sufficiently jubilant. The Saturday Evening Post raised me to $2750 and not $3000, which is a jump of $750.00 in one month. It was probably in my mind that I could not get $3000 from the smaller magazines. The Post merely met the Hearst offer, but that is something they seldom do.

What garbled versions of the McAlmon episode or the English orgy we lately participated in I told you, I don’t know. It is true I saved McAlmon from a beating he probably deserved and that we went on some wild parties in London with a certain Marchioness of Milford Haven whom we first met with Tallulah Bankhead. She was about half royalty, I think. Anyhow she was very nice - anything else I may have added about the relations between the Fitzgeralds and the house of Windsor is pure fiction.

I’m crazy to read the comic novel. Are you going to the Mac- Leishes’ Tuesday? I hope Hadley is well now. Please believe me that we send our best wishes to Ernest M. Hemingway.

Scott

Villa St Louis

Juan-les-Pins

August or September, 1926

Dear Ernest:

Sorry we missed you and Hadley. No news. I’m on the wagon and working like hell. Expect to sail for N.Y. December 10th from Genoa on the Conte Biancamano. Will be here till then. Saw bullfight in Fréjus. Bull was euneuch (sp.). House barred and dark.

Front door chained. Have made no enemies for a week. —

domestic row ended in riot. Have new war books by Pierrefeu. God is love.

Signed, Ernestine Murphy

Did you read in the N.Y. Herald about ‘... Henry Carpenter, banker, and Willie Stevens, half wit,...’

Villa St Louis

Juan-les-Pins

Fall, 1926

We were in a back-house in Juan-les-Pins. Bill had lost control of his sphincter muscles. There were wet MaFins in the rack beside the door. There were wet Eclaireurs de Nice in the rack over his head. When the King of Bulgaria came in, Bill was just firing a burst that struck the old limeshit twenty feet down with a splat-tap. All the rest came just like that The King of Bulgaria began to whirl round and round.

The great thing in these affairs -’ he said.

Soon he was whirling faster and faster. Then he was dead.

At this point in my letter my 30th birthday came and I got tight for a week in the company of such fascinating gents as Mr Theodore Rousseau and other ornaments of what is now a barren shore.

Ernest of little faith, I hope the sale of ‘The Killers’ will teach you to send every story either to Scribners or an agent. Can’t you get Today Is Friday’ back? Your letter depressed and rather baffled me. Have you and Hadley permanently busted up, and was the necessity of that what was on your soul this summer? Don’t answer this unless you feel like it. Anyhow I’m sorry everything’s such a mess and I do want to see you if you come to Marseille in October.

We saw the--- — s before they left, got stewed with them (at their party) - that is we got stewed - and I believe there was some sort of mawkish reconciliation. However they’ve grown dim to me and I don’t like them much any more. — s too have grown shadowy - he’s so nice, but she’s a club woman at heart and made a great lot of trouble in subtle ways this summer. We saw — the day she left and the huge Garoupe standing desolate, and her face, and the pathetic bales of chiclets for the Garoupe beach in her bedroom are the strongest impression I have left of a futile and petty summer. It might all have happened at Roslyn, Long Island.

Swimming’s almost over now. We have our tickets for America December 10th on the Conte Biancamano - we’ll spend the winter in New York. — was here with his unspeakably awful wife.

He seems anemic and washed out, a memory of the past so far as I’m concerned.

I’m glad as hell about the story and I hope it’s the first of many. I feel too much at loose ends to write any more tonight Remember - if I can give you any financial help let me know.

Always your friend,

Scott

I had a lot more to say but it’s 3:30 A.M. and I’ve been working since 11 this morning and it’s very hazy. Have you read The Spanish Farm and Sixty-four, ninety-four! by Mottram? Wonderful war books. Much better than Ford Madox Ford. In fact the best thing I’ve read this summer. Met your cousin from Princeton!

Villa St Louis Juan-les-Pins

December, 1926

Dear Ernest:

We leave this house Tuesday for Genoa and New York. I hope everything’s going better for you. If there is anything you need done here as in America - anything about your work, or money, or human help under any head - remember you can always call on Your devoted friend,

Scott

S.S. Conte Biancamano

En route New York

Postmarked December 23, 1926

Dear Ernest:

Your letter depressed me - illogically because I knew more or less what was coming.

I wish I could have seen you and heard you, if you wished, give some sort of version of what happened to you. Anyhow I’m sorry for you and for Hadley and for Bumby and I hope some way you’ll all be content and things will not seem so hard and bad.

I can’t tell you how much our friendship has meant to me during this year and a half - it is the brightest thing in our trip to Europe for me. I will try to look out for your interests with Scribners in America, but I gather that the need of that is past now and that soon you’ll be financially more than on your feet.

I’m sorry you didn’t come to Marseille. I go back with my novel still unfinished and with less health and not much more money than when I came, but somehow content, for the moment, with motion and New York ahead and Zelda’s entire recovery - and happy about the amount of my book that I’ve already written.

I’m delighted with what press I’ve already seen of The Sun, etc. Did not realize that you had stolen it all from me but am prepared to believe that it’s true and shall tell everyone. By the way I liked it in print even better than in manuscript.

1st printing was probably 5000. 2nd printing may mean that they’ve sold 4500 so have ordered up 3000 more. It may mean any sale from 2500 to 5000, tho.

College Humor pays fine. No movie in Sun Also unless book is big success of scandal. That’s just a guess.

We all enjoyed ‘La vie est beau avec Papa.’ We agree with Bumby.

Always yours affectionately,

Scott

Write me care of Scribners.

Hotel RooseveltWashington, D.C.

March, 1927

Dear Ernest:

A line in terrible haste. Lunched with Mencken in Baltimore yesterday. He is just starting reading The Sun, etc. - has no recollection of having seen ‘BigTwo-Hearted River’ and admits confusion about two In Our Times. Got him to say he’d pay you $250.00 for anything of yours he could use. So there’s another market.

Told him about how you were going to beat him up. He’s a ‘peach of a fellow’ (no irony; just a slip of the pen). He’s thoroughly interested and utterly incapable of malice. Whole thing was simply rather sloppy, as he’s one of the busiest men in America.

The Killers’ was fine.

Your devoted friend,

Scott

Ellerslie

Edgemoor, Delamare

Postmarked April 18, 1927

Dear Ernest:

Your stories were great (in April Scribners). But like me you must beware Conrad rhythms in direct quotation from characters, especially if you’re pointing a single phrase and making a man live by it ‘In the fall the war was always there but we did not go to it any more’ is one of the most beautiful prose sentences I’ve ever read.

So much has happened to me lately that I despair of ever assimilating it - or forgetting it, which is the same thing.

I hate to think of your being hard up. Please use this if it would help. The Atlantic will pay about $200.00, I suppose. I’ll get in touch with Perkins about it when he returns from vacation (1 week). Won’t they advance you all you need on the book of stories? Your title is fine by the way. What chance of your crossing this summer? My novel to be finished July1st.

With eager and anxious good wishes,

Scott

Address for a year - EllerslieMansion, Edgemoor, Delaware. Huge old house on Delaware River. Pillars, etc. I am called ‘Colonel.’ Zelda ‘de old Missus.’

Ellerslie Edgemoor, Delaware

November, 1927

Dear Ernest:

Thousands will send you this clipping. I should think it would make you quite conscious of your public existence. It’s well meant - he praised your book a few days before.

The book is fine. I like it quite as well as The Sun, which doesn’t begin to express my enthusiasm. In spite of all its geographical and emotional rambling, it’s a unit, as much as Conrad’s books of Contes were. Zelda read it with fascination, liking it better than anything you’ve written. Her favorite was ‘Hills Like White Elephants,’ mine, barring ‘The Killers,’ was ‘Now I Lay Me.’ The one about the Indians was the only one that left me cold and I’m glad you left out ‘Up in Michigan.’ They probably belong to an earlier and almost exhausted vein.

‘In the fall the war was always there but we did not go to it any more.’ God, what a beautiful line. And the waking dreams in ‘Now I Lay Me’ and the whole mood of ‘Hills Like.’

Did you see the pre-view by that.... Rascoe who obviously had only read three stories but wanted to be up to the minute?

Max says it’s almost exhausted 7500 - however that was five days ago. I like your title - AH the Sad Young Men Without Women - and I feel my influence is beginning to tell. Manuel Garcia is obviously Gatsby. What you haven’t learned from me you’ll get from Good Woman Bromfield and soon you’ll be Marching in the Van of the Younger Generation.

No work this summer but lots this fall. Hope to finish the novel by1st December. Have got nervous as hell lately - purely physical but scared me somewhat - to the point of putting me on the wagon and smoking denicotinized cigarettes. Zelda is ballet dancing three times a week with the Phila Symphony - painting also. I think you were wise not jumping at Hearst’s offer. I had a contract with them that, as it turned out, did me unspeakable damage in one way or another. Long is a sentimental scavenger with no ghost of taste or individuality, not nearly so much as Lorimer for example. However, why not send your stories to Paul Reynolds? He’ll be glad to handle them and will get you good prices. The Post now pays me $3500 - this detail so you’ll be sure who’s writing this letter.

I can’t tell you how I miss you. May cross for 6 weeks in March or April. The Grandmothers * was respectable but undistinguished, and are you coming home? Best to Pauline. With good wishes and affection,

Scott

Ellerslie, Edgemoor, Delaware

December, 1927

Dear Ernest:

Perkins sent me the check for 800 bits (as we westerners say), indicating, I hope, that you are now comfortably off in your own ascetic way. I am almost through my novel, got short and had to do three Post stories but as I am now their pet exhibit.... to the tune of 32,000 bits per felony it didn’t take long to come to the surface.

(This tough talk is not really characteristic of me - it’s the influence of AH the Sad Young Men Without Women in Love.) Louis Golding stepped off the boat and said you and I were the hope of American Letters (if you can find them) but aside from that things look black, ‘old pard’ - Brommy is sweeping the West, Edna Ferber is sweeping the East and Paul Rosenfeld is sweeping what’s left into a large ornate waste-basket, a gift which any Real Man would like, to be published in November under the title, The Real Leisure Class, containing the work of one-story Balzacs and poets so thin-skinned as to be moved by everything to exactly the same degree of mild remarking.

Lately I’ve enjoyed Some People, Bismarck (Ludwig’s), Him (in parts) and the Memoirs of Ludendorff. I have a new German war book, Die Krieg Against Krieg, which shows men who mislaid their faces in Picardy and the Caucasus - you can imagine how I thumb it over, my mouth fairly slithering with fascination.

If you write anything in the line of an ‘athletic’ story please try the Post or let me try them for you, or Reynolds. You were wise not to tie up with Hearst’s. They are absolute bitches who feed on contracts like vultures, if I may coin a neat simile.

I’ve tasted no alcohol for a month but Xmas is coming.

Please write me at length about your adventures - I hear you were seen running through Portugal in used B.V.D.S, chewing ground glass and collecting material for a story about boule players; that you were publicity man for Lindbergh; that you have finished a novel a hundred thousand words long consisting entirely of the word ‘balls’ used in new groupings; that you have been naturalized a Spaniard, dress always in a wine-skin with ‘zippervent and are engaged in bootlegging Spanish Fly between St Sebastian and Biarritz where your agents sprinkle it on the floor of the Casino. I hope I have been misinformed but, alas!, it all has too true a ring. For your own good I should be back there, with both of us trying to be good fellows at a terrible rate. Just before you pass out next time think of me.

This is a wowsy country but France is illegible and I hope to spend March and April, or April and May, there and elsewhere on the continent.

How are you, physically and mentally? Do you sleep? ‘Now I Lay Me’ was a fine story - you ought to write a companion piece, ‘Now I Lay Her.’ Excuse my bawdiness but I’m oversexed and am having saltpeter put in my Pâté de Foie Gras au Truffles Provençal.

Please write news. My best to Pauline - Zelda’s also to you both. God will forgive everybody - even Robert McAlmon and Burton Rascoe.

Always afftly,

Scott

Ellerslie

Edgemoor, Delaware

Postmarked December 28,1928

Dear Ernest:

I’m terribly sorry about your trouble. I guess losing parents is just one of the things that happens to one in the thirties - every time I see my father now I think it’s the last time.

Thank Pauline for the really beautiful Xmas card. It was great to have you both here, even when I was intermittently unconscious.

I send you what may be news, and what a nice precedent for beating up Mencken. Saw the Murphys for an hour in New York. We’re sailing March 1st and I hope to have the novel here. (Confidential about sailing though, until I’m sure - won’t go unless novel’s finished.) Ring thought you were fine - he was uncharacteristically enthusiastic.

I’m bored and somewhat depressed tonight so I won’t continue. Oh, yes -I met old H. Stearns just before leaving Paris and feeling drunk and Christ-like suggested a title to him, ‘Why I Go On Being Poor in Paris,’ told him to write it as an informal letter to me and I’d sell it. In a burst of energy he did and I sent it to Max who wrote a check for $100.00 for it. Now Harold writes me that $100 isn’t very much (as a matter of fact it isn’t much of a letter either) and exhibits such general dissatisfaction that I think he thinks I held out on him. You’ve got to be careful who you do favors for - within a year you’ll probably hear a story that what started him on his downward path was my conscienceless theft of his royalties.

Spengler’s second volume is marvelous. Nothing else is any good - when will you save me from the risk of memorizing your works from over-reading them by finishing another? Remember, Proust is dead - to the great envy of Your crony and gossip,

Scott

Paris, France

Postmarked May 17, 1929

Dear Herr Hemophile: or ‘Bleeding Boy’ as I sometimes call you.

Will you take salt with us on Sunday or Monday night? Would make great personal whoopee on receipt of favorable response. Send me a pneu or answer me in person, save between 3 and 7. Highest references, willing to travel - gens du monde, cultivé, sympathique cherche hôte pour dimanche ou lundi - answer because I shall probably ask Bishop, if you can come....

God save us, Preserve us, Bless us.

Yrs, in Xt

Fitzg —

12 Blvd. Eugène Gazagnaire Cannes, FranceAugust 23, 1929

Dear Ernest:

I’ve been working like hell, better than for four years, and now am confident of getting old faithful off before the ail-American teams are picked - hence the delay. I wrote Max (not mentioning your letter) one of those don’t- lose-your-head notes, though I, like you, never thought there was more than an outside chance of his being forced to let you down. I felt sure that if it came to a crisis he’d threaten to resign and force their hand.

The book sticks with me, by the way; I’m sure it’s all I thought at first and can’t wait to read it in printing letters.

It’s been gay here but we are, thank God, desperately unpopular and not invited anywhere. See the Murphys once a week or so - Gerald is older, less gay, more social, but not so changed as many people in five years. D. Parker is on the crest - the I didn’t see her as much as I’d liked.

Now - Ruth Goldbeck Voallammbbrrossa not only had no intention of throwing you out in any case, but has even promised on her own initiative to speak to whoever it is (she knows her) has the place. She is a fine woman, I think; one of the most attractive in evidence at this moment, in every sense, and is not deserving of that nervous bitterness.

Not knowing whether you’ve left Spain I’m sending this to Paris. Hoping you’ll be here in September for a week or so.

Bunny Wilson’s book  has a fascinating portrait of Dos in it, and is full of good things, and to me interesting throughout Oddly enough what it lacks is his old bogey, form. It is shapeless as Wells at his wildest, or almost Have read nothing good recently save a book on the Leopold- Loeb case and Harold Nicholson’s Trnnyson, neither recent.

This is a dull letter but it’s late and what’s left of the mind is tired.

Always afftly yours,

Scott

Best to Pauline.

Villa Fleur des Bois Cannes, France

September 9,1929

Dear Ernest:

I’m glad you decided my letter wasn’t snooty - it was merely hurried (incidentally I thought you wanted a word said to Ruth G. if it came about naturally - I merely remarked that you’d be disappointed if you lost your apartment - never a word that you’d been exasperated). But enough of pretty dismal matters - let us proceed to the really dismal ones. First the let me say that from Perkins’ last your book like Pickwick has become a classic while still in serial form. Everything looks bright as day for it and I envy you like hell but would rather have it happen to you than to anyone eke.

Just taken another chapter to typist’s and it’s left me in a terrible mood of depression as to whether it’s any good or not. In 2 1\2 months I’ve been here I’ve written 20,000 words on it and one short story, which is superb for me of late years. I’ve paid for it with the usual nervous depressions and such drinking manners as the lowest bistro (bistrot?) boy would scorn. My latest tendency is to collapse about 11:00 and, with the tears flowing from my eyes or the gin rising to their level and leaking over, tell interested friends or acquaintances that I haven’t a friend in the world and likewise care for nobody, generally including Zelda, and often implying current company - after which the current company tend to become less current and I wake up in strange rooms in strange places. The rest of the time I stay alone working or trying to work or brooding or reading detective stories - and realizing that anyone in my state of mind, who has in addition never been able to hold his tongue, is pretty poor company. But when drunk I make them all pay and pay and pay.

Among them has been — . Naturally she, having been in an equivalent state, lacks patience - (this isn’t snooty - no one likes to see people in moods of despair they themselves have survived). Incidentally the Murphys have given their whole performance for her this summer and I think, the she would be the last to admit it, she’s had the time of her life.

We’re coming to Paris for 2 months the 1st of October.

Your analysis of my inability to get my serious work done is too kind in that it leaves out the dissipation, but among acts of God it is possible that the 5 years between my leaving the army and finishing Gatsby (1919-1924) which included 3 novels, about 50 popular stories and a play and numerous articles and movies may have taken all I had to say too early, adding that all the time we were living at top speed in the gayest worlds we could find. This au fond is what really worries me - the the trouble may be my inability to leave anything once started. I have worked for 2 months over a popular short story that was foredoomed to being torn up when completed. Perhaps the house will burn down with this ms. and preferably me in it.

Always your stinking old friend,

Scott

I have no possible right to send you this gloomy letter. Really if I didn’t feel rather better with one thing or another I couldn’t have written it. Here’s a last flicker of the old cheap pride: the Post now pays the old whore $4000 a screw. But now it’s because she’s mastered the 40 positions - in her youth one was enough.

1307 Park Avenue

Baltimore,

Maryland

May 10,1934

Dear Ernest:

Did you like the book? For God’s sake drop me a line and tell me one way or another. You can’t hurt my feelings. I just want to get a few intelligent slants at it to get some of the reviewers’ jargon out of my head.

Ever friend,

Scott All I meant about the editing was that if I’d been in Max’s place I’d have urged you to hold the book t for more material. It had neither the surprise of I.O.T(nessessessarily) nor its unity, and it did not have as large a proportion of first-flight stories as M.W. W.  I think in a ‘general presentation’ way this could have been atoned for by sheer bulk. Take that opinion for what it’s worth.

On the other hand you can thank God you missed this publishing season 11 am 5th best seller in the country and haven’t broken 12,000.

1307 Park Avenue

Baltimore,

Maryland June 1, 1934

Dear Ernest:

Your letter crossed, or almost crossed, one of mine which I am glad now I didn’t send, because the old charming frankness of your letter cleared up the foggy atmosphere through which I felt it was difficult for us to talk any more.

Because I’m going egoist on you in a moment, I want to say that just exactly what you suggested, that the addition of that Chinamen-running story in the Cosmopolitan would have given Winner Take Nothing the weight that it needed, was in my head too. Allow me one more criticism, that while I admire your use of purely abstract titles I do not think that one was a particularly fortunate choice.

Next to go to the mat with you on a couple of technical points. The reason I had written you a letter was that Dos dropped in in passing through and said you had brought up about my book what we talked about once in a café on the Avenue de Neuilly about composite characters. Now, I don’t entirely dissent from the theory but I don’t believe you can try to prove your point on such a case as Bunny using his own father as the sire of John Dos Passos, or in the case of this book that covers ground that you personally paced off about the same time I was doing it. In either of those cases how could you trust your own detachment? If you had never met any of the originals then your opinion would be more convincing.

Following this out a little farther, when does the proper and logical combination of events, cause and effect, etc., end and the field of imagination begin? Again you may be entirely right because I suppose you were applying the idea particularly to the handling of the creative faculty in one’s mind rather than to the effect upon the stranger reading it. Nevertheless, I am not sold on the subject, and especially to account for the big flaws of Tender on that ground doesn’t convince me. Think of the case of the Renaissance artists, and of the Elizabethan dramatists, the first having to superimpose a medieval conception of science and archaeology, etc., upon the Bible story; and, in the second, of Shakespeare’s trying to interpret the results of his own observation of the life around him on the basis of Plutarch’s Lives and Hollinshed’s Chronicles. There you must admit that the feat of building a monument out of three kinds of marble was brought off. You can accuse me justly of not having the power to bring it off, but a theory that it can’t be done is highly questionable. I make this point with such persistence because such a conception, if you stick to it, might limit your own choice of materials. The idea can be reduced simply to: you can’t say accurately that composite characterization hurt my book, but that it only hurt it for you.

To take a case specifically, that of Gerald and Sara. I don’t know how much you think you know about my relations with them over a long time, but from certain remarks that you let drop, such as one ‘Gerald threw you over,’ I guess that you didn’t even know the beginning of our relations —

I think it is obvious that my respect for your artistic life is absolutely unqualified, that save for a few of the dead or dying old men you are the only man writing fiction in America that I look up to very much. There are pieces and paragraphs of your work that I read over and over - in fact, I stopped myself doing it for a year and a half because I was afraid that your particular rhythms were going to creep in on mine by process of infiltration. Perhaps you will recognize some of your remarks in Tender, but I did every damn thing I could to avoid that. (By the way, I didn’t read the Wescott story of Villefranche sailors till I’d done my own version. Think that was the wisest course, for me anyhow, and got a pleasant letter from him in regard to the matter.)

To go back to my theme song, the second technical point that might be of interest to you concerns direct steals from an idea of yours, an idea of Conrad’s and a few lines out of David-into-Fox- Garnett. The theory back of it I got from Conrad’s preface to The Nigger, that the purpose of a work of fiction is to appeal to the lingering after-effects in the reader’s mind as differing from, say, the purpose of oratory or philosophy which respectively leave people in a fighting or thoughtful mood. The second contribution to the burglary was your trying to work out some such theory in your troubles with the very end of A Farewell to Arms. I remember that your first draft - or at least the first one I saw - gave a sort of old-fashioned Alger book summary of the future lives of the characters: ‘The priest became a priest under Fascism,’ etc., and you may remember my suggestion to take a burst of eloquence from anywhere in the book that you could find it and tag off with that; you were against this idea because you felt that the true line of a work of fiction was to take a reader up to a high emotional pitch but then let him down or ease him off. You gave no aesthetic reason for this - nevertheless, you convinced me. The third piece of burglary contributing to this symposium was my admiration of the dying fall in the aforesaid Garnett’s book and I imitated it as accurately as it is humanly decent in my own ending of Tender, telling the reader in the last pages that, after all, this is just a casual event, and trying to let him come to bat for me rather than going out to shake his nerves, whoop him up, then leaving him rather in a condition of a frustrated woman in bed. (Did that ever happen to you in your days with McCallagan or McKisco, Sweetie?)

Thanks again for your letter which was damned nice, and my absolute best wishes to all of you. (By the way, where did you ever get the idea that I didn’t like Pauline, or that I didn’t like her as much as I should?) Of all that time of life the only temperamental coolness that I ever felt toward any of the people we ran around with was toward — , and even in that case it was never any more than that. I have honestly never gone in for hating. My temporary bitternesses toward people have all been ended by what Freud called an inferiority complex and Christ called ‘Let him without sin’ - I remember the day he said it. We were justlikethat then; we tossed up for who was going to go through with it - and he lost.

I am now asking only $5000 for letters. Make out the check to MalcolmRepublic, c/o The New Cowlick.

Ever your friend,

Scott

P.S. Did you ever see my piece about Ring in The New Cowlick - I think you’d have liked it.

P.S.S. This letter and questions require no answers. You are ‘write’ that I no longer listen, but my case histories seem to go in largely for the same magazines, and with simple people I get polite. But I listen to you and would like damn well to hear your voice again.

Grove Park Inn

Asheville, North Carolina

August, 1936

Dear Ernest:

Please lay off me in print. If I choose to write de profundis sometimes it doesn’t mean I want friends praying aloud over my corpse. No doubt you meant it kindly but it cost me a night’s sleep. And when you incorporate it (the story) in a book would you mind cutting my name?

It’s a fine story t - one of your best - even though the ‘Poor Scott Fitzgerald, etc.’ rather spoiled it for me.

Ever your friend,

Scott

Riches have never fascinated me, unless combined with the greatest charm or distinction.

On the train, traveling to some point in the South June 5, 1937

It was fine to see you so well and full of life, Ernest. I hope you’ll make your book fat -I know some of that Esquire work is too good to leave out. All best wishes to your Spanish trip I wish we could meet more often. I don’t feel I know you at all.

Ever yours,

Scott

Going South always seems to me rather desolate and fatal and uneasy. This is no exception. Going North is a safe dull feeling.

1403 North Laurel Avenue

Hollywood,California

November 8, 1940

Dear Emest:

It’s a fine novel, better than anybody else writing could do. Thanks for thinking of me and for your dedication. I read it with intense interest, participating in a lot of the writing problems as they came along and often quite unable to discover how you Brought off some of the effects, but you always did. The massacre was magnificent and also the fight on the mountain and the actual dynamiting scene. Of the side shows I particularly liked the vignette of Karkov and Pilar’s Sonata to death - and I had a personal interest in the Moseby guerilla stuff because of my own father. The scene in which the father says goodbye to his son is very powerful. I’m going to read the whole thing again.

I never got to tell you how I liked To Have and Have Not either. There is observation and writing in that that the boys will be imitating with a vengeance - paragraphs and pages that are right up with Dostoevsky in their undeflected intensity.

Congratulations too on your new book’s great success. I envy you like hell and there is no irony in this. I always liked Dostoevsky with his wide appeal more than any other European - and I envy you the time it will give you to do what you want.

With old affection,

Scott

P.S. I came across an old article by John Bishop about how you lay four days under dead bodies at Caporetto and how I flunked out of Princeton (I left on a stretcher in November - you can’t flunk out in November) and how I am an awful suck about the rich and a social climber. What I started to say was that I do know something about you on the Italian front, from a man who was in your unit - how you crawled some hellish distance pulling a wounded man with you and how the doctors stood over you wondering why you were alive with so many perforations. Don’t worry - I won’t tell anybody. Not even Alan Campbell who called me up and gave me news of you the other day.

P.S. (2) I hear you are marrying one of the most beautiful people I have ever seen. Give her my best remembrance.

To Frances Scott Fitzgerald

La Paix, Rodgers’ Forge Towson,Maryland August 8, 1933

Dear Pie:

I feel very strongly about you doing your duty. Would you give me a little more documentation about your reading in French? I am glad you are happy - but I never believe much in happiness. I never believe in misery either. Those are things you see on the stage or the screen or the printed page, they never really happen to you in life.

All I believe in in life is the rewards for virtue (according to your talents) and the punishments for not fulfilling your duties, which are doubly costly. If there is such a volume in the camp library, will you ask Mrs Tyson to let you look up a sonnet of Shakespeare’s in which the line occurs ‘Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.’

Have had no thoughts today, life seems composed of getting up a Saturday Evening Post story. I think of you, and always pleasantly; but if you call me ‘Pappy’ again I am going to take the White Cat out and beat his bottom hard, six times for every time you are impertinent. Do you react to that? I will arrange the camp bill. Halfwit, I will conclude.

Things to worry about: Worry about courage Worry about cleanliness Worry about efficiency Worry about horsemanship Worry about... Things not to worry about: Don’t worry about popular opinion Don’t worry about dolls Don’t worry about the past Don’t worry about the future Don’t worry about growing up Don’t worry about anybody getting ahead of you Don’t worry about triumph Don’t worry about failure unless it comes through your own fault Don’t worry about mosquitoes Don’t worry about flies Don’t worry about insects in general Don’t worry about parents Don’t worry about boys Don’t worry about disappointments Don’t worry about pleasures Don’t worry about satisfactions Things to think about: What am I really aiming at?

How good am I really in comparison to my contemporaries in regard to:

(a) — Scholarship

(b) — Do I really understand about people and am I able to get along with them?

(c) — Am I trying to make my body a useful instrument or am I neglecting it?

With dearest love,

Daddy

P.S. My come-back to your calling me Pappy is christening you by the word Egg, which implies that you belong to a very rudimentary state of life and that I could break you up and crack you open at my will and I think it would be a word that would hang on if I ever told it to your contemporaries. ‘Egg Fitzgerald.’ How would you like that to go through life with - ‘Eggie Fitzgerald’ or ‘Bad Egg Fitzgerald’ or any form that might occur to fertile minds? Try it once more and I swear to God I will hang it on you and it will be up to you to shake it off. Why borrow trouble?

Love anyhow.

Grove Park Inn

Asheville,

North Carolina

Summer, 1935

Scottina:

It was fine seeing you, and I liked you a lot (this is aside from loving you which I always do). You are nicer to adults - you are emerging from that rather difficult time in girls, 12-15 usually, but you are emerging I think rather early - probably at 14 or so. You have one good crack coming but - well:

‘Daddy the prophet!’ I can hear you say in scorn. I wish to God I wasn’t so right usually about you. When I wrote that ‘news-sheet’ with events left out, you know - the letter that puzzled you - and headed it ‘Scottie Loses Head,’ it was because I saw it coming. I knew that your popularity with two or three dazed adolescent boys would convince you that you were at least the Queen of Sheba, and that you would ‘lose your head.’ What shape this haywire excursion would take I didn’t know - I couldn’t have guessed it would be writing a series of indiscreet letters to a gossipy and indiscreet boy who would show them to the persons for whom they were not meant (Understand: I don’t blame Andrew  too much - the fault was yours - he didn’t, will you notice, put into writing an analysis of his best friends of his own sex!).

However, that’s of no seriousness. But I think that the next kick will be a bad one - but you will survive, and after that you will manage your affairs better. To avoid such blows you almost have to have them yourself so you can begin to think of others as valuing themselves, possibly, quite as much as you do yourself. So I’m not afraid of it for you. I don’t want it to be so bad that it will break your self-confidence, which is attractive and is fine  if founded on positive virtues, work, courage, etc., but if you are selfish it had better be broken early. If you are unselfish you can keep it always - and it is a nice thing to have. I didn’t know till 15 that there was anyone in the world except me, and it cost me plenty.

Signs and portents of your persistent conceit: Mrs Owens t said to me (and Mrs Owens loves you), ‘For the first time in a long while Scottie was nice, and not a burden as I expected. It was really nice to be with her.’

Because, I guess, for the first time you entered into their lives, humble lives of struggling people, instead of insisting that they enter into yours - a chance they never had, of belonging to ‘high society.’ Before, you had let them be aware of what you were doing (not in any snobbish sense, because heaven knows I’d have checked you on that) - but because you never considered or pretended to consider their lives, their world at all - your own activities seemed of so much more overwhelming importance to you! You did not use one bit of y our mind, one little spot! to think what they were thinking, or help them!

You went to Norfolk and gave out the information (via the Taylors, via Annabel, via mother) that you were going to Dobbs. That doesn’t matter save as indicative of a show-off frame of mind. You know it was highly tentative. It was a case, again, of boasting, of ‘promoting yourself.’ But those signs of one big catastrophe (it’ll come - I want to minimize it for you, but it can’t be prevented because only experience can teach) are less important than your failure to realize that you are a young member of the human race, who has not proved itself in any but the most superficial manner. (I have seen ‘popular girls’ of 15 become utterly déclassé in six months because they were essentially selfish.) You and Peaches  (who isn’t selfish, I think) had a superficial head-start with prettiness, but you will find more and more that less pretty girls will be attaching the solider, more substantial boys as the next two years will show. Both you and Peaches are intelligent but both of you will be warped by this early attention, and something tells me she won’t lost her head; she hasn’t the ‘gift of gab’ as you have - her laughter and her silence takes the place of much. That’s why I wish to God you would write something when you have time - if only a one act play about how girls art in the bath house, in a tent, on a train going to camp.

I grow weary, but I probably won’t write again for a month. Don’t answer this, justifying yourself - of course I know you’re doing the best you ‘can.’ The points of the letter are:

1st You did spill over, rashly!

2nd You are getting over the selfish period - thank God! 3rd But it’ll take one more big kick, and I want it to be mild, so your backside won’t suffer too much.

4th I wish you’d get your mind off your precious self enough to write me a one act play about other people - what they say and how they behave.

With dearest love, Your simply so-perfect too-too Daddy

Please, turn back and read this letter over! It is too packed with considered thought to digest the first time. Like Milton - oh yeah!

New York City

July, 1935

Darlin’:

Am on a flying visit to New York. Spent yesterday afternoon with, of all people, Elissa Landi. She sailed for Europe last night. She is very nice.

I am not going to write you much this summer but you know my heart is with you always. Remember the one thing about riding - that you can’t be as reckless at it as you can about swimming, because there’s another factor besides yourself involved, the horse. So that no matter how good you were if the horse was bad there might be trouble. Different from diving, for example, where you have only yourself to blame. The point is, don’t do anything or try anything that the riding master doesn’t approve of. He knows just the point you’ve reached at handling the mount.

Good-by double durling. Aunt Rosalind, Mr Ober and Mr Perkins all invite you to spend a few days with them in N.Y. when camp is over. We shall see. I leave for the South Monday.

Your utterly irresistible,

Daddy

Grove Park Inn

Asheville, North Carolina August 4, 1935

Darling:

I always thought the first book of that series was one of the most exciting books I ever read. Ernest Hemingway thought so too. Please read it with a view to a possible dramatization of it and tell me your opinion. I never went any further in that series than the first one on account of no English versions being available.

I am glad you fell off your horse. Here in Carolina the only conveyance is by zebra. I have one zebra named Clarence.

My correspondence is now limited to five people: Elissa Landi, Mrs Roosevelt, Aquilla, and a fourth whom I need scarcely mention, because I hardly know his name.

Darling, I am working hard and getting very well.

Please unleash yourself in your letters to your mother without mentioning riding catastrophies which might make her nervous.

Give my affectionate regards to Virginia, Helen  and Betty and tell your counselor what a really obnoxious person you might turn out to be unless carefully watched.

Your stoogie —

Daddy

Grove Park Inn

Asheville, North Carolina

July, 1936

Darling:

O.K. about the tutoring. Let it slide. But I hate to let one season slip by at your age without one difficult advance.

Do something for me! I’m proud of the swimming but summer’s only summer. Give me a time maybe, and know always I’m thinking of you and for you, and my plans will come to you as soon as crystallized, sometime in August. Slim chance of my getting up to Pennsylvania. All Europe ideas definitely out. Spain was what I wanted to see and Spain is in what the newsmen call the ‘throes of revolution.’

Your mother likes your letters so much. Hope you have nice tent mates. I don’t agree with Mrs Tappan on that subject, but that’s a whole story and I know whatever the situation is you’ll make the best of it in your own courageous way.

Oh darling Scottie - I don’t want to force you but it does please me when you can make a connection between the Louisiana Purchase and why Fred Astaire lifts up his left hind foot for the world’s pleasure. I want you to be among the best of your race and not waste yourself on trivial aims. To be useful and proud - is that too much to ask?

I enclose you the jacket of my latest book. I have decided to write in Scandinavian from now on!

Your devoted

Daddy

Grove Park Inn

Asheville,

North Carolina July 31, 1936

Darling:

I am enclosing in this some pictures that tell a sad story. I had a terrific accident and broke my shoulder. I thought I would be very smart and do some diving and after a year and a half of inactivity I stretched my muscles too much in the air and broke my shoulder. It has all been very troublesome and expensive but I have tried to be as cheerful as possible about it and everyone has been very kind; the people here have rigged up a curious writing board for me so that I work with my hand over my head rather like this.

I enclose money for your present small needs. It may be that the expenses of this injury will preclude your going to an expensive school this fall but life sometimes does those things to you and I know you are brave and able to adjust yourself to changing

‘Fitzgerald had drawn a picture of himself seated at his writing board.

conditions and to know that all the effort that I have will be thrown into your education and the care of your mother. If I had not had this operation on my shoulder the doctor tells me I would never have been able to raise my arm above my shoulder again. It is still an open bet as to whether or not I will ever be able to raise it above my shoulder.

I am proud of you and I am only a little angered by the fact that you have not managed to read more than one of the French books.

Sunday night I leave for Baltimore and you can write me either there care of Mrs Owens or here where I am returning. Isn’t it lucky I did not go to Spain after all! Or maybe it would have been rather fun.

Your loving Daddy Grove Park Inn

Asheville,

North CarolinaOctober 20, 1936

Dearest Scottina:

I had already decided to go up Thanksgiving which I will do, God willing, and so on your own suggestion I have killed the idea of going up on your birthday. You seem to understand the fact that I cannot afford at the moment to make two trips within the same month; so I know you won’t be unduly disappointed.

To finish up news of me, the arm is really definitely out of danger and I am going to be able to use it again, which I doubted for three or four weeks. Went out to a football game with the Flynns last Saturday, the same sort of game exactly that we went to last fall at very much the same time. Lefty was his usual handsome self and Nora was charming as always. They asked about you repeatedly, and not because they thought they ought to but because they have a real affection for you, and I mean both of them. They were so happy to know that you are getting along so well at your school.

Confirming my Christmas plans, they are, briefly: that we shall have a party for you in Baltimore at the Belvedere or the Stafford, if we can afford it! Then the actual Christmas Day will be spent either here with your mother (it won’t be like that awful Christmas in Switzerland), or else you and your mother and the trained nurse will go to Montgomery and spend Christmas with your grandmother; perhaps with a little time afterwards in Baltimore before you go back to school.

Don’t be a bit discouraged about your story not being tops. At the same time, I am not going to encourage you about it, because, after all, if you want to get into the big time, you have to have your own fences to jump and learn from experience. Nobody ever became a writer just by wanting to be one. If you have anything to say, anything you feel nobody has ever said before, you have got to feel so desperately that you will find some way to say it that nobody has ever found before, so that the thing you have to say and the way of saying it blend as one matter - as indissolubly as if they were conceived together.

Let me preach again for a moment: I mean that what you have felt and thought will, by itself, invent a new style, so that when people talk about style they are always a little astonished at the newness of it, because they think that it is only style that they are talking about, when what they are talking about is the attempt to express a new idea with such force that it will have the originality of the thought. It is an awfully lonesome business, and, as you know, I never wanted you to go into it, but if you are going into it at all I want you to go into it knowing the sort of things that took me years to learn.

Why are you whining about such matters as study hall, etc., when you deliberately picked this school as the place you wanted to go above all places? Of course it is hard. Nothing any good isn’t hard, and you know you have never been brought up soft, or are you quitting on me suddenly? Darling, you know I love you, and I expect you to live up absolutely to what I laid out for you in the beginning.

Scott Grove Park Inn

Asheville,

North Carolina November 17, 1936

Dearest Pie:

I got a School Letter saying that Thanksgiving Day is best, and it is better for me that way. There is no particular advantage in going out two or three times rather than one, without particular objectives; the idea is to go out once and have a good time. I’ll be delighted to meet whoever you want, and our engagement is on Thanksgiving Day.

(This is a parenthesis: I got the little charms that you sent me for my birthday, the bells dangling and the mule, and appreciated your thought of me - you little donkey!)

Park Avenue girls are hard, aren’t they? Usually the daughters of ‘up-and-coming’ men and, in a way, the inevitable offspring of that type. It’s the ‘Yankee push’ to its last degree, a sublimation of the sort of fay Gould who began by peddling bad buttons to a county and ended, with the same system of peddler’s morals, by peddling five dollar railroads to a nation.

Don’t mistake me. I think of myself always as a northerner - and I think of you the same way. Nevertheless, we are all of one nation and you will find all the lassitude and laziness there that you despise, enough to fill Savannah and Charleston, just as down here you will find the same ‘go getter’ principle in the Carolinas.

I don’t know whether you will stay there another year - it all depends on your marks and your work, and I can’t give you the particular view of life that I have (which as you know is a tragic one), without dulling your enthusiasm. A whole lot of people have found life a whole lot of fun. I have not found it so. But, I had a hell of a lot of fun when I was in my twenties and thirties; and I feel that it is your duty to accept the sadness, the tragedy of the world we live in, with a certain esprit.

Now, insofar as your course is concerned, there is no question of your dropping mathematics and taking the easiest way to go into Vassar, and being one of the girls fitted for nothing except to reflect other people without having any particular character of your own. I want you to take mathematics up to the limit of what the school offers. I want you to take physics and I want you to take chemistry. I don’t care about your English courses or your French courses at present. If you don’t know two languages and the ways that men chose to express their thoughts in those languages by this time, then you don’t sound like my daughter. You are an only child, but that doesn’t give you any right to impose on that fact.

I want you to know certain basic scientific principles, and I feel that it is impossible to learn them unless you have gone as far into mathematics as coordinate geometry. I don’t want you to give up mathematics next year. I learned about writing from doing something that I didn’t have any taste for. If you don’t carry your mathematics such as coordinate geometry (conic sections), you will have strayed far afield from what I had planned for you. I don’t insist on the calculus, but it is certainly nothing to be decided by what is easiest. You are going into Vassar with mathematical credits and a certain side of your life there is going to be scientific.

Honey, I wish I could see you. It would be so much easier to go over these important matters without friction, but at a distance it seems rather tough that you are inclined to slide into the subjects that are easy for you, like modern languages.

No more until I see you Thanksgiving.

With dearest love,

F. Scott Fitz

P.S. Sorry you are on bounds - feel as if I had been the same for six months. However I have bought an ancient Packard roadster and get out more now. I always allow for your exuberance but I hope this doesn’t come from a feud with any special teacher, or from any indiscretion of speech, a fault you should be beginning to control.

Grove Park Inn

Asheville,

North Carolina December 12, 1936

Dear Scottie:

As I wired you, there is no question of having ninety people. The most you can possibly ask is about sixty people; and even that is counting on ten or twelve refusals. If I had thought that the Ethel Walker School was going to give you a peculiar idea of what your financial resources are, it would have been far, far better to send you to a modest school here in the Carolina mountains. You are a poor girl, and if you don’t like to think about it, just ask me. If you don’t make up your mind to being that, you become one of those terrible girls that don’t know whether they are millionairesses or paupers. You are neither one nor the other. The dance for you in Baltimore is a very modest one. It will have dignity because it pretends to nothing that it isn’t. It will give you a certain amount of whoopee and it will probably lack a certain amount of things that you would expect. For instance, I am determined to have a hurdy-gurdy for the orchestra - you know, an Italian with a monkey, and I think the children will be very content with that. They don’t want much, children of sixteen or seventeen, and they will be amused by the antics of the monkey. Your idea of a swing orchestra seems zero to me.

However, in the next room I will have some of the older people with a swing orchestra that I have engaged, and from time to time you may bring some of your choice friends in there to dance.

- But remember that I expect you and your crowd to dance by the hurdy-gurdy during the whole afternoon, quietly and slowly and without swing music, just doing simple waltz dancing.

You can stay all night all you want with people up to the night of December 24th, when you and I are going to make a hop South.

With dearest love,

Daddy

P.S. You ask what to put on the cards. It should be about like this:

Dancing Miss Frances Scott Fitzgerald F. Scott Fitzgerald

December 22nd Four to six Hotel Belvedere

Oak Halt Hotel

Tryon, North Carolina

Spring, 1937

Darling Scottina:

I loved having you here (except in the early morning) and I think we didn’t get along so badly, did we? Glad you had a gay time in Baltimore and New York and have a friend at Groton. They are very democratic there - they have to sleep in gold cubicles and wash at old platinum pumps. This toughens them up so they can pay the poor starvation wages without weakening. (By the way, the older boys only can smoke at Andover and in a special place - you wretched liar you!)

The horse show is Wednesday. Everybody asks about you and really means it, some of them. La Sprague said her mother forgot to invite you to some party she gave and was in tears. She has two Williams boys who are here at the hotel on her trail. Caroline Kelly sends her love. I see your mother tomorrow. Finally finished my story (very good) and am starting another and a play on the side. Hollywood postponed but may come through.

What did you do in Baltimore? How were Peaches and Meredith? Answer.

With dearest love to my slew-footed angel, Daddy P.S. What about the toil? Are you sweating gall and vinegar?

En route to HollywoodPostmarked July 5, 1937

Dearest Pie:

What an exit! Horrors of life in the sticks - nothing could have turned around there except a model T Ford. Sorry to leave you and Grandma in such a mess.

The air trip was fine - very thrilling as always. I’m sending this to the Obers where I hope you are by now. Also by the time you get this I’ll have heard from the MacArthurs though I know it’s all right. It will be great to have you with me in Hollywood. I know Freddie Bartholomew will love taking you around to birthday parties in the afternoons, and you’ll find Shirley Temple as good a pal as Peaches and more loyal.

Where on earth did you get that preconception that I think of you as a scarlet woman? Hell, you’re a romantic but that’s not in your disfavor. It’s all right to like affection, but not when you drive, in the immortal words of Mitzi Green. I simply don’t want you in danger and I don’t want you to do anything inappropriate to your age. For premature adventure one pays an atrocious price. As I told you once, every boy I know who drank at eighteen or nineteen is now safe in his grave. The girls who were what we called ‘speeds’ (in our stone-age slang) at sixteen were reduced to anything they could get at the marrying time. It’s in the logic of life that no young person ever ‘gets away with anything.’ They fool their parents but not their contemporaries. It was in the cards that Ginevra King should get fired from Westover - also that your mother should wear out young. I think that despite a tendency to self indulgence you and I have some essential seriousness that will manage to preserve us. Whatever your sins are I hope you never get to justify them to yourself.

With dearest love,

Daddy

En route to Hollywood

July. 1937

Dearest Pie:

This may be the last letter for a time, though I won’t forget the check when I get at my check book.

I feel a certain excitement. The third Hollywood venture. Two failures behind me though one no fault of mine. The first one was just ten years ago. At that time I had been generally acknowledged for several years as the top American writer both seriously and, as far as prices went, popularly. I had been loafing for six months for the first time in my life and was confident to the point of conceit. Hollywood made a big fuss over us and the ladies all looked very beautiful to a man of thirty. I honestly believed that with no effort on my part I was a sort of magician with words - an odd delusion on my part when I had worked so desperately hard to develop a hard, colorful prose style.

Total result - a great time and no work. I was to be paid only a small amount unless they made my picture - they didn’t.

The second time I went was five years ago. Life had gotten in some hard socks and while all was serene on top, with your mother apparently recovered in Montgomery, I was jittery underneath and beginning to drink more than I ought to. Far from approaching it too confidently I was far too humble. I ran afoul of a bastard named de Sano, since a suicide, and let myself be gypped out of command. I wrote the picture and he changed as I wrote. I tried to get at Thalberg but was erroneously warned against it as ‘bad taste.’ Result - a bad script. I left with the money, for this was a contract for weekly payments, but disillusioned and disgusted, vowing never to go back, the they said it wasn’t my fault and asked me to stay. I wanted to get East when the contract expired to see how your mother was. This was later interpreted as ‘running out on them’ and held against me.

(The train has left El Paso since I began this letter - hence the writing - Rocky Mountain writing.)

I want to profit by these two experiences - I must be very tactful but keep my hand on the wheel from the start - find out the key man among the bosses and the most malleable among the collaborators - then fight the rest tooth and nail until, in fact or in effect, I’m alone on the picture. That’s the only way I can do my best work. Given a break I can make them double this contract in less than two years. You can help us all best by keeping out of trouble - it will make a great difference to your important years. Take care of yourself mentally (study when you’re fresh), physically (don ‘t pluck your eyebrows), morally (don’t get where you have to lie) and I’ll give you more scope than Peaches.

Daddy

The Garden of Allah Hotel

Hollywood,California

October 8, 1937

Darling Pie:

I’m awfully sorry about that telegram. I got a letter from Bill Warren, saying that it was all around Baltimore that I was making twenty-five hundred a week out here, and it disturbed and upset me. I suppose it was one of Rita Swann’s ideas. I don’t know why I suspected you - I should have known you would be more discrete and would at least name some believable figure. You see what a reputation you’ve made with your romantic tales!

As to the missing three days, I really don’t blame you for that either. The trouble was that Harold Ober didn’t know where you were either. If you had wired him instead of Aunt Rosalind, it would have been all right. However, it gave me only one bad hour, as I really don’t fret about you as much as I used to. I did worry about your smoking this summer, but you gave me your word that you wouldn’t smoke at Peaches’ so that was all right; and I don’t care much who you go out with so long as you are in at a decent hour and don’t get the practice on your mind. From next summer on, you can find you’ll have more privileges, but I don’t want them to become habits that will turn and devour you. You have got to devote the best and freshest part of your energies to things that will give you a happy and profitable life. There is no other time but now.

No special news - things have been quiet. Had the questionable honor of meeting — , a shifty-eyed fellow surrounded by huge bodyguards. Norma Shearer invited me to dinner three times but I couldn’t go - unfortunately, as I like her. Maybe she will ask me again. Also have seen something of Buff Cobb, Irving Cobb’s daughter, who is an old friend; and Sheilah  who, by the way, has broken her engagement to the Marquess Donnegal. (The poor man was about to get on a boat, but it was a sort of foolish marriage in many ways.) Also have been to much tennis and saw Helen Wills come back in company with Von Cramm to defeat Budge and his partner. Took Beatrice Lillie, Charlie MacArthur and Sheilah to the Tennis Club the other night, and Errol Flynn joined us - he seemed very nice though rather silly and fatuous. Don’t see why Peaches is so fascinated. Frank Morgan came over and talked to me, telling me that we had a fight in the cloak room at Gloria Swanson’s seventeen years ago, but I had no recollection of the incident except that I had a scuffle with somebody. But in those days there were so many scraps that this one doesn’t stand out in my memory.

I hope you thought over my analysis as to how to deal with the neatness habit, and if for one week you put each thing away individually from the moment of touching it to the moment of its final disposal - instead of putting away three things at a time - I think that you would lick it in a month and life would be easier for you in one more way. Please tell me about this when you write.

Looking over your letters and answering them in turn - it was nice of Peaches to give a party for you, and I’m glad Stanley is divine-looking; sorry Andrew is repulsive. I’m glad that you went out with that great heart-throb, Bob-the-Baker. Was Bob Haas nice? Your next letter comes from Exeter. Sorry you can’t go to Annapolis - you’ll be invited there again. Here I have a postcard and, by God, I’m awfully sore at you about that tutoring. I don’t understand how on earth the letter could have been mislaid. I posted it from the airport in Spartanburg that night. So you are still dwelling on the Fisher’s Island party in retrospect!

Another letter tells of visiting Mary Earle on Long Island. It sounds fine, but you are right that romantic things really happen in roachy kitchens and back yards. Moonlight is vastly overestimated. It was all right what you borrowed from Harold. He will put it on my account. So Meredith called from Baltimore! Aren’t you afraid of stirring up those old embers? Your disloyalty to Princeton breaks my heart. I sent Andrew football tickets. Your dress sounds fine, Scottie, my bonnie lass.

Lastly, the letter with the Yale postmark - I bet you bought that stationery. It reminds me of something that happened yesterday. On such paper, but with the Princeton seal, I used to write endless letters throughout sophomore and junior years to Ginevra King of Chicago and Westover, who later figured in This Side of Paradise. Then I didn’t see her for twentyone years, though I telephoned her in 1933 to entertain your mother at the World’s Fair, which she did. Yesterday I get a wire that she is in Santa Barbara and will I come down there immediately. She was the first girl I ever loved and I have faithfully avoided seeing her up to this moment to keep that illusion perfect, because she ended up by throwing me over with the most supreme boredom and indifference. I don’t know whether I should go or not. It would be very, very strange. These great beauties are often something else at thirty-eight, but Ginevra had a great deal besides beauty.

I was hoping that they’d get up a ‘Higher French’ course for you. Was nothing done about that? Miss Walker mentioned it in her letter. Your learning German seems to me rather pointless but don’t construe this into any tendency to loaf on it. Knowing just a little bit would be a foundation - especially if we go abroad for a few weeks next summer.

I sent the thirteen dollars to Rosalind.

What do you want for your birthday? You might make a suggestion.

I think of you a lot. I was very proud of you all summer and I do think that we had a good time together. Your life seemed gaited with much more moderation and I’m not sorry that you had rather a taste of misfortune during my long sickness, but now we can do more things together - when we can’t find anybody better. There - that will take you down! I do adore you and will see you Christmas.

Your loving

Daddy

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Corporation

Culver City,

California

November 4, 1937

Dearest Pie:

I admit I’m a terrible correspondent but I hope it isn’t the pot calling the kettle black - i e., do you write your mother regularly once a week? As I assured you before, it is of the greatest importance, even if Bob-the-Butcher or Bill-the-Baker doesn’t get the weekly hook in his gills.

News about the picture: The cast is tentatively settled. Joan Crawford had her teeth in the lead for a while but was convinced that it was a man’s picture; and Loretta Young not being available, the decision rests at present on Margaret Sullavan. Certainly she will be much better than Joan Crawford in the role. Tracy and Taylor will be reinforced by Franchot Tone at present writing, and the cameras will presumably roll sometime in December. An old friend, Ted Paramore, has joined me on the picture in fixing up much of the movie construction, at which I am still a semi- amateur, though I won’t be that much longer.

Plans about Christmas depend on whether I will be held here for changes through the shooting. I don’t think that’s probable, and if it weren’t my first picture that I’m anxious to get as perfect as can be, I wouldn’t let it be possible, because I can always have a vacation on three weeks’ notice - but I want to mention it as a very faint chance. However, let us suppose I come East, as I will nine chances out of ten -I will expect to spend the time with you and your mother, perhaps a little in Baltimore, some in Asheville. Maybe I can take your mother to Montgomery, though that is very faint indeed and should not be mentioned to her. Also I want to spend a couple of days in New York and I have no doubt that you will want to be with me then.

Have you any plans of what you’d like to do? Would you like another party in Baltimore? I mean just an afternoon affair like the last. It might become a sort of an institution, a yearly roundup of your Baltimore friends. Write me immediately what you thought you wanted to do - of course you also will go to see your mother sometime during the holidays.

By ill chance the Harvard game tickets for Andrew went astray and were sent me here. I’m sorry. He must have been disappointed - save that he missed the worst drubbing Princeton has had in many years.

My social life is in definite slow motion. I refused a good many parties and am now in the comfortable position of not being invited much any more. I had dinner at Gladys Swarthout’s last week with John McCormick and some of the musical crowd. I have taken in some football games with Sheilah Graham, and met the love of my youth, Ginevra King (Mitchell), after an interval of twenty-one years. She is still a charming woman and I’m sorry I didn’t see more of her.

How much do the ads cost for your year book? Please let me know.

I have a small apartment now at the Garden of Allah, but have done nothing about the house situation, as there seems no chance of your mother coming out here at the present.

I am anxiously awaiting your first report and will be more inclined to go —

Congratulations on Cheerleader, etc. Can you turn a cartwheel?

The Garden of Allah Hotel

Hollywood, California

February, 1938

Dearest Scottina:

So much has happened out here, and in the East, that a letter can’t tell it.

Beginning at the end - Three Comrades went into production today and I started on the new Joan Crawford picture - as yet unnamed. I am half sick with work, overwhelmed with it and yet vaguely happier than I’ve been in months. The last part of a job is always sad and very difficult but I’m proud of the year’s output and haven’t much to complain of.

Your mother was better than ever I expected and our trip would have been fun except that I was tired. We went to Miami and Palm Beach, flew to Montgomery, all of which sounds very gay and glamorous but wasn’t particularly. I flew back to New York intending to take you out with your friends Saturday but I discovered you were on bounds. My zero hour was Monday morning in California so there was nothing to do except fly back on Sunday afternoon. I didn’t think you and I could cover much ground with the horses flying around the tan bark and steaming in Rosa Bonheur’s steel engraving on the wall.

One time in sophomore year at Princeton, Dean West got up and rolled out the great lines of Horace:

‘Integer Vitae, scelerisque pueris Non eget mauris, facule nec arcu - And I knew in my heart that I had missed something by being a poor Latin scholar, like a blessed evening with a lovely girl. It was a great human experience I had rejected through laziness, through having sown no painful seed.

But when anything, Latin or pig latin, was ever put to me so immediately as your chance of entering Vassar next fall I could always rise to meet that. It is either Vassar or else the University of California here under my eye and the choice is so plain that I have no sympathy for your loafing. We are not even out of debt yet, you are still a scholarship student and you might give them a break by making a graceful exit. They practically took you on your passport picture.

Baby, you’re going on blind faith, as vain as Kitsy’s belief that she wouldn’t grow a whisker, when you assume that a small gift for people will get you through the world. It all begins with keeping faith with something that grows and changes as you go on. You have got to make all the right changes at the main corners - the price for losing your way once is years of unhappiness. You have not yet entirely missed a turning, but failing to get somewhere with the Latin will be just that. If you break faith with me I cannot feel the same towards you.

The Murphys, Nora, etc., asked after you. We will without fail go somewhere at Easter - your mother’s going to make a stay in Montgomery with a companion and she’ll meet us. Some New York gallery has taken some very expensive pictures of you - do you want any? I like them but my God they cost.

With dearest love always, Daddy

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Corporation

Culver City,

California

February 22,1938

Dearest Pie:

I never hear from you any more. Please drop me a line and tell me if all goes well.

I started my new picture which is after all a piece called Infidelity and will star Joan Crawford and I don’t know who else. I will finish the first draft Easter and will come East to take you somewhere.

Three Comrades is halfway through. I have seen some of the shooting and some of the ‘rushes’ (where they run off what they’ve shot that day) but you can’t tell much from either. To my mind, the producer seriously hurt the script in rewriting it. It may be I am wrong.

People ask after you, but I am the most curious of all. May I be permitted to ask after you? I’d like a line about your health, your work, your morale, success or failure of the play and such affairs. If you will let me know when the play is, I will send you a message of congratulation or flowery tokens if you prefer.

I think of you always, darling, and will try to invent something very nice for Easter.

Just heard from Mrs Turnbull who said you had three especial qualities - loyalty and ambition were two, the third I’ll tell you later. She felt that would protect you from harm. I make no comment. She seemed very fond of you.

Also the Finneys have sent me the work of a musician to do something about, and I am taking the matter in hand.

With dearest love,

Daddy

The Garden of Allah Hotel

Hollywood,California March 11, 1938

Dearest Pie:

I’m glad you got 74. If you had gotten that the first term, we’d have something to start on now. A letter came at the same time from Miss Walker, in which she referred to your ‘low position in the class.’ Of course this is not at all what you implied to me where I saw you in January, and I do wish you would be more accurate. To suggest a state of affairs which doesn’t exist merely stalls off the final reckoning. The most important thing in your life now is to get good marks at school and pass the examinations for Vassar in June. It is so important that if you don’t, I am unable, offhand, to think of any satisfactory alternative. You will be exactly in the position of a man who has done a bad job and been fired, which will be a nice black mark against you at sixteen. You can’t and mustn’t let this happen. I am not going to spend Easter lecturing you and this is to forestall any attitude on your part that I am unreasonable not to be appeased by your success in other lines.

On the other hand, I am of course pleased that you did well as Mrs Bennett (Harold Ober wrote me that your acting stood out). Also, I am glad that the musical comedy you wrote was so successful at school. Why don’t you get a volume of Gilbert and Sullivan and read the extraordinary and amazing lyrics of Iolanthe and Patience. I used to study them like mad when I was writing the Triangle shows at Princeton. (I see, by the way, that a boy named James W. Huntley has been elected to the Cottage Club at Princeton. Did you know him in Baltimore?) I wish I could say as nice things about the poem after Ogden Nash (I dined with him and Bill Leonard night before last). It was a long way after. Ogden Nash’s poems are not careless, they all have an extraordinary inner rhythm. They could not possibly be written by someone who in his mind had not calculated the feet and meters to the last iambus or trochee. His method is simply to glide a certain number of feet and come up smack against his rhyming line. Read over a poem of his and you will see what I mean. Your poem has every line in a different meter. One changes from a two-four rhyme to a gallop, to a waltz, and so forth, and the total effect is nil. I know you didn’t think much of it but you did send it to me, so I am telling you the truth.

I am glad you have gotten around to liking Dorothy Parker and that you had the good taste to pick out her ‘Diary of a New York Lady.’ It is one of her best pieces. As to knowing her, you do know ter, but that was in the days when you were a little weary of my literary friends. I knew Elizabeth Firestone’s father very well and liked him very much. What are you going to do for the Firestone Tire Hour? Thank God you got a credit for posture That’s really good news. I think you can have the suit that you want for spring. Shall I send you the money or what? Write me immediately.

I think your Pinehurst suggestion is rather good for Easter. Jim Boyd lives at Southern Pines next door; in fact, he owns most of it. We might do a few days there and a few days at Virginia Beach. However, the geographical part of our plans will depend on what the doctor will let your mother do.

Dearest love always.

Daddy

I liked the lyrics you told me last January - very well turned. I suppose they were in the show. Ordered none of those photos - they were so tight-lip one imagined that they concealed gold teeth. I heard there was a flood here but didn’t look out the window as I was busy.

The Garden of Allah Hotel

Hollywood, California

March, 1938

Dearest Pie:

Your letter was welcome but I’m sorry you waited to write me until you had nothing pleasant to say - all about hating people, and where you were going to college and how you were about to replace DeMille and Berlin next year. Together with some impertinent cracks about my absurd unreasonableness. I simply conclude that you were in a bad humor because none of it makes much sense.

As to Bryn Mawr, I am entering you at St Timothy’s next year so if you miss at Vassar you will be able to be near Baltimore, which I gather you want. If you thought you were going to spend next year weekending in Baltimore you must have suddenly come to one of those decisions of yours that I am a sucker. I have no such plans for you. Either you accept responsibilities and let me graduate from this unwelcome role of stern father or you stay another year in jail with the children. Your whole liberty turns on the question of your work and nothing else - the kind of talent in demand out here doesn’t walk out on a job.

In any case I’m coming East this month and we’ll go somewhere and we’ll find out your objections to this dog’s life you lead and if they’re valid we’ll change them.

Love,

Daddy

The Garden of Allah Hotel

Hollywood,California

April 18,1938

Dearest Pie:

Got your postcard. A couple of days ago got a wire from my old friend, Alice Lee Myers. You remember, the woman who took Honoria and some other girls abroad last summer. She is taking a party this year which will include Fanny, and I think it sounds very good. Traveling is always fun; you always meet young people on the boat and in hotels during the summer, and the trip itself would include a station wagon tour of France, Belgium, Holland, and perhaps a taste of England. I won’t mention that it would help your French, because that sounds too much like work, but I will say that if it works out you will be a very lucky girl, for quite possibly these are the last few years in which you will be able to see Europe as it was. Though I may add that if you get caught in a war this summer, I will simply deny knowing you and you will have to get out of it the best way you can; but please don’t start one.

God, how I’d like to go myself. Everything is work here, just as I expected, and of course I came back without any rest and it was two or three days before I was really able to get going again. I like the work part, but seem to have to do it in big, heartbreaking doses, which is bad for the constitution. Sorry we didn’t have as many talks as I had hoped for. You had no special plans for the summer, I gathered, except what general invitations might be available, and I really don’t want you out here for the whole summer because there is no Helen Hayes and really nothing much to do that would interest you except a repetition of last summer - only less interesting, as I am out of touch with Norma, Joan, etc. However, if you come for a week in June with Peaches, I will open up relations again and try to make an impression on her. I am writing the Finneys today. I wouldn’t talk around school about summer plans until they are more definite. I will have to bargain with Alice Lee Myers about the European trip, and for the Hollywood trip see if Pete will trust his precious into my hands. Your mother, Obers, etc., are to know nothing yet - the teachers nothing.

Now the European trip would be due to start either June 22 or July 2nd. I imagine that I could have the dates changed a little, or rather that, as you are one-fourth of the party, the time of your examinations would have to be a determining point in the itinerary. When will they be over? What are the actual dates? What would you say, if the European trip is decided on, to the idea of leaving school after graduation, coming out here and taking your boards here in Hollywood and then, if time is short, flying back to New York? I don’t mind your flying now as I did last summer. It is as nearly safe in June as such things can ever be. Also, I want a truthful answer as to whether the school would rather you stayed there. Please don’t make me take this up with Miss Walker. If they would rather, by a margin of 60-40, that you stayed, I want to know, and I want to know now, by airmail. The marks were really so very mediocre that, if I was Vassar, I wouldn’t take you unless the school swore that you were a serious character - and the school is not going to swear you are a serious character if you let a prep school dance stand even faintly in the way of your success. Besides, if they don’t want you to stay, and the trip abroad works out, I would like to catch a glimpse of you during that time. I don’t want to come East in June if it can possibly be avoided. After all, you are going to college, so this is not your real graduation. Nobody came to mine, and I don’t remember being hurt. Nevertheless, if it were not for all the hazards involved, such as bringing your mother there or else hurting her feelings by not bringing her, and the fact that it may come right at the crucial point of this picture (due to roll in June, but perhaps not starting till the fifteenth), I would love to go and see you standing flowerlike among the other fashionable peonies. Moreover, if it means an overwhelming lot to you, I will try to arrange it, but you can well understand how I dread any repetition of this Easter trip.

I got a vague word from Harold that you were going to ‘study hard’ but I have no word from anybody about whether you took Latin and how many lessons you took. The report is the same in detail from all your teachers and it is too dispiriting to go into. If you will trust my scheme of making a mental habit of doing the hard thing first, when you are absolutely fresh, and I mean doing the hardest thing first at the exact moment that you feel yourself fit for doing anything in any particular period, morning, afternoon or evening, you will go a long way toward mastering the principle of concentration. It has been so ironic to me in after life to buy books to master subjects in which I took courses at college and which made no impression on me whatsoever. I once flunked a course on the Napoleonic era, and I now have over 300 books in my library on the subject and the other A scholars wouldn’t even remember it now. That was because I had made the mental tie-up that work equals something unpleasant, something to be avoided, something to be postponed. These scholars you speak of as being bright are no brighter than you, the great majority not nearly as quick nor, probably, as well endowed with memory and perception, but they have made that tie-up, so that something does not stiffen in their minds at the mention that it is a set task. I am so sure that this is your trouble because you are so much like me and because, after a long time milling over the matter, I have concluded that it was mine. What an idiot I was to be disqualified for play by poor work when men of infinitely inferior capacity got high marks without any great effort.

Write me what you think about the summer plans. The alternative is not sitting around in some attractive suburb with a bunch of GilmanSchool boys chewing on your ear, pleasant as the prospect might appear. I am afraid you would be somewhat second-hand by autumn, and I prefer you as you are for a little longer.

Dearest love.

Your Progenitor in the Direct Line Will you kindly touch on every point in this letter when you answer it? I am keeping a carbon, hoping you will. This is a time when we ought to be able to communicate - we are unconflicting on 90% of things - all except your lazy belly which my thin guts shrinks from. Please work - work with your best hours.

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Corporation

Culver City,

California

Spring, 1938

Dearest:

I hope Mary Earle won’t find the trip too expensive. It is if you are not going to Vassar, but if you are I think it will be such a worthwhile thing and I wish to God I could go over with you.

We have reached a censorship barrier in Infidelity to our infinite disappointment. It won’t be Joan’s next picture and we are setting it aside awhile till we think of a way of halfwitting halfwit Hayes and his Legion of Decency. Pictures needed cleaning up in 1932-33 (remember I didn’t like you to see them?) but because they were suggestive and salacious. Of course the moralists now want to apply that to all strong themes - so the crop of the last two years is feeble and false, unless it deals with children. Anyhow we’re starting a new story and a safe one.

About adjectives: all fine prose is based on the verbs carrying the sentences. They make sentences move. Probably the finest technical poem in English is Keats”Eve of Saint Agnes.’ A line like ‘The hare limped trembling through the frozen grass,’ is so alive that you race through it, scarcely noticing it, yet it has colored the whole poem with its movement - the limping, trembling and freezing is going on before your own eyes. Would you read that poem for me, and report?

I’m having a controversy with the HighlandHospital. They want to keep your mother there with only six weeks out a year and a few trips with Dr and Mrs Carroll. I can’t see it - I think she should be out from one-fourth to one-half the time, using the hospital only as a base. If I insist, they threaten to release her altogether to me which would be simply a catastrophe - I can’t work and look after her. And she wouldn’t obey any companion unless the hospital has authority back of the companion. Mrs Sayre wants her to come and sit beside what will soon be a deathbed and I can’t see that as promising any future (I don’t mean Mrs Sayre is sick but she is almost so). She (your mother) wants to come to your commencement with Newman and Rosalind - O.K. if it can be arranged for a nurse to take her to and from N.Y.

I don’t dare at the moment to tell your mother about the Alice Lee Myers trip or the fact that I’ve taken a shack at the beach here (address Garden of Allah still). She would feel as if we were happy and she was in prison. If only old Carroll was less obstinate - however it should be solved within a few weeks - I may have to go East but God forbid.

A letter from Miss Walker. Never has my intuition so surely informed me of a thing than now - that you are walking on a most delicate line there. No matter how you feel I should play a ‘straight’ role for five weeks, lest they mistake any action for a frivolous attitude. All through life there are such games to play - mine for instance, when I first came here, to keep away from any bars, even though I wasn’t tempted to drink. The connection of ‘bar-drunk’ was too easy to establish in people’s minds after my past performances. But don’t tell your best friend that you are playing a sober role - such things travel fast and far. You will be smart in playing nun for the time being - five weeks will win you many months.

Dearest love always.

Daddy

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Corporation

Culver City,

California

May, 1938

Dearest Pie:

I’m glad you acted decently in the end about that infirmary affair. We’ll consider it closed.

About the college courses, in case you get in - for freshman year at least I want them to be subject to discussion between us - I don’t think, for example, that you are ready for philosophy. I made some bad mistakes in choosing my own curriculum on silly careless premises, because courses came at the right time, were rumored easy, etc. I thought I’d read Italian to read Dante and didn’t get to first base. I should have known from my wretched French that I had no gift for languages. Similarly you went into physics instead of taking more French and you must have been a considerable drag on the rest of the class. So we will discuss your curriculum when we meet. The enclosed is merely to indicate to you that a course in economics might be interesting in these troubled times. I am not insistent about science but at least one line you follow must be useful rather than cultural.

It’s been a bad year for you. I hope you’ll save the remnants by getting into college and I do wish you wouldn’t blame others ever for what happens to you. A famous gunman who was lately electric-shocked from among us said he only shot the policeman because he wasn’t let alone. Right up to the chair he thought he was being put upon. You were never anti-social in youth - it is one regard in which this year your reasoning is more like your mother’s than mine. Never in her whole life did she have a sense of guilt, even when she put other lives in danger - it was always people and circumstances that oppressed her. I think, though, that you are walking towards some awful sock in the next few months that will have a sobering effect on you and I will be glad when it’s over and you are your old modest and charming self again.

Do try to make your mother happy for two days - excuse her enthusiasm. In her youth, she didn’t know such schools existed. Tell her you may go abroad if your exams are good.

If you do, and I am very anxious you should, I can’t bring you and Peaches out here this June - September would be better. I have no facilities for chaperonage at the moment but if there is cooperation in your heart this summer I will arrange it for next September. I gather Mary Earle’s mother wasn’t interested in the European trip.

The censors have stopped Infidelity as we were about to go into production. I am doing the screenplay of The Women for Norma Shearer. My God - what characters! What gossip! Let me remind you never to discuss my affairs with a living soul.

With dearest love,

Daddy

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Corporation

Culver City,

California

July 7, 1938

Dearest Scottie:

I don’t think I will be writing letters many more years and I wish you would read this letter twice - bitter as it may seem. You will reject it now, but at a later period some of it may come back to you as truth. When I’m talking to you, you think of me as an older person, an ‘authority,’ and when I speak of my own youth what I say becomes unreal to you - for the young can’t believe in the youth of their fathers. But perhaps this little bit will be understandable if I put it in writing.

When I was your age I lived with a great dream. The dream grew and I learned how to speak of it and make people listen. Then the dream divided one day when I decided to marry your mother after all, even though I knew she was spoiled and meant no good to me. I was sorry immediately I had married her but, being patient in those days, made the best of it and got to love her in another way. You came along and for a long time we made quite a lot of happiness out of our lives. But I was a man divided - she wanted me to work too much for her and not enough for my dream. She realized too late that work was dignity, and the only dignity, and tried to atone for it by working herself, but it was too late and she broke and is broken forever.

It was too late also for me to recoup the damage - I had spent most of my resources, spiritual and material, on her, but I struggled on for five years till my health collapsed, and all I cared about was drink and forgetting.

The mistake I made was in marrying her. We belonged to different worlds - she might have been happy with a kind simple man in a southern garden. She didn’t have the strength for the big stage - sometimes she pretended, and pretended beautifully, but she didn’t have it. She was soft when she should have been hard, and hard when she should have been yielding. She never knew how to use her energy - she’s passed that failing on to you.

For a long time I hated her mother for giving her nothing in the line of good habit - nothing but ‘getting by’ and conceit. I never wanted to see again in this world women who were brought up as idlers. And one of my chief desires in life was to keep you from being that kind of person, one who brings ruin to themselves and others. When you began to show disturbing signs at about fourteen, I comforted myself with the idea that you were too precocious socially and a strict school would fix things. But sometimes I think that idlers seem to be a special class for whom nothing can be planned, plead as one will with them - their only contribution to the human family is to warm a seat at the common table.

My reforming days are over, and if you are that way I don’t want to change you. But I don’t want to be upset by idlers inside my family or out. I want my energies and my earnings for people who talk my language.

I have begun to fear that you don’t. You don’t realize that what I am doing here is the last tired effort of a man who once did something finer and better. There is not enough energy, or call it money, to carry anyone who is dead weight and I am angry and resentful in my soul when I feel that I am doing this.

People like — and your mother must be carried because their illness makes them useless. But it is a different story that you have spent two years doing no useful work at all, improving neither your body nor your mind, but only writing reams and reams of dreary letters to dreary people, with no possible object except obtaining invitations which you could not accept. Those letters go on, even in your sleep, so that I know your whole trip now is one long waiting for the post. It is like an old gossip who cannot still her tongue.

You have reached the age when one is of interest to an adult only insofar as one seems to have a future. The mind of a little child is fascinating, for it looks on old things with new eyes - but at about twelve this changes. The adolescent offers nothing, can do nothing, say nothing that the adult cannot do better. Living with you in Baltimore (and you have told Harold that I alternated between strictness and neglect, by which I suppose you mean the times I was so inconsiderate as to have T.B., or to retire into myself to write, for I had little social life apart from you) represented a rather too domestic duty forced on me by your mother’s illness. But I endured your Top Hats and Telephones until the day you snubbed me at dancing school, less willingly after that....

To sum up: What you have done to please me or make me proud is practically negligible since the time you made yourself a good diver at camp (and now you are softer than you have ever been). In your career as a ‘wild society girl,’ vintage of 1915, I’m not interested. I don’t want any of it - it would bore me, like dining with the Ritz Brothers. When I do not feel you are ‘going somewhere,’ your company tends to depress me for the silly waste and triviality involved. On the other hand, when occasionally I see signs of life and intention in you, there is no company in the world I prefer. For there is no doubt that you have something in your belly, some real gusto for life - a real dream of your own - and my idea was to wed it to something solid before it was too late - as it was too late for your mother to learn anything when she got around to it. Once when you spoke French as a child it was enchanting with your odd bits of knowledge - now your conversation is as commonplace as if you’d spent the last two years in the Corn Hollow High School - what you saw in Life and read in Sexy Romances.

I shall come East in September to meet your boat - but this letter is a declaration that I am no longer interested in your promissory notes but only in what I see. I love you always but I am only interested by people who think and work as I do and it isn’t likely that I shall change at my age. Whether you will - or want to - remains to be seen.

Daddy P S. If you keep the diary, please don’t let it be the dry stuff I could buy in a ten-franc guide book. I’m not interested in dates and places, even the Battle of New Orleans, unless you have some unusual reaction to them. Don’t try to be witty in the writing, unless its natural - just true and real P.P.S. Will you please read this letter a second time? I wrote it over twice.

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Corporation

Culver City,

California

July, 1938

Dearest Pie:

When I wrote down those architectural terms hoping to encourage a ‘Gothic Quest’ I overlooked what was right under my eye. Rotterdam, oddly enough, is the center of modern architecture. J. P. P. Oud, who was invited to give the Kalin lectures at Princeton some years ago, is the greatest living architect in all probability, and his workers’ dwellings, designed when he was city architect of Rotterdam, are a model for the world. See them if you come back that way and compare them with New York slums. Also, if this reaches you in Paris, you might find Caffin’s easy book on architecture at Brentano’s. Please buy it.

Also if you’re in Paris when this reaches you, a pneumatique might reach Nanny at 23 rue Pascal-Lecointre. I think it would be nice if you took her to lunch. If you do, make her feel happy and important - she did a great deal for you. Give her my love.

I have been trying to get your actual college board ratings. Do you realize now that all that bother about French has saved you one whole year of education? I mean that French was the deciding factor in your skipping a grade. So that if you should marry at 19 you will have had one more year of education than if you had let it slip. I hadn’t intended to bring up the college matters definitely in this letter, but, since I’ve said this,

I might as well add that you should approach Vassar as if you were going to do the four years. A girl’s life is so different from a boy’s in America that the odds are incalculable as to whether or not you will take a degree - but who knows? Your mother had a broken engagement on her hands a few days before her nineteenth birthday - what could have been better than to have had something to go on with? It is very exceptional for a grown person to jump straight from one serious love affair into another.

Aside from that - and you know I’d be happy if you didn’t marry before twenty at the earliest - I think it would have an effect on your own morale and the feelings of other students towards you if you signed up ‘for the duration of the war.’ To half of the girls there, Vassar will be their whole world as Princeton was mine and, though they might enjoy a little butterflying, their resentment against the self-confessed butterfly who is only killing time with them will be very deep in their hearts, and will deepen as the years increase. So I should soft-pedal my social ambitions and ride with the times. After all the president of last year’s Vassar senior class just married a Rockefeller and the Clark girl of Boston made her debut as a singer instead of on Beacon Hill. The Bachelors’ Cotillion simply doesn’t mean what it did twenty years ago - or even ten. I suppose it meant a lot to — because she’s not likely to have anything any better.

All that is snobbish talk but the part about going in wholeheartedly, and publicly so, is very important and real. I want college to be good -I was pretty discouraged there for a while -I felt myself losing interest, and illness has made me pretty selfish and self-protective. I could see you stranded with a lot of childhood memories - and two thousand trivial letters. I even had a talk with a man who owns a canning factory in San Diego with the idea of giving you the works from the bottom. It would have made you or broken you (i e., made you run away). But it was pretty drastic medicine and I’m glad I didn’t have to resort to it. In an odd way you are an old-fashioned girl, living half in the world of Mrs Finney and Mrs Turnbull (you should have seen the latter’s face the day the banks closed in ‘33 and I had the only money on the place - $1800 in gold). Often I have encouraged that because my generation of radicals and breakers-down never found anything to take the place of the old virtues of work and courage and the old graces of courtesy and politeness. But I don’t want you to live in an unreal world or to believe that the system that produced Barbara Hutton can survive more than ten years, any more than the French monarchy could survive 1789. Every girl your age in America will have the experience of working for her living. To shut your eyes to that is like living in a dream - to say ‘I will do valuable and indispensable work’ is the part of wisdom and courage.

With dearest love,

Daddy P.S. At the Saturday Evening Post rate this letter is worth $4000. Since it is for you only and there are so many points, won’t you read it twice?

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Corporation

Culver City,

California

September 19, 1938

Dearest Pie:

Here are a few ideas that I didn’t discuss with you and I’m sending this to reach you on your first day.

For heaven’s sake don’t make yourself conspicuous by rushing around inquiring which are the Farmington Girls, which are the Dobbs Girls, etc. You’ll make an enemy of everyone who isn’t. Thank heaven you’re on an equal footing of brains at last - most of the eventual leaders will be high school girls and I’d hate to see you branded among them the first week as a snob - it’s not worth a moment’s thought. What is important is to go to the library and crack your first book - to be among the 5% who will do this and get that much start and freshness.

A chalk Une is absolutely specified for you at present because... besides the ‘cleverness’ which you are vaguely supposed to have ‘inherited’, people will be quick to deck you out with my sins. If I hear of you taking a drink before you’re twenty, I shall feel entitled to begin my last and greatest non-stop binge, and the world also will have an interest in the matter of your behavior. It would like to be able to say, and would say on the slightest provocation: There she goes - just like her papa and mama.’ Need I say that you can take this fact as a curse - or you can make of it a great advantage?

Remember that you’re there for four years. It is a residential college and the butterfly will be resented. You should never boast to a soul that you’re going to the Bachelors’ Cotillion. I can’t tell you how important this is. For one hour of vainglory you will create a different attitude about yourself. Nothing is as obnoxious as other people’s luck. And while I’m on this: You will notice that there is a strongly organized left-wing movement there. I do not particularly want you to think about politics, but I do not want you to set yourself against this movement. I am known as a left-wing sympathizer and would be proud if you were. In any case, I should feel outraged if you identified yourself with Nazism or Red-baiting in any form. Some of those radical girls may not look like much now but in your lifetime they are liable to be high in the councils of the nation.

I think it would be wise to put on somewhat of an act in reference to your attitude to the upper classmen. In every college the class just ahead of you is of great importance. They approach you very critically, size you up and are in a position to help or hinder you in anything you try. I mean the class just ahead of you. A sophomore class is usually conceited. They feel that they have been through the mill and have learned something. While this is very doubtful, it is part of wisdom to humor that vanity in them. It would pay dividends many times to treat them with an outward respect which you might not feel and I want you to be able to do such things at will, as it happens that all through life you may be in a position in which you will constantly have to assume a lowly rank in a very strict organization. If anybody had told me my last year at Princeton that I would stand up and take orders from an ex-policeman, I would have laughed. But such was the case because, as an army officer, he was several grades above me in rank and competence - and that is not the last time it has happened.

Here is something you can watch happen during your college course. Always at the beginning of the first term about half a dozen leaders arise. Of these at least two get so intoxicated with themselves that they don’t last the first year, two survive as leaders and two are phonies who are found out within a year - and therefore discredited and rated even lower than before, with the resentment people feel for anyone who has fooled them.

Everything you are and do from fifteen to eighteen is what you are and will do through life. Two years are gone and half the indicators already point down - two years are left and you’ve got to pursue desperately the ones that point up!

I wish I were going to be with you the first day, and I hope the work has already started.

With dearest love,

Daddy

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Corporation

Culver City,

California

Fall, 1938

Dearest Scottie:

I am intensely busy. On the next two weeks, during which I finish the first part of Madame Curie, depends whether or not my contract will be renewed. So naturally I am working like hell - though I wouldn’t expect you to understand that - and getting rather bored with explaining the obvious over and over to a wrong-headed daughter.

If you had listened when Peaches read that paper aloud last September this letter and several others would have been unnecessary. You and I have two very different ideas - yours is to be immediately and overwhelmingly attractive to as many boys as you can possibly meet, including Cro-Magnons, natural-born stevedores, future members of the Shriners and plain bums. My idea is that presently, not quite yet, you should be extremely attractive to a very limited amount of boys who will be very much heard of in the nation or who will at least know what it is all about.

The two ideas are irreconcilable, completely and utterly inverse, obverse and contradictory! You have never understood that!

I told you last September that I would give you enough to go to Vassar, live moderately, leave college two or three times during the fall term - a terrific advantage in freedom over your contemporaries in boarding school.

After four weeks I encountered you on a weekend. Here is how it was spent - God help the Monday recitations:

Friday - on the train to Baltimore Dance Saturday-to New York (accidentally) with me Sunday - to Simsbury to a reunion

The whole expedition must have cost you much more than your full week’s allowance. I warned you then, as I had warned you in the document Peaches read, that you would have to pay for your Thanksgiving vacation. However, in spite of all other developments - the Navy game, the Dean’s information, the smoking, the debut plans - I did not interfere with your allowance until you gave me the absolute insult of neglecting a telegram. Then I blew up and docked you ten dollars - that is exactly what it cost to call you the day of the Yale-Harvard game because I could not believe a word you said.

Save for that ten dollars you have received $13.85 every week. If you doubt this I will send you a record of the cancelled checks.

There is no use telegraphing any more - if you have been under exceptional expenses that I do not know of I will of course help you. But otherwise you must stay within that sum. What do you do it for? You wouldn’t even give up smoking - and by now you couldn’t if you wanted to. To take Andrew and Peaches - who, I think you will agree, come definitely under the head of well- brought-up children - if either of them said to their fathers: ‘I’m going to do no favors for you but simply get away with everything I can’ - well, in two minutes they’d lost the J25 a month they probably get!

But I have never been strict with you, except on a few essentials, probably because in spite of everything I had till recently a sense of partnership with you that sprang out of your mother’s illness. But you effectively broke that up last summer and I don’t quite know where we stand. Controlling you like this is so repugnant to me that most of the time I no longer care whether you get an education or not. But as for making life soft for you after all this opposition - it simply isn’t human nature. I’d rather have a new car.

If you want to get presents for your mother, Peaches, Mary Law, Grandmother, etc., why not send me a list and let me handle it here? Beyond which I hope to God you are doing a lot about the Plato - and I love you very much when given a chance.

Daddy

P.S. Do you remember going to a party of Rosemary Warburton’s in Philadelphia when you were seven? Her aunt and her father used to come a lot to Ellerslie.

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Corporation

Culver City,

California

November 15, 1938

Dearest Scottie:

I haven’t heard from you yet but I’m assuming that your common sense has asserted itself and I’ll get a fair answer to my letter. How you could possibly have missed the answer to my first question I don’t know, unless you skipped pages 160 to 170 in Farewell to Arms. Try again! There’s nothing vague in these questions of mine but they require attention. I hope you’ve sent me the answer to the second question. The third question is based on the book Ecclesiastes in the Bible. It is fifteen pages long and since you have it in your room you ought to get through it carefully in four or five days. As far as I am concerned you can skip the wise-cracks in italics on pages 766, 767 and 768. They were written by somebody else and just stuck in there. But read carefully the little introduction on 754 and note also that I do not mean ‘Ecclesiasticus’ which is something entirely different. Remember when you’re reading it that it is one of the top pieces of writing in the world. Notice that Ernest Hemingway got a title from the third paragraph. As a matter of fact the thing is full of titles. The paragraph on page 756 sounds like the confession of a movie producer, even to the swimming pools.

Am glad you were reading about Twentieth Century Sophists. You meet them every day. They see their world falling to pieces and know all the answers, and are not going to do anything about it.

Did the quilts come? The Baltimore stuff and also the one from New York, which, of course, was a duplication as it turned out. Isn’t it common courtesy to âcknowledge such matters? Also, Harold said he sent you that old Redbook story of mine. Did you read it?

Dearest love.

Daddy

P.S. Your failure to send me that slip on the second page gummed up the list of Elizabethan lyrics I’d made, so that there was some repetition in the second list. Your teachers must love you for that splendid casual quality but I don’t think you’d hold a job five minutes.

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Corporation

Culver City,

California

November 18, 1938

Dearest Scottie:

I’m certainly glad to catch a glimmer of wisdom in your attitude - even though you unveiled the story of the blow-away pink slip after the telegraph company had checked on you. And even though in one page of your letter you had intended to go to Baltimore from Thursday to Saturday, while in another part you hadn’t intended to go at all.

I’m sorry about — ‘s tea. I’ve nothing against her except that she rather stuck her neck out about Vassar, which I suppose she is attending for the social prestige involved. She seemed very nice, quite transparent - a type that turned up all too frequently in the Cottage Club at Princeton. I do wish you would find some more interesting friends. To take the curse off your not going to her party I wrote a nice letter to her mother explaining my apparent tyranny in forbidding it. Same to the mother of — .

In answering my questions you asked some yourself. The one about Baltimore can be answered from Ecclesiastes, ‘There is a time for weeping, a time for laughing,’ etc. Fourteen was simply not the time for you to run around on evening dates - at least Pete Finney and I thought not in our erroneous ways. The parents of — and — thought differently. Who is interested in a girl with her bloom worn off at sixteen? The one thing you still reproach me for is letting you go, against my better judgment, to the dance at St Andrew’s School.

It is now perfectly sensible for you to go with college boys. (I didn’t want you to stay in Baltimore this fall because I felt it would shoot you into Vassar with your mind full of gayety or love, which it apparently did, for your first month there was a flat bust. Also, I did not want you to start with a string of football games this fall.) If you are invited to the Yale or Princeton proms this winter or next spring by a reputable boy - and I’m entitled the name, please - I’d have absolutely no objection to your going The whole damn thing about going to the colleges is to keep it in proportion. Did you ever hear of a college boy, unless he were an idiot, racing from Smith to Vassar to Wellesley? There are certain small sacrifices for a college education or there wouldn’t be any honor in having gone to college.

But the New York thing is as wrong now as the auto date was at fourteen. I will quote you from a letter I wrote Harold Ober: Those debutante parties in New York are the rendezvous of a gang of professional idlers, parasites, pansies, failures, the silliest type of sophomores, young customers’ men from Wall Street and hangers-on - the very riff-raff of social New York who would exploit a child like Scottie with flattery and squeeze her out until she is a limp colorless rag. In one more year she can cope with them. In three more years it will be behind her. This year she is still puppy enough to be dazzled. She will be infinitely better off here with me than mixed up with that sort of people. I’d rather have an angry little girl on my hands for a few months than a broken neurotic for the rest of my life.’ But I don’t have to tell you this - you probably read the Life article on the dim-witted — girl and the razz on her in The New Yorker.

As to the money. Your full allowance for next Monday, $13.85, will reach you almost as soon as this does. I’m sorry you were inconvenienced at the loss of the $10.00, but it is a trifle compared to the inconvenience you have caused at this end. I will also send an additional $5.00, which will make $18.85 for the Baltimore trip, but that $5.00 will come off the following week’s allowance. I want you to stay in Baltimore until Sunday, and I mean specifically in Baltimore, not at Vassar, not at Scarsdale. This money must absolutely take care of the Baltimore trip!

Yes, it is too bad you have to be checked up on like a girl of ten. I’d hoped you’d be rather different this year. If Peaches hadn’t been with you that first day in Hollywood I would have squelched the idea of rooming with a debutante as I had meant to. I let it go because I didn’t want to open her visit that way. I’m as sick of this bloody matter as you are. I can just see people pointing at you at New York dances and saying, That’s Scott Fitzgerald’s daughter. She likes her champagne young. Why doesn’t he do something about it?’

Even if your aims are the most worldly, the road that I am pointing out is the right one. A great social success is a pretty girl who plays her cards as carefully as if she were plain.

With dearest love,

Daddy

P.S. Please address all future correspondence to my new address, 5221 Amestoy Ave, Encino, Los Angeles, California.

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Corporation

Culver City,

California

November 25, 1938

Dearest Scottie:

I’m concerned about the history test though I know the classroom work may have been better. However, at Walkers your tests ran almost equal to your classroom work, usually ahead of it, and finishing early rather indicates that you were out of material, doesn’t it? But I feel that if you like that work you can pass it. I never blame failure - there are too many complicated situations in life - but I am absolutely merciless toward lack of effort. That’s why I finally lost interest in — . I’m sending you a book that seems to have helped some people at Princeton. You might glance over it. You must admit that my prophecy has proven true. I said that to get decent grades you would have to study at least as hard as you did between leaving Walkers and taking the board examinations. I don’t mean that it will be tough sledding indefinitely but there will have to be a period of tough sledding before you come to Easy Street. Why don’t you let it be now? You can still pull out of this hole before Christmas - and put me in a most generous mood.

Knowing your character, here’s about the way things will go in the next month. You have four weeks before Christmas and probably you intend to try hard but at the moment you have gotten into some entanglement in Baltimore that you either want to go deeper into or get out of, or put on ice - in any case, that will require two or three days of letter writing and absorption. Then you will do well for three days - until the reply to your letter sets you off again. By now your impetus will be exhausted and you will have a good three-day low - the movies and New York, forget to hand in a theme, or something like that. Two weeks gone. Then, alas, one of those things will happen against which only the wisest will guard - a two-day cold, an unexpected change of Christmas plans, some personal trouble or upset. Then there’s only a week left and despite frantic hours you will have another failure on your hands. Don’t you see that this is just how it happens? Where’s that ‘common sense’ that you boast about?

I begin to wonder about the postal service there. I wrote you some weeks ago that the second question was:

During the retreat from Caporetto, Lieutenant Henry was haunted by one of the poems in the second list, which came into his memory in distorted form. What poem was it?

That should take you only a minute. Also, did you ever get my letter in which I included a letter you wrote me from Walkers last June?

The address given you before is incorrect. The right address is: 5521 Amestoy Ave, Encino, Los Angeles, California.

With dearest love,

Daddy

P.S. $5.00 of the $10.00 advanced you is deducted from this week’s check, which please find enclosed.

5521 Amestoy Avenue

Encino,California

December, 1938

Dearest Scottie:

A letter from Miss Barber tells me you may very possibly be on probation. I am disappointed but not broken-hearted as it was on the cards from September. In one way you are like me - that when things seemed to be going oh so smoothly they were really slipping from underneath subtly and surely. But on the other hand remember that when you are struggling and fighting and perhaps feeling you are getting nowhere, maybe even despairing - those are the times when you may be making slow, sure progress. I hope December has been one of those times - I hope it is the beginning of an effort that, if the probation is imposed, will see it lifted very soon.

I thought the letter from Miss Barber had a somewhat impertinent tone. This is doubtless because you seem to have told her you were eighteen which of course would throw an entirely different light on my wishes about New York and make me rather silly. This rather detracted from the sympathy that I felt for you, which prompted my wire.

Presuming you are hard up I am sending a small advance on your Dec. 19th allowance to keep the wolf from the door.

My plans are all uncertain. Is that Princeton pamphlet any good?

With dearest love,

Daddy

P.S. Your letter came. Touched that you wish I wouldn’t worry about the marks and enlightened to know why freshmen are marked hard. ‘I don’t see why you’re so furious because I’m not brilliant’ is a sentence that touches my heart. I don’t know whether it’s the thought or the style that impresses me most. Which was your philosophical poem? ‘Be my little little little, little wife?’

Which reminds me. I sent you the librettos of W. S. Gilbert. What I want you to read is Patience which was written as a counterblast of Wilde’s asceticism. Did you like the Dowson poem? What notorious modern novel takes its title from a line of it?

About your masterwork - the diary. (Seriously it has some nice writing in it, sharp observation, flashes of wit, etc. I cut pages 1 and 1 from a typed version and sent it to your grandmother.)

The editing I did was slight - names changed (Myers, Murphys, etc.); reference to your mother’s not getting well.... There is not a word or a line changed - nor even a correction of spelling. Excuse my map - I never did know how you got from Switzerland to Paris.

Who are you going to visit in Baltimore if you go there? I have no time to dig you up stuff about Ernest but his first book In Our Time tells a lot about himself. I have not taken a week from your allowance. I wish in your letter now - the last I’ll get before vacation - you would tell me in bulk just how much you owe!

Daddy

5521 Amestoy Avenue

Encino,California

January, 1939

Dearest Pie:

I believe you have to deposit this by the third of February. Anyhow as soon as you know you are going on give it to them. I have added the music charges from the catalogue - of course you get no scholastic credit for preliminary music.

I suppose you have finished the essay. If you are still writing it don’t forget that the age of marriage is largely a biological question. Girls in India mature at thirteen, in the American tropics at about fifteen or sixteen, and in Scandinavia as late as twenty-one. Most questions in life have an economic basis (at least according to us Marxians), but this is one where biology undermines economics. Hence the Spanish duenna and the French chaperone, because these races realize that while economically it’s better to wait, nature in southern lands has quite contrary intentions.

I will take care of the Turnbull matter.

By this time you will have heard from exams. I hope it goes well. You are the first woman on either side of your family to try for a higher education - though many of them have been well- read. If you get to know a little bit you will combine a great deal of latent power in yourself, and be able to live more fully and richly than the majority of pretty girls whose lives in America are lop-sided, backward-looking and wistful.

How about ‘Cynara,’ etc.? I feel a slowly mounting exasperation.

My address is simply Endno, California.

Your letter was a masterpiece of polite evasion.

Love,

Daddy

5521 Amestoy Avenue

Encino, California

Winter, 1939

Dearest Scottie:

I know you looked first at the check, but it does not represent a business transaction. I am too tired at the moment to argue but your figures are wrong. However, I’m having it all checked up by my secretary. I think there is a gift somewhere.

Sorry you got the impression that I’m quitting the movies - they are always there - I’m doing a two-weeks rewrite for Paramount at the moment, after finishing a short story. But I’m convinced that maybe they’re not going to make me Czar of the Industry right away, as I thought 10 months ago. It’s all right, baby - life has humbled me - Czar or not, we’ll survive. I am even willing to compromise for Assistant Czar!

Seriously, I expect to dip in and out of the pictures for the rest of my natural life, but it is not very soul-satisfying because it is a business of telling stories fit for children and this is only interesting up to a point. It is the greatest of all human mediums of communication and it is a pity that the censorship had to come along and do this, but there we are. Only - I will never again sign a contract which binds me to tell none other than children’s stories for a year and a half!

Anyhow, I’m on the new Madeleine Carroll picture (go to see Café Society - it’s pretty damn good, I think. This one is the same producer-director-stars combination) and anyhow the movies are a dull life and one hopes one will be able to transcend it.

You’ve let me down about the reading. I’m sorry you did because I’ll have to bargain with you. Read MollFlanders, for any favors asked. I mean this: skip Tono Bungay but if you don’t care enough about my advice to do some fractional exploring in literature instead of skimming Life and The New Yorker, I’m going to get into one of those unsympathetic moods - if I’m not sorry for people’s efforts there seems to be an icy and inhuman reaction. So please report on MollFlanders immediately... meanwhile airmail me another travel folder on Mrs Draper and her girls. Who is she and they? And who is Moll Flanders?

I hope you enjoy the Princeton prom - please don’t be overwhelmingly - but no, I am done with prophecies - make your own mistakes. Let me only say ‘Please don’t be overwhelmingly anything!’ and, if you are, don’t give my name as the responsible parent! (And by the way never give out any interview to any newspaperman, formal or informal - this is a most definite and most advised plea. My name and you, bearing parts of it, is (are) still news in some quarters - and my current policy, for reasons too numerous to explain, is silence. Please do me this courtesy!)

I should like to meet you somewhere early in April - the third or fourth.

Your mother is in Florida - it seems to have been delayed.

Of course I’m glad and it warms me all over to know that even ungrammatically ‘both your French English and history teachers’ etc. Though you are pretty completely hatched and I can be little more than your most dependable friend, your actions still have a most decided effect on me and at long range I can only observe you thru the eyes of Vassar. I have been amazed that you do not grasp a certain advantage that is within your hand - as definite as the two-headed Russian eagle - a girl who didn’t have to have an education because she had the other women’s gifts by accident - — and who took one anyhow. Like Tommy Hitchcock who came back from England in 1919 already a newspaper hero in his escapes from Germany and the greatest polo player in the world - — and went up to Harvard in the same year to become a freshman - because he had the humility to ask himself ‘Do I know anything?’ That combination is what forever will put him in my pantheon of heroes.

Go thou and do likewise.

Love,

Daddy

5521 Amestoy Avenue

Encino,California

Winter, 1939

Dearest Pie:

Day of rest! After a wild all-night working on Gone with the Wind and more to come tomorrow. I read it - I mean really read it - it is a good novel - not very original, in fact leaning heavily on The Old Wives’ Tale, Vanity Fair, and all that has been written on the Civil War. There are no new characters, new technique, new observations - none of the elements that make literature - especially no new examination into human emotions. But on the other hand it is interesting, surprisingly honest, consistent and workmanlike throughout, and I felt no contempt for it but only a certain pity for those who considered it the supreme achievement of the human mind. So much for that -I may be on it two weeks - or two months. I disagreed with everybody about how to do Madame Curie and they’re trying it another way.

Your cold stirred certain gloomy reflections in me. Like me, you were subject to colds when young, deep chest colds near to pneumonia. I didn’t begin to be a heavy smoker until I was a sophomore but it took just one year to send me into tuberculosis and cast a shadow that has been extremely long. I wish there was something that would make you cut it out - the only pay-off is that if you’re run down by June to spend a summer in the open air, which is a pity with so much to do and learn. I don’t want to bury you in your debut dress.

My own plans are uncertain. I am pretty disgusted with pictures after all that censorship trouble and want to break off for a while when I have another good credit (I won’t get one on The Women) - but when, I don’t know.

Haven’t read De Monorchia. Read several pieces by Cornelia Skinner and found them thin and unamusing. Since you’ve undertaken the Dorian Gray I hope you make a success of it but I hope the professor knows what you’re doing. She might not consider the rearrangement of someone else’s words a literary composition, which would leave you out on a limb. Are you taking swimming?

Dearest love,

Daddy

P S. Of course I do not care if you postpone ‘Cynara,’ etc., though it’s such a detail, and you must be in the library every day. Your college work comes first - but I can’t help wondering how, if time is reduced to such miniscules, you would ever have thought of trying out for a play. That of course is entirely out at present - last year should have taught you that lesson.

5521 Amestoy Avenue

Encino,

California March 11, 1939

Dear Scottie:

Thanks for your long letter about your course of subjects.

Generally, I think that your election of French as a major is a wise decision. I imagine that there will be some competition for the Sorbonne but it might be something to aim at. Also, if you want to take one English course I think you have chosen wisely. Once again I concur about the History of Music if it pleases you. But I wish you would thoroughly reconsider the chemistry question. It is an extremely laborious subject - it requires the most meticulous care and accuracy during long laboratory hours. Moreover, unless your mathematics are at your fingertips - and you were never very good at mathematics - you will be continually redoing experiments because of one small slip, and I just can’t see it fitting in with hours of music practice and some regular exercise.

One suggestion is to take preliminary physics. I don’t know whether, if you have already offered that as an entrance, they would allow it, but they might and it would be a fairly easy running over of it as a very essential and interesting subject. I do not mean that I advise a second-year physics course because that would run into as much mathematics as chemistry. But if, God help us, they insist on a science I should advise you to consider them in the following order: botany, physiology, or child study. Think of the enormous pleasure amounting, almost, to the consolation for the tragedy of life that flowers have been to your mother and your grandmother. Maybe you could be a landscape architect like LeNotre but the personal element is equally important. I felt all my life the absence of hobbies except such, for me as abstract and academic ones, as military tactics and football. Botany is such a definite thing. It has its feet on the ground. And after reading Thoreau I felt how much I have lost by leaving nature out of my life.

I am sorry about the philosophy. I should think that if anything your test questions will deal with the big key figures, and a certain concentration of work upon Plato, Aquinas, and Descartes would pay more dividends than trying to study over entirely the course from the beginning. Please don’t give it up as a bad job. Are you sure that you entirely understand the great usages thru the ages of such terms as nominalists and realists? I want you to keep your interest at least as far as Hegel from whose stem all Marxian thinking flows; certainly you will agree that Marxism does not concern itself with vague sophistries but weds itself to the most practical mechanics of material revolution.

I should suggest that you go to SeaIsland with the party and return by yourself, passing at least a full day with your mother in Asheville, and a day, if you like, in Baltimore; that is, I think the Finneys would be a little offended if you did not pay at least a courtesy visit. I shall try my best to be East by the second, and at least cross your path - perhaps in Asheville - but I have let myself be inveigled into another picture and it may possibly run on to the tenth of April; on the other hand it may blow up tomorrow. (It is the new Carroll-MacMurray picture.)

With dearest love,

Daddy

P.S. Can you give me some sort of budget for your trip to SeaIsland? 2nd P.S. You are not entirely right about the translations (poetry, of course, cannot be translated, but even there we have exceptions such as The Rubaiyat). Constance Garnett’s Russian translations are excellent, while Scott-Moncrieff’s Proust is a masterpiece in itself. And please do not leave good books half- finished, you spoil them for yourself. You shouldn’t have started War and Peace, which is a man’s book and may interest you later. But you should finish both the Defoe and the Samuel Butler. Don’t be so lavish as to ruin masterpieces for yourself. There are not enough of them!

5521 Amestoy Avenue

Encino, California

March, 1939

Dearest Scottie:

I was incredibly happy when I heard that the cloud had lifted. Don’t let it come down again! I was so happy when it lifted for me at Princeton and let me in for everything I’d wanted that I forgot. And the second time I never did manage to get out of a scholastic mess all the time I was in college. If you don’t get too happy this spring, don’t lose the ground you’ve gained - it’s going to be all right.

Congratulations -I know what it means to you, something you did for and by yourself. A sort of justification. The only excuse for the damper up above is that we have to continue to justify ourselves each week of our lives and it would seem there would be rest sometimes. Did you ever read Christina Rossetti’s

‘And does the road wind uphill all the way?

Yes - to the very end -’

I want you to get Peaches a present - rather a useful one. This seems somewhat lavish but this is a world of give and take. I am allowing you twenty-five dollars for it. As it is a lavish gesture it should be a simple present - something she should find practical and useful - on the other angle from a ring-watch. Something that if you hadn’t bought it, Pete would have had to buy it. You know her well enough to give her familiar things. Ponder this carefully - if you buy her a ‘bauble’ the idea will defeat its purpose.

Also take your mother something for $15. So I’m sending:

6 days at SeaIsland at $13.00 —  $78.00

2 presents —         $40.00

Railroad fare —           $100.00

Clothes                                             $50.00

Expenses —           $310.00 $50.00

$310.00 (sic)

And to cover the airplane I’m making it $350.00. You have no leeway on your incidentals. I know the instinct to delight everybody with a big tip but in the end we too generous people die of heart trouble, trying to make it good, and have rewarded the wrong people, so be a little penurious and calculating with your small change.

I’m just as glad Cottage lost out. They’ve been dominant for five years - it’s time it should be someone else. The only healthy thing about the God-awful system is that no one of the four is triumphant for long. In my time it was Tiger Inn - since then they’ve all taken turns. Did you run into a man named Ralph Wyer at the prom? He’s a Minnesotan and seems to me an altogether admirable fellow. I saw him lose a tooth with great grace at the Dartmouth Winter Carnival in the hockey game.

Your comment on the satirical quality in English fiction is very apt. If you want a counter-irritant read Bleak House (Dickens’ best book) - or if you want to explore the emotional world - not now, but in a few more years - read Dostoevski’s Brothers Karamazov. And you’ll see what the novel can do. Glad you like Butler - I liked the place where Ernest’s father ‘turned away to conceal his lack of emotion.’ My God - what precision of hatred is in those lines. I’d like to be able to destroy my few detestations — , for example - with such marksmanship as that.

Again thanks for wiring me. I must love you a lot for you have quite a power to lift me up and cast me down.

Jove, (Sometimes known as Jupiter or ‘Papa Angelicus’)

5521 Ames toy Avenue

Encino, California

April 5, 1939

Dearest: Thanks for your letter.

When you get time give me a sort of budget of what you did with the money I sent you. I mean, estimate roughly what became of it. Also, did you take any planes to and from SeaIsland or Asheville? As I wrote you, most of those eastern lines are safe after the first February. In spite of the storm you ran into on way back East last fall, I think it’s rather old-fashioned not get used to airplane travel and use it as a convenience. You made a great impression on your mother. How different a year ago at Virginia Beach when you seemed as far apart the poles, during those dreary tennis games and golf lessons!

Of course, the fact that she is so much better accounts for a good deal of it, but I believe that was the time you had first discovered love, in the person of — , and were in a sort of drugged coma until you could get back to Baltimore.

Spring was always an awful time for me about work. I always felt that in the long boredom of winter there was nothing else to do but study. But I lost the feeling in the long, dreamy spring days and managed to be in scholastic hot water by June. I can’t tell you what to do about it - all my suggestions seem to be very remote and academic. But if I were with you and we could talk again like we used to, I might lift you out of your trouble about concentration. It really isn’t so hard, even with dreamy people like you and me - it’s just that we feel so damned secure at times as long as there’s enough in the bank to buy the next meal, and enough moral stuff in reserve to take us through the next ordeal. Our danger is imagining that we have resources - material and moral - which we haven’t got. One of the reasons I find myself so consistently in valleys of depression is that every few years I seem to be climbing uphill to recover from some bankruptcy. Do you know what bankruptcy exactly means? It means drawing on resources which one does not possess. I thought I was so strong that I never would be ill and suddenly I was ill for three years, and faced with a long, slow uphill climb. Wiser people seem to manage to pile up a reserve - so that if on a night you had set aside to study for a philosophy test you learned that your best friend was in trouble and needed your help, you could skip that night and find you had a reserve of one or two days preparation to draw on. But I think that, like me, you will be something of a fool in that regard all your life, so I am wasting my words.

Query: Are you taking up the swimming during the spring term? I hope tremendously you will, but I suppose that’s been decided already. If not, what are you doing for spring athletics?

Query No. 2: Is there any way - and don’t kid me - in which you can take driving lessons? Also, if you get time - and this is not important - give me a slight picture of what the life is at Sea Island. Also, when you get time, write your mother, because I’ve been putting off a visit to her and may possibly have to be here three weeks longer on this damned picture and she probably feels that I’m never coming.

Dearest love always.

Daddy

P.S. Got a nice thank-you letter from Frances Turnbull for the check I sent her.

5521 Amestoy Avenue

Encino,California

May 6, 1939

Dearest:

I am sending you four weeks’ allowance and hope you can make it go. Found your very sweet letter when I got back. Please pay up your debts in full. You know if things get really out of hand you can always call on me, but I am in for a little siege of illness and I will have to count pennies for a few months until this time is over, so don’t splurge on any new big spring wardrobe.

Plans for June all depend on factors that I am absolutely unable to regulate now. Literally, I do not know what we are liable to do. In spite of the fact that I have this house and may possibly bring your mother out here for a month or so (now this must absolutely not be mentioned in any letter to her because everything is ready by the hospital and I haven’t yet divulged any plans to Dr Carroll) I still don’t see you out here. You see, it would inevitably force us into that old relationship which was unsuccessful five years ago in Baltimore of my being more or less in the unpleasant position of a spy on your private affairs.

I am turning over several possibilities in my mind. One of them is would you like to go to Russia with a group of girls on an economically organized tour? I am sure such things must be going on at Vassar and you need only make inquiries about it and give me the data. I mean something for three or four weeks. I agree I don’t want you to go back to France this summer. But it might just be an experience to go to Russia on some non-deluxe affair. Form your own opinion about how the experiment might work-out. I have several more strings to my bow, but I am not telling you all of them at once. But Hollywood - why?

What do you want to do out here? I can no more see you as a reader in a studio wading through bad novels and worse magazine stories all summer and being so dog-tired at the end of the day that you would probably be ready for anything, even these empty-headed California boys. The question of getting you a test has occurred to me too, but I have got at least three or four reasons against it. First, I believe you ought to wait another year - — second, I want you to have one more year at Vassar and then make your debut in Baltimore. Suppose you were good? Then it would completely upset the applecart which we have elaborately set up back East. And what else can you do out here? Do you want to come out and be my secretary? Let us laugh quietly and mirthlessly with a Boris Karloff ring. As for some of the ideas you had before, it skips my mind whether we discussed them, but I remember one of them was whether you should go to summer stock in one of those New England towns. Honey, I may as well hand you over to the white slavers and make a thorough job of it. For girls like you, it is nothing but a complete playtime job and strong competition between the girls to see who gets the honor of being seduced by the leading man.

Doubtless all sorts of ideas have occurred to you and, if so, why not list them and send them to me - maybe we will find out of them one that fits both our ideas.

I think I have answered almost everything in your letter and I have another idea about the driving which I am going to leave for another month because it seems to me almost dangerous for a girl your age not to know how to drive.

Dearest love.

Daddy

5521 Amestoy Avenue

Encino,California

July, 1939

My plan would be to start you out here the last day of the month - — that is ten days from the time of writing this letter. The only thing that would prevent this would be some unexpected turn of illness. This is unlikely, but possible. I don’t know how this trip is going to work out and feel a certain trepidation. I am of course not drinking and haven’t been for a long time, but any illness is liable to have a certain toxic effect on the system and you may find me depressing, over-nervous about small things, and dogmatic - all these qualities more intensified than you have previously experienced them in me. Beyond this I am working very hard and the last thing I want at the end of day is a problem while, as it is natural at your age, what you want at the end of the day is excitement. I tell you all this because lately we had planned so many meetings with anticipation and they turned out to be flops. Perhaps forewarned will be forearmed.

If the experiment proves upsetting I will have no further choice than to pack you off East somewhere again, but there are several friends here whom you could visit for a time if we failed to make a satisfactory household. So the trip will be worthwhile. Also I am more of a solitary than I have ever been but I don’t think that will worry you because you had your dosages of motion pictures stars on two other trips. To describe how humorless I feel about life at this point you have simply to read the Tarking- ton story called ‘Sinful Dadda Little’ in the Post issue of July 22 (still current, I believe) and remember that I read it without a particle of amusement but with a complete disgust at ‘Dadda’ for not drowning the two debutantes at the end.

Probably I am underestimating you, as everyone seems to be pleased with your good manners and your ‘attitude’ (I know you hate that word) this summer - notably Mrs Owens and your mother. But you left a most unpleasant impression behind last autumn with many people, and I would much rather not see you at all than see you without loving you. Your home is Vassar. Anything else to be supplied at present is a mockery of a home. It is too bad it should be this way but the only thing is to treat it as a visit and for us both to remember the rules of common courtesy towards each other. I take my sleeping pills regularly between eleven and twelve so we won’t have any of those midnight wrangles that disfigured your June and September visits. Can’t the party wait till you get here to discuss? Beneath all this, you understand, I have so much to talk to you about. (Incidentally, your memory has played you false about the philosophy.

If the taking of it was a mistake it was mine not yours. I chose it one day when we were sitting on my bed with the catalogue at the beach a year ago. And I had some correspondence with Vassar trying to get you into the course at all. The history and French are as much a mystery to me as you say they are to you.)

Please give your mother this enclosed letter when you are alone with her as I don’t want it to go through the sanitarium. (Changed. Am writing her

Zelda separately. Enclosed is for yours and her expenses at boarding house.)

With dearest love,

Daddy

P.S. I am pretty definitely breaking with Ober but he doesn’t know it yet.

5521 Amestoy Avenue

Encino, California

July, 1939

I am certainly glad that you’re up and around and sorry that your selection of post-Flaubertan realism depressed you. I certainly wouldn’t begin Henry James with The Portrait of a Lady which is in his ‘late second manner’ and full of mannerisms. Why don’t you read Roderick Hudson or Daisy Miller first? Lord Jim is a great book - the first third at least and the conception, though it got lost a little bit in the law-courts of Calcutta or wherever it was. I wonder if you know why it is good? Sister Carrie, almost the first piece of American realism, is damn good and is as easy reading as a True Confession.

I wish I could say the same about a recent article in Mademoiselle. I grant you the grace of having been merely a dupe as I warned you you would be - for I cannot believe that you would announce that you pursued your education yourself while I went around to the speakeasies. There’s nothing to do about it now, but in future please call yourself by any name that doesn’t sound like mine in your writings. You must have wanted fifty dollars awfully bad to let them print such a trite and perverted version of your youth, unless you mean that it was the Fred Astaire pictures that taught you that gallant stance upon ‘your own two feet.’ This isn’t in the nature of quarreling but you certainly owe me an explanation because I see no earmarks of the ‘dutiful daughter’ about any of it.

By the time you get this it will be the eleventh. Your plan was to leave for California the fourteenth - your mother’s has varied between a trip to Virginia Beach and a quiet time at Saluda. Both of you have something on me because I can’t quite decide what is best. I am waiting to hear from Montgomery about the exact state of your grandmother’s health and also to make up my mind how much work I can undertake in the studios and under what conditions - a matter which depends on X rays, the willingness of the studio to let me work at home, and other such factors.

I want to have you out here for part of the summer. I have a nice cottage in the country, but very far out in the country, and utterly inaccessible if one doesn’t drive well. Whether a piano here would be practical or not I don’t know (remember how I felt about radio) but all that might be arranged if the personal equation were not doubtful (a situation for which for the moment I take full blame). Since I stopped picture work three months ago, I have been through not only a T.B. flare-up but also a nervous breakdown of such severity that for a time it threatened to paralyze both arms - or to quote the doctor: ‘The good Lord tapped you on the shoulder.’ While I am running no fever above 99, I don’t know what this return to picture work is going to do and when and if my health blows up you know what a poor family man I am. It seems best - and I am merely feeling my way as I Write this letter - for you to spend at least another week in the East and you might as well spend it in or near Asheville, especially as it gives your mother such a great pleasure. A long pilgrimage with her would almost certainly require a nurse and run into expense as all trips that your mother and I make have a way of doing.

However, if things seem more stabilized out here toward the end of this month I may change my mind and bring you out here and let your mother go to Montgomery. For the moment, there is nothing for you to do but wait and get along as well as possible with your music and writing and what money I can send you. I have a bill from Dr Hamman for $25.00. Either he was very dilatory or you didn’t go to see him till the end of your visit in Baltimore for his diagnosis arrived the day of the operation and it was money thrown away. He seemed to agree, however, that four times out of five you would have had eventual trouble with the appendix.

I have sent for your marks. If you get them, airmail them to me. If they average around ‘B’ I should think you’ve done well in pulling yourself out of a very difficult hole.

You can read as much or as little of this letter to your mother as you want. I don’t mean it to be disagreeable, but I was naturally surprised when instead of carrying out your announced intention of writing about the difference between northern and southern girls you chose to ride on my shoulder and beat me on the head with a wooden spoon.

Your bank statements came through. I noticed there were half a dozen slips marked ‘insufficient funds.’ Marshall Neilan, once an ace director out here, went to jail for that little failing last week. These are days when if you haven’t got it you better do without. Sorry about Meredith too - I always liked him. The Ober mix-up accounts for his recent coolness. I’m sorry - we got along pretty well for twenty years. — isn’t smug or even stuffy - he’s a nice adolescent who married a smooth-faced — person.

Love,

Daddy

P.S. Sent Peaches a nice present. Was going to do the same for the — girl but John gave me a ‘subtle’ talk about some dim-witted brother who was reformed by a year in a drink sanitarium, and almost got his bottom kicked on 33rd Street

5521 Amestoy Avenue

Encino,

California October 31,1939

Scottina:

(Do you know that isn’t a nickname I invented but one that Gerald Murphy concocted on the Riviera year ago?) Look! I have begun to write something that is maybe great, and I’m going to be absorbed in it four or six months. It may not make us a cent but it will pay expenses and it is the first labor of love I’ve undertaken since the first part of Infidelity. (Do you remember that half-finished script the censor stopped that I showed you in Norfolk two years ago last Easter? You read it in the cabin of one of those Baltimore-Norfolk liners.)

Anyhow I am alive again - getting by that October did something - with all its strains and necessities and humiliations and struggles. I don’t drink. I am not a great man, but sometimes I think the impersonal and objective quality of my talent and the sacrifices of it, in pieces, to preserve its essential value has some sort of epic grandeur. Anyhow after hours I nurse myself with delusions of that sort.

And I think when you read this book, which will encompass the time when you knew me as an adult, you will understand how intensively I knew your world - not extensively because I was so ill and unable to get about. If I live long enough I’ll hear your side of things but I think your own instincts about your limitations as an artist are possibly best: you might experiment back and forth among the arts and find your niche as I found mine - but I do not believe that so far you are a ‘natural.’

So what? These are such valuable years. Let me watch over the development a little longer. What are the courses you are taking? Please list them. Please cater to me. Please do not ask me to rise to heights of nervous energy - in which I can usually discern the name of the dye on your instructor’s hair at long distance or reconstruct the murder of March, 1938, from a rag and a bone and a hank of hair. But give me some outlines.

a- What do Obers say about me? So sad?

b- What is this about my telling Mrs Owens you were a heel?

c. — What play are you in?

d. — What proms and games? Let me at least renew my youth!

e. — As a papa - not the mad child of a mad genius - what do you do? and how?

f. — What furniture? Do you still want etchings?

g. — What did Rosalind write?

h. — Do you want a test here?

i. — Did you ever think of calling on the Murphys to make them happy - not to deprecate — ?

I’m glad you read Malraux. Did you get the driver’s license? Is Mary Earle nice? I got an instant impression in Connecticut of a brave, lovely, impish person....

With dearest love,

Daddy

5521 Amestoy Avenue

Encino,

CaliforniaNovember 4, 1939

Dearest Scottie:

Sorry my letter crossed yours - I mean the letter where I said you were not ‘a natural.’ If you brought or helped to bring off the show there, I am more than pleased. Without sentimentality, I think it would be nice to give Vassar something back of what it has given to you.

The only important questions in my letter were about your relations in Baltimore; I want to know about the formality of the presentations because, naturally, I will have to send appropriate gifts, etc.

Answer me that question, and also I would like to know how big a part you played in the show.

I have been trying to think of a name that is better for you than ‘Paint and Powder Club.’ What do you think of calling it the ‘Song and Story?’ Not so good - or is it?

I am sorry I wrote you that letter. Again let me repeat that if you start any kind of a career following the footsteps of Cole Por-

ter and Rodgers and Hart, it might be an excellent try. Sometimes I wish I had gone along with that gang, but I guess I am too much a moralist at heart and really want to preach at people in some acceptable form rather than to entertain them. Will send you a small check herewith.

Dearest love.

Daddy

5521 Amestoy Avenue

Encino,

California January 25, 1940

Dearest Scottie:

Communication having apparently ceased from your end, I conclude that you are in love. Remember - there’s an awful disease that overtakes popular girls at 19 or 20 called emotional bankruptcy. Hope you are not preparing the way for it. Also I have a bill from a doctor which includes an X ray. Have you had a cough? Please give me a little information, no matter how skimpy.

You have earned some money for me this week because I sold ‘Babylon Revisited,’ in which you are a character, to the pictures (the sum received wasn’t worthy of the magnificent story - neither of you nor of me - however, I am accepting it).

Dearest love always.

Daddy

5521 Amestoy Avenue

Encino,

California February 19, 1940

Dearest Scottie:

Delighted that you’re working on a play. In answer to a query in one of your past letters I do like Thomas Mann - in fact I had Put his Death in Venice on that list I gave you last summer. Have sent your treasurer his check.

I was very interested to hear about Kilduff. Let me know what becomes of Andrew in the club elections. Things are still very vague here.

With dearest love, F. S. Fitz

Have paid Peck & Peck & Peck & Peck & Peck.

5521 Amestoy Avenue

Encino,California

March 15, 1940

Dearest Scottie:

No word from you for some time but I suppose a letter will cross this. I think it was you who misunderstood my meaning about the Comrades. The important thing is this: they had best be treated not as people holding a certain set of liberal or conservative opinions but rather as you might treat a set of intensely fanatical Roman Catholics among whom you might find yourself. It is not that you should not disagree with them - the important thing is that you should not argue with them. The point is that Communism has become an intensely dogmatic and almost mystical religion and whatever you say they have ways of twisting it into shapes which put you in some lower category of mankind (‘Fascist,”Liberal,”Trotskyist’) and disparage you both intellectually and personally in the process. They are amazingly well- organized. The pith of my advice is: think what you want, the less said the better.

I am sorry about the physiology. There is no answer except the advice that I used to give you constantly in your less receptive days: that sometimes you can lick an especially hard problem by facing it always the very first thing in the morning with the very freshest part of your mind. This has so often worked with me that I have an uncanny faith in it No particular news. The Sayres are of course delighted that your mother is coming out. Your mother said something in her letter about spending vacations with you. As you know, I will not have this, except in the most limited fashion. I think the pull of an afflicted person upon a normal one is at all times downward, depressing and eventually somewhat paralyzing, and it should best be left to those who have chosen such duties as a life work. So if there are any inquiries from that source about your summer plans I think it would be wise to answer them in the most general terms, even hinting that you had work mapped out in the North.

With dearest love,

Daddy

P.S. When does your Easter vacation begin? This is very important. Don’t forget to tell me about the fate of Turnbull and other Baltimorians - and about the play.

5521 Amestoy Avenue

Encino,California

March 18, 1940

Dear Scottie:

Thanks for your very full letter. Of course I am terribly curious to hear about the show and how big a success it was - for I don’t doubt that it was a success, and I think your idea to found a sort of Triangle was most ingenious and energetic and exactly the sort of thing that gives me great pride in you. The satiric theatre is perhaps a better method of expression for you than journalism and perhaps it is just as well that you did not get on the Miscellany board. Naturally I would give anything to see the play but will await your description of it when I see you.

Am enclosing $75.00, which I hope will cover your vacation. Negotiations on the screenplay of ‘Babylon’ are still in course. If they should go through and you should be in Baltimore a week from now I would like you to go to Asheville and spend a night with your mother. As things are now I can’t afford it but we will see.

Thanks for the news about the Princeton boys. Colonial is a good club, older than Cap and Gown, in fact. At one time people used to refer to the ‘Big Five,’ but in my day Colonial got an unfortunate drinking reputation. Now I believe it specializes in boys out of the social register who don’t quite make the grade in the big time. I hope Andrew is happy there, though I don’t doubt that he is a little disappointed. If I were you I should not discuss the matter with him at all. I still think it is a lousy cruel system.

We’ll discuss the summer later. It so much depends on how much money I have. I think that doubtless some movie job could be found for you out here. Competent people with a little pull have no trouble finding places in the small income brackets. It is when your price is $1000 and up a week that it is another story. However I’m not exactly sure it’s the best thing.

I will attend to those New York bills when the first money comes in. I wish you would write me immediately where you will be during vacation. I mean the approximately exact dates so that I can reach you by wire in case it is feasible for you to go to North Carolina.

Dearest love.

Daddy

P.S. I wish very much you would call on the Murphys during your spring vacation. If there is any way in which you could help Honoria  - to a date, for instance - I think it would be mutually very advantageous. Of course, it shouldn’t look as if the suggestion came from me. I know it is difficult to pick up an old thread after an interval but it would please me immensely if you could at least pay a call there.

5521 Amestoy Avenue

Encino,

CaliforniaMarch 27, 1940

Dear Scottie:

I am going to work on “Babylon’ at a lousy salary - a week from Monday. Anyhow it’s something.

A letter from Baltimore disturbed me this morning - what have you done to your hair? Three different people have seen fit to correspond with me about it. Can’t you tone down the effect a little? You heightened it so gradually that I don’t think you realize yourself now just what it looks like. Nobody minds if a woman over thirty wants to touch hers up but why imitate a type that is passé even in pictures? It was a cute trick when you had one blond strand that looked as if the sun might have hit it, but going completely overboard defeats any aesthetic purpose.

Best luck for the spring term. I know it’s always the hardest and I have that almost uncanny fear for you at the moment that comes sometimes. Perhaps it’s the touch of overconfidence and self- justification in your letters (i e., the Daisy Chain) that I haven’t seen for over a year. Please give yourself a margin for hard luck.

Love,

Daddy

P.S. I can understand the overconfidence - God haven’t I had it? But it’s hard as hell to recognize it in oneself - especially when time’s so short and there’s so much we want to do.

5521 Amestoy Avenue

Encino, California

April 11, 1940

Dearest Pie:

Thanks for your letter. I’m writing this on a Sunday night, sans Françoise and I hope you can read it I go to cinema work tomorrow on a sort of half-pay, half-’spec’ (speculation) business on my own story ‘Babylon Revisited.’ Which is to say Columbia advances me living money while I work and if it goes over in installments with the producer, the company, the releasing people, I get an increasing sum. At bottom we eat - at the top the deal is very promising.

Why I’m writing tonight is because I foresee three months of intensive toil. (I feel like a criminal who has been in a hideout, been caught, and has to go back to the Big House. I’ve been visited by my crooked doctor and my moll and Frances the Fence has protected me. Now the Big House - oh Jees them guards!)

To put you in a good humor for the ensuing gratuitous though friendly advice, let me say I got a letter from Andrew today, out of two years’ silence, in which he ‘judges you objectively’ as a very fine girl. I was pleased naturally and wish they hadn’t counteracted the work I did on him by sending him to a school with a professional Holy-Joe for headmaster. His letter would make you very conceited - shall I send it? You seem to be a big shot down there.

The advice consists of this — --------’s name bobs up in so many of your letters that I assume he plays a big part in your life, no matter how seldom you see him. I’ve naturally formed a picture of him - vaguely I associate it with my relation with Marie Hersey at about your time of life. I think she told herself that I was hers for the special effort. But they had become matter- of-fact to me - lesser girls would have rivalled them for new excitement and anyone who summed them up, or seemed to me like your mother, would simply have washed them out of my mind.

Supposing — to be self-absorbed, charming, successful, and full of the same psychology I had - how definitely handicapped you might be in counting on him! By the very fact of old familiarity, old experience in common, it would be difficult, for men, if they’re alive, are continually looking for the new. I mean that he might, so to speak, meet the Queen of Abyssinia in his travels. And how can you rival her?

I’m not driving at the obvious answer of having many strings to your bow. I suppose you have. But haven’t you taken — as the only type? Women are capable of loving three or four types of masculine excellence like the women in Candida and Strange Interlude. You ought to have, for example: as a cold intellectual, someone who’s made the Harvard Law Review - you can find him with a little effort. He’ll probably be taken already but it can be done. The point is that you have not exhausted any other type at its best except — ; you have only examined the second-rate “nproved man of other species ( — , — , etc.). You should know the young predatory business type, hard as hell. He will lick you maybe but you should know him. A lead at Princeton would be one of the Ivy boys - not Harvey, but he might be a wedge - a boy inheriting a big business.

All the above is probably very obvious so forget it Are any of the enclosed friends of yours?

Dearest love.

Daddy

P.S. Have paid the Wallace Co. $35.00 and Altmans $40.00 on account. The printed enclosure reminded me that if you have occasion to drive, I forgot to tell you that in the rain don’t depress the clutch - use the brake only. And on hills - go down in the gear in which you’d have come up. I am moving in town to be near my work, so will you address me care of my new agent, Phil Berg, 9484 Wilshire Boulevard, Beverly Hills, or General Delivery, Encino, as they will forward it? Will write you as soon as I have a permanent address.

5521 Amestoy Avenue

Encino,California

April 12, 1940

Dearest Scottie:

I’m sorry about the tone of the telegram I sent you this morning, but it represents a most terrific worry. You are doing exactly what I did at Princeton. I wore myself out on a musical comedy there for which I wrote book and lyrics, organized and mostly directed while the president played football. Result: I slipped way back in my work, got T.B., lost a year in college - and, irony of ironies, because of scholastic slip I wasn’t allowed to take the presidency of the Triangle.

From your letter I guess that you are doing exactly the same thing and it just makes my stomach fall out to think of it. Amateur work is fun but the price for it is just simply tremendous. In the end you get ‘Thank you’ and that’s all. You give three performances which everybody promptly forgets and somebody has a breakdown - that somebody being the enthusiast.

Please, please, please delegate every bit of the work you can and keep your scholastic head above water. To see a mistake repeated twice in two generations would be just too much to bear. This is the most completely experienced advice I’ve ever given you. What about that science and the philosophy? You’ve got to find hours to do them even if you have to find a secret room where you can go and study.

Dearest love always.

Daddy

5521 Amestoy Avenue

Encino,California

April 27,1940

Dearest Scottina:

I am of course delighted about the play. Now that it is over I can admit that I thought it was quite a conception from the beginning and quite an achievement -I just had a moment when I was afraid that you were wearing yourself out over it. Musical comedy is fun - I suppose more ‘fun’ than anything else a literary person can put their talents to and it always has an air of glamor around it.

I was particularly interested in your line about ‘feeling that you had lost your favorite child.’ God, haven’t I felt that so many times. Often I think writing is a sheer paring away of oneself leaving always something thinner, barer, more meager. However, that’s not anything to worry about in your case for another twenty years.

I am glad you are going to Princeton with whom you are going. I feel you have now somehow jumped a class. Boys like Kilduff and Lanahan are on a guess more ‘full of direction’ than most of the happy-go-luckies in Cap and Gown. I don’t mean more ‘ambition,’ which is a sort of general attribute of youth and is five parts hope to five parts good will, but I mean some calculated path stemming from a talent or money or a careful directive or all of these things, to find your way through the bourgeois maze - if you feel it is worth finding. Remember this, though, among those on both sides of the fence there are a lot of slow developers, people of quality and distinction whom you should not overlook. Particularly you will find them among those of difficult exteriors like Eleanor Turnbull or of a great pervading shyness or personal ugliness, etc. I certainly had to dig under a bushel of spoiled blackberries to find — at Princeton and often the same in later life. Needless to say I’ve made bad mistakes - one of them was —

I was going to speak to you about the summer plans - without anything special to contribute. Could you let me know more specifically about the New England idea? Who would you be with? What girls? I know you could make up a lot of names but please tell me pretty specifically what would be the housekeeping set-up? I think I could manage to back something like that. I rather hate to think of you out here unless you were going right out for money by displaying your person in celluloid. It is a half- tropical and listless atmosphere.

I am working on this ‘Babylon Revisited’ picture at a rotten salary but it is rather fun and may amount to something. Your mother seems happy to be home. I don’t expect the trouble to begin for at least two months.

With dearest love,

Daddy

5521 Amestoy Avenue

Encino,California

May 4, 1940

Dearest Scottina:

Glad you got a break in the New York papers. Bet you were thrilled. Notice you got the picture into the background to show you were a glamor girl at heart. No kidding, it was a good job. All I hope is you don’t flunk out. You are always welcome in California though. We are even opening our arms to Chamberlain in case the British oust him. We need him for Governor because we are afraid the Asiatics are going to land from Chinese parasols. Never mind - Santa Barbara will be our Narvik and we’ll defend it to our last producer. And remember, even England still has Noel Coward.

I actually have a formulating plan for part of your summer - if it pleases you - and I think I’ll have the money to make it good. I’m working hard, guiding by the fever which now hovers quietly around the 99.2 level, which is fairly harmless. Tell Frances Kil- patrick that though I never met her father he is still one of my heroes in spite of the fact that he robbed Princeton of a football championship single-handed - he was probably the greatest end who ever played football. In the future please send me clippings even though you do crack at me in the course of your interviews. I’d rather get them than have you send me accounts of what literary sour bellies write about me in their books. I’ve been criticized by experts including myself.

I think I’ve about finished a swell flicker piece. Did you read me in the current Esquire about Orson Welles? Is it funny? Tell me. You haven’t answered a question for six letters. Better do so or I’ll dock five dollars next week to show you I’m the same old meany.

Honestly, Pie-crust, I’m tickled about the play. I hope to God your health is good.

Love,

Daddy

P.S. Enclosed 50c in stamps to buy the Esquire with the Orson Welles piece.

5521 Amestoy Avenue

Encino, California

May 7, 1940

Dearest Scottie:

We write to each other without ever answering the other’s questions. For once I’ll answer one of yours. You asked me whether I thought that in the Arts it was greater to originate a new form or to perfect it. The best answer is the one that Picasso made rather bitterly to Gertrude Stein:

‘You do something first and then somebody else comes along and does it pretty.’

In the opinion of any real artist the inventor, which is to say Giotto or Leonardo, is infinitely superior to the finished Tintoretto, and the original D. H. Lawrence is infinitely greater than the Steinbecks.

Last thought about your review. You will be interviewed again and once more I ask you please do not discuss your mother or myself even faintly with them. You once made the astounding statement that you were immediately going to write our biographies. I’ll always agree with myself that I would never write anything about my own father and mother till they had been at least ten years dead, and since I am forty-three and may still have a lot to say for myself I think you’d be somewhat premature. I realize that you are now fully mature and would realize the unwisdom of talking about family affairs consciously - but sometimes these newspaper people twist things out of you.

My movie progresses and I think it’s going to be damn good. If your summer plans mature in any way keep me in the know. I send you a bonus of five dollars, not for any reason but simply because a letter without a check will probably seem to you half- filled. If you have no need for it just add it to your bank account.

Dearest love.

Mad Fitz (once the Scourge of the San Fernando) (Daddy)

5521 Amestoy Avenue

Encino,California

May 11, 1940

Dearest Scottina:

Unfortunately the stub of the money order was just the one of many that Frances happened to have misplaced (she has all the others). I’ve threatened her and great tears are oozing out of her eyes as she takes this dictation. However, even if it hadn’t been lost it would have been impossible to do much about a signed money order, especially from this end. I hope you went into the Vassar post office branches and identified yourself and put the clerks on watch. So don’t let it worry you. I lose ten dollars which is all in a day’s work and you lose the five which I was giving you as a bonus. A little later I’m going to ask you to send me a summary of your bills - not that I’ll be able to pay them all immediately but I’d like to know how you stand at the term’s end. Please try to address me c/o Phil Berg Agency, Wilshire Boulevard, Beverly Hills. That isn’t so hard to remember.

You confused me rather about your summer plans. If you were rooming with Mary Earle does that mean Cape Cod or does it mean at Vassar under Miss Hallie Flannigan? If it means Cape Cod I know some particularly interesting people up there - not at all the kind that are called ‘old friends’ whom you automatically are prejudiced against but some people who might open many rather camouflaged gates to you - some that your contemporaries don’t know about. I’m signing up for an apartment in the middle of Hollywood where there is a spare room for any wandering daughter, though if you come out here it should be for a reason as it is a dreary town for anyone with nothing to do.

I’m glad you didn’t start going to Princeton at sixteen or you’d be pretty jaded by this time. Yale is a good year ahead of Princeton in sophistication, though, it should be good for another year. Though I loved Princeton I often felt that it was a by-water, that its snobby institutions were easy to beat and to despise and unless I was a natural steeplechaser or a society groom I’d have to find my own private intellectual and emotional life. Given that premise it is a lovely quiet place, gentle and dignified, and it will let you alone. Of course, it is at its absolute worst in the fane Hall atmosphere you described. Sometime go down with a boy on one of those weekends when there’s almost nothing to do.

You’ve had a good year, haven’t you - the fruition of a great deal that went before. I’d love to see you and just talk a blue streak with you for about two days about plans if we could afford it financially which we can’t. But who can tell, maybe by late June or July we can. Please arrange to see your mother at the earliest possible time because I think those are going to be restless days for her. You don’t necessarily have to meet her in Montgomery. Perhaps you could meet somewhere else halfway. If there could be some arrangement where she wouldn’t be entirely left out and you wouldn’t be away with some boy at all hours.

Dearest love.

Daddy

5521 Amestoy Avenue

Encino,California

May 18,1940

Dearest Scottie:

No word from you this week. I do want to hear all about your plans. Can you see your mother before you go to Baltimore? You say you want eight days. If you’re planning a sylvan idyll or doing anything rash like throwing away your honeymoon in advance - well, I can’t do anything about it except advise you that women from Aphrodite to Kitty Foyle have tried it impulsively and found that they threw away their lifetime with their honeymoon. I know it’s none of my business any more and I hope to God that I’m speaking out of turn. But you seemed so particularly fervent about it.

Isn’t it funny how different things are after only six months. For example, wasn’t your suggestion to the Miscellany board people about changing their paper rather like suggesting to the local church that it would be more fun if it were a burlesque house? And didn’t they take it about the same way, only more drily? I mean, you seem much wiser month by month and I don’t think you would have gone about it quite that way now. You would have made the paper first, posing as being in complete agreement and then throwing your bomb. Did you see in Time that the editor of the Yale News and nine other boys threw Bones this spring and aren’t you glad now that Vassar hasn’t a formal social system?....

1403 Laurel Avenue Hollywood,California (new address)

June 7, 1940

Dearest Scottie:

Thank you for your letter. Planning from week to week, I am not quite sure yet about anything, but go ahead about the summer school, make reservations and so forth. I think it can be managed all right. I went to San Francisco with some friends for one day, and found it much too long to see that singularly second-rate and uninspired Fair - though they had some good Cranachs and El Grecos in the art exhibition.

Vassar’s only fault to the outer world is the ‘Vassar manner’ - which of course is founded on the sense of intellectual intensity that you mention. I found it particularly annoying in — ‘s daughter in Tryon some years ago. She told me all about American literature in the first half hour I met her - I believe she had been editor-in-chief of the Miscellany the year before. Of course it does not usually show itself like that, but, like the Harvard manner of 1900 which gave Harvard a country-wide unpopularity, makes itself known in a series of smug silences. Southern manners are better - especially the rather punctilious deference to older people. The chances are that some toothless old codger who doesn’t open his mouth may turn out to be the greatest authority in the world on some recondite subject, and you feel rather a fool when you have judged him and settled his hash with the glossy learning of a year or so. So be careful of it, especially this summer when you will meet many idiots, some in hysterical panic about the war and others too dumb to know what is going on.

You credit me with a gift of prophecy I don’t have. I did feel the war was coming in ‘39 and said so to a lot of people, but it was calculated by the time when Germany would have several new replacement classes to make up for the decreased birth-rate from 1915 to 1918. We all knew the German army wasn’t beaten and Woodrow Wilson didn’t want it to be beaten, not appreciating the utter helpless decadence of the English - something that has been apparent to even English intellectuals for twenty years. The intellectuals, those few who ever dabbled in military affairs, knew that the war was lost at Munich and that the Germans would tear the Allies to pieces, in Europe at least. And the American rich will try to betray America in exactly the same way as the British conservatives. A pogrom could be organized overnight against all the ‘subversive elements’ (whose power is tremendously overestimated at the moment) but the rich will have to have the pants scared off them before they stop skulking in their tents and begin to get their boys safe jobs in the quarter-master department.

The Comrades out here are in a gloomy spot; — goes around groaning how ‘the Revolution will have to come the hard way,’ in other words the party line is to let National Socialism (Nazism) conquer us and then somehow milk Marxism out of Hitler’s sterile teats! Stalin has pulled another boner just as he did in Finland. He had no intention of letting Hitler go this far.

With the situation changing as fast as it does now, it is difficult for Liberals to have a policy. The war may lead to anything from utter chaos to a non-Comintern American Revolution, but the world that I knew and that you have had eighteen years of will never exist again in our time. On the other hand I do not think it possible for the Germans to win the South American war against us. The native Yankee is still the most savage and intelligent fighter in the world. He plays the toughest, hardest games with a cooler head and it is simply unthinkable that an oppressed stock could be whooped up in one decade to conquer him. Still I think many of your friends will probably draw their last breaths in Paraguay or the forests of the Chaco. Did you see that Lehman has called for anti-aircraft defense for New York? What a cowardly panic! Next we will have Louis B. Mayer calling for anti-aircraft guns to defend Metro.

The letter has turned into gossip, and I have much to do. I finished the picture and am doing a short story. Had intended to rest for a week, but there wasn’t a chance. Dear, I have had a very depressed letter from your mother and another from your grandmother - the second told me in cautious language that your mother had had a ‘toxic attack.’ I know what this means, only I expected her to hold out at least two months. She seems to be recovered from that, but her own letter shows a great deal of despair, and your grandmother’s has a defeatism that I have never seen before. I don’t know what is going to happen, but as this may be the last time you have a chance to see your mother in a sane period, I want you to find ten days to spend with her this June. This may bust hell out of your plans, but remember that for ten months you have lived for yourself and you owe this to me. I don’t care when you go, except it is to be before summer school opens, and not just three or four days.

The Harper’s business is all right for me if you can fit it in with everything else. Will you tell me what you are going to take at summer school? I think I wrote you that I thought your next year’s Vassar course is fine, except for the Greek Civilization and Literature, which seems to me a profound waste of time. Your other three courses are so completely cultural that I wish that the fourth could be as practical a one as Vassar offers - I wish they had business school - or else a supplementary French course or another language. Greek Civilization and Literature is something you cannot learn in nine months, and it seems to me a rather dilettantish way of wasting time.

I expect to hear in a day or so whether I am going back to work on my picture story - I told you once it was an old Saturday Evening Post story called ‘Babylon Revisited’ that I wrote in 1931. You were one of the principal characters.

With dearest love,

Daddy

1403 North Laurel Avenue

Hollywood,

CaliforniaJune 12, 1940

Dearest Scottina:

Thanks for your nice full letter - it made me happy, and I don’t doubt your sincerity about work. I think now you will always be a worker, and I’m glad. Your mother’s utterly endless mulling and brooding over insolubles paved the way to her ruin. She had no education - not from lack of opportunity because she could have learned with me - but from some inner stubbornness. She was a great original in her way, with perhaps a more intense flame at its highest than I ever had, but she tried and is still trying to solve all ethical and moral problems on her own, without benefit of the thousands dead. Also she had nothing ‘kinetic,’ which, in physics, means internal driving force - she had to be led or driven. That was the tired element that all Judge Sayre’s children inherited. And the old mother is still, at times, a ball of fire!

I could agree with you as opposed to Dean Thompson if you were getting ‘B’s.’ Then I would say: As you’re not going to be a teacher or a professional scholar, don’t try for ‘A’s’ - don’t take the things in which you can get ‘A,’ for you can leam them yourself. Try something hard and new, and try it hard, and take what marks you get. But you have no such margin of respectability, and this borderline business is a fret to you. Doubt and worry - you are as crippled by them as I am by my inability to handle money or my self-indulgences of the past. It is your Achilles’ heel - and no Achilles’ heel ever toughened by itself. It just gets more and more vulnerable. What little I’ve accomplished has been by the most laborious and uphill work, and I wish now I’d never relaxed or looked back - but said at the end of The Great Gatsby: ‘I’ve found my line - from now on this comes first. This is my immediate duty - without this I am nothing.’...

Please wire me what days you have chosen to go South so I can make financial arrangements.

Can’t you tell some story down there that it’s urgently necessary to go to summer school because you’ve been on the edge of flunking out? Otherwise they’ll wonder why the money couldn’t be spent for a seaside vacation for you all. I’m living in the smallest apartment here that will permit me riot to look poor, which I can’t afford to do in Hollywood. If the picture goes through, I will give your mother a trip in August. At the moment I am keeping her on a slender allowance, as for ten years she has absorbed the major proportion of the family income.

I did listen to the radio all through my trip. Jesus! What a battle!

Please at least go in to see Gerald Murphy at Marfe Cross for five minutes in passing thru N.Y. this summer!

Send me the details about Harvard Summer School Can I pay,n ‘bailments?

Even as a construction man, Pinero was inferior to both Shaw and Ibsen. What purpose is served in teaching that second-rate Noel Coward at Vassar?

The New Yorker story might hamper you if you attach too much importance to it. The play was an accomplishment -I admit it with pride and pleasure. I’d like to see the story. Can’t you send the a copy?

Reading over your letter, you don’t sound like an introvert at all. You sound a little flushed and overconfident, but I’m not worried.

With dearest love,

Daddy

P.S. You want to go to summer school. I will have to do extra work for that, and I’ll do it gladly. But I want you to spend ten days with your mother first. And please give me a full complete report on your mother’s condition. Your request for $15.00 just came as I was putting this in an envelope. To get it to you (Frances is away) cost me my morning. You must not ask me to wire you money - it is much harder to get than last summer. I owe thousands. I couldn’t have had this trip except that the Rogers were going and invited me. Sorry to close the letter this way but you must count your pennies.

1403 North Laurel Avenue

Hollywood,

California June 15, 1940

Dearest Scottie:

Here is your round fare to Montgomery. I’m sorry it can’t be more but, while my picture is going to be done, the producer is going to first do one that has been made for the brave —

who will defend his country in Hollywood (though summoned back to the British Government). This affects the patriotic and unselfish Scott Fitzgerald to the extent that I receive no more money from that source until the company gets around to it; so will return to my old standby Esquire.

Meanwhile I have another plan which may yield a bonanza but will take a week to develop, so there’s nothing to do for a week except try to cheer up your mother and derive what consolation you can in explaining the Spenglerian hypotheses to Miss------and her fellows feebs of the Confederacy. Maybe you can write something down there. It is a grotesquely pictorial country as I found out long ago, and as Mr Faulkner has since abundantly demonstrated.

Anyhow they need you. I will dig you out in time for the summer school.

Love,

Daddy

P.S. As I said, I am trying to give you $30.00 a week this summer, and when there is a lot of traveling to be done will increase this somewhat. For instance, I gave you $20.00 extra to get out of Vassar and there is $10.00 extra in this check which makes $30.00 and which will cover a good deal of transportation to date (including the round trip fare to Montgomery). Will send the next check there.

1403 North Laurel Avenue

Hollywood,California June 20, 1940

Dearest Zelda and Scottie:

I wish I were with you this afternoon. At the moment I am sitting rather dismally contemplating the loss of a three-year-old Ford and a thirty-three-year-old tooth. The Ford (heavily mortgaged) I shall probably get back according to the police because it is just a childish prank of the California boys to steal them and then abandon them. But the tooth I had grown to love.

In recompense I found in Colliers a story by myself. I started it Just before I broke my shoulder in 1936 and wrote it in intervals over the next couple of years. It seemed terrible to me. That I will ever be able to recover the art of the popular short story is doubtful. At present I’m doing a masterpiece for Esquire and waiting to see if my producer can sell the ‘Babylon Revisited’ screenplay to Shirley Temple. If this happens, everything will look very much brighter.

Scottie, I got the marks and was naturally pleased you were off probation at last. It brought back memories of phoning you from Los Angles to see if you were at the Harvard game, of the dean’s gloomy picture a year ago last October, of years of distress about your work with threats and prayers and urgings and rewards and apologies and promises and then suddenly the first change about a year ago when you found that Vassar didn’t care whether you studied or not - or whether you stayed in or not. It is a story of hair-breadth escapes, and extraordinary devices going back to the French schedule that we had at ‘La Paix.’ All sorts of people have been drawn into it. Hours, days and weeks have been consumed. Stories, scripts, trips have been put aside - all to achieve what might have been prevented if I had carried out my first plan - never to let you go near an American school, or else I should have let you become a doll. I couldn’t leave you hanging -

The police have just called up telling me they’ve recovered my car. The thief ran out of gas and abandoned it in the middle of Hollywood Boulevard. The poor lad was evidently afraid to call anybody to help him push it to the curb. I hope next time he gets a nice, big, producer’s car with plenty of gas in it and a loaded revolver in each side pocket and he can embark on a career of crime in earnest. I don’t like to see any education left hanging in the air.

Enclosed find four checks, two of which (including one of yours, Scottie) should go to Mrs Sayre for provisions, etc. By Monday I should be able to make some plans for you, Scottie. Meanwhile you will have written whether you would like to go to Harvard alone which I did not think should frighten you. You have those two Vassar credits to make up if you are going to get an A.B. degree and I presume this would do it.

From the larger attitude one doesn’t know from day to day what the situation will be. We may be at war one week after the extinction of the British, an event which at present writing seems scarcely a fortnight away. It will probably mean our almost immediate embroilment both in Northern Canada and Brazil and at least a partial conscription. Scottie, you’ve been as lucky as anybody could be in your generation to have had a two months’ look at Europe just before the end and to have gotten in two years of college in times of peace before such matters are drowned in the roar of the Stuka bombers. And you have seen the men’s colleges as they may not be again in our time, with the games and proms. Maybe I’m speaking too quickly - if the British hold out two months until we can get aid to them - but it looks to me as if our task will be to survive.

Even so I would rather you didn’t get tied up in any war work except of a temporary nature for the present. I want vou to finish your education. If you have any plan for this summer that displaces summer school and is actually constructive please tell me immediately but I know you want to do something.

My thoughts are not so black as this letter sounds - for instance I’m now going to break off and hear the Louis and Godov fight which will prove Black Supremacy or Red Indian Supremacy or South American Inca Supremacy or something. I hope you are swimming a lot. I can’t exercise even a little any more; I’m best off in my room. But I love to think of you two diving from great heights and being very trim and graceful in the water.

With dearest love to all,

Daddy Scott

1403 North Laurel Avenue

Hollywood,

CaliforniaJune 29, 1940

Dearest Scottie:

There’s no time to write you a long letter or to answer yours. Only about the summer school:

It seems important that either you take what will tend to give you a definite credit at Vassar or else have a practical tinge. You mentioned economics - I don’t know what kind of economics are taught there but the whole science is in such process of dissolution with new laws being built up overnight that if you take it be sure get a smart man - I mean a brilliant man and preferably a young one. I know a month is a very short time or there are several suggestions I might make. Not being on the spot I can’t advise you but only say that I hope it won’t be any form of intellectual needlework.

As soon as you get a minute, write me your circumstances there.

With dearest love,

Daddy

1403 North Laurel Avenue

Hollywood,

CaliforniaJuly 12, 1940

Dearest Scottie:

Jib is not spelt gyb. And beyond everything you have sinned in omission by not giving me the correct financial data and I expect an apology. Literally I had $12.00 in the bank for most of that week and it was very unpleasant.

Max Perkins writes me that Jane and three classmates are coming here and want to see something of the movies. I don’t know who to introduce them to except Shirley Temple with whom I spent the day yesterday. (Her mother was there so it was all right.) She really is a sweet little girl and reminds me of you at 11 1/2 when you hadn’t succumbed to the wiles of Fred Astaire, lovey dovey and the radio crooners. But I told her mother it wouldn’t be long now. I don’t know whether she’s going to do my picture or not.

Haven’t you got a carbon of the New Yorker article? I’ve heard that John Mason Brown is a great favorite as a lecturer and I think it’s very modern to be taking dramatic criticism though it reminds me vaguely of the school for Roxy ushers. It seems a trifle detached from drama itself. I suppose the thing’s to get really removed from the subject, and the final removal would be a school for teaching critics of teachers of dramatic criticism.

Isn’t the world a lousy place? - I’ve just finished a copy of Life and I’m dashing around to a Boris Karloff movie to cheer up. It is an inspirational thing called The Corpse in the Breakfast Food.

Once I thought that Lake Forest was the most glamorous place in the world. Maybe it was.

With dearest love,

Daddy

1403 North Laurel Avenue

Hollywood,California

July 18, 1940

Dearest Scottie:

This summer has shown among other things that your education to date is entirely theoretical. I have no general quarrel with this and I believe it is as it should be in preparing for any sort of literary work. However the odds are against your having the type of talent that matures very quickly - most of my contemporaries did not get started at twenty-two, but usually at about twenty- seven to thirty or even later, filling in the interval with anything from journalism or teaching to sailing a tramp-schooner and going to wars.The talent that matures early is usually of the poetic type, which mine was in large part. The prose talent depends on other factors - assimilation of material and careful selection of it, or more bluntly: having something to say and an interesting, highly developed way of saying it.

Looking at the problem from short range only, you see how difficult it was to get a job this summer. So let’s see what Vassar’s got. The first thing that occurs to me is Spanish, which is simply bound to be of enormous value in the next ten years. Every junior-high-school child in California gets a taste of it and could beat you out of a job in South America if we expand that way. It is enough like French so that you have few alphabetical troubles, is pronounced as written, and has a fairly interesting literature of its own. I mean it’s not like studying Bulgarian or Chippewa or some strange dialect in which no one had ever had anything to say. Don’t you think this would be a much wiser move than the Greek and Latin culture? - the which shocks me that Vassar has such a namby-pamby ‘course.’

I wonder if you’ve read anything this summer -I mean any one good book like The Brothers Karamazov or Ten Days That Shook the World or Renan’s Life of Christ. You never speak of your reading except the excerpts you do in college, the little short bits that they must perforce give you. I know you have read a few of the books I gave you last summer - then I have heard nothing rom you on the subject. Have you ever, for example, read Pere Goriot or Crime and Punishment or even The Doll’s House or St Matthew or Sons and Lovers? A good style simply doesn’t form unless you absorb half a dozen top-flight authors every year. Or rather it forms but, instead of being a subconscious amalgam of all that you have admired, it is simply a reflection of the last writer you have read, a watered-down journalese.

Don’t be too hard on Princeton. Harvard produced John Reed but they also produced Richard Whitney who I like to believe would have been spotted as a punk at Princeton. The Honor System sometimes has a salutary effect on light-fingered gentry.

With dearest love,

Daddy

1403 North Laurel Avenue

Hollywood,California July 29, 1940

I am still on the Temple picture and will continue on if a very avaricious gent named — will loosen up. If he doesn’t, I will rest for a week, and can stand it as my cough has become a public nuisance.

I wonder who was the ex-Westover woman you met. I wasn’t responsible for Ginevra getting fired but that’s the way of a legend - it was some Yale boys.

This job has given me part of the money for your tuition and it’s come so hard that I hate to see you spend it on a course like ‘English Prose since 1800.’ Anybody that can’t read modern English prose by themselves is subnormal - and you know it. The chief fault in your style is its lack of distinction - something which is inclined to grow with the years. You had distinction once - there’s some in your diary - and the only way to increase it is to cultivate your own garden. And the only thing that will help you is poetry which is the most concentrated form of style.

Example: You read Melanctha which is practically poetry and sold a New Yorker story - you read ordinary novels and sink back to a Kitty-Foyle-diary level of average performance. The only sen-

sible course for you at this moment is the one on English Poetry - Blake to Keats (English 241). I don’t care how clever the other professor is, one can’t raise a discussion of modern prose to anything above tea-table level. I’ll tell you everything she knows about it in three hours and guarantee that what each of us tells you will be largely wrong, for it will be almost entirely conditioned by our responses to the subject matter. It is a course for clubwomen who want to continue on from Rebecca and Scarlett O’Hara.

Strange Interlude is good. It was good the first time, when Shaw wrote it and called it Candida. On the other hand, you don’t pass an hour of your present life that isn’t directly influenced by the devastating blast of light and air that came with Ibsen’s Doll’s House. Nora wasn’t the only one who walked out of the Doll’s House - all the women in Gene O’Neill walked out too. Only they wore fancier clothes.

Well, the old master wearies - the above is really good advice, Pie, in a line where I know my stuff. Unless you can break down your prose a little it’ll stay on the ill-paid journalistic level. And you can do better.

Love,

Daddy P.S. Understand me, I think the poetry courses you took in school (and I read the booklets) were utterly sissified drool. But a real grasp of Blake, Keats, etc., will bring you something you haven’t dreamed of. And it should come now.

1403 North Laurel Avenue

Hollywood,

California August 3, 1940

Dear Scottie:

Jane Perkins passed through and happened to mention that she had taken that Blake-to-Keats course - I became less enthusiastic about it because she said they studied Amy Lowell’s biography which is a saccharine job compared to Colvin’s. However, in the catalogue I see a course called #217 in verse writing. It says, ‘limited to twelve members - permission required’ and it gives only one point. Is that at all practical? I imagine there would be some latitude in the poets that you would read. There is also that Shakespeare course (165) and one in French Poetry (240), one point. Some of the history and philosophical courses look good to me but - oh, hell I can’t advise you from this distance. I’m just sorry you can’t read some poetry.

It isn’t something easy to get started on by yourself. You need, at the beginning, some enthusiast who also knows his way around - John Peale Bishop performed that office for me at Princeton. I had always dabbled in ‘verse’ but he made me see, in the course of a couple of months, the difference between poetry and non- poetry. After that one of my first discoveries was that some of the professors who were teaching poetry really hated it and didn’t know what it was about. I got in a series of endless scraps with them so that finally I dropped English altogether.

Poetry is either something that lives like fire inside you - like music to the musician or Marxism to the Communist - or else it is nothing, an empty, formalized bore around which pedants can endlessly drone their notes and explanations. ‘The Grecian Urn’ is unbearably beautiful with every syllable as inevitable as the notes in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony or it’s just something you don’t understand. It is what it is because an extraordinary genius paused at that point in history and touched it. I suppose I’ve read it a hundred times. About the tenth time I began to know what it was about, and caught the chime in it and the exquisite inner mechanics. Likewise with ‘The Nightingale’ which I can never read through without tears in my eyes; likewise the ‘Pot of Basil’ with its great stanzas about the two brothers, ‘Why were they proud, etc.’; and ‘The Eve of St Agnes,’ which has the richest, most sensuous imagery in English, not excepting Shakespeare. And finally his three or four great sonnets, ‘Bright Star’ and the others.

Knowing those things very young and granted an ear, one could scarcely ever afterwards be unable to distinguish between gold and dross in what one read. In themselves those eight poems are a scale of workmanship for anybody who wants to know truly about words, their most utter value for evocation, persuasion or charm. For awhile after you quit Keats all other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming.

You still have that French typewriter in storage, haven’t you? Would it be any good? We rent one here and it costs only $5.00 for three months. You threaten to send me money! If you have any extra, pay your bills in Poughkeepsie. My suggestion is that after you visit Miss Doyle, you go to Lake Forest and from there go South to Montgomery. I’m afraid the latter seems to be necessary. Your mother most particularly asked to see you again and the only alternative would be to send her North to see you, which means sending two people. I know it will be dull going into that hot little town early in September - but you are helping me. Even invalids like your mother have to have mileposts - things to look forward to and back upon. It gives her more pride there in Montgomery if you come to see her, something to talk about. Only think how empty her life is and you will see the importance of your going there. Will you figure out what the fare to Chicago will be?

You wrote me such a full letter that I haven’t answered it all even now. When we get some breathing space here I’ll have Frances figure how much you cost this year.

Dearest love.

Daddy

P.S. Be careful about showing my letters - I mean to your mother for instance. I write you very freely.

1403 North Laurel Avenue

Hollywood,

California August 12, 1940

Dearest Scottina:

I’m sorry I didn’t mention the story - I’m glad you sold it but I thought you were disappointed that you didn’t sell it to a big magazine. I suggested disposing of it to some Vassar paper - do you remember? - just for the sake of getting into print and getting some opinions on it. I’m glad you got some money too. I thought it as a sort of practice composition but I felt a personal interest in it, not having forgotten the nights we worked over it.

I saw your picture in Harper’s Bazaar and I’m glad you got the job. Working among the poor has differing effects on people. If you’re poor yourself you get their psychology and it’s broadening - for example, when a boy of the bourgeoise ships before the mast on a tramp-schooner where he has to endure the same privations as the seamen, undoubtedly he achieves something of their point of view forever. On the contrary, a Bennington girl spending a month in slum work and passing weekends at her father’s mansion in Long Island gets nothing at all except a smug feeling that she is Lady Bountiful.

I was interested in your Cape Cod conquest. Theoretically a girl has her widest range of choice from about 19 years, 6 months, to 20 years, 6 months - or so I figure. The 18-year-old girl seems to have, because she has a stag line after her, but actually she has probably collected less eligibles than a slightly older girl. Of course, with the war there may be a tendency among your generation to rush into things. There were lots of quick marriages in 1918. Most of the men came back - but there are a few ‘class boys’ from my class at Princeton who never saw their fathers.

Enclosed is a Vassar paper about the Spanish. Do remember that, with a new language, the first week when you Iearn the structure is the important time. I believe that if you study Spanish hard for a fortnight, even at the expense of everything else, you can coast along on it pretty easily the rest of the year, but if you don’t get the verb forms right and the declensions it will start getting mountainously hard inside of a month and will become your cross. I discovered this in Italian at Princeton - neglecting it and then trying to catch up too late. Result: I flunked it hopelessly and never did learn it. However, I’m glad you’re taking a chance.

With dearest love, always,

Daddy

1403 North Laurel Avenue

Hollywood,

California August 24, 1940

Dearest Scottina:

I can imagine the dinner party. I remember taking Zelda to the young — ‘s when we were first married and it was a pretty frozen dish, though in general the places we went to even from the beginning were many flights up from the average business man’s menage. Business is a dull game and they pay a big price in human values for their money. They are ‘all right when you get to know them.’ I liked some of the young Princeton men in business but I couldn’t stand the Yale and Harvard equivalents because we didn’t even have the common ground of the past. The women are empty twirps mostly, easy to seduce and not good for much else. I am not talking about natural society women like Mary Harriman Rumsey and Sara Murphy and some others who made their lives into pageants, almost like actresses.

However, you seem wise enough to see that there is something in — ‘s angle. College gives you a head start, especially a girl, and people are not in any hurry to live and think your way. It’s all a question of proportion: if you married an army officer you would live half a lifetime of kow-towing to your inferiors until your husband made his way to the top. If, as the chances are, you marry a business man - because for the present business absorbs most of the energetic and attractive boys - you will have to play your cards properly in the business hierarchy. That was why I have always hoped that life would throw you among lawyers or men who were going into politics or big-time journalism. They lead rather larger lives.

Advertising is a racket, like the movies and the brokerage business. You cannot be honest without admitting that its constructive contribution to humanity is exactly minus zero. It is simply a means of making dubious promises to a credulous public. (But if you showed this letter to — it would be the end of everything in short order, for a man must have his pride and the more he realizes such a situation the less he can afford to admit it.) If I had been promoted when I was an advertising man, given enough money to marry your mother in 1920, my life might have been altogether different. I’m not sure though. People often struggle through to what they are in spite of any detours - and possibly I might have been a writer sooner or later anyhow.

You haven’t given me much idea of — . Would he object to your working - outside the house I mean? Excluding personal charm, which I assume, and the more conventional virtues which go with success in business, is he his own man? Has he any force of character? Or imagination and generosity? Does he read hooks? Has he any leaning toward the arts and sciences or anything beyond creature comfort and duck-shooting? In short, has he the possibilities of growth that would make a lifetime with him seem attractive? These things don’t appear later - they are either there latently or they will never be there at all.

I’m not asking these questions to be answered, but only to suggest again that if he is a fairly standardized article, you will find plenty of them during the next year - more than you ever met before - and eighteen is still young to commit yourself.

I think I have a job with 20th Century, which may be a long one. I will know Monday. I’m deducing that you received some money from Harper’s because you give me no idea of the state of your finances. Anyhow I’m enclosing $15.00. When you get this letter please night letter me how much it will cost to get to Montgomery. I would suggest that you go as follows: take the evening boat from New York to Norfolk, spending a day or night with Ceci, and then go from there to Montgomery or to Atlanta as you like. Certainly before you see all those walking neuroses you can spend a day with the Taylors who have always liked you so much. The trip to Norfolk by boat from New York is really damn nice. You come into Chesapeake Bay and Hampton Roads from a different angle - almost like an ocean voyage and the ship is larger and nicer than the little ferry boats from Baltimore. Also the price is reasonable - less than railroad.

Dear, even in joking I don’t like you to use the expression ‘nervous breakdown’ about any emotional struggle you may have to pass through in the next couple of years. Is your generation so soft that they talk of going to pieces if life doesn’t always present itself in terms of beautiful, easy decisions? Most girls of your generation and your mother’s and your grandmother’s have had to decide difficult things at your age and it is silly to think that it is any strain peculiar to yourself. The young men are just as bad - some of them talk about having nervous breakdowns if they are conscripted. But you didn’t cut your milk teeth on an aspirin tablet and I hate that raspberry sundae diction. Face what you’ve got to face and keep your chin where it belongs.

With dearest love, always,

Daddy

P.S. In your telegram please say also if you are going to Norfolk, and when.

1403 North Laurel Avenue

Hollywood,

California September 5, 1940

Dearest Scottie:

I’m going into a huddle on this script and probably won’t be able to write you again at length before Vassar starts. I read the story in College Bazaar and was very pleased with it. You’ve put in some excellent new touches and its only fault is the jerkiness that goes with a story that has often been revised. Stories are best written in either one jump or three, according to the length. The three-jump story should be done on three successive days, then a day or so for revise and off she goes. This of course is the ideal - in many stories one strikes a snag that must be hacked at but, on the whole, stories that drag along or are terribly difficult (I mean a difficulty that comes from a poor conception and consequent faulty construction) never flow quite as well in the reading. However, I’m glad you published this one. It was nice to see your name.

About names, I don’t quite know what to do. You calling yourself Frances Scott Fitzgerald does push me a little into the background. It calls attention to my being of my generation, which is not too good since I hope to have a big book out in a year. That is my only objection. There are three Van Dorens who write and people have long ago given up telling which is Rita, which is Mark, and which is Carl. I’m afraid that Frances Scott Fitzgerald is likely to lead to a certain confusion. What do you think?

You never told me why you stayed in New York so long - I lather gather somebody was married, possibly my Favorite Glamorist. All girls from 18 to 19 take the marriage of a friend as a heavy body blow but don’t let it worry you, kid. Remember your old book, ‘Men Are Like Street Cars.’ Anyhow panic about such things is completely endemic to your age and has no basis in reality. God willing, you will have at least fifteen more years of being highly attractive to attractive men. And all this because you’ve never shaved your legs, plucked your eyebrows or criticized your father! —

A last thought about other people’s weddings - you don’t have to be right about your objectives at the moment - only about your ways and means, learning Spanish, for instance, getting to know poetry. Honestly the ends will take care of themselves.

With dearest love,

Daddy P.S. Also saw your account of a weekend at Yale, Harvard and Princeton. It was very colorful. Things don’t seem to have changed much. Have you ever been to Cornell? Aw, tell me the truth, I won’t dock your allowance. How much does College Bazaar pay you? If you remember, will you write me the name of a picture- frame store at Vassar and I’ll have those Princeton etchings of Don Swann’s framed for you before college starts.

1403 North Laurel Avenue

Hollywood, California

September 17, 1940

Dearest Scottina:

I hope they won’t gun for you at college this year but from the tenor of the letter they sent about your work improving, I gather that they will. There was just a hint in it. You must try to realize their point of view and compromise with it. They feel they give you a lot and don’t want you to use the place as simply a proving ground for individual egotisms -

- which, of course, is what you and I would like it to be. I went back to junior year with Princeton in my pocket and it took them four months to take it all away from me - stripped of every office and on probation - the phrase was ‘ineligible for extra-curricular activities.’ I was in the hospital besides.

Don’t let it happen to you. It isn’t necessary. Start well with your work - the old ‘initial impression.’ But if you took the whole play on your shoulders, as you threaten, you’ll have to get straight B’s to make them think you’re doing any studying - can’t you find some bright sophomores to do the work while you play the executive - bring them along ‘to inherit,’ so to speak? If any one man tried to do the Triangle he’d have a beautiful breakdown - it’s a complex organization built up over years.

This is really such sensible advice - you’ve founded the club, you want to perpetuate it. All right - draw up an organization that will really divide the creative work, which is to say the hard work. For you to write, cast, direct, ballyhoo and manage - and do any work or reading besides is an idiotic program. I know what effort is and I respect it but aren’t you verging on the extravagant - you who pride yourself on your common sense?

When I set out to write a big novel at 21 it was ambitious and difficult - but when your mother started to catch up with Pavlova at 28 it was fantastic and impossible. Your trying to juggle this thing without a director or organization, with your Harper’s Bazaar and your admirers and the games and parties, would lead to disaster. It doesn’t take any prophet to make that observation - it just takes the most casual onlooker. No possible triumph is worth the loss of your health.

I could almost bet that you’ve done very little work on the play this summer - that it’s uppermost on your mind now. That is just the beginning of the great confusion in which you will find yourself if you don’t sit down now and decide what you can do and what you can’t - and find others to delegate it to. Believe me - they’ll let you do all the work - and heartily admire you - like they did me. They sent flowers too - but not to the footlights, where I expected them - only to the infirmary.

Your affectionate but somewhat concerned Daddy

P-S. This is an advance on your next week’s allowance as I know all your trips leave you penniless.

1403 North Laurel Avenue

Hollywood,California

October 5, 1940

Dearest Scottie:

Glad you liked Death in Venice. I don’t see any connection between that and Dorian Gray except that they both have an implied homosexuality. Dorian Gray is little more than a somewhat highly charged fairy tale which stimulates adolescents to intellectual activity at about seventeen (it did the same for you as it did for me). Sometime you will re-read it and see that it is essentially naive. It is in the lower ragged edge of ‘literature,’ just as Gone with the Wind is in the higher brackets of crowd entertainment. Death in Venice, on the other hand, is a work of art, of the school of Flaubert - yet not derivative at all. Wilde had two models for Dorian Gray: Balzac’s Le Peau de Chagrin and Huysman’s A Rebours.

After which literary lecture I can only sympathize with the practically desolate state of Vassar and assure you that many of those that have left will lament through their lives that they didn’t go on. In that connection, by the way, aren’t there many transfers from other colleges in junior year? I should think after this past year everything would indeed be anti-climax. You’ve had almost everything you wanted - in Vassar, in Baltimore, and in general. But it’s rather lucky that in life we don’t go on repeating. Certainly you should have new objectives now - this of all years ought to be the time of awakening for that nascent mind of yours. Once one is caught up into the material world not one person in ten thousand finds the time to form literary taste, to examine the validity of philosophic concepts for himself, or to form what, for lack of a better phrase, I might call the wise and tragic sense of life.

By this I mean the thing that lies behind all great careers, from Shakespeare’s to Abraham Lincoln’s, and as far back as there are books to read - the sense that life is essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of defeat, and that the redeeming things are not ‘happiness and pleasure’ but the deeper satisfactions that come out of struggle. Having learned this in theory from the lives and conclusions of great men, you can get a hell of a lot more enjoyment out of whatever bright things come your way.

You speak of how good your generation is, but I think they share with every generation since the Civil War in America the sense of being somehow about to inherit the earth. You’ve heard me say before that I think the faces of most American women over thirty are relief maps of petulant and bewildered unhappiness.

Well, and fare thee well. You never answer the specific questions in my letters. You tell me about your courses in general, but not in particular. And that was an important question about your literary name - I’m against your using two names of mine, like in the College Bazaar.

With dearest love,

Daddy

1403 North Laurel Avenue

Hollywood,

CaliforniaNovember 2, 1940

Dearest Scottina:

Listening to the Harvard-Princeton game on the radio with the old songs reminds me of the past that I lived a quarter of a century ago and that you are living now. I picture you as there though I don’t know whether you are or not.

I remember once a long time ago I had a daughter who used to write me letters but now I don’t know where she is or what she is doing, so I sit here listening to Puccini - ‘Someday she’ll write (Pigliano edda ciano).’

With dearest love,

Daddy

1403 North Laurel Avenue

Hollywood,

CaliforniaNovember 29, 1940

Dearest Scottie:

I started Tom Wolfe’s book on your recommendation. It seems better than Time and the River. He has a fine inclusive mind, can write like a streak, has a great deal of emotion, though a lot of it is maudlin and inaccurate, but his awful secret transpires at every crevice - he did not have anything particular to say! The stuff about the GREAT VITAL HEART OF AMERICA is just simply corny.

He recapitulates beautifully a great deal of what Walt Whitman said and Dostoevski said and Nietzsche said and Milton said, but he himself, unlike Joyce and T. S. Eliot and Ernest Hemingway, has nothing really new to add. All right - it’s all a mess and it’s too bad about the individual - so what? Most writers line themselves up along a solid gold bar like Ernest’s courage, or Joseph Conrad’s art, or D. H. Lawrence’s intense cohabitations, but Wolfe is too ‘smart’ for this and I mean smart in its most belittling and most modern sense. Smart like Fadiman in The New Yorker, smart like the critics whom he so pretends to despise. However, the book doesn’t commit the cardinal sin: it doesn’t fail to live. But I’d like you to think sometime how and in what way you think it is superior to such a piece of Zolaesque naturalism as Maugham’s Of Human Bondage, or if it is superior at all. Did you like the description of Max Perkins as ‘Foxhall’? I believe Max had mixed emotions.

I’m taking a day off from my novel to go to the dentist, the doctor, and my agent, to the latter in order to discuss picture business when and if I go back to it in February. And I have saved an hour to rush in where angels fear to tread. I don’t know-------- — and have had to piece him together from what you have told me and from a letter you showed me and so forth. But it sounds to me as if he had a perceptible dash of lavender. I know exactly what you mean about the Dwight Fiske attitude - sometimes the Harvard manner approaches that deceptively as a pose - but when a man is tired of life at 21 it indicates that he is rather tired of something in himself. One thing I’m sure of. There are plenty of absolutely first-rate men who will be within your range in the next two years. I remember that Lois Moran used to worry because all the attractive men she knew were married. She finally inverted it into the credo that if a man wasn’t married and inaccessible, he wasn’t a first-rate man. She gave herself a very bad time. The sea is still as full as ever of sharks, whales, trout and tuna. The real handicap for a girl like you would have been to have worn herself out emotionally at sixteen. I think we cut that by about two-thirds by keeping you comparatively busy in those two very crucial years. Life should be fun for you and there’s plenty of time. All I care for is that you should marry someone who is not too much a part of the crowd.

Lanahan is wrong about your disposition. You take adversity very well, but you are utterly dependent on sleep. Your extraordinary performance out here two years ago was directly attributable to the fact that you hadn’t slept since getting off the boat, if you slept on board of it! It amounts almost to an idiosyncracy in you and you should never make important decisions when you are extremely tired.

With dearest love,

Daddy

P.S. It’s O.K. about the Xmas money but go slow. The phone rang after I finished this letter and the doctor after seeing my cardiogram has confined me to the house. So at this moment I couldn’t go to the studios if I wanted to. Try to save your fare to Baltimore and back.

1403 North Laurel Avenue

Hollywood,

CaliforniaDecember 7, 1940

Dearest Scottie:

I’m sending the check you asked for next week. Will that be time enough? Also will send railroad fare, etc. I’m still in bed but managing to write and feeling a good deal better. It was a regular heart attack this time and I will simply have to take better care of myself. I’ve been living two floors up and will probably have to move, though not immediately.

It interests me what you are doing for Peaches. I should certainly think of nothing else but Peaches while you are writing it so it will be absolutely honest. But afterwards I would very much like to see a copy of it. Littauer, the editor of Colliers, came through here last week and liked your New Yorker piece very much. He might pay you more than almost anyone else. While in on the subject, remember that Harold Ober’s advice is only good up to a point. He is ‘the average reader’ and about one third the stories that I sold to The Saturday Evening Post were stories which he did not think they would buy. Like all agents, he is clogged with too much of the kind of reading trained to smell the money in the page - so I should never ask his advice on any literary matter, though of course in other regards he is an excellent agent.

My novel is something of a mystery, I hope. I think it’s a pretty good rule not to tell what a thing is about until it’s finished. If you do you always seem to lose some of it. It never quite belongs to you so much again.

Your Xmas plans seem O.K. to me.

With dearest love,

Daddy

1403 North Laurel Avenue

Hollywood,California

December, 1940

Dearest Scottie:

There has reached you by this time, I hope, a little coat. It was an almost never-worn coat of Sheilah’s that she wanted to send you. It seemed very nice to me - it may fill out your rather thin wardrobe. Frances Kroll’s father is a furrier and he remade it without charge! So you must at once please write the following letters: (1) To Sheilah, not stressing Mr Kroll’s contribution, (z) To Frances, praising the style.

(3) To me (in the course of things) in such a way that I can show the letter to Sheilah who will certainly ask me if you liked the coat.

You make things easier for me if you write these letters promptly. A giver gets no pleasure in a letter acknowledging a gift three weeks’ late even though it crawls with apolog es - you will have stolen pleasure from one who has tried to give it to you. (Ecclesiastes Fitzgerald.)

Lastly, drum up some story for Alabama that you bought the coat from some girl. Don’t say it came through me.

for the rest, I am still in bed - this time the result of twenty- five years of cigarettes. You have got two beautiful bad examples for parents. Just do everything we didn’t do and you will be perfectly safe. But be sweet to your mother at Xmas despite her early Chaldean rune-worship which she will undoubtedly inflict on you at Xmas. Her letters are tragically brilliant on all matters except those of central importance. How strange to have failed as a social creature - even criminals do not fail that way - they are the law’s ‘Loyal Opposition,’ so to speak. But the insane are always mere guests on earth, eternal strangers carrying around broken decalogues that they cannot read.

I am still not through Tom Wolfe’s novel and can’t finally report it but the story of the fire is magnificent. Only I’m afraid that after the grand character-planting nothing is going to come of it all. The picture of ‘Amy Carleton’ (Emily Davies Vanderbilt who used to come to our apartment in Paris - do you remember?), with the cracked grey eyes and the exactly reproduced speech, is just simply perfect. She tried hard to make Tom - sans succès - and finally ended by her own hand in Montana in 1934 in a lonely ranch house. The portrait of Mrs Jack is grand too. I believe her absolutely.

With dearest love,

Daddy

P-S- In the name of Somerset Maugham, the letter I.

UNDATED FRAGMENTS OF LETTERS TO SCOTTIE

All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.

The conclusion is: it will not win you either financial in- ependence or immortality. But you will be wise to publish it, if you can - if for no gain and only in a college magazine. It will you a sense of your own literary existence, and put you in not°h °t*lers trying (he same thing. In a literary way I can- help you beyond a point. I might say that I don’t think anyone succinct prose unless they have at least tried and failed to write a good iambic pentameter sonnet, and read Browning’, short dramatic poems, etc. - but that was my personal approach to prose. Yours may be different, as Ernest Hemingway’s was. But I wouldn’t have written this long letter unless I distinguished underneath the sing-song lilt of your narrative, some traces of a true rhythm that is ear-marked Scottina. There is as yet no honesty - the reader will say ‘so what?’ But when in a freak moment you will want to give the low-down, not the scandal, not the merely reported but the profound essence of what happened at a prom or after it, perhaps that honesty will come to you - and then you will understand how it is possible to make a even a forlorn Laplander feel the importance of a trip to Cartier’s!

The first thing I ever sold was a piece of verse to Poet Lore when I was twenty.

I shall somehow manage not to appear in a taxi-cab on Thanksgiving and thus disgrace you before all those ‘nice’ girls. Isn’t it somewhat old-fashioned to describe girls in expensive backgrounds as ‘nice?’ I will bet two-thirds of the girls at Miss Walker’s school have at least one grandparent that peddled old leather in the slums of New York, Chicago or London, and if I thought you were accepting the standards of the cosmopolitan rich, I would much rather have you in a southern school, where scholastic standards are not so high and the word ‘nice’ is not debased to such a ludicrous extent. I have seen the whole racket, and if there is any more disastrous road than that from Park Avenue to the Rue de la Paix and back again, I don’t know it.

They are homeless people, ashamed of being American, unable to master the culture of another country; ashamed, usually, of their husbands, wives, grandparents, and unable to bring up descendants of whom they could be proud, even if they had the nerve to bear them, ashamed of each other yet leaning on each other’s weakness, a menace to the social order in which they live — oh, why should I go on? You know how I feel about such things- If I come up and find you gone Park Avenue, you will have to explain me away as a Georgia cracker or a Chicago killer. God help Park Avenue.

Madame Curie progresses and it is a relief to be working on something that the censors have nothing against. It will be a comparatively quiet picture - as was The Barretts of Wimpole Street, but the more I read about the woman the more I think about her as one of the most admirable people of our time. I hope we can get a little of that into the story.

You must have some politeness toward ideas. You can neither cut through, nor challenge nor beat the fact that there is an organized movement over the world before which you and I as individuals are less than the dust. Sometime when you feel very brave and defiant and haven’t been invited to one particular college function, read the terrible chapter in Dos Kapital on ‘The Working Day,’ and see if you are ever quite the same.

So many writers, Conrad for instance, have been aided by being brought up in a métier utterly unrelated to literature. It gives an abundance of material and, more important, an attitude from which to view the world. So much writing nowadays suffers both from lack of an attitude and from sheer lack of any material, save what is accumulated in a purely social life. The world, as a rule, does not live on beaches and in country clubs.

To Maxwell Perkins

599 Summit Avenue

St Paul,

Minnesota

July 26, 1919

Dear Mr Perkins:

After four months’ attempt to write commercial copy by day and painful half-hearted imitations of popular literature by night I decided that it was one thing or another. So I gave up getting married and went home.

Yesterday I finished the first draft of a novel called: THE EDUCATION OF A PERSONAGE. It is in no sense a revision of the ill-fated Romantic Egotist but it contains some of the former material, improved and worked over, and bears a strong family resemblance besides.

But while the other was a tedious, disconnected casserole this is definite attempt at a big novel and I really believe I have hit it, as immediately I stopped disciplining the muse she trotted obediently around and became an erratic mistress if not a steady wife.

Now what I want to ask you is this - if I send you the book by August 20th and you decide you could risk its publication (I am blatantly confident that you will) would it be brought out in October, say, or just what would decide its date of publication?

This is an odd question I realize, especially since you haven’t even seen the book, but you have been so kind in the past about my stuff that I venture to intrude once more upon your patience.

Sincerely,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

599 Summit Avenue

St Paul,

Minnesota

September 4, 1919

Dear Mr Perkins:

I sent the book today under a separate cover. I want to discuss a few things in connection with it.

You’ll notice that it contains much material from The Romantic Egotist.

(1) — Chapter II, Book I of the present book contains material from ‘Spires and Gargoyles,”Ha-Ha Hortense,”Babes in the Wood,’ and ‘Crescendo’ - rewritten in third person, cut down, and re-edited.

(2) — Chapter III, Book I contains material from ‘Second Descent of the Egotist’ and ‘The Devil,’ rewritten, etc.

(3) — Chapter IV, Book I contains material from ‘The Two Mystics,”Clara,’ and The End of Many Things.’

(4) — Chapter III, Book II is a revision of Eleanor in third person - with that fur incident left out.

Chapter I, Book I, and Chapters I, II, IV and V of Book II are entirely new.

You’ll see that of the old material there is all new use, outside the revision in the third person. For instance the Princeton characters of The R.E. - Tom, Tump, Lorry, Lumpy, Fred, Dick, Jim, Burne, Judy, Mclntyre and Jesse - have become in this book Fred, Dick, Alex, Tom, Kerry and Burne. Isabelle and Rosalind of The R.E. have become just Isabelle while the new Rosalind is a different person.

Beatrice is a new character. Dr Dudley becomes Monsignor Darcy; is a much better done - in fact every character is in better perspective.

The preface I leave to your discretion - perhaps it’s a little too clever-clever; likewise you may object to the literary personalities in Chapter II and Book II and to the length of the socialistic discussion in the last chapter. The book contains a little over ninety thousand words. I certainly think the hero gets somewhere.

I await anxiously your verdict Sincerely,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

P.S. Thornton Hancock is Henry Adams - I didn’t do him thoroughly, of course - but I knew him when I was a boy.

599 Summit Avenue

St Paul,

Minnesota

September 18, 1919

Dear Mr Perkins:

Of course I was delighted to get your letter and I’ve been in a sort of trance all day; not that I doubted you’d take it but at last I have something to show people. It has enough advertisement in St Paul already to sell several thousand copies and I think Princeton will buy it. (I’ve been a periodical, local Great-Expectations for some time in both places.)

Terms, etc., I leave to you but one thing I can’t relinquish without at least a slight struggle. Would it be utterly impossible for you to publish the book Xmas - or, say, by February? I have so many things dependent on its success - including of course a girl - not that I expect it to make me a fortune but it will have a psychological effect on me and all my surroundings and besides open up new fields. I’m in that stage where every month counts frantically and seems a cudgel in a fight for happiness against time. Will you let me know more exactly how that difference in time of publication influences the sale and what you mean by ‘early spring?’

Excuse this ghastly handwriting but I’m a bit nervous today. I’m beginning (last month) a very ambitious novel called The Demon Lover which will probably take a year. Also I’m writing short stories. I find that what I enjoy writing is always my best - every young author ought to read Samuel Butler’s Notebooks.

I’m writing quite a marvelous after-the-war story. Does Mr Bridges   think that they’re a little passé or do you think he’d like to see it?

I’ll fix up data for advertising and have a photo taken next  week with the most gigantic enjoyment (I’m trying H. G. Wells’ use of vast Garagantuan sp. words).

Well, thank you for a very happy day and numerous other favors and let me know if I’ve any possible chance for earlier publication, and give my thanks or whatever is in order to Mr Scribner or whoever else was on the deciding committee.

Probably be East next month or November.

Sincerely,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

P.S. Who picks out the cover? I’d like something that could be a set - look cheerful and important like a Shaw book. I notice Shaw, Galsworthy and Barrie do that. But Wells doesn’t - I wonder why. No need of illustrations, is there? I knew a fellow at college who’d have been a wonder for books like mine - a mixture of Aubrey Beardsley, Hogarth and Montgomery Flagg. But he got killed in the war.

Excuse this immoderately long and rambling letter but I think you’ll have to allow me several days for recuperation.

599 Summit Avenue

St Paul,

Minnesota

October 25,

1919

Dear Mr Bridges:

This is a query. I have a project. It is a work of about 20,000 words and more on the order of my novel than like these stories I’ve been doing. But it’s the sort of thing that will require a full month’s work and as The New Republic, Scribner’s and possibly the Atlantic Monthly are the only magazines that would publish it I don’t want to start until you assure me that there’s nothing in the project which seems to bar it from Scribner’s if it be sufficiently interesting and well done.

It is a literary forgery purporting to be selections from the notebooks of a man who is a complete literary radical from the time he’s in college thru two years in New York - finally he goes to training camp, gets bored, and enlists as a private. This is the end of the book - a note by me will say that he served in Companies E and G of the Twenty-eighth Infantry and died of appendicitis in Paris in 1918. It will be in turns cynical, ingenuous, life-saturated, critical  A few letters not addressed to Max Perkins but bearing on Fitzgerald’s relations with Scribners are included in this group.

and bitter. It will be racy and startling with opinions and personalities. I have a journal I have kept for 3 1/2  years which my book didn’t begin to exhaust, which I don’t seem to be able to draw on for stories but which certainly is, I think, highly amusing. This, thoroughly edited and revised, plus some imagination and 1/2 dozen ingredients I have in mind will be the bulk of it. It would take 2 or possibly 3 parts to publish it The tremendous success of Butler’s Notebooks and of Barbel- lion’s (Wells’?) Disappointed Man makes me think that the public loves to find out the workings of active minds in their personal problems. It will be bound to have that streak of coarseness that both Wells and Butler have but there won’t be any fames Joyce flavor to it.

Of course you can’t possibly commit yourself until you’ve seen it but as I say I’d want to know before I start if a work of that nature would be intrinsically hostile to the policy of Scribner’s Magazine. With apologies for intruding upon your patience once again I am

Sincerely,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

599 Summit Avenue

St Paul,

Minnesota circa January 10, 1920

Dear Mr Perkins:

I was delighted to hear from you - and tickled to death that W. E. Hill liked my book and has done the cover. I admire him more than any artist in the country. I can hardly wait to see it I came home in a thoroughly nervous alcoholic state and revised two tales that went the complete rounds of the magazines last April. I did ‘em in four days and sent ‘em to Reynolds in the hopes he could get enough for ‘em so that I could go South, because I’m afraid I’m about to develop tuberculosis. Last Monday he sent me a check for a thousand from the Post for ‘em so I’m leaving for New Orleans tomorrow night. I’ll write you my address when I have one - meanwhile, anything sent here will be forwarded.

Now for several questions. When would a novel have to be finished to have it published serially and then brought out by you for the fall season? Do you think a book on the type of my first one would have any chance of being accepted for serial publication by any magazine? I want to start it but I don’t want to get broke in the middle and start in and have to write short stories again - because I don’t enjoy it and just do it for money. There’s nothing in collections of short stories is there? About how many copies of John O’May were sold?

Everything goes serenely except that I feel written out on this short stuff. I’ve had two vaudeville offers for my current play in Smart Set and I’ve just sent $1000 worth of movies to the Metro people. I have two stories for Mr Bridges, both stuck in the middle, and two Post stories cut off in their first paragraphs.

My Drunkard’sHoliday and Diary of a Literary Failure are also defunct.

The more I think of that advertisement I wrote for my book the more I dislike it. Please don’t use it unless you have it already set up in which case I’ll make a few small changes in proof and it’ll have to go.

I’m deadly curious to see if Hill’s picture looks like the real ‘Rosalind.’  I suppose he did either the boudoir scene or the mellow parting. May be in New York in March if I can get rid of this damn cough. By the way, I liked Maxwell Burt’s ‘Cup of Tea’so well that I wrote him a note about it and got a very pleasant one in return. He’s sort of Richard Harding Davis, only literary instead of journalistic - but he’s the only real romanticist there is. We have the daughters of Henry James - Gerould, Glaspell  and the other female psychological hair-splitters and the Yiddish descendants of O. Henry - Fanny and Edna and that’s all - except Burt, so I like him.

As ever,

F. Scott Fitz -

2900 Prytania StreetNew Orleans, Louisiana January 21, 1920

Dear Mr Perkins:

I am returning herewith the first batch of proofs, corrected. There is one change I would like to have you make if you can possibly see your way clear to doing it. It is in regard to the type used in those subheadings throughout the chapters, such as ‘A kiss for Amory’ and ‘Preparatory to the great adventure’ - you know what I mean.

Now I have a very strong instinct about having those in a different sort of type. It may seem a small point but I got the idea originally from the Shaw prefaces and the exact sort of type does make a difference. Those subheadings are intended as commentaries, sort of whimsical commentaries rather more than they are intended as titles, and the correct type would be that sort used in the first two words of the book. The words ‘Amory Blaine’ that begin Chapter one are in exactly the sort of type I mean. I don’t know what you call it but it has capitals slightly bigger than the ones in the present subheadings and the first letter of the important words is slightly bigger.

I should have explained that to you before - you see, I think that this sort of type I mean gives the sort of effect of a marginalia - really doesn’t break it up as much as these small, severe headings you’re using now.

Of course this is my fault but I feel very strongly about it so if it can be done without inconvenience I wish you’d have it fixed up.

As ever, Scott Fitzgerald F S. It looks damn good. Thanks for your letter. O. Henry said this was a story town - but it’s too consciously that - just as a Hugh Walpole character is too consciously a character.

2900 Prytania StreetNew Orleans, Louisiana February 3,

1920

Dear Mr Perkins:

I certainly touched the depths of depression tonight. The action on that book, Madeline, has knocked hell out of my new novel, Darling Heart, which turned completely on the seduction of the girl in the second chapter. I was afraid all along because of Susan Lennox and the agitation against Dreiser but this is the final blow. I don’t know what I’ll do now - what in hell is the use of trying to write decent fiction if a bunch of old women refuse to let anyone hear the truth!

I’ve fallen lately under the influence of an author who’s quite changed my point of view. He’s a chestnut to you, no doubt, but I’ve just discovered him - Frank Norris. I think McTeague and Vandover are both excellent. I told you last November that I’d read Salt by his brother Charles and was quite enthusiastic about it. Odd! There are things inParadise that might have been written by Norris - those drunken scenes, for instance - in fact, all the realism. I wish I’d stuck to it throughout! Another of my discoveries is H. L. Mencken who is certainly a factor in present day literature. In fact I’m not so cocksure about things as I was last summer - this fellow Conrad seems to be pretty good after all.

I’ve decided I’d rather not use Nathan’s t name at all in connection with my book and in fact that whole foreword strikes me as being rather weak. Couldn’t one of your advertising men write it?

I’m glad you’re fixing it up about those subtitles. I’m anxiously awaiting the cover.

Those stories I sold the Post will start to appear February 21st. I have ‘Dalyrimple’ and ‘Benediction’ in the current Smart Set and I had a one-act play in the January number which got several vaudeville offers. Read it if you can. It was called ‘Porcelain and Pink’ and it’s excellent. Smart Set, Scribner’s and Post are the only three magazines.

I’m going to break up the start of my novel and sell it as three little character stories to Smart Set. I’ll only get $40.00 a piece but no one else would take them, I don’t think - and besides I want to have Mencken and Nathan hot on my side when my book comes out. As soon as I’ve done that I’m going to do two or three stories for Mr Bridges. If I give up the idea of Darling Heart which I’ve practically decided to do, at least as a serial, and plan not to start my fall novel until June and finish it in August, my idea will be to do 3 stories a month, one for Smart Set, one for Scribner’s, and one for the Post. The latter are now paying me $600.00 which is a frightful inducement since I’m almost sure I’ll get married as soon as my book is out.

Have you any idea of the date yet? And when my short stories will begin to appear?

Faithfully yours,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

P.S. Please forward any mail that may come there for me. I expect to be in New York about the 24th - leave here the 20th.

Westport,Connecticut August 12, 1920

Dear Mr Scribner:

Again I am immensely obliged to you. I should certainly feel much more business-like and less profligate if you would tell your bookkeeper when our reckoning comes this autumn to charge me full interest on the advances you’ve made me.

My new novel, called The Flight of the Rocket,! concerns the life of one Anthony Patch between his 25th and 33d years (1913 — 1921). He is one of those many with the tastes and weaknesses of an artist but with no actual creative inspiration. How he and his beautiful young wife are wrecked on the shoals of dissipation is told in the story. This sounds sordid but it’s really a most sensational book and I hope won’t disappoint the critics who liked my first one. I hope it’ll be in your hands by November 1st.

Sincerely,

F. Scott Fitzgerald 38 West 59th StreetNew York City December 31, 1920

Dear Mr Perkins:

The bank this afternoon refused to lend me anything on the security of stock I hold - and I have been pacing the floor for an hour trying to decide what to do. Here, with the novel within two weeks of completion, am I with six hundred dollars’ worth of bills and owing Reynolds $650.00 for an advance on a story that I’m utterly unable to write. I’ve made half a dozen starts yesterday and today and I’ll go mad if I have to do another debutante, which is what they want.

I hoped that at last being square with Scribners I could remain so. But I’m at my wit’s end. Isn’t there some way you could regard this as an advance on the new novel rather than on the Xmas sale which won’t be due me till July? And at the same interest that it costs Scribners to borrow? Or could you make it a month’s loan from Scribner & Co. with my next ten books as security? I need $ 1600.00.

Anxiously,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

6 Pleasant Avenue Montgomery, AlabamaJuly 30, 1921

Dear Mr Perkins:

I have been intending to write you the following letter for some months and I’ve been deterred for many causes - chief among which were the facts that any letter from me on this subject would sound like impertinent and unsolicited criticism and secondly because I have been the recipient of so many favors and courtesies from Scribners that it was scarcely my place to cavil at what I considered ultra-conservatism in their marketing and editorial policies. But in most businesses nowadays a box is set aside for employees’ suggestions and so perhaps even from outside you won’t resent it if I speak what’s on my mind.

What prompted this letter was the clipping on page D  which I took from the Tribune. I happen to know that two weeks ago Mooncalf had not reached 50,000 copies and I know also that it has not had nearly the vogue of my book in the libraries as is apparent from The Bookman’s monthly score. Yet my novel so far as I have seen got not one newspaper ad, not one Times or Tribune ad or Chicago ad since six months after publication. And Knopf has forcibly kept Mooncalf in the public eye for twice that long. What notoriety my book has preserved as well as what notoriety it got in the beginning, it got almost unaided. Its ads were small and undistinguished and confined almost entirely to college magazines and to Scribner’s. The only ad from among my nine or ten suggestions that was used (except the ‘novel about flappers written for philosophers’) was ruined by Black’s ‘make it a Fitzgerald Christmas.’ The ads gotten up in the office were small and so scattered as to have no follow-up or reiterative punch. Don’t gather from this that I have the idea that my book was slighted: on the contrary I think Whitney Darrow and Rodgers and everyone who had anything to do with it there gave it much more personal attention than any book they were handling. Nevertheless the following facts remain:

(1) Mooncalf, on its issue, was advertised in Montgomery, Alabama. This Side of Paradise, the it sold fifty or more copies here on Zelda’s reputation, wàs not once advertised. Mooncalf was advertised two months in St Paul. This Side of Paradise appeared in the papers 3 times in ads. It sold itself largely on personal home-town unsolicited notices about me. This was also true to a great extent in Chicago - from the advertising section of the Chicago Daily News which I have on file together with the numbers ofChicago Tribune during the week when my book was heading the list, I discover about eleven ads. It ran 18 weeks as best seller in Chicago. During that time it should have been advertised in 2 papers at least every other week. From my slight experience in advertising I know that much about campaigns. Mooncalf (not to mention Lulu Bett and The Age of Innocence, neither of which had one-tenth the initial publicity of my book and both of which are still selling) has been advertised almost every week for 8 months in Chicago papers and usually in both. Knopf runs almost daily ads for books that he believes in that may not sell 10,000 copies (like Zell for instance) in the Tribune. The greatest selling point my book had, Mencken’s statement quoted on the wrapper (together with an entirely neutral statement from Phelps) was allowed to be forgotten with one exception, one ad. Knopf would be using it still, and keeping the book talked about by means of it. Sinclair Lewis’s remark in the Tribune, ‘In Scott Fitzgerald we have an author who will be the equal of any young European,’ was absolutely unused.

Dellwood White Bear Lake,  Minnesota August 25, 1921

Dear Mr Perkins:

Excuse the pencil but I’m feeling rather tired and discouraged with life tonight and I haven’t the energy to use ink - ink, the ineffable destroyer of thought, that fades an emotion into that slatternly thing, a written-down mental excretion. What ill- spelled rot!

About the novel - which after my letters I should think you’d be so bored with you’d wish it had never existed - I’d like very much if it came out in England simultaneously with America. You have the rights to it, have you not? If you do not intend to place it would you be willing to turn them over to me on the same 10% basis asParadise so I could place it either with Collins or thru Reynolds?

Hope you’re enjoying New Hampshire - you probably are. I’m having a hell of a time because I’ve loafed for 5 months and I want to get to work. Loafing puts me in this particularly obnoxious and abominable gloom. My third novel, if I ever write another, will I am sure be black as death with gloom. I should like to sit down with 1/2  dozen chosen companions and drink myself to death but I am sick alike of life, liquor and literature. If it wasn’t for Zelda I think I’d disappear out of sight for three years. Ship as a sailor or something and get hard - I’m sick of the flabby semi-intellectual softness in which I flounder with my generation.

Scott Fitz

Dellwood White Bear Lake, Minnesota

Before October 7, 1921

Dear Mr Perkins:

I appreciate your courtesy and thoughtfulness in telegraphing me. Zelda received the letter and is awaiting the book with interest. In setting up the book are they including that table ‘By F. Scott Fitzgerald’ with my multitudinous and voluminous notes numbered beneath?

I have not seen one single review for 2 months but here are my prognostications for the fall. I have only read the first of these books.

(1) — Brass by Charles Norris. Worthy, honest, thorough, but fundamentally undistinguished.

(2) — Three Soldiers by John Dos Passos. The book of the autumn.

(3) — Eric Dorn by Ben Hecht. Probably the second best book of the autumn.

(4) — The Beginning of Wisdom by Stephen Vincent Benet. Beautifully written but too disjointed and patternless. Critics will accuse him of my influence but unjustly as his book was written almost simultaneously with mine.

(5) — The Briary Bush. Another rotten novel by Floyd Dell, which, because it is without a touch of grace or beauty or wit, will be hailed as a masterpiece by all the ex-policemen who are now critics.

Will you send me that Brentano sketch when it appears?

Sincerely,

F. Scott Fitz —

626 Goodrich Avenue

St Paul,

Minnesota

December 12, 1921

Dear Mr Perkins:

Have just received your letter in re Bible anecdote in novel  and I’m rather upset about it. You say:

‘Even when people are wrong you cannot but respect those who speak with such passionate sincerity about it.’

Now in that remark lies, I think, the root of your objection - except to substitute ‘be intimidated by’ for ‘respect.’ I don’t sup pose any but the most religious-minded people in the world believe that such interludes as The Song of Solomon or the story of Ruth have or ever had even in the minds of the original chroniclers the faintest religious significance. The Roman Church insists that in The Song of Solomon the bride is the church and the lover is Christ but it is almost universally doubted if any such thing was even faintly intended.

Now I feel sure that most people will know that my sketch refers to the Old Testament, and to Jehovah, the cruel Hebrew God, against whom such writers as even Mark Twain not to mention Anatole France and a host of others have delivered violent pyrotechnics from time to time.

As to the personal side of it don’t you think all changes in the minds of people are brought about by the assertion of a thing - startling perhaps at first but later often becoming, with the changes of the years, bromidic. You have read Shaw’s preface to Androcles and the Lion - that made no great stir - in fact to the more sophisticated of the critics it was a bit bromidic. His preface, moreover, is couched with very little reverence even the it treats of Christ who is much less open to discussion than merely that beautiful epic of the Bible. If you object to my phrasing I could substitute ‘deity’ for’god almighty’and get a better word than bawdy - in fact make it more dignified - but I would hate to cut it out as ifs very clever in its way and Mencken - who saw it -

and Zelda were very enthusiastic about it. It’s the sort of thing you find continually in Anatole France’s Revoit of the Angels - as well as in furgen and in Mark Twain’s Mysterious Stranger. The idea, refusing homage to the Bible and its God, runs thru many of Mark Twain’s essays and all through Paine’s biography.

In fact, Van Wyck Brooks in The Ordeal  criticizes Clemens for allowing many of his statements to be toned down at the request of William Dean Howells or Mrs Clemens. If it was an incident which I felt had no particular literary merit I should defer to your judgment without question, but that passage belongs beautifully to that scene and is exactly what was needed to make it more than a beautiful setting for ideas that fail to appear. You say:

‘Even when people are altogether wrong you cannot but respect those who speak with such passionate sincerity.’

I can imagine that remark having been made to Galileo and Mencken, Samuel Butler and Anatole France, Voltaire and Bernard Shaw, George Moore and even, if you will pardon me, in this form once upon a time.

‘You don’t like these scribes and pharisees. You call them whitened sepulchres but even when people are altogether wrong - etc.’

I haven’t seen the proof with your notation and have only read your letter. But I do feel that my judgment is right in this case. I do not expect in any event that I am to have the same person-for- person public this time thatParadise had. My one hope is to be endorsed by the intellectually élite and thus be forced onto people as Conrad has. (Of course I’m assuming that my work grows in sincerity and proficiency from year to year as it has so far.) If I cut this out it would only be because I would be afraid and I haven’t done that yet and dread the day when I’ll have to.

Please write me frankly as I have you - and tell me if you are speaking for yourself, for the Scribner Company, or for the public. I am rather upset about the whole thing. Will wait until I hear from you.

As ever,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

P.S. Besides, as to the position of the thing in the story, it is necessary to show the growth of Maury’s pessimism and to do this I have invented a fable in which the hoi poloi do more than refuse to believe their wise men - but they twist the very wisdom of the wise into a justification of their own maudlin and self-satisfactory creeds. This would discourage anyone.

626 Goodrich Avenue

St Paul,

Minnesota

Before December 21, 1921

Dear Mr Perkins:

Your second letter came and I want to apologize to you for mine. I might have known you did not mean what in haste I imagined you did. The thing was flippant - I mean it was the sort of worst of George Jean Nathan. I have changed it now - changed ‘god almighty’ to ‘deity,’ cut out ‘bawdy,’ and changed several other words, so I think it is all right.

Why, really, my letter was so silly, with all those absilrd citations of Twain, Anatole France, Howells, etc., was because I was in a panic because I was afraid I might have to cut it out and, as you say, it does round out the scene.

I hope you’ll accept my apology.

Is the girl beautiful in the W. E. Hill picture? Are you going to have a light blue background on the jacket as I suggested - I mean like you had for your Lulu Ragdale book two years ago? And did you catch that last correction I sent you before it was too late?

I have put a new ending on the book - that is, on the last paragraph, instead of the repetition of the Paradise scene of which I was never particularly fond. I think that now the finish will leave the ‘taste’ of the whole book in the reader’s mouth as it didn’t before - if you know what I mean.

I can’t tell you how sorry I am about that silly letter. I took that ‘Oh Christ’ out as you suggested. As you say, ‘Oh, God’ won’t fill the gap but ‘Oh my God’ does it pretty well.

With my changing of the extreme last and fixing up the symposium I am almost, but not quite, satisfied with the book. I prophesy that it will go about 6o ooo copies the first year - that is, assuming thatParadise went about 40,000 the first year. Thank God I’m thru with it

As ever,

F. Scott Fitzg —

626 Goodrich Avenue

St Paul,

Minnesota circa January 31, 1922

Dear Mr Perkins:

The books came and I’m delighted with the blurb on the back which I suspect you wrote yourself. I think it strikes exactly the right note, gives a moral key to the stupider critics on which to go, and justifies the book to many who will think it is immoral I Thank you.

I like the way it is got up - it surprised me to find that it is half again as long asParadise.

I wired you last night about the color of the jacket, which has come out, in my copies at least, a sickly yellow. It was a deep reddish orange, you remember, in the jacket you sent me before.

The more I think of the picture on the jacket the more I fail to understand his drawing that man. The girl is excellent of course - it looks somewhat like Zelda - but the man, I suspect, is a sort of debauched edition of me. At any rate the man is utterly unprepossessing “and I do not understand an artist of Hill’s talent and carefulness going quite contrary to a detailed description of the hero in the book.

Note these divergencies -

1. — Anthony is ‘just under six feet’ - Here he looks about Gloria’s height with ugly short legs.

2. — Anthony is dark-haired - This bartender on the cover is light-haired.

3. — Anthony’s general impression is described on page 9 - in not a single trait does this person on the jacket conform to that impression. He looks like a sawed-off young tough in his first dinner- coat Everybody I’ve talked to agrees with me and I’m a little sore. When a book has but one picture to give the impression, the illustrator ought to be careful. The Metropolitan illustrations were bad enough, God knows, but at least the poor botcher of an illustrator tried to give Anthony the physique and atmosphere assigned to him.

As you can see I’m an ill-natured crabber. I ought not to be. The girl is excellent and I suppose Hill thought it would please me if the picture looked like Zelda and me. But I’d rather have the man on the Paradise jacket even with his tie tucked neatly under his collar in the Amherst fashion. Hill has done about 9 figures for my covers altogether and I suppose 8 good out of 9 is a good average.

Excuse this letter - its just to get rid of an inhibition of anger so I can get back to my play this morning. Wilson’s article about me in the March ist Vanity Fair is superb. It’s no blurb - not by a darn sight - but it’s the first time I’ve been done at length by an intelligent and sophisticated man and I appreciate it - jeers and all.

As ever,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

626 Goodrich Avenue

St Paul,

Minnesota circa

March 5,1922

Dear Mr Perkins:

This is to thank you for the money. I was in a tight place - had actually cashed a bad check and didn’t know it. However, the Metropolitan has begun to pay a little and I think I’m out of the woods.

When I wrote you about The Mind in the Making * I’d only read two chapters. I have finished it and entirely changed my views on its importance. I think it’s a thoroughly excellent book. It states the entire case for modernity’s lingering hope of progress. It is a depressing book, I think, as are Wells’ and Shaw’s late things, and all those of that brave company who started out in the By James Harvey Robinson.

go’s so full of hope and joy in life and faith in science and reason. Thomas Hardy survives them all. I think when I read Upton Sinclair’s The Brass Check I made my final decision about America - that freedom has produced the greatest tyranny under the sun. I’m still a socialist but sometimes I dread that things will grow worse and worse the more the people nominally rule. The strong are too strong for us and the weak too weak. I shall not write another novel for a year but when I do it will not be a realistic one. At least I don’t think it will.

The more I think of The B. and D.’s chances the more I think that your blurb will save it if anything can.

Nathan writes me: ‘A very substantial performance. There is a wealth of sound stuff in it. You are maturing rapidly. It pleases me to have so good a piece of work dedicated in part to me. You have done a first rate job.’

I don’t want to use this though as he’s funny about that sort of thing.

I’ve read my book over and I’ve decided that I like it fine. I think it is as good as Three Soldiers - which is high praise from me.

The Knopf man was here a while ago and I had quite a talk with him in Boyd’s bookstore. It seemed to me that he was personally dishonest and utterly disloyal to his company - that is, he was trying to sell one of his sample books and he said that Knopf was as honest as any publisher with a wink! I doubt if Knopf gives his authors a full 15% on those $2.50 books - of course he shouldn’t as they cost more. I had an interesting time with Herge- sheimer - he came through and came to dinner. However, what I started to say was how favorably Knapp compared with the Knopf man.

Please don’t get the impression that I was fooled by the size of the St Paul orders. I knew they were chiefly ‘on sale.’ I think I’m going to have a great non-fiction book ready for you about next January. And if my play is a big success, will you bring it out in book form - or do you think it best to wait until I have three of them, as O’Neill has done, following Shaw and Barrie and Galsworthy?

I’m glad you liked In One Reel* Wait till you see the stories.

You haven’t seen half of them. Read Chrome Yellow. Best to Roger. Knapp seemed devoted to you, which was our chief bond of union.

Yours ever,

F. Scott Fitzg —

626 Goodrich Avenue

St Paul,

Minnesota

April 19, 1922

Dear Mr Scribner:

I am consumed by an idea and I can’t resist asking you about it. It’s probably a chestnut, but it might not have occurred to you before in just this form.

No doubt you know of the success that Boni and Liveright have made of their Modern Library. Within the last month Doubleday, Page & Company have withdrawn the titles that were theirs from Boni’s Modern Library, and gone in on their own hook with a Lambskin Library. For this they have chosen so far about 18 titles from their past publications - some of them books of merit (Frank Norris and Conrad, for instance) and some of them trashy, but all books that at one time or another have been sensational either as popular successes or as possible contributions to American literature. The Lambskin Library is cheap, bound uniformly in red leather (or imitation leather), and makes, I believe, a larger appeal to the buyer than the A. L. Burt reprints, for its uniformity gives it a sort of permanence, a place of honor in the scraggly library that adorns every small home. Besides that, it is a much easier thing for a bookseller to display and keep up. The titles are numbered and it gives people a chance to sample writers by one book in this edition. Also it keeps before the public such books as have once been popular and have since been forgotten.

Now my idea is this: the Scribner Company have many more distinguished years of publishing behind them than Doubleday, Page. They could produce a list twice as long of distinguished and memorable fiction and use no more than one book by each author - and it need not be the book by that author most in demand.

Take for instance Predestined and The House of Mirth. I do not know, but I imagine that those books are kept upstairs in most book-stores, and only obtained when someone is told of the work of Edith Wharton and Stephen French Whitman. They are almost as forgotten as the books of Frank Norris and Stephen Crane were five years ago, before Boni’s library began its career.

To be specific, I can imagine that a Scribner library containing the following titles and selling for something under a dollar would be an — enormous success: —

1. — The House of Mirth — Edith Wharton — (or Ethan Frome) —

2. — Predestined — Stephen French Whitman 3- — This Side of Paradise — F. Scott Fitzgerald 4- — The Little Shepherd of — John Fox, Jr — Kingdom Come —

5- — In Ole Kentucky — Thomas Nelson Page 6. — Sentimental Tommy — J. M. Barrie 7- — Some Civil War book by — George Barr Cable 8. — Some novel by — Henry Van Dyke 9- — Some novel by — Jackson Gregory 10. — Saint’s Progress — John Galsworthy 11. — The Ordeal of Richard — George Meredith — Feverel —

12. — Treasure Island — Robert Louis Stevenson 13- — The Turn of the Screw — Henry James 14- — The Stolen Story — Jesse Lynch Williams — (or The Frederic —

— Car rolls) —

15- — The Damnation of — Harold Frederick — Theron Ware (I think —

— Stone used to own this.) —

16. — Soldiers of Fortune — Richard Harding Davis 17- — Some book by — Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews 18. Simple Souls — John Hastings Turner Doubtless a glance at your old catalogues would suggest two dozen others. I have not even mentioned less popular writers such as Burt and Katharine Gerould. Nor have I gone into the possibilities of such non-fiction as a volume of Roosevelt, a volume of Huneker, or a volume of Shane Leslie.

As I say, this is quite possibly an idea which has occurred to you before and been dismissed for reasons which would not appear to me, an outsider. I am moved to the suggestion by the success of the experiments I have mentioned. They have been made possible, I believe, by the recent American strain for ‘culture’ which expresses itself in such things as uniformity of bindings to make a library. Also the selective function of this library would appeal to many people in search of good reading matter, new or old.

One more thing and this interminably long letter is done. It may seem to you that in many cases I have chosen novels whose sale still nets a steady revenue at J 1.75 - and that it would be unprofitable to use such property in this way. But I have used such titles only to indicate my idea - Gallagher (which I believe is not in your subscription sets of Davis) could be substituted for Soldiers of Fortune, The Wrong Box for Treasure Island, and so on in the case of Fox, Page and Barrie. The main idea is that the known titles in the series should ‘carry’ the little known or forgotten. That is: from the little-known writer you use his best novel, such as Predestined - from the well-known writer you use his more obscure, such as Gallagher.

I apologize for imposing so upon your time, Mr Scribner. I am merely mourning that so many good or lively books are dead so soon, or only imperfectly kept alive in the cheap and severe im- permanency of the A. L. Burt editions. I am, sir, Most Sincerely,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

626 Goodrich Avenue

St Paul,

Minnesota

May 11,

1922

Dear Mr Perkins:

After careful consideration by the Fitzgerald menage, two booksellers and several friends, I am strongly in favor of keeping the Jazz Age title.

doubtedly right - the word flapper, or jazz, would be passé and kill a big sale.

(2) — Short stories do not sell and Flappers was an exception chiefly on account of my first novel and what was then the timeliness of the title.

(3) — I do not expect the new collection to have an advance sale of more than four or five thousand, and the total will never reach more than nine or ten thousand (that is, the first year or so).

(4) — It will be bought by my own personal public - that is, by the countless flappers and college kids who think I am a sort of oracle.

(5) — The question of Jazz or not Jazz is Scylla and Charybdis anyhow. If I use such a title as Half Portions, etc., or Chance Encounters, no one will buy it anyhow - it will just be another book of short stories. It is better to have a title and a title-connection that is a has-been than one that is a never-will-be. The splash of the flapper movement was too big to have quite died down - the outer rings are still moving.

(6) — If I could think of a wonderful selling title unconnected with jazz I’d use it but I can’t, so we better use a safe one that has a certain appeal. Short story collections are the hardest things on earth to name - to get a title which is at once arresting, inviting, applicable and inclusive, and doesn’t sound like a rehash of the titles of O. Henry, or isn’t an anemic namby-pamby wishy-washy phrase.

(7) — In any case I think it will be wise to undersell the booksellers - a few, I fear from your silence, are going to be stuck with The B. and D. and, though Flappers seems to be still trickling along, there are two bookstores in St Paul that have quite a few left.

(8) — The only possible other title I can think of is The Diamond as Big as the Ritz and Other Stories. I hate titles like Sideshow and In One Reel and Happy End. They have begun to sound like veils and apologies for bringing out collections at all. Only good short story titles lately are Limbo and Seven Men. I might possibly call my book Nine Humans and Fourteen Dummies if you’d permit such a long title (in this case I’d have to figure out how many humans and how many dummies there are in the collection) - but if you feel awfully strongly against Jazz Age, I insist that it be an arresting title if it spreads over half the front cover. Please let me know at once what you think. I’m sure in any case the stories will be reviewed a great deal, largely because of the Table of Contents. Wire me if necessary.

As ever, Scott Fitzg —

If you are really considering the library, don’t forget The White Mice by Gouverneur Morris.

626 Goodrich Avenue

St Paul,

Minnesota

Before May 13, 1922

Dear Mr Bridges:

As Mr Perkins has no doubt told you I was aghast and horrified at that silly anecdote sprung from God knows whither which Burton Rascoe had the ill-taste to reprint in his column. I wrote him an indignant letter about it but I haven’t heard from him.

I can only tell you what I have long suspected - that any strange happening in the new literary generation is at once attributed to me. When we returned from Europe last summer there were legends enough current to supply three biographers.

Needless to say I regret the indignity done to you by the association with your name of such a piece of unwarranted vulgarity - and believe me.

As ever Sincerely,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Yacht Club

White Bear Lake,

Minnesota circa August 11, 1922

Dear Mr Perkins:

I’ve labored over these proofs for a week and feel as if I never want to see a short story again. Thanks for the information about Canadian and Australian publishers. You ought to penalize the lighted-match-girl twenty yards.

Now as to ‘Tarquin of Cheapside.’ It first appeared in the Nassau Literary Magazine at Princeton and Katharine Fullerton Gerould reviewing the issue for the Daily Princetonian gave it high praise, called it ‘beautifully written,’ and tickled me with the first public praise my writing has ever had. When Mencken printed it in the Smart Set it drew letters of praise from George O’Neill, the poet, and Zoe Akins. Structurally it is almost perfect and next to ‘The Offshore Pirate’ I like it better than any story I have ever written.

If you insist I will cut it out, though very much against my better judgment and Zelda’s. It was even starred by O’Brien in his yearbook of the short story and mentioned by Blanche Colton Williams in the preface to the last O. Henry memorial collection. Please tell me what you think.

As to another matter, my play, Gabriel’s Trombone  is now in the hands of Arthur Hopkins. It is, I think, the best American comedy to date and undoubtedly the best thing I have ever written. Noting that Harper’s are serializing The Intimate Strangers, a play by Booth Tarkington, I wonder if Scribner’s Magazine would be interested in serializing Gabriel’s Trombone - that is, of course, on condition that it is to be produced this fall. Will you let me know about this or shall I write Bridges?

Also, last but not least, I have not yet received a statement from you. I am awfully hard up. I imagine there’s something over $1000 still in my favor. Anyway will you deposit $1000 for me when you receive this letter? If there’s not that much due me will you charge off the rest as advance on Tales of the Jazz Age? After my play is produced I’ll be rich forever and never have to bother you again.

Also let me know about the ‘Tarquin’ matter and about Gabriel’s Trombone.

As ever,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

P.S. Thanks for the Fair & Co. check. —

Great Neck,

Long Island

Before November 7, 1923

Dear Max:

I have got myself into a terrible mess. As you know, for the past month I have been coming every day to the city to rehearsals * and then at night writing and making changes on the last act and even on the first two. It’s in shape at last and everybody around the theater who has seen it says it’s a great hit. I put aside the novel three weeks ago and wrote a short story but it was done under such pressure that it shows it and Hovey doesn’t want it. I am so hard pressed now for time trying to write another for him that I’m not even going to the Harvard-Princeton game Saturday. The show opens in Atlantic City a week from Monday.

I went up to the American Play Company yesterday and tried to get some money on the grounds that the show was in rehearsal. They sighed and moaned a little but said firmly that it was against their rules.

I’m at the end of my rope - as the immortal phrase goes. I owe the Scribner Company something over $3500, even after deducting the reprint money from The Beautiful and Damned. I owed them more than that before The B. and D. was published but that was guaranteed by the book being actually in your hands.

Could this be done? Could I assign the first royalty payments on the play to you to be paid until the full amount be cleared up? I meant to pay some of it if there was a margin anyhow on account of the delay in the novel. But this would at least guarantee it.

What I need to extricate myself from the present hole is $650.00 which will carry me to the 15 th when Hovey will have my next story. And the only grounds on which I can ask for this additional is for me to assign you those rights up to the figure outstanding and to include also the interest on the whole amount I owe you.

If I don’t in some way get $650.00 in the bank by Wednesday morning I’ll have to pawn the furniture. Under the assignment of the royalties to you, the full amount would be paid back at between $500.00 and $1100 a week, before January 15th.

I don’t even dare come up there personally but for God’s sake try to fix it.

Yours in Horror,

F. Scott F.

Great Neck,

Long Island

Before April 16, 1924

Dear Max:

A few words more, relative to our conversation this afternoon. While I have every hope and plan of finishing my novel in June, you know how those things often come out, and even if it takes me ten times that long I cannot let it go out unless it has the very best I’m capable of in it, or even, as I feel sometimes, something better than I’m capable of. Much of what I wrote last summer was good but it was so interrupted that it was ragged and, in approaching it from a new angle, I’ve had to discard a lot of it - in one case, 18,000 words (part of which will appear in the Mercury as a short story). It is only in the last four months that I’ve realized how much I’ve, well, almost deteriorated in the three years since I finished The Beautiful and Damned. The last four months of course I’ve worked but in the two years - over two years - before that, I produced exactly one play, half a dozen short stories and three or four articles - an average of about one hundred words a day. If I’d spent this time reading or traveling or doing anything - even staying healthy - it’d be different, but I spent it uselessly, neither in study nor in contemplation but only in drinking and raising hell generally. If I’d written The B. and D. at the rate of one hundred words a day, it would have taken me 4 years, so you can imagine the moral effect the whole chasm had on me.

What I’m trying to say is just that I’ll have to ask you to have patience about the book and trust me that at last, or at least for the first time in years, I’m doing the best I can. I’ve gotten in dozens of bad habits that I’m trying to get rid of 1. — Laziness 2. — Referring everything to Zelda - a terrible habit; nothing ought to be referred to anybody until it’s finished 3. — Word consciousness and self-doubt, etc., etc., etc., etc.

I feel I have an enormous power in me now, more than I’ve ever had in a way, but it works so fitfully and with so many bogeys because I’ve talked so much and not lived enough within myself to develop the necessary self-reliance. Also I don’t know anyone who has used up so much personal experience as I have at 27. Copperfield and Pendennnis were written at past 40, while This Side of Paradise was three books and The B. and D. was two. So in my new novel I’m thrown directly on purely creative work - not trashy imaginings as in my stories but the sustained imagination of a sincere yet radiant world. So I tread slowly and carefully and at times in considerable distress. This book will be a consciously artistic achievement and must depend on that as the first books did not.

If I ever win the right to any leisure again, I will assuredly not waste it as I wasted this past time. Please believe me when I say that now I’m doing the best I can.

Yours ever,

Scott F —

Villa Marie, Valescure StRaphael, France June 18, 1924

Dear Max:

Thanks for your nice long letter. I’m glad that Ring’s had good reviews but I’m sorry both that he’s off the wagon and that the book’s not selling. I had counted on a sale of 15 to 25 thousand right away for it.

Shelley was a God to me once. What a good man he is compared to that colossal egotist Browning! Haven’t you read Ariel yet? For heaven’s sake read it if you like Shelley. It’s one of the best biographies I’ve ever read of anyone and it’s by a Frenchman. I think Harcourt publishes it. And who ‘thinks badly’ of Shelley now!

We are idyllically settled here and the novel is going fine - it ought to be done in a month - though I’m not sure as I’m contemplating another 16,000 words, which would make it about the length ofParadise - not quite enough even then.

I’m glad you liked ‘Absolution.’ As you know it was to have been the prologue of the novel but it interfered with the neatness of the plan. Two Catholics have already protested by letter. Be sure and read The Baby Party’ in Hearst’s and my article in The Woman’s Home Companion.

Tom Boyd wrote me that Bridges had been a dodo about some Y.M.C.A. man - I wrote him that he oughtn’t to fuss with such a silly old man. I hope he hasn’t - you don’t mention him in your letter. I enjoyed Arthur Train’s story in the Post but he made three steals on the first page - one from Shaw (the Arab’s remark about Christianity), one from Stendahl, and one I’ve forgotten. It was most ingeniously worked out - I never could have handled such an intricate plot in a thousand years. War and Peace came - many thanks, and for the inscription too. Don’t forget the clippings. I will have to reduce my tax in September.

As ever, yours,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

P.S. If Struthers Burt comes over here, give me his address.

Villa Marie,

Valescure

St Raphael,

France

circa July 16, 1924

Dear Max:

Is Ring dead? We’ve written him three times and not a word. How about his fall book? I had two suggestions. Either a collection called Mother Goose in Great Neck (or something nonsensical) to include his fairy tales in Hearst’s, some of his maddest syndicate articles, his Forty-niners’ sketch, his Authors League sketch, etc.

- or My Life and Loves (privately printed for subscribers only - on sale at all bookstores). I believe I gave you a tentative list for that but he’d have to eke it out by pointing some new syndicate articles that way. I thought his short story book was great - ‘Alibi Ike,”Some Like ‘em Cold’ and ‘My Roomy’ are as good almost as ‘The Golden Honeymoon.’ Mencken’s review was great. Do send me others. Is it selling?

Would you do me this favor? Call up Harvey Craw, Fifth Ave. - he’s in the book - and ask him if my house is rented. I’m rather curious to know and letters bring me no response. He is the Great Neck agent.

I’m not going to mention my novel to you again until it is on your desk. All goes well. I wish your bookkeeper would send me the August statement even the no copies of my books have been sold. How about Gertrude Stein’s novel? I began War and Peace last night. Do write me a nice long letter.

As ever, Scott

Villa Marie,Valescure StRaphael, France

Before August 27, 1924

Dear Max:

(1) — The novel will be done next week. That doesn’t mean however that it’ll reach America before October 1st as Zelda and I are contemplating a careful revision after a week’s complete rest (2) — The clippings have never arrived.

(3) Seldes  has been with me and he thinks For the Grimalkins is a wonderful title for Ring’s book. Also I’ve got great ideas about My Life and Loves which I’ll tell Ring when he comes over in September.

(4) How many copies has his short stories sold?

(5) — Your bookkeeper never did send me my royalty report for August 1st.

(6) — For Christ’s sake, don’t give anyone that jacket you’re saving for me. I’ve written it into the book.

(7) — I think my novel is about the best American novel ever written. It is rough stuff in places, runs only to about 50,000 words, and I hope you won’t shy at it.

(8) — It’s been a fair summer. I’ve been unhappy but my work hasn’t suffered from it. I am grown at last.

(9) — What books are being talked about? I don’t mean best sellers. Hergesheimer’s novel in the Post seems vile to me.

(10) — I hope you’re reading Gertrude Stein’s novel in the Transatlantic Review.

(11) — Raymond Radiguet’s last book (he is the young man who wrote Le Diable au Corps at sixteen untranslatable) is a great hit here. He wrote it at 18. It’s called Le Bal du Comte d’Orgel and though I’m only half through it I’d get an opinion on it if I were you. It’s cosmopolitan rather than French and my instinct tells me that in a good translation it might make an enormous hit in America, where everyone is yearning for Paris. Do look it up and get at least one opinion on it. The preface is by the dadaist ean Cocteau but the book is not dada at all.

(12) — Did you get hold of Ring’s other books?

(13) — We’re liable to leave here by October 1st so after the 15th of September I wish you’d send everything care of Guaranty Trust Co., Paris.

(14) — Please ask the bookstore, if you have time, to send me Have- lock Ellis’ Dance of Life and charge to my account.

(15) — I asked Struthers Burt to dinner but his baby was sick.

(16) — Be sure and answer every question, Max.

I miss seeing you like the devil.

Scott

Villa Marie, Valescure St Raphael, France

Before October 18, 1942

Dear Max:

The royalty was better than I’d expected. This is to tell you about a young man named Ernest Hemingway, who lives in Paris (an American), writes for the Transatlantic Review and has a brilliant future. Ezra Pound published a collection of his short pieces in Paris, at some place like the Egotist Press. I haven’t it here now but it’s remarkable and I’d look him up right away. He’s the real thing.

My novel goes to you with a long letter within five days. Ring arrives in a week. This is just a hurried scrawl as I’m working like a dog. I thought Stallings’ book was disappointingly rotten. It takes a genius to whine appealingly. Have tried to see Struthers Burt but he’s been on the move. More later.

Scott

P.S. Important. What chance has a smart young Frenchman with an intimate knowledge of French literature in the bookselling business in New York? Is a clerk paid much and is there any opening for one specializing in French literature? Do tell me as there’s a young friend of mine here just out of the army who is anxious to know.

Sincerely,

Scott

Villa Marie,Valescure StRaphael, France (After Nov. 3d care of American Express Co., Rome, Italy)

October 27, 1924

Dear Max:

Under separate cover I’m sending you my third novel, The Great Gatsby. (I think that at last I’ve done something really my own, but how good ‘my own’ is remains to be seen.)

I should suggest the following contract.

15% up to 50,000

20% after 50,000

The book is only a little over fifty thousand words long but I believe, as you know, that. Whitney Darrow has the wrong psychology about prices (and about what class constitute the book- buying public now that the lowbrows go to the movies) and I’m anxious to charge two dollars for it and have it a full-size book.

Of course I want the binding to be absolutely uniform with my other books - the stamping too - and the jacket we discussed before. This time I don’t want any signed blurbs on the jacket - not Mencken’s or Lewis’ or Howard’s or anyone’s. I’m tired of being the author of This Side ofParadise and I want to start over.

About serialization. I am bound under contract to show it to Hearst’s, but I am asking a prohibitive price, Long t hates me, and it’s not a very serialized book. If they should take it - they won’t - it would put publication in the fall. Otherwise you can publish it in the spring. When Hearst turns it down, I’m going to offer it to Liberty for $15,000 on condition that they’ll publish it in ten weekly installments before April 15 th. If they don’t want it, I shan’t serialize. I am absolutely positive Long won’t want it.

I have an alternative title: Gold-hatted Gatsby.

After you’ve read the book, let me know what you think about the title. Naturally I won’t get a night’s sleep until I hear from you, but do tell me the absolute truth, your first impression of the book, and tell me anything that bothers you in it.

As ever,

Scott

I’d rather you wouldn’t call Reynolds as he might try to act as my agent.

Hotel Continental StRaphael, France (leaving Tuesday)

circa November 7, 1924

Dear Max:

By now you’ve received the novel. There are things in it I’m not satisfied with, in the middle of the book - Chapters 6 and 7. And I may write in a complete new scene in proof. I hope you got my telegram.

I have now decided to stick to the title I put on the book. Trimalchio in West Egg.

The only other titles that seem to fit are Trimalchio and on the Road to West Egg. I had two others, Gold-hatted Gatsby and The High-bouncing Lover, but they seemed too light.

We leave for Rome as soon as I finish the short story I’m working on.

As ever,

Scott

I was interested that you’ve moved to New Canaan. It sounds wonderful. Sometimes I’m awfully anxious to be home.

But I am confused at what you say about Gertrude Stein. I thought it was one purpose of critics and publishers to educate the public up to original work. The first people who risked Conrad certainly didn’t do it as a commercial venture. Did the evolution of startling work into accepted work cease twenty years ago?

Do send me Boyd’s (Ernest’s) book when it comes out. I think the Lardner ads are wonderful. Did the Dark Cloud flop?

Would you ask the people downstairs to keep sending me my monthly bill for the encyclopedia?

Hotel des Princes Piazza di Spagna

Rome, Italy

circa December 1, 1924

Dear Max:

Your wire and your letters made me feel like a million dollars - I’m sorry I could make no better response than a telegram whining for money. But the long siege of the novel winded me a little and I’ve been slow on starting the stories on which I must live.

I think all your criticisms are true.

(a) — About the title. I’ll try my best but I don’t know what I can do. Maybe simply Trimalchio or Gatsby. In the former case, I don’t see why the note shouldn’t go on the back.

(b) — Chapters VI and VIII know how to fix.

(c) — Gatsby’s business affairs I can fix. I get your point about them.

(d) — His vagueness I can repair by making more pointed - this doesn’t sound good but wait and see. It’ll make him clear.

(e) — But his long narrative in Chapter VIII will be difficult to split up. Zelda also thought it was a little out of key, but it is good writing and I don’t think I could bear to sacrifice any of it.

(f) — I have 1000 minor corrections which I will make on the proof and several more large ones which you didn’t mention.

Your criticisms were excellent and most helpful, and you picked out all my favourite spots in the book to praise as high spots. Except you didn’t mention my favourite of all - the chapter where Gatsby and Daisy meet.

Two more things. Zelda’s been reading me the cowboy book aloud to spare my mind and I love it - the I think he learned the American language from Ring rather than from his own ear.

Another point - in Chapter II of my book when Tom and Myrtle go into the bedroom while Carraway reads Simon Called Peter - is that raw? Let me know. I think it’s pretty necessary.

I made the royalty smaller because I wanted to make up for all the money you’ve advanced these two years by letting it pay a sort of interest on it. But I see by calculating I made it too small - a difference of 2000 dollars. Let us call it 15% up to 40,000 and 20% after that. That’s a good fair contract all around.

By now you have heard from a smart young French woman who wants to translate the book. She’s equal to it intellectually and linguistically, I think - had read all my others - if you’ll tell her how to go about it as to royalty demands, etc. Anyhow thanks and thanks and thanks for your letters. I’d rather have you and Bunny like it than anyone I know. And I’d rather have you like it than Bunny. If it’s as good as you say, when I finish with the proof it’ll be perfect.

Remember, by the way, to put by some cloth for the cover uniform with my other books.

As soon as I can think about the title, I’ll write or wire a decision. Thank Louise for me, for liking it. Best regards to Mr. Scribner. Tell him Galsworthy is here in Rome.

As ever,

Scott

Hotel des Princes Piazza di Spagna Rome,Italycirca December 20, 1924

Dear Max:

I’m a bit (not very - not dangerously) stewed tonight and I’ll probably write you a long letter. We’re living in a small, unfashionable but most comfortable hotel at $525.00 a month, including tips, meals, etc. Rome does not particularly interest me but it’s a big year here, and early in the spring we’re going to Paris. There’s no use telling you my plans because they’re usually just about as unsuccessful as to work as religious prognosticators are as to the End of the World. I’ve got a new novel to write - title and all - that’ll take about a year. Meanwhile, I don’t want to start it until this is out and meanwhile I’ll do short stories for money (I now get $2000 a story but I hate worse than hell to do them) and there’s the never-dying lure of another play.

Now! Thanks enormously for making up the $5000. I know I don’t technically deserve it, considering I’ve had $3000 or $4000 for as long as I can remember. But since you force it on me (in- execrable or is it execrable joke) I will accept it. I hope to Christ you get 10 times it back on Gatsby - and I think perhaps you will.

For:

I can now make it perfect but the proof (I will soon get the immemorial letter with the statement ‘We now have the book in hand and will soon begin to send you proof.’ What is ‘in hand?’ I have a vague picture of everyone in the office holding the book in the right hand and reading it.) will be one of the most expensive affairs since Madame Bovary. Please charge it to my account. If it’s possible to send a second proof over here I’d love to have it. Count on 12 days each way - four days here on first proof and two days on the second. I hope there are other good books in the spring because I think now the public interest in books per se rises when there seems to be a group of them, as in 1920 (spring and fall), 1921 (fall), 1922 (spring). Ring’s and Tom’s (first) books, Willa Cather’s Lost Lady, and in an inferior, cheap way Edna Ferber’s are the only American fiction in over two years that had a really excellent press (say, since Babbitt).

With the aid you’ve given me I can make Gatsby perfect. The Chapter 7 (the hotel scene) will never quite be up to mark - I’ve worried about it too long and I can’t quite place Daisy’s reaction. But I can improve it a lot. It isn’t imaginative energy that’s lacking - it’s because I’m automatically prevented from thinking it out over again because I must get all those characters to New York in order to have the catastrophe on the road going back, and I must have it pretty much that way. So there’s no chance of bringing the freshness to it that a new conception sometimes gives.

The rest is easy and I see my way so clear that I even see the mental quirks that queered it before. Strange to say, my notion of Gatsby’s vagueness was O.K. What you and Louise and Mr Charles Scribner found wanting was that:

I myself didn’t know what Gatsby looked like or was engaged in and you felt it. If I’d known and kept it from you you’d have been too impressed with my knowledge to protest. This is a complicated idea but I’m sure you’ll understand. But I know now. - and as a penalty for not having known first, in other words to make sure, I’m going to tell more.

It seems of almost mystical significance to me that you thought he was older - the man I had in mind, half-unconsciously, was older (a specific individual) and evidently, without so much as a definite word, I conveyed the fact. Or rather I must qualify this Shaw Desmond trash by saying that I conveyed it without a word that I can at present or for the life of me trace. (I think Shaw Desmond was one of your bad bets - I was the other.)

Anyhow after careful searching of the files (of a man’s mind here) for the Fuller Magee case and after having had Zelda draw pictures until her fingers ache I know Gatsby better than I know my own child. My first instinct after your letter was to let him go and have Tom Buchanan dominate the book (I suppose he’s the best character I’ve ever done - I think he and the brother in Salt and Hurstwood in Sister Carrie are the three best characters in American fiction in the last twenty years, perhaps and perhaps not) but Gatsby sticks in my heart. I had him for awhile, then lost him, and now I know I have him again. I’m sorry Myrtle is better than Daisy. Jordan of course was a great idea (perhaps you know it’s Edith Cummings) but she fades out. It’s Chapter VII that’s the trouble with Daisy and it may hurt the book’s popularity that it’s a man’s book.

Anyhow I think (for the first time since The Vegetable failed) that I’m a wonderful writer and it’s your always wonderful letters that help me to go on believing in myself.

Now some practical, very important questions. Please answer every one.

1. — Montenegro has an order called the Order of Danilo. Is there any possible way you could find out for me there what it would look like - whether a courtesy decoration given to an American would bear an English inscription - or anything to give verisimilitude to the medal which sounds horribly amateurish?

2. — Please have no blurbs of any kind on the jacket!!! No Mencken or Lewis or Sid Howard or anything. I don’t believe in them one bit any more.

3. — Don’t forget to change name of book in list of works.

4. — Please shift exclamation point from end of third Une to end of fourth line in title page poem. Please! Important!

5. — I thought that the whole episode (2 paragraphs) about their playing the ‘Jazz History of the World’ at Gatsby’s first party was rotten. Did you? Tell me your frank reaction - personal.

Don’t think! We can all think!

Got a sweet letter from Sid Howard - rather touching. I wrote him first I thought Transatlantic was great stuff - a really gorgeous surprise. Up to that I never believed in him specially and I was sorry because he did in me. Now I’m tickled silly to find he has power, and his own power. It seemed tragic too to see Mrs Vietch wasted in a novelette when, despite Anderson, the short story is at its lowest ebb as an art form. (Despite Ruth Suckow, Gertrude Stein, Ring, there is a horrible impermanence on it because the overwhelming number of short stories are impermanent.)

Poor Tom Boyd! His cycle sounded so sad to me - perhaps it’ll be wonderful but it sounds to me like sloughing in a field whose first freshness has gone.

See that word? The ambition of my life is to make that use of it correct. The temptation to use it as a neuter is one of the vile fevers in my still insecure prose.

Tell me about Ring! About Tom - is he poor? He seems to be counting on his short story book, frail cane! About Biggs! - did he ever finish the novel? About Peggy Boyd  - I think Louise might have sent us her book!

I thought The White Monkey was stinko. On second thoughts I didn’t like Cowboys, West and South either. What about Bal du Comte d’Orgel? and Ring’s set? and his new book? and Gertrude Stein? and Hemingway?

I still owe the store almost $700.00 on my encyclopedia, but I’ll pay them on about January 10th - all in a lump as I expect my finances will then be on a firm footing. Will you ask them to send me Ernest Boyd’s book? § Unless it has about my drinking in it that would reach my family. However, I guess it’d worry me more if I hadn’t seen it than if I had. If my book is a big success or a great failure (financial - no other sort can be imagined I hope) I don’t want to publish stories in the fall. If it goes between 25,000 and 50,000 I have an excellent collection for you. This is the longest letter I’ve written in three or four years. Please thank Mr Scribner for me for his exceeding kindness.

Always yours,

Scott Fitz —

Hotel des Princes Rome,

Italy (But address the American Express Co. because it’s damn cold here and we may leave any day.)

January 24, 1925

Dear Max:

This is a most important letter so I’m having it typed. Guard it as your life.

1) — Under a separate cover I’m sending the first part of the proof. While I agreed with the general suggestions in your first letters I differ with you in others. I want Myrtle Wilson’s breast ripped off - it’s exactly the thing, I think, and I don’t want to chop up the good scenes by too much tinkering. When Wolfsheim says ‘sid’ for ‘said,’ it’s deliberate. ‘Orgastic’ is the adjective for ‘orgasm’ and it expresses exactly the intended ecstasy. It’s not a bit dirty. I’m much more worried about the disappearance of Tom and Myrtle on galley 9 -I think it’s all right but I’m not sure. If it isn’t please wire and I’ll send correction.

2) — Now about the page proof - under certain conditions never mind sending them (unless, of course, there’s loads of time, which I suppose there isn’t. I’m keen for late March or early April publication).

The conditions are two.

a) — That someone reads it very carefully twice to see that every one of my inserts are put in correctly. There are so many of them that I’m in terror of a mistake.

b) — That no changes whatsoever are made in it except in the case of a misprint so glaring as to be certain, and that only by you.

If there’s some time left but not enough for the double mail, send them to me and I’ll simply wire O.K. which will save two weeks. However don’t postpone for that. In any case send me the page proof as usual just to see.

3) — Now, many thanks for the deposit. Two days after wiring you I had a cable from Reynolds that he’d sold two stories of mine for a total of $3750, but before that I was in debt to him and after turning down the $10,000 from College Humor I was afraid to borrow more from him until he’d made a sale. I won’t ask for any more from you until the book has earned it. My guess is that it will sell about 80,000 copies but I may be wrong. Please thank Mr Charles Scribner for me. I bet he thinks he’s caught another John Fox  now for sure. Thank God for John Fox. It would have been awful to have had no predecessor.

4) — This is very important. Be sure not to give away any of my plot in the blurb. Don’t give away that Gatsby dies or is a parvenu or crook or anything. It’s a part of the suspense of the book that all these things are in doubt until the end. You’ll watch this, won’t you? And remember about having no quotations from critics on the jacket - not even about my other books!

5) — This is just a list of small things.

a) — What’s Ring’s title for his spring book?

b) — Did O’Brien star my story ‘Absolution’ or any of my others on his trash-album? t c) — I wish your bookkeeping department would send me an account on February first. Not that it gives me pleasure to see how much in debt I am but that I like to keep a yearly record of the sales of all my books.

Do answer every question and keep this letter until the proof comes. Let me know how you like the changes. I miss seeing you, Max, more than I can say.

As ever,

Scott

P-S. I’m returning the proof of the title page, etc. It’s O.K. but my heart tells me I should have named it Trimalchio. However against all the advice I suppose it would have been stupid and stubborn of me. Trimalchio in West Egg was only a compromise. Gatsby is too much like Babbitt and The Great Gatsby is weak because there’s no emphasis even ironically on his greatness or lack of it. However let it pass.

Hotel Tiberio Capri, Italy (new address)

circa February 18,1925’

Dear Max:

After six weeks of uninterrupted work the proof is finished and the last of it goes to you this afternoon. On the whole it’s been very successful labor.

(1) — I’ve brought Gatsby to life.

(2) — I’ve accounted for his money.

(3) — I’ve fixed up the two weak chapters (VI and VII).

(4) — I’ve improved his first party.

(5) — I’ve broken up his long narrative in Chapter VIII.

This morning I wired you to hold up the galley of Chapter X. The correction - and God! it’s important because in my other revision I made Gatsby look too mean - is enclosed herewith. Also some corrections for the page proof.

We’re moving to Capri. We hate Rome. I’m behind financially and have to write three short stories. Then I try another play, and by une, I hope, begin my new novel.

Had long interesting letters from Ring and John Bishop. Do tell me if all corrections have been received. I’m worried.

Scott

I hope you’re setting publication date at first possible moment.

Hotel Tiberio Capri,

Italy

March 31, 1925

Dear Max:

As the day approaches, my nervousness increases. Tomorrow is the 1st and your wire says the 10th. I’ll be here until the 25th, probably later, so if the book prospers I’ll expect some sort of cable before I leave for Paris. All letters that you write after 15th of April should be addressed to the Guaranty Trust Co., Paris, but if there’s any dope in the first two or three days of publication I’d love a reassuring line here, even if the success doesn’t justify a cable.

I enclose you a picture of a naked woman, which you may add to your celebrated pornographic collection from Sumatra, Transylvania, and the PolynesianIslands.

This place is full of fairies - one of them, a nice young man my own age, is a writer of promise and performance on the Aldous Huxley type. I like his books (his name is — ) and suggested that I send some to you as you are shy on young English of recent years, but Knopf had signed him up three weeks before!

I think Tom Boyd’s book is excellent - the preface is faintly pretentious but the stories themselves are great. By the way I think my new collection will be called

Dear Money. It ought to be awfully good and there will be no junk in it.

Yours in a Tremble,

Scott

Will you have a copy of my book sent to Miss Willa Cather, care of Knopf?

When should my book of short stories be in?

I had, or rather saw, a letter from my uncle who had seen a preliminary announcement of the book. He said. ‘It sounded as if it were very much like his others.’

This is only a vague impression of course but I wondered if we could think of some way to advertise it so that people who are perhaps weary of assertive jazz and society novels might not dismiss it as ‘just another book like his others.’ I confess that today the problem baffles me - all I can think of is to say in general to avoid such phrases ‘a picture of New York life,’ or ‘modern society’ - though as that is exactly what the book is it’s hard to avoid them. The trouble is so much superficial trash has sailed under those banners. Let me know what you think.

14 rue de Tilsitt

Paris,

France (permanent address)

circa April 22, 1925

Dear Max:

I suppose you’ve sent the book to Collins. If not, please do, and let me know right away. If he won’t take it because of its flop we might try Cape’s. I’m miserable at owing you all that money - if I’d taken the serial money I could at least have squared up with you.

I’ve had enthusiastic letters from Mencken and Wilson - the latter say s he’s reviewing it for that Chicago Tribune syndicate he writes for. I think all the reviews I’ve seen, except two, have been absolutely stupid and lousy. Someday they’ll eat grass, by God! This thing, both the effort and the result, have hardened me and I think now that I’m much better than any of the young Americans without exception.

Hemingway is a fine, charming fellow and he appreciated your letter and the tone of it enormously. If Liveright doesn’t please him he’ll come to you, and he has a future. He’s twenty-seven.

Bishop sent me The Apple of the Eye and it seemed pretty much the old stuff that D. H. Lawrence, Anderson, Suckow and Cather did long ago and Hardy before them. I don’t think such peasantry exists in America - Ring is much closer to the truth. I suspect tragedy in the American countryside because all the people capable of it move to the big towns at twenty. All the rest is pathos. However maybe it’s good, a lot of people seem to think so.

I will send All the Sad Young Men about June 1st or 10th. Perhaps the deferred press on Gatsby will help it but I think now there’s no use even sending it to that crowd, Broun, F.P.A., Ruth Hale, etc. Incidentally my being over here and consequent delay in the proofs and review copies undoubtedly hurt the effect of the book’s appearance. Thanks again for your kind letters and all you’ve done. Let me know about Collins.

Scott

Let me know how many copies sold and whether the sale is now dead.

Marseille, en route to Paris

circa April 24, 1925

Dear Max;

Your telegram depressed me - I hope I’ll find better news in Paris and am wiring you from Lyons. There’s nothing to say until I hear more. If the book fails commercially it will be from one of two reasons or both.

First, the title is only fair, rather bad than good.

Second and most important, the book contains no important woman character, and women control the fiction market at present. I don’t think the unhappy end matters particularly.

I will have to sell 20,000 copies to wipe out my debt to you. I think it will do that all right - but my hope was it would do 75,000. This week will tell.

Zelda is well, or almost, but the expense of her illness and of bringing this wretched little car of ours back to France, wh’ch has to be done, by law, has wiped out what small progress I’d made in getting straight financially.

In all events I have a book of good stories for the fall. Now I shall write some cheap ones until I’ve accumulated enough for my next novel. When that is finished and published I’ll wait and see. If it will support me with no more intervals of trash I’ll go on as a novelist. If not, I’m going to quit, come home, go to Hollywood and learn the movie business. I can’t reduce our scale of living and I can’t stand this financial insecurity. Anyhow there’s no point in trying to be an artist if you can’t do your best. I had my chance back in 1920 to start my life on a sensible scale and I lost it, and so I’ll have to pay the penalty. Then perhaps at 40 I can start writing again without this constant worry and interruption.

Yours in great depression, Scott PS. Let me know about Ring’s book. Did I tell you I thought “Hair-cut’ was mediocre?

PS. (2) Please refer any movie offers to Reynolds.

c/o Guaranty Trust Co.

Paris, France May I,

1925

Dear Max:

There’s no use for indignation against the long suffering public when even a critic who likes the book fails to be fundamentally held - that is, Stallings who has written the only intelligent review so far - but it’s been depressing to find how quick one is forgotten, especially unless you repeat yourself ad nauseam. Most of the reviewers floundered around in a piece of work that obviously they completely failed to understand and tried to give it reviews that committed them neither pro or con until someone of culture had spoken. Of course I’ve only seen The Times and the Tribune - and, thank God, Stallings, for I had begun to believe no one was even glancing at the book.

Now about money. With the $1000 for which I asked yesterday (and thank you for your answer) I owe you about $1200, or, if the book sells 12,000, about $4000. If there is a movie right, I will pay you all I owe - if not, all I can offer you at present is an excellent collection of stories for the fall entitled All the Sad Young Men - none of the stories appeared in the Post - I think ‘Absolution’ is the only one you’ve read. Thank you for all your advertising and all the advances and all your good will. When I get ahead again on trash I’ll begin the new novel.

I’m glad Ring is getting such a press and hope he’s selling. The boob critics have taken him up and always take a poke at the ‘intelligentsia’ who patronize him. But the ‘intelligentsia,’ Seldes and Mencken, discovered him (after the people) while the boob critics let The BigTown and Gullible’s Travels come out in dead silence. Let me know the sale.

A profound bow to my successor, Arlen - when I read The London Venture I knew he was a comer and was going to tell you but I saw the next day that Doran had already published Piracy. That was just before I left New York.

Which reminds me - it seems terrible that all the best of the young Englishmen have been snapped up. I tried to get — for you in Capri but he’d signed a rotten cash contract with Knopf a week before. Also they’ve just signed Brett Young who might have been had any time in the last two years and who’ll be a big seller and now I see The Constant Nymph is taken. Wouldn’t it Pay you to have some live young Londoner watch the new English books? I imagine Kingsleyt gets his information a month late out of The London Times Supplement. This sounds ill-natured but I am really sorry to see you lose so many new talents when they are appearing as fast now in England as they did here in 1920. Liveright has got Hemingway! How about Radiguet?

We have taken an apartment here from May 12th to January 12th, eight months, where I shall do my best. What a six months in Italy! Christ!

I’m hoping that by some miracle the book will go up to 23,000 and wipe off my debt to you. I haven’t been out of debt now for three years and with the years it grows heavy on my aging back. The happiest thought I have is of my new novel - it is something really N E w in form, idea, structure - the model for the age that Joyce and Stein are searching for, that Conrad didn’t find.

Write me any news - I haven’t had a written line since publication except a pleasant but not thrilling note from the perennial youth, Johnny Weaver. I am bulging with plans for - however, that’s later. Was Ring’s skit which was in Mencken’s American Language incorporated into What Of It? If not it should have been - it’s one of his best shorter things. And doesn’t it contain his famous World’s Series articles about Ellis Lardner’s Coat? If not they’d be a nucleus for another book of nonsense. Also his day at home in imitation of F.P.A.’s diary.

My address after the 12th is 14 rue de Tilsitt. If you have my Three Lives by Gertrude Stein don’t let anybody steal it.

Many thanks to Mr Scribner and to all the others and to you for all you’ve done for me and for the book. The jacket was a hit anyhow.

Scott

PS. And Tom Boyd’s book?

14 rue de Tilsitt

Paris,

France circa June 1, 1925

Dear Max:

This is the second letter I’ve written you today - I tore up my first when the letter in longhand from New Canaan telling me about Liveright arrived. I’m wiring you today as to that rumor - but also it makes it necessary to tell you something I didn’t intend to tell you.

Yesterday arrived a letter from T. R. Smith asking for my next book - saying nothing against the Scribners but just asking for it: if I happened to be dissatisfied they would be delighted, etc., etc. I answered at once, saying that you were one of my closest friends and that my relations with Scribners had always been so cordial and pleasant that I wouldn’t think of changing publishers. That letter will reach him at about the time this reaches you. I have never had any other communication of any sort with Liveright or any other publisher except the very definite and explicit letter with which I answered their letter yesterday.

So much for that rumor. I am both angry at Tom who must have been in some way responsible for starting it and depressed at the fact that you could have believed it enough to mention it to me. Rumors start like this -

Smith (a born gossip): I hear Fitzgerald’s book isn’t selling. I think we can get it, as he’s probably blaming it on Scribners.

The Next Man: It seems Fitzgerald is dissatisfied with Scribners and Liveright is after him.

The Third Man: I hear Fitzgerald has gone over to Liveright.

Now, Max, I have told you many times that you are my publisher, and permanently, as far as one can fling about the word in this too mutable world. If you like I will sign a contract with you immediately for my next three books. The idea of leaving you has never for one single moment entered my head.

First. Tho, as a younger man, I have not always been in sympathy with some of your publishing ideas (which were evolved under the pre-movie, pre-high-literacy-rate conditions of twenty to forty years ago), the personality of you and of Mr Scribner, the tremendous squareness, courtesy, generosity and open-mindedness I have always met there and, if I may say it, the special consideration you have all had for me and my work, much more than make up the difference.

Second. You know my own idea on the advantage of one publisher who backs you and not your work. And my feeling about uniform books in the matter of house and binding.

Third. The curious advantage to a rather radical writer in being published by what is now an ultra-conservative house. Fourth (and least need of saying). Do you think I could treat with another publisher while I have a debt, which is both actual and a matter of honor, of over $3000?

If Mr Scribner has heard this rumor please show him this letter. So much for Mr Liveright & Co.

Your letters are catching up with me. Curtis in Town & Country and Van Vechten in The Nation pleased me. The personal letters - Cabell, Wilson, Van Wyck Brooks, etc. - have been the best of all. Among people over here, Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein are quite enthusiastic. Except for Rascoe it has been, critically only, a clean sweep.

Ring’s book has been a terrible disappointment to everyone here. He didn’t even bother to cut out the connecting tags at the end of his travel articles and each of the five plays contain the same joke about ‘his mother - afterwards his wife.’ I shouldn’t press him about his new collection if I were you because if you just took the first nine stories he writes, they couldn’t be up to the others and you know how reviewers are quick to turn on anyone in whom they have believed and who now disappoints them. Of course I’ve only read ‘Haircut’ and I may be wrong. I do want him to believe in his work and not have any blows to take away his confidence. The reviews I have seen of What of It? were sorry imitations of Seldes’ stuff and all of them went out of their way to stab Seldes in the back. God, cheap reviewers are low swine - but one must live.

As I write, word has just come by cable that Brady has made an offer for the dramatic rights of Gatsby, with Owen Davis, king of professional play doctors, to do dramatization. I am, needless to say, accepting, but please keep it confidential until the actual contract is signed.

As you know, despite my admiration for Through the Wheat, I haven’t an enormous faith in Tom Boyd either as a personality or an artist - as I have, say, in E. E. Cummings and Hemingway. His ignorance, his presumptuous intolerance and his careless grossness, which he cultivates for vitality as a man might nurse along a dandelion with the hope that it would turn out to be an onion, have always annoyed me. Like Rascoe he has never been known to refuse an invitation from his social superiors - or to fail to pan them with all the venom of a fames Oliver Curwood he-man when no invitations were forthcoming.

All this is preparatory to saying that his new book sounds utterly lousy - Sheila Kaye-Smith has used the stuff about the farmer having girls instead of boys and being broken up about it. The characters you mention have every one become stock-props in the last ten years - ‘Christy, the quaint old hired man’ after a season in such stuff as Owen Davis’ Ice Bound must be almost ready for the burlesque circuit.

History of the Simple Inarticulate Farmer and His Hired Man Christy (Both guaranteed to be utterly full of the Feel of the Soil) First Period 1855 - English Peasant discovered by George Eliot in Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner, etc.

1888 - Given intellectual interpretation by Hardy in fude and Tess.

1890 - Found in France by Zola in Germinal.

1900 - Crowds of Scandinavians - Hamsun, Bojer, etc. - tear him bodily from the Russian, and, after a peep at Hardy, Hamlin Garland finds him in the Middle West. (Most of that, however, was literature. It was something pulled by the individual out of life and only partly with the aid of models in other literatures.)

Second Period 1914-Sheila Kaye-Smith frankly imitates Hardy, produces two good books and then begins to imitate herself.

1915 — - Brett Young discovers him in the coal country.

1916 — - Robert Frost discovers him in New England.

1917 — - Sherwood Anderson discovers him in Ohio.

1918 — - Willa Cather turns him Swede.

1920 - Eugene O’Neill puts him on the boards in Different and Beyond the Horizon.

1922 — - Ruth Suckow gets in before the door closes.

(These people were all good second-raters except Anderson. Each of them brought something to the business - but they exhausted the ground, the type was set. All was over.)

Third Period The Cheapskates discover him - bad critics and novelists, etc.

1923 — - Homer Croy writes West of the Water Tower.

1924 — - Edna Ferber turns from her flip fewish saleswoman for a strong silent earthy carrot grower and the Great Soul of Charley Towne thrills to her passionately Real and Earthy Struggle.

1924-Ice Bound by the author of Nellie the Beautiful Cloak Model wins Pulitzer Prize. The Able McLaughlins wins f 10,000 prize and is forgotten the following week.

1925 — - The Apple of the Eye pronounced a masterpiece.

1926-TOM, BOYD, WRITES, NOVEL, ABOUT, INARTICULATE, FARMER, WHO, IS, CLOSE, TO SOIL, AND, HIS, HIRED, MAN CHRISTY! ‘STRONG! VITAL! REAL!’

As a matter of fact the American peasant as ‘real’ material scarcely exists. He is scarcely 10% of the population, isn’t bound to the soil at all as the English and Russian peasants were - and, if he has any sensitivity whatsoever (except a most sentimental conception of himself, which our writers persistently shut their eyes to), he is in the towns before he’s twenty. Either Lewis, Lardner and myself have been badly fooled, or else using him as typical American material is simply a stubborn seeking for the static in a world that for almost a hundred years had simply not been static. Isn’t it a fourth rate imagination that can find only that old property farmer in all this amazing time and land? And anything that ten people a year can do well enough to pass muster has become so easy that it isn’t worth doing.

I can not disassociate a man from his work. That..  are going to tell us mere superficial ‘craftsmen’ like Hergesheimer, Wharton, Tarkington, and me about the Great Beautiful Appreciation they have of the Great Beautiful Life of the Manure Widder rather turns my stomach. The real people like Gertrude Stein (with whom I’ve talked) and Conrad (see his essay on James) have a respect for people whose materials may not touch theirs at a single point. But the fourth-rate and highly derivative people like Tom are loud in their outcry against any subject matter that doesn’t come out of the old, old bag which their betters have used and thrown away.

For example there is an impression among the thoughtless (including Tom) that Sherwood Anderson is a man of profound ideas who is ‘handicapped by his inarticulateness.’ As a matter of fact Anderson is a man of practically no ideas - but he is one of the very best and finest writers in the English language today. God, he can write! Tom could never get such rhythms in his life as there are on the pages of Winesburg, Ohio. Simple! The words on the lips of critics make me hilarious: Anderson’s style is about as simple as an engine room full of dynamos. But Tom flatters himself that he can sit down for five months and by dressing up a few heart throbs in overalls produce literature.

It amazes me, Max, to see you with your discernment and your fine intelligence fall for that whole complicated fake. Your chief critical flaw is to confuse mere earnestness with artistic sincerity. On two of Ring’s jackets have been statements that he never wrote a dishonest word (maybe it’s one jacket). But Ring and many of the very greatest artists have written thousands of words in plays, poems and novels which weren’t even faintly sincere or earnest and were yet artistically sincere. The latter term is not a synonym for plodding earnestness. Zola did not say the last word about literature nor the first.

I append all the data on my fall book, and in closing I apologize for seeming impassioned about Tom and his work when neither the man or what he writes has ever been personally inimical to me. He is simply the scapegoat for the mood Rascoe has put me in and, the I mean every word of it, I probably wouldn’t have wasted all this paper on a book that won’t sell and will be dead in a month, and an imitative school that will be dead by its own weight in a year or so, if the news about Liveright hadn’t come on top of the Rascoe review and ruined my disposition. Good luck to Drummond.  I’m sure one or two critics will mistake it for profound stuff - maybe even Mencken, who has a weakness in that direction. But I think you should look closer.

With best wishes as always, Max,

Your friend,

Scott

DATA ON NEW FITZGERALD BOOK

Title: All the Sad Young Men (9 Short Stories)

Print list of previous books as before with addition of this title under ‘Stories.’ Binding uniform with others. Jacket plain, as you suggest, with text instead of picture. Dedication: To Ring and Ellis Lardner.

The stories (now under revision) will reach you by July 15th. No proofs need be sent over here.

It will be fully up to the other collections and will contain only one of those Post stories that people were so snooty about. You have read only one of the stories (‘Absolution’) - all the others were so good that I had difficulty in selling them, except two.

They are, in approximate order to be used in book:

1. — The Rich Boy (just finished - serious story 13,000 words and very good)

2. — ‘Absolution’ (from Mercury) — 6,500 words

of English prose now writing in America.... What other writer has shown such unexpected developments, such versatility, changes of pace,’ etc., etc., etc. I think that, toned down as you see fit, is the general line. Don’t say ‘Fitzgerald has done it!’ and then in the next sentence that I am an artist. People who are interested in artists aren’t interested in people who have ‘done it.’ Both are O.K. but don’t belong in the same ad. This is an author’s quibble. All authors have one quibble.

However, you have always done well by me (except for Black’s memorable excretion in the Alumni Weekly, do you remember - ‘Make it a Fitzgerald Christmas!’) and I leave it to you. If 100,000 copies are not sold I shall shift to Mitchell Kennerley.

By the way what has become of Black? I hear he has written a very original and profound novel. It is said to be about an inarticulate farmer and his struggles with the ‘soil’ and his sexual waverings between his inarticulate wife and an inarticulate sheep. He finally chooses his old pioneering grandmother as the most inarticulate of all but finds her in bed with none other than our old friend THE HIRED MAN CHRISTY.

CHRISTY HAD DONE IT!

In 1962 Fitzgerald’s famous letter to Perkins was sold at auction at Chrystie’s (not old man Christy’s) for £7,000.

14 rue de Tilsitt

Paris, France

circa July 1, 1925

Dear Max:

This is another one of those letters with a thousand details in them, so I’ll number the details and thus feel I’m getting them out of the way.

(1) Will you have an account (bi-yearly statement) sent me as soon as you can? I don’t know how much I owe you but it must be between 3 and 4 thousand dollars. I want to see how much chance All the Sad Young Men has of making up this difference. Thanks many times for the $700.00. It will enable me to go ahead next month with Our Type t which is getting shaped up both on paper and in my head. I’d rather not tell about it just yet.

(2) — Is Gatsby to be published in England? I’m awfully anxious to have it published there. If Collins won’t have it, can’t you try JonathanCape? Do let me know about this.

(3) — Will you tell me the figures on Ring’s books? Also on Through the Wheat. I re-read the latter the other day and think it’s marvelous. Together with The Enormous Room and, I think, Gatsby, it’s much the best thing that has come out of American fiction since the war. I exclude Anderson because since reading Three Lives and his silly autobiography my feeling about him has entirely changed. He is a short story writer only.

(4) — I spent $48.00 having a sketch of me done by Ivan Opfer. It was lousy and he says he’ll try another. If it’s no good I’ll send a photo. The stories for the book leave here day after tomorrow.

(5) — I think the number of Americans in Europe has hurt the market. Gatsby is the last principal book of mine that I want to publish in the spring. I believe that from now on fall will be much the best season.

(6) — I’m sorry about that burst at Tom

Boyd. But I am among those who suffer from the preoccupation of literary America with the drab as subject matter. Seldes points this out in a great review of Gatsby for the London Criterion. Also he says, ‘Fitzgerald has certainly the best chance at present of becoming our finest artist in fiction.’ Quite a bit from Gilbert who only likes Ring, Edith Wharton, Joyce and Charlie Chaplin. Please get Meyer to put it on the cover of the new book and delete the man who says I ‘deserve the huzzas of those who want to further a worthy American Literature.’ Perhaps I deserve their huzzas but I’d rather they’d express their appreciation in some less boisterous way.

(7) — T’m sending back the questionnaire.

(8) — I suppose that by now Gatsby is over 18,000.I hope to God it reaches 20,000. It sounds so much better. Shane Leslie thought it was fine.

No news, Max. I was drinking hard in May but for the last month I’ve been working like a dog. I still think Count Orgel’s Ball by Radiguet would sell like wildfire. If I had the time I’d translate it myself.

Scott

14 rue de Tilsitt

Paris,

France circa October 6, 1925

Dear Max:

Your letter of September 28th doesn’t answer my question about Gatsby in England. Is there some reason why Chatto & Windus can’t publish in the spring? - And if they believe in it so little that they’ll defer it a year and a half wouldn’t they be willing to hand it over to Cape? I hate to be a crabby old woman about this, Max, but it means a lot to me. Gatsby is just the sort of book which the English say that Americans can’t write, which they praise Hergesheimer for almost writing; I know half a dozen influential people there who will go to bat for it right now and it seems to me that it should have a chance. I am further confused when your letter says ‘Chatto & Windus and other publishers admired it but they thought it too American in its scene to be understood in England.’ Does that mean Chatto & Windus aren’t going to publish it? I’m disgruntled and up-in-the-air about the whole thing.

Isn’t Hemingway’s book fine? Did you read the last story?

I’m having Reynolds send you 6 tickets to the opening of Gatsby if it gets to New York. Distribute them as you like and if you want more let him know.

I’m anxiously awaiting the figure on Gatsby (how many sold, I mean); also on Ring’s reprints as I feel sort of responsible to you on that idea. If he’d have a little pep and interest he might have devoted enough care to What of It? to make it sell as well as The Illiterate Digest.

Who has the American rights to Paul Morand’s Open AH Night and Closed All Night? Guy Chapman publishes them in England. They’re great - and would sell like wildfire. Isn’t Anderson’s new book lousy?+

As ever,

Scott

14 rue de Tilsitt

Paris,

France

circa December 27, 1925

Dear Max:

I write to you from the depth of one of my unholy depressions. The book is wonderful - I honestly think that when it’s published I shall be the best American novelist (which isn’t saying a lot) but the end seems far away. When it’s finished I’m coming home for awhile anyhow though the thought revolts me as much as the thought of remaining in France. I wish I were twenty-two again with only my dramatic and feverishly enjoyed miseries. You remember I used to say I wanted to die at thirty - well, I’m now twenty-nine and the prospect is still welcome. My work is the only thing that makes me happy - except to be a little tight - and for those two indulgences I pay a big price in mental and physical hangovers.

I thank you for your newsy letter - by the way we got and hugely enjoved Louise’s beautiful book and I wrote and thanked her care of Scribners. I liked too your idea about Representative Men but it seems remote to me. Let me know if it comes to something and I’ll contribute.

That was a sweet slam from Ellen Mackey. Is it true that she and Irving Berlin have signed up to play a permanent engagement in Abie’s Irish Rose? I hope the short stories sell seven or eight thousand or so. Is Gatsby dead? You don’t mention it. Has it reached 25,000? I hardly dare to hope so. Also I deduce from your silence that Tom Boyd’s book was a flop. If so I hope he isn’t in financial difficulties. Also I gather from reviews that the penciled frown came a cropper. I wish Liveright would lose faith in Ernest. Through the whole year only the following American novels have seemed worth a damn to me:

The Spring Flight

Perennial Bachelor

In Our Time

The Great Gatsby

I thought the books by Lewis, Van Vechten, Edith Wharton, Floyd Dell, Tom Boyd and Sherwood Anderson were just lousy!

And the ones by Willa Cather and Cyril Hume almost as bad.

Dos Passos and Ruth Suckow I haven’t yet read.

The press Anderson got on Dark Laughter filled me with a much brighter shade of hilarity. You notice it wasn’t from those of us who waited for the Winesburg stories one by one in the Little Review but by Harry Hansen, Stallings, etc., and the other boys who find a new genius once a week and at all cost follow the fashions.

It’s good you didn’t take my advice about looking up Gertrude Stein’s new book (The Making of Americans). It’s bigger than Ulysses and only the first parts, the parts published in the Transatlantic, are intelligible at all. It’s published privately here.

The best English books of the fall are The Sailor’s Return by David Gamett and No More Parades by Ford Maddox Ford (a sequel to Some Do Not).

(Speaking of Gertrude Stein I hope you are keeping my precious Three Lives safe for me.) Ring’s book sounds good. Send me a copy - also the wrap of mine.

I told Ober to send you half a dozen seats for the Gatsby opening to distribute to the Scribners as you think best. If you want more phone him.

No, Zelda’s not entirely well yet. We’re going south next month to Salies-les-Bains to see if we can cure her there. So from the time of receiving this letter address all mail to me care of

The Guaranty Trust Co.

1 rue des Italiens Paris,France

Why was fack Wheeler kicked out of Liberty?

My novel should be finished next fall.

Tell me all the gossip that isn’t in The New Yorker or the World - isn’t there any regular dirt?

I called on Chatto & Windus in London last month and had a nice talk with Swinnerton, their reader. (It was he, it seems, who was strong for the book.) Saw Leslie  also and went on some very high-tone parties with Mountbattens and all that sort of thing.

Very impressed, but not very, as I furnished most of the amusement myself. Please write! Best to Louise.

Your friend, Scott Fitzg —

Has story book had good advance sale? Or hasn’t it been the rounds yet? What’s its date?

14 Rue de Tilsitt

(New address: Guaranty Trust Co.1 rue des Italiens)

circa December 30,1925

Dear Max:

(1) — To begin with, many thanks for all deposits, to you and to the Scribners in general. I have no idea now how I stand with you. To set me straight, will you send me my account now instead of waiting till February ist? It must be huge, and I’m miserable about it. The more I get for my trash, the less I can bring myself to write. However this year is going to be different.

(2) — Hemingway’s book (not his novel) is a 28,000 word satire on Sherwood Anderson and his imitators called The Torrents of Spring. I loved it, but believe it wouldn’t be popular, and Liveright have refused it - they are backing Anderson and the book is almost a vicious parody on him. You see I agree with Ernest that Anderson’s last two books have let everybody down who believed in him - I think they’re cheap, faked, obscurantic and awful. Hemingway thinks, but isn’t yet sure to my satisfaction, that their refusal sets him free from his three-book (letter) agreement with them. In that case I think he’ll give you his novel (on condition you’ll publish satire first - probable sale, 1000 copies) which he is now revising in Austria. Harcourt has just written Louis Bromfield that to get the novel they’ll publish satire, sight unseen (utterly confidential) and Knopf is after him via Aspinwall Bradley.

He and I are very thick and he’s marking time until he finds out how much he’s bound to Liveright. If he’s free I’m almost sure I can get satire to you first and then if you see your way clear

c/o Guaranty Trust Co.

Paris, France circa January 19, 1926

Dear Max:

Your thoughtful cablegram came today and I can’t imagine how the rumor got started - unless from Zelda using an imaginary illness as a protection against the many transients who demand our time. Somehow if one lives in Paris one is fair game for all the bores one wouldn’t look at and who wouldn’t look at one in New York. (If there’s one thing I hate it’s a sentence full of ‘ones.’)

We have escaped to a small town in the Pyrenees where Zelda is to take a cure. Our address for cables is Fitzgerald, Bellevue, Salies-de-Bearn, France, but for letters the Guaranty, Paris, is best. We are living in an absolutely deserted hotel. We move on to Nice the first of March. Here are my usual list of things.

(1) — Thanks a million times for the bound copy of my book - it is beautiful and, Max, I’m enormously obliged. I wish you’d written in the front - but that will wait till I get home. Your thought of me touched me more than I can say.

(2) — Now about the many deposits. They are past all reckoning but must total $5000 which is a record advance (?) on a book of short stories. I’m terribly sorry, Max. Could he send me my account this year on the1st of February really instead of February 15th? We won’t be able to tell about The Sad Young anyhow and I’m frantic to know if I’m helplessly in debt.

(3) — What is the date of the book? How are advance sales, compared with Gatsby? Did the latter ever reach 25,000?

(4) — Now, confidentially, as to Hemingway. He wrote a satire 28,000 words long on Sherwood Anderson, very funny but very cerebral, called The Torrents of Spring. It is biting on Anderson - so Liveright turns it down. Hemingway’s contract lapses when Liveright turns down a book, so Hemingway says. But I think Horace will claim this isn’t a book and fight it like the devil, according to a letter I saw which he wrote Ernest, because he’s crazy to get Ernest’s almost completed novel The Sun Also Rises. It is such a mess that Ernest goes to N.Y. next month.

Meanwhile Harcourt and Knopf are after him but he’s favorably disposed toward you because of your letters, and of the magazine. He’s very excitable, though, and I can’t promise he’ll know his own mind next month. I’ll tip you off the moment he arrives. Of course if Bridges likes his work and if you’ll take Torrents he’s yours absolutely - contingent, of course, on the fact that he isn’t bitched by some terrible contract with Liveright. To hear him talk you’d think Liveright had broken up his home and robbed him of millions - but that’s because he knows nothing of publishing, except in the cuckoo magazines, is very young and feels helpless so far away. You won’t be able to help liking him - — he’s one of the nicest fellows I ever knew.

In addition to the critics will you send my new book to the following people and charge my account (except in cases like Hergesheimer and Van Vechten, who actually reviewed Gatsby)? Send me only 3 copies. Thanks again for my beautiful copy.

As ever, Scott

South of France February 20, 1926

Dear Max:

Two things have just occurred to me - or rather three. (1) You’ll get this letter about the 3rd of March. My book of stories may, at that time, have been out three weeks or three days - — you’ve not told me the date. Will you in any case write me immediately forecasting roughly the approximate sale? I know it can be only guesswork and you’ll be afraid of overestimating but I’d like to know at least the sale to that date. It has something to do with my income tax which must leave here the 14th. Also, would you send me an income tax blank?

My God! If it should sell 10,000 copies I’d be out of debt to you for the 1st time since 1922. Isn’t that a disgrace, when I get $2500 for a story as my regular price? But trash doesn’t come as easily as it used to and I’ve grown to hate the poor old debauched form itself.

How about Tom Boyd? Is he still going to be one of the barnyard boys? Or has he got sense and decided to write about the war, or seducing married women in St Paul, or life in a bum Kentucky military school, or something he knows about. He has no touch of genius like Hemingway and Cummings but like Dos Passos he has a strong, valuable talent. He must write about the external world, as vividly and acutely and even brilliantly as he can, but let him stop there. He is almost without the power of clear ratiocination and he has no emotional depths whatsoever. His hide is so thick that only battle itself could really make an impression on him - playing with the almost evanescent spiritual material of Anderson he becomes an ox to public view. I wish to God I could see him and talk to him. For heaven’s sake, Max, curb your usual (and, generally, sagacious) open-mindedness and don’t help him to ruin his future by encouraging his stupidest ambitions - he’ll turn bitter with failure.

(2) Has the play’s success helped the book Gatsby? My theory, you know, is that nowadays there’s not the faintest connection. That’s why I wouldn’t allow a movie edition of The Beautiful and Damned. By the way I don’t imagine those little 75 cent books sell any more. They shouldn’t. Do they? I mean did Jesse Williams’, Arthur Train’s, Wilson’s addresses, etc., sell like The Perfect Tribute and The Third Wise Man?

Now, confidential: T. S. Eliot, for whom you know my profound admiration - I think he’s the greatest living poet in any language - wrote me he’d read Gatsby three times and thought it was the first step forward American fiction had taken since Henry James.

Wait till they see the new novel!

Did you get Hemingway?

There was something else I wanted to ask you. What was it, damn it?

We’re coming home in the fall, but I don’t want to. I’d like to live and die on the French Riviera.

What’s the inside dope on the Countess Cathcart case?

I can’t remember my other question and it’s driving me frantic. Frantic! (Half an hour later) Frantic!

FRANTIC!!!

If you see anybody I know tell ‘em I hate ‘em all, him especially. Never want to see ‘em again.

Why shouldn’t I go crazy? My father is a moron and my mother is a neurotic, half insane with pathological nervous worry. Between them they haven’t and never have had the brains of Calvin Coolidge. If I knew anything I’d be the best writer in America.

Scott Fitzg —

Eureka! Remembered! Refer my movie offers to Reynolds.

Villa Paquita Juan-les-Pins Alpes Maritime France (address till June 15)

circa February 25, 1926

Dear Max:

Thanks very much for your nice letter and the income blank. I’m delighted about the short story book. In fact with the play going well and my new novel growing absorbing and with our being back in a nice villa on my beloved Riviera (between Cannes and Nice) I’m happier than I’ve been for years. It’s one of those strange, precious, and all too transitory moments when everything in one’s life seems to be going well. Thanks for the Arthur Train legal advice. I’m glad you got Hemingway. I saw him for a day in Paris on his return and he thought you were great. I’ve brought you two successes (Ring and Tom Boyd) and two failures ( — and — ).

Ernest will decide whether my opinions are more of a hindrance or a help.

Why not try College Humor for his story? They published one thing of mine.

Poor Tom Boyd! First I was off him for his boneheadedness. Now I’m sorry for him.

Your friend,

Scott

I am out of debt to you for the first time in four years.

Will you get the enclosure for me, open it, and write me?

Think of that horse’s ass F.P.A. coming around to my work after six years of neglect. I’d like to stick his praise up his behind, God knows it’s no use to me now.

Villa Paquita Juan-les-Pins France

Before April27, 1926

Dear Max:

Why in God’s name did the advertising department broadcast a rotten sketch of me that makes me look like a degenerate? It’s come to me in a dozen clippings and will probably haunt me for the next five years. As it appears in Scribner’s Magazine I suppose Meyer sent it out - otherwise I would have thought it originated with some country newspaper that needed space in an awful hurry. I know it’s partly my own fault for not sending you one and I suppose this sounds vain and unpleasant but if you knew how it has taken the joy out of the press on my book to have that leering, puffy distortion reach me at the head of almost every review you’d know the way I’ve gotten worked up over it Thanks many times for Our Times. I read every word of it and loved it. Thoroughly interesting. About Mary Colum’s article: I thought that the more solid parts were obvious and pedantic, and that a good half of it was the sort of nonsense I didn’t expect from her. What on earth is the connection between Cocteau and Cummings? What does she mean by form? Does she think King Lear lacks it, while Marianne Moore has it? She uses it in the sense of successful conscious organization (so one thinks) and then it develops that she means mere novelty. Says she:

‘How profoundly true to their race, period and the needs of their public are the great artists - Goethe, Dante, Shakespeare, Moliere! You can from their work pick out all the qualities, all the thoughts, all the ideals of the time that needed expression.’

How in the devil does she know that? How does anyone know that? There may have been whole elements in each of their times (John Donne, Roger Bacon in Shakespeare’s and Dante’s respective times for example) whose ideals and spirits were not even faintly summed up by the powerful but fallible and all-too-human titan who succeeded in forcing on us his picture. Don’t you agree?

I disliked the essay chiefly because it’s so plausible, and so dead, like (whisper it not, because I like him) the critical work of Ernest Boyd. Perhaps because I’ve just finished Chekhov’s Letters on Literature. God, there’s a book!

You owe me a long letter.

As ever,

Scott

Villa Paquita Juan-les-Pins France

Before May 10, 1926

Dear Max:

Thanks many times for all the books. The Hickey  I loved, having read the other three volumes of it. The war book too was great - God, what bad luck Tom Boyd had! Stallings made the killing with the play and movie; now Thomason makes a contract with Hearst, for a lot, I guess, and Tom who came first came too early, I suppose. Yet What Price Glory would never have been written, I suppose, except for Through the Wheat. Not that Tom’s novel wasn’t a success in a way but to make about $6000 as an originator and see others rake it in like croupiers later - I know how bitter it must make him.

The — book was tedious. I’m allowing for having seen it all at least three times but it was tedious. Undoubted power and a great gift of prose but you can’t arbitrarily patch together shreds of fine writing and call it a novel. And parts of it were merely sensational bombast. I’m sorry.

Nor, I’m afraid, will Ring’s book add to his reputation. Several stories were fine, none were cheap, but - God, I wish he’d write a more or less personal novel. Couldn’t you persuade him? The real history of an American manager, say Ziegfeld or a theatrical girl. Think how far Anita Loos got with a mere imitation of him.

I’m enclosing a letter. If you are willing I’d like to have them use ‘May Day’ from Tales of the Jazz Age and ‘The Rich Boy’ from All the Sad Young Men.

If it is too soon, in your judgment, to use the latter I could substitute ‘The Diamond as Big as the Ritz.’ If you act as my agent in a case like this will you take it up with them? If not, let me know immediately and I will.

Also Charlie Bailey of Henry Holt wants to use The Camel’s Back’ in an anthology. I suppose it’s all right, good advertising, etc. I’d rather have him use ‘The Curious Case of Benjamin Button’ if he would. Both are in Tales of the Jazz Age.

The reviews of All the Sad Young Men have been pleasant, mostly, but, after the book and the play, rather tame. Did it go to 12,000 as you suggested? We’ve had some good nibbles for the movie rights of Gatsby but they want $45,000, I hear. I get one- third of the gross price.

See my article on Hemingway in The Bookman - it’s pretty good.

In absolute confidence I’ve received an offer of $3500 per short story from Liberty. I’m considering it.

My book is wonderful. I don’t think it’ll be interrupted again. I expect to reach New York about December 10th with the manuscript under my arm. I’ll ask between $30,000 and $40,000 for the serial rights and I think Liberty will want it. So book publication would be late spring 1927 or early fall.

No news. Do write. Tell me if Torrents of Spring gets a press. I doubt it will sell. Again thank you for the books.

Ever and always friend,

Scott Fitzg —

Why don’t you come over for a month this summer? You and Louise and the two oldest children! Has your depression of last December gone?

Villa St Louis Juan-les-Pins

France

circa May 10, 1926

Dear Max:

The mistral is raging outside like the end of the world and the idea of writing is anathema to me. We are wonderfully situated in a big house on the shore with a beach and the Casino not 100 yards away and every prospect of a marvelous summer.

I’m sorry about Van Wyck Brooks. You yourself sounded a bit depressed.

Dreiser would be crazy to leave Liveright, the I can understand how Horace would get on his nerves. I heard that the movie rights of An American Tragedy brought $90,000 but I don’t believe it. Gatsby, so it now appears, sold for $50,000. An agent on the coast got 10% and Davis, Brady and I split the $45,000. Then I had to pay Reynolds 10% more, so instead of $16,666.66 I received $13,500 - or $3,166.66 went in agents’ commissions. However I shouldn’t kick. Everybody sells movies through an agent and the Reynolds part was necessary since I’m away. I thought the drawings for The Sad Young Men ads were fine. By the way I’m sending two negatives for pictures. Do send them out right away to replace the others.

Thanks for the O’Brien anthology information. You have never mentioned a cheap edition of Gatsby. Not that I care, for I’m rather skeptical about it, but I’m curious to know if it was ever put up to the trade. Tell me what you think of The Sun Also Rises.

I’m not surprised at Galsworthy not being responsive to my stuff. I’ve found that if you don’t respond to another man’s writings the chances are it’s mutual - and except for ‘The Apple Tree’ and, oddly enough, Saint’s Progress, he leaves me cold. I suspect he had some unfortunate idyllic love affair in his youth and whenever that crops into his work it comes alive to me. The subject matter of The Forsyte Saga seemed stuffy to me. I entirely ‘approve’ of him though and liked him personally.

Have you considered coming over?

Always your friend,

Scott

Villa Paquita Juan-les-Pins Alpes Maritime Francecirca June 10, 1926

Dear Mr Scribner:

For the first time in over four years I am no longer in financial debt to you - or rather I won’t be when the money from my short story book becomes due me. But in another sense I shall always be in your debt - for your unfailing kindness and confidence and obligingness to me in all my exigencies during that time. Never once was I reminded of my obligations, which were sometimes as high as $4000, with no book in sight.

With every assurance of my deep respect and very real gratitude I remain Faithfully yours,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Villa St Louis Juan-les-Pins Francecirca June 25, 1926

Dear Max:

Thanks for both letters. We were in Paris having Zelda’s appendix neatly but firmly removed or I would have answered before.

First as to Ernest’s book.  I liked it but with certain qualifications. The fiesta, the fishing trip, the minor characters were fine. The lady I didn’t like, perhaps because I don’t like the original. In the mutilated man I thought Ernest bit off more than can yet be chewn between the covers of a book, then lost his nerve a little and edited the more vitalizing details out. He has since told me that something like this happened. Do ask him for the absolute minimum of necessary changes, Max - he’s discouraged about the previous reception of his work by publishers and magazine editors (tho he loved your letter). From the latter (magazine editors) he has had a lot of words and, until Bridges’ offer for the short story (from which he had even before cut out a thousand words on my recommendation), scarcely a single dollar. From the Torrents I expect you’ll have little response. Do you think the Bookman article did him any good?

I roared at the idea of you and the fish in the tree.

O.K. as to Haldeman-Julius.

Will you ask them (your accounting department) to send me an account the ist of August? I’d love to see what a positive statement looks like for the first time in three years.

I am writing Bridges today. I have an offer now for a story at $3500 (rather for six stories). To sell one for $1000 would mean a dead loss of $2500 and as I average only six stories a year I don’t see how I can do it. I hope he’ll understand.

The novel, in abeyance during Zelda’s operation, now goes on apace. This is confidential butLiberty, with certain conditions, has offered me $35,000 sight unseen. I hope to have it done in January.

Do send out a picture to everyone that got that terrible one.

Ever your friend,

Scott

Villa St Louis Juan-les-Pins Francecirca June 28, 1926

Dear Mr Bridges:

It isn’t a question of contracts - it’s frankly a question of money. I hate writing short stories, as you know, and only do my six a year to have the leisure to write my novels at leisure. And since my price has risen to $3500 per story it would mean a dead loss to me of $2500. I’m terribly sorry. If it comes about that a story develops, as they sometimes do, into the type that the big circulation magazines can’t print I’ll send it on to you but that’s all I can promise, because it’s become a sort of chore to me to write a short story having had to cook up so many tasteless morsels under the whip of the national advertisers. I do hate to refuse, Mr Bridges. I hope you’ll understand.

Sincerely,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Villa St Louis Juan-les-Pins Francecirca August 10, 1926

Dear Max:

As to your questions:

(1) — Unless the Americans are first driven out of France (as at present seems hot unlikely) - I’ll be home with the finished manuscript of my book about mid-December. We’ll be a week in New York, then south to Washington and Montgomery to see our respective parents and spend Xmas - and back in New York in mid- January to spend the rest of the winter. Whether the spring will see us back on Long Island or returning to Europe depends on politics, finances and our personal desires.

(2) — The only censorable thing I found in Ernest’s book was the ‘balls’ conversation. I didn’t find the James thing objectionable but then he seems to me to have been dead fifty years.

(3) — I’m sorry Torrents hasn’t done better and delighted about The Sad young Men. Have you sounded out Curtis Brown about an anthology of my stories in England? Still, that better wait till my novel. Don’t forget the August statement.

(4) — God, how much I’ve learned in these two and a half years in Europe. It seems like a decade and I feel pretty old but I wouldn’t have missed it, even its most unpleasant and painful aspects.

(5) — About the Scribners’ story I wrote Bridges. If another ‘Absolution’ turns up he shall have first look.

I do want to see you, Max.

Always your friend,

Scott

Ellerslie Edgemoor, Delaware circa May 12, 1927

Dear Max:

The cane was marvelous. The nicest one I ever saw and infinitely superior to the one mislaid. Need I say I value the inscription? This is the cane I shall never lose.

It seems a shame to put business into a letter thanking you for such a gift but a line about Ernest. It is all bull that he left Liveright about that story. One line at least is pornographic, though please don’t bring my name into the discussion. The thing is - what is a seduction story with the seduction left out? Yet if that is softened it is quite printable. However I trust your judgment, as he should.

I’m sorry about O’Hara.  I imagined that this book wasn’t as good as his first - however he doesn’t seem to me now to be an indisputably good risk - he’s mature and developed and ought to be doing first rate things, if ever.

(Explain to Hemingway, why don’t you, that while such an incident might be lost in a book, a story centering around it points it. In other words the material raison d’etre as opposed to the artistic raison d’être of the story is, in part, to show the physiological details of a seduction. If that were possible in America, 20 publishers would be scrambling for James Joyce tomorrow.)

Thanks many times for looking for the old cane. It doesn’t matter. I want to put off the pamphlet for a month until I make up some misunderstandings with the men who wrote the articles.

Many, many sincere thanks, Max. I was touched when I found it at the station.

Scott

Ellerslie Edgemoor, Delaware

Before January 3, 1928

Dear Max:

Patience yet a little while, I beseech thee, and thanks eternally for the deposits. I feel awfully about owing you that money - all I can say is that if book is serialized I’ll pay it back immediately. I work at it all the time but that period of sickness set me back - made a break both in the book and financially so that I had to do those Post stories - which made a further break. Please regard it as a safe investment and not as a risk.

I have no news. I liked Some People by Nicolson and The Bridge of San Luis Rey. Also I loved John’s book and I saw your letter agreeing that it’s his best thing, and the most likely to go. It’s really thought out - oddly enough its least effective moments are the traces of his old manner, the on the whole it’s steadily and cumulatively effective throughout. From the first draft, which was the one I saw, I thought he could have cut 2000 or 3000 words that was mere Conradian stalling around. Whether he did or not I don’t know.

No news from Emest. In the latest Transition (Volume 9) there is some good stuff by Murray Goodwin (unprintable here) and a fine German play.

Always your afft. friend,

Scott

Except for a three day break last week (Xmas) I have been on the absolute wagon since the middle of October. Feel simply grand. Smoke only Sanos. God help us all.

c/o Guaranty Trust Co.

Paris,France

circa July 1,1928

Dear Max:

We are settled and not a soul in the world knows where we are; on the absolute wagon and working on the novel, the whole novel and nothing but the novel. I’m coming back in August with it or on it. Thank you so much for the money - by this time Reynolds will have sold my last story and that, at French prices, will carry us through.

Please advise me as to the enclosure. Why not let’s do it - you acting as my agent directly with him and keeping 10% thus saving Curtis Brown’s 10%? Anyhow please advise me - I’d like to be published by him as he’s done better than anyone in England with Americans.

I strongly advise your obtaining immediately the translation rights to Les Hommes de la Route by André Chamson (Published by Bernard Grasset)

He’s young, not salacious, and apparently is destined by all the solid literary men here to be the great novelist of France - no flash in the pan like Crevel, Radiguet, Aragon, etc. He has a simply astonishing reputation in its enthusiasm and solidity.

Yours as ever devotedly,

Scott

Thanks for the books at the boat - many thanks!

58 rue Vaugirard

Paris, France

circa July 15, 1928

Dear Max:

I read John Bishop’s novel. Of course it’s impossible. All the people who were impressed with Norman Douglas’ South Wind and Beerbohm’s Zuletlta Dobson tried to follow them in their wretched organization of material - without having either the brilliant intelligence of Douglas or the wit of Beerbohm. Vide the total collapse of Aldous Huxley. Conrad has been, after all, the healthy influence on the technique of the novel.

Anyhow at the same time Bishop gave me a novelette to read - and to my great astonishment, as a document of the Civil War, it’s right up to Bierce and Stephen Crane - beautifully written.

thrilling, and water tight as to construction and interest. He’s been so discouraged over the hash he made of the novel that he’s been half afraid to send it anywhere, and I told him that now that tales of violence are so popular I thought Scribner’s Magazine would love to have a look at it.

So I’m sending it - no one has seen it but me. His address is Chateau de Tressancourt, Orgeval, Seine et Oise. I’m working hard as hell.

As ever your friend,

Scott

58 rue Vaugirard

Paris

France

circa July 21, 1928

Dear Max:

(1) — The novel goes fine. I think it’s quite wonderful and I think those who’ve seen it (for I’ve read it around a little) have been quite excited. I was encouraged the other day, when James Joyce came to dinner, when he said, ‘Yes, I expect to finish my novel in three or four years more at the latest,’ and he works 11 hours a day to my intermittent 8. Mine will be done sure in September.

(2) — Did you get my letter about André Chamson? Really, Max, you’re missing a great opportunity if you don’t take that up. Radiguet was perhaps obscene - Chamson is absolutely not - he’s head over heels the best young man here, like Ernest and Thornton Wilder rolled into one. This Hommes de la Route (Road Menders) is his second novel and all but won the Prix Goncourt - the story of men building a road, with all of the force of K. Hamsun’s Growth of the Soil - not a bit like Tom Boyd’s bogus American husbandmen. Moreover, the I know him only slightly and have no axe to grind, I have every faith in him as an extraordinary personality, like France and Proust. Incidentally King Vidor (who made The Crowd and The Big Parade) is making a picture of it next summer. If you have any confidence in my judgment do at least get a report on it and let me know what you decide. Ten years from now he’ll be beyond price.

(3) — I plan to publish a book of those Basil Lee stories after the novel. Perhaps one or two more serious ones to be published in The Mercury or with Scribners, if you’d want them, combined with the total of about six in the Post series would make a nice light novel, almost to follow my novel in the season immediately after, so as not to seem in the direct line of my so-called ‘work.’ It would run to perhaps 50 or 60 thousand words.

(4) — Do let me know any plans of (a) Ernest, (b) Ring, (c) Tom (reviews poor, I notice), (d) John Biggs.

(5) — Did you like Bishop’s story? I thought it was grand.

(6) — Home September 15 th, I think. Best to Louise.

(7) — About Cape - won’t you arrange it for me and take the 10% commission? That is if I’m not committed morally to Chatto & Windus who did, so to speak, pick me up out of the English gutter. I’d rather be with Cape. Please decide and act accordingly if you will. If you don’t I’ll just ask Reynolds. As you like. Let me know.

Ever your devoted and grateful friend,

Scott

Everslie

Edgemoor,

Delaware

November, 1928

Dear Max:

It seems fine to be sending you something again, even though it’s only the first fourth of the book (2 chapters, 18,000 words). Now comes another short story, then I’ll patch up Chapters 3 and 4 the same way, and send them, I hope, about the ist of December.

Chapter 1 here is good.

Chapter 2 has caused me more trouble than anything in the book. You’ll realize this when I tell you it was once 27,000 words long! It started its career as Chapter 1.I am far from satisfied with it even now, but won’t go into its obvious faults. I would appreciate it if you jotted down any criticisms - and saved them until I’ve sent you the whole book, because I want to feel that each part is finished and not worry about it any longer, even though I may change it enormously at the very last minute. All I want to know now is if, in general, you like it and this will have to wait, I suppose, until you’ve seen the next batch which finishes the first half. (My God, it’s good to see those chapters lying in an envelope!)

I think I have found you a new prospect of really extraordinary talent in a Carl Van Vechten way. I have his first novel at hand - unfortunately it’s about Lesbians. More of this later.

I think Bunny’s title is wonderful!

Remember novel is confidential, even to Ernest.

Always yours,

Scott

Everslie

Edgemoor, Delaware

circa March 1, 1929

Dear Max:

I am sneaking away like a thief without leaving the chapters - there is a week’s work to straighten them out and, in the confusion of influenza and leaving, I haven’t been able to do it. I’ll do it on the boat and send it from Genoa. A thousand thanks for your patience - just trust me a few months longer, Max - it’s been a discouraging time for me too but I will never forget your kindness and the fact that you’ve never reproached me.

I’m delighted about Ernest’s book - I bow to your decision on the Modern Library without agreeing at all. $100.00 or $50.00 advance is better than one-eighth of $40.00 for a year’s royalty, and Scribner collection sounds vague and arbitrary to me.But it’s a trifle and I’ll give them a new and much inferior story as I want to be represented with those men, i e., Forster, Conrad, Mansfield, etc.

Herewith a manuscript I promised to bring you - I think it needs cutting but it just might sell with a decent title and no foreword. I don’t feel certain the at all -

Will you watch for some stories from a young Holger Lund- berg who has appeared in The Mercury? He is a man of some promise and I headed him your way.

I hate to leave without seeing you - and I hate to see you with-

out the ability to put the finished ms. in your hands. So for a few months goodbye, and my affection and gratitude always.

Scott

Somewhere in France

circa April 1, 1929

Dear Max:

This letter is too hurried to thank you for the very kind and encouraging one you wrote me. It’s only to say - watch for a book on Baudelaire by Pierre Loving which Madeleine Boyd will bring you. I believe another one has been published but this man once did me a service and I promised to call your attention to it, before knowing it had a rival in the market.

I’m delighted about Ernest’s novel. Will be here in Paris trying as usual to finish mine, till July 1st, c/o The Guaranty Trust, rue des Italiens. Then the seashore.

A Frenchman here (unfortunately I haven’t his book at hand but he’s a well known writer on aviation) has written a book called Evasions d’Aviateurs dealing with aviators’ escapes during the war - all true and to me fascinating. It’s a best seller here now. In three months will come a sequel which will include some escapes of German and American aviators (as you know it was the tradition of all aviators to escape) which will include that of Tommy Hitchcock.

What would you say to the two-in-one oversized volume, profusely illustrated with photographs? I believe Liberty had a great success with Richthofen and as a record of human ingenuity Les Evasions d’Aviateurs is astounding. To swell the thing a third book he has just published called Special Missions of Aviators During the War might be added. What do you think? It might just make a great killing, like Trader Horn - it has a certain bizarre quality to divert the bored.

Unfortunately I haven’t the man’s name.

Again thank you for your kind and understanding letter. I’m ashamed of myself for whining about nothing and never will again.

Scott F.

Villa Fleur des Bois Boulevard Eugene Gazagnaire (Till October 1st)

Cannes, France circa June, 1929

Dear Max:

A line in haste to say (1) — I am working night and day on novel from new angle that I think will solve previous difficulties.

(2) — Dotty Parker, whose ‘Big Blonde’ won O. Henry prize, is writing a novelette or novel. She has been getting bad prices and I think, if she interested you, she’d be glad to find a market in Scribners. fust now she’s at a high point as a producer and as to reputation. You’d better get her Paris bank address from Bookman or New Yorker and have them forward, as I don’t know when she’ll leave here, where she’s at Hotel Beau Rivage, Antibes. I wouldn’t lose any time about this if it interests you.

(3) — Ernest’s last letter a little worried, but I don’t see why. To hell with the toughs of Boston. I hope to God All Quiet on the Western Front won’t cut in on his sales. My bet is the book will pass 50,000.

(4) — Deeply sorry about Ring. Why won’t he write about Great Neck, a sort of Odyssey of man starting in theatre business?

(5) — Do send me Bunny’s book. I heard about his breakdown. I hope his poems include ‘Our Autumns were unreal with the new -’ Please ask him about it - it’s haunted me for 12 years.

(6) — Sorry about John’s leg - am writing him as I want news of the play.

(7) — Tom Boyd has apparently dropped from sight, hasn’t he? Do give me any news.

Always your afft. friend,

Scott

10 rue Pergolèse Paris, France circa November 15, 1929

Dear Max: —

For the first time since August I see my way clear to a long stretch on the novel, so I’m writing you as I can’t bear to do when it’s in one of its states of postponement and seems so in the air. We are not coming home for Xmas, because of expense and because it’d be an awful interruption now. Both our families are raising hell but I can’t compromise the remains of my future for that.

I’m glad of Ring’s success the - at least it’s for something new and will make him think he’s still alive and not a defunct semi- classic. Also Ernest’s press has been marvelous and I hope it sells. By the way McAlmon is a bitter rat and I’m not surprised at anything he does or says. He’s failed as a writer and tries to fortify himself by tying up to the big boys like Joyce and Stein and despising everything else. Part of his quarrel with Ernest some years ago was because he assured Ernest that I was a fairy - God knows he shows more creative imagination in his malice than in his work. Next he told Callaghant that Ernest was a fairy. He’s a pretty good person to avoid.

Sorry Bunny’s book didn’t go - I thought it was fine, and more interesting than better, or at least more achieved, novels.

Congratulations to Louise.

Oh, and what the hell is this book I keep getting clippings about, with me and Struthers Burt and Ernest, etc.? As I remember, you refused to let The Rich Boy’ be published in the Modern Library in a representative collection where it would have helped me, and here it is in a book obviously foredoomed to oblivion that can serve no purpose than to fatigue reviewers with the stories. I know it’s a small matter but I am disturbed by the fact that you didn’t see fit to discuss it with me.

However that’s a rather disagreeable note to close on when I am forever in your debt for countless favors and valuable advice. It is because so little has happened to me lately that it seems magni-

fied. Will you, by the way, send the Princeton book by Edgar - it’s not available here. Did Tom Boyd elope? And what about Bigg’s play?

Ever your afft. friend,

Scott

10 rue Pergolèse Paris, France

January 21, 1930

Dear Max:

This has run to seven long close-written pages so you better not read it when you’re in a hurry There is so much to write you - or rather so many small things that I’ll write, first the personal things, and then on another sheet a series of suggestions about books and authors that have accumulated in me in the last six months.

(1) — To begin with, because I don’t mention my novel it isn’t because it isn’t finishing up or that I’m neglecting it - but only that I’m weary of setting dates for it till the moment when it is in the post office box.

(2) — I was very grateful for the money - it won’t happen again but I’d managed to get horribly into debt and I hated to call on Ober, who’s just getting started, for another cent.

(3) — Thank you for the documents in the Callaghan case. I’d rather not discuss it except to say that I don’t like him and that I wrote him a formal letter of apology. I never thought he started the rumor and never said nor implied such a thing to Ernest.

(4) — Delighted with the success of Ernest’s book. I took the responsibility of telling him that McAlmon was at his old dirty work around New York. McAlmon, by the way, didn’t have anything to do with founding Transition. He published Ernest’s first book over here and some books of his own and did found some little magazine but of no importance.

(5) — Thank you for getting Gatsby for me in foreign languages.

(6) — ....

(7) — Tom Boyd seems far away. I’ll tell you one awful thing tho. Laurence Stallings was in the West with King Vidor at a huge salary to write an equivalent of What Price Glory. King Vidor told me that Stallings, in despair of showing Vidor what the war was about, gave him a copy of Through the Wheat. And that’s how Vidor made the big scenes in The Big Parade. Tom Boyd’s profits were a few thousand - Stallings were a few hundred thousands. Please don’t connect my name with this story but it is the truth and it seems to me rather horrible.

(8) — Lastly and most important. For the English rights of my next book Knopf made me an offer so much better than any in England (advance $500.00; royalties sliding from ten to fifteen and twenty; guaranty to publish next book of short stories at same rate) that I accepted of course. My previous talk with Cape was encouraging on my part but conditional. As to Chatto and Windus - since they made no overtures at my All the Sad Young Men I feel free to take any advantage of a technicality to have my short stories published in England, especially as they answered a letter of mine on the publication of the book with the signature (Chatto & Windus, per Q), undoubtedly an English method of showing real interest in one’s work.

I must tell you (and privately) for your own amusement that the first treaty Knopf sent me contained a clause that would have required me to give him $10,000 on date of publication - that is: 25% of all serial rights (not specifying only English ones) for which Liberty have contracted, as you know, for $40,000. This was pretty — or maybe an error in his office, but later I went over the contract with a fine tooth comb and he was very decent. Confidential! Incidentally he said to me as Harcourt once did to Ernest that you were the best publishers in America. I told him he was wrong - that you were just a lot of royalty-doctorers and short changers.

No more for the moment. I liked Bunny’s book and am sorry it didn’t go. I thought those Day Edgar stories made a nice book, didn t you? —

Ever your devoted friend,

Scott

I append the sheet of brilliant ideas of which you may find one or two worth considering. Congratulations on the Eddy book.

(Suggestion List)

(1) — Certainly if the ubiquitous and ruined McAlmon deserves a hearing then John Bishop, a poet and a man of really great talents and intelligence, does. I am sending you under another cover a sister story of the novelette you refused, which together with the first one and three shorter ones will form his Civil-War- civilian-in-invaded-Virginia book, a simply grand idea and a new, rich field. The enclosed is the best thing he has ever done and the best thing about the non-combatant or rather behind-the-lines war I’ve ever read. I hope to God you can use this in the magazine - couldn’t it be run into small type carried over like Sew Collins did with Boston and you Farewell to Arms? He needs the encouragement and is so worth it.

(2) — In the new American Caravan amid much sandwiching of Joyce and Co. is the first work of a 21 year old named Robert Cantwell. Mark it well, for my guess is that he’s learned a better lesson from Proust than Thornton Wilder did and has a destiny of no mean star.

(3) — Another young man therein named Gerald Sykes has an extraordinary talent in the line of heaven knows what, but very memorable and distinguished.

(4) — Thirdly (and these three are all in the whole damn book) there is a man named Erskine Caldwell, who interested me less than the others because of the usual derivations from Hemingway and even Callaghan - still, read him. He and Sykes are 26 years old. I don’t know any of them.

If you decide to act in any of these last three cases I’d do it within a few weeks. I know none of the men but Cantwell will go quick with his next stuff if he hasn’t gone already. For some reason young writers come in groups - Cummings, Dos Passos and me in 1920-21; Hemingway, Callaghan and Wilder in 1926-27 - and no one in between and no one since. This looks to me like a really new generation.

(5) — Now a personal friend (but he knows not that I’m writing you) - Cary Ross (Yale 1925) - poorly represented in this American Caravan, but rather brilliantly by poems in The Mercury and Transition, studying medicine at John Hopkins, and one who at the price of publication or at least examination of his poems might prove a valuable man. Distinctly younger than post war, later than my generation, sure to turn to fiction and worth corresponding with. I believe these are the cream of the young people.

(6) — Dos Passos wrote me about the ms. of some protégée of his but as I didn’t see the ms. or know the man the letter seemed meaningless. Did you do anything about Murray Godwin (or Goodwin)? Shortly I’m sending you some memoirs by an ex- marine, doorman at my bank here. They might have some documentary value as true stories of the Nicaraguan expedition, etc.

(7) — In the foreign (French) field there is besides Chamson one man, and at the opposite pole, of great talent. It is not Cocteau nor Aragon but young René Crevel. I am opposed to him for being a fairy but in the last Transition (Number 18) there is a translation of the beginning of his current novel which simply knocked me cold with its beauty. The part in Transition is called ‘Mr Knife and Miss Fork’ and I wish to God you’d read it immediately. Incidentally the novel is a great current success here. I know it’s not yet placed in America and if you’re interested please communicate with me before you write Bradley.

(8) — Now, one last, much more elaborate idea. In France any military book of real tactical or strategical importance, theoretical or fully documented (and usually the latter) (and I’m not referring to the one-company battles between ‘Red’ and ‘Blue’ taught us in the army under the name of Small Problems for infantry) - they are mostly published by Payot here and include such works as Ludendorf’s Memoirs; and the Documentary Preparations for the German Break-through in 1918 - how the men were massed, trained, brought up to the line in 12 hours in 150 different technical groups from flame throwers to field kitchens, the whole inside story from captured orders of the greatest tactical attack in history; a study of Tannenburg (German); several, both French and German, of the first Marne; a thorough study of gas warfare, another of tanks; no dogmatic distillations compiled by some old dotard, but original documents.

Now - believing that so long as we have service schools and not much preparation (I am a political cynic and a big-navy-man, like all Europeans) English translations should be available in all academies, army service schools, staff schools, etc. (I’ll bet there are American army officers with the rank of captain that don’t know what ‘infiltration in depth’ is or what Colonel Bruckmuller’s idea of artillery employment was) - it seems to me that it would be a great patriotic service to consult the war-department bookbuyers on some subsidy plan to bring out a tentative dozen of the most important as ‘an original source tactical library of the lessons of the great war.’ It would be parallel, but more essentially military rather than politico-military, to the enclosed list of Payot’s collection. I underline some of my proposed inclusions. This, in view of some millions of amateurs of battle now in America, might be an enormous popular success as well as a patriotic service. Let me know about this because if you shouldn’t be interested I’d like to make the suggestion for my own satisfaction to someone else. Some that I’ve underlined may be already published.

My God - this is 7 pages and you’re asleep and I want to catch the Olympic with this so I’ll close. Please tell me your response to each idea.

Does Chamson sell at all? Oh, for my income tax will you have the usual statement of lack of royalties sent me - and for my own curiosity to see if I’ve sold a book this year except to myself.

10 rue Pergolèse

Paris, France

circa May 1, 1930

Dear Max:

I was delighted about the Bishop story - the acceptance has done wonders for him. The other night I read him a good deal of my novel and I think he liked it. Harold Ober wrote me that if it wouldn’t be published this fall I should publish the Basil Lee stories, but I know too well by whom reputations are made and broken to ruin myself completely by such a move - I’ve seen Tom Boyd, Michael Arlen, and too many others fall through the eternal trap-door of trying to cheat the public, no matter what their public is, with substitutes - better to let four years go by. I wrote young and I wrote a lot and the pot takes longer to fill up now but the novel, my novel, is a different matter than if I’d hurriedly finished it up a year and a half ago. If you think Callaghan hasn’t completely blown himself up with this deathhouse masterpiece just wait and see the pieces fall. I don’t know why I’m saying this to you who have never been anything but my most loyal and confident encourager and friend but Ober’s letter annoyed me today and put me in a wretched humor. I know what I’m doing - honestly, Max. How much time between The Cabala and The Bridge of St Luis Rey, between The Genius and The American Tragedy, between The Wisdom Tooth and Green Pastures? I think it seems to go by quicker there in America but time put in is time eventually taken out - and whatever this thing of mine is it’s certainly not a mediocrity like The Woman of Andros and The Forty-Second Parallel. ‘He’s through’ is an easy cry to raise but it’s safer for the critics to raise it at the evidence in print than at a long silence.

Ever yours,

Scott

10 rue Pergolèse

Paris,France

May, 1930

Dear Max:

First let me tell you how shocked I was by Mr Scribner’s death. It was in due time of course but nevertheless

I shall miss his fairness toward things that were of another generation, his general tolerance and simply his being there as titular head of a great business.

Please tell me how this affects you - if at all. The letter enclosed has been in my desk for three weeks as I wasn’t sure whether to send it when I wrote it. Then Powell Fowler and his wedding party arrived and I got unfortunately involved in dinners and night clubs and drinking; then Zelda got a sort of nervous breakdown from overwork and consequently I haven’t done a line of work or written a letter for twenty-one days.

Have you read The Building of St Michele and D. H. Lawrence’s Fantasia of the Unconscious? Don’t miss either of them.

Always yours,

Scott What news of Ernest?

Please don’t mention the enclosed letter to Ober as I’ve written him already.

Switzerland

circa July 8, 1930

Dear Max:

I’m asking Harold Ober to offer you these three stories which Zelda wrote in the dark middle of her nervous breakdown. I think you’ll see that apart from the beauty and richness of the writing they have a strange haunting and evocative quality that is absolutely new. I think too that there is a certain unity apparent in them - their actual unity is a fact because each of them is the story of her life when things for a while seemed to have brought her to the edge of madness and despair. In my opinion they are literature the I may in this case read so much between the lines that my opinion is valueless. (By the way Caldwell’s stories were a thorough disappointment, weren’t they - more crimes committed in Hemingway’s name.)

Ever yours,

Scott

Switzerland

circa July 20, 1930

Dear Max:

Zelda is still sick as hell, and the psychiatrist who is devoting almost his entire time to her is an expensive proposition. I was so upset in June when hopes for her recovery were black that I could practically do no work and got behind - then arrived a wire from Ober that for the first time he couldn’t make me the usual advance up to the price of a story. So then I called on you. I am having him turn over to you $3000 from the proceeds of the story I am sending off this week, as it’s terrible to be so in debt. A thousand thanks and apologies.

Yours as ever (if somewhat harassed and anxious about life),

Scott

Geneva, Switzerland

circa September 1, 1930

Dear Max:

All the world seems to end up in this flat and antiseptic smelling land - with an overlay of flowers. Tom Wolfe is the only man I’ve met here who isn’t sick or hasn’t sickness to deal with. You have a great find in him - what he’ll do is incalculable. He has a deeper culture than Ernest and more vitality, if he is slightly less of a poet that goes with the immense surface he wants to cover. Also he lacks Ernest’s quality of a stick hardened in the fire - he is more susceptible to the world. John Bishop told me he needed advice about cutting, etc., but after reading his book I thought that was nonsense. He strikes me as a man who should be let alone as to length, if he has to be published in five volumes. I liked him enormously.

I was sorry of course about Zelda’s stories - possibly they mean more to me than is implicit to the reader who doesn’t know from what depths of misery and effort they sprang. One of them, I think now, would be incomprehensible without a waste-land footnote. She has those series of eight portraits that attracted so much attention in College Humor and I think in view of the success of Dotty Parker’s Laments (25,000 copies) I think a book might be got together for next spring if Zelda can add a few more during the winter.

Wasn’t that a nice tribute to C.S. from Mencken in The Mercury?

The royalty advance or the national debt as it might be called shocked me. The usual vicious circle is here - I am now exactly $3000 ahead which means 2 months on the encyclopedia. I’d prefer to have all above the $10,000 paid back to you off my next story (in October). You’ve been so damn nice to me.

Zelda is almost well. The doctor says she can never drink again (not that drink in any way contributed to her collapse), and that I must not drink anything, not even wine, for a year, because drinking in the past was one of the things that haunted her in her delirium Do please send me things like Wolfe’s book when they appear. Is Ernest’s book a history of bull-fighting? I’m sending you a curious illiterate ms. written by a chasseur at my bank here. Will you skim it and see if any parts, like the marines in Central America, are interesting as pure data? And return it, if not, directly to him? You were absolutely right about the dollar books - it’s a preposterous idea and I think the Authors League went Crazy. —

Always yours,

Scott

This illness has cost me a fortune - hence that telegram in July. The biggest man in Switzerland gave all his time to her - and saved her reason by a split second.

Grand Hotel de la Paix Lausanne, Switzerland

Before May 21, 1931

Dear Max: —

An idea:

Princeton has had lots of books, too many in the last ten years (on a cursory inspection I’m not so much impressed with Burn- ham’s book which leans heavily on so many of us greybeards), but-

There’s been no Harvard book since Charlie Flandrau and Philosophy Four. I’m very impressed with a series of Harvard-Boston society stories by Bernard De Voto which have been running in the Post the last year. They’re light, romantic and exceedingly witty. I think that under some such title as Outside the Yard the as yet unsaturated Harvard public would lap them up. (I don’t dare suggest you call them Recent Researches at Cambridge.)

The new avant-garde magazines are not up to Transition, and this Caravan has nothing new except some good poetry. The fazz Age is over. If Mark Sullivan is going on, you might tell him I claim credit for naming it and that it extended from the suppression of the riots on May Day 1919 to the crash of the stock market in 1929 - almost exactly one decade.

Zelda is so much better. I’m taking her on a trip tomorrow - only for the day. But she’s herself again now, the not yet strong. Please send that proof of hers.

Yours always,

Scott

Fitz Don Ce-Sar Hotel StPetersburg, Florida (for three days only)

circa January 15,1932

Dear Max:

At last for the first time in two years and a half I am going to spend five consecutive months on my novel. I am actually six thousand dollars ahead. Am replanning it to include what’s good in what I have, adding 41,000 new words and publishing. Don’t tell Ernest or anyone - let them think what they want - you’re the only one who’s ever consistently felt faith in me anyhow.

Your letters still sound sad. For God’s sake take your vacation this winter. Nobody could quite ruin the house in your absence, or would dare to take any important steps. Give them a chance to see how much they depend on you and when you come back cut off an empty head or two. Thalberg did that with Metro-Goldwyn- Mayer.

Which reminds me that I’m doing that ‘Hollywood Revisited’ in the evenings and it will be along in, I think, six days - maybe ten.

Have Nunnally Johnson’s humorous stories from the Post been collected? Everybody reads them. Please at least look into this. Ask Myers - he ought to search back at least a year which is as long as I’ve been meaning to write you about it.

Where in hell are my Scandinavian copies of The Great Gatsby?

You couldn’t have sent me anything I enjoyed more than the Churchill book.

Always yours devotedly,

Scott Fitzg —

Hotel Rennert Baltimore,

Maryland

Before May 2,1932

Dear Max:...

Zelda’s novel is now good, improved in every way. It is new. She has largely eliminated the speakeasy-nights-and-our-trip-to-

Paris atmosphere. You’ll like it. It should reach you in ten days. I am too close to it to judge it but it may be even better than I think. But I must urge you two things.

(1) — If you like it please don’t wire her congratulations and please keep whatever praise you may see fit to give on the staid side - I mean, as you naturally would, rather than yield to a tendency one has with invalids to be extra nice to cheer them up. This seems a nuance but it is rather important at present to the doctors that Zelda does not feel that the acceptance (always granted you like it) means immediate fame and money. I’m afraid all our critical tendencies in the last decade got bullish; we discovered one Hemingway to a dozen Callaghans and Caldwells (I think the latter is a wash-out) and probably created a lot of spoiled geniuses who might have been good workmen. Not that I regret it - if that last five years uncovered Ernest, Tom Wolfe and Faulkner it would have been worthwhile, but I’m not certain enough of Zelda’s present stability of character to expose her to any superlatives. If she has a success coming she must associate it with work done in a workmanlike manner for its own sake, and part of it done fatigued and uninspired, and part of it done when even to remember the original inspiration and impetus is a psychological trick. She is not twenty-one and she is not strong, and she must not try to follow the pattern of my trail which is of course blazed distinctly on her mind.

(2) — Don’t discuss contract with her until I have talked to you.

Ring’s last story in the Post was pathetic, a shade of himself, but I’m glad they ran it first and I hope it’ll stir up his professional pride to repeat.

Beginning the article for you on Monday. You can count on it for the end of next week.

Now very important.

(1) — I must have a royalty report for 1931 for my income tax - they insist.

(2) — I borrowed $600 in 1931. $500 of this was redeemed by my article. The other hundred should show in royalty report.

(3) Since Gatsby was not placed with Grosset or Burt, I’d like to have it in the Modern Library. This is my own idea and have had no approach but imagine I can negotiate it. Once they are interested would of course turn negotiations over to you. But I feel, should you put obstacles in the way, you would be doing me a great harm and injustice. Gatsby is constantly mentioned among memorable books but the man who asks for it in a store on the basis of such mention does not ask twice. Booksellers do not keep such an item in stock and there is a whole new generation who cannot obtain it. This has been on my mind for two years and I must insist that you give me an answer that doesn’t keep me awake nights wondering why it possibly benefited the Scribners to have me represented in such an impersonal short story collection as that of the Modern Library by a weak story, and Ring, etc., by none at all. That ‘they would almost all have been Scribner authors’ was a most curious perversion of what should have been a matter of pride into an attitude of dog-in-the-manger.

Excuse that outburst, Max. Please write, answering all questions. Tell Louis I liked her story and hope she’s better. Things go all right with me now. What news of Ernest? And his book?

Ever your friend,

Scott

Hotel Rennert

Baltimore,

Maryland

circa May 14, 1932

Dear Max:

Here is Zelda’s novel. It is a good novel now, perhaps a very good novel - I am too close to tell. It has the faults and virtues of a first novel. It is more the expression of a powerful personality, like Look Homeward, Angel, than the work of a finished artist like Ernest Hemingway. It should interest the many thousands interested in dancing. It is about something and absolutely new, and should sell.

Now, about its reception. If you refuse it, which I don’t think you will, all communication should come through me. If you accept it write her directly and I withdraw all restraints on whatever meed of praise you may see fit to give. The strain of writing it was bad for her but it had to be written - she needed relaxation afterwards and I was afraid that praise might encourage the incipient egomania the doctors noticed, but she has taken such a sane common-sense view lately - (At first she refused to revise - then she revised completely, added on her own suggestion and has changed what was a rather flashy and self-justifying ‘true confessions’ that wasn’t worthy of her into an honest piece of work. She can do more with the galleys but I can’t ask her to do more now.) - But now praise will do her good, within reason. But she mustn’t write anything more on the personal side for six months or so until she is stronger.

Now a second thing, more important than you think. You haven’t been in the publishing business over twenty years without noticing the streaks of smallness in very large personalities. Ernest told me once he would ‘never publish a book in the same season with me,’ meaning it would lead to ill-feeling. I advise you, if he is in New York (and always granting you like Zelda’s book), do not praise it, or even talk about it to him! The finer the thing he has written, the more he’ll expect your entire allegiance to it as this is one of the few pleasures, rich and full and new, he’ll get out of it. I know this, and I think you do too and probably there’s no use warning you. There is no possible conflict between the books but there has always been a subtle struggle between Ernest and Zelda, and any apposition might have curiously grave consequences - curious, that is, to un-jealous men like you and me.

One thing more. Please, in your letter to Zelda (if of acceptance) do not mention contracts or terms. I will take it up immediately on hearing from you.

Thanks about the Modern Library. I don’t know exactly what I shall do. Five years have rolled away from me and I can’t decide exactly who I am, if anyone....

Ever your friend,

Scott

La Paix, Rodgers’ Forge Tow son, Maryland

January 19, 1933

Dear Max:

I was in New York for three days last week on a terrible bat. I was about to call you up when I completely collapsed and laid in bed for twenty-four hours groaning. Without a doubt the boy is getting too old for such tricks. Ernest told me he concealed from you the fact that I was in such rotten shape. I send you this, less to write you a Rousseau’s Confession than to let you know why I came to town without calling you, thus violating a custom of many years’ standing.

Thanks for the books that you have had sent to me from time to time. They comprise most of the reading I do because like everybody else I gradually cut down on expenses. When you have a line on the sale of Zelda’s book let us know.

Found New York in a high state of neurosis, as does everybody else, and met no one who didn’t convey the fact to me: it possibly proves that the neurosis is in me. All goes serenely down here. Am going on the water-wagon from the first of February to the first of April but don’t tell Ernest because he has long convinced himself that I am an incurable alcoholic due to the fact that we almost always meet on parties. I am his alcoholic just like Ring is mine and do not want to disillusion him, the even Post stories must be done in a state of sobriety. I thought he seemed in good shape, Bunny less so, rather gloomy. A decision to adopt Communism definitely, no matter how good for the soul, must of necessity be a saddening process for anyone who has ever tasted the intellectual pleasures of the world we live in.

For God’s sake can’t you lighten that pall of gloom which has settled over Scribner’s

Magazine - Erskine Caldwell’s imitations of Morley Callaghan’s imitations of Ernest, and Stuart Chase’s imitations of Earl Browder’s imitating Lenin? Maybe Ring would lighten your volume with a monthly article. I see he has perked up a little in The New Yorker.

All goes acceptably in Maryland, at least from the window of my study, with distant gun flashes on the horizon if you walk far out of the door.

Ever your old friend,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

La Paix, Rodgers’ Forge Towson, Maryland

September 25, 1933

Dear Max:

The novel has gone ahead faster than I thought. There was a little setback when I went to the hospital for four days but since then things have gone ahead of my schedule which, you will remember, promised you the whole manuscript for reading November 1, with the first one-fourth ready to shoot into the magazine (in case you can use it) and the other three-fourths to undergo further revision. I now figure that this can be achieved by about the 25th of October. I will appear in person, carrying the manuscript and wearing a spiked helmet.

There are several points and I wish you would answer them categorically.

1. Did you mean that you could get the first fourth of the story into the copy of the magazine appearing late in December and therefore that the book could appear early in April? I gathered that on the phone but want to be sure. I don’t know what the ocean travel statistics promise for the spring but it seems to me that a May publication would be too late if there was a great exodus and I should miss being a proper gift book for it. The story, as you know, is laid entirely in Europe -I wish I could have gotten as far as China but Europe was the best I could do, Max (to get into Ernest’s rhythm).

2.1 would not want a magazine proof of the first part, though of course I would expect your own proofreaders to check up on blatant errors, but would want to talk over with you any small changes that would have to be made for magazine publication - in any case to make them myself.

3. Will publication with you absolutely preclude that the book will be chosen by the Literary Guild or the Book-of-the-Month? Whatever the answer, the serial will serve the purpose of bringing my book to the memory and attention of my old public and of getting straight financially with you. On the other hand, it is to both our advantages to capitalize if possible such facts as that the editors of those book leagues might take a fancy to such a curious idea that the author, Fitzgerald, actually wrote a book after all these years (this is all said with the reservation that the book is good). Please answer this as it is of importance to me to know whether I must expect my big returns from serial and possibly theatrical and picture rights or whether I have as good a chance at a book sale, launched by one of those organizations, as any other best seller.

Ober is advancing me the money to go through with it (it will probably not need more than $2000 though he has promised to go as far as $4000) and in return I am giving him 10% of the serial rights. I plan to raise the money to repay him (if I have not already paid him by Post stories) by asking a further advance on the book royalties or on my next book which might be an omnibus collection of short stories or those two long serial stories about young people that I published some time ago in the Post as the Basil stories and the Josephine stories - this to be published in the fall.

You are the only person who knows how near the novel is to being finished. PIease don’t say a word to anyone.

4. — How will you give a month’s advance notice of the story - slip a band on the jacket of the December issue? I want to talk to you about advertising when I see you in late October so please don’t put even the publicity man at any work yet. As to the photographs I have a snapshot negative of the three of us with a surfboard, which enlarges to a nice 6 x 10 glossy suitable for rotogravures, and also have a fine double profile of Zelda and me in regular cabinet photograph size and have just gotten figures from the photographer. He wants $18.00 for twelve, $24.00 for twenty-four and $35.00 for fifty and says he does not sell the plates, though I imagine he could be prevailed upon if we give him a ‘take it or leave it’ offer. How many would you need? These two photographs are modem. I don’t want any of the old ones sent out and I don’t want any horrors to be dug up out of newspaper morgues.

Tell me how many you would need to cover all the press? Would it be cheaper if I sat when I came up there - the trouble is that in only one out of any three pictures is my pan of any interest.

5. — My plan, and I think it is very important, is to prevail upon the Modern Library, even with a subsidy, to bring out Gatsby a few weeks after the book publication of this novel. Please don’t say that anybody would possibly have the psychology of saying to themselves ‘one of his is in the Modern Library, therefore I will not buy another,’ or that the two books could be confused. The people who buy the Modern Library are not at all the people who buy the new books. Gatsby - in its present form, not actually available in sight to book buyers - will only get a scattering sale as a result of the success of this book. I feel that every time your business department has taken a short-sighted view of our community of interest in this matter, which is my reputation, there has been no profit on your part and something less than that on mine. As, for example, a novel of Ernest’s in the Modern Library and no novel of mine, a good short story of Ernest’s in their collection of the Great Modern Short Stories and a purely commercial story of mine. I want to do this almost as much as I want to publish this novel and will cooperate to the extent of sharing the cost.

There will be other points when I see you in October, but I will be greatly reassured to have some sort of idea about these points so that I can make my plans accordingly. I will let you know two or three days in advance when you may expect me.

One last point: unlike Ernest I am perfectly agreeable to making any necessary cuts for serial publication but naturally insist that I shall do them myself.

You can imagine the pride with which I will enter your office a month from now. Please do not have a band as I do not care for music.

Ever yours,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

La Paix, Rodgers’ Forge Towson,Maryland

September 29, 1933

Dear Max:

Since talking to you and getting your letter another angle has come up. Ober tells me that Burton of Cosmopolitan is very interested in the novel and if he took it would, in Ober’s opinion, pay between $30,000 and $40,000 for it. Now against that there are the following factors:

1. The fact that though Burton professes great lust for my work the one case in which I wrote a story specifically for him, that movie story that you turned down and that Mencken published, he showed that he really can’t put his taste into action; in that case the Hearst policy man smeared it 2. — The tremendous pleasure I would get from appearing in Scribner’s.

3. — The spring publication.

4. — My old standby, the Post, would not be too pleased to have my work running serially all spring and summer in the Cosmopolitan.

On the other hand, the reasons why it must be considered are between thirty and forty thousand, and all of them backed by the credit of the U.S. Treasury. It is a purely hypothetical sum I admit and certainly no serial is worth It, yet if Willie Hearst is still pouring gold back into the desert in the manner of 1929 would I be stupid not to take some or would I be stupid not to take some? My own opinion is that if the thing is offered to Burton, he will read it, be enthusiastic, and immediately an Obstacle will appear. On the other hand, should I even offer it to them? Should I give him a copy on the same day I give you a copy asking an answer from him within three days? Would the fact that he refused it diminish your interest in the book or influence it? Or, even, considering my relations with you would it be a dirty trick to show it to him at all? What worries me is the possibility of being condemned to go back to The Saturday Evening Post grind at the exact moment when the book is finished. I suppose I could and probably will but I will need a damn good month’s rest outdoors or traveling before I can even do that.

Can you give me any estimate as to how much I could expect from you as to payment for the serial and how much of that will be in actual cash? It seems terrible to ask you this when it is not even decided yet whether or not you want it; but what I want to do is to see if I can not offer it at all to Burton. I wish to God I had never talked to Harold about it and got these upsetting commercial ideas in my head.

I am taking care of the picture matter. I certainly would like to be on your cover and stare down Greta Garbo on the news-stands. I figure now that it should reach you, at the latest, on the 25th, though I am trying for the 23rd.

Ring’s death was a terrible blow. Have written a short appreciation of him for The New Republic.

Please answer.

Ever yours,

Scott

La Paix, Rodgers’ Forge Towson, Maryland

October 7, 1933

Dear Max:

I had already thought of your point and talked to John Lardner about it. My idea was that Gilbert Seldes could do it and was the ideal man for the job; also my idea was that the articles that Ring wrote over that series of time could be made into a sort of Ring’s history of the world. Whoever edits it should make it into a unit as far as possible. (Naturally I am not referring to the achieved facts of the stories.) I think that a big book of nonsense could be got up based on all the writings, apart from fiction, that Ring did, from his early newspaper days until the present. I have already taken it up with Seldes and John Lardner (the latter of whom is still under the spell of his father’s obsequies and will probably not get around to any action for a week or so) that it must be edited. When I say edited, I mean edited; if you want to have a volume of Ring’s that would properly represent him you should commission such a man as Gilbert to go through everything which is not fiction and make a sort of story out of it. Pay him high, 35 to 45% of the total royalties, and publish the book as a standard book of nonsense; no thin little volume as the Story of a Wonder- man (though what meat was in that should be used) but a real monument of American nonsense.

Any collection of Benchley, Corey Ford or Thurber would be merely a selection of incidents, in my opinion, while this collection of Ring’s could be made the story of a whole period, not up to the present, for toward the end he was a sick man and did not record very well; but during the period in which Ring functioned rationally he got everything that was going and that might be of interest to many people.

Why not get in touch with Gilbert and talk it over, showing him this letter, or else telling him the equivalent of the opinions here expressed? I know what I could do with the material and have faith in the hypothetical result, but it is simply impossible for me to undertake such work under present circumstances. This publication, mind you, would have to be utterly unlike the hasty compilations of Ring’s nonsense that you have put out - it would have to be a new dealing with it; it would take an intelligent ap- preciator’s whole time for a month to put it out in any other form than that would do harm to his reputation. My idea is that this nonsense cannot be spotted like Lear’s nonsense but must be organized like Lewis Carroll’s nonsense. All of it that is still funny (except the parts that were merely timely) should be included, but it must be made consecutive - well, consult with Gilbert and see if he has anything to suggest; this is the best I can offer.

Ever yours,

Scott

La Paix, Rodgers’ Forge Towson,Maryland

October 19,1933

Dear Max:

All goes well here. The first two chapters are in shape and am starting the third one this afternoon. So the first section comprising about 26,000 words will be mailed to you Friday night or Saturday morning.

Naturally I was delighted by your gesture of coming up two thousand. I hope to God results will show in the circulation of the magazine and I have an idea they will. Negotiations with Cosmopolitan were of course stopped and Ober is sure that getting the release from Liberty is merely a matter of form which he is attending to. I think I will need the money a little quicker than by the month, say $1000 on delivery of the first section and then the other J3000 every fortnight after that. This may not be necessary but the first $2000 will. As you know, I now owe Ober two or three thousand and he should be reimbursed so he can advance me more to carry me through the second section and a Post story. Naturally, payments on the serial should be made to him.

I am saying this now and will remind you later. My idea is that the book form of the novel should be set up from the corrected proof of the serial - in that I will re-insert the excisions which I am making for the serial.

If you have any way of getting French or Swiss railroad posters it would be well for you to try to. Now as to the blurbs: I think there should not be too many; I am sending you nine.....

‘The Great Gatsby is undoubtedly a work of art.’

The London Times

As to T. S. Eliot: What he said was in a letter to me - that he’d read it several times, it had interested and excited him more than any novel he had seen, either English or American, for a number of years, and he also said that it seemed to him that it was the first step forward in the American novel since Henry fames.

I know him slightly but I would not dare ask him for an endorsement. If it can be managed in any way without getting a rebuff, even some more qualified statement would be the next best thing to an endorsement by foyce or Gertrude Stein.

Of course I think blurbs have gotten to be pretty much the bunk, but maybe that is a writer’s point of view and the lay reader does not understand the back-scratching that is at the root of most of them. However, I leave it in your hands. Don’t quote all of these unless you think it is advisable.

We can talk over the matter of Gatsby in the Modern Library after your announcement has appeared.

Again thanks for the boost in price and remember the title is a secret to the last Ever your friend,

Scott Fitzgerald

I should say to be careful in saying it’s my first book in seven years not to imply that it contains seven years’ work. People would expect too much in bulk and scope.

This novel, my fourth, completes my story of the boom years. It might be wise to accentuate the fact that it does not deal with the depression. Don’t accentuate that it deals with Americans abroad - there’s been too much trash under that banner.

No exclamatory ‘At last, the long awaited, etc.’ That merely creates the ‘Oh yeah’ mood in people.

1307 Park Avenue

Baltimore,

Maryland

Xmas, 1933

Dear Fritz: —

Section III (Chapters VI to IX inclusive) is being typed and goes off special delivery Wednesday evening. I was foolish to have come South as there was inevitable Xmas confusion and I only got through by working all night and all the night before. It began by being 40,000 words but I judge it will turn out between 24,000 and 29,0000 after all.

While it is not weak it is perhaps a let-down from the two love affairs of Sections I and II. This was a hurried business and I intend to do the polishing on the proof. The month I lost in Bermuda was damn costly.

Now give me a real date and not a precautionary one for Section IV so I can make my plans with some rationality. You have nothing to fear - at the worst you could publish that section as it stands.

If this doesn’t arrive too late ‘beyed’ is better Deep South for ‘bird’ than either ‘bed’ or ‘buhd.’ As for the ‘Ah guess, etc.’ - better change the one dialect line to ‘I reckon’ and let it go at that.

I appreciate your interest which I feel is in the piece as well as in the magazine. Don’t hesitate to pass on any comments but I’d rather get them in bulk than piecemeal. I’ll probably have rewritten the whole thing by spring. Very best of Xmas greetings and tell Max only shame has prevented me thanking him for the extra loan.

Scott Fitzgerald

The psychiatrist at Hopkins says that not only is the medical stuff in II accurate but it seems the only good thing ever written on psychiatry and the - oh what the hell. Anyhow, that part’s O.K.

My mother wasn’t interested so it must have some merit.

1307 Park Avenue

Baltimore,

Maryland

January 13, 1934

Dear Max:

What do you think of the idea of using twenty-four of those woodcuts, which illustrate the serial, as head and tail pieces for chapters in the book or, alternatively, interspersing them through the novel? I think it is comparatively an innovation in recent fiction and might give the book a certain distinction. I’ve gotten very fond of the illustrations. Who the hell is the illustrator? If it is too expensive a process let me know, but since the cuts are already made I thought it might not be.

Please do not send me any book galley for the present, just hold it there. I am already confused by the multiplicity of the irons I have in the fire and as far as possible would prefer to do the book galley in one or two long stretches.

I did not thank you over the phone for the further advance, which does not mean that I did not appreciate it, but only that I have so much to thank you for.

Tell Dashiell that I cannot promise not to make changes in Section III, but under no conditions will it be lengthened. Section IV is taking longer than I thought and it may be the middle of next week before you get it Ever yours,

Scott Fitz —

P.S. 1. Will you ask Dashiell to strike off as many as half a dozen additional proofs because I have always a use for them in passing them around for technical advice. Again, this request is conditioned by not wanting it to be exorbitantly expensive.

P.S. 2. Don’t forget my suggestion that the jacket flap should carry an implication that though the book starts in a lyrical way, heavy drama will presently develop.

P.S. 3. Any contract you suggest will probably be O.K. You might bring one with you when you come down, an event to which I look forward eagerly.

P.S. 4. Also remember that upon due consideration I would prefer the binding to be uniform with my other books. If these were prosperous times and there were any prospect of a superior reissue of my whole tribe I’d say ‘Let it begin here,’ to quote the famous commander of the Minutemen, but there isn’t, so I prefer to stick to my undistinguished green uniform - I mean even to the point of the gilt stampings being uniform to the others.

P.S. 5.I don’t want to bore you by reiterating but I do think the matter of Gatsby in the Modern Library should be taken up as shortly as possible after the appearance of installment II.

P.S. 6. Am getting responses only from a few writers and from the movies. The novel will certainly have succès d’estime but it may be slow in coming - alas, I may again have written a novel for novelists with little chance of its lining anybody’s pockets with gold. The thing is perhaps too crowded for story readers to search it through for the story but it can’t be helped, there are times when you have to get every edge of your fingernails on paper. Anyhow I think this serial publication will give it the best chance it can possibly have because it is a book that only gives its full effect on its second reading. Almost every part of it now has been revised and thought out from three to six times. P.S. 7. What is the name of a functioning press clipping bureau?

1307 Park Avenue

Baltimore,

Maryland

February 5, 1934

Dear Max:

Isn’t there any mechanical means by which you can arrange to include the 1400 words of the arrest in Cannes? The more I think of it the more I think that it is absolutely necessary for the unity of the book and the effectiveness of the finale to show Dick in the dignified and responsible aspect toward the world and his neighbors that was implied so strongly in the first half of the book. It is all very well to say that this can be remedied in book publication but it has transpired that at least two dozen important writers and newspaper men are reading the book in the serial and will form their impressions from that. I have made cuts in Section IV - a good bit of the last scene between Dick and Tommy - but also the proof has swollen somewhat in revision which counteracts that, nor can I reduce the 1250 words of that scene to 800. I am saying 1400 because I know there will be a slight expansion. Couldn’t you take out some short piece from the number? Surely it hasn’t crystallized at this early date. Even with this addition the installment is shorter than the others, as I promised Fritz.

If I do not hold these two characters to the end of the book it might as well never have been written. It is legitimate to ruin Dick but it is by no means legitimate to make him an ineffectual. In the proof I am pointing up the fact that his intention dominated all this last part but it is not enough ‘nd the foreshortening without the use of this scene, which was a part of the book structure from the first, does not contain enough of him for the reader to reconstruct his whole personality as viewed as a unit throughout - and the reason for this is my attempt to tell the last part entirely through Nicole’s eyes. I was even going to have her in on the Cannes episode but decided against it because of the necessity of seeing Dick alone.

My feeling about this was precipitated by the remarks of the young psychiatrist who is the only person who had read all the magazine proof and only the magazine proof. He felt a sharp lesion at the end which those who had read the whole novel did not feel.

While I am writing you I may as well cover some other points:

1. — Please don’t forget the indentation of title and author on the front cover as in previous books. There are other Fitzgeralds writing and I would like my whole name on the outside of the book, and also I would prefer uniformity.

2. — Would you please strike off at least three book proofs for me, all to be used for revisions such as medical, linguistic, etc.? Also, I would like an extra galley of book proof Section IV when you have it, for Ober to pass on to Davis in order to supply the missing material.

3. — In advertising the book some important points are: Please do not use the phrase ‘Riviera’ or ‘gay resorts.’ Not only does it sound like the triviality of which I am so often accused, but also the Riviera has been thoroughly exploited by E. Phillips Oppenheim and a whole generation of writers and its very mention invokes a feeling of unreality and unsubstantially. So I think it would be best to watch this and reduce it only to the statement that the scenes of the book are laid in Europe. If it could be done, a suggestion that, after a romantic start, a serious story unfolds would not be amiss; also it might be mentionable that for exigencies of serialization a scene or two was cut. In general, as you know, I don’t approve of great ballyhoo advertisements, even of much quoted praise. The public is very, very, very weary of being sold bogus goods and this inevitably reacts on solider manufactures.

I find that revising in this case is pulling up the weakest section of the book and then the next weakest, etc. First Section III was the weakest and Section IV the strongest, so I bucked up III; then IV was the weakest and is still, but when I have fixed that Section I will be the weakest. The section that has best held up is Section II.

I was tremendously impressed with South Moon Under * until I read her prize short story, ‘Gal Young Un.’ I suddenly saw the face of Ethan Frome peering out from under a palmetto hat. The heroine is even called Matt in tribute to the power of the subconscious. Well, well, well, I often think of Picasso’s remark ‘You do it first, then other people can come along and do it pretty and get off with a big proportion of the spoils. When you do it first you can’t do it pretty.’ So I guess Miss Rawlings is just another writer after all, just when I was prepared to welcome her to the class of 1896 with Ernest, Dos Passos and myself.

Please wire about the inclusion of the Cannes episode, and don’t sidetrack these advertising points.

Ever yours,

Scott

1307 Park Avenue

Baltimore,

Maryland

February 7, 1934

Dear Max:

The fear of being dependent again on The Saturday Evening Post promoted this idea and led me to a consideration of publishing in general; and, from that, the notion developed in the half- baked way that I told you. I began by thinking of the publishing devices of the early 18th century, with special reference to Dickens’ Household Words.

Now, just as Scribner’s Magazine has changed its character several times between being primarily a fiction magazine, or primarily an open forum, so there is no reason in its tradition why it should not consider a radical step. I do not underestimate the value of the present Scribner’s in the humanitarian way, but nowadays ventures must be self-sustaining, and competing journals can also muster the same quantity and quality of uneasy liberal thinking - viz. Harper’s and Atlantic Monthly. This innova- tionary policy has, of course, been exemplified in your regime, not only by encouraging the short novels, or novelettes, but also in this new departure about long novels. Pursuing this policy to its logical end, I am inclined to think that sooner or later you will be faced with the decision of choosing (temporarily at least) between being a magazine of fiction or being a magazine of opinion, and that the opinion eventually must be yours. I am Communist enough to distrust the idea of an ‘open forum,’ which usually means a forum in which a Roman citizen can appear and talk as much as he wants within the range of Roman opinion - in despite of the apparent radicalism of your publishing John Strachey.

By and large I see the problems that confront you, yet I wonder whether you or I, or any of us, can really print a synthesis of opinions in the air as a policy; and in the same breath, I reiterate that in all common sense this tack will sooner or later amount to a compromise that, like all compromises, will have neither force nor vitality. The other idea, on the contrary, has the following advantages: from the editorial point of view it would give you the opportunity of going into a specialization that, substituted for the somewhat vague economic views (and here I refer to the whole staff of Scribners publishing house, from Charles to the printer’s devil, indeed, to all of us insofar as we are associated with you, with the accumulated taste embodied in the publishing house), would be a line for which you are perhaps better equipped than anybody in America.

A second argument in favor of the idea is that you have at your disposal almost anybody that you want. When you say, as you did the other night, that you cannot count on writers delivering on time, God knows I understand, but you have so many good young writers, and I am counting on the idea attracting so many others who otherwise cannot publish except in book form. I think your difficulties, once the idea was launched, would be on the contrary, a question of deciding betwixt good things offered.

My idea, as I told you, would be a cover, which would say, for example: first part of Hemingway, second part of Fleming, third part of Fitzgerald, fourth part of Wolfe. You would be dealing with two or three established authors and perhaps one newcomer that you happened to like, and the money that you paid out would serve to keep those people going. In these days any author would rather have a modest fee for his serial than not to serialize at all. In a sense, they would develop a feeling that they were partners in a corporate enterprise and I think that I can speak for many of us when I say that we would welcome the idea of a forum which is as open for long fiction as it is for the most casual opinionated shreds of political opinion.

A fourth point: while I don’t know the mechanics of the magazine’s make-up, this policy should not preclude the inclusion of a certain number of opinionated articles upon public affairs, used almost as editorials. From your experience you must have seen that out of half a dozen articles in Scribner’s, or for that matter in any other quality magazine, about six a year have the value of what the Victorians would call essays and the rest is mere timely journalism, moribund almost with its appearance; after a few months how many of such articles are of more literary or humanitarian importance than the spreads in Hearst’s Sunday supplement? And, practically, if the consumer can get The New York Sunday Times Book Review and Magazine Section what distinction can he make between that and a quality magazine except for the name and the colored jacket?

As I mentioned last night, almost all the editorial magazine successes have depended on young men, if I can flatter you and Charles Scribner, me, Ernest, Tom Wolfe, as being young men. Crowninshield grows old and Ross comes up with The New Yorker; The Literary Digest grows old and Time comes along; Lorimer t who has been for a long time my bread (Scribner’s being considered the meat of my survival), is growing old, and then that bread will inevitably go stale.

It is not beyond the limits of imagination to suppose that this condition, in which only the choices of the Book-of-the-Month get across big, may be a permanent condition. It is conceivable that the local bookstore, except as represented by such as yours and Brentano’s, will become as obsolete as the silent picture. For one thing the chain-store buying and the job-lot-buying department stores seem to condemn the independent bookstores to the situation that they have reached in Baltimore where, considering the outlay involved, they can only be compared to the fallow antique shops. There is also the library question, which, in a socializing world, will become bigger and bigger.

In résumé, let me line up the elements for and against the idea.

Present procedure: dignified presentation of a, perhaps, good book with sale of 3000 copies, and not much profit to anybody.

Attitude toward the author’s surrendering dramatic and movie rights correct in the 90s when conditions were different but now archaic.

Futility of issuing books that, either from inefficiency in writing or being-over-the-heads-of-the-crowd, clutter up the remnant counter. Essentially this is not a service to writers as was the case in the past. Take, for example, my recommendation to you, rather half-hearted, of Woodward Boyd’s The Love Legend. Why the hell should she have the right to publish a poor book? As things tighten up I think that more harm is done by encouraging inefficient amateurs than would be done if they were compelled to go through a certain professional apprenticeship. The one man or woman aspirant out of a hundred who has some quality of genius is another matter, but those who show ‘promise’ had probably better be relegated immediately to doing other things in the world, or else working on their own guts for professional advancement, rather than be coddled along on the basis that they may eventually make a fortune for themselves and everybody concerned.

Therefore, a weariness in the reviewers, and, except for the presentation, no realistic cooperation.

Now to consider conditions as they are: there is, first, the selection by the book leagues, whether we like it or not; there is the reprinting of either quality stuff in the Modern Library or drug-

Store stuff in the reprint houses, with the publishers frankly taking a share in other rights, specifically including movie rights.

Now why shouldn’t incipient writers have to prove themselves? Why shouldn’t an issue of a book between boards be contingent upon the ability of the work to arouse interest? And isn’t a magazine-printing a cheaper and more advantageous test all around?

If this comes out at the proper end of the horn as the note I intended to blow when I blew, it reduces itself to the following propositions:

1. — That Scribner’s is much better equipped now to handle fiction, travel, etc., than to handle politics.

2. — That, unless you have some big axe to grind, politics are of only transitory interest.

3. — That traditionalism is, in this case, a policy to which one can fairly attach the odium of archaism, because just as an author’s main purpose is ‘to make you see,’ so a magazine’s principal purpose is to be read.

4. — Perhaps I am the proverbial fool rushing in, and if it so appears to you simply forget the whole suggestion. However, I have a hunch that within a year somebody will adopt such a policy. And may I reiterate that the idea was suggested orginally by a policy which you have already inaugurated, and that this is simply a radical urge to hasten it toward what I think is an inevitable outcome, an effort to meet the entertainment business on its own predetermined grounds.

Ever yours,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

1307 Park Avenue

Baltimore,

Maryland

March 4, 1934

Dear Max:

Confirming our conversation on the phone this morning, I wish you could get some word to the printers that they should not interfere with my use of italics. If I had made a mess of a type face, that would be another matter. I know exactly what I am doing, and I want to use italics for emphasis, and not waste them on the newspaper convention laid down by Mr Munsey in 1858. Of course, always you have been damned nice in having your printers follow my specifications, but in this case, and under the very pressing conditions under which we are working, it worries me that the book galleys came back with exactly the same queries that the magazine galleys had. Could you tip them the wink some way so that they would please follow my copy exactly as they used to, as this is my last chance at the book? Whoever has been in charge of it must be very patient because I know at the ninth revision that the very sight of any part of it fills me with nausea. However, I have to go on in this particular case while they don’t, and so are liable to get careless.

Going over the other points, I hope both (1) that the review copies will go out in plenty of time, and (2) that they will get the version of the novel as it will be published because there is no doubt that each revision makes a tremendous difference in the impression that the book will leave. After all, Max, I am a plodder. One time I had a talk with Ernest Hemingway, and I told him, against all the logic that was then current, that I was the tortoise and he was the hare, and that’s the truth of the matter, that everything that I have ever attained has been through long and persistent struggle while it is Ernest who has a touch of genius which enables him to bring off extraordinary things with facility. I have no facility. I have a facility for being cheap, if I wanted to indulge that. I can do cheap things. I changed Clark Gable’s act at the moving picture theatre here the other day. I can do that kind of thing as quickly as anybody but when I decided to be a serious man, I tried to struggle over every point until I have made myself into a slow-moving behemoth (if that is the correct spelling), and so there I am for the rest of my life. Anyhow, these points of proofreading, etc., are of tremendous importance to me, and you can charge it all to my account, and I will realize all the work you have had on it.

As I told you on the phone, I enjoyed Marjorie Rawlings’ praise, but it was somewhat qualified by her calling my people trivial people. Other stuff has drifted in from writers from all over America, some of it by telegram, which has been complimentary.

Now, about advertising. Again I want to tell you my theory that everybody is absolutely dead on ballyhoo of any kind, and for your advertising department to take up any interest that the intellectuals have so far shown toward the book, and exploit that, would be absolutely disastrous. The reputation of a book must grow from within upward, must be a natural growth. I don’t think there is a comparison between this book and The Great Gatsby as a seller. The Great Gatsby had against it its length and its purely masculine interest. This book, on the contrary, is a woman’s book. I think, given a decent chance, it will make its own way insofar as fiction is selling under present conditions.

Excuse me if this letter has a dogmatic ring. I have lived so long within the circle of this book and with these characters that often it seems to me that the real world does not exist but that only these characters exist, and, however pretentious that remark sounds (and my God, that I should have to be pretentious about my work), it is an absolute fact - so much so that their glees and woes are just exactly as important to me as what happens in life.

Zelda is better. There is even a chance of her getting up for the exhibition of her paintings at Easter, but nothing certain. Do you still think that idea of piling the accumulated manuscript in the window is a valid one? My instinct does not quite solve the problem. What do you think? Would it seem a little phony?

With best wishes,

Scott

1307 Park Avenue

Baltimore,

Maryland

March 5,1934

Dear Max:

The stout arrived this morning and I am sampling it for lunch. I think I’d better have my photograph taken first for if I become as swollen as you intend my thousands and thousands of younger admirers will just leave the sinking ship.

By the way, when you and Louise left here did you, by any chance, take with you 12 spoons, 12 forks, 12 knives (fish), 12

knives (dinner), 1 silver salver, 1 revolver, 1 platinum and diamond wrist-watch? I don’t like to accuse anybody of anything but there is a very curious coincidence. I may say if it’s all sent back within the week I shall take no further steps in the matter. We assure you, sir, that we returned the wrong trousers and we are having our agent look into the matter. With a business as large as ours and trousers as small as yours such things will happen.

In any case, Max, if the stout kills me I protected myself by a new clause in my will based on the old Maryland Poison Act - Md.362 XX: 1,47, Yours very truly,

F. Scott Fitzgerald (Bart)

1307 Park Avenue

Baltimore,

Maryland

June 26, 1934

Dear Max.

Am sending along Number 1 of the stories because I feel it’s going to be the devil to set up. There are two others all corrected, but the slow thing is to look through Tender Is the Night and see what phrases I took out of the stories. This is confused by the fact that there were so many revisions of Tender that I don’t know what I left in it and what I didn’t leave in it finally. I am going to have trouble with two of the stories you suggested. In ‘The Captured Shadow,’ I’ll have to make up a whole new ending which is almost like writing a new story. Secondly, the Josephine story, ‘A Nice Quiet Place,’ has some awfully phony stuff in the middle that I’ll have to find a substitute for. So can’t I send the stories in their original order, and have them set up separately, and then sandwich between them these last two if I can think of some way of fixing them in time?

Nothing new about the title.

By the time you get this, you will have gotten a begging telegram asking for a thousand dollars. How I ever got so deep in debt I don’t know unless it’s been this clinic business, because I’ve written regularly a story a month since finishing the last proof of Tender and they have been sold. I have also fixed up and sold some of Zelda’s little articles besides. Debt is an odd thing and it seems if you ever get started in it it is very difficult to get disentangled. I have put the movie possibilities of the novel out of mind for the present though the young man I told you about who went from here to the coast is still trying further treatments in hopes that they will buy it. My best chance now is that if Phyllis Bottome’s psychiatric story goes, they may all rush to buy whatever else is available in that line. Looks now as if I will be here until well into the summer, but I am going to try damn hard to get a month off somewhere if I can get clear of debts and clear of the work to which I committed myself. I can well understand all your difficulties working in the office by day and with Tom Wolfe by night because until ten days ago, when I collapsed and took to my bed, I have been doing about the same thing. I am all right now and once I get this Post story off should be out of the worst.

Zelda does much better. Morrow read her stuff but turned down the plan.

Ever yours, Scott

1307 Park Avenue

Baltimore,

Maryland

July 30, 1934

Dear Max:

The bottom sort of fell out of things after you left. We sat around for a few hours and talked a lot about you. The only flaw in the evening was the fact that afterwards I didn’t seem to be able to sleep any better in Virginia than I did in Maryland, so, after reading an old account of Stuart’s battles for an hour or so, I got dressed in despair and spent the small hours of the morning prowling around the place, finally snatching two hours of sleep between seven and nine. The next day - it being our hostess’ custom to sleep late - Anne took me over to meet the fabled Harden, who was as interesting as promised by the discussion about him.

Returning to ‘Welbourne,’a whole slew of Virginians appeared and to my regret I didn’t have much more chance to talk to Elizabeth, because my conscience had begun to worry me and I decided to take the three o’clock bus back to Washington. However, one of the guests took dictation and I managed to have my joke about Grant and Lee taken down on paper. Then last night I had it faked up by the Sun here in Baltimore and I am going to send one to Elizabeth framed. Please return the one herewith enclosed for your inspection.

I thought Elizabeth Lemmon was charming.... The whole atmosphere of that countryside made me wonder about many things. It seems to me more detached than any place I have ever visited in the Union except a few remote towns in Alabama and Georgia during the war before the radio came. By the way, I had never ridden in a bus before and thought it was rather a horrible experience after the spacious grace of that house.

This morning before breakfast I read Tom Wolfe’s story in Scribners.I thought it was perfectly beautiful and it had a subtlety often absent from his work, an intense poetry rather akin to Ernest (though naturally you won’t tell Tom that because he wouldn’t take it as a compliment). What family resemblance there is between we three as writers is the attempt that crops up in our fiction from time to time to recapture the exact feel of a moment in time and space, exemplified by people rather than by things - that is, an attempt at what Wordsworth was trying to do rather than what Keats did with such magnificent ease, an attempt at a mature memory of a deep experience. Anyhow please congratulate him for me with all my heart.

This letter is dragging out. Hope you found Louise all right. A thousand thanks for taking me into that very novel and stimulating atmosphere. I had been in a hell of a rut.

Ever yours,

Scott

P.S. Here’s the money I owe you. I made it twelve instead of eleven because I had forgotten that expensive wine that I insisted upon ordering and which I drank most of, and anyhow twelve is a more symmetrical number than eleven.

1307 Park Avenue

Baltimore,

Maryland

August 24, 1934

Dear Max:

This is a sort of postscript to my letter of yesterday: I do think that you were doing specious reasoning in part of your letter. The fact that Ernest has let himself repeat here and there a phrase would be no possible justification for my doing the same. Each of us has his virtues and one of mine happens to be a great sense of exactitude about my work. He might be able to afford a lapse in that line where I wouldn’t be and after all I have got to be the final judge of what is appropriate in these cases. Max, to repeat for the third time, this is in no way a question of laziness. It is a question absolutely of self-preservation. It is not going to be a money book in any case and is not going to go very far toward reimbursing the money I still owe you, and so I think in view of everything that my suggestion of waiting until after Christmas is the best.

Besides, it is not only the question of the repetitions but there are certain other stories in the collection that I couldn’t possibly think of letting go out in their current form. I fully realize that this may be a very serious inconvenience to you but for me to undertake anything like that at this moment would just mean sudden death and nothing less than that.

Ever yours,

Scott

P.S. I have just gotten a royalty report and don’t know whether the sum of my debit is on the red page or on the regular royalty report. Please have someone let me know.

1307 Park Avenue

Baltimore,

Maryland

October 17, 1934

Dear Max:

The mood of terrible depression and despair is not going to become a characteristic and I am ashamed and felt very yellow about it afterwards. But to deny that such moods come increasingly would be futile.

I took you at your word and went down to Welbourne for an afternoon to prance before Elizabeth and found her in her usual good form, and also Mary Rumsey. But the trouble about women is that when you need them most they are never in a receptive mood (not that both Elizabeth and Mary were not hospitable, it’s just the old story that when you feel like weeping on somebody’s shoulder you’re usually in such a state of mind and body that nobody wants you to weep on their shoulder).

The country was beautiful, however. Will write at length later. They missed you, and I added to their chagrin by telling them how I urged you to go down the night before.

Feel somewhat refreshed and am finishing my story today.

Ever yours, Scott

1307 Park Avenue

Baltimore,

Maryland

November 8, 1934

Dear Max:

In further reference to my telegram of Tuesday night: first, I am sending you the third story in its proper place ready to go into the book. The thing that worried me when I did it was whether the proof-reader is going to be able to release a lot of type, because, due to the fact that the end of one story and the beginning of another were run on one galley, he will have to scrap half the type in the galley and yet retain the other half - this because the stories were not set up in proper order. I know this is a terrible and costly mess and I take full responsibility; nevertheless, I did think the stories would be set up separately and getting at them is as if the chapters of a book were set up any which way, like, I, VII, II, V, III, VI, and it all has to be straightened out each time. As you know that is fatiguing work and can best be done when one is fresh, and is hard to do at night.

My big mistake was in thinking I could possibly deliver this collection for this fall. I should have known perfectly well that, in debt as I was to the tune of about $12,000 on finishing Tender, I should have to devote the summer and most of the fall to getting out of it. My plan was to do my regular work in the daytime and do one story every night, but as it works out, after a good day’s work I am so exhausted that I drag out the work on a story to two hours when it should be done in one and go to bed so tired and wrought up, toss around sleepless, and am good for nothing next morning except dictating letters, signing checks, tending to business matters, etc. - but to work up a creative mood there is nothing doing until about four o’clock in the afternoon. Part of this is because of ill health. It would not have seemed so difficult to me ten years, or even five years ago, but now just one more straw would break the camel’s back.

I have about half a dozen of these done but I am determined this time to send them in only in the proper order and not add further confusion either in my own mind or that of the printer’s. The trouble began when I sent you two stories to be set up which were nowhere near each other in the book. If I told a story about a boy of sixteen years old and sixty pages on the reader came upon a story of the same boy at thirteen it would make no sense to him and look like careless presentation, and which, as you know, I dislike nothing more.

As you may have seen I took out ‘A New Leaf and put in ‘Her Last Case.’ You didn’t tell me whether or not you read it or liked it.

I know you have the sense that I have loafed lately but that is absolutely not so. I have drunk too much and that is certainly slowing me up. On the other hand, without drink I do not know whether I could have survived this time. In actual work since I finished the last proof of the novel in the middle of March, eight months ago, I have written and sold three stories for the Post, written another which was refused, written two and a half stories for the Redbook, rewritten three articles of Zelda’s for Esquire and one original for them to get emergency money, collaborated on a 10,000-word treatment of Tender Is the Night, which was no go, written an 8ooo-word story for Gracie Allen, which was also no go, and made about five false starts on stories which went from 1000 to 5000 words, and a preface to the Modern Library edition of The Great Gatsby, which equalizes very well what I have done in other years. I am good for just about one good story a month or two articles. I took no vacation this summer except three or four one-night trips to Virginia and two business trips to New York, each of which lasted about four or five days. Of course this is no excuse for not making more money, because in harder times you’ve got to work harder, but as it happens I am in a condition at the moment where to work extra hard means inevitably that I am laid up for a compensatory time either here or in the hospital. All I can say is that I will try to do two or three of these all at once after finishing each piece of work, and as I am now working at the rate of a story each ten days for the Redbook series I should finish up the ten I have left to do in about one hundred days and deliver the last of them in mid-February. Perhaps if things break better it may be a month sooner.

Thanks immensely for the Henry fames which I thought was wonderful and which is difficult reading as it must have been to write, and for ‘At Sea.’

The London press on my book has been spotty but The London Times gave it a good review as did G. B. Stem in The Daily Telegraph, and so did The Manchester Guardian and The Spectator, and those I guess are the four most important ones in England and I got a column in each of them. A letter says that it hasn’t reached a thousand copies yet.

I hope you’ll be down here soon. It was rather melancholy to think of ‘Welbourne’ being closed for the winter but the last time I saw Elizabeth she seemed quite reconciled at visiting here and there, though such a prospect would drive me nuts. Hope you have sent off the carbon of the Table of Contents.

Best ever,

Scott

1307Park Avenue

Baltimore,

Maryland

November 26,1934

Dear Max:

The real thing that decided me about ‘Her Last Case’ was that it was a place story and just before seeing it in published form I ran across Thomas Wolfe’s ‘The House of the Far and Lost and I thought there was no chance of competing with him on the same subject, when he had brought off such a triumph. There would inevitably have been invidious comparisons. If my story had anything to redeem it, except atmosphere, I would not hesitate to include it but most of it depends on a mixture of hysteria and sentiment - anyhow, I did not decide without some thought.

I think by this time you will have read and liked ‘The Fiend’ which, spare and meager as it may be, has, I believe, a haunting quality. At least the tale in itself had enough poignancy to haunt me long enough, to keep in my skull for six years. Whether I’ve given it the right treatment, or disparaged it by too much peeling away of accessories, I can’t say. That’s one reason that I asked you to set it up, because maybe I am not too clear about it myself and maybe I can do something with the proof if it seems advisable.

I throw out most of the stuff in me with delight that it is gone. That statement might be interesting to “consider in relation with Ernest’s article in last month’s Esquire; an unexpressed idea is often a torment, even though its expression is liable to leave an almost crazy gap in the continuity of one’s thoughts. And it would have been absolutely impossible for me to have stretched ‘The Rich Boy’ into anything bigger than a novelette.

That statement was something that Ring got off; he never knew anything about composition, except as it concerned the shorter forms; that is why he always needed advice from us as to how to organize his material; it was his greatest fault - the fault of many men brought up in the school of journalism - while a novelist with his sempiternal sigh can cut a few breaths. It is a hell of a lot more difficult to build up a long groan than to develop a couple of short coughs!

Glad Ernest isn’t doing the Crusading story, now, because it would be an unfortunate competition.

Josephine goes along and I think I will be in the clear about her this week, and - as I told you - two or three of the others have already been done and just have to be glanced at.

Your suggestion to go to Key West is tempting as hell but I don’t know whether it would be advisable on either Ernest’s account or mine. We can talk about that later.

A short note from Beth acknowledged an invitation that I gave her to meet Gertrude Stein if she should be in the vicinity, and said that she had a long letter from you. Outside of that, life has gone along at what would seem to most people a monotonous routine: entertained Lovestone ‘the Opposition Communist Saturday and put him up for the night but haven’t quite made up my mind what I think of him.

Am so fascinated with the medieval series that my problem is making them into proper butcher’s cuts for monthly consumption. I have thought of the subject so long that an actual fertility of invention has become even a liability.

Ever yours,

Scott

1307 Park Avenue

Baltimore,

Maryland

December 18, 1934

Dear Max:

Tremendously obliged for the fifty dollars. The Redbook is stalling on these medieval stories, much to my disgust, and that is slowing up things and also it may put a crimp in the series so far as serialization is concerned. They have taken three and can’t seem to decide about the fourth, so temporarily I am going to return to the Post and make some larger money until that straightens out. This was the reason for the financial emergency.

Now I’ve got to blow up because an incident of this proof has upset my entire morning. You know how irascible I am when I am working and it increases with the years, but I have never seen a proofreader quite as dumb as the one who has looked over this second galley. In the first place I did not want a second galley and did not ask for it - these stories have been corrected once for myself, once for the Post and the third time on your first galleys and that is all I can do. I expected to have the page proofs made up from the corrected first galley and requested that not even these be sent to me. I first understand that it is an advantage to make no more corrections, then along comes a set of completely superfluous galleys marked with the most idiotic and disturbing queries.

Example: this proofreader calmly suggests that I correct certain mistakes of construction in the characters’ dialogue. My God, he must be the kind who would rewrite Ring Lardner, correcting his grammar, or fix up the speeches of Penrod to sound like Little Lord Fauntleroy. Who is it? Robert Bridges?

His second brilliant stroke of Victorian genius was to query all the split infinitives. If, on a fourth version, I choose to let them stand I am old enough to know what I am doing. On this proof I simply struck off the queries and am sending the rest back without looking at it. My worry is that I didn’t look at the Basil stories at all before returning them, and if he has corrected all Basil’s language, spoiling some of my jokes - well, it just gives me the feeling of wanting to send back the whole mass of first galleys and saying set it up.

Honestly, Max, I have worked like a dog on these galleys and it is costing me money to make these changes, and to have some cluck fool with them again is exasperating beyond measure. They should have gone right into page proof from my first galleys - I would a hundred times rather have half a dozen errors creep in than have half a dozen humorous points and carefully considered rhythms spoiled by some school marm. This may seem vehement but I tell you it will haunt me in my sleep until you write reassuring me that no such thing happened in the case of the Basil stories.

Again thanks for the money. It was a life-saver. There will be another story coming along tomorrow.

Ever yours,

Scott

1307 Park Avenue

Baltimore,

Maryland

March 9, 1935

Dear Max:

The book arrived. It was fine to see. I liked the get-up and thought it was an excellent blurb on the back, but -

- is it, alas, too late to do anything about the jacket? It is pretty God-awful and about six people have commented on it. I don’t know who Miss Doris Spiegal is but it’s rather discouraging to spend many hours trying to make the creatures in a book charming and then have someone who can’t draw as well as Scottie cover five square inches with daubs that make them look like morons. The first jacket was very much better.

This sounds ungrateful in view of the trouble my books have always been, but I do want to record the fact that of late I have been badly served by your art department. To take a perfectly good photograph and debauch it into a toothless old man on the back of Tender was not so good, but I do think a jacket like this has the absolute opposite effect of those fine attractive jackets that Hill and Held used to draw for my books. I always believed that eternal care about titles and presentation was a real element in their success.

I’ve seen Jim Boyd and we’ve had several meals together. He’s an awfully nice fellow.

I am still hesitating about sending this letter because I know what a lot more important things you have in your mind and how busy you are at this season, but I am sending it on the off- chance that it might have been a sample jacket and that something might be done. -

Ever yours,

Scott

P.S. I was glad that Tom got nice reviews in Time and The New Yorker and that they gave him space in proportion to the time and effort that went into his volume. I’m going to give it a more thorough reading next week.

1307 Park Avenue

Baltimore,

Maryland

March 11, 1935

Dear Max:

The second annoyance to you in two days - pretty soon I’m going to be your most popular author. (By the way, we had sort of a Scribner congeries here last night. Jim Boyd and Elizabeth came to supper and George Calverton dropped in afterwards. Your name came up frequently and you would have probably wriggled more than at Wolfe’s dedication. To prolong this parenthesis unduly I am sorry I mentioned Tom’s book. I hope to God I won’t be set up as the opposition for there are fine things in it, and I loved reading it, and I am delighted that it’s a wow, and it may be a bridge for something finer. I simply feel a certain disappointment which I would, on no account, want Tom to know about, for, responding as he does to criticism, I know it would make us life-long enemies and we might do untold needless damage to each other, so please be careful how you quote me. This is in view of Calverton’s saying he heard from you that I didn’t like it It has become increasingly plain to me that the very excellent organization of a long book or the finest perceptions and judgment in time of revision do not go well with liquor. A short story can be written on a bottle, but for a novel you need the mental speed that enables you to keep the whole pattern in your head and ruthlessly sacrifice the sideshows as Ernest did in A Farewell to Arms. If a mind is slowed up ever so little it lives in the individual part of a book rather than in a book as a whole; memory is dulled. I would give anything if I hadn’t had to write Part III of Tender Is the Night entirely on stimulant. If I had one more crack at it cold sober I believe it might have made a great difference. Even Ernest commented on sections that were needlessly included and as an artist he is as near as I know for a final reference. Of course, having struggled with Tom Wolfe as you did all this is old hat to you. I will conclude this enormous parenthesis with the news that Elizabeth has gone to Middleburg to help Mrs White open up her newly acquired house.)

This letter is a case of the tail (the parenthesis) wagging the dog. Here is the dog. A man named John S. Martens writes me wanting to translate Tender Is the Night or This Side of Paradise or The Great Gatsby into Norwegian. He has written Scribners and met the same blank wall of silence that has greeted me about all publishing of my books in other countries. I am quite willing to handle continental rights directly but I cannot do it when I do not know even the name of the publisher of my books, having never had copies of them or any information on that subject. Isn’t there somebody in your office who is especially delegated to seeing to such things? It is really important to me and if I should write a book that had an international appeal it would be of great advantage to have a foothold with translators and publishers in those countries. All I want from you is the status of The Great Gatsby in Scandinavia, Germany, etc., and a word as to whether I shall go ahead and make arrangements myself for the future in that regard.

I’d be glad to get a dozen or so copies of Taps at Reveille as soon as available.

Ever yours,

Scott

P.S. I haven’t had a drink for almost six weeks and haven’t had the faintest temptation as yet. Feel fine in spite of the fact that business affairs and Zelda’s health have never been worse.

1307 Park Avenue

Baltimore,

Maryland

April 15, 1935

Dear Max:

You don’t say anything about Taps so I gather it hasn’t caught on at all. I hope at least it will pay for itself and its corrections. There was a swell review in The Nation; did you see it?

I went away for another week but history didn’t repeat itself and the trip was rather a waste. Thanks for the message from Ernest. I’d like to see him too and I always think of my friendship with him as being one of the high spots of life. But I still believe that such things have a mortality, perhaps in reaction to their very excessive life, and that we will never again see very much of each other. I appreciate what he said about Tender Is the Night.

Things happen all the time which make me think that it is not destined to die quite as easily as the boys-in-a-hurry prophesied. However, I made many mistakes about it from its delay onward, the biggest of which was to refuse the Literary Guild subsidy.

Haven’t seen Beth since I got back and am calling her up today to see if she’s here. I am waiting eagerly for a first installment of Ernest’s book. When are you coming South? Zelda, after a terrible crisis, is somewhat better. I am, of course, on the wagon as always, but life moves at an uninspiring gait and there is less progress than I could wish on the medieval series - all in all an annoying situation as these should be my most productive years. I’ve simply got to arrange something for this summer that will bring me to life again, but what it should be is by no means apparent.

About 1929 I wrote a story called ‘Outside the Cabinet Maker’s,’ which ran in the Century Magazine. I either lost it here or else sent it to you with the first batch of selected stories for Taps and it was not returned. Will you (a) see if you’ve got it? or (b) tell me what and where the Century Company is now and whom I should address to get a copy of the magazine?

I’ve had a swell portrait painted at practically no charge and next time I come to New York I am going to spend a morning tearing out of your files all those preposterous masks with which you have been libeling me for the last decade.

Just found another whole paragraph in Taps, top of page 384, which appears in Tender Is the Night. I’d carefully elided it and written the paragraph beneath it to replace it, but the proofreaders slipped and put them both in.

Ever yours,

Scott

1307 Park Avenue

Baltimore,

Maryland

April 17,1935

Dear Max:

Reading Tom Wolfe’s story in the current Modern Monthly makes me wish he was the sort of person you could talk to about his stuff. It has all his faults and virtues. It seems to me that with any sense of humor he could see the Dreiserian absurdities of how the circus people ate the cod, bass, mackerel, halibut, clams and oysters of the New England coast, the terrapin of Maryland, the fat beeves, porks and cereals of the middle west,’ etc., etc., down to ‘the pink meated lobsters that grope their way along the sea-floors of America.’ And then (after one of his fine paragraphs which sounds a note to be expanded later) he remarks that they leave nothing behind except ‘the droppings of the camel and the elephant in Illinois.’ A few pages further on his redundance ruined some paragraphs (see the last complete paragraph on page 103) that might have been gorgeous. I sympathize with his use of repetition, of Joyce-like words, endless metaphor, but I wish he could have seen the disgust in Edmund Wilson’s face when I once tried to interpolate part of a rhymed sonnet in the middle of a novel, disguised as prose. How he can put side by side such a mess as ‘With chitterling tricker fast-fluttering skirrs of sound the palmy honied birderies came’ and such fine phrases as ‘tongue- trilling chirrs, plum-bellied smoothness, sweet lucidity’ I don’t know. He who has such infinite power of suggestion and delicacy has absolutely no right to glut people on whole meals of caviar. I hope to Christ he isn’t taking all these emasculated paeans to his vitality very seriously. I’d hate to see such an exquisite talent turn into one of those muscle-bound and useless giants seen in a circus. Athletes have got to learn their games; they shouldn’t just be content to tense their muscles, and if they do they suddenly find when called upon to bring off a necessary effect they are simply liable to hurl the shot into the crowd and not break any records at all. The metaphor is mixed but I think you will understand what I mean, and that he would too - save for his tendency to almost feminine horror if he thinks anyone is going to lay hands on his precious talent. I think his lack of humility is his most difficult characteristic, a lack oddly enough which I associate only with second or third rate writers. He was badly taught by bad teachers and now he hates learning.

There is another side of him that I find myself doubting, but this is something that no one could ever teach or tell him. His lack of feeling other people’s passions, the lyrical value of Eugene Gant’s love affair with the universe - is that going to last through a whole saga? God, I wish he could discipline himself and really plan a novel.

I wrote you the other day and the only other point of this letter is that I’ve now made a careful plan of the medieval novel as a whole (tentatively called Philippe, Count of Darkness - confidential) including the planning of the parts which I can sell and the parts which I can’t. I think you could publish it either late in the spring of ‘36 or early in the fall of the same year. This depends entirely on how the money question goes this year. It will run to about 90,000 words and will be a novel in every sense with the episodes unrecognizable as such. That is my only plan. I wish I had these great masses of manuscripts stored away like Wolfe and Hemingway but this goose is beginning to be pretty thoroughly plucked I am afraid.

A young man has dramatized Tender Is the Night and I am hoping something may come of it. I may be in New York for a day and a night within the next fortnight.

Ever yours,

Scott

Later - went to N.Y. as you know, but one day only. Didn’t think I would like Cape that day. Sorry you and Nora Flynn didn’t meet. No news here -I think Beth is leaving soon.

1307 Park Avenue

Baltimore,

Maryland

May 11,1935

Dear Max:

It was fine seeing you but I was in a scrappy mood about Tom Wolfe. I simply cannot see the sign of achievement there yet, but I see that you are very close to the book and you don’t particularly relish such an attitude.

I am closing the house and going away somewhere for a couple of months and will send you an address when I get one.

Did you ever find that copy of ‘Outside the Cabinet-Maker’s?’

I’d like to see Ernest but it seems a long way and I would not like to see him except under the most favorable of circumstances because I don’t think I am the pleasantest company of late. Zelda is in very bad condition and my own mood always somehow reflects it.

Katy Dos Passos was here and in her version the bullet bounced off the side of the boat, but I suppose when Ernest’s legend approaches the Bunyan type it will have bounced off the moon, so it is much the same thing.

Had a nice letter from Jim Boyd agreeing with me about Clara but not about the weak writing at the end. I am quite likely to see him this summer.

Ever yours,

Scott

Hotel Stafford

Baltimore,

Maryland circa June 25,1935

Dear Max:

I feel I owe you a word of explanation: first, as to the health business. I was given what amounted to a death sentence about 3 months ago. It was just before I last saw you - which was why, I think, I got into that silly quarrel with you about Tom Wolfe that I’ve regretted ever since. I was a good deal dismayed and probably jealous, so forget all I said that night. You know I’ve always thought there was plenty of room in America for more than one good writer, and you’ll admit it wasn’t like me.

Anyhow what upset me most was that it came just two months after the liquor question was in hand at last - and I was quite reconciled, simply cross and upset at the arbitrary change of plan. (I never felt emotional about it until a fortnight ago when I learned that the Great Scene wasn’t coming off. It seemed such a shame after such good rehearsals that one grew suddenly sentimental and sorry for oneself.)

Second. Came up to Baltimore for five days to see Zelda who seems hopeless and send Scottie to camp. I had 24 hours with nothing to do and went to N.Y. to see a woman I’m very fond of - if s a long peculiar story.... one of a curious series of relationships that run through a man’s life. Anyhow she’d given up the weekend at the last minute to meet me and it was impossible to leave her to see you.

Putting Scottie on train in 10 minutes. In haste,

Always yours,

Scott

I wish Struthers Burt would decide on a name -1 call him everything but Katherine!

1 East 34th Street Baltimore,

Maryland

March 17, 1936

Dear Max:

A kid named Vincent McHugh has written me asking me to recommend him to you. Ordinarily I would not do such things any more but he has been a sort of unknown protégé of mine for some time. He has published a book called Sing Before Breakfast which I thought was a remarkable book and showed a very definite temperament. I’m not promising you that he is as strong a personality as Ernest or Caldwell or Cantwell or the men that I have previously recommended, but I do wish you would get hold of this earlier book Sing Before Breakfast published by Simon and Schuster in 1933 and consider that as much as what he has to offer at the moment in making your decision.

I know that due to your experience with Tom Boyd, you place a great deal of emphasis on vitality, but remember that a great deal of the work in this world has been done by sick men and people who at first sight seem to have no vitality will suddenly exhibit great streaks of it. I’ve never seen this young man but potentially he seems capable of great efforts.

Things are standing still here. I am waiting to hear this afternoon about a Saturday Evening Post story, which, if it is successful, will continue a series.

Best wishes always,

Scott

Asheville, North Carolina

September 19, 1936

Dear Max:

This is my second day of having a minute to catch up with correspondence. Probably Harold Ober has kept you in general touch with what has happened to me but I will summarize:

I broke the clavicle of my shoulder, diving - nothing heroic, but a little too high for the muscles to tie up the efforts of a simple swan dive. At first the doctors thought that I must have tuberculosis of the bone, but x-ray showed nothing of the sort, so (like occasional pitchers who throw their arms out of joint with some unprepared-for effort) it was left to dangle for twenty-four hours with a bad diagnosis by a young intern; then an x-ray and found broken and set in an elaborate plaster cast.

I had almost adapted myself to the thing when I fell in the bathroom reaching for the light, and lay on the floor until I caught a mild form of arthritis called ‘myotosis,’ which popped me in the bed for five weeks more. During this time there were domestic crises: Mother sickened and then died and I tried my best to be there but couldn’t. I have been within a mile and half of my wife all summer and have seen her about half dozen times. Total accomplished for one summer has been one story, not very good, two Esquire articles, neither of them very good.

You have probably seen Harold Ober and he may have told you that Scottie got a remission of tuition at a very expensive school where I wanted her to go (Miss Ethel Walker’s School in Connecticut). Outside of that I have no good news, except that I came into some money from my mother, not as much as I had hoped, but at least $20,000 in cash and bonds at the materialization in six months - for some reason, I do not know the why or wherefore of it, it requires this time. I am going to use some of it, with the products of the last story and the one in process of completion, to pay off my bills and to take two or three months’ rest in a big way. I have to admit to myself that I haven’t the vitality that I had five years ago.

I feel that I must tell you something which at first seemed better to leave alone: I wrote Ernest about that story of his, asking him in the most measured terms not to use my name in future pieces of fiction. He wrote me back a crazy letter, telling me about what a greater Writer he was and how much he loved his children, but yielding the point - ‘If I should outlive him which he doubted. To have answered it would have been like fooling with a lit firecracker.

Somehow I love that man, no matter what he says or does, but just one more crack and I think I would have to throw my weight with the gang and lay him. No one could ever hurt him in his first books but he has completely lost his head and the duller he gets about it, the more he is like a punch-drunk pug fighting himself in the movies.

No particular news except the dreary routine of illness. Scottie excited about the wedding.

As ever yours,

Scott Fitz

Grove Park Inn

Asheville,

North Carolina

October 16, 1936

Dear Max:

As I wired you, an advance on my mother’s estate from a friend makes it unnecessary to impose on you further.

I do not like the idea of the biographical book. I have a novel planned, or rather I should say conceived, which fits much better

In ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’, published in Esquire (August, 1936), Hemingway had his hero musing, The rich were dull and they drank too much, or they played too much backgammon. They were dull and they were repetitious. He remembered poor Scott Fitzgerald and his romantic awe of them and how he had started a story once that began, “The very rich are different from you and me.” And how someone had said to Scott, Yes, they have more money. But that was not humorous to Scott. He thought they were a special glamorous race and when he found they weren’t it wrecked him just as much as any other thing that wrecked him.’

into the circumstances, but neither by this inheritance nor in view of the general financial situation do I see clear to undertake it. It is a novel certainly as long as Tender Is the Night, and, knowing my habit of endless corrections and revisions, you will understand that I figure it at two years. Except for a lucky break you see how difficult it would be for me to master the leisure of the two years to finish it. For a whole year I have been counting on such a break in the shape of either Hollywood buying Tender or else of Grisman getting Kirkland or someone else to do an efficient dramatization. (I know I would not like the job and I know that Davis who had every reason to undertake it after the success of Gatsby simply turned thumbs down from his dramatist’s instinct that the story was not constructed as dramatically as Gatsby and did not readily lend itself to dramatization.)So let us say that all accidental, good breaks can not be considered. I can not think up any practical way of undertaking this work. If you have any suggestions they will be welcomed, but there is no likelihood that my expenses will be reduced below $18,000 a year in the next two years, with Zelda’s hospital bilk, insurance payments to keep, etc. And there is no likelihood that after the comparative financial failure of Tender Is the Night that I should be advanced such a sum as $36,000. The present plan, as near as I have formulated it, seems to be to go on with this endless Post writing or else go to Hollywood again. Each time I have gone to Hollywood, in spite of the enormous salary, has really set me back financially and artistically. My feelings against the autobiographical book are:

First: that certain people have thought that those Esquire articles  did me definite damage and certainly they would have to form part of the fabric of a book so projected. My feeling last winter that I could put together the articles I had written vanished in the light of your disapproval, and certainly when so many books have been made up out of miscellaneous material and exploited material, as it would be in my case, there is no considerable sale to be expected. If I were Negley Farson and had been through the revolutions and panics of the last fifteen years it would be another story, or if I were prepared at this moment to ‘tell all’ it would have a chance at success, but now it would Three Essays known collectively as ‘The Crack-Up’.

seem to be a measure adopted in extremis, a sort of period to my whole career.

In relation to all this, I enjoyed reading General Grant’s Lost Stand, and was conscious of your particular reasons for sending it to me. It is needless to compare the difference in force of character between myself and General Grant, the number of words that he could write in a year, and the absolutely virgin field which he exploited with the experiences of a four-year life under the most dramatic of circumstances. What attitude on life I have been able to put into my books is dependent upon entirely different field of reference with the predominant themes based on problems of personal psychology. While you may sit down and write 3000 words one day, it inevitably means that you write 500 words the next....

I certainly have this one more novel, but it may have to remain among the unwritten books of this world. Such stray ideas as sending my daughter to a public school, putting my wife in a public insane asylum, have been proposed to me by intimate friends, but it would break something in me that would shatter the very delicate pencil-end of a point of view. I have got myself completely on the spot and what the next step is I don’t know.

I am going to New York around Thanksgiving for a day or so and we might discuss ways and means. This general eclipse of ambition and determination and fortitude, all of the very qualities on which I have prided myself, is ridiculous, and, I must admit, somewhat obscene.

Anyhow, thank you for your willingness to help me. Thank Charlie for me and tell him that the assignments he mentioned have only been waiting on a general straightening up of my affairs. My God, debt is an awful thing!

Yours,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Heard from Mrs Rawlings and will see her.

Grove Park Inn

Asheville,

North Carolina

October 22, 1936

Dear Mr Kerr:

There is one great publisher in America, and that is Charles Scribner’s Sons. Their list includes, as you must know, Hemingway, Wolfe, etc., and has included at most times young Erskine Caldwell and (for the magazine, at least) William Faulkner. There is no question that they are more open to talent than any other publisher because of their resources, first, and because of the tradition of taking a chance on a talent that has not yet got itself an audience.

I am out of Baltimore in Asheville where I have been ill and I am unable to see you or read your manuscript or estimate what you have to offer, but I think by all odds the wisest thing to do is to send your manuscript to Maxwell Perkins, where you will be read carefully and with imagination by a staff of three or four men who have managed to pick out some of the most extraordinary books of our time, after other publishers have turned them down.

If they should decide that it was not to their advantage to publish your manuscript, send copies of this correspondence to my agent, Harold Ober, at 40 East 49th Street, New York City, and he might be able to give you better advice. If in the future your novel is published and makes a success, I should suggest that you put all rights in his hands. He will charge you ten per cent, but in sixteen years of professional writing he has saved me much more than ten per cent.

Now, have I told you anything you want to know? Again, I am sorry that I cannot read your novel until it is in type, but I am laboring under tremendous obligations here and there is simply not the physical time. This is exactly the same advice that I gave Ernest Hemingway many years ago and is based on a long career which has touched the publishing business in general.

Sincerely yours,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Oak Hall Hotel

Tryon, North Carolina

February, 1937

Dear Max:

Thanks for your note and the appalling statement. Odd how enormous sums of £10,000 have come to seem lately - I can remember turning down that for the serialization of The Great Gatsby - from College Humor.

Well, my least productive and lowest general year since 1926 is over. In that year I did 1 short story and 2 chapters of a novel - that is, two chapters that I afterwards used. And it was a terrible story. Last year, even though laid up 4 months, I sold 4 stories and 8 Esquire pieces, a poor showing God knows. This year has started slowly also, some damn lack of interest, staleness, when I have every reason to want to work if only to keep from thinking. Haven’t had a drink since I left the North (about six weeks, not even beer) but while I feel a little better nervously, it doesn’t bring back the old exuberance. I honestly think that all the prize fighters, actors, writers who live by their own personal performance ought to have managers in their best years. The ephemeral part of the talent seems when it is in hiding so apart from one, so ‘otherwise,’ that it seems it ought to have some better custodian than the poor individual with whom it lodges and who is left with the bill. My chief achievement lately has been in cutting down my and Zelda’s expenses to rock bottom; my chief failure is my inability to see a workable future. Hollywood for money has much against it, the stories are somehow mostly out of me unless some new source of material springs up, a novel takes money and time - I am thinking of putting aside certain hours and digging out a play, the ever-appealing mirage. At 40 one counts carefully one’s remaining vitality and resources, and a play ought to be within both of them. The novel and the autobiography have got to wait till this load of debt is lifted.

So much, and too much, for my affairs. Write me of Ernest and Tom and who’s new and does Ring still sell and John Fox and The House of Mirth. Or am I the only best seller who doesn’t sell?

The account, I know, doesn’t include my personal debt to you. How much is it please?

I don’t know at all about Brookfield. Never heard of it but there are so many schools there. Someone asked me about Oldfields where Mrs Simpson went and I’d never heard of that. Please write me - you are about the only friend who does not see fit to incorporate a moral lesson, especially since The Crack-Up’ stuff. Actually I hear from people in Sing Sing and Joliet all comforting and advising me.

Ever your friend,

Scott

Oak Hall Hotel

Tryon, North Carolina

Before March 19, 1937

Dear Max:

Thanks for the book - I don’t think it was very good but then I didn’t go for Sheean or Negley Farson either. Ernest ought to write a swell book now about Spain - real Richard Harding Davis reporting or better. (I mean not the sad jocosity of P.O.M. passages or the mere calendar of slaughter.) And speaking of Ernest, did I tell you that when I wrote asking him to cut me out of his story he answered, with ill grace, that he would - in fact he answered with such unpleasantness that it is hard to think he has any friendly feeling to me any more. Anyhow please remember that he agreed to do this if the story should come in with me still in it.

At the moment it appears that I may go to Hollywood for awhile, and I hope it works out. I was glad to get news of Tom Wolfe though I don’t understand about his landlady. What?

Ever yours,

Scott

Write me again - I hear no news. On the wagon since January and in good shape physically.

Oak Hall Hotel

Tryon, North Carolina

Before May 20, 1937

Dear Max:

Thanks for your letter - and the loan. I hope Ober will be able to pay you in a few weeks.

All serene here and would be content to remain indefinitely save that for short stories a change of scene is better. I have lived in tombs for years it seems to me - a real experience like the first trip to LoudonCounty usually means a story. As soon as I can, I want to travel a little - it’s fine not having Scottie to worry over, love her as I do. I want to meet some new people. (I do constantly but they seem just the old people over again but not so nice.)

Ever friend,

Scott

Thanks for the word about Ernest. Methinks he does protest too much.

The Garden of Allah Hotel

Hollywood, California

Before July 19, 1937

Dear Max:

Thanks for your letter - I was just going to write you. Harold has doubtless told you I have a nice salary out here the until I have paid my debts and piled up a little security so that my ‘catastrophe at forty’ won’t be repeated I’m not bragging about it or even talking about it. The money is budgeted by Harold, as someone I believe Charlie Scribner recommended years ago. I’m sorry that the Scribner share will only amount to $2500 or so the first year but that is while I’m paying back Harold who like you is an individual. The second year it will be better.

There are clauses in the contract which allow certain off-periods but it postpones a book for quite a while.

Ernest came like a whirlwind, put Ernst Lubitsch the great director in his place by refusing to have his picture prettied up and remade for him à la Hollywood at various cocktail parties. I feel he was in a state of nervous tensity, that there was something almost religious about it. He raised $1000 bills won by Miriam Hopkins fresh from the gaming table, the rumor is $14,000 in one night.

Everyone is very nice to me, surprised and rather relieved that I don’t drink. I am happier than I’ve been for several years.

Ever friend,

Scott

The Garden of Allah Hotel

Hollywood, California

Before August 24, 1937

Dear Max:

Have heard every possible version  save that Eastman has fled to Shanghai with Pauline t Is Ernest on a bat - what has happened? I’m so damn sorry for him after my late taste of newspaper bastards. But is he just being stupid or are they after him politically? It amounts to either great indiscretion or actual persecution.

Thanks for my ‘royalty’ report. I scarcely even belong to the gentry in that line. All goes beautifully here. So far Scottie is having the time of her young life, dining with Crawford, Shearer, etc., talking to Fred Astaire and her other heroes. I am very proud of her. And a grand-daughter, Max! Do you feel a hundred?

Ever friend,

Scott

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Corporation

Culver City,

California

September 3, 1937

Dear Max:

Thanks for your long, full letter. I will guard the secrets as my life.

I was thoroughly amused by your descriptions, but what transpires is that Ernest did exactly the asinine thing that I knew he had it in him to do when he was out here. The fact that he lost his temper for only a minute does not minimize the fact that he picked the exact wrong minute to do it. His discretion must have been at low ebb or he would not have again trusted the reporters at the boat.

He is living at present in a world so entirely his own that it is impossible to help him, even if I felt close to him at the moment, which I don’t. I like him so much, though, that I wince when anything happens to him, and I feel rather personally ashamed that it has been possible for imbeciles to dig at him and hurt him. After all, you would think that a man who has arrived at the position of being practically his country’s most eminent writer could be spared that yelping. All goes well - no writing at all except on pictures.

Ever your friend,

Scott

The Schulberg book is in all the windows here.

TheGarden of Allah

Hotel Hollywood,

California

March 4, 1938

Dear Max:

Sorry I saw you for such a brief time while I was in New York and that we had really no time to talk.

My little binge lasted only three days, and I haven’t had a drop since. There was one other in September, likewise three days. Save for that, I haven’t had a drop since a year ago last January. Isn’t it awful that we reformed alcoholics have to preface everything by explaining exactly how we stand on that question?

The enclosed letter is to supplement a conversation some time ago. It shows quite definitely how a whole lot of people interpreted Ernest’s crack at me in ‘Snows of K.’ When I called him on it, he promised in a letter that he would not reprint it in book form. Of course, since then, it has been in O’Brien’s collection, but I gather he can’t help that. If, however, you are publishing a collection of his this fall, do keep in mind that he has promised to make an elision of my name. It was a damned rotten thing to do, and with anybody but Ernest my tendency would be to crack back. Why did he think it would add to the strength of his story if I had become such a negligible figure? This is quite indefensible on any grounds.

No news here. I am writing a new Crawford picture, called Infidelity. Though based on a magazine story, it is practically an original. I like the work and have a better producer than before - Hunt Stromberg - a sort of one-finger Thalberg, without Thal- berg’s scope, but with his intense power of work and his absorption in his job.

Meanwhile, I am filling a notebook with stuff that will be of more immediate interest to you, but please don’t mention me ever as having any plans. Tender Is the Night hung over too long, and my next venture will be presented to you without preparation or fanfare.

I am sorry about the Tom Wolfe business. I don’t understand it. I am sorry for him and, in another way, I am sorry for you for I know how fond of him you are.

I may possibly see you around Easter.

Best to Louise.

Ever yours,

Scott

All this about ‘The Snows’ is confidential.

The Garden of Allah Hotel

Hollywood,

California

April 23, 1938

Dear Max: —

I got both your letters and appreciate them and their fullness, as I feel very much the Californian at the moment and, consequently, out of touch with New York.

The Marjorie Rawlings’ book fascinated me I thought it was even better than South Moon Under and I envy her the ease with which she does action scenes, such as the tremendously complicated hunt sequence, which I would have to stake off in advance and which would probably turn out to be a stilted business in the end. Hers just simply flows; the characters keep thinking, talking, feeling and don’t stop, and you think and talk and feel with them.

As to Ernest, I was fascinated by what you told me about the play, touched that he remembered me in his premonitory last word, and fascinated, as always, by the man’s Byronic intensity. The Los Angeles Times printed a couple of his articles, but none the last three days, and I keep hoping a stray Krupp shell hasn’t knocked off our currently most valuable citizen.

In the mail yesterday came a letter from that exquisitely tactful co-worker of yours, — . I’ve never had much love for the man since he insisted on selling This Side of Paradise for a dollar fifty, and cost me around five thousand dollars; nor do I love him more when, as it happened the other day, I went into a house and saw someone reading the Modern Library’s Great Modern Short Stories with a poor piece of mine called ‘Act Your Age’ side by side with Conrad’s ‘Youth,’ Ernest’s The Killers’ because — was jealous of a copyright.

His letter informs me that This Side of Paradise is now out of print. I am not surprised after eighteen years (looking it over, I think it is now one of the funniest books since Dorian Gray in its utter spuriousness - and then, here and there, I find a page that is very real and living), but I know to the younger generation it is a pretty remote business, reading about the battles that engrossed us then and the things that were startling. To hold them I would have to put in a couple of abortions to give it color (and probably would if I was that age and writing it again). However, I’d like to know what ‘out of print’ means. Does it mean that I can make my own arrangements about it? That is, if any publisher was interested in reprinting it, could I go ahead, or would it immediately become a valuable property to — again?

I once had an idea of getting Bennet Cerf to publish it in the Modern Library, with a new preface. But also I note in your letter a suggestion of publishing an omnibus book withParadise, Gatsby and Tender. How remote is that idea, and why must we forget it? If I am to be out here two years longer, as seems probable, it certainly isn’t advisable to let my name sink so out of sight as it did between Gatsby and Tender, especially as I now will not be writing even the Saturday Evening Post stories.

I have again gone back to the idea of expanding the stories about Philippe, the Dark Ages knight, but when I will find time for that, I don’t know, as this amazing business has a way of whizzing you along at a terrific speed and then letting you wait in a dispirited, half-cocked mood when you don’t feel like undertaking anything else, while it makes up its mind. It is a strange conglomeration of a few excellent overtired men making the pictures, and as dismal a crowd of fakes and hacks at the bottom as you can imagine. The consequence is that every other man is a charlatan, nobody trusts anybody else, and an infinite amount of time is wasted from lack of confidence.

Relations have always been so pleasant, not only with you but with Harold and with Lorimer’s Saturday Evening Post, that even working with the pleasantest people in the industry, Eddie Knopf and Hunt Stromberg, I feel this lack of confidence.

Hard times weed out many of the incompetents, but they swarm back - Herman Mankiewicz, a ruined man who hasn’t written ten feet of continuity in two years, was finally dropped by Metro, but immediately picked up by Columbia! He is a nice fellow that everybody likes and has been brilliant, but he is being hired because everyone is sorry for his wife - which I think would make him rather an obstacle in the way of making good pictures. Utter toughness toward the helpless, combined with super-sentimentality - Jesus, what a combination!

I still feel in the dark about Tom Wolfe, rather frightened for him; I cannot quite see him going it alone, but neither can I see your sacrificing yourself in that constant struggle. What a time you’ve had with your sons, Max - Ernest gone to Spain, me gone to Hollywood. Tom Wolfe reverting to an artistic hill-billy.

Do let me know about This Side of Paradise.------ — ‘s letter was so subtly disagreeable that I felt he took rather personal pleasure in the book being out of print. It was all about buying up some secondhand copies. You might tell him to do so if he thinks best. I have a copy somewhere, but I’d like a couple of extras.

Affectionately always,

Scott

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Corporation

Culver City,

California

September 29, 1938

Dear Max:

I feel like writing to you about Tom as to a relation of his, for I know how deeply his death must have touched you, how you were so entwined with his literary career and the affection you had for him. I know no details. Shortly after I got your letter that he was in Seattle, I read in the paper that he was starting East sick. This worried me and it seemed a very forlorn and desolate and grievous experience, yet something which his great vitality would somehow transcend and dominate - and then the end at Baltimore and that great pulsing, vital frame quiet at last. There is a great hush after him - perhaps even more than after the death of Ring who had been moribund so long.

I would like to know something about the situation. You, as his literary executor, are I suppose oddly enough more in control of his literary destiny than when he was alive. I don’t suppose that his ‘million words’ rounds out his great plan but I am not so sure that that matters because the plan must have been a mutating and progressive thing. The more valuable parts of Tom were the more lyrical parts or, rather, those moments when his lyricism was best combined with his powers of observation - those fine blends such as the trip up the Hudson in Of Time and the River. I am curious to know what his very last stuff was like, whether he had lost his way or perhaps found it again.

With deepest sympathy for you and his family. Do you think it would do any good to write them a letter, and to whom should I address it?

Ever, your friend

Scott

P.esses: I am more than delighted about Zippy’s boy. Which of your daughters went to Vassar? You speak vaguely of some plan of Ernest’s, but you leave me in the dark. Glad he cut me out of ‘The Snows.’ Thanks for ‘The Captain’s Chair.’ Also for the news about Elizabeth.

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Corporation

Culver City,

California

December 24, 1938

Dear Max:

Since the going-out-of-print ofParadise and the success (or is it one?) of The Fifth Column I have come to feel somewhat neglected. Isn’t my reputation being allowed to let slip away? I mean what’s left of it. I am still a figure to many people and the number of times I still see my name in Time and The New Yorker, etc., makes me wonder if it should be allowed to casually disappear - when there are memorial double deckers to such fellows as Farrell and Steinbeck.

I think something ought to be published this spring. You had a plan for the three novels and I have another plan, of which more hereafter, for another big book; the recession is over for awhile and I have the most natural ambition to see my stuff accessible to another generation. Bennett Cerf obviously isn’t going to move about Tender and it seems to me things like that need a spark from a man’s own publisher. It was not so long ago that Tender was among the dozen best of a bad season and had an offer from the Literary Guild - so I can’t be such a long chance as, say, Callaghan. Either of the two books I speak of might have an awfully good chance to pay their way. A whole generation now has never read This Side of Paradise. (I’ve often thought that if Frank Bunn at Princeton had had a few dozen copies on his stands every September he could have sold them all by Christmas.)

But I am especially concerned about Tender - that book is not dead. The depth of its appeal exists -I meet people constantly who have the same exclusive attachment to it as others had to Gatsby andParadise, people who identified themselves with Dick Diver. Its great fault is that the true beginning - the young psychiatrist in Switzerland - is tucked away in the middle of the book. If pages 151-212 were taken from their present place and put at the start, the improvement in appeal would be enormous. In fact the mistake was noted and suggested by a dozen reviewers. To shape up the ends of that change would, of course, require changes in half a dozen other pages. And as you suggested, an omnibus book should also have a preface or prefaces - besides my proposed glossary of absurdities and inaccuracies in This Side of Paradise. This last should attract some amused attention. The other idea is this:

A Big collection of stories leading off with Philippe - entirely rewritten and pulled together into a 30,000-word novelette. The collection could consist of:

1. — Philippe 2. — Pre-war (Basil and Josephine)

3. — ‘May Day 4. — The Jazz Age (the dozen or so best jazz stories)

5. — About a dozen others including ‘Babylon’

The reason for using Philippe is this: he is to some extent completed in the fourth story (which you have never read) and, in spite of some muddled writing, he is one of the best characters I’ve ever ‘drawn.’ He should be a long book - but whether or not my M-G-M contract is renewed I’m going to free-lance out here another year to lay by some money, and then do my modern novel. So it would be literally years before I got to Philippe again- if ever.

In my work here I can find time for such a rewrite of Phillippe as I contemplate - I could finish it by the first of February. The other stories would go into the collection unchanged. Unlike Ernest I wouldn’t want to put in all the stories from all four books but I’d like to add four or five never published before.

I am desperately keen on both these schemes - I think the novels should come first and, unless there are factors there you haven’t told me about, I think it is a shame to put it off. It would not sell wildly at first but unless you make some gesture of confidence I see my reputation dying on its feet from lack of nourishment. If you could see the cards for my books in the public libraries here in Los Angeles continually in demand even to this day, you would know I have never had wide distribution in some parts of the country. When This Side of Paradise stood first in The Bookman’s Monthly List it didn’t even appear in the score of the Western States.

You can imagine how distasteful it is to blow my own horn like this but it comes from a deep feeling that something could be done, if it is done at once, about my literary standing - always admitting that I have any at all.

Ever your friend,

Scott

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Corporation

Culver City,

California

January 4, 1939

Dear Max:

Your letter rather confused me. I had never clearly understood that it was the Modern Library who were considering doing my three books as a giant volume. I thought it was an enterprise of yours. If they show no special enthusiasm about bringing out Tender by itself, I don’t see how they would be interested in doing a giant anyhow. You spoke of it last year as something only the recession kept you from doing.

What I don’t like is the out-of-print element. In a second I’m going to discuss the Philippe business with you, but first let me say that I would rather have This Side of Paradise in print, if only in that cheap American Mercury book edition than not in print at all. I see they have just done Elliot Paul’s Indelible. How do you think they would feel about it? And what is your advice on the subject?

Now about Philippe. When I wrote you I had envisaged another year of steady work here. At present, while it is possible that I may be on the coast for another year, it is more likely that the work will be from picture to picture with the prospect of taking off three or four months in the year, perhaps even more, for literary work. Philippe interests me. I am afraid, though, it would have to be supported by something more substantial. I would have to write 10,000 or 15,000 more words on it to make it as big a book as Gatsby and I’m not at all sure that it would have a great unity. You will remember that the plan in the beginning was tremendously ambitious - there was to have been Philippe as a young man founding his fortunes - Philippe as a middle-aged man participating in the Capetian founding of France as a nation - Philippe as an old man and the consolidation of the feudal system. It was to have covered a span of about sixty years from 880 A.D. to 950. The research required for the second two parts would be quite tremendous and the book would have been (or would be) a piece of great self-indulgence, though I admit self-indulgence often pays unexpected dividends.

Still, if periods of three or four months are going to be possible in the next year or so I would much rather do a modern novel. One of those novels that can only be written at the moment and when one is full of the idea - as Tender should have been written in its original conception, all laid on the Riviera. I think it would be a quicker job to write a novel like that between 50 and 60,000 words long than to do a thorough revision job with an addition of 15,000 words on Philippe. In any case I’m going to decide within the next month and let you know.

Thanks for your letter. I wish you’d send me a copy of the Tom Wolfe article because I never see anything out here. John wrote about me in the Virginia Quarterly, too.

Ever your friend,

Scott

P.S. I hope Jane and Scottie see a lot of each other if Scottie stays in, but as I suspected, she has tendencies toward being a play-girl and has been put on probation. I hope she survives this February.

5521 Amestoy Avenue

Encino,

California

February 25, 1939

Dear Max:

I was sorry that a glimpse of you was so short but I had a hunch that you had wanted to talk over something with your daughter and that I was rather intruding. How pretty she was - she seemed a little frightened of me for some reason, or maybe it was one of my self-conscious days.

One of the things I meant to tell you was how much I enjoyed the book Cantigny by Evarts, whom I gather is a cousin of yours - or is that true? It seemed to me very vivid. It reminded me of one of the best of Tom Boyd’s stories in Point of Honor though the attitude was quite satisfactorily different.

No doubt you have talked to Harold in regard to that life insurance business. Of course, he thinks I am rash, but I think it would be morally destructive to continue here any longer on the factory worker’s basis. Conditions in the industry somehow propose the paradox: ‘We brought you here for your individuality but while you’re here we insist that you do everything to conceal it.’

I have several plans, and within a day or so will be embarked on one of them. It is wonderful to be writing again instead of patching - do you know in that Gone with the Wind job I was absolutely forbidden to use any words except those of Margaret Mitchell; that is, when new phrases had to be invented one had to thumb through as if it were Scripture and check out phrases of hers which would cover the situation!

Best wishes always.

Scott

P.S. I am, of course, astonished that Tom Wolfe’s book did what you told me. I am sure that if he had lived and meant to make a portrait of you he would at least have given it a proper tone and not made you the villain. It is astonishing what people will do though. Ernest’s sharp turn against me always seemed to have pointless childish quality - so much so that I really never felt any resentment about it. Your position in the Wolfe matter is certainly an exceedingly ironic one.

5521 Amestoy Avenue

Encino,

California

May 22, 1939

Dear Max:

Just had a letter from Charlie Scribner - a very nice letter and I appreciated it and will answer it. He seemed under the full conviction that the novel was about Hollywood and I am in terror that this misinformation may have been disseminated to the literary columns. If I ever gave any such impression it is entirely false: I said that the novel was about some things that had happened to me in the last two years. It is distinctly not about Hollywood (and if it were it is the last impression that I would want to get about).

It is, however, progressing nicely, except that I have been confined to bed for a few weeks with a slight return of my old malady. It was nice getting a glimpse of you, however brief - especially that last day. I caught the plane at half past four and had an uneventful trip west.

I have grown to like this particular corner of California where I shall undoubtedly stay all summer. Dates for a novel are, as you know, uncertain, but I am blocking this out in a fashion so that, unlike Tender, I may be able to put it aside for a month and pick it up again at the exact spot factually and emotionally where I left off.

Wish I had some news, but what I have seen lately is only what you can see outside a window. With very best to all - and please do correct that impression which Charlie seems to have.

Ever your friend,

Scott

5521 Amestoy Avenue

Encino,

California

November 20, 1939

Dear Max:

A lot depends on this week. I’ve about decided to show him (Littauer)  the first nine or ten thousand words and I think it’s literally about fifty-fifty whether he’ll want it or not. The material is definitely ‘strong.’ As soon as I hear anything from him I’ll let you know.

Of course, if he will back me it will be a life-saver, but I am by no means sure that I will ever be a popular writer again. This much of the book, however, should be as fair a test as any. Thanks for your letter.

Ever yours,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

5521 Amestoy Avenue

Encino, California

December 19, 1939

Dear Max:

The opinion about the novel seems half good and half bad. In brief, about four or five people here like it immensely, Leland likes it and you like it. Colliers, however, seems indifferent to it though they like the outline. My plan is to just go ahead and dig it out. If I could interest any magazine, of course, it would be a tremendous help but today a letter from the Post seems to indicate that it is not their sort of material. The plan has changed a bit since I first wrote the outline, but it is essentially as you know it.

Your offering to loan me another thousand dollars was the kindest thing I ever heard of. It certainly comes at the most opportune time. The first thing is this month’s and last month’s rent and I am going to take the liberty of giving my landlady a draft on you for $205.00, for January 2nd. This with the $150.00 that you have already sent me is $355.00. For the other $645.00, will you let me know when it is available?

I am not terribly in debt as I was in 1935-7, but uncomfortably so. I think though my health is getting definitely better and if I can do some intermittent work in the studios between each chapter of the novel instead of this unprofitable hacking for Esquire, I shall be able to get somewhere by spring.

Max, you are so kind. When Harold withdrew from the questionable honor of being my banker, I felt completely numb financially and I suddenly wondered what money was and where it came from. There had always seemed a little more somewhere and now there wasn’t Anyhow, thank you.

Ever your friend,

Scott

5521 Amestoy Avenue

Encino,

California

February 21, 1940

Dear Max:

Thanks for sending tne release on ‘Babylon.’ I haven’t yet gotten the money but it will be something over $800.00, very little as Hollywood prices go. However, it will give me a chance to try another short story and if either that or the one that is out now finds a home I ought to produce a few chapters of the novel. Meanwhile things do not move here at all in a moving-picture way, but one makes a certain adjustment.

I am glad John Bishop is in good spirits. The affairs of the world never really worried him much. The fact fills me with great envy. I can see ahead no further than finishing this book and getting Scottie through Vassar. The rest looks no brighter than it has for a long time. The greatest privilege would be to be able to do work so absorbing that one could forget the trouble abroad and at home.

I will keep you informed.

Ever yours,

Scott

c/o Phil Berg Agency

9484 Wilshire Boulevard

Beverly Hills,

California

May 20, 1940

Dear Max:

I’ve owed you a decent letter for some months. First - the above is my best address though at the moment I’m hunting for a small apartment. I am in the last week of an eight week movie job for which I will receive $2300. I couldn’t pay you anything from it, nor the government, but it was something, because it was my own picture Babylon Revisited and may lead to a new line up here. I just couldn’t make the grade as a hack - that, like everything else, requires a certain practiced excellence.

The radio has just announced the fall of St Quentin! My God! What was the use of my wiring you that André Chamson has a hit when the war has now passed into a new stage, making his book a chestnut of a bygone quiet era.

I wish I was in print. It will be odd a year or so from now when Scottie assures her friends I was an author and finds that no book is procurable. It is certainly no fault of yours. You (and one other man, Gerald Murphy) have been a friend through every dark time in these five years. It’s funny what a friend is - Ernest’s crack in ‘The Snows,’ poor John Bishop’s article in the Virginia Quarterly (a nice return for ten years of trying to set him up in a literary way) and Harold’s sudden desertion at the wrong time, have made them something less than friends. Once I believed in friendship, believed I could (if I didn’t always) make people happy and it was more fun than anything. Now even that seems like a vaudevillian’s cheap dream of heaven, a vast minstrel show in which one is the perpetual Bones.

Professionally, I know, the next move must come from me. Would the 25-cent press keep Gatsby in the public eye - or is the book unpopular? Has it had its chance? Would a popular reissue in that series with a preface not by me but by one of its admirers -I can maybe pick one - make it a favorite with classrooms, profs, lovers of English prose - anybody? But to die, so completely and unjustly after having given so much! Even now there is little published in American fiction that doesn’t slightly bear my stamp - in a small way I was an original. I remember we had one of our few and trifling disagreements because I said that to anyone who loved ‘When Lilacs Last,’ Tom Wolfe couldn’t be such a great original. Since then I have changed about him. I like ‘Only the Dead’ and ‘Arthur, Garfield, etc.,’ right up with the tops. And where are Tom and I and the rest when psychological Robespierres parade through American letters elevating such melo as Christ in Concrete to the top, and the boys read Steinbeck like they once read Mencken! I have not lost faith. People will buy my new book and I hope I shan’t again make the many mistakes of Tender. Tell me the news if you have time. Where is Ernest and what doing?....

Love to all of you, of all generations.

Scott

1403 Laurel Avenue

Hollywood,

California (new address)

June 6, 1940

Dear Max:

Thanks for your nice long letter, and for the book  - or did I thank you for the book? I was fascinated, not only by the excellent coverage of the battles (though the man’s extreme bias and the necessity of compression threw some of them out of focus), but by the curious philosophic note which began to run through it, from the discussion of Pharsalla on.

The note was reminiscent, exultant and dumb, but not until I found the name Spengler did his psychology become clear to me. Up to then I had thought: ‘What a wide range for a military man!’ Then the truth became plain. Poor old Spengler has begotten Nazis that would make him turn over in his grave, and Fuller makes his own distortion. Spengler believed that the Western world was dead, and he believed nothing else but that - though he had certain ideas of a possible Slavic rebirth. This did not include Germany, which he linked with the rest of western Europe as in decline. And that the fine flower of it all was to be the battle of Vittorio Veneto and the rise of Mussolini - well, Spengler’s turn in his grave must have been like that of an airplane propeller.

In his last four chapters Fuller begins to get ridiculous. I wonder how he feels now when that admirable Mr Franco is about to batter down Gibraltar. This of course does not detract from the interest of the book, especially through the Napoleonic era. Did you ever read Spengler - specifically including the second volume? I read him the same summer I was writing The Great Gatsby and I don’t think I ever quite recovered from him. He and Marx are the only modern philosophers that still manage to make sense in this horrible mess - I mean make sense by themselves and not in the hands of distorters. Even Mr Lenin looks now like a much better politician than a philosopher. Spengler, on the other hand, prophesied gang rule, ‘young peoples hungry for spoil,’ and more particularly ‘the world as spoil’ as an idea, a dominant super- cessive idea.

Max, what becomes of copyrights when a book goes out of print? For example, in the case of Flappers. For the sake of possible picture rights and so forth should I renew that copyright now? I haven’t an idea about this.

How does Ernest feel about things? Is he angry or has he a philosophic attitude? The Allies are thoroughly licked, that much is certain, and I am sorry for a lot of people. As I wrote Scottie, many of her friends will probably die in the swamps of Bolivia. She is all right now, by the way....

Do let me know about the copyright business, and I would be interested in at least a clue to Ernest’s attitude.

Every your friend,

Scott

1403 North Laurel Avenue

Hollywood,California

December 13,1940

Dear Max:

Thanks for your letter. The novel progresses - in fact progresses fast. I’m not going to stop now till I finish a first draft which will be sometime after the 15th of January. However, let’s pretend that it doesn’t exist until it’s closer to completion. We don’t want it to become - ‘a legend before it is written,’ which is what I believe Wheelock * said about Tender Is the Night. Meanwhile will you send me back the chapters I sent you as they are all invalid now, must be completely rewritten, etc. The essential idea is the same and it is still, as far as I can hope, a secret.

Budd Schulberg, a very nice, clever kid out here, is publishing a Hollywood novel with Random House in January. It’s not bad but it doesn’t cut into my material at all. I’ve read Ernest’s novel and most of Tom Wolfe’s t and have been doing a lot of ruminating as to what this whole profession is about. Tom Wolfe’s failure to really explain why you and he parted mars his book but there are great things in it. The portraits of the Jacks (who are they?), Emily Vanderbilt are magnificent.

No one points out how Saroyan has been influenced by Franz Kafka. Kafka was an extraordinary Czechoslovakian Jew who died in ‘36. He will never have a wide public but The Trial andAmericaare two books that writers are never able to forget.

This is the first day off I have taken for many months and I just wanted to tell you the book is coming along and that comparatively speaking all is well.

Ever your friend,

Scott

P.S. How much will you sell the plates of This Side of Paradise for? I think it has a chance for a new life.

To John Peale Bishop

626 Goodrich Avenue

St Paul,

Minnesota

Late February or early March, 1922

Dear John:

I’ll tell you frankly what I’d rather you’d do. Tell specifically what you like about the book and don’t. The characters - Anthony, Gloria, Adam Patch, Maury, Bloeckman, Muriel Dick, Rachael, Tana, etc., etc., etc. - exactly whether they’re good or bad, convincing or not. What you think of the style - too ornate (if so quote) good (also quote) rotten (also quote). What emotion (if any) the book gave you. What you think of its humor. What you think of its ideas. If ideas are bogus hold them up specifically and laugh at them. Is it boring or interesting? How interesting? What recent American books are more so? If you think my ‘Flash- Back in Paradise’ in Chapter I is like elevated moments of D. W. Griffith say so. Also do you think it’s imitative, and of whom? What I’m angling for is a specific definite review. I’m tickled both that they’ve asked for such a lengthy thing and that you’re going to do it. You cannot hurt my feelings about the book - the I did resent in your Baltimore article being definitely limited at 25 years old to a place between Mackenzie who wrote il/i good (but not wonderful) novels and then died - and Tarkington who if he has a great talent has the mind of a school boy. I mean, at my age they’d done nothing.

As I say I’m delighted that you’re going to do it and, as you wrote asking me to suggest a general mode of attack, I am telling you frankly what I would like. I’m so afraid of all the reviews being general and I devoted so much more care myself to the detail of the book than I did to thinking out the general scheme that I would appreciate a detailed review. If it is to be that length article it could scarcely be all general anyway.

I’m awfully sorry you’ve had the flu. We arrive East on the 9th. I enjoy your book page in Vanity Fair and think it is excellent.

The baby is beautiful.

As ever,

Scott

Capri, Italy

March, 1925

Dear John.

I am quite drunk. I am told that this is Capri; though as I remember Capri was quieter. As the literary wits might say, your letter received and contents quoted. Let us have more of the same - I think it showed a great deal of power and the last scene - — the dinner at the young Bishops - was handled with admirable restraint. I am glad that at last Americans are producing letters of their own. The climax was wonderful and the exquisite irony of the ‘Sincerely yours’ has only been equaled in the work of those two masters Flaubert and Ferber....

I will now have two copies of Wescott’s Apple as in despair I ordered one - a regular orchard. I shall give one to Brooks here whom I like. Do you know Brooks? He’s just a fellow here...

Excuse the delay. I have just been working on the envelope....

That was a caller. His name was Mussolini, I think, and he says he is in politics here. And besides I have lost my pen so I will have to continue in pencil... t It turned up - I was writing with it all the time and hadn’t noticed. That is because I am full of my new work, a historical play based on the life of Woodrow Wilson.

ACT I. At Princeton

Woodrow seen teaching philosophy. Enter Pyne. Quarrel scene - — Wilson refuses to recognize clubs. Enter woman with Bastard from Trenton. Pyne re-enters with glee club and trustees. Noise outside. ‘We have won - Princeton 12, Lafayette 3.’ Cheers. Football team enter and group around Wilson. ‘Old Nassau.’ Curtain.

ACT II. Gubernatorial Mansion at Paterson

Wilson seen signing papers. Tasker Bliss and Marc Connolly come in with proposition to let bosses get control. ‘I have im- portant papers to sign - and none of them legalize corruption.’ Triangle Club begins to sing outside window. Enter woman with Bastard from Trenton. President continues to sign papers. Enter Mrs Gait, John Grier Hibben, A1 Jolson and Grantland Rice. Song The Call to Larger Duty.’ Tableaux. Coughdrop.

ACT III (optional). The Battlefront 1918.

ACT IV

The peace congress. Clemenceau, Wilson and Jolson at table. The Bastard from Trenton now grown up but still a baby, in the uniform of the Prussian Guard, is mewling and pewking in Wilson’s lap.... The junior prom committee comes in through the skylight. Clemenceau: ‘We want the Sarre.’ Wilson: ‘No, Sane, I won’t hear of it.’ Laughter... Enter Marilyn Miller, Gilbert Seldes and Irish MeuseL Tasker Bliss falls into the cuspidor...

Oh Christ! I’m sobering up I Write me the opinion you may be pleased to form of my chef d’oeuvre and others’ opinion. Please! I think it’s great but because it deals with much debauched materials, quick deciders like Rascoe may mistake it for Chambers. To me it’s fascinating. I never get tired of it....

Zelda’s been sick in bed for five weeks, poor child, and is only now looking up. No news except I now get J2000 a story and they grow worse and worse and my ambition is to get where I need write no more but only novels. Is Lewis’ book any good? I imagine that mine is infinitely better - what else is well reviewed this spring? Maybe my book  is rotten but I don’t think so.

What are you writing? Please tell me something about your novel. And if I like the idea maybe I’ll make it into a short story for the Post to appear just before your novel and steal the thunder. Who’s going to do it? Bebe Daniels? She’s a wow!

How was Townsend’s first picture? Good reviews? What’s Alec doing? And Ludlow? And Bunny? Did you read Ernest Boyd’s account of what I might ironically call our ‘private’ life in his Portraits? Did you like it? I rather did.

Scott

I am quite drunk again and enclose a postage stamp.

c/o American Express Company Rome,Italy

April, 1925

Dear John: —

Your letter was perfect. It told us everything we wanted to know and the same day I read your article (very nice too) in Vanity Fair about cherching the past. But you disappointed me with the quality of some of it (the news) - for instance that Bunny’s play failed, that Townsend has got the swelled head and that you and Margaret find life dull and depressing there. We want to come back but we want to come back with money saved and so far we haven’t saved any - the I’m one novel ahead and book of pretty good (seven) short stories. I’ve done about 10 pieces of horrible junk in the last year the that I can never republish or bear to look at - cheap and without the spontaneity of my first work. But the novel I’m sure of. It’s marvelous.

We’re just back from Capri where I sat up (tell Bunny) half the night talking to my old idol Compton Mackenzie. Perhaps you met him. I found him cordial, attractive and pleasantly mundane. You get no sense from him that he feels his work has gone to pieces. He’s not pompous about his present output. I think he’s just tired. The war wrecked him as it did Wells and many of that generation.

To show you how well you guessed the gossip I wanted, we were wondering where — got the money for Havana, whether the Film Guild finally collapsed. (Christ! You should have seen their last two pictures - one from my story.) But I don’t doubt that —

and — will talk themselves into the Cabinet eventually. I’d do it myself if I could but I’m too much of an egotist and not enough of a diplomat ever to succeed-in the movies. You must begin by placing the tongue flat against the posteriors of such worthys as — and — and commence a slow carressing movement. Say what they may of Cruze - Famous Players is the product of two great ideas, DeMille and Gloria Swanson, and it stands or falls not on their ‘conference methods’ but on those two and the stock pictures that imitate them. The Cruze winnings are usually lost on such expensive experiments as — .

(Needless to say this letter is not for T.M. or Alec, but for your ears alone.)

Is Dos Passos’ novel any good? And what’s become of Cum- mings’ work? I haven’t read Some Do Not but Zelda was crazy about fit. I glanced through it and kept wondering why it was written backward. At first I thought they’d sewn the cover on upside down. Well - these people will collaborate with Conrad.

Do you still think Dos Passos is a genius? My faith in him is somehow weakened. There’s so little time for faith these days.

— is a damned attractive woman and, while the husband’s a haberdasher, he’s at least a Groton haberdasher (he went there, I mean, to school)....

The Wescott book will be eagerly devoured. A personable young man of that name from Atlantic introduced himself to me after the failure of The Vegetable. I wonder if he’s the same. At any rate your Wescott, so Harrison Rhodes tells me, is coming here to Rome.

I’ve given up Nathan’s books. I liked the fourth series of Prejudices. Is Lewis’ new book good? Hergesheimer’s was awful. He’s all done.

Merrit Hemingway - I have a dim memory that he and I admired Ginevra King at the same time once in those palmy days.

The cheerfulest thing in my life are first Zelda and second the hope that my book has something extraordinary about it. I want to be extravagantly admired again. Zelda and I sometimes indulge in terrible four-day rows that always start with a drinking party but we’re still enormously in love and about the only truly happily married people I know.

Our very best to Margaret Please write!

Scott

In the Villa d’Este at Tivoli all that ran in my brain was:

An alley of dark cypresses

Hides an enrondured pool of light

And there the young musicians come

With instruments for her delight

— locks are bowed

Over dim lutes that sigh aloud

Or else with heads thrown back they tease

Reverberate echoes from the drum

The stiff folds etc.

It was wonderful that when you wrote that you’d never seen Italy - or, by God, now that I think of it, never lived in the 15th century.

But then I wrote T.S. of P. without ever having been to Oxford.

14 rue de Tilsitt Paris, France

August 9,1925

Dear John:

Thank you for your most pleasant, full, discerning and helpful letter about The Great Gatsby. It is about the only criticism that the book has had which has been intelligible, save a letter from Mrs Wharton. I shall duly ponder, or rather I have pondered, what you say about accuracy - I’m afraid I haven’t quite reached the ruthless artistry which would let me cut out an exquisite bit that had no place in the context. I can cut out the almost exquisite, the adequate, even the brilliant - but a true accuracy is, as you say, still in the offing. Also you are right about Gatsby being blurred and patchy. I never at any one time saw him clear myself - for he started as one man I knew and then changed into myself - the amalgam was never complete in my mind.

Your novel sounds fascinating and I’m crazy to see it. I am beginning a new novel next month on the Riviera. I understand that MacLeish is there, among other people (at Antibes where we are going). Paris has been a mad-house this spring and, as you can imagine, we were in the thick of it. I don’t know when we’re coming back - maybe never. We’ll be here till January (except for a month in Antibes), and then we go Nice for the spring, with Oxford for next summer. Love to Margaret and many thanks for the kind letter.

Scott

Paris,France

Probably September, 1925

Dear Sir:

The enclosed explains itself. Meanwhile I went to Antibes and liked Archie MacLeish enormously. Also his poem, though it seems strange to like anything so outrageously derivative. T.S. of p. was an original in comparison.

I’m crazy to see your novel. I’m starting a new one myself. There was no one at Antibes this summer except me, Zelda, the Valentinos, the Murphys, Mistinguet, Rex Ingram, Dos Passos, Alice Terry, the MacLeishes, Charlie Brackett, Maude Kahn, Esther Murphy, Marguerite Namara, E. Phillips Oppenheim, Mannes the violinist, Floyd Dell, Max and Crystal Eastman, ex-Premier Orlando, Etienne de Beaumont - just a real place to rough it, an escape from all the world. But we had a great time. I don’t know when we’re coming home -

The Hemingways are coming to dinner so I close with best wishes.

Scott

do Guaranty Trust

Paris,France

Winter, 1929

Dear John:

My depression over the badness of the novel * as novel had just about sunk me, when I began the novelette t - John, it’s like two different men writing. The novelette is one of the best war things I’ve ever read - right in with the very best of Crane and Bierce - intelligent, beautifully organized and written - oh, it moved me and delighted me - the Charles Town country, the night in town, the old lady - but most of all, in the position I was in at 4 this afternoon when I was in agony about the novel, the really fine dramatic handling of the old-lady-and-silver episode and the butchery scene. The preparation for the latter was adroit and delicate and just enough.

Now, to be practical - Scribner’s Magazine will, I’m sure, publish the novelette, if you wish, and pay you from $250-$400 therefor. This price is a guess but probably accurate. I’d be glad to act as your amateur agent in the case. It is almost impossible without a big popular name to sell a two-part story to any higher-priced magazine than that, as I know from my experience with ‘Diamond Big as Ritz,”Rich Boy,’ etc. Advise me as to whether I may go ahead - of course authority confined only to American serial rights.

The novel is just something you’ve learned from and profited by. It has occasional spurts - like the conversations frequently of Brakespeare, but it is terribly tepid - I refrain - rather I don’t refrain but here set down certain facts which you are undoubtedly quite as aware of as I am.

1. — Pp. 1-28. Elaborate preparation. Baby born without a scene. Only announcement. Monsignor feeble. A Catholic bishop does not rank above monsignor - his ambition to be a bishop is as incomprehensible as the idea of a staff captain to have a company.

2. — You have now all but lost the reader. He will not face the mass of detail 28 et sequitur. Italian theme strained - your ignorance of the Catholic Church fascinates me. Did you ever meet Mrs Winthrop Chanler? Madden good idea but observed thinly.

Your combination of leaning on a great thing for your color and simultaneously trying to patronize it -!

At end something happens - child cries - feeble - has no significance except the strained one of making the reader think - ‘Well, after all that climb it must mean more than I think it does!’

P. 48. Et sequitur.

First really fine page - my novel has same idea (shorter) about an English whore. However when this sixth Who’s Who commences all interest finally vanishes. No life is that dull. Did you ever see those midwestern books of the eighties-nineties, Our Pioneers, or Mid-Western Military Men - A Compilation? Even lists of dates, with their suggestion, are more alive.

(I’m taking you for a beating, but do you remember your letters to me about Gatsby? I suffered, but I got something - like I did out of your friendly tutelage in English poetry.)

You ought never to use an unfamiliar word unless you’ve had to search for it to express a delicate shade - where in effect you have recreated it. This is a damn good prose rule I think. Cf., andrognous (sic), etc. Exceptions: (a) need to avoid repetition (b) need of rhythm, etc. (c) etc.

P. 62. Story interest again begins.

P. 71. Gone again. Reader’s effort, like writer’s, was too much.

P. 79, etc. (Incidentally in this novel you have (a) suggestion that Gettysburg was fought before Chancellorsville (b) that retreat from Gettysburg and from Antietam was in same campaign (c) that Colonels were often locally elected in southern armies - which contrast sharply with your profound knowledge of the Civil War in story.)

A big person can make a much bigger mess than a little person and your impressive stature converted a lot of pottery into pebbles during the three years or so you were in the works. Luckily the pottery was never very dear to you. Novels are not written, or at least begun, with the idea of making an ultimate philosophical system - you tried to atone for your lack of confidence by a lack of humility before the form.

The main thing is: no one in our language possibly excepting Wilder has your talent for ‘the world,’ your culture and acuteness of social criticism as implied in the story. There the approach (second and third person, etc.) is considered, full scope in choice of subject for your special talents (descriptive power, sense of le pays, ramifications of your special virtues such as loyalty, concealment of the sensuality, that is your bête noire to such an extent that you can no longer see it black, like me my drunkenness).

Anyhow it’s (the story) marvelous. Don’t be mad at this letter. I have the horrors tonight and perhaps am taking it out on you. Write me when I could see you here in Paris in the afternoon between 2:30 and 6:30 and talk - and name a day and a café at your convenience - I have no dates save on Sunday so any day will suit me. Meanwhile I’ll make one more stab at your novel to see if I can think of any way by a miracle of cutting it could be made presentable. But I fear there’s neither honor nor money in it for you.

Your old and always affectionate friend, Scott Excuse Christ-like tone of letter. Began tippling at page 2 and am now positively holy (like Dostoevski’s non-stinking monk).

Grand Hotel de la Paix Lausanne April, 1931

Dear John:

Read Many Thousands over again (the second time) and like it enormously. I think it hangs together as a book too. I like the first story -1 think it’s damn good. I’d never read it before. ‘Death and Young Desire’ doesn’t come off - as for instance the handling of the same theme in The Story of St Michele. Why I don’t know.

My favorite is ‘The Cellar’ - I am still fascinated by the Con-

radian missing man - that’s real fiction. ‘Bones’ seems even better in the respect-inspiring light thrown by Bunny’s opinion. I’m taking it to Zelda tomorrow.

Ever friend,

Scott

1307 Park Avenue

Baltimore,

Maryland April 2, 1934

Dear John:

Somebody (I’ve forgotten who after an overcrowded and hectic twenty-four hours in New York) quoted you to me as saying that this current work is ‘no advance on what he’s done before.’ That’s a legitimate criticism, but I can’t take it as a slam. I keep thinking of Conrad’s Nigger of the Narcissus preface - and I believe that the important thing about a work of fiction is that the essential reaction shall be profound and enduring. And if the ending of this one is not effectual I should be gladder to think that the effect came back long afterwards, long after one had forgotten the name of the author.

All this makes it more necessary to see you and do some doping on the practice of the novel while you’re in process of revision. I’ll be up in New York toward the beginning of next week. Will you keep that in mind and if your plans change suddenly let me know?

Pleasant thoughts to you all.

As ever, Two things I forgot to say -

j. There’s a deliberate choice in my avoidance of a dramatic ending - I deliberately did not want it.

2. Without making apologies, I’d prefer to fade off my book, like the last of The Brothers Karamazov, or Time Regained, and let the belly carry my story, than to resort to the arbitrary blood-letting of Flaubert, Stendahl and the Elizabethans.

You see we must talk - no room in a letter.

1307 Park Avenue

Baltimore,

Maryland April 7, 1934

Dear John:

On receiving your first letter with its handsome tribute and generous praise I realized that I had been hasty in crediting that you would make such a criticism as ‘this book is no advance on Gatsby.’ You would be the first to feel that the intention in the two books was entirely different, that (to promote myself momentarily) Gatsby was shooting at something like Henry Esmond while this was shooting at something like Vanity Fair. The dramatic novel has canons quite different from the philosophical, now called psychological, novel. One is a kind of tour de force and the other a confession of faith. It would be like comparing a sonnet sequence with an epic.

The point of my letter which survives is that there were moments all through the book where I could have pointed up dramatic scenes, and I deliberately refrained from doing so because the material itself was so harrowing and highly charged that I did not want to subject the reader to a series of nervous shocks in a novel that was inevitably close to whoever read it in my generation.

Contrariwise, in dealing with figures as remote as are a bootlegger and crook to most of us, I was not afraid of heightening and melodramatizing any scenes; and I was thinking that in your novel I would like to pass on this theory to you for what it is worth. Such advice from fellow-craftsmen has been a great help to me in the past, indeed I believe it was Ernest Hemingway who developed to me, in conversation, that the dying fall was preferable to the dramatic ending under certain conditions, and I think we both got the germ of the idea from Conrad.

With affection always, Scott

1307 Park Avenue

Baltimore,

Maryland January 30, 1935

Dear John:

Your book had an extraordinary effect on me. Let me be frank to say that I took it up with some misgivings due to the fact that I felt that you had decided to deal with somewhat drab material, and that to make it colorful you might be inclined to lean over into melodrama - but more of that later. From the first I got completely under the spell of the exquisite prose, the descriptions of the Shenandoah country, and as one by one the characters began to unfold, the whole scene became tense and exciting. I think the way that you built up the character of Marston on the foundation of old Mason was fine - contrary to Ernest’s dictum as to synthetic characters not being plausible.

Charlie emerges as an almost heroic figure early in the book, your young narrator is sympathetic but suffers insomuch as he partakes of the vague artist-as-a-young-man quality that distinguishes our time from the Werther-Byron-Stendahl character of a hundred years ago.

Virginia is the least achieved character to me. There are the fine passages describing her bedroom hysteria after the event, but, because it was never clear in your own mind exactly how she was, the courtroom scene in which she appeared did not hang fire with the intensity of similar scenes in High Wind in Jamaica or An American Tragedy or Sanctuary.

Your minor characters were fine, the comic aunt, the nigger pansy, the decayed Job’s counselor (female), the ghost of the poetic judge - all in all, the book is packed full of beauty and wisdom and richness of perception. I read through the first half in onenight and was so excited that I had to call up somebody (it turned out to be Elizabeth Lemmon) to tell them how much I liked it, how good it was, and how delighted I was that it was good!

Yet when I finished the book there was a certain sense of unfulfillment and now I am going to permit myself to play papa for a moment.

When your heart was in poetry your inclination was to regard prose fiction as merely a stop-gap, a necessary nuisance. Time showed you the error of that early evaluation and it cost you a pretty penny in years. There are things in this book which are still typical of one who cannot light his way around and who has got to, for these are the years for you during which the best ammunition has to be fired off. Let me list, not too categorically, what I consider the faults of execution in the opus:

First, conscientiously you must try to cut all traces of other people out of yourself. If you were twenty-one it wouldn’t matter; it was all right for Tom Wolfe in Look Homeward, Angel to make one chapter practically a parody of a chapter in Ulysses. It was forgivable for me to have done an equivalent thing half a dozen times in This Side of Paradise, but for anybody over forty to do it is simply not in the picture of one who has to make himself a personality.

Vide: Page 148, Frank Norris, speaking of Kipling, said, ‘the little colonial, to whose pipe we must all dance’ - but by that general admission of the tremendous power of certain stylists he announced that he, for one, would fight shy of any effect that he might gain by using their rhythms to cradle his ideas or to fill gaps with reminiscent echolalia. Several times I saw patterns in this book which derived background and drama from Faulkner, or cadence from Hemingway, and each time you might have produced something much stronger by having more of a conscience, by fighting against that tendency, cutting out the passage no matter how satisfactory it may have been in itself, and building up the structure with something that is yourself. In any case, that has been my experience, and I pass it on to you for what it’s worth.

Let’s call that the first point - There are only two. The second is purely a matter of structure. You once wrote me about Conrad’s ability to build his characters into such a reality, commonplace reality, that any melodrama that afterwards occurred would be palatable. The first half of your book is so heavy with stimuli and promises, that the later catastrophe of the rape is minimized - both in itself and in its consequences. Charle’s whole wild day should have been telescoped and much cut, insofar as the intervening episodes are concerned, such as the bathers hearing the shots. The title should not have given away so much of the plot. You had put out so many leads by that time that the reader was practically expecting the World War, and the actual fact that Charlie violated a spinster is anticlimactical as is her ensuing denunciation of him. When you plant a scene in a book the importance of the scene cannot be taken as a measure of the space it should occupy, for it is entirely a special and particular artistic problem. If Dreiser, in The American Tragedy, plans to linger over the drowning in upper New York well and good, but I could tell you plenty of books in which the main episode, around which swings the entire drama, is over and accomplished in four or five sentences.

There is, after all, a third point I think the book is a little too rough. The insistence on sex-in-the-raw occupies more space than the phenomenon usually does in life. Insofar as this is the story of a boy’s awakening to the world of passion, it is justified, but when you launch yourself into an account of the brutal fate that haunts us the balance is not what it should be. Much of the testimony in the trial seemed to be arbitrarily introduced from Krafft- Ebing.

Now as a peroration let me congratulate you again. It is beautifully made, beautifully written and one of your three characters emerges as a creation. I liked Charlie, and would like to have met him, and he will stay with me when most of the fictional history of many years is forgotten. I congratulate you with all my heart With best to you both, Scott

P.S. Aside from the fun of the above strictures it gives me great pleasure to tell you that the word ‘demean’ does not mean ‘de- base.’The phrase ‘to demean’ means only ‘to conduct one’s self and does not imply that the conduct is either good or bad. It is a common error. Other quibbles: On the jacket the Shenandoah Valley is placed in tidewater Virginia and the story in the 90s. When did people roll around so casually in cars in the late 90s? It seems to me that you would be justified in asking Max to correct these errors iii further printings.

Grove Park Inn

Asheville,

North Carolina

May, 1935

Dear John:

Here’s a letter of uncalled-for advice. I think though it’s good. All right - into the lion’s mouth.

Act of Darkness must be written off. It was a good novel - it Had high points (I’m coming back to that), it showed that your long phase of being self-conscious in prose is over. You’ve got ten good years - two or three fine novels left. Now, here’s my inventory.

From the wildest fantasy (which you did not and could not handle through lack of readiness and incisiveness of wit, profuse- ness of it, and through other reasons like Hergesheimeric tendency to take it easy doing still-lives) you went (and I was all for it) to the most complete realism, taking in passing the Civil War. The part taken in passing came closest to being your natural field. You jumped over it too quickly - I don’t mean the war in particular - I mean the blend. Because you’re two people - you are not yet your work as in a sense I am mine.

You are a. — a person of conventional background and conduct with tendency almost to drabness, non-resistance, uxoriousness, bourgeois- respectable, etc., etc., etc., etc.

b. — a poet with sense of wonder and color of life expressed in men, women, and words; and grand gestures, grand faits accomplis, parades.

1. Setting. I should use a sensational set, probably costume set using some such character as the Lost Dauphin - I mean it - not fulfilled Renaissance character or you’ll just make a picture book. Something enormous, gross, obvious, untouched by fine hands. Some great stone the sculptors have rejected. Your background had better shimmer, not be static or peaceful.

2. Plot. Advice on this is no good. You handle it well but I advise a change of pace -I find so many good enough books are in the same key, i e., Appointment in Samarra. Life is not so smooth that it can’t go over suddenly into melodrama. That’s the other face of much worry about inevitability. Everything’s too beautifully caused - one can guess ahead. Even the movies know this and condemn a story as ‘too straight.’ My own best solution to date is the to-and-fro, keep-facts-back mystery stuff, but it’s difficult. Of course it’s the Dickens-Dostoevski thing. Act of Darkness was much too straight, and tempo too even. Only a very short piece wants complete tempo, one breath, Ethan Frome. It’s short story technique. Even Pride and Prejudice walks and runs like life.

3. Try and find more ‘bright’ characters; if the women are plain make them millionairesses or nymphomaniacs; if they’re scrubwomen, give them hot sex attraction and charm. This is such a good trick I don’t see why it’s not more used - I always use it just as I like to balance a beautiful word with a barbed one.

There is tremendous comedy inherent in your relations with Hurlock and Feustman. You can do more with minor characters - your perverted Negroes, etc., are good enough but you’re rich with stuff. You dredge yourself with difficulty.

I’d like to see some gaiety in your next book to help sell it Can’t you find some somewhere?

Anyhow all this care for shimmering set, active plot, bright characters, change of pace and gaiety should all show in the plan. Leave out any two, and your novel is weaker, any three or four and you’re running a department store with only half the counters open.

All this is a presumption. Max Perkins told me the book hadn’t gone and while I know it had a good press and the season was bad still I do worry about you and would hate to see you either discouraged or apathetic about your future as a novelist.

Best to your huge clan.

Scott

P.S. Address as on envelope till about June 25th.

Haven’t had a drink this year - not even wine or beer - are you surprised?

To Mrs Bayard Turnbull

La Paix,

Rodgers’ Forge

Towson, Maryland

September 10, 1932

Dear Mrs Turnbull:

Thanks for your quotation from the Emperor. It is a great thesis and even the Communists are working it - claiming that no man not under a religious spell (in their case, Communism) can have a focal point from which to orientate his work. I think that it is largely a question of the age in which one lives and I am not philosopher enough to think it through for myself.

Thanks too for the Lawrence item which I will read tonight Later: Read it and enjoyed the Murray letter hugely.

With unjustified egotism I am sending you two articles on the American novel that have appeared in the last year. I know Munson by reputation - Leighton I haven’t heard of. One is pleasantly disposed toward me - the other not - and both articles seem to me mostly bunk. I send them because Lewisohn treats with interest his own generation and dismisses mine so entirely, because we deal with the post-war world which he does not understand. To give, for example, Hergesheimer’s stories of ladies’ laundry and picturesque peasants, all got up in the questionable later stylistics of Henry James, more importance than Hemingway’s work is simply to say, ‘Well, that’s the world I like and I’m a pacifist liberal Jew and you can’t expect me to understand new tendencies in a social system I didn’t get with my mother’s milk anyhow.’ He allows to his own generation the right to report the traditionally unimportant, but in the new one, the observed truth has got to fit in with his own crystallized conceptions. Well, well -I shall be like that sometime.

The young men turn to us (I don’t mean, God forbid! my Post stories, but to my generation). The bow they make to Cabell, for example, is purely formal. I believe that if one is interested in the world into which willy-nilly one’s children will grow up the most accurate data can be found in the European leaders, such as Lawrence, Jung and Spengler, and after that in the very sincere young Americans emerging one by one, and least in the attempts to make logical and palatable the current world scene. I think we are all a little sick but the logic of history won’t permit us to go backward.

Again thanks for sending me the Lawrence, which I’d have otherwise missed. With very best wishes,

Sincerely,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

La Paix, Rodgers’ Forge

Towson, Maryland

September 21, 1932

Dear Mrs Turnbull:

I’m afraid I was dogmatic last night on a subject about which it is silly to be dogmatic. But I do know that I’d prefer Scottie to marry a man of the world even if he was not of her world - a man six or eight years older than herself. The value of every year of experience he brings to the marriage is enormous. I have heard so many college girls complain about their young husbands not knowing anything, by which they didn’t mean formal education but the lack of any approach to life except the social or the modern big-business approach. They have never been to sea, or to the wars, robbed a bank, hunted to live, supported a chorus girl, founded a religion, or dealt directly with other men in some rough school such as politics. If she marries for a whole lot of money that is a different matter for with enough money one can change husbands or live in Paris and not even bother. I am referring to the young couple who will have to meet the usual problems together, such as the money one. And I think if a suitor of Scottie’s was entirely innocent in his past life I’d be inclined to make the old remark: ‘Well, I don’t want you to practice on her.’

Of course nowadays with so much knowledge available the chances are that women know when they’re being cheated but fifty years ago, so numerous doctors have revealed, there were many marriage tragedies beneath what seemed a happy surface.

Of course, I don’t believe in the double standard -I believe it’s disappearing anyhow - I only meant that it was possible for a man to be far from a saint and yet be wildly jealous of his wife, as I am.

Just a last word and I am through boring you with this interminable discussion - I don’t think it matters what a boy’s politics are before he is sixteen but I hope the colleges will cover about all the current economic theories, if only that the boy should know where he stands and what he’s fighting. When a United States Senator after his election has to look up the principles of Marxism by which one-sixth of the world is governed it shows he’s a pretty inadequate defender of his own system.

Again, excuse this long letter - couldn’t get down to work this morning and simply had to argue about something.

Sincerely,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

I’m sorry I lent you the Hemingway book - there’s a streak of vulgarity in it I would find quite offensive except I know that he does it as a protest against censorship.

La Paix, Rodgers’ Forge

Towson, Maryland

Probably Spring, 1933

Dear Mrs Turnbull:

I can’t resist adding a word of qualification to the opinions I expressed so freely last night.

1st Ford Madox Ford once said, ‘Henry James was the greatest writer of his day; therefore for me the greatest man.’ That is all I meant by superiority. T. S. Eliot seems to me a very great person - Mrs Lanier seems to me a very fine character. To me the conditions of an artistically creative life are so arduous that I can only compare to them the duties of a soldier in war-time. I simply cannot admire, say, a merchant or an educator with the intensity I reserve for other professions, and in a sense the world agrees with me. Of the Elizabethans we remember the Queen and Drake, a ruler and a captain - only two ‘people of affairs’ in contrast to Bacon, Sidney, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson, Raleigh. You may say that is because history is written by writers - I think it is more than that.

2nd Please believe that, within the limits of the frame you have chosen, I know no children better brought up than yours. My somewhat tactless bursts of criticism of the frame itself are prompted by my faith in a sort of sixth sense that I think I have about the way the world is going.

3rd I cannot permit my silence of last night when you spoke of yourself as being ‘shallow, etc.’

to pass as a tacit acceptance of the truth of that. I simply meant that for me the test of human values is conformity to the strictest and most unflinching rationality, while in your case it is based on standards of conduct. I don’t mean that because Rousseau’s life was disordered an intellectual should use that to justify his own weaknesses, nor even that my criteria necessarily subsume yours, but I must think they do even though I continually check up by seeing the lives of ‘orderly’ people, judging what’s fake and what’s real. This by the way doesn’t excuse the arrogance and bad manners of which I was guilty last night.

4th In résumé I owe you an apology, because I value your friendship, but not a retraction if I can persuade you that even my definitions are different from yours. With great admiration and respect for you and your way of life let me sign myself as Erratic but sincere tenant,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

La Paix, Rodgers’ Forge

Towson, Maryland

September, 1933

Dear Mrs Turnbull:

I am going to have to not come to dinner Friday * (all of us, I mean), though naturally will come up in evening or afternoon to pay my respects to your mother with great pleasure - and curiosity and interest - at your convenience. We have dined out exactly four times in two years: twice with you, once at the Ridgelys, once on a ship. Without going into the whys of the precedent, it has become one, so with many thanks, I remain your friend (in this case regretful),

Scott Fitzgerald P.S. I have some documents of yours which I will cherish for a few days, unless you want them back immediately: one magazine article, one clipping, 2 letters of Andrew’s (or do you save letters - if not I will file them as they seem interesting to me and form part of a series).

La Paix, Rodgers’ Forge

Towson, Maryland

September, 1933

Dear Mrs Turnbull:

How would this plan seem to you? for the school trek, beginning Thursday.

You to take Thursday and Friday; then:

Our week, your week, our week, your week, your week Our week,”

etc.

This arrangement because this year your children have the far mileage to cover. Is it Oak? (I believe the dictionary spelling is ‘Oke.’)

Your mother is utterly charming. I have never known a woman of her age to be so alive (I retract: there was also Mrs Winthrop Chanler). I enjoyed our hour together so much. Tell her so.

Ever your chattel,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

1307 Park Avenue

Baltimore,

Maryland

May 31, 1934

Dear Margaret:

I know it was very annoying for me to have lost my temper in public and I want to apologize to you both, for the discomfort that I know I gave you. There are certain subjects that simply do not belong to an afternoon tea and, while I still think that Mrs Perce’s arguments were almost maddening enough to justify homicide, I appreciate that it was no role of mine to intrude my intensity of feeling upon a group who had expected a quiet tea party.

Ever yours faithfully,

Scott Fitzgerald

P.S. I’m sorry this is typed but I seem to have contracted Scottie’s poison ivy and my hands are swathed in bandages.

1307 Park Avenue

Baltimore,

Maryland

May11, 1935

Dear Margaret:

The lilies are wonderful. First I gave them to Scottie and then I took them back. I rushed to my window and called you just as your Ford rolled out of sight. I wanted to see you before I left, which is now, for a protracted sojourn in the country, probably Carolina, still seeking to get back the hours of sleep that I lost in ‘33 and ‘34. I am closing the house but am coming back in June to pack Scottie off to camp.

I think of you all so often and I miss keeping up with Andrew and Eleanor, their woes and joys and changes. Through Scottie’s eyes they lack reality, Andrew becomes a schemer of Machiavellian hue, Eleanor remains the child who just never will be as old as Scottie no matter how hard she tries, as though she were an Alice who had just perversely lost her growing cake. I still hear the wings of a career beating about her. As for Andrew I shall have to catch up as much as possible when I take him to the football game next autumn, though I wish I knew what he was going to do this summer.

I have a fair story in the current McCall’s if you run into it. La Paix must be grand now - I wish Zelda could walk through it, but alas, she is far too sick. When she is a little better and can go outside will you call on her sometime? I will let you know. She will be pretty lonesome when I am away and I hate like the devil to leave her but it is doctor’s orders.

Always affectionately,

Scott

Grove Pork Inn

Asheville,North Carolina

June, 1935

Dear Margaret:

What a nice letter you write! I quoted to Zelda tonight (in a letter) the part about ‘Scottie in yellow ruffles... with Andrew, Jack and Clarence... forming the dark half of the design.’

Also the inevitable fatalism that creeps into all womanhood, the almost lust for death as the culmination of experience; to quote you again, ‘life being made up of hope, and a little fulfillment.’ The hell it is - too much fulfillment from a man’s point of view, if he has been one of those who wanted to identify himself with it utterly. It’s so fast, so sweeping along, that he walks stumbling and crying out, wondering sometimes where he is, or where the others are, or if they existed, or whether he’s hurt anybody, but not much time to wonder, only sweeping along again with his only choice being between blindness or being muscle- bound from caution-conservatism-cowardice, the three great C’s I’ve tied up together, though God knows I’m capable of all three...

I became so metaphysical there that I had to destroy what I’d written. Anyhow I think that the fatalism of women can be confused with radicalism but is neither radical nor conservative to any extent. But a man’s life is a more gorgeous thing, I think, if he’s one of the fortunate. Oh, well - these generalities set ill upon a man of my age.

Thank you for asking Scottie out. You have been good to her. I like it when she goes to your house and gets a sense of the continuity of life that her own choppy existence hasn’t given her. I want her to be pretty hard but if she has to be a condottiere to a certain extent, I like her to know that all people don’t.

I am benefiting by my rest here, gaining weight, exuberance. But living alone leaves so many loopholes for brooding and when I do face the whole tragedy of Zelda it is simply a day lost. I think I feel it more now than at any time since its inception. She seems so helpless and pitiful. Liquor used to help put it out of mind, and it was one of the many services my old friend Barleycorn did me. However he had outlived his usefulness in that as well as all other regards.

I hear it is beautiful here, but without people all places are the same to me. I’d rather be at La Paix watching thru my iron grille one of your tribe moving about the garden, and wondering if Zelda had yet thrown the tennis racquet at Mr Crosley.

What a ten months this has been for Frances - good God! a lifetime for some people. Blessings on her - she is a fine person.

All my affectionate good wishes to you and yours,

Scott Fitz

Cambridge Arms Baltimore,

Maryland

Fall, 1935

Dear Margaret:

Pardon! We moved. I wrote. And wrote. And wrote. All politesse ceased to exist for a thick week during which I lived in a haze of cigarette smoke and nervous querulousness. I don’t even know why I wrote you about Scottie save that on my occasional emergencies all matters in the outside world seemed of equally vital importance - or unimportance: the N.R.A. and the Princeton-Williams game, the decline of the democratic dogma and the faint worry of a child. Anyhow, thanks.

I destroyed Andrew’s letter - he is so level-headed in his analyses and he keeps growing. I wish I knew him better but I won’t though, until he is about 19. He might know me but I won’t know him because until then he will give me a presentation of himself that he thinks will impress or please me. This will not prevent him, I repeat, from finding out more and more about me if we meet often.

I know this Pell’s brother who was in ‘28. This one t had a school in New England for awhile, didn’t he, or was assistant headmaster somewhere or taught at St Mark’s? I’ve heard well of him. He was in Ivy, I think, and well liked, but on principle I’m against schoolmarms, male or female - though there’s just the ghost of one in me. Common sense tells me that there are rules but, like all modern men, the shade of Rousseau haunts me. (Bert- rand Russell’s Rousseau school is a flop - I know that at practically first hand - I’ve seen and talked to both parents and products.) That’s too big a subject for a letter and we’ve probably talked of it before.

Zelda is much much better - I’ve taken her out twice; suicidal tendency vanishing - interest in life returning.

Please enclose this to Andrew when you write.

Oh - I know what I wanted to tell you - I think I’m about to write a series of sketches for radio about father and daughter - I’ll tell you about it when we meet. In a week we’ll be in our real apartment (this is a substitute) in the same building, and you and Frances must come and give us your benediction, or are there only dates and cotillions now? We talk about you all a lot.

Always affectionately,

Scott Fitzg —

The Harvard game is November 9th - just a reminder.

The Cambridge Arms

Baltimore,

Maryland

Spring, 1936

Dear Margaret:

Just a footnote to our conversation: you of course recognized the allusion to William James’ remark when I spoke of ‘tender- minded’ and ‘tough-minded’ and said that I was the former and you the latter. It has no relation to sensitiveness but rather to sensibility. And I am not at all sure which I am. I think perhaps the creative worker has the privilege of jumping from one attitude to the other, or of balancing on the line. I am continually surprised both by my softness and by my hardiness.

Ever yours,

Scott Fitzg —

Read the article by Antheil if you get the last Esquire.

Grove Park Inn Asheville,

North Carolina

November n, 1936

Dear Margaret:

Only the fact that I have been incapacitated by a broken shoulder has broken the tradition of taking Andrew to a game beside the hall of his grandfather (‘Pepper Constable’). I am sending him two tickets to the last Princeton game and if he doesn’t want to use them he can give them to someone else who wants to.

Andrew is a brave fighter and I admire, sometimes, his stubbornness and his reticence just as much as I would like him in the sunshine when I have tried to give him what I have found from life. He has the potentialities of being absolutely first-rate. I hope he read War and Peace; and I wish I had had the advantage when I was a child of parents and friends who knew more than I did.

With dearest love to you all,

Scott Fitzgerald

Oak Hall

Hotel

Tryon, North Carolina

Spring, 1937

Dear Margaret:

What a lovely letter you write. I am timorous in answering you, having no flair for letters - my old ones reread make me wince.

And now, assuming that there are 20 intelligent women in Baltimore (isn’t the proper word ‘bright’ or ‘clever?’) I spring to answer you.

I think your first topic is the best of the two  (the second embraces all feminism and will lead to triteness) but it’s not perfect. It’s awfully yes or no - has the aristocrat got money? - if ‘if hasn’t it had better be born into the middle of the middle classes in a small town. If you had money and were not Russian or Spanish it was certainly an advantage to be an aristocrat up to group to which she belonged.

now. One might not be invited out much or have a king give up his throne in one’s honor or be as well known as Harlow and Low outside the county, and certainly one had to kneel to the monied nobility, but it had its compensations. Tories have such true-and-tried indignations that they are practically formed at ten.

Oh, well - Tolstoi didn’t like it - which leads me to ask if Andrew finished War and Peace or has D. H. Lawrence come between them? He seemed fine at Xmas. The time will come when all adults will spend the holidays in bed as I did and you apparently. I came down here and went on the white list for another long stretch and am finding it dull and not even conducive to work. Not that I miss the liquor which gives me but little elation in my old age but it is gloomy to see how few things I really care about when I see clearly. I support Zelda’s contention that it were best to begin at the pole and work south to the Riviera and likewise add that one should have first drunk at 35 and progress to a champagne-pink three score and ten.

I should think Andrew would love Look Homeward, Angel and A Farewell to Arms.

Reading over Eleanor’s sweet little note gave me pleasure. Scot- tie does well, leading the school in French and English and apparently being very serious after her Xmas debauch.

I think of you often in your garden. Hasn’t my ghost become pretty dim at La Paix?

Always affectionately,

Scott

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Corporation

Culver City,

California

Fall, 1937

Dear Margaret:

I have owed you a letter for so long but these have been crowded months. I suppose Scottie told you the general line-up - after almost 3 years of intermittent illness it’s nice to be on a steady job like this - a sort of tense crossword puzzle game, creative only when you want it to be, a surprisingly interesting intellectual exercise. You mustn’t miss my first effort, Three Comrades, released next winter.

I’m sorry you were ill last March - a blood transfusion - that sounds serious! The news about Frances is strange and loyal and profound. I hope she finds it again - it’s not very easy if you have ‘anything to you.’ I know - though I’ve often tried desperately hard to be light of love.

Antony is a fine book - odd I almost sent it to you! Also an odd comment - several people who were ‘tops’ in English society - and I don’t mean the fast set but the inner-of-inner Duke-of-York business - told me he was ‘rather a bounder.’ I wonder what they meant -1 can sort of understand.

I have sent Andrew two seats to Harvard-Princeton and two to Navy-Princeton. They will arrive in a few weeks addressed to me care of you with Princeton University Athletic Association stamped on the envelope, fust open them and send them to Andrew with my enduring affection.

And reserve a bushel for yourself. —

Scott

5521 Amestoy Avenue

Encino,California

November 13, 1939

Dear Margaret:

The enclosed letter explains itself,  I am not allowed to communicate with Andrew in this regard by the club convention, nor should you send him this letter, but it would be perfectly proper for you to tell him that if a delegation of Cottage boys call on him, he might at least exchange appraising glances with them. Of course, he may be already set with a crowd joining some other organization - and most especially I want him to be happy in his choice of companions for his last two years.

In general my views are somewhat contrary to yours, insofar as the advantage of belonging to a larger than to a smaller corporate body. You remember how I argued, almost to the point of presumption, against your selection of Williams for him as against one of the Big Three. In the same manner, it seems to me that it would be a little better for Andrew’s future if he joined one of the so-called ‘big clubs’ at Princeton than one of the others. They are called big not because they necessarily have more members, but because they divide among themselves the leadership in most undergraduate policy. The Charter Club and the Quadrangle Club are notably among the nicer ‘small’ clubs, but only a few months ago Jimmy Stewart was telling me how it wrankled throughout his whole Princeton career that he had joined Charter instead of Cottage, which had been his father’s club. The larger group, it seems to me, though it may make for stiffer going, pays off better at the end.

Nothing would please me better than that the whole snobbish system be abolished. But it is thoroughly entrenched there, as Woodrow Wilson saw, and to boys of that impressionable age assumes an importance all out of proportion to its reality. And boys have gone through college without joining any club at all with no loss of self-respect.

In general: if Andrew goes into naturally, say Cap and Gown, with the crowd he has always known, that is all in all probably the best thing. Failing that, it would be better to go into Cottage with two or three friends than to go with some larger group into any of the lesser clubs. I haven’t seen Andrew for years now (though I’ve had pleasant glimpses of him from Scottie and from several letters which he’s written me). So this is pretty much work in the dark. One thing that distinguished ‘big clubs’ from the others is that the boys are slightly older, and more sophisticated, and rather more endowed with front. I had my choice of two of the bigger clubs and two of the smaller ones and though I might have been more comfortable in Quadrangle, for instance, where there were lots of literary minded boys, I was never sorry about my choice. My ideas of education still go in the direction that college like the home should be an approximation of what we are likely to expect in the world.

Let me hear some news of you and yours. Scottie seems to be settling down at last at Vassar, but I would never again want to undertake the education of a girl of whom boys have made a sort of adolescent fetish. I don’t think that down in her heart she likes it much either.

With affection,

Scott

To Christian Gauss

Edgemoor, Delaware Ellerslie

February 1, 1928

Dear Dean Gauss:

This is in elaboration of my excited telegram. As it happened I left Princeton in company with two different types and in both cases I worked the discussion around to the honor system. The freshman, a football man with whom I rode to the Junction, told me specifically (for I didn’t ask for opinions) that his roommate knew of two cases of absolute violations during tests, one man twice and another once, and ‘didn’t know whether to report it or not.’ He had known for some months. In other words the honor system no longer included his personal honor but seemed opposed to it.

I rode from the Junction to Phila with the president of a very prominent club, not my own, a Princetonian of the rather old- line, conservative, very gentlemanly type. He said he’d often participated in discussions as to whether he would report a case - and his conclusion was he didn’t know. But he knew of cases where violations had not been reported. The implication was that these were many. The utter stupidity of the business on the part of the undergraduates is what excited and depressed me to the extent of wiring you. I wanted to come back and see you but there was a whole house party here at home.

Now it seems to me that if one complete generation goes through with this attitude, that is if next year there is no class which hasn’t felt it as part of them, the chain is eternally broken and something has gone out of the life and pride of every Princeton man. But I can’t believe it could happen surreptitiously. What is behind it? I heard some talk about the ‘spirit of the honor system’ and an implication that it was being stretched too far, to cover themes, etc. If this has been done then I can understand it and the people who stretched it have, I believe, been in grave error. For after all it was a bargain, as all honor is until it becomes a tradition, and if it applied to themes what does the undergraduate get out of it? The other way he gets freedom from supervision, but themes were never written under supervision. As delicate a thing as the honor system is not at anyone’s willful and arbitrary control.

Don’t you think that, if that is so, it means that it should be redefined in its original and simplest form? Then perhaps an appeal might be made all at once, in the Prince, student council, by alumni (my occasionally eloquent pen is at your service) to show them the utterly perverted stupidity of what they are doing? I feel helpless and ignorant. Please enlighten me.

Always yours cordially and admiringly,

Scott Fitzg —

P.S. I’m so sorry you were let in for my ‘speech’ the other night. It was my first and last public appearance and the awful part of it was that I really did have something to say.

La Paix, Rodgers’

Forge Towson,

Maryland

February 2, 1933

Dear Mr Gauss:

I had no special reason for calling you beyond that of friendship. I was up there for a couple of days because Gregg Dougherty was checking over some chemistry data I had in a story. I observed the disappearance of the rah-rah boy and thought Princeton in sweaters was quite becoming to itself. If this depression wasn’t so terrible it wouldn’t be so bad at all.

I am still at the novel and hope to God it can be finished this spring as I am very tired of being Mr Lorimer’s little boy year after year, though I don’t know what I’d do without him.

Will certainly call on you when I next come to Princeton. With best regards to Mrs Gauss and your beautiful red headed progeny, I am, as always,

Your friend,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

1307 Park Avenue

Baltimore,

Maryland

April 23, 1934

Dear Mr Gauss:

Your full and generous letter reached me just before I went off on a three-day vacation. I cannot tell you how it pleased me.There comes a time when a writer writes only for certain people and where the opinion of the others is of little less than no importance at all and you are one of the people for whom I, subconsciously, write. From the time that you put in a good word for my first book, then bound for Scribners, I have appreciated your opinion and advice. I remember the one thing you said against The Great Gats by in Paris some seven years ago when we saw something of each other with Ernest Hemingway; the fact that I had over-used the expression of ‘windows blooming with light’ has stuck with me to the present day, and I think had a large and valuable influence in some of my problems.

I wish to God I could join you and Bunny on your junket but I am simply swamped by the hangover of the book and with domestic affairs so I don’t think I will see Princeton before June, and, believe me, I regret it very much because there is much more that I want to talk to you about than literature.

Scribners writes that they are sending me your book which I think I have read almost entire in its scattered form but which I will pursue again with deep pleasure.

With best regards to Mrs Gauss and admiration for your beautiful red-headed progeny, I am

Ever yours, (even in red crayon, the only thing available)

Scott Fitzg —

1307 Park Avenue

Baltimore,

Maryland

September 7, 1934

Dear Dean Gauss:

This is a wild idea of mine, conditioned by the fact that my physician thinks I am in a solitary rut and that I ought to have outside interests. Well, outside interests generally mean for me women, liquor or some form of exhibitionism. The third seems to be most practical at the present moment, wherefore I would like to give a series of lectures at Princeton, say eight, on the actual business of creating fiction. There would be no charge and I would consider it a favor if I were allowed to do this in a University lecture hall. (Incidentally, to safeguard you from my elaborate reputation, I would pledge my word to do no drinking in Princeton save what might be served at your table if you should provide me with luncheon before one of these attempts.)

The lectures I’ve not planned but they would be, in general, the history of say:

1.What Constitutes the Creative Temperament 1. — What Creative Material Is.

2. — Its Organization.

And so forth and so on.

This would be absolutely first-hand stuff and there might be a barrier to crash in regard to the English Department, and if you don’t think this is the time to do it don’t hesitate to let me know frankly. So many bogus characters have shown up in Princeton trying to preach what they have never been able to practice, that I think even if I reach only half a dozen incipient talents the thing might be worthwhile from the scholastic point of view, and will be selfishly worthwhile to me -I would like to time these lectures so that they would come on the afternoon or eve of athletic events that I would like to see.

You will know best how to sound out the powers-that-be in the English Department. I have a hunch that Gerould rather likes me and I like Root whether he likes me or not....

This is an arrow in the dark. I feel I never knew so much about my stuff as I now know, about the technique concerned, and I can’t think of anywhere I would like to disseminate this egotistic feeling more than at Princeton. This all might come to something, you know I Hope you had a fine summer abroad. With my respects to Mrs Gauss.

Ever yours,

F. Scott Fitzg

P.S. Naturally, after my wretched performance at the Cottage Club you might be cynical about my ability to handle an audience, but my suggestion is that the first lecture should be announced as a single, and if there is further demand we could go from thence to thither.

1307 Park Avenue

Baltimore,

Maryland

September 26,1934

Dear Dean Gauss:

I know about The Club’ and they asked me last year to come and lecture. What I have against that is that it is sponsored by undergraduates which detracts from speaking under the authoritative aegis of the University, and second, because my plan was a series of lectures and not one that I could develop in a single evening. Also they were meant to be pretty serious stuff, that is, written out rather than spoken from notes, straight lectures rather than preceptorials. However, if the powers-that-be feel it inadvisable I can only yield the point and postpone the idea until a more favorable year.

Glad you enjoyed your rest abroad and escaped Miriam Hopkins’ jumping out of the second-story window onto your shoulders. But I suppose you’ve been kidded to death about that already and I know you took it with your usual sense of humor.

Best wishes always,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Hotel Stafford

Baltimore,

Maryland

September 30, 1935

Dear Dean Gauss:

This is an imposition coming at the very beginning of the term when I know you are busy, so if you can grant this favor please do it at your leisure. As you know my daughter was brought up in France and I have conscientiously labored to keep her bilingual. This is now reduced to fortnightly conversations with a French woman and to supplement this I wanted some work in grammar - I mean advanced grammar. She is rather widely read in French (Hugo, Dumas, Molière, etc., and the classic poets) and I’d like to have for her some junior and senior French examination papers which I can have administered to her here. Is it within your power to have a sheaf of old ones dug up for me, or can you tell me where I can find some?

This is an odd request coming from such a wretched linguistic scholar as I was.

With best wishes to you always and with high hopes of seeing you sometime this fall,

Ever yours,

Scott Fitzg

To Harold Ober

599 Summit Avenue

St Paul,

Minnesota

January 8,

1920

Dear Mr Ober:

You could have knocked me over with a feather when you told me you had sold ‘Myra’ - I never was so heartily sick of a story before I finished it as I was of that one.

Enclosed is a new version of ‘Barbara,’ called ‘Bernice Bobs Her Hair’ to distinguish it from Mary Rinehart’s ‘Bab’ stories in the Post. I think I’ve managed to inject a snappy climax into it. Now this story went to several magazines this summer - Scribner’s, Woman’s Home Companion and the Post - but it was in an entirely different, absolutely unrecognizable form, single-spaced and none of ‘em kept it more than three days except Scribner’s, who wrote a personal letter on it. Is there any money in collections of short stories? This Post money comes in very handy - my idea is to go South - probably New Orleans - and write my second novel. Now my novels, at least my first one, are not like my short stories at all, they are rather cynical and pessimistic - and therefore I doubt if as a whole they’d stand much chance of being published serially in any of the uplift magazines at least until my first novel and those Post stories appear and I get some sort of a reputation.

Now I published three incidents of my first novel in Smart Set last summer and my idea in the new one is to sell such parts as might go as units separately to different magazines, as I write them, because it’ll take ten weeks to write it and I don’t want to run out of money. There will be one long thing which might make a novelette for the Post called The Diary of a Popular Girl, half a dozen cynical incidents that might do for Smart Set and perhaps a story or two for Scribner’s or Harper’s. How about it - do you think this is a wise plan - or do you think a story like C. G. Norris’ Salt or Cabell’s Jurgen or Dreiser’s Jennie Gerhardt would have one chance in a million to be sold serially? I’m asking you for an opinion about this beforehand because it will have an influence on my plans.

Hoping to hear from you I am,

Sincerely

F. Scott Fitzgerald

P.S. The excellent story I told you of probably won’t be along for two or three weeks. I’m stuck in the middle of it.

Salies de Bearn God knows where

Received March 15,1926

Dear Ober:

This is one of the lousiest stories I’ve ever written. Just terrible! I lost interest in the middle (by the way the last part is typed triple-space because I thought I could fix it - but I couldn’t).

PIease - and I mean this - don’t offer it to the Post. I think that as things are now it would be wretched policy. Nor to the Red- book. It hasn’t one redeeming touch of my usual spirit in it. I was desperate to begin a story and invented a business plot - the kind I can’t handle. I’d rather have $1000 for it from some obscure place than twice that and have it seen. I feel very strongly about this!

Am writing two of the best stories I’ve ever done in my life.

As ever,

Scott Fitz —

Villa St Louis Juan-les-Pins Alpes MaritimeFrance

Received June 3, 1926

Dear Ober:

Well, it’s rather melancholy to hear that the run was over. However as it was something of a succès d’estime and put in my pocket seventeen or eighteen thousand without a stroke of work on my part I should be, and am, well content.

A thousand thanks for your courtesy to my father. You went out of your way to be nice to him and he wrote me a most pleased and enthusiastic letter. He misses me, I think, and at his age such an outing as that was an exceptional pleasure. I am, as usual, deeply in your debt, and now for a most pleasant and personal reason. His own life after a rather brilliant start back in the seventies has been a ‘failure’ - he’s lived always in mother’s shadow and he takes an immense vicarious pleasure in any success of mine. Thank you.

Yours always,

Scott Fitzgerald

No stories sent since ‘Your Way and Mine’

10 rue Pergolèse Paris, France

Received November 16, 1929

Dear Harold:

Sorry this has been so delayed. I had another called The Bamaby Family’ that I worked on to the point of madness and may yet finish, but simply lost interest. The enclosed (I mean to say separate package) is heavy but, I think, good. Is it too heavy?

Now to answer questions, etc.

(1) As to Hemingway. You (I speak of you personally, not the old firm) made a mistake not to help sell his stuff personally 2 years ago - if any success was more clearly prognosticated I don’t know it. I told him the present situation and I know from several remarks of his that he thought at first he was being approached by the same agents as mine - but he is being fought over a lot now and is confused and I think the wisest thing is to do nothing at present. If any offer for moving pictures of his books for $20,000 or more came to you however don’t hesitate to wire him as he’s not satisfied with present picture offers. Simply wire him Garritus - he knows quite well who you are, etc. Please don’t in any correspondence with him use my name - you see my relations with him are entirely friendly and not business and he’d merely lose confidence in me if he felt he was being hemmed in by any coalition. My guess is, and I’m not sure, that he is pretty much deferring definite action for the present on stories and serials but this may not be true by the time this reaches you and may not be at this moment.

(2) — I note cable formula and will save $25 or $50 a year thereby.

(3) — Post stories all available here - don’t send Post.

(4) — World offer seems small ($300). Will answer refusing it politely myself.

(5) — Of new authors this Richard Douglass  author of The Innocent Voyage (called High Wind in Bermuda) in England is much the best bet but a lot of editors may have thought of that. Maybe not though! Will try to keep you informed at the same time I usually do Scribners of anybody new I hear of as, if he interests me, I like to give him a chance for a hearing; but there’s nobody now - but may write about that later! America will from now on give about one-half its book-buying ear to serious people or at any rate to people who have a backing from the sophisticated minority.

(6) — New Yorker offers O.K. but uninteresting - as for Mrs —

— (whoever she is) I will gladly modify my style and subject matter for her but she will have to give me her beautiful body first and I dare say the price is too high.

(7) — Did McCall’s like the article ‘Girls Believe in Girls?’

(8) — Now I have two uninterrupted months on the novel and will do my best. There is no question of my not trying for the serial right and never has been.

(9) — About The Woman’s Home Companion, you know.

Yours ever in Masonry and Concubinage,

Scott Fitzg

4 rue Herran Paris, France

Received May,3.1930

Dear Harold: —

First, I will be mailing a new story about the 25th. Glad you liked ‘A Nice Quiet Place.’ Did you ask about the corrected proof of ‘First Blood?’ (Addenda of letter covers this.) - I do so want to have it. Glad you put up a kick about the illustrations - they were awful, with all the youthful suggestion of a G.A.R. congress.

Thanks for the statements. I’m about where I feared I was.

Zelda was delighted with your compliments about ‘The Millionaire’s Girl.’

Now - about the novel - the other night I read one great hunk of it to John Peale Bishop, and we both agreed that it would be ruinous to let Liberty start it uncompleted. Here’s a hypothetical possibility. Suppose (as may happen in such cases) they didn’t like the end and we quarreled about it - then what the hell! I’d have lost the Post, gained an enemy in Liberty - who would we turn to - Ray Long? Suppose Liberty didn’t like even the first part and went around saying it was rotten before it was even finished. I want to be in New York if possible when they accept it for there’s that element of cutting, never yet discussed - are they going to cut it? Are they going to cut my stories to 5000 words or not? Are they going to pay $3500 or $4000? At one time I was about to send four chapters out of eight done to you. Then I cut one of those chapters absolutely to pieces. I know you’re losing faith in me and Max too but God knows one has to rely in the end on one’s own judgment. I could have published four lousy, half- baked books in the last five years and people would have thought I was at least a worthy young man not drinking myself to pieces in the south seas - but I’d be dead as Michael Arlen, Bromfield, Tom Boyd, Callaghan and the others who think they can trick the world with the hurried and the second-rate. These Post stories in the Post are at least not any spot on me - they’re honest and if their form is stereotyped people know what to expect when they pick up the Post. The novel is another thing - if, after four years, I published the Basil Lee stories as a book I might as well get tickets for Hollywood immediately.

Well, that’s how things are. If you’ll have the confidence in me I think you’ll shortly see I knew what I was doing.

Ever yours,

Scott Fitz —

This letter sounds cross but I’m stupid-got with work today and too tired to rewrite it. Please forgive it - it has to get tomorrow’s boat Addenda Zelda’s been sick - not dangerously but seriously - and then I got involved in a wedding party and after 2 weeks just got to work on new story yesterday but 3000 words already done - about as many as I must owe you dollars.

Meanwhile I acknowledge:

(1) — The account (2) — News about The Beautiful and D —

(3) — Costain’s suggestion (incidentally he can go to hell). The only way I can write a decent story is to imagine no one’s going to accept it and who cares. Self-consciousness about editors is ruinous to me. They can make their criticisms afterwards. I’m not going to do another Josephine thing until I can get that out my head. I tore up the beginning of one. You might tell him pleasantly, of course, that I just can’t work that way. Still there’s no use telling him - the harm’s done but if he has any other ideas about writing stories please don’t tell me.

(4) — I’m sorry the proof’s destroyed on ‘First Blood.’ Could you get me a copy of the magazine it’s in - I’ve lost mine. I want to fix it while I remember. By the way I don’t mind not having proofs of my own stories sent me when I’m here - but when I’ve worked on a proof it’s like losing a whole draft of a thing.

Yours always,

Scott

Last Word

I undertand the movies are buying short stories again. Do you know a good agent in Hollywood you might persuade to interest himself in ‘Majesty?’ It’s constructed dramatically like a play and has some damn good dramatic scenes in it.

1307 Park Avenue

Baltimore,

Maryland

December 8, 1934

Dear Harold:

After rereading your letter there were some things I felt hadn’t been sufficiently answered. The first is that I have a deep suspicion that you and Max got together at some point and decided I needed disciplining. Now I know of my fondness for you both and assume that it is reciprocated and I know also that when one man is in debt to another he is rather helpless in such matters. Nevertheless, the assumption that all my troubles are due to drink is a little too easy. Gliding over my domestic difficulties and my self-indulg- ence on that score and not deciding which one has caused the trouble - whether the hen preceded the egg or the egg preceded the hen -I want to get down to a few facts: a compact ‘apologia pro sua vita’ after all the horrors in Montgomery and the winter of ‘30 and ‘31, the return of Zelda’s trouble, attacked by the family, etc. (and you will find that this coincides almost exactly with my remissness in getting out mss. on specification). It became apparent to me that my literary reputation, except with the Post readers, was at its very lowest ebb. I was completely forgotten and this fact was rubbed in by Zelda’s inadvertently written book. From that time on until early this spring my chief absorption was to get my book published at any cost to myself and still manage to keep the ball rolling. With yours and Max’s help and some assistance from Mother the thing was accomplished but at the end it left me in the black hole of Calcutta, mentally exhausted, physically exhausted, emotionally exhausted, and, perhaps, morally exhausted. There seemed no time or space for recuperation. My expedition to Bermuda was a washout because of the pleurisy; Zelda collapsed again shortly after the holidays. The necessary ‘filling up’ that a writer should be able to do after great struggles was impossible. No sooner did I finish the last galley on the last version of the last proof of the book proof of Tender Is the Night than it was necessary to sit down and write a Post story.

Of course any apologia is necessarily a whine to some extent; a man digs his own grave and should, presumably, lie in it, and I know that the fault for this goes back to those years, which were really years of self-indulgence....

Hotel Stafford

Baltimore,

Maryland

Received July 2, 1935

Dear Harold:

I’m still here - at the last moment it appears that there is a suggestion about Zelda (three days ago was a most discouraging time) and it means finding a very special nurse. So I won’t leave till tomorrow. On an impulse I’m sending you a letter from Zelda that came today - a letter from which you can gauge the awful strangling heart-rending quality of this tragedy that has gone on now more than six years, with two brief intervals of hope. I know you’ll understand the intrusion of sending it to you - please mail it back to me; with things so black I hang on to every scrap that is like things used to be.

And with its precise irony life continues - I went to N.Y. after all Saturday afternoon to meet a girl - stayed 20 hours and got back here Sunday night to put Scottie on the train to camp.

Now as to business - or rather finances. I owe you still somewhere around S6500 (?) and should be paying you back at the rate of $1500 per story. But this has been a slow 6 weeks - first illness, then unsuccessful attempt at revise of Medieval IV, then a false start, then ‘What You Don’t Know.’ Considering that story alone for a minute and supposing it sold for $3000. You’ve given me

5500 advance $500

+ 300 commission =$1300

Normally that would leave me $1700. And I need $1000 for bills due (that doesn’t solve them but is ‘on account’) and I’ll need J700 on the 12th for life insurance. Of course I hope to have a new story in your hands by the 15th but I hope you can see your way clear to letting me have the whole sum this time - with the “nderstanding that on the next story I will surely be able to reimburse you $1500. (Won’t need the $700 till the 12 th but need the $1000 this week, by Friday, say, if the Post accepts and will put a check through.)

All this raises the ugly head of Medieval IV. Granted that Post pays J 3000 and you can complete paying me the whole sum this time - that is $1700 more -

Then shall I do Redbook revise IV first (it’s, alas, paid for!) and make Balmer * believe in me again? (He’s already published III and it reads well), or shall I do a Post story and begin to square things with you? Only you can decide this. I told you: Redbook III — can’t be revised but must be rewritten, and that and a new Post story will take to the end of July. I can survive till then but will it be too much of a drain on you to wait till then for further payments?

There is no use of me trying to rush things. Even in years like ‘24, ‘28, ‘29, ‘30, all devoted to short stories, I could not turn out more than 8-9 top-price stories a year. It simply is impossible - all my stories are conceived like novels, require a special emotion, a special experience - so that my readers, if such there be, know that each time it’ll be something new, not in form but in substance. (It’d be far better for me if I could do pattern stories but the pencil just goes dead on me. I wish I could think of a line of stories like the Josephine or Basil ones which could go faster and pay $3000. But no luck yet. If I ever get out of debt I want to try a second play. It’s just possible I could knock them cold if I let go the vulgar side of my talent.)

So that covers everything. Will you let me know by straight wire as soon as you’ve read this if I can count on these advances ($1000 this week - $700 on the 12th) if the Post buys?

Then I can sign the checks and get off South with a clear conscience.

I want to see you and have a long talk with you under better conditions than we’ve found of late. You haven’t seen me since I’ve been on my no-liquor regime.

Yours ever, Scott Fitz —

Mail Zelda’s letter to Asheville. Thanks for your nice wire about story. It set me up.

Cambridge Arms Apartments Charles & 34th Streets Baltimore,

Maryland

December 31, 1935

Dear Harold:

I’d have gone to Hollywood a year ago last spring. I don’t think I could do it now but I might. Especially if there was no choice. Twice I have worked out there on other people’s stories - on an ‘original’ with John Considine telling me the plot twice a week and on the Katharine Brush story - it simply fails to use what qualities I have. I don’t blame you for lecturing me since I have seriously inconvenienced you, but it would be hard to change my temperament in middle-life. No single man with a serious literary reputation has made good there. If I could form a partnership with some technical expert it might be done. (That’s very different from having a supervisor who couldn’t fit either the technical or creative role but is simply a weigher of completed values.) I’d need a man who knew the game, knew the people, but would help me tell and sell my story - not his. This man would be hard to find, because a smart technician doesn’t want or need a partner, and an uninspired one is inclined to have a dread of ever touching tops. I could work best with a woman, because they haven’t any false pride about yielding a point. I could have worked with old Bess Meredith if we hadn’t been in constant committees of five. I’m afraid unless some such break occurs I’d be no good in the industry.

The matter will probably solve itself - I’ll either pull out of this in the next few months or else go under - in which case I might start again in some entirely new way of my own.

I know what you would do now in my situation and what the Ideal Way would be, but it simply isn’t in me to do my duty blindly. I have to follow my fate with my eyes wide open.

Scottie is so well and happy. She has such faith in me and doesn’t know what’s happening. Tonight she and two of her ad-

mirers decorated a tree. I hope Dick is better and has a happy Christmas even out there away from his family.

Yours,

Scott Fitzgerald

P.S. Do you think The New Yorker could use the poem attached?

The Cambridge Arms Charles & 34th Streets Baltimore,

Maryland

February 8, 1936

Dear Harold:

The man Braun is a plain, simple man with a true instinct toward the arts. He is of complete financial integrity and we were awfully nice to him once during a journey through North Africa and I think he is honestly fond of both Zelda and me.

I start with this because I don’t want to mess up this chance with any of the inadvertencies and lack of foresight that lost me the sale of Tender Is the Night and ruined the Grade Allen venture. You are now in touch with Hollywood in a way that you were not several years ago. This is obviously a job that I can do expertly - but it is also obviously a job that a whole lot of other people can do fairly well. Now it seems to me that the point can be sold that I am equipped to do this treatment, which is the whole gist of this letter.

He has gone out there and they will put some hack on the thing and in two minutes will have a poor imitation of Lily Pons deserting the stage for a poor country boy or a poor country girl named Lily Pons astounding the world in ten minutes. A hack will do exactly that with it, thinking first what previous stories dealing with the ballet and theatre have been about, and he will try to write a reasonable imitation about it. As you know Zelda and I have been through hell about the whole subject and you’ll know, too, that I should be able to deliver something entirely authentic in the matter of invention and feeling.

It seems odd having to sell you such a suggestion when once you would have taken it at my own valuation, but after these three years of reverses it seems necessary to reassure you that I have the stuff to do this job and not let this opportunity slide away with the rumor that ‘Scott is drinking’ or ‘Scott is through.’

You know that the merest discussion of ideas among the Yids would mean that they were public property. You know also as in the case of radio Columbia, that they want a sample. Now how on earth you can both sell the idea that I can do this job, that is, write a 5000-word story with cash in advance, and yet be sure that the plot won’t leak out, I don’t know. That seems to be your problem. You remember that I lost the whole month of October on that false radio come-on where they were obviously kidding. Isn’t there some way to determine whether these people are kidding or not? This man has, in a sense, come to me and I think the idea ought to be caught and trapped right now because as you may well imagine I have little energy to dissipate.

A list of suggestions follows:

First I enclose something which I wish you would read last because it has nothing to do with the present offer, but it is something that I wrote gratuitously for a Russian dancer some years ago. Please consider that last and featuring, as it does, a male dancer rather than a female, it would certainly not fit Spessivtzewa’s requirements. The other ideas which follow are the basis of a moving picture while that was for an actual ballet.

l. Zelda’s awful experience of trying a difficult art too late in life to culminate with the irony that just before she cracked up she had been hoping to get little ‘bits’ in Diaghilev’s ballet and that people kept coming to the studio who she thought were emissaries of his and who turned out to be from the Folies Bergères and who thought they might make her into an American shimmy dancer. This was about like a person hoping to lead the Philadelphia Symphony being asked to be assistant conductor of Ben Bernie’s band.

Please don’t have anybody read Zelda’s book because it is a bad book! But by glancing over it yourself you will see that it contains all the material that a tragedy should have, though she was incapable as a writer of realizing where tragedy lay as she was incapable of facing it as a person. Of course the tragic ending of Zelda’s story need not be repeated in the picture. One could concede to the picture-people the fact that the girl might become a popular dancer in the Folies Bergères. One could conceive of a pathetic ending à la Hepburn in which because of her idealism she went on being a fifth-rate ‘figurine’ in ballets all over Europe - this to be balanced by a compensatory love story which would make up for her the failure of her work. This would seem to me to be much the best treatment of this story.

2. This idea has to do with an episode of some memoirs of Pavlova. It begins with a little girl briefly glimpsed and dancing in the Imperial Ballet before the war. A scene later in Paris at the height of the flurry over the ballet and stranded finally with a ballet company in either Australia or Brazil for lack of funds. The climax would hinge on the catastrophe of the death of Diaghilev. The sorrow of it that Zelda felt, as did many others, who seemed to feel also that the ballet was ended; the old Imperial school was dead and now Diaghilev who had personally kept it alive in Paris had gone to his grave. There seemed to them no future and I know how strong that feeling was among the ballet people in ‘30 and ‘31, a sort of utter despair, a sense that they had once been under patronage of the Czar and later of an entrepreneur and that now nobody was taking care of them. They are like children to a ridiculous extent and have less practical ideas than the wildest musician imaginable. This story would end up in New York or in Hollywood, the ballet having a new renaissance under an American growing delight in that particular art, as is practically true with Masine’s ballet in New York and with Trudy Shoop’s successful little trek around the country. That’s idea number two.

The third idea is more difficult in its selling aspects. In 1920 I tried to sell D. W. Griffith the idea that people were so interested in Hollywood that there was money in a picture about that and romance in the studio. He was immediately contemptuous of it, but of course a year later Merton of the Movies mopped up the country. The movies seem willing always to romanticize anything from a radio broadcasting room to a newspaper office as far as the entertainment world is concerned, but are so shy about themselves that another picture can be got out of Hollywood, which is certainly one of the most romantic cities in the world. A sort of mental paralysis came over them. Do you remember how the Hearst publicity men killed my story ‘Crazy Sunday’ for Cosmopolitan? That was in case someone should get hurt, that it might offend Norma Shearer, Thalberg, John Gilbert or Marion Da vies, etc., etc. As a matter of fact I had mixed up those characters so thoroughly that there was no character who could have been identified except possibly King Vidor and he would have been very amused by the story.

Let me repeat that this is the most difficult idea to sell but in some ways the most interesting of the three. A Russian ballet dancer finds herself in the extra line in Hollywood; they pick her out of the crowd for her good looks, give her bits of one kind or another but always on some other basis than the fact that she is a ballet dancer. This treatment of the general subject would have to close with a crash, at least I haven’t thought any further than that. It would turn entirely on the essential tonal background of the adventures of Europeans who develop their metier in a Yiddish world (only you don’t use that word except in Germany) that would be interesting to the people in the same rococo sense that the demand for pictures about places like Shanghai and the Trans- Siberian Railroad have in the American people. Combined with it is the always fascinating Hollywood story.

I’ve spent the morning writing this letter because I am naturally disappointed about the Post’s not liking the Gwen story and must rest and go to work this afternoon to try to raise some money somehow, though I don’t know where to turn.

Scott

Oak Hall Hotel

Tryon,North Carolina

Received March 23, 1937

Dear Harold;

Here, or herewith, is the revision of ‘Thumbs Up.’ Maybe it’ll go. It’s an odd story - one editor says cut the thumbs episode, another says cut everything else - I’ve done the latter and shortened it to about 5500 words (from 8000) and revised it thoroughly and written a new scene.

Thanks for the money - as time passes my position becomes more and more ludicrous, I mean generally. I just got a book (Books and Battles of the Twenties) in which I am practically a leading character; my birthday is two-column front page news as if I were 80 instead of 40 - and I sit worrying about next week’s $35.00 hotel bill! I really meant it that I’d like to go to Hollywood and let them see me. I wish you could see me. Weight 160 instead of 143 which was it last Xmas. And the dullest dogs making $1000 a week in Hollywood. Something has got to be done - this will end in slow ruination. Anyhow I’ve begun the football story but God knows where the next two weeks’ rent comes from. I will owe $105 by Thursday and will need cash - all in all $150. I was going to Max as a last resource but you have tapped that. What in hell shall I do? I want to write the football story unworried and uninterrupted. Since going on the wagon I will have written two originals, rewritten two stories (‘Thumbs’ and the cartoon story) and written 3 little Esquire pieces (two of them mediocre) to live on. That will be a hard two and a half months’ work. But reward, there is none.

In fatalistic optimism,

Scott

Going to the country dog-shows isn’t my daily occupation - it was my single appearance of that kind. I wanted you to see how different I look from Xmas.

Look at this — * next to me - covered with rings, lives in a mansion and owns it. Ah me - well, perhaps I’ve learned wisdom at 40 at last. If I ever get out of this mess!

5521 Amestoy Avenue

Encino,

California

August 2, 1939

Dear Harold:

I have been and still am somewhat shocked by your sudden and most determined reversal of form. Only six months ago you were telling me ‘not to be in too much of a hurry to pay you back’ but instead try to save some money. It was something of a counter-blast to find that my credit was now worth much less than I loaned Charles Warren and other young authors last year.

Your advice that I should have ‘taken on some movie work’ with a lung cavity and a temperature of 102° was a new slant. The cavity evidently began to form about the time I started on Air Raid, and your implication that I had been loafing must have been based on those two-day binges in New York, several months apart. Anyhow, when the temperature was still a hundred and the cavity still crackling I was asking Swanie to get me work and meanwhile putting in five hours a day on a bed-desk.

Being in need, I make no apology for having sent the original of the enclosed directly to the Post, with the request that they communicate by wire to me as well as by letter to you. I had a fifteen-day wait on ‘Temperature’ - it is hard to remember there was a time your cables reached me in North Africa. Sending a story direct may be bad policy but one doesn’t consider that when one is living on money from a hocked Ford - every day counts, less in the material matter of eating than in the inestimable question of morale. Swanie turned down a dozen jobs for me when I was sick in bed - but there just haven’t been any since the cavity began to heal.

I don’t have to explain that even though a man has once saved another from drowning, when he refuses to stretch out his arm a second time the victim has to act quickly and desperately to save himself. For change you did, Harold, and without warning - the custom of lending up to the probable yield of a next short story obtained between us for a dozen years. Certainly you haven’t just discovered that I’m not any of the things a proper business man should be? And it wasn’t even a run-around - it was a walk-around that almost made me think the New York telegraph was closed. Finally I had to sell a pair of stories to Esquire, the longer one of which (2800 words) might have brought twice as much from Liberty.

Whatever I am supposed to guess, your way of doing it, and the time you chose, was as dispiriting as could be. I have been all too hauntingly aware during these months of what you did from 1934 to 1937 to keep my head above water after the failure of Tender, Zelda’s third collapse and the long illness. But you havemade me sting nevertheless. Neither Swanson nor Sheilah nor Eddie Knopf have any idea but that I have labored conscientiously out here for twenty months and every studio (except Wanger, but including Metro!) asked for, according to Swanson, me at some time during April and May.

Your reasons for refusing to help me were all good, all praiseworthy, all sound - but wouldn’t they have been equally so any time within the past fifteen years? And they followed a year and a half in which I fulfilled all my obligations If it is of any interest to you I haven’t had a drink in two months but if I was full of champagne I couldn’t be more confused about you than I am now.

Ever yours,

Scott

P.S. Temperature’ turned up yesterday at the Van Nuys Railway Express - and in case you think that’s incredible I forward the evidence.

5521 Amestoy Avenue

Encino,

California

October 7, 1939

Dear Harold:

Thanks for your letter. Thanks for taking care of Scottie. And your saying that you had written me several letters and torn them up did something to clarify what I had begun to interpret as some sadistic desire to punish me. I sent the stories to Colliers for the simple reason that it seemed difficult to deal with someone who treats you with dead silence. Against silence you can do nothing but fret and wonder. Your disinclination to back me is, of course, your own business, but representing me without communication (such as returning a story to me without even an airmail stamp) is pretty close to saying you were through with me.

I communicated directly with Colliers and wrote a series of pieces for Esquire because we have to live and eat and nothing can interfere with that. Can’t you regard this trouble as a question of a man who has had a bad break and leave out the moral problem as to whether or not or how much it is his own fault? And if you think I can’t write, read these stories. They brought just two hundred and fifty apiece from Esquire, because I couldn’t wait to hear from you, because I had bank balances of five, ten and fifteen dollars.

Anyhow I have ‘lived dangerously’ and I may quite possibly have to pay for it, but there are plenty of other people to tell me that and it doesn’t seem as if it should be you.

I don’t think there is any chance of fixing up that other story. It just isn’t good.

Sincerely,

Scott

P.S. Could you mail me back these stories? I have no copies. Don’t you agree that they are worth more than $250.00? One of them was offered to Colliers in desperation - the first Pat Hobby story - but Littauer wired that it ‘wasn’t a story.’ Who’s right?

To Mrs Richard Taylor

PrincetonUniversity

Princeton,

New Jersey

June 10,1917

Dear Cousin Ceci: Glad you liked the poem. Here are two others.

ON THE SAME PLAY - TWICE SEEN

Here in the figured dark I watch once more There with the curtain rolls a year away A year of years - There was an idle day Of ours when happy endings didn’t bore Our unfermented souls - and rocks held ore, Your little face beside me, wide-eyed, gay, Smiled its own repertoire, while the poor play Reached me as a faint ripple reaches short -

Yawning and wondering an evening thru I watch alone and chatterings of course Spoil the one scene which somehow did have charms You wept a bit, and I grew sad for you Right there - where Mr K. defends divorce And What’s-her-name falls fainting in his arms.

Here’s another one, very recent, that’s rather better. It’s called:

WHEN WE MEET AGAIN

The little things we only know We’ll have forgotten, Put away Words that have melted with the snow And dreams begotten This today And dawns and days we used to greet That all could see and none could share Will be no bond - and when we meet

We shall not care - We shall not care.

And not a tear will fall for this

A little while hence

No regret

Will rise for a remembered kiss

Nor even silence

When we’ve met

Can give old ghosts a waste to roam

Or stir the surface of the sea

If grey shapes drift beneath the foam

We shall not see - We shall not see.

When life leaps deathward as a flame

Love at the scorching

Of its breath

Casts his mad heart into the same

Fires that are torching

Life to Death

Though cracks may widen in the tomb

Chords from still heart to moving ear

Tremble and penetrate the gloom

We shall not hear - We shall not hear

Colours of mine have filled your eyes.

Light from the morn

Of our last sea

Has gathered to you till the wise

Think love so born

Eternity.

But wisdom passes - yet the years

Will feed you wisdom; age will go Back to the old - For all your tears

We shall not know - We shall not know.

I can’t resist putting in two more.

ON A CERTAIN MAN

He loved me too much, I could not love him

Opened so wide my eyes I could not see,

For all I left unsaid I might not move him

He did not love himself enough for me.

He kissed my hand and let himself, unruddered,

Drift on the surface of my ‘youth’ and ‘sin’

His was the blameless life, and still I shuddered

Seeing the dark spot where his lips had been.

‘How you must hate me, you of joy and brightness

Who have no sentiment - Ah - I’m a bore -’

I smile and lie and pray the God, politeness;

I’ll sicken if his curled hair nears once more.

Trembling before the fire, I gasp and rise.

Yawn some and drawl of sleep, profess to nod,

And weird parallels image on my eyes

A devil screaming in the arms of God.

He’d gone too far, had merged his heart somewhere

In my mean self, and all that I could see

Was a raw soul that labored, grovelled there.

I loathed him for that soul - that love of me.

Here’s the last one. Do you remember what I said about my capacity for hero worship? Well -

CLAY FEET

Still on clear mornings I can see them sometimes -

Men, gods and ghosts, queens, girls and graces,

Then that light fades, noon sickens, and there come times

When I can see but pale and ravaged places

That they have left in exodus; and seeing

My whole soul falters, as an invalid

Too often cheered. Did something in their being

That was fine pass when my ideal did?

Men, gods and ghosts, damned so by my own damning,

Whether you knew or no, saw or nay,

Either were weak or failed a bit in shamming -

Yet had I known a freedom that could weigh

So much, hung round the heart, I’d sought protection

Once more in those warm dreams, lest you should fall

From that great height to this great imperfection -

So do I mourn - so do I hate you all.

I’m writing a lot now - especially poetry - also drilling and preparing to go to this second camp - Damn this war!

Had I met Shane Leslie when I last saw you? Well, I’ve seen a lot more of him - He’s an author and a perfect knockout - On the whole I’m having a fairly good time - but it looks as if the youth of me and my generation ends sometime during the present year, rather summarily - If we ever get back, and I don’t particularly care, we’ll be rather aged - in the worst way. After all, life hasn’t much to offer except youth and I suppose for older people the love of youth in others. I agree perfectly with Rupert Brooke’s men of Grantchester

‘Who when they get to feeling old

They up and shoot themselves I’m told.’

Every man I’ve met who’s been to war - that is this war - seems to have lost youth and faith in man unless they’re wine-bibbers of patriotism which, of course, I think is the biggest rot in the world.

Updike of Oxford or Harvard says ‘I die for England’ or ‘I die for America’ - not me. I’m too Irish for that - I may get killed for America - but I’m going to die for myself.

I’m going to visit in West Virginia and I may stop by Norfolk for a day. Will you give me lunch on say about the twentieth - or will you be away?

Do read The End of a Chapter and The Celt and the World by Shane Leslie - you’d enjoy them both immensely.

I suppose Tom  has come and gone -I hear reports of him all over the country. He certainly seems to carry faith and hope with him. He’s the old fashioned Jesuit - the kind they got continually when the best men in the priesthood were all Jesuits.

Went to a reception last week at the Duke de Richelieu’s in New York where I consumed great quantities of champagne and fraternized with most of the prominent Catholics - due to champagne. I used to wonder how terribly stiff and formal receptions were possible but I see now that it is the juice of the grape.

One more thing - the most sincere apologies for the cold you got listening to my inane ramblings (of course I don’t really think they were inane) on the porch of the Cairo.

Give my best to Sally Cecilia Tommy Ginny. And love to Aunt Elise.

Yours etc.,

F. Scott Fitz

The Ambassador Hotel Los Angeles, California

Winter, 1927

Dear Cousin Ceci:

If you can imagine the rush from France to Italy to New York to Montgomery to New Orleans and then to - to be plunged immediately into movie-making you’ll understand this delayed Christmas card. Please believe how much I want to see you all. And do send me Sally’s address because we want to send her our delayed wedding present when we get back to New York.

My God! how hard they work out here! This is a tragic city of beautiful girls - the girls who mop the floor are beautiful, the waitresses, the shop ladies. You never want to see any more beauty. (Always excepting yours.)

Love,

Scott

S.S. Olympic

February 23,1931

My dearest Ceci:

I don’t know what in hell I’d have done unless you had come up. The trip South was not so fortunate as it might have been, but it didn’t blot out my sense of you and how much I have always loved you and depended on you. Thank you for your second note. I have always wanted, if anything happened to me while Zelda is still sick, to get you to take care of Scottie.

All those days in America  seem sort of blurred and dreamlike now. Sometimes I think of Father, but only sentimentally; if I had been an only child I would have liked those lines I told you about of William McFee over his grave:-

‘O staunch old heart that toiled so long for me: I waste my years sailing along the sea.’

Life got very crowded after I left you, and I am damned glad to be going back to Europe where I am away from most of the people I care about, and can think instead of feeling.

Gigi wrote me such a sweet letter, especially because it said that you liked me.

Dearest love to you,

Scott

1307 Park Avenue

Baltimore,

Maryland

Postmarked August 17,1934

Dearest Ceci:

Mrs Owens says you asked her about the picture - I did get it Didn’t you get yours? Let me know.

Everything here goes rather badly. Zelda no better - your correspondent in rotten health and two movie ventures gone to pot - one for Grade Allen and George Burns that damn near went over and took 2 weeks’ work and they liked and wanted to buy - and Paramount stepped on. It’s like a tailor left with a made-to- order suit - no one to sell it to. So back to the Post. (By the way I have a new series in the Redbook.) Hope to hell the whoopies are well, and all the kids.

Love always,

Scott

P.S. Apropos of our conversation it will interest you to know that I’ve given up politics. For two years I’ve gone half haywire trying to reconcile my double allegiance to the class I am part of, and the Great Change I believe in - considering at last such crazy solutions as the one I had in mind in Norfolk. I have become disgusted with the party leadership and have only health enough left for my literary work, so I’m on the sidelines. It had become a strain making speeches at ‘Leagues Against Imperialistic War,’ and their treatment of the Negro question finished me. This is confidential, of course.

Grove Park Inn

Asheville,

North Carolina

June 11,1935

Dearest Ceci:

By now the Result-of-an-Irresistible-Impulse will be among you. I am enclosing a check with which I hope you will buy her as much gayety as she deserves. Don’t let her go out with any sixteen-year-old boys who have managed to amass a charred keg and an automobile license as their Start-in-Life. Really I mean this. My great concern with Scottie for the next five years will be to keep her from being mashed up in an automobile accident. I love you as always - and that is no perfunctory statement. Isn’t Mother a funny old wraith? Didn’t you get a suggestion of the Witches’ Cave from several of the things that she said that night at 2400?

Always affectionately,

Scott

P.S. I mean that, about any unreliable Virginia boys taking my pet around. I will never forget that it was a Norfolk number (later drowned in the South American swamps) who gave me my first drink of whiskey. Scottie hasn’t got three sisters - she has only got me. Watch her please!

What a typist this one turned out to be!

Oak Hall

Hotel

Tryon, North Carolina

Spring, 1937

Dearest Ceci:

Zelda is at Highland’s Hospital, Asheville, N.C.

She is much much better. So am I.I stopped drinking in January and have been concentrating on other mischief, such as work, which is even duller, or seems so to me at present. But Scottie must be educated and Zelda can’t starve. As for me I’d had enough of the whole wretched mess some years ago and seen thru a sober eye find it more appalling than ever.

With dearest love always,

Scott

En route toHollywood

Postmarked July 5,1937

Dear Ceci:

Just a line about my whereabouts. I’m going out here for two years on a big contract financially. My health’s equal to it now and the movie people are convinced I’m on the wagon and worth buying.

It’s a hell of a prospect in every other way except money but for the present and for over 3 years the creative side of me has been dead as hell. Scottie is in New York; Helen Hayes and Charlie MacArthur are bringing her out to me in July. Helen isn’t working, as she has 40 more weeks as Queen Victoria on the road, so she’s keeping an eye on Scottie out here while Charlie and I work.

Could Scottie spend a few days with you in September? I think you’d like her a lot now. She took her preliminaries for Vassar this spring.

Dearest love always,

Scott

1403 North Laurel Avenue

Hollywood,

California

August 14, 1940

Dearest Ceci:

Aunt Elise’s death was a shock to me. I was very fond of her always - I was fond of Aunt Annabel and Aunt Elise, who gave me almost my first tastes of discipline, in a peculiar way in which I wasn’t fond of my mother who spoiled me. You were a great exception among mothers - managing by some magic of your own to preserve both your children’s love and their respect. Too often one of the two things is sacrificed.

With Father, Uncle John and Aunt Elise a generation goes. I wonder how deep the Civil War was in them - that odd childhood on the border between the states with Grandmother and old Mrs Scott and the shadow of Mrs Suratt. What a sense of honor and duty - almost eighteenth century rather than Victoria. How lost they seemed in the changing world - my father and Aunt Elise struggling to keep their children in the haute bourgeoisie when their like were sinking into obscure farm life or being lost in the dark boarding houses of Georgetown.

I wrote Scottie to stop by and say hello to you on her way South to see her mother next month. I would so like to see you all myself. Gigi wrote me such a nice letter from Richmond.

With dearest love always,

Scott

To Edmund Wilson

593 Summit Avenue

St Paul,

Minnesota

September 26, 1917

Dear Bunny:

You’ll be surprised to get this but it’s really begging for an answer. My purpose is to see exactly what effect the war at close quarters has on a person of your temperament. I mean I’m curious to see how your point of view has changed or not changed -

I’ve taken regular army exams but haven’t heard a word from them yet. John Bishop is in the second camp at Fort Benjamin Harrison in Indiana. He expects a ist Lieutenancy. I spent a literary month with him (July) and wrote a terrific lot of poetry mostly under the Masefield-Brooke influence. Here’s John’s latest.

BOUDOIR

The place still speaks of worn-out beauty of roses, And half retrieves a failure of Bergamotte, Rich light and a silence so rich one all but supposes The voice of the clavichord stirs to a dead gavotte

For the light grows soft and the silence forever quavers, As if it would fail in a measure of satin and lace, Some eighteenth century madness that sighs and wavers Through a life exquisitely vain to a dying grace.

This was the music she loved; we heard her often Walking alone in the green-clipped garden outside. It was just at the time when summer begins to soften And the locust shrills in the long afternoon that she died.

The gaudy macaw still climbs in the folds of the curtain; The chintz-flowers fade where the late sun strikes them aslant. Here are her books too: Pope and the earlier Burton, A worn Verlaine; Bonheur and the Fêtes Galantes.

Come - let us go -I am done. Here one recovers Too much of the past but fails at the last to find Aught that made it the season of loves and lovers; Give me your hand - she was lovely - mine eyes blind.

Isn’t that good? He hasn’t published it yet I sent twelve poems to magazines yesterday. If I get them all back I’m going to give up poetry and turn to prose. John may publish a book of verse in the spring. I’d like to but of course there’s no chance. Here’s one of mine.

TO CECILIA

When Vanity kissed Vanity

A hundred happy Junes ago,

He pondered o’er her breathlessly,

And that all time might ever know

He rhymed her over life and death,

‘For once, for all, for love,’ he said...

Her beauty’s scattered with his breath

And with her lovers she was dead.

Ever his wit and not her eyes,

Ever his art and not her hair.

‘Who’d learn a trick in rhyme be wise

And pause before his sonnet there.’

So all my words however true

Might sing you to a thousandth June

And no one ever know that you

Were beauty for an afternoon.

It’s pretty good but of course fades right out before John’s. By the way I struck a novel that you’d like, Out of Due Titne by Mrs Wilfred Ward. I don’t suppose this is the due time to tell you that, though. I think that The New Machiavelli is the greatest English novel of the century. I’ve given up the summer to drinking (gin) and philosophy (James and Schopenhauer and Bergson).

Most of the time I’ve been bored to death - Wasn’t it tragic about Jack Newlin? I hardly knew poor Gaily. Do write me the details.

I almost went to Russia on a commission in August but didn’t so I’m sending you one of my passport pictures - if the censor doesn’t remove it for some reason - It looks rather Teutonic but I can prove myself a Celt by signing myself

Very sincerely,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Cottage Club

Princeton,

New Jersey

Fall,1917

Dear Bunny: —

I’ve been intending to write you before but as you see I’ve had a change of scene and the necessary travail thereof has stolen time.

Your poem came to John Biggs, my room-mate, and we’ll put it in the next number - however it was practically illegible so I’m sending you my copy (hazarded) which you’ll kindly correct and send back -

I’m here starting my senior year and still waiting for my commission. I’ll send you the Lit  or no - you’ve subscribed, haven’t you?

Saw your friend Larry Noyes in St Paul and got beautifully stewed after a party he gave. - He got beautifully full of canned wrath -I don’t imagine we’d agree on much -

Do write John Bishop and tell him not to call his book Green Fruit.

Alec is an ensign. I’m enclosing you a clever letter from Town- send Martin which I wish you’d send back.

Princeton is stupid but Gauss and Gerould are here. I’m taking naught but Philosophy and English -I told Gauss you’d sailed (I’d heard as much) but I’ll contradict the rumor.

Have you read Wells’ Boon, the Mind of the Race (Doran, 1916). It’s marvelous! (Debutante expression.)

The Lit is prosperous - Biggs and I do the prose - Creese and Keller (a junior who’ll be chairman) and I the poetry. However any contributions would be etc., etc.

Young Benêt (at New Haven) is getting out a book of verse before Xmas that I fear will obscure John Peale’s. His subjects are less precieuse and decadent. John is really an anachronism in this country at this time - people want ideas and not fabrics.

I’m rather bored here but I see Shane Leslie occasionally and read Wells and Rousseau. I read Mrs Gerould’s British Novelists Limited and think she underestimates Wells but is right in putting Mackenzie at the head of his school. She seems to disregard Barrie and Chesterton whom I should put above Bennett or in fact anyone except Wells.

Do you realize that Shaw is 61, Wells 51, Chesterton 41, Leslie 31 and I 21? (Too bad I haven’t a better man for 31.1 can hear your addition to this remark.)

Oh and that awful little — (a sort of attenuated super-

fruit) is still around (ex ‘16 - now ‘17 1/2). He belongs to a preceptorial where I am trying to demolish the Wordsworth legend - and contributes such elevating freshman-cultural generalities as ‘Why I’m suah that romanticism is only a cross-section of reality, Dr Murch.’

Yes - Jack Newlin is dead - killed in ambulance service. He was, potentially, a great artist.

Here is a poem I just had accepted by Poet Lore.

THE WAY OF PURGATION

A fathom deep in sleep I lie

With old desires, restrained before;

To clamor life-ward with a cry

As dark flies out the greying door.

And so in quest of creeds to share

I seek assertive day again;

But old monotony is there -

Long, long avenues of rain.

Oh might I rise again! Might I

Throw off the throbs of that old wine -

See the new morning mass the sky

With fairy towers, line on line -

End each mirage in the high air

A symbol, not a dream again!

But old monotony is there -

Long, long avenues of rain.

No -I have no more stuff of John’s -I ask but never receive. If Hillquit gets the mayoralty of New York it means a new era. Twenty million Russians from South Russia have come over to the Roman Church.

I can go to Italy if I like as private secretary of a man (a priest) who is going to Cardinal Gibbons’ representative to discuss the war with the Pope (American Catholic point of view - which is most loyal - barring the Sinn Fein - 40% of Pershing’s army are Irish Catholics). Do write.

Gaelically yours,

Scott Fitzgerald

I remind myself lately of Pendennis, Sentimental Tommy (who was not sentimental and whom Barrie never understood), Michael Fane, Maurice Avery and Guy Hazelwood.

Fort Leavenworth, Kansas

January 10, 1918

Dear Bunny; Your last refuge from the cool sophistries of the shattered world is destroyed! I have left Princeton. I am now Lieutenant F. Scott Fitzgerald of the 45th Infantry (regulars). My present address is clo Q. P.O.B.

Ft Leavenworth, Kansas

After February 26th

593 Summmit Avenue

St Paul,

Minnesota will always find me, forwarded.

- So the short, swift chain of the Princeton intellectuals (Brooks clothes, clean ears and, withal, a lack of mental priggish- ness... Whipple, Wilson, Bishop, Fitzgerald...) have passed along the path of the generation - leaving their shining crown upon the gloss and unworthiness of John Biggs’ head.

One of your poems I sent on to the Lit and I’ll send the other when I’ve read it again. I wonder if you ever got the Lit I sent you... so I enclosed you two pictures; well, give one to some poor motherless Poilu fairy who has no dream. This is smutty and forced but in an atmosphere of cabbage...

John’s book came out in December and though I’ve written him reams (Rheims) of praise, I think he’s made poor use of his material. It is a thin Green Book.

GREEN FRUIT

(One man here remarked that he didn’t read it because Green Fruit always gave him a pain in the a — !)

by JOHN PEA LE BISHOP ist Lt Inf. R.C.

SHERMAN FRENCH CO.

BOSTON

In section one (‘Souls and Fabrics’) are ‘Boudoir,’ The Nassau Inn’ and of all things ‘Fillipo’s Wife,’ a relic of his decadent sophomore days. ‘Claudius’ and other documents in obscurity adorn this section.

Section two contains the Elspeth poems - which I think are rotten. Section three is ‘Poems out of Jersey and Virginia’ and has ‘Campbell Hall,”Millville’ and much saccharine sentiment about how much white bodies pleased him and how, nevertheless, he was about to take his turn with crushed brains (this slender thought done over in poem after poem). This is my confidential opinion, however; if he knew what a nut I considered him for leaving out ‘Ganymede’ and ‘Salem Water’ and ‘Francis Thompson’ and ‘Prayer’ and all the things that might have given body to his work, he’d drop me from his writing list. The book closed with the dedication to Townsend Martin which is on the circular I enclose. I have seen no reviews of it yet.

THE ROMANTIC EGOTIST

by F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

.. the Best is over

You may complain and sigh

Oh Silly Lover...’

Rupert Brooke

“Experience is the name Tubby gives to his mistakes.’

Oscar Wilde

Chas Scribner’s Sons (Maybe!) MCMXVIII

There are twenty-three chapters, all but five are written, and it is poetry, prose, vers libre and every mood of a temperamental temperature. It purports to be the picaresque ramble of one Stephen Palms from the San Francisco fire thru school, Princeton, to the end, where at twenty-one he writes his autobiography at the Princeton aviation school. It shows traces of Tarkington, Chesterton, Chambers, Wells, Benson (Robert Hugh), Rupert Brooke and includes Compton-Mackenzie-like love affairs and three psychic adventures including an encounter with the devil in a harlot’s apartment.

It rather damns much of Princeton but it’s nothing to what it thinks of men and human nature in general. I can most nearly describe it by calling it a prose, modernistic Childe Harold and really if Scribners takes it I know I’ll wake some morning and find that the debutantes have made me famous overnight. I really believe that no one else could have written so searchingly the story of the youth of our generation...

In my right hand bunk sleeps the editor of Contemporary Verse (ex), Devereux Josephs, Harvard ‘15 and a peach - on my left side is G. C. King, a Harvard crazy man who is dramatizing War and Peace; but you see I’m lucky in being well protected from the Philistines.

The Lit continues slowly but I haven’t received the December issue yet so I can’t pronounce on the quality.

This insolent war has carried off Stuart Walcott in France, as you may know, and really is beginning to irritate me - but the maudlin sentiment of most people is still the spear in my side. In everything except my romantic Chestertonian orthodoxy I still agree with the early Wells on human nature and the ‘no hope for Tono Bungay’ theory.

God! How I miss my youth - that’s only relative of course but already lines are beginning to coarsen in other people and that’s the sure sign. I don’t think you ever realized at Princeton the childlike simplicity that lay behind all my petty sophistication and my lack of a real sense of honor. I’d be a wicked man if it wasn’t for that and now that’s disappearing...

Well I’m overstepping and boring you and using up my novel’s material so goodbye. Do write and let’s keep in touch if you like. God bless you.

Celtically,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Bishop’s address:

Lieut, John Peale Bishop (He’s a 1st Lt)

334th Infantry Camp Taylor, Kentucky

599 Summit Avenue

St Paul,

Minnesota

August 15,

1919

Dear Bunny:

Delighted to get your letter. I am deep in the throes of a new novel. Which is the best title?

(1) — The Education of a Personage (2) — The Romantic Egotist (3) — This Side of Paradise I am sending it to Scribners - they liked my first one. Am enclosing two letters from them that might amuse you. Please return them.

I have just finished the story for your book.It’s not written yet. An American girl falls in love with an officer Français at a southern camp.

Since I last saw you I’ve tried to get married and then tried to drink myself to death but foiled, as have been so many good men, by the sex and the state I have returned to literature.

Have sold three or four cheap stories to Amuricun magazines.

Will start on story for you about 25th d’Aout (as the French say or do not say) which is about 10 days off.

I am ashamed to say that my Catholicism is scarcely more than a memory - no, that’s wrong, it’s more than that; at any rate I go not to the church nor mumble stray nothings over crystalline beads.

May be in N’York in September or early October.

Is John Bishop in hoc terrain?

Remember me to Larry Noyes. I’m afraid he’s very much off me. I don’t think he’s seen me sober for many years.

For God’s sake, Bunny, write a novel and don’t waste your time editing collections. It’ll get to be a habit.

That sounds crass and discordant but you know what I mean.

Yours in the Holder  group,

Scott Fitzgerald

599 Summit Avenue

St Paul,

Minnesota

Probably September, 1919

Dear Bunny:

Scribners has accepted my book for publication late in the winter. You’ll call it sensational but it really is neither sentimental nor trashy.

I’ll probably be East in November and I’ll call you up or come to see you or something. Haven’t had time to hit a story for you yet Better not count on me as the w. of i. or the E.S. are rather dry.

Yrs. faithfully,

Francis S. Fitzgerald

Hotel Cecil London, England

May, 1921

Dear Bunny:

Of course I’m wild with jealousy! Do you think you can indecently parade this obscene success before my envious disposition, with equanimity? You are mistaken.

God damn the continent of Europe. It is of merely antiquarian interest. Rome is only a few years behind Tyre and Babylon. The negroid streak creeps northward to defile the Nordic race. Already the Italians have the souls of blackamoors. Raise the bars of immigration and permit only Scandinavians, Teutons, Anglo- Saxons and Celts to enter. France made me sick. Its silly pose as the thing the world has to save. I think it’s a shame that England and America didn’t let Germany conquer Europe. It’s the only thing that would have saved the fleet of tottering old wrecks. My reactions were all philistine, anti-socialistic, provincial and racially snobbish. I believe at last in the white man’s burden. We are as far above the modern Frenchman as he is above the Negro. Even in art! Italy has no one. When Anatole France dies French literature will be a silly jealous rehashing of technical quarrels. They’re thru and done. You may have spoken in jest about New York as the capital of culture but in 25 years it will be just as London is now. Culture follows money and all the refinements of aesthe- ticism can’t stave off its change of seat (Christ! what a metaphor). We will be the Romans in the next generations as the English are now.

Alec sent me your article. I read it half a dozen times and think it is magnificent. I can’t tell you how I hate you. I don’t hate Don Stewart half as much (tho I find that I am suddenly and curiously irritated by him) because I don’t really dread him. But you! Keep out my sight. I want no more of your articles!

Enclosed is 2 francs with which you will please find a French slave to make me a typed copy of your letter from Mencken. Send here at once, if it please you. I will destroy it on reading it. Please! I’d do as much for you. I haven’t gotten hold of a Bookman.

Paradise is out here. Of 20 reviews about half are mildly favorable, a quarter of them imply that I’ve read ‘Sinister Street once too often’ and the other five (including The Times) damn it summarily as artificial. I doubt if it sells 1500 copies.

Mencken’s first series of Prejudices is attracting attention here. Wonderful review in The Times.

I’m delighted to hear about The Undertaker.... Edna has no doubt told you how we scoured Paris for you. Idiot! The American Express mail department has my address. Why didn’t you register? We came back to Paris especially to see you. Needless to say our idea of a year in Italy was well shattered and we sail for America on the 9th and thence to the ‘Sahara of Bozart’ (Montgomery) for life.

With envious curses and hopes of an immediate response.

F. Scott Fitzgerald - author of Flappers and Philosophers (juvenile)

626 Goodrich Avenue

St Paul Minnesota

Postmarked November 25, 1921

Dear Bunny:

Thank you for your congratulations.  I’m glad the damn thing’s over. Zelda came through without a scratch and I have awarded her the croix-de-guerre with palm. Speaking of France, the great general with the suggestive name is in town today.

I agree with you about Mencken - Weaver and Dell are both something awful. I like some of John’s criticism but Christ! he is utterly dishonest. Why does he tell us how rotten he thinks Mooncalf is and then give it a ‘polite bow’ in his column. Likewise he told me personally that my ‘book just missed being a great book’ and how I was the most hopeful, etc., etc., and then damned me with faint praise in two papers six months before I’m published. I am sat with a condescending bow ‘halfway between the post of Compton Mackenzie and Booth Tarkington.’ So much for that!

I have almost completely rewritten my book. Do you remember you told me that in my midnight symposium scene I had sort of set the stage for a play that never came off - in other words when they all began to talk none of them had anything important to say. I’ve interpolated some recent ideas of my own and (possibly) of others. See enclosure at end of letter. Having disposed of myself, I turn to you. I am glad you and Ted Paramore are together. I was never crazy about the oboist nor the accepter of invitations and I imagine they must have been small consolation to live with. I like Ted immensely. He is a little too much the successful Eli to live comfortably in his mind’s bed-chamber but I like him immensely.

What in hell does this mean? My control must have dictated it. His name is Mr Ikki and he is an Alaskan orange-grower.

Nathan and me have become reconciled by letter. If the baby is ugly she can retire into the shelter of her full name, Frances Scott.

I hear strange stories about you and your private life. Are they all true? What are you going to do? Free-lance? I’m delighted about The Undertaker’s Garland. Why not have a preface by that famous undertaker in New York, say just a blurb on the cover? He might do it if he had a sense of humor.

St Paul is dull as hell. Have written two good short stories and three cheap ones.

I like Three Soldiers immensely and reviewed it for the St Paul Daily News. I am tired of modern novels and have just finished Paine’s biography of Clemens. It’s excellent. Do let me see it if you do me for The Bookman. Isn’t The Triumph of the Egg a wonderful title? I liked both John’s and Don’s articles in Smart Set. I am lonesome for New York. May get there next fall and may go to England to live. Yours in this hell-hole of life and time, the world.

F. Scott Fitz

626 Goodrich Avenue

St Paul,

Minnesota

Postmarked January 24, 1922

Dear Bunny:

Farrar tells a man here that I’m to be in the March ‘Literary Spotlight.’  I deduce that this is your doing. My curiosity is at fever heat - for God’s sake send me a copy immediately.

Have you read Upton Sinclair’s The Brass Check?

Have you seen Hergesheimer’s movie Tol’able David?

Both are excellent. I have written two wonderful stories and get letters of praise from six editors with the addenda that ‘our readers, however, would be offended.’Very discouraging. Also discouraging that Knopf has put off the Garland till fall. I enjoyed your da- daist article in Vanity Fair - also the free advertising Bishop gave us. Zelda says the picture of you is ‘beautiful and bloodless.’

I am bored as hell out here. The baby is well - we dazzle her exquisite eyes with gold pieces in the hopes that she’ll marry a millionaire. We’ll be East for ten days early in March.

I have heard vague and unfathomable stories about your private life - not that you have become a pervert or anything - romantic stories. I wish to God you were not so reticent!

What are you doing? I was tremendously interested by all the data in your last letter. I am dying of a sort of emotional anemia like the lady in Pound’s poem. The Briary Bush is stinko. Cytherea is Hergesheimer’s best but it’s not quite.

Yours, John Grier Hibben

626 Goodrich Avenue

St Paul,

Minnesota

January, 1922

Dear Bunny:

Needless to say I have never read anything with quite the uncanny fascination with which I read your article. It is, of course, the only intelligible and intelligent thing of any length which has been written about me and my stuff - and like everything you write it seems to me pretty generally true. I am guilty of its every stricture and I take an extraordinary delight in its considered approbation. I don’t see how I could possibly be offended at anything in it - on the contrary it pleases me more to be compared to ‘standards out of time,’ than to merely the usual scapegoats of contemporary criticism. Of course I’m going to carp at it a little but merely to conform to convention. I like it, I think it’s an unprejudiced diagnosis and I am considerably in your debt for the interest which impelled you to write it.

Now as to the liquor thing - it’s true, but nevertheless I’m going to ask you take it out. It leaves a loophole through which I can be attacked and discredited by every moralist who reads the article. Wasn’t it Bernard Shaw who said that you’ve either got to be conventional in your work or in your private life or get into trouble? Anyway the legend about my liquoring is terribly widespread and this thing would hurt me more than you could imagine - both in my contact with the people with whom I’m thrown - relatives and respectable friends - and, what is much more important, financially.

So I’m asking you to cut.

1. — ‘when sober’ on page one. I have indicated it. If you want to substitute ‘when not unduly celebrating’ or some innuendo no more definite than that, all right.

2. — From ‘This quotation indicates...’ to ‘... sets down the facts’ would be awfully bad for me. I’d much rather have you cut it or at least leave out the personal implication if you must indicate that my characters drink. As a matter of fact I have never written a line of any kind while I was under the glow of so much as a single cocktail and the my parties have been many it’s been their spectacularity rather than their frequency which has built up the usual ‘dope-fiend’ story. Judge and Mrs Sayre would be crazy I And they never miss The Bookman.

Now your three influences, St Paul, Irish (incidentally, though it doesn’t matter, I’m not Irish on Father’s side - that’s where Francis Scott Key comes in) and liquor are all important I grant. But I feel less hesitancy asking you to remove the liquor because your catalogue is not complete anyhow - the most enormous influence on me in the four and a half years since I met her has been the complete, fine and full-hearted selfishness and chill- mindedness of Zelda.

Both Zelda and I roared over the Anthony-Maury incident. You’ve improved mine (which was to have Muriel go blind) by 100% - we were utterly convulsed.

But Bunny, and this I hate to ask you, please take out the soldier incident. I am afraid of it. It will not only utterly spoil the effect of the incident in the book but will give rise to the most unpleasant series of events imaginable. Ever since Three Soldiers, The New York Times has been itching for a chance to get at the critics of the war. If they got hold of this I would be assailed with the most violent vituperation in the press of the entire country (and you know what the press can do, how they can present an incident to make a man upholding an unpopular cause into the likeness of a monster - vide Upton Sinclair). And, by God, they would! Besides the incident is not correct. I didn’t apologize. I told the Colonel about it very proudly. I wasn’t sorry for months afterwards and then it was only a novelist’s remorse.

So for God’s sake cut that paragraph. I’d be wild if it appeared! And it would without doubt do me serious harm.

I note from the quotation from ‘Head and Shoulders’ and from reference to ‘Bernice’ that you have plowed through Flappers for which conscientious labor I thank you. When the strain has abated I will send you two exquisite stories in what Professor Lemuel Ozuk in his definitive biography will call my ‘second’ or ‘neo- flapper’ manner.

But one more carp before I close. Gloria and Anthony are representative. They are two of the great army of the rootless who Still, I didn’t bring it out.

With these two cuts, Bunny, the article ought to be in my favor. At any rate I enjoyed it enormously and shall try to reciprocate in some way on The Undertaker’s Garland though I doubt whether you’d trust it to my palsied hands for review. Don’t change the Irish thing - it’s much better as it is - besides the quotation hints at the whiskey motif.

Forever,

Benjamin Disraeli

I am consoled for asking you to cut the soldier and alcoholic paragraphs by the fact that if you hadn’t known me you couldn’t or wouldn’t have put them in. They have a critical value but are really personal gossip.

I’m glad about the novelette in Smart Set. I am about to send them one. I am writing a comedy - or a burlesque or something. The ‘romantic stories’ about you are none of my business. They will keep until I see you.

Hersesassery - Quelque mot!

How do you like echolalia for ‘meaningless chatter?’

Glad you like the title motto - Zelda sends best - Remember me to Ted. Did he say I was ‘old woman with jewel?’

626 Goodrich Avenue

St Paul,

Minnesota February 6,

1922

Dear Bunny:

I read your letter in a chastened mood. My whole point was that you read the book a long time ago in its informal condition, before its final revision and before your own criticisms had strained out some of the broken cork - that, therefore, while as a critic seeing the book for the first time you would, of course, have to speak the truth whether it hurt me financially or not, still that this case was somewhat different and that a pre-publication review which contained private information destined (in my opinion) to hurt the sale of my book was something of which I had a legitimate right to complain. My specification of ‘financial’ injury is simply a private remark to you - it would be absurd for me to pretend to be indifferent to money, and very few men with a family they care for can be. Besides you know that in these two novels I have not suppressed anything with the idea of making money by the suppression but I think I am quite justified in asking you to suppress a detail of my private life - and it seems to me that a financial reason is as good as any, rather better in fact, according to Samuel Butler, than to spare my family.

I had forgotten, as a matter of fact, that those ‘Spotlight’ things are supposed to be personal. Please don’t think that I minded the Maury thing. I was simply congratulating you on inventing a more witty parody than I thought I had made. Still I was tight that night and may have said it. The actual quotation from my first draft is quite correct -I didn’t say it wasn’t.

This is a quibbling letter and I hope it doesn’t sound ill-natured. It isn’t. I simply felt that your letter put me in a bad light and I hasten to explain my objections.

As a matter of fact I am immensely grateful to you for the article and tried to tell you so in my letter. Despite the fact that I am not quite insane about What Maisie Knew as you prophesied I would be I admire your judgments in almost every way more than those of anyone else I know, and I value your opinion on my stuff. In your first letter you said yourself that it was O.K. to object to the booze thing and your quarrel with me seems to be that I gave you a perfectly unaffected and honest answer when I told you I feared financial injury.

As you have a first edition of the book I won’t send you another but will give it my invaluable autograph when I reach New York. I had intended that Perkins should send me the novel to autograph first.

I think it’s too bad that you have gone to all this trouble over the article and I’m afraid I have put you to it. Anyway it’s a complicated subject and I can excuse myself better when I see you sometime next month. But I feel quite sure that if Mencken in doing a ‘Literary Spotlight’ on Dreiser had remarked in dead earnest that Dreiser’s having four wives had had a considerable influence on his work, Dreiser would have raised a slight howl. And if he had remarked that Dreiser was really the hero of all the seductions mentioned in The Titan I think Dreiser would have torn his hair - and complained, at least, that he wanted to save such data for his privately printed editions.

As ever,

F. Scott Fitz-Hardy

626 Goodrich Avenue

St Paul,

Minnesota

Spring, 1922

Dear Bunny:

From your silence I deduce that either you decided that the play * was not in shape to offer to the Guild or that they refused it.

I have now finished the revision. I am forwarding one copy to Harris and, if you think the Guild would be interested, will forward them the other. Your play should be well along by now. Could you manage to send me a carbon?

I’m working like a dog on some movies at present. I was sorry our meetings in New York were so fragmentary. My original plan was to contrive to have long discourses with you but that interminable party began and I couldn’t seem to get sober enough to be able to tolerate being sober. In fact the whole trip was largely a failure.

My compliments to Mary Blair, Ted Paramore and whomsoever else of the elect may cross your path.

We have no plans for the summer.

Scott Rtz —

F. SCOTT FITZGERALD HACK WRITER AND PLAGIARIST SAINT PAUL, MINNESOTA

626 Goodrich Avenue

Postmarked May 30,1922

Dear Bunny:

Your delightful letter, of which I hope you have kept a copy, arrived this A.M. and the Fitzgeralds perused it ferociously, commending especially your hope that — gets a good screw in France.

I am so discouraged about the play that it has cheered me to know it’s still under consideration. I thought they’d burn it up.

I think you overestimate the play - the Act I is a gem. Also I think you’re wrong about the soldier scene. Zelda, George Nathan, Miller, Townsend and I think John all thought it should come out. Still I should not object to it being reinserted. Do you like my letterhead? I have jazzed up the millionaire scene in the revised version. I have not read Ulysses but I’m wild to - especially now that you mention some coincidence. Do you know where I can get it at any price? Sorry about your Smart Set novelette....

I am enormously interested in your play. Send me a copy when you can.

I’d like to meet Dos Passos - God, this is a dull letter. I didn’t read your Double Dealer poem the I heard about it and it seems to have achieved fame. The magazine is unprocurable out here.

We’re going to the country for the summer, but write me here immediately. I wish I could close in a rhapsody like yours but the fire is out for the night. Harris sent back the play to Reynolds without comment. If you can think of a title for it, jot it down and let me know.

Yield to your country complex. Zelda says how-de-do.

Ever thine,

F.Scott F —

St Paul,

Minnesota

Postmarked June 4, 1922

Dear Bunny:

You will be looked up by Thomas A. Boyd, a very clever kid who conducts the best book page west of New York, in a newspaper here. I do not ask you to wine and dine him as I personally dislike people sent to me with letters. I do ask you to see him the and give him half an hour or so of your valuable time. He’s quite a friend of mine.

Scott Fitz —

The Yacht Club

White Bear Lake, Minnesota

June 25, 1922

Dear Bunny:

Thank you for giving the play to Craven - and again for your interest in it in general. I’m afraid I think you overestimate it - because I have just been fixing up ‘Mr Icky’ for my fall book and it does not seem very good to me. I am about to start a revision of the play - also to find a name. I’ll send it to Hopkins next. So far it has only been to Miller, Harris and the Theatre Guild. I’d give anything if Craven would play that part. I wrote it, as the text says, with him in mind. I agree with you that Anna Christie was vastly overestimated....

Am going to write another play whatever becomes of this one. The Beautiful and Damned has had a very satisfactory but not inspiring sale. We thought it’d go far beyond Paradise but it hasn’t. It was a dire mistake to serialize it. Three Soldiers and Cytherea took the edge off it by the time it was published....

Did you like The Diamond as Big as the Ritz’ or did you read it. It’s in my new book anyhow.

What do you think of Rascoe’s page? It’s excellent, of course, compared to The Times or Herald but I think your criticism of his Frank-Harassment of his conversations hit the mark. There is something faintly repellent in his manner - in writing I mean. Who is this professionally quaint Kenhelm Digby? He is kittenish beyond credibility and I hate his guts. Is it Morley or Benêt?

I have Ulysses from the Brick Row Bookshop and am starting it. I wish it was laid in America - there is something about middle- class Ireland that depresses me inordinately - I mean gives me a sort of hollow, cheerless pain. Half of my ancestors came from just such an Irish strata or perhaps a lower one. The book makes me feel appallingly naked. Except to go either South or to New York in October for the winter.

Ever thine,

F. Scott Fitz

The Yacht Club

White Bear Lake,

Minnesota

Postmarked July 13, 1922

Dear Bunny:

Zelda and I have concocted a wonderful idea for Act II of the play. So when Craven returns it will you send it to me - or hold on to it, either one?

I read your article on Ulysses, the only criticism yet I could make head or tail of. Also your article on Byron in the Tribune. You are an incomparable egg and I wish I could see you. Life is damn dull

In God’s name,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Yacht Club

White Bear Lake,

Minnesota

Postmarked August 1, 1922

Dear Bunny:

Just a line to tell you I’ve finished my play and am sending it to Nathan to give to Hopkins or Selwyn. It is now a wonder. I’m going to ask you to destroy the 2 copies you have as it makes me sort of nervous to have them out This is silly but so long as a play is in an actor’s office and is unpublished as my play at Craven’s I feel lines from it will soon begin to appear on Broadway.

I want to thank you again for all you did for it and the time it took. I don’t know anything that involves more labor than trying to place someone else’s ms. I did it for — so I know and I am enormously obliged.

Write me any gossip if you have time. No news or plans have L

Thine,

Fitz

The Yacht Club

White Bear Lake, Minnesota

Postmarked August 5, 1922

Dear Bunny:

Fitzgerald howled over ‘Quintilian.’ He is glad it was reprinted as he couldn’t get the Double Dealer and feared he had missed it. It’s excellent especially the line about Nero and die one about Dr Bishop.

The play with an absolutely new second act has gone to Nathan who is giving it to Hopkins or Selwyn. Your description of John leaving was fine. Zelda and I both enjoyed it with dramatic

? and, what would have been gratifying to you, awe. Thank you for taking it to Ames 8c Elkins. I’m rather glad now that none of them took it as I’d have been tempted to let them do it - and my new version is much better. Please do not bother to return the 2 mss. you have as it’s a lot of trouble. I have copies of them and no use for them. Destruction will serve the same purpose - it only worries me to have them knocking around.

I read sprigs of the old oak that grew from the marriage of Mencken and Margaret Anderson (Christ! What a metaphor!) and is known as the younger genitals. It bored me. I didn’t read yours - but Rascoe is getting worse than Frank Harris with his elaborate explanations and whitewashings of himself. There’s no easier way for a clever writer to become a bore. It turns the gentle art of making enemies into the East Aurora Craft of making people indifferent... in the stunned pause that preceded this epigram Fitzgerald bolted his aspic and went to a sailor’s den.

‘See here,’ he said, ‘I want some new way of using the great Conradian vitality, the legend that the sea exists without Polish eyes to see it. Masefield has spread it on iambics and downed it; O’Neill has sprinkled it on Broadway; McFee has added an Even- rude motor -’

But I could think of no new art form in which to fit him. So I decided to end the letter. The little woman, my best pal and, I may add, my severest critic, asked to be remembered.

Would you like to see the new play? Or are you fed up for awhile? Perhaps we better wait till it appears. I think I’ll try to serialize it in Scribner’s - would you?

Scott F.

Am undecided about Ulysses application to me - which is as near as I ever come to forming an impersonal judgment.

The Yacht Club

White Bear Lake,

Minnesota

Postmarked August 28, 1922

Dear Bunny:

The Garland arrived and I have re-read it. Your preface is perfect - my only regret is that it wasn’t published when it was written almost two years ago. ‘The Soldier’ of course I read for about the fifth time. I think it’s about the best short war story yet - but I object violently to ‘pitched forward’ in the lunch- putting anecdote. The man would have said ‘fell down’ or ‘sorta sank down.’ Also I was delighted as usual by ‘The Efficiency Expert.’ Your poems I like less than your prose - ‘The Lake’ I do not particularly care for. I like ‘The Centaur’ and the ‘Epilogue’ best - but all your poetry seems to flow from some source outside or before the romantic movement even when its intent is mostly lyrical.

I like all of John’s except the play, which strikes me as being obvious, and ‘Resurrection’ which despite its excellent idea and title and some spots of good writing is pale and without any particular vitality.

Due to you, I suppose, I had a wire from Langner, I referred him to George Nathan.

Many thanks for the book. Would you like me to review it? If so suggest a paper or magazine and I’ll be glad to.

Thine,

F. Scott Fitz

The format of the book is most attractive. I grow envious every time I see a Knopf binding.

Villa Marie, Valescure St Raphael, France

Postmarked October 7,1924

Dear Bunny:

The above will tell you where we are, as you proclaim yourself unable to find it on the map. We enjoyed your letter enormously, colossally, stupendously. It was epochal, acrocryptical, categorical. I have begun life anew since getting it and Zelda has gone into a nunnery on the Peloponnesus —

The news about the play is grand and the ballet too. I gather from your letter that O’Neill and Mary had a great success. But you are wrong about Ring’s book t My title was the best possible. You are always wrong - but always with the most correct possible reasons. (This statement is merely acrocritical, hypothetical, diabolical, metaphorical.)....

You speak of — ‘s wife. I didn’t see her - but stay, there was a woman there - but what she said and did and looked like I can not tell. Is she an elderly, gross woman with hair growing in her ears and a red, porous forehead? If so, I remember her. Or stay - there was a rumor that he had married an Ethiop and took her to bleach beside the fjord —

I had a short curious note from the latter Î yesterday, calling me to account for my Mercury story. At first I couldn’t understand this communication after seven blessedly silent years - behold: he was a Catholic. I had broken his heart This is a dumb letter but I have just been reading the advertisements of whore-houses in the French magazines. I seethe with passion for a ‘bains-massage,’ with volupté for oriental delights (tout un) in a Hotel Particular, or else I long to go with a young man (intell., bonne famille, affectueux) for a paid amorous weekend to the coast of illegible. Deep calling to deep.

I will give you now the Fitz touch without which this letter would fail to conform to your conception of my character.

Sinclair Lewis sold his new novel to the Designer for $50,000 (950,000.00 francs) - I never did like that fellow. (I do really.)

My book is wonderful, t so is the air and the sea. I have got my health back - I no longer cough and itch and roll from one side of the bed to the other all night and have a hollow ache in my stomach after two cups of black coffee. I really worked hard as hell last winter - but it was all trash and it nearly broke my heart as well as my iron constitution.

Write to me of all data, gossip, event, accident, scandal, sensation, deterioration, new reputation - and of yourself.

Our love,

Scott

14 rue de Tilsitt Paris, France

Spring, 1925

Dear Bunny:

Thanks for your letter about the book. I was awfully happy that you liked it and that you approved of the design. The worst fault in it, I think is aBlG FAULT: I gave no account (and had no feeling about or knowledge of) the emotional relations between Gatsby and Daisy from the time of their reunion to the catastrophe. However, the lack is so astutely concealed by the retrospect of Gatsby’s past and by blankets of excellent prose that no one has noticed it - the everyone has felt the lack and called it by another name. Mencken said (in a most enthusiastic letter received today) that the only fault was that the central story was trivial and a sort of anecdote (that is because he has forgotten his admiration for Conrad and adjusted himself to the sprawling novel) and I felt that what he really missed was the lack of any emotional backbone at the very height of it.

Without making any invidious comparisons between Class A and Class C, if my novel is an anecdote so is The Brothers Karamazov. From one angle the latter could be reduced into a detective story. However, the letters from you and Mencken have compensated me for the fact that of all the reviews, even the most enthusiastic, not one had the slightest idea what the book was about and for the even more depressing fact that it was, in comparison with the others, a financial failure (after I’d turned down fifteen thousand for the serial rights). I wonder what Rosenfeld thought of it I looked up Hemingway. He is taking me to see Gertrude Stein tomorrow. This city is full of Americans - most of them former friends - whom we spend most of our time dodging, not because we don’t want to see them but because Zelda’s only just well and I’ve got to work; and they seem to be incapable of any sort of conversation not composed of semi-malicious gossip about New York courtesy celebrities. I’ve gotten to like France. We’ve taken a swell apartment until January. I’m filled with disgust for Americans in general after two weeks’ sight of the ones in Paris - these preposterous, pushing women and girls who assume that you have any personal interest in them, who have all (so they say) read James Joyce and who simply adore Mencken. I suppose we’re no worse than anyone, only contact with other races brings out all our worst qualities. If I had anything to do with creating the manners of the contemporary American girl I certainly made a botch of the job.

I’d love to see you. God. I could give you some laughs. There’s no news except that Zelda and I think we’re pretty good, as usual, only more so.

Scott

Thanks again for your cheering letter.

Ellerslie Edgemoor, Delaware

February, 1928

Dear Bunny:....

All is prepared for February 25th. The stomach pumps are polished and set out in rows, stale old enthusiasms are being burnished with that zeal peculiar only to the British Tommy. My God, how we felt when the long slaughter of Passchendaele had begun. Why were the Generals all so old? Why were the Fabian society discriminated against when positions on the general staff went to Dukes and sons of profiteers? Agitators were actually hooted at in Hyde Park and Anglican divines actually didn’t become humanitarian internationalists overnight. What is Britain coming to - where is Milton, Cromwell, Oates, Monk? Where are Shaftesbury, Athelstane, Thomas à Becket, Margot Asquith, Iris March? Where are Blackstone, Touchstone, Clapham-Hopewell- ton, Stoke-Poges? Somewhere back at G.H.Q. handsome men with grey whiskers murmured, ‘We will charge them with the cavalry,’ and meanwhile boys from Bovril and the black country sat shivering in the lagoons at Ypres writing memoirs for liberal novels about the war. What about the tanks? Why did not Douglas Haig or Sir John French (the big smarties - look what they did to General Mercer) invent tanks the day war broke out, like Sir Phillip Gibbs, the weeping baronet, did or would, had he thought of it?

This is just a sample of what you will get on the 25th of February. There will be small but select company, coals, blankets, ‘something for the inner man.’

Please don’t say you can’t come the 25th but would like to come the 29th. We never receive people the 29th. It is the anniversary of the 2nd Council of Nicea when our Blessed Lord, our Blessed Lord, our Blessed Lord -

It always gets stuck in that place. Put on ‘Old Man River’ or something of Louis Bromfield’s.

Pray gravity to move your bowels. It’s little we get done for us in this world. Answer.

Scott

Enjoyed your Wilson article enormously. Not so Thompson affair.

c/o Guaranty Trust

4 Place de la Concorde Paris,

France

Summer, 1930

Dear Bunny:

Congratulations on your marriage and all real hopes for your happiness. We heard, through Mary, long after the event of your collapse t and the thought that you’d survived it helped me through some despairing moments in Zelda’s case. She is now almost ‘well,’ which is to say the psychosis element is gone. We must live quietly for a year now and to some extent forever. She almost went permanently crazy - four hours’ work a day at the ballet for two years, and she 27 and too old when she began. I’m relieved that the ballet was over anyhow as our domestic life was cracking under the strain and I hadn’t touched my novel for a year. She was drunk with music that seemed a crazy opiate to her and her whole cerebral tradition was something locked in such an absolutely impregnable safe inside her that it was months after the break before the doctors could reach her at all. We hope to get home for Christmas.

I have seen no one for months save John in Paris.... the brief spell of work I nagged him into during Margaret’s pregnancy has now given way to interminable talk about a well on their property — Also a man named Thomas Wolfe, a fine man and a fine writer. Paris swarms with fairies and I’ve grown to loathe it and prefer the hospital-like air of Switzerland where nuts are nuts and coughs are coughs. Met your friend Allen Tate, liked him....

Salute the new Mrs Wilson for me.... and remember you’re never long absent from the solicitudes of

Your old friend,

Scott

It was nice of you, and like you, to write Zelda.

La Paix (My God!)

Tow son, Maryland

Probably March, 1933

Dear Bunny:

Your letter with the head of Vladimir Ulianov just received. Please come here the night of the inauguration and stay at least the next day. I want to know with what resignation you look forward to your role of Lunacharsky and whether you decided you had nothing further worth saying in prose fiction or whether there was nothing further to say. Perhaps I should draw the answer to the last question from Axel’s Castle yet I remember stories of yours that anticipated so much that was later said that it seemed a pity. (Not that I don’t admire your recent stuff - particularly I liked ‘Hull House.’)

We had a most unfortunate meeting. I came to New York to get drunk and swinish and I shouldn’t have looked up you and Ernest in such a humor of impotent desperation. I assume full responsibility for all unpleasantness - with Ernest I seem to have reached a state where when we drink together I half bait, half truckle to him; and as for bringing up the butcher boy matter - my God I making trouble between friends is the last thing I had ever thought myself capable of. Anyhow, plenty of egotism for the moment.

Dos was here, and we had a nice evening - we never quite understand each other and perhaps that’s the best basis for an enduring friendship. Alec came up to see me at the Plaza the day I left (still in awful shape but not conspicuously so). He told me to my amazement that you had explained the fundamentals of Leninism, even Marxism, the night before, and Dos tells me that it was only recently made plain thru the same agency to The New Republic. I little thought when I left politics to you and your gang in 1920 you would devote your time to cutting up Wilson’s shroud into blinders! Back to Mallarmé.

- Which reminds me that T. S. Eliot and I had an afternoon and evening together last week. I read him some of his poems and he seemed to think they were pretty good. I liked him fine.... However, come in March. Don’t know what time the inaugura-

tion takes place but you find out and tell us the approximate time of your arrival here. Find out in advance for we may go to it too and we might all get lost in the shuffle.

Always your friend,

Scott

P.S. Please not a word to Zelda about anything I may have done or said in New York. She can stand literally nothing of that nature. I’m on the water-wagon but there’ll be lots of liquor for you.

1307 Park Avenue

Baltimore,

Maryland

Postmarked March 12, 1934

Dear Bunny:

Despite your intention of mild criticism  in our conversation, I felt more elated than otherwise - if the characters got real enough so that you disagreed with what I chose for their manifest destiny the main purpose was accomplished. (By the way, your notion that Dick should have faded out as a shyster alienist was in my original design, but I thought of him, in reconsideration, as an ‘homme épuisé,’ not only an ‘homme manqué.’ I thought that, since his choice of a profession had accidentally wrecked him, he might plausibly have walked out on the profession itself.)

Any attempt by an author to explain away a partial failure in a work is of course doomed to absurdity - yet I could wish that you, and others, had read the book version rather than the magazine version which in spots was hastily put together. The last half for example has a much more polished facade now. Oddly enough several people have felt that the surface of the first chapters was too ornate. One man even advised me to ‘coarsen the texture,’ as being remote from the speed of the main narrative!

In any case when it appears I hope you’ll find time to look it over again. Such irrelevancies as Morton Hoyt’s nose-dive and Dick’s affair in Innsbruck are out, together with the scene of calling on the retired bootlegger at Beaulieu, and innumerable minor details. I have driven the Scribner proofreaders half nuts but I think I’ve made it incomparably smoother.

Zelda’s pictures go on display in a few weeks and I’ll be meeting her in N.Y. for a day at least. Wouldn’t it be a good time for a reunion?

It was good seeing you and good to think that our squabble, or whatever it was, is ironed out.

With affection always,

Scott Fitzgerald

1307 Park Avenue

Baltimore,

Maryland

September 7,1934

Dear Bunny:

I’ve had a big reaction from your last two articles in The New Republic.In spite of the fact that we always approach material in different ways there is some fast-guessing quality that, for me, links us now in the work of the intellect. Always the overtone and the understatement.

It was fun when we all believed the same things. It was more fun to think that we were all going to die together or live together, and none of us anticipated this great loneliness, where one has dedicated his remnants to imaginative fiction and another his slowly dissolving trunk to the Human Idea. Nevertheless the stress that you put upon this in your New Republic article - of forces never still, of rivers never ending, of clouds shifting their prophecies at evening, afternoon or morning - this sense of things has kept our courses loosely parallel, even when our references to data have been so disparate as to throw us miles apart.

The purport of this letter is to agree passionately with an idea that you put forth in a discussion of Michelet: that conditions irretrievably change men and that what looks purple in a blue light looks, in another spectrum, like green and white bouncing snow. I want you to know that one among many readers is absolutely alert on the implications and substrata of meaning in this new work.

Ever affectionately yours,

Scott

5521 Amestoy Avenue

Encino,

California

May 16, 1939

Dear Bunny:

News that you and Mary had a baby reached me rather late because I was out of California for several months. Hope he is now strong and crawling. Tell him if he grows up any bigger I shall be prepared to take him for a loop when he reaches the age of twenty- one at which time I shall be sixty-three. I don’t know any girl in the last several years with more charm than Mary. It was a delight to meet her and spend an evening with you all. If I had known about the news in time, I would have wired you.

I called up Louise Fort in San Diego, but couldn’t get her number and imagine she had left before I came back to California. However, I am sending on your letter to Ted Paramore who may have more luck.

Believe me, Bunny, it meant more to me than it could possibly have meant to you to see you that evening. It seemed to renew old times learning about Franz Kafka and latter things that are going on in the world of poetry, because I am still the ignoramus that you and John Bishop wrote about at Princeton. Though my idea is now, to learn about a new life from Louis B. Mayer who promises to teach me all about things if he ever gets around to it

Ever your devoted friend,

Scott

1403 North Laurel Avenue Hollywood, California

October 21, 1940

Dear Bunny:

I am deep into the Finland Station and I break off to write you that some of the reviews especially The New Yorker and New Republic made me sick....

I suppose they wanted you to produce a volume on the order of John Strachey, and they had a few labels prepared with which to quarantine you. Why otherwise they should quarrel with your historical approach is inexplicable to me.

It is a magnificent book - just as it promised to be in The New Republic. My very best to you both and to the young one.

Ever,

Scott

P.S. Am somewhere in a novel

1403 North Laurel Avenue Hollywood,

California

November 25, 1940

Dear Bunny:....

Two years after it was published I ran across an article by John Bishop in the Virginia Quarterly. His war story about Ernest under the corpses is pure crap. Also he says that I flunked out of Princeton, though in the year referred to I went to my last class November 28th, when it is somewhat unusual to flunk out. Also he reproached me with being a suck around the rich. I’ve had this before but nobody seems able to name these rich. I always thought my progress was in the other direction - Tommy Hitchcock and the two Murphys are not a long list of rich friends for one who, unlike John, grew up among nothing else but. I don’t even know any of the people in ‘café society.’ It seems strange from John. I did more than anyone in Paris to help him finish his Civil War book and get it published. It can’t be jealousy for there isn’t much to be jealous of any more....

I think my novel is good. I’ve written it with difficulty. It is completely upstream in mood and will get a certain amount of abuse but is first hand and I am trying a little harder than I ever have to be exact and honest emotionally. I honestly hoped somebody else would write it but nobody seems to be going to.

With best to you both,

Scott

P.S. This sounds like such a bitter letter - I’d rewrite it except for a horrible paucity of time. Not even time to be bitter.

To Gerald and Sara Murphy

Grove Park Inn Sunset

Mountain Asheville,

North Carolina

August 15, 1935

Dearest Sara:

Today a letter from Gerald, a week old, telling me this and that about the awful organ music around us, made me think of you, and I mean think of you (of all people in the world you know the distinction). In my theory, utterly opposite to Ernest’s, about fiction, i e., that it takes half a dozen people to make a synthesis strong enough to create a fiction character - in that theory, or rather in despite of it, I used you again and again in Tender

‘Her face was hard and lovely and pitiful’

and again

‘He had been heavy, belly-frightened with love of her for years’

- in those and in a hundred other places I tried to evoke not you but the effect that you produce on men - the echoes and reverberations - a poor return for what you have given by your living presence, but nevertheless an artist’s (what a word!) sincere attempt to preserve a true fragment rather than a ‘portrait’ by Mr Sargent. And someday, in spite of all the affectionate skepticism you felt toward the brash young man you met on the Riviera eleven years ago, you’ll let me have my little corner of you where I know you better than anybody - yes, even better than Gerald. And if it should perhaps be your left ear (you hate anyone to examine any single part of your person, no matter how appreciatively - that’s why you wore bright clothes) on June evenings on Thursdays from 11:00 to 11:15 here’s what I’d say.

That not one thing you’ve done is for nothing. If you lost everything you brought into the world - if your works were burnt in the public square the law of compensation would still act (I am too moved by what I am saying to write it as well as I’d like). You are part of our times, part of the history of our race. The people whose lives you’ve touched directly or indirectly have reacted to the corporate bundle of atoms that’s you in a good way. I have seen you again and again at a time of confusion take the hard course almost blindly because long after your powers of ratiocination were exhausted you clung to the idea of dauntless courage. You were the one who said:

‘All right, I’ll take the black checker men.’

I know that you and Gerald are one and it is hard to separate one of you from the other, in such a matter for example as the love and encouragement you chose to give to people who were full of life rather than to others, equally interesting and less exigent, who were frozen into rigid names. I don’t praise you for this - it was the little more, the little immeasurable portion of a millimeter, the thing at the absolute top that makes the difference between a World’s Champion and an also-ran, the little glance when you were sitting with Archie on the sofa that you threw at me and said:

‘And-Scott!’

- taking me in too, and with a heart so milked of compassion by your dearest ones that no person in the world but you would have that little more to spare.

Well - I got somewhat excited there. The point is: I rather like you, and I think that perhaps you have the makings of a good woman.

Gerald has invited me to come up for a weekend in the fall - probably September.

It’s odd that when I read over this letter it seems to convey no particular point, yet I’m going to send it. Like Cole’s eloquent little song ‘I think it’ll tell you how great you are.’

From your everlasting friend,

Scott

Cambridge Arms Apts.

Baltimore,

Maryland

Postmarked March 30,1936

Dearest Sara (and Gerald too, if he’s not in London):

I want news of you. The winter has presented too many problems here for me to come North, even as far as New York, and my last word of you was by kindness of Archie - and not too encouraging.

If you read the little trilogy I wrote for Esquire you know I went through a sort of ‘dark night of the soul’ last autumn, and again and again my thoughts reverted to you and Gerald, and I reminded myself that nothing had happened to me with the awful suddenness of your tragedy of a year ago, nothing so utterly conclusive and irreparable. I saw your face, Sara, as I saw it a year ago this month, and Gerald’s face last fall when I met him in the Ritz Bar, and I felt very close to you - and correspondingly detached from Emest, who has managed to escape the great thunderbolts, and Nora Flynn whom the gods haven’t even shot at with much seriousness. She would probably deny that, and she helped me over one black week when I thought this was probably as good a time to quit as any, but as I said to her the love of life is essentially as incommunicable as grief.

I am moving Zelda to a sanatorium in Asheville - she is no better, though the suicidal cloud has lifted. - I thought over your Christian Science idea and finally decided to try it but the practitioner I hit on wanted to begin with ‘absent treatments,’ which seemed about as effectual to me as the candles my mother keeps constantly burning to bring me back to Holy Church - so I abandoned it. Especially as Zelda now claims to be in direct contact with Christ, William the Conqueror, Mary Stuart, Apollo and all the stock paraphernalia of insane-asylum jokes. Of course it isn’t a bit funny but after the awful strangulation episode of last spring I sometimes take refuge in an unsmiling irony about the present exterior phases of her illness. For what she has really suffered, there is never a sober night that I do not pay a stark tribute of an hour to in the darkness. In an odd way, perhaps.

incredible to you, she was always my child (it was not reciprocal as it often is in marriages), my child in a sense that Scottie isn’t, because I’ve brought Scottie up hard as nails (perhaps that’s fatuous, but I think I have). Outside of the realm of what you called Zelda’s ‘terribly dangerous secret thoughts’ I was her great reality, often the only liaison agent who could make the world tangible to her -

The only way to show me you forgive this great outpouring is to write me about yourselves. Some night when you’re not too tired, take yourself a glass of sherry and write me as lovely and revealing a letter as you did before. Willy-nilly we are still in the midst of life and all true correspondence is necessarily sporadic but a letter from you or Gerald always pulls at something awfully deep in me. I want the best news, but in any case I want to know.

With dearest affection to you all,

Scott

Oak Hall

Hotel Tryon,

North Carolina

January 31, 1937

Dearest Gerald and Sara:

The telegram came today and the whole afternoon was so sad with thoughts of you and the past and the happy times we had once. Another link binding you to life is broken and with such insensate cruelty that it is hard to say which of the two blows was conceived with more malice I can see the silence in which you hover now after this seven years of struggle and it would take words like Lincoln’s in his letter to the mother who had lost four sons in the war to write you anything fitting at the moment. The sympathy you will get will be what you have had from each other already and for a long, long time you will be inconsolable.

But I can see another generation growing up around Honoria and an eventual peace somewhere, an occasional port of call as we all sail deathward. Fate can’t have any more arrows in its quiver for you that will wound like these. Who was it said that it was astounding how the deepest griefs can change in time to a sort 0f joy? The golden bowl is broken indeed but it was golden; nothing can ever take those boys away from you now.

Scott

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Corporation

Culver City,

California

March 11,1938

Dear Gerald:

Your letter was a most pleasant surprise. The telegram I sent you was prompted by one of those moments when you see people as terribly alone - a moment in the Newark airport. It was entirely a piece of sentimentality because, of course, Sheilah  has lots of friends in New York; and I realize now that it was a bad time to ask anything. You were awfully damn kind, in any case, and as a friend you have never failed me.

Alas, I wish I could say the same for myself. I don’t gather from your letter whether you were going to look upon the antique world with Sara, Dos and Katy t I wish I was, but with the sort of wishing that is remote and academic. I don’t care much where I am any more, nor expect very much from places. You will understand this. To me, it is a new phase, or, rather, a development of something that began long ago in my writing - to try to dig up the relevant, the essential, and especially the dramatic and glamorous from whatever life is around. I used to think that my sensory impression of the world came from outside. I used to actually believe that it was as objective as blue skies or a piece of music. Now I know it was within, and emphatically cherish what little is left.

I am writing a picture called Infidelity for Joan Crawford. Writing for her is difficult. She can’t change her emotions in the middle of a scene without going through a sort of Jekyll and Hyde contortion of the face, so that when one wants to indicate that she is going from joy to sorrow, one must cut away and then cut back. Also, you can never give her such a stage direction as ‘telling a lie,’ because if you did, she would practically give a representation of Benedict Arnold selling West Point to the

British. I live a quiet life here, keeping regular hours, trying to get away every couple of weeks for days in the sun at La folia, Santa Barbara. King Vidor appeared for a day or so, asked about you and is off for England. Eddie * and I talk of you. Sheilah, of course, was fascinated by you both, and I looked up old pictures in old scrapbooks for her. Tender Is the Night has been dramatized and may go on the stage next fall. I shall obtain you gallery seats for the first night where you can blush unseen.

Scott

5521 Amestoy Avenue

Encino, California

Spring, 1940

Honey - that goes for Sara too:

I have written a dozen people since who mean nothing to me - — writing you I was saving for good news. I suppose pride was concerned - in that personally and publicly dreary month of September last about everything went to pieces all at once and it was a long uphill pull.

To summarize: I don’t have to tell you anything about the awful lapses and sudden reverses and apparent cures and thorough poisoning effect of lung trouble. Suffice to say there were months with a high of 99.8, months at 99.6 and then up and down and a stabilization at 99.2 every afternoon when I could write in bed - — and now for two and a half months and one short week that may have been grip - nothing at all. With it went a psychic depression over the finances and the effect on Scottie and Zelda. There was many a day when the fact that you and Sara did help me at a desperate moment... seemed the only pleasant human thing that had happened in a world where I felt prematurely passed by and forgotten. The thousands that I’d given and loaned - well, after the first attempts I didn’t even worry about that. There seem to be the givers and the takers and that doesn’t change. So you were never out of my mind - but even so no more present than always because this was only one of so many things.

In the land of the living again I function rather well. My great dreams about this place are shattered and I have written half a novel and a score of satiric pieces that are appearing in the current Esquires about it. After having to turn down a bunch of well-paid jobs while I was ill there was a period when no one seemed to want me for duck soup - then a month ago a producer asked me to do a piece of my own for a small sum ($2000) and a share in the profits. The piece is ‘Babylon Revisited’ and an old and not bad Post story of which the child heroine was named Honoria! I’m keeping the name.

It looks good. I have stopped being a prophet (third attempt at spelling this) but I think I may be solvent in a month or so if the fever keeps subservient to what the doctors think is an exceptional resistance —

So now you’re up to date on me and it won’t be so long again. I might say by way of counter-reproach that there’s no word of any of you in your letter. It is sad about — . Writing you today has brought back so much and I could weep very easily.

With dearest love,

Scott

Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation

Beverly Hills,

California

September 14, 1940

Dear Gerald:

I suppose anybody our age suspects what is emphasized - so let it go. But I was flat in bed from April to July last year with day and night nurses. Anyhow as you see from the letterhead I am now in official health.

I find, after a long time out here, that one develops new attitudes. It is, for example, such a slack soft place - even its pleasure lacking the fierceness or excitement of Provence - that withdrawal is practically a condition of safety. The sin is to upset anyone else, and much of what is known as ‘progress’ is attained by more or less delicately poking and prodding other people. This is an unhealthy condition of affairs. Except for the stage-struck young girls people come here for negative reasons - all gold rushes are essentially negative - and the young girls soon join the vicious circle. There is no group, however small, interesting as such.

Everywhere there is, after a moment, either corruption or indifference. The heroes are the great corruptionists or the supremely indifferent - by whom I mean the spoiled writers, Hecht, Nunnally Johnson, Dotty, Dash Hammett, etc. That Dotty has embraced the church and reads her office faithfully every day does not affect her indifference. So is one type of Commy Malraux didn’t list among his categories in Man’s Hope - but nothing would disappoint her so vehemently as success.

I have a novel pretty well on the road. I think it will baffle and in some ways irritate what readers I have left. But it is as detached from me as Gatsby was, in intent anyhow. The new Armageddon, far from making everything unimportant, gives me a certain lust for life again. This is undoubtedly an immature throw-back, but it’s the truth. The gloom of all causes does not affect it - I feel a certain rebirth of kinetic impulses - however misdirected —

I would like to have some days with you and Sara. I hear distant thunder about Ernest and Archie and their doings but about you not a tenth of what I want to know.

With affection,

Scott

Other Letters

TO ALIDA BIGELOW

Cottage Club Princeton, New Jersey

Postmarked January 10,1917

Dear Alida:

I never felt so depressed in my life as I do this afternoon and what should I do in the middle and lowest point of it but pick up North of Boston. - It made me still gloomier; but it’s well worth reading and for the most part good poetry. The first poem, the one about mending the wall, is the best thing in it I think.

- Much obliged - you were very good to send it. Even the ‘platitudinous remark’ seemed satirical on a day like this however.

I’ll send you a one-act play by me when it comes out in the next Nassau Lit. It’s called ‘The Debutante.’ - It’s a knockout!

Just had a scrap with my English preceptor - he’s a simple bone- head and I’m not learning a thing from him. I told him so!

I never had such a simple Christmas vacation as this one. The only two parties I enjoyed particularly were the German and the Lamda Sigma dance. Perhaps there was a reason - the incidentally I’ve cut out all drinking for one year. (Good old New Year’s resolution.) I suppose you’ve regaled Ruth with an account of my exploits at the first-named affair - but what bother I!

Isn’t it a shame about Mrs S! I hear from Elkins Owlliphant, however, that she’s now back at school.

I wonder if Sandy is going to maTry — ! Wouldn’t this be a suitable pair to travel around the streets of St Paul! He must have some strange power over woming!

Haven’t heard a word from home since I got back here - Gee! Honestly! Never did I feel so low.

It’s four o’clock and I have the electric light on - you can imagine what kind of day it is.

If you can receive books and you won’t be shocked I’ll send you a knockout called The Confessions of an Inconstant Man. One part of it is rather mean, the!! You’ll have to send it back as another copy is unprocurable for Love or Money. - Tell me whether you want to read it or not.

I got the funniest letter from a girl in New York whom I’d never heard of saying that she had light brown hair and brown eyes and that she wanted to meet me. She said she’s seen that picture (awful chromo) of moi in The Times.

Well Alida I’m sorry this letter is so gloomy but that’s the form I’m in so it can’t be helped.

Give my best to Virginia Sweat and tell her I’m sorry I’ve got such a weak line. I am

Yours till deth,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

TO THE AUTHOR’S MOTHER

Camp Chatham Orillia, Ontario

July 18, 1907

Dear Mother, I received your letter this morning and though I would like very much to have you up here I don’t think you would like it as you know no one here except Mrs Upton and she is busy most of the time. I don’t think you would like the accommodations as it is only a small town and no good hotels. There are some very nice boarding houses but about the only fare is lamb and beef. Please send me a dollar because there are a lot of little odds and ends I need. I will spend it cautiously. All the other boys have pocket money besides their regular allowance.

Your loving son,

Scott Fitzgerald

TO MRS EDWARD FITZGERALD

University Cottage Club Princeton, New Jersey

November 14, 1917

Dear Mother:

You were doubtless surprised to get my letter but I certainly was delighted to get my commission.

My pay started the day I signed the Oath of Allegiance and sent it back which was yesterday - Went up to Brooks Brothers yesterday afternoon and ordered some of my equipment.

I haven’t received any orders yet but I think I will be ordered to Fort Leavenworth within a month - I’ll be there three months and would have six additional months’ training in France before I was ordered with my regiment to the trenches.

I get $141 a month ($1700 a year) with a 10% increase when I’m in France.

My uniforms are going to cost quite a bit so if you haven’t sent me what you have of my own money please do so.

I’m continuing here going to classes until I get orders. I am Second Lieutenant in the regular infantry and not a reserve officer -I rank with a West Point graduate.

Things are stupid here -I hear from Marie and Catherine Tighe occasionally and got a letter from Non two weeks ago - I hear he’s been ordered to Texas.

Went down to see Ellen Stockton in Trenton the other night She is a perfect beauty.

About the army, please let’s not have either tragedy or Heroics because they are equally distasteful to me. I went into this perfectly cold-bloodedly and don’t sympathize with the ‘Give my son to country’ etc.

etc. etc.

or ‘Hero stuff’

because I just went and purely for social reasons. If you want to pray, pray for my soul and not that I won’t get killed - the last doesn’t seem to matter particularly and if you are a good Catholic the first ought to.

To a profound pessimist about life, being in danger is not depressing. I have never been more cheerful. Please be nice and respect my wishes.

Love,

Scott

TO SHANE LESLIE

Ft Leavenworth, Kansas December 22, 1917

My dear Mr Leslie:

Your letter followed me here - My novel isn’t a novel in verse. It merely shifts rapidly from verse to prose but it’s mostly in prose.

The reason I’ve abandoned my idea of a book of poems is that I’ve only about twenty poems and can’t write any more in this atmosphere - while I can write prose, so I’m sandwiching the poems between reams of autobiography and fiction. It makes a potpourri, especially as there are pages in dialogue and in vers libre, but it reads as logically for the times as most public utterances of the prim and prominent. It is a tremendously conceited affair. The title page looks (will look) like this:

THE ROMANTIC EGOTIST by

F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

The Best is over.

You may remember now and think and sigh Oh silly lover!’

- — Rupert Brooke

- — ‘Ou me coucha banga loupa Domalumba guna duma..

- — Gilbert Chesterton

“Experience is the name Tubby gives to all his mistakes.’

- — Oscar Wilde

I’ll send you a chapter or two to look over if you would. I’d like it a lot if you would. I’m enclosing you a poem that Poet Lore a magazine of verse has just taken.

Yours,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

2nd Lt, U.S., Co. Q

Ft Leavenworth, Kansas February 4, 1918

Dear Mr Leslie:

This is just a note to inform you that the first draft of The Romantic Egotist will be ready for your inspection in three weeks altho I’m sending you a chapter called The Devil’ next week.

Think of a romantic egotist writing about himself in a cold barracks on Sunday afternoons... yet that is the way this novel has been scattered into shape - for it has no form to speak of.

Dr Fay told me to send my picture that he wants through you. Whether he meant for you to forward it to him or put it away until he returns I didn’t comprehend.

I certainly appreciate your taking an interest in my book... By the way I join my regiment, the 45th Infantry, at Camp Taylor, Kentucky, in three weeks.

Faithfully,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Ft Leavenworth, Kansas

Early February, 1918

Dear Mr Leslie:

Here’s Chapter XVI The Devil’ and Chapter XIII. I picked it out as a chapter you could read without knowing the story. I wish you’d look it over and see what you think of it It’s semi-typical of the novel in its hastiness and scrubby style.

I have a week’s leave before joining my regiment and I’m going up to Princeton to rewrite. Now I can pass thru Washington and see you about this novel either on the seventh or eighth or ninth of February. Will you tell me which of these days you’d be liable to have an afternoon off? Any one of them is convenient as far as I’m concerned. I could bring you half a dozen chapters to look at and I’d like to know whether you think it would have any chance with Scribner.

The novel begins nowhere as most things do and ends with the war as all things do. Chapter XIII will seem incoherent out of its setting. Well - I leave here Monday the 26th. After that my address will be Cottage Club - Princeton, N.J.

I’d be much obliged if you’d let me know which afternoon would be most convenient for you.

Faithfully,

F. Scott Fitzgerald Did you ever notice that remarkable coincidence? Bernard Shaw is 61 years old, H. G. Wells is 51, G. K. Chesterton 41, you’re 31, and I’m 21 - all the great authors of the world in arithmetical progression.

45th Infantry Camp Gordon, Georgia May 8, 1918

Dear Mr Leslie:

Your letter filled me with a variety of literary emotions... you see, yours is the first pronouncement of any kind that I’ve received upon my first born...

That it is crude, increditably dull in places is too true to be pleasant... I have no idea why I hashed in all that monotonous drivel about childhood in the first part and would see it hacked out like an errant appendix without a murmur... There are too many characters and too much local social system in the Princeton section... and in all places all through, the verses are too obviously lugged in...

At any rate I’m tremendously obliged to you for taking an interest in it and writing that awfully decent letter to Scribner... If he thinks that a revision would make it at all practicable I’d rather do it than not, or if he despairs of it I might try some less conservative publisher than Scribner is known to be...

We have no news except that we’re probably going inside of two months and, officers and men, we’re wild to go...

I wonder if you’re working on the history of Martin Luther or are on another tack... Do write a novel with young men in it, and kill the rancid taste that the semi-brilliant Changing Winds left on so many tongues. Or write a thinly disguised autobiography... or something. I’m wild for books and none are forthcoming... I wrote mine (as Stevenson wrote Treasure Island) to satisfy my own craving for a certain type of novel. Why are all the truish novels written by the gloomy half-twilight realists like Beresford and Walpole and St John Ervine? Even the Soul of a Bishop is colorless... Where are the novels of five years ago: Tono Bungay, Youth’s Encounter, Man Alive, The New Machiavelli? Heavens, has the war caught all literature in the crossed nets of Galsworthy and George Moore?

Well... May St Robert (Benson) appear to Scribner in a dream...

Faithfully,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

P.S. Much obliged for mailing on Dr Fay’s letter.

17th Infantry, Brig. Headquarters Camp Sheridan, Alabama January 13,

1919

Dear Mr Leslie:

I can’t tell you how I feel about Monsignor Fay’s death - He was the best friend I had in the world and last night he seemed so close and so good that I was almost glad - because I think he wanted to die. Deep under it all he had a fear of that blending of the two worlds, that sudden change of values that sometimes happened to him and put a vague unhappiness into the stray corners of his life.

But selfishly dam sorry. Never more

‘will we drink with the sunlight for lamp

Myself and the dead’

I know how you feel too and Stephen Parrott and Mrs Leslie and Mrs Chanler and Father Hemmick and Delbos and O’Kelly and Sanderson and the fifty people that must somehow have felt a great security in him. He was such a secure man: one knows that he is happy now - Oh God! I can’t write -

I just wanted to talk to someone who knew him as I knew him.

Sincerely,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

American Red Cross Base Hospital Camp Sheridan, Alabama

Late January, 1919

Dear Mr Leslie:

Your letter seemed to start a new flow of sorrows in me. I’ve never wanted so much to die in my life. Father Fay always thought that if one of us died the other would, and now how I’ve hoped so.

Oh, it all seemed so easy - life, I mean, with people who understood satisfied needs. Even the philistines seemed very good and quiet, always ready to be duped or influenced or something, and now my little world made to order has been shattered by the death of one man.

I’m beginning to have a horror of people: I can quite sympathize with your desire to be a Carthusian.

This has made me nearly sure that I will become a priest. I feel as if in a way his mantle had descended upon me - a desire, or more, to some day recreate the atmosphere of him. I think he was the sort of man St Peter was, so damned human.

Think of the number of people who in a way looked to him and depended on him. His faith shining thru all the versatility and intellect.

I think I did feel him but I can’t tell you of it in a letter. It was rather ghastly.

I’m coming to New York in February or March to write or something. I’ll come and see you then.

If there’s anything about him in any magazine I wish you’d send them.

I’ve been here in the hospital with influenza.

As ever,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Westport, Connecticut August 6,1920

Dear Mr Leslie:

Your letter came today and I hasten to assure you that you were one of the half dozen chosen to whom I sent autographed first editions. I am sorry as the deuce, not to say humiliated, that it never reached you as you were my first literary sponsor, godfather to this book, and my original intention was to dedicate it to both of you. I sent it to your New York address as I’d lost your letter from Ireland.

I am married and living rustically in Connecticut - working on a second novel. I married the Rosalind of the novel, the southern girl I was so attached to, after a grand reconciliation.

The book has sold 30,000 copies here and will be published immediately in England and Australia.

I apologize for the spelling of Dr Fay’s name; also - did you notice - for an almost excerpt from one of your letters with an account of the funeral. I didn’t see it myself and had to describe it. I credited you with it in the copy I sent you.

I have written numerous short stories to be published by Scribners this fall, under the title of Flappers and Philosophers. I am living royally off the moving picture rights of these same stories.

I will certainly send you a first edition of my new book which includes that story ‘Benediction,’ since published in the Smart Set - and next time I’m in New York I’ll send you the 7th edition of This Side of Paradise just to show you I’m not like republics ungrateful, and that the correction in Dr Fay’s name has been corrected.

Stephen Parrott was staying with us last week and we talked much of both you and Dr Fay. I certainly made use of his letters and the poem in the book but I’m sure he would fully approve, don’t you?

When are you coming to America?

Sincerely,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

P.S. My best regards to Mrs Leslie.

The Catholic papers here seem to think my book was a subtle attack on the American clergy. I can’t think why! I’m sure the most sympathetic character in it was Monsignor Darcy.

Westport, Connecticut September 17, 1920

Dear Mr Leslie:

The book is appearing in England next spring. Williams Collins Sons & Co. are bringing it out. Did I tell you? I sent a tracer after the book I sent you last spring and today I forwarded an 8th edition of Paradise and a first of my new one, Flappers and Philosophers, a collection of short stories. I am now working on my second novel - much more objective this time and hence much harder sledding. But the bourgeoisie are going to stare 1

The three letters and the poem of Dr Fay’s possibly should not have followed the dedication but I really don’t think he’d have minded. I was married quite liturgically and canonically - I mean only the latter, tho, for it took place in the rectory of St Patrick’s Cathedral.

We are coining abroad in January and will certainly come and have a long talk with you, ‘Rosalind’ was tremendously impressed with ‘10, Talbot Square, Hyde Park, London, England.’ And I would like to see Fr Hemmick again. How I’ll watch for that review in the Dublin Review!

I liked Tom Kettle’s poem but I really don’t think it’s extraordinary. I’m trying to get hold of his book.

I’m taking your advice and writing very slowly and paying much attention to form. Sometimes I think that this new novel has nothing much else but form.

There’s no use concealing the fact that my reaction a year ago last June to apparent failure in every direction did carry me rather away from the church. My ideas now are in such wild riot that I would flatter myself did I claim even the clarity of agnosticism. If you knew the absolute dirth of Catholic intelligentsia in this country! One Catholic magazine, America, had only one prim comment on my book - ‘a fair example of our non-Catholic college’s output.’ My Lord! Compared to the average Georgetown alumnus Amory is an uncanonized saint. I think I laundered myself shiny in the book!

Faithfully,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

38 West 59th Street New York City November 16, 1920

Dear Mr Leslie:

Thanks for the article. It seems a pity that something even more exhaustive can’t be written about Dr Fay. He always told me to save his letters and some day we’d all publish them anonymously in some form. I found, however, that he’d written me less than he thought so the three letters that occur in the book are largely pieced together and even considerably added to from memories of remarks he’d made to me plus even a few things I thought he might have said.

The entire funeral description you quoted was culled from your letter except that ‘he would have enjoyed his own funeral’ and ‘making all religion a thing of lights and shadows, etc.’ I apologize most humbly. I think the influences of your style on me are traceable in various other portions of the book.

I met Fr Hemmick in the Biltmore and he looked at me as the he saw the horns already sprouting. Do you know that the story ‘Benediction’ that I sent you and that also received the imprimatur of the most intelligent priest I know has come in for the most terrible lashing from the American Catholic intelligentsia? It’s too much for me. It seems that an Englishman like Benson can write anything but an American had better have his works either pious tracts for nuns or else disassociate them from the church as a living issue.

I am coming to see you when we cross this winter.

Yours ever,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Paris, France May 24,1921

Dear Mr Leslie:

Just a word to thank you for your courtesies to us. I think Zelda enjoyed her trip through Wapping more than anything that’s happened so far.

We had dinner with Galsworthy the night before we left and I was rather disappointed in him. I can’t stand pessimism with neither irony nor bitterness. Incidentally, I tried all over London to get you The Mysterious Stranger by Twain but evidently it’s not published in England. I am almost through with Manning and intend to review him in The Bookman.

France is a bore and a disappointment, chiefly, I imagine, because we know no one here. Italy on Wednesday.

Faithfully,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

TO SALLY POPE TAYLOR

45th Infantry Camp Taylor, Kentucky

March 10, 1918

Dear Sally Pope:

Much obliged for the Easter postcard - I’d have loved to have come down for Easter but as you know we haven’t much say as to what we can do and what we can’t.

My first novel is now in the hands of Scribner and Co. Whether they’ll publish it for me I don’t know yet. It’s called The Romantic Egotist and most of the adventures in it have happened to me in my short but eventful life. Your mother probably won’t let you read it until you’re sixteen, Sally, and she’s perfectly right. However this is premature as it hasn’t been accepted yet.

I often think of you all down there and it’s good to think that in this muddled hurly-burly of a world some little corners still preserve their peace and sanity. We’re going to be moved from CampTaylor soon but where we’re going I don’t know. I’m anxious to get to France but probably won’t for a long, long time. Tell your mother to read Changing Winds by St John Ervine. It is anti-Catholic rather, but Rupert Brooke is one of the characters in it and I rather think she’d like it.

I hope you read a most tremendous lot, Sally - you’ve got a keen mind and just feed it with every bit of reading you can lay your hands on, good, poor or mediocre. A good mind has a good separator and can peck the good from the bad in all it absorbs. My best wishes to everyone.

Love,

Scott F.

TO SALLY POPE TAYLOR

45th Infantry Camp Sheridan, Alabama

June 19,

1918

I did enjoy your letter, Sally, and I believe you’re going to be quite a personage. A personage and a personality are quite different - I wonder if you can figure the difference. Your mother, Peter the Hermit, Joan of Arc, Cousin Tom, Mark Antony and Bonnie Prince Charlie were personalities. You and Cardinal Newman and Julius Caesar and Elizabeth Barrett Browning and myself and Mme de Staël were personages. Does the distinction begin to glimmer on you? Personality may vanish at a sickness; a personage is hurt more by a worldly setback. Of you four sisters, you and Tommy are personages, Celia is a personality and Virginia may be either - or both, as Disraeli was.

Do you know, Sally, I believe that for the first time in my life I’m rather lonesome down here - not lonesome for family and friends or anyone in particular but lonesome for the old atmosphere - a feverish crowd at Princeton sitting up until three discussing pragmatism or the immortality of the soul - for the glitter of New York with a tea dance at the Plaza or lunch at Sherries - for the quiet respectable boredom of St Paul.

What a funny way to write a girl of thirteen, or is it fourteen?

Thy cousin,

Scott

TO RUTH STURTEVANT

67th Infantry Camp Sheridan, Alabama 1st of Winter

Nineteen hundred and Eighteen

Postmarked December 4,1918

Dear Ruth:

Just a line to tell you how much I enjoyed Sonia - If you like that sort of book you should read Youth’s Encounter (Mackenzie), Changing Winds (Ervine), and The New Machiavelli and Tono Bungay (H. G. Wells) -

My affair still drifts - But my mind is firmly made up that I will not, shall not, can not, should not, must not marry - still, she is remarkable - I’m trying desperately exire armis -

As ever,

Scott Fitzg —

TO C. EDMUND DELBOS

17th Brig. Headquarters Camp Sheridan, Alabama

January 13,

1919

Dear Mr Delbos:

Your telegram was the greatest shock I have ever known. Like so many others I looked to Dr Fay before anyone in the world - and I’ll think of the days when I came back to school to join his circle before the fire as the happiest of my life.

I can’t realize that he has gone - that all of us who loved him have lost him forever and that that side of life is over, the great warmth and atmosphere he could cast over youth - the perfect understanding. - When I begin to think about him and what he meant to me I can hardly see the paper.

I can’t get leave, but all day Tuesday I’ll devote to his memory just as I suppose I will all my life. The best is over -I feel like the dregs of a cup.

Sincerely,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

TO MRS EDWARD FITZGERALD

FortLeavenworth,

Kansas

Winter, 1919

Dear Mother: I wrote you a letter yesterday but lost it somewhere.

(1) — Candy was fine but best not send it in a long box again as it gets smashed a little.

(2) — Checks came - Thanks.

(3) — Am very well.

(4) — My novel is autobiographical in point of view but I’ve borrowed incidents from all my friends’ experience.

(5) — It’s too much trouble to send my flannels home to be washed.

(6) — I want suitcase back.

(7) — Will you ask father to show you those quotations about ‘Lord Alfred’ in ‘Lucille’ - and copy them out and send them to me -I need them in my book.

(8) — I am bored but not weary.

(9) — This is the coldest state in the Union.

Love, Scott

TO RUTH STURTEVANT

New York City

June 24,

1919

Dear Ruth:

I feel I ought to tell you something because you’re the only person in the world that knows the other half. I’ve done my best and I’ve failed - it’s a great tragedy to me and I feel I have very little left to live for because until everything is as it should be I’ll have that sense of vacancy that only this can give.

I wish you’d tear up this letter and I know you’ll never say what I told you in an hour of depression. Unless someday she will marry me I will never marry.

As ever,

Scott

TO ALIDA BICELOW

1st Epistle of St Scott to the Smithsonian Chapter the I Verses the I to the last -

(599 Summit Ave)

In a house below the average

Of a street above the average

In a room below the roof

With a lot above the ears

I shall write Alida Bigelow

Shall indite Alida Bigelow

As the world’s most famous goof

(This line don’t rhyme)

(September 22, 1919)

What’s a date! —

Mr Fate —

Can’t berate —

Mr Scott. —  —

He is not —  —

Marking time:

It’s too late So, in rhyme, To the dot!

Tho I hate To berate; Such a lot Father time, Keep a date, Stop this rot What’s a date, Mr Fate?

S’ever Scott

Most beautiful, rather-too-virtuous-but-entirely-enchanting Alida:

Scribners has accepted my book. Ain’t I smart!

But hic jubilatio era t tot am spoiled for meum par lisant une livre, une novellum (novum) nomine Salt par Herr C. G. Morris - a most astounding piece of realism, it makes Fortitude look like an antique mental ash-can and is quite as good as The Old Wives’ Tale.

Of course I think Walpole is a weak-wad anyhow. Read Salt, young girl, so that you may know what life B.

In a few days I’ll have lived one score and three days in this vale of tears. On I plod - always bored, often drunk, doing no penance for my faults - rather do I become more tolerant of myself from day to day, hardening my crystal heart with blasphemous humor and shunning only toothpicks, pathos, and poverty as being the three unforgivable things in life.

Before we meet again I hope you will have tasted strong liquor to excess and kissed many emotional young men in red and yellow moonlights - these things being chasteners of those prejudices which are as gutta percha to the niblicks of the century.

I am frightfully unhappy, look like the devil, will be famous within one 12-month and, I hope, dead within 2, Hoping you are the same, I am With excruciating respect,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

P.S. If you wish, you may auction off this letter to the gurls of your collidge - on condition that the proceeds go to the Society for the Drownding of Armenian Airedales.

Bla!

TO RUTH STURTEVANT

The Allerton East 39th StreetNew York City

February, 1920

Dear Ruth:

I should have written you many moons ago to congratulate you but life sort of picked me up and whirled me along beginning last June and it’s only recently that I’m on my feet - so I’m hoping you’ll forgive me and sending you a belated wedding present. I have a vague memory of writing you a wild letter when my world collapsed last June -I wonder if you ever got it.

I seem, at present, to be a fairly well established author, with six stories appearing in The Saturday Evening Post beginning with the issue of February 21st, stories regularly in Smart Set and some in Scribner’s, and a novel coining out in April, published by Scribners. I’m probably going to get married in March - the same girl, of course - but we haven’t any idea where we’re going to live. I am immeasurably older, Ruth; I rather want to talk to you sometime - maybe we’ll be able to have an eventual bicker while our respective husband and wife chatter of the weather in the corner.

I told you an astounding thing last April -I shouldn’t have told you but at the time I simply had to tell someone. Life is so damn odd I Faithfully,

F. Scott Fitz —

P.S. Is that your right name - ‘Curt’ - or is it ‘Curtis?’ Or maybe it’s Kirt, Kurt or Kirk.

TO RUTH STURTEVANT

University Cottage Club Princeton, New Jersey

March 26,1920

Dear Ruth:

I certainly was glad to get your letter because you are a good egg, Ruth, and Sam Kauffman who is at my elbow agrees with me. You may laugh when I tell you I am getting married April Fools’ Day but as a matter of fact I think I am. I have no idea where we’ll live - we’re going to the Biltmore for a week or so but my pocketbook wouldn’t stand that long, so we may take a cottage at Rye or somewhere like that. My book came out today and of course I’m frightfully excited. I am quite jubilant because I sold the movie rights of my first Post story, ‘Head and Shoulders’ for $2500 to the Metro people. Doesn’t that sound good? It was in the February 21st issue and was much better than the one last week.

Next time you’re in New York I want you to meet Zelda because she’s very beautiful and very wise and very brave as you can imagine - but she’s a perfect baby and a more irresponsible pair than we’ll be will be hard to imagine. My address for the next ten years will probably be c/o Charles Scribner’s Sons and be sure and let me know next time you come or sometime and we can have luncheon or dinner or some darn thing - (You can see from this how out of my depths, I am.)

Well, Ruth, read my book.

As ever,

Scott Fitz —

TO THE BOOKSELLERS’ CONVENTION-

The Biltmore Hotel

New York City

Early April, 1920

THE AUTHOR’S APOLOGY

I don’t want to talk about myself because I’ll admit I did that somewhat in this book. In fact to write it, it took three months; to conceive it - three minutes; to collect the data in it - all my life. The idea of writing it came on the first of last July; it was a substitute form of dissipation.

My whole theory of writing I can sum up in one sentence. An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward.

So, gentlemen, consider all the cocktails mentioned in this book drunk by me as a toast to the Bookseller’s Convention.

Sincerely yours,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Commodore Hotel New York City

May, 1920

Dear Bug:

Well, you may go to Princeton but we never will again. We were there three days, Zelda and five men in Harvey Firestone’s car, and not one of us drew a sober breath, fust ask anybody about it when you go down there - ask your friend Ollie Rogers - he was on the party. It was the damnedest party ever held in Princeton and everybody in the University will agree.

We are going around in a circle but at last seem to have a plan. We have purchased an ancient Marmon - not very ancient, 1917 - and we’re going to tour north to Lake Champlain and see if we can get a cottage there for the summer. We didn’t like Rye at all and we can’t live in Princeton after our celebration.

So you are going to see Bet. My Gawd! I can imagine anyone married but not she.

I’m glad you and Jim are going to have another chance to cause each other’s doom and I certainly hope that if you decide you do want him you won’t change your mind again. I’m still mad about marriage - if we could only find a place to live.

Zelda sends her best and says to come back to New York and help her buy some more clothes.

Best to Bet and Heine.

Love, F.Scott F —

TO RUTH STURTEVANT

c/o MrsWakeman Westport, Connecticut

May 14, 1920

Dear Ruth:

In acute agony and despair we at last forcibly left the Commodore, bought a car, threw our bags in the back seat and set out. We discovered the alarming fact our first day on the road from the people we had lunch with that there’s no swimming in Lake Champlain because it’s too cold. That was the shock of our lives, Ruth, because if Zelda can’t swim she’s miserable. I feel I’m a terrible piker to have put you to all that trouble but honestly it never occurred to me that there was no swimming there. We turned down a slick cottage on the coast of Maine last month for that very reason.

So we bore East, arrived here at nine o’clock this morning and immediately found the slickest little cottage on the Sound. We signed the lease on it at noon. There’s a beach here and loads of seclusion and just about what we’re looking for. We’d just about given up hope so now we’re in the most jovial mood imaginable.

Thank Curt for me, Ruth, and tell him I’m mighty indebted and awfully sorry we were so stupid in our geography. He wrote that you weren’t well. I hope you’re lots better now.

As ever,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

TO JOHN GRIER HIBBEN

Wakeman’s Westport,Connecticut

June 3, 1920

My dear President Hibben:

I want to thank you very much for your letter and to confess that the honor of a letter from you outweighed my real regretthat my book gave you concern. It was a book written with the bitterness of my discovery that I had spent several years trying to fit in with a curriculum that is after all made for the average student. After the curriculum had tied me up, taken away the honors I’d wanted, bent my nose over a chemistry book and said ‘No fun, no activities, no offices, no Triangle trips - no, not even a diploma if you can’t do chemistry’ - after that I retired. It is easy for the successful man in college, the man who has gotten what he wanted to say.

‘It’s all fine. It makes men. It made me, see’ -

- but it seems to me it’s like the captain of a company when he has his men lined up at attention for inspection. He sees only the tightly buttoned coat and the shaved faces. He doesn’t know that perhaps a private in the rear rank is half crazy because a pin is sticking in his back and he can’t move, or another private is thinking that his wife is dying and he can’t leave because too many men in the company are gone already.

I don’t mean at all that Princeton is not the happiest time in most boys’ lives. It is, of course - I simply say it wasn’t the happiest time in mine. I love it now better than any place on earth. The men - the undergraduates of Yale and Princeton are cleaner, healthier, better-looking, better dressed, wealthier and more attractive than any undergraduate body in the country. I have no fault to find with Princeton that I can’t find with Oxford and Cambridge. I simply wrote out of my own impressions, wrote as honestly as I could a picture of its beauty. That the picture is cynical is the fault of my temperament.

My view of life, President Hibben, is the view of the Theodore Dreisers and Joseph Conrads - that life is too strong and remorseless for the sons of men. My idealism flickered out with Henry Strater’s anti-club movement at Princeton. ‘The Four Fists,’ latest of my stories to be published, was the first to be written. I wrote it in desperation one evening because I had a three-inch pile of rejection slips and it was financially necessary for me to give the magazine what they wanted. The appreciation it has received has amazed me.

I must admit however that This Side of Paradise does over- accentuate the gayety and country club atmosphere of Princeton. For the sake of the reader’s interest that part was much over- stressed, and of course the hero, not being average, reacted rather unhealthily I suppose to many perfectly normal phenomena. To that extent the book is inaccurate. It is the Princeton of Saturday night in May. Too many intelligent classmates of mine have failed to agree with it for me to consider it really photographic any more, as of course I did when I wrote it.

Next time I am in Princeton I will take the privilege of coining to see you.

I am, sir,

Very respectfully yours,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

TO BURTON RASCOE

38 West 59th StreetNew York City

November 17, 1920

Dear Mr Rascoe:

Thanks for the pamphlet. I enjoyed your essay on Mencken - I think it’s a clever touch: his ‘being the only true American,’ just as Anatole France ‘is the only living Catholic.’ Also I agree with you that he is a great man and bum critic of poetry. Why has no one mentioned to him or of him that he is an intolerably muddled syllogism with several excluded middles on the question of aristocracy? What on earth does he mean by it? Every aristocrat of every race has come in for scathing comment yet he holds out the word as a universal panacea for art.

He and Nathan were up in the apartment drinking with us the other night and he was quite enthusiastic about Main Street.

This Mooncalf is a wretched thing without a hint of glamor, utterly undistinguished, childhood impressions dumped into the reader’s lap with a profound air of importance, and the sort of thing that Walpole and Beresford (whom I abominate) turn out twice a year with great bawlings about their art. I’d rather be Tarkington or David Graham Phillips and cast at least some color and radiance into my work! Wouldn’t you?

Thanks again.

Yours,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

38 West 59th StreetNew York City

Christmas, 1920

Dear Mr Cabell:

It was the surprise of my life when Zelda handed me an autographed first edition of Jurgen this morning. You can imagine how I felt when I tell you I haven’t even been able to borrow it. Whenever I go to George Nathan’s I finger it covetously but I could never get farther than the door with it. People have a way of regarding it as infinitely precious. I want to see anyone try to borrow mine!

I once fingered a copy of it in a New Orleans bookstore one year ago and I’ve been cursing myself ever since for not buying it. I’d seen Mencken’s review but was very broke at the time. I read a wretched article on you in The Bookman by someone last month. Mencken and water. It must amuse you to have whole book review sections devoted to you after years of comparative neglect. Do you remember Samuel Butler’s

‘Oh critics, cultured critics

Who will praise me after I am dead

Who will see in me either more or less than I intended

How I should have hated you.’

- only you have the ironic good fortune of being alive.

I have just finished an extraordinary novel called The Beautiful Lady Without Mercy which shows touches of your influence, much of Mencken, and not a little of Frank Norris. Up to now such diverse writers as you, Mencken, Dreiser, and so forth have been held together more or less by the common enemy, philistia, but now that good books are, for the moment, selling almost as well as bad ones I wish Mencken would take a crack at such bogus masterpieces as Mooncalf, a book without glamor, without ideas, with nothing except a timorously uninteresting report of a shoddy and uninteresting life. I’m all for Salt, The Titan and Main Street. At Poor White I grow weary - but at Mooncalf - my God!

The only two books I’ve ever known my wife to weep over were Ethan Frome and The Rivet in Grandfather’s Neck I appreciated your qualified tribute to Tarkington in Beyond Life. I agree with it perfectly.

I hope we’ll meet in the near future and meanwhile I’m looking forward to Jurgen as I have never looked forward to a book before.

Most admiringly and gratefully,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

TO MR AND MRS PHILIP MCQUILLAN

38 West 59th StreetNew York City

December 28, 1920

Dear Aunt Lorena and Uncle Phil:

The steak set is fine! We were in a furnished cottage all summer so we bought no silver so this will come in awfully handy whenever we have dinner in our apartment. We won’t have to bring the bread knife on the table any more. We certainly are much obliged.

I am just putting the finishing touches on my novel, The Beautiful Lady Without Mercy, which is the story of a young couple who rapidly go to pieces. It is much more carefully written than the first one and I have a good deal of faith in it the it’s so bitter and pessimistic that I doubt if it’ll have the popular success of the first. Still, as you know, I really am in this game seriously and for something besides money and if it’s necessary to bootlick the pet delusions of the inhabitants of Main Street (Have you read it? It’s fine!) to make money I’d rather live on less and preserve the one duty of a sincere writer - to set down life as he sees it as gracefully as he knows how.

I have a contract you know with the Metropolitan Magazine to serialize my next novel for $7000 but I’m sure if they tried to do this one their circulation would drop. You know the stuff they want! My current idol, H. L. Mencken, says about it:

‘If you yearn to uplift and like a happy comfortable sobbing, an upward rolling of eyes and a vast blowing of noses it will please you - on the other hand if you are a carnal fellow as I am, with a stomach ruined by alcohol, it will gag you.’

So within several years you’ll probably hear that I’ve been hung by an earnest delegation of 100% Americans.

I am waiting to hear from a scenario I outlined on Griffith’s order for — who is a colorless wench in the life as is her pal, — . But I am not averse to taking all the shekels I can garner from the movies. I’ll roll them joy pills (the literary habit) till doomsday because you can always say, ‘Oh, but they put on the movie in a different spirit from the way it was written!’

When I collect from Scribners this winter we expect to go abroad and spend a year or so. Why don’t you come East? The best liquor in New York is only $8.00 a quart. I thought of sending you and Uncle Alley and Father a bottle each but I decided it was too risky. I imagine you’d pay about $18.00 for anything drinkable out there.

Thanks again and luck to the redoubtable David.

As ever,

Scott

TO JAMES BRANCH CABELL

38 West 59th StreetNew York City

December 30, 1920

Dear Mr Cabell:

Can’t resist telling you that I have finished Jurgen and think on the whole that it’s a finer novel than The Revolt of the Anqels - the at present I’m inclined to rank your work as a whole below both Conrad and Anatole France. However you’re a much younger man.

My wife doesn’t agree - you are by all odds her favorite novelist.

Please don’t bother to answer this but if you’d let us know next time you’re in New York we’d both be very flattered.

Yours,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Then Joe read us... his poem at which both David... and I laughed appreciatively.

I’m sending a cable to Cabell

To cavil at callow callants

Who callously carped at the rabble

For caring for amours gallantes

For each pious burg out in Bergen

(a county in Jersey) has spoke

For jerking the joy out of Jurgen

And judging The Genius a joke!’

TO SINCLAIR LEWIS

38 West 59th StreetNew York City

January 26, 1920

1921

Dear Mr Lewis:

I want to tell you that Main Street has displaced Theron Ware in my favor as the best American novel. The amount of sheer data in it is amazing! As a writer and a Minnesotan let me swell the chorus - after a third reading.

With the utmost admiration,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

TO JAMES BRANCH CABELL

38 West 59th Street

New York City

February 23,

1921

Dear Mr Cabell:

I was delighted to get Figures of Earth. I had just ordered it at the bookstore, which copy I shall present to some unworthy charity.

I am cancelling all engagements to read it today and tomorrow. Having finished my second novel née The Beautiful Lady Without Mercy but now known as The Beautiful and Damned I am about to sell my soul — and go to the coast to write one moving picture — ‘Well,’ as Codman says in his touching monograph on Anchovies, ‘there is no movie in Jurgen. It just won’t fillum.’ Incidentally given free rein, wouldn’t it be a treat to see it unex- purgated in the movies?

That was an idiotic review of The Cords of Vanity by Richard Le Gallienne - which reminds me I must order France’s new book, The Fall of the Angels. It must be a sequel to The Revolt of the Angels.

Still hoping that we may meet soon.

Faithfully,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

TO FRANCES NEWMAN

38 West 59th Street

New York City

February 26, 1921

My dear Miss Newman:

While it astonished me that so few critics mentioned the influence of Sinister Street on This Side of Paradise, I feel sure that it was much more in intention than in literal fact. It occurred to me to write an American version of the history of that sort of young man - in which, no doubt, I was hindered by lack of perspective as well as by congenital shortcomings. But I was also hindered by a series of resemblances between my life and that of Michael Fane which, had I been a more conscientious man, might have precluded my ever attempting an autobiographical novel. I have five copies of Youth’s Encounter at present in my library, sent me by people who stumbled on the book and thought that it was an amusing parallel to my own life. When I was twenty-one and began This Side ofParadise my literary taste was so unformed that Youth’s Encounter was still my ‘perfect book.’ My book quite naturally shows the influence to a marked degree. However, I resent your details. Both Shane Leslie in the Dublin Review and Maurice Francis Egan in the Catholic World took me to task for painting ‘Monsignor Darcy’ from the life. He was, of course, my best friend, the Monsignor Sigourney Fay to whom the book was dedicated. He was known to many Catholics as the most brilliant priest in America. The letters in the book are almost transcriptions of his own letters to me.

Amory Blaine’s mother was also an actual character, the mother of a friend of mine, whose name I cannot mention. There is such an obvious connection between her early career and that of the cook in Youth’s Encounter that I appreciate your pointing it out. You see I object to being twice blamed - once for transcribing a character from life and once for stealing him from another author. I have had numerous comments from Princeton about putting J — into the book as Thomas P. D’Invilliers,’ and now I am told that I borrowed the dilettante aesthete Wilmot from Mackenzie. ‘Spires and Gargoyles’ was possibly suggested by ‘Dreaming Spires’ but the terms ‘slicker’ and ‘big men’ were in use at Princeton when I first went there - before Youth’s Encounter was written.

It seems to me that you have marred a justified criticism by such pettinesses as comparing the names ‘Blaine’ and ‘Fane,’ and by remarking on the single occurrence of the word ‘narcissus’ in Sinister Street. You seem to be unconscious that even Mackenzie had his sources such as Dorian Gray and None Other Gods and that occasionally we may have drunk at the same springs. Incidentally Michael’s governess did not tease him about G. A. Henty.

This is the first letter of any kind I have ever written to a critic of my book and I shall probably regret this one before the day is over. I sent the novel to Mencken with the confession that it derived itself from Mackenzie, Wells and Tarkington, with half a dozen additional overtones, but there are comparisons you brought up that make me as angry as my book evidently made you. It is as if I accused Floyd Dell of being a plagiarist because both our mooncalfs wrote poetry and both walked toward a dark town at the last, whispering of their lost loves - or said that Cabell’s Jurgen is an imitation of The Revolt of the Angels, or even, to use another Tristan and Irene comparison, compared your article with p. 138 of Mencken’s Prejudices, ist Series.

Yours very truly,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

TO MISS VAS

Dellwood White Bear Lake, Minnesota

September 14, 1921

My dear Miss Vas:

Your teacher is probably an ass - most of them are, I’ve found. Your details about me are correct but your spelling is as incorrect as mine. There were 125 misspellings in the 1st printing of Paradise.

I would enjoy seeing your review - also your novel. There is no such thing as ‘getting your values straightened out’ except for third-class minds who are willing to accept the latest jitney interpretation of the universe by some Illinois or South Carolina messiah.

Sincerely,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

TO GEORGE JEAN NATHAN

626 Goodrich Avenue

St Paul,

Minnesota

Winter, 1922

Dear George:

Thanks for your note. In the same mail came a letter from Harris’ office about my play. I suppose they would be best as,.

according to Zoe Akin, Hopkins is a bad financier and John Williams is on the rocks. The play is, like most of my stuff, a very bad performance full of exceedingly good things. It varies between comedy and burlesque and is composed of three intermediate fanciful scenes strung together not too securely between a very solid first and last act.

I shall probably be sending you an exquisite novelette within the month - the best thing I’ve ever done - something really remarkable.

By now you’ve read my book and though I know it amused and entertained you I’d give anything to talk with you and hear what you thought of its artistic merits. Bunny (Edmund B.) Wilson is doing an article on me for the March Bookman in which he dissects me cruelly and completely. I can’t tell you how I enjoyed it. He has a fine mind, George, and except for Aldous Huxley and Dos Passos he’s worth all the rest of the ‘younger generation’ put together.

A long time ago when Donald Stewart first met you he wondered if you recognized him as the man whom we brought to your apartment once and who went on a party with Ruth, Zelda, you and me.

We’re coming East for a fortnight in March. I read The Critic and the Drama with the greatest interest, though I had read most if not all of it in the Smart Set. Best to Mencken.

As ever,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

TO JAMES BRANCH CABELL

626 Goodrich Avenue

St Paul,

Minnesota

February, 1922

Dear Mr Cabell:

I feel that by asking your permission to quote a private letter I have not acted in the best of taste. There have been, of course, innumerable precedents of late, but that does not excuse it. I appreciate your exceeding kindness and courtesy.

It seems that Perkins of Scribners had heard from some editor in Richmond that you liked the book. He had tried to get in touch with that editor to see if it was quotable - realizing how invaluable a word from you might be. For some reason he evidently failed, and he wired me Monday night - or Sunday - asking me if I had a letter from you which was quotable. I wired you immediately.

I’ve had the pleasure of a three day amour with an Exquisite Case of Spanish Influenza, and like all such illicit affairs it has left me weak and chastened. I hope you are not the same.

Faithfully,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

TO JAMES BRANCH CABELL

626 Goodrich Avenue

St Paul,

Minnesota

March 4, 1922

Dear Mr Cabell:

Thank you for your letter. I am tremendously sorry you followed The Beautiful and Damned in the serial because it was cut to pieces. But I appreciate the compliment of your doing so. And the final book version was considerably revised. However it isn’t worth going through again, for you, I mean.

Hergesheimer, that charming egotist, came through this swollen Main Street awhile back. He didn’t like it When do we meet?

I have just finished a comedy for the commercial stage. When do you publish another book? Please do soon as I am bored with all current fiction including my own.

Yours faithfully,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

I appreciate your kindness in saying those things about the book. I cut part of the ending in the final revision, as you notice. I hope it wasn’t the part you liked. I liked the other ending but it seemed to spoil the general hardness of the book.

TO JAMES BRANCH CABELL

The Plaza New York City

March 27,1922

Dear Mr Cabell:

Am dictating this and it is the most profound agony I have ever gone through. The stenographer embarrasses me because I feel that I have got to think quickly and in consequence everything comes in broken clauses. But I simply cannot let your very kind letter go unanswered any longer. You were very nice to allow me to place such an endorsement in the advertisements of my book. It has gone up beyond 30,000, in fact it will touch 40,000 within the week, but I doubt very much if as many people will like it who liked This Side of Paradise. I saw Mencken and Nathan for a minute the other morning. Mencken seemed nervous and tired, but Nathan is his usual self, albeit developing a paunch and losing a bit of his remarkable youthfulness. Why do not you publish a geography of the lands of your own creating on the inside, front and back covers of your next book, much as Conrad has in the last edition of Victory? I think it would be very amusing both for you and for your public, or would it, in the case of an imaginative country, appear too obvious?

Am in New York, having rather a poor time and will return to St Paul Sunday.

As ever,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

TO JOHN V. A. WEAVER

626 Goodrich Avenue

St Paul,

Minnesota

Probably May, 1922

Dear John:

I was tickled to write the review. I saw Broun’s and F.P.A.’s reviews but you know how they love me and how much attention I pay to their dictums.

This is my new style of letter writing. It is to make it easy for comments and notes to be put in when my biographer begins to assemble my collected letters.

The Metropolitan isn’t here yet. I shall certainly read ‘Enamel.’ I wish to Christ I could go to Europe.

Thine,

P. Scott Fitzgerald

TO MISS PAXTON

Great Neck,  Long Island

Fall, 1922-Spring, 1924

Dear Miss Paxton:

As I have nothing but respect for Theta Sigma Phi it would be a mean trick for me to agree to make a speech for them. How would you like to have a collapsed novelist wandering wildly over the campus of the University of Illinois? I suggest Mr Bryant or Mr Cone as an alternate.

Seriously I’d love to do it but I’m absolutely incapable through constitutional stagefright. With appreciation of the honor of being asked, I am Most sincerely,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

P.S. My price for lectures is 12,000 louis d’or, or, when lecturing in Guatemala, I accept my fee in rubber.

TO MR MAURICE

Great Neck, Long Island

February, 1923

Dear Mr Maurice:

I don’t know how to apologize for my delay - but the fault is Sherwood Anderson’s. It’s an amazing book t and affected me profoundly. It reached me Friday and I didn’t get to reading it until Sunday - finished it late Sunday night - intending to review it Monday morning. Well, I sat down at nine and wrote about 1500 words of the worst drivel ever launched. My wife read it, we decided it’d be criminal to hand it in. The book is the full flowering of Anderson’s personality and wants the most careful consideration else one is tempted to say the wildest things about it.

This is the first time I can remember having failed to live up to my word on a thing like this - but it seemed simply out of my power. My review will reach you Friday. I suppose that’s plenty of time as it’s already two days too late for the issue of February 24th.

With sincere apologies, I am Yours,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

TO THE EDITOR OF THE LITERARY DIGEST

Great Neck, New York

Probably late April, 1923

The clean-book bill will be one of the most immoral measures ever adopted. It will throw American art back into the junk heap where it rested comfortably between the Civil War and the World War. The really unmoral books like Simon Called Peter and Murnbo Jumbo won’t be touched - they’ll attack Herge- sheimer, Dreiser, Anderson and Cabell whom they detest because they can’t understand. George Moore, Hardy and Anatole France who are unintelligible to children and idiots will be suppressed at once for debauching the morals of village clergymen.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

TO CARL VAN VECHTEN

Great Neck, New York

Postmarked March 1, 1924

Dear Carl:

Thanks for the kind telegram. I’m always glad when anyone likes The Beautiful and Damned - most people prefer This Side of Paradise and while I do myself I hate to see one child preferred above another - you know the feeling. We both want to see you soon and are going to haul or drag you out here by ‘hook or crook’ (if I may be allowed to coin a new phrase).

Thine,

F. Scott Fitz —

TO SHERWOOD ANDERSON

Great Neck, Long Island

April, 1923

Dear Sherwood:

Just as I was asking the girl in Vanity Fair to save me an autograph of yours if one ever happened in there, your letter came. I liked Many Marriages much more fully than I could express in that review - It stays with me still. It’s a haunting book and, it seems to me, ahead of Poor White and even of the two books of short stories.

I don’t quite get you about Tom Boyd - he’s a great fellow, incidentally, and a strong admirer of your work. His own first book out this month is an excellent piece of work.

Yours,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

TO CARL VAN VECHTEN

Villa Marie,  Valescure St Raphael,  France

Probably June, 1924

Dear Carl:

Your letter was one of the nicest compliments I’ve ever had. Thank you for a most cheerful half hour while I basked in the warmth of such generous praise. We shall be here until November 1st so don’t neglect to send The Tatooed Countess   down to the last sardonic gargoyle on her navel.

We are living here in a sort of idyllic state among everything lovely imaginable in the way of Mediterranean delights. Unlike you I have only an occasional lust for the exotic streets of the metropolis - at present I am content to work and become excruciatingly healthy under Byron’s and Shelley’s and Dickens’ sky. I will try to dig up a picture though God knows where. I have just received two furious letters from papists referring to ‘Absolution.’ But yours is worth ten thousand of them.

Zelda sends her admiration and love to you both and I do too.

F. Scott Fitz —

TO ERNEST BOYD

Hotel des Princes Rome,  Italy

February 1,1925

Dear Ernest:

Your picture of me in Portraits, Real and Imaginary truly touched me. I was honestly delighted that I, or we, had pleased anybody enough so they could write about me (or us) like that. Of course it was indiscreet (you should see the letter I got today from Mother: ‘Who is this Ernest Boyd who seems to know so much about my boy?’) but it is so delicately done that I’m sure it will fill the gay cafés with everybody who reads it. It made Zelda and I horribly homesick for New York. We’d love to go shooting out into space with you and Madeleine. We’re tired of black shirts and dirty teeth and the parades of Pope — the Sixth - tho, contrary to Madeleine’s prediction, we thoroughly enjoyed St Raphael last summer. Paris in the spring, as they say!

I read the whole book with the greatest pleasure, regretting that the ‘impressions’ were so short, and liking especially A. E., Nathan, myself, Aesthete, Yeats and Beer. And, least, the critic. But God, it all sounded like home - and the $100,000 we’re trying to save over here is still about 199,000 away.

My new novel appears in late March: The Great Gatsby. It represents about a year’s work and I think it’s about ten years better than anything I’ve done. All my harsh smartness has been kept ruthlessly out of it - it’s the greatest weakness in my work, distracting and disfiguring it even when it calls up an isolated sardonic laugh. I don’t think this has a touch left. I wanted to call it Trimalchio (it’s laid on Long Island) but I was voted down by Zelda and everybody else.

Best love to you and Madeleine from both of us - and thank you for writing about me so pleasantly. I feel like an infinitely more genial soul than I did a week ago.

Scott Fitzg —

TO ROGER BURLINGAME

Bound from Naples to Marseille en route to Paris

April 19, 1925

Dear Roger:

I think that’s about the nicest letter I ever received about my work. I was tremendously pleased that it moved you in that way - ‘made you want to be back somewhere so much’ - because that describes, better than I could have put it myself, whatever unifying emotion the book has, either in regard to the temperament of Gatsby himself or in my own mood while writing it. Thank you so much for taking the trouble to write. As yet I know nothing. Zelda has been too sick for the long overland trip to Paris in our French Ford so we had to catch a boat on a day’s notice to get the car back to France within the 6 months’ period of the International touring arrangement. (She’s better now - Italy depressed us both beyond measure - a dead land where everything that could be done or said was done long ago - for whoever is deceived by the pseudo-activity under Mussolini is deceived by the spasmodic last jerk of a corpse. In these days of criticism it takes a weak bunch of desperates to submit for 3 years to a tyrant, even a mildly beneficent one.)

- But leaving suddenly I have heard nothing about Gatsby - nothing except you and Ring since Perkins’ letters three months ago. I don’t know how many were printed or what advance orders or what notices or advertising, not to mention reviews, the by this time all that information is probably waiting for me in Paris, having been forwarded from Capri. (By the way, will you ask Max to pass on any movie nibbles to Reynolds?)

Thank you again and again for your letter. I shall always keep it.

Scott Fitz —

TO H. L. MENCKEN

14 rue de Tilsitt Paris, France

May 4, 1925

Dear Menck:

Your letter was the first outside word that reached me about my book. I was tremendously moved both by the fact that you liked it and by your kindness in writing me about it. By the next mail came a letter from Edmund Wilson and a clipping from Stallings, both bulging with interest and approval, but as you know I’d rather have you like a book of mine than anyone in America.

There is a tremendous fault in the book - the lack of an emotional presentment of Daisy’s attitude toward Gatsby after their reunion (and the consequent lack of logic or importance in her throwing him over). Everyone has felt this but no one has spotted it because it’s concealed beneath elaborate and overlapping blankets of prose. Wilson complained: The characters are so uniformly unpleasant’; Stallings: ‘a sheaf of gorgeous notes for a novel’; and you say: ‘The story is fundamentally trivial.’ I think the smooth, almost unbroken pattern makes you feel that. Despite your admiration for Conrad you have lately - perhaps in reaction against the merely well made novels of James’ imitators - become used to the formless. It is in protest against my own formless two novels, and Lewis’ and Dos Passos’ that this was written. I admit that in comparison to My Antonia and The Lost Lady it is a failure in what it tries to do but I think in comparison to Cytherea or Linda Condon it is a success. At any rate I have” learned a lot from writing it, and the influence on it has been the masculine one of The Brothers Karamazov, a thing of incomparable form, rather than of the feminine one of The Portrait of a Lady. If it seems trivial or ‘anecdotal’ (sp) it is because of an aesthetic fault, a failure in one very important episode, and not a frailty in the theme. At least I don’t think so. Did you ever know a writer to calmly take a just criticism and shut up?

Incidentally, I had hoped it would amuse the Mencken who wrote the essay on New York in the last book of Prejudices - the I know nothing in the new Paris streets that I like better than Park Avenue at twilight.

I think the book is so far a commercial failure, at least it was two weeks after publication - hadn’t reached 20,000 yet. So I rather regret (but not violently) the fact that I turned down $15,000 for the serial rights. However I have all the money I need and was growing rather tired of being a popular author. My trash for the Post grows worse and worse as there is less and less heart in it. Strange to say, my whole heart was in my first trash. I thought that ‘The Offshore Pirate’ was quite as good as ‘Benediction.’ I never really ‘wrote down’ until after the failure of The Vegetable and that was to make this book possible. I would have written down long ago if it had been profitable - I tried it unsuccessfully for the movies. People don’t seem to realize that for an intelligent man writing down is about the hardest thing in the world. When people like Hughes and Stephen Whitman go wrong after one tragic book, it is because they never had any real egos or attitudes but only empty bellies and cross nerves. The bellies full and the nerves soothed with vanity they see life rosily and would be violently insincere in writing anything but the happy trash they do. The others, like Owen Johnson, just get tired. There’s nothing the matter with some of Johnson’s later books, they’re just rotten that’s all. He was tired and his work is no more writing in the sense that the work of Thomas Hardy and Gene Stratton Porter is writing than were Dreiser’s dime novels.

However I won’t bore you any longer. I expect to spend about two years on my next novel and it ought to be more successful critically. It’s about myself - not what I thought of myself in This Side of Paradise. Moreover it will have the most amazing form ever invented.

With many, many thanks,

F. Scott Fitz —

P.S. This is simply an acknowledgment and expects no answer.

Italy (but not France) is full of Pilson and Munich beer of fine quality. There is less than there was when I got there.

TO H. L. MENCKEN

14 rue de Tilsitt Paris, France

May or June, 1925

Dear Menck:

The idea is fascinating and I’ll try it when we go to Brussels in July. I’ve got two pieces of hack work to do first. I thought the Spring Flight  was great - it needed some cutting tho, and I have no feeling that he has another book in him. That must have been all true. Abo I liked The Constant Nymph t but I thought The Apple of the Eye was lousy.

By the way you mention in your review of Sea Horses that Conrad has only two imitators. How about O’Neill in Emperor Jones Hergesheimer in Bright Shawl Me in Gatsby Maugham in The Moon and Sixpence (Heart of Darkness) (Java Head)

(God! I’ve learned a lot from him)

(You mentioned it in your own review, five years ago)

But his (Conrad’s) approach and his prose is naturally more imitated than his material, the he did send at least O’Neill and Masefield to sea in ships.

As ever, Robert Chambers Fitzgerald (according to Rascoe)

TO CARL VAN VECHTEN

14 rue de Tilsitt Paris, France

Postmarked June 6, 1925

Dear Carl:

I met Fanya on the streets of this not unpress-agented hamlet, looking lovely as usual (Fanya - not Paris) and she told me you like Gatsby and had written me. The letter must have gone astray but last week arrived The Nation with your review of my book. Carl, it made me feel awfully high to have anyone whose work I admire and enjoy as much as I do yours feel that way and write that way about my book. A dozen or more people have been very complimentary about it, largely on account of the writing, but only three or four seemed to have cared to notice what I was driving at and whether or not I approached realizing my intention - but I am consoled by the fact that those three or four have been the people whose appreciation I would rather have than any other Americans. And when one of them goes to the trouble not only of writing a letter but of reviewing it - well, you can’t ask much more in the way of courtesy or friendliness. I can’t tell you how deeply I am in your debt.

Scott Fitz —

TO GILBERT SELDES

14 rue de Tilsitt

Paris, France

June, 1925

Dear Gilbert:

Your letter made me feel awfully good. Please come over! We dined with Gerald t last night and had such a good time that I  Mrs Carl Van Vechten. —

must shift to pencil or my trembling hand will spread the high hint of hangover over the page.

If you get a proof of your Dial review please send it to me as I can’t wait to see the magazine - having had only three even decent reviews.

Burton Rascoe says The Great Gatsby is just Robert Chambers with overtones of Nedra by Harold Nigrath. So I think I’ll write a ‘serious’ novel about the Great Struggle the Great American Peasant has with the Soil. Everyone else seems to be doing it. Burton will be the hero as I’m going to try to go to ‘life’ for my material from now on. Best from us both to you both.

Scott

TO GERTRUDE STEIN

14 rue de Tilsitt

Paris, France

June, 1925

Dear Miss Gertrude Stein:

Thank you. None of your letter was ‘a bad compliment’ and all of it ‘was a comfort.’ Thank you very much. My wife and I think you a very handsome, very gallant, very kind lady and thought so as soon as we saw you, and were telling Hemingway so when you passed us searching your car in the street. Hemingway and I went to Lyons shortly after to get my car and had a slick drive through Burgundy. He’s a peach of a fellow and absolutely first-rate.

I am so anxious to get The Making of Americans and learn something from it and imitate things out of it which I shall doubtless do. That future debt I tried so hard to repay by making the Scribners read it in the Transatlantic convinced one, but the old man’s mind was too old.

You see, I am content to let you, and the one or two like you who are acutely sensitive, think or fail to think for me and my kind artistically (their name is not legend but the word like it), much as the man of 1901, say, would let Nietche (sp!) think for him intellectually. I am a very second-rate person compared to first-rate people - I have indignation as well as most of the other major faults - and it honestly makes me shiver to know that such a writer as you attributes such a significance to my factitious, meritricious (metricious?) This Side of Paradise. It puts me in a false position, I feel. Like Gatsby, I have only hope. Thank you enormously for writing me.

Scott Fitzg —

TO GILBERT SELDES

14 rue de Tilsitt Paris,France

June or July, 1925

Dear Gilbert:

Thank you a thousand times for your enthusiasm about Gatsby. I believe I’d rather have your discriminating enthusiasm than anyone’s in America (did I tell you this before?), and to be really believed-in again, to feel ‘exciting,’ is tremendously satisfactory. My new novel may be my last for ten years or so - that is if it sells no better than Gatsby (which has only gone a little over 20,000 copies) for I may go to Hollywood and try to learn the moving picture business from the bottom up.

We leave for Antibes on August 4th - Zelda and I in our car (the same one) and nurse and baby by train. There we shall spend one month growing brown and healthy - then return here for the fall. Beyond January our plans are vague - Nice followed by Oxford or Cambridge for the summer perhaps. — has been here - he seemed horribly pretentious to me and more than usually wrong - in fact it was a shock to see the change in him. I see Hemingway a great deal and, before you left, something of Gerald - both of them are thoroughly charming.

If you and Amanda come over in the spring we may have a villa big enough for you to visit us in Nice. God, I’m wild for the Riviera. Love from us to you both.

Scott

TO H. L. MENCKEN

14 rue de Tilsitt

Paris, France

Fall, 1925

Dear Menck:

Thank you for your most kind, just and illuminating review of Gatsby. I am amused at the later reviews coming in from the West, some of them containing whole paraphrases from it (your review) needless to say unacknowledged. I think it has had the effect of swinging the expression of opinion from a sort of suspicious bewilderment to a grudging, but on the whole deferential, bewilderment.

Once more I am in your debt for the interest you have shown in dedicating that much space and consideration to me.

I have met most of the American literary world here (the crowd that centers about Pound) and find them mostly junk- dealers; except a few like Hemingway who are doing rather more thinking and working than the young men around New York. Best regards to George.

Sincerely,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

TO ALEXANDER WOOLLCOTT

14 rue de Tilsitt Paris, France

Fall, 1925

Dear Alec:

This is to ask you a peculiar favor and to add hastily that if it is any trouble please don’t hesitate to neglect it. It is the case of a newspaperman here named Harold Stearns, whom you may know, and who is down and out through, so he claims and so others claim, a sort of persecution on the part of Sinclair Lewis. To what extent Lewis has gone after him I don’t know but he came to me (he meaning Stearns) with the story that he could get no answer of any kind from the stuff he has sent the World or The New Yorker, stuff that was to some extent solicited.

He has been helped here by various people (for the last month his typewriter has been in pawn in Deauville) but he is terribly depressed by what he imagines is a sort of universal blackball against him. The favor Ï want to ask you is to find out if there is stuff of his lying unused and unpaid for in the World office. He says he’s written and written and can’t get an answer.

This is of course confidential and any answer I get from you I will communicate to no one but him. It is terribly sad to see a man of his age and intelligence going to pieces because of what may possibly be a series of accidents and coincidences. This possibility is what I’d like to clear up.

Your friend,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

TO CARL VAN VECHTEN

14 rue de Tilsitt Paris, France

Fall, 1925

Dear Carl:

Firecrackers came and Zelda and I read it with the greatest delight. You have never done anything better than the acrobats, the whole roadhouse scene at the end and attempted seduction by the broker (character of the girl was marvelously managed). With The Blind Bow Boy I like it best of your four novels - it seems to me that this rather than The Tattooed Countess is your true line of genius - in Campaspe for example you suggest so much more than you say - she is the embodiment of New York, mysterious and delicate and entirely original, while Countess Natorini, for all the amazing and virtuosic details about her past, was really a ‘character.’ Cunnar was fine also, and a brilliant conception - the least successful part of a very brilliant book were the relations between Gunnar and Campaspe.

I wish you could personally create a new form for that sort of novel, something lying between the almost unbearable sequence of humor in Zuleika and the almost equally annoying diffuseness of South Wind. You in The Blind Bow Boy have come nearer to doing it, so far, than either Huxley or Firbank.

As ever your friend,

Scott Fitzgerald

TO MARYA MANNES

14 rue de Tilsitt Paris,  France

October, 1925

Dear Marya:

Thank you for writing me about Gatsby - I especially appreciate your letter because women, and even intelligent women, haven’t generally cared much for it. They do not like women to be presented as emotionally passive - as a matter of fact I think most women are, that their minds are taken up with a sort of second-rate and unessential bookkeeping which their apologists call ‘practicality’ - like the French, they are centime-savers in the business of magic. (You see I am a Schopenhauerian, not a Shavian.)

You are thrilled by New York - I doubt you will be after five more years when you are more fully nourished from within. I carry the place around the world in my heart but sometimes I try to shake it off in my dreams. America’s greatest promise is that something is going to happen, and after awhile you get tired of waiting because nothing happens to people except that they grow old, and nothing happens to American art because America is the story of the moon that never rose. Nor does the ‘minute itself ever come to life either, the minute not of unrest and hope but of a glowing peace - such as when the moon rose that night on Gerald and Sara’s garden and you said you were happy to be there. No one ever makes things in America with that vast, magnificent, cynical illusion with which Gerald and Sara make things like their parties.

(They were here, last week, and we spent six or seven happy days together.)

My new novel is marvelous. I’m in the first chapter. You may recognize certain things and people in it.

The young people in America are brilliant with second-hand sophistication inherited from their betters of the war generation who to some extent worked things out for themselves. They are brave, shallow, cynical, impatient, turbulent and empty. I like them not. The ‘fresh, strong river of America!’ My God, Marya, where are your eyes - or are they too fresh and strong to see anything but their own color and contour in the glass? America is so decadent that its brilliant children are damned almost before they are born. Can you name a single American artist except James and Whistler (who lived in England) who didn’t die of drink? If it is fresh and strong to be unable to endure or tolerate things-as-they-are, to shut your eyes or to distort and lie - then you’re right, Marya Mannes, and no one has ever so misinterpreted the flowers of civilization, the Greek or Gallic idea, as Your sincere admirer,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

TO GERTRUDE STEIN

14 rue de Tilsitt Paris, France

December 27, 1925

Dear Miss Gertrude Stein:

It was so good to hear from you again - especially as I am in the geographical center of The Making of Americans and have been so fascinated by it and have been thinking of you so much lately.

About Tuesday: We leave for Salies-les-Bains January 7th or 8th to try and cure my wife who has been ill now in bed for over a week. She gets up tomorrow but it’s too soon for her to go out as she must save for the trip and we’ve been forced to decline all invitations. But she’s so anxious to see you again that instead of accepting for myself alone I’m going to be so bold as to ask you if we can’t come some afternoon between this Friday (1st) and next Thursday (6th) - any one of those afternoons we’d be so happy to come. Can we?

Yours, always admiringly and respectfully,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

TO HENRY ALBERT PHILLIPS

Hotel Bellevue Salies de Bearn

Basses-Pyrénées France

Winter, 1926

Dear Mr Phillips:

As you see we’re in this out-of-the-way hole; taking a cure and getting very healthy. That is: my wife’s taking a cure and I’m merely getting healthy. The other inhabitants are two goats and a paralytic. We’ll be in Nice however from the ist of March on, where our address will be c/o American Express. Can’t we meet there?

Sincerely,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

TO CARL VAN VECHTEN

Villa St Louis Juan-les-Pins France

Summer, 1926

Dear Carl:

Nigger Heaven is great! Your best to date, though my affection for The Bow Boy will never die. I can’t tell you of our enthusiasm, but suffice to say I read it in one night and Zelda read it the next. It seems, outside of its quality as a work of art, to sum up subtly and inclusively, all the direction of the northern nigger or, rather, the nigger in New York. Our civilization imposed on such virgin soil takes on a new and more vivid and more poignant horror as if it had been dug out of its context and set down against an accidental and unrelated background. This is a lousy sentence but I hope it expresses a small part of our delight in the book.

Always your friend,

Scott Fitz —

TO CECILIA TAYLOR

Ellerslie Edgemoor, Delaware

August, 1927

Dear Cecilia:

This is to remind you about September. We’ll be having some sort of party here and then we’ll go to New York for a day or two and see some shows. So save a week for us. When is your vacation?

We’re just leaving for Long Island to visit Tommy Hitchcock and watch the polo (Zelda prays nightly that the Prince of Wales will come down from Canada), then we’re visiting some people in Genesee and back here by the eighteenth. We talk of you all so often - I can’t tell you how proud of you I am for being such exceptionally gorgeous people, or how much I enjoyed being with you and feeling pleasantly linked up with you. I know when I say how few people in the world really count at all, it seems to you a mere piece of snobbishness, but to me it’s simply a bare, cold, unpleasant fact. People have always subconsciously recognized this by letting vitality atone for many more sins than charity can. You five t are among those ‘for whom the physical world exists.’I For most people it simply glides by in a half-comprehended and unenjoyed dream. And We Both Love You.

Scott

TO GILBERT SELDES

Ellerslie Edgemoor, Delaware

Probably Fall, 1927

Dear Gilbert:

The doll was beautiful. I sleep with it. You are the dearest grandmother a little girl ever had.

As I sit here in my spacious twenty-room mansion, hearing the howling of the winds outside and the groans of my toiling servants below, I think of how wonderful it is to be born a German prince- let. The letter I wrote is in our very owniest dialect, Iranian- Ruthanian, or, allowing for the Cyrillic alphabet, Chinese Basque, altho some philologists and restaurateurs admit nothing of the sort.

Tell Amanda that we have not taken up Behaviorism but are going to govern our child’s life by the cipher concealed in the Sears, Roebuck catalogue which proves that Julian Rosenwald wrote the works of Edgar Guest. I don’t blame either of you for being disgusted with our public brawl the other day - but the manhole is on again; we are sober and almost the nicest people I ever met.

How about the Dial reprints for $30.00! Have you forgotten - we are yearning for them and if you send them I can sell two other sets.

We’d love to have you for Christmas or New Year’s or both. We are on the wagon till then and our difference of opinion, which had been going on for a miserable fortnight for two weeks before we came to New York and led to all the unpleasantness, is settled and forgotten.

Zelda wrote you a letter but mailed it to 82nd St without the number.

Love to you both,

Scott

TO THOMAS LINEAWEAVER

Ellerslie Edgemoor, Delaware

1927 or 1928

Dear Tom:

I’ve been meaning to write you for months. I’m afraid I was the world’s greatest bore last night. I was in the insistent mood - you know the insistent mood? I’m afraid I irritated both you * Lineaweaver, a college friend, and his wife Eleanor had been to a party at the Fitzgeralds’.

and Eleanor, and I wanted to please you more than anyone there. It’s all very dim to me but I remember a lot of talk about fairies and the managing kind of American woman, whatever that means. It’s possible that I may be apologizing to the wrong people - anyway if I was lousy, please forgive me and tell Eleanor I can be almost human when sober.

We are on the wagon. If you come down to Roseleaf or Rosen- bloom or whatever that place is please come over! We are always here weekends. I’m awfully anxious to see you and bicker with you under more favorable circumstances. Tell Eleanor I love her and I want to marry her. Does that fix everything?

Scott

TO ZOE AKINS

Ellerslie Edgemoor, Delaware

February, 1928

Dear Zoë: Darling Zoë:

Are you, by any chance, so to speak, here? If you are, perhaps you’d come out Sunday to lunch - Thornton Wilder and some others are coming down.

Perhaps, even, you and Miss Taylor  would come out after the performance for a small revel Saturday night -? If we sent the car for you? We are just five minutes from the Dupont Hotel. Will you phone 5859? We do so want to see you.

Always Your Slave,

F. Scott Fitzgerald Zelda is in Philadelphia at ballet school for the afternoon so I’m writing this for her.

I hear The Furies t is great. We are seeing it tonight - Friday.

TO JULIAN STREET

c/o Guaranty Trust (en route to Paris)

Postmarked July 1, 1928

Dear Julian Street:

My best to you! My contempt for Tarkington extends only to his character of being ashamed of his early sins and thus cutting out of his experience about one-half of life. He woke up one morning sober and 40, and thought that no one had ever been lascivious or drunk or vain except himself, and turned deliberately back to the illusions of his boyhood.

Delighted that you liked Wilder - do read Hemingway - what do you mean by a theme? ‘Begin with an individual and you have created a type. Begin >yith a type and you have created nothing,’ as an humble writer once said.  Books called ‘oil’ or ‘money’ - surely the author of Sunbeams, Inc t couldn’t mean what you seem to mean. War and Peace is one man’s point of view always. Excuse this lousy pen.

Yours cordially, Scott Fitzgerald That clipping was fine and am having it duplicated to send to young writers who ask for advice.

TO BETTY MARKELL

c/o Guaranty Trust 4 Place dé la Concorde Paris, France

September 16, 1929

Dear Betty Markell:

I haven’t answered your letter before because it’s one of the nicest letters I’ve ever received, and it came when I was in a mood of tremendous dejection and I wanted to wait until I was a human being again before answering it. About five years ago I became, unfortunately, interested in the insoluble problems of personal charm and have spent the intervening time on a novel that’s going to interest nobody and probably alienate the remaining half dozen who are kind enough to be interested in my work. Unfortunately my sense of material is much superior to my mind or my talent and if I ever survive this damned thing I shall devote my life to musical comedy librettos or become swimming instructor to the young Mikadesses of Japan.

The Basil Lee stories were a mistake - it was too much good material being shoved into a lousy form. I’m glad you liked them - I thought they were rather better than the response they had. I am going to be in New York from January 5th-March 1st. If you make trips East and can stand disillusion about people I’d love to meet you. I have no address yet, save care of my publishers. With most sincere hopes of meeting you, Yours,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

TO MRS EDWARD FITZGERALD

Beau-RivagePalaceOuchy-Lausanne

June, 1930

Dear Mother:

My delay in writing is due to the fact that Zelda has been desperately ill with a complete nervous breakdown and is in a sanitarium near here. She is better now but recovery will take a long time. I did not tell her parents the seriousness of it so say nothing - the danger was to her sanity rather than her life.

Scottie is in the apartment in Paris with her governess. She loved the picture of her cousins. Tell Father I visited the and thought of the first poem I ever heard, or was it The Raven?’ Thank you for the Chesterton.

Love,

Scott

TO MRS EDWARD FITZGERALD

Switzerland

June, 1930

Dear Mother:

I’ve thought of you both a lot lately and I hope Father is better after his indigestion. Zelda’s recovery is slow. Now she has terrible eczema - one of those mild but terrible diseases that don’t worry relations but are a living hell for the patient. If all goes as well as it did up to a fortnight ago we will be home by Thanksgiving.

According to your poem I am destined to be a failure. I re- enclose it.

(1) — All big men have spent money freely. I hate avarice or even caution.

(2) — I have never forgiven or forgotten an injury.

(3) — This is the only one that makes sense.

(4) — If it’s worth doing. Otherwise it should be thrown over immediately.

(5) — No man’s criticism has ever been worth a damn to me.

These would be good rules for a man who wanted to be a chief clerk at 50.

Thanks for the check but really you mustn’t. I re-enclose it. The snap I’ll send to Scottie. The children are charming. Address me care of my Paris bank though I’m still by Father’s Castle of Chil- lon. Have you read Maurois’ Life of Byron? And Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel?

Much love to you both,

Scott

TO DAYTON(?) KOHLER

819 Felder AvenueMontgomery, Alabama

January 25, 1932

Dear Mr Kohler:

The reason for my long delay in writing you is this - shortly after receiving your letter I left France for Switzerland in terrible confusion because of the sickness of my wife. My current correspondence was packed by mistake in a crate - which has only just been opened. I am terribly sorry.

I was delighted naturally with your article about me. You cover me with soothing oil and make me feel more important than I have for ages.

I am mid-channel now in a double-decker novel which I hope will justify some of the things that you say. Perhaps Swanson of College Humor or someone there might be interested - for the moment I am vieux jeu and completely forgotten by the whole new generation which has grown up since I published my last book in ‘26. So since there has been no published development since then, I think the article would be for the present hard to sell.

I am doubly grateful for your interest and again I apologize for my apparent discourtesy in not answering you before.

If you are ever in Montgomery, Alabama, I would love to see you. My address is 819 Felder Avenue.

Sincerely,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

TO GERTRUDE STEIN

Hotel Rennert Baltimore,

Maryland

April 28, 1932

Dear Gertrude Stein:

You were so nice to think of me so far off and send me your book. Whenever I sit down to write I think of the line that you drew for me and told me that my next book should be that thick.

So many of your memorable remarks come often to my head, and they seem to survive in a way that very little current wisdom does.

I read the book, of course, immediately, and was half through it for the second time (learning a lot as we all do from you) when my plans were upset by my wife’s illness, and by an accident it was consigned to temporary storage.

I hope to be in Europe this summer and to see you. I have never seen nearly as much of you as I would like.

Yours always, admiringly and cordially,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

TO ANDREW TURNBULL

La Paix, Rodgers’ Forge Towson, Maryland

August 2, 1932

Reputed Bantling:

In deponing and predicating incessantly that you were a ‘Shakespearean clown’ I did not destinate to signify that you were a wiseacre, witling, dizzard, chowderhead, Tom Nody, nizy, radoteur, zany, oaf, loon, doodle, dunderpate, lunkhead, sawney, gowk, clod-poll, wise man of Boeotia, jobbernowl or mooncalf but, subdititiously, that you were intrinsically a longhead, luminary, ‘barba tenus sapientes,’ pundit, wrangler, licentiate learned The- ban and sage, as are so many epigrammatists, wit-worms, droits de corp, sparks, merry-andrews, mimes, posture-masters, pucinellas, scaramouches, pantaloons, pickle-herrings and persifleurs that were pullulated by the Transcendent Skald.

Unequivocally,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

TO ANDREW TURNBULL

La Paix, Rodgers’ Forge Tow son,Maryland

August 18, 1932

Dear Andronio:

Upon mature consideration I advise you to go no farther with your vocabulary. If you have a lot of words they will become like some muscle you have developed that you are compelled to use, and you must use this one in expressing yourself or in criticizing others. It is hard to say who will punish you the most for this, the dumb people who don’t know what you are talking about or the learned ones who do. But wallop you they will and you will be forced to confine yourself to pen and paper.

Then you will be a writer and may God have mercy on your soul.

No! A thousand times no! Far, far better confine yourself to a few simple expressions in life, the ones that served billions upon countless billions of our forefathers and still serve admirably all but a tiny handful of those at present clinging to the earth’s crust. Here are the only expressions you need:

‘Yeah’

‘Now’

‘Gimme de meat’

and you need at least one good bark (we all need one good bark) such as:

‘I’ll knock your back teeth down your throat!’

So forget all that has hitherto attracted you in our complicated system of grunts and go back to those fundamental ones that have stood the test of time.

With warm regards to you all,

Scott Fitz —

TO RICHARD KNIGHT

La Paix, Rodgers’ Forge Tow son, Maryland

September 29, 1932

Dear Dick:

That was swell praise you gave Zelda and needless to say delighted her and set her up enormously. She revised the book so much that she lost contact with it and yours is the first word that gives it public existence. My own opinions on it were as disjointed as hers.

I’m sorry I used the word fairy and that you found it offensive. I have never in my wildest imaginings supposed you were a fairy, and I admit that under similar circumstances I would be inclined probably to bristle if the word were thrown around by someone whose attitude toward me was not unchallangeable. It is a lousy word to anyone not a member of the species. I offer you my sincere apologies and put it down to the fact that I was half asleep when you came and subsequently a little tight.

However, there must have been some desire to wound in using such a word, however trivially. You annoyed me - specifically by insisting on a world which we will willingly let die, in which Zelda can’t live, which damn near ruined us both, which neither you nor any of our more gifted friends are yet sure of surviving; you insisted on its value, as if you were in some way holding a battlefront, and challenged us to join you. If you could have seen Zelda, as the most typical end-product of that battle, during any day from the spring of ‘31 to the spring of ‘32 you would have felt about as much enthusiasm for the battle as a doctor at the end of a day in a dressing station behind a blood battle.

So for the offensive and inapplicable phrase read neurotic, and take it or leave it, whatever the bulk concerned. We have a good way of living, basically, for us; we got through a lot and have some way to go; our united front is less a romance than a categorical imperative and when you criticize it in terms of a bum world, no matter how big you face it, it is annoying to me, and seems to negate on purpose both past effort and future hope and I reserve the right to be annoyed.

Of course I like you, as who wouldn’t, and appreciate your lavish generosity with yourself, and much more about you than I can express in a letter.I feel that any unpleasantness between us has all been on the basis of liking Zelda, and the sincerity of your feeling toward her shouldn’t offend anybody except the most stupid and churlish of husbands. In another year, Deus volens, she will be well. For the moment she must live in a state of Teutonic morality, far from the exploits of the ego on its own. In other words, when you city fellows come down you can’t put ideas in the heads of our farm girls, without expecting resistance.

I lay myself open to your discovery of my most blatant hypocrisies. God knows that the correctness of our life preys on such a one as old Fitzgerald, but there we are, or rather here we are. With all good wishes,

Your most obedient servant,

Scott

TO MALCOLM COWLEY

La Paix, Rodgers’ Forge Towson,Maryland

June 1, 1933

Dear Malcolm:

It was good to hear from you and we certainly enjoyed your brief visit. Dos is cured and has left to bask in the sun at Antibes and I certainly do envy him. I am working like hell.

As to using a part of my article in your book, go ahead, but I am using certain parts of it myself in my new book, in particular, parts about Antibes, so I will ask you to say, as it were, ‘Fitzgerald says’ instead of ‘Fitzgerald says in an article on the fazz Age’ because I do not want to call attention to the fact that I piece shorter things into long things though I suppose we all do. Would you mind arranging this?

Hope you manage to come back this way and let us know in advance.

Sincerely,

Scott

TO CHARLES W. DONAHOE

La Paix, Rodgers’ Forge Towson,Maryland

June 26, 1933

Dear Sap:

The rush from the house t included not only the butler, the second butler, the two footmen, the first and second trained nurse, my mother, aunt, three first cousins, my four children, my secretary, who is very fat and weighs 250 pounds, the illegitimate children, J. P. Morgan and myself but ten other members of my household who may perhaps not be known to you by name. I extinguished the fire myself by an act of tremendous valor. Among the objects of art saved were ‘The Last Supper,’ the bat with which Babe Ruth batted his first home run, and the baby spoon with which you presented Scottie at her birth. (Let me take this occasion to congratulate you on what the West Coast does to growing boys. I cannot see Mrs Sap’s face in the picture but gather all goes beautifully.)

Seriously, the fire was greatly overexaggerated - so was the implication that old Fitzgerald was keeping up an elaborate household. We are struggling along like everybody else though I must confess with a pretty good break so far.

It was a coincidence that I heard from all my Princeton friends of which there are about a dozen - of which you, my dear sir, happen to be the most cherished - have turned up lately without even going to a reunion. From our class I heard from Non, two letters from Henry, one from you, none from Paul Dickey; in 1918 the record is not good on second thought; in 1919 however I crossed with Dave Bruce a year ago and Tom Lineaweaver turned up here in Baltimore and we spent two good days together.

Insofar as upperclassmen are concerned I saw a rather depressed nint at the Yale game and leave out — , a professional fairy. Even Dean Clarke, Bob Clarke’s brother (class of ‘27), has been here in Baltimore this winter which is like seeing Bob again.

All this list of names is put in for what provocative powers may be on you, and with a further wish that it may suggest to you the personality of your old friend from reading off a list of the people with whom he had dealings.

For yourself, your family and all that are dear to you I tender the old bunk and can’t tell you what a kick I got out of your note.

Scott

TO JOHN O’HARA

La Paix, Rodgers’ Forge Towson, Maryland

July 18, 1933

Dear O’Hara:

I am especially grateful for your letter. I am half black Irish and half old American stock with the usual exaggerated ancestral pretensions. The black Irish half of the family had the money and looked down upon the Maryland side of the family who had, and really had, that certain series of reticences and obligations that go under the poor old shattered word ‘breeding’ (modern form ‘inhibitions’). So being born in that atmosphere of crack, wisecrack and countercrack I developed a two-cylinder inferiority complex. So if I were elected King of Scotland tomorrow after graduating from Eton, Magdalene to Guards, with an embryonic history which tied me to the Plantagenets, I would still be a parvenu. I spent my youth in alternately crawling in front of the kitchen maids and insulting the great.

I suppose this is just a confession of being a Gael though I have known many Irish who have not been afflicted by this intense social self-consciousness. If you are interested in colleges, a typical gesture on my part would have been, for being at Princeton and belonging to one of its snootiest clubs, I would be capable of going to Podunk on a visit and being absolutely booed and overawed by its social system, not from timidity but simply because of an inner necessity of starting my life and my self-justification over again at scratch in whatever new environment I may be thrown.

The only excuse for that burst of egotism is that you asked for it. I am sorry things are breaking —

TO ANDREW TURNBULL

La Paix, Rodgers’ Forge Tow son, Maryland

August 8, 1933

Dear Andrew:

Nobody naturally likes a mind quicker than their own and one more capable of getting its operation into words. It is practically something to conceal. The history of men’s minds has been the concealing of them, until men cry out for intelligence, and the thing has to be brought into use. Your mother told me that you had written a couple of somber letters home and I am both amused and disgusted. In trouble such as yours (of the reality of which I am by no means convinced) the proper tradition is that the mouth is kept shut, the eyes are lowered; the personality tries to say to itself: ‘I will adjust and adapt, I can beat anything offered to me; therefore I can beat change.’ Anything short of that would be dishonor to the past and to whatever you believe in.

The mouth tight, and the teeth and lips together are a hard thing, perhaps one of the hardest stunts in the world, but not a waste of time, because most of the great things you learn in life are in periods of enforced silence. Remember to think straight: the crowd at camp is probably right socially and you are probably wrong. I’ll tell you a fact to corroborate that: I almost gave up the lease on this house for the simple fact that you persistently clung to the idea that beating down females was a method of establishing superiority over them.

Andrew, this will sound like kicking somebody when he’s down, and you wouldn’t expect that from a man who pretends to be your friend-; nevertheless, we have spent too many hours together for you to doubt that my friendship for you is founded on a mutual understanding that nothing could break - outside of a disagreement in principle. So I presume to suggest: would you examine your conscience and see if you have violated such primary laws as have been laid down for you? Where you haven’t - well, to hell with what other people think - better to fight your way out. The only thing that I ever told you definitely was that popularity is not worth a damn and respect is worth everything, and what do you care about happiness - and who does except the perpetual children of this world?

Always your friend,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Postscript: Am sending you a book.

Postscript (2) The poor boys called on me again. I tried to discourage them by making them work but I think they liked itl Postscript (3) Don’t leave this letter around - I’m sure you will get what I’m shooting at but it would defeat its own purpose if your contemporaries happened on it Postscript (4) Why, if your professed affection for your family is so strong, should you have disturbed your mother enough so that she should have brought up your gloom in conversation to me? Are you a Willie boy after all?

Postscript (5) This letter expects an answer.

TO JOHN LARDNER

La Paix, Rodgers’ Forge Towson, Maryland

September 20, 1933

Dear John:

I was sorry not seeing you in Paris but your residence there coincided with illness in Switzerland. The whole point of calling you up was an idea that I have had for some time, which won’t be less good for being old, that those articles that your father wrote could be strung into a very interesting story. Nevertheless, someone would have to work over it. Who to turn to! Much better a contemporary; consequently I have examined the possibilities. I can’t do it myself because I am engrossed in work of my own, and it seems to me the next best person would be Gilbert Seldes; consequently I called Gilbert Seldes and he said he would like to do the work. I suggested to him a ten per-cent cut of whatever it nets; even if he asks more I think it would be worth your while because he is a crack editor and I would let stand whatever terms he suggests.

This is a rather difficult situation because, as I said on the phone, your father is the worst editor of his own stuff who ever turned up in a big way of the writing line, with the possible exception of Theodore Dreiser. And your mother is not especially interested in writing as such, and so I will have to turn it over to you, but I would like to turn it over as a complete idea so that you could do it or destroy it as seems fitting to you. Will you let Gilbert Seldes decide? Pass over all the material to him that you get from Wheeler, not in sections, but collect it first yourself even if it takes about a month altogether. Gilbert is one of the very first journalists in America and if anyone can make an interesting and consecutive narrative of it he can do it, and, to repeat, he is interested in the idea. When a few is interested he has the strong sense of the track that we other races don’t even know the sprinting time of. His task is not merely an editorial one, according to my original conception, but will also include getting the stuff in order so it will tell a whole story (as much as Ring wanted to tell) of a certain period in his life. As his happens to be one of the most interesting temperaments of all the Americans of our time somebody is sure to be interested in publishing it, probably Scrib- ners; but there I want to butt into the situation and get it done right. The Autobiography of Ring W. Lardner was merely a long short story, all full of personal anecdotes that could only have been of interest to Ring and his friends. That’s what I mean by the fact that he has been a poor editor of his own stuff, and probably his sickness has not improved him in that regard, so while you must naturally tell him the idea is in progress it is much wiser for you and me to keep it in our hands. Or rather I hereby hand it over to you, with the opinion that you get from Seldes, and I would like to be called in as the doctor at the last moment when something tangible has been accomplished.

With regards to (Scarface) (Half-Wit) (Red Nose) (Pure Insult) Lardner: please give all of them my very best regards and to yourself with reiterated regrets that we didn’t meet in Paris.

Yours,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

TO GLENWAY WESCOTT

1307 Park Avenue

Baltimore,

Maryland

February 6, 1934

Dear Glenway Wescott (This seems to be the form with which authors insult each other) (this letter is friendly), About six years ago when I was doping out my novel Tender Is the Night, which will appear this spring, somebody told me about the departure of an American battleship from Villefranche with the attendant poules, etc. I built an episode of my book around it and spoke of it to several people. A year or so later a letter came from Ernest Hemingway telling me that you had used it for a background in a short story. His advice was that I should read it and thus avoid any duplication, but my instinct was to the contrary, and I waited until I had written my own scene before I read Goodbye to Wisconsin. There are, unavoidably, certain resemblances, but I think that I will let it stand. This letter is written to you exactly as I wrote one to Willa Cather before publication of The Great Gatsby in regard to a paragraph that strangely paralleled one of hers in The Lost Lady. I have a cruel hatred of plagiarism of one’s contemporaries, and would not want you to think I had taken to shoplifting.

What the hell did you do to Gertrude Stein that she went harsh on you? I am eagerly awaiting your next book.

With best wishes,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

TO THOMAS WOLFE

1307 Park Avenue

Baltimore,

Maryland

April 2, 1934

Dear Arthur, Garfield, Harrison and Hayes:

Thanks a hell of a lot for your letter t which came at a rather sunken moment and was the more welcome. It is hard to believe that it was in the summer of 1930 we went up the mountainside together - some of our experiences have become legendary to me and I am not sure even if they happened at all. One story (a lie or a truth) which I am in the habit of telling is how you put out the lights of Lake Geneva with a Gargantuan gestured so that I don’t know any more whether I was with you when it happened, or whether it ever happened at all!

I am so glad to hear from our common parent, Max, that you are about to publish. Again thanks for your generous appreciation.

Ever yours,

F. Scott Fitzgerald and Arthur, Garfield, Harrison and Hayes

TO JOHN JAMIESON

1307-Park Avenue

Baltimore,

Maryland April 7, 1934

Dear Mr Jamieson:

I thought Leighton’s article had a sort of fruity bitterness about it but I was not at the time in a position of answering it - and I was amused by the severe kidding that Ernest Hemingway gave it. I am absolutely sure that more sweat and blood went into the creation of, say, A Farewell to Arms than into Le Bal du Comte d’Orgel. I agree with you that the latter is not heavily weighted, but to me it sounds less like a rough draft than like a small section of Proust.

I was interested also in your analysis of the influences upon my own books. I never read a French author, except the usual prep- school classics, until I was twenty, but Thackeray I had read over and over by the time I was sixteen, so as far as I am concerned you guessed right.

In any case let me thank you many times for your interest in Gatsby (by the way, the Modern Library is bringing it out again this spring) and your courtesy in sending me your observations. With very best wishes in hopes that we may meet in the near future.

Sincerely,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

TO JOHN JAMIESON

1307 Park Avenue

Baltimore,

Maryland

April 15, 1934

Dear Mr Jamieson:

Thank you, immensely, for sending me your article. I agree with you entirely, as goes without saying, in your analysis of Gatsby. He was perhaps created on the image of some forgotten farm type of Minnesota that I have known and forgotten, and associated at the same moment with some sense of romance. It might interest you to know that a story of mine, called ‘Absolution,’ in my book All the Sad Young Men was intended to be a picture of his early life, but that I cut it because I preferred to preserve the sense of mystery. Again, thanks! With very best wishes,

Yours,

Scott Fitzgerald

TO H. L. MENCKEN

1307 Park Avenue

Baltimore,

Maryland

April 23, 1934

Dear Menck:

I am afraid that I am going to have to violate your favorite code of morals - the breaking of engagements - because I’ve got to go to New York about trying to capitalize on my novel in the movies.

Without wanting to add to your mass of accumulated correspondence just as you’ve cleared it away, I would like to say in regard to my book that there was a deliberate intention in every part of it except the first. The first part, the romantic introduction, was too long and too elaborated largely because of the fact that it had been written over a series of years with varying plans, but everything else in the book conformed to a definite intention and if I had to start to write it again tomorrow I would adopt the same plan, irrespective of the fact of whether I had in this case brought it off or not brought it off. That is what most of the critics fail to understand (outside of the fact that they fail to recognize and identify anything in the book): that the motif of the ‘dying fall’ was absolutely deliberate and did not come from any diminution of vitality but from a definite plan.

That particular trick is one that Ernest Hemingway and I worked out - probably from Conrad’s preface to The Nigger - and it has been the greatest ‘credo’ in my life ever since I decided that I would rather be an artist than a careerist. I would rather impress my image (even though an image the size of a nickel) upon the soul of a people than be known except insofar as I have my natural obligation to my family - to provide for them. I would as soon be as anonymous as Rimbaud, if I could feel that I had accomplished that purpose - and that is no sentimental yapping about being disinterested. It is simply that, having once found the intensity of art, nothing else that can happen in life can ever again seem as important as the creative process.

With terrific regrets that I probably won’t be back in time to hear your harrowing African adventures, and compare them with my own, and with best regards always to my favorite Venus, Sara, I am As ever,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

TO MABEL DODGE LUHAN

1307 Park Avenue

Baltimore,

Maryland

May 10, 1934

Dear Mrs Luhan:

I was tremendously pleased and touched by your letter and by your communication to the TribuneA It always strikes me as very strange when I find new people in the world, because I always crystallize any immediate group in which I move as being an all- sufficient, all-inclusive cross-section of the world, at the time I know it (the group) - this all the more because a man with the mobility of the writing profession and a certain notoriety thinks that he has a good deal of choice as to whom he will know. That from the outer bleakness, where you were only a name to me, you should have felt a necessity of communicating an emotion felt about a stranger, gave me again the feeling that Conrad expresses as ‘the solidarity of innumerable human hearts,’ at times a pretty good feeling, and your letter came to me at one of those times. Having been compared to Homer and Harold Bell Wright for fifteen years, I get a pretty highly developed delirium tremens at the professional reviewers: the light men who bubble at the mouth with enthusiasm because they see other bubbles floating around, the dumb men who regularly mistake your worst stuff for your best and your best for your worst, and, most of all, the cowards who straddle and the leeches who review your books in terms that they have cribbed out of the book itself, like scholars under some extraordinary dispensation which allows them to heckle the teacher. With every book I have ever published there have always been two or three people, as often as not strangers,

who have seen the intention, appreciated it, and allowed me whatever percentage I rated on the achievement of that intention. In the case of this book your appreciation has given me more pleasure than any other, not excepting Gilbert Seldes who seemed to think that I had done completely what I started out to do and that it was worth doing.

With gratitude for that necessity in you which made you take the special trouble, the extra steps, which reassured me that even at the moment of popping out something new I was reaching someone by air mail - and with the added declaration that I want to see you, I am Yours most cordially,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

P.S. My excuse for dictating this is a sprained arm.

TO GILBERT SELDES

1307 Park Avenue

Baltimore,

Maryland

May 31, 1934

Dear Gilbert:

fust read the Lardner collection. At first I was disappointed because I had expected there would be enough stuff for an omnibus and I still feel that it could have stood more weight. However, looking over those syndicate articles I realize what you were up against - even many of those which you were compelled to use are rather definitely dated and I think you did the best you could with the material at hand.

Anyhow, I’ve had a further hunch on the matter which is this: the short one-act plays at the end do stand up but they would not play in any conventional sense because so much of the nonsense is embodied in the stage directions, but if they were done, as I believe one was, for the Authors League Fete or the Dutch Treat Club with Benchley and Stewart clowning the whole business, I believe they would play very well. Now doping along on the subject, it seems to me an evening of five nonsense plays would be monotonous no matter how funny they were, but just suppose, taking over the technique of the Grand Guignol, two of those plays were alternated with something macabre. When the Grand Guignol failed in New York it seems to me that I remember that all the plays were plays of horror and the minute the novelty wore off it closed up shop. If the fault of too much of a good thing were repeated this whole hunch might flop, but mightn’t some enterprising producer be interested in a thoroughly balanced program if we could get the material together? I don’t know whether there are any good horror one-acters in America but we might pick up a couple of the Grand Guignol hits very cheaply or get somebody to dredge something out of Edgar Allan Poe. What do you think of this idea? Do you think there’s any money in it? If we do it we ought to get started immediately. I am terribly tied up in work and also not being on the spot could not efficiently go into it. I hand you the suggestion for what it is worth and I wish you would let me know what you think of it. In any case I would be glad to aid in any advisory capacity.

My novel seems to go pretty well. I haven’t been able to make up my mind entirely how good it is because most of the reviewers have been so entirely cuckoo in their effect of saying in one line that the thing comes off entirely because it is technically so well done and others say it comes off in spite of all its technical faults. No two reviewers - and I am speaking only of the big shots - agree who was the leading character. Malcolm Cowley in The New Republic seems to be chiefly impressed by a man who only appears once in the whole picture - in any case my total impression is that a whole lot of people just skimmed through the book for the story and it simply cannot be read that way. In any case, your review and Mabel Dodge Luhan’s enthusiasm made it all worthwhile to me.

Love to Amanda and the children.

Ever yours, Scott

TO FRITZ CRISLER

1307 Park Avenue

Baltimore,

Maryland

June, 1934

Dear Fritz:

You write me again demanding advice concerning the coming season. I hasten to answer - again I insist that using a member of the Board of Trustees at left tackle to replace Charles (‘Asa’) Ceppi and Christian (‘Dean’) Eisenhart would be a mistake. My idea is a backfield composed of Kipke, Eddie Mahan, President Lowell, and anybody we can get for the left side - Pepper Einstein in the center - and then either bring back Light-Horse Harry Lee, or else you will fill in yourself for the last place. Or else shift Kadlic to center and fill in with some member of the 75-lb. team.

Failing that, it is, as you suggest in your round-robin, a question of using a member of the Board of Trustees. Then who? and where? There is ‘Hack’ Kalbaugh. There is the late President Witherspoon - but where is he? There is Harkness Hall, but we can’t get it unless we pay for the whole expressage at this end!

The best suggestion is probably to put Rollo Rulon Roll-on at full, and return to the Houghton system.

Now Fritz, I realize that you and I and Tad know more about this thing than I do - nevertheless I want to make my suggestion: all the end men and backfield men and members of the Board of Trustees start off together - then they all reverse their fields, led by some of the most prominent professors and alumni - Albie Booth, Bob Lassiter, etc. - and almost before we know it we are up against the Yale goal - let me see, where was I? I meant the Lehigh goal - anyhow some goal, perhaps our own. Anyhow the main thing is that the C.W.A. is either dead, or else just beginning, and to use again that variation of the ‘Mexican’ shift, that I suggested last year will be just disastrous. Why? Even I can follow it! Martineau comes out of the huddle - or topples back into it - he passes to some member of past years’ teams - (who won’t be named here because of the eligibility rules) and then - well, from there on we go on to practically anything. But not this year, Fritz Crisler, if you take my advice!

THE TEAM

TO ANDREW TURNBULL

Middleburg,Virginia

Summer, 1934

Dear Andrew:

I’m down here in Virginia recuperating from a siege of two stories by fishing and ruminating. Wish to heaven I could see you before you go and would promise to tell you nothing about life on a ranch, as Scottie tells me my moralities are becoming a strain. (Ungrateful woman - as if my prophecies have ever been wrong about her.)

Only remember - west of the Mississippi it’s a little more look, see, act.

A little less rationalize, comment, talk.

Yours for the Purple Sage,

Scott Fitz —

TO ELIZABETH LEMMON

1307 Park Avenue

Baltimore,

Maryland

September 6, 1934

Dearest Beth:

This is the story that I got out of ‘Welbourne,’  with my novelist instinct to make copy out of social experience. I don’t think for a moment that this does any justice to ‘Welbourne’ but it might amuse you as conveying the sharp impression that the place made on me during a few weekends. Am sorry that this is not a transcription of the final draft as the Post will publish it, but in its general outlines it is the story as written.

Of course the detail about the initials of the ‘Gallant Pel- ham will identify the place to such neighbors of yours who read The Saturday Evening Post. As the story is so detached from any reality I am sure it won’t cause you or family any annoyance.

With love,

Scott Fitz —

Just wired you the weather killed my Manassas trip. Hope to hell you’re all right now.

TO MRS WILLIAM HAMM

1307 Park Avenue

Baltimore,

Maryland

October 4, 1934

Dear Marie:

It seems late to answer your letter....

Scottie has become acclimated to Baltimore but I’d like to have her pull a sort of Gertrude Harris a little later to the extent of having a debut out there. So a few years may see us settled there for at least a summer. This in spite of the fact that having rambled so much I no longer regard St Paul as my home any more than the eastern seaboard or the Riviera. This is said with no disloyalty but simply because after all my father was an easterner and I went East to college and I never did quite adjust myself to those damn Minnesota winters. It was always freezing my cheeks, being a rotten skater, etc. - though many events there will always fill me with a tremendous nostalgia. Anyhow all recent reports paint it as a city of gloom and certainly the ones from the remnants of the McQuillan family are anything but cheerful. Balti-

more is very nice and with plenty of cousins and Princetonians, if I were in a social mood, and I can look out the window and see a statue of the great, great uncle, and all three of us like it here. There, have I rambled on long enough?

I send you this letter as a desperate bid for some news of St Paul and the following people: the Kalmans, Flandraus, facksons, Clarks and Kit Ordway. I suppose Dud and Grace are now completely expatriated to Chicago and I know that foe and Lou will most likely never return. Who runs things now? So many of us have emigrated - Katharine Tighe, etc. - and so many new names keep popping up whenever I get hold of a St Paul paper that I cling in spirit to the few friends I still have there. With affection from Zelda and love always from me,

Scott

P.S. Don’t omit to add news mostly about yourself.

TO GERTRUDE STEIN

1307 Park Avenue

Baltimore,

Maryland

November 23, 1934

Dearest Gertrude Stein:

Ever since you’ve been in this country I have been looking forward to a meeting with you and ever since news of your arrival became the town topic of Baltimore I had determined that I would give you such pleasures as I could command in these parts. Knowing how you are going to be hymned and sung I leave the details to you. I have a small but efficient establishment here and would be more than delighted to give you lunch alone, dinner alone, lunch alone and a group of your choosing, dinner alone and a group of your choosing, lunch alone and a group of my choosing, dinner alone and a group of my choosing. Also I offer you tea, breakfast, midnight supper - in fact anything that you can possibly suggest, and as many of them, so you see you have one devoted slave in this vicinity who tenders you material homage. All I ask of you is to tell me in advance how many hours and occasions you will be able to give me.

With affection always,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

TO GERTRUDE STEIN

1307 Park A venue Baltimore,

Maryland

December 29, 1934

Dearest Gertrude Stein:

It was a disappointment to think that you would not be here for another meeting. I was somewhat stupid-got with the Christmas spirit, but I enjoyed the one idea that you did develop and, like everything else you say, it will sing in my ears long after everything else about that afternoon is dust and ashes. You were the same fine fire to everyone who sat upon your hearth - for it was your hearth, because you carry home with you wherever you are - a home before which we have all always warmed ourselves.

It meant so much to Zelda, giving her a tangible sense of her own existence, for you to have liked two of her pictures enough to want to own them. For the other people there, the impression was perhaps more vague, but everyone felt their Christmas Eve was well spent in the company of your handsome face and wise mind - and sentences ‘that never leak.’

All affection to you and Alice,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

TO ALICE RICHARDSON

1307 Park Avenue

Baltimore,

Maryland

February 28, 1935

Lovely Alicia:

You are in receipt of a communication from a man who has been in the southland and has not touched liquor for a month and, because some things in the last few months are a little hazy, you will have to be more explicit as to what the other letters were As I remember, the two department store tie-ups that I had were through Brown Wanamaker and Cupid Simon. I am enclosing a letter to my publisher. It seems to me there were other angles that we talked about, but what they were I don’t remember. On a long chance I am enclosing one also to Charlie Mac- Arthur. Of course script girls are made, not born. He and Ben Hecht have their own plant now and you might strike him at the right moment. Beyond that I am pretty blank, that is, I could suggest nothing that Carmer couldn’t suggest or that you would not find yourself. However, if you remember any further suggestions I made, write them to me and I will come through with the letters.

Now as to the manuscript.It won’t do, Alice. It is in part too personal and in part not personal enough. It is really not English to write such a sentence as ‘Her tonsils were in terrible shape,’ which gives rather a revolting picture of the lady’s throat. I appreciate your sparing me on the alcoholic side, at the same time the picture of a writer living in a dressing gown isn’t sufficiently new or startling to give personality interest. Due to the fact that my books no longer have the national circulation they used to have but sell chiefly in big cities, the interest in such articles would be limited to magazines such as The New Yorker whose readers would not consider the company of an author very exciting after all. This is sad but true and it was a bad guess of mine to think it could be steered into something marketable. It’s like those episodes that are funny when they happen but don’t bear telling.

I hope to heaven things go well with you, Alice, and that these letters may, by some chance, bear some fruit.

Faithfully,

Scott Fitzg

TO ALEXANDER WOOLLCOTT

1307 Park Avenue

Baltimore,

Maryland

April 24, 1935

Dear Alec:

That was damn nice of you to write me about the poem. I was surprised at the number of people who liked it but I was especially delighted to hear from you after so long. It pleased me too that you liked Tender Is the Night.

I thought it was awfully nice of you to have that mention of Patrick Murphy in your broadcast. Sweet Jesus, you have become famous!

I have seen one of the Woollcott girls act at BrynMawrSchool; I have talked to a second one in person about her short stories; and a third one is in the same class at Bryn Mawr with my daughter, so I feel as if I knew the whole family. This is a big city and it is almost as rare to look up people as it would be in New York, but I am looking forward to running into them sometime and I will give your name as a recommendation.

I am engrossed in a new literary project but it will be another year before it develops because I am feeling somewhat plucked and old as I approach forty. I have been for some time a teetotaler with the chief intention of fooling the kind friends who predicted for me an alcoholic grave. With my very best wishes to you always, Alec,

Your friend,

Scott Fitz —

TO ZOË AKINS

1307 Park Avenue

Baltimore,

Maryland

April 24, 1935

Dearest Zoë:

That was a hell of a nice thing you wrote about the poem. There was a good deal of emotion in it but I was nevertheless surprised that it was noticed as much as it was, it being the first poem I have written in thirteen years.

Zelda is no better at the moment but spring and summer always represent a hope for improvement; in trying for a cure in these cases the difficult period is always the protecting of her during a readjustment to life when she returns to it, and I fall far short in this regard, being usually an agitated and turbulent sort of person myself. Scottie is fine and I will ask her about the moving picture stars.

I am delighted that The Old Maid is still on Broadway. It is still talked about here by those who went to it with me. No news with me except that I don’t drink any more, many moons now since liquor of any kind has touched these lips. Tender Is the Night is being dramatized. I’ve always thought that the advantageous contract I made in the case of The Great Gatsby was thanks to your sound advice.

Always affectionately yours,

Scott Fitz

TO JAMES BOYD

1307 Park Avenue Avenue

Baltimore,

Maryland

May 2,1935

Dear Jim:

I started Roll River in a copy Max Perkins sent me and recapitulated The Dark Shore, of which I missed one issue in Scribner’s, then in the copy which you were kind enough to send me I read Toward Morning I could say a hell of a lot of nice things about the book - the whole war episode from the landing to the return, the reunion scene with his wife which is one of the best little touches in the book, the mine scene per se, the gen- erousness of talent, the sense that you really do know about all those people - but in view of the fine press you are beginning to get I want to make a few cavils.

In the first place there is the question of Clara. The obvious model for such a picture of a woman as heroine and later as priestess of accumulated experience is of course Beatrix Esmond, later Madam Bernstein in Esmond and The Virginians. Madam Bernstein is a projection of Beatrix but she lives in her own right and what we recognize in her is Beatrix’s enormous vitality and how life both preserved it and transmuted it. I can’t honestly think that the elder Clara has that vividness, or preserves much of the younger Clara, and your failure to bring this off is the biggest fault of the book as a whole for she was your strongest thread to draw it together with.

One more point is that I have the same penchant as you at the moment for letting a theme unravel at the end, so to speak, as things do in life rather than to cut it off short, but I feel that this can be achieved without having the writing itself become exhausted. It is my old contention that tiredness, boredom, exhaustion, etc., must not be conveyed by the symbols which they show in life, in fact, can’t be so conveyed in literature because boredom is essentially boring and tiredness is essentially tiring. For example: your rag-tag-and-bob-tail of continental troops filing past in the dark latter days of the Revolution were for the most part somewhat discouraged farmers, and the impression of a dogged discouragement was beautifully conveyed because you had the vitality to invent a tremendously vivid picture which wasn’t a bit discouraging artistically. You did not let their state dampen your power to describe, nor their exhaustion drag you down; but in the last part of Toward Morning both the foreshortening and the lack of any such writing as there is in the best passages of The Dark Shore show that you have let the oldness of your protagonists communicate itself to you. This may be nonsense. It is one of those things that is easy to say after the event. This letter should be really to congratulate you on a fine book and to thank you for the enjoyment it gave me.

All quiet here. In a week or so I am off for the summer. You made a conquest in Elizabeth Lemmon who was very enthusiastic about Roll River and who has returned to The Old Dominion.

As your sister-in-law has probably told you I tried like hell to get you at the Belvedere. The Ed Poes wanted to have you for dinner.

I have been in Tryon since I saw you and found Southern Pines a surprisingly long distance away from it, but I shall be in Carolina again this summer, will you?

With the most cordial good wishes,

Scott Fitzgerald

TO ARNOLD GINGRICH

1307 Park Avenue

Baltimore,

Maryland

May 8, 1935

Dear Arnold:

Scottie was delighted to get the check from Abramson. I don’t know what in God’s name he wants it for but he’s welcome to it. It’s a nice little piece for that age so you have pleased her immensely and don’t reproach yourself.

As to health, the body had been gradually sliding toward annihilation for two years but the process didn’t get acute until about six months ago, and when it did, it went fast. I was doing my stuff on gin, cigarettes, bromides, and hope. Finally, the stuff itself was getting rather watery so I decided to get away while I was still on my feet. I laid up, or rather down, in Tryon, North Carolina, recuperated quickly, decided to quit drinking for a few years (which has honestly been no trouble so far) and am back here feeling quite myself t I tell you these dull details at length because your letter seemed really interested, and an inquiry about health is practically irresistible at my age.

I’ve followed the career of Cast Down the Laurel with interest. You certainly got the top press and I was gratified. (Finished Part III by the way and like it best of all!)

Will be here till heaven knows when, except possibly a short Easter trip somewhere with my daughter.

Ever yours,

Scott Fitz

P.S. I haven’t forgotten that I owe you a $200.00 article, but I am sewed up with S.E.P. fiction for a few weeks more. P.S. 2. Again let me tell you that I appreciate that nice little compliment to Scottie about the poem.

TO ARNOLD GINGRICH

1307 Park Avenue

Baltimore,

Maryland

May 11,1935

Dear Arnold:

That was a damn nice letter to write me, but, my God, I have suddenly reached a change of life in which everything I have written seems terrible, an odd state of things because usually I pore over my own stuff crying aloud from time to time in ecstasy, “What a man!’ I don’t like anybody else’s work either. I wish there was something to do except read. Women and liquor take up so much time and get you into so much trouble. I wish I liked music like you do but it simply makes me want to howl when certain notes are struck.

Esquire holds up beautifully but my dog story was rotten, I have two other short plots which I swear I will do for you within the next two months. I still owe you one. Your literary plans are frightening but of course everybody is always behind; still, it is exceptional to be so particularly far behind.

Best wishes always,

Scott Fitz

TO ANDREW TURNBULL

Grove Park Inn

Asheville,

North Carolina

Summer, 1935

Dear Andrew:

Thanks for remembering me with a letter on Frances’ new typewriter. Haven’t seen you to really talk for such a long time that I scarcely know you except thru Scottie. She tells me you are a low-lifer and in trouble with the police for passing some of the Weyerhauser kidnap jack but I say, ‘Don’t believe it - Andrew is all right. There is nothing the matter with the boy except his character, environment, family, body, mind, past and future, and he will probably turn out O.K. in the end.’ But what an end!

So far as Constable is concerned - I don’t want you to run him down. He’s all right - not as good as his substitute Rulon-Miller but all right. And I’m glad. In fact I got him elected captain - I came into the room in a blackbeard disguise during the conclave and pled with them. ‘See here,’ I said, ‘a good back hasn’t come out of Gilman since Slagle, and they’re starving for somebody to admire, them kids are. Pretty soon they’ll begin to turn to dolls like “Apples” Fitzpatrick and “Mozart” Hopney -’ but I stopped myself at this juncture. I enclose Fritz Crisler’s answer.*

Always your friend,

Scott Fitz —

TO JULIAN STREET

Grove Park Inn Asheville,  North Carolina

Summer, 1935

Dear Street:

Thanks for your letter - I mean really thanks. It was a most generous gesture and came at a time when I was wondering if anyone I respected read my stories - not that exactly, but if they liked them or if I was losing my grip in that medium - that is, of writing ‘high-priced’ stories and still having them make sense. It was easier when I was young and believed in things and hoped that life might be a happy matter for some people. But as you learn that happiness is a prerogative of the perennial children of this world, and not too many of them, it becomes increasingly difficult.

Again thanks - my mind goes back often to several pleasant afternoons in Paris with you.

Faithfully,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

TO MARGARET CASE HARRIMAN

Hotel Stafford Baltimore,

Maryland

August, 1935

Anyhow I knew later that you knew all this. I started to come to New York yesterday afternoon, to see you, because I thought you’d think I’d run out on you, instead of on my own wretched state of mind and health (not a bit helped by a three-hour session with Zelda’s doctors), got as far as Philadelphia, phoned from there to the Algonquin to change my forwarding address to The Stafford instead of my house, and took the train back to Baltimore. When I see you again I want everything to be right - even if I find you engrossed in a love affair with Geo V. and have no time for me.

I am still swollen up like a barrel but have reduced my beer consumption to nine bottles today. My spots are fading, but I still have a faint hope they may turn out to be leprosy and end my exigent private life forever so I can go on writing unperturbed.

Sweet Jesus! They have now disappeared from the torso and appeared on the sides of my neck! The end has come! Oh, if I had but known!

While I think of it-in regard to Joe Hergesheimer. Of course he is more established than I am, in the same way that Hugh Walpole is more ‘established’ than D. H. Lawrence - established with whom? And I like his talent in half a dozen fine scenes and don’t compare Walpole to him intellectually. But it is simply another sort of writing. Almost everything I write in novels goes, for better or worse, into the subconscious of the reader. People have told me years later things like ‘The Story of Benjamin Button’ in the form of an anecdote, having long forgotten who wrote it. This is probably the most egotistic thing about my writing I’ve ever put into script or even said (it’s one of those matters like the question of being a 1.1. that has to be left to demonstration - but in the former case literary the matter takes a spread of years). Everyone who has read Java Head knows that Hergesheimer wrote it - even those who remember a fairly novel torch cry from Cytherea, ‘I want to be outraged,’ will remember Hergesheimer. But his two highest flights, the only two that really became part of the conscience of our race, probably wouldn’t be remembered. The awful loneliness of the girl and the man in the forest in Episode I of the Three Black Pennies (the rest of the 3 legged thing was n g. pretentious and superimposed form) -

and the other was the burning of Linda’s mother’s hair in a permanent.

Surely that is a very mild contribution to have made to the human consciousness 1

This letter is getting as long as the other. I remember so many things you said - about how New Yorkers’ lives were spaced to have always something, there was no time left for loneliness - oh, there’s so much to hear you say, no matter how much I’d be cynical about -

Affectionately,

Scott

I may be North again in three weeks -I must go to Carolina first and write one story or two.

Postscript: In the morning.

I sent a telegram. I feel so sick - I’m lying in a gallon of sweat as I write this - that I’d call a doctor except I’ve been through this before and would be ashamed to ask him what to do when I know! I hope the telegram was coherent. Will try to lie here and discipline myself and note down what goes thru my head in fever and make something out of these lost three days.

And I can all too well see us sitting together in ‘one of those outdoor cafés or whatever they call them.’

Whatever they call them!

TO JAMES BOYD

Grove Park Inn

Asheville, North Carolina

August, 1935

Dear Jim:

Long Hunt came. I read it immediately. I liked it - it has the same quality of all your books, and yourself is in it. (To digress for a minute - I’ve had several clippings lately that found qualities in common between your work and mine. I was trying to think what they were, for God knows our subject matter, pasts, etc., have been miles apart, but I think I know - it’s a sort of nostalgic sadness that runs through them. I don’t know whether it’s because we both read Keats a lot when we were young, or because we neither of us have been entirely well men throughout a large part of our maturity but there is undoubtedly a similarity of mood between The Dark Shore and Tender Is the Night. God what a parenthesis.)

Anyhow Long Hunt is a haunting book. I have quarrels with it as I have with every book ever written, including one’s own, of course, but I like it because of its sharp individuality that follows it through the - wait a minute, let me start that sentence over. You have a strong sense of the common good, the common weal, whether in tribes, frontier cities, ‘society,’ etc., but the individuality never deserts you. They are both you.

I have just emerged not totally unscathed, I’m afraid, from a short violent love affair which will account for the somewhat sentimental cadence of this letter and for the lack of ink in the vicinity.It’s no one I ever mentioned to you but it was in the bag when I came to Southern Pines and I had done much better to let it alone because this was scarcely a time in my life for one more emotion. Still it’s done now and tied up in cellophane and - and maybe someday I’ll get a chapter out of it. God, what a hell of a profession to be a writer. One is one simply because one can’t help it. Much better to follow the Long Hunt.

With regards and good wishes to you both - hope we meet again this summer. You write a nice letter -I wish I did.

Your Friend, Scott Fitzg TO —

Grove Park Inn

Asheville, North Carolina

Early September, 1935

This is going to be as tough a letter to read as it is to write. When I was young I found a line in Samuel Butler’s Notebooks - the worst thing that can happen to a man is the loss of his health, the second worst the loss of his money. All other things are of minor importance.

This is only a half truth but there are many times in life when most of us, and especially women, must live on half truths. The utter synthesis between what we want and what we can have is so rare that I look back with a sort of wonder on those days of my youth when I had it, or thought I did.

The point of the Butler quotation is that in times of unhap- piness and emotional stress that seemed beyond endurance, I used it as a structure, upon which to build up a hierarchy of comparative values:

- — This comes first.

- — This comes second.

This is what you, — , are not doing!

Your charm and the heightened womanliness that makes you attractive to men depends on what Ernest Hemingway once called (in an entirely different connection) ‘grace under pressure.’ The luxuriance of your emotions under the strict discipline which you habitually impose on them makes that tensity in you that is the secret of all charm - when you let that balance become disturbed, don’t you become just another victim of self-indulgence? - breaking down the solid things around you and, moreover, making yourself terribly vulnerable? - imagine having to have had to call in Doctor Cole in this matter! The indignity! I have plenty of cause to be cynical about women’s nervous resistance, but frankly I am concerned with my misjudgment in thinking you were one of the strong - and I can’t believe I was mistaken.

The tough part of the letter is to send you this enclosure - which you should read now a loving, dependent letter from Zelda -

- — now you’ve read it?

There are emotions just as important as ours running concurrently with them - and there is literally no standard in life other than a sense of duty. When people get mixed up they try to throw out a sort of obscuring mist, and then the sharp shock of a fact - a collision seems to be the only thing to make them sober- minded again. You once said, ‘Zelda is your love!’ (only you said ‘lu-uv’). And I gave her all the youth and freshness that was in me. And it’s a sort of investment that is as tangible as my talent, my child, my money. That you had the same sort of appeal to me, deep down in the gut, doesn’t change the other.

The harshness of this letter will have served its purpose if on reading it over you see that I have an existence outside you - and in doing so remind you that you have an existence outside of me. I don’t belittle your fine intelligence by supposing that anything written here need be said, but I thought maybe the manner of saying it might emphasize those old dull truths by which we live. We can’t just let our worlds crash around us like a lot of dropped trays.

- — You have got to be good.

- — Your sense of superiority depends upon the picture of yourself as being good, of being large and generous and all-comprehending, and just and brave and all-forgiving. But if you are not good, if you don’t preserve a sense of comparative values, those qualities turn against you - and your love is a mess and your courage is a slaughter.

TO LAURA GUTHRIE

Hotel Stafford

Baltimore,

Maryland

September 23, 1935

Dear Laura:

The news from the West is pretty terrible -I have seen plenty of people disappointed in love, from old maids who thought they had lost their only chance, to — who tried to kill herself when — threw her over - but I never saw a girl t who had so much take it all so hard. She knew from the beginning there would be nothing more, so it could scarcely be classed even as a disappointment - merely one of these semi-tragic facts that must be faced. It’s very strange and sad. I have nothing from her except the wire.

For myself all goes well. I woke up on the train after a fine sleep, came to the hotel and went to work with Mrs Owens before noon. We discussed all the ‘ifs’ and will decide nothing before a week. Scottie arrived like a sun goddess at 3 o’clock, all radiant and glowing. We had a happy evening walking and walking the dark streets. The next morning she was invited to visit in the country for the weekend and I continued my picking up of loose ends, first Zelda - she was fine, almost herself, has only one nurse now and has no more intention of doing away with herself. It was wonderful to sit with her head on my shoulder for hours and feel as I always have even now, closer to her than to any other human being. This is not a denial of other emotions - oh, you understand.

I have stopped all connections with M. Barleycorn. The eczema is almost gone but not quite. Baltimore is warm but pleasant. I love it more than I thought - it is so rich with memories - it is nice to look up the street and see the statue of my great uncle and to know Poe is buried here and that many ancestors of mine have walked in the old town by the bay. I belong here, where everything is civilized and gay and rotted and polite. And I wouldn’t mind a bit if in a few years Zelda and I could snuggle up to-

gether under a stone in some old graveyard here. That is really a happy thought and not melancholy at all.

Scott

TO JOSEPH HERGESHEIMER

Baltimore,

Maryland

Probably Fall, 1935

Dear Joe:

You talked to someone who didn’t like this book - I don’t know who, or why they didn’t. But I could tell in the Stafford Bar that afternoon when you said that it was ‘almost impossible to write a book about an actress’ that you hadn’t read it thru because the actress fades out of it in the first third and is only a catalytic agent.

Sometime will you open it at the middle, perhaps at page 155, and read on for five or ten minutes -? If it were not for my sincere admiration for your judgment I would forego this plea. You were not the only one repelled by the apparent triviality of the opening - I would like this favorite among my books to have another chance in the crystal light of your taste.

Ever yours,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Page 155-et seq.

TO JULIAN STREET

Cambridge Arms Apartments 1 East 34th StreetBaltimore,

Maryland

February 24, 1936

Dear Mr Street:

That was an awfully nice letter. Like the other it has made me think that you are indeed a friend even though we have seldom met. There is a third article which completes the trilogy of depression Of course now that things seem a little brighter, or at least the intensity of that despair is fading, I can see that the writing of them was a sort of catharsis but at the time of writing them what I said seemed absolutely real. And may I add that this is no claim to being completely out of the woods except that I would not be inclined to write that way again under the present circumstances. I see, too, that an unfriendly critic might damn the series as the whining of a spoilt baby, but in that case so is most poetry the complaints of the eternally youthful thing that persists in the writer and merely the fact that this is prose separates it from a great many of the mutterings of Shelley, Stephen Crane and Verlaine. I am not comparing this in quality with great poems of lamentation. I am simply saying that it is not essentially different in mood.

Thank you again for your letter. I wish we could meet sometime soon when I have fully emerged from this small abyss.

Ever yours,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

TO ARNOLD GINGRICH

The Cambridge Arms

Baltimore,

Maryland

March 20, 1936

Dear Arnold: In my ‘Ant’ satire phrase

Lebanon School for the Blind should be changed to

New JerseySchool for Drug Addicts.

It will be an easy change to make, easy to find in such a short piece. It seems important because the former seems in poor taste because of war blind, etc.

This is a good issue - fine piece by Ernest, and I enjoyed the Mex divorce. Haven’t got through the issue.

I get letters from all over (mostly from writers) about the ‘Crack-Up’ series: Alec Woollcott, Julian Street, G. B. Stem, Nancy Hoyt, James Boyd, etc., and from old friends, and naturally am rather touched. What the general response is is more questionable but there have been many of those too.

I will have another piece along shortly but I know there’s no hurry and I’m doing a ballet story or trying to for Goldwyn and Miriam Hopkins. Let me know when you want it.

Ever yours,

Scott Fitz

Please don’t forget this change in ‘Ants.’

TO ASA BUSHNELL

The Cambridge Arms

Baltimore,

Maryland

April 27, 1936

Dear Asa:

Is this a crazy idea? Perhaps architects will laugh at it but a recent editorial in an Alumni News asked for suggestions. My idea is to have as a building for the library a reproduction of what was torn down to make way for the present library. This part of the library would be above ground, and a series of subterranean galleries covered with glass brick radiating therefrom would house the books.

These galleries would (according to the type of book they carried, scientific, cultural, etc.) shoot in the direction of some convenient hall; for example, the gallery served with scientific books would lead toward the laboratories, that with religious books toward the Chapel reading room, etc.

The idea of a sort of subway, served (as I should envisage it) by electric trucks, and passing a series of alcoves, lit overhead by skylights paralleling the present walks, or by the aforementioned glass brick, is certainly revolutionary. But it would keep the library in the center of the campus. It would solve so many prob-

lems, and without violating any of the strategical plan for future Princeton architectural development.What do you think?

Ever yours,

Scott

TO MRS CLIFTON SPRAGUE

The Cambridge Artns

Baltimore,

Maryland

June, 1936

Dear Annabel:

It has been a rather terrible day and tomorrow promises to be no better, but after that I’m going to - got to - put Mother out of my mind for a day or so. I’ll summarize what happened.

It was sad taking her from the hotel, the only home she knew for fifteen years, to die - and to go thru her things. The slippers and corset she was married in, Louisa’s dolls in tissue paper, old letters and souvenirs, and collected scrap paper, and diaries that began and got nowhere, all her prides and sorrows and disappointments all come to nothing, and her lugged away like so much useless flesh the world had got thru with -

Mother and I never had anything in common except a relentless stubborn quality, but when I saw all this it turned me inside out realizing how unhappy her temperament made her and how she clung, to the end, to all things that would remind her of moments of snatched happiness. So I couldn’t bear to throw out anything, even that rug, and it all goes to storage......

TO ROBERT R. DUNN

Grove Park Inn

Asheville,

North Carolina

Probably Summer, 1936

Dear Bob:

This is sheer impulse for no close friend ever passed so completely and abruptly out of my life as you did - except by death. Our whole adult life till now has passed without a single communication, unless I count a few chance encounters with your father fifteen years ago.

Is your mother living? Are you married? Has life been kind or bitter to you? I assume you know something about me from happening on my stuff here and there, but I know nothing about you. I remember a talk with Norma Talmadge (not Nash!) where your name figured, and meeting a fraternity brother of your ‘delegation’ on a bout between Naples and Marseille (name forgotten) - and I sometimes dream of you. In the dream you’re always very snooty and high-hat Life’s too short for you not to answer this. If your mother lives, give her my eternal homage, unqualified by the fact that she was always skeptical of me. She was one of the most fascinating women I ever knew.

Your old friend,

Scott

TO BENNETT CERF

Grove Park Inn Asheville,  North Carolina

July 23, 1936

Dear Bennett:

Temporarily I am no longer a Baltimorean, so I am afraid we will not be able to talk personally unless you are this far South. From your letter I guess that you are a little cagey about shooting at Tender Is the Night at the moment and I have no idea how many of a Modern Library edition of a book is necessary to sell to make it pay its way.

I have an idea that even among your clientele the actual bulk of a book, the weight of it in the hand, has something to do with buyer psychology. That is, that you would do better with, say, Willa Cather’s My Antonia than you would with Lost lady. All the first Modern Library books were small. Your tendency toward the giant size shows that you are alive to this psychological trait in the potential buyer.

To that extent you might have luck with Tender Is the Night. As you may know, Tender Is the Night hung around between sixth and twelfth best seller through its publishing season (spring of ‘34) which was a terrible one, while The Great Gatsby, which was a light little volume barely touching 50,000 words, was a rank commercial failure and was only on best seller lists its first week during a fine season (the spring of 1925). As a succès d’estime Gatsby outshone This Side of Paradise and Beautiful and Damned but I do not believe its sale to this day, outside your Modem Library edition, has passed 25,000 copies in America. Of course the Continental sales in German, French and Scandinavian have added a great deal to that.

Since actual distribution of Tender Is the Night was small in spite of its place on the best-selling list, it might be a much better bet than The Great Gatsby and there is always recurrent interest in This Side of Paradise (a calling, indeed, by this time).

I would like to have another book on your list, not from vanity (take a bow, Mr Cerf), but simply because I think that two books would be stronger than one in building up a permanent interest among those whose destiny leads them to accept my observation as part of their cosmology. Do let me hear from you.

Ever yours,

Scott

TO JOHN O’HARA

Grove Park Inn

Asheville,

North Carolina

July 25, 1936

Dear John:

Your letter got side-tracked in moving and has just turned up. Possibly I may have answered it before and, if I did, everything I said was true, and if what I say now contradicts everything I said before that is all true too. Before I tell you how to write your new novel let me tell you about affairs here.

There are no affairs here.

We will now turn to your new novel. You quoted in your letter a very cryptic passage from the wonderful advice that I give to people. It sounds exactly like the advice that Ernest and I used to throw back and forth at each other, none of which ever had any effect - the only effect I ever had on Ernest was to get him in a receptive mood and say let’s cut everything that goes before this. Then the pieces got mislaid and he could never find the part that I said to cut out. And so he published it without that and later we agreed that it was a very wise cut. This is not literally true and I don’t want it established as part of the Hemingway legend, but it’s just about as far as one writer can go in helping another. Years later when Ernest was writing Farewell to Arms he was in doubt about the ending and marketed around to half a dozen people for their advice. I worked like hell on the idea and only succeeded in evolving a philosophy in his mind utterly contrary to everything that he thought an ending should be, and it later convinced me that he was right and made me end Tender Is the Night on a fade-away instead of a staccato. Didn’t we talk about this once before - I seem to see your large ear in the way of my voice.

There is some element that can as well as not be expressed by the dietician’s word ‘roughage’ or up-stream by which you can judge yourelf as a novelist or as a personality - the fact recently quoted by Middleton Murray that John Keats felt that creative talent is essentially without character, is empiric: the acceptance of disorganization is another matter because it eventually implies a lesion of vitality. I have just written a long letter to an admirer or mourner as to why I do not believe in Psychoanalysis, for the disintegration of that thing, that judgment, the extinction of that light is much more to be dreaded than any material loss.

We are creatures bounding from each other’s shoulders, feeling already the feet of new creatures upon our backs bounding again toward an invisible and illusory trapeze (at present played by the short-winded Saroyans). If the calf no longer flexes, the bound will not be so high. In any case the outstretched arms will never catch that swinging thing because when life has been well lived one can make an adjustment and become the second man in the pyramid. It is when life has been ill lived that one is the third man; the first man always falls to his death, a fact that has haunted Ernest all his life.

This is all rather poor metaphysics expressed in ineffectual images. Again and again in my books I have tried to imagize my regret that I have never been as good as I intended to be (and you must know that what I mean by good is the modern don’t-hurt-a-hair-of- anybody’s-head-and-kill-a-hundred-thousand-people-if-necessary - in other words a personal conscience and meaning by the personal conscience yourself stripped in white midnight before your own God).

To take off with my whole weight (Charlie MacArthur continually urges me) if my suggestion about the bucolic background for a novel makes any sense it is embraced in the paragraph you requoted to me. I certainly think you should undertake something - more ambitious and I know to my own sorrow that to contemplate and project a long work is often an excuse for laziness. But let me pass along a suggestion:

Invent a system Zolaesque (see the appendix to Josephson’s Life of Zola in which he gives Zola’s plan for the first Rougon-Maquart book), but buy a file. On the first page of the file put down the outline of a novel of your times enormous in scale (don’t worry, it will contract by itself) and work on the plan for two months. Take the central point of the file as your big climax and follow your plan backward and forward from that for another three months. Then draw up something as complicated as a continuity from what you have and set yourself a schedule.

After all who am I to be giving you advice? I dare to do so only because I know that you are at heart a humble man and not resentful of anything said by one who wishes you well.

(This is being taken down by a young man from BrownUniversity who is wilting visibly as he writes after a session with the many concerns that seem to surround a man of forty and the hieroglyphics of a half-done Post story to decipher tomorrow. He sends his regards or does he? Do you? No answer. He says he wonders what would happen if he would write a postscript to this thing.)

So much for tonight....

Ever your friend,

Scott

TO BENNETT CERF

Grove Park Inn

Asheville,

North Carolina

August 13, 1936

Dear Bennett:

The revision job would take the form, to a large extent, of a certain new alignment of the scenes - without changing their order in any case. Some such line as this:

That the parts instead of being one, two, and three (they were one, two, three and four in the magazine serial) would include in several cases sudden stops and part headings which would be to some extent explanatory; certain pages would have to be inserted bearing merely headings. Part two, for example, should say in a terse and graceful way that the scene is now back on the Riviera in the fall after these events have taken place, or that this brings us up to where Rosemary first encounters the Divers. Those examples are not accurate to my intention nor are they at all couched as I would have them, but that’s the general idea. (Do you remember the number of subheads I used in This Side of Paradise - at that time a rather novel experiment, the germ of which I borrowed from Bernard Shaw’s preface headings to his plays; indeed that was one of the few consciously original things in This Side of Paradise.)

There would be certain changes but I would supply the equivalent line lengths. I have not my plan with me; it seems to be in Baltimore. But I know how printing costs are. It was evolved to have a very minimum of replacement. There is not more than one complete sentence that I want to eliminate, one that has offended many people and that I admit is out of Dick’s character: ‘I never did go in for making love to dry loins.’ It is a strong line but definitely offensive. These are all the changes I contemplated with - — in addition some minor spelling corrections such as would disturb nothing but what was within a printed line. There will be no pushing over of paragraphs or disorganization of the present set-up except in the aforesaid inserted pages. I don’t want to change anything in the book but sometimes by a single word change one can throw a new emphasis or give a new value to the exact same scene or setting.

Ever yours,

Scott

TO BEATRICE DANCE

Grove Park Inn

Asheville, North Carolina

September 15,1936

Dear Beatrice:

The last two months have been such a feverish nightmare, day and night, sickness and that sort of thing, that I haven’t very clear memories of what letters I have written and what I haven’t. Today for the first time, I am really systematizing things under the proper headings of: ‘Immediate, Semi-Immediate,’ Mother’s Death, Financial, Scottie’s School,”Work,’ etc., etc. - so I am by no means sure whether I have to thank you for the fine kimono which I am wearing at present (alas! I have used it so much that you would scarcely know that it is only a month old), or whether only for the gorgeous sweater which I have so reverently laid away to save for more robust days) but really you must not inundate me with such tokens. I am embarrassed. It is impossible for me to send up equivalent incense to your memory - — much more than a memory, you know that.

Your letters were bright - and melancholy in the practically arctic night of the past ten months. I have never had so many things go wrong and with such defiant persistence. By an irony which quite fits into the picture, the legacy which I received from my mother’s death (after being too ill to go to her death bed or her funeral) is the luckiest event of some time. She was a defiant old woman, defiant in her love for me in spite of my neglect of her, and it would have been quite within her character to have died that I might live.

Thank you for your wire today. People have received this Esquire article with mingled feeling - not a few of them think it was a terrific mistake to have written any of them from ‘Crack- Up.’ On the other hand, I get innumerable ‘fan letters’ and requests to republish them in the Reader’s Digest, and several anthologists’ requests, which I prudently refused.

My Hollywood deal (which, as it happened, I could not have gone through with because of my shoulder) was seriously compromised by their general tone. It seems to have implied to some people that I was a complete moral and artistic bankrupt.

Now - I come to some things I may have written you before. Did I tell you that I got the broken shoulder from diving from a fifteen-foot board, which would have seemed modest enough in the old days, and the shoulder broke before I hit the water - a phenomenon which has diverted the medicos hereabout to some extent; and that when it was almost well, I tripped over the raised platform of the bathroom at four o’clock one morning when I was still surrounded by an extraordinary plaster cast and I lay on the floor for forty-five minutes before I could crawl to the telephone and get rescued by Mac? It was a hot night, and I was soaking wet in the cast so I caught cold on the tile floor of the bathroom, and a form of arthritis called ‘myotosis’ developed, which involved all of the joints on that side of the body, so back to the bed I went and I have been cursing and groaning without cessation until about three days ago when the devil began to abandon me. During this time Mother died in the North and a dozen other things seemed to happen at once, so that it will take me several months to clear the wreckage of a completely wasted summer, productive of one mediocre short story and two or three shorts....

The summer was to have been devoted to Zelda and I have seen her exactly five times, her doctors feeling proud of her improvement and knowing that it would depress her to see me ill or in pain.

As to Ernest, at first I resented his use of my name in the story  and I wrote him a somewhat indignant letter, telling him it must not be republished in a book. He answered, agreeing, but rather resentfully, and saying that he felt that since I had chosen to expose my private life so ‘shamelessly’ in Esquire, he felt that it was sort of an open season for me, and I wrote him a hell of a letter which would have been sudden death for somebody the next time we met, and decided, hell, let it go. Too often literary men allow themselves to get into internecine quarrels and finish about as victoriously as most of the nations at the end of the World War. I consider ic an example of approaching maturity on my part and am proud of my self control. He is quite as nervously broken down as I am but it manifests itself in different ways. His inclination is toward megalomania and mine toward melancholy.

I am glad you have had a happy summer and have been amused by such reports as your running into our Grove Park Inn friend.

Scott

TO CAMERON ROGERS

Grove Park Inn Asheville,  North Carolina

September 21, 1936

Dear Rogers:

Manila Galleon arrived last week. I was reminded all through of Victory, just as Conrad I suppose was reminded of something when he wrote Victory. I loved it.

I have been with a broken shoulder and there were only two books in the bad times that I could let the nurses read to me — Manila Galleon and Mencken’s American Language. I had the sense of an utterly vacant sky, without the blue of the Caribbean, sort of a yellow-white. It made me ill at ease and made me want to go back to Europe at all cost, or at least to some seaboard where the only colors were those of my own scars and breeches and the only glint that of my own sword.

Your friend and admirer,

Scott Fitz

TO C. O. KALMAN

Grove Park Inn

Asheville,

North Carolina

October 10,1936

Dear Kallie:

Above and beyond the egotism that seems to descend upon a sick man like a dark cloud, I have been able to appreciate the kindness and friendliness with which you have come to my assistance. I do not know very many rich people well, in spite of the fact that my life has been cast among rich people - certainly only two well enough to have called upon in this emergency, the first personal loan I have ever asked for - though I have made heavy drains on my publishers and agents at times.

I was just about up to the breaking point financially when I came down here to Asheville. I had been seriously sick for a year and just barely recovered and tried to set up a household in Baltimore which I was ill equipped to sustain. I was planning to spend a fairly leisurely summer, keeping my debt in abeyance on money I had borrowed on my life insurance, when I went over with Zelda (who is in a sanitarium near here, better, but still a mental patient, as perhaps she always will be) to a pool near here and tried a high dive with muscles that had not been exercised, by the doctors’ orders, for two years, and split my shoulder and tore the arm from its moorings, so that the ball of the ball-and-socket joint hung two and one-half inches below the socket joint. It started to heal after two weeks and I fell on it when it was soaked with sweat inside the plaster cast, and got a thing called ‘myoto- sis’ which is a form of arthritis. To make a long story short, I was on my back for ten weeks, with whole days in which I was out of bed trying to write or dictate, and then a return to the impotency of the trouble. The more I worried, the less I could write. Being one mile from Zelda, I saw her twice all summer, and was unable to go North when my Mother had a stroke and died, and later was unable to go North to put my daughter in school. (She earned a scholarship to a very expensive school - Miss Walker’s, do you know it? She is now in school and apparently very happy.)

The nervous system is pretty well shot. You have probably guessed that I have been doing a good deal of drinking to keep up what morale has been necessary - think of it any way you want to; I know, thank God, you are no moralist. I know you have lent this money on the ask-me-no-question basis, but I feel I owe you this explanation.

For heaven’s sake, please try to expedite the loan. The first time in my life I have known what it is to be hog-tied by lack of money, as you know how casually I have always dealt with it.

I want to bring Scottie West at Easter and, seeing her, you will see how much I still have to live for, in spite of a year in a slough of despond.

Ever afftly yours,

Scott Fitz

TO MRS WILLIAM HAMM

Grove Park Inn Asheville,  North Carolina

October 28, 1936

Dear Marie:

It was damn nice of you to write me. That article in Time (not to mention the three ‘Crack-Up’ articles in Esquire) brought so many letters from old friends, ranging from such as you - and I think of you as about my oldest real friend, certainly my first love - to men that had been in my Company in the army, addressed to ‘

Dear Lieutenant.’ Thank you for your thoughtfulness in trying to cheer me up. However, child, life is more complicated than that. There has been some question in my mind whether I should ever have written the Esquire articles. Ernest Hemingway wrote me an irritable letter in which he bawled me out for having been so public about what were essentially private affairs and should be written about in fiction or not at all.

As to the article in Time, it came from an interview in the New York Evening Post written by a man who presumably had come all the way from New York to talk to me about my fortieth birthday. He spread it across three columns in the Post, with a picture of me as I was at twenty-one and an entirely faked-up picture of me as I was at forty. None of the remarks attributed to me did I make to him. They were taken word by word from the first ‘Crack-Up’ article. I saw him because he had come a long way, and I had a temperature of 103 with arthritis, after a ten weeks’ siege in and out of bed. He was an s. o. b. and I should have guessed it. As soon as the Time article came out I wired Miss Walker’s School in Simsbury, which Scottie has just entered, to keep it from her if possible, and I think she escaped reading it.

I am leading a dull life convalescing, but am planning to go to New York next month and am actually writing again after a long interval of incapacity to do anything.

Indeed, I do know Lefty and Nora Flynn. We three and Zelda (she is still ill and in and out of sanitariums) went to a football game last week. Yesterday she called me up from downstairs in the hotel to say she was in a fashion show and would I come behind the scenes. Zelda and I are going over to dine with them sometime next week. During the mood of depression that I seem to have fallen into about a year ago she was a saint to me; took care of Scottie for a month one time under the most peculiar circumstances, and is altogether, in my opinion, one of the world’s most delightful women. But if you know her, there is no need to tell you that.

Saw something of Joe with the Kalmans in Paris - my God, is it six years ago? But since then they have vanished. St Paul contacts have been so infrequent that I am practically determined to go out there next summer for a while and bring the daughter. In spite of a fifteen-year absence, it is still home to me; but the people that make it so are now only such a few - the Kalmans, Nonnie, Bob Clarke and a scattering of others. I don’t know what I would have to say to so many people who once meant so much to me. An amazing letter came out of the West from Bob Dunn a few months ago saying that he had tried to get in touch with me the last time I was in Hollywood. We exchanged a little local gossip by correspondence, but the trying to keep alive a friendship at long distance is a difficult business. Do you remember one time at the Cottage Club at Princeton, about 1927, when I came up behind you and grabbed you by the arms in a great crowd and said in your ear, This is somebody you know very well,’ but I might have been almost anyone, so far as you knew.

I know you went through hell, Marie, with your first marriage, and all that kidnapping of the children, and of course when my son named, I believe, John Fitzgerald, kidnapped your husband (or was he then your fiance?) I was shocked at his daring to molest you. I wrote him a letter to the penitentiary in which I said that if he wanted to kidnap anybody to leave Marie alone, because she was beginning to have a neurosis on the matter. John has been a good son to me, sending me most of the Weyerhauser ransom money, but the trouble is, I blew it in, Marie.

Well, well, for the rest of the news - my mother died at a ripe old age last summer. If you answer this, tell me how is your mother, who always daily frightened me, and for whom I also had a peculiar admiration because she somehow played the part that Alice Brady plays currently of a completely haywire person who always really had a grip on things.

I thought — was not particularly interesting but very nice. Her father is the oldest settler in this hotel, a retired newspaper publisher, and the man she married looked to me like one of his contemporaries.

It seems strange to hear you say you have just moved in from LakeMinnetonka instead of from White Bear. The cities were growing close when we were young, but are they now so close together that such places as White Bear Lake and Minnetonka are the same thing?

With affection always,

Scott

TO MR AND MRS EBEN FINNEY

Oak Hall Hotel

Tryon, North Carolina

Spring, 1937

Dear Pete and Peggy:

It was swell of you to write me and I don’t know yet how you found out where my wandering daughter was. Coincidental with your telegram came one from her saying she had expected to wire me tomorrow and is coming by Spartanburg, not Asheville as ordered, with me in the act of leaving a call for six o’clock to meet her in Asheville! Ah, me - or youth, hell, or something.

Still as I let her down Xmas I shall forgive the lapse. There isn’t really much I can do about it. She expects it to be dull here but she’ll find it quite gay. I want to get to know her again - I’m in fine shape again (for forty) - not so much as a glass-beer since January and perhaps she’ll approve of me.

I think of you often and your kindness to her in the chilling emergencies of the past year. Someday I’m going to write about the series of calamities that led up to the awful state I was in Xmas. A writer not writing is practically a maniac within himself. Because of this - I mean too many anxieties and too much introspection - I’m going to Hollywood next month and extrovert awhile, do a picture on order for Harlow and Robert Taylor and then some other work for Metro if they want me to stay on. I might take Scottie there this summer.

This little town is as full of Princetonians as Baltimore and fuller of sunshine. I was never a part of Baltimore but in spite of much personal unhappiness there, I mean chiefly illnesses, I love the place and am grateful to its general urbanity and sophistication for much kindness - with your kindness to Scottie coming first. I think I like it next to any city except New York but I’m too confirmed a wanderer to have been content there.

I hope the Peacherino  is as beautiful and blooming as ever and that you, Peggy, are strong enough now to do whatever you want to do. I still think of your lovely house with the June sunlight on the pool and the black-brown children being ravenously happy.

With every good wish to you all,

Ever your friend,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

P.S. I still don’t see how you got Scottie’s address unless you phoned Miss Walker’s. I didn’t even know Sally Simmons’ father’s name!

TO COREY FORD

Oak Hall Tryon, North Carolina

April, 1937

Dear Corey:

I think you have read or heard that I’ve been in a somewhat bitter temper for a year, and that led you to say to yourself, ‘It might cheer the poor bastard up to think he’s not forgotten.’ Whatever was the impulse that made you write it did cheer me up and the idea that people have such thoughts and do something so concrete about it is the most cheering of all.

I had been sick as hell for a year and took an extra one to get over it morally for, as a child of the bitch goddess, I began trying to fight it with two quarts a day and got into an awful psychological jam. However I came back to life last January after the newspapers began cracking at me (it was rather a shock - nobody ever tried to interfere with Ring Lardner’s utterly private life, but I had myself to blame with those indiscreet Esquire articles) and decided to be an example to myself. I now admire myself almost as much as William Seabrook, Mary McLane and Casanova.

Maybe this has nothing to do with why you wrote me. Anyhow thank you more than I can say. I’m sorry our meetings have been so brief - the last at Marice Hamilton’s in February, 1931. My God, where have these six years gone? - whole months go by and nothing seems to happen. Is that just middle-age? I’d like to do a lot of leisurely things now but there seems to be no time.

Yours,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

TO C. O. KALMAN

Oak Hall Hotel

Tryon,North Carolina

June, 1937

Dear Kallie:

Well, you certainly gave me a generous helping hand out of a nightmare and now that it is paid up - as far as such an obligation can be paid -I want to tell you that I’ve been constantly thinking ofwhat you did with gratitude and appreciation. What got me into the two years’ mess that reached its lowest point in the fall of 1936 was the usual combination of circumstances. A prejudiced enemy might well say it was all drink, a fond mama might say it was a run of ill-luck, a banker might say it was not providing for the future in better days, a psychiatrist might say it was a nervous collapse - it was perhaps partly all these things - the effect was to fantastically prevent me from doing any work at the very age when presumably one is at the height of one’s powers. My life looked like a hopeless mess there for awhile and the point was I didn’t want it to be better. I had completely ceased to give a good Goddamn.

Luckily a few people had faith in me, or perhaps only kindliness - there was a doctor that was interested and some old friends who simply couldn’t believe it was me. I hurt myself professionally no end but did no great damage to private relations - Scottie being away at school, Zelda in a sanitarium, and myself in North Carolina where I saw no people at all. And for six months (I went on the complete wagon, not even beer, in January) I have been steadily coming back, first physically, and finally financially, the that’s only just begun and I’m afraid I’ll have to go to Hollywood before accumulating any surplus.

So much for me and I don’t think it will ever happen again. I want to come to St Paul sometime this summer, probably on my way to or from the coast, and I want to be sure you’re there, so write me if and when you and Sandy will be gone to Europe to fight with General Franco for the rights of labor and the 20- hour day. Scribners, 597 Fifth Avenue, is a permanent address for me, though in person I am usually in Carolina near Zelda. I took her out swimming yesterday and we talked of you. Again my deepest gratitude.

With affection always,

Scott Fitzg —

TO CORY FORD

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Corporation

Culver City,

California

Early July, 1937

Dear Corey:

These Texas lands are like crossing a sea - spiritually I mean, with a fat contract at the end and the loss of something for a year or so. the I find that the vast majority of — s who yelp about that had nothing to lose, either talent or vitality, when they sold out - and at the moment with my play finished I’m no exception. Even Dotty’s * chief kick was, I imagine, that the precious lazybones never had to work so hard in her life. And it amuses me to see the squirming of one-opus geniuses like Lawson, Hermann and Saroyan who simply have no more to say. How simple to be a Communist under those conditions - one can explain away not only the world’s inadequacies but one’s own. After — ‘s long pull at the mammalia of the Whitneys he ought to be able to swim under a long way. He’ll be under something eke when the real trouble begins.

The only real holdout against Hollywood is Ernest. O’Neill, etc., are so damn rich that they don’t count. Dos Passos has nibbled and Erskine Caldwell, whom I admire a lot, seems to have gone in. It’s a pretty unsatisfactory business - I’m trying a special stunt to beat the game. I’m getting up at six and working till nine on my own stuff which I did before under similar circumstances when I was young. (This is confidential.) The boys who try to write creatively at night after a day in the studio or on Saturdays after work there are gypped from the start - also those who write ‘on vacations.’ Nobody’s ever gotten out that way and I’m not going to perish before one more book.

Oddly enough this book is likeParadise. Mine have alternated between being selective and blown up.Paradise and Gatsby were selective; The Beautiful and Damned and Tender aimed at being full and comprehensive - either could be cut by one-fourth, especially the former. (Of course they were cut that much but not enough.) The difference is that in these last two I wrote everything, hoping to cut to interest. In This Side of Paradise (in a crude way) and in Gatsby I selected the stuff to fit a given mood or ‘hauntedness’ or whatever you might call it, rejecting in advance in Gatsby, for instance, all of the ordinary material for Long Island, big crooks, adultery theme and always starting from the small focal point that impressed me - my own meeting with Arnold Rothstein for instance. All this because you seem to sincerely like some of my work and I dare then assume that above might interest you somewhat.

So our meeting is postponed unless you come West the I’ll keep your address in my ‘immediate’ file in case autumn finds me in New York.

Yours with cordial good wishes,

Scott Fitzgerald

TO THOMAS WOLFE

The Garden of Allah Hotel

Hollywood,California

July, 1937

Dear Tom:

I think I could make out a good case for your necessity to cultivate an alter ego, a more conscious artist in you. Hasn’t it occurred to you that such qualities as pleasantness or grief, exuberance or cynicism can become a plague in others? That often people who live at a high pitch often don’t get their way emotionally at the important moment because it doesn’t stand out in relief?

Now the more, the stronger, man’s inner tendencies are defined, the more he can be sure they will show, the more necessity to rarefy them, to use them sparingly. The novel of selected incidents has this to be said: that the great writer like Flaubert has consciously left out the stuff that Bill or Joe (in his case, Zola) will come along and say presently. He will say only the things that he alone sees. So Madame Bovary becomes eternal while Zola already rocks with age....

That, in brief, is my case against you, if it can be called that when I admire you so much and think your talent is unmatchable in this or any other country.

Ever friend,

Scott Fitzgerald

TO MRS HAROLD OBER

The Garden of Allah Hotel

Hollywood,California

July 26, 1937

Dear Anne:

This letter is long overdue. Suffice to summarize: I have seen Hollywood - talked with Taylor, dined with March, danced with Ginger Rogers (this will burn Scottie up but it’s true), been in Rosalind Russell’s dressing-room, wise-cracked with Montgomery, drunk (ginger-ale) with Zukor and Lasky, lunched alone with Maureen O’Sullivan, watched Crawford act, and lost my heart to a beautiful half-caste Chinese girl whose name I’ve forgotten. So far I’ve bought my own breakfasts.

And this is to say I’m through. From now on I go nowhere and see no one because the work is hard as hell, at least for me, and I’ve lost ten pounds. So farewell, Miriam Hopkins, who leans so close when she talks, so long, Claudette Colbert, as yet unen- countered, mysterious Garbo, glamorous Dietrich, exotic Shirley Temple - you will never know me. Except Miriam who promised to call up but hasn’t. There is nothing left, girls, but to believe in reincarnation and carry on.

Tell my daughter she is a vile daughter of Babylon who does not write letters but can charge $25.00 worth of wash dresses at Franklin Simon but nowhere else. Or if she wants, Harold will advance her $25.00 from a check sent today to go to Saks.

I’m glad she is playing tennis. I do want to see the wretched little harpy and don’t let her make a mess of it. Helen  will be in Nyack after the 29th - and is leaving the 2nd. No Long Island date should prevent Scottie from getting in touch with her and coming with her. All Metro could find for chaperones were the Ritz Brothers and I can’t see it. They might vanish her as a practical joke.

Yours with gratitude and devotion,

Scott

TO HELEN HAYES

The Garden of Allah Hotel

Hollywood,California

September 16, 1937

Dear Helen:

You left so precipitately (to my mind) that I’m not going to blame myself for not being on hand. Called up Scottie half an hour after you’d gone to suggest that we make a farewell call on you; then I sent a wire to Mrs MacArthur on the train, but it was returned - I guess you were just plain Helen Hayes again. (I see, by the way, that the Basil Rathbone story leaked out, to my great delight.)

Helen, I’m not going to overwhelm you with thanks, but if you ever get too old to play Queen Victoria, I’m going to write a companion piece to Shaw’s Methuselah for you that will eke out a living for you and Charlie and Mary during your declining years.

As a sort of a ‘wake’ for you, Scottie and I ran off Madeleine Claudet the day you left, in a projection room. Charlie dropped in, and the Fitzgeralds contributed appropriate tears to the occasion - an upshot which, as you will remember, Garbo failed to evoke from this hardened cynic, so I think you have a future. Remember to speak slowly and clearly and don’t be frightened -

the audience is just as scared as you are. Maxwell Anderson’s line should be spoken with a chewing motion and an expression of chronic indigestion.

I’ll now tell you all about Mary’s education, as I am a licensed nuisance on the subject. I think it is impossible to get a first rate American governess who will not make home a hell. That’s reason number one for procuring a French, English or German number who will have a precise knowledge of her so-called ‘place.’ The position of a governess, which is halfway between an employee and a servant, is difficult for anyone to keep up with dignity - that is, to be a sort of an ideal friend to the child and yet maintain an unobtrusive position in regard to mama and papa. It is utterly un-American, and I have never seen one of our countrywomen who was really successful at it. They don’t succeed in passing on any standards, save those of the last shoddy series of movies. On the contrary, from a European upper servant, a child learns many short cuts, ways to dispose of those ordinary problems that irk us in youth. The business of politeness is usually deftly handled without any nonsense - and what a saving! The self-consciousness, if any, is eradicated smoothly and easily; the nerves are somehow cushioned by a protective pillow of good form, something which would be annoying to a formed adult but for a child is a big saving of wear and tear. We can all manufacture our unconventionality when the time comes and we have earned the right to it, but this country is filled with geniuses without genius, without the faintest knowledge of what work is, who were brought up on the Dalton system or some faint shadow of it. As I told you, it was tried and abandoned in Russia after three years. It is an attempt to let the child develop his ego and personality at any cost to himself or others - a last gasp of the ideas of Jean Jacques Rousseau. As a practice against too much repression, such as sending a shy girl to a strict convent, it had its value, but the world, especially America, has swung so far in the opposite direction that I can’t believe it is good for one American child in a hundred thousand. Certainly not for one born in comparatively easy circumstances.

I have said my say on the subject, welcome or not, because I know you will be faced with some such problem soon when Miss X outgrows her usefulness. The pace of American life simply will not permit a first-rate woman to take up such a profession. I think for very young children the very best negro nurses in the South are an exception. They at least stand for something and I think a child absolutely demands a standard. Those years can be passed without harm in some uncertainty as to where the next meal is coming from, but they can’t be passed in an ethical void without serious damage to the child’s soul, if that word is still in use. The human machinery which controls the sense of right, duty, self-respect, etc., must have conscious exercise before adolescence, because in adolescence you don’t have much time to think of anything.

I have just come back from eight days in the East where I found Zelda much better than usual - we went to Charleston, South Carolina, for four days - and on my return here learned that the work had pleased the powers-that-be.

Scottie has finished her play and goes back to school with enthusiasm, though she paid me the tribute of a rare tear when I left her. She will remember this summer all her life, and moreover she will be marked by the idealism she has for you. She talked about you constantly - the things that you wisely did and wisely left undone. Do you mind being a shining legend?

Devotedly,

Scott

TO MR AND MRS EBEN FINNEY

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Corporation

Culver City,

California

October 8, 1937

Dear Pete and Peggy:

The mystery of the missing daughter solved itself when your telegram came. I might have guessed she was with you, but it was absolutely arranged that she was to go on to New York to do some tutoring before school opened. I had visions of her being up in the pampas of Charles Town with the little Mackie girl, or else shopping herself around from house to house in Baltimore so that she could tear around madly with Bill-the-Butcher or Bob- the-baker, or whatever that boy’s name is. It seems that she had told her aunt and simply thought that I’d crawled back into my shell hole out here and put her out of my mind. The weakness was that the Obers didn’t know where she was either. However, that’s ancient history.

So is her trip out here, but I must say that it was an Alice in Wonderland experience for her, and both of us kept wishing that Peaches could have shared some of the excitements that were rife. She seems to have a little more poise and made a good impression, though the reports about the talent scouts following her around are somewhat exaggerated.

I have just finished the script of Three Comrades  (I guess she told you about it) and I’m reconciled to staying out here. It is the kind of life I need. I think I’m through drinking for good now, but it’s a help this first year to have the sense that you are under observation - everyone is in this town, and it wouldn’t help this budding young career to be identified with John Barleycorn. In free-lance writing it doesn’t matter a damn what you do with your private life as long as your stuff is good; but I had gotten everything pleasant that drink can offer long ago, and really do not miss it at all and rather think of that last year and a half in Baltimore and Carolina as a long nightmare. A nightmare has its compensations but you wake up at the end of it feeling that life has moved on and left you standing still with ever greater problems to meet than before.

Your kindness to Scottie is again appreciated. She has a fixation on Baltimore - partly because it was there that she first became conscious of boys. I think that this time she was old enough to realize that Baltimore boys are no more or less magical than any other boys, but the warm spot will always be there.

Ever yours with gratitude and affection, Scott Fitzgerald

TO MRS ALLEIN OWENS

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Corporation

Culver City,

California

October 8, 1937

Dear Mrs Owens:

Thanks for your letter. I think of you often and am enclosing a Christmas present in advance which I wish you would use to buy feed for the puppies.

Regarding the usual mix-up about Scottie, entitled “Where Is She?’ - she finally appeared from under a boxcar in the neighborhood of GramercyPark. So I am proceeding to forget her for a few months. She seemed happy out here and, as you say, has much more poise this year than during her lamentable career as the Belle of Baltimore. She listens to me more willingly. I remember Mark Twain saying, At fourteen I thought I’d never seen such an awful ignoramus as my father was, but when I got to be twenty, I used to be astonished at how much the old man had learned in the interval.’

Three Comrades is almost finished. Joan Crawford is still slated for Pat, but you never can tell. In my version, Taylor has about three lines to her two - perhaps that will discourage her.

Will you do this for me? Go to the storage and find the box which contains my files and abstract file or files which probably contain important receipts, old income tax statements, etc. - not the correspondence file. You will know the one or ones that I mean - those that would seem to have most to do with current business. I should have taken it or them along. Also I want my scrapbooks - the big ones including Zelda’s and the photograph books. This should make quite a sizable assortment, and I’d like the whole thing boxed and sent to me here collect. If they won’t send it this way, let me know what the charges will be. I have just sent them a check for $99.00 which covers all bills to date, but maybe they have another statement for me and don’t know where to send it.

I like it here very much. I hear the report of my salary has been terrifically exaggerated in Baltimore. Thought at first it was Scottie’s doing but she denies it. I like the work which is occasionally creative - most often like fitting together a very interesting picture puzzle. I think I’m going to be good at it.

With affection always,

Scott Fitz

TO TED PARAMORE

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Corporation

Culver City,

California

October 24, 1937

Dear Ted:

I’d intended to go into this Friday but time was too short. Also, hating controversy, I’ve decided after all to write it. At all events it must be discussed now.

First let me say that in the main I agree with your present angle, as opposed to your first ‘war’ angle on the script, and I think you have cleared up a lot in the short time we’ve been working. Also I know we can work together even if we occasionally hurl about charges of pedantry and prudery.

But on the other hand I totally disagree with you as to the terms of our collaboration. We got off to a bad start and I think you are under certain misapprehensions founded more on my state of mind and body last Friday than upon the real situation. My script is in a general way approved of. There was not any question of taking it out of my hands - as in the case of Sheriff. The question was who I wanted to work with me on it and for how long. That was the entire question and it is not materially changed because I was temporarily off my balance.

At what point you decided you wanted to take the whole course of things in hand - whether because of that day or because when you read my script you liked it much less than did Joe * or the people in his office - where that point was I don’t know. But it was apparent Saturday that you had and it is with my faculties quite clear and alert that I tell you I prefer to keep the responsibility for the script as a whole.

For a case in point: such matters as to whether to include the scene with Bruer in Pat’s room, or the one about the whores in Bobby’s apartment, or this bit of Ferdinand Grau’s dialogue or that, or whether the car is called Heinrich or Ludwig, are not matters I will argue with you before Joe. I will yield points by the dozen but in the case of such matters, Joe’s knowledge that they were in the book and that I did or did not choose to use them are tantamount to his acceptance of my taste. That there are a dozen ways of treating it all, or of selecting material, is a commonplace but I have done my exploring and made my choices according to my canons of taste. Joe’s caution to you was not to spoil the Fitzgerald quality of the script He did not merely say to let the good scenes alone - he meant that the quality of the script in its entirety pleased him (save the treatment of Kôster). I feel that the quality was obtained in certain ways, that the scene of Pat in Bruer’s room, for instance, has a value in suddenly and surprisingly leading the audience into a glimpse of Pat’s world, a tail hanging right out of our circle of protaganists, if you will. I will make it less heavy but I can’t and shouldn’t be asked to defend it beyond that, nor is it your function to attack it before Joe unless a doubt is already in his mind. About the whores, again it is a feeling but, in spite of your current underestimation of my abilities, I think you would be overstepping your functions if you make a conference-room point of such a matter.

Point after point has become a matter you are going to ‘take to Joe,’ more inessential details than I bothered him with in two months. What I want to take to Joe is simply this - the assurance that we can finish the script in three weeks more - you’ve had a full week to find your way around it - and the assurance that we are in agreement on the main points.

I’m not satisfied with the opening and can’t believe now that Joe cared whether the airplane was blown up at the beginning or the end of the scene, or even liked it very much - but except for that I think we do agree on the main line even to the sequences.

But, Ted, when you blandly informed me yesterday that you were going to write the whole thing over yourself, kindly including my best scenes, I knew we’d have to have this out Whether the picture is in production in January or May there is no reason on God’s earth why we can’t finish this script in three to four weeks if we divide up the scenes and get together on the piecing together and technical revision. If you were called on this job in the capacity of complete rewriter then I’m getting deaf. I want to reconceive and rewrite my share of the weak scenes and I want your help but I am not going to spend hours of time and talent arguing with you as to whether I’ve chosen the best or second best speech of Lenz’s to adorn the dressing-up scene. I am not referring to key speeches which are discussable but the idea of sitting by while you dredge through the book again as if it were Shakespeare - well, I didn’t write four out of four best sellers or a hundred and fifty top-price short stories but of the mind of a temperamental child without taste or judgment.

This letter is sharp but a discussion might become more heated and less logical. Your job is to help me, not hinder me. Perhaps you’d let me know before we see Joe whether it is possible for us to get together on this.

This letter is an argument against arguments and certainly mustn’t lead to one. Like you, I want to work.

Scott

TO MRS HAROLD OBER

The Garden of Allah Hotel

Hollywood,California

Christmas, 1937

Dear Anne:

Thanks for your note. Scottie will be North again before school opens. As she is obviously destined to be a perpetual guest I do try to split her visits with such easily imposed-on yaps as the Finneys and Obers into reasonable bits lest the golden gooses cease to lay - wait a minute, this metaphor has gotten entirely out of hand. Anyhow all I can think of is for you and Harold to spend your old age with me - and even that won’t square things.

These letters or cards for Scottie come to hand - better hold them. I have high hopes of getting East before she goes back to school - if not I’ll go to her school in January. I love it here. It’s nice work if you can get it and you can get it if you try about three years. The point is once you’ve got it - Screen Credit first, a Hit second, and the Academy Award third - you can count on it forever - like Laurence Stallings does - and know there’s one place you’ll be fed, without being asked to even wash the dishes. But till we get those three accolades we Hollywood boys keep trying.

That’s cynical but I’m not a bit cynical. I’m delighted with screen credit and really hopeful of a hit - the line-up is good, depending on whether or not one of our principals has to have an operation. I hope none of you need even an extraction.

Ever affectionately,

Scott Fitz —

P.S. I recognized the dogs individually in your Christmas card. I’m going to have my suite photographed with the mice in the hall for next Xmas. (I’m getting old and unfertile so will put this crack in my notebook.)

TO JOSEPH MANKIEWICZ

New York City

January 17, 1938

Dear Joe:

I read the third batch (to page 31) with mixed feelings. Competent it certainly is, and in many ways tighter-knit than before. But my own type of writing doesn’t survive being written over so thoroughly and there are certain pages out of which the rhythm has vanished. I know you don’t believe the Hollywood theory that the actors will somehow ‘play it into shape,’ but I think that sometimes you’ve changed without improving.

P. 32 The shortening is good.

P. 33 Tough but sentimental.’ Isn’t it rather elementary to have one character describe another? No audience heeds it unless it’s a false plant.

P. 33 Pat’s line, T would, etc.,’ isn’t good. The thing isn’t supposed to provoke a sneer at Alois. The pleasant amusement of the other is much more to our purpose. In the other she was natural and quick. Here she’s a kidder from Park Avenue. And Erich’s ‘We’re in for it, etc.,’ carries the joke to its death. I think those two lines about it in mid-page should be cut. Also the repeat on next page.

P. 36 Original form of ‘threw it away like an old shoe’ has humor and a reaction from Pat Why lose it? For the rest, I like your cuts here.

P. 37 The war remark from Pat is as a chestnunt to those who were in it - and meaningless to the younger people. In 8 years in Europe I found few people who talked that way. The war became rather like a dream and Pat’s speech is a false note.

P. 39 I thought she was worried about Bruer - not her T.B. If so, this paragraph (the second) is now misplaced.

P. 41 I liked Pat’s lie about being feverish. People never blame women for social lies. It makes her more attractive taking the trouble to let him down gently.

P. 42 Again, Pat’s speech beginning if all I had, etc.,’ isn’t as good as the original. People don’t begin all sentences with and, but, for and if, do they? They simply break a thought in mid- paragraph, and in both Gatsby and Farewell to Arms the dialogue tends that way. Sticking in conjunctions makes a monotonous smoothness.

The next scene is all much better but -

P. 46 Erich’s speech too long at beginning. Erich’s line about the bad smell spoils her line about spring smell.

P. 48 ‘Munchausen’ is trite. Erich’s speech - this repetition from first scene is distinctly self-pity.

I wired you about the flower scene. I remember when I wrote it, thinking whether it was a double love climax, and deciding it wasn’t. The best test is that on the first couple of readings of my script you didn’t think so either. It may not be George Pierce Baker but it’s right instinctively and I’m all for restoring it. I honestly don’t mind when a scene of mine is cut but I think this one is terribly missed.

P. 49 Word ‘gunman’ too American. Also ‘tried to strong-arm Riebling’ would be a less obvious plant P. 51 Roster’s tag not right. Suppose they both say, with different meanings, ‘You see?’

What I haven’t mentioned, I think is distinctly improved.

New York is lousy this time of year.

Best always,

Scott

TO JOSEPH MANKIEWICZ

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Corporation

Culver City,

California

January 20, 1938

Dear Joe:

Well, I read the last part and I feel like a good many writers must have felt in the past. I gave you a drawing and you simply took a box of chalk and touched it up. Pat has now become a sentimental girl from Brooklyn, and I guess all these years I’ve been kidding myself about being a good writer.

Most of the movement is gone - action that was unexpected and diverting is slowed down to a key that will disturb nobody - and now they can focus directly on Pat’s death, squirming slightly as they wait for the other picture on the program.

To say I’m disillusioned is putting it mildly. For nineteen years, with two years out for sickness, I’ve written best-selling entertainment, and my dialogue is supposedly right up at the top. But I learn from the script that you’ve suddenly decided that it isn’t good dialogue and you can take a few hours off and do much better.

I think you now have a flop on your hands - as thoroughly naive as The Bride Wore Red but utterly inexcusable because this time you had something and you have arbitrarily and carelessly tom it to pieces. To take out the manicurist and the balcony scene and then have space to put in that utter drool out of True Romances which Pat gets off on page 116 makes me think we don’t talk the same language. God and ‘cool lips,’ whatever they are, and lightning and elephantine play on words. The audience’s feeling will be ‘Oh, go on and die.’ If Ted had written that scene you’d laugh it out of the window.

You are simply tired of the best scenes because you’ve read them too much and, having dropped the pilot, you’re having the aforesaid pleasure of a child with a box of chalk. You are or have been a good writer, but this is a job you will be ashamed of before it’s over. The little fluttering life of what’s left of my lines and situations won’t save the picture.

Example number 3000 is taking out the piano scene between Pat and Koster and substituting garage hammering. Pat the girl who hangs around the garage!And the re-casting of lines - I feel somewhat outraged.

Lenz and Bobby’s scene on page 62 isn’t even in the same category with my scene. It’s dull and solemn, and Koster on page “is as uninteresting a plodder as I’ve avoided in a long life.

What does scene 116 mean? I can just hear the boys relaxing from tension and giving a cheer.

And Pat on page 72 - ‘books and music - she’s going to teach him.’ My God, Joe, you must see what you’ve done. This isn’t Pat - it’s a graduate of PomonaCollege or one of more bespectacled ladies in Mrs Farrow’s department. Books and music! Think, man! Pat is a lady - a cultured European - a charming woman. And Bobby playing soldier. And Pat’s really re-fined talk about the flower garden. They do everything but play ring-around-a-rosie on their Staten Island honeymoon. Recognizable characters they simply are not, and cutting the worst lines here and there isn’t going to restore what you’ve destroyed. It’s all so inconsistent. I thought we’d decided long ago what we wanted Pat to be!

On page 74 we meet Mr Sheriff again, and they say just the cutest merriest things and keep each other in gales of girlish laughter.

On page 93 God begins to come into the script with a vengeance, but to say in detail what I think of these lines would take a book. The last pages that everyone liked begin to creak from 116 on, and when I finished there were tears in my eyes, but not for Pat - for Margaret Sullavan.

My only hope is that you will have a moment of clear thinking. That you’ll ask some intelligent and disinterested person to look at the two scripts. Some honest thinking would be much more valuable to the enterprise right now than an effort to convince people you’ve improved it. I am utterly miserable at seeing months of work and thought negated in one hasty week. I hope you’re big enough to take this letter as it’s meant - a desperate plea to restore the dialogue to its former quality - to put back the flower cart, the piano-moving, the balcony, the manicure girl - all those touches that were both natural and new. Oh, Joe, can’t producers ever be wrong? I’m a good writer - honest. I thought you were going to play fair. Joan Crawford might as well play the part now, for the thing is as groggy with sentimentality as The Bride Wore Red, but the true emotion is gone.

Scott

TO EDDIE MANNIX AND SAM KATZ

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Corporation

Culver City,

California

Winter, 1938

Dear Sirs:

I have long finished my part in the making of Three Comrades but Mank — has told me what the exhibitors are saying about the ending and I can’t resist a last word. If they had pronounced on Captains Courageous at this stage, I feel they would have had Manuel the Portuguese live and go out West with the little boy and Captains Courageous could have stood that much better than Three Comrades can stand an essential change in its story. In writing over a hundred and fifty stories for George Lorimer, the great editor of The Saturday Evening Post, I found he made a sharp distinction between a sordid tragedy and a heroic tragedy - hating the former but accepting the latter as an essential and interesting part of life.

I think in Three Comrades we run the danger of having the wrong head go on the right body - a thing that confuses and depresses everyone except the ten-year-olds who are so confused anyhow that I can’t believe they make or break a picture. To every reviewer or teacher in America, the idea of the comrades going back into the fight in the spirit of ‘My head is bloody but unbowed’ is infinitely stronger and more cheerful than that they should be quitting - all the fine talk, the death of their friends and countrymen in vain. All right, they were suckers, but they were always that in one sense and if it was despicable what was the use of telling their story?

The public will feel this - they feel what they can’t express - otherwise we’d change our conception of Chinese palaces and French scientists to fit the conception of hillbillies who’ve never seen palaces or scientists. The public will be vaguely confused by the confusion in our mind - they’ll know that the beginning and end don’t fit together and when one is confused one rebels by kicking the thing altogether out of mind. Certainly this step of putting in the ‘new life’ thought will not please or fool anyone - it simply loses us the press and takes out of the picture the real rhythm of the ending which is:

The march of four people, living and dead, heroic and incon- querable, side by side back into the fight.

Very sincerely yours,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

TO MRS EDWIN JARRETT

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Corporation

Culver City,

California

February 17, 1938

Dear Mrs Jarrett:

The play pleases me immensely. So faithful has been your following of my intentions that my only fear is that you have been too loyal. I hope you haven’t - I hope that a measure of the novel’s intention can be crammed into the two hours of the play. My thanks, hopes and wishes are entirely with you - it pleases me in a manner that the acting version of The Great Gatsby did not. And I want especially to congratulate you and Miss Oglebay on the multiple feats of ingenuity with which you’ve handled the difficult geography and chronology so that it has a unity which, God help me, I wasn’t able to give it.

My first intention was to go through it and ‘criticize’ it, but I see I’m not capable of doing that - too many obstacles in my own mind prevent me from getting a clear vision. I had some notes - that Rosemary wouldn’t express her distaste for the battlefield trip - she had a good time and it belittles Dick’s power of making things fun. Also a note that Dick’s curiosity and interest in people was real - he didn’t stare at them - he glanced at them and felt them. I don’t know what point of the play I was referring to. Also I’m afraid some of his long Shavian speeches won’t play -

and no one’s sorrier than I am - his comment on the battle of the Somme for instance. Also Tommy seemed to me less integrated than he should be. He was Tommy Hitchcock in a way whose whole life is a challenge - who is only interested in realities, his kind - in going into him you’ve brought him into the boudoir a little - I should be careful of what he says and does unless you can feel the strong fresh-air current in him. I realize you’ve had to use some of the lesser characters for plot transitions and convenience, but when any of them go out of character I necessarily feel it, so I am a poor critic. I know the important thing is to put over Dick in his relation to Nicole and Rosemary and, if you can, Bob Montgomery and others here would love to play the part. But it must get by Broadway first.

If it has to be cut, the children will probably come out. On the stage they will seem to press, too much for taste, against distasteful events. As if Dick had let them in for it - he is after all a sort of superman, an approximation of the hero seen in overcivilized terms - taste is no substitute for vitality but in the book it has to do duty for it. It is one of the points on which he must never show weakness as Siegfried could never show physical fear. I did not manage, I think in retrospect, to give Dick the cohesion I aimed at, but in your dramatic interpretation I beg you to guard me from the exposal of this. I wonder what the hell the first actor who played Hamlet thought of the part? I can hear him say, ‘The guy’s a nut, isn’t he?’ (We can always find great consolation in Shakespeare.)

Also to return to the criticism I was not going to make -I find in writing for a particular screen character here that it’s convenient to suggest the way it’s played, especially the timing - i e., at the top of page 25 it would probably be more effective -

Rosemary didn’t grow up. (pause) It’s better that way. (pause) Etc.

But I’d better return to my thesis. You’ve done a fine dramatization and my gratitude to you is part of the old emotion I put into the book, part of my life.

Most sincerely,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Corporation

Culver City,

California

February 22, 1938

Dear Mr Garis:

In several ways, I am familiar with the melancholia you describe. Myself, I had what amounted to a nervous breakdown which never, however, approached psychosis. My wife, on the contrary, has been a mental patient off and on for seven years and will never be entirely well again, so I have a very detached point of view on the subject.

As I look at my own approach toward a practical inability to function and my gradual recession from it, it appears to me as being a matter of adjustment. The things that were the matter with me were so apparent, however, that I did not even need a psychoanalyst to tell me that I was being stubborn about this (giving up drink) or stupid about that (trying to do too many things); and so, to say that all such times of depression are merely ‘a moment of adjustment’ is pretty easy.

I know this: that it is impossible to write without hope, and especially it is impossible to write cheerfully the sort of things in demand by the magazines when one is hospitalized physically or mentally and trying to draw sustenance from a dark-appearing world or from the childish optimism of nurses.

There was a period in my time of depression where I had T.B. and another where I had a broken back. (I lump the whole time together as covering about three and a half years.) I had to look far, far back into my life to write anything at all except about children and hospitals. My own life seemed too dismal to write about.

I think a great deal of your problem will depend on whether you have a sympathetic wife who will realize calmly and coolly, rather than emotionally, that a talent like yours is worth saving, will help you figure out how much strain, how many hours a day of strain you can stand and how many hours must be given to a rigorous if not vigorous physical regime. In this your attention must be bent figuratively on such nonessentials as the ‘birds and flowers,’ the weight, the number of hours’ sleep, the utterly nontoxic diet - even though this means a much smaller amount of production and a temporary reduction in your scale of living or if debt enters into it. If you get sicker, there is no question but that you must retire to some absolutely quiet place and be prepared to sacrifice three or four months of your life to build up your nervous system. This can be done by yourself with the help of a good friend, at a certain stage. If you let it go too far, you will need a sanitarium. I got myself in hand just before the latter and more unpleasant alternative would have become necessary.

In three old Esquire magazines of 1936, you will find three articles called ‘Crack-Up,”Paste Together’ and ‘Handle with Care,’ which show the mood I was in at the time and doubtless you will find it quite parallel to yours. The writing of the articles helped me personally but rather hurt me professionally. They do not tell you how I gradually climbed out of the morass though there are hints in it of what course it finally took.

The question of will in these cases is very doubtful. Let us say that in my case the disease wore itself out. Let us hope that in yours it will also. But I assure you that if at the moment when I first became aware that my nervous system was out of hand, that there were unnecessary rages, glooms, nervous tensity, times of coma-like inertia, if I had, instead of trying quick remedies like a couple of days in the hospital or a one-week trip, taken off several months, I would have saved at least a year of my life.

One of the best psychiatrists near you is Dr James Rennie, consultant at the Phipps Clinic, JohnsHopkinsHospital, Baltimore. He was in charge of my wife and was a kindly friend to me during my own struggle. The men around New York all seem a little bit ovemervous themselves, to me. The most helpful man in my wife’s case was Dr Robert S. Carroll of HighlandHospital, Asheville, North Carolina. However, he is less a consultant than a practicing clinitian. His strong point is that toxic conditions of the blood from diet, etc., play a tremendous part in nervous disturbances. But if it ever came to the point where you thought you ought to lay up under medical care, his is the sanitarium which I should choose, and I have had my wife in a half dozen in this country. And it is quite reasonable in price.

Phipps Clinic in Baltimore is really a sanitarium for diagnosis. It is rather unfortunately situated, to my mind, in the middle of a big city.

I find that living alone in a very small town did more to restore my nervous strength than any other one thing, though I must say the months there were not highly productive.

I hope you will get something out of this letter that will be of value to you, and if there is any point on which you would like me to go further, please write me again.

With hope that by the time this reaches you, you will be seeing some point of light in your trouble, I am Sincerely yours,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

TO MRS MARY LEONARD PRITCHETT

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Corporation

Culver City,

California

March 4, 1938

Dear Mrs Pritchett:

Sorry I could not get word to you before you sailed.

I am out of touch with the stage in New York, but have talked to Sidney Howard and several other playwrights here regarding your suggestions for the casting of Tender Is the Night. Invariably, Margaret Rawlings has seemed a very good choice for Nicole to those who have read the book, and, equally unanimously, they have been against Beulah Bondi.

Nicole should have not merely glamor but a practically irresistible glamor. In fact, my ideal casting would be Katharine Hepburn or Margaret Sullavan, with the beauty of Loretta Young.

Oddly enough, the character of Tommy, or rather some of the mannerisms of Tommy, were taken from Mario Braggiotti, the brother of Stiano. It would be a delightful coincidence if Stiano played the part.

Thank you for your interest in the casting. They have really done an awfully good job and, in the reading, all the parts seemed very fat and tempting. Bob Montgomery out here is one of several actors who keep recurring to the playing of Dick Diver. With very best wishes, Sincerely yours,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

TO DAYTON KOHLER

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Corporation

Culver City,

California

March 4,1938

Dear Mr Kohler:

Your project of a survey of contemporary literature sounds interesting. I should think that whether it should be a success or not would depend rather on its unity than its variety. If you follow what has been said about the names you mention, you could very well produce a book which would be a mere recapitulation and summary and would be out-classed by a later manifestation of literary vitality - much as Carl Van Doren’s two books on the American novel, published in 1920, have become obsolete, as well as the studies of Henry S. Canby and Stuart P. Sherman. Mencken’s book, Prefaces, on the contrary, is still very much alive.

I should think you would approach the Houghton Mifflin people with something more than the outline which you have sent me. Some of the names. I find in it are meaningless. Elinor Wylie as a novelist, for example, is entirely imitative of Max Beerbohm and others. Elsie Singmaster I never heard of. —

is not even as faintly important as, say, Harry Leon Wilson. And who are — and H. L. Davis? Why Wilbur Daniel Steele, who left no mark whatsoever, invented nothing, created nothing except a habit of being an innocuous part of the O’Brien anthology? Dorothy Canfield as a novelist is certainly of no possible significance. Cora Jarrett was a realer person. Canfield simply got hold of child education as an early monopoly and what she has to say is less important than Willa Cather’s ‘Paul’s Case.’

Does Maxwell Anderson deserve a special section? Have you read Edmund Wilson in The New Republic upon his blank verse? Winterset seemed to me a complete fake. James Ahearn is certainly a much more important figure of the past than Augustus Thomas.

In fact, your list includes so much of the mediocre, so many men who are already covered with dust, that I cannot find a line through it. If you’d confine yourself to twelve contemporaries, instead of fifty, you would find, I think, that they swept up everything worth saying. Perhaps I am wrong. Some people seem to look on our time as a sort of swollen Elizabethan age, simply crawling with geniuses. The necessity of the artist in every generation has been to give his work permanence in every way by a safe shaping and a constant pruning, lest he be confused with the journalistic material that has attracted lesser men.

Perhaps I misunderstand your intention. If so, I apologize and await an answer.

Sincerely,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

TO MATTHEW JOSEPHSON

The Garden of AllahHotel Hollywood,California

March 11, 1938

Dear Matty:

Glad you enjoyed Hollywood. Something you said makes me fear you carried away one false impression. In the old days, when movies were a stringing together of the high points in the imagination of half a dozen drunken ex-newspapermen, it was true that the whole thing was the director. He coordinated and gave life to the material - he carried the story in his head. There is a great deal of carry-over from those days, but the situation of Three Comrades, where Frank Borzage had little more to do than be a sort of glorified cameraman, is more typical of today. A Bob Sherwood picture, for instance, or a Johnny Mahin script, could be shot by an assistant director or a script girl, and where in the old days an author would have jumped at the chance of becoming a director, there are now many, like Ben Hecht and the aforesaid Mahin, who hate the eternal waiting and monotony of the modern job. This is a necessary evolution that the talkies brought about, and I should say that in seven out of ten cases, your feeling that the director or producer was the great coordinator no longer applies.

It was great meeting you. Anything I can ever do for you here let me know. Best wishes.

Scott Fitz

Sid  and I had lunch and he spoke so affectionately of you and of your wife.

TO MR AND MRS EBEN FINNEY

The Garden of Allah Hotel Hollywood,California

March 16, 1938

Dear Pete and Margaret:

I waited an unpardonably long time to write you, but I wanted to see if I could manage to give Miss (or Mrs?) Hoffmannt a decent hearing here. What I have arranged, I will come to presently, but first I want to tell you what I did. I went first to Metro-Goldwyn- Mayer and twice missed the head man and got no encouragement - nothing but a blank statement that they were not interested in listening to music by amateurs or even professionals. The acute cause of their attitude I soon found was that they have five law suits on their hands because they have done that, and at this moment Cole Porter is being sued for a great sum by a woman who played him her pieces and then accused him of stealing melodies from them. I then went to 20th Century-Fox and Warner Brothers and met the same situation. Next I concluded that I had better hear the tunes myself. I had them played over by a musician but didn’t think his opinion was honest - then who should occur to me but our old friend — , who had written me a month before that he was in Hollywood and would like to see me. I went to call, with the music. It was rather depressing to see — , who was so sprightly at Princeton, turned into a down-at-the-heels, very discouraged-looking pansy. He told me a little of his story - that he had been out here ten years, had written two thousand tunes (they were all scored and piled on his piano), had had half a dozen auditions and no luck at all except some incidental music that he had written for a Nelson Eddy radio broadcast and the two or three pieces that he had in the New York show, New Faces. He played over some of his own tunes - easily the best were the ones that he and I wrote together for the Triangle - finally, without its seeming to be the object of the visit, I brought out Miss Hoffman’s pieces. They seemed to me so far ahead of — , there was no comparison. Especially I liked ‘Beautiful Things,’ which has a real swing and a good lyric and, I should think, just that quality that catches on.

A friend then took, or promised to take, the songs to Paramount, but nothing came of that and, as time was passing, I thought I’d make another onslaught on M-G-M. This time, I got an introduction from my producer to the top man in the music department, Mr Finston. He seemed more practical than anyone I had talked to and I asked him what would happen if young authors got no hearing on the ground that perhaps they might bring suit for plagiarism. I told him the number of people who had turned down my own stuff when I was young, but that never had anyone refused to read it, and tried to make him see it from the point of view of the incipient young musical talent who actually had something to offer. Nothing doing. He wouldn’t have them played over. However, he did say that he would definitely get her an audition in New York, where for some reason they haven’t got the overwhelming fear of law suits which hangs over the moving pictures. He promised me (and I am writing for the carbon copy of his letter to Miss Hoffman - and I will check on it) that he would see positively that her stuff got an audition in New York from the people with whom they deal there, perhaps a musical subsidiary of the M-G-M office.

This seems little to have accomplished after this long wait. Perhaps there is some secret trick to breaking in that I don’t know, but there was the experience of — , an accomplished musician, after ten years which was far from encouraging. It seems to be a very crowded profession. Certainly my advice to her is to follow exactly what Finston says in his letter because, though he was not especially encouraging, he seemed an utterly honest man and was trying to do the best he could as a favor to the producer who introduced me. He said also that he was returning the music to her in your care.

I will now answer letters (which I do all in great gobs every two months). The party that Peaches and Scottie gave seems a long way off now but I am glad it was a success and that the ticket matter straightened itself out. Peggy’s account of the other festivities of Christmas fill me with a vague melancholy which is not even nostalgia, that is, I would never want to go through the time of life again Peaches and Scottie are in, but I am sorry for anyone who believes as much as they must believe. There is something very special to be written about the psychology of pretty girls. Lately I have run into two who were great belles of my time and who are now ravaged with dope. The reason is that life promises so very much to a pretty girl between the ages of sixteen and twenty-five that she never quite recovers from it. By pretty girl I mean what used to be called the belle type, the type with ‘it.’ Ernest Hemingway once said that you could never go back emotionally, or, with more accuracy, sensationally; having had a sensation in the emotional sense, one would not be inclined to be content with a lesser sensation, so a belle nowadays, unless sobered by a flock of children, is liable to go on seeking the intensity of that game of playing with men. None of our colleges have succeeded in inventing anything to compete with the kind of love that doesn’t have to be paid for with responsibility.

I think Scottie at fourteen was in a fair way to a disproportionate youth. Lacking Peaches’ calm temperament, she had projected herself into the world of sixteen and, of course, was taking it all much more hysterically than a girl of sixteen would. The convent-like attitude of Miss Walker’s was just right for her. I think she caught up on her precocity by a full year and I am not afraid for her now in the same way that I was then. These are the days, I should think, when the next star on the horizon is the chance, remote but always possible, of an unfortunate early marriage or an equally unfortunate early love affair. I found that Scottie, with the one man she could invite to school this year - for the senior tea - had chosen a Princeton boy now in his last year at YaleLawSchool. I suppose it was nothing but sheer bravado. There she, when the other girls were writing to prep school and college boys, would dazzle them by producing an actual man of the world. I put my foot down immediately, because a boy of that age, if he happened to be loose in principle, could twist a sixteen-year-old girl around his finger. The boy happened to be a nice boy, but the idea was absolutely bogus and phoney. Every once in a while, such delusions of grandeur overtake my daughter - is the same true of Peaches?

I wouldn’t tell Scottie this but I am really not very concerned about whether she remains a virgin after the âge of twenty, but I think it is of the greatest importance that the girl doesn’t throw herself away for any trivial or inessential reason, and every year makes such a difference. I stilf believe in the strictest chaperonage, formal or secret (by which I mean a pretty close check upon a girl’s movements), because my theory follows Pope’s statement that Evil (I am using the word in its old-fashioned sense), first looked upon as terrible, longer looked upon as tolerable, finally becomes attractive. He said it much better, with a beautiful rhyme. Also, I am hot against a child of Scottie’s background ever having any traffic with liquor, and don’t like cigarettes either, simply because it takes up so much unnecessary energy and is such a comfort to the idler and the loafer. Moreover, if she ever takes up a sedentary profession like mine, it will be awful for her. I smoked myself right into T.B. Did you notice the recent pronunciamento about cigarettes in Time? So you see, in general I am still the old-fashioned parent.

To go back to Miss Hoffman - took one song to a party where I knew Rodgers and Hart were going to be, and had it played over. Rodgers thought it was very good, but all he could advise me to do was to try to get it played over in some studio. I didn’t know him well enough to ask him to do anything about it. So you see that this appears to be the wrong door to knock at. There is something about Hollywood, everybody very highly paid and camping on the job, which makes it harder to approach from here than if one is in New York with the magic of distance giving desirability. Not only has no one been willing to give the stuff a break but no one has been able to tell me - and that includes Irving Berlin, with whom I talked about six months ago, before I got this music - just what gets a song-writer a start. Somehow, they get involved with a manager, a lyric writer, a playwright, and a show is staged and a show clicks. They are part of the line-up and it seems to miraculously make them professionals. They don’t seem to cross that line alone in the way writers do. I remember at Princeton, Cam Clark and others used to come down and pick the best of the hundred or so compositions composed on the campus. There seems to be nothing like that in the professional world, at least out here, and it is terrible to think how many good songs go unpublished when old hacks, such as Romberg has become, continue to grind out repetitions of themselves for operettas. It simply can’t be bucked from here.

With affection to you both, and regrets that this is such a pessimistic report, Ever yours,

Scott

P.S. Been doing a picture for Joan Crawford. About one-third through. Is an original and quite a different job from the dramatization of Three Comrades. However, this time I have the best producer in Hollywood, a fine showman who keeps me from any amateur errors, and I hope to finish the picture alone. Do you remember Ted Paramore of Hill? He was my collaborator on Three Comrades.

TO MISS MARTHA FEUERHERM

Hollywood,California

March 16, 1938

My dear Miss Feuerherm:

In regard to your letter about F. Scott Fitzgerald we refer you to the following: F. Scott Fitzgerald: His Youth and Parentage - C. B. Ansbrucher, Berlin. Privately Printed.

F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Image and the Man - Irene Kramer Thurston. Brentano’s, 1937.

Fitzgerald As I Knew Him - J. B. Carstairs. Scribners, 1928. F. Scott Fitzgerald and the Rise of Islam. Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1922.

The Women Who Knew F. Scott Fitzgerald - Marie, Comtesse de Segours. Editions Galantiere, Paris.

I hope that these books will serve your purpose.

Sincerely yours,

J. P. Carms Secretary

TO FRANCES TURNBULL

5521 Amestoy Avenue

Encino, California

November 9,1938

Dear Frances:

I’ve read the story carefully and, Frances, I’m afraid the price for doing professional work is a good deal higher than you are prepared to pay at present. You’ve got to sell your heart, your strongest reactions, not the little minor things that only touch you lightly, the little experiences that you might tell at dinner. This is especially true when you begin to write, when you have not yet developed the tricks of interesting people on paper, when you have none of the technique which it takes time to learn. When, in short, you have only your emotions to sell.

This is the experience of all writers. It was necessary for Dickens to put into Oliver Twist the child’s passionate resentment at being abused and starved that had haunted his whole childhood. Ernest Hemingway’s first stories, In Our Time, went right down to the bottom of all that he had ever felt and known. In This Side of Paradise I wrote about a love affair that was still bleeding as fresh as the skin wound on a haemophile.

The amateur, seeing how the professional, having learned all that he’ll ever learn about writing, can take a trivial thing such as the most superficial reactions of three uncharacterized girls and make it witty and charming - the amateur thinks he or she can do the same. But the amateur can only realize his ability to transfer his emotions to another person by some such desperate and radical expedient as tearing your first tragic love story out of your heart and putting it on pages for people to see.

That, anyhow, is the price of admission. Whether you are prepared to pay it, or whether it coincides or conflicts with your attitude on what is ‘nice’ is something for you to decide. But literature, even light literature, will accept nothing less from the neophyte. It is one of those professions that want the ‘works.’ You wouldn’t be interested in a soldier who was only a little brave.

In the light of this, it doesn’t seem worthwhile to analyze why this story isn’t salable but I am too fond of you to kid you along about it, as one tends to do at my age. If you ever decide to tell your stories, no one would be more interested than Your old friend,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

P.S. I might say that the writing is smooth and agreeable and some of the pages very apt and charming. You have talent - which is the equivalent of a soldier having the right physical qualifications for entering West Point.

TO BUDD SCHULBERG

5521 Amestoy Avenue

Encino,

California

February 28, 1939

Dear Budd:

I didn’t send my Dartmouth impressions   because I know that when one is once separated from a picture any advice is rather gratuitous - seems to come from a long and uninformed distance. However, if Walter t still wants to use the Indian school for a prologue it would be very funny if the Indian students were being solemnly addressed by Ebenezer when you cut outside and pick up young squaws approaching on snow shoes, bursting into the school and dancing around with the young braves. From there you could dissolve to the station and the arrival of the girls.

Also your introduction of some character at the station might be a student smashing baggage, followed by a newly arrived girl. And his turning suddenly, mutual recognition: the pay-off is his finding that he has picked up the baggage of his own girl.

On that same working-your-way-through basis, I got a kick from the student waiters going out of character and talking to the guests - like the man who hired himself out to do that sort of thing.

The picture seems temporarily very far away, and I am engrossed in work of my own. But I wish you well, and I won’t forget the real pleasure of knowing you, and your patience as I got more and more out of hand under the strain. In retrospect, going East under those circumstances seems one of the silliest mistakes I ever made.

Always your friend,

Scott

TO JUDGE JOHN BIGGS, JR

5521 Amestoy Avenue

Encino, California

Spring, 1939

Dear John:

Your letter with its family chronicle fascinated me. It was nice to catch up a little. I remember Baba as a wild fascinating little witch with a vague touch of WutheringHeights about her as she wrestled with her brothers. One girl in a family of boys has her dangers - like one boy in a family of girls who inevitably has a touch of the milksop - anyhow I’m glad Baba has temperament and sorry you’ve had to send her to reform school so young....

As to sons - that’s another question. I’d feel on a big spot if I were you. the you’re not a worrier. With daughter I can feel sure she’s about like me - very little of her mother save the good looks - like me with less positive artistic talent and much more natural social talent. She hasn’t the loneliness of the artist - though one can’t be sure that means anything. Ernest wasn’t lonely superficially - what I mean is that in spite of the fact that Scottie edited her school paper and wrote the school play she doesn’t care - doesn’t care deeply and passionately so that she feels the necessity to say. And it’s just as well. Nothing is more fatuous than the American habit of labeling one of their four children as the artist on a sort of family tap day as if the percentage of artists who made any kind of go of the lousy business was one to four. It’s much closer to 1 to 400,000. You’ve got to have the egotism of a maniac with the clear triple-thinking of a Flaubert. The amount of initial talent or let us say skill and facility is a very small element in the long struggle whose most happy end can only be a mercifully swift exhaustion. Who’d want to live on like Kipling with a name one no longer owned - the empty shell of a gift long since accepted and consumed?

To go back. I won’t discuss boys. They are incalculable. But I would like to sit around with you for hours discussing men, in particular J.B., Jr and F.S.F. I would make you read some of the stuff that’s stirred me lately, and append this list, culled from two years.

a. — Julius Caesar by James Anthony Froude. Don’t be appalled - it’s as modern as Strachey and I find from Max that Scribner never lets it go out of print.

b. — Flaubert and Madame Bovary. Absolute tops.

c. — The Culture of Cities which you must have read.

d. — The Trial - fantastic novel by the Czech Franz Kafka which you may have to wait for but it is worth it - it’s an influence among the young comparable only to Joyce in 1920-25.

e. — As for Americans there’s only one - Jerome Weidman, whose two books have been withdrawn as too perspicacious about the faults of his own race. He’s a grand writer the - only 25 and worth fifty of this Steinbeck, who is a cheap, blatant imitation of D.H.Lawrence. A book-club return of the public to its own vomit.

f. — (I am now writing this letter for my files as well as to you.) The best individual novel of the last five years is still Malraux’s Man’s Fate. I fought against reading it - liking neither the scene nor what I thought was going to be the attitude - but Jesiss, once I’d gotten into it - it’s as absorbing as the Farewell to Arms. On the other hand Man’s Hope is hasty journalism - about as good as Ernest’s Spanish stuff. (He agrees with me about Steinbeck by the way - thinks he’s a phoney, like Farrell.) You know how generous I feel toward new men if they have something, and I hope you won’t read under this a jealousy of which I think I’m incapable. I keep waiting for Odets to produce something fine.

For God’s sake, order these right away and for good jazz I append Guedalla’sWellington, and Burne’s Lee, Grant and Sherman - they’ll kill a night of insomnia. Hayes’ book on Lincoln neither brings us closer nor further away - ends by being a bore because he seems to have been conspicuously non-communicative about what we have now decided were the great moments. I guess Lincoln was just too busy to throw him his little crust of attention and he was out whoring somewhere.

I hope you’ll be a better judge than I’ve been a man of letters. I’ve worked here on the best jobs - Madame Curie, Three Comrades, Gone with the Wind, etc. - but it’s an uphill business and the only great satisfaction I’ve had has been paying off my debts - which amounted to about $40,000 at the end of 1936. At that point, despite Becky Sharp’s dictum that you can live on your debts for awhile, people begin to distrust you - and someday in Dostoevskian manner I’m going to write about the great difference between how you high-heartedly helped me over a hurdle and the heartburnings and humiliations I went thru in the process of approaching you. (That sentence is as full of ‘h’s’ as a passage in the later Swinburne.)

Anyhow we have always been great good friends to each other and that is a satisfaction as Gertrude Stein would say. I am glad for Bobby as only an old lunger can be glad (was she ever one). I only play ping-pong but if she ever condescends to that let her have a table ready at the point where our paths next cross.

Scott

TO MRS FRANK CASE

5521 Amestoy Avenue

Encino,

California

May 3, 1939

I seem to be inadvertently writing you from a sick-bed, but not a very serious one - though I think without your prompt action a week ago it might very well have been. I love New York in a very special way, but somehow the DoctorsHospital couldn’t quite compete with the balmy spring California and I took up my bed and walked, so to speak - at least as far as the airport.

Sheilah came out to see me yesterday and told me of another great kindness of yours which I hope life will someday enable me to repay - that you had telephoned her from New York telling her you thought I was in trouble and that perhaps she was the person to help me. The situation goes back several months further than the break between Sheilah and me, however.

Very much against my will, I was persuaded to take a job to which I felt spiritually inadequate because I needed a rest from pictures and because my health was going steadily worse. I was going to sleep every night with a gradually increasing dose of chloral - three teaspoonfuls - and two pills of nembutal every night and 48 drops of Digitalin to keep the heart working to the next day. Eventually one begins to feel like a character out of The Wizard of Oz. Work becomes meaningless and effort a matter of the medicine closet. To the last job, I brought a great deal of individual enthusiasm, but by the end of the last week I was doing it on gin and to a person of my constitution the end of that is fairly plain.

I am sorry though it was so very plain. I am sorry that I ended up by putting up such a poor showing in front of you who have treated me always with - well, ‘kindness’ is a very inadequate word.

I found Flora flourishing and glad to see me back. She is a very nice heritage. It seems honestly awful to have caused either of you distress -I am a little dim on the last few hours in the hotel, and I don’t think Dr Graham wanted to be very explicit about it, but if there was any damage take care of it either directly with me or with Harold Ober with whom I have a running account and whom I am afraid, after twenty years, will not be very much shocked by any of my enormities.

With deep respect and affection.

Scott

TO S. J. PERELMAN

5521 Amcstoy Avenue

Encino, California

June 7,1939

Dear Sidney:

Seeing your apparently dead but only sleeping pan in the magazine, I was reminded to address you on several things. One is that while you once inherited a baby nurse from me I have now evened matters up by owning your 1937 Ford which gives excellent service. But the real purpose is this - that Laura’s brother (Nathaniel West) sent me his book  and a very nice letter with it which has totally disappeared since a trip I made to Cuba, and I don’t know where to reach him to answer it.

The book, though it puts Gogol’s The Lower Depth in the class with The Tale of Benjamin Bunny, certainly has scenes of extraordinary power - if that phrase is still in use. Especially I was impressed by the pathological crowd at the premiere, the character and handling of the aspirant actress, and the uncanny almost medieval feeling of some of his Hollywood background, set off by those vividly drawn grotesques. The book bears an odd lopsided resemblance to Victor Hugo’s Notre Dame de Paris, except that the anonymous builders of the Middle Ages did a better job with their flying buttresses than Mannix, Katz and Company with their theory of the buttocks in place.

Anyway, all good wishes to you. I’ll be out of pictures at least till late fall, working on a novel. Best to Laura.

Ever your friend,

TO TOM F. CAREY, JR

5521 Amestoy Avenue

Encino, California

June 9, 1939

Dear Mr Carey:

My friend and landlord, Edward Everett Horton, handed your letter over to me thinking that as a Princetonian and a professional writer I could answer your questions to your satisfaction. He told me he was very fond of your father and asked me to speak to you as frankly and helpfully as possible.

In the first place, there have been in the past (and in what pictures considered better times) attempts to hire inexperienced writers - what they call ‘junior writers’ - and groom them to be useful. The particular attempt about which I know the method and its eventual outcome was made at Metro about three years ago when Eddie Knopf (then Scenario head) brought in a dozen young men who had written for the college magazines at the University of California, Stanford, etc., paid them what is here considered a living wage for a writer and hoped that genius would turn up among them. The outcome was that one boy has made something of a record - he did a solo job on Shopworn Angel - I can’t remember his name at the moment - and the others were let out’ to the last man with every wave of the recession in 1937-38.

This Metro experiment did not necessarily prove anything - certain ones I know were only there through pull, but I do know that it convinced Metro - the largest, richest and in some ways most experimental studio here - that the idea was not good. I had a young protégé in the East whom I brought out here, who - though he had written over one hundred stories for the pulp magazines - was never able to sell himself to Metro with whom I was then under contract - unless he came equipped with an idea and access to the powers-that-were. He had the access but he did not seem to have the idea or to be able to get it on paper so he has returned to the somewhat desperate business of pulp-writing in the East.

If a young man, however, has ‘made the slick paper magazines’ it is an entirely different story. Two or three stories in the slicks, especially a minor triumph such as Richard Sherman’s To Mary with Love’ in the Post several years ago, can set a man for a whole Hollywood career. I know a young Dartmouth man, a recent graduate, who has every access to the heads of companies but who has just chosen to go East and continue some work he has in mind for Colliers - there’s no secret about it - it’s young Budd Schulberg - thus seriously curtailing his income, but he leaves with the conviction that these people are more impressed with what comes out with the imprimatur of an important magazine in the East than with almost anything done here.

This resume of the situation applies to the present time - there was a period when the eastern writer was suspect - he was ‘high hat,’ he did not know the medium, and wouldn’t take the trouble to learn it - and in those days people entered scenario-writing through the oddest channels - but I believe that time is gone.

Hardly a man here is in the big money who has not a best seller or some striking stories or a successful play to his credit. (A few exceptions to this are John Lee Mahin and Robert Riskin, who are among the half dozen best picture-writers in the business.) But the rule still stands.

And all this is subject to the vagueness that surrounds this industry. There is none of it that I could swear to. I have been out here almost two years though with my eyes open and this is what I would tell my daughter if her literary ambitions were far enough developed to make her yearn toward the flesh pots of Hollywood.

With very best wishes to you,

Sincerely,

F. Scott Fitzgerald ‘17

P.S. Edward Everett Horton gave me carte blanche in answering this letter but to your questions I must respond even more vaguely. I am sure that if you had professional material in your portfolio and were on the spot Mr Horton would be only too glad to give you letters to the heads of any Scenario department but he could not guarantee, any more than I could, their mood toward your work or their studio’s attitude toward untried authors. I broke into the literary world by selling stories to the now defunct Smart Set at $35.00 a shot (some of them had been in the Nassau Lit) and then kept cracking at The Saturday Evening Post, but every man’s literary beginnings are different. However, I do know that 80% of what is classified here as ‘talent’ has made its reputation in the East.

TO KENNETH LITTAUER

5521 A tries toy Avenue

Encino,California

July 18, 1939

Dear Kenneth:

I was of course delighted to finish off the Civil War story to your satisfaction at last - I may say to my satisfaction also, because the last version felt right. And after twenty months of moving pictures it was fun to be back at prose-writing again. That has been the one bright spot in a situation you may have heard from Harold Ober: that I have been laid up and writing in bed since the first of May, and I am only just up and dressed.

As I told your Mr Wilkinson when he telephoned, the first thing I did when I had to quit pictures for awhile was to block out my novel (a short one the size of Gatsby) and made the plan on a basis of 2500 word units. The block-out is to be sure that I can take it up or put it down in as much time as is allowed between picture work and short stories. I will never again sign a long picture contract, no matter what the inducement: most of the profit when one overworks goes to doctors and nurses.

Meanwhile I am finishing a 4500-word piece designed for your pages. It should go off to you airmail Saturday night because I am going back to the studios for a short repair job Monday.

I would like to send the story directly to you, which amounts to a virtual split with Ober. This is regrettable after twenty years of association but it had better be asked under the anonymity of ‘one of those things.’ Harold is a fine man and has been a fine agent and the fault is mine. Through one illness he backed me with a substantial amount of money (all paid back to him now with Hollywood gold), but he is not prepared to do that again with growing boys to educate - and, failing this, I would rather act for a while as my own agent in the short story just as I always have with Scribners. But I much prefer, both for his sake and mine, that my sending you the story direct should be a matter between you and me. For the fact to reach him through your office might lead to an unpleasant cleavage of an old relationship. I am writing him later in the week making the formal break on terms that will be understood between us, and I have no doubt that in some ways he will probably welcome it. Relationships have an unfortunate way of wearing out, like most things in this world.

Would you be prepared, in return for an agreement or contract for first look at the novel and at a specified number of short stories in a certain time, to advance me $750.00, by wire on receipt of this letter - which will be even before the story reaches you Monday? This is a principal factor in the matter at the moment as these three months of illness have got me into a mess with income tax and insurance problems. When you get this, will you wire me yes or no, because if you can’t I can probably start studio work Friday. This may be against your general principles - from my angle I am offering you rather a lot for no great sum.

Ever yours with best wishes,

Scott

P.S. If this meets with your favorable consideration the money should be wired to the Bank of America, Culver City. If not would you wire me anyhow because my determination to handle my magazine relationship myself is quite final.

P.S. (2) The novel will run just short of 50,000 words.

TO KENNETH LITTAUER

5521 Amestoy Avenue

Encino,California

Probably late July, 1939

Dear Kenneth:

Here’s another Hollywood story. It is absolutely true to Hollywood as I see it. Asking you to read it I want to get two things clear. First, that it isn’t particularly likely that I’ll write a great many more stories about young love. I was tagged with that by my first writings up to 1925. Since then I have written stories about young love. They have been done with increasing difficulty and increasing insincerity. I would either be a miracle man or a hack if I could go on turning out an identical product for three decades.

I know that is what’s expected of me, but in that direction the well is pretty dry and I think I am much wiser in not trying to strain for it but rather to open up a new well, a new vein. You see, I not only announced the birth of my young illusions in This Side of Paradise but pretty much the death of them in some of my last Post stories like ‘Babylon Revisited.’ Lorimer seemed to understand this in a way. Nevertheless, an overwhelming number of editors continue to associate me with an absorbing interest in young girls - an interest that at my age would probably land me behind the bars.

I have a daughter. She is very smart; she is very pretty; she is very popular. Her problems seem to me to be utterly dull and her point of view completely uninteresting. In other words, she is exactly what I was once accused of being - callow. Moreover she belongs to a very overstimulated and not really adventurous generation - a generation that has been told the price of everything as well as its values. I once tried to write about her. I couldn’t So you see I’ve made a sort of turn. My hope is that, like Tarkington, if I can no longer write M. Beaucaire and the Gentleman from Indiana, I can make people laugh instead as he did in Seventeen which is completely objective and unromantic.

The second thing is my relation to Ober. It is completely vague. I’ve very seldom taken his advice on stories. I have regarded him as a mixture of friend, bill collector and for a couple of sick years as backer. So far as any editorial or financial dealing, I would much rather, as things are now, deal directly with an editor. For instance, if this sort of story is worth less to you than a story of young love, I would be perfectly willing to accept less. I would not want any agent to stand in my way in that regard. I think all the agents still act as if we were back in the 1920s in a steadily rising market So can I again ask you to deal telegraphically with me? I hope this story amuses you.

Ever yours,

Scott

TO MRS LAURA FELEY

5521 Aroestoy Avenue

Encino,California

July 20, 1939

Dear Mrs Feley:

I don’t know whether those articles of mine in Esquire - that ‘Crack-Up’ series - represented a real nervous breakdown. In retrospect it seems more of a spiritual ‘change of life’ - and a most unwilling one - it was a protest against a new set of conditions which I would have to face and a protest of my mind at having to make the psychological adjustments which would suit this new set of circumstances. Being an essentially stable type I managed to cling on until there was a mixture of the patient’s adjustment to the situation and the situation’s adjustment to the patient.

And that, in such a case, is about all there is to do. The sensitive cannot make themselves overnight into specimens of the ‘tough- minded’ - the great ally is time, though I know that is a pretty old saw. Time was my rescuer and there was a friend concerned too, though I rather despised her intellectually and drew more nourishment from what she didn’t say than from what she did.

To come closer to your case: the word nervous breakdown covers a multiplicity of conditions, as your doctor has probably told you. It may mean anything from a collapse of the central nervous system, a case of schizophrenia that the family doesn’t want to acknowledge or a little mood of Irish melancholy. A girl having lost a man is liable to suddenly build him up into the only man in the world when, had things run smoothly, it is doubtful if he would have long interested her. You must know cases of this. I knew a high-strung girl who had an unfortunate ‘trial marriage’ with a man, which went badly - after which she went to Europe, turning down a series of good matches - returned to the scene of her early disaster to find the lost love, took one look at him and thought, ‘My God, how did I ever happen to go for that!’

From what you tell me in your letter (and at such long range it is impossible for me to speak in anything but the broadest generalities) I can only say this: that if you are in any mess caused by conflict between old idealisms, religious or social, and the demands of the immediate present, you will probably have to make a decision between them. That is all too frequently a problem of these times - I hope the generation now growing up will shake free of it.

The doctor is probably your best friend, certainly much better than anyone you will find in your family - and if you have reason to think he is not your best friend, your very first move should be to find another. I don’t mean a series of doctors, but another whom you have good reason to think is equipped to deal with a case requiring intelligent handling.

With best wishes,

Sincerely,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

TO MISS HELENE RICHARDS

5521 Awestoy Avenue

Encino,

California

July 27, 1939

Dear Miss Richards:

Attached is some biographical data. Sorry I have no picture but I may say that out here I am known as the old ‘oomph man.’ So any haberdasher’s advertisement will do as a portrait.

Will you tell that so-called Mr Gingrich that I am accustomed, in my haughty way, to some word of approbation if not ecstasy about my contributions. Bland and chaste as your check was, it somehow lacked emotion. However, we are accepting it

Sincerely,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

5521Ames toy Avenue

Encino, California

August 3, 1939

Dear Morton:

Because your story was so perfect technically and so absolutely sincere I am going to take the risk of making an unasked-for suggestion. Someone once said - and I am quoting most inexactly - ‘A writer who manages to look a little more deeply into his own soul or the soul of others, finding there, through his gift, things that no other man has ever seen or dared to say, has increased the range of human life.’

That is why a young writer (and I shrink at the word as much as you do) is tempted, when he comes to the crossroads of what to say and not to say as regards character and feeling, to be guided by the known, the admired and the currently accepted as he hears a voice whisper within himself, ‘Nobody would be interested in this feeling I have, this unimportant action - therefore it must be peculiar to me, it must not be universal nor generally interesting nor even right.’ But if the man’s gift is deep or luck is with him, as one may choose to look at it, some other voice in that crossroads makes him write down those apparently exceptional and unimportant things and that and nothing else is his style, his personality - eventually his whole self as an artist. What he has thought to throw away or, only too often, what he has thrown away, was the saving grace vouchsafed him. Gertrude Stein was trying to express a similar thought when - speaking of life rather than letters - she said that we struggle against most of our exceptional qualities until we’re about forty and then, too late, find out that they compose the real us. They were the most intimate self which we should have cherished and nourished.

Again, the above is inexact and all that I have said might lead you astray in the sense that it has led Saroyan astray and the late Tom Wolfe in imagining that writing should be a cultivation of every stray weed found in the garden. That is where talent comes in to distinguish between the standard blooms which everyone knows and are not particularly exciting, the riotous and deceitful weeds, and that tiny faint often imperceptible flower hidden in a comer which, cultivated à la Burbank, is all it will ever pay us to cultivate whether it stays small or grows to the size of an oak.

This is all too professorial. I felt you were trying to characterize with your fat boy. You failed to get a strong effect because (a) it was too facile a characteristic which you merely repeated from time to time to give him visibility and stability and (b) anyone who could write that story so well and with so much observation must certainly be able to see deeply enough into himself and others and to dredge forth a more vivid person than a mere clumsy gawk about whom ‘it was just too bad.’ And let me say that I think if you had done so the story, because of its honesty so far as it went, and because of its economical and dramatic straight line, might very well have been salable.

Your friend by proxy,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

TO MORTON KROLL

5521 Amestoy Avenue

Encino,

California

August 9,1939

Dear Morton:

I claim the last word. You’re entirely right that one’s first influences are largely literary but the point where the personal note emerges can come very young (vidé Keats). I’ll go further than that. I believe that with the natural prose-writer it might very well come long before twenty, depending on the amount of awareness with which it is looked for - and, referring directly to the classics, my mother did me the disservice of throwing away all but two of my very young efforts - way back at twelve and thirteen, and later I found that the surviving fragments had more quality than some of the stuff written in the tightened-up days of seven or eight years later.

A last word supplementary to my somewhat ponderous letter: if you were learning tennis you would form yourself not upon an eccentric like Tilden, for example, but upon players with classic styles like Cochet or La Coste (my references are of the dim past). You cannot imitate a mannerism with profit; a man might labor over Tilden’s tennis style for six years, finding at the end that it simply couldn’t be done without Tilden’s 6’6” in height.

The Hemingway of Farewell to Arms, the Joyce of Dubliners, the Keats of ‘The Eve of St Agnes’

and ‘The Grecian Urn,’ the Mark Twain of the great central parts of Huckleberry Finn, the Daisy Miller of Henry James, the Kipling of The Drums of Fore and Aft are great English classics in a sense that such grand things as Shropshire Lad are not. Oscar Wilde for all his occasionally penetrating guesses was as Whistler said, a provincial at bottom - he tried imitating The Shropshire Lad in the ‘Ballad of Reading Gaol,’ and with the borrowed and, hence, phoney mood produced something only a few steps up from Robert Service.

(One last great parenthesis. It just happens that the most classical classics are in French while the most eccentric classics seem to be in English. If you had French, for example, I would recommend you the ‘Maison Tellier’ of Maupassant rather than that Kipling piece as a completely classical short story.)

Don’t answer this. I am keeping your letter and will sell it for a great profit later on.

Yours,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

TO DR JOHN G. VOIGT

5521 Atnestoy Avenue

Encino, California

August 11, 1939

Dear Dr Voigt:

I’m terribly sorry but I haven’t had a picture taken for about twelve years. This is no stall. I think now that I shall wait until it’s time for a death mask because I’m in that unattractive middle- aged phase that doesn’t seem safe to record for prosperity. (This is not a misprint.)

Thank you for your very kind letter. Hope someday we may meet.

Sincerely,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

TO EDGAR POE

5521 Amestoy Avenue

Encino,

California

September 18, 1939

Dear Ed:

You have an early Chaldean handwriting but an excellent heart. And our tastes must be similar because the dressing gown is a beautiful piece of lechery. Thank you. I have named it Cela- lume  and shall think in its depths.

Best to Babe - sorry I didn’t see her. I’ve been on the run between Universal and United Artists (where Niven is and isn’t going to finish his picture) and on the point of suing R.K.O. for keeping me awake on their lot across the street. I am so tired of being old and sick - would much rather be a scared young man peering out over a hunk of concrete or mud toward something I hated than be doing this here stuff.

Ever yours,

Scott

TO MISS KENT

5521 Amestoy Avenue

Encino,

California

November 6, 1939

Dear Miss Kent:

I’m sorry that I could not conscientiously recommend this in its present form. You have an idea - but scarcely a story, do you think? I thought at first there was going to be an element of Ramona about it - that someone in the tribe was going to engage our interest. But no. We get a slowly mounting feud between two opposing forces - something that should be crammed into the first part of a story, and not have to sustain it dramatically throughout. I don’t think there’s enough here to hold the reader’s attention. If there was some sort of relation between the widow of an American colonel and the prince of an Indian tribe, or vice versa between the Indian princess and a captain of the U.S. troops, the story might gain some poise and balance.

This is not suggested as a way to make it a success. Some better way will probably occur to you. It is only said to tell you what I feel is lacking in your outline: a point of real interest, a true climax rather than a succession of incidents which do not build to an instant of real excitement. That’s what people buy.

Sorry I cannot be more helpful. Please feel quite free to send me anything else you may write.

Sincerely,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

TO JEAN OLIVIER

5521 Amestoy Avenue

Encino, California

January 29, 1940

Dear Miss Olivier:

Thanks for your letter about ‘The Lost Decade’ and many apologies for not answering before. I am afraid Mr Trimble was drunk during those ten years, which is easier than one would think if one has the money.

You write in such a good English style that I am going to take the liberty of asking you never to sign yourself ‘Miss’ Jean Olivier. You wouldn’t like to get a letter from your namesake signed ‘Mister’ Laurence Olivier, would you?

Sincerely,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

TO EDWIN KNOPF

5521 Amestoy Avenue

Encino,

California

February 1, 1940

Dear Eddie:

An hour after I called you a letter came asking if McBride could use my sketch, ‘The Night Before Chancellorsville,’ in an anthology. Armed with this coincidence I’ll enlarge a little on my idea.

You may remember that the battles of Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville were fought respectively late in 1862 and early in 1863 and very nearly upon the same Virginia battlefield. I would begin my story with two girls who come South from Concord seeking the body of their brother who has been killed at Fredericksburg. They are sheltered, puritanical girls, used to the life of a small New England town. On the train going down they run into some ladies of the type pictured in my story. Moreover they encounter a charming Union cavalry captain with whom the gayer of the two Concord girls falls in love.

As in the story, the train rides right into Jackson’s surprise attack at Chancellorsville - the Union retreat and the Confederate advance. The girls are separated and their first task is to find each other. One of them meets a Confederate private from Alabama who at first she dreads and dislikes. In a Union counterattack the Confederate private is captured. He is identified as a Mosby guerilla by a man who bears him a grudge and hung up by his thumbs. (This actually happened to a cousin of my father’s in the Civil War and I have embodied the incident in another story called ‘When This Cruel War’ which Colliers bought last spring but has not yet published.) The northern girl cuts down the Confederate soldier and helps him to escape. The girl has begun by being impatient of her sister’s gayety. During their time behind the Confederate lines she has conscientiously continued her search for her brother’s grave. Now, after helping her enemy escape, and at the moment of a love scene between them, she finds that they are only a few yards from her brother’s grave. Entwined with the story of the two girls I would like to carry along the semi-comic character of one of those tarts, using her somewhat as Dudley Nichols used the tart in Stagecoach.

There are two Civil Wars and there are two kinds of Civil War novels. So far, pictures have been made only from one of them - the romantic, chivalric, Sir Walter Scott story like Gone with the Wind, The Birth of a Nation, the books of Thomas Nelson Page and Mary Johnson. But there is also the realistic type modeled primarily on Stendhal’s great picture of Waterloo in La Chartreuse de Parme, Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, and the stories of Ambrose Bierce. This way of looking at war gives great scope for comedy without bringing in Stepin Fetchit and Hattie McDaniel as faithful negro slaves, because it shows how small the individual is in the face of great events, how comparatively little he sees, and how little he can do even to save himself. The Great War has been successfully treated like this - Journey’s End and All Quiet - the Civil War never.

We can all see ourselves as waving swords or nursing the sick but it gets monotonous. A picture like this would have its great force from seeing ourselves as human beings who go on eating and loving and displaying our small vanities and follies in the midst of any catastrophe.

I would like to write this story, with any encouragement. What do you think?

Ever your friend,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

TO DR CLARENCE NELSON

5521 Amestoy Avenue

Encino,

California

February 7,1940

Dear Dr Nelson:

Just to tell you I have not forgotten you nor what I owe you. Physically the situation is really miraculously improved. Financially it is still as bad as ever but I just don’t see how it can go on being this bad. I have had no fever now for well over six weeks, feel no fatigue beyond what is normal, cough only a very little bit in the mornings and usually that is all for the whole day. In other words, as far as I can determine the disease is absolutely quiescent and, if anything, I have been more active than at any time since I took to bed last March.

I suppose that my absolutely dry regime has something to do with it but not everything. Oddly enough the little aches around the elbows and shoulders return from time to time whenever I have had a great orgy of Coca-Colas and coffee.

With very best wishes and hopes that soon I may be able to do something substantial about your bill.

Sincerely and gratefully,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

TO ARNOLD GINGRICH

5521 Amestoy Avenue

Encino,

California

February 7, 1940

Dear Arnold:

What would you think of this? You remember that about a week ago I wrote asking you about the publication of ‘Between Planes.’  You said that you hadn’t intended to publish it until after the Pat Hobby stories. Why don’t you publish it under a pseudonym - say, John Darcy? I’m awfully tired of being Scott Fitzgerald anyhow, as there doesn’t seem to be so much money in it, and I’d like to find out if people read me just because I am Scott Fitzgerald or, what is more likely, don’t read me for the same reason. In other words it would fascinate me to have one of my stories stand on its own merits completely and see if there is a response. I think it would be a shame to let that story stand over for such a long time now.

What do you think of this? While the story is not unlike me it is not particularly earmarked by my style as far as I know. At least I don’t think so. If the idea interests you I might invent a fictitious personality for Mr Darcy. My ambition would be to get a fan letter from my own daughter.

Ever your friend,

Scott

TO MR AND MRS S. J. PERELMAN

5521 Amestoy Avenue

Encino,

Californiaphone: STate 4-0578

May 13, 1940

Dear Sid and Laura:

This is a love missive so do not be alarmed. I am not giving a tea for either the Princess Razzarascal or Two-ticker Forsite. But I am leaving this Elysian haunt in two weeks (the 29th to be exact) and sometime before that nonce I wish you two would dine or lunch. I know Sunday isn’t a good day for you because of the dwarfs and Saturday next I’m going to Maurice Evans’ and Sunday I’m engaged (now you know, girls, isn’t it wonderful?)

- but any other day between now and the 28th would be fine. I want to see you and very specifically you, and for the most general and non-specific reasons. The days being at their longest it is no chore to find this place up to 7:30, and perhaps the best idea is dinner. We could either dine à quatre or add the Wests and some other couple - say the Mannerheims or Browders - and afterwards play with my model parachute troops. At any event, side arms will not be de rigueur. Sheilah will be with me, just as merry as can be, to greet you on the porch with a julep. I have just reread Crime and Punishment and the chapters on gang labor in Capitalist Production and am meek as a liberal bourgeois lamb.

Call me up on the party line or drop me a note. The only acceptable excuse is that you’re going on vacation or have impetigo because I want to see you.

With spontaneous affection,

Scott

TO MRS HART FESSENDEN

c/o Phil Berg Agency Beverly Hills, California

May 29, 1940

DearK:

Seeing that Hester’s first born was the last man tapped for Bones reminded me of you both. Doesn’t that make about the fourth tie in a line and, as you two formed my first ideas of ‘Vas- sar Gals,’ I wonder if you knew that my daughter has been one now for some two years, so I must have been suitably impressed. She wanted to go to Bryn Mawr (to be near Baltimore where she came out last year) but I put my foot down - it was Vassar or nothing.

In these times speaking of oneself seems old-fashioned, but in the last three years I’ve known every extreme of sickness and health, riches and poorness, success and failure, and only in the last few months has life begun to level out again in any sensible way. The movies went to my head and I tried to lick the set up single-handed and came out a sadder and wiser man. For a long time they will remain nothing more nor less than an industry to manufacture children’s wet goods.

Tell me some news about you and yours if you ever get time.

Scott

TO LESTER COWAN

1403 North Laurel Avenue

Hollywood,California

June 26, 1940

Dear Lester:

Thinking over what we discussed yesterday I’ve listed many flaws in construction. The introduction of the little girl’s voice at the beginning of Sequence B is confusing, and I agree about the insufficiency of the last sequence, which leaves the little girl out of the picture for so long. From the middle of the Ritz Hotel stock-market scene, the script must be not only revised but invigorated with a new note - in which Honoria will participate dramatically.

I agree with you also that we must build a scene on the dock around the parting of Honoria and her father - a scene which will clearly show the spark already established between them. I like the new scene we outlined which shows Honoria at the beach at Brittany learning to dive and writing to her father’s trained nurse about it.

The changes in the story of Charles Wales’ business dealing, etc., can wait - I want to make clear his real reasons for going to Europe, to make stronger his reasons for signing away the guardianship of the child, his affection for the nurse, his motivation for going back into the market and whether he wins or loses there - and finally what he learns from the whole experience - but this all goes with the big revision.

Now about the other matter. Originally the child was to have been eight or nine years old. If she is to be slightly older, say at the very end and apex of childhood, the period of ‘Goodbye to dolls,’ she would of course be more aware and articulate about what is going on. Not at every moment, because a little girl of eleven lives halfway between a child’s world and that of an adult. But if she’s been well brought up she is beginning to realize her social responsibilities (in that regard I was very impressed with the Temple kid - no trace of coyness or cuteness, yet a real dignity and gentleness).

On the other hand this is a real child and I don’t think that I would want to put into Honoria’s mouth anything approaching the dying speech of Little Eva or the less credible children of Dickens. They ring false upon the modern ear, and, though they make certain sections of the audience weep, they revolt and alienate the intelligent section of the audience, including especially young people between eighteen and twenty-five, and create an atmosphere of disbelief in what happens thereafter.

Therefore, though no one is more responsive than I am to true sentiment and emotion, I still hold out against any sentimentality.

This is not the old story about ‘Daddy’s little helper’ - it is a mature dramatic piece and whatever child you find for it must have an emotional range larger than the First Reader. I want what happens in this picture to be felt in the stomach first, felt out of great conviction about the tragedy of father and child - and not felt in the throat to make a fat woman’s holiday between chocolate creams.

Going back to young Shirley Temple: if the personality that she has in private life could be carried almost without heightening over into the picture, I believe she would be perfect. She has reached a point pictorially and by reason of natural charm where any attempt to strain and stress her prophetic conduct would seem a vulgarization. She is a perfect thing now in her way, and I would like to see that exquisite glow and tranquility carried intact through a sustained dramatic action. Whoever you get for the part would have to forget such old dodges as talking with tears in her voice, something that a well brought-up child wouldn’t.

Scott

TO ALICE RICHARDSON

Santa Barbara,California

July 29,1940

Dear Alicia:

Your letter and Scottie’s reached me here the same day - here where with a producer I am working on a story for little Miss Temple. Santa Barbara is supposed to have some escape magic like Palm Springs, but no matter how hard you look it’s still California.

Daughter speaks of you with great admiration, says you have grown a full cubit since Baltimore, put your hair up, and stand like a modern Pallas Athene in mid-career. How well I remember Philippe’s castle drawn by a friend of yours and Gertrude Stein’s passage through Baltimore. It was a solemn winter but there were worse to come and in retrospect those months have an air of early April.

I am sincerely sorry not to have seen you - not only from curi-

osity but because you were always so determined things would be right that I’m glad they’ve turned out right. And turned out as you hoped and intended.

Your old friend,

Scott

P.S. Isn’t Hollywood a dump - in the human sense of the word? A hideous town, pointed up by the insulting gardens of its rich, full of the human spirit at a new low of debasement

TO MRS NEUVILLE

1403 North Laurel AvenueHollywood, California

July 29, 1940

Dear Mrs Neuville:

I thought the other day that a large rat had managed to insert itself into the plaster above my bedroom and workroom. I was, however, surprised that it apparently slept at night and worked in the day, causing its greatest din around high noon.

However yesterday, much to my surprise, I deduced from the sounds it emitted that it was a dog, or rather several dogs, and evidently training for a race, for they ran round and round the tin roof. Now I don’t know how these greyhounds climbed up the wall but I know dog-racing is against the law of California - so I thought you’d like to know. Beneath the arena where these races occur an old and harassed literary man is gradually going mad.

Sincerely,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

TO MRS NEUVILLE

1403 North Laurel AvenueHollywood,California

August 12, 1940

My dear Mrs Neuville:

The woman across the hall takes her dog on that bare and resounding roof every morning. It is impossible to work or sleep while the riot is in progress. Today we had some words about it and she informed me of her intention to continue - though if I took to rapping on her roof she would doubtless consider it an outrage.

I believe that the roof was locked when I took this apartment and I request that it be locked again. As a respecter of the rights of others I know she has no legal or moral right to perpetuate this nuisance.

Sincerely,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

TO BENNETT CERF

1403 North Laurel Avenue

Hollywood, California

December 13, 1940

Dear Bennett Cerf:

I told Budd

Schulberg I was going to write you a word about his novel   with permission to quote if you wanted. I read it through in one night. It is a grand book, utterly fearless and with a great deal of beauty side by side with the most bitter satire. Such things are in Hollywood - and Budd reports them with fine detachment. Except for its freshness and the inevitable challenge of a new and strong personality, it doesn’t read like a first novel at all.

It is full of excellent little vignettes - the ‘extra girl’ or whatever she is, and her attitude on love, and the diverse yet identical attitude of the two principal women on Sammy. Especially toward the end it gets the feeling of Hollywood with extraordinary vividness. Altogether I congratulate you on publishing this fine book and I hope it has all the success it deserves.

Sincerely,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

TO RALPH CHURCH

1403 North Laurel AvenueHollywood, California

December 17, 1940

DearMrChurch:

I hope the appearance of this pamphlet about the clubs means what I think it does - that the pictures and membership lists will be eliminated from The Bric-a-Brac proper. I’ve often wondered what the non-club men thought when they brought The Bric-a- Brac home with all that emphasis on Prospect Avenue.

For a dozen years Princeton has sunk steadily behind Yale and Harvard in their attitude toward this monkey business. The Bric-a-Brac could do a magnificent job by leaving out the clubs or else print in addition pictures of all the clubs who eat at tables in Commons.

Sincerely,

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Saint Mary’s Church Cemetery in Rockville, Maryland – Fitzgerald’s final resting place

Fitzgerald’s grave

Table of Contents

The Novels

THIS SIDE OF PARADISE

THE BEAUTIFUL AND DAMNED

THE GREAT GATSBY

TENDER IS THE NIGHT

THE LOVE OF THE LAST TYCOON

The Short Story Collections

FLAPPERS AND PHILOSOPHERS

TALES FROM THE JAZZ AGE

ALL THE SAD YOUNG MEN

TAPS AT REVEILLE

THE PAT HOBBY STORIES

MISCELLANEOUS STORIES

The Short Stories

CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF SHORT STORIES

ALPHABETICAL LIST OF SHORT STORIES

The Plays and Screenplays

THE GIRL FROM LAZY J

THE CAPTURED SHADOW

COWARD

ASSORTED SPIRITS

SHADOW LAURELS

PORCELAIN AND PINK

MR. ICKY

THE VEGETABLE,

“SEND ME IN, COACH”

THREE COMRADES

INFIDELITY

The Poetry

LIST OF POETRY

The Non-Fiction

LIST OF ESSAYS AND ARTICLES

The Letters

LIST OF CORRESPONDENTS